Ben Shapiro dissects the second Democratic debate, exposing a split between "Radicals" like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose policy failures on Medicare for All and wealth taxes contrasted with Marianne Williamson's spiritual victory. He critiques Tom Perez's alarmist climate claims and Don Lemon's bias, arguing the party prioritizes emotional resonance over substance. Ultimately, Shapiro concludes Democrats are abandoning technocratic rigor for a faith-based strategy reminiscent of Obama and Trump, relying on crowd enthusiasm rather than concrete governance plans. [Automatically generated summary]
We're going to explain why Marianne Williamson, her big night actually had kind of some import to it.
I'll explain in just one second.
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All righty.
So, it was the Democratic debates.
Round two.
Fight night one.
So tonight, Is the other one.
Tonight is the one with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and it's going to be all race, all the time.
Can old Joe get up off the mat?
But last night was fascinating for another reason.
It really highlighted the division inside the Democratic Party between the sane and the insane.
The insane right now have their hands on the steering wheel.
When I say the insane, I mean the people who are proposing massive, radical change to the United States.
People like Elizabeth Warren.
People like Bernie Sanders.
People, yes, like Pete Buttigieg, who originally came out as a moderate and then Has sort of backtracked ever since, all the way to the point where he is now suggesting you're a bad Christian if you don't support his ideas on minimum wage.
And so there is this radical wing of the party.
Then, there is the moderate wing of the party.
And actually last night on the stage, the moderates outnumbered the radicals.
The moderates on stage...
Folks like Amy Klobuchar and Tim Ryan from Ohio and John Delaney, who actually showed pretty well, former congressperson, and Steve Bullock from Montana.
And what these divisions between the radicals and the sane showed is that when asked very simple questions, the radicals simply could not defend their policies.
They're running far to the left on the idea of grand visions, grandiose plans for the future.
And the moderates are sitting over there going, guys, you're going to lose, right?
You pushing too hard means that it will be a referendum on our policy.
It won't be a referendum on President Trump anymore.
So they're trying to grip the coattails of these radical Democrats and try to haul them back over the edge of the cliff.
And while it was pretty obvious that the radicals had no answers, it obviously wasn't working in the hall because the applause lines were all for the radicals in the hall, which makes sense.
It's a primary.
But all of these clips are going to live on forever.
This is why Rahm Emanuel, former congressperson, former chief of staff for Barack Obama, was saying openly yesterday that the Democrats are busy alienating an enormous percentage of the population with their prescriptions.
Now, the person who came away with the big win last night was the person who channeled the spirit of radicalism without actually any of the policy.
See, what we last night exposed, more than anything else, is that folks who are very into the radicalism of the Democratic Party, very into the radical left, Medicare for all, no first use of nuclear weapons, people who want to decriminalize illegal immigration.
What this showed, this debate last night, is that it's not that those policies are inherently popular or inherently wonderful.
People aren't resonating to the policies.
They're resonating to the notion put forward by the radicals that a change in policy will occasion a change in the spirit of man.
Barack Obama's appeal in 2008 was not a policy appeal.
He did not campaign on policy for five minutes of that entire campaign.
The reason that Barack Obama was very popular is because he campaigned on two things.
One, that he was going to be a unifying figure in the wake of the Bush administration and not only was he going to be a unifying figure, he was going to be a unifying racial figure, meaning that the greatest Drama and and cruelty in American history was going to be rectified by President Obama, who is going to bring all the parties back to the table.
He's going to bring everybody together.
We could resonate around the idea of a black president who signified the progress that America had made.
And then all Americans would be treated as Americans rather than as members of subgroups.
That was Barack Obama's chief appeal.
And that was tied to another appeal that Michelle Obama spelled out.
I found it incredibly off-putting at the time.
I still find it incredibly off-putting.
She said during the campaign that Barack was going to force you to be better.
He was going to change your spirits.
He was going to change your souls.
It was a religious appeal, an overtly religious appeal.
