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June 4, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:14:54
The Religion Of Wokeness | Ep. 1024
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Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison increases the charges against George Floyd's alleged killer, leftists prepare to blame racism for a COVID-19 uptick, and Drew Brees comes under fire for defending the American flag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Okay, so I think what we are watching in increasing numbers is people converting to the religion of wokeness.
And the religion of wokeness is really exciting stuff.
The religion of wokeness has all the other stuff that religions have.
It has catechisms, things that you're just supposed to listen and repeat.
You may not understand them, but if you don't repeat them, this means you're bad and you have sinned.
It's got a nearly impenetrable code.
The code is constantly changing.
It is constantly moving.
You have no idea what the standard is from day to day, but that code is brought to you by a priestly caste of really intelligent and woke people who will be able to absolve you of sin so long as you listen to everything they say.
There is an intermediary between you and wokeness.
The intermediary is fairly obvious, right?
It is all the members of the New York Times editorial board.
It is all the people who tweet angrily on Twitter.
It is your late night host, but even they have intermediaries.
They have to call in some of their black friends that we saw on all of the late night TV shows last night in order to interpret blackness for them so that they can absolve themselves of their own white privilege.
It's got sacrificial rights, right?
People who are bad, who do not meld the proper catechism are immediately destroyed.
And there's no forgiveness, right?
There's no forgiveness.
And it's got public atonement rituals, where you're supposed to come out and make apologies for absolutely anodyne things.
If you do not repeat things loud enough or long enough, then you're considered bad.
The religion of wokeness suggests a bunch of conflicting things, and the only way to avoid the conflict is to just listen and repeat.
Listen and believe.
That's the basic idea here.
So, we have heard over the past 48 hours a few things.
Well, past, I would say several years, but really exacerbated in the last 48 hours.
We have heard that speech is violence.
So if I say something you don't like, I have enacted violence upon you.
I used to hear this when I would speak at college campuses.
People were literally chanting speech is violence when I spoke at UC Berkeley.
Also, silence is violence.
So, if you don't speak, that's a form of violence.
So, if you do speak, and we don't like it, that's violence.
If you don't speak, that is also a form of violence.
So, America has now adopted tap dancing, apparently, as its new solution, or mimery.
I mean, because if you speak, it's violence.
If you don't speak, it's violence.
So, We have to find some other form of communication.
The religious nature of wokeness is incredible.
It is a substitute for religion.
People are filling a God-shaped hole in their hearts with performative virtue signaling.
And what the virtue signaling is really designed to do in the end is to separate you off from the non-believers.
It really isn't designed to actually be virtuous.
It is not that you're doing anything virtuous when you kneel as a white person in front of a black protester and then suggest that America is endemically racist.
That is not you being a virtuous person.
That is you actively separating yourself off from people who will not do that.
It is you suggesting, because you're not actually taking on the sin.
What you're actually doing is saying, I am not responsible for the sins of the past.
I am not responsible for any of the bad things going on in society.
Please leave me alone.
All those other white folks who are not doing this, those are the people who are responsible.
So it's amazing to watch this blossom and become the state religion of the United States.
It's obviously the religion in Europe.
You've seen tens of thousands of people in Europe marching about police brutality in the United States, which is fairly interesting considering that over in Europe, they have a significant problem with, for example, massive anti-Semitism that has led to the mass exodus of Jews from Europe.
I haven't seen a lot of marches about that in Europe.
Hong Kong was recently completely taken over by the Chinese government and its millions of citizens subjected to the jackboot of the Chinese government.
No protests about that.
But when it comes to America being bad, that's something we can all agree on.
Because America, as the leader of Western civilization, that really is the new religion.
The new religion is that the first article of faith is that America is bad, was bad, will be bad, was rooted in corruption and evil.
And therefore, if we can all march together about that, we can separate ourselves off from the stench of evil Western civilization, and we can rip on people.
Now, again, none of this is to argue that marching against police brutality is bad.
Marching against police brutality is fine.
We all agree on that.
But that is not the program that is being promulgated by members of the media.
It is not the program that is being promulgated by many of the protesters.
I would say most of the protesters, they're not out there marching about police brutality purely.
They're out there marching with the assumption that America is systemically and endemically racist, and that American law enforcement is systemically and endemically racist.
If this were just about police brutality, there wouldn't be any kneeling.
If this were just about police brutality, there wouldn't be any talk about how America has deep, unextirpated sin that everyone in America is responsible for unless you do all these things that the woke want you to do.
If this were just about police brutality, we'd all agree.
As I pointed out yesterday, we all agree on certain fundamental propositions.
Proposition number one, police brutality is evil.
Number two, we all agree riding and looting is evil.
Number three, we all agree individual instances of racism, actual instances of racism, are evil.
We're all in agreement on that.
But that's not what these marches are about.
What these marches have become about is a broader agenda, which is basically suggesting that America at root, root and branch, is very, very, very bad.
And the media have taken that to the logical extreme by suggesting that rioting and looting are merely an extension of the protests.
Now, again, do I think all the protesters believe this?
No.
But I think that the messaging that is being put forth, including the kneeling, the obvious attempt to mimic the message that was put forth by Colin Kaepernick, that is clearly the message that is now being put forth by many of the protesters.
And that I object to, because if you could split the messages, I'm all for one, I'm not for the other.
All against police brutality, all against racism, all against the Use of policing in the wrong ways, all of that agreed.
Against rioting, all of that agreed.
But if the idea here, and as we'll see, this is the idea.
If the idea is that if you don't greenlight rioting and looting, that if you say that rioting and looting should be stopped, if you believe that America is actually an incredible, wonderful place, and the story of America is a story of tremendous founding principles and unchallenged Good philosophy that was failed by Americans for centuries.
But the story of America is the perfection of our behavior in accordance with original ideals.
So the story of America is America getting better in accordance with founding ideals.
If you believe that's the case, then you are to be thrown out.
And as we will see, this is actually what is happening to people, right?
If you say that America is a good place and the flag is good, you will now be called out as not being sufficiently woke and you will be called racist.
So we're going to get to all of that in just one second.
First, I have to bring you some updates.
on the George Floyd actual criminal case, and it's imperative that people understand the facts of the George Floyd criminal case, because you might need to know what's going to happen next.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so let's go to the actual fact of the George Floyd prosecution, because it seems to me that the Attorney General of Minnesota is now doing something that is actually legally dangerous.
If you would like to see the officer in this case go to jail, then you need to charge him with the crime that he committed, and then you need to convict him of that crime.
One of the great dangers that we have seen in other cases is overcharging.
People Putting forth a charge that they cannot fulfill.
So, for example, if there had been an attempt to charge George Zimmerman with manslaughter as opposed to murder, there's a better case that he's probably in jail right now.
If, however, you're talking about charging somebody with second-degree or first-degree murder when they're obviously guilty of manslaughter or assault, then you can easily see somebody acquitted on a higher charge.
Now, people don't seem to understand how this works.
A charge is not your indicator of how seriously you take a crime.
That is not how charging works.
If you say second-degree murder as opposed to third-degree murder, that's not because you're taking the crime more seriously.
Or if you say third-degree murder as opposed to second-degree murder, that's not because you're taking the crime less seriously.
Crimes have definitions.
And so what we have seen in the media and from many of the people online is that they think that because Attorney General Keith Ellison upgraded charges against the former Minneapolis police officer who knelt on George Floyd's neck from third degree murder to second degree murder that this is somehow an indicator that Minnesota is taking this thing more seriously.
That's really not how criminal law is supposed to work, nor should any of these decisions be driven by people outside the justice system making decisions about how to elevate charges based on public outrage.
That's a fool's errand.
It's stupid for a variety of reasons.
One, it's not equal justice under law.
