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July 21, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:34
How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps | Ep. 1056
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New polling shows how successful disintegrationists have become in American thinking.
A prosecutor brings charges against a Missouri couple defending themselves from rioters.
And is coronavirus starting to flatten?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Protect yourself at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
A little bit later on in the program, we're going to get to all of the coronavirus related issues that are cropping up around the country.
What is the proper strategy?
Why is it that people keep claiming they have the strategy to stop this thing and then they actually don't present a strategy to stop the thing?
We'll get to all of that.
It's actually possible that we've actually seen the peak already in some places like Arizona and Texas, which would be Great news.
So we'll get to all of that.
But first, gotta remind you, today is the day.
Finally, the long-awaited book that I've been talking about for months at this point, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, it's now available.
You can go over to Amazon.com or anywhere else books are sold and pick it up right now.
I could not think of a time when it would be more relevant.
It is extraordinarily relevant.
The reason it is so relevant should be obvious from a brand new poll.
It is out today from the Wall Street Journal.
It is a devastating poll for the country.
A devastating poll for the country.
Because what it really says is that Americans don't believe that we share much anymore.
The only thing that we share, apparently, is a desire to virtue signal the pollsters.
But when it comes to what we actually share as a country, the answer is not much.
So the premise of my book, as I've talked about before, That there are essentially two visions of American society.
One vision of American society is the Unionist vision.
This is a vision that suggests that in order for a nation to survive, you have to have a common philosophy, culture, and history.
The common American philosophy is expressed beautifully in the Declaration of Independence, that we are endowed by nature and nature's God with certain inalienable rights, that government is instituted to protect those rights, and that violation of those rights makes the government lose its reason for being.
That we are all endowed with reason, we are all equal before the law.
These are the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, and we cherish them, and we hold them dear.
That our natural rights are what we call negative rights, rights against other people.
They are not positive rights, meaning entitlements from other people, entitlements from government.
These were the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
And those principles are good.
Those principles have brought about the flowering of American freedom.
They've brought about the insane levels of prosperity that not only Americans enjoy, but the rest of the world enjoys as well.
Those principles have brought about the end of Nazism and communism.
Those principles Those principles were instrumental, were the key principles in overthrowing the dominance of racism and white supremacy in American life.
That is the common American philosophy.
Then there's the common American culture.
American culture was built on a series of beliefs about the way the world works and a series of attitudes toward the world.
And those attitudes include things like a feeling of entrepreneurship and adventure.
The spirit of Americanism was the spirit of adventure.
When you read de Tocqueville, he's constantly talking about Where America can be found, and what he says is America can essentially be found on the frontier.
That when you look at the nature of Americans, they are constantly striving, they are constantly building, they are constantly moving, and they are constantly seeking.
The spirit of adventure and entrepreneurship is what characterizes Americans, as opposed to de Tocqueville's picture of Europeans, which was much more sedentary.
Americans were constantly on the move, constantly on the go, embracing the journey, embracing the adventure, not Asking for anything, but being granted the freedom to do with their lives what they would do.
It was a spirit of adventure.
Also, there was a culture of tolerance for other people's rights and understanding that rights mean that other people may not use their rights in ways that you like.
So the right to free speech isn't just your right to speak as you see fit.
It relies on a cultural underpinning that you understand that other people may not agree with you and they have a right to free speech too.
Freedom of association means not only that you have a right to associate freely, but that others may choose not to associate with you based on their right to associate freely.
You have to have tolerance for other people's rights.
That is a culture of rights.
Also, the culture of the United States was built on the value of social institutions, that rights were going to be balanced by duties, that every right came with a consonant duty, that a free country relied, as John Adams suggested, on a moral and religious people, and that you required social institutions to undergird that.
You required things like churches, you required things like schools, you required social and communal institutions that were designed to inculcate virtues so that when people did exercise their rights, they were not harming one another.
And finally, the culture of the United States relied on a militant defense of those rights.
A belief that if others were to threaten those rights, that you would stand up for yourself.
This is where the right to keep and bear arms comes from.
This militant belief that your rights are worthy of defense.
So that was the American philosophy and the American culture.
And then there was a picture of American history.
And that picture of American history...
Was that America struggles to live up to its founding ideals and is gradually moving toward the fulfillment of those founding ideals.
The story of America is a nation founded not in 1619 because slavery was a human universal.
It's an evil human universal.
And to mention that does not alleviate in any way America's responsibility for the sin of American slavery.
It is to put that sin into the context of all human sin.
Okay, which is where all sin belongs, right?
All sin belongs in the context of all human sin, because to myopically focus on the sin of America at the expense of all of human history and all over the world is to miss the point, which is that human beings are innately sinful and do terrible things to one another, and that the goal of freedom and virtue is to move human beings beyond that.
And that's the story of America, is the fight against human nature by instituting checks and balances, by fighting for liberty, The story of America on a racial level is the caching of the promissory note that was written in 1776, not the story of the continuation of 1619.
Any attempt to link American life in 2020 to 1619 is going to be very difficult on a practical level.
It is much easier To link American life in 2020 to 1776, because frankly, America was not founded in 1619.
It was founded in 1776.
And the story of America is the gradual fulfillment of those promises.
That's the Unionist vision.
The things that unify us are our philosophy, they're our culture, and they're our history, right?
Those are things that have to unify any nation that hopes to be cohesive in any sense or fashion.
And then there's the disintegrationist vision.
The disintegrationist vision wants to tear down the entire system.
