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Aug. 16, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:07
Trump’s Messy Presser | Ep. 363
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Time Text
President Trump gives an uncomfortable press conference, to say the least.
The left decides that Antifa are the same as World War II allies.
And the media decides that everything is Hitler.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so we're going to go through in detail President Trump's unnecessary and ridiculous press conference yesterday.
He said a couple of things that were true, and then he did something that I thought was just morally egregious.
And we're going to talk about all of it in the most fair-minded way that I think that we can.
We're going to go through all of the evidence.
On what President Trump said, and we're going to talk about the media response to all of it.
So get ready for a very, very full show.
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Okay, so.
Yesterday, President Trump is doing a press conference.
It's supposed to be Infrastructure Week.
Okay, I'm getting... There is something hilarious about the fact that every week with President Trump is a new week.
In which he declares a theme, right?
It's American Jobs Week, or it's Infrastructure Week, or it's Relaxation Week.
Well, this week was another Infrastructure Week.
And naturally, he decided to burn every bridge in sight in honor of Infrastructure Week.
So, he gave his statement on Monday, right?
He gave it yesterday, and I talked briefly about, or Tuesday, and I talked briefly about that statement yesterday.
Yes, he's, I'm sorry, he gave the statement Monday.
He gave an original statement Saturday on Charlottesville.
Then he gave a statement Monday, which we talked about yesterday.
And then, after we finished the show yesterday, Trump went out and did an unnecessary press conference.
He was not asked to do the press conference for anyone.
No one wanted him to do the press conference.
His own people didn't want him to do a press conference.
But Trump obviously had something on his mind and he wanted to say it.
And so he said to the press, here, now I'm going to take questions.
So he began, he basically, to sum up the press conference, He spoke about a few different topics.
He spoke about what he called the alt-left, which would be Antifa, presumably.
Alt-left is a term I believe coined by Sean Hannity as sort of a counter to the alt-right.
I never liked the term alt-left because it sort of legitimizes alt-right.
There is no alt-left.
There is just the hard left and Antifa.
But in any case, he went after what he called the alt-left, which I assume means Antifa.
He talked about Confederate statues being removed.
He talked about whether what happened on Friday night and Saturday was bad, and then he also talked about the people who were present at the rally.
He was asked specifically about the alt-right, and so he talked about those four things.
And so we'll go through all of those four.
Now, I will say, as just a prefatory note, the fact that the left has decided that everything that he said yesterday was false, and the right has decided that everything that he said yesterday was true, is really discomforting to me.
It's a serious problem for me.
Okay, he said some things yesterday that were true, and then he said a good many things that I think were actually immoral.
And we'll talk about all of them, but I think that it is necessary to go through in detail what exactly he said, so we can tease out what he said was true and what he said was false.
So he started off by ripping Antifa.
Here is what the president had to say about Antifa.
What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?
Do they have any semblance of guilt?
Let me ask you this.
What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs?
Do they have any problem?
I think they do.
As far as I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.
Wait a minute, I'm not finished.
I'm not finished, Fake News.
That was a horrible day.
I will tell you something.
I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it.
And you have, you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.
And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now.
You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.
Okay, so the fact that Trump put so much focus on what he called the alt-left here, and I assume he means Antifa when he talks about them, had the left up in arms.
They're saying, why aren't you focusing more on the white supremacist rally and the fact that a white supremacist actually was responsible for murder, rammed a car into 20 people.
At that particular rally on Saturday.
Why are you focusing so much on the alt-left?
I think that it is perfectly appropriate for the President of the United States to talk about the violence of Antifa, which has been violent in Seattle.
They were violent in Seattle again yesterday.
Violent in Berkeley.
Violent in Sacramento.
Violent in Richmond.
Violent yesterday.
Okay, so this is tape from yesterday.
This is still in Charlottesville.
They were at the courthouse.
And here's Antifa getting into it with the police.
Okay, so Antifa has been violent and consistently violent for a long time now, and what I'm seeing from the left is an attempt by the left to pretend that Antifa are the great heroes of this story, that Antifa are standing up to tyranny, that Antifa are standing up to the alt-right, and therefore That Antifa is somehow a good force, that something good is happening with Antifa.
And you're seeing this from the left almost universally this morning.
It's a huge mistake by the left, okay?
So, here's just a couple examples.
Mitt Romney, right, who's not on the left, but Mitt Romney tweeted this out this morning or last night.
He tweeted, "No, not the same.
One side is racist, bigoted Nazi.
The other opposes racism and bigotry.
Morally different universes." Okay, again, it is true that some of the protesters who were there to protest the white supremacists were there and are in completely morally different universes, but Antifa is not in a completely Antifa is a violent communist anarchist group that's been making violent trouble all around the country.
And then you had members of the press who are mimicking this talking point.
Hendrickson, John Hendrickson is a writer at Esquire.
