← The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
The 47 Morning Update with Ben Ferguson
Border Madness: In-Depth from the Border-Traffickers, Terrorists & Tragedy
00:44:46
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- [00:01]
Ben Shapiro
Senator, nice to be with you in the studio, as always. You just got back from the border, and I want to get into this. It's not really shocking, but it's very concerning. Now, from a national security standpoint, how bad has it gotten compared to what it was even just last time you were there?
- [00:16]
Ted Cruz
Well, it keeps getting worse and worse. So I was down on the border Thursday and Friday of last week. And so the Senate was in session. I was in D.C. until Thursday afternoon and then jumped on a plane. And I flew down to McAllen Thursday night. And I brought along with me four other senators, John Cornyn, and he and I often host our colleagues down at the southern border. And we also had with us John Barrasso and Mike Lee and Pete Bricketts. And so the five of us came down, we landed. First thing we did, we went straight from the airport to the midnight muster of the Border Patrol agents. And there were about 50 Border Patrol agents gathered the musteras, where they sit and talk right before they go out on duty. And we had a good discussion with the Border Patrol agents. Really. I just stood up and told them, thank you. More than anything, I wanted them to hear from me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And to tell them. And I said exactly this. I said, listen, I travel all over Texas. I travel all over the country. You need to know that the American people appreciate what you're doing.
- [01:19]
Ben Shapiro
Their morale is low right now.
- [01:20]
Ted Cruz
It's incredibly low. I mean, they are working for bosses who undermine them, who undercut them, who make their jobs impossible to do. All right, I'll tell you something. So we did. Each of us spoke to them a few minutes, and we opened it up for Q and A, and we asked the board of patrol agents, okay, what should we know that we don't know? One of the things we learned, which I had never heard, which is, in the past year, the Biden administration has put out new guidelines for pursuit of illegal aliens. This is illegal aliens that are running, that are trying to get away. And the guidelines, you'd have to effectively call them guidelines for non pursuit because they are told you cannot pursue illegal aliens if there is anything that could potentially endanger someone's safety. So what does that mean? It means if in a car, they have four people in the back seat, and you know, there are only three seat belts, you're not allowed to pursue them.
- [02:16]
Ben Shapiro
Just let them go.
- [02:17]
Ted Cruz
Just let them go. It means if they run a stop sign, you must immediately stop pursuing them and let them go. And what they said happens as a Practical matter, they said, look, the cartels know this memo has gone out, the memo of non pursuit. And so when they see someone and try to apprehend them, if they have illegal aliens hiding, like huddled down, they'll all sit up so you can see, wait, there are more of us than there are seat belts. And the border patrol agents have to stop and just let them drive away.
- [02:46]
Ben Shapiro
Wow. And that came down, I'm assuming, from.
- [02:49]
Ted Cruz
The top, from mayorkas in the past year. It was written instruction basically, that they're prevented from pursuing. They said things like the stop signs, the coyotes now know, okay, break a traffic law immediately. As soon as you see border patrol do something dangerous, run a stop sign, run a red light, speed, anything, speed, whatever. Because the instant you do that, they're required to stop pursuit. And of course, so it's encouraging them to run red lights and do things that are dangerous because of the idiocy of the policy. All right, so we did that. Then we went out on midnight patrol. And that's something I do almost every time I'm down at the border and you go out and you're looking to see where illegal aliens are. And we were out maybe 45 minutes to an hour when we encountered a group. This group was a group mostly of women and children. It was about maybe 20 women and children, mostly kids. And we stood there and we talked to them for about 30, 40 minutes. And we asked them where they were from. They were from Guatemala, they were from El Salvador. A number of them were unaccompanied minors. There was one little girl, a very cute little girl, was 13 years old. She had no family with her. There was another boy who was 15 years old. He had no family with her. There was another girl who was 16 years old. She had no family with her. They were all in this group. So we asked them, we said, okay, well, where are you going? And they told different places they were going. One said he was going to Oregon. Another said she was going to Virginia. And we said, well, where? You know where. And their answer was the same. Every one of them, they said their tio was there. Tio is Spanish for uncle. Mi tio, mi tio. And we'd ask, okay, so does your uncle know you're coming? No. And it started to really dawn on us in a really depressing way that these kids weren't going to an uncle. Yeah, that they were being. They're being trafficked. They're being sent somewhere. They're all told to say they're going to see their tio. We asked them how many of them had experienced violence, an assault on the trip. I have to say, Ben, the look on those kids faces, because they know.
