Trump administration moves to crack down on race-based discrimination in college and university admissions. Ben Shapiro explains why this is a good thing and why the left should be worried about it. Plus, the collapse of socialism in Venezuela, and the release of the Seth Rich case, and much, much more. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to the conservative newsletter "The Weekly Standard" and the Opinionsated Spectator. He's also the host and founder of The Ben Shapiro Project, which he describes as "America's Most Conservative Podcast." Ben is a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire, The Weekly Standard, and The Daily Caller, and is one of the most influential conservative voices in America. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Nation, and many other publications. Ben's new book, "The Dark Side of America" is out now and is available for pre-order now. If you like what you hear, you can get a copy of the book for free on Amazon Prime, wherever books are sold, for $99.99, or you can also get 20% off your first month with Prime membership, for as little as $99 a month, plus free shipping, shipping nationwide, free of a maximum of $99, plus shipping and handling, plus a 2-year shipping plan, shipping plans, shipping included in the purchase of a 3-piece of 4 boxes of shipping and shipping, and a free of course, including shipping to your choice of your choice. and a lifetime membership. All of this plus a free shipping plan with shipping and a $50 or two days of shipping, plus an additional $99 per month, including a lifetime of shipping to you get all of these things. - Ben Shapiro's Freebie, plus all of that plus a 5-day shipping policy and shipping options, plus the use of a skyrocketing shipping policy, and more! - Free shipping, no obligation, no commitment required, no hush, no matter what you decide you decide what you get, and you'll get 100% of the service you're getting, you get it all for 100% satisfaction and a 100% guaranteed, 100% guarantee, no questions asked and a 50% chance of a good night's chance to keep it, and they'll get it for 99% of your answer.
00:00:00.000On Tuesday, the Trump Department of Justice announced they would move to combat the racism inherent in college admissions affirmative action.
00:00:06.000Instead of using the DOJ Civil Rights Division as a sort of defense mechanism for radical leftist groups, as the Obama administration did, the Trump administration is going to use the office to crack down on actual discrimination, pursuing what they call investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions, according to an internal document.
00:00:25.000This is a welcome development, despite the left's quick move to demagogue the issue by claiming this is somehow a white identity politics defense mechanism from the Trump administration.
00:00:33.000Often, the groups hurt most by affirmative action are not white people, but minorities like Asian Americans and Jews.
00:00:38.000The left, of course, complains that the DOJ Civil Rights Division should be specifically dedicated to the interests of particular minorities.
00:00:44.000As Kristen Clark of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law told the New York Times,
00:00:48.000The left thinks the Civil Rights Division was, quote, created and launched to deal with the unique problem of discrimination faced by our nation's most oppressed minority groups.
00:00:57.000She called the move deeply disturbing.
00:01:01.000First off, affirmative action has done nothing to advance black economic interests.
00:01:05.000According to Stephen and Abigail Thornstrom of the Liberal Brookings Institute, quote,
00:01:26.000In fact, very often those who make it into the top universities through affirmative action are themselves hurt by the process.
00:01:31.000Let's say a black student performed well enough to get into Duke, but not Yale.
00:01:35.000Putting that student at Yale means that instead of flourishing in an environment in which the student has earned membership, that student will now be the low man on the totem pole.
00:01:41.000In an article published in The Atlantic in 2012, Richard Sandard and Stuart Taylor Jr.
00:01:45.000highlight some of the ways this mismatch issue impacts black students.
00:01:51.000Students who got in through significant affirmative action, they're twice as likely to be derailed from pursuing a doctorate and an academic career.
00:01:56.000Black law school grads are four times as likely to fail the bar as their white counterparts.
00:02:00.000Black college freshmen want to go into science or engineering more than white students but are twice as likely to drop out.
00:02:06.000About half of black college students rank in the bottom 20% of their classes and the bottom 10% in law school.
00:02:11.000And, of course, affirmative action is unfair to those of other races who outperform the minorities who benefit.
00:02:16.000A Princeton University study showed that blacks received a bonus of 230 points on SAT scores versus their competitors on the old 1600-point scale.
00:02:23.000By contrast, Asians were penalized 50 points.
00:02:27.000It's a solid policy aimed at ending the sort of discrimination that continues to divide us by race, assuming without evidence that a black kid who scores lower on the SATs than an Asian kid of the same socioeconomic status has somehow suffered more and requires the open university slot.
00:02:40.000That's pernicious, it's nasty, and it should be fought.
00:02:44.000I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:02:52.000Alrighty, so a lot to get to today, as always.
00:02:54.000I want to talk about President Trump apparently opening the Seth Rich can of worms, just a little bit.
