Trump loves tariffs, and wants to somehow fix the impact of the tariffs. It s all confusing. Today, Ben explains why tariffs are not the greatest, and how you can make your resume better. Plus, Harley-Davidson cuts its profit forecast for the year, and Whirlpool announces that they re moving some factories to Europe. Plus, the New York Daily News fires half its staff, and every Democrat vows to help Millennials virtue signal on issues that don t matter. And President Trump both loves tariffs and also wants to Somehow Fix the Impact of the Tariffs. It s confusing. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on the FiveThirtyEight Network. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is one of the most influential people in American business. You can reach Ben Shapiro at ben.shapiro@fiveeightmedia.co.nz and use the discount code "ELISSA" at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a copy of his new book, "The Secret Life of a Billionaire's Journalist" which is out now. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review and tell a friend about it! You'll get 20% off the entire service, and we'll get 5% off his next month, too! Subscribe to his newest book "The Art of the Deal" wherever you get your first book is available. Subscribe & Reviewed, plus a FREE 7-day shipping plan from Audible starting next week, shipping anywhere else gets $5,000 shipping starts $24,000, and they'll get 7GBGBRRP $99,99 a month, and I'll get an ad-free version of the book is shipping free, too get 20GBRMS, FREE FASTEST PRODUCING FREE, PROMOTION AND VIP PROMO, AND FREE PRODUED, AND A MONTH SUPPORTING THE PODCAST IS UP TO 48GBRUM AND VIP SUPPORTING VIP SUPPORTED INCLOSURE TO BUILDSIPPERS ARE A VOTING INCLICK HERE TO BUY TALKING ABOUT THIS ISSUES ARE ALSO PRACTICALLY PROODS AND PATREON AND OTHER THIRD-PRODUCED IN CHECKED IN TO GET A PROOFS AND A FRIENDS ARE ALSO INCLOGGED?
00:00:20.000President Trump's Twitter feed is a cornucopia, a cornucopia, a veritable cornucopia of joy and issues and, ah, sometimes it appears that the president is getting high off his own supply when it comes to Twitter.
00:00:31.000And we'll go through his Twitter feed, which is just lit, as the children say these days.
00:00:34.000But first, I want to get to how you can make your resume better.
00:00:39.000Whatever job you are currently holding, sorry to break it to you, employees, but in five years you will probably not be holding that job.
00:00:45.000And it's not because you're going to get fired.
00:00:46.000It's going to be because your resume is going to get better, and you're going to want a better job, or you're going to want to raise, or you're going to want to start a side business.
00:00:51.000Well, the best way to do that is by heading over to Skillshare and talking with my friends over there.
00:00:56.000Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 20,000 classes in business design, technology, and more.
00:01:01.000You can take classes in social media marketing, and illustration, and data science, mobile photography, creative writing, you name it.
00:01:06.000They've got a course on it taught by an expert.
00:01:08.000These courses are like 45 minutes, and they're really fantastic, top-notch stuff.
00:01:12.000Whether you're trying to deepen your professional skill set or start that side hustle,
00:01:15.000Or explore new passions, Skillshare is for you.
00:01:17.000I've taken classes in social media marketing, and yes, watercolors, because some of us have to relax in our off hours.
00:01:22.000That's what Skillshare can do for you.
00:02:29.000Okay, so we could talk about the fact that tariffs are not, in fact, the greatest.
00:02:33.000The last people who thought the tariffs were the greatest were a couple of guys named Smoot and Hawley.
00:02:36.000They were responsible for a tariff regime that ended up lengthening the Great Depression by probably eight years.
00:02:41.000So tariffs are not, in fact, the greatest, specifically because they're artificially increasing the price of products that you pay for on the shelves, and they are also artificially increasing the prices of inputs for American companies.
00:02:53.000They also draw retaliatory tariffs, so that means that American companies can't ship their products overseas.
00:03:07.000Harley-Davidson has cut its forecast for profit margin by an amount that suggests it's finding a way to cope with the damage done by President Donald Trump's trade war.
00:03:15.000Operating margin this year will drop to about 9.5 percent.
00:03:37.000The maker of home appliances said rising raw material costs hurt results in three out of four of its regional markets in the second quarter, including North America, Asia, and its struggling Europe, Middle East, and Africa division.
00:03:48.000The only region where it didn't cite input cost inflation was in Latin America, which faced its own problems in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg, including a Brazilian trucker strike.
00:03:56.000According to Chief Executive Officer Mark Robert Bitzer, he said, our annual steel contracts and hedging contracts with our base metals
00:04:03.000Give us some protection, but do not insulate us from these more material trends.
