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March 19, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:36
The Cancellations Will Continue Until Morale Improves | Ep. 1219
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Alexi McCammond is forced from her job as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue for tweets from her teenage years.
Democrats continue to defend their rotten COVID policy, and the left continues to insist that anti-Asian racism is an outgrowth of white supremacy alone.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so.
We begin today with the continuation of cancellation.
The cancellations will continue until morale improves.
So here's the thing.
Unless you are just pure as the driven snow, and I mean, you haven't said a word since you are a baby, because we know from a wide variety of left-leaning studies that babies begin to get racist around three months.
I'm not kidding.
These articles have been reported in NBC News.
This means that basically the only people we should be allowing to have any sort of influence in public life are people who have not spoken a word Since they were capable of speaking.
Basically, anybody who has spoken, like, when you learned language as a toddler, when you were like 13, 14 months old and you really started to learn how to say words, at that point, you need to shut the hell up.
You need to shut the hell up all the way until you want a job at Teen Vogue.
That is the way this now works.
Is that nothing you say is off limits.
Everything you have ever said is going to be held over your head for all time.
Because what we have created in this country is an arbitrary system of justice whereby, since everything is online and since we can basically surveil everything that you have ever said, we can always dig up something from your past to hit you with.
If you become inconvenient, we can just punish you.
See, there's this notion in law that selective prosecution is a bad thing.
That if you're holding one person to a standard and everybody else to a different standard, that that is unfair.
But that is the way that our social media social justice crowd works right now, is that the standards are completely arbitrary.
The points don't matter, and then we name a winner.
Whose line is it anyway?
At any given point, we can go back into your past, pluck a thing that you said, and then we can use it to hit you over the head, even if you've apologized for it or explained it away 10 million times.
And this is exactly what happened to Alexi McCammond.
Now, listen.
Some of us here on the right are willing to defend people on the left or in the center who get canceled for no reason other than the animus and spite of a bunch of woke staffers who have decided that they are the purity police and have decided they don't want this particular person in power at this particular time.
Because make no mistake, this is not about a principled stand that anyone who has ever said anything bad must be ousted because we've all said things that are bad.
We all have bad social media posts.
If you've been online for more than a couple of years, the chances that you have said something at some point that is unpleasant are really, really high.
In fact, if you've ever used email or text messages, if you've ever been on WhatsApp, if you've ever been on like a group board, if you've ever done any of those things, the chances that you have said something that could be taken out of context or misinterpreted or that you actually said something bad are 193%.
Because we're all human and we all sin.
As it says in Ecclesiastes, we have all sinned.
Every single one of us.
But we have a society where we can arbitrarily choose which sins to bring up at any given time, and then we can choose to just destroy you.
So this is what just happened to Alexei McCammon.
Now, Alexei McCammon is not a member of the right.
Alexei McCammon is a member of the left.
Alexi McCammon was hired by Teen Vogue specifically because they said they wanted to make their editorial page and their editorial oversight more diverse.
Alexi McCammon is a black woman.
Well now, she's been ousted from her job at Teen Vogue because a bunch of 23-year-old woke staffers decided that tweets that she sent when she was a freshman in college, like 10 years ago, that she sent when she was a freshman in college, are bad and racist.
And they are, they're not good tweets.
But that this is an excuse for now denying her a career promotion.
And this is usually how it works.
Well usually, Alexi McCammon wasn't cancelled when she was over at Axios.
Alexi McCammon wasn't cancelled when she was reporting stories from the White House.
Alexi McCammon was cancelled when she felt that she had reached the apex of her career thus far.
The same thing happened with Kevin Hart.
In other words, keep your head down, try not to get any level of career advancement.
The moment that you advance a little bit, that is when they club you.
Same thing with Gina Carano.
As soon as Gina Carano hits the Mandalorian, suddenly the hate comes out.
As soon as Chris Pratt is doing Guardians of the Galaxy, that's when all the hate comes out.
The higher you rise in your career, the more people want to tear you down, and so they will just bring up anything from the past in an attempt to smear you and destroy you, and it doesn't matter, again, whether you've repented, because we are not a culture of repentance.
We're a culture of graceless jackassery.
According to the New York Times, Alexi McCammon, who made her name as a politics reporter at the Washington news site Axios, had planned to start as the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue next Wednesday.
Now, after Teen Vogue staff members publicly condemned racist and homophobic tweets Ms.
McCammon had posted a decade ago, she has resigned from the job.
Condon asked, as Teen Vogue's publisher, they announced the abrupt turn on Thursday in an internal email that was sent amid pressure from the publication's staff readers and at least two advertisers just two weeks after the company had appointed her to the position.
So, Alexi McCammon put out a statement about this.
So did HR, obviously, because you always have to have a statement from HR.
Alexi McCammon's statement was an announcement, of course, that she was no longer going to be the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue.
She wrote, quote, I became a journalist to help lift up stories and voices of our most vulnerable communities.
