Big media companies are cracking down on conservative news? We ll talk about it. Plus, there s a Harvard professor who s now being ripped apart for supposedly supporting the alt-right. Is he, too? And the Obama Library. I promised it to you yesterday. You will get it today. Plus, Project Veritas does something really good today. I ve said this before about James O'Keefe, that he can be hit or miss. But he did a service to the conservative public today. And I ll explain why. Today on The Ben Shapiro Show: 1. Is Big Media Companies Crushing Down on Conservative News? 2. Is A Harvard Professor Who's Now Being Ripped Apart For Supporting The Alt-Right? 3. Is The Obama Library Really A Monument? 4. What do you think of the new Obama Library? 5. Is it a masterpiece or a disaster? 6. How do you feel about it? 7. What are your thoughts on it now? 8. What would you like to see it look like? 9. What kind of artwork do you see in the future? 10. Do you think it would look good in a museum? 11. What type of art do you want to see in a movie? 12. How much money should you be getting? 13. Who are you looking for? 14. What can you get? 15. What is your favorite kind of movie setting? 16. Does it have a mascot? 17. What s your favorite type of background music? And so on and so much more? Enjoy! - Ben Shapiro is a guy who gets it all in this episode? - The more I like it like it's a good thing, and I think it's more than that? The more he s getting it better than that's a guy that he s a guy like that he's a better than he's not a he s more than he gets it like that I think he's just a guy he's more of a guy than he just he s just a he's good than he really gets it's just like that's just really he's really just he's like that kind of stuff like that ... And he's got it's not that he just like it, right he s not like that, etc. He's just right he's right he really does it, he really has it's good like that...
00:00:51.000The holidays are over and now you're back in the workflow and everything is terrible because the holidays aren't coming up again for another full year.
00:02:23.000So James O'Keefe made some real news yesterday because he had talked to an insider over at Twitter, a former Twitter staffer.
00:02:30.000And this Twitter staffer explained in full living detail how it is that Twitter apparently shadow bans people, where Twitter will downgrade particular tweets, prevent people from seeing them.
00:02:40.000I've heard this about my own tweets in the past, that I'll tweet something out and people who follow me don't actually see the tweet.
00:03:42.000So there's a guy named Abhinav Vadraev, who's a former Twitter software engineer, and he says shadow banning takes place.
00:03:47.000He says one strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control.
00:03:50.000The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone, but they don't know they've been banned because they keep posting and no one sees their content.
00:03:56.000So they just think no one is engaging in their content when in reality, no one is seeing it.
00:04:00.000Twitter software engineer Steven Pierre said, quote,
00:04:18.000Alinda Hassan is a policy manager for Twitter's Trust and Safety Team, which is the most Orwellian name.
00:04:23.000And they say they are working on downranking bad people.
00:05:04.000Obviously, the people who have been banned on Twitter, and they're people who I am not particularly fond of, some of the alt-right Twitter trolls, the people who have been banned,
00:05:12.000I'm not a fan of their stuff, but the idea that they get banned and a bunch of people on the left don't get banned for similar content from the left is just insane to me.
00:05:19.000It's not a shock that Twitter is downgrading content.
00:05:21.000We found out earlier this week, by the way, that Google is basically downgrading content from conservatives.
00:05:27.000Because right now, if you go over to google.com and you search the name of the website that I run, Daily Wire, which is a fully credible site, most of what we do is aggregate news from other sources.
00:05:36.000Most of what we are doing is taking the news and then adding a bit of commentary to it.
00:05:40.000So, it's very rare that we actually report original news at Daily Wire.
00:05:45.000Nonetheless, if you actually go over to Daily Wire on Google and you search Daily Wire, there's something that pops up.
00:05:52.000is something that says, on the right side of the page, writes about, and then it'll show some of our old pieces.
00:05:58.000And then, there's a thing that you click on, and it says, Reviewed Claims.
00:06:01.000Okay, Reviewed Claims are a bunch of claims that come from Snopes and Climate Feedback and FactCheck.org.
00:06:07.000In fact, all of the leftist fact-checking organizations.
00:06:10.000And Snopes is a left-wing fact-checking organization.
00:06:12.000They have a nasty habit of taking a factual statement a right-winger makes and then drawing some sort of conclusion from that statement and then arguing with the conclusion that they are drawing from that statement.