00:04:06.000So in other words, all of those manufacturing jobs that President Trump wants to protect are actually being hurt by the tariffs that he loves and thinks are the greatest.
00:04:14.000Technically, by the way, Muhammad Ali is the greatest.
00:04:17.000But according to President Trump, tariffs are, in fact, the greatest.
00:04:20.000Also, I do love that everybody is talking.
00:04:23.000I didn't realize that that was a school of economics now.
00:04:25.000The everybody's talking school of economics.
00:04:28.000And I was also under the impression that everybody was talking about the bird.
00:04:32.000Because, of course, the bird is the word.
00:04:33.000But the fact that the President of the United States continues to tweet out about this stuff suggests that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about.
00:05:05.000That's true of the United States as well, but I have a trade deficit with my dry cleaners, I have a trade deficit with our nanny, I have a trade deficit with our gardener, I have a trade deficit with the
00:05:13.000Local restaurants around here, a pretty massive trade deficit with the local restaurants around here.
00:05:17.000That doesn't mean the solution is for me to stop shopping at those restaurants or stores at the grocery and instead artificially increase costs.
00:05:24.000Now, how do we know that this is actually having an impact?
00:05:26.000I know there are a lot of people right now who are shaking their heads.
00:05:28.000No, if Trump says tariffs are great, it's because tariffs are great.
00:05:31.000Because he's making tariffs great again or some such.
00:05:35.000If this were the case, then why exactly is the president now announcing that he is going to be providing aid to farmers?
00:05:43.000The Trump administration is planning to ease fears of a trade war by announcing later on Tuesday billions of dollars in aid to farmers hurt by tariffs, according to two sources familiar with the plan.
00:05:52.000The administration's plan will use two commodity support programs in the Farm Bill, as well as the Agricultural Department's broad authority to stabilize the agricultural economy during times of turmoil.
00:06:02.000The plan has been in the works for months.
00:06:05.000farmers and ranchers, a key constituency for President Trump and Republicans, don't bear the brunt of an escalating trade fight with China, the European Union,
00:06:12.000And other major economies as the administration pursues an aggressive course to rebalance America's trade relationships.
00:06:17.000Trump's move to slap tariffs on imports from some of America's largest trading partners have prompted retaliation against U.S.
00:06:23.000farm goods like pork, beef, soybeans, sorghum, and a range of fruits.
00:06:26.000So what's happening is that President Trump decided he wanted to tariff
00:06:30.000And these countries that we are now tariffing have decided they're going to tariff America on agricultural exports, which means that our farmers don't have any place to ship their goods, which are now withering on the vine.
00:06:40.000So now President Trump is going to borrow from the future in order to pay off those farmers.
00:06:48.000FDR's policy from 1933 all the way until the war began in 1941 was this policy.
00:06:53.000The policy was that we were going to leverage tariffs against
00:06:57.000People who are screwing us in trade wars.
00:06:59.000We're going to fight those trade wars.
00:07:00.000And then we are going to somehow make up for all the farmers who are losing money by artificially boosting prices.
00:07:06.000Now FDR went so far as to actually regulate farmers and force farmers to actually burn off their excess grain supply in order to boost prices.
00:07:13.000So he provided them with all sorts of subsidies and then he also regulated them up the wazoo so you didn't have an oversupply of grain.
00:07:20.000This led to a very famous case at the Supreme Court called Wickard v. Filburn where a guy was growing grain for his own consumption and the federal government said you have to burn off the grain for your own consumption because you're artificially lowering the price of grain.
00:07:32.000It's lowering the price in the global market because you are eating that grain instead of buying it from somebody else.
00:07:37.000And the Supreme Court, idiotically under pressure from FDR, found that the federal government could actually regulate your ability to grow grain in your own backyard for your own use.
00:07:44.000Somehow this impacted interstate commerce.
00:07:49.000And this is one of the problems with the areas where the president has sole control.
00:07:52.000The Constitution of the United States does not delegate tariff power to the president of the United States.
00:07:57.000It delegates tariff power to the legislature.
00:08:01.000Now, originally, the legislature delegated tariff power to the president of the United States because they wanted the presidency, they wanted the executive branch, to lower tariffs.
00:08:08.000And they figured that it would be easier to have a president who could unilaterally lower tariffs than it would be to have a legislature that had to lower tariffs by fiat, by legislation.
00:08:16.000Well, the problem is, once you give a lot of power to the executive, the executive can use it however he wants.
00:08:20.000So the President of the United States can simply play with the tariff rates.
