The Ben Shapiro Show - Live Socialist Or Die | Ep. 951

00:00:00.000 The New Hampshire primaries are here, Michael Bloomberg meets Ruff Road as old audio of him emerges on Stop and Frisk, and we discuss whether the nuclear family was mistake.

00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:10.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:18.000 Your data is your business protected at expressvpn.com slash ben.

00:00:22.000 Well today, New Hampshire primaries, and the voting has already started.

00:00:25.000 In Dixville Notch, which is of course this tiny little place in New Hampshire where they vote really early, the first few voters voted surprisingly for Michael Bloomberg.

00:00:33.000 Bloomberg's getting some write-in votes, which demonstrates that there is real disquiet.

00:00:36.000 I mean, it doesn't demonstrate that much because it's like three voters, but What it does demonstrate is that there is some pretty significant disquiet inside the Democratic Party about exactly who ought to be its nominee.

00:00:45.000 A lot of people very, very nervous about Bernie Sanders, as well they should be, because the new national polling has Bernie Sanders on top, not because he has really gained a lot of ground, but because Joe Biden is absolutely collapsing in on himself like a dying star.

00:00:56.000 It's unbelievable.

00:00:57.000 I mean, the man is turning into a polling black hole.

00:00:59.000 There are two separate national polls out, and Joe Biden has collapsed in both of them.

00:01:04.000 There's a Quinnipiac poll that came out yesterday.

00:01:06.000 It showed Bernie Sanders up at 25%, which is not Honestly, like a huge jump for him.

00:01:10.000 Normally, he's somewhere between 20 and 23, so it's like a slight increase for him.

00:01:13.000 But Joe Biden, who normally runs in the low 30s or high 20s, is all the way down at 17% in that Quinnipiac poll, with Michael Bloomberg polling at 15%.

00:01:21.000 He hasn't even run in a primary yet.

00:01:24.000 Elizabeth Warren at 14, Pete Buttigieg at 10, Amy Klobuchar at 4.

00:01:27.000 Okay, and when you break that down by white and black voters, Sanders is actually leading among white voters 22-16 over Elizabeth Warren.

00:01:34.000 Among black voters, Biden is still in the lead with 27%, but that's not going to be enough to carry him over the top.

00:01:39.000 That gap between him and the rest of the field has been shrinking steadily.

00:01:42.000 In second place with black voters in that Quinnipiac poll is Michael Bloomberg.

00:01:46.000 Now as we'll get to, that may not last long.

00:01:48.000 Depending on the impact of some new audio that's come out about Michael Bloomberg talking about his stop-and-frisk policies in New York, and largely defending the fact that the impact of the stop-and-frisk policies just really kind of disproportionately, depends on how you measure the proportionality, fell largely, let's say, on minority people in New York City.

00:02:06.000 We'll get to audio of Bloomberg talking about that, which is creating a stir today.

00:02:11.000 Bernie Sanders is running in third place, only eight percentage points back among black voters.

00:02:15.000 In that Quinnipiac polls, those are good numbers for Bernie Sanders and horrible, horrible numbers for Joe Biden.

00:02:21.000 And that's not the only poll that's horrible for Biden today.

00:02:23.000 Disastrous poll from Monmouth.

00:02:25.000 The previous poll from Monmouth was January 16th through 20th.

00:02:29.000 Bernie Sanders has gained only about three points, about 26%.

00:02:32.000 Joe Biden has collapsed 14 points in that poll nationally.

00:02:37.000 He's now collapsed in most of the polls down to second place, which is a disaster for him because again, his entire pitch was electability.

00:02:43.000 Joe Biden's entire spiel here was, I'm the person who is most electable.

00:02:48.000 You have to put me up in a general election because I'm going to win.

00:02:50.000 The problem is people, when they hear electable, believe that electable is a quality that translates from the primaries to the general.

00:02:56.000 So they get the logic wrong.

00:02:57.000 What Biden was always arguing is that he was the most electable in a general election matchup against Trump.

00:03:01.000 And there's an argument for that, even though he doesn't do well in primaries.

00:03:04.000 The problem is that electability is not separated in the public mind between primaries and general election electability.

00:03:10.000 People don't make that distinction.

00:03:11.000 So if you say, I'm super electable, guys, I'm the most electable, and then you start losing elections, it's very difficult to recover from that and look like Captain Electability when it comes to a general election.

00:03:22.000 So the overall perception of electability in a general is indeed affected, even though it shouldn't be, by lack of electability in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where Biden is completely falling down on the job.

00:03:32.000 In that Monmouth poll, by the way, a couple of the candidates who have been rising, Bloomberg is up to 11% in that poll.

00:03:37.000 Buttigieg is up to 13% in that poll.

00:03:40.000 Elizabeth Warren has been dropping steadily as well.

00:03:42.000 It would not be a grand surprise to see Elizabeth Warren drop into third or even fourth place.

00:03:47.000 Amy Klobuchar has been getting some early support.

00:03:49.000 As well, she should because she is the most electable Democrat who is not Joe Biden in a general election in all of this.

00:03:56.000 And by the way, that is pretty much what this Quinnipiac poll shows.

00:03:59.000 The Quinnipiac poll shows that there is that everybody basically beats Trump on a national level.

00:04:04.000 But again, the Quinnipiac poll is taken nationally.

00:04:06.000 It's not taken in these various states.

00:04:08.000 The favorability rating is where all of these Democrats are in serious trouble, okay?

00:04:12.000 Because right now, the presumption is that a lot of these Democrats are going to outperform expectations because Trump is so unpopular, but the favorability ratings for a lot of these Democrats are really bad.

00:04:21.000 So let's go back to the Quinnipiac poll for a second.

00:04:23.000 So it says that Michael Bloomberg would beat Trump 51 to 42, that Sanders would beat Trump 51 to 43, that Biden would beat Trump 50 to 43, which again, kills Biden's electability argument, because if Sanders is polling better against Trump than Biden is, then what exactly is Biden's argument?

00:04:37.000 Klobuchar would defeat Trump 49-43, Warren 48-44, Buttigieg 47-43.

00:04:42.000 Now, in reality, Trump, who's an incumbent president, is not going to finish at 42-43%.

00:04:47.000 He was polling at 42-43% in the last election cycle, and he ended up winning 46% of the vote.

00:04:52.000 He's now the incumbent president with a strong economy.

00:04:54.000 Chances are he ends up closer to 48 or 49% of the vote.

00:04:58.000 But, here's the real problem for Democrats.

00:05:00.000 In that Quinnipiac poll, Elizabeth Warren has a negative favorability rating.

00:05:05.000 A 39% favorability rating.

00:05:07.000 That is lower than Trump's.

00:05:08.000 Biden has a 43% favorability rating, which is about the same as Trump's.

00:05:12.000 Bloomberg has a 34% favorability rating.

00:05:15.000 25% have not heard enough about him to get him higher than that, so he's underwater by about 6 points.

00:05:20.000 Biden's underwater by 7.

00:05:22.000 Warren is underwater by 8.

00:05:23.000 Sanders has a 44% favorability rating.

00:05:27.000 Buttigieg has a positive favorability rating, but only 36% of people say they're positive about him because 31% haven't heard enough about him.

00:05:34.000 And Klobuchar has 32% positive, 44% have not heard enough about her.

00:05:39.000 President Trump, even in this Quinnipiac poll, it shows that President Trump is at the highest point of his presidency in the Q poll in terms of favorability.

00:05:47.000 He's at 43% favorable, which again is very competitive with all these other Democrats.

00:05:50.000 The only Democrat who's ahead of him, and this is within the margin of error, is Sanders at 44%.

00:05:54.000 Everybody else is well behind President Trump.

00:05:57.000 And he scores high marks on his handling of the economy.

00:06:00.000 54% of voters, even in this Quinnipiac poll, approve of his handling of the economy.

00:06:05.000 Independence approved 59% to 37% so Trump is in very strong shape heading into this election cycle.

00:06:12.000 The Democrats are collapsing and Joe Biden in particular is completely collapsing and so everybody is looking for an alternative.

00:06:17.000 The alternative for the moment was supposed to be Pete Buttigieg.

00:06:20.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:06:22.000 We're gonna get to Sanders and Buttigieg and really Bloomberg who is seen as sort of the guy waiting in the wings and obviously the person that Trump is worried about.

00:06:27.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:08:20.000 Okay, so, with Joe Biden collapsing into the mud, I mean, absolutely collapsing, this means that his last gasp is Nevada.

00:08:27.000 He's not even gonna make it to South Carolina.

00:08:28.000 He'll stick around till South Carolina, just for the craps and giggles of it, right? 0.93

00:08:32.000 I mean, he has to, because his entire pitch is that he's gonna win a disproportionate share of black voters. 0.98

00:08:37.000 Well, he's collapsing in the black vote, right?

00:08:39.000 Michael Bloomberg is chipping away at that, which is unbelievable because, again, Michael Bloomberg is widely perceived by the radical left on Twitter to be a racist.

00:08:46.000 I mean, Bloomberg is racist is trending today.

00:08:48.000 The reason that Bloomberg is racist is trending today is because there's audio that came out of Michael Bloomberg in 2015 at the Aspen Institute talking specifically about stop and frisk policy.

00:08:57.000 Now, one of the things that I think is necessary to understand what Bloomberg is saying here He's being accused of racism because he's saying that Stop and Frisk disproportionately affected black and Hispanic communities in New York City.

00:09:10.000 In order to determine whether that's true, whether it's disproportionately affecting black and Hispanic communities, the question is, what proportionality are you using?

00:09:18.000 We're just going to analyze the content of what he's saying, and then we'll get to the affect of what he's saying.

00:09:22.000 Because the affect of what he's saying is obviously very bad.

00:09:23.000 He articulates this in the worst possible way.

00:09:26.000 In order to understand, and I've talked about this on the program before, whether stop-and-frisk policy was disproportionately affecting minorities, the question is, what are you comparing it to?

