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March 21, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:33
Is America Punishing Young Black Boys? | Ep. 500
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The New York Times touts a new study saying disparities between black and white children are based on racism, President Trump congratulates Putin on his sham election, and Democrats threaten civil war.
A lot to get to.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So, good morning.
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So, you wonder, Where is your news studio, Mr. Shapiro?
Well, my news studio is directly outside the Speaker of the House's office.
Actually, this office right here, this magnificent office, festooned with American flags and bust of George Washington just behind these flags, the true American president.
This office was apparently the place where President Trump, right after his inauguration, went to sign a bunch of bills and also tweet some stuff.
And so it is very important for that reason.
I will not I will not suggest what has happened on this desk.
I don't know, so I can't speculate.
You know, maybe some things have happened.
I don't know.
I just can't speculate.
But later today I'm going to be speaking with the Speaker of the House, which should be an honor and a privilege for him.
For me.
It'll be great.
And I'm looking forward to talking with him.
But there's a lot of news that's happening.
So, I've been asked by a lot of people to go through a study that was reported yesterday by The New York Times.
So, one of the main issues that has come up, cropped up so often in American society these days is, of course, racism.
Racism this and racism that, and racial disparities are indicative of the horror of American life.
America's racism problem is what has generated income inequality between black folks and white folks.
And there's this brand new study from the New York Times complete with massive, beautiful graphics all about how black people can't get ahead in America.
Here was the headline from the New York Times yesterday.
Extensive data shows punishing reach of racism for black boys.
It's a pretty shocking headline for the New York Times, which usually ends around its headlines.
Usually it says something like, data sometimes suggest black people have faced discrimination in certain areas, people say.
That's a normal New York Times headline.
So this one's a hard-hitting headline.
Extensive data shows punishing reach of racism for black boys.
So what exactly does the study show?
And this is a pretty important study, and I think it's important to deconstruct the study so that we know what we're talking about when we talk about whether racism is responsible for some of the imbalances we see in American life.
Now, this is not to imply that racism hasn't been a historic part of America.
Of course it has.
This is not to imply that there is not racism today.
Of course there is.
What this is to suggest is that this study, which is being really touted as the final data on racism in America, demonstrating that only racism is responsible for the difference in income outcome between black folks and white folks, that's not what the study says.
So according to the New York Times, Young black men lag behind young white men, not because of behavioral differences, not because young black men commit more crimes than young white men on average, or because they have a lower educational background, or because they have single dads, but because of widespread American racism.
Here is what the Times reports.
Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children.
White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way.
Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households.
So what this study's main finding was is that if a black kid, a young black boy, grows up in a rich household in Beverly Hills next to a rich white family in Beverly Hills with a young white boy, that the black boy is more likely to fall into poverty than the white boy, even though they start off in the same area and with the same two-parent family.
And so this must obviously be due to racism, right?
This is the New York Times' take on the study.
According to the Times, "Gaps persisted even when black and white boys grew up in families with the same income, similar family structures, similar education levels, and even similar levels of accumulated wealth." So they're removing all the factors that people would normally suggest contribute to disparities between black income They're saying even when a rich black kid grows up rich and black with two parents and goes to a good high school and all this stuff, they still have lower outcomes than white folks.
And the IQ is not the problem, right?
So there are some people who are racially suggestive, we shall say, who say that maybe this is because black folks have lower IQs on average than white folks.
The data is not there to suggest that.
The reason the data is not there to suggest that is because the income Outcome right the outcome of income for for black women is exactly the same as for white women who grow up rich So the disparity only exists between young black men and young white men It does not exist between young black women and young white women So if you have a rich black girl who grows up next to a rich white girl They basically are going to have exactly the same income as their life progresses.
So as I acknowledge right the study openly acknowledges that the racism doesn't extend to black women and So first of all, this gives a lie to a lot of the intersectional nonsense you hear from the left.
So the case for intersectionality is that everyone's experience is different and is predicated upon group differences.
A black woman is both black and a woman.
This means that she has two status symbols.
Being a female means that she has somehow been victimized by American society.
And being black means she's been victimized.
That means a black woman has been more victimized than a black male.
The study suggests the opposite, actually.
The study actually suggests that young black men do worse in American society than black women.
So much for that intersectional point.
But this finding that no income gap exists between black and white women raised in similar households should also make you wonder, is this really about racism?
Is racism the dividing line?
Because, again, black women happen to be black.
So if black women have the same outcomes as white women when given the same circumstances, wouldn't that suggest that racism is not actually the central problem?
Black women aren't not black just because they're treated well by the surrounding community.
That's a foolish argument.
The study itself says that black women earn slightly more than white women conditional on parent income.
There's little or no gap in wage rates or hours of work between black and white women.
And black women also have a higher college attendance rate than white men, conditional on parental outcome—on parental income, rather.
So, immediately, this should give you some serious pause as to the headline that was espoused by The New York Times.
Again, The New York Times headline here was, extensive data shows punishing reach of racism for black boys.
They're already attributing all of the difference between black boys and white boys to racism, even though that racism apparently just disappears with regard to black women.
