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Aug. 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:20
The Left Defends Evil Of Its Own | Ep. 364
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The left defends Antifa, we talk about Confederate statutes and why we're really talking about Confederate statutes, and we talk about the Republican response to everything Trump-related.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, if possible, everything is worse.
Yesterday, I left the show by saying, can we have a good day?
Apparently, no one listened, so they decided to have an incredibly crappy day.
Well done, everyone!
Just a great job all around.
We're going to talk today, a lot, about why the left seems to now be defending violence, why it is that Antifa has to be turned into heroes, why that was their ultimate goal in the first place.
Also, we'll talk about Confederate statues, should they be removed, Confederate monuments, Why are we even talking about Confederate monuments, what the goals are of the various political sides, and even discussing this, and we'll go through the various arguments for and against keeping them.
So, it seems that the left had an ulterior motive when it comes to the events in Charlottesville.
I don't mean that they organized the events in Charlottesville with an intent toward what happened to that innocent young woman, or that it's their fault that they went there and counter-protested An evil white supremacist movement and spare me all the talk about how there were lots of wonderful people at the at the evil white supremacist movements.
The thing was pitched as a white supremacist rally.
Okay, that's just the way that it was.
Okay, but it is clear that one of the goals of the left and it has been for now a year and Charlottesville allowed them to do this with some level of credibility is they are now attempting pretty overtly To legitimize the Antifa movement.
The Antifa movement is a deeply violent movement that seeks to use violence against all the people they oppose.
And the media have basically covered up the level of violence that Antifa is engaged in.
So, yesterday, we got news that another rally in Richmond, Virginia, where a bunch of Antifa people showed up, there was a journalist who really got clocked.
We have a couple of pictures of what happened to that journalist.
So, here is a picture of the journalist after the journalist got clocked by an Antifa member.
And here is another picture of the journalist's head after the journalist was clocked by the Antifa member.
Four staples in the head, concussion from the Antifa member.
This was not covered in any real way by the media more broadly.
They basically suggested that none of this sort of stuff happened and that when Trump said that the alt-left was charging into people, that was not true.
Again, it was true.
Okay, what Trump said there was true.
He said some things during that press conference that really, I thought, were quite upsetting morally, but that was not one of them.
When he went after what he called the alt-left, by which he meant Antifa, he was exactly right to do so.
Antifa is a violent, vile group.
And you're seeing this, unfortunately, this notion spread around the country that Antifa, violence against Nazis is okay.
We had this conversation a while back when Richard Spencer, who is a neo-Nazi, a white supremacist, was punched in the head.
And a lot of people on the left celebrated, yay, Richard Spencer was punched in the head.
And I said at the time, I think Richard Spencer is vile, but you can't punch Nazis in the head, we live in a civilized country.
You shouldn't be punching people in the head, this is why we have police.
Ideally, I mean, it's one thing to defend yourself, it's a whole other thing to go somewhere with the intent of engaging in violence.
But the left seems now ensconced in this idea.
There were two Washington Post op-eds in the course of 48 hours, basically, Endorsing Antifa.
So one of them was from a professor named NDB Connolly of Johns Hopkins University.
And he wrote an entire piece called Charlottesville showed that liberals that liberalism can't defeat white supremacy.
Only direct action can.
In other words, we can't have votes.
We can't have conversations.
We can't have debates.
No, only white supremacy.
The white supremacy can only be defeated By throwing what he calls rocks.
And this is seriously what he writes.
Liberalism, paper, preserves our country's long commitment to contracts.
Under liberalism, citizens stand in contract with their government.
The government's job in turn has been to enforce contracts between individuals and groups.
But, Connolly continues, white supremacy represents our culture's scissors.
There have been people historically cut out of our social contract, but there is a rock, right?
It's rock, paper, scissors.
There is a rock.
Resistance.
Okay, resistance is the rock.
And he says, rocks can look like armed self-defense or non-violent direct action campaigns.
Well, those are not the same thing at all.
Non-violent direct action campaigns like boycotts?
That's not the same thing as punching somebody in the head or throwing rocks.
He goes on to talk about why violence is okay.
He says, in April 1968, amid a flurry of other rocks, riots shook American cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
It took that rolling unrest, not the promise of further economic growth, to spur President Lyndon Johnson and Congress to action.
Within a week, they had passed the Fair Housing Act.
Over the past century, liberalism, vexed by an ever-sharp, ever-cutting white supremacy, has needed these rocks.
So riots are necessary.
So burning down Detroit, burning down Los Angeles in the Watts riot, that was necessary.
And then he concludes, segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House, and many other American temples.
By the way, Jeff Sessions immediately called this a hate crime and said he was going to investigate this as a terrorist incident, so that's just nonsense.
And when he says segregationists in the White House, Trump isn't a segregationist.
Okay, I don't like what Trump said.
I've been very clear that I didn't like what Trump said on Tuesday.
Or on Saturday.
I think Trump sometimes fellow travels with the alt-right because he thinks they're his friends.
But he's not a segregationist.
