And we will talk about Steve Bannon leaving the White House.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Yay, it's total eclipse day, and this is the day when a guy comes back from the future and tells us all about it, and we give him all the power just like in a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court.
We'll talk a little bit later about the solar eclipse if we have to.
I'm still weirded out by the fact that people are so obsessed with a giant circle moving in front of another giant circle in the sky, but Nonetheless, we will get to Solar Eclipse talk.
We're actually filming this inside a completely dark studio, so I will be the only one who can see after this is over.
I'm very excited about this.
I'll be the last seeing person in America, along with Mathis and Jess.
The other people in this room are safe, so we will be your new rulers when this is over and you're blind, wandering the streets, not knowing what is going on.
But we'll be able to see because we were in here filming this, so haha to us!
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So, there's this very irritating line of thought that has now appeared from the left, and it is super duper irritating, and it is that if you condemn Antifa, and you also condemn neo-Nazis, you are therefore covering for neo-Nazis.
This is stupid, and it's part of a broader effort by the left to paint everyone in the world who is on the right as a neo-Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer or a Confederate sympathizer.
It's really ugly.
As I said last week, there's a number of propositions I think that 95% of Americans agree on.
Nazis, bad.
Communism, bad.
Violence against peaceful protesters, bad, right?
Those three seem to me pretty simple.
And it seems to me like the vast majority of Americans should agree with those.
But because of political motivations on all political sides, All of this has gone into the background.
It's receded into the background.
Instead, we're clubbing each other over the head.
Apparently, all right-wingers are supposed to be neo-Nazis, and all left-wingers are Antifa, and nary the two shall meet.
So today, I want to talk about who is who, because I think there's a lot of category error going on.
I think that people are looking at the rally that happened in Boston, the Boston Free Speech Coalition rally, and the left is saying, that's a bunch of neo-Nazis.
And then the right is looking at all the protesters, the 40,000 protesters who showed up, and they're saying, all of those people are Antifa.
No.
No.
Okay, so, if you're going to gauge the particular merit of a group, you have to gauge them along two lines.
One line is, what do they believe?
And the other line is, what do they do?
Right?
You can gauge the morality of what somebody believes, and you can gauge the morality of what they do.
So one of the things that's been very irritating is when people like me say Antifa's an evil group because they violate the social contract by beating up people with whom they disagree, people say, oh, you're saying they're worse than the Nazis.
No, I'm not saying they're worse than the Nazis in terms of their belief system.
I'm saying if they initiate violence and the Nazis don't, then they are worse than the Nazis in terms of their particular behavior.
Now, if the Nazis initiate violence, then we have moral equivalence in terms of their behavior, and the Nazis are worse on ideology.
I'm trying to be very specific and particular here because I don't like broad labels.
Now, I want to correct myself on that score because I've said before that the left has been very kind to Antifa.
Let me be clear about this.
I don't mean everyone on the left.
I mean many mainstream leftists.
Many more mainstream leftists are kinder to Antifa than mainstream right-wingers are kind to the alt-right.
The alt-right has been a movement that a lot of people on the right have kind of winked and nodded at, President Trump and Steve Bannon among them, but the idea that the entire right has been winking and nodding or openly celebrating, forget winking and nodding, openly celebrating the alt-right, that's not true.
And the left, many mainstream leftists, have been openly celebrating Antifa.
So I think a great case in point is what happened over the weekend in Boston.
So in Boston this weekend, There is what the Boston Free Speech Coalition called its Free Speech Rally.
Leading up to it, the mayor of Boston, a guy named Thomas Walsh, he said that he doesn't want any of the white supremacists in his city.
Here's what he had to say.
We also have a message to the hate groups, especially any that are planning to come to our city this weekend.
Boston does not welcome you here.
Boston does not want you here.
Boston rejects your message.
We reject racism, we reject white supremacy, we reject anti-semitism, we reject the KKK, we reject neo-Nazis, we reject domestic terrorism, and we reject hatred.
And we will do every single thing in our power to keep hate out of our city.
Okay, so it's fine for him to say that he wants to prevent that people who are hateful shouldn't be in the city.
That's fine.
When he says we'll do all in our power to keep them from entering the city, that's illegal.
Okay, you can't prevent people from moving into your city because of their viewpoint.
That's just not something that you can do.
But what's amazing about this is who are the Boston Free Speech Coalition?
So let's talk about this for a second, because here's my fear.
My fear is that what happened in Charlottesville is now going to be conflated with events that are not alt-right.
Events that are not white supremacist.
So I'm going to speak in Berkeley on September 14th.
Is the media going to cover that as though I'm an alt-righter?
Because that fits their convenient narrative?
That I'm some sort of neo-Nazi?
Because that would be absurd.
I was the number one target of the alt-right in 2016.
Right?