And that was appealing to a lot of folks on the left because the real vision of Marxism and most American leftism is tied to the ideas of Karl Marx is what distinguishes American leftism from
Normal sort of moderate policy or conservatism the roots of leftism lie in a materialist definition of reality in which true troubles in all of America's in all American walks can be boiled down largely to the inequalities produced by capitalism and by free markets and by property ownership If you read Marx, one of the things that Marx says, pretty obviously in the Communist Manifesto, is he talks about the idea that Marxism will transform man.
That man is malleable, and that Marxism will make man different.
That the reason man is bad is because man has been shaped by his socio-political environment in order to be bad.
That capitalism, free markets, property ownership, these have made man lesser.
And that in the future, inevitably, man will become greater as he lets go of these things.
And that's an overtly spiritual appeal.
It's actually a religious appeal.
Marianne Williamson, last night on the stage, was making religious appeals.
And those religious appeals are more in line with today's politics than the sort of technocratic politics that dominated America from basically the Eisenhower administration all the way through the George W. Bush administration.
The spiritual appeal is what got Barack Obama elected in 2008.
And it's the spiritual appeal that got Donald Trump elected in 2016.
Donald Trump didn't make a policy appeal at any point.
No point in 2016 did Donald Trump really talk about policy.
Instead, he talked about the quote-unquote spirit of America, making America great again, quote-unquote restoring the American soul, right?
That was the sort of idea.
It was a religious appeal.
And what he meant by restoring the American soul, unlike the vast majority of people in the media who lie and say that it was all about white response to Barack Obama and all of this, when he said that he wanted to make America great again, that was a spiritual appeal.
What he meant was he wants an America that was rooted in fundamental ideals of unity, where we were all firing our guns in the same direction.
Now, he wasn't clear about what the direction would be.
He was very vague about that, which was my main criticism of him, and one of many, in 2016.
But, that was a spiritual appeal.
Well, last night, the only person who was talking on a spiritual level was Marianne Williamson, and people have been mocking her for this.
I've mocked her for this.
The pretensions, and the crystals, and the massage oils, and the auras, and the penumbras, and all of this kind of stuff.
And it is weird.
It's weird.
But there is something she was doing last night that operated on a different level than the other Democratic candidates.
This doesn't mean she's going to win the nomination.
It does mean that whichever Democrat channels the zeitgeist that Marianne Williamson is attempting to channel is going to win the nomination and maybe the presidency.
Because what she was doing last night was not talking about the wonders of Medicare for All.
What she was doing last night instead was talking about changing the American soul.
And in a debate where the moderates were basically kicking around the radicals on policy, she's the only one who rose above it.
So she was saying the same sort of stuff.
I mean, she did an interview last night where she was specifically asked, what kind of Democrat was she?
She was asked this by Anderson Cooper, what kind of Democrat are you?
And Marianne Williamson is charmingly kooky.
I mean, even obviously Anderson Cooper is very much charmed by her.
And she's inherently hilarious because she's charmingly kooky.
But she says in the middle of this interview, in the one substantive point, that she is a Bernie Sanders Elizabeth Warren Democrat.
But that's not what came across last night.
Because again, she wasn't speaking at the level of politics.
She was speaking at the level of dark forces and American spirits and all the rest of this.
Here's where she identifies politically and also why she's kind of charming.
unidentified
I just find it really interesting, this notion that a plan is not enough, and who else, does anybody else that you have seen of all twenty... Why do you need anybody else?
Yeah, well, you got me, so... So she's charmingly kooky, but then she finished that by saying she's an Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders Democrat, meaning she agrees with him on policy.
But that's not what came across last night, because that's not the level upon which she was campaigning.
OK, so now let's get into the details of this debate.
First of all, you want to talk about how radical the Democrats are?
Let's talk about Tom Perez.
So Tom Perez is the head of the Democratic National Committee.
He was made that while Barack Obama was still president.
He was the former head of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ under Barack Obama, where he was extraordinarily radical himself.
I know folks who served in the DOJ at that time in the civil rights division.
And it was fairly obvious that Tom Perez was orienting that division in one particular way toward targeting one particular sort of discrimination while ignoring other forms of discrimination.
In any case, Tom Perez leads off this thing.
He's trying to get the crowd all revved up and he starts talking about global warming.
And then he gets into universe warming, which is not a thing because global warming is reliant on carbon emissions on Earth that create thickening of certain chemical levels in the atmosphere of the Earth.
