Trump meets with Vladimir Putin. Anastasia Cortez Ortega says something really really dumb. And Sacha Baron Cohen is back at it. Ben Shapiro talks about it all on this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, which is a podcast about politics, economics, and pop culture. Subscribe to the show Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and also consider giving a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your stuff. Thanks for listening and Good Luck Out There. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Ben Shapiro Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD, tyops, and tyops again. The opinions stated here are our own and do not necessarily those of our companies, the ones listed below. We are not affiliated with any of our corporations, the or any of their parent companies, unless they explicitly state otherwise in their press release or any other statement they make us aware of our rights under this title. This episode was produced for noncommercial use only. We do not represent the views and opinions expressed in this episode. It is not intended to be a reflection of those of any other person s, unless otherwise stated in the article or any such notice or such notice given or such other such notice received by the author or such expression). Thank you for your support or review or review of this episode or review/reviewed by the media outlet. - Ben Shapiro, etc., etc. - Thank you, Ben Shapiro and the rest of the people involved in the work of any of the work referenced in this piece, etc. Thank you in any of this work, etc.. - etc., in any other agency or such reference in this work? Thanks for the work mentioned in this article or review and any other consideration received in this document or such such thing received in any reference in the reference or such value received in such reference or reference received in reference in such expression or such etc. etc. etc.) - etc., etc. in any consideration or such consideration received or such effort is appreciated? - thank you, ? & , etc., any other such consideration is appreciated or such appreciation is appreciated . ... + ) so much
00:02:29.000If all of that sounds a little bit anticlimactic to you, it's because it is anticlimactic, and people are taking away from it what they want to take away from it.
00:02:35.000So on the left, what they're taking away from this Trump-Putin summit is that Trump got job, that Trump got played, that Trump basically made all sorts of concessions to the Russians that we won't find out about until later, but at least in terms of his language, he was very sycophantic.
00:02:48.000And in terms of his language, he was very sycophantic, because President Trump has been consistently sycophantic with regard to Vladimir Putin for at least three years.
00:03:49.000will arm the Ukrainians with deadly weaponry in a way that Obama never would have.
00:03:53.000So this massive disconnect is confusing a lot of people, but it does show that inside the United States, inside his own administration, inside his own administration, there are a lot of people who are not taking his verbiage seriously.
00:04:05.000And I don't think Vladimir Putin is taking his verbiage seriously either.
00:04:08.000There seems to be a concept out there that Vladimir Putin is going to look at Trump and think, wow, that guy's a softy.
00:04:17.000Because Putin does not take his words all that seriously.
00:04:19.000It is also worth noting, in the first year and a half of their administrations, Bush and Obama were not much better when it came to signaling softness with the Russians.
00:04:26.000You remember George W. Bush got together with Vladimir Putin after 9-11, and he said he looked into Putin's soul, and he saw something magical there.
00:04:32.000Yeah, what he saw was Putin looking at taking over Georgia.
00:04:35.000And then Barack Obama in 2012 said he wanted to grant flexibility to the Russians, and then he proceeded to grant the Russians Crimea.
00:04:42.000All of this talk about Trump is universally and strangely and in weird fashion pro-Russian, that may apply to his rhetoric, but it certainly doesn't apply to his policy.
00:04:53.000Now, when it comes to his rhetoric, his rhetoric does kind of suck, right?
00:04:56.000So Trump has jumped into this meeting with Putin.
00:05:00.000And he suggests that the United States is responsible for the poor state of U.S.-Russia relations.
00:05:05.000He tweeted out this morning that U.S.-Russia relations have never been worse.
00:05:16.000Yeah, well, that's not great, because none of that is true.
00:05:19.000The reason that our relationship with Russia sucks is because Vladimir Putin is a thug and a dictator who's attempted to expand his sphere of influence broadly across the region, everywhere from Iran to Kazakhstan.
00:05:29.000And you've seen President Putin, you've seen him
00:05:33.000Seize power and keep himself in power for nearly 20 years over in Russia.
00:05:37.000At this point, it's not because of U.S.
00:06:00.000But suffice it to say that that comment is really dumb, and it leaves people believing that Trump is much more pro-Russia in his policy than he actually is.
00:06:07.000And then Reuters asked Trump about that tweet, and Trump said,
00:06:40.000And so it would behoove me not to be a hypocrite.
