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June 5, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:04
The Woke Revolution Eats Its Own | Ep. 1025
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Time Text
Unemployment unexpectedly drops, and some Democrats are upset about it.
The New York Times' woke staffers destroy its op-ed page to stop a conservative column, and Drew Brees' atonement is rejected.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so the big story of the morning is that the unemployment rate shockingly declined to 13.3%.
There are a lot of people who are expecting, most of the economists were expecting, an addition of some 7.5 million people to the unemployment rolls this month.
Instead, it turns out that unemployment actually decreased by 2.5%.
Millions.
Dow Jones experts, according to Daily Wire, had predicted the rate would soar to 19.5%, with another 8 million jobs lost.
The economists were not even close.
The economy actually created more than 2.5 million jobs in May, according to the Labor Department.
The May gain was the biggest one-month jobs gain in American history since at least 1939.
President Trump wrote on Twitter, it's a stunner by any stretch of the imagination.
It's a stupendous number.
It's joyous.
Let's call it like it is.
The market was right.
It's stunning.
Jobs returned to many sectors, from retail sales to restaurants and bars, to clothing stores, to dentistry and medical practices.
Jobs were lost in government and education due to ongoing school closures.
Futures on the Dow soared more than 650 points on the good news.
The unemployment rate increased by more than 10% in April.
It went all the way up to 14.7%.
The March jobs report barely caught the initial surge in unemployment.
It was just then at 4.4%.
There was some bad news on Thursday, with the Labor Department stating that 1.8 million Americans made first-time claims for unemployment benefits last week.
That pushed the number of people who had lost their jobs amid the pandemic above 42 million.
Weekly jobless claims totaled 1.877 million.
Dow Jones analysts had estimated a job loss of 1.775 million.
So this is all bizarre.
A lot of people who are still claiming unemployment, but a lot of jobs were added to the economy because it turns out that people are not into being locked up and losing their jobs forever.
And a lot of the people who are on unemployment have technically been sort of furloughed, right?
A lot of them went to their employers and they said, if you could just kind of lay me off so that I'm eligible to make more money off unemployment than I am working for you right now, since I'm furloughed, that would be great.
But those people are going to get their jobs back.
The economy is expected to begin recovering during the second half of 2020.
The CBO's May report had said the labor market is projected to materially improve after the third quarter, but obviously this was happening earlier, right?
So bottom line is that people want to get back to work.
People are getting back to work, and that is amazing.
That is really good news.
This led Paul Krugman, the expert over at the New York Times, because the experts are always right.
This is the thing that we have learned over the past several months, is you must listen to data, you must listen to the experts, you must listen to the science.
Now, as somebody who is kind of fond of listening to data and science, I've been noting all along that the data and science have not been backing a lot of the positions taken by the so-called experts.
But it is amusing to watch as Paul Krugman becomes an employment truther.
He tweeted out this morning, This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility.
They've gotten to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
They've gotten to them.
President Trump went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and he said, it's going to be your unemployment numbers or your brains on this piece of paper.
But it's much more likely, says Paul Krugman, that the models used to produce these numbers have gone haywire in a time of pandemic.
He says these numbers should make you more, not less, pessimistic about the economic outlook.
Why?
Because they'll reinforce the White House inclination to do nothing and let emergency aid expire.
Unbelievable.
So you were wrong by like the swing there from 7.5 million jobs lost to 2.5 million jobs gained.
You were off by 10 million jobs in that swing.
And your initial response is, this is very bad because it means that there won't be as much stimulus as we need.
Or you're just wrong about like all the things, Paul Krugman.
And you have been wrong for years.
This is the same guy who suggested the internet would not change the way we did business.
It would be like the fax machine.
Genius, Paul Krugman.
The guy's just incredible at what he does.
So that is very good news.
People have been saying on the right, is it possible that Trump can still win given everything that's going on, given the fact that he's trailing Joe Biden heavily, given the fact that he's trailing in a lot of the swing states?
The answer is if the economy really recovers, and if COVID doesn't kill everybody, then by the time we get to the election, the story ain't gonna be the riots.
The story is going to be the economy booming again, or the economy skyrocketing again, or the, I mean, this month we had the greatest jobs growth since 1939.
The economy picking up again.
And in the face of that, Joe Biden and his performative wokeness.
Because right now, the performative wokeness looks good when you got a lot of people out in the streets and when everybody is being forced to kneel at the altar, almost literally kneel, kneel at the altar of the proposition that America is systemically racist.
Every major corporation putting out notices about this and Joe Biden out there rah-rahing it in the middle of rioting and looting.
All of that looks good when President Trump doesn't look like he's in control.
But if we get to November and the actual question is booming economy versus performative wokeness from a dead guy in Joe Biden, That is a better race for Donald Trump.
It is a better race for Donald Trump.
So basically, Trump's entire future in politics rests on an economic recovery at this point.
It has to happen for him.
If there's no economic recovery, he's toast.
If there is an economic recovery, then he could win.
He could win a fairly solid victory in the Electoral College.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
Meanwhile, in the rioting news and the looting news and the protest news, the big story of the evening and of the morning was this video.
There's a lot of video that's coming out right now of the police being brutal to people.
And this is bad, and all the officers involved should be punished when they are brutal to people, obviously.
The police have a really rough job.
That does not alleviate them of their responsibility to not involve themselves in acts of police brutality.
