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April 19, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:20
Starbucks Now | Ep. 521
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Starbucks is in serious trouble and we will go through the case.
Plus, President Trump reaches out to North Korea and Democrats try to take Ted Cruz's seat in Texas.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
As always, it is a busy news day and I have a lot to talk about, particularly with regard to the Starbucks fiasco.
I just hate how the media covered these racial incidents without actually waiting to hear all the facts, without waiting to see if there's any additional evidence.
The immediate jump to conclusions is pretty astonishing.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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All right.
So I want to start today with the situation over at Starbucks.
This has now become a national issue.
So Starbucks is supposed to shut down every one of its stores for a day next week.
Because there was apparently an incident in which two black guys were at a Philadelphia Starbucks.
And sat down and the manager asked them if they wanted to buy anything.
And they said no.
And according to them, at this point, she called the police.
According to her, they continuously refused to leave.
They were just loitering.
And she called the police.
The police came.
The police apparently asked these guys to leave.
The guys refused over and over, at which point the police arrested them.
So Starbucks has, of course, apologized for the incident.
The woman in question has not been fired.
She apparently no longer works at this store.
Which makes me a little suspicious.
It does make me a little suspicious.
It makes me a little suspicious that Starbucks didn't just fire the lady.
If they actually thought that there was a deeply racist incident that had happened, you would imagine that they would get rid of the lady for simple legal reasons.
Having this woman hanging around, if she actually was participant in a racial incident, seems like really stupid, stupid policy.
But Starbucks didn't get rid of her, which leads me to believe there might be a little bit more to the story.
So, today I want to go through the media hubbub about all of this, and I want to ask a few simple questions that are all answerable.
This is not truthoring.
I'm not saying I don't believe these guys' story.
I'm just saying that I want to see the evidence on all sides, and I don't think that that's unreasonable.
So, for example, the guys go on Good Morning America, the two black fellows go on Good Morning America, and they are being given national coverage for an incident in which they were threatened with arrest for apparently sitting in a Starbucks for no reason.
And the tape was originally taken by a couple of different people who were at the Starbucks.
And who claimed that they saw this racial incident unfold when the guys asked to use the bathroom.
They were told they couldn't use the bathroom because they hadn't bought anything and then they refused to buy something.
And the manager, whose name is Holly, apparently called the police for loitering.
So here is a little bit of the of the ABC News exclusive interview with these two guys.
Now, again, I have to point out that this is being wildly overblown.
The lady is presumably being punished.
The Starbucks has apologized.
They're shutting down their entire company for a day to teach about implicit bias.
I'll discuss implicit bias and how stupid implicit bias assessment tests are in just a second, and why implicit bias training is completely useless from a social science perspective.
I'll talk about that in just a few minutes here.
But important to note, Kyle Smith has a good point in National Review.
There are 238,000 employees of Starbucks.
Let's assume that everything that's said here is right.
Let's assume that this manager, this manager at the Starbucks was a brutal, horrible, Bull Connor type racist.
Would that implicate everyone who works for Starbucks?
Kyle Smith points out 238,000 people is like the entire population of the city of Richmond.
If someone killed somebody in the city of Richmond, would you say, listen, I'm never traveling to Richmond again, I'm gonna boycott Richmond?
Would you force the entire population of Richmond to go and get implicit bias training?
Or would you say, that's a bad person?
So first of all, this is an individual issue at the very most.
And second of all, we're not even sure if it's an individual issue yet because, as I'm going to point out, there are cameras in the store.
This is an amazing thing.
I'm amazed nobody's asked this before.
I've been asking this for the last couple of days.
Every Starbucks I've ever been in has cameras.
They have cameras there because they want to ensure that if a crime actually does take place on the premises, that they can hand that tape over to the police.
So I asked my listeners to actually go over to the Starbucks.
I asked one particular listener who had actually been to the Starbucks, knew the manager, said that this manager was a social justice warrior leftist who is so woke that she spends her days telling people not to use the wrong pronouns.
And yet this one is supposed to be the great racist in the whole story.
She still has not publicly revealed herself or told her side of the story.
But in any case, I asked a couple of my listeners and one of my Twitter followers if they could go take a look at the Starbucks itself to see if there were a bunch of cameras there.
It turns out that from the pictures she took, there are no less than four cameras in the establishment.
And yet we have seen no camera tape from any of this.
The only reason I'm breaking this down this way, folks, is because it's a national story.
Otherwise, I wouldn't care because when the I'll give you an example.
There's a story from Applebee's.
There's an there's an Applebee's.
I believe that it was in Wisconsin.
And just back in February, it was Missouri.
Rather, Applebee's fired three employees at a Missouri mall based restaurant back in February that it determined were involved in the racial profiling of two African-American customers whom they falsely accused of skipping out without paying their bill.
The restaurant chain also apologized for the February 9th incident at the Independence, Missouri eatery.
The apology comes after one of the diners, Alexis Brisson, posted a video of her encounter with employees from her cell phone and commented on the incident on Facebook.
The restaurant in the Independence Center Mall was temporarily closed, and the video showed a restaurant staffer, a police officer, and a security guard talking to two women, one of whom was crying uncontrollably and had been estimated viewed 3 million times.
The company said that it regretted the incident, and the manager, the server, and another employee were fired.
This is an incident where I'm not questioning what happened because the company fired the employees.
The company not only admitted what had happened, the company then fired the employees.
