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Aug. 1, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

50:18

Is The Second Civil War Coming? | Ep. 593

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	President Trump does a rally and the media are very, very upset about it.
	A new poll shows Republicans don't actually mind Russian election interference.
	And a federal judge tries to ban 3D gun printing.
	We'll talk about all of it.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	So many things to get to today.
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	Alrighty, so.
	President Trump did another one of his patented rallies last night and it got pretty rowdy because President Trump's rallies are always rowdy.
	Now what's weird to me is that the media are so deeply concerned over this.
	If they were so deeply concerned over President Trump's rallies, maybe they should have stopped covering them soup to nuts when he was doing them in the middle of the election cycle, but Trump loves these things.
	He's a guy who plays to the crowd.
	If you've ever seen President Trump speak in person, this is somebody who really is a performer.
	I used to perform regularly, not just in terms of doing my speaking in front of an audience, but I used to actually perform.
	I was a classical violinist.
	I used to perform in front of audiences.
	And you know when the audience is into it, when the audience isn't into it.
	President Trump is really good at this.
	He is a performer.
	And so he knows when the audience is into it and when they're not.
	And so he does these rallies.
	They are very rowdy and they're very excited.
	And the media went nuts yesterday.
	They were very, very upset about this.
	And I'm at a loss to explain quite why.
	why Brian Schatz, who is a senator from Nevada, he tweeted out, we have no equivalent to the dark carnival that is a Trump rally.
	This is not a thing on the left.
	We just argue about healthcare and climate and sometimes relitigate 2016, but we are not actually out of our minds.
	It's a dark carnival over at the Trump rally.
	I'd just like to point out to Brian Schatz that history did not start yesterday.
	There's this weird syndrome on the left that suddenly all history began with Donald Trump.
	So yesterday we talked about LeBron James saying that Trump has politicized sports, ignoring the fact that sports has been politicized for years and years and years and years, and that the politicization of our culture and our sports, that's one of the reasons why Trump has been so successful, because Trump is a counterpunch to all of that politicization.
	Well, the same thing is true when it comes to the quote-unquote dark carnival of Trump rallies.
	I'm old enough to remember in 2011 after Paul Wellstone, who is a senator from Minnesota, after he died in a plane crash, I'm old enough to remember when Democrats led an actual rally at Paul Wellstone's funeral.
	I mean, like, this is a thing that actually happened.
	Can you please let the people of this state hear your voice on his behalf to keep his legacy alive and help us win this election for Paul Wellstone?
	For Paul Wellstone!
	Will you stand up and keep fighting for social and economic justice?
	Say yes!
	That was October 2002.
	That was at a funeral for Paul Wellstone.
	It was a funeral memorial for Paul Wellstone.
	But don't worry, only Trump has been involved in the dark carnival of rallies.
	Again, that was all the way back in 2002.
	There were a bunch of Republicans sitting in the audience who just went there to pay tribute at the memorial.
	And I remember all these people getting up there and shouting about how Republicans were the worst thing ever at this event in memoriam for a senator who died in a plane crash.
	And, of course, we saw this happen in Tucson after the Gabby Giffords shooting.
	You remember that President Obama traveled down to Tucson where he did a full-on anti-gun rally, like a pep rally against guns, in which he and everybody else tore into the gun culture in the United States.
	It prompted actual mainstream media discussions as to whether this was a memorial service for those who had died in the Tucson shooting or whether it, in fact, was a pep rally.
	Here's, you know, folks in the mainstream media talking about it at the time.
	This is back in 2011.
	Chip, let me ask you, what was the White House expecting?
	And when they had the speech in their hands, walked into the venue, did they know it was going to have this mix of You know, memorial and pep rally?
	I think they probably figured it out when the president walked in and there was a scream that went up like I've never heard before.
	It really was extraordinary because I think, like Roger, I and Robert Gibbs said today, he too, were expecting a much more solemn occasion.
	Okay, and the crowd was going nuts.
	I remember this.
	It was a big story at the time.
	I mean, members of the mainstream media were talking about whether this was appropriate in 2011.
	Don't worry, it's the dark carnival of Trumpism.
	There's been no other dark carnival.
	You know, when I need 600 police officers to escort me into Berkeley, that's not a dark carnival in any way.
	When Antifa is breaking apart actual Trump rallies, when people are showing up and punching people in Trump hats, when Maxine Waters, an actual sitting congressperson, is encouraging people to be confronted in parking lots of gas stations, that's not anything dark.
	That's just how Democrats do politics.
	You know, they're cordial and they're civil.
	That's just, that's how they are.
	But these Republicans, they're really dark.
	Occupy Wall Street.
	I'm old enough to remember when people were occupying parks and rape was actually happening at occasional events of Occupy.
	I'm old enough to remember at the Trump inauguration when people from Antifa were throwing gas canisters and breaking cars.
	But don't worry, nothing dark has ever happened in politics up till now.
	It's one of the great irritants to me is when people are just ignorant of history, not just ignorant of history, but willfully blind to stuff that happened legitimately about five minutes ago in the great timeline of American politics.
	And you see this yesterday from the media as well.
	as well.
	So Jim Acosta was at this Trump rally yesterday and there were a bunch of people who were mocking Jim Acosta and mocking CNN.
	He was very upset about it.
	And if you can't see this, there are people who are flipping off Jim Acosta, flipping off CNN, having a good time kind of flipping off CNN, having a good time kind of booing CNN.
	And Jim Acosta then tweeted out just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa.
	I'm very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some of the conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.
	We should not treat our fellow Americans this way.
	The press is not the enemy.
	I sort of agree with the idea that we shouldn't treat our fellow Americans this way, but I do have a question, which is the same media who apparently didn't care at all when Trump supporters were legitimately being beaten up outside rallies in San Jose, who didn't care when a Trump rally was getting shut down by protesters in Chicago, who didn't, who barely covered for like a week the actual shooting of Congress people, of Republican Congress people at a softball game in Northern Virginia.
