The episode dissects U.S. riots as coordinated, not spontaneous, with Democrat-run cities like New York and Minneapolis facing unrest while conservative states remain stable. Trump’s National Guard push contrasts with leaders like Cuomo (blamed for NY’s COVID-19 nursing home deaths) and Biden (criticized for blaming police without solutions). Polls show public support for order, yet media ignores it. Foreign funding—possibly from China or Soros—is suspected, while Obama’s DAPA and progressive movements like BLM are tied to current chaos. Trump’s DOJ-designated Antifa as terrorists, enabling wiretaps to expose their financial ties, framing him as a necessary global leader despite controversies. [Automatically generated summary]
Riots in America: Coordinated or Spontaneous?00:08:22
Hello rebels.
Today I give you an update on the riots in America that I think are coordinated.
I don't think they're organic or spontaneous.
And we go into depth about how Donald Trump, almost alone, is reacting to them.
Lots of video clips, lots of interesting ideas, including from Joel Pollock, who's in one of the riot hotspots of LA.
Before we get to the podcast, can I invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus?
It's $8 a month or $80 for the whole year.
Just go to rebelnews.com and click subscribe.
All right, here's the podcast.
Tonight, who loves the riots?
And who loves calling you racist?
I'll show you.
It's June 2nd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say to the government about why I'm publishing it is because it's my bloody right to do so.
So much is going on these days.
The world is changing.
At least it seems that way.
It's hard to tell.
Is the world changing more than it usually does?
Or is it just our perception based on the media and especially social media?
The riots across America do feel unprecedented, at least in our generation.
The looting in Manhattan seems particularly unusual.
New York City, one of the best police forces in the world, I think.
It's rare that they lose control of the streets like this, but they are not being backed by their mayor or their governor.
Andrew Cuomo botched the coronavirus pandemic.
He has by far the largest death toll in America.
And it was precisely because he ordered seniors' homes to take in contagious patients.
He literally sent six people, sorry, sick people into seniors' homes.
In fact, he made it illegal for them to be turned away.
But he's seen as a counterweight to Trump, so the media hailed him, including his brother, Chris Cuomo, who works for CNN.
At first, I enjoyed their brotherly banter.
In the early days, I thought it was pretty funny.
I called mom.
I called mom just before I came on this show.
By the way, she said I was her favorite.
She never said that.
Good news is she said you were her second favorite.
Second favorite son.
Christopher.
We both know neither of us are mom's first or second favorite in the family.
I can't believe you're lying to my audience.
You've blown the credibility of the entire interview.
I should have ended it before.
Second favorite son.
Listen to the words.
Listen to the words.
Politicians are very tricky.
That stuff was funny, but after Andrew Cuomo's decision led directly to the death of thousands of New Yorkers, that Cuomo Brothers ringling circus was a bit less funny.
Still, the governor was the anti-Trump, so he'll be fine in the media.
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, briefly ran for Democrat president too, but never cracked 1% in the poll.
So he quit in humiliation, and he spent the pandemic writing a series of bizarre tweets, all targeting New York's Jewish community for special enforcement of his no-gatherings order.
Really?
He just wouldn't stop talking about the Jews and how he was threatening to send police to arrest the Jews.
I guess the Jews are the big crime problem in New York City.
So Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo, they both despise Donald Trump, but neither is particularly good at doing their own jobs.
But that suits the purposes of the media party.
Even if the bad news on the virus or the riots is created by Democrat mayors and Democrat police chiefs and Democrat governors in Democrat states, it redounds to the discredit of Donald Trump as president.
The media will see to that.
Trump has almost begged Democrat governors to call in the National Guard to put down the riots, but they don't want to do so.
It's against their ideology to begin with.
They don't believe in cracking down on crime.
And it's against their political interest right now.
They would literally rather see their own cities burn than see Trump re-elected.
And they think national chaos hurts Trump more than it hurts them.
