D.C. Democrats defend Louis Farrakhan, President Trump brings burgers to the White House, and we get into Gillette's controversial commercial. Happy Birthday to me, Ben Shapiro! I m spending it here with you, and it s going to be awesome, because we re going to suffer through my show together, and by the end, you ll be enlightened, and amused, and maybe even a little offended, but that s not really what this episode is about, is it? It s about the President of the United States, who was born to do this, and the fact that he was born on January 20th, 2020, and was born with a love for all things American food, including hamburgers and Wendy s and McDonald s, and he does it in front of a giant portrait of Abraham Lincoln and a table filled with $2 worth of burgers. What's your favorite thing Mr. President? What s your favorite burger? Do you like it all? And it will be very interesting to see at the end of the show, how many leftovers are left? If it s American stuff, that s a tough question, because if it's American, it's a tough one, right? I mean, if it s all American, what do you prefer? -- it's all American stuff? - Ben Shapiro Subscribe to my new show, The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to my other podcast episodes. Rate/subscribe to stay up to date with the latest episodes of the Ben Shapiro Podcasts podcast, The FiveThirtyEighteen Podcasts and become a supporter of my work on social media by becoming a supporter and get 20% off the average Ben Shapiro podcast listening plan! If you like what you re listening to Ben Shapiro is listening to my show, consider supporting me on iTunes, I'll be giving you a discount code: Ben Shapiro will be getting a chance to win a FREE FIVE-PRICING promo code SHAPIRO! and a 4-week trial plus a discount of $5 off your first month of Ben Shapiro's new book, Shrinking it starts on January 1st, starting on the next episode of the next issue of my new issue of The Six Months Journalist Journalist s new book Outlawed by Ben Shapiro starts on Monday, February 1st!
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00:01:55.000Alright, so the big news of the day yesterday is that the President of the United States loves hamburgers.
00:02:03.000Into the middle of a government shutdown, So the President of the United States hosted the Clemson Tigers, the national champion Clemson Tigers, at the White House.
00:02:11.000I'm trying to remember the name of this room.
00:02:31.000And you can see the waiters who are going through and lighting the candles on these massive candelabras.
00:02:37.000You've got these fancy candelabras in this beautiful room with Abraham Lincoln looking on from behind and President Trump, who was born to do this.
00:02:44.000This was the moment that Trump truly became president.
00:02:46.000Standing in front of a table, piled high with $2 burgers, talking about his own generosity.
00:04:28.000So, President Trump, that is solid stuff.
00:04:31.000Somebody... There's so many great tweets about... There's a great picture of President Trump posing in front of that Abraham Lincoln portrait.
00:04:48.000Somebody tweeted out, this looks like, it's like Willy Wonka at the Chocolate Factory, except it's the President at the White House with burgers.
00:04:56.000Somebody tweeted out today that basically the President of the United States standing in front of a table of burgers piled high in front of a picture of Abraham Lincoln is what the alternative front page would look like in a dystopian future.
00:05:11.000Like, if you went back to the future 2, there's the moment where Marty McFly realizes he's actually not in the normal future, he's in the dystopian future, because there's a giant tower of Biff.
00:05:36.000If you buy 300 burgers from the local McDonald's, you spent about 700 bucks, okay?
00:05:41.000This is not, like, massive quantities of generosity.
00:05:45.000And the president patting himself on the back for that is very, very Trump.
00:05:48.000But what's amazing is how crazy the left went.
00:05:50.000So there was this meme that went around during the Obama presidency that the right was deeply, deeply upset when Barack Obama put on a tan suit.
00:06:28.000There's a full-on fact-check from the Washington Post, done by Philip Bump.
00:06:32.000President Trump's extravagant $3,000, $300 sandwich celebration of Clemson University.
00:06:39.000And then they fact check what the president actually said about the- and they like chart out the table.
00:06:44.000There's a full-on chart of the table showing where he put Big Macs, and chicken nuggets, and sauce, and filet-o-fish, and quarter pounders, and chicken sandwiches, and burgers, and burgers, and Whoppers.
00:06:55.000I kid you not, this is all in the Washington Post.
00:06:57.000And then they figured out the estimate of how many fries were actually on the table.
00:07:02.000They figured an estimate of 200 large fries.
00:07:04.000And then, this is the best part, they say, the grand total, according to our count, Trump spent about $2,900 on feeding the team.
00:07:10.000A sixth of that is the fries alone, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
00:07:15.000Half the cost was incurred at McDonald's alone.
