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Sept. 13, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:30
Getting Googly-Eyed Over Google | Ep. 621
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President Trump says a lot of stuff about Puerto Rico.
Gets him in trouble.
Plus, craziness over at Google and John Kerry carrying out collusion with the Iranians.
We'll get to all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
One of the features behind the scenes of the show that you never see is that every morning, Alex, one of our producers, picks out a great clip from a movie to cheer me up before the show.
And today he picked out some Shakespeare.
And so we were watching a little bit of Henry V.
And then I looked at today's news and I went, oh, God.
And we'll get to all of today's news because, yeah, yeah, everything's stupid.
As per our usual arrangement, everything is quite stupid first.
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All right, so we begin today with the president of the United States, who has great economic news, who's facing down a hurricane that is going to make landfall very shortly, who is in the midst of what could be a decent news cycle, plus a crisis that requires some presidential leadership.
So naturally, the president took to Twitter to tweet about Hurricane Maria, which happened like a year and a half ago.
Because that's what we do around here.
We just do stupid crap.
Like, on a routine basis, that's pretty much all we do.
So, the media have decided to cover anew the death toll from Puerto Rico.
And this is happening, obviously, in the run-up to Hurricane Florence, which is set to make landfall in the next 48 hours or so.
And the president of the United States is very angry watching the media cover the death toll from Hurricane Maria, which was, of course, the major hurricane that hit Puerto Rico about a year and a half ago.
And the media have been covering particularly the Puerto Rican government's revised death toll, which now stands at 2,975.
Now, you remember, originally, the stated death toll was something like 6 to 18.
And everybody said, well, that's way too low.
That's not real.
And then it turns out that it kept being revised upward and upward and upward.
Well, President Trump decided that he needed to tweet about that.
And this is just a foolish move on every level.
First of all, if you want to discuss the level of the disaster response, discuss the level of the disaster response.
If you want to talk about the vagary of the numbers of estimated dead, there's a way to do that, too.
The way to do that is not to suggest that only six people died in the hurricane, because six people clearly did not die in the hurricane.
It was a lot more people than that.
And there's an enormous amount of variation in the estimates for death from hurricane.
Which I'll explain in just a second.
But here is what President Trump tweeted this morning, obviously eating the news cycle all day, even though we now have great economic news, even though, again, the president's leadership is necessary with regard to the response to Hurricane Florence.
The president decides it is deeply necessary to jump into a conspiracy theory by which the media have promulgated a statistic that is outright false.
Here's what the president says.
Quote.
3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico.
When I left the island after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.
As time went by, it did not go up by much.
Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3,000.
This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.
If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list.
Bad politics.
I love Puerto Rico!
Exclamation point.
Well, one way to show you don't love Puerto Rico is by suggesting only six people died.
That's probably not a very good idea.
And while the president is not wrong to suggest that there is vagary to the statistics, he's certainly wrong to suggest that only 20 people died or that the count of dead basically stopped the minute that he left Puerto Rico.
Now, let's get into the actual statistics with regard to the number of people who died in Puerto Rico.
First, the president yesterday was bragging about Puerto Rico, saying that Puerto Rico was a tremendous success by the federal government.
I mean, this is always a mistake.
It's always a mistake when the federal government proclaims how well they've done on a project like this.
George W. Bush, of course, famously said that his head of FEMA, Ron Brown, had done a heck of a job and that basically finished his presidency in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina.
I mean, he was basically a lame duck from there on in.
It was a horrible move.
President Trump, just a couple of days ago, praised his successes in Puerto Rico.
And that, of course, generated this whole new round of headlines.
Puerto Rico was actually our toughest one of all because it's an island, so you can't truck things onto it, everything's by boat.
We moved a hospital into Puerto Rico, a tremendous military hospital in the form of a ship, you know that?
And I actually think it was one of the best jobs that's ever been done with respect to what this is all about.
I think that Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success.
Okay, so just fantastic stuff.
You know, he says that and then the San Juan mayor, who is responsible, by the way, for an enormous amount of catastrophic suffering in Puerto Rico.
The Puerto Rican government is responsible for the vast majority of suffering on the island of Puerto Rico.
Although the federal government may have botched the response, they did not botch it to the extent that the Puerto Rican government botched it.
There's no question about this.
For example, here's some video showing water sitting on an abandoned tarmac.
People are dying of dehydration in Puerto Rico.
People can't find potable water anywhere.
CNN covered this yesterday.
Literally millions and millions, something like 40 million bottles of water sitting on an abandoned tarmac.
That's about 38 million bottles of water, 10 for every resident of Puerto Rico or so, just sitting there baking in the sun.
Apparently FEMA started delivering to that airstrip back in the fall, October or November or so.
They didn't start distributing it until May and then some residents complained of a foul odor and taste.
Okay, so just spectacular job by everybody involved, including the local government.
The San Juan mayor, of course, trying to shift the blame in the same way that the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, tried to shift the blame to the federal government.
And the governor of Louisiana, who I believe was Kathleen Blanco at the time, tried to shift all the responsibility to the federal government during Katrina.