After all, that's sort of the package when it comes to blue states and blue cities.
Reminder, here's Philadelphia's liberal mayor cheering about declaring the city a sanctuary city.
That means a place that will not deport illegal immigrants, even criminals.
A sanctuary city.
Yeah, lawlessness and disorder isn't regarded as a bug with these guys.
It's a feature.
It's a campaign promise.
I saw this very sad news clip about riots and looting in Los Angeles, City of Angels.
It made me sad, but really, didn't California vote for precisely this?
Sanctuary cities where the law is not upheld, banning firearms for law-abiding citizens, anti-capitalist ideology, and racial grievances.
I'm Jonathan Bigliotti in Southern California, the site of some of the worst looting in America.
We saw it firsthand in Santa Monica.
This is a sushi store here.
You can see the chairs were thrown around, even the computers ripped off.
And here we have the jewelry store.
So across the street, we've got the Patagonia.
What you're seeing is people of all ages, all backgrounds, helping themselves using Black Lives Matters as the reason.
It is throughout Santa Monica.
Sui guys, why are you doing this?
Are you fighting Black Lives Matters?
Are you just surprised?
What's this new, guys?
Eventually, police moved in.
Santa Monica officials say there were 400 arrests and claim 95% were outsiders.
Police chief Cynthia Renaud says the looters took advantage of the peaceful protesters.
There are opportunists.
The National Guard helped control the crowds.
There was also common ground.
But it can't undo the damage done.
Dr. Alice Sun and Daniel Sholand run sunny optometry.
The couple saw their business ransacked on the eve of finally reopening their doors.
COVID had kept their patients away for nearly three months.
Never in a million years did we think what happened to us.
So life-saving is in here that just got destroyed.
Yeah, sorry, I feel terrible for those people, but I think that's what they voted for.
It's not particularly an American phenomenon in general.
It's a blue state, Democrat state phenomenon.
There have been some moments like that in places like Dallas.
And I saw about 30 seconds of that sort of thing in Salt Lake City, Utah.
But it's pretty much the Democrat-run cities.
Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., L.A. Not a lot of riots in South Dakota or Wyoming.
I wouldn't try rioting in most parts of Texas either.
I don't know if you remember the attempted mass shooting in the Texas church that was stopped by one of the congregants who was actually a firearms instructor.
But if you look at the security camera footage, you can see several other congregants who were just a few seconds behind that one hero, all pulling their guns out of their holsters, pockets, and purses at the same time, too.
That can't happen in a state without the right to carry firearms.
So those Democrat states, they won't let you protect yourself.
They won't protect you either, like in Minneapolis, where the mayor actually ordered police to retreat and surrender and give up their police station.
And they refused to allow Trump to send in reinforcements like the National Guard.
They really do want the world to burn.
Washington, D.C. is a unique situation because it's in a unique jurisdiction.
It's not part of a state.
It's called the District of Columbia.
It has a left-wing Democrat mayor, of course.
But there are lots of local police forces that work together, including the Secret Service and the Capitol Hill Police.
And yesterday they put on a bit of a show of force.
There's a park right across the street from the White House called Lafayette Park that's the site of so much rioting two nights ago.
Just arson, riot, assault, complete anarchy.
Yesterday afternoon, the president literally walked out the front gates of the White House and walked on the street to the nearby church that had been vandalized and attempted to be torched by the mob.
Trump was on the street.
He wasn't hiding away.
He wasn't in a bulletproof vehicle.
Show of Force00:04:18
He was showing he was boss.
And he held up a Bible.
Why?
Well, lots of reasons.
One is because the rule of the mob, the law of the jungle, chaos, anarchy, whatever, that's not America's creed.
It's not how America works.
It's not what America is built on.
Books and laws and moral codes, not the lack thereof.
Trump has said many sympathetic things about the killing of George Floyd.
Sympathetic towards George Floyd, of course, the black man of Minneapolis.