00:07:17.000And then, they get to the actual fact check.
00:07:20.000So, the president said that they bought a thousand burgers for Clemson.
00:07:23.000It was piled up a mile high, is something that Trump said.
00:07:38.000That's what we call just an overstatement.
00:07:41.000That's what we call Basically just using normal human language in a normal human way.
00:07:48.000The president was talking about how he had bought a lot of burgers and they were like a mile high.
00:07:53.000But I guess they weren't exactly a mile high as it turns out that when you stack a couple of two-inch burgers together, that's not a mile high.
00:08:01.000It does demonstrate we don't have a lot of real problems in this country, honestly.
00:08:04.000If you are focused in on the president's inaccuracy with regard to how tall are the burgers that he bought at the White House stacked up together, Then the media may be missing the main message.
00:08:14.000The Washington Post also ran a long piece today on their front page about how everybody was very upset that Trump turned the White House into a White Castle.
00:08:25.000When the Clemson football players entered the White House's opulent State Dining Room during their visit with President Trump on Monday, they were greeted by a sight many had likely never laid eyes on before.
00:08:33.000In the center of the historic room that has hosted royalty, Foreign dignitaries and celebrities, a long mahogany table gleamed under the glow of an enormous golden chandelier.
00:08:43.000A pair of ornate candelabras holding tapered white candles sat on the table amid numerous silver serving platters piled high with what Trump described as great American food.
00:08:51.000Boxes of McDonald's Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, and Filet-O-Fish.
00:08:54.000Sandwiches were stacked in neat rows next to pyramids of packaged salads.
00:08:59.000The Wendy's girl and her wholesome grin decorated mounds of wraps.
00:09:02.000Silver gravy boats overflowed with packets of dipping sauce for Chicken McNuggets.
00:09:07.000I thought it was a joke one Clemson player could be overheard saying in a video shared on Twitter, accurately capturing many people's reaction to the president's earlier promise to serve college football's national champions items found on various dollar menus.
00:09:18.000Only the meal was very real, and late night hosts and the internet had a lot to say about it.
00:09:23.000Jimmy Kimmel, of course, said of all the crazy things Trump said and did over the weekend, this might be the craziest.
00:09:42.000Look, it's ridiculous that this is a thing that happened.
00:09:45.000It's ridiculous that President Trump was so gleeful about it.
00:09:48.000And it's ridiculous that anybody cares.
00:09:51.000Honestly, like, the idea that Trump is doing something deeply wrong by serving football players burgers at the White House is insane.
00:09:59.000I love all these- By the way, I'm old enough to remember when people celebrated Democrats for being down-to-earth for eating at fast food places.
00:10:06.000And I remember that Joe Biden and Barack Obama went to some fast food place and they sat down and the media were like, oh my god.
00:10:17.000And I recall when Hillary Clinton went to Chipotle, remember she ordered a burrito bowl, and the media were like, oh my goodness, look at her.
00:10:36.000So, well done, media, for covering that which truly matters and demonstrating that you are not at all out of touch with normal Americans who, it turns out, eat millions and millions of McDonald's burgers every single day.
00:10:48.000All right, meanwhile, controversy continues to dog the Republican Party surrounding Steve King.
00:10:52.000So Steve King, as you recall, is a Republican congressman from Iowa.
00:10:55.000He has said a lot of things in the past that were interpretable one of two ways.
00:10:59.000In a way that made him look like a racist, and in a way that did not make him look like a racist.
00:11:02.000And then he said something over the weekend, late last week, that was just outright racist, in which he questioned Why it was that people were upset with the terms white supremacist and white nationalist.
00:11:12.000And this drew the fire of top Republicans from the Senate and from the House as well.
00:11:17.000Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, he slammed Steve King.
00:11:21.000He said that his comments were unworthy of his elected position.
00:11:24.000A significant statement, though, coming tonight from the leader over here in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.
00:11:29.000He stopped just short of calling for him to resign.
00:11:31.000He says in a statement, in part, quote, Rep.
00:11:34.000King's statements are unwelcome and unworthy of his elected position.
00:11:38.000If he doesn't understand why white supremacy is offensive, he should find another line of work.
00:11:44.000Okay, and then Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, came out and he said something very similar.
00:11:47.000He said that Steve King should probably resign.
00:11:49.000I don't think there's a room for Steve King's comments in polite company, or in the Republican Party, or for that matter, in Congress.
00:11:57.000I think you ought to step aside, and I think Congress ought to make it very clear he has no place there.
