The New York Times touts a new study saying disparities between black and white children are based on racism, President Trump congratulates Putin on his sham election, and Democrats threaten civil war. Ben Shapiro talks about it all on The Ben Shapiro Show with host, host, and radio host, Ben Shapiro (R.I.P. President Trump) and host, Dr. Michael Bloomberg (A.K.A. Joe Biden) discuss it all and more on this morning's episode of The B.S.B. Show with Ben Shapiro and his co-host, Michael Barbaro (The Weekly Standard). Subscribe to The B-S-B-S Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! You can also join the conversation by using the hashtag , and find Ben on social media using and to interact with Ben on as well! Subscribe, Like, and Share the podcast on your favorite streaming platform! If you like what you hear, share it with a friend, and tell a friend about what you're listening to on your social media! or share it on your podcast! Thanks again for listening, Ben and I hope you enjoy! Timestamps: 5:00 - President Trump Declares a Coup! 6:05 - I am now President of the United States 7:30 - We're Good! 8:15 - I Declare a Coup? 9:20 - Civil War? 11:00 | Civil War! 12: What's the problem? 15: What is the real problem here? 16:00 17:00- What's your problem is America's Problem? 18:15- What do you agree with me? 19: Is racism? 21:40 - Is racism worse? 22:30- What are you going to do now? 25:00 -- What do I want? 26: What would you like to see? 27: How do you think of the future? 30: What should I do next? 31:30 -- Is racism better? 32:30 33:30 | Is racism more important? 35: What does racism more? 36:40 -- What is racism less likely to be a problem than black? 37:40 | What is my IQ?
00:00:00.000The New York Times touts a new study saying disparities between black and white children are based on racism, President Trump congratulates Putin on his sham election, and Democrats threaten civil war.
00:00:18.000At 11.06 Eastern Time, I declared a coup.
00:00:21.000I am now President of the United States.
00:00:23.000The current government of the United States has been dissolved in its entirety, and all of them will be replaced by non-corrupt, non-prostitute schtipping people.
00:00:30.000This is how this is going to work from here on in.
00:00:32.000The IRS has been dissolved, and I declare a thumb war as well.
00:01:33.000Where is your news studio, Mr. Shapiro?
00:01:35.000Well, my news studio is directly outside the Speaker of the House's office.
00:01:38.000Actually, this office right here, this magnificent office, festooned with American flags and bust of George Washington just behind these flags, the true American president.
00:01:47.000This office was apparently the place where President Trump, right after his inauguration, went to sign a bunch of bills and also tweet some stuff.
00:01:53.000And so it is very important for that reason.
00:03:43.000Young black men lag behind young white men, not because of behavioral differences, not because young black men commit more crimes than young white men on average, or because they have a lower educational background, or because they have single dads, but because of widespread American racism.
00:03:56.000Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.
00:04:07.000White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way.
00:04:10.000Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.
00:04:15.000So what this study's main finding was is that if a black kid, a young black boy, grows up in a rich household in Beverly Hills next to a rich white family in Beverly Hills with a young white boy, that the black boy is more likely to fall into poverty than the white boy, even though they start off in the same area and with the same two-parent family.
00:04:33.000And so this must obviously be due to racism, right?
00:04:35.000This is the New York Times' take on the study.
00:04:46.000So they're removing all the factors that people would normally suggest contribute to disparities between black income and white income.
00:04:51.000They're saying even when a rich black kid grows up rich and black with two parents and goes to a good high school and all this stuff, they still have lower outcomes than white folks.
00:05:03.000So there are some people who are racially suggestive, we shall say, who say that maybe this is because black folks have lower IQs on average than white folks.
00:05:11.000The data is not there to suggest that.
00:05:12.000The reason the data is not there to suggest that is because the income
00:05:16.000Outcome right the outcome of income for for black women is exactly the same as for white women who grow up rich So the disparity only exists between young black men and young white men It does not exist between young black women and young white women So if you have a rich black girl who grows up next to a rich white girl They basically are going to have exactly the same income as their life progresses.
00:05:35.000So as I acknowledge right the study openly acknowledges that the racism doesn't extend to black women and
00:05:40.000So, first of all, this gives the lie to a lot of the intersectional nonsense you hear
00:06:21.000Because, again, black women happen to be black.