Okay, Connolly concludes, So overtly calling for violence.
Overtly calling for violence in the streets in a country that is highly law-abiding, where levels of violence are at their lowest levels on average in 50 years, basically.
I mean, this is really, really vile stuff.
It's, by the way, it's also historically ignorant.
And this is another point I think worth making.
Riots in America have not forwarded the cause.
Riots in America have made the cause worse.
Detroit, before the Detroit riots of 1967-1968, before those Detroit riots happened, Detroit was the fastest-growing black city in America.
It was an economic hub.
Black families earned 95% on average what white families earned in the city of Detroit.
Desegregation was happening wholesale in Detroit.
Housing was being desegregated in Detroit.
And then after the riots, you got white flight.
People left.
The tax base eroded.
They raised taxes in order to take advantage of whatever smaller tax base was left.
More people left, and that's how you hollow out a major city like Detroit, right?
So we've done the same thing in L.A.
L.A.
is a highly segregated city.
I've lived my entire life here.
LA is very, very segregated.
South Central Los Angeles, or South Los Angeles as they like to call it now.
is very black, and East L.A.
is very Hispanic, and Simi Valley is very white.
It's a very segregated city, and one of the reasons is because of riots like the L.A.
riots, or as Maxine Waters, that disgusting human being, called them the L.A.
uprising, when many black folks decided to burn their own neighborhoods and target Korean shopkeepers in South Central over the Rodney King verdict.
Riots, throwing rocks, is not a worthwhile thing in the United States.
Self-defense is one thing.
Riots are not self-defense.
Riots are not self-defense.
I'm not talking here about the lynch mob comes to get a black guy and he shoots them.
Good for him.
More power to him.
That's why the NRA is useful.
Okay, but I'm talking here about what he's talking about, the idea that Antifa needs to go out in the streets, and if the Nazis are marching, Antifa needs to go out and punch them in the head.
He's not the only person saying this.
Mark Bray is a historian and lecturer at Dartmouth University, and he's defending Antifa.
He was on MSNBC fully defending this vile, violent, communist, anarchist group.
How do far-right movements grow?
I say they grow by becoming normalized, by not being confronted, by being able to present themselves as family-friendly and respectable.
So part of the reason why the alt-right called themselves alt-right is to present that mainstream image.
And the opposition that people showed in Charlottesville really marred and tainted that.
So I think that by showing up and confronting it, it prevents the ability of being able to be presented as mainstream.
And connected that, I think really you need to be able to prevent them from being able to organize.
People who are involved in politics know that for movements to expand, they need to be able to organize and grow.
And if you stop that, it prevents it.
Okay, this is sheer nonsense.
What he is saying here, that people who engaged in violence with the Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville did the country a service?
Absolute, absolute crap.
He wrote in his piece that Antifa has been fighting Klansmen and fascists for years, and then he specifically talks about how they helped stop Hitler.
Except for how they didn't stop Hitler.
In retrospect, anti-fascists have concluded it would have been much easier to stop Mussolini back in 1919 when his first fascist nucleus had 100 men, or to stamp out the far-right German Workers' Party which had only 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting before he transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
So he says that, not just, but he's saying they shouldn't just do this through education.
He says, the first anti-fascists fought Benito Mussolini's black shirts in the Italian countryside, exchanged fire with Adolf Hitler's brown shirts in the taverns and alleyways of Munich, and defended Madrid from Francisco Franco's insurgent nationalist army.
Yeah, how'd that go?
How'd that go?
All three of those times, the bad guys won.
So how'd that go?
I mean, I want to talk a little bit about this myth that armed violence by communists in the Weimar Republic would have stopped the Nazis.
There was armed violence by communists in the Weimar Republic.
It was one of the driving forces behind the Nazis' success.
People looked at the communists and they said, okay, if we have to decide between communist violence and fascist violence, we'll go with the fascists.
This is from Richard Evans' book, The Coming of the Third Reich.
Quote, A graphic account of the life of the committed communist activists during the Weimar Republic was later provided by the memoirs of Richard Krebs.
Clashes with the police strengthened his hatred of them and their bosses, the social democratic rulers of the city.
The communists refused to work with the social democrats.
It says, Krebs later describes how committed communists would attend street demonstrations with pieces of lead piping in their belts and stones in their pockets, ready to pelt the police with.
I want to tell you the rest of this story, and why it is that groups like Antifa only grow the alt-right, only grow the neo-nazis, only grow the neo-confederates, only grow the white supremacists.
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Okay, so.
It wasn't just that the Communists and the Nazis went at one another.
Paramilitary battles were common, by the way.
Here's some statistics about the paramilitary battles.
In the aftermath of World War I, the German army was essentially disbanded by the Versailles Treaty, and there were a lot of ex-military people roaming around.
The Communists grabbed some of them, and what were called the Free Corps, the Freikorps, grabbed another.
And they formed things like the Steel Helmets and the Freikorps and these were all, these were all militia groups basically, local militia groups that wandered the countryside fighting each other and quote-unquote defending the population from the various entities.