But two, it is really, really stupid to change your charges to something you can't prove because of public pressure.
So yesterday, Keith Ellison, who, by the way, was an awful congressperson, awful congressperson, I mean, openly To the Floyd family, to our beloved community, and to everyone that is watching, I say, George Floyd mattered.
He was loved.
His family was important.
So Keith Ellison, yesterday he made this announcement.
He said that George Floyd mattered, which, of course, everyone agrees about, considering that everyone agrees about it.
To the Floyd family, to our beloved community and to everyone that is watching, I say George Floyd mattered.
He was loved.
His family was important.
His life had value.
And we will seek justice for him and for you.
And we will find it.
The very fact that we have filed these charges means that we believe in them.
But what I do not believe is that one successful prosecution can rectify the hurt and loss that so many people feel.
So now we are going to continue to perpetuate the narrative that even if the justice system works, the justice system is not working.
That's what Ellison is saying at the very end, that even if we convict this guy, then that has not alleviated the situation in any real way.
Magic Johnson is a good indicator of the sort of reaction that the elevation of the charges earned online.
So Magic Johnson, obviously the former NBA star and now part owner of the L.A. Lakers, says I'm so thrilled that Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison amended the police officer who killed George Floyd's charge to second degree from third degree and have then announced the other three Minneapolis officers have been charged with aiding and abetting George Floyd's murder.
I'm wondering what his legal take is on that, because like he says the work does not stop here.
They must be sentenced.
We also need to continue to call for change with our policymakers.
If you believe that agitation gets charges elevated, that's really not a good thing.
You don't want political agitation elevating charges.
You want people charged with the crimes they can commit.
That is a bad thing.
And everyone, left, right, and center, should agree that is a bad thing.
If you can just agitate so that someone is charged with a crime with a higher penalty, that's not how the justice system is supposed to work.
But The real question is whether they are being charged with the correct crime.
And the reason I'm talking about this is because if you're a defense lawyer and you look at the case against Derek Chauvin, it is not impossible that Derek Chauvin gets off on this case.
It is not impossible that he's acquitted.
In fact, I would say that there's at least a 35% possibility that he's acquitted on these charges.
And the reason I say that is because of two specific elements.
One is, that the charges themselves might be overcharged.
So when you look at what the charges suggest, the differences between second and third degree murder, for example, second degree murder is typically described as you have to have intent to have done it.
Intent is a key element of the case.
Well, it's really not clear from the video that Chauvin intended to kill him.
It looks more like malicious and wanton destruction, right?
I mean, it looks more like third degree.
Third degree is malicious, is basically reckless disregard, right?
That you did something that could kill somebody and you didn't care and you just did it anyway, right?
That's what that video looks like.
Does it look like Chauvin was actively attempting to kill George Floyd?
Second degree sort of requires that.
Now, there are various sort of interpretations of these charges.
There's a good piece over at Heritage Foundation from a legal expert there saying the second degree actually is the appropriate charge.
I'll get to that in a second.
But, according to CNN, under Minnesota law, third-degree murder is defined as causing death of a person by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind without regard for life and without intent to kill.
Which is what this looks like.
But they just elevated it from third degree to second degree.
According to CNN legal analyst Laura Coates, a former U.S.
District Attorney for the District of Columbia, she is saying that now the other charges would require that a person plans and willingly carries out a killing or has intention to kill in the spur of the moment.
Now, the other possibility of second-degree murder is felony murder, is that you're committing a felony, and in the process of the felony, you kill somebody.
So you're robbing a store, and your gun accidentally goes off and you kill somebody.
That's felony murder.
You'd have to claim that Chauvin was committing a felony, which I guess you could call this felony as well, maybe?
And that's the theory of the case, perhaps?
But it's a risky charge.
It depends under which charges they're moving.
If they're going to claim that he had intent to kill Chauvin, that Chauvin had intent to kill Floyd, you could certainly see a jury saying, well, it looks more like he accidentally killed him after doing a very, very bad, terrible, brutal thing.
And so he's not actually guilty of second degree murder.
He might be guilty of manslaughter, for example, voluntary manslaughter.
You could see a jury doing that.
And this has happened in other cases.
Overcharging leads to acquittals.
So that is problem number one with the case.
Okay, then there is the problem of the other people who are being charged.
So they're charging the three other officers with aiding and abetting.
The statute that charges aiding and abetting is you are criminally liable for a crime committed by another if a person intentionally aids, advises, hires, counsels, or conspires with or otherwise procures the other to commit the crime.
So usually that means like you hired somebody or you're riding in the same car with somebody and you decided to commit the crime together.
You standing by and not doing anything?
Not quite as clear under Minnesota law.
Right, according to legal expert over at the Daily Signal, the three other officers mere presence at the scene or their inaction alone would not be sufficient for aiding and abetting.
Instead, they would have had to play a knowing role in Chauvin's crime.
Now, it's possible they get convicted if they quote-unquote did nothing to prevent the offenses committed or the brutal activity.
Because if you must have known of the activity and made no effort to stop it, then that makes the crime possible.
You could theoretically make that case, but it's going to be hard to argue aiding and abetting when the officers are just standing there.
Meaning, were they complicit in the act?
That's a hard legal line to draw.
So again, that's not making the case that they shouldn't be convicted, but it is making the case that you actually want to look at these facts because if you think things are bad right now, wait until a jury acquits the three other officers on charges of aiding and abetting because the legal definition ain't all that clear, or if Derek Chauvin gets off because Ellison overcharged.
That could be a real disaster.
That's why you have to be very specific as a prosecutor in exactly what you are doing.
Also, if you're the defense lawyer, you have a fairly decent case that this is not second-degree murder, specifically because there are two separate autopsies.
Now again, There are certain things you could certainly charge her and you could certainly convict for.
Felony assault would be an obvious one.
This is obviously an assault.
Actually, it's a battery.
He's committing battery on George Floyd.
There are certain things.
He should go to jail.
I mean, none of this is to doubt that Chauvin did something brutal and should go to jail.
The question is, you need to prepare the American public for the facts of the case, because otherwise what you end up with is this miasmatic sense in the atmosphere that Chauvin is going to go to jail for life, and then Ellison overcharges, or the defense puts on a fairly solid case, and he gets off, and then it's the American justice system is racist again.
And that's the way this goes.
We saw this with Michael Brown, for example.
In a second, I'm going to explain why the various autopsy reports also could be used in defense of the officer.
Again, people need to know this.
This is not me making a defense of the officer's activity at all.
The officer should go to jail.
The question is, under what circumstances and for what crime?
Because again, if you overcharge, you end up with an acquittal and things are going to be a lot worse a year from now if there's an acquittal in this case.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so the autopsies that came back in the George Floyd case are conflicting.
So there is the official autopsy that was done by the government medical examiner.
And it's important here that we note that there are only a few classifications on government documents when it comes to death certificates and autopsies.
So there's accident, there's natural death, and there's homicide, right?
There are really only a few different categories that you can put down.
A homicide does not mean that somebody was murdered or that somebody was killed.
All it means is that somebody committed an act that ended in death.
Right, so that doesn't mean that it was the proximate cause of the death.
It means that it was not natural.
You didn't die in bed.
It wasn't an accident.
You didn't get hit by a car.
It wasn't a lightning strike or something.
So the mere classification of homicide does not mean that a murder took place.
So people, you need to understand how the process works if you understand what exactly these documents are saying.
So the original charging document against Chauvin said, no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.
Instead, it was a combination of force and health problems contributing to the death.
In other words, according to the police report, by the way, George Floyd was saying, I can't breathe, before the knee was put on his neck.
If you are the lawyer, you're going to say, Chauvin did something wrong here, he committed an assault, but he didn't kill him.
He didn't mean to kill him, he didn't kill him.
