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June 3, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:13:08

No, This Isn’t America’s Fault | Ep. 1023

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	Most Americans agree that police brutality and rioting are both wrong.
	So why are our political class indicting Americans for the death of George Floyd?
	Plus, good news, apparently protesting racism means COVID-19 can't kill you.
	Things I didn't know.
	You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN's Stop putting your online data at risk.
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	Okay, so while we watch the fire raging out of control, and good news was last night, it seems like it raged a little bit less out of control.
	There wasn't major rioting in Los Angeles.
	Doesn't seem like there was as major rioting in New York.
	There were some problems in New York, but it wasn't nearly as bad.
	DC seems to have gotten things more under control.
	Minneapolis was under control as well.
	And you know why that was?
	Because of all the evil, terrible police officers and law enforcement officers who are apparently systemically racist who are out there protecting the veneer of civilization from rioting and looting.
	We ought to recognize a couple things can be true at once.
	One, police brutality is bad.
	Second, the police who you are indicting as systemically racist and evil are the people who are standing between you and a smashed window.
	They're the people who are standing between you and being beaten on the streets.
	There is a reality in the world and that reality is there are bad people who are willing to do you harm And the people who are in blue are very often the last line of defense against those people.
	And we saw that over the past week.
	That does not mean that police brutality is okay.
	It means that you ought to actually be accurate in your portrayal of the police instead of this binary decision-making where you see people chanting things like abolish the police.
	Abolish the police ain't gonna go so well if the last week was any indicator.
	Okay, so here is the thing that's super irritating about everything that is going on.
	I mean, there are many things that are very irritating about everything that's going on.
	The big narrative that is supremely irritating is the narrative that Americans, broadly speaking, are responsible for the death of George Floyd.
	And this can be attributed to a larger narrative, which is that America, writ large, is responsible for every inequality that exists in America, that inequality is inequity, and that every inequality can be laid at the feet of the American system.
	Which is, of course, how you get people justifying the looting of Target.
	Because the idea is, by looting Target, I am looting an institution of the American hierarchy.
	Now normally we would just say that if you loot Target, you're a piece of crap.
	But, as long as you cite these sort of Marxist pseudo-studies that university professors and members of our media spout, as long as you say that Target is just an institution of the capitalist structure, and therefore you breaking into an ATM is fighting back against the system that oppresses you, Well, then apparently it is utterly and totally fine.
	Now, here's the thing about all this.
	This would assume that most Americans didn't care about George Floyd.
	And if you listen to our politicians, it really is incredible.
	You listen to our politicians in our media and many of the protesters, they're screaming to the heavens that Americans don't care about George Floyd.
	Weird, because every single person I have met ever knows George Floyd's name.
	And every single person I have met ever believes that that police officer should go to jail for putting his knee on the neck of a man for nine long minutes while he says, I can't breathe and provides no threat to the officers.
	I'm still waiting to meet the people who think that the police officer was completely fine.
	But there is widespread, widespread agreement on virtually all of these issues.
	The fact is the vast majority of Americans, I mean like nearly all of them, believe that police brutality is bad.
	And if you look at the statistics on the protests that are happening right now, there is a poll that is out from Morning Consult and Monmouth.
	And here's what it says.
	Regardless of the actual actions taken, do you think the anger that led to these protests was fully justified, partially justified, or not at all justified?
	Fully justified.
	57% of Americans say yes.
	Partially justified.
	21% of Americans say yes.
	So that means 78% of Americans say that this thing was either fully or partially justified.
	Only 18% say that it was not at all justified.
	And I'll go further than that.
	I think that the question is vaguely worded.
	I think that if you ask Americans, how many of you believe that police brutality should be ended, the answer would not be 78%.
	The answer would be 99.99999%.
	Also, how many Americans believe that their local police department is doing a good job?
	41% of Americans say that they are very satisfied with their local police department.
	30% of Americans say they are somewhat satisfied with their police department.
	So that's 71%.
	And another 13% say they are somewhat satisfied, and neither did satisfied nor satisfied.
	Okay, so that means that, doing some quick mental math, 84% of Americans say they are somewhere between, eh, they're okay, and they're doing a great job on their own police force.
	So does that suggest that people believe that their police force is systemically racist and that their police officers are evil and terrible and no good and very bad?
	Also, a clear majority of Americans say they support supplementing city police forces with the military in order to stop rioting.
	A very large majority of Americans, in fact, 58% of Americans say they either strongly support or somewhat support sending in the military, if necessary, in order to stop rioting.
	Just 19% say they strongly oppose.
	11% say they have no opinion.
	Now, there is one data point where Americans have shifted.
	So all of those stats, by the way, are extremely consistent.
	They've been very consistent for a very long time.
	Americans like and respect police officers in their neighborhood, by and large, by statistics, by poll statistics.
	Americans, by and large, Like, universally, think police brutality is bad.
	And Americans don't want to see rioting and looting in their streets.
	These seem like things that we can all agree on, right?
	That seems like a pretty good starting point for a society and a civilization.
	The one area where opinion has shifted is in the area of whether they believe that black Americans are more likely to be victims of excessive force than white Americans.
	In July 2016, when Barack Obama was president, that answer was 34% of Americans said that black Americans were more likely than white Americans to be victims of excessive force if they are black.
	That was during Barack Obama's presidency.
	Now Trump is president, and that number has skyrocketed to 57%.
	I would suggest that the partisan breakdown is that a lot more Democrats than Republicans have now shifted their opinions on this because of the nature of the President of the United States.
	I think that has very little to do with the underlying feelings about all of this.
	So if we all basically agree on a lot of this stuff, then why the division?
	And the answer, again, goes back to this suggestion that is being put forward by the media, by our politicians, by academia.
	by the political class, that the death of George Floyd is supposed to be a referendum on you as a person, on you as an individual, and on America writ large.
	And there we do have some pretty significant and severe disagreements.
	And we'll get to those disagreements in just one second.
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	All right, so we're gonna get to the narrative problem in just a second, but suffice it to say that the narrative dichotomy that's been set up by our media, by our political betters, by the elites in our society, That political narrative that America is bad and terrible means that our political class have gone incredibly soft on rioters and looters.
	They've gone incredibly soft on people who are acting violently.
	And that has real-world consequences.
	I mean, people are dying.
	And I don't just mean people who are victims of police brutality.
	We have seen a bevy of police officers shot.
	We have seen police officers attacked.
	We saw, over the last 48 hours, a retired St.
	Louis police captain named David Dorn, who is black.
	We saw him shot to death outside of a looted North City pawn shop in St.
	Louis.
	He's 77 years old.
	He was a retired St.
	Louis city captain.
	According to the Ethical Society of Police in St.
	Louis, Dorn was a retired St.
	Louis city captain, and they said he was murdered by looters at a pawn shop.
	He was the type of brother that would have given his life to save them if he had to.
	Violence is not the answer, whether it's a citizen or an officer.
	Apparently, he was murdered during the looting while exercising law enforcement training, according to St.
	Louis Police Chief John Hayden.
	The video is absolutely heartbreaking.
	Absolutely heartbreaking.
	Of a family member standing over his body as the man dies on the sidewalk.
	But you wouldn't know David Dornan's name, really, except for a few media stories.
	We're going to have mass nationwide protests over George Floyd, because apparently the great threat to black Americans is the police.
	But this 77-year-old retired police captain Who is black, was murdered, and nobody's gonna know David Dorn's name within 48 hours, because that's the way our media culture works in this country.
	Just as nobody knows the name of the federal officer, the black federal officer who was shot to death and murdered in cold blood in Oakland, nobody's gonna remember his name either, because it doesn't fit the narrative.
	The narrative is that black people in America are an existential threat because of white people in America, even though that is not true.
	It isn't true, and we're gonna get to how not true that is in just one second.
	So, President Trump, of course, tweeted about the officer who was shot, And he tweeted out a tribute to the officers and our highest respect to the family of David Dorn, a great police captain from St.
	Louis who was viciously shot and killed by despicable looters last night.
	We honor our police officers perhaps more than ever before.
	Thank you.