Which is kind of weird.
I immediately should wonder, is racism really the dividing factor here, or is it that black women and black men actually have different perspectives on decision-making processes in higher-income households?
Is it possible that young black men and young black women are encouraged to pursue different activities, even in higher income households with two parents?
The study also finds that income gaps between whites and Hispanics are converging and will disappear in very short order.
Asian Americans actually earn more than whites raised at the same income level.
So again, this should call into question, if America is such a deeply racist place, why is it only racist apparently against black boys?
Not against black women, not against Hispanics, not against Asians, just against black boys.
And this should make you wonder.
It's also worth noting that one of the chief arguments in favor of the notion that blacks suffer under a regime of white privilege when they say that, you know, people like me can't speak on politics because we are a member of a white privileged class and the system was built for us.
One of the arguments for white privilege is that black people suffer in the United States today because of a historic wealth gap—that because black people were subject to slavery and Jim Crow, they have less wealth in the families in which they grow up.
OK, well, there is that wealth gap, but the study demonstrates that family wealth is actually not an indicator of continued life success for black men.
So even when black men are growing up with a tremendous amount of wealth, they're having poorer outcomes in terms of income than white men are.
So that suggests that wealth is actually not the primary differentiating factor between the outcome of people's earning power.
So this is the big question of the study.
The big question of the study is, are black men failing in a way black women are not because of discrimination, or is it because of differences in behavior?
So my suggestion is that it would have something to do with differences in behavior.
And the study itself suggests this.
This is not the stuff the New York Times wants to cover.
It's all buried in the 100-page study that I read yesterday.
For example, the study discusses criminal behavior among high-income young black men, but it doesn't actually investigate the possible causal link between criminal behavior and drop in income.
So the study says that black men raised in the top 1% of income, people who are millionaires, were as likely to be incarcerated as white men raised in households earning about $36,000 a year.
So is that the fault of white racism?
That's an amazing statistic.
That means that a black kid growing up in a millionaire household is as likely to go to prison as a white kid growing up in a household earning $36,000.
Is that the result of racism, or is that the result of bad individual behavior?
Is it really that the police are staking out Beverly Hills for young black men who live in that area and then just arresting them willy-nilly?
Or is it possible that criminal rates among young black men, even in upper-income areas, are higher than they are among young black women, for example?
And it has nothing to do with race.
It has to do instead with certain cultural inculcation, which I'll get to in just a second.
In fact, the study itself recognizes that incarceration is not the result of surrounding racism, that those incarceration rates that are elevated for young black men in rich areas are not actually the result of surrounding racism.
They say that the relationship between racism in a given area and incarceration rates, quote, is not statistically significant, meaning that young black men are not being arrested just because the cops are a bunch of racists in Beverly Hills.
As a sidebar—and this is an important point—high black crime rates do have horrible externalities for innocent young black men.
I want to talk about this in a little bit, because here's the area where racism really sort of does play a role, because I don't think that racism is a completely irrelevant factor, but I don't think it's quite racism, either.
I think that it's a form of discrimination that Thomas Sowell talks about, and I'll talk about that in just a second.
Other differences between young black men and young black women is that the study indicates that the impact of neighborhood on young black men matters.
Young black men do best in neighborhoods with low levels of racism.
The study actually, its measurements of racism are really suspect.
They use the implicit assessment test, the implicit bias assessment test, which is not a good test.
And high levels of fatherhood in the community at large.
So, young black boys do better when there are dads in the community.
What's interesting is that the study suggests it's not even having black men in the home.
It's not even about having a father in the home.
It's about are there high levels of black men in the community who can play the father figure role?
So that's an interesting thing.
More social fabric helps raise boys better, whether they are white or black.
But these communities are pretty rare, right?
Single motherhood does remain prevalent in the black community, and the study admits, quote, the fraction of low-income black fathers present is most predictive of smaller intergenerational gaps.
So again, it's about single motherhood.
It is not really about racism.
Black boys who grow up in areas with high father presence are also significantly less likely to be incarcerated, which could explain part of the association with higher employment rates.
So I will get to the end of this study and a word about discrimination in just a second.
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Okay, so back to the study that the New York Times calls a damning indictment of American racism with regard to young black boys.
What I have suggested is that the data from the study actually suggests that differentiations between the outcomes for rich young black men and young black women, for example, or young black men and young white men, has little to do with generalized American racism and a lot to do with personal choices that are being made in the black community, even in areas that are more wealthy.
So the study tries to attribute to generalized racism a little bit this differentiation between young black men and young white men, even if they are both rich.
The study's take on racism is actually its weakest methodologically.
It uses that implicit association test, as I suggested.
This is the implicit bias test.
If you've been in college, they've forced you to take an IAT.
What that is is that stupid test where you're supposed to click on words as black and white faces appear.
And what it's supposed to show is that if you click on negative words, When a black face appears more quickly than you click on negative words when a white face appears, this is your supposed racism.
The problem is that the implicit assessment test actually doesn't measure real-world racism, nor is it even duplicable.
If you take the test twice, you can game the system.
Right?
So you can take the test once, and it'll come up as you're a racist.