And so they castigate the system as racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic.
They don't castigate particular Americans as that because those Americans, that's perfectly obvious.
There are Americans who are racists and sexists and bigots and homophobes.
They do exist.
But the system itself, the system that was created by the Declaration of Independence and then preserved by the Constitution of the United States with its amendments over time, That system is not racist.
That system is not sexist.
That system is not homophobic.
That system is not brutal and vicious.
That system is a system of freedom.
But disintegrationists suggest that that system is indeed an attempt to re-establish and re-inculcate hierarchies of power.
So disintegrationists say about American philosophy that it's just dead wrong.
There are no rights that pre-exist government.
Government is the source of your rights.
Government is the source of your privileges.
And government is the source of your entitlements.
Rights themselves are not rights you have against other people.
Rights instead Are things that you get from the government.
You have a right to social security, you have a right to housing, you have a right to healthcare.
Now, the founders would have thought this was bizarre because obviously all of those quote-unquote rights require something from other people.
As opposed to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or the right to life, liberty, and property, that doesn't require anything of anybody.
If I have a right to life, that just means you're not allowed to kill me.
If I have a right to housing, that means you now have an obligation to build me a house.
That is a very different thing.
Philosophers have termed this difference negative rights versus positive rights.
So disintegrationists say, they're positive rights, which means, essentially, I can use the government to point a gun at you and steal your stuff.
That's the nature of positive rights.
The disintegrationists believe that all men are not equal before the law.
There's no such thing as equal rights before the law, because equal rights are a lie.
Because if we were to just apply the law evenly between individuals, well, that might end with group injustice.
Because what if one group commits more crimes than another group?
Well, then that means the group is being treated unjustly.
This is why you see the disintegrationists left very often citing criminal justice disparity statistics in order to suggest that America's system is innately broken, without reference to the nature of the crimes that are being committed by individuals.
And so people on the right will say, you have to name the people who are innocent who are in jail, who shouldn't be in jail, and I'm fine with it.
People on the left will say it doesn't matter if they're innocent.
They could be guilty and in jail.
The system created the disparity.
Therefore, the system is guilty of the disparity.
So, the only rectification for that is that the law does not treat people equally.
The law treats people differently based on race or victim status of the group to which they belong in the United States.
The disintegrationists have said that the American philosophy of limited government is wrong.
The only path toward utopia is a non-limited government.
No checks and balances.
No federalism.
Top-down cram-downs that will change human nature.
Because the philosophy of the United States, the unionist philosophy of the United States, relies Not a simple idea.
Human beings are not angels.
They're not devils.
They're human beings.
They're capable of sin.
They're capable of great good.
This is why you need checks and balances.
This is expressed best in James Madison's Federalist No.
51.
But disintegrationists don't believe that.
They believe that human beings, this is what John Dewey said, Woodrow Wilson, many of the early 20th century progressives, they said that human beings are innately malleable.
And the reason that human beings are flawed is because they live in a capitalist system shaped by things like the Declaration of Independence.
Get rid of that system, put in a more just and equitable economic system, and human beings will change.
They will change.
They'll become better.
This is the promise of Karl Marx.
It was expressed by progressives in the early 20th century.
And that has never waned.
This belief that all disparities in the system can be cured if you just get rid of the system.
So American philosophy must be dissolved.
American culture has to be fought according to the disintegrationists.
A spirit of entrepreneurship is actually a spirit of exploitation.
Entrepreneurs, adventurers, those who wander forth and sally forth into the wilds of life and try to conquer and build, those people are exploiters.
The best people are the people who rely on the government to give them things.
The best people are the people who demand things from others because they create social justice.
Your demand is your heroism.
The fact that you want a thing is what grants you heroism because you are trying to establish a more equitable society.
If you go and you build for yourself, that means that you are reliant on somebody else to build for you, which means you're an exploiter.
If, however, you demand something from somebody else, you are just demanding that the system be more just, and you are a hero, according to the disintegrationists.
The spirit of tolerance for others' rights is bad, according to disintegrationists.
Because according to disintegrationists, if you tolerate other people's rights, well, what if they're bad?
What about the jerk who's not going to let a black person go to his business?
We have to quash his rights.
Because nobody should have a right to do something that's wrong.
Well, listen, I can think that guy's just as much of a jerk as a disintegrationist does.
But rights exist.
And can be used by bad people in the wrong ways.
Which is why you need social institutions that inculcate virtue.
But disintegrationists fight those social institutions.
Because they believe that social institutions are a barrier against government dominance.
So church is dangerous because a church might teach something that disintegrationists don't like.
The family structure is an enemy.
That's why Black Lives Matter, the organization, suggests family structure must be torn down because the family is the smallest minority other than the individual.
Families might teach stuff that the majority doesn't like.
Families might teach stuff the government doesn't want.
And so family has to be broken down.
And finally, a culture that understands not only tolerance for other people's rights, but also fights on behalf of those rights.
That's something disintegrationists don't like either.
Because if you fight on behalf of those rights, then you're standing up to a dominant government.
And the only thing that can establish equity in our time is a dominant government.
And then finally, American history.
Disintegrationists say about American history that American history is 1619.
American history is the story of Columbus brutalizing the Arawaks.
It is not the story of Western civilization's growth in the Western Hemisphere and how that has bettered the world.
The story of Western society is a story of exploitation.