	And we should keep in mind, by the way, that the police in the vast majority of situations, as in like 98% of situations, are doing their best and are not violating the law.
	And yes, there are police officers who are brutal.
	And yes, there are police officers who are doing bad things.
	And you can see videos of them right now.
	Because if you expand the number of police-civilian interactions, the number of bad things on a raw level is going to go up.
	That's just the reality of the situation.
	But officers like David Dorn, who again is a retired police officer, they matter too.
	They matter too.
	I mean, this stuff is just egregious.
	In New York City, Bill de Blasio, who's the head of the police department, because in New York City, the mayor is the head of the police department, he's allowed the NYPD officers to basically, they've been abandoned.
	They've been abandoned.
	There was video of NYPD cars yesterday that was going around, and how many of them had their windows shattered, how many of them had been spray painted.
	We've seen this in LA as well.
	The abandonment of law enforcement.
	is ongoing and insane.
	And by the way, abandonment of civilians, which we'll get to in just one second.
	But here is a list in the last 96 hours of the police officers who have been attacked over the last 96 hours.
	And you won't hear about any of this, right?
	Because again, the story is only the police officers are the bad guys and that they are systematically attempting to exterminate, viciously brutalize black Americans.
	Even though the fact is that the people that they are largely protecting from crime in areas where they are having encounters with black Americans are other black Americans.
	The police get called when a black American calls the police because another black American is trying to hurt them, just the same way the police show up when a white American calls because a white American is trying to hurt them.
	And the vast majority of crime in the United States is intraracial, not interracial.
	The vast, vast, vast, vast majority.
	And by the way, if you're going to speak about interracial crime, there is vastly more by percentages black on white crime than there is white on black crime.
	But the bottom line here is that if we're gonna talk about what the police are doing on a day-to-day level, what we see in the George Floyd case is not what the police are doing on a day-to-day level.
	That is statistically aberrant.
	It is evil.
	It is horrible.
	That officer should go to jail.
	Police brutality should be ended.
	And by the way, there are certain policies that we should all be able to agree on, that the left won't agree on five moments from now, right?
	Okay, here are a couple of them.
	We should get rid of qualified immunity.
	That means that right now, by 1982 Supreme Court doctrine, Police officers, if you are acting outside the scope of your authority, if you violate somebody's civil rights, you're granted immunity by Supreme Court doctrine.
	That's ridiculous.
	Just because you are in a blue uniform does not mean that you get to put your knee on the neck of a guy for nine minutes while he asphyxiates, obviously.
	And then there is the problem of police unions.
	Public sector unions across the board are a problem.
	I'm one of the few Americans, right, left, or center, who's been saying this for years.
	Police unions, fire unions, teachers unions, anybody who's unionizing against the taxpayer, which is what public sector unions are, it's a problem.
	Because then, presumably, you're going to strike against the public.
	That's always the threat of a union, is they're going to strike.
	And negotiating contracts with the city that are not in the interest of the civilian population is pretty ridiculous.
	So those are some things we could do right now.
	We could simply say that police unions, that public sector unions broadly, ought not exist.
	That is something that, by the way, that was true for most of American history.
	It only became public sector unions as important facets of American life in the 1930s, really, late 1930s under FDR and under the Wagner Act.
	But those are things the left won't agree on in a moment, because as soon as we get down to specifics, we realize the left doesn't actually care about the specifics.
	For a lot of people politically, all they care about is the broader message, which we'll get to.
	So, in the last 96 hours, here's what's happened to the police officers who, broadly speaking, have been maligned as racist and part of a systemically discriminatory system.
	A Las Vegas metropolitan police officer shot in the back of the head struggling with a rider.
	An active shooter opened fire on law enforcement at a Las Vegas courthouse.
	Four St.
	Louis police officers were shot by an active shooter.
	A New York police officer was struck by a vehicle.
	Three Buffalo law enforcement officers were struck by a vehicle in front of a police station.
	Three Davenport law enforcement officers were ambushed and one was shot.
	132 officers were injured in Chicago during a riot.
	Nine Pittsburgh officers were injured by objects during a riot.
	Several officers in Rhode Island were injured during riots.
	An active shooter opened fire at the Oakland Police Department.
	Two officers were struck in the head with projectiles in Santa Ana.
	Two Richland officers were struck in Virginia.
	One officer was struck in the head by a brick in Albany.
	Four Prince William County police officers sustained head injuries from projectiles, seven officers injured in Sacramento, several officers shot at and injured in Lynchburg, several Champaign police officers injured, three Oak Law police officers injured, 21 officers injured in Salt Lake City, at least 50 Secret Service agents injured by Molotov cocktails in Washington, three Denver police officers run over by vehicle, 33 New York police officers injured during riots, six Athens police officers injured during a protest, two Capra police officers injured during a riot in Harrisburg, 12 Las Vegas metropolitan police officers injured during riots.
	21 Minneapolis law enforcement officers injured in riots.
	One federal protective services officer shot and killed.
	Hey, so is that worthy of mention?
	Like any of that?
	Any of that?
	Or are we all supposed to just act as though none of this has ever happened?
	Or none of this is happening?
	The police officers who are on the streets are being abandoned by a lot of the political class.
	Again, in defense of the broader narrative, which is that police departments across the country are systemically racist because America is systemically racist.
	And thus, all Americans are somehow guilty for the death of George Floyd.
	About which 99.99% of Americans agree that the officer who did that should go to jail.
	Now we're gonna get to the Sergeant's Benevolence Association.
	They put out a statement that is pretty astonishing yesterday in response to the abandonment of the police force by Bill de Blasio, who's just a disgrace.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so the Sargent's Benevolence Association.
	In New York City, has now come out just ripping into Bill de Blasio.
	As well they should, by the way.
	The Sergeant's Benevolence Association says, Dear fellow sergeant, I'm being inundated with calls, text messages, and emails pleading for help.
	Please know I'm reading each and every correspondence I receive.
	I want each of you to know, I'm very much aware of everything that is occurring in our city.
	I know we are losing the city.
	We have no leadership, no direction, no plan.
	I know you are being held back and used as pawns.
	I understand.
	I am one of you.
	I am doing it and will continue to do everything I can to protect you and the people of the city.
	So I'm asking you to please stay together and stay strong.
	Hold the line.
	Protect each other.
	Stand shoulder to shoulder.
	Do not give up.
	Never give up.
	I hear you.
	I am aware, and soon everyone is going to hear you.
	Help is coming.
	We will win this war in New York City.
	Remember, you work for a higher authority.
	It's good against evil, and good always wins.
	He's talking about the looters and the rioters, not the protesters.
	Obviously.
	The following are some of the messages I am receiving.
	This is according to Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolence Association.
	Total nightmare last night.
	The executives of the NYPD are going to get a member of the service killed.
	They have no plan set in motion.
	You have inspectors and chiefs running around the city with no direction.
	Leave the police work to the frontline supervisors.
	I've been at these riots since the beginning.
	I've been hit with eggs, bricks, and rocks.
	My officers are depleted, tired, and beat up.
	Our officers and supervisors are getting hurt every night doing their jobs without any support from our PC, our chief of police, and our mayor.
	And this, by the way, is the widespread sentiment for police officers in areas across the country.
	I'm talking to police officers in major cities across the country.
	Again, because our political class is invested in a particular narrative.
	And that narrative is that the violence and the looting and the treatment of police officers is an outgrowth.
	It's a response to the evils of our entire system.
	That's the idea here.
	So it comes, first and foremost, from the media.
	So our media, who are all Ivy League-educated, college-educated intelligentsia, who never are going to have to actually be in the middle of one of these riots, ever.
	They get to sit in their cush mansions in Upper West Side New York.
	They don't have to worry about their small store being looted in Van Nuys.
	They don't have to worry about their storefront windows being shattered in the middle of Midtown.
	So they can sit in their studios and they can do hits on CNN.
	Nicole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times editor who just won a Pulitzer Prize.
	She just won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1619 project, which again is a bag of garbage.
	She said she was on CBS News last night, and she says it's actually not violent to loot.
	Good news, guys.
	It turns out Nicole Hannah-Jones has some words about violence.
