The Ben Shapiro Show


Trump’s Messy Presser | Ep. 363


Summary

Trump gives an uncomfortable press conference, to say the least. The left decides that Antifa are the same as World War II allies, and the media decides that everything is Hitler. Ben Shapiro explains it all in the most fair-minded way he can, and takes a look at the media's response to it. Plus, Trump burns every bridge in sight with Infrastructure Week, and then does a press conference that was, in his own words, "uncomfortable" and "morally egregious." Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new show, The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your shows, to get the most out of your time and listen to the most entertaining and thought-provoking news and opinion piece of the week. Use promo code "ELISSA" for 20% off any order, and also use that promo code BONUS to get 20% of your entire order when you enter the Promo Code "BEN" when you place your order with that code. Thanks to our sponsor, Tracker. The Tracker is a company that makes the lightest, bluest, most reliable Bluetooth tracking device on the market. They help you find your lost or forgotten keys, wallet, keys, and wallet in seconds! and they make your life easier and less stressful! Use the promo code BenShoes at checkout to save 20% on your first order! Ben Shapiro is a big fan of Tracker and gets 20% all year long! Thanks, Ben Shapiro to help make his life better, better, and more fun, and makes his life a little better! . . . . and he's a little more bearable! ! Thanks Ben Shapiro to Ben to help me out here at the Ben Shapiro show! - Ben Shapiro. - Ben to do a better job of explaining what's going to make my life better. Ben is a better than normal! Thank you Ben Shapiro:) - Thank you for listening to my podcast, Ben to me, Ben is my day job - and I really appreciate it, and I'm looking forward to having you out there! and I hope you enjoy it! Love ya, Ben, Ben and I love you, too, Ben Timestamps: - The Best, Timestop: : , & Thank You, Ben: :) - Timeless


Transcript

00:00:00.000 President Trump gives an uncomfortable press conference, to say the least.
00:00:03.000 The left decides that Antifa are the same as World War II allies.
00:00:06.000 And the media decides that everything is Hitler.
00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:10.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:17.000 Okay, so we're going to go through in detail President Trump's unnecessary and ridiculous press conference yesterday.
00:00:22.000 He said a couple of things that were true, and then he did something that I thought was just morally egregious.
00:00:27.000 And we're going to talk about all of it in the most fair-minded way that I think that we can.
00:00:31.000 We're going to go through all of the evidence.
00:00:32.000 On what President Trump said, and we're going to talk about the media response to all of it.
00:00:36.000 So get ready for a very, very full show.
00:00:38.000 But before we get to any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tracker.
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00:01:53.000 Okay, so.
00:01:54.000 Yesterday, President Trump is doing a press conference.
00:01:57.000 It's supposed to be Infrastructure Week.
00:01:59.000 Okay, I'm getting... There is something hilarious about the fact that every week with President Trump is a new week.
00:02:05.000 In which he declares a theme, right?
00:02:06.000 It's American Jobs Week, or it's Infrastructure Week, or it's Relaxation Week.
00:02:10.000 Well, this week was another Infrastructure Week.
00:02:12.000 And naturally, he decided to burn every bridge in sight in honor of Infrastructure Week.
00:02:16.000 So, he gave his statement on Monday, right?
00:02:18.000 He gave it yesterday, and I talked briefly about, or Tuesday, and I talked briefly about that statement yesterday.
00:02:25.000 Yes, he's, I'm sorry, he gave the statement Monday.
00:02:26.000 He gave an original statement Saturday on Charlottesville.
00:02:28.000 Then he gave a statement Monday, which we talked about yesterday.
00:02:31.000 And then, after we finished the show yesterday, Trump went out and did an unnecessary press conference.
00:02:35.000 He was not asked to do the press conference for anyone.
00:02:38.000 No one wanted him to do the press conference.
00:02:40.000 His own people didn't want him to do a press conference.
00:02:42.000 But Trump obviously had something on his mind and he wanted to say it.
00:02:45.000 And so he said to the press, here, now I'm going to take questions.
00:02:48.000 So he began, he basically, to sum up the press conference,
00:02:52.000 He spoke about a few different topics.
00:02:55.000 He spoke about what he called the alt-left, which would be Antifa, presumably.
00:02:59.000 Alt-left is a term I believe coined by Sean Hannity as sort of a counter to the alt-right.
00:03:04.000 I never liked the term alt-left because it sort of legitimizes alt-right.
00:03:07.000 There is no alt-left.
00:03:09.000 There is just the hard left and Antifa.
00:03:11.000 But in any case, he went after what he called the alt-left, which I assume means Antifa.
00:03:15.000 He talked about Confederate statues being removed.
00:03:18.000 He talked about whether what happened on Friday night and Saturday was bad, and then he also talked about the people who were present at the rally.
00:03:29.000 He was asked specifically about the alt-right, and so he talked about those four things.
00:03:33.000 And so we'll go through all of those four.
00:03:35.000 Now, I will say, as just a prefatory note, the fact that the left has decided that everything that he said yesterday was false, and the right has decided that everything that he said yesterday was true, is really discomforting to me.
00:03:46.000 It's a serious problem for me.
00:03:47.000 Okay, he said some things yesterday that were true, and then he said a good many things that I think were actually immoral.
00:03:52.000 And we'll talk about all of them, but I think that it is necessary to go through in detail what exactly he said, so we can tease out what he said was true and what he said was false.
00:04:00.000 So he started off by ripping Antifa.
00:04:03.000 Here is what the president had to say about Antifa.
00:04:06.000 What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?
00:04:10.000 Do they have any semblance of guilt?
00:04:14.000 Let me ask you this.
00:04:16.000 What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs?
00:04:21.000 Do they have any problem?
00:04:24.000 I think they do.
00:04:24.000 As far as I'm concerned, that was a horrible, horrible day.
00:04:30.000 Wait a minute, I'm not finished.
00:04:32.000 I'm not finished, Fake News.
00:04:34.000 That was a horrible day.
00:04:39.000 I will tell you something.
00:04:41.000 I watched those very closely, much more closely than you people watched it.
00:04:45.000 And you have, you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.
00:04:53.000 And nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now.
00:04:56.000 You had a group, you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent.
00:05:03.000 Okay, so the fact that Trump put so much focus on what he called the alt-left here, and I assume he means Antifa when he talks about them, had the left up in arms.
00:05:10.000 They're saying, why aren't you focusing more on the white supremacist rally and the fact that a white supremacist actually was responsible for murder, rammed a car into 20 people.
00:05:18.000 At that particular rally on Saturday.
00:05:20.000 Why are you focusing so much on the alt-left?
