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June 25, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:06
They Don’t Care About Fixing Anything | Ep. 1039
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Democrats block police reform while proclaiming the time to act is now.
The creator of the 1619 Project calls for slavery reparations.
And the media focus in on COVID-19 spikes in Texas and Florida while ignoring California.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, a lot to get to today.
We're going to get to everything COVID-related because we are seeing spikes around the country.
Only certain parts of the country are apparently Worth lots of media attention.
Like California, which actually may be seeing the biggest spike by home county of LA County, is now the number one county in America in terms of COVID-19 identified infections.
That's getting ignored in favor of Florida and Texas.
We'll get to that in a little bit.
We will also get to a new call for slavery reparations, which of course is not going to settle the problem.
Because the fact is that a lot of the people who are calling for slavery reparations are not going to suggest that once the reparations have been made to people who had an ancestor who 165 years ago was being held in slavery, that once that reparation is made, that suddenly the problem has been fixed and now we can move on with our lives.
None of that is the reality, obviously.
We're going to get to the problems of slavery reparations and the very, very bad argument that's being made by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which of course is based and rooted in the idea that America is endemically racist, continues to be endemically racist, and that nothing much has changed in the United States.
We'll get to that in a little bit.
First, let's talk about the Reality of the markets.
The markets are up and down right now.
There's so much uncertainty in the markets.
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Okay, so yesterday, it became perfectly obvious for those of us who were unconvinced.
It has now been perfectly obvious that what is going on right now in the United States is not about solutions.
It's not about solutions.
It's not about anything that is relevant to solving the underlying problem.
It is not about an attempt to Breach gaps that have existed in American life.
It is not about an attempt to rectify historic racism.
It's not even about an attempt to stop police brutality.
It's about none of that.
Yesterday, the Republicans brought up in the Senate a police reform bill.
And the police reform bill didn't give Democrats everything they wanted.
For example, it did not outright ban chokeholds.
It said that departments had to take a look at chokeholds and decide how they would be applied.
And the federal government would make its funding contingent on particular procedures put in place with regard to chokeholds.
Now, there are a bunch of Democrats who think that chokeholds should be outright banned because either they are mischaracterizing what a chokehold is, there's a difference between a chokehold and a submission hold, or they're trying to deprive law enforcement of a tool that you sometimes require in order to make a situation more quiescent, as opposed to being forced to use deadly force in a case where somebody is resisting arrest.
I mean, this is really one of the instances in which officers You see an officer and the officer is trying to put somebody into submission hold, right?
They're trying to deprive oxygen to the brain, knock the person out, or at least put the person in a more quiescent state.
The alternative to that is the person continuing to thrash around, struggle, maybe grab the officer's gun.
Having Democrats who really don't know anything about police procedure decide full out on a federal level exactly what local police departments ought to do after a 30-year continuous drop in crime in the United States is a pretty astonishing move.
Republicans were going to do something different.
They were going to say, OK, these chokeholds have sometimes resulted in death.
These submission holds have sometimes resulted in death.
So we should look at the procedures.
OK, it was a little bit vaguer.
Democrats didn't like that.
OK, so Democrats decided for that reason, among many others, that they were just going to block this police reform bill put forward by the Republicans.
They weren't even going to allow a vote on it.
They weren't going to allow a vote.
Now, just a couple of weeks ago, the idea was if Republicans don't bring forward legislation, then they don't care about black Americans.
So immediately Republicans put together a bill.
Senator Tim Scott has been very outspoken about his belief that the police sometimes do act in racially disparate ways.
He's talked about his own personal experiences with what he believes to be racial profiling.
He was the lead sponsor on this bill, and Democrats rejected it outright.
Now, I will note that the suggestion that America is endemically plagued by racist police is not backed by very much data.
Jason Reilly has a good piece in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the police act, talking about the real problem with police.
He points out, in a 2015 Gallup poll taken after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, a majority of black respondents said police treat them fairly.
Far more blacks, 38 percent, than whites, 18 percent, said they want a greater police presence in their local communities.
Another Gallup survey published last year asked Black and Hispanic residents of low-income neighborhoods about policing and found that these groups, quote, aren't averse to law enforcement.
In fact, they are particularly concerned about crime in their neighborhoods.
59% of both Blacks and Hispanics said they would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do, making them more likely than white residents, 50%, to respond this way.
Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that a more uniform data collection among police agencies would be a good thing, says Jason Riley.
They're right, but it's no guarantee the media will report the additional data or put it in context.
We have plenty of data right now.
Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s.
Upward of 95% of black homicides in the United States don't involve law enforcement.
Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force.
And the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior.
The problem isn't a shortage of data, but a race-based narrative that is immune to any data that challenge it.
Okay, nonetheless, there was a push for police reform.
The idea is police across the country are endemically brutal and terrible and awful across the board.
And so Republicans pushed forward this bill.
And then the Democrats block it.
The Democrats just outright block it.
45 senators, they don't even allow a vote.
The Republicans control the Senate, so the Republicans are gonna get a majority here.
But 45 senators say we're not even going to allow a vote.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a minority of the Senate, 45 Democrats, voted Wednesday to close off any debate on a police reform bill.
Not against the bill, against even allowing the Senate to debate or offer amendments to Tim Scott's proposal.
The Republicans were going to allow something like 21 amendments to the proposal.