	Who don't care when Charles Murray is run off campus at physical risk and a leftist professor actually ends up concussed.
	Right?
	Who undercover all of this stuff.
	But then when it's the media, then it's the end of the world.
	And specifically when it's the left media, it's the end of the world.
	When the Family Research Council is shot up by a guy who read the Southern Poverty Leadership Council, their hate map, and decided to target the FRC, that's not a huge story.
	When the media decide what to cover and what not to cover, and then the only thing they seem to care about covering is themselves, you can't be all that surprised when people are upset.
	Now, that's not an excuse for treating people badly.
	I don't think it's an excuse for standing there and shouting at Jim Acosta and it's First of all, I think you're helping Jim Acosta when you do this.
	It allows Jim Acosta to play victim.
	It allows Jim Acosta to pretend that he is some sort of braveheart character standing out there amidst the slings and arrows.
	It allows Jim Acosta to posture, which is his favorite thing to do.
	Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta so much that I assume when you go to his apartment, Jim Acosta actually has life-sized cutouts of Jim Acosta.
	Just all around, right?
	There's like one standing at the fridge and then there's one at the bathroom holding his razor for him.
	Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta.
	You are actually benefiting, Jim Acosta, when you do this sort of thing.
	But let's be real about this.
	The media pretending that this is something new in American politics and that they have not contributed to this climate is just insane.
	Remember, CNN held a full-scale gun control rally complete with shaming rituals directed at the NRA and Marco Rubio just a few months ago after the Parkland shootings.
	We talked about it at the time.
	It included a reporter who I think is very often good, Jake Tapper, right?
	Jake was doing the interviews.
	And it turned into this pathetic ritual where a bunch of people would get up and suggest that Marco Rubio was equivalent to a mass shooter in a public high school.
	And we're supposed to believe now that everything that's happening is new?
	That demonization in politics is new?
	That mistreatment of media members is new?
	That rallying at inappropriate events is new?
	First of all, this was a Trump rally.
	Okay, like, what did you expect?
	Trump's rallies have been like this from the very beginning.
	They've always been rowdy.
	Nothing has changed.
	I've been critical of the rowdiness of some of Trump's rallies for a very long time, but The media's pretend ignorance about all of this is really kind of galling.
	And that's what people are reacting to.
	And then people wonder, oh, people in the media, why do they dislike us so much?
	We're just here covering the facts.
	We're just here reporting.
	Why do they dislike us so much?
	Well, maybe it's because you pose yourselves as the conscience of America versus the rest of America.
	Nobody likes a schoolmarm.
	Nobody likes a nanny.
	And nobody likes an insulting nanny more than anything else.
	Mark Caputo is a reporter at Politico.
	He actually tweeted this out in response to Jim Acosta.
	Yes, I'm sure that is going to really ramp down the rhetoric here.
	I'm sure that is really going to make sure that everybody treats each other with a certain level of civility and decency that we have not yet found in American politics.
	And there are all these polls showing that people don't trust the media.
	One of the reasons people don't trust the media is because the people believe that the media are a self-serving institution.
	A lot of Trump supporters believe that President Trump is fighting for them.
	One of the reasons they believe that President Trump is fighting for them and not for himself is because he expresses sympathy for a lot of these folks.
	He doesn't call them bitter clingers.
	He doesn't suggest they're a bunch of losers.
	He'll say things like, we are the elites.
	He expresses the frustration of a lot of people in the middle of the country, particularly who have felt culturally dispossessed by the elites on the coast, by the elitists, I should say, on the coast for a very long time.
	Trump expresses that particularly well because Trump, as a human being, has a certain level of insecurity that drives him to feel like he's a guy outside the party constantly.
	He's had this for decades.
	And that resonates well with a lot of people who felt like they've been forcibly expelled from the party by the cultural arbiters of decency, by the folks like Jim Acosta.
	And so when Trump rallies those folks, there's a certain level of warmth to him.
	But there's not that same level of warmth to the media.
	The media who treat themselves as a sort of cased apart.
	They're a sort of clique.
	They're a clique of people who are special and beyond you.
	They are geniuses.
	Arbiters of what is good and bad in the United States, as opposed to just fact tellers and truth tellers.
	In just a second, I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and the proof of that.
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	Okay, so, you know, the media treating themselves as a sort of special group of people is one of the great irritants, I think, to the American people.
	You see it every time there's talk about First Amendment rights by the media.
	Now, I am almost a First Amendment absolutist.
	I'm about as close to a First Amendment absolutist as you can get.
	I've gotten more libertarian on the First Amendment over the course of my career just because I fear the government intervention in the First Amendment sphere, which we'll talk about in just a little while.
	There's a new case in which the government looks to be cracking down on the First Amendment in order to crack down on the Second Amendment.
	But...
	The media treat the First Amendment as though it is a special preserve of members of the media.
	So, when there's an attempt to shut down people from speaking at public universities, then the media treat it as though this is an actual debate we ought to be having.
	But, when there are members of the media who are restricted from asking a question to the President of the United States, it's the end of the world.
	They are not principled in their actual pursuit of First Amendment rights.
	The same media that will champion the idea that there should be restrictions on quote-unquote hate speech will tell you about how the media are a special preserve of people and the freedom of the press is our key freedom.
	Well, the freedom of the press was not a... The idea by some on the left is that you have to be an accredited journalist to really experience freedom of the press.
	That's not what freedom of the press meant.
	And the same thing is true when it comes to the sort of violent, nasty rhetoric we've been seeing in our politics.
