Trump does a rally and the media are very, very upset about it. A new poll shows Republicans don t mind Russian election interference. And a federal judge tries to ban 3D gun printing. We ll talk about all that and more on today s show with Ben Shapiro. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review. Use the promo code: PODCAST to receive 10% off your first month with discount code SHOPSHOP at checkout. You ll get 55 bucks of FREE postage, a digital scale, and a 4-week trial of Stamps. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use the promo codes: CRITICIALS to receive $5 off your purchase when you enter the offer. We are a proud supporter of The Daily Wire and The Weekly Standard. Thank you so much for your support, it means the world to us and we can keep bringing you high quality, high quality conservative commentary. produced by our team of high-quality, high-experts and correspondents. Our mission is to connect conservative Americans with like minded people who are thinking about, talking about, writing, thinking, and sharing ideas that impact their everyday lives in every facet of their every day life. This episode is for you, my dear friends. Thank you for listening, thank you for supporting, supporting, and spreading the word out there about what we do, and supporting us, and sending us your thoughts and opinions on all things we can do better than that matter! Ben Shapiro - Ben Shapiro - and much more! - The DailyWire . is a proud of you, your support is so much more. - Thank you, Ben Shapiro is a friend of the culture and business and business, and we are so grateful for all the support we get back from you. . Thank you Ben Shapiro, Thank you to all of you for being a friend, more than enough, and thank you, you are a friend and thanks you listen to us, you're listening out for all of your support and support us, so much of you listen out, and you're a little more than you can see us out there, we really appreciate it, we appreciate you, we get it, and it means it, you get it? thank you!
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00:01:43.000President Trump did another one of his patented rallies last night and it got pretty rowdy because President Trump's rallies are always rowdy.
00:01:50.000Now what's weird to me is that the media are so deeply concerned over this.
00:01:53.000If they were so deeply concerned over President Trump's rallies, maybe they should have stopped covering them soup to nuts when he was doing them in the middle of the election cycle, but
00:02:30.000They were very, very upset about this.
00:02:32.000And I'm at a loss to explain quite why.
00:02:34.000Brian Schatz, who is a senator from Nevada, he tweeted out,
00:02:48.000It's a dark carnival over at the Trump rally.
00:02:49.000I'd just like to point out to Brian Schatz that history did not start yesterday.
00:02:52.000There's this weird syndrome on the left that suddenly all history began with Donald Trump.
00:02:57.000So yesterday we talked about LeBron James saying that Trump has politicized sports, ignoring the fact that sports has been politicized for years and years and years and years, and that the politicization of our culture and our sports, that's one of the reasons why Trump has been so successful, because Trump is a counterpunch to all of that politicization.
00:03:12.000Well, the same thing is true when it comes to the quote-unquote dark carnival of Trump rallies.
00:03:16.000I'm old enough to remember in 2011 after Paul Wellstone, who is a senator from Minnesota, after he died in a plane crash, I'm old enough to remember when Democrats led an actual rally at Paul Wellstone's funeral.
00:03:27.000I mean, like, this is a thing that actually happened.
00:03:30.000Can you please let the people of this state hear your voice on his behalf to keep his legacy alive and help us win this election for Paul Wellstone?
00:03:55.000That was at a funeral for Paul Wellstone.
00:03:58.000It was a funeral memorial for Paul Wellstone.
00:04:00.000But don't worry, only Trump has been involved in the dark carnival of rallies.
00:04:05.000Again, that was all the way back in 2002.
00:04:06.000There were a bunch of Republicans sitting in the audience who just went there to pay tribute at the memorial.
00:04:10.000And I remember all these people getting up there and shouting about how Republicans were the worst thing ever at this event in memoriam for a senator who died in a plane crash.
00:04:20.000And, of course, we saw this happen in Tucson after the Gabby Giffords shooting.
00:04:25.000You remember that President Obama traveled down to Tucson where he did a full-on anti-gun rally, like a pep rally against guns, in which he and everybody else tore into the gun culture in the United States.
00:04:34.000It prompted actual mainstream media discussions as to whether this was a memorial service for those who had died in the Tucson shooting or whether it, in fact, was a pep rally.
00:04:43.000Here's, you know, folks in the mainstream media talking about it at the time.
00:04:59.000I think they probably figured it out when the president walked in and there was a scream that went up like I've never heard before.
00:05:06.000It really was extraordinary because I think, like Roger, I and Robert Gibbs said today, he too, were expecting a much more solemn occasion.
