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Nov. 21, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:26
The Attempted Ideological Purge Continues | Ep. 1615
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After a horrifying mass shooting at a gay club in Colorado, the political left seeks to blame the right, Elon Musk restores Donald Trump's Twitter account to wild overreaction, and Merrick Garland names a special counsel to go after Donald Trump.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Well, terrible news over the weekend as a gunman killed five people and injured 25 at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
According to the Washington Post, at least five people were killed, 25 were injured after a man with a rifle walked into an LGBTQ nightclub here and opened fire, according to law enforcement officials who credited one or more club goers with subduing the shooter before more people were hurt.
The FBI is assisting with the investigation, which officials said is in its early stages.
As of Sunday morning, local and federal officials were trying to piece together details about the attack, including what may have led the gunman to the club, the suspect's criminal history, and how the shooter came to possess the weapon the officials say was used in the attack.
Charges will probably include first-degree murder.
Of course, because it is apparently first-degree murder.
Around 11.57 p.m.
Saturday, police received a call about a shooting at Club Q on North Academy Boulevard.
Lieutenant Pamela Castro, a spokesperson for the Colorado Springs Police, told reporters.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Southers said the first officer arrived on the scene within three minutes after being dispatched.
The suspect was subdued within two minutes after that.
One person inside the club just before midnight, a person named Joshua Thurman, told the Post that people were dancing as shots began to ring out.
We heard the music and then we heard pop, pop, pop, pop.
That was it.
So I kept on dancing, said Thurman.
When I heard another set of shots go off, that's when it clicked in my mind, and that's when I immediately took off and ran for cover.
A patron did tackle the gunman inside the club and prevented him from killing more people.
So, obviously, heroic action by somebody who was there to prevent more murder.
Nick Greshka is one of the club's co-owners.
He said that he and his co-owner had reviewed surveillance video that showed the gunman entering the building and immediately beginning to fire.
He says, I don't even know the names of the people who held him down.
What they did is incredible.
Club Q, which is the name of the club, did have an active shooter protocol, which Grishka's co-owner, Matthew Haynes, had followed to the letter.
The two owners arrived at the scene minutes after the shooting and gave surveillance camera footage to the investigators.
So this immediately raised questions as to who exactly the shooter was.
Apparently, the shooter is a 22-year-old with a, as you would guess, serious history of violent Imprecations.
A person with the same name, address, and date of birth as the suspect was arrested in June 2021 and charged in connection with making a bomb threat in the Lauriston Ranch community, a suburb of modest single-family homes on the southeastern outskirts of Colorado Springs in El Paso County.
According to a sheriff's office report at the time, a woman had called the sheriff's office to say that her son was threatening to hurt her with a homemade bomb and other weapons.
According to the report, after a nearly one-hour standoff, the shooter, or a person with the same name, surrendered without incident.
No bomb was found, according to the sheriff's office.
So, once again, we have the specter of a probably insane person committing a mass murder.
The question is how this person got his hands on weaponry, why this person wasn't under psychiatric evaluation.
This person was known to law enforcement, is what we are learning.
This person had threatened his own family.
Again, this is a common threat among mass shooters, is that they threaten members of their own family.
This happened obviously at Sandy Hook.
This happened also in Parkland.
The pattern here, obviously, is person with significant violent tendencies known to law enforcement who has threatened members of his own family.
That's a good place to start when you're looking for trying to screen out possible shooters.
Now, this has not prevented the entire political and media left from immediately determining that what this was, was probably a conservative Christian who just randomly decided to get up from a church and go murder a bunch of gay people at a gay club.
This is the line that is being taken by every member of the left, which is, if you oppose same-sex marriage, or if you don't like Drag Queen Story Hour, or if you think that children should not be indoctrinated into radical gender ideology or into the alternative Lifestyle ideology that suggests that all forms of sexual activity are equally meritorious.
And if you're a person who believes, in other words, in traditional social values, this means that you bear responsibility for a whack job murdering gay people at a nightclub.
This is the going line today.
President Biden said in a statement Sunday, although the motive is not yet clear, we know gun violence has a particular impact on LGBTQI plus communities across our nation.
Which is a weird statement because the truth is that LGBTQI plus people are traditionally not as gun owning as, for example, more traditionally minded Americans.
But, okay.
Says we must address this public health epidemic of gun violence in all forms.
We must drive out the inequities that contribute to violence against LGBTQI plus people.
I don't even know what that means.
The inequities that contribute to violence against LGBT, like what?