00:09:34.000 Are you comparing the number of people stopped and frisked in a particular community to the general population demographic of a community, or are you comparing it to crime rates?

00:09:44.000 And that makes a huge difference, right?

00:09:45.000 Because if you were to say, if I was just going to tell you 50% of the people in prison in the United States for murder are black, Which is about correct. 1.00

00:09:52.000 It's somewhere between 45 and 50% last I checked.

00:09:55.000 You would immediately say, well, that's disproportionate.

00:09:57.000 That's a disproportionate number because 13% of Americans are black people. 0.89

00:10:01.000 So if 50% of the people in jail for murder are black, that must mean that something disproportionate is happening. 0.92

00:10:06.000 That's criminal justice racism.

00:10:08.000 Except that murder is a specific crime that is reported basically 100% of the time.

00:10:14.000 And so the question is not the population of murderers Who are black compared to the population of blacks who are American, right?

00:10:22.000 The question is the population of murderers who are black compared to the number of murder suspects who are black, right? 0.82

00:10:27.000 In other words, was there a white suspect and they just went and arrested a black guy and threw him in jail.

00:10:30.000 So the same thing is true of stop and frisk.

00:10:32.000 If you actually want to talk about the proportionality of how many people were stopped and frisked by race, then you have to compare that to the reported crime rates.

00:10:38.000 You can't compare that to the demographics.

00:10:42.000 To take a quick example, heavy percentage of the population of New York City is Jewish.

00:10:45.000 The crime rate in the Jewish community in New York City is extraordinarily low.

00:10:49.000 Are we really going to suggest that the proportionality of people stopped and frisked has to be done not on the basis of crime reports or crime areas, but has to be done on the basis of sheer population?

00:10:58.000 That would make no sense whatsoever.

00:11:00.000 I mean, that's not what the police are there to do.

00:11:01.000 So if you actually want to establish disproportionality, what you would have to do is demonstrate that the police are over-profiling, right?

00:11:08.000 They are over-stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic people in comparison to the crime rate in New York City among Black and Hispanic people. 1.00

00:11:14.000 So that is why all of the talk about stop and frisk disproportionately affecting black and hispanic people.

00:11:19.000 It depends on what you are using as your numerator.

00:11:23.000 It depends what you are using as your numerator.

00:11:24.000 Are you using the demographic profile generally of New York or the criminal profile of New York, which is a different profile?

00:11:31.000 The same thing would hold true if I were to say to you, 99% of people in jail for violent crimes are men.

00:11:35.000 Is that disproportionate?

00:11:36.000 Well, it's disproportionate in the sense that only 50% of the population of the United States, like every place else, is male.

00:11:42.000 But it's not disproportionate in the sense that virtually all violent crime in the United States is committed by men.

00:11:46.000 So, again, the same thing holds with stop-and-frisk.

00:11:49.000 I'm just gonna give you a few statistics here, so you understand why stop-and-frisk policy is not inherently racist, despite the fact that a heavy percentage of the people who are stopped and frisked, and really a stop-question-and-frisk is the actual Supreme Court-approved policy.

00:12:00.000 It's not that the police were supposed to be able to just walk up to people and then pat them down.

00:12:04.000 It's supposed to be that you have a reasonable suspicion that the person is carrying a gun or carrying a banned knife.

00:12:09.000 By the way, if you've ever worked with police officers, I mean, I work with security all the time, right?

00:12:13.000 I've been in rooms where the police who are working with me, where the officers who are working with me can spot a gun on somebody's hip, or they can spot a knife on somebody's hip, and they can do so with extraordinary accuracy.

00:12:23.000 I mean, when you see people walking around a certain way for a long enough time, then you actually get pretty good at telling when they are carrying a foreign object on their body.

00:12:29.000 In any case, Here are some of the statistics in New York City that Bloomberg is going to be talking about here.

00:12:34.000 Okay, so this is according to Heather McDonald. 0.97

00:12:37.000 She says, who is killing and shooting black crime victims? 0.99

00:12:39.000 Overwhelmingly not whites, not the police, but tragically other blacks. 1.00

00:12:42.000 The high black homicide victimization rate is a function of the black homicide commission rate. 0.99

00:12:46.000 Blacks commit homicide nationally at seven times the rate of whites and most Hispanics combined. 1.00

00:12:51.000 Black males between the age of 14 and 17 Commit homicide of 10 times the rate of white and most Hispanic males between the ages of 14 and 17. 0.98

00:12:59.000 Officer-involved shootings are not responsible for the black homicide victimization rate either.

00:13:03.000 In fact, a greater percentage of white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by a police officer than black homicide victims.

00:13:09.000 In 2015, 12% of all whites and Hispanics who died of homicide were killed by cop, compared with 4% of black homicide victims who were killed by cop.

00:13:16.000 Nor is white violence responsible for the black victimization rate. 0.91

00:13:19.000 Blacks commit most interracial crime. 1.00

00:13:21.000 Between 2012 and 2015, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations excluding homicide between blacks and whites. 0.99

00:13:29.000 Blacks committed 85.5% of those violent victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on whites, while whites committed 14.4% of those violent victimizations, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. 0.93

00:13:35.000 Here's the important part. 0.96

00:13:36.000 14.4% of those violent victimizations or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks.

00:13:42.000 Here's the important part.

00:13:43.000 These national disparities are repeated locally.

00:13:45.000 In New York City, for example, blacks, 23% of the population, committed 71% of all gun violence in 2016.

00:13:53.000 Whites, who had 34% of the population, are the city's largest racial group, committed less than 2% of all shootings.

00:13:59.000 Okay, so to go back to the proportionality argument that I am making here, if you were to compare the population of New York City, you would say, okay, well, 34% of the population is white, 34% of the people who are pulled over in stop-and-frisk should be white. 0.98

00:14:13.000 Except that's stupid because whites Constitute 2% of all the shootings. 0.98

00:14:16.000 So why would you frisk 34% of the people 34% of the time when it's really 2% of the crime? 0.99

00:14:22.000 Why would you frisk them 34% of the time?

00:14:24.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:14:26.000 These identifications, says Heather McDonald, are provided by the victims of and witnesses to those shootings, overwhelmingly minorities themselves.

00:14:32.000 A black New Yorker is thus 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker.

00:14:35.000 In Chicago, blacks and whites are each a little under a third of the city's population. 0.96

00:14:39.000 Blacks commit 80% of all shootings, whites a little over 1%, making blacks in the Windy City 80 times more likely to commit a shooting than whites. 0.85

00:14:45.000 In Oakland, blacks committed 83% of homicides, attempted homicides, robberies, assaults with firearms, and assaults with weapons other than firearms in 2013, even though they constitute only 28% of Oakland's population. 0.97

00:14:56.000 Whites were 1% of robbery suspects, 1% of firearm assault suspects, and an even lower percent of homicide suspects, even though they make up about 34% of the city's population.

00:15:04.000 In Pittsburgh, 82% of known homicide suspects were black in 2015, even though the Pittsburgh population is just 26% black.

00:15:10.000 In St.

00:15:10.000 Louis, Nearly 100% of homicide suspects were black through December 22, 2017, though the population is 47% white and 47% black.

00:15:20.000 And as Heather McDonald points out, the vast majority of black residents in high-crime areas and elsewhere are law-abiding and hardworking, and they deserve the same freedom from fear as residents of safer neighborhoods, and they beg for more proactive police enforcement, as reporters from the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post both discovered when covering the aftermath of the Freddie Gray riots.

00:15:37.000 Okay, so she's not making a case.

00:15:39.000 The racist case here would be that blacks are inherently more inclined to commit crime. 0.99

00:15:42.000 No one is making that case because it's absurd and ridiculous on its face. 0.95

00:15:45.000 The question is whether it is racist if you apply a stop-and-frisk policy that hits on a population level disproportionately particular groups, but on a crime level hits exactly proportionally Those particular groups, whether that is racist.

00:15:58.000 OK, that is the backdrop to Michael Bloomberg's commentary.

00:16:01.000 So we're going to get to what Michael Bloomberg actually said that has him trending as hashtag Bloomberg is racist in just one second, despite the fact that under Bloomberg's tutelage of the city, like really the one bright spot of his mayoralty was the continuing drop in crime rates in New York City that started under Rudy Giuliani and then continued on through Michael Bloomberg, largely because of policies like broken windows policing and stop and frisk policies that were taking place in New York City.

00:16:24.000 Proactive policing, putting cops on street corners that were known to be high crime.

00:16:29.000 The use of measures like ComStat in order to determine high crime areas and then target those exact precincts.

00:16:36.000 All of that is really Bloomberg's major achievement.

00:16:38.000 He's had to run against that because he's afraid of being labeled racist by the media.

00:16:41.000 It's not going to save him one iota because as it turns out, he has said stuff defending his own record before.

00:16:45.000 We're gonna get to that in just one second.

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00:18:09.000 Okay, so back to stop and frisk policies and proactive policing.

00:18:13.000 So the fact is, in the United States, crime rates between 1960 and 1994 spiked dramatically in major cities across the country.

00:18:21.000 In the early 1990s, a lot of cities began to use proactive policing in order to lower crime rates.

00:18:26.000 And the United States underwent one of the greatest crime transformations in history.

00:18:30.000 We lowered our murder rate dramatically in major cities across the country.

00:18:33.000 Okay, and that was because of proactive policing and broken windows policing and ComStat and yes policies like stop, question, and frisk.

00:18:40.000 And these were applied in bipartisan fashion.

00:18:41.000 Mayor Giuliani became Mayor Giuliani because David Dinkins wasn't going to do any of this stuff.

00:18:46.000 Mayor Richard Reardon in LA became Mayor Richard Reardon because Democrats in LA were not doing this sort of stuff.

00:18:53.000 The attempt to clean up crime was one of the major American success stories between 1994 and 2015 when there was sort of a reverse effect after some of the Ferguson riots and the so-called Ferguson effect where police started backing off out of fear that they were going to ruin their lives and careers if they engaged in proactive policing.