Where are Yamaka?
I'm an Orthodox Jew.
Okay, this would be insane.
But I fear that the media and the left are going to do exactly that.
I fear the media and the left are going to do exactly that, and they're going to use the Boston situation as sort of their prototype for this.
So Boston Free Speech Coalition, they had originally invited a couple of guys who are what they call alt-right.
One is named Joe Biggs.
And the other is BassStickMan.
We've had BassStickMan on the program before specifically to talk about Antifa violence in Sacramento and Berkeley, right?
So these are guys who are friendly with the alt-right, but I don't think it's fair necessarily to call them devotees of the alt-right per se.
In any case...
These guys were both slated to speak at this particular rally, and they were both cancelled because the rally said, listen, we don't want to be associated with anybody who's even alt-right.
We don't want people who are associated with that.
So, we openly condemn white supremacism, neo-Nazism, and the alt-right.
This is what the organizers of the event said.
They said this clearly and openly in the days leading up to this event.
They said, we don't want anything to do with those people.
And in fact, here's a picture from the event.
Okay, at the event, there was a guy who's a congressional candidate whose name is Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, who's a congressional candidate in Boston.
Here's a picture from this event.
And what you can see is that they're standing inside a gazebo in Boston Common.
I know the gazebo well because I used to go to school in Boston, so I know Boston Commons pretty well.
And his tweet says, to all fake news, this was the white supremacist free speech rally I just spoke at.
Okay, and what you can see is it says Shiva for Senator.
Shiva for Senate.
And then people are holding up signs that say, Black Lives Do Matter.
Okay, does that sound like a white supremacist rally to you?
They're holding up signs that say, black lives do matter at this supposed white supremacist rally.
And then there's another kind of lefty thing, it says, no to GMOs, stop Monsanto.
It's not a lefty thing to the Black Lives Matter, by the way.
It's sort of a lefty thing to pander to the Black Lives Matter movement, but there's a person who's holding up a sign that's also sponsored by Shiva for Senate, and it says, clean food, clean air, clean government, no to GMOs, stop Monsanto.
Okay, that's a real lefty cause, the anti-GMO cause.
Does this sound like a white supremacist rally to you?
So, on Twitter, I went out and I said, you know, what's the evidence that this was actually a white supremacist rally?
Because it was sort of being pitched that way.
Even Huffington Post said it's not a white supremacist rally.
Even Huffington Post said the white supremacist didn't show up.
But the, but was this a white supremacist?
So the only evidence that anybody could see was there was one guy, literally one guy who showed up wearing a shirt with the so-called 14 words.
The 14 words are the sentence that neo-Nazis say something about we have to protect white civilization for our progeny.
That's a few more words than that because it's 14.
But that's why there's this neo-Nazi symboling 1488.
It's the 14-word slogan about protecting white civilization for our children.
And then 88 is Heil Hitler, right?
Because H is the eighth letter in the alphabet.
So there's one guy who's wearing the 14 words on the back of his shirt.
That was legitimately the only evidence that I could see that this was an alt-right rally as it materialized.
The media covered this as though the neo-Nazis had shown up in Boston and they were shut down by 40,000 demonstrators.
Okay, this is the problem.
When you start conflating people who are normal conservatives, normal right-wing, normal Republicans, with the neo-Nazis, you're gonna get a backlash.
And it's really gross.
CNN has been doing this, too.
CNN published an entire list of supposed hate groups, and they got the list directly from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is a radical left group that routinely labels normal conservatives as neo-Nazis and hate groups.
So, for example, they labeled the David Horowitz Freedom Center, where I used to work, they labeled that a hate group.
Okay, they've labeled a bunch of other groups, like the Family Research Council, right?
They labeled that a hate group.
That labeling led a nutcase named Floyd Lee Corkins to go over to the Family Research Council in 2012, and he tried to shoot people at that particular establishment.
CNN ran a story all about how the SPLC's labels of hate groups meant that these were all hate groups that were in league with the worst in America.
As City Journal writes today, Mark Pulliam writes, the SPLC has an undeniable ideological agenda.
In addition to its tendentious list of 917 hate groups, it also maintains a list of more than 1,600 purported extremists or extremist groups, including Charles Murray.
At one time, they labeled Ben Carson an extremist because he was opposed to gay marriage.
Yet CNN was pushing this out there as though in the aftermath of the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, this was the real threat, was all of these groups were basically neo-Nazis.
You wonder why the right reacts so negatively to the left's take on all of this?
You wonder why?
Maybe it's because the left, instead of unifying with the 95% of Americans I talked about at the beginning, instead of doing that, they're much more focused on trying to broaden out mainstream members of the left, more interested in broadening out their critique of neo-Nazis to fit the entire right-wing movement, to fit all conservatives.
The Neo-Nazis aren't even conservative, okay?
