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March 14, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:01
Ep. 88 - Is Donald Trump Responsible For Violence at His Events?

Ben talks about violence at Trump rallies, who's to blame, and the hubbub at Breitbart News. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Why, hi there!
We're back.
It's Monday, and it was an eventful weekend, as my weekends have tended to be lately.
And so we will talk about everything that happened over the weekend a little bit later in the show.
We will also talk about Donald Trump and whether he's responsible for violence at his rallies.
We'll talk about all of these things, plus an uplifting segment of things that I like.
We'll get to all of those things.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
...tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
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Okay, so I promise you we will get to all of the breaking news from Breitbart and all of that.
I know there are a lot of people who are listening and watching today because of all the drama, but I first want to start with the actual news because the truth is that I'm not the Michelle Fields is not the news story.
We'll get to all of that and what I actually think of that.
I can tell you that I haven't slept for about 48 hours at this point and and this whole situation makes me sick to my stomach, but first As I say, to the news.
So, one of the big things that's been happening over the weekend is, we talked about it last week, this sort of violence that's been breaking out at Donald Trump rallies.
So, in the last podcast, we showed tape of, for example, a Donald Trump rally-goer, somebody who was a fan of Donald Trump's, clocking a black guy as he was walking out.
He's a protester being escorted out by security, and one of the folks in the audience clocked him with his elbow and then said that, next time, maybe we'll have to kill him.
And Donald Trump, you know, continues to sort of foment this feeling among a lot of his followers.
We're fighting back, but not just fighting back.
Listen, fighting back is fine.
I've used President Obama's tagline as my tagline.
Punch back twice as hard.
Rhetorically speaking.
I don't actually encourage my followers to do violence to people.
Never would.
Don't do violence.
Violence is evil.
You know, violence in the politics is, these are two things that should not meet.
Okay, there's no justification for political discussions to become violent.
There's no justification.
This is what happened at Cal State LA, right?
You have to stand in favor of people's freedom of speech, even if it's speech with which you disagree.
So.
As you know, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump.
As you know, I think that Donald Trump is quite awful.
But, but, Donald Trump was in fact the victim of violence at the last couple of his rallies.
So, we saw over the weekend that there was a Trump rally and a guy rushed the stage.
Here's what it looked like.
I will call up Terry, the president, because I have to do it myself.
- You can fuck him up. - Go get him get up, get him, get him!
Get him! - Pick his s**t by him, go get him!
Go get him!
Throw his s**t out of here!
Go get him!
Jump!
Okay, so that's what it looks like.
Folks, if you can't see what's going on here because you don't subscribe, first of all, subscribe.
It's useful.
You can go to dailywire.com to subscribe to our podcast.
You see we have visuals.
We have a beautiful set that looks like bombed-out shelter.
But we do show you visuals that you want to see.
What it shows in this video is a guy tries to rush to the stage.
He tries to jump on the stage, and Secret Service jumps on top of him.
He actually gets pretty close to Trump.
He almost makes it up onto the stage.
Obviously, this is egregious.
Obviously, this is bad.
They did interview the guy who rushed Trump.
For some reason, I don't know why he's not, he really should be in jail.
If you try to rush somebody, if you try to do physical violence to somebody, then you should be in jail.
He's not for some reason.
He was let out, which is absurd.
And again, I'm saying this as a Trump critic, but this is unacceptable behavior.
Here's the guy who rushed Trump talking about what he thinks of Trump.
What were you thinking?
I was thinking that Donald Trump is a bully, and he is nothing more than that.
He is somebody who is just saying a lot of bold things.
He's making bold claims.
But I can see right through that.
And I can see that he's truly just a coward.
And he's opportunistic.
And he's willing to destroy this country for power for himself.
Well, that's your motivation.
But what were you thinking at that moment?
Why did you do what you did?
I was thinking that I could get up on stage and take his podium away from him.
And take his mic away from him and send a message to all people out in the country who wouldn't consider themselves racist, who wouldn't consider themselves approving of what type of violence Donald Trump is allowing at his rallies and send them a message that we can be strong, we can find our strength and we can stand up Against Donald Trump and against this new wave he's ushering in of truly just violent white supremacist ideas.
Were you, if you had made it to that stage, were you going to attack him?
No, not at all.
There would have been no point.
Donald Trump is 6'3".
I'm 5'9", maybe, you know.
He's a giant man surrounded by thousands of followers, 12 Secret Service, and a former Ohio State off-line man.
That would have accomplished nothing.
But can you see how people might have perceived that you weren't?
Of course.
And I wasn't expecting there to be as much Secret Service as there was there that day.
From what I'd sort of seen, there hadn't been that much or hadn't been that much in a contained area, so I thought my chances of getting up on stage and getting to the podium would have been better.
Okay, so this guy, he's an idiot.
Okay, so some of the things he's saying about Trump here are true, that Trump is a bully and he's debased the discourse, but your solution to this is that you're going to jump up on stage and take his microphone away from him?
That's your solution?
So your solution is, he's made the discourse worse, he's a bully, so I'm gonna go up there and I'm gonna forcibly take away his microphone.
This is where we are going as a country.
It's someplace very scary.
Where we're going as a country is a place that we haven't been for a very long time, really since the 60s.
And that is a place where there are people, a significant number of people, who believe that it's okay to do violence in the name of their political beliefs.
