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July 17, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:13
Why Republicans And Democrats Hear Different Things | Ep. 819
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Democrats pass a resolution condemning President Trump's quote-unquote racist tweets.
The Squad prepares to go back to war with Nancy Pelosi.
And Republicans struggle to react.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, it's all a complete mess out there.
Unclear how all of this shakes out in terms of the polling data.
AOC at war with Nancy Pelosi.
Nancy Pelosi at war with the squad and President Trump.
President Trump at war with anyone.
The media at war with everyone as well.
It's just, it's a complete mess.
We'll get to all of it in just one second.
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Alrighty, so...
Yesterday, late in the day, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning President Trump's quote-unquote racist tweets.
Four Republicans voted along with all the Democrats to condemn President Trump's quote-unquote racist tweets.
According to NBC News, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed a resolution Tuesday night condemning President Trump for his quote racist comments about four Democratic Congresswomen of color.
The resolution passed largely along party lines with 235 Democrats joined by only four Republicans supporting the measure.
Following hours of back and forth and gamesmanship, there is a lot of hubbub that broke out last night because Nancy Pelosi used language that was not actually allowed by the House rules.
So there are House rules that prevent you from impugning the motives of the president of the United States or other members of the House or of the Senate.
Well, Nancy Pelosi did that on the floor of the House.
The resolution itself Says that the president used quote-unquote racist language.
So that is impugning the motives of the president of the United States.
It violates the house rules.
Now listen, I think those house rules are stupid.
Let's be real about this.
Congress members immediately leave the chamber and then say whatever they want to say about each other anyway.
Saying they can't say this stuff on the floor of the house has not really upped the game of the House of Representatives.
In Britain, they rip each other all the time.
I mean, they have full-on parliamentary sessions where they basically browbeat one another.
I'm fine with that.
I think it's a dumb rule, but it was the rule.
Nancy Pelosi broke it.
Here's Nancy Pelosi yesterday on the floor of the House talking about how she's speaking truth to power.
Now, obviously, this is a lie.
She's not speaking truth to power at all.
One of the ways that you know whether somebody is honest is whether they are willing to condemn people on their own side for doing something bad.
Nancy Pelosi not only will not speak truth to power to the president of the United States, she's the third most powerful person in American government, really the second most powerful because the VP has no real power.
She's third in line for the presidency.
She runs the House of Representatives.
And she's saying that she's speaking truth to power by not impeaching President Trump.
She's got a lot of power.
Second of all, she couldn't even get the support to condemn members in her own party for being clearly and openly anti-Semitic.
So don't get me, she speaks truth to power.
She doesn't.
She wields racism as a political tool in favor of her partisan agenda.
Which, as we will see, is one of the reasons they're getting an anti-anti-Trump backlash.
Right?
So there's this anti-Trump backlash, people pushing against Trump, and then you have people who are anti-anti-Trump saying, well all the people who are condemning Trump They're compromised in some way morally.
They're liars.
They're partisan hacks like Nancy Pelosi.
So I'm not going to go along with the condemnation of Trump just to make Nancy Pelosi happy.
I think that's one of the dynamics that is very strongly in play right now.
Here's Nancy Pelosi, though, patting herself on the back, talking about how she's speaking truth to power when she won't even condemn members of her own caucus for being openly bigoted.
Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the President's racist tweets.
To do anything less would be a shocking rejection of our values and a shameful abdication of our oath of office to protect the American people.
I urge a unanimous vote and yield back the balance of my vote.
I was just going to give the General Speaker of the House if she would like to rephrase that comment.
I have cleared my remarks as a parliamentarian before I read them.
Okay, and that little controversy right there, that little contratums back and forth, that was a representative from Georgia who stood up and said, listen, you just violated the rules of the House.
You're not allowed to impugn the motives of the President of the United States.
Would you like to strike that?
She said, I cleared it with the parliamentarian.
Apparently she had not, because the parliamentarian then ruled that her language did violate the rules of the House.
And so there are rules that Say that she now has to not speak for the rest of the day and her language has to be struck from the record.
Emanuel Cleaver was the chair of the house at the time.
He was chairing the house.
You can sort of pass the gavel back and forth to particular members of your caucus.
He was chairing this thing.
The parliamentarian ruled that Pelosi's words were out of order, that they broke the rules.
Emanuel Cleaver refused to say that they broke the rules.
So instead, he just said, I'm going to drop the gavel and leave.
I came in here to try to do this in a fair way.
I kept warning both sides, let's not do this, hoping we could get through.
Mr. Japal had a situation where we could be in here on another motion to take down words of a friend of mine.
But we don't ever, ever want to pass up, it seems, an opportunity to escalate.
And that's what this is.
I'll dare anybody to look at any of the footage and see if there was any unfairness.
But unfairness is not enough, because we want to just fight.
I abandon the chair.
Okay, so he walks off, violates the rules of the House, right, in order to protect Nancy Pelosi for violating the rules of the House.
Then Steny Hoyer, who's the House Majority Leader, he gets up, he takes the gavel, and he says, yeah, it turns out she broke the rules, and now she can't talk the rest of the day.
Chairs, prepare to rule.
The words of the gentlewoman from California contain an accusation of racist behavior on the part of the President.
As memorialized in Daschle's Precedents, Chapter 29, Section 65.6, characterizing an action as racist is not in order.
The chair relies on the precedent of May 15, 1984, and finds that the words should not be used in debate.
Okay, and then the House votes to basically change the rules for Nancy Pelosi, rules the words back in order, votes on the resolution, rules that Pelosi has done nothing wrong.
So there's this whole back and forth over violating the rules.
And again, I think the rule itself is stupid because these Congress people will just go out and say whatever they want anyway.
However, that sort of hubbub last night Proved again that there's nothing but chaos in the House of Representatives.
Okay, so the question becomes, you know, Nancy Pelosi says everybody of good heart should vote with us on this resolution.
Everyone of good heart should vote with us on this resolution.
There are several reasons why Republicans were not going to vote on this resolution the way that it was phrased.