00:06:24.000A lot of these fact-checking organizations aren't actually fact-checking the fact that's being espoused.
00:06:29.000Instead, what they are doing is fact-checking some conclusion that they draw from the fact.
00:06:32.000So, for example, I remember Politifact did a very long review of a video that I did about how many people in Muslim countries have extremist beliefs.
00:06:40.000My entire video was based on poll results from Pew Research Global, right?
00:06:44.000The entire video that I did, and you can view it, it has several million hits at this point, is me just saying a certain percentage of the population of Pakistan believes suicide bombings are okay, for example.
00:07:18.000PolitiFact ranked my entire video false.
00:07:21.000The most hilarious part of that PolitiFact fact check is that they did their own calculation and they found that something like 20% of the entire Muslim population on planet Earth was extreme by their own calculation, meaning that some 200 million people are extreme.
00:07:33.000And then, in their own fact check, they say, but we don't want to draw that conclusion or anything.
00:07:37.000We're not comfortable with the conclusions that we're drawing.
00:07:40.000The reason all of this is a problem is because there's an attempt now to reassert gatekeeping from the top.
00:07:46.000There's an attempt that's happening right now, in real time, to reassert the gatekeeping of news.
00:07:51.000And a lot of this is driven by the fake news mania that the left has pushed in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton losing the election.
00:08:16.000And unfortunately, because the left disagrees with so much of what the right has to say, what you see very often is the left actually engaging in a process where they will shut down the dissemination of conservative-oriented news because they're saying it's a-factual.
00:08:41.000How you search on Google is very different than the search results that you receive from another web engine like Bing.
00:08:48.000Obviously, Twitter has been downgrading conservatives for a while.
00:08:50.000So what James O'Keefe uncovered here is something that's very troubling.
00:08:53.000It's one of the reasons why, for example, YouTube has gotten itself in serious trouble.
00:08:56.000They demonetized a video that I did with Dave Rubin the other day, which is the least controversial political video of all time.
00:09:02.000They demonetized a conversation I did with Blair White on transgenderism, which is a very friendly conversation with a transgender person about the pronouns that ought to be used in addressing transgender people.
00:09:12.000YouTube has demonetized a lot of the Prager University videos, so much so that Prager University is suing YouTube.
00:09:18.000Now, is that a lawsuit that can sustain?
00:09:21.000I'm not sure it can, because these are all private companies.
00:09:23.000But it is certainly true that we do have a troubling situation that people should know about when all of the major ways that you gain your news are being curated by a bunch of lefties on the top who are biasing the news feed in favor of their own favorite political beliefs, knowing that other media outlets will praise them for doing so.
00:09:40.000So, good on O'Keefe for doing this, and this is something you should keep an eye on, just because
00:09:45.000News is being downgraded by an outlet does not mean that that news is fake news.
00:09:49.000I mean, as I say, Daily Wire now has these reviewed claims over at Google.
00:10:49.000And when you misplace an item that has a Tracker Pixel attached to it, you can use your smartphone and a 90 decibel alert will help you find it in seconds.
00:11:04.000But you turned your ringer off, so now you're trying to dial it and locate it by the ring.
00:11:08.000But the ringer's off, so what do you do?
00:11:09.000Well, if you have the Tracker Pixel, you hit the Tracker Pixel on your keychain, and it actually overrides the sound settings on your phone.
00:11:15.000And that means that you can now find your phone even if the sound is off, which is a super cool thing.
00:11:20.000You can even locate your item if it's miles away, because every Tracker user is part of the largest crowd-locate network in the world, sort of like Waze, except for finding your stuff.
00:11:28.000Tracker has a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you really have nothing to lose.
00:11:43.000Again, it's one of those things you don't think about until it makes your life inordinately easier.
00:11:48.000Okay, so in other ways that the left has been shutting down debate, there is this tape going around of Steven Pinker.
00:11:58.000Steven Pinker is not a right-wing figure.
00:12:00.000Steven Pinker is a professor at Harvard.
00:12:02.000I took a class when I was at Harvard Law School with Pinker and Alan Dershowitz, which was kind of a fun class.
00:12:08.000And Pinker is, of course, the author of a book called The Blank Slate.