00:02:59.000But the biggest story in the news is obviously what's going on in Venezuela, where socialism has collapsed, as it always does, into full-scale disaster.
00:03:05.000We're going to talk about that in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors
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00:07:49.000These were wealthy, growing economies.
00:07:52.000And they've been absolutely destroyed by socialism.
00:07:56.000There are people now who are searching through the trash.
00:07:59.000When Ami was there, he told me that he was watching normal citizens hunting dogs to eat in the streets, like stray dogs, hunting them down, killing them, and eating them.
00:08:06.000Here's some video from CNN of some of the food lines.
00:08:09.000Again, this is the capital city of what was one of the great countries in the Western Hemisphere.
00:08:15.000Even in the driving rain, Venezuelans started their day in search of food, expecting to see the usual grim cues that form at government stores.
00:09:57.000Even when they were redistributed, it was very often to people who didn't know what they were doing.
00:10:00.000So what you ended up with was a dramatic drop-off in all of the productive capacity of the country, which prompted him to ratchet up tariffs, right?
00:10:07.000He said, okay, well, if we can't produce anything in the country, and we're buying everything from out of the country, we'll ratchet up the tariffs, which meant that no one could afford anything.
00:10:14.000So nothing was being imported and nothing was being produced, so nobody actually had either the money to buy anything or the productive capacity to make anything.
00:10:21.000He created wage controls, he created price controls, he ramped up the inflation, he entirely destroyed the economy.
00:10:29.000I mean, entirely destroyed it to the point where you're seeing people literally searching through the garbage at bread lines.
00:10:35.000I mean, not just at government bread lines, they'll go to bakeries, and this is according to the Associated Press, Hannah Dreyer of the Associated Press,
00:10:43.000The government of President Nicolas Maduro blames the U.S.
00:10:45.000and right-wing business interests for the economic collapse, but most economists say it actually stems from the government-imposed price and currency distortions.
00:10:52.000Of course, the United States can't even trade with Venezuela because of Hugo Chavez and because of Nicolas Maduro.
00:10:56.000There often seems to be a direct line, she writes, between economic policy and daily hardship.
00:11:00.000One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton.
00:11:05.000The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets and still have not come back.
00:11:08.000People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings, soggy pizza crusts, eating them on the spot.
00:13:10.000This is what happens when you have a country that is solely dedicated to the proposition of dictatorship, the demagogues.
00:13:15.000I mean, this is Bernie Sanders' land, okay?
00:13:16.000This is when you demagogue and you say, it's big business that's doing all of this.
00:13:20.000All we have to do is seize all the property from big businesses and redistribute it.
00:13:24.000Or regulate it so deeply that we ensure that we spread around all the wealth.
00:13:28.000Now, I think that we should not allow the left to get away with this because what the left did is for literally years, for literally years, they talked about how wonderful Chavez was, how wonderful Chavezism was, how great Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro were.
00:13:41.000You know, we on the right are criticized very often for the war in Iraq.
00:13:44.000How many evil countries has the left declared were good before they actually turned evil?
00:13:49.000The left actually liked Nazi Germany until it turned out that Hitler was Hitler.
00:13:53.000The left liked Mussolini and turned out that Mussolini was Mussolini.
00:13:56.000The left liked Lenin until it turned out that Lenin and Stalin were Lenin and Stalin.
00:13:59.000The left liked Mao until it turned out that Mao was Mao.
00:14:02.000The left liked Hugo Chavez until it turned out that Hugo Chavez was Hugo Chavez.
00:14:05.000And each time, each time leftist dictatorship is tried,
00:14:09.000Every single time the left immediately declares after it fails, it wasn't honestly tried.
00:14:13.000Socialism's never been honestly tried.
00:14:15.000It's really funny, today I tweeted out that the World Bank calls Venezuela one of the most income-equal states on earth, and the Socialist Party, the official Socialist Party, tweeted at me, and they said, how dare you blame socialism for this?
00:14:32.000Venezuela is what happens when leftism goes wrong.
00:14:34.000Don't blame socialism for a leftist failure to manage a profit-driven capitalist economy.
00:14:39.000So in their opinion, if they just nationalized all the resources over at the Socialist Party, if they nationalized even more, it would go even better.
00:14:45.000And then they attached a graphic that said, Question.
00:14:49.000With populations collectively and directly owning the means of production and distribution, therefore resulting in free access to all goods and services?
00:15:10.000They're capitalist economies with heavy taxation placed on top of them.
00:15:13.000Even the taxation levels on businesses are very low.
