All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 14, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:06
Horror in Charlottesville | Ep. 361
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
A horrific, horrific weekend.
We'll tell you everything you need to know about what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia and violence breaking out all over the country.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so we have just an enormous amount to get to today.
I want to explain to you the roots of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I want to explain to you the violence of Antifa.
I want to explain to you the violence of the alt-right and what the alt-right is and why people on the right are misperceiving what the alt-right is.
We're going to go through all of that, so it's going to be a very difficult show.
I mean, I don't want to, you know, pitch this badly, but the fact is that we're going to go through a lot of very difficult and nasty material today because, unfortunately, what we saw in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend Is the apotheosis of the nastiness that's been building in our country for the last several years and it came to a head on Saturday in Charlottesville.
So we'll talk about all of that.
But before we get to that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Ring.
So Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
Today, over a million people are using the amazing Ring video doorbell device to protect their homes.
The way that it begins is that if somebody tries to knock on your door and then knows that you're not home, they might break into your house.
Ring gives you this doorbell where they They hit the doorbell, and you can pick up the doorbell from anywhere you are.
It can be across the country, and you know that your front door is ringing.
There's a camera on it, so you can tell who's at your front door, whether to let them in or not.
It cuts down on home burglaries by a tremendous percentage.
And right now, they have security programs for the rest of your home.
The Ring Floodlight Cam is one.
Just like Ring's amazing doorbell, Floodlight Cam is a motion-activated camera and floodlight that connects right to your phone with HD video and two-way audio that lets you know the moment anyone steps on your property.
You can see and speak to visitors and even set off an alarm right from your phone.
When something goes bump in the night, you're going to know about it with Ring Floodlight Cam.
It's the ultimate in-home security program.
With Ring, you're always at home safe.
Up to $150 off a Ring of Security Kit when you go to ring.com slash ben.
That's ring.com slash ben.
Again, you get $150 off that Ring of Security Kit.
It's such a good product that I even bought extra products for family members.
Ring of Security Kit.
Go get it.
Save up $150.
Ring.com slash Ben.
Ring.com slash Ben.
That also lets them know that we sent you.
Okay, so I first want to go through what exactly happened in Charlottesville and then President Trump's response, who the various players are.
By the end of today's show, you're going to need to know, you're going to know everything that you need to know about the current status of relations between the social justice warrior left and the alt-right.
You're going to know everything you need to know about the Trump administration and their relationship with the alt-right.
You're going to know what the alt-right is by the end of today's show.
So today's a very information-driven show.
And also, I have to say that there are just so many garbage people who refuse to acknowledge evil on any side.
You have the left refusing to acknowledge the evil of Antifa.
You have the right, many on the right, refusing to acknowledge the evils of the alt-right or trying to blame the evils of the alt-right on the SJWs.
It is possible to hold two thoughts in your mind at the same time.
The social justice warrior left, the Antifa, race politics, intersectionality left, is vile, and Antifa is getting violent, and all of this has been true for months, and the alt-right is a vile, disgusting, repulsive, utterly morally inconceivable movement.
The alt-right is a horrible movement.
And just because you think you're alt-right doesn't actually mean you're alt-right.
We're going to explain to you what the roots of the alt-right are, where it came from, how it was mainstreamed, and who mainstreamed it.
And we're going to talk about President Trump's response to all this.
So, let's just jump right in.
Let's start with what actually happened.
So here's some of the video.
On Saturday, there was something called Unite the Right.
Unite the Right was an event organized by people like Richard Spencer, a bunch of white supremacists decide that they are going to, white separatists, white nationalists, decide they're going to put together this march in Charlottesville, Virginia.
And they get I guess about a thousand people to show up on Friday night.
They have a torchlight parade holding tiki torches and it's a bunch of nerdy losers who have never been laid in their lives showing up to to talk about how black people are awful and they think this makes them cool.
They did that on Friday night and then in Charlottesville the next day they're doing a march and things take a turn for the worse.
Antifa shows up and some of the protesters I'm sure are people who are not Antifa.
They just want to protest the white supremacy White supremacism that they're seeing on display.
And some of the people definitely are Antifa.
The violent people are Antifa.
It's sort of like what happened at Berkeley when Milo Yiannopoulos spoke there.
You had some leftist protesters who showed up and then Antifa came in and decided to make the whole thing violent.
We've seen this sort of thing happen all over the country.
So that's nothing new.
We saw that happen at Berkeley and we've had on people on the show who were victims of that violence in Berkeley.
We've seen it happen in Sacramento, California.
We saw it happen in Seattle again over the weekend, so we're going to show you some of this footage.
So, here is a little bit of the video of Antifa getting violent in Charlottesville on Saturday.
So you can see, it's hard to tell which protesters are which.
Some of the white supremacists carrying Confederate flags.
I guess some of them had Nazi flags.
Just disgusting people walking down the street.
and some media members, and then you're going to see, in just a second, some Antifa people in the far left of your screen jump into action, and now everybody's pounding on each other.
People swinging flags at each other, a girl getting hit, and her going out for a guy.
So, it turns into a melee play.
First thing that you do have to ask is where the hell are the police?
Where the hell are the police?
I mean, this is a legitimate question to be asking at this point.
You know, we've seen these sorts of violence incidents break out again.
They did in Seattle over the weekend.
So we'll show you some tape of that.
They've been breaking out all over the country and the police seem to either be overwhelmed or to have stand down orders.
I don't know where the governor of Virginia is knowing this is going on, but this is a situation where the National Guard should be there.