00:06:42.000President Trump should not say such things because this is gross.
00:06:46.000Hey, when the President of the United States blames the United States for our conflict with Russia, that is just silly in every available sense.
00:06:52.000But I think what's really going on here is something else.
00:06:54.000So what's really going on here is that the President of the United States really, really, really does not like this Russian collusion investigation.
00:07:01.000And he thinks that because the Russian collusion investigation is a witch hunt against him, it is also a witch hunt against Russia.
00:07:10.000And this is where we go back to late last week, late on Friday last week, Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General, he announced there would be 12 indictments coming down of Russian citizens who'd been responsible for working to hack into the DCCC and the DNC and to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:07:25.000So Rod Rosenstein announced last week that we're not Republicans, we're not Democrats.
00:07:28.000This is just about going after people who violate the law.
00:07:31.000When we confront foreign interference in American elections, it's important for us to avoid thinking politically,
00:07:37.000As Republicans or Democrats and instead to think patriotically as Americans.
00:08:02.000They attempt to they attempted to screw with the election itself.
00:08:05.000And so when Rosenstein says we should worry about the law, the law breaking, we shouldn't worry so much about how it affects either of the parties, he's exactly right about this.
00:08:15.000And as we discussed last week, the indictment itself, the indictments are pretty telling.
00:08:18.000There are a few things to know about that, right?
00:08:20.000It is pretty clear from these indictments that GRU agents, that would be the newfangled KGB, 12 GRU officers knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other and with persons known and unknown to hack the emails of the Clinton campaign, the DCCC, and the DNC.
00:08:33.000Around April 2016, the conspirators began planning how to release Hillary Clinton's emails.
00:08:37.000Around June, they began releasing that material via DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, and they spearfished John Podesta, as well as other top Clinton campaign officials.
00:08:52.000Roger Stone, who was very close with the Trump campaign, he repeatedly defended Guccifer 2.0.
00:08:57.000He seemed to be working with Guccifer 2.0, but that doesn't mean he necessarily knew that Guccifer 2.0 was actually the Russians, or that he was talking specifically with President Trump about directly
00:09:09.000Guccifer 2.0 was also working with WikiLeaks.
00:09:11.000According to the indictment, the conspirators also used the Guccifer 2.0 persona to release additional stolen documents through a website maintained by an organization that had previously posted documents stolen from U.S.
00:09:26.000They released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC network that began three days before the DNC.
00:09:33.000As you recall, President Trump has been saying all along he doesn't think that the hacking was actually the Russians.
00:09:37.000He thought that it was a 400-pound man living in his mother's basement or some such nonsense.
00:09:41.000And then there were a bunch of conspiracy theorists, including some pretty mainstream voices, who suggested that it was all Seth Rich, that it was some DNC staffer who had actually
00:09:49.000Leaked all of these emails to Guccifer 2.0, who had released all of them, and then they suggested that Seth Rich was murdered over that.
00:09:55.000There was no evidence for any of that.
00:10:02.000Here's what the left perceives, and then here's what the right perceives.
00:10:05.000And I think that there are some elements of truth to the perceptions of both, but the truth lies somewhere in between.
00:10:10.000So what the left perceives is that President Trump was very pro-Russian since the beginning of the campaign.
00:10:14.000This must have been because he was in Vladimir Putin's pocket.
00:10:17.000And then, when the Russians started hacking, it was pretty clear that it must have been that Trump was coordinating with Russia to make all that happen, because that's the only way Hillary Clinton possibly could have lost this election, is if Donald Trump and the Russians conspired to steal the election.
00:10:30.000And then they say, well, now Trump is being super pro-Russian and super anti-probe because he knows the probe is going to find something and because he believes that the Russians were the people who got him elected and he's best friends with them.
00:10:40.000Okay, so here's what they're right about and here's what they're wrong about.
00:10:43.000They are right that the Russians attempted to affect the election in 2016.
00:10:47.000They are wrong about everything else, at least so far as the evidence says.
00:10:50.000Now, there is no actual hard evidence that the Trump administration, Trump campaign, coordinated with the Russians during the campaign or post-campaign in order to create soft Russian policy.
00:10:59.000There's no evidence of that at all, and there's no evidence that Trump is personally in Putin's pocket.
00:11:28.000It's true that Trump is not in Putin's pocket.
