Justin Trudeau emerges in pictures of blackface, but the Fed's lower rates, but President Trump is enraged anyway, and Democrats host teens to talk about climate change, we'll get to that in just one second. But first, we have to discuss the importance of life insurance, and the fact that if you're interested in life insurance you should check out PolicyGenius, where you get finalized quotes, not estimates, and their team of experts will help you compare your options side by side. If you already have coverage, the Policy Genius team will shop your policy around if there's a better rate out there out there, and get you switched. Plus, clients who bundle their home and auto insurance through Policygenius typically save an additional 20% on their home insurance policies. That's the easy way to compare and buy home insurance once more, and let them know that they sent you! Go check out the website today. If you need home insurance for a new place, or you just want to reshop your current policy, head on over to PolicyGeniuses and get started on your plan today. That s a one-stop shop for your insurance needs. You can get started, on your smartphone, right now. You ll get a 20% discount on your policy, and you ll get 20% off your current rate. It s not that bad, right? Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show, The Show on The . And let me know what you think about it on the next episode of show by calling in to Ben Shapiro and let him know what he s been up to on or what you s got to do on the last place he s up to that s gonna be up to to do that on the episode that he s got a chance to do it on that s got it up on his he s gonna do that a thing that s happening today on the thing that he did on that or he s doing that s up on the he did that s not doing that on that episode on his thing on his s got that s that s s on his tweet about that s_ on that thing he s_ that s doing it on his_ , he s getting a whole thing, too he s not so he s really getting it up to that s s s gonna talk about it, right
00:00:00.000Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, emerges in pictures of blackface, the Fed's lower rates, but President Trump is enraged anyway, and Democrats host teens to talk about climate change.
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00:01:45.000Okay, so Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada.
00:01:48.000He's handsome Bernie Sanders, as I like to say.
00:01:50.000And Justin Trudeau has made a career out of being insanely politically correct.
00:01:55.000He has campaigned on political correctness and sensitivity, and he's a feelings guy, right?
00:02:01.000I mean, when he's not snowboarding and when he's not teaching elementary school, he's prime ministering and talking about feelings.
00:02:07.000Well, it now has emerged that there are two separate instances in which Justin Trudeau wore either brownface or blackface.
00:02:15.000Now, I do want to make clear That there are gradations to wrongness here, okay?
00:02:20.000This is not, not only my model, I think this is particularly obvious to anyone who is living, right?
00:02:25.000If you are dressed Al Jolson style in 1920s, dressed in blackface in order to mock black people, that is not quite the same thing as you dressed up as Michael Jackson in 1985 when the Thriller video was huge.
00:02:36.000One is to pay tribute to Michael Jackson, the other is to make fun of black people.
00:02:44.000Okay, so the question is, what was Justin Trudeau actually doing wearing brownface or blackface?
00:02:50.000Now it turns out there are two instances of Justin Trudeau doing this.
00:02:52.000Okay, so according to Time Magazine, Justin Trudeau, Canada's Prime Minister, wore brownface makeup to a party at the private school where he was teaching in the spring of 2001.
00:03:01.000Time has now obtained a photograph of the incident.
00:03:03.000The photograph has not been previously reported.
00:03:05.000The picture was taken at an Arabian Nights-themed gala.
00:03:08.000It shows Trudeau, then the 29-year-old son of the late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, wearing a turban and robes, with his face, neck, and hands completely darkened.
00:03:16.000The photograph appears in the 2000-2001 yearbook of West Point Grey Academy, a private day school where Trudeau was a teacher.
00:03:23.000Okay, so this is when he was 29, which is not super young.
00:03:26.000Earlier this month, Time obtained a copy of the yearbook, The View, with the photograph of Trudeau in brownface from Vancouver businessman Michael Adamson, who was part of the West Point Grey Academy community.
00:03:37.000Adamson was not at the party, which was attended by school faculty, administrators, and parents of students.
00:03:41.000He said he first saw the photograph in July and felt it should be made public.
00:03:45.000And that was not the only picture of Justin Trudeau to emerge.
00:03:50.000Trudeau then came forward and said that he had worn blackface makeup in high school to sing Deo, a Jamaican folk song famously performed by Harry Belafonte.
00:03:58.000And there is this picture of him from a high school yearbook dressed up in an afro and with his face darkened, presumably to sing Deo.
00:04:07.000And then tape has now emerged of him dressed in a very similar outfit in which he is singing Deo.
00:04:15.000They did confirm to us last night that we are looking at Justin Trudeau in this video.
00:04:20.000You can see that he has blackface makeup on.
00:04:23.000It's covering his face, neck, his arms and hands, and you can see between the tears in his jeans there that he also appears to have the makeup down his legs as well.
00:04:31.000This, as you mentioned, is the third image of him within about 12 hours that has come out.
00:04:38.000Okay, so there are two separate incidents that we are talking about here.