It's the Howard Zinn story about how everything was a Rousseauian, beautiful, natural, savage wilderness out in the Western Hemisphere until the evil West got here with their exploitative ways.
Human sin did not exist until the West arrived on these shores.
That Western civilization is a cruel, exploitative place, unlike any other civilization, right?
Uniquely exploitative, uniquely evil.
That narrative has taken a foothold.
So that is the battle.
And the problem is, if the disintegrationists win, what exactly holds us together?
We don't share a philosophy, right?
Basically, the philosophy of disintegrationists suggests that whoever holds the majority should be able to club the minority over the head.
The only reason, by the way, that disintegrationists believe this these days is because they believe they're in the ascendancy.
The thing about disintegrationists when it comes to governmental structures is they have no consistent take on governmental structures.
Whatever is convenient is what they will push.
So sometimes that means that they are in favor of states standing up to the federal government.
So they're in favor of sanctuary cities because they don't want the federal government cramming down its view of immigration on the states.
And sometimes it means they want the federal government to completely run roughshod over states like the same-sex marriage.
Disintegrationists have no consistent philosophy of government.
The philosophy of unionism says that government is supposed to be both federalist, meaning that power devolves to the lowest level, and also there's supposed to be checks and balances at every level to prevent too much accretion of power and to prevent people's rights from being overridden.
There's no consistent philosophy of government from the disintegrationists.
The philosophy of government is just whatever gets the job done.
Whatever moves us closer to utopia.
And that means ultimate government power.
The goal is ultimate government power.
So this all has very significant ramifications for the United States and the future of the United States because disintegrationists are basically claiming that their vision of America, in which we share very little.
We don't share a history.
History is just a series of clubbings over the head.
We don't share a culture because we don't believe that you should have rights if you think the wrong things.
This is where cancel culture comes in.
That if you think the wrong things, we should go after your livelihood, we should go after your family, we should expose the places where you live, we should dox you, we should make sure that if we can, we'll use the power of government against you.
Disintegrationists believe that checks and balances should go away and that you don't have any individual rights, that all rights spring from the government and you can be treated differentially based on whether you are part of a historically marginalized group or a chosen historically marginalized group or not.
That's the disintegrationist philosophy, and it will end with tyranny, because that is the only way this can end.
When you get rid of all the checks and balances, what you end up is with tyranny of the mob, which is essentially what many people have called for, getting rid of the United States Senate, getting rid of the Electoral College, packing the courts.
Getting rid of the federalist system, tyranny of the majority, tyranny of the mob, which is something that the founding fathers worried deeply about.
Or alternatively, just tyranny of a bureaucracy, tyranny of a cultural bureaucracy, of cultural elites who know better than you.
Which means we can't live together.
Because here's the thing, if you want California and Texas to live together, they gotta leave each other alone.
That is the only way this works.
If you want me to share a country with Bernie, then we gotta understand that there are certain parts of our lives that are inviolable.
We have certain rights that are inalienable.
If you don't believe that, we can't live in the same country.
Because then it's just a question of who's got the government gun, which is exactly what disintegrationists want.
So how does this matter?
So in a second, I'm gonna get to a poll showing that disintegrationists are winning.
That their view of America as racist, as bigoted, as cruel, their view of America's systems as innately bigoted, it's taken an extraordinary foothold in American public life.
And if this continues, there will not be an America left to stand up for.
It just will not exist.
It'll be a different thing.
We're gonna get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so this brings us to a Wall Street Journal poll that is out this morning.
Do I believe that every aspect of this poll is reflective of permanent changes in American thinking?
I do not.
I think that very often, polling follows extraordinary amounts of media coverage.
So, in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, when pollsters were calling up Americans and saying, what do you think of these protests?
Do you like them or do you not like them?
Hmm?
Hmm?
I think a lot of Americans were like, I like them.
I do.
I like them.
And let's be real.
The original protests?
There wasn't a lot to dislike, per se.
Nobody's in favor of police brutality.
I said this at the time.
I didn't oppose protests against police brutality.
What I opposed was the attempt to conflate questions of police brutality with the idea that there's endemic American racism that can only be removed by a top-down government or a bottom-up movement.
I don't think that's the case.
I don't think police officers are endemically racist.
I don't think the American system is endemically racist.
I don't think the vast majority of Americans are racist or tolerate racism.
And most of all, I do not think that in order to be quote-unquote anti-racist, I have to stand for tearing down the system, which is the case being made by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, which is an ugly, wrong, neo-Marxist, stupid case.
It doesn't make sense.
And not only does it not make sense, it is innately racist in and of itself because it assumes that we have to treat each other as members of groups rather than individuals.
I mean, Robin DiAngelo herself says that it is racist to treat people as individuals.
She says this in White Fragility.
It's nuts.
Okay, it's just absolutely crazy.
But unfortunately, because of the way the media have treated this entire situation, and because the media have attempted, frankly, to polarize the conversation around President Trump, and they've attempted to make Trump the font head of America.
The goal here is to make Americans feel bad about America and then say, if you want to feel better about America, all you got to do is get rid of Trump, put Joe Biden in there and you'll feel better about America.
And I will say that Joe Biden is playing a smart hand here, because what Joe Biden is doing is he's basically playing dead in the basement and he's avoiding the big mistakes.
When he's asked about statues, for example, he'll say, yeah, we should probably move the Confederate statues, but we should leave up Columbus and Washington and Jefferson.
His radical left flank is screaming at him.
No, no, no, you got to get rid of all of those things.