From 1924 to 1929 it was claimed that 29 Nazi activists had been killed by communists.
Communists reported 92 workers had been killed in clashes with fascists from 24 to 30.
26 members of the Steel Helmets, the Steel Helmets were sort of this, uh, this veterans group, were said to have fallen in the fight against communism.
In 1930, the figures rose dramatically in the lead-up to the Nazis taking power.
This was a key factor in the rise of the Nazis.
In 1930, the figures rose dramatically.
The Nazis claimed to have suffered 17 deaths, rising to 42 in 1931, 84 in 1932.
Remember, 1932 is the year the Nazis essentially paved their way to power.
In 1932, the Nazis reported nearly 10,000 of their rank-and-file had been wounded in clashes with their opponents.
According to Mark Bray, wouldn't that have stopped them?
I mean, you obviously had armed resistance.
Why didn't that stop them?
The communists reported 44 deaths in fights with the Nazis in 1930, 52 in 1931, 75 in the first six months of 1932 alone.
And the number of dead in the year to March 1931 was no fewer than 300 dead in these various battles.
I mean, serious, serious stuff.
The number of dead in the year to March 1931 was no fewer than 300 dead in these various battles.
I mean, serious, serious stuff.
I mean, it makes Charlottesville look like a piker's game, the number of people who are dying in these meetings.
Communists would break up Nazi meetings.
At one meeting, Krebs went and he broke up a Nazi speech by Hermann Goering.
Goering would become the second in command to Hitler.
He said that he, quote, made sure that each man was armed with a blackjack or brass knuckles.
A terrifying melee followed.
Blackjacks, brass knuckles, clubs, heavy buckled belts, glasses, bottles were the weapons used.
Goering?
He stood calmly on the stage, his fists on his hips.
Evans reports scenes like this were being played out all over Germany in the early 1930s.
The Nazis made their money off these sorts of things.
If you want to make the alt-right more popular, all you have to do is go out in the streets and fight them, then they get to look tough, they get to look like they win, they get to look like they're victims at the same time, like they're fighting a defensive battle when really what they're doing is promulgating an evil ideology.
Again, this is Richard Evans, okay?
Goebbels made his reputation, above all, as regional leader of Berlin, where his fiery speeches, his incessant activity, his outrageous provocations of the Nazis' opponents, and his calculated staging of street fights and meeting hall brawls to gain the attention of the press won the party a mass of new adherents.
Young, disenchanted men who have nothing better to do with their lives are looking for a movement to belong to and that will engage in violence.
It makes them feel tough.
It makes them feel special.
This is why you see Christopher Cantwell in that Vice video talking about how many guns he carries and how he works out all the time and makes himself more ready for violence.
This is a thing, okay?
And when Antifa plays right into their hands, not only are they doing something evil when they shut down normal conservatives, They're doing something evil when they fight these Nazis in the streets with their fists.
That's why we have police in this country.
We have very able police in this country.
And the idea that we need Antifa in the streets as some sort of grand and glorious mission is really disgusting.
It's a way of legitimizing a group that, by the way, is communist, anarchist, and fights law-abiding people too.
Not just white supremacists.
Not just white supremacists.
But this is just in line With something that I think is really terrible, which is that I think everyone is taking advantage of racial conflagrations like this.
They're taking advantage of hot points like this to promulgate an image of their opponent.
So the whole point, this is why we're talking about Confederate statues.
So the reason that we're talking about Confederate statues has become a major issue now because President Trump decided to make that an issue at his press conference a couple of days ago because the rally for the white supremacists took place around the Robert E. Lee statue and because the left is now calling for Stone Mountain to be taken down and they're talking about how they need to get rid of various monuments all over the United States that include Confederate figures or pre-Confederate figures.
So we need to ask ourselves, why are we even having this conversation?
And I think it's worth recalling that in the aftermath of that evil piece of crap Dylan Storm Roof shooting 19 black people, murdering 19 black people at a black church, a historically black church.
Dylan Storm Roof, there's a picture of him with a confederate flag and we had a whole national conversation about the confederate flag.
Why is it?
Then whenever somebody does something evil, we immediately jump to try to find some divisive symbol that we can all rally around or against.
Why is it that we do that?
And I would suggest that it has very little to do with the symbol, and a lot more to do with political gamesmanship.
It has a lot more to do with people trying to make political hay.
Okay, so let's start at the beginning here.
The controversy over Confederate statues has been a hot-button issue for decades.
There are good arguments on both sides.
In a second, I'm going to go through the arguments on both sides and what they mean and whether they are worthwhile.
But the question is, why in the aftermath of what we just saw in Charlottesville are we now talking about getting rid of all the Confederate statutes?
I mean, like a year ago, we got rid of all the Confederate flags, supposedly, and that obviously didn't tamp things down.
So why is it that we keep going back to iconoclasm?
Iconoclasm literally means taking down icons.
Why is it that we're attempting to do that now?
Why is that an important thing?