He died because he had fentanyl in his system, because he had some sort of pre-existing condition, and even according to the medical examiner, there was no traumatic asphyxia or strangulation, meaning he wasn't crushing his windpipe.
He may have exacerbated an underlying health situation like Eric Garner in New York again, but he didn't actually.
So that's what the defense is going to say.
Now the independent autopsy says that George Floyd's death was homicide caused by asphyxia due to neck and back compression that led to lack of blood flow to the brain.
So that is a different autopsy report.
That's the one that's being done by the family.
So that is going to be the area in which the defense focuses.
The reason I'm bringing this all up is because it's very important to understand the facts of the case so that you charge correctly and so that we understand what is going to happen once this gets into a courtroom, because people don't pay attention to any of the details.
And then they are shocked when things do not go the way they want them to go.
We saw this with Michael Brown, the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
The original case, as reported by the media, was Michael Brown was shot in the back with his hands up.
And it turned out that none of the facts supported any element of that story.
And then the officer was not, in fact, indicted by a grand jury.
And people went nuts because the assumption had been from the original media coverage that this was going to turn into that sort of case.
You saw the same thing with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
The original story told by the media was that Trayvon Martin had been stalked and then shot down in cold blood by George Zimmerman.
And as it turns out, the story was different.
And so it looked like an overcharge by the prosecutors.
And he was acquitted.
And that was what happened.
So focus it, like the media are being irresponsible if they don't tell you all the facts, so that you can urge the prosecutors to actually charge correctly and put this guy in jail for the thing he did, not for a thing that he cannot be proved to have done.
If you want him in jail, you need the prosecutors to do the right thing, not to overcharge on the basis of people being mad on Twitter and thinking that you are more virtuous for overcharging than you would be for actually appropriately charging in this case.
Okay, this is a case for putting the person in jail, not a case against putting the person in jail.
Okay, so.
Meanwhile, that's all the underlying facts, because remember, George Floyd is the victim here.
I mean, George Floyd was at the center of this case.
I know that's all been forgotten, and I know that everything has become a slogan right now, but it seems to me that if you care about George Floyd and justice for his family, you should want the officer to go to jail, and it seems like the facts of the case are relevant to that particular inquiry.
Okay, in a second, we're going to get to the narrative, because the narrative has now become utterly stupid, utterly religious in nature.
The religion of wokeness has taken over in every way.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, the religion of wokeness has now taken over.
As I've said before, and I will say again, Virtually everybody agrees on certain basic propositions.
Racism, bad.
Police brutality, bad.
Rioting and looting, bad.
But we have now reached the point where a huge swath of Americans are arguing for something different, about which there should be and is widespread disagreement.
One is the proposition that America is endemically racist and evil, that black people are under existential threat in the United States from police and from white Americans, and the proposition that racism can really be blamed for everything.
Now, there are a couple of different types of propositions that are all explanatory.
One is conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories are completely explanatory.
They are all explanatory.
And the second one is religion.
When it comes to conspiracy theory, everything can be explained by malevolent people behind the scenes pulling the strings.
This is the sort of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Or, by the way, the idea of institutional racism, that a bunch of white people are sitting behind the scenes and deliberately attempting to harm black people.
If you're making that argument, you're an idiot.
There is not some cadre of white people out there who are like, how do we keep black people down today?
That does not exist.
That is not a thing.
If there are people who think that way, they're living in a bunker somewhere in Idaho, right?
I mean, and it's like four of them.
So, that's not real.
Okay, the other one is religion.
Religion suggests that there is an all-encompassing logic to the universe, and it is provided by God, the creator, who stands behind the logic of the universe.
The religion of wokeness is a religion.
It suggests that there is a creator of America, a creator of Western civilization.
That creator is not God.
That creator is not human beings with actual agency.
That creator is racism.
Racism is the malevolent God in the religion of wokeness.
And it is up to you to fight that malevolent God.
Because everything can be explained by racism.
Literally all things.
And if you think it can't be explained by racism, it's because you're not going high level enough.
So take, for example, there's a tweet yesterday, and it is just a perfect example of this religion from Mark Levine.
And Mark Levine writes, this guy is the chair of New York City Council Health Committee.
Remember, one second ago, he was saying that you were murdering grandmother if you went outside without a mask.
Now he says, let's be clear about something.
If there is a spike in coronavirus cases in the next two weeks, don't blame the protesters, blame racism.
Ah, racism, the all-purpose god of the gaps for the left.
You can't explain differentials, you can't explain inequalities, or you're unwilling to say that behavior might be an actual factor in unequal outcomes.
Well, then, that's because racism.
Because racism.
Racism is the god of the gaps.
And let's say that you even say that.
Let's say that, for example, you suggest that, hey, wait a second, the protesters, they might have higher levels of COVID-19 because they're out there infecting each other.
And that's, I thought that's bad, right?
I mean, I thought we opposed that, didn't we?
Until like five seconds ago?
Well, here's the thing.
You can't blame the protesters, because the protesters are protesting racism.
So if you just remove one level, then racism is still to blame.
And this is like the argument that suggests, oh, by the way, you might notice that police officers are having tons and tons of law enforcement encounters with black people.
And maybe that is the reason for elevated numbers of bad incidents involving police and black people.
If you're talking about disproportionate numbers of black people being arrested, maybe it's not that the police officers are just rounding up black folks.
Maybe it's that black people are statistically committing more crimes.
On average, than white people are.
That 13% of the American population is black, but something like 40-50% of all murders in the United States are committed by black men, and therefore the police are having more encounters with black homicide suspects than they are with white homicide suspects as a percentage of the population.
Well, then, so that would be an answer to why the police are having these encounters with black people that does not implicate racism.
So then, if you are a true religious woke person, what you say is, no, no, no, it's still racism.
It's still racism.
Because you see, the institution of the police itself was racist and was instituted as a racist institution.
And not only that, the difference in human behavior today Between the black man who murders somebody and the white man who murders somebody is attributable to historic racism.
So the reason that you have these differentials in the first place is because of slavery and Jim Crow.
So you can always just remove one level and then you get to racism as the bottom line rationale for everything.
It's the all-important factor in everything and it's the explanatory factor in everything.
That's a religious perspective.
Because when you ask people to nail down exactly how that works, It's nearly impossible.
But if you refuse to accept that that is the case, then you are a heretic, and you must be outed, and you must be ousted.
And that is how you end up blaming racism for COVID-19 upticks at rallies with thousands of people protesting, when it is perfectly obvious why you're going to see an uptick if you do see an uptick, and it's because you have thousands of people breathing all over each other, and the virus doesn't care why you're out there protesting.
So this has become a religion, and you can see the religious aspects of it in the human behavior surrounding it.
The virtue signaling is not about actual virtue.
It is about the idea that you are fighting against the heretics.
You are fighting against the barbarians at the gates who doubt the story.
So best example ever, this example from Bethesda, Maryland, which is a rich white suburb in Maryland.
I don't see any of these people sending their kids, busing their kids into inner cities, into impoverished schools with heavy minority populations out of solidarity.
But what they are willing to do is sit on the ground and then listen and repeat.
This is just a religious ceremony.
It's a religious right.
White people are supposed to accept the sins of their forefathers upon them, but that's not really what they're doing.
Let's be real about this.
What they're actually doing is they're now able to go around and say to their friends, well, I accept white privilege, but you don't!
You don't!
And thus you are damned!
So the reality is that I accepted the sin, but I don't really accept the sin because the sin's not on me, man.
I extirpated the sin.
I did my atonement.
I did my public atonement ritual.
I sacrificed my goat.
You didn't sacrifice your goat.
Therefore, you're the one who really carries the communal sin upon you because you are the one continuing to perpetuate racism by not doing this random symbolic act today.