00:05:25.000You know, when I need 600 police officers to escort me into Berkeley, that's not a dark carnival in any way.
00:05:30.000When Antifa is breaking apart actual Trump rallies, when people are showing up and punching people in Trump hats, when Maxine Waters, an actual sitting congressperson, is encouraging people to be confronted in parking lots of gas stations, that's not anything dark.
00:05:45.000That's just how Democrats do politics.
00:05:47.000You know, they're cordial and they're civil.
00:05:52.000I'm old enough to remember when people were occupying parks and rape was actually happening at occasional events of Occupy.
00:05:59.000I'm old enough to remember at the Trump inauguration when people from Antifa were throwing gas canisters and breaking cars.
00:06:05.000But don't worry, nothing dark has ever happened in politics up till now.
00:06:09.000It's one of the great irritants to me is when people are just ignorant of history, not just ignorant of history, but willfully blind to stuff that happened legitimately about five minutes ago in the great timeline of American politics.
00:06:20.000And you see this yesterday from the media as well.
00:06:23.000So Jim Acosta was at this Trump rally yesterday, and there were a bunch of people who were mocking Jim Acosta and mocking CNN, and he was very upset about it.
00:06:42.000And if you can't see this, there are people who are flipping off Jim Acosta, flipping off CNN, having a good time kind of booing CNN.
00:06:50.000And Jim Acosta then tweeted out just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa.
00:06:55.000I'm very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some of the conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.
00:06:59.000We should not treat our fellow Americans this way.
00:07:04.000I sort of agree with the idea that we shouldn't treat our fellow Americans this way, but I do have a question, which is the same media who apparently didn't care at all when Trump supporters were legitimately being beaten up outside rallies in San Jose, who didn't care when a Trump rally was getting shut down by protesters in Chicago, who didn't, who barely covered for like a week the actual shooting of Congress people, of Republican Congress people at a softball game in Northern Virginia.
00:07:28.000Who don't care when Charles Murray is run off campus at physical risk and a leftist professor actually ends up concussed.
00:08:40.000The media pretending that this is something new in American politics and that they have not contributed to this climate is just insane.
00:08:47.000Remember, CNN held a full-scale gun control rally complete with shaming rituals directed at the NRA and Marco Rubio just a few months ago after the Parkland shootings.
00:09:04.000And it turned into this pathetic ritual where a bunch of people would get up and suggest that Marco Rubio was equivalent to a mass shooter in a public high school.
00:09:14.000And we're supposed to believe now that everything that's happening is new?
00:09:59.000And nobody likes an insulting nanny more than anything else.
00:10:01.000Mark Caputo is a reporter at Politico.
00:10:03.000He actually tweeted this out in response to Jim Acosta.
00:10:10.000Yes, I'm sure that is going to really ramp down the rhetoric here.
00:10:12.000I'm sure that is really going to make sure that everybody treats each other with a certain level of civility and decency that we have not yet found in American politics.
00:10:22.000And there are all these polls showing that people don't trust the media.
00:10:24.000One of the reasons people don't trust the media is because the people believe that the media are a self-serving institution.
00:10:29.000A lot of Trump supporters believe that President Trump is fighting for them.
00:10:32.000One of the reasons they believe that President Trump is fighting for them and not for himself is because he expresses sympathy for a lot of these folks.
00:10:39.000He doesn't suggest they're a bunch of losers.
00:10:41.000He'll say things like, we are the elites.
00:10:42.000He expresses the frustration of a lot of people in the middle of the country, particularly who have felt culturally dispossessed by the elites on the coast, by the elitists, I should say, on the coast for a very long time.
00:10:52.000Trump expresses that particularly well because Trump, as a human being,
00:10:57.000has a certain level of insecurity that drives him to feel like he's a guy outside the party constantly.
00:11:03.000And that resonates well with a lot of people who felt like they've been forcibly expelled from the party by the cultural arbiters of decency, by the folks like Jim Acosta.
00:11:10.000And so when Trump rallies those folks, there's a certain level of warmth to him.
00:11:13.000But there's not that same level of warmth to the media.
00:11:16.000The media who treat themselves as a sort of cased apart.
00:11:51.000It is written and hosted by Mark Ramsey, the man behind Inside Psycho and Inside the Exorcist.
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00:12:56.000If you love that Inside Hollywood stuff, it's really, really good.
00:12:58.000And the movie, of course, is great, so go check it out.
00:13:01.000It's, again, called Inside Jaws, and you can subscribe at wondery.fm slash insidejaws.