Okay, we're actually participating, I think, in a politically advantageous proxy argument.
The people who want to get rid of the statues want to label everyone who wants to keep the statues a member of the alt-white right supremacists.
Okay, that's actually what they want to do.
So people who say, if you want to keep the statues, that's because you're a white supremacist.
And then people who don't want to get rid of the statues, they say, in contrast, that everyone who wants to get rid of the statues just wants to wipe away American history.
Now, there are people who back the confederate statues who actually are white supremacists as we saw in Charlottesville.
And there are a lot of people on the left who want to use the confederate statues as a club issue and want to get rid of all of American history.
They want to get rid of Jefferson and Washington and what Trump was saying is true.
There is a cadre of people who absolutely that is on their agenda.
But those aren't the real honest arguments about this particular confederate statue or that particular confederate statue.
All of this, all of this chaos, all of this fighting, all of it is being done in order to build particular movements.
So let's start with the alt-right.
Why did they have their rally around the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the first place?
Well, they chose to protest the removal for two reasons.
One, they're actual white supremacists who find the arguments of the Confederacy attractive about the racial supremacy of whites to blacks.
Okay, but more importantly, the real reason they did this is because they know that there are many non-white supremacists, right?
There are a lot of people who are not white supremacists, who also oppose getting rid of the Robert E. Lee statue on other grounds.
Historic grounds, cultural grounds, the grounds that maybe this is a good opportunity to teach their children about the evils of slavery and the problems of Confederacy.
The alt-right used these statues as a rallying cry because they're trying to draw closer to the normies.
They're trying to say that normal people who don't want to get rid of the statues... By the way, the polls show a vast majority of Americans are not interested in getting rid of these statues, including, according to some polls, a majority of blacks.
The idea that everyone wants to get rid of the statues is nonsense.
The alt-right knows this, and so they pick a cause they think has a majority of support, like, let's not get rid of this Robert E. Lee statue.
And then they rally around that, hoping to broaden their cause.
So the left reacts in exactly the flipside way.
So just as with Dylan Storm Roof, the left decides that it's very important now to label everyone who is their opponent a Nazi.
So everyone who opposes getting rid of these statues is now a member of the alt-right, according to the left.
According to Antifa and the hard left, there are no good people who believe this.
Now this is not the same thing as what Trump said.
Trump said there were good people who went to that rally on Friday night.
I seriously doubt that.
But, what the right is saying is that there are some good people who believe that you shouldn't get rid of the statue.
Undoubtedly true.
The left is saying there are no good people who believe that you shouldn't get rid of the statue.
They did the same thing with the confederate flag.
The idea was, anybody who flies a confederate flag must be a redneck racist who wants to murder black people.
It wasn't true then, it's not true now, and it's not true about the statues.
How about President Trump?
Well, President Trump also is acting out of political convenience.
So the left has now broadened the rubric of bad guys to include anybody who opposes getting rid of the Lee statue.
So Trump responds by defending anyone, anyone, who doesn't want statues of Lee torn down as decent.
This is why he's tried to broaden out the argument, right?
He's tried to say that not only are there a lot of decent people who don't want to get rid of the Lee statues, but, you know, if those people hang out with white supremacists on Friday night, Right, that's the problem.
So everybody is now, so it's the worst of all worlds.
You've got the alt-right trying to unite with the normies who don't want to get rid of the Confederate statue.
And then you've got the left trying to unite the normies with the alt-right by saying all of them don't want to get rid of the Confederate statue.
And then you have Trump saying, Well, you know, we're sort of on the same side as the alt-right.
We don't want to get rid of the Confederate statues.
And so what we end up with is this very, very polarized politics.
And you're seeing it on the left routinely.
And I think the left started this by trying to use the Confederate statues as a flashpoint.
And suggesting that everybody who wants to keep them is a racist.
But I think that the alt-right jumped on it, and now the right is falling into the trap.
And I don't say that the right should get rid of the statues, but I think that we should at least understand which arguments are really going on.
Okay, the arguments that are really going on are not the honest arguments.
And I'm going to talk about the honest arguments over Confederate statues in just a minute, because there are honest arguments on both sides.
I really do see them.
Okay, I really do see the honest arguments on both sides, and I'll tell you about them.
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Okay, so, now I want to go through a couple of the actual honest arguments with regard to the Confederate statues because the only reason we're having this debate in the first place is so everyone can demagogue it.
So the alt-right can demagogue it and pretend that everybody who opposes them wants to wipe away American history and they are really just siding with the normal American.
You've got President Trump demagoguing it by saying that there are lots of good people who oppose getting rid of the Confederate statues, therefore a lot of the people on Friday night who are with these white supremacists are fine.
And then you have the left demagoguing it by saying anyone who doesn't want to get rid of the Confederate statues is obviously an evil neoconfederate.
Everyone's demagoguing it.
So, let's talk about the actual arguments here.
So, this morning, President Trump tweets out three tweets on this.
The first tweet, he tweets, excuse me, He tweets, "Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.
You can't change history, but you can learn from it.
Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, who's next, Washington and Jefferson?
So foolish.
Also, the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced." Okay, so he's basically making three arguments here.
The first argument is that statues of Confederate history should be left up to preserve our history and culture.
He's not the only one who's made this argument before.
Condoleezza Rice has made it from a slightly less positive point of view.
Here's Condoleezza Rice making pretty much exactly that case.
I am a firm believer in keep your history before you.
And so I don't actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners.
I want us to have to look at those names and recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history.
When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better, it's a bad thing.
Okay, so she's making the same case that Trump is making, and I agree with this basic case.
I think this case is basically right, that you leave the ugly parts of your history up so that people know about it.
And also, it is worthwhile noting that there are a lot of people who are descendants of Confederate soldiers who see the monuments not as homages to slavery, as homages to slavery, but as homages to people who thought they were defending their states from federal encroachment, even if they were defending an evil cause in the process.
Right, so I think there's a little bit more complexity than just everyone who likes the Confederate statues is a racist, bigot, sexist, homophobe, okay?
And I think that Condie makes a good case, and I think the case there is relatively strong.
What's undercutting that case is the white supremacists actively doing what the left thinks most of America thinks about the Confederates.
So let me make that clear.
The left believes that most Americans think that these statues should stay up because they're racist.
The actual reason that the white supremacists want the statue to stay up is because they're racist.
So it's a serious problem that the white supremacists are taking and using these symbols as rallying points.
It's really quite demoralizing.
Okay, so the second argument that Trump makes is the slippery slope argument.
This is actually Trump's strongest argument, is the one that he made on Tuesday.
He said that the left wants to wipe away all vestiges of American history, right?
They want to get rid of Washington.
They want to get rid of Jefferson.
This is certainly true, okay?
There are members of the left who want to do this.
There's already talk, Al Sharpton is talking about how he wants to get rid of statues.
People are talking about changing the name of Washington, D.C.
I mean, as I mentioned yesterday, University of Missouri, there was a strong push to get rid of statues of Thomas Jefferson.
In fact, I showed you video from that, I showed you video from that Vice documentary about what happened in Charlottesville, and one of the things that happened is there was a black woman who was talking and she said, Thomas Jefferson's house sits up there on that hill, the Slave Master's house sits up there on that hill, and we should get, you know, that's just another monument, that's Charlottesville.
Okay, so the idea that this stops with Robert E. Lee is not true.
It will go back to Thomas Jefferson, no question.
Now, it doesn't have to.
It doesn't have to.
And if we're logical, I think there's a fairly strong case for getting rid of monuments to Lee but keeping monuments to Thomas Jefferson.
The case for getting rid of the monuments to Lee but keeping the one for Thomas Jefferson is that, number one, Robert E. Lee himself Opposed building monuments to Confederate soldiers because he thought that it would prevent unity, which apparently he was right.
But second, Robert E. Lee was fighting for a rebel cause to break away from the Union.
George Washington was fighting to uphold the Union.
The question when you build a monument is what are you celebrating?
When you build a monument to MLK, you are not celebrating MLK's sexual peccadillos, right?
When you build a monument to MLK, you're celebrating his message on race relations.
When you build a monument to George Washington, you're not celebrating his slaveholding, you're celebrating his actions in the Revolutionary War and his establishment of the Constitution and his presidency, right?
These are the things you're celebrating.
Monuments celebrate causes, not just the people who are on the monuments.
And so that's how you distinguish them, right?
So Lee was for the rebellion.
What are you celebrating when you celebrate Lee?
Maybe you're making the case that you're celebrating a man who honorably thought that he was fighting for states' rights even though he opposed slavery, or apparently opposed slavery, and after he lost the war was was instrumental in trying to rally the country around a common point again.
Maybe that's what the monument is for, but that's a conversation worth having.
There's no question when you have a Jefferson memorial, for example, that that is not a monument to Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings.
That is a monument to Jefferson being the father of the Declaration of Independence.
Clearly, that's what the monument is for.
So, you don't have to engage in the Slippery Slope.
This is the difference between Slippery Slope arguments.
People get this wrong all the time.
This is the difference between Slippery Slope arguments and application of principle arguments.
A Slippery Slope argument says, if you allow them to do A, then they'll do B. If you allow them to do B, then they'll do C.
An application of principle argument, like for example the argument that gay marriage will lead to polygamy, that's not actually a slippery slope argument.
The argument there is that same-sex marriage redefines marriage as people who love each other.
Polygamy can also be people who love each other, so you're applying the same principle and you're just filling out what that principle means, right?
So that's not the same thing as a slippery slope argument.
This is an actual slippery slope argument.
If you allow them to take Lee, then they will also take Jefferson and Washington.
Unfortunately, it's a true argument, as the left is showing every day, and Trump is not wrong about all of this.
Now, we'll get to the third argument that Trump makes in just a second, but for that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
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Okay, so the third argument that Trump makes with regard to these Confederate statues is that the statues are aesthetically pleasing.
This is a very dumb argument.