	Because, you know, it turns out that real violence is what's been done to black people over American history.
	Real violence doesn't involve burning things down or breaking into stores or anything like that.
	Real violence is just systemic racism, according to Nicole Hannah-Jones.
	It turns out Jim Crow is real violence.
	So is slavery.
	You know what else is real violence?
	Burning down a black store owner's store.
	Or a white store owner's store, by the way.
	I have some notes in a few moments about the store owners who are posting BLM messages on the plywood outside their stores in a vain attempt to get the rioters and looters to leave them alone.
	But here was Nikole Hannah-Jones last night.
	Again, this commentary is so stupid she should be given another Pulitzer.
	Here she was explaining that violence does not include looting and rioting.
	It is disturbing to see property being destroyed.
	It is disturbing to see people taking property from stores.
	But these are things.
	And violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body.
	Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence.
	And to put those things, to use the exact same language to describe those two things, I think really, it's not moral to do that.
	Oh, weird, because you know what I've heard over and over and over from members of the intelligentsia left is that speech is violence, hate speech is violence, using the wrong pronoun is violence, but apparently burning down someone's store is not violence.
	Pretty incredible stuff right there.
	By the way, is it violence when people attack police officers or shoot police officers or run police officers over in cars?
	Is that not violence?
	Are we not allowed to comment on that either?
	Chris Cuomo last night was defending the rioters.
	He said, who says that rioters have to be polite and peaceful?
	Then later says, I'm not approving of violence.
	Then why did you use the word peaceful?
	Here's Chris Cuomo last night.
	Too many see the protests as the problem.
	No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets.
	Persistent and poisonous inequities and injustice.
	And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful, because I can show you that outraged citizens are the ones who have made America what she is and led to any major milestones.
	Be honest, this is not a tranquil time.
	By the way, peaceful protests are usually the stuff that actually affects change.
	If you want to affect political change, the last thing you should do is riot.
	It turns out that Richard Nixon probably won an election in 1968 on the back of the rioting of 1968.
	If you actually want people elected to oppose your agenda, by all means go ahead and riot and burn crap down.
	Because you know what that's doing?
	It's leading large majorities of Americans to want the military sent into cities to stop all of this.
	Which doesn't sound anti-law enforcement to me, so much.
	But it wasn't just Chris Cuomo, block of wood Chris Cuomo.
	It was members of the media all over who were defending the rioters.
	The Media Research Center cut this little compendium of various members of the media defending the rioting.
	I want to make perfectly clear, this has been almost entirely peaceful.
	In fact, completely peaceful.
	Many of these protests have been largely peaceful.
	Mostly peaceful.
	I'm looking at those live pictures next to you and they seem very peaceful.
	There are always folks on the fringes of protests that do the things that we don't like.
	A few people who break a few windows and burn a few cars.
	No one should be destructing property and that sort of thing, but I understand the anger.
	Okay, this was the narrative from the media.
	By the way, you would never hear anything remotely like this for a cause the media didn't love.
	And then the media love this particular cause, because again, it ties into the narrative.
	We're going to get to the narrative and the falsehood of the narrative in just one second.
	But there is nobody who, if this were a Tea Party protest and swaths of the Tea Party were going out and looting and rioting, if this were an anti-lockdown protest and swaths of people were going, I mean, they were going nuts and calling the protesters violent for exercising their right to bear arms and breathing too close to other people.
	Now you have people who are attacking cops, burning down.
	We had curfew in a county of 10 million people in Los Angeles last night.
	For like the fourth straight night.
	Are you insane?
	But this is the narrative the media are pushing.
	So we're gonna get to that narrative in just one second because the narrative is a lie.
	You are not guilty for George Floyd's death unless you are Derek Chauvin.
	You are not guilty for systemic racism unless you have done a racist thing.
	We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so what does this narrative that I've been talking about, and I'm going to get to in a second, lead to?
	The narrative leads to the bizarre situation where if you defend your own property, we are now going to declare you a vigilante.
	This is what happened in Philadelphia last night.
	According to townhall.com, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Daniel Outlaw paid lip service to the right of citizens to defend their businesses and lives on Tuesday during a press conference.
	But in the next breath, they expressed how disturbed they were that people would take matters into their own hands.
	Because it turns out when the police won't defend you, people tend to defend themselves.
	Here's what happened.
	A gun store owner in the city shot and killed a looter.
	The 67-year-old gun store owner told cops he spent the night at Firing Line Inc.
	on South Front Street after a recent attempted burglary at his business.
	He was inside his gun shop overnight because someone had attempted to break in over the past few days.
	The owner, Greg Isabella, opened fire with a Bushmaster M4 rifle, according to police.
	Why?
	Well, because a group of four men using bolt cutters cut a lock before forcing open a door to the gun range about 4.15 a.m.
	The suspects then proceeded to a second floor, and that's where Isabella was waiting for them.
	One of the males pointed a gun at the owner.
	That's when the owner of the gun shop, who was in possession of one of his guns, fired several shots, striking one male at least one time in the head.
	So what exactly did the politicians have to say?
	Outlaw said, we do not endorse or condone any form of vigilante justice or taking the law into one's own hands.
	She encouraged people to use safe nonviolent methods when possible.
	She was forced to admit that there are very clear laws that allow us to protect ourselves and our property from harm.
	Kenny said he was deeply troubled by the incident.
	What is troubling about a man?
	The only thing that's troubling there is that somebody was attempting to break into a store.
	You break into a store and you get shot for your trouble?
	That's a good thing.
	But again, this ties into the narrative that breaking into stores, rioting, looting, all of this ties into the bottom line narrative that America is cruel and America is evil and America is bad.
	And this has become a bipartisan narrative.
	So it started off as a narrative in academia and on the left.
	And now it has made its way into conciliatory Republican circles.
	There are a lot of conciliatory Republicans who are trying to understand the anger that they are seeing out there.
	And instead of saying, okay, well, the anger about police brutality is justified, the anger that suggests that America is to blame, broadly speaking, for instances like what we saw with George Floyd, that is not justified.
	That sometimes anger is not actually justified.
	That certain types of anger may be justified and certain types of anger may not be justified.
	We all feel this way in our lives, that there are certain types of anger that are justified and certain that are not.
	But just because somebody's angry, anger is not self-justifying.
	You have to provide evidence that your anger is rooted in something that is true.
	Okay, but that apparently has gone by the wayside.
	So, this has been a longtime democratic narrative, is that America is deeply racist and deeply sexist and bigoted, rooted in racism, that America's history began 1619 with the importation of African slaves to the American continent, that it did not begin in 1776 in freedom and liberty, that the American story is truly about the exploitation of black Americans by white Americans, and that has never let up.
	It has minimized slightly, but not really.
	That's been the narrative of the left for a very long time.
	And thus, all inequalities can be chalked up to America's innate evil.
	And even if you're not racist, even if you've never done a thing that's racist, you are a product of that racist system.
	And therefore, you are just as guilty as Derek Chauvin for what happened to George Floyd because you looked the other way.
	You were complicit in the system.
	This is the broad scale narrative that's being driven.
	This is what Joe Biden was doing yesterday when he spoke in Philadelphia.
	So Joe Biden gave a speech from teleprompter and congratulations to him.
	He got through three sentences without falling all over himself.
	So that's it.
	That's a big accomplishment for a man who's on the verge of senility.
	Here was Joe Biden, the former vice president, who for eight years apparently had nothing to say about, about any of this stuff, except to rip police every so often.
	Didn't solve the problem after 36 years in the Senate.
	But here he is now explaining that we've all turned away from inequality, which again, I'm going to need the evidence considering that Everyone agrees that the officer in the George Floyd case should go to jail and that when officers are brutal they should go to jail.
	We all agree on this.
	But here is Joe Biden laying George Floyd's death at the feet of all of us.
	And you know what?
	I'm not going to accept collective responsibility for something I didn't do any more than a black American should accept collective responsibility for rioting and looting.
	Because that's bullcrap.
	It's nonsense.
	We're individuals and we should treat each other as individuals.
	Here is Joe Biden saying we should not.
	I can't leave this moment thinking that we can once again turn away and do nothing.