The reason, number one, is that it is actually controversial whether the president was being racist or xenophobic.
Now, this is a distinction that actually does matter in American politics.
Why?
Well, because the word racist is the worst thing you can be called in American politics.
If you are a racist in American politics, then your political career is basically over.
And we tend to categorize anybody who supports that person as also a racist, right?
There's a move that we make in modern American politics where if a politician is perceived as being a racist because race is the great dividing line in the history of the United States and the great stain on our national honor for the first 150, 200 years of our existence.
And by existence, I'm dating back to 1776, not to the Mayflower Compact or anything like that.
If you're talking about slavery, it goes back hundreds of years further than that, obviously.
But the use of the word racist to label somebody or somebody's action basically throws them outside the Overton window of politics.
And so to label the president of the United States racist means that he should not be president anymore under today's modern American political definition.
So the distinction between racist and xenophobic does matter here.
There's also an aspect of stupid, meaning that President Trump says crap a lot, and it's usually very stupid.
And many of the stupid things that President Trump tends to say are directed in the drunk uncle at your family barbecue direction.
Meaning, is he a true, deep down, bigoted racist who believes that black folks are inferior and brown people can't be good American citizens?
Or is the president just somebody who's like a bad caller to a C-SPAN show?
And he sees Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar on TV and he's like, I don't like these people.
Let's just go back where they came from because I don't like these people.
And would he say the same thing about somebody who was white and part of that caucus?
I don't know.
You don't know.
Nobody knows because the Justice Democrats are represented by four women of color.
Right, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, the Ringo Starr of this Beatles crew.
So, you know, when Trump condemns them, and when he says, they should all go back where they came from, is that a representative of racism?
Or is that him assuming that everybody who disagrees with him comes from a foreign place?
If there were a white member of that caucus, would he spare that person, for example?
These questions matter, again, because the word racist is so charged in modern American life.
And the reason that you can tell that this is really charged is people are saying on the left, well, why won't Republicans just universally come out and say that this was racist?
Again, because you have to be sort of exact in your language when you're labeling something racist as opposed to merely xenophobic.
Now the reason that I make this this sort of context clear is because I want to take the text of the resolution that was voted on yesterday and contrast it with the text of the resolution that was voted on earlier this year that received unanimous support condemning Representative Steve King from Iowa.
So here is the text of the resolution condemning Steve King of Iowa who made comments that were Sort of complimentary toward white nationalism.
Here's the resolution.
OK, said condemning and censuring Representative Steve King of Iowa.
Remember, the House Republicans voted for this thing and it was sponsored by House Republicans.
So Democrats couldn't condemn their own, but Republicans certainly did when it came to Steve King.
Nowhere in the resolution did it call King racist.
Instead, it was very specific.
It said, whereas on January 10th, 2019, in an interview published by the New York Times, Representative Steve King asked white nationalists, white supremacists, Western civilization, how did that language become offensive?
Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?
Whereas Representative King's comments legitimize white supremacy and white nationalism as acceptable in today's society.
Whereas Representative King's comments are abhorrent to the founding principles of our nation and our rich history of diversity and tolerance of those whose backgrounds and beliefs have made America the envy of the world.
And whereas Representative King's comments reflect negatively on the House of Representatives, now therefore be it resolved that Representative King be censured.
And that passed unanimously.
Well, again, the reason that it passed unanimously is because it didn't characterize his comments.
It literally repeated his comments and then just made the very clear logical statement that they legitimized white supremacy and white nationalism.
The resolution that was adopted by the Democrats went further than that.
The resolution adopted by the Democrats ladled in a lot of their own immigration policy and also suggested, without real explanation, not even quoting his tweets, they just said, whereas President Trump's racist comments have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.
That's more of a characterization of his statement than a mere analysis of what the man said.
The actual resolution does not even quote his tweets in the first place, as opposed to the resolution that was about Steve King that quoted his tweets and then just said, here's what he said.
So this was obviously going a lot further than the Steve King resolution.
So that was reason number one that Republicans didn't vote for it.
But there are other reasons that Republicans didn't vote for it.
And those reasons are revealed by a couple of polls that are out today regarding how Americans view President Trump's comments and the response to Trump's comments.
And it really is fascinating because there's a conversation going on in which the two sides, I think, are completely missing one another.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, when you look at the polling data surrounding people's perceptions of President Trump's comments, What you see is that there are two questions that are being perceived.
Question one is, what is the content of what Trump said?
Do you like it or do you not?
And that's the question the left thinks they're asking, but that's not really the question the right thinks that the left is asking them.
So Nancy Pelosi will get up there and say, why can't you just condemn these comments?
And folks on the right are looking at her going, because you're the one asking and because you are willing to overlook racism and bigotry and antisemitism in your own party.
And so we think you're a political hack.
who is not actually making a clear-eyed assessment of what the president is saying, we think instead that what you are doing is weaponizing the president's comments and attacks on race or ethnicity more generally in favor of your own political side.
Right?
That is what people are reading.
And you can see this in the polling data.
You see this very often with a lot of hot-button political issues.
Somebody will pick a hot-button political issue, and then they will say, why can't you admit my point?
And the answer is because we don't think that your point derives from the material that you are relying upon.
So to take an example.
The Black Lives Matter movement was founded on the belief that black people are being disproportionately targeted by police.
And then they used as their basis for that, the Ferguson shooting.
And the Ferguson shooting was not, by all available data, a bad shoot by the police officer.
It was not a racist shooting by the police officer.
And yet the question that was being asked routinely is, so you don't think racism exists in America?
Now everyone believes racism exists in America, but you're asking, The wrong question.
So you are pointing at Ferguson, or you're pointing at disproportionate police shootings of black folks, which, statistically speaking, have generally been shown to be justified by Roland Fryer over at Harvard University based on the activities of the criminal lit issue.
And then you are saying, are you saying racism doesn't exist in America?
It's like, no, I'm saying racism does exist in America, but the evidence you're providing for this is not clear, and it feels like you are asking me to say yes so that you can then justify the rest of your agenda.
This sort of thing happens routinely in American politics, and you're seeing it happen here with President Trump's comments.
