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00:00:02.000A brand spanking new study has found that doing away with traditional marriage laws has supposedly reduced suicide rates among gay teenagers by a whopping 14% in states that have embraced same-sex marriage.
00:00:12.000Here are just some of the glowing headlines.
00:00:19.000Legalizing same-sex marriage was associated with fewer youth suicide attempts, new study finds.
00:00:29.000Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage was legalized.
00:00:32.000These headlines, which are just a tiny sampling of the blanket media coverage this study has received,
00:00:37.000The study printed in JAMA Pediatrics concludes that same-sex marriage policies would be associated with more than 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide every year.
00:00:57.000The study shows a basic correlation between loosening same-sex marriage law and suicide rate, but it does not show that same-sex marriage policies reduced adolescent suicide attempts as the study's conclusions state.
00:01:07.000In fact, the study itself acknowledges, quote, In other words, they say they know same-sex marriage policies impacted suicide attempts, but they have no idea how.
00:01:50.000We also could not control for unmeasured individual-level characteristics, including socioeconomic status, or for unmeasured state characteristics that may change over time, such as religious affiliation or acceptance of religious minorities and sexual minorities.
00:02:03.000Also, the study fails to explain why non-LGBT students would see their suicide rates decline in states that approve same-sex marriage.
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00:05:27.000Okay, so let's begin with what's going on at CPAC, aside from somebody apparently killing themselves and Richard Spencer being thrown out of the proceedings.
00:05:49.000There should be a lot of talk about policy.
00:05:51.000There should be a lot of talk about conservatism.
00:05:53.000It is called, after all, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
00:05:57.000Except that Kellyanne Conway just showed up there, like a few minutes ago, and apparently she said, she's making her first public appearance in weeks, she said that, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC.
00:06:06.000She was asked, how has Trump affected the conservative movement?
00:06:08.000She said, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC, meaning the Trump Political Action Conference, and then she added that conservatism was, quote, sclerotic and dusty.
00:06:22.000No conservative political action conference should probably be advertising from one of its lead speakers that the founding ideology and founding idea upon which it's based is sclerotic and dusty.
00:06:32.000The hero worship for Trump is obviously over the top.
00:06:35.000I've been saying this for a long time.
00:06:36.000Call him when he's... Praise him when he's right.
00:06:51.000Whose show is really very entertaining because he basically has on some idiot from the left every so often and then he hammers them into the ground and it's really entertaining stuff and he does the Tucker Carlson patented bemused face kind of while he's on split screen and he's really good at it and he's a very talented host and he's obviously getting huge ratings.
00:07:07.000One of the things that the Tucker Carlson says in this Atlantic interview is that he has no set ideology.
00:07:13.000I mean, it's important to note about Tucker that when he started out early on as the Atlantic Reports, on CNN's Crossfire, he was basically a mainline partisan conservative.
00:07:22.000And then after he left CNN in 2005, he went libertarian, and now he's going full populist.
00:07:29.000He said, I'm not much of an economic conservative.
00:07:31.000I'm not conservative at all on foreign policy.
00:07:34.000And then he said, so he was asked, well, why did you shift all your positions?
00:07:36.000He says, if your politics don't change when circumstances do, you're an idiot, you're a reactionary.
00:07:41.000And he says, my views are not super interesting.
00:07:44.000I have a feeling that some of Tucker's views I'm sure shifted because the political ground map changed because of Trumpism, because of this nationalist populism.
00:07:53.000This idea that you're a reactionary if you stick to your principles, but you're not a reactionary if you shift them in reaction to events is definitionally wrong.
00:08:00.000Reactionary means that you're reacting to events by shifting your principles and your philosophies.
00:08:04.000Now listen, Tucker can do whatever he wants, but it is dangerous for the movement as a whole to simply shift its philosophy based around whatever Trump wants that day or whatever events happen that day.
00:08:13.000That's not a philosophy that's worth upholding.
00:08:15.000That's not a set of values that's worth upholding.
00:08:17.000And so I think that we ought to be careful, before we fall into the idolatrous trap of turning CPAC into TPAC, of recognizing that Trump is only important insofar as he advances conservative principles.
