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June 26, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:27
The Rise Of The Mobocracy | Ep. 568
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Democrats and Republicans condemn Maxine Waters, but is she the future?
Plus, President Trump throws one hell of a rally and the Supreme Court helps out President Trump on the travel ban.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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All righty.
So the breaking news today is that the Supreme Court has upheld President Trump's travel It was not a travel ban, according to the Trump administration, but it was a travel ban for particular countries.
There were seven different countries from which travel was essentially banned because we could not vet people who are coming in from those countries.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Trump's temporary travel ban, affecting several countries recognized as state sponsors of terrorism, according to Emily Zanotti over at Daily Wire.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, and it appears both Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Anthony Kennedy agreed with the majority, handing President Trump's Justice Department a win on the issue.
The court's language was strong.
Roberts wrote the opinion.
He noted that the president, quote, lawfully exercised the broad discretion granted to him under Section 1182F to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States.
And the president of the United States does have plenary power to suspend immigration in this sort of fashion for security purposes.
The court also noted that the president's interest in preserving national security, particularly in light of terrorism concerns, overrides concerns pertaining to the free exercise of religion as codified in the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.
That was always a stupid argument, the argument that the First Amendment's Establishment Clause applies to people who are not American citizens.
So if you are in Iran and you want to get into the United States and we say, well, we're banning certain religions, as bad as that policy would be, as stupid as that policy would be, it doesn't violate the First Amendment.
You're not a citizen.
It can't just be somebody in the middle of a hill in Afghanistan and you say, well, you're violating my First Amendment rights.
You don't have First Amendment rights under the Constitution of the United States.
The court stuck to the traditional strict scrutiny standard, writing the president must have compelling reason to over override guarantees of religious freedom.
In the case of the travel ban, it's entirely possible that the danger of importing known terrorists or supporters of terror outweighs potential First Amendment concerns.
Opponents of the ban had asked the court to apply a rational basis standard.
The court did not appear to agree on the matter, even considering the president's tweet about Islam.
So there are all these courts, these lower courts that had quoted President Trump, suggesting that he was a bigot and that's what was motivating all of this.
And the court said, listen, you can't just cite a bunch of presidential tweets or presidential candidate tweets in support of the proposition that a piece of legislation is inherently bad.
You actually have to show that the legislation violates the Constitution.
This piece of legislation, or at least this regulation from the executive branch, did not violate the Constitution, and thus President Trump's travel ban stands, at least for the moment, according to the Supreme Court.
So that, of course, is a win for President Trump.
Meanwhile, the continuation of the mob discussion is, it continues forthwith.
So all of the focus on people who are protesting Trump administration officials at restaurants and trying to get them thrown out of restaurants and shouting outside of people's homes and intimidating people in public places, You recall yesterday we talked about Maxine Waters, representative from California, who went out there and said that you should have mobs basically run people down at gas stations and get them not to participate in public life by screaming at them using these intimidation tactics.
A lot of folks on the left have said this is a bad idea, which is good for them, right?
That's exactly right.
These tactics are stupid.
It turns out that even the Red Hen story, the story about Sarah Huckabee Sanders going into a Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia and being turned away with her family, it didn't actually end there.
According to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, employees at the Red Hen then followed her to the next restaurant where they attempted to heckle her at a restaurant that was not their own, which, as I said yesterday, is even worse than a restaurant owner just throwing somebody out for politics.
Actually going to somebody else's restaurant and heckling somebody until they leave is close to a brown shirt tactic in public life.
It is a nasty, nasty tactic that has been used by sort of mobs everywhere in order to intimidate people into not getting involved in politics.
Well, people on both sides of the aisle have now condemned this.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, yesterday she slammed Maxine Waters for pushing for exactly this sort of mob action.
Here is the White House Press Secretary.
Okay, all of that is fine, and she's exactly right.
The Democrats, top Democrats, are saying the same thing.
Chuck Schumer came out and condemned Maxine Waters.
to avoid the public is unacceptable.
America is a great country and our ability to find solutions despite those disagreements is what makes us unique.
Okay, all of that is fine and she's exactly right.
The Democrats, top Democrats are saying the same thing.
Chuck Schumer came out and condemned Maxine Waters.
Here's what he had to say.
I strongly disagree with those who advocate harassing folks if they don't agree with you.
If you disagree with a politician, organize your fellow citizens to action and vote them out of office.
But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents.
That's not right.
That's not American.
Okay, and that of course is exactly right.
Good for Chuck Schumer for saying that.
The Senate Minority Leader, even Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, she came out and said the same thing, condemning Maxine Waters.
She said, So she's correct about this, that we actually need to return to civility.
But there's something in her comment here that is telling, and it's the reason why we're not going to return to civility anytime soon.
What she says is that Trump's daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unaccessible.
This is all Trump's fault.
A mentality that suggests that lack of civility on the other side is the real problem Generally allows people on your side to act with lack of civility.
So there's a lot of good psychological studies that suggest that if you believe you are a victim, you are more likely to act out against somebody else.