Now the Puerto Rican government is attempting to do the same to the feds.
It's pretty obvious, however, that the local government really botched this one.
Here's what the San Juan mayor had to say, of course, blasting President Trump.
Well, I think the President's statement is despicable.
It just goes to the lack of understanding of reality that he has.
If he thinks that the death of 3,000 people is a success, he really doesn't know what this was all about.
This was never about politics.
He's talking about unsung praise.
Well, nobody's singing his praises.
So I really don't know where the President gets the nerve to call this a success story.
Okay, so everybody does have an interest in shifting the blame.
However, the way to fight this is by suggesting that the federal government did its job, the local government did not do its job, which I think is actually a pretty fair argument from the evidence that is on the table.
Instead, for the president to start tweeting out about how 3,000 people are not actually dead, like what happened to them?
Were they raptured?
What happened?
Were they just sort of, they're up and walking around, but we sort of, you just didn't count them correctly?
Here's the problem.
When you're trying to come up with a death estimate from a hurricane, there are two major issues.
One is that there are a lot of people whose bodies are just missing.
Like you don't actually know where they are because of the hurricane, because of natural disasters.
This is true in every natural disaster.
And two, it's difficult to actually attribute a death to the hurricane.
Let's say that, for example, there's a hospital and the hospital's power is knocked out by the hurricanes.
And there are a bunch of sick people in the hospital, and a bunch of those sick people die.
Did those people die because they were going to die anyway, or did they die because the hurricane knocked out the power, and then the government didn't do its job in restoring the power?
So if they don't get potable water, for example, if there are 38 million bottles of water sitting on an abandoned tarmac in Puerto Rico and that water doesn't get to people and people die of dehydration three months after the event, is that due to the hurricane?
Or is that due to government malfeasance?
How do you actually chalk up these statistics?
And this isn't just me saying this in some sort of a defense of the president.
These sort of uncertainties do exist in estimates.
Without regard to what the hurricane is.
So, for example, Hurricane Katrina in 2015, Carl Bialik of FiveThirtyEight pointed out, quote, we still don't know how many people died because of Katrina.
Here's what he wrote.
He said, by its own admission, Louisiana never finished counting the dead.
Its last news release on the topic from February 2006 put the statewide toll at 1103.
Three months later, it added hundreds of state residents who died in other states.
Three months after that, in August 2006, Louisiana counted 1,464 victims, with 135 people still missing.
Today, in 2015, when asked about the Louisiana death total, the Health Department cites a 2008 study that reviewed death certificates and concluded there were 986 victims.
But that study said the total could actually be 50% higher if deaths possibly linked to the storm were included.
This is one of the major questions.
Do you just include direct deaths, meaning somebody was swept up in the hurricane and died, or somebody's house blew over and they were crushed?
Or do you include indirect deaths, like the dehydration case?
Again, this is from 538.
Direct deaths are those that occur from drowning or an injury sustained during a storm or post-storm flooding, while indirect deaths occur from some other cause that might be linked to the storm, such as an inability to access medical care to treat an illness.
After Katrina, government counters in Louisiana chose to include indirect deaths based on an arbitrary cutoff.
People who were evacuated from New Orleans and died after October 1st were not included, while those who died before were.
The authors of the 2008 study that counted 986 Louisiana deaths took a different approach, counting only deaths that could be directly attributed to the storm.
So, it is not clear at all how many people even died in Hurricane Katrina.
So, now fast forward to Hurricane Maria.
And President Trump, back in May of this year, he started trotting out these statistics that are clearly not true.
He said 16 people died in Hurricane Maria.
He said 16 people certified.
16 people versus in the thousands.
You can be very proud of all your people, all of our people working together.
16 versus literally thousands of people.
But in reality, Thousands of people died in Hurricane Maria.
It's only a question as to how many thousands of people died.
Here is Governor Ricardo Rosselló.
Back a few months ago, they announced that they had increased the death toll to near 3,000.
And there's another study that suggested the death toll is actually near 5,000.
Here is the governor on CNN being grilled over the statistics.
The way it's taken care of when it got to 64, it was those related to the storm immediately after the storm.
Once we realized that that was a faulty protocol, we called upon the Malkin Institute at George Washington so that they could revise it and do it properly and do it scientifically.
So it's taken time, no doubt about it.
But the number is still on your website.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but just to be clear, you're saying that that number on your website, the official death toll, is not accurate.
Well, we've never expected that it was accurate.
That's why we always said that it was going to be higher and that we gave the task to George Washington University so that they can study it and that they could arrive at a number.
So I'm going to explain how they came up with this statistic and why President Trump is wrong despite all the vagary of this and why it's politically inept for him to approach this issue at all, frankly.
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So how exactly did they come up with this 3,000 number?
Well, as you heard, Ricardo Rossello, who's the governor of Puerto Rico, he basically outsourced the study to George Washington University And what they did is they compared excess deaths over the normal death rate at this particular time of year.
