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June 14, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
23:24
Ep. 319 - Attempted Massacre on Congressman In DC - What Do We Know?
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The Democrats have apparently discovered the fountain of youth.
Rage.
Speaking last week, Senator Bernie Sanders, a crazed elderly loon, recently spotted wandering around the country shouting about wealth and equality while closing on a second vacation home, stated, quote, you should be angry.
Take your anger out on the right people.
Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles speaking to Politico explained, quote, if we only turn that anger inward, I fear we become the permanent party of opposition.
Over the next couple months, we'd better get our act together.
The Democrats are late to the game.
During the 2016 election cycle, Republicans expressed their anger routinely and richly.
Trump himself cultivated that anger.
As Ian Tuttle rightly wrote at National Review in 2015, quote, many conservatives are having their Howard Beale moment.
They're mad as hell, and they don't want to sit down and take it anymore.
Now, anger is nothing new in politics.
Anger has dominated political discourse since the days of Moses.
Ask him how he felt about a stiff-necked people seemingly ready to throw him overboard every few weeks.
And some anger is, of course, justified.
If you're angry at corruption in DC, you have every right to be.
If you're angry at a heedless Leviathan grasping at your wages, that anger is justified.
Even if you channel that emotion in the wrong direction, we can at least understand the anger.
But something new has happened to American politics in the last few years.
Politicians have realized that the simplest path to power is to humor everyone's anger.
If you take someone's anger away from them, you've emotionally castrated them.
More important, you run the risk of driving them into the arms of someone who will feed their anger, an anger that will now turn on you for the sin of having discounted that anger in the first place.
This is deeply unhealthy.
One of the great lies of psychology, dominant since the era of Freud, is that coddling emotions leads to more emotional fulfillment.
Actually, coddling emotions leads to emotional unhealthiness.
It even leads us to wallow in our emotions.
Anger feels good, and it feels even better when someone tells you you're not wrong to be angry in the first place.
If you crave emotional payoff, and if those around you are taught to cosset your emotions, you're likely to engage more and more often in emotionally overwrought behavior.
Bad psychologists indulge their clients' emotional states.
Good psychologists ask whether those emotional states are justified.
As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, among others, states, Cognitive behavioral therapy, a technique used to treat those with emotional disorders, is generally as effective as antidepressants for anxiety and depression.
Therapy consists of identifying illogical links in a chain of thought that lead to an emotionally hazardous place.
You might figure out, for example, that you're attributing motives to someone even though you have no evidence about his motives, or that you overgeneralize, or that you're looking only at the bad things in your life rather than at the good things.
Once you've identified your own faulty thinking, you can stop the emotional runaway train.
Politicians, however, are trained to do the opposite.
Politicians spend their lives seeking the favor of others.
That means they find it wildly beneficial to nurse the emotions and the grievances of constituents.
The customer is always right, of course.
It means that if a constituent is angry, the best option isn't to help break the chain of emotional volatility, it's to channel that volatility into beating back enemies.
If you wonder why generic congressional support is so low, but support for local incumbents is so high, this is why.
Your local congressman hears you and understands you, but the faraway government, full of cronies and fools, simply doesn't.
On a national level, such pandering has become endemic.
It's why Hillary Clinton presided over the intersectional Olympics in 2016.
In which voters must constantly be reassured that their anger at alleged victimhood isn't illegitimate and why Trump spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Rust Belt voters who must be reassured that their anger at the system and China and Mexico is worthwhile.
All of which makes very toxic politics.
The founders knew public passions were constantly at risk of demagoguery.
It's why they weren't Democrats.
They believed in a system that would check passion with passion.
And they believed in a system in which each politician would be forced to answer to so many different factions, he would be fully incapable of satisfying all of them.
In Federalist 10, Madison eloquently laid out the problem of demagoguery.
His answer?
Gridlock.
Federalism.
Various legislative entities.
Passions incapable of satisfaction at the governmental level.
Without such a system, Madison wrote, The despotism of the majority would rule, quote, if the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control.