00:12:02.000Okay, and we'll get to Senator Tim Scott in just one second.
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00:14:11.000Because Steve King agrees with a lot of the Republican caucus on certain legislative priorities.
00:14:16.000So, in other words, if somebody agrees with you on legislative priorities, but they also happen to believe some really terrible things, then this means that you also believe those really terrible things, even if you disassociate from that person's terrible belief and that person.
00:14:30.000As an example, there's a guy named Adam Serwer over at The Atlantic.
00:14:33.000He writes an incredibly intellectually dishonest piece today talking about President Trump and saying that President Trump is just like Steve King.
00:14:40.000I'm going to get to that in just one second.
00:14:47.000His attempts to expel undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to public safety and their American family members, his elevation of an ostentatious partisan to the Supreme Court, his implementation of a policy of child abuse as a deterrent to illegal immigration, his abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, his Justice Department's green lighting of police abuses, his attempts to weaken the political power of minorities targeted by his policies, and other acts of state violence and disapproval against religious and ethnic minorities, too numerous to name.
00:15:15.000All of them follow the underlying logic of Trump's response to Charlottesville, that extremism in pursuit of white power is no vice, and defending the rights of those who threaten that power is no virtue.
00:15:24.000So in other words, if there is a person in your caucus who declares that they have no problem with white supremacy, this means your entire agenda is clearly driven by white supremacy.
00:15:34.000And I love that Surwer just links together Trump's immigration policy and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
00:15:41.000What does the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court have anything to do with white supremacy or white nationalism?
00:15:47.000And then you wonder why folks on the right grant the benefit of the doubt to people on the right when it comes to statements they make that can be interpreted one of two ways.
00:15:55.000It's because people on the left spend all day, every day, calling everything remotely conservative racist.
00:16:01.000If you keep doing that over and over and over, it's going to lead normal conservatives to immediately, in knee-jerk fashion, defend things that are vaguely worded, saying, okay, well, you guys are just interpreting that in the wrong possible way, because that's what you do with everything.
00:17:01.000Folks like Ilhan Omar, who has said that Israel is deceiving the world.
00:17:07.000You have folks like Rashida Tlaib, who, as I mentioned yesterday, invited an actual terrorist supporter to her swearing-in.
00:17:15.000This guy actually supports Hezbollah openly.
00:17:19.000You've got Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who meets and dances with anti-Semite Al Sharpton, a guy who helped incite riots in Crown Heights against Jews, who once called Jews diamond merchants and white interlopers, and ranted, if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.
00:17:34.000Sharpton is still a member in respect in the Democratic Caucus.
00:17:38.000There are 21 different members of the Democratic Caucus who have met with and taken pictures of Louis Farrakhan.
00:17:44.000None of them have disassociated from Louis Farrakhan, so far as I'm aware.
00:17:58.000Because Jews are not part of the intersectional mission.
00:18:01.000Being anti-black, you know, that obviously is banned inside the Democratic caucus, as well it should be.
00:18:08.000But, being anti-Jewish, not so much, because Jews are just normal white people, except very successful, even more successful than normal white people, so they've benefited from white privilege, which means that Jews are not historic victims, which means that if they're the victims of anti-Semitism now, we simply ignore it.
00:18:22.000Because it's not a reflection of an underlying American political problem.
00:18:27.000Tamika Mallory, the Women's March leader, she was on The View yesterday.
00:18:32.000And she was treated with kid gloves by everybody on The View with regard to Louis Farrakhan and her association with Louis Farrakhan, whom she has called the greatest of all time.
00:18:40.000Except for Meghan McCain, who asked her the only question that most members of the media will never ask a Democrat, which is, why don't you just condemn his anti-Semitism?
00:18:48.000And watch as Tamika Mallory tries to slip out of it.
00:19:27.000Because Democrats will never condemn any other member of the intersectional coalition they feel will forward their goals.
00:19:33.000In other words, racism and anti-Semitism on the part of leftists are totally, it's totally fine, according to vast swaths of the Democratic Party.
00:19:40.000On the right, at least we try to police.
00:19:49.000And it is a point of high irritation to me that whenever the right cleanses somebody from their ranks, whenever the right reacts to people like Steve King in the proper fashion, that the left's first move is, well, that Steve King was ever in your caucus in the first place is kind of telling, don't you think?
00:20:04.000What's more telling to me is that the Democratic Party is more than happy to accept open anti-Semites into its ranks, cheer them, call them the fresh faces of the Democratic Party, and pretend like nothing is wrong and that the real discrimination exists on the right.