Listen.
The alt-right is disgusting, awful, okay?
I've been spending a year- I was the number one target of the alt-right last year in the journalistic community.
I received over 8,000 nasty, anti-semitic, racist tweets directed at me in the middle of last year's election cycle, specifically because I was anti-alt-right.
And they still have a right to speak And they still have a right to march and they should be protected by the police.
So I don't know where the police are in any of this.
But what's funny is that you can see Antifa jumping into action and getting violent.
The left has tried to suggest that Antifa was not involved in the violence in any way.
Now, Antifa being involved in the violence does not justify either the perspective or the violence you're going to see from the alt-right.
None of that justifies any of this.
But it would be remiss, factually speaking, to pretend that Antifa was not involved in this.
Antifa is a communist group.
Antifa is basically a bunch of reds fighting a bunch of brownshirts.
So we're now having a replay of the Weimar Republic, reds versus brownshirts, on American streets.
One of the things that was amazing is that a reporter for the New York Times acknowledged as much.
A reporter for the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, she tweeted out, The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right.
I saw club-wielding Antifa beating white nationalists being led out of the park.
Okay, and a bunch of people on the left then hit her and they said, well, they weren't hate-filled.
They weren't hate-filled.
And she retracted and she said, oh, they weren't hate-filled.
They were just violent.
You know, they can be hate-filled too.
And that is a New York Times reporter saying all that.
Okay, so you can see some of the violence it looks like was launched by Antifa, but some of the violence obviously was coming from the white supremacists too.
Here's some of the white supremacists getting violent.
I guess this is another point during this during this march.
You can see the white supremacist guy charging into the crowd.
People hitting each other.
You can tell they're white supremacists because they're carrying this shield.
This white supremacist shield.
It's a white shield with a black cross on it.
People beating the hell out of each other.
Folks with Confederate flags and all the rest of this.
Okay, now you can see.
Okay, so that's enough of that one.
You can also see that some of the people who were arrested in Charlottesville were members of the left.
So again, I'm trying to point out that the violence at the beginning was on both sides.
Then we'll get to the actual murder, okay?
So, the violence was on both sides in this particular instance.
That's not to say that people who are anti-white supremacy are the same morally as people who are white supremacists.
They're not.
And it's also not to say that reds are the same as everybody who's in the crowd, because that's not true either.
But, it is fair to say that violence on all sides is not appropriate in a civilized society.
Here is clip 26.
clip 26, there's one of the guys arrested in Charlottesville was it was a counter protester who punched a female reporter.
Lauren, I'm sorry, please, can you put that away?
I understand, can you please put that away?
Ah!
I saw it, you can't!
Hey, look.
Okay, so you can't really see much there, but the woman who's holding the camera is a reporter, and she's socked in the head by one of the Antifa, presumably, counter-protesters.
This is not rare.
Okay, so to pretend that the left is not violent in these situations is just, it's just dishonest.
Okay, so you can see that the Charlottesville organizer, right, people were celebrating this, but the organizer of this Charlottesville march, he was doing a press conference on Saturday after all of this, and he was punched in the face and chased off the grounds.
Where were the cops for all of this?
There he is, this twerp.
They're getting chased off the grounds.
And then you'll see someone coming and clock him.
Okay, so they chase him away.
Again, is any of that justified in a civilized society?
No, it really is not.
This guy's a piece of crap.
That doesn't mean he gets to punch pieces of crap in the United States.
Right, there he goes down.
Okay, so, again, the violence... So, again, the violence was happening from both the left and the right here.
And, by the way, it's happening across the country from the left, okay?
So, in Richmond, there was a photojournalist who was covering another one of these rallies, and the photojournalist was hit by a member of Antifa.
Here's clip 27.
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
We're here!
We're gay!
We fight for gay, gay, gay!
yesterday there was another one of these rallies this time it was not a white supremacist versus red rally this was apparently just a pro-trump group that has openly disavowed any sort of white supremacism and the antifa protesters show up and start beating the crap out of people let's go give me some fights The police are trying to protect the people who are marching.
And you can see they're starting to be hit by the left-wing protesters.
The police are being hit by the left-wing protesters.
Okay, so this sort of stuff has been happening all over the country.
The left has been ignoring it because they prefer to focus in on the narrative about right-wing violence.
Now, to pretend that right-wing violence doesn't exist is stupid.
Okay?
It does.
Okay, when I say right-wing, I mean alt-right, because there is a difference between constitutional conservatism, as I'll explain, and the alt-right.
The alt-right is anti-SJW, but they are not Conservative.
In any marked way, in any real way, they oppose the Declaration of Independence.
They oppose the Constitution of the United States.
They're not in favor of individual liberty.
They're not in favor of equality before God.
They're not in favor of any of those things.
We'll explain what the alt-right is in just a second.
So to call it right-wing violence is, even there, a bit of a misnomer.
But, of course, the most important and horrifying thing that happened on Saturday was the tape we've not yet shown, and this is an actual tape of a murder taking place.
This is a 20-year-old piece-of-crap alt-righter from Ohio who takes his car and rams it into a bunch of the protesters against the alt-right in Charlottesville.
Here's the actual tape of it.
Here comes the car.
You see him.
He actually accelerates into the crowd.
One dead, 19 injured.
And then, people crowd around behind the car.
And the guy reverses and comes back at 40 miles an hour down the street.
And one dead is a 32-year-old woman who is there to protest against these alt-right pieces of human debris.
Just awful, awful, awful, awful in every way.
