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June 27, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:55
The Democrats Swing Far Left | Ep. 569
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The Democrats embrace their socialist id, incivility becomes the word of the day, and the Supreme Court strikes a really harsh blow against public sector unions.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Wow, lots and lots and lots of news today and we'll get to all of it first.
I have to remind you that on July 2nd we are going to be having a special event and it's going to be awesome.
We're going to be having another episode of the God King Jeremy Boring hosting the Daily Wire backstage and we're going to be joined by Jordan Peterson celebrating Independence Day a couple of days early 7 p.m.
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Basically, that's the pitch that I'm making here.
So, we'll get to the news in just a second.
First, I also want to remind you that the economy is a volatile place, particularly when President Trump is pushing tariffs that could have significant impact On the future of the U.S.
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OK, so the big news of the day is the Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that does serious, serious damage to public sector unions all across the nation.
And the reason is because public sector unions are awful.
OK, we need to explain a little bit about the background of public sector unions and why they are bad and how this corrupt bargain works between public sector unions and state governments, as well as the federal government.
So here's the way that usually works.
In order for you to be certified as a public sector union, or as a union generally, that is negotiating on behalf of an entire block, an entire industry, you have to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board.
The National Labor Relations Board decides that your entire industry now fits within a bargaining unit, and that if a majority of that bargaining unit votes to join a union, Then that union now represents the entirety of that bargaining unit.
So let's say that you are a welder and you're contracting with the federal government.
So the NLRB will determine that you are part of a sector and that sector can now be represented by the AFL-CIO, for example, if they choose to, if half of the people in that unit Choose to join the AFL-CIO.
Vote to be represented by the union.
Then, the union gets to represent that entire collective bargaining unit against the federal or state government.
And that's the way this typically works.
In the state of Illinois, they passed a law that permits public employees to unionize.
If a majority of the employees in a bargaining unit vote to be represented by a union, that union is designated as the exclusive representative of all the employees, even those who do not join.
Now, the way this becomes very corrupt, obviously, is, number one, public sector unions are a massive drain on fiscal resources because they're not bargaining with the boss of a company or if all the members of daily wire decided to unionize and then they decided to bargain with us the leadership at the company we have an interest in bargaining against them we have an interest in saving money you have two adversarial sides and then they come to an agreement because the growth of the business as well as the the necessity of paying workers what they need we we all want to get to the same point but we're coming at it from opposite sides if
If you're a member of a public sector union and you are bargaining with legislators, legislators have no interest in saving money.
Legislators are much more interested in making some sort of deal with the union such that the union gets paid a lot of money and then the union then dumps a bunch of money back into electing those legislators again.
Legislators don't care because it ain't their money.
They're third parties.
It's your money and my money that are being represented by legislators.
So there's this corrupt bargain that goes on where unions get certified as a union, and then they go and bargain with a bunch of legislators, and then legislators hand them a bunch of money, and those unions take some of that money and they pour it back into the campaigns of those legislators to get them re-elected.
It's this very, very corrupt cycle.
It's happened in California for decades.
While Illinois has a very similar law, Under the Illinois law, the real problem is not just that the union can be certified on behalf of an entire bargaining unit, which, again, I have no idea how that's even constitutional in the first place.
The National Labor Relations Act, in my view, is deeply unconstitutional.
I do not see how I, as an individual worker, should be co-opted into the bargaining of a collective unit.
This is not legislation.
This is not me voting for politicians who are going to install a minimum wage.
A group of people in my particular sector who may not represent a majority of the population voting for a union that is supposedly going to represent me even though I don't want them representing me.
It is removing my personal ability to bargain on my own behalf for a better job or a better pay or a better raise.
It's removing that ability from me on the basis of a vote inside of a collective bargaining unit decided by the federal or state government.
And that seems to me deeply unconstitutional in the first place, but even assuming that part's constitutional, the question before the Supreme Court that was decided today was, can all of those people who did not actually want to join the union be forced to pay the union?
So according to the law in Illinois, only the union may engage in collective bargaining.
Individual employees may not be represented by another agent or negotiate directly with their employer.
So my rights have been removed, right?
The union itself is the only unit that can now bargain with the government.
If I'm a really good employee of the federal or state government, then I can't bargain with my employer.
I can't go in and say I want a raise because they already have a union contract and violates the union contract for them to give me a raise.
This is one of the reasons why teachers unions are so terrible because great teachers can't bargain with the school for higher pay or for a raise and great schools can't fire bad teachers because of these union contracts.
Non-members, and this is the part that has become controversial, non-members are required to pay what is generally called an agency fee, which is a percentage of full union dues.
Under Abood v. Detroit, which was a decision made back in 1977, this fee may cover union expenditures attributable to those activities germane to the union's collective bargaining activities, but may not cover the union's political and ideological projects.
The problem, of course, is that unions use this money in fungible fashion.
Is it germane to politics?
To push Democrats?
Kind of.
Is it germane to the functioning of a union to push particular legislators?
The argument can certainly be made.
The union sets the agency fee annually and then sends non-members a notice explaining the basis for the fee and the breakdown of expenditures.
Here, in this particular case, it was 78% of full union dues.