This is how the right is reading it.
They don't feel like there's an actual open, honest question being asked as to whether President Trump's comments were racist.
They feel like all that's really happening is for what they want.
And by they, I mean the left, the Democrats, the media.
What they want is to say, they want you to say, yes, I think those comments were bad.
I don't know if they're racist, but they're bad.
And then they say, OK, well, why don't you impeach him and vote for Nancy Pelosi for president and vote for Kamala Harris for president?
Why can't you admit that Republicans are all racist?
There's a second step that we know is coming on the other end of a question that is not honest, in other words.
And you can see this reflected in the polling data.
So there are two polls that are out today showing what Republicans and and folks more generally think of Of Trump's comments.
Now, I will point out here as well that the media have jumped into this game where they are openly calling Trump's tweets racist.
So they're characterizing the tweets and calling it a factual verification of the tweets.
OK, I'm just pointing out that the media are damned liars when it comes to this sort of stuff, because when it comes to Ilhan Omar saying openly anti-Semitic stuff, they won't say Ilhan Omar's anti-Semitic tweets.
They'll say Ilhan Omar's controversial tweets, Ilhan Omar's anti-Israel tweets, tweets that some have called anti-Semitic.
When it comes to Trump, they will say racist tweets, even though As best I can see, the tweets are not actually racist, they're xenophobic.
And I do think that there is a difference between racism and xenophobia.
Both are bad.
They're not either equivalently bad or exactly the same.
Not all rectangles are squares, in other words.
So something can be xenophobic and racist, it can be xenophobic and not racist, it can be bad and not xenophobic or racist.
These distinctions do matter in American politics and gradations matter in American politics as well.
There are lots of various shades of bad, in other words.
And it's somewhat troubling that people are so focused in on President Trump being the root of all evil for what are admittedly and obviously very bad, stupid, ridiculous tweets, but they are utterly unbothered by Ayanna Pressley going out there and saying that black people are not black unless she agrees with them, and gay people are not gay unless she agrees with them.
It's pretty amazing.
Okay, so here's what the polls show coming out of this latest brouhaha.
There's a poll that is printed by USA Today and Ipsos.
A clear majority of Americans say President Trump's tweets targeting four minority Congresswomen were un-American.
But most Republicans say they agree with his comments, an illustration of the nation's sharp partisan divide on issues of patriotism and race.
More than two-thirds of those aware of the controversy, some 68%, called Trump's tweets offensive.
Among Republicans alone, however, 57% said they agreed with tweets that told the Congresswomen to go back to their original countries, and a third strongly agreed with them.
So what are Republicans hearing when they hear that poll?
I don't think that what they're actually hearing is, were the tweets good?
I know.
People are gonna... This is not me reading chicken entrails, okay?
My actual assessment of this, knowing conservatives better than anyone in the media, my actual assessment is that conservatives and Republicans, when they are asked this question, are hearing, are you willing to condemn President Trump as un-American and racist so that we can press forward Nancy Pelosi and the squad?
In other words, people are reading the consequence of the poll question, not merely the poll question.
Which happens on the left as well.
You see this pretty often on the left as well.
People will ask people, do you condemn socialism?
And folks on the left, who may not even know what socialism is, will read the second order question there as, will I condemn the squad, for example, and they'll say, no, socialism's fine with me.
So again, that poll shows that 57% said they agreed with the tweets.
Now that's a pretty low number.
That really is.
Remember, Trump has over 90% approval rating among Republicans.
Only 57% of Republicans said they agreed with his tweets.
So, you know, I'm gonna put it out there that most Republicans are actually not particularly happy with President Trump's tweets, but they're not gonna tell the media that.
59% of people across the country called the tweets un-American.
And again, I do think that it is an un-American thing to tell people to go back to their home country based on political disagreement.
I actually think that it's an un-American thing to say to somebody, you know, go back to your home country if they're born in America.
I think it's a very bad thing to say.
I don't think it's a racist thing to say, necessarily.
It depends on the context, but I think it's an un-American, bad, xenophobic thing.
Could certainly be racially tinged.
I'm open to that argument.
In any case, The polls show that three quarters of women called the tweets offensive.
This is why, for all the people saying this is an act of genius by President Trump to make the squad the face of the Democratic Party, he's alienating precisely suburban voters he's going to need for that 2020 election because he can't keep his damn mouth shut.
Three quarters of the women polled called his tweet offensive.
Independents, by more than two to one, said they were un-American.
But Republicans said that they mostly agreed.
How many Democrats were willing to say that Ilhan Omar was an anti-Semite?
I wonder.
25% of Republicans said that the tweets were, quote unquote, un-American, which is a very high number, again, inside his own party.
How many Democrats were willing to say that Ilhan Omar was an anti-Semite?
I wonder.
Partisanship is a hell of a drug.
Nearly three quarters of Democrats agreed that this is a racist statement.
About 65% said that it was a racist statement overall.
Republicans were actually inclined to agree that the comment was racist.
45 to 34.
Republicans were much more skeptical of charges of racism generally.
70% agreed that people who call others racist usually do so in bad faith, and that is the key question.
That's the key question that Republicans are really answering.
They're not answering what they think of President Trump's tweet.
They're answering what they think of you, the people who are polling them, the people in the media who are covering them, the people on the left who are insisting that they call out every instance of presidential stupidity and quasi-racism, except when it comes from the left, at which point we're supposed to celebrate it.
Democrats, 31% agreed that people who call others racist usually do so in bad faith.
35% disagreed.
Even Democrats, apparently, understand that the charge of racism goes out too often.
When it came to patriotism, 72% of Democrats and 93% of Republicans said they were proud to be American in this latest poll.
So, you sort of have to decode these polls a little bit to determine what exactly people think about them.
I'm going to get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, so there's also something else going on when Republicans are polled about whether the president's tweets were quote-unquote racist.
They're being polled on a number of different topics, and this is how Republicans break this down, I think, if we have to break down how Republicans are thinking about this.
So, there are several questions they think they are being asked, because the question is sort of implicit in the next step of coverage from the media.