	The media don't seem to mind so much when it's targeted at gun control opponents, when it's targeted at Second Amendment advocates, when it's targeted at social conservatives, when it's targeted at religious bakers.
	Then they don't care so much when there's all this ire and anger and ginning up of outrage directed at the people they don't like.
	But as soon as it's directed at the media themselves, then all of a sudden they get very, very touchy about this stuff very, very quickly.
	Then they say, oh, well, now I feel like we're on the verge of a civil war.
	Now, remember, Jim Acosta is tweeting this stuff out.
	Well, the same media was downplaying just a few weeks ago when a Fox News reporter said that she couldn't even report from the steps of the Supreme Court because she was fearful of the reaction of a bunch of lefties to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, so she wouldn't go out there and report because she felt like she was being threatened.
	The media said, oh, well, you know, that's, that's just, I mean, we were out there and it was fine.
	We were out there and it was no problem.
	But when a CNN reporter gets tossed out of the briefing room, wrongly in my opinion, by the White House, then all of a sudden it's, why aren't Fox News, why aren't the people on the right defending us?
	People on the right should defend you, and you know what you should do?
	You should defend the First Amendment.
	You should actually defend the civility in the political process.
	The same people, MSNBC will host Maxine Waters every night of the week without actually pressing her on whether it is appropriate to tell people to Accost people in public places.
	The media will champion folks who yell at Christian Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in a restaurant.
	They'll say this is all good.
	But then, as soon as there's some people who yell at Jim Acosta at a rally, then it's the end of the world and we're supposed to pretend that this is something new and history started just now.
	Like, we just figured out that history just started.
	It's really irritating to a lot of folks.
	And I think that's the reason why you are seeing so much ire on the part of folks on the right.
	Now, I will say that I think that all of this needs to calm down on every side.
	There's been a lot of talk in the last...
	A couple of years, three years, about an upcoming civil war in the United States.
	About the idea that we are going to break out into fighting.
	I wrote a dystopian novel about the possibility of civil war coming to the United States.
	The whole point of the dystopian novel is that it is about five steps removed from reality.
	We are not there yet.
	There are indicators that conflict is on the way, but the idea that there's going to be some great armed conflict or that we are in the middle of the second civil war right now is just absurd.
	If you just walk around the United States, the idea that people are going to be shooting each other in the next couple of years is insane.
	You could not say the same thing in the lead-up to the first Civil War.
	In the lead-up to the first Civil War, you actually had a pre-Civil War in Kansas in 1856.
	It was called Bleeding Kansas, where slaveholders and advocates for slavery and freestaters were actually going at it and shooting each other and murdering each other in relatively significant numbers in the state of Kansas.
	They actually had John Brown going down to Harper's Ferry and trying to lead a slave revolt and Almost a dozen people being shot, right?
	You actually had this sort of stuff happening on a fairly regular basis, and there was open talk about the possibility of a civil war leading up to the civil war.
	It's very difficult to look at today's United States and figure that all the hemp smokers in San Francisco are going to be at war with the gun owners in Texas in the next few years.
	Yeah, I think that both sides now have an interest in ramping up the rhetoric of civil war.
	So on the left, you have an interest in suggesting that fascism is on the way and that we are all going to be put under the tyrannical boot of the Trump administration.
	And on the right, you have an interest in suggesting that the resistance, the so-called resistance of the left, is going to lead to the outgrowth of a civil war.
	Now, I will admit that when you are in the political sphere and you're watching this stuff every day, it's very easy to be drawn into this sort of rhetoric.
	I don't think I've been immune to it over the course of my career.
	It's easy to get alarmist when you are immersed in politics every single day.
	And then you turn off Twitter and you go out into the world and you realize nobody's actually ready to shoot each other.
	And the number of people who are actually ready to clock each other, it's very, very low, which is why when things have come to blows, very often the government backs down.
	The case in point being, for example, the Bundy Ranch scenario where Cliven Bundy and his sons essentially told the federal government to stand down and some of them were arrested and then there was some jury nullification and nobody actually went to jail, right?
	When the possibility of actual violence is in the offing, it seems like there has been a generalized move to back off of that.
	As opposed to exacerbating that.
	And the problem with the Civil War rhetoric is that what it actually does, it justifies any sort of behavior from any side.
	So, Victor Davis Hanson, who's a terrific writer.
	Victor Davis Hanson has written some of my favorite books, particularly on the history of warfare.
	He has a piece over at National Review, with which I significantly disagree, okay?
	And it's called, The Origins of Our Second Civil War.
	And he writes, how, when and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?
	Almost every cultural and social institutions in social institution has not just been politicized, but also weaponized.
	Now, again, I don't know what that means, that these things have been, quote unquote, weaponized.
	They have been politicized, but weaponized is a bit of an extreme term that sports has been weaponized.
	It has been politicized.
	It has not been weaponized in the sense that you're now banned from participating in sports if you happen to be a conservative or you're banned if you happen to be somebody on the left.
	But Victor Davis Hanson continues, Donald Trump's election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.
	Agree with that.
	But he says, we are now nearing a point comparable to 1860 and perhaps past 1968.
	Left-right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography, always history's force multiplier of civil strife.
	Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.
	So he says that the country is polarizing along geographic lines.
	He says that globalization has undermined national unity because we have these iconic billionaires in high tech and finance and coastal elites, but it's hollowed out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.
	This is just not true.
	Technology has largely muscled out a lot of those jobs.
	The manufacturing capacity of the United States has actually risen over the past three decades.
	It's just the technology has gotten a lot better because as a country, we have moved more in the direction of technology doing work that human hands Used to do.
	That doesn't mean that we can't solve that with job retraining and with programs designed to get people into new industries.
	But the idea that globalization is what is driving all of this, this angst, I think is not correct.
	He says high tech has driven a lot of this, the mass production of cheap consumer goods.