They said, quote, our excess mortality study analyzed past mortality patterns, mortality registration and population census data from 2010 to 2017 in order to predict the expected mortality if Hurricane Maria had not occurred.
That's the predicted mortality.
And compared that to the actual deaths that did occur, which were the observed mortality.
Now, the problem there is that maybe it was a year when there were going to be an inordinate number of deaths.
Anyway, we don't actually have the names of the people, so can you count somebody as dead if you never find their name?
Are these people who existed or did not exist?
This is why there's inherent vaguery, and that's why the numbers really swing pretty wildly here.
There was a study that came out last year, not from George Washington, that put the range of estimates anywhere from 900 people dead to 8,000 people dead.
It was from Harvard.
Huge range and people said that's an insane range.
How are we even supposed to take that seriously?
The George Washington University study estimated total excess mortality at 2,975.
The Puerto Rican government adopted that number.
This year, the Puerto Rican government had already increased its body count to nearly 1,500 in early September, estimating deaths in the four months after the storm.
But Lynn Goldman, who's the dean of the university's Milken Institute of Public Health, admitted, quote, among all the deaths that occurred, which of them were related to Maria?
Which of them would not have occurred if it hadn't been for the storm?
We're not able to say that now.
So there is vagueness.
There are a bunch of different estimates.
The New York Times estimated 1,000 deaths occurred after Maria.
The medical journal JAMA, that's the Journal of American Medicine, estimated between 1,000 and 1,300 people died in connection with the storm.
And again, there was that Harvard University study that put the estimate anywhere from 800 to 8,500, which is a huge range.
But was it six people?
Was it 18 people?
No, it wasn't six or 18 people.
It was certainly hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.
And in fact, the president is reopening this wound by suggesting the only reason people are talking about these deaths is to get him politically is a huge mistake.
It's a huge political mistake, especially because the president of the United States has been particularly critical over the course of his career of other people's handling of hurricanes.
Here's what he tweeted after Hurricane Sandy, quote, The federal government has handled Sandy worse than Katrina.
There is no excuse why people don't have electricity or fuel yet.
About 285 people died in Hurricane Sandy.
And it is important to note, the initial estimate was 26 dead.
The final estimate was like 300 dead in Hurricane Sandy.
So the estimates always rise from the beginning.
For the president to use that original estimate is statistically illiterate.
And it's also politically foolish, given the fact that the president has a pretty good argument about the local government botching the job rather than the federal government botching the job.
Now it just looks like he's insensitive.
Now it just looks like he doesn't care.
And the only reason that he cares about the fallout from these particular issues is for his own political survival.
Which looks gross in any case involving death.
We on the right ripped President Obama up and down for not taking seriously enough the deaths in Benghazi.
That was four people.
It looks really bad when the President of the United States doesn't look like he's taking seriously the deaths of what has to be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people.
It's just, it's really, it's one of the worst things he's ever tweeted, frankly.
It's really, really bad.
Okay, so, in just a second, I want to talk about the mainstream media and Google.
So, Google, Breitbart got a hold of, and I'm not sure how they did, they got a hold of tape from Google right after the election.
And the tape from Google right after the election is pretty telling, because remember, all of these major media companies have essentially suggested there is no bias at these companies.
Now, just because people at a particular company are politically biased does not mean that necessarily their product is biased.
But when you are talking about the art of coming up with a search engine that benefits certain results at the expense of other results, You do have to ask questions as to how exactly those algorithms are created.
Now, I have friends who work for Google, and these are folks who work hard every day trying to create algorithms that are more responsive to market conditions.
But there's no question that Google manipulates its data on a pretty regular basis.
They've done this, for example, with regard to China, where they've cut off certain search results at the behest of the government.
Why couldn't Google do that on behalf of various other political causes?
The answer is, they certainly could, and they have in the past.
We reported here on this program, I think it was based on a Washington Examiner report, if I'm not mistaken, or a Daily Caller report, I can't remember.
I don't want to misattribute it.
There was a report that Google had been attaching fact checks from left-wing sources to sources like Daily Wire, Daily Caller, Washington Examiner, but had done no such thing for sources on the left.
Google had to correct it.
So in other words, when you're creating an algorithm, it's garbage in, garbage out.
If you start with a particular premise and the premise is politically biased, you're going to end up with a result that is also politically biased.
It's hard to think that that's not what's been happening at these major tech companies like Google, particularly in the aftermath of some of the ridiculous things that are being said at this particular meeting right after the election.
So they held a company-wide meeting of kind of top executives and team leaders where everybody vented about President Trump.
And this tape finally broke over at Breitbart.
We do think that history is on our side in a profound and an important way.
suggesting that Google, which their slogan was something like, don't be evil.
But by be evil, they basically mean be conservative.
Here is them ripping into everyone who voted for President Trump as the VP of global affairs.
We do think that history is on our side in a profound and an important way.
I would say that the moral arc of history is long, but it bends toward progress.
And out of progress comes rising living standards and better health care, and ultimately the ability to transcend those forces of tribalism, yes, reach toward justice.
While it may be that the Internet and globalization were part of the cause of this problem, we are also fundamentally an essential part of the solution to this problem.