They're leftists.
In the sense that they believe in bigger government, they believe in government intervention, they don't believe in the Constitution of the United States, they believe in government involvement in things like healthcare, and they're only right-wing compared to left-wingers.
In sort of the European sense, in the same way that the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany was right-wing compared to the Communist Party in Nazi Germany, but had nothing to do with American conservatism.
Nazism has nothing to do with American conservatism.
The left is very much invested in trying to tie those two together.
And then what's the purpose of that?
Well, number one, they think it gains them points politically.
By calling everybody on the right a deplorable, they think that this is somehow going to win them elections.
And then they do something else, and this is even worse.
They start to make excuses and room for folks at Antifa.
And if I have to gauge the threat to America between the neo-Nazi movement and Antifa, I would suggest right now that the threat from Antifa to the American social fabric is just as or more dangerous than the threat from the neo-Nazis.
Not because their ideology is worse.
The neo-Nazi ideology is, of course, worse.
But because the mainstream right is not embracing the neo-Nazis.
Many members of the mainstream left are embracing Antifa, and Antifa is based on the proposition that rejects the basic Max Weber concept, which is that in a civilized society, the monopoly on use of force has to belong to the government.
Civilization is based on the idea that we all got together and we banded together and we said to the government, you protect our rights, you have the gun.
We're not going to shoot each other in the streets, you have the gun.
We have police forces and we have army.
And Antifa rejects all that.
They say, listen, it's up to us.
We're going to go out in the streets and we're going to kill people and we're going to harm people and we're going to hurt people and burn things and loot property and all the rest of it.
That's dangerous.
So I'm going to talk about what Antifa did at this Boston rally, which I think is a much bigger story than 10 people showing up for a free speech rally and being labeled white supremacists.
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Okay, so as I say, the media covered this great triumph of the left in Boston, all these white supremacists, Who weren't really white supremacists, except for apparently one guy.
They say 40,000 protesters showed up and it was just a grand and glorious thing.
First of all, 40,000 people protesting neo-nazism is a grand and glorious thing.
That's fine.
That's great.
But to pretend that Antifa did not play a role in Boston is to be silly.
Now, I do want to make a slight distinction here, and I think it's important for Charlottesville in understanding it.
President Trump said there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville and in the protest crowd.
Again, I'm still waiting to see all the good people in Charlottesville in the Torchlight March.
I haven't seen them.
But when he says there is violence on both sides, that's definitely true.
Now, we do have to look at the proportion.
So, if you're looking at the proportion of violent people in Charlottesville on the Neo-Nazi side, versus you're looking at the proportion of violent people in Charlottesville on the Antifa side, I would say that as a percentage of the larger group, from what I can tell, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but from the information that I can see, it looks like a larger group of the Neo-Nazis, as a proportion, were ready to go than a proportion of the protesters.
Antifa was there, but it's not a huge group.
In Boston, I guess there were 33 arrests out of 40,000 people?
That doesn't sound like many until you realize that when you go to a Dodger game, there are 40,000 people there, and there are zero arrests.
33 arrests is actually a rather sizable contingent of people getting arrested.
And even the Boston PD, it's amazing the duality that the Boston police will engage in.
They'll say that everybody was peaceful, everybody was great, then they'll say this.
There was a lot of talk in the week leading up about bottles being thrown with urine at our offices.
And I wanted to make sure that they, you know, that you had to have a good arm to basically throw and get at them.
So, you know, we basically wanted them separated.
And I'm sorry to report we did have some bottles thrown at our offices that did have urine in it.
A couple of our officers were hit with that.
They were hit with a lot of stuff today, and I'm very proud of the job they did, and it goes to the professionalism of this department.
Okay, so he says that it was basically a peaceful protest, and then he says people were flinging bottles of pee at the cops.
And there's tape of all this stuff.
Here's some tape of a woman with an American flag being dragged at Boston Rally, presumably by members of Antifa.
You can tell the Antifa folks because they cover their faces, because they're committing criminal acts.
If the viewer's watching right now, take a look at what happens to this woman who is holding an American flag.
She's holding an American flag and a protester comes to her, drags her along there, pulls her anyway there.
Let's watch this.
You can see her flag wound up on the ground.
Okay, just delightful people.
And that wasn't the only situation.
Some pro-lifers were apparently attacked.
There was a journalist who tweeted this out.
And then, the Antifa went after the police officers.
folks just mobbed some anti-abortion protesters with posters, yelled into our posters till the cops came.
And then the Antifa went after the police officers.
So here's some footage of the Antifa people going at the police officers.
*Crips* No, this is not the white supremacists.
Okay, were these the quote unquote white supremacists?
No, this is not the white supremacists.