And what did he think was going to happen?
Trump was just going to give it up?
He'd have had to push Trump away from the mic, obviously.
There would have had to be physical violence.
And there was.
I mean, he rushed the stage.
This wasn't the only physical violence over the weekend.
There was also violence that broke out in Chicago.
So Trump was scheduled to do an event in Chicago, which of course is kind of one of the centers of the Black Lives Matter movement.
A lot of lefties in Chicago, obviously.
And here's what it looked like inside the hall where Trump was supposed to speak.
So Pondeb was on the floor of the arena as tensions built.
Raw emotions on both sides.
Build that wall 10 feet higher!
Yeah!
Build that wall!
He interviewed both protesters and Trump supporters.
These people are protesting and exercising their free speech, and the irony of that is we don't get to have our side.
Tons of student organizations all over the campus got together, had meetings all week to stop this atrocity from happening.
Police cleared the pavilion, and the streets outside were quickly blocked.
Tensions were high.
Deb shot video of an arrest.
Police surrounded a man whose face was bloodied.
Protesters screamed at police.
Deb continued to roll as police kept watch.
Without warning, Deb was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground.
Okay, so all of this insanity, obviously, and there's more.
We can show you more footage of the violence.
Here's a little bit more of what it looked like in Chicago, and I think it is important to look at what happens at these Trump rallies because it's important to note two things.
One, there are two groups of people, and they're actually in some ways the same group of people.
You have the protesters who are willing to do violence in order to stop Trump from speaking, and then you have the protesters who are pro-Trump who are willing to do violence in order to stop the protesters who are anti-Trump from speaking.
Anybody who tries to shut down free speech is the villain in this particular case.
Here's what it looked like at some of the Trump rallies over the last week.
St. Louis, Chicago got ugly.
Isn't it great to be at a Trump rally, really?
What?
It's more fun. - Go, Dave.
- All right?
Demonstrator injured in a fight outside the Trump rally.
This is becoming violent.
There is pushing and shoving going on inside this arena.
People are throwing objects.
Fight breaking out between a protester and a Trump supporter apparently.
So this kind of stuff was was apparently pretty common and it looks actually we here at the Daily Wire have some personal experience with this because this is pretty much what it looked like at Cal State Los Angeles when I went to speak there the other day.
We're reaching the end of politics.
We're reaching the end of American politics when we can't even have conversations with each other.
I agree that Donald Trump is a horror show.
I also agree that Donald Trump has a right to speak.
And the problem is, honestly, politically, when people do this sort of thing at Trump rallies, when people come to stop Trump from speaking, it makes him more popular.
It actually makes him more popular.
It makes him look like he's a big, strong, tough guy for going to the rally or for being shut down or for canceling the rally.
People say, who are these people who are trying to shut this down?
Trump must be doing something right.
Well, He really isn't.
I mean, in fact, he's doing many things wrong.
So here's Donald Trump's reaction to all of this.
This is what Donald Trump had to say about the Chicago protesters.
And they were pouring into the arena, good arena, everything nice, and all of a sudden, a planned attack just came out of nowhere, printed by, and it was printed by people that were professional people.
If you look at the posters, they're all printed, they have a mark on them, who made them, all done by a group, all very professionally done.
A disgrace, if you want to know the truth.
And with these thousands of people, And fortunately, we're able to let a lot of them know, don't go, because we would have had a problem like you wouldn't have believed, just like Big Nick.
They would have wiped them out and that would not have been good.
And we made a decision.
We said, and I hated to do this because, frankly, it would have been easier to go.
But I didn't want to see anybody get hurt.
You would have had a problem like they haven't seen in a long time.
Because we have people that are so amazing.
And it's not necessarily loyal to me.
It's loyal to the country.
We want to see things happen.
Okay, so it's not loyal to me, it's loyal to the country.
First of all, I hate that sort of language generally because the idea that identity with Trump is loyalty to the country implies that if you're not loyal to Trump then you're disloyal to the country.
I will also point you out here that while it's not Trump's fault that people show up and act violent against his protests, it's not his fault, you don't see this happening at Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz events.
Right?
You don't.
You don't see people showing up from the other side ready to do physical violence.
Now, I think part of that's a reflection of Trump's prominence.
I think part of that's Trump's rhetoric.
But, whatever it is, Donald Trump plays a role in his own supporters getting violent.
That he does.
So I'm not going to blame him for Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter has been getting violence since Baltimore and Ferguson.
That's not Donald Trump's fault.
In fact, the rise of Trump is at least in part due to the fact that so many people have reacted badly to these riots and to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the violence being done in the name of leftist ideology.
And they said, OK, fine, let's appoint somebody who's going to at least bring back some law and order.
That's sort of the idea here.
But as far as Trump's own followers, that's a different story.
So, for example, you remember Just a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump at a rally, he said that if somebody tries to throw a tomato, clock them, right, take them out, and I'll pay your defense bills.
So, we showed you the video last week of the elderly guy, older guy, who either elbowed or punched a black guy in the face, put him on the ground in the middle of a Trump rally.
Donald Trump was asked about that on the Sunday shows, and here's what Donald Trump said about the sucker punch incident.
I'm just curious, do you plan on paying for the legal fees of this older gentleman in North Carolina who sucker-punched the protester?
Well, I'm not aware.
I will say this.
I do want to see what that young man was doing, because he was very taunting.