We're gonna give tax rebates to people and this is somehow going to prevent insane mass shooters from murdering gay and lesbian people at a nightclub?
But this is the line.
The line that is going here is that if you really wish to prevent violence against gay clubs, this means you have to support every element of the progressive agenda or you are complicit.
And this is a game that only gets played by one side of the political aisle.
Again and again and again, we see in public life, when there is a threat against a person of the right, when there is an attack by a member of a left-wing organization or an intersectional identity associated with the left against someone else, that we don't tie that to a broader ideology.
We don't attempt to suggest that it's the fault of everyone who has general beliefs in a broader social system.
Instead we say, well that's an individual and he believes an extreme thing and that person ought to be ostracized obviously.
But when it comes to the right, then the idea is that if a person who we don't even know what his views are on any of this stuff yet, even if it turns out this person has a manifesto that is wildly, horrifically anti-gay for example, does that mean that everybody who believes that same-sex marriage is wrong?
A societally approved same-sex marriage is wrong.
Does that mean everybody is now guilty for a person who goes and shoots up in a nightclub?
This sort of game is really ugly.
It's really hideous.
And again, it is only played by one side of the political aisle.
I've been saying for my entire career, as far as I'm aware, that when you have an act of violence, And the person who commits that act of violence is a whack job who is misinterpreting the words of a movement or a politician.
That person is not reflective of the movement or politician.
When a Black Lives Matter fellow traveler murders Dallas police officers in 2015, that is not the fault of Barack Obama.
It's actually not even the fault of Black Lives Matter.
When a Bernie Sanders supporter shoots up a congressional baseball game, that's not the fault of Bernie Sanders.
And yet, the entire left-wing media infrastructure and Democratic Party will immediately shift into, if you don't support every element of our radical social agenda, then you are responsible for murder.
It's an ugly, stupid game that is directed specifically at silencing people who disagree with you.
And you're seeing the media do this immediately.
So the idea here is that this is tied to a broader movement.
And you again see this over and over again from the left.
So Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez being irrepressibly foolish.
She had a series of tweets on this.
Lauren Boebert, who represents this area.
She tweeted out, the news out of Colorado Springs is absolutely awful.
This morning, the victims and their families are in my prayers.
The lawless violence needs to end and end quickly.
Which is a fine statement.
There's nothing wrong with that statement.
AOC immediately tweeted, Lauren Boebert, you have played a major role in elevating anti-LGBT plus hate rhetoric and anti-trans laws while spending your time in Congress blocking even the most common sense gun safety laws.
You don't get to thoughts and prayers your way out of this.
Look inward and change.
Unless you reflect the progressive ideology of AOC, you are responsible for murder.
So again, if you say that boys are boys and girls are girls, and if you say that we should not surgically mutilate 16-year-old girls who wrongly believe they are boys, this means that you are complicit in a person who had a history of threatening his own mother with a bomb, shooting a bunch of gay people in a nightclub in Colorado Springs.
This is the take from AOC.
And then she broadened this.
After Trump elevated anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric, we had the deadliest anti-Latino shooting in modern history.
After anti-Asian hate with COVID, Atlanta, Tree of Life, Emanuel AME, Buffalo, and now after an LGBT plus campaign, anti-LGBT plus campaign, Colorado Springs.
Connect the dots, GOP.
Well, the problem is that those dots don't connect.
First of all, the quote-unquote anti-Asian hate attack in Atlanta was directed against sex workers.
I mean, that's what it was.
And when she suggests that Emanuel A.M.E.
is the fault of Donald Trump, which is what she's suggesting there, Emanuel A.M.E.
happened, I checked the date, the day after Donald Trump announced for the presidency.
He was not respon- Like, there's no relationship there.
When it comes to the Buffalo shooter, the Buffalo shooter in his manifesto actively dissociates from Trump.
If we're going to talk about anti-LGBT Rhetoric and attacks.
The Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting was not connected with quote-unquote right-wing rhetoric.
It was connected with a person who appeared to be a radical Muslim.
The only dots that connect here are that law enforcement has all of these people on their screen and they miss every single one of them.
That's the dot that apparently needs to be connected.
But again the idea here from AOC and company is always and forever, that if something terrible happens, then we can connect it to our political opponents.
Jason Buttigieg did the same routine.
As you repeat Buttigieg's husband, he tweeted out at Lauren Boebert, you encourage this type of hatred.
Get off Twitter and start looking inward.
Look inward, look inward, look inward.
Again, I'm not going to be lectured on looking inward by people who use The actual instances of horrific evil violence as an excuse to attack political opponents who are not in favor of the horrific evil violence.