00:12:11.000One of the things that makes Pinker controversial among a lot of people on the left is that Pinker doesn't believe in the ultimate malleability of human beings.
00:12:18.000He believes that the reason he titled his book The Blank Slate
00:12:22.000is because he was saying that that perception of humans, that we are a blank slate, and that we don't have any natural inclinations, we don't have any natural presets, he says that's nonsense.
00:12:30.000And that means that we're constantly battling with our own nature in order to change.
00:12:35.000Well, Steven Pinker was doing a panel for Spiked Magazine, the unsafe space tour panel at Harvard.
00:12:40.000Pinker has come under fire recently because he'll say things that are true, like women may have different
00:12:46.000different interests than men do in the career space, which may account for some of the discrepancies between men and women in terms of science staffing.
00:12:54.000He'll say things like, statistically speaking, blacks commit crimes more often than whites.
00:13:08.000But he's willing to say facts that people on the left aren't willing to say.
00:13:10.000So Pinker, in discussing this, starts talking about how political correctness has really led to the rise of the alt-right.
00:13:17.000That what political correctness has done is it has said to a lot of people that you're not even allowed to say facts like men and women are different or that races commit crimes at different rates.
00:13:25.000Because if you say that, then people are afraid of the conclusions you're going to draw.
00:13:28.000So we were talking earlier about how the fact-checking organizations do this.
00:13:31.000They don't like the poll results that I cite.
00:13:32.000So instead, they argue with the conclusion that I cite, and then label the polls that I cite false.
00:13:44.000There are a bunch of people in the alt-right, or who are not even in the alt-right yet.
00:13:48.000And they will say, listen, I'm looking at the statistics.
00:13:50.000And what I see is that black people commit more crimes than white people on an average per capita basis.
00:13:55.000And then people on the left will go, that's not true, you can't say that, you're a racist.
00:13:59.000And then people on the right will say, you know, people who, not even on the right, people who will see that fact will say, well if it's taboo for me to even cite that fact, maybe it's taboo, maybe it's also taboo but not false to be racist about that fact, to suggest that the race is inherently what's driving the crime.
00:14:16.000If the politically correct people would say, that's a true fact, now here's the explanation that has nothing to do with racism, which, by the way, is not a left thing.
00:14:22.000It's something that I do on a regular basis when I'm arguing against the alt-right.
00:14:27.000The left won't acknowledge the common basis of fact.
00:14:29.000Instead, they'll just say, you're not allowed to mention the fact because the fact itself is racist.
00:14:33.000So this is what Pinker says, and Pinker just got shellacked for this.
00:14:36.000I mean, he's just getting destroyed by the left.
00:14:38.000Here's what Pinker had to say in his own words.
00:14:41.000The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be, I wouldn't want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right,
00:15:10.000Internet-savvy, media-savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the illusion from the Matrix, when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media.
00:15:53.000taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.
00:15:57.000So here is a fact that's going to sound ragingly controversial but is not, and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones.
00:16:21.000It's controversial, although it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates.
00:16:27.000Now, if you've never heard these facts before and you stumble across them or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions, such as that women are inferior, that African Americans are naturally violent.
00:16:45.000That we all ought to be anarcho-capitalists and do away with all regulation and social safety nets.
00:16:54.000That most terrorism in this country is the fault of Muslims.
00:16:59.000The first time you hear them, you're apt to say, number one, the truth has been withheld from me by universities, by mainstream media.
00:17:33.000So we can hear him say, right, is that the point here is that people are taking these facts and then they're drawing the wrong conclusions.
00:17:39.000But when the left argues that the facts don't exist, it's driving people to embrace the wrong conclusions.
00:17:45.000He's trying to explain why the politically correct left is creating the alt-right.
00:17:48.000It's the same stuff that I've been saying on this program for years.
00:17:51.000It's the same thing that I've said about the identity politics of the left, that when you push an identity politics that suggests that race and ethnicity are primary, you can't be surprised when people who are not of your race and ethnicity start to treat their own race and ethnicity as primary.
00:18:06.000But you have to acknowledge the forces at work in the universe that are pushing people toward these nasty, horrible groups.
00:18:12.000And there's no one who's more anti-alt-right than I am.