He was very loud, very disruptive.
And from what I understand, he was sticking a certain finger up in the air.
And that is a terrible thing to do in front of somebody that, frankly, wants to see America made great again.
And so we'll see.
I'm going to take a look at it.
But I want to see what that man was doing.
And that condones a sucker punch, though?
No, as I told you before, nothing condones, but I want to see.
The man got carried away.
He was 78 years old.
He obviously loves this country, and maybe he doesn't like seeing what's happening to the country.
I want to see the full tape, but I don't condone violence.
I don't.
Well, I'm going to look at it.
I'm going to see, you know, what was behind this because it was a strange event.
But from what I heard, there was a, you know, there was a lot of taunting and a certain finger was placed in the air.
Not nice.
Again, I don't condone the violence.
I don't condone what he did.
But, you know what?
Not nice on the other side either.
It's possible you could help him with legal fees if this man needs it.
I've actually instructed my people to look into it, yes.
What the hell is wrong with Donald Trump?
Really, I mean, since when is raising your middle finger called to get punched in the face?
He says maybe he loves the country too much.
I'm sorry, you don't get to do this.
At what point do we say to ourselves, this behavior is just unacceptable?
It's uncivilized.
The definition of civilization is I don't have to walk down the street at night and look over my shoulder fearing I'm gonna get a hit, right?
That's the definition of civilization, is that I get to live in a society where I don't have to fear the imminent threat of violence at every turn.
Donald Trump is not fostering that.
He's saying that people who hit other people, it just demonstrates their loyalty to him and their loyalty to the country.
And then he plays this footsie where he gives enough to his supporters that they can sort of get out of it.
He sort of gaslights you.
He does this routine where he says, well, you know, I'm not saying this is a bad guy.
I'll look into paying his defense funds.
But it's not like I'm saying it's okay what he did.
No, it kind of is.
It kind of is.
Imagine it where your child, and your child is on the playground, and your child is hitting the other kids.
Do you go to your kid and you say, you know what?
If you go ahead and you hit those other kids, more power to you.
I'm gonna make sure you don't get in trouble, but hitting is bad.
No, the kid will be confused, obviously.
What do you think his followers are not children?
They're adults.
But the bottom line is, when you promote the message that you are going to side with the people who perpetrate violence, That breeds a situation of violence.
Because people go in expecting there to be violence, and then on the other side, they show up expecting there to be violence.
Right?
The fact is that aggression is typically met with aggression in just any- in all the animal kingdom.
You punch somebody, you're gonna get punched back.
If people anticipate they're going to be punched, they're going to be more ready for the punch than they otherwise would be.
They're gonna be- show up more on edge.
Not a lot of people show up to a Kenny G concert ready to go.
People show up to Trump rallies and they're ready to go.
And there's a reason for that.
There's a reason for that.
And Donald Trump continued along these lines.
He said that, you know, disruptive protesters should be thrown in jail.
Here's what he had to say on that.
I hope these guys get thrown into a jail.
They'll never do it again.
It'll destroy their record.
They'll have to explain to mom and dad why they have a police record and why they can't get a job.
And you know what?
I'm going to start pressing charges against all these people.
Okay?
And then we won't have a problem.
And I don't want to do that.
I don't want to ruin somebody's life.
They're probably good kids.
You know, they're probably good kids.
I don't want to ruin people's lives.
But the only way we're going to stop this craziness is if we press charges.
The only way we're gonna stop this craziness is if we press charges.
Okay, then how about pressing charges against the guy who clocked someone at your alley?
Who you say you're gonna pay the defense bills for?
You don't get to have it both ways.
You don't get to say violence is always bad unless my guys are doing it.
That is the essence of fascism.
Violence is always bad unless my guys are doing it.
No, that's not right.
And Trump says that this is okay because people are angry.
Our good friend Andrew Klavan has cut a great video.
If you haven't seen it, go to dailywire.com and check out his fantastic video, I'm Angry and So I'm Voting Trump.
It's great.
It's got like 1.3 million hits on Facebook already.
It's terrific.
But the idea that anger justifies everything is a very, very dangerous one.
It's extraordinarily dangerous.
We'll get back to that in just a moment, but first we do have to take a brief profit timeout with Reagan.com.
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Okay, so again, Trump says he's a messenger for anger.
So here's Donald Trump talking about how he is a messenger for America's anger.
By the way, Bernie gets peanuts compared to what we get.
And I say we because it's me, and I'm just the messenger.
Because there is a lot of anger in this country, and it's anger at incompetence.
It's anger at the border.
It's anger at trade deals that are so bad for us and all our jobs are being taken out of the country.
There is a lot of anger.
I didn't need to do this.
I have a wonderful life.
I have a great, great company.
I didn't need to do this.
I wanted to do it because somebody has to do it.
I would just ask... Our country is in trouble.
I hear you, sir.
Okay, so he says that our country's in trouble.
I'm not asking them to do it, but when people are angry, what can you do?
Okay, the uncontrolled anger, like, I'm ginning up the anger, but then it's not my fault.
Nothing, how do I control?
Your baseline obligation, it would be, it seems to me, it would be to lead off your speech with a unifying reminder that what keeps us all American is the fact that we don't punch each other over our views.
And Trump continues to push this, but it's not just that he's pro-America, it's that he's pro-Trump.