00:19:08.000 Well, this was a bipartisan coalition that favored lowering crime and that bipartisan coalition included a lot of black legislators and a lot of black city council members who are sick of watching High crime neighborhoods affecting black people who are living in those high crime neighborhoods. 0.61

00:19:23.000 Okay, so that's the backdrop to all of this.

00:19:24.000 So Michael Bloomberg's great success story in New York City, really, is that he was able to continue lowering crime.

00:19:29.000 And that's the only reason he can run for president.

00:19:31.000 If he had not lowered crime, he'd be like Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had a complete failure of a campaign.

00:19:35.000 Mayor Bloomberg's basic pitch is, I made the city of New York safer.

00:19:40.000 I helped continue the transformation of Times Square from what was a squalid cesspool Into a pretty nice place to be.

00:19:46.000 You can take your kids, you can walk around, it's kind of like Disneyland.

00:19:49.000 Right?

00:19:49.000 That is Bloomberg's pitch.

00:19:51.000 But he's had to run directly away from that pitch because he's running directly into the teeth of a bunch of the woke warriors who suggest that proactive policing is inherently racist.

00:19:59.000 Okay, so he's at the Aspen Institute.

00:20:00.000 Now, the piece of audio you're about to hear, we don't hear the beginning of the audio.

00:20:03.000 The reason I think this is kind of important, honestly, is because you don't know, it was a Q&A session, you don't know what question he was asked.

00:20:10.000 So the way that the audio sounds, it's like he's volunteering that they were targeting black people.

00:20:14.000 Maybe that's what he said, and if he did say that, then he is expressing this all wrong, right?

00:20:17.000 In very bad fashion, but...

00:20:20.000 If he was asked, which I have a feeling he was, why stop-and-frisk disproportionately affected black and Hispanic people, and he gave this answer, and the answer might be rough, but the answer is also based in fact, which is that the crime rates in the black and Hispanic community in New York City are dramatically higher than the crime rates in other areas of New York City.

00:20:38.000 And this is why the police are in those areas, and this is why the arrest rates are disproportionate to population statistics.

00:20:42.000 Okay, so here's what Bloomberg had to say at the Aspen Institute.

00:20:45.000 It's got Bloomberg is racist trending, and we'll see if this has any impact on the race.

00:20:48.000 I'm kind of doubtful that it does, honestly.

00:20:50.000 Like, I'm kind of doubtful that you're going to see Bloomberg's support in the black community completely collapse in the same way that Trump's support in the Hispanic community did not completely collapse despite the fact that he was saying all of these kind of ridiculous and egregious things about immigration generally and about Mexicans and all this stuff because most people of Mexican descent who live in the country Who support Trump are not off put by the fact that Trump speaks in harsh language about illegal immigration.

00:21:16.000 Most black people in America are not.

00:21:18.000 I think that the amount of black support.

00:21:22.000 for letting people out of prison who have committed crimes is way lower than the mainstream media would have you believe.

00:21:27.000 I think the vast majority, I mean, I don't think, I know, the vast majority of black Americans are law-abiding people who want to live in safe communities. 1.00

00:21:34.000 And so when they are told that the police are supposed to be out of their communities, the police are inherently bad and all of this, I don't think most black Americans believe that, which is why Joe Biden, who said a lot of similar things to what you're going to hear Bloomberg say right here, his support has not cratered with black Americans either.

00:21:47.000 Here is Michael Bloomberg talking.

00:21:48.000 This is supposedly the clip that's going to end his presidential bid.

00:21:52.000 Why?

00:21:52.000 Yes, that's true.

00:21:53.000 Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. 1.00

00:21:55.000 Yes, that's true.

00:21:56.000 Why do we do it?

00:21:58.000 Because that's where all the crime is.

00:22:00.000 is people say, oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana.

00:22:05.000 They're all minorities. 1.00

00:22:06.000 Yes, that's true.

00:22:08.000 Because we put all the cops in the minority hand.

00:22:08.000 Why?

00:22:10.000 Yes, that's true.

00:22:12.000 Why do we do it?

00:22:13.000 Because that's where all the crime is.

00:22:14.000 And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them against the wall and frisk them. 0.81

00:22:20.000 Okay, now he's saying this in the roughest and dumbest possible fashion, is to get the guns out of hands.

00:22:25.000 You throw them up against the wall and you frisk them. 0.92

00:22:27.000 Well, or, if you ask any police officer in your city, you stop, you question, and you frisk, right?

00:22:31.000 That is the actual legal language.

00:22:32.000 So, the minute-long excerpt, Bloomberg says, 95% of your murders, murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O.

00:22:38.000 You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all of the cops.

00:22:42.000 Right, so this is why whether he was asked about the racial disproportion is sort of relevant to how he's answering.

00:22:46.000 If he's defending the policy on the basis that it is disproportionate to the general demographic, then that's a problem.

00:22:52.000 If he's defending the supposed disproportion on the basis of crime statistics, then he's saying it in rough fashion.

00:22:58.000 What he's saying is basically correct, right?

00:23:00.000 What he's saying is basically true on a factual level, which is that disproportionately the vast majority of crime victims From murder to violent crime to robbery in the city of New York are minorities. 0.51

00:23:10.000 And the disproportionate number of perpetrators and suspects are members of these communities too.

00:23:15.000 So who do you think that active policing is going to end up hitting more often?

00:23:19.000 And this is also true for marijuana statistics.

00:23:22.000 If you have more cops in high crime areas, and those high crime areas are disproportionately minority, then presumably, disproportionately, people who are smoking pot in front of the cops in those areas are going to be the ones who are arrested.

00:23:32.000 When people say, why aren't the cops hanging out around Wall Street?

00:23:34.000 Because there ain't street crime around Wall Street.

00:23:36.000 That's why.

00:23:37.000 Because the cops are where the street crime is.

00:23:38.000 They are where the violent crime is.

00:23:40.000 It's a completely different division that investigates white-collar crime.

00:23:42.000 You want to up the white-collar crime element in New York City, you're not going to call NYPD when you see a white-collar crime.

00:23:48.000 You're going to call a specific division, presumably, of the DOJ.

00:23:52.000 You're not going to call, like, the beat cop.

00:23:54.000 You're not going to flag down a cop car.

00:23:56.000 You're not going to flag down a patrol car and be like, I saw a man engaging in insider trading in the elevator over on Wall Street.

00:24:02.000 That's not how any of that works.

00:24:04.000 And that's what Bloomberg is saying.

00:24:05.000 He says that's true in New York.

00:24:06.000 That's true in virtually every city.

00:24:08.000 You want to spend the money to put a lot of cops on the street.

00:24:10.000 Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods. 0.95

00:24:14.000 Okay, well, that's awkwardly put, but that is true, which is that the crime is disproportionately in areas that have a disproportionate number of minorities. 0.98

00:24:20.000 That just is the fact.

00:24:21.000 Okay, so Bloomberg is getting excoriated for this.

00:24:23.000 He then made a second statement about this that's also going around.

00:24:26.000 We'll get to all of this in just one second and what this does to Michael Bloomberg's campaign hopes.

00:24:31.000 First, let's talk about a fantastic Valentine's Day gift, like a very important Valentine's Day gift.

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00:24:40.000 You know that this is true.

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00:26:05.000 Okay, so a second comment from Michael Bloomberg has materialized as well.

00:26:09.000 Both of these are trending on Twitter because the way this works is that Michael Bloomberg's, again, his only pitch for being president of the United States is that he was a half-decent mayor of New York City.

00:26:18.000 That involved lowering the crime rates.

00:26:19.000 But in the Democratic Party, you're not supposed to run on lowering crime rates.

00:26:22.000 You're supposed to run on wokeness.

00:26:24.000 And that means that you're supposed to run on the basic presupposition that if a disproportionate number to the demographic population of blacks and Hispanics are arrested, that must reflect criminal justice racism as opposed to disproportionate crimes taking place They just keep saying, oh, it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.

00:26:49.000 That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder.

00:26:56.000 In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much. 0.91

00:27:02.000 And minorities too little. 1.00

00:27:03.000 Okay, that is 100% true.

00:27:05.000 He's getting ripped up for this, right?

00:27:06.000 How could he say this?

00:27:07.000 What he just said on a factual basis is 100% true.

00:27:10.000 On the basis of crime statistics, if you were just to compare crime reports to numbers of stops and frisks, what you see is that black and Hispanic suspects are being pulled over less frequently than they are charged in terms of the general crime statistics.

00:27:25.000 So Bloomberg's getting ripped up and down, and presumably Bloomberg is going to come out and apologize.

00:27:28.000 Now, if he had any stones, Bloomberg would say, listen, My policies helped save literally thousands of black and Hispanic lives in New York City.

00:27:34.000 Proactive policing saves lives.

00:27:37.000 If you want to lower crime rates, and that disproportionately affects people who are living in minority communities, which are high crime areas. 1.00

00:27:42.000 If you want to increase the economic growth in those areas, you need more policing, not less.

00:27:47.000 And this is why I've been very much questioning the criminal justice reform proposals of the Trump administration.

00:27:52.000 I'm not sure that letting more criminals out onto the streets is a solution to the investment and growth problems in minority areas of the country.

00:28:00.000 The going concern has been that there are too many black men in prison, that if they go back, they're going to...

00:28:04.000 Go back to their kids, they're going to go back to their girlfriends or spouses, they're going to form nuclear families, they're going to be part of the rebuilding of the social fabric in these areas.

00:28:12.000 That may be true for some, but a lot of these people are going to be recidivists, and then they're going to increase the crime rates in these particular communities. 1.00

00:28:17.000 The fact is, one of the great miraculous stories of the last half century in the United States is the lowering crime rate between 1994 and 2015.

00:28:23.000 To blow that on the basis of political correctness seems weird to me.

00:28:26.000 And damaging.

00:28:27.000 Highly damaging to minority Americans. 1.00

00:28:30.000 But again, the media drive this stuff by suggesting that Stop and Frisk itself was inherently racist, as opposed to a reaction to the fact that there were high crime rates in New York City.