00:04:41.000They're a bunch of images, but two separate incidents.
00:04:43.000One is this Arabian Nights party in 2001, when he was teaching at a private school.
00:04:48.000And the other is apparently from the early 1990s, because he graduated from high school in the early 1990s.
00:04:53.000So Justin Trudeau comes out and he makes a statement, and his statement is basically, this is racist stuff.
00:04:59.000I didn't think of it as racist at the time, but it clearly is, and I apologize.
00:05:03.000I take responsibility for my decision to do that.
00:05:40.000And there are gradations of wrong, right?
00:05:42.000Just like in all of life, there are gradations of categories of wrong.
00:05:47.000So that's issue number one, categories of wrong.
00:05:49.000The second question is, if you participate without intent in racism, are you a racist?
00:05:56.000And this is an interesting question, because there are lots of people who do stuff that they don't realize is racist at the time or discriminatory at the time.
00:06:03.000Not even discriminatory, engaging in stereotypes.
00:06:06.000Discrimination implies that you have actively stopped somebody from advancing in society.
00:06:11.000Racism may just amount to you involving yourself in stereotyping.
00:06:16.000Can you engage in racist activity, like dressing up in blackface, without knowing that it was wrong?
00:06:23.000And then finally, there's the third question, which is the question of timing and the question of can people change over time and what kind of society we want to have.
00:06:31.000So let's go through these questions one by one and try to break this down in rational fashion.
00:06:34.000And remember, I don't like Justin Trudeau as a politician.
00:06:38.000I think that Justin Trudeau is wrong on nearly every issue.
00:06:42.000I think that he stands with the woke-skulled in general.
00:06:45.000And so there is a tremendous irony to the fact that so many of these blackface or brownface or makeup photos are now coming out about people who have spent careers trying to ruin other careers based on stuff that people have said 30 years ago, right?
00:06:57.000Justin Trudeau stands firmly in the woke-skulled category.
00:06:59.000And so there's something deliciously ironic about the fact that now the crowd is coming for him.
00:07:03.000All right, I don't think Justin Trudeau would be out there defending a Republican in the United States if the same thing happened today, right?
00:07:10.000So I'm not defending Justin Trudeau's original behavior, but I am going to say I don't think that Justin Trudeau deserves to lose an election based on this, nor do I think that Justin Trudeau deserves to be judged as a human being based simply on these incidents, and I'll explain why.
00:07:23.000So let's begin with that first question.
00:07:26.000The answer is yes, there are gradations to this.
00:07:28.000As I mentioned at the outset, Al Jolson dressing up in blackface in 1910-1920 is a very different thing than Justin Trudeau dressing up as Aladdin in Arabian Nights in 2001.
00:07:42.000One is meant specifically to be derogatory toward black people.
00:07:47.000It is meant to denigrate black people.
00:07:49.000It is meant to make fun of black people.
00:07:52.000The Harry Belafonte Afro is closer to that.
00:07:56.000It's closer to that, but even there, I really don't think that Justin... I have doubts that Justin Trudeau in the 1990s was doing anything other than just trying to shock people by being transgressive.
00:08:07.000I highly doubt that Justin Trudeau meant blackface in the same way that Al Jolson and company in 1910, 1915 meant blackface.
00:08:15.000The sort of Amos and Andy kind of stuff.
00:08:16.000I really don't think that that is what we are talking about here.
00:08:27.000Point number two is the question as to what the intent was.
00:08:31.000So when Justin Trudeau says, I participated in something racist, but I didn't know it was racist, That's a really interesting way to put it, and I kind of think that that model is worth exploring a little bit.
00:08:44.000The reason being that people very often unconsciously do things that hurt other people.
00:08:49.000We see this constantly in the realm of human behavior.
00:08:51.000People will transgress into territory that they didn't realize crossed a line, and then when they're informed that it crossed a line, they say, oh, well, I really didn't mean to say that.
00:08:59.000I'm sorry, I didn't realize that that was an offensive thing.
00:09:01.000I didn't realize I'd now engaged in a stereotype that's really not where I'm meant to go.
00:09:06.000So can you engage in a racist behavior without intent?
00:09:10.000The behavior can be racist, and also, you are not necessarily a racist for engaging in the behavior if you don't have the intent to be racist.
00:09:17.000I do think that intent is an element of the crime when it comes to racism.
00:09:21.000And broadening out the definition of racist act to make the person who engaged in it a racist human, Without any sort of question of intent being brought to bear seems weird to me.
00:09:32.000So, to take a perfectly obvious example, let's say that you have a person who is very much on the political left who dressed up as Michael Jackson in 1985 at some sort of event.
00:09:46.000Is that the same thing as a member of the KKK dressing up as Michael Jackson at an event in 1985?