That's a religious take.
Here was the religious take yesterday in Bethesda, Maryland.
About racism, anti-blackness, or violence.
About racism, anti-blackness, or violence.
I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible and do everything in my power to educate my community.
I will love my black neighbors the same as my white ones.
I mean, it's a public atonement ritual.
That's what it is.
And by the way, when they say I will educate everybody, no you won't.
What you will do is you will repeat what this person says to you to somebody else.
And then you will claim that you have educated somebody.
You will proselytize on behalf of people who quote-unquote know better.
Right?
That's what's going on here.
There's a reason why white liberals are the people who are most likely to defend looting.
There's a poll out today showing that white college-educated liberals are the people most likely to defend looting.
Because most Americans don't buy into this crap.
But if you are a deep devotee of the religion of intersectionality, if you are a deep devotee of the idea that white privilege decides everything in America, Then you are going to defend looting.
Because you just don't understand the looters, don't you see?
You don't understand their lived experience.
And until you understand their lived experience, you can't fight back again.
Racism is to blame for the looting.
Just remove it one level.
Remember, it's not the people making the decision to steal that pair of shoes from Foot Locker.
Supposedly in memory of George Floyd or some such nonsense that the Floyd family actively, actively says is bad?
No, it's that racism at a higher level drove people into poverty, and drove them into despair, and drove them into stealing a pair of shoes from the Nike store.
Even if Nike puts out an ad talking about how bad racism is.
This is the religion, and the religion must be listened to at all times.
I'll get to more examples of this, because it's astonishing.
I mean, it has gone to utterly extraordinary lengths.
Americans should not buy into this.
It destroys the possibility of unity.
Because for the 1,200,073rd time, We all have unity on racism is bad.
We all have unity on police brutality is bad.
But that's not what the religion says.
The religion must have outcasts.
The religion must have heretics.
And the religion makes claims that are significantly beyond racism is bad to, you are a racist if you don't do random performative thing I tell you to do today.
If you do not read these chicken entrails the way I tell you today, you are bad.
And you are an enemy of the religion.
And you must be made to repent.
We're gonna get to that in just one second.
Let's talk about the fact that right now, probably not a great time to go to the local AutoZone.
Probably you should just shop for that auto part online.
Also, when you go to the local AutoZone, you're spending too much money.
RockAuto.com.
It's so much easier than walking into a store and then somebody asking you very specific questions about your car that you don't actually have on you and they give you a generic auto part or they tell you they have to order it anyway.
Just use the interwebs.
RockAuto.com always offers the lowest prices possible rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear like airlines do.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
And in many cases, that's exactly what you're doing if you go to the auto parts store as opposed to going to RockAuto.com.
Prices at rockauto.com are always reliably low, and the same for professionals and do-it-yourselfers.
Why spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
rockauto.com.
Check them out right now.
See all the parts available for your car or truck.
Write Shapiro in their how-did-you-hear-about-us box so they know that we sent you.
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Alrighty, in a second we're going to get to some pure proof that this has now become basically a religious conflict.
A religious conflict in which the woke are not actually proposing anything that remotely resembles reality.
It's not about practical proposals.
It's not about things that we can either agree or disagree about.
It is about generalized propositions.
Manifested in bizarre acts.
Generalized propositions like America is bad manifested in bizarre acts like kneeling before kneeling before protesters.
And then if you don't do that, then it's because you're bad.
We're going to get to that in just one second first.
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I don't mean to pitch my book on the back of the horror show that we are seeing across the United States right now, but it is extraordinarily relevant.
I'll admit, when I wrote this book, I wrote this book back in December, January.
When I wrote this book and then COVID hit, I thought, maybe it's not so relevant.
I was wrong.
The book is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
The basic premise of the book is that there is a group of people, I call them disintegrationists because they're interested in the disintegration of the American Union.
And they are trying to destroy America's philosophy, culture, and history.
Our shared philosophy of rights under the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Our institutions themselves.
Our culture of rights.
The idea that free speech matters, as we'll see.
The New York Times no longer believes this.
And our shared history.
The notion that we share history even if our history has victimization of some groups by other groups.
The glory of our history is that victimization ended, and the bravery of those victimized groups.
That's all part of a shared history.
Martin Luther King Jr.
is part of my history, too.
Jim Crow is part of my history, too.
Yes, I'm white, because I'm an American.
It's part of your history, too.
So are the evils.
The evils are part of your history, too, because we're all Americans.
My book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, is about the destruction of any semblance of unity in the country on the back of a separate narrative that suggests that American philosophy is at root evil, That American history is at root corrupt, and that America's culture of rights is at root an excuse for exploitation.
Go check out my book.
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There is an audiobook version of it.
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You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
All righty, so...
The religion of wokeness, it has its priests, and it has its devotees, and it has its proselytizers as well.
So, the sort of hierarchy, in terms of the Priestley case, are people like the people over at the New York Times.
So the people over at the New York Times, there was a piece written by the sitting senator, Tom Cotton, from Arkansas, who was a member of the military.
And he wrote a piece called, Send in the Droogs.
And it was about the use of the military to stop rioting and looting.
Which, by the way, happened in 1992.
It has happened repeatedly in American history.
If you require the National Guard, or you require the military, in order to stop rioting and looting, There is plenty of legal precedent for this.
The president does have the power under the Insurrection Act to do this.
It has been invoked before.
The idea it's not been invoked since 1807 is a lie.
This thing runs in the New York Times.
And New York Times staffers then start using all of the tactics they learned at Wellesley in order to stop this.
Tactic number one is this thing.
If you've ever been at a college protest, it's amazing.
I mean, this is all religious.
It's so religious.
As a religious person, I can identify the symbols of religion when they are used.
If you've ever been on a college campus, there's a thing that people do where if a speaker says something, you're not supposed to clap because it might traumatize somebody.
So they do this.
Right?
That's their thing.
They snap to symbolize agreement.
And also at their protests, as you saw in that protest from Bethesda, somebody will repeat a slogan or a very, very long sort of encomium, and then you're supposed to repeat it word for word.
Say, I pledge to do X, Y, and Z.
I pledge to you X, Y, and Z in support of the environment, in support of the environment, and transgender lobsters, and transgender lobsters, right?
That's how it goes on college campuses.
So the staffers at the New York Times are doing this now.
So Tom Cotton has his op-ed printed.
And this results in Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for the New York Times, writing, running this puts black New York Times staff in danger, in danger.
Writing and looting is not dangerous.
If you put an op-ed about How you might need the police and the military to put down riots and looters.
You're putting black New York Times staffers in danger.
Why?
Are you out looting tonight?
Seriously, how does that put you in danger?
First of all, it's an op-ed.
It is not an act of Congress.
Second of all, even if it were an act of Congress, are you rioting and looting tonight, Taylor Lorenz?
And then there was Katie Weaver, another New York Times staffer.
Running this puts black New York Times staff in danger.
J.C.
Fortin, another New York Times staffer, running this puts black New York Times staff in danger, right?
They're doing the exact Wellesley thing.
They're all repeating the same things.
They're snapping.
All of this to stop the New York Times from running a dissenting op-ed.
I mean, this is absurd.
It's absurd.
And then the New York Times runs a separate piece about resistance at the New York Times to the New York Times editorial board.
So the New York Times editorial board is not woke enough because they ran a piece, which by the way, the proposition that if we have to use the military to put down the rioting and looting, that we should, that is a proposition that by polling data is supported by somewhere between 6 and 7 in Americans out of 10.
It is a vast majority proposition.
Most Americans agree.
Whatever you have to do so we can go back to work and so that we can, you know, not be locked in our homes at 9 p.m.
or 1 p.m.
in Beverly Hills every day, maybe that's worth it.