	We can't do that this time.
	We just can't.
	The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism, to deal with the growing economic inequity that exists in our nation, to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation.
	Okay, so he is just fulfilling the promise laid out by LBJ back in the 1960s, suggesting that you don't have to identify an actual inequity.
	You don't have to identify a difference in law.
	You don't have to identify an actual racist.
	All you have to do is say that when something happens that is unequal, that is an indicator that America, writ large, is broadly guilty.
	All inequality is inequity.
	That is the message here.
	This is a message being put forth by Eric Garcetti, our idiot mayor of Los Angeles.
	By the way, can I just point out that it is a bad thing to bring thousands of people to protest outside of somebody's private residence?
	Protesters were being praised for this.
	They went outside Mayor Eric Garcetti's house.
	I am not a Garcetti sympathizer.
	His kids are inside there.
	That's where his wife and his kids live.
	Protesting outside somebody's house.
	He's got an office.
	It's downtown.
	You can just go right down there and protest it.
	But going into a residential area, and then sitting, thousands of people sitting outside a private residence, because you don't like Eric Garcetti, is, can we point out, kind of threatening?
	Like a little bit threatening?
	It's right outside, how would you feel if somebody were right outside your door?
	Yelling at you.
	Would that feel the same as if someone was protesting outside your office?
	I think not.
	Anyway, here's Eric Garcetti, who went out into the crowd.
	Again, no mask or anything.
	We'll get to that in a second.
	Amazing.
	Amazing how our politicians, we all got locked down.
	You're killing grandma if you don't wear a mask a hundred feet away from everybody else.
	But if you're protesting against racial inequality, that's totally different than if you want to just go back to work or something, or you want to go to synagogue or something.
	We'll get to that in a little bit.
	But here's Eric Garcetti saying, we need a country that listens.
	Question, you're the mayor.
	How's that listening going?
	What does that actually look like?
	Politicians do this all the time, by the way.
	I'm going to have a listening tour.
	A listening tour!
	Oh, a tour where you use your ears!
	Well, problem solved, guys!
	A listening tour just means I'm not going to change anything, but I'm going to express my sympathy for your feelings.
	We're not going to address the core issues and whether you are justified in your feelings, and whether there's any data to back this, and practical measures to alleviate some of the problems.
	Instead, we're going to go on a listening tour!
	And you know I'm sympathetic because Eric Garcetti feels your pain.
	Here's Eric Garcetti last night.
	Blackface should not be a sentence to die, nor to be homeless, nor to be sick, nor to be underemployed, nor to be under-educated.
	We need a country that listens.
	So secondly, I'm here to listen.
	I want to invite the leaders of this organization.
	Stop him.
	That's so disgusting.
	A black face should not be a reason to die, a reason to be underemployed.
	Who's saying it should be?
	Who are you arguing with?
	Who are you, like, really, who are you arguing with?
	And the answer is that you're arguing with nobody.
	You're arguing with nobody.
	You're arguing with a straw man America that says that black people should simply die.
	What is the statistical evidence that anyone in America believes this?
	But this, of course, is the narrative that is set, because once the narrative is set, there's a predictable result.
	And that predictable result is unrest.
	It is, because once you declare that America is rotten, root and branch, once you declare that the foundations of America are fundamentally rotten, you cannot then suggest, well, what we need to do is we need to do a little touch-up job right here, you know, on like the corner of the building.
	Once the foundations of the building are completely rotten, there's only one solution, which is to destroy the building.
	And you can see that many of the rioters and looters, and yes, the protestors, some of the protestors, by the way, to pretend that all the protestors are unsympathetic to the rioting and the looting is not true.
	There are some protestors who are very sympathetic.
	We haven't done polls of the protestors.
	It is not 0%.
	It may not be 50%.
	It may not be 40%.
	I don't know the percentages.
	You don't either.
	But to pretend, as the media have done, that all the protestors are unsympathetic to the looting is simply not true, especially when a lot of these A lot of the rioting and looting is springing out from the protests.
	They started the protests and the idea they're outside infiltrators, the data are not too certain on that.
	It is not blaming all protesters writ large for the actions of rioters and looters.
	But Ami Horowitz, documentarian, he went to Minneapolis and he actually asked some of the protesters, not the rioters and looters, some of the protesters how they felt about the rioting and the looting.
	And here was their explanation.
	Rioting and looting are justified because America is evil.
	Because Target is part of the system.
	Here was Ami talking to some of the protesters who are African-American.
	Target, Walmart, Best Buy, all of that st, wherever the fk y'all at, you better lock your door.
	George Floyd!
	This is us saying, hey man, you're not giving it to us, so we're gonna take it.
	Of course!
	What do you expect them to do?
	Google!
	Microsoft!
	All that bullsh** that's all built up!
	That's all slavery money!
	If anybody's a thief, it's America!
	So when we take it back, or we burn it down, yeah!
	We gettin' back what's ours!
	You wanna give it up?
	Okay, you ain't havin' it no more!
	Okay, if you push the narrative that America is rooted in exploitation and slavery and Jim Crow, if you push the narrative that all of today's inequality is driven by yesterday's injustices or today's continuing racism, Then is it a surprise when people rebel against that?
	Is that really a surprise?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	And this is why it's a mistake to give credence to the narrative in the first place.
	And I think that George W. Bush gave credence to the narrative yesterday.
	I'm really disappointed in him because it is one thing to express sympathy for people who are protesting police brutality.
	I'll go out there and protest.
	Members of the police will go out there and protest police brutality.
	They were.
	They took a knee.
	They were marching with protesters against police brutality.
	But I'm certainly not going to march with people who suggest that Americans writ large are responsible for individual actions that are bad, racist, or evil.
	That's crap.
	And to back that narrative is to basically suggest that the entire system needs to be torn away.
	It doesn't create unity, it creates division.
	We're going to get to that in just one second.
	First, let's talk about the Second Amendment.
	You know what's kind of important these days is the Second Amendment.
	You know how we know?
	Because when the police are told by the politicians not to step in and protect you, you might need a gun to protect yourself.
	It's amazing.
	Gun control laws are going to be in a lot of danger after what we just saw over the prior week.
	Our Founding Fathers knew you needed the ability to protect yourself in the violation of your rights from others.
	Because guess what?
	Sometimes the police ain't going to show.
	And this is why the people at Bravo Company Manufacturing take gun manufacturing incredibly seriously.
	The people at Bravo Company MFG support the right of responsible private individuals to have the access and ability to employ the same tools as civilian law enforcement as a means of defending ourselves, our loved ones, our communities, our freedoms, should a threatening situation ever arise.
	BCM assumes that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or soldier overseas.
	So quality is of the utmost value to them.
	Every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans in Heartland, Wisconsin, to a life-saving standard.
	Every American is responsible to question, debate, confront issues that affect our lives, and when your life and liberty are threatened, you gotta protect yourself.
	This is why you need a firearm.
	If the last week didn't teach you that as a private citizen, you might need a firearm, I don't know what would.
	Go check out my friends at Bravo Company Manufacturing.
	Head on over to BravoCompanyMFG.com, where We're going to get to George W. Bush's statement, which I think is really not good.
	And I think that it buys into a particular set of lies.
	If you need more convincing, find out even more about BCM and the amazing people who make their products at YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA.
	That's YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA.
	All right, we're going to get to George W. Bush's statement, which I think is really not good.
	And I think that it buys into a particular set of lies.
	And then we're going to get into the pathetic attempt by some Americans to basically avoid the rage of the mob by essentially parroting a line that is not true.
	We'll get to all of that in a second.
	We have a lot more to get to, but you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
	Right now when you do, you get to count them to leftist tiers tumblers.
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	That's dailywire.com slash subscribe and we'll see you there.
	So there you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So the narrative again is America is evil.
	America hasn't listened.
	Every inequality in America is due to inequity.
	This comes out in as stupid as possible fashion in a column by a person named Savala Trebzinski, the executive director of the Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
	She has a book about race, gender, and the body published by Simon & Schuster in 2021.
	I'm sure it will be a massive bestseller.
	It is called Black and Brown People Have Been Protesting for Centuries.