00:09:55.000I think that intent is an element of the crime, meaning that the crime is exactly the same from an objective point of view, but intent does matter to determining the character of the human being who is engaged in this.
00:10:05.000And this brings us to the third point, and that is, do you think that Justin Trudeau has matured or gotten better or what does his career say?
00:10:12.000Does his career say that this is a guy who's a racist?
00:10:15.000Does his career say that this is a guy who's anti-Arab because he dressed up in brownface in 2001 or anti-black because he dressed up in blackface and danced around as Harry Belafonte in 1990?
00:10:29.000What exactly is Justin Trudeau as a human being?
00:10:33.000When you're voting, you're basing your vote on what you think of the human being in total.
00:10:38.000And I said this about Ralph Northam, too.
00:10:40.000Again, a politician I despise for his policies.
00:10:43.000I know personally, his policies are awful.
00:10:45.000I mean, this is a person who went out there and talked basically openly about the possibility of infanticide.
00:10:50.000I still said that when that photo came out of Ralph Northam, in what really was a truly egregious photo, does that characterize him for the rest of his life?
00:10:59.000And do we want to live in a society where he can go back 20 years and nobody has a- We have a time machine that only works in one way.
00:11:06.000I'll explain in just one second about the time machine that is our current politics.
00:11:11.000First, let's talk about the coffee that you drink.
00:11:13.000So today is a day where I need coffee.
00:12:20.000Okay, so Trudeau makes the statement and To go back to the point I was making, right now we live in an era in politics in which apology is considered a sin.
00:12:31.000If you say, I did something 20 years ago, but that's not me, we say, ah, but you did it 20 years ago, didn't you?
00:12:37.000Ah, you're a bad person because you did it 20 years ago.
00:13:16.000And that doesn't characterize me as a human being.
00:13:18.000I don't know what more you expect from him.
00:13:20.000We have a time machine that only works in one way.
00:13:22.000And that time machine is excellent at going back and finding stuff and bringing it back to the future, right?
00:13:27.000Going back and getting the sports book and bringing it back to the future.
00:13:31.000But there's one problem with the time machine, and that is in the here and now, we do not allow you to justify your behavior, apologize, explain.
00:14:16.000And we don't have any ability to ask him because, again, the time machine don't work that way.
00:14:19.000So instead, we have a time machine that brings back all the bad stuff, but doesn't allow us to explore your mind at the time.
00:14:25.000So we are supposed to speculate on your mind at the time, based on that activity and no other data.
00:14:30.000We're not allowed to take into account anything you've ever done since.
00:14:32.000And we're supposed to pretend that you're the same person now that you were then.
00:14:35.000And we're supposed to read your activity in the worst possible light with the worst possible intent, even though the evidence of intent is lacking.
00:14:42.000That's the world that people want to create right now.
00:14:45.000Now listen, I want Justin Trudeau to lose that election.
00:14:47.000And I'm not speaking on behalf of a political point here.
00:14:51.000I'm speaking on behalf of a culture of forgiveness in society that makes us able to live with one another.
00:14:57.000Because I promise you that if we get a time machine and we go back into everyone's past, there will be something that is embarrassing.
00:15:03.000And then the only question for the left really becomes, have people engaged in enough of a struggle session that we allow them to go?
00:15:09.000And by struggle session, that means that you cave to certain political priorities.
00:15:14.000Somehow, Ralph Northam has been able to survive the ire of the left, mainly because he is on the left.
00:15:20.000Justin Trudeau will be able to self-flagellate enough that people will let him go on this thing.
00:15:27.000Maybe he pledges to build some affordable housing.
00:15:29.000Maybe he pledges to have meetings with local Muslim groups to demonstrate how sorry he is.
00:15:36.000But the reality is we don't know what was in his head at the time, we have no capacity for forgiveness, and we also fail to recognize that stuff that happened 20 years ago happens in different contexts.
00:15:44.000What we have here is a very short-term representation of the longer-term problem that we now see in teaching American and world history, which is, we go back to 1790, and we look at Thomas Jefferson, we're like, that dude owned slaves.
00:16:58.000And if we have no capacity for forgiveness of the stuff that people have done in the past, there's no way to move forward from that.
00:17:04.000Because otherwise, we could club each other over the head about this stuff all day long.
00:17:08.000But in order for us to have a productive conversation politically and as a society generally, we do have to assume good intentions in the now.
00:17:16.000It doesn't mean I have to assume good intentions 20 years ago, but we do have to assume good intentions in the now unless you can provide evidence that that is untrue.
00:17:25.000And an old photo from 20 or 30 years ago does not prove that your intentions in the now are bad.
00:17:30.000And if the idea is that we are going to now change the assumption and assume that your intentions in the now are bad because of something bad that happened, and the only way for you to demonstrate your good intentions is to do what I want, then this isn't about alleviating problems at all.
00:17:50.000I don't think that motivations matter too much when it comes to talking about facts.