You take it again, and now you're not a racist anymore.
So the test is not actually duplicable.
It's not a good measurement.
The study itself states that closing the gap between whites and blacks is largely driven by high rates of father presence among low-income blacks, And the study even dismisses—right?
This is all the stuff the New York Times didn't report.
Right?
The New York Times headline is that America's racist and black boys are suffering.
Here's what the New York Times didn't report.
It's a direct quote from the study.
So, in other words, the Democrats' favorite methods of closing this gap?
outcomes of a single generation, such as cash transfer programs or minimum wage increases, are less likely to have persistent effects unless they also affect intergenerational mobility.
So in other words, the Democrats' favorite methods of closing this gap, they don't do anything.
Not only that, forced integration in schools and housing won't do anything either.
They'll, quote, "...also likely leave much of the gap in place, since the gap persists even among low-income children raised on the same block." So all of the left's favorite Policy prescriptions that would rise from that shocking headline from the New York Times, the study itself rejects.
So what exactly is the difference?
So what exactly is the difference between why young black men who are growing up rich with two parent families and young white men growing up the same way have different outcomes?
What would explain that?
Well, one theory that was put forward by black anthropologist John Ogbu since the 1980s theorized that black children are often penalized socially for acting white.
Okay, those aren't my words.
Those are the words of Barack Obama.
Here's what Barack Obama said in 2004, quote, children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth of the book is acting white.
And in fact, repeated studies have shown that even in high-income areas, black students spend less time on studying than white students, particularly black males.
Barack Obama reiterated this in 2014.
Barack Obama reiterated this in 2014.
He said, there's an element of truth in the accusation that too many black parents denigrate education, where, okay, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that?
He said there's an element of truth in the accusation that too many black parents denigrate education, where, okay, if boys are reading too much, then, well, why are you doing that?
Or why are you speaking so properly?
Or why are you speaking so properly?
This was a serious question that was asked about Barack Obama in 2008 by people on the left.
Is he black enough because he doesn't speak any bonics?
And because the president used to, the ex-president used to, you know, had a very mellifluous speaking voice.
And if he turned on the radio, you wouldn't know whether he was white or black and used particular dialects.
There was a lot of talk.
Is he too white?
Is Clarence Thomas too white?
Are educated black people too white?
This is a serious issue that there are a lot of people who have faced.
Larry Elder has talked about this a lot.
Thomas Sowell has talked about this.
There is a cultural denigration in certain parts of the black community against education.
By the way, this exists in certain parts of the white community, as well.
In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D.
Vance talks specifically about this in impoverished white communities in Appalachia, for example.
Communities that value education and that promote education are more likely to have children who value education, promote education, and end up with better life outcomes.
The reason that Asians outperform whites is because Chinese American culture and Korean American culture, to take a couple of examples, are heavily focused on education and achievement.
This is also true of Jewish Americans who came to the United States dirt poor and tested below average on IQ tests before they acclimated and ended up becoming one of the wealthier subgroups in the United States.
Black children spend significantly less time on homework than any other race of children.
Asian children spend significantly more time on homework.
That makes a difference.
Harvard's Roland Fryer, another black scholar, formalized a particular peer effect, acting white, which potentially contributes to the ongoing puzzle of black underachievement.
His suggestion is that you are socially ostracized if you spend too much time studying as a young black male.
The New York Times doesn't go into any of that, of course.
All they do is they just—they say young black men do worse than young white men.
That must be to some greater racist issue.
Now, here is where discrimination comes in.
I promised you there would be discussion of discrimination.
Here is the discussion of discrimination.
So, there are three types of discrimination.
At the end of the show, I'm going to talk about things I like.
I'm going to recommend Thomas Sowell's book.
Tony, he has a brand new book out on discrimination.
We're going to interview him for the show.
Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite thinkers.
People have asked me before, if I were not declaring a clue and declaring myself president today, who would I do that for?
And I've said that I would do that for Thomas Sowell, who I think is the best thinker in the country.
In Thomas Sowell's book, he talks about three separate types of discrimination.
And it's important for us to distinguish these things in our mind, so that we are exact when we use words like discrimination.
So there are three types.
Discrimination type number one is the type of discrimination you use every day.
No, you're not a racist.
You discriminate between behavioral choices.
You decide who is going to be your friend and who is not based on whether somebody will drive you to the airport.
You decide whether or not you want to date someone based on whether they are nice to you.
You decide whether you want to hire someone based on whether you think they are likely to steal the silverware.
You make all of these decisions based on individual data and individual behavior.
That's not racism.
That's just what we do every day.
We're always making these decisions.
Our entire day is a series of discriminatory decisions that we make against one particular choice and in favor of another.
That's totally innocent discrimination.
This is what Thomas Sowell calls Type 1a discrimination.
Then there is Type 2 discrimination.
Type 2 discrimination is the absolute, overt, alt-right racism.
Black people are inferior, they're genetically inferior, and therefore, we can't hire them, they shouldn't be allowed into schools, we should live apart from them, etc., etc., right?
That is actual, alt-right discrimination and racism.