A calculation is pure election year cynicism.
Block the Senate from passing a bill that Republicans could campaign on, then denounce Republicans for refusing to pass the bill that House Democrats will pass this week that would micromanage local police departments.
Blame Republicans for opposing reform when Senate Democrats were the real opponents, says the Wall Street Journal editorial board.
Much of the press corps will play along by reporting on the House vote, but treating the Senate vote as a GOP failure.
The election year calculation will go largely unmentioned as Democrats maneuver to return the Senate to Democratic Party control in 2021.
It is no accident that California Senator Kamala Harris led the filibuster as she campaigned to be Joe Biden's running mate.
So nothing gets done, which of course is the purpose because the Republicans in the Senate are not going to vote for the House bill.
They're not going to vote for a bill that micromanages the police to the extent that Democrats want to micromanage this thing.
So Democrats are just demagoguing this.
They don't actually want 70% of what they could have.
This is what Tim Scott points it out.
He said, like, you guys, you could get 70 to 80% of what you want here, and you won't even allow us to put up the bill for amendment?
We can't even debate this thing?
I get the feeling maybe you have some different priorities here.
I finally realized what the problem is, Mr. President.
The actual problem is not what is being offered.
It is who is offering it.
Instead of getting 70% of what you wanted, today, and tomorrow, and next week, you get zero!
And you're gonna wait until the election to get more!
Okay?
Well...
Why wouldn't you take the 80% now, see if you can win the election and add on the other 20%?
And the answer, of course, is because they don't want the 80% now.
Because they don't really want to solve problems.
Many of our politicians, many of the members of the media class, they don't want to solve problems.
They want to keep talking about the problem because the problem is politically beneficial for them.
They want to exaggerate the problem or continue to jabber about the problem, and they want to make it look like people who disagree with them on policy actually don't care about the problem.
Leading that crew, of course, is Nancy Pelosi, who's just a terrible human being.
I mean, really despicable.
She said over the last 48 hours that Republicans are trying to cover up George Floyd's murder while they're trying to pass a police reform bill that her colleagues are blocking at her behest, presumably.
She is saying that Republicans are trying to cover up George Floyd's murder, which is insane.
Insane!
Have you seen a single Republican defending Derek Chauvin?
Like, any of them?
What the hell is she talking about?
But, of course, it's all about the narrative, and the narrative is all about how Republicans are a bunch of evil racists, while Nancy Pelosi is, of course, a godsend, a white-woke liberal here to save black Americans across the board.
She was asked about her ridiculous comments yesterday on NBC News.
And she said, no, I'm not going to apologize for saying the GOP covered up Floyd's murder, which is nuts, nuts.
Derek Chauvin is going to be tried by Keith Ellison in a democratic state, with a democratic mayor of Minneapolis, with a democratic AG.
When you were speaking yesterday, you said that Republicans are, quote, trying to get away with murder, actually, the murder of George Floyd.
Senate Republicans are demanding an apology for that statement.
Will you apologize?
Absolutely, positively not.
The fact is, people say, I think you, frankly, and the press have given them far too much credit for a bill that does nothing.
They're saying, well, you have your bill, they have theirs.
Yeah, our bill does something, theirs does nothing.
Their bill does nothing.
Ours does something.
Therefore, they're trying to cover up the murder of George Floyd.
I mean, that's despicable stuff.
By the way, if you want to talk about changing police behavior in major cities, it might be worthwhile pointing out that every one of these major cities is governed by a Democrat.
Every single one.
And you know what's easier than passing federal police reform?
Having local mayors change police procedures in Democratic areas.
This is something Tim Scott pointed out as well.
He said, listen, Democrats are talking, we need to change this.
We need to do something.
Guys, you're in charge of these cities.
We've seen riots in Ferguson.
We've seen riots in Baltimore.
Baltimore is a Democrat city.
We've seen riots in Atlanta, Democrat City.
We've seen riots in L.A., Democrat City.
New York, Democrat City.
Like, anytime you want, guys, you can make this change, but I don't see you making the change.
I just see you demagoguing the issue for political gain, says Republican Tim Scott.
In Detroit, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, all these cities could have banned chokeholds themselves.
They could have increased the police reporting themselves.
They could have more data information themselves.
They could have de-escalation training themselves.
They could have duty to intervene themselves.
Minneapolis as well.
All these communities have been run by Democrats for decades.
Yep.
Yep.
So, where are those solutions?
Anytime?
Bueller?
Bueller?
Maybe it wasn't about the solutions.
Maybe it was never about the solutions.
Maybe it was just about promulgating the narrative that all disparities in American life are due to broad-scale American racism.
Then you block the solution, because if you provide a solution, then you can't talk about how America's racist and evil anymore.
You'll notice that every time people talk about the evils of American racism and they mention police shootings, they never ever mention Walter Scott.
It is amazing.
You'll see them talk about how police are wrongfully shooting black men.
Then you'll see them list the names of the victims.
And many of these cases are cases that are really, at the very least, tough.
They'll mention the case of Michael Brown.
Michael Brown was justifiably shot by the police.
The Department of Justice under Barack Obama found that that was the case.
They will mention the Rayshard Brooks case.
A case in which a black man wrestled down two officers, took a taser off one, tased an officer, tried to tase the other one while running away, and then got shot.
They'll mention that.
