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Sept. 22, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:39

Republicans Roll Forward | Ep. 1100

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	Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vows to bring a vote to the floor, some Republican commentators waiver, and the DOJ declares several major cities anarchic jurisdictions.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Alrighty, we're gonna get to all of the news of the day, and plenty there is of it.
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	Okay, so Mitch McConnell yesterday.
	He suggested that the time has come.
	They're going to act.
	They're not going to wait on it.
	He gave a speech on the floor of the Senate talking about this.
	President Trump himself suggested that he wants to vote before the election.
	Here was President Trump yesterday saying that he wants this thing to move forward.
	He wants it to move forward fast.
	This makes sense because here is the problem.
	If you don't get a vote before the election, and Mitch McConnell has declared that an election effectively is a referendum on a question as to who will appoint the next justice of the Supreme Court.
	Let's say that November 3rd Trump loses and the Republicans lose the Senate.
	It's going to be very difficult to make the case that the American people desperately wanted Republicans to fill that seat.
	So instead, you do it right now before the election.
	That's the logic here.
	Here is President Trump talking.
	Well, I'd much rather have a vote before the election.
	Because there's a lot of work to be done, and I'd much rather have it.
	We have plenty of time to do it.
	I mean, there's really a lot of time.
	So let's say I make the announcement on Saturday.
	There's a great deal of time before the election.
	That'll be up to Mitch in the Senate.
	But I'd certainly much rather have the vote.
	I think it sends a good signal.
	And it's solidarity and lots of other things.
	OK, so that obviously is the correct political tack for the president to take.
	He should not be waiting on this.
	He should be pushing ahead.
	He's supposed to announce his pick Friday or Saturday.
	And this is one thing that Trump is very good at.
	The rose ceremony will be beautiful.
	Now, you remember that he did this with Brett Kavanaugh.
	Who will he unleash from behind the door?
	Open the door!
	It's Brett Kavanaugh!
	Come on down and receive your hearing from Democrats who will call you a rapist!
	Congratulations, sir!
	Okay, so we'll get that whole show.
	Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, who is absolutely ruthless.
	I mean, let's just point out that Mitch McConnell is one cold dude.
	Cocaine Mitch is a hardcore operator.
	He's not gonna bring a vote to the floor unless he knows that he is going to get the vote.
	Here was Mitch McConnell saying, we are going to act, and anybody who says that we shouldn't act, that those people are very, very silly.
	No Senate has failed to confirm a nominee in the circumstances that face us right now.
	The historical precedent is overwhelming, and it runs in one direction.
	If our Democratic colleagues want to claim they are outraged, they can only be outraged at the plain facts of American history.
	Okay, well, fact check true.
	Meanwhile, he does have the votes.
	Okay, so Mitt Romney has released a statement announcing that he is going to vote in favor of the nominee.
	He is certainly going to hear the nominee.
	So that means that he's bad again.
	So for a second there, he was good.
	Now he's bad again.
	That's the way that it works with Mitt Romney.
	When he does the bidding of the left, then he gets the Strange new respect.
	But the minute that he no longer does the bidding of the left, then he's as bad as he ever was, a racist who wants to put black people back in chains, as Joe Biden suggested that he was back in 2012.
	He put forward a statement basically saying, listen, precedent and the Constitution are pretty clear about this.
	Not only does the Senate have the authority to go ahead with this nomination, but when the party in power is holding both the presidency and the Senate, There is literally no reason for them not to go ahead with all of this.
	So Mitt Romney, bad again.
	Meanwhile, Cory Gardner in Colorado and Chuck Grassley both stepped up and said that they are going to move ahead with this as well.
	There's some questions about Grassley because earlier this year, Grassley had suggested that maybe he wouldn't vote in favor of any nominee brought up this year, but he has reversed himself now and he was basically like, yeah, whatever.
	Listen, all of this is kabuki theater.
	If Democrats were in charge of the Senate, this nominee would not get a vote.
	We all know this.
	And if the Democrats had elected Hillary Clinton and Republicans were in charge of the Senate, She wouldn't get a vote either.
	Hey, this is just pure power politics.
	Everybody knows this.
	And this is a pure, simple result of the fact that Democrats politicized the court.
	And that's what happened here.
	They shifted the definition of what it meant to be a Supreme Court justice from a person who interprets the text of the Constitution to a person who acts as a super legislature, giving Democrats all the things they could possibly want.
	In a second.
	I want to talk about why it feels like the country is breaking down over Supreme Court justice.
	Why is it so important what the institutions of the country are?
	Because there is a real reason, a deep philosophical reason, why we are now seeing the country basically crack up over what is a normal constitutional process.
	But Grassley said, once the hearings are underway, it's my responsibility to evaluate the nominee on the merits just as I always have. The Constitution gives the Senate that authority. The American people's voices in the most recent election could not be clearer. Meanwhile, Cory Gardner, who is trailing John Hickenlooper in Colorado despite all sorts of legal questions surrounding Hickenlooper, he says, I have and will continue to support judicial nominees who will protect our Constitution and not legislate from the bench and uphold the law. Should a qualified nominee who meets this criteria be put forward, I will vote to confirm.
	And again, Mitt Romney has also announced that he is going to go forward with the vote as well.
	So this thing is basically a done deal.
	Lindsey Graham was asked about this and people got very angry at him because Lindsey Graham, of course, was a big advocate in 2016 of not bringing up Merrick Garland for a vote.
	He said, Dear Senators Feinstein, Leahy, Durbin, White House, Klobuchar, Coons, Blumenthal, Hirono, Booker and Harris.
	Like millions of Americans, I was shocked and saddened to hear of Justice Ginsburg's death.
	Justice Ginsburg served honorably on the federal bench, was a trailblazer for women in law.
	She will be missed.
	When the American people elected a Republican Senate majority in 2014, Americans did so because we committed to checking and balancing the end of President Obama's lame duck presidency.
	We did so.
	We followed the precedent that the Senate has followed for 140 years.
	Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite party president's Supreme Court nominee during an election year.
	Lastly, and this is a key point, after the treatment of Justice Kavanaugh, I now have a very different view of the judicial confirmation process.
	The American people expanded the Republican majority in 2018.
	We should honor that mandate.
	Also, unlike in 2016, President Trump is currently standing for re-election.
	The people will have a say in his choices.
	Lastly, and this is a key point, after the treatment of Justice Kavanaugh, I now have a very different view of the judicial confirmation process.
	Compare the treatment of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh to the treatment of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
	This is right.
	Lindsey Graham 2.0 was basically launched by the fact that the Democrats went after Brett Kavanaugh and called him a rapist.
	So Lindsey Graham says my entire perspective changed after Brett Kavanaugh.
	And he is correct about this.
	All of the precedents with regard to judicial nominees were broken.