Okay, so to recapitulate, there are several issues that have to do with unions.
Only one was decided today.
So issue number one is, should unions be given the power to bargain collectively on behalf of non-members?
I think the answer should be no to that.
It seems to me that unions can be just fine if everybody wants to join the union.
In fact, the whole point of having a union is that people want to join it.
But if you have to kneecap people, if you have to use the government in order to force people to be represented by a union, I don't see how that doesn't violate the Constitution.
That was not what was at issue, though.
Even assuming that unions have the capacity to represent people who do not want to be members, then there was a law on the books in Illinois, it's in California, it's in a bunch of other states in the union.
This law suggested that even if I did not want to join the union, but the union is now bargaining on my behalf, I now am forced by the government to pay that union.
So the government now becomes the enforcer for the union.
You see how corrupt this is?
The government forces me to pay money to a union so that the union can pay members of the government to cut it a better deal.
This is all deeply, deeply corrupt.
So there's a member of the union, a non-member of the union actually, a state employee, whose unit was represented by a public sector union in Illinois.
And he refused to join the union because he doesn't like a lot of its positions, including those taken in collective bargaining.
And he was paying something like 500 bucks a year to this union, even though he didn't want to join the union in the first place.
So, the Supreme Court held today, under the decision written by Justice Alito and joined by Kennedy and Gorsuch and Thomas and Roberts, this decision held that this part of the law is no longer applicable.
That you cannot force non-members of unions to pay union dues.
Which seems like an obvious thing.
I didn't want to join the union.
Why should I be forced to pay the dues?
So the counter argument to that that's been made by folks on the left is, well, what happens when all the members of the union decide not to pay the union?
They decide they don't want to be represented by the union anymore because they don't want to pay the union dues and they are quote-unquote free riders, right?
Now they're getting benefits of union representation without having to pay the fee.
And the answer to that is, so what?
So what?
The answer to that is, then the union should do a better job of earning its members' loyalty and earning its members' money.
It shouldn't be the government stepping in and forcing people to pay the union when you don't want to pay the union in the first place.
So Justice Alito delivers the opinion of the court and he writes, under Illinois law, public employees are forced to subsidize a union even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bargaining and related activities.
We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of non-members by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.
And this, of course, is exactly right.
And Justice Alito goes on to explain why all of the foolishness that is being pushed by the left on these union issues is unconstitutional.
He says, The First Amendment, made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, forbids abridgment of the freedom of speech.
We've held time and again that freedom of speech, quote, includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.
The right to eschew association for expressive purposes is likewise protected.
As Justice Jackson memorably put it, if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned.
Suppose, for example, the state of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues, say the platform of one of the major political parties.
No one we trust would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.
Perhaps because such compulsion so plainly violates the Constitution, most of our free speech cases have involved restrictions on what can be said rather than the law's compelling speech.
But measures compelling speech are at least as threatening.
And it goes on to discuss the fact that these unions are essentially compelling speech.
He says that the dissent in this particular case proposes that we apply what amounts to a rational basis review, that is, that we ask only whether a government employer could reasonably believe that the exaction of agency fees serves his interest.
This form of minimal scrutiny is foreign to our free speech jurisprudence, and we reject it here.
So then they go through the Abood decision, which is a 1977 decision, saying that the state can compel people to pay money to unions.
And just Alito destroys it.
He says there were basically two rationales that were used by the court in Abood to suggest that unions could actually be forced to, that non-union members could be forced to pay agency fees.
Okay, argument number one was labor peace.
Right?
So, what the hell is labor peace?
That's a stupid argument in the first place.
Labor peace is apparently the idea that if you are not forced to pay an agency fee to the union, then you may instead go join another union, and then that other union will be certified and a different union will be decertified.
And the answer to that is, so the hell what?
Why should you be locked into a union forever?
That's idiotic.
And Alito debunks that fully.
I'll explain what Alito has to say in just a second.
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Labor peace is called monopoly.
If you suggested on the other side of the aisle that employers should be able to get together and decide wages because what we really need is wage peace, everybody would understand that amounts to collusion and monopoly.
But when a union does it and the government props up that union, this is supposed to lead to labor peace, which is just ridiculous.
The only capacity for unions to strike is when they have a monopoly.
You want to destroy the labor market, all you have to do is have monopoly of unions, because then those unions can walk off the job, particularly if they are contracted with public sector employers.
You've seen this.
You've actually seen police officers walk off the job and firefighters walk off the job, which makes cities completely unworkable.
You've had sanitation strikes.
They completely destroy cities, basically.
All of this does not create labor peace.
It creates labor warfare.
But the left thinks that labor peace amounts to labor should be forced into a position of bargaining thanks to a union.
So Justice Alito destroys this.
this.
He says, the federal employment experience is illustrative.
Under federal law, a union chosen by a majority vote is designated as the exclusive representative of all the employees, but federal law does not permit agency fees.
Nevertheless, nearly a million federal employees, about 27% of the federal workforce, are union members.
The situation in the Postal Service is similar.
Although permitted to choose an exclusive representative, Postal Service employees are not required to pay an agency fee, and about 400,000 are union members.