00:20:19.000When will the media start asking Democrats to actually condemn Louis Farrakhan?
00:20:23.000When will the media start asking Democrats why it's totally fine to appear three chairs down from Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin's funeral?
00:20:29.000Why don't they ask Bill Clinton that question?
00:20:31.000I promise you, if David Duke showed up at somebody's funeral and a Republican were standing three chairs down, that Republican would never stop being asked about it.
00:20:39.000But apparently, in Democrat world, none of this is relevant.
00:20:42.000You never have to worry about being discriminatory in any way.
00:20:46.000So the Republicans are doing the right thing on Steve King.
00:20:48.000But you should notice, that for the left, doing the right thing is never enough.
00:20:52.000Because it's not really about doing the right thing.
00:20:54.000It betrays ill motivation, when your only goal is to put your boot in the face of someone trying to do the right thing.
00:21:06.000Do not attribute bad motivation to people because it's a bad way of doing politics.
00:21:10.000It means you can't have an honest conversation with folks.
00:21:12.000But it's hard for me not to see the bad motivation when somebody tries to do the right thing and people on the left kick them in the teeth directly, meanwhile patting on the back some of the worst people on earth.
00:21:21.000It's hard for me not to see the bad motivation there.
00:21:24.000In just a second, I want to talk a little bit more about acceptable discourse on the left versus acceptable discourse on the right.
00:21:29.000But first, let me remind you about Ring.
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00:22:12.000So somebody steps on your property, the camera and light go on, and now you see it on your phone.
00:22:17.000And you can actually talk to people and say, get off my property before I call the cops.
00:23:12.000What is your view about some municipalities, like San Francisco, who have decided that it's okay for some non-citizens to vote in local elections?
00:23:20.000I'm not arguing for it or against it, but I will say, having been deputy city attorney, the granularity of what cities decide is so specific as to, I think, allow for people to be participants in the process without it somehow undermining our larger democratic ethic that says that you should be a citizen to be a part of the conversation.
00:23:39.000So in some cases you would be supportive of non-citizens voting?
00:23:44.000Okay, so I'm wondering why exactly that wouldn't apply on the state or federal level, considering that illegal immigrants have a stake in the American bargain as well.
00:23:52.000Presumably they're living in the United States.
00:23:53.000Democrats are very eager to have illegal immigrants vote in elections.
00:23:57.000That doesn't mean that they want to be in favor of voter fraud, per se.
00:24:00.000But it does mean that they have no moral problem with allowing people who do not actually pay taxes in the United States to vote in our elections.
00:24:08.000She made some other comments in this interview that were quite fascinating.
00:24:10.000She talked about how the shifting demographics of Georgia were shifting in her favor.
00:24:13.000And you'll notice this sort of rhetoric is commonplace on the part of folks on the left.
00:24:18.000They were saying things, Obama would say things like this from 2008 to 2016.
00:24:21.000He would constantly say things like, there's a new day dawning in America because the demographics are shifting.
00:24:27.000Because there are more minorities, there are fewer white folks, because the demographics themselves are shifting.
00:24:32.000Now, that is dubious, because the reality is that ideas cross racial boundaries.
00:24:36.000This is the essence of the American bargain and the essence of Western civilization and the Enlightenment ideal, is that your ethnicity does not decide how you think.
00:24:46.000And so you can have 45% of Hispanics in the state of Texas voting for Greg Abbott for governor of Texas.
00:24:52.000You can see a heavy percentage of Hispanics in Florida voting for Rick Scott for Senate in Florida.
00:24:56.000Because it turns out that people are not defined by their racial characteristics or ethnic characteristics.
00:25:01.000But Democrats have been talking for legitimately years about the idea that if there are more blacks and more Hispanics as a percentage of the population, that means they are more likely to win elections.
00:25:09.000And then people on the right, right, people like Steve King, will pick up that mantle and they will make the same argument and they'll say, well, this is why we shouldn't have as much immigration from black and brown countries.
00:25:23.000Of course, we shouldn't bar people by ethnicity.
00:25:26.000Of course, that's un-American to bar people by ethnicity.
00:25:28.000It is similarly un-American to suggest that people are defined by their racial categories.
00:25:33.000You can't simultaneously say that it's fine for the left to talk about how demographics are going to decide our future, but it's totally wrong for people on the right to say that demographics are going to decide our future.
00:25:42.000Demographics, when it comes to race and ethnicity, are not going to decide our future.