	And they were broken because the Democrats have a very different view of what the court ought to be.
	Now, this has not stopped the Democrats from screaming to high heaven that somehow this is a violation of principle.
	We'll get to Democrats screaming to the heavens in just one second.
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	Okay, so, the Senate minority is of course screaming and moaning about all of this.
	Chuck Schumer says it's the inconsistency that makes you absolutely crazy.
	It's so inconsistent.
	I mean, this is this is inconsistent, says Chuck Schumer, the same man who in 2016 was declaring openly that Merrick Garland should absolutely have a vote, even though the Democrats did not control the Senate.
	Now he's like, we should not have a vote.
	It's absurd.
	OK, here's Chuck Schumer again.
	Political principle means nothing in the American Senate, which is, you know, kind of normal.
	Here he is.
	Leader McConnell and Chairman Graham have made a mockery of their previous position.
	They seem ready to show the world their word is simply no good.
	It's enough to make your head explode and then to hear Leader McConnell up on the floor trying to defend this.
	Pathetic.
	Pathetic.
	Chuck Schumer's so, he's so disappointed in you, Mitch McConnell.
	Mitch McConnell's sitting there with that tiny little grin, creasing that turtley face.
	He didn't care.
	Here's Chuck Schumer saying, every modicum of decency and honor demands that you can't fill a seat, even though you have the presidency and a Senate majority.
	Here's Chuck Schumer, who undoubtedly, if he had a Senate majority right now, would block this nominee.
	The right to join a union, marry who you love, freely exercise your right to vote.
	The right of a parent with a child who has cancer not to watch helpless as their son or daughter suffers without proper health care.
	If you care about these things and the kind of country we live in, this election and this vacancy mean everything.
	And by all rights, by every modicum of decency and honor, Leader McConnell and the Republican Senate majority have no right to fill it.
	No right.
	They have every right.
	And not only do they have every right, you know who used to say that?
	That would be like every one of these Democrats.
	There's an RNC ad they cut yesterday, just compendiums of Democrats talking about how Merrick Garland should be confirmed, even though they did not have a Senate majority at the time, the Democrats.
	Instead of just saying the blanket rule is no matter who you are, no matter what your qualifications, because you were sent by this president, we will create a unique rule for you and refuse to entertain you.
	One of the most important consequences of who is president of the United States is who sits on the United States Supreme Court.
	If you want to stop extremism in your party, You can start by showing the American people that you respect the President of the United States and the Constitution.
	We don't have to listen to these hypocrites.
	Here's the bottom line.
	Policy, politics makes for hypocrites, and nobody tends to care because your own base tends to forgive you hypocrisy.
	But there is something more important here, and that is when you hear Chuck Schumer talk about the Supreme Court, when he says, your right to gay marriage, your right to vote, your right to health care, all these rights are on the line on this Supreme Court pick.
	Understand that what he is really reflecting is a deeper Democratic sentiment about the role of the Supreme Court in American life.
	Namely, Republicans generally view the Supreme Court's job as reading the Constitution and providing an institutional barrier to violations of your rights.
	There's a law, the legislature passes it, it violates the First Amendment, the Supreme Court strikes it down.
	For Democrats, the legislature is merely one component Of what government should do, meaning that the Supreme Court should actually give them things they could not get legislatively and or green light things that are blatantly unconstitutional.
	For the Democrats, all institutions of American government are institutions of power.
	And to understand why that is, you have to understand there's a grave philosophical difference in American life between what I've called in my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, the unionists and the disintegrationists.
	The Unionist vision of American philosophy is very simple.
	It's embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
	You have certain inalienable rights granted to you by God or by nature.
	These inalienable rights pre-exist government.
	These are rights to life, liberty, and property.
	Government was instituted in order to protect those rights.
	That is the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and thus the philosophy of the Constitution of the United States.
	Abraham Lincoln called the Constitution the silver frame around the golden apple of that philosophy.
	So again, that philosophy is a philosophy of limited government instituted in order to protect pre-existing rights.
	The Constitution is specifically designed to protect those pre-existing rights.
	Because what you need, and this is the philosophy of the Federalist Papers throughout, particularly in Federalist 51 by James Madison, the basic philosophy is that you need a government that is powerful enough to ensure that people's rights can be protected, but not powerful enough to invade your rights.
	And that's a very delicate balance.
	So how do you achieve that?
	How do you ensure that those rights, the pre-existent government, are not violated by the government itself, but are protected by a government that is powerful enough to protect those rights?
	On the one hand, the founders were trying to balance the weakness of the Articles of Confederation, which is the proto-Constitution, right?
	The Articles of Confederation were the earliest governing documents of the United States.
	The problem was they were not sufficient to actually maintain order in the United States.
	There were armed rebellions in the United States that broke out during the Articles of Confederation.
	It turns out that the federal government did not have enough power to pay back national debts.
	It did not have a power to raise an army.
	It couldn't really fight in any plausible fashion.
	And so, Congress people from all over the United States came together.
	in the Constitutional Convention.
	Originally, their idea was that they were going to tinker with the Articles of Confederation.
	They ended up replacing it wholesale.
	The goal of the new Constitution, again, was to have a government that was powerful enough, if need be, in emergency circumstances to act, but not powerful enough to invade your rights.
	And so the founders came up with basically a three-pronged institutional approach to creating this government.
	Prong number one, enumerated powers.
	The government only has certain powers that are enumerated and listed.
	So the legislature has the power to legislate on specific issues having to do with the federal government.
	And those issues are quite limited in scope, right?
	The fullest is things like making sure that mail is delivered.
	They can do that, right?
	They can create, they can, they don't have to.
	They can create post offices.
	They have the power to levy certain taxes against the states, right?
	There are certain things that are encompassed in the constitution and they are named, right?
	They are enumerated powers.
	There was not a blanket grant of power to the federal government in the Constitution.
	So, number one, enumerated powers.
	But the founders didn't just rely on enumerated powers or on a Bill of Rights.
	They said, okay, well, those are parchment barriers.
	We need institutional checks and balances.
	This is why we have a two-chambered legislature.
	We have a House of Representatives that is done by population.
	And then to ensure that the big states don't overrule the small states, We have a Senate that is supposed to balance it out, where Montana has the same number of votes as California.
	The idea here is that the checks and balances will require essentially a broad-scale agreement on a particular issue in order for anything to happen.
	And this will protect against violation of small states' rights, for example.
	And then we'll balance that legislature with an executive.
	We won't have a unitary executive capable of doing anything.
	We won't have a cabinet government like they have in Great Britain, for example.
	Instead, there will be very limited powers in the executive branch Those very, very limited powers in the executive branch include a veto against legislative action, but the legislature controls the purse strings so they can defund the executive anytime they damn well please.