Again, she's not a member of the right.
As a young woman of color, that's part of the reason I was so excited to lead the Teen Vogue team in its next chapter.
My past tweets have overshadowed the work I've done to highlight the people and issues I care about, issues that Teen Vogue has worked so tirelessly to share with the world.
First of all, does anyone understand the irony of Teen Vogue, which is the teen version of a fashion magazine, like a high fashion magazine, deciding that they are now the moral police?
Teen Vogue?
It's where you go for your political morality.
Teen Vogue, which writes pieces every few days about how socialism is wonderful.
Hey, Conde Nast and I have decided to part ways, says Alexa McCammon.
I should not have tweeted what I did, and I have taken full responsibility for that.
I look at my work and growth in the years since and have redoubled my commitment to growing in the years to come as a person and as a professional.
I wish the talented team at Teen Vogue the absolute best moving forward.
Their work has never been more important.
I will be rooting for them.
There are so many stories left to be told, especially about marginalized communities and the issues affecting them.
I hope to have the opportunity to rejoin the ranks of tireless journalists who are shining light on the issues that matter every single day.
Okay, so, we'll see who hires her next.
Because apparently advertisers are so afraid of this, they are so cowed by the woke staffers, that they are deeply concerned that if Alexi McCammon were to edit Teen Vogue and they were to be associated with that person, then they would lose, what, their consumer base?
The sheer cowardice of people in institutional power, and the sheer brazenness of all the woke staffers who decide that they get to decide who their bosses are, is pretty impressive.
Again, if a bunch of employees at the Daily Wire came to me and they were like, you know what?
We don't like the stuff that you've been saying on your show.
And so you're supposed to now fire yourself.
My answer would be, no, that's not your job.
The Teen Vogue publisher should have said to the woke staffers, guess what?
You don't get to appoint the EIC.
I get to appoint the EIC.
But all of these companies are so afraid of their own staff and they're so afraid they're gonna be accused in other media outlets of being racist and terrible.
They're so afraid they just fired a black editor.
Okay, Alexi McCammond is a black woman.
That didn't save her, because she crossed swords with the woke, because the woke decided they didn't like her enough.
Kansan asked, their HR department put out an entire statement and said, hi everyone, Yoshika Olden, our Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, again, the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer is the most Orwellian title in all of American corporate life, because it's not about inclusion or about diversity, certainly not on an ideological level, it's about complete corporate conformity rammed down from the absolute top.
That is what the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer always is, and it's a billion-dollar industry.
I mean, multi-billion dollars.
As of 1990 or something, we were spending $8 billion on diversity initiatives at these various companies.
Now it's got to be a multiple of that, obviously.
Yeshika Olden, our Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, i.e.
a professional useless person, and I have had conversations with many of you over the past week.
We know this has been a challenging time for so many.
Really, was it a challenge?
Was it a super challenging time that you read a tweet that was 10 years old from a freshman in college, and you thought to yourself, God, my life is ruined.
Why don't I just get rid of this person?
Our most important work as a company right now is embodied in the focused efforts we are all undertaking to become more equitable and inclusive.
By equitable and inclusive, they mean not inclusive, and we need to fire somebody.
Our commitment to these issues is sincere and unwavering.
It is fair to say that Alexi McCammon's appointment with Teen Vogue brought many difficult and important conversations to the forefront over the last few weeks.
I want to be fully transparent with you about our decision-making process regarding her appointment.
When Alexi was a teenager, she made racially charged statements on social media about Asian people.
Alexi was straightforward and transparent about these posts during our interview process and through public apologies years ago.
Okay, so that should be the end of the conversation.
It's one thing if the company says, I was sandbagged, right?
I had no idea that this stuff was out there.
And now that I found out, well, that changes the math.
But they knew she had dealt with it in the interview process.
And this company was still so pusillanimous, still so cowardly, they decided to dump her on the side of the road.
After saying, yeah, we see what you did, and we accept your explanation and your apology and the fact that you've grown over time.
It's amazing, amazing stuff, right?
So they're actually reversing their own grace that they'd given this woman.
Given her previous acknowledgment of these posts and her sincere apologies, in addition to her remarkable work in journalism elevating the voices of marginalized communities, by the way, all of that kind of stuff where they talk about journalism elevating the voice of the marginalized, that is an ideological goal.
Journalism is usually covering the news, but now you're considered a good journalist if you are ideologically driven to cover certain stories at the expense of other stories, but that is a side point.
They say we were looking forward to welcoming her into our community.
In addition, we were hopeful that Alexi would become part of our team to provide perspective and insight that is underrepresented throughout media.
We were dedicated to making her successful in this role and spent time working with her, our company leadership, and the Teen Vogue team to find the best path forward.
To that end, after speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed it was best to part ways so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue.
Again, all that important work.
You need that important work.
Various sexual positions, as well as the latest in Lady Gaga's makeup.
I'm including the notes you shared on Twitter today.