00:05:23.000 I think that it is perfectly appropriate for the President of the United States to talk about the violence of Antifa, which has been violent in Seattle.
00:05:29.000 They were violent in Seattle again yesterday.
00:05:30.000 Violent in Berkeley.
00:05:32.000 Violent in Sacramento.
00:05:33.000 Violent in Richmond.
00:05:35.000 Violent yesterday.
00:05:35.000 Okay, so this is tape from yesterday.
00:05:37.000 This is still in Charlottesville.
00:05:39.000 They were at the courthouse.
00:05:40.000 And here's Antifa getting into it with the police.
00:05:46.000 Okay, so Antifa has been violent and consistently violent for a long time now, and what I'm seeing from the left is an attempt by the left to pretend that Antifa are the great heroes of this story, that Antifa are standing up to tyranny, that Antifa are standing up to the alt-right, and therefore
00:06:09.000 That Antifa is somehow a good force, that something good is happening with Antifa.
00:06:13.000 And you're seeing this from the left almost universally this morning.
00:06:16.000 It's a huge mistake by the left, okay?
00:06:18.000 So, here's just a couple examples.
00:06:21.000 Mitt Romney, right, who's not on the left, but Mitt Romney tweeted this out this morning or last night.
00:06:26.000 He tweeted,
00:06:33.000 Okay, again, it is true that some of the protesters who were there to protest the white supremacists were there and are in completely morally different universes, but Antifa is not in a completely morally different universe.
00:06:43.000 Antifa is a violent communist anarchist group that's been making violent trouble all around the country.
00:06:48.000 And then you had members of the press who are mimicking this talking point.
00:06:51.000 Hendrickson, John Hendrickson is a writer at Esquire.
00:06:53.000 Here's what he tweeted this morning.
00:06:55.000 He tweeted, alt-left thugs who battled Nazis, right?
00:06:59.000 And it's a picture of a bunch of World War II vets.
00:07:02.000 Hey, those were not alt-left thugs.
00:07:03.000 Those were American soldiers who were fighting armed Nazis who were engaged in violence and the takeover of a sovereign nation.
00:07:09.000 I assume that if the alt-right white supremacist neo-Nazis had actually, in armed fashion, taken over Charlottesville, that we'd have sent the armed forces, not Antifa.
00:07:18.000 The alt-left is much more akin to, as I said yesterday, the red mobs who were fighting the brown shirts in 1932 Germany and actually led to the increase in the vote share for Hitler's Nazi party because people got sick of watching the reds fight the browns and they sided with the browns over the reds.
00:07:34.000 But he's not the only one making this comparison.
00:07:35.000 Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.
00:07:37.000 He tweets out, watching Save It Private Ryan, a movie about a group of very aggressive alt-left protesters invading a beach without a permit.
00:07:44.000 Well no, that's idiotic.
00:07:46.000 It's about a group of American soldiers who are invading sovereign French territory in order to oust the Nazis, who are an actual fighting force.
00:07:54.000 Okay, not the same thing.
00:07:55.000 To compare people who are not behaving violently in Charlottesville to people who are behaving violently on the beaches of France, and to compare people who are American soldiers to alt-left protesters who, by the way, would never join the American army in a thousand years, to compare those people is just asinine.
00:08:11.000 It's morally asinine.
00:08:11.000 But you saw this.
00:08:12.000 This became a meme over the evening.
00:08:15.000 Brian Fallon is a Hillary Clinton spokesperson, and here's what he tweeted.
00:08:17.000 He said,
00:08:24.000 Okay, same routine from Chris Cuomo, who's an anchor over at CNN.
00:08:24.000 Insane.
00:08:28.000 Anti-fascist disrupting a large gathering of white supremacists.
00:08:31.000 And then it says, let's not forget.
00:08:33.000 That's what Chris Cuomo wrote.
00:08:34.000 And it's not just the sort of idiots in the movement.
00:08:37.000 Mark Bray is a historian.
00:08:38.000 Here's what he wrote in the pages of the Washington Post today.
00:08:40.000 Quote.
00:08:42.000 This is, again, defending Antifa.
00:08:43.000 The vast majority of anti-fascist organizing is nonviolent, but their willingness to physically defend themselves and others from white supremacist violence and preemptively shut down fascist organizing efforts before they turn deadly distinguishes them from liberal anti-racists.
00:08:56.000 Anti-fascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective.
00:09:05.000 The history of anti-fascist demands that we take seriously the violence of white supremacists.
00:09:09.000 The days of just ignoring them are over.
00:09:10.000 And he says European anti-fascists fought Hitler, and they fought Stalin, and they fought, uh, well, he didn't say they fought Stalin, actually, because that would be actually incorrect.
00:09:18.000 They fought Mussolini, he says they fought Franco.
00:09:20.000 There's only one problem with that.
00:09:22.000 The anti-fascist forces who fought Hitler and Franco and Mussolini, they all lost.
00:09:26.000 Okay, and the reason, one of the reasons they all lost is because they actually made those movements more popular.
00:09:30.000 By going out there and engaging in street fights in Weimar in 1930, 31, 32, 230 people were killed in street clashes between the Brownshirts and the Reds in 1932.
00:09:39.000 That led to the rise of the Brownshirts.
00:09:42.000 It led, people wanted a restoration of order.
00:09:45.000 So backing the so-called Antifa groups is really bad.
00:09:48.000 Okay, it's really bad.
00:09:49.000 Antifa's tactics actually help the alt-right because it makes people see the alt-right as victims.
00:09:53.000 It makes people feel that the alt-right
00:09:55.000 Or a group of people who just want to protest non-violently, and then Antifa shows up and gets violent with them.
00:10:01.000 World War II allies fighting Hitler's shoulders, soldiers, were not fighting protesters.
00:10:05.000 They were fighting armed men with guns.
00:10:06.000 That's why we sent tanks and howitzers to fight them.
00:10:08.000 We don't send tanks and howitzers to rallies of neo-Nazis.
00:10:12.000 The ACLU defended Nazis marching in Skokie.
00:10:15.000 We didn't send guys with guns.
00:10:17.000 The alt-right isn't an army.
00:10:19.000 They believe in evil things.
00:10:19.000 They're evil.
00:10:20.000 The minute they get violent, they should be arrested and they should be put down.
00:10:23.000 But the idea that you can meet
00:10:26.000 The idea that you can meet nonviolent protests, even of people that you hate with violence, is really dangerous.
00:10:32.000 It's really dangerous stuff.
00:10:33.000 And so when Trump says this stuff, when Trump says that Antifa attacked the alt-right and that there's evidence of that, he's correct.
00:10:39.000 That is true.