00:28:41.000 Now, I will say this about Bloomberg.

00:28:44.000 Openly says here that the problem of high crimes is largely relegated to big cities and unfortunately is Identifiable in minority communities particularly that a disproportionate number of gun suspects in New York City Like and he says like every other major city is happening among young minority males Okay, and then his proposal is to disarm all Americans.

00:29:05.000 So I'm gonna need him to explain that one.

00:29:06.000 I'm gonna, really, I need him to square that circle for me, because remember, he's one of the big gun control pushers, nationally.

00:29:12.000 His suggestion is that everyone should have their gun taken away from them.

00:29:14.000 Well, if you are in favor of targeted crime in things like stop and frisk, then why are you also in favor of broad crime policies that would remove guns from presumably tens of millions of law-abiding Americans who have nothing to do with elevated rates of crime in places like New York City?

00:29:27.000 And by the way, if you look at state crime rates, they're disproportionately located in major cities.

00:29:32.000 Okay, so we're gonna get to more of this in just a second, because is it possible that this is the end of sort of the Bloomberg hope?

00:29:38.000 And if so, who does that leave standing?

00:29:40.000 If Bloomberg starts to collapse and Biden is collapsing, well, that leaves really two, right?

00:29:44.000 Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, because everybody is sort of starting to wake up to the fact that Bernie Sanders is going to be a disaster for their party, like really a disaster.

00:29:52.000 Also, Bernie is, you know, he's kind of fibbing now, right?

00:29:56.000 Like Bernie said he was gonna release his medical records, and now he's saying, well, not so fast.

00:29:59.000 I don't need to release my medical records.

00:30:01.000 Why would I release those records?

00:30:03.000 They're mine.

00:30:03.000 They're not yours.

00:30:05.000 I guess we'll have to nationalize his medical records in order to see them.

00:30:07.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:30:08.000 First, let's talk about your life insurance policy.

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00:31:28.000 Okay, we'll get back into this 2020 race in just one second.

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00:33:29.000 All righty.

00:33:35.000 So Michael Bloomberg supposedly going to take a serious hit for this audio.

00:33:39.000 We will see whether that is just in the Twitter universe or whether that's in the real world because there's this massive divide between the Twitterati and the real world.

00:33:46.000 The Twitterati will provide you with your base.

00:33:47.000 They'll provide you with your core, right?

00:33:49.000 That's what Bernie Sanders found out.

00:33:50.000 Super active on Twitter.

00:33:51.000 But are they really enough to drive you over the top?

00:33:54.000 Now, I don't want to say that Twitter doesn't matter because Joe Biden basically said Twitter didn't matter and now Joe Biden Like both physically and also his campaign are sort of a smoldering wreck.

00:34:03.000 But the fact is that Twitter is not real life.

00:34:07.000 And so if Michael Bloomberg is going to collapse on the basis of this, we'll see.

00:34:10.000 We'll see whether these comments actually make a difference.

00:34:12.000 I'm pretty sure that everybody knew that Michael Bloomberg was the stop and frisk guy.

00:34:15.000 The bigger problem for Michael Bloomberg is inauthenticity.

00:34:18.000 If you campaigned on stop-and-frisk for years, and defended stop-and-frisk for years, and then five minutes ago, you decided to run as a Democrat for the presidential nomination, and then repudiated your own legacy, that's a problem.

00:34:27.000 See, here's the thing about Bernie.

00:34:28.000 He has never repudiated any form of his own legacy.

00:34:31.000 Instead, he just says, but he's never repudiated anything he's ever said in the 60s and 70s.

00:34:36.000 Joe Biden has spent half this campaign repudiating his own support for a 1994 crime bill, which contributed to, again, that lowered crime rate.

00:34:43.000 None of these Democrats actually have the stones to just stand on their own record and say, yeah, I did that, and it may be unpopular now, but it was the right thing to do because it lowered crime rates and saved a lot of lives, specifically in minority communities.

00:34:54.000 Bernie Sanders has never had to repudiate anything, because when you are radical and pure, you never have to repudiate anything you've ever said.

00:34:59.000 It's funny.

00:35:02.000 You'll see folks on the left very often.

00:35:03.000 There'll be somebody on the right who says something, and it is racially tinged or racist, and people on the left will say, well, why didn't you oust this person earlier?

00:35:09.000 And we'll be like, well, yeah, we did.

00:35:11.000 Like, well, like, we did it now. 0.90

00:35:12.000 Like, when Steve King came out and made ridiculous comments, and the entire Republican Party went, yeah, that's bad.

00:35:17.000 We should probably condemn that and, like, not give him chairmanships and all that kind of stuff.

00:35:21.000 And then the Democrats were like, well, why didn't you do that before with Steve King?

00:35:25.000 Let me ask you a question.

00:35:26.000 When was the last time a Democrat was ejected from the Democratic Party for anything ideological?

00:35:31.000 Not for doing something corrupt, right?

00:35:33.000 Not for doing something like sexual piccadillo or something.

00:35:35.000 Doing something ideologically wrong.

00:35:37.000 When was the last time a Democrat was ejected for being too far to the left, too radical?

00:35:41.000 It has never happened.

00:35:42.000 Like, the last time I can remember it happening was Cynthia McKinney when she was saying openly anti-Semitic things back in, like, 2003.

00:35:47.000 And if Cynthia McKinney were around today, she would be part of the squad.

00:35:50.000 Because what she was saying in 2003 is identical to the stuff that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib say today and are honored for inside the Democratic Party.

00:35:58.000 So, again, it is pretty incredible that all of the Democrats who have accomplished things, like Michael Bloomberg, are going to have to repudiate their own policies unless you're a useless communist like Bernie Sanders, in which case you repudiate nothing, and then you get to run as the authentic candidate.

00:36:13.000 And they're saying the quiet part out loud.

00:36:14.000 Cynthia Nixon, who's a very wealthy actress from Sex and the City, and then she ran for governor against Andrew Cuomo and got absolutely smoked. 1.00

00:36:21.000 Cynthia Nixon was rallying for Sanders.

00:36:23.000 They had a big rally last night.

00:36:25.000 And she said, we don't just want the crumbs anymore, the crumbs. 0.98

00:36:29.000 We want the whole pie, which is just pure class warfare, garbage language. 0.82

00:36:34.000 Can we explain something? 0.58

00:36:35.000 What you get in the United States is not crumbs.

00:36:38.000 What you get in the United States is a share of the greatest experiment in human history and also the greatest prosperity in human history.

00:36:43.000 Like, where are these crumbs of which you speak, Cynthia Nixon, who's worth millions of dollars?

00:36:48.000 Where are these crumbs?

00:36:49.000 I'm confused.

00:36:51.000 Bernie Sanders has a lake house.

00:36:53.000 What are you talking about?

00:36:54.000 Here's Cynthia Nixon basically suggesting that we nationalize all wealth and redistribute it because we want the whole pie. 1.00

00:36:59.000 Who is we?

00:37:01.000 And what is the whole pie?

00:37:02.000 And why is it that you think the pie is fixed?

00:37:04.000 Because you don't understand basic econ.

00:37:05.000 Here's Cynthia Nixon rallying for Sanders. 0.89

00:37:09.000 Because of Bernie Sanders and because of what he has spent his life doing and how he has changed this country in the last four years.

00:37:18.000 He has taught me and he has taught us as a country what we can ask for.

00:37:24.000 We have made do with crumbs for so long.

00:37:29.000 And Bernie has said, hey, We're starving in this country.

00:37:34.000 We can't subsist on these crumbs anymore.

00:37:37.000 Why can't we demand the whole pie?

00:37:40.000 Why can't we demand the whole pie?

00:37:41.000 I mean, this is just pure Russian Revolution language, right?

00:37:44.000 Why can't we demand?

00:37:46.000 Demand from whom?

00:37:47.000 From whom?

00:37:48.000 Like, if you didn't create... You know, it's so funny.

00:37:51.000 The folks on the left will say things like, Jeff Bezos, you didn't build that because there are roads, man, because there are roads.

00:37:57.000 And it's like, well, OK, if we were going to just price in to Jeff Bezos' wealth, the value of roads that are publicly owned, would that represent like 1% of the value of Amazon?

00:38:07.000 The fact that there are roads?

00:38:09.000 Right, or would that represent, like, not all that much value at all compared to the vast majority of the brand building that Amazon has done?

00:38:15.000 Or is it really the infrastructure that's responsible for that?

00:38:17.000 Because if that's the case, then why doesn't Amazon exist in Estonia?

00:38:20.000 They have roads there, too.

00:38:20.000 Or Latvia?

00:38:21.000 It turns out roads are pretty common and have been common since the Roman era.

00:38:25.000 So, like, what are you talking about?

00:38:27.000 But the same people who will say that Jeff Bezos didn't build that will proclaim that we want the whole pie.

00:38:31.000 Well, you didn't build that, Cynthia Nixon.

00:38:33.000 You didn't build any of that.

00:38:34.000 What right do you have to demand something that you didn't build?

00:38:38.000 This is why when people say that socialism is about altruism, it's not.

00:38:40.000 It's about greed.

00:38:41.000 It's about you didn't build that and now you want a piece of something that you didn't build because you are breathing and you are here.

00:38:46.000 Well, guess what?

00:38:47.000 That is not altruistic.

00:38:48.000 That is just you being selfish.

00:38:50.000 Socialism is inherently selfish because it demands.

00:38:53.000 That's the whole point.

00:38:53.000 You never hear a socialist talk about us giving.

00:38:56.000 It's always what we demand.

00:38:57.000 It's always what we want.

00:38:58.000 It's like my three-year-old when he desperately wants another Popsicle.

00:39:03.000 It's all about what you want.

00:39:04.000 It's never about what you're willing to give.

00:39:06.000 It's so funny.

00:39:07.000 who are capitalists, tend to talk about the sacrifices that you make in order to engage in transactions.