As always, the People team and I are here to support you and answer any and all questions you may have.
Thank you for your patience with us.
Thank you for your patience with us?
What patience?
We're available to meet with you and your teams to continue these important conversations.
Amazing, amazing stuff from HR.
Again, it's a graceless, terrible society, and the cancellations will continue until morale improves.
Now, I gotta tell you, as a conservative, I'm rooting for the cancellations.
I'm rooting for the cancellers.
I'm rooting for the cancellers at this point.
I hope that they cancel everybody on the left side of the aisle so that they learn that cancellation is bad.
Okay, because if they gotta burn down the village in order to save the village, go for it, guys.
I'm rooting for you.
I'm here for you.
You guys wanna cancel a bunch of decent people who are attempting to do good work because you are graceless jerks?
Guess what?
Plenty of room on this side of the aisle for you.
You want to wish everybody out in the cornfield?
Eventually, there are going to be enough of us here out in the cornfield that we vastly outnumber you.
So you want to continue doing this?
You're just going to open business opportunities for those of us who do not accept the fundamental basis of the nonsense you are now proposing.
You want to keep canceling Gina Carano?
I'll just hire her.
You want to cancel a bunch of journalists?
We'll hire them.
You woke corporations decide that you wanna cater to your woke base, we'll just form corporations that are not woke, and we'll cater to a much broader and more diverse base, ideologically and racially speaking, probably.
Just keep doing it, guys.
Just keep it up.
You're doing great.
You're making America a better place one cancellation at a time.
And then they, what's amazing is that these people actually think that they're making the country more pure.
They probably do.
I mean, I'm gonna grant them the purity of their intent.
Or is it just that they have nothing better to do?
And their lives are empty.
The people who spend their days trolling the internet for bad old comments to cancel people.
Their lives are empty.
They have no sense of community.
They have no sense of grace because they don't actually deal with human beings.
They just deal with people online.
And they go for the retweets and the clicks.
And so the goal is the destruction of other human beings for fun and profit.
Guess what?
At a certain point, the fun stops being fun.
And you're gonna make those of us who are not on the side of the cancelers, the actual profitable ones.
Just keep doing it.
Just keep doing it.
You're stuffing money in the pockets of your political opponents.
You're giving us all political credibility.
So I hope that this continues.
And I hope the Democratic Party continues to cater to it.
I hope the folks at Teen Vogue continue to do this sort of stuff.
Because eventually, it's just going to be the woke talking to themselves.
That is the choice that they made, by the way.
The way this works is that the only way Alexi McCammond could have gotten out of this, presumably, was not only to apologize for her past commentary, but to have joined the Borg, to have assimilated to the Borg, and found them another target for them to attack.
Right?
Don't kill me.
Kill that person over there.
But Alexi McCammond didn't do that.
Or maybe it didn't matter.
Maybe no matter what she did, they were going to take her down.
And the fact that you have now brought me to the point where I've now defended, over the past few years, Sarah Zhang, who's awful, Alexi McCammon, with whom I wildly disagree, James Gunn, who I wildly disagree with, and is in favor of cancel culture, and is awful, I will defend people from having their lives ruined because these rules are not rules that anybody can live by.
But if the left continues to live by these rules, they're gonna alienate everybody, and good.
Good.
I hope they do continue this.
I hope they alienate everybody.
Okay, meanwhile, COVID policy continues to be a contentious issue.
It is amazing to see the Biden administration continue to downplay, simultaneously upplay the success that they've had on vaccine distribution, and downplay the actual effectiveness of the vaccines.
It's kind of a weird combo.
Because on the one hand, they want to say that Biden's done a wonderful job tranching out the vaccines, which The administration has done fine.
I'm not going to pretend they've done horribly.
They haven't done, like, amazing.
Again, by the end of February, they were supposed to have 100 federal mass vaccination sites.
They had 7.
It's the states that have been doing all the heavy lifting with regard to the vaccinations.
But they've been talking up Joe Biden's performance on COVID.
At the same time, they've been saying that we have to wear masks until the end of time because, you know, the vaccines might not solve all the problems and all of this.
They've been saying the schools have to remain closed, but the schools can kind of open, but they should remain closed.
Their COVID policy, in other words, has been a bag of garbage, but they want it both ways.
We're doing a great job on COVID, and also COVID still haunts the land, which is why you need us.
Now, here's the thing.
In order to promote that, they have to promote a bunch of bad science.
So yesterday, Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky, he questioned the great and glorious Dr. Anthony Fauci, second best doctor in America, after Dr. Joe Biden, who, of course, will diagnose you with a need for a junior college degree should you have a heart attack.
Dr. Anthony Fauci appearing in front of Rand Paul's committee, And Rand Paul points out that once you are vaccinated, once you've gone through the vaccinations, and once you've had COVID, then wearing a mask is essentially theater.
That you are wearing a mask because it makes other people feel comfortable.