Madison was not wrong to rely on the intricate framework of the American government as a bulwark against the perverse passions of the majority.
But he also relied on local interests to supersede national interests and diffusion of power to defeat virtually all interests.
The growth of the federal government has rendered all such notions obsolete.
On the one hand, local interests can now dictate national interests.
President Trump can cater to the anger of a factory worker by promising tariffs that affect everyone.
On the other hand, every local politician can now campaign nationally.
Eric Garcetti barely presides over the potholes in LA, but he's seen as the national face for his party.
The result?
A national pathology.
And the only cure?
Americans must get real.
And that means, unfortunately, politicians have to be brave.
They must tell voters when their anger is both misplaced and unearned.
They must be willing to stand with truth rather than with the power of sympathy.
If they don't, the anger that politicians have attempted to channel for their own ends will eventually burst loose in ways those politicians never anticipated.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, we're gonna get to all of the latest with regard to this horrific shooting in Alexandria, Virginia today.
For those who don't know, there was a leftist, apparent leftist, psychopath who went and shot a bunch of members of Congress and their aides over at a baseball field in Alexandria, Virginia.
They were practicing for a congressional softball charity game.
It's the only nice thing in Washington, D.C., and it has to be ruined by a radical leftist who decided to murder people.
We'll talk about all of that, the fallout from that, what it means for free speech, and who gets to be blamed for all of this, and I want to be as clear on that as humanly possible.
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Okay, so.
Let's jump right into the news.
So obviously, you know what I have to say about political anger has some bearing on what just happened in Alexandria, Virginia.
So here is what we now know.
We know that the shooter, the alleged shooter, and I only say alleged for legal reasons, his name is James T. Hodgkinson.
He's identified by the Washington Post, 66 years old.
And here's what the Washington Post reports.
They say the shooter At the GOP Congressional Baseball Practice this morning is James T. Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois.
According to law enforcement officials, Hodgkinson, 66, owns a home inspection business.
His home inspection license expired in November 2016 and was not renewed, according to state records.
He was charged in April 2006 with battery and aiding damage to a motor vehicle.
So he's got a history of some violence as well.
Here's some of the media coverage of the Congressional Baseball Practice shootings, clip 19.
So there were two bits of gunfire, and how long did they last?
Pop, pop, pop.
And it was returned, then another bunch.
It went on for a while.
I would say at least four to five minutes, starting and stopping.
So it could have been someone was trying to catch the guy that was shooting at him, or he was beginning to take out everybody.
My thinking was in the YMCA.
You said you ran right into the house.
You felt concerned.
Kind of elaborate on what was going through your mind.
I'm sure your heart was racing.
Well, if you're in your yard mowing the lawn and there's shots up the street, you don't want to get shot just to mow your lawn.
Okay, this is just horrifying.
They say 50 to 60 shots were fired.
Senator Rand Paul was there.
He said if the police had not been there, there would have definitely been a massacre.
Apparently Capitol Police were there because Steve Scalise, who was shot, he's the House Majority Whip, He had brought some security with him and the Capitol Police ended up shooting the guy and apparently killing him.
This piece of crap, James Hodgkinson, is indeed dead.
Here's Rand Paul talking about what it would have been. -Circumstances as they played out in Alexandria right now, we are hearing more details from Mo Brooks, that Alabama Republican who was among those present today at that baseball practice. He said this morning in an interview of the shooter he was going after elected officials.
It sure as heck wasn't an accident.
And Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who was also there, said it would have been warming up in a batting cage during this practice.
He was just heaping praise on the Capitol Police, who he says happened to be there because the majority whip, Steve Scalise, was there.
He said had they not been there, it would have been a massacre.
This morning, Rand Paul and others are praising the police, Specifically for their bravery on this Mo Brooks as a congressman on the scene He also described the shooting and then there's another GOP representative Who said that before the shooting this this guy?
Hodgkinson walked up to him and asked him if Democrats or Republicans were playing on the field So yes, there was political motivation.