I don't think there's a single person in all of America, in any party, of any ideological stripe who supports the killing of that man.
I just haven't seen one.
And I don't think there's a single person in all of America, except Democrats and the media party, who say that these riots and the looting has anything to do with racial justice or even that one particular killing.
Certainly George Floyd's brother doesn't support the riots.
It's a lot of us!
A lot of us!
And we're still going to do this peacefully.
Because that's when we're going to get them, because we're going to fool them.
They think we're going to do this.
They think we're going to do something, and we're going to switch it on them.
Let's switch it up, y'all.
Let's switch it up.
Amen.
Do this peacefully.
Please.
But Justin Trudeau thinks this is the time to give us racial lessons.
That's right.
The prime minister who has worn blackface so many times that he's lost count, he says that we're racist too, and we have so much to learn.
Learn from him, I presume, because whenever he condemns Canada, he never includes himself in that.
He's the solution, you see.
We're the problem.
We all watch in horror and consternation what's going on in the United States.
It is a time to pull people together, but it is a time to listen.
It is a time to learn what injustices continue despite progress over years and decades.
But it is a time for us as Canadians to recognize that we too have our challenges.
That black Canadians and racialized Canadians face discrimination as a lived reality every single day.
There is systemic discrimination in Canada, which means our systems treat Canadians of color, Canadians who are racialized differently than they do others.
Yeah, no thanks.
Not sure I'm going to take a lecture on race from Trudeau or the rest of his cabinet that not only accepted his blackface repeatedly, but stayed silent as he fired the first Aboriginal justice minister in history because she didn't want to go along with his corrupt scheme on behalf of a Quebec corporate donor called SNC Lavalan.
Canada has our problems.
We have our coronavirus seniors' homes too.
Our prime minister is still laughably self-hiding.
Our media is still laughably covering for him.
Our country is blessed from being free of many of the racial legacies of the United States because we were part of the British Empire that abolished slavery centuries ago.
We were the destination of the Underground Railroad for the U.S. slaves.
We don't have national penance to do.
But that makes it all the more perfect for Trudeau.
To him, the perfect apology is one that he himself claims to have done nothing wrong personally, but he blames Canadians and others for some woke failure, and he offers himself up as the salvation.
The media party up here bored to tears with Trudeau's two months of blather.
They're only too happy to go along with it because really, it's all about bashing Trump, isn't it?
Hey, just before I go, watch this for a laugh.
One thing that people may want to consider is that, of course, wearing a mask is important, but shouting and making really loud sort of projections can potentially increase the risk.
And so, you know, I might want to choose other means of showing or messaging, whether it be signage or making noise using other instruments, for example, as just to consider that shouting and that type of behavior can potentially project more droplets.
What a laugh.
Risks Of Protest Shouting00:13:08
I can't believe she's still talking and that the media party still treats her seriously.
Oh, sorry, that's probably racist to say, too.
Stay with us for an in-depth interview with Joel Pollack next.
U.S. President Donald J. Trump standing in front of St. John's Church, he physically walked over to the church from the White House itself.
He didn't drive over in his bulletproof limo, the beast as its nickname.
He walked over, flanked by lots of Secret Service and other police.
A bold statement, I thought, that he was not going to concede the ground.
As our next guest says, there's that leftist chance, whose streets, our streets, whose streets, our streets.
Well, Donald Trump answered that question and he held up a book.
What was the symbolism of that book?
And the March.
Well, joining us now to talk about is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, great to see you again.
What did you make of the symbology there, of the symbolism of the march, not the drive, and standing in front of a church holding up a Bible?
What did that all mean?
Well, it was electrifying, and I think it'll be remembered as one of the most impressive moments of Donald Trump's presidency.
In the face of all of the hostility, the protest, the unrest, he walked right out of the White House through Lafayette Park, which if you've been to the White House is where visitors and protesters typically stand when they want to take photographs.