00:39:15.000 They tend to talk about the amount of work they do.

00:39:16.000 When was the last time you heard a socialist talk about the amount of work they do, as opposed to what they demand for the work?

00:39:23.000 Well, you can make a demand, but that demand should not be backed by a government gun.

00:39:27.000 In any case, Bernie Sanders, he is now reversing himself on his medical records on Sunday.

00:39:33.000 Sanders reversed his position on medical records, saying he would not release comprehensive medical records about his health, reneging on a promise he made in September that he would absolutely release his medical records before the Democratic primary season began.

00:39:42.000 This is according to Hank Barian over at Daily Wire.

00:39:45.000 Speaking on Sunday's Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd pointed out to Sanders what he had said in September before he had a heart attack in early October.

00:39:51.000 Sanders doubled down in late October.

00:39:52.000 He said, I want to make it comprehensive.

00:39:54.000 I will probably by the end of the year.

00:39:56.000 AP continued, campaign manager Faiz Shakir later said, more definitively, Sanders does plan to release the records by the end of December.

00:40:03.000 But then he didn't.

00:40:04.000 Chuck Todd said the first votes have already been cast.

00:40:06.000 You didn't release your medical records.

00:40:07.000 You released a few letters.

00:40:09.000 Nobody interviewed your doctors.

00:40:10.000 You did have a heart attack apparently.

00:40:11.000 Shouldn't the voters see your medical records before Super Tuesday?

00:40:15.000 Sandra said, we've released as much documentation, I think, as any other candidate.

00:40:19.000 And Chuck Todd said, right, but nobody else had a heart attack in the last six months.

00:40:22.000 And Sandra said, well, look, I am.

00:40:24.000 No other candidate's doing four or five events running around the country.

00:40:27.000 And Todd said, right, like you've proven your mettle, but you have reporters that are concerned about your age.

00:40:32.000 And Sandra said, I mean, you can start releasing medical records and it never ends.

00:40:36.000 We have released a substantive part, all of our backgrounds.

00:40:38.000 We have doctors, cardiologists confirming I am in good health.

00:40:41.000 Yahoo News notes that Sanders released three brief letters from doctors in December that declared he was in good health currently, but he has not released his full medical records.

00:40:49.000 Which, again, he's not going to release those full medical records because that's the thing about heart attacks, guys.

00:40:54.000 You look like you're really vital until the moment you have a heart attack, and then you don't look quite so vital, right?

00:40:57.000 Sanders looked vital before the heart attack, then he had a heart attack.

00:41:00.000 It would be good to know whether that heart attack is going to reoccur.

00:41:03.000 Being in good medical health at this point does not suggest that you're going to be in good medical health two minutes from now if you don't release those medical records, but Bernie's not going to release that because he thinks he's going to win based on hiding that stuff.

00:41:14.000 Also, The Democratic Party is getting more and more nervous about mobilizing behind Bernie Sanders.

00:41:19.000 Dave Weigel, who's a Bernie kind of acolyte and fan, right?

00:41:22.000 He has a piece today titled, Sanders may be on the verge of another New Hampshire win.

00:41:25.000 Democrats aren't ready to get behind him.

00:41:27.000 This is according to the Washington Post.

00:41:30.000 He says that in the contest final hour, Sanders has minimized his own criticism of the party, pitching his campaign as a chance for the state to get things right and pick an electable candidate who will supercharge voter enthusiasm.

00:41:40.000 But Sanders had already won New Hampshire once by a 21-point landslide.

00:41:43.000 Unlikely to beat him here, rival candidates and skeptical voters are still asking whether Sanders and his movement could be trusted to win a general election.

00:41:50.000 And you can see that people are very nervous about this.

00:41:52.000 Gavin Newsom, the garbage governor of California, he says he's nervous about pretty much all the Democrats.

00:41:56.000 He says that we're all anxious about Sanders and Bloomberg and Warren and all these people as well they should be. 0.78

00:42:02.000 Talking to all the governors the last 48 hours, there's deep anxiety that we're not publicly communicating around what is potentially emerging as a Bernie Sanders ascendancy with the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party and the prospects, as you were mentioning in the last segment, that Bloomberg moves into that and you're in a place of civil war.

00:42:25.000 It's not my point of view per se.

00:42:27.000 But it is the anxiety that is, I think, spoken very much, universally spoken.

00:42:33.000 Okay, well, you know, that, again, is the well-received wisdom inside the Democratic Party.

00:42:38.000 Everybody is very nervous about Sanders, as well they should be.

00:42:40.000 Meanwhile, President Trump has had a triumphal couple of weeks.

00:42:43.000 He held a big rally again last night.

00:42:44.000 People waited out in the rain and the snow for hours on end to get into Trump's rallies.

00:42:48.000 Very entertaining dude.

00:42:50.000 He said yesterday, We are indeed more enthusiastic than the Democrats.

00:42:52.000 By the way, this is what the polls are showing, is that Republicans are in fact more enthusiastic than Democrats.

00:42:56.000 And Bernie's turnout numbers are not good, right?

00:42:58.000 Everybody is burying the lead in Iowa.

00:43:00.000 The lead is not that Bernie Sanders performed well in Iowa or that Pete Buttigieg performed well in Iowa.

00:43:04.000 It's that nobody showed up.

00:43:06.000 That was Hillary Clinton's big problem in 2016. 1.00

00:43:08.000 And the Democrats are betting, pure and simple, on the idea that Trump is unpopular to launch them to victory.

00:43:14.000 This is Chris Hayes, right?

00:43:14.000 Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

00:43:16.000 He was saying, guys, we shouldn't be anxious.

00:43:18.000 People don't like Donald Trump.

00:43:19.000 Here's Chris Hayes trying to trying to gin up the base.

00:43:22.000 It ain't going to work.

00:43:24.000 The idea that this is some terrifyingly popular juggernaut is just not borne out by the facts.

00:43:29.000 Almost all of what the president is doing and has done independent of the state of the economy, which is a big F, right?

00:43:36.000 The stuff he's actually doing, almost all of it is wildly unpopular.

00:43:40.000 He is weak.

00:43:42.000 He's vulnerable. 0.99

00:43:43.000 Politically, he's beatable.

00:43:45.000 He wants you to believe that he's strong, but he's not.

00:43:48.000 He is not a colossus. 0.97

00:43:50.000 He's a con man.

00:43:51.000 Okay, well, good luck with this, because this is exactly what Hillary Clinton said, and then nobody showed up, because it turns out nobody's enthused about what you guys are pitching.

00:43:59.000 Here's Trump yesterday at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, drawing bigger crowds than any of the Democrats who are actually running for a nomination right now.

00:44:05.000 Here is Trump saying, yeah, our enthusiasm is way bigger than the Democratic enthusiasm right now.

00:44:10.000 You know, they always talk about the Democrats.

00:44:13.000 They have enthusiasm, right?

00:44:14.000 We have so much more enthusiasm than that.

00:44:16.000 It's not even close.

00:44:18.000 They're all fighting each other.

00:44:20.000 They're all going after each other.

00:44:21.000 You got them all over the place.

00:44:23.000 They don't know what the hell they're doing.

00:44:25.000 They don't know what they're doing.

00:44:27.000 They can't even count their votes.

00:44:29.000 Accurate.

00:44:30.000 Fact check.

00:44:30.000 True.

00:44:31.000 Fact check.

00:44:31.000 What are the Democrats going back to?

00:44:33.000 They're going back to the sort of chiding.

00:44:35.000 George Conway is so desperate at this point.

00:44:36.000 Kellyanne's husband.

00:44:37.000 He is so he is so desperate at this point.

00:44:39.000 He is suggesting preemptively impeaching Trump again.

00:44:43.000 Again.

00:44:44.000 Not kidding.

00:44:44.000 Washington Post opinions today.

00:44:46.000 Trump is right.

00:44:47.000 We might have to impeach him again.

00:44:49.000 He says, with essentially no pretense about why he was doing it, the president brazenly retaliated Friday against two witnesses who gave truthful testimony in the House's impeachment inquiry.

00:44:57.000 He fired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a U.S.

00:44:59.000 ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, and he also fired a third man, Lieutenant Colonel Yevgeny Vindman, merely for being the brother of the first.

00:45:05.000 This is part of, by the way, of a broader cut down in federal staffing, so it's not wholly true that this was just about going after these people.

00:45:12.000 Trump essentially admitted his retaliatory motive on Saturday when he tweeted that he sacked Vindman in part for having reported content of my perfect calls incorrectly.

00:45:20.000 If this were a criminal investigation and Alexander Vindman and Sondland had given their testimony to a grand jury, this Friday night massacre could have been a crime.

00:45:26.000 At the very least, it ought to be impeachable.

00:45:28.000 If Richard Nixon was to be impeached for authorizing hush money for witnesses, Yeah, good luck with this.

00:45:32.000 Good luck with this.

00:45:33.000 It's just not going to fly.

00:45:33.000 You took your shot.

00:45:34.000 You missed.

00:45:35.000 Is this a move that Trump should have made?

00:45:36.000 for complying with subpoenas and giving truthful testimony about presidential misconduct should make for a high crime or misdemeanor as well.

00:45:42.000 So let's impeach him again.

00:45:43.000 Yeah, good luck with this.

00:45:44.000 Good luck with this.

00:45:45.000 It's just not going to fly.

00:45:47.000 You took your shot.

00:45:48.000 You missed.

00:45:49.000 Is this a move that Trump should have made? 1.00

00:45:51.000 No, it's politically stupid. 0.98

00:45:52.000 But for Trump, the rip on Vindman is that Vindman was deliberately misinterpreting what he was saying because he doesn't like Trump personally and didn't like his Ukraine policy that it had nothing to do with Trump actually committing a crime per se. 0.99

00:46:04.000 Okay, so George Conway saying let's impeach him again.

00:46:07.000 You get this from Pelosi, too.

00:46:08.000 Republicans have normalized lawlessness.

00:46:09.000 Good luck with all of this.