Did Lauren Boebert call for shootings at nightclubs?
Did I miss that part?
Who's called for that?
I'm going to need some evidence that these things are connected, as opposed to you just saying it.
And we see this over and over and over again.
I mean, going all the way back to the shooter of Gabby Giffords being linked to Sarah Palin without any evidence whatsoever.
This is the stupid game.
Nancy Pelosi, by the way, did the exact same thing.
Nancy Pelosi put out a statement suggesting that it was the fault of MAGA Republicans that this had happened.
So she put out this long statement.
Remember, this is the moderate, historic speaker of the House.
This is the person who brought Americans together as historic figures.
The thing Nancy Pelosi should be remembered for is that she was an extraordinarily polarizing political figure who had no fear whatsoever of saying the most ridiculous, absurd, and insulting things about her political opponents.
For folks on the left who are constantly talking about how Donald Trump polarized the environment and Donald Trump made things worse and Donald Trump created this giant rift in American public life, Nancy Pelosi is a major factor in that.
As I've said before, Donald Trump was the coroner.
He was not the killer.
Nancy Pelosi, she put out this statement, quote, As our nation marks Transgender Day of Remembrance, the House Democratic Caucus mourns the countless Americans stolen away by the scourge of transphobic violence, a crisis that continues to disproportionately harm trans people of color.
By the way, statistically speaking, the idea that there is a wild, disproportionate wave of violence against trans people on the basis of being trans, there's no evidence to actually suggest that that is true.
Listen, every murder, every hate crime is evil.
But the notion that transgender people are being disproportionately targeted in the United States for death by apparently raging MAGA hat-wearing pieces of crap, the evidence for that does not actually exist statistically speaking.
Anyway, Nancy Pelosi says, that fight remains more urgent than ever as right-wing extremists target transgender Americans' most fundamental rights and freedoms.
Whether spouting dangerous rhetoric from cable news desks or openly bullying schoolchildren from the halls of power, Bullying school children?
It seems to me that bullying school children amounts to taking five-year-olds and indoctrinating them in the idea that they can be members of the opposite sex and insisting that we not actually inform their parents of any of this.
That seems like bullying.
But, she continues, MAGA Republicans are cruelly undermining the safety and well-being of our transgender community.
I'm not sure what the connection is between saying a boy can't be a girl and a girl can't be a boy and go shoot a person who is doing that.
So there are a bunch of dots that are just not being connected by Nancy Pelosi, but you don't need the dots.
The dots don't need to be connected.
They don't even need to be dots.
The entire idea here is my opponents are evil.
Therefore, I will attribute the most evil of actions to people who are not even at this point associated with them and people who, again, there's no evidence drew inspiration from them.
And even if they did, there's no evidence that person is sane in the first place.
She says, horrified by such shameless bigotry, House Democrats are proud to march along our trans friends, neighbors, and siblings as we work to uphold justice and dignity for all.
That is why we enacted fully inclusive federal hate crime protections with the historic Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr.
Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
It's why the Democratic House has twice passed the Equality Act, landmark legislation extending the full protections of the Civil Rights Act to LGBTQ Americans.
Again, the idea here is that if you vote against the Equality Act, which is the greatest single violation of religious freedom in the history of the United States, That if you vote for that thing, if you don't vote for that thing, then you are complicit in murder.
Quote, heartbroken for so many beautiful souls murdered by hate and guided by relentless activists across the country.
Let us renew our resolve to build the future our children deserve.
Together we will forge a safer, more just America, one where people of, where all of its people can freely and proudly exercise the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That is an amazing statement there by Nancy Pelosi.
Again, the idea is that if you do not If you do not back Nancy Pelosi's radical left-wing agenda, then you must be guilty of murder.
And then people wonder why polarization in American politics is getting worse.
The one thing that I generally will not say about my political opponents is that they are people who are engaged in wanton murder of people like me.
That's not something that I generally do.
Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite, but I do not believe that Ilhan Omar is responsible for wanton murder of Jews.
She hasn't openly called for that.
It's so embedded, apparently, in our political rhetoric at this point that the left just gets to do this.
And as soon as there is an attack, regardless of the evidence, before the evidence is even in, you can immediately just say, well, probably this is Lauren Boebert's fault.
Or probably this is Tucker Carlson's fault.
Or probably this is Matt Walsh's fault.
Or maybe it's Libs of TikTok.
There are people literally on Twitter yesterday who are saying that Libs of TikTok is responsible for this attack because Libs of TikTok posts video of drag queen performances in front of small children.