Here's what he tweeted this morning.
He tweeted, alt-left thugs who battled Nazis, right?
And it's a picture of a bunch of World War II vets.
Hey, those were not alt-left thugs.
Those were American soldiers who were fighting armed Nazis who were engaged in violence and the takeover of a sovereign nation.
I assume that if the alt-right white supremacist neo-Nazis had actually, in armed fashion, taken over Charlottesville, that we'd have sent the armed forces, not Antifa.
The alt-left is much more akin to, as I said yesterday, the red mobs who were fighting the brown shirts in 1932 Germany and actually led to the increase in the vote share for Hitler's Nazi party because people got sick of watching the reds fight the browns and they sided with the browns over the reds.
But he's not the only one making this comparison.
Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.
He tweets out, watching Save It Private Ryan, a movie about a group of very aggressive alt-left protesters invading a beach without a permit.
Well no, that's idiotic.
It's about a group of American soldiers who are invading sovereign French territory in order to oust the Nazis, who are an actual fighting force.
Okay, not the same thing.
To compare people who are not behaving violently in Charlottesville to people who are behaving violently on the beaches of France, and to compare people who are American soldiers to alt-left protesters who, by the way, would never join the American army in a thousand years, to compare those people is just asinine.
It's morally asinine.
But you saw this.
This became a meme over the evening.
Brian Fallon is a Hillary Clinton spokesperson, and here's what he tweeted.
It also confronted the Nazis without a permit, and it's a picture of the guys from World War II wading onto Normandy Beach.
Insane.
Okay, same routine from Chris Cuomo, who's an anchor over at CNN.
Anti-fascist disrupting a large gathering of white supremacists.
And then it says, let's not forget.
That's what Chris Cuomo wrote.
And it's not just the sort of idiots in the movement.
Mark Bray is a historian.
Here's what he wrote in the pages of the Washington Post today.
Quote.
This is, again, defending Antifa.
The vast majority of anti-fascist organizing is nonviolent, but their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly distinguishes them from liberal anti-racists.
Anti-fascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.
The history of anti-fascist demands that we take seriously the violence of white supremacists.
The days of just ignoring them are over.
And he says European anti-fascists fought Hitler, and they fought Stalin, and they fought, uh, well, he didn't say they fought Stalin, actually, because that would be actually incorrect.
They fought Mussolini, he says they fought Franco.
There's only one problem with that.
The anti-fascist forces who fought Hitler and Franco and Mussolini, they all lost.
Okay, and the reason, one of the reasons they all lost is because they actually made those movements more popular.
By going out there and engaging in street fights in Weimar in 1930, 31, 32, 230 people were killed in street clashes between the Brownshirts and the Reds in 1932.
That led to the rise of the Brownshirts.
It led, people wanted a restoration of order.
So backing the so-called Antifa groups is really bad.
Okay, it's really bad.
Antifa's tactics actually help the alt-right because it makes people see the alt-right as victims.
It makes people feel that the alt-right Or a group of people who just want to protest non-violently, and then Antifa shows up and gets violent with them.
World War II allies fighting Hitler's shoulders, soldiers, were not fighting protesters.
They were fighting armed men with guns.
That's why we sent tanks and howitzers to fight them.
We don't send tanks and howitzers to rallies of neo-Nazis.
The ACLU defended Nazis marching in Skokie.
We didn't send guys with guns.
The alt-right isn't an army.
They're evil.
They believe in evil things.
The minute they get violent, they should be arrested and they should be put down.
But the idea that you can meet The idea that you can meet nonviolent protests, even of people that you hate with violence, is really dangerous.
It's really dangerous stuff.
And so when Trump says this stuff, when Trump says that Antifa attacked the alt-right and that there's evidence of that, he's correct.
That is true.
Okay, that's true.
So that's what he said that I think was true.
In a second I'm going to get to More of what he said about the statues, and then I want to get to what I think was the heart of his press conference, which really wasn't that.
The heart of the press conference was him doing a soft defense of the alt-right and really giving the alt-right what they wanted.
I know that a lot of people on the right are angry with me for saying this, but that's the way I see it, and I will explain in full context why that is in just a second.
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So we start off with his comments about Antifa, which I think are eminently correct and totally fine.
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Okay, so moving on in President Trump's presser.
So we start off with his comments about Antifa, which I think are eminently correct and totally fine.
Okay, but there are some problems.
And I'll get to the problems in a second.
He says something else that was true.
He was talking about the movement from the left to tear down statues.
Now, as I said yesterday, I think that there's a very solid case for taking Confederate war memorials and moving them into private museums, moving them into private hands.
You know, the idea that black people should have to pay taxes for the upkeep of statues of people who were attempting to keep them in slavery.
I understand that argument perfectly well, and I sympathize to a large degree with that argument.