And apparently, this is a much more clear-cut case where the police were called on these particular women who were accused of walking out on their bill, but they did not walk out without paying their bill.
They actually were trying to pay their bill.
According to the Facebook post, about an hour into dinner, these two women were accused of ordering food the day before and leaving without paying their bill.
And then it turns out that these were not the same two women.
So the employees were fired.
Okay, so that's an easy one to prove, right?
There's either evidence that they were there the day before or they weren't there the day before, right?
It turns out the employees were all wrong and they were all fired.
So in that particular case, I'm not saying show me the tape.
In this particular case, I'm saying show me the tape because there is a little bit of countervailing evidence.
And you're going to see the countervailing evidence here.
So I want to play you the account of the two men who are on Good Morning America.
Again, this is now a national incident, even though it's at best one person at a Starbucks in Philadelphia.
Important to point out that this this manager, Holly.
She's working at a Starbucks in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia is 42% black.
If you really think that Holly has not dealt for the past year with any black customers or that she's a wild racist who's discriminating against black customers, it's weird that everything was fine for a year in a 42% black city where presumably a lot of the customers are black.
And again, as I say, one of my listeners, I talked about this yesterday on the program, one of my listeners knows Holly, has been there and has seen her deal with black customers and has never seen any inkling of anything like this, but All right, here's the account of the two men on Good Morning America.
And I'm going to show you, this even conflicts with the police accounting of what happened.
I want to show you also how the media treat this.
So Robin Roberts is the one doing the interview on ABC News' Good Morning America.
Here it is.
Dante, you both walk in, you get a table.
Rashaun, how long was it before you asked to use the restroom?
Immediately, as soon as I walked in.
And she stated that they were for paying customers only.
What happened next?
Um, we're at the table.
We sit down.
We're just talking amongst each other.
Um, she then comes from around the register, asks, you know, walks up to us, asks if, uh, you know, she can help us with anything.
Can we start with some drinks or water or something like that?
You know, for when we have bottles of water with us.
So, you know, we're fine.
We're just waiting for a meeting.
We'll be out really quick, type thing.
According to 9-1-1 accounts, a call was placed at 4-37 approximately two minutes after you arrived to 9-1-1.
What did you think when you saw police arrive, Dante?
You can't be here for us.
OK, so let's pause it there for one second.
So first thing to note here is when she says that they arrived at 435 and then the call happened at 437.
How does she know what time they got there?
Right.
I mean, she's not revealing how she knows that because presumably she'd either have to have testimony from Starbucks itself.
She'd have to have access to tape.
She'd have to have witnesses who said 435, or these guys told her they got there at 435, and at 437, this woman made a call.
We just don't know the answer.
Now, this is one of the areas where a tape could obviously clear this up.
You'd see them walk in, there'd be a timestamp on the tape, you'd know whether this is true or not.
According to the police, this is not what happened, right?
If you actually listen to what the police officer said, right, it's not, it doesn't match up with what these two guys are saying.
So these two guys are saying that they walked in, they sat down, they asked to use the restroom, they were declined because they did not buy anything, they were asked if they wanted to buy anything, and then they refused to leave.
Because they're waiting for somebody.
Okay, that's their story.
Now here is the police officer's story.
So here's the police chief in Philadelphia, who is black, and he is telling the story of what happened according to the police.
When the call was initially made, the Starbucks employees had told the males that they were going to call police, and they said, go ahead and call police, we don't care.
So police get there and they're confronted by the same type of attitude.
And repeatedly are told that they're not leaving.
In fact, there's some alleged rhetoric about, you don't know what you're doing.
You're only a $45,000 a year employee or something to that regard.
And so because these individuals refuse to leave, because Starbucks actually called, the police did not just happen upon this event.
They did not just walk into Starbucks to get coffee.
They were called there for a service.
And that service had to do with pulling a disturbance, a disturbance that had to do with trespassing.
So, I need to underscore the fact that these males were arrested.
When they were arrested, they were taken out essentially without incident.
There was no harm done to them.
But after being transported to the police district in the area, the officers, after processing paperwork, discovered that Starbucks no longer was interested in processing.
Okay, so listen to the police.
So what the police chief says is when they arrived, they asked these men, do you want to leave?
And the guy said, no, we're not leaving.
And apparently at one point they said, we don't care, go ahead and arrest us.
This is not the same story the media are telling, right?
The media are telling a story where these two guys walk in, they're in no trouble at all, they're just sitting there, and then they're arrested for no reason after being incredibly polite to the police officers.
The police themselves are saying that's not what happened.
We don't have the story of Holly the manager.
We don't have any of the tape footage, right?
Again, there are four cameras in the establishment, from what I can see from these pictures, that are being sent publicly on social media.
And it's been confirmed by a couple of people.
And yet, the media are running this as though this is a Bull Connor Jim Crow story.
I'm going to explain in a second why this really isn't even that.
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Okay, so.
Let's discuss for a second why Starbucks has this policy about loitering in the first place.
So the impression here is that Starbucks employee just decides randomly, these two black guys gotta go, don't like them, they're black.
That's the story that we're being told on national television by Good Morning America.
Again, facts being stated without any real verification.
Again, Robin Roberts saying there's a two minute delay between the time these guys sat down and the time the police were called.
You know, again, we don't know.
Like, I don't know where that's coming from.
