The Ben Shapiro Show - Was America Founded On Racism? | Ep. 842

00:00:00.000 Democrats formulate their 2020 narrative, the Omar Tlaib BDS train continues to roll, and Antifa gets more favorable media coverage.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:09.000 All righty.

00:00:15.000 Well, we have a lot to get to today.

00:00:16.000 We'll get to the Antifa hubbub in Portland a little bit later on in the show.

00:00:20.000 Plus, we'll get to the economic update.

00:00:22.000 Well, we begin today with the Democrats trotting out the new narrative for 2020.

00:00:25.000 It was obvious that this was going to be the narrative for 2020.

00:00:28.000 The truth is, it was the narrative for 2012.

00:00:30.000 It just wasn't the narrative for 2016.

00:00:31.000 So in 2012, the Democrats ran on the platform that, effectively speaking, there was no great way for the for the United States to get past its racial bias, except by electing Barack Obama president of the United States again.

00:00:46.000 That was the only good way to do this.

00:00:48.000 And Mitt Romney thus had to be thrown under the bus. 0.95

00:00:50.000 Mitt Romney was a terrible, no good, very bad man.

00:00:52.000 Mitt Romney was the kind of fellow who was going to put people back in chains in the words of Joe Biden.

00:00:56.000 Well, then in 2016, the Democrats switched it up because Hillary Clinton was the nominee.

00:01:00.000 And it turns out it's difficult to run on a narrative of American racism.

00:01:03.000 Well, your nominee is a white woman. 0.89

00:01:06.000 And so now we are moving forward to 2020.

00:01:09.000 Donald Trump has been the president by that point for four years, and people are looking for a narrative to use against Trump.

00:01:14.000 Now, there are many narratives that the Democrats could use against Trump in 2020.

00:01:17.000 They could do what Joe Biden has done.

00:01:19.000 They could use a character narrative that Donald Trump is short on character, that Donald Trump is divisive and derisive, that Donald Trump is mean and cruel and alienates suburban women.

00:01:27.000 That would be their smart move.

00:01:29.000 The reason it would be their smart move is because it would attempt to emulate the coalition of 2008 for Barack Obama.

00:01:34.000 So in 2008, Barack Obama did not run On the race narrative.

00:01:37.000 In 2008, Barack Obama did not run on the idea that the United States was deeply rift by racial strife and that the only way to fix that was to elect him president.

00:01:46.000 He basically ran on the suggestion that America was moving toward a better day.

00:01:50.000 No red states, no blue states, the United States.

00:01:52.000 He ran on hope and change.

00:01:54.000 And then he won a broad-based victory.

00:01:55.000 Yes, with heavy black turnout, but also with extraordinarily high white turnout and with a lot of people in the middle switching sides to favor him.

00:02:02.000 He won a much broader victory in 2008 than he did in 2012.

00:02:05.000 Then in 2012, Obama created what Democrats thought was the new electoral normal.

00:02:09.000 And the new electoral normal suggested That he was going to be at the Democrats forever.

00:02:14.000 We're going to be able to turn out at insane rates, minority voters. 1.00

00:02:18.000 They were going to be able to turn out at wildly disproportionate rates, minority voters.

00:02:22.000 That's why Barack Obama was reelected, because he turned out minority voters in heavy numbers in a lot of swing states like Ohio, for example, where about 10% of the population was black, but about 13% of the electorate was black.

00:02:34.000 So Democrats in 2016 thought, okay, the new normal is 2012, not 2008.

00:02:37.000 And they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to be able to draw exactly those same black voters, and they would show up at exactly the same rates, and then she would run away with the election.

00:02:45.000 It didn't happen.

00:02:46.000 Well now, move forward to 2020, and Democrats have to make a choice.

00:02:49.000 Do they choose to run on Barack Obama circa 2008, or do they choose to run on Barack Obama circa 2012?

00:02:56.000 And it is becoming more and more obvious that Democrats are addicted to the narrative that 2012 is the new coalition, not 2008.

00:03:03.000 That running on the basis of Trump's moral shortcomings and lack of character is not a winning strategy. 0.99

00:03:08.000 Instead, the strategy is going to be that Donald Trump is a vicious racist, that America is terribly, horribly sinful and racist and racism is built into its DNA. 0.98

00:03:18.000 And the only way to fix that is to elect a Democrat. 0.97

00:03:20.000 Now, it's going to be very awkward if Joe Biden is the nominee.

00:03:23.000 If Joe Biden is the nominee, it's going to be extraordinarily awkward for Democrats to run on the race narrative because Joe Biden's own racial history is, as we have seen from Kamala Harris's critiques of him, at least somewhat checkered going all the way back to the 1970s and desegregation through busing and all of this.

00:03:39.000 But if they were to nominate somebody like Cory Booker or Kamala Harris, it becomes a lot simpler.

00:03:44.000 In any case, the media, who are well-educated white liberals who live in major metropolitan areas, it turns out that they are more interested in the racial narrative than they are in the reach out to the white folks in the middle of the country narrative.

00:03:56.000 They're more interested in replicating the 2012 Obama coalition than they are in replicating the 2008 Obama coalition.

00:04:02.000 And this mirrors some of the statistics that we have seen about the political preferences of white Upper educated college liberals living in major cities.

00:04:13.000 Those are the people who are the foundation of the new woke politics.

00:04:15.000 And it is more important to appeal to those people than it is to appeal to the people in the middle of the country, according to Democrats, because those are the people who constitute the media.

00:04:23.000 And so you're seeing the Democratic Party embrace their 2020 strategy.

00:04:26.000 Their new 2020 strategy, it turns out, is not only that Donald Trump is a racist, but that Donald Trump is representative of a long line of American racism stretching all the way back to slavery, and that America is rife with Endemic problems that are created by slavery and that cannot be wiped out absent total revolution.

00:04:43.000 That is the narrative that Democrats are trying to draw.

00:04:45.000 It justifies their revolutionary rhetoric.

00:04:47.000 It justifies their radicalism.

00:04:49.000 It justifies nearly everything.

00:04:50.000 If it turns out that America was based in, rooted in, not just that America was reliant upon economically, but that America was, all of its institutions were infected with and infused with and rooted in and based on slavery, then the only way to fix those institutions is to rip them down To branch and branch and tree.

00:05:08.000 I mean, the entire thing must be ripped down.

00:05:11.000 And that is what Democrats are now claiming, as we will see.

00:05:14.000 Democrats, particularly, again, those media, those media radicals, this is the narrative they are pushing.

00:05:20.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:05:22.000 I'll explain what the narrative is and why it is taking a grain of truth and then blowing it up into a massive, massive lie.

00:05:31.000 Again, slavery is a massive part of America's founding.

00:05:35.000 It is not the root of America's founding.

00:05:36.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:06:48.000 Okay, so as I say, the democratic narrative leading up to 2020 is now being formulated.

00:06:53.000 And it's being formulated in real time.

00:06:55.000 It's being backfilled.

00:06:56.000 And it's being backfilled because it turns out that the Democratic narrative was supposed to be Donald Trump is a Russian tool.

