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June 10, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes
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20200610_Wed_Barnes
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Welcome to Wednesday, June 10th, 2020.
as we approach Election Day.
It's getting closer and closer.
And to American Countdown, as we discuss not only the end of the pandemic, lockdown, hopefully comes soon for the rest of the world, where it suddenly reignited interest as President Trump talked about holding rallies.
Suddenly, there was a interest in the pandemic again and how the pandemic and COVID-19 would block or should block Trump's rallies, which are particularly effective.
But that is a difficult call for politicians and the press to make when they have greenlit protests all across the world in the name of BLM and other related groups.
In the same context, in fact, they've seized the City Hall in Seattle, which is of course entirely indoors, and yet somehow the virus magically vanishes or disappears.
If it's good enough for protesters to seize Seattle City Hall, then it's good enough for the president to start holding rallies.
But part of the broader effort of sort of these new this new police is not just a to defund the existing police and replace them with some left version of the Stasi, but or to replace them with just gangs on the street as is happening in Seattle.
In fact, Seattle has part of the city has been blocked off from any police presence and has been taken over by Antifa.
Of course, the last time they did that, it devolved quickly into Antifa trying to extort local businesses for contributions that were within that area and things of that nature.
Indeed, that's how the Black Panther Party also devolved back in the 1970s.
It had sort of the three E's of embezzlement, extortion, and enforcer for criminal operations.
So in that same capacity, we're seeing the same thing happen again now.
But it's not just the idea of replacing the physical police, the law enforcement police, It's increasingly a red guard mindset or mentality to replace the thought police.
As more and more people are getting laid off or fired because of their speeches or ideas, canceled culture continues to consume larger and larger parts of American society based solely on a person's thoughts or ideas.
Increasingly, not only is there big tech acting as a big brother Orwellian censor of people's thoughts and ideas by removing videos, by Limiting people's ability to hear, limiting ability to people to speak, limiting people's ability to see what they want to see, hear, or speak.
But it goes beyond that.
One of the methods and mechanisms and means of that control comes from an article in Breitbart.
Democrats are going to use the Pentagon-funded AI system to target pro-Trump narratives online.
Democrats have converted an AI project that was initially funded by the Department of Defense to combat propaganda from ISIS into a tool to track down and counter Trump supporters on social media.
The quote, Defeat Disinfo group is being advised by retired Army General McChrystal, who was popularly portrayed by Brad Pitt in a movie making fun of how he handled the Afghanistan debacle.
The project is called Defeat Disinfo, a creation of an entrepreneur, and it was initially funded by the Pentagon's top secret DARPA research agency.
So they're actually going to use this state-funded technology to try to remove Trump supporters and try to block Trump supporters from spreading Trump-favored messages.
This is the new form of Big Tech Big Brother politics.
But it even goes to a certain degree beyond that.
And that is the way in which public opinion polling is being manipulated.
For that we should go into a history of public opinion polling.
The very idea that you could talk to, say, a thousand people, and from that tell the world what 300 million plus think, was always something rooted as much in art as it was in science.
Indeed, in the past, polling had more credibility because it was more scientific and less artistic as it has become over time.
Recent polls released over this past weekend are trying to create a narrative, shape a narrative, try to plant thoughts and shape thoughts rather than actually honestly reflect the thoughts of the American public.
This reflects core problems of polling that are deliberately manipulated by the pollsters to create and shape a false reality.
To give you an example of the history of polling, the first examples of it were back to the 1890s and 1900s where local party leaders or local precinct chairmen or local news reporters would simply poll the neighborhoods and communities they knew to get a sense for how the election was going.
That polling ended up being pretty accurate in predicting things.
The next stage and wave of polling was the use of postcards in the 1920s and 1930s.
The initial postcard poll ended up being accurate, though kind of accidentally accurate.
But the next postcard poll turned out to be widely inaccurate.
It predicted FDR would lose in 1936.
That gave the rise to a new pollster, George Gallup.
The reason why that poll failed was because polling, as a pollster told me when I was a kid, I asked him, how does polling work?
He explained, well, polling tells you who you polled.
That's the number one thing it tells you.
It doesn't necessarily predict, forecast, or accurately reflect public opinion at any given time.
Because you're only polling a tiny sample of the relevant population, the ability to make it scientific requires a discipline that is often absent from politically motivated pollsters.
So you can shape opinion, you can try to create opinion through a poll, but its ability to accurately reflect or forecast depends on the degree to which the polling is more scientific than artistic.
In that respect, George Gallup came up with the idea of going door-to-door.
The reason why the postcard poll failed was because it polled a disproportionate upscale group of voters who were disproportionately likely to not vote for FDR in 1936.
It was not accurately reflective of the public opinion across the country.
George Gallup hired people to go all across the country to farming districts and urban districts, knock on people's door, and take in-person polling.
His polling ended up being extraordinarily accurate, though even there it often predicted the winner but did not predict the margin of victory.
Indeed, while he kept continuously correctly predicting the election winner in almost every election between 1936 and 1968, he would notoriously get the 1948 election wrong.
Indeed, you could have forecast that if you had looked at his prior margin of error, which constantly understated FDR's support in 1936, 1940, and 1944.
So though he predicted Roosevelt would win, he didn't predict the margin right in any of those three elections, and the bias all went in one direction against FDR in that context.
Why was that?
It was because his people had difficulty tracking the voters of rural working class voters particularly, but also some urban working class precincts, that they had difficulty getting an accurate read and knocking on the doors of those places.
It was still a much more accurate mechanism and methodology than we often see today because they were going door-to-door and taking massive sample sizes of thousands and thousands of people.
They would poll on average once a month.
But in 1948, he famously predicted Truman would get wiped out.
The reason why he did so is because he missed the rural working class, which came out in huge droves for Truman.
In fact, Truman's election was one of the most class-divided elections in American history.
Because of this tendency to oversample upper-middle class voters, a problem that has not disappeared from the polling history, that is what led him to notoriously get it wrong.
He tried to tighten down the way in which he did sampling to try to more accurately reflect those neighborhoods in future polling and tended to be closer to being accurate than he had been before, but still often missed the margins.
But as a whole, it did not matter too greatly because the class division that occurred in 1948 did not reoccur until 2016.
So often the fact that he was undersampling working class voters did not ultimately translate to public opinion.
There has been a long history of polling's difficulty tracking the opinions of African-Americans and Latinos, but it's not limited to them and it's also been extended to the working class writ large.
Then in 1968, people started getting phones at such a scale that he could shift from using in-person polling to using live landline polling.
Most people had a landline, and from 1968 till 2000, over half the people who were called by a pollster would answer the poll.
That helped improve pollsters' accuracies.
They still were often wrong by a certain percentage and tended to have certain institutional biases because of who answered the poll.
Partisans tend to answer more than non-partisans.
Upper middle class people tend to answer more than working class people.
But it generally did not impact the polling outcome or polling prediction in many elections.
Though he did, though Gallup did predict that Ford would win in 1976 in that very close election, when in fact it would ultimately go to Jimmy Carter.
Then what happened around 2000, two things came into play.
First, more and more people started abandoning the landline and shifting to cell phones, mobile phones.
Well, there was a particular method of calling landlines.
They would call the person who was the oldest person in the household in some cases, the youngest person in the household in other cases, to try to get an accurate sample from the homes because they would often undercount young people because older people tended to answer the phone more often in a multi-person household.
But how to adjust for that when everybody had their own personal cell phone?
So that was problem one.
More and more people no longer had landlines or did not rely upon them.
The second problem was the rise of do not call lists.
The ability of people to put themselves on a do not call list and simply the response rate in general began to precipitously decline.
Today, where we went from about half the people answering a polling call, often today it's as low as 1% or 2% of people who will answer a call.
This not only dramatically increases the cost and expense of doing live polling, it dramatically reduced the scientific authenticity and accuracy of such polling.
Indeed, by 2012-2014, Gallup was so consistently wrong in predicting the election of 2012 that it completely said it would no longer do presidential polling.
Pew would make the same announcement, the second most substantial pollster of any length or duration, for the 2016 election as well.
Both of them were reporting that polling was no longer reliable enough to even predict the presidential election that put both of their polling institutions on the scientific and academic map.
That led to further polling of a wide range.
More and more people use online polling.
They use IVR polling.
That's where they're calling on an automated phone line.
More and more text polling.
A group called Data for Progress on the left uses almost exclusively text-based polling.
And then others, the main media and university institutions, still claim that the gold standard is a live phone poll.
But the live phone poll became increasingly incredulous and unreliable, particularly in predicting individual state elections.
They were getting some elections wrong.
It first showed up in 2010, again in 2012, but it was particularly bad in 2014.
A friend of the show, Richard Barris, at People's Pundit Daily, was doing his own polling and recognized that they were systematically getting the state elections wrong in 2014.
He was able to accurately forecast what took place, while many of those polls ended up being way wrong.
Often wrong by 10 points, 15 points, in predicting what the outcome of the election would be.
Of course, quite famously in 2016, almost everybody predicted the polls wrong.
Not only did they predict a much bigger margin of victory for Hillary Clinton in the quote-unquote national vote, but they got the states wrong over and over again.
The average poll out of Michigan was predicting a double-digit or close-to-it victory for Hillary Clinton.
Polls out of Wisconsin were predicting six, seven, eight-point victories for Hillary Clinton.
Polls out of Pennsylvania were often predicting double-digit victories for Hillary Clinton.
Some of us at the time were pointing out the problems with these pollings that was particularly exposed when you have a deep class divide, which has always been a problem for pollsters when they're forecasting an election that has such a deep divide due to the lack of working class and increasingly rural participants in their mode of polling.
The mode is whether it's by a live phone call, an automated call, a text, or by online.
By contrast, USC was doing an experiment of polling the same group of people throughout the election, and it was predicting a very close election all the way through.
They got widespread criticism and denunciation by the Nate Cones of the world, by the Nate Silvers of the world, by the established people who monitor and measure polls.
That's because the so-called data analysts, G. Eliot Morris and others, are all to the left.