I also think, like Condoleezza Rice has said, That ripping away historic monuments actually prevents people from discussing history openly.
That chipping away Woodrow Wilson, off the name of buildings at Princeton, prevents us from having honest discussions.
Like, if I would walk with my child past a Confederate war monument, it would give me an opportunity to say, look, here's the history of the country, here's how far we've come, here's what the Civil War was all about, and here's why the Confederacy deserved to lose.
So, you know, the truth is that when you drive through a city, the vast majority of war memorials are things people walk right by.
So these are really not flashpoints.
They've been made flashpoints by two separate groups of people.
Black Lives Matter, which has decided that these Confederate memorials are somehow the... the...
Gas in the tank for racists, and racists themselves who have, in retaliation, have used the Confederate War Memorials as gathering points, which is really negative and problematic.
Here is President Trump, though, saying, here's his bigger problem, is that the left isn't just focusing on Confederate War Memorials.
There is a campaign among people on the left to go after memorials to Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington, who is the slave owner.
And what he says here is also eminently correct.
George Washington was a slave owner.
Was George Washington a slave owner?
So will George Washington now lose his status?
Are we going to take down?
Excuse me.
Are we going to take down?
Are we going to take down statues?
How about Thomas Jefferson?
What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
You like him?
Okay, good.
Are we going to take down the statue?
Because he was a major slave owner.
Now we're going to take down his statue.
So you know what?
It's fine.
You're changing history.
You're changing culture.
Okay, so what he says there, I think, is at least arguably correct.
I think what he says there, you can make a distinction, I think, logically, pretty easily, between Robert E. Lee and George Washington.
Robert E. Lee fought on the side of a rebel army attempting to destroy the Union in an attempt to uphold slavery.
And George Washington was the great preserver of the union.
So there's a pretty strong distinction there.
But the case that he's making is not wrong, considering the left has actively made the case against keeping up statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, right?
At University of Mizzou, there was a big protest attempting to do all of this.
There's a big protest attempting to get rid of a statue of Thomas Jefferson at University of Missouri, led by the Black Lives Matter movement.
So Trump isn't wrong on this particular And the right is jumping on the two points that I've talked about to say that everything Trump said was correct.
Right, what he said about Antifa is right, and condemning both sides, that's fine, and the statue stuff, he's right.
Okay, but, here's the problem.
What the President of the United States had to do, more than anything else, was stick by his statement of Monday.
The statement where he said, I'm not talking about neo-nazis and white supremacists.
society and what they say is evil, right?
That's all he had to do.
All he had to do is keep saying that.
So what Trump did is he played a double game in his press conference.
He said, I'm not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
I think that they're bad, right?
But he said also, there are a lot of good people who showed up at these rallies.
And then he also said that he didn't know what the alt-right was.
This is a Somebody asked him specifically about the alt-right and he said he didn't know what it was.
We're going to play all of these clips and you're going to see that Donald Trump provided the alt-right most what it wanted.
The alt-right wants to be known not as a white supremacist group.
They want their face to the public to be we're just defending Western civilization, not white supremacism, even if they are actual white supremacists.
And they want the President of the United States to lend them credence, as though they're a bunch of very fine people?
This is what the alt-right wants.
Okay, we talked on Monday about exactly what the alt-right is.
The alt-right's basic creed is that Western civilization is inherently bound up with ethnicity and race, and that white people were the builders of Western civilization, and therefore people of other races and cultures cannot adapt.
That is the basic argument of the alt-right.
Trump knows that, because his chief strategist at the White House is Steve Bannon, who helped promulgate the alt-right, and said that Breitbart was, in fact, a platform for the alt-right to wrecked quote from Steve Bannon.
But Trump played stupid, and in doing so, he gave the alt-right what they wanted.
He focused on the left.
Again, that's fine, but if you're going to focus on the left, you can't poo-poo the alt-right.
This is the problem on both sides.
The left is saying everything he said about Antifa is wrong, and the right is saying everything that he said about Antifa is right, and therefore he's right, or therefore he's wrong.
No, he's right about Antifa, and he's totally wrong about the alt-right, and even granting them a smidgen of credibility is morally disgusting.
Okay, and that's what he did yesterday.
To pretend otherwise is to ignore that when Barack Obama did the same thing to Black Lives Matter, the right went nuts.
And rightly so.
When Barack Obama granted credence to the people who were burning down Ferguson and Baltimore, the right rightly went nuts.
We went nuts.
As well we should have.
We said he was vague.
And the left said, wait, he condemned the people rioting.
And we said that wasn't enough.
He needed to condemn what they were rioting about.
Okay, but President Trump really tried hard to soft-pedal this stuff yesterday.
So, he started off by defending his statement on Saturday.
Why exactly, he was asked, why did it take till Monday for you to say neo-Nazis and the KKK and neo-Confederates were bad?
Why didn't you just say it on Saturday?