00:11:30.000It is true, as far as we know, that Trump did not coordinate with the Russians during the campaign.
00:11:34.000But it is not true that the Russians did not attempt to... It is not true that the Russians didn't hack into the DCCC or the DNC or Hillary Clinton's campaign.
00:11:43.000So I'm going to tell you the real story in just a second, and then we'll see how these two narratives play into what the right and the left are saying about the Trump-Putin summit.
00:11:51.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Betterment.
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00:13:47.000OK, so he's not wrong that Obama didn't do enough about it, obviously, but Trump would go on to essentially claim that a lot of this was just false in general, that the hacking itself may have happened or didn't happen or has been or has been exaggerated in some way.
00:14:11.000He hasn't yet said that the indictments themselves were BS, but there are allies of his who have said that the indictments themselves are BS.
00:14:17.000So Devin Nunes over at the House Intelligence Committee, he says that this is basically a witch hunt.
00:14:42.000All of that is fine, but the fact is the indictment says what the indictment says, and it's pretty clear the Russians were trying to meddle in the election.
00:14:47.000Again, because the right is trying to claim that Trump is not in the pocket of Putin, which he isn't, they're also trying to claim that the entire indictment is wrong.
00:14:54.000That somehow the Russians were not attempting to affect the election in a serious way.
00:14:57.000And it's because Republicans are reacting like this, it's because Trump has reacted like this, that the left therefore thinks that Trump is even more in the pocket of Putin.
00:15:06.000The left says, Trump is in Putin's pocket, and he's in Putin's pocket because Putin hacked the election.
00:15:12.000And Trump says, wait a second, I'm not in Putin's pocket, and also Putin didn't hack the election.
00:15:16.000And the left says, see, he's lying about Putin hacking the election, which shows that he's in Putin's pocket.
00:15:20.000And Trump says, but wait, I'm not in Putin's pocket, and you're the ones who are claiming he hacked the election, so why am I supposed to believe you?
00:15:25.000And so you see how this goes around and around in a circle.
00:15:27.000Now, the real answer is Putin did attempt to affect the election, and Donald Trump is not in Putin's pocket.
00:15:32.000Right, both of these things can be true all at once.
00:15:35.000The problem is that nobody is going to play this honestly.
00:15:38.000Nobody is going to honestly look at these issues and look where the evidence takes them.
00:15:42.000Instead, they're going to jump to the assumption they think most meets with their preconception of the situation itself.
00:15:49.000Now, all of this was exacerbated by the run-up to the Russian meeting.
00:15:52.000So, in the run-up to the Russian meeting, President Trump started signaling that he was anti-EU.
00:15:58.000The NATO meetings talking about the shortcomings in NATO and a lot of people were saying, well, this is signaling weakness to Vladimir Putin.
00:16:04.000First, I do have to note that if there's a group of people who can make President Trump look wonderful, it is his protesters.
00:16:09.000So this is a group of protesters apparently over the weekend who decided to take on President Trump.
00:16:14.000I guess this was in London or San Francisco.
00:16:17.000Yeah, there's a there's a dummy of President Trump.
00:16:20.000And it looks like a bunch of gay activists who are punching the dummy of President Trump and losing.
00:17:55.000A lot of people are angered by those words.
00:17:57.000That is, you know, I think it is fine to be angry at the stuff that President Trump says in the same way that it was fine to be angry at what Obama said.
00:18:05.000The difference is that Trump says stuff and it doesn't mean a lot very often.
00:18:08.000When President Obama said things that were anti-American, it usually manifested as policy.
00:18:12.000When Obama went around the world and did his apology tour, that manifested in military cuts in an attempt to reduce America's influence around the world.
00:18:18.000When President Trump goes around and says, we're all to blame for 2016.
00:18:22.000When he goes around and he says, well, when it comes to Russia-American relations, we all carry a little bit of blame.
00:18:26.000When he says that kind of stuff, is it gross?
00:18:31.000Remember, this is the same guy who said twice in the last three years that the United States kills people in the same way that Russia kills people.
00:18:38.000Has that manifested in anything like a soft policy with regard to Russia?
00:19:06.000He tweeted, the stories you heard about the 12 Russians yesterday.
00:19:10.000Took place during the Obama administration, not the Trump administration.
00:19:12.000Why didn't they do something about it?
00:19:14.000Especially when it was reported President Obama was informed by the FBI in September before the election.