So here is Donald Trump saying that the protesters of him personally, they're all people who don't love the country.
When you talk about these protesters, you said, these are bad, bad people.
We're going to take our country back from these people.
These people do nothing.
Who are the these people in that case?
Well, I see people in the audience that I don't think they have a great future.
I think they're disruptors.
I think they are not in love with our country.
I think they protest and they disrupt.
That's what they do.
I don't know if they do it for a living.
I don't know if they get paid for doing it.
But they are not good people and they are certainly not good for our country.
And the people that come to my rallies, these are extraordinary people.
These are great people.
These are people that are really disenfranchised in many cases.
They're disenfranchised, and the people who come are great people who I'm bringing in, but the other people, they're not Americans.
They're not real Americans.
They're all fake Americans.
So what are we supposed to do?
If it gets violent, if it gets bad, what exactly are we supposed to do about that?
They're not real Americans.
Being against Trump does not mean you're a bad American.
In my view, it means you may be a very good American.
Because I think that Donald Trump's campaign is a disaster area.
I think he stands only for himself.
I think he is a bully, and I think that he enables bullies, and I think he enables violence.
I do.
I think that his is a campaign not just in terms of rhetoric.
We'll get to Corey Lewandowski and him grabbing Michelle Fields hard enough that he bruised her.
We'll talk about that in just a little while and what that's led to, this giant conflagration over at Breitbart News.
We'll talk about that near the end of the program.
But Donald Trump, does he bear responsibility for what his people do?
Yes.
He bears some responsibility for what his people do when he's incentivizing it.
When he's incentivizing it.
When he's saying to people, I'm going to defend you.
You're great Americans.
Your anger makes you great.
Presumably, if you're not angry, then you're not great enough.
And if you get super, the best Americans, the idea is that the more angry you are, the better an American you are.
And if you're so angry that you punch someone, that means you're the best kind of American.
There's a certain logic here that's just perverse.
Okay, so everyone has now responded to Trump on this.
Bernie Sanders says that Donald Trump has to tone it down.
And this from the left I find utterly unconvincing.
Here's Bernie Sanders.
But Donald Trump is a pathological liar.
Okay, agree.
Agree.
Agree.
We have never, our campaign does not believe and never will encourage anybody to disrupt We have millions of supporters.
People do what they do.
People have the right to protest.
I happen not to believe that people should disrupt anybody's meetings.
But let me say something about Mr. Trump.
Some of you may have read, just a few hours ago, that Mr. Trump said that he is prepared to pay The legal costs of an individual who sucker punched somebody at a recent event.
He's going to pay the legal fees of somebody who committed a terrible act of violence.
What that means is that Donald Trump is literally inciting violence with his supporters.
He is saying if you go out and beat somebody up, that's okay.
I'll pay the legal fees.
That is an outrage and I would hope that Mr. Trump tones it down big time and tells his supporters that violence is not acceptable in the American political process.
Okay, I totally agree with everything Bernie Sanders said.
I do have one problem, which I'll elucidate for you in one second.
Hillary Clinton said basically the same thing.
This would be clip 19.
Hillary Clinton was talking about Trump inciting violence, and she said essentially the same thing on CNN.
He actually incites violence in the way that he urges his audience on.
You know, talking about punching people, offering to pay legal bills.
And then on the specifics, you know, we know that he has been incredibly bigoted towards so many groups.
He talks about deporting 11, 12 million immigrants.
We're a nation built on immigrants.
He talks about preventing Muslims from coming into our country.
We believe in religious freedom.
There's just so much of what he's doing that...
I think we all have to reject, because it is so at odds with our values.
You don't make America great by tearing down everything that made America great.
Okay, so here's, and herein lies the problem.
Herein lies the problem.
So, it's not enough for her to say what Sanders says, which is basically correct.
You can't incentivize violence at your rallies.
She then ties it to his political opinion, right?
She says, Donald Trump is the guy who wants to deport people.
What does that have to do with incentivizing violence?
I think that a lot of illegal immigrants should be deported.
I would never tolerate acts of violence in the name of politics.
But this is what the left does, and this is a game they can't play either.
Because once you get to the point where you're saying your political view emboldens violence, hers and Bernie Sanders actually do.
How do you think those Black Lives Matter protesters are getting out there in Chicago?
It's because Hillary Clinton is kowtowing to them.
Hillary Clinton is saying to Black Lives Matter, I want to let more people out of prison, and I want to be softer on the people who offend.
What's the difference between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders saying that they want to make sure that offenders don't go to prison, and Donald Trump saying he'll pay for an offender's legal bills?
Really, what's the difference?
There is no difference.
What disturbs me so much about Trump, what disturbs me about Trump, is that he's actually adopting leftist tropes and using them in a supposedly right-wing context.
Leftism has always tolerated violence in the name of its ideology.
They've always been okay with this.
The left in America has always been okay with this brand of either government thuggery or non-governmental thuggery that they sort of incentivize and push forward.
And this is what they did all the way back in the 60s when the rates of crime in this country skyrocketed because the left said, okay, we have social decay, understood, but that's just the way things are going to be.
And they stopped enforcing the law.
That was their actual policy.
And that's still the policy of the left.
But, For the right to adopt that now on a personal level, for Donald Trump to say that he's going to incentivize violence so long as it's done in the name of the right cause, that's really disturbing.