And frankly, I don't think that Joe Biden would be a bulwark against his radical left flank once in office.
He himself has said he would be a transitional figure, but he's playing it smart.
So the implicit promise of the media is we are going to militate against American unity from now until the election.
If you elect Joe Biden, then we'll shut up for like five seconds.
Then, of course, it'll restart again.
Remember, the Ferguson riots happened under Barack Obama, but What this polling data shows is that Americans are more and more warm to a lot of the disintegrationist viewpoints, which is really dangerous because once you have a majority of Americans who don't believe in fundamental American notions of rights, don't believe in that philosophy, don't believe in that culture, don't believe in that history, what exactly is supposed to hold us together other than rage at the system?
And what happens after the rage at the system is vented?
Because it turns out that there are pretty wildly differing points of view on what should happen once you tear down the house.
Once you tear down the house, then it's just a question of who's in charge.
And revolutionaries very rarely have an idea as to what to do after the revolution is over.
The French revolutionaries were pretty sure what they wanted to tear down.
Some of what they wanted to tear down was good.
Some of what they wanted to tear down was bad.
It took an awful lot of blood.
They tore it down.
And in its place, they established a tyrannical directorate, which was eventually replaced by an actual dictator, which was eventually replaced by a restoration of the monarchy.
So that worked out poorly.
The Russian Revolution was pretty much sure what it wanted to tear down, right?
There were whites and reds, and they both wanted to tear down the tsarist system.
And then what replaced it?
A significantly worse communist tyranny that lasted for nearly all of the 20th century and resulted in the slaughter of literally tens of millions of people, maybe up to 100 million people in the USSR alone.
Depends on your calculation.
And so, revolutionaries very rarely know what they want to do after the revolution.
This is what makes the American Revolution different.
Is that after the American Revolution, because it was based on English common law and notions of philosophy and enlightenment ideas from John Locke and such, there was a creedal attempt to build something in the aftermath of breaking away from Great Britain.
The revolution was really a separation.
I mean, the Declaration talks about this.
It was less a revolution than a separation impelled by a gap in thinking.
I don't think that's what's going to happen in the United States if our unity dissolves in the face of disintegrationism.
It's not like people know what's coming after.
It's just perpetual revolution from here on in.
Because that's essentially what progressives have wanted forever, is this perpetual revolution, which is why you see the woke eating their own, right?
You see the woke going after the more woke, or the less woke.
Okay, so what does this poll actually show?
The numbers are pretty devastating.
According to the Wall Street Journal, voters in growing numbers believe that black and Hispanic Americans are discriminated against.
A majority of 56% holds the view that American society is racist.
A new Wall Street Journal NBC News poll finds.
So that is an incredibly vague question.
Is American society racist?
What do you mean by that?
Do you mean are there racists in American society?
Of course.
You'd be a fool not to say there are racists in American society.
Of course.
What percentage of American society is racist?
An extraordinary low percentage by every available metric.
By actual data.
Very, very low percentage.
There have been studies that have been done on where America stands in the world in terms of racial treatment.
What it finds is America is one of the least racist countries on earth.
It's like America, Canada, and the UK.
Those are the least racist countries on earth.
By polling data reported by the Washington Post back in 2013, America is not a racist society.
It is not.
And I know it's become cliche to say this, but racist societies do not elect a black president twice in overwhelming fashion.
That is not what racist societies do.
You know how I know that?
Because America was a deeply racist society.
Can you imagine America electing a black president in 1960?
Of course you cannot.
Of course you cannot.
Not only electing a black president, electing him with an extraordinary margin over a historic war hero the first time, and over a popular Republican Massachusetts governor the second time.
This is an extraordinary country.
It's an extraordinary country.
And it's an extraordinary society.
And I don't know how many Americans can really look at their neighbors and say, my neighbors are racist.
The society is racist.
So if you believe, if a majority of Americans believe the society is racist, how much of that is really believing the society is racist?
And how much of that is just wishing to dissociate from the society so you can claim moral superiority in the modeling of Shelby Steele?
I think a lot is the latter, but it doesn't really matter because that number is devastating.
If a majority of Americans believe American society is racist, the question becomes, okay, what's the corrective?
Because when people like me say, okay, show me the racist incident or the person who's doing a racist thing and I'll fight it with you, then people say, well, no, you can't ask me for specifics because the society is racist.
The very vagary of the statement tears at the system, which of course is the goal.
And as we'll see, when polled about whether the American system is endemically racist, large numbers of Americans think yes, which is disastrous.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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The poll finds that Americans of all races and age groups share significant concerns about discrimination nearly two months after George Floyd, a black man, was killed in police custody in Minneapolis.
This is the Wall Street Journal reporting.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans, 71%, believe that race relations are either very or fairly bad, a 16-point increase since February.
That's not a great shot considering we've had actual race riots across the United States egged on by the white, woke left.
I mean, when you see entire major American cities shut down for a week while people riot in the streets, you might think, oh yeah, race relations are getting worse.
By the way, one of the things that is important to note, race relations in every poll have been getting consistently worse since Barack Obama was elected.
Why?
Well, because there was an optimism when Obama was elected that we were going to move into the post-racial era that MLK had once dreamed of, when people would judge each other on the basis of their individuality rather than the color of their skin.
Then we were told that we can't do that.
That if you say that I judge you as an individual and not based on the color of your skin, that is in and of itself racist because you are failing to recognize the most important factor about someone, which is their race.
Race relations have been getting steadily worse.