Here was his answer.
I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters.
I didn't know David Duke was there.
I wanted to see the facts and the facts as they started coming out.
were very well stated.
In fact, everybody said his statement was beautiful.
If he would have made it sooner, that would have been good.
I couldn't have made it sooner because I didn't know all of the facts.
Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts. - Okay, so this is nonsense.
Everyone knew all the facts virtually immediately.
Antifa got violent, and then an alt-right protester drove a car into a crowd of people who included a bunch of innocent non-Antifa people, and the alt-right people were violent as well.
Okay, so he says he had to wait for the facts.
First of all, you know that's a tell, okay?
Trump has never, ever in his entire life had to wait for the facts.
This is a guy who spends a year proclaiming that Barack Obama, without evidence, was born in Kenya.
This is a guy who goes out preemptively and declares Muslim terrorist attacks before all the facts are in.
Some of that is not a huge problem, but to pretend that he is the considerate arbiter of the facts is just a joke, okay?
That is not a good excuse from President Trump.
It's obviously not a good excuse.
He repeated, it must have been ten times in a three-minute segment, how he was waiting for all of the facts.
Such nonsense.
Such absolute nonsense.
Especially since we know from Eliana Johnson over at the Washington Post, by the way, Eliana, It's kind of conservative, okay?
She's a Claremont Fellow.
When I was a Claremont Fellow, Eliana Johnson, who writes for the Washington Post, she reported that Trump had a statement exactly the same as the one on Monday on his desk on Saturday.
He was standing with it right there, and he went off script and decided not to say it.
Okay, so there's another reason that Trump didn't want to do this, and that's because Trump is happy to pander to the alt-right.
He was always happy to pander to the alt-right.
During the campaign, he pandered to the alt-right.
He continued to pander to the alt-right because he thinks that they're his biggest supporters and they're nice to him, so he has to soft-pedal them.
And he did that again yesterday.
He was asked specifically about the alt-right, okay?
The alt-right, I've defined it now 1,000 times, and they defined it themselves.
Richard Spencer was at this rally.
Okay, Jared Taylor, his people, were at this rally.
The Daily Stormer, neo-Nazis, were at this rally.
It was actually pitched like this.
Okay, the ad promoting the Unite the Right rally, it was designed to evoke fascist posters, which Jon Podhoretz writes.
He's correct.
Okay, it invited speakers like Mike Ennick, who hosts a podcast called The Daily Show-Up.
Augustus Invictus, an alt-right figure who once said, I have prophesied for years I was born for a great war, that if I had not witnessed the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.
And Christopher Cantwell, who calls himself a fascist, along with Johnny Monoxide, who calls himself fashy.
The march's organizer, Jason Kessler, described the views of the people who showed up.
He said, you don't give a damn about white people.
You people are implementing policies which are displacing us in our home countries, and we will not be allowed to survive.
The goal of this rally was extraordinarily clear, so much so that Gavin McInnes, the head of the Proud Boys, and a guy with whom I've been friendly, Gavin said, I will not go to this rally because it's infused with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
The alt-right There's a group of people who decided to show up for this rally because they are part of this movement.
And here is Trump being asked about the alt-right, and here is Trump pretending he doesn't know what it is.
When you say the alt-right, define alt-right to me.
You define it.
Go ahead.
No, define it for me.
Come on, let's go.
Define it for me.
The militant.
Define it for me.
Come on, let's go.
Define it for me.
It's not a fight.
How about you define it?
How about you say, if by the alt-right you mean...
X, then I condemn it.
If by the alt-right you mean people who like memes, I don't.
How about he could do that?
But the defensiveness about the alt-right is really truly incredible.
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Okay, so as I say, he went out of his way not to condemn the alt-right.
And then, here's the part that a lot of his allies are relying on.
He says that he's condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but here's what he says.
I've condemned neo-Nazis.
I've condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me.
Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch.
Okay, so combine those two statements.
He doesn't know what the alt-right is, and not all of those people were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
That is a defense of the alt-right.
That is an attempt to paint the alt-right as non-white supremacist, non-neo-Nazi.
That is what that is, okay?
And then it got worse.
Then it got worse.
He said, he specifically cited the Friday night Torchlight March.
And if you reported it accurately, you would say.
And you had some very bad people in that group.
And he had all these people literally chanting in the streets, carrying tiki torches and shouting, Jews will not replace us.
Right.
This is what he had to say about that particular rally.
And if you reported it accurately, you would say, and you had some very bad people in that group.
But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did.
You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
Okay, so, again, this is really quite despicable when you look at the actual tape.
Okay, so here is the tape of the protests.
Okay, this is what the protests that he is talking about were filled with very fine people.
This is the tape of the protests, so this would be, uh, clip three.
This is what that actually looked like.
Is it a Hitler salute right there?
Yeah, that's nice.