The left and the right are now unified in pushing violence and this is what's truly scary.
When the left and the right are now on the same side.
When the left and the right are now on the same side and they're both saying it's okay to push violence in the name of a political cause, we've reached the end of the debate.
There's nothing to be said.
The two sane people here are Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and they're both getting flack from people on the right, which I don't understand at all.
Here's Ted Cruz talking about how Donald Trump has essentially encouraged violence.
So to be clear, you believe Mr. Trump is encouraging this violence?
Well, let's be clear.
First of all, the protesters were in the wrong.
When you come up and you use violence, you engage in violence, you threaten violence, and when you try to shut down and shout down speech, that's not what the First Amendment allows.
The First Amendment gives every one of us the right to speak, but not to disrupt others.
But I think also in any campaign, the responsibility starts at the top.
And it is not beneficial when you have a candidate, like Donald Trump, who's telling his protesters, punch that guy in the face.
I don't think you should be encouraging people to violence.
And I think beyond that, we need a candidate Who respects the people, who engages, even engages the protesters with civility and respect, not with hostility.
I think, you know, what I would appeal to for every candidate is decency and civility, that we can disagree and we can disagree forcefully while still respecting each other and not engaging in insults and vulgarity and not encouraging violence.
Okay, and there are people on the right who are mad at Cruz for saying this.
Why can't you just condemn the people on the left for protesting?
He did.
At the very outset, he did.
At the very outset, he said that the left, there's no excuse for this.
But there's also no excuse for incentivizing it from the top.
You don't get to do that.
And he's getting flack on this.
By the way, Cruz says what I'm saying here, and this is why I think he's right.
He says, you know, Obama does the same sort of divisive demagoguery.
This is what we've come to in America.
We've come to the point Where we're basically saying to people that it's okay to do violence in the name of your ideology.
Obama said we'll use the government to protect you if you do this.
We'll send people to actually go to Michael Brown's funeral after he attacks a cop and is shot in the process.
We'll give people room to riot, as Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the mayor of Baltimore, said.
I don't know how that's any different than Donald Trump saying to people, if you punch somebody, I'll pay your legal bills.
He's just not the head of government.
But imagine what he would do if he were.
Here's Ted Cruz talking about the similarities between Obama and Trump.
You know, Chuck, Barack Obama is a world-class demagogue.
That language there is designed to divide us.
No, Mr. President, we're not angry at that.
We're angry at politicians in Washington, including you, who ignore the men and women who elected you.
Who have been presiding over our jobs going overseas for seven years, who have been cutting deals that are enriching the rich and powerful, the special interests and the big corporations, while working men and women are seeing their wages stagnating.
And he talks about immigrants and Muslims.
Mr. President, we're mad at a president who wants to bring in Syrian refugees who may be infiltrated by ISIS.
And you're unwilling to be Commander-in-Chief and keep us safe, so don't engage in attacking the people like the President did.
I'll tell you, that language is the kind of self-righteous moralizing from the President that makes people angry.
You think that's worse than what Donald Trump's been doing?
To be honest, I think it's very much the same.
They're both engaging in demagoguery.
We need instead a president who wakes up every day working for the hard-working taxpayers.
If I'm president, Chuck, my focus is going to be the hard-working taxpayers bringing back jobs.
Okay, so we can stop it here.
The bottom line is, I love Chuck Todd there.
He can't just let him say what he's going to say about Obama.
He has to bring it back to Trump.
He already talked about Trump, but he's bringing it back to Trump because for the left, Trump is their wet dream.
Trump is everything the left has ever wanted from the right.
He is a leftist who's pretending to be a right-winger and in the process justifying every bias they have ever held about people of the right.
Right?
That's what he is.
That's why he's such a nightmare for people like me who have fought for a higher conservatism, a conservatism of values and philosophy that doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of emotion.
And it's really devastating.
Marco Rubio is also lamenting the fact that it's come to this.
He says, we've now become a nation where people hate each other.
And then Rubio actually went further.
I'll tell you about that in a second.
A new brand of leadership, which is no leadership at all, which says to people, yes, get angry, get even angrier.
And let's take it out on these people.
And let's do this.
And it's everybody else's fault that things are going wrong in our country.
And the result is we are now a nation where people hate each other.
We are now a nation where we are no longer apparently capable of debating serious public policy without immediately concluding that the person that disagrees with you is evil.
This can't continue.
All this is unifying language and it's fine and it's good.
But the problem is that anger is now overwhelming everything.
It's overwhelming everything.
And this is why I think that the rise of Trump It's both symptomatic and problematic.
It's symptomatic of a deeper anger a lot of Americans have, but that anger is not justified to the extent that you get to do violence to people who disagree.
I'm angry too.
Everybody who's watching the country at this point should be angry.
I'm angry that my constitutional values have been undermined and ripped away.
I'm angry that the government is intruding into my life.
I'm angry that the media lies to me on a regular basis.
I'm angry about all of these things.
But I am not somebody who is going to pretend that if somebody on my side goes and clocks someone for no reason other than basic political disagreement, that's okay.
If we can't hold that in common, we've got nothing in common.
We don't have a political system anymore.
We have anarchy.
It's really, really disturbing.
Marco Rubio actually said he's worried somebody's gonna end up dead at a Trump rally, and the way things are going, you could certainly see that.
It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
I'm very concerned about that.
I'm very, very concerned.