00:19:18.000Okay, then he continued along these lines and he said, Additionally, congratulations to President Putin and Russia for putting on a truly great World Cup tournament.
00:19:34.000And people went nuts over this because, oh my God, he's complimenting Putin, as opposed to Obama, who also would have complimented Putin on the handling of the World Cup.
00:19:41.000Hillary Clinton, by the way, tweeted in response to this.
00:21:01.000Know how to do is resist and obstruct.
00:21:03.000This is why there is such hatred and dissension in our country, but at some point it will heal.
00:21:06.000So again, it's all about President Trump.
00:21:08.000It's one of the off-putting things about the president is that everything seems to be about President Trump, except for policy.
00:21:13.000Now, here's the reaction to all of this.
00:21:15.000So the reaction to all of this begins with some folks on the right who are very upset with President Trump, and it extends to some people on the left who are very upset with President Trump.
00:21:22.000Again, I think there's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing in the end.
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00:22:35.000Okay, so people don't actually understand that what President Trump says and what he does are two very, very different things.
00:22:40.000And so people are responding, and I think,
00:23:05.000Rightly outraged fashion over President Trump's language because no president of the United States should be saying the kind of things about America in relation to Russia that the president of the United States has been saying.
00:23:14.000And I understand there are a lot of Trump fans who say, well, really what he means is that Barack Obama's policy with Russia was bad.
00:23:20.000Or really what he means was George W. Bush's policy with Russia was bad.
00:23:23.000The reality is no matter how bad American policy has been, and it usually has been bad in terms of weakness, not in terms of strength,
00:23:31.000The only way that you are going to be able to confront Vladimir Putin is by confronting Vladimir Putin.
00:23:35.000It's not going to be done with kissing his ass.
00:23:37.000It's certainly not going to be done by blaming America for Putin-America anger or dissension.
00:23:44.000Because the reality is that Putin's been doing this since he got into office.
00:23:47.000But apparently, President Trump said that we've had a bad relationship with Russia, but that all changed about four hours ago when he got in a room with him.
00:23:54.000I mean, this is the same thing that President Trump said about Kim Jong-un.
00:23:57.000He went over and met with Kim Jong-un.
00:23:58.000Some of us were critical of that meeting, saying that meeting was counterproductive and useless, and that, in fact, it was elevating Kim Jong-un on the world stage.
00:24:04.000And then President Trump came back and he tweeted out that we no longer had to worry about a nuclear North Korea, which, of course, was very, very silly.
00:24:10.000Did America's policy on North Korea change in any massive way?
00:28:05.000I think what I meant is, like, the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.
00:28:33.000If Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez were a Republican, is there any doubt that she would be labeled crazy eyes, nuts, doesn't know what she's talking about, stupid, affirmative action candidate?
00:28:44.000This is exactly what they did with Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin.
00:28:47.000They said it over and over and over about every Republican woman who was ever in a position of power.
00:28:51.000It was that she was stupid, she was affirmative action, she was only there because she was pretty.
00:28:56.000Again, they did this about every Republican woman who ever reached a position of power that I can remember, except for maybe Condoleezza Rice, and they couldn't say it about her because she was black, and they didn't want to say it about a black woman.
00:29:05.000But there is no question that this woman is a dunderhead.
00:29:08.000It does show where the base of the Democratic Party is, though.
00:29:10.000If she says occupation over and over and over and doesn't know what the occupation is, doesn't know what she's talking about, has no clue, and then begs off the question and gets away with it, it shows you that the base of the Democratic Party is anti-Israel.
00:29:20.000It also shows how radical the base of the Democratic Party is.
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00:30:55.000Okay, so the future of the Democratic Party is Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez, who doesn't know what the hell she's talking about on virtually any topic.
00:31:03.000That dude's basically dead, so that's pretty exciting as well.
00:31:06.000The other candidates who are being talked about are people like Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, none of whom are deeply inspiring.
00:31:12.000I would say at this point, the frontrunner would probably have to be Biden if Obama endorses him.
00:31:17.000If Obama does not endorse him, then the frontrunner is likely somebody like Elizabeth Warren, who is deemed to be sort of the Bernie Sanders double, except she's female and empowered.
00:31:25.000Right, so that's very... Elshir has a Native American background, as we keep hearing.