In other words, It is now undeniable that labor peace can be readily achieved through means significantly less restrictive than the assessment of agency fees.
Okay, so labor peace is a stupid argument.
Then, there's the better argument.
The better argument is the risk of free riders, right?
So this is the idea that you're going to benefit from the union bargaining on your behalf, but you're not going to pay the union.
So the union doesn't make the money, but they're bargaining on your behalf, supposedly out of the goodness of their hearts.
So here is what Alito says about that.
He says, In other words, I didn't want to join this union.
kai endorse this reasoning contending that agency fees are needed to prevent non-members from enjoying the benefits of union representation without shouldering the cost petitioner is the guy who's suing strenuously objects to this free rider labor he argues he's not a free rider on a bus headed for a destination he wishes to reach but is more like a person shanghai for an unwanted voyage in other words i didn't want to join this union i don't want them bargaining on my behalf and now you're forcing me to pay them so how the hell am i a free rider i'm not the i'm I don't want to pay them because I don't want to be part of the union.
If I could get away from the union, I would do it.
And Alito says, and this is the telling point, he says, suppose that a particular group lobbies or speaks out on behalf of what it thinks are the needs of senior citizens or veterans or physicians.
Take just a few examples.
Could the government require that all seniors, veterans or doctors pay for that service, even if they object?
It has never been thought that this is permissible.
And this, of course, is exactly right.
Again, just because a group says that it speaks on behalf of a broader group does not mean that it should be able to leverage the government into forcing those people to pay that group.
Now, the left is going nuts over this decision.
And in just a second, I'm going to explain why it is that the left is losing its mind over this decision.
The left believes that this is going to destroy public sector unions.
The left truly believes that this decision, now that people are not forced to pay the unions, is going to destroy the public sector union wholesale.
That basically people will stop paying the unions, the unions will run out of money, and then the unions will no longer have a monopoly on labor, and it will destroy the unions as they stand.
The answer to that is, okay, so?
Really, that's the answer.
Because it is forbidden to kneecap people to force them to join a union.
Pointing the government gun at people and forcing them to pay a union is no better.
So, if the unions can't provide services and benefits that make people want to join the union, that is their problem.
The truth is that the American law in states and the federal level have been stacked in favor of public sector unions for a very long time and it has corrupted our entire system of government.
Unions take more than $3.5 billion a year from public sector union members.
They spend billions of dollars a year on politics.
People are always talking about money and politics on the left.
They're always talking about these big corporations.
Ooh, the evil corporations that are spending money to lobby politicians and giving money to politicians.
Folks like Cenk Aygar are constantly making this case after taking millions of dollars from outside funders to prop up their companies.
Sure, you know, all of this is... Corporate money is bad.
We know corporate money is bad, but...
The truth is, the corporate money pales in comparison to what public sector unions have been spending on politics for a very long time.
Unions spend a ton of money on politics.
They spend a ton of money on politics because they are bribing the public officials with whom they will have to bargain.
So, when people are screaming and crying about the unions not being able to force people to pay the money, understand the reason they're upset about this is because they believe that people do not want to voluntarily join unions.
If they wanted to voluntarily join unions, then they would go ahead and voluntarily join unions.
Now, the way the left is playing this is that the Supreme Court in the last several days over the course of several decisions, the travel ban decision and the religious freedom decision, that they are now cutting against left-wing interest groups.
What they're really cutting against is non-legal justification for political ends.
That's really what the Supreme Court has done here.
The left has this very perverse view of the Supreme Court that the Supreme Court exists to green-light and rubber-stamp the leftist agenda.
The Supreme Court is there to benefit particular populations of people that the left wishes to benefit.
So the left believes that in the travel ban case, the question is not whether the president does have executive authority under current law to actually use national security as an excuse to shut down immigration from five predominantly Muslim countries.
They say, no, no, no, that's religious discrimination.
That's because Trump hates Muslims.
Even though 92% of the world's Muslims can still enter the United States because they're not coming from these particular countries, this is obviously because the Supreme Court, like President Trump, hates Muslims.
It can't be that the status of the law requires them to actually look at the law.
It must be that they hate Muslims.
And then, when it comes to religious freedom, it can't be that the Supreme Court looked at the status of the First Amendment and said, you cannot compel people to act in artistic fashion on behalf of a group that you like.
You can't do that by force of government.
They say, no, no, that's because the Supreme Court must hate gay people.
And then when it comes to this particular case, it must be that the Supreme Court hates poor people.
The Supreme Court hates unions.
The Supreme Court hates blue-collar workers.
It can't be that the Supreme Court looks at the First Amendment and says, how in the hell can you possibly justify forcing someone at point of gun to pay an organization they don't want to join?
Instead, it must be they hate unions.
And it's this sort of shortcut thinking that leads to a breakdown in civil politics in our society.
We're going to get to the civility in politics in just a second, because the Democrats are moving radically to the left, and it's happening incredibly quickly.
But it is this mentality that is leading to that polarization.
Every time the left sees an outcome from the right, every time they see an outcome that is based on law, based on neutral principles of law, that does not cut in their favor, they immediately attribute bad motivation to the party that is pushing that particular opinion.
