New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jeans keeps her job despite racist tweets, Jim Acosta loves that dude, and President Trump argues with Ivanka over the media. Today's show is full of things to talk about, including: - Why you need to stock up on some precious metals - What is your plan from hyperinflation? - What are the chances of inflation? - Is it time to get into precious metals? - How much of your savings should you be sitting on? - Should you be putting it in a savings account? - Why is it a good idea to have a gold or a silver retirement plan? - When the bottom falls out of everything, gold tends to protect your savings - why you should be buying some gold and silver - and more! Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on the FiveThirtyEight Radio Network. See linktr.ee/TheBenShapiroShow and listen to his weekly radio show on the Four Corners Podcast wherever you get your shows - including the newest episodes of The FiveThirtyeight Radio Network every Sunday morning starting at 8am Eastern Time. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE! Subscribe to the show and tell a friend about what's going on in your favorite podcast and let us know what your thoughts are on the latest episode! You can also become a supporter of the show by texting BONUS! when you leave us a rating and review in Apple Podcasts! and we'll get 10% off your favorite streaming platform! Thank you! if you leave a review and review the show becomes a review, we'll receive $5 or review it in Apple Paypalanced! Thanks! in iTunes! It'll help us spread the word to other listeners get 5 stars and receive 5 stars, and receive $10,000 in future episodes like that'll get $5,000, they'll get 7 days of promo code BenShaparts and I'll get a discount on their ad-free version of The Ben Shapiro's new book "The Best Thing I'll Say That's Ben Shapiro Does It Like That? and other things like that too! Ben's Reviewed It'll get 5-star reviews, too get a FREEbiebiebie_ and more like that? Thanks Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro does it on his book "Ben Shapiro's Best of Ben Shapiro Talks About It All, Too Good at It?
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00:02:05.000Okay, so, meanwhile, let's talk a little bit about the New York Times.
00:02:09.000So, the New York Times, about a year ago, tried to hire a tech reporter.
00:02:12.000This tech reporter, it turned out, was friends with some rather unsavory people on the internet, and people dug up her old tweets, and then the New York Times fired this person.
00:02:19.000The New York Times, however, has not fired a woman named Sarah Zhang.
00:02:39.000For example, if I had a bunch of tweets 10 years old and somebody had hired me and they didn't know about my old tweets, like they hadn't been public fodder, they hadn't done their research or something, and then it came to light, then firing me would not be the end of the world.
00:02:50.000If, however, they knew what they were getting when they hired me, then they should not fire me over calls to boycott.
00:02:55.000They should not fire me just on a principled level over them making a bad decision.
00:02:59.000Like the fault of the New York Times here is the fault of the New York Times.
00:03:03.000She tweeted this stuff in the past four years and the New York Times just didn't do its research.
00:03:06.000Or if they did do their research, they obviously didn't care.
00:03:10.000So that's a little bit different from, for example, the Roseanne Barr situation, where ABC fully knew that Roseanne Barr was kind of a crazy person, but she then tweeted something new, and that new thing was something that, it's new information, Disney didn't have it when they decided to hire Roseanne, ABC didn't have it when they decided to hire Roseanne, and so that sort of changes the equation.
00:03:27.000Well, Sarah Jean, all this stuff has been known, and here's some of the stuff that she tweeted, and I'll explain why this matters.
00:03:32.000She tweeted, oh man, it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.
00:03:50.000There are some old tweets that are now surfacing about cops, where she tweeted stuff like,
00:04:04.000And says, when homeless people can beat cops senseless and suffer nary a repercussion, then let's talk about accountability going both ways.
00:04:15.000But the New York Times knew all this when they hired her.
00:04:16.000So, the New York Times came out and they defended her, which tells you something about the New York Times.
00:04:21.000I think it is good, by the way, that employers are not jumping to firing people based on social media mobbing.
00:04:27.000This lady is a bad lady, but I don't think that it is a good thing as a general rule for employers to start firing people based on the social media mob getting angry.
00:04:37.000We've seen this from the left too many times to think that it's any better when it comes from the right.
00:04:40.000It's just not a good idea to have blowback on Twitter drive whether somebody can hold a job or not as a general rule.
00:04:47.000The New York Times released a statement, and their statement is more telling about the New York Times than anything else.
00:04:50.000Because as I say, a year ago, the New York Times fired somebody for doing exactly what Sarah Zhang did, except that she was perceived to be on the right.
00:04:57.000Sarah Zhang is perceived to be on the left, so she gets to keep her job.
00:05:31.000And then, the New York Times says, she now sees that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media.
00:05:37.000She regrets it and the Times does not condone it.
00:05:39.000We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history.
00:05:44.000She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times, and we are confident she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.
00:05:51.000So, several things can be true here at once.
00:05:53.000One, I don't think The New York Times should fire this lady.
00:06:01.000If you choose not to subscribe to The New York Times,
00:06:03.000You have every right to do that, and they should bear the consequences of their own decision-making.
00:06:07.000Two, does the New York Times have a double standard?
