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Aug. 15, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:07
The Aftermath Of Charlottesville | Ep. 362
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The latest on Charlottesville, the latest on Antifa, the latest on the alt-right, and people tearing down Confederate memorials for no apparent reason.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
But before we get to any of that, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MVMT.
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Okay, so I just want to remind everyone of how terrible what happened in Charlottesville over the weekend was.
There was some new footage that came out yesterday that we weren't able to show on the show because it came out later.
Here is drone footage of what happened in Charlottesville when this 20-year-old piece of crap decided to drive his car into a crowd of anti-Neo-Nazi, anti-Neo-Confederate, anti-alt-right protesters.
You can see it from the south.
Right, you can see this red car being pushed into the crowd, and people being killed.
One person died from this, and another 19 were injured.
Pretty frightening and horrifying.
And then, of course, the car reversed itself and drove off in the other direction.
Just horrifying stuff.
Okay, so, with that in the background, we're going to get to a lot today.
I want to talk about President Trump's new response.
Yesterday, he finally came out and gave a speech that he should have given on Saturday, and then his activities afterward, which were not helpful to him.
We're going to talk about the left, which has lost its mind.
So, the left always was going to turn this into a referendum on the entire right.
It doesn't matter.
The people like me have been the lead antagonist of the alt-right for well over a year.
They were always going to turn this into some sort of club that they could wield against the entire right, and against the Trump administration in particular, claiming that everyone in the Trump administration must be smeared with this broad brush of alt-rightism and racism and bigotry.
And that is really nasty, and actually it's exacerbating the problems.
What you're seeing is two sides, as I spoke about yesterday.
Antifa on the one side, and the alt-right on the other side, and the mainstream left Focus on the alt-right and willingness to adhere to Antifa and the mainstream right's willingness to ignore the alt-right and their willingness to go after Antifa alone means that both the alt-right and Antifa will grow.
We're now in a self-perpetuating cycle where Antifa says we have to stop the fascists and then they act violently and the right says Well, we're going to side with anybody who acts violently the way these Antifa people are.
The alt-right must not be that bad.
Which, of course, leads the left to say, well, Antifa must not be that bad because the alt-right represents a broad swath of the right, and therefore we have to fight them tooth and nail because Hitler's around the corner.
And they just keep re-enshrining the importance of one another.
And you can see it from the left.
So the left's activities in the aftermath of Charlottesville have been absolutely egregious.
Not just the stuff they're saying, the stuff that they're doing.
We'll start with the stuff they're saying.
Joy Reid over at MSNBC, she came out yesterday and she said white nationalists are everywhere, they're behind your bed, they're behind your curtains, they're inside your closet, and they're all over the White House.
Here's Joy Reid making this case.
What is the alt-right?
It's a dressed-up term for white nationalism.
They call themselves white identitarianism.
They say that the tribalism that's sort of inherent in the human spirit ought to be also applied to white people.
That is who is in his government.
Sebastian Gorka, who wore the medal of a Tessie Rand, a Nazi organization, being paid by the taxpayer in the government of Donald Trump.
Okay, so the two people that you mentioned are particularly bad examples.
Sebastian Gorka is not anti-semitic.
in the government he is surrounded by these people it isn't both sides he's in the White House they're in the White House with him.
Ok so the two people that you mentioned are particularly bad examples Sebastian Gorka is not anti-semitic the stories about him hanging out with the far right in Hungary There's some truth to him hanging out with the far right in Hungary But there's no evidence of his anti-semitism per se and and the attempts to to link the metal that he's been wearing around to Nazism are really overblown There was a whole article in the that debunked the debunked the article in the floor And I think it's from the Atlantic that debunked a lot of this stuff
So the Gorka's a bad example.
And Michael Anton, as much as I dislike Michael Anton's writing, and think his Flight 93 election essay was garbage, he is not a white nationalist.
And so she's picking bad examples.
It just demonstrates how the left is tempted to use the alt-right brush to paint everyone.
Rich Lowry, who's sitting there, actually went on to chide Joy Reid for doing exactly that.
And it's just, it's just foolish of the left to do this.
Because the more they do this, the more they push more people into the arms of the alt-right.
A lot of people say, well, if the alt-right is people like Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka, I guess maybe I'm alt-right.
No, you're not, because those guys aren't really alt-right, okay?
The alt-right is Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, they're a bunch of popularizers who have tried to mainstream it by changing the definition, and the left is helping out in that quest.
Meanwhile, you see the Black Lives Matter co-founder coming out and saying that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
This is an actual threat to the First Amendment of the United States.
We saw yesterday, Texas A&M canceled some sort of rally, this white nationalist rally.
under threat of violence.
This is scary, okay?
It's not just scary because they're white supremacists, but it's scary because free speech is a right that all of us have, even the people who I think are garbage and have terrible, terrible views.