So if I say that the First Amendment suggests that you cannot force me to join a union, or you cannot force me to pay fees into a union, their suggestion is, I'm only saying that because I hate blue-collar people.
It's always they go directly to the character attack.
It's never that they stand and say, well, you know, maybe this person has a little bit of justification for their point of view.
Maybe it is that they believe in competing values like freedom of speech above compelled payment to collective bargaining.
They can't actually credit the other side with any sort of logic or decency.
Instead, they immediately go to the Supreme Court is filled with a bunch of bigots, Justice Gorsuch, Must be a big hit.
If only we had Merrick Garland there, then he would have voted in favor of our favorite constituencies.
If you believe that the purpose of the Supreme Court is to back your favorite constituencies instead of to enforce the law as it stands, to adjudicate the law as it stands, then I would suggest that you are perverting the cause of the Supreme Court.
So would Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the Federalist Papers that the minute that the judiciary begins to substitute will for judgment, it loses its raison d'etre.
There's no reason for it to exist in the first place.
So, you know, the Supreme Court decision is quite good, and makes a lot of sense, but the left is not going to accept it because the left has moved radically to the left.
Now, in just a second, I'm going to explain how radically the left has moved.
I mean, it is pretty astonishing, and we have some more great evidence of that over the last 24 hours.
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If you're an addict, So, when we talk about the radical move to the left by the Democratic Party, it is obvious from yesterday's elections that this is the case.
So when we talk about the radical move to the left by the Democratic Party, it is obvious from yesterday's elections that this is the case.
So yesterday, a guy named Joseph Crowley was ousted.
He was expected to challenge Nancy Pelosi for the speakership.
So how old is the Democratic Party?
Nancy Pelosi is 78 years old.
Joe Crowley, who is 58 years old, is just slightly younger than my dad.
Joe Crowley was seen as the heir apparent to Nancy Pelosi.
So he was the up-and-comer.
He was the fresh face, the 58-year-old.
Well, he was ousted yesterday in a Democratic primary by a woman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is 28, a first-time candidate, and an open member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
So she's a Bernie Sanders Socialist, and she is a former bartender.
She's bartending until about five minutes ago.
She's a graduate of Boston College, or Boston University, rather, in 2011, and she is wildly left.
When I say she's a leftist, I mean she is an insane leftist.
Not only does she believe that Israel is genocidal, she also favors Medicare for all, abolishing immigration and customs enforcement.
She suggests that there should be a job for everyone provided by the government.
She believes that there should be a minimum wage of $15.
She says, quote, when it comes to power, we can't just be tempted by power and money alone.
What we need to do is be bold enough and courageous enough to choose leadership that takes no corporate money and advances health care, education and housing for all.
So this is another one of her programs is housing for all.
So she is a full scale redistributive socialist.
And she's really, really radical.
The reason that she won in the district is because nobody came out to vote.
Only 5% of registered voters, eligible voters in this district, actually voted in this primary.
It was on a really weird day.
There were only a grand total of about 27,000 votes in the primary total.
She won about 17,000 of those.
Also, Joe Crowley did not take his district particularly seriously.
He'd won 10 consecutive terms, so he didn't spend any time in that district.
Nonetheless, This is the dawning of a new era for the Democratic Party.
They've fully embraced Bernie Sanders' socialism and Maxine Waters' nuttiness.
Here is this new hero of the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Here she was today after winning the primary.
She'll win the general too because this is a heavily Democratic district.
Claiming that ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, is running black sites on the border.
Black sites being like CIA sites set up in Jordan to torture people.
She thinks that's what's happening on the American border because she's a crazy person.
I think that ICE is right there as a part of it.
Its extrajudicial nature is baked into the structure of the agency and that is why they're able to get away with black sites at our border, with the separation of children.
We are committing human rights abuses on this border and separating children from their families.
Okay, so one of the reasons that Joe Crowley lost this election also, number one, he wasn't radical enough for the district, but number two, one of the things that's been happening in his district is that he's moved to what is now a majority-minority district.
It's a heavily Hispanic district, and he was one of the last remaining Democrats living in a heavily minority district who was a white guy.
So there's been a real shift in racial demographics in this particular district, and that was reflected in this election as well.
She is a deep radical, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She will be treated as an up-and-comer.
She'll be treated as the new heroine of the left, of course, because she's a pretty young woman, obviously.
And also, she is talented at what she does.
So, I mean, she's a good face for the Democratic Party, if you like socialism.
If socialism is her thing, she's a much more attractive candidate on every possible level than Joe Crowley, except for the fact that she is a radical, insane person.
So here she is talking some more in a debate about ICE and trying to go after Joe Crowley's folks, trying to suggest that Joe Crowley is not extreme enough on ICE.
If this organization is as fascist as you have called it, and you have said it's fascist, then why don't you adopt the stance to eliminate it?
This is a moral problem, and your response has been to apply more paperwork to this situation, to have ICE collect more information on immigrants.
And that puts our communities in danger, and it also conveys a profound misunderstanding of how we should be approaching this problem.
She wasn't the only radical who was elected last night.