- [05:29]
Ben Shapiro
What you're asking.
- [05:32]
Ted Cruz
Their look answered it. And they basically just said, it's everywhere, it's constant. The one that was haunting for me was in the back. There was this man, a grown man, maybe 35 years old, and he was with a little girl who was 10. And he said she was his daughter. She said he was her dad. It was obvious to everyone he was lying. He was not her father. He had his arm around her and it was like locked tight, like he was holding her almost so she wouldn't run away. And the look of terror in that little girl's face, she was so frightened of this large, sweaty man who had his arm around her and was saying he was her father. And there's a frustration and helplessness that there's nothing we can do, there's nothing the border patrol can do. Because when they take them in, the Biden administration instructs them, release them. And you know, during the Trump administration they had a policy that they were DNA testing in particular adult men who would present with young children and claim to be their fathers because this was a persistent problem. And they DNA test them. And north of 30% of them had no match. They were not their fathers. Now think for a second about what the risks are of handing a 10 year old girl over a man who, a grown man who is not her father. And the reason for this is the policy under Obama and the policy under Biden is if you show up with a kid, you get let go immediately. And so there's a value to bring that child. It's a cover story. The cartels effectively rent these kids. But I gotta say, it was sick looking at that little girl. In any sane world, you'd say, get your damn hands off her. And we're gonna DNA test, we're gonna DNA test you. And when we find out you're not her dad, you're gonna be arrested.
- [07:49]
Ben Shapiro
Can they even separate the parent from the child?
- [07:52]
Ted Cruz
Biden canceled the DNA tests. Like you want to talk about one of the great scandals. These Democrats who prance around and say they're so compassionate, they no longer test to find out if father and alleged daughter or father and alleged son are related because they don't want to know, they don't care. They are perfectly happy just leaving a pedophile with a little girl or a little boy who's being abused. I mean, it's sick. I've never seen. So I've raised this in judiciary committees repeatedly. I've never seen a Democrat give any reason, compassionate, rational. Why wouldn't you DNA test it when you know?
- [08:33]
Ben Shapiro
Because you could stop the trafficking at that moment.
- [08:36]
Ted Cruz
But they don't want to. Their objective is to be efficient. They want it to be fast. They want more, more, more, more, more. I gotta say, it was. And all five of us, I mean, we were shaken up. When you're looking at little girls, all or almost all of whom had been sexually assaulted recently, you could tell the trauma was evident in everything about them. And it's horrifying. The little 13 year old girl, she was going to see her to, she just had a number to call. Sarah Carter from Fox News was there and she said, oh, you want to call him? I have a cell phone. Do you want to call him here on my phone? No, no, no, no, no, no. Like with absolute fear.
- [09:24]
Ben Shapiro
Look, kid, and this is every day, all day, 24 hours a day.
- [09:28]
Ted Cruz
In all likelihood, that little girl is going to spend the next several years trapped in forced prostitution. And that was one day in one hour. There's a reason it was interesting. We were talking to the border patrol agents. We were asking, okay, do Democrats come down here? Do they see this? And they said no. And they said they don't. And they said, there are a couple who've come down and they said they do totally different things than you guys. The Republicans do. They said they will never go out on midnight patrol because they don't want to actually see the kids who are being abused. Because I guess then they would have to lie about it if they've never seen it. What they do instead is they go in to the headquarters, they don't want to actually see the illegal aliens. And they say, okay, talk, talk to us about what kind of food you're giving them, what kind of medical care you're giving them, what kind of. Their whole focus is like a welfare worker where they assume the border patrol is the bad guy and can we give them more stuff? Is basically what the handful of Democrats who go down there do. Now, mind you, Kamala Harris has been to the southern border zero times since she became the border czar. Joe Biden has ostensibly been to the border. Once he went to El Paso, except when he went there, he didn't go to any border, any migrant facilities, and his advance team cleared all the illegal immigrants off the street. So he went to a bridge, he met with some government officials and he left. And according to the White House, he Literally did not see a single illegal alien. That is a heartlessness because when you see these people. By the way, we did that on midnight patrol. Also in that group was a couple, a husband and wife with a little girl. They were from Moldova. The little girl was beautiful, blonde, blond curls, maybe two, three years old. A gorgeous little girl. They had gone from Moldova to Holland, to South America, to Central America, to Mexico, and then trafficked up into the United States, a many month trip to come for Moldova. And I'll tell you, that couple, it was evident they had gone through hell. Especially the Eastern Europeans. The border patrol agents told us they will never tell you what happened to them. They're very disciplined. Like if you ask, they're just, they don't answer questions. They're no, no, no, they won't. They said they're from Moldova, that's it. But they won't describe. They're too afraid of the cartels, they're too afraid of what the cartels would do to them, that they won't describe what happened. But again, it was obvious these people had gone through hell. And it makes you angry because this is entirely preventable. And the reporters, Karine Jean Pierre, we've talked about this a lot on the pod, stood up and said, well, people are not just walking across the border. And you remember I invited her, I said, karine, come with me and I'll.