00:06:23.000So if black women have the same outcomes as white women when given the same circumstances, wouldn't that suggest that racism is not actually the central problem?
00:06:30.000Black women aren't not black just because they're treated well by the surrounding community.
00:06:37.000The study itself says that black women earn slightly more than white women conditional on parent income.
00:06:42.000There's little or no gap in wage rates or hours of work between black and white women.
00:06:46.000And black women also have a higher college attendance rate than white men, conditional on parental outcome—on parental income, rather.
00:06:53.000So, immediately, this should give you some serious pause as to the headline that was espoused by The New York Times.
00:06:58.000Again, The New York Times headline here was, extensive data shows punishing reach of racism for black boys.
00:07:02.000They're already attributing all of the difference between black boys and white boys to racism, even though that racism apparently just disappears with regard to black women.
00:07:11.000I immediately should wonder, is racism really the dividing factor here, or is it that black women and black men actually have different perspectives on decision-making processes in higher-income households?
00:07:23.000Is it possible that young black men and young black women are encouraged to pursue different activities, even in higher-income households, with two parents?
00:07:51.000It's also worth noting that one of the chief arguments in favor of the notion that blacks suffer under a regime of white privilege when they say that, you know, people like me can't speak on politics because we are a member of a white privileged class and the system was built for us.
00:08:03.000One of the arguments for white privilege is that black people suffer in the United States today because of a historic wealth gap—that because black people were subject to slavery and Jim Crow, they have less wealth in the families in which they grow up.
00:08:15.000OK, well, there is that wealth gap, but the study demonstrates that family wealth is actually not an indicator of continued life success for black men.
00:08:22.000So even when black men are growing up with a tremendous amount of wealth, they're having poorer outcomes in terms of income than white men are.
00:08:29.000So that suggests that wealth is actually not the primary differentiating factor between the outcome of people's earning power.
00:08:36.000So this is the big question of the study.
00:08:37.000The big question of the study is, are black men failing in a way black women are not because of discrimination, or is it because of differences in behavior?
00:08:44.000So my suggestion is that it would have something to do with differences in behavior.
00:08:48.000This is not the stuff the New York Times wants to cover.
00:08:50.000It's all buried in the 100-page study that I read yesterday.
00:08:53.000For example, the study discusses criminal behavior among high-income young black men, but it doesn't actually investigate the possible causal link between criminal behavior and drop in income.
00:09:02.000So the study says that black men raised in the top 1% of income, people who are millionaires, were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000 a year.
00:09:15.000That means that a black kid growing up in a millionaire household is as likely to go to prison as a white kid growing up in a household earning $36,000.
00:09:23.000Is that the result of racism, or is that the result of bad individual behavior?
00:09:28.000Is it really that the police are staking out Beverly Hills for young black men who live in that area and then just arresting them willy-nilly?
00:09:34.000Or is it possible that criminal rates among young black men, even in upper-income areas, are higher than they are among young black women, for example?
00:09:44.000It has to do instead with certain cultural inculcation, which I'll get to in just a second.
00:09:49.000In fact, the study itself recognizes that incarceration is not the result of surrounding racism, that those incarceration rates that are elevated for young black men in rich areas are not actually the result of surrounding racism.
00:10:00.000They say that the relationship between racism in a given area and incarceration rates, quote, is not statistically significant, meaning that young black men are not being arrested just because the cops are a bunch of racists in Beverly Hills.
00:10:10.000As a sidebar—and this is an important point—high black crime rates do have horrible externalities for innocent young black men.
00:10:16.000I want to talk about this in a little bit, because here's the area where racism really sort of does play a role, because I don't think that racism is a completely irrelevant factor, but I don't think it's quite racism, either.
00:10:25.000I think that it's a form of discrimination that Thomas Sowell talks about, and I'll talk about that in just a second.
00:10:32.000Other differences between young black men and young black women is that the study indicates that the impact of neighborhood on young black men matters.
00:10:40.000Young black men do best in neighborhoods with low levels of racism.
00:10:43.000The study actually, its measurements of racism are really suspect.
00:10:46.000They use the implicit assessment test, the implicit bias assessment test, which is not a good test.