Ben Jealous, who's the former head of the NAACP, won Maryland's Democratic primary for governor on Tuesday, and he promised to deliver an agenda that makes college free, legalizes marijuana, and raises the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour.
So the Bernie Sanders full-on Medicare-for-all Legalized marijuana, raising the state's minimum wage.
I don't care about legalizing marijuana all that much, but making college free and raising the state minimum wage, all of this stuff is really radical stuff.
And you're seeing a significant move, a really heavy move, toward the far left among Democrats.
Now, that clip that I just played you of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showing righteous indignation against Joe Crowley because he doesn't want to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, because he doesn't want to abolish the people who actually enforce the border.
You know, that sort of righteous indignation is now what animates the Democratic Party.
It makes the Democratic Party feel special.
It makes them feel as though they are authentic.
This is one of the big problems in American politics generally right now, and this is true right and left, is that people are mistaking decency for insincerity.
That if you are a decent person, and you don't want to go after people hammer and tongs, and you are not demonstrating sufficient passion, that means that you are not authentic.
Really authentic people are people who can't keep their emotions in check.
If you're truly authentic, you're the kind of person who pounds the table, right?
You're the kind of person who looks across at your opponent and yells at them.
That's true authenticity.
And that's how we know that you're a decent, authentic person and you're not just a political phony, is the more you yell and the more you scream and the more emotional you are, the more we believe that you're an authentic human being.
Well, I think that that is about as stupid a policy as you can have when it comes to voting for candidates.
Unfortunately, it's being adopted on both sides of the aisle.
But the Democrats have fully embraced this stuff and they're moving radically to the left politically as well.
President Trump said yesterday the Democrats have become the party of Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi.
There's no question Nancy Pelosi is now the moderate in the Democratic Party.
Nancy Pelosi is now representing the moderate wing of the Democratic Party because the up and comers are all Bernie Sanders acolytes.
They're only good at one thing.
What's that term?
Resist!
It's the party of Maxine Waters.
Do you believe her?
No, no.
No, no.
This has become the party of Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi.
That's how it is.
There's no question he's correct about this.
Of course that's right.
Of course it is.
Now, I'll say one thing President Trump was not correct about is that after Joe Crowley lost his race last night, President Trump tweeted this out.
He tweeted out, uh, wow, big Trump hater Congressman Joe Crowley, who many expected was going to take Nancy Pelosi's place, just lost his primary election.
In other words, he's out.
This is a big one nobody saw happening.
Perhaps he should have been nicer and more respectful to his president.
Pretty solid guess that Joe Crowley did not lose because he wasn't nice enough to President Trump.
He lost to an open socialist who thinks Trump should be impeached, so he's not correct about that.
But he's certainly right that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Maxine Waters crowd, these are the future of the Democratic Party.
That's obvious.
The Democratic Party has been radicalizing for a long time.
You want to know where Trump came from?
It's the radicalization of the Democratic Party and the reactionary nature of the right in response to all of that.
Now I want to talk in greater fashion about the exacerbation of this radicalization among Democrats, first, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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So the radicalism of the Democratic Party has been in the works for quite a while.
And more evidence of this.
So Keith Ellison, who's currently the number two at the DNC, he nearly won the top slot as head of the Democratic National Committee.
He's a radical with long-standing connections to racist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.
He came out yesterday, he compared the travel ban decision by the Supreme Court saying that President Trump has the authority, in fact, to cut down on immigration from countries that are heavily ensconced in terror.
It includes five Muslim countries, but the countries that the travel ban includes are North Korea, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Chad, and Venezuela.
So not even all Muslim countries.
He says that this is the equivalent of the Dred Scott decision.
The Dred Scott decision said that black people were not humans.
That's how radical Keith Ellison is when he makes this comment.
The Supreme Court in the 1850s said that it was okay to own a black person.
That was a Dred Scott decision.
That decision hit the dustbin of history.
So did Plessy v. Ferguson.
So did Korematsu.
And this one will, too.
I'm telling you, discrimination and racism and hatred and religious bigotry is never going to be winning in the end.
Now, my favorite part of that is that he says religious bigotry and racism and hatred will never win in the end, except that he's a giant Louis Farrakhan fan.
Jake Tapper had on Keith Ellison yesterday and it got really rough.
OK, when you're too far left for when Jake Tapper can destroy you this easily because you're this far left.
Maybe your party has a problem.
Here's Keith Ellison, number two at the DNC, who, by the way, has worn shirts that say, I hate borders, right?
The entire Democratic Party has now embraced the consensus, or at least large swaths of the Democratic Party.
I don't want to exaggerate.
Large swaths of the Democratic Party have embraced the idea that every legal immigrant in the country ought to be remanded out of custody and released into the general population.
They've moved far, far, far to the left.
Here's Jake Tapper going after Keith Ellison for his associations with Louis Farrakhan.
This is the number two at the DNC.
The Washington Post fact checker did give you four Pinocchios about that.
That's just true.
Jake, they were wrong.
They were wrong.
Jake, I have not... It's untrue, Jake.
I'm sorry.
And, you know, I'm dismayed that that's why you called me on your show today.
Okay, let's be real about this.