- [12:32]
Ben Shapiro
Show you them walking across the border.
- [12:33]
Ted Cruz
Within an hour and this last time we found this group within an hour.
- [12:37]
Ben Shapiro
How big was the group?
- [12:38]
Ted Cruz
About 20, mostly kids, little, little kids, three and four year old kids, teenagers, several moms, a couple of men, but it was mostly women and children. And, and, and the border patrol agents told us, they said in all likelihood every one of these children has been sexually abused repeatedly. Not just once. That, that's just part of the trip. Being trafficked is that you are going to be violently raped repeatedly. And I don't understand how if you're Joe Biden, if you're Chuck Schumer, how you don't care about that.
- [13:20]
Ben Shapiro
You've seen this a lot. The others that were with you when they left, what was their demeanor? I mean, you bring other sinners with you, some of them not from border states.
- [13:32]
Ted Cruz
It's disturbing at a level like when you see it, it's different. When you look in the eyes of a 10 year old girl who is with an adult male pretending to be her father, you want to rescue that girl, but there's nothing you can do. They're in custody.
- [13:51]
Ben Shapiro
Can they even, you know, like when you have normal investigations in the US and something happens, they'll usually separate. Even if you're two good guys, they'll separate you to get your stories to see. And I've been told the Biden administration doesn't even allow them to be separated anymore.
- [14:04]
Ted Cruz
Is that true or false? Well, Border Patrol will do some investigation. If they're behaving very unusually, will do some investigation, and they will occasionally find people who are obviously abusing kids. But that's not their mandate. Their mandate is process as fast as possible.
- [14:23]
Ben Shapiro
So it's churn and burn.
- [14:24]
Ted Cruz
Yeah. It's speed. And by the way, look.
- [14:28]
Ben Shapiro
And that really happened to go back in time to remind people when there was a humanitarian issue and there were so many people under that bridge and they started getting the drones up and the media were covering it, and there was tens of thousands of people under this bridge, and it was a humanitarian PR problem. That's when they went into full expedite and get as fast as they come in, release them so that we don't look like we have a problem at the border with a bunch of people gathering.
- [14:52]
Ted Cruz
And by the way, release them means send them to every city in America. Yeah, you look at this supplemental bill that the Biden White House wants. Israel military funding, but they also want Ukraine added to it. They also want what they call border security, which has nothing to do with border security. It's a whole bunch of money for more people to process illegal aliens faster, to put them on more buses and more planes. All right, that was Thursday night. Friday morning, we wake up, we meet with senior leadership of the Border Patrol for a briefing on what's happening. The numbers that continue to skyrocket. We're upwards of 7.9 million illegal aliens under Joe Biden. 7.9 million. After that, we. We went to the Ursula facility, which is a facility that is processing illegal immigrants. There were hundreds and hundreds of illegal immigrants in holding cells. They separate them. So there were adult males. There were adult males with criminal convictions. They get lots of adult males with criminal convictions. They separate them. That's just US convictions, by the way. They don't know if they have convictions in Honduras or El Salvador or Venezuela. That's just US Criminal convictions. There are single women. There was a separate holding cell for pregnant women filled with pregnant women who.
- [16:11]
Ben Shapiro
Will have kids in America.