00:10:51.000And high levels of fatherhood in the community at large.
00:10:53.000So, young black boys do better when there are dads in the community.
00:10:56.000What's interesting is that the study suggests it's not even having black men in the home.
00:11:00.000It's not even about having a father in the home.
00:11:02.000It's about are there high levels of black men in the community who can play the father figure role?
00:11:09.000More social fabric helps raise boys better, whether they are white or black.
00:11:12.000But these communities are pretty rare, right?
00:11:14.000Single motherhood does remain prevalent in the black community, and the study admits, quote, the fraction of low-income black fathers present is most predictive of smaller intergenerational gaps.
00:11:22.000So again, it's about single motherhood.
00:11:26.000Black boys who grow up in areas with high father presence are also significantly less likely to be incarcerated, which could explain part of the association with higher employment rates.
00:11:34.000So I will get to the end of this study and a word about discrimination in just a second.
00:11:37.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Indochino.
00:11:44.000Then all you need to do is go over to Indochino.
00:11:46.000Because the fact is, you can go buy a suit off the rack and it won't look that great on you unless you happen to be a specified size.
00:11:50.000Or you can have a suit made to order just for you by the folks over at Indochino.
00:11:54.000They're the world's largest made-to-measure menswear company that makes suits and shirts.
00:11:58.000They're created to your exact measurements for a great fit.
00:12:01.000I've been to the Inzo Chino workshop over in Beverly Hills, and it is just fantastic.
00:12:05.000They allow you to personalize your suit, they allow you to pick how you want the lapels to look, they allow you to pick the color, the lining, everything.
00:12:10.000It actually is a lot of fun, and not only that, the suit fits fantastically well.
00:12:14.000Or you can go online and submit your measurements, and they will send it directly to your house, and you have all the same abilities to personalize your suit.
00:12:20.000Again, you go there, you pick your fabric, you choose your customizations, you submit your measurements, and then you just wait for the custom suit to arrive in a few weeks.
00:12:26.000It's inzochino.com, and right now, my listeners get any premium Inzo Chino suit
00:13:02.000OK, so, back to the study that The New York Times calls a damning indictment of American racism with regard to young black boys.
00:13:08.000What I have suggested is that the data from the study actually suggests that differentiations between the outcomes for rich young black men and young black women, for example, or young black men and young white men, has little to do with generalized American racism and a lot to do with personal choices that are being made in the black community, even in areas that are more wealthy.
00:13:28.000So the study tries to attribute to generalized racism a little bit this differentiation between young black men and young white men, even if they are both rich.
00:13:38.000The study's take on racism is actually its weakest methodologically.
00:13:41.000It uses that implicit association test, as I suggested.
00:14:16.000The study itself states that closing the gap between whites and blacks is largely driven by high rates of father presence among low-income blacks,
00:14:48.000Not only that, forced integration in schools and housing won't do anything either.
00:14:52.000They'll, quote, "...also likely leave much of the gap in place, since the gap persists even among low-income children raised on the same block."
00:15:08.000So what exactly is the difference between why young black men who are growing up rich with two parent families and young white men growing up the same way have different outcomes?
00:15:17.000Well, one theory that was put forward by black anthropologist John Ogbu since the 1980s theorized that black children are often penalized socially for acting white.
00:16:35.000Vance talks specifically about this in impoverished white communities in Appalachia, for example.
00:16:40.000Communities that value education and that promote education are more likely to have children who value education, promote education, and end up with better life outcomes.
00:16:48.000The reason that Asians outperform whites is because Chinese American culture and Korean American culture, to take a couple of examples, are heavily focused on education and achievement.
00:16:55.000This is also true of Jewish Americans who came to the United States dirt poor and tested below average on IQ tests before they acclimated and ended up becoming one of the wealthier subgroups in the United States.
00:17:06.000Black children spend significantly less time on homework than any other race of children.
00:17:10.000Asian children spend significantly more time on homework.
00:17:13.000Harvard's Roland Fryer, another black scholar, formalized a particular peer effect, acting white, which potentially contributes to the ongoing puzzle of black underachievement.
00:17:21.000His suggestion is that you are socially ostracized if you spend too much time studying as a young black male.
00:17:27.000The New York Times doesn't go into any of that, of course.
