Paul Manaford in hot water AGAIN! The left ignores the situation on the border, and they go full alarmist about global warming. Ben Shapiro's take on the latest breaking news in the Mueller investigation, including a bombshell from The Guardian and an alleged meeting between Paul Maniford and Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and why it matters a lot to the special counsel's office and the rest of the country. The full episode will be available on The Ben Shapiro Show wherever you get your shows, and wherever else you get yours. Thanks for listening, and Happy Holidays! -Ben Shapiro's Daily Outro: "Outro Music: "Space Travel" by Cairo Braga "Goodbye Outer Space" by Fountains of Wayne "Outer Space Warning" by Suneaters "Outtro Music: Fair Weather Fans" by Zapsplat "In Need of a Savior" by Komando "Outrageous" by Kompass "Outlaw" by Puddle of Nails "Good Morning America" by John Singleton "Outdoor Music" by Jeff Perla - Outro Song: "We Will Figure it Out" by Ian Dorsch Outtro Song: "We'll Figure It Out How This Is How We Do It" by Haley Shaw by Skynyrd & Jon Rigsby -- And We'll Find Out How We'll Know It Out? -- -- & Other Accomplishments? -- "Including: "A Little More Than This Will We Will Find It Out In This In This How We Will Do It In The Next Part" -- "A Good Deal?" -- "Let Me Say It In This Will Be In The Rest In It By We Will Have It In Our Best In It?" -- And Then We Will Figure It In It? -- And This Will See It In We Will Hear It In A Chance By We'll Hear It By Our Best And Let Them Say It? And They Will Hear Them Out In It In Them -- Also Hear It And Let Me Hear It? And They Say It And See It And Hear It & They Will Say It & Let Them Hear It Out It And We Will Let Us Hear It...? -- Will They Hear It It Will Be Better Than That In Them In It And They'll See It & Hear It, Will They Do It? & We Will Be Telling Them In A Better One?
00:00:33.000is the key player in the Mueller investigation.
00:00:37.000And there are a couple of pieces of news that seem to have pretty significant impact on the Mueller investigation.
00:00:42.000Piece of news number one came out earlier yesterday, courtesy of the Washington Post.
00:00:46.000Paul Manafort, you'll remember, was the campaign manager for President Trump for about four months in the middle of the campaign, from like March to June.
00:00:54.000And now, according to prosecutors, he has lied to them again.
00:00:57.000You remember he came to a plea arrangement with them several months ago in which he was supposedly going to testify on behalf of the Mueller investigation in a variety of matters.
00:01:05.000Well now, the Mueller investigation seems to have a problem.
00:01:08.000Here is what the Washington Post reported.
00:01:14.000Breached his plea agreement, accusing President Trump's former campaign chairman of lying repeatedly to them in their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
00:01:23.000Manafort denied doing so intentionally, but both sides agreed in a court filing that the U.S.
00:01:27.000District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District should set sentencing immediately.
00:01:31.000The apparent collapse of Manafort's cooperation agreement is the latest stunning turnaround in his case, exposing the longtime Republican consultant to at least a decade behind bars That was like an actual thing.
00:01:41.000He wasn't charged over that, but he was wearing a jacket made of ostrich.
00:01:43.000foreign lobbying laws and attempting to obstruct justice, as well as wearing suits made out of ostrich.
00:01:49.000He wasn't charged over that, but he was wearing a jacket made of ostrich.
00:01:53.000Which, let's be frank, if you're going to be an international criminal and you don't have a suit made of ostrich, I don't know what you've been doing all your life.
00:02:00.000The filing also indicated that Mueller's team may have lost its potentially most valuable witness in Manafort, a top campaign official present at discussions at the heart of the special counsel's mission to determine if any Americans conspired with Russia's efforts to sway the U.S.
00:02:14.000This posed a serious problem for Robert Mueller.
00:02:17.000If your key witness is Paul Manafort, and you just accused your key witness of lying to you, and then you revoked his plea arrangement, then that would seem to kind of crush your case.
00:02:26.000If this is the guy on whose credibility lies the entire Mueller investigation itself, and the key elements of the Mueller investigation, well, this is a pretty big problem for you.
00:02:35.000If you've been building a case against Michael Corleone, and it turns out that your key witness You now have to withdraw because he's been lying to you.
00:02:43.000It's going to be hard to convict Michael Corleone unless, as it turns out, there is a second story.