He walked right out through that park and then crossed the street and stood in front of the church, which had been burned partially by a mob rioting the night before.
And he held a Bible.
And in my mind, it was reminding the country what the source of our community really is.
What is the source of our republic?
It's a constitution.
And it's also the Judeo-Christian idea of morality, the difference between right and wrong that underlies that constitution.
But even if you're not part of that Judeo-Christian tradition, you don't believe in any of that stuff, we're a civilization based on the word, based on a covenant, at least among each other.
And that's what he was doing.
He was saying, this is what we're all about.
It was almost one of those break the glass moments in case of social emergency.
He rebooted the Republic in a way.
It felt like he was going back to the source code and saying to people, this is who we are.
This is what we believe in.
We are the people of the book.
We're the people of many books.
But ultimately, we're the people founded on a belief that there is right and there is wrong, and our purpose on earth is to pursue the good.
And it was such a powerful gesture.
You see the opinion polls starting to come in about what people want to see done about the National Guard or the military.
Overwhelmingly, the American people want the president to bring in the National Guard.
There's also a majority of Americans and a plurality of Democrats who want the president to bring in the military, but you're not seeing that reflected in the media.
Our media are 100% on the side of the protesters/slash rioters, and they are quite happy to see unrest if they think it might help remove Donald Trump from office.
And indeed, that's the tone of much of the commentary: that wouldn't it be better if Donald Trump weren't president, Donald Trump is somehow to blame for this, even though this all started under Obama.
Go back to Occupy Wall Street, go back to Trayvon Martin, go back to Black Lives Matter.
It all started under Obama.
But wouldn't it be great if Trump wasn't president?
And can we blame him for this somehow?
And by showing that he's taking decisive action, that he's willing to take responsibility for it, and by showing that he stands with the country's principles.
I mean, they burned a church.
You know, it's unbelievable.
That's not all, by the way.
Here in Los Angeles, when the protest, quote unquote, was happening on Saturday, the protest at that point was completely inseparable from the looting and the rioting.
There are protests where they've been separated at least by a street or two.
But in the Saturday protest, there really was no separation.
And the procession marched through a very Jewish area of Los Angeles and vandalized synagogues.
And they wrote things like Free Palestine and F Israel on the side of Temple Beth Israel in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles.
They ransacked kosher stores.
They destroyed stores of people I know in the Jewish community.
They destroyed stores over here in Santa Monica of minority-owned businesses, other people I know.
They graffitied the public library.
You know, it's unbelievable.
It's not a war on racism.
It's a war against civilization.
And I have no patience anymore for the people who say, well, that's the rioters.
Those are the looters.
That's not part of the peaceful protest.
I understand that subjectively, that is in terms of how they feel.
Most of the people who showed up to the protests believe they're doing the right thing.
They feel good about it.
They want to say something.
But not every peaceful protest is lawful.
The reason we ask people to apply for permits before they have a protest is so that it can be done safely.
And if you're going to occupy a lot of space, you're going to take up a lot of space.
You're going to have a march.
You're going to disrupt traffic.
You're going to inconvenience other people.
We all live in a community.
And you get to say whatever you want if you're by yourself on a sidewalk.
But if you're going to bring a large group of people to say it in front of my lawn, we have to have some ground rules so that we can all go back to our lives.
So we have this permitting process where you coordinate with local government and with the police to make sure everything is safe and everybody who wants to be heard can be heard.
That's not going on.
You just have people calling protests, showing up somewhere, and then they say, peaceful protest, peaceful protest.
But what they do is they're diverting law enforcement to protect them and their right to protest because they do have a right to protest, even though a bit of a stretch to say they can do it whenever and wherever they want.
But anyway, they're diverting police resources while the looters go one block over and start ransacking the stores and fighting people and knocking people out and in some cases shooting people.
That's happened now a couple of times.
I have no patience for it because in the old days of community organizing, I mean, imagine that, organizing a protest.