It didn't start with Trump.
The media have said that it's about Trump.
Wrong.
Go back and look at the polling.
The question of positivity or negativity about race relations, it's been getting worse every year since Barack Obama was elected.
The height of optimism was literally the week Obama was elected.
And then, it's been going down ever since.
In other signs of substantial shifts in views on race, more voters see racial bias as a feature of American society and support protests aimed at addressing it.
Nearly 60% in the survey said that black people face discrimination.
Just over half said so of Hispanics, about double the shares from 2008.
Now, the thing about poll questions is you have to kind of determine what exactly are people perceiving when the question is asked.
Example.
So if the question was, do black people face discrimination?
The answer is obviously yes, because there are racists in American society.
So sure.
I mean, of course.
If the question is, does American society discriminate against black people?
Broadly speaking, the answer is no.
If the question is, do America's legal institutions discriminate against black people?
The answer is pretty obviously no.
In fact, the only legal programs based on race are created to benefit people who are black, right?
Questions like affirmative action.
Support has also grown for two of the public responses to concerns about inequality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and professional athletes' practice of kneeling during the national anthem.
So, in terms of views on racism, percentage who agree that American society is racist, according to this poll, 46% of men agree.
66% of women agree.
And these are the women who have been cudgeled into thinking so by the Washington Post so they can write puff pieces about how you're confronting your own racism.
51% of white Americans say that American society is racist.
Which, by the way, is pretty incredible, right?
Half of white Americans say American society is racist.
So who are the other, like, so who are the racists?
The people who don't say that American society is racist?
78% of black Americans say American society is racist.
60% of Hispanics say American society is racist.
Now here is the really interesting stat.
Okay, ready?
82% of Democrats, 82%, say American society is racist.
45% of Independents say it's racist.
30% of Republicans say it's racist.
So in other words, the disproportion here is not between Democrats and Republicans.
It's between Democrats and everybody else.
Democrats are up at 82% say American society is racist.
Independents and Republicans below 50.
If you are aged 18 to 34, 65% believe American society is racist.
If you're above the age of 65, only 53% believe that American society is racist.
So in other words, we have inculcated in young people the least discriminated against people in the history of the world in America.
If you're 18 years old in America, you don't remember Jim Crow?
Your parents may not remember Jim Crow?
If you're 18 years old, that means that you were born after the year 2000.
The idea that you have experienced vast discrimination in America between the years 2000 and 2020 is generally absurd.
That doesn't mean you haven't experienced racism.
I'm a Jew.
I've experienced anti-Semitism.
In fact, I've experienced a fair bit of it in the last few years.
You know what?
That doesn't mean that American society is endemically anti-Semitic.
It isn't.
Americans... Noting that there are anti-Semites does not mean that American society is anti-Semitic, because it is not.
Noting that black people experience racism in their lives is not the same as noting that American society is generally racist.
Not the same thing.
The conflation of those two things is incredibly dangerous.
Because what do you mean when you say American society is racist?
You mean its structures and its institutions.
Namely, you mean its philosophy and its culture and its history.
All the things that tie the nation together, if you call those racist, you're disintegrating them.
In its steepest look at race in America in two decades, the journal NBC News Poll shows members of the two parties hold sharply different opinions about the extent of racial discrimination.
An overwhelming majority of Democrats, 90%, say Black people are discriminated against, whereas 26% of Americans agreed.
Again, these questions are vaguely worded, and they allow a lot of wiggle room.
If you say, do Americans' legal systems discriminate against Black Americans?
That'd be a much more specific question.
82% of Democrats believe American society is racist.
Only 30% of Republicans do.
57% of voters said they support the protests sparked by Floyd's killing.
58% said they are more concerned with racial inequality as a result of the demonstrations.
Because everybody understands that you are sort of supposed to say this.
I don't understand why you weren't concerned with racial problems before this.
But apparently people got more concerned in just a few short weeks.
On specific questions, like kneeling, In August of 2018, 54% of Americans thought that kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial inequality was inappropriate.
Only 43% of Americans thought it was appropriate.
By the way, the numbers were even more on behalf of not appropriate before Trump was elected.
Trump jumped into that culture war.
A lot of people took the other side just because they don't like Trump.
So it used to be like a 60-40 proposition, maybe a 65-35% proposition.
People didn't like kneeling for the national anthem because they felt like, okay, police brutality does not represent the flag and the flag doesn't represent police brutality.
That's absurd.
The flag represents the fact that people get to play athletics for millions of dollars regardless of race, right?
That's more representative of the American flag than incidents of police brutality.
Okay, so most Americans thought this was a bad idea.
Now, 52% of Americans say it is appropriate for athletes and football players to kneel during the national anthem.
45% say it is not appropriate.
Again, if you believe that the American flag represents police brutality, you're doing it wrong.
You're doing it wrong.
There are only two groups of people who actually believe the American flag, in its essence, represents police brutality or defends police brutality.
White supremacists and the woke.
Everybody else recognizes that police brutality is acting outside the scope of agency.
And scope of agency is a legal concept.
If I deploy you to go get me a pizza as my agent, and then you veer off the road and decide to strike a child with your car, you have acted outside the scope of agency.
When a policeman acts brutally, that is outside the scope of agency.
Nobody said to the policeman, go act brutally.
So the kneeling question has shifted pretty dramatically.
Furthermore, a majority of black voters in the survey, 65%, this is the key question, said that people of color experience racial discrimination because it is built into American society, including U.S.
policies and institutions.