There are a bunch of us.
White lives matter!
White lives matter!
Screaming white lives matter.
Vice has some pretty good tape of all this.
They have a 22-minute documentary they brought out about this.
The first 10 minutes is really stunning material.
The rest of it is... Vice is biased, but the first 10 minutes of this is stunning material.
Here's what the rally actually looked like on Friday night.
2-1!
Replace us!
Jews will not replace us!
Blood and soil!
Whose streets?
Our streets!
You can see in the center there, those are the anti-white supremacist protesters.
Black lives matter!
Black lives matter!
What just happened?
from the actual fights that got started. - What just happened?
- They based me.
Who?
I don't know.
I'm positive for one second, okay?
So, number one, you see that Friday night, that was not a lot of good people.
There weren't some very fine people marching.
And by the way, if you find yourself in a march, just a tip to people, if you find yourself in a march where people start shouting, Jews will not replace us, maybe you should leave.
Maybe you should leave.
If you're not a piece of garbage, maybe you should leave.
Why is it that even the people who are alt-right friendly, even people who ally with the alt-right from time to time, looked at this Unite the Right event and decided not to show?
Why is that?
There's a reason for that.
Even people like Mike Cernovich, who spends a year propping up the alt-right.
Why is it that people like Mike Cernovich said, I'm not showing up?
Why do you think?
Was it because it was filled with very fine people, as President Trump says?
There were a lot of very fine people?
Okay, also important to notice on this tape, the guy who's wiping his face off here is a guy named Christopher Caldwell, open racist, says that he wishes President Trump were more racist, and he's very upset that President Trump would allow his daughter to marry a Jew.
He was maced here.
Again, Christopher Caldwell is a disgusting piece of garbage.
But macing people is not something that you get to do in the United States for peacefully protesting even for evil causes.
Here's some more of the tape from Vice.
We're here obeying the law.
We're doing everything that we're supposed to do, trying to express opinions.
And the criminals are over there getting their way.
And that is a foundational problem in our society.
And whatever you think of my opinions, that's going to be something that puts you in danger.
Yeah, and that is because this city is run by Jewish communists and criminals.
We did not initiate force against anybody.
We're not non-violent.
We'll kill these people if we have to.
So Christopher Conwell is going to follow who you see saying that he'll kill people if he has to.
But again, this is why Antifa's activities are really bad.
Antifa is just granting credibility to the alt-right, saying, oh, we're just here for defensive purposes.
We're just here for defensive purposes.
Okay, so, a lot of... Sorry, almost cursed there.
A lot of really crappy people on both sides, okay?
That is true, but, It is unfair for the President of the United States to say that there were a lot of very fine people who were marching on Friday night.
There were not, or if there were, I would like to see the evidence of it.
That does not mean that everyone who opposes the Robert E. Lee statue coming down is a bad person.
Okay, I've said that.
I started the show with that.
I think that Trump is not wrong about some of the things he says about the Confederate statuary.
But, when he says there are a lot of very fine people and, oh, what's the alt-right?
I've never heard of it.
What does it do?
That is really, really gross, and you can see why people are reacting so negatively to it.
The President of the United States has a moral responsibility to say not only that white supremacists and neo-Nazis are terrible and believe terrible things, but that the alt-right is terrible, particularly because they claim him as an ally.
That does matter.
It does matter.
When people claim you as an ally, It becomes more incumbent on you to disassociate from them if you want to disassociate from them.
If somebody says publicly, like today, for example, a stupid example, Martin Shkreli, who's like the weird pharmaceutical bro guy, who's now in jail for fraud, he tweeted something out about how he wanted to run for president and make me his vice president.
And I immediately tweeted out, if elected I will not serve, if nominated I will not run.
Like, what in the hell?
That's not my guy, right?
That's not somebody who I'm interested in being associated with, and that's a funny, ridiculous example, but if you have an entire movement of people who believe what Christopher Caldwell believes, but are just a little quieter about it, and they claim that you support them as President of the United States, why don't you do what Ronald Reagan did and just denounce them and say, I don't want your support!
I don't want you anywhere near me!
But apparently Steve Bannon over the weekend was telling Trump that he couldn't alienate a lot of these people because if he did then he'd lose his base.
The truth is that it would actually alienate Bannon's base but not Trump's base.
Okay, Trump's base is very large.
Trump is the President of the United States.
He has a responsibility to stand up for everyone in the United States.
And Steve Bannon's base is not that large.
Steve Bannon's base is very alt-right driven.
There are a lot of people on the alt-right who like Bannon and see him as their great protector.
And that's why Bannon is motivated to protect the alt-right.
Trump is motivated to protect them not because he's a racist or a neo-nazi, but because Trump is motivated to sound off in favor of any or at least protect anybody who is ever nice to him.
And this is creating a real rift on the right that I'm going to talk about in just a minute.