Okay, so, question number one that they believe they are being asked.
There are really four questions they believe they are being asked.
Okay, there are four questions that Republicans believe, and this is why you're seeing a gap in the perception of the President's comments.
Okay, so here are the four questions.
Question number one, do we trust the media's definition of racism?
Right, that is the first question that Republicans perceive they are being asked.
Do we trust the media's definition of racism?
So, if Washington Post calls me up and says, do you think this is racist?
I immediately, in my reptile brain, I immediately go to, who's asking me the question?
Is it an honest broker or is it somebody who hates President Trump and is going to use this as a club against everybody?
Because the same people who call President Trump's tweets racist also justify the activities of Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley and all the other Democrats who are saying radical insane things.
So why would I tell you what I think is racist when you guys are not honest about racism?
You won't even define your terms.
So that is question number one.
And so you are less likely to go along with the Washington Post's question itself or the USA Today's question itself.
Question number two.
Do we trust that this isn't just a partisan hack job?
Meaning, not only do we think that you applied the label racist too broadly, and that you've been labeling everything Trump does racist for his entire presidency, and everything Mitt Romney did racist, and everything Paul Ryan did racist, and everything George W. Bush did racist, and now you're asking me do I think this is racist?
You cried wolf too many times, go screw yourself.
That's what Republicans are thinking on question number one.
Do we agree that you are a worthy source of the definition of racism?
Then there's question number two.
Are you partisan hacks?
And this breaks down into a couple of different areas.
One, do you in the media and do you in the Democratic Party, do you, Nancy Pelosi, apply a double standard on bigotry?
In other words, are you fine with anti-Semitism so long as Ilhan Omar is spouting it?
But suddenly you're all up in arms when you think Steve King is saying something very bad.
In other words, is this a partisan hack attack?
So question number one was, is your definition of racism too broad?
And if I acquiesce to your definition of racism in this particular case, am I acquiescing to your broader definition of racism?
In other words, if I say, yeah, I think these tweets are bad and maybe even racist, am I acquiescing to your definition of racism, which apparently includes everything under the sun?
That's why that USA Today poll is really fascinating.
It shows that Republicans, 45 to 34, thought that the president's tweets were actually racist, But they also thought, 70% of Republicans thought that the charge racism is too broadly applied and 57% said they were fine with the tweets.
So just the 57% and the 45% seem like they should not overlap, right?
That's more than 100%.
So what's the deal?
The deal is that a lot of the same people in the Republican Party who are uncomfortable with the president's tweets are even more uncomfortable with the media using the tweets to justify their broader definition of racism.
Because they understand the game.
Okay, so that was question number one.
Question number two is, isn't this all just a bunch of partisan hackery?
Like, when you're asking about the president's tweets, and when, let's say that, let's say there was an attack by a terrorist group in America, an Antifa attack on an ICE facility over the weekend, by a person quoting AOC, basically, talking about concentration camps, and not a single Democrat has been asked about it by you, the same media?
Not one Democrat in power has been asked about it?
Zero?
Zero.
When it's left to the rebel and the Daily Caller to ask Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and AOC whether they condemn an actual terrorist attack on an ICE facility.
And when those women stay silent when asked the question and there are no follow-ups from the mainstream media, do we trust you or Nancy Pelosi to ask honest questions upon which we should be able to reach agreement?
When we know that you're immediately going to use it as a tool?
So in other words, should we go along with your partisan hackery masquerading as a unifying message just so that you can turn around and clock us tomorrow with something intellectually dishonest and terrible?
Is that something that we're willing to go along with?
That's what Republicans are hearing as well.
In other words, the dishonesty of the left on a lot of these issues has left Republicans unwilling to even answer the question in an honest and real fashion.
Because they don't think the question is motivated well.
They don't think the question is honestly motivated.
And I don't blame conservatives or Republicans for this.
I really don't.
Because the fact is that you do this in your daily life all the time.
How you ask a question and who is asking the question is often just as important as what the question is.
If you are asked by a police officer, how fast were you going?
That is different than your wife asking you after you got home, so how fast did you go?
It's coming from a different source.
The purpose of the question is different.
It's the exact same question, right?
But everybody knows that there is a slight difference in what exactly the question is designed to elicit.
And Republicans are reading beneath the question to what it is designed to elicit.
Okay, then there's the third question that Republicans believe they're being asked, and that is, is President Trump himself a racist?
Meaning, not are these comments racist, not are these comments xenophobic, not are these comments ugly, but is President Trump himself a racist?
And that's a different question.
It really is.
There are lots of non-racist people who say things that are at the very best racially tinged on occasion.
Really, there are people who do not believe that people of other races are inferior, but they're dumb, and they say dumb things because they're dumb.
Maybe we used to acknowledge that this was a fact in American life and American politics.
So, what people in the Republican Party, many conservatives are reading is, sure, those tweets, maybe they're racist, but we don't think Trump is a racist.
You saw Mitch McConnell do this yesterday, for example.
He was asked if the tweets are racist, and McConnell said, I don't think that Trump is a racist.
In other words, he was trying to cut them off at the pass.
He was saying, okay, well, I know what you're doing here.
You're gonna say, if I say that the tweets are racist, your next question is, do you think Trump is a racist?
And I'm not willing to go there.
So instead, I'm just going to cut you off.
I'm going to say Trump is not a racist.
End of story.
I have a question as to how many Democrats even are willing to go out there and say that they think that President Trump himself is a vicious, brutal racist, as opposed to the man who says dumb, racially tinged crap all the time.
How many think that he's overt in his own mind, in how he thinks, in terms of intent and motive, which is what racism is.
I don't think there's a strict liability standard with regard to racism.
They actually have to have intent.
Is Trump a racist?
That's a question that people are reading into.
And then finally, there is the final question, which is, are we all racist?
Right?
That is what Republicans and conservatives feel like they are being asked.
Meaning, here's how the logical chain goes.
If I say that I think the tweets were racist, then your next question is going to be, do you acquiesce to our entire definition of racism, whereby everything a Republican has ever said is racist?