	And then, there will be a judicial branch.
	And the role of the judicial branch, as Alexander Hamilton put it, was to be the least dangerous branch.
	Not the most dangerous branch, the least.
	He says, the judicial branch does not have the power to even effectuate its own judgments.
	So there is a great argument in American constitutional law over whether the judiciary in the United States, the federal judiciary, has judicial supremacy or simply has the same powers as any of the other branches, meaning that they can rule for themselves, but they can't actually effectuate those rulings.
	It's fairly clear from both the text of the Constitution and from the Federalist Papers and from all the debates surrounding the judiciary that the very notion that everybody would be bound by the Supreme Court's determination of the law And would not have its own independent ability to assess the nature of constitutional law is not correct.
	Basically, it was meant to be a negotiation between the three branches.
	The judiciary says this thing is unconstitutional.
	And then the legislature says, well, we think it's not unconstitutional.
	And the executive then says, OK, well, it's either constitutional or it's not constitutional.
	You have this argument out.
	And this has happened throughout American history where the Supreme Court will make a decision.
	The executive won't like it.
	The legislature will fight with the executive.
	All of that conflict is good.
	The gridlock is part of the system.
	And the reason for the gridlock, again, is that we want to make sure that the government cannot just willy-nilly violate people's rights.
	The third aspect of American constitutional government is federalism.
	The idea here is that local government generally governs best.
	You want a federal government that is capable of protecting the rights of individuals violated by local government.
	This is why you want a federal government that, for example, after the Civil War, is involved in Reconstruction to make sure that states are not violating the rights of black Americans.
	One of the great tragedies of American history is that the federal government did not do enough in the aftermath of the Civil War to effectuate the newly insured rights of black Americans, obviously.
	So you want a federal government that's powerful enough to protect the rights of individuals, but states are given most of the power under the Constitution of the United States.
	This is why you have a Tenth Amendment that devolves authority to the states or to the people, respectively, meaning that most of the legislation is supposed to be done at the state level.
	So those are the three principles of the Constitution, right?
	One is enumerated powers, the second is checks and balances, and the third is federalism.
	And all of that is designed in defense of a philosophy of limited government based on inalienable rights that preexist the government.
	Now, as I'm about to talk about, Democrats don't like any of this.
	Democrats see government as us.
	Government is supposed to give us all the things, and that means Institutional obstacles are very bad when they control the government.
	Democrats don't have a thoroughgoing theory of institutions.
	Sometimes the institutions are great.
	The filibuster is great when you're in the minority.
	But when you're in the majority, the filibuster is super bad, because the bottom line is, in the pursuit of utopia, any institution that gets in the way is an obstacle, and any institution that helps you is a club.
	And that is the way that Democrats view American government.
	And that is why they are now threatening American institutions.
	They're using this as an opportunity To completely overthrow the constitutional structure which they don't like very much and have not liked for well over a hundred years.
	We're gonna get to more of this in just one second because you have to understand the underlying conflict in order to understand why this is getting so fraught and what the real danger is going to be in the end.
	Okay, we're gonna get to more of this in just one second first.
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	The Democratic Party has, since the early 20th century, been at total war with the Declaration of Independence philosophy.
	Woodrow Wilson was not shy about this.
	He thought the Declaration of Independence was hackneyed.
	He thought it was old.
	He thought the idea of inalienable rights pre-existing government was a lie.
	That government was the only guarantor of your rights.
	And therefore, government had to be as big and as powerful as humanly possible in order to effectuate those rights.
	This has been the philosophy of the Democratic Party for well over 100 years at this point.
	That means that the only obstacle to utopia is ability to implement.
	And that means that all the checks and balances when Democrats are in power should go away.
	It means that the Constitution of the United States should become basically a dead letter.
	This is why they always talk about the dead Constitution as opposed to the living Constitution.
	By living Constitution, they mean whatever we want is what the Constitution says.
	And this means that the judiciary should become a tool of democratic policymaking.
	And this has long been a democratic talking point, is that the institutions of the United States ought to be completely overthrown in pursuit of this sort of utopian scheme whereby government grants you all of the rights you could possibly want and all the entitlements you could possibly want.
	All you have to do is give up all of your doubts about government invading your rights in the first place, which of course completely overthrows the rationale of the American Revolution.
	This is not hidden, okay?
	This is very clear.
	Philosophers on the left, progressive philosophers from Woodrow Wilson to John Dewey, stated this sort of stuff openly at the beginning of the 20th century.
	And then that particular philosophy has been given new credence and new credibility by the rise of so-called critical theory.
	The critical legal studies genre basically suggests that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were a lie in the first place.
	That the idea of an alienable rights pre-existing government defended by that government.
	Those ideas were a lie.
	Now there are two particular forms that this lie supposedly took.
	Particular form number one is that this was a class-based lie.
	That it was basically a bunch of rich people who are attempting to enshrine in law and via the institutions of the Constitution their own economic privilege.
	This argument was first put forth by a guy named Charles Beard, a historian, who tried to suggest that the real reason that the founders did the Constitution and the Declaration the way that they did is because they were hiding their own economic interests.
	It turns out that that was bad history, but it was a really, really big idea, very formative, in the generation of the progressive movement.
	And that has been held by people like Howard Zinn.
	It's been carried forward throughout sort of Marxist... If you listen to Bernie Sanders, Bernie Sanders talks like this, that basically the institutions of the Declaration and the Constitution were created in order to enshrine class privilege.
	It's a Marxist take on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
	Then we have the racially Marxist take on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
	And this is the 1619 Project.
	And their basic idea There's also the idea of Ibram Kendi.
	It's the idea of Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael.
	The basic idea here is that all of the institutions of the United States were not really instituted in order to protect class privilege.
	They were instituted in order to protect racial privilege.
	So the rights of freedom of speech and right to bear arms and the right to a free press, all of that was meant to just enshrine hierarchies that already existed and to protect white privilege against people of other races who could take control of the government.
	And so that was the real goal here.
	And you see this In the discussions now about systemic racism, the systems have to be torn down because the systems are themselves repositories of racism.
	It's not that you can locate racism in the system itself.
	You can't actually look at the system and see that it's racist.
	It's that the product of the system is racist because the intent behind the system, unconscious or conscious, was racist in the first place.
	So with that in mind, you have to understand that when the Democrats look at institutions of American government, they see obstacles to what they want to do.
	And so they have shifted the nature of what we thought the Supreme Court was.
	The Supreme Court, again, was supposed to be the least dangerous branch, interpreting the text of a statute.
	Just as you don't think of the judiciary as a dangerous branch of government when it comes to interpreting a contract, the founders never thought of the judiciary as a dangerous branch of government.
	They figured they'll interpret the text of the Constitution the way they would interpret the text of a contract.
	Democrats don't think like that.
