On this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben talks about the recent violence at Donald Trump rallies and whether or not he is responsible for it. He also talks about a new sponsor, Hillsdale College, and a new segment that he likes. Plus, he tells the story of how he almost got run over by a heckler at a Trump rally, and why he doesn t care about the feelings of people who don't care about your feelings. And, he talks about why he thinks Trump should be fired if he's responsible for the amount of violence he causes at his rallies. Also, he's got an uplifting segment at the end of the show that you can listen to on his favorite podcast platform, the podcast Podullets. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Ben Shapiro is a writer and host of the "Ben Shapiro Show" on Comedy Central and conservative radio host of "The Weekly Standard" and is a regular contributor on the conservative radio show "The View From The Mount Rushmore" on SiriusXM Radio, where he also hosts a weekly political talk show and hosts weekly stand-up comedy show on conservative politics and hosts his own show, "The Righteous Conservative" on the radio show. He is a frequent guest on conservative talk radio host and host on conservative radio and radio show, The View From Hell. and hosts a podcast with his own podcast, The Right Wing Radio, which can be found on every major radio station in the Midwest, and the Right Wing Report. . and on his website, Right Wing Watch, and his social media account, , and his new book, "Right Wing Watch. , Right Wing Talk is available on Podulio, which is out on the Left Wing Report, which is a must-listener guide to the right-wing podcast, right here on the internet, and on the left wing of the right wing, and on social media, , right here, and everywhere else, right here in the world, right now! Ben is a fellow, Ben is not your host, Ben Shapiro, you can find him on all things right here! and he's also on the podcast, and you can reach him on Insta-lycie, right there, too! He's on the air!
00:00:57.000And instead of simple random drug tests, we'd actually have simple random constitutional rights tests.
00:01:02.000If you actually want to fully understand the Constitution and your constitutional rights, I encourage you to check out the free online course, Constitution 101, at Hillsdale College.
00:01:11.000You can sign up for Hillsdale College's Constitution 101 for free at hillsdale.edu slash ben.
00:02:15.000So, one of the big things that's been happening over the weekend is, we talked about it last week, this sort of violence that's been breaking out at Donald Trump rallies.
00:02:23.000So, in the last podcast, we showed tape of, for example, a Donald Trump rally-goer, somebody who was a fan of Donald Trump's, clocking a black guy as he was walking out.
00:02:33.000He's a protester being escorted out by security, and one of the folks in the audience clocked him with his elbow and then said that, next time, maybe we'll have to kill him.
00:02:42.000And Donald Trump, you know, continues to sort of foment this feeling among a lot of his followers.
00:02:48.000We're fighting back, but not just fighting back.
00:05:43.000I was thinking that I could get up on stage and take his podium away from him.
00:05:49.000And take his mic away from him and send a message to all people out in the country who wouldn't consider themselves racist, who wouldn't consider themselves approving of what type of violence Donald Trump is allowing at his rallies and send them a message that we can be strong, we can find our strength and we can stand up
00:06:10.000Against Donald Trump and against this new wave he's ushering in of truly just violent white supremacist ideas.
00:06:17.000Were you, if you had made it to that stage, were you going to attack him?
00:06:46.000And I wasn't expecting there to be as much Secret Service as there was there that day.
00:06:50.000From what I'd sort of seen, there hadn't been that much or hadn't been that much in a contained area, so I thought my chances of getting up on stage and getting to the podium would have been better.
00:07:00.000Okay, so some of the things he's saying about Trump here are true, that Trump is a bully and he's debased the discourse, but your solution to this is that you're going to jump up on stage and take his microphone away from him?
00:07:10.000So your solution is, he's made the discourse worse, he's a bully, so I'm gonna go up there and I'm gonna forcibly take away his microphone.
00:07:17.000This is where we are going as a country.
00:07:22.000Where we're going as a country is a place that we haven't been for a very long time, really since the 60s.
00:07:28.000And that is a place where there are people, a significant number of people, who believe that it's okay to do violence in the name of their political beliefs.
00:07:34.000And what did he think was going to happen?