00:02:53.000So according to The Guardian, which has been the leak source for a lot of Mueller investigation-related stuff that is damaging to the Trump administration, here is what The Guardian reports.
00:03:04.000Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and visited around the time he joined the Trump campaign, The Guardian has been told.
00:03:22.000Russia was hacking Hillary Clinton's email and hacking the DNC, and then taking all of that email and dumping it to WikiLeaks, who was dumping it in public.
00:03:33.000And the accusation all along has been that the Trump campaign was coordinating in the release of the WikiLeaks emails and the WikiLeaks documents in order to sink Hillary Clinton's campaign.
00:03:45.000So, until now, there was no open collaboration, or any collaboration of any sort, really, between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.
00:03:52.000The closest connection was Roger Stone, who was under investigation by the Mueller investigation, and that is because Roger Stone had been sort of bragging to various folks that he was talking with WikiLeaks.
00:04:01.000He maintains that WikiLeaks did not Advance him any information before it was publicly released.
00:04:08.000CNN had reported about a year ago, wrongly, that Donald Trump Jr.
00:04:15.000Well now, maybe here's the bombshell that the Democrats and the media have been looking for.
00:04:19.000Sources have said that Paul Manafort went to see Julian Assange in 2013, 2015, and in spring 2016.
00:04:26.000During the period when he was made a key figure in Trump's push for the White House.
00:04:29.000It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed, but the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller.
00:04:37.000The special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
00:04:42.000A well-placed source, and here's where things start to get dicey.
00:04:45.000A well-placed source has told The Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016.
00:04:49.000We don't know who the well-placed source is.
00:04:58.000Months later, WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.
00:05:03.000We also don't know, by the way, about the timing.
00:05:06.000The reason we don't know about the timing is because he didn't only see Assange once.
00:05:11.000Even according to these sources, Assange was met by Manafort in 2013 when he was working with the government of Ukraine, which was then sort of a puppet government for the Russians apparently, 2015, and in spring 2016.
00:05:37.000His lawyers have declined to answer the Guardian's questions about the visits.
00:05:40.000In a series of tweets, WikiLeaks said Assange and Manafort had not met.
00:05:43.000Assange describes the story as a hoax.
00:05:45.000Well, just because Assange says something doesn't mean that it's an actual thing, right?
00:05:50.000It is not clear that Assange is a truth teller.
00:05:52.000In fact, it's pretty clear that he is not.
00:05:54.000Manafort was jailed this year and was thought to have become a star cooperator in the Mueller inquiry.
00:05:58.000On Monday, Mueller said Manafort had repeatedly lied to the FBI despite agreeing to cooperate two months ago in a plea deal.
00:06:03.000According to a court document, Manafort had committed crimes and lies on a variety of subject matters.
00:06:09.000This was always the real question about story number one that we discussed earlier, Manafort lying to Muller.
00:06:14.000Why would Muller go out of his way to revoke a plea arrangement that cast his star witness in a credibility problem, that created a credibility problem for his star witness?
00:06:24.000Well, the answer could be that maybe the credibility problem for his star witness is actually not a problem for the Mueller investigation, if it turns out that he's basically traded Manafort's credibility for evidence of Manafort actively colluding with the Russians.
00:06:39.000So he doesn't need Manafort anymore, is the idea.
00:06:41.000Now he no longer needs Manafort's testimony.
00:07:30.000Did Manafort actively collaborate with Assange in the release of the WikiLeaks emails, especially since most of the key WikiLeaks emails came out long after Manafort left the campaign?
00:07:42.000So there's still a bunch of questions here, and the media are jumping to the conclusion that all the dots have now been connected, and therefore Trump is guilty of something.
00:07:52.000People in his campaign had to know stuff.
00:07:54.000In order for anything to be brought against Trump himself.
00:07:57.000Apparently, according to The Guardian, Manafort's 2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes.
00:08:02.000One source said, adding, Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports.
00:08:13.000Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged, which is really weird.
00:08:17.000Why exactly would Manafort not be logged by the Ecuadorian embassy?
00:08:20.000Embassy staff were aware only later of the potential significance So, again, we still have a lot of questions that have to be answered about all of this.
00:08:28.000Again, we still have a lot of questions that have to be answered about all of this.
00:08:32.000According to sources, Manafort's acquaintance with Assange goes back at least five years to late 2012 or 2013 when the American was working in Ukraine and advising its Moscow friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych.