Okay, that is a disputed fact pattern at the very least.
To say that that is a clear-cut case of racist murder is insane and completely disconnected from facts.
So they'll talk about that one.
I'll talk about Tamir Rice, which is a horrible situation in which a 12-year-old boy was shot by the police after he was going around in a park and he had a pellet gun, he had a BB gun, but he had sawed off the front of the BB gun, the orange part.
Normally, when you buy a BB gun, there's an orange part on the front that lets, deliberately there, that lets the cops know that this is not an actual gun.
They got a call, the police got a call, that there was somebody who was running around the park with an actual gun.
They got there and there was somebody who was running around the park with what appeared to be an actual gun and didn't stop and put down the gun when told to do so.
That doesn't mean the shoot was good, but to try and say that that is a racist murder based solely on the race of the 12-year-old child, Tamir Rice, to lump all these things together, right?
Those are the disputed cases.
Here's an undisputed case.
The case of Walter Scott.
He never gets mentioned in this litany.
It's truly amazing.
We'll see this a little bit later when we get to Nicole Hannah-Jones' awful piece on reparations.
The attempt to lump all these cases together that have very, very different fact patterns, and then they ignore the one most clear-cut racist case.
Why?
Because what happened in that case?
What happened?
The police officer went to jail for murder.
So they won't talk about that case.
Because in a case where the system worked, they won't talk about it.
Because if the system works, you can't indict the system.
So instead, you have to pick a case with a variegated fact pattern, with a difficult fact pattern.
And then you suggest the system didn't work because in this case, in this case, the system is really shown.
Not the Walter Scott case.
We have a clear-cut case where a black man is running away from a police officer, unarmed.
The officer shoots him in the back and then tries to plant a gun on him.
The officer ends up in jail, as he should, for murder.
Right?
Walter Scott, it's amazing.
If you ever want to know about the bad faith of people who make a lot of these arguments, notice that in the litany of victims of white police violence, Walter Scott never gets mentioned.
He never gets mentioned.
It's truly an incredible thing.
And you have to wonder why.
And you really don't have to wonder why, because it's never about the solutions.
It's never about fixing the problem.
It is always about indicting the system, generally speaking.
So Senator Mitch McConnell, he went on the floor yesterday and he said, listen, you guys were the ones who were like, put a bill on the floor.
And they were like, okay, we'll put a bill on the floor.
And then you refuse to even allow us to amend the bill or debate the bill.
So it seems to me that you're not too super focused on solutions here, guys.
For weeks, Democratic leader has blustered that the Senate simply had to address this issue before July 4th.
Well, that's what the vote this morning is about.
Are you beginning to see how this game works?
Two weeks ago, it was implied the Senate would have blood on our hands if we didn't take up police reform.
Now, Democrats say Senator Scott and 48 other senators have blood on our hands because we are trying to take up police reform.
Correct, correct.
By the way, that Pelosi bill is going nowhere.
You know why it's not going anywhere?
It's not going anywhere because Pelosi's not allowing any amendments to be brought.
Nancy Pelosi's committee is not allowing any amendments to be brought on the Democrats' police reform bill, which means it's going absolutely nowhere.
The rule provides for four hours of debate a bill, no amendments.
And then a straight vote.
So do you think that bill is going anywhere?
The Republicans were offering amendments and the Democrats blocked it anyway.
This is not about solutions.
It simply is not about solutions.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, speaking of the system working, right?
And so it will stop being in the news.
The Ahmaud Arbery case, that case in Georgia, a Georgia grand jury has just indicted three suspects in the Ahmaud Arbery case.
And that was the case of the black guy who was jogging through the neighborhood after trespassing on an open construction site, which is not an excuse to try and roadblock somebody and then confront them with a shotgun, which is exactly what happened.
And Arbery, The alleged vigilante-style murder of Arbery by three white men who mistook him for a burglar ignited nationwide outrage, but not as much nationwide outrage as George Floyd, you'll notice.
The George Floyd case is much more paid attention to.
Why?
I suppose the idea is that in this case the system works.
So whenever the system works, the media pay less attention to it.
That's the way this works.
When the system works, the media pay less attention to it.
The media have an interest in driving a particular narrative.
That's just the reality.
The media are pushing a particular narrative that America does not care about black men, and particularly does not care about black men who are killed, but does not care about racism in general.
America just doesn't care about racism.
This narrative is so important.
This narrative is so important to the media that even instances of non-racism are portrayed as continuing grievances about racism.
It's a perfect example.
Bubba Wallace yesterday finally admitted, oh yeah, by the way, that wasn't a noose.
Do you remember that whole NASCAR, there was a noose in his garage, and then Bubba Wallace went on national TV, and he said, no, it was a straight-up noose.
I was like, nope, dude, that was not a straight-up noose.
That was not a noose.
It was not a noose.
It was a hand pull.
It wasn't even a slipknot, right?
It was a hand pull on a garage door.
And Bubba Wallace announces straight up news.
And the entire left started mimicking this notion that we should still worry about this as a racist incident, even after it has been debunked.
Well, finally, Bubba Wallace puts out a good statement, which he should have put out in the first place.
He says, it's been an emotional few days.
First off, I want to say how relieved I am the investigation revealed this wasn't what we feared it was.
I wanna thank my team, NASCAR and the FBI for acting swiftly and treating this as a real threat.