00:46:10.000 It's just not going to cut it.

00:46:12.000 It really is not.

00:46:13.000 So this is the problem for Democrats.

00:46:15.000 They've got an octogenarian socialist who is now running away with this thing.

00:46:19.000 Bernie is not only the frontrunner, he's now the prohibitive frontrunner because nobody else is rising.

00:46:23.000 They just took a shot at Michael Bloomberg, who is the only person who is in the mode of Joe Biden.

00:46:31.000 Biden is collapsing.

00:46:32.000 Bloomberg is coming under heavy fire.

00:46:34.000 Pete Buttigieg is the only one who is sort of left standing.

00:46:37.000 Unless Amy Klobuchar shows really strong in New Hampshire, there is no moderate opposition.

00:46:41.000 The moderates have flipped six ways from Sunday, and Bernie's going to run away with this thing.

00:46:45.000 That's just the way it is.

00:46:45.000 By the way, Amy Klobuchar should win.

00:46:48.000 If the Democrats had any brains at all, they would be taking a second look at Amy Klobuchar. 0.96

00:46:51.000 She's the only candidate who has won in a purple state and won repeatedly.

00:46:55.000 And when Elizabeth Warren was saying, I've won a Senate seat in Massachusetts. 0.98

00:46:58.000 Yeah, you could slap a blue D on a bag of dog crap in Massachusetts and it would win a Senate seat. 0.97

00:47:03.000 And they effectively do that every six years in Massachusetts. 0.97

00:47:06.000 But in Minnesota, you actually have to be pretty good at politics.

00:47:08.000 Klobuchar happens to be a talented politician with actually a pretty stellar intellectual background.

00:47:12.000 And this is not coming from somebody who agrees with Klobuchar a lot.

00:47:14.000 Like, I disagree with her tremendously. 0.96

00:47:16.000 But the Democrats are fools not to be looking seriously at Klobuchar and instead be looking at, like, Pete Buttigieg, who's the mayor of seven people. 0.97

00:47:24.000 And whose father was a Gramsci scholar. 0.98

00:47:28.000 Antonio Gramsci was one of the founders of the Marxist movement in Italy in 1918-1919.

00:47:33.000 And his dad, so Buttigieg's dad was like the guy on Gramsci.

00:47:38.000 Gramsci, Gramsci.

00:47:39.000 Can't remember how to pronounce it.

00:47:40.000 In any case, they've got a bunch of radicals and Klobuchar. 0.85

00:47:43.000 Maybe Klobuchar shows strong in New Hampshire and that changes the race.

00:47:46.000 Maybe Bloomberg starts to pick something up.

00:47:49.000 It's looking a lot like Bernie.

00:47:50.000 A lot like Bernie.

00:47:51.000 And for Trump, Trump is licking his chops.

00:47:53.000 Trump is just waiting to drop those attack ads against Bernie Sanders.

00:47:57.000 As well he should be because guess what?

00:47:58.000 Nancy Pelosi yelling about Trump, it's all priced in.

00:48:01.000 It is all priced in at this point.

00:48:04.000 So that is where things stand.

00:48:05.000 I will say that there was a great ironic moment.

00:48:08.000 If there are mathematical rounding errors, why can't those be adjusted?

00:48:11.000 still has not really finalized the results.

00:48:12.000 Like they're finally finalizing the results, but they're re-canvassing and all this.

00:48:15.000 The Iowa Democratic chair yesterday was caught on tape explaining the disastrous caucuses.

00:48:20.000 And while he was doing so, the sign in front of him that said, Iowa Democratic Party fell down.

00:48:25.000 It was pretty spectacular.

00:48:26.000 If there are mathematical rounding errors, why can't those be adjusted?

00:48:32.000 Because these sheets are signed not only by the precinct chair and the precinct secretary, they're also signed by campaign representatives.

00:48:44.000 And so for us, they are the official record of what took place in the room.

00:48:49.000 Even he is realizing that this is like a disaster area.

00:48:53.000 It is a disaster area for Democrats.

00:48:54.000 By the way, in the prediction markets, in the betting markets, Michael Bloomberg is now running second to Bernie Sanders.

00:48:59.000 Pete Buttigieg is trailing in third and Biden is all the way down at fourth in the betting markets.

00:49:04.000 The collapse of Joe Biden is going to be something for the record books.

00:49:07.000 It really is.

00:49:07.000 It's pretty impressive.

00:49:09.000 Meanwhile, by the way, as I say, Elizabeth Warren may be done after this, which consolidates some of the vote for Bernie.

00:49:15.000 Presumably some of the Warren voters move over to Bernie, but many of those Warren voters could theoretically move over to Klobuchar.

00:49:20.000 And there are reports that Democrats are depressed.

00:49:23.000 Really, there is serious depression setting in for Democrats because they are looking at this field, and this field is a bag of nothing.

00:49:30.000 I mean, Michael Tamasky has a piece over at the Daily Beast today called, They're voting in New Hampshire, but this Democrat just wants to jump off a bridge.

00:49:40.000 This Democrat just wants to jump off a bridge. 0.98

00:49:42.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:49:43.000 He says, New Hampshire is voting.

00:49:45.000 I remember when this used to be an exciting day.

00:49:46.000 It's not exciting now.

00:49:47.000 It's depressing.

00:49:48.000 I'm depressed.

00:49:49.000 Almost everybody I know, every Democrat anyway, is depressed.

00:49:51.000 It's a mess.

00:49:52.000 Iowa's a bleep show and shouldn't be first anyway.

00:49:54.000 New Hampshire shouldn't be second.

00:49:55.000 It's totally preposterous.

00:49:56.000 Yet the party lacks the stones to tell these self-important second-tier states to go stuff it.

00:50:00.000 The candidates don't look like winners.

00:50:01.000 The party looks like it might be headed toward a face-off between a billionaire and a man who wants to ban billionaires, neither of them really Democrats, and Donald Trump is gonna be reelected.

00:50:09.000 That is a hell of a take from one of your fans, Democratic Party.

00:50:11.000 Well done. 0.86

00:50:12.000 All they had to do was not be crazy.

00:50:14.000 And they couldn't do it.

00:50:15.000 And every time it looks like they might pull back from the brink of being crazy, they just go right back in it again.

00:50:20.000 Okay, let's get to a couple of things that I hate.

00:50:23.000 We're going to skip things I like today.

00:50:24.000 today, we're going to go directly to things that I hate.

00:50:26.000 Things that I hate, number one.

00:50:32.000 So there's an article by Kate Wagner in the New Republic, and she's very, very upset about a new order, a proposed executive order titled, Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.

00:50:42.000 The order essentially forces a rewrite of the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which mandated that an official architectural style must be avoided for federal buildings, and that new buildings should be exemplary of the time in which they are built.

00:50:54.000 Right, so this means that you have ugly-ass buildings all over Washington, D.C., because the 1960s and 1970s were the home of what were called the Brutalist architecture.

00:51:02.000 Now, that name is pretty descriptive, Brutalism.

00:51:04.000 It's actually named after the French for concrete, which is called Bruté, I believe.

00:51:08.000 My French is horrible.

00:51:10.000 In any case, basically, you end up with monstrosities like this.

00:51:12.000 This is the FBI building, which looks like it's something directly out of the Panopticon.

00:51:16.000 I mean, it looks like something out of dystopian horror film.

00:51:20.000 This brutalist architecture with overt concrete, windows buried inside layers of concrete, metal bars on the windows. 1.00

00:51:27.000 I mean, this thing is just a hideous piece of crap. 0.98

00:51:29.000 And then, contrast that with, like, the Supreme Court building. 0.99

00:51:32.000 So the Supreme Court building is a gorgeous piece of building, right?

00:51:34.000 I mean, this is classical Roman architecture.

00:51:37.000 Or Greek architecture.

00:51:39.000 Looks like the Parthenon.

00:51:40.000 It's beautiful.

00:51:41.000 I mean, there's a beautiful building.

00:51:42.000 The White House is a beautiful building. 1.00

00:51:43.000 Go back to the Brutalist piece of crap. 0.98

00:51:44.000 That one is from, like, 1965. 0.97

00:51:45.000 The FBI's building from 1965.

00:51:49.000 And, again, go back to, let's see, the Brutalist piece. 0.99

00:51:52.000 This thing is just a horrific piece of garbage. 0.99

00:51:56.000 And a lot of Washington, D.C. 1.00

00:51:57.000 looks like that. 1.00

00:51:58.000 It's not the only horrific piece of garbage in Washington, D.C. 0.99

00:52:00.000 These sorts of things age badly. 0.85

00:52:01.000 Now, listen, I'm no interior decorator, but let me just say that if you were going to build something for all time, not just for the Whim of the moment.

00:52:08.000 And you're putting carpets down your den.

00:52:10.000 You don't get the green shag carpet from the 1970s.

00:52:12.000 That thing's going to be obsolete inside of seven years.

00:52:14.000 What instead you do is you tend to build in time-tested and honored tradition.

00:52:18.000 And this is true for great cities all over the world.

00:52:20.000 Great cities all over the world are built in particular style.

00:52:22.000 If you were to build brutalist architecture in the center of Paris, it would mar the landscape, obviously.

00:52:27.000 In Jerusalem, you must, by law, build things from Jerusalem stone so that all of the city is of a piece.

00:52:33.000 Right, so the new executive order was to suggest that we stop building crap like that and instead we build some of these classical buildings, right, which are much better looking.

00:52:40.000 They are much nicer looking, they're more beautiful, they stand the test of time. 0.86

00:52:43.000 Nobody goes and gawks at the front of the FBI building.

00:52:47.000 Nobody does that.

00:52:48.000 Instead, people tend to go to the major sites in Washington, D.C.

00:52:54.000 that are nicer looking and don't look like they have aged.

00:52:57.000 I mean, the White House is a beautiful building, just aesthetically.

00:52:59.000 It's a very pleasing building.

00:53:00.000 But according to this article by Kate Wagner, you're a racist if you push for classical federal buildings. 0.95

00:53:05.000 A racist!