00:08:41.000Why Manafort might have sought out Assange in 2013 is unclear.
00:08:44.000So a lot of this is not clear at this point, but that's not going to stop people from immediately connecting all the dots.
00:08:52.000So we will see how all of this plays out in real time.
00:08:55.000Meanwhile, the chaos on the border continues to bewilder folks on the left, and they're trying to now spin the story that President Trump is cruel and inhumane to the people on the border in a way that no one has been historically.
00:09:12.000And when I say unlikely, I mean it seems untrue, because as it turns out, Using tear gas against people who are attempting to break through the border has been an extraordinarily common occurrence.
00:09:21.000It happened during Obama's presidency many, many, many times.
00:09:24.000According to the Washington Times, the same tear gas agent the Trump administration is taking heat for deploying against a border mob this weekend is actually used fairly frequently, including more than once a month during the later years of President Barack Obama's administration, according to Homeland Security data.
00:09:38.000Customs and Border Protection has used two chlorobenzidiline melaninitrile, or CS, since 2010 and deployed it 26 times in fiscal year 2012 and 27 times in 2013.
00:09:50.000The use dropped after that but was still deployed three times in 2016.
00:09:54.000Border authorities also use another agent, pepper spray, frequently, including a decade-high record of 151 times in 2013, also under President Obama.
00:10:03.000So, as usual, when it comes to the unprecedented nature of President Trump's activity, there's precedent.
00:10:09.000As it turns out, the Obama administration did this kind of stuff all the time, but that didn't stop Democrats from claiming that Trump had done something wild and unprecedented here.
00:10:19.000All the folks on the left who accuse Republicans of climate change denialism, which we'll get to in just a few minutes, all those folks are engaged in border denialism on a routine basis.
00:10:28.000Meanwhile, meanwhile, the Democrats continue to claim that President Trump's use of tear gas on the border, his administration's use of tear gas, is just the worst thing ever.
00:10:52.000Orange man bad, as they say on the interwebs.
00:10:54.000So, President Trump was asked about this, and in typical Trumpian fashion, he said the tear gas is extremely safe, and then he talked about a lighter version of tear gas that doesn't exist.
00:11:04.000So here is the President of the United States.
00:11:07.000First of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself.
00:11:19.000But you really say, why is a parent running up into an area where they know the tear gas is forming and it's going to be formed and they're running up with a child?
00:11:30.000And in some cases, you know, they're not the parents.
00:11:32.000These are people, they call them grabbers.
00:11:34.000They grab a child because they think they're going to have a certain, uh, they're going to have a certain status by having a child.
00:11:40.000You know, you have certain advantages in terms of our crazy laws that frankly, Congress should be changing.
00:11:46.000You know, if you change the laws, you wouldn't be having this problem.
00:11:49.000And I think the funding of the wall right now is, uh, never looked better.
00:11:53.000Okay, so I think a lot of what President Trump has to say here is basically correct.
00:11:58.000Although, I don't know about a lighter form of tear gas.
00:12:42.000Unfortunately, the migrants pushed through them, overwhelmed them, went around them, and down through the Tijuana River Channel, and then tried to enter the U.S.
00:12:50.000unlawfully through the southbound lanes of the port of entry.
00:12:54.000We responded and prevented that access at the border line.
00:12:57.000They then went back around San Ysidro and then started to look for a weak spot in the international border fence on the east side of San Ysidro.
00:13:06.000At several points, they tried to tear down parts of the wall and make a large group entry.
00:13:11.000And it was in those engagements where people started throwing rocks, assaulting our agents.
00:13:22.000But they did have to respond to resolve those assaultive engagements as safely as possible with less lethal pepper ball spray, as well as CS gas.
00:13:55.000We'll get to that issue because there's a climate report the left is going crazy over.
00:14:00.000When we're talking about denialism on an issue, border denialism is a form of denialism.
00:14:04.000Denying that there is a problem when people rush the border, throw rocks at agents, and try to break through the southbound lanes of the port of entry.
00:14:11.000I don't understand why you would do that other than you have a political agenda.
00:14:15.000So here's what the Democrats had to say about this.
00:14:17.000Joaquin Castro, who's a representative in Texas, who for some odd reason thinks he should run for president, he told Chris Hayes, who is not in fact Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, he told... by the way, that's not a rip on what these people look like.
00:14:32.000It's just there's one pair of glasses at MSNBC.