00:17:56.000It is a fact that Justin Trudeau did this stuff.
00:17:58.000But I think that when it comes to the way in which we castigate somebody like Justin Trudeau, the motives do matter.
00:18:03.000And if you're motivated not by your outrage at Justin Trudeau dressing up in 2001, by the fact that you don't want him elected Prime Minister of Canada again, then you're doing decency wrong.
00:18:14.000Again, this cuts against my political interest.
00:18:26.000I'll explain what I mean by that in just one second.
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00:19:50.000So when I say be an adult and I say it's time to be an adult, one of the things that happens when you are a small child is you think that your parents are perfect.
00:21:13.000And in fact, you appreciate your parents more for being People.
00:21:17.000Because in spite of all their foibles, in spite of all their flaws, they did all this incredible stuff for you.
00:21:22.000Or, you can be a douche, and you can spend the rest of your life going around complaining that all the problems that your parents created in your life, it's your parents' fault, it's not your fault, because you are infallible.
00:21:33.000You can start seeing something in common with your parents, or you can say, well, adults should be infallible, I'm infallible, all my problems are my parents' fault.
00:21:39.000Okay, that's what we have to question as a society.
00:21:42.000When we look at prominent figures, or any figures really, when we look at our neighbors, we have to ask a question.
00:21:48.000Do we expect perfection from everybody, or do we take the generally more true statement that everyone has sinned, and people are striving to do their best as a general rule in the face of their own sinful nature?
00:21:59.000Do people make mistakes and progress from it?
00:22:01.000Do we assume the worst of motives for every single act?
00:22:04.000Or do we assume the worst of motives for political purposes?
00:22:06.000If we're doing any of that stuff, we are doing being a human being wrong and we are making society worse.
00:22:11.000And my fear is that with all this Justin Trudeau stuff, just as an example, And that the whole hubbub isn't making the society better.
00:22:20.000Like, we can all be more sensitive about brownface and blackface, fine with me, but that that's not the purpose here.
00:22:24.000That the purpose really here is to club people into supporting particular points of view, or club them into behaving in certain ways that really have nothing to do with sensitivity or morality.
00:22:37.000And that the shaming tactics that are now being applied across a broad range of human activity are making the world unlivable.
00:22:45.000And worse, and making people less likely to have fun, knowing that 10 years from now, you're never gonna be, you're not gonna live it down, right?
00:22:54.000It's the reason why I tell high school students, when I speak on high school and college campuses, I tell high school students, college students, never post anything online, because the fact is they're gonna shift the lines, and all the stuff that is innocent today will now be considered terrible 10 years from now.
00:23:05.000And maybe it is terrible today, but it hasn't occurred to anybody yet.
00:23:10.000Because do you really think that if Justin Trudeau had shown up at that 2001, he's 29 years old, he shows up to that particular event wearing brown makeup, and one person had gone up to Justin Trudeau and said, you know, Justin, I'm really offended by that.
00:23:43.000I don't know how we live together if this is the standard.
00:23:45.000In fact, I think it's a standard deliberately designed to keep us from living with one another.
00:23:49.000Okay, meantime, in other news that is kind of making the rounds, the left is really pushing this one hard.
00:23:57.000According to the Washington Post, Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Shane Harris reporting, President Trump's communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say.
00:24:25.000Trump's interaction with the foreign leader included a promise that was regarded as so troubling, it prompted an official in the U.S.
00:24:31.000intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint.
00:24:35.000with the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
00:24:43.000So, another leak from the administration.
00:24:45.000It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed.
00:24:52.000It raised new questions about the president's handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationships with US spy agencies.
00:25:00.000One former official said that the communication was a phone call.
00:25:04.000The White House declined to comment late Wednesday night.
00:25:06.000The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a lawyer representing the whistleblower declined to comment.
00:25:12.000Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of urgent concern, a legal threshold that requires notification of a Congressional Oversight Committee.
00:25:22.000So in other words, someone in the intel community filed a so-called whistleblower complaint.
00:25:26.000A whistleblower complaint once filed means you can't be fired for having blown the whistle.
00:25:29.000He fired a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General.
00:25:34.000And the inspector general determined that the complaint was credible and troubling, and therefore Congress had to be notified.
00:25:40.000The Congressional Oversight Committees had to be notified.
00:25:42.000But the acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, has refused to share deals about Trump's alleged transaction with lawmakers, touching off a legal and political dispute that has spilled into public view and prompted speculation that the spy chief is improperly protecting the president.
00:25:57.000He said, no, I'm not turning that over.
00:25:59.000So basically, he disagrees with the Inspector General of the intelligence community.
00:26:02.000And this, once again, raises the big problem.
00:26:06.000of unitary executive theory versus the idea that there are independent agencies within the executive branch.