I think we'll gladly take a little embarrassment over what the alternatives could have been.
Make no mistake, but some will try.
This should not detract from the show of unity we had on Monday and the progress we've made as a sport to be more welcoming for all.
Okay, that's a statement you should have been put out in the first place.
Like as soon as this story was debunked, you should have said, it's pretty amazing that the entire NASCAR came around me when we even thought that this was happening, right?
That's a sign of racial progress, but the New York Times will not allow that.
Here's the New York Times' headline.
Oh, so a thing that DIDN'T happen highlights NASCAR's troubles with racism?
So the thing's debunked by the FBI and you're still going with the story that this highlights NASCAR's troubles with racism?
The entire motor team over at Talladega, all the drivers, all the pit crews, marched with Bubba Wallace to the front of Talladega over an incident that didn't happen to fight supposed racism.
And your headline at the New York Times is Talladega Noose Incident Puts Spotlight on NASCAR's Troubles with Racism.
Of course, that has to be your headline, because if you actually put the facts in the headline, non-noose incident with Significant overreaction against racism.
Against a racist incident that did not occur.
Put spotlight on racism.
Like, it makes no sense.
The minute the facts are known, this story makes no sense.
But it doesn't matter.
Juliette McCurr and Alan Blinder talk about Talk about this situation.
Really?
Like forced?
National turmoil over race and serial injustice has complicated both Wallace's reaction and the public's response to the FBI's findings.
With the government's investigation closed and no charges filed, Wallace has found himself all but forced to defend himself from baseless speculation that he or his supporters staged the incident to garner publicity.
All but forced to defend himself.
Really?
Like, who's forcing him?
Like, seriously, who?
Well, it literally was a pull cord on a garage.
noose as a pull rope for a garage door that was fashioned like a noose.
Some people insisted the noose was just a rope with a handle and that Wallace and stock car racing executives had overreacted.
Well, it literally was a pull cord on a garage.
So yeah, I'm going to go with they overreacted by calling it a noose.
But according to the New York Times, the narrative must never die.
The narrative must never die.
Even situations that don't happen are indicators of racism.
By the way, I fully predicted that.
I fully predicted that.
I tweeted yesterday that the New York Times the next day would run with a story about how garage door pull handles have a long racist history in the United States.
I mean, this stuff is wild and crazy.
And there are consequences to it.
There are consequences to it.
Okay, it leads to full-on foolishness.
So the most foolish article of the day, again, comes courtesy of the New York Times.
It is called, The Minneapolis Neighborhood Vowed to Check Its Privilege.
It's already being tested.
Okay, and this is all about how, again, white people are refusing to acknowledge their white privilege.
But what's hilarious about the article is it really demonstrates how when you are initiated into the white woke leftist thought complex, it's unsustainable and idiotic.
It's truly incredible.
So there are a few different stories that are told here.
So let me read some of this to you.
When Sherry Albers moved three decades ago into Powderhorn Park, a tree-lined Minneapolis neighborhood known as a haven to leftist activists and bohemian artists like herself, she went to work sprucing it up.
She became a block club leader, organizing her mostly white neighbors to bring in playgrounds and help tackle longstanding issues with crimes.
On many nights, she banged on car windows of men who had come to solicit prostitutes outside her door, she said.
She kept meticulous notes when dozens of men would gather in a circle for gang meetings in the park across from her house.
After each episode, she called the police.
But times have changed.
After the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, Mrs. Albers, who is white, and many of her progressive neighbors have vowed to avoid calling law enforcement into their community.
Doing so, they believed, would add to the pain that black residents of Minneapolis were feeling and could put them in danger.
Okay, so when you draw the narrative that the police are all endemically racist, and not only that, you are implicated in the racism if you call the cops when you see a crime.
People stop calling the cops when they see a crime.
What do you think happens to the crime rates?
You think they go down or you think they go up?
If you're not a moron, of course they go up.
So here's what the New York Times reports.
Already, that commitment is being challenged.
Two weeks ago, dozens of multicolored tents appeared in the neighborhood park.
They were brought by homeless people who were displaced during the unrest that gripped the city.
The multiracial group of roughly 300 new residents seems to grow larger and more entrenched every day.
They do laundry, listen to music, and strategize about how to find permanent housing.
Some are hampered by mental illness, addiction, or both.
Their presence has drawn heavy car traffic into the neighborhood, some from drug dealers.
At least two residents have overdosed in the encampment and had to be taken away in ambulances.
The influx of outsiders has kept Miss Albers awake at night.
Though it is unlikely to happen, she has had visions of people from the tent camp forcing their way into her home.
She imagines using a baseball bat to defend herself.
Not being able to call the police, as she has done for decades, has shaken her.
I am afraid, she said.
I know my neighbors are around, and I'm not feeling grounded in my city at all.
Anything could happen.
So she's just not going to call the cops anymore.
And then her neighborhood is being taken over by people who are overdosing in the park.
So things are going great, guys.
Really well done.
The consequences of the narrative being promulgated at the expense of the facts, there are real world consequences to this sort of stuff.
There really are.
I'm bringing more examples of this in just a second.
Then we'll get to the 1619 editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones, doing her best Very Juan, Ta-Nehisi Coates impersonation, calling for reparations and doing what she does best, ignoring facts in the process.
I mean, she really is.
