Don’t Defund The Police
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
176.76727
Summary
Ted Cruz returns to Washington, D.C. to discuss the Democratic Party's plan to abolish the Police Department, and why it's a bad idea. Plus, Cruz explains why the police should be funded the same way they are now.
Transcript
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Riots have overtaken the country, lawlessness abounds, and the genius Democrat policy proposal
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for dealing with all of it is to defund the police.
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Senator, you invited me here on our last episode.
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You said we could have a stogie together if I just made it out to the East Coast.
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So I fly out to basically the rubble of Washington, D.C.
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I actually couldn't even get to my hotel room last night in my car because the National Guard
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What has happened to this place since the last time I was here?
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And on top of that, in D.C., they don't even let you smoke a cigar.
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If you did actually light one up, I'm not sure they have the police officers to come arrest you.
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And it seems if the Democrats get their way, then we're going to have even fewer police officers
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You know, you have spent a good bit of your career in law enforcement.
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The Minneapolis City Council voted overwhelmingly veto-proof majority to abolish and dismantle
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And you're seeing Democrats at the federal level taking up anti-police legislation as well.
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Like, did you see the Minneapolis mayor, the poor lefty guy who's trying to like, okay,
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They're like, okay, well, you abolished the whole police department.
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Now, mind you, Comrade de Blasio is like, goodbye me.
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And their solution is abolish the police departments.
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By the way, these are the same morons that want to abolish ICE.
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You know, they're just like, okay, let's get rid of everybody charged with protecting us.
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And it would end up killing a whole lot of people.
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If you think black lives matter, and let me be clear, black lives absolutely matter.
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Your dumbass idea to abolish police departments will kill a lot of black lives, will kill a
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lot of Hispanic lives, will kill a lot of white lives, will kill a lot of people.
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Because it's all the people who are saying black lives matter, and the people who are
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pushing these things are the ones who are pushing a policy that will have a very negative
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Because we spoke about this a little bit on the last show, I think.
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There was a study out that the number of unarmed black men who are killed by the police every
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But the number of unarmed black men who are killed by criminals is very high.
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And when the criminals are in the neighborhood, who's going to take care of it?
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What is the effect of this going to be in troubled areas around the country?
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The victims of violent crime are disproportionately low income.
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They're disproportionately minority African Americans and Hispanics.
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And we've seen in the past, we've seen what was called the Ferguson effect.
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You recall in Ferguson when you had riots against the police officers.
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And what happened was police officers naturally, look, if you're a cop, you're out doing your
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job and you realize suddenly, okay, if I have a citizen encounter and it goes wrong, my whole
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We saw in Baltimore, after the riots in Baltimore, we saw the murder rates spike.
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You look at the murder rates in Chicago year after year after year.
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And so if you end up pulling back the police and not letting them do their job, that means
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the criminals, the gangbangers, the violent murderers, the rapists, the robbers, have
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And the people who will pay the price, they're not going to be, by the way, Hollywood celebrities
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That they're going to be perfectly fine and protected.
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It's going to be, it's going to be the people who are vulnerable that need the police to keep
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Yes, we want the police to protect everyone's rights fairly, but if you make the police go
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away, those who are in closest proximity to violent criminals, and that is heavily in
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low-income areas, they're the ones that are going to pay the biggest price.
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You see this kind of radicalism being pushed by people who will always enjoy the safety
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and security, not only of the police, but of good neighborhoods.
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But why are they trying to cancel the police protection for their low-income residents?
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It's police protection for me, but not for thee.
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I think that's what we're hearing from a lot of Democratic politicians.
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You remember that during the coronavirus lockdown?
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He shut down all the gyms, and then he opened it up specially so he could go work out.
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Because he said, you know, it's important that I be healthy,
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This was the mayor of Chicago who said, no one can go get a haircut, do not get a haircut,
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I need a haircut because I care about my appearance.
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And this hypocrisy, actually, on that point in particular, ties in with the coronavirus.
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Because a lot of what we've been hearing, remember, we did not do any shows in person.
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We social distanced for months because that's what the public health officials told us to do.
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Then, all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of people pour out into the streets in very
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And the same public health officials who excoriated conservatives for demonstrating in any way,
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peaceably, against some of the lockdown overreaches, those same public health officials
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encouraged the protests and the riots and the arson that have accompanied them.