Well, there he is, being as radical as possible, and then the Democrats are like, why aren't people resonating to John Delaney?
Because the head of your party's a crazy person who's standing up there talking about universe warming.
What in the, what?
By the way, if global warming were actually about universe warming, then carbon emissions wouldn't be the problem, would they?
It would be the sun.
That is the only body capable of warming the universe.
If we were just talking about the sun heating up, it would be a very different question than the emissions that are coming out of your cow's butt.
We'll get to the actual debate in just one second, but that was the setup.
The payoff was Democrats cheering for everything radical.
Well, logically, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were absolutely exposed by the moderates on the stage last night.
It was pretty amazing, actually.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay.
So let's jump into the actual debate.
So everybody sort of gave their opening statements and their opening statements made fairly clear where exactly they are on the spectrum.
Elizabeth Warren is vying for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party against Bernie Sanders.
Now, what was weird about this debate last night is you would have expected at some point Warren to go after Sanders or Sanders to go after Warren.
Instead, they seemed sort of content to leave each other alone and go after the moderates.
That's not going to help either of them because this is Highlander.
There can be only one.
If Warren and Sanders stay in the race, Joe Biden is the nominee.
It's that simple.
If Warren and Sanders stay in the race together and they're both earning double digits, Joe Biden is the nominee.
One has to take out the other.
Well, Sanders isn't going anywhere.
He feels like, I ran this race in 2016.
I should have won.
I'm not going anywhere.
And Elizabeth Warren feels bad that she didn't jump in in 2016.
So she's not going anywhere.
So at a certain point, they've got to turn their guns on each other.
That did not happen last night.
Instead, they're trying to demonstrate how radical they are.
So Elizabeth Warren has been trying to have it both ways.
She's super radical, just like Sanders, but also she's kind of moderate.
Well, no, she's just a radical.
So here's Elizabeth Warren making the pitch that the way that the Democrats win the White House is with big ideas, which of course is idiocy, by polling data.
The way the Democrats win the White House is by standing there and pointing at President Trump.
That's how they win.
If they talk about radical policy ideas, they lose.
And as we'll see, there were some Democrats on stage last night who actually pointed this out.
So here's Elizabeth Warren saying, we need courage, we need strength, and the base cheering along.
I mean, my goodness, she is rehearsed and she is canned, but I love that her answer to, is the reason that you're saying that you're a capitalist because you don't want to be Bernie Sanders.
Her saying, yes, basically.
She says, no, it is my way of talking about how I know how to fight and I know how to win.
Meaning, if I say that I'm not a capitalist, then I go the way of Bernie, so I'm not doing that.
So basically, she just answered yes to a question to which she answered no.
How horrible is Elizabeth Warren?
Elizabeth Warren is so horrible.
John Delaney, who's an actual business person, was asked about the wealth tax and before he starts to answer, you know, Don Lemon, who is just, as we will see, the worst Democrat debate facilitator ever.
He's just terrible because he should be on the stage.
If he actually wants to run, he should just run.
John Delaney's asked about as well.
Elizabeth Warren literally stood there and took her hands and started doing this with her hands in eagerness at taking John Delaney's money.
We have got to take on Trump's racism, his sexism, xenophobia, and come together in an unprecedented, unprecedented grassroots movement to not only defeat Trump, but to transform our economy and our government.
Science tells us we have 12 years before we reach the horizon of catastrophe when it comes to our climate.
By 2030, the average house in this country will cost half a million bucks, and a woman's right to choose may not even exist.
We're not going to be able to meet this moment by recycling the same arguments, policies, and politicians that have dominated Washington for as long as I have been alive.
Okay, so again, it's going to be, I'm young, and I'm radical, and I'm here.
Okay, so that was the radical wing of the Democratic Party last night.
Then you got to the reasonable people.
And when I say reasonable, I don't mean Republican, I just mean people who are not totally crazy.
Okay, Amy Klobuchar gets up there, and she says, listen, a lot of people are going to promise you stuff, but we have to live in reality, and I can win.
And that was the pitch that has been made by a bunch of different candidates on the stage last night.