This was a bunch of the Antifa people and some of the other protesters presumably I don't know if they're all Antifa or which other groups they are with, but you can see that the violence at this particular event is not coming from the alt-right and the white supremacists, who apparently, again, were explicitly denounced by the organizers of the rally.
It was coming from the left.
Here's some more footage of Antifa going after the cops.
I'll come bail you out.
I'm scared.
Come on, piece of .
How much money was it?
Way to go.
Yes.
Got black spit on you .
Yeah.
Cursing at the cops, you got black bleep on you, something like that.
And then you have a Trump supporter wearing an Israeli flag, told to get the F out of Boston.
I mean, it's just delightful, folks.
I want to show that people shouldn't be afraid to voice their other views and voice their opinions.
You shouldn't be afraid to go outside and say you're a conservative.
- And no violence to be.
- No violence. - I wanna show that people shouldn't be afraid to voice their other views and voice their opinions.
You shouldn't be afraid to go outside and say you're conservative.
It's pretty sad that things like this happen.
It is pretty sad that things like that happen.
And it wasn't relegated just to Boston.
There was a supposedly anti-white supremacist protest led by leftist groups in Dallas.
And here they are shouting about the cops and how the cops are the Klan.
You can hear them shouting cops and Klan go hand in hand.
You can see that some of these people, again, are the Antifa folks.
They've got the masks across their face.
Now, why is all this important?
Okay, why am I showing all this footage of violent and nasty, horrible Antifa people?
The reason is because, unlike the right, which has universally condemned the neo-Nazis and the alt-right, and is trying to disassociate from these people, They're mainstream leftists who are embracing all of this stuff.
And they're using this binary logic again.
The Neo-Nazis are bad, so Antifa must be okay.
This is dangerous.
Okay, this is really dangerous.
I'm not talking about just dangerous in terms of people cursing at each other or yelling at each other.
We've been having that for a couple hundred years.
I'm talking about dangerous in violent terms.
Dangerous in serious violent terms.
And I want to talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so, as I say, I don't want to talk anymore about these fringe movements, the neo-Nazis and Antifa.
They are fringe movements.
I want to talk instead about whether they are being mainstreamed.
On the right, is it being mainstreamed?
Are the neo-nazis being mainstreamed?
This was the great fear of what President Trump did last week when he seemed to legitimize the alt-right.
When he seemed to suggest there were good people in the crowd with the alt-right.
When he seemed to make a moral equivalence between the protesters and some of the protesters who were protesting with the alt-right and the neo-nazis.
That seemed to be the problem.
People were afraid that this was going to be mainstreamed.
And the universal condemnation was strong and lasting and loud.
There are openly leftists who are saying today, and have been saying now for a week, that Antifa is not a problem.
And remember, this is not just them embracing Antifa's viewpoint, this is them embracing Antifa's central contention, which is that violence in the streets is sometimes necessary.
Here's that same Dartmouth professor we were talking about last week, who wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, talking about how Antifa is necessary.
He's Mark Bray, who's a lecturer at Dartmouth College.
I think that a lot of people recognize that when pushed, self-defense is a legitimate response to white supremacy and neo-Nazi violence.
And you know, we've tried ignoring neo-Nazis in the past.
We've seen how that turned out in the 20s and 30s.
And the lesson of history is you need to take it with the utmost seriousness before it's too late.
We've seen the millions of deaths that have come from not taking it seriously enough.
And we can see that really the way that white supremacy grows, the way that neo-Nazism grows is by becoming legitimate, becoming established, becoming everyday, family friendly, wear khakis instead of hoods.
And the way to stop that is what people did in Boston, what people did in Charlottesville, pull the emergency brake and say, you can't make this normal.
There's a big difference between confronting fascism and confronting other forms of violence.
So we can see that during the 30s and 40s, there was no public opinion to be leveraged by nonviolent resistance.
If you get fascists to be powerful enough in government, they're simply not going to listen to the kind of public opinion that nonviolence can generate.
That's the argument for resistance.
The idea that the white supremacists are powerful in government, so powerful that we have to go out in the streets with our guns, Listen, I've said for a long time that if government becomes tyrannical, then we ought to have guns in order to protect ourselves, but you're not talking about a government that's enforcing neo-Nazi views.
CNN made the same mistake.
Here's a headline that CNN actually ran yesterday.
Their original headline, and then they changed it because they got backlash from Antifa.
It said, unmasking the leftist Antifa movement.
Activists seek peace through violence.
Which is accurate, right?
It demonstrates the irony of the Antifa movement.
So what did they do?
They updated the piece, and they got rid of the last half of the title.
Activists seek peace through violence?
They got rid of that.
Because they wouldn't want to offend Antifa.
Representative Steve Cohen, who is a Democratic representative, I believe he is from, is he from Tennessee?
Yeah, he's from Tennessee, and here he was defending Antifa.