But the reality is that if you want people to get the vaccine, if you want to cut down on vaccine hesitancy, what you tell people is, you can go back to regular life after you've had both doses of the vaccine in your two weeks past the last dose.
He's right.
He's absolutely right.
Rand Paul in this exchange is 100% correct, and Dr. Anthony Fauci is wrong.
Scientifically speaking, Rand Paul is correct.
I checked the work, okay?
So I went to Dr. Marty Makary, frequent guest on the program from Johns Hopkins University.
He's written in the Wall Street Journal.
He was a member of several prior administrations.
And I said, in this exchange, who is right, Fauci or Paul?
He said, Fauci is just wrong.
Okay, so the case that you're about to hear Rand Paul make is that once you're vaccinated, or once you've had COVID, you now have immunity, right?
You are now immune.
We don't know how long the immunity lasts, but we do know that the immunity is pretty damn good, and there is no countervailing data that suggests widespread second infections.
And so once you do that, why are we worried about you wearing a mask?
We shouldn't care whether you wear a mask at that point.
And he says to Dr. Fauci, what you're doing is just for show, right?
You've been vaccinated.
So why exactly are you double masking?
It's just pretend at this point.
And Fauci's answer, which is that there might still be variants out there, Is an answer without a limiting principle.
It's like saying, sometime in the future, an asteroid could hit Earth.
So we better prepare for it now.
Okay, well, I mean, how?
By wearing a mask every single day?
He says that there could be variants that come along that are really bad.
Yes, and there could be a brand new pandemic tomorrow that could be really bad.
So maybe we should just keep wearing masks forever.
The point that he is making is not scientifically correct.
The vaccines have been extraordinarily resilient against most of the, virtually all of the variants.
There's one single situation, I believe in Brazil, in a very small area where there was a variant that did not end up spreading beyond that, that had some secondary infections.
But there is very little evidence at this point at all to suggest, in fact, no major study, as Rand Paul points out, that suggests that if you're vaccinated or if you've had COVID, that you should be deeply worried about a second wave of COVID from a variant, so why are you wearing a mask?
Here's Rand Paul pointing this out to Fauci, and Fauci getting angry that he's being called on the carpet.
What studies do you have that people that have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection?
If we're not spreading the infection, isn't it just theater?
No, it's not.
You've had the vaccine and you're wearing two masks.
Isn't that theater?
No, it's not.
Here we go again with the theater.
Let's get down to the facts.
In the South African study conducted by J&J, they found that people who were infected with wild type and were exposed to the variant in South Africa, the 351, it was as if they had never been infected before.
They had no protection.
Okay, except for the fact that when these South African variants have hit Europe, when they've hit the United States, in places where there's been mass vaccination, you're not seeing secondary infections.
There is no evidence in the United States at all, and as far as I'm aware, no evidence in Europe, that there has been widespread secondary infection of people who have already been infected with COVID from the variants.
The variants are, in fact, variants.
Some of them spread faster.
Some of them are apparently more deadly.
But vaccination has thus far been extraordinarily resilient to that.
And if you've already had COVID, the generalized notion that the variants are now going to reinfect you and kill you, maybe you get reinfected, but the severity of the infection is another matter that matters here.
The masks are in fact theater at this point, if you've already been vaccinated.
And yet you have the entire administration saying that you're supposed to wear the mask until when?
There's no end point here, because a variant could arise literally at any point along the line.
Again, there's no limiting principle here.
That's what's so weird about the position that this administration is taking.
They have to justify their policy.
They have to justify masking until the end of time.
They have to justify lockdowns.
Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University yesterday, he did a presser, and he points out lockdowns have not stopped the spread.
He did this presser with Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.
The international evidence and the American evidence is clear.
The lockdowns have not stopped the spread of the disease in any measurable way.
The disease spreads by aerosol, by droplets.
It's a respiratory disease.
It's very difficult to stop.
The idea of the lockdown is incredibly, I mean, in some ways, beguiling.
If you just stay apart far enough, like rats in cages, We won't spread the disease.
The humans are not like that.
Okay, and that is exactly right.
What you've seen is that places that did lockdown, like New York or like California, they got hit just as hard as places that didn't lockdown.
In some cases, significantly harder.
By the way, how unscientific is the Biden administration?
The CDC is now revising its guidelines on COVID distancing.
They're supposed to do that today.
They're supposed to point out that in classrooms, kids can be three feet apart.
We just spent a year doing six feet apart for no reason at all.
So when people say follow the science, what they really mean is just listen to experts who tell you stuff that's not based on the science.
That's where Fauci comes in.
And then they wonder why people have doubt in our scientific institutions.
If you can't explain the science, then you're doing a bad job.
End of story.
Okay, meanwhile, the entire media has decided that this shooting in Atlanta is once again evidence of America's widespread white supremacy, which is a weird take considering, again, we have no evidence at this point that the accused gunman, the alleged gunman, that this piece of crap targeted the women because of race.
We have fairly good evidence at this point that he targeted these particular places because they were sex shops that he had visited before.