00:10:40.000 Okay, that's true.
00:10:41.000 So that's what he said that I think was true.
00:10:43.000 In a second I'm going to get to
00:10:45.000 More of what he said about the statues, and then I want to get to what I think was the heart of his press conference, which really wasn't that.
00:10:50.000 The heart of the press conference was him doing a soft defense of the alt-right and really giving the alt-right what they wanted.
00:10:55.000 I know that a lot of people on the right are angry with me for saying this, but that's the way I see it, and I will explain in full context why that is in just a second.
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00:11:45.000 Okay, so moving on in President Trump's presser.
00:11:47.000 So we start off with his comments about Antifa, which I think are eminently correct and totally fine.
00:11:52.000 Okay, but
00:12:11.000 There are some problems, okay?
00:12:12.000 And I'll get to the problems in a second.
00:12:13.000 He says something else that was true.
00:12:14.000 He was talking about the movement from the left to tear down statues.
00:12:17.000 Now, as I said yesterday, I think that there's a very solid case for taking Confederate war memorials and moving them into private museums, moving them into private hands.
00:12:26.000 You know, the idea that black people should have to pay taxes for the upkeep of statues of people who were attempting to keep them in slavery.
00:12:34.000 I understand that argument perfectly well, and I sympathize to a large degree with that argument.
00:12:38.000 I also think, like Condoleezza Rice has said,
00:12:40.000 That ripping away historic monuments actually prevents people from discussing history openly.
00:12:45.000 That chipping away
00:12:46.000 Woodrow Wilson, off the name of buildings at Princeton, prevents us from having honest discussions.
00:12:50.000 Like, if I would walk with my child past a Confederate war monument, it would give me an opportunity to say, look, here's the history of the country, here's how far we've come, here's what the Civil War was all about, and here's why the Confederacy deserved to lose.
00:13:01.000 So, you know, the truth is that when you drive through a city, the vast majority of war memorials are things people walk right by.
00:13:07.000 So these are really not flashpoints.
00:13:08.000 They've been made flashpoints by two separate groups of people.
00:13:11.000 Black Lives Matter, which has decided that these Confederate memorials are somehow the... the...
00:13:16.000 Gas in the tank for racists, and racists themselves who have, in retaliation, have used the Confederate War Memorials as gathering points, which is really negative and problematic.
00:13:26.000 Here is President Trump, though, saying, here's his bigger problem, is that the left isn't just focusing on Confederate War Memorials.
00:13:32.000 There is a campaign among people on the left to go after memorials to Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington, who is the slave owner.
00:13:40.000 And what he says here is also eminently correct.
00:13:43.000 George Washington was a slave owner.
00:13:46.000 Was George Washington a slave owner?
00:13:48.000 So will George Washington now lose his status?
00:13:51.000 Are we going to take down?
00:13:52.000 Excuse me.
00:13:53.000 Are we going to take down?
00:13:55.000 Are we going to take down statues?
00:13:58.000 How about Thomas Jefferson?
00:13:59.000 What do you think of Thomas Jefferson?
00:14:00.000 You like him?
00:14:02.000 Okay, good.
00:14:03.000 Are we going to take down the statue?
00:14:04.000 Because he was a major slave owner.
00:14:06.000 Now we're going to take down his statue.
00:14:08.000 So you know what?
00:14:09.000 It's fine.
00:14:10.000 You're changing history.
00:14:11.000 You're changing culture.
00:14:13.000 Okay, so what he says there, I think, is at least arguably correct.
00:14:17.000 I think what he says there, you can make a distinction, I think, logically, pretty easily, between Robert E. Lee and George Washington.
00:14:22.000 Robert E. Lee fought on the side of a rebel army attempting to destroy the Union in an attempt to uphold slavery.
00:14:29.000 And George Washington was the great preserver of the union.
00:14:31.000 So there's a pretty strong distinction there.
00:14:33.000 But the case that he's making is not wrong, considering the left has actively made the case against keeping up statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, right?
00:14:41.000 At University of Mizzou, there was a big protest attempting to do all of this.
00:14:45.000 There's a big protest attempting to get rid of a statue of Thomas Jefferson at University of Missouri, led by the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:14:51.000 So Trump isn't wrong on this particular
00:14:55.000 And the right is jumping on the two points that I've talked about to say that everything Trump said was correct.
00:14:59.000 Right, what he said about Antifa is right, and condemning both sides, that's fine, and the statue stuff, he's right.
00:15:04.000 Okay, but, here's the problem.
00:15:07.000 What the President of the United States had to do, more than anything else, was stick by his statement of Monday.
00:15:11.000 The statement where he said,
00:15:15.000 I'm not talking about neo-nazis and white supremacists.
00:15:18.000 I think that they're bad.
00:15:33.000 He said also there are a lot of good people who showed up at these rallies and then he also said that he didn't know what the alt-right was.
00:15:38.000 Somebody asked him specifically about the alt-right and he said he didn't know what it was.
00:15:42.000 We're going to play all of these clips and you're going to see that Donald Trump provided the alt-right most what it wanted.
00:15:46.000 The alt-right wants to be known not as a white supremacist group.
00:15:49.000 They want their face to the public to be we're just defending Western civilization, not white supremacism, even if they are actual white supremacists.
00:15:56.000 And they want the President of the United States to lend them credence, as though they're a bunch of very fine people?
00:16:00.000 This is what the alt-right wants.
00:16:02.000 Okay, we talked on Monday about exactly what the alt-right is.
00:16:04.000 The alt-right's basic creed is that Western civilization is inherently bound up with ethnicity and race, and that white people were the builders of Western civilization, and therefore people of other races and cultures cannot adapt.
00:16:15.000 That is the basic argument of the alt-right.
00:16:18.000 Trump knows that, because his chief strategist at the White House is Steve Bannon, who helped promulgate the alt-right, and said that Breitbart was, in fact, a platform for the alt-right to wrecked quote from Steve Bannon.
00:16:29.000 But Trump played stupid, and in doing so, he gave the alt-right what they wanted.
00:16:33.000 He focused on the left.
00:16:34.000 Again, that's fine, but if you're going to focus on the left, you can't poo-poo the alt-right.
00:16:40.000 This is the problem on both sides.
00:16:41.000 The left is saying everything he said about Antifa is wrong, and the right is saying everything that he said about Antifa is right, and therefore he's right, or therefore he's wrong.
00:16:48.000 No, he's right about Antifa, and he's totally wrong about the alt-right, and even granting them a smidgen of credibility is morally disgusting.
00:16:55.000 Okay, and that's what he did yesterday.
00:16:57.000 To pretend otherwise is to ignore that when Barack Obama did the same thing to Black Lives Matter, the right went nuts.