00:07:01.000 And it's no longer Donald Trump is a Russian tool. 0.93

00:07:03.000 Now it is America is rife with racism. 0.93

00:07:05.000 Donald Trump is representative of the James Buchanan South.

00:07:08.000 Donald Trump is representative of John C. Calhoun.

00:07:12.000 Right.

00:07:12.000 That's that that is who Trump is.

00:07:14.000 That's what America is.

00:07:16.000 And this is now the narrative that is being pushed by the left.

00:07:18.000 As I say, as we will see, there is a there is more than a grain of truth to the idea that slavery was a deeply rooted, endemic part of American life for several hundred years, beginning in 1619 and ending officially in 1863.

00:07:33.000 Right.

00:07:33.000 Yes, that is official.

00:07:35.000 It depends on whether you're dating it from the Emancipation Proclamation or the 14th Amendment, might say 1865.

00:07:40.000 In any case, the fact is slavery was, of course, a massive part of America's history.

00:07:46.000 Jim Crow was a massive part of America's history. 0.96

00:07:49.000 But it is a lie to suggest that America was founded based on slavery.

00:07:52.000 Surely the Puritans who arrived on the Mayflower were not there to bring slavery about, nor was it the Southern economy that lent the great strength of America's economy her strength.

00:08:03.000 We'll get to that in just one second, but here's the thing.

00:08:05.000 Beto O'Rourke, who is now trying to channel exactly what the media want from him.

00:08:09.000 So Beto O'Rourke is a man in search of love.

00:08:11.000 Beto O'Rourke had that love back in the 2018 Senate race against Ted Cruz.

00:08:18.000 He had it going.

00:08:20.000 It was going to be his moment, and the media loved him for it.

00:08:22.000 Well, now Beto O'Rourke is a man in search of love.

00:08:24.000 He is searching for media love, and the only way he can see toward finding it is becoming the most white, woke person on planet Earth. 0.86

00:08:31.000 So yesterday, Beto announces his campaign.

00:08:33.000 His campaign is that America was founded on racism, and so we need a woke, white guy who was born into immense privilege.

00:08:39.000 He's worth that $9 million because his daddy was very, very wealthy and very, very powerful in his area.

00:08:44.000 We need that guy to lead us to a broader American future.

00:08:48.000 And this country, though we would like to think otherwise, was founded on racism, has persisted through racism, and is racist today.

00:09:02.000 But this racism, though foundational, for so long it had flown under the surface.

00:09:09.000 But it was only until this administration, Trump is the real America, according to Beto O'Rourke.

00:09:21.000 Trump is representative of America's true, dark, evil, slave-ridden heart. 0.62

00:09:27.000 Now, you may be saying to yourself, I've never held a slave.

00:09:29.000 I am not a racist.

00:09:30.000 And you're right.

00:09:31.000 You've never held a slave.

00:09:33.000 You're not a racist.

00:09:34.000 But according to the Democrats, even if you are not a racist, you still suffer from the afterpayings of white supremacy. 0.95

00:09:39.000 It is buried deep within you.

00:09:41.000 It is unconscious.

00:09:41.000 It's exactly as AOC said a couple of weeks ago in a tweet thread, white supremacy is so deeply embedded in American life that there is no way of extricating it from American life, which suggests that the only solution is radical chemotherapy.

00:09:53.000 But if the cancer is everywhere, if it has infected the entire body politic, the only answer is radical chemotherapy.

00:09:59.000 And that's what Beto is calling for.

00:10:00.000 This justifies the radical changes Democrats are calling for.

00:10:03.000 It justifies the overthrow of a lot of the wonderful great things about America.

00:10:06.000 Because after all, if all those wonderful great things are rooted in one of the most evil institutions in the history of mankind, it's difficult to make the moral case for them being retained, even if they have had some good positive effect.

00:10:18.000 As we will see, this is exactly what the New York Times is about to claim.

00:10:21.000 So the New York Times has launched something called the 1619 Project.

00:10:24.000 Now, on its face, there is nothing wrong with the 1619 Project.

00:10:28.000 There's nothing, not only is there nothing wrong, there's something quite good about America learning about its own history, about staring the evils of racism in the face, about staring the evils of slavery and white supremacism and Jim Crow directly in the face, recognizing their ugliness.

00:10:41.000 Too many Americans don't know much about slavery.

00:10:43.000 They just hear it as a word and they don't understand the tremendous suffering.

00:10:46.000 They've never read any of the slave memoirs.

00:10:48.000 They've never read Frederick Douglass.

00:10:50.000 They've never watched any of the documentaries about slavery.

00:10:54.000 They haven't looked at any of the materials.

00:10:56.000 They don't understand the deep cruelty, the malignant malice and racism and evil of slavery.

00:11:03.000 Many Americans don't understand how that was projected forward a hundred years through Jim Crow.

00:11:07.000 How institutions took slavery as their model and then used that in order to keep black people down and segregate them and destroy their lives and make it impossible for them to progress in American society. 0.94

00:11:18.000 Too many black folks in the United States, right? 1.00

00:11:21.000 That is stuff that, of course, should be taught about. 0.78

00:11:23.000 And if the 1619 Project were that, that would be one thing.

00:11:26.000 But the 1619 Project is not that, as it turns out.

00:11:28.000 The 1619 Project is about something that is much deeper and much more radical.

00:11:33.000 And that is radically rethinking America as the quote-unquote product of slavery.

00:11:36.000 That everything in America is due to slavery.

00:11:39.000 That America's founding ideology is a slave ideology. 0.70

00:11:42.000 It's an ideology about promoting and promulgating slavery.

00:11:45.000 And so, as we'll see, the New York Times has shifted its premise.

00:11:48.000 Now, the reason the New York Times is doing this is purely political.

00:11:50.000 This is not because they've suddenly become interested in educating the American people about slavery 150 years after it ended.

00:11:57.000 That is not what is going on here.

00:11:58.000 This is a political move by the New York Times, and they're basically admitting as much.

00:12:01.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:12:03.000 First, I look at screens all day long, right?

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00:12:14.000 And then when I go home, I'm watching TV with my wife sometimes, more screens.

00:12:18.000 Probably out of every 15 hours a day that I am awake, Probably seven or eight of them.

00:12:22.000 I'm staring at some form of screen.

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00:12:25.000 Most Americans are doing the same thing.

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00:13:43.000 Okay, so as I say, this is part of a narrative that is now being driven by the media.

00:13:47.000 And that narrative is, again, rooted in a basic truth, which is that slavery was a serious part of America's founding, that it was a massive part of America's history, which, again, I think most people know on a basic level, but don't understand at a root emotional level.

00:14:01.000 All of that would be fine and dandy.

00:14:04.000 But that is not what the 1619 Project really is about.

00:14:06.000 The 1619 Project is really about driving a narrative ahead of 2020.

00:14:09.000 The Washington Examiner reported last week that Dean Beckett, the executive editor of the New York Times, said recently that after the Mueller report, the paper has to shift the focus of its coverage from the Trump-Russia affair to the president's alleged racism.