She's truly awful at her job, but she's one of the Pulitzers, so I guess we're done here.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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Okay, so back to this New York Times piece.
So the New York Times has this entire piece about white woke liberals who feel bad calling the cops when they see a crime.
I'm not being judgmental, said Carrie Nightshade 44, who explained she no longer felt comfortable letting her children, 12 and 9, play in the park by themselves.
It's not personal.
It's just not safe.
Well, as we learned from Robyn D'Angelo, this means she's a racist.
On Friday, she sat in a shared backyard with four other women who live in neighboring houses.
The women, four of whom are white, had called a meeting to vent about the camp.
Angelina Roslick burst into tears, explaining she had spent the past four years fleeing unstable housing conditions and was struggling more than she cared to admit with the chaos the camp had brought into the neighborhood.
Well, that means that she's immune.
stopped walking her dog through the park because she was tired of being catcalled.
My emotions change every 30 seconds, said Tria Hauser, who is part Native American.
Well, that means that she's immune.
She can't be racist, obviously.
The women agreed to let any property damage, including to their own homes, go ignored and to request a block party permit from the city to limit car traffic.
Rather than turn to law enforcement, if they saw anyone in physical danger, the results called the American Indian Movement, a national organization created in 1968 to address Native American grievances such as police brutality, which had been policing its own community locally for years.
But some people in the neighborhood have already found their best laid plans to avoid calling the police harder to execute than they had imagined.
Because here's the deal, if you commit a crime and you're a person of color, well then, it is racist to call the police on you.
People are not held to the same standard, like don't commit crimes in the United States anymore.
If you have a particular...
If you have a particular history as a member of a victimized racial group, then apparently you are immune to the law, because if you call the police, the police might come and be very mean.
The police might come and they might be racist.
Based on which evidence?
The evidence that... stuff.
Last Thursday night, Joseph Menkovich found a black man wearing a hospital bracelet passed out in the elevator of his apartment building, two blocks away from the park.
Menkovich, who is white, quickly phoned a community activist, but she did not pick up.
He felt he had no choice but to call 911, so he did.
But requested an ambulance only, not the police.
Ultimately, a white police officer arrived at the scene.
The officer checked the situation out briefly and then returned to his squad car.
It didn't resolve the way I hoped, Mr. Mankovich said.
All they did was offer to bring him back to the hospital.
He refused, so they kicked him out on a rainy night.
What the hell else were they supposed to do?
So if they shoved him into the squad car and taken him to the hospital, because he obviously needed to be in a hospital, then you would have claimed that they were responsible for police brutality.
I'm sorry, this is ridiculous crap, and these people are insane and self-parodic.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
To the extent that illegal activity is going on in the park, Toby Miller, who is 34, does not blame the tent residents.
My feeling around it is those are symptoms of systemic oppression, and that's not on them.
All personal responsibility is gone.
You can commit any crime you want because systemic oppression.
Systemic oppression.
Good stuff, guys.
Really, really solid stuff.
On a recent afternoon, Sarah Kenny and Diane Columber, who are both white, were speedwalking behind their toddler sons through the park leading up to the camp.
Ms.
Kenny had been volunteering there a few times a week.
She said the experience had challenged her to consider not only the safety of her own family, which has a comfortable home and locked doors to retreat behind, but also that of people living outside without protection.
Ms.
Columber agreed.
Some people of color in the neighborhood, however, said they were skeptical the community would allow the encampment to stay.
This thing is probably gonna last two or three weeks at Aza Ochoa, a Mexican and Native American father who is walking through the park with his three children.
Yeah, you think?
Okay, here's the best story.
Mitchell Erickson's fingers began dialing 911 last week before he had a chance to even consider alternatives when two black teenagers who looked to be 15 at most cornered him outside his home a block away from the park.
One of the boys pointed a gun at Mr. Erickson's chest, demanding his car keys.
Flustered, Mr. Erickson handed over a set, but it turned out to be the house keys.
Teenagers got frustrated and ran off and stole a different car down the street.
Mr. Erickson said later he would not cooperate with the prosecutors in a case against the boys.
After the altercation, he realized that if there was anything he wanted, it was to offer them help.
But he still felt it had been right to call the authorities because there was a gun involved.
Two days after an initial conversation, his position had evolved.
Been thinking more about it, he wrote in a text message.
I regret calling the police.
It was my instinct, but I wish it hadn't been.
I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.
What about the fact the boys had put his life in danger?
Yeah, I know.
And yeah, it was scary.
But the cops didn't really have much to add after I called them.
I haven't been forced to think like this before.
So I would have lost my car.
So what?
At least no one would have been killed.
Okay, you're talking about the end of civil society here.
What you're talking about is the end of civil society.
You cannot hold people to the basic standards of acting like a human being.
Like, oh, I don't know, don't point your gun at somebody's chest and threaten to shoot them if they don't let you steal their car.
Okay, but you can't call the cops.
If you call the cops, you're a racist.
Does anybody think any of this is sustainable?
Does anybody think any of this is sustainable?
Of course, none of this is sustainable.
The idea that personal responsibility has disappeared into the vast ether of systemic oppression is so dangerous for any society.
Again, if you want to point to a system that needs to be changed, then change the system.
If you want to point to a racist person doing a racist thing, then let's all fight that together.
But don't give me, I can't call the cops when someone points a gun at my chest and steals my car.