00:26:12.000So under Justice Scalia's unitary executive theory and the Constitution of the United States, once you delegate power from the legislature to the executive branch, everybody in the executive branch works for the president.
00:26:22.000He's the head of the executive branch.
00:26:24.000So if something happens that is bad within the executive branch, then the notion that those people can simply determine, in the absence of running it up the chain of command, what to do and then answer only to Congress creates serious balance of power issues.
00:26:41.000Because what you really could end up with is the Congressional branch running the Executive branch.
00:26:47.000You could end up with the Legislature running the Executive with a bunch of unelected officials who were appointed by Congress And then left there forever.
00:26:59.000You end up with an unanswerable branch of Congress in the bureaucracy.
00:27:03.000But that runs up against situations like this, like what if the whistleblower complaint is actually a serious problem?
00:27:09.000What if the whistleblower is actually making a complaint that is criminal in nature?
00:27:17.000So this is where you end up with these sort of constitutional crisis questions.
00:27:22.000The dispute is expected to escalate Thursday when Atkinson is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee in a classified session close to the public.
00:27:29.000The hearing is the latest move by committee chairman Adam Schiff to compel U.S.
00:27:33.000intelligence officials to disclose the full details of the whistleblower complaint to Congress.
00:27:38.000McGuire has agreed to testify before the panel next week.
00:27:40.000He declined to comment for the article.
00:27:43.000According to Schiff, who has fibbed about this kind of stuff in the past with regard to Russia, the inspector general determined the complaint is both credible and urgent.
00:27:50.000The complaint was filed with Atkinson's office on August 12th, a date on which Trump was at his golf resort in New Jersey.
00:27:57.000White House records indicate that Trump had had conversations or interactions with at least five foreign leaders in the preceding five weeks.
00:28:04.000Among them was a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin the White House initiated on July 31st.
00:28:09.000Trump also received at least two letters from Kim Jong-un during the summer.
00:28:14.000It also could have been the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, or the Emir of Qatar.
00:28:19.000So because Putin's name is on the list, this has led people to speculate that Trump made some sort of promise to Putin that was super-duper law-breaking, and that somebody in the intelligence community then notified the Inspector General, blew the whistle, and the Inspector General was like, okay, you gotta go tell Congress, and then the head of the National Intelligence Community said, no, you don't.
00:28:43.000Statements and letters exchanged between the offices of the DNI and the House Intelligence Committee in recent days have pointed at the White House without directly implicating the president.
00:28:51.000Schiff has said he was told the complaint concerned conduct by someone outside of the intelligence community.
00:28:57.000The dispute has put McGuire thrust into the DNI job in an acting capacity with the resignation of Daniel Coats last month at the center of a politically perilous conflict with constitutional implications.
00:29:07.000Schiff is demanding full disclosure of the whistleblower complaint.
00:29:10.000McGuire is defending his refusal by saying that the subject of the complaint is beyond his jurisdiction.
00:29:15.000In other words, a member of the intel community filing a complaint about the president, that doesn't fall under the intelligence auspices, right?
00:29:25.000And if the Congress wants to subpoena Trump and have him testify, or if the Congress wants to issue, you know, pass laws to that effect, they can do it.
00:29:36.000Defenders of McGuire dispute he's subverting legal requirements to protect Trump, saying he's trapped in a legitimate legal predicament and he has made his displeasure clear to officials at the Justice Department and the White House.
00:29:46.000By law, McGuire is required to transmit complaints to Congress within seven days.
00:29:50.000In this case, he refrained from doing so because he turned to the Justice Department for some sort of guidance and they said, you're not allowed to turn this stuff over.
00:29:58.000Legal experts, according to the Washington Post, say there are scenarios in which a president's communications with a foreign leader could rise to the level of an urgent concern for the intelligence community.
00:30:06.000But they also noted that the president has broad authority to decide unilaterally when to declassify or classify information.
00:30:14.000So in other words, if it was somebody in the intel community who is basically suggesting, oh, you know what?
00:30:19.000We don't like that Trump gave this info to Putin.
00:30:21.000All Trump has to do is say, boom, declassified.
00:30:47.000I'm talking about two additional hours per day.
00:30:50.000I'm talking about me talking at you and with you for two additional hours a day.
00:30:54.000I'm talking about you get our Sunday special on Saturday.
00:30:57.000This week, you're definitely going to want to tune in to the Sunday special and get the material we have behind the paywall.
00:31:01.000Our final question, because Kennedy from Fox Business Network stopped by and it was great.
00:31:06.000Here's a little bit of what that sounded like.
00:31:09.000Anytime something happens that feels like it's beyond our control, the knee-jerk is, we need more government, as if government is going to solve things.
00:31:53.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:31:57.000Okay, so the Federal Reserve has decided that it is time to lower the benchmark interest rate of the Fed.
00:32:11.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point for the second time in as many months to cushion the economy against a global slowdown amplified by the U.S.-China trade war.
