CNN s trying to ban the term "fake news" and an Obama holdover left-wing deep state stooge is trying to take over an executive agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Then, Amanda Presta Giacomo and Aswan Soobsang join the panel of deplorables to discuss a groundbreaking new study out of Yale that shows indulging in ridiculous fantasies makes you more liberal.
00:05:45.260The New York Times' main reporting on the alleged Trump-Russia collusion was shown to be entirely false.
00:05:50.100It was so false, actually, that former FBI Director James Comey, under oath, said that the story wasn't true.
00:05:56.620Also on alleged Trump-Russia collusion, CNN, that Brian Stelter's network, was forced not only to retract a story,
00:06:03.100but to fire an entire reporting team over false reporting, over a bad story.
00:06:08.260According to a Media Research Center study, 91% of mainstream news coverage of Donald Trump has been negative.
00:06:15.320According to Pew Research Center, Trump has received more negative coverage, not only than Democrats like Obama and Clinton, even more than George W. Bush.
00:06:24.920According to another study, the majority of Americans believe that mainstream news coverage of Donald Trump is too negative.
00:06:31.260And we're not just talking about the facts of the stories.
00:06:33.140It's not like the majority of Americans say, stop running reality.
00:06:36.540It's more which stories are being run, which stories are being harped on, which stories are being completely ignored,
00:06:43.320or they're harped on for Republicans but ignored for Democrats.
00:08:16.220The agency was proposed by Elizabeth Warren before she became a senator, 2007, 2008.
00:08:20.980It was authorized by the Dodd-Frank Permanent Financial Cronyism Act of 2010.
00:08:25.340The agency's major accomplishments in its seven years of existence appear to have been enriching trial lawyers and abusing black employees.
00:08:32.960One unit was nicknamed the plantation because it comprised all black employees and was subject to a special abuse, specific abuse.
00:08:41.800One employee called it a, quote, humiliating experience, said working for the CFPB is, quote, a living hell.
00:08:57.580According to a government accountability office report, one quarter, 25 percent of minority employees at the CFPB reported that they have been victims of discrimination.
00:09:07.760Almost one in ten employees reported that they had been retaliated against by a supervisor for calling attention to the discrimination.
00:09:14.640Now, none of this is surprising, by the way, because this is one of the major problems baked into the agency.
00:09:26.100Dennis Scholl, who's a former aide to Barney Frank, that's the law that created the agency, Dodd Frank, he explained in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week that the CFPB should just be shut down, which it should.
00:09:37.160The CFPB is uniquely unaccountable, he writes.
00:09:40.140It's an independent agency with a sole director.
00:09:43.200The director isn't even accountable to the congressional appropriations process.
00:09:47.440So there are some independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FCC, the FTC.
00:09:52.400Those are funded by Congress, but the CFPB is funded by the Federal Reserve.
00:09:58.180So that means it has precisely zero congressional oversight.
00:10:01.960Scholl assails the position of CFPB chief as, quote,
00:10:06.300a politically biased regulatory dictator and a political stepping stone for its sole director.
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00:13:10.160I really like this, but they just, like, the day I ordered it, they came out with a new line called the Revolver Line, and I really want to get one of those watches, too.
00:13:18.260So, if these watches were $500, I couldn't do that.
00:13:20.820I'd have to sell many more blank books.
00:13:22.500Fortunately, they started under $100, so I think I'll probably just get another one.
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00:15:03.620What I'm more interested in as a reporter, honestly, is the drama that you alluded to at the beginning of the show that's going on right now.
00:15:09.440It's really, really funny how Mick Mulvaney and Miss English, as you were talking about at the top of this show, are right now warring for the top spot and control over the staff of the CFPB.
00:15:23.380And it looks like this is going to be tied up potentially in court for at least a little while.
00:15:27.500But there seems to be a serious, actual fight for control of the CFPB.
00:15:34.020It sounds like the worst job in the world.
00:15:50.380It's just a very funny, almost bizarre situation.
00:15:52.940Perhaps doing so would acknowledge that this is something to which you would need to appoint a permanent head to.
00:16:00.900And as the Trump administration has been very plain about, their position is probably very similar to yours, that this is something that should 100% be on the federal shopping block.
00:18:49.040You just think that the right is more prone to military strength and so they'll grow the government in that sector.
00:18:55.400Well, again, I really don't think that's exclusive to either the Republican or Democratic Party.
00:19:04.020As you were talking about, if we want to talk about Bush era abuses and expansion, the Obama administration certainly was not very, very friendly to the political left, shall we say, in terms of rolling a lot of those back.
00:19:18.140So I get worried about painting these into exclusively left or right, but that's just me.
00:19:25.400And I think it's fair enough to point out that the Bush administration expanded the federal government in many ways.
00:19:31.900Medicare Part D, for instance, and Barack Obama, while perhaps holding an incoherent foreign policy, nevertheless kept us in Afghanistan for a long time.
00:19:42.140The vast majority of deaths in Afghanistan occurred under his watch.
00:19:45.180Nevertheless, even though they're imperfect actors here, is it not fair to say, Amanda, that government expansion per se is a greater facet of leftism than it is of any conservative philosophy in modern America?