Well, it was equivocated because it tried to put the blame on both sides.
Even if the Antifa was there and did things, they were there because of the Nazis and because of the Confederates.
And when they went out and marched the night before with those tiki torches, it was a reminder of Kristallnacht in my mind, the 1938 German terrorism on Jewish people in Berlin.
And it also looked like Klan rallies, where they used to have big bonfires and burn crosses.
And so the whole idea of the fire, I mean, it was so well-staged to remind people of that, and yelling, the Jews will not take our place, blood and soil.
These were just the most bone-chilling sounds and chants, and they were in lockstep.
Okay, and that's true, but so what in terms of the violence?
Why does that justify violence?
Again, as somebody who is an Orthodox Jew, I have no fondness for Nazis or Klansmen.
I've spent my entire career fighting Nazis and Klansmen.
David Duke came out for me personally last year on Twitter.
Okay, I'm very much in favor of these movements disappearing immediately.
That said, in a civilized society, you don't get to justify Antifa just because you don't like stuff that people are saying.
And this is dangerous stuff.
The reason it's dangerous stuff is because people who are... I've said before, I'm only going to attribute violence to rhetoric when the rhetoric explicitly calls for violence.
Antifa explicitly calls for violence.
What the left is doing now, people like Steve Cohen, what mainstream leftists are doing, many of them, is they are now explicitly poo-pooing violence.
When you explicitly poo-poo violence, you are going to make it more common.
And I want to read you a little bit about a guy named Everett Glenn Miller.
You probably missed this story.
Everett Glenn Miller, and this is according to Heavy.com, is a former Marine with mental health history.
And he was named as the suspect accused of shooting and killing two Kissimmee, Florida, police officers, a guy named Matthew Baxter and Sergeant Richard Sam Howard.
The police chief says it was an ambush.
Miller went by the name on Facebook, Malik Muhammad Ali.
He only changed that recently.
And right before he went on the shooting spree, killing two cops, He shared a picture of Martin Luther King jr That said for this from August 18th.
It said when I said March I didn't mean forever mother effers shoot back I'll even wrote with the photo when them n-words wake up It's gonna be some hell to answer for you only can poke a tie-up dog for so long once that chain breaks It's over wake up America before it's too late and then another post said racist ass America America is evil and And then there were derogatory posts about Trump, posts about the Confederate monument issue, and Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On August 15th, they shared a page, a video of the Charlottesville clashes and wrote, Confederate Nazis, I will hurt you all.
You are the enemy.
You can run, but you can't hide.
So if you have a group of people, this is what Antifa does, who equate the police with the bad guys, who equate conservatives with the bad guys, and who openly say that violence is necessary in order to stop the bad guys.
When you have mainstream people on the left, like Steve Cohen, when you have mainstream people on the left, like Michael Eric Dyson, when you have mainstream people on the left, like Mark Bray at the Washington Post, when you have those people making excuses for the violence, do you think the violence is going to become more common or less common?
Do you think that it's going to get worse or better?
Do you really have so little belief in the police that you don't think that the police can stop the Nazis?
There are like 10 Nazis.
Do you really believe that the police are in league with them?
So I'm calling on you leftists.
I called on President Trump.
I called on the right to disown the alt-right.
I've been doing it for over a year.
Well over a year.
And now, with equal or more fervor, I call on people on the left.
You must disown Antifa.
You must disown the violence that is being done in your name.
Antifa is doing it in your name.
And Democrats aren't disowning it.
Democrats aren't disowning it.
Instead, they're focusing on Confederate monuments.
Instead, they're focusing on Confederate monuments, and those are the real threat to peace.
No, there's a group in America right now that is openly calling for violence and property destruction, and it's being shied away from by members of the mainstream left.
And that is really gross.
I've seen some members of the left who are willing to disown this stuff.
I've seen some people who are willing to say that Antifa's a problem.
But, here's what I'm afraid of.
I'm afraid that I'm gonna go to Berkeley on September 14th, and Antifa's gonna show up, and they're gonna get violent, and the media, because they want their narrative, where violence against right-wingers is justified, that the media's gonna proclaim that it's my fault that Antifa showed up and got violent.
That's what I'm concerned about.
I'm concerned somebody's gonna get killed.
I'm concerned some of my security guards are gonna get hurt.
And I'm concerned the media is going to blame my views for that, even though I've been anti-Antifa and anti-alt-right overtly so for a long time, which is why when I speak at Berkeley, the topic that I'm going to be speaking on is why all of the following groups are destroying America.
Antifa, the alt-right, BLM, social justice warriors, radical feminists, I'm going to talk about all of these groups and why they're destroying America's social fabric.
I'm going to talk about all of that.
And we'll see if the media are honest enough to recognize that I'm condemning all the groups they say ought to be condemned, like the alt-right, and have been doing so for a year.