00:17:29.000All they do is they just—they say young black men do worse than young white men.
00:17:33.000That must be to some greater racist issue.
00:17:35.000Now, here is where discrimination comes in.
00:17:37.000I promised you there would be discussion of discrimination.
00:17:39.000Here is the discussion of discrimination.
00:17:40.000So, there are three types of discrimination.
00:17:42.000At the end of the show, I'm going to talk about things I like.
00:17:44.000I'm going to recommend Thomas Sowell's book.
00:17:46.000Tony, he has a brand new book out on discrimination.
00:17:47.000We're going to interview him for the show.
00:17:48.000Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite thinkers.
00:17:50.000People have asked me before, if I were not declaring a clue and declaring myself president today, who would I do that for?
00:17:54.000And I've said that I would do that for Thomas Sowell, who I think is the best thinker in the country.
00:17:58.000In Thomas Sowell's book, he talks about three separate types of discrimination.
00:18:02.000And it's important for us to distinguish these things in our mind, so that we are exact when we use words like discrimination.
00:18:48.000Type 2 discrimination is the absolute, overt, alt-right racism.
00:18:52.000Black people are inferior, they're genetically inferior, and therefore, we can't hire them, they shouldn't be allowed into schools, we should live apart from them, etc., etc., right?
00:18:59.000That is actual, alt-right discrimination and racism.
00:19:01.000That exists, but it's a relatively small amount in the United—it's a very low level in the United States.
00:19:06.000In fact, I would suggest that racism across the world is much higher than it is in the United States.
00:19:11.000Then there is the type of discrimination that is somewhere in the middle.
00:19:15.000This is what Thomas Sowell calls discrimination 1B.
00:19:18.000So remember, 1A was you discriminating amongst choices.
00:19:21.0001B is you discriminating about individuals based on group data.
00:19:26.000So here is the example that Thomas Sowell uses for discrimination 1B.
00:19:30.000If 40% of people in Group X are alcoholics, and 1% of people in Group Y are alcoholics, an employer may well prefer to hire only people from Group Y for work
00:20:20.000Or is that him using group data in order to make a decision about what to do here and now based on a risk assessment?
00:20:27.000What it really is, is this discrimination 1B.
00:20:28.000Now, it makes us all a little bit queasy, right?
00:20:30.000It makes us a little bit uncomfortable, because what we would prefer is that we all see each other as individuals, that we have all the information available.
00:20:36.000But there are certain legislative efforts in place that actually prevent this.
00:20:40.000So, for example, President Obama said that he wanted federal employees to never be able to be tested for criminal background checks.
00:20:47.000He wanted federal contractors not to be able to test for criminality in background checks of employees, because he said too many young black men have gone to prison, and then they won't be able to get a job afterward.
00:20:57.000Well, the actual effect of that policy is to lower black employment, according to a study in 2001, because what do employers do when they're told that they can't do criminal background checks?
00:21:06.000Instead of screening out people who are actually criminals or who've had a criminal record, instead of doing that, what they do is they screen out entire populations.
00:21:14.000They say, okay, the criminal rate in the black community is much higher than the criminal rate in the white community, and this is particularly true among young black males, so I just won't hire young black males because I can't check whether the person's a criminal or not.
00:21:27.000Or is that just the use of group data without any further investiture of time?
00:21:31.000So there are two things that we can do to stop this sort of discrimination.
00:21:36.000I'll explain the two things we can do to stop discrimination 1B in just a second, and this is really where I think we should be putting some of our efforts.
00:21:43.000I need to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
00:21:45.000So, mass shootings, terror attacks that can happen, as we've seen, anytime, anywhere, unfortunately.
00:21:49.000London, Paris, New York, Vegas, Parkland.
00:21:51.000After every tragedy, the politicians blame the only people who need the protection the most.
00:22:01.000And they say, well, why don't you just give up your AR?
00:22:03.000And then the media show a video of some idiot sawing off the end of their AR and being prosecuted for sawing off the end of their AR and making the gun an illegal weapon.
00:22:23.000And in this guide, you will learn what we really know about mass shootings, how to survive an attack, proven strategies for stopping a shooter, and a whole lot more.