00:06:09.000You bet your ass they have a double standard.
00:06:12.000You bet your life they have a double standard.
00:06:13.000There is no question the New York Times has an insane double standard.
00:06:16.000Not only does the New York Times have an insane double standard, Sarah Zhang has an insane double standard, because it turns out Sarah Zhang loves social media mobbing.
00:06:25.000Tim Hunt, you'll recall, is a former honorary professor with the University College London School of Life and Medical Sciences.
00:06:31.000He's a Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine, as well as recipient of the Royal Medal.
00:06:36.000He made a joke one time in a speech about how young women and young men should work in laboratories together because they tend to fall in love.
00:06:50.000People took this as, well, he's saying women shouldn't be in the laboratory, which is weird since his wife is actually a very highfalutin scientist in her own right.
00:08:08.000It turns out that when Barry Weiss, a New York Times columnist, was mobbed for having suggested that the right was being mistreated online, Sarah Zhang was very upset about that.
00:08:17.000She says, Is there anything more tedious than media navel gazing over outrage mobs?
00:08:21.000Start paying attention to what's happening outside your Ivy League, New York City-centric circles.
00:08:25.000Look at how the pylons operate in other contexts and get some bleep perspective.
00:08:30.000She got engagement for it, and then she didn't want to engage back.
00:08:32.000What exactly was Barry Weiss's bad tweet?
00:08:35.000Her bad tweet was, she said, immigrants get the job done, when she was talking about the daughter of an immigrant who went to the Olympics in ice skating.
00:09:17.000I think employers should only fire employees if they are feeling actual business blowback from the decisions of those employees made while in the employ of those employers.
00:09:27.000So I don't think Sarah Zhang should be fired.
00:09:28.000I think she should sit on the New York Times editorial board and we should continue to characterize the New York Times as a terrible piece of garbage newspaper.
00:09:34.000I think that seems to me the fairest outcome here.
00:09:36.000That she should have to work there after having criticized the New York Times for years, by the way, as being too right-wing.
00:09:41.000She should have to work there and then we can all sit here and laugh at the New York Times for being stupid enough to hire somebody like Sarah Zhang.
00:09:47.000By the way, I think it is worthwhile noting that Sarah Zhang, the real reason she wasn't fired is not because the New York Times has suddenly discovered the evils of social media mobbing.
00:09:57.000She was not fired because the New York Times agrees with her.
00:10:01.000She was not fired because the New York Times agrees with her take on white America.
00:10:04.000They are a bunch of white, upper-crust New York elitists who believe that anyone who is not white in the United States is inherently under the boot of Uncle Sam.
00:10:14.000And therefore, when Sarah Jean tweets racist stuff about white people, it's because white people deserve it.
00:10:39.000After Zach Beauchamp wrote an article two weeks ago suggesting that Mark Duplass, this independent director, we talked about it on the show, he had tweeted something nice about me.
00:10:46.000And then after he was social media mobbed, he deleted the nice tweet about me and then issued a public apology for ever having said anything nice about me.
00:10:52.000Zach Beauchamp wrote a piece for Vox.com suggesting that
00:10:56.000I completely deserved it, and Mark Duplass was exactly right because I'm a horrible, horrible human being.
00:11:00.000So, Mark Duplass should have been social media mobbed, and he should have deleted the tweet, and all the rest of this stuff.
00:11:05.000I got letters from two different Vox writers who would not come out publicly and say so, saying Zach Beauchamp is an idiot, and you are not a bad person because I know you and we talk frequently.
00:11:18.000A lot of people on the internet today confusing the expressive way anti-racist and minorities talk about white people, unquote, with actual race-based hatred for some unfathomable reason.
00:11:28.000So he looks at those tweets from tweets that say things like, and I quote, And he says that this is actually the expressive way anti-racist and minorities talk about white people.
00:11:44.000And this should never be confused with actual race-based hatred.
00:11:48.000It would be unfathomable for you to actually equate these two things.
00:11:52.000Like when you say dumbass effing white people, how could I not read that as, oh, that's just the expressive way that Asian people talk.
00:13:14.000The left tends to see things in this Marxist universe where power relations are the entirety of what we should be talking about every day.
00:13:20.000Relations between the more powerful groups and the less powerful groups.
00:13:23.000And the less powerful groups are less powerful because those less powerful groups have been put upon by the more powerful groups.
00:13:29.000As I always say, the Marxist view of life is that if you have two people in a room, one person has five bucks, one person has one buck, it must be that the person with five dollars somehow subordinated the person with one dollar.
00:13:37.000That is not true in a free country, but this is how the left sees things.
00:13:40.000So, if white people are racist, then their racism is really just a tool of their power.
00:13:46.000But if black people are racist, or Asian people are racist, or Mexicans are racist, or Jews are racist, then this means that they are just fighting back against the man.
00:13:53.000They're just fighting back against the man and they are using the tools at their disposal to fight back against this power relationship.