That's the devastating question.
So two in three black Americans believe that racial discrimination is not endemic to human nature, and it's not just a matter of individual sin.
It is built into the systems, which inherently means you gotta tear down the entire system in order to fight racial discrimination.
That's a disintegrationist worldview.
And that is being promulgated by our media.
It's being promulgated by folks who are attempting to foster racial conflict.
It is a perspective on American society that is generally oriented at destroying anything that could possibly bind us.
A plurality of white voters, 48%, attribute racial discrimination to individuals who hold racist views as opposed to institutions and society as a whole.
Which, by the way, is much more accurate because if you're going to point to it, I've been saying this for years, if you're going to say institutional racism, you have to point to the institution and you have to explain how it is racist.
And it is not enough to say, well, you know, policing when it first started was about slave catching.
Fast forward 200 years and it's exactly the same.
None of this fast forward crap.
Because fast forwarding means you skipped the entire plot.
Just like if you're watching a movie and you don't know the plot.
If you start with the first five minutes and you fast forward to the end, you don't get the plot.
If you go 1619, 2020, no difference.
You just skipped 400 years somewhere in there.
And there's been a few developments in that time.
Views of the Black Lives Matter movement also differ by race.
76% of black voters hold a positive view.
These are evenly divided among white voters.
42% hold a positive view, 39% a negative one.
And again, one of the issues here is that when it comes to these issues, there is so much semantic overload.
And when people say black lives matter, do they mean that we want black people to live full and prosperous lives?
If so, there should be 100% agreement.
I agree with that.
If what we mean is the Black Lives Matter organization is good, no.
The Black Lives Matter organization is horrible neo-Marxist garbage.
The Black Lives Matter organization, again, not the protesters, not the phrase, the actual organization, Black Lives Matter, which you can find on the web, I think it's blacklivesmatter.org or something, it's a neo-Marxist garbage organization.
It is openly anti-Semitic.
It is a terrible organization.
So the problem with poll questions like this is it's unclear What exactly people are asked to side behind to get an unclear result.
Three-quarters of voters said they were encouraged the country is addressing long-standing issues of racism in society.
So, I think this is the hopeful stat here, right, that suggests that maybe the disintegrationists are not going to win, is that it really suggests this stat might be the most telling one of all.
That three-quarters of voters say they are encouraged the country is addressing these issues, meaning just by us responding to this poll, we're hoping that we can tie the country back together again.
We've shown we don't like racism, so can we please go back to normal?
I think that's really what that poll stat is saying.
At the same time, half said they were concerned that the protests over racial issues are creating social unrest and bringing too much change to the country, including erasing America's history and significant figures in it.
Which, of course, that should, again, be a 75% proposition, not a 50% proposition.
What these stats show is that we're living on knife's edge when it comes to the preservation of the factors that allow a society to continue forward in positive fashion.
That's what my new book is about.
It is being lived out every single day.
I didn't know that my book was gonna be quite as relevant as it has become even in the past few weeks.
Speaking of which, my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, it goes on sale today at 6 p.m.
Eastern, 3 p.m.
Pacific.
We'll be doing a virtual live signing event later today with your purchase of a signed copy.
You can write in a question which may be read and answered as I sign your book live on air.
You can preorder your signed copy and write in your question at dailywire.com slash Ben.
Yeah, we've been talking extensively about what the book is about.
I think I don't need to pitch again the topic because it speaks for itself.
So go check it out right now at dailywire.com slash Ben.
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So all of this plays out in real life as violence takes place in the streets.
It is very obvious to see how the disintegrationists really damage the country when you see what is happening in Portland right now.
So in Portland, you basically have rolling riots that have been occurring for nigh on two months at this point.
And the local authorities have basically said that because the system, a system of which they are part by the way, because the system is endemically racist and cruel and brutal, they're gonna stand aside and just let this stuff happen.
So according to CNN, it's classic entrenchment with no end in sight.
Neither side is backing down as protesters and federal agents continue to periodically clash in downtown Portland, following an infusion of federal resources in the area.
And the Trump administration persists in seeking political gain from ongoing tensions.
Gotta love CNN's coverage.
Very objective journalism-ing happening right there.
The Trump administration persists in seeking political gain from ongoing tensions.
How about, Portland has completely refused to enact any semblance of law and order for years at this point, and the federal government is saying, no mas, we are done here, no more.
According to Aaron, a Portland resident who withheld his full name, we want to get them the F out of our city.
According to acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, he said, I offered DHS support to help locally address the situation going on in Portland.
Their only response was, please pack up and go home.
That's not going to happen on my watch.
What constitutes the situation Wolf describes is not one mutually accepted by those on different sides of the issue.
The Trump administration says they are fighting anarchists.
But protesters here on the ground in Portland tell CNN the president and his team are broad-brushing an entire movement overwhelmingly peaceful despite some periods of violence for purely political reasons.
I love that when you shut down, rioting and looting, that's political.
When you riot and loot, that's not political.
Also, overwhelmingly peaceful.
This phrase is being stretched beyond all boundaries of linguistic accuracy.
Overwhelmingly peaceful does not include you attacking a federal courthouse.
Overwhelmingly peaceful.
And honestly, I can't wait for the phrase mostly peaceful to start being applied in America's criminal courtrooms.
I'm really looking forward to it.
They should have used it at the OJ trial.
You know, that night OJ was mostly peaceful.
Yeah, really.