This would fall under the category of political terrorism here is representative describing This this murderer come or attempted murder because I don't think anyone has died yet except for the shooter Asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats practicing on the field.
What I'd like to talk to you is give you an overview of what took place.
We received a call of an active shooter.
Shots fired at zero seven, zero nine.
Nine minutes after seven this morning.
Here at the park on Monroe, Simpson Park.
At that time, there was a practice team event with a baseball team of folks that were representing some folks on the hill.
We were there within three minutes.
We do know that officers from the Office of Capitol Police, as well as three officers... Okay, so terrific response by Capitol Police.
They get there within three to five minutes.
Governor Terry McAuliffe, who is the governor of Virginia, he of course came out immediately with the Democratic talking points whenever there's a situation like this.
The Democratic talking point is it must be the guns.
Now, According to Rand Paul, if there's nobody there with a gun, then this guy just mows everybody down and he can do it at his leisure.
I mean, he's literally walking through a crowded area, there are kids there, and he's just killing people.
Governor Terry McAuliffe, however, he says this is really just the result of too many guns, Clip 23.
Do you think anything more needs to do to protect politicians?
Well, let me say this.
I think we need to do more to protect all of our citizens.
I have long advocated, this is not what today is about, but there are too many guns on the street.
We lose 93 million Americans a day to gun violence.
I mean, I've long talked about this.
Background check.
He's an insane person.
We don't lose 93 million Americans a day.
And again, it was a good guy with a gun who stopped the bad guy with a gun, not gun control laws.
There are background checks.
This guy was from Illinois where there's heavy gun control.
And we don't know where he got the gun.
We don't know if he went through a background check.
He apparently, as I say, had a couple of run-ins with the law.
He was charged with battery and aiding damage to a motor vehicle, so he clearly had some issues.
He probably shouldn't have gotten a gun if there was a background check, so we will see what is revealed.
But again, the Democrats always jump there instead of jumping to a bad person decided to go off.
And here's what we know about Hodgkinson.
Hodgkinson hated Trump.
Here's something else that we know about Hodgkinson.
Hodgkinson loved Bernie Sanders.
Okay, so we have all sorts of graphics from his Facebook page.
His Facebook page, its key image, is a picture of Bernie Sanders in the Uncle Sam outfit.
He's got pages up that he's been tweeting, that he's been putting out on his Facebook page, talking about how corporations write bills and Congress is bribed until it becomes a law.
Here's something that he just said, quote, I want to say, this was two days ago, I want to say, Mr. President, for being an a-hole, you are truly the biggest a-hole we have ever had in the Oval Office.
Same day, make America great again, resign.
Then he tweets, puts out on Facebook a graphic that says, all in all, it's just another bleep in the wall picture of Trump with his hand against The Western Wall says, same day, Trump is guilty and should go to prison for treason.
He has, on June 11th, please read and pass on.
And there's a quote from Alternet, stop fighting over who created the world and fight against the people who are destroying it.
In March, he put out on his Facebook page, Trump is a traitor.
Trump has destroyed our democracy.
It's time to destroy Trump and company.
This is leading to the same conversation that we always have in the country when a domestic, politically motivated terrorist decides to go on a rampage.
And we've seen this already.
In Portland, the guy who was responsible for murdering a couple of people with a knife was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
Democrats have always tried to claim that Republicans are responsible whenever there is a violent crime.
They tried to claim that Jared Loftner, who is legitimately an insane person, was responsible for killing Gabby Giffords because of Sarah Palin for some odd reason.
They tried to claim the Oklahoma City bombing was because of talk radio.
Going all the way back to the 1960s, JFK and his administration, after his death, tried to claim that it was the toxic political rhetoric and the climate against JFK that led to his assassination, not a communist stooge who shot JFK because he was a communist.
Again, there's always this conversation that happens.
And I think that there are several points that need to be made here.
One, I am not going to blame Bernie Sanders for the attempted murder of these congresspeople.
I'm not.