People must never be made aware of this.
If they're made aware of this, then obviously they go on massive shooting sprees in Colorado Springs, and that is the fault of Libs of TikTok.
That's the real problem here.
Now again, I keep coming back to the fact that this particular shooter, this particular shooter, is a person who threatened his mother with a bomb and ammo and other weapons.
Where is law enforcement?
How many times can law enforcement fail and then the generalized political climate gets blamed?
So the New York Times has a fascinating piece today from their editorial board.
It's called There Are No Lone Wolves.
Now, this is not something that they used to say about Islamic terrorism.
When it came to Islamic terrorism, everyone was a lone wolf.
But now there are no lone wolves.
What they mean by this is that everyone is tied into the broader political situation.
There's no such thing as a lone wolf, so you can blame a bunch of people who didn't commit murder for people who do commit murder.
And here is what the New York Times says.
It's unfortunate the term lone wolf has come into such casual use in the years since the September 11th attacks.
It aims to describe a person, nearly always a man, who is radicalized to violence but is unconnected to an organized terrorist group like Al Qaeda.
But it is wrong to think about violent white supremacists as isolated actors.
And then the New York Times points out there are in fact formal white supremacist organizations.
While the majority of adherents to the white supremacist cause aren't directly affiliated with these groups, they describe themselves as part of a global movement of like-minded people, some of whom commit acts of leaderless violence in the hopes of winning more adherents and destabilizing society.
The atomized nature of the global white extremist movement has also obscured the public's understanding of the nature of their cause and led to policy prescriptions that aren't enough to address the scope of the threat.
Thoughts and prayers alone will not solve the problem, nor will better mental health care, important though all those things are.
One missing piece of any solution is acknowledging that right-wing extremist violence in the United States is part of a global phenomenon and should be treated that way.
Okay, fine.
So then what you would have to show is that there's actual associations that are illegal between people in the United States and people abroad, for example.
And then you'd have to prohibit that.
But that's not what they're actually saying.
What they're actually saying is when they say global white supremacist movement, they mean Donald Trump and people who disagree with the New York Times editorial board.
Quote, there's been a steady rise in political violence in the United States in the years since Donald Trump became president.
Threats against sitting members of Congress have skyrocketed.
The husband of the Speaker of the House was assaulted in his home by a man wielding a hammer.
So now we are connecting the nut job who hit Paul Pelosi with a hammer while prancing around his underwear.
We're connecting that nutjob to the nutjob who shot up a Colorado gay club, and we're connecting both of those people to Donald Trump.
And we're connecting Donald Trump to everyone who voted for him, and we're connecting everybody who voted for him to the broader conservative movement.
This year, venues from school board meetings to libraries have been the sites of physical clashes.
The majority of political violence in the past few years has come from white-wing extremist experts, which, again, whenever they say experts, say you understand that that comes with the asterisk of left-wing experts, considering we saw the most damaging riots in American history in 2020, and that was not considered left-wing violence by any of the quote-unquote experts.
The country cannot accept violence as a method of mediating its political disagreements.
Okay, I would like for you to explain which mainstream members of the conservative movement have accepted violence as a method of mediating political disagreement.
Then the New York Times says there are steps the U.S.
should take now, including cracking down on illegal right-wing paramilitary groups and weeding extremists out of positions of power in the military.
Extremists succeed when they have access to power, be that positions of power, the sympathy of those in power, or a voice in the national conversation.
They should be denied.
All three.
Again, this is where they go.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So according to the New York Times, this shooting is the result of people who watch Fox News or people who voted for Donald Trump.
You want to talk about a danger to our liberties?
A danger to our liberties is when you just associate the worst acts of evil violence with people who you politically disagree with without showing any actual connection between the two.
It's a terrible thing to do in a representative democracy.
So the New York Times editorial board says violent right-wing extremists harbor a variety of beliefs, from a loathing of the government to explicit white supremacy.
During his time in office and in the years since, Trump and his political allies have not only encouraged political violence through their silence or otherwise, through their silence or otherwise, So, in other words, if you don't say anything, silence is violence, is the new line.
They've also helped bring explicitly white supremacist ideas, like the Great Replacement, into mainstream politics and popular culture.
Now again, I point out that Chuck Schumer literally said last week, in public, on a microphone, that we're not having enough babies in this country, so we need to bring illegal immigrants from south of the border up and legalize them.
That was Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader.