According to the New York Times, he checked himself into a rehab clinic for a self-described sexual addiction.
He was so intense on avoiding pornography, he blocked websites from his computer and only used a flip phone.
He worried to a roommate about falling out of God's grace.
Months before the shooter, we don't mention shooters' names on the show, was charged with carrying out a bloody rampage at three massage parlors that horrified the nation and stoked a furious outcry over anti-Asian violence, the 21-year-old suspect who'd grown up in a conservative Baptist church appeared fixated on guilt and lust.
Okay, so the New York Times is saying that this is about sex addiction.
It's about guilt and lust, by all of the available evidence.
And presumably, the New York Times also thinks this is about religion, because if religion didn't make you feel so guilty about your guilt and lust, then you wouldn't do this sort of stuff, which is a pretty extraordinary claim.
As investigators on Thursday pieced together whether and how racism and sexism might have motivated Tuesday's attacks, people who knew the shooter offered new details about a dangerous collision of sexual loathing and what a former roommate described as religious mania that marked his life in the years before the shooting spree.
This guy went to a church that strictly prohibited sex outside of marriage, was distraught by his failed attempts to curb his sexual urges, said a former roommate.
Nearly once a month, he would admit he had again relapsed by visiting a massage parlor for sex, said the roommate.
He once asked the roommate to take his computer away from him.
Atlanta police said on Thursday that the shooter had been a customer at two spas in the city that were targeted in the attacks that killed eight people overall, including six women of Asian descent.
They did not specify whether he had sought anything more than a massage at the two businesses, Aromatherapy Spa and Gold Spa, both of which appear on sort of sex place listings online apparently.
Apparently when the shooter was arrested, he said he was on his way to Florida to carry out another attack on a business tied to the pornography industry.
He's been charged with eight counts of murder.
Okay, so it seems pretty obvious that this is chiefly not about race.
What this is chiefly about is this guy's perverse views on sex, his blaming women in the sex trade for his own inability to control himself.
And there are plenty of issues to discuss there.
The sexualization of American culture, how people deal with things like pornography addiction, which is a very real thing.
Where the blame ought to lie, how we deal with that in a society that champions the virtues of sexual profligacy.
There are all sorts of issues to discuss here.
But race is pretty low on the evidence-based issues to discuss.
Again, there's not a lot of evidence that this guy was doing this because he hated Asian people.
There's a fair bit of evidence that he was doing this because he hated sex workers.
He hated massage shops that were actually brothels.
Now, the Atlanta police have come under a lot of fire because the Atlanta police have just reported what this guy said.
Here is the deputy police chief, Charles Hampton, saying that he doesn't have a position on whether it was a hate crime or not because they literally have no evidence at this point it was a hate crime.
The investigation into a possible hate crime, that's still on the table.
Our investigation is looking at everything, so nothing is off the table for our investigation.
What is APD's position on that?
I don't have a position.
Like I said, I'm only going to comment about our investigation.
And again, we're not prepared to talk a lot about what has been said because, again, we're not trying to try the case in public.
The media are hungry for a narrative.
How hungry are they for a narrative?
There was a police spokesperson yesterday who did a presser on this and talked about how the suspect had said that he had a really bad day.
That's what the suspect said.
He didn't say, I think he had a really bad day.
He said the suspect told us that he had a really bad day.
So he was narrating what the suspect had said.
There's a jackass online named Aaron Rupar.
He's a terrible, terrible source of misinformation.
He frequently cuts things out of context and then just puts them up.
He put up the clip as though the police chief, the police spokesperson, was making the claim that this guy had a really bad day and somehow this justified the murders.
That is not true.
I mean, it's overtly not true.
If you just look at the entirety of the clip that he took out of context, what you'll see is that the police spokesperson was relaying what the suspect had said.
The blowback against the police officer was so strong that people were calling for his firing.
People were saying the police officer should be fired for even narrating the words of what the suspect had told them.
Because the narrative is obvious, right?
The narrative is that this was anti-Asian animus, that it was an anti-Asian hate crime.
And the reason the media are intent and focusing on this particular story as an anti-Asian hate crime is because their narrative is anytime there is hate, and it can be tied to broader American quote-unquote whiteness, then we can talk about racial hatred.
If it's hatred between blacks and Asians, you can't talk about that at all.
That is an unmentionable thing.
Yes, now I want to make a correction on yesterday's show.
So yesterday's show, I talked about violent crime statistics by community.
And I pointed out that violent crime statistics by community, if you look at the victimizers of Asian people in violent crime, it was disproportionately black people who were targeting Asian people in crime.
Now, that was not hate crime statistics, okay?
So that could just be casual crime.
That could just be a black person robbed an Asian person or something.
And when I say disproportionate, I mean that about 24% of all crimes committed against Asians or by Asians, about 24% are committed by whites against Asians, and about 25% are committed by black people against Asians.
But that's normal everyday crime.