	For them, the Constitution of the United States is merely an obstacle to be overcome or a tool to be used if you can get enough justices on the Supreme Court and you can stack it with people who agree with you.
	And that is why every Supreme Court justice becomes a fighting issue for Democrats because they are losing a tool of power if they lose the Supreme Court.
	They are losing what they use in order to cram down a particular point of view if they lose the Supreme Court.
	They've completely shifted the definition of what a justice is supposed to be.
	Sonia Sotomayor is not interested in interpreting the text of a statute.
	Sonia Sotomayor is interested in promulgating a leftist view of the universe.
	This is true of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as well.
	For all the worship of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on civil procedure, she was interested in interpreting statutes.
	On social issues, she didn't give one good damn about the Constitution of the United States.
	And that was perfectly clear.
	And that's true of Sonia Sotomayor.
	It's been true in many cases of Justice Breyer.
	It's been true of many of the Supreme Court picks by the left, which is why Democratic picks always vote for the Democratic priorities.
	Always.
	Invariably.
	Whereas Republican picks tend to vary.
	Because Republicans are like, OK, well, there are a lot of ways to read a statute.
	Democrats are like, there's only one way to read the statute, and that's the way that agrees with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
	In just a second, we're going to get to Democrats' threats to the institutions, because there are predictable effects of all of this.
	We're going to get to all of that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that there are a lot of new threats online.
	Like, every single day, there are new threats online.
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	Okay, so with all this in mind, Democrats look at the Supreme Court pick and they see the possibility of breaking institutions.
	Woodrow Wilson wanted to completely overthrow the constitutional structure by creating an executive government Millions of people strong in order to effectuate the wishes of the big man on top.
	FDR in the 30s wanted to pack the court to make the court just another tool in his arsenal against many constitutional principles.
	LBJ ran roughshod over many principles of the Constitution in terms of private versus public in order to effectuate what he wanted.
	Barack Obama declared the government is us.
	This is nothing new.
	It's just that the Democrats have now decided that they can come out openly and basically suggest that it's time to break all of America's institutions in pursuit of a pure majoritarianism.
	See, Democrats have believed for a while now, really since the election of Barack Obama, that they have a majority in the country.
	And therefore, all obstacles should go away.
	It used to be that Democrats worried deeply about tyranny of the majority.
	The founders worried about tyranny of the majority.
	That is one of the reasons you have checks and balances and federalism.
	What they did not want, what they were afraid of, was what they called mob rule.
	What they meant by mob rule was not mobs running around burning things.
	What they meant was 51% of the population ruling with an iron hand over 49% of the population.
	Because at a certain point, the 49% are gonna go, you know what, we're out.
	We are not interested in engaging in this particular deal when we are constantly being victimized by the 51% of the population who violate our rights.
	And so the founders were deeply worried about majoritarian tyranny.
	Now, Democrats used to worry about this, too, because Democrats in many areas were not actually the majority, right?
	They were worried about majority.
	They loved the filibuster when George W. Bush was president and he had a Democratic and he had a Democratic minority.
	They still love the filibuster right now, even while declaring it a Jim Crow relic.
	Twice in the last six months, they've used the filibuster, a Jim Crow relic, according to Barack Obama, in order to stymie COVID relief and police reform.
	So they're worried about majoritarian tyranny when they are in the minority.
	And when they're in the majority, they cannot wait to effectuate majoritarian tyranny because they have no institutional allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and its structures.
	And so for them, they believe they're in the majority.
	This, by the way, undergirds a lot of their take on 2016.
	After 2008 and Barack Obama wins this sweeping victory.
	And then 2012, Obama governs pretty radically from 2009 to 2012.
	And Democrats figure, OK, we might be in trouble here.
	And then Obama wins a fairly broad victory over Mitt Romney.
	Despite all of that, Democrats figured we're never losing again.
	We are the true majority.
	And then when Trump won, they couldn't handle it because their forever majority was not there.
	And so they pointed to the popular vote.
	They said, OK, well, we do have a majority.
	And so you started hearing rumblings about getting rid of the Electoral College, which they had loved up until that very moment.
	You started hearing rumblings about, let's reconstitute the United States Senate.
	You heard rumblings about, let's pack the court.
	All of this preceded the Supreme Court pick.
	In open debate, Democrats were talking about the undemocratic nature of the American Senate.
	They were talking about the evils of the Electoral College.
	They were talking openly about packing the court six months ago, before any of this happened.
	So when they believe they are in the majority, they are very much in favor of majoritarian tyranny.
	And they can't handle the fact that sometimes they're not in the majority.
	Now, everybody should be afraid, right, left, or center, of majoritarian tyranny.
	We've seen it too many times in American history.
	The story of Jim Crow is a story of majoritarian tyranny, where 51% of the population is literally depriving black Americans of their rights under the Constitution of the United States.
	That is majoritarian tyranny.
	American government, for all of its failings, was designed to prevent this sort of stuff.
	OK, but because Democrats now believe that they are in the majority, they want majoritarian tyranny and they want it bad.
	And so the media, who have allegiance to this idea, they say it's time to wreck all the institutions.
	The institutions got to go.
	Here is just a mashup of a bunch of members of the media encouraging the Democrats to break all the institutions in American life.
	The only way that we restore fairness is for Congress to pass an act expanding the court.
	Do you say Democrats, if they get back the Senate in this election in November, should then move to expand the Supreme Court?
	Are you in favor of trying to expand the numbers of justices on the Supreme Court?
	Like the idea of eliminating the filibuster, should they do that?
	As you know, some Democrats are openly threatening to try to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices.
	Would you agree with that?
	Potentially changing the number of justices on the court, changing the filibuster, changing the number of states in the union.
	So the media have been pushing this extremely, extremely hard.
	Harder than many of the Democrats.
	Some Democrats still have some sort of institutional allegiance.
	Like, Dianne Feinstein came out yesterday and she said, I don't really want to get rid of the filibuster.
	I think it's important.
	She got reamed.
	Members of the media were enraged by the fact that Dianne Feinstein, who's I believe 80 years old and a senator from California out here, she said she didn't want to get rid of the filibuster.
	Democrats were absolutely enraged.
	Don Lemon demonstrating his own lack of knowledge about anything basic to the Constitution.
	I mean, you know that you're really, really dumb about American politics when Chris Cuomo, an actual block of wood with fewer than three brain cells to rub together, is looking at you like, dude, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
	So here was Don Lemon last night suggesting it was time for the Electoral College to be scrapped.
	via a non-constitutional amendment, which would, in fact, be required, also suggesting it's time to burn down all the institutions.
	And Chris Cuomo's like, dude, what are you talking about?
	When you're too radical for Chris Cuomo.
	By the way, this is a news show, according to Brian Stelter, a reliable source at CNN.