You have a bias that not only are those conducting the polls to the left at universities and institutions, but you have that the people who are reviewing the accuracy of the polls and reporting on the polls are also almost uniformly to the left.
One of the few people that's to the right is an old friend of mine, Sean Trendy, who reports at RealClearPolitics.
And he was one of the few people to say that the election is likely closer than people believe and that there's a herd mentality and herd mindset in the way polling is taking place.
They sometimes call it herd or hive mindset in a poll itself when polls magically end up all saying right on the eve of the election day what the margin will be.
That's usually a sign that all the pollsters are looking to an outcome and shaping and shifting the poll to make sure it matches that outcome.
That was, in fact, a dead giveaway in 2016 because everybody decided that they were going to settle in on Hillary winning by four points, which meant, in their view, by an even bigger margin in the key swing states in the upper Midwest.
But if you looked at their internal cross tabs, as they call them, that's the subsamples of particular groups within the poll, what you found was wide variances and deviations.
So it was clear that they had fixed the poll to measure a particular outcome rather than honestly reflect what the poll was saying.
We're seeing that now with polls predicting that Joe Biden is going to win by double digits in the upcoming election, much as they did in August of 2016 for Hillary Clinton.
The problem is the polls do not have any degree of accuracy within them anymore.
A poll often reflects what is being polled.
Let me give you just two examples.
One, they've done extensive surveys and studies within the scholastic literature on whether or not people really tend to change their minds and shift dramatically within an election.
Because that's the story that polling is telling.
Polling is telling you that 20-30% of the country are just going back and forth and back and forth.
But in fact, when you dig into the data underneath that, you find that in fact when they measure the same group of people over time, there's no evidence that in fact there's major shifts in opinion.
That what they're doing is they're changing who answered the poll.
They're not changing the opinions of existing voters.
And that has been documented repeatedly.
Let me give you just one of the articles that was published from the Journal of the American Statistical Association, back when they were more honestly dealing with this information in the pre-Trump era, called Disentangling Bias and Variance in Election Polls.
It goes through and they looked at all the polls going back 20 years, and they found that the polls understate, understate the total survey error rate.
There's very little ground truth for comparison, of course, and this is why polls get away with things, because by doing a poll of what's going to happen in six months, the pollster can say, well, I was just saying what was going to happen in June.
That's where they get away with it, because there's no way to test the accuracy of the poll in live time.
But there's other errors they found.
Even the polls on the eve of the elections were consistently wrong by almost double their reported margin of error.
To give you some understanding of what a margin of error is, which is only done in phone polls because online polls don't have the same sort of component built into them, a margin of error will often say three and a half or four and a half percent.
People think that often means just the margin.
Actually, it can apply to both sides of the margin.
So if they reported honestly on polls, let's say a poll came back and said Biden was up by 8, what they really mean is Trump may be up by 1 or Biden may be up by 16.
That's what they really mean.
That's how wide the variation is.
But they don't report that, do they?
You'll see the poll defenders say, oh, this was within the margin of error, etc.
But the reason why people get upset is because they didn't report that in the first place.
They don't do headlines that say Trump either up by 1 or Biden up by 16.
They don't do those headlines because then people would be like, well, that's mostly useless.
That's not very valuable information in a close contested electoral age.
But that's in fact what the polling often would reflect if accurately reported.
But they went into all the different errors that continue to take place within polling beyond those I've identified already.
One of them is called the design effect.
This is where that corresponds to unequal weights.
What often happens is they get a small sample of a particular subgroup that votes like a group.
And so what they do is they'll weight them more.
But if they happen to get sort of a random one-off within that group in terms of that opinion not reflecting that group because the sample size is already too small, they weight them up to be representative within the broader sample.
But the net effect of that can be that you have, say, the one African-American conservative within, say, Democrat, say, African-American communities leaning 85 to 15 in favor of Biden, which would be great for Trump.
15% would be a great outcome in the African-American vote.
But let's say they only get of the 15% that's the only people they actually ended up polling.
They weight them as if they represent 100% of the African-American community.
In that context, you can over-inflate the African-American support for Trump.
The same thing happens across the board.
So when they fail to do so, people often look at how many Republicans or Democrats have been polled.
That can be useful.
The debate there is whether partisan identification does not radically shift.
So when you see polls that suddenly Republicans go from 35% of the electorate down to 23% of the electorate, as many of the polls recently report.
CNN has a poll that suddenly has African Americans going from about 11% up to almost 20%.
Those are polls that are going to misshape the outcome because they oversampled particular groups or overweighted those groups within the representative sample of the poll.
The same capacity, the same context leads to other errors that they make.
But to give you, on the partisan side, it's often not the polling error that's made because of just getting under-representing Republicans.
When you see a lot of bad polls, it's often the independents that they inaccurately get.
Because what they'll do is they'll get a disproportionately upscale group, or just a distinct ideological group.
To give you an example, Monmouth throughout the 2016 and Quinnipiac throughout the 2016 often was reporting that young working class whites were overwhelmingly going to vote for a libertarian candidate, Johnson.
Gary Johnson.
But in fact, there was no reason to believe that based on a wide range of survey information and just common sense and talking to people.
The reason why they got that wrong, they were sampling a particular subset of people that did not reflect the overall group.
But that isn't the only errors that have occurred.
Indeed, they said if polling standard errors were properly reported, they should be increased by a factor of 30% just to account for the weighting errors that occur.
They identified four additional types of error.
Frame, non-response, measurement, and specification.
And what they mean by that is, one, they often include many adults who are not likely to vote.
You're seeing that frequently.
They're either polling all adults, which is a joke at this point.
That also is going to include a lot of illegals who are now president of the country, much more so than they were 20 years ago.
Uh, but also registered voters who are unlikely to vote.
People who are only registered because they have a cross-registration system with their local driver's license or something like that, but they have no history or habit of voting are highly unlikely to vote.
That's just the first problem.
The second problem is the non-response error.
You'll often see this during conventions and controversies, and it's probably happening at a peak right now.
What happens is when people are excited, about their candidate, or they're deflated about their candidate, that they're the ones who answer the poll.
So this happened badly, always happens during conventions.
You see these wild swings that aren't really reflective of voters changing their mind because of a convention.
But it often misleads people who do those conventions into thinking that's the case.
The same thing happened during Trump's Access Hollywood tape release.
What happens is Trump supporters are deflated so they don't answer the phone.
They don't answer the poll.
Whereas Hillary supporters are thrilled so they do answer the poll.
And you get a non-response bias problem that ends up shaping the polling outcome in a way that does not accurately reflect public opinion or forecast how the election is going to go.
The third potential issue is how question wording and question order is done.
So if you frame where you place a certain question, it can often dictate the answers.
You can have a leading poll, sometimes they call it a push poll, is the worst form of this, but basically pollsters do this all the time where they'll give you negative information, let's say about President Trump, and then ask you whether you approve of President Trump.
That's going to naturally reduce the overall numbers.
The same part is question wording.
The way a question is worded will have major influence.
For example, if you ask people, do you want the National Guard to be used to put down rioting and looting, you get almost 80% support.
If you ask people, do they want the army in their streets, you'll get something like 50% support.
It's all about the wording, all about the phrasing, all about the kind of question and how it's asked.
There are additional problems with translation error and coverage error.
That reflects the fact that sometimes the people getting the answers don't accurately report it or record it on the poll.
And the last one is called social media bias.
And so this is where people are social bias, the enhanced in our social media era.
What that is, is that's where people are afraid to give their honest opinion.
So that's going to happen at a peak right now.
Not only are you going to have major non-response bias, not only are you going to have major institutional flaws with live phone polling in particular, undersampling working class, older whites in rural areas especially, but what they're also going to do is there's going to be people who don't want to give the answer that may be their honest answer because they think people will look bad upon them.
In an era in which, right now, if you say anything other than, go BLM, you're not going to tell a live phone poller, who often you may recognize as maybe African American, or you may think of as a younger Democrat type, when you're answering a live phone call.
The tendency is to just give the answer that you think they want to hear or the world wants to hear, not your honest answer.
This was always a problem back in the 80s and 90s where people over-reported how willing they were to vote for an African-American candidate for governor in both California and Virginia.
That problem has mostly been filtered out as people are more accurate about that now.
Now, in fact, it's quite the opposite.
There was a good evidence that Barack Obama was always getting more support in his job approval than people honestly felt.
The way you could filter that out is you would go to their specific issue approval ratings.
So if you went to do you approve of how Barack Obama's hailing the economy, that number was consistently lower than his overall job approval.
By contrast, President Trump is the first president whose job approval rating is constantly lower than his specific issue job approval rating.
What that tells you is these are people that are actually satisfied with what Trump is doing, are likely to vote for his re-election, but don't want to tell people they approve of Trump in a live interview poll because they think that would be socially disfavored.
And that is how part of the thought control is taking place now to create a false narrative that, in fact, Biden is just going to crush Trump.
That is mostly disadvantageous, ultimately, for the Democratic Party.
The reason is the only real way they could defeat Trump is to replace crazy old Uncle Joe.
That would give them an honest and a real chance to have success.
By doing what they're doing, by creating this false impression, this false narrative that Biden is just going to roll in, it actually hurts the Democratic Party because it does not incentivize their replacement of Joe Biden, which was their only practical alternative to actually have a realistic shot at the president.
This is partially reflected in election betting markets, which have consistently considered Trump more likely than Biden to win, even when the polls have been saying huge leads for Joe Biden.
It looks like the media class, the Democratic political analyst class, the data crowd, and the pollsters themselves will once again repeat the errors of Trump.
The biggest obstacle the president faces will be economic recovery after the lockdowns did such devastating damage.
Indeed, in that context, there's more stories about the fake news that was spread during the COVID-19 era.
That includes, who's to blame?
The three scientists who are at the heart of the surgesphere COVID-19 scandal.
They had to do redactions in the Lancet, they had to do redactions in the New England Journal of Medicine because they made false claims about the dangers of hydroxychloroquine to deal with COVID-19.