	This is driving the Second Civil War.
	Campuses are driving the Second Civil War.
	You know, as somebody who has been You know, literally banned from campuses.
	Campuses are a terrible place, very often.
	But, I've spoken on probably 50 campuses in the last couple of years, and 45 of them were mostly okay.
	Illegal immigration.
	He says the Obama project, like, I agree with all of his critiques of where the United States is going wrong.
	So I think it's all leading to a second civil war.
	I really don't.
	Now I want to explain what could lead to a second civil war.
	OK, now what actually could lead to a second civil war, I don't think is any of these outside forces.
	I don't think that it's globalization.
	I don't think it's illegal immigration.
	I don't even think that it was the terrible Obama presidency, which I think really did exacerbate a lot of the gaps in the United States.
	I don't think economics is what's going to lead to a second civil war.
	war.
	Victor Davis Hanson at National Review, he says a steady three to four percent growth in annual GDP would trim a lot of cultural rhetoric.
	Four percent in employment will make more Americans valuable and give them advantages with employers.
	Measured meritocratic, diverse legal immigration would help to restore the melt in the melting pot.
	Reforming the university would help to mostly by abolishing tenure, requiring an exit competence exam for BA degrees.
	And then he gets to the one thing that I think is correct.
	Here is the one thing that I think Victor Davis Hanson says that is correct.
	He's ignored it through most of the article, but this is where I think that he is right.
	He says, Religious and spiritual reawakening is crucial.
	The masters of the universe of Silicon Valley did not, as promised, bring us new age tranquility, but rather only greater speed and intensity to do what we always do.
	Trolling, doxing, fishing were just new versions of what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount.
	Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life Technology is simply the delivery pump.
	We confuse the two.
	This, I totally agree with.
	Okay, this is the part where he is totally right.
	One of the things that has happened is that we have polarized along technological lines because it is easy to sit behind your keyboard on Twitter and say mean things to other people you would never say to them in person.
	It's easy when you don't go to church to slander your neighbors as people without teeth, as Mark Caputo was doing.
	It is very easy when you don't actually have a community you feel a sense of belonging to To talk about going to war with all of your neighbors.
	All that stuff is social isolation has actually increased in a time of social networking, which is one of the great ironies of the rise of technology.
	We spend less time with human beings and we spend more time online pretending to be with human beings and treating people how we would not want to be treated did we actually meet people in regular life.
	What's missing is the spiritual component, the sense that we're all in the fight together.
	And that's been missing for a while in the United States.
	That's nothing new.
	The problem is that all of the Civil War talk actually exacerbates the problem.
	And this is the problem I have with the Civil War talk.
	The Civil War talk...
	If you want to talk about a crisis of American conscience, I'm with you.
	If you want to talk about a crisis of American spirituality, I'm totally with you.
	If you want to talk about a crisis in the West of meaning and purpose, not only am I with you, I wrote an entire book on it.
	I wrote an entire book on this crisis of meaning, what we've lost, why we lost it.
	I think that we've lost a couple of things in the West.
	I think we've lost the idea of a Judeo-Christian value system that bound us all together.
	And we also lost the idea of reason as a universal solvent that was going to help Bring us together and also grant us the capacity to talk with one another.
	And we've broken down into identity politics and subjectivism.
	I think there are a lot of things that have gone wrong with our culture, but talking about civil war only exacerbates the problem because the problem with saying that we're on the verge of a second civil war is that it actually encourages you to look at people across the aisle from you and not see the common face of an American, but see somebody who is your enemy attempting to destroy the United States.
	And that's not to say that conflicts between left and right don't exist.
	They do.
	And I think the left is dead wrong on virtually all of these issues.
	I think fighting leftist principles is a deeply important thing because I think the left is complicit in the destruction of these central ideals of America that bind us together.
	I think the left has forcibly attempted to destroy the Judeo-Christian fabric.
	I think that the left has abandoned reason on behalf of subjective feeling.
	But I also think that most people in the United States are not, quote unquote, on the left.
	I think most people in the United States simply are told certain things by the media, and they believe those things because members of the media say them.
	I think a lot of people in the United States don't even think about policy very often.
	They don't think about politics very often.
	And if they do think about politics, I think they are driven into a state of insanity by all of the talk of this sort of civil war mentality.
	The war is on.
	America's on the verge of destruction.
	The greatest, freest country in the history of the world, most prosperous country in the history of the world.
	We're on the verge of chaos.
	That sort of talk, I think, makes things worse.
	I don't think we're on the verge of chaos, but I think that we have to look at the underlying trends and try to reverse them.
	I think that would be the best way to talk about this.
	We're not on the verge of the collapse of the United States.
	We are not.
	And Donald Trump is not a symptom of that, nor is he a cause of that.
	We are not on the verge of the collapse of the United States.
	500 disgusting idiots marching in Charlottesville is not the collapse of the United States, right?
	Even the shooting of Congress people by an evil Bernie Sanders supporter, that is not the collapse of the United States, right?
	The United States is a lot more durable than that because it was built on these principles.
	What is the collapse of the United States is when we forget about this common fabric.
	I still believe most Americans believe in the certain set of decency brought about by Judeo-Christian values.
	Even if people don't go to church, I think they believe in those values.
	They just don't know where they came from.
	Which means it's our job to reinstill those values.
	It's our job to talk about those values.
	To talk about where they came from, why they are important, why people should go to church, why people should go to synagogue.
	At the same time, we have to talk about why it is that reason is necessary.
	Why it is that classical liberalism, the idea that we are free because we have certain inalienable rights.
	Why our reason allows us to have a republic where we can sit and talk together.
	Why that stuff is actually important.
	Right?
	Arguments over the tax rates are not going to destroy the United States.
	Abandonment of reason and abandonment of values are going to destroy the United States.