Because what you'll see is that the media will report it saying things like, these two men arrived at 435, and then by 437 the police were called.
Or they'll say, it has been reported.
It has been, by whom?
By whom?
Okay.
Again, I don't want to break this thing down like this is a pruder tape.
I don't think it's that important an incident, but the media think it's that important an incident.
We wouldn't be talking about this if the media weren't blowing this up into, all of America is implicitly racist, including Starbucks.
Right, this is what this is all about.
Again, I wasn't questioning the Applebee's incident that happened back in February because that was an actual racial incident and the people involved were fired by the chain, which apologized.
Okay, so, obviously, and again, the reason that I asked for substantiating evidence is because we've had too many cases in the past of high-profile incidents like this where it's turned out that the whole story was not being told.
I remember Michael Bennett, who's a football player, last year claimed that the Las Vegas Police Department had cracked down on him for racial reasons, and then the tape came out and it turned out the reason they cracked down on him is because he was acting in criminal fashion.
So, if tape is available, I like tape.
If tape is not available, we have to evaluate the evidence of the people who are talking.
But, just as in a police incident, I want to see the body cam footage before I make any sort of judgment, in this particular incident, I don't think it's unreasonable for Starbucks to release footage of exactly what happened here.
Now, there are a lot of people who say, well, Starbucks won't release the footage because they know that they're guilty.
Okay, it's also possible Starbucks won't release the footage because they know that if they release the footage, then the entire media and the Black Lives Matter movement would suggest that they don't care enough about racism and they're fighting back against these charges because they're racist themselves.
It is the way the racial game is played, unfortunately, which is if you provide countervailing evidence to the charge that you are racist, then the media will claim that you are even more of a racist because you're not acknowledging your white privilege and people's different sensory experiences.
Okay, but here is the point.
Starbucks has had this policy for a very long time.
Okay, Starbucks has had this policy with regard to people not using the bathroom for a long time, and they've had controversies about this policy for a very long time.
And in just a second, I'm going to bring you that controversy.
I'm going to show you that controversy.
Okay, so, here is the story.
There's another Starbucks in Philadelphia at 13th and Chestnut Streets.
This is sent to me by another one of the Ben Shapiro Show listeners.
And this is from NBCPhiladelphia.com.
This story is dated September 15, 2015.
In the wake of a social media post that went viral over the weekend claiming a Starbucks barista denied a uniformed Philadelphia police sergeant access to a restroom at a downtown Philadelphia coffee shop, Starbucks has apologized to the sergeant.
The spokesperson for the international coffee shop chain told NBC10 the company personally apologized to the police sergeant for the incident, which happened late last week.
The sergeant, according to a Facebook post shared thousands of times, walked into the Starbucks at 13th and Chestnut Streets and asked for the key code to use the restroom.
An employee, according to the post, stated in a loud voice that the bathroom is for paying customers only.
The post went on to say the sergeant politely requested access again, and the Starbucks employee continued to deny it loudly as customers listened.
While she continued loudly to tell me about the bathroom down the street, I was even more astonished that the many customers and other employees said nothing and seemed indifferent.
This is the world cops live in anymore, wrote the sergeant, who has declined to comment, saying he didn't anticipate his post would gain such traction.
Officer Joe Lightheart, a friend of the sergeant, was one of the first to share the fellow officer's post about the incident.
Lightheart says he personally has been to that Starbucks location several times on calls for service, but never as a customer.
I didn't intend for it to go viral, Lightheart said, adding that most people who have responded to the post have been supportive.
Starbucks wrote in part, quote, This officer apparently was white.
It is certainly not in line with the experience we want any of our customers to have in our stores.
We are taking all necessary steps to ensure this doesn't happen in the future.
This officer apparently was white.
There's no indicator that the officer was actually black.
And so the idea that, you know, the loitering policy is being exclusively used on black people, again, I'm not seeing all of the evidence for this.
But the entire point here is to shake down Starbucks.
The entire point is to make the entire chain feel that they're responsible for the actions of one employee, even without us even knowing the whole story about the employee.
So now Starbucks is going to be giving implicit bias training to all of its employees.
This is deeply stupid.
Implicit bias training is a giant, giant, giant waste of time.
Hillary Clinton, back during the 2017 campaign, talked about how implicit bias was a problem for everyone, not just police.
And she said that too many people jump to conclusions about each other.
Of course, Senator Cory Booker has talked about implicit bias.
Okay, people tend to use what they call the implicit association test as proof of implicit bias.
The implicit association test is a test that you've probably had if you're on a college campus where some idiot sociology professor says, we're going to show you you're a racist.
You don't think you're a racist?
You've never done anything racist?
But secretly, like Freudian unconscious secretly, you're actually a racist.
And the way that we can tell this is what we do.
is we show you a black face with some words associated with it and a white face with some words associated with it.
If you more quickly identify white faces associated with good words than black faces associated with good words, this means that implicitly you are a racist.
Now there are a bunch of problems.
There are a bunch of problems with the IAT.
The studies are not particularly reliable.
They have a relatively small sample size.
They find no significant correlation between implicit bias and behavior in the real world.
Texas A&M psychologist Professor Hart Blanton points out that scores on the IAT mean virtually nothing.
There's not a single study showing that above and below that cutoff, people differ in any way based on that score.
Social psychologist Russell Fazio of Ohio State University says, quote, as traditionally implemented, the IAT really has problems.