00:08:38.000Okay, Larry Kudlow somewhere is spinning in his office, but...
00:08:41.000All the people in the administration who are pro-free trade are looking at tweets like this and thinking, why would the president undercut his own strong economy with this sort of foolishness?
00:08:58.000And the president is going to find that out the hard way if he continues along this path.
00:09:02.000Now, all of this has some impact on the generic congressional ballot.
00:09:06.000Right now, it looks like the Democrats do have the momentum again in the congressional races.
00:09:09.000The president's approval ratings, as I discussed yesterday, continue to be very high.
00:09:13.000But the congressional races are starting to open up in favor of Democrats, at least on the generic ballot.
00:09:20.000And part of that is because the president is unpopular.
00:09:22.000If, as I said yesterday, the Democrats are going to climb back into this thing, if the Republicans are going to climb back into this thing, it's going to be reliant on the Democrats overstepping their boundaries.
00:09:32.000Fortunately, there is a good shot of that.
00:09:35.000I think solid critiques that could be leveraged against policies of the Trump administration have gone by the wayside in favor of completely unhinged
00:09:55.000We should separate out two missions and do the anti-terrorism mission, the national security mission, and then on the other side, make sure you're looking at immigration as a humanitarian issue.
00:11:16.000First of all, I would just like to point out that if a Republican ever said that any politician was on a jihad against anything, people would immediately call them an Islamophobe, right?
00:11:23.000You're only allowed to use the word jihad when you are specifically referring to an internal struggle, because that's what it means according to the Quran.
00:11:31.000But Andrew Cuomo says that Trump is on a jihad against immigrants.
00:11:34.000Yeah, that's a way you're going to win over all those people in the middle of the country who are attempting to cope with falling wages in particular industries.
00:11:42.000If you really think that any of that is going to win back the base of Trump support to the Democratic side of the aisle, you have to be crazy.
00:11:49.000In a second, I want to talk about the elitism that is evident in some of these particular comments, which is translated over to the reaction to the New York Daily News.
00:11:57.000I'm going to talk about that in just one second.
00:12:07.000The reason I know you look like a schlump is because you got that suit off the rack, didn't you?
00:12:10.000You went down to the local suit warehouse, and then you picked up the thing you thought was gonna fit you, and now it looks like you're wearing a burlap sack with a couple of buttons on it.
00:12:17.000Okay, what you really need is a custom-made suit, like a suit that is made, made to order, from Indochino.
00:12:22.000Indochino is the world's largest made-to-measure menswear company.
00:12:25.000They've been featured in major publications, including GQ, Forbes, and Fast Company.
00:12:29.000They make suits and shirts made to your exact measurements for a fantastic fit.
00:12:32.000Guys love the wide selections of high-quality fabrics.
00:12:35.000You can personalize all the details, including your lapel, lining, monogram.
00:12:39.000You can either visit a showroom or you can shop online at Indochino.com.
00:12:42.000You pick your fabric, you choose your customizations, you submit your measurements,
00:12:45.000And then you just wait for your custom suit to arrive in just a few weeks.
00:12:47.000I've been to their showroom over here in Beverly Hills and it really is awesome.
00:12:50.000You feel like James Bond walking in there.
00:13:30.000I guess when you look at President Trump's trade policy, and then you look at the Democrats' response to President Trump on immigration, there's a bigger message that comes out from it.
00:13:37.000As much as I dislike President Trump's trade policy, and I do, I think it's garbage.
00:13:40.000I think that President Trump doesn't understand basic economics when it comes to trade.
00:13:44.000I think he has a bizarre version of how trade deficits actually work.
00:13:47.000I think that this is likely to be harmful to the economy that he is president during.
00:13:53.000I don't like using the phrase his economy because I don't think the president runs the economy, but the economy over which he presides.
00:13:59.000I think it's going to hurt him to pursue this policy.
00:14:01.000With that said, if you have to contrast President Trump's
00:14:05.000Apparent like for sort of the manufacturing base and the people in the middle of the country.
00:14:09.000What the Democrats dislike for those people, there's a reason that President Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio going away.
00:16:52.000If I fire someone at this company, I don't actually have to notify Jerry Brown, the governor of the state of California.
00:16:57.000First of all, I assume Jerry Brown would be happy if people, if we lost employees at the Daily Wire, but that in itself is a bizarre statement.
00:17:41.000The conflict between the editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News saying, if you want heavier scrutiny on government, what happened today is terrible, and then the government saying, we'll help you rehire all those reporters.