And if you believe in our definition of racism and you vote Republican, then aren't you a racist?
The reason that I'm breaking this down is because I think that people are completely misunderstanding how these poll results are working and just what people think of race in America.
Because here's the reality.
How many Americans on the Republican side of the aisle really stood up for, will stand up for openly racist language?
Like how many Republicans stood up for Steve King?
The answer was about zero.
How many Republicans actually stood up for the man who, for the police officer in South Carolina who shot Walter Scott, a black man in the back, and then tried to plant the gun on him basically?
How many people stood up for that?
Anyone?
But when you take a hot button issue like this and then you poll people about it, people answer the question they think they are being asked.
In reality.
And so we're talking past one another because, yes, Democrats doubt Republican motives because they think Republicans are all racists.
And that means that Republicans doubt Democratic and media motives, which is the same thing.
And why wouldn't they doubt those motives?
Why wouldn't they doubt those motives, especially when CNN is willing to go out of its way to ask the thoughts of Richard Spencer on Donald Trump's tweets?
So CNN actually had Richard Spencer on, you know, actual white supremacist Richard Spencer.
They gave him airtime yesterday to talk about Donald Trump's tweets.
Why?
Why is Richard Spencer being polled about this?
Who gives a crap about what Richard Spencer, an actual white supremacist, has to say about any of this?
The reason is because CNN is trying to imply that if you support President Trump, then you are like Richard Spencer.
And if you think that the tweets are bad, but you also don't think that the tweets are End of world bad, Trump's an obvious racist, he ought to be expelled from office bad, then you are just like Richard Spencer.
That Trump's real constituency is Richard Spencer, as opposed to, you know, the 65 million people who voted for the President of the United States.
When CNN does that, and they won't ask a single question to a Democrat about, you know, Ayanna Pressley saying openly racist crap over the weekend, Or Ilhan Omar saying anti-semitic stuff repeatedly.
They won't ask Democrats what they think of an actual terror attack on an ICE facility with a person who's basically paraphrasing AOC.
You think Republicans are going to have a trust problem?
Maybe just a little bit?
I mean, honestly, CNN bringing Richard Spencer on is an amazing thing.
Here's what that sounded like yesterday.
White nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Trump when he was first elected, is among those who are turning on Trump.
Many white nationalists will eat up this red meat that Donald Trump is throwing out there.
I am not one of them.
CNN had him on specifically to suggest that his real base is white nationalists.
That's what they are doing.
And so when CNN asks Republicans what they think of race, what do you think Republicans are going to say to that?
Again, many things can be true at once.
Once.
One, the president's comments are bad, and they're really bad.
They were bad, morally wrong, morally egregious, xenophobic at best, racially tinged.
Maybe verging over into the racist.
All of those things can be true.
Also, it can be true that we do not trust the media's definition of racism and the Democrats' definition of racism.
Two, we think that they are damned liars because they don't apply an even standard to folks.
Instead, they're applying a standard that is politically convenient for them.
Three, they're attempting to paint President Trump personally as a racist so that they can, four, declare everyone who supports him a racist.
All of those things are true.
All of them at once.
In just a second, we're going to see how this plays out for the Democrats because this battle is not just restricted to one side of the aisle.
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OK, more on all of this in just one second, because Republicans are now in an uncomfortable position.
But here's the reality.
The Democrats are now at the at the beck and call of the squad.
There's some ramifications on the other side we haven't even talked about yet.
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So Republicans have been having trouble responding to Democrats on the basis of President Trump's Because President Trump's comments, again, put them in an uncomfortable, dumb position because President Trump did something both morally and politically wrong here.
It was a mistake.
At the same time, Republicans are not willing to trust the left and the media with their assessment of the situation.
In fact, all trust is gone in American political life, because everything is used as a club to wield.
Republicans are looking at Democrats, they're saying, why would we trust you to assess what is racist and what is bad and what is immoral, when you're ripping Paul Ryan?
You're saying that Donald Trump is un-American for declaring that these four women have un-American points of view.
In 2012, the Democrats literally ran an ad with Paul Ryan throwing an old woman off a cliff in 2012.
Just flashback to that.
It says, remember what Paul Ryan did to Granny?
And then it's an actual reenactment of Paul Ryan throwing Grandma off a cliff.
This is a Democratic super PAC.
Literally killing an old woman.
Okay, and then there was another ad that they cut in 2012 in which they accused... I mean, they literally have him throwing an old woman off a cliff.
You think that that doesn't threaten people?
Democrats have been calling Republicans Nazis for years.
Everyone.
Everyone's a Nazi.
Everyone's a white supremacist.
And then you're asking us what we think of your assessment of white supremacism and Nazism?
We think your assessment sucks.
So even if we were inclined to grant that the president's tweets are bad and cross lines and are morally wrong, we're not going to answer that way to you guys because we think that you're dishonest hacks.
You're the same people who didn't mind it at all, apparently, when in 2012, Joe Biden suggested that Mitt Romney was a vicious racist who wanted to put black people back in chains.
And a Democratic super PAC cut an ad suggesting that Mitt Romney gave a man's wife cancer.
I don't think Mitt Romney understands what he's done to people's lives by closing the plant.
I don't think he realizes that people's lives completely changed.
When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care.
And my family lost their health care.
A short time after that, my wife became ill.
I don't know how long she was sick.
Mitt Romney gave people cancer.
Joe Biden likened the Tea Party to terrorists.
According to sources, this is Politico reporting in 2011.
He likened members of the Tea Party who wanted to restrict spending to terrorists in American government.
And yet now we're told that Donald Trump is crossing the line?
Guys, if you were worried about line crossing, maybe you should have applied that evenly all the way across the board.
I'm worried about the line crossing.
The difference is that when Trump crosses the line, I say he crossed the line, I say that it was garbage.
When Steve King crosses the line, not only do I say that he crossed the line, I max out to his primary opponent.
When Democrats cross the line, you guys back them all the way to the hills, and then you feature them on national television.
And this is where I think the backlash could set in in favor of Republicans.