So this is the worst of his arguments, that we'll never be able to beautify our parks again if we don't have a statue of Nathaniel Bedford Forrest.
I'm pretty sure it'll be okay.
I'm pretty sure it'll be okay.
That's not a particularly good argument.
I think there's an argument for some of them, like I think that Stone Mountain is an amazing monument.
I mean, just aesthetically, it's an amazing thing.
I mean, they carved these giant monuments into a mountain.
That's pretty incredible, but I don't think that some of these statues that exist on street corners that nobody's looked at in 40 years, I don't think that those are... That's a very weak case, as opposed to the case that you see from a lot of people on the left, which I think is a fair case, where they say, hey, I'm a black taxpayer, and I don't feel like paying for somebody to polish the shoes of Nathaniel Bedford Forrest.
I think that's totally fair.
I think that's a totally fair argument.
So, those are arguments we can have, though, right?
I mean, I'm just presenting you all the arguments.
Those are arguments we can have.
We're not going to have any of those arguments.
We're going to stand in our various corners and scream at each other.
Because that's what politics has become.
Us standing in the corners, screaming at each other, the fringes getting less fringy, the fringes getting more violent, and things getting worse.
I think that, unfortunately, Charlottesville may be the beginning rather than the end, which is terrifying.
In its own right.
Between Antifa and the alt-right, I just... Wow.
I think things are moving in the wrong direction.
Okay.
Meanwhile, President Trump is trying to recover from the foolishness of holding a press conference that was completely counterproductive.
His business council basically resigned on him.
And the CEO of IBM presented a letter saying, We disbanded the business council.
He wrote, Team, by now you've heard the news.
We have disbanded the President's Strategy and Policy Forum.
In the past week, we have seen and heard of public events and statements that run counter to our values as a country and a company.
IBM has long said, and more importantly, demonstrated its commitment to a workplace and a society that is open, inclusive, and provides opportunities to all.
And they denounce Charlottesville, and then they say, Okay, so they agreed to disband the group, so Trump tweets out that, you can't, you can't quit.
You're fired.
He says, I'm ending the council.
He says, I'm ending both.
And we have always believed dialogue is critical to progress.
That's why I joined the president's forum earlier this year.
This group can no longer serve the purpose for which it was formed.
We agreed to disband the group.
Okay, so they agreed to disband the group.
So Trump tweets out that you can't quit.
You're fired.
He says, I'm ending the council.
He says, rather than putting pressure on the business people of the manufacturing council and strategy and policy forum, I am ending both.
Thank you all.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, when they issue a letter, like, who do you believe?
You think Trump disbanded the forum?
Or do you think that the people who are the CEOs were going to leave, and then Trump disbanded the forum, or they decided to disband it themselves?
None of this is good.
Apparently Trump is very proud of himself for this press conference.
Steve Bannon is very proud of him for this press conference because he feels like, finally, we get down to the root of the battle.
Finally, we get down to the identity politics battle.
In fact, Steve said that directly to the New York Times.
He said, the left's been engaging in identity politics for a while.
Let them continue to do that, and we'll just play off of that.
It's not a good thing.
The President of the United States should not be celebrating the rise of identity politics on the left.
Even though it's destroying the left, I don't think he should be celebrating that.
He should be fighting it with every tooth and nail in his body, every bone in his body, he should be fighting that with.
Instead I think that he's engaging with it.
Apparently Trump was telling people that he has no regrets.
I think that he should actually get the tattoo that says no regerts.
You should at this point have some regrets about What state you see the country in.
And obviously this is not all Trump's fault.
It was like this before.
Obama had exacerbated racial tensions to a tremendous degree.
Look at the Gallup polls.
But this is definitely not helping.
Bannon, by the way, seems to be in trouble.
Bannon did that.
He did an interview with the American prospect.
He called up a guy at the American prospect.
Which is a very far-left organization, and began ranting to him about globalists like Gary Cohn, and he started yelling about Trump's North Korea policy, saying there's no chance we're going to do anything military in North Korea, obviously.
And then the guy printed it.
And so Bannon's been trying to backtrack ever since.
I think the greatest part of this particular story is that clearly whatever disease the Mooch had is infectious.
It is a contagious disease.
The Mooch calls up a reporter, forgets to say it's off the record, and then apparently Bannon says he did the exact same thing.
Not smart, but Bannon may be on the skids.
The easiest thing for Trump to do right now, by the way, is fire Bannon, and then say, listen, I have to disassociate from all these people, they're really bad.
Is Trump gonna do that?
I'm skeptical.
I'm skeptical.
Maybe he fires Bannon, but I don't think that he... Trump is a guy who always doubles down.
Always doubles down.
And that means that if you know he's bluffing, you should definitely play poker with him.
Because he will just continue to double down.
He'll go all-in on nothing.
He'll go all-in on not even a pair of twos.
He'll go all in on, you know, 2-7 offsuit.
It's really, it's an unfortunate tendency.
It's put Republicans in a weird position.