00:17:50.000Do you think maybe those reporters might go easy on Governor Cuomo if Governor Cuomo is the person who gets them rehired at the New York Daily News?
00:17:56.000You think maybe a corrupt relationship between the government and the press is probably a bad idea?
00:17:59.000But that's really not the point that I'm seeking to make.
00:18:01.000The point I'm seeking to make is that the level of outrage over the firing of these journalists is wildly outsized.
00:18:06.000There are industries in the United States where people legitimately have lost their jobs.
00:18:09.000We're talking about dying industry towns.
00:18:11.000We're talking about production factories that existed in the Rust Belt that have gone empty, that have turned into ghost towns.
00:18:17.000And there are those of us who are free market people who say, you know, there are certain things that just happen under a capitalist system.
00:18:22.000Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction, where every time there's a new technological development, certain people in certain industries lose jobs, and we have to try and grease the skids so that they can get new jobs in a different industry or move out of those dying towns, right?
00:18:34.000We have to do something to help those people move out of a dying industry, but that's just the way the economy works.
00:18:40.000But there are a bunch of people in the press who just ignore those people completely.
00:18:44.000Who sort of have scorn for all those people who are working in factory towns.
00:18:47.000Look at these rubes who voted for Donald Trump.
00:18:49.000These stupid rubes who voted for Donald Trump.
00:18:51.000Don't they understand how the economy works?
00:18:52.000Don't they understand creative destruction?
00:18:54.000Don't they understand that the economy moves on and these are low IQ idiot plumbers showing their butt cracks?
00:19:16.000The Wall Street Journal is doing fine.
00:19:17.000It's just that everybody is moving over to a subscription basis online as opposed to free online content.
00:19:22.000The New York Daily News thought that they could cover for a bad press strategy and a bad business strategy by just printing nasty covers about President Trump incessantly.
00:19:30.000They thought that was going to raise their profile and their circulation.
00:19:34.000But because they made a bunch of bad decisions, they laid off a bunch of people.
00:19:38.000But it is indicative of a certain self-censoredness that exists on the coast and in particular industries that journalists' jobs are more important than the rest of your jobs.
00:19:46.000That somehow these journalists losing their jobs is a tragedy for the country, but the factory worker in the center of the country losing his job is just fine.
00:19:53.000Now, my view on this is that anybody who loses a job, that's a sad thing, but we have to determine whether that is a free market force at play and whether we can help those people out on the back end, but without actually regulating all of these other industries into sort of subservience to keeping
00:20:10.000Lacking industries alive, but the but the fact that there is this dichotomy in the cultural attitude toward various jobs I think is very telling and one of the reasons the president of the United States continues to be very successful There's a feeling people the New York Daily News don't care very much about you if you're in Ohio and the president does even if the policy the president is pursuing on trade is Just not correct.
00:20:57.000OK, here in California, we are now experiencing a massive heat wave and the government is telling us we should turn off our air conditioner and lights, which is just not going to happen.
00:21:04.000But if all the lights go out, if the air conditioner should go out, if all the food in your fridge starts to spoil and suddenly all of the grocery shelves are empty because everybody is running out to try and replenish, what are you going to do then?
00:21:14.000Well, one of the ways that you can help
00:21:16.000Again, this is not because we're prepping for the apocalypse or anything.
00:21:19.000It's because there are times when natural disasters hit.
00:21:21.000There are times when the police can't get to you.
00:21:23.000There are times when first responders can't get to you or emergency aid.
00:22:27.000She also happens to be absolutely charming in person.
00:22:31.000And she spoke yesterday at the Turning Point USA event in Washington, D.C.
00:22:35.000And I've spoken at many Turning Point USA events, and it's filled with great kids who really want to help push America in a more conservative direction.
00:22:42.000I mean, these are really motivated kids.
00:22:45.000One of the things that's become very common among the younger set, and I know because I'm still one of the younger set, is this notion that what we ought to do here in the conservative movement is own the libs.
00:22:54.000If you've ever been on Twitter, this is all we talk about all day long is owning the libs.
00:22:57.000And here at The Daily Wire, we are not averse to owning the libs.
00:23:01.000The leftist here is hot or cold Tumblr.
00:23:03.000And it comes free with your membership for 99 bucks a year, right?
00:23:06.000The whole point of the Leftist Heroes Tumblr is that we own the libs, okay?
00:23:10.000But the thing is that when you're going to own the libs, meaning own the liberals, when you're worried about owning the libs, you actually ought to own the libs by purchasing them at a fair market rate.
00:23:19.000And the way that you do this is by actually making a good argument and convincing them, right?
00:23:23.000That is the way that you own the libs.