00:22:29.000Plus, the USCCA does wonderful work in ensuring that you are legally prepared in case, God forbid, you have to pull the trigger on somebody who's attempting to hurt you.
00:22:37.000Plus, this entire packet comes with a bonus audiobook so you can listen whenever you want as soon as you finish my podcast.
00:23:09.000So the reason that this actually plays a role with regard to the study that we're talking about is—let's take my suggestion for just a second—that one of the reasons that we see lower income outcomes—I know it's confusing when I say income outcome.
00:23:22.000What I mean is lower earnings outcomes for young black men than young white men who grow up in the same cohort.
00:23:29.000I'm saying maybe it's individual choices, maybe it's educational disparities brought on by cultural disdain in certain parts of the black community for education, the acting white phenomenon.
00:23:38.000There are a bunch of factors that need to be taken into account.
00:23:40.000The study doesn't actually take into account.
00:23:43.000So let's suggest that—I mean, the statistics really are stunning—that something like 10 percent of young black men in the top quintile actually have been convicted of a crime.
00:23:57.000And let's say that we have all these bans on the books that prevent you from doing federal background checks, criminal background checks on your employees.
00:24:03.000And so employers start using broad-based discrimination based on data.
00:24:08.000So they start using group data because they can't use individual data.
00:24:11.000And that means that innocent young black men are caught up in the court.
00:24:13.000And just like in the alcoholics case, 60% of the group of people who are considered more alcoholic are not alcoholic, but those people are not being hired because all the taxi company cares about
00:24:23.000is not hiring any alcoholics, and they've been prevented from screening for DUI background.
00:24:29.000So there are two ways to prevent this.
00:24:30.000One is to take away the government disincentive to actually do the research.
00:24:34.000So get rid of regulations on the books that don't allow you to do criminal background checks.
00:24:39.000Get rid of the regulations on the books that prevent people in housing from doing criminal background checks.
00:24:44.000There have been a lot of local areas that refuse to allow people who own apartment buildings, for example, to do criminal background checks of their potential clients, of potential residents at their house.
00:24:55.000Well, if I'm renting out my garage, I want to know whether the guy's a criminal or not.
00:24:58.000And if I'm not allowed to check whether the guy's a criminal, I'm just going to rent—I'm going to rent to the Amish guy down the road, because the criminal rate in the Amish community is really low.
00:25:05.000You can actually play this forward, not even with regard to black and white.
00:25:08.000You can play it forward to any community.
00:25:09.000The criminal rate in the Amish community is extremely low.
00:25:11.000If I have a choice between the normal non-Amish white guy and the Amish guy, I will choose the Amish guy every time to occupy my garage.
00:25:19.000Is that discrimination or is that a database group decision that has nothing to do with racism?
00:25:22.000It has to do just with group data that you are now applying.
00:25:34.000It also means that innocent people of the same race or of the same group as the people with the criminal record will get hired.
00:25:40.000And this is what that 2001 study showed.
00:25:42.000When you got rid of regulations preventing criminal background checks, more black people were hired.
00:25:47.000So every time the left tries to help by preventing employers from gathering information, employers simply use group data, which is a worse kind of data.
00:25:55.000So that's something that has to change.
00:25:56.000The second thing that has to change is you need to change the group data.
00:26:01.000So the criminal rates in the Jewish community when Jews first came over from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century were actually not low.
00:26:08.000They were quite high in the Italian community when Italian immigrants first came to the United States.
00:26:11.000In the Irish community, there was a reason where it said no Jews need apply, no Irish need apply, no Italians need apply.
00:26:16.000This has been true of virtually every single ethnic group that has ever entered the United States.
00:26:20.000When they first get here, they are poor and very often admired in crime.
00:26:24.000And then over the course of generations, the crime stops.
00:26:27.000Well, if you are going to prevent group data from being used as a basis for Discrimination 1B in Thomas Sowell's modeling, then what you really need to focus on is how do you get that criminal rate down?
00:26:38.000Now, what the study suggests is the first thing you need to do is ensure that there are fathers in the community.
00:26:44.000An individual decision having nothing to do with racism.
00:26:47.000As I've said many times in my speeches on this program, there's not a black man in America who is forced at gunpoint to impregnate a black woman and leave.