When you have scientists willing to create fake media reports, fake news reports, fake medical reports that they actually publish in high profile publications that they have to retract within weeks because it gets exposed as bogus.
It tells you the scale to which they're willing to resort to spread fake narratives to hurt the president and help their own cause.
In the same context, it's not a coincidence that the Democratic governors of Michigan and of Pennsylvania were some of the harshest and most severe in their lockdowns, given how critical those states are to President Trump's reelection.
And of note, Metro Michigan suffered the largest percentage declines in employment because of the shutdown in Michigan.
This is the main obstacle the president has to overcome, the economic effect of removing his Trump card from the political equation.
In the same capacity, more news about Antifa's mob is taking over, not only took over the original neighborhood they took over, but they plan to take over even more neighborhoods in Seattle.
That's the sort of insanity that's developing.
But anybody who followed the politics of the late 1960s knows that that generally backfires over time.
Indeed, if you study the history of Antifa, as has been published in a range of places, not only do you find their origins in the Communist Party of East Germany, originally Germany, then East Germany, but in addition to that you find their connections to the Weather Underground, their connection to the Black Liberation Army, their connection ideologically like BLM to the Black Panther Party, that ended up counter-causing a massive backlash across the country.
Their backlash often not reported or recorded by polls.
But in fact, if you dig into them, that's where you find the real history of Antifa and the American Mind organization goes in to that notorious history.
And as reported in a op-ed, virtue signaling and fundraising will solve nothing.
In fact, that's exactly the case.
Nothing they're proposing will be a policy resolution.
The net effect of that will be that a backlash that's coming that may fuel Trump's re-election.
Up next we'll have an author, maker of a lot of documentary movies, someone who was himself victimized by wrongful prosecution and politically motivated selective prosecution, Dinesh D'Souza.
We'll be talking about the identity politics that has conformed into identity socialism as he details in his new book.
Come back with us after the break, and we'll be going into that in more detail with Dinesh.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
When I was a young kid working at a diner in New Hampshire, my grandfather's diner, my brother and I would often go up in the mid-eighties to Dartmouth University.
I once snuck into the Dartmouth Review, where I was able to read a wide range of publications, including by someone who had recently been the young editor of Dartmouth Review, Dinesh D'Souza.
He's our next guest, a maker of a wide range of documentaries, has a new book out called United States of Socialism about the merger of Marxist ideologies with identity politics and how precarious and nefarious that can be, and has upcoming new documentary, including Trump's card, coming out later this year.
Dinesh, glad you could be with us.
Hey, good to be on the show.
Looking forward to it.
Can you explain to people part of what the thesis is behind United States of Socialism, your new book?
It is commonly said by people on the right that socialism can't work because it's never worked before.
And of course there is a heavy body count when we look at the 20th century record of socialism from Stalin to Mao, a hundred million or so casualties.
So there's a lot of empirical support for that.
The New Socialists are a different breed.
Most of them were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
They claim to be, in a sense, exempt from history.
They say that they have discovered new forms of socialism that are not vulnerable to the problems of the past.
So they say, number one, we don't want authoritarian socialism, we want democratic socialism.
Number two, who says that socialism doesn't work?
It works in Scandinavia, it works in part in Canada, in Australia, in large parts of Europe.
Number three, they say we have taken Marx's old concept of class-based socialism, the rich against the poor, and we have added racial grievance, gender grievance, transgender grievance, the grievance of illegals against legals.
So, ultimately we're facing this new hybrid, which is a marriage of socialism and identity politics, and I just used a simple phrase, identity socialism, to describe this new type of socialism.
So I wrote the book to deal with socialism as it is now, to refute it, challenge it, and consider also its unique tactics, very different from the old socialism, say, of Marx.
Yeah, could you describe what some of those new tactics and techniques are to try to persuade people?
Because I run into young people who believe extraordinary things that are belied by history and economic understanding, but clearly they've been effective at persuading a whole new generation of this distorted ideology.
Yes, the left is actually extremely good at generating narratives.
Now, a narrative is not a collection of facts.
A narrative is an interpretation that makes sense of the facts.
So if you look, for example, at the George Floyd killing, the left will say, our view is that this is not anomalous.
It's not a freak episode.
It's typical.
Cops are inherently racist.
And that's no surprise, because they live in a racist society.
Our other institutions, like our free market system, are no less racist.
And moreover, this is not some new development.
America's been this way since 1776, if not since 1619, to pick a date that the New York Times Seems to prefer so this is their narrative now on our side We often counter this by trying to invoke facts like wow You know there are there's more black on black crime or it's more likely to have a white guy be shot than a black guy but of course none of this is to substitute a rival narrative for their narrative and
And so part of what I try to do in the book is generate this rival narrative, show ultimately not just why socialism is bad and evil, but also make the moral case for free enterprise and expose the gangsterization of the left.
We've seen the gangsterization of the left in the Democratic Party, not just at the street level with Antifa and these paramilitary gangs, Black Lives Matter and so on, But we've seen also the gangsterization at the high level of government with the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, the so-called deep state, the police agencies of government that are supposed to be neutral but have been corrupted at least in high places.
In the same capacity, you've often done a good job of uniting the explanation of how fascism and socialism both share sort of a belief in the state, a sort of totalitarian control, and that where people try to divorce those and claim fascism is just a right-wing philosophy and socialism is a left-wing philosophy, they really share the most dangerous combination, which is this belief in control of the state and control of the institutions that govern people's thoughts, behavior, and actions.
Can you describe that for folks?
Yes, it seems that if you say that fascism is left-wing, as I do, that I'm engaging in some kind of new conceptual diagram that's different from other people's diagrams.
But that's actually not what I'm saying.
What I'm actually saying is that fascism developed in many countries starting in about the 19-teens and 20s.
It developed in France, in England, in Germany, in Italy, in other parts of Europe.
The founders of modern fascism in all those countries were men of the far left.
There is no exception to this rule.
These are people who considered themselves to be on the left.
They were considered by their opponents to be on the left.
So there is absolutely no doubt that fascism is a left-wing phenomenon.
The fascist, the Nazi platform, the 20-point platform of 1920, I believe.
If you just look at it, state control of business, state control of health care, state control of education, state control of religion, and down in the list it goes.
This does not sound like Donald Trump, but it sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
So, it's only after the war that we got progressive revisionist history.
They didn't want to be associated with the gas chambers.
They undertook a clever mission, a brilliant and a mission of unbelievable chutzpah to move this left-wing ideology in the right-wing column with so much success that today you go on the History Channel, Wikipedia, NPR.
There it is!
Fascism is right-wing.
Dinesh must be wrong because, gee, it says right here in Wikipedia.
In that same capacity, we see in their sort of approach to the police, not necessarily in opposition to the idea of police, but this particular form of police.
That the history of it has been, when they say they want to defund the police, that often means they want to replace them with their own sort of Praetorian Guard.
Can you describe and explain that for folks?
This is a critical point, and it ties into a larger point, which is that we need to have a correct understanding of who and what we're up against.
For years I would tear my hair out as I heard people say things like, Obama doesn't understand.
If only Obama could realize.
I mean all these libertarian groups unfurling all these studies showing that confiscatory tax rates, burdensome regulations, state takeovers would hurt the economy.
And it was really difficult for me to scream, That's not Obama's goal.
He's not trying to create economic growth.
He's not trying to maximize consumer welfare.
You're measuring him by a standard that he rejects.
The same when people talk about the media today.
They'll say things like, the media is so biased.
Look at this double standard.
Well, of course, they're giving the media way too much credit.
They're assuming the New York Times is Has some single standard, some higher principle of impartiality or objectivity, and we can somehow shame them into adhering to it?
No!
They've long jettisoned that.
They've taken a side.
They view themselves pretty much the way Goebbels viewed himself, as a propaganda arm of the socialist regime.
And the New York Times is no different.
Trump says that the media is the sort of propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, but another way to put it is the Democratic Party is the political arm of the media.
Either way you look at it, it is senseless to start talking about bias.
You've just got to realize that these people are part of the opposition.
That's actually how they see themselves.
Exactly, and I think that's critical.
One of the aspects of that has been, as you mentioned, the sort of political contamination of our prosecutors, of our high-ranking institutional national security law enforcement, seen reflected in Russiagate and everything, and Ukrainegate, but particularly in the selective prosecution and the insanity of that prosecution of General Flint.
You yourself were a victim of a very selective prosecution in New York.
And you've seen some of those things repeated and were able to predict it in ways other people have not.
What are your thoughts on what is happening to General Flynn and to what degree it reflects a broader problem in the politicized parts of our Department of Justice?
The difference between General Flynn and my case is that I actually did do something wrong.
I did exceed the campaign finance law.
I didn't realize I was committing a felony or doing anything egregious.
And in reality, people who do what I did typically get a fine and a warning.
But in my case, the injustice was not That I was held accountable, but that I was given a penalty utterly disproportionate to what I did, and that no one else in American history has ever gotten.
It's kind of like saying you were speeding, yes, but we're not going to give you three years in prison.
What?
That's disproportionate to the crime, and nobody else gets that penalty.
So the selective prosecution here isn't giving me an exaggerated set of charges and punishments, All driven also by a legal bludgeoning that General Flynn is very familiar with, which is if you don't plead guilty, we will put additional charges on that would have the potential of sending you away for years and years, destroying your career, ruining your relationship with your family.
I mean, no rational person, guilty or innocent, would abstain from taking that deal just because you're facing the utter ruination of your life.
So whenever I heard the left say, oh well General Flynn pleaded guilty, I knew exactly what that meant.
That they impose so many threats, will destroy your family, will file charges against your family members and this and that.
So ultimately General Flynn takes the lesser evil.
He's willing to suffer a lesser punishment to avoid this complete wreckage that the government with infinite resources is ready to unleash on him.
And I think some of the politicized prosecutions that have occurred gives us sort of a preview of what a replaced police force would look like in a sort of democratic America, particularly of this sort of new agenda.