Here's Black Lives Matter saying that if Tate's speech, then it's not protected by the First Amendment.
Eminently untrue.
White nationalists are actually fighting to take away people's rights.
Black Lives Matter and groups like Black Lives Matter are fighting for equality.
And hate speech, which is what we're seeing coming out of white nationalist groups, is not protected on the First Amendment rights.
And so I think that's important that we really delineate what's happening right now.
Okay, that's not true, number one.
Okay, hate speech is, of course, protected by the First Amendment.
And when it comes to BLM trying to claim that only one side is promulgating hate speech, there are videos of people at BLM rallies shouting, pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon, talking about cops.
You remember that it was a guy who was very sympathetic to the means and motives of BLM who shot a bunch of cops in Dallas a year and a half ago.
I'm not saying BLM is to blame for that, I am saying that BLM's program is hardly Uh, is- is hardly a nothing, okay?
It's- it's hardly just, we're trying to defend lives.
They've been incredibly anti-cop, they've incentivized people in Ferguson and Baltimore to riot, uh, and- and yet they say that all of their enemies must be shut down.
This is the danger point, okay?
We're reaching the danger point where- where people on the left say that the alt-right has to be legitimately shut down, not for violence, but because of what they say, and people on the alt-right say that people on the left, like Antifa, Our representative of the entire left, okay?
We're really at a Weimar Republic point where you're seeing battles in the streets and they've been going on for months and you're seeing the left exacerbate this.
So I understand that the media's, all of their sympathy is with the left here because they think that Antifa is not that bad, many of them.
They think Antifa is just anti-fascist.
That's not just what Antifa is.
It's a communist anarchist group that has protested Normal conservatives, normal Republicans in Portland.
Peter Beinart, who I usually despise, wrote a great piece over at the Atlantic talking about what Antifa has done in cities like Portland, where just a normal group of Republicans wanted to march in their Rose Parade, and the entire Rose Parade had to be cancelled because Antifa was threatening.
Okay, so you've got a bunch of violent people in the streets from Antifa, and a bunch of violent people from the alt-right, sometimes in response, like in Sacramento, and sometimes, as in Charlottesville, it's unclear who's actually starting the violence, we just don't know yet, but it's not getting better when the left cheers on people who are moving outside the modes of law in order to enact their supposed agenda.
So, here's some video.
Yesterday, this happened over in Durham, North Carolina, and here's a picture, here's video of protesters toppling Confederate soldiers' monument.
You can see how this is working.
They're toppling the monument, destroying the monument, and then cheering like they've done something grand and glorious, and then kicking the statue because, Ma, I broke my toe fighting racism.
The statue was dedicated in 1924.
Authorities greased the statue with cooking spray to help make it harder to climb.
Then they stood around while this happened.
We were the cops for all of this.
Okay, so the people united will never be defeated.
It's divided, guys.
I mean, if you're gonna get your chance, get it right.
And then they're all standing around, there's video of these people jumping on top of the statue and kicking the statue.
Congratulations, you ended racism by tearing down a Confederate statue nobody knew about or cared about and was erected in 1924.
I'm sure that you didn't embolden the alt-right in any way by doing this sort of thing.
By vandalizing property.
Again, there's a case to be made, and I've said this before, I certainly see the case for taking Confederate monuments And moving them into museums, moving them off of public property.
I see the case for that.
I don't see the case for destroying it.
This looks like, you know, it's not like ISIS because these people aren't ISIS, but there's an attempt in the human soul to rip away history that you don't like.
Supposedly because you're going to fix the future, but that's not the case.
I mean, honestly, you know, I live as a Jew.
I live in a world where Auschwitz still exists in Germany.
I want that to exist in Germany.
I want people to visit it.
I want people to know that the threat of Auschwitz is still a thing and that people should be aware of that.
I fully understand why a lot of black folks and a lot of white folks would like to see Confederate monuments taken away because it's a reminder of an era when slavery was fought and defended.
At the same time, you have to acknowledge that a lot of the people who had great-grandfathers who fought for the Confederacy were not fighting for slavery.
There were a lot of Confederates who were fighting because they thought that the North was encroaching on southern states' rights.
Okay, I understand that this is a historic, what I'm saying is historically accurate, but may not be popular.
The fact is that the Civil War was over slavery, but it was also over states' rights.
It was over both of those things.
And to pretend that it was only over one of those things is to neglect the actual history of the situation.
Because the fact is that even when the North went into the Civil War, it wasn't meaning to abolish slavery.
The Emancipation Proclamation only happens a couple of years into the Civil War.
It was over slavery, but it was over more than that.
That does not justify the Confederacy, of course.
Thank God the Confederacy lost.
That is a wonderful thing the Confederacy lost.
The rebels should have lost.
The people who fought to divide the country so that they could preserve slavery were doing something evil.