00:17:05.000 And rightly so.
00:17:06.000 When Barack Obama granted credence to the people who were burning down Ferguson and Baltimore, the right rightly went nuts.
00:17:10.000 We went nuts.
00:17:12.000 We said he was vague.
00:17:12.000 As well we should have.
00:17:13.000 And the left said, wait, he condemned the people rioting.
00:17:16.000 And we said that wasn't enough.
00:17:17.000 He needed to condemn what they were rioting about.
00:17:20.000 Okay, but President Trump really tried hard to soft-pedal this stuff yesterday.
00:17:24.000 So, he started off by defending his statement on Saturday.
00:17:27.000 Why exactly, he was asked, why did it take till Monday for you to say neo-Nazis and the KKK and neo-Confederates were bad?
00:17:32.000 Why didn't you just say it on Saturday?
00:17:34.000 Here was his answer.
00:17:35.000 I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters.
00:17:39.000 I didn't know David Duke was there.
00:17:43.000 I wanted to see the facts and the facts as they started coming out.
00:17:49.000 Okay, so this is nonsense.
00:18:06.000 Everyone knew all the facts virtually immediately.
00:18:07.000 Antifa got violent, and then an alt-right protester drove a car into a crowd of people who included a bunch of innocent non-Antifa people, and the alt-right people were violent as well.
00:18:18.000 Okay, so he says he had to wait for the facts.
00:18:20.000 First of all, you know that's a tell, okay?
00:18:22.000 Trump has never, ever in his entire life had to wait for the facts.
00:18:25.000 This is a guy who spends a year proclaiming that Barack Obama, without evidence, was born in Kenya.
00:18:29.000 This is a guy who goes out preemptively and declares Muslim terrorist attacks before all the facts are in.
00:18:35.000 Some of that is not a huge problem, but to pretend that he is the considerate arbiter of the facts is just a joke, okay?
00:18:41.000 That is not a good excuse from President Trump.
00:18:43.000 It's obviously not a good excuse.
00:18:44.000 He repeated, it must have been ten times in a three-minute segment, how he was waiting for all of the facts.
00:18:49.000 Such nonsense.
00:18:50.000 Such absolute nonsense.
00:18:51.000 Especially since we know from Eliana Johnson over at the Washington Post, by the way, Eliana,
00:18:54.000 It's kind of conservative, okay?
00:18:56.000 She's a Claremont Fellow.
00:18:57.000 When I was a Claremont Fellow, Eliana Johnson, who writes for the Washington Post, she reported that Trump had a statement exactly the same as the one on Monday on his desk on Saturday.
00:19:06.000 He was standing with it right there, and he went off script and decided not to say it.
00:19:10.000 Okay, so there's another reason that Trump didn't want to do this, and that's because Trump is happy to pander to the alt-right.
00:19:15.000 He was always happy to pander to the alt-right.
00:19:16.000 During the campaign, he pandered to the alt-right.
00:19:18.000 He continued to pander to the alt-right because he thinks that they're his biggest supporters and they're nice to him, so he has to soft-pedal them.
00:19:24.000 And he did that again yesterday.
00:19:25.000 He was asked specifically about the alt-right, okay?
00:19:27.000 The alt-right, I've defined it now 1,000 times, and they defined it themselves.
00:19:30.000 Richard Spencer was at this rally.
00:19:33.000 Okay, Jared Taylor, his people, were at this rally.
00:19:37.000 The Daily Stormer, neo-Nazis, were at this rally.
00:19:40.000 It was actually pitched like this.
00:19:43.000 Okay, the ad promoting the Unite the Right rally, it was designed to evoke fascist posters, which Jon Podhoretz writes.
00:19:48.000 He's correct.
00:19:49.000 Okay, it invited speakers like Mike Ennick, who hosts a podcast called The Daily Show-Up.
00:19:53.000 Augustus Invictus, an alt-right figure who once said, I have prophesied for years I was born for a great war, that if I had not witnessed the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.
00:20:02.000 And Christopher Cantwell, who calls himself a fascist, along with Johnny Monoxide, who calls himself fashy.
00:20:08.000 The march's organizer, Jason Kessler, described the views of the people who showed up.
00:20:13.000 He said, you don't give a damn about white people.
00:20:14.000 You people are implementing policies which are displacing us in our home countries, and we will not be allowed to survive.
00:20:20.000 The goal of this rally was extraordinarily clear, so much so that Gavin McInnes, the head of the Proud Boys, and a guy with whom I've been friendly, Gavin said, I will not go to this rally because it's infused with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
00:20:33.000 The alt-right
00:20:34.000 There's a group of people who decided to show up for this rally because they are part of this movement.
00:20:39.000 And here is Trump being asked about the alt-right, and here is Trump pretending he doesn't know what it is.
00:20:45.000 When you say the alt-right, define alt-right to me.
00:20:49.000 You define it.
00:20:50.000 No, define it for me.
00:20:50.000 Go ahead.
00:20:51.000 Come on, let's go.
00:20:52.000 Define it for me.
00:20:53.000 The militant.
00:20:54.000 Define it for me.
00:20:55.000 Come on, let's go.
00:20:56.000 Define it for me.
00:20:56.000 It's not a fight.
00:20:57.000 How about you define it?
00:20:58.000 How about you say, if by the alt-right you mean...
00:21:01.000 X, then I condemn it.
00:21:02.000 If by the alt-right you mean people who like memes, I don't.
00:21:05.000 How about he could do that?
00:21:07.000 But the defensiveness about the alt-right is really truly incredible.
00:21:10.000 And then it gets even worse, and I'll show you the even worse part in just a second.
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00:22:51.000 Okay, so as I say, he went out of his way not to condemn the alt-right.
00:22:56.000 And then, here's the part that a lot of his allies are relying on.
00:22:59.000 He says that he's condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, but here's what he says.
00:23:04.000 I've condemned neo-Nazis.
00:23:06.000 I've condemned many different groups, but not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me.
00:23:13.000 Not all of those people were white supremacists, by any stretch.
00:23:16.000 Okay, so combine those two statements.
00:23:18.000 He doesn't know what the alt-right is, and not all of those people were neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
00:23:22.000 That is a defense of the alt-right.
00:23:23.000 That is an attempt to paint the alt-right as non-white supremacist, non-neo-Nazi.
00:23:27.000 That is what that is, okay?
00:23:28.000 And then it got worse.
00:23:29.000 Then it got worse.
00:23:30.000 He said, he specifically cited the Friday night Torchlight March.
00:23:33.000 And if you reported it accurately, you would say.
00:23:35.000 And you had some very bad people in that group.