00:14:34.000It's a black framed pair of glasses, like black rimmed glasses.
00:14:38.000And every single person puts them on and looks the same on MSNBC.
00:14:42.000You actually can't sit behind the anchor's desk unless you wear the same pair of glasses.
00:14:46.000In any case, Joaquin Castro talking to Chris Hayes, and Joaquin Castro says, all this stuff that's happening at the border, it's Trump's fault.
00:14:54.000Well, like a lot of Americans, I was horrified to see women and children, these are folk, babies in diapers, barefoot, being gassed.
00:15:03.000And I think Americans were horrified at the idea of agents of the United States government making a decision to use tear gas on on kids that are two or three years old.
00:15:12.000And as you mentioned, this was a self-created, chaotic situation by the president.
00:15:18.000He has used migrants from day one, even before he became president, during the campaign, as the number one political boogeyman for him.
00:15:26.000He has weaponized resentment and fear of migrants, basically to his political benefit.
00:15:33.000And that's why you see him do a lot of things that he does with respect to migration and immigration. - Okay, I love this on MSNBC, The Chiron's has a spectacle of cruelty, a spectacle of cruelty.
00:15:41.000And then Joaquin Castro saying, they're firing tear gas at babies.
00:15:44.000Well, no, they're firing tear gas at people who are throwing rocks at them and trying to cross the border illegally.
00:15:50.000And if those people are carrying babies, that seems to me the fault of the people who carry babies into what seems to be a quasi war zone.
00:15:58.000I mean, if you if I have a two and a half year old child, I would not bring my two-and-a-half-year-old child to a border to try and break through illegally, knowing that people on the other side were going to fire tear gas, which has, again, happened dozens and dozens and dozens of times per year, including under President Obama.
00:19:45.000So, shutting down the border worked, and it also proves that we don't need, I think, a border wall, because the migrants went out of their way to go to the Tijuana entrance, because the rest of the border was considered too hazardous, too dangerous to cross, so they went an extra hundreds of miles to the port of entry of Tijuana, because they considered that the easiest.
00:20:08.000So, in other words, the system is actually working.
00:20:17.000So we don't need a border wall because people tried to break through the border wall and went to Tijuana because it was easier.
00:20:21.000Well, actually, no, they went to Tijuana because they wanted the publicity.
00:20:24.000And a huge number of people do cross the unguarded portions of the U.S.-Mexico border.
00:20:31.000And as you may have noticed, Scaling the wall was significantly less successful than them trying to actually break through just the southern lanes of traffic.
00:20:38.000So, walls tend to make people go around the walls.
00:21:01.000Who I think has strong authoritarian tendencies, who seems to love people like Mr. Putin and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the leader of North Korea.
00:21:12.000I worry very much about for the first time using the military in that way in this country.
00:21:18.000So I think that is a very legitimate concern.
00:21:22.000Okay, so he's worried that if we send troops to our border to defend our border, that's fascism, because it's a crackdown on people who are not citizens trying to get into the country, as opposed to countries that Bernie Sanders has been fond of in the past, like Venezuela and Cuba and the USSR.
00:21:40.000Those were not fascist, because there, they had walls to keep people in.
00:22:48.000Here's Maxine Waters explaining how that went.
00:22:51.000I am very saddened to see this situation with desperate people and all of this being the political ploy of the President of the United States of America.
00:23:04.000He made this the central part of his platform.
00:23:07.000Uh, that he was going to do something about these migrants who are coming here.
00:23:13.000He called them killers and rapists and, uh, he certainly did stoke a lot of fear about, uh, these migrants who are trying to get in.
00:23:22.000And so he promised the American people that he was going to make Mexico pay for it all, that we would not have to pay a dime for it.
00:23:47.000My favorite part of all of this is that awkward time an MSNBC reporter actually revealed that the caravan was not full of suffering women and children, that it was a bunch of young men who were looking for economic opportunity.
00:23:56.000That's when all this got real awkward.
00:23:58.000So you had MSNBC and CNN filled to the brim with commentators and congresspeople saying, this is all Trump's fault.
00:24:04.000And then it got real awkward because a reporter at MSNBC down there was like, um, guys, Trump's kind of not wrong about all this stuff.
00:24:13.000The truth is, the majority of the people that are part of this caravan, especially outside, if we can make our way all the way over there, we'll show you, the majority of them are men.