	It's white people who are responsible for what happens next.
	What I love about that title, particularly, is the idea that white people had nothing to do with, you know, ending slavery.
	White people had nothing to do with ending Jim Crow.
	That basically there's this stark dichotomy between the races.
	Which, of course, is not true in terms of there are lots of good white people and lots of bad white people.
	There are lots of great black people and lots of bad black people.
	It turns out that individuals are both good and bad.
	This is a thing that happens.
	But, according to this article at Time Magazine, the way that you know you're white is that you exist in opposition to other groups.
	She says, How do you know you're white?
	I'm talking to 100 law students.
	The room is racially diverse and full of people who have gotten into top law schools.
	They're committed to making racial equality a cornerstone of their work.
	They tend to think about race in their daily lives.
	They've chosen to attend this evening lecture about the problematic ways race is baked into American law and legal pedagogy.
	But not a single hand goes up to answer my question.
	And this matters.
	You know why no one raised their hand?
	Because they're afraid you're going to yell at them.
	Because if you say, I know I'm white because of the color of my skin, you're gonna say, no, you're not acknowledging the systems and hierarchies of race that have made you so powerful.
	And if you say, I don't think of myself as white, I think of myself as Jewish, well, you don't understand that you are white because of the systems of privilege and power.
	No matter what you say, there's no right answer.
	There's no right answer.
	According to this professor over at UC Berkeley School of Law, the way that you know you're white in the end is because you are part of whiteness.
	So you shouldn't be guilty because you're white.
	She says white students often stop short, unable to identify and articulate the cultural, political, economic, and historic clues that tell them they are part of whiteness, let alone what being part of whiteness truly means.
	I let the silence grow.
	It gets uncomfortable.
	Then I step in to suggest that this phenomenon is a significant part of America's problem with race.
	If you answer, she yells at you because you don't understand your own whiteness unless you shout that you are guilty for all of America's problems.
	And then if you don't answer, that's also the problem.
	So, this particular narrative is the end point of the academic nonsense that suggests collective responsibility for individual sins.
	And it's pretty disgusting.
	George W. Bush put out a statement yesterday about the protests, and he bought into some of the nostrums that have been promoted here.
	Now, he starts off and he talks about the brutal suffocation of George Floyd.
	Again, we all agree.
	Then he says, We have resisted the urge to speak out because this is not the time for us to lecture.
	It is time for us to listen.
	It is time for America to examine our tragic failures.
	And as we do, we will also see some of our redeeming strengths.
	Okay, what are our tragic failures?
	It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country.
	Okay, can we have some, like, data on that?
	Or some specific people who are doing that?
	Because that's a crime.
	So this is just George W. Bush trying to calm the anger.
	It's the same thing as police officers taking a knee with protesters.
	It's not that police officers believe that they themselves are systemically racist or that they are racist at all.
	It's that police officers are trying to quell the anger by legitimizing the anger.
	There's a problem, however.
	I understand the short-term strategy, but there's a problem.
	When you legitimize the anger by also legitimizing a lie, namely that America is in a horrible, terrible place for black Americans to live, that black Americans cannot experience equality, that black Americans are innately under the thumb of white America, there are going to be predictable results that do not end up working inside the political system.
	So George W. Bush puts out this statement, along with Laura Bush.
	He says, this tragedy, and a lot of similar tragedies, raises a long overdue question.
	How do we end systemic racism in our society?
	The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving.
	Those who set out to silence those voices do not understand the meaning of America or how it becomes a better place.
	Not sure who's trying to silence the voices, but are we allowed to say that if you suggest that America is a systemically racist place without any evidence whatsoever of actual policy, that maybe you need to provide some evidence?
	That's not silencing, that's asking for evidence.
	Again, anger is not evidence.
	And anecdotal evidence is a form of evidence, but it is not statistical evidence.
	The buying into the narrative that America broadly writ is guilty for the sins of people like Derek Chauvin, that every one of those instances can be broadened out and blamed on American hierarchies of power, is a trope that has a predictable endpoint, and the predictable endpoint is the disintegration of the country.
	That is the predictable end point.
	When you see people as a member of a group, everyone is a member of a group that is either guilty or innocent.
	The only way you can expiate your guilt, by the way, is by posting some sort of black box on your Twitter or Instagram.
	That's how you do your sacrifice in the temple to expiate your sins so you can get forgiveness.
	This is not the way that a country comes together.
	This is the way a country falls apart.
	By holding people accountable for things they did not do.
	And for holding the system accountable for laws that no longer exist.
	If you're going to talk about systemic racism, there are really only a couple ways to define systemic racism.
	One is practices and laws that are innately discriminatory.
	Jim Crow.
	Housing bias.
	Right?
	The things that are innately discriminatory.
	We all oppose them.
	And they are against federal law.
	Then, there is a second way to define systemic discrimination.
	And that is disparate impact.
	Disparate impact is the idea that if you pass a law and has a disparate impact on one group, meaning one group is harder hit than another group, that this is an element of racism.
	I do not...
	I will not endorse that version of systemic racism, because every single law that has ever been passed in human history impacts groups differently.
	The question is whether the law is directed at the group.
	But you see the conflation, right?
	The conflation is, okay, if black Americans by and large are poorer than white Americans, then that must be because of systemic racism.
	We can't look at any of the other factors.
	If more black Americans on a population level adjusted basis are shot by the police than white Americans, then we immediately have to announce that this is an aspect of American racism.
	We can't look to any other factor.
	The simple inequality is the inequity.
	The fact that group statistics are not identical across groups is evidence that the system is discriminating in favor of certain people against other people.
	Perfect example of this sort of bizarre and unfounded logic today in the New York Times.
	Minneapolis police use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites.
	Now, the first question for anybody who sees that headline is, okay, so why are the Minneapolis police encountering more black criminals than white criminals?
	And are those based on actual phone calls from people reporting crimes?
	Because, let me give you another example.
	Virtually all Americans who go to prison for violent crimes are men.
	Virtually none are women.
	Does that mean that the system is unequal with regard to men and women?
	Or does it mean that men are committing more crimes than women?
	In terms of violent crimes.
	Wouldn't you want to know that before you declared the system innately inequitable?
	Innately systemically discriminatory against men?
	The answer is, of course you would.
	So, if the question is, how many people are being shot by police?
	The second question should be, okay, and how many people committed crimes?
	Because if you look at the Washington Post database of how many people in America were black and unarmed and shot by police in 2019, this is the Washington Post database, the answer in 2019 was nine.
	If you want to talk about the number of black Americans who were shot who are unarmed and who are not fleeing from police, the answer is three.
	Does that sound like the extermination of black people across the country?
	It does not.
	Nowhere in this New York Times piece, not a single place, do they actually talk about differential crime rates by race.
	Now again, that's not racist.
	It is not racist to point out that there are differential crime statistics any more than it is racist to point out that there are differential statistics when it turns to police officers shooting people.
	A statistic is a statistic.
	Statistics are not racist.
	They are just statistics.
	But apparently if you point out that a disproportionate share of crime is committed by young black men, this is racist.
	But if you point out that a disproportionate share of young black men are shot by police, then this is woke.
	How about both of those are stats and they are related stats, but we're not allowed to point that out.
	We just have to attribute the disparity, the second disparity, not the first.
	The second disparity we are supposed to attribute to broad scale American racism.
	So we have this long, long article about the evils of the Minneapolis police, My favorite quote in this is from David Schultz, professor at Hamline University in St.
	Paul.
	He says, the disparities in the use of force in Minneapolis parallel large racial gaps and vital measures in the city, like income, education, and unemployment.
	He says, it just mirrors the disparities of so many other things in which Minneapolis comes in very badly.
	Okay, might it mirror the disparity in crime statistics?
	Might it?
	Wouldn't that be like the number one question, considering you called the cops?
	This is not about random white Americans shooting random black Americans.
	This is about the police who are called in to deal with crime.
	Wouldn't you want to know what the calls actually said before you declare that the police are racist?
	If somebody calls up the police and says, you know, my neighbor just murdered my other neighbor.
	Both of them were black and the police come and they get in an armed confrontation with the person, with the murderer.