- [16:13]
Ted Cruz
They will have kids in America that will be US Citizens. They're right there. There was another cell that was just for people that are sick that are coming in with infectious diseases. You look at this. And by the way, these cells, the illegal immigrants, many of them are sleeping on the floor. They're packed in side by side like sardines. I mean, a cell will be, oh, I don't know, 30ft wide by 60ft long, something like that. And you'll have 100 illegal immigrants in there. And they'll be lying on the floor side by side by side, covered in reflective blankets. Looks like tinfoil.
- [16:54]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah.
- [16:55]
Ted Cruz
And they're just in there. That's every day. By the way, those. Remember the kids in cages? Yeah, those are the Biden cages.
- [17:03]
Ben Shapiro
They're still there, they're still being used.
- [17:05]
Ted Cruz
And no Democrat cares, Nobody in the media cares.
- [17:08]
Ben Shapiro
No AOC is down there crying.
- [17:09]
Ted Cruz
Nope, nope. It just. It doesn't matter at all. From there, we went to a stash house. So this is a stash house they had just busted. The stash house was an incredibly dilapidated, nasty house. They had busted it and they found two illegals held in there right there. And so they arrested them. We saw them pulling them out in handcuffs as we arrived. I mean, we were there minutes after they busted it. Those tend to be much more dangerous illegal aliens. Why? Because the ones that are more dangerous try to run and escape. Many of them just turn themselves in. But if you've got a criminal conviction, if you're a gang member, if you're ms.13, if you're a murderer, a rapist, a child molester, if you're a terrorist, those are the ones that want to be gotaways. And so the cartels will put them in stash houses and hold them for a day or two and then try to put them on a bus or put them on some transport to get them into the interior. So these stash houses are located all over the place down on the southern border. This stash house, like we opened the door, it was this totally dilapidated house. There were wet clothes. They had clearly crossed the river recently because they were soaking wet. Clothes that were just thrown on the ground right there. There were piles of clothing, shoes, shirts, I mean, just piled up. There was one tiny little air conditioner in the house, but the walls were falling down, the house was filthy, it stunk and that. And they don't know who owned it. They said that house had probably been rented to 20 different people they'll try to track down. But the cartels, by the way, there was a lock on the outside, so they put the illegals in there and lock them in.
- [18:58]
Ben Shapiro
Unbelievable.
- [18:59]
Ted Cruz
There was not a caretaker there when they busted it. So sometimes they'll have the cartel person watching them. And look, the stash houses are also where they will rape women again. They will shake people down for more money. In that case, they were just holding these two guys. The two guys they pulled out were both single adult men. I'd say 20s or 30s, military age men, lots of tats, pretty rough looking guys. They got pulled out in handcuffs. We don't know their story. From there, we went out on horseback patrol. And so the border patrol has a whole division that is on horseback because much of the terrain there's you can't even get to with vehicles. And so we spent about an hour on horseback patrolling and riding along the Rio Grande. Then we met with local leaders, including the mayor of a big Mexican city on the other side of the border, who was expressing enormous frustration, said, look, your policies are killing us, are resulting in my city being invaded. He said, we've got tens of thousands of people camping out in my city because when they come to the United States, you guys let them go. Now, his argument, what he wanted is he said, couldn't you just take them at the embassy so they don't have to come to the border? He was fine with us letting them all in. He just didn't want them to have to cross through his city. So he's like, can't you be even more efficient and like, fly them from Mexico City or something? I wasn't terribly interested in that suggestion.
- [20:26]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah, fair point.
- [20:27]
Ted Cruz
And then the last thing we did is we went out with border patrol on the boat, went up and down the river. It was interesting. You're going up and down the river all along the shore. We probably saw 20 different discarded rafts that are like green vinyl, but they were done. They were sort of, you know, thrashed out and just laying along the. Laying along the shore. Probably 20 of them that had been used to either shuttle illegal aliens or shuttle drugs. And then several times we saw people that the border patrol agents said were cartel scouts that were just Mexicans on the Mexican side of the border. They were like standing a little bit in the river and like pretending to fish or something. But they weren't really fishing. They were there watching us to radio back, okay, here's what the border patrol is doing. And then we ended with a press conference. But, you know, the press conference, we tried to talk about what happened. What is happening at the border is horrific and it keeps getting worse.