So, I mean, you can see the lamentation, you can see the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, people rending their garments and putting sackcloth and ashes on.
And it wasn't just Kent Walker, it was also Sergey Brin, who's the co-founder of Google, who said he was deeply offended by President Trump's election.
Again, all these people can have their political point of view, but if you think that this doesn't bleed into the product, it's very difficult to imagine that.
And it's going to, again, underscore the level of distrust conservatives have for a lot of these major tech companies.
As an immigrant and a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too.
And I think it's a very stressful time, and it conflicts with many of our values.
Okay, so there he is, Sergey Brin, basically saying that Google's values have been overridden by President Trump.
Why would anybody on the right be suspicious of how these tech companies run their business?
And then, this is the best part, this nerd in the audience gets up and starts talking about white privilege while wearing a backpack, which is always a good look, and a bunch of Google executives start applauding him for talking about white privilege at a company that is, I believe, universally run by white people?
So here is the Google execs applauding Rando for shouting about white privilege.
Speaking to white men, there's an opportunity for you right now to understand your privilege in this society.
Take the opportunity to go through the bias-busting training.
Read about privilege.
Read about the real history of oppression in our country.
And tomorrow night, watch 13th, the movie that is here.
If you can't watch it here, watch it on Netflix.
Discuss the issues you are passionate about during Thanksgiving dinner.
And don't back down and laugh it off when you hear the voice of oppression speak through metaphors.
And I promise to do this.
Wow, so much heroing.
So much heroing.
I mean, just look at the heroism on that stage.
These are the same people who caved under, knuckled under to the Chinese government when the Chinese government was trying to foster tyranny in its own country by preventing certain search results.
Look at the... I mean, we have to fight white privilege in the United States, see a bunch of white guys on the stage.
Just really, really amazing stuff from Google.
Again, the elites in this country are driving people into a state of madness because they believe that they are being passed over in favor of particular values that are held by a group of people who are out of touch with everyday Americans.
I want to talk a little bit more about that.
In just one second.
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Okay, so...
One of the things that I think is so alienating about what you saw there from Google and the Google leadership is this feeling of a gap between the elites who control the way we think and everybody else in the country who is sick and tired of being told what to do.
And I think people are getting tired of the feeling that the system is rigged, not just on the technological level, but also on the governmental level, on the level of pushing particular thought.
I think that people are getting very uptight with that.
I think it also plays into the Democrats' agenda of free college tuition.
So there's been a lot of talk lately about free college tuition.
Virtually every major Democrat in the country is pushing free college tuition.
This is not about increasing people's income trajectory.
This is a lie.
They keep saying that we need free college tuition in order to increase people's income trajectory.
The reality is that the reason that Democrats keep pushing free college tuition is because they want everyone to be part of this thought contingent that is pushed on college campuses they want people put into a mill of leftist thought and brought out the other end as good little liberals who are who are dependent on government largesse and believe the government can solve all of our problems the the lie is that college is going to make you rich and it's going to make you wealthy
and the truth is that college is going to put you in a serious amount of debt or waste several years of your life if you don't There's very little evidence to suggest that a college degree alone is likely to raise a given person's income, because college-educated people do out-earn non-college-educated people, but that's largely because there's an IQ gap between people who go to college and people who don't go to college.
I mean, just to put this as bluntly as possible, People who go to college on average have a higher IQ than people who do not go to college on average.
That doesn't mean everyone who doesn't go to college is stupid, obviously.
There are a lot of high school graduates who didn't graduate college who are incredibly smart.
Bill Gates didn't graduate college.
Jeremy Boring, who's the CEO of this company, did not graduate from college.
Jeremy's a really smart guy.
But on average, the reason that you see a gap between college graduates and non-college graduates is because, again, on average, people who graduate from college tend to be higher IQ than people who do not graduate from college.
But That does not mean that college makes you smarter.
It means that college is a sorting mechanism.
Oren Kass of the Manhattan Institute points out, the vast majority of community college enrollees drop out.
Fewer than 60% of students complete degrees with even six years at the schools where they first enroll.
That's at four-year colleges.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, four in ten recent graduates work non-degree requiring jobs.
That means there are a bunch of people who are working at Coffee Bean who graduated from college.
Do they actually have to go to college to work at Coffee Bean?
Of course not!
Okay, Oren Kast points out the bottom half of the earnings distribution for college grads, not just enrollees, but graduates, sits lower than the top half of earnings distribution for those with only a high school education.
In other words, higher-earning high school graduates do better than lower-earning college graduates, which makes a lot of sense.
If you're the higher-earning high school graduate, chances are you are a pretty high IQ guy who didn't go to college.
And if you are a lower-earning college graduate, chances are pretty good that you are a lower IQ college graduate who didn't actually have to go to college to work the job that you're working right now.
But the left keeps pushing everybody into college.
Why are they pushing everybody into college?
Because they keep lying about the idea that if you go to college, you're going to be rich coming out.
But it really does depend on major in a pretty significant way.