That exists, but it's a relatively small amount in the United—it's a very low level in the United States.
In fact, I would suggest that racism across the world is much higher than it is in the United States.
Then there is the type of discrimination that is somewhere in the middle.
This is what Thomas Sowell calls discrimination 1B.
So remember, 1A was you discriminating amongst choices.
1B is you discriminating about individuals based on group data.
So here is the example that Thomas Sowell uses for discrimination 1B.
If 40% is from his new book, Discrimination and Disparities.
Thank you.
It's discrimination and disparities.
So here is the example.
If 40% of people in Group X are alcoholics and 1% of people in Group Y are alcoholics, an employer may well prefer to hire only people from Group Y for work, where an alcoholic would not only be ineffective but dangerous.
So you have a taxi company, and you're not allowed to do criminal background checks, so you're not allowed to know whether someone's ever had a DUI.
All you know is that people in Group A, Group X, 40% of them drive drunk, and all you know is that in Group Y, the second group, only 1% of people do.
That's all the information you have.
Who do you choose to drive your taxi?
And we make these sorts of decisions every day, right?
Jesse Jackson once said about walking down the street at night, right?
Jesse Jackson said, if I'm walking down the street at night and I see a young black man coming at me in a hoodie, I cross the street.
Was that Jesse Jackson being racist?
Or is that him using group data in order to make a decision about what to do here and now based on a risk assessment?
What it really is, is this discrimination 1B.
Now, it makes us all a little bit queasy, right?
It makes us a little bit uncomfortable, because what we would prefer is that we all see each other as individuals, that we have all the information available.
But there are certain legislative efforts in place that actually prevent this.
So, for example, President Obama said that he wanted federal employees to never be able to be tested for criminal background checks.
He wanted federal contractors not to be able to test for criminality in background checks of employees, because he said too many young black men have gone to prison, and then they won't be able to get a job afterward.
Well, the actual effect of that policy is to lower black employment, according to a study in 2001, because what do employers do when they're told that they can't do criminal background checks?
Instead of screening out people who are actually criminals or who've had a criminal record, instead of doing that, what they do is they screen out entire populations.
They say, okay, the criminal rate in the black community is much higher than the criminal rate in the white community, and this is particularly true among young black males, so I just won't hire young black males because I can't check whether the person's a criminal or not.
I can only use the data at hand.
Is that racism?
Or is that just the use of group data without any further investiture of time?
So there are two things that we can do to stop this sort of discrimination.
I'll explain the two things we can do to stop discrimination 1B in just a second, and this is really where I think we should be putting some of our efforts.
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Okay, so back to discrimination.
So the reason that this actually plays a role with regard to the study that we're talking about is—let's take my suggestion for just a second—that one of the reasons that we see lower income outcomes—I know it's confusing when I say income outcome.
What I mean is lower earnings outcomes for young black men than young white men who grow up in the same cohort.
Why exactly do we see that?
I'm saying maybe it's individual choices, maybe it's educational disparities brought on by cultural disdain in certain parts of the black community for education, the acting white phenomenon.
There are a bunch of factors that need to be taken into account.
The study doesn't actually take into account.
But let's start with criminality.
So let's suggest that—I mean, the statistics really are stunning—that something like 10 percent of young black men in the top quintile actually have been convicted of a crime.
It's something insane.
It's a really, really high number.
And let's say that we have all these bans on the books that prevent you from doing federal background checks, criminal background checks on your employees.
And so employers start using broad-based discrimination based on data.
So they start using group data because they can't use individual data.
And that means that innocent young black men are caught up in the court.
And just like in the alcoholics case, 60% of the group of people who are considered more alcoholic are not alcoholic, but those people are not being hired because all the taxi company cares about is not hiring any alcoholics, and they've been prevented from screening for DUI background.
So there are two ways to prevent this.
One is to take away the government disincentive to actually do the research.
So get rid of regulations on the books that don't allow you to do criminal background checks.
Get rid of the regulations on the books that prevent people in housing from doing criminal background checks.
And there's been a serious issue.
There have been a lot of local areas that refuse to allow people who own apartment buildings, for example, to do criminal background checks of their potential clients, of potential residents at their house.
Well, if I'm renting out my garage, I want to know whether the guy's a criminal or not.
And if I'm not allowed to check whether the guy's a criminal, I'm just going to rent—I'm going to rent to the Amish guy down the road, because the criminal rate in the Amish community is really low.
You can actually play this forward, not even with regard to black and white.
You can play it forward to any community.
The criminal rate in the Amish community is extremely low.
If I have a choice between the normal non-Amish white guy and the Amish guy, I will choose the Amish guy every time to occupy my garage.
Is that discrimination or is that a database group decision that has nothing to do with racism?
It has to do just with group data that you are now applying.
So how do you get past that?
Number one, you remove the disincentive.
Now you treat people as individuals.
You do a criminal background check.
Yes, that means that people with a criminal record probably won't get hired.
But guess what?
It also means that innocent people of the same race or of the same group as the people with the criminal record will get hired.
And this is what that 2001 study showed.
When you got rid of regulations preventing criminal background checks, more black people were hired.