Could you describe that what they're really looking for is someone to enact their agenda consistently, and they see the current police as not doing that effectively, so that's their real objective rather than simply not having any police at all.
Yeah, think of what the left does with organizations like the Boy Scouts or even with the churches.
Their real goal is not to shut down the churches.
They'd like to take over the churches, take the moral credibility of the churches, and then apply it to the advancement of their ideology.
Similarly with the Boy Scouts, they're not trying to get rid of the Boy Scouts, they're trying to turn the Boy Scouts into a sort of institution of gay indoctrination.
They'd love to have all the Boy Scout leaders be gay, and they'd love ultimately to turn the Boy Scouts into a vehicle, a mechanism for transmitting their values.
Same with the cops.
They're not dumb enough.
We, in a sense, underestimate them to say, oh, you guys are silly.
Are you really saying that when someone's getting raped and called 911, no one's going to show up?
That's not what they mean.
What they actually mean is they want the police to be subordinate to them.
They want to have their police force.
They want the police force, if you will, to be a politically correct police force that allows their side to live outside the law if it wants to.
So their protests are allowed.
If they beat up people, it's allowed.
They want the police to beat up people.
They want the police to beat up our people.
So they'd like to unleash the police against entrepreneurs, against law-abiding citizens, against churches, against people who, in a sense, refuse to genuflect before their ideology.
It's ultimately, I think, a rather terrifying prospect, perhaps even scarier than not having any police at all, because then we at least know we're in the state of nature.
We have to fend for ourselves.
If we can't, we hire private security.
That's a world we at least know what we're dealing with.
But with the left, we're dealing with a very hazy world in which ultimately they want to bring us all to heel.
And in that capacity, you reference in the book the various ways we can kind of resist this.
I remember George Orwell being interviewed years ago and he said the key to stopping totalitarianism is you, the audience, you, the people, making the difference and making the change and resisting it, both by self-information and educated action.
Can you describe what you identify as some of the ways that people can push back against this, this particular new wave of a new form of pernicious socialism and Marxism?
Well, the left is dealing with a living nightmare, and that is Trump.
They did not count on Trump.
Every other Republican they know how to deal with.
They could beat every other Republican into a pulp, and they know it.
Trump, on the other hand, by an accident of history, some would say by the provision of God, nevertheless, Trump is a guy who not only knows how to fight them, but he relishes it.
He takes a certain kind of, and he's a genius at it, because he has a sort of foot in popular culture that is atypical for Republican politicians.
So he speaks a kind of ordinary language that common people understand.
And I think he's going into this election basically saying, I, Trump, am the man that stands between you, the American people, and utter insanity and chaos.
If you want utter insanity and chaos, go for the man in the rocking chair, who isn't really going to be running the country anyway.
He's going to be surrounded by Rasputins galore.
They're going to be deciding everything for him.
He'll have all the right ventriloquists and puppeteers, but we'll have a nightmarish America.
Or you can have a decent America, rooted in its founding principles, and that's what I So Trump is a great danger.
This is why they expend such extraordinary efforts.
I mean, they would run the economy into the ground.
They've proved it just to beat Trump.
So we have actually a formidable general.
It's kind of like we finally got Grant.
Now there's some never Trump Republicans who say things like, wow, you know, the problem with Grant is that he's an alcoholic and he ran his family business into the ground and he's known to cuss in front of his wife and this kind of thing.
And of course, the only issue is, can he fight?
That's our issue with Trump.
Now, longer term, we have to deal with the media, with Hollywood, with academia.
We have given so much ground that these institutions have slipped away from us.
And this is a long-term problem.
The left owns the megaphones of the culture.
This is even in some sense more important than Trump's re-election because it affects every election.
I think perhaps we have to consider building our own, you could almost call it alternative universe.
Of publishing, of media, of education, and so on.
So we just don't live in their world.
We don't have to fight about CNN.
We don't watch CNN.
We don't have to fight about some editorial in the New York Times.
We've never read it.
We may not even have heard of it.
We don't talk to people who've read it.
This may seem like a rather startling way to think about America.
It's certainly not the way I thought in the Reagan era.
But I've been radicalized because the other side has become gangsterized.
And if we don't do to them what they've been doing to us, they will never stop.
Yeah, and can you explain, like, I'm still startled by the Mitt Romneys of the world and the rest who take at face value the agenda of a group like BLM.
I experienced it as a civil rights lawyer.
BLM is never there for any case of mine because it could be a uniting case rather than a dividing case because it's focused on institutional reform, not radical insurrection.
Can you describe for people why a BLM should not be taken at face value in this habit of people kneeling and walking with them and celebrating them is a co-option that is actually counterproductive over time?
I think what happens is that those of us who have come up in the kind of intellectual world or even in Romney's business and political world It is tiring after a while to be constantly taking a beating when you know that there are unbelievable accolades open to you if you were to switch sides.
So, for example, I release a movie.
I've got to write the business plan.
I've got to raise the money.
I've got to then make the movie.
I then got to go market it.
The RNC won't help me.
In my contrast, if you're Michael Moore, the moment you make a movie, you're embraced by the entire Democratic Party.
George Soros puts in money.
Millions of people are buying tickets.
You're booked on The View and Good Morning America.
And in fact, you don't even have to do anything.
Somebody at the studio will do the legal plan.
They'll give you the money to make the film.
You just go do it.
And then the publicity comes pouring your way.
There'll be glowing profiles of you.
So, I just want to describe, this is the world we live in.
And I think for a guy like, guys like Romney, it's so tempting when you make the slightest criticism of Trump to realize that the other side starts fawning over you and making you into a hero.
And the same people who bashed you just a few years ago are suddenly lionizing you.
And you're being invited to give commencement addresses and you start getting honorary degrees that you never got before.
So the bottom line of it is, I'm just saying that these guys are succumbing to the temptation of wanting to be lionized, wanting the other side ultimately to hold them up, to award the cultural medals that it seems only their prerogative to give.
And I think that's really the key to understanding the Romney phenomenon.
And what is the best way to persuade those folks to recognize the error of their ways?
It's ultimately to show them that they are selling their soul because the guys on the other side are really bad guys.
They will get rid of people like Romney and Rubio at the drop of a hat.
They will send them to the guillotine in a minute.
And so all this praise is purely tactical.
McCain is useful as long as his funeral carcass can be used against Trump.
Romney is useful as long as he's willing to vote for impeachment.
If he wasn't, he ceases to be useful.
He becomes ultimately trash as far as they're concerned.
So the illusion here is that the other side actually likes you, whereas you're actually a battering ram that they're using against patriots, against people who believe in free markets.
So at the end of the day you've got to realize it's a it's a battle and there are only two sides and politics is fought in teams and one side is going to win and so it's better to be on the right side even if you lose.
Can you tell folks about your upcoming documentary?
Yeah, my book which is out now is called United States of Socialism and I typically like to do this kind of one-two punch.
The book is sort of the intellectual spine of the movie.
Books and movies are very different.
A book is kind of an argument, it has references, it lays out the case.
So this book is very valuable in that sense.
It's kind of a handbook against not just socialism, the new socialism we're dealing with now.
The movie is going to be called Trump Card, and it's going to come out later this summer.
For a while there, I was dithering about releasing it in the theater.
I was just scared not enough theaters would be open, people would be reluctant to go.
I'm now convinced that's not the case.
The theaters are going to open full-scale.
People have been cooped up for too long.
We've been sold a bill of goods.
Our people are ready to get out.
The theaters are very eager to have my movie, and so I'm going to come out with a big splash in August with a wide release in lots of theaters all around the country.
Fantastic.
In terms of the, what you referenced, the lockdown, the lockdown sort of was exposed as the political scam that it was.
Once everybody could protest, once people could take over city halls.
But I was startled the degree to which so many establishment types, even on the right, went along with the logic of the lockdown and really assumed that these ideologically motivated so-called scientists weren't just doing their ideology rather than actual science.
Can you talk about that?
Yes, in fact, I'll admit that I myself was a little startled to see the, you may say, co-optation of the medical establishment.
I mean, I've been on to the fact that these climate scientists are frauds, and a lot of them are frauds for the simple reason that whenever they produce a study favorable to climate science, lots of money pours into their pockets.
Look at a guy like Al Gore.
You know, a complete loser.
But somebody who has become extremely rich.
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
Off of what?
Off of climate change.
So it pays for Al Gore.
It pays for all of these guys.
And so basically their science is something like this.
Go put the thermometer into the ocean and see what the temperature looks like.
And if it doesn't turn out right, go further out and find a different spot where you may get a different result.
So I've been on to these scam artists for a while.
They call me a climate denier, but of course, kind of implying like I'm sort of a holocaust denier, but of course the main difference is that the holocaust actually occurred, whereas climate change is some supposed event that's going to occur in the future.
It never seems to happen and the date is always pushed out, although the urgency is always the same.
Now, with regard to the coronavirus, yes, I mean, I was initially suckered by this.
But come early April, I began to realize that this was not producing a death toll in the way that they had projected.
And then when I began to see that instead of trying to bring your projections into line with reality, you try to bring your reality into line with projections by counting people killed in auto accidents and ski accidents.
As being coronavirus victims, even people shot in murders.
Oh, he had COVID after all.
Let's put him down as a COVID death.
Then I realized that this is a very corrupt operation and we've just got to take their findings with an incredible grain of salt.
So, what I came to find out in early April, I think the whole country has pretty much figured out by now.
Oh, exactly.
In fact, if it wasn't videotaped, George Floyd's death may have been listed as a COVID death under the standards that they had previously enunciated since he had COVID and died under the logic that was being applied.
In that same context, what would be your advice to President Trump in terms of going forward?
Because he's getting a lot of competing voices in the room.
I don't think he always has the best advisors inside the White House who share his instincts.
What would be your advice to the President to reassure his re-election, and that being essential, I'm trying to steer the Trump team to the need to produce a rival narrative.
Notice that this is something that Trump doesn't do.
He may not think it's important.
And it's a real difference between Trump and, say, Reagan.