So the New York Times has now run a full piece about the New York Times, the New York Times priesthood, the intersectional priesthood, dictating religious terms to the New York Times editorial board.
The most woke Wellesley graduates who have used, see, everybody thought, I didn't think this because I've spent too much time on college campuses to think this.
There's a whole group of people, cancel culture doesn't exist.
Who cares about safe spaces and microaggressions?
Once they get out in the real world, they're going to see this stuff doesn't work.
Well, what if they get out in the real world and then they impose that system on everybody else?
What if it turns out that what starts on college campuses does not end on college campuses?
It just started there.
If that's what you're seeing at the New York Times today, according to the New York Times, and this would be Mark Tracy reporting, Senators sending the troops op-ed in the Times draws online ire.
Staff members at the newspaper, including a Pulitzer winner, denounced an opinion essay by Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, calling for a military response to protests.
The Times has reported on the debate within the administration over whether or not to follow Cotton's suggestion.
But now you have a bunch of members of the New York Times who are criticizing the New York Times op-ed board.
By the way, you know what I would do if staffers at my... I run publication.
If my staffers went online and started ripping me for running an op-ed, and we run a variety of op-eds from the right, many of them disagree with each other.
If people went online and they started suggesting that I'm putting lives in danger, number one, you should quit.
If you think that your publication is putting lives in danger or doing something so deeply immoral you cannot work there, you should leave.
You should.
By the way, I did it back in 2016.
I actually did.
I left a publication over disagreements with the way they were treating their own reporter.
So, I'm speaking from experience here.
Any of these New York Times reporters can give up their cush job with the cush salary anytime, but they're not going to, right?
They're gonna virtue signal.
So, instead, you get a variety of members of the newspaper staff criticizing this.
So, James Bennett, the editorial page editor, was forced to issue a statement.
But this is bad.
Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
to our readers to show them counter arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy.
We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton's argument painful, even dangerous.
We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.
But this is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
Dozens of Times staff members tweeted the same sentence because Nicole Hannah-Jones, correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a garbage essay in which she completely botched the history.
And she continues to botch the history.
A person who said literally yesterday that rioting and looting is not actually violence.
Did you know?
Rioting and looting isn't violence.
Speech is violence.
Quote, I'll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral.
As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.
Well, why don't you toss in some crappy history and some overwrought writing?
Then you'll probably be fine with it.
I mean, then you want to appeal it to her, maybe.
The News Guild of New York, a union that represents many times journalists, said in a statement on Wednesday that the op-ed, quote, promotes hate.
Promotes hate.
They said this is a particularly vulnerable moment in American history.
Cotton's op-ed pours gasoline on the fire.
Media organizations have a responsibility to hold power to account, not amplify voices of power without context and caution.
This is just insane.
Okay, it's fully crazy.
And apparently, there are a bunch of people from the New York Times who are saying, my sources aren't even talking to me anymore.
My sources won't give me information anymore because of this op-ed.
Sure, sure they won't.
Sure they won't.
Sure the sources leaking you information are now going to go silent on you because they didn't like Tom Cotton's op-ed.
By the way, I am amazed.
This is where they draw the line, the New York Times.
They've run op-eds from Vladimir Putin, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
They've run op-eds in support of communism.
They've run op-eds from the Chinese government.
But Tom Cotton says, maybe we should use the military to put down rioting and looting if nothing else suffices, and here's the legal authority to do so.
And my God, you're endangering everyone.
This is religious, religious nonsense.
Religious nonsense.
My favorite religious video, actually, of the week comes courtesy of some account called Digital Forests, I guess.
This is a video from New York.
So after some of the rioting and looting, there were some people who apparently own a building or work for a building owner, and they were trying to clean graffiti off the side of a building.
Which is what you should do because graffiti is illegal and bad and ugly and terrible.
Graffiti is defacement of private property.
So naturally, a woke white woman rolls up and she starts lecturing these women who are cleaning off the graffiti, saying they are racist for cleaning off the graffiti.
You shall atone!
Here's our new ridiculous standard of the moment.
And I'm going to- Shame!
Shame!
It's now Game of Thrones.
They'll force these people to walk naked through a crowd while you toss an excrement at them because they're cleaning graffiti off a wall.
Here's this video.
It's insane.
Why are you guys removing Black Lives Matter's graffiti?
We're just trying to take care of the thing.
We tried over there and it wasn't coming off.
It's still the one that's coming off.
Well, why do you want that to come off?
Because this is a federal building.
Yeah, it's just a vandalism.
So you don't care about black lives then?
Not at all.
That's not at all what we're saying.
That's what this... We certainly do care about black lives.
Not enough to leave up a message?
No.
We don't disagree with the message, ma'am.
It's just on the building.
We're just trying to clean it.
Right.
Not a great way to use your white privilege, ladies.
Not a great... Not a great way to use your white privilege.
Oh, go to hell.
I mean, seriously.
You're in favor of racism if you're cleaning graffiti off a federal building?
It's not even a private building, it's a federal building.
Insanity.
Full-scale insanity.
But, this is the way it's gonna work now.
You know Lego?
Lego, the company, asked stores to stop advertising police and White House sets Legos.
They are Legos.
The Legos are not racist.
Did the Legos kill George Floyd?
Are the Legos brutalizing black people?
What in the actual living hell are you talking about?
What in the world?
I'll tell you what I'm gonna do today.
I'm gonna go buy some Legos on discount.
Because, like, if I can get them cheaper for my kids, I will absolutely do it.
Absolute insanity.
But these are the rituals that are required.
Now, the person who has gotten hit the hardest over the last 24 hours is, of course, the New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees.
He's a future Hall of Famer.
He's a Super Bowl winner.
He said something super bad.
Super duper bad.
That requires ATONEMENT.
What did he say that was so bad?
He said, I don't like when people kneel for the national anthem and the American flag.
Which, by the way, is like a 60-40 proposition in the United States.
And before Trump, it was like an 80-20 proposition.
That people were not really very hot on the idea of kneeling for the American flag or the national anthem because those used to be unifying symbols.
What he's about to say is so utterly uncontroversial that it should go without saying.
But nothing goes without saying.
And in fact, if you do say this, then your speech has now become a form of violence.
And also, if you are silent, you are violent.
And also, if you do anything we don't like, you are violent.
So here is Drew Brees saying an uncontroversial thing and then being forced to walk it back by the most woke among us, LeBron James, who had nothing to say about, you know, the Chinese government cracking down on the NBA over one GM in the NBA saying a bad thing about China and Hong Kong.
And by the way, the bad thing was correct.
LeBron James comes down on Drew Brees for this.
Here's what Drew Brees had to say.
I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country.
Let me just tell you what I see or what I feel when the national anthem is played and when I look at the flag of the United States.
I envision my two grandfathers who fought for this country during World War II, one in the Army and one in the Marine Corps.
Both risking their lives to protect our country and to try to make our country and this world a better place.
So every time I stand with my hand over my heart, looking at that flag and singing the national anthem, that's what I think about.
Okay, and this was apparently extremely bad.
Very, very terrible and bad.
So bad that LeBron James went out there and tweeted about it.
It was just awful.
LeBron James tweeted, Wow, man.
Is it still surprising at this point?
Sure isn't.
You literally still don't understand why Kap was kneeling on one knee?
Okay, so let's be frank about this.
This is LeBron James basically saying that Colin Kaepernick was right.
So there are some people who are saying, Okay, Breeze is missing the point.
The kneeling right now isn't the same as the kneeling that Kaepernick was doing.
That is not true, okay?
We all know what the kneeling is.
It's been a symbol in American public life for a while.
So, LeBron James tweets out about this.
And he tweets out, you still don't know what Colin Kaepernick was doing?
And then he suggests that it is very bad.
You have to kneel.