Like, for most of the night, like there were 12 hours of the night between sunset and sunrise.
That was like a 12 hour period.
And for at least 10 hours and 45 minutes, OJ was peaceful.
Overwhelmingly peaceful that evening.
This kind of what absolute mush mouth garbage from the media.
It really is incredible.
OK, so President Trump is now threatening a crackdown on violent anarchists, as he should, because it turns out that when a city refuses to protect its law abiding citizenry, they fail in their duty to protect the life, liberty and property of their citizenry.
Here was President Trump yesterday correctly stating that he was not going to allow law and order to completely collapse in a major American city.
I'm going to do something, that I can tell you, because we're not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these... Oakland is a mess.
We're not going to let this happen in our country.
All run by liberal Democrats.
More federal law enforcement to some of these cities.
We're going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you.
In Portland, they've done a fantastic job.
They've been there three days.
And they really have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time.
No problem.
They grab them.
A lot of people in jail.
They're leaders.
These are anarchists.
These are not protesters.
Okay, and he is correct about this.
The media naturally conflate the anarchists and the protesters.
It's amazing.
Rioters in Portland overwhelmed police and torched the police union headquarters over the last couple of days.
But apparently this is all just like normal protesting, according to the media.
And you can tell which side the media are on, right?
So long as they are opposing Trump, they don't care if they are forwarding the goals of so many members of Antifa.
They don't care if they are helping the anarchists.
In fact, they kind of like it because the system deserves to fall.
The system deserves to go down.
The media coverage of this stuff is absolutely astonishing.
I mean, truly, truly crazy.
My favorite piece on this was by Richard Reed at the LA Times.
This is amazing.
So in Portland, there was a naked crazy lady who showed up and started doing yoga poses in front of the cops.
Richard Reed apparently took out the Vaseline and had himself an old time while writing this piece.
She emerged as an apparition from clouds of tear gas as federal agents fired pepper balls at angry protesters in the early Saturday darkness.
A woman wearing nothing but a black face mask and a stocking cap strode toward a dozen heavily armed agents, attired in camouflage fatigues, lined up across a downtown Portland street.
The agents, dispatched by the Trump administration over vociferous objections of state and city officials, are part of a force that has fired projectiles at and detained activists protesting nightly since the killing of George Floyd.
Numerous photos and videos posted on Twitter show the unidentified woman as she halted in the middle of the street at about 1.45 a.m.
She stood calmly, a surreal image of human vulnerability in the face of an overwhelming force that has been criticized nationally by civil rights advocates.
The agents in gas masks and helmets continued firing pepper balls in a staccato.
Heard on video, aiming low at the asphalt, where puffs of smoke mingled with clouds of gas.
At one point, a fellow protester, clothed, carried a homemade shield, darted in front of the woman, angling to protect her, but the woman sidestepped him.
He jumped out of the way, perhaps realizing he made them both a target.
Before it was over, she struck ballet poses and reclined on the street.
She also sat on the asphalt in a yoga-like position, facing officers before they left.
The woman making her statement Saturday was altogether uninhibited, at one point standing on one leg, raising her arms in an archetype motion.
As she struck ballet poses, a patrol car arrived, and a dozen officers in blue uniforms replaced the line of agents, whom officials described as having been targeted by protesters, throwing rocks, bottles, and pieces of metal.
Oh, well, that's kind of why they're there, not the naked lady.
She sat in the street facing them, legs spread, and the headlights glare.
Calm down there, dude.
Calm down, Richard Reid of the LA Times.
Later, she rolled on her back in a graceful pose, then stood again.
Images of her on social media harked back to a previous iconic, but clothed images juxtaposing force and vulnerability.
Nudity has served as a form of protest since at least the 11th century, when legend holds that Lady Godiva rode naked, veiled only by her long hair, on a horse through Coventry, England, to protest oppressive taxation.
On Twitter, sympathetic commentators were quick to conclude that naked Athena, as they dubbed the Portland protester, caused the officer to turn tail.
Others on Twitter said the performance by a white woman distracted from protests of injustices faced by black people, which is hilarious.
OK, I do love that the woke are even like, this naked lady needs to go because she's white.
Get out.
Get her out of here.
She's protesting for us.
No more naked lady.
But the media's willingness to just basically bow at the altar of insanity just because they are in favor of the Kass.
They like the Kass.
The Kass is good, according to many members of the media.
It's ugly and it has an underlying agenda.
Because guess what?
Bad crap's happening in the country right now.
The NYPD commissioner said yesterday that he was losing count of how many cops have been attacked in New York, which is correct.
Cops all over the United States are being attacked.
Violent crime rates are going up.
And you know who's paying the most?
It ain't the cops.
It is black citizens of places like Chicago and New York, where violence has been skyrocketing.
Here's the NYPD commissioner.
I mean, we've had attack after attack on police officers.
I'm losing count of the officers that I'm calling at home injured, having surgery.
This is just in the last week.
So this all has prompted Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina to compare federal law enforcement to the Gestapo.
Seriously, a thing.
Okay, so federal law enforcement comes in because these cities are refusing to enforce law.
And he is now calling federal law enforcement the Gestapo.
This is the new thing, by the way.
There's an entire column by the idiot Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, suggesting, quote, Trump's occupation of American cities has begun.
You know, as opposed to the occupation by unlawful forces that have completely shut down major American cities for weeks on end, sending in the federal law enforcement to arrest people.
That's an occupation.