But to pretend that people who have Confederate ancestors, when they see a Confederate monument, are immediately thinking of enslaving black people is just not true.
And it's not accurate, at least for the vast majority of them.
Tearing down statues like this.
Again, we have a rule of law in this country.
You want to do this?
Vote for people who are going to remove the memorial.
Vote for people who are going to remove the memorial.
Don't just destroy things.
But I think this, what we're seeing here, is actually part of the same movement that wants to chip Woodrow Wilson's name off buildings at Princeton, and wants to tear down statues of Thomas Jefferson.
And that's a very dangerous ideology.
And then, beyond that, the violence that you're seeing here, the vandalism that you're seeing, where are the cops?
You know, tearing down monuments and breaking the law to do so.
We have a democracy.
We have a republic.
And the mayors of Lexington and Baltimore, they're removing Confederate monuments.
They're elected officials.
They can do that.
This idea that you're going to go around tearing down monuments and that this is somehow similar to tearing down monuments of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein's fall is just inane.
It's just inane.
And all it's doing is emboldening the alt-right, which is going to a lot of people and saying, look at these vandals, these people who have no respect for America's history, because yes, the Confederacy was a dark part, but a part of America's history.
And to pretend that it wasn't is historically ignorant.
You're emboldening people on the alt-right.
This sort of behavior is not purposeful.
This sort of behavior is not helpful.
You want to protest against the alt-right?
By all means do it.
You want to protest racism?
By all means do it.
Tearing down public property is not the way to do this.
All you're doing is driving people against you.
And it's driving, again, this cycle of nastiness.
These examples go on and on.
Yesterday, over in New York, a bunch of protesters protesting at Trump Tower because they didn't like Trump's statement over Charlottesville.
Fine, fair.
But then, there was this video of this woman screaming at the cops for no apparent reason.
Those Nazis said that we're doing what we were told!
That's not fair to you guys!
Have a f***ing backbone!
Thank you!
backbuzz!
You roll your eyes because you're f***ing weak!
Because you know you're wrong!
Because you think you're a man and you can roll your eyes at a f***ing young woman!
Roll your eyes!
Your suit doesn't f***ing protect you!
What a delightful person.
Screaming at people who are trying to protect the President of the United States at Trump Tower and saying that they are the bad guys.
Again, none of this is helpful to the anti-racist cause.
None of this is helpful to the coming together of Americans.
None of it is helpful.
And the left is getting worse.
Because I think that now the left is celebrating the punching of Nazis.
Look at the coverage of Charlottesville.
I pointed out yesterday, I opened with all of the video from Charlottesville, and I pointed out there were a lot of violent people on the left there.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who was there from the New York Times, said as much.
And now, what you're seeing is a whitewashing of Antifa in order to go after the alt-right.
I don't see why you have to whitewash one in order to go after the other.
I went after the alt-right pretty hard yesterday.
I will continue to go after them hard.
I think they're a disgusting movement, and I think that a lot of people have been seduced into believing they're not as disgusting as they are.
But that does not excuse violence.
It does not excuse vandalism.
It does not excuse abusing police officers.
None of this is worthwhile.
None of this is worthwhile.
Unfortunately, it's all getting worse.
I want to talk about President Trump's response to all of this.
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Okay, so President Trump decides that he is going to finally change his statement he made on Saturday.
As you recall, The President of the United States made a statement on Saturday in which he said that there was violence and bigotry on all sides, all sides.
And he didn't specifically single out the alt-right.
He didn't single out the Nazis.
He didn't single out any of that.
And the result of that was that there was a lot of blowback.
And I think right blowback.
I think it was correct to have blowback.
I think President Trump didn't do enough to disassociate himself From the alt-right, which he'd sort of been winking at.
There was a report yesterday that Steve Bannon had been telling him over the weekend.
Steve Bannon, who is his White House chief strategist, a guy I know well, former head of Breitbart, a man who said that he was happy that he had turned Breitbart into basically a forum for the alt-right.
A guy who helps prop up figures like Milo, who are popularizing the alt-right.
And so, Trump didn't say anything.
And apparently he was very angry that he had to go out and make a statement yesterday.
So, let's reenact yesterday with President Trump.
So, President Trump starts off the day by going after the head of Merck.
So, Merck is a major pharmaceutical company.
The CEO, a guy named Kenneth Frazier, he's the CEO of Merck and he was on President Trump's manufacturing board.
After Trump didn't come out strongly enough in his opinion and condemn the alt-right and white nationalism and white supremacism, he quit the board.
And Trump went out and tweeted.
Remember, this is before he's made any overt statement with regard to the alt-right or the KKK or anything.
He tweeted, So that's how he leads off yesterday.
And people are like, really?
This is where you're putting your focus?
You're putting your focus on the Merck head?
Everybody thinks that you need to come out and condemn the alt-right.