00:08:29.000When he breaks from those conservative principles, he shouldn't be celebrating TPAC, right?
00:08:33.000If TPAC and CPAC are the same thing, then let's just call it CPAC.
00:08:36.000And if TPAC is something different than CPAC, then maybe that ought to be called out a little bit.
00:08:45.000It looks like it's gonna be a fantastic event.
00:08:46.000Looks like a lot of fun stuff is gonna be happening there, despite a lot of the confusion that surrounded it because of everything that happened with Milo.
00:08:53.000Apparently, Richard Spencer showed up and he was immediately tossed out.
00:08:59.000A lot of people have been talking this morning about the idea that if you don't let certain people speak at your event, this is called no platforming.
00:09:05.000No, no platforming is when there is a state group
00:09:11.000It's also no platforming if you have a group that is dedicated to free speech, like say a university that says in its mission statement that we're dedicated to free speech and they're banning certain people.
00:09:21.000It's not no platforming for a conservative group to not have Bernie Sanders as the keynote speaker.
00:09:25.000In fact, it's the opposite of no platforming.
00:09:27.000Okay, no platforming is- if you think that no platforming means that you have a right to sit in my chair and take over my show, for example, or you have a right to take over CPAC's main stage, or you have a right to take over a historically black university and you're David Duke,
00:09:43.000It doesn't mean that once you're invited, you should be tossed out.
00:09:45.000If somebody invites you, then that is no platforming to disinvite them.
00:09:48.000But it is really, really, really silly to make the contention that you have a right to someone else's distribution mechanism for your message.
00:09:55.000That's actually the Fairness Doctrine, right?
00:09:56.000That's something the conservatives oppose.
00:09:58.000The left has been saying for years that talk radio should be hit with the Fairness Doctrine because it's all right-wingers.
00:10:03.000And the right has been saying, no, these are all private companies.
00:10:05.000They should be allowed to say and do what they want.
00:10:07.000You can't hold both ideas in your mind at once because they don't mesh.
00:10:11.000Okay, so no platforming is a bad thing if you actually define it the way it's supposed to be defined.
00:10:15.000If you define no platforming as everybody should be allowed to take over any stage that they want at any time, that's just silly.
00:10:36.000It doesn't really make a blip around the country.
00:10:38.000What does make a blip is all these town hall uprisings.
00:10:40.000So there's a lot of talk about paid protesters supposedly going into town hall meetings and ripping on Republican Congress people, trying to intimidate them into leaving Obamacare in place.
00:10:50.000Among the people pushing these things is Michael Moore.
00:10:51.000Here's Michael Moore talking about the wonders of these town hall protests.
00:10:55.000You can see, just watching the footage there, that nobody's being paid.
00:11:00.000They are there because they love this country, and they're coming out.
00:11:11.000The big town hall thing was August in 2009, because that was the August recess, and that's when those town halls happened, people getting yelled at, and there was a bill that was about to be passed, and the mobilization.
00:11:29.000I mean, I love the left claiming the Tea Party was bad, but what's happening now is good.
00:11:33.000Listen, everybody has the right to protest, but the fact that the media continually downgrade, and I know that there was a reporter from Politico, I think, who was downgrading the Tea Party, claiming that was all fake, but this is all real.
00:11:44.000Now, I will say it's a mistake for right-wingers to immediately assume that all of this is fake, that it's all astroturfed.
00:11:49.000There's this tendency on both sides to do this.
00:11:51.000That the Tea Party was AstroTurfed by the Koch Brothers, and that all these protests are AstroTurfed by other groups.
00:11:56.000If there's evidence of that, then show me the evidence of that.
00:11:58.000Let's not just throw out the idea that it's all AstroTurfed without a lot of evidence of that.
00:12:01.000I haven't seen tons of evidence of that.
00:12:03.000I've seen some evidence that some people are AstroTurfed, but the idea that everybody in all of these rooms is AstroTurfed, I don't think that's right.
00:12:09.000It's difficult to mobilize that many people on the basis of paying them five bucks an hour.