	And the problem is, once you get into a mentality that we are in a war, wartime mentality encourages people to abandon morality.
	People are at their worst in a war.
	And one of the weird things about the way that we perceive war in the modern world, because so few of us have actually been in the military, only a small percentage of Americans actually even know people who have been in the military or deal with people in the military on a regular basis, Because of that, we tend to think that war makes the best of people.
	When we watch war movies, we see, oh, look at the unity of the guys in Band of Brothers.
	Look how they came together.
	Look how, in a war, there's a common sense of purpose.
	This is why so many folks, particularly on the political left, like to talk about the war on poverty.
	People on the right will talk about the war on illegal immigration, the war on Christmas.
	We're constantly using the language of war because we think that war brings us together and refines us, that pressure turns us into a purer version of ourselves.
	The worst atrocities in the history of mankind have happened during war.
	The reason for that is because once you believe that you are fighting in a battle, once you believe that your life is at stake, once you believe that war is at your front door, you're willing to do almost anything in order to prevent yourself from losing that war.
	Once you believe that the country is one step away from its end, it's pretty easy to justify doing virtually anything.
	And I think that that's having a pretty significant impact, this sort of Civil War rhetoric, on how people think on both the left and on the right.
	So, let's take an example.
	Over the last 24 hours, several members of the Trump administration have talked about Russian meddling in elections.
	And they've talked about how bad it is.
	So, Mike Pence, the vice president, he says that Russian meddling is offensive to democracy.
	Of course, he's exactly right.
	The fact is, Russia meddled in our 2016 elections.
	Russia's goal was to sow discord and division, and to weaken the American people's faith in our democracy.
	And while no actual votes were changed, any attempt to interfere in our elections is an affront to our democracy, and it will not be allowed.
	Okay, so that's right.
	What Mike Pence says there is exactly right.
	And then Christian Nielsen, who's the Homeland Security Secretary, she comes out and she says election meddling is happening in real time.
	Americans need to be aware that it's a very real threat.
	It's happening real time.
	FBI has lead on that.
	They have a task force.
	We support them.
	And we work with the private sector, such as Facebook, companies like Facebook, to try to pull down content that is inauthentic.
	Okay, so there is a real problem with the Russians meddling in our election.
	Now, if you're a patriotic American who believes that Western civilization actually requires defense, you should be offended by the idea of a country like Russia attempting to meddle in our elections.
	The idea that Vladimir Putin, who is a thug dictator who murders his dissidents, interfering in our elections should be offensive to you no matter where you stand on the political aisle.
	I was deeply offended when Barack Obama said to Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 that he wanted flexibility from the Russian government so that if they were kind to him and didn't do anything, he would provide them flexibility in his next administration.
	It was disgusting.
	Russian interference in the election is a bad thing.
	But there's a new poll out today, and this is, I think, an outgrowth of a Civil War mentality.
	There's a new poll out today, and here was the question in the poll.
	If Russia were to help the Republicans or Democrats keep or win control of Congress in the November elections, do you think their actions would be appropriate, inappropriate but not a big deal, or inappropriate and it's a big deal?
	So according to Republicans, people who lean Republican, Fully 40%, 40% of Republicans say it would either be appropriate for the Russians to interfere in our elections to help Republicans win, or that it wouldn't be appropriate but it wouldn't be all that big a deal if the Russians interfere in our elections to help us win.
	40% of Republicans say that it's not that big a deal if the Russians actually interfered in our elections and we knew that they were interfering in our elections.
	Four in ten.
	55% say it's not appropriate and it would be a big deal.
	Which means that's the correct 55%.
	Democrats now say 14% say that it would be inappropriate but not a big deal.
	86% say it would not be appropriate and it would be a big deal.
	Okay, so that is a, you know, that is a massive gap.
	That's a massive gap.
	Now, I'm gonna talk in a little while, in a second, about why I think that those statistics are what those statistics are.
	I don't think that this is about Republicans are bad people and Democrats are good people or anything stupid like that.
	I think that there is There are a couple of explanations for this, but you'll all have to explain on the other side of the Facebook.
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	Hi, my name's Dave Mamet.
	Please tune in to Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special.
	Check that out right now.
	Also, subscribe to our YouTube or our iTunes.
	And when you subscribe to YouTube, please hit that bell so you get all the notifications.
	We do have a brand new Sunday special coming out this Sunday, as we do every Sunday, this time with David Mamet, one of the probably America's greatest living playwright.
	He stopped by and we chatted about art.
	We chatted about politics and we chatted about his new book, Chicago.
	It'll be great.
	Hi, my name is Dave Mamet.
	Please tune in to Ben Shapiro's Sunday special.
	We're going to talk about the truth behind the rumor that John F. Kennedy was killed by a drunk driver.
	So go check that out.
	That'll be up on Sunday.
	It'll be a blast.
	We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
	So there are two factors that are leading to this disparate polling, right?
	So what the polling shows, again, is that 40% of Republicans think that if the Russians interfered in the elections to help Republicans maintain control of Congress in 2018, it wouldn't be a big deal.
	14% of Democrats say that if the Democrats were helped by the Russians, it would be a not big deal.
	So why 40 versus 14?
	There are two reasons.
	Reason number one is the most obvious reason, which is that the Republicans who are answering this poll Are seeing, are actually not answering the poll question.
	This is one of the big problems with polling of Republicans right now.
	Anytime a pollster mentions the word Russia, Republicans immediately trigger and they immediately go to, I'm going to deny that anything bad has ever happened with Russia.
	Because you guys are making such a big deal out of this Russian nonsense.
	You keep saying that Trump, the election was illegitimate.
	You keep trying to make this into Trump is a tool of the Russians.
	Well, F you, right?
	So this answer is basically F you to the media and the pollster who are asking questions.