00:13:59.000This is how you end up with this foolishness of intersectionality suggesting that certain opinions are worth more than others based on the color of the skin of the person who's making a particular argument.
00:14:07.000I'll talk a little bit more about that in just one second.
00:14:09.000First, let's talk about your security.
00:15:24.000Okay, so final note on this tendency of the left to be okay with racism so long as it's not coming from white people.
00:15:28.000I was talking with a leftist friend who happens to work with an aforementioned publication.
00:15:49.000We're talking about intersectionality, and she's saying all intersectionality really is is context.
00:15:53.000It's just trying to suggest that every interaction has a context in which group characteristics play a part.
00:15:58.000And I said, well, I'm not sure, number one, that every interaction does have that context.
00:16:02.000And second of all, if there is a context in which, for example, black people suffer more from racism than white people, if that's true,
00:16:09.000I think that if we're talking about how much that impacts disparities between group outcome, I think that may account for a small percentage of the disparity between group outcome, maybe 15-20%.
00:17:00.000They use intersectionality as a club in order to beat up people who are not of a minority group.
00:17:05.000And that's why Sarah Zhang still has a job today.
00:17:08.000If she were on the right, she would not have a job.
00:17:09.000If she were white, she would not have a job.
00:17:10.000She is Asian and she is on the left, therefore she has a job today at the New York Times, which tells you a fair bit about how awful the New York Times actually is, which is why I say they should continue to employ her so we can mock them for their awfulness on a routine basis.
00:17:22.000Okay, meanwhile, speaking of awfulness in the media, yesterday, Jim Acosta,
00:17:26.000was doing his job at the White House, which is basically to show up on camera and show his bouffant to the world.
00:17:33.000And Jim Acosta, as I've said many times in the past, Jim Acosta, CNN's White House correspondent, get you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
00:18:11.000Unconsciously bias their stories in leftward directions a fair bit.
00:18:15.000I think that that is, I think you have to double check the media's work on a routine basis and try and extricate, try and separate the opinion from the fact in their news stories.
00:18:23.000I think that's your job as a consumer of news.
00:18:27.000I've ripped about media bias many times on the air with CNN, right?
00:18:30.000I'm the guy who went on CNN and during the last Gaza war suggested that if Hamas could have a news outlet, it would look exactly like CNN.
00:18:37.000I'm not shy about saying to various hosts on various networks that their networks are biased.
00:18:43.000I said this, I remember, to Martin Bashir before he lost his job at MSNBC, that MSNBC is a left-wing network, and that they bias their news that way.
00:18:50.000And so, President Trump isn't wrong about that, but when he says enemy of the people, not my favorite term, because it does have certain connotations that are just not correct, okay?
00:18:58.000They're not the enemy of the people, they are just biased sources for a truth they think they are purveying when they purport to be objective.
00:19:06.000Jim Acosta has now made a pretty solid living off of acting like he is victimized by the American people who don't trust him.
00:19:12.000Now, the reason we don't trust Jim Acosta is not because Trump said enemy of the people.
00:19:16.000This is such a left-wing myth that the right wing, we actually loved the media until President Trump came around.
00:19:21.000Then Trump came around, he said mean stuff about the media.
00:19:23.000And then we were all like, oh man, those guys do suck.
00:19:27.000In like 2001, I think, Bernard Goldberg wrote a book called Bias about bias in the media.
00:19:32.000It was a number one New York Times bestseller because everyone on the right has hated the media for decades.
00:19:37.000Because the media are wildly biased and always have been, certainly as long as I've been alive.
00:19:41.000Going back even further than that, when you had Walter Cronkite, who was a leftist, and Edward Murrow, who was a leftist, as the quote-unquote trusted voices of the American news media.
00:19:49.000So the media has been biased for literally generations in the United States.
00:20:01.000Because in election 2012, Newt Gingrich jumped to a presidential lead, specifically by smacking around John Harwood in the middle of a presidential debate.
00:20:09.000He said, you guys are the biased media, you're awful.
00:20:10.000And everyone, yeah, that guy should be president.
00:20:16.000Jim Acosta now makes a living going around pretending that history started in the last 15 minutes and that now the right hates the media and we don't like Jim Acosta, not because Jim Acosta is bad at his job, which he is, spoiler alert, but also that we really hate the media because Donald Trump is a big old meanie.
00:20:30.000So he goes to the White House and he decides this is going to be his Sam Donaldson moment.
00:20:34.000He's going to sit there and he's going to grill Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, over whether the media are the enemies of the people.
00:20:41.000Now, before I show you the clip, before I play for you the clip,
00:20:44.000Remember what Sarah Huckabee Sanders' job is.
00:20:46.000Her job is not to express the opinions of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:20:50.000This is why somebody from the White House once asked me, would I be interested in working for the White House press office, which is hilarious.
00:20:57.000And my answer was, of course, no, because I prefer to express my own opinion, not the opinion of the president.
00:21:01.000Her job is to express the president's opinion.
00:21:04.000It is not her job to express her own opinion, or Jim Acosta's opinion, or anybody else's opinion.
