On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Ben Shapiro discusses the disunity in the country fostered by Trump’s critics after the shooting, particularly how it’s underscored by a Democratic Congressman who doxxed his constituents because of their support for Trump. Video and partial transcript below:
The media are running with all of this that Trump is a divisive figure, that he shouldn’t show up [to El Paso and Dayton]. So, CNN has a headline today, “Critics Question Whether Trump Visit to El Paso and Dayton Will Help Healing.” Well, no bleep, Sherlock. I mean, of course they’re questioning that. This is part of the narrative and it’s also part of the entire debate. According to CNN, Trump will travel Wednesday “to the scenes of back-to-back mass shootings that stunned the nation and left at least 31 people dead, but his appearances in Ohio and Texas aren’t being well received by all local officials — some of whom say it would be best if the commander in chief avoided their grief-stricken cities. Exact plans for Trump’s visits to Dayton and El Paso haven’t been released and were still being finalized by the White House advance teams on Tuesday afternoon.”
There was the same sort of hubbub in the run-up to President Trump visiting Pittsburgh in the aftermath of the Tree of Life shooting. Everything went fine in Pittsburgh, it was fine. There were a few protesters, that was it. But obviously that’s not really what the media want here. What the media want here is not a unifying moment; what they want is a divisive moment.
According to CNN, “The question his critics have is whether he will comfort their cities in mourning or deepen the divisions.” Well, I could ask the same question of the media. Are they interested in comforting the cities in mourning, or are they interested in deepening political divisions for political purposes? CNN says, “Trump has at most moments of his presidency appeared more focused on driving a divisive political message than acting as a unifier. While he has expressed intense interest in appearing ‘presidential,’ including through the military trappings of the job, he has not eagerly adopted the tone his predecessors have used from the Oval Office or other official settings.”
All of that may be true. It is also true that Barack Obama is a highly divisive president, just in a very different and more subtle way. I’m not going to equate the level of the rhetoric of the two, but there is no question that Barack Obama was deeply divisive, and people had similar questions. I mean he showed up to Dallas — after the Dallas police shooting —and nobody said he shouldn’t. Nobody said he shouldn’t come.
What all of this leads up to is the conclusion that for a lot of folks on the left, they’re actually unhappy at Trump now trying to do the “unity” routine. They’re unhappy about it because what they would prefer is that unity not take place. What they would prefer is the continuing narrative that Trump is a white supremacist and his supporters are white supremacists. This is why Joe Biden is planning an entire address in Iowa today, about white supremacists, in which presumably he will blame President Trump for the shooting in El Paso, Texas.
And it’s not just Joe Biden; over the last 24 hours something truly egregious has been done by a congressperson named Joaquin Castro (D-TX). So, Joaquin Castro is the congressperson from San Antonio. He is engaged in the widespread mythmaking now, on the part of members of the media and on the left that everyone on the right is supportive of a mass shooting. So, they use the transitive property. It goes something like this: President Trump is responsible for the El Paso shooting — that’s not true — but they say Trump is responsible for the El Paso shooting. Then they say, therefore, anyone who supports Trump is, by the transitive property, responsible for the El Paso shooting. So, Joaquin Castro is Julian Castro’s (D-TX) brother and a congressperson from San Antonio. He put out a target list; he tweeted out:
Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump —the owner of Bill Miller barbecue, owner of historic Pearl, realtor Phyllis Browning etc. Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as “invaders.”
And then he put out a full list, a list of 44 different people. I don’t believe that’s the actual full list of everybody who maxed out to Trump in San Antonio. I’ve seen the list from the FEC; it’s a bit longer. But in any case, he puts out a list of 44 people in his own district — with their names — who are funding Trump. The idea being that he would like to see them bear some sort of public scrutiny; he would like to see them harassed. That’s something he would like to see, something bad happen to them. This is doxing. Now people say that it is publicly available information. Yes, doxing can be publicly available information. The question is whether you are driving people to target people based on their political viewpoint. And that’s exactly what Joaquin Castro is doing right there.
He’s not trying to hide the ball on this stuff, by the way. This does have consequences. We live in a time when people were standing outside Mitch McConnell’s house, outside his home that’s publicly available information. It is also disgusting. People are standing outside Mitch McConnell’s home and chanting at him and calling for his death. People have shown up outside Tucker Carlson’s home. Over the last 24 hours, a self-described member of Antifa in New York called for people in L.A. to show up at my house and harass me or kill me on Twitter. We filed the appropriate police reports. It is in law enforcement’s hands now. And as always, I do have 24/7 security.
You want to make the country a worse place? This is how you do it, right here. This is making the country a worse place because not only is the suggestion that people are responsible for the shooting who were not responsible for the shooting, the idea is we are now going to publicly put their faces out there and make them targets. I mean basically Joaquin Castro’s calling these people accessories to murder. He’s saying Trump is an accessory to murder, and then these people are accessories to Trump, so they are accessories to murder. There is a conspiracy to murder and therefore these people are part of that. They are part of that problem.
How do you think people are going to react to that? You want to talk about heightening rhetoric and incitement? This is a lot closer to that than anything that Trump has said about illegal immigration. His statements about illegal immigration are generalized and somewhat vague. They are not targeted to specific individuals … I mean the media went nuts when Trump said Elijah Cummings (D-MD) is a crap congressperson. The media went crazy when someone took a picture of AOC (D-NY) eating a burger in public. And now the media are covering for this. They’re covering for Joaquin Castro putting out a target list of people, who donated to Trump, which is specifically designed to incite action against those people. There’s no other reason to put out the list, it’s why it’s being done. It’s disgusting; it’s divisive; it’s wrong. But Democrats are out there defending it because this runs as part of their narrative.
Download full episode of the “Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special” on iTunes.