00:31:30.000Meanwhile, folks in the media are very, very excited because Sacha Baron Cohen is back.
00:31:34.000Now, Sacha Baron Cohen can be really, really funny.
00:31:36.000If you ever watched any of the Oli G show, it's extremely, extremely funny.
00:31:40.000Well, now he has a brand new show, and this show is basically punking Americans, right?
00:31:45.000The show is called Who is America on Showtime, and it's essentially him going to a series of Americans, mostly on the right wing, and trying to make them look foolish.
00:31:53.000It's sort of like he did in Borat, where he went down south and then
00:31:57.000You know, walked into churches where people were speaking in tongues and made them look stupid.
00:32:01.000And then did that routine where he went into a bar and started singing, throw the Jew down the well, because obviously everybody in the bar was an anti-Semite.
00:32:08.000And this is the stuff that Sacha Baron Cohen does.
00:32:10.000Well, this time he posed as an Israeli former Mossad agent who wanted to start a pro-gun program in the United States, arming four-year-olds.
00:32:18.000And he got a bunch of Republican congressmen to talk about how wonderful this idea would be.
00:32:23.000Matt Gaetz was smart enough to avoid it, but there were a few other Republicans who got sucked into it.
00:32:27.000Typically, members of Congress don't just hear a story about a program and then indicate whether they support it or not.
00:32:33.000The intensive three-week kindergarten course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, and a rudimentary knowledge of mortars.
00:32:49.000In less than a month, less than a month, a first-grader can become a first-grenader.
00:32:57.000Okay, so all of this is a little bit inherently funny, getting all of these Republicans on record saying that they want to teach young children how to use grenades, right?
00:33:04.000All of that is inherently funny, but I will point out that it is actually extraordinarily easy to do this.
00:33:09.000It's very, very easy to get people to say stupid things when they believe they're saying something that they're not saying.
00:34:06.000He reiterated on Twitter Sunday that he didn't believe that we should train and arm kindergartners and then he urged people to boycott Showtime.
00:34:13.000And he says that they gave him a fake award, and he shows what the award says, and it says, So basically, it was, they got him in a mood to believe that he was with friends, and then they told him what to say off a teleprompter.
00:34:28.000And they did this with a series of people.
00:34:53.000It does demonstrate that you want to know why it is, really, you want to know why it is that so many folks on the right are deeply skeptical of the media and don't actually want to have open interviews with people in the media because they feel like this every time they sit down with them, it's a trap.
00:35:07.000Every time you sit down with somebody who's an unfriendly, it's a trap.
00:35:09.000There's a reason that President Trump announced that he would be giving his first interviews after all of this was over to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
00:35:17.000And the reason for that is you really do have to vet the people you sit down with.
00:35:20.000And if you don't trust them, you don't sit down with them in the first place.
00:35:23.000Because otherwise, you may very well end up in a situation just like Sacha Baron Cohen's.
00:35:27.000Now, is it good for the country that Sacha Baron Cohen is doing all of this?
00:35:30.000I'm not sure that it is, just in the sense that do you really think that all of these Republicans are actually going to vote for that sort of a bill?
00:35:46.000But if the idea here is that Republicans actually support this sort of stuff, that what they are actually going for here is arming four-year-olds, that that's really where their heart lies, then
00:35:57.000I think that all it contributes to is a cynicism about politics that is unwarranted.
00:36:02.000I do not think many politicians on the right are walking around actively promoting the idea of four-year-olds with guns any more than I really think that there are a lot of politicians on the left who are actively promoting the idea that we're going to take children away from their parents if you don't teach them about transgenderism.
00:36:17.000And I think we're a lot closer to the second than we are to the first.
00:36:20.000I think that there are a lot of people in the California state legislature who believe that you should be able to teach children what you want from the state schools, and if you don't teach those kids what you want from the state schools, then they are going to move toward somehow cracking down on parents.
00:36:32.000But they will say that without having to be prompted.
00:36:35.000The real question is, what do people say without having to be prompted?
00:36:37.000What do people say in public without having to be prompted?
00:36:39.000So I think most Democrats have in their mind, I want to seize children from their parents.
00:36:43.000And I don't think most Republicans have on their mind, they want to separate kids from parents at the borders.
00:36:46.000I don't think most Republicans have on their minds that they want to arm four-year-old children.
00:36:50.000I really don't think that the gap in the country is that wide.