00:23:37.000 But you also had people that were
00:23:57.000 Very fine people on both sides.
00:23:59.000 You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same pictures as you did.
00:24:04.000 You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
00:24:16.000 Okay, so, again, this is really quite despicable when you look at the actual tape.
00:24:21.000 Okay, so here is the tape of the protests.
00:24:23.000 Okay, this is what the protests that he is talking about were filled with very fine people.
00:24:27.000 This is the tape of the protests, so this would be, uh, clip three.
00:24:29.000 This is what that actually looked like.
00:24:46.000 Is it a Hitler salute right there?
00:24:47.000 Yeah, that's nice.
00:24:48.000 There are a bunch of us.
00:24:49.000 White lives matter!
00:24:50.000 White lives matter!
00:24:52.000 Screaming white lives matter.
00:24:53.000 Vice has some pretty good tape of all this.
00:24:54.000 They have a 22-minute documentary they brought out about this.
00:24:57.000 The first 10 minutes is really stunning material.
00:25:00.000 The rest of it is... Vice is biased, but the first 10 minutes of this is stunning material.
00:25:05.000 Here's what the rally actually looked like on Friday night.
00:25:07.000 2-1!
00:25:09.000 Replace us!
00:25:11.000 Jews will not replace us!
00:25:16.000 Blood and soil!
00:25:20.000 Whose streets?
00:25:21.000 Our streets!
00:25:27.000 You can see in the center there, those are the anti-white supremacist protesters.
00:25:32.000 Black lives matter!
00:25:33.000 Black lives matter!
00:25:37.000 What just happened?
00:25:38.000 They based me.
00:25:44.000 Who?
00:25:45.000 I don't know.
00:25:46.000 I'm positive for one second, okay?
00:25:48.000 So, number one, you see that Friday night, that was not a lot of good people.
00:25:50.000 There weren't some very fine people marching.
00:25:52.000 And by the way, if you find yourself in a march, just a tip to people, if you find yourself in a march where people start shouting, Jews will not replace us, maybe you should leave.
00:25:59.000 Maybe you should leave.
00:26:00.000 If you're not a piece of garbage, maybe you should leave.
00:26:02.000 Why is it that even the people who are alt-right friendly, even people who ally with the alt-right from time to time, looked at this Unite the Right event and decided not to show?
00:26:11.000 Why is that?
00:26:13.000 Even people like Mike Cernovich, who spends a year propping up the alt-right.
00:26:13.000 There's a reason for that.
00:26:17.000 Why is it that people like Mike Cernovich said, I'm not showing up?
00:26:19.000 Why do you think?
00:26:21.000 Was it because it was filled with very fine people, as President Trump says?
00:26:23.000 There were a lot of very fine people?
00:26:25.000 Okay, also important to notice on this tape, the guy who's wiping his face off here is a guy named Christopher Caldwell, open racist, says that he wishes President Trump were more racist, and he's very upset that President Trump would allow his daughter to marry a Jew.
00:26:36.000 He was maced here.
00:26:38.000 Again, Christopher Caldwell is a disgusting piece of garbage.
00:26:41.000 But macing people is not something that you get to do in the United States for peacefully protesting even for evil causes.
00:26:47.000 Here's some more of the tape from Vice.
00:26:49.000 We're here obeying the law.
00:26:50.000 We're doing everything that we're supposed to do, trying to express opinions.
00:26:55.000 And the criminals are over there getting their way.
00:26:58.000 And that is a foundational problem in our society.
00:27:01.000 And whatever you think of my opinions, that's going to be something that puts you in danger.
00:27:05.000 Yeah, and that is because this city is run by Jewish communists and criminals.
00:27:10.000 We did not initiate force against anybody.
00:27:12.000 We're not non-violent.
00:27:13.000 We'll kill these people if we have to.
00:27:20.000 It's a Christopher Conlon fellow who you see saying that he'll kill people if he has to, but, again, this is why Antifa's activities are really bad, okay?
00:27:26.000 Antifa is just granting credibility to the alt-right, saying, oh, we're just here for defensive purposes.
00:27:31.000 We're just here for defensive purposes.
00:27:32.000 Okay, so, a lot of... Sorry, almost cursed there.
00:27:36.000 A lot of really crappy people on both sides, okay?
00:27:39.000 That is true, but,
00:27:40.000 It is unfair for the President of the United States to say that there were a lot of very fine people who were marching on Friday night.
00:27:45.000 There were not, or if there were, I would like to see the evidence of it.
00:27:48.000 That does not mean that everyone who opposes the Robert E. Lee statue coming down is a bad person.
00:27:52.000 Okay, I've said that.
00:27:53.000 I started the show with that.
00:27:54.000 I think that Trump is not wrong about some of the things he says about the Confederate statuary.
00:27:58.000 But, when he says there are a lot of very fine people and, oh, what's the alt-right?
00:28:02.000 I've never heard of it.
00:28:02.000 What does it do?
00:28:04.000 That is really, really gross, and you can see why people are reacting so negatively to it.
00:28:09.000 The President of the United States has a moral responsibility to say not only that white supremacists and neo-Nazis are terrible and believe terrible things, but that the alt-right is terrible, particularly because they claim him as an ally.
00:28:20.000 That does matter.
00:28:21.000 It does matter.
00:28:22.000 When people claim you as an ally,
00:28:24.000 It becomes more incumbent on you to disassociate from them if you want to disassociate from them.
00:28:30.000 If somebody says publicly, like today, for example, a stupid example, Martin Shkreli, who's like the weird pharmaceutical bro guy, who's now in jail for fraud, he tweeted something out about how he wanted to run for president and make me his vice president.
00:28:41.000 And I immediately tweeted out, if elected I will not serve, if nominated I will not run.
00:28:45.000 Like, what in the hell?
00:28:47.000 That's not my guy, right?
00:28:49.000 That's not somebody who I'm interested in being associated with, and that's a funny, ridiculous example, but if you have an entire movement of people who believe what Christopher Caldwell believes, but are just a little quieter about it, and they claim that you support them as President of the United States, why don't you do what Ronald Reagan did and just denounce them and say, I don't want your support!
00:29:07.000 I don't want you anywhere near me!
00:29:09.000 But apparently Steve Bannon over the weekend was telling Trump that he couldn't alienate a lot of these people because if he did then he'd lose his base.
00:29:14.000 The truth is that it would actually alienate Bannon's base but not Trump's base.
00:29:17.000 Okay, Trump's base is very large.
00:29:19.000 Trump is the President of the United States.
00:29:21.000 He has a responsibility to stand up for everyone in the United States.
00:29:25.000 And Steve Bannon's base is not that large.