00:13:05.000Okay, so, you know, the media treating themselves as a sort of special group of people is one of the great irritants, I think, to the American people.
00:13:11.000You see it every time there's talk about First Amendment rights by the media.
00:13:15.000Now, I am almost a First Amendment absolutist.
00:13:17.000I'm about as close to a First Amendment absolutist as you can get.
00:13:20.000I've gotten more libertarian on the First Amendment over the course of my career just because I fear the government intervention in the First Amendment sphere, which we'll talk about in just a little while.
00:13:28.000There's a new case in which the government looks to be cracking down on the First Amendment in order to crack down on the Second Amendment.
00:13:33.000The media treat the First Amendment as though it is a special preserve of members of the media.
00:13:37.000So, when there's an attempt to shut down people from speaking at public universities, then the media treat it as though this is an actual debate we ought to be having.
00:13:45.000But, when there are members of the media who are restricted from asking a question to the President of the United States, it's the end of the world.
00:13:52.000They are not principled in their actual pursuit of First Amendment rights.
00:13:55.000The same media that will champion the idea that there should be restrictions on quote-unquote hate speech will tell you about how the media are a special preserve of people and the freedom of the press is our key freedom.
00:14:05.000Well, the freedom of the press was not a... The idea by some on the left is that you have to be an accredited journalist to really experience freedom of the press.
00:14:13.000That's not what freedom of the press meant.
00:14:15.000And the same thing is true when it comes to the sort of violent, nasty rhetoric we've been seeing in our politics.
00:14:20.000The media don't seem to mind so much when it's targeted at gun control opponents, when it's targeted at Second Amendment advocates, when it's targeted at social conservatives, when it's targeted at religious bakers.
00:14:30.000Then they don't care so much when there's all this ire and anger and ginning up of outrage directed at the people they don't like.
00:14:36.000But as soon as it's directed at the media themselves, then all of a sudden they get very, very touchy about this stuff very, very quickly.
00:14:42.000Then they say, oh, well, now I feel like we're on the verge of a civil war.
00:14:45.000Now, remember, Jim Acosta is tweeting this stuff out.
00:14:47.000Well, the same media was downplaying just a few weeks ago when a Fox News reporter said that she couldn't even report from the steps of the Supreme Court because she was fearful of the reaction of a bunch of lefties to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, so she wouldn't go out there and report because she felt like she was being threatened.
00:15:00.000The media said, oh, well, you know, that's, that's just, I mean, we were out there and it was fine.
00:15:04.000We were out there and it was no problem.
00:15:06.000But when a CNN reporter gets tossed out of the briefing room, wrongly in my opinion, by the White House, then all of a sudden it's, why aren't Fox News, why aren't the people on the right defending us?
00:15:15.000People on the right should defend you, and you know what you should do?
00:15:17.000You should defend the First Amendment.
00:15:18.000You should actually defend the civility in the political process.
00:15:21.000The same people, MSNBC will host Maxine Waters every night of the week without actually pressing her on whether it is appropriate to tell people to
00:15:39.000But then, as soon as there's some people who yell at Jim Acosta at a rally, then it's the end of the world and we're supposed to pretend that this is something new and history started just now.
00:15:46.000Like, we just figured out that history just started.
00:15:48.000It's really irritating to a lot of folks.
00:15:51.000And I think that's the reason why you are seeing so much ire on the part of folks on the right.
00:15:55.000Now, I will say that I think that all of this needs to calm down on every side.
00:16:01.000There's been a lot of talk in the last...
00:16:03.000A couple of years, three years, about an upcoming civil war in the United States.
00:16:07.000About the idea that we are going to break out into fighting.
00:16:09.000I wrote a dystopian novel about the possibility of civil war coming to the United States.
00:16:13.000The whole point of the dystopian novel is that it is about five steps removed from reality.
00:16:19.000There are indicators that conflict is on the way, but the idea that there's going to be some great armed conflict or that we are in the middle of the second civil war right now is just absurd.
00:16:28.000If you just walk around the United States, the idea that people are going to be shooting each other in the next couple of years is insane.
00:16:32.000You could not say the same thing in the lead-up to the first Civil War.
00:16:35.000In the lead-up to the first Civil War, you actually had a pre-Civil War in Kansas in 1856.
00:16:40.000It was called Bleeding Kansas, where slaveholders and advocates for slavery and freestaters were actually going at it and shooting each other and murdering each other in relatively significant numbers in the state of Kansas.