00:27:17.000It's much more about behavior than about race.
00:27:20.000So what I would suggest is that if you actually want to get rid of Discrimination 1B and get down to the level where we treat everybody as individuals, take away the bureaucratic and economic incentives to make group decisions, and number two,
00:27:37.000Okay, so the reason I spent so much time on this is because, number one, I got a lot of emails about this particular study, but number two, because I think that it's indicative of what the media want.
00:27:49.000The media only quoted a certain segment of the study, right?
00:27:51.000They said, this shows that racism is responsible for young black boys not succeeding in America, and then
00:27:57.000It's pretty obvious they didn't even analyze the vast majority of the study, right?
00:28:00.000That entire section near the end where they say that forced housing integration is not going to work, and forced busing is not going to work, and income redistribution is not going to work, right?
00:28:10.000All of that was left out by The New York Times.
00:28:12.000It shows you the media bias when they are in pursuit of a particular agenda.
00:28:15.000OK, so now I want to talk about a controversy that has broken out over President Trump, of course.
00:28:22.000Apparently, called up Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, who won an overwhelming election victory, in the least surprising result, since Fidel Castro won an overwhelming election victory.
00:29:10.000As you know, he made a statement that being in an arms race is not a great thing.
00:29:15.000That was right after the election, one of the first statements he made.
00:29:17.000And also to discuss Ukraine and Syria and North Korea and various other things.
00:29:25.000OK, so the part that's troubling is obviously not to talk about the arms race.
00:29:28.000The part that's troubling is where he says that he congratulated Putin.
00:29:31.000So, it has now been leaked to the Washington Post that Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers on Tuesday when he congratulated Putin.
00:29:39.000There was apparently a section in his briefing materials in all capital letters stating, do not congratulate, according to officials familiar with the call.
00:29:47.000One, people in the White House should not be leaking what's on national security documents to the press.
00:29:51.000Okay, obviously there's some serious leaks still inside the White House.
00:29:55.000The fractiousness of the White House is insane.
00:29:57.000The fact that this stuff is leaking is not good.
00:29:59.000Second of all, if you want President Trump to do something, never write in capital letters for him not to do something.
00:30:05.000Okay, because if the President of the United States—he is like my four-year-old daughter, who at this point in her life says whatever the opposite is of what I want her to say.
00:30:14.000If I want her to stop jumping on her bed, I have to tell her that I want her to continue jumping on her bed.
00:30:18.000Never write on a piece of paper, do not congratulate Putin and slide it in front of the president in all capital letters because he's just going to, in his own mind, go, I can congratulate whoever I want.
00:30:38.000And, you know, the defense of it was equally stupid.
00:30:40.000Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the spokeswoman for the White House, she said that—you know, she was asked about this, and her answer was rather morally egregious.
00:31:07.000Putin has been elected in their country, and that's not something that we can dictate to them how they operate.
00:31:14.000We can only focus on the freeness and the fairness of our election, something we 100% fully support, and something we're going to continue to do everything we can to protect, to make sure bad actors don't have the opportunity to impact them in any way.
00:32:28.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:37.000OK, so, is this a smart thing for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to say?
00:32:40.000No, this is a very dumb thing for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to say.
00:32:43.000The president should not have congratulated Putin.
00:32:45.000Obviously, the president has an unfortunate habit of congratulating dictators on their election after Erdogan, who's the dictator of Turkey, won his election.
00:33:42.000There's been a big debate in American foreign policy that I think is not really an honest one.
00:33:46.000And that is, should morality play a part in our foreign policy?
00:33:49.000There are people who declare themselves sort of foreign policy realists—this would be folks like Rand Paul—who say morality really shouldn't play a role in American foreign policy.
00:34:07.000The other is that it costs us too much money and too much time and too much treasure.
00:34:11.000These arguments are not mutually exclusive, but they also are not identical.
00:34:15.000You can make the argument that morality should help dictate our foreign policy, but we shouldn't spend money in this particular place.
00:34:21.000I did that with regard to, for example, the Libyan intervention—or the Syrian intervention, actually.
00:34:27.000I think you can make fair arguments on either side.
00:34:28.000But for those who say that morality should not dictate our foreign policy, of course morality does dictate our foreign policy, because the whole rationale for a strong America
00:34:36.000At home, even, for us existing, is because we are a more moral system.