He uses inflammatory rhetoric.
Terry McAuliffe himself uses inflammatory rhetoric.
Here's an example.
Yesterday, there's McAuliffe going out there about gun control.
Clip one, he was talking about how there are treasonous Americans, presumably inside the Trump administration, coordinating with Russia to steal the election.
Do you think that there are Americans who committed treason?
I think, as we get into this, It seems to me that Russia was actively involved in destabilizing our democracy.
But were there American people helping?
Somebody, I believe, had to give them a roadmap.
Somewhere in this, somebody was directing the Russians on whose names to use, what impact a certain people sending a memo would have on the American electorate.
I mean, they just didn't sit over in some cubicle over there somewhere in Moscow and figure this out.
Okay, so there he is basically humoring the idea that somebody has committed treason.
The penalty for treason under the Constitution of the United States is death.
Is that because Terry McAuliffe actually wants some nutcase to go and shoot up a bunch of people?
No, I don't think so.
This is heated political rhetoric.
It's pretty normal.
So, I want to point out a couple... So let's start with this.
Just because Bernie Sanders says inflammatory things does not make him responsible.
for what this guy did any more than the fact that Donald Trump says inflammatory things would make him responsible if somebody had gone and done this to Democrats.
Okay?
That's not how political rhetoric works in the country.
I judge whether political rhetoric is directly responsible for violence if the political rhetoric directly tells people to commit acts of violence.
That's when political rhetoric is responsible for violence.
Otherwise, we're going to get into very dicey territory where we decide to shut down free speech because it could promote violence.
That's the direction everybody likes to move.
Barack Obama did a whole campaign-style rally after the Gabby Giffords shooting, in which he blamed toxic political rhetoric from the right, and he blamed lack of gun control, and then he suggested that basically the right and its toxicity was responsible in some way for all of this.
I'm not going to do that because I thought it was immoral when Obama did it, and I think it's immoral when anybody does it.
The way that you can connect rhetoric and ideology with actual violence is if that rhetoric and ideology is actually calling for violence.
So, for example, radical Islamic jihadism actually calls for violence.
Governing Sharia law is a call for actual violence against human beings.
And one of the ways that you can judge whether the rhetoric is actually calling for violence is whether this is a rare exception to a general rule or whether it is a widespread belief, a wide-held belief, and a lot of people are participating in it.
So terrorism is a widespread thing.
It's happening all over the world.
There are regimes that are participating in it.
There are regimes that are funding it.
And there are large swaths of the population in the radical Muslim world and in the just fundamentalist Muslim world that are supportive of the general beliefs of some of the terrorists, including the use of violence.
Okay, that is not the case here.
I'm not seeing the upsurge from the left saying, I'm so glad that this guy went out and shot a bunch of a bunch of Republican Congress people.
So I'm not going to equate American leftists with jihadists.
And just because the left does this to the right doesn't mean it's okay for us to do it.
Just because the Southern Poverty Law Center tries to connect every act by a loon who once listened to Rush Limbaugh, with Rush Limbaugh's views does not mean that I'm going to participate in the same thing because I think it's disgusting when they do it, so it'd be equally disgusting when we do it.
And I want to talk about, though, I do want to talk about when rhetoric is responsible for creating a toxic climate and what that actually means generally.
So I've talked about when rhetoric is directly responsible for violence, and I'll talk about, in a second, when it's sort of indirectly responsible for creating a climate that creates more of these sort of isolated events.
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Okay, so I've talked a little bit about the idea that left rhetoric.
Terry McAuliffe's rhetoric, Bernie Sanders' rhetoric, I'm not going to blame that rhetoric for this guy going out and doing this stuff.
And by the way, I'm not going to blame even Kathy Griffin's rhetoric.
I'm not going to say that Kathy Griffin is responsible for this guy going out and shooting Congress people.
Because I don't think Kathy Griffin told this guy to go out and shoot Congress people or said, I think it's okay if you go out and shoot Congress people.
I think she's an idiot.
I think she's a fool.