That's nuts.
That's perfectly insane on every level.
But again, maybe the goal here is not solutions.
We go right back to the beginning.
Maybe the goal here is not solutions, because this ain't a solution.
Maybe the goal here is just a narrative.
And the narrative ends with the idea that there is a vast group of owed in the United States and a vast group of owing in the United States.
And you can tell who is owed and who is owing simply by dents of skin color.
Which seems fairly racist to me.
It seems fairly racist to me that you refuse to take into account any of the personal decision-making involved in being a human being.
Personal agency disappears completely.
We are all simply the product of systems.
That's all we are.
And this presumably is why you end up with essays like the giant essay in the New York Times Magazine, what is owed?
The suggestion that slavery reparations are owed and this will fix all problems.
Now, listen, you can make the case for slavery reparations if the idea is that a wrong has been done and it needs to be repaired.
Typically, you have to link the wrong that has been done to a person and to the person who has been wrong.
Like, if God forbid, my father hit somebody with his car, it would not be on me to pay that person's grandson, right?
That's not the way that justice works.
Okay, just put that out front.
The notion of racial reparations, or Holocaust reparations, or any reparations, is that the people who are responsible for the sin have to pay the people who are responsible, people who are victimized by the sin.
But they actually have to have been victimized.
It can't just have been that something bad happened to my grandfather and that has historical aftereffects.
Because otherwise, there is no, there's no limiting principle there.
The history of the world is replete with groups victimizing one another.
There is literally no end to that particular logic.
But the real logic of slavery reparations is, again, the logic that systemic oppression is the great rationale for all disparities in American society.
And the evidence that is offered to prove this particularly vulnerable case is usually pretty skimpy, and it usually relies on extraordinarily broad claims put in particularly passionate language.
That is why the cases on reparations are typically being written not by economists on how this will help black Americans.
They're typically being written by people who are really bad at history, like Nikole Hannah-Jones, or by people who are most famous for their prose craftsmanship, like Ta-Nehisi Coates.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Ready?
In just a second, we're gonna get to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the 1619 Project, calling for slavery reparations, which she's really attempting to do, because slavery reparations are not going to happen.
Realistically speaking, they're not going to happen because it'd be nearly impossible to administer.
But what she's really doing is trying to suggest that all disparities in American society should be attributed to the system as a whole.
So the system needs to be torn down, which is a very Marxist point of view on how the U.S.
should work.
We'll get to that.
We'll also get to the spikes that are happening around the country on COVID-19, which are very dangerous.
We'll get to that.
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All righty.
So Nicole Hannon Jones is pushing forward the author of the 1619 Project, who has said that she is happy if they call it the 1619 riots, what's been going on around.
She has a piece in the New York Times Magazine suggesting that it's time for racial reparations.
What the piece is really about, the call for racial reparations, is really a call for a specific policy.
Because it turns out, what amount of money would be sufficient to repair for slavery that technically ended in 1865?
What amount of money would be sufficient to answer for Jim Crow?
How would you calculate that amount?
Especially, we are now talking nearly 60 years after the fact.
We're talking about the grandchildren of the people who were subjected to Jim Crow.
How exactly would you measure that?
Nikole Hannah-Jones doesn't bother with any of that, because again, the goal of the Case for slavery reparations and for racial reparation.
The goal is to attribute all disparity, all of it, to discrimination because America is endemically evil.
It's just an extension of the 1619 Project mentality.
Now, in order to get to this answer, you have to play a bunch of tricks.
Linguistic tricks, historical tricks, a-factual tricks, and Nikole Hannah-Jones is certainly not above any of that.
She says it has been more than 150 years since the white planter class last called up slave patrols and deputized every white citizen to stop, question, and subdue any black person who came across their paths in order to control and surveil a population who refused to submit to their enslavement.
It has been 150 years since white Americans could enforce slave laws that said white people acting in the interest of the planter class would not be punished for killing a black person.
Those laws morphed into the Black Codes, passed by white Southern politicians at the end of the Civil War to criminalize behaviors like not having a job.
Those Black Codes were struck down and altered over the course of decades, eventually transmuted into stop-and-frisk, broken windows, and of course, qualified immunity.
Okay, that is just such sheer, that is just such a sheer lie.
That the basic idea that slave patrols morphed into stop and frisk, that is nuts.
That is nuts.
Okay, but this is the linguistic trick.
Again, America has not changed.
America has just transmuted.
America has not gotten any better.
America has just gotten more subtle.
Racism never went away.
Racism is in fact there, and it is racism that is the driving indicator of inequality between white and black.
That is the driving factor in American life.
Which, again, is this about solutions?
The answer is, of course, it's not about solutions.
You could cut a check to everybody in America today who is black, and it would not alleviate either, number one, the historical wrongs that were done.
It would not alleviate that at all, right?
All those historical wrongs would still exist.
And also, it would probably not alleviate, and when I say probably, I mean almost indubitably, would not fix all of the gaps between white and black in the United States, absent changes in other factors.
Absent change, like, The fact is that the drivers of the income gap, for example, are things like dropout rates in schools, inability to get a good education from schools, single motherhood rate.
These things do matter.
But according to Nikole Hannah-Jones, they don't matter whatsoever, like at all.
I don't just mean she says they don't matter enough.
I mean, she literally says in the essay they do not matter at all.