00:21:08.000And if she did that, she would not be doing her job.
00:21:11.000Jim Acosta suggests to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I need you, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to tell me that the media are not the enemy of the people.
00:21:23.000You did not say, in the course of those remarks that you just made, that the press is not the enemy of the people.
00:21:30.000For the sake of this room, the people who are in this room, this democracy, this country, all the people around the world are watching what you're saying, Sarah.
00:21:39.000And the White House, for the United States of America, the President of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the people.
00:21:45.000His own daughter acknowledges that, and all I'm asking you to do, Sarah, is to acknowledge that right now and right here.
00:22:16.000Again, I would bet you money that if you got Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the phone off the record right now, she would tell you the same thing.
00:22:21.000I'll bet you that she doesn't like that line either.
00:22:26.000And the whole point, and Acosta knows that's not her job, and his whole point here is to somehow shame Sarah Huckabee Sanders as an individual human being.
00:22:32.000If he wants to go out and yell this question to Trump, go and yell it at Trump.
00:22:35.000You want to grill Sarah Huckabee Sanders over Trump's perspective?
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00:24:15.000Okay, so, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is grilled by Jim Acosta, who wants, he wants her to admit right here, right now, the press are not the enemy of the people!
00:24:31.000And then, Sarah Huckabee Sanders basically wheels around with a George Foreman-like punch and knocks Jim Acosta through the wall, mentioning the fact that, you know, while you talk about how the press are the victims of the President of the United States, you guys have been pretty awful to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:24:46.000Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders explaining.
00:24:47.000Repeatedly, repeatedly, the media resorts to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger.
00:24:54.000The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network, said I should be harassed as a life sentence, that I should be choked.
00:25:03.000ICE officials are not welcomed in their place of worship and personal information is shared on the internet.
00:25:08.000When I was hosted by the Correspondents Association, of which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender.
00:25:18.000In fact, as I know, as far as I know, I'm the first press secretary in the history of the United States that's required Secret Service protection.
00:25:26.000The media continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the president and everyone in this administration.
00:25:32.000And certainly we have a role to play, but the media has a role to play for the discourse in this country as well.
00:25:51.000OK, what she says there, that the media have been complicit in the failures of trust and the battle between the media and President Trump, is exactly right.
00:25:59.000And then, so what does Jim Acosta do with this information?
00:26:01.000Jim Acosta, who loves him some Jim Acosta.
00:26:03.000What does he do with this information where he has been told, you know, you guys might want to stop.
00:26:07.000Creating a situation where I need security by Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:26:11.000You might want to create a situation where you treat people fairly and then maybe there won't be so many people who are willing to treat you unfairly.
00:26:17.000Maybe we all ought to go weapons down.
00:27:11.000So I think what you should really do, and we don't trust you in large part because of your disparate treatment of Democrats and Republicans.
00:27:17.000So I think what you really should do is you should probably go out in front of the White House where a Republican resides, and then you should chant, you're not the enemy of the people, in opposition to Donald Trump supporters.
00:27:27.000Absolutely, we'll respect you more then.
00:27:29.000You shouldn't do better in terms of your journalisming.
00:27:31.000You shouldn't actually try to be more objective.
00:27:33.000You shouldn't try to worship yourself a little bit less, Jim Acosta.
00:27:35.000Instead, what you should do is you should go out there and chant about how awesome you are.
00:28:18.000The reason people don't trust Jim Acosta is not because he's left wing.
00:28:21.000The reason people don't trust Jim Acosta is because he proclaims he is not left wing while acting exactly like a correspondent for the Daily Kos.
00:28:28.000Okay, and then he continues along these lines.
00:28:30.000He says, I'm just, I'm so tired of this.
00:28:33.000Who cares whether you're tired of this, Jim Acosta?
00:29:28.000There was a BBC host yesterday who was interviewing Sean Spicer.
00:29:30.000Now, Sean Spicer was not a good White House press secretary.
00:29:33.000Right, Sean Spicer always looked like he was dying a little bit behind his eyes.
00:29:36.000Like, if you could look through into Sean Spicer's soul, every time he had to get up there and talk about crowd size and act all angry, you could see that there was a part of Sean Spicer that wanted to crawl into a hole and just plot.
00:29:49.000Sean Spicer did the same job that Jake Harney did when he was at the White House, which is to lie for the president.
00:29:53.000Let's be honest about what the White House press secretary does.
00:29:55.000The job of the White House press secretary is to lie for the president of the United States.
00:29:58.000This has been true as long as I have been alive, basically.
00:30:01.000There are very few press secretaries who don't do it.
00:30:03.000I really do think that members of the Bush administration did it less.
00:30:06.000But Jake Harney used to get up there every day and say, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, knowing full well that wasn't true.
00:30:11.000Robert Gibbs used to do the exact same thing.
00:30:13.000I confronted Robert Gibbs about this in 2012 at the DNC, I remember.
00:30:16.000You know, so anyway, Sean Spicer goes on BBC and the BBC correspondent says, It only applies to Sean Spicer because it's brand new.