	I think that really is what's driving this because Honestly, I felt this feeling too.
	I went to a place called the Magic Castle up here in the hills in Hollywood.
	It's a great place.
	It's really fun.
	There's a magician who actually has, I think, a show on Netflix coming out soon.
	A terrific magician.
	But at the very beginning, he made some joke about Trump.
	And I was so tempted to stand up and just start yelling at the guy because it's so irritating.
	It's all really, really irritating.
	So I think that part of that statistic that 40% of Republicans don't care if the Russians interfere in the 2018 elections, I think that that statistic is largely driven by Republicans going, you know what?
	Screw you, I'm not answering your question, because you keep making a big deal out of this Russia stuff.
	Part of it is that a lot of Republicans really believe that if we are in the midst of a civil war, any and all means necessary to defeat the opponent are on the table.
	This is the danger of talking civil war.
	And I think Democrats felt the same way when they felt that Barack Obama was in danger.
	They felt that anything that helped defeat Barack Obama It was a great evil that had to be fought at every possible turn.
	So riots in Ferguson?
	Well, that was just a way of expressing discontent with the system.
	Riots in Baltimore?
	Just a way of expressing discontent with the system.
	No, Antifa.
	Maybe they're a little bit extreme, but are they that extreme?
	This sort of attitude now pervades the country.
	The belief that civil war is upon us is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	Once you start saying that civil war is this far away, people start building up for war.
	People start girding their loins, getting ready for battle.
	And that means treating other people around them in more immoral fashion, not more moral fashion.
	So I think that's why I object to some of the Civil War rhetoric and I think that it's actually quite dangerous for the future of the country for us to keep talking like this instead of focusing on the fact that we do have this amazing edifice that we've built together and that, with the grace of God, has been built for us by people who came before us.
	What do we have to do to uphold that edifice as opposed to tearing it down?
	And yes, let's have the fights with the socialists.
	Yes, let's talk about the foundational principles of the United States.
	But let's not pretend that we're on the verge of shooting each other in the streets because we actually are not.
	I also think that the more that Republicans talk like this, the more they're going to off-put the independent vote.
	I think that people in the middle don't want to hear this.
	Most people don't want to be bothered, is the truth.
	Most people want to be left alone.
	And people constantly shrieking in your ear that the Civil War is coming is not actually of benefit to you electorally.
	By the way, when the Civil War does come, you know, if the Civil War were to come in, I think, several decades, I don't think that it would come from Tyrannical Republicans cramming down their values.
	I think it would come more from tyrannical Democrats outlawing hate speech, outlawing religious practice, attempting to crack down on my church or my synagogue, attempting to take my child away from me if I don't teach them their preferred social policies.
	Right?
	That's where things are really going to get bad.
	But I think it's going to be a long while before we get there, because I still think that the vast majority of Americans don't believe like the radical left believes.
	That said, this is one of the reasons why it's important how we talk about politics.
	This is why the mannerisms of militants actually don't help us generate victory.
	They don't help generate political victory.
	What helps us generate political victory is making better arguments than the other side, calling them out when they make bad character attacks, calling them out for lack of character when they do those sorts of things.
	But the constant, the constant idea that we have to be weapons up all the time, eventually somebody is going to pull the trigger and things will get ugly at that point.
	The more weapons that go up, the better chance that somebody is going to pull the trigger.
	And that is a serious problem.
	Now, speaking of pulling the trigger, There is a crazy thing that is happening right now where a bunch of folks on the left are now attempting to ban 3D gun printing.
	We talked a little bit yesterday about the fact that folks in the media do not know what in the hell they are talking about when they talk about printing of 3D guns.
	They really think that I'm going to take my HP LaserJet and print out a gun in my house right now.
	Like, they really think that that's a thing I can do.
	That I can just go into my library and I can print out a gun from my normal printer.
	Because they hear printing and this is what they think.
	That's not how it works.
	An actual 3D printing machine costs upward of $8,000 all the way up to $100,000.
	Nobody is sitting in their basement actually printing out fully plastic guns.
	That is illegal.
	You are not allowed to manufacture guns that are not detectable.
	That is just not something that happens.
	People have been manufacturing their own guns literally for centuries.
	People making guns in their house with gun-making kits.
	Most of those are made of metal.
	Most of the parts are coming from actual gun manufacturers.
	But the left is driving this narrative that the new great danger in the United States is going to be 3D guns.
	That's going to be the great danger.
	That's where all of the danger in the United States is coming from.
	So, Senator Markey, who doesn't know legitimately a damn thing about guns, he was speaking yesterday.
	He says, 3D guns are a national security risk.
	In a world where a 3D printer cartridge has become as deadly as a gun cartridge.
	And that's because these downloadable firearms are available even to those who could not pass a background check.
	It's the ultimate gun loophole.
	What in the world is he talking about?
	Ed Markey does not know what he is talking about.
	The idea there are a bunch of felons who are sitting in their basements with $100,000 printing machines for 3D plastic guns is just ridiculous.
	If a felon wants to get a gun, the easiest way to do it is just to buy it illegally.
	Really, it's going to cost you like $1,000, as opposed to, I don't know, $150,000 to manufacture a 3D AR-15 that fires three times before it breaks.
	This is so stupid.
	But a federal judge has now blocked 3D gun plans.
	So according to CNN, If you are looking to download the blueprints for how to make a plastic gun using a 3D printer, you can't yet get them online from a site distributing them legally.
	A federal judge Tuesday night blocked a settlement that would have allowed Defense Distributed, a Texas-based gun rights organization, to legally post blueprints for 3D printable guns.
	But hundreds of designs reportedly were downloaded before the judge's decision, meaning those designs are out there, legally or not.
	Well, yes, I mean, the idea that you're going to shut down every site on the internet that is posting these blueprints is just asinine and a significant violation of free speech.