00:18:14.000I think I can safely say that, considering I was their number one target in 2016, and that I've been ragingly anti-alt-right ever since they became a prominent force in the American political scene.
00:18:28.000So there are a bunch of people on the left who think now that Pinker isn't—who's acting—they think Steven Pinker, the leftist Harvard professor, who is on the left, okay?
00:19:08.000Jamal Bowie of Slate, who I've had fights with over this sort of stuff before, he suggested that Pinker had claimed that blacks cause crime and Jews control the world.
00:19:16.000Which, of course, is not what Pinker is saying, right?
00:19:18.000What Pinker is saying is that black people in America have a higher crime rate.
00:19:23.000But then he explicitly denounces the idea that the race is connected with the crime rate.
00:19:27.000He says there are other factors that are relevant in assessing whether race is connected with crime.
00:19:32.000And to come to the conclusion that race causes crime is stupid.
00:19:36.000But people are ignoring that because they're using exactly the same sort of PC censorship that Pinker is talking about that drives people to the alt-right.
00:19:42.000Professor Jesse Daniels of Hunter College says,
00:19:55.000That's not what Pinker is saying at all.
00:19:57.000But that's the astonishing thing about the left, is they are so utterly incapable of even looking internally at what they've done to promote this nastiness, that instead they continue to engage in exactly the same tactics that make the nastiness more likely and more prominent.
00:20:14.000When you're ripping down Steven Pinker, it's so funny, when I was going to Harvard Law, Alan Dershowitz was on the left and Steven Pinker was on the left.
00:20:19.000And now, by the time I went there, I graduated in 2007, now 11 years later, Steven Pinker is on the right apparently, he's now an alt-righter, and Alan Dershowitz is a Trumpkin.
00:20:33.000Okay, I don't think that Alan Dershowitz and Steven Pinker changed all that much.
00:20:36.000I think the left changed all that much.
00:20:37.000I think the same left that decided that Larry Summers, who was ousted from the presidency of the university when I was there, for stating that women may have different aptitudes and interests in science and math than men.
00:20:48.000That same university now says that Steven Pinker is to be ousted.
00:20:52.000That Steven Pinker has to be targeted.
00:20:54.000You wonder how people like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker and I all end up on the same side of the aisle on this stuff?
00:20:59.000And we disagree about virtually everything else?
00:21:01.000Maybe the reason is because the left is so extreme and radical that they're driving away an entire contingent of people who just want to talk about facts, even if they draw different conclusions from those facts.
00:21:10.000I cannot have a discussion with people who will not operate in the same world of facts that I operate.
00:21:15.000I can have a discussion with Steven Pinker.
00:21:17.000And that, I think, is what drives the left up a wall.
00:21:19.000And so instead they use censorship as a way of preventing honest and open discussion about issues that matter.
00:21:24.000Okay, before I go any further, and I will, I do have to show you the pictures of the Obama library.
00:21:28.000I think it does say something about Obama as a human, really.
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00:23:54.000If you look at the Bush Presidential Library, it's kind of a classy-looking building.
00:23:58.000If you look at any of the old presidential libraries, they're all nice-looking.
00:24:01.000The Nixon Presidential Library is beautiful.
00:24:03.000The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is beautiful.
00:24:05.000This is just a hideous eyesore that apparently is being built by modernists, and those modernists do not know how to build anything remotely interesting-looking.
00:24:14.000It looks like a Soviet Bloc era modernist
00:24:33.000But it's supposed to emphasize how important words were to Obama, which makes perfect sense because the guy sucked at governing, so words were the only thing that he was good at.
00:24:41.000Here's the part that I find really interesting.
00:24:43.000So, in 2011, he said he wanted to be an architect, did Obama.
00:25:45.000This has been mocked for years because it looks like a double-wide trailer.
00:25:49.000It's a very weird-looking presidential library.
00:25:50.000In fact, I know a local radio host in Arkansas who went and stuck a bunch of pink flamingos in front of it as a prank because it looks like a double-wide trailer.
00:26:18.000So, the House is now reconsidering the renewal of the FISA Act.
00:26:21.000The FISA Act is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the FISA Act sets up a system whereby intelligence agencies have to go to secret FISA courts in order to obtain warrants for domestic wiretapping.
00:26:40.000And if people get caught up in that, they get caught up in that.