Confounding factors do not matter.
There is a direct quote in this piece Here's the direct quote in this piece, ready?
To summarize, none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to lift themselves out of poverty and gain financial stability, not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home, can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering.
None of those.
And so all personal responsibility has been lifted.
Every inequality in American life is attributable to slavery.
And by the way, when you say 400 years of racialized plundering, to, again, equate to date, to get to 400 years of racialized plundering, you have to go 1619 to 2019.
Right?
To say that there's been no mitigation whatsoever of racialized plundering in the United States, you know, between Full-on slavery, and the end of slavery, and Jim Crow, and the end of Jim Crow, is to be historically lying.
Which is what, of course, she's very good at.
She's very good at this.
And all of this is designed not to create solutions.
It is not designed to help black Americans.
All it is designed to do is tear down the system about our ears, and to suggest that the system itself, the system of individualism, the system of meritocracy, is inherently flawed, inherently biased.
I promise you, Nikole Hannah-Jones, if checks got signed tomorrow, Nikole Hannah-Jones the next day would explain that the checks were insufficient because all remaining inequalities after the writing of the checks would still be the result of systemic American racism.
By the way, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his own piece on the case for reparations, basically says this.
I mean, he says it straight out in his piece.
Sure, slavery reparations might not actually fix anything, but at least we'll have done it.
Okay, that is not a case for slavery reparations, especially when you are talking about doing an injustice today to people who live.
On behalf of people who lived three generations ago, minimum.
Okay, on behalf of our grandparents.
This is not about solutions.
Now, speaking of people who are not about solutions, let's move on to COVID-19.
So it is fairly obvious at this point that COVID-19, there are only a few things that we can do.
One, there are a few treatments that we have attempted in hospitals.
They've had some mitigating effect.
There's a pretty common steroid apparently that has a mitigating effect on people who are in fairly serious conditions who require oxygen or who require ventilators.
We know That if you protect nursing homes and you test everybody going in and out, you can prevent the death of huge swaths of citizens.
We learned that from Andrew Cuomo, who didn't.
We know that masks can help prevent transmission of the thing.
And that universal masking in places like Hong Kong and South Korea and Japan has been fairly successful at preventing the transmission of these disease vectors.
With all of that said, there is no solution to the virus right now, and there's not gonna be a solution for several months.
And this is happening across the country.
The media have been focusing almost solely on Florida and Texas.
Florida, Texas, Arizona, right?
That's the triumvirate.
Florida, Texas, Arizona.
What do all those places have in common?
They're all governed by Republicans, right?
So Ducey in Arizona, and Greg Abbott in Texas, and Ron DeSantis in Florida.
These are, of course, the hotspots.
These are, of course, the worst places.
They're the very, very bad places.
And California is getting crushed right now.
California is just getting wrecked.
The virus cases in California are up extraordinarily heavily.
They're up so heavily that Disneyland just delayed its reopening.
Disneyland, which was supposed to open on July 17th, they said, we're not going to open at all.
The state of California, said the company, has now indicated it will not issue theme park reopening guidelines until sometime after July 4th.
Given the time required for us to bring thousands of cast members back to work and restart our business, we have no choice but to delay the reopening of our theme parks and resort hotels until we receive approval from government officials.
There's been a spike in L.A.
County.
L.A.
County now officially has more cases than any other county in America.
Hospitalization rates are not as high as feared, but obviously those hospitalization rates could rise fairly dramatically because hospitalization is a trailing indicator.
Basically, there's three steps.
You get diagnosed, and then it might take a few days until you have to go to the hospital.
You might not have to go.
And then after that, a few days until you get to the ICU.
Deaths are the biggest trailing indicator.
So if deaths are low right now, that's because we're actually looking at stats from two weeks ago.
If hospitalizations are low right now, we're actually looking at stats from one week ago.
So we're going to have to wait a week to see where we are in terms of hospitalizations in two weeks in terms of deaths.
According to ABC News, as coronavirus cases continue to climb across the country, a new forecast from the CDC says the U.S.
could soon see 150,000 fatalities.
Currently, we have at least 122,000 fatalities, with 2.3 million The 2.38 million confirmed cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Dozens of Secret Service agents are now in self-quarantine after President Trump's rally in Tulsa over the weekend.
A source familiar with the matter told ABC News, the number of Secret Service personnel who are self-quarantining is in the low dozens.
Because basically they were in public and a lot of people were not wearing masks.
Apparently there are a bunch of people who are sick already.
Disneyland, as I mentioned, delayed reopening.
Nevada, the state of Nevada has now mandated that everybody in the state wear masks or facial coverings in order to stop the spread of COVID-19, which is correct.
Texas is offering local authorities the ability to mandate mask wearing.
The same thing is happening in Florida.
In California, COVID-19 cases saw a stunning 69% jump in just two days, according to Governor Gavin Newsom.
California reported 4,230 new cases on Sunday.
On Monday, 5,000 new cases.
On Tuesday, 7,100 new cases.
As the state increases testing, residents should anticipate more of an increase in the positivity rate, said the governor.
Hospitalization numbers have increased.
30% of ICU capacity statewide is being used right now.
Obviously, the spike is what people fear.
L.A.
has over 88,500 residents diagnosed with COVID-19, followed by 87,700 cases in Cook County, Illinois, which is Chicago, and 64,000 cases in Queens, in New York City.