- [21:27]
Liz Wheeler
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- [23:01]
Ben Shapiro
There'S also something that's changed, and I really want to focus on this for a moment before we move on to other stuff. But there are new threats that are against our men and women at the border, our Border Patrol agents. We're seeing bounties on them. We're seeing people that are willing to pay for their families, addresses where they're living, where they're renting, if they're in a hotel, whatever it may be. There's a new level of boldness from the cartels that are now saying, we want these Border patrol agents to be afraid of us and not do their job and just disappear.
- [23:36]
Ted Cruz
Look, it is very dangerous. The threats against Border Patrol agents are real. Just this past week, I sent an oversight letter to Alejandro Mayorkas saying, what are you doing to protect Border Patrol agents given these threats, given that they're paying for their home addresses, their families addresses, they're threatening their families. What are you doing? And if you can't protect your agencies, you need to resign. He needs to resign regardless.
- [23:59]
Ben Shapiro
Is this thing Republicans should take up in the House? We got a new speaker now.
- [24:03]
Liz Wheeler
Yes.
- [24:03]
Ted Cruz
Yes.
- [24:04]
Ben Shapiro
Because there's enough evidence now. It's not.
- [24:07]
Ted Cruz
The House should impeach Mayorkas and Why, absolutely, yes. For Africa. Absolute dereliction of duty. For defying federal law. For facilitating the invasion of the United States of America by 7.9 million people. For facilitating the deaths of 753 migrants last year. For facilitating the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of women and thousands of little children for 100,000 overdoses, including 70% from Chinese fentanyl across the southern border. All of that Alejandro Mayorkas is responsible for and he doesn't give a damn. And by the way, you remember when I questioned him in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I asked him about the colored wristbands. He said he had no idea what they were. He'd never seen them before. When I was down there, I found several colored wristbands just laying on the ground. It takes you about a minute to do it. The wristbands, the colors, correspond to how many thousands of dollars they owe the cartels. They are modern day leg irons. And that group we met, we met a group of slaves. And it's horrifying. You feel like you're back pre civil war and you encounter slave traders.
- [25:17]
Ben Shapiro
People are gonna say, how did you know they were actually slaves? You're making it up. You're exaggerating. I know. The left is gonna say it. When you say you meet slaves. Explain that.
- [25:24]
Ted Cruz
When you talk to little girls and they say they're going to some random tio who. They don't know his name, they don't know who he is. They say, oh, he doesn't know I'm coming, but I just have a number to call.
- [25:35]
Ben Shapiro
You're in slavery.
- [25:36]
Ted Cruz
You are in slavery. And it sounds harsh to say Democrats don't care, but if you cared, you'd do something about it. If Joe Biden cared, he could stop it. If Alejandro Mayorkas cared, he could stop it. If Democrat senators cared, they could join us in trying to force Joe Biden to stop it. But they don't. The Democrat Senate has zero interest. Look, two and a half years of Biden being president, I have not seen one single Democrat senator on judiciary question, one single witness about the slavery, about the sexual assault, about the abuse of migrants by the traffickers. Now, they're all for made up story. So you remember there was that whole thing about border patrol agents are whipping migrants. Yes, and it was a completely made up lie where they focused on the reins of the horse. By the way, we were riding those horses, where they have long reins that are used for riding the horse, but they weren't. I mean, it was a total lie that got Democrats Very excited because they're full investigation.
- [26:48]
Ben Shapiro
They should be fired immediately.
- [26:50]
Ted Cruz
But when it comes to the cartels, look at lunchtime we sat down with local community leaders. We sat down with Mayor McAllen, who's a Republican, a good friend. We sat down with the sheriff of Brooks County. Brooks county is north. And where Brooks county is, there's a checkpoint at Valfurious. And so what happens is the smugglers don't want to be caught at the checkpoint. So they stop south of the checkpoint and they make all the illegal immigrants get out and they go through Brooks county to get around the checkpoint. And Brooks county is a pretty rugged county. In the summertime, it's brutally hot. There's not a lot of water there. And the number of deaths that they find, they just. The farmers and ranchers find dead bodies one after the other after the other after the other. There are emergency beacons that they've installed that have writing for illegal immigrants. The first language you see is Chinese.
- [27:52]
Ben Shapiro
Wow.
- [27:53]
Ted Cruz
They have writing in Chinese, they have writing in Arabic and it's push this if you're in distress. So border patrol will come rescue you, but they go off and the coyotes, if you're in distress, they just abandon you.