00:32:21.000Now, President Trump had, of course, been calling on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
00:32:25.000He wants them to keep lowering and keep lowering and keep lowering.
00:32:27.000The idea being that if they do, that spurs borrowing and lending and that that will jog the economy.
00:32:33.000See, there's this weird catch-22, politically speaking, that President Trump is in, with regard to the economy.
00:32:49.000On the one hand, if the economy is really going gangbusters, if the economy is really super strong, there's no real reason for a rate cut.
00:32:56.000If the economy is strong, you don't need to cut rates to, quote-unquote, spur growth and spur spending and boost lending and all of this.
00:33:03.000If, however, the rates are continuously lowered, that indicates that Trump thinks that the economy is starting to turn south, which cuts against his re-elect efforts.
00:33:44.000stocks wobbled and paired losses after the Fed's decision.
00:33:46.000Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, ticked higher, though held their recent range, meaning that people said, OK, maybe the economy is stabilizing a little bit.
00:33:55.000Markets have been looking to the Fed for more concrete promises of rate cuts, but Powell has been reluctant to make any.
00:33:59.000The trade-related risks are out of the Fed's control and difficult to predict.
00:34:03.000Officials are divided over how to respond.
00:34:05.000In other words, the tariff war is having a toll on the American economy.
00:34:08.000If Trump were to cut some sort of deal with the Chinese, that'd probably help the economy, and then you don't need to cut rates.
00:34:13.000But Jerome Powell has no idea what's gonna happen, because nobody has any idea what's going to happen.
00:34:18.000Seven of the 10 Fed officials voted in favor of lowering the benchmark of federal funds rates to a range between 1.75% and 2%, with two Reserve Bank presidents preferring to hold rates steady, and one favoring a larger half-point cut.
00:34:31.000The Fed also, on Wednesday, injected money into the banking system for the second day in a row to ease a crunch an overnight funding market said it would do so again on Thursday.
00:34:41.000The operations are aimed at keeping the Fed funds rate in the central bank's target range.
00:34:47.000So people are trying to see that as, okay, the Feds had to intervene in the banking system because people are withdrawing too much money from the banking system.
00:35:24.000He said, I continue to believe the independence of the Federal Reserve from direct political control has served the public well over time.
00:35:30.000And he said that the Fed will continue to conduct monetary policy without regard to political considerations.
00:35:36.000And bottom line is that we just don't know which direction the economy is going.
00:35:40.000President Trump wants the rates cut because he figures, okay, what's the worst that can happen?
00:35:45.000Well, let's say the economy is going strong.
00:35:46.000If we cut the rates, maybe it'll grow even stronger.
00:35:49.000The Fed did estimate that there would be growth this quarter, or its GDP forecast for 2019, slightly up to 2.1% or 2.2%, but that is not the kind of rate that President Trump was aiming for when he came into office.
00:36:04.000He was suggesting 3 or even maybe 4% growth.
00:36:57.000Elizabeth Warren has very solid support among white upper-class liberals, and then she has mid-range to low support among every other group, but there is room for her to move up.
00:37:07.000The problem for Elizabeth Warren is that in order to steal more support from Bernie and finally overtake Biden in the polls, she keeps having to move left, and she keeps pandering, and she keeps getting worse.
00:37:18.000Sort of read on Elizabeth Warren, broadly speaking, is that she's sincere Hillary Clinton.
00:37:23.000I think she's more talented than Hillary, but I don't think she's sincere in any way, shape or form.
00:37:28.000I don't think she believes half the things that she is saying.
00:37:31.000I think when she does the full-on woke routine, when she is suggesting she wants Medicare for all but she's not going to raise middle class taxes, and when she goes out and she starts playing the Hillary Clinton, men have no part in American history card, I don't think she believes any of this stuff.
00:37:45.000It really is a radical departure from what she used to be when she was at Harvard Law School, for example.
00:37:50.000So Elizabeth Warren spoke in New York City a couple of days ago and she dropped this astonishing line, we are not here because of men.
00:37:56.000I am especially glad to be here in Washington Square Park.
00:38:01.000I wanted to give this speech right here, and not because of the arch behind me or the president that this square is named for.
00:39:07.000And two, he's got the legacy of Barack Obama to run on, and people still have warm feelings for Barack Obama personally, and they've extended those to Joe Biden.
00:39:15.000But what you're starting to see from the Democratic Party is a turn away from even Barack Obama-era semi-rationality.
00:39:23.000Farhad Manjoo, Who is one of the ids of the democratic establishment, he writes over for the New York Times, one of the brilliant, myriad brilliant intellects on their editorial page, has a piece today called Barack Obama's Biggest Mistake.
00:39:39.000That Barack Obama still believed heavily in free markets, even though Barack Obama was a massive interventionist into free markets.