00:15:15.000The reason that Denmark continues... I mean, it was a thriving society, they created a massive welfare state on top of it, that killed the economy, and now they're moving to the right and looking to slash taxes.
00:15:24.000The fact is you cannot tax and spend your way into prosperity.
00:15:32.000Now, before people say, well, the left never identified with Venezuela, I mean, the left never sided with Venezuela, let's just go through the left's quick record on this.
00:15:41.000Let's go through the left's record on Venezuela.
00:16:18.000Jimmy Carter praised Chavez's, quote, commitment to improving the lives of his fellow countrymen, adding that he would be remembered for his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments, and for his formidable communication skills and personal connections with supporters in his country and abroad, to whom he gave hope and empowerment.
00:16:34.000Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post called Chavez quick and popular.
00:16:39.000The Atlantic stated, quote, passionate and charismatic.
00:16:42.000Chavez slipped comfortably into the role of romantic Latin American revolutionary, championing the poor against an unfeeling local oligarchy and its imperial paymasters.
00:16:51.000Today, millions of Venezuelans will weep tears of genuine anguish at his passing.
00:16:55.000ABC News and Univision said he was revered by Venezuela's poor, who considered him one of their own.
00:16:59.000The New York Times sounds it off, calling him a dreamer with a common touch and enormous ambition.
00:17:03.000All he had to do was crush his adversaries, destroy the economy, destroy press freedoms in the country.
00:17:11.000Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning economist who leans to the left, he said this in 2007, quote,
00:17:16.000Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have had success in bringing health and education to the people in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, again, now the most violent city in the Western Hemisphere, to those who previously saw few benefits of the country's oil wealth.
00:17:29.000It is not only important to have sustainable growth, but to ensure the best distribution of economic growth for the benefit of all citizens.
00:17:35.000Once you redistribute, you cannot hope to grow.
00:17:59.000When they say there's a leftist utopia, the leftist utopia looks a lot more like Venezuela than it does like Denmark.
00:18:04.000Because the bottom line is that even Denmark is based on a capitalist system that the left really doesn't like very much.
00:18:11.000By the way, even Denmark, if it didn't have the United States holding up its military budget for years and years and years, and if they hadn't been using capitalist corporate tax systems for years and years and years, would have been in serious trouble, looked a lot more like Greece than it would like Denmark.
00:18:23.000But before we get to any of that, first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at the USCCA.
00:18:29.000Over the weekend, the Chicago Trib reported that 56 people were wounded, 11 of them fatally.
00:18:34.000One of the kids who was killed was 10-year-old Gustavo.
00:18:37.000He was simply riding in the car with his dad when he was attacked.
00:18:40.000Well, that's not the same thing for a lot of USCCA members.
00:18:43.000There was one USCCA member, David, whose young sons were threatened by armed thugs during a trip to the barbershop.
00:18:48.000He was forced to use his firearm to defend them.
00:18:50.000He killed one guy and he wounded the other, which is the way that you are supposed to do it if you own a gun.
00:18:55.000That didn't end your legal saga, because the fact is that the USCCA then had to step in and help guide David through the aftermath.
00:19:01.000There will be legal consequences if you have to use your firearm under any circumstances.
00:19:06.000USCCA was there to provide all of that.
00:19:08.000USCCA helps ensure you against what happens after you use your firearm, train you for using your firearm, get you the firearm.
00:19:13.000Visit defendmyfamilynow.com to hear all the shocking details on David's story and see the live news footage that captured the moment he was forced to shoot on tape.
00:19:44.000Okay, so here are just a few of the key figures on the left who have spent years praising Hugo Chavez.
00:19:48.000Here's Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labor Party.
00:19:51.000I'm Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the British Parliament.
00:19:55.000I'm also a very good friend of Tony Benn.
00:19:58.000It's a very sad time as he passed away last week.
00:19:59.000He was a leader in the fight against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:20:16.000And also leader in the struggle against the policies of the European Bank, and others which were detrimental to the poor of Britain and other countries.
00:20:34.000During his life, we discussed many times the problems for building socialism in the fight against capitalism.
00:20:38.000He was the leader of the Labour Party.
00:21:49.000...had a significant role, but he also was significant in helping to bring about some form of unification of the hemisphere and move towards freeing themselves from imperial control, but he was not the only one.
00:22:02.000It's happened in most of the countries, and it's dramatic.
00:22:42.000Very often people like me will point to places like Singapore, right?
00:22:45.000We'll talk about places that have open trade, places that have attempted to lower taxes.
00:22:50.000Not necessarily every aspect of their culture is something that I want the United States to emulate, but economically free systems benefit.