00:12:13.000Sean Spicer basically said this, though.
00:12:16.000He came out and he said a lot of this is just manufactured.
00:12:20.000I think some people are clearly upset.
00:12:22.000But there is a bit of professional protest or manufactured base in there.
00:12:27.000But obviously there are people that are upset.
00:12:29.000But I also think that when you look at some of these districts and some of these things, it is not a representation of a member's district or an incident.
00:12:40.000It is a loud group, small group of people disrupting something, in many cases, for media attention.
00:12:58.000Just because a group is very loud doesn't mean there are a lot of them.
00:13:00.000The alt-right is very loud, it doesn't mean they're a huge, huge force.
00:13:03.000But it's a political mistake for spokespeople for presidents to go out there and say that when you can see a protest on TV, it's all fake, it's all astroturfed, it makes it look like a denial of reality.
00:13:13.000I said that, by the way, way back when, okay?
00:13:14.000Robert Gibbs was the press secretary under Barack Obama, and here's what he said about town hall protests directed against President Obama's Obamacare.
00:13:22.000Is it your contention, is it the White House contention, that the anger that some members of Congress are experiencing at town hall meetings, especially over health care reform, is manufactured?
00:13:35.000In fact, I think you've had groups today, conservatives for patients' rights, that have bragged about organizing and manufacturing that anger.
00:13:46.000Okay, so again, it was bad when Gibbs says it, I'm not a big fan.
00:13:49.000When Spicer says it, just politically speaking, it's not smart.
00:13:52.000And it's especially not smart because it plays directly into the hands of the protesters.
00:13:54.000So, for example, here's one woman who comes out at one of these town hall events and she says, look, I'm not a paid protester, I'm here just to talk to you.
00:14:03.000Thank you, Senator Cotton, for being here today.
00:14:06.000First of all, I'm Mary Story from Fayetteville, and I'm not a paid protester.
00:14:22.000Mary, can I address that point that you just made?
00:14:25.000I don't really care if anybody here is paid or not.
00:14:27.000You're all Arkansans, and I'm glad to hear from you.
00:14:35.000I know there's been some talk about that in the media.
00:14:41.000I just want to say thank you to everyone for coming out tonight, whether you agree with me or disagree with me.
00:14:47.000This is part of what our country is all about.
00:14:50.000Okay, so, you know, good response here by Senator Cotton.
00:14:53.000Much better response than the response you got from Sean Spicer.
00:14:56.000But it does put people in an awkward position when you say, everybody here is paid, and somebody gets up and says, I'm not paid.
00:15:01.000So, these town hall events, I want to talk a little bit more about them and what they're doing.
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00:16:42.000So these town hall events have basically become a way for the left to put sympathetic faces on TV to talk about how terrible it would be if they repeal Obamacare.
00:16:55.000A woman gets up and she's asking Tom Cotton about her husband and I just want to play this because I think that it's indicative of what exactly the media are trying to do and the sort of narratives that come into play here.
00:18:12.000But to pretend that she has extra moral authority because she's experiencing tragedy, it's just not true.
00:18:18.000And it's something the left likes to play, but only selectively.
00:18:20.000So, after 9-11, they said that the widows of 9-11, the Jersey Girls, as they called them, they said that they had
00:18:27.000Impeccable moral authority, because they had spouses who died on 9-11, therefore they should be making policy for the whole country.
00:18:32.000And you heard this from Maureen Dowd, when, I think it was Code Pink, when Cindy Sheehan, who had a son who died in Iraq, when she started talking, Maureen Dowd immediately said that she had absolute moral authority, not just moral authority, God-like moral authority to determine what policy should be and what policy would be.
00:18:49.000But when it comes to Pat Smith, I mean, Michelle Malkin makes this point, and she's right.
00:18:52.000When it comes to Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, who was killed in Benghazi, she comes out and says, my son was killed in Benghazi, and that's a problem, and the entire media ignores her.
00:19:05.000And the reason for that is because the left likes to use tragedy as a club with which to beat its enemies, but it will not allow there to be a common rule about tragedy.