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Now, all of a sudden, we see a pivot back to backing away again.
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How are we to understand this, if not as a rank politicization of the public health sector?
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And this woke virus, if you are protesting with Antifa, if you're arguing for abolishing
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the police, you can get thousands of you together.
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And the virus, the virus is actually marching alongside you.
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You just, you need a microphone, a microscope to see it.
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But it's sitting there like anyone saying, regardless of your politics, you turn on the
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TV, you see thousands and thousands of people smashed in very, very closely.
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And you're sitting there going, well, wait a second.
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Everyone said it was the end of the world if, like, my kid went to school.
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Everyone said it was the end of the world if I went to my grandmother's funeral, that I
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And then you turn on the TV and the same public health officials are saying, oh, no, no, this
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We were told that the virus spreads very easily on surfaces, part of the reason why we need
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Then we were told it does not spread very easily on surfaces.
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We were told initially that asymptomatic people are the ones spreading coronavirus.
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The World Health Organization just came out this week and said that asymptomatic spread
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So for those of us who are not scientific experts with lots of degrees, how are we supposed to
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think about this virus after the chaos of the past couple weeks?
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On one level, this virus has been hard to figure out and the experts have genuinely struggled.
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And so they haven't necessarily understood how it operated.
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They didn't know how easily it would be transmitted, how it would be transmitted.
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And I'm, look, with a new virus, I'm understanding that the science takes some time to get out
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And you saw many leaders trying to protect people and keep people safe.
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It then became this woke virtue signal where, you know, ostentatiously wearing a mask and
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shutting everything down became, it actually had nothing to do with the science.
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When's the last time someone actually said the phrase flattening the curve?
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Everything must stay shut down until a cure is discovered.
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You're like, wait, that wasn't the explanation you gave before.
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And then suddenly we didn't know it was or until we want to have giant riots and burn the
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And also it's elected officials not giving a damn about people's livelihoods, not caring.
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And by the way, with both COVID-19 and the riots, we're seeing the same thing, which is
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small businesses being destroyed by the shutdown.
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And not only Democrats don't care, did you see this editorial writer with the New York
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Times who said property crime, so burning someone's business to the ground, is not violent.
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See, I always thought that when you have Molotov cocktails and pitchforks and hammers, when
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But listen, I'm not a genius like the people at the New York Times.
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Did you see the ostentatiously named president of the Minneapolis City Council?
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But she was on TV saying, if someone breaks into your garage, if someone is coming and
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breaking into your home and you call the cops, that's your privilege.
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Like, okay, I want everyone to get this straight because this is the problem.
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You should have no expectation that the police should protect your home from a burglar because
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Well, I want to get your thoughts on this, speaking of the New York Times, because I think
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One school says the left has gone so insane, encouraging political violence, completely
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They've gone so crazy that we're now at a tipping point where we're going to swing back
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I think the other school of thought is we're on the brink of revolution and people are as
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The New York Times published an op-ed by your Senate colleague, Tom Cotton, and it was an
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op-ed about whether or not to call in troops to deal with the riots.
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The editor who took that op-ed has now resigned from the New York Times.
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It got such blowback that the New York Times says we cannot publish any opinions that contradict
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And in our last podcast, you and I talked about this, and you know, look, smacking the
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New York Times is, you know, it's kind of low-hanging fruit.
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And they're so bad that it's easy to point out how idiotic they are.
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Because he dared publish an op-ed from someone else, not from the New York Times, from someone
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By the way, his name was on it, that the lefties in the newsroom disagreed with.
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We are suddenly, we're back in like some leftist classroom where the reporters, if they hear
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When is the next time the New York Times or any other of these big papers are going to
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publish any view other than absolute lefty orthodoxy?
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This is a weird inversion here because typically what you might expect is, you know, at every
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news organization, there's opinion and there's reporting.
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And opinion interprets the facts and gives their point of view.
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You might expect the opinion people to complain about the reporters.
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But at the New York Times, it's the allegedly straight, objective reporters who are throwing
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The reporters are opinion journalists, but they all have one opinion.
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This is, it is very much, it's something of which communist China would be proud, except
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making that point that the New York Times wouldn't make because that would imply criticism
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And I've often said, look, if there's somebody listening who has some money.