Or whether they lie, and they say that just because I think the BLM is a bad group that espouses bad things, that I am therefore a rightful victim of Antifa.
Because I think that will expose the media's agenda.
I think that if the media decide That they are going to target the stuff that I say, just like the stuff that you say.
You're a normal conservative.
They're going to target you as a Nazi?
If they decide to target me as a Nazi, I think it'll say a whole hell of a lot, considering the fact that there's been no one who's been more anti-alt-right, more anti-white supremacist than I have been, certainly over the past year, by statistics.
I fear that the left is going to lie about it nonetheless.
I want to talk about the Confederate monument statue and Steve Bannon leaving the White House, but for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber.
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So that was a stellar pitch.
Let's move on to what Democrats are really focused on.
Are they focused on condemning Antifa?
The right has been spending weeks talking about how white supremacy is evil.
Paul Ryan released a statement this morning talking about how white supremacy is evil.
I don't know a lot of right-wingers who are not saying this, other than Pat Buchanan.
Democrats, however, are focusing in on the real issue, and this is such a mistake for them.
You know, President Trump successfully pivoted from the alt-right issue that was kind of the thorn in his side.
He pivoted instead to Confederate statues, talking about whether Confederate monuments should go down.
And because the left is so radical, they immediately leapt on this and decided to make this the issue.
Now, that's very stupid politics.
The polls show the vast majority of Americans want to keep the Confederate statues, or at the very least don't care very much.
Okay, but they've decided to make this their key issue.
And this demonstrates, I think, the disconnect between a lot of people who are living in Washington D.C., and New York, and L.A., and Chicago, and a lot of the people who are living in the rest of the country, who frankly don't care very much about these Confederate memorials, and don't think that they're the worst thing in the world, or the cause of a lot of violence.
Yeah, you are seeing Democrats push this stuff very hard, the same way the Democrats pushed really hard on the Washington Redskins issue.
We have to rename the team.
Very important we rename the team.
They're doing the same thing with Confederate monuments.
Now, I think there's a stronger case to rename, to get rid of Confederate monuments by far, than getting rid of the name of the Washington Redskins.
But the left is treating this as though this is the real threat of violence.
So Antifa isn't the real threat of violence.
No, Confederate statues are the real threat of violence.
Jay Johnson, who is the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, here's what he had to say about removing these statues.
What alarms so many of us from a security perspective is that so many of the statues, the Confederate monuments are now, modern day, becoming symbols and rallying points for white nationalism, for neo-Nazis, for the KKK.
And this is most alarming.
We fought a world war against Nazism.
The KKK reigned terror on African Americans for generations.
And so a number of Americans, rightly Republican and Democrat, are very concerned and very alarmed.
And I salute those in cities and states who are taking down a lot of these monuments for reasons of public safety and security.
Okay, so here's my question.
He was the Secretary of Homeland Security for the last four years of the Obama administration.
Why didn't he take down any of the monuments?
The alt-right was doing this before.
Why didn't he take down any of those monuments?
And the answer is because it's the left seeking to lump in, members of the mainstream left, seeking to lump in support for confederate monuments with alt-rightism and white supremacy.
Again, I think that there's a very strong case that some of these things should come down.
I don't know why there's Jefferson Davis highways in Arizona.
Actually, I do know a lot of these monuments were erected in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement as sort of a backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, which really is gross.
I mean, if you erect a Confederate memorial in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement because you're attempting to say something about civil rights, then that's pretty disgusting.
Some of these monuments went up in like 1960.
Okay, so they're not a hundred years old.
They're not part of the historic South or anything.
They're going up in states like Arizona that wasn't even existent at the time of the Civil War.
So I think that that's a problem.
That said, this idea that these are flashpoints, that this is high priority for the United States, it's sort of like the argument after the evil Dylan Storm Roof shot up a black church that the key issue was whether people should fly a Confederate flag on their truck.
And the answer was, this was not a major issue five minutes ago.
Why is it a major issue now?
If it is a major issue, then we should have this discussion outside the context of a radical shooting someone.
Here's the problem.
When you use radicals who shoot people as an excuse to have broader conversations, then you end up dismissing entirely benign people.
You end up hurting entirely benign people in the process.
So, I'll give you an example for the leftists in the audience.
For people who are on the left in the audience, liberals in the audience.
After the shooting, the congressional baseball shooting, There are people like me, who I think we're intellectually honest enough to say, I'm not blaming Bernie Sanders for this.
His rhetoric is not something that I want to blame for a guy going and shooting congresspeople.
We've always had rhetoric that's been very heated in American politics.
I disagree with everything Bernie Sanders has to say.
I think that no one should ever give him a pudding cup.
I don't think it's important.