00:14:22.000 Baquette said that they had built up their entire staff, basically, to cover Trump-Russia, and then it turns out that Mueller blew up that narrative.

00:14:30.000 And Baquette said, I think we've got to change.

00:14:31.000 The Times must, quote, write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.

00:14:36.000 I mean, the vision for coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier, said Baquette.

00:14:40.000 How do we cover a guy who makes these kind of remarks?

00:14:42.000 How do we cover the world's reaction to him?

00:14:44.000 How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies?

00:14:47.000 How do we cover America that's become so divided by Donald Trump?

00:14:50.000 And that in and of itself is an editorial decision that it's Trump dividing America as opposed to pre-existing divisions that have been exacerbated and made worse by President Trump.

00:15:00.000 And then he continues.

00:15:02.000 He vows a vision for the paper for the next two years.

00:15:04.000 Quote, how do we grapple with all the stuff you're talking about?

00:15:07.000 How do we write about race in a thoughtful way?

00:15:09.000 Something we haven't done in a large way in a long time.

00:15:12.000 That to me is the vision for coverage.

00:15:13.000 You all are going to have to help us shape that vision, but I think that's what we're going to have to do for the rest of the next two years.

00:15:18.000 And in case you think that that is the Washington Examiner taking this stuff out of context, it is not.

00:15:23.000 There's a full transcript of Dean Beckett's exchange.

00:15:26.000 He's the executive editor of the New York Times.

00:15:27.000 His exchange with a bunch of staffers That was obtained by Slate.

00:15:33.000 And in the middle of this exchange, he references the 1619 Project three separate times.

00:15:37.000 And here is what he said.

00:15:38.000 I'll give you each of the contexts.

00:15:39.000 He says, quote, what I'm saying is that our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden.

00:15:46.000 They sometimes want us to pretend he was not elected president, but he was elected president.

00:15:50.000 And our job is to figure out why and how and to hold the administration to account.

00:15:54.000 If you're independent, that's what you do.

00:15:57.000 The same newspaper that this week will publish the 1619 Project, the most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken in a newspaper, to try and understand the forces that led to the election of Donald Trump.

00:16:08.000 In other words, slavery led to the election of Donald Trump, and the 1619 Project is an attempt to explain that.

00:16:14.000 That is what he is saying.

00:16:16.000 You just heard me quote him.

00:16:17.000 And that, of course, is not the only time that Dean Beckett talked about the 1619 Project.

00:16:21.000 A staffer asked him about the 1619 Project and said this, quote, Hello, I have another question about racism.

00:16:28.000 I'm wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting.

00:16:35.000 Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know?

00:16:38.000 Like these conversations about what is racist, what isn't racist.

00:16:41.000 I just feel like racism is in everything.

00:16:43.000 This is what a staffer says to the executive editor of the New York Times.

00:16:46.000 In everything.

00:16:48.000 It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.

00:16:53.000 And so to me, it's less about the individual instances of racism and sort of how we're thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all the systems in the country.

00:17:02.000 All the... the foundation.

00:17:03.000 Not just a part of all the systems in the country.

00:17:05.000 The foundation of all the systems in the country.

00:17:09.000 Not just that racism was something that America has fought with, and struggled with, and given into, and fought to overcome, but the root of all of our institutions is what this staffer is saying.

00:17:21.000 Which is sort of like saying that, let's say that you get married, and let's say that your marriage involves emotional abuse.

00:17:29.000 That the marriage was rooted on emotional abuse.

00:17:32.000 No, the marriage was probably rooted on all of the other stuff and then endured it despite the emotional abuse.

00:17:38.000 Emotional abuse is a major part of the story, but it is not in fact the whole story, nor it is the foundation of the story.

00:17:44.000 The staffer says, I think particularly As we are launching a 1619 project, I feel like it's going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, okay, well, you're saying this and you're producing this big project about this, but are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?

00:17:58.000 The staffer said, it's less about the individual instances of racism and sort of how we're thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all the systems in the country.

00:18:07.000 All of them.

00:18:08.000 And here's how Bacchette responded, quote, I do think that race and understanding of race should be a part of how we cover the American story.

00:18:14.000 Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment, but of course it should be.

00:18:18.000 I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.

00:18:25.000 So they're going to teach their readers that they have to think of every issue in America through the lens of race.

00:18:30.000 Race in the next year, and I think this is, to be frank, what I would hope you come away with this discussion with, race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story, Question, why in the next year?

00:18:40.000 What's happening in the next year?

00:18:41.000 Anybody?

00:18:43.000 The election, obviously.

00:18:45.000 Race is only a part of the American story for the next year.

00:18:47.000 How weird, how weird that the timeline matches up precisely with the 2020 election.

00:18:52.000 He says, I mean, race in terms not only of African Americans in their relationship with Donald Trump, but Latinos in immigration.

00:18:58.000 I think one of the things I would love to come out of this with is for people to feel very comfortable coming to me and saying, here's how I would like you to consider telling that story.

00:19:06.000 Because the reason you have a diverse newsroom, to be frank, is so that you can have people pull together to try to tell that story.

00:19:12.000 By diverse newsroom, he doesn't mean ideologically diverse newsroom or philosophically diverse newsroom.

00:19:17.000 He means a racially diverse newsroom, of course.

00:19:18.000 That is the only thing that matters in the end for Dean Beckett.

00:19:21.000 So.

00:19:22.000 The point that I am making is, again, not that it is bad to review the history of slavery in the United States, or to try, in some statistical, data-driven way, examine the impact of slavery on a going-forward basis in American life, and how we obliterate the vestiges of Jim Crow and slavery in our institutions when we identify them.

00:19:41.000 I'm all for all of those things.

00:19:42.000 Those are all great things.

00:19:43.000 That is not what this project is.

00:19:45.000 This project is a media-driven enterprise designed How do I know this?

00:19:49.000 That people who support Donald Trump are part of the legacy of slavery.

00:19:52.000 Those who oppose Donald Trump are not.

00:19:54.000 It is a bit of virtue signaling on the part of the New York Times.

00:19:58.000 Not designed to raise awareness about America's past, but designed to do so specifically in order to draw modern connections with political movements they don't like.

00:20:06.000 How do I know this?

00:20:07.000 Because that's exactly what they do.

00:20:08.000 In one second, I'm going to explain to you some of the pieces from the 1619 Project.

00:20:12.000 There are a bevy of them.

00:20:14.000 The vast majority of them are not very good.

00:20:15.000 There are a couple that I think are appropriate.

00:20:18.000 There's one in particular that I think is appropriate, if overstated.

00:20:23.000 And then there are a bunch that are really not, that are really quite sloppy, that are designed to be op-eds directed against conservatives.

00:20:29.000 And the idea here is that if you say that these op-eds are sloppy and directed against conservatives, it's because you're not taking the legacy of white supremacy and slavery seriously enough.

00:20:38.000 This is designed, specifically, not to bring America together to learn about our history, but to polarize around modern political issues by linking them directly with slavery.