00:26:42.000This is one of the big arguments over whether Trump was wiretapped or Manafort was wiretapped when the FBI was attempting to wiretap foreign sources.
00:26:50.000When they were looking for a wiretap on Carter Page, were they actually looking for a wiretap on Carter Page?
00:26:55.000If so, did that violate the Fourth Amendment?
00:26:57.000Or was that they were having a wiretap on foreign sources, and those foreign sources were talking to Trump and talking to Manafort, and therefore they were sort of swept up in this foreign intelligence surveillance.
00:27:07.000So the Trump administration had come out and endorsed the
00:27:33.000So, yesterday, the White House press secretary gave this statement.
00:27:37.000They said, So there was an attempt to amend Section 702 so that intelligence agencies couldn't share information as easily, supposedly in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights.
00:28:10.000Judge Napolitano comes on and gives a monologue at 6.47 a.m.
00:28:14.000urging Trump not to back FISA reauthorization.
00:28:17.000And minutes later, minutes later, Trump tweets, quote, House votes on controversial FISA Act today.
00:28:22.000This is the act that may have been used with the help of the discredited and phony dossier to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign by the previous administration and others?
00:28:31.000So then, he got calls from his administration, like people inside saying, uh, Mr. President, we endorsed this yesterday.
00:28:59.000I mean, the law itself would have to be changed.
00:29:02.000Now, does any of this matter in the end?
00:29:03.000No, because I don't think anybody takes Trump's verbiage on policy completely seriously.
00:29:08.000But for probably 90 minutes, every Republican in the world was panicking.
00:29:11.000And for 90 minutes, all the Republicans were going, what in the world is he talking about?
00:29:15.000And that's why I think that a lot of the emphasis, a lot of the fear about what Trump is doing on policy is a little bit overblown.
00:29:23.000You can't take Trump seriously on policy or literally on policy.
00:29:26.000All you can do is watch what the administration does.
00:29:28.000Because Trump, frankly, doesn't know what he's talking about on policy a lot of the time.
00:29:32.000We saw that in his immigration meeting the other day when he reversed himself on DACA, a Clean Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals bill.
00:29:38.000He reversed himself on that in the course of 40 seconds when informed by Kevin McCarthy that he didn't know what he was talking about.
00:29:44.000So a lot of his base is very upset with him over this.
00:29:48.000He's very angry at him for supposedly signaling that he's going to show tremendous flexibility on illegal immigration.
00:29:55.000I think that his base is getting out in front of itself.
00:29:57.000I think that a lot of the people like Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, I think a lot of these people are taking Trump literally and seriously and they should not be doing either.
00:30:05.000The reality is Trump was having a meeting.
00:31:07.000Tuesday, January 16th at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific.
00:31:10.000That's when we are doing our fifth episode of The Conversation, featuring Klavan, moderated by Alicia Krauss.
00:31:15.000Subscribe today to be part of The Conversation, and you can ask Drew live questions.
00:31:18.000He'll answer those for everybody to hear.
00:31:20.000You can watch it live on DailyWire's Facebook page or our YouTube channel, but if you want to ask questions, log in as a subscriber at dailywire.com, go to The Conversation page, you can watch the live stream there, and then start typing into the DailyWire chat box, and Alicia will curate and funnel questions to Drew.
00:32:43.000And those things that he is saying, he'll flip on them inside of an hour.
00:32:46.000He tweeted out a bunch of stuff that completely contradicted what he had said to Dianne Feinstein about illegal immigration.
00:32:53.000He had sent out his press secretary to say that they would consider amnesty for illegal immigrants, and then five minutes later, they sent out Pence to saying that they are committed to the promises that they made.
00:33:01.000Let's do Mike Pence, actually, first, and then we'll show the reaction.
00:33:03.000So Mike Pence, the vice president, he's asked about Trump on illegal immigration, and here is the vice president.
00:33:09.000This president and this administration are absolutely committed to keep the promises we made to the American people.
00:33:15.000As the president said last weekend at Camp David, there's no DACA fix without a wall.
00:33:47.000Good for them for actually being critical of the president when they think the president is doing something wrong.
00:33:51.000I think that they are underestimating, or they're both underestimating Trump and overestimating Trump.