I mean, that's not necessarily racially motivated.
So I wanna correct the record on that, okay, because that was wrong.
The information was incorrect.
What we do know is that according to the FBI statistics, there were more than 4,000 hate crimes in the United States in 2019.
About 4.4% of those were committed against Asian Americans.
Which amounts to about 220 crimes against Asian Americans.
They don't give the source of the crimes, so we don't actually know who is committing the hate crimes against Asian Americans.
But we have no evidence, by the same token, to suggest that it is quote-unquote white supremacy that is responsible for the uptick in anti-Asian violence.
And the anecdotal evidence shows that there's been a pretty significant spike in violent crime, including in the major cities.
That are not being done by white people, predominantly.
If you look at a major crime uptick in New York City, there's been a major murder uptick in New York City, major murder uptick in Los Angeles.
If you look at that, you wouldn't automatically say, well, that's an outgrowth of white supremacy.
That'd be a weird take.
So if you say there's been an elevated level of crime in New York City against Asian-Americans, or in Los Angeles against Asian-Americans, and your first take is that's white supremacy?
These cities are extremely racially diverse.
These cities are very much to the left.
The notion that you had a bunch of red-hatted MAGA trolls who, you know, people who are like, well, you know, he said Chinese virus.
I'm gonna go target a Chinese person today.
That's what's been happening in America's major cities, which is where most of the spike is happening.
Kind of a weird take.
Certainly evidence-free.
There's no basis for, and evidence for that.
But the narrative must be promulgated at all costs, because the narrative is always the same.
America broadly writ is to blame, and America broadly writ is a white supremacist country, and thus, any bad thing that happens is attributable to the white supremacy.
I've even seen the argument that even if it is disproportionately black people who are harming Asian American people in the United States, that that is an outgrowth of white supremacy, because our white supremacist system has forced conflict between minorities.
It's the, you know, the atheists will talk about how religious people who don't know how to defend their religion will kind of use the God of the gaps argument.
We don't know why X happened, therefore God.
There is a racism of the gaps argument, a white supremacy of the gaps argument that is frequently used, not just frequently, ubiquitously used by the left.
Something bad happens, therefore, racism of the gaps, right?
White supremacy of the gaps.
We don't know why there's been this uptick in anti-Asian crime.
White supremacy, it must be white supremacy.
Must be Trump.
Must be a bunch of things that I don't like.
It can never be the possibility that maybe there's a disproportionate amount of minority on minority violence in this particular situation.
Which, by the way, again, if you look at the overall crime statistics, there is a disproportionate amount of black on Asian violence, just by percentages of population.
We'll get to more of this in just one second because this also goes to which kind of stories are ignored by the media and which kind of stories are covered by the media and how exactly the media cover these stories.
The broader point here, which is that the media are blaming the right wing for this without any evidence whatsoever at this point, that's undeniable.
The editorial board at the New York Times says Asian Americans are scared for a reason.
Bigotry and demagoguing have pushed communities close to a crisis point.
So the suggestion, of course, is once again that it was Donald Trump that is responsible for the uptick in anti-Asian crime, even though the uptick in anti-Asian crime is happening almost entirely in large metropolitan blue areas.
After a year of vitriol and violence against Asian Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic, it's long past time to admit the country has a problem.
A year ago this month, after the pandemic had already established a beachhead in the United States, this board wrote, There's a long history of diseases triggering waves of violence against Jews during the Black Death right through the animus linked to Ebola, SARS, and Zika.
Chinese Americans and other Asians, lumped together with them by races, are being beaten, spat on, yelled at, insulted from coast to coast.
The president then was Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump said China virus again this week during a Fox News interview.
There is no evidence that this was driven by Trump saying China virus.
And by the way, the virus did come from China.
That is not an anti-Asian sentiment.
That's asinine.
That's like saying that the South African variant of the virus should be blamed on South Africans or the Brazilian variant of the virus should be blamed on Brazilians.
It's just a location.
The Spanish flu did not mean that you're supposed to be a racist against people who originate from Spain.
And again, there's no evidence to suggest that this is a result of Trump saying China virus over and over and over.
But the message has to be promulgated, and this is a broader problem.
Our media are basically now saying that anytime a crime is committed by a white person against a person of another race, the answer must be racism.
But if a crime is committed by a minority against a person of another race, then the answer is also white supremacy, but by extension.
Hey, you've created a completely unfalsifiable thesis here.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Alrighty folks, it is that glorious, glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Dailyware member.
Today, it is Marissa on Instagram who knows you need the right energy fuel to help tackle today's parenting tasks.
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Also, there's a lot of buzz in the air here Candace Owens filmed the first episode of her new show this week.
It's all anyone in the office can talk about.
It looks fantastic.
Candace does an amazing job.
Folks, you're going to love the show, but you have to be a member.
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Now remember, all of this is a broader argument by the left.
And that broader argument by the left is, if a white person does a bad thing, that is reflective of American racism and white supremacy and whiteness more generally.