And then they quote Oren Segal, the VP of the Center of Extremism at the ADL, quote, this extremism isn't going to go away or moderate until people who have normalized it realize their culpability in the things that it inspires.
And then they try to link again this shooter to Stephen Miller of the Trump administration, quote.
White supremacy has been a part of the story of the country since its earliest days, but the modern notion of replacement is a foreign import. It was outlined in 2012 by Renaud Camus, a French author who has written that immigrants with high birth rates are a threat to white European society.
By the way, what exactly does this have to do with the shooting of gay people at a nightclub in Colorado? No, again, everything is one thing, according to left.
Because when you make everything into one thing, when it's just a giant bowl of mush, then you never have to explain exactly why you're associating the murder of five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado with Stephen Miller.
But if you just put it into the bowl of mush, then you just blend it up, and then it's mush, and then it's good, and then everything is the same.
A shooting at a gay club in Colorado is the same thing as Stephen Miller recommending harsher immigration limitations.
The book is a touchstone in white supremacist circles and is popular with some prominent Republicans.
Stephen Miller, a senior official in the Trump administration, once recommended the book to the staff of Breitbart when he was a Senate aide, according to emails obtained by the ADL.
The idea of hostile replacement by immigrants has gained currency and some acceptance around the world, even after inspiring mass killers in New Zealand and Buffalo, Norway and South Carolina.
Extremists driven to murder are a tiny fraction of those who subscribe to racist ideologies, but the mainstream of their ideas can make the turn to violence easier for some.
That's why it's alarming to see the Great Replacement idea espoused by political leaders around the globe.
And then they cite Viktor Orban and Tucker Carlson.
They say that the Great Replacement theory has gone mainstream as a victory for white supremacists and their cause.
One of the best ways to counter a global ideology of violent extremism in a country that also wants to protect civil liberties is to create problems with extremists.
To work to make them less popular and less capable.
Domestic law enforcement agencies in the United States says the New York Times editorial board already have effective tools to target organized extremist groups, including wiretaps and undercover informants.
A pervasive problem, though, is the political will to turn the power of the state against white supremacists.
So, again, they're not even explaining how they would do this.
They keep saying that we have the tools, for example, to actively fight people who are involved in groups planning violence.
But they don't want to limit it to that.
And herein lies the problem.
And this, broadly speaking, is just an entry point, because everything is the same, because it's just all mush in a bowl.
This is a broad entry point into the left's disdain for Elon Musk and Twitter.
Because the idea here is that if, broadly speaking, right-wing speech is evil, and if that evil speech leads to violence, then follow the bouncing ball.
An act of violence can be associated with right-wing ideology without any particular connection.
And then, that right-wing ideology can be associated with free speech.
And free speech is a white supremacist implementation because it assumes neutrality, and only the powerful are benefited by neutrality.
And that means you have to have active social media spaces that bar opinions the left doesn't like.
You see how that works?
And what that means is that it's very bad that Elon Musk, for example, is letting Donald Trump back onto Twitter.
So over the weekend, Elon Musk did a public poll of people at Twitter, followers at Twitter, should Donald Trump be allowed back on the service or not?
And like 51 to 49, it went that Trump should be allowed back on the service.
Now, was Elon Musk not going to allow Donald Trump back on the service if the votes had come in against Donald Trump?
I have significant doubts.
I think that Musk was going to let Trump back on Twitter.
He's a presidential candidate.
He shouldn't have banned from Twitter in the first place.
Musk has a broader version of free speech than his predecessors over at Twitter.
For what it's worth, by the way, Musk is also saying that he is not going to allow Alex Jones back on Twitter due to Alex Jones' anger and consternation.
I will say this for Elon Musk.
What Elon Musk is doing is he's basically taking sort of personal accountability for who is let back on and who is not let back on.
He says, you have questions, come to me.
Which actually is a more honest standard than what Twitter was doing.
Twitter was presenting a false objective version of what was allowing people to get banned or not.
Musk is just saying, listen, I'm the king over here.
And that means I'm the Cottie under the tree.
You come to me, you ask, and maybe I'll let you back on.
But at least he's taking accountability for all that.
OK, fine.
So Musk lifts the ban on Donald Trump.
And the left goes insane, totally insane, because the idea is that it is actively dangerous for Donald Trump to be allowed to speak.
Now, remember, this guy was the president of the United States.
I didn't like a lot of the things he tweeted.
I made very clear that I thought that what he said between the election and January 6th was not backed by evidence and was explicitly designed to foment chaos.
I didn't like any of that stuff.
But should he be on Twitter?