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I think Michael Knowles is actually having on one of the people who was one of the white supremacists or alt-right people at 12.30.
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Okay, so all of this has created a rift on the right.
There's no rift on the left, because the left is fully willing to go all the way with Antifa.
Because of the left, because of the left's willingness to go all the way with Antifa, there's a reactionary side to the right that says, okay, well, the alt-right isn't that bad.
Like, what Trump said yesterday wasn't that bad.
There wasn't anything morally wrong with it.
And you see, people are so hesitant to alienate sort of the hardcore alt-right Trump support base and that's not that's a small percentage of Trump supporters by the way the vast majority of Trump supporters are not alt-right supporters a very small group of people but people are so hesitant to alienate that they are hesitant to condemn in moral terms what the president did yesterday and what he did was immoral yesterday it was an immoral thing the president did yesterday by pretending he didn't know what the alt-right was and then suggesting that there were very fine people who showed up for that rally on Friday night
And then suggesting that not all those people were white supremacists and putting this sort of equal focus on what he called the alt-left with the alt-right.
Again, the alt-left, the Antifa groups are evil, but it was an alt-right guy who murdered someone on Saturday.
It was an alt-right guy who drove a car into a crowd and murdered a woman and killed and hurt 19 other people.
There's plenty of time to discuss the evils of Antifa.
There's plenty of time to discuss the evils of leftist violence.
We do it on this show routinely.
You know, yesterday, it's fine to mention Antifa's violent.
It is not fine to either equate the activities of the two at these particular rallies, or to suggest that the alt-right was not a part of this.
It's what the alt-right could have wished for.
The proof is in the pudding.
Both Richard Spencer and David Duke celebrated President Trump's statements yesterday.
If I were President Trump, I wouldn't want David Duke or Richard Spencer celebrating me for any reason under the sun.
In any case, this has broken out into an intellectual fight on the right.
Laura Ingraham, who of course has been a very, very strong supporter of President Trump's throughout the campaign and was talked about as press secretary when she was on Fox News, and she said, well, the big problem is that this doesn't forward the president's policy agenda.
I always like to think about it this way.
Is he advancing his agenda with what happened this afternoon?
And I will say, when you had Gary Cohn up there talking about, they're going to hit the ground running on tax reform.
We're ready.
We spent the whole day doing it.
I was like, I wanted to hear more and more and more.
I mean, that's great.
And we got sidetracked on this horrific event of the weekend, which he had made the subsequent statement about.
That was I think really, really good.
I think he could have been more specific, clearly, on Saturday.
But when he said, we must love each other, show affection for each other, unite together and condemn the hatred, bigotry of the violence that we saw, that was so great yesterday.
I think today, he's really torched about people conflating Trump's support with white nationalists.
You can see it and hear it in his responses, and I understand that.
But he's not there to win every debating point.
People want to see a calm president in the storm.
I think today, I think he made some points that were factually right.
There was violence on both sides in that event on Saturday.
Anyone who's watched the video could see it.
Okay, what she says there is not all wrong, but it is also a massive misdirect.
And that's what Krauthammer immediately comes back and says to her.
He says, you know, that is that it's really a cop-out.
To say that what Trump did yesterday was wrong because it distracts from his agenda is a real cop-out.
What he did wrong yesterday was wrong.
It was just wrong.
I mean, it was a morally wrong thing to do.
So Krauthammer says that, and then Ingram immediately comes back by doing this, this Tired, boring talking point, where she says that anybody who's dissatisfied with anything Trump does is just because they hate Trump personally.
I am so bored with this bullcrap, I can't even tell you.
The fact is, I want the same things that Laura Ingraham wants in terms of policy at least 70% of the way.
The idea that I'm sitting here rooting for Trump to fail is nonsense.
I want Trump to do the right thing.
I want him to do the right thing not only for the agenda, but morally I want him to do the right thing.
I want him to do the ethically right thing.
I want him to come out and condemn the alt-right.
I want the alt-right excised.
I think they're a cancer on our movement.
I want him to call out Antifa.
I celebrate him calling out Antifa.
But he needs to also call out the people who are evil within his own movement.
And if he won't do that clearly and concisely, not just 99 times out of 100, not just I'm irritated having to do it, it should be easy.
I remember a couple of weeks ago, I was on with Dana Perino on Fox News debating some guy from CAIR.
And I said, why don't you condemn the Muslim Brotherhood?
And he said, why don't you condemn the KKK?
I said, sure, the KKK is a bunch of garbage human beings.
Was that any skin off my nose?
Did I feel bad about that?
Did I feel like, oh, how dare he demand that I... Who cares?
Defend bad... condemn bad people.
Why is this difficult?
It's not difficult.
It's such a gimme.
It's such a gimme.
And the fact that he didn't do it is immoral.
It's immoral.