Here are the top 10 earning majors among graduates according to the Census Bureau and the American Community Survey.
Petroleum Engineering, Pharmaceutical Science and Administration, Metallurgical Engineering, Mining and Mineral Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and finally, Geological and Geophysical Engineering.
You notice anything in common about all those majors?
Yes, it's the word engineering.
It turns out when you major in something practical, because you're a smart person who's majoring in a marketable commodity, you're going to make money coming out of college.
Now, here are the top 10 lowest earning college graduating majors.
Are you ready for this?
Here we go.
Family and consumer science, drama and theater arts, shocker, elementary education, theology, visual and performing arts, teacher education, social work, studio arts, human services and community organization, and early childhood education.
In other words, the liberal arts, or at UCLA as we call them, the North Campus majors, those people make less money than the money people are making in engineering.
But the free college degree crowd want everybody to go to college and major in drama and theater arts and teacher education and early childhood education.
They don't urge everybody to go into engineering they're not urging everybody to go into a useful major in fact that's what government loans do government loans are specifically there to allow you to major in useless crap that is what government loans are there for because let's say that you're a high school graduate and let's say you got 1300 on your sat's you're a decent score you can go to a good school with a 1300 sat and let's say you have a choice between mechanical engineering and drama For some reason, you're into both of those.
So you decide, you know what?
I like drama better, but mechanical engineering looks like more of a career path.
Let's say that only private banks, only private lenders were willing to actually give you a loan.
No one would give you a loan to go into drama and theater arts.
No one.
You would not be able to get a loan for that because a college degree is not collateral.
It's not like a mortgage where the bank actually just gives you a loan against the value of your house.
There's no loan against the value of your college degree.
It's them betting on whether you're going to be successful career-wise enough for them to pay you back.
So you would never bet on a drama major.
You would bet on an engineering major if you are a bank.
But if you're the federal government, you don't make that bet.
If you're the federal government, it doesn't matter what you major in.
If you're the federal government, then what difference does it make whether you major in drama and theater arts or whether you major in mechanical engineering?
Which means that the government is subsidizing people to major in precisely the majors that are least likely to earn you money when you get out of college.
Okay, here's the reason this matters.
Because this suggests that Democrats, when they're talking about free college tuition, are not actually talking about increasing income trajectory.
What they're actually talking about is shoveling people into college to major in things that don't actually earn coming out the other side.
Now, why would they do that?
Two reasons.
One, it artificially lowers the unemployment rate because you have an enormous number of people who are now quote-unquote in the education system, so they don't actually have to have jobs.
And number two, it shovels an enormous quantity of cash to a bunch of their political allies.
Because here's the dirty little secret.
All the majors that actually earn are less politically biased than the majors that don't earn.
There's a study that came out in April of this year from Mitchell Langbert, Associate Professor of Business Management at Brooklyn College.
And the study is from the National Association of Scholars.
It compared the number of Democratic faculty for every Republican in 25 academic fields.
There was a sample size of over 5,000 professors.
So, guess which majors were the least politically biased in terms of the breakdown?
All the ones that earn.
All the ones that earn.
Okay, among engineering professors, there were 1.6 Democrats for every Republican.
You think, oh, well, that's a 60% imbalance.
I mean, that seems like a pretty major imbalance.
That is the lowest level of imbalance among any major, is 1.6 Democrats to every Republican, mainly because a lot of Democrats like to go into the education field, also because it's this sort of ivory tower mentality where everybody agrees with one another at these universities, but that's not supremely imbalanced.
1.6 Democrats for every Republican.
Again, which is the highest earning major.
Among chemistry professors, 5.2 Democrats for every Republican.
Economics professors, 5.5 Democrats for every Republican.
Professionals, 5.5.
Mathematics, 5.6.
In other words, all of the hardcore majors where you learn something and increase your income trajectory, you're subsidizing actual marketable commodities, not leftist professors.
Now, here's the imbalance in the useless majors, as I like to call them.
The majors in lesbian dance theory and sociology.
Here are the professor imbalances in these particular fields.
Among liberal arts professors, For communications degrees, 108 Democrats in communications compared with zero Republicans.
56 to 0 in anthropology, 70 to 1 in theology, 48.3 to 1 in English, 43.8 to 1 in sociology, 40.3 to 1 in art.
In other words, this is Democrats subsidizing a bunch of majors that are not marketable with your taxpayer dollars in order to keep all their friends employed and in order to shovel people into a university system that pushes their political values.
That's what we're talking about.
And so when you see people in the middle of the country who like Mike Rowe, for example, and work jobs that don't require a college degree, and they look with scorn on all of the educational pretensions of the highfalutin left, maybe the reason they're angry is because their taxpayer dollars are being sucked out of their pocket to be used as political cudgels on behalf of an entrenched interest group at the university level.
When people complain about the elites, these are the people that they are talking about.
These are the folks they're talking about.
Now, I want to talk a little bit more about corruption in statistics in just one second.
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Okay, so I want to talk about Skewed statistics in other arenas of American life in just one second.