00:34:39.000Now, you may say, what strengthens America is not to get entangled in foreign battles.
00:34:53.000So, you know, I think that a lot of the talk about morality in foreign policy going out the window because Trump's a foreign policy realist is actually not true.
00:35:01.000I just think that that's a bit of a fib and a futzing over on the part of the Trump administration.
00:35:06.000There's a big article over at the Washington Post, again, targeting Cambridge Analytica and talking about how Cambridge Analytica is the root of all evil.
00:35:13.000We've been following this story all week, because I think this whole thing is a front.
00:35:16.000I think—it's very rare that I air a quasi-conspiracy theory.
00:35:20.000I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, because I think that all of it has been basically said.
00:35:23.000I think that Zuckerberg has not been unclear over at Facebook about what his agenda is.
00:35:28.000What's happening here is pretty obvious.
00:35:40.000But until now, there's been no allegation of actual illegal activity.
00:35:43.000There's been allegations that they gathered an enormous amount of Facebook data and then cross-tabulated people's personal preferences with their politics, which is like, OK, whatever.
00:36:14.000The reason that Facebook has moved, as I discussed at length yesterday, ad nauseam yesterday, the reason that Facebook has moved against conservatives is because Zuckerberg is on the left and because the left has pressured Facebook and Google and YouTube and Twitter and said that you guys are responsible for Trump's election.
00:36:27.000You need to somehow rejigger your algorithms to prevent those nefarious right-wingers from taking advantage of the situation.
00:36:33.000Well, the scandal of the day now, today's scandal, is not that they did anything illegal.
00:36:38.000But instead, that they did research on what presumed Trump voters would like.
00:36:42.000So, according to Christopher Wiley, who's the pink-haired dude who was the informant to the U.K.
00:36:47.000Guardian about Cambridge Analytica, Wiley said that both Bannon—Steve Bannon, who's a stockholder in Cambridge Analytica, and Rebecca Mercer,
00:37:22.000The year before Trump announced his presidential bid, the data firm had already found a high level of alienation among young white Americans with a conservative bent.
00:37:28.000In focus groups arranged to test messages for the 2014 midterms, these voters responded, according to the Washington Post, these voters responded to calls for building a new wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants, to reforms intending to drain the swamp of Washington's entrenched political community, and to thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called race realism, he recounted.
00:37:47.000OK, so the first few messages here are utterly anodyne, right?
00:37:50.000A lot of people want to build the wall.
00:37:52.000A lot of people want to drain the swamp.
00:37:54.000Washington is a swamp, even though it's snowing here today.
00:37:57.000And—but it's the last thing here that I think that the media are jumping on, and that is thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called race realism.
00:38:05.000So, that's the only reference in this article to race and the crossover to potential Trump voters.
00:38:11.000Now, I don't have enough data here to actually make a decision as to what exactly was being polled.
00:38:19.000It has been linked to scientific racism.
00:38:21.000It's the basic idea that distinctions between groups are racially based.
00:38:25.000Not the argument that I was making with regard to racial differences in outcome being linked to individual decision-making, but racial differences in outcome being linked to racial disparity in biology.
00:38:39.000If that's actually what was being polled, that's not a good thing.
00:38:41.000That also doesn't suggest that everybody who's a Trump supporter was a race realist.
00:38:45.000Or knew that they were endorsing race realist messages.
00:38:49.000It also doesn't define race realism really specifically in this article.
00:38:51.000So, I'd like to see a little more data on that before we declare every Trump voter racist, which is really what the Washington Post, it seems like, wants to do here.
00:38:58.000The firm apparently also tested views of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
00:39:01.000According to Wiley, the only foreign thing we tested was Putin.
00:39:04.000It turns out there's a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader, and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin's invasion of Crimea.
00:39:13.000That, again, is not particularly surprising.
00:39:15.000There were polls done at the time—open polls, right?
00:39:17.000This is not Cambridge Analytica's doing.
00:39:18.000There were open polls about Putin at the time, and there were a lot of conservatives who were responding to how much they disliked Obama by saying that anybody who humiliated Obama on the world stage was suddenly good.