And you can see In fact, everybody said his statement was beautiful.
If he would have made it sooner that would have been good.
White House chief of staff, the guy who's going to save the Trump administration from Trump's sort of chaos.
This is actual tape of John Kelly, an honorable man, reacting to President Trump's press conference yesterday.
In fact, everybody said his statement was beautiful.
If he would have made it sooner, that would have been good.
I couldn't have made it sooner because I didn't know all of the facts.
Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts.
Who wrote that statement?
Excuse me, excuse me.
It was very important to me to get the facts out and correct them.
Because if I would have made a fast statement, and the first statement was made Look how uncomfortable Kelly is.
What were the many sides you were talking about, sir?
What was the other side?
The Press: What were the many sides you were talking about, sir?
The Press: There's still things that people don't know.
The Press: What was the other side?
The Press: I want to make a statement with knowledge.
I want to know the second.
The Press: So you said on many sides, Mr. President.
The President: Okay, Kelly did this for like 15 minutes.
It was just him staring into the abyss for 15 minutes.
Kelly was not a happy camper, nor should he have been.
Nor should he have been.
And I'm tired of this cop-out that, you know, if he does something immoral, it's only bad because it's a distraction from policy.
Immoral things are immoral.
And I'm also tired of this cop-out that if I think something he did is immoral, it's because I want him to fail or I'm anti-Trump.
He's the president.
I want him to succeed.
He's the president.
I want him to do good things.
Just enough.
Now, the media is not helping any of this, of course, because the media have decided not just to condemn Trump for doing what he is obviously doing, pandering to the alt-right, but they have decided that it is important to call him an actual Nazi.
So Jimmy Kimmel suggested that President Trump cuts eyeholes out of his bedsheets.
He's an actual member of the KKK.
It's another disturbing Monday in America.
You know, we went into the weekend worrying about Kim Jong-un starting a war.
We came out of it wondering if our president is cutting eyeholes out of his bedsheets.
You know, um, as you know, this weekend in Virginia, the worst people in the United States went to the hardware store, bought tiki torches, lit them up, and marched in Charlottesville.
A non-violent protester was killed by a white supremacist, and so the president, who is the president, by the way, went on television to say this.
We condemn in the strongest possible term- Okay, you can see it.
You don't have to go on with Kimmel, but you can see that Kimmel Is obviously calling Trump a Nazi.
David Axelrod, who was the former White House Communications Director, I believe, under President Obama.
He was his campaign strategist in 2008.
He said that Trump bleached the white robes of the KKK.
Listen, this press conference was in every way, shape, and form a car wreck for the president.
It showed a guy who was melting down.
It showed a guy who was small-minded, intemperate, and sending dog whistles to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, which is why they have thanked him for his comments.
He was bleaching their white robes and he was shining their shields with his remarks today.
And he may say he condemned them, but that's not the way anybody in America read that.
So the idea from Axelrod is of course that Trump isn't doing this for political gain, he's doing this because he actually sympathizes with white supremacism.
Okay, I don't think that's what's going on with Trump.
And this is one of the things that's bothered me about the leftist take on all of this.
It bothered me with Steve Bannon.
Okay, Steve Bannon is a guy I know and personally dislike very strongly.
I think Steve's a bad human being.
But, when people said that Steve was a racist or an anti-Semite, I had to say, I don't see any evidence of that.
I do see evidence that he's willing to pander to those groups for political gain.
The left can't just stick to the truth.
They cannot just stick to the truth.
I've been saying this for a year.
Okay?
They can't just stick to the truth of what's going on.
They have to declare not only that Trump is a Nazi, but that everyone who supports him is a Nazi, that everybody on the right is a Nazi, and that Antifa is a group of glorious World War II allies who are fighting the bad guys.
Okay?
Antifa shut down a rally in Portland where a bunch of Republicans just wanted to march in the Rose Parade as they do every year.
But this is what the left is doing.
I said this yesterday.
The left is embracing the radical left, and the right, in response, is increasingly winking and nodding at the radical right.
And I don't even think that the alt-right is right, but I think that they are Trump supporters in the main, because they see in Trump an ally against the SJWs and against political correctness.
And it's dangerous on both sides.
It's getting more dangerous.
At the very least, can we start with no violence?
Can we start with Antifa should be arrested when they commit acts of violence?
And then we'll talk about how everybody in the United States needs to condemn, including the President of the United States, needs to come out and cut out the cancer that is the alt-right.
The alt-right is a cancer.
They're a blight.
And the fact that the president won't do that, it's so disheartening.
Some days it's very hard to do the show because it's so disheartening when you see the moral emptiness on both sides of the political aisle for partisan gain.
It really is quite horrifying to me.
And I'm as conservative as anyone in America.
And not only do I think that You know, in spite of my conservatism, I think all this stuff is terrible.
I think because of my conservatism, I think all this stuff is terrible.