So, the left has been saying, a lot of people in the media have been saying, when do the Republicans disassociate?
When do they turn on Trump?
Jeffrey Toobin, for example, on CNN, he says, Republicans are just mildly rebuking him.
When will they really turn on him?
No, we're talking about whether you can function as President of the United States, and he can certainly function because the Republican Party is not going to abandon him.
Mitch McConnell said he was upset.
You know, I'm upset when I can't find a good parking place.
I mean, it is the mildest kind of rebuke.
Do you think Mitch McConnell is not going to fight for tax reform now?
Do you think that the Republican Party is going to stop trying to disenfranchise African Americans like it's doing all over the country because Donald Trump said something bad?
This is what the Republican Party stands for now.
Okay, you want to know why the Republicans aren't abandoning Trump?
Because what the left means by abandoning Trump is not a thing.
Okay, keep hearing this.
I'm hearing this actually from some people with whom I largely agree on politics saying, you know, that if you call balls and strikes on Trump, then you're doing it wrong because you just have to disassociate totally from Trump.
It's not a matter of dis—how do you disassociate from a human being?
Like, what does that mean?
To just, like, never talk to me?
I don't talk to Trump now.
What does it mean to disassociate from him?
I can't support anything he does, ever.
I have to yell at every single thing he does.
Like, this is clearly what the media would like.
Chuck Todd says that Republicans have to call out Trump.
They're not doing it enough.
But I'll tell you, how on earth is the party going to confront this crisis if it's unwilling to stand up against the person who arguably instigated it?
We invited every single Republican senator on this program tonight, all 52.
We asked roughly a dozen House Republicans, including a bunch of committee chairs.
And we asked roughly a half dozen former Republican elected officials, and none of them agreed to discuss this issue with us today.
So who's going to step up?
The president has lost his moral authority for now.
And in the process, he's tried to destroy or discredit everyone else's.
Have all of our elites lost their moral authority?
Or are they afraid to find out that the answer might be yes?
Okay, so this is the pitch of the media, is that every Republican wants to be coming out and yelling about this.
Okay, so number one, there are some of us who have been yelling about this, right?
I mean, like, I've obviously been very exercised over President Trump's failures to disassociate from the alt-right.
However, what the left really wants, and this is why I think you're seeing fewer Republicans who are resonating to what the left wants, the left is not intellectually honest about what they want.
Okay, like, I don't know what they're talking about when they say high-level Republicans won't say anything, right?
Here's Rhonda McDaniels, who's the head of the RNC, and she's directly addressing white supremacists, and I think this is right.
Well, the president condemned the white supremacists and the KKK and the neo-Nazis unequivocally.
But it took 48 hours for him to do that.
But he did it.
And he should have.
And he did.
And our party has, across the board, said this is unacceptable.
We have no place in our party at all for KKK, anti-Semitism, race, Racism.
Bigotry.
It has no place in the Republican Party.
There is no home here.
We don't want your vote.
We don't support you.
We'll speak out against you.
The President has said so.
The Vice President.
Leaders across our party.
This is the beginning of what needs to be a longer conversation.
We are seeing this rhetoric ramp up.
We are seeing more violence.
And we need to take a stand against it.
Okay, so obviously everybody's willing to condemn white supremacists.
Why won't they condemn Trump?
Why won't they speak Trump's name?
Because they understand, and this is really one of the problems with political partisanship, I'm willing to say that President Trump did something wrong, because I think he did something wrong here.
But what you are seeing is that what the left really want is they think that you have not condemned Trump strongly enough unless you embrace their agenda.
That's really what they want.
Jeff Sessions, who's Trump's Attorney General, he came out immediately and said this could be a civil rights violation or a hate crime, right?
It's not enough.
Here's what Sessions said.
I don't think we should just feel like we've got to do it in a matter of hours or days.
This investigation is ongoing around the country.
It could be 245, a civil rights violation, Title 18-245 or 249, which is a hate crime.
And there might be other charges that could be brought.
Okay, so he's obviously taking the thing very seriously.
What the left actually wants, and this is why you're seeing there's a poll today that said 67% of Republicans approve of Trump's response.
That's because, once again, when you poll Republicans about what they think of Trump, you're really polling them about what they think of the media.
And when you poll Republicans about what they think of Trump, they're actually responding to what they think of the media, because they know the media are asking them a question, and they think the ulterior motive of the media is to destroy Trump, and by proxy, to destroy the Republican policy and governing agenda.
So when people say, sure I support how Trump handled Charlottesville, it doesn't necessarily mean they actually like how Trump handled Charlottesville.
Many of them, probably in the privacy of their own homes and when they discuss with their Republican friends, are not particularly happy with what Trump did with Charlottesville.
But they're not going to tell that to a pollster from the Washington Post.
Instead, what they're going to say is, fine, if it's you against Trump, I'm with Trump.
Because that's the way that the left has drawn the battle lines and that's the way the right has responded by drawing the battle lines.
So instead of... Here's the way a normal conversation should go, right?
The left says, Trump did something wrong here.