Every victimizer believes at root that they are a victim.
Hitler believed that he was a victim of the world.
He believed that the Jews were victimizing his country, and so he was therefore justified in acting out.
Very rare that you find somebody who's an aggressor who doesn't claim that they were acting in some sort of vague sense of self-defense.
Well, this is what Democrats are doing now.
Democrats are basically suggesting that Trump started all of this.
And Trump, meanwhile, is suggesting that Democrats started all of this.
Now, I think the Democrats got uncivil long before Republicans did.
I think they were deeply uncivil during the Bush administration when they were calling Bush Hitler.
I think that President Obama was uncivil in the way that he was fomenting riots in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland.
But does that does that mean that we have an excuse for exacerbating the incivility?
I don't think so, because the bottom line is that we can now have this reactionary back and forth of incivility across the political aisle as long as we want to do it.
I just don't think that's going to make the country better in any way.
But my argument is likely to lose because I'm saying that we should take a moral high ground here, that we should take a stand in favor of civility, that even if somebody is attempting to protest you and destroy you by going into a restaurant and yelling at you that this is not an excuse for you to do the same thing to people on the other side of the aisle.
I understand that's an unpopular perspective right now and this is how you have entire political parties that are captured by a base.
So while you have Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi condemning Maxine Waters, I really think that Maxine Waters is the future of the Democratic Party, in just the same way that you saw Democrats during 2008, 2012, 2016, suggesting that Bernie Sanders was too radical, and then Bernie Sanders took over the entire base.
I think the same thing holds true here.
Maxine Waters is channeling the most extreme side of the Democratic base, and that extreme side of the Democratic base has a lot of emotion behind it.
And even people in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, they may disagree with the tactics, but they agree with the sentiment.
And so I think Maxine Waters, in the end, is probably going to win this one in the long run.
I don't think a return to civility is in the cards anytime soon.
Here's Maxine Waters, who is expressing exactly what I'm talking about, blaming Trump for her own nasty and evil actions here.
I don't know why the president chose to stretch that out and and try to imply that I was causing harm.
As a matter of fact, the president calls for more violence than anybody else.
But let's not talk about that.
Okay, so Maxine Waters, again, saying that it's totally okay for her to call for violence or mob action because Trump, she thinks, called for violence or mob action.
Then President Trump has responded basically in kind, right?
President Trump has suggested that there would be consequences for what Maxine Waters had to say, that there would be backlash.
None of this is good stuff.
And as I say, I think Maxine Waters represents a serious portion of the Democratic base and the most passionate portion of the Democratic base and a part of the Democratic base that a lot of these politicians like Schumer and Pelosi eventually will have to bow to.
So for example, John Legend, who is, I think, more representative of the base in many ways than Nancy Pelosi, he tweeted out, "Let's make a deal with the Trump administration.
"Reunite all these families immediately, "and you can go out to eat wherever the bleep you want." In other words, do what we want, or we're going to use tactics of intimidation.
And John Legend is, of course, a very popular figure.
Simone Sanders on CNN, she said yesterday that all these people who are talking about civility, including Nancy Pelosi, including people like Chuck Schumer, the only reason they're talking about civility is because civility is just another instance of white privilege.
There is something to be said about that the folks calling for civility might need to check their privilege.
And so, where is the civility in a press briefing room, Jake?
Where is the civility at the border for these children?
And so, this conversation about civility is completely one-sided and skewed.
How is it one-sided and skewed?
Going into restaurants and shouting people out of restaurants, going to people's homes and protesting outside their homes.
How exactly is that skewed?
Why is that an element of white privilege?
It seems to me that of all the people in the United States who shouldn't like mob action, black folks should be high on that list considering how mob action resulted in tremendous suffering for black people for literally a century and a half in this country.
That makes no sense to me.
Like, the worst instances of mob action in this country's history have been actions that were taken in the Jim Crow South during the 1910s, 20s, and 30s.
And yet, Simone Sanders says that to oppose that, to oppose mob action, is some sort of white privilege?
I just, I don't see that at all.
I don't understand how that works.
Ashley Nicole, who, Ashley Nicole Black, she tweeted something out similarly, this is tweet 15, this is a writer, I believe for Jimmy Kimmel, and she tweeted, oh hello, I didn't see you there.
Civility is a tool of white supremacy.
Okay, cool, bye.
Which is a weird tweet.
She tweeted that out, she's a Samantha Bee writer, rather.
Civility is a tool of white supremacy?
No, civility is a tool of having a decent republic.
We can't have a decent republic if we can't have conversations with one another.
But again, I think that the capture of the base is nearly complete.
I'm going to talk a little more about that in just a second.
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Okay, so...
As I said, I think there's a lot of talk on the Democratic side of the aisle from the leadership about let's not get violent.
Let's not engage in this sort of mass action.
Let's not get uncivil.
But I don't think that that's the way this is going to go.
I think that incivility is now seen as a tool of the passionate.
Civility is seen as a tool of the establishment.