00:53:07.000 The proposition put forth by this new executive order, which is spearheaded by the National Civic Arts Society, a conservative non-profit, would essentially scrap the old guidelines in favor of a mandate that establishes a classical style inspired by Greek and Roman architecture as the default.

00:53:19.000 The American Institute of Architects swiftly published vehement denunciations of the plan on the grounds it would stifle architecture and violate the free thought and artistic expression that are essential to a democracy.

00:53:29.000 Comparisons have already been made to Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin.

00:53:34.000 Really?

00:53:34.000 Like, because you're building nice buildings?

00:53:36.000 That's like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin?

00:53:37.000 I mean, people should actually, like, take a look at Stalinist architecture.

00:53:40.000 It's hideous. 0.99

00:53:41.000 It's hideous garbage. 0.99

00:53:42.000 If you actually go and look at the old Soviet architecture, it's really, really horrible looking. 0.99

00:53:46.000 The abrupt aesthetic reversal heralded by this executive order has some obvious underpinnings, beginning with the fact that the reversion to a mandatory classical style reflects the architectural philosophies of white supremacists online.

00:53:58.000 Oh, so it was the 4chan folks who decided that they wanted beautiful buildings.

00:54:02.000 I'm confused.

00:54:03.000 Don't diverse people like good-looking buildings? 1.00

00:54:06.000 It seems pretty obvious to me that that FBI building is a piece of crap. 1.00

00:54:08.000 It seems pretty obvious to everybody who's ever walked by it, but apparently that makes you a racist. 0.99

00:54:12.000 This is the inevitable result of an architectural faux-populism that has been sown in the conscience of American architecture since postmodernism.

00:54:19.000 The effort to stifle aesthetic expression in public architecture by instating a mandatory style is wrong for all the reasons that the AIA and the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board lay out in opposition.

00:54:28.000 The proposal Speaking as an architecture critic, this is insane and borderline totalitarian.

00:54:31.000 Weird.

00:54:31.000 Because the same people who say that we shouldn't have lobbyists deciding exactly how anything is done in Washington, D.C.

00:54:35.000 Artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, members of the building industry, or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization involved in architecture.

00:54:44.000 Speaking as an architecture critic, this is insane and borderline totalitarian.

00:54:48.000 Weird, because the same people who say that we shouldn't have lobbyists deciding exactly how anything is done in Washington, D.C.

00:54:53.000 Say that architecture lobbyists should decide how architecture is done in Washington, D.C.

00:54:57.000 Whether we like to admit it or not, says this New Republic columnist, Trump is an architectural president.

00:55:04.000 Like all building peddlers, Trump is subjected to the gaze of architecture critics who have occasionally praised his work but have mostly often panned it.

00:55:10.000 Though Trump has put up buildings ranging from 19th century retrofits to late modern skyscrapers, his personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV.

00:55:18.000 His choice of modernism for the style of the Trump Towers in Chicago and New York can simply be explained away by the fact that modern all-glass buildings, our hegemonic aesthetic signature of corporate capitalism, is the style of big business.

00:55:29.000 Okay, so hold on a second.

00:55:31.000 Most of Trump's architecture is not this stuff.

00:55:35.000 But somehow Trump's fascist tendencies lead to a preference for neoclassical architecture?

00:55:42.000 Eventually, this columnist admits, neoclassical architecture isn't always a right-wing dog whistle.

00:55:46.000 Yeah, because it's almost never a right-wing dog whistle.

00:55:49.000 Most architects are required to learn about it in their architectural history classes.

00:55:52.000 Many architects train at architecture schools, most notably the University of Notre Dame, that specialize in traditional Western architectural language.

00:55:58.000 These architects sometimes go to work on new buildings.

00:56:00.000 Many apply their trade in restorations.

00:56:02.000 There is beauty and nuance in classical architecture.

00:56:05.000 So what exactly are you whining about? 0.90

00:56:07.000 But apparently, if you don't want those hideous, brutalist buildings, then you're a racist. 0.95

00:56:11.000 So, good news there from the nation. 0.96

00:56:13.000 Okay, other things that I hate today.

00:56:14.000 So David Brooks has an extraordinarily long piece in The Atlantic today, talking about the nuclear family and suggesting the nuclear family was a mistake.

00:56:22.000 He says, the family structure we've held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many.

00:56:28.000 It's time to figure out better ways to live together.

00:56:30.000 So David Brooks, as he so often does, strings together a bunch of true statements to come up with a false conclusion.

00:56:35.000 This article basically suggests that the concept of the nuclear family is inherently bad.

00:56:42.000 That the nuclear family is somehow created at the expense of extended family and community and society building.

00:56:49.000 That is basically his premise.

00:56:51.000 So what he says is that we should get rid of this concept of the nuclear family.

00:56:53.000 It's past its time.

00:56:55.000 Never really applied anyway.

00:56:55.000 It only applied for a short period of time and only when brutal sexism was in order.

00:57:00.000 And instead, we need to create new social networks that we're supposed to do without churches.

00:57:04.000 We're supposed to do it without nuclear families that work with one another. 1.00

00:57:07.000 It's absolute horse crap. 0.98

00:57:08.000 So he comes up with, he critiques The nuclear family existing in isolation without extended family. 0.99

00:57:15.000 But then his solution is not, okay, well, we need the nuclear family and the extended family.

00:57:19.000 His solution is the nuclear family no longer exists, so we have to build these tribal structures around non-nuclear families. 0.95

00:57:26.000 And he comes up with, like, all the wrong solutions.

00:57:28.000 So here's what David Brooks has to say about the nuclear family.

00:57:30.000 And this, again, is a failure to recognize that old standards of morality, when it comes to the nuclear family, that you need a mom and a dad and kids, and that you should have grandparents around, and that government structures, by the way, totally undercut that, right?

00:57:44.000 What Social Security actually did in many cases was prevent Children from feeling the need to take care of their parents because Social Security was going to do that.

00:57:51.000 It used to be 50, 60 years ago before Social Security got enormous, that everybody sort of assumed that when your parents got older, you were going to have to build a mother-in-law unit on your house and then your mother-in-law is going to have to stay there.

00:58:02.000 I mean, they were literally called mother-in-law units.

00:58:04.000 There was always the assumption that as your parents age, you're going to have to take care of them.

00:58:08.000 But government incentives changed that structure.

00:58:10.000 In any case, David Brooks, he starts again from the right premises and ends in the wrong place, which is so typical of people who are unwilling to admit that maybe we've gotten a few things wrong over the past 60 years in terms of social policy, particularly with regard to the differences between the sexes and the necessity of having a mother and a father.

00:58:24.000 David Brooks says, the scene is one.

00:58:26.000 Many of us have somewhere in our family history, dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables.

00:58:33.000 Siblings, cousin aunts, uncles, great aunts.

00:58:35.000 The grandparents are telling old family stories for the 37th time.

00:58:38.000 The old sirs start squabbling about whose memory is better after the meal.

00:58:41.000 There are piles of plates in the sink.

00:58:42.000 Squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement.

00:58:45.000 Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway making plans.

00:58:48.000 This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson's 1990 film, Avalon, based on his own childhood in Baltimore.

00:58:54.000 As the years go by, in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role.

00:58:58.000 By the 1960s, there's no extended family at Thanksgiving.

00:59:00.000 It's just a young father and mother and their son and daughter eating turkey off trays in front of the TV.

00:59:05.000 In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened.

00:59:09.000 This is the story of our times.

00:59:10.000 The story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms.

00:59:16.000 The initial results of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn't seem so bad.

00:59:19.000 But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued.

00:59:23.000 In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families, or no families.

00:59:30.000 Okay, this is where his narrative goes off the rails.

00:59:32.000 So it is true that when you create a family structure, you should do so, and you should look to do so, in places where you have support structures.

00:59:38.000 We talk about this on my show all the time, right?

00:59:40.000 I live within a mile of my parents.

00:59:41.000 Why?

00:59:42.000 Well, because today, for example, I have like an errand that I need to run with my daughter.

00:59:46.000 I'm working and my wife has an appointment.

00:59:48.000 My dad is picking up the slack, right?

00:59:50.000 When we have our next baby, which should come sometime in the next few weeks.

00:59:53.000 When that happens, my parents are going to step in and help.

00:59:55.000 We deliberately live close to my parents in order to make this happen.

00:59:58.000 By the way, with travel now, it is also true.

01:00:01.000 That having an extended family that is available to you is much more possible than ever before.

01:00:05.000 When my sister, who lives over on the East Coast, has a problem, she calls my parents and my mom gets on the next plane and she's over there and just stays with them to help out.

01:00:12.000 Or when my wife has this baby, her parents are going to come down and they're going to help out too.

01:00:16.000 Like having extended family available is obviously necessary.

01:00:19.000 Not only that, having an extended tribe, and by tribe I don't mean genetically associated, I mean a group of people with whom you have a common interest available is really good.

01:00:28.000 Like when my wife has her baby, and this happens with every baby in our Jewish community, whenever somebody has a baby, for the next three weeks every meal is taken care of.

01:00:35.000 Like somebody in the family, we actually have like a full schedule online, and we will all claim a meal, and we'll all drop off a meal with the family of the baby that was just born, so that the wife doesn't have to cook, the mom doesn't have to cook.

01:00:45.000 For like three weeks to make sure that she's able to take care of the kid, and take care of the dad too, and all of that. 1.00

01:00:50.000 Right?

01:00:50.000 It is true you need social structures.

01:00:52.000 But what's weird about David Brooks' piece is that his argument is that the nuclear family was a myth.

01:00:58.000 No, the nuclear family is an inherent part of this.

01:01:00.000 The nuclear family exists with the rest of the social structure.

01:01:03.000 David Brooks concludes in this piece that basically extended clans fell away, the nuclear family was left, and the nuclear family wasn't strong enough to bear all the pressures that were put on it by outside forces.