Everybody thinks you need to come out and condemn white supremacism.
If you want to condemn Antifa at the same time, that would be nice.
If you want to do all those things, you can do those things.
And instead he's tweeting about Merck.
So finally, yesterday afternoon, right about the time that we were finishing filming the show, Trump gave a statement.
And here was Trump's statement about racism and finally condemning the alt-right or groups associated with the alt-right by name.
Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.
We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal.
We are equal in the eyes of our Creator.
We are equal under the law.
And we are equal under our Constitution.
Those who spread violence in the name of bigotry strike at the very core of America.
Two days ago, a young American woman, Heather Heyer, was tragically killed.
Her death fills us with grief, and we send her family our thoughts, our prayers, and our love.
Okay, good.
Good for Trump for saying this, right?
This is what everybody wanted him to say.
She just said it 48 hours earlier.
The long delay gave a lot of credence to a lot of the groups that were claiming that Trump was on their side.
You remember I read yesterday the Nazi outlet, the Daily Stormer, coming out and praising Trump for not going too hard on the white nationalists.
Yesterday, he blasts them.
And then what's interesting is that, okay, what's the fallout?
So that 48-hour gap creates a series of alt-right people who go out and say, well, Trump is really sort of defending us, isn't he?
You know, his silence means something to us.
And a bunch of people on the left saying his silence means something, obviously, to the alt-right.
And then Trump says this, and, you know, he condemns them.
And the alt-right's response is, well, he didn't really mean it, right?
Like, now he really didn't mean it because he's coming out, he's doing this after pressure.
So according to Olivia Nuzzi, who is a reporter, I believe, for Politico, she says, Richard Spencer doesn't think President Trump condemned his movement today.
He called it kumbaya nonsense and said Trump didn't mean it.
Okay, so who cares about that, right?
Maybe Richard Spencer is just wrong.
Trump does mean it, and it's great that Trump did it, and good.
Okay, but then, five minutes after the speech, you know, a few minutes after the speech, Trump goes right back on Twitter, and is he going after the, is he going after the, um, Is he going after the alt-right on Twitter?
Is he retweeting his own speech about racism?
No, he's going back after the Merck guy.
He decides that it is important that he must go after the Merck guy again.
So he tweets again about the Merck guy, you know, going after him because he says he's a bad guy.
Then he goes on Twitter after that and he decides that it is necessary to tweet about the media.
So here's what he tweeted.
He tweeted, quote, made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realized once again that the fake news media will never be satisfied.
Truly bad people.
This is just not smart.
It's not smart and it's not moral.
Okay, the reason that you should make that additional statement on Charlottesville is because the first one was insufficient.
It was morally insufficient.
You have to condemn the bad guys.
What Trump sounds like he's saying here, okay, if I were just to read this as a layman, what it sounds like he's saying is that the reason that he made the remarks in the first place is because the fake news media were pushing him to do so and then they wouldn't accept him saying what he was saying.
In other words, he was fine with not saying anything additional.
This, of course, lends a lot of credence to the stuff that Spencer was saying, that really the only reason that Trump was doing this is because he was pressured, but deep down in the cockles of his heart, he really didn't want to condemn the alt-right, he really didn't want to condemn the white supremacists.
You know, Mr. Trump, President Trump, I don't think that you're a racist.
I don't think you're a white supremacist.
I don't think you're an alt-righter.
Please, stop making moves that are...
That are even open to question.
This is so obvious and this is so easy.
And when you blame the fake news media for being mean to you because you made a bad statement on Saturday.
By the way, the reports are that there was a second statement that he had in front of him on Saturday that was exactly the same as the statement he made yesterday and he went off cuff because he didn't actually want to discuss the white supremacy on Saturday.
There was that report that came out yesterday.
It's not good stuff.
The president of the United States agenda is determined by the president actually Being strong enough of will, being strong enough morally to stand up against bad people.
And the idea that he's going to sort of bend over backwards to appease this, this, this alt-right movement is really gross.
I mean, it's, it's such a problem.
This, this, another example, right?
Yesterday, last night, the president decides that it is important to tweet a couple of things.
And he tweets, he tweets, this is this morning, he retweeted at 4.40 a.m.
Uh, this, this meme.
And the meme says, fake news can't stop the Trump train.
And then it's a picture of the Trump train hitting a reporter with the CNN logo over it.
Now, we've already had Trump do this, right?
I mean, Trump already did the thing with the, with him tackling the meme from the alt-right of him tackling the, the CNN logo head and the entire world going nuts.
But this is three days after a car hit anti-alt-right protesters and now he's tweeting out a picture of a train hitting CNN.
It's just not smart.
It's just not smart.
And the account he tweeted from apparently is an alt-right account.
Yesterday, last night, he tweets out an account, I guess the guy's name is Jack Posabiak.
You'll remember him from such hits as Storming the Stage at the Julius Caesar production in Central Park.