	First of all, you can buy the Anarchist Cookbook right now at Barnes & Noble.
	You can go to Amazon.com and you can buy the Anarchist Cookbook, which actually includes bomb-making lessons.
	So the distribution of information is not the serious problem here.
	The distribution of information is not what is going to lead to the collapse of the United States.
	I'm much more fearful of the federal government stepping in and saying, we are afraid that you're going to manufacture a gun in your own house, therefore, We are going to regulate what kinds of sites are on the internet.
	By the way, everybody just went to an alternate site yesterday.
	They shut down one site and everybody just went to an alternative site.
	But this is my great fear.
	If tyranny is going to come in the United States, it's going to come from people who are so fearful of the liberty of Americans that they believe that the government should shut down all sorts of freedoms that we hold dear.
	That's where tyranny is actually going to come from.
	It's not going to come from The idea that globalization and additional technology is exacerbating cultural differentiation, which leads to us picking up guns and going and invading the local Starbucks.
	That's not a thing that's really in the offing.
	And so, again, media ignorance on full display.
	They're just doing a wonderful job.
	Meanwhile, the president of the United States is sounding off again about Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
	He tweeted out earlier today that there's a terrible situation surrounding the Mueller investigation.
	He says Attorney General Jeff Sessions should stop this rigged witch hunt right now before it continues to stain our country any further.
	Bob Mueller is totally conflicted.
	His 17 angry Democrats are doing his dirty work and are a disgrace to the United States.
	Again, Rudy Giuliani, call your office, tell the president not to tweet things just as a lawyer.
	This is not good.
	They are now investigating President Trump for obstruction.
	Obstruction is the impediment, presenting impediments to the Mueller investigation.
	And he's fully tweeting out he wants Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire This guy.
	It's just none of it is smart.
	None of it is smart.
	And again, the creation of a crisis mentality around issues where there really is no crisis, I think, is a major mistake in virtually every way.
	OK, time for some things I hate, some things I like, and then some things I hate.
	And then we'll do a long awaited Federalist paper because we missed doing it a little bit earlier this week.
	OK, so things I like.
	So I've been in the middle of this delightful book.
	I'm called Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.
	And it sort of is Harry Potter for grown-ups.
	It's imitation Dickens, which means that it's wry and it's humorous.
	And it's also kind of creepy.
	So basically, it's English magic comes back at the beginning of the 19th century via these two guys.
	Jonathan Strange is kind of a likable but quirky doof, and Mr. Norrell, who is a nebbish.
	And the two of them are supposed to restore English magic.
	It's really entertaining.
	It's super long.
	So I will admit that the reason that I picked up this book is because Dana Perino and I were talking.
	We decided to start our own private book club.
	And so both of us are reading this.
	I don't know how far Dana is into this book.
	I will have to ask her later.
	But I am enjoying it, so go check it out.
	There's also a BBC series they made out of it that got really good reviews, which is next on my watch list as soon as I finish this book.
	Other things that I like.
	So I have to admit, this Ron DeSantis ad is so funny.
	So Ron DeSantis, who I am friendly with, congressperson from Florida, he is now running for governor of Florida.
	I believe that DeSantis should win.
	I think he's a good candidate, and I think that he will make an excellent governor of the state of Florida.
	Really smart guy.
	His family is very charming.
	He cut this ad in an attempt to win the primaries in Florida.
	And obviously he has to show allegiance to President Trump in order to win the primaries in Florida.
	So he goes over the top and it's really, really funny.
	Everyone knows my husband Ron DeSantis is endorsed by President Trump, but he's also an amazing dad.
	Ron loves playing with the kids.
	Build the wall!
	He reads stories.
	Then Mr. Trump said, you're fired.
	I love that part.
	He's teaching Madison to talk.
	Make America great again.
	People say Ron's all Trump, but he is so much more.
	Big League.
	So good.
	I just thought you should know.
	So I love the kind of tongue-in-cheek of it.
	And it is true, obviously.
	DeSantis has been a Trump supporter, and he will be an excellent governor.
	Trump himself has endorsed DeSantis, which will help DeSantis in the primaries.
	I think you're looking at the next governor of Florida in Ron DeSantis, which is just terrific.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So when I suggest that the extreme rhetoric on left and right is bad for the country, I mean it.
	D.L.
	Hewley, who has been featured on CNN.
	Remember, these are the same people who suggest that the media are truth tellers and are attempting to bring the country together.
	D.L.
	Hewley, who is allegedly a comedian.
	He was talking about Dak Prescott.
	Dak Prescott is the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.
	And he has said he is not kneeling for the National Anthem because he thinks it's stupid to kneel for the National Anthem, which is eminently correct.
	So D.L.
	Hewley suggested, of course, that Dak Prescott is not actually a black person.
	I understand you want to make your money.
	You could have said nothing, but you chose to speak for the master.
	You chose to speak for the masses.
	And I say this, and I say this, it's perfect that two players would speak up for the cowboy owners.
	At least you got the boy part right.
	This kind of stuff is really amazing.
	So I've been criticized in the past for suggesting that Jews who vote for abortion policy, for example, or same-sex marriage, that they're Jews in name only because Judaism is actually a creed that has certain values attached to it.
	And if you ignore those values, then you may be ethnically Jewish, but you're actually not participating in the religion of Judaism in any serious way.
	Being black is not actually a creed.
	Being black is a color.
	You can't change it, right?
	You are what you are.
	And so when D.L.
	Hewley suggests that Dak Prescott is no longer a black person, he's a boy working for the master because he doesn't want to kneel for the national anthem and says that it is bad to kneel for the national anthem, that sort of bigotry on a national stage is completely ignored.
	And that is bad for the country.
	That is just another example of extreme rhetoric that the left will ignore while they are jabbering about how people are being mean to Jim Acosta at a rally.