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Sometimes people ask me, all right, what do you read to learn news?
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So what I try to do is I try to read things on both sides to even it up.
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I will read the Washington Post, which they're hard lefty, but they're trying.
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And I'll read things like National Review and try to balance it out.
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But look, I think somebody with resources ought to buy one of these legacy masthead things
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like, you know, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington, Washington Post.
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And so instead of, and to have debate, to trust the dialectic process.
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And I'll tell you what I'd do also is I'd have a conservative and a liberal news editor.
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Because so much of the bias in journalism comes from picking which stories to run and which
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So I'd have a real rock-ribbed conservative and a real flaming lunatic liberal and say,
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both of you, you can have, and so people reading it through the synthesis can actually
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Well, none of the supposed mainstream media places are even trying to do it.
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But you know, as the leftist media outlets run the people who are not far, far radical
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leftists out, I don't know, maybe we should hire them to be producers here.
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We certainly, I think, give a more balanced perspective than some of those outlets.
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I know that you don't spend much of your day thinking about Harry Potter, but Harry Potter
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The author of Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, is a left-winger, a left-wing activist, a feminist.
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She came out, she had a whole long tweet thread, and she's signaled this point of view before,
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where she said, look, I support people who are transgender.
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But it is simply the case that a woman is a woman, and there's something about being a woman that a man can't be.
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And she's trying to, sort of like the Minneapolis mayor, trying to come to this accommodation with the hard left.
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It is the French Revolution, and the guillotines are coming.
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The guillotines already came for James Bennett, the editor of the New York Times, and others as well.
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There, you can't get extreme enough, because right now they're out extreme.
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Listen, a week ago, if I would have said, these idiots are going to call for abolishing the police department,
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Like, we're at the point, and it will keep going, and they will keep consuming themselves.
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Part of it is, you don't give a damn if they come after you.
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They do, but it doesn't, you know, it helps that you don't wake up at night going,
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You and I first got to know each other, among other things, through Friends of Abe.
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You know, a group of conservatives underground in Hollywood, in entertainment.
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And I got to tell you, first time I spoke to Friends of Abe, I think it was 2013 or 2014.
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So six, seven years ago, about 400 people came out in L.A.
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And what was striking, and there were some big famous people.
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There were people like, you know, like John Voight was there.
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Actually, Bruce Jenner, before he was Caitlyn Jenner, Bruce was there.
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And, but you also had lots of lower level folks, people who were writers, people who were gaffers, people who were makeup artists, just kind of all working in Hollywood.
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It's the only gathering I've ever been, and the rule is no photographs at all.
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If you're someone working in Hollywood, and they got a picture of you, right of center, and this was seven years ago, you could lose your job and your whole career.
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If you dare disagree with their propaganda, if you're not woke enough, if you just want to fight against police brutality, but you don't actually want to abolish the police department.
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This hadn't occurred to me, but you know, you expect this from Hollywood.
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But it used to be the case that if you were a serious journalist, you could be photographed with a Democratic senator or a Republican senator.
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What the past few weeks have shown is you can't.
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You couldn't take a photo with Tom Cotton, or you couldn't run his op-ed.
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You mentioned Robespierre and the French Revolution.
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I did have thoughts of this the other day because Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman, said that we're going to abolish the police and we're going to have a new imaginative approach to public safety.
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And you know, the committee that chopped off everybody's head in the French Revolution was the Committee of Public Safety.
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The hard left has always been very comfortable with totalitarianism.
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Anytime they're talking about abolishing the police, it's not like force is going to disappear.
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It's just they want the monopoly on who exercises the force.
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And that is, you know, look, you look at communist dictatorships, whether Cuba, whether the Soviet Union, whether China, whether Vietnam.
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I mean, vicious murder, torture, oppression, Nicaragua, Bernie Sanders' friends down in Nicaragua.
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This is consistent, and it's because they're collectivists.
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Listen, on the right, one of the beauties of liberty, there are all sorts of people I disagree with.
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Like, A, I don't really want to hang out with people that just agree with me.
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On the left, it's like, you know what we're living in the left?
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They put everyone in masks, and they must all say the same thing.
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I mean, the fact that this New York Times editor, I think he's waking up to this.
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J.K. Rowling, a hardened leftist, I think she's waking up and saying, gosh, this is not the left that I thought I was a part of.