00:22:57.000We don't like socialism and redistributionism, because inevitably, once you take the line of redistributionism far enough, you end up destroying the economy, and if you continue down that line, and you don't tack back to the center, you end up destroying it even more.
00:23:09.000Honest leftists will say that leftism is basically a dose against capitalism, and if you take it too far, it'll kill the patient, but maybe you need a little bit of it.
00:23:18.000But that's not- but the true honest leftists who really believe this stuff believe that what Chavez did was great, and then they're shocked when the dose killed the patient.
00:23:26.000I want to talk a little more about this, and then I want to get to some of the stuff happening inside the Trump administration in just a minute.
00:23:30.000For that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:23:33.000$9.99 a month gets you a subscription to dailywire.com.
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00:26:02.000And next time they say that a country is engaging in this sort of revolutionary experimentation on economics that is going to lead to widespread prosperity, understand that the end result
00:26:11.000No matter how you approach it, the end result is when you tack to the left, when you tack too far to the left, you end up in Venezuela.
00:26:18.000Okay, so, in other news, more kind of silliness from the White House.
00:26:22.000So yesterday, there was a report, there was a lawsuit that broke in which a guy named Rod Wheeler, who was an investigator, he was investigating supposedly the death of Seth Rich, and he had a lawsuit suing a bunch of people, including Ed Butowsky, who was the guy who funded him, and in his lawsuit he alleged that basically Fox News and the White House
00:26:41.000cooperated in order to push the Seth Rich story.
00:26:44.000For those who don't remember, this is a conspiracy theory.
00:26:50.000And there were accusations that he was killed having something to do with the fact that he, the idea, it's not a fact, the idea that he was leaking information to WikiLeaks and maybe the Democrats didn't like it and killed him or some such nonsense.
00:27:01.000So Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the White House, when she's asked about this, she said, listen, we had nothing to do with the Seth Rich story, so this is all nonsense.
00:27:08.000Did the president know about the story pre-publication and did he have an influence on the way the story was written?
00:27:13.000The president had no knowledge of the story and it's completely untrue that here the White House involvement in the story and beyond that this is ongoing litigation and I'd refer you to the actual parties involved which aren't the White House.
00:27:27.000Then it's followed up with somebody asking, okay, so does Trump believe the Seth Rich conspiracy theory that the leaks, the Russian leaks, were not actually Russian, they were Seth Rich talking to WikiLeaks?
00:27:37.000And here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders' answer.
00:27:39.000Very quickly on Seth Rich, does the president believe the predicate about original Fox News reporting that Seth Rich was responsible for the release of DNC emails to WikiLeaks?
00:27:50.000Thanks guys, we've got a small business event coming up shortly and hopefully you'll all tune in.
00:27:55.000That's a pretty amazing statement there that she's not sure what Trump believes about the Seth Rich conspiracy.
00:27:59.000The reason that's amazing is not because she couldn't say that he doesn't believe it, you know, like maybe she's never talked about it with him, but this is the inherent problem with having Trump as your president and you being his press secretary.
00:28:34.000meeting with a bunch of Russian lawyers, Russian-connected lawyers.
00:28:37.000He's been promised there's going to be some dirty Hillary information and that the Russian government will pledge their support basically to Donald Trump.
00:28:44.000Jay Sekulow, this is a few days ago, this is just a couple of weeks ago, he's on with Chris Cuomo and he has asked, so Donald Trump Jr., if you recall,
00:28:51.000released a statement initially about the meeting.
00:28:53.000And he said, we only discussed Russian adoption.
00:28:55.000We didn't discuss anything having to do with the campaign.
00:30:33.000But it's not going to stop from Trump because this is who Trump is.
00:30:35.000Yesterday, Trump came out and there was a Boy Scout, you know, he spoke to the Boy Scouts and we played the audio of it last week and the video of it last week and it was pretty ridiculous.
00:30:44.000I mean, he went out there and basically did a campaign rally in front of a bunch of 15-year-olds and it was really quite hilarious.
00:31:02.000So, if he's fibbing about the Boy Scouts, it makes it very difficult to be his press secretary.
00:31:07.000Again, this is not on Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:31:09.000It's just to point out that whoever is the president's representative is going to be in a bit of trouble because you can't say things that any other person would think were normal because Trump might undercut you.
00:31:18.000And that leads to a serious problem for the Trump administration itself.
00:31:21.000You could imagine a whole spate of questions day after day.
00:31:23.000The media going in there and asking, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, does the president believe that the moon is made of green cheese, and that the wizard, and that the Wicked Witch of the West surrounds it on her broom every evening?
