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Jan. 15, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:27
The Best A Person Of Unspecified Gender Can Get | Ep. 695
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Democrats defend Louis Farrakhan, President Trump brings burgers to the White House, and we get into Gillette's controversial commercial.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, happy birthday to me.
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But we begin today.
Before I get to the news.
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Alright, so the big news of the day yesterday is that the President of the United States loves hamburgers.
Not hamburgers.
Hamburgers.
Here's what happened.
Into the middle of a government shutdown, So the President of the United States hosted the Clemson Tigers, the national champion Clemson Tigers, at the White House.
I'm trying to remember the name of this room.
I've actually been in this room.
I know, name dropping a little bit.
I've actually been in this room.
President Trump is standing in front of a giant portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hangs on the wall in front of an enormous table.
Filled with burgers from, like, McDonald's and Wendy's.
It's just fantastic.
And you can see the waiters who are going through and lighting the candles on these massive candelabras.
You've got these fancy candelabras in this beautiful room with Abraham Lincoln looking on from behind and President Trump, who was born to do this.
This was the moment that Trump truly became president.
Standing in front of a table, piled high with $2 burgers, talking about his own generosity.
Just phenomenal.
What's your favorite thing here, Mr. President?
I like it all.
It's all good stuff.
Great American food.
And it will be very interesting to see at the end of this evening how many are left.
Do you prefer McDonald's or Wendy's?
That's a tough question.
If it's American, I like it.
It's all American stuff.
We have pizzas.
We have 300 hamburgers.
Many, many French fries.
All of our favorite foods.
I want to see what's here when we leave, because I don't think it's going to be much.
This is the most excited Trump has ever been about being president.
Like, he is so pumped up about this.
I don't know how many French fries, but I'm gonna count them later.
I'm counting them before and after to see how many French fries, precisely, we're eating.
So he tweeted out this morning one of the all-time great Donald Trump tweets.
Great being with the national champion Clemson Tigers last night at the White House.
Because of the shutdown, I served them massive amounts of fast food.
I paid over 1,000 hamburgers, et cetera.
Within one hour, it was all gone.
Great guys and big eaters.
He's like your grandmother.
You go over, she's like, eat some more food.
Eat it.
Eat all the food.
He's very excited because the Clemson Tigers, who are a bunch of 300-pound offensive linemen, ate a bunch of burgers.
Pretty spectacular stuff.
And I also love that he's bra... Notice how in clip one, he said he bought 300 hamburgers.
By the time he tweets it out this morning, the hamburgers have reproduced.
They're now 1,000 hamburgers.
And they're not hamburgers, they're hamburgers.
Which only makes sense if you're the Swedish chef.
Like, oh, it's the hamburgers!
So, President Trump, that is solid stuff.
Somebody... There's so many great tweets about... There's a great picture of President Trump posing in front of that Abraham Lincoln portrait.
In front of...
Behind this giant table of burgers, there's so many great, there's so many fantastic takes on this on Twitter today.
A couple of my personal favorites.
Somebody tweeted out, this looks like, it's like Willy Wonka at the Chocolate Factory, except it's the President at the White House with burgers.
Another one of my favorites.
Somebody tweeted out today that basically the President of the United States standing in front of a table of burgers piled high in front of a picture of Abraham Lincoln is what the alternative front page would look like in a dystopian future.
Like, if you went back to the future 2, there's the moment where Marty McFly realizes he's actually not in the normal future, he's in the dystopian future, because there's a giant tower of Biff.
It's kind of like that.
But what's hilarious about all of this is that all of this is funny, and all of this is, like, it's meaningless, right?
It's totally meaningless.
Like, the president spent some money on burgers, and then he patted himself on the back for spending, like, 600 bucks on burgers.
Let's be real about this.
If you buy 300 burgers from the local McDonald's, you spent about 700 bucks, okay?
This is not, like, massive quantities of generosity.
And the president patting himself on the back for that is very, very Trump.
But what's amazing is how crazy the left went.
So there was this meme that went around during the Obama presidency that the right was deeply, deeply upset when Barack Obama put on a tan suit.
Well, he mocked the tan suit.
I don't know if you remember this, but Barack Obama, in the middle of his presidency, he put on a suit that was very ugly.