00:25:46.000The better argument, you would hope, is going to decide our future.
00:25:50.000But the point that I'm making is that this rhetoric on the part of people on the left is considered totally acceptable.
00:25:55.000Racism of intersectionality is totally fine on the left.
00:25:58.000Racism that suggests that you are inherently defined by your grouped characteristics, totally cool on the left.
00:26:03.000On the right, when that same argument is made, we recognize it for what it is, which is racism.
00:26:08.000But the left gets away with this sort of stuff all the time.
00:27:12.000You'd say, well, is she good or is she not good?
00:27:15.000But this is the case that is being made in the pages of the New York Times.
00:27:17.000It says, when people picture a financial advisor, they typically think of a gray-haired guy who looks like Bernie Madoff, or perhaps a younger man like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Wolf of Wall Street.
00:27:27.000Roughly less than 20% of financial advisors are women, a number that has barely budged for the past two decades despite rising gender equity in other fields.
00:27:34.000But what has this overwhelmingly male workforce accomplished?
00:27:37.000Banks and brokerage firms consistently rank rock bottom on lists of the most beloved companies and brands, and not by coincidence.
00:27:43.000In 2015, the Department of Labor estimated that the cost of conflicted investment advice for retirement savers is more than $17 billion per year.
00:27:51.000Then there are the roots of the financial crisis last decade.
00:27:56.000When something bad happens in society, it's men.
00:27:59.000When something good happens in society, it's women.
00:28:01.000Never mind that we're all just people, and maybe it's just people making bad judgments.
00:28:05.000While neither sex is immune to shoddy behavior, says this columnist, research has shown that female investors are more likely than men to focus on a family's financial goals over their own absolute investment performance.
00:28:15.000A study by Warwick Business School concluded that women outperformed men at investing by 1.8%.
00:28:20.000For one, women avoid lottery-style trading and are more likely to focus on shares with good track records or on overlooked yet productive funds.
00:28:28.000In one of my favorite papers, Boys Will Be Boys, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Terrence Odeon at UC Berkeley and Brad Barber at UC Davis found that accounts owned by women outperformed those of men because women traded a whopping 69% less than men and incurred less in trading costs.
00:28:43.000The research indicates men regularly exhibit overconfidence in their ability.
00:28:47.000So the idea here is that you should invest with women because women are hardwired naturally to be better at investment.
00:28:53.000Which cuts against the argument, really.
00:28:56.000It cuts against the argument that women are naturally the same as men.
00:29:00.000Either women are better at investments for natural reasons or they are not.
00:29:04.000This columnist concludes, Harvard's Kennedy School found the use of blind auditions for symphony orchestras increased the likelihood of female musicians being selected by as much as 30% to the shock of many conductors who did not believe they were biased.
00:29:15.000The percent of female musicians in the five highest ranked orchestras in the nation increased by 15% over a 23 year period.
00:29:22.000Similarly, innovative measures might be necessary to bring about changes in the business world.
00:29:27.000By the way, I'm fine with this idea of basically blind music auditions, because who cares what your musician looks like?
00:29:33.000I'm fine with the idea that you shouldn't know the sex of your investment advisor, you should just base it on performance.
00:29:58.000I mean, the argument is that women represent a vastly smaller percentage of total investment advisors.
00:30:04.000I don't know what your statistical sampling is like.
00:30:06.000I don't know the period that you're looking over.
00:30:07.000I don't know whether women are investing in different types of funds or why they're investing in different types of funds.
00:30:11.000I don't have enough data to know that women are naturally better at investments.
00:30:15.000But if women are, on average, naturally better at investments, then I would expect that there will be a market move toward female investors, and that will be fine.
00:30:22.000But the notion that right now we should be moving in that direction from the left is totally okay.
00:30:28.000If I were to say the same thing from the right in any area of American life, I would immediately be called discriminatory.
00:30:34.000Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about President Trump and NATO.
00:30:37.000There's a story from the New York Times suggesting that Trump seriously considered us pulling out of NATO last year.
00:30:42.000I'm gonna talk about that in just a second.
00:30:43.000First, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:30:46.000For $9.99 a month, you get the rest of this show live.
00:30:48.000Plus, two additional hours of this show every day.
00:31:43.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:45.000In other news, the New York Times reports today that President Trump considered pulling out of NATO in 2018.
00:31:58.000According to the New York Times, senior administration officials told the New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
00:32:08.000You'll recall the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in the aftermath of World War II as a mutual defense organization directed against Soviet aggression in Europe.