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Either that could be a healthy thing for the country, we could swing back a little bit, or it's all broken and we're just living in the rubble.
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It wasn't too long ago when the left believed in free speech.
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You know, as you know, I've got a book that's coming out later this year, and it's a book on the Supreme Court.
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It's talking about how all of our rights are hanging literally just one vote away.
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There's a whole chapter on free speech where it talks about a very famous Supreme Court case where a guy wore a jacket that said, F the draft, although he didn't abbreviate it.
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And the Supreme Court quite rightly said that he had a First Amendment right to express that view, even if that view was profane, even if it might be distasteful.
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Well, that used to be a mainstream liberal view.
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Now the left not only is willing to silence anyone who disagrees, they demand that anyone who disagrees be silenced.
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In the last moment or two that we have left, we've got to get through some very important mailbag questions.
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The most important one I saw is from GT at the top.
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Senator Cruz, thank you for your service in the Senate.
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From Captain of the Silent Majority, that's a Twitter account.
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Do you support the use of force to protect historical sites and property being destroyed by rioters?
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I guess that means do you support the police basically going in and stopping the rioters?
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Churchill, if you try to hurt somebody, law enforcement should stop you.
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If you try to destroy somebody else's property, law enforcement should stop you.
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Look, we saw the idiocy reach its peak when in the past few days a statue of Churchill was defaced.
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I mean, he literally, I couldn't help but send out a tweet and say, okay, look, he only defeated Hitler, defeated the Nazis, saved the free world.
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But, you know, you're young and angry and you've got a can of spray paint.
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So your contributions to humanity and to equality.
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And by the way, Mr. Social Justice Warrior, in terms of equality, stopping the frigging Nazis from murdering people.
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See, these things used to be uncontroversial, but I guess we're living in very strange times.
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And apologies to Churchill for going with the Monte Cristo number one.
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I mean, he has a whole size of cigar named after him, the Churchill.
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Will we ever have the Knolls and what will the Knolls be?
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If I could get a cigar named after me, that's it.
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But I don't know if I'm going to be able to save the Western world.
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Senator, any intelligent, honest, and well-reasoned liberals I should follow, I want a more balanced
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Someone who used to fit into that was Michael Kelly, who wrote in the Washington Post 20
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He wrote, I Believe, which if you go back 20 years, laid out the cognitive dissonance that
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Um, the problem is smart, smart liberals that are actually principled, so many of them have
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That it, it, there used to be quite a few, but...
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Or, or they're no longer really considered liberal, like I would, uh, Professor Dershowitz.
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Alan Dershowitz, that, that would be an example.
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You know, Dershowitz, Dershowitz, my criminal law professor, first year of law school.
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Um, you know, it was when Mike Tyson's rape trial was going on.
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I'm like, holy cow, my professor is like defending Mike Tyson.
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He said, he assigned to us as part of our reading, Penthouse Magazine, because he had
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written, I think it was the cover story in Penthouse.
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Think, it may be the first time Penthouse had ever not had a woman on the cover.
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And Dershowitz had written this long cover story about him and what he explained, he did,
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So I can legitimately say we only read it for the articles because we just had the Xerox
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There were no pictures of what we were given, but, but I remember he told the criminal law
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class, he said, look, I could write an op-ed in the New York times and, you know, a handful
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But, you know, I think at the time he said, Penthouse had a readership of like 5 million
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So it was an interesting, he was a fabulous professor.
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And I remember first year of law school, he said, listen, by any measure, this is Dershowitz
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speaking, I am in the most liberal 1% of Americans in this country.
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But he would do things like defend free speech and argue for, look, he, he used to muse,
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He used to talk about, you know, how he would think about if he was hired as a criminal defense
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Look, I'm glad when I was practicing law, I, I didn't defend, I, I would not have defended
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Adolf Hitler because everyone deserves a lawyer, but I ain't working for him.
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He believed in, in protecting the rights of the accused.
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He believed in, he believed in civil liberties in a way that, that there aren't many liberals left
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And now it seems that the world has gone upside down.
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We'll have to dig into more of that upside downness.
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I've got to make it back to my hotel to see if I can get past the national guard because
00:28:23.660
So my advice is, is simply protest on the way and they'll let you right through it.
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This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security
00:28:48.320
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