In comparison, the entire state of Florida, right?
You've only heard about Florida.
The entire state of Florida had 109,000 cases.
So, L.A.
County has about 10 million residents.
Florida has 21.4 million residents.
Florida has 21.4 million residents.
Florida has about 12,000, 20,000, 11,000 cases more than the entire county of Los Angeles in LA, which goes to show you that while Florida is getting hit, I mean, Florida is getting hit.
They have a 60%.
They have a 16% positivity rate out of the tests conducted on Tuesday, 36,300 tests conducted on Tuesday.
This is not a mere Florida problem.
This is an everywhere problem now.
It's obviously an everywhere problem right now.
According to Axios,
Every single state in the U.S., with the exception of North Dakota and South Dakota and Alabama, Indiana, New Jersey, Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, and Maine, as well as D.C., every single one of those areas has seen, every other state has seen either a keeping steady or a vast increase in the number of COVID-19 cases, particularly steep increases, like an over 50% increase in COVID-19 cases in states like Washington, Idaho, Montana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
According to Axios, the U.S.
today is getting closer to the worst-case scenario envisioned in the spring, a nationwide crisis made worse by a vacuum of political leadership threatening to overwhelm hospitals and spread out of control.
They say this is the grimmest map in the eight weeks since Axios began tracking the change in new cases in every state.
Alternatively, it is very difficult to keep something under control as soon as people leave their homes.
Okay, as soon as people leave their, and by the way, mass protests, it turns out they did not immunize you to COVID-19.
CNN yesterday had this ridiculous piece where they suggested that protesting did not spread the virus.
And then what the actual study said was protesting may have been drowned out by the fact that so many people stayed home.
So in other words, everyone got curfewed and the people who were curfewed didn't get COVID-19, but people at the protests may well have been getting the virus, which of course they will then bring home and give to mom and dad and grandma and grandpa.
So, you know, this is dire stuff, for sure.
And we are seeing that even in countries like Germany, there's been a bit of a resurgence in COVID-19.
Our rate, the reproduction rate, is going up in Germany.
We've seen that the rates are going up around the world, really.
There's a coronavirus resurgence, apparently, that has been continuing in South Korea as well.
So it's not just the United States.
Everybody is sort of pretending that this is just the U.S.
It is not just the U.S., obviously.
So are there any real solutions to this?
Well, there really is only one, and that is personal responsibility.
Marco Rubio yesterday, a senator from Florida, he said, listen, just put on the stupid mask.
Just put it on.
Like, seriously, let's keep this thing tamped down.
You want to go back to work?
You want to have a good time?
You don't have to wear a mask when you're at the beach and you're far away from other people or when you're eating outdoors away from other people.
But if you're in an enclosed area, in an air-conditioned room, wear a mask.
He is correct about this.
However, unfortunately, the world is filled with stupid people.
I do want to point out that, again, the media coverage here is pretty astonishing.
So, L.A.
County has seen, as I say, almost as many cases as the entire state of Florida, with about half the population.
CNN, however, is focused laser-like in on crazy people in Florida, so that there are new restrictions in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach County, and a bunch of people went to sort of a local parks and rec board meeting and decided to yell at the board that had mandated mask wearing, because there's a new rule in Palm Beach County, as well as Miami-Dade, that when you are in an indoor, crowded area, you need to wear a mask.
So CNN covered this floor at a town hall.
The real question here is why CNN covered it, not that there are crazy people.
If you've ever been to a public event where people speak out to, like, their local boards, the only people who have time and energy to do this sort of stuff are exactly the sort of people you would not want in control of policy.
Nonetheless, it made for some colorful TV.
Here were some crazy people yelling at this board that was mandating mask wearing.
You literally cannot mandate somebody to wear a mask knowing that that mask is killing people.
Every single one of you that are obeying the devil's laws are going to be arrested.
And you, doctor, are going to be arrested for crimes against humanity.
The problem with humanity today is ignorance, arrogance, and apathy.
Keep taking the road of least resistance.
Keep listening to the TV brainwashing you from birth.
And they want to throw God's Wonderful breathing system out the door.
You're all turning your backs on it.
Okay!
OK, so I think probably those people should not control our public policy.
Just going to put that out there.
We probably shouldn't put that out there.
Those those people are not.
But again, the point there is that CNN will cover that.
They're not going to go down to L.A.
and find the crazies who go to local town hall meetings.
They'll only do it in Florida because Florida, man.
Right.
That's that's that's the whole that's the whole goal here.
And by the way, mention worth mentioning, the Democrats are now planning a virtual convention.
So.
Everybody is sort of expecting this to last until the fall.
I believe Washington, D.C.
has already declared they may not reopen schools.
So, if you thought that this was going to end anytime soon, wrong you were.
Unfortunately, as always, there are not a lot of great solutions.
The only solution?
Be personally responsible.
Protect yourself if you're older.
If you are younger, wear a mask to protect the elderly and the vulnerable around you.
It's a pain in the butt.
I don't like doing it either.
Nobody likes doing it.
But be a responsible human being and make sure that this thing does not spread out of control.
OK, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content, a lot more to talk about, including Michael Flynn being released.
The appeals court has now ordered the release of Michael Flynn.
We'll get to that a little bit later on in the day.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2020.
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You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
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