He's an alt-right friendly figure.
And Jack Posobiec was also a Pizzagate promulgator, and he tweeted something out about how there were 35 people who were shot in Chicago over the weekend.
Why is no one paying attention to that?
And Trump retweeted it.
Now if Trump wants to say, listen, there's killings all over the country, there are a lot of things that we need to do to stop them, that's one thing.
But retweeting people who are sort of part of the alt-right and alt-right friendly base, It does not help his case that he's trying to separate off from this group.
And he should be separating off from this group, okay?
It's an immoral group.
It's an immoral group.
And it's not that everyone who likes memes, everyone who tweets memes, is a member of the alt-right.
I discussed this yesterday.
But the alt-right has effectively used the internet to seize the high grounds of sort of meme territory, and then use it as a way to spread the word.
So...
I have a brief story about this that I think is worth telling.
So I was speaking at a California college, which was last year, and this California college was, you know, a lot of the conservatives had decided to ask me there.
And we go to dinner afterward, which is one of the things that I tend to do with the college Republican groups that I get invited by.
So, we were sitting there having a good time, we're talking, and one of the guys pipes up and says that he's a fan of Milo, and I said, that's great, you know, whatever, you know, that's fine, and he is at the end of the dinner, he waits till the end of the dinner, and everybody is filing out the door, and this fellow turns to me, and he said, and he kind of winks at me quietly, he's wearing a MAGA hat, and he winks at me quietly, and he says, another showa.
Okay, for people who don't know what that means, Anada Shoah is one of these alt-right anti-Semitic memes suggesting that all Jews do is talk about the Holocaust all day long.
Right, that everything is Anada Shoah.
Shoah is a word for Holocaust, and they don't say another, they say Anada.
Right, A-N-U-D-D-A-H.
Right, Anada Shoah, because you're stupid, because you keep talking about the Holocaust, you terrible Jews.
And the guy looked at me and said this, and he obviously meant it as like a wink wink nod nod joke, and I just thought to myself, why would you think that that's okay?
Like, I'm not gonna, like, ruin your life over it, I don't think your life ought to be ruined over it, but why would you think that that's okay?
Because the joke is not, you know, mocking anti-semitism, the joke is actually anti-semitic.
The joke itself is actually anti-semitic.
Like, I'm on Steven Crowder's show a lot, and Steven's a great guy, and Steven makes a lot of, you know, jokes about Jews, right?
He'll talk about how he doesn't like the fact that we have this beautiful tumbler because he has his own mug club, and so he'll make a joke about how our tumbler stinks, but we filled it with Jew gold, right?
The whole point of him doing that is not because he's actually anti-semitic, the point is he's mocking himself for pretending to be anti-semitic.
That's the whole point of the joke.
The whole point of the joke is that anti-semitism's stupid.
That's the entire point of the joke.
That's why when Steven does it, it's not offensive.
The point of the Another Shoah memes is not that anti-Semitism is stupid.
It's not self-parody.
Right?
It's that the Jews actually, like, there's something nefarious about the Jews.
Like, it is an anti-Semitic joke.
This stuff is being passed around by people who don't know better.
I don't think the kid was an anti-Semite.
I think the kid was a perfectly nice kid.
I think the kid was being dragged into this meme underculture where being frivolous and troll-y Uh, is seen as a positive good, because anything that pisses off SJWs, anything where people are triggered, means it's a good thing.
And so this idea that if you trigger people, that's a good thing.
People sided with Trump because they felt like he triggered people.
Ticking off the left is more important than being decent or being right.
And that's really a negative thing.
This is how people get sucked into the maw of the alt-right.
Not because they start off as white supremacists, but because they believe that anything that trolls the left must inherently be decent or good.
It's a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Okay, and again, not everybody who loves memes is a member of the alt-right.
The vast majority of people who like memes are not members of the alt-right.
But this is how the alt-right recruits, this is how the alt-right seduces.
They say we're just being dissidents and trolly, and we're tweeting out anti-semitic and racist memes, and it's because the left can't take a joke that they don't like your stuff.
Not because they don't like racism or anti-semitism, but because they can't take a joke.
That is not...
Positive in any way and the right needs to excise that and President Trump, please for the love of God Stop associating with people from the alt-right and retweeting them.
I understand you think they're a solid part of your base I understand maybe Steve Bannon has told you they're a part of your base.
You can't afford to alienate You're the president of the United States for God's sake You represent the entire country.
Be a man and reject these groups.
Stop retweeting them.
Stop reaching out to them.
These are not people you want to be associated with.
These are not people who are winning the meme war for you.
You didn't win the election because of the meme war.
I understand the alt-right likes to say that you won because of the meme war.
Memes are funny.
Memes are wonderful.
You didn't win because of the meme war.
You won because Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate in the history of mankind.