00:08:49.000Deb continued to roll as police kept watch.
00:08:53.000Without warning, Deb was grabbed from behind and thrown to the ground.
00:09:10.000Okay, so all of this insanity, obviously, and there's more.
00:09:15.000We can show you more footage of the violence.
00:09:16.000Here's a little bit more of what it looked like in Chicago, and I think it is important to look at what happens at these Trump rallies because it's important to note two things.
00:09:24.000One, there are two groups of people, and they're actually in some ways the same group of people.
00:09:28.000You have the protesters who are willing to do violence in order to stop Trump from speaking, and then you have the protesters who are pro-Trump
00:09:34.000Isn't it great to be at a Trump rally, really?
00:10:23.000Fight breaking out between a protester and a Trump supporter apparently.
00:10:30.000So this kind of stuff was was apparently pretty common and it looks actually we here at the Daily Wire have some personal experience with this because this is pretty much what it looked like at Cal State Los Angeles when I went to speak there the other day.
00:10:43.000We're reaching the end of American politics when we can't even have conversations with each other.
00:10:48.000I agree that Donald Trump is a horror show.
00:10:50.000I also agree that Donald Trump has a right to speak.
00:10:52.000And the problem is, honestly, politically, when people do this sort of thing at Trump rallies, when people come to stop Trump from speaking, it makes him more popular.
00:11:16.000I mean, in fact, he's doing many things wrong.
00:11:17.000So here's Donald Trump's reaction to all of this.
00:11:19.000This is what Donald Trump had to say about the Chicago protesters.
00:11:26.000And they were pouring into the arena, good arena, everything nice, and all of a sudden, a planned attack just came out of nowhere, printed by, and it was printed by people that were professional people.
00:11:38.000If you look at the posters, they're all printed, they have a mark on them, who made them, all done by a group, all very professionally done.
00:11:46.000A disgrace, if you want to know the truth.
00:11:51.000And fortunately, we're able to let a lot of them know, don't go, because we would have had a problem like you wouldn't have believed, just like Big Nick.
00:12:00.000They would have wiped them out and that would not have been good.
00:12:27.000Okay, so it's not loyal to me, it's loyal to the country.
00:12:29.000First of all, I hate that sort of language generally because the idea that identity with Trump is loyalty to the country implies that if you're not loyal to Trump then you're disloyal to the country.
00:12:38.000I will also point you out here that while it's not Trump's fault that people show up and act violent against his protests, it's not his fault, you don't see this happening at Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz events.
00:13:10.000In fact, the rise of Trump is at least in part due to the fact that so many people have reacted badly to these riots and to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the violence being done in the name of leftist ideology.
00:13:22.000And they said, OK, fine, let's appoint somebody who's going to at least bring back some law and order.
00:13:32.000Just a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump at a rally, he said that if somebody tries to throw a tomato, clock them, right, take them out, and I'll pay your defense bills.
00:13:40.000So, we showed you the video last week of the elderly guy, older guy, who either elbowed or punched a black guy in the face, put him on the ground in the middle of a Trump rally.
00:13:50.000Donald Trump was asked about that on the Sunday shows, and here's what Donald Trump said about the sucker punch incident.
00:13:59.000I'm just curious, do you plan on paying for the legal fees of this older gentleman in North Carolina who sucker-punched the protester?
00:15:34.000The definition of civilization is I don't have to walk down the street at night and look over my shoulder fearing I'm gonna get a hit, right?
00:15:39.000That's the definition of civilization, is that I get to live in a society where I don't have to fear the imminent threat of violence at every turn.
00:18:41.000ReaganPrivacy.com is where you need to go, and one of the cool things about this...
00:18:46.000As you can see from this image, you can get your desired name at reagan.com, which means that every time you write your in-laws an email inviting them to dinner, they have to swallow the fact that you're a fan of Ronald Reagan, which is always a lot of fun.
00:18:57.000So you go to your name, you get an email address, yournameatreagan.com, go to reaganprivacy.com right now, and you get your personal private email address.
00:19:06.000And it is fun to know that all of the people on the receiving end of your emails are going to have to see the name of the man they most despise, Ronald Reagan.