00:29:27.000 Steve Bannon's base is very alt-right driven.
00:29:29.000 There are a lot of people on the alt-right who like Bannon and see him as their great protector.
00:29:32.000 And that's why Bannon is motivated to protect the alt-right.
00:29:35.000 Trump is motivated to protect them not because he's a racist or a neo-nazi, but because Trump is motivated to sound off in favor of any or at least protect anybody who is ever nice to him.
00:29:44.000 And this is creating a real rift on the right that I'm going to talk about in just a minute.
00:29:48.000 But for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:29:50.000 You can subscribe for $9.99 a month.
00:29:52.000 At $9.99 a month, you get the rest of this show live.
00:29:54.000 It's a video show.
00:29:55.000 You can see the entire program.
00:29:58.000 You can be part of the Mailbag, which we'll be doing on Friday.
00:30:00.000 You can also engage with the Andrew Clavin Show, which will be coming on in about 45 minutes here over at dailywire.com.
00:30:07.000 You can be part of the Michael Knowles Show as well.
00:30:09.000 That comes on at 1.30 today.
00:30:11.000 I think Michael Knowles is actually having on one of the people who was one of the white supremacists or alt-right people at 12.30.
00:30:17.000 Okay, he's having on one of the alt-right folks who showed up at this rally.
00:30:20.000 We're good.
00:30:36.000 There are rumors, unconfirmed, that it is made from Valyrian steel.
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00:31:02.000 We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:10.000 Okay, so all of this has created a rift on the right.
00:31:12.000 There's no rift on the left, because the left is fully willing to go all the way with Antifa.
00:31:16.000 Because of the left, because of the left's willingness to go all the way with Antifa, there's a reactionary side to the right that says, okay, well, the alt-right isn't that bad.
00:31:24.000 Like, what Trump said yesterday wasn't that bad.
00:31:27.000 There wasn't anything morally wrong with it.
00:31:28.000 And you see, people are so hesitant to alienate sort of the hardcore alt-right
00:31:33.000 Trump support base and that's not that's a small percentage of Trump supporters by the way the vast majority of Trump supporters are not alt-right supporters a very small group of people but people are so hesitant to alienate that they are hesitant to condemn in moral terms what the president did yesterday and what he did was immoral yesterday it was an immoral thing the president did yesterday by pretending he didn't know what the alt-right was and then suggesting that there were very fine people who showed up for that rally on Friday night
00:31:57.000 And then suggesting that not all those people were white supremacists and putting this sort of equal focus on what he called the alt-left with the alt-right.
00:32:08.000 Again, the alt-left, the Antifa groups are evil, but it was an alt-right guy who murdered someone on Saturday.
00:32:13.000 It was an alt-right guy who drove a car into a crowd and murdered a woman and killed and hurt 19 other people.
00:32:20.000 There's plenty of time to discuss the evils of Antifa.
00:32:22.000 There's plenty of time to discuss the evils of leftist violence.
00:32:25.000 We do it on this show routinely.
00:32:27.000 You know, yesterday, it's fine to mention Antifa's violent.
00:32:31.000 It is not fine to either equate the activities of the two at these particular rallies, or to suggest that the alt-right was not a part of this.
00:32:39.000 It's what the alt-right could have wished for.
00:32:40.000 The proof is in the pudding.
00:32:41.000 Both Richard Spencer and David Duke celebrated President Trump's statements yesterday.
00:32:45.000 If I were President Trump, I wouldn't want David Duke or Richard Spencer celebrating me for any reason under the sun.
00:32:50.000 In any case, this has broken out into an intellectual fight on the right.
00:32:53.000 Laura Ingraham, who of course has been a very, very strong supporter of President Trump's throughout the campaign and was talked about as press secretary when she was on Fox News, and she said, well, the big problem is that this doesn't forward the president's policy agenda.
00:33:06.000 I always like to think about it this way.
00:33:08.000 Is he advancing his agenda with what happened this afternoon?
00:33:11.000 And I will say, when you had Gary Cohn up there talking about, they're going to hit the ground running on tax reform.
00:33:17.000 We're ready.
00:33:17.000 We spent the whole day doing it.
00:33:19.000 I was like, I wanted to hear more and more and more.
00:33:21.000 I mean, that's great.
00:33:22.000 And we got sidetracked on this horrific event of the weekend, which he had made the subsequent statement about.
00:33:28.000 That was
00:33:29.000 I think really, really good.
00:33:30.000 I think he could have been more specific, clearly, on Saturday.
00:33:32.000 But when he said, we must love each other, show affection for each other, unite together and condemn the hatred, bigotry of the violence that we saw, that was so great yesterday.
00:33:41.000 I think today, he's really torched about people conflating Trump's support with white nationalists.
00:33:50.000 You can see it and hear it in his responses, and I understand that.
00:33:54.000 But he's not there to win every debating point.
00:33:57.000 People want to see a calm president in the storm.
00:34:01.000 I think today, I think he made some points that were factually right.
00:34:04.000 There was violence on both sides in that event on Saturday.
00:34:08.000 Anyone who's watched the video could see it.
00:34:10.000 Okay, what she says there is not all wrong, but it is also a massive misdirect.
00:34:15.000 And that's what Krauthammer immediately comes back and says to her.
00:34:18.000 He says, you know, that is that it's really a cop-out.
00:34:20.000 To say that what Trump did yesterday was wrong because it distracts from his agenda is a real cop-out.
00:34:24.000 What he did wrong yesterday was wrong.
00:34:26.000 It was just wrong.
00:34:27.000 I mean, it was a morally wrong thing to do.
00:34:29.000 So Krauthammer says that, and then Ingram immediately comes back by doing this, this
00:34:32.000 Tired, boring talking point, where she says that anybody who's dissatisfied with anything Trump does is just because they hate Trump personally.
00:34:38.000 I am so bored with this bullcrap, I can't even tell you.
00:34:41.000 The fact is, I want the same things that Laura Ingraham wants in terms of policy at least 70% of the way.
00:34:46.000 The idea that I'm sitting here rooting for Trump to fail is nonsense.
00:34:49.000 I want Trump to do the right thing.
00:34:51.000 I want him to do the right thing not only for the agenda, but morally I want him to do the right thing.
00:34:54.000 I want him to do the ethically right thing.
00:34:56.000 I want him to come out and condemn the alt-right.
00:34:58.000 I want the alt-right excised.
00:35:00.000 I think they're a cancer on our movement.
00:35:01.000 I want him to call out Antifa.
00:35:03.000 I celebrate him calling out Antifa.
00:35:04.000 But he needs to also call out the people who are evil within his own movement.