In many ways, I think Trump is bolder than Reagan.
He's got more guts than Reagan.
Uh, Reagan, I think today would be a little lost.
I think he would be very sad for what's happened to America.
Wouldn't quite know what to do.
Trump does.
Trump is the man of the hour.
Now, that being said, uh, I think it's important to produce a narrative.
Uh, Reagan did.
If you, if you go back and watch Reagan's evil empire... We're almost done, Dinesh.
Thanks for being with us.
British are coming.
The British are coming.
You are about to be on the street today.
And one more.
America first.
And the clock.
What's your country?
Welcome back to American Countdown.
Up next, our guest has personal experience with the wonders of Antifa, Gavin McInnes.
You can find him at censored.tv, an appropriately titled website, given the nature of social censorship to which he has been targeted.
Even though he was one of the original founders of Vice, Vice has gone in a different direction these days.
He can also take credit for creating the hipster culture, at least to some degree.
Gavin, glad you could be with us.
Hey, thanks for having me.
And don't forget Proud Boys!
Oh, I was actually going to go into that first.
Because as soon as Proud Boys started, I was telling people that the Antifa and the media left will become obsessed with taking them out because they want to own the streets solely themselves.
They don't want anyone to push back.
They don't want anyone to defend anybody.
They want to make it bad if you try to defend yourself.
Now the police are even on the defense about it.
Can you talk about the entire experience of what happened vis-a-vis the Proud Boys and Antifa from the inception?
Proud Boys is just a silly club, like the Elks Lodge, like the Knights of Columbus.
Actually, the Knights of Columbus is much more serious than Proud Boys.
I mean, you have to name five breakfast cereals while you get beaten up to get in.
We have Sharia law in our meetings where we discuss if anyone has a beef with anyone else.
All jokes.
But Antifa was attacking us.
They were pepper spraying me when I did talks.
So my friends at my club We're going to have your back.
We're going to defend you.
By the way, I'm also a Knight of Columbus and the Knights of Columbus, even though they're in their seventies, they were like, yo, next time you have a thing, let us know.
You know, I, I like a good fucking punch up once in a while.
Um, so that's what men's clubs do.
So we ended up by proxy becoming this sort of like self-defense guardian angels thing that would protect Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter.
And in the left's mind, that became a hate group that roams the streets looking to pulverize people.
Did we lose him?
We'll come back to Gavin in a minute.
Iowa is introduced to Antifa in person and to Gavin at the same event, the Deplora Ball in D.C., where the Antifa-type groups were lined up throwing rocks and batteries, actually batteries, at people.
In fact, my young media assistant who was there, who's short, about 5'2", had to dodge the batteries as they went in.
And one of the people that actually helped defend her and others was Gavin and his friends.
Then ultimately what happened is Proud Boys became targeted by the press.
A smear campaign was launched against them, so successful that even people like Joe Rogan bought into it.
And then when they defended people at a New York event, it was they who were prosecuted rather than TIFA.
So yeah, Gavin, go ahead.
I'm sorry, we got cut off there.
I don't know if it's, I think it's our connection things.
We're not actually using our usual equipment.
But anyway, yeah, the deplorable was an interesting case too.
That really pissed me off.
That's why I fought that Antifa guy out front because DC voted maybe what, 2% for Trump?
So if you're a conservative woman in DC, you have trouble finding a date.
But these women dressed up, they're wearing gowns.
They go to this ball to meet a conservative man and go on a date, and there's 500 people out front throwing batteries, throwing feces, throwing urine.
Thanks to Project Veritas, we learned they were planning to gas the event.
And this was not like a strategy war room where everyone was planning to kill Hillary Clinton.
This was a ball with guys in tuxedos wanting to dance with pretty ladies.
I mean, exactly, and it showed the degree of the depravity.
And what's interesting is what started happening in D.C.
is either they weren't prosecuting, or the juries were nullifying the verdicts.
Because many of the cases that went through with what happened at the inauguration, many of them never faced any time, and it's only led them to accelerate.
Can you describe what happened in New York, where people basically just tried to defend themselves, and in fact nobody came forward on the other side that was Antifa trying to create violence, and yet Anybody who was associated with Proud Boys ended up being targeted for extraordinary levels of criminal prosecution, which really stands out in light of the prosecutor Vance saying he's not going to prosecute anybody connected to what's been happening in New York the last week.
Yeah, Vance was part of that whole thing.
And the judge, Mark Dwyer, the prosecution, Steinglass, they were just kissing Cuomo's ass because Cuomo had put out a dictum that said, throw the book at these guys and it'll be good for your career.
So they're like, no problem.
Screw justice.
I hate justice.
Don't worry.
We'll do it, Andy.
The night of my talk, I did a silly comedy show.
It's available on YouTube.
And Antifa were beating the crap out of anyone who attended, including journalists, and taking their equipment.
A mob of Antifa beat the crap out of a journalist, stole his equipment.
Conservatives, not the police, but conservatives tackled three of them and brought the police over and said these guys were beating up that guy.
Nothing.
Antifa like to pretend they're not an organization.
Really?
Why do lawyers magically appear?
Four lawyers magically appeared at their hearing and got them off.
No probation.
Nothing.
At the end of the night, they're being escorted to the subway.
These Proud Boys, they get ambushed, and that was the NYPD's term, ambushed by Antifa.
Antifa basically says, you want to fight?
Throws a bottle of urine at them.
Proud Boys say, yes, we'd love to.
And they proceed to beat the crap out of Antifa.
The cops say, hey Antifa, you want to press charges?
Antifa swears at the cops, calls them pigs, etc.
Which I actually give Antifa credit for.
They didn't say, let's press charges.
They said, no charges, screw it.
We started it.
But the DNC, de Blasio, Cuomo, they saw this as a way to vilify Trump supporters and they absolutely roasted these guys.
They, it was bizarre how they made it into a white power thing.
They took out, there was three guys, there was two white guys and a brown guy.
They took out the brown guy, focused on the two white guys.
One of the white guys has a black wife.
They made sure she was never photographed.
And they managed to sort of carve out this bizarre white power thing.
And with the jury at work, four years in prison for a 17 second fight.
It is extraordinary.
I mean, particularly in light of what the normal sentence ranges is in New York for actually real serious crimes.
And given what they're saying now in the sense of choosing not to prosecute anybody that's involved.
I mean, they were even, if it wasn't for the fed involvement, I don't think they would even prosecute the lawyers who were carrying Molotov cocktails around.
But I guarantee you that woman who threw the Molotov cocktail, not the Antifa chick.
She's probably in big trouble, but that rich lawyer chick who just had some other fancy lawyer pay her bail.
I guarantee you she gets nothing.
I promise you.
Exactly.
That's just been the history.
Pete, it's been sort of a, not only has the media underreported it, but I think a lot of people on the right have not adequately paid attention to it.
This has been a building movement where they're seeing how much more they can get away with, how much more they can get away with.
There was a preview of what happened to the Proud Boys in New York.
When Portland, Oregon, a little reporter just brandished his gun against four guys that were coming at him.
He ended up getting prosecuted with 17 charges.
None of them ever got prosecuted, even though they have long criminal rap sheets.
And now we see what Portland looks like today, in terms of what's happening, along with what's happening in Seattle.
Can you describe, I mean, what was your first interaction with Antifa and your recognition that this was a particular kind of threat to civil society moving forward?
I am Antifa.
That was my first interaction.
I was a punk rocker in the 80s.
We had a massive problem in Canada with Nazi skinheads.
We followed this anarcho-punk band called Crass.
We were all vegetarians.
We were all about animal rights.
I was Antifa.
But we were radicals at that time.
Our thing was we hated the government.
And we hated sexism, racism, homophobia.
The government.
And I see racism and sexism and homophobia.
In the left, I see it with Islam, so I'm still Antifa in a way.
Okay, yeah, we'll see if we can get Gavin back.
The roots and origin of... I think we do, I think.
Are you there?
Maybe not.
The nature of the behavior of Antifa was having some of the actions be sort of attributed to sort of honest, authentic, radical types that became converted over time to a more political, ideological cause in terms of practically what was happening on the streets.
I think we, yeah, I think, Gavin, we have you back.
Hey man, you got me back?
I'm sorry, when did I get cut off?
Uh, just about the, about when you were in Tifa, what it meant at the time versus what it has become.
Yeah, I was a punk rock... We losing?
Ah, okay, so it's where you have a little bit of a sketchy connection.
Uh, won't necessarily attribute it to any nefarious purposes.
Though no one has been targeted more for various forms of harassment, the smear campaign, all of the rest of it than Gavin McInnes.
Uh, I think we may have him back now.
Oy vey, is this getting frustrating.
So you got me now?
Yes, we do.
Go ahead.
Let's do a test.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane.
Indeed, we got it.
Still there?
So, when we were anarchists in the 80s, we were against China and their human rights record.
We were against Russia and their communism.
I remember ejecting communists.
Even, like, there was this band Crash We Fought, and we discovered the bassist was a communist.
We're like, you're out of here.
You're not an anarchist.
But that group, the Anarcho-Punks, became Antifa, and then they became hijacked by the left and used as their paramilitary wing.
And now they are just dunces.
I saw Antifa in Germany.
They were rioting when people said, we want to go back to work.
So they were writing on behalf of the government.
They've become the plebs of the government now.
And I can't believe I'm sort of fighting guys who have band logos on their jackets where I know those bands.
And I used to hang out with those guys.
Right.
The other component of all this has been the deplatforming obsession.
Not only preventing people from speaking, but preventing people from having any kind of voice in the social media space.
Particularly the more effective you are, the more likely you're going to be targeted.
Can you describe how that's happened to you over the last three years?
Well, that's the long and short of it right there.
If you're charming and influential and you support Trump, you have to go.
Laura Loomer is interesting.
She's didactic.
Milo Yiannopoulos is fun.
He's interesting.
I'm incredibly handsome and hilarious.
These people have to go.
Alex Jones is the most memeable person on earth.
These people have to go because they might get Trump re-elected.