	Is that a racist incident or is that the police doing their job?
	That's the big question.
	The question isn't how many black Americans are being shot by police.
	The question is how many black Americans are being unjustifiably shot by police.
	And how does that compare with the number of white Americans being unjustifiably shot by police?
	And more because that would implicate racism.
	And more broadly, how many Americans are broadly being unjustifiably shot by police is an issue of police brutality.
	OK, and that one we all agree on.
	But instead, we have to drive this narrative over and over and over again that every inequality is due to the innate evils of the United States.
	And so you saw CNN put up a piece today about racial inequalities in the United States in terms of the wealth gap.
	It is true that there are certain disparities in the wealth gap that are attributable to historic injustices like redlining, for example, because so much of wealth is concentrated in homeownership, for example.
	But it would not explain, racism would not explain, the continuing income disparity between black Americans and white Americans, particularly because you know where there is no income disparity.
	If you look at parental income, if your parents are poor, you are not going to have as high an income, generally speaking, after the same period of time as somebody who's born in a rich family, which is not a particular surprise, right?
	You're going to grow up in a richer community, you're going to have more connections.
	That is a class issue, that is not a race issue.
	But Let's say that you're a black woman who was born in a wealthy black family versus a white woman born in a wealthy white family.
	How exactly does that turn out?
	Is that racism?
	Well, it turns out there is no income gap between black and white women raised in similar households.
	None.
	None.
	It's only among males, which might implicate behavior because it turns out that black women are also black.
	So again, statistics I know have been verboten here because we're trying to drive a narrative.
	It is wrong for people to try and buy their way out of conflict by buying into narratives that are going to create deeper conflicts over the nature of America.
	Because again, the idea that America is systemically racist and broadly racist just allows people to, number one, avoid naming and shaming.
	And being specific about policies and people who are doing bad things, and instead allows them to say the entire system is guilty, therefore tear down the entire system.
	And if you don't say tear down the entire system, then you're a racist.
	That is the implication of the narrative that is being drawn.
	Okay, in just a second, I'm going to get to some actual police statistics, and we'll talk about systemic police racism.
	We'll also talk about this attempt to buy penance, particularly by woke white people.
	Who are attempting to demonstrate their bona fides by mouthing platitudes.
	Which again, does not cure racism.
	You know what didn't cure racism?
	You putting up a black square on Instagram yesterday.
	Racism not solved.
	You have accomplished zero things.
	And guess what?
	It ain't gonna matter because next time there is a police officer who is white who kills a black man unjustifiably, nobody's gonna care that you put up a black square three years ago.
	No one.
	It ain't gonna matter one iota.
	We're gonna get to all this in just one second.
	First, let's talk about the actual statistics.
	So Heather McDonald, who has spent her life studying the statistics on police brutality and racial disparities, she has a piece in the Wall Street Journal that is worth reading.
	Again.
	We can acknowledge that people are angry.
	We can acknowledge that people have anecdotal evidence of the police mistreating them.
	We can even acknowledge that if you are a black person living in a high-crime area, there is a better chance that you had a bad run-in with a police officer than there is if you are a black person living in a high-income area, or if you're a white person living in a high-income area, or a white person living in a low-crime area.
	Right?
	The area is determinative, and the amount of interaction between police officers and people of a particular race is determinative, too.
	My guess is that you can find quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of police abusing Latinos in East Los Angeles, where there are high crime rates and a lot of Hispanic populations.
	But, here's Heather McDonald talking about the myth of systemic police racism.
	She says, this charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years, it remains so today.
	However, sickening the video of Floyd's arrest, it isn't representative of the 375 million annual contacts police officers have with civilians.
	A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution, or sentencing.
	Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
	In 2019, police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous.
	African Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year, 235, a ratio that has remained stable since 2015.
	Okay, so first of all, we should know just right off the bat that police officers fatally shot 235 black people last year.
	There are 30 million black Americans.
	Does that sound like a campaign of extermination by police officers against black people?
	It does not.
	That share of black victims is less than what black crime rates would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects.
	In 2018, the last year for which such data have been published, African Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S.
	and committed about 60% of robberies, although they are 13% of the population.
	In fact, if you actually want to break down that subset even further, You shouldn't really use 13% of the population as a substitute because really you're talking about young black men.
	It is not black women who are committing homicide and robbery, right?
	It's a smaller percentage of the population even than that.
	The post defines unarmed broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, New Jersey who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase.
	Washington Post that is down from 38 and 32 in 2015.
	The Post defines unarmed broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, New Jersey, who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase.
	That guy was still considered unarmed by the Post.
	In 2018, there were 7,400 black homicide Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African Americans killed in 2019.
	By contrast, a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is likely to be killed by a police officer.
	On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African Americans were killed in drive-by shootings.
	Such routine violence has continued.
	This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally.
	The victims overwhelmingly black.
	Police shootings are not the reason that blacks are dying of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.
	Criminal violence is.
	The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
	The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by the police officer.
	There is no significant evidence of anti-Black disparity in the likelihood of being shot by the police.
	A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philly Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.
	Research by Harvard economist Roland Fryer found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings.
	So, none of this matters, though, because the narrative must be driven.
	And the easiest way for the narrative to be driven is to bully people into buying the narrative and to repeating the narrative.
	So, yesterday, I drove down Ventura Boulevard in the Valley because there were threats online that there was going to be rioting and looting in Encino and in Sherman Oaks.
	And I would say a quarter of the businesses were boarded up.
	There are a bunch of businesses that were boarded up.
	People had boarded up their windows so they didn't want them to be smashed and rocks thrown at the windows.
	And I would say of those, about half of them had BLM spray painted on the Black Lives Matter spray painted on the plywood or Justice for George Floyd painted on the plywood or something like that.
	And let's be real about this.
	Do you think that they spray-painted that on the plywood because they're out joining the protests?
	Or do you think they painted that on the plywood because they're under the strange misimpression that people who loot their stores give a damn about George Floyd or about racial justice?
	They were attempting to avoid their store windows being broken.
	You saw this, I saw several of these stores had signs up on the window that said minority-owned businesses.
	Which, by the way, is an unbelievable statement.
	Basically, don't break my windows if I'm your race.
	If you are another race, break the guy's next door windows.
	Go ahead and do that.
	That is immoral.
	It is immoral.
	Can you imagine if there were an anti-black riot and people were putting up store window signs that said, white-owned business?
	That would be racist.
	By the way, the way you know this is a racially driven riot is because people are putting up exactly those kinds of signs.
	Otherwise, the sign wouldn't work.
	If we're not racially driven, then why are you putting up a race-based sign on who owns the business?
	The attempt by retailers, by businesses, by corporations to buy off the mob, because this is the other corollary of this.
	Once you've declared America as racist and systemically racist, Once you have gone to the extent of saying that Target and Best Buy, that these are just extensions of American hierarchies of power built on slavery and Jim Crow, once you say all that, there's only one way for those corporations to get off the schneid, so to speak, and that is for them to put out a mea culpa.
	It's for them to say, yeah, well, that may, sure, we're part of the American system, but, and we agree, we agree, America is racist, but don't hurt us because we agree with you.
	We're on your side.
	So we agree with you.
	So the most pandering of these statements came from Nordstrom yesterday.
	So Nordstrom was looted over at the Grove in Los Angeles.
	Nordstrom put up a statement on his website, quote, The events of this weekend are one more painful reminder that injustice remains in the world.
	We can fix the damage to our stores.
	Windows and merchandise can be replaced.
	We continue to believe as strongly as ever that tremendous change is needed to address the issues facing black people in our country today.
	Ah.
	So in other words, keep breaking our windows because you're doing so in the name of justice.
	But please don't break our windows.
	We're on your side.
	That's pretty astonishing stuff.
	I'm sorry, woke white people involving themselves in performative virtue signaling so that they will be left alone online or in their business?
	I'm not sure how that's great for the country.
	You're not calling for actual changes to policy.
	You're not backing actual changes to policy.
	I'd love to see one of these corporations come out in favor of ending qualified immunity.
	I'd like to see one of these corporations come out, small businesses come out and say, you know what the big problem here is?