00:36:54.000But again, if the goal is just to make people look stupid, then I guess that people can look stupid and we're all supposed to pretend that all of this is normal.
00:37:04.000Our system was built for a lot of interplay.
00:37:07.000Our system was built to weed out stupid ideas.
00:37:09.000Our system was built by people who are proposing their own legislation, not being duped into proposing legislation by people like Sasha Baron Cohen.
00:37:16.000And so the left's glee about this, that really what gun owners want is to arm four-year-olds
00:37:21.000Is really, I think, overwrought in a pretty significant way.
00:38:20.000The Frankfurt School were a group of German expatriates who came over prior to World War II, and they were Marxists.
00:38:25.000They came to the United States, and one of the things that they promoted was the idea that America was a right-wing capitalist country on the verge of authoritarianism.
00:38:31.000They were trying to suggest that Nazism was an outgrowth of a capitalist free system, because capitalism and freedom were an outgrowth of actually a hierarchical system that implanted in people a desire to believe in authority.
00:38:43.000Eric Fromm was one of the leaders here, a famous psychologist.
00:38:45.000He argued that fascism would rise in the United States thanks to its devotion to capitalism.
00:38:49.000He said capitalism sprang from social structures that had urged, quote, compulsive conformity in the process of which the isolated individual becomes an automaton.
00:38:58.000So the idea is that you are just a babbit.
00:39:00.000You're a loser who goes to work and you slavishly follow the rules because you are actually an authoritarian.
00:39:06.000And that's why capitalism works in the United States.
00:39:08.000He says that we all have authoritarian character.
00:39:10.000Well, there have been a lot of people on the left who have been trying to prove this ever since.
00:39:13.000And so what you will see very often is these online surveys where they ask you questions about, do you believe that flag burning should be banned?
00:39:20.000And they say, if you believe that flag burning should be banned, it's because you're an authoritarian.
00:39:23.000They say people on the right, they're authoritarians with rigid mentalities, rigid right wing mindsets.
00:39:28.000They're just more liberal and open and they just like things more.
00:39:36.000Jesse Singel, over at New York Magazine, who is on the left, but does some really good social science work, he says,
00:39:52.000And while social and political psychologists have sometimes asked about rigidity in ways designed to zap liberal ideas, the famed authoritarianism researcher Bob Altemeier, for example, did publish a left-wing authoritarianism scale.
00:40:03.000This has been the exception rather than the norm.
00:40:05.000In other words, we've been told for years and years and years that right-wingers are authoritarians.
00:40:11.000And it turns out that that's not true.
00:40:14.000So, when you encounter an authoritarian quiz online, it usually is about banning flag-burning, but you'll never see an authoritarian quiz online talk about banning hate speech.
00:40:23.000Because the people who are designing those quizzes want the results to come out that right-wingers are more authoritarian.
00:40:28.000Now, as it turns out, there are people who have come up with tests that are biased against the left, and here's what it found.
00:40:34.000These tweaks affected which group responded more dogmatically a great deal.
00:40:38.000Liberals scored as more dogmatic than conservatives when it came to their agreement with sentiments like, when it comes to stopping global warming, it is better to be a dead hero than a live coward.
00:40:46.000And a person who thinks primarily of his or her own happiness and in doing so disrespects the health of the environment is beneath contempt.
00:40:53.000While conservatives, by contrast, scored higher than liberals on items tuned in the opposite political direction.
00:40:58.000So again, speaking of the Sacha Baron Cohen technique with regard to the media, it also applies to science.
00:41:02.000Very often, some of the social science that you read is inherently biased in an attempt to generate a headline.
00:41:08.000It's one of the reasons why we always have to be very careful when we read social science headlines and determine whether or not they are true.
00:41:14.000This is why there are some of us who are very critical of a lot of the social science with regard to, for example, transgenderism, because it seems like a lot of this stuff is biased in its construction.
00:41:23.000It seems like the media is attempting to push an agenda, mainly because the media are attempting to push an agenda.
00:41:28.000There's a headline from the New York Times about a transgender competitor from Spain in the Miss Universe contest.
00:41:33.000And the headline was, basically, isn't it wonderful that this transgender competitor is teaching schoolchildren that girls can have a penis and boys can have a vagina?
00:41:42.000And the answer is no, that's not wonderful because that's anti-scientific.