Even advocates of the IAT, like its creator, Professor Anthony Greenwald, admit that these findings are simply not appropriate for settings such as courtrooms.
In fact, one major study has found that, quote, being alerted to potential bias and limited response control through direct personal experience, such as that provided by the IAT, can lead to worse rather than better behavioral regulation.
Statistics show the correlation between IAT and political preference are stronger than racial preference.
And there's good evidence to suggest that the IAT measures in-group, out-group implicit bias rather than racial bias per se.
So if you're told which group is your group, you associate good things with that group off the bat.
Jesse Singal of New York Magazine.
I'm friendly with Jesse.
Jesse is not on the right.
Jesse is a definitely liberal guy.
He's a left guy.
He says that the fact that the idea that the IAT predicts behavior in any serious way is not true.
He says a pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals, and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality control standards normally expected of psychological instruments.
The IAT is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals' behavior.
And by the way, implicit bias training does nothing either.
either.
Single points out, both critics and proponents of the IAT now agree that the statistical evidence is simply too lacking for the test to be used to predict individual behavior.
And so we're now being told that if you train people on implicit bias that this is going to fix things.
Again, the data just is not here.
The data is just not here, but nobody needs the data.
This is all just an attempt to, again, paint the United States as broadly racist because of one incident that is still under controversy, and for which we have not seen tape.
And if you ask for evidence, then people call you racist, because that's the way this works now.
It's just ridiculous.
Like, I got questions from the media for asking for tape.
I asked for tape, and people were like, why are you asking for tape?
For the same reason that you ask for tape, when a black guy gets shot by a cop, because you want to see what happened.
I mean, why is this even a question?
Okay, in just a second, I'm going to talk about President Trump's foreign policy.
Some foreign policy achievements may be in the offing, despite media coverage to the contrary.
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Well, all of this hubbub on idiotic social issues continues to plague the United States.
Actual things are happening in terms of foreign policy.
So it's really interesting.
There really is no Trump doctrine as of yet.
We don't know what the Trump doctrine is.
There have been a few attempts to define President Trump's foreign policy.
The real truth is that President Trump's foreign policy is ad hoc.
He's basically making decisions on the spot.
Now, what's interesting about this is that I think that most presidents actually are doing foreign policy on the basis of ad hoc foreign policy.
I don't think most of them sit there with a formula.
I don't think they sit there with an abacus.
I don't think they sit there with an algebraic formula with different variables, and they input different countries and different numbers in.
And this concludes whether they ought to use diplomacy, whether they ought to use the CIA, or whether they ought to use military strikes.
I don't think that's how it works.
I think foreign policy is generally a matter of muddling through for the United States, and it has been since World War II.
President Trump makes that obviously clear, because the muddling is so clear just in public, right?
I mean, every so often the president just reverses himself on a matter of foreign policy, whereas previous administrations have tried to lay out a coherent reason why they're doing what they're doing, and sometimes that coherent reason is just not coherent.
Trump doesn't even bother, right?
Trump is obviously just kind of lurching side to side.
I don't think that that's a change in kind.
I think that it's just a change in the way that that is presented to the world.
Now, sometimes that ends well, and sometimes it's kind of weird, right?
So in one case right now, there's obviously some controversy about what exactly President Trump is going to do with regard to North Korea.
So yesterday, President Trump was doing a press conference with Japan, and he said that we've had talks with North Korea, high-level talks have been taking place with the North Koreans.
Well, let's leave it a little bit short of that.
But we have had talks at the highest level.
And it's going very well, but we'll see what happens.
Okay, so we'll have to see how this plays out.
A lot of people are very skeptical of the idea that any serious negotiation can take place with the North Koreans.
I'm one of those people who's skeptical, because again, I think that the North Koreans have no interest in giving up their nuclear program.
I think this is another shakedown effort.
The North Korean government has, for the last 35 years, been routinely firing missiles, doing nuclear tests, doing all this stuff in an effort to pry goodies out of the United States and out of our allies.
They did it under Clinton, they did it under Bush, they did it under Obama, and now they are doing it under President Trump.
So I think it's a little premature to celebrate the fact that we are talking with the North Koreans as some sort of grand design to change the face of North Korea.
However, it is important to note that the New York Times is reporting today that North Korea is now removing a major obstacle to U.S.
negotiations according to South Korea.
It is important to note here also, by the way, that South Korea's government is what they call a sunshine government, meaning that they have attempted to ratchet down tensions with the North Koreans at any possible cost.
According to the New York Times, Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, has removed a key obstacle to negotiations with Washington by no longer demanding that American troops be removed from South Korea as a condition for denuclearizing his country, according to the South's President Moon Jae-in.
Okay, this is actually pretty important because if it is true that North Korea is not demanding that the United States withdraw troops from South Korea, from the Korean Peninsula, then a deal is much more in the offing.
The United States was never going to withdraw troops from South Korea, no matter how much President Trump might want to do so, simply because we have strategic interest not only in South Korea, but in the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea more broadly.
So removing our troops from South Korea was never a thing.
The change in stance, according to the Times, if officially confirmed by the North, could affect the United States' long-term military plans in Northeast Asia and ease Washington's reluctance to strike a deal with North Korea.
For decades, the reclusive country, an ally of China, has been a very strong country.
"has persistently demanded the withdrawal of 28,500 American troops in South Korea, citing their presence as a pretext to justify its development of nuclear weapons.