So they lie and they say this person endorses violence, this person is racist, this person is whatever.
Anything they can do to get rid of us.
But it's actually a badge of honor.
To be censored in this day and age, because it shows that you're influential.
It's like what the sort of revolutionary and insurrectionary and radical used to mean.
The people getting banned, the people getting targeted, the people getting censored, that too is supposed to be sort of true old-school, outside-the-system, anti-the-system celebrity figures.
And now instead, Antifa gets features in CNN.
It's a very different kind of mindset.
Well, I said this to Zenoa Kinsman, who is John Kinsman's wife.
John Kinsman is one of the Proud Boys in jail.
And she said, I give up.
I hate the world.
I don't even believe in God anymore.
And I said, Zenoa, stop, stop.
First of all, you need to be strong for your husband.
He's in prison.
But secondly, We're in a war!
We're in a culture war!
If this was the American Revolution, and someone was seen with Patriots, even though they were maybe loyal to the Queen, but they had been associated with Patriots, and selling them a gun, that person would be thrown in jail to make an example out of them, so King George could flex his muscles.
This is what's going on right now.
People are unjustly being thrown in prison, being cancelled, getting fired, having their reputations destroyed, because we're in a war.
It's not an obvious war with like, and then advancing 40 feet.
It's not that, but it is the same in many ways.
People are having their lives ended.
One of the interesting things is you're one of the original founders of Vice, and I've been intrigued to watch.
While I like their stylistic approach, they have become so substantive and ideological on one side of the aisle.
What's your take on that?
Get woke, go broke!
I think Vice, after I left, I was always in charge of the editorial up to 2008.
We might have lost him.
Alright.
We almost got him back.
Yeah, so we'll get him back here in just a minute.
Gavin McInnes was one of the co-founders of Vice back when it was cool and hip, before it became politicized and partisanized and in a different direction.
Now if you watch Vice, or if you listen to Vice, what you'll get is often interesting sort of style of presentation, but the substance tends to stick to a institutional narrative, to an institutional script.
And the consequence of that is that a whole generation of people who see Vice as sort of an independent check on the institutional narrative as an outside-the-system explainer of events around the world is often a promoter and propagator of the institutional narrative, even when afforded the opportunity to contest it or challenge it, not only here but in their international coverage as well.
The effect of what we've seen is the continued co-option of almost any mechanism or means of outsider resistance by the institutional forces that be on the ideological left.
That's what's happening into the Academy, that's what's happening with people who join Antifa, that's what's happening with people who have originally outsider media presentation, and it's also why they're obsessed with deplatforming, defaming, and destroying anyone that has an independent public presence.
In the same capacity, it was the goal and the objective of deep state operatives vis-a-vis the president in going after not only him, but going after people like General Flynn.
In that respect, as Dinesh D'Souza referenced, and as Gavin McInnes referenced, there's been a weaponization of the legal system of criminal prosecutions against people who simply share the wrong ideology.
Whether it's a selective punishment proposal in the case of D'Souza, a selective prosecution in the case of General Flynn, or both selective prosecution and selective punishment in the case of the Proud Boys in New York, that lead to a false and fake narrative.
The fake narrative being, oh, these people pled guilty or were found guilty, so surely they must be guilty.
Well, I can show you a lot of cases from 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s South, where African Americans were wrongfully convicted.
It's what led to a book like To Kill a Mockingbird.
In the same capacity, you can look at labor organizers in the 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, also often framed or wrongfully prosecuted, or the coercive power and tools of the state put someone under macroscopic, microscopic inquiry And the net effect of that producing the outcomes that we've seen in contexts like General Flynn, like Dinesh D'Souza, like the Proud Boys of New York.
So Gavin, I think we have you back on audio.
I have to commend you.
You don't break stride when we get cut off.
You're keeping a good flow going.
It was the effect of being a trial lawyer.
I would have been smashing things and whipping computer monitors out the window.
I would have lost it by now.
No problem whatsoever.
So were you surprised at Vice's devolution into sort of what used to be this sort of punkish alternative media network challenging institutional narratives, now basically just sharing them with a different stylistic presentation?
Yeah, I mean, like, when you get on that train, that far left train, you're doomed.
And they started saying, OK, yeah, let's unionize these writers who are writing articles about ingesting semen in cocktails and that no one reads.
But let's let's get them on board.
And then they said, let's have a tranny health care plan.
And when they did the tranny health care plan, that included sex changes, which I believe are about one hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
So they kept okaying all of these bizarre ideas.
And that shit gets expensive.
So they got woke and they went broke.
The far left is sort of like the Taliban.
And the more you appease them, the more they demand.
And this is what I say with all this kneeling we're seeing all over America.
People don't see you kneel and go, OK, we're good.
They go, oh, you just chummed the waters.
Now this shark is hungrier.
That's what happened to Vice.
Exactly.
And what do you think sort of ordinary working class people in places like New York and elsewhere, what their reaction is going to be?
Because my recollection is late 60s when the left truly showed its true colors led to one of the biggest backlashes by the right, particularly in working class communities, that had happened in 50 years in American politics.
But it's not going to be captured in the polls because people aren't going to tell pollsters about it.
What do you think is going to happen on the street?
In other words, if you're in a blue-collar Irish bar in Staten Island, what do you think their reaction is to what they're witnessing on TV?
FTW.
I'm glad you said 50 years because this is the biggest change since 1968 when Martin Luther King was assassinated.
When he was assassinated, America said, all right, I'm sorry I wasn't paying attention to the water fountains thing.
It didn't seem like a big deal.
Now I'm obsessed.
We need to fix racism.
What the hell?
I can't believe they just killed Martin Luther King.
And America became totally united and committed to fighting racism.
In 2020, they're saying, all right, I give up.
I tried.
You're lying.
You're ignoring statistics.
You're vilifying people who are trying to help you.
I'm done.
And I think, I call it silent apartheid.
What's going to happen is the suburbs and the country is going to give the cities to Antifa and to BLM and to all the radicals.
They can have New York City and they can have Austin.
They can have every big city, just like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago.
They're all going to have these horrible hell holes that will be police-free zones, relatively.
And we're going to live out here on the outskirts.
And it's a divorce.
America is getting divorced.
And we haven't seen a change like this since 1968 when MLK was assassinated.
Well, exactly.
What do you think?
I mean, you dabble in real estate, and we saw sort of a new urbanization over the past 10-15 years.
People tend to forget that after the late 1960s, urban centers became hellscapes for about 20 years.
Places like Newark, places like New York, places like Detroit, places like Baltimore, some of those cities you just mentioned.
What do you think is going to happen in terms of, are people going to stay in cities, or are they going to start abandoning cities in the same way they did back then?
No, there's a mass exodus right now.
There's millionaires on Park Avenue in New York who are selling their $6 million apartments for $3 million.
New York is emptying out and it's turning into the movie Escape from New York, which I just saw a few days ago and I was shocked at how prescient it was.
There's pictures of New York you could take last night with overturned cop cars and graffiti that look like they're from the set.
of escape from New York.
And that's irrevocable.
And this has already happened.
I don't know if you've been to Philly recently, but Philly looks like it's been handed over to the homeless.
They, they run it.
You walk over their bodies, they stare at you eating sandwiches, wearing a winter jacket, no shirt on, eating like a weird burrito they found in the garbage as you're walking with your kids to the Ben Franklin Museum.
Like, Philly's gone.
And that will, that, that Philadelphia is going to summarize every city in America.
And you're going to see murders.
I mean, Chicago, Baltimore, New York City are up to a murder a day right now.
That's going to triple.
And it's all going to be black people.
All the people getting killed are going to be black.
We have 20 black men killed every day.
That's going to triple in this utopia.
Exactly.
It's going to be a true dystopia like it was in the 70s and 80s, and could be even worse if they have different degrees of success.
Are you surprised?
You've been one on the front lines of the culture war, recognizing that there is a culture war, but I'm always intrigued by a certain institutional response by your typical Mitt Romney's of the world.
Who they just want to join in, they just want to kneel, they just want to walk, they just want to repeat the words.
When that, it never leads to anything good.
Can you, that mindset, that mentality, can you explain why that is a disastrous way politically and culturally to approach these issues?
It's a uniquely white trait, this ethnomasticism.
Like you never hear Japanese people talk about how horrible they were in the rape of Nan King.
Or you don't hear Mexicans lamenting all the French they killed in Cinco de Mayo.
Yeah, the French they killed.
We have this, it might be a Christian thing, I don't know what it is, but we hate ourselves and we ruin the world and we're so horrible and we feel so guilty.
It never pans out.
No one is impressed by that.
No, girls are not turned on by that.
I don't know why we do it.
Maybe it's because I'm Scottish.
And all the Scots who liked being tread upon are dead, extinct.
But I will never kneel.
It doesn't work.
It's one of these things where if it did work, I might be open to it.
Like a corporal punishment with kids, smacking them around, smacking them on the ass.
I would spank my kids if it was effective, but I looked it up.
It's not effective.
They just become numb to the pain.
So I don't do it.
Why are you doing it if it doesn't work?
Why are you on your knees?
Why are you groveling?
And sending out, like, these woke corporations putting up a black square.
I saw a porn site the other day that is only... Well, yeah, I mean... ...in order to help... Go ahead.
...help the black movement.
That's their two cents.
And you'll notice, by the way, when you look at the bourgeoisie talking about all the important things, they all have a vote sitting on your ass.
It all involves looking at videos, googling white privilege, googling slavery.
Everything involves sticking your ass in your sweatpants, looking at an iPad.
It's pathetic!
No doubt about it.
What do you think could be some of the successful ways to push back against the new cultural revolution they would like to bring about?
Oh, I have a great idea.
It's called Step Back.
Let BLM and Antifa eat each other.
Pat Buchanan wrote a great book called The Unnecessary War, where he said we shouldn't have gotten involved in WWII.
He said Stalin and communism is a poisonous snake.
That's my analogy.
I'm paraphrasing.
Hitler is a scorpion.
Hitler go east, let fascism and communism fight it out, and they'll both die.