Steve Bullock, who is the governor of Montana, he made the same pitch.
He said, listen, you guys are all going crazy.
I was watching that last debate, and you're more interested in running to the left than winning an election.
unidentified
I come from a state where a lot of people voted for Donald Trump.
Let's not kid ourselves.
He will be hard to beat.
Yet, watching that last debate, folks seem more concerned about scoring points or outdoing each other with wish-list economics than making sure Americans know we hear their voices and we'll help their lives.
This, of course, is exactly right if they actually wanted to win.
John Delaney, who had a good night last night, former congressperson, he said the same thing.
He said, we can go down the Sanders and Warren route and then we'll lose.
Then we'll lose.
unidentified
Folks, we have a choice.
We can go down the road that Senator Sanders and Senator Warren want to take us, with bad policies like Medicare for All, Free Everything, and impossible promises that'll turn off independent voters and get Trump re-elected.
That's what happened with McGovern, that's what happened with Mondale, that's what happened with Dukakis.
Okay, so again, this broke down very quickly into Sanders and Warren versus the quote-unquote moderates in the field.
And then there's Marianne Williamson, as we'll see.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so the other Democratic candidate on the stage who is somewhat moderate is John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado.
And he comes out, the former governor of Colorado, he comes out and he says, listen, your policies are not going to win you any seats.
All the people who won seats in last year's elections, those people are running on my policies, not your policies.
unidentified
Last year, Democrats flipped 40 Republican seats in the House, and not one of those 40 Democrats supported the policies of our frontrunners at center stage.
OK, so again, stage breaks down into radicals versus moderates and then Marianne Williamson, who's just out there.
And Marianne Williamson, again, is making the same pitch as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but she's making an actually more honest pitch, which is, if you do what I want, we're going to transform the spirit of America.
Now, not my thing.
I think it's ugly in politics when political leaders do this routine.
I don't like it when Trump did it, I don't like it when Obama did it.
I don't think political leaders are there to be our spiritual mentors or guides.
I do not think that political leaders are there to transform our spirits.
I think that political leaders are there to do the things they promise they are going to do, and ideally, to uphold the rights that are established in the Constitution of the United States.
But unfortunately, I am in the minority on this.
Most people in the United States want a leader who is going to channel them.
They want the Wilsonian big man who is going to channel their spirit.
And Marianne Williamson does that better than anybody else on the stage last night.
In 1776, our founders brought forth on this planet an extraordinary new possibility.
It was the idea that people, no matter who they were, would simply have the possibility of thriving.
And now it is time for a generation of Americans to rise up again.
For an amoral economic system has turned short-term profits for huge multinational corporations into a false god.
And this new false god takes precedence over the safety and the health and the well-being of we, the American people, and the people of the world, and the planet on which we live.
Okay, so again, she's using keywords in sort of the spiritualist push, and she's talking about thriving, which is a favorite word of a lot of sort of secular humanists.
She is talking about an amoral economic system.
Not an immoral, like an amoral economic, we need a morality.
She's talking about multinational corporations as false gods.
This is all deeply spiritual language and it's going to a level of the iceberg that the other Democrats are not going to.
The other Democrats are talking about policy here on the top of the iceberg.
Marianne Williamson is going beneath the surface of the iceberg.
Now again, does that mean she wins the nomination?
No.
It means that she is channeling something in the Democratic Party right now and in the American political system more broadly that goes deeper than the political debate.
So I know we're not supposed to take her seriously, but she's going to have a moment.
She's going to have a moment.
It's happening right now.
And now in a second, I want to get to the actual battles that happened, because as we'll see, the reason Marianne Williamson sort of flies over the top in this debate is because Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders on any objective level got brought back down to earth last night on their policy.
OK, so let's talk about that.
So there was a lot of talk about health care last night.
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both pushing Medicare for all, both lying about it.
So Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren keep making the same case, which is, sure, we're going to raise your taxes, although Elizabeth Warren lies about it and says she won't.
They both say, sure, we're going to raise your taxes, but in the end, you're going to pay less for health care, which, of course, is not really true in the sense that out of pocket, you will be paying more for health care because you're paying from your tax dollars, whereas right now, for the vast majority of Americans, their employer is paying for their health care.