00:20:47.000 By saying, if you disagree with me, it's because you don't take slavery seriously, it's because you don't take white supremacy seriously, and if you did, you would recognize that I'm right on my politics today.

00:20:56.000 That is what these pieces are, which is why they are universally written by members of the political left.

00:21:01.000 Now there are people on the right who are historians, who have studied slavery.

00:21:05.000 Theoretically, some of them could have been asked to write.

00:21:07.000 There are prominent black people in America who are conservative.

00:21:10.000 Senator Tim Scott would be a good example of this.

00:21:11.000 Jason Reilly at the Wall Street Journal.

00:21:13.000 There are plenty of them.

00:21:14.000 Thomas Sowell.

00:21:15.000 None of them were asked to write a piece for any of this.

00:21:17.000 Instead, it was a bunch of left-leaning scholars and commentators.

00:21:20.000 I hesitate to call Jamel Bouie a scholar because I don't think that he is a specialist.

00:21:25.000 I'm not a scholar either, by the way, on this stuff.

00:21:28.000 And yet, what you see, too much, is the New York Times basically driving a narrative.

00:21:34.000 That's what this is.

00:21:35.000 In a second, we'll get to all of that.

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00:22:44.000 Okay, so now to the contents of the 1619 Project.

00:22:47.000 It's this big issue of the New York Times Magazine.

00:22:50.000 And it leads off this way.

00:22:52.000 In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia.

00:22:57.000 It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans who were sold to the colonists.

00:23:01.000 No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

00:23:06.000 Now, I think that's an overstatement, but a mild one, meaning that, of course, America was affected deeply and in a variety of ways by slavery.

00:23:18.000 I think it would be difficult to say that no aspect of the country was untouched by years of slavery, but that's within the realm of possibility.

00:23:25.000 You see, on the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

00:23:32.000 And then the original text suggested they've changed the text a little bit.

00:23:36.000 They said that the true founding of the country was in 1619.

00:23:41.000 We have to understand 1619 as the true founding.

00:23:44.000 Sorry, here, they didn't change it.

00:23:45.000 Here's what it says.

00:23:46.000 The 1619 project is a major initiative from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, which again, worthwhile.

00:23:54.000 It aims to reframe the country's history This is where we get into trouble.

00:23:58.000 It aims to reframe the country's history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

00:24:11.000 And now, again, placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the American story is totally fine.

00:24:18.000 I don't have a problem with that.

00:24:19.000 But 1619 was not the true founding of the country.

00:24:22.000 It was not.

00:24:23.000 1607 was Jamestown.

00:24:24.000 Plymouth Rock was 1619.

00:24:25.000 It was in a different part of the country.

00:24:27.000 This notion...

00:24:31.000 That slavery was not just a part of the American founding, but the central factor in the American founding is just a historical lie.

00:24:38.000 It is not true.

00:24:39.000 It is historically inaccurate. 0.98

00:24:41.000 It is inept. 0.92

00:24:42.000 It ignores the fact that there was an entire northern part of the country in which slavery was banned. 0.98

00:24:46.000 It ignores the Civil War.

00:24:47.000 It ignores 200 years of attempted development away from slavery.

00:24:52.000 It ignores a lot.

00:24:53.000 And as we will see, the essays that are attached to the 1619 Project are not about the legacy of slavery so much as they are about an attempt to link modern politics with slavery so that Democrats and liberals and leftists can claim that any conservative policy is in fact rooted in slavery and thus racist and bigoted.

00:25:13.000 So there are a couple pieces here that are worthwhile.

00:25:15.000 There's one by Nicole Hannah-Jones that I think is over overstated, but generally correct, which is our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written.

00:25:25.000 Black Americans have fought to make them true.

00:25:27.000 Now, that little stinger right there is not true.

00:25:31.000 They were not false when they were written.

00:25:33.000 They were wrongly applied when they were written.

00:25:35.000 If you read the Declaration of Independence, Or the Constitution, both of which Frederick Douglass suggested were freedom documents.

00:25:41.000 And he was right.

00:25:42.000 The founding ideals were not false when they were written.

00:25:44.000 They were wrongly applied only to white Americans.

00:25:46.000 They were not applied to Africans.

00:25:48.000 And that, of course, was wrong.

00:25:50.000 But they were not false when written.

00:25:51.000 Okay, now, maybe we can read it, that they were falsely applied when written, but if the idea is that the ideals were originally corrupt, that's not true.

00:25:59.000 This particular piece is actually fairly good, right?

00:26:02.000 This piece, as I say, by Nicole Hannah-Jones talks about how black Americans have shaped America, changed America, made America better, helped America live up to its original eternal values.

00:26:14.000 And that is, that's good, right?

00:26:16.000 That's worthwhile.

00:26:19.000 So this piece, while I say, I think that this piece overstates the case in terms of the impact of slavery on the nation.

00:26:27.000 I think that in general, this piece is fine and worthwhile, right?

00:26:31.000 She says, it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage.

00:26:37.000 Black Americans have also been and continue to be foundational to the idea of American freedom.

00:26:40.000 Of course, totally agree.

00:26:42.000 More than any group in this country's history, we have served generation after generation in an overlooked but vital role.

00:26:47.000 It is we who have been perfectors of this democracy.

00:26:50.000 That is true, although I think that you would have to include among the people who have perfected the democracy all the people who fought to free slaves, including hundreds of thousands of white people who died to free slaves, including the abolitionist movement, which was generally led by white people.

00:27:05.000 In other words, it was not just black people fighting against white people, it was good people fighting against people who were wrong.

00:27:10.000 And to boil that down to black people versus white people is racially untrue.

00:27:15.000 It is true that black people were fighting for rights that they ought to have had.

00:27:18.000 It is also true that they were joined in that fight by a huge number of people who did not share their race but did share their ideals.

00:27:25.000 That is what made America great.

00:27:28.000 This, uh, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4th, 1776, proclaims that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, but the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in our midst.

00:27:46.000 Okay, that's not true for all the white men.

00:27:49.000 It's just not true for all the white men.

00:27:51.000 It's true for some of the slave-holding white men. 0.94

00:27:53.000 It was certainly not true for a bunch of the founders who were actual abolitionists, who opposed slavery.

00:27:58.000 John Adams opposed slavery, of course.

00:28:01.000 Despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believe fervently in the American creed.

00:28:06.000 Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.

00:28:12.000 Again, all of this is fine.

00:28:14.000 All of this is good.

00:28:16.000 This particular essay is not the problem.

00:28:17.000 It's the other essays that are the problem.

00:28:19.000 Is there a bunch of other essays?

00:28:20.000 These other essays link everything from capitalism to Trump To the criminal justice system, to differences in medical outcome, to slavery.

00:28:32.000 So in other words, anything that the left doesn't like, any inequality is due to inequity, and any policy the left does not like is due to slavery.

00:28:40.000 There's an essay in the New York Times Magazine as part of the 1619 Project that suggests that America's failure to embrace Medicare for all is rooted in slavery.