00:24:21.000So, when this becomes a polarized political issue in the United States, you have people on one side that point and say, there are women and children here, and that is true, and then there are others who point and say, these are men that are trying to cross the border, and that's true too.
00:24:38.000From what we've seen, the majority are actually men.
00:24:45.000But again, when it comes to the border, it's the Democrats who are the denialists.
00:24:48.000Now, in a second, we're going to talk about climate change denialism, because this is the new charge the left has been throwing at everybody on the right.
00:24:54.000The idea is that you are a climate change denier if you disagree with their prospective solutions, which involve massive damage to the world economy and particularly the United States economy in service to something.
00:25:06.000It is not clear by any stretch of the imagination, even from the proponents of the measures that are now being promoted by a lot of these folks, that these measures will actually succeed in curbing global warming in any serious way.
00:25:17.000So while the left is completely focused on denying what's happening at the border and blaming Trump for stuff that's been going on for, you know, our entire life, now they are also claiming that everybody on the right is a climate change denier.
00:25:29.000Now, I hate the language that is used with regard to climate change deniers because Obviously, it's supposed to be reminiscent of Holocaust denialism, like you're denying an established fact that millions of people died in the Holocaust.
00:26:05.000Are we denying that the majority of those changes are coming because of man-related activities?
00:26:12.000A minority would probably, a strong minority might deny that, but I would say a strong majority probably supports that, even among people who happen to be on the right.
00:26:20.000But, you can acknowledge all those things, and then if you say, but I don't want a massive carbon tax, nor do I think this is a crisis necessitating the death of the world economy, then it's like, oh, you're a denier.
00:26:28.000Because what I'm really denying, what I'm really denying, is that your solution is the proper solution.
00:26:32.000Folks on the left, I don't think that your solution is the right solution.
00:26:35.000In fact, I think that you are alarmist.
00:26:36.000I think that you are creating alarm around a problem that is not, in fact, as extraordinarily dire as you make it out to be.
00:28:00.000Well, number one, the water level rises that have been forecast so far have not actually been accurate.
00:28:04.000Number two, if that happens over the course of a century, you think people might move their houses?
00:28:09.000You think maybe people might move inland?
00:28:10.000You know, like they have over the course of time?
00:28:12.000That people might adapt to their climate because human beings are adaptable creatures?
00:28:16.000I'm always bewildered by this idea that humans can't move.
00:28:19.000I mean, how do you think people got to America?
00:28:21.000How do you think people got to different parts of the globe?
00:28:23.000In any case, this is my favorite part.
00:28:25.000The people on the left are taking the most extraordinary claims of this study, and then they are claiming that this is evidence that the National Climate Assessment means that we're all going to die.
00:29:12.000It turns out that the 10% GDP number is not consistent with the physical science part of the report.
00:29:17.000It is a political conclusion buried in Chapter 29 of the report, according to Roger Pilkey, who is author of The Edge, The Honest Broker and The Climate Fix.
00:31:28.000Now, there's a difference between acknowledging the reality of climate change and trying to figure out what are the best measures and when would those measures kick in and denying climate change itself.
00:31:38.000And I think the simple-minded version here is to say climate change isn't happening or it's not man-caused.
00:31:43.000So I am not, in fact, a climate denier.
00:31:45.000But if you are going to make claims, those claims should be backed by science and the measures that you are projecting out should have some bearing on what exactly you are seeking to prevent.
00:31:56.000I'll get to all that in just one second.
00:31:58.000But first, so let me start by showing you what President Trump had to say.
00:32:01.000Here's what President Trump had to say about the climate change report released by his own scientists.
00:32:05.000Again, these scientists are drawing political conclusions.
00:32:07.000The same thing happened with the IPCC report, the International Panel on Social Science.
00:32:55.000OK, well, he's not saying anything wrong here, and he is correct that if the United States were to cut emissions, which we have been, we were the single largest reducers of emissions last year.
00:33:04.000If we were to cut emissions by ourselves, you know what happened to global warming?
00:33:08.000Pretty much nothing, because China is still the leading emitter on planet Earth.
00:33:44.000The President of the United States seems to be honestly believing that global warming means it never gets cold anywhere.
00:33:52.000NASA has a good explanation of the difference between weather and climate on its website, its website for children.
00:33:58.000So we're just suggesting, Mr. President, if you don't want to believe science or the 1,600-page report your team tried to slip past the American public on Friday, maybe just start with climatekids.nasa.gov.