Of course he should be on Twitter.
He's a major political figure.
It is insane not to have him on Twitter.
But apparently, it is an active danger to have him on Twitter.
Because if he says things that you don't like, things that you consider to be lies, then obviously, the world becomes a worse place and violence becomes more common.
You, however, are pure as the driven snow, and you have never said anything that would lead anyone to do anything bad.
Because you're right, and he's very bad.
And you know this because you're like God, and so you can actually determine that.
Now again, I'm not going to pretend that I like everything that Donald Trump says.
I'm also not going to pretend that free speech spaces ought to be designed according to my whim.
That is not the way that this works.
So according to Politico, Musk said that Trump will be reinstated on Twitter, making good on his promise to lift the ban on the former president who had been banished for violating the platform's rules against inciting violence.
Now again, that was always unbelievable that he had been banned for inciting violence, considering he did not call for violence.
I know the left has been continually struggling with this, but Donald Trump saying bad things between November 4th and January 6th Did not actually mean that he was quote-unquote inciting violence.
To incite violence, you have to say, I wish for you to go and harm this person.
It is not enough for you to say, that person is doing something wrong.
I don't like what that person is doing and we should protest.
Incitement is a very high legal standard.
Does that mean that, again, I can not like a lot of things.
I don't like a lot of what the left says.
I'm not going to blame Barack Obama for police officers getting shot in Dallas.
I'm not going to blame Bernie Sanders for Congress people getting shot in Virginia.
That's not the way this works.
But the left will!
And so the idea is that Donald Trump being on Twitter is a great danger to everyone.
Musk had posted a Twitter poll on Friday asking users to weigh in on whether Trump should be allowed to return.
Late on Saturday, the tech billionaire tweeted that based on the results of the poll, the people who have spoken, Trump will be reinstated.
As of Saturday night, Trump's account was live on the platform.
Now, whether Trump decides to come back is another question because Trump decided to sink some of his money, not too much, but some of his money into TruthSocial.
TruthSocial does not have a huge user base.
It has a fairly small user base.
But if Trump starts tweeting on Twitter, it basically kills TruthSocial.
So Trump made a statement saying he is not coming back to Twitter.
I cannot imagine that that's going to be true, considering that over at TruthSocial, he has like 5 million followers.
And on Twitter, after being reinstated for like a day, he has 70 million or something.
TruthSocial is through the roof.
It's doing phenomenally well.
TruthSocial has been very, very powerful, very, very strong.
And I'll be staying there, but I hear we're getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter.
I don't see it because I don't see any reason for it.
Okay, so he says there's no reason for him to go back on Twitter because TruthSocial is such a massive success.
Not true.
But bottom line is, it's the left's reaction that's really telling right here.
So you have Sam Harris who says that he should not be allowed back on Twitter because he spreads dangerous lies.
This is Sam Harris who, the same Sam Harris who, by the way, said that he would not have cared if Hunter Biden, like, killed and ate children.
Maybe the story should have been suppressed before the election because, after all, Hunter Biden was not a danger to the Republican Donald Trump was.
He tweeted out, if you do bring him back, you shouldn't, please have a terms of service that covers the deliberate spreading of dangerous lies and then apply it.
He'll be off again within a week.
Now, the question is, what constitutes a dangerous lie?
What constitutes a dangerous lie?
Well, I mean, I think that there are many dangerous lies on Twitter that are routinely allowed.
In fact, some of them are trended on Twitter for months at a time.
But again, there's no actual standard here for the left, except I don't like it, so it shouldn't be exposed to the public view.
I don't like a lot of things.
They should still be exposed to the public view.
See, the Adam Schiff, who for years paraded around saying that essentially the Republic was in the hands of the Russians because Donald Trump had been rigged into the presidency by Russian collusion.
And he's like, well, no, of course we shouldn't allow Trump back on Twitter because that would just be, that'd be terrible.
I want to begin with the news overnight that Donald Trump has been reinstated by Elon Musk on Twitter.
Watching the January 6th committee hearings, Trump's tweets were a big part of the story to be told.
What do you think of him being back on Twitter?
I think it's a terrible mistake, and you're absolutely right.
As we showed in the January 6 hearings, the president used that platform to incite that attack on the Capitol.
His comments about the vice president, his own vice president, put Mike Pence's life in danger.
He showed no remorse about that.
He continues to lie about his actions on that day.
Again, trotting out Adam Schiff to talk about lies in public life and what should and should not be allowed is a hell of a move by ABC News.