If any Republican were to have the sort of associations that Louis Farrakhan has, they would be called out every single day and every Republican would be made to disassociate from that Republican as well.
The Democrats have moved radically to the left, so far so, that the incivility of the Democratic Party, as I said yesterday, I think that there are a couple of people in the Democratic Party who are trying to hold back the tide.
Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, they've been saying that incivility, mob action, this stuff is inappropriate for Democrats to pursue.
They're gonna hit the dustbin of history.
Those people are not loved by their base.
Their base is not into it.
Their base is Occupy Wall Street.
Their base is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slamming the desk and suggesting that ICE is running black sites.
That is their base right now.
And you can see this pretty clearly.
Linda Sarsour, for example.
She goes after Chuck Schumer, right?
Linda Sarsour, who has in the past supported terrorists.
Linda Sarsour says that civility is wrong and Chuck Schumer is the problem.
Martin Luther King warned us about people like Chuck Schumer.
He said it wasn't the Ku Klux Klan and the white citizen counselors who are the obstacles towards justice.
It was the people calling for, quote, civility and people that were telling us when to protest, at what time, and how to protest.
Okay, so MLK, according to Linda Sarsour, would oppose civility.
Okay, his protests were not uncivil.
His protests were protests.
There's a difference between a protest and civil disobedience and you going into a restaurant and shouting at people until they leave and then following them to another restaurant and then shouting at them until they leave.
But the left, the hardcore left base, really believes this stuff.
They really do, right?
MSNBC's Chris Hayes, who is not unrepresentative of the base, he says it's actually important to harass public officials.
In a real deep sense, like, hectoring?
Yelling at public officials?
I mean, I covered all the tea party town halls in 2009.
That was a festival of yelling at public officials.
And in the same way, that's actually an important right to preserve.
Okay, that's not true.
That just isn't true.
I went to tea parties in 2009, 2010.
It was generally protests that were held at parks.
If they went to places with public officials, They were standing outside the Capitol building, and they were yelling as public officials came down the steps.
They weren't going into restaurants and yelling at people.
The conflation of those two things is astonishing, but it shows you that the Democratic Party has embraced its id.
They really have embraced their id.
This is why Sarah Huckabee Sanders now requires Secret Service protection.
There are a bunch of members of the Trump administration who now need Secret Service protection, specifically because of the insanity of the left in all of this.
Here's some tape from yesterday that was making the rounds.
Elaine Chao, who is the wife of Mitch McConnell, she is coming out of some sort of dinner party at a private residence, and she starts being harassed by a bunch of protesters who decide that they're going to harass her.
Again, if this were a bunch of Republican men harassing Nancy Pelosi, all we would hear about is toxic masculinity for three weeks.
But it's a bunch of Democratic men harassing Harassing Elaine Chao, an Asian woman.
So we won't hear about any of that.
Plus, I mean, I guess because they're Democrats, we can't assume their gender or anything.
So here is the tape of that.
Okay, so that's great.
You have mobs who are standing outside private residences now to harass Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao.
All of this is going to go really well.
I just can't see how this goes bad in any way.
Civility is a thing of the past.
It's been a thing of the past for a while.
So people are blaming this on Trump.
People are suggesting that Trump has contributed to incivility.
I'll admit that Trump has contributed to incivility, but to pretend that Trump is the source of incivility is to ignore the last 20 years of American politics.
It just is not accurate at all.
I remember Bush-Hitler.
I remember the left describing George W. Bush as a monster and a genocidal maniac.
I remember.
Barack Obama said to a group of CEOs that if they didn't do what he wanted, he's all that stood between them and the pitchforks and the torches.
That's something Barack Obama actually said.
He's the guy who said, don't bring a knife to a gunfight, politically speaking.
It was Joe Biden who suggested that Mitt Romney wanted to put y'all back in chains about a bunch of black folks.
All of this Does not contribute to an era of civility, but authenticity is now connected deeply within civility.
The more authentic you are, the more uncivil you are.
This can't go anywhere good.
So we are losing civility, and we are losing the concept of reasoned politics in general.
Instead, we're just supposed to shout at the moon about what we wish politics would bring to us, and then, magically, it will descend upon us.
We've reached the when you wish upon a star moment in American politics.
So in just a second, I'm going to explain what I mean by that.
The when-you-wish-upon-a-star moment in American politics is basically the Pinocchio moment where when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.
All you have to do is shout at the moon and all of your dreams will descend upon you.
You can see this a little bit among Republicans who believe that all of their problems will immediately be solved if President Trump simply does what they want.
This is why there are so many Republicans who are willing to go along with President Trump's idiotic tariffs.
But you see it a lot more among Democrats.
So among Democrats, the idea is if they shout at the moon, and if they wish that President Trump were not president, and if they yell, and if they scream, and if they make trouble, and if they confront public officials, and if they bang the table hard enough, then everything they want will magically come to fruition.
OK, this is not correct.
And not only is it not correct, it's not good for our politics.
Politics was always about rational reason debate, or it should have been, right?
This is what the founders believed.
The founders believed that it would be interest juxtaposed against interest, checking interest, and that the only way to hash any of that stuff out was to have these reasonable, rational conversations.