- [28:05]
Ben Shapiro
Yeah. They don't care if you're a pregnant.
- [28:07]
Ted Cruz
Lady, if you're elderly, if you're a little kid, you will die. The sheriff of Brooks county had brought a three ring binder with about 100 different cases of bodies they'd found in Brooks County.
- [28:22]
Ben Shapiro
Wow.
- [28:23]
Ted Cruz
And I sat there, Ben and I flipped through it one at a time, the conditions of those bodies. I have to tell you, I was physically ill, seeing in the heat. People's face gets charred, they get. They get blown up and enlarged. Just the effects of the weather are grotesque. There were multiple young women who had died and every one of them had their pants open and pulled down. And it was clear they'd been raped before they died, one after the other after the other. And I actually made a point. I said, I'm going to go through this entire book. These are human beings. I need to see what's happening. I gotta say, I don't know a reporter at CNN or MSNBC or ABC or CBS or NBC who goes through that book, who covers that book, who tells the story. These are the Biden body bags. These are the people who are dying because of your policies.
- [29:34]
Ben Shapiro
Last question on the border. How concerned were border patrol agents over the possibility of terrorists? Not possibility, the reality that terrorists are coming across at a much higher rate than we've seen over the last five years combined. We talked about this on a previous verdict, but this is the first time you've been down there since these new numbers have been released that are saying there's a significant increase of terrorists that are on the terrorist watch list that we are catching at the border. Doesn't count any of the ones that we're not catching.
- [30:02]
Ted Cruz
So look, they're very concerned we talked about, particularly with the war in Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah specifically targeting coming across the bor. As we talked about in last week's podcast, the San Diego division of the Border Patrol instructed their agents be on the lookout for people from Hamas and Hezbollah hiding and pretending that they're not in the Rio Grande Valley. They said they had not encountered recently people from Hamas and Hezbollah. So in the last couple of weeks that had not yet presented, they're worried about it. They're watching for it now. It's worth noting, if you're a Hamas terrorist, you're not going to be in the people that are turning themselves in voluntarily. Sure, you're gonna be in the gotaways. And one of the real problem is the volume is so great that it overwhelms the Border Patrol agents so that you have on any given night no capacity to even chase the gotaways. And so that evening muster, it was interesting. I was talking with Brandon Judd, who's the head of the Border Patrol union, a good friend. He was with us and he was saying, he said, all right, that night, he said typically that night there would be about 170 agents that are available to go out on patrol. He said that night there were 31 that were available because all of the rest were doing paperwork and processing and handling the detention facility. So it should have been 170 some odd. Instead it was 31. That's part of how the cartels overwhelm us is the bulk of the manpower is not actually on the border securing it.
- [31:34]
Ben Shapiro
Air marshals are a great example. They're off planes now processing at the border.
- [31:39]
Ted Cruz
Yes, the exact same thing. And then, so this group that they encountered. So this group, there were several agents, he said, okay, there are 31 that started at midnight out on patrol. This one group, you've got 20 to 25, mostly women and children. You have several agents to go pick them up. You've got to detain them, you've got to question them, you've got to process them. He said, that group will take 5 to 10 off the field. So that means 31 becomes 21, by the way, where they were There was no transport bus, so they had to load them in the back of pickup trucks. All these kids in the back of pickup trucks. And you know what they told me? They said, okay, this is against the rules. Yeah, but are they just supposed to leave them here? What else are they supposed to do? They don't have any vehicle to put them in. So they put him in the back of the pickup truck to take him to the processing center. And he said, you know what if something happens, if that car gets in a wreck, if a kid jumps out the back and hurts himself, those agents will be disciplined or fired for transporting them unsafely. And he said, now there's no alternative way to transport them. They could leave these children out here, just say, okay, bye.
- [32:44]
Ben Shapiro
They could die.
- [32:45]
Ted Cruz
There's a reason the Democrats don't come. There's a reason CNN doesn't come. You cannot see this and spin it and say, hey, this is great, this is perfectly okay.
- [32:56]
Ben Shapiro
Senator, I also want to bring in our guests. We've talked a lot about kids protecting kids. We also have problems in this country where we have basically given our kids over to the government and parents are trying to get back in their kids lives have been declared domestic terrorists by our own government, which is shocking. A good friend of the show, someone that you used to do Verdict plus with, people know her from that, Liz Wheeler has her own great show. She's got an incredible new book out as well. And I know it was important that we make sure we had her on Verdict.