The demand has always been a non-starter for South Korean and American negotiators.
On Thursday, Mr. Moon said North Korea no longer included that demand in the list of things it wanted in return for giving up its nuclear weapons.
That has encouraged the United States to proceed with plans to hold its first-ever summit meeting with North Korea." So one of the serious questions is what are they going to ask the United States to give And the bigger question is, how are we going to verify that they have indeed given things up?
Remember, in 1994, the United States signed onto a North Korean nuclear framework agreement that President Clinton claimed was going to end the North Korean nuclear program.
It involved the United States giving the North Koreans a light water nuclear reactor so that they could have domestic nuclear energy.
And also involved us signing major checks to the North Koreans.
It was impossible to verify, and obviously now North Korea has nuclear weapons.
It'll be interesting to see if the North Koreans think they can play the United States this way again.
One of the major issues when it comes to negotiations with North Korea is whichever party is in power has an interest in claiming that their deal is going to work.
We see this with the Iran deal, right?
The Iran deal is a giant fail, but the Democrats still have an interest in claiming that it worked.
The Syrian deal, where we were told that Russia was going to remove all chemical weapons from Syria.
We were told this was a massive success by everyone on the left, including the New York Times, up until the point when Assad started gassing his citizens again, at which point everybody had to recognize that it was a failure.
Every administration and all of their backers have an interest in claiming that every negotiated deal that is cut is a success.
But without significant teeth to the actual verification regime, all of these promises mean very, very little.
According to Moon, the North Koreans did not present any conditions that the United States could not accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops in South Korea.
They only talk about an end to hostilities against their country and about getting security guarantees.
It's safe to say the plans for dialogue between North and the United States could proceed because that has been made clear.
So, we don't really have a clear plan from the United States as to what we are going to demand in terms of verification standards.
North Korea in 2016 demanded the U.S.
stop deploying long-range bombers, submarines, and other nuclear strike capabilities in and around South Korea.
You know, it is unclear that the United States is actually going to is actually going to do any of those things.
So we will find out what happens here.
But there's very little question that this is, you know, somewhat ad hoc, right?
I mean, this is all ad hoc foreign policy.
And again, I'm not blaming Trump for that, but it does create a certain amount of confusion in terms of world politics.
Creating another amount of confusion is the Trump administration approach to Russia.
So earlier this week, obviously, there were promises that Russian sanctions were on the way after Russia helped sponsor Syria's governmental chemical attacks on civilians in Syria.
Nikki Haley went on national television.
She claimed that we were going to put sanctions on Russia.
And then Larry Kudlow came out and said, we are not putting sanctions on Russia.
Well, now Trump is defending himself.
He says, there's no one who's been tougher on Russia than I have been.
There has been nobody tougher on Russia than President Donald Trump.
Between building up the military, between creating tremendous vast amounts of oil, we raised billions and billions of dollars extra in NATO.
We had a very, very severe, we were talking about it a little while, fight in Syria recently, a month ago.
Between our troops and Russian troops, and that's very sad.
OK, so this is all true.
I mean, what Trump is saying here is true.
The problem is when you have conflicting messages coming from President Trump, it obscures the fact that in some of these areas, particularly on Russia, the policy has been pretty harsh.
So it is the open chaos of the administration that's a problem for the administration, not the actual policy.
And this has long been true.
As Kanye West would put it, and did yesterday on Twitter, distraction is the opposite of vision.
To which I responded, actually, glaucoma is the opposite of vision.
But in any case, the idea that the administration is being very distracting about how it pursues its goals is certainly part of the problem.
Now, a lot of that is not on the administration.
Obviously, the media have an interest in providing distractions because the economy is doing quite well under President Trump, because there are no major foreign crises under President Trump.
They have to make it seem as though there's a greater amount of cast in the administration, even than Trump is creating.
And to that end, they've continually promoted James Comey.
And they keep pushing Comey, right?
They keep saying that James Comey, the former FBI director, has something important to tell us.
And then he gets on TV and he has nothing important to tell us.
It's a real irritant.
It's a real irritant, because every time I see him on TV, I just assume there's nothing important for him to tell us, because he doesn't have anything.
It's just the media pushing him.
So yesterday, they were pushing him again, and James Comey came out, and I'm not sure why this is any sort of news.
He says, I'm not a Republican anymore.
James Comey says he's no longer a Republican.
Yeah, shock of shocks.
In your heart of hearts, do you still consider yourself a Republican?
No.
No.
The Republican Party has left me and many others.
I need no better evidence than their new website, which I think is Lyon Comey maybe, attacking me.
I just think they've lost their way and I can't be associated with it.
Well, I guess that's the end.
I mean, this guy is the master of loyalty.
We've been told that this is a duty loyalty guy.
I mean, if James Comey can't be a Republican, who can be a Republican?
Or maybe James Comey is angry at President Trump, doesn't like President Trump.
Listen, I didn't vote for President Trump in 2016.
I don't like a lot of things about President Trump.
I am still a Republican, and I'm not going to give up the Republican Party to people I disagree with simply because I want to take my ball and go home.
Again, they keep trying to claim that James Comey is some sort of grand arbiter of decency here.
I'm going to show you in a second why none of this is news.
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So why is James Comey in the news?
The answer is that he shouldn't be.
I mean, he doesn't have anything new to say.
How do I know this?
Because even James Comey is now acknowledging that he doesn't think that Donald Trump is going to fire Robert Mueller.