	Here were two of our intellectual heavyweights in this clash of the mental titans going at it on CNN last night.
	We're going to have to blow up the entire system.
	And you know what we're going to have to do?
	No, I don't know about that.
	You know what we're going to have to do?
	You just got to vote.
	Honestly, from what your closing argument is, you're going to have to get rid of the electoral college.
	Because the people... I don't see it.
	Because the minority in this country decides who the judges are and they decide who the president is.
	Is that fair?
	Well, you need a constitutional amendment to do that.
	And if Democrats, if Joe Biden wins, Democrats can sack the courts and they can do that amendment and they can get it passed.
	Well, you need two-thirds vote in the Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures.
	They may be able to do that.
	By the way, it is not just Don Lemon who doesn't understand how the Electoral College works.
	If he thinks they can, simply by constitutional amendment, get the Electoral College abolished, good luck with that.
	Seriously, good luck.
	That is not how that process is going to end up working.
	Reza Aslan, meanwhile, is tweeting.
	He tweeted immediately.
	He's a commentator for CNN, of course.
	Really good guy, Reza Aslan.
	So he tweeted out, Earlier this week that it was time to burn it all down and he reiterated that yesterday quote been a few days since I tweeted that if GOP try to jam a SCOTUS through before election we burn the effing thing down and since the death threats and Breitbart headlines about my tweet have now stopped let me just say that if GOP try to jam SCOTUS through we burn the effing thing down.
	But here's the thing.
	Democrats are always in favor of burning the effing thing down unless they get what they want.
	Right?
	That is the goal here.
	Now, what's crazy about this is that, let's say that they burn the effing thing down.
	Let's say they burn it down.
	Let's say they make all these institutional changes.
	Let's say that they get rid of the filibuster.
	Let's say they get rid of the electoral college.
	Let's say that they add states via 51-vote majority in the Senate.
	Let's say that they pack the court.
	Don't you believe that'll dissolve the country?
	Democrats have to know this.
	Or they don't care.
	Or they believe that their majoritarian tyranny will simply hold.
	If you're a state, do you think that you're going to listen to a law made by a process that you did not approve of at any stage?
	That simply adding states willy-nilly, through a simple majority, vote in the Senate, and making a permanent Democratic majority on that basis, you think the minority states are just gonna stick around for that?
	And then, when you pass something unconstitutional, and a packed, rigged Supreme Court greenlights it, you think they're just gonna sit around for that?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	See, for Democrats, when they say, burn it all down, what they mean is, we wish to run this thing with an iron hand from above.
	Now, this is a problem for Joe Biden, as I mentioned yesterday, because Joe Biden's entire pitch is, I am a doddering old man who is not going to bother you very much.
	And now the Democratic Party pitch is, we are going to burn the whole thing down.
	You see how these two messages are somewhat in conflict.
	But Joe Biden does not have the strength of character or the strength of mind, frankly, to simply say, we're not going to do any of that stuff.
	See, Joe Biden could still win in a walk.
	All he would have to say is, it is immoral for the Republicans to try to push through a justice.
	They're hypocrites, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	He can do the same routine that Chuck Schumer did.
	American government is durable.
	The constitutional system is valuable.
	And so we're not going to burn anything down.
	We're just going to win elections.
	That's all he has to say.
	He can't do it.
	He can't do it because the heart and soul of the Democratic Party is in favor of burning things down if they feel they can effectuate their power grab by burning things down.
	So he was asked specifically, Joe Biden was yesterday, about packing the court.
	He wouldn't rule it out.
	He wouldn't just say, no, we're not going to pack the court.
	Now, let's be real about this.
	If you look at the constituency of the Supreme Court right now, The Supreme Court ages right now.
	What you are looking at is Clarence Thomas is now 72 years old.
	Stephen Breyer is 82.
	John Roberts is 65.
	Alito is 70.
	Hey, so if Joe Biden were to win the presidency, there is a not insignificant shot that he would get to replace certainly Breyer, that he would also get to replace Clarence Thomas, who again is 72 years old, and that he might get to replace Samuel Alito, who will be 74 or 75 by the time that Joe Biden leaves office.
	And if he serves two terms, there is very little doubt that he would get to replace probably three of those justices, because that's the way this works, gang.
	Hey, that is the way that this works.
	There is turnover at the Supreme Court level.
	So he could just say, I'm not going to do any of this.
	But he won't do that because he's so afraid of his left wing.
	So should Americans really gamble that Joe Biden is going to stand up to the radicals in his caucus who wish to burn it all down?
	I don't see why you would.
	Really, I'm not seeing any evidence.
	Here's Joe Biden wavering on this.
	This is the easiest answer in the world.
	It's like, can you condemn Antifa for burning down cities just by name?
	And I'll be like, no.
	These are easy answers.
	Joe Biden is not a bulwark in favor of moderation.
	He is not.
	I'm not going to answer that question.
	Because it will shift all the focus.
	That's what he wants.
	He never wants to talk about the issue at hand.
	He always tries to change the subject.
	Let's say I answer that question.
	Then the whole debate is going to be, well, Biden said or didn't say.
	Biden said he would or wouldn't.
	The discussion should be about why he is moving in a direction that's totally inconsistent with what the founders wanted.
	This is insane.
	It's not inconsistent with what the founders wanted to appoint a justice when you have a majority in the Senate and the presidency.
	The fact that he won't answer the question, that's not the distraction.
	That's not a distraction.
	That is the key question.
	Are you willing to burn it all down?
	And Joe Biden will not answer the question.
	If you wish to have a country that continues to work, the answer always has to be from all sides, no, I am not willing to burn it all down.
	Because if you are willing to burn it all down, we have a fundamental conflict that cannot be bridged by some sort of ham-handed deal.
	In a second, we're going to get to some conservatives, people who are friends of mine, who are calling for some sort of ham-handed deal.
	I strongly disagree.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to various conservatives who are now suggesting a deal.
	And I just don't understand why you would believe that a deal is a good idea with people who refuse to rule out burning down the system.
	That's not a deal.
	That's just called blackmail.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	So we are now seeing a cadre of conservatives who are getting a little bit skimpish, kind of squeamish, I would say, about the idea of pushing through a Supreme Court justice when you have a majority in the Senate or the presidency.
	Jonah Goldberg, with whom I'm friends, I like Jonah a lot, but he's dead wrong about this.
	He has a piece over at the LA Times saying that Republicans and Democrats should make a deal.
	He says, I'll confess, there was a time when I would have considered the question facing Republicans a no-brainer.
	Of course they should seize this opportunity to replace RBG with a conservative.
	Moving the courts, especially the Supreme Court, rightward, has been a conservative lodestar for generations.
	It remains one of the last tenets of pre-Trump conservatism that still largely unites the right.