If you are civil, if you are decent to other people, because our politics has gotten so contentious, this means you don't care enough.
And we now gauge our politicians not along the lines of what they get done or how effective they are.
We gauge them along the lines of how much they care.
We see authenticity in anger.
We see authenticity in rage.
We see authenticity in you going out there and shouting at the moon.
This makes you a more authentic politician.
Nancy Pelosi's fake.
Chuck Schumer is fake.
But Maxine Waters, she's real.
She's anti-Maxine.
She's anti-Maxine, sitting around your kitchen table, telling you how you ought to go to a gas station and harass somebody until they leave.
So I have my serious doubts that this genie can be put back in the bottle.
And by the way, I'm not sure that the genie can be put back in the bottle from the right, because there are a lot of people on the right who are calling for civility today.
A lot of people on the right who are suggesting that we need to be more civil to one another.
And that is not the tenor of the Republican Party at this point.
That is not the tenor of President Trump.
That is not the tenor Of a lot of the people who are big fans of President Trump.
The thing they like best about President Trump is that he is uncivil.
Again, because they think, I think rightly so, that Republicans have been punched so often that they need someone who's going to punch back.
The problem is there's a difference between punching.
You can punch in civil fashion.
I know that sounds contradictory, but it's not.
You can be polite and still say things that really gut the opponent.
And then there's punching wildly and making the civil society worse.
And I think that that's more what President Trump tends to do.
Like, I'm not sure how this is particularly helpful.
Trump supporters were at a rally yesterday and they started yelling, go home, Jim and Jim Acosta.
Now I think Jim Acosta is an idiot, right?
I mean, I think that he's terrible.
I've talked about it on the air many, many times, but the kind of revelry that surrounds this, the sort of triumphalism that surrounds shouting at a reporter, go home, Jim.
I'm just not sure how that makes the country better in any significant way.
Trump will be here later on tonight, campaigning for the man who wants to be the governor of South Carolina for another four years.
That is Henry McMaster.
And as you can hear behind me, Wolf, the crowd is very fired up.
We have about a couple thousand people in this room so far.
They are letting the press corps here know exactly how they feel about what we're doing here, Wolf.
And it is certainly true that the press has been awful for President Trump.
The press has been just garbage all the way across.
I mean, I've covered it in detail, but I think it is possible to criticize the press strenuously without The country basically turning into two groups of people screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, standing five inches from each other's faces, spittle-flecking them.
I just don't, I don't see how that makes the country a better place.
Now, so I think that, you know, what we're seeing in South Carolina at that rally is quite the same thing as going into a restaurant and harassing someone until they leave.
I don't.
I don't think it's quite the same thing.
But the temperature has been raised in the country to a point where I'm not sure the temperature can be, can be simmered down anytime in the near future.
And again, I don't see either party attempting to really do so.
So in just a second, I want to talk about President Trump's actual rally in South Carolina.
And again, I think that President Trump is channeling something.
I don't think that President Trump is the great driver of incivility in this country.
What you're seeing today is a lot of people on the left, Pelosi, Maxine Waters, saying that Trump is the one who made politics uncivil.
As I said before, I don't think that Trump made politics uncivil.
I think politics has been uncivil since Cindy Sheehan was standing outside George W. Bush's ranch and screaming at him that he had murdered her son.
I think politics has been uncivil for at least the last nearly 20 years.
I think the politics has been really uncivil since maybe the mid-90s.
Probably most likely after the 2000 election, it got really uncivil, I think.
And then top-level politicians have channeled that anger.
And instead of saying to people, the hardest thing in politics to say is, your anger is unjustified, or your anger is justified, but let's try to treat each other well.
Those are two very difficult things to say in politics.
Much easier to say to people, That anger is justified, that your anger is righteous, that your anger is good.
And President Trump is great at channeling this stuff.
He's terrific at it.
Right?
It's his specialty.
So, for example, yes, and he's very funny, too.
I mean, just on an objective level, the man's very funny.
So yesterday at his rally, President Trump slammed Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel.
Listen, I've slammed all three of them.
I think all three of them have done a piss poor job at actually being funny as opposed to being political.
But the president kind of rabble-rousing off their back.
I'm not sure that this is what the president of the United States should be doing, per se, even if I enjoy it as a partisan.
As a partisan, I may enjoy the fighting, but as an American, I think it would be better if we had more of a civil society being built as opposed to being torn down.
The guy at CBS is... What a low life.
What a low life.
I mean, honestly, are these people funny?
There's no talent.
They're not like talented people.
Jimmy Kimmel, no talent, but I'd go to his studio to do a shot, you know, to do a thing.
He would stand outside on the sidewalk waiting for me.
Oh, here he comes, Donald Trump.
Oh, sir, how are you?
Oh, sir, thank you so much for doing it.
Jimmy Fallon calls me up, and he's like a nice guy.
He's lost.
He looks like a lost soul, right?
He gets out there, hey, hey, hi, oh.
But you know what?