And I want to get to the media and how they've reacted to all of this and what I thought was an egregious segment on CNN yesterday.
Plus, we have things I like, things I hate, and deconstructing the culture.
But before we get to any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
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Okay, so last night on CNN, the media have decided that – Part of the problem here is the media likes the ratings that they get off of all this stuff.
I mean, there is part of the media that is overjoyed when this sort of stuff happens because the controversy drives ratings.
And the left is eager always to label everyone, as I say, a member of the alt-right no matter whether they're a member of the alt-right or not.
And last night on CNN, this panel just devolved because there was a Trump fan named Paris Denard who was a Bush staffer and Keith Boykin who's a Democratic staffer and Boykin just goes directly after Denard and basically says he's not black.
I'm offended that you continue to go there, Paris, but the reality is that President Trump has not done enough, and I'm ashamed that you as an African American, Paris, will not say that.
Well, Keith, I don't need you to try to pull my black card.
I am well aware of my blackness and don't need you to try to classify me as being one.
I understand what racism is.
Are you?
Keith, don't go there.
Do not go there.
I know what it means to be a black man in this country.
I know, and I experience racism on a regular basis by being a Trump supporter and by being a proud American who happens to be a Republican.
So that's the racism you experience by being a Trump supporter?
I get racist comments about my family, about my mother, about my girlfriend, about my character, every single day, mostly coming from black people, Keith.
If you really want to get down to it, I'm from, my family's from Georgia.
Keith, let me finish.
My family's from Georgia.
We have members of our family that went missing because of the KKK taking them up.
So don't come to me and tell me about what it means to be a black person in this country.
I fought every day in the George W. Bush White House.
Yes, Keith, let me finish.
No, no, no.
I won't calm down because I will not be attacked by you about my blackness because I happen to be a Republican and I listen to our president.
Paris, you've really gone off the rails here.
I am going off the rails.
OK, so the fact is that Paris Dinnard has every reason to to lash out at Keith Boykin for what Keith Boykin just said.
But this is the sort of stuff the media loves to promulgate and it's just pushing the conflict to a higher and higher pitch.
None of this is good.
All of it is frightening.
Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll deconstruct some culture.
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Okay, so for things I like today, I want to do an oldie but a goodie because it's, I think, almost indicative of where we've gone as a country, these two books that I'm about to talk about.
So, Harper Lee wrote one of the great American classics, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is a phenomenal book.
It is a truly phenomenal book.
I remember reading this book, I think I was probably nine, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time.
And it is a brilliant, beautifully written piece about the power of not only tolerance, but fighting for the right.
It's just terrific.
The movie itself is also very good.
You'll spot a very young Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, actually, in the movie.
He's in it for five seconds, but To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Just a grand, grand book.
The whole book is really an ode to Scout is the main character, her father Atticus Finch.
And Atticus Finch, of course, one of the great American literary heroes, is a lawyer who defends an innocent black man accused of a crime.
Uh, and it's it's all about what it takes in what what heroism requires and sometimes it's quiet and sometimes it just requires standing up for the right things.
But what I was going to say is that it demonstrates where we've gone as a country in the last couple of years in an attempt to make some profit.
Uh, the there is another version of this book that Harper Lee wrote that was never published.
It was originally written in the mid-1950s, and it was the first novel that Harper submitted to publishers and was rejected.
It was called Go Set a Watchman.
And it features a lot of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some 20 years later, and it's about Scout realizing that her dad was actually a racist and her dad was actually not so nice and all this kind of stuff.
And this is demonstrative of the fact that To Kill a Mockingbird is about the American dream and how we need more Americans like Atticus Finch in order to achieve the American dream.
And Ghosts Out of Watchmen is about how the American Dream doesn't really exist, even the people who you think are heroes are actually villains.
And we have to get away from Ghosts Out of Watchmen and back to To Kill a Mockingbird.
We all need to be idolizing Atticus Finch.
We all need to be moving in that direction.
And we need to get away from the world where everyone's a villain, so if Atticus Finch is a villain, we all might as well be villains.
You know, the sort of sullying of the Atticus Finch character in Ghosts Out of Watchmen is really one of the literary tragedies of the last ten years.
And it's...
You should read the original and ignore the rewriting in Ghosts of the Watchmen that was only released for profit after Harper Lee.
It was unclear whether Harper Lee was even competent to release it, apparently.
But To Kill a Mockingbird is, again, one of my favorite novels.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So I haven't talked about this yet, but I think that it is worthwhile noticing.
Well, a couple of things.
So we'll start with Dennis Prager.
So Dennis Prager is a friend of mine.
And Dennis was almost rejected from conducting with the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The left tried to destroy Dennis.
They tried to suggest that Dennis was a racist, and a sexist, and a bigot, and a homophobe, and therefore he shouldn't be allowed to conduct the Santa Monica Symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall, about 2,300 seats.