Just awful in every way.
So, in a second, I'm going to explain to you what exactly the alt-right is, where it came from, why it's important, and why it is that everyone of good conscience has an obligation to call out the alt-right for what it is, how it got prominent, Because I think the difference here, what we're seeing now, and this is the problem, There have been white supremacists my entire life.
There's a guy named Buford Furrow, who when I was probably 11 years old, let's see, it was 97 I think, so maybe I was a little younger, maybe it was 95 or something.
Buford Furrow was a white supremacist who came in to Los Angeles.
He scoped out the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
I went to high school next to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
He scoped it out.
Because he wanted to shoot a bunch of Jews.
When he saw there was security, he left.
He went over to the JCC in the West Valley, and he proceeded to shoot a bunch of people at the JCC in the West Valley.
White supremacist violence has been a thing in the United States for a long time.
Since 2001, there have been an enormous number of white supremacist attacks on people.
In the past few months, there have been an enormous number of white supremacist attacks on people.
To pretend that these don't exist is to ignore reality.
It's not to suggest that they're the only people committing violence, but who cares?
That's not the point.
The point is that there are a group of white supremacists who do commit violence, and they were always a fringe group.
But now you're seeing white supremacists, people who hold that ideology, marching openly in the streets, celebrating, and something has changed.
And we're going to talk about what has changed in just a second, but first, I want to talk to you about an advertiser and thank them for their sponsorship, the Five Four Club.
So, Five Four Club is a fantastic, fantastic service.
What they do is they ensure that you are well dressed even if you don't know how to dress.
So, you go over to fivefourclub.com And each month they send you a curated box of two to three items that are handpicked to match the current season and your style.
They've been helping men with fashion for over 15 years.
They ship to over 100,000 men every single month.
If you don't know how to build a wardrobe, they make it happen for you.
Right now you get $120 worth of clothes for just $60 a month.
You can pause or cancel your membership at any time with no commitments.
You also receive up to 50% off items in their online shop.
They have an online shop, so it's not just you wait for the box to come.
You can go and proactively buy things.
Access to exclusive members-only items, free shipping, size exchanges.
Right now, go to fivefourclub.com.
You spell out five and you spell out four, so fivefourclub.com right now.
Enter promo code Ben.
They'll give you 50% off your first month's package, plus A free pair of sunglasses.
So, that means you get $120 worth of clothes for just $30 for that first month.
Plus, you get a free pair of sunglasses.
That's 50% off your first package at FiveFourClub.com.
F-I-V-E-F-O-U-R.
Club.com.
Promo code Ben.
FiveFourClub.com.
Promo code Ben.
I think that looking good is an obligation in today's day and age.
And FiveFourClub can help make it happen for you if you don't know anything about fashion.
Even if you do, they'll make your wardrobe better.
FiveFourClub.com.
Promo code Ben to get that special deal and let them know Okay, so, let's start off with this.
What is the alt-right?
So the alt-right is marching in the streets, and the alt-right is, supposedly, there's a lot of misperception.
People on the left are calling everyone on the right alt-right and saying everybody's a Nazi.
That's absolute garbage.
Okay, the alt-right is its own movement.
The alt-right is a group of white supremacists who believe, essentially, that Western civilization is an outgrowth of white race, and that threats to white race are a threat to Western civilization.
That's the basic premise.
Of the alt-right.
Okay, a lot of people think they're alt-right now because they like memes, or because they believe in the god of Keck, right?
Keck is this, like, memery that you see on 4chan and Reddit.
And a lot of people who think that if they post a frog, that makes them a member of the alt-right.
That's not what the alt-right is.
The alt-right has a basic root philosophy.
What happened over time is that the alt-right was mainstreamed by a group of people who decided to broaden the definition to include people who liked frog memes.
Okay, they decided to broaden the definition, and then they used that broadened definition in order to make the claim, basically, that they were a big movement that had a lot of support.
And then you saw people like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, yes, the President of the United States, yes, his chief strategist, give legitimacy to the alt-right and refused to condemn them in the middle of the campaign, which gave them added impetus.
And now you see them marching openly in the streets.
So, was Charlottesville Trump's fault?
No, of course Charlottesville wasn't Trump's fault, any more than what happened in Dallas a year ago.
It was Barack Obama's fault where a guy who believed a lot of the slogans of Black Lives Matter went out and shot a bunch of cops.
You're only responsible for violence if you are rhetorically calling for violence.
Trump has never done that.
What he is responsible for, in some degree, is mainstreaming the alt-right and not treating them as a cancer to be excised from the conservative movement that they really are.
And again, I'm talking about what the alt-right actually means.
Not what you think it means.
People in the media think it means the media has an interest in pretending the alt-right's a big movement that includes people like me.
Two weeks ago, they were labeling me alt-right.
Okay, I was the number one target of the alt-right in 2016.
That's fully insane.
And then there are a bunch of people in the alt-right who have a drive to call people alt-right who aren't because that way they get to claim that they're a bigger movement than they are.
But here's what the alt-right actually is.
So, Some of the supposed thought leaders of the alt-right are people like Jared Taylor.
Jared Taylor is the creator of American Renaissance, which is a racist website.
And here is Jared Taylor talking about what exactly the alt-right is.
Why don't we let the leaders of the alt-right define what the alt-right is.
Here is Jared Taylor.
As a long-standing member of the alt-right, this is how I see it.
We are a broad, dissident movement that includes many different websites, organizations, and viewpoints.
Some members hold distinctive positions on sex roles, trade and free markets, forms of government, and foreign policy.