He's a nice guy.
I agreed to do a show.
What is it, a year and a half, two years later?
He's now apologizing because he humanized me.
And he really hurt himself.
So I said to him today on social media, I said, Jimmy, be a man.
Just relax.
Just relax.
So two things can be simultaneously true.
One, Trump is hilarious, right?
I mean, this is a funny, funny stand-up routine, him going after all of these comedians.
Two, is this really great for our civil discourse?
Is this the kind of stuff that you want to see the presidents of the United States saying?
Probably not.
Now listen, I know, I know that inside Republican circles, we've all taken this for granted.
This is who Trump is.
This is what Trump is going to be.
I get all of that, but to pretend that it's not having any impact on our civic discourse is to, I think, be foolish.
Okay?
It is having an impact on our civic discourse.
Does it mean that Trump is the great driver of the collapse of civic discourse?
No.
I think that he is a response to the collapse of the civic discourse that had already been happening.
Again, in 2012, Joe Biden was going around saying that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back in chains, and the entire left was suggesting that Mitt Romney had given a woman cancer specifically so that he could make her husband lose her health insurance.
So, incivility has been a part of our politics for a long time, but there's no question it's getting a lot worse.
The left, I think, is leading the way, but the right's reactionary nature is driving a cycle of incivility.
I think that's fair to say.
I think what we have right now is a cycle of incivility, and what it's going to take is one group saying, listen, I know you guys are being uncivil.
I know you guys are being jackasses.
I get it.
But guess what?
I'm not going to be a jackass just because you're being a jackass.
I'm going to point out that you're being a jackass, but I'm not going to call for any of these sorts of tactics.
I think it's wrong to call for any of these sorts of tactics.
In fact, these tactics are what make you a jackass in the first place.
This is the thing I don't get from the left.
The left is saying, well, Trump started all of this.
The reason you don't like Trump is because he said all these things.
So your response is to be him?
You think Trump is the worst of all possible worlds?
You think Trump is so uncivil, and he's so untoward, and he's so gauche, so your response is to imitate him?
Your response is that all of the things that you hate about President Trump are the things you now want to be?
This is why you have a politics that is spiraling into disarray.
And on the right, you're seeing the same thing.
People saying, well, if the left's going to do that, well, why shouldn't the right do that?
Why unilaterally disarm?
It'd be one thing if you were saying, we're going to use this tactic in order to prove to the other side this tactic is not worth using.
A mutually assured destruction.
But that's not what's really going on.
What's really going on on the right is an attempt to hijack the tactic because, hey, turnabout is fair play.
It's more of revenge play than an attempt to make the country better.
We need to make the country better.
Now, with all of that said, there are some people who are going too far in this direction, suggesting that incivility in politics from President Trump and the right, it means that Republicans should vote for Democrats.
David Brooks is the latest to make this case.
So today, David Brooks, In the New York Times has a long piece calling for conservatives to avoid voting for the Republican Party.
This is asinine.
OK, so Will, you'll recall George Will, claimed that Republicans in Congress had abdicated their duty to check the executive branch and Democrats would do a better job, ignoring the Democrats would be stymied by a Republican minority and that the Democratic agenda has moved wildly to the left.
Well, David Brooks argues that conservatism is being undermined by the Republicans and by President Trump.
How?
Well, he argues that conservatism is about protection of the order that pre-exists liberty.
So, there's a great argument in conservatism over whether conservatism is really primarily about liberty or whether it is about the idea of order.
So, to take it to a philosophical level, there's an argument between Locke and Burke.
This is the argument that I think David Brooks wants to set up.
So, John Locke suggested that human beings could be governed by reason, and that we had certain inherent inalienable rights, and these rights were life, liberty, and property, and the right to freedom of thought was one of those rights, and that if we all got together in civil society with a small government, that would be the best way to run things.
And Edmund Burke said, listen, all this stuff about rationality is just fine and it's just great, but we have to understand that without civic institutions that inculcate virtue, liberty is bound to devolve into libertinism.
You have a free society with no rules and people are bad people, then things are going to decay really, really quickly.
So what you need is a social order that pre-exists liberty.
Without the social order, there cannot be liberty.
And so the argument seems to be sort of that conservatism is more about the social order than it is about liberty.
At least that's what Brooks is arguing.
So he argues that conservatism is about the protection of the order that pre-exists liberty, the maintenance of what he calls the sacred space, necessary for liberty to thrive.
He contrasts the enlightenment mentality of reason and consent with the Burkean notion that such concepts unmoored from shared cultural history and institutions run amok.
So Edmund Burke was a famous British jurist, not a judge, but he was a member of parliament.
And he famously wrote against the French Revolution, suggesting the French Revolution had given up on the legacy of the French Revolution.
So here's what Brooks writes.
of pure reason and that it would soon evolve into the guillotine.
Of course, he was exactly right.
So here's what Brooks writes.
He says, "The practical upshot was that conservatives have always placed tremendous emphasis on the sacred space where individuals are formed.