00:23:42.000But triggering people on the left, you can do that just by being a jerk as well.
00:23:47.000And I think it's very important to recognize that the way that you win people over is not always by being a jerk.
00:23:52.000So Nikki Haley was speaking at TPUSA and she said, And everybody raised their hand because this is the thing that you do on Twitter and Facebook.
00:24:10.000We've all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn't leadership, it's the exact opposite.
00:24:14.000Real leadership is about persuasion, it's about movement, it's about bringing people around to your point of view.
00:24:18.000Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way that you do.
00:24:24.000Not only do I think that message is eminently correct, I said basically the same thing at a TPUSA event just a few weeks ago at the Young Women's Leadership Summit.
00:24:31.000I think that we ought to, here on the right, take Nikki Haley's words to heart.
00:24:36.000That doesn't mean that we have to be weak in how we promote our viewpoint.
00:24:40.000We should be forward with how we promote our viewpoint.
00:24:42.000But we should also recognize that just doing things to tick off people on the left is not actually going to win over the people in the middle that you need in order to win elections and in order to win the day.
00:24:51.000The reason I bring this up is because the President of the United States yesterday decided that he was going to think about pulling the clearances of various Trump critics from previous administrations.
00:25:00.000Now, here's the thing about security clearances.
00:25:01.000I think that they should automatically expire upon you leaving the government.
00:25:05.000This is normally the way that it works.
00:25:06.000If you are fired, like James Comey was fired, he lost his security clearance, I believe.
00:25:12.000The same thing happened with James Clapper as well.
00:25:15.000When you leave an administration, very often, your security clearance goes away with it.
00:25:19.000But there are certain people who are allowed to keep their security clearance.
00:25:21.000Now, just because you have a security clearance doesn't mean that you can access classified material.
00:25:24.000It's not like Susan Rice can stroll into the White House any day of the week.
00:25:28.000And then just start accessing the computers and looking up classified materials.
00:25:31.000The idea is that she retains her security clearance in case somebody in the government needs to talk with her or in case there's another Democrat who's elected and they want to bring her back in so she doesn't have to be cleared again.
00:25:43.000There's a fair argument to be made by the Trump administration that security clearances should just go away as soon as you no longer work for the government, and if we have to redo it later, then we redo it later.
00:25:52.000But instead, it seems like the Trump administration is talking about removing security clearances from various actors they perceive as bad, and many of whom are bad, simply out of some sort of retaliatory anger.
00:26:03.000Sarah Huckabee Sanders talked yesterday about what President Trump was going to do with regard to the clearance.
00:26:08.000The president is exploring these mechanisms to remove security clearance because they've politicized and in some cases actually monetized their public service and their security clearances and making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the president is extremely inappropriate.
00:26:28.000So what that sounds like is Trump is simply removing security clearances from anyone who has one who has been critical of him with regard to Russia.
00:26:37.000Now, again, I think that there's a case to be made that if you actually think that James Clapper or Susan Rice are using their security clearance to get access to information that they are then using to lie about on national television, first of all, we probably ought to discuss whether there's a legal violation that is prosecutable by the DOJ.
00:26:53.000But if there is not, then this sounds like simple trollery.
00:27:55.000I just think the president is sort of stunning and petty, small, and doesn't speak well for a president of the United States who is supposed to be able to handle his critics.
00:28:12.000Okay, so, again, triggering, triggering everywhere.
00:28:14.000And people on the right celebrate this because when CNN is triggered, that means something good is happening.
00:28:20.000Sometimes it's true that when you trigger CNN, it's because something good is happening.
00:28:23.000The president has triggered CNN before for good reason, and I've pointed it out when he has done so.
00:28:28.000The question is whether this is actually beneficial or whether this is just, you know, trolling to troll.
00:28:33.000Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, who is outgoing, so he can now speak some truths, he says that this is basically just President Trump trolling people.
00:29:57.000It is fun and games to a certain extent.
00:29:58.000But I want to talk about the real cost of this.
00:30:01.000In terms of public policy in just a second.
00:30:03.000But for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:30:06.000For $9.99 a month, you can get the rest of Daily Wire's content, get the rest of the show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, the rest of Michael Knowles' show live.
00:30:13.000You get to be part of our mailbags on Friday.
00:30:15.000You get to go fill out the VIP section at our big events coming up in Dallas and Phoenix.
00:30:19.000Go over to dailywire.com slash events to get those tickets, which are going fast.
00:30:23.000When you subscribe, you get this, the very greatest in all beverage vessels, the Leftist Tears hot or cold tumbler, triggering the libs.