But, to say that we're going to have now a referendum on Bernie Sanders' language because the nutcase went out and shot some people, If we are going to judge the veracity of an ideology or the morality of a rhetoric by the people who are outside the realm of the normal, then we're going to basically have to all shut up.
Because there are a lot of crazy people out there who are set off by a lot of crazy things.
And so this is my problem with having this conversation in a broader context by suggesting that Charlottesville is some sort of representation of the vast majority of people who want to stop the Confederate statues from going down.
This is why Trump was smart to pivot to the Confederate statue issue because the vast majority of people who were protesting on that Friday night a couple of weeks ago in Charlottesville for the Robert E. Lee statue were neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters.
The vast majority of people across the country who don't want Robert E. Lee statues to come down are none of those things.
And there I think Trump is correct and is smart to pivot.
And I think the left is idiotic to follow him in that pivot.
They're not going to do themselves any political favors.
It's amazing.
As low as Trump sinks in the polls, everybody keeps saying, oh, Trump's failing in the polls.
He's falling apart.
If Trump's falling apart, then why is it that he had like 39% approval rating in Wisconsin and won the state anyway?
There's still a Democrat who's going to have to run against him.
And the reason Democrats are having trouble is because they're recruiting radicals to run in their party.
People like Kamala Harris.
If they ran Joe Biden, somebody who is relatively radical on politics but is perceived as moderate, he would womp President Trump.
But instead, they're looking to the left wing of their party.
They're looking to people who pander, and that's not going to do them any service.
Okay, so in other news, Steve Bannon is out at the White House.
This broke in the middle of the show on Friday, and I've had a chance to sort of collect my thoughts on what this means.
I don't think it means a whole hell of a lot.
I think that Bannon had already been marginalized at the White House.
He had very little input at the White House already.
Him going back to Breitbart doesn't make very much of a difference.
Alex Marlow, who's the editor-in-chief over there, I gotta say, Alex is probably miserable this morning because Steve is not the easiest person to work with, but that said, Steve heading back to Breitbart isn't markedly going to change things other than it's sort of a green light to Breitbart to start attacking all the people who surround Trump.
That's going to be the move.
At Breitbart, they're going to move to attack Gary Cohn.
They're going to move to attack Ivanka, right?
Jared and Ivanka Kushner.
They're going to attack H.R.
McMaster, which they've been doing with alacrity for some time now.
It's just going to become louder and more strident.
Bannon is going to insist, of course, that he's trying to help Trump.
But Bannon cares about Bannon.
Bannon doesn't care about the future of Breitbart.
He doesn't care about their traffic.
The only thing that Bannon cares about, really, is being perceived as a big man on campus.
And that means that he has to present himself as a sort of populist hero.
In fact, after he left on Friday, he headlined, right, Bannon did an editorial meeting on meeting, and the first headline that went up was this, in giant orange letters, Stephen K. Bannon returns home to Breitbart News, and then in quotes, populist hero.
Well, I mean, nothing like fulfilling the mooches' expectations of you there, for going back and immediately running a headline about how wonderful you are.
But what that means is that Bannon is going to sort of present himself as the voice of morality from the populist right, and that's going to be a thorn for Trump a little bit.
Is it going to be a major thorn?
I don't think so.
I think Bannon knows better than to alienate a lot of the Trump-centric voters.
But if Trump ever becomes so vulnerable that Breitbart can make a difference, then you could see Bannon, in a revenge move, sort of moving to hurt him.
Do I think it makes a huge difference inside the administration?
No, it's just another indicator that this administration was never conservative, okay?
For as much as I dislike Steve Bannon personally, Steve Bannon is right-wing on immigration, Steve Bannon is right-wing on Israel, Steve Bannon is right-wing on national security, so all of those things have sort of been moved off of the spectrum a little bit.
Bannon was more isolationist than right-wing, I should say, on national security, but he was very much in favor of a military buildup.
A lot of that has now been moved off to the side.
Trump's administration, for all the people who thought he was going to be the great conservative halcyon, let me just point out the people now surrounding him are entirely Democrats or generals.
There is not a single major registered Republican who surrounds the president of the United States in his inner circle.
H.R.
McMaster is a general.
John Kelly is a general.
Jared and Ivanka were registered Democrats until five minutes ago.
Gary Cohn was a registered Democrat.
Steve Mnuchin was a registered Democrat.
All of the people who surround him, all the people who are closest to him, are either generals or registered Democrats, okay?
That is not gonna bode well for Trump.
The only thing that might save the conservative agenda, truly, is that, number one, there's a Republican Congress, and number two, Democrats will not work with Trump.
They hate Trump so much that they're willing to cut off their nose in spite of their face.
The fact is that if Democrats were smart, what they would immediately do is begin going to President Trump and saying, let's get some of your legislation done.
And they'd start pushing for single-payer health care and get Trump to sign it.
