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March 16, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:38
Ep. 270 - Epic Media Fail: Trump Tax Return Edition
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On Monday, the New York Board of Regents announced it would dump the academic literacy skills test.
They didn't dump the test, which was designed to test teachers on reading ability in order to raise standards, because there's anything wrong with the test, per se.
They dumped it because too many minority teachers were failing it.
One of the members of the task force that looked at the teacher certification test, Professor Leslie Sudak of Pace University, said, quote, having a white workforce really doesn't match our student body anymore.
It turns out that according to ABC News, 54% of Hispanics and 59% of blacks who took the test failed it on the first try, as opposed to 36% of whites.
Does that mean the test was racist?
Nope.
A federal judge in New York, not exactly a bastion of conservatism, ruled the test was fine.
That wasn't enough, though, for the state of New York, where it's more important that your teacher is black than that your teacher can read and understand material.
Sudeik's comments were echoed by National Council on Teacher Quality President Kate Walsh, who summarily dismissed test results, quote, There's not a test in the country that doesn't have a disproportionate performance on the part of blacks and Latinos.
But she acknowledged that getting rid of the test would be a step in the wrong direction.
Here is the problem.
The students.
There's this weird notion on the left that students learn better from teachers of equal quality so long as the teacher shares a race with those students.
A good deal of research finds weak or no evidence to substantiate that claim, and that's assuming the teachers are of equal quality.
There is no evidence, none, zippo zilch, that an inferior teacher of the same race is better for a student than a superior teacher of a different race, yet it's that latter hypothesis New York wants to now pursue.
So, New York State now wants to sublimate the interests of its students to the interests of political correctness.
Better for a black kid to have a black teacher who failed the ALST than to have a white teacher who passed it.
Statistically, of course, this means a higher likelihood the black kid will have an underqualified teacher than a white kid, since we're now attempting to race-sort rather than to hire meritorious teachers.
That creates new intergenerational pathologies of failed education, for which, presumably, the left will blame white racism and test discrimination without evidence.
Meanwhile, the kids continue to fail.
Well done, New York.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty.
So we have lots to talk about, including the greatest media fail of my lifetime.
I mean, this is a giant, epic-sized media fail, and it is glorious in every way it is possible for this to be glorious.
And we'll talk about Rachel Maddow and her giant fail of epic proportions in just a second.
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Okay, so, Rachel Maddow has herself an evening last night.
And it is just Hilario.
So, here's how it went.
About 3.35 yesterday afternoon Pacific Time, Rachel Maddow goes to Twitter and she says, We have Trump tax returns!
We have Trump tax returns!
Ooh!
And everybody goes crazy.
That's crazy!
Oh my goodness!
We're going to finally find out what he's been hiding for all these years.
What is he hiding from?
What doesn't he want people to know?
Is he secretly named Dmitry Trumpkin?
Is he in the pay of the Russians?
Does he have no money?
Is he actually broke?
Has he been stealing money from small children?
We don't know.
Now we're going to find out because Rachel Maddow has all the new information.
There's this massive buildup on Twitter.
Huge buildup.
And then she shows up on air and for like 30 minutes, she does this long lead up, this long drawn out.
Now, I don't watch Maddow a lot, so I can't speak to whether she does this regularly.
Apparently, she's kind of famous for this.
She does like 10 minute monologues that don't lead anywhere.
And then finally she gets to the news.
And she did that last night, except it felt like hours, and people on Twitter were going nuts.
Why don't you just get to the meat of the matter?
As my father used to say, get to the meat of the matter, Uncle Eddie.
Like, at some point, you're gonna have to actually tell us what's in these tax returns.
And finally, she gets there, and sad trombone.
Here's Rachel Maddow last night on MSNBC.
There are definitely personality-driven and petty reasons to seek the president's tax returns.
Is he not as rich as he says he is?
Is he not as charitable as he says he is?
Was he, in fact, under audit when he was using that as an excuse to not release his tax returns?
Was that worse than just a bad excuse?
Was he really being audited?
There are small reasons to be interested, right?
But whether it's for small reasons or big reasons, there has been an unrelenting demand by people to see his tax returns.
More than a million people have signed the White House petition demanding that he release his tax returns.
But with all of that, the concerns about whether he's going to be self-dealing in his tax policies.
Concerns about whether he might have lied or misrepresented his own financial circumstance during the campaign.
Concerns about whether or not he might have misstated things to the FEC.
On and on and on.
You can see she's going on and on and on.
It's unbelievable.
There are looms over all of this.
The big national security worry.
Is there a way to fast forward to the part where she actually pulls the tax returns?
Because she just goes on, incessantly like this.
Donald Trump's tax returns.
Yep, still going.
Has decided to leak.
Okay, here we go.
A portion of his 2005 tax return.