00:19:14.000And by the way, you go right now, you get two free bonus months at ReaganPrivacy.com.
00:20:08.000Your baseline obligation, it would be, it seems to me, it would be to lead off your speech with a unifying reminder that what keeps us all American is the fact that we don't punch each other over our views.
00:20:19.000And Trump continues to push this, but it's not just that he's pro-America, it's that he's pro-Trump.
00:20:23.000So here is Donald Trump saying that the protesters of him personally, they're all people who don't love the country.
00:20:29.000When you talk about these protesters, you said, these are bad, bad people.
00:20:32.000We're going to take our country back from these people.
00:23:38.000That is an outrage and I would hope that Mr. Trump tones it down big time and tells his supporters that violence is not acceptable in the American political process.
00:23:52.000Okay, I totally agree with everything Bernie Sanders said.
00:23:54.000I do have one problem, which I'll elucidate for you in one second.
00:23:57.000Hillary Clinton said basically the same thing.
00:25:01.000So, it's not enough for her to say what Sanders says, which is basically correct.
00:25:04.000You can't incentivize violence at your rallies.
00:25:06.000She then ties it to his political opinion, right?
00:25:08.000She says, Donald Trump is the guy who wants to deport people.
00:25:11.000What does that have to do with incentivizing violence?
00:25:14.000I think that a lot of illegal immigrants should be deported.
00:25:16.000I would never tolerate acts of violence in the name of politics.
00:25:19.000But this is what the left does, and this is a game they can't play either.
00:25:23.000Because once you get to the point where you're saying your political view emboldens violence, hers and Bernie Sanders actually do.
00:25:29.000How do you think those Black Lives Matter protesters are getting out there in Chicago?
00:25:33.000It's because Hillary Clinton is kowtowing to them.
00:25:35.000Hillary Clinton is saying to Black Lives Matter, I want to let more people out of prison, and I want to be softer on the people who offend.
00:25:42.000What's the difference between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders saying that they want to make sure that offenders don't go to prison, and Donald Trump saying he'll pay for an offender's legal bills?
00:25:53.000What disturbs me so much about Trump, what disturbs me about Trump, is that he's actually adopting leftist tropes and using them in a supposedly right-wing context.
00:26:02.000Leftism has always tolerated violence in the name of its ideology.
00:26:07.000The left in America has always been okay with this brand of either government thuggery or non-governmental thuggery that they sort of incentivize and push forward.
00:26:16.000And this is what they did all the way back in the 60s when the rates of crime in this country skyrocketed because the left said, okay, we have social decay, understood, but that's just the way things are going to be.
00:26:33.000For the right to adopt that now on a personal level, for Donald Trump to say that he's going to incentivize violence so long as it's done in the name of the right cause, that's really disturbing.
00:26:42.000The left and the right are now unified in pushing violence and this is what's truly scary.
00:26:46.000When the left and the right are now on the same side.
00:26:49.000When the left and the right are now on the same side and they're both saying it's okay to push violence in the name of a political cause, we've reached the end of the debate.
00:26:58.000The two sane people here are Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and they're both getting flack from people on the right, which I don't understand at all.
00:27:04.000Here's Ted Cruz talking about how Donald Trump has essentially encouraged violence.
00:27:10.000So to be clear, you believe Mr. Trump is encouraging this violence?
00:27:17.000First of all, the protesters were in the wrong.
00:27:19.000When you come up and you use violence, you engage in violence, you threaten violence, and when you try to shut down and shout down speech, that's not what the First Amendment allows.
00:27:30.000The First Amendment gives every one of us the right to speak, but not to disrupt others.
00:27:36.000But I think also in any campaign, the responsibility starts at the top.
00:27:39.000And it is not beneficial when you have a candidate, like Donald Trump, who's telling his protesters, punch that guy in the face.
00:27:48.000I don't think you should be encouraging people to violence.
00:27:51.000And I think beyond that, we need a candidate
00:27:56.000Who respects the people, who engages, even engages the protesters with civility and respect, not with hostility.