Well, let's put it this way.
The employer is not going to lower your salary based on your healthcare benefits.
Your healthcare benefits will just go away, and then you will pay out of your own pocket for healthcare, which means in your pocket will be less money for the vast majority of Americans.
That's just a basic fact.
Your employer is mostly paying for your healthcare at this point, if you're in the employment-based market.
In any case, John Delaney points this out, because John Delaney isn't a crazy person.
And Delaney says, you keep talking about taking away the health insurance of 155 million people, you think that that's a real pitch?
You think that's really what you're going to do?
And Bernie Sanders has no answer, except to get very angry, and the crowd gets angry along with him.
unidentified
What I'm talking about is really simple.
We should deal with the tragedy of being uninsured and give everyone healthcare as a right.
But why do we gotta be the party of taking something away from people?
Senator, just a point of clarification, in 15 extra seconds, would you raise taxes on the middle class to pay for Medicare for all, offset obviously by the elimination of insurance premiums, yes or no?
Okay, for middle class family, total costs will go down.
By what gradation?
By what metric will total costs go down?
Costs to your employer or costs out of your pocketbook?
Because those are not quite the same thing.
Remember, your employer is paying for those benefits.
And then Bernie Sanders got the same treatment from Tim Ryan and John Delaney.
So Jake Tapper asks Bernie Sanders, he says, I understand it would provide universal coverage, but can you guarantee union members that the benefits of Medicare for all will be as good as the benefits that their union reps fought hard to negotiate?
Now Sanders starts to answer this question, and then Ryan jumps in, and then Sanders gets mad.
And it's Sanders' anger that has made him popular.
It is not Sanders' policies.
This is why, again, Marianne Williamson is channeling something, a thing.
Bernie Sanders is the closest to the other thing, right?
Bernie Sanders is the closest thing to an alternative, which is just sheer rage.
Just anger, yelling, screaming.
But Marianne Williamson is doing sort of the same thing as Bernie, and sort of the same thing as Obama.
I understand that it would provide universal coverage, but can you guarantee those union members that the benefits under Medicare for All will be as good as the benefits that their representatives, their union reps, fought hard to negotiate?
Well no, what you don't know is that Medicare is going to guarantee the same level of coverage as Cadillac medical plans that unions have negotiated.
In fact, I can guarantee you they won't.
It won't be the same thing.
Your care won't be as good.
Because Medicare is not as good.
We know what Medicare looks like.
People purchase supplemental insurance through Medicare Advantage.
It's why Medicare Advantage exists.
So Bernie is just lying out his butt there, but he said, damn.
And so everyone gets very excited.
So as I say, this contrast between radical left and moderate, it goes well for the crowd in the room, but for the rest of the election, it's not going to go well for Democrats because it won't just be Democrats in the room at that point.
Now, again, Marianne Williamson makes a different pitch.
Marianne Williamson gets up and she says about health care, I'm not going to talk about Medicare for all or not Medicare for all.
Instead, we're just going to talk about big ideas, big ideas.
We need to be the party talking about why so many of our chemical policies and our food policies and our agricultural policies and our environmental policies and even our economic policies are leading to people getting sick to begin with.
And again, she is doing something that is different than all the other Democrats.
The reason I keep bringing up Williamson is not just me.
I'm not just standing for Marianne here.
The reason that I'm talking about Williamson is because she was the number one searched, googled person in the debate last night in every single state except Montana.
In Montana, the number one search was their governor, Steve Bullock.
They were trying to google whether he was in fact their governor.
Because no one knows, it's Montana.
Yeah, but the fact is that Marianne Williamson was doing something different than everyone else on the stage last night.
As we will see, this was a race between radicals for the left, moderates trying to hold them back, and Marianne Williamson just going right over the top.
It was really kind of fascinating on a base political level.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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So Democrats racing for the left on immigration.
Elizabeth Warren repeated her nonsense about decriminalizing border crossings, which, of course, would only incentivize people to cross the border illegally between points of entry.
Instead of waiting to be processed at a point of entry, at which point you're going to be presumably detained, and then family separations take place, instead you try to cross at a non-port of entry, and then just enter the country illegally, and you wait for amnesty.