00:34:14.000OK, do you think that Anderson Cooper read that 1600 page report?
00:34:17.000Do you think that Anderson Cooper holds by his rule of not reporting weather as climate?
00:34:20.000Because it seems like every time there's a hurricane, we hear from the left that this is a this is a climate change issue, as opposed to, you know, a weather event.
00:34:28.000Every time it is extraordinarily hot in California, like, ooh, climate change.
00:34:32.000Right, so the media have been complicit in the conflation of weather and climate.
00:34:36.000Weather is a trend or pattern over time.
00:34:48.000In any case, The left is in the habit of exaggerating these reports and picking out the most alarmist headlines, which then are never met.
00:34:55.000What's fascinating about this is if folks on the left really wanted us to take climate change seriously, they'd be moderate in their assessments.
00:35:01.000They would say, OK, here's the moderate case, and then here's what we should do to prevent the moderate case from happening.
00:35:05.000Instead, they pick the most wild, outlying, alarmist predictions, like 10% loss of GDP by 2100.
00:35:09.000They're like, that, that's what's going to happen.
00:35:12.000Oh, well, 30,000 people are going to commit suicide because it's hot outside.
00:35:17.000They pick the most alarmist prediction, and then when it doesn't materialize, and the right goes, hey, you know, you guys have been doing this crap for like 20 years.
00:35:24.000Al Gore claimed that all the polar ice caps were going to be gone, like, five years ago.
00:35:30.000And then the left's like, well, that's because you don't take this stuff seriously.
00:35:32.000How about if you just told us what your moderate prediction was that you can fulfill, and then I could take seriously the rest of your predictions?
00:35:39.000Again, the IPCC has consistently revised downward its estimates of impending doom.
00:35:49.000According to that report, the level of climate change observed was going to be higher than it was in their recent IPCC report.
00:35:55.000And also, we have to actually determine how much damage is going to be done.
00:35:59.000As I mentioned on the show before, there's a guy named William Nordhaus at Yale.
00:36:02.000The political left celebrated him because he won the Nobel Prize in Economics this year.
00:36:06.000It was supposed to be a slap in the face to the Trump administration, but Nordhaus' work suggests that the IPCC alarmism is just wrong.
00:36:13.000He himself argues the optimal trajectory for climate would end with a 3.5 degree Celsius increase in degrees in global temperature by 2100, not 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees.
00:36:26.000He says that the international target for climate change with a limit of 2 degrees Celsius is infeasible.
00:36:31.000He says the target of 2.5 degrees Celsius is technically feasible, but would require extreme and virtually universal global policy measures in the near future.
00:36:40.000He said if we tried to hold to 2.5 degrees Celsius, it could avert $91 trillion of damage, but would cost $134 trillion in economic damage.
00:36:49.000When the left says, well, if we just take a few minor economic fixes here, that'll fix... Nope.
00:37:37.000An efficient tax on carbon emissions would require a valid estimate for the cost such emissions impose on society.
00:37:43.000But any estimate of the social cost of carbon, which is the marginal cost of an additional ton of CO2, involves what economists call an integrated assessment model that stacks assumptions upon assumptions upon assumptions.
00:37:53.000The result of such modeling is not much better than a guess.
00:37:56.000Calling these models close to useless, says MIT economist Robert Pindick, is generous.
00:38:00.000To model a relationship between carbon emissions and costs, IAMs, this would be the integrated assessment models, must first assume a climate sensitivity.
00:38:09.000That is how quickly the climate will respond to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
00:38:12.000The IPCC offers a range of assumptions, from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius, and that range has actually grown wider in recent years.
00:38:19.000So in order for us to assess the cost, we have to determine how sensitive is the climate, we have to determine how big the damage is going to be from a climate change, And that, in turn, actually depends on the level of damage to be done to existing structures.
00:38:32.000So, for example, we've seen a lot of stories in the recent past.
00:38:35.000Hurricanes are becoming more financially ruinous.
00:38:45.000Like, if you're building more expensive stuff and then the hurricane tears down more expensive stuff, it turns out it's a more expensive storm.
00:38:51.000And this is particularly true on the coast, where the hurricanes happen.
00:38:55.000The rebuilding of New Orleans is a perfectly great example of what we should not be doing as a society in the aftermath of a massive natural disaster.
00:39:04.000Right where there was a giant levee breach, and thousands of people died, we should probably build that city right back up again.