She says, can we call it fascism yet?
My favorite part is that she literally does not understand the law.
So she's like, people are being arrested without warrants!
Okay, you know what that is called very often?
That is just called an arrest.
Felony arrests in public places do not require a warrant according to Supreme Court law.
They do not... Felony arrests in places not open to the public require a warrant.
But if you're walking around the park and you're committing a felony, or there's suspicion you're committing a felony, you can be arrested.
They don't need a warrant to arrest you on site.
Yeah, but apparently this is very bad.
Anyway, here's James Clyburn suggesting that Americans, American soldiers, right?
Federal law enforcement, members of the DHS are the Gestapo.
I find this rather insulting to people who actually survived the Gestapo.
Here's James Clyburn.
For all of a sudden, these people that go in there, nothing from the governor, nothing from local law enforcement, just show up with their faces covered in unmarked cars.
That is the beginning of the ending of this democracy.
That kind of activity is the activity of a police state.
And this president and this attorney general seem to be doing everything they possibly can to impose Gestapo activities in local communities.
James Clyburn should know better than anybody alive what actual Gestapo tactics look like.
This is a man old enough to have lived through Jim Crow and experienced it.
That was Gestapo stuff.
When the police were actively in arm of segregation.
That was Gestapo stuff.
Not when the police are acting, when the federal law enforcement are acting to stop people from burning federal buildings.
But the goal, of course, is to conflate all of this.
It's to conflate all of this.
If you stand up against the burning of federal buildings, if you stand up against the lawlessness running rampant through America's cities, you're just defending the system.
And if people have to pay, innocent people have to pay because the system collapses, them's the brakes.
Them's the brakes.
Disintegrationism does not care about the costs.
It doesn't care about the costs.
Which is why, of course, the media will go after, they'll be very, very upset about the vandalism committed by an anti-Black Lives Matter protesters, a black woman who went to the giant painting mural Black Lives Matter in front of Fifth Avenue a couple days ago.
And she started pouring black paint on there and shouting that black lives do matter, which is why we need to refund the police.
But that's vandalism, right?
That's something that's worth prosecuting, obviously.
Throwing paints on George Washington?
We leave that alone if we're disintegrationists.
This lady is obviously doing something deeply wrong by defacing the holy yellow painting outside of the 5th Avenue Trump Tower, even though it has done nothing to save black lives.
That mural has done nothing.
Zero things, as the lady correctly notes.
Again, vandalism?
Not a great thing.
Her generalized point is correct.
The virtue signaling, the disintegrationism has costs.
It does have costs, especially when you're talking about removing police.
Meanwhile, a Democratic prosecutor is now charging a Missouri couple for defending their private property.
A Democratic prosecutor who is up for re-election, her name is Kim Gardner, announced on Monday she's charging a St.
Louis couple who defended their private property using firearms last month.
They were ripped up and down on social media.
It was so terrible.
What happened?
They lived in a private gated community.
Protesters, who become rioters the moment you break the law, they ripped doors off the hinges of the private gated community because they wanted to yell at the mayor.
And they walked through and apparently were threatening this guy and his wife and their property.
The guy and his wife walked out carrying guns.
Now they are being charged with fourth degree misdemeanor assault.
As well as felony unlawful use of a weapon, according to the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch.
Mark and Patricia McCloskey each are now facing a single felony count of unlawful use of a weapon, exhibiting.
Charging documents say that Mark pointed an AR-15 rifle at protesters and she wielded a semi-automatic handgun, placing those protesters in fear of injury.
There's only one problem.
There is a Castle Doctrine in Missouri.
Okay, there's a Castle Doctrine in Missouri, and that Castle Doctrine in Missouri means you get to defend your private property.
Mark McCloskey appeared on Tucker Carlson's show last night and here's what he had to say for himself.
The people that broke into my neighborhood, they're all trespassing.
The guy that recruited it, that planned this event, said the next day that he intended to break the law, that he needed to break laws in order to send his message.
None of those people are arrested.
None of those people are charged.
The prosecutor, the circuit attorney, has apparently decided that her job as a prosecutor isn't to keep us safe from criminals, but to keep the criminals safe from us.
It's a bizarre, upside-down world.
I've been a little irritated by this process until today.
Now I'm just flat out pissed off.
I mean, this has gotten to be outrageous.
McCloskey pointed out that one person pulled out loaded pistol magazines, clicked them together and said, you're next.
He said, we were threatened with our lives, threatened with the house being burned down, my office building being burned down, our dog's life being threatened.
It was about as bad as it can get.
I really thought it was the storming of the Bastille.
We'd be dead.
The house would be burned.
There was nothing we could do about it.
It was a large, frightening crowd.
They broke in the gate and they were coming at us.
Well, the good news is that Missouri AG has filed to dismiss the charges.
He says, I won't stand by while Missouri law is being ignored.
So at least there is that.
But the lawlessness, the attempt to tear down the system from within, that is the grave threat to the Republic.
We should all, all be able to stand with the idea that law-abiding matters.
That the system is built around freedom.
It is not built around oppression.
Because if we believe the opposite, then the system will indeed collapse, and what replaces it is going to be something not quite as nice as the most powerful, free, and prosperous nation in the history of the world.
Okay.
Well, we'll be back here later today with a couple of additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
In the meantime, go pick up a copy of my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, and go over to dailywire.com, slash Ben, pick up a signed copy and watch our live stream today when I do a live book signing.
Maybe you will have your questions answered.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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