He said, he has absolutely nothing to do with disrespect of the flag of the United States and our soldiers who keep our land free.
My father-in-law was one of the men who fought as well for this country.
I asked him a question about it and thank him all the time for his commitment.
He never found CAP peaceful protest offensive because he and I both know what's right is right and what's wrong is wrong.
God bless you.
Richard Sherman also said he's beyond lost about Drew Brees, beyond lost.
Guarantee you there were black men fighting alongside your grandfather, but this doesn't seem to be about that.
That uncomfortable conversation you're trying to avoid by injecting military into a conversation about brutality and equality is part of the problem.
But what if the Colin Kaepernick protest was wrong?
What if all of these things are true at the same time?
Kneeling for the national anthem is wrong.
Kneeling for the American flag is wrong.
Police brutality is bad and racism is bad.
And the American flag does not represent police brutality and racism.
Right?
That's the conflation that Colin Kaepernick made.
And that's what Drew Brees was objecting to.
But Drew Brees had to apologize.
He was forced into a public humiliation ritual.
Yay!
Because this is how our stupid country works now.
So Drew Brees was forced to apologize and he put out a statement.
He said, I would like to apologize to my friends, teammates, the city of New Orleans, the black community, NFL community, and anyone I hurt with my comments yesterday.
In speaking with some of you, it breaks my heart to know the pain I have caused.
He literally said, don't kneel for the American flag.
Apparently, massive pain caused.
In an attempt to talk about respect, unity, and solidarity centered around the American flag and the national anthem, I made comments that were insensitive and completely missed the mark on the issues we are facing right now as a country.
And then he puts out a bunch of statements about standing against the systematic racial injustice and police brutality and creation of real policy change that will make a difference, condemning the years of oppression that have taken place throughout our black communities and still exists today.
So now he is repeating the various slogans he's expected to repeat in order so that he can be expiated of his sin.
Because that's the way this works.
You say the American flag is not bad, and that the national anthem is good, and now you have to repeat all of the slogans that you are sent by the PR department over at the New Orleans Saints.
That's the way this is supposed to work.
By the way, the Broncos head coach was forced to do the same thing.
Broncos head coach said, I think that there's minimal.
He said he thinks that the NFL is a league of meritocracy.
You earn what you get, you get what you earn.
He said, I don't see racism at all in the NFL.
I don't see discrimination in the NFL.
By the way, huge majority of players in the NFL are black.
And so he then had to put out a statement saying, after reflecting on my comments and listening to players this morning, I realized what I said regarding racism and discrimination in the NFL was wrong.
While I have never personally experienced those terrible things firsthand, during my 33 years in the NFL, I understand many players, coaches, and staff have different perspectives.
I should have been more clear, and I am sorry.
I look forward to listening to the players both individually and collectively.
There's a lot of work to be done in the areas of diversity and providing opportunities across the board for I mean, it's just unbelievable.
We're just gonna force everybody to repeat the same catechism.
The religion is quite powerful.
It is quite powerful.
Okay.
In a second, we're going to get to the virtue signaling by the people who are attempting to demonstrate their bona fides and the lack of clarity in what exactly is being demanded.
So one of the things I've been saying all along is it seems like there should be some agreement on some of the policy.
We should be able to agree that we need to more clearly define, for example, qualified immunity.
So yesterday, On the show, as I was informed by people correctly.
I misidentified the nature of qualified immunity.
It does not mean you can't be prosecuted if you are a police officer for doing a bad thing.
It means that you're immune from civil liability so long as you did something that is quote-unquote within the scope of agency.
The problem is that the Supreme Court has failed to define scope of agency, so you have a bunch of bad cases where people are doing stuff that's clearly criminal and still cannot be sued for that.
And by the way, if the individual can't be sued, then the police department ends up suing and the taxpayer ends up on the hook.
I also suggested that police unions are a problem.
I still agree with this, right?
I'm not going to back off the idea that unions in general in the public sector are bad.
It is illegal for them to strike.
That does not mean they have not struck in the past, that they have indeed committed strikes in the past.
But these are areas where there should be some policy disagreement between left and right and libertarians and conservatives.
Clarence Thomas is very much in favor of changing the Qualified Immunity Doctrine, for example.
But here's the problem.
There's not actual agreement among people on the left, members of the religion, about the actual policies to be pursued.
There's not actual agreement on this stuff.
Because the radicals don't want any of that stuff.
The radicals don't care about that stuff.
The radicals are openly suggesting that we defund the police.
So the Black Lives Matter movement will develop an armed branch of peace officers to combat police brutality in black communities during a so-called war on police.
This is according to an interview with the Daily Mail where BLM New York Chapter Chairman Hawk Newsome describes how the group plans to follow in the footsteps of the Black Panther Party by matching fire with fire when necessary.
He says, we're talking about defending our communities.
You know what it's like to see a taser pointed at a 7-year-old?
You know what it's like to see a 67-year-old black woman pepper sprayed and pushed to the ground?
We're preparing and training to defend our communities.
So, he's now talking about arming quote-unquote peace officers, open carrying firearms while patrolling black communities in order to deter police brutality.
Now listen, if you are abiding by the law in open carrying, Do what you want to do, right?
I mean, that is fully in consonance with the law.
If you are suggesting that when a police officer comes to arrest somebody for a crime, that you need people who are going to show up and stop that, that's kind of a problem, is it not?
And then there's controversy on the left over defunding the police.
So one of the big slogans that is now gaining steam is defund the police.
By the way, if you've enjoyed the last week in America, if you've enjoyed your free trial of major cities without police, I urge you to buy the subscription Democrats are offering.
Because it seems like a really crappy deal.
It seems like the veneer between civilization and widespread rioting and looting was like this thin, and when you remove the police, it's gone.
Amazing.
Okay, so Brian Fallon, was the former press secretary for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Due to mainstream Democrat.
He tweeted out yesterday, defund the police.
Defund the police.
Yes, get rid of the police.
Get rid of it.
Genius idea.
Genius idea.
But there's disagreement on the left about this proposition because, of course, it's an idiotic idea.
So Eric Garcetti called for cuts to police funding in LA while the LAPD is wildly understaffed.
As in, like, the New York City Police Department is not understaffed in terms of a population-to-police level.
Or at least not to the extent of L.A.
L.A.
is probably the most understaffed major city in the country in terms of just number of population to number of police.
Very, very small department.
So Garcetti called for serious cuts to police funding, which makes perfect sense in the middle of rioting and looting.
In the middle of us having to go into mandatory curfew each night, perfect time to call for cuts to police funding.
But the Congressional Black Caucus chair actually opposes defunding the police.
So there's disagreements on the left about policy.
As we will see, this disagreement on the left about policy ends up resolving itself by avoiding policy discussions entirely.
So we won't discuss policies that could fix any of this.
Instead, what we will discuss is broad statements about American evil.
So here is Karen Bass, Representative Karen Bass from California.
She's chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, saying that defund the police is a silly idea.
I am not familiar with that demand of Black Lives Matter.
I work closely with them, and so I will consult them.
But if you ask me my personal opinion, no, I don't believe that we should defund police departments.
I think that we need to come up with very significant legislation now But I also think it's time to have a conversation in our country.
What is policing in America?
Why is it that we have two completely different standards?
Okay, I mean, first of all, we don't have two completely different standards for how the police treat people, which is why this person is going to go to jail if Keith Ellison does his job properly.
So what are some of the other policies that are being put forward?
Well, Karen Bass also says that we're going to vote for a committee to investigate the possibility of slavery reparations.
This is a thing that's never going to happen.
It's just not going to happen.
If you believe that you can even identify who ought to receive the slavery reparations and who ought to pay the slavery reparations 170 years later, or that, by the way, if you think that cutting like a $30,000 or $40,000 check to everybody who is a descendant of a slave in the United States is going to end the claim that America is responsible for all inequality, you're wrong.