	In fairness, the conservatives who take these matters seriously would say the issue isn't so much moving the courts rightward as it is restoring the courts to their proper role.
	They, we, believe the primary reason these fights have become so ugly is the judiciary has taken upon itself legislative functions it does not have.
	That's why even pro-choice conservatives and even pro-choice liberals, like Justice Ginsburg, believe Roe vs. Wade was deeply flawed.
	When Supreme Court justices do the job of politicians, it shouldn't be a surprise confirmation battles resemble political campaigns.
	And of course, that is exactly right.
	That is exactly right.
	I mean, that's the case that I've been making here.
	But, says Jonah Goldberg, a few Republicans could agree to postpone the process until after the election in exchange for a few Democrats agreeing never to vote for a court-packing scheme.
	This would give voters some buy-in for whatever happens next.
	If no Democrats agree, then their issue is really with the system, and Republicans should feel free to vote for Trump's pick, even in a lame succession.
	Of course, if Trump wins, he gets his pick anyway, and there's no reason he shouldn't nominate someone now.
	Versions of this idea have been getting steam among eggheads, but there's little sign it is catching on among senators.
	Well, the reason that it's not catching on is because no one has any trust in the other side that they will not burn down the system.
	Once you bring out the threat, you're gonna burn down the system.
	Why should we trust you when you say you are not going to burn down the system?
	The person who takes a child as a hostage, the terrorist, who takes a child as a hostage, if you say, I'm making a deal with you, the deal is don't take the child as a hostage.
	The problem is they're the kind of person who would take a child as a hostage, so why would you make a deal with them?
	This is what Israel learned when it negotiated with the Palestinian terrorist authority.
	And when you do that, it turns out you're negotiating with the kinds of people who routinely do terrorist things.
	If you were threatening six months ago to pack the courts, Obviously, there's a major moral distinction between actual terrorists and what the Democrats are doing today.
	What the Democrats are doing today is hostage-taking on a political level that is incredibly ugly and threatening to burn down the system, which is, you know, political terrorism is not the same as, like, terrorism, terrorism.
	But what Democrats have been threatening for years is to wreck every institution of American government.
	So why would I believe any promise that they will, in exchange for you doing what they want, not wreck the government?
	They're the kinds of people who have already threatened to wreck the government, so they have no credibility when they say.
	Are you the kind of person who would threaten to wreck the government if you didn't get what you wanted?
	If the answer is yes, then negotiating with you not to wreck the government seems simply like acceding to blackmail.
	Okay, but it is not just Jonah who's making this case.
	Bret Stephens over at the New York Times is making this case.
	He wrote an open letter to Mitt Romney who already said that he's gonna vote in favor of bringing the nominee forward.
	Brett Stevens wrote an open letter to Mitt Romney saying that maybe there's a deal to be made.
	He points out that Democrats have been the great sinners on issues judicial for generations, which is true, going all the way back to Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas and Justice Kavanaugh.
	But he says, you know what?
	Maybe we should, you know, like, make a deal.
	He says, I respect the fact that you're a pragmatic politician who values the views of your colleagues and constituents.
	But as you so eloquently put it in February when you cast the lone GOP vote to convict President Trump in his impeachment trial, freedom itself is dependent on the strength and vitality of our national character.
	A Republican party that lies and bamboozles voters contributes nothing to improving that character.
	So he says it's bad that Republicans suggested that they weren't gonna give Merrick Garland a vote, and now you need to stand up for principle and not give a vote to a Republican appointee, which of course is very silly because the parties were obviously not in the same position then that they are now.
	Again, I like all these people.
	I know Brett, I know Jonah.
	I'm very good friends with David French.
	I had a long conversation with David French on Friday about this specific issue.
	He has a piece in Time Magazine suggesting that Republicans cut a deal.
	He suggests that Republicans basically make a deal with some of the Democrats in order to back down.
	He says, We know that President Trump will put forward a nominee.
	He's promised to do it quickly.
	Now a critical mass of the Senate faces a choice.
	At the end of the day, do principles matter at all, or is power the only coin of the realm?
	After all, while much can happen between now and November 3rd, the Democrats may well hold the House, narrowly take control of the Senate, and win the White House.
	At that point, they'd have the legal and constitutional power to not just reverse conservative control of the court by amending the law to increase the number of Supreme Court seats, they could also permanently alter the balance of power in the Senate by admitting new states.
	namely Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.
	Republicans would object, conservative Americans would protest, they'd appeal to norms and worry about a tyranny of the majority.
	But if power is all that matters now, Democrats could respond with the same three words from the start of this piece, elections have consequences.
	So he says that Trump should make the pick, the Senate should apply the Schumer principle and give a hearing, and then they should delay it until after the election.
	Okay, first of all, the comparison between nominating a judge and confirming a judge to the Supreme Court when you have a majority in the Senate and the presidency, and packing the court, which again has not been done since like 1860, or getting rid of the filibuster, or adding states willy-nilly, I mean, There is no norm not to confirm a justice when a president of your own party nominates the justice.
	That is not a norm.
	The fact that the Republicans articulated this stupid sort of bizarre broad norm in 2016 was a mistake for sure, but is that a norm on par with don't break all the fundamental institutions of the democracy?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	And again, if you are threatening to break those institutions, why exactly would I trust you not to break the institutions?
	The answer is I wouldn't.
	Okay, meanwhile, there are a couple of people who are sort of on the...
	On the shortlist for President Trump.
	One, of course, is Amy Coney Barrett.
	Apparently, he met with her yesterday, according to Fox News.
	Fox News says that he met with her yesterday at the White House.
	On Monday, Trump said he had narrowed his choices down to five potential nominees.
	While speaking to reporters, he specifically addressed potentially nominating Barbara Lagoa, a Cuban-American who serves on the 11th U.S.
	Circuit Court of Appeals.
	He said, I may.
	She's highly thought of.
	There's a lot of talk about the fact that she is a Latino woman of, I believe, Cuban extraction from Florida.
	She's obviously, she's been a favor of Governor Ron DeSantis over there, who appointed her to the state high court before she was put on the federal high court.
	She was considered, she was considered for higher courts before.
	Here Barbara Leglo's record seems to be pretty good.
	So the information that I have about Barbara Lagoa seems to be pretty solid, which is that she's ruled on some contentious cases.
	She was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate, by the way, 80 to 15, including many, many top Democrats.
	The ABA gave Lagoa a unanimous rating of well-qualified prior to the 11th Circuit confirmation.
	She was involved in an 11th Circuit 6-4 decision upholding a Florida law requiring ex-felons to pay outstanding fines, fees, and other costs before being permitted to vote.
	Because she said, okay, you actually have to fulfill all of your obligations, including fines and fees, before you vote.