00:35:08.000 And if he won't do that clearly and concisely, not just 99 times out of 100, not just I'm irritated having to do it, it should be easy.
00:35:14.000 I remember a couple of weeks ago, I was on with Dana Perino on Fox News debating some guy from CAIR.
00:35:19.000 And I said, why don't you condemn the Muslim Brotherhood?
00:35:21.000 And he said, why don't you condemn the KKK?
00:35:23.000 I said, sure, the KKK is a bunch of garbage human beings.
00:35:26.000 Was that any skin off my nose?
00:35:27.000 Did I feel bad about that?
00:35:28.000 Did I feel like, oh, how dare he demand that I... Who cares?
00:35:32.000 Defend bad... condemn bad people.
00:35:33.000 Why is this difficult?
00:35:34.000 It's not difficult.
00:35:35.000 It's such a gimme.
00:35:36.000 It's such a gimme.
00:35:37.000 And the fact that he didn't do it is immoral.
00:35:39.000 It's immoral.
00:35:40.000 And you can see
00:35:41.000 In fact, everybody said his statement was beautiful.
00:35:42.000 If he would have made it sooner that would have been good.
00:35:45.000 I couldn't have made it sooner because I didn't know all of the facts.
00:36:07.000 Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts.
00:36:10.000 Who wrote that statement?
00:36:11.000 Excuse me, excuse me.
00:36:14.000 It was very important to me to get the facts out and correct them.
00:36:19.000 Because if I would have made a fast statement, and the first statement was made
00:36:23.000 Look how uncomfortable Kelly is.
00:36:25.000 What were the many sides you were talking about, sir?
00:36:27.000 What was the other side?
00:36:29.000 When you said, on many sides, Mr. President...
00:36:41.000 Okay, Kelly did this for like 15 minutes.
00:36:43.000 It was just him staring into the abyss for 15 minutes.
00:36:45.000 Kelly was not a happy camper, nor should he have been.
00:36:47.000 Nor should he have been.
00:36:49.000 And I'm tired of this cop-out that, you know, if he does something immoral, it's only bad because it's a distraction from policy.
00:36:54.000 Immoral things are immoral.
00:36:56.000 And I'm also tired of this cop-out that if I think something he did is immoral, it's because I want him to fail or I'm anti-Trump.
00:37:00.000 He's the president.
00:37:01.000 I want him to succeed.
00:37:02.000 He's the president.
00:37:03.000 I want him to do good things.
00:37:05.000 Just enough.
00:37:05.000 Now, the media is not helping any of this, of course, because the media have decided not just to condemn Trump for doing what he is obviously doing, pandering to the alt-right, but they have decided that it is important to call him an actual Nazi.
00:37:15.000 So Jimmy Kimmel suggested that President Trump cuts eyeholes out of his bedsheets.
00:37:20.000 He's an actual member of the KKK.
00:37:22.000 It's another disturbing Monday in America.
00:37:26.000 You know, we went into the weekend worrying about Kim Jong-un starting a war.
00:37:30.000 We came out of it wondering if our president is cutting eyeholes out of his bedsheets.
00:37:34.000 You know, um, as you know, this weekend in Virginia, the worst people in the United States went to the hardware store, bought tiki torches, lit them up, and marched in Charlottesville.
00:37:44.000 A non-violent protester was killed by a white supremacist, and so the president, who is the president, by the way, went on television to say this.
00:37:52.000 We condemn in the strongest possible term- Okay, you can see it.
00:37:55.000 You don't have to go on with Kimmel, but you can see that Kimmel
00:37:57.000 Is obviously calling Trump a Nazi.
00:38:00.000 David Axelrod, who was the former White House Communications Director, I believe, under President Obama.
00:38:06.000 He was his campaign strategist in 2008.
00:38:08.000 He said that Trump bleached the white robes of the KKK.
00:38:13.000 Listen, this press conference was in every way, shape, and form a car wreck for the president.
00:38:20.000 It showed a guy who was melting down.
00:38:22.000 It showed a guy who was small-minded, intemperate, and sending dog whistles to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, which is why they have thanked him for his comments.
00:38:36.000 He was bleaching their white robes and he was shining their shields with his remarks today.
00:38:42.000 And he may say he condemned them, but that's not the way anybody in America read that.
00:38:47.000 So the idea from Axelrod is of course that Trump isn't doing this for political gain, he's doing this because he actually sympathizes with white supremacism.
00:38:54.000 Okay, I don't think that's what's going on with Trump.
00:38:56.000 And this is one of the things that's bothered me about the leftist take on all of this.
00:38:59.000 It bothered me with Steve Bannon.
00:39:00.000 Okay, Steve Bannon is a guy I know and personally dislike very strongly.
00:39:03.000 I think Steve's a bad human being.
00:39:05.000 But, when people said that Steve was a racist or an anti-Semite, I had to say, I don't see any evidence of that.
00:39:10.000 I do see evidence that he's willing to pander to those groups for political gain.
00:39:13.000 The left can't just stick to the truth.
00:39:15.000 They cannot just stick to the truth.
00:39:16.000 I've been saying this for a year.
00:39:17.000 Okay?
00:39:17.000 They can't just stick to the truth of what's going on.
00:39:19.000 They have to declare not only that Trump is a Nazi, but that everyone who supports him is a Nazi, that everybody on the right is a Nazi, and that Antifa is a group of glorious World War II allies who are fighting the bad guys.
00:39:30.000 Okay?
00:39:30.000 Antifa shut down a rally in Portland where a bunch of Republicans just wanted to march in the Rose Parade as they do every year.
00:39:36.000 But this is what the left is doing.
00:39:38.000 I said this yesterday.
00:39:41.000 The left is embracing the radical left, and the right, in response, is increasingly winking and nodding at the radical right.
00:39:47.000 And I don't even think that the alt-right is right, but I think that they are Trump supporters in the main, because they see in Trump an ally against the SJWs and against political correctness.
00:39:57.000 And it's dangerous on both sides.
00:39:59.000 It's getting more dangerous.
00:40:01.000 At the very least, can we start with no violence?
00:40:03.000 Can we start with Antifa should be arrested when they commit acts of violence?
00:40:06.000 And then we'll talk about how everybody in the United States needs to condemn, including the President of the United States, needs to come out and cut out the cancer that is the alt-right.
00:40:16.000 The alt-right is a cancer.
00:40:17.000 They're a blight.
00:40:18.000 And the fact that the president won't do that, it's so disheartening.
00:40:22.000 Some days it's very hard to do the show because it's so disheartening when you see the moral emptiness on both sides of the political aisle for partisan gain.
00:40:31.000 It really is quite horrifying to me.