We have seen this happen a bunch of times.
So there is a situation that happened in Buffalo, New York yesterday.
In which an elderly man, apparently he's 75 years old, approached police officers.
He's a protester.
And he is pushed.
He loses his balance and he smacks his head against the pavement.
Medics come forward and treat him.
They put him in an ambulance.
He was taken away.
The man's name is Martin Gugino of Amherst.
He was in serious but stable condition, apparently with a concussion and lacerations.
The officers were seen walking past him as he lay bleeding on the ground.
And then they went and they arrested somebody who was behind him, who apparently was not leaving when they were supposed to leave.
The Buffalo mayor, Byron Brown, issued a statement saying he was deeply disturbed by the video.
The officers were suspended without pay.
The governor, Andrew Cuomo, of course, called the incident wholly unjustified and utterly disgraceful, which it is.
I just wish that Andrew Cuomo were quite as upset about mass rioting and looting in the middle of New York City.
You can do both, right?
I'm not upset with the tweet about this being unjustified and disgraceful.
I'm more upset that he allowed people to run roughshod through his major city for seven complete days and seven complete nights.
That seems like that was a bad policy.
But with that said, there are a few points to be made here.
One, Police brutality is a thing that happens.
It is a thing that happens.
There are police who are brutal.
And right now, because all the cameras are out and every police officer in America is out, you're going to see more instances of that.
And that being caught on camera and police officers being punished for this sort of thing, I think most police officers are on board with that.
In this particular case, the shove is bad.
The guy obviously does lose his balance and trips over himself.
Don't shove 75-year-old people is the answer to this particular problem.
The guy's white.
We've seen other cases.
There was a case in Washington, D.C.
when SWAT was attempting to disperse a crowd, and one SWAT member just goes right after a cameraman.
There's a cameraman who's standing right there, and you see the SWAT guy take his shield and just slam the shield into the stomach of the cameraman.
The cameraman's white.
He's from Australia.
Why do I mention the race?
Because the narrative that we are being told by the Black Lives Matter crew is that police brutality is reserved for black people.
That the issue here is not bad police training and police brutality and incidents thereof, but generalized systemic American racism.
I've suggested that typically when you have incidents of police brutality, it's really more an issue of the fact That a lot of police are not well trained, a lot of police are too aggressive, that that happens across communities, it is not relegated to the black community, and that to pretend that every incident of brutality is in fact an incident of racism is to make a category error.
In fact, everybody who's jumping to the conclusion that the Derek Chauvin killing of George Floyd, the alleged killing of George Floyd, and I say alleged because again there's conflicting autopsies on this, but the alleged killing of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin People who are jumping to the conclusion that Chauvin did that because he's a brutal racist as opposed to because he's just not a good cop and was involved in incidents of police brutality and was badly trained.
The jump there is not supported by the evidence in that particular case.
Now, there are cases in which there is evidence to support the racism charge.
So a perfect case where you have evidence to support a racism charge would be the Ahmed Arbery case.
So originally I said, maybe this is just vigilantes.
Who were attempting to stop what they thought was a crime, and they were wrong, and they were acting like idiots and bad people, and they got into an armed confrontation with Arbery and shot him, which means they should go to jail.
But that is not a case necessarily of racism.
Well, now we actually have evidence.
So now it looks more like racism, right?
So when you follow the evidence, The nice thing about evidence is it doesn't tend to bring you to the wrong conclusion.
More data is generally good.
Knowing the motivations of people is generally going to be more helpful in generating data for a narrative than simply just assuming the narrative.
And what you're seeing from the Black Lives Matter movement, what you're seeing from the media is, and what you're seeing from every major corporation, every major corporation in America is now saying, I've donated a million dollars to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in acknowledgement of systemic racism.
By the way, if you think that those sorts of donations are going to now alleviate people calling you racist, if you're a major corporation, you're wrong.
It's not going to happen.
If Amazon thinks that by putting up a Black Lives Matter banner on their website that people are going to now just pretend that Amazon is fine, that the left is going to leave Amazon alone, good luck with that.
Really, enjoy.
But the reality is that in certain cases, you can actually tell whether racism is happening so.
So, there is an allegation now that Travis McMichael, 34, called the alleged victim, Ahmaud Arbery, in that Georgia awful, awful, awful case, right?
They're not being charged with murder.
Travis McMichael, who is one of the shooters, called the alleged victim an effing N-word after the shooting and before police arrived, according to testimony from Special Agent Richard Dial.
That came secondhand from a co-defendant, William Roddy Bryan, 50, the man who recorded video of the fatal shooting.
Now, this has been called a little bit into question because the guy was recording the shooting from behind, he was in his car, so unless he yelled it, the question is how the guy in the car heard it.
But, assuming that he's not lying, assuming he's not trying to, you know, get off the hook by basically saying this was a racist murder and I wasn't involved in any of it, it was the racism, but assuming it's true, which I don't see why we shouldn't assume it's true, assuming it's true, that is a case of a racist murder, right?
So, yes, racism exists.
Yes, we can identify it, and yes, we can punish it.
But to immediately assume that every incident of police brutality involving a black person is really about the race of the black person, as opposed to the police brutality, I think is a fairly major category error.
But we are not really supposed to talk about the category error, because again, there is a narrative to be driven.
And the narrative is that America is deeply evil and deeply terrible in every possible way.