Speaking of the news services, one of the funniest things was that CBS News over the weekend had said that they were going to halt activity on Twitter because of, quote unquote, security concerns.
They said, after pausing for much of the weekend to assess the security concerns, CBS News and stations is resuming its activity on Twitter as we continue to monitor the situation.
So they stayed off of Twitter for a grand total of less than 40 hours.
They were like, wow, Twitter is not a safe place.
It's not a safe place.
In 40 hours, they were like, man, we still got to get some clicks.
So maybe we should go back on Twitter.
And this is the stupid game that we are supposed to believe they play, is that there's some sort of principle here.
There is no principle.
There really isn't.
It's just a matter of, can we somehow pressure people into silencing opinions that we don't like?
And that really is a danger to the Republic.
See, the thing is this.
There are people who are dangerous to human beings.
Those people typically have a lot of red flags attached to them.
A normal person who follows politics, I mean like a sane and rational person who follows politics, typically does not pick up guns and go start murdering random people at a gay club.
That's not what a normal person does.
Normal people do not go and shoot up schools.
Normal people do not go and shoot up the Walmart.
Almost always.
In fact, I would venture to say in every case I know of publicly, except for one, the Las Vegas massacre, where we still don't know what the hell happened there.
Every single other mass shooting that we know of involves a person with violent tendencies who was known to police before.
This is an easier pattern to spot and call than it is to actually say entire broad scale political movements that represent half the country are responsible for extremists who attach themselves to the movements and then to the violent extremists who attach themselves to the extremists.
And yet, the left is using what's happening out here to go after this.
And that's their... That's the whole shtick.
And that's why it's connected to what's happening with Trump.
So Jonathan Greenblatt over at the ADL, he tweeted out, and it's just, I'm sorry, it's a terrible tweet thread.
For Elon Musk to allow Donald Trump back on Twitter ostensibly after a brief poll shows he is not remotely serious about safeguarding the platform from hate, harassment, and misinformation.
I mean, again, at least Musk is making himself accountable.
He's like, listen, I'm making the call.
Blame me if you don't like it.
Greenblatt says, as we've said before, Trump used Twitter to foment intolerance, issue threats, and incite a violent attack against the U.S.
government.
Moreover, he has shown no indication he would do anything different if given the opportunity.
When ADL and other stop-hate-for-profit leaders met with Musk, he committed to not replatform anyone regardless of stature until he installed a transparent, clear process that took into consideration the views of civil society.
I mean, frankly, a public poll is a pretty transparent, clear process that takes into consideration the views of civil society.
It's actually better than a backroom coterie of dudes with cigars figuring it out.
Greenblatt said, Elon Musk's decisions over the last month have been erratic and alarming, but this decision is dangerous and a threat to American democracy.
Trump speaking on Twitter is a threat to American democracy?
Is American democracy really that fragile?
Is it really that fragile?
He said, we need to ask.
Is it time for Twitter to go?
Elon Musk then tweeted back, hey, stop defaming me.
Fair enough.
And it wasn't, by the way, just the ADL.
The NAACP did the same thing.
The NAACP called for a complete pause by all advertisers still funding Twitter after the restored accounts access to Trump.
So Trump being on Twitter means that all advertisers should stop advertising on Twitter.
And the NAACP will use whatever political weight it still has in order to go after advertisers, presumably that spend their money, on Twitter.
We'll get some more on this in just a second.
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OK, so it's not just the ADL that is going after Twitter for the great sin of of readmitting Donald Trump.
Also, the NAACP is.
So NAACP President Derrick Johnson sent a bunch of tweets In Elon Musk's Twitter sphere, you can incite an insurrection at the U.S.
Capitol, which led to the deaths of multiple people, and still be allowed to spew hate speech and violent conspiracies on his platform.
Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising if Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy.
God help us.
And then he added, your garbage poll means nothing.
Did people outside the US vote?
Did you reach out to marginalized communities, the targets of Trump's rhetoric, for their input?
Your followers don't represent America.
So in other words, if you don't agree with Derek Johnson, then this means that all advertisers should stop spending their money over at Twitter.
Now, here's the thing.
Do you think the NAACP would have a free speech standard over at Twitter?
Do you think the ADL would have a free speech?
Do you think anybody on the left would have anything remotely approaching a free speech standard over at Twitter?
Now, free speech is not unlimited at Twitter, right, as Alex Jones just found out.
The legal standard of free speech is not what actually applies to Twitter.
There is, in fact, an Overton window.
