A gunman opened fire at a Las Vegas strip club, killing at least 58 people and injuring at least 515. Within hours, the hashtag Thoughts and Prayers began trending on social media, and was quickly attacked for its use of the phrase, We need to put politics aside and stand up to the NRA.
00:03:19.400We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.
00:03:26.400It's just, the Clintons, the thing that defines them is having absolutely no shame, no sense of shame whatsoever.
00:03:33.540The bodies aren't even cool yet before Hillary Clinton tries to score cheap points on the NRA.
00:03:38.360But consider this statement, we must put politics aside and stand up to the NRA.
00:03:45.540You just said to put politics aside, and now you're pushing gun control, and you're offending one of the largest, most popular civil rights lobbies in the entire country, the NRA, which defends our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
00:04:18.840Now, this woman, I don't know who she is, describes herself as a marginally talented writer, unintentional comedian, and future corpse.
00:04:26.440And that last one, I mean, she's making a sort of joke, I guess, but that actually does get to the point because she's saying she's a future corpse.
00:05:30.120It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren't public policy responses to this epidemic.
00:05:39.400There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference.
00:05:46.780It's time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.
00:05:50.440There's a lot of stupidity in that statement, obviously, the standing up to the NRA.
00:05:55.780The NRA represents the 100 million Americans who have guns.
00:06:00.280The huge portion of this country that uses its Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and a larger percentage of the country that supports that right, that supports that important civil right.
00:06:13.540But for Congress to get off its ass, that's the statement that's going around.
00:06:20.000And for the thoughts and prayers to be cruelly hollow, why are they cruelly hollow?
00:06:24.920Now, I think the reason that they think it's cruelly hollow is because they don't believe in God.
00:06:29.880If you believe in God, then your prayers aren't hollow.
00:07:30.660Which technocratic advancement is going to stop people from viewing their culture and their life as meaningless?
00:07:38.540Now, if we could reduce these gun deaths by getting rid of the Second Amendment, getting rid of the federalist system, coming state to state, town to town, house to house, and taking everybody's guns, what would that do to other crime?
00:07:50.560What would that do to rape, burglary, assault?
00:07:54.040Would those numbers remain the same if only the bad guys had guns?
00:07:57.280What would that mean for our relationship to the government?
00:07:59.820What would that mean about how we view ourselves, about how we view ourselves as citizens, as individuals with dignity?
00:08:07.280I have some thoughts on all of this, but I will save it for the final thought because right now we have to cover something obviously much more important than how we view ourselves as a nation in this tragedy.
00:08:17.380We have to talk about these stupid football players getting on their knee again this weekend.
00:08:21.120We actually have to cover it because for some reason this is a major news story.
00:08:26.160And it does say something about our culture.
00:08:27.980Now, I have tried to get this interview with Mary Lane who has an interesting perspective and who thinks that the football protests in Germany played a large role in the right-wing electoral winning in that country.
00:08:54.460She's been with Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Associated Press.
00:08:58.600She's now writing a book about Nazi art.
00:09:01.460And yesterday we tried to interview Mary because she has an interesting perspective from Germany on the relation between football protests and national politics and nationalism.
00:09:12.700Apparently, America isn't the first country to deal with this.
00:09:15.540Obviously, there was some Zuckerbergian conspiracy to keep us apart that would not allow us to discuss this hot-button social issue.
00:09:26.900Mary, explain the entire situation to us and give us some context on how take a knee relates to politics.
00:09:34.580Yeah, so I think, as with many things, Americans think they invented things.
00:09:39.740But actually, this whole politicizing of sports and the fact that it has to do with national pride and something that should be a system of unity.
00:09:48.580And even the word Antifa actually originated in Germany.
00:10:30.040But it also brought up this problem because every other country that's hosted the World Cup has seen it as this triumph of their national pride.
00:10:40.000And they're so, like, the ultimate dream of a football player in any country, soccer player, is to sing the national anthem for the World Cup on their own soil.
00:11:30.920But a big problem in 2006 was that in every other country, a politician would have said, like, I'm so proud to be South African and that the World Cup is in South Africa.
00:11:42.840But in Germany, even Angela Merkel, who has been the chancellor for 12 years, to this day will never be caught dead saying the sentence, I'm proud to be German.
00:12:11.880Well, this raises an interesting point about American exceptionalism, too.
00:12:16.100One can become an American because the country was settled by my dearest ancestors, my religious extremist ancestors, who came from the U.K. through Leiden to America.