00:39:46.000He says, after the financial crash, Democrats had a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity presented by a careening global crisis.
00:39:53.000Across the country, people were losing jobs and homes in numbers not seen since World War II.
00:39:58.000If he'd been in the mood to press the case, Obama might have found widespread public appetite for the sort of aggressive, interventionist restructuring of the American economy that FDR conjured with the New Deal.
00:40:08.000One of the inspiring new president's advisors even hinted that that was the plan.
00:40:12.000And then he quotes Rahm Emanuel saying you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
00:40:15.000Now this seems to ignore the fact that Barack Obama tried to ram through Obamacare and really failed to do so in the fashion that he originally suggested and had to cut a bunch of deals and then got the Affordable Care Act and that was so unpopular that Democrats across the country lost their seats.
00:40:30.000But according to Farhad Manjood the lesson of Obama is that the left didn't pull far left enough.
00:40:35.000Farhad Manjoo said rather than try for a Rooseveltian home run, he bunted.
00:40:39.000Instead of pushing for an aggressive stimulus to rapidly expand employment and long-term structural reforms in how the economy worked, Obama and his team responded to the recession with a set of smaller emergency measures designed to fix the immediate collapse of financial markets.
00:41:30.000Of course, he's pushing for Elizabeth Warren.
00:41:32.000He says, Elizabeth Warren really only pushed for going after big banks.
00:41:35.000to rank at the top of mind for a Democratic electorate that is now choosing between Obama's vice president and progressives like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who had pushed Obama during the recovery to adopt policies with more egalitarian economic effects.
00:41:46.000Elizabeth Warren really only pushed for going after big banks.
00:41:53.000From this distance, as Farhad Manju, the history favors Warren's approach.
00:41:57.000So the problem isn't that Barack Obama made business extraordinarily uneasy with his heavy hand of regulation, with his increases in taxes.
00:42:06.000No, the real problem is that he didn't fully embrace the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders plan.
00:42:09.000And this is the direction the Democratic Party is moving.
00:42:12.000But in order to do that, they have to declare a complete break with the Obama years.
00:42:17.000And that means declaring a complete break with Joe Biden.
00:42:21.000And the new attack on Joe Biden, so they've tried a few.
00:42:23.000Attack number one was that Joe Biden is too old.
00:42:26.000That really has not gone very much of anywhere.
00:42:28.000Attack number two is that Joe Biden is a racist.
00:42:30.000That, again, is not really going to go much of anywhere.
00:42:32.000And then there is attack number three.
00:42:34.000And that is that Joe Biden is too nice.
00:42:51.000All the groups in America that were increasing in terms of their demographics were voting Democrat.
00:42:55.000And therefore, there was no chance a Republican would ever win again.
00:42:58.000The Obama 2012 coalition ushered in a new era in American politics in which you could lose heavy shares of the white vote and still win general election.
00:43:08.000And then Donald Trump came along, and he beat Hillary Clinton, and Democrats had to cope with what had happened.
00:43:14.000And so they could choose one of two narratives.
00:43:15.000One is, Donald Trump represents a racist backlash, but it's an aberration, and it'll go away.
00:43:25.000And the other one is maybe we ought to start thinking about some of those white voters we alienated with all of our intersectional identity politics nonsense.
00:43:31.000And instead they chose the Donald Trump is an aberration, he's probably gonna go away.
00:43:37.000And we need to treat Republicans like scum and treat everybody who disagrees with us like some sort of horrible person.
00:43:43.000And this is how you arrive at the third attack on Joe Biden.
00:43:45.000So we've had again, he's a racist, nope.
00:43:59.000Now, first of all, Joe Biden basically called the Tea Party terrorists and suggested if you don't want your taxes increased, that you are not patriotic in the United States.
00:44:08.000So I'm not going to completely buy this.
00:44:11.000Joe Biden is a wonderful friend to Republicans line, at least not publicly.
00:44:15.000Now, privately, he is good friends with a lot of Republicans.
00:44:18.000I know a lot of rock ribbed Republicans who feel that Joe Biden is a nice guy.
00:44:23.000They can talk with him, negotiate with him.
00:44:24.000But according to the New York Times, that's very bad and it needs to be stopped.
00:44:29.000So according to the New York Times, again, this is a news piece, not an opinion piece.
00:44:34.000The Senate Republican leader and self-described grim reaper of liberal legislative dreams settled into a routine of sorts during Barack Obama's second term whenever he felt he was cornered by Democrats.
00:44:44.000McConnell would rise from his chair in the Capitol, walk to his scheduler's desk, smile a tight smile, and ask, can we get Joe Biden on the phone?
00:44:51.000That was precisely what happened in late 2012 when Republicans were in the minority and McConnell hit an impasse with Harry Reid over the elimination of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy.
00:45:02.000As a New Year's Eve deadline approached, Biden and Mr. McConnell hammered out an agreement in a dozen phone calls, aides to both men said, with Obama signing off on every move.