00:32:16.000The main goals of NATO were to keep the Soviets, were to keep the Germans down, keep the Soviets out, and keep the Americans in.
00:32:23.000Because they didn't want the Germans rising again and providing a continental conflict, they didn't want the Soviets encroaching into Europe, and they wanted to keep the Americans as the mutual protection force.
00:32:32.000NATO has only been invoked in the past 30, 40 years once, with regard to the coalition defense of the United States and Afghanistan, actually.
00:32:44.000He's talked before about how he thinks that NATO entangles us in alliances that are not good for us, and how people aren't picking up their fair share of defense, and we're picking up their defense bills, and all the rest.
00:32:53.000So it's no secret that Trump has been at the very best mixed on NATO.
00:32:59.000But now the New York Times is reporting that Trump seriously considered pulling out.
00:33:02.000Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.
00:33:10.000In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.
00:33:20.000Now, the truth is, it is not a drain on the United States.
00:33:22.000The fact that NATO has a mutual defense clause means that we are spending less on defense.
00:33:26.000If, in fact, we did not have NATO, You would see Russian aggression into the Baltics, which would necessitate probably a European war in which the United States would be involved and spend an awful lot of money.
00:33:38.000When the United States was involved in the Yugoslav War in the 1990s, it was not exactly cheap.
00:33:43.000At the time, Mr. Trump's national security team, including Jim Mattis, then Secretary of Defense, and John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, scrambled to keep American strategy on track without mention of withdrawal that would drastically reduce Washington's influence in Europe and could embolden Russia for decades.
00:33:59.000Now the president's repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries about national security efforts amid growing concern about Mr. Trump's efforts to keep his meetings with Mr. Putin secret from his own aides and an FBI investigation into the administration's Russia ties.
00:34:12.000In other words, there is no news here.
00:34:47.000When Trump says it publicly, then it emboldens Russia.
00:34:50.000Then it makes our allies feel uncomfortable.
00:34:52.000But this New York Times article makes our allies feel more uncomfortable than anything Trump said privately to members of his own administration.
00:35:54.000Okay, so he says this, and then he backs that up with the fact that his new Attorney General nominee, William Barr, the guy who's going to oversee the end of the Mueller investigation, he has said openly and clearly that Mueller's investigation should be allowed to complete itself without outside interference.
00:36:12.000His opening statement that he's supposed to give today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he says it is vitally important to let the Special Counsel reach the end of his investigation on Russia's interference with the 2016 campaign.
00:36:22.000He says, I believe it is in the best interest of everyone, the President, Congress, and most importantly, the American people, that this matter be resolved by allowing the Special Counsel to complete his work.
00:36:31.000I believe it is vitally important that the Special Counsel be allowed to complete his investigation.
00:36:34.000I have the utmost respect for Bob and his distinguished record of public service.
00:36:39.000That's the person Trump is nominating for his AG.
00:36:41.000So where's the evidence of obstruction?
00:36:46.000That's not stopping people from jabbering anyway, because obviously they're going to continue to back a case they don't actually have evidence for.
00:36:53.000Meanwhile, the judiciary has gone off its rocker in its attempts to stop Trump.
00:36:59.000They've left behind the Constitution and basic legal interpretation long ago.
00:37:04.000There are a couple of judicial rulings that have come down in the last 48 hours that are just nuts.
00:37:07.000One of them upholds the Obamacare mandate on contraceptives.
00:37:11.000So, the Obama administration, you'll recall, took a vague piece of legislation, Obamacare, and then they passed down a regulation in which they claimed that it was incumbent on every business in the United States, including religiously owned businesses and religious institutions, to provide for healthcare coverage that included abortion and contraceptives.
00:37:30.000And in Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court struck that down for closely held corporations.
00:37:34.000Well, the Trump administration came in and they rewrote the regulation.
00:37:37.000They said, OK, well, not just closely held corporations.
00:37:40.000Also, anybody who's religious who doesn't want to violate their own religious scruples doesn't have to provide contraceptive coverage.
00:37:47.000A judge struck that down on the basis of nothing.
00:37:52.000Because the judge just happened to like Obamacare.
00:37:55.000And now we have another such ruling that broke this morning.
00:37:58.000According to the Washington Post, a federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration's addition of a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
00:38:05.000The president does have essentially plenary power over the census.
00:38:09.000The census is one of the powers of the executive branch.
00:38:12.000And there's nothing illegal about asking people their citizenship status.
00:38:18.000Why is it that so many people on the left don't even want to know how many illegal immigrants are in the country?