Those reasonable, rational conversations have gone completely by the wayside in favor of people screaming at the moon.
The RNC just highlighted this among Democrats.
They cut a really fantastic ad.
It's the best ad they've cut in years regarding Democrats pushing violence and extremism.
And here's what it sounded like.
A few years ago, ideas that we talked about were thought to be fringe ideas, radical ideas, religious ideas.
Those ideas are now mainstream.
I just don't even know why there aren't uprisings all over the country.
Maxine Waters, of course.
- At a gas station, you get up and you create a crowd.
And you push back on them.
And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.
- Do something about your dad's immigration practices, you feckless c*****. - What's Uncle Tom but for white women - Of course, Samantha Bee.
- Disappoint other white women. - And this is Michelle Wolfe.
There's Bill Maher.
That's Johnny Depp.
economy.
That's Bill Maher.
When was the last time an actor has...
That's Johnny Depp.
I have thought and all thought about blowing up the White House.
And there, of course, a picture of Snoop Dogg shooting an actor dressed as President Trump.
And then the ad concludes, the left in 2018 unhinged.
Alright, this is a, it's a very good ad and it's also true.
Now, I assume that the left could cut a similar ad about people on the right saying similarly ridiculous things, although I think that it wouldn't be quite as prominent members of the right saying such ridiculous things.
The difference is that the Democrats have claimed for a long time they're the nice guys.
They're not the nice guys anymore.
They've embraced their radical side.
And what we are seeing is a complete shift in the Democratic Party away from a liberal party and toward a hard left party that wants to restrict its opponents, that believes that the Supreme Court should be a tool of its own politics, that believes that you should be compelled to believe everything that they believe, and believes that violence is not necessarily out of bounds.
Now, this is going to go some really bad places.
It's going to lead to a reactionary side.
So, Laura Loomer, who is kind of a nutty human being in my perspective, Laura Loomer, she confronted Maxine Waters.
Now, I will say that I think that turnabout is fair play when it comes to Maxine Waters.
She's calling on people to be pushed on.
I think that creating a certain sense of mutually assured destruction, that this is not the country we want, so you better figure this out, that's not Unwarranted.
So Laura Loomer confronts Maxine Waters in public, and here's how Maxine Waters responds to somebody doing to her exactly what she has suggested be done to other Republicans.
Do you think it's civil to call for the harassment and harassment?
Please come to my office and sit down and talk with me.
No, I'm asking you right now.
Will you please come to my office?
Are we supposed to sit at the back of the bus?
Are we supposed to sit at the back of the bus?
This elevator is members only.
This elevator is members only.
Are we supposed to sit at the back of the bus?
Ma'am, it's a ma'am.
Ma'am, it's a member's elevator.
And there's Maxine Waters grinning as Laura Loomer is pushed off the elevator.
But the irony there is that Maxine Waters says, why don't you come up to my office and talk civilly about it?
That's exactly what Maxine Waters is telling people not to do.
Maxine Waters is telling people not to do that.
So when Laura Loomer does that, I can't say that Laura Loomer is wrong to do that when she is just doing what Maxine Waters has specifically asked Her to do.
OK, so so all of this is to say that what we are watching right now is a polarization in politics that simply is unhealthy and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
I don't think that this is something we're on the verge of curing.
I don't think a mass breakout of civility is in the cards.
I just think that we're too polarized as a country and we are too in love with the idea that anger is authenticity to let it go.
And certainly it's not being helped by the by the political situation we now find ourselves in when judges are really, the federal judge has now ordered the Trump administration to basically release all illegal immigrants.
As long as our politics continues to be this polarized, there can't be any rational discussion to be had at all.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate and then we'll do a little Bible talk because it's Wednesday and I do hope that A certain level of Judeo-Christian values can return to our public discourse.
So, we'll start with the thing I like.
So this is really funny.
Tracy Ullman, the comedian, she did a little skit for the BBC in which she mocked leftists, woke leftists.
This is a woke leftist therapy session.
And it's actually quite funny.
How did you guys get on with the homework that I set you?
Guys is no especially inclusive term.
Not now, Jamie.
By homework, do you mean having to watch that old people's sitcom?
It's called Friends, Lily.
And you were supposed to watch it and enjoy it.
Well, I tried, but I found it deeply problematic.
Why?
Well, there's the homophobia, the transphobia, the fatism and the slut-shaming.
And could Chandler be any more annoying?
You can't go through your 20s worrying about every aspect of everything.
You have to pick your battles.
And just remember that it doesn't really matter, because by the time you hit your 30s, most of you are going to be massively right-wing anyway.
Have any of you started to think that maybe poor people don't deserve benefits?
No.
Well, watch out for that one, because that's how it starts.
Look, I understand this has all been a bit much for some of you, so let's take five and have a hobnob.
I find the word hobnob very phallocentric.
I don't think Tracy Ullman's a right winger, okay?
Even members of the left now are beginning to recognize how crazy the left is.
This is the good news.
The good news is that if there's a new consensus built, it's going to be built on the back of the insane.
So the insanity of some folks on the right, the insanity of a huge swath of the left, this is going to drive a lot of people to say, you know what, maybe you ought to have rational conversations instead of screaming and tweeting at each other.