Which is how and why we got it tonight.
And I am sure it is only the start.
But it's a start.
And our little piece of it.
We just got it.
We'll go through it.
Okay, so, and then she goes to break, right?
Get you through that commercial break.
Finally, what does she reveal?
What does she reveal?
She reveals that Donald Trump in 2005 paid 150.
He had made $150 million in income and he paid $38 million in taxes.
Sad trombone.
Because you know what they were hoping is that he never paid any taxes, right?
What they were hoping is that he's declared a loss every year for all time, that he's not a billionaire.
It turns out that $150 million to make in a year, that's a lot of money.
The average household income in the United States is somewhere around $56,000.
So if you were to earn that average household income for 2,600 years, you wouldn't hit $150 million.
He made that in one year.
Number one, Trump is super-duper rich.
Well done, Rachel Maddow.
You've broken the story.
You've got the silver bullet.
Donald Trump is no longer president.
It's unbelievable.
I love when she says, but it is a start, as though she's actually going to break something.
And then she breaks that he just made a crap load of money and paid a crap load of money in taxes.
And that's the other part, right?
He paid $38 million in taxes.
$38 million, OK?
That's a lot of money.
$38 million is a crap in one year in taxes.
Not only that, his effective tax rate that year was 25%.
You know what Barack Obama's effective tax rate was in 2015?
It was 19%.
You know what Bernie Sanders' effective tax rate was in 2014?
It was 13%.
You know what Comcast, which owns NBC, you know what their effective average tax rate has been from 2008 to 2012?
24%.
In other words, Donald Trump, in this one year of tax returns that they have, paid more as a percentage of his income than any of the people that I just mentioned.
But they've been saying for years that he paid none, like zero taxes, none.
So what did they come up with?
I love this.
What did they come up with to try and spin this as though Trump did something wrong?
Well, you know, Trump only paid that much in taxes.
Because of the alternative minimum tax.
The alternative minimum tax is this idiotic tax provision that basically catches you.
If you have a lot of deductions and you make a lot of money, then it basically jacks your rate back up.
And Trump wants to get rid of that because he says that's not fair.
You know, you're basically, it's just a money grab.
And say, well, if Trump had his way, he would have paid not very much in taxes at all.
Great!
And if I had my way, I'd pay nothing in taxes.
Legally.
Because the fact is that I don't want to pay all my money to the government.
The government sucks.
But I love this, they're going nuts over this.
My God, it's just unbelievable.
Okay, this was the giantest fail, the giantest media fail, since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's vault, if you recall.
Where he made the big build-up, we're gonna open Al Capone's vault, and then this is what actually happened.
You know, when we began opening this vault nearly two hours ago, we had no real idea what we'd find inside.
As it turns out, we haven't found very much, at least not yet.
In any case, I think that, uh, a legend a half century old or so has been resolved.
I don't know if we've gone far enough.
I mean, we found the other wall over there.
There may be more to be discovered.
This is one of the more embarrassing moments in TV history, and Rachel Maddow topped it, because at least it was Geraldo doing something ridiculous about Al Capone's vault from, like, 50, 60 years before.
Rachel Maddow is doing something about the most sought-after document in modern presidential history, Donald Trump's tax returns, and she comes up absolutely empty.
Even the left doesn't know exactly why this is happening to them.
Even the left is looking at this going, what in the world?
No, Don Lemon said, how is this not good for Trump?
How?
How is this not good for Donald Trump?
Oh, I think it may be good for Donald Trump.
I mean, one of the things that's very strange about this is Donald Trump probably would benefit from releasing his tax returns with a lot of people.
This is David K. Johnson, the guy who's speaking right there.
David K. Johnson is the guy who apparently anonymously received the tax returns in his mail.
Now, do I believe that Trump leaked his own tax returns?
No, I don't believe Trump leaked his own tax returns, because if he wanted to do that, he could have done that a long time ago.
It wouldn't have hurt him at all for him to do it.
Like, why would he do it now?
I guess they were saying that he was trying to distract from the Trumpcare fail, but I don't buy that.
But it wouldn't surprise me if some guy named John Miller had done it.
For those who don't know, John Miller is actually a Trumpian alter ego.
He's his PR guy.
Again, the only reason I say that is because it's really funny.
They go through this whole rigmarole about the tax returns.
Now, does this answer every question people have about the tax returns?
Of course not.
Because the fact is that we still don't have Trump's tax returns from any time in the last 10 years.
We still don't know why exactly he won't release them, and it seems to me that the same logic that people had with regard to Obama's birth certificate should certainly apply to Trump, right?
All the people who said that Obama was actually born in Kenya, the reason he's not revealing his birth certificate is because he's actually born in Kenya, and then Obama reveals his birth certificate and he's, of course, not born in Kenya.