It was like an Easter suit.
It was like a tan Easter suit.
And people were mocking him for it, but mostly just kind of ribbing him.
People on the left were genuinely upset that Donald Trump served hamburgers at the White House from fast food joints.
They're very offended by this.
He should have served foie gras.
That's what he should have paid for, for the Clemson Tigers.
So, the Washington Post fact-checked the President of the United States on his statement about burgers.
I kid you not.
There's a full-on fact-check from the Washington Post, done by Philip Bump.
President Trump's extravagant $3,000, $300 sandwich celebration of Clemson University.
And then they fact check what the president actually said about the- and they like chart out the table.
There's a full-on chart of the table showing where he put Big Macs, and chicken nuggets, and sauce, and filet-o-fish, and quarter pounders, and chicken sandwiches, and burgers, and burgers, and Whoppers.
I kid you not, this is all in the Washington Post.
And then they figured out the estimate of how many fries were actually on the table.
They figured an estimate of 200 large fries.
And then, this is the best part, they say, the grand total, according to our count, Trump spent about $2,900 on feeding the team.
A sixth of that is the fries alone, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
Half the cost was incurred at McDonald's alone.
And then, they get to the actual fact check.
So, the president said that they bought a thousand burgers for Clemson.
It was piled up a mile high, is something that Trump said.
Philip Bump fact-checked that.
He fact-checked at two inches each, a thousand burgers would not reach one mile high.
No bleep, Sherlock.
You think?
That's what we call just an overstatement.
That's what we call Basically just using normal human language in a normal human way.
The president was talking about how he had bought a lot of burgers and they were like a mile high.
But I guess they weren't exactly a mile high as it turns out that when you stack a couple of two-inch burgers together, that's not a mile high.
Thank you, Washington Post.
It does demonstrate we don't have a lot of real problems in this country, honestly.
If you are focused in on the president's inaccuracy with regard to how tall are the burgers that he bought at the White House stacked up together, Then the media may be missing the main message.
The Washington Post also ran a long piece today on their front page about how everybody was very upset that Trump turned the White House into a White Castle.
This is by Allison Chu.
When the Clemson football players entered the White House's opulent State Dining Room during their visit with President Trump on Monday, they were greeted by a sight many had likely never laid eyes on before.
In the center of the historic room that has hosted royalty, Foreign dignitaries and celebrities, a long mahogany table gleamed under the glow of an enormous golden chandelier.
A pair of ornate candelabras holding tapered white candles sat on the table amid numerous silver serving platters piled high with what Trump described as great American food.
Boxes of McDonald's Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, and Filet-O-Fish.
Sandwiches were stacked in neat rows next to pyramids of packaged salads.
The Wendy's girl and her wholesome grin decorated mounds of wraps.
Silver gravy boats overflowed with packets of dipping sauce for Chicken McNuggets.
I thought it was a joke one Clemson player could be overheard saying in a video shared on Twitter, accurately capturing many people's reaction to the president's earlier promise to serve college football's national champions items found on various dollar menus.
Only the meal was very real, and late night hosts and the internet had a lot to say about it.
Jimmy Kimmel, of course, said of all the crazy things Trump said and did over the weekend, this might be the craziest.
Yeah, okay, great.
Really, this is what you're going to spend your stress on?
This is really where you're going to put your focus, Washington Post?
It's so ridiculous.
On every level.
Look, it's ridiculous that this is a thing that happened.
It's ridiculous that President Trump was so gleeful about it.
And it's ridiculous that anybody cares.
Honestly, like, the idea that Trump is doing something deeply wrong by serving football players burgers at the White House is insane.
I love all these- By the way, I'm old enough to remember when people celebrated Democrats for being down-to-earth for eating at fast food places.
And I remember that Joe Biden and Barack Obama went to some fast food place and they sat down and the media were like, oh my god.
Look at them.
They are just so human, celebrities.
They're just like us.
And I recall when Hillary Clinton went to Chipotle, remember she ordered a burrito bowl, and the media were like, oh my goodness, look at her.
She's so genuine.
Hillary Clinton, focus testing whether she should have a burrito bowl at Chipotle or just an actual burrito at Chipotle.
But when Trump does it, then it