And that's how I feel about these radicals.
You know what?
You want the cities?
Go bananas.
I mean, we're already seeing it right now.
Seattle has an Antifa area, a no-go zone for cops, that they have taken over.
They've already had rapes.
They've already had assault.
They already have a warlord named Raz, who's walking around with a gun, like something out of the movie Idiocracy.
We've already seen them destroy themselves.
The cannibalism of the left is real.
Let them cannibalize.
Stand back.
Yeah, that makes sense.
One of the ways you fought back was filing suit against Southern Poverty Law Center.
Any progress on that?
Yeah, we've been painted into a corner.
I'm a Canadian and we're not litigious by nature, but they left me no choice and I decapitated them.
I got rid of Morris Deas.
I got rid of the president.
I'm staying there for a year.
And I said to my uncle, the, yeah, it looks like it dropped a little bit.
The suit against Southern Poverty Law Center was rooted in the fact that Southern Poverty Law Center has long been engaged in defamation of people that are their political opponents.
The Southern Poverty Law Center was itself almost always a scam.
It started out by Morris Dees, who, guess how he started out?
He didn't start out as a civil rights lawyer in the South, in the state of Alabama.
He started out representing Klansmen in the South.
That's right, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center that got all these rich liberals to write him checks and the media to feet at his feet, if you will, basically is someone who started out representing Klansmen.
And then he recognized by the early 70s there was no more money representing the Klan.
Gavin, are you back?
Yeah, you know a major detail that no one understands about the SPLC?
Martin Luther King had a thing called the SCLC.
Yes.
And the S.P.L.C.
chose their acronym to mimic that to circumvent the money from Martin Luther King's organization.
Because as I said earlier, in 1968, everyone was obsessed with Martin Luther King and wanted to help out.
So they looked at his organization, S.P.L.C., and then also the S.P.L.C.
chose a board member that has the same name as Martin Luther King's partner.
What was his name again?
Forget what it was.
That also helped this sort of obfuscation.
So the SPLC's name itself is to rip off MLK.
And that was starting in 1972, and their lies have continued non-stop till now.
What's the state of the suit currently?
It's sitting on the judge's lap.
I'm not going to criticize him because I don't want to jeopardize anything, but it could sit on his lap forever.
We spent about a hundred grand with back and forths, but nothing so far.
All right.
But yeah, it was definitely good to still take action because it led to the kind of scrutiny they deserve.
I've had that experience.
It also toppled the top brass.
I mean, the whole organization, Morris Dease, Richard Cohen, they're all gone.
And that was a very well-deserved, and it's one of the benefits.
I always tell people that it can be useful to bring certain civil rights action, even if your goal isn't necessarily to win in the courtroom, or even if that is part of your goal, you can achieve other objectives simply by publicizing the recognition of what took place.
Exactly.
Yeah, Abernathy was his name.
Charles Abernathy.
That's exactly right.
Where can people find you, Gavin?
Censored.TV.
That's the only place I'm allowed.
Exactly.
One of the best and brightest young minds in conservative populist thought today.
You can find Gavin at Censored.TV.
I encourage it and reward it, and we should, in continuing to resist this effort to control what we think, see, and hear by the gated institutional narrative.
It's time to break through and keep it open.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
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So that you get to choose what news you have and you get to choose what views you hold, not an institutional narrative trying to shape it the way fake polls are, the way politicized prosecutions are, the way the mob street violence is currently trying to do.
It's all about controlling what you think, controlling what you believe.
Indeed, getting to those politicized prosecutions, there was an amicus brief filed today in the District Court of the District of Columbia in the General Flynn case.
It was an ex-judge who filed it on behalf of Judge Sullivan in a protocol and procedure that I've never witnessed before.
That by itself made it problematic, but the screed that was put in, and notably it was put in today, just two days before oral argument will be held in the D.C.
Circuit about whether a writ should issue from the Court of Appeals to mandate that Judge Sullivan follow the law and follow the Constitution and dismiss all charges and end the case.
Now, this was clearly filed for political reasons to make sure it could be filed before the Court of Appeals could prevent its filing.
And mostly it reads like a political screed.
But maybe the most problematic aspect of what was written was the judge's, this ex-judge's, suggestion to this judge that quote, the court should consider the defendant's perjury in sentencing on the false statements offense rather than issuing an order to show cause.
What he's now saying is that the fact The his view is the judge should deny the dismissal request of the government.
The the judge does not have the discretion to do so.
That is really beyond dispute by any meaningful legal analysis.
And unless you have the unfortunate tendency to watch someone like Legal Eagle on YouTube, you would recognize that that has no legal basis in the law.
The judge has no discretion when the executive branch seeks dismissal with prejudice where it would not work to the detriment of the defendant.
He has no other choice except to dismiss.
That's what his discretion is limited, not only by statute and by rule, but by constitutional origin for what those statutes and rules stem from.
In the same capacity, but this is an even more dangerous and precarious suggestion being made by this ex-judge to Judge Sullivan, because what it says is if anybody thinks about withdrawing their plea, then you can subsequently institute a new criminal prosecution or additional then you can subsequently institute a new criminal prosecution or additional criminal punishment to them simply for requesting a plea withdrawal by interpreting any act of withdrawal of a plea as quote-unquote
Now that goes directly against the laws and the rules that govern plea withdrawal.
We specifically allow people to withdraw a plea prior to sentencing for a wide range of reasons.
And that plea cannot be used against them if the withdrawal request is granted and they go to trial.
If they make certain statements as part of the deal, if they do sort of a proffer session, then it can be used against them on cross-examination, things like that.
But the statements they make in the plea cannot be used against them in trial, or the fact of the plea cannot be used against them in trial in most circumstances.
And that's there to protect the right to withdraw the plea.
The goal is to, if you don't do that, two things are going to happen.
One, you're going to have a bunch of people not plea who maybe should.
The judicial efficiency will be dramatically undermined because people will say, if this is a final decision and I have no means to withdraw it, then I'm just going to take my chances at trial.
Whereas a lot of people plead now, believing that if some evidence develops that proves their innocence, or shows their misconduct took place in some context, or for any other reason they feel the need to go forward.
To give you an example, years ago David Stockman, the former OMB Director for President Reagan, he and a bunch of other people were targeted by a rogue prosecutor in New York.
He continued to insist on his innocence, but several people pled.
Later on, when that prosecutor left the office, a new one came in, re-evaluated the case, realized that all the charges were bogus, and that what the people had pled to, they were not even guilty of a crime in the first place.
So the point was that they should be allowed to withdraw their plea when new information, new evidence, new legal interpretations justify their basis to do so.
Secondly, if someone pleads, and then only after the plea discovers government misconduct, under this interpretation, you would never have an incentive to raise it.
Because, jeez, if I raise government misconduct as a grounds to withdraw my plea...
Then I'll be discharged with a new crime of perjury!
That is why it is a very dangerous and perilous interpretation that threatens core civil liberties, undermines the rules governing pleas, undoes the criminal justice system, encourages and incentivizes government misconduct, as long as you can cover it up prior to a plea.
It is an extraordinary, and yet many of the left are urging this.
Now notably, a liberal professor, law professor from George Washington University, Jonathan Turley, He is indeed one of the most well-recognized.
He's the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University.
He published an article in The Hill that he also put up on his Jonathan Turley website called, The Flynn Court Drifts Dangerously Outside Judicial Navigational Beacons.
He highlights this precise issue.
He notes that, in fact, courts don't appear to have any authority to even allow these kind of, quote-unquote, amicus briefs to even be filed.
But more importantly, he states, under Sullivan's theory, any time a defendant seeks a dismissal, even with the support of the prosecutors, that defendant would face a judicially mandated perjury charge.
Faced with evidence of prosecutorial wrongdoing, which often arise after a plea, the defense counsel would have to warn their clients not to discuss prosecutorial misconduct because of the risk of a perjury charge if they use the procedural mechanism to do so.
The procedural mechanism to challenge the government misconduct being the request to withdraw the plea.
Indeed, as he noted, that this would be conviction by judicial design, which directly contradicts and contravenes our entire constitutional history for criminal justice.
That General Flynn just represents the latest and most extreme example of the politicization of the prosecution, which we also see reflected not only in the past in the Proud Boys cases and in Dinesh D'Souza's case and in Roger Stone's case, but which we also see going forward.
We see it in the various decisions of prosecutors and police officials to not meaningfully either investigate or prosecute those concerned with the rioting and looting in various cities, counties and states across the country.
And that same capacity, this sort of mob mentality and mob mindset that has consumed parts of the culture, is reminiscent of the Cultural Chinese Revolution.
We'll show a little clip of a documentary from that, and notice in particular how they had kids as young as seven or eight going around condemning their parents, friends, and neighbors.
That's the degree of insanity that sees them.
And notice as well, their destruction of statutes, trying to take off the heads of statutes, destroy statutes, destroy various places, is very reminiscent of what we're seeing today.
Christopher Columbus' statutes removed in some places.
Gandhi's statute vandalized in another place.
Abraham Lincoln's statute vandalized, because what did he ever do for civil rights, right, in the history of the country?
He just ended slavery, that's all.
That's the mindset mentality that's gripping people and it's of the same mindset that led to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which ultimately resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people and the destruction of hundreds of millions of people's lives going forward.
So let's play clip number six.
1966, Mao takes millions of ordinary teenagers and turns them into red guards.
Mao followed rampage to destroy everything old and bourgeois.
Trying to break the thinking and attitudes of old China, he began with her traditional culture.
The thousand-year-old Beijing Opera was singled out as the start of his attack.
If it could be changed, then anything could be.
Eight new revolutionary plays were written to replace all the old stories of emperors and concubines.
All ideas contrary to Mao's thinking and the objects that represented them had to be destroyed.
Not just Confucianism and Buddhism, but even more so foreign faiths like Christianity.
Throughout the country, churches were closed, clergy unfrocked, religious symbols smashed.
The statue of the Virgin Mary was replaced by a portrait of Mao.