00:12:27.200Then there came the Scots-Irish, the Irish.
00:12:29.960There were American Indians who integrated.
00:12:31.920The first people we saw were Samoset and, what's the other guy's name, Squanto.
00:12:37.940And obviously there were black slaves who came over.
00:12:40.560So it's a country that doesn't really have an ethnic identity per se, whereas Germany, when you think of a German, you get an image in your mind.
00:12:48.760When you think of a Frenchman, you get a much more pathetic image in your mind, and so on and so forth.
00:12:54.200In 2010, there were problems because so, and this is where we get to Antifa, Antifascismus, they call it Antifa, is that this Turkish family in Germany, in Berlin, in an area where people with Turkish backgrounds and annoying students and tourists have been together since the 1950s,
00:13:15.580they saved up and got a 22-meter, so what is that, like 60-foot flag, and put it over their entire-
00:13:21.600I don't know, I'm completely unfamiliar with the metric system, but sure, I'll take your word for it, 60-foot, sure.
00:13:25.220So they put it over, like, all four stories of their house, this German flag, and they were, they were, they'd been from Lebanon, and they had become German citizens, and they were so proud.
00:13:36.820And it got torn, it became this national show, sorry, because they had, people were tearing it down, but it wasn't Nazis or far-right people tearing it down, it was Antifa.
00:13:48.480It was the left, the left was upset that the immigrants were grateful toward the country that had taken them in.
00:13:54.220So essentially, that's what bled over, because, you know, people saw this brutal in 2010, and that's when the far-right party, and obviously Antifa in Germany, started blooming.
00:14:05.520But then in 2013, the AFD, the far-right party, only got 4.7% of the vote, and everyone was like, phew, because you have to get 5% to do parliamentary representation.
00:14:16.700But AFD was like, hey, like, we're a really new party, and we got 4.5% with no funding, like, watch out, guys, because 2017 is coming.
00:14:25.700And then, lo and behold, the World Cup happens in 2014, and then Germany pummels Brazil 7-1, and Brazil was the home country.
00:14:36.520And, you know, no one, there were no, like, foul play going on, it was just like Germany was the better team, and normally you would be, like, so excited to be beating the home country.
00:14:46.560I mean, they would be bummed out, but Brazil was bummed out, but they weren't saying, like, oh, you're racist or something.
00:14:51.820And besides, they were colonized by the Portuguese anyway, you know.
00:14:54.680And Germans in the bar were depressed.
00:14:59.620They were, like, like, they wanted to win, but they were, like, like, once I got to about 4-1, they were, like, oh, my God.
00:15:16.320And then the next, and I thought, you know, trying to be a reasonable person, I was, like, you know, like, anecdotal evidence is not pure evidence.
00:15:46.780But now, if this is all happening there, if politics is downstream of culture, we see this happening in Germany 10 years later, 11 years later, what can we look forward to in the United States?
00:15:56.260For conservatives, there's a lot of good news.
00:15:58.540But there's also some, you know, interesting, if you look, say, yeah, down the road, consequences of culture.
00:16:04.240So basically, the establishment parties that didn't want to take a side on either of the anthem problems, they had their worst results.
00:16:16.940And that meant that the Miracles Party is still reigning.
00:16:21.260She's going to be having 16 years of consecutive power now.
00:16:24.280But she has to team up with these kind of smaller parties, the FDP and the Greens.
00:16:31.240And what's good for America out of that is that the Greens are really big Russia hawks.
00:16:39.620And they're going to be less oppositional to the idea of spending money on NATO and, like, really stepping up their game for that.
00:16:47.720The FDP is really good news for America because they are for small businesses.
00:16:57.260But the problem is, is that since so many people are divided, there might be so much internal gridlock that getting into these great benefits for America may not happen.
00:17:07.840Mary, thank you so much for being here.
00:17:10.040That's a really interesting perspective.
00:17:11.740And nobody's talking about it, but it's pretty scary to think about.
00:17:14.640It is pretty strange, the analogy, too, when you think about the crazy leftist culture, the lefties ripping down symbols of national pride, and the push rightward that then the culture engages in, and how perhaps internal gridlock makes it difficult to do anything.
00:18:56.820And, you know, it is true that he's not an orthodox political player, but he's been pretty good and in some ways more conservative than I think many of the ostensibly more conservative candidates would have been in office.