Well, if he doesn't think that Trump is going to fire Robert Mueller—remember, the entire reason James Comey is in the news right now is because James Comey and his allies in the media have been suggesting that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, that he fired James Comey in order to shut down the Russia investigation.
Well, if you were trying to shut down the Russia investigation, presumably, James Comey would be saying, well, you know, it's really knife's edge right now.
President Trump's going to fire Mueller.
It's just going to show more obstruction.
But James Comey can't even say that, because at least he's honest enough to admit this.
He says, I don't think Trump's going to fire Mueller.
OK, so then why are we talking obstruction?
If he's not firing the guy who's investigating him, that doesn't look a lot like obstruction to me.
And here's Comey admitting it.
What if he fires Mueller?
Were you going to be with him?
Oh my gosh.
These are hypothetical.
We're going to be in the streets.
Well, I don't think that's going to happen.
Oh, you don't?
I don't, because it would make no sense for a bunch of reasons.
Okay, so again, it would make no sense for a bunch of reasons.
He's admitting that he has nothing newsworthy to say here.
The only thing that's newsworthy about James Comey is that now he's in a fight with Andrew McCabe, right?
So it turns out that Andrew McCabe, who was his former deputy, Okay, so that means that it's now a Comey-McCabe fight.
All of this is making the FBI look bad.
It's not making Trump look much worse than he already looked.
But it is amazing the media continued to trot him out, put him on major shows like The View, and the only person on The View who asks him any tough questions is, of course, Meghan McCain.
Meghan McCain did a really good job grilling him the other day.
Here she was going after James Comey.
I think that maybe J. Edgar Hoover is rolling over in his grave at saying the types of things you're saying and revealing the types of things you're revealing.
It doesn't seem like something that the director of the FBI... Why are you laughing?
Because J. Edgar, really, he's the wrong guy to bring up.
I wonder what dress he's wearing.
But he didn't write a tell-all when he left.
Did he say that he was a...
OK, so she's exactly right here.
But again, the media have an interest in promoting stories that are more scandal about Trump.
This is their thing.
It's the reason they continue to push the stupid and idiotic claims about Sean Hannity and Michael Cohen.
Remember, Sean Hannity turns out to have been a client of Michael Cohen.
Cohen was, of course, Trump's lawyer.
And the media are making this into a major issue, even though it's not a major issue.
Andrew McCarthy over at National Review has a long piece today about why it's idiotic That Hannity's name was even revealed in open court.
Like, what exactly does Sean Hannity have to do with anything?
And yet the media have been running with this story as though it's a major story because distraction is the name of the game.
It's so funny.
The media accused Donald Trump of distracting with one hand, you know, put the shiny object over here, and then pursuing policies they don't like over here.
Well, there's one problem.
That's exactly what the media are doing.
Right now we're pursuing a nuclear deal with the North Koreans.
Right now we are pushing On the economy.
Right now we are discussing very controversial measures with regard to Syria and trade.
And yet all of our focus is going into James Comey and Michael Cohen.
And look how the media are just out of their minds and excited and just jazzed about the Sean Hannity news, which is a big nothing burger.
It's a giant nothing burger that Sean Hannity used Michael Cohen as his lawyer or didn't use Michael Cohen as his lawyer.
Who cares?
Who cares?
I mean, Michael Cohen's in legal jeopardy no matter what here.
So I don't know what Sean Hannity has to do with anything, but it doesn't matter.
The media are going to, particularly CNN and MSNBC, of course, are going to use this as an opportunity to club Fox News.
Here's Anderson Cooper doing just that.
In the two days that have elapsed since the president's lawyer, Michael Cohen, was forced to reveal in court that the mystery client he tried to keep secret was, in fact, Sean Hannity, the consequences have been swift.
Hannity's employer, Fox News, did what any respectable news organization would do when faced with the knowledge that one of its anchors had gone on the air time after time after time to breathlessly report on someone without disclosing his own personal connection to the story.
I'm kidding.
They don't care.
They don't care.
Because CNN, you know, they've always disclosed personal connections of all the people working at CNN to various Democratic politicians.
Like, always.
And they're very good about this.
MSNBC did the same thing.
They're suggesting that Fox News is actually running the administration of the United States, which is insipid.
But, again, none of this has to do with anything real.
But all of it does generate numbers and generates controversy.
I think it's dangerous.
The Nunes memo was a huge ratings boon for Fox.
What Donald Trump ended up doing to Christopher Wray, his hand-picked director of the FBI, was, among disgraces, the most disgraceful thing he has done.
Correct.
Christopher Wray went to Paul Ryan and said, please, for the love of God, don't release the Nunes memo.
It's incomplete.
It's inaccurate.
It brings into question one of the most sacred processes we have, the secret FISA court.
And this is why I think we get this wrong.
Fox isn't state-run media.
The state is run by Fox.
Sean Hannity needed that story, and I think he ran the president like an asset, the way people are wondering if the Russians are running the president.
Yes, Sean Hannity is running President Trump as an asset.
Yeah, this is the real news.
Thank you for your news coverage, guys.
And then we're supposed to pretend that this is news coverage?
Just ridiculous.
Okay, so, meanwhile, is any of this having any impact on the polls?
Well, the Evidence tends to show no.
So the polls are not as good for Democrats as you would assume they would be.
So right now, the smart money is on Democrats still taking the House.