00:31:01.000There are a thousand ways you could pin him to the wall on dishonesty, but saying that he corrupted the entire discourse is so free of all context in the American political system that it's just absurd.
00:31:44.000American politics was awesome, clean, and pure as the driven snow until Donald Trump took office, at which point evil people like Sean Spicer came in and sullied up the place.
00:31:52.000They just got mud all over the curtains.
00:31:55.000You're wondering why we don't trust the media?
00:31:59.000OK, now, with that said, in a second, I want to talk about, you know, President Trump's impact on the party, because I don't think it's been entirely good on these things.
00:32:07.000I think that we can be honest and still destroy the media.
00:32:09.000I don't think you have to be dishonest to destroy the media.
00:32:11.000And I also don't think that you have to say things that are over the top in order to destroy the media.
00:32:16.000I don't think that our goal should be to quote unquote destroy the media as much as it should be to club them back into covering things objectively or at least announcing their own political allegiances.
00:32:25.000We'll get into that in just one second.
00:32:27.000But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:32:29.000Now, let me tell you something about the subscriptions.
00:34:20.000There was a new wage report out today that is terrific for the president.
00:34:22.000Why that isn't the top of the news cycle?
00:34:24.000Well, because every day is a new news cycle driven by the president's Twitter account or personal animus.
00:34:30.000So the latest example of this is that the RNC, the Republican National Committee, is now warning that candidates should stay away from the Koch brothers.
00:35:25.000$80 billion with a B. Do you really think that the reason that they aren't opposing Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota is because they have to protect their business interests?
00:35:34.000Or maybe it's because they've been lifelong libertarians who have held these positions for legitimately decades.
00:35:38.000And they've funded a wide variety of projects, libertarian projects, ranging from the Cato Institute to other foundations on the right and backed a variety of candidates.
00:35:47.000And this sort of RNC sudden animus against the Koch brothers is really dishonest.
00:35:51.000And the implication that they are doing this for corrupt, sleazy business reasons is quite absurd.
00:35:56.000And that's just a reflection of the fact that the president is angry at the Koch brothers.
00:35:59.000The Republican Party should not become a tool of the president's id.
00:36:03.000When the president doesn't like something, that doesn't mean that it's bad.
00:36:05.000Sometimes it just means that the president is wrong.
00:36:10.000Another example of this is Ivanka yesterday.
00:36:12.000Ivanka Trump, who very often is sort of the moderate face of the administration, she was asked about the president's enemy of the people talk, and here's what Ivanka Trump had to say.
00:36:36.000I have some sensitivity around why people have concerns and gripe, especially when they're
00:36:45.000Okay, so that is an actually mature approach to the subject of the press.
00:36:54.000And President Trump immediately responded by attempting to basically take that comment from Ivanka Trump and turn it into, yeah, she actually thinks that the press is the enemy of the people.
00:37:18.000So, you know, is this is this good stuff?
00:37:19.000Is this good for the future of conservatism?
00:37:22.000No, this is not good for the future of conservatism.
00:37:24.000We should all be angry when the media bias their case.
00:37:27.000We should all be angry when they are not objective.
00:37:29.000But the president's kind of blunderbuss language when it comes to the media is not useful.
00:37:33.000And the fact that he is trying to cudgel Ivanka Trump into now, she really does believe that the fake news are the enemy of the people.
00:37:39.000See, in order to understand why this tweet is so funny, you have to understand that Trump thinks that virtually all media that are against him are fake news.
00:37:46.000So Ivanka Trump says, if you ask Ivanka Trump, do you think the fake news is fake news?
00:37:50.000She'd say, no, I think that there's news that is biased.
00:37:52.000I think that, like, I've met with Ivanka Trump.
00:37:55.000I do not think that Ivanka Trump is somebody who is sitting around going fake news all day.
00:37:59.000And she's been targeted, by the way, much more unfairly than President Trump.
00:38:02.000You want to talk about people who have been absolutely badgered by the media for no reason whatsoever?
00:38:06.000Ivanka Trump is at the top of that list, right?
00:38:07.000Ivanka Trump got blasted by the media for having the gall to take an Instagram photo with her own children in the middle of the immigration debate.
00:38:15.000And then it became, she's out of touch.
00:38:25.000You know, she has more reason, at least every reason that President Trump has, to be angry with the media.
00:38:30.000When President Trump, he does differ from Ivanka on this topic, but the idea that we're supposed to follow Trump down every rabbit hole, I just, I find it unconvincing.
00:38:45.000Now, Rudy Giuliani was asked about 2018, and here was his take on what 2018 election is going to be about.
00:38:50.000He's framing this midterm election in do-or-die terms for the Trump White House.
00:38:55.000But this election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment.
00:38:59.000OK, so if you really think that that's going to get people out to the polls, if you think that 2018 should be a referendum on whether to impeach President Trump or not, you're missing the fact that what it really should be is a referendum on President Trump's record.
00:39:10.000It should be a referendum on the fact that the economy is awesome.