00:40:33.000 And I'm as conservative as anyone in America.
00:40:35.000 And not only do I think that
00:40:40.000 You know, in spite of my conservatism, I think all this stuff is terrible.
00:40:43.000 I think because of my conservatism, I think all this stuff is terrible.
00:40:45.000 Conservatives believe in individual liberty and individual value.
00:40:48.000 We believe in the idea that human beings were made in God's image, each and every one of us.
00:40:52.000 We believe in the idea of respect and tolerance for other people's views.
00:40:57.000 We believe in the idea that the best views will win.
00:41:00.000 We believe in the idea that the government shouldn't get involved in this stuff because we believe all the things I just mentioned.
00:41:04.000 And if we are willing to wink and nod at all of these bad things in order to advance our agenda on either side, then we're just part of the problem and we're making the country a lot worse place.
00:41:14.000 It's really horrifying.
00:41:15.000 Okay.
00:41:16.000 With that said, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then a quick Bible study.
00:41:20.000 So, things I like.
00:41:22.000 Over the weekend I had a chance to read a highly recommended book called The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak.
00:41:27.000 This is a book about World War I, and it's about a guy who grows up very young in the United States, and then he moves back to Czechoslovakia, or what becomes Czechoslovakia, and ends up joining up with the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. It's a very beautifully written novel.
00:41:44.000 It's very spare.
00:41:45.000 It's very reminiscent of Farewell to Arms by Hemingway.
00:41:50.000 And it's already being counted as sort of a World at One classic.
00:41:52.000 He apparently wrote a sequel that I'm looking forward to reading about the Vietnam War.
00:41:55.000 It's called The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak, good piece of fiction, and it reminds us that despite our partisan fights, you know, there are certain human values that we should hold dear together.
00:42:05.000 It's a very good book.
00:42:06.000 Go out and buy it.
00:42:07.000 Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:42:14.000 So, I've been focusing a lot on sports TV lately because it seems like everything is becoming more and more politicized, and so Stephen A. Smith has come in for some heavy criticism on the show recently.
00:42:22.000 Yesterday, Stephen A. Smith suggested that the race of a protester grants that protester legitimacy or illegitimacy.
00:42:29.000 Here is Stephen A. Smith suggesting that white people should never be able to tell black people not to protest.
00:42:35.000 No white person has the right to tell black folks when you should protest about something.
00:42:42.000 Because usually protest that emanates from the black community is due in large part because of the transgressions exacted against that community by those who don't happen to be black.
00:42:55.000 And then you wonder why there's an alt-right?
00:42:57.000 Then you wonder why there's a white identity politics?
00:42:59.000 White people can never tell black people not to protest for any reason.
00:43:02.000 So what about when white people say the same thing?
00:43:03.000 What about when the alt-right says the same thing?
00:43:05.000 What about when the alt-right, white identity, disgusting human beings say, well, black people can't tell us not to protest.
00:43:10.000 After all, there are policies like affirmative action.
00:43:14.000 How can they tell us that we're not the victims?
00:43:16.000 This is what's wrong with the country, but this is happening in the mainstream.
00:43:19.000 That's not a march around a Robert E. Lee statue in the middle of Virginia.
00:43:24.000 This is on national TV on ESPN.
00:43:25.000 Stephen A. Smith is a sports commentator.
00:43:28.000 This sort of stuff makes the country worse.
00:43:29.000 It makes the country worse.
00:43:31.000 One more thing that I hate.
00:43:33.000 So, Iran is now threatening a nuclear restart.
00:43:35.000 Thank you, Obama administration.
00:43:36.000 Thank you.
00:43:37.000 On August 15th, Iran's president warned it could restart its nuclear program within hours or days if the Trump administration continues its confrontational policy toward the Islamic Republic.
00:43:46.000 I thought that we were guaranteed that Iran was now going to be non-nuclear.
00:43:50.000 I thought that everything was going to be hunky-dory now.
00:43:53.000 Yeah, no, it turns out that when you deal with evil people, when you cut deals with evil people, you end up with the crap in your lap, and that's basically what's happened here.
00:44:00.000 Okay, so time for a very quick Bible study, a little bit of inspirational uplift in the middle of a very dark week.
00:44:06.000 So, as I mentioned, every week we've been going through not the Torah, but the Haftorah.
00:44:10.000 The Torah is the five books of Moses.
00:44:12.000 Every week the Jews also read a portion from the prophets and the writings that corresponds to the portion
00:44:16.000 from the Torah reading.
00:44:17.000 We do that because back in Roman times, Jews were not allowed to read from the Torah.
00:44:21.000 They were barred from reading from the Torah.
00:44:22.000 So instead, they started reading references from the prophets and the writings that people could easily cross-reference to the Torah itself.
00:44:29.000 So this comes courtesy of Isaiah.
00:44:31.000 This is chapter 54 of Isaiah.
00:44:32.000 He's talking about
00:44:46.000 The idea that eventually there will be a messianic era in which the kingdom of David will shine forth.
00:44:53.000 The part that I think is really interesting here is where he says, We tend to think about the messianic age a lot as the idea that good will rule and command.
00:45:05.000 But it's not just that.
00:45:06.000 It's about witnessing.
00:45:06.000 And this is something we should all take to heart.
00:45:08.000 We are all witnesses.
00:45:08.000 Okay?
00:45:10.000 We are not just about ruling.
00:45:11.000 We're not just about power.
00:45:12.000 It's not just about who controls the levers of power.
00:45:14.000 We are all witnesses to good and evil.
00:45:16.000 We all are going to be called on by God to testify when our time comes as to whether we stood up or whether we stood with or whether we stood against.
00:45:23.000 Okay?
00:45:24.000 We are all witnesses.
00:45:25.000 We're witnesses to all the things that go on around us.
00:45:28.000 And to shut our eyes, to blind ourselves that we are not called upon to witness is part of the problem.
00:45:33.000 We are all part of this together.
00:45:35.000 If we don't witness evil and speak out about it, if we're not able to testify even on our own behalves as to what we think about bad things that are happening, then we don't deserve the messianic era, let alone good in the afterlife or even good on this planet.
00:45:46.000 I think that as people who are delegated a certain
00:45:49.000 Responsibility by God, and by our fellow man.
00:45:53.000 We have to stand up to evil when we see it, and we have to call it out when we see it.
00:45:56.000 Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
00:45:57.000 Hopefully we'll have a good day of news.
00:45:59.000 That'd be nice, wouldn't it?
00:46:00.000 And then we can do something fun?
00:46:01.000 Please, Mr. President?
00:46:03.000 Please, for the love of God, can we have a nice day?
00:46:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.