It's just that Elon Musk's Overton window, meaning the spectrum of speech that is considered Permissible in a free society and socially acceptable, should we say, in a free society is much broader than the left version.
The left version of the Overton window, that window within which you must play unless you are going to be socially ostracized, that window for the left is about a centimeter tall and a centimeter wide.
It's very, very, very narrow.
That Overton window suggests that you have to believe in every radical social policy that the left propagates every single day, or we will cast you out from the Overton window.
Elon Musk's is much, much broader.
That doesn't mean that it covers literally everything.
It doesn't mean that if you go on Twitter and you say, Hitler is right and all the Jews should be murdered, that Elon Musk will be like, OK, well, let's leave that on there.
He's not.
The Overton window still exists.
With that said, his Overton window is a lot broader.
Now what the left would like is to actually dictate what everyone can think and believe and say.
I've never called for people who've personally targeted me on Twitter to be thrown off the platform.
I've never called for anybody on the left to be thrown off the platform.
I've called for people who listen to my show to listen to shows that rival my show.
I've told people, you know, when you're forming your own political opinions, you should listen to my show.
And then you should go listen to like Pod Save America.
Pod Save America would never say that about my show.
I assume that people at Pod Save America would like my show thrown off the air.
The same thing is true for a lot of people on the left, generally speaking.
And this is why you cannot trust when all of these organizations are out there suggesting that they're out there for the protection of the American public.
They have identified their own viewpoint as the only correct viewpoint, so correct in a religious sense, that everyone else must be cast into the outer darkness.
And this is why they're so angry that Elon Musk is in control of Twitter.
And it's the same reason why they're perfectly willing, in the most cynical fashion, to blame active violence on their political opponents without any linkage.
It's an amazing phenomenon and it's really, really cynical.
And it's been going on for at least a couple of decades at this point.
And it needs to stop.
If you wish to have a society where we can air out these views and discuss them, which I do.
If you wish to have a society, a democratic republic, where we have conversations about tough, rough topics.
In a substantive way, you're going to have to allow other views to exist, and you're going to have to be able to counter them with actual arguments rather than attempts at censorship or linkage with violence, which is a backdoor attempt at censorship.
Because obviously, when you link speech with violence, you're saying that speech is violence, that particular speech is violence, and that that speech should be banned, because violence, of course, is illegal and should be illegal.
This is the game that is being played right now, and if you don't spot it, and if you don't fight back against it, it's a real problem.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of religious liberty, now again, the left's claim, Nancy Pelosi's claim, is that if you don't back the Equality Act, somehow I assume you're complicit in murder or something.
The reality is that the bill that the Senate just voted cloture on, this what they call Respect for Marriage Act, which is really the undermining of the definition of marriage act, which at a federal level essentially enshrines the idea that same-sex marriage is morally equivalent to traditional marriage in every conceivable way, and will allow a few of you crazy religious bigots to continue doing what you're doing, but only maybe in your actual religious lives, not in your business, not in your schooling, not in any of that stuff.
When it comes to your actual activities as a religious person in everyday life, We won't allow you to do that sort of stuff.
But when it comes to your church, we'll kind of wink and nod and we'll pretend that it's okay.
Well, there's an amendment that's being proposed by Mike Lee at the Senate level that should absolutely be taken up by Republicans.
Lee put out a letter talking about what this quote unquote Respect for Marriage Act does.
He says, my amendment would ensure that federal bureaucrats do not take discretionary actions against individuals, organizations, nonprofits, and other entities based on their sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions about marriage by prohibiting the denial or revocation of tax-exempt status, licenses, contracts, benefits, etc.
It would affirm that individuals still have the right to act according to their faith and deepest convictions even outside of their church or home.
If Republicans don't vote alongside that, and if Democrats don't vote alongside that, it'll tell you everything you need to know.
If that can't hit closure, what that says is that Respect for Marriage Act is a Trojan horse for going after people of a different belief stripe than you with regard to same-sex marriage.
I would be shocked if Lee's amendment passes, but if the left actually wishes to show that they're willing to allow a plethora of views, pluralism as David French says, if they're willing to allow that, that would go a long way toward it.
I just don't think they'll do it.
I think they'll shoot down Mike Lee's Amendment.
I think they'll shoot down Mike Lee's amendment specifically because it says it actually does what the Respect for Marriage Act pretends it's going to do.
It actually makes it material.
And the left doesn't want that.
That's not something they'll go along with.
Alrighty, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Donald Trump.
We'll be getting to the World Cup and virtue signaling with Rainbow Armbands, plus a new boss over at Disney, same as the old boss.
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