And this is why you see senators kneeling at the US Capitol.
Okay, now again, the kneeling symbol is, I don't know if it's deliberately vague or if it's obviously supposed to be the Colin Kaepernick thing, right?
That was the symbol that Colin Kaepernick used.
Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback, got benched and then decided to kneel and wore socks with cops as pigs on them.
He was kneeling for the national anthem and for the American flag.
Because of police brutality.
The implication being that America, broadly writ, is guilty for the sins of police brutality and racism is to blame for all police brutality.
Now you have United States sitting senators who are kneeling in honor of George Floyd.
Well, if the idea is that you have to accept that America is systemically racist, then that's a very bad thing for the country.
Here's the problem with making arguments like institutionally racist or systemically racist.
They are deliberately nonspecific and they are deliberately created so that you can never alleviate them.
I don't like problems that you can never alleviate, especially in politics.
It's a serious issue because first of all, if you're not able to alleviate it, then you really shouldn't concern yourself with it in politics.
If something in politics is not alleviatable, then sometimes the solution is worse than the cure.
This is true with regard to, for example, income inequality.
If you want to solve income inequality, you could go full commie and everybody can have the exact same income.
But that is not an alleviatable problem in which the solution is not worse than the problem.
If you say systemic racism, you never actually have to cite the policy you think is racist or point to the person you think is racist.
Instead, you just say everything is racist.
And as I said yesterday, that's a religious belief.
It is not an actual specific belief about something that we can fix.
That's just racism is out there in the atmosphere.
Who's the racist?
I don't know.
Maybe it's you.
Maybe it's you.
Well, but I'm not a racist.
I've never done anything racist.
Well, maybe it's implicit.
Maybe you don't even know you're doing a racist thing.
Well, can you name the racist thing I've done?
No.
Can you name the racist thing that I believe?
No.
Can you name any of the racist things that I am responsible for?
No.
But deep down in your heart, without you even knowing it, you're probably racist.
Okay, well now you've made an allegation that is completely unfalsifiable.
Suggesting systemic racism or institutional racism is deliberately nonspecific.
And if you want to talk about policy, if you want to talk about redlining, for example, back in the 1960s, which was a thing and was made illegal in 1975 by the federal government, if you want to talk about informal practices of redlining, which, by the way, are illegal, and by the way, you could sue banks over, Then you're talking about a policy that has been alleviated by law.
If you want to talk about the fact that history has consequences, that of course is true.
But the question is, what do you want to do about that today?
Because I can't go back, I don't have a time machine.
I can't go back in time and change stuff that happened in the past.
So what policy would you like to pursue today that is going to alleviate the problem of quote-unquote systemic racism?
And if your suggestion is that we have to do injustice today in order to rectify the injustices of the past, the answer is no.
Because now you're just doing injustices today.
Two wrongs do not actually make a right, nor do they alleviate the problem.
If anybody thinks that slavery reparations, that signing checks to descendants of slaves, people are going to go, oh, OK, I guess we're done here.
Systemic racism fixed.
Good luck.
It's not going to happen.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has admitted it as much in his seminal essay, The Case for Reparations.
Very late in the essay, he says, maybe it won't work, but we should just give it a try.
Well, no.
Your entire case is that the reparations are reparative.
If you're saying it might not work, then it's not reparative.
That's not, if you go to a mechanic and the mechanic says, you know, I'm going to need to complete, I'm going to charge you the worth of the car, all you need to do, and it might fix your car, it might not fix your car.
Are you going to go to that mechanic?
I have serious doubts, have serious doubts.
Okay, so we're going to talk more about the Black Lives Matter agenda because it's not clear exactly what people are stumping for other than that generalized sense of America being bad, which is something that you as an American should oppose.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Okay, so what does the Black Lives Matter movement want?
So if you're talking about specific policies, the answer is that the BLM agenda as posted on their website is completely insane.
I mean, it's things like defund the police, free Palestine, like it's just, it's radical, radical stuff.
And if you don't remember the agenda, all you have to do is go back to 2014 when it was the exact same agenda that nobody actually wanted to adopt.
So what exactly is driving all of this?
What's driving a lot of this is the pitch, which is that America is deliberately keeping black people down.
Now, I have a generalized view of human beings.
They don't think about each other all that much.
They don't spend an awful lot of time thinking about keeping other people down.
Not in America.
In America, there are not very many people who get up in the morning and they're like, you know what?
I'm keeping a black guy down today.
I really don't think there are a lot of those people.
So if there are not a lot of those people and you can't cite those people, then you need to cite me the rule.
The rule that's keeping black people down.
And if you can't cite me a rule, then I'm not sure exactly what we are supposed to do about your accusation.
If instead what is actually happening is the generalized leftist pitch that any inequality can be chalked up to injustice, even if you can't name the injustice, I'm not going to go along with that.
If the idea is that any inequality, that income inequality, can be chalked up to some sort of exploitation or historic grievance that can only be cured by some new injustice, no.
The answer is no.
I'm not going to go along with that.
And if you're going to imply that Americans are bad-hearted and racist, and that the only way to alleviate this is the expiation of sin through quasi-religious rituals in which you kneel and repeat after people, the answer is no.
That is un-American.
That is not something I'm willing to do as a free American who has not sinned against black people.
That is not something I'm willing to do.
I'm perfectly willing to accept my own sins.
I have a full list on my website of things I feel I've said wrong over the course of my career.