00:41:44.000But when you bias the science, when you make up the science as you go, it turns out that it's very easy to generate a headline in any direction that you wish to generate a headline.
00:41:53.000And this is just the latest example, the most obvious example.
00:41:55.000So, next time before you believe a social science headline, check out the basis of the headline.
00:41:59.000It may very well be that the people who designed it were looking for a particular outcome before they even began.
00:42:04.000Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll do a Federalist paper.
00:42:41.000All of this worship of Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands neglects what exactly made Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands economic powerhouses before they attempted socialist projects.
00:42:50.000It also neglects the fact that in the past several years they've had to cut social services specifically because of all of the massive growth of governments and the incentive systems that have been created that are allowing people not to work.
00:43:01.000A great book on this topic is a book called Debunking Utopia by Nima Sanandaji.
00:43:06.000Who was a Middle Eastern immigrant to Norway.
00:43:10.000And it's debunking Utopia, exposing the myth of Nordic socialism.
00:43:13.000It's about 250 pages, something like that.
00:43:16.000And it is a very clean debunking of the idea that this is Utopia and that you can just translate it over to the United States.
00:43:22.000It's got all the stats and figures that you'd want.
00:43:24.000And it makes some pretty good points about how it is that people bias the case in favor of Norway or Denmark and against the United States, when in reality,
00:43:32.000Denmark, particularly, is a capitalist system and they're redistributionist programs.
00:43:38.000have actually dampened the growth in a pretty significant way over there.
00:43:41.000Also, he explains why it is that you can't just take their system, apply it to the United States, and hope that it works the same way, because it obviously does not.
00:43:47.000The biggest point, I think, of the book is that when you look at a lot of these democratic socialist utopias, these places were basically great places to live before democratic socialism, because the culture in Norway and the culture in Denmark, it's a homogenous culture where people pretty much act alike and are part of a common family, or at least part of a common bond.
00:44:06.000And that common bond is not nearly as ethnically diverse and culturally diverse as the United States.
00:44:10.000You can't just take those programs, apply them to the United States and assume they're going to impact in the same way.
00:44:15.000Also makes a great point, which is that if you look at Danish expatriates to the United States, they should earn more than than Danes back at home.
00:44:25.000Nima Sanandaji exposing the myth of Nordic socialism.
00:44:28.000OK, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:44:34.000So speaking of trying to import Nordic socialism to the United States, San Francisco has been trying this for years and it is a giant fail.
00:44:40.000They've been trying this with rent control, they've been trying this with all sorts of benefits for the homeless, they've been trying this with the idea that you have a right to sleep on the streets, and the result has been giant piles of poop in the streets.
00:44:49.000So here's the mayor of San Francisco explaining that what used to be one of the cleanest cities in America now has piles of feces on the corner.
00:45:37.000You shouldn't just, like, assume that because someone's gay, they've done something terribly wrong in terms of their lifestyle, right?
00:45:43.000You shouldn't just assume that homosexual people are bad, and you shouldn't use gay as a slur, right?
00:45:47.000If you're a kid on a playground, you certainly shouldn't look at another kid and say, hey, you're gay, and what you mean is something bad by it.
00:45:51.000You should never do something like that.
00:45:52.000Unless you're the New York Times making fun of Trump and Putin.
00:45:55.000So they actually released this video over at the New York Times, and it is pretty astonishing they thought this was okay, but they did.
00:46:02.000Do you have a relationship with Vladimir Putin?
00:46:05.000It's a picture of Donald Trump opening the door.
00:47:59.000When you have a group of people who are put together,
00:48:13.000On Earth, by the Almighty, at a certain point in time, to create a system that was durable enough to withstand Barack Obama and Donald Trump, and a system durable enough to withstand the Democrats and the Republicans of today, you have to admire that system in a pretty major way.
00:48:26.000And it was a system that was created by compromise, and a system that was created by gridlock, and a system that was designed to check the worst impulses of people.
00:48:34.000Donald Trump said a lot of bad things today in that press conference with Vladimir Putin.
00:48:38.000The fact of the matter remains that this is a very durable form of government.
00:48:42.000And while everybody should be concerned about that sort of language, when it comes to actual foreign policy, the United States has done pretty well over the past couple of centuries.
00:48:50.000And I don't think one press conference is going to change that.
00:48:52.000OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.