But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
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So I'll answer all your questions tomorrow.
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I mean, are we doing the conversation tomorrow?
Yes.
No, it's the following Friday.
So it's a week from Friday.
We're doing the conversation.
When we do that, then you're going to be able to ask your questions and get all your questions answered by me, if you are a member.
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All righty, so let's talk about some other skewed statistics.
The other day, I was reading about this long piece in the New York Times Magazine about people who are living in poverty in the United States.
The basic suggestion being there is not enough of a social safety net in the United States.
The United States spends an insane amount of money on our social safety net on a per capita basis.
We do spend as much as European countries on our social safety net.
We spend an enormous quantity of cash on Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps and all the rest of these social welfare programs.
But according to Matthew Desmond, who's the author of a book called Evicted, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for it, basically having a job isn't enough in the United States.
The way that he gets to this answer is by playing with the stats.
Again, this just demonstrates again and again that elites in American society are willing to manipulate the stats in what I think is corrupt fashion in order to reach preordained political conclusions.
And that's true whether you're looking at college stats.
That is true certainly when you're looking Google search results, and it is also true when it comes to public policy issues.
Kevin Williamson has a great breakdown over at National Review of this piece.
He talks about the fact that when Democrats say that having a job in the United States is useless, that is eminently untrue.
Here's what Kevin Williamson writes.
According to Matthew Desmond, he tells the story of Vanessa Sullivan and her three children and their economic struggles.
Sullivan is a home health aide, a job for which she is paid between $10 and $14 an hour, depending on the reimbursement rate of the patient in question.
She works part-time between 20 and 30 hours a week.
Desmond writes the federal government estimates Sullivan would need to earn $29,420 to meet her family's basic needs.
This is written under the headline, Americans want to believe jobs are the solution to poverty.
They're not.
And Kevin Williamson says, well, aren't they?
If we assume an average wage of $12 an hour in the middle of that $10 to $14 an hour spread, then Sullivan would earn $24,000 a year by working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, which is what most people work.
I mean, we at this office work that Pretty much every year.
As Desmond notes, our welfare programs favor the employed, and as such, Sullivan would receive about $5,200 in earned income tax credit benefits, raising her total income, absent any other benefits, to $29,200, just a few dollars shy of that $29,420 estimate of her family's basic needs.
Which is to say, a job looks like a pretty good solution, if not a complete solution to poverty in her case, provided it's an actual full-time job.
So perhaps the headline should be amended, part-time jobs are not a solution to poverty.
But that isn't much of a headline, since not many people believe that part-time jobs are such a solution.
It will occur to some that the fathers of Sullivan's three children are out of the picture, for the most part.
One of them is dead of a gunshot wound after a stint in prison.
The other has contributed to his children's welfare, has been erratic child support payments, and a single trip to Chuck E. Cheese's, as Desmond reports.
What if that weren't the case?
Two $12-an-hour workers, married, say, working full-time jobs would bring in about $48,000 a year, or about 40% more than the median household income in Trenton, New Jersey, where Sullivan lives.
So maybe the headline instead should be amended to read, having two full-time earners in a household is actually a pretty good solution to poverty.
Or, if we want to get radical, marriage and full-time employment together are a pretty good solution to poverty.
Desmond gets that.
He reports that Sullivan and many others like her would prefer to work more hours than they do, but for many reasons they cannot.
He does not consider very carefully why that is.
It is difficult to look at Sullivan's situation and see a problem that is primarily economic in nature.
The wage on offer would, given different family circumstances, be sufficient to raise her and her children out of poverty, even in a low-skill, low-pay job.
Of course, having two parents working full-time with three children puts all sorts of stress on family life.
Having both of them working, one as a secretary, one as a janitor at a high school, with four children certainly did, it would still be a tough life.
But to return to a familiar theme, we must ask, compared to what?
There are all sorts of things to be said and debate to be had about welfare benefits, taxes, education, different treatment of income investment, and wage income, etc.
But does anyone really think that rearranging any of that is going to produce a world in which a part-time home health aide raising three children in New Jersey is not going to have a hard time?
And did anybody listen when conservatives were pointing out that the structure of the Affordable Care Act would give employers incentives to prefer part-time workers to full-time workers?
Or when your correspondent argued that federal and local policies intended to keep the price of houses high and rising inevitably are going to be hard on the poor?
Or when social conservatives pointed to the obvious link between single motherhood and poverty?
There are a million things we can and should be doing differently when it comes to helping people such as Vanessa Sullivan and her children, writes Kevin Williamson.
But, if anything, her case should point us toward exactly the kind of reforms conservatives have been arguing for.
Those that are oriented toward work and eventual self-sufficiency, and those oriented toward the much trickier business of trying to encourage the formation and preservation of intact families, which more and more seems to me to be the root of much of the dysfunction under consideration.
The reason I read at length from Williamson's column is, again, the left has a particular set of values.
They want to push those values by using government largesse and by lying about the stats.
That is true whether you're talking free college or whether you're talking welfare programs.
And it is a huge mistake to take all of that at face value.