But I'm not willing to accept responsibility for something that my non-ancestors did.
And I'm not willing, and nobody else should either.
Just as a black person should not be forced to accept responsibility For things that black people do that are wrong, white people should not be forced to accept responsibility for things that white people do that are wrong or have done in the past.
If you are looking to fix things, there's a basic rule in marriage.
A basic rule in marriage is when you're having an argument, don't say, you always act.
You always treat me like this.
This is like the first rule of marital counseling.
Why?
Because it's not specific.
It's not a problem you can solve.
And usually it's inaccurate, because people don't always do anything.
Instead, you have to say, what is the exact problem that we have, and how do we solve this problem that is right in front of us?
If you're just going to suggest, without evidence, that every single instance of police brutality is indicative of broader American racism, And by the way, every instance of a black person killing a white person is not indicative of a bigger problem.
It's just an individual incident.
But every instance of a white person killing a black person is indicative of broader American historical racism.
None of this follows.
None of this follows.
And it does not help when you trot out spokespeople like Al Sharpton, the worst race baiter of modern American history.
Al Sharpton completely falsified a rape case about Tawana Bradley.
Al Sharpton was involved in inciting the riots, in my opinion, in Crown Heights in 1991 that ended with the murder of an Orthodox Jew.
He literally went out in front of a crowd and said that if a Jew wanted to fight him, pin back your yarmulke and come on over.
Al Sharpton was involved in the incitement of the burning of Freddy's Fashion Mart, in my opinion, again, in New York City in 1996, when he suggested that Jewish interlopers were taking over real estate in New York.
That guy, and the guy, I mean, his shtick is that he goes to businesses, he claims that they're racist, and then if they sign a check to his fund, he leaves them alone.
This is Al Sharpton's shtick.
So am I going to listen to him?
Nobody has made more money off of the lie of systemic American racism than Al Sharpton.
Nobody has made more money off of it than Al Sharpton.
So using him as your spokesperson is a mistake.
So Al Sharpton yesterday made a statement in which he suggested that ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck for 400 years.
Now, Americans literally kept their knees on the necks of black people all the way up through the Civil War and then in the South through Jim Crow.
But Al Sharpton has had no one's knee on his neck.
Al Sharpton has made a very, very lucrative career out of blackmailing people so that he would leave them alone.
He says, we were smarter than the underfunded schools you put us in, but you had your knee on our neck.
We could run corporations and not hustle in the street, but you had our knee on our neck.
Okay, what is the policy knee?
So we can all be on the same page.
What is the policy knee that is on the neck of black people right now?
If you can't name it, then I'm going to have a hard time taking very seriously Al Sharpton's contentions.
This is the problem that I have with this program.
If you want to march against police brutality, cops are marching against police brutality.
Everybody is against police brutality.
But the vaguer the charge, the harder it is to rebut.
And that, I think, is the purpose.
That is the goal here.
The vaguer the charge, the harder it is to rebut.
And that is why vague charges are being made.
So, Kihana Mariah Ross, a professor of African American Studies, has a piece of the New York Times called, Call It What It Is, Anti-Blackness.
She says it's not racism.
She says the right term is anti-blackness.
She says, to be clear, racism isn't a meaningless term, but it's a catch-all that can encapsulate anything, from black people being denied fair access to mortgage loans to Asian students being burned, burdened with a model minority label.
It's not specific.
Anti-blackness is one way some black scholars have articulated what it means to be marked as black in an anti-black world.
It's more than just racism against black people.
That oversimplifies and defangs it.
It's a theoretical framework that illuminates society's inability to recognize our humanity, the disdain, disregard, and disgust for our existence.
Okay, evidence, please.
Evidence.
Seriously.
Disdain, disregard, and disgust for our existence.
We have active affirmative action programs at every major American university.
Because there is not disdain, disregard, and disgust for the existence of black people.
There's a desperate attempt to help black people in bad circumstances move up the ladder of success.
But the basic notion in America that anti-blackness is the defining feature, that again allows you to lay everything at the feet of an unspecified enemy.
And then we get in this column the usual trick, we're going to go back 150 years to slavery and then we're just going to fast forward as though nothing has changed in the interim.
Anti-Blackness describes the inability to recognize Black humanity.
It captures the reality that the kind of violence that saturates Black life is not based on any specific thing a Black person, better described as a person who has been racialized Black, did.
What does that even mean?
The violence we experience isn't tied to any particular transgression.
It's gratuitous and unrelenting.
Anti-Blackness covers the fact that society's hatred of Blackness, and also its gratuitous violence against Black people, is complicated by its need for our existence.
For example, for white people, again, better described as those who have been racialized white.
This is an easy way, by the way, of dismissing black conservatives and treating white liberals as though they are woke.
The abject inhumanity of the black reinforces their whiteness, their humanness, their power, their privilege, whether they're aware of it or not.
This is my favorite part.
Whether they're aware of it or not.
Okay, so now we're ghost hunting.
Now we are.
You're a racist, even if you don't know you're a racist.
I can't explain why you're a racist, but I know you are.
Because whether you're aware of it or not, I know that out there, there's a bunch of people who are just anti-black.
And the fact that you exist is evidence, as a white person, that anti-blackness exists.
Like, the vagary is the enemy of unity.
If you want people to come together, you have to make a specific proposal.