00:30:30.000But also, because we like to, we don't actually want to own the libs, okay?
00:30:34.000We want to lease them, because if, honestly, if you're going to, if you own the libs, then you actually have to take care and maintenance of them.
00:30:39.000If you lease the libs, then the good news is you can turn them in every few years because they're new cup holders.
00:30:44.000Every New Year's they update the cup holders, and then you can actually just lease them and turn in one lib for the next, which is actually a better deal.
00:31:21.000Well, there are two reasons that it matters.
00:31:23.000Reason number one, when people are very interested in triggering the libs and triggering the cons, they're also very interested in sometimes, sometimes,
00:31:32.000So there are those of us who understand that a lot of this is just jokey and sort of gamey.
00:31:37.000And yes, you want to fight the leftist positions as hard as possible because those positions are wrong and in some cases are actually evil.
00:31:42.000You want to fight those positions as hard as you can.
00:31:44.000But that's not the same thing as I'm just going to say something to say something because it made Whoopi Goldberg mad or whatever.
00:31:50.000Whoopi Goldberg's mad about a lot of stuff.
00:31:51.000I don't have to say much to get her mad.
00:31:54.000If you're focused solely and completely on making the other side mad all the time, then it stands to reason that you're also going to be more likely to want to do things that cross the bounds of civility.
00:32:04.000You're more likely to want to destroy people's lives based on giant nothings, for example.
00:32:08.000You're more likely to say, well, I won a grand victory because the ends justify the means.
00:32:13.000And if I triggered them, that means I did something right.
00:32:15.000Well, that doesn't make for good dialogue.
00:32:16.000Also, it is true that it brings you to a certain sort of crisis mentality.
00:32:21.000The whole triggering phenomenon basically assumes that people on the other side of the aisle are the worst that humanity has to offer.
00:32:27.000So simply by dint of you making them angry, you've done something good and done something right.
00:32:32.000That you making them angry is in and of itself an achievable and easy goal, and therefore it's something that we should aim at.
00:32:37.000But what if it turns out that the stuff that we're triggering each other over is actually rather minor?
00:32:41.000That the stuff we spend most of our time agonizing over is actually relatively unimportant?
00:32:46.000The reason I think about this is that, you know, I live in Los Angeles and everybody in my immediate vicinity, everybody within a nuclear blast radius of this office is on the left.
00:32:56.000And all of those people invariably, invariably think we're living in a crisis scenario.
00:33:01.000You look around LA, people are living pretty good.
00:33:06.000Aside from the mass number of homeless people brought in by the left in this city, which is a serious problem, people are living pretty well, okay?
00:33:12.000People are, you can be born in this society and expect to live a full eight decades.
00:33:18.000And yet we think that everything is a crisis.
00:33:20.000Because we think everything is a crisis, every headline becomes an excuse to fight the daily battle by triggering the other side.
00:33:26.000But what if the real crises that our society is facing are crises that are much deeper than that?
00:33:31.000Crises of, for example, entitlement spending that is going to cripple our ability to do anything in the future.
00:33:37.000Crises of a young population that is losing its purpose amidst all of this internecine warfare.
00:33:44.000What if it turns out there are broader issues at stake and serious conversations are merited?
00:33:47.000Well, if you're too busy triggering the other side, you can't have those serious conversations because it's more important to slander the other side as something terrible than it is to have conversations that are actually productive.
00:33:57.000It's been very telling, I think, the last couple of weeks.
00:34:01.000I try to make a point, as much as I enjoy triggering the occasional Lib.
00:34:05.000And I do have a stock of Libs in my garage.
00:34:08.000I mean, it's sort of like Season 2 of The Walking Dead.
00:34:10.000I actually have in my garage a bunch of Libs.
00:34:12.000You just sort of wander around in there, because I own many of them.
00:34:18.000One of the things I've been trying to do, and I've been really, this is not new, I've been trying to do this since law school, is have substantive conversations with people on the left.
00:34:26.000The reason I want to have those substantive conversations is because it at least clarifies where we stand and where the real rifts in our society are going to be when it comes to solving these serious and deep issues.
00:34:35.000And if we can't have those conversations, then what we end up doing is trying to simply destroy each other for purposes of the latest news cycle.
00:34:42.000And that means making people lose their jobs, and it means destroying people's careers, and it means going back through everybody's old tweets and destroying them one by one.
00:35:28.000We don't fight it with this kind of sour outrage and this vicious glee in, oh my gosh, the other guy got really, really, really, really mad.
00:35:35.000If you don't like it on the left, you shouldn't like it on the right.