00:19:14.000Because tragedy can't be a common rule.
00:19:15.000Because the vast majority of people in life have experienced some form of tragedy or another.
00:19:20.000And it doesn't make them experts on the topic.
00:19:22.000It doesn't mean that they should actually create the policy.
00:19:26.000In fact, there's a good case to be made that if you've experienced tragedy on a particular score, you should be the person who's least likely to make the policy.
00:19:33.000The logic being that if you're a doctor and your son comes into the waiting room with a cancerous tumor, you shouldn't be the one to operate on him.
00:19:42.000Your empathy is skewing how you're actually going to treat the situation.
00:19:46.000It's why we all take doctor's advice rather than researching it on our own and then just determining that we're going to do X, Y, or Z. Like, we do our own research, but then we combine that empathy with actual expertise and expert advice.
00:19:57.000There's a guy named Professor Paul Bloom at Yale University.
00:19:59.000He's written an entire book on the fact that empathy makes for bad policy.
00:20:02.000He says, emotional empathy is a different matter when it comes to guiding our moral judgments and political decisions.
00:20:08.000Recent research in neuroscience and psychology shows that empathy makes us biased, tribal, and often cruel.
00:20:15.000Because if you have empathy for this lady right here, maybe you're being cruel to the millions of people who are forced to buy health insurance that they can't afford, or forced off of health insurance that they could afford.
00:20:24.000And this is what Bernie Sanders said the other day.
00:20:26.000He says, you know, what good is it to have the right to buy health care if you can't afford it?
00:20:30.000And the answer is, number one, it is the market system that makes health care affordable.
00:20:33.000But number two, it's a lot worse to me to have a system where you can afford health care and you're not allowed to get it because of Bernie Sanders.
00:20:42.000What Professor Bloom says is, empathy is activated when you think about a specific individual, the so-called identifiable victim effect, but it fails to take broader considerations into account.
00:20:50.000Which is why people will give tons of money when they see a wounded baby sealed during a hurricane, but they won't give any money to hundreds of thousands of people being slaughtered in Syria, because one is an identifiable victim, and the other is not an identifiable victim.
00:21:03.000The point being here that when you form policy for millions of people, for millions of people, then it is imperative that you put your empathy to the side so that you can make a good policy.
00:21:12.000Doesn't mean you shouldn't be empathetic.
00:21:14.000Doesn't mean you shouldn't feel for this lady.
00:21:15.000But this idea that the left keeps trotting out victims, and then we're supposed to make policy based on the fact that certain policies have certain effect, but the statistical impact is either small or is balanced out by other factors,
00:21:28.000That's really a bad way to make policy, but this is what the left is trotting out.
00:21:32.000In clip 16, we get this from another woman.
00:21:45.000Aside from inheriting their patriotism and their work ethic, I unfortunately inherited an incurable genetic connective tissue disorder.
00:21:55.000I qualify for Medicare, but unfortunately it's useless for me, since only two of my doctors, who are the only doctors in over a 500-mile radius who are familiar with my condition, accept Medicare.
00:22:07.000Without the coverage for pre-existing conditions, I will die.
00:22:12.000Will you commit to replacements in the same way that you have committed to the repeal?
00:22:23.000And she gets a standing ovation for the question.
00:22:28.000And again, the idea is that her suffering confers a certain level of value to her opinion.
00:22:33.000Again, you have to feel awful for this person.
00:22:35.000You have to feel terrible for this person.
00:22:38.000And I promise you that if she started a charity fund, people would raise tons of money for her because, again, that identifiable victim effect means that our empathy for her means that we would help her out.
00:22:47.000But shifting, crafting a broad public policy around one person and their suffering and their tragedy is just not, it's just not good public policy.
00:22:56.000So it's also worthwhile noting, by the way, that all these Republicans have already said that they want pre-existing conditions to be covered, which is something with which I disagree, because that doesn't actually look like insurance anymore.
00:23:08.000But, you know, that's because I'm talking about broad public policy, not about having to win re-election when you've got these sort of sympathetic stories being trotted out on a routine basis.
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