On Friday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Shapiro discusses the Left’s attempt to peg the GOP at-large to the El Paso shooter. Video and partial transcript below:
[The] New York Times has this long piece trying to link those groups that are, on policy, immigration restrictionists with the racist, white supremacist sentiments of the El Paso shooter. It’s David Nakamura writing this egregious piece:
Hours after the mass shooting in El Paso last weekend, Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, issued a tweet in the organization’s name denouncing the “tragic” carnage and urging Americans to “stand together against senseless rage and destructive impulses.” FAIR, a leading proponent of restricting immigration, typically provides its 300,000 followers on Twitter and 2.1 million on Facebook with links to studies, news stories and podcasts warning of the economic, public safety and environmental costs of high immigration levels. But Stein made no mention in his tweet of the online document police believe was written by the alleged killer, … which cited many of the same arguments against immigration as a rationale and motivation for the attack that killed 22 people in a predominantly Hispanic city near the U.S.-Mexico border.
Now, why exactly would the head of FAIR be tweeting out elements of the manifesto? He didn’t write the manifesto. He doesn’t support the manifesto. There’s no evidence that he’s a racist. There’s no evidence that he’s a white supremacist. Nonetheless, The New York Times overtly links what is, by most lights, a mainstream conservative, anti-illegal immigration group. They are more anti-immigration than I am because they want to restrict legal immigration, too, but they are not a racist group. And there’s no evidence provided in the piece that they are. Nonetheless, The New York Times goes out of its way to link the right-wing views of the shooter on immigration to the right-wing views of this group on immigration, then suggests that the two are equivalent. Despite the fact that the shooter’s right-wing views were not just right-wing, they were actually white supremacist, which is not right-wing — white supremacism is something beyond. The racial solidarity implicit in white supremacism is not just about ensuring that immigrants assimilate to American culture, [white supremacism] says no immigrants at all because they’re “brown,” [which] is a completely different thing.
Stein’s decision to rapidly issue a statement condemning the El Paso massacre — the group did not comment on the weekend’s other mass shooting, in Dayton, Ohio — reflects a sense of alarm among FAIR and the small cohort of other restrictionist groups about potential political fallout from the massacres.
Well, yeah, number one, they should condemn the shooting, we should all condemn the shooting. But second, maybe they were worried about disingenuous reporters at The New York Times linking them with the shooter, and so they came out and condemned the shooting because they knew The New York Times would do it, and then the New York Times did it anyway.
Long relegated to the fringes of the debate, these organizations have moved center stage under President Trump — helping to provide the intellectual and ideological framework for the administration’s hard-line immigration agenda, one that immigrant rights advocates have decried as xenophobic and racist.
And there you have it, right in the end. The New York Times is going to use, as its shield and as its sword, immigration rights groups that basically posit exactly what David Nakamura wants them to posit, which is that immigration policy is racist and xenophobic. If it’s not open borders, you’re a white supremacist … So, the Left’s newfound attempt, and many in the media, their newfound attempt to link basic conservative policy with the El Paso shooting. One of the reasons this is going to have such dire effect for American society is once you’ve basically suggested that half of Americans — because half of Americans voted for Trump — are actually Nazis, what do you think the Left is going to do? Do you think that they’re going to get more reasonable in their conversations, or less reasonable in their conversations. Once you overtly link ICE to Gestapo tactics, as Sheila Jackson Lee did, do you think you’re raising the temperature or lowering the temperature?
Now, I’ve been sort of positing the linkage. I’ve been talking for four years about the linkage between rhetoric and violence, and I’ve said that I think that unless rhetoric explicitly calls for violence, it is not incitement of violence — that is the legal standard in the United States. I will say, however, and I’ve said this before, that raising the temperature is not good for the country … So, it’s sort of like the distinction between climate and weather that we very frequently use when we’re talking about climate change. The climate is the generalized pattern of weather over time. The climate is over a certain period of time; we can expect the average to move up or down based on particular factors. Weather is specific events. As scientists generally say, “You cannot mistake weather for climate.”
So, you cannot say this specific hurricane is due to global warming. You can say that there are trends with regard to hurricanes that may be due to global warming. But you can’t say this specific hurricane is due to global warming. A weather event is not a climate event per se, a snowy [day] is not evidence that there is global cooling, nor is a super-hot day evidence of global warming. Well, the same thing is true when it comes to egregious acts, evil acts, out of the statistical norm — acts like a shooting at the El Paso Wal-Mart. That is an act of weather, it is not an act of climate. But raising the climate, changing the climate, will have impacts on weather.
Inevitably, the Left is having an impact on the entire climate, and it is getting warmer. The political climate is getting warmer. We are experiencing political climate change right now. We could lower the hot air emissions coming from our mouths. We could lower the emissions that are coming from our fingers, out on Twitter. We could lower the emissions by being reasonable, and how we castigate our political opponents. But instead, we are not doing this. Instead we are deciding that we ought to ramp it up, and Democrats are ramping it up at an extraordinary rate. It really is truly incredible.