And the right says, yes, Trump did something wrong here.
And the left says, good, we all agree.
But that's not how the conversation goes.
What happens, the left says, Trump did something wrong here, and the right says, yes, Trump did something wrong here, or they prepare to say that, and then the left says, you know what?
Even if you say Trump did something wrong here, you still agree with him because you want to pass his tax agenda.
And so what this leads to is sort of a game of chicken.
It's really more of a prisoner's dilemma, as I've explained in Game Theory.
It's more of a prisoner's dilemma where the best option for both sides, the dominant strategy for both sides, is to fall into the trap of defending their man.
So if you're a Republican and you know that the Democrats' next step is to say, even if you condemn it, you're still a racist, then you say, fine, I'm just not going to condemn it.
I know what your real agenda here is.
Your real agenda is to just slander me, so screw you, I'm not engaging.
That's what these polls are actually showing.
I don't think the polls are showing that Republicans are racists or bigots.
I think what the polls are actually showing is that Republicans hate the media, and so they are unwilling to answer the questions of the media, honestly.
I really think that's what it comes down to.
Okay, so, time for a quick thing I like and a thing I hate.
There were enough big ideas today, so we won't do Big Idea Thursday.
So, things I like.
I just, I couldn't stop laughing at this last night.
So last night I went to a ball game, and my White Sox, who are 50 games under 500, were playing the Dodgers, who are 50 games over 500.
And the White Sox were winning, and they were winning 4-2.
They have a new young guy named Nicky Delmonico who's just a terrific player.
He hit two home runs in the game and a single, and he was playing a terrific, terrific left field.
And just a great player.
Everything is going swimmingly.
And then my dad and I know that the wheels are going to come off, so we leave at the bottom of the eighth inning.
And naturally, the wheels do come off, and the Dodgers win 5-4.
So I had lots of fun at the game.
It was nice.
There were a couple of people who tweeted, saw that I was at the game, tweeted where I was, so I did some pictures, so that was fun.
So, hello, all of you who are listening, who were at the game last night.
But the best baseball moment was not just me and my dad at the game last night, which was a blast.
The best baseball moment of yesterday was the worst first pitch ever.
This is an amazing first pitch.
And this, I guess, happened at the Red Sox game.
Pretty incredible.
I mean, you gotta give credit to this guy.
This is hard to do.
So if you can't see it, dude is throwing out the first pitch, and nails a guy.
Right in the nads.
Just a bit outside.
Just a bit outside.
Boom.
Oh man, that is not a good first pitch.
I'm not sure who threw that first pitch, but kudos to him for bringing America together again.
He's making America great again, I think, with that first pitch.
He even tweeted, I think the guy who threw it tweeted, who knew that America could begin its healing process with a fastball to the testicles.
So, well done, Red Sox first pitch guy.
Okay, now for a thing I hate.
So, the thing I hate today is the thing that I've hated for many, and many, and many a month.
And that, of course, is John McKasick.
A raisin in the sun.
A man who looks like the wadded receipt you left in your pocket and then sent it through the wash.
John Kasick, the governor of Ohio, the most self-aggrandizing human being ever, the person who single-handedly allowed Donald Trump to become the nominee of the party by refusing to get out and let us have an honest vote between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in the latter part of the race.
He stayed in for no reason other than he's an egoistic moron.
And now he says he wants to primary Trump.
And so he's out there bashing Trump because he wants to primary Trump.
Pathetic, isn't it?
Just pathetic listening to this and hearing these marchers.
Think if you were a 8, 9 or 10 year old getting ready to go to school like they are in Ohio and you happen to come from a Jewish family or if you're African-American and you hear this kind of hatred and we know about bullying that goes on in the schools and what are we doing to our children and to not condemn
These people who went there to carry out violence and to somehow draw some kind of equivalency to somebody else reduces the ability to totally condemn these hate groups.
Okay, so, um, here's my problem.
Okay, my problem is not with some of the things that he is saying here, but my problem is that John Kasich obviously has political ambition and political agenda, and that's what infuses all of this.
I mean, it doesn't sound like an honest take from Kasich.
Kasich has been criticizing for Trump criticizing Trump over everything, large and small.
And as I've said since the beginning of this administration, you've got to wait to turn the needle up to 11 for times when it deserves to be turned up to 11.
John Kasich seems like a cynical manipulator.
The idea that he's going to run in the primaries against Trump is just idiotic.
Okay, if he runs in the primaries against Trump, he'll get 20% of the vote maximum.
And it's largely because most of the people who oppose Trump opposed him from the right, not from the left, and Kasich is coming at him from his left.
So, that's not going to be helpful at all.
John Kasich, you egotist.
It is largely your fault that Donald Trump won the nomination in the Republican Party in the first place, and then here you are doing this routine.
Just, yeah, go away.
Just go away.
Okay, so, we'll be back here tomorrow.
I implore you, again, Everyone, try to have a nice day, and then tomorrow we can talk about nice things.
And we'll do the mailbag tomorrow, so that'll be fun at least.
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