00:28:04.000I think, you know, what I would appeal to for every candidate is decency and civility, that we can disagree and we can disagree forcefully while still respecting each other and not engaging in insults and vulgarity and not encouraging violence.
00:28:21.000Okay, and there are people on the right who are mad at Cruz for saying this.
00:28:23.000Why can't you just condemn the people on the left for protesting?
00:29:08.000But imagine what he would do if he were.
00:29:10.000Here's Ted Cruz talking about the similarities between Obama and Trump.
00:29:14.000You know, Chuck, Barack Obama is a world-class demagogue.
00:29:19.000That language there is designed to divide us.
00:29:21.000No, Mr. President, we're not angry at that.
00:29:23.000We're angry at politicians in Washington, including you, who ignore the men and women who elected you.
00:29:29.000Who have been presiding over our jobs going overseas for seven years, who have been cutting deals that are enriching the rich and powerful, the special interests and the big corporations, while working men and women are seeing their wages stagnating.
00:29:43.000And he talks about immigrants and Muslims.
00:29:45.000Mr. President, we're mad at a president who wants to bring in Syrian refugees who may be infiltrated by ISIS.
00:29:52.000And you're unwilling to be Commander-in-Chief and keep us safe, so don't engage in attacking the people like the President did.
00:29:57.000I'll tell you, that language is the kind of self-righteous moralizing from the President that makes people angry.
00:30:04.000You think that's worse than what Donald Trump's been doing?
00:30:09.000To be honest, I think it's very much the same.
00:30:31.000He already talked about Trump, but he's bringing it back to Trump because for the left, Trump is their wet dream.
00:30:36.000Trump is everything the left has ever wanted from the right.
00:30:39.000He is a leftist who's pretending to be a right-winger and in the process justifying every bias they have ever held about people of the right.
00:30:47.000That's why he's such a nightmare for people like me who have fought for a higher conservatism, a conservatism of values and philosophy that doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator in terms of emotion.
00:31:18.000And it's everybody else's fault that things are going wrong in our country.
00:31:21.000And the result is we are now a nation where people hate each other.
00:31:25.000We are now a nation where we are no longer apparently capable of debating serious public policy without immediately concluding that the person that disagrees with you is evil.
00:31:53.000And this is why I think that the rise of Trump
00:31:56.000It's both symptomatic and problematic.
00:31:58.000It's symptomatic of a deeper anger a lot of Americans have, but that anger is not justified to the extent that you get to do violence to people who disagree.
00:32:20.000But I am not somebody who is going to pretend that if somebody on my side goes and clocks someone for no reason other than basic political disagreement, that's okay.
00:32:28.000If we can't hold that in common, we've got nothing in common.
00:32:31.000We don't have a political system anymore.
00:32:35.000Marco Rubio actually said he's worried somebody's gonna end up dead at a Trump rally, and the way things are going, you could certainly see that.
00:32:41.000It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
00:32:47.000We don't know what's going to happen next here.
00:32:49.000I know that we've reached the point now where people in American politics have decided that if they don't agree with you, that they can get angry at you, that you're a bad and evil person, that they can say anything they want about you.
00:33:00.000I think that the, you know, all the gates of civility have been blown apart, and we've now reached the point where on both sides everyone is just saying or doing whatever they want.
00:33:08.000And, you know, you can't just say or do whatever you want.
00:33:11.000This is not about political correctness.
00:33:13.000This is about rules of civility and the way a society talks to each other.
00:33:17.000Do we really want to live in a country where everybody hates each other?
00:33:21.000Where everybody's at each other's throat?
00:33:23.000Where because we disagree on the role of government or the tax rate or Obamacare or foreign policy, we now in this nation cannot have a discourse or agree on any other issue and end up hating each other?
00:33:38.000If you're not angry enough, then it doesn't matter.
00:33:40.000The other problem here is that when Rubio says, I don't want a country where you can say or do anything, I do want a country where you can pretty much say anything.
00:33:47.000I don't want a country where you can do anything.
00:33:49.000I want you to be able to say whatever it is that you want to say without fear that you're going to get physically harmed.