So every time the left tries to help by preventing employers from gathering information, employers simply use group data, which is a worse kind of data.
So that's something that has to change.
The second thing that has to change is you need to change the group data.
The group data itself has to change.
So the criminal rates in the Jewish community when Jews first came over from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century were actually not low.
They were quite high.
They were quite high in the Italian community when Italian immigrants first came to the United States.
In the Irish community, there was a reason where it said no Jews need apply, no Irish need apply, no Italians need apply.
This has been true of virtually every single ethnic group that has ever entered the United States.
When they first get here, they are poor and very often admired in crime.
And then over the course of generations, the crime stops.
Well, if you are going to prevent group data from being used as a basis for Discrimination 1B in Thomas Sowell's modeling, then what you really need to focus on is how do you get that criminal rate down?
Now, what the study suggests is the first thing you need to do is ensure that there are fathers in the community.
Again, an individual decision.
An individual decision having nothing to do with racism.
As I've said many times in my speeches on this program, there's not a black man in America who is forced at gunpoint to impregnate a black woman and leave.
Not by white racists.
This has never happened.
Or if it has, then it would be criminal and we'd prosecute it.
Individual decision making is usually responsible for even group disparity.
Because there are cultural differences, because there are histories, because there are pathologies of poverty—all of this is true.
It has nothing to do with race, by the way.
Nothing I'm saying here has anything to do with implicit race, right?
I mean, this happens among white people.
It happens among black people.
It's much more about behavior than about race.
So what I would suggest is that if you actually want to get rid of discrimination 1B and get down to the level where you treat everybody as individuals, take away the bureaucratic and economic incentives to make group decisions, and number two, make sure that the group data itself changes by bringing enough cops into crime-ridden communities to ensure that the make sure that the group data itself changes by bringing enough cops into crime-ridden communities to ensure that the crime rate Okay, so the reason I spend so much time on this is because, number one, I got a lot of emails about this particular study, but number two, because I think that it's indicative of what the media wants.
The media only quoted a certain segment of the study, right?
They said, this shows that racism is responsible for young black boys not succeeding in America, and then It's pretty obvious they didn't even analyze the vast majority of the study, right?
That entire section near the end where they say that forced housing integration is not going to work, and forced busing is not going to work, and income redistribution is not going to work, right?
All of that was left out by The New York Times.
It shows you the media bias when they are in pursuit of a particular agenda.
OK, so now I want to talk about a controversy that has broken out over President Trump, of course.
Apparently, called up Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, who won an overwhelming election victory, in the least surprising result, since Fidel Castro won an overwhelming election victory.
You know, he is a dictator, OK?
Russia is a dictatorship.
People like dictatorship for reasons I explained on Monday when I talked about romantic nationalism.
President Trump made a boo-boo, OK?
In the boo-boo, President Trump called up Putin, and he said, congratulations on your magnificent election victory.
Here is Trump talking about it.
I had a call with President Putin and congratulated him on the victory, his electoral victory.
The call had to do also with the fact that we will Probably get together in the not-too-distant future so that we can discuss arms.
We can discuss the arms race.
As you know, he made a statement that being in an arms race is not a great thing.
That was right after the election, one of the first statements he made.
And also to discuss Ukraine and Syria and North Korea and various other things.
OK, so the part that's troubling is obviously not to talk about the arms race.
The part that's troubling is where he says that he congratulated Putin.
So, it has now been leaked to the Washington Post that Trump did not follow specific warnings from his national security advisers on Tuesday when he congratulated Putin.
There was apparently a section in his briefing materials in all capital letters stating, do not congratulate, according to officials familiar with the call.
So, a couple of things.
One, people in the White House should not be leaking what's on national security documents to the press.
Okay, obviously there's some serious leaks still inside the White House.
The fractiousness of the White House is insane.
The fact that this stuff is leaking is not good.
Second of all, if you want President Trump to do something, never write in capital letters for him not to do something.
Okay, because if the President of the United States—he is like my four-year-old daughter, who at this point in her life says whatever the opposite is of what I want her to say.
If I want her to stop jumping on her bed, I have to tell her that I want her to continue jumping on her bed.
Never write on a piece of paper, do not congratulate Putin and slide it in front of the president in all capital letters because he's just going to, in his own mind, go, I can congratulate whoever I want.
Boom.
Roasted.
OK, so, you know, should he have congratulated Putin?
Of course he shouldn't have congratulated Putin.
Putin's a dictator, OK?
It's stupid to congratulate Putin.
And, you know, the defense of it was equally stupid.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the spokeswoman for the White House, she said that—you know, she was asked about this, and her answer was rather morally egregious.
Here's what she said.
Does the White House believe that the election in Russia was free and fair?
Look, in terms of the election, there we're focused on our elections.
We don't get to dictate how other countries operate.
What we do know is that Putin has been elected in their country, and that's not something that we can dictate to them how they operate.
We can only focus on the freeness and the fairness of our election, something we 100% fully support, and something we're going to continue to do everything we can to protect, to make sure bad actors don't have the opportunity to impact them in any way.
No, no, no, no.