One form of worship gave way to another.
The physical destruction brought by the Red Guards was unparalleled even in China's long history.
Monasteries all over the country, as far away as distant Tibet, were ransacked and razed to the ground.
The most important sites, like the Forbidden City, were protected on the orders of Zhou Enlai.
But elsewhere, Mao's storm troops had free reign.
Zhou Enlai's implicit distinction between smashing bourgeois ideas and smashing bourgeois individuals was quickly forgotten.
Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of people in Beijing were harangued and severely beaten.
Many hundreds died.
In 1966, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was well underway.
The group behind it, led by Mao's wife, and later to be called the Gang of Four, tried to build the Mao cult to new heights.
In school, children recited his message to them. - Even small children were taught to denounce you.
The Red Guards went wild, doing all they could to fulfil their mission from Mao.
But then, once they were done, Mao banished them to the remotest corners of China, to live and learn from the peasants.
17 million saw out their teens in the countryside.
For some, it would be 10 years before they came home.
But the Cultural Revolution only ended with Mao himself, in 1976.
In a bid
to keep the country together, the propagandists exploited the scenes of mass emotional Mars death.
Much of the grief was genuine, and many had seen their lives improved beyond measure.
Indeed, as you saw as part of that, they had even young children learning to denounce people during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, meant to in part cover up the disaster of Mao's great leap forward that led to the starvation of an estimated 40 million people's death In about four years, he unleashed the Red Guard that unleashed a mindset and a mentality that itself became a virus of its own kind, its own form of China virus that ended up infecting the population
to such a degree that little children were denouncing their own parents, leading to beatings and executions and a wide range of insane behavior.
But we shouldn't allow the inanity of the insanity to deprive us of the recognition of the risk that it poses.
Let's take a part of a clip from Tucker Carlson discussing the insanity of the left-wing mobs that has consumed our culture.
Play clip number four.
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight.
We had a very long open yesterday.
In fact, we spent almost half of last night's show telling you about the rise of left-wing mobs in this country and the threat they pose to all of us.
We felt it was that important.
We told you that no matter what they're claiming on television or how loudly they are claiming it, their main goal is power.
It always is.
In order to seize that power, they will do literally anything, whatever it takes.
They'll silence you, they'll hurt you, they'll burn your country down, and they're doing all of that now.
You're watching it.
So the question is, how should you respond to this?
And the answer is, with courage.
You're an American.
You live in a free country.
You have nothing to be ashamed of.
You don't have to apologize for crimes you did not commit.
You have the absolute right to say exactly what you believe is true.
That is your birthright.
Now is the time to affirm that right out loud.
When enough decent people rise from their knees and stand down the mob, the mob evaporates.
These people are not warriors, they are vampires.
They melt in the light.
When we show them we are not afraid, they go away.
That's what we told you last night.
Minutes after we said that, the mob came for us.
Irony of ironies.
They spent the last 24 hours trying to force this show off the air for good.
They won't succeed in that, thankfully.
We work for one of the last brave companies in America, and they're not intimidated.
We're grateful for that.
But the whole thing did get us thinking that we should be more specific about who this mob is and what they're doing.
Who are the people trying to take over your country, cancel your rights, eliminate our centuries-long tradition of tolerance, yes tolerance, and of free expression?
And the truth is we often don't know their names.
They're mostly faceless political agitators who exist primarily online.
They're trolls who thrive on cruelty.
And yet suddenly they have immense power over all of us.
Weak leaders now reflexively bow to their demands, no matter what those demands are.
Why is that?
What's changed?
Well, that's a much longer conversation.
We probably ought to do an entire show on that topic, and if the news ever calms down long enough to think in bigger terms, we will do that.
But for now, it's enough to say that the country's defenses have been badly weakened by decades of relentless propaganda, all of it designed to make us feel that we have no right to stand up for ourselves, to stand up for our country.
We are too sinful to resist.
We deserve whatever we get.
Shut up and take it, America.
We could spend days showing you examples of this, but here's just the very latest.
It's from CNN over the weekend.
Oh!
Yeah, I'm bringing this sign to the protest at the community center later.
Oh.
They look upset.
Are the protesters sad?
They are sad.
And upset.
And they have every right to be, Elmo.
People are upset because race Across the country, people of color, especially in the black community, are being treated unfairly because of how they look.
It's a children's show.
Got that, Bobby?
America is a very bad place, and it's your fault.
So no matter what happens, no matter what they do to you when you grow up, you have no right to complain.
That's the message, and it starts very young.
Where does it end up?
Exactly what we're finding out.
Here's where it ends up.
Alexander Kitai is a Serbian soccer player who, until the other day, played professionally for the Galaxy in Los Angeles.
Last week, Katai's wife posted criticism online of the looters she was watching wreck Minneapolis.
A lot of people felt that way.
Katai's wife wrote in Serbian when she speaks.
And yet someone noticed them anyway and then attacked her for writing them.
She deleted the post very quickly.
But it was too late.
Now, we should be clear that her husband, the soccer player, may not even have known that she wrote the post.
His wife was in Chicago when she wrote them.
He was practicing with his team in Los Angeles.
But it didn't matter.
Protesters dutifully arrived at the stadium to call for his firing.
So the management of the LA Galaxy forced Katai to apologize for his wife, and then to denounce her.
Denounce his own wife.
Then they made him endorse Black Lives Matter, which he did, and then they fired him anyway, and then they attacked him on his way out.
For something he didn't even do, and may not even have known about, that was written in a language almost nobody in America understands.
That's what happened.
The team's president, Chris Klein, sounded pleased by the whole thing.
Quote, In the end, he said, we have to look at what the club stands for and who we are.
Hmm.
Who we are.
That's a good question, actually.
Who are we?
Well, at this point we're becoming North Korea.
We now believe in blood guilt.
We punish people for the sins of their relatives.
We don't allow individuals to have private thoughts.
We hurt anyone who disagrees with orthodoxy.
We demand that the innocent plead guilty to things we know they didn't do, and then read their confessions in public to prove they've been re-educated.
And then we brag about doing all of this.
Obviously something terrifying has descended on America, and it's easy to see if you stand back what has happened.
Terrible ideas suddenly have free reign.
Why?
Because no one pushes back.
Those ideas are met with supine weakness.
You've seen it happen a thousand times.
Some professional activist says something crazy and destructive because that's what professional activists do, always.
Defund the police!
What's changed, what's brand new, is that no one in charge has the stones to disagree.
So the rhetoric gets even crazier and more destructive.
Kill the police!
Okay, what next?
UCLA is now investigating a professor for the crime of reading Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail out loud.
Meanwhile, also at UCLA, another professor called Gordon Klein is under police protection tonight.
What did Gordon Klein do wrong?
Well, when minority students asked to be exempted from final exams after George Floyd died, Klein refused.
He said, everyone, of all colors, has to take the exam.
UCLA immediately suspended him.
Students threatened to kill him.
Now, Klein has police cars outside of his house.
All of this is happening right now in America.
The question is, is anyone defending these guys?
Defending the right to give exams or to read Martin Luther King out loud?
Probably not.
No one's defending anyone anymore.
It's every man for himself.
Meanwhile, the worst ideas, the ones that could harm all of us, are growing in power.
Last week, the cosmetics company L'Oreal announced it was hiring a black transgender model called Monroe Bergdorf.
Bergdorf will sit on the company's newly formed Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board.
Bergdorf had worked at L'Oreal before, if you follow fashion you know that, but got fired three years ago for writing this specifically addressed to white people.
We're going to quote from it.
Your existence, privilege, and success as a race is built on the backs, blood, and death of people of color.
Your entire existence is drenched in racism.
Racism isn't learned.
It's inherited, and consciously or unconsciously passed down through privilege.
Once white people begin to admit that their race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth, then we can talk." Now, Monroe Bergdorf got canned for writing that.
L'Oreal announced that crackpot racial theories were contrary to, quote, diversity and tolerance toward all people, irrespective of their race.
That, of course, is true.
Or it was true.
It's not true anymore, apparently, at least now at L'Oreal.
L'Oreal has apologized for ever supporting tolerance and diversity, and has now rehired Bergdorf.
The idea that racism can be inherited and passed down is now consistent with L'Oreal's Black Lives Matter-inspired HR policies.
Some employees there must be worried.
We should all be worried.
This is terrifying.
We should fight against sweeping racial attacks like this with everything we have.
Not because we're sympathetic to the specific group they're going after, but because it is wrong, always, no matter what, no matter who the target is.
No child is born evil.
Sin cannot be inherited.
That's insane.
Certain racial groups are not morally superior to other racial groups, and we should never condemn any ethnicity as, quote, the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth.
That's Nazi talk!
I'm sorry, it is!
It is!
Today, the left has singled out one ethnic group to hate and punish, but tomorrow, it will be another ethnic group.
Bigots never stop with just one.
And it will be every bit as wrong when they do that to other people as it is wrong now, because it's always wrong.
We have an entire monument on the National Mall in Washington dedicated to the idea that in America, citizens are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.
We don't always live up to that ideal, obviously, but it's got to be the ideal.
If we give up on that, if we stop trying to treat people equally under the law, all people, all Americans, all citizens, Then we're done.
At that point, this country is simply a collection of angry tribes, and violence is inevitable.
That's where we're heading tonight, at very high speed.
Democrats are thrilled as they watch it.
They believe they can win the November election by inciting tribalism and division.
And maybe they can.
But what then?
Then how do you get the country back?
Then to what degree is this sort of blood libel logic?
Blood libels were long considered terribly morally inappropriate because of the way in which it was used against people of the Jewish faith during the time of the medieval ages where people were basically, if you were Jewish, you were blamed for the death of Jesus.
That's the kind of dangerous mindset and mentality that led to pogroms, all forms of discrimination, people being kicked, massive versions of Jewish people being kicked out of the entire society and civilization.
That's the blood libel logic the new BLM would have us follow and go down.
It's a path we must reject in the American tradition of the best of free thought, not worry about right thought, not worry about group think, but worry about individual think.
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