- [33:24]
Ted Cruz
Well Liz, welcome back. Liz is my former co host of Verdict. We did Verdict together. We traveled the country, we went to college campuses together and dealt with young leftists who had questions and wanted to be confronted with the truth. And Liz does an amazing job on her own show on the Liz Wheeler show and she has a brand new book, Hide youe Children, Exposing the Marxists behind the Attack on American Kids.
- [33:50]
Liz Wheeler
Liz, welcome back Senator, thanks so much for having me.
- [33:54]
Ben Shapiro
Thanks Ben, Good to have you here. Tell us a little bit about this book, why you wanted to write it and why it's so important, especially right now.
- [34:02]
Liz Wheeler
Yeah, this book started as a question that I, I think a lot of parents actually had the same question that I had during COVID when we saw this increase in attacks on our children. I mean all parents had to do is look over their kid's shoulder on Zoom School and they'd see Critical Race Theory and trans ideology, the 1619 Project, plus good old fashioned moral relativism just thrown at their kids. And I understand that this Isn't a new thing that our kids are the target of the left? But it did seem to be escalating. So I wondered, well, where is this coming from? Who's behind this? What's behind this? What's the goal? So the purpose of this book is I sought to find the answer to that question. And what I found was both frightening and frustrating. The frightening part is that the left has spent decades trying to get to our children. And to do so, they have co opted, they've captured what I call four of the five major cultural institutions. So the media, that's an obvious one. The education system, sadly, a lot of religious institutions too. The law, which has become evident in the last couple of years. And now they've set their sights on the nuclear family, particularly on children. This is the frightening part, the frustrating part is if this attack on our children isn't new, if it's been decades in the making, why haven't we been able to stop this? What has the Republican Party been doing for all of these decades to fight back? And so what I do in the book, the first half of the book, is I name the names of the people and the organizations that are behind the capture of the institutions behind the attack on our kids. And the second half of the book is a critique of the Republican Party. I offer a solution that I will tell you is different than what the Republican Party offers for how we can actually start winning, how we can recapture our institutions, how we can protect our kids and therefore our country.
- [35:50]
Ted Cruz
All right, so let's take those one at a time. You said the first half of the book you're naming names. So who are the biggest names? Who are the individuals most responsible for the relentless attack on our kids?
- [36:01]
Liz Wheeler
Yeah, that's a great question. So what I do in the book is I make sure to differentiate between the Marxists who conceived the ideas, many of whom are long dead, and the current Marxists, the modern Marxists that are alive and well in our country today who are propagating these ideas on our children. And I'll give you an example of one of each. One of the modern Marxists who's propagating an entirely destructive ideology on our children is a woman by the name of Gayle Rubin. Gayle Rubin is known as the founder or she wrote the founding document of Queer Theory. Queer Theory is a neo Marxist theory that unsurprising to most of your viewers, is what underpins the transgender ideology. So these poisonous ideas that are being taught to children in school right now, that boys can be girls, Girls can be boys. Gender is not connected to biological sex. Everything's fluid. This is not just a random assortment of nonsense. This is pulled directly from Neo Marxist queer theory, which was penned by Gayle Rubin, who is alive and well in our country today. And yet most people maybe in the past couple months, they've heard about her because I've been talking so much about her. Most people have never heard of this woman, even though she's having such a direct and destructive impact on our children. That's the first example. The second example I will give is a Marxist who is long dead, and that's a Marxist, a Brazilian Marxist, actually, by the name of Paul Paulo Freire. He was the one who contended that teachers in school shouldn't teach children facts and knowledge. He should teach them a worldview, how to view the world. And he called this worldview critical consciousness. What critical consciousness is really is just teaching children to look at everything through a Marxist lens. And this idea of critical consciousness is what exists in our public school system today under the all encompassing, vague umbrella term of wokeness. So I trace everything back to its origins and show the manifestations of how it's impacting our kids in our society in America today.