00:31:33.000And Sarah Huckabee Sanders goes, no, of course the president doesn't believe that.
00:31:36.000And then the next day, Trump comes out, he says, well, I don't know.
00:31:42.000Because she's cautious about this, she's going to have to say, I don't know the answer.
00:31:45.000And then the headline the media are going to run is, Trump doesn't know whether Moon is made of cheese.
00:31:49.000That's what they're doing on the Seth Rich thing.
00:31:51.000This is why having an unpredictable president, or really an unstable president when it comes to these sorts of issues, is really not helpful in any way.
00:31:58.000And it's why I'm very skeptical, you know, we'll find out, but I'm very skeptical that putting General John Kelly in charge of his staff is going to help Corey Lewandowski yesterday,
00:32:07.000Another one of Trump's fabled wonderful picks.
00:32:10.000He was saying that Kelly is the chief of staff, but he's not going to be chief of the president.
00:32:15.000Corey, let's talk about General Kelly.
00:32:51.000Look, I think the choice for Donald Trump, President Trump, was a clear reflection of his desire to move in a different direction and to put a reset together.
00:33:00.000But what I think is, you know, General Kelly, Secretary Kelly is going to be successful, which he's going to learn very quickly.
00:33:07.000And, uh, it's a phrase that I have coined and I think people understand is you have to let Trump be Trump.
00:33:12.000And you're not going to change the president because for the last 40 years, he's been an unbelievably successful business executive, a television executive author, uh, you know, real estate executive, and he doesn't want to change.
00:33:25.000And that's not what the American people voted for.
00:33:26.000They didn't vote to have Donald Trump change.
00:33:38.000And if he is able to do his job, which I think he will, which will be limiting the backbiting and the infighting amongst the individuals who are serving inside the administration.
00:33:49.000Uh, that is a very, very important thing and put everybody on one agenda, which is the Trump agenda.
00:33:56.000Okay, so again, this is the big problem here, and it does remain a large problem for the Trump administration.
00:34:04.000It's not about all the people who surround him.
00:34:06.000At a certain point, if you, as a human being, are realizing that everybody around you doesn't want to be around you, maybe it's not the people around you who are the problem.
00:34:24.000He's doing the right thing on Venezuela.
00:34:26.000The Trump administration released a statement yesterday in which they condemned Maduro, and they said that the United States hold Maduro personally responsible for the health and safety of Mr. Lopez, Mr. Ledesma, and any other C's.
00:34:42.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
00:34:45.000So, things I like, um, all week long we've been paying tribute to the late, great Anthony Scaramucci, uh, the greatest of all characters in the Trump saga thus far.
00:34:54.000Now, today's comparison to Anthony Scaramucci comes courtesy of Kevin Williamson at National Review.
00:34:58.000He wrote a fantastic piece in which he talked about how a lot of people who are kind of Trump followers are fans of Alec Baldwin's speech from Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, the famous always be closing speech.
00:35:07.000He says there's like a bunch of people who think that this guy's the hero of the film when in reality he's a jerk.
00:35:12.000Right, and that is Anthony Scaramucci.
00:35:14.000It's almost impossible not to see Alec Baldwin's performance here, and think of Scaramucci, a bloviating guy, you know, over the top, talking about how powerful he is.
00:35:24.000Because only one thing counts in this life!
00:35:27.000Get them to sign on the line which is dotted!
00:36:32.000Okay, so one of the great speeches in film history.
00:36:35.000This isn't actually part of the original play, which I didn't know.
00:36:37.000It was written specifically for the movie.
00:36:39.000Alec Baldwin's only in the movie for this five-minute segment, basically.
00:36:43.000But the truth is that people who think that this kind of stuff is real life are wrong, okay?
00:36:48.000There's a whole group of business people who think of themselves as this hard-charging guy who's really gonna get things done because this is how business... Not really how business works.
00:36:56.000The way that successful business actually works is by making deals that are mutually beneficial for the two sides, not by screwing people.
00:37:02.000The people who tend to screw people are the people who have great image, you know, like Trump and Scaramucci, but aren't necessarily the world's best business people because they're not actually providing a mutual benefit in their dealings.
00:38:12.000The thing I love about baseball is that the Boston Red Sox- I mean, it's happening in Fenway Park.
00:38:15.000The Boston Red Sox fan gave him a standing ovation, and then after they showed the play again on the big screen, they gave him a second standing ovation, which is a pretty cool thing.
00:40:12.000I would also wonder, I tweeted out about this, that I wondered what this woman's perspective was on abortion until I realized she was a transgender man and therefore she can't speak about pregnancy because men can't get...