00:35:37.000And I promise you, you don't like it on the left.
00:35:39.000And when you see people on the left who are pettily suggesting that the president is in the pocket of the Russians, you're angry, aren't you?
00:35:44.000You should be angry because that's unbased.
00:35:46.000They don't actually have evidence for that.
00:35:48.000And they are doing this to win the headline of the day.
00:35:50.000How many people on the left honestly believe that the President of the United States is in the pay of the Russians and that we're being run by Russia?
00:35:56.000How many people actually believe that?
00:35:57.000And how many people believe that because our tribal need to own the other is too strong?
00:36:03.000How many people actually believe that folks on the right are truly, deeply evil?
00:36:06.000They don't believe it about members of their own family.
00:36:08.000They don't believe it about people they know on the other side of the aisle.
00:36:10.000They just believe that this sort of other that's out there is truly terrible.
00:36:14.000And social media exacerbates this because you get to hide behind your computer screen all day, you get to hide behind your phone screen, you get to pretend that you're somebody that you're not.
00:36:21.000You say things to people on Twitter that you'd never say to anybody in real life.
00:36:25.000You know, Louis C.K., the comic who no longer gets to work, Louis C.K.
00:36:29.000has a very funny routine about how people are in their cars.
00:36:32.000And what he suggests is that you scream things at people in your car that you would never say to them in an elevator.
00:36:38.000And if you're in a car and somebody cuts you off in traffic, you will curse a blue streak.
00:36:41.000You'll say things like, I hope you die.
00:36:43.000Whereas if you're in an elevator and somebody brushed up next to you, you wouldn't turn to that person right in your face and go, I hope you die.
00:36:59.000We ought to be operating in good faith and we ought to be a lot less focused on trollery and a lot more focused on solving substantive issues.
00:37:06.000Now, speaking of substantive issues, I want to talk about a substantive issue that very few people are going to talk about today.
00:37:11.000And that is the New York Times has a long piece about childless women and men.
00:37:15.000This is a substantive issue because there are just too many people in American society who are not having children.
00:38:24.000When we ask people who don't plan to have children about the reasons for an article in The Upshot,
00:38:34.000The top answers were the desire for more leisure time, the need to find a partner, and the inability to afford child care.
00:38:40.000Many women said motherhood had become more of a choice, and they were choosing to forego it, whether for personal or economic reasons.
00:38:46.000In response to that article and related one about a woman who was happily child-free, we heard from many older childless women and some older childless men reflecting on their lives without children.
00:39:33.000Why would you be proud that you never have children?
00:39:35.000What sort of contribution to society have you made by not generating a second generation?
00:39:40.000That's one thing if you obviously can't have children, if you have that sort of trouble.
00:39:43.000But to choose not to have children is an inherently selfish act.
00:39:47.000Again, this is a very controversial proposition in today's day and age.
00:39:50.000The reason it is a selfish act is because you are voluntarily disconnecting yourself from the future of the human species.
00:39:58.000You no longer have a stake in what happens next.
00:40:00.000The world stops turning the moment you die.
00:40:02.000Once you have kids, you start realizing that your decisions mean something more.
00:40:05.000Nothing changes human beings more than having children.
00:40:08.000Nothing makes you rethink the decisions that you've made in your life more than having children and deciding what to pass on to those kids.
00:40:13.000Nothing makes you care more about building a better society than having children.
00:40:17.000Nothing makes you more protective of the things that we have that are good than having children.
00:40:22.000And when you sacrifice all that because, hey, I had a good time and my kids weren't a pain in the ass, at least I didn't have to deal with little Timmy's drug problem when he was 16.
00:40:57.000By poll data, it is certainly not ignorant.
00:40:59.000The vast majority of women want to have kids and they want to have kids for a reason.
00:41:03.000And just because human beings have an enormous capacity for self-deception and may want to suggest to themselves that everything is hunky-dory when they're 60 years old living at home with no one else there, you know, in a house by themselves with no kids.
00:41:21.000The real question is why is the New York Times actually pushing this?
00:41:23.000And the answer is because the New York Times believes that this inherently
00:41:45.000Self-absorbed culture is something good for the country.
00:41:48.000This is something we need to talk about.
00:41:49.000How do we instill a culture of purpose and meaning again in people that they want to contribute to the next generation and that they actually want to be part of the great chain of history that leads backward toward a time when people did not live in prosperity and decency with safety for their children, toward a time when people will live in ever-increasing prosperity and decency with a sense of meaning for their kids.
00:42:06.000Those are the conversations we need to be having.