And we can impute intent without actually showing evidence of intent, right?
This does tie back into the general cancel culture idea, which is that it's the impact of your words that matters, not why you said it or what you did.
So this sort of thought has sort of seeped in this sort of strict liability notion of how we ought to treat fellow human beings.
This has seeped into every area of our discourse.
So Trevor Noah over on Comedy Central who, I mean, I used to, it's in the name of the network, Comedy Central, but I'm just wondering where the comedy went.
Now it's just Central.
So Trevor Noah He says the Atlanta shooter is clearly operating from racist premises.
Now, here's the thing.
Again, I don't know whether he's a racist.
Maybe he is.
Maybe he isn't.
He's crap either way.
It turns out you don't have to be a racist to be a complete piece of crap.
There are lots of people who are awful, evil people who are not, in fact, driven primarily by race or racial animus.
Happens all the time.
There are lots of people who commit evil, horrifying crimes against members of their own race.
They are evil and horrifying.
But since the great sin in America is not actually doing things that are evil, but being a racist, There is only one type of sin that lies at the root of all other sin.
In any case, here is Trevor Noah making the strict liability case, which is, if you are a member of, if you are a white person, and you hurt a non-white person, we do not even have to investigate intent.
The actions themselves are racist, so we don't even have to listen to what you have to say in order for us to impute your action to all of America, her background, her history, and her institutions.
One of the first things that's been the most frustrating for me is seeing the shooter say, oh, it wasn't racism, it was sex addiction.
First of all, fuck you, man.
You killed six Asian people.
Specifically, you went there.
If there's anyone who's racist, it's a mother who killed six Asian women.
Your murders speak louder than your words.
Six Asian women were killed.
Okay, so your murders speak louder than your words.
Okay, so by his standard, by his standard, which is your actions speak louder than your words, so we can impute racist intent, then I can, by Trevor Noah's standard, go back to the stats I was using yesterday, in which some 27% of all violent crimes committed against Asian Americans are committed by Black Americans.
A wildly outsized number.
More Asian Americans are victimized in violent crime by Black Americans than by members of any other race.
Now, earlier, I corrected the record because I said, I don't know whether those are racially motivated or whether they're not, whether they're just street crime.
But according to Trevor Noah, I don't even have to do that.
I can say that because Black Americans target Asian Americans for crime at outsized rates, that must mean that that is racial hatred that is driving it.
Now, I can do that by his standard, except I can't, because the standard only works this way with white people.
It only works this way with white people, according to the left.
Which is why it is not a major national news story when two black teenagers light a mentally ill man on fire and let him die in Rochester, New York.
Now, you know if the races were reversed, this would not only be a national news story, it would be the only national news story.
If there were two white teenagers, 16 and 14, and they'd found a mentally ill black man, and then they had set him on fire in his own home and burned him to death, That would certainly be not only a national news story, it would spark a thousand think pieces about what kind of culture could create kids who would do such a thing.
How the ingrained history of 400 years of racism in America had led to this sort of evil.
As it is, you've never even heard this story.
I mean, it's not a national news story.
It's one of the things you'll find wonderful about our establishment media.
They get to decide what a national news story is and what a national news story is not.
It is not a national news story every weekend when a dozen people get shot to death in Chicago.
It is a national news story if a white person says a mean thing to a black person and it's caught on tape.
Because again, the narrative is more important than what actually is the news.
By the way, here's that story from Rochester, New York.
is according to Amanda Prestigiacomo, two black teens have been charged with assault and arson in connection to the brutal death of a mentally ill white man in Rochester, New York.
The two reportedly sneaked into the home of the man on Friday afternoon, sprayed him with an ignitable fluid and set him on fire until 70% of his body was covered in second and third degree burns.
A man identified as either a mail carrier or a gas and electric worker burst into the apartment to try to put out the burning man, who was apparently left to die.
By the time the 911 call was made and police arrived, it was too late.
The victim fought for his life for four days in a burn trauma unit before he passed.
The story was reported by local station WHAM 13 News, but the races of the individuals involved were not specified.
Rochester journalist and radio host Bob Lonsbury made the races public and highlighted the double standard in news coverage that has contributed to the deterioration of Rochester, a city engulfed in a at times violent campaign against police officers over alleged racism.
Citing law enforcement sources, Lonsbury reports the teens instructed the victim during the incident to tell authorities it was two white men who perpetrated the crime.
A police source confirmed Lonsbury's reporting to the Daily Wire.
Again, the races were considered irrelevant when this was reported by WHAM 13 in Rochester.
Is there any circumstance, any circumstance, where the races were reversed?
Or where white teens had burned to death an Asian person?
Or any minority person, for that matter?
And this is not a national news story that leads the nightly news every night for several weeks?
Any situation, of course not.
Of course, that is the chief news story.
But if it's a white person you impute, this is the rule of the left these days.
If it's a white person you impute intent.
Intent matters if it's, it does not matter if it's a white person.