This space is populated by institutions like the family, religion, the local community, the local culture, the arts, the schools, literature, and the manners that govern everyday life.
Over the centuries, conservatives have resisted anything that threatened the sacred space." Okay, all of that is true, right?
We are all defenders in the conservative movement of family, religion, local community, local culture, the arts, good literature, civilization, right?
These are all things that we believe ought to be protected.
But here's where Brooks goes wrong.
He believes that the market is what has undermined all of this.
So he argues that conservatives only value small government because they think that big government is going to violate family and violate the social order.
But if big government didn't violate the social order, everything would be just dandy.
So he says conservatives fought big government not because they hated the state per se, but because they loved the sacred space.
The last attempts to build a conservatism around the sacred space were George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism and in Britain, David Cameron's big society conservatism.
They both fizzled because over the last 30 years, the parties of the right drifted from conservatism.
So he says the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party because it no longer cares about the social order.
Instead, it only cares about market fundamentalism.
And he says, Okay, this is untrue.
Market fundamentalism is the basic idea that you own your own labor.
That's market fundamentalism.
It is not the idea that growth in and of itself is the great win.
That's a utilitarian view of the market.
Market fundamentalism is about the idea that markets in and of themselves are moral, which they are.
If you get to own your own labor, then the market is moral, as opposed to government regulation of that market, which is generally immoral because it is a violation of your ownership of your labor and your time.
But Brooks says, Again, I think this is a dramatic misreading of American conservatism.
and went for the tribalism of Donald Trump because at least he gave them a sense of social belonging.
At least he understood that there's a social order under threat.
Again, I think this is a dramatic misreading of American conservatism.
This is why Brooks' distinction between Locke and Burke is wrong.
Drawing a hardline break between Locke and Burke is foolish.
Hey, George W. Bush's conservatism was flawed, not because he cared about social institutions, but because he didn't care enough about market fundamentalism.
The founders believed in the notion of individual liberty, but they also believed that individual liberty could only thrive when people were virtuous.
So you actually needed social institutions to fill the gap left by government.
So if you want to take care of each other, we're going to need churches, we're going to need groups where we get together.
If you want to have kids who grow up healthy and strong and form families, you're going to need social institutions that help foster all of that.
Liberty, and that's what allowed there to be liberty, right?
Because if you create a bunch of good human beings, you can leave them free to do anything.
Whereas if they're a bunch of bad human beings, you can barely leave them free to do anything.
A liberty and order were originally seen in the American bargain as two sides of the same coin.
Brooks, however, separates the two.
And he says that free markets are inherently non-conservative, which is not true at all.
And then he says that Americans swung to Trump because Trump was a substitute for market fundamentalism, which of course is not true either.
Most conservatives voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary Clinton.
And while Brooks is correct that we've now substituted a certain level of tribal politics, For our social institutions.
He's certainly wrong that such tribal politics are a response to market breakdown.
What has actually happened in the United States is not that the market has taken over everything.
What's happened in the United States is that social institutions destroyed themselves because there was a forced attempt to destroy those social institutions in the name of libertinism.
Not in the name of markets.
In the name of social freedom.
In the name of I should be able to do whatever I want.
So I agree that we're seeing a breakdown into tribal politics.
I agree that social institutions and social capital has degraded.
But I don't think that has to do with market fundamentalism.
And so here's where Brooks, he comes out.
So Brooks, this whole column has been written in order to say that you should not vote for Trump and you should not vote for Republicans.
Here's what he says.
He says, That's a pretty radical statement.
He says it's a radical individualism that leads to vicious tribalism.
The threat comes from those two main currents of the National Republican Party.
At his essence, Trump is an assault on the sacred order that conservatives hold dear, the habits and institutions that cultivate sympathy, honesty, faithfulness and friendship.
So Trump is contributing to the breakdown of the social order.
Therefore, Republicans should not vote or conservatives should not vote Republican because Trump is contributing to the breakdown of social order.
But that's not correct.
OK, there are two sides to liberty.
One is small government, which is inherently good, because again, the government does not have a place telling you what to do.
And the other side is social order.
Even if I agree that President Trump is helping contribute to a breakdown in the social fabric, which I think is arguably true, even if I think that is true, that does not mean I'm going to turn to the Democrats who have forcibly attempted to destroy the social fabric wholesale.
To say that Democrats ought to win, people who have been anti-family, who have been anti-church, who spend all their days trying to come up with government legislation to destroy the social order, to say that's a better solution than voting for Republicans is simply insane.
But Brooks says today you can be a conservative or a Republican, but you can't be both.
And then he says that the places where he sees the future of the country are Burlington, Vermont, and Salt Lake City.
Well, that's a pretty amazing thing to say, considering that Burlington, Vermont has a total population of 42,000 people, a median family income of $76,000, and an unemployment rate of 2%.
Yeah, it's easy enough to say that's a nice place when it's a nice place.
The real question is, what is going to reinstitute social fabric?
Trump isn't going to do that.