But they all agree on one thing.
Equality is a dangerous myth.
The alt-right is united in rejecting the current dogma that all races are equal.
Races are different.
They differ in average levels of intelligence.
They do not build identical societies.
And there is no reason to think non-whites can maintain Western civilization, the civilization that whites created.
Okay, so that is Jared Taylor pointing... I mean, that's a very good synopsis of what the alt-right believes.
And he's not the only one who says this.
Richard Spencer, one of the guys who was at this rally yesterday, a sort of Nazi-sympathizing piece of garbage.
Here is Richard Spencer also summing up what the alt-right is.
Well, I would describe it, if I could sum it up in one word, I would say identity.
It is an identitarian movement.
It's an identity politics for white people in North America and really around the world.
So that's what the alt-right is, just in one sentence or a bumper sticker.
Okay, okay, and he's not the only one either.
Vox Dei, who's another member of the alt-right, again one of the alt-right thought leaders.
All these guys are very active online.
All these guys are very active in promoting their perspective.
They have a lot of followers on places like 4chan and Reddit, and they latched onto Trump for a reason I'll explain in a second.
Here's Vox Dei making the same exact description as Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.
People tend to look at our Richard Spencer, who is the head of the National Policy Institute, and also some guys like Ramsey Paul, Some people even look at Mencius Moldbug and Nick Lan, but they're really more nail reactionaries than alt-right proper.
And some folks have even looked at me, I think probably because Milo called me an alt-right figurehead a few months ago.
Okay, so this should be a fringe movement, right?
A bunch of people who believe that equality before law is not a thing, that racial equality is not a thing, that even the concept of people being equal as individuals is not a thing because we are all characterized by our race.
So, this was a fringe movement.
The left has made it more of a movement because the left has embraced an identity politics of its own.
The left has basically said, okay, you are a white male.
You white males, you exist because of white privilege, and therefore you must be moved out of power.
Right?
We have identity politics.
And so a lot of white people, people like Vox Day and Spencer and Taylor, they say in response, okay, well, you have your identity politics, we'll have our identity politics, we'll have white identity politics.
We will be a group of people who stands up for white pride because white people are awesome.
This has been the response.
And that has come along with a lot of anti-SJW stuff.
So a lot of people who are just anti-SJW, anti-social justice warrior, but who aren't believers in racial inequality and racial disparity, who aren't advocates of racism and anti-Semitism, a lot of those people They fell into the trap of thinking that they are allies of people like Vox Day and Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor.
And there have been a couple of figures who have been very prominent in helping to mainstream the alt-right.
One of these, unfortunately, is a guy who directed a lot of his sort of alt-right followers at me on Twitter and became very popular, Milo Yiannopoulos.
So, Milo is very popular.
He's very popular because a lot of the stuff That he said on campus a year ago about feminism.
A lot of it is irreverent and some of it is funny and all of it is crazy and out of the box and he says inflammatory things deliberately and all of this, okay?
But Milo was very, very instrumental in mainstreaming the alt-right and treating the alt-right as an intellectual movement that ought to be respected and given its fair hearing.
This was his shtick, right?
His shtick was he was going to pander to the alt-right.
He later came out and said, I separate off from the alt-right, they're not me.
I have problems with the alt-right, but that didn't stop him from going on national television and talking up the alt-right and saying he just wanted to give them a fair hearing.
Here he is on CNBC last year doing exactly this.
No, I mean, I've never identified as the alt-right.
The press seems determined to crown me the queen of it.
All I've done is give them a fair hearing in the press.
I think that white identity and white nationalism is a little misleading.
I think it's more accurate to say that the alt-right cares about Western supremacy rather than white supremacy.
It cares about Western values.
It cares about liberal, capitalist, Western democracy.
Democratic values, freedom, equality, that kind of thing.
And it sees, you know, various threats to those on various fronts.
Okay, so you see what he's doing here, okay?
Milo knows better than this, okay?
Because he's been dealing in these circles for a long time.
He apparently used to call himself Milo Wagner, okay?
Milo knows what he is doing here.
And what he is doing here is he's broadening the definition of alt-right.
It's very clever.
He's broadening the definition of alt-right on national television to now encompass a larger group.
And this serves two people, right?
Or it serves two groups.
It serves the alt-right itself, which now gets to claim a larger constituency.
And it serves the left, which gets to lump in everybody who believes in Western civilization with people like Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, and Vox Dei.
Here's Milo writing on the alt-right last year.
This was the seminal piece that really brought the alt-right to public knowledge.
There's a piece called The Establishment Conservative's Guide to the Alt-Right.
It was written by Milo along with a guy named Alan Bakari who wrote at Breitbart.com.
This is about a month after I left Breitbart.
And here's what Milo wrote.
Quote.
There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads.
Alternative right is a term coined by Richard Spencer.
That is alt-right.
Alt-right stands for alternative right.
There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads to whom they are often idiotically compared.
But one thing stands out above all else.
Intelligence.
Skinheads, by and large, are low-information, low-IQ thugs driven by the thrill of violence and tribal hatred.
The alternative right are a much smarter group of people Which perhaps suggests why the left hates them so much.
The left doesn't hate them because they're racist.
The left hates them because they're dangerous.
They're dangerously bright.
This is all Milo, okay?
This is Milo writing.
The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Takis Magazine.
In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.
Alongside other nodes of Steve Saylor's blog, VDARE and American Renaissance, Alternative Right became a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or other.
You see what's happening here?