If you want people to actually move beyond a problem, you have to make a specific proposal for a solution.
That's what's so irritating about this.
Because the only specific proposals I've seen, things like limiting qualified immunity, or stopping police unions from negotiating bad contracts, I agree with those!
Okay, but nobody wants to actually acknowledge that the right agrees on a lot of those points, so instead it's, well, if you don't agree on the broader point that America is, broadly speaking, racist, then you're part of the problem.
Now it seems to me that A big part of the problem here is the deliberate attempt to paint a vague picture of what the problem is in the first place such that the goalposts can move ad nauseum.
They can just move randomly.
Everything becomes racist so long as people on the left suggest that it is racist and the goalposts consistently recede.
It doesn't, like, perfect example, college campuses.
The reality is that on college campuses, no place in America has more accusations of racism than college campuses.
These are also the most woke places on the planet.
So if you think that acknowledging white privilege, which is like the de rigueur move on campuses, that if acknowledging white privilege on America's college campuses has somehow alleviated the problem of accusations of racism or alleviated racism itself, I beg to differ.
There is no evidence of this whatsoever.
Because again, the problem is being used as a club.
And again, the problem is not even being specifically explained.
What is the problem?
And don't tell me bad things happening to black people is the problem.
Bad things happen to everybody.
And the question is why they happen and how we alleviate the problem.
If you can't specify exactly where the problem is coming from, better than racism We're anti-blackness that nobody knows about, and I can't name a policy, and I can't name a person, I can't name who did the bad thing.
If somebody came to your house, and if you called the police...
And let's assume a world in which the police are good, okay?
Like they normally are.
You call the police, and somebody, and they come to your door, and they say, okay, what's the problem?
And you say, the problem is a bad thing just happened to me.
And they say, okay, what's the bad thing that happened to you?
And you can't really specify the bad thing that happened to you, and you can't specify who did it, and you can't specify what exactly happened.
What are you supposed to do?
Is this a problem-solving routine, or is this just an expression, a venting of spleen at inequality?
And inequality is a reality, but it is not necessarily an inequity.
By the way, worth noting that anybody who thinks that the problem is alleviated by accepting your white privilege is full of it.
Bill de Blasio has spent the entire last week allowing rioting and looting to overtake his city.
His daughter was arrested at a protest and he said he was proud of her.
Bill de Blasio has spent, he did full speeches talking about his evil, horrible white privilege.
Bill de Blasio got booed at a vigil for George Floyd yesterday.
So well done on buying off everybody who you thought was going to appreciate your newfound wokeness.
Let us welcome, with respect, the mayor of New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio.
And First Lady Sha'Crain McRae.
Again!
We say respect!
We say respect!
Say it with me!
Respect!
Respect!
Okay, so the people at the rally have to be told to respect the mayor, who is the wokest mayor in America.
So well done, everybody.
Problem solved, right?
Problem solved.
What's hilarious is that Democrats made the pitch that America is systemically racist, that they can't name who's doing the racism or what the policy is.
Just elect us and we'll alleviate it.
Has it been alleviated in New York?
Has it been alleviated in Washington, D.C.?
Has it been alleviated in L.A.?
All Democrats governing it.
I haven't noticed.
Okay, meanwhile, the performative woke crowd has taken over major American institutions.
The culture wars are ongoing and the culture wars are bloody.
There are people like me who have been speaking on college campuses for a long time and pointing out the problems that exist on America's college campuses for a long time, particularly the problems of safe spaces and microaggressions.
And if you say something I don't like, you're hurting me and you're creating a danger.
And there's a general attempt by many in the media and by many on the left, cancel culture doesn't exist.
Cancel culture isn't real.
Well, it turns out that it actually is.
And not only that, there are a bunch of people on the right like, well, is it really a problem that it's happening on campuses?
After all, these kids will one day enter the real world.
And in the real world, they won't be able to get away with this bullcrap.
In the real world, they will actually have to undertake to understand opposing points of view.
Well, some of us have been warning you that what starts in academia doesn't stay in academia, and that the ridiculous social justice warrior, censorious culture was not just going to stay in the academy, it was going to leave and take over the institutions.
And that the Maoist cultural revolution that you are seeing at America's major institutions is ongoing.
It's so hilarious, by the way.
Half of the Vox writing team is now realizing the cancel culture exists.
They spent like years denying that it exists.
Now I've seen in the last day, half of the writers over at Vox, a very left-wing publication, say, oh, by the way, this cancel culture thing, it's not great.
It's not great.
Why?
Well, because of what just happened over at the New York Times.
So I'm gonna explain what happened over at the New York Times.
And it is a perfect and ridiculous example of how when you start with the premise that America is systemically evil, And that America is systemically racist, and then you suggest that America's rights, rights to free speech, rights to freedom of expression, that those rights fall unequally on people because of the innate inequality in American life, then all you have to do is curb those rights and make the rights available only to people who have been historically victimized.
That's the injustice that has to be done today to correct for the injustices of the past.
This is a case first made by Herbert Marcuse, the radical Marxist professor from the 1960s, when he suggested that what you really needed, what you really needed was repression of opposing viewpoints.
He called it repressive tolerance.
You need repressive tolerance.
You need a situation in which tolerance of the left-wing viewpoint is exacerbated and intolerance of right-wing viewpoints is put down because that has to be silenced because freedom of speech is actually bad because if the right people, if people who are bad use freedom of speech, those people could actually win.