In the old days, you had responsibility for making sure that there was good behavior on the part of the participants.
You also were there to ferret out any provocateurs who might have slipped in among the protests and might have tried to cause problems.
That was part of what organizing a protest was about.
Somehow, our community organizers today lack that training.
They don't have those skills or the will to do it.
They just leave public order up to the police.
Meanwhile, the looters come in convoys and they start smashing the plate glass of the store windows.
I think that this is going to be, in a sad way, good for the president because we shouldn't have had to go through this.
Joe Biden gave a speech Tuesday morning where he criticized the police.
He condemned the violence, but he also criticized the police.
He actually accused the police of escalating the tensions, which is nonsense, absolute nonsense.
I mean, where I live, the police retreated on every front until the National Guard arrived.
The police allowed the looting to happen.
They did not want to be caught on camera beating a protester or shooting someone.
They did not want to give any opportunity for the protesters to catch them actually doing their jobs, for which they will now be fired.
And so the police retreated everywhere.
So the idea that the police escalated the tensions is nonsense.
It's an illusion that comes from the New York Times.
The New York Times printed an article after Sunday's violence in which they said the police had, in a sense, instigated the violence because the police responded with force.
They arrested people who did bad things.
They arrested hundreds of people in Santa Monica, for example, as part of that unlawful protest because they wouldn't move and they were blocking a major intersection.
Well, they didn't arrest the looters.
A couple blocks over.
Maybe they should have arrested the looters instead of the protesters, but you can't really distinguish anymore when there's no organization.
So I feel that the president will come out of this ahead.
Joe Biden has taken the wrong tack.
Biden's staff actually put together money to bail out some of the protesters who were arrested in Minneapolis, one of whom at least was looting a store.
I don't know if that's directly one of the ones the Biden people bailed out, but a lot of these Hollywood celebrities and left-wing politicians have been bailing people out, and that's one of the people they sprung from jail, evidently.
So they're on the wrong side of this in the worst way.
And the polling is about to hit them, and they're going to try to backtrack on this.
But what the real problem is here is that you've destroyed these retail businesses in inner cities, some of which took decades to begin a revival.
And under Trump, we saw black unemployment drop to the lowest level ever, black unemployment, black employment, black people finding jobs, rising by the hundreds of thousands, and inner cities were coming back to life after the decay of the Great Recession, after the riots of the 1960s, from which they've never recovered really.
And those retail businesses then had to stay out of business, had to stay closed for two months because of coronavirus.
They just opened some of them, and now they've been destroyed.
And people are not going to feel safe shopping there.
And investors, business owners are not going to want to invest in neighborhoods, urban neighborhoods in general.
I mean, we saw Manhattan, Union Square, which is pretty white in Manhattan, trashed last night.
And it's just a complete disaster in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
Nobody is going to put up a store anymore when you know it can be attacked for no reason whatsoever.
And I hope that's not true, but that's how it feels.
So I think that it's possible, I hope it's not the case, but I think it's possible that the riots have set back the black community in the United States economically 20 years.
I think that's the damage we've seen.
And I blame the white left for it, if I can use a racial term.
I blame the notion of white privilege and the white-dominated leadership of Antifa, which has been handing out bricks to black protesters.
They've actually been caught on camera doing this, which has operated a highly sophisticated organization and which has only now been declared a domestic terrorist organization by the Department of Justice.
But I blame them for promoting this idea that white privilege is the problem.
You know, when you say that white privilege is the problem, the only people who can undo white privilege are white people.
So you've basically put white people in the driver's seat.
So ironically, this whole idea of white privilege and white supremacy makes these white leftists more powerful within these movements that are supposedly representing the interests of blacks and minorities and so forth.
And this self-indulgence of our elite, largely white elite, has destroyed the black community, has destroyed the economy in black neighborhoods.
And yet it's covered all up in this veneer of social justice by our media.