It's obviously an underpitch.
Antonio Gizzi Coates admitted as much.
He wrote a long piece for The Atlantic a couple of years ago, trying to revive the slavery reparations debate, suggesting the case for slavery reparations.
And he said, well, we could try it, but maybe it won't work.
Well, then what are you talking about?
Here is Karen Bass suggesting a policy that's never going to get passed, obviously.
I've not had a specific conversation with Speaker Pelosi, but I've certainly talked to other members of leadership.
And being on Judish, where that bill is, I believe that it will move.
I don't know what will be in the package that the House passes at this point in time.
I know the broad strokes, and we are looking at that.
But I do believe that it will be voted on out of committee, and hopefully out of the House, before the session concludes.
Okay, so then there will be a board that investigates slavery reparations, makes a bunch of vague recommendations, and then doesn't do anything, and then America will be accused of being racist for not passing slavery reparations.
And if there are slavery reparations, if that ever were to happen, then it will be deemed not enough money to rectify the imbalances of the last 200 years.
We all know where this is going.
So the broader Black Lives Matter sort of agenda is not any specific policy preference 'cause the BLM agenda, which includes defund the police, is not even popular with many on the left.
So instead, you sort of have these people who are reverting to the religious.
The religious is the only thing that unifies this at this point.
And that religion has certain things that you are supposed to just believe.
The core beliefs, the core beliefs.
Core beliefs like America is, America's original sin was slavery, but it wasn't just America's original sin.
Every bad thing that happens now is attributable to America's original sin.
So here is Barack Obama giving a widely praised speech in the media because everything Barack Obama says is widely praised in the media.
Here was Obama yesterday saying that Floyd's death is related to America's original sin of slavery.
How he makes that connection is absolutely beyond me.
We don't know that Chauvin is a racist.
We know that he engaged in an act of police brutality.
We don't know the surrounding circumstances of the arrest.
We don't know what this has to do with slavery.
I mean, like, really, this is a pretty major leap, but it's the leap that is, it's the leap of faith that is required of you to believe that the great malevolent god of racism stands behind all events in the United States.
Here's Barack Obama proselytizing.
What has happened over the last several weeks is challenges and structural problems here in the United States have been thrown into high relief.
They're the result of a long history of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and institutionalized racism that too often have been the plague, the original sin of our society.
That is the article of faith.
The article of faith is that everything bad that happens is a racist thing and every racist thing is due to America's inherent nature.
And you are expected to repeat this catechism because we can't actually agree on policy.
If we actually talk about policy, then maybe we could have an intelligent conversation, but we're not going to do that.
Instead, you're just supposed to listen and believe and then repeat.
It's listen, believe, repeat.
That is the formula here.
And so we have some people who have taken it upon themselves to listen and believe and repeat.
By the way, the other thing that you're supposed to do is pretend that if you say this catechism that it makes you a victim in some way.
So John Boyega, who's one of the stars of the Star Wars films, he plays Finn.
Does he play Poe or Finn?
I mix them up.
He plays Finn, that's right.
Yes, Finn, because it's FN, right?
Because he's a member of the Stormtrooper Brigade.
In any case, he plays Finn, and he's fine.
He's a good actor.
He shows up at a Black Lives Matter protest in London, and he declares that he might not have a career after the speech, as though there is a bevy of people in Hollywood who are looking to blacklist him for saying the most popular thing you could say in Hollywood, which is that America is bad and racist.
Here is John Boyega yesterday.
Imagine it, a nation that is set up with individual families that are thriving, that are healthy, That communicate, that raise their children in love, have a better rate of becoming better human beings.
And that's what we need to create.
Black men, it starts with you.
And it's done, man.
We can't be trash no more.
We have to be better.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm speaking to you from my heart.
Look, I don't know if I'm going to have a career after this.
Okay, first of all, everything that he says there is not only uncontroversial in like normal terms, it's uncontroversial in every term.
When he says that if you lead a thriving life, you're likely to have better outcomes, that's not remotely controversial.
He's not even saying the controversial part of the Black Lives Matter sloganeering.
I mean, that's not even the controversial part.
Okay, then you have people like the Duchess of Sussex.
So Meghan Markle is now speaking out.
I'm excited now that she's speaking out.
I needed to hear from her.
It was very important that I hear from Meghan Markle.
So Meghan Markle is now speaking out because of course silence is violence.
Here is the Duchess of Sussex speaking out about this issue.
She is deemed to be one of the case to people who are allowed to speak and you're supposed to listen and repeat everything she says.
For the past couple of weeks, I've been planning on saying a few words to you for your graduation.
And as we've all seen over the last week, what is happening in our country and in our state and in our hometown of LA has been absolutely devastating.
And I realized the only wrong thing to say is to say nothing.
George Floyd's life mattered, and Breonna Taylor's life mattered, and Philando Castile's life mattered, and Tamir Rice's life mattered.
Okay, we agree about all those things.
My favorite line there, though, is, the only wrong thing to say is to say nothing.
I feel like that's not true.
I feel like Drew Brees said a thing, and then that was the wrong thing to say.
I feel like it turns out that you guys have a very specific idea of what can be said and what cannot be said under these circumstances.
And so, what you actually mean by the wrong thing to say is nothing, is that if you say exactly what I want you to say, then we are very happy with you.
Probably my favorite celebrity take of the last couple days is Ashton Kutcher trying to explain Black Lives Matter and completely botching it in the process.
It's pretty fun.
There's Ashton Kutcher explaining Black Lives Matter to all of you other un-woke white people.
Because Ashton is woke.
So that means that he can lecture you.
He's allowed.
When it comes to Black Lives Matter, I think what folks that are writing All Lives Matter need to understand is that for some people, for some people, black lives don't matter at all.
So, So for us, black lives matter.
Who?
Who?
Want to name some names?
Like really, who?
What he means by that is, I'm not one of those people.
I am a member of the initiated.
I'm a member of the initiated.
For some people.
Who are these people?
Of whom you speak.
Even the person you hate most, President Trump, has made repeated statements about how George Floyd's killer should be brought to justice.
Everyone, everyone.
But again, that's part of the catechism, because every religion also has to have people who are outside the religion, so that you can say that those people are heretics and wrong, and those are the damned, while we who are the initiates will end up in heaven.
Okay, meanwhile, In other news, the major controversy has broken out over General James Mattis.
So you remember the Secretary of Defense, he left the Trump administration a couple of years ago in December 2018.
He left over President Trump's Syria policy.
That's when President Trump randomly just made an announcement that he was going to withdraw troops from Syria and ended up clearing the way for Turkey to sort of invade northern Syria.
And Mattis said, I don't like this, and he left.
Well, now he's put out a statement just ripping Trump up and down.
So a couple of preliminaries here.
I'm not going to rip James Mattis as a person.
James Mattis is an American hero.
He is a service person.
He has served in honor.
He has done great things for the United States.
I think that his characterization of a lot of this stuff is just dead wrong.
I think a lot of his characterization here, to be completely fair, I think it's just dead wrong.
And this is coming from somebody who's kind of a Mattis fan.
So here's what Mattis wrote.
He said, I've watched this week's unfolding events, angry and appalled.
The words equal justice under law are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court.
This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding.
It is a wholesome and unifying demand, one that all of us should be able to get behind.
So if that's all that the protesters were demanding, I'd be behind it like full score, obviously.
That's not all that they are demanding.
Even if that's most of what they're demanding, I've said that protesting for that, again, for the two millionth time, I've said, protesting in favor of equal protection of the laws, totally on board.
Do it.
Right, I spent the entire first 20 minutes of this particular episode talking about the necessity for properly charging a person so he goes to jail for equal justice under law.