- [37:59]
Ben Shapiro
Liz, I want to ask you about moms specifically. I've actually been inspired and I think TC and I, we've been on the road, we've seen this. There are a lot of moms have gotten off the bench and are getting really involved with their kids and their kids curriculum and what's happening, their schools and what they're being taught. That's one of the biggest blessings, I think, of the COVID lockdowns was moms got to see in the classroom what was happening with their kids. I'm inspired by that. And I think this is going to be something that the liberals are gonna have hell to pay now with moms that are now involved. Is that part of what you're seeing and inspiring you to write this book? Yeah.
- [38:35]
Liz Wheeler
It's incredible to see how many parents, moms and dads who've had their eyes opened. I think as conservatives, we're generally people of good faith. We generally like to give other people the benefit of the doubt. We generally see the good in humanity. And sometimes because of that, it can be difficult to look at our political opposition and label them for what they are. We'd rather say, you know what? This is a well intentioned, good faith opposition who just has unwise, practical solutions to problems that we all admit are problems. That's how the Republican Party actually has operated for the last 50 years. But I think for the first time in many parents lives during COVID they saw that. No, that's not true. Our Democrat opposition are not well intentioned, well intentioned opposition who want the best but have bad ideas for how to bring that about. They are in fact embracing neo Marxist, anti Christian, anti American, sometimes anti human ideology. And it's a really important step in fighting back against this to be able to define what the other side is. That's why I spent so much time doing that in the first half of my book. Because if we don't understand the reality of this political enemy we face, we won't fight well against it. And if we don't fight well, we won't win. And I'm tired of not winning. I'm ready to win as I know everyone watching this show is too.
- [39:51]
Ted Cruz
Amen. All right, Liz, last question. You said the second half of the book focuses on a critique of the Republican Party and what we need to do better to fight back. What does the Republican Party need to do to stop this madness?
- [40:04]
Liz Wheeler
Honestly, this is the part of the book that I'm proudest of, and I know it's the part that's ruffled some feathers a little bit, but I stand by this 100%. So I'll give you an example of one of the most interesting pieces of information that I found in the course of researching this book. Our public school system was not mandatory. Children were not compelled to go to public school until the year 1852. In 1852, the state of Massachusetts became the first state to compel public education. And the reason why was because there was an influx of immigrants to our country at the time, particularly Catholic immigrants. And the Protestant politicians in charge wanted to indoctrinate these immigrant children in American values so that they would be loyal to America first rather than the country of their birth. And in Protestant doctrine because of the centuries long battle between Protestants and Catholics. And I realized that our institutions were never intended to be neutral institutions. Our school system was never intended to simply teach reading, writing, arithmetic and otherwise be value neutral. That if we as conservatives and the Republican Party do not harness these institutions to teach children our values, what's going to happen is the left is going to swoop in and teach their own. The Republican Party has fallen for the false idea of tolerance and neutrality which doesn't exist. And perhaps the philosophical reason for this is because they misdefine the word liberty. They define liberty as simply the maximum amount of individual freedom possible in a civil society, when really our government was formed around the idea that liberty is the means to something greater, that there's a moral, the thing that is greater is a moral thing, and that our society, a flourishing society, is intended to try to attain that. And Republicans have gotten very shy of bringing religion or morals or anything of that nature into our politics, and it's been to our detriment. We wouldn't be in the chaos, the cultural chaos that we exist in now if Republicans had not surrendered both institutions in the name of neutrality and morality and virtue in the name of libertarianism to the left a long time ago.
- [42:08]
Ben Shapiro
Liz, congratulations on the new book grab it for your kids, your grandkids. Make sure you read this.
- [42:13]
Liz Wheeler
Hide your children.
- [42:14]
Ben Shapiro
It is out now exposing the Marxists behind the attack on America's kids. Congratulations.
- [42:20]
Liz Wheeler
Thank you gentlemen. I appreciate it.
- [42:22]
Ted Cruz
Great to see you.
- [42:23]
Liz Wheeler
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- [44:12]
Ben Shapiro
Can download Verdict and listen Monday, Wednesday and Friday wherever you get your podcast. Also, we have our weekend review on Saturday that's become incredibly pop popular. Some of the things you may have missed later in each podcast during the week, so make sure you grab that as well. Don't forget to rise to five star review and please share this episode if you're watching on Facebook or on YouTube or wherever you're listening on social media. And on those in between days, grab my podcast, the Ben Ferguson Podcast. I'll keep you updated on the breaking news in between Verdict episodes. We'll see you back here in a couple of days.