00:28:49.000 That America's failure to embrace nationalized healthcare is rooted in slavery. 0.98

00:28:52.000 Now that's just idiocy, I'm sorry. 0.97

00:28:54.000 That has nothing to do with history. 0.98

00:28:56.000 And as... I mean, I've read all these pieces.

00:28:58.000 And these pieces have a common pattern.

00:29:00.000 And it's very sloppy.

00:29:01.000 It's very sloppy thinking and it's very sloppy writing.

00:29:03.000 First, the piece is open with talking about the depredations of slavery.

00:29:07.000 Again, totally valid and worthwhile.

00:29:09.000 We should all understand that.

00:29:10.000 We should all learn the history.

00:29:10.000 We should all know that.

00:29:12.000 Worth it.

00:29:12.000 Got it.

00:29:13.000 Good.

00:29:14.000 Then, they all fast forward about 150 years, and then they say, and just as slavery was bad then, here is an institution now I don't like, and it's connected to slavery.

00:29:24.000 And they don't really explain how that institution is deeply connected with slavery, they just sort of fast forward, and then make the assumption, and they assume that the good-hearted liberal readers at the New York Times will understand precisely what they're talking about, because the good-hearted liberal readers at the New York Times wish to believe that their political opponents are pro-slavery and pro-Jim Crow.

00:29:41.000 It's extraordinarily lazy.

00:29:43.000 It's extraordinarily lazy writing by the New York Times editors, by the columnists, for the most part.

00:29:48.000 And it's... It is intellectually...

00:29:55.000 Sluggish.

00:29:55.000 It is just not tightly written.

00:29:57.000 If you're gonna make an argument like every institution in America is founded on slavery, that should be some pretty tightly reasoned stuff because that's counterintuitive.

00:30:04.000 It turns out that the North's industrial power was significantly greater than the South's agricultural power.

00:30:09.000 And yet you have an essay in the New York Times suggesting that American capitalism is rooted in slavery.

00:30:13.000 That's nonsense. 1.00

00:30:14.000 It's just crap. 0.99

00:30:15.000 The reason the South lost is because their enterprise was not free market or capitalistic. 0.99

00:30:20.000 Capitalism is not rooted in the destruction of other people's human rights.

00:30:25.000 It is a violation of free markets.

00:30:26.000 Because chief among the priorities of a free market is the ability to alienate your own labor.

00:30:32.000 You can't enslave people in a free market if you live by free market systems.

00:30:36.000 Okay, we'll get to this.

00:30:36.000 Consent relies at the root of the free market system.

00:30:39.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

00:30:41.000 And again, this is the New York Times driving a narrative.

00:30:43.000 It is not them exploring history.

00:30:45.000 And my great fear is that the New York Times is purposefully doing this sort of stuff deliberately and cynically.

00:30:52.000 In order to suggest that if you disagree with the implications that they are drawing from slavery, that you are not taking slavery seriously.

00:30:59.000 And that's a lie.

00:31:00.000 You can take slavery and Jim Crow seriously, you can take racism seriously, and still disagree with the New York Times, that Medicare for All is not mandated by opposition to slavery.

00:31:08.000 For God's sake.

00:31:09.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:32:41.000 Okay, so as I say, the 1619 Project contains a couple of essays that are good and some poetry that's good.

00:32:56.000 And then it contains a lot of cynical politicking by people who are cynical politicos.

00:33:01.000 Take an example.

00:33:02.000 There's a piece by Jamel Bouie.

00:33:03.000 Now, Jamel Bouie is a very radical dude on politics.

00:33:07.000 He still claims that Stacey Abrams is governor of Georgia.

00:33:09.000 He still thinks that she lost the vote by 50,000 votes.

00:33:12.000 He still thinks that she was the duly elected governor of Georgia and only racism prevented that, despite the fact that black voters turned out in massive numbers in the last election cycle and were not, in fact, suppressed.

00:33:21.000 He has a piece in the New York Times Magazine in the 1619 Project.

00:33:25.000 It says, America holds on to an undemocratic assumption from its founding that some people deserve more power than others.

00:33:31.000 And I can tell from that blurb that this is going to be wildly overbroad, that he is now going to suggest that because America was founded With slavery as part of its founding compact.

00:33:42.000 That slavery was tolerated and there was an assumption that some people deserve power and others did not.

00:33:46.000 That this is now the same in American politics.

00:33:50.000 So he talks about the Tea Party.

00:33:53.000 And he talks about the debt limit standoff that took place in 2011.

00:33:57.000 He says, quote, the debt limit standoff was a case study of a fundamental change within the Republican Party after Obama took office in 2009.

00:34:04.000 Republicans would either win total victory or they would wreck the system itself.

00:34:08.000 The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, used a variety of procedural tactics to effectively nullify the president's ability to nominate federal judges and fill vacancies in the executive branch.

00:34:17.000 In the minority, he used the filibuster to an unprecedented degree.

00:34:20.000 Well, actually, Harry Reid then ended the judicial filibuster.

00:34:22.000 That was unprecedented.

00:34:24.000 In the majority, after Republicans won the Senate in the 2010 midterm elections, he led an extraordinary blockade of the Supreme Court, stopping the Senate from even considering the president's nominee for the bench.

00:34:33.000 First of all, the Republicans didn't win the Senate in 2010.

00:34:35.000 They won the Senate in 2014.

00:34:36.000 The Democrats, between 2010 and 2014, Insured that the judicial filibuster went away.

00:34:43.000 Harry Reid did it at the time.

00:34:44.000 So you at least got to get your facts straight.

00:34:46.000 The Republicans won back the Congress in 2010.

00:34:50.000 In any case, the debt limit, he's trying to suggest that the debt limit standoff, believe it or not, is racism and slavery.

00:34:57.000 Equivalent that it is an outgrowth of it.

00:34:59.000 He says, where did this destructive sectarian style of partisan politics come from?

00:35:03.000 Conventional wisdom traces its roots to the Gingrich revolution of the 1990s, whose architect pioneered a hardball insurgent style of political combat, undermining norms and dismantling congressional institutions for the sake of power.

00:35:15.000 This is true enough, but the Republican Party of the Obama years didn't just recycle its Gingrich era excesses.

00:35:20.000 It also pursued a policy of total opposition, not just blocking Obama, but also casting him as fundamentally illegitimate and un-American.

00:35:27.000 He may have been elected by a majority of the voting public, but that majority didn't count.

00:35:31.000 It didn't represent the real America. 1.00

00:35:33.000 And that's just a bunch of crap. 1.00

00:35:34.000 Sorry, it's just a bunch of crap. 1.00

00:35:36.000 Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in the 1990s. 0.98

00:35:40.000 They never made a move to impeach Barack Obama, despite the myriad scandals that cropped up during his administration.

00:35:47.000 I'm not aware of a single major Republican figure who said that Barack Obama was not the legitimate president of the United States, despite the fact that Democrats have claimed that George W. Bush was illegitimate.

00:35:55.000 They've claimed that Donald Trump is illegitimate.

00:35:58.000 So this is just not true.