Okay, but Mattis is misreading the room here.
He says, we must not be distracted by the small number of lawbreakers.
Distracted by the small number of lawbreakers.
Um, dude.
Dude.
Dude.
45 million Americans were confined to quarters at 6 o'clock p.m.
across the United States a couple of nights ago.
We have seen, at this point we're approaching double-digit deaths from these riots.
We've seen billions of dollars in property damage.
We have seen people lose their life savings.
We have seen the complete destruction of American freedoms on America's streets.
That's not a small number of looters.
You don't shut down a county in L.A.
of 10 million people at 6 p.m.
every night for a week for a small number of looters.
That ain't this.
Okay, then he says, the protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting we live up to our values, our values as people and our values as a nation.
We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.
Okay, who are these evil, evil, horrible people?
Then he goes straight to Trump.
He says, Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people, does not even pretend to try.
Instead, he tries to divide us.
You can find Donald Trump divisive.
You can.
But to pretend that divisiveness in American politics started with Donald Trump is just to be absolutely myopic and politically ignorant.
Barack Obama was an incredibly divisive president.
Go back and look at the polling data.
When Barack Obama took office, most Americans were quite hopeful about race relations.
By the time he left office, most Americans were not hopeful about race relations.
Barack Obama spent years saying the Cambridge police acted stupidly when they did not.
Suggesting that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight with regards to his political enemies.
Suggesting the Tea Partiers were terrorists.
Suggesting that Fox News was a propaganda outlet.
The President of the United States, Barack Obama, spent years suggesting that every black person is in the same sort of danger as Trayvon Martin, suggesting that the rioters in Ferguson and looters in Ferguson had justification for their rioting and looting because people don't make things up, even though the case regarding Michael Brown was indeed made up.
The President of the United States deployed his vice president to say that Mitt Romney wanted to put y'all back in chains.
He suggested that he had a typical white grandmother.
The grandmother who raised him, by the way, was a typical white person who was subtly racist.
Barack Obama was a very, very divisive president.
I know that we're all supposed to pretend that the world started revolving the moment Donald Trump became president, but it's not true.
It's just not, it's not accurate.
Okay, I have a question.
What was Ferguson in Baltimore about?
That happened under Obama.
Was that also because of Trump?
He says, we are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.
We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society.
Well, we didn't when Obama was president, so I'm looking for it.
He says, this will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens, to past generations that bled to defend our promise, to our children.
And then he says, instructions given by military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that the Nazi slogan for destroying us was divide and conquer.
Our American answer is, in union there is strength.
We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis, confident that we are better than our politics.
Okay, so I'm wondering who is destroying the Constitution when you literally have complete lawlessness overrunning America's cities and the president invoking a Constitutional Insurrection Act and not even using it, right?
Saying he might use it.
As far as the idea that divide and conquer was the Nazi slogan while America was in union, there is strength, I'm wondering who exactly feels more unified these days?
Do you feel a lot more unified?
Is that because of Trump?
Or is it possible these rifts have been emerging for decades and that the academic mentality of critical theory and critical race studies that suggest that we are all but members of our race, this racial reductionism where Joe Biden tells you you're not actually black if you don't vote for Joe Biden.
Maybe this divisiveness predates Donald Trump.
So while I have a lot of respect for General Mattis as a person, I think that this statement is wildly off-base.
Unfortunately, it's really not good for Trump, right?
It's very, very bad for President Trump to have his former Secretary of Defense ripping him.
Trump then comes back at him.
And then this follows hard on a couple other major defense officials who are coming after Trump as well.
So Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that he was aware on Monday night of his plan to visit the Washington church.
Again, I thought it was a dumb plan, this plan to go into a photo op in front of the church.
At least if you're going to do it, wait until curfew to clear the crowd.
They didn't wait till curfew to clear the crowd.
There was a peaceful protest in Lafayette Park by most available metrics.
There were some people who were suggesting that bottles were being thrown at the cops.
If that's true, that's a different story.
We haven't seen the tape of that.
From the tape, it looks mostly like people are standing there, and then the cops just start clearing them, or the Secret Service starts clearing them, and then they clear the area so Trump can walk out, hold up a Bible, and go back in.
Very dumb photo op.
But the defense secretary says he got roped into it, which is always a great look.
He says he wasn't aware of the photo op.
Here is the defense secretary creating some daylight between himself and Trump on this.
I did know that we were going to the church.
I was not aware of a photo op was happening.
Of course, the president drags a large press pool along with him.
And look, I do everything I can to try to stay apolitical and to try and stay out of situations that may appear political.
And sometimes I'm successful at doing that, and sometimes I'm not as successful.
But my aim is to keep the department out of politics, to stay apolitical.
And that's what I continue to try and do, as well as my leaders here in the department.
Okay, meanwhile, the Army General Mark Milley, who's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was also dragged along for that particular photo op.
It turns out that this is one of the more major political own goals of modern politics.
He sent an open letter, an unclassified open letter, to the Chief of Staff of the Army, Commandant of the Marine Corps, Chief of Naval Operations, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Chief of the National Guard, Commandant of the Coast Guard, Chief of Space Operations, and Commanders of the Combatant Commands.
And his message was, follow the Constitution.
Right, which should be fairly obvious, but the implication is fairly obvious as well.
Mark Milley sent out this letter saying, Every member of the U.S. military swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the values embedded within it.
This document is founded on the essential principle that all men and women are born free and equal and should be treated with respect and dignity.
It also gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.
We in uniform remain committed to our national values and principles embedded in the Constitution.
During the current crisis, the National Guard is operating under the authority of state governors to protect lives and property, preserve peace, and ensure public safety and justice.
As members of the joint force comprised of all races, colors, and creeds, you embody the ideals of our Constitution.
Please remind all of our troops and leaders we will uphold the values of our nation.
And then he hand wrote on this piece of paper, we all committed our lives to the idea that is America.
We will stay true to that oath and the American people.
So the implication is pretty hard not to read into that.
He's only sending a letter that restates the obvious because he's attempting to chide Trump pretty clearly.
So none of that is particularly good for President Trump.
Trump being at war with his own Chief of Staff of the Joint Chiefs.
Him being at war with his own Defense Secretary.
Him being at war with his former Defense Secretary.
Like his whole goal here was to look tough.
His whole goal here was to look like he was a law and order guy.
And having your defense establishment kind of going at you is not a good look.
Forget about the fact that I think that Mattis is wrong in his particular take on politics.
An own goal is an own goal, and you have to acknowledge an own goal when it happens.
There's a reason right now that the polls are not looking good for President Trump.
President Trump needs to rein it in.
He needs to rein in his behavior.
He needs to ensure that he runs a much more disciplined campaign, because right now, things are quite ugly for the President in the polling data.
And before you discount all the polls, recognize that the polls at this point in time did not even have Barack Obama up 8 on Mitt Romney in 2012.
Right now, the average polling data, at no point was Hillary up eight on Donald Trump, at no point.
Right now, Joe Biden is in the RealClearPolitics polling average up eight points, and Trump is trailing in virtually every battleground state, according to Fox News polling.
According to the Fox News polling, Trump is now trailing in Arizona.
He's trailing in Ohio.
He's trailing in Wisconsin.
Polls are deadlocked in Texas.
These are disastrous numbers for the president.
He's got to turn this around some way and he must do it quickly.
It's a bad situation for him, politically at the very least.
Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we will see you here tomorrow.
Also, I have an all-access tonight, so make sure to check that out.
Go subscribe, and I'll answer all your questions in a Q&A in which I wear a t-shirt.
That's always our major pitch.
And while you're at it, go pick up a copy of my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, comes out July 21st.
It is about all of the things, all of the things.
It seriously could not be more timely.
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