00:33:54.000And I don't think that advocacy for physically harming someone counts as
00:34:40.000I mean, when they incentivize criminals, when they tell Black Lives Matter that they're all victimized by the police, when they suggest over and over and over that everybody is a victim of the white power structure and that the only way you can fight back is through some sort of illegal activity.
00:34:53.000When you do that sort of stuff, that has ramifications.
00:34:56.000But the problem again is that what you end up doing is undermining, you end up undermining on the right
00:35:03.000Another incident of violence at a Donald Trump rally.
00:35:04.000Apparently the victim was this man, Dr. Ben Carson.
00:35:32.000who was attacked moments ago by an angry mob that mistook him for a protester.
00:36:56.000If they're gonna hit Trump for the violence at his rallies, that's difficult to fight when there is actual violence at his rallies.
00:37:01.000Okay, time for some things I like and then in the things I hate section we'll talk about what's going on in my own situation with Breitbart News.
00:38:19.000Not sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fuss in us unused.
00:38:31.000Now, whether it be bestial oblivion or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event, a thought which quartered hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward, I do not know why yet I live to say this thing's to do, as if I have cause and will and strength and means to do it.
00:39:22.000We were meant to do something on this earth more than just sleep and feed.
00:39:26.000We were meant to fight for higher things, and examples of the ages exhort us to stand up against the craven and the cowardly, and to stand up against the bullies.
00:39:36.000With that, I want to move to things that I hate.
00:39:38.000So, as I mentioned, I haven't been sleeping particularly well, and my stomach's been churning for days, ever since what happened last week with Michelle Fields and the Donald Trump campaign.
00:39:49.000So if you don't remember, Corey Lewandowski grabbed Michelle Fields by the arm and he pulled her back.
00:39:55.000Hard enough that it left bruises on her.
00:40:11.000She was essentially an attention whore.
00:40:13.000They said pretty much all of these things.
00:40:15.000They linked to Charles Johnson's wildly discredited blog, GotNews.com, and they tried to slander Michelle as basically somebody who's constantly fabricating situations.
00:40:30.000What was worse is that Breitbart News, my former employer, Breitbart News was a... Breitbart News came out with a very tepid call for an apology from Lewandowski.
00:40:43.000If this happened, then please apologize to Michelle Fields.
00:40:56.000And was caught on audio tape talking about it, that he came up with, concocted this bizarre scheme with Michelle in order to get Trump for no reason, right?
00:41:23.000They continue to say that we want an apology.
00:41:25.000The Trump campaign continues to say, stick it.
00:41:27.000All this is bad enough, and last Thursday night I went on Megyn Kelly's show and I said, it's absurd for Breitbart News, after all of this, to not call for an apology instead of the firing.
00:41:38.000They should be calling for a firing, not an apology.
00:41:41.000The next morning, on Friday morning, Breitbart News ran a story that was as egregious as any story I've ever seen.
00:42:02.000He said that Michelle had basically concocted with Ben Taras or made a mistake.
00:42:08.000This really wasn't Lewandowski at all.
00:42:10.000It was really a secret service agent who had grabbed, it happened, but it was a secret service agent who had grabbed Michelle by the arm and pulled her.
00:42:16.000And he put together this wild kind of unsubstantiated conspiracy theory.
00:42:21.000They ran it as the lead of Breitbart News about their own reporter.
00:42:24.000At this point, you know, I'd already talked to Michelle about this.
00:43:38.000So here's the statement that I gave to BuzzFeed, my resignation statement.
00:43:46.000As a close personal friend and mentee of Andrew Breitbart, it saddens me tremendously to announce that as of 9 p.m.
00:43:52.000Pacific Time, I have resigned from Breitbart News as editor-at-large.
00:43:55.000I met Andrew Breitbart when I was 17 years old and remained his friend until his tragic death.
00:43:59.000I signed on with Breitbart News two weeks before Andrew's death because I believed in his mission.
00:44:03.000I am proud of what we accomplished in the years following his death, fighting back against the leftist media, debunking the left's key narratives.