00:39:12.000It should be a referendum on the fact that Iran has now been contained in a more superior way than it was when Obama was letting them out of the box to destroy the Middle East.
00:39:19.000It should be a referendum on President Trump's regulatory policy.
00:39:22.000It should be a referendum on all of the areas where the Trump administration has done well and the areas where they've done poorly.
00:39:28.000Instead, by focusing in on Trump and making Trump the center of the political universe, what you have done is turned Republican politics into a black hole of suck in which anything Trump does that is bad allows the media to ramp things up to 11, and it's not going to be good for Republicans come the election of 2018.
00:39:43.000We should always be arguing principles, issues, and the stuff that works.
00:39:47.000And yes, that includes fighting the cultural battles that matter.
00:39:50.000But it doesn't include the president's personal animus for the Koch brothers or his sudden enjoyment of the phrase enemy of the people.
00:40:01.000So it's a Friday, you sent in your letters, and now we get to answer them.
00:40:07.000Well, I mean, usually I go to my yacht, and then I smoke as many expensive cigars as I can, lighting $100 bills on fire, and then I cut a music video with Jay-Z.
00:40:20.000That's usually how I stay grounded after work.
00:40:23.000In reality, I have two kids under five.
00:40:26.000They run around, and they bother people, and they're wonderful, and I have a wife, and I have things I need to do at home, and I have a religious obligation that I fulfill as much as I can every day.
00:40:36.000And so, I don't find it particularly hard to stay grounded, because life grounds you if you are willing to let it.
00:40:42.000But you have to be willing to let it ground you.
00:40:46.000With regard to your stance on pre-existing conditions, how are people like me, having had a disability since my mom was in a car accident and five months pregnant with me, afford necessary medical equipment?
00:40:55.000Well, my take is that this is where private charity really should play a significant role.
00:41:00.000I mean, if you were in my Jewish community, when in my community, I really believe in churches and synagogues and community support systems.
00:41:06.000If there are people in my community who have a problem, typically they go to the rabbi of the community.
00:41:10.000The rabbi then makes an appeal to the people of the shul, and then everybody sort of pitches in to help out.
00:41:15.000The American people are extraordinarily generous, but suggesting that insurance companies should not be insurance companies is silly.
00:41:20.000It's not an insurance company if they are covering something that has already happened.
00:42:23.000I love ragtime, which is one of the reasons I love the movie The Sting, because the entire score is Scott Joplin, which actually doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, because it takes place in the 1930s, and ragtime is really from the 1910s and 1920s.
00:42:47.000What they will do is they will launch a whole series of movies with Rey and Finn and Poe and all the characters you've come to know and be lukewarm about.
00:42:55.000What they really should do is they should pretend none of this ever happened.
00:42:59.000They should pretend the prequels didn't happen.
00:43:00.000They should pretend the sequels didn't happen.
00:43:02.000They should recast Han, they should recast Luke, they should recast Leia, and they should pick up right where Return of the Jedi left off.
00:43:07.000That's what they actually should do, because those are the characters that you like, and they've already shown that they can recast Han.
00:43:12.000Like, Alden Ehrenreich did, I thought, a creditable job as Han Solo in the latest Solo movie, which I actually enjoyed.
00:43:17.000I think that what they should have done is just picked up afterward.
00:43:19.000They shouldn't do prequels for characters that they... The problem with Solo, the reason it didn't do well, is because, spoiler alert,
00:43:25.000In Force Awakens, they kill Han Solo in the worst, stupidest possible way, thereby destroying my childhood and making him a divorced loser dad murdered by his son.
00:43:32.000Okay, it's a terrible, terrible way for Han Solo to go.
00:43:44.000What they should do is they should just get the only good, really, the only good movies in the Star Wars canon are Rogue One, which has very little to do with anything outside of the original trilogy and makes very slight reference to some of the prequels.
00:43:59.000So keep Rogue One, keep the original three movies.
00:44:02.000If you want to keep Solo, fine, I guess.
00:44:04.000Dump everything else, pretend Force Awakens never happened, certainly pretend Last Jedi never happened, and take Kathleen Kennedy's resume and burn it on a funeral pyre.
00:44:12.000Okay, Chelsea says, Dear Benjamin, What does a typical day look like for you religiously as an Orthodox Jew?
00:44:18.000What rituals, traditions do you have to do?
00:44:56.000I wish I had more of an opportunity to pray with what you call a minion, which is a group of ten people, which you're supposed to do.
00:45:01.000You're picking the right day to do this.
00:45:02.000We have a rabbi visiting the studio, so I'm going to act a lot more religious than I actually am in my daily life.
00:45:07.000But I keep full kosher, which means I'll only eat at kosher restaurants, or I'll only eat food that is made according to particular standards.
00:45:13.000I can give you the whole spiel on what kashrut is and why it exists and what the restrictions are.
00:45:19.000And I keep Sabbath, which means that from Friday night to Saturday night to one hour past sunset on Saturday night, I don't use any electric devices.