00:36:00.000 And doubts about Barack Obama's belief system came from Barack Obama being an extraordinarily radical figure.

00:36:06.000 Barack Obama said he wanted to fundamentally transform the nature of the country.

00:36:10.000 That's a pretty radical statement.

00:36:13.000 Jamel Bui says, Obama's election reignited a fight about democratic legitimacy, about who can claim the country as their own, and who has the right to act as a citizen that is as old as American democracy itself.

00:36:22.000 What a bunch of hooey. 1.00

00:36:24.000 Really, what a bunch of hooey. 1.00

00:36:26.000 Did anyone, like, who was claiming that Barack Obama did not have the right to act as a citizen?

00:36:32.000 Okay, so basically, if you opposed Obama, it's because you were an outgrowth of slavery.

00:36:34.000 And then he goes into the history of John C. Calhoun, right?

00:36:36.000 and arrest the power of majorities beyond the limits of the Constitution, has its own peculiar history, not just in the ideological battles of the founding, but in the other institutions that define the American Republic as much as any other.

00:36:47.000 Okay, so basically, if you opposed Obama, it's because you were an outgrowth of slavery.

00:36:52.000 And then he goes into the history of John C. Calhoun, an actual secessionist who was militantly in favor of slavery and talked about it being a positive good for black people, vicious racist John C. Calhoun.

00:37:06.000 He says, listen to how he fast forwards here.

00:37:08.000 Okay, you ready?

00:37:09.000 Listen to this fast forwarding.

00:37:11.000 And this is what I say.

00:37:14.000 Intellectually incredibly sloppy. 0.94

00:37:16.000 Incredibly lazy and sloppy intellectually.

00:37:18.000 He says Calhoun died in 1850.

00:37:19.000 Ten years later, following the idea of nullification to its conclusion, the South seceded from the Union after Abraham Lincoln won the White House without a single southern state.

00:37:28.000 War came a few months later, and four years of fighting destroyed the system of slavery Calhoun fought to protect.

00:37:33.000 But parts of his legacy survived.

00:37:35.000 His deep suspicion of majoritarian democracy, his view that government must protect interests defined by their unique geographic and economic characteristics more than people, would inform the sectional politics of the South in the 20th century, where solid blocks of Southern lawmakers worked collectively to stifle any attempt to regulate the region.

00:37:51.000 Okay, a couple of things here.

00:37:52.000 One, suspicion of majoritarian democracy is not unique to John C. Calhoun.

00:37:56.000 Okay, that is true for everyone from Montesquieu to John Locke.

00:37:59.000 It is true for all of the Enlightenment philosophers who lay at the foundation of American democracy.

00:38:05.000 If you read the Federalist Papers, there is deep concern about maturitarian democracy, which is why we have checks and balances.

00:38:11.000 So this is not unique to John C. Calhoun.

00:38:12.000 Calhoun used it in the worst possible way and for the worst possible excuse.

00:38:16.000 But to blame a belief in federalism on favoring slavery is just historically illiterate.

00:38:24.000 Bui says, despite insurgencies at home, the Populist Party, for example, swept through Georgia and North Carolina in the 1890s, reactionary white leaders were able to maintain an iron grip on federal offices until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

00:38:37.000 Another thing worth noting here, when he says majoritarianism ought to rule the day, populism ought to rule the day, you know who was a majoritarian populist president?

00:38:45.000 Like, probably our first one?

00:38:47.000 Maybe our second after Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, a brutal, horrible racist who declared himself a big man governing with the will of the people through majority without reference to the checks and balances of American government.

00:38:59.000 Those checks and balances were designed to protect In many cases, what one justice in the Supreme Court called in a case called Caroline Products, a discreet and insular minority.

00:39:09.000 In other words, black people have largely been a discreet and insular minority throughout American history. 0.96

00:39:14.000 The system should have been designed to protect those discreet and insular minorities, not just majorities.

00:39:19.000 Majoritarianism for most of American history was the worst threat to black people in the United States.

00:39:24.000 He says, even then, the last generation of segregationist senators held on through the 1960s into the early 2000s, united like their predecessors, by geography and their stake in Jim Crow segregation, they were a powerful force in national politics, a bloc that vetoed anything that touched their regional prerogatives.

00:39:41.000 So now, he has fast-forwarded all the way from 1865 to the early 2000s, and now he's going to claim that everything that he opposes is an outgrowth of slavery.

00:39:53.000 He says there's a homegrown ideology of reaction in the United States inextricably tied to our system of slavery.

00:39:58.000 And while the racial content of that ideology has attenuated over time, the basic framework remains fear of rival political majorities, of demographic replacement, of a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy.

00:40:09.000 So now if you oppose Bernie Sanders, you know, a government that threatens privilege and hierarchy, then that's because you've been, you've been somehow infused with the spirit of slavery.

00:40:18.000 The past 10 years of Republican extremism is emblematic.

00:40:22.000 The Tea Party billed itself as a reaction to debt and spending, but a close look shows it was actually a reaction to an ascendant majority of black people, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and liberal white people. 0.95

00:40:30.000 This is such self-praising nonsense. 0.69

00:40:36.000 It must make you feel real good to label all your political opponents secret slavery advocates.

00:40:42.000 The larger implication is clear, says Jamel Bouie.

00:40:44.000 A majority made up of liberals and people of color isn't a real majority.

00:40:47.000 No, it's a real majority.

00:40:49.000 But many of us have concerns about a pure majoritarian system, and those concerns are embedded in the Constitution of the United States for good reason.

00:40:57.000 Majorities sometimes do horrible things to minorities, as Jamel Bouie of all people should understand.

00:41:03.000 Anybody who's minority in America should understand the majorities.

00:41:06.000 They're called minorities for a reason. 1.00

00:41:08.000 Majorities can hurt minorities.

00:41:09.000 That's been a lot of the history of the United States.

00:41:11.000 That's why we should enshrine protections for minorities.

00:41:14.000 Why we should have checks and balances, for example.

00:41:18.000 The recent attempt to place a citizenship question on the census was an important part of this effort.

00:41:24.000 To write people out of the polity, to use every available tool to weaken their influence on American politics.

00:41:28.000 So now, Jamal Bowie is trying to connect the effort to determine who's an illegal immigrant in the country to slavery and racism.

00:41:36.000 And then you wonder why conservatives are not taking the 1619 Project at face value.

00:41:41.000 Because the people who are writing it are not taking it seriously.

00:41:45.000 If you took seriously talk about slavery, you wouldn't connect questions about citizenship in the census with slavery.

00:41:53.000 That is an unserious thing to do.

00:41:54.000 And it turns out a bunch of the pieces are like this. 0.68

00:41:57.000 Perhaps the silliest piece comes courtesy of Matthew Desmond.

00:42:01.000 Who's written a book called eviction that's actually a pretty interesting book, but he has a tendency to ascribe to American capitalism all of the all of the problems that individuals experience in their lives.

00:42:14.000 He has a piece that cuts against the very foundations of economic theory for the last 200 years.

00:42:19.000 He has a piece blaming capitalism on slavery.