Fail, no, no.
W-U-T.
What?
OK, that is not accurate in any way.
The United States has a long history of criticizing how other countries run their elections when they are dictatorships.
But that said, I'm going to talk a little bit about the media and democratic response, because it is pretty hypocritical.
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Okay, so, is this a smart thing for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to say?
No, this is a very dumb thing for Sarah Huckabee Sanders to say.
The president should not have congratulated Putin.
Obviously, the president has an unfortunate habit of congratulating dictators on their election after Erdogan, who's the dictator of Turkey, won his election.
I'm putting won in scare quotes.
Then, you know, Trump congratulated him.
He shouldn't have done that.
It's really dumb.
But to pretend this is unique is also to be historically ignorant.
Yeah, President Obama congratulated Nicolás Maduro in 2012, I believe, on his re-election.
It was either Hugo Chávez, specifically, or Nicolás Maduro.
I can't remember if Chávez was dead at that point.
But he congratulated the leadership in Venezuela for its re-election.
Venezuela is a communist dictatorship where people are eating dogs.
You don't congratulate bad people.
Now, this is where I don't like the whataboutism.
It was bad when Obama did it, and it's bad when Trump does it.
You shouldn't congratulate dictators on rigging elections for their own benefit.
It's just not a good thing to do.
And I'm constantly surprised by people on my own side of the aisle who had a different standard for Obama than they have for Trump.
Well, you know, now it's just Trump politicking and all the rest.
Well, so what?
So what?
There's been a big debate in American foreign policy that I think is not really an honest one.
And that is, should morality play a part in our foreign policy?
There are people who declare themselves sort of foreign policy realists—this would be folks like Rand Paul—who say morality really shouldn't play a role in American foreign policy.
But even that is morality.
Right?
That is morality.
That's a moral statement.
Why should America not play a role in other countries?
Well, there are a couple of reasons that are suggested.
One is it's none of our business what other countries do.
We can't impose ourselves on them.
The other is that it costs us too much money and too much time and too much treasure.
These arguments are not mutually exclusive, but they also are not identical.
You can make the argument that morality should help dictate our foreign policy, but we shouldn't spend money in this particular place.
I did that with regard to, for example, the Libyan intervention—or the Syrian intervention, actually.
I think you can make fair arguments on either side.
But for those who say that morality should not dictate our foreign policy, of course morality does dictate our foreign policy, because the whole rationale for a strong America At home, even, for us existing, is because we are a more moral system.
Now, you may say, what strengthens America is not to get entangled in foreign battles.
Fine.
But that's an argument of utility, not an argument of immorality.
Right?
You do have a moral stance.
I assume that Rand Paul actually doesn't like the Russian dictatorship.
I assume that's the case.
So, you know, I think that a lot of the talk about morality in foreign policy going out the window because Trump's a foreign policy realist is actually not true.
I just think that that's a bit of a fib and a futzing over on the part of the Trump administration.
There's a big article over at the Washington Post, again, targeting Cambridge Analytica and talking about how Cambridge Analytica is the root of all evil.
We've been following this story all week, because I think this whole thing is a front.
I think—it's very rare that I air a quasi-conspiracy theory.
I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, because I think that all of it has been basically said.
I think that Zuckerberg has not been unclear over at Facebook about what his agenda is.
What's happening here is pretty obvious.
Cambridge Analytica data mined.
OK, there's not an accusation yet they actually did it illegally.
The FTC is apparently investigating.
If they did something illegal, they'll be prosecuted, and then we can have a scandal.
Great.
But until now, there's been no allegation of actual illegal activity.
There's been allegations that they gathered an enormous amount of Facebook data and then cross-tabulated people's personal preferences with their politics, which is like, OK, whatever.
We all do that.
Data mining has been in existence in the United States forever.
This is true of every business in the United States.
Every business that markets online is putting cookies on your computer to determine what kind of products you want to see so that they can show you those products and you will buy them.
Nothing untoward happened here.
The reason that people on the left are focusing in on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is because they're trying to browbeat Facebook into shutting down dissemination of conservative information.
That is the entire purpose here.
The reason that Facebook has moved, as I discussed at length yesterday, ad nauseum yesterday, the reason that Facebook has moved against conservatives is because Zuckerberg is on the left and because the left has pressured Facebook and Google and YouTube.
and Twitter and said that you guys are responsible for Trump's election.
You need to somehow rejigger your algorithms to prevent those nefarious right-wingers from taking advantage of the situation.
Well, the scandal of the day now, today's scandal, is not that they did anything illegal.
But instead, that they did research on what presumed Trump voters would like.
So, according to Christopher Wiley, who's the pink-haired dude who was the informant to the U.K.
Guardian about Cambridge Analytica.
Wiley said that both Bannon and Steve Bannon, who's a stockholder in Cambridge Analytica, and Rebecca Mercer, whose father Robert Mercer financed the company, participated in conference calls in 2014 in which plans to collect Facebook data were discussed, although Wiley acknowledged it was not clear they knew the details of how the collection took place.
Bannon approved the data collection scheme we were proposing, said Wiley.