But there's a series of new polls that don't seem to be going all that well for Democrats.
So according to Julie Kelly over at The Federalist, the tide seems favorable for Democrats as a record number of incumbent Republicans, including the Speaker of the House, are not running for re-election.
But less than seven months out, a strong undercurrent is pulling the blue wave out to political sea.
A trove of new polling shows the once formidable lead Democrats had in the generic congressional ballot is nearly gone.
Wedge issues such as gun control and immigration are not working in Democrats' favor.
In fact, thanks to Trump, even independent voters believe Democrats are using the children of illegal immigrants for political purposes rather than legitimately protecting their welfare.
I think that might be too pro-Trump point for me, but let's look at the polls.
In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Monday, voter preference in the November election chose a four-point lead for Democrats.
47% to 43% among registered voters.
That's a drastic drop from a 13-point advantage Democrats had blown out at the end of last year.
There is no enthusiasm gap for Democrats.
Republicans are now more motivated to vote than Democrats in November.
86% of Republicans say they're absolutely or certain to vote this fall, compared to 81% of Democrats.
Democrats only hold a six-point lead among independents and among the 18 to 39 voters, so that poll is not particularly good.
An NBC News Wall Street Journal poll indicates waning support for Democrats as well.
The poll showed a big drop in the percentage of voters who want Democrats to win in order to keep tabs on Trump and the GOP.
In October 2017, that number was 46%.
to 40%.
The polls showed a big drop in the percentage of voters who want Democrats to win in order to keep tabs on Trump and the GOP.
In October 2017, that number was 46%.
Today, it's only 40%.
Now, are all the polls No, there's a very bad poll today for Ted Cruz.
Senator Cruz, who you would think would cruise to re-election, no pun intended, in Texas, is apparently not, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.
That poll shows that Cruz and Beto O'Rourke, who's a representative from Texas Democrat, it's a very competitive race now.
They're saying that 47% of registered voters in Texas support Cruz, 44% back O'Rourke.
That's a 3.6% margin of error for the poll.
And President Trump was apparently underwater in Texas with 52% of respondents disapproving of him and 43% approving of his job performance.
Cruz's favorability rating shows a pretty polarized response.
46% of Texans have a favorable view of the senator.
44% have an unfavorable view.
Cruz has been trying to fight the perception that he is either anti-Trump or pro-Trump from two various sides, right?
The people who are pro-Trump claim that Cruz can never be forgiven for the fact that during the RNC in 2016, he didn't overtly endorse President Trump.
And people who are anti-Trump claim that Ted Cruz has bent over for President Trump in a variety of ways, including today, he apparently wrote a profile of President Trump for the Time 100, the most important 100 people in the country.
And Cruz wrote the profile of Trump, which is pretty glowing.
A lot of people are saying, well, why would he do that?
It just looks politically motivated.
In any case, the polls are too over the place to declare exactly where this is going to end up, which is, of course, why Democrats are going to try to cheat.
Or at least one Democrat is going to try and cheat.
Andrew Cuomo in New York has now declared that parolees can vote.
This is an amazing thing.
So by executive order, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, declared that now people who are on parole can vote.
Hey, so you would ask, how can he possibly do this legally?
Wouldn't that require a law?
Well, the answer is yes, it would require a law.
And the legislature in New York, which is still run by Republicans, says, no, you're not going to pass that law.
So Andrew Cuomo just says, I'm going to make sure that 36,000 people who are on parole can now vote.
The reason for this, of course, is because he figures all of those people will vote for him in primaries and in a general election.
Now imagine if there were a dictator of another country who simply declared that all political prisoners who he was now releasing were going to be able to vote for him.
We would say, well, that seems kind of corrupt.
Andrew Cuomo went ahead and did that in New York, and no one seems to care.
No one seems to care.
So we're told the Republicans — Joe Biden, two days ago, said Republicans are trying to suppress voter turnout.
They're trying to keep black people from voting.
He has no evidence of this whatsoever.
None.
Zero.
Zip.
Zilch.
IDs for voting is not voter suppression.
When Republicans say, however, that maybe Democrats want to let illegal immigrants into the country because they want to legalize those immigrants and then have them vote for Democrats, that looks a little better.
That statement looks a little more true today, given the fact that Andrew Cuomo just unilaterally declared that 36,000 people in his state could vote who are on parole.
The whole reason, by the way, you're on parole is because we don't trust you to be fully reintegrated back into society, which is the reason we don't allow you to vote generally if you're on parole.
So, again, just corruption and corruption.
Well done, New York.
Andrew Cuomo, one of the worst governors in the country.
Okay, so time for a couple of things I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
Things that I like today.
So I've been watching the series of The Expanse.
I've recommended the books of The Expanse before by James S. A. Corey.
I think that's his name.
But now there is a series of it on Syfy, and the series is quite good.
It starts slow by the end of season one and the beginning of season two.
It gets really good.
It is pretty significantly different from the books, which I've found interesting.
I think it's better than the books in a variety of ways.
The plotting on TV generally is better than the plotting in books because you can waste a lot of time in books that you can't waste on TV.
Anyway, here's a little bit of the preview for season one of The Expanse.
May I ask you something?
Do you miss Earth?
These endless blue skies.
Free air everywhere.
And open water all the way to the horizon.
When you spend your whole life living under a dome, even the idea of an ocean is almost impossible to imagine.