Do you see how evil what's happening here is?
Taking the philosophy, the evil philosophy, of people like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer and Vox Day.
Milo wrote the foreword to Vox Day's book, okay?
They're taking the political philosophy that Milo knows well and then broadening it out to suggest that it applies to everyone who wants to defend Western civilization.
I want to defend Western Civilization.
I've spent my entire career defending Western Civilization.
I've spent my entire career defending the Declaration and the Constitution.
My original break with Milo online actually came over, not over the Michelle Field stuff or the Trump stuff or any of that stuff, they deleted his account so you should be able to look it up, but it came originally over Milo suggesting that constitutional conservatism was dead and ought to be replaced by the alternative right.
That's where the break came, on Twitter.
So it's...
What he did here by mainstreaming the alt-right was create the feeling that they were a burgeoning movement.
It wasn't just Milo, there were other people doing it too.
Steve Bannon, who at the time was running Breitbart, which was making Milo its star figurehead.
Steve Bannon said, we are the meeting place for the alt-right.
He celebrated that they were the meeting place for the alt-right.
Then he became the head of Trump's campaign and now he's the chief strategist at the White House.
And meanwhile, President Trump, and yes, Trump bears some responsibility in the growth of the alt-right, President Trump We'll just go right through the timeline.
He continually, during the campaign, refused to disassociate from alt-right figures or even racist figures.
I hate to go back and play this stuff, but it's now relevant.
Here's a flashback.
This is from March 2016, the same month that Milo wrote this piece.
This is Trump refusing to denounce the KKK and David Duke.
Well, just so you understand, I don't know anything about David Duke, okay?
I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.
So, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know, did he endorse me, or what's going on?
Because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke, I know nothing about white supremacists, and so you're asking me a question that I'm supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.
But, I guess the question from the Anti-Defamation League is, Even if you don't know about their endorsement, there are these groups and individuals endorsing you, would you just say unequivocally you condemn them and you don't want their support?
Well, I have to look at the group.
I mean, I don't know what group you're talking about.
You wouldn't want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.
I'd have to look.
If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them, and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong.
But you may have groups in there that are totally fine, and it would be very unfair.
So give me a list of the groups, and I'll let you know.
Okay, and then Tapper kept repeating, Ku Klux Klan and Trump wouldn't go there.
Okay, that was not the only time Trump did this.
Trump was asked on national television by Wolf Blitzer on CNN about denouncing anti-Semitic attacks on a journalist named Julia Jaffe.
I haven't read the article, but I heard it was a very inaccurate article.
And I heard it was a nasty article.
I'm married to a woman who's a very fine woman.
She's a very fine woman.
She doesn't need this.
Believe me.
She was very, very successful.
She did tremendously well as a top model.
She made a lot of money.
And she's a nice person.
And I guess some of the article says that she would go in at night and she would stay.
She wasn't a party person.
She, you know, it's not her thing.
But this was a very, this is a very high quality woman who loves people and has a big heart.
She doesn't need to be have bad things said about her.
And I heard the article was nasty.
You know, I haven't read it, but I heard the article was not what it should be.
They shouldn't be doing that with wives.
I mean, they shouldn't be doing that.
Melania is a top model.
They sent pictures around to Utah and it wasn't even, you know, it wasn't even like a naked - But these death threats that have followed, these anti-Semitic death threats.
- Oh, I don't know about that.
I don't know anything about that.
You mean fans of mine? - Suppose that fans of yours are posting these very angry - I don't know.
You'll have to talk to them about it. - But your message to these fans is - I don't have a message to the fans.
A woman wrote an article that was inaccurate.
Now I'm used to it.
I get such bad articles.
Okay, so again, there's another incident where Trump did this.
And again, Steve Bannon at the same time talking about how his website is the meeting place for the alt-right.
And so what happens is that the alt-right believes that because Trump is anti-political correctness and because he's anti-SJW and because he keeps refusing to denounce the alt-right in any sort of vigorous terms, and Trump never has a problem denouncing his enemies in vigorous terms, they begin to latch on to him.
And that's not entirely Trump's fault, but it's at least partially Trump's fault.
And so that's why in Charlottesville you see David Duke marching around talking about how Charlottesville is really about Trump.
What does today represent to you?
The camera's right here.
What does today represent to you?
How you doing?
This represents a turning point for the people of this country.
We are determined to take our country back.
We're gonna fulfill the promises of Donald Trump.
That's what we believed in.
That's why we voted for Donald Trump.
Because he said he's going to take our country back.
And that's what we gotta do.
Okay, so...
The fact is, okay, and these are unpopular things to say, I know, I know a lot of the people who listen to the show voted for Trump.
I'm not blaming you for voting for Trump.
I never blamed anyone for voting for Trump to stop Hillary Clinton.
But to pretend that Donald Trump didn't have to do with looking the other way with a lot of this stuff during the campaign would be just factually untrue.
It would be factually untrue.
And I think it's important for us as constitutional conservatives to call out bad things when they happen.
To call out evil ideologies when they crop up.
The alt-right is an evil ideology.
This ideology that says white nationalism.
This ideology that says that race is inseparably tied from ideology.
That's what I hate about the left.
I hate the identity politics of the left.
And I don't believe in the identity politics of the right.
It's evil.
It's nasty.
You think I stand with the people who are flying Nazi flags and Confederate flags and David Duke marching around?
Why is this difficult?
This is the easiest thing in the fricking world to denounce.
Just denounce it.
What the hell is wrong with people?