	Police unions.
	We need to end police brutality.
	I'd like to see one of these businesses come out and say, you know, one of the big problems here is that we have too little policing in high crime areas because that leads to continuing levels of crime against people of color in these areas.
	And that makes it very difficult to invest money in those areas.
	None of these businesses are going to say any of that because that's actual content.
	Instead, they're going to virtue signal with sloganeering, hoping they will be left alone.
	That's what's happening here.
	We're going to buy into the narrative that blame America writ large, kneel with the protesters, say that systemic racism is responsible for all inequality, and then maybe everybody can get along.
	That's not the way this is going to go.
	That's not the way this is going to go.
	Honestly, the best video of the last 24 hours came courtesy of our friend Ami Horowitz, who's in Minneapolis and who's in somebody's apartment building.
	And he took this video of these, appear to be frat bros, who are giving the thumbs up to protesters who are on the street.
	So they're a bunch of protesters who are walking along the street.
	And these frat bros start giving the thumbs up.
	We're on your side, man!
	We're on your side!
	And five seconds later, rocks come smashing through the window.
	It's pretty hilarious.
	In a very sad and tragic fashion, it is hilarious.
	But they're there giving the thumbs up.
	We're on your side, man.
	Filming themselves.
	And boom.
	Rock comes right through the window.
	There it goes.
	Yep.
	And the guy begging and pleading, I'm on your side, man, we're on your side.
	Well, that didn't help, did it?
	It didn't help, did it?
	We see this from our late night host, too.
	Jimmy Fallon is trying to buy his way out of out of woke jail.
	So Jimmy Fallon has been declared un-woke for several years, ever since he touched President Trump's hair, which is apparently the font of all evil.
	You're not allowed to touch President Trump's hair and ruffle it and treat him like a human being.
	So Fallon did that a few years ago back in 2016.
	He has never been let out of Woke prison since.
	He was leading in the ratings until then.
	Then the media turned on him and it became time for Woke Prince Jimmy Kimmel and Woke Prince Stephen Colbert to take the lead.
	So Jimmy Fallon, the other night on his show, he apologized for wearing blackface in 2000, as though this is going to get him out of Woke jail, which it will not.
	Right?
	But by the way, he didn't wear blackface in the traditional sense of, I'm making fun of black people writ large.
	He was dressed up as his friend, Chris Rock.
	You know how it wasn't racist?
	You know how you know it wasn't racist?
	Because no one cared in 2000.
	And it turns out racism was kind of an issue in 2000.
	I was there.
	It turns out people cared about racism in 2000.
	Jimmy Kimmel apologized for it and then he hosted Don Lemon because he had to bring on his black friend to expiate his sins.
	If I bring on Don Lemon, one of the worst commentators in America, but he's black and he's my friend, to talk about this stuff, I have listened.
	I have demonstrated my listening quality.
	Here's Jimmy Fallon.
	A story came out about me on SNL doing an impression of Chris Rock in blackface and I was horrified.
	How do I say I love this person?
	I respect this guy more than I respect most humans.
	So I thought about it and I realized that I can't not say I'm horrified and I'm sorry and I'm embarrassed.
	And what that small gesture did for me was break my own silence.
	And what then I started to do was talk to some experts, some of which are here tonight and this week, and I realized that the silence is the biggest crime that white guys like me and the rest of us are doing.
	It feels like the silence is not the biggest crime that white people are doing.
	It seems like the biggest crime that people are doing is actual crime.
	And by the way, again, I'm not sure who thought, like, the implication here is that if you do not sound off on Twitter about every issue, you therefore approve of bad behavior, which is insane.
	I haven't spent a lot of my time online talking about rape in the Congo.
	I think it's evil.
	I think rape in the Congo is evil.
	I haven't spent a ton of time talking about it because it hasn't been in the news.
	When it is in the news, I'll talk about it.
	But, I don't think that it's safe to assume that because I have not spent tons of time talking about rape in the Congo, that means I approve of rape in the Congo.
	I also do not believe that because Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon, and all the rest of the late night white hosts have not spent every day talking about systemic police racism, that they think that police brutality is okay.
	Who is, like, what, this implication is idiotic.
	It's idiotic, top to bottom, front to back, it's moronic.
	Okay, all of this, so much of this is performative.
	And you can tell so much of this is performative.
	Representative Eliot Engel, he's a Democrat from New York, let the cat out of the bag.
	He was supposed to speak at a rally, and he was caught on a hot mic saying, you know, I wouldn't care about making a speech in front of this crowd except that I have a primary coming up.
	I'll announce everybody.
	I appreciate you coming.
	Then go down the list and it's just too many folks here.
	If I didn't have a primary, I wouldn't care.
	Say that again?
	If I didn't have a primary, I wouldn't care.
	Don't do that to me.
	We're not going to do this.
	We're not going to politicize this.
	Everybody has a primary.
	So we're arguing over who gets to posture in front of a crowd for the sake of voting.
	These are people who take seriously the problems, or alternatively, you know you can, as long as you express sympathy for causes, even causes that, again, not the cause of anti-police brutality, the cause of America is bad, as long as you express sympathy for that, you can win some primary votes.
	Does that sound like a way to heal America, or does it really, really not?
	Okay, meanwhile, I have to comment on this because it's perfectly insane.
	It's perfectly, perfectly insane.
	And it demonstrates that our political class should never be given any sort of power at all.
	It's absurd.
	Absurd.
	Okay, so, remember that time when COVID-19 was a thing?
	Remember, that was really, that was kind of a thing, right?
	I mean, we were locked in our houses from like the middle of March all the way till now.
	And we were told that if you go out in public and you breathe anywhere close to anybody without a mask, you're evil and you're killing grandma.
	And if you talk about reopening businesses, if you even talk about it, you're killing grandma.
	You're engaging in an experiment in human sacrifice.
	Weird how that all went away over the last week.
	Isn't that weird?
	You have Eric Garcetti, video of Mayor Eric Garcetti, who had locked down all of LA County for months on end.
	All of it.
	Restaurants, shut down.
	Nail salons, shut down.
	Businesses, shut down.
	Schools, shut down.
	Yesterday, you had our moron Mayor Eric Garcetti Out in the middle of a crowd, in his neighborhood, with no mask, and people one foot around him.
	By the way, what do you think people do at rallies?
	Do you think that they whisper to one another, six feet apart?
	Or do you think they shout as loudly as possible, expelling germs from their mouth at every shout?
	The entire rationale for, by the way, shutting down churches, is that when people sing very loudly, they expel spittle, and that that gets in other people's orifices, and that this conveys COVID-19.
	What do you think protests with tens of thousands of people do?
	What do you think that does?
	So you had Eric Garcetti doing that.
	You had Bill de Blasio out in public.
	You had Phil Murphy out in public.
	You had every lockdown advocate in America who's a Democrat out in public, in the middle of large crowds, no masking, hugging people.
	Weird!
	It's almost as though I kind of think that your perspective on COVID-19 was now bullcrap.
	That you are full of it.
	That you actually don't think it's that dangerous.
	By the way, you know who else is picking up on that signal?
	Everyone in Los Angeles.
	I was on the freeway in LA yesterday.
	85% of normal traffic.
	I'm not kidding.
	Over here on the 405, 85% of normal traffic.
	Full-on traffic down Ventura Boulevard.
	Because, you know what?
	People pick up on the signal, you're not taking it seriously, when you're obviously not taking it seriously.
	NPR printed a piece yesterday called, Protesting Racism vs. Risking COVID-19.
	I wouldn't weigh these crises separately.
	So apparently, and then they quote supposed experts in the issue as saying that protesting racial inequality is very important because racial inequality kills people.
	But COVID-19 also kills people, but if you protest racism, you're also stopping COVID-19.
	Amazing, amazing.
	So basically, if I go out in a giant crowd and I pray, COVID-19 is going to get me.
	If I go out there and I read Torah this weekend with my family at a shul, COVID-19 COVID-19 is, this is the most evil virus I've ever heard of.
	COVID-19 hates Jews, but here's the good news.
	COVID-19 loves anti-racism, loves it.