00:42:21.000 So we've already had Jamal Bowie saying that everything that he doesn't like in today's politics is because of slavery.

00:42:26.000 Now we have Matthew Desmond writing a piece that says, in order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

00:42:34.000 Weird, because I thought that if you wanted to understand capitalism, you might start with, you know, industrial era revolution, the industrial revolution in Britain.

00:42:41.000 Maybe you start with managerial capitalism in the United States post-Civil War.

00:42:45.000 Maybe you start with financial capitalism that begins in the United States in the 1970s and 80s.

00:42:52.000 To start with the most backward part of the American economy, You know, the part of the American economy so backward that the entire South was overrun simply through the sheer industrial might of the North is pretty incredible, but Matthew Desmond somehow manages to turn this ridiculous trick.

00:43:06.000 He connects Martin Shkreli to slavery.

00:43:08.000 Not kidding you.

00:43:09.000 So here's... Again, you want to make the argument that slavery ought to be examined as part of the legacy of American institutions?

00:43:17.000 Do it.

00:43:18.000 But this is not the way to do it.

00:43:19.000 This is irresponsible, and it's cynical, and it's obviously politically motivated.

00:43:24.000 And by the way, it's just factually wrong in many cases, which means the political motivations really matter more than they otherwise would.

00:43:29.000 Matthew Desmond had this piece a couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud.

00:43:33.000 Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a life-saving anti-parasitic drug.

00:43:40.000 And then he talks about Shkreli being terrible.

00:43:42.000 He says, No one wants to say it.

00:43:43.000 No one's proud of it.

00:43:44.000 Proud of it.

00:43:44.000 But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.

00:43:48.000 This is a capitalist society.

00:43:50.000 It's a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can't be more fair or equal.

00:43:56.000 But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated.

00:44:03.000 When Americans declare we live in a capitalist society, what they're often defending is our nation's peculiarly brutal economy.

00:44:10.000 No, what I'm defending when I say we live in a capitalist society is that we live in an economy that has generated the vast majority of the world's growth for the last 50 years and raised half of the world's population from abject poverty in the last 30.

00:44:20.000 That's what I'm talking about when I say we live in a capitalist society.

00:44:22.000 But according to this columnist for the 1619 Project, Matthew Desmond, Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places.

00:44:33.000 But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the natty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to cotton houses and slave auction blocks as the birthplace of America's low-road approach to capitalism.

00:44:43.000 And then he talks about the, again, this is the same sloppy intellectual move.

00:44:46.000 We're going to move directly from slavery is bad to capitalism is slavery.

00:44:50.000 Which is a hell of a move.

00:44:53.000 So he talks about nearly two average American lifetimes have passed since the end of slavery, only two.

00:44:57.000 It's not surprising we can still feel the looming presence of this institution, which helped turn a poor fledgling nation into a financial colossus.

00:45:05.000 The surprising bit has to do with many of the eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life.

00:45:11.000 Oh really?

00:45:12.000 You mean the agricultural economy?

00:45:14.000 That represents what, 3% of the American economy?

00:45:16.000 Nearly none of it based in cotton and none of it rooted in slavery right now?

00:45:20.000 That's...

00:45:21.000 That's the legacy of like, what are you talking about?

00:45:23.000 You don't mean industrial capitalism in the North was rooted in slavery?

00:45:26.000 You're gonna have to explain that one.

00:45:27.000 You're gonna have to explain why financial capitalism is rooted in slavery.

00:45:30.000 And as it turns out, he doesn't.

00:45:32.000 He just immediately jumps from the evils of slavery and then fast forward.

00:45:37.000 So what is his connection?

00:45:39.000 His connection is that slaveholders had a system of management of their plantations.

00:45:44.000 And that the systems of management were what?

00:45:46.000 Adopted by the industrial North?

00:45:48.000 That's absurd.

00:45:50.000 It's absurd on its face.

00:45:51.000 They were not adopted by the industrial north.

00:45:54.000 That would suggest that these plantations were the site of incredible and disproportionate productivity as opposed to the north.

00:46:03.000 Now they did become more productive over time through these managerial processes and mostly through the use of machineries like the cotton gin.

00:46:09.000 But the fact is that the industrial north was way more powerful than the south and it was not close.

00:46:13.000 Slavery is a net drag on an economy. 0.76

00:46:16.000 Because to hire people, it turns out, is cheaper than to have slaves.

00:46:20.000 That people are motivated to work when they are paid and not owned.

00:46:25.000 Aside from all the endemic moral evil of slavery.

00:46:28.000 As an economic prospect, slavery is not good for your economy. 0.86

00:46:31.000 Nonetheless, this article argues that capitalism is rooted in American slavery, which is just silly.

00:46:37.000 It says, the uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations predates industrialism.

00:46:43.000 Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation.

00:46:49.000 But supposedly it had to do with slavery.

00:46:51.000 So you're telling me that it started in the South, and it was wonderful.

00:46:54.000 It worked amazing.

00:46:55.000 It was wonderful economically, but it wasn't adopted for decades, but it was rooted in slavery.

00:47:01.000 He tries to connect people using Excel to slavery.

00:47:03.000 I am not kidding you.

00:47:04.000 He says companies have developed software that records workers' keystrokes and mouse clicks, along with randomly capturing screenshots multiple times a day.

00:47:13.000 The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations.

00:47:18.000 Unbelievable.

00:47:19.000 Unbelievable.

00:47:21.000 No, literally unbelievable.

00:47:23.000 He says, consider a Wall Street financial instrument as modern sounding as collateralized debt obligation, CDOs, as ticking time bombs backed by inflated home prices in the 2000s.

00:47:32.000 CDOs were the grandchildren of mortgage-backed securities based on the inflated value of enslaved people sold in the 1820s and 1830s.

00:47:39.000 That's insane.

00:47:40.000 That's insane.

00:47:42.000 You mean that collateralized debt obligations, like you sell a mortgage, that that's rooted in slavery too?

00:47:46.000 Because it turns out people owned houses before that and took out mortgages.

00:47:50.000 You're seriously connecting the crash of 2007 to slavery?

00:47:57.000 It's irresponsible and it's bad journalism.

00:47:59.000 In fact, it's not journalism at all.

00:48:01.000 And as it turns out, a lot of these pieces are not.

00:48:03.000 A lot of these pieces are designed to elicit a particular emotional response that, again, suggests that if you disagree with the conclusion being drawn, you don't take slavery seriously enough.

00:48:11.000 No.

00:48:11.000 I take slavery incredibly seriously, and Jim Crow incredibly seriously, as all Americans should.

00:48:16.000 I should spend more time getting educated.

00:48:17.000 You should spend more time getting educated on it.

00:48:19.000 We all should.

00:48:20.000 New York Times ain't doing that.

00:48:21.000 New York Times is just saying, if you disagree with their political conclusions, It's because you don't care enough about slavery and you don't understand that at the heart of every beating foundation of the United States, at the beating heart of every foundation of the United States, lies this evil institution and thus they all must be torn down.