We don't know what's going to happen next here.
I know that we've reached the point now where people in American politics have decided that if they don't agree with you, that they can get angry at you, that you're a bad and evil person, that they can say anything they want about you.
I think that the, you know, all the gates of civility have been blown apart, and we've now reached the point where on both sides everyone is just saying or doing whatever they want.
And, you know, you can't just say or do whatever you want.
This is not about political correctness.
This is about rules of civility and the way a society talks to each other.
And let me ask everybody this.
Do we really want to live in a country where everybody hates each other?
Where everybody's at each other's throat?
Where because we disagree on the role of government or the tax rate or Obamacare or foreign policy, we now in this nation cannot have a discourse or agree on any other issue and end up hating each other?
Because that's what it feels like.
Ah, but Marco, shut up.
You're not angry enough.
You're not angry enough.
If you're not angry enough, then it doesn't matter.
The other problem here is that when Rubio says, I don't want a country where you can say or do anything, I do want a country where you can pretty much say anything.
I don't want a country where you can do anything.
I want you to be able to say whatever it is that you want to say without fear that you're going to get physically harmed.
And I don't think that advocacy for physically harming someone counts as Free speech.
And in fact, it doesn't.
I mean, under the First Amendment or any definition of free speech, it doesn't.
If I say to Lindsay, go kill X, that's not free speech.
That's conspiracy to commit murder.
Although Lindsay clearly is ready to do so.
So, okay, final thing here is that, again, when I say that Trump is making things very easy for the left, he is.
And again, this is not, I've said, this is not a pile on Donald Trump.
This is the left and the right, unfortunately.
It's Trump and the left.
But he's making things very easy for the left.
The left is more clever than Donald Trump.
The left just says to its people, wink, wink, nod, nod.
If you want to go do violence, go do violence.
Donald Trump says if you want to go to violence openly, go to violence.
But the left does the same thing.
I mean, when they incentivize criminals, when they tell Black Lives Matter that they're all victimized by the police, when they suggest over and over and over that everybody is a victim of the white power structure and that the only way you can fight back is through some sort of illegal activity.
When you do that sort of stuff, that has ramifications.
But the problem again is that what you end up doing is undermining, you end up undermining on the right Another incident of violence at a Donald Trump rally.
is the battle of ideas.
So Saturday Night Live, I mentioned this last week, Saturday Night Live has been putting out anti-Trump hit pieces.
And normally when they put out anti-right wing hit pieces, I find it disturbing and problematic.
It's very difficult to argue with these anti-Trump hit pieces when they're based in reality.
So here's the Saturday Night Live rip on Trump.
Another incident of violence at a Donald Trump rally.
Apparently the victim was this man, Dr. Ben Carson, who was attacked moments ago by an angry mob that mistook him for a protester.
We go there now.
It's okay.
I'm fine.
Guys, what did I say?
Not this one.
This is one of the good ones.
I'm sorry, Ben.
Hey, they're just lucky I don't have my knife on me.
I've been known to cut a bitch.
Don't worry.
We've got a very classy Trump steak on his eye.
And to the media, please don't use this as an excuse to call me racist.
Donald's actually got a lot of black friends.
Omarosa.
Dennis Rodman.
The list goes on.
Mike Tyson.
The list ends.
Okay, so again, this is half right and half wrong.
So the idea that people are being beaten up or hurt at Trump rallies is right.
The idea that it's race-based is wrong.
That's not true, right?
I mean, so this is how the left works in their slander.
This is how they work in their slander.
But it makes it difficult to defend Trump.
I can defend him on the racial grounds here because there are plenty of black people who go to Trump rallies who are fans of Trump.
But on the other hand, If they're gonna hit Trump for the violence at his rallies, that's difficult to fight when there is actual violence at his rallies.
Okay, time for some things I like and then in the things I hate section we'll talk about what's going on in my own situation with Breitbart News.
Okay, so things I like.
This is actually something that I know Andrew Klavan is not that fond of.
So, both Klavan and I are big Shakespeare fans.
Klavan likes the Mel Gibson version of Hamlet.
I prefer the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet.
He really doesn't like Branagh's play on Hamlet.
He thinks that Branagh plays it.
Not kind of wavering enough.
He thinks he doesn't play it crazy enough.
He thinks that Branagh basically plays Hamlet like he's playing Henry V, which is not an unfair criticism.
But I will say that this production is beautifully mounted.
The acting is good throughout.
It's a really great production.
He shot it, I think, on 72mm, so it's beautiful to watch.
Here is one of the key speeches that Hamlet makes.
I believe it's the end of one of the acts.
I can't remember which one.
But here's Kenneth Branagh in Hamlet.
All occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge.
What is a man?
If his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?
A beast!
No more.
Not sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fuss in us unused.
Now, whether it be bestial oblivion or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event, a thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward, I do not know why yet I live to say this thing's to do, as if I have cause and will and strength and means to do it.
Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge, led by a delicate and tender prince, whose spirit with We can cut it off, but I could watch this all day.
It's really quite glorious.
And there, you should be exhorted to the fight.
Don't be craven, don't bow down.
We were meant to do something on this earth more than just sleep and feed.
We were meant to fight for higher things, and examples of the ages exhort us to stand up against the craven and the cowardly, and to stand up against the bullies.
Okay.
With that, I want to move to things that I hate.