And if it's a minority person who does something terrible to a white person or a black person who does something terrible to an Asian person, then we try to brush that under the rug a little bit because the only racism that matters is of course racism combined with power.
Now what's amazing about this is the entire argument is that racism combined with power is true racism.
This is the argument you'll hear from the radical racial left.
That racism is not just animus about other racial groups.
It is that combined with institutional power.
But who actually has the institutional power when the only narrative that you are allowed to promulgate is this narrative?
That's the irony.
Who is the actual institutional power here when certain types of crime get brushed under the rug as racialized crime?
And other types of crime that there's no evidence are racially based are treated as racial crimes.
Who has the institutional power when that narrative is not only promulgated, but if you deny the narrative, you are considered out of the mainstream and crazy and terrible.
And racist, by the way.
Who has the actual institutional power here?
It is not the supposed white supremacists who run the system, is it?
The treatment of these cases, the disparate treatment, is pretty telling.
And the media are just going to repeat this stuff over and over and over again.
So CNN's Lisa Ling, she went on the air and she said Americans are always scapegoating minorities.
That's what that's what Americans do.
That Americans are constantly scapegoating minorities.
No, actually.
And if we're going to talk about scapegoating minorities, you can't say all Americans, because that breaks the leftist taboo against saying that some Americans of minority status might victimize other Americans of minority status.
If you're going to talk about Americans blaming minorities, you might want to talk about the left, which literally says that we have to shut down merit-based high schools because too many Asians are doing well, and that we should have discriminatory admissions policies into major universities because Asians are doing too well.
That's not the narrative you're gonna hear on CNN.
On CNN, it is wonderful and progressive to bar Asian-Americans from high-performing high schools, and in fact, to shut down the high schools entirely, as they're doing in New York and San Francisco.
But it is anti-Asian, if you can find no evidence that somebody did something that's anti-Asian, per se, did something evil, but no evidence yet that it's anti-Asian specifically.
One of those things is anti-Asian, one of those things is clearly not, but it's not what the media are telling you.
Here is Lisa Ling, again, blaming America for all of this.
Asian people are being scapegoated like they have for a century in this country, and this has to stop?
This has to stop.
We cannot be continued to be scapegoated.
And this is frankly a pattern of scapegoating that happens in this country.
Yesterday, it was Muslim and Southeast Asian people after 9-11.
When there's an economic downturn, it's the Latin population.
You know, it's always the black community being scapegoated for so many things.
During the Cold War, it was gay people.
This scapegoating of entire populations Has to stop in this country.
Okay, you noticed something.
I'm just going to notice something right there.
That narrative is so... Her final line does not comport with everything else that she has said there.
The scapegoating of entire populations has to stop in this country.
And then she names a bunch of people who have been victimized by the American system.
Asians.
Gay people.
Black people.
Latinos.
You noticing one group that is never mentioned here?
Ever, ever, ever, ever?
White people, of course, right?
Those are the victimizers.
In all those circumstances, it's white people who are the victimizers.
What if not every story comports with that?
What if it turns out the vast majority of white people Are not racist.
What if it turns out the American meritocracy is not racist?
In fact, it is the American meritocracy that has led to Asian Americans being the highest earning income group in the United States.
But so long as the narrative is the narrative, it must be preserved at all costs.
Intent doesn't matter.
Evidence doesn't matter.
Only, only the narrative matters.
Which is why you have Olivia Munn on national television saying that a sheriff from Atlanta who is just repeating the words of the suspect ought to lose his job.
First of all, I don't know why Olivia Munn is an expert on this.
I mean, she's a person of Asian ancestry, but I assume they could have found, like, an actual political expert of Asian ancestry.
Turns out there are many of them.
Here's Olivia Munn on MSNBC.
This captain actually tried to humanize the shooter in this way.
It just dehumanizes all of the victims.
And then to find out that he had been posting racist Facebook posts about blaming the pandemic on China, I don't even know how this guy still has a job.
It's just mind-boggling, but it makes so much sense once you see where he stands.
He is a racist.
And he shouldn't have that job.
How can he protect and serve all of us when he clearly has viewpoints that he hates a large portion of us?
Okay, she literally has no evidence of this.
The entire evidence that this police staffer is apparently a bad guy, this police captain, is that he wore a shirt that said China virus.
That's the entirety of it.
And he was not defending the shooter.
He was literally just relating what the shooter said.
It was taken out of context, and then they called for his head.
Because again, you notice the race on that police officer?
That's the way that it works in the United States.
Intent is not necessary to impute racism to white people in the United States.
My view is consistent.
If you can show racist intent, that is an act of racist evil.
But you require evidence.
You require intent.
And you don't get to attribute to the entire American quote-unquote white supremacist system crimes that are committed by specific people without an actual explanation of how that happened or why that happened or how that occurred in the first place.
The left doesn't need evidence.
All they need is just a talking point.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
So, head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.
Eastern and tune in.
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