Because if Americans are given the choice between the uncomfortable, dumb, bad tweets of Donald Trump and the sentiments expressed by Ilhan Omar and the squad.
I'm not sure that they choose the squad.
I really am not sure.
Plus, the squad is now turning on Nancy Pelosi again.
Now remember, the same squad that is supposed to be the be-all end-all... I mean, this is... You wonder why Republicans don't trust the Democratic assessment of what racism constitutes?
Maybe it's because AOC and the squad think Nancy Pelosi's a racist.
Everybody's a racist, according to AOC and the squad.
They did an interview with CBS, with Gayle King.
And they literally suggested again, AOC and Rashida Tlaib suggested that Nancy Pelosi was responsible for attacks and death threats against them.
We're supposed to give credibility to these people?
This is your big move here?
Here's AOC and Rashida Tlaib returning to last week's fight and going after Nancy Pelosi again.
So that wound remained closed for approximately five seconds, papered over by President Trump's dumb tweeting.
And it's reopening immediately.
I did not say that she was disrespectful of women of color.
I found some of the comments disrespectful, and that was my personal opinion.
And I did feel that singling out on the basis of one vote was creating an opening.
The fact of the knowledge is, and I've done racial justice work in our country for a long time, acknowledge the fact that we are women of color.
So when you do singles out, be aware of that and what you're doing, especially because some of us are getting death threats, because some of us are being singled out in many ways because of our backgrounds, because of our experiences, and so forth.
So having these women stand up there and talk about what they perceive to be racism is not going to be effective with the American people because frankly they think everything is racist except when they themselves are being racist.
When Ayanna Pressley is going out over the weekend and suggesting that black folks are not black if they disagree with her.
And when Ilhan Omar is dropping anti-semitic slurs every five seconds and Rashida Tlaib is accusing everybody of dual loyalty and AOC is suggesting that everything including cauliflower is racist.
Maybe they're not the best judges of this particular situation.
In other words, Who makes the assessment matters in American politics and everyone has lost such credibility and intellectual honesty that nobody trusts anybody to make the assessment anymore.
There is no commonality.
There is no common standard that we hold to make these assessments at all.
And there's a double standard in the media when it comes to exactly the sort of material that they find objectionable.
So you'll get AOC suggesting that Mitch McConnell is complicit in advancing racism.
This is the same AOC who defended Ilhan Omar's antisemitism to the hilt.
The same AOC whose squad refuses to come out openly and just condemn a terrorist attack on an ICE facility.
The majority leader is complicit in advancing racism in America if he doesn't even have the backbone to speak out against the most basic, basic line.
Honestly, if these members go on the record condoning the president telling women of color to go back to their own country, I invite them to because we will win the 2020 election and we will take this country back because we believe in fighting for every American.
Okay, and then AOC ignores in her own caucus.
So if that were her line, and I thought she were an honest person, I might agree with some of what she says there.
But I don't think that she's an honest person.
Because when it comes to Ilhan Omar and Open Anti-Semite, she defended her to the health.
Omar was asked by Gayle King, does she regret any of her anti-Semitic comments?
She said yesterday, no, she does not.
The other women were sitting right next to her when she said this.
The way that we hear and consume information is very different than how the next person might.
So you don't regret your words either?
I do not, but I have gotten the... I am grateful for the opportunity to really learn how my words made people feel and have taken every single opportunity I've gotten to make sure that people understood Um, that I, I apologize for it.
She didn't apologize for anything!
She just said she doesn't regret a word she said!
She hasn't apologized for a damn thing!
She's never apologized for anything!
It's unreal!
It's unreal!
She's sitting there right next to AOC, and Tlaib, and, and Ayanna Pressley, and they're all sitting there, silent, as this open anti-Semite is talking about how she's fine with what she said before, and then all of them are like, well, if you're silent about President Trump's tweets, well, you're a racist.
What if I'm not silent about his tweets and I think that you guys are just full of crap?
What if I think that the tweets were bad, and wrong, and morally objectionable?
But I also think that you guys are damned liars and radicals and you shouldn't be in charge of the country.
What if both of those things are true at the exact same time?
But if I say that, apparently then you go right back to the poll question.
Well, don't you think that Trump's comments were racist?
And if they were racist, how could you possibly support him for president?
Because lots of things can be true at the same time.
He can say bad things, racially tinged things, things I find objectionable and terrible.
I have not wavered one iota in my assessment of President Trump as a personality since 2016.
I think that President Trump, when it comes to his personal behavior, has always been not only deeply flawed, but in many areas a disaster area.
That does not change what the left is doing, their broad definition of racism, the reaction to that, the fact that we are supposed to now choose between the squad and Trump.
If you're going to force me that choice, guys, that choice is not hard.
It isn't.
Because I think Trump says dumb, ignorant, foolish things on a regular basis.
I think he says offensive things on a regular basis.
And then I think his policies match mine, mostly.
And I think that the people who oppose him say stuff that is just as dumb or foolish or irresponsible, except I don't think that it's just foolish and irresponsible in their case.
I think many of those people are actually ill-motivated and vile.
I think that their motives are nasty.
And I think that they are militarizing Trump's stupidity against him in a way that is politically viable, but I think dishonest, obviously.
The lack of nuance and complexity in our analysis of American politics is what is leading to this breakdown.
The dichotomy.
Because we can't just have the question that is asked out there in the ether without looking at the ramifications of the question, how it's asked and how it's answered.
That, I think, is what is going on right here.
And you're seeing the Republicans struggle with all of this because, again, two things can be true at once.
Trump's comments can suck, and also the squad can suck radically.
They can just be awful.
Because, guess what?
They are.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
There's been a lot of talk about patriotism, and this made me think of the Amazon show, Patriot.
Now, this show is not for everyone.
It is supremely quirky.
It's a spy drama, but it's really a spy kind of drama comedy.
It's extraordinarily dark, but it's got some moments that are really very funny.
It's more situational comedy than kind of punchline, laugh out loud funny.
It's just bizarre situations and a person being put in awkward, bizarre situations.
So if you don't mind awkward humor, then this is the show for you.