	Democrats, of course, accused her of attempting to shut down the right to vote.
	She's also spoken at length about originalism during her confirmation hearings.
	She spoke about the value of originalism.
	For folks who don't follow constitutional law, originalism is the very simple concept that the text of a statute should be read as it was written when it was written.
	In other words, you shouldn't write a statute in 1890 and then interpret it using the verbiage of 2020.
	You might say that you shouldn't write a statute about women and men in the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and then interpret it as though women and men meant transgenderism in 2020.
	So this would be Barbara Lagoa cracking back against the idea that you should interpret a statute in any way other than the original meaning of the statute.
	Here was Barbara Lagoa testifying during her 11th Circuit nomination hearing.
	If we are not bound by what the Constitution means, and it is ever-changing, then we are no different than the country that my parents fled from, which is Cuba.
	Because Cuba has a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, and it means nothing.
	Because there is no one to hold it and to say, this is what the definition of this Constitution means, if it is always ever-changing.
	The principles that were articulated in the Constitution at the time of ratification have a meaning.
	That meaning is constant.
	What changes is the application of the meaning to new things like new technologies.
	In the Fourth Amendment context, for example.
	Okay, so that is an excellent articulation of the principles of originalism.
	The other possible nominee is, of course, Amy Coney Barrett.
	She was talked about to fill Justice Kavanaugh's seat.
	I was a big proponent of Amy Coney Barrett.
	I suggested that she be nominated instead of Justice Kavanaugh, who I still have my doubts about in terms of his jurisprudence.
	We'll see where we end up.
	Coney Barrett does not have a huge and long history on the court.
	She was Nominated to the Seventh Circuit just a few years ago.
	Both of these women, by the way, are quite young.
	Barbara Legault is in her early 50s.
	Amy Coney Barrett is 48.
	She's a pro-life Roman Catholic on a personal level.
	She clerked for Anthonin Scalia after she graduated from law school.
	Her most famous articulation of her philosophy is in an article for the Notre Dame Law Review she taught at University of Notre Dame.
	called Originalism and Stare Decisis, about Justice Scalia.
	And there she was trying to negotiate the sort of difference between originalism, where you look at the text of the Constitution, and bad decisions.
	How often do you simply acquiesce to bad decisions that have been made over the course of American history because they're so deeply embedded in the fabric of American law?
	So, for example, there are a lot of legal questions, not moral questions, legal questions to be asked about Brown versus Board.
	It's long been an area of serious contention among legal scholars.
	So Justice Scalia said that's so embedded in the fabric of American life that you cannot remove it.
	It constitutes what Amy Coney Barrett said was super precedent, meaning it's precedent so deeply embedded that you can't get rid of it.
	She explicitly, in this Notre Dame Law Review article, excludes Roe v. Wade as super precedent.
	She says it is not super precedent because it has been a topic of conversation and controversy ever since.
	Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
	So she obviously is made in this sort of Scalia mold.
	I'm looking over the records of both of them today.
	Hopefully I'll have some more details for you tomorrow.
	On first glance, both Coney Barrett and Barbara Lagoa look like very solid originalist slash textualist picks for the court.
	And then the question becomes the politics of the situation.
	Lagoa theoretically could win some more Cuban-American votes in Florida for President Trump if she were nominated.
	Coney Barrett is a white Catholic.
	Theoretically, if she were to be attacked by Democrats who get over their skis in the same way they went after Justice Kavanaugh, then you could win some additional votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania.
	Political considerations will be first and foremost.
	Listen, if I were just going to pick a justice based on who I thought would be a good justice, I'd just pick Ted Cruz, because I know exactly what Cruz's constitutional philosophy is.
	He's pretty consistent with it, and he would actually make a pretty good justice.
	He's iconoclastic, and he's a good writer.
	If you're picking between these two ladies, from what I've seen, both of them look pretty good at this point.
	Those are those are the people who are at the top of the list.
	Barbara Lagoa and Amy Coney Barrett.
	And I'm looking forward to this week speaking with proponents for each, presumably before President Trump makes a pick.
	OK, meanwhile.
	The DOJ, in other news, has designated New York, Seattle, and Portland as what they call anarchic jurisdictions.
	Well, what they mean by this is that the state and local governments in these cities have allowed violence to run roughshod over the cities, and the Justice Department has said that we are not going to provide federal funding or federal help to cities that basically refuse to enforce the law.
	According to NBC New York, New York City is one of three places that have permitted violence and destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities, leading to its designation as an anarchist jurisdiction, according to the DOJ on Monday.
	The designation does have potential financial consequences.
	President Trump issued a memo earlier this month directing the DOJ to identify jurisdictions that, in its view, were not enforcing the law appropriately and designated cities could lose their federal funding.
	New York Governor, of course, Andrew Cuomo, of course, got very, very angry about all of this.
	He said, I understand the politics, but when you try and manipulate and distort government agencies to play politics, which is what the Trump administration has done from day one, this is more of the same.
	The president can't supersede the law, and so I'm going to make those funds basically discretionary funds, which is what he would have to do.
	If they actually do this, we'll challenge it legally, and they will lose once again.
	Trump's September 2nd order gave the director of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, 30 days to issue guidance to federal agencies on restricting eligibility for federal grants for the cities on the DOJ list.
	Such grants make up a huge portion of New York City's already strapped annual budget, more than $7 billion in fiscal 2021 alone, or 7.5% of the city's projected total revenue.
	The DOJ cited the New York City rising gun violence, the cuts to the NYPD budget, and moves by various DAs not to prosecute charges related to protests earlier this summer.
	Portland and Seattle were also hit with the same designation.
	William Barr, in a statement, the Attorney General, He said, Now listen, I'm in favor of local rule.
	If you want to vote for a crappy government that is going to remove police from your neighborhoods, by all means, go ahead and do it.
	The cities identified by the DOJ today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.
	Now listen, I'm in favor of local rule.
	If you want to vote for a crappy government that is going to remove police from your neighborhoods, by all means, go ahead and do it.
	But as a federal taxpayer, I don't see why I should have to subsidize your crappy local governance.
	So long as you're taking...
	I've had a very basic rule when it comes to accepting federal funding.
	If you get in bed with the federal government, do not be surprised when you get effed, okay?
	And the fact that the federal government is now saying, we are not going to subsidize cities that refuse to enforce their own laws, frankly, I have no problem with it at all.
	You decided to rely on the federal government for your budget?
	That means there are strings attached.
	Hilariously enough, AG Letitia James, who is one of the most, Muelling awful public servants in America.
	And she's militarized her office against political opponents.
	When she was campaigning, she explicitly said that she was just going to go after Donald Trump.
	She said that she was going to go after political opponents, which is the opposite of what an AG is supposed to do.
	Normally, you identify criminal activity.