So we have to silence those people such that marginalized voices can speak.
That perspective and allowing the non-marginalized voices to speak, allowing right-wingers to Is a threat to your life.
That perspective has taken over the New York Times.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
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All right, we're going to get to the unbelievable takeover of the New York Times editorial board.
Basically, Nikole Hannah-Jones is now the editor of the New York Times.
I mean, that's essentially what we have realized.
She's not one of the editors, she is the editor.
And she is determining all policy.
The woke staff at the New York Times, and this is happening at a lot of major companies.
If you've been noticing a lot of the major corporations issuing statements, that's because they have a lot of woke interns who are basically telling them that if they don't, then they're gonna be very, very angry at them.
And the silence is violence movement is gaining speed.
I actually have, so I go to a gym out here when we're in non-pandemic times.
The head of the gym emailed me yesterday and said he had received a cancellation from somebody, not because he had said anything bad, but because he did not put out a corporate statement about Black Lives Matter in the middle of this.
So the person, like, he found the one person who's apparently sitting at home going, I need corporate virtue signaling or I will not patronize your business.
Ridiculous.
Okay, we're gonna get to this in just one second.
First, 2020.
Remember that Donald Trump was actually impeached this year?
You know how long this year has been?
Like, so long that Donald Trump was impeached this year, and that was 127 years ago.
That's how long this year has been.
We have seen an impeachment.
We have seen presidential debates.
We have seen Bernie Sanders climb to the top of the rankings and collapse.
We have seen a global pandemic.
We have seen race riots in our streets.
We have seen virtually all the things you can see.
But the year is not even halfway over, guys.
The year is not even halfway over.
Like, it's right now about halfway.
So if you want to keep track of all of this and you want to make sure the mainstream media is not cutting off your ability to see all of the news, Then you want to check out Daily Wire.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
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Facts do not care about your feelings, gang.
Also, now is a great time to pre-order my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
As I said yesterday, When I wrote this book, I was fairly certain it would be relevant.
And then the pandemic hit, I was like, I'm not sure it's going to be relevant.
People seem to be coming together.
And then it's super relevant because the entire book is about how America is coming apart at the seams because of a motivated group.
of social justice warriors and what I call disintegrationists.
People who are determined to destroy America's common philosophy and suggest that it is evil, suggest that our culture of rights is discriminatory, and destroy our common history and suggest that instead, America be divvied up by racial and socioeconomic group and then destroyed from the inside.
That's the book.
The entire book is about this.
It's rebutting a lot of those contentions.
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The book is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
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And over history, failed to unify us because people strayed from those principles.
Go check it out.
How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
It's coming out July 21st.
You can pre-order it right now.
Now you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative radio show and podcast in the nation.
Alrighty, so the move toward America is evil, systemically racist, and therefore the only way to fix that systemic racism is to shut down all the voices we don't like.
That move is being made by the New York Times staff, by the woke staff at the New York Times.
And understand, they don't actually think.
That right-wing perspectives are quote-unquote violent.
They don't.
They don't actually think that.
I think there are some of them who do.
Some of them are so delusional that they believe that if they print an editorial from Tom Cotton that that is actual violence to people.
I think most of them just don't like the viewpoint and they are using the excuse of Your viewpoint is inherently unjust.
An unjust viewpoint means that you are exacerbating the systemic inequalities of the United States.
Therefore, we have every right to ban what you are saying.
And every obligation, not just right, every obligation to ban what you are saying.
So it is not really a threat of violence.
It is the belief that the only way to make a better America is to repress voices that you don't like.
And listen, every publication has editorial standards.
But if you are saying that you cannot print an op-ed from a sitting United States Senator, Tom Cotton, A Harvard Law graduate who is writing a piece, served in the military, writing a piece about the use of the military against rioting and looting.
A viewpoint, by the way, agreed to by polling data, by six in 10 Americans, that you cannot run that piece, and that it's bad to run that piece, you are not, only not in the mainstream.
You are fully insane.
You are fully crazy.
Okay, but that is the way that a lot of these organizations are being run.
We saw the same thing with The Atlantic.
That organization, run by the execrable Jeffrey Goldberg, hired Kevin Williamson from National Review to write, and then after some woke staffers decided that Kevin Williamson was bad, bad, they fired him.
Well, now you're seeing this over at The New York Times.
So yesterday, There is a big brouhaha because Tom Cotton wrote this op-ed suggesting that it was time to send in the troops to restore order during rioting and looting.
He did make a distinction between protesters and rioters and looters, but people at the New York Times don't make that distinction because they think that the rioters and looters are justified in tearing down the institutions of America.
So a bunch of members of the New York Times woke staff tweeted out the same thing.
As I mentioned yesterday, they all did the college, this is all college bullcrap.
It's all college bullcrap.
I've been on enough campuses to know this.
I visited dozens and dozens, probably a hundred campuses over the course of the last four years.
They all do this.
It's ridiculous.
These campuses are replete with this kind of woke nonsense.
And one of the things that they do, as I mentioned yesterday, is the, if you agree with somebody, you can't clap because it might trigger somebody's post-traumatic stress disorder.
So instead you're supposed to snap.
And you're supposed to repeat slogans.
So if somebody says something, then you're supposed to—just like you saw at that de Blasio rally, somebody from the microphone says, respect, and you don't just give respect.