00:16:52.000They actually had John Brown going down to Harper's Ferry and trying to lead a slave revolt and
00:16:58.000Almost a dozen people being shot, right?
00:16:59.000You actually had this sort of stuff happening on a fairly regular basis, and there was open talk about the possibility of a civil war leading up to the civil war.
00:17:07.000It's very difficult to look at today's United States and figure that all the hemp smokers in San Francisco are going to be at war with the gun owners in Texas in the next few years.
00:17:17.000Yeah, I think that both sides now have an interest in ramping up the rhetoric of civil war.
00:17:20.000So on the left, you have an interest in suggesting that fascism is on the way and that we are all going to be put under the tyrannical boot of the Trump administration.
00:17:28.000And on the right, you have an interest in suggesting that the resistance, the so-called resistance of the left, is going to lead to the outgrowth of a civil war.
00:17:37.000Now, I will admit that when you are in the political sphere and you're watching this stuff every day, it's very easy to be drawn into this sort of rhetoric.
00:17:43.000I don't think I've been immune to it over the course of my career.
00:17:46.000It's easy to get alarmist when you are immersed in politics every single day.
00:17:50.000And then you turn off Twitter and you go out into the world and you realize nobody's actually ready to shoot each other.
00:17:54.000And the number of people who are actually ready to clock each other, it's very, very low, which is why when things have come to blows, very often the government backs down.
00:18:03.000The case in point being, for example, the Bundy Ranch scenario where Cliven Bundy and his sons essentially told the federal government to stand down and some of them were arrested and then there was some jury nullification and nobody actually went to jail, right?
00:18:16.000When the possibility of actual violence is in the offing, it seems like there has been a generalized move to back off of that.
00:19:06.000It has not been weaponized in the sense that you're now banned from participating in sports if you happen to be a conservative or you're banned if you happen to be somebody on the left.
00:19:14.000But Victor Davis Hanson continues, Donald Trump's election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.
00:19:21.000But he says, we are now nearing a point comparable to 1860 and perhaps past 1968.
00:19:27.000Left-right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography, always history's force multiplier of civil strife.
00:19:32.000Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.
00:19:40.000So he says that the country is polarizing along geographic lines.
00:19:43.000He says that globalization has undermined national unity because we have these iconic billionaires in high tech and finance and coastal elites, but it's hollowed out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.
00:19:55.000Technology has largely muscled out a lot of those jobs.
00:19:57.000The manufacturing capacity of the United States has actually risen over the past three decades.
00:20:01.000It's just the technology has gotten a lot better because as a country, we have moved more in the direction of technology doing work that human hands
00:22:01.000Okay, this is the part where he is totally right.
00:22:03.000One of the things that has happened is that we have polarized along technological lines because it is easy to sit behind your keyboard on Twitter and say mean things to other people you would never say to them in person.
00:22:13.000It's easy when you don't go to church to slander your neighbors as people without teeth, as Mark Caputo was doing.
00:22:18.000It is very easy when you don't actually have a community you feel a sense of belonging to
00:22:24.000To talk about going to war with all of your neighbors.
00:22:26.000All that stuff is social isolation has actually increased in a time of social networking, which is one of the great ironies of the rise of technology.
00:22:34.000We spend less time with human beings and we spend more time online pretending to be with human beings and treating people how we would not want to be treated did we actually meet people in regular life.
00:22:43.000What's missing is the spiritual component, the sense that we're all in the fight together.
00:22:47.000And that's been missing for a while in the United States.
00:22:58.000If you want to talk about a crisis of American conscience, I'm with you.
00:23:01.000If you want to talk about a crisis of American spirituality, I'm totally with you.
00:23:04.000If you want to talk about a crisis in the West of meaning and purpose, not only am I with you, I wrote an entire book on it.
00:23:09.000I wrote an entire book on this crisis of meaning, what we've lost, why we lost it.
00:23:14.000I think that we've lost a couple of things in the West.
00:23:15.000I think we've lost the idea of a Judeo-Christian value system that bound us all together.
00:23:19.000And we also lost the idea of reason as a universal solvent that was going to help
00:23:25.000Bring us together and also grant us the capacity to talk with one another.
00:23:29.000And we've broken down into identity politics and subjectivism.
00:23:32.000I think there are a lot of things that have gone wrong with our culture, but talking about civil war only exacerbates the problem because the problem with saying that we're on the verge of a second civil war is that it actually encourages you to look at people across the aisle from you and not see the common face of an American, but see somebody who is your enemy attempting to destroy the United States.
00:23:50.000And that's not to say that conflicts between left and right don't exist.
00:23:54.000And I think the left is dead wrong on virtually all of these issues.
00:23:57.000I think fighting leftist principles is a deeply important thing because I think the left is complicit in the destruction of these central ideals of America that bind us together.
00:24:06.000I think the left has forcibly attempted to destroy the Judeo-Christian fabric.
00:24:10.000I think that the left has abandoned reason on behalf of subjective feeling.
00:24:15.000But I also think that most people in the United States are not, quote unquote, on the left.
00:24:19.000I think most people in the United States simply are told certain things by the media, and they believe those things because members of the media say them.
00:24:25.000I think a lot of people in the United States don't even think about policy very often.
00:24:28.000They don't think about politics very often.
00:24:30.000And if they do think about politics, I think they are driven into a state of insanity by all of the talk of this sort of civil war mentality.
00:26:10.000And one of the weird things about the way that we perceive war in the modern world, because so few of us have actually been in the military, only a small percentage of Americans actually even know people who have been in the military or deal with people in the military on a regular basis,
00:26:23.000Because of that, we tend to think that war makes the best of people.
00:26:27.000When we watch war movies, we see, oh, look at the unity of the guys in Band of Brothers.
00:26:32.000Look how, in a war, there's a common sense of purpose.
00:26:34.000This is why so many folks, particularly on the political left, like to talk about the war on poverty.
00:26:39.000People on the right will talk about the war on illegal immigration, the war on Christmas.
00:26:42.000We're constantly using the language of war because we think that war brings us together and refines us, that pressure turns us into a purer version of ourselves.
00:26:51.000The worst atrocities in the history of mankind have happened during war.
00:26:53.000The reason for that is because once you believe that you are fighting in a battle, once you believe that your life is at stake, once you believe that war is at your front door, you're willing to do almost anything in order to prevent yourself from losing that war.
00:27:06.000Once you believe that the country is one step away from its end, it's pretty easy to justify doing virtually anything.
00:27:14.000And I think that that's having a pretty significant impact, this sort of Civil War rhetoric, on how people think on both the left and on the right.
00:27:34.000The fact is, Russia meddled in our 2016 elections.
00:27:39.000Russia's goal was to sow discord and division, and to weaken the American people's faith in our democracy.
00:27:46.000And while no actual votes were changed, any attempt to interfere in our elections is an affront to our democracy, and it will not be allowed.
00:28:13.000And we work with the private sector, such as Facebook, companies like Facebook, to try to pull down content that is inauthentic.
00:28:19.000Okay, so there is a real problem with the Russians meddling in our election.
00:28:22.000Now, if you're a patriotic American who believes that Western civilization actually requires defense, you should be offended by the idea of a country like Russia attempting to meddle in our elections.
00:28:32.000The idea that Vladimir Putin, who is a thug dictator who murders his dissidents, interfering in our elections should be offensive to you no matter where you stand on the political aisle.
00:28:39.000I was deeply offended when Barack Obama said to Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 that he wanted flexibility from the Russian government so that if they were kind to him and didn't do anything, he would provide them flexibility in his next administration.
00:28:54.000Russian interference in the election is a bad thing.
00:28:56.000But there's a new poll out today, and this is, I think, an outgrowth of a Civil War mentality.
00:29:00.000There's a new poll out today, and here was the question in the poll.
00:29:03.000If Russia were to help the Republicans or Democrats keep or win control of Congress in the November elections, do you think their actions would be appropriate, inappropriate but not a big deal, or inappropriate and it's a big deal?
00:29:14.000So according to Republicans, people who lean Republican,
00:29:18.000Fully 40%, 40% of Republicans say it would either be appropriate for the Russians to interfere in our elections to help Republicans win, or that it wouldn't be appropriate but it wouldn't be all that big a deal if the Russians interfere in our elections to help us win.
00:29:31.00040% of Republicans say that it's not that big a deal if the Russians actually interfered in our elections and we knew that they were interfering in our elections.
00:31:12.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:20.000So there are two factors that are leading to this disparate polling, right?
00:31:24.000So what the polling shows, again, is that 40% of Republicans think that if the Russians interfered in the elections to help Republicans maintain control of Congress in 2018, it wouldn't be a big deal.
00:31:33.00014% of Democrats say that if the Democrats were helped by the Russians, it would be a not big deal.
00:31:41.000Reason number one is the most obvious reason, which is that the Republicans who are answering this poll
00:31:48.000Are seeing, are actually not answering the poll question.
00:31:51.000This is one of the big problems with polling of Republicans right now.
00:31:54.000Anytime a pollster mentions the word Russia, Republicans immediately trigger and they immediately go to, I'm going to deny that anything bad has ever happened with Russia.
00:32:02.000Because you guys are making such a big deal out of this Russian nonsense.
00:32:05.000You keep saying that Trump, the election was illegitimate.
00:32:07.000You keep trying to make this into Trump is a tool of the Russians.
00:32:38.000So I think that part of that statistic that 40% of Republicans don't care if the Russians interfere in the 2018 elections, I think that that statistic is largely driven by Republicans going, you know what?
00:32:47.000Screw you, I'm not answering your question, because you keep making a big deal out of this Russia stuff.
00:32:51.000Part of it is that a lot of Republicans really believe that if we are in the midst of a civil war, any and all means necessary to defeat the opponent are on the table.
00:33:02.000This is the danger of talking civil war.
00:33:03.000And I think Democrats felt the same way when they felt that Barack Obama was in danger.
00:33:06.000They felt that anything that helped defeat Barack Obama
00:33:11.000It was a great evil that had to be fought at every possible turn.
00:33:23.000Maybe they're a little bit extreme, but are they that extreme?
00:33:25.000This sort of attitude now pervades the country.
00:33:28.000The belief that civil war is upon us is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:33:33.000Once you start saying that civil war is this far away, people start building up for war.
00:33:37.000People start girding their loins, getting ready for battle.
00:33:38.000And that means treating other people around them in more immoral fashion, not more moral fashion.
00:33:44.000So I think that's why I object to some of the Civil War rhetoric and I think that it's actually quite dangerous for the future of the country for us to keep talking like this instead of focusing on the fact that we do have this amazing edifice that we've built together and that, with the grace of God, has been built for us by people who came before us.
00:34:00.000What do we have to do to uphold that edifice as opposed to tearing it down?
00:34:03.000And yes, let's have the fights with the socialists.
00:34:05.000Yes, let's talk about the foundational principles of the United States.
00:34:09.000But let's not pretend that we're on the verge of shooting each other in the streets because we actually are not.
00:34:14.000I also think that the more that Republicans talk like this, the more they're going to off-put the independent vote.
00:34:18.000I think that people in the middle don't want to hear this.
00:34:20.000Most people don't want to be bothered, is the truth.
00:34:23.000And people constantly shrieking in your ear that the Civil War is coming is not actually of benefit to you electorally.
00:34:30.000By the way, when the Civil War does come, you know, if the Civil War were to come in, I think, several decades, I don't think that it would come from
00:34:37.000Tyrannical Republicans cramming down their values.
00:34:39.000I think it would come more from tyrannical Democrats outlawing hate speech, outlawing religious practice, attempting to crack down on my church or my synagogue, attempting to take my child away from me if I don't teach them their preferred social policies.
00:34:50.000That's where things are really going to get bad.
00:34:52.000But I think it's going to be a long while before we get there, because I still think that the vast majority of Americans don't believe like the radical left believes.
00:34:59.000That said, this is one of the reasons why it's important how we talk about politics.
00:35:02.000This is why the mannerisms of militants actually don't help us generate victory.
00:35:09.000They don't help generate political victory.
00:35:11.000What helps us generate political victory is making better arguments than the other side, calling them out when they make bad character attacks, calling them out for lack of character when they do those sorts of things.
00:35:20.000But the constant, the constant idea that we have to be weapons up all the time, eventually somebody is going to pull the trigger and things will get ugly at that point.
00:35:28.000The more weapons that go up, the better chance that somebody is going to pull the trigger.
00:35:35.000There is a crazy thing that is happening right now where a bunch of folks on the left are now attempting to ban 3D gun printing.
00:35:41.000We talked a little bit yesterday about the fact that folks in the media do not know what in the hell they are talking about when they talk about printing of 3D guns.
00:35:47.000They really think that I'm going to take my HP LaserJet and print out a gun in my house right now.
00:35:53.000Like, they really think that that's a thing I can do.
00:35:55.000That I can just go into my library and I can print out a gun from my normal printer.
00:36:01.000Because they hear printing and this is what they think.
00:37:04.000What in the world is he talking about?
00:37:06.000Ed Markey does not know what he is talking about.
00:37:08.000The idea there are a bunch of felons who are sitting in their basements with $100,000 printing machines for 3D plastic guns is just ridiculous.
00:37:16.000If a felon wants to get a gun, the easiest way to do it is just to buy it illegally.
00:37:19.000Really, it's going to cost you like $1,000, as opposed to, I don't know, $150,000 to manufacture a 3D AR-15 that fires three times before it breaks.
00:37:36.000If you are looking to download the blueprints for how to make a plastic gun using a 3D printer, you can't yet get them online from a site distributing them legally.
00:37:42.000A federal judge Tuesday night blocked a settlement that would have allowed Defense Distributed, a Texas-based gun rights organization, to legally post blueprints for 3D printable guns.
00:37:50.000But hundreds of designs reportedly were downloaded before the judge's decision, meaning those designs are out there, legally or not.
00:37:55.000Well, yes, I mean, the idea that you're going to shut down every site on the internet that is posting these blueprints is just asinine and a significant violation of free speech.
00:38:04.000First of all, you can buy the Anarchist Cookbook right now at Barnes & Noble.
00:38:07.000You can go to Amazon.com and you can buy the Anarchist Cookbook, which actually includes bomb-making lessons.
00:38:12.000So the distribution of information is not the serious problem here.
00:38:16.000The distribution of information is not what is going to lead to the collapse of the United States.
00:38:21.000I'm much more fearful of the federal government stepping in and saying, we are afraid that you're going to manufacture a gun in your own house, therefore,
00:38:27.000We are going to regulate what kinds of sites are on the internet.
00:38:29.000By the way, everybody just went to an alternate site yesterday.
00:38:31.000They shut down one site and everybody just went to an alternative site.
00:38:36.000If tyranny is going to come in the United States, it's going to come from people who are so fearful of the liberty of Americans that they believe that the government should shut down all sorts of freedoms that we hold dear.
00:38:46.000That's where tyranny is actually going to come from.
00:38:50.000The idea that globalization and additional technology is exacerbating cultural differentiation, which leads to us picking up guns and going and invading the local Starbucks.
00:38:59.000That's not a thing that's really in the offing.
00:39:02.000And so, again, media ignorance on full display.
00:39:48.000And again, the creation of a crisis mentality around issues where there really is no crisis, I think, is a major mistake in virtually every way.
00:39:57.000OK, time for some things I hate, some things I like, and then some things I hate.
00:40:00.000And then we'll do a long awaited Federalist paper because we missed doing it a little bit earlier this week.
00:42:32.000Dak Prescott is the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys.
00:42:35.000And he has said he is not kneeling for the National Anthem because he thinks it's stupid to kneel for the National Anthem, which is eminently correct.
00:43:02.000So I've been criticized in the past for suggesting that Jews who vote for abortion policy, for example, or same-sex marriage, that they're Jews in name only because Judaism is actually a creed that has certain values attached to it.
00:43:13.000And if you ignore those values, then you may be ethnically Jewish, but you're actually not participating in the religion of Judaism in any serious way.
00:43:27.000Hewley suggests that Dak Prescott is no longer a black person, he's a boy working for the master because he doesn't want to kneel for the national anthem and says that it is bad to kneel for the national anthem, that sort of bigotry on a national stage is completely ignored.
00:43:40.000That is just another example of extreme rhetoric that the left will ignore while they are jabbering about how people are being mean to Jim Acosta at a rally.
00:43:47.000And again, I don't think it's great to be mean to Jim Acosta at a rally.
00:43:50.000I think you are serving Jim Acosta's purpose of worshipping Jim Acosta when you do that.
00:43:53.000But I also think that the left has ignored extreme... Al Sharpton still has a show on MSNBC, for God's sake.
00:43:58.000The man was responsible, at least in part, for, and instrumental, in helping to incite a race riot in Crown Heights in 1991 that ended with the murder of an Orthodox Jew.
00:44:07.000So, I mean, and that guy has a show on MSNBC.
00:44:11.000Speaking of extreme rhetoric, when I talk about the Civil War rhetoric that's emanating from every side right now, Andrea Mitchell, who's supposed to be a reporter last time I checked, right?
00:44:19.000She was on Comedy Central, and she compared President Trump to Stalin, which makes perfect sense because they're exactly the same, except for not the same in any way that you can actually measure.
00:44:28.000Here's Andrea Mitchell making that comparison.
00:44:31.000I do think that he has very deliberately set up the press as the enemy of the people.
00:44:37.000I don't feel that I am the enemy of the people, and it's not benign.
00:44:41.000I mean, this is a... This is something that we first heard from Joseph Stalin.
00:45:05.000Do I like Trump's rhetoric about the media?
00:45:07.000No, I've been very critical of President Trump's rhetoric about the media because I don't think that everything he says is fake news is actually fake news and I don't think the press are the enemies of the American people or anything like that.
00:45:16.000I think they are self-indulgent all too often.
00:45:18.000I think they have their own priorities, but I don't think that they are, you know, actively attempting to destroy the American people or anything like that.
00:45:25.000That said, comparing Trump to Stalin is not actually making
00:45:28.000It's not making Trump's case harder that you're doing a bad job as objective members of the media.
00:45:53.000He says that a republic is a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period or during good behavior.
00:46:03.000It is essential to such a government that it be derived from a great body of society, not from an inconsiderable proportion or a favored class of it, otherwise a handful of tyrannical mobiles exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers might aspire to the rank of republicans and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.
00:46:18.000It is sufficient for such a government that the persons administering it be appointed either directly or indirectly by the people, that they hold their appointments by either the tenures just specified.
00:46:27.000Otherwise, every government in the United States, as well as every other popular government that has been or can be well-organized or well-executed, would be degraded from the Republican character.
00:46:36.000What he's saying is what makes a republic is that we have a bunch of elected officials, elected by the great majority of the public, and that these officials hold their offices for a limited period or during good behavior.
00:46:47.000This is a far cry from the bureaucratic government that has been instituted since the beginning of the 20th century in the United States.
00:46:53.000The legislature of the United States has become the withered arm of American government.
00:46:56.000The Constitution's Article 1 presents virtually all power in the form of the legislature.
00:47:01.000There's no question that Congress was meant to be
00:47:04.000Of all the branches, the most powerful.
00:47:07.000And yet it has become in many ways the least powerful branch of the American government, which demonstrates we have moved away from an elected republic, more toward a bureaucratic government that has created all sorts of tension inside the American system.
00:47:20.000It's the reason why people feel frustrated that government isn't doing what they want it to do, because your elected officials have kicked overall responsibility to a bunch of unelected, life-tenured bureaucrats
00:47:29.000Over at a bunch of executive agencies.
00:47:40.000The way that the nation was formed was the assent and ratification of the several states derived from the supreme authority in each state, the authority of the people themselves.
00:47:48.000The act therefore establishing the Constitution will be a national, well not a national, but a federal act.
00:47:52.000So he says the states basically made the United States because the formation of the Constitution had to be upheld on a state-by-state basis universally.
00:48:03.000And then he describes the Republic this way, he says,
00:48:10.000In its foundation, it is federal, not national.
00:48:12.000In the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national.
00:48:17.000And in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal, meaning that it doesn't operate on a state-by-state basis.
00:48:22.000You treat all the states the same according to the Constitution of the United States.
00:48:26.000It says in the extent of them, it is again federal, not national, meaning that you can't override the rights of the states.
00:48:30.000And finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.
00:48:35.000Now, the reason that this became an interesting battle is leading up to the Civil War, there was an argument
00:48:39.000It was called State Compact Theory that was made by members of the Confederacy, that basically, if the Constitution violated the original prescriptions that were signed off on by a variety of states, that those states had the right to withdraw from the Constitution.
00:48:52.000Just as if I sign a contract with you, and you break the contract, I get to withdraw from the contract.
00:48:56.000They say the states were the signatories to the Constitution, and therefore, if you violate the rights of a particular state, that state has the ability to withdraw.
00:49:03.000The counter-argument was, we have an amendment process to the Constitution.
00:49:07.000How the government is acting, all you have to do is pass an amendment.
00:49:10.000You don't have the votes for this amendment.
00:49:13.000And so, how exactly are you going to fight that?
00:49:17.000argument I don't think is legally insignificant.
00:49:20.000I also think it has ramifications for today with regard to what is the exact purview of the state.
00:49:26.000I think that the state compact theory is not entirely wrong from a legal perspective.
00:49:29.000The problem was it was being fought over the great evil of the 19th century, slavery.
00:49:34.000And therefore, the moral imperative to destroy slavery was stronger than the legal imperative to maintain the state's rights.
00:49:41.000And that had some dramatic ramifications for the federal government going forward, although the truth is the full destruction of state power really didn't happen until the middle of the 20th century with the rise of the federal bureaucracy.
00:49:52.000OK, well, we will be back here tomorrow to break down all the latest.