So, as I mentioned, I haven't been sleeping particularly well, and my stomach's been churning for days, ever since what happened last week with Michelle Fields and the Donald Trump campaign.
So if you don't remember, Corey Lewandowski grabbed Michelle Fields by the arm and he pulled her back.
Hard enough that it left bruises on her.
She took pictures of the bruises.
She filed a police report of the bruises.
There was simultaneous audio tape.
Now there's videotape showing that he grabbed her.
So the original Trump defense was that he never saw her.
He never grabbed her.
There was no physical contact.
She was a liar.
She was essentially an attention whore.
They said pretty much all of these things.
They linked to Charles Johnson's wildly discredited blog, GotNews.com, and they tried to slander Michelle as basically somebody who's constantly fabricating situations.
This was bad enough, in my view.
This was bad enough.
What was worse is that Breitbart News, my former employer, Breitbart News was a... Breitbart News came out with a very tepid call for an apology from Lewandowski.
If this happened, then please apologize to Michelle Fields.
Instead, Lewandowski replied with, "Michelle Fields is a liar.
This is all made up.
None of it is real." Which would suggest a couple of things.
One, Ben Terrace of the Washington Post, who had actually reported it and was caught on audio tape talking about it, that he came up with, concocted this bizarre scheme with Michelle in order to get Trump for no reason, right?
Again, no motivating reason.
That two, Michelle had then gone and had someone bruise her arm, right?
Just fake the bruise.
Three, that all of the video and audio had somehow been manufactured in some way.
And so all of this comes out.
Breitbart News says nothing.
They say nothing.
They continue to say that we want an apology.
The Trump campaign continues to say, stick it.
All this is bad enough, and last Thursday night I went on Megyn Kelly's show and I said, it's absurd for Breitbart News, after all of this, to not call for an apology instead of the firing.
They should be calling for a firing, not an apology.
The next morning, on Friday morning, Breitbart News ran a story that was as egregious as any story I've ever seen.
It was written by Joel Pollack.
Joel Pollack is one of the editors over there, and a guy I know relatively well.
Joel wrote another piece in which he slandered, essentially slandered Michelle.
He said that Michelle had basically concocted with Ben Taras or made a mistake.
This really wasn't Lewandowski at all.
It was really a secret service agent who had grabbed, it happened, but it was a secret service agent who had grabbed Michelle by the arm and pulled her.
And he put together this wild kind of unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
They ran it as the lead of Breitbart News about their own reporter.
At this point, you know, I'd already talked to Michelle about this.
She'd already told me what happened.
And I believe her, and I still do believe her, because literally all of the evidence is on her side.
It wasn't just her account, it was Ben Terrace's account.
It wasn't just Ben Terrace's account, it was simultaneous audio tape.
It wasn't just simultaneous audio tape, it was videotape of Lewandowski reaching for her arm.
And now videotape of Lewandowski grabbing her arm.
And so the Lewandowski pro-Trump people, they've tried to slow down that videotape, Take it out of context.
They take like a three second segment and then and slow it down so that it doesn't look like he's doing anything.
Bottom line is this if somebody grabbed my wife's arm and bruised my wife's arm, there would be actual physical consequences to that.
You don't get to grab my wife or my child and bruise them.
This is unprofessional behavior.
And by the way, People were saying that Michelle was some sort of attention seeker.
Michelle stayed silent about this.
Michelle didn't say anything about this for 24 hours.
The only statement she put out was an explanation of what she said happened at Breitbart News.
She didn't even file a police report.
And I was encouraging her, and she eventually did, I was encouraging her to go file a police report.
All of this happens, and Michelle and I are talking, and on Sunday, we both resigned from Breitbart News Sunday night.
And here is the statement.
I can't say it better than this.
So here's the statement that I gave to BuzzFeed, my resignation statement.
As a close personal friend and mentee of Andrew Breitbart, it saddens me tremendously to announce that as of 9 p.m.
Pacific Time, I have resigned from Breitbart News as editor-at-large.
I met Andrew Breitbart when I was 17 years old and remained his friend until his tragic death.
I signed on with Breitbart News two weeks before Andrew's death because I believed in his mission.
I am proud of what we accomplished in the years following his death, fighting back against the leftist media, debunking the left's key narratives.
I have many good friends at Breitbart News, including editor-in-chief Alex Marlow and editor-at-large John Nolte, and I admire CEO Larry Solove for his dedication to ensuring a financial future for Andrew's widow Susie and his four children.
Andrew built his life and his career on one mission.
Fight the bullies.
This really was what Andrew was all about, folks.
Andrew was all about fighting the bullies from the beginning of his career to his death.
He was all about fighting bullies.
And let me tell you, knowing Andrew really well, Andrew would have flown down to Florida and personally confronted Corey Lewandowski and Donald Trump about their smear of Michelle Field.
But Andrew's life mission, I write in my statement, has been betrayed.
Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew's legacy.
In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully and has sold out Andrew's mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.
He has shaped the company into Trump's personal Pravda to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News' Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump's bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle.
I spoke with Michelle the night after the incident.
She told me her story.
That story was backed by audio tape, eyewitness testimony from the Washington Post's Ben Terris, physical bruises, and videotape.
Both Lewandowski and Trump maligned Michelle in the most repulsive fashion.
Meanwhile, Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue.
That's public record.