00:33:55.000They're underestimating Trump in the sense that they are saying that Trump is gonna break promises because he's not a promise keeper.
00:34:01.000I agree with that to a certain extent.
00:34:03.000They're overestimating Trump if they think he's actually in control of policy, because he really is not.
00:34:07.000Here is Laura Ingraham going after Trump on exactly these grounds.
00:34:10.000I'm going to wait to see what the final DACA proposal looks like.
00:34:14.000But if it does not include a wall, a real wall, not a see-through wall, expect a political revolt from the base, which means losing the House and maybe even losing the Senate.
00:34:23.000And by the way, chain migration, absolutely necessary.
00:34:27.000OK, so what she's saying there is right on policy.
00:34:50.000But in any case, she's not wrong on policy.
00:34:52.000All I'm suggesting is that all these people who are members of the base, listen, I'm happy that they finally arrived at the point that I was at a while ago calling balls and strikes with Trump.
00:34:59.000I'm glad that they're finally saying that if Trump does something that they don't like, that they'll break with Trump.
00:35:03.000But if they think that Trump is actually, that yesterday was anything more, that his meeting with Democrats was anything more than posturing, I think that that's wrong.
00:35:17.000Congress is full of people from both parties who believe that the point of our immigration policy is to provide cheap labor to their donors and to atone for America's imaginary sins against the world.
00:35:28.000They couldn't care less about immigration's effect on you or your family.
00:35:32.000Yet these are the same people the president now says he trusts to write the immigration bill, the one he'll sign no matter what it says.
00:35:39.000So what was the point of running for president?
00:35:42.000OK, so he's not wrong on this, but again, I would suggest that Trump is not actually—the policy is not going to look like this.
00:35:47.000The policy is going to look like what Congress shapes, and whatever Congress is able to get through the Republican Senate.
00:35:52.000They're not going to get any Democratic help on this.
00:35:53.000The question is what they get through the Republican Senate.
00:35:56.000I would hope that they get the ending of chain migration, the ending of the diversity visa lottery, some funding for the wall so Trump can claim victory on the wall.
00:36:03.000But the idea that Trump was serious about any of this, I think, is utterly untrue.
00:36:07.000The part that I would be disquieted about here is not what Trump does on immigration, actually.
00:36:11.000The part that I would be disquieted about is what Trump does when there's a Democratic Congress.
00:36:15.000Which, as I've been saying now for weeks, is why Congress matters.
00:36:28.000News broke that, in all likelihood, will end the career of the Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who is sort of an up-and-coming Republican star, ex-Navy SEAL.
00:36:35.000So, apparently, he'd been having an extramarital affair.
00:36:37.000But that's not the worst part of the story.
00:36:39.000The worst part of the story is that the ex-husband of Greitens' ex-mistress came forward with a tape in which the woman talked about her relationship with Greitens.
00:36:51.000Basically, she says that he invited her over to his house.
00:36:54.000That he told her that he was going to show her how to do a proper pull-up, which is a very interesting come online, that she acceded to his request, that he proceeded to tape her hands to rings, blindfold her, get her naked, and then take a picture of her.
00:37:08.000And then take that picture and say, basically, if anything ever comes out about this, this picture is going to hit the press.
00:37:13.000So he's basically attempting to use revenge porn as a way to blackmail this woman, allegedly.
00:37:37.000The allegations are serious enough that this is now going to dog him.
00:37:40.000I think the chances that he remains in office are relatively low.
00:37:43.000Again, if this woman comes out and says that this is true, particularly, then it sounds like—I wouldn't be surprised if there are other shoes to drop here, if it turns out that this is a tactic they've used before.
00:37:54.000Because this doesn't sound like something you do as a one-off.
00:37:57.000You're going to have an affair and you just think of this on the spot.
00:37:59.000OK, I'm going to get you naked, tape you up, and then I'm going to take a picture of you.
00:38:04.000One of the things that I find so disturbing about stories like this is it does go to whether character matters in politics, because there will be a group of people, undoubtedly, who will say, OK, so he did all this stuff.
00:38:18.000I do wonder if we've hit rock bottom with this.
00:38:21.000If there are still people who are outraged enough by this activity, if it's true, to oust Greitens, or if there are going to be a bunch of people who say the same thing they said about Roy Moore, which is, OK, well, even if it's true that he was allegedly molesting 14-year-old girls, even if that turns out to be true,
00:38:54.000But that was secret from the American public.