00:45:10.000The two sides struck a deal that delivered some but far from all of what Reid wanted.
00:45:14.000This year, as he runs for president, Biden cites that deal and others he cut with McConnell as proof of his skill in achieving bipartisan legislation in an otherwise hyper-partisan environment.
00:45:24.000Biden said this month, I'll work with Mitch McConnell where we can agree.
00:45:27.000He said there were some issues like gun control where there is no room for compromise.
00:45:30.000That he would agree with Mr. McConnell on anything is a controversial statement for any Democrat to make these days, but in a sprawling field of 20 candidates, Biden stands out for his enduring belief in the goodwill of congressional Republicans.
00:45:41.000He insists that the GOP has been bullied by President Trump, but that civility and compromise will return to Washington once Trump is gone.
00:45:48.000Now, the reality is that Biden doesn't even believe that.
00:45:50.000Biden believes that he could probably get a deal done now.
00:45:53.000With Trump in office, he believes that deals are there to be done.
00:45:56.000He's just saying that because he's running against Trump.
00:45:59.000It's a view that has been branded naive and wistful by some Democratic rivals, as well as by the ascendant left wing of his party.
00:46:06.000That criticism is particularly pointed with regard to McConnell, whose decision to block Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court elevated him from mere obstructionist to arch villain in the eyes of many Democrats.
00:46:19.000And the reason it may stick is because Joe Biden is violating a crucial rule.
00:46:23.000That rule is you have to demonize Republicans as evil, horrible human beings.
00:46:27.000And Biden does that sometimes, but other times he does not.
00:46:30.000And Elizabeth Warren has fallen into the habit of doing it on a routine basis.
00:46:35.000And Bernie Sanders, of course, does it all the time.
00:46:38.000Well, this is the attack that could be a problem for Joe Biden, but the fact is that if you knock Biden out of the box with this attack, then you provide a parallel problem, and that's the problem for Elizabeth Warren.
00:46:49.000There's a piece by Paul Starobin, journalist based in Orleans, Massachusetts, suggesting that Elizabeth Warren's critical vulnerability is that white working-class voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin aren't interested in her wild-eyed progressivism.
00:47:02.000So in other words, all the stuff that makes Biden unpalatable in a primary, again, is the stuff that makes him palatable in a general and vice versa with Elizabeth Warren.
00:47:09.000Alrighty, time for a quick thing that I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
00:47:34.000Children and incipient children in the womb being killed, good!
00:47:37.000A decline that may be driven more by increased access to contraception and fewer women becoming pregnant than by the proliferation of laws restricting abortion in some states, according to new research.
00:47:47.000Abortion rates decrease in almost every state.
00:47:49.000There's no clear pattern linking these declines to new restrictions.
00:47:51.000Right, but there is a clear pattern linking these declines to the restrictions in the sense that the overwhelming wave in American public opinion is that more and more people are recognizing that a baby in the womb is in fact a baby in the womb.
00:48:04.000And that's driving both the laws and the trend on an individual level for people to have fewer abortions, just as in the opposite way in the 1970s, the weird assumption that children were not children, that abortion was a moral good, led to both a rollback in laws and to an increase in abortion simultaneously.
00:48:19.000But that is a very good piece of news, and we should note it.
00:48:23.000In other things that I like today, this is just a wonderful, wonderful story.
00:48:27.000Lauren Zuka, who has been a guest on our radio program, She's a former Teen Vogue columnist, most famous for going at it with Tucker Carlson on his television show.
00:48:37.000Well, according to a BuzzFeed News profile, her students in Feminism and Journalism at New York University filed a formal complaint.
00:48:46.000Because it turns out she's terrible at her job.
00:48:49.000According to BuzzFeed News, nearly four weeks after the course ended, her students sent a collective formal complaint to the heads of the NYU Journalism School about Duca's conduct.
00:48:58.000Five out of the ten students had similar allegations against Duca and class structure.
00:49:02.000They said that Duca didn't follow her own syllabus, that she spoke often and inappropriately about her personal life, that she would belittle and yell at students, and most pressingly, that she targeted one student in particular.
00:49:12.000Apparently, she even used certain slurs to deal with a student, according to the BuzzFeed report.
00:49:20.000They claim that she would disappear for 30 to 45 minutes per class to meditate, which is incredible.
00:49:27.000She would belittle one student in particular, apparently.
00:49:32.000The students described the course as, quote, a waste of six weeks for all of us.
00:49:38.000And one student told BuzzFeed, it's frustrating to see as a student, as a young woman, see how somebody can so clearly take advantage of the system and capitalize on her supposed wokeness while not practicing what she's writing about.
00:49:51.000Lauren Zuko responded to BuzzFeed, it's okay if I'm not a great teacher because I'm great at a lot of other things.