Why do some segments of the left seem intent on harassing the other side? Andrew Klavan, bestselling author and host of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” answered that question on Monday’s episode.
“It’s not Trump’s fault if you suck,” said Klavan. “If you gang up on women in movie theaters, you’re a bully, it’s not on Trump. You are a bully if you harass duly-elected public officials in restaurants. You are a thug if you oppose free speech like The New York Times does for anyone who disagrees with you, if you shout people down at colleges, if you attack them. It’s not Trump who’s the fascist, it’s you. You are what you do. How did you become like this? If you think you’re a good person, how’d you become a bad person? It’s got to be your ideas, it’s got to be your philosophy.”
Video and transcript below:
It’s not Trump’s fault if you suck. If you gang up on women in movie theaters, you’re a bully, it’s not on Trump. You are a bully if you harass duly-elected public officials in restaurants. You are a thug if you oppose free speech like The New York Times does for anyone who disagrees with you, if you shout people down at colleges, if you attack them. It’s not Trump who’s the fascist, it’s you. You are what you do.
How did you become like this? If you think you’re a good person, how’d you become a bad person? It’s got to be your ideas, it’s got to be your philosophy. You know, socialism is not wrong because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, but it’s also wrong. It is wrong just like slavery is wrong, it’s wrong for exactly the same reasons. In movies about slavery they always try to tell you how bad slavery is by showing people get whipped and brutalized. But slavery wasn’t bad because people got whipped and brutalized, people got whipped and brutalized because slavery was bad. That’s why that happened, because when you want to control people, when you want to take people’s freedoms away, when you want them to become instruments of your will, you have to abuse them and enslave them. …
Slavery is wrong because people should be free, that is self-evident. We hold that as a self-evident truth that people should be free. What does it mean for people to be free? It means you cannot use superior force to force them to do what you want them to do. Now obviously there are some limits on people’s behavior. You can’t murder somebody, you can’t physically attack somebody, but we want to keep those as small as possible. The fact that some are needed is not an excuse to control people’s behavior altogether. Slavery is wrong because it is wrong for people with superior power to tell people with less power to use that power to force people to do what they want.
Why does that include property? You know, sometimes people don’t know about this, it includes property because your life is made of time. That’s all you have in life is time. When your time is up, your life is over, that’s it. So when you use your life — when you are free — you choose to use your time the way you want. If I build a statue in my house, you can’t come into my house and take that statue away, it’s mine. It’s part of my life, it’s part of my freedom. If I use my time to make money, you can’t come and take that money away, even if you are oh so smart, and oh so good, and your experts are oh so brilliant that they know how to spend my money better than I know how to spend my money. It is still slavery, it is still wrong, and when you enslave people you have to brutalize them because they do not like it.