At least that's what I hope.
That's my hope, is that we can have these rational conversations, because I think that we can, you know, if we can't come to consensus, at least we can clarify our positions through rational conversation, as opposed to getting up in each other's grills, shouting at each other, suggesting that because we disagree on the nature of government, that means that we're inherently bad human beings.
I think that that can be hopefully stopped.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So I have to mention, if I'm talking about incivility and stupidity on the left, I also have to mention it when it happens on the right side.
So Chris Cuomo of CNN, he had on Steve King, Representative King from Iowa, whom I know, I think is personally a perfectly nice human being.
But when it comes to his politics, I will say that he does very stupid things politically on a fairly regular basis.
And Chris Cuomo has on Steve King.
Steve King had tweeted out a Nazi sympathizer retweet.
I don't believe that you recognize his values as your own.
But you say, but I won't delete the tweet.
Right.
I don't get it.
It's pretty simple.
It's pretty simple.
I tweeted a Breitbart story.
I didn't tweet a message from him.
I tweeted a Breitbart story.
I'm not deleting that because then you all pile on me and say King had to apologize.
He was wrong.
He knows he's guilty.
I'm not.
I don't feel guilty one bit.
I'm human.
I'm not here to say that you are a neo-nazi, okay?
That you know me better than that.
I'm here to say that you're so caught up in this us versus them thing with the left and the right that you don't want to give ground on even something that you acknowledge is wrong.
Okay, well, here's the truth.
What he should do is delete the tweet, and then he should retweet the Breitbart story if that's what he wants to do.
But, you know, check the counts of people that you're retweeting.
Just don't be so stupid that you retweet neo-nazi accounts and then leave it up.
Come on, come on.
Okay, other things that I hate.
At a rally this week, President Trump went after Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel as well.
And these comedians decided that in order to demonstrate that they were not biased against President Trump and weren't fat comedians, they would do a skit in which they all combined to attack President Trump.
So this is great.
I mean, it is wonderful when comedians basically acknowledge all of their own biases and justify everything President Trump said about them.
It is also demonstrative, I think, of the fact that all of these comedians are so self-centered that they feel the necessity to defend themselves against the president of the United States instead of just saying, listen, I'm a comedian, which is the actual proper response to this.
Instead, they're going to cut a video about basically how much they dislike Trump, mocking Trump right back, because this, look, they're happy when Trump name checks them.
It's their favorite thing.
Hey, little ass.
Hey, lost soul.
What are you up to?
Be a man.
I'll try.
What are you up to?
Oh, I'm busy having no talent.
Did you see Trump's rally last night?
Nope.
Me either.
Heard he said some pretty bad stuff about us.
Really?
That doesn't sound like him.
I heard he said we're all no-talent, low-life, lost souls.
Well, that's not right.
That's Conan.
Hold on.
I'll get him.
Oh, hey, guys.
What's up?
President who?
Trump.
Donald Trump.
The real estate guy who sells steaks?
He's president?
Yeah.
Wow.
How's he doing?
Not so good.
Oh.
Well, guys, give him time, OK?
And remember, please, be civil.
If we're not careful, this thing could start to get ugly.
Hey, I'm about to start shaving my chest.
You guys want to watch?
No, thanks.
Hey, you still up for lunch?
Yeah.
What do you want to eat?
Red Hen?
Red Hen.
Okay, and at the very end, the punchline, of course, is that they want to go eat at a restaurant that threw Sarah Huckabee Sanders out.
Yeah, that's not going to drive the right further into the arms of President Trump.
That's not going to justify President Trump, just everything he said about you.
And bringing the country together by ripping the guy who you say is politically biased and who says you are politically biased.
Just brilliant stuff.
I mean, honestly, if that's the best thing to come up with, and the only funny thing there is Conan, then...
First of all, they should have left Conan in late night.
Let's be real about this.
Conan was much better.
He's much more talented than either of these other two bums.
Okay, time for a quick Bible review.
So, I've decided that instead of haphazardly picking from the Bible, as I have been doing, now I want to go through the Book of Psalms.
So, we're going to pick a psalm every week and we're going to go through it.
So, the first psalm is, I think, rather apt, actually, this week.
It says, Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers.
But whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night, that person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither, whatever they do prospers.
Not so the wicked, they are like chaff, and the wind blows them away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
For the Lord watches over the ways of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.
I'm not sure that one needs all that much commentary, but the tribalism of our American politics has become sitting in the company of mockers, standing in the way that sinners take, walking in step with the wicked.
If you are following people who you know are wicked, if you are engaging in wicked activity just because it is owning the cons or owning the libs, You are not standing with the Lord.
You are not standing with decency.
You are not standing with virtue.
You are standing with a group of people.
Put not your faith in other human beings whose variable standards of morality are going to change with the times and in line with their own particular proclivities.
Instead, stand with truth, stand with virtue, and you won't go wrong.
You won't go wrong.
That doesn't mean you'll have a lot of company.
But it does mean that you will be the tree that is planted by streams of water rather than the chaff that is blown away over time.
Because standing with anything variable means that you're likely to be blown away when the strong winds come.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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