00:46:21.000The argument against, just to present the counter argument, is that once somebody is intoxicated, they no longer have the power to make independent judgments.
00:46:26.000And so you are basically preying on them by selling them alcohol.
00:46:29.000But in just the same way that our law suggests that you are responsible for first degree murder if you get in the car drunk and hit somebody, you are responsible for getting drunk if you decide to get drunk.
00:46:39.000So I'm not a big fan of holding the bartender liable for any of that.
00:46:43.000I'm a bigger fan of holding the responsible individual, holding responsible the individual who's actually participating in the behavior.
00:46:51.000Yeah, any Californian who has a business or who operates in the state has thought about moving.
00:46:54.000There are a couple reasons why I stay.
00:46:55.000I mean, obviously the weather, which I control.
00:47:09.000Second of all, as an Orthodox Jew, I have to be in a place that has a significant number of kosher restaurants and, more importantly, Jewish schools for my kids, and so that limits the number of places I can live.
00:47:20.000I would love to be able to go and buy a huge estate in Montana or something and create my own country.
00:47:26.000But there are no kosher shops in Montana, I'd have to learn how to slaughter cattle, and that's really not on my agenda.
00:47:30.000So, that means that they're really only—the truth is, the Orthodox Jewish community is centralized in a few places around the United States.
00:47:36.000It's in New York, it's in Dallas, it's in Chicago, it's in L.A.
00:47:53.000Drew says, Dear Ben, Although I am not a big fan of his, Rousseau said something to the effect that in order for people to properly vote in a democracy, they must be properly educated.
00:48:01.000Therefore, it would be the responsibility of the government to educate the population.
00:48:04.000Even Thomas Jefferson said something to this effect.
00:48:06.000My question is, now that the government has taken on the responsibility of education, wouldn't it be proper for the people to take a test in order to vote?
00:48:12.000Despite the negative historical implications that poll tests have in this country, I feel this would be a good solution to politicians preying on the ignorant.
00:48:21.000Obviously, I wish that the American public were more educated, but I think that you'd have to determine what exactly is the standard for those polls, right?
00:48:29.000I mean, would it have to be knowledge of current events?
00:48:30.000I'm not sure why it should have to be knowledge of current events.
00:48:33.000What if you spend your days studying Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero?
00:48:36.000It seems to me you know enough about politics at that point to vote, and you just never read the newspapers.
00:48:41.000Hmm, I don't really see why I shouldn't be able to vote.
00:48:43.000How do you test for that sort of stuff?
00:48:46.000Well, you know your own interests without a literacy test.
00:48:48.000So, well, I think the idea is correct, that we should have a more popularly educated group of people voting.
00:48:55.000I'm not sure how you decide what elements go into a poll test that make you eligible to vote in the first place that don't bias the voting population.
00:49:03.000I think it would be difficult to figure that out.
00:49:09.000Well, really, abolishing the IRS is just a byproduct of abolishing the income tax.
00:49:12.000I think the income tax is an awful, awful institution.
00:49:16.000The 16th Amendment should be repealed as soon as humanly possible.
00:50:28.000I practiced at the beginning, you know, maybe 10, 15 minutes a day.
00:50:32.000It got to the point where when I was really good, I was practicing, you know, maybe three hours a day or more when I was really first rate.
00:50:37.000You know, my daughter is learning to play now.
00:50:39.000She's four and a half, and it's difficult to get her to sit still long enough to practice, but you make her do it, right?
00:50:45.000I mean, and what I say to her when she doesn't want to practice, OK, well, then we're not going to pay for your lessons, right?
00:50:50.000If you don't want to practice, then we're not going to actually expend money to go take you to a lesson.
00:50:53.000You have to, if you want to have your lessons.
00:52:35.000And the encore that he played was a riff on Bizet's Carmen by, that was written by Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great pianists of the 20th century.
00:52:44.000And here is a recording of him doing this.
00:54:16.000If you were able to pick up a microphone one day and be good at something, it didn't require a lot of skill.
00:54:21.000Really, seriously, if you have to, this guy trained, I promise you, he was practicing eight hours a day from the time this kid was probably eight years old, okay?
00:54:37.000The answer is you read and you read and you read, and then you write and then you write and then you write, and then you do this for lots of years, and then you eventually get good at things, right?
00:54:44.000This is actually how you get good at things.
00:54:45.000You spend an awful lot of time prepping things.
00:54:49.000Whether it's popular or whether it's not popular.
00:54:51.000Where it was, oh yeah, I picked up a guitar one day and in three months I was good enough that I could cut CDs and now I'm selling a million records.
00:55:45.000Playing this kind of stuff is not one of them.
00:55:47.000And if you're going to ask me who I admire more, George Lee, who will sell maybe 1-100 the CDs that any of these other artists I've mentioned ever will.
00:55:54.000Do I admire him more or do I admire Taylor Swift more?
00:56:03.000And frankly, stuff that comes hard is better for you as a general rule, as a human being, than stuff that comes really easily.