00:20:02.720I mean, I could see the argument for national security reasons where the right might expand bureaucracy in that sense.
00:20:08.700But aside from that, I mean, it's clearly that's a tick of the left in almost any other area besides maybe national security.
00:20:18.040Plus, I also have a TSA pre-check now, so I've been the main Bush era expansion.
00:20:23.960I haven't been groped by in a long time.
00:20:27.560As we've seen, the Trump administration has been doing a phenomenal job of shrinking the government when it comes weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after undocumented families.
00:20:38.780You mean illegal aliens resigning in the country?
00:20:41.920You mean that he's enforcing the law through his Justice Department, but the euphemism you used was weaponizing an agency to go after undocumented families.
00:20:52.220But consider the language of that phrase.
00:20:54.580There are people here who have broken the law, and the law enforcement agency is now finally holding up the law because we are a nation of laws, not a nation simply of men.
00:21:10.940Well, in terms of enforcing the law, I mean, do you really think the Obama administration, and this is where the Obama administration was actually hit repeatedly by immigration activists on the left for ramping up deportation?
00:21:25.140By the way, you don't mean immigration activists.
00:21:27.100You mean illegal immigration activists.
00:21:28.900Well, people who think, as I do, as long as we're talking about political preferences and opinion, you said at the top of the show, you were very upfront about your political views.
00:21:39.480People who wish there was something closer to an open borders policy or people who think a larger level of immigration is better than a lower level of immigration.
00:21:49.180And this, by the way, I don't mean to cut you off, but I want to hear your opinion in light of this news story because this leads perfectly into the main news story I want to bring on.
00:21:58.840And, by the way, I appreciate you being honest about your political views, but more than that, I appreciate that you have come on this show.
00:22:04.440It is so hard to get lefties and Democrats to come on this show.
00:22:16.840Well, this is the—here's the news story from dear old Yale.
00:22:21.660Researchers at dear old Yale are now claiming to have cured conservatism.
00:22:26.500Professor John Barr writes in The Washington Post, quote,
00:22:30.400No one had ever turned conservatives into liberals until we did.
00:22:34.740Before conservatives answered survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise.
00:22:40.060They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower.
00:22:47.220If they imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal.
00:22:54.120So if conservatives—in other words, if conservatives are instructed to indulge in ridiculous fantasies, they become more left-wing, which makes perfect sense to me.
00:23:02.460Now, Asowyn, to you—and please continue on your previous thread as well.
00:23:05.840These professors appear to be treating conservatism as a strange psychological glitch rather than as a coherent political philosophy or set of philosophies.
00:23:16.480Now, we're all just pulsing nerve endings according to this idea.
00:23:52.300But if you're a macro question is that there is a lot of people in American liberalism or even farther than that on the American political spectrum who see conservatism as a disease, that's what you're getting at, right?
00:24:09.040There's certainly—and, again, I hate playing this both sides thing, but, I mean, there's certainly—you wouldn't disagree with me that there certainly is no shortage of that on the American political right and far right.
00:24:23.680Like, I think saying liberalism is a cancer or a disease, if we Googled around for that, I'm sure you'd find plenty of conservative commentators you know and probably enjoy and respect who go around saying that.
00:24:34.980I will make one distinction, though, because we have heard—
00:24:38.040We have heard versions of this like feminism is cancer or whatever, you know, you hear these things.
00:24:43.400But the distinction is I think by saying that leftism is a disease or cancer, you might say that and say that it's really bad for the country and we should convince people to stop thinking those things and become conservatives.
00:24:55.740But to say that it's a psychological glitch, which I think is what these people are getting at at Yale and I think what a lot of people on the left have said for a while, I think is what the field of political psychology is largely based on.
00:25:07.820To say that it's just a psychological glitch is to deny our faculties of reason.
00:25:15.900So whereas we might have a debate over whether leftism is a cancer on the American body politic, if we accept their premises, what their premises are saying is that we can't have any debate at all because we've arrived at our conclusions not by reasoned thought or discourse, but because, you know, our brain made us do it.
00:25:34.140And they twitched in a certain way, Amanda, if wishes were fishes, we'd all swim in riches.
00:25:40.620And if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas.
00:25:43.660Given the absurdity of the premise of this survey, is there anything worthwhile in the results?
00:25:51.820No, I mean, from what I gathered from the Washington Post piece in the write up we did at Daily Wire, basically, if you just indulge, if you're granted this power by a magical genie,
00:26:03.200that nothing, you're impervious to any consequences of these policies, then, yeah, you'll think like a liberal.
00:26:09.060So it kind of proves the opposite, that if you have a rational mind and you're aware of consequences and you're aware of safety risks, for instance, we're talking about immigration, then, yeah, you're going to side on the right because there are real risks.
00:26:21.560And, by the way, they were talking about immigration.
00:26:23.380And if you look broad based, there are a lot of people, it's a clear majority who want to put some sort of clamps on immigration.
00:26:48.900Sometimes I think it was this amazing providential moment that when this show launched, Yale was at the center of just every crazy lefty thing in the country because they might have convinced a few people in that study, but not me, everybody.