01:01:14.000 Well, that's sort of true, and it's sort of not, because as David Brooks acknowledges, the nuclear family is still the standard in high-income America.

01:01:20.000 Now, he says that's because it's easier to have a nuclear family when you're high-income.

01:01:24.000 This is completely reversing logic.

01:01:26.000 The reality is that one of the reasons people are low-income is because they do not form nuclear families as often.

01:01:31.000 One of the greatest intergenerational predictors of poverty is not forming a nuclear family.

01:01:35.000 It's being a single mom, right? 0.86

01:01:37.000 You don't have as much social structure available to help with your kids.

01:01:40.000 This is one of the lead predictors of criminal engagement by your children.

01:01:44.000 It's one of the lead indicators of intergenerational poverty.

01:01:46.000 So Brooks gets it all backwards.

01:01:47.000 He says that only rich people can afford to have a nuclear family.

01:01:50.000 No, that is wrong.

01:01:51.000 The reason, one of the major reasons that rich people are rich is because they make good decisions about their family, right?

01:01:56.000 As I've cited before, if you want to be not poor in America, permanently poor in America, do three things.

01:02:01.000 Graduate high school, get a job, don't have a baby before you're married.

01:02:04.000 That's it.

01:02:04.000 Those are the only three things.

01:02:07.000 And if you violate those three things, you're going to be poor, right?

01:02:09.000 Or at least there's a better shot that you're going to be poor in the United States by leaps and bounds.

01:02:14.000 But Brooke seems to assume that it's harder to form a nuclear family these days, when the truth is, it's actually easier than ever to form a nuclear family these days.

01:02:22.000 It really is.

01:02:23.000 It is simple to form a nuclear family.

01:02:25.000 You walk down to, like, of all sorts, by the way, you walk down to a government office, you get a document.

01:02:31.000 Now you are married.

01:02:32.000 And what has changed?

01:02:33.000 Other than you have to file as joint income filers, which is actually a marriage penalty the government should get rid of.

01:02:38.000 Other than that, you get child tax credits.

01:02:40.000 There are all sorts of benefits that are available to you as a married couple.

01:02:44.000 Two are now living for the price of one, to a certain extent.

01:02:46.000 Because when I got married with my wife, my expenses really did not rise all that much, but our income did.

01:02:50.000 If she had been working.

01:02:51.000 She was a student at the time.

01:02:53.000 But David Brooks, what he's really doing is he's lamenting the death of extended family.

01:02:57.000 That is fair.

01:02:58.000 But to lament the death of extended family by crapping on the nuclear family is completely bizarre.

01:03:02.000 He says extended families have two great strengths.

01:03:03.000 The first is resilience.

01:03:05.000 An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web.

01:03:07.000 Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents, a complex web of relationships among say 7, 10, 20 people.

01:03:15.000 If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents are there to step in.

01:03:18.000 If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach.

01:03:21.000 Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

01:03:29.000 A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people.

01:03:33.000 If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers.

01:03:35.000 In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

01:03:40.000 All of that is true.

01:03:41.000 It is also true that if you want an extended family, you know what's very helpful?

01:03:44.000 Having two parents involved in the extended family.

01:03:47.000 Even in the stories I'm telling about my own family, my parents are involved, my wife's parents are involved, right?

01:03:51.000 We now have two sets of grandparents who are able to pitch in. 0.97

01:03:54.000 My wife's siblings can come over and babysit. 0.92

01:03:57.000 My siblings are available if we need help, and I'm available to them.

01:04:01.000 In order to build a big web, a network of relationships, you do have to have a nuclear family at the center. 0.58

01:04:05.000 The reason that I'm pushing this is that the title of this article is that the nuclear family was a mistake.

01:04:11.000 No, the death of the extended family was a mistake.

01:04:13.000 The nuclear family is a longtime part of human history, and his case that he makes that the nuclear family didn't exist until the 1950s is obviously untrue.

01:04:22.000 It's obviously untrue.

01:04:24.000 When people were expanding across the continent of the United States, Was the nuclear family not a part of that?

01:04:29.000 When people have expanded throughout human history, was the nuclear family not a part of that?

01:04:34.000 And what exactly is he calling for?

01:04:35.000 A replacement of the nuclear family by a social structure that is going to have... It takes a village. 0.95

01:04:39.000 It does take a village, but it takes a family within the village.

01:04:42.000 And it takes families networking with other families in that village.

01:04:45.000 So this call for the replacement of the nuclear family is quite bizarre by David Brooks.

01:04:50.000 And that is where he ends up.

01:04:52.000 He ends up suggesting that the cure for lack of fathers in the African-American family, fathers sticking around in the home, is social networks.

01:05:01.000 Well, that can help.

01:05:02.000 It certainly can.

01:05:02.000 But you know what the leading indicator is of help in those social networks?

01:05:07.000 Fathers in the surrounding areas.

01:05:09.000 Harvard did a study where it talked about lack of fathers in the black community and it said that a lack of one father in the black community can be replaced as long as the surrounding community has a high percentage of fathers.

01:05:17.000 In other words, you do need nuclear families. 0.66

01:05:19.000 It can't just be a matriarchy taking care of a bunch of kids with no fathers present at all because they've created a social network. 1.00

01:05:25.000 That is simply not going to cut it.

01:05:27.000 But David Brooks ends up here.

01:05:28.000 He says, in other words, social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can't operationalize because it is no longer relevant.

01:05:35.000 Because it is no longer relevant.

01:05:36.000 Why is that no longer relevant?

01:05:38.000 Why?

01:05:39.000 Like, seriously.

01:05:40.000 He says it's no longer relevant because women want to work and because the idea of a nuclear family rests on the fact that women have to stay home.

01:05:48.000 No, it doesn't.

01:05:49.000 If you have an extended family, then everybody sort of shares the burdens.

01:05:51.000 But you need the nuclear family, again, to provide that core.

01:05:54.000 He says the sexual revolution has come and gone.

01:05:56.000 And it's left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals.

01:06:02.000 And so the progressives have no philosophy of family life at all because they don't want to seem judgmental.

01:06:06.000 So instead, we want to redefine kinship.

01:06:08.000 Here's his solution.

01:06:09.000 He says, Well, again, now he's just talking about the loss of community generally, with which I totally agree, but I don't understand why this is supposed to come at the expense of the nuclear family. 0.98

01:06:39.000 He says, back in the 17th and 18th centuries when European Protestants came to North America, their relatively individualistic culture existed alongside the Native Americans' very communal culture.

01:06:48.000 In his book, Tribes, Sebastian Junger describes what happened next.

01:06:50.000 While European settlers kept defecting to go live with Native American families, almost no Native Americans ever defected to go live with European families.

01:06:57.000 Europeans occasionally captured Native Americans and forced them to come with them.

01:07:00.000 They taught them English and educated them in Western ways, but almost every time they were able, the indigenous Americans fled. 0.94

01:07:05.000 European settlers were sometimes captured by Native Americans.

01:07:08.000 They rarely tried to run away.

01:07:09.000 When you read such accounts, you can't help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

01:07:14.000 It's a very weird example to choose, given the fact that the nuclear family and extended kin were a hallmark of American life for most of American history.

01:07:23.000 He says, our culture is oddly stuck.

01:07:24.000 We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose.

01:07:29.000 We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible.

01:07:34.000 We've seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached family.

01:07:38.000 Yet recent science suggests the possibility a new family paradigm is emerging.

01:07:41.000 And here's where he gets to his, his kind of, his punchline.

01:07:45.000 He says, many of the statistics I've cited are dire, but they describe the past.

01:07:49.000 Americans are now experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

01:07:55.000 He says that we're moving into a new cultural paradigm.

01:07:58.000 Why?

01:07:58.000 Because kids are staying around with their parents and this is creating new networks.

01:08:03.000 No, this is incorrect.

01:08:05.000 Again, because you have now said that a kid who is 30 staying with mom and dad is the same as a kid who is 30 married with three kids living within a mile of mom and dad.

01:08:12.000 Not the same thing.

01:08:14.000 If you're going to create kinship networks, the nuclear family remains at the center of that. 0.92

01:08:18.000 And then he has this very weird situation where he says African Americans have always relied on extended family more than white Americans do.

01:08:26.000 He says, the black extended family survived even under slavery and all the forced family separations that involved.

01:08:31.000 Family was essential in the Jim Crow South.

01:08:32.000 All of this is true.

01:08:34.000 And then he said, government policy sometimes made it more difficult for this family form to thrive.

01:08:37.000 That is also true, but this happened identically at the same time as the death of nuclear family in the black community.

01:08:45.000 But you're gonna need a lot of nuclear families to make a network. 0.95

01:08:47.000 So bottom line here is the nuclear family was not a mistake.

01:08:49.000 The nuclear family is, was, and will continue to be since biblical times, the standard for human living.

01:08:55.000 The question is whether we can create social fabric, and that requires commonality of interest.

01:08:59.000 And this is the thing that Brooks is unwilling to say.

01:09:01.000 The bottom line is, all of the areas of American life typically in which nuclear families have formed the core of a broader social network happen inside religious communities.

01:09:10.000 And he's unwilling to say that people need to get involved in social networking via common interest again, because the bottom line is, as common interest fragments, And, as nuclear family fragments, there's nothing left to hold us together.

01:09:21.000 And that is a bigger problem.

01:09:22.000 So we need two things to happen.

01:09:23.000 One, make responsible decisions about your own childbearing and rearing.

01:09:26.000 Get married, have babies, and two, you need a social network of common interest, and that involves seriously thinking about your own values and getting involved with others on a social level.

01:09:35.000 And yes, that might mean that we might need to go back to church at a higher level.

01:09:39.000 Okay, so there you have it.

01:09:40.000 We will be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.

01:09:43.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow for the recap of the New Hampshire primaries.

01:09:46.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:09:47.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:09:52.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.

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01:10:19.000 Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.

01:10:22.000 You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.

01:10:29.000 But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 11, 2020

Live Socialist Or Die | Ep. 951

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