	And again, I don't think it's great to be mean to Jim Acosta at a rally.
	I think you are serving Jim Acosta's purpose of worshipping Jim Acosta when you do that.
	But I also think that the left has ignored extreme... Al Sharpton still has a show on MSNBC, for God's sake.
	The man was responsible, at least in part, for, and instrumental, in helping to incite a race riot in Crown Heights in 1991 that ended with the murder of an Orthodox Jew.
	So, I mean, and that guy has a show on MSNBC.
	It's really kind of sickening.
	Speaking of extreme rhetoric, when I talk about the Civil War rhetoric that's emanating from every side right now, Andrea Mitchell, who's supposed to be a reporter last time I checked, right?
	She was on Comedy Central, and she compared President Trump to Stalin, which makes perfect sense because they're exactly the same, except for not the same in any way that you can actually measure.
	Here's Andrea Mitchell making that comparison.
	I do think that he has very deliberately set up the press as the enemy of the people.
	I don't feel that I am the enemy of the people, and it's not benign.
	I mean, this is a... This is something that we first heard from Joseph Stalin.
	This is very dangerous.
	It undercuts democracy.
	Okay, the difference is that if Joseph Stalin thought you were an enemy of the people, he would take you out and shoot you.
	Donald Trump says a lot of things, but Donald Trump has yet to shoot Andrea Mitchell, thank God.
	You know, this is not...
	Do I like Trump's rhetoric about the media?
	No, I've been very critical of President Trump's rhetoric about the media because I don't think that everything he says is fake news is actually fake news and I don't think the press are the enemies of the American people or anything like that.
	I think they are self-involved.
	I think they are self-indulgent all too often.
	I think they have their own priorities, but I don't think that they are, you know, actively attempting to destroy the American people or anything like that.
	That said, comparing Trump to Stalin is not actually making It's not making Trump's case harder that you're doing a bad job as objective members of the media.
	That's for sure.
	OK, time for a quick Federalist paper.
	So every week we go through a Federalist paper.
	We're all the way up to Federalist 39.
	So we're moving steadily through here.
	So James Madison wrote Federalist 39, and he is making the case for why the government of the United States ought to be a republic.
	And it's quite fascinating.
	Here's what he says.
	He describes why the U.S.
	is a republic and not a democracy.
	He says that a republic is a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period or during good behavior.
	It is essential to such a government that it be derived from a great body of society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it, otherwise a handful of tyrannical mobiles exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers might aspire to the rank of republicans and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.
	It is sufficient for such a government that the persons administering it be appointed either directly or indirectly by the people, that they hold their appointments by either the tenures just specified.
	Otherwise, every government in the United States, as well as every other popular government that has been or can be well-organized or well-executed, would be degraded from the Republican character.
	So, recognize what he's saying there.
	What he's saying is what makes a republic is that we have a bunch of elected officials, elected by the great majority of the public, and that these officials hold their offices for a limited period or during good behavior.
	This is a far cry from the bureaucratic government that has been instituted since the beginning of the 20th century in the United States.
	The legislature of the United States has become the withered arm of American government.
	The Constitution's Article 1 presents virtually all power in the form of the legislature.
	There's no question that Congress was meant to be Of all the branches, the most powerful.
	No question.
	And yet it has become in many ways the least powerful branch of the American government, which demonstrates we have moved away from an elected republic, more toward a bureaucratic government that has created all sorts of tension inside the American system.
	It's the reason why people feel frustrated that government isn't doing what they want it to do, because your elected officials have kicked overall responsibility to a bunch of unelected, life-tenured bureaucrats Over at a bunch of executive agencies.
	This is a serious problem.
	Madison continues by talking about how the nation was formed.
	The reason this is important is because it actually led to some arguments about the actual Civil War.
	So what he says is, The way that the nation was formed was the assent and ratification of the several states derived from the supreme authority in each state, the authority of the people themselves.
	The act therefore establishing the Constitution will be a national, well not a national, but a federal act.
	So he says the states basically made the United States because the formation of the Constitution had to be upheld on a state-by-state basis universally.
	And then he describes the Republic this way, he says, "The proposed constitution is in strictness "neither a national nor a federal constitution, "but a composition of both.
	"In its foundation, it is federal, not national.
	In the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national.
	And in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal, meaning that it doesn't operate on a state-by-state basis.
	You treat all the states the same according to the Constitution of the United States.
	It says in the extent of them, it is again federal, not national, meaning that you can't override the rights of the states.
	And finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.
	Now, the reason that this became an interesting battle is leading up to the Civil War, there was an argument It was called State Compact Theory that was made by members of the Confederacy, that basically, if the Constitution violated the original prescriptions that were signed off on by a variety of states, that those states had the right to withdraw from the Constitution.
	Just as if I sign a contract with you, and you break the contract, I get to withdraw from the contract.
	They say the states were the signatories to the Constitution, and therefore, if you violate the rights of a particular state, that state has the ability to withdraw.
	The counter-argument was, we have an amendment process to the Constitution.
	If you don't like, How the government is acting, all you have to do is pass an amendment.
	You don't have the votes for this amendment.
	And so, how exactly are you going to fight that?
	argument I don't think is legally insignificant.
	I also think it has ramifications for today with regard to what is the exact purview of the state.
	I think that the state compact theory is not entirely wrong from a legal perspective.
	The problem was it was being fought over the great evil of the 19th century, slavery.
	And therefore, the moral imperative to destroy slavery was stronger than the legal imperative to maintain the state's rights.
	And that had some dramatic ramifications for the federal government going forward, although the truth is the full destruction of state power really didn't happen until the middle of the 20th century with the rise of the federal bureaucracy.
	OK, well, we will be back here tomorrow to break down all the latest.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
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