00:56:09.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:56:15.000Okay, so I've never heard of this QAnon stuff.
00:56:17.000So I've just been informed of this in the last week.
00:56:18.000The reason I was informed of it is because somebody tweeted something at me on a topic I didn't really know, and they had a blue checkmark.
00:56:24.000And so like an idiot, I sort of retweeted it.
00:56:26.000And then somebody emailed me and they're like, do you believe QAnon?
00:56:28.000I'm like, I don't even know what the hell QAnon is.
00:56:30.000And then I looked up, I was like, ooh, I shouldn't have retweeted that.
00:56:34.000And QAnon, I guess, is this conspiracy theory about the deep state and the workings of a military government.
00:56:42.000And it's all this weird garbage, this weird garbage conspiracy theory.
00:56:45.000I'm not going to pretend to understand it because I haven't spent more than five minutes looking at it because it makes no sense at all.
00:56:50.000It basically suggests that there's a conspiracy led by President Trump where he leads the executive branch in these conspiratorial designs, which makes no sense since he's actually the head of the executive branch.
00:56:59.000He doesn't need a military conspiracy inside the executive.
00:59:01.000I can fairly say that I think that at least the marketing campaign
00:59:17.000for the new film is not my cup of tea, comparing President Trump to President Lincoln.
00:59:22.000The trailer for the new film basically suggests that President Lincoln was shot by horrible Democrats who are attempting to reestablish slavery, and now President Trump faces a similar challenge.
01:00:00.000was at the premiere and he proceeded to... So one of the things Dinesh just talked about...
01:00:05.000is sort of a premise that he took from Jonah Goldberg's liberal fascism about how the Nazis were actually left-wing in a lot of ways.
01:00:10.000Now, to understand the Nazis, what you have to understand is that European politics is not the same as American politics.
01:00:15.000There is no such thing as a European conservative party.
01:00:18.000Classical liberalism, which is the motivating factor behind American conservatism, the idea of small government, God-guaranteed rights that are guaranteed and protected by a limited government that is established only to protect those rights, that is an American idea.
01:00:33.000Right, John Locke talked about it, but it was really adopted by the American founders and adopted nowhere else.
01:00:36.000When you talk about European right-wing parties, what you're talking about are parties that still embrace nationalized healthcare, that still embrace full-on social safety nets, that really still embrace all sorts of lefty programs in a variety of ways, but just happen to be more nationalist on issues like immigration and culture.
01:00:50.000They're more culturally assimilationist as opposed to multicultural.
01:00:54.000That's sort of the great distinguishing factor.
01:00:55.000And on occasion, they might be in favor of slightly more austerity measures, but there's no such thing as a right-wing party in Europe the same way that conservatives are right-wing in the United States.
01:01:04.000It just doesn't exist in Europe in anywhere near the same way.
01:01:07.000So when you look at the Nazi Party, the Nazi Party was right-wing as compared with the Communist Party in Germany.
01:01:12.000So when the left says the Nazis were right-wing, they are correct in the sense that they were the right-wing of European politics, but the Nazis bear no resemblance to the American conservative movement.
01:01:22.000So, Jonah pointed this out, and he pointed out that the Nazis were called national socialists, believed in big government, nationalized healthcare, corporate control from the top of industry, right?
01:01:31.000That all these things are left-wing propositions, which is true.
01:01:33.000Dinesh took that further, and he basically said, well, the Nazis are the Democrats, right?
01:01:36.000The Nazis and the Democratic Party share a lot of common thoughts.
01:01:40.000Now, the problem that I have with this is the way that we treat Nazi in public discourse, because the reality is the reason that everybody hates the Nazis is because of World War II and the Holocaust.
01:01:48.000Up until World War II and the Holocaust, the reality is that the vast majority of the West was kind of okay with the Nazis, which demonstrates how much of the West is sick.
01:01:56.000If you look at the Nazis' actual agenda, there are a lot of people today, if you just remove the word Nazi at the top, who would look at the agenda that they talk about, you know, nationalized health care, more spending on veterans, more of the public education, more restrictions on industry, tariffs, what they called autarky, the idea we should produce all product in-house inside Germany.
01:02:15.000There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who would probably agree with some of those propositions.
01:02:19.000Because it was a political party that also happened to be motivated by a deep-rooted evil, and it was a fascist tyranny that suggested a one-party state was the best.
01:02:28.000To try and link that to today's Democratic Party, I think we need to be careful about the Nazi comparisons, unless you are just... Like, what people do is they say, Democratic Party platform, like the Nazi platform, Nazis went and killed 6 million Jews.
01:02:54.000basically goes to the bumper sticker version of this, which is that the Democratic Party platform is the Nazi platform.
01:02:59.000When you look at the actual history of how these things evolved, and when you actually look at that platform versus the platform of the modern left, you say, wait a minute, those two are really heavily aligned, and frankly, contrary to the right.
01:03:09.000You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s, and what was actually put out there, and you look at it compared to the DNC platform of today, and you're saying, man, those things are awfully similar.