Here's a little bit of the preview for Patriot.
I would like to send someone over to get in front of this election.
Who?
My son, but it's complicated.
He records folk music under an assumed name because he says it helps him with his feelings.
Hey brother.
All you gotta do is bring a bag of money from A to B. That's it.
It's never easy like that.
This project's gonna play out in Iran and Luxembourg.
McMillan comes and goes both places.
Lakeland.
Okay, so the series is really weird and quirky, and it's got some real moments.
So you can go check it out over at Amazon Prime.
It's got some funny stuff in it.
Amazon's Patreon, so go check that out.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So everything is canceled.
Everything that is good in American life historically is now canceled.
A lot of this is manufactured.
Okay, so all of the supposed outrage over the Betsy Ross flag was manufactured.
Colin Kaepernick is adult.
He doesn't know anything about the Betsy Ross flag or Betsy Ross.
He declares it racist because some white supremacists will seize on any symbol of the American founding and try to reuse it for themselves.
And the left acquiesces in this and goes along with this.
And that raises a question.
Eric Erickson, I saw, raised this question online.
I think it's the right question.
Why is it that when a couple of idiotic, disgusting white supremacists say things like, the flag, the Betsy Ross flag is racist, and we love it because it's racist, why does the left respond?
Not by saying, oh, they're so full of crap.
This is not a racist symbol.
Why does the left respond by going, you know what?
They're right.
It is a racist symbol.
And now we cannot have any of the nice things.
The American flag is racist now.
The Betsy Ross flag is racist now.
Why does the left go along with all that?
Because it really is a tiny minority of people who don't know anything about history, who immediately jump to a conclusion based on, what, the trollery of the alt-right and white supremacists on Gab or 4chan?
Why does the left go along with that?
Racist groups have always attempted to grab American symbols and use them for themselves.
The American Nazi Party used to have rallies with giant American flags and pictures of George Washington in the background.
This did not mean that the American flag represented the Nazis or that George Washington was a Nazi.
And you didn't see the left at the time say, oh, well, I guess that George Washington was a Nazi.
You see the American Nazi Party is using him right there.
The KKK used to routinely grab American symbols and then use them and suggest that America was the KKK.
Good-hearted folks on the left didn't say, well, you know what, they're right.
All those symbols are now banned.
But this is what we're seeing now.
We're starting to see symbols of the United States that have nothing to do with white supremacy.
They are grabbed by white supremacists, and then the left acquiesces in that grab and suggests that the solution to this is to ban the symbol.
So, today's example of completely manufactured controversy.
So, Yahoo runs a piece about Chris Pratt, the actor.
Now, Chris Pratt is pretty apolitical.
By apolitical, I mean he's not a social justice warrior, and he has not openly come out as a conservative and said, I am a conservative.
And Chris Pratt happens to be a religious Christian, and he's kept his politics pretty close to his chest.
Everything I've ever heard him say has been talked, you know, that has any political ramifications, has been about personal responsibility and giving glory to God.
That's basically it.
Which is a pretty innocent message, as far as I am concerned.
Well, Chris Pratt made a huge mistake, according to Yahoo News.
What was his supposed huge mistake?
Well, according to Yahoo News, his supposed huge mistake is that he wore a Don't Tread On Me t-shirt with the Gadsden snake.
Now, that t-shirt was... Okay, that flag, the Gadsden flag, was actually the first symbol of the US Navy.
According to Yahoo News, it was controversial.
The writing and snake combo on its own is depicted on the Gadsden flag, a symbol created by Christopher Gadsden, a Charleston-born brigadier general in the Continental Army.
It came to prominence, according to Yahoo News, during the Revolutionary War of the United States by colonists who wanted independence from Great Britain.
Although it is one of the symbols and flags used by the U.S.
men's soccer team, Metallica, and some libertarian groups, over the years, the flag has been adopted by far-right political groups like the Tea Party, as well as gun-toting supporters of the Second Amendment.
And none of those are actually bad groups.
The Tea Party is not far-right.
The Tea Party was mainstream-right.
And gun-toting supporters of the Second Amendment, that would just be like, you know, people who believe in the Second Amendment, pretty much, right there.
Which, as it turns out, is an amendment to our Constitution, which is our founding document.
Which provides the basis for American government, of which Yahoo News is a beneficiary.
And then, Yahoo News says, it has therefore become a symbol of more conservative and far-right individuals, and according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the U.S., it also is sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts.
They had to go searching far and wide for that one.
And then, they tweeted, they quoted six particular tweets, from six people who are not verified on Twitter and have about 15 followers and then they headline this that Chris Pratt is criticized for the quote-unquote white supremacist t-shirt.
Now the question is not why Yahoo News does this sort of clickbait.
We all understand why they do this sort of clickbait.
The reason they do this sort of clickbait is because they want the clicks, obviously.
It's the same reason that the news created this faux controversy about black Ariel, as though there were scads and oodles of people who were deeply broken up and concerned about the race of a fictional mermaid.
They were just out there in force.
Again, all they could come up with is like three people, and at least one of those accounts was pretty much completely fake.
So they create a controversy.
They did the same thing with the black stormtrooper in Star Wars.
Oh my God, John Boyega's going to be in Star Wars?
How can there be a black stormtrooper?
Lando Calrissian's in the original.
Like, what are you talking about?
No one cared.
No one.
And so they create these faux controversies.
But the question is not why these clickbait sites create faux controversies.
The real question is why the left goes along with them, and then you start seeing this multiplier effect where people are like, yeah, why is Chris Pratt wearing a Gadsden flag?
That is a symbol of white supremacy.
And you're like, really, is it?
The left has gone along with this pretty much at every turn.
So there is a symbol.
It is called the OK symbol right here.
This is not me making a white supremacist symbol.
This is the OK symbol.
In some contexts, like Steph Curry, it is the three point symbol.
And it's amazing.
Now watch Media Matters clip that, freeze frame it, and suggesting that I'm making a white power symbol.
Because this is what they do.
Why?