The data and analyses that Cambridge Analytica generated in this time provided discoveries that would later form the emotionally charged core of Trump's presidential platform, said Wiley.
So he said, Trump wasn't in our consciousness at that moment.
This was well before he became a thing.
He wasn't a client or anything.
The year before Trump announced his presidential bid, the data firm had already found a high level of alienation among young white Americans with a conservative bent.
In focus groups arranged to test messages for the 2014 midterms, these voters responded, according to the Washington Post, these voters responded to calls for building a new wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants, to reforms intending to drain the swamp of Washington's entrenched political community, and to thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called race realism, he recounted.
OK, so the first few messages here are utterly anodyne, right?
A lot of people want to build the wall.
That's not racist.
A lot of people want to drain the swamp.
Washington is a swamp, even though it's snowing here today.
And—but it's the last thing here that I think that the media are jumping on, and that is thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called race realism.
So, that's the only reference in this article to race and the crossover to potential Trump voters.
Now, I don't have enough data here to actually make a decision as to what exactly was being polled.
We just don't know.
Was it the actual term race realism?
Because race realism is racist, OK?
It has been linked to scientific racism.
It's the basic idea that distinctions between groups are racially based.
Not the argument that I was making with regard to racial differences in outcome being linked to individual decision-making, but racial differences in outcome being linked to racial disparity in biology.
That's race realism.
If that's actually what was being polled, that's not a good thing.
That also doesn't suggest that everybody who's a Trump supporter was a race realist.
Or knew that they were endorsing race realist messages.
It also doesn't define race realism really specifically in this article.
So, I'd like to see a little more data on that before we declare every Trump voter racist, which is really what the Washington Post, it seems like, wants to do here.
The firm apparently also tested views of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to Wiley, the only foreign thing we tested was Putin.
It turns out there's a lot of Americans who really like this idea of a really strong authoritarian leader, and people were quite defensive in focus groups of Putin's invasion of Crimea.
That, again, is not particularly surprising.
There were polls done at the time—open polls, right?
This is not Cambridge Analytica's doing.
There were open polls about Putin at the time, and there were a lot of conservatives who were responding to how much they disliked Obama by saying that anybody who humiliated Obama on the world stage was suddenly good.
It should have been an indicator that tribal politics had taken over.
Vladimir Putin is a very bad guy.
Authoritarian leaders are really bad.
The idea that strong and powerful is a synonym for good is undemocratic and un-American.
So, this is a fight that I've been fighting for a long time.
Again, I think there were tribal tendencies in the last election cycle.
I think those tribal tendencies certainly existed on the right.
I talked at length about the alt-right in the last election cycle.
I talked at length about my fears that there was a perversion of conservative ideas going on toward certain authoritarian endorsements, and also toward a certain level of identity politics based on white solidarity that I really don't like and I think is, again, un-American and anti-constitutional.
It also exists on the left, right?
Obviously, Barack Obama in 2012, when he was data mining, was data mining specifically toward particular groups, right?
He had African Americans for Obama, and he had Jewish Americans for Obama, and gay Americans for Obama, and women for Obama.
So, identity politics on the right does exist.
It's a problem.
I think it's a serious problem.
It's something I've been railing against for well on two years here.
It's not a shock to me to find that by 2014, the identity politics of the left had bred a pretty strong identity politics on the right.
It's something that we all have to fight together.
That's something that we all have to fight together.
And I hope that if we do fight all of that together, that we will end with a more individually oriented American politics.
I think that that will be that will be a better outcome here.
But as for the Cambridge Analytica scandal in general, I'm not seeing it.
I don't I don't see anything really nefarious here.
And so Democrats, of course, are going out on limbs and just claiming that something nefarious is going on without really any evidence at this point.
Jackie Speyer, who's a Democratic representative from California, actually speculated that Cambridge Analytica was in was in bed with, you guessed it, the Russians.
Well, I think we really need to find out whether or not in their conversations with Luck Oil, which is a Russian oil company, whether or not that was really a pretense to use what is called Russian cutouts and.
And they were, in fact, informing Russia and maybe even working with Russia and the Trump campaign.
It all comes back to why all these relationships with Russia?
OK, and again, that's really vague, and Speier has no actual allegations to make, but she hopes that if she says Russia, Russia, Russia over again, then everything looks illegitimate.
Now, back to the identity politics point.
One of the great fears that I had when President Trump was elected—I had three fears when President Trump was elected.
Fear number one was that President Trump would be so toxic that he'd sink the Republican agenda, even if he were president.
That fear is still on the table.
Fear number two that I had about President Trump is that he wouldn't govern as a conservative.
So far, that fear has not been realized.
The president has governed relatively conservative.
And fear number three is that the president would actually become a thought leader for the Republican Party.
I don't think that has happened.
I don't think that people see President Trump as a thought leader for conservatism.
I think the left likes to portray him that way.
But I don't think that the vast bulk of conservatives are sitting around wondering what Donald Trump thinks about Russell Kirk.
I don't think that that's a thing.
And it looks to me like Republicans in Congress are doing a fairly decent job of checking President Trump's worst impulses.