You want to encourage people to cross that Rio Grande illegally in significantly more dangerous conditions than they would get at a port of entry?
Do exactly what Elizabeth Warren is talking about right here.
Bernie Sanders is actually harsher on the border than Warren.
So this would be an area where you would expect Warren and Sanders to go at one another a little bit, but it never happened.
Warren and Sanders formed a weird team up instead of actually going at one another, which was kind of fascinating, frankly.
So Bernie Sanders was asked about the fact that soft border policies create an incentive for people to cross and get benefits, especially since both Warren, I believe, and certainly Sanders have talked about giving free medical care for illegal immigrants.
Sanders says, oh, no, no, no, we're going to be tough on the border, which is kind of interesting.
unidentified
Senator Sanders, you want to provide undocumented immigrants free health care and free college.
Why won't this drive even more people to come to the U.S.
But that's not where the heart and soul of the Democratic Party is right now.
The heart and soul are with Marianne Williamson, but the political corollary of that is that it's really with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
And that leads to this weird situation where everybody on stage last night who was proposing anything that was reasonable was basically booed off the stage and treated as an apostate.
It was incredible.
So take an example.
The Green New Deal.
So John Delaney makes a proposal on global warming and climate change that is actually fairly bipartisan.
There are some Republicans who support this.
I'm still considering whether it's worthwhile or not, whether it would be effective or not.
But John Delaney says, listen, here's what we should do.
We should put a price on carbon and then we should have what's called the carbon dividend.
There are a few Republicans who are on board with this.
As I say, I'm not on board with this yet.
The carbon dividend is basically the idea that you're going to tax carbon and then you're going to redistribute the money from the use of carbon to other projects inside the United States.
The reason I'm not on board with it is because I am not sure that China and India are going to sign off on anything similarly and then you have a serious collective action problem in which we are harming our economy specifically so that we cannot actually lower global warming if that's something we're worried about.
In any case, here is John Delaney making a pitch that is actually somewhat reasonable and then we will hear Elizabeth Worm's completely unreasonable pitch.
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My plan, which gets us to net zero by 2050, which we absolutely have to do for our kids and our grandkids, will get us there.
I put a price on carbon, take all the money, give it back to the American people in a dividend.
That was introduced by me on a bipartisan basis.
It's the only significant bipartisan climate bill in the Congress.
Barack Obama tried this with his Green Jobs Initiative under Van Jones.
It was a complete fail.
She's saying we're just going to dump money on this problem and it's going to solve itself.
But, again, it's all about the yelling and the screaming and the enthusiasm.
It is not actually... Basically, the Democratic Party is now making a choice.
Whether they want to be the party of jazz or whether they want to be the party of rock.
So, original jazz actually took skill.
It actually took skill.
It was all about the ability to know different harmonies and to work with sophisticated harmonies.
And to improvise.
That was original jazz.
Then you got to rock.
And rock is not about skill.
Rock is about enthusiasm.
It's about the level of enthusiasm that you have.
Well, the Democratic Party is choosing between skill, policies that work, policies that at least should be considered, and just rank enthusiasm.
And you can see that rank enthusiasm is winning.
That's why Bernie Sanders is still pulling up around 20% right now, although this did lead to the funniest exchange of the evening, in which Tim Ryan got irritated at the old man screaming at the clouds and also at him.
They waited until the end to get to questions of race.
And then it just turned into a pander fest about slavery, reparations, and the legacy of racism in the United States.
Listen, we can talk about the legacy of racism in the United States.
If we want to do a data-driven drive into what level of current endemic poverty is based on historic racism in Jim Crow, and what level is based on individual actions that keep people in intergenerational poverty, single motherhood, lack of education, criminal activity, and all the rest.
And you can say that those things are outgrowths of past systems of discrimination.
I'm sure that's true.
But the question when it comes to your individual behavior is, what is your individual behavior going to be today?
Not, did the legacy of Jim Crow contribute to your individual behavior?
The question is, are forces beyond your control the ones that are controlling your life?
Or is it stuff that is in your control that is controlling your life?
We can have all those sorts of conversations.