Well, because if you are looking under every nook and cranny of American life for racism and bigotry and white supremacy, Anywhere you can find it, you will grab it, you will blow it up, and then you will suggest that it is indicative of America's deep underlying racism.
And so if you can't find enough real racism, you just make up fake racism.
And then, when you do see an instance of what you perceive to be real racism, it's too late.
You've cried wolf one million times.
This is how you get to the poll results on Trump's tweet.
This is a you guys problem.
Trump's tweets are a problem, and separately, your assessment of what racism is, is completely fictionalized and crap.
Because you've been searching for it in all the wrong places, and then lying about it when it isn't occurring, and declaring that Chris Pratt is a frickin' white supremacist on the basis of wearing a Gadsden flag.
There's something else that's going on here, too.
I think Ben Domenech at The Federalist, I believe, was the one who made this point.
Whoever made it is a good point.
The point is that for the left, the reason that they are so willing to go along with the obliterate... It was Dan... Sorry, it was Dan... His name is... He's from National Review.
I can't believe his name is... He'll forgive me.
I can't believe his name is slipping my mind.
In any case, the actual... The point that he is making is that for the left, for so many people who are on the left, They actually share the goal of obliterating America's symbols.
Because they believe that America is steeped in racism and bigotry and homophobia.
Because they believe that America is a deeply racist place and the Constitution is driven by racism and white supremacy.
They share a goal with these radical morons who are trying to relabel the Gadsden flag racist.
So they know the Gadsden flag isn't racist.
Or at least they suspect it's not.
But it's Dan McLaughlin, sorry.
The National Review guy.
Instead, what they are trying to do is they share a common cause.
The common cause is, let's get rid of these symbols altogether because America is deeply racist.
We'll find places to place our interpretation of racism.
Every place we can find it.
And two, if we share the common cause of painting America's history as irredeemably racist, then we will even go along with your lies.
We'll even go along with Betsy Ross's flag as a representative of racism.
This is Nike's routine.
We'll even go along with that because it backs the overarching narrative that everything in American history was racist.
You could literally pick a random object from the Revolutionary War era, and it becomes racist.
You can pick a mural of George Washington that asks serious questions about American history in San Francisco, and it must be obliterated, because all of American racism is not controversial, it is openly racist.
All of it's racist.
You can find a canon on the Cambridge Commons, next to which George Washington assumed command of the Second Continental Army.
And you can, or the First Continental Army, and you can declare the cannon racist because the cannon itself is a symbol of a time in which slaves were held.
The left goes along with this because it fits with their perspective on American history.
It's ugly, it's stupid, it's divisive, but it's not particularly shocking.
And the media do this with nearly everything now.
So to take a more prominent example, yesterday the Washington Post ran a piece called, The Hard Charging Space Program, Breakthroughs, Breakups, and Breakneck.
And they tweeted about it, and their suggestion in their tweet, their suggestion in the tweet, is that it was overwhelmingly white, NASA.
This is what we should take away from the NASA space program.
Not the incredible achievements of humanity.
Not the magic of NASA using what, by comparative terms, were abacuses in order to send a man to the moon.
You have more computing power in your iPhone right now than all of NASA had when we sent a man to the moon.
It's not that.
That's not the story.
The real story is that they lived in a society where racism was common.
Which is not a story, because we all know that.
That's not the story of NASA.
That's like saying the story of Babe Ruth is the story of racism.
No, the story of Babe Ruth is a guy who had a lot of home runs.
Also, the story of MLB included racism, no doubt, at the time.
But that's not Babe Ruth is... Babe Ruth's... When I talk about Babe Ruth hitting 60 home runs, that is not an indicia, an indicator of white supremacy.
That's Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs.
It's a different story.
To read racism into everything, including the moon landing.
Okay, so what's the idea now?
We gotta take down the American flag on the moon.
Because the flag is racist, the moon is racist, and NASA was racist.
Everybody's racist.
So Karen Heller has this dumb piece today, talking about this.
Back then in the 60s, rocket scientists were the badass dudes of innovation.
Just the title was about the highest Brainiac accolade that could be conferred.
As in, he's smart, but he's no rocket scientist.
As NASA worked relentlessly to fulfill John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon by decade's end, it turned to the nation's engineer.
Many of them were fresh out of school, running the gamut from mechanical to electrical engineers, because that's mostly what was taught in universities, and almost exclusively to white men.
If the story of the moon landing was racism, I think that you're missing the story and you're doing it on purpose.
I suspect that you are doing it on purpose to back a separate narrative that it turns out has nothing to do with the moon landing.
It's all about wiping out the glories of American history in favor of a separate narrative.
I was talking with a friend of mine on the left yesterday, and she was saying, why can't we believe that America is the greatest country in world history and is great and was great, and also recognize that America's history is shot through with racism and white supremacy?
And I said, well, we can certainly recognize both of those things.
But I have a feeling that a lot on the left are not willing to acknowledge the first or explain why they believe the first is true if they believe the second is the overarching theme.
Where you put the focus is the key.
If you look at the moon landing and your first take is, not, unbelievable.
America is such an incredible country that we put a man on the moon using old garbage technology and the ingenuity of the human mind.
And we did it because we are free and because we are creative and we defeated an evil empire in doing it.
If your first instinct is, ah, but segregation was still a thing then, wasn't it?
And NASA was full of white folks.
Yeah, we know.
That wasn't the actual story at this particular time.
You want to talk about segregation?
Perfectly up for it.
You want to talk about the evils of Jim Crow?
Perfectly up for it.
You want to talk about America sucking and every aspect of American life being tinged by this?
And not up for it nearly as much.
Alrighty, well, we will be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, or we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Today, over on the Matt Wall Show, the left is continuing to eat itself.
The latest example is the president of Planned Parenthood experiencing an early termination, shall we say.
She was fired from Planned Parenthood for the crime of believing that only women can get pregnant.
Also, Ayanna Pressley, one of the members of the Squad, has Just made one of the most bigoted statements we've heard from an American politician in several decades, and that's not an exaggeration.
Finally, I asked a left-wing doctor to define the word man for me, and he wasn't able to do it.
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