00:48:36.000 There's an article in here by Bryan Stevenson suggesting that our criminal justice system is rooted in slavery.

00:48:43.000 Now again, they're going to have to explain how it is that people commit crimes and go to jail.

00:48:49.000 There are parts of America's criminal justice system that, of course, were vestiges of slavery and brutality to black people and Jim Crow, particularly.

00:48:56.000 Of course, that's true.

00:48:57.000 But the people in jail today are not there because of slavery or Jim Crow.

00:49:01.000 It's because they committed a crime right now.

00:49:03.000 It's because they committed a crime 10 years ago.

00:49:06.000 And it's not just prisons.

00:49:08.000 We also have articles that suggest that if you oppose the Affordable Care Act, it's because you're pro-slavery.

00:49:13.000 We have articles that suggest that the gap in maternal mortality between black women and white women in the United States is due to slavery and differences in beliefs about racial characteristics, based on incredibly flimsy evidence and also not really explaining why it is that Europe has the same gaps.

00:49:32.000 And Europe, of course, eliminated slavery a lot earlier than the United States.

00:49:36.000 So as I say, this is a narrative.

00:49:38.000 It's a narrative that's being driven.

00:49:40.000 And the kickback against it should be on that level.

00:49:42.000 It should not be on the level of, we shouldn't study this stuff, and I don't really see a lot of people who are making that case.

00:49:46.000 What I do see is a lot of people on the left who are cynically suggesting that if you disagree with them politically, it's because you don't take slavery seriously enough, and lead among them is...

00:49:55.000 Okay, time for a thing I like and then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.

00:49:56.000 of the New York Times, who's deliberately attempting to link slavery with the 2020 election.

00:50:00.000 That's what's going on here.

00:50:01.000 Okay, time for a thing I like, and then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.

00:50:04.000 Okay, things that I like.

00:50:06.000 It turns out America is filled with wonderful, wonderful people.

00:50:09.000 For all the hatred that we tend to show each other on a daily basis, particularly on social media, which is bleeding over into real life, The fact is that when called upon, the American people can be wonderful to each other.

00:50:22.000 Amazing example.

00:50:23.000 So there is an El Paso shooting victim who was a widower with no other family.

00:50:29.000 And Tony Vasco lost, as you said, the love of his life, Margie.

00:50:32.000 to the funeral and they were afraid that nobody would show up.

00:50:35.000 My friends were afraid that nobody would show up.

00:50:37.000 Instead, hundreds of people showed up, hundreds of strangers showed up for the victim's funeral.

00:50:42.000 There's still a lot of good-hearted, compassionate people in the United States, lest we forget. - Tony Basco lost, as you said, the love of his life, Margie.

00:50:51.000 They'd been married 22 years.

00:50:53.000 She was one of the 22 people killed at the Walmart.

00:50:56.000 He has no other family in the world.

00:50:59.000 And all of a sudden, we see a total inside and outside of this church of at least 850 people.

00:51:06.000 And I just want to give you a look at this line, how far it spreads.

00:51:09.000 And keep in mind, right now in El Paso, it is 99 degrees outside.

00:51:14.000 And this is the line here.

00:51:16.000 People waiting here with the fans.

00:51:18.000 And most of them are from the El Paso area and also nearby New Mexico, but I've talked to people also from California, from Arizona, and from Utah.

00:51:26.000 I mean, it's amazing.

00:51:26.000 People driving in from surrounding states to be part of a funeral that they don't know the person.

00:51:32.000 It's amazing stuff.

00:51:33.000 America is still a great country and becoming better in its tolerance, becoming better in its willingness to overlook differences and its acceptance of people who are different.

00:51:43.000 That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

00:51:45.000 Divisive attempts to tear Americans apart, whether it's coming from the right, left, or center, are bad.

00:51:49.000 And this is evidence.

00:51:51.000 I mean, people are looking to be out there for each other, and they should be.

00:51:53.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:51:59.000 So clashes broke out in Portland over the weekend because it was a weekend in Portland, and there were some dueling rallies, one by the Proud Boys and one by Antifa.

00:52:07.000 We've seen these sorts of things break out routinely.

00:52:09.000 Naturally, the media covered this as though we're fascists and anti-fascists.

00:52:12.000 Doesn't matter that Antifa has gotten extraordinarily violent with people in the past, including in Portland.

00:52:16.000 They beat up my friend Andy Ngo.

00:52:18.000 Democrats still will not denounce Antifa.

00:52:20.000 They're going to go along with this bizarre notion that Antifa actually is anti-fascist and not just a bunch of thugs in masks running around beating people up.

00:52:29.000 Here is a list of Democrats, how they responded to TPUSA's Benny Johnson when he asked them to denounce Antifa.

00:52:37.000 Here's Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, for example.

00:52:39.000 I was wondering if you could take this opportunity to denounce Antifa as a hate group.

00:52:47.000 Would you be willing to publicly denounce Antifa today?

00:52:52.000 Would you?

00:52:53.000 Mayor Blasio?

00:52:54.000 Nope.

00:52:54.000 Will you denounce Antifa, Senator Sanders?

00:53:00.000 Would you be willing to publicly denounce Antifa today?

00:53:07.000 Would you be willing?

00:53:08.000 That's Julian Castro.

00:53:10.000 Nope.

00:53:10.000 Would you be willing to publicly denounce Antifa?

00:53:17.000 Would you be willing to denounce Antifa publicly right now?

00:53:22.000 I'm not denouncing anybody.

00:53:23.000 You're not denouncing Antifa.

00:53:25.000 It's Marianne Williamson.

00:53:26.000 OK, and it just goes on and on and on and on.

00:53:28.000 The only person who would even come close to doing it was Joe Biden, who said that he denounces hate on all sides.

00:53:34.000 That at least is closer to the answer.

00:53:37.000 But the fact that the Democrats, that people on the left continue to cover for Antifa is pretty telling about what they want from American politics.

00:53:43.000 Antifa are really bad folks.

00:53:45.000 Really, really bad people.

00:53:47.000 There are people who have threatened my life, the lives of people that I know.

00:53:51.000 The fact that you cannot get a willingness to denounce just the same way that on the right, you should have a willingness to denounce white supremacists and people who get violent.

00:53:59.000 This is, this is, it's getting ugly.

00:54:01.000 So the flip side of people gathering together to try and, to try and band together against the forces of darkness is people who will not do so, apparently, including leading Democratic politicians.

00:54:10.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.

00:54:13.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:54:13.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:54:14.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.

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00:54:24.000 Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:54:26.000 Senior Producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:54:28.000 Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.

00:54:30.000 And our Technical Producer is Austin Stevens.

00:54:33.000 Edited by Adam Sievitz.

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00:54:40.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:54:42.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

00:54:45.000 Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:54:48.000 The New York medical examiner has declared the death of the New York Times a suicide after the wealthy but perverted former newspaper strangled itself in a philosophical cell of its own making.

00:54:58.000 We'll get to the heart of the conspiracy on The Andrew Klavan Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 19, 2019

Was America Founded On Racism? | Ep. 842

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