Democrats aren't going to do that.
But that doesn't mean that you sacrifice the social fabric to people who forcibly want to destroy it.
I mean, look, I don't think Trump has been a force for good when it comes to the social fabric, but I think that Trump at least still likes the American flag.
I think there are certain aspects of the social fabric Trump is still in favor of that Democrats simply are not.
Free markets are not killing social institutions.
Lack of social connections are killing social institutions.
And again, the Democratic Party is a much greater threat to the social fabric at this point than the Republican Party, even as much as I hate watching the Republican Party threatening the social fabric at all.
I think all that's a mistake.
Okay, so in just a second, I want to talk a little bit about President Trump's tariff plans.
He's now attacking Harley Davidson.
Plus, I want to talk about a New York Times op-ed that explains what I mean about the destruction of the social fabric and why David Brooks is wrong.
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So here is why I think that David Brooks is so wrongheaded when he said, and George Will, when they say vote for the Democrats to stop President Trump.
First of all, I think Trump's agenda has largely been good.
Not universally, but largely been good.
And second of all, I think that trying to suggest that Trump is going to be more destructive to the social fabric than Democrats ignores exactly what the Democrats are doing right now.
Hey, so on Monday, the New York Times ran an op-ed from a guy named Brian W. Van Norton, who is a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University, Yale-NUS College, and Vassar College, calling for deplatforming of all conservative dissenters.
Why?
Because those opinions are bad, of course.
So the same people that David Brooks are saying you should vote for, those people are saying we should deplatform anyone who disagrees with them.
There's a reason that the left is so comfortable with David Brooks these days.
So Norton, in this New York Times op-ed, he juxtaposes worthwhile opinions with non-worthwhile opinions.
Here's what he says.
He says worthwhile opinions, quote, include historically informed argument from Ta-Nehisi Coates that structural racism makes the American dream possible.
And the nuanced thoughts of Kate Mann, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of empathy in supporting misogyny.
Like sympathy, but for him.
Get it?
Uninformed arguments, according to this professor at Yale, include arguments from Jordan Peterson taken wildly out of context.
So Jordan Peterson should shut up, but we should hear from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who said about 9-11 that he watched the planes hit the buildings and felt nothing because he was smoking pot on the rooftop.
And we should definitely listen to the arguments of Kate Mann, who non-ironically uses the word empathy.
If you do not ironically use the word empathy, I think that pretty much suggests that we should not listen to you on pretty much anything.
But according to this professor, we should ensure that people like Jordan Peterson or Ann Coulter, they should not be able to speak publicly.
So here's what Norton writes.
He says, We may feel certain that Coulter and Peterson are wrong, but some people feel the same way about Coates and Mann.
And everyone once felt certain that the Earth was the center of the solar system.
If this specious line of thought seems at all plausible to you, it is because of the influence of On Liberty, published in 1859 by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill.
Mill's argument for near-absolute freedom of speech is seductively simple.
Well, his argument for near-absolute freedom of speech is simple because it's correct.
Basically, he says, if it's a true opinion, it should get a hearing.
If it's a bad opinion, then we should suss it out.
We should actually treat with it and figure out why it's a bad opinion.
But Norton says that's not good.
We shouldn't have freedom of speech, really, because freedom of speech relies on the rationality of human beings.
And as we all know, human beings, except for this guy, are stupid.
He says he's smart, so he should decide what you get to hear.
But everybody else is really dumb.
Here's what he says.
This is in the pages of the New York Times again.
I mean, this is, this is, uh, this is thought tyranny.
He says, the problem with Mill's argument is that he takes for granted a naive conception of rationality that he inherited from Enlightenment thinkers like Rene Descartes.
Of course, Mill and Descartes disagreed fundamentally about the one ahistorical rational method, which is one of the reasons for doubting the Enlightenment dogma that there is such a method.
And this is purely idiotic.
It is like saying that because Christianity and Islam disagree about the nature of God, there is no God.
And throwing out rationality because Descartes and Mill disagree is just like that.
You can't throw out rationality just because two people disagree.
And indeed, it turns out that Norton doesn't think that rationality is wrong at all.
He thinks that he is the only rational person, so he should do all your thinking for you.
He says, the problem is that humans are not rational in the way Mill assumes.
Well, first of all, I think that Mike Pence probably does agree with that.
not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation, but the current vice president of the United States does not agree.
Well, first of all, I think that Mike Pence probably does agree with that.
I think that if Mike Pence owned a restaurant, he would have gay people at his restaurant.
He says, I wish everyone knew it is irrational to deny the evidence that there was a mass shooting in Sandy Hook, but a syndicated radio talk show host can make a career out of arguing for the contrary.
Right.
There are some people who act with less rationality than others.
This is not an argument against rationality, and it's certainly not an argument in favor of shutting down the political process, because once you're arguing against rationality, folks, once you're arguing that the individuals in the United States are incapable of discerning true from false, that they are incapable of understanding decent argumentation, there is no purpose to a republic at that point.