	And then, based on the identification of criminal activity, you go ahead and you prosecute the person who committed the crime.
	Letitia James identified the prospective criminal and then decided that she wanted to go after Donald Trump.
	She's a terrible, terrible AG of the state of New York.
	Nonetheless, here she was saying it's arbitrary and capricious to call us anarchic.
	Weird because Andrew Cuomo said like two weeks ago that if Donald Trump wanted to visit New York City, he would need an army in order to visit New York City, which sounds kind of anarchic, doesn't it?
	It's important that individuals understand that this president is doing nothing more than saber rattling, rattling to his base, using words and phrases that unfortunately are filled with racial overtones, couched and baked in racial overtones and appealing to his base.
	This is in violation of the Constitution, in violation of anti-commandeering statutes, in violation of the Tenth Amendment, in violation of the Spending Clause because Congress has the power of the purse.
	It is arbitrary and capricious, as you mentioned, because there are only three cities that are on this list.
	Okay, so maybe they should add more cities to the list.
	Honestly, like, if we're cutting federal funding, maybe we should add more cities to the list now.
	We'll find out in court whether it's mandatory spending or discretionary spending, but labeling cities that are badly governed as not great targets for federal dollars, on principle, it's not a bad idea.
	Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis in Florida has introduced legislation to combat violence, looting, and disorder.
	This would add new criminal offenses to the state law in Florida, a prohibition on violent or disorderly assemblies, a prohibition on obstructing roadways, and including that the law would say a driver is not liable for injury or death cost if fleeing for safety from a mob.
	Which, good!
	I mean, I've been saying for a while that if you're in a car and you're on a freeway and a mob surrounds you and starts pounding on the top of the car and jumping on top of the car and then you move the car, that would be on them.
	Here's the rule.
	You jump in front of a moving vehicle, that one's on you.
	You try and break into someone's car while they're in the car, whatever happens next, that should be on you.
	He's also pushing for a state prohibition on destroying or toppling monuments and a prohibition on harassment in public accommodations.
	So in other words, don't gather in front of somebody's restaurant and decide that you're gonna rush in and drink their beer and scream at them.
	And increasing penalties including mandatory minimum jail sentences and offense enhancements.
	This is good.
	Meanwhile, this has been declared racist by a bunch of people, of course, on the left, who believe that Black Lives Matter should basically be able to engage in any sort of violent activity they choose.
	And by the way, the Antifa Black Lives Matter movement have been invading the suburbs.
	Nellie Bowles, who's been doing increasingly excellent reporting, believe it or not, for the New York Times, right?
	She's the person who originally reported in the New York Times that Portland was a hell hole.
	Now she has a piece talking about Black Lives Matter protest tactics, Quote, Terrence Moses was watching protesters against police brutality march down his quiet residential street one recent evening, when some in the group of a few hundred suddenly stopped and started yelling.
	Mr. Moses was initially not sure what the protesters were upset about, but as he got closer, he saw it.
	His neighbors had an American flag on display.
	It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, how dare you fly the American flag, said Mr. Moses, who is black and runs a nonprofit group in Portland.
	They said, take it down.
	They wouldn't leave.
	They said they're going to come back and burn the house down.
	Mr. Moses and others blocked the demonstrators and told them to leave.
	We don't go around terrorizing folks to try and force them to do something they don't want to do, said Mr. Moses, whose nonprofit group provides support for local homeless people.
	I'm a veteran.
	I'm for these liberties.
	Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational and personal approach.
	The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come out of your house and into the street and demonstrate their support.
	These more aggressive protest tactics target ordinary people going about their lives, especially those who decline to demonstrate allegiance to the cause.
	That includes a diner in Washington who refused to raise her fist to show support for BLM, or in several cities, confused drivers who happened upon the protests.
	We don't need allies anymore, said Stephen Green, an investor and entrepreneur in Portland who is black.
	We need accomplices.
	And this is the shift in thinking that has been happening.
	This is what Ron DeSantis is trying to fight.
	That it's not enough for you to post the black square on your Twitter.
	Of course, it was never going to be enough.
	Now, you're going to be roped into whatever act of allegiance you require today.
	And by the way, there is no end to the demands.
	There is no end to the demands.
	The demands just continue.
	One of the leaders of this particular ideological movement is Ibram Kendi.
	Kendi, he wrote the book How to Be an Antiracist.
	It is a garbage, trite piece of tyrannical crap.
	It is unbelievably disgusting.
	The basic premise of How to Be an Antiracist is that on a top-down level, you should be forced into acquiescence to anything Ibram X. Kendi personally approves.
	In fact, he says, it's never ending.
	It's like a religious struggle.
	He says, you can't wake up one day and say, I'm out.
	I'm now an anti-racist.
	No one ever becomes an anti-racist.
	It's only something we can start to be.
	Ah, so it's a religious principle now, anti-racism.
	And that religious principle means that Ibram X. Kendi will get to dictate to you anything that he wants you to do, which is why he has explicitly called for a Department of Anti-Racism at the federal level.
	That the Department of Anti-Racism would be given the power to strike down, you know, when we talk about wrecking American institutions in favor of majoritarian tyranny, this is what we're talking about.
	Ibram Kendi would like to have a department that strikes down any local, state, or federal law that results in inequality between groups.
	Which would be every law, because it turns out there is no law that is guaranteed to provide equality between groups in result, unless you are going to take all authority up to the central government and then devolve particular benefits to everybody, which is exactly what Ibram X. Kendi wants.
	This is the crusade.
	When you combine the institutional dereliction and hatred that Democrats have for the Constitution, Unfortunately, on a broad level, a broader and broader level these days, with the Ibram X. Kendi vision of an American government that crams down on everyone, his version of language.
	Ibram X. Kendi is like, I'm anti, anti, he literally wants to rewrite words, right?
	He is anti-freedom.
	He says there should not be a designation of, I'm not racist.
	You're either racist or you're anti-racist.
	To be anti-racist means you have to be against the system.
	He's not shy about this.
	He says this openly.
	To be anti-racist means you have to tear down systems of power and institutions of power, and you have to be forced into being a quote-unquote accomplice, right?
	This is what you're seeing reflected in these marches.
	This is supremely dangerous.
	It tears apart the country.
	The fact that this is now repeated in diversity training at corporations, that people pay Ibram Kendi 20 grand a pop to tell their employees they need to tear down capitalism to fight racism, It's bizarre.
	It is the sign of a society in decline.
	It is the sign of a civilization that hates itself so much it won't even stand up for its fundamental principles, including the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
	And that's the real danger to the country.
	OK, we'll be back later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	While Democrats exploit the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Justice sends a message on her final wishes from beyond the grave.
	Then, rioters burn down more of our politics out of love and compassion, and BLM deletes its beliefs.

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