	COVID-19 will just stop existing as soon as you're protesting racism.
	So if you go out there, and in some ways it's very anti-Jewish, it seems, like COVID-19, very anti-Christian, very anti-Jewish.
	But in other ways, COVID-19 is really super virtuous.
	And the way that you know COVID-19 is really virtuous is that if you were to lock down protest, COVID-19 was not only going to kill you, it was going to kill your grandmother you're not associating with.
	But, if you're in a protest that is anti-American racism, COVID-19 not only will not kill you, you are inoculating yourself to COVID-19.
	What an amazing woke virus!
	Why has this not been unleashed on America before?
	According to this NPR piece, tens of thousands of people, masked and unmasked, have thronged the streets of Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville, Kentucky, and other cities in the weeks since George Floyd died after a white Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck.
	They are the largest public gatherings in the U.S.
	since the pandemic forced widespread shutdowns.
	Many local officials warned of a possible spike in new cases in one or two weeks.
	Dr. Elaine Nisossi, an assistant professor of global health at Boston University, said risk of transmission is lower in open spaces, but wherever there's a gathering, there is still the risk of transmitting the virus.
	Health experts urged protesters not to sing and shout to reduce the threat of person-to-person transmission.
	The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene issued a list of tips for demonstrators to lower their risk of contracting COVID-19.
	And Washington, D.C.
	Mayor Muriel Bowser said she's worried about how consecutive days of protests could trigger an influx of COVID-19 cases.
	But, according to dozens of public health and disease experts who signed an open letter in support of the protests, the risks of congregating during a global pandemic shouldn't keep people from protesting racism.
	This is according to dozens of public health and disease experts.
	I feel like these medical experts are like Dr. Nick on The Simpsons.
	These are not medical experts.
	They know about as much about medicine as my six-year-old daughter when she puts on her white coat to dress like mommy.
	They wrote a letter saying, white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.
	So I'm just going to point out here, we shut down the most thriving economy in the history of the world.
	We put 40 million people out of work.
	This has, we know, severe health consequences.
	We know that if you put tens of millions of people out of work, you're going to get an uptick in suicide.
	You're going to get an uptick in domestic abuse.
	You're going to get a massive uptick in drug dependency.
	You're going to get a massive uptick in mental illness.
	You're going to get a massive uptick in people who are not going in for their vaccinations and their surgeries.
	We know all this because all of this happens to be factual.
	But if you protested, if you said, hold on, there's some health costs to this COVID-19 shutdown, you are killing grandma.
	But if you're out there and you're just shouting that America is bad and police forces are racist, no solutions, nothing that actually alleviates the problem.
	If you just go out there and you yell a lot about George Floyd, COVID-19 is solved, guys.
	COVID-19, it's over.
	Have you seen the massive crowds in Europe?
	By the way, I do find it incredible that the crowds in Europe have so much time to protest about things happening in the United States.
	When's the last time you had massive crowds in the United States protesting about policy in Great Britain or something?
	But, and I love the Chinese government intervening here too.
	The Chinese government's like, yes, we also oppose racism, except for the million Uyghurs that we are holding in abject captivity in our country, and the billion people that we hold in abject forms of economic repression in our country, and the people of Hong Kong who we hold in forms of abject repression.
	I definitely trust the Chinese government on this one.
	These health experts saying that you can now go protest because we agree with the protest is insane.
	So this doctor, an associate, she said data is showing that blacks and Latinos have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
	Racism is one of the reasons this disparity exists.
	She said, racism is a social determinant of health.
	It affects the physical and mental health of blacks in the United States.
	I wouldn't weigh these crises separately.
	Okay, so put aside the notion that racism is killing people of COVID-19, which of course is a bizarre notion.
	Are people being wheeled into the hospital and doctors are like, not taking care of him, he's black, get him out of here.
	Toss him in that freezer out back, we're done.
	Not seeing a lot of evidence of that, but let's just take it at face value.
	She says, I wouldn't weigh these crises separately.
	Okay, so why should we weigh the government-imposed economic lockdown that has destroyed tens of millions of lives separately from the lockdown itself, from COVID-19?
	It's amazing.
	It's amazing.
	By the way, it's the politicians too.
	So here's what Governor Phil Murphy said, this idiot governor of New Jersey.
	He was asked about the fact that the protest violated his ban on large gatherings.
	And here's what he said, quote, It's one thing to protest what day nail salons are opening.
	It's another to come out and peacefully protest about somebody who was murdered right before our eyes.
	You know what COVID-19 doesn't give two craps about, like, at all?
	What your cause is, because it's a disease.
	So that was your entire argument!
	Your entire argument was, I can shut down churches and synagogues and leave certain businesses open because certain ones are essential and certain ones are not.
	Now he's just making clear he doesn't like churches and synagogues, and he likes these protests, so he's going to allow the protests to go on, but he's going to continue to shut down churches and synagogues.
	If that same exact crowd went out and protested lockdown very bad, shut them down, they're creating COVID.
	This is what Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, said.
	Well, if you're out protesting, you may spread COVID.
	We're going to have a bigger lockdown now because of that.
	But if you're protesting racism, police racism in a state run by Democrats, then, well, you know, COVID-19.
	We've stopped COVID-19, cold guys.
	I mean, this is good news.
	COVID-19's over.
	We stopped it.
	Victory has been achieved.
	Incredible.
	The worst on this was, of course, Bill de Blasio, the idiot mayor of New York who should be ousted as soon as humanly possible.
	Bill de Blasio was specifically asked by a Jewish newspaper called Hamodia yesterday.
	about the fact that he was sending cop cars to Williamsburg to tell people not to congregate for Marev.
	That's the evening service for Jews.
	He really was.
	They sent like a line of cop cars.
	The tape is available.
	He sent a line of cop cars in the middle of Midtown Manhattan being looted and tens of thousands of protesters being trapped on the Manhattan Bridge.
	He was sending cop cars to Williamsburg to tell the Jews, don't go to Minyan.
	Stop going to Minyan, you 10 Jews congregating and praying to God.
	Stop that right now.
	So de Blasio was asked about this.
	He was asked about this.
	Here was de Blasio's insane and, by the way, First Amendment violative answer.
	When you see a nation, an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism, I'm sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.
	This is something that's not about which side of the spectrum you're on.
	Yes, it is.
	No, it is about exactly which side of the spectrum you are on, because you are now declaring it is a more important American activity to go out in the streets and shout about something without any practical solutions or evidence that this is broad systemic racism.
	That's more important than you having a business, you having a way to make a living, you putting food on the table, you praying to God.
	By the way, those last few things, seem to be at the heart of what most Americans do every single day and consider their fundamental freedoms.
	So, it's not important that you go back to work.
	It's not important that you earn a living.
	It's not important that you invest in yourself and your family.
	It's not important that you go to shul or that you go to church or that you go to mosque.
	None of that's important.
	What's really important is my daughter getting arrested in a protest last night.
	That was truly important activity.
	The real important activity in American life is going out and protesting against miasmatic American racism.
	Based on an incident where all Americans agree the police brutality took place.
	Deeply important.
	That's important.
	COVID-19 can have no truck against that.
	COVID-19, the most virtuous virus ever devised by man, apparently.
	Really well done.
	The wokest virus in the history of the world.
	Or, alternatively, this is all bullcrap.
	Alternatively, it turns out that our political leaders were not actually being honest with us, because either they were lying then, or they are lying now.
	Either they are lying about the deadliness of COVID-19 then, in order to lock us down, or they are lying about the deadliness of COVID-19 now, in order to let people out of jail, so that they can go and protest.
	Well done, everybody.
	Well done, everybody.
	Problem of COVID-19 solved.
	I'm glad that this whole situation could end with at least one positive, which is that people can apparently now go out and... I don't know if we can go back to work, though.
	But if your work involves you going out in the street and lying down on a bridge, then I guess you're good to go.
	So, solid stuff there.
	Democratic governors and mayors.
	Just really, really well done.
	All right, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Liberal slacktivists flood social media with black squares to support Black Lives Matter and accomplish nothing.
	The violence continues and the honest radicals defend it, all the while normal people of all races get hurt.

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