Democrats don't want to have any of them.
And so instead, they just pander.
It just turns into slavery reparations this and slavery reparations that.
Pete Buttigieg tried to pander and failed.
And then, And so did Elizabeth Warren.
And then Marianne Williamson stepped in.
Again, it was her night.
She's the one who had the best night.
So, Pete Buttigieg said, he had this very awkward line where he said that the racial divide lives within me.
Okay, what in the... Okay, so it's environmental racism, this kind of racism, and that kind of... Okay, then Marianne Williamson steps in.
And Marianne Williamson actually makes a pitch that, again, is spiritual in nature, and thus, when it comes to issues of race, is actually more attractive.
Here's Marianne Williamson putting the slavery reparations question in a way that actually sounds more reasonable than the way Democrats are talking about it.
What happened in Flint would not have happened in Grosse Pointe.
This is part of the dark underbelly of American society.
The racism, the bigotry, and the entire conversation that we're having here tonight.
If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I'm afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.
The folks who were involved in the Flint water crisis were of minority descent.
It wasn't white people cramming down a situation on Flint.
By the way, they're all Democrat.
But what she's actually saying there is more speaking to the heart and soul of the Democratic Party than anything that Elizabeth Warren just said.
Elizabeth Warren is substituting policy for spirit.
And Marianne Williamson is substituting spirit for policy.
And if Democrats have to choose, I have a feeling that Marianne Williamson, whoever channels that spirit best, is going to do some damage in these Democratic primaries.
Now, listen, it's real weird, right?
I mean, she's talking about the dark psychic force of collectivized hatred.
We must form a fellowship.
We shall call it the Fellowship of the Ring.
We shall go and fight the dark psychic force of collectivized hatred.
I told you we'll toss the ring into the flames, the fiery furnace from whence it came.
Marianne Williamson.
But, again, got a big cheer.
I mean, did you hear that?
Big cheer.
And then here she was more unraced and a better pitch than Elizabeth Warren.
We don't need another commission to look at evidence.
I appreciate what Congressman O'Rourke has said.
It is time for us to simply realize that this country will not heal.
All that a country is is a collection of people.
People heal when there's some deep truth-telling.
We need to recognize that when it comes to the economic gap between blacks and whites in America, it does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with.
Yes, our problem is not just that we need to defeat Donald Trump.
We need a plan to solve institutionalized hatred, collectivized hatred, and white nationalism.
I want a politics that goes much deeper.
I want a politics that speaks to the heart, because the Only way to fight.
You keep talking about how we're going to fight Donald Trump.
You can't fight dog whistles.
You have to override them.
And the only way you can override them is with new voices.
Voices of energy that only come from the fact that America has been willing to live up to our own mistakes, atone for our own mistakes, make amends for our own mistakes, love each other, love our democracy, love future generations.
Something emotional and psychological that will not Be, be, be emerging from anything on this stage.
It will emerge from something I'm the one who's qualified to bring forth.
Again, I'm not saying Marianne Williamson wins the nomination.
I'm saying that if Democrats keep playing this game where they think that radicalism for radicalism's own sake is going to be the victorious notion, they're actually missing the appeal of their own appeal, which is a religious appeal in nature.
Williamson understands this.
Barack Obama understood this in 2008.
I'm not sure there's any Democrat who really understands this, and that's why I think that they're having a real rough time with Trump, who makes a spiritual appeal to Americans.
You may not like his spiritual appeal.
I don't like parts of his spiritual appeal.
I think that spiritual appeals in politics, as I said before, are stupid and wrong, generally.
But, I also think that Williamson is doing something no other Democrat is doing, and if they can't capture what she's doing, they're gonna lose.
Okay, one final note.
Don Lemon is terrible.
Let me just point out that Don Lemon at CNN, who helped moderate this debate, is awful at his job.
The fact that he is considered an objective journalist is ridiculous.
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
Man, it's good to be a Democrat, isn't it?
You go to debate and who shows up to ask you the tough questions?
Other Democrats, namely the media.
Now to their credit, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did introduce what the Democrat candidates called conservative talking points and what the rest of us call reality.
But there was a much bigger talking point that went unspoken all through the debate.