You're supposed to shout back, respect!
Or at the Bethesda, Maryland thing, you're supposed to repeat sentence by sentence what somebody is telling you, which is a religious woke incantation.
Okay, so the entire New York Times staff apparently decides to tweet out the same thing.
Running this puts black New York Times staff in danger.
In danger!
If you're a black writer for the New York Times, Tom Cotton saying that using American military to put down riots is putting black staff at the New York Times in danger.
Why are they rioting and looting?
Are they flinging molotov cocktails at cop cars?
If not, they probably shouldn't feel super endangered by this.
But this became such an issue that the New York Times, they didn't pull down the piece.
They didn't issue a correction to the piece.
Instead, they issued a statement.
And here was their statement from their spokeswoman.
woman.
We've examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication.
This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to publication of an op-ed that did not meet our standards.
As a result, we're planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of op-eds we publish.
So they're actually printing fewer op-eds because some woke staffers who were not willing to quit, by the way, If it was such a danger, they should have quit.
I've quit publications where I think that the publication is doing something deeply and terribly wrong.
I've done it myself.
None of these woke staffers were willing to quit the New York Times over apparently running a piece so dangerous it was putting their own staff's lives in danger.
None of them are willing to quit.
They're just willing to bitch about it to upper management so that the pusillanimous, cowardly upper management would apologize for running a piece that 58% of Americans agree with.
Really well done, well done.
By the way, how do you know they're lying?
You know they're lying because it's 27 hours later, 29 hours later.
This thing's been up for, I think, nearly two days, maybe 48 hours later.
They still have not issued a correction on the piece.
So if the piece was factually wrong, where's the correction?
They still haven't pulled it down, it's still up.
So this was just, please, please don't, please don't yell at us, please don't yell at us, it's so bad!
Why are you yelling at us?
We're woke, we're woke!
The New York Times staffers, they were leaking to other publications, news that people were canceling their subscriptions.
Wow.
Oh man.
First of all, I thought that generally speaking, you don't want your staffers leaking to outside publications.
That's just not something that is done.
If I found the staffers of the Daily Wire leaking to outside publications about internal business at the Daily Wire, they're fired like this.
That's how fast they are fired.
It's my company.
It's my business.
Okay, but they had staffers who are leaking this stuff out.
And the staffers were leaking out amazing, amazing news.
News like 200 people canceled their subscriptions inside of one hour.
Ooh, 200 people.
Well, if 200 people did a thing, that means that probably the 1 million New York Times subscribers, by the way, I think that's an underestimate.
It may be 2 million New York Times subscribers.
Clearly they're all canceling en masse.
The amount of cowardice in corporate America, even including in our press and especially in our press, it's stunning.
You want to know why Peloton is sending out little notices about woke culture?
Because they're afraid they might receive 10 tweets.
That's why.
Because all of these corporations are cowardly, and so they've decided they're going to bow to the notion of systemic racism.
By the way, what they don't understand is they're signing the death warrant for their own companies.
Because the woke culture is not satisfied with you making protestations of your innocence or of your guilt.
Once you say that you are responsible for systemic racism, do you think it stops with that admission?
Or do you think that now you're on the hook for every claim that people who claim that you are the problem are going to make?
The admission of guilt is not an alleviation of your responsibility, according to these folks.
The admission of guilt is the first step toward them wrecking you.
This is how these apologies work.
This is how these apologies work.
So Barry Weiss, who is one of the only sane people at the New York Times.
I don't know how she's lasted there that long.
I don't think she'll last much longer, to be frank with you, given the nature of the situation at the New York Times.
She tweeted out, The old guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism.
They assumed that they shared that worldview with the young people they hired, who called themselves liberals and progressives.
This was an incorrect assumption.
The new guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by John Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
They call it safetyism, in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.
I'm in no way surprised by what has now exploded into public view.
In a way, it's oddly comforting.
I feel less alone and less crazy trying to explain the dynamic to people.
What I am shocked by is the speed.
I thought it would take a few years, not a few weeks.
Here's one way to think about what's at stake.
The New York Times motto is, one group emphasizes the word all, the other emphasizes the word fit.
Okay, this is correct.
Naturally, everyone at the New York Times is like, that's not happening.
That's not happening.
Max Strasser says, I'm in the same meeting.
Barry is live tweeting.
This is inaccurate in both characterizations.
It's not a civil war.
It's an editorial conversation.
Oh, it's an editorial conversation that ends with you restricting your op-ed page, not pulling down a piece that supposedly is chock full of errors.
By the way, for the New York Times to say that their fact-checking is bad on the Tom Cotton piece, this is the same newspaper that printed the 1619 Project that made the suggestion that virtually everything in the American Revolution was designed to preserve slavery, which is insane.
Insane.
Fully insane.
They want to appeal itself for their trouble.
Pinch Solzberger, the idiot publisher of the New York Times, he put out a statement saying, I've already heard from many of you.
I will do more listening in the days ahead.
There will be a town hall tomorrow.
A town hall about running an op-ed from a sitting American senator.
They've run op-eds from Vladimir Putin.
They've run op-eds about why sex is better in communist countries.
And they can't run an op-ed from Tom Cotton saying that maybe you might need to use the military to put down civil insurrection?
Like, this is, it's crazy.
It's crazy.
He says, I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those you may disagree with.