They are an entire culture working together to turn a lifeless rock into a garden.
We had a garden, and we paved it.
Someday, things gonna change.
OK, so the series is actually quite good.
And it is from the writers of Children of Men and Iron Man.
So it's got good credentials.
It looks really good, too.
I mean, for a cable series, it looks really tremendous.
So check out The Expanse.
You can see it, I believe, on Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime, by the way, now has 100 million members.
Well done, Amazon Prime.
Everybody's whining about these big companies.
Amazon Prime makes my life a hell of a lot better.
It probably makes your life a hell of a lot better, too.
This is why when President Trump rips on Amazon Prime, I'm so annoyed by it.
I get any movie I want at the touch of a button.
Okay, that's amazing.
That's amazing.
I can order any product, anywhere, at any time, right?
I'm just sitting around, and I remember that I forgot to pick something up from the grocery store.
I just order it.
Amazon Prime is just unbelievable.
Love it.
Okay, other things that I like today.
So, Laura Ingraham's ratings actually spiked after all of the controversy over David Hogg.
You remember there was a ridiculous call to boycott Laura Ingraham because she tweeted out that David Hogg was whining about his college admissions, and then David Hogg said, well, let's boycott them.
So, two things.
One, David Hogg, Now has called for a boycott of Vanguard, as in the investment fund, because they invest in a couple of gun manufacturers.
They have a six billion dollar capitalization.
Six billion.
OK, anything that you try to boycott from Vanguard is going to be a rounding error.
It's just a giant fail.
It's strategically idiotic.
But in any case, it turns out that the boycott on Ingram was also strategically foolish because all of her ratings have spiked.
So according to The Hill, in the three months before the advertiser boycott frenzy, Ingram averaged 2.5 million viewers per night, consistently winning her 10 p.m.
time slot.
Then the advertiser controversy got going, and Ingram went on what FNC was a planned vacation.
Since Ingram's return a week ago, the show's viewership has jumped to 3 million viewers per night, more than her average before the controversy erupted.
Just demonstrating once again that in the real world, when you generate controversy for a show, more people tend to watch it rather than fewer people, particularly if the controversy isn't about something supremely awful that somebody said, which was the case, obviously, with Laura Ingraham.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So, speaking of the Parkland Survivors, Time Magazine, again, in their 100 most important people, they have now put the Parkland Survivors, but not all of them.
Obviously, my friend Kyle Kasher, the 16-year-old student over at Parkland, he is not included in the Time 100 of important people.
It's only the ones that you've already seen.
Cameron Kasky and Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg.
Those ones are all in there.
And who wrote the profile of them?
Who else but Barack Obama.
No, I'm not kidding.
You wonder about media bias?
Having the former president of the United States write a glowing profile of a bunch of 17-year-olds because he agrees with their agenda, that might be a little bit of media bias.
I remember that a couple of years ago, I think it was Malala Yousafzai, whose profile was written by Hillary Clinton.
Time magazine is doing that to promote democratic policies and democratic politicians.
Malala Yousafzai is an amazing person.
I have no idea why Hillary Clinton should have been writing her profile.
Another thing that's kind of ridiculous is that apparently David and Lauren Hogg, the sister and brother, they've now signed a book deal with Random House, and that book is going to be called Hashtag Never Again.
A New Generation Draws the Line, talking about all the things that they've been attempting to do.
Finally, they have a book deal, right?
I mean, that's good for them.
They want to write a book.
That's fine.
They say they're going to donate some of the proceeds to charity.
Good for them.
My problem is the title of the book.
OK, never again is about the Holocaust.
OK, the phrase never again came about after the murder of six million Jews systematically by government.
OK, the idea that you're going to equate an evil shooter who killed 17 people And the crisis that that presents for American society, more importantly, that that crisis is going to be equated with the Holocaust, is just insipid.
It's just insipid.
And the fact that nobody over at Random House thought, hey, maybe we shouldn't compare this to the Holocaust, is really quite absurd.
It's really quite absurd on every level.
One final thing that I hate.
So apparently, there's a new document that's been brought to light according to Breitbart by James Damore's class action lawsuit.
James Damore, you'll recall, he's been on the program.
He was the guy who was fired from Google for putting out a memo trying to explain a couple of reasons why there may be fewer women than male engineers over at Google.
Apparently, there's a document that was brought to light that was drafted by the company's HR department instructing managers of the company on how to be inclusive, and it cautioned managers against rewarding employees for traits, quote, valued by the U.S.
white male dominant culture.
Okay, what exactly were they supposed to be worried about?
Apparently, they were supposed to be worried about meritocracy, winning, avoiding conflict, a belief in objectivity, a colorblind racial frame, urgency, numbers driven, and perfectionism.
Right.
These are these are the values that are valued by white male dominant culture, because that's just terrible.
How could we?
I mean, just terrible.
But here's what we really need to do.
We need to listen, raise up voices, identify multiple viable paths.
Everything's a work in progress.
Sustainability.
Okay, if you run a company on the basis of the non-apparently white male dominant cultural features, your company's gonna fail.
If you're not running a company based on a meritocracy, winning, avoiding conflict, a belief in objectivity, you're going to fail.
Your company is going to suck.
And if Google actually ran on the principles it says it runs on, rather than the principles it says it hates, then Google would be bankrupt as well.
But it just goes to show how much social justice narratives now come to dominate the way that so many of these major companies run their business.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
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