At that point, you may as well just have an aristocracy run by professors from Yale who get to decide what you see and hear.
And indeed, that's what this professor then argues.
He argues that free speech has become the tyranny of the majority.
And instead of John Stuart Mill, he quotes German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse is one of the most evil philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century.
He's the guy who originally coined the term make love, not war.
He's also the guy who suggested a theory of what he called repressive tolerance, Marcuse.
Marcuse's theory of repressive tolerance was that if we are tolerant of everybody's viewpoint, then in fact, we are strengthening bad viewpoints, so we should simply suppress viewpoints that are of the right.
He openly said this, Marcuse, and now he's being quoted in the pages of the New York Times by this professor as a counter to the argument that liberty is good.
Here's the quote.
And the professor says, So in other words, we should shut up everybody that this guy disagrees with.
Who does he want to have talk more?
one the misinformed may talk as long as the informed and propaganda rides along with education truth with falsehood and the professor says this form of free speech ironically supports the tyranny of the majority so in other words we should shut up everybody that this guy disagrees with who does he want to have talk more he says he'd like to hear more from noam chomsky the the political simpleton who has sided with every repressive dictatorship of the of the latter half of the 20th He says that we should hear more from Noam Chomsky.
Now, do these sound like the kinds of people that you want to trust with the social fabric?
This is the kinds of people who say that Herbert Marquez was right about free speech, but John Stuart Mill was wrong.
These are the kind of folks you want to trust.
That's why in all the talk about civility, which I think is beneficial and we should return to a certain level of civility, we should try to have polite conversations with one another.
We shouldn't lose the distinction between left and right in the battle over civility.
Civility should apply to left and right, but right ideas are better than left ideas.
Because left ideas, when it comes to civility, there's nothing more uncivil than taking the government and forcing your point of view down somebody's throat with the point of the gun.
Okay, meanwhile, President Trump is going after Harley Davidson.
You know, I've been saying since before Trump was actually inaugurated that President Trump's government interventionism when it came to the economy would eventually rear its ugly head, and it was bad.
I got a lot of flack for saying that.
I'm sure I'll get a lot of flack for saying it again, but tough.
On Tuesday, President Trump was obviously stung by reports that Harley-Davidson, the iconic motorcycle company, would be moving some jobs overseas in response to President Trump's tariffs on aluminum and steel, which have raised the cost of input in Harley-Davidson motorcycles, as well as in response to new European Union tariffs that were placed as a reaction to President Trump's tariffs.
So President Trump took to Twitter and started savaging the company.
So here's what he tweeted.
He tweeted, Okay, that is not true.
Okay, they announced that they would move some of their plant operations in Kansas City to Thailand, having nothing to do with tariffs, but that's not the same thing as what they're saying now.
"Tariffs trade war as an excuse shows how unbalanced "and unfair trade is, but we will fix it." Okay, that is not true.
Okay, they announced that they would move some of their plant operations in Kansas City to Thailand, having nothing to do with tariffs, but that's not the same thing as what they're saying now.
Now they're saying they're moving jobs into Europe.
It's a completely different thing.
And then he says, when I had Harley Davidson officials over to the White House, I chided them about tariffs in other countries like India being too high.
Companies are now coming back to America.
Harley must know they won't be able to sell back into U.S. without paying a big tax.
So now he's talking about taxing Harley Davidson out of existence because of his own stupid trade policy.
And then he said, a Harley Davidson should never be built in another country.
Never.
Their employees and customers are already very angry at them.
If they move, watch.
It will be the beginning of the end.
They surrendered.
They quit.
the aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before.
OK, if you think this is in any way remotely conservative, you are out of your mind.
This is not conservative.
OK, to target a company because they are making an economically feasible decision in response to government interventionism, to target them and suggest that they surrendered and they quit and the aura is gone and that you're going to tax the hell out of them?
It's obnoxious.
It was obnoxious when Obama did it, too, by the way.
This is the second time in two days that Trump has attacked Harley-Davidson.
Yesterday, he said that he was surprised that Harley-Davidson, of all companies, would be the first to wave the white flag.
He said, Well, no, Harley-Davidson is moving because tariffs are bad for a lot of companies in the United States.
into the EU, which has hurt us badly on trade, down $151 billion.
Tax is just a Harley excuse.
Be patient.
Well, no, Harley-Davidson is moving because tariffs are bad for a lot of companies in the United States.
They're a net job loser, and they impact lots of companies.
But what Trump is talking about, this is why Trump at heart is not a free market guy.
Again, he's cut regulations, he's given us tax cuts.
I'm very grateful to President Trump for a lot of his policies, but he's not a free market guy when it comes to trade, and it's very obvious from these tweets.
Okay, this sort of language precisely mirrors the sort of language that Barack Obama used when he was slamming companies for taking economically feasible action in response to Obamacare.
So you remember in the aftermath of Obamacare being passed, a bunch of companies said they were going to have to drop man-hours so they didn't have to pay for the full-time healthcare of all their employees, or they were going to have to cut jobs.