And he was pushed not to conduct the Haydn Symphony No.
51.
There were two UCLA professors named Michael Chu and Andrew Apter.
They're both violinists with the Santa Monica Symphony, and they wrote in an open letter, Dennis does not promote horribly bigoted positions, of course.
It's just another demonstration that the left attempts to lump everyone in with the alt-right, and that's why it is so important both that the left stop doing that and that the right actively separate itself From the alt-right and from the racists who would hang around the fringes and pretend to be important members of the movement.
This stuff is not justifiable and Dennis is one of the good guys.
And the idea that Disney Hall should have been closed to Dennis just demonstrates the intolerance of the left.
It's quite ridiculous.
So it didn't work.
The New York Times wrote an article on the issue.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote an article on the issue.
And it just shows that when the right stands up and says we're not going to stand for being called racist, sexist, bigots, homophobes when we're not, then people back down.
But, in order for that to work, you actually have to not associate with racist, sexist, bigots, and homophobes.
Which, of course, the vast majority of people who are conservative don't.
The alt-right is not a conservative movement.
It's an anti-conservative movement.
And pretending that they're just a troll-y version of the conservatives, It's really not true.
It's a bad definition.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, the Washington Post tried to hit the Trump campaign yesterday and it's just amazing the way that the Washington Post tries to get away with hitting Trump even when it's unjustified.
So, the Washington Post had an article titled, Trump campaign emails show aides repeated efforts to set up Russia's meetings.
Okay, from that headline, you would gather that someone in the Trump campaign was actively attempting to set up meetings with the Russians, with the oversight of the Trump campaign.
But the article itself says, in paragraph 3, the proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower.
Campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made.
Another Trump advisor cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of US sanctions.
Okay.
And so, in other words, the documents show that Trump tried to fight back, right?
The Trump campaign tried to fight back against this particular effort to set up some sort of meeting with the Russians.
So, sort of undercuts the Russian narrative.
That's not what the headline says.
Just another example of the media blowing up a story that really is an exculpatory story for Trump into something that is not exculpatory.
Okay, final thing that I hate, and then we'll deconstruct a little bit of culture.
The final thing that I hate here is, again, just showing that the left ...has no clue what they're doing and they're actually pushing more people into the arms of the alt-right.
This is from the New York Times.
After a day of work at the Engineering Research Center at University of Arkansas...
Kyle Quinn had a pleasant Friday night in Bentonville with his wife and a colleague.
He explored an art exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and dined in an upscale restaurant.
Then on Saturday, he discovered that social media sleuths had incorrectly identified him as a participant in a white nationalist rally some 1,100 miles away in Charlottesville.
Overnight, thousands of strangers across the country have been working to share photographs of men bearing tiki torches on the University of Virginia campus.
But, there was a guy at the rally who's photographed Wearing an Arkansas engineering shirt.
And amateur investigators found a photo of Quinn that looked something similar.
And that was enough to go after Quinn.
And they basically ruined his life.
People demanded he lose his job.
People accused him of racism.
People posted his home address on social networks.
He and his wife stayed with a colleague this weekend.
Again, the fever pitch in this country, it needs to calm down.
This is insanity.
You can't target innocent people because you're attempting to get the guilty.
This is just nuts, folks.
Okay, this sort of doxing of people, it has to stop.
It has to stop.
Wow.
It's wow.
Okay, time to deconstruct the culture a little bit.
So, one of the things that I hate about the modern pop culture is the attempt to virtue signal.
We've talked about this in recent weeks a fair bit.
The cultural figures who feel the need to virtue signal on politics because they think that it's going to make them more pop culturally sort of popular, that is going to draw more support.
It's really foolish.
So one of the people who was doing this was, of course, Lorde.
Lorde, not like God.
L-O-R-D, the E, the young New Zealand singer Lorde.
Was she the one who did Royals?
Is that her group?
Okay, yeah.
So she did the song Royals.
She's like a one-hit wonder.
I'm not sure she's ever done anything else.
But she's done some other stuff.
Okay.
Mathis is more with it than I am.
He's a decade younger than I am, so he's still ensconced in this idiotic culture.
So Lorde, Lorde, Lorde, L-O-R-D-E, she tweeted out, being a privileged white non-U.S. citizen, I feel like tweeting to reinforce how horrific people of color treatment here is is unnecessary and inappropriate.
Okay?
And then she says, I just want to say I'm so, so sorry.
All white people are responsible for this system's thrive and fall.
We have to do better.
I'm sorry.
Um, who is we?
I didn't do any of these things.
And I think all the people who did these things are despicable.
And I've spent my career fighting these people.
So, um, who is we?
Like, you wonder why there's an identity politics of the right?
Maybe that is because there's an anti-white identity politics.