Somebody, certainly not me because I'm not even privy to these conversations, leaked out a conversation that was happening, I guess they have an editorial chat room, where people were protesting that they wanted to help out Michelle and Joel Pollack was telling them not to do so.
Finally, in the ultimate indignity, they undermine Michelle completely by running a poorly evidenced conspiracy theory as their lead story, in which Michelle and Terrace had somehow misidentified Lewandowski.
This is disgusting.
Andrew never would have stood for it.
No news outlet would stand for it.
Nobody should.
This truly breaks my heart.
Talk to my wife about how upset I've been over the past few days over this.
But as I'm fond of saying facts don't care about your feelings and the facts are undeniable, Breitbart News has become precisely the reverse of what Andrew would have wanted.
Steve Bannon and those who follow his lead should be ashamed of themselves.
So I resigned, and so did Michelle.
And we're going to be on Megyn Kelly tonight to talk about it.
We're going to be on the news for the next couple of days talking about this, I'm sure.
There was one other person who resigned from Breitbart News.
He's a copywriter for Breitbart News.
That person was, we can show the picture of this piece now.
That person was, you can't see the byline, but underneath is a guy named William Bigelow.
William Bigelow resigned last night.
William Bigelow is my father.
William Bigelow is a copywriter.
And my dad was a copywriter for Breitbart.
We brought him in when we were real short-staffed near the beginning of Breitbart.
And we gave him a pseudonym specifically because I was a public figure and I didn't want to endanger him.
I have enough death threats on my own.
I didn't need death threats directed at my dad or threats directed at my dad that impacted how I did my job.
So, my dad quit last night.
This morning I wake up and here's the headline of Breitbart News.
Ben Shapiro betrays loyal Breitbart readers in pursuit of Fox News contributorship.
And there's a picture of Michelle Fields holding what look like Trump the Game cards, and then there's an inset of me that looks semi-like a Jewish star, and my face inside it.
This piece is a disaster area.
So the piece, number one, it's just chock full of lies, okay?
I've never been offered a Fox News contributorship.
I've never been in talks about a Fox News contributorship.
Here is the precise amount of money I have ever earned from Fox News.
I've earned zero dollars from Fox News ever in my entire life.
So, this is nonsense.
Beyond that, they didn't just do that, right?
Just rip me up and down.
That's fair, they wanna rip me up and down, that's their business, that's their prerogative.
They then linked to my State Bar profile, Breitbart did, and they linked to my State Bar profile, which until two weeks ago, actually listed my home address and phone number, so they doxed me, right?
They tried to make it clear to their readership where I was, where I live, right, what my phone number was.
And then, it wasn't just enough to do that, they put this piece under the William Bigelow byline.
They put it under my dad's byline.
So my dad had already quit, but they still own the byline, because it's a pseudonym, so they put it under my dad's byline.
Why?
What's the purpose of that?
The purpose of that is, number one, to jab me, and number two, because in order for me to respond, they knew I would have to out my dad as this guy under the pseudonym, endangering his safety.
Whatever I thought of Breitbart before, triple down on it now.
This is despicable behavior in every possible way.
It's despicable behavior in every possible way.
And it tells a bunch of lies in the piece, like it says I violate my contract with Breitbart.
I don't have a contract with Breitbart.
I haven't since I resigned from Breitbart in February of 2014.
And then they renegotiated a deal where I would stay on, but I've been an at-will employee ever since then.
In any case, No need to debunk all the lies.
It really is not about me.
What it really is is about a movement, an entire movement, a conservative movement, that is flocking to the idol Donald Trump, and they're willing to sell out their most basic principles, the most basic principles of human decency, in order to serve at the behest of Donald Trump.
I'm not the only one who left.
My dad's not the only one who left.
Michelle's not the only one who left, right?
Today, two more editors left over there, right?
Jarrett Stepman and Jordan Schachtel both left.
Kurt Bardella, who's the publicist, left on Friday.
All of us saying essentially the same thing.
And it makes me sick to my stomach that this is what's happened to the legacy and the sight of a man I not only greatly admired, but somebody who I was friends with, somebody who I was really close with, right?
You know, Andrew was a magnificent human being.
A magnificent human being.
And if you don't believe what, you know, there will now be, I'm sure, an attempt to smear me as somehow betraying Andrew's memory.
All I can say is that if you don't believe that Andrew and I were close, take a look at his acknowledgement to me at the end of Righteous Indignation, which is a terrific book.
Take a look at the acknowledgement to me, and it should demonstrate how close we were.
Read the beginning of my book, Bullies.
I talk at length about how close we were.
Andrew was a fighter.
Breitbart News, in my opinion, has become a site not for fighting, but for worship.
And that's sickening.
And I don't want to see the conservative movement become the same.
I don't want to see the conservative movement fall in thrall to some idol who tells us that we can be great again, and just because he says it, we're all supposed to worship and fall at his feet.
That's not who I am.
That's not who the conservative movement is.
That's not who you are.
America is better than this.
We are better than this.
And if you're on the left and you worship your politicians, you're better than this.
And if you're on the right and you're worshiping Donald Trump, you're better than this.
Because worship of politicians leads to the sort of violence that we're seeing on both sides now.
And it really is scary stuff.
Let's all come together around common American ideas.
Not around people.
Around American ideas.
Let's re-educate ourselves as to what they are.
If we do that, then we really can actually make America great again.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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