00:39:10.000Instead of saying, well, you know what?
00:39:11.000Why don't we do what people have historically done, when their town gets washed out, and, you know, not build a town there again.
00:39:17.000Instead, we decide to rebuild New Orleans, and then when the levees are breached again in 20 years, we'll talk about climate change again, instead of recognizing that certain eventualities are happening to the climate, and perhaps the best mitigation factor would be to take other measures.
00:39:29.000And maybe the best innovation would actually be a better way of curbing carbon emissions.
00:39:33.000So as I talked about yesterday on the program a little bit, when it comes to carbon emissions, it seems worthwhile to discuss the fact that our carbon emissions have dropped radically in the United States thanks to fracking, which the left hates.
00:39:43.000Natural gas has taken over for coal, which the left hates.
00:40:01.000If you want to base this on moderate assessments you can fulfill, then we can discuss solutions and costs and benefits.
00:40:06.000But if you just say, climate change is happening, and if you deny that we ought to have a massive global carbon tax that no one else will apply except the United States, then you are a denier.
00:40:15.000Then you don't go after yourself, dude, because honestly, that has no relation to reality.
00:40:19.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
00:42:02.000You know, it's frustrating because some of these are really not great, but there are elements of this that are pretty... I would say of the six stories that it tells, three of them are good and three of them are really mediocre.
00:42:14.000But if you have a short attention span, it's really kind of fantastic.
00:42:17.000And it's cool that Netflix is commissioning creative projects like this.
00:42:21.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:42:27.000Thing that I hate, number one, you know, there are a bunch of people who say that when it comes to transgenderism and the debate about use of pronouns and the definition of gender and all this stuff, that it has no real world effects.
00:42:38.000Yesterday, I told you the story of what happened in a local gym near me, where a bunch of Orthodox Jewish women go because they want gender segregation.
00:42:46.000For Jewish law reasons and for modesty reasons, they don't want to exercise in front of men, nor do they want to see naked men or anything of the like.
00:42:52.000A transgender woman came into the locker room, refused to go into the private area and basically threatened to sue if they did not allow this man to unclothe himself in front of these Orthodox women.
00:43:02.000The Orthodox women started dropping their memberships.
00:43:04.000The gym could do nothing about it because they were afraid of legal liability.
00:43:07.000There are real world consequences to this kind of stuff.
00:43:09.000And we talked yesterday about trying to force doctors to perform surgeries That have no actual bearing on health or not, right?
00:43:17.000I mean, which is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
00:43:19.000Well, now there's another story that is just a shocking story from Walt Heyer of The Federalist.
00:43:24.000He reports about a Texas divorce case, which now pits a mother who dresses her six-year-old male child, James, as a girl, and calls him Luna, against James' father, whom she's accusing of child abuse for refusing to treat James as a girl.
00:43:36.000So the kid's six years old, and mom wants James to be Luna.
00:43:40.000James wants to be James when he's with dad.
00:43:43.000But weirdly enough, he wants to be Luna when he's with mom, because mom wants him to be Luna.
00:43:46.000Now mom is trying to sue dad and claim child abuse, because dad won't go along with this nonsense.
00:43:52.000This stuff is going to become more and more common.
00:43:55.000There are real-world consequences to all of these discussions.
00:44:10.000I said, well, it doesn't, but it does change the social standard of what marriage is and how we teach marriage to kids.
00:44:15.000And that sort of teaching does have implications for the behavior of children.
00:44:18.000If I don't want my kid to engage in a same sex relationship because I'm the parent and I think it is more healthy to engage in a heterosexual relationship with someone that they can have kids with.
00:44:29.000Right, because I think that that is the ideal.
00:44:32.000And now I'm supposed to teach my kids something?
00:44:33.000That has a public policy ramification for me.
00:44:35.000It has a public policy ramification for me if you now want me to invite a gay couple into my synagogue, violating my religious scruples, or into my religious school, violating my religious scruples, right?
00:44:47.000There are public policy consequences to hot-button social issues.
00:44:52.000Pretending otherwise is just foolishness.
00:44:56.000Again, if you just wanted to say, gay people get married, there's no imposition on anybody else, if that's a rule you want to hold to, I am all with it, man.
00:45:08.000I mean, I care on a religious level, but on a public policy level, certainly do not care.
00:45:12.000But I am not going to stand by while you change full-scale social standards and then mandate that I teach my child something.