So, for example, Senator—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he's been open and obvious about the fact that he doesn't want Trump to fire Robert Mueller, the special investigator.
So, for all of Trump's fulminations over Robert Mueller, there's no evidence that anything's going to happen here.
Here's what McConnell had to say yesterday.
Well, look, I agree with the president's lawyers that Bob Mueller should be allowed to finish his job.
I think it was an excellent appointment.
I think he will lead.
He will go wherever the facts lead him.
And I think he will have great credibility.
So listen, I think that President Trump still could toxify the Republican brand, but in reality, have Republicans fallen on bended knee to everything Trump wants to do?
I think the answer is no.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today, I recommended the book earlier.
It is fantastic.
We're going to have Thomas Sowell on the program in, I think, next week, probably.
It's called Discrimination and Disparities.
It's a very short book, maybe 145 pages, all about whether statistical disparities are an indicator of discrimination.
So it goes right to the heart of what I was discussing at the very beginning of the program.
It was Sowell's model that I was talking about when I talked about the three types of discrimination.
The book is really well thought out, like everything Sowell writes.
Sowell is, I think, the best thinker.
Okay, so, the shape of water.
politics of the last 30 years.
And this book is just another piece of evidence to that effect.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so The Shape of Water.
This thing won Best Picture.
It is an awful film.
So I watched it originally, and I thought it was an awful film.
And then it won Best Picture, and I thought, well, I'll give it another shot.
Maybe I just missed the point.
So I was on a plane to the East Coast, and I watched the movie.
Again, all I can say is I wanted to walk off the plane.
It is that bad.
It is one of the 10 worst movies ever made.
This is not an exaggeration.
It is an awful, awful piece of crap.
Good to look at, right?
It's a pretty-looking film.
It is, in fact, about a woman who has sex with a fish, basically, which is real weird.
And here is a little bit of the preview, and then I will discuss how the script is basically written by an SJW 10-year-old with a crayon.
I mean, the script is just garbage, but here is what the preview looks like.
She deaf?
Mute, sir.
She can hear you.
You clean that lab, you get out.
This may very well be the most sensitive asset ever to be housed in this facility.
You may think that thing looks human.
Stands on two legs, right?
But we're created in the Lord's image.
You don't think that's what the Lord looks like, do you?
Okay, so this movie is just... Okay, shut it off.
Shut it off.
Stop it!
Make it stop!
Okay, this movie is so awful in every possible way.
So, every single trope that you could possibly find is in this movie.
Right?
There is the... All of the... So basically, it's about a woman who is mute, who falls in love with a fish man, from the Black Lagoon, and has to help him escape the clutches of an evil American general and his sidekick, right?
A Bible-believing American sidekick who also happens to be a sexual harasser and abuser, as well as a racist and an anti-gay piece of crap, right?
So, basically, it's every possible trope that the left has ever said about Mike Pence, except they say it about Michael Shannon's character, and he's a villain who just, for no reason, wants to cut open this fish man, this magical fish man.
He doesn't want to research him or have a conversation with him.
He wants to cut him open for no reason other than America is a terrible place.
And this guy, of course, is trained by the military, and the military is awful.
It's legitimately every lefty—it's why I won Best Picture.
It's every lefty trope.
The fish man has helped to escape and have sexual pleasure with a human woman, which is, again, very odd.
And all this is aided and abetted by the gay neighbor, right, the generous and wonderful gay neighbor, who is rejected in his advances on a younger man.
And the younger man, I love that they add this in the movie, the younger man is very nice to the gay man until the gay man makes advances, at which point he goes, whoa, buddy.
And then right at that moment in the film, a black couple walks into his diner and the young man acts racist to the black couple.
So it's not enough just to say that the guy wasn't into the whole gay thing, right?
He's straight.
They also have to imply that the only person who would reject a gay man's advances is a racist, right?
It's pretty amazing.
So, the bands of untouchables in this movie who help Fish Man escape are a mute woman, who apparently, we learn, spoiler alert, can breathe underwater, and a gay man who's being rejected because he's gay, and a black woman who is put upon by her stupid husband She's a sassy black lady put upon by her stupid husband.
That's not a cliché at all in the films.
That's not clichéd at all.
And this group is also aided by an American scientist who happens to be a Russian spy, a Soviet spy.
That's how we know he's good, because he's a Soviet spy.
It's so bad.
Everything about this movie is bad.
Every line of dialogue rings false.
The way that Guillermo del Toro, who wrote the script, basically makes excuses for all of this is because he says that it's a metaphor.
So this is the easy way out, right?
The easy way out of the conundrum of writing bad movies is to say it's all metaphorical.
Don't take it seriously.
It's all surreal.
OK, if surreal writing just means you get to write stupid crap that makes no sense and then claim that it's a metaphor, then well done, Guillermo del Toro.
The movie is supremely bad.
Don't bother watching it.
Instead, get a fish tank and don't have sex with the inmates.
All right, so we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
A little bit later today, we're going to be interviewing the Speaker of the House from this, the office where I have declared my coup.
And we will be showing that a little bit later this week.
Looking forward to it.
We will see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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