00:39:27.000It should have been an indicator that tribal politics had taken over.
00:39:33.000The idea that strong and powerful is a synonym for good is undemocratic and un-American.
00:39:39.000So, this is a fight that I've been fighting for a long time.
00:39:42.000Again, I think there were tribal tendencies in the last election cycle.
00:39:45.000I think those tribal tendencies certainly existed on the right.
00:39:47.000I talked at length about the alt-right in the last election cycle.
00:39:49.000I talked at length about my fears that there was a perversion of conservative ideas going on toward certain authoritarian endorsements, and also toward a certain level of identity politics based on white solidarity that I really don't like and I think is, again, un-American and anti-constitutional.
00:41:06.000Well, I think we really need to find out whether or not in their conversations with Luck Oil, which is a Russian oil company, whether or not that was really a pretense to use what is called Russian cutouts.
00:41:20.000And they were, in fact, informing Russia and maybe even working with Russia and the Trump campaign.
00:41:26.000It all comes back to why all these relationships with Russia?
00:41:32.000OK, and again, that's really vague, and Speier has no actual allegations to make, but she hopes that if she says Russia, Russia, Russia over again, then everything looks illegitimate.
00:41:39.000Now, back to the identity politics point.
00:41:41.000One of the great fears that I had when President Trump was elected—I had three fears when President Trump was elected.
00:41:45.000Fear number one was that President Trump would be so toxic that he'd sink the Republican agenda, even if he were president.
00:42:16.000And it looks to me like Republicans in Congress are doing a fairly decent job of checking President Trump's worst impulses.
00:42:21.000So, for example, Senator—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he's been open and obvious about the fact that he doesn't want Trump to fire Robert Mueller, the special investigator.
00:42:30.000So, for all of Trump's fulminations over Robert Mueller, there's no evidence that anything's going to happen here.
00:42:36.000Here's what McConnell had to say yesterday.
00:42:38.000Well, look, I agree with the president's lawyers that Bob Mueller should be allowed to finish his job.
00:42:45.000I think it was an excellent appointment.
00:42:49.000He will go wherever the facts lead him.
00:42:53.000And I think he will have great credibility.
00:42:57.000So listen, I think that President Trump still could toxify the Republican brand, but in reality, have Republicans fallen on bended knee to everything Trump wants to do?
00:45:21.000There is the... All of the... So basically, it's about a woman who is mute, who falls in love with a fish man,
00:45:27.000from the Black Lagoon, and has to help him escape the clutches of an evil American general and his sidekick, right?
00:45:33.000A Bible-believing American sidekick who also happens to be a sexual harasser and abuser, as well as a racist and an anti-gay piece of crap, right?
00:45:43.000So, basically, it's every possible trope that the left has ever said about Mike Pence, except they say it about Michael Shannon's character, and he's a villain who just, for no reason, wants to cut open this fish man, this magical fish man.
00:45:52.000He doesn't want to research him or have a conversation with him.
00:45:54.000He wants to cut him open for no reason other than America is a terrible place.
00:45:57.000And this guy, of course, is trained by the military, and the military is awful.
00:46:00.000It's legitimately every lefty—it's why I won Best Picture.
00:46:04.000The fish man has helped to escape and have sexual pleasure with a human woman, which is, again, very odd.
00:46:10.000And all this is aided and abetted by the gay neighbor, right, the generous and wonderful gay neighbor, who is rejected in his advances on a younger man.
00:46:18.000And the younger man, I love that they add this in the movie, the younger man is very nice to the gay man until the gay man makes advances, at which point he goes, whoa, buddy.
00:46:25.000And then right at that moment in the film, a black couple walks into his diner and the young man acts racist to the black couple.
00:46:31.000So it's not enough just to say that the guy wasn't into the whole gay thing, right?
00:46:42.000So, the bands of untouchables in this movie who help Fish Man escape are a mute woman, who apparently, we learn, spoiler alert, can breathe underwater, and a gay man who's being rejected because he's gay, and a black woman who is put upon by her stupid husband
00:47:04.000She's a sassy black lady put upon by her stupid husband.
00:47:46.000OK, if surreal writing just means you get to write stupid crap that makes no sense and then claim that it's a metaphor, then well done, Guillermo del Toro.