The only person standing for law and order in this country right now is President Donald Trump.
And Americans are seeing that.
And it's hitting home because people are starting to see what's happening in their neighborhoods.
Here in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, boarded up stores, businesses forced to close.
People forced to stay home from work again.
It was incredible to drive around yesterday afternoon and see how many businesses at once were boarding up their stores.
So this is the failure of the left.
It's a partnership that the left have with the media and the Democrats.
They're determined to get rid of Donald Trump.
They don't see that not only they're making his election or re-election more likely, but they're also hurting the people they claim to be helping.
Wolves in the Neighborhood00:04:32
The devastation this has caused to the African American community is right now incalculable, and we'll only know maybe decades hence.
That is so sad, Joel, but I can't disagree with a single word you've just said.
I want to ask you about something.
I saw a tweet by Bernard Carrick, the former police commissioner of New York City, or commissioner, or the top cop, basically, of New York City.
He's become a conservative pundit.
And he showed a map of all the Antifa riots in America.
And he basically said, this is an enormous effort of organization, communication, planning, execution.
He looked at it like a top cop would say, well, if I were to do that, I would need lieutenants and captains and logistics.
Now, I don't know if it's quite that organized or if it's like birds going into formation somewhat instinctively.
I mean, maybe in every community, someone said, oh, tonight's the night.
They went to some Facebook pages and Twitter pages and said, okay, we know what to do.
We know the drill.
So I don't know if he's right, if this is a masterminded nationwide plan, or if it's more a bunch of known wolves, lone wolves say, ah, time to mask up and get some weapons.
I mean, I noticed that Alexandria Okezia-Cortez had an Instagram post where she cautioned people to wear black clothing, cover their tattoos, hide their identities.
That was crazy.
I guess my question for you is, is this organized?
Is there some mastermind, or is it just like a counterculture that has muscle memory from the last time they protested?
Well, I do think there's a lot of organization behind it.
The media have been able to get away with the idea that this is not a real threat because there's no central organization and so forth.
But I don't think that's true.
The fact that they've been declared a terrorist organization gives the FBI new tools to investigate their finances.
And I think that's really the key.
You can't run this kind of organization without money.
And some of them are trust fund babies who don't need money, but you've got to buy all of this equipment.
You've got to invest in some of the technology they're using to communicate with one another.
So follow the money.
They're going to find the money trail.
They're going to find out who's donating to this group or these organizations.
They're going to find out where it's coming from.
I'm imagining there'll be some domestic donations, maybe some crime involved.
I would not be surprised if some of the money were coming from abroad.
And I say that only because China has been trying very hard to hack into American system for quite some time.
And if it turns out that it is some sort of foreign adversary that's funding some of this stuff for their own reasons, and why wouldn't they?
Because China is obviously very excited about the unrest in the United States.
They like taking the attention away from what they're doing to Hong Kong.
I wouldn't be surprised.
And I think it's going to become very interesting.
I also think we will know.
I think once the FBI has the tools it needs to treat this organization like the terror organization it is, I think we'll start to find out what the real story is.
I'm very sad to see it.
I mean, I don't know all of these communities, but I know a little bit of L.A., and I know a little bit of New York, a little bit of Washington.
And I mean, I'm up here in Toronto, Canada.
There's an attempt at copycat riots up here, even though we have a totally different history as regards to blacks.
We were the destination of the Underground Railroad.
We were part of the British Empire when they outlawed slavery and sent their Navy to stop the slave ships.
There's such an eagerness amongst the left in Canada to duplicate the protests and even the riots.
There was a guitar store smashed and looted in Montreal.
How that connects to a police issue in Minnesota is unknown to me.
It makes me sad.
It makes me scared.
I can only imagine what it's like to be in these cities.
We've got to do anything to dislodge Trump and chaos is the way.
Glenn Beck would say this is the chaos strategy that they've been planning for years.