And this idea that we went for a year without denouncing it, or making excuses for it, or patting it on the head because we thought it was an important movement, an important constituency.
You know what?
It's not an important constituency.
It's like five people.
Number one, it's not a lot of people.
Number two, even if it were a million people, even if it were five million people, even if it were 30 million people, You do not pander to the worst people the planet has to offer.
You do not pander to Americans who don't understand what Americanism and promote an ideology that is contra-Americanism.
You do not do that for political gain.
That is sick and it is vile.
Okay?
And there were a lot of people who were doing it during the campaign.
And it's continued now, and should stop immediately.
And even people on the right now know this, okay?
A lot of people on the right now know- Now, listen.
I feel the same way about the left.
When it comes to the left, who won't denounce Antifa.
When it comes to the left, that won't denounce the Marxist intersectionality philosophy that they've been promulgating.
When the left won't announce riots in Ferguson or Baltimore.
When the left continues to pretend that violence in places like- in places like Berkeley and Sacramento and Seattle and Richmond and Charlottesville, coming from the left, when they pretend all of that is no problem at all, the only problem is that of the right?
All they're doing is pushing people into the arms of the alt-right.
You have two vile movements pushing more and more people into each other's arms.
It's horrifying.
It's horrifying and disgusting.
I'm going to get to Trump's response in just a second.
But for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
For $9.99 a month, you can subscribe to dailywire.com.
You get my show live.
You get Andrew Klavan's show live.
It's a video show, so you get to see it.
You get to see all the video that we're showing, which is imperative when you're talking about topics like this.
dailywire.com, $9.99 a month.
Michael Knowles' show is live today.
That's starting at, I think, 12.30 today.
I'm sorry, 1.30 today, and Clavin's show comes up right after this one at like 10.30, so stick around for that when you get the subscription at dailywire.com, or you can get an annual subscription, and with the annual subscription for $99 a year, you get this, the most magnificent tumbler that ever was or shall be.
Leftist tears, hot or cold, from The Daily Wire, and you get this tumbler.
So you get that with the annual deal.
Or just go over to iTunes or SoundCloud and subscribe.
Do both.
Subscribe to our site and go over to iTunes or SoundCloud and hit subscribe and leave us a review.
We always appreciate it.
we continue to be by far the largest conservative podcast in the nation.
So why is all of this relevant?
It's relevant because, you know, we don't have to go nuts every time a horrible thing happens in the United States.
People are killed by evil people in the United States every day.
We do have to call it out when we see that the President of the United States once again refuses to openly call out the alt-right.
Okay, I know that President Trump, and I don't think it's coming out of any sort of sympathy for the alt-right.
I don't think that Trump is an alt-righter.
I don't think that Trump is a racist.
I don't think he's an anti-Semite.
I do think that President Trump has this unfortunate and kind of gross Achilles heel where anybody Who supports him in any way.
Anybody who's been warm to him gets warm treatment from Trump.
And anybody who's mean to him gets nasty treatment from Trump.
Alright, the proof and point is we'll hear Trump's statement in just a second.
But, this morning, the head of Merck, the Merck CEO, a guy named Kenneth Frazier, who's a black guy, the only member of President Trump's commission, I think it's his panel on American manufacturing, or his council on American manufacturing, he resigned this morning because of Trump's comments, which he felt didn't go far enough, and Trump promptly went on Twitter and denounced him and suggested that he was involved in price fixing.
essentially.
So Trump went directly after him.
We've seen him go harsh after people like Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough and Brit Hume and John McCain and Ted Cruz and Ted Cruz's father and Ted Cruz's wife.
And we've seen him go hard after a thousand people.
And when it comes to the alt-right, then suddenly he seems to swallow his whistle and it turns into, okay, well, I just condemn everybody equally.
Here is what Trump had to say immediately after all of these events on Saturday.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.
On many sides.
It's been going on for a long time in our country.
Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama.
It's been going on for a long, long time.
It has no place in America.
What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives.
No citizen should ever fear for their safety and security in our society.
And no child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.
Okay, and then he continued.
He was specifically asked about white supremacism and he just walked away from the podium apparently.
Here he is talking about how hate and division have to stop.
I just got off the phone with the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, and we agreed that the hate and the division must stop, and must stop right now.
We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation, and true affection, really, and I say this so strongly, true affection For each other.
Okay, so this is milquetoast nonsense, okay?
Well, what he's saying here is milquetoast nonsense, and the reason it's milquetoast nonsense is not because we shouldn't call for unity.
We should.
But this would be a good time to call out all of the bad people.
You know, Trump spent an enormous amount of time over the last five years saying that Barack Obama refused to call out radical Islam.
That was true, and Trump has been very strong and forthcoming and correct in calling out the dangers of radical Islam.
He should be just as forthcoming in calling out both the alt-right for what it is and Antifa for what it is.
There's nothing wrong with him getting up there and saying the alt-right represents an evil, racist movement.
It's an evil, racist ideology.
It's disgusting.
And use of violence is unjustified in any civilized country.
And he could say the same thing, or something similar, with regard to the Antifa Marxist group that seems to believe that everybody who they disagree with ought to be protested, not only protested, who cares about protests, that's fine, but punched.
He could have said all those things.
It's not difficult.
None of this is hard.
None of this is difficult.
But Trump didn't do that.
So he said all this, and everybody went, wait, that was it?
That's all you got?
And we can hear the rest of his statement.
So many incredible things happening in our country.
So when I watch Charlottesville, to me it's very, very sad.