00:38:56.000And if the American public had found out that JFK was a perv in 1963, he's not reelected in 1964.
00:39:02.000Yes, LBJ was a piece of crap, but none of that information was public knowledge.
00:39:05.000So there have been bad men who have been president before, going all the way back to the beginning, but that was hidden from the American public because the public did not tolerate that.
00:39:14.000And that does have an effect on the culture that we all inhabit together.
00:39:18.000Maybe it's true that people of low character can be good politicians.
00:39:21.000Maybe it's true that Ted Kennedy can leave a woman to drown after presumably having an affair with her and leaving her in the back of a car in the middle of the river.
00:39:28.000Maybe it's true that he can go on to be a very powerful and influential senator.
00:39:32.000But what is also true is that a society that suggests that character does not matter when it comes to people who are making policy is a society that is going to treat character as completely irrelevant.
00:39:43.000And that's, I think, where we are going.
00:39:45.000Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined this phrase, defining deviancy down.
00:39:50.000He said, over the past generation, the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can afford to recognize.
00:39:57.000And accordingly, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the normal levels in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.
00:40:09.000This is certainly not true only of crime.
00:40:11.000It is also true with regard to personal behavior of politicians, and that bleeds down to what we accept in our personal lives.
00:40:18.000Not just with regard to career, but what you're willing to accept in a friend.
00:40:21.000What you're willing to accept in a community.
00:40:23.000What you're willing to accept in a church.
00:40:25.000These do have widespread effects, right?
00:40:27.000I mean, there was a lot of talk after Bill Clinton that there are a lot younger people who are engaging in oral sexual activity because Bill Clinton had basically made that a byword.
00:40:37.000I think that there's been statistics to show that various types of sexual activity that were hitherto considered taboo, as they are defined down, as those are no longer considered deviant, they are tried more often, and then the human psyche is just to look for the new taboo.
00:40:51.000As we continue to search for the new taboo, we're going to continue to lower the character of the American people.
00:40:55.000It doesn't mean every taboo is worthwhile or that certain taboos shouldn't be broken.
00:40:58.000Obviously, there are certain taboos that should be broken.
00:41:00.000For example, the most obvious example would be interracial marriage, which was a taboo for centuries.
00:41:05.000And that was broken, and no harm, no foul.
00:41:08.000Not only no harm, no foul, I think positive good.
00:41:10.000But the idea that every taboo should be shattered, and that when we shatter taboos, we're definitely moving society forward instead of backward, I think it's a mistake, and it leads to a lower character for the American people, for sure.
00:41:22.000OK, so in a second, I want to get to some things that I like and some things that I hate.
00:41:25.000So let's do a couple of things that I like.
00:41:30.000So we begin with Black Mirror Season 4.
00:42:35.000Okay, so the whole point of Black Mirror is that technology is twisting us in ways that we don't even think about, and that's why it's interesting to watch.
00:42:41.000It does raise some issues about exactly how we treat technology that are worth thinking about, and that's what makes it fun.
00:42:46.000It's sort of like Twilight Zone, but technology-based Twilight Zone.
00:44:38.000If Mark Wahlberg was smart enough to understand that he had the studio over a barrel, and he could do whatever he wanted, and he'd get paid a lot of money, that's fine.
00:44:45.000Also, if you're talking about box office draws, there is no doubt that Mark Wahlberg is a much bigger box office draw than Michelle Williams.
00:44:55.000I love the idea, though, that this is blatant sexism, as though Wahlberg's getting paid more not because he's a better negotiator, but because he's a man.
00:45:02.000Not because he's a bigger star, but because he's a man.
00:45:04.000If that's the truth, I'd like to talk about pay discrepancies on Ocean's 8.
00:45:33.000You know, before you start claiming sexism, racism, privilege, why don't you look to the complicating factors in the same way that before you claim that race is responsible for crime, you might want to look to the complicating factors.
00:46:09.000He's a very good actor, Robert Pattinson.
00:46:12.000It is shocking that you could take Robert Pattinson, who's a very good actor, and Kristen Stewart, who's also a good actress, and make Twilight, which is a horrific,