Do you think this is witting or do you think this is just, I don't know, I'm trying to make sense of what's going on.
I think I can only speculate, but there are some people I think who would like to see the world burn.
Bill Maher himself on HBO said he'd like a recession to get rid of Trump.
He was happy to have pain on tens of millions of Americans if it meant Trump was out.
Bill Maher is just a pundit.
He's not an organizer or a billionaire financier.
I don't know.
I wouldn't put this past to George Soros, who has literally bankrolled civil wars in other countries before.
Yeah, I think there's something to that.
I definitely think that the Democrats are trying to exploit it.
There's no attempt at national unity coming together.
I just see that they're starting to fight amongst themselves.
You have Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, who had time to go on CNN on Monday night, but not time to supervise his state where Manhattan was ransacked by the mob.
He's fighting now with Bill de Blasio, the Democrat socialist governor or mayor of New York City.
They hate each other anyway, but they can't even seem to pull it together to save life, property, the economy of their state.
I wouldn't put it past them.
I do think, though, this is bigger than Trump.
This is older than Trump.
This has started a long time ago.
And you can go back to the 60s and all of that.
But the person who, and I'm going to borrow a phrase from Joe Biden here.
Joe Biden attacked Trump and said that he's knocking down the guardrails around our democracy.
If you actually study Trump's record on the Constitution, Trump has followed the Constitution incredibly closely.
There's only one case he's lost at the Supreme Court.
He lost 5-4, very close decision on whether he could ask about citizenship in the census.
Everything else, from the immigration policy to the border wall to you name it, Trump has won.
Trump has operated strictly within the constitutional limits.
Unlike Obama, Obama simply decided to do whatever the heck he wanted to do if Congress wouldn't bow to his will.
And I can list so many examples from the Iran deal, which never went to the Senate, and on and on and on.
Obama did whatever he wanted to do, even though he knew things were unconstitutional, like he created new immigration policy, the DAPA program, even though he'd said 22 times he couldn't do it because it was against the Constitution.
So the guardrails were kicked out by Barack Obama.
And the reason that's important, even though, you know, obviously the left didn't start with Obama, but the reason it was important with Obama is that Obama was our first African-American president.
He was elected also during a moment of profound economic and social crisis.
He had the goodwill of the entire country behind him.
And instead of using that to build a foundation, Obama used it to divide the country further.
He became a partisan politician who used the White House and the federal budget to dole out patronage to Democratic clients, to public sector unions, to big blue state governments.
He never grew the economy rapidly, told the rest of us we just had to get used to decline, never stood up to China.
In other words, he'd never developed an idea of the national interest.
For Obama, it was always about the left's interest.
And he wasn't even that interested in that in a personal way because he's actually quite lazy.
He is an elitist who prefers his $15 million home on Martha's Vineyard to actually doing something positive or difficult maybe, but positive with his influence, with his career, with his record to help American poverty or help the African-American community or whatever.
He's just not doing it.
He's not there.
He shows up at these moments of political crisis to utter a few cryptic words on Twitter.
That's it.
So it was Obama who started breaking down these guardrails.
He trampled the Constitution.
He backed the Occupy Wall Street movement.
He fomented this ridiculous unrest in the Black Lives Matter uprising in 2014, which was all based on a lie.
Now you have a real case, something people should be outraged about, which is what happened in Minneapolis.
But Minneapolis is a left-wing city.
It's a progressive blue city in a blue state.
This is a crisis of democratic governance, not small D Democratic, large D Democratic Party.
And Obama's message is go out and vote.
That's literally what his message is.
We can make a difference if we vote.
He means vote for Democrats, the same people who caused the problem.
And I'm not saying these are easy problems to solve, but these are the people who've been in charge of these cities for so long.
So, you know, the guardrails of our democracy were kicked aside by the Obama administration.
And that, in some ways, I believe, has led us to this point.
It doesn't mean everything Obama did was bad.