Conservatives believe in individual liberty and individual value.
We believe in the idea that human beings were made in God's image, each and every one of us.
We believe in the idea of respect and tolerance for other people's views.
We believe in the idea that the best views will win.
We believe in the idea that the government shouldn't get involved in this stuff because we believe all the things I just mentioned.
And if we are willing to wink and nod at all of these bad things in order to advance our agenda on either side, then we're just part of the problem and we're making the country a lot worse place.
It's really horrifying.
Okay.
With that said, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then a quick Bible study.
So, things I like.
Over the weekend I had a chance to read a highly recommended book called The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak.
This is a book about World War I, and it's about a guy who grows up very young in the United States, and then he moves back to Czechoslovakia, or what becomes Czechoslovakia, and ends up joining up with the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. It's a very beautifully written novel.
It's very spare.
It's very reminiscent of Farewell to Arms by Hemingway.
And it's already being counted as sort of a World at One classic.
He apparently wrote a sequel that I'm looking forward to reading about the Vietnam War.
It's called The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak, good piece of fiction, and it reminds us that despite our partisan fights, you know, there are certain human values that we should hold dear together.
It's a very good book.
Go out and buy it.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So, I've been focusing a lot on sports TV lately because it seems like everything is becoming more and more politicized, and so Stephen A. Smith has come in for some heavy criticism on the show recently.
Yesterday, Stephen A. Smith suggested that the race of a protester grants that protester legitimacy or illegitimacy.
Here is Stephen A. Smith suggesting that white people should never be able to tell black people not to protest.
No white person has the right to tell black folks when you should protest about something.
Because usually protest that emanates from the black community is due in large part because of the transgressions exacted against that community by those who don't happen to be black.
And then you wonder why there's an alt-right?
Then you wonder why there's a white identity politics?
White people can never tell black people not to protest for any reason.
So what about when white people say the same thing?
What about when the alt-right says the same thing?
What about when the alt-right, white identity, disgusting human beings say, well, black people can't tell us not to protest.
After all, there are policies like affirmative action.
How can they tell us that we're not the victims?
This is what's wrong with the country, but this is happening in the mainstream.
That's not a march around a Robert E. Lee statue in the middle of Virginia.
This is on national TV on ESPN.
Stephen A. Smith is a sports commentator.
This sort of stuff makes the country worse.
It makes the country worse.
One more thing that I hate.
So, Iran is now threatening a nuclear restart.
Thank you, Obama administration.
Thank you.
On August 15th, Iran's president warned it could restart its nuclear program within hours or days if the Trump administration continues its confrontational policy toward the Islamic Republic.
I thought that we were guaranteed that Iran was now going to be non-nuclear.
I thought that everything was going to be hunky-dory now.
Yeah, no, it turns out that when you deal with evil people, when you cut deals with evil people, you end up with the crap in your lap, and that's basically what's happened here.
Okay, so time for a very quick Bible study, a little bit of inspirational uplift in the middle of a very dark week.
So, as I mentioned, every week we've been going through not the Torah, but the Haftorah.
The Torah is the five books of Moses.
Every week the Jews also read a portion from the prophets and the writings that corresponds to the portion from the Torah reading.
We do that because back in Roman times, Jews were not allowed to read from the Torah.
They were barred from reading from the Torah.
So instead, they started reading references from the prophets and the writings that people could easily cross-reference to the Torah itself.
So this comes courtesy of Isaiah.
This is chapter 54 of Isaiah.
He's talking about King David in the Messianic era, and the idea that eventually there will be a Messianic era and the idea that eventually there will be a Messianic era in which the kingdom of David will shine The part that I think is really interesting here is where he says, behold, a witness to nations I have appointed him, a ruler and commander.
We tend to think about the Messianic age a lot as the idea that good will rule and command.
But it's not just that.
It's about witnessing.
And this is something we should all take to heart.
Okay?
We are all witnesses.
We are not just about ruling.
We're not just about power.
It's not just about who controls the levers of power.
We are all witnesses to good and evil.
We all are going to be called on by God to testify when our time comes as to whether we stood up or whether we stood with or whether we stood against.
Okay?
We are all witnesses.
We're witnesses to all the things that go on around us.
And to shut our eyes, to blind ourselves that we are not called upon to witness is part of the problem.
We are all part of this together.
If we don't witness evil and speak out about it, if we're not able to testify even on our own behalves as to what we think about bad things that are happening, then we don't deserve the messianic era, let alone good in the afterlife or even good on this planet.
I think that as people who are delegated a certain Responsibility by God, and by our fellow man.
We have to stand up to evil when we see it, and we have to call it out when we see it.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
Hopefully we'll have a good day of news.
That'd be nice, wouldn't it?
And then we can do something fun?
Please, Mr. President?
Please, for the love of God, can we have a nice day?
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