Above all else, we must remember this truth.
No matter our color, Creed, religion, or political party, we are all Americans first.
We love our country.
We love our God.
We love our flag.
Okay, so it's a bunch of just stuff, right?
I mean, he just says a bunch of stuff.
And if Obama had done the same thing, and he did do the same thing, I ripped him up and down at the time.
Go back.
Listen to my podcast after the Dallas shootings.
I did the exact same thing at the time.
In fact, here was Barack Obama doing something very, very similar after the Dallas shootings.
The FBI is already in touch with the Dallas police and anyone involved in these senseless murders will be held fully accountable.
Justice will be done.
I will have more to say about this as the facts become more clear.
For now, let me just say that even as yesterday I spoke about our need to be concerned as all Americans about racial disparities in our criminal justice system, I also said yesterday that our police have an extraordinarily difficult job, and the vast majority of them do their job in outstanding fashion.
I also indicated the degree to which we need to be supportive Okay, at no point in here did Obama ever even come close to condemning the ideology that police are the bad guys.
At no point did he come out and say that.
In fact, at the funeral for the Dallas Slane, he came out and reiterated that police officers were what was driving the entire conflict.
At the time, I said, this is disgusting what Obama's doing.
Go back and listen to it.
At the time, I said this.
Okay, so nothing new under the sun.
But it doesn't matter if it's coming from left or from right.
Evil people, evil ideologies should be condemned full-throatedly.
This is not difficult.
It's not difficult.
Okay, so the media, of course, have gone over, have gone insane over all of this, like beyond even what is necessary.
I think this is a critical moment for the country.
Apparently President Trump is going to speak momentarily about Charlottesville, probably try to put a band-aid, some ointment on the boo-boo.
It's a little bit late.
Okay, he should have done this by Saturday.
I don't understand why this happened.
Okay, the White House came out later and they made some sort of statement suggesting, well, he really meant that he condemned the alt-right when he said his statement.
Why doesn't he just come out and say that?
Why didn't he just come out and say that?
Why wait 48 hours to do a presser?
It's ridiculous.
There's no reason for that.
And his silence means something to the bad guys, okay?
Here's the Daily Stormer.
This is an actual neo-Nazi website.
Quote, Trump outright refused to disavow.
People saying he cucked.
Cucked means people like me, who don't like racism and anti-Semitism.
We are cucks, according to the alt-right slang.
Again, not to bring Milo up again, Milo sent me a picture of a black baby on the day of my son's birth because I was a cuck.
Because I didn't sufficiently support the alt-right agenda or President Trump.
The idea behind the alt-right word cuck is that people like me are for race mixing and therefore are fine with my wife having sex with a black man.
That's the idea.
So that's what the language means.
People saying he cucked are shills and kikes.
That's the actual word they use.
He did the opposite of cuck.
He refused to even mention anything to do with us.
When reporters were screaming at him about white nationalism, he just walked out of the room.
Okay, that may be unfair to Trump, but that's what the white nationalists are seeing.
That's what the white supremacists are seeing, which is why it is important for good leaders, powerful leaders, to come out and condemn evil when they see it.
For God's sake, it's not difficult!
It's not difficult.
The media, of course, says that Trump shares responsibility for what happened in Charlottesville.
That I disagree with.
Again, I think Trump shares responsibility for the growth of the alt-right.
I think that Obama shared responsibility for the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and for the intersectional SJW movement.
But to suggest that Trump shares responsibility for the violence, again, Trump has not espoused violence, so that's just a left-wing talking point.
Here's Koki Roberts making that point, though.
Who shares responsibility in this?
Who shares responsibility?
It's not only the man, it's not only the movement, but anybody that points their fingers at Mexicans and Muslims shares responsibility as well.
The president has to share responsibility.
The fact is, is that through that campaign, he blew all kinds of whistles that those of us who grew up in the Jim Crow South, like I did, recognized immediately.
It was just calling out to these white supremacists who then felt empowered by it.
And the president now not calling them out.
You know, he should listen to Nikki Haley, his now UN ambassador.
She's the person who started bringing down Confederate monuments.
And she did it so graciously in exactly the right tone.
Here she is talking about confederate monuments as though it's confederate monuments that are really driving all of this.
The confederate monuments have been around for a long time.
It's not the confederate monuments that are driving all of this.
I think there's good arguments to be made on both sides of the confederate monument issue, but I don't think that the argument is that Trump created the violence in Charlottesville because that's not right.
By the same token, you have people from the right defending Trump's response.
Tom Bossert is one of Trump's aides and he gives an absurd explanation for Trump's comments.
The President not only condemned the violence, and stood up at a time and a moment when calm was necessary, and didn't dignify the names of these groups and people, but rather addressed the fundamental issue.
And so Jake, what you need to focus on is the rest of his statement.
The President didn't just call for human beings to respect one another, which is his pragmatist core fundamental bare minimum, but he called for ideally Americans to love one another, for all God's children to love one another.
Okay, that idea that he didn't want to dignify the alt-right by naming them?
He didn't want to dignify them?
It's absurd.
Trump did an entire speech last week on MS-13.
Okay, his whole point, over and over, has been that you must name the bad guys, otherwise you can't fight them.
He's only said that 1,000 times over the course of his career.
H.R.
McMaster, there's a desperate attempt by someone in the White House to try and cover for this, and that's fine.
I mean, I think that Trump needs to correct this as soon as possible.
I assume he's doing that right now as we speak.
Here's H.R.
McMaster trying to pretend that Trump actually did a sufficient job.