If the Secret Service actually thought that she was advocating assassination, they would have arrested her.
It is not a crime to say gauche things.
A lot of people today on the right are going to do the Shakespeare in the Park routine where Julius Caesar is played by Trump and assassinated.
That this is what led to the events of today.
I'm not going to do that because I think it's gross when the left does that.
Yeah, I think that there can be a badly interpreted play.
I think that there can be a play that I would think crosses some lines without saying that it is directly responsible for the violence.
Now, it is true that as rhetoric and violent rhetoric escalates on both sides of the political aisle, and it's been ignored on the left by the media, the right is pointing it out with regard to Trump, and it is certainly true.
The Kathy Griffin stuff.
The Shakespeare in the Park stuff.
A toxic political climate is not going to make rational people go out and shoot Congress people, but it is going to have an outsized impact on what we in the legal field call somebody with an eggshell skull.
Right?
The idea that somebody is right on the verge, and now the climate has become so toxic that he's going to go nuts and start shooting people.
The toxic political climate is indirectly responsible for this.
So what does that suggest?
It suggests everybody should rapture this stuff down a little bit.
We keep hearing the war rhetoric from the left.
We keep hearing the treason, the resist rhetoric from the left.
We keep hearing the war rhetoric from the right.
And the response has been from people on both sides of the aisle to keep upping the ante.
Well, if they use a tactic, why can't we use a tactic?
If they use violent rhetoric, why can't we use violent rhetoric?
If the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, blames the right every time something bad happens, why can't we do that too?
Why can't we just keep making the rhetoric Why can't we just keep making everything more and more and more toxic?
Okay, listen.
I am not shy when it comes to using rhetoric.
If you've ever seen the show before, if you've ever seen any of my videos, I'm not shy about speaking what I believe to be the truth, and I'm not even shy about using harsh language.
But when it comes to advocacy of political violence, or giving the go-ahead to anything that remotely hints at political violence, that's where we all need to take a step back.
Not because it's going to lead to widespread battles in the streets, although we have seen some of that with Antifa, which actually is a violent terrorist group.
Not only have we, but it's going to have an impact if the entire culture goes toxic.
If the entire culture just becomes a war of all against all, then that doesn't mean it's going to turn into open warfare in the streets, but it does mean that more nutty people who are right on the brink are going to be pushed over the line into doing something Truly awful and truly violent.
So, here's my recommendation.
Everybody should take it down a notch.
Try to decide whether your anger is justified before you vent your anger.
Try to decide whether something is worth tweeting before you tweet it.
Try to decide whether that Facebook post talking about how you wish Trump would just die already is worth doing if you're on the left.
And if you're on the right, try not to respond by saying, I hope you die.
Right?
Let's all just take it down a notch because I don't think that either you or the guy you're posting with is gonna go and shoot somebody, but I think that somebody who's reading might be outside, might be impacted in an outsized fashion.
Now, I don't make decisions, and I don't think anybody needs to make decisions about their personal behavior based on the nutcase who could go nuts.
But, I also think it's kind of immoral to talk in these ways as a general rule, so I think that we should all take a step back.
In that in that sort of in that sort of notion.
And again, I'm not saying we shouldn't use harsh language.
I mean, for goodness sake, I've signed books punched back twice as hard using the Obama rhetoric with regard to political battles.
But that is not the same thing as openly advocating for violence against people on the other side of the aisle.
Obviously, meaning things figuratively is not a good thing.
And I think that people including me should maybe take a step back on all of this.
In other words, instead of blaming Bernie Sanders, instead of blaming Donald Trump for people who are bad doing bad things, I think we should recognize it's a free country, people should say what they want to say, but people should also take care that maybe it's not a great thing if we decide to inject the toxicity of violence into our rhetoric at every available turn, and it's been just upped dramatically in recent years.
Okay, so I now want to turn to More toxicity in our political culture.
But you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now because we're going to discuss the Sessions hearing, what actually happened yesterday in the Sessions hearing.
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