00:38:21.000Could it be the number is far larger than we have been led to believe by folks in the media and on the left?
00:38:28.000According to the Washington Post, in the first major ruling on the controversial question, U.S.
00:38:32.000District Court Judge Furman of New York's Southern District Court ordered the administration to stop its plans to add the question to the survey without curing the legal defects identified in his opinion.
00:38:43.000This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities.
00:38:49.000I don't understand how it's weaponizing the census to ask people their immigration status.
00:38:52.000It's not like the federal government is going to have an ICE agent next to the census worker.
00:38:56.000It's not like the census worker asks somebody, are you an illegal immigrant?
00:39:07.000Plaintiffs in the trial include 18 states and several cities and jurisdictions along with civil rights groups.
00:39:12.000Opponents of the question say it will reduce response rates in immigrant communities and make the constitutionally mandated decennial survey more costly and less accurate.
00:39:20.000So they say people are going to avoid participating in the census because they're afraid that they're going to be deported.
00:39:54.000The judiciary has run roughshod, roughshod over any semblance of their legal role in the system.
00:40:03.000In the Federalist Papers, I think it's Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton talks specifically about what happens when the judiciary becomes a political body.
00:40:10.000He says it would actually remove the reason for there being a separate judiciary if the judiciary were to act in this way.
00:40:17.000That has not stopped the judiciary from acting in precisely this way.
00:40:20.000It's really ugly and it's really terrible.
00:40:23.000Meanwhile, speaking of illegal activity, there's a lot of talk over the last 48 hours about the possibility of TSA officials striking.
00:40:31.000In the New York Times, author Barbara Ehrenreich and former labor official Gary Stevenson actually called on the employees of the Transportation Security Administration to strike.
00:40:49.000You don't work for the employer, like a private employer.
00:40:52.000Barbara Ehrenreich and Stevenson say the time has come for a genuine old-fashioned strike, one with picket lines, chants, quick impulses, and the power to reignite the traditional fighting spirit of American labor.
00:41:03.000First of all, if that happens, then Trump should fire everybody and hire scabs.
00:41:06.000Second of all, Federal law is not vague on this in any sense.
00:41:12.000He says, an individual may not accept or hold the position in the government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he participates in a strike or asserts the right to strike against the government of the United States or is a member of an organization of employees of the government of the United States or of individuals employed by the government of the District of Columbia that he knows asserts the right to strike against the government of the United States.
00:41:33.000You're not even allowed to be a member of a group that says that they might strike.
00:41:38.000Federal employees take an oath declaring, I am not participating in any strike against the government of the United States.
00:41:43.000That's not stopping folks on the left from calling on the TSA to strike, simply to increase the pain that travelers feel, so that presumably they'll be more angry at President Trump.
00:41:52.000This is the latest public union strike that we have seen, or proposed public union strike.
00:41:56.000There's one going on in Los Angeles right now, where tens of thousands of teachers have walked off the job in violation of law.
00:42:03.000This is why public sector unions are a disaster area.
00:42:05.000You should not be allowed to unionize against the federal government.
00:42:10.000Your pay is not set by negotiation between you and a school board you elect.
00:42:15.000It's a corrupt bargain in the first place.
00:42:17.000And the fact that so many folks on the left are eager about public sector unions demonstrates that they see the government as a giant piggy bank.
00:42:24.000They see the government as a giant grab bag of cash that they can stick their hand into at any available moment, and then they can use that money to re-elect the same people who are going to be negotiating with them.
00:42:34.000They want to use government employment as an interest group.
00:42:38.000So if they're going to use government employment as an interest group, if it's now an interest group, if working for the government is all about increasing the size of the government, then why exactly should Republicans go along with anything to end the government shutdown?
00:42:49.000If it turns out that employment in the government is first and foremost just a way of paying off Democratic political constituencies, what's the political interest Republicans have in ending the shutdown?
00:43:26.000There's been a lot of talk on the right and the left about IQ and intelligence.
00:43:31.000And I am not averse to discussing the IQ measures.
00:43:35.000I'm not averse to discussing what it means, how somebody scores on IQ.
00:43:39.000I think that it's an important data point in deciding whether a disparity is discriminatory.
00:43:44.000Meaning that if somebody says that One particular person has been discriminated against on the basis of race, for example, and it turns out that person of any race has a lower IQ than the person of another race.
00:43:55.000Well, by an objective metric, it's not discrimination on the basis of race anymore, it's discrimination on the basis of IQ.