00:44:10.000I have many good friends at Breitbart News, including editor-in-chief Alex Marlow and editor-at-large John Nolte, and I admire CEO Larry Solove for his dedication to ensuring a financial future for Andrew's widow Susie and his four children.
00:44:22.000Andrew built his life and his career on one mission.
00:44:32.000And let me tell you, knowing Andrew really well, Andrew would have flown down to Florida and personally confronted Corey Lewandowski and Donald Trump about their smear of Michelle Field.
00:44:41.000But Andrew's life mission, I write in my statement, has been betrayed.
00:44:45.000Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew's legacy.
00:44:50.000In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully and has sold out Andrew's mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.
00:44:56.000He has shaped the company into Trump's personal Pravda.
00:45:18.000Both Lewandowski and Trump maligned Michelle in the most repulsive fashion.
00:45:22.000Meanwhile, Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue.
00:45:32.000Somebody, certainly not me because I'm not even privy to these conversations, leaked out a conversation that was happening, I guess they have an editorial chat room, where people were protesting that they wanted to help out Michelle and Joel Pollack was telling them not to do so.
00:45:48.000Finally, in the ultimate indignity, they undermine Michelle completely by running a poorly evidenced conspiracy theory as their lead story, in which Michelle and Terrace had somehow misidentified Lewandowski.
00:46:06.000Talk to my wife about how upset I've been over the past few days over this.
00:46:09.000But as I'm fond of saying facts don't care about your feelings and the facts are undeniable, Breitbart News has become precisely the reverse of what Andrew would have wanted.
00:46:16.000Steve Bannon and those who follow his lead should be ashamed of themselves.
00:47:07.000This morning I wake up and here's the headline of Breitbart News.
00:47:10.000Ben Shapiro betrays loyal Breitbart readers in pursuit of Fox News contributorship.
00:47:15.000And there's a picture of Michelle Fields holding what look like Trump the Game cards, and then there's an inset of me that looks semi-like a Jewish star, and my face inside it.
00:47:50.000That's fair, they wanna rip me up and down, that's their business, that's their prerogative.
00:47:54.000They then linked to my State Bar profile, Breitbart did, and they linked to my State Bar profile, which until two weeks ago, actually listed my home address and phone number, so they doxed me, right?
00:48:02.000They tried to make it clear to their readership where I was, where I live, right, what my phone number was.
00:48:08.000And then, it wasn't just enough to do that, they put this piece under the William Bigelow byline.
00:48:21.000The purpose of that is, number one, to jab me, and number two, because in order for me to respond, they knew I would have to out my dad as this guy under the pseudonym, endangering his safety.
00:48:32.000Whatever I thought of Breitbart before, triple down on it now.
00:48:36.000This is despicable behavior in every possible way.
00:48:40.000It's despicable behavior in every possible way.
00:48:42.000And it tells a bunch of lies in the piece, like it says I violate my contract with Breitbart.
00:48:46.000I don't have a contract with Breitbart.
00:48:47.000I haven't since I resigned from Breitbart in February of 2014.
00:48:51.000And then they renegotiated a deal where I would stay on, but I've been an at-will employee ever since then.
00:49:00.000What it really is is about a movement, an entire movement, a conservative movement, that is flocking to the idol Donald Trump, and they're willing to sell out their most basic principles, the most basic principles of human decency, in order to serve at the behest of Donald Trump.
00:49:51.000And if you don't believe what, you know, there will now be, I'm sure, an attempt to smear me as somehow betraying Andrew's memory.
00:49:58.000All I can say is that if you don't believe that Andrew and I were close, take a look at his acknowledgement to me at the end of Righteous Indignation, which is a terrific book.
00:50:06.000Take a look at the acknowledgement to me, and it should demonstrate how close we were.
00:50:09.000Read the beginning of my book, Bullies.
00:50:10.000I talk at length about how close we were.
00:50:20.000And I don't want to see the conservative movement become the same.
00:50:22.000I don't want to see the conservative movement fall in thrall to some idol who tells us that we can be great again, and just because he says it, we're all supposed to worship and fall at his feet.