Instead, you actually have to delve into the statistics to realize that there are entrenched political interests that are at the root of a lot of these problems.
And what Democrats are doing in many cases is simply serving those entrenched political interests.
Now, meanwhile, I know that you remember when everybody on the left was accusing President Trump of Russian collusion, mainly because they still are.
And it turns out that the Mueller investigation seems to sort of be falling apart in a lot of ways.
George Papadopoulos, whose malactivity supposedly led to the launch of the Mueller investigation, he was recently sentenced for lying to the FBI.
He got 14 days in jail, which suggests they really didn't have a lot on George Papadopoulos.
And then it turns out that the Russian honeypot, you know, the accusation was that there was this Russian woman who was going around honeypotting particular Republicans in order to get access on behalf of the Russian government.
It turns out she wasn't actually doing that.
So they still have her in jail on other charges.
But a lot of this looks a lot like botchery.
And unless they come out with some sort of clear and convincing evidence of actual Russian interference in the election at the behest of the Trump campaign, it's going to be very difficult to make that case.
There are those of us on the right who have said, let's wait for all the evidence to come out.
I am happy to wait for all the evidence to come out, but I don't have to wait for the evidence to come out when it comes to actual democratic collusion with foreign governments.
The evidence this week of democratic collusion with foreign governments comes courtesy of John Kerry.
Remember John Kerry?
Worst Secretary of State in American history.
Yes, worse than Hillary Clinton.
An absolute crap show of a Secretary of State, guy who helped negotiated the lies and prevarications of the Iran deal, which put Iran on the direct path toward a nuclear bomb without any sort of international disapproval.
So Secretary Kerry has a longstanding relationship with Javad Zarif, who is the foreign minister for Iran.
It goes all the way back before he was Secretary of State.
This is like a decade before, apparently, he knew Javad Zarif, according to a book by Human Majd, who frequently translates for Iranian officials.
So he has a longstanding relationship with a lot of Iranian foreign officials.
And he's been advocating since 2004, doing some sort of deal with the Iranians.
So he's obviously got a personal stake in all of this.
And he also is pursuing his own foreign policy on the side.
He went over to Iran and chatted with the Mullahs.
And there, he basically made a promise to them, which is, wait until a democratic administration, and then we'll get all of this straightened out.
It's kind of amazing how hypocritical it is for Democrats to engage in this sort of collusion on a regular basis and for no one to care.
Barack Obama was caught on a hot mic in 2012 saying to Dmitry Medvedev, who was then the deputy to Vladimir Putin, that if the Russians would lay off, he would give them flexibility after the election, and no one on the left gave a crap.
Now, it's John Kerry saying the same thing to the Iranian government, and still no one on the left gives a crap.
Here's John Kerry talking about his shadow diplomacy.
Every Secretary of State, former Secretary of State, continues to meet with foreign leaders, goes to security conferences, goes around the world.
We all do that.
And we have conversations with people about the state of affairs in the world in order to understand them.
I think everybody in the world is sitting around talking about waiting out President Trump.
John Kerry.
Is indeed incredibly connected with the Iranian government.
He likes the Iranian government.
And it is ridiculous to suggest that past secretaries of state were traveling abroad to make separate foreign policy on behalf of future administrations.
That's not accurate.
John Kerry was grilled on this by Dana Perino yesterday on Fox News.
He had no good answers for it.
The Trump administration would be frustrated to learn that a former Secretary of State or former official of the Obama administration aren't advising the Iranians or the Europeans on this, even if it's contrary to their position.
Let me be crystal clear.
When I met with the Iranians, the policy of the United States was still to be in the Iran deal because the President had not decided and had not pulled out.
Secondly, every Secretary of State, former Secretary of State, continues to meet with foreign leaders, goes to security conferences, goes around the world.
We all do that.
Okay, no, you don't all go around the world negotiating separate deals with terrorist governments.
That's not something that happens.
This is an open collusion, okay?
It's not even closeted collusion at this point.
It's an open collusion between Democrats and an enemy government to the United States.
And we're supposed to just take that as though that's normal?
We're supposed to pretend that all of that is fine?
You know, I hesitate to use this is how you got Trump, but kinda it is.
I mean, when you just violate every rule and then suggest that people on the other side are violating rules, it makes everybody so cynical about politics.
They say, just give us anybody who's not lying to us, no matter how crass they are, no matter what silly things they say.
John Kerry is a garbage human.
He's been a garbage human his entire career and the fact that he is still going around negotiating deals with an evil terror state is demonstration of that once more.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
So...
Things I like in the aftermath of the stabbing of a mainline Brazilian political candidate on the right.
I've been reading some books about Brazil because I want to get more educated on the topic.
There's a good book by a guy named Larry Roeder, who I believe used to write for Newsweek, called Brazil on the Rise.
It requires an update since like 2010, but it's a good explanation of Brazil's culture and its politics.
Suffice it to say that Brazil has been rife with governmental corruption for an awful long period of time.
And since 2010, when this book was published, it was taken over by radical leftists like Dilma Rousseff, who was then ousted for corruption and her deputy took over.