They'd start pushing for infrastructure bills and they'd get Trump to sign it.
They'd start pushing for tax hikes and get Trump to sign it.
And Trump would be more than willing to go to war with McConnell and Ryan.
He's already shown that he's willing to do that.
So how far left does Trump move is not dictated right now by the Republican Party.
It's dictated by a Democratic Party that doesn't want to work with Trump, which is quite fascinating.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
So, unfortunately, Jerry Lewis died over the weekend.
He was 94 years old.
Growing up, we liked Jerry Lewis movies.
We're not French, but we liked Jerry Lewis movies nonetheless.
One of my favorite Jerry Lewis films is a very underrated film called Cinderfella.
And it's a reverse of the Cinderella story, except he is Cinderella, right?
He's a guy and he falls in love with a princess.
And Jerry Lewis was a great physical comedian.
This is one of the scenes from Cinderfella where he's sitting in the kitchen, his stepmother has made him basically the maid, and he's sitting in the kitchen after serving them dinner, listening to the radio.
and this is sort of classic Jerry Lewis.
One of the great things about this movie is the Count Basie music.
One of the great things about this movie is the Count Basie music.
It's very kid-friendly, this particular film, and there's a lot of good stuff.
I was showing my daughter, who's three and a half, a clip from this movie.
There's a scene where he does a dance with the princess, and Count Basie's band is there.
This is part of his transformation, is that Count Basie's band shows up as part of his transformation into the prince.
It's a little bit slow, but there are a couple of scenes in it that are really, really funny, so Cinderfella, highly recommend it.
Okay, other things that I like.
This catch in the Junior Little League World Series is just incredible.
And this is one of the best catches I've ever seen in any league, period.
Watch this center fielder go back on this ball.
It's amazing.
On a wild pitch, it's just a really tough way to go home.
Wow, great catch kid.
I don't know who you are, but that's a fantastic catch.
So, anytime there's a good piece of baseball, I'll put it on the show.
He's in the Junior League.
Look at this catch.
Whoa.
That's also why the fences shouldn't be two and a half feet high in the league.
But, wow, great catch, kid.
I don't know who you are, but that's a fantastic catch.
So anytime there's a good piece of baseball, I'll put it on the show.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So just to show you how evil a lot of the neo-Nazis are and the white supremacists are and some of the alt-right members are, The Charlottesville rally organizer actually tweeted this out yesterday.
This is Jason Kessler, the piece of garbage who was punched in the face at the rally.
He said, Yeah, again, not a lot of very fine people doing this.
communists.
Communists have killed 94 million.
Looks like it was payback time.
And then he links directly to, you guessed it, the Daily Storm or the neo-Nazi site.
Yeah, again, not a lot of very fine people doing this.
Not a lot of very fine people involved with that particular rally.
Horrifying, horrifying in every sense of the word.
Okay, other things that I hate.
Jerry Falwell Jr.
was on TV.
And Jerry Falwell Jr.
has been the loudest evangelical advocate for President Trump.
He is, of course, the Dean of Liberty University.
I know we have a lot of listeners over at Liberty, so I want to say hi to all of the folks who listen over at Liberty University.
I'm sorry that Jerry Falwell Jr.
said something this dumb over the weekend.
Here is Jerry Falwell Jr.
on ABC's This Week talking about President Trump's response to Charlottesville.
The only groups he identified by name as the evil and causing what happened in Charlottesville were the Nazis, the KKK, and the white supremacists.
That's what I thought was bold and true.
Well, let me tell you what he said, though.
Let's go back to this.
He said there were very fine people on both sides.
Do you believe there were very fine people on both sides?
He has inside information that I don't have.
I don't know if there were historical purists there who were trying to preserve some statues.
I don't know.
But he had information I didn't have, and I believe that he spoke... What do you mean, you think he knew that some people were there?
I think he saw videos of who was there.
I think he was talking about what he had seen, information that he had that I don't have.
Okay, this idea that he had information that Jerry Falwell Jr.
didn't have and that's why he said what he said, I'm kind of sick of attributing to President Trump information that is just not accurate.
I don't see... If that information is not there, it's not there.
End of story.
So, enough.
If you're going to defend President Trump, defend him on the merits.
Don't make up stuff like he's some omnipotent, omniscient, all-seeing God's eye.
Okay, that's nonsense.
I still would like to see the evidence of the great people that were there on that Friday night that President Trump was apparently talking about because I don't actually see that evidence.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
President Trump is supposed to give a big speech tonight in Arizona.
A lot of stuff happening tonight, actually.
President Trump is supposed to give a speech about his new Afghanistan policy.
We'll talk about that.
Plus, President Trump is supposed to do a rally in Arizona.
Some violence outside is expected, so I'm sure that things will get more heated, not less.