Those same people, they're not calling for Trump's tax returns, but you would imagine that by the same logic they should be saying there's something nefarious in there that Trump doesn't want you to see.
Now, it's very possible that Trump is just trolling people the same way Obama did.
Obama trolled people for years on his birth certificate.
It's possible that Trump is trolling people for years on his tax returns, and eventually he releases them and there's nothing in them.
It's also possible that it shows that he's not worth $10 billion, he's worth like $2 billion.
And Trump is such an egomaniac that it's quite possible that he thinks that this would somehow sink him in the public estimation.
Like, we're all out here sitting around going, well, you know, now we know he's a liar.
He's only worth $2 billion.
Guess he ain't that rich, hmm?
Again, that's that's really silly if that's why he's doing it.
But you know, we still haven't answered why he hasn't released the tax returns.
But it just demonstrate the media's desire for a silver bullet for Trump is so high.
This is why people were sitting on this last night.
This is why for the first time anyone watched Rachel Maddow's crappy show was because they were hoping they'd tune in and suddenly she'd reveal Hundreds of pages of tax returns and somewhere buried deep in there would be Donald Trump trying to take a deduction for child sex slavery or something.
There'd be a silver bullet buried somewhere in there to destroy Donald Trump.
Uh-uh.
Didn't happen.
Just hilarious.
Trump himself released a statement last night.
You can always tell when Trump himself releases the statements because the statements include the word totally.
If a statement includes the word totally, then Donald Trump wrote it.
So here is what the statement said.
Before being elected president, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world with a responsibility to his company, his family, and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required.
That being said, Mr. Trump paid $38 million even after taking into account large-scale depreciation for construction on an income of more than $150 million, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes, and this illegally published return just proves that.
You can also tell it's a Trump tax, a Trump statement because of the run on sentences.
Despite the substantial income figure in tax paid, it is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns.
The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda while the president will focus on his, which includes tax reform that will benefit all Americans.
Good for Trump.
I don't see anything wrong with Trump's statement.
It is not illegal, by the way, for Rachel Maddow to put this on the air so long as she didn't actually steal the documents or illegally obtain the documents.
If somebody just handed them to her like an informant handed them to her and she went with them, then she didn't do anything particularly illegal.
Again, Trump could not have planned this better.
If Trump didn't have anything to do with this, he should have, because it's just incredible.
She humiliated herself on national television in a major way, demonstrating once and for all that all the media want from all of this is just to destroy Trump.
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Okay, so Sean Hannity...
Last night, kind of assuming that this was going to be a big disaster for Trump, he went out there and he did a show and he said that NBC was waging a corporate jihad against Trump.
They are breaking laws all in an effort to undermine and delegitimize the newly elected president.
NBC News in particular is on a political jihad against the president and his administration.
Okay, now I can say that Rachel Maddow is awful at her job.
I can say that MSNBC obviously has a political bias and that most of journalism is now perpetuated against Donald Trump.
That's true.
When he says NBC is waging a corporate jihad against Trump, I don't like words like jihad because the idea that it's like some sort of holy war equivalent to, you know, the people who are actually murdering people all over the world, I think is really silly and I think it's over the top.
But you can see why the right thinks this about the left.
You can see why The Right looks at what happened on Maddow last night and we say, guys, you are out of your damn minds.
If you think that this is how you're going to bring down the president, you must be totally crazy.
I thought the most ironic thing, though, was last night there was a Hillary spokesman named Brian Fallon.
And if you recall, Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump paid nothing in taxes during the campaign.
She said the reason he won't reveal his tax returns is because he paid nothing in taxes.
This is Hillary during the campaign.
Why won't he release his tax returns?
And I think there may be a couple of reasons.
First, maybe he's not as rich as he says he is.
Second, maybe he's not as charitable as he claims to be.
Third, we don't know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks.
Or maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, To know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody... I'm right there because obviously that's not true.
Now her spokesman comes forward and says, pay no attention to those tax returns showing that he actually paid $38 million in taxes.
We should instead return focus to Trumpcare tomorrow and the millions it will leave uninsured.
Oops!
Oops!
We stepped on the rake, it hit us in the face, and now we should switch the topic because that did not go quite as planned, oopsies!
So, is it okay to enjoy the schadenfreude of the entire left stepping on its own feet with regard to Trump's tax returns on this one?
Yeah, it is.
Should Trump still release his tax returns?
Yeah, he should.
But for the moment, let's just enjoy the spectacle of Rachel Maddow making a huge deal out of the fact that Donald Trump is very rich and pays lots of taxes because it's quite spectacular.
We're going to talk a little bit more about Trumpcare and the confusion therein.
We're also going to be talking about What is easily the greatest prank in history played by 4chan.
This is a fantastic, fantastic prank you're going to want to hear about.
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