And Barack Obama responded by ripping into specific companies, including Staples.
He said, when I hear large corporations that make billions of dollars in profits trying to blame our interest in providing health insurance as an excuse for cutting back workers' wages, shame on them.
And then he said, I haven't looked at Staples' stock lately or what the compensation of the CEO is, but I suspect they could well afford to treat their workers favorably and give them some basic financial security.
And if they can, then they should be willing to allow those workers to get the Affordable Care Act without cutting wages.
So he was ripping into Staples.
Why?
Because Staples was responding in perfect market fashion to a terrible economic disincentive, Obamacare.
And I said at the time, it's just like Democrats, it is just like government interventionists to create garbage government policy, and then companies respond to that garbage government policy, and then they say, well, if only you were a little more patriotic, then you wouldn't respond to our policy this way.
It's like when Joe Biden said back in 2012 that companies that are big, they should be patriotic and pay more taxes.
I don't gauge my patriotism by paying a higher tax rate.
I'm paying a hell of a lot more in taxes than I paid even five years ago.
I'm not more patriotic now than I was five years ago, just because I'm paying a lot more taxes.
I'm just getting screwed by the government harder.
Probably so are you.
So this idea that Trump is putting forth that Harley Davidson is being unpatriotic or un-American by responding to his bad policy is stupid and counterproductive.
Maybe the policy is just bad.
Government interventionism has unintended side effects and that is not the fault of the companies that are responding to those unintended side effects by attempting to save jobs and save their company.
Alright, time for a couple of things I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
So, let's do a thing that I like.
So, you may have missed this story, but in Iran there's actually a bunch of protests taking place.
There's been these protests that have been taking place.
Economic insecurity is roiling Iran.
The regime would be on its last legs if it were not for the Obama administration signing billions of dollars over to the Iranian mullahs and their evil, evil government.
Here, this is an amazing thing.
Crowds in Iran were chanting yesterday and what they are actually chanting is death to Palestine.
Not a joke.
Not death to Israel.
Death to Palestine.
Listen to this.
I mean, that's unbelievable because all we've been told forever is that the Muslim street hates Israel, that Muslims across the world despise Israel.
They don't want to make peace with Israel and that if it weren't for Israel, everything would be hunky dory.
Barack Obama bought that line, too.
I mean, he said in his speeches that the core of all Middle East politics was the Israel-Palestinian issue.
Here are the people of Iran saying, no, that's not the core.
You guys are sending money to Hamas and Hezbollah.
That money should be staying here.
That money shouldn't be spent on terrorism.
So when they're chanting death to Palestine, what they are really chanting is death to the regime that is giving money to terrorists all over the world in order to kill Jews.
That's an amazing thing.
And thank God we have an administration now that actually wants to foment this sort of uprising.
Because that's what it's going to take.
It's going to take, actually, an uprising in Iran.
What it really is going to take, realistically speaking, is somebody inside the Iranian military who agrees with a lot of the protesters and launches some sort of coup.
Because if not, then the mullahs will just mow these people down in the streets, unfortunately.
Unfortunately.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So this is a truly amazing story.
California is now considering creating a fake news advisory group in order to monitor information posted and spread on social media.
Not a joke.
This is according to CBS Local, Sacramento.
Senate Bill 1424 would require the California Attorney General to create an advisory committee by April 1, 2019.
It would need to consist of at least one person from the DOJ, representative from social media providers, civil liberties advocates, and First Amendment scholars.
The advisory group would be required by the California state government To study how false information is spread online and to come up with a plan for social media platforms to fix the problem.
The left is fully convinced that the reason they've been losing elections is because of fake news.
It can't just be that people think their arguments are garbage.
It has to be fake news.
It has to be that people are being deceived.
And thus, we need to regulate speech in just the way that this New York Times op-ed writing Yale professor was saying that we need to regulate speech.
The state of California wants to regulate speech too.
State of California has already moved in this direction with their educational policy.
They're attempting to move in this direction with their non-discrimination policy, suggesting that if people like me say in the state of California that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, that we ought to be fined.
Now they're cracking down even harder.
They want to have the government determine what is fake news or not.
It's hard to think of anything more Orwellian than the government determining what sort of news ought to be covered.
That is deeply Orwellian stuff.
If Donald Trump were doing it, the left would be crying Nazi right now.
But it's the state of California doing it, so we have to pretend this is all about tolerance and diversity.
How radical is this bill?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a left-wing group, opposed the bill, calling it flawed and misguided.
The group argued the measure would make the government and advisory group responsible for deciding what is true and what is false.
And it points out the First Amendment prevents content-based restrictions, even if statements are admittedly false.
So, it's just another indicator that when it comes to gaining political power, the left has no compunction about using governmental censorship in order to achieve their ends.
That's why, as much as I dislike the incivility that is evident in our politics right now, I'm not going to pretend that left and right are exactly the same across the spectrum in the way that George Will and David Brooks seem to want to right now.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest updates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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