00:45:19.000This is why I always say, when it comes to transgender folks, If I'm in a conversation with a transgender person, I'm not going out of my way to use their biological sex when I talk with them.
00:45:29.000But if you're asking me about public policy, I'm not going to lie and pretend that biological sex does not exist.
00:45:34.000And people take this as a lack of sympathy for folks who are transgender.
00:45:38.000It's not a lack of sympathy for folks who are transgender.
00:45:41.000These people have a serious, serious disorder.
00:45:43.000But it is also not helpful to engage a country in a wide scale violation of biological standards in order to supposedly quash the feelings hurt that people are feeling because of the disorder.
00:45:59.000And I love the assumption that because I disagree with you about the forced feeding of gender terminology, because I disagree with you about the violation of basic freedoms for hundreds of millions of people in favor of a false perception of reality of a few, that because this is the case, I somehow lack sympathy for people who are suffering.
00:46:19.000It's just that there is no evidence of that whatsoever.
00:46:24.000Okay, so I'll tell the story in the least indicative way.
00:46:29.000So I spoke at a university pretty recently, in the last few months.
00:46:33.000And at this university, there was an exchange that took place where a transgender person came up and asked about transgenderism.
00:46:40.000And we had this exchange, and the transgender person, who's a transgender woman, meaning a biological male who believes that he is a woman in a male body, and has had surgeries and hormone treatment and all the rest, this person got up and asked me about transgenderism.
00:46:52.000We had a back and forth, the exchange did not go as the transgender person wanted, and the person became very emotional and rushed out of the room.
00:46:59.000I personally reached out because this person was obviously suffering.
00:47:02.000I personally reached out to this person.
00:47:05.000I had the people who were filming the event cut that part out of the tape because I didn't feel like there would be anything in it for there's nothing good that can come from it.
00:47:13.000I don't want anybody feel humiliated or bad when they go to my events.
00:47:24.000When you're discussing public policy and you mistake public policy discussions for lack of sympathy because we disagree, it gets really ugly really quickly.
00:47:54.000When it comes to actual real-world bias and real-world hatred and real-world stereotyping, you don't need to scratch beneath the surface very far to find antisemitism.
00:48:43.000One in five said they have too much influence in the media.
00:48:45.000The same number believe they have too much influence in politics.
00:48:49.000Meanwhile, a third of Europeans said they knew little or nothing about the Holocaust, which happened within the living memory of a lot of people.
00:48:56.000The mass murder of some six million Jews in lands controlled by the Nazi regime.
00:49:00.000Those are among the key findings of this new CNN report.
00:49:04.000So while we talk about all different forms of bias, it turns out that the most durable form of bias continues to be anti-Semitism.
00:49:11.000And I love all the people who say they're not anti-Semitic, but the Jews control everything.
00:49:16.000A few people said they personally have an unfavorable attitude toward Jews.
00:49:20.000Across seven countries in the survey, only one in ten people said they did, which is pretty shocking.
00:49:24.000The figure rises to 15% in Poland and 19% in Hungary.
00:49:28.000So that's 20% of people in Hungary saying, yeah, we don't like the Jews.
00:50:03.000You know, one of the ways that you can tell if people are anti-Semitic, like a kind of trick question is, how many Jews do you think there are?
00:50:10.000Because people who are deeply concerned about the Jews think that the Jews are like a huge percentage of the world population.
00:50:15.000It turns out that the Jews are a tiny percentage.
00:50:17.000There's like 13 million Jews worldwide.
00:50:19.000As a percentage of the population, it's nothing, right?
00:50:21.000As a percentage of the population, we're talking significantly under 1% of the population worldwide.
00:50:28.000They were off by a factor of about 100.
00:50:30.000that the world is more than 20% Jewish.
00:50:32.000No, they were off by a factor of about 100.
00:50:35.0000.2% of the world's population is Jewish.
00:50:38.000In fact, Israel is the only country on planet Earth where more than 2% of the population is Jewish.
00:50:45.000So, anti-Semitism continues to be the more storable hatred and also the hatred people will ignore.
00:50:50.000As we saw yesterday, when it turns out that over the weekend there was a guy whose name was Mohamed Mohamed, who shouted Allahu Akbar while trying to run down two Jews in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which I know quite well, having All right.
00:51:07.000Well, we will be back here tomorrow to talk about all the latest news.