And now Brazil is in the midst of a very, very contentious election.
Brazil does not have an actual right-wing party in the American conservative sense of a right-wing party.
More nationalist parties that are somewhat more free market economically.
But Brazil has been a chaotic place politically, thanks to not only its history, but thanks to a legacy of socialist governments that stretches back to the death of the dictatorship in the 1980s.
It's worth reading about Brazil because Brazil has always been considered a country with enormous economic potential.
The only way that potential is really going to be unleashed on a major scale is if Brazil, which has friendly relations with all of its neighbors, Brazil which has enormous natural resources, is if Brazil begins to take seriously the injunctions of the American Constitution and take seriously economic liberty and personal property rights instead of the quasi-socialist policies that have corrupted its government for decades and decades and decades at this point.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So Planned Parenthood has a new president.
The new president is Leanna Nguyen.
And she's now cut a video on behalf of Planned Parenthood.
And this video demonstrates full scale how conflicting, ridiculous, morally bereft Planned Parenthood's actual mission is.
And I wanted to fight for our most vulnerable individuals on a bigger scale.
And that's why I became the health commissioner of Baltimore.
I see what's at stake.
Those who will be hurt the most are those who already bear the brunt of health disparities.
They are women of low income, of color.
She wants to help the most vulnerable, you understand?
She wants to help the most vulnerable.
The most vulnerable.
No, not the babies inside the women.
Let's not do that.
We're talking about poor women who have to kill babies in order so they can get ahead economically.
That's obviously the issue here.
It's pretty amazing stuff.
Honestly, for Wen to be as pro-abortionist, she's pretty astonishing considering she came from China with her parents when she was eight years old.
She said her family was dependent on Medicaid and food stamps and also on Planned Parenthood for health care.
And then she says she became an ER doctor because she never wanted to turn any patients away.
Presumably now she wants to help fund the killing of babies.
It is worth noting that the China that she came from and that her parents escaped had a one-child policy for legitimately decades that ended with the murder particularly of young, of unborn, the forced abortion of unborn Chinese females, which is why there's a massive imbalance between the number of males and females in Chinese society that actually leads to some geopolitical instability.
The fact that Planned Parenthood is constantly tweeting about how we have to protect the most vulnerable just demonstrates how inhumane Planned Parenthood is.
They don't even recognize the life of the child inside, and of course they can't, because if they did, they couldn't do what it is they do on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, other things that I hate.
So Michael Moore And the left has become increasingly unhinged.
One thing that I didn't like during the last election cycle, and you saw it from a lot of folks on the right, is this is the last election.
If Hillary Clinton wins, this is the last election there will ever be.
The country is at stake.
If we elect Hillary Clinton, the country will end.
Now, I think there's a strong case to be made against Hillary Clinton as president, for sure.
I disagreed with her on virtually 100% of her policies.
But it was not going to be the last election.
America is a pretty durable place.
Our Constitution is pretty durable.
She would have had a Republican Congress.
That doesn't mean she should have been elected president.
I never at any point encouraged people to vote for Hillary Clinton.
But I also thought it was ridiculous for people to suggest this is going to be the last election.
Democrats are now doing the same thing with Trump.
They say basically Trump could be the end of the country as we know it.
This sort of extreme rhetoric does Do you think that?
The last president of the United States?
It's possible.
It's less likely that we actually are going to have a social fabric to return to when all of this chaos is through.
Here's Michael Moore making the case that Trump could be the last president.
Do you think that?
The last president of the United States?
It's possible.
You really think that?
I think it's possible, absolutely.
I think that we have someone in the White House who has no respect for the rule of law, who dislikes democracy by an incredible degree, which doesn't make him really any that much different from other billionaires or CEOs because their businesses are not democracies.
They rule by fiat, they decide, they make the calls, and they don't like having anybody else having a say.
Yeah, I mean, if you really believe that the administration in power is going to thwart democracy itself, then you do have a duty to go get a gun at this point.
And Michael Moore is pretty anti-gun, has a duty to pick up a gun.
If he actually thinks that democracy is about to be thwarted...
And the tyrannical institution is about to be created at the top of American government.
They'll end elections.
Doesn't he sort of have a duty to put together an army?
You would think.
But he doesn't actually.
Nobody actually believes this, including stupid Michael Moore.
And he's not the only one.
Joy Behar, who continues to mouth off in braying-ass fashion, she basically suggests that Donald Trump should die, which is just a wonderful thing to say on mainstream American television.
This man will never apologize.
If he lives another 20 years, God forbid.
Not 20.
If he lives another 20 years.
Well, he could be like 105 by the time he... You know, we've got him here for the next...
Okay, so just well done there, Joy Behar.
God forbid he lives another 20 years.
When you wish death on your political opponents, that's usually a bad sign.
And then you wonder why it is that so much of American politics is above and beyond the norm.
You can't blame that all on Trump.
Joy Behar has been around quite a while and she's been saying stuff like this for a long time.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest, including the updates on the hurricane and all the rest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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