This piece was published in that spirit, but it's essential we listen and reflect on the concerns we're hearing, as we would with any piece that is the subject of significant criticism.
So just absolute, absolute cowardice.
Okay, how bad is the cancel culture?
How bad is the censorious culture?
There is a piece in the Washington Post today by Alyssa Rosenberg, who is one of the TV columnists.
And sometimes she writes interesting stuff.
This is not one of those times.
She has a piece titled, So the police are so bad that we should all stop watching Law & Order, because the police are evil.
We should all stop watching any show or movie that portrays the police as good, because we all know the police are actually brutal and racist.
Now, first of all, if you think there has not been a TV show or movie made about police brutality and racism, let me recommend every single police show ever made except for Law & Order and maybe Dragnet.
Every show made since NYPD Blue has taken on these issues.
Every.
Single.
One.
All of them.
But Alyssa Rosenberg suggested we have a generalized view of the police as good, and that's bad, and that needs to stop.
She says, for a century, Hollywood has been collaborating with police departments, telling stories that whitewash police shootings and valorizing an action hero's style of policing over the harder, less dramatic work of building relationships with the communities cops are meant to serve and protect.
Purely from a dramatic perspective, crime makes a story seem consequential.
Investigating crime generates action.
Solving crime provides for a morally and emotionally satisfying conclusion.
The result is an addiction to stories that portray police departments as more effective than they actually are, crime as more prevalent than it actually is, and police use of force as consistently justified.
And then she says we should cancel Dick Wolf's Chicago franchise of shows.
We should get rid of Law & Order SVU.
We should get rid of all of the shows that you like watching because obviously they are training you that the police are good.
Instead, we should all watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine because it's a reformist police show.
It's very, very important.
One way, one way forward might be to emphasize the dialogues.
And sometimes fierce struggles that take place within police departments.
The Shield follows the reign and eventual downfall of corrupt detective Vic Mackey.
So she likes The Shield, and she likes The Wire, but those are the only ones.
And even The Shield took too long to get to the point where the cops are actually bad.
We need only shows where the cops are bad.
Now, I have a question.
Should we also ban rap music?
So, for a long time, there was this idea, and it came from some elements of the right and some elements of the left, that rap music was causing people to be violent.
Video games, also causing people to be violent.
Then there was a bevy of social science, and it showed not so much.
Okay, so now we have a piece in the Washington Post suggesting we stop all police movies and TV shows.
There's a piece today in the New York Times talking about how we don't need any more novels or TV shows about cops who do the wrong things for the right reason.
We need to stop all of that.
No more hard-charging cops in novels and TV shows.
We need to stop all of this.
Instead, we need woke books.
More woke books.
That's what we need.
The censorship is... How fast is this taking place?
Incredibly fast.
Because cancel culture is real.
It exists.
It is ugly.
It is designed to destroy your freedoms.
Your freedoms to consume what you would like.
Your freedom to say what you would like.
Your freedom to read and watch what you would like.
In order so that all messages must mirror the same message.
Even if that message is factually untrue, such as that America was founded on slavery, not on freedom, or that America is systemically racist, rotten to the core.
Every message must be made to match this message.
It's not even enough for Drew Brees to apologize for saying that all he said was, I won't kneel for the American flag because I had grandfathers who fought in the military and the American flag stands for freedom.
He was forced to apologize, and then he was forced to apologize again.
He issued a second apology today.
Okay, they're coming for you.
They're coming to kill you.
Not literally speaking, figuratively speaking.
They're coming to finish your career.
They're coming at you.
Once you apologize for saying something as anodyne as the American flag is not worth kneeling for, the American flag is worth much more than that.
They'll never stop.
Shannon Sharpe, the former tight end for the Denver Broncos, he says he's never going to respect Drew Brees now for having said that kneeling for the American flag is bad.
Here was Shannon Sharpe yesterday.
Drew Brees still doesn't seem to get it.
Now, he issued an apology, Skip, but it's meaningless because the guys know that he spoke his heart the very first time around.
Correct.
Now, I don't know if I- I don't know what Drew's gonna do, but he probably should just go ahead and retire.
Now, he- it will never be the same.
What he said, they're gonna like, oh, yeah, you know- No.
They will never look at him the same because he spoke his heart and Skip- and what he said, it wasn't what he said, it's how he said it.
He was defiant.
I will never Respect the man.
So all respect has gone for Drew Brees for having said that he likes the American flag.
Once you apologize, did it solve the problem?
Did it?
Because I'm not getting that impression.
Once you bow to the performative woke crowd, once you bow to the social justice warriors, they're joffrey.
Okay, kneeling, bending the knee does not amount to an act of unity in front of social justice warriors who suggest that America is systemically racist.
Joffrey lops off the head of Ned.
Okay, that is what is going to happen for a country that decides that it is indeed endemically racist across every aspect of its humanity.
They can't explain why.
You can't explain the policies.
You can't explain the racists.
You're granting a premise that is going to end the country.
That is the danger here.
Not marching against police brutality, which is fine.
Not marching against individual instances of racism, which is fine.
Suggesting that America broadly writ is unjust.
That is a serious problem.
And that is a problem that's going to outlast whatever happens over the course of the next week or so.
Alrighty, we will be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, please, I told you last weekend, try not to burn down the country while we're gone for the weekend.
Can we try that again?
Like take two?
We'll see you here next week.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
I think there are enough of those already out there.
We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.
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