Well, the president's been very clear.
We cannot tolerate this kind of bigotry, this kind of hatred.
And what he did is he called on all Americans to take a firm stand against it.
This is a great opportunity for us to ask ourselves... Can you stop it right there?
What is it?
What is it?
Okay?
Take a stand against it?
Against bigotry?
Against hatred?
This is the same sort of nonsense that Trump kept saying was unacceptable throughout his campaign.
You can't just say that radical Islam is just hatred or bigotry.
You have to say what it is.
What is the problem?
Even Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch, was on TV yesterday.
Even when we've lost Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich said Trump should have been stronger on this.
And then the mooch came out and said that Trump should have been stronger on this.
When you've lost the mooch and Gingrich, that's a pretty good indicator you didn't do a good job with this.
I think you needed to be much harsher as it related to the white supremacist and the nature of that.
I applaud General McMaster for calling it out for what it is.
It's actually terrorism, and whether it's domestic or international terrorism, with the moral authority of the presidency, you have to call that stuff out.
Okay, so, I think that in the end, what we're watching in the United States, and this is the scary part, what we're watching right now, and this is why strong, powerful, moral leadership is necessary, If we don't, if we're not careful, we're going to end up with a red versus brown shirt situation in the United States.
That's what you're watching on the streets in Charlottesville.
It's what you're seeing in Seattle.
It's what you're watching, not in Seattle so much.
They're just seeing reds, not even brown shirts.
But it's what you've been seeing in places including Berkeley or Sacramento.
You're seeing an alt-right movement that is racist in nature, fighting a red movement that is violent in nature, and they're going right at each other.
And all that happens is that people play off one another for power.
To understand the rise of the Nazis, and we're not in that moment, I hope.
I hope to God.
But to understand the rise of the Nazis, you have to understand most Germans did not believe in the Nazi Party.
Most Germans just hated the Reds for taking over towns and threatening the country.
And so they thought that the Nazis would stop them.
This is some tape of Joseph Goebbels making exactly the same sorts of points that Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and Vox Dei like to make.
Here is Joseph Goebbels talking about how he and the Nazis are going to end the Red Terror.
It was called the Red Terror in 1931, 1932.
Hundreds of people were killed in street battles between the SA, which was Hitler's stormtroopers, and the Reds, which were the communists.
Here is Joseph Goebbels, one of the most evil men in history, talking about this.
He says, the end of the Red Terror is closer than you think.
Communists expect to get the worst drubbing you've ever had.
Then you see the cheering throngs.
This is the 1933 election.
This is the 1933 election.
They're even flying the same... We can stop it there.
They're even flying the same.
We can stop it there.
That, of course, is tape from the Nazi era.
They're even flying the same flags.
You saw Nazi flags in Charlottesville, you saw Communist flags in Charlottesville.
It is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
They may also be an enemy of Western civilization.
It is possible that in a fight between Nazis and Communists, everyone is bad.
It is possible that both ideologies are vile.
It is possible that violence on all sides is vile.
And if we don't have leadership that can say all this, then I don't know what to tell you.
Not just in vague terminology, not just everybody has responsibility, not just violence and bigotry on all sides.
No.
Call out the ideology, because if you don't do that, people are going to label conservatives alt-right, people are going to label liberals SJW left, and we're all going to just polarize into these two opposite camps that are the worst of the worst.
Okay, so very quickly, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
Things I like.
If you don't know anything about the history of the Third Reich and how it rose, and why this is all very, very dangerous, you need to read William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany.
It's, I would say, the second best book on the history of Nazi Germany that I've read.
The best is this three-part series by Richard Evans, but this is a very deep, detailed book by a guy who was present in Nazi Germany during the rise of the Nazi Party.
Again, the book is The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
It is a slog.
It is a very long read.
It's like 900 pages.
But when you finish, you'll be more scared for civilization when you finish than you are now.
As well you should be because civilization is a fragile thing and what we are watching is the greatest civilization in history and tension simmering under the surface that threaten to tear it apart.
Okay, time for a quick thing I hate.
The thing that I hate today is Bill Maher on Friday night.
He dislikes President Trump so much that he is hoping the stock market crashes so that Trump falls apart.
Here's Maher making this case.
I thought he would crash the stock market, and I still think he will.
I'm hoping, actually, because that's one thing that would maybe lose him a lot of support in the Republican Party.
But I thought and predicted, and I was wrong, that the stock market hates volatility and uncertainty, and who is more volatile than Donald Trump?
But I guess I underestimated their greed, because they still want their tax cut.
Okay, so again, one of the big problems here is that the left is so focused on taking down President Trump, they don't actually want what's good for the country.
And I would say that there are people on the right who sometimes are so focused on protecting President Trump that they don't want what's good for the country either.
How about we all want what's good for the country and we all want policies from our politicians and moral stances from our politicians that are good for the country.
And if people don't uphold those moral stances on either side, we call them out.
This is not difficult politics.
is valuable.
Politics is necessary.
Politics reflects deeper values.
But if we can't share values of decency, if we can't share values of freedom and liberty to say what we want, if we can't share values where we hope for prosperity for the country, then we're just doing it wrong.
We're just doing it wrong.
We've become nihilists.
And God forbid we should become nihilists and destroy the greatest civilization the world's ever known.
We'll be back tomorrow.
I'm hopeful that President Trump will correct his errors of the weekend.
I hope that President Trump forcefully condemns the alt-right and begins his separation from them as well he needs to do.
We'll talk about it either way.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection