The left defends Antifa, we talk Confederate statues, and why we re even talking about Confederate monuments, and we talk about the Republican response to the white supremacist counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ben Shapiro explains why the left seems to have an ulterior motive in defending Antifa and why they want to turn Antifa into heroes. Also, we discuss why Confederate statues should be kept, why we should keep them, and what the goal of the Confederate Monument Project is and why the removal of Confederate monuments is a bad idea. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" on Fox News Radio. He is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard and has been featured on CNN, CBS, NPR, and the New York Times, among other outlets. He is also a frequent contributor to the conservative publication Accuracy in the American Opinion and has written for publications such as The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller, and The Huffington Post. You can find Ben Shapiro on all social medias, if you search for him, he is your go-to guy for the latest news and discussion on all things social media topics, including blogs, podcasts, blogs, and social media, including The Daily Mail, and websites. . He can be found on social media as and on Insta: . He is the author of the book, , and is on the radio show as well as the podcast, , The Daily Beast, and many other social media outlets. and is a frequent appearances on the airwaves, including among many other things. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Ben Shapiro s is Ben Shapiro's. Thank you for listening to The Ben Shapiro Podcast! Ben is a friend of the Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro? in this episode of to Ben Shapiro: the podcast, Ben is an old friend of mine, and Ben has been a long-time friend of Ben's work on the podcast and I hope you enjoy The Ben is kind of a good friend of yours, too so you like Ben's music is great, Ben s music is good, too! and Ben is very good, Ben has a good day, too, Ben's voice is good enough, and I'm glad you like it's good, so much so that you're listening to it?
00:00:00.000The left defends Antifa, we talk about Confederate statutes and why we're really talking about Confederate statutes, and we talk about the Republican response to everything Trump-related.
00:00:08.000I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:28.000We're going to talk today, a lot, about why the left seems to now be defending violence, why it is that Antifa has to be turned into heroes, why that was their ultimate goal in the first place.
00:00:36.000Also, we'll talk about Confederate statues, should they be removed, Confederate monuments,
00:00:40.000Why are we even talking about Confederate monuments, what the goals are of the various political sides, and even discussing this, and we'll go through the various arguments for and against keeping them.
00:00:48.000So, it seems that the left had an ulterior motive when it comes to the events in Charlottesville.
00:00:54.000I don't mean that they organized the events in Charlottesville with an intent toward what happened to that innocent young woman, or that it's their fault that they went there and counter-protested
00:01:04.000An evil white supremacist movement and spare me all the talk about how there were lots of wonderful people at the at the evil white supremacist movements.
00:01:11.000The thing was pitched as a white supremacist rally.
00:01:14.000Okay, that's just the way that it was.
00:01:15.000Okay, but it is clear that one of the goals of the left and it has been for now a year and Charlottesville allowed them to do this with some level of credibility is they are now attempting pretty overtly
00:01:29.000The Antifa movement is a deeply violent movement that seeks to use violence against all the people they oppose.
00:01:36.000And the media have basically covered up the level of violence that Antifa is engaged in.
00:01:40.000So, yesterday, we got news that another rally in Richmond, Virginia, where a bunch of Antifa people showed up, there was a journalist who really got clocked.
00:01:49.000We have a couple of pictures of what happened to that journalist.
00:01:52.000So, here is a picture of the journalist after the journalist got clocked by an Antifa member.
00:01:57.000And here is another picture of the journalist's head after the journalist was clocked by the Antifa member.
00:02:02.000Four staples in the head, concussion from the Antifa member.
00:02:05.000This was not covered in any real way by the media more broadly.
00:02:09.000They basically suggested that none of this sort of stuff happened and that when Trump said that the alt-left was charging into people, that was not true.
00:04:37.000So burning down Detroit, burning down Los Angeles in the Watts riot, that was necessary.
00:04:41.000And then he concludes, segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House, and many other American temples.
00:04:47.000By the way, Jeff Sessions immediately called this a hate crime and said he was going to investigate this as a terrorist incident, so that's just nonsense.
00:04:53.000And when he says segregationists in the White House, Trump isn't a segregationist.
00:05:14.000Overtly calling for violence in the streets in a country that is highly law-abiding, where levels of violence are at their lowest levels on average in 50 years, basically.
00:05:26.000I mean, this is really, really vile stuff.
00:05:29.000It's, by the way, it's also historically ignorant.
00:05:31.000And this is another point I think worth making.
00:05:32.000Riots in America have not forwarded the cause.
00:05:34.000Riots in America have made the cause worse.
00:05:36.000Detroit, before the Detroit riots of 1967-1968, before those Detroit riots happened,
00:05:42.000Detroit was the fastest-growing black city in America.
00:06:18.000is very Hispanic, and Simi Valley is very white.
00:06:22.000It's a very segregated city, and one of the reasons is because of riots like the L.A.
00:06:25.000riots, or as Maxine Waters, that disgusting human being, called them the L.A.
00:06:29.000uprising, when many black folks decided to burn their own neighborhoods and target Korean shopkeepers in South Central over the Rodney King verdict.
00:06:38.000Riots, throwing rocks, is not a worthwhile thing in the United States.
00:06:53.000Okay, but I'm talking here about what he's talking about, the idea that Antifa needs to go out in the streets, and if the Nazis are marching, Antifa needs to go out and punch them in the head.
00:07:55.000What he is saying here, that people who engaged in violence with the Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville did the country a service?
00:08:03.000He wrote in his piece that Antifa has been fighting Klansmen and fascists for years, and then he specifically talks about how they helped stop Hitler.
00:08:13.000Except for how they didn't stop Hitler.
00:08:16.000In retrospect, anti-fascists have concluded it would have been much easier to stop Mussolini back in 1919 when his first fascist nucleus had 100 men, or to stamp out the far-right German Workers' Party which had only 54 members when Hitler attended his first meeting before he transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
00:08:31.000So he says that, not just, but he's saying they shouldn't just do this through education.
00:08:35.000He says, the first anti-fascists fought Benito Mussolini's black shirts in the Italian countryside, exchanged fire with Adolf Hitler's brown shirts in the taverns and alleyways of Munich, and defended Madrid from Francisco Franco's insurgent nationalist army.
00:08:52.000I mean, I want to talk a little bit about this myth that armed violence by communists in the Weimar Republic would have stopped the Nazis.
00:09:00.000There was armed violence by communists in the Weimar Republic.
00:09:03.000It was one of the driving forces behind the Nazis' success.
00:09:06.000People looked at the communists and they said, okay, if we have to decide between communist violence and fascist violence, we'll go with the fascists.
00:09:11.000This is from Richard Evans' book, The Coming of the Third Reich.
00:09:14.000Quote, A graphic account of the life of the committed communist activists during the Weimar Republic was later provided by the memoirs of Richard Krebs.
00:09:21.000Clashes with the police strengthened his hatred of them and their bosses, the social democratic rulers of the city.
00:09:26.000The communists refused to work with the social democrats.
00:09:29.000It says, Krebs later describes how committed communists would attend street demonstrations with pieces of lead piping in their belts and stones in their pockets, ready to pelt the police with.
00:09:38.000I want to tell you the rest of this story, and why it is that groups like Antifa only grow the alt-right, only grow the neo-nazis, only grow the neo-confederates, only grow the white supremacists.
00:09:47.000But before I do that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Framebridge.
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00:11:07.000It wasn't just that the Communists and the Nazis went at one another.
00:11:10.000Paramilitary battles were common, by the way.
00:11:11.000Here's some statistics about the paramilitary battles.
00:11:14.000In the aftermath of World War I, the German army was essentially disbanded by the Versailles Treaty, and there were a lot of ex-military people roaming around.
00:11:21.000The Communists grabbed some of them, and what were called the Free Corps, the Freikorps, grabbed another.
00:11:28.000And they formed things like the Steel Helmets and the Freikorps and these were all, these were all militia groups basically, local militia groups that wandered the countryside fighting each other and quote-unquote defending the population from the various entities.
00:11:42.000From 1924 to 1929 it was claimed that 29 Nazi activists had been killed by communists.
00:11:46.000Communists reported 92 workers had been killed in clashes with fascists from 24 to 30.
00:11:51.00026 members of the Steel Helmets, the Steel Helmets were sort of this, uh, this veterans group, were said to have fallen in the fight against communism.
00:11:57.000In 1930, the figures rose dramatically in the lead-up to the Nazis taking power.
00:12:01.000This was a key factor in the rise of the Nazis.
00:12:04.000In 1930, the figures rose dramatically.
00:12:06.000The Nazis claimed to have suffered 17 deaths, rising to 42 in 1931, 84 in 1932.
00:12:11.000Remember, 1932 is the year the Nazis essentially paved their way to power.
00:12:14.000In 1932, the Nazis reported nearly 10,000 of their rank-and-file had been wounded in clashes with their opponents.
00:12:21.000According to Mark Bray, wouldn't that have stopped them?
00:12:22.000I mean, you obviously had armed resistance.
00:13:09.000He stood calmly on the stage, his fists on his hips.
00:13:12.000Evans reports scenes like this were being played out all over Germany in the early 1930s.
00:13:16.000The Nazis made their money off these sorts of things.
00:13:20.000If you want to make the alt-right more popular, all you have to do is go out in the streets and fight them, then they get to look tough, they get to look like they win, they get to look like they're victims at the same time, like they're fighting a defensive battle when really what they're doing is promulgating an evil ideology.
00:13:35.000Goebbels made his reputation, above all, as regional leader of Berlin, where his fiery speeches, his incessant activity, his outrageous provocations of the Nazis' opponents, and his calculated staging of street fights and meeting hall brawls to gain the attention of the press won the party a mass of new adherents.
00:13:51.000Young, disenchanted men who have nothing better to do with their lives are looking for a movement to belong to and that will engage in violence.
00:14:00.000This is why you see Christopher Cantwell in that Vice video talking about how many guns he carries and how he works out all the time and makes himself more ready for violence.
00:15:18.000So we need to ask ourselves, why are we even having this conversation?
00:15:22.000And I think it's worth recalling that in the aftermath of that evil piece of crap Dylan Storm Roof shooting 19 black people, murdering 19 black people at a black church, a historically black church.
00:15:31.000Dylan Storm Roof, there's a picture of him with a confederate flag and we had a whole national conversation about the confederate flag.
00:15:38.000Then whenever somebody does something evil, we immediately jump to try to find some divisive symbol that we can all rally around or against.
00:15:47.000And I would suggest that it has very little to do with the symbol, and a lot more to do with political gamesmanship.
00:15:53.000It has a lot more to do with people trying to make political hay.
00:15:55.000Okay, so let's start at the beginning here.
00:15:57.000The controversy over Confederate statues has been a hot-button issue for decades.
00:16:01.000There are good arguments on both sides.
00:16:02.000In a second, I'm going to go through the arguments on both sides and what they mean and whether they are worthwhile.
00:16:08.000But the question is, why in the aftermath of what we just saw in Charlottesville are we now talking about getting rid of all the Confederate statutes?
00:16:15.000I mean, like a year ago, we got rid of all the Confederate flags, supposedly, and that obviously didn't tamp things down.
00:16:19.000So why is it that we keep going back to iconoclasm?
00:16:23.000Iconoclasm literally means taking down icons.
00:16:26.000Why is it that we're attempting to do that now?
00:16:29.000Okay, we're actually participating, I think, in a politically advantageous proxy argument.
00:16:35.000The people who want to get rid of the statues want to label everyone who wants to keep the statues a member of the alt-white right supremacists.
00:16:42.000Okay, that's actually what they want to do.
00:16:43.000So people who say, if you want to keep the statues, that's because you're a white supremacist.
00:16:47.000And then people who don't want to get rid of the statues, they say, in contrast, that everyone who wants to get rid of the statues just wants to wipe away American history.
00:16:56.000Now, there are people who back the confederate statues who actually are white supremacists as we saw in Charlottesville.
00:17:02.000And there are a lot of people on the left who want to use the confederate statues as a club issue and want to get rid of all of American history.
00:17:09.000They want to get rid of Jefferson and Washington and what Trump was saying is true.
00:17:12.000There is a cadre of people who absolutely that is on their agenda.
00:17:15.000But those aren't the real honest arguments about this particular confederate statue or that particular confederate statue.
00:17:21.000All of this, all of this chaos, all of this fighting, all of it is being done in order to build particular movements.
00:17:29.000Why did they have their rally around the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the first place?
00:17:35.000Well, they chose to protest the removal for two reasons.
00:17:37.000One, they're actual white supremacists who find the arguments of the Confederacy attractive about the racial supremacy of whites to blacks.
00:17:44.000Okay, but more importantly, the real reason they did this is because they know that there are many non-white supremacists, right?
00:17:50.000There are a lot of people who are not white supremacists, who also oppose getting rid of the Robert E. Lee statue on other grounds.
00:17:56.000Historic grounds, cultural grounds, the grounds that maybe this is a good opportunity to teach their children about the evils of slavery and the problems of Confederacy.
00:18:06.000The alt-right used these statues as a rallying cry because they're trying to draw closer to the normies.
00:18:14.000They're trying to say that normal people who don't want to get rid of the statues... By the way, the polls show a vast majority of Americans are not interested in getting rid of these statues, including, according to some polls, a majority of blacks.
00:18:23.000The idea that everyone wants to get rid of the statues is nonsense.
00:18:25.000The alt-right knows this, and so they pick a cause they think has a majority of support, like, let's not get rid of this Robert E. Lee statue.
00:18:32.000And then they rally around that, hoping to broaden their cause.
00:18:36.000So the left reacts in exactly the flipside way.
00:18:39.000So just as with Dylan Storm Roof, the left decides that it's very important now to label everyone who is their opponent a Nazi.
00:18:46.000So everyone who opposes getting rid of these statues is now a member of the alt-right, according to the left.
00:18:51.000According to Antifa and the hard left, there are no good people who believe this.
00:18:55.000Now this is not the same thing as what Trump said.
00:18:56.000Trump said there were good people who went to that rally on Friday night.
00:19:24.000Well, President Trump also is acting out of political convenience.
00:19:27.000So the left has now broadened the rubric of bad guys to include anybody who opposes getting rid of the Lee statue.
00:19:34.000So Trump responds by defending anyone, anyone, who doesn't want statues of Lee torn down as decent.
00:19:39.000This is why he's tried to broaden out the argument, right?
00:19:41.000He's tried to say that not only are there a lot of decent people who don't want to get rid of the Lee statues, but, you know, if those people hang out with white supremacists on Friday night,
00:19:51.000So everybody is now, so it's the worst of all worlds.
00:19:54.000You've got the alt-right trying to unite with the normies who don't want to get rid of the Confederate statue.
00:20:00.000And then you've got the left trying to unite the normies with the alt-right by saying all of them don't want to get rid of the Confederate statue.
00:20:11.000Well, you know, we're sort of on the same side as the alt-right.
00:20:14.000We don't want to get rid of the Confederate statues.
00:20:15.000And so what we end up with is this very, very polarized politics.
00:20:18.000And you're seeing it on the left routinely.
00:20:21.000And I think the left started this by trying to use the Confederate statues as a flashpoint.
00:20:26.000And suggesting that everybody who wants to keep them is a racist.
00:20:29.000But I think that the alt-right jumped on it, and now the right is falling into the trap.
00:20:33.000And I don't say that the right should get rid of the statues, but I think that we should at least understand which arguments are really going on.
00:20:39.000Okay, the arguments that are really going on are not the honest arguments.
00:20:41.000And I'm going to talk about the honest arguments over Confederate statues in just a minute, because there are honest arguments on both sides.
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00:22:17.000Of course, by texting Shapiro to 303030, you're also letting them know that we sent you as well.
00:22:22.000Okay, so, now I want to go through a couple of the actual honest arguments with regard
00:22:26.000to the Confederate statues because the only reason we're having this debate in the first place is so everyone can demagogue it.
00:22:32.000So the alt-right can demagogue it and pretend that everybody who opposes them wants to wipe away American history and they are really just siding with the normal American.
00:22:39.000You've got President Trump demagoguing it by saying that there are lots of good people who oppose getting rid of the Confederate statues, therefore a lot of the people on Friday night who are with these white supremacists are fine.
00:22:49.000And then you have the left demagoguing it by saying anyone who doesn't want to get rid of the Confederate statues is obviously an evil neoconfederate.
00:22:56.000So, let's talk about the actual arguments here.
00:22:58.000So, this morning, President Trump tweets out three tweets on this.
00:23:02.000The first tweet, he tweets, excuse me,
00:23:07.000Okay, so he's basically making three arguments here.
00:23:29.000The first argument is that statues of Confederate history should be left up to preserve our history and culture.
00:23:34.000He's not the only one who's made this argument before.
00:23:36.000Condoleezza Rice has made it from a slightly less positive point of view.
00:23:40.000Here's Condoleezza Rice making pretty much exactly that case.
00:23:44.000I am a firm believer in keep your history before you.
00:23:47.000And so I don't actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners.
00:23:52.000I want us to have to look at those names and recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history.
00:24:00.000When you start wiping out your history, sanitizing your history to make you feel better, it's a bad thing.
00:24:06.000Okay, so she's making the same case that Trump is making, and I agree with this basic case.
00:24:09.000I think this case is basically right, that you leave the ugly parts of your history up so that people know about it.
00:24:14.000And also, it is worthwhile noting that there are a lot of people who are descendants of Confederate soldiers who see the monuments not as homages to slavery, as homages to slavery, but as homages to people who thought they were defending their states from federal encroachment, even if they were defending an evil cause in the process.
00:24:29.000Right, so I think there's a little bit more complexity than just everyone who likes the Confederate statues is a racist, bigot, sexist, homophobe, okay?
00:24:37.000And I think that Condie makes a good case, and I think the case there is relatively strong.
00:24:42.000What's undercutting that case is the white supremacists actively doing what the left thinks most of America thinks about the Confederates.
00:25:31.000I mean, as I mentioned yesterday, University of Missouri, there was a strong push to get rid of statues of Thomas Jefferson.
00:25:37.000In fact, I showed you video from that, I showed you video from that Vice documentary about what happened in Charlottesville, and one of the things that happened is there was a black woman who was talking and she said, Thomas Jefferson's house sits up there on that hill, the Slave Master's house sits up there on that hill, and we should get, you know, that's just another monument, that's Charlottesville.
00:25:53.000Okay, so the idea that this stops with Robert E. Lee is not true.
00:25:56.000It will go back to Thomas Jefferson, no question.
00:26:01.000And if we're logical, I think there's a fairly strong case for getting rid of monuments to Lee but keeping monuments to Thomas Jefferson.
00:26:07.000The case for getting rid of the monuments to Lee but keeping the one for Thomas Jefferson is that, number one, Robert E. Lee himself
00:26:13.000Opposed building monuments to Confederate soldiers because he thought that it would prevent unity, which apparently he was right.
00:26:19.000But second, Robert E. Lee was fighting for a rebel cause to break away from the Union.
00:26:24.000George Washington was fighting to uphold the Union.
00:26:26.000The question when you build a monument is what are you celebrating?
00:26:28.000When you build a monument to MLK, you are not celebrating MLK's sexual peccadillos, right?
00:26:34.000When you build a monument to MLK, you're celebrating his message on race relations.
00:26:39.000When you build a monument to George Washington, you're not celebrating his slaveholding, you're celebrating his actions in the Revolutionary War and his establishment of the Constitution and his presidency, right?
00:26:47.000These are the things you're celebrating.
00:26:49.000Monuments celebrate causes, not just the people who are on the monuments.
00:26:53.000And so that's how you distinguish them, right?
00:26:57.000What are you celebrating when you celebrate Lee?
00:26:59.000Maybe you're making the case that you're celebrating a man who honorably thought that he was fighting for states' rights even though he opposed slavery, or apparently opposed slavery, and after he lost the war was
00:27:13.000was instrumental in trying to rally the country around a common point again.
00:27:17.000Maybe that's what the monument is for, but that's a conversation worth having.
00:27:20.000There's no question when you have a Jefferson memorial, for example, that that is not a monument to Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings.
00:27:25.000That is a monument to Jefferson being the father of the Declaration of Independence.
00:27:31.000Clearly, that's what the monument is for.
00:27:33.000So, you don't have to engage in the Slippery Slope.
00:27:35.000This is the difference between Slippery Slope arguments.
00:27:38.000This is the difference between Slippery Slope arguments and application of principle arguments.
00:27:42.000A Slippery Slope argument says, if you allow them to do A, then they'll do B. If you allow them to do B, then they'll do C.
00:27:48.000An application of principle argument, like for example the argument that gay marriage will lead to polygamy, that's not actually a slippery slope argument.
00:27:55.000The argument there is that same-sex marriage redefines marriage as people who love each other.
00:28:00.000Polygamy can also be people who love each other, so you're applying the same principle and you're just filling out what that principle means, right?
00:28:06.000So that's not the same thing as a slippery slope argument.
00:28:08.000This is an actual slippery slope argument.
00:28:10.000If you allow them to take Lee, then they will also take Jefferson and Washington.
00:28:13.000Unfortunately, it's a true argument, as the left is showing every day, and Trump is not wrong about all of this.
00:28:19.000Now, we'll get to the third argument that Trump makes in just a second, but for that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
00:28:25.000For $9.99 a month, you get this show live, right?
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00:28:30.000You get the Andrew Klavan show live, that's happening at 10.30.
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00:28:41.000Michael, I thought, did a really interesting interview yesterday with a fellow who attended the Charlottesville March, and so you can go listen to that.
00:30:06.000So this is the worst of his arguments, that we'll never be able to beautify our parks again if we don't have a statue of Nathaniel Bedford Forrest.
00:30:15.000That's not a particularly good argument.
00:30:17.000I think there's an argument for some of them, like I think that Stone Mountain is an amazing monument.
00:30:22.000I mean, just aesthetically, it's an amazing thing.
00:30:23.000I mean, they carved these giant monuments into a mountain.
00:30:27.000That's pretty incredible, but I don't think that some of these statues that exist on street corners that nobody's looked at in 40 years, I don't think that those are... That's a very weak case, as opposed to the case that you see from a lot of people on the left, which I think is a fair case, where they say, hey, I'm a black taxpayer, and I don't feel like paying for somebody to polish the shoes of Nathaniel Bedford Forrest.
00:30:57.000We're not going to have any of those arguments.
00:30:58.000We're going to stand in our various corners and scream at each other.
00:31:00.000Because that's what politics has become.
00:31:02.000Us standing in the corners, screaming at each other, the fringes getting less fringy, the fringes getting more violent, and things getting worse.
00:31:10.000I think that, unfortunately, Charlottesville may be the beginning rather than the end, which is terrifying.
00:31:23.000Meanwhile, President Trump is trying to recover from the foolishness of holding a press conference that was completely counterproductive.
00:31:32.000His business council basically resigned on him.
00:31:35.000And the CEO of IBM presented a letter saying, We disbanded the business council.
00:31:40.000He wrote, Team, by now you've heard the news.
00:31:42.000We have disbanded the President's Strategy and Policy Forum.
00:31:45.000In the past week, we have seen and heard of public events and statements that run counter to our values as a country and a company.
00:31:51.000IBM has long said, and more importantly, demonstrated its commitment to a workplace and a society that is open, inclusive, and provides opportunities to all.
00:31:58.000And they denounce Charlottesville, and then they say, Okay, so they agreed to disband the group, so Trump tweets out that, you can't, you can't quit.
00:32:33.000Or do you think that the people who are the CEOs were going to leave, and then Trump disbanded the forum, or they decided to disband it themselves?
00:33:44.000He did an interview with the American prospect.
00:33:45.000He called up a guy at the American prospect.
00:33:48.000Which is a very far-left organization, and began ranting to him about globalists like Gary Cohn, and he started yelling about Trump's North Korea policy, saying there's no chance we're going to do anything military in North Korea, obviously.
00:34:10.000The Mooch calls up a reporter, forgets to say it's off the record, and then apparently Bannon says he did the exact same thing.
00:34:16.000Not smart, but Bannon may be on the skids.
00:34:18.000The easiest thing for Trump to do right now, by the way, is fire Bannon, and then say, listen, I have to disassociate from all these people, they're really bad.
00:35:05.000No, we're talking about whether you can function as President of the United States, and he can certainly function because the Republican Party is not going to abandon him.
00:35:18.000You know, I'm upset when I can't find a good parking place.
00:35:22.000I mean, it is the mildest kind of rebuke.
00:35:25.000Do you think Mitch McConnell is not going to fight for tax reform now?
00:35:28.000Do you think that the Republican Party is going to stop trying to disenfranchise African Americans like it's doing all over the country because Donald Trump said something bad?
00:35:37.000This is what the Republican Party stands for now.
00:35:40.000Okay, you want to know why the Republicans aren't abandoning Trump?
00:35:42.000Because what the left means by abandoning Trump is not a thing.
00:35:47.000I'm hearing this actually from some people with whom I largely agree on politics saying, you know, that if you call balls and strikes on Trump, then you're doing it wrong because you just have to disassociate totally from Trump.
00:35:57.000It's not a matter of dis—how do you disassociate from a human being?
00:36:19.000But I'll tell you, how on earth is the party going to confront this crisis if it's unwilling to stand up against the person who arguably instigated it?
00:36:28.000We invited every single Republican senator on this program tonight, all 52.
00:36:32.000We asked roughly a dozen House Republicans, including a bunch of committee chairs.
00:36:36.000And we asked roughly a half dozen former Republican elected officials, and none of them agreed to discuss this issue with us today.
00:36:42.000The president has lost his moral authority for now.
00:36:45.000And in the process, he's tried to destroy or discredit everyone else's.
00:36:49.000Have all of our elites lost their moral authority?
00:36:51.000Or are they afraid to find out that the answer might be yes?
00:36:54.000Okay, so this is the pitch of the media, is that every Republican wants to be coming out and yelling about this.
00:36:59.000Okay, so number one, there are some of us who have been yelling about this, right?
00:37:03.000I mean, like, I've obviously been very exercised over President Trump's failures to disassociate from the alt-right.
00:37:11.000However, what the left really wants, and this is why I think you're seeing fewer Republicans who are resonating to what the left wants, the left is not intellectually honest about what they want.
00:37:18.000Okay, like, I don't know what they're talking about when they say high-level Republicans won't say anything, right?
00:37:22.000Here's Rhonda McDaniels, who's the head of the RNC, and she's directly addressing white supremacists, and I think this is right.
00:37:29.000Well, the president condemned the white supremacists and the KKK and the neo-Nazis unequivocally.
00:37:34.000But it took 48 hours for him to do that.
00:38:14.000Because they understand, and this is really one of the problems with political partisanship, I'm willing to say that President Trump did something wrong, because I think he did something wrong here.
00:38:22.000But what you are seeing is that what the left really want is they think that you have not condemned Trump strongly enough unless you embrace their agenda.
00:38:32.000Jeff Sessions, who's Trump's Attorney General, he came out immediately and said this could be a civil rights violation or a hate crime, right?
00:38:39.000I don't think we should just feel like we've got to do it in a matter of hours or days.
00:38:44.000This investigation is ongoing around the country.
00:38:48.000It could be 245, a civil rights violation, Title 18-245 or 249, which is a hate crime.
00:38:57.000And there might be other charges that could be brought.
00:39:00.000Okay, so he's obviously taking the thing very seriously.
00:39:03.000What the left actually wants, and this is why you're seeing there's a poll today that said 67% of Republicans approve of Trump's response.
00:39:09.000That's because, once again, when you poll Republicans about what they think of Trump, you're really polling them about what they think of the media.
00:39:15.000And when you poll Republicans about what they think of Trump, they're actually responding to what they think of the media, because they know the media are asking them a question, and they think the ulterior motive of the media is to destroy Trump, and by proxy, to destroy the Republican policy and governing agenda.
00:39:30.000So when people say, sure I support how Trump handled Charlottesville, it doesn't necessarily mean they actually like how Trump handled Charlottesville.
00:39:37.000Many of them, probably in the privacy of their own homes and when they discuss with their Republican friends, are not particularly happy with what Trump did with Charlottesville.
00:39:45.000But they're not going to tell that to a pollster from the Washington Post.
00:39:49.000Instead, what they're going to say is, fine, if it's you against Trump, I'm with Trump.
00:39:53.000Because that's the way that the left has drawn the battle lines and that's the way the right has responded by drawing the battle lines.
00:39:58.000So instead of... Here's the way a normal conversation should go, right?
00:40:03.000The left says, Trump did something wrong here.
00:40:06.000And the right says, yes, Trump did something wrong here.
00:40:08.000And the left says, good, we all agree.
00:40:11.000But that's not how the conversation goes.
00:40:12.000What happens, the left says, Trump did something wrong here, and the right says, yes, Trump did something wrong here, or they prepare to say that, and then the left says, you know what?
00:40:19.000Even if you say Trump did something wrong here, you still agree with him because you want to pass his tax agenda.
00:40:25.000And so what this leads to is sort of a game of chicken.
00:40:29.000It's really more of a prisoner's dilemma, as I've explained in Game Theory.
00:40:32.000It's more of a prisoner's dilemma where the best option for both sides, the dominant strategy for both sides, is to fall into the trap of defending their man.
00:40:40.000So if you're a Republican and you know that the Democrats' next step is to say, even if you condemn it, you're still a racist, then you say, fine, I'm just not going to condemn it.
00:40:49.000Your real agenda is to just slander me, so screw you, I'm not engaging.
00:40:52.000That's what these polls are actually showing.
00:40:54.000I don't think the polls are showing that Republicans are racists or bigots.
00:40:57.000I think what the polls are actually showing is that Republicans hate the media, and so they are unwilling to answer the questions of the media, honestly.
00:41:04.000I really think that's what it comes down to.
00:41:06.000Okay, so, time for a quick thing I like and a thing I hate.
00:41:08.000There were enough big ideas today, so we won't do Big Idea Thursday.
00:42:35.000Oh man, that is not a good first pitch.
00:42:38.000I'm not sure who threw that first pitch, but kudos to him for bringing America together again.
00:42:43.000He's making America great again, I think, with that first pitch.
00:42:46.000He even tweeted, I think the guy who threw it tweeted, who knew that America could begin its healing process with a fastball to the testicles.
00:42:53.000So, well done, Red Sox first pitch guy.
00:43:10.000A man who looks like the wadded receipt you left in your pocket and then sent it through the wash.
00:43:15.000John Kasick, the governor of Ohio, the most self-aggrandizing human being ever, the person who single-handedly allowed Donald Trump to become the nominee of the party by refusing to get out and let us have an honest vote between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in the latter part of the race.
00:43:27.000He stayed in for no reason other than he's an egoistic moron.
00:43:30.000And now he says he wants to primary Trump.
00:43:33.000And so he's out there bashing Trump because he wants to primary Trump.
00:43:37.000Just pathetic listening to this and hearing these marchers.
00:43:41.000Think if you were a 8, 9 or 10 year old getting ready to go to school like they are in Ohio and you happen to come from a Jewish family or if you're African-American and you hear this kind of hatred and we know about bullying that goes on in the schools and what are we doing to our children and to not condemn
00:44:03.000These people who went there to carry out violence and to somehow draw some kind of equivalency to somebody else reduces the ability to totally condemn these hate groups.
00:44:16.000Okay, my problem is not with some of the things that he is saying here, but my problem is that John Kasich obviously has political ambition and political agenda, and that's what infuses all of this.
00:44:27.000I mean, it doesn't sound like an honest take from Kasich.
00:45:01.000It is largely your fault that Donald Trump won the nomination in the Republican Party in the first place, and then here you are doing this routine.