00:44:00.000With that said, there's a lot of faith placed in IQ tests that seems unjustified.
00:44:04.000Now, the IQ test is a rough metric for a certain number of variables.
00:44:08.000The IQ test will tell you how well you concentrate, it sometimes tells you how well you can compute statistics quickly, how quickly you grasp concepts, but it doesn't necessarily say how deeply you grasp concepts.
00:44:18.000It's good at determining who, on a very broad level, who is less intelligent and who is more intelligent, but it doesn't correlate all that highly with what they call greatness, meaning life success.
00:44:29.000IQ doesn't necessarily correlate all that highly with earnings power.
00:44:32.000In other words, for every IQ point that you gain, that doesn't mean that your earnings power goes up.
00:44:35.000It doesn't mean that if you have a 165, you will, by necessity, be earning more than a guy with a 120.
00:44:41.000There's a good book called Ungifted, Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman called The Truth About Talent, Practice, Creativity, and the Many Paths to Greatness.
00:44:48.000It's important to remember all of this because in a time when people are sort of suggesting that America is breaking down along IQ lines, that America is breaking down where the people with high IQs are going to do great, And people with low IQs are basically screwed.
00:45:01.000This book makes the case that that's not really true, that there are a bunch of different skill sets that are involved in human interactions and boiling that down to a simple number and then suggesting that that simple number decides everything is an overstatement of the power of IQ.
00:47:36.000But I have never remotely seen a situation where two boys are beating the crap out of each other, and the fathers are just standing around going, you know, boys will be boys.
00:47:44.000You know how fast the dad steps in and stops that stuff?
00:47:48.000And then I love this little scene that they've got of a man in an office building putting his hand on a woman's shoulder and saying, what I think she means is... Because that's totally equivalent to sexual harassment.
00:48:00.000I mean, like we didn't see the rest of that conversation.
00:48:02.000So the assumption is that men are constantly telling women to pipe down because they have to mansplain.
00:48:08.000But a lot of cases of quote-unquote mansplaining, I mean, frankly, I mean, not to play into sexist stereotypes, but if we're going to talk about mansplaining, I've been in many, many more scenarios at a dinner party where the woman is womansplaining what the man just said.
00:48:26.000And this happens all the time, all the time, because men are dunderheads and men say dumb stuff.
00:48:31.000And then their wives have to step in and say, well, you know, Bob, I think what you really meant to say was, because when people say things that are dumb, other people want to explain away the things they said that are dumb.
00:48:41.000But anytime a man, anytime a man says this to a woman now, it must be that it's immediately sexist.
00:48:45.000And then you've got a bunch of men standing by the barbecues saying, boys will be boys, because that's what men have been doing for generations, is just shying, pretending that toxic masculinity and toxicity is no problem.
00:48:57.000It's been too much male presence that has destroyed America.
00:49:00.000That's really the message of this Gillette commercial, and it continues along these lines.
00:49:05.000And then we get clips of Anna Kasparian from The Young Turks.
00:49:39.000I mean, if you walk up to her and you ask her for her phone number, immediately you are a part of rape culture now.
00:49:44.000This commercial, which lumps in masculinity with toxic masculinity, as though it's been fathers inculcating toxic masculinity, is sheer nonsense.
00:49:51.000You want to know what has created serious problems in American society?
00:50:24.000At the same time, toxic masculinity has risen.
00:50:26.000So maybe it's that in the absence of a strong male presence providing guidance to young men, what you end up with is toxic masculinity.
00:50:35.000Because it turns out, if you're getting your male influence from other teenagers, teenagers are stupid and more aggressive and they make worse decisions.
00:50:42.000So it's not that there have been too many fathers inculcating bad ideas in their kids.
00:50:46.000It's that there have been too few fathers around to teach their sons responsibility and decency.
00:50:50.000That's the major problem in American society.
00:51:18.000Again, the fact is that it is dearth of men that has created the massive problem.
00:51:23.00070% of inmates grew up in a one-parent home as of 1987.
00:51:25.000The Center for Children and Families found that 70% of gang members, high school dropouts, teen suicides, teen pregnancies, and teen substance abusers come from single mother homes.
00:51:35.000So, maybe the best a man can get is a father.
00:51:38.000Maybe the best a man can get is being a dad and a husband.
00:51:42.000Maybe the best a man can get is not lack of masculinity, it's more masculinity.
00:51:46.000Because traditionally, masculinity is what stands between innocent people and the wolves.
00:51:50.000Okay, well we will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.