It doesn't mean he can't have a positive contribution also.
But the norm breaking began then.
And what Trump is doing is restoring norms.
And to people who've been raised on the idea of entitlement or that white privilege is the problem and all this nonsense, fighting back is so strange and alien to them.
Restoring, you know, I saw a report, you probably are all over it already, but the Associated Press reported about an hour ago that Justin Trudeau was asked about what's going on in the States, and he was silent for 21 seconds while he tried to find an answer.
And that to me says it all.
Trump is the man of action.
He walks across a park, holds up a Bible, and sends in the National Guard.
And Trudeau can't find words for 21 seconds.
We have that problem here.
They're calling Trump holding up a Bible a photo op.
When Obama gave a speech about race where he threw his grandmother under the bus to defend his racist pastor, they didn't call that a photo op.
They called it a speech on the par of Abraham Lincoln.
Our media are turning us against each other, and Trump is doing something to help solve that.
In a sense, he's occupying this role.
I'm borrowing from Victor Davis Hansen here, but it's almost like a Greek heroic role.
Deeply unappreciated by his society, but performing a task only he can complete.
You know what?
I think you're right on that.
I think Victor Davis Hansen's right on that.
And let me just say in closing, Joel, first of all, thank you for your time.
I really enjoyed your essay.
Let me just put it on the screen for viewers.
It's called Why Trump's Walk Across Lafayette Park Holding Bible Aloft by St. John's Church were crucial.
I really appreciated that essay.
But let me just say a word in defense of Justin Trudeau, and that's very rare for me.
I think he was stoned.
I think he's just on marijuana.
For two months, he's been self-quarantining for two months at a house.
Just no doctor's orders, no reason.
Pandemic's over.
Just for two months, he's been in a house.
So I think he just plays video games and smokes pot.
And I know you're probably thinking I'm joking and having a guffaw, but that's sort of what he's doing, Joel.
So don't be too mad at Justin Trudeau.
I'm trying to be a light-hearted moment in a very serious talk.
That sound is an emergency alert, just to give you some idea of what it's like in L.A. right now.
I don't know what the alert is, but we get these little alerts every few hours telling us what the police are doing and when the curfew is.
It's terrible.
It's life in Los Angeles right now.
It's terrible.
Well, listen, Joel, you've been generous with your time.
I learned so much from you as I always do.
My comment about Trudeau is a half joke and it's half true.
And I agree with you.
Donald Trump is a flawed man, as are all Greek and biblical heroes.
But I think he's absolutely fulfilling a crucial role.
I think he really is the essential man, the indispensable man.
And I hope he succeeds because not just America turns on it.
I think so much of the world does too.
Thanks, my friend.
Good luck down there.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it, Joel Pollock Sr., head of the largebreitbart.com.
Stay with us for now.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about the Antifa riots.
Jamie writes, how do you get a pallet of bricks delivered during a lockdown?
Good point.
I mean, just organize, poof, 40 cities, same night, same tactics.
Don't tell me that's organic.
Sherry writes, it's interesting to know that the worst of the protests and the most damaging chaos are coming from Democrat-controlled cities and states.
There seems to be very little effort to control the situation in these areas.
They are the same politicians who enacted severe lockdown measures.
Hey, that's a good point.
Same thing in Toronto, where I have the pleasure of talking to you from.
Boy, they were strict on that Trinity Bellwoods park.
They were bringing those little circles where you had to stand $880 fines.
But you want to march downtown and talk about racism in Minnesota?
Have at it.
You know, as Teresa Tam says, just don't shout too loud.
That seriously was her advice.
Dawn writes, follow the money to where this movement is being organized and funded.
It's time to clean it out.
Yeah, well, hopefully now that Trump has said he's going to treat them like a terrorist organization, they can have new tools for tracing money, wiretaps, things of that sort.
Of course, it's a terrorist organization.
It meets the definition.
Violence and terror to extort a political outcome.