You know, the white identity politics, a lot of that, the growth of that, is a direct response to the identity politics of the left, which suggests that the color of your skin makes you responsible for the sins of other white people.
I am not responsible for a sin committed by a white person just because I am white.
You are not responsible for the sin of a black person just because you are black.
This insanity that suggests that race confers guilt or innocence upon you That ethnicity confers guilt or innocence upon you.
It's just that.
It's insanity.
And the virtue signaling by pop cultural figures who are attempting to make it clear to their audience just how woke they are.
The Katy Perry looking like she came back from college as a lesbian dance theory major and sitting with DeRay McKesson cross-legged on a couch talking about her cultural responsibility.
Look, if you didn't do anything wrong... We live in an individual culture, okay?
I don't believe in social justice because I believe in individual justice.
If you didn't do anything wrong, you are not guilty.
If I didn't do anything wrong, I am not guilty.
If you did do something wrong, you are guilty.
And if I did something wrong, I am guilty.
Otherwise, no guilt, no innocence, okay?
Your moral status is neutral if you haven't done anything.
You do have a duty to come out and condemn racism when you see it as a moral human being, but that does not make you complicit in racism if you do the right thing.
Doing the right thing is you doing the right thing.
I don't know why we have to do third grade morality for people again.
This is insane.
Other things that I hate in the culture.
So I've been lamenting the politicization of sports for several years now, particularly over at ESPN.
One of the shows that I used to enjoy watching a lot more on ESPN was Pardon the Interruption with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon.
They're both really clever guys.
They know a lot about sports.
I used to be a big fan of the show, but now it seems like it's just two lefties going back at each other on every topic under the sun, and that's really boring.
It's really boring.
ESPN has made a huge mistake By attempting to excise everyone who has a differing point of view.
People like Curt Schilling, people like Mike Ditka, people like Chris Broussard.
You know, all these people have been marginalized or thrown out because they have conservative points of view.
And so you end up with stuff like this on ESPN.
Again, sports fans tend to be overwhelmingly conservative, actually.
The majority of sports fans, particularly NFL fans, for example, I'd say this a lot, and I worry that maybe I say it so much that people pay no attention anymore.
This is a constitutional right.
This is a guaranteed thing.
If you don't want to stand for the anthem, you don't have to.
A lot of times I say it in half jest, but I'm getting to the point where it's not even half jest anymore.
I don't even know why they play the anthem.
I mean, I play the Beach Boys.
I like the Beach Boys.
I would, me personally, and I think you too, I would stand for the anthem.
But if you don't, it's, it is not troublesome to me if you don't do this.
Okay, why, okay, so it should be troublesome when people don't stand for our common anthem, because the one thing that you should hope is that the anthem comes to embody what you want it to embody.
Okay, suggesting that America is thoroughgoing racist is nonsense.
Of course, Kaepernick and everybody else who's kneeling for the anthem has the right to kneel for the anthem.
It's America, you get to do what you want, but The idea that we should stop playing the anthem at all so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of people who don't like the flag?
What a bunch of horse manure.
Really silly stuff.
The other politicized topic of the week, it's all been Kaepernick all the time over at ESPN.
I mean, it's amazing how many people seem to care deeply about a second string quarterback who absolutely blows at his job for the last two years.
Stephen A. Smith says that Charlottesville should get Kaepernick a job.
It's amazing how the outcome is always Kaepernick should have a job.
There's a car crash in Louisiana, Kaepernick should get a job.
Storm clouds roll over Texas, Kaepernick should get a job.
Doesn't matter what A is, B is always Kaepernick should get a job.
Here's Stephen A. Smith saying Charlottesville should be the reason Kaepernick gets a job or something for no reason, whatever.
Now, in light of what occurred this weekend in Charlottesville, Stephen A., will this change opinions on Colin?
Well, first of all, it should.
I think to some degree it has.
And I want to state for the record that it damn sure had better change the opinions of owners within the National Football League.
Quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Not just quick, not just fast, but quick, fast, and in a hurry.
Also, expediently.
Speedily.
As fast as their little legs can carry them.
What does Charlottesville have to do with Colin Kaepernick?
Was Colin Kaepernick there?
Did I miss it?
What did Charlottesville—what?
To suggest that the NFL owners are like Richard Spencer is just insane.
It's just insane.
Do you have any evidence of that whatsoever?
That Bob Craft is like Richard Spencer?
What absolute nonsense.
But again, this sort of politicization drives people to the alt-right.
It drives people to the extremes.
Whenever you have politicization of what are common topics, it drives people insane and drives them to the extremes of politics.
It's a bad thing.
We should have social fabric where we can come together.
The National Anthem seems like one place we should be able to come together.
Watching football games seems like another place we should come together.
If even these last tiny and almost insignificant vestiges of commonality are ripped away from us, it's pretty clear that we are going to be irrevocably torn in the near future.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with more updates on all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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