00:42:08.000And that's not going to be happening if we are so focused on the triggering of the libs.
00:42:12.000Okay, all that stuff's just not that important.
00:42:14.000Okay, time for things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:42:18.000So, I've been doing jazz all week, which is to say yesterday.
00:42:21.000We're doing another piece of jazz today.
00:42:23.000Ella Fitzgerald, of course, one of the great jazz singers of all time.
00:42:27.000So, my grandfather, a guy we call Papa, he was a jazz drummer.
00:42:32.000So, my dad is a jazz pianist, my grandfather was a jazz drummer, sort of in his spare time.
00:42:35.000And he used to go down to a club where Ella Fitzgerald would sing, and he would bring her corned beef sandwiches right before she would perform, actually.
00:42:42.000And Ella Fitzgerald is considered by many, probably most, to be the greatest jazz singer who ever lived, at least on the female side of the aisle.
00:42:50.000Here's Ella Fitzgerald from her album, Ella in Hollywood, I've Got the World on a String.
00:43:11.000What a world, what a life, I'm in love.
00:43:50.000We begin with the story of a Texas waiter.
00:43:51.000This Texas waiter decided that he was going to tell everyone that there was a racist message on a receipt.
00:43:57.000Okay, this guy's name is Khalil Kaveel, a 20-year-old server for Saltgrass Steakhouse in Odessa, and he claimed in a post on Facebook that a customer had left a racist note on a receipt.
00:44:06.000The post, along with a photo of the receipt, quickly went viral.
00:44:48.000When he wasn't bringing corned beef sandwiches to Ella Fitzgerald, if the service was really poor and he thought the waiter was a jerk, he'd leave them like a nickel tip.
00:45:41.000McLaughlin is black, Dreschka is white.
00:45:43.000And there is some video that was shown on Good Morning America.
00:45:46.000It's kind of disturbing, so if you don't want to see it, then don't watch.
00:45:49.000But basically what the video is going to show is that this guy Dreschka walked out to a car and he apparently started berating McLaughlin's girlfriend.
00:45:57.000Outside the store, he yelled at her for parking in a handicapped space without a permit.
00:46:01.000So he was the do-gooder who was going to virtue signal by telling these people to get out of the handicapped spot.
00:46:05.000And instead of just walking by and saying, you know, Miss, do you mind moving this?
00:46:25.000And it appears that this guy's yelling at his girlfriend, and so he pushes the guy down.
00:46:28.000And then what happens next is that the guy pulls out a gun, points it at the guy who just pushed him down, and the person who pushed him down, McGlockton, he starts to back off a little bit, and then Drezhka shoots the guy in the chest and kills him.
00:46:44.000Britney Jacobs was sitting in her boyfriend's idling car when, she says, 47-year-old Michael Dredgeka approached to tell her that she illegally parked in a handicapped spot.
00:46:54.000You can see McLaughlin walk out of the store, he sees and hears the argument, runs over, and pushes Dredgeka to the ground.
00:47:02.000But that's when the irreversible happens.
00:47:30.000Okay, the Stand Your Ground law does not say that you get to shoot anybody who pushes you down on the floor.
00:47:34.000Now, if he had taken out the gun and threatened the guy with it, the guy backed off, and then he'd call the police or something, then we're not talking about the same thing.
00:47:45.000The Standard Ground Law does not actually say that.
00:47:46.000And this is the part that's a little bit crazy, is the fact that the police decided not to charge him based on this mis-invocation of the Standard Ground Law.
00:47:54.000Standard Ground Law, there has to be a deadly threat to you, and then you are allowed to stand your ground.
00:47:58.000Now, the media routinely mis-covered the Standard Ground Law, so they said that, for example, in the Trayvon Martin case, stand your ground was implicated.
00:48:04.000Stand your ground was not implicated in the Trayvon Martin case, because Trayvon Martin was shot in self-defense, according to the jury.
00:48:11.000He was having his head pounded against the ground by, according to witness testimony and forensic evidence, but that the Stand Your Ground law actually was never actually invoked by the defense in that case.
00:48:20.000In this case, for the police to invoke Stand Your Ground to say that it's okay for this guy to shoot this other guy,
00:48:26.000Who's basically backing away when he pulls the gun is just crazy and demonstrates how the police sometimes get it wrong.
00:48:32.000I do not understand the logic behind this and I'm having some trouble understanding it, frankly.
00:48:37.000Okay, so that brings us to the end of our show.
00:48:39.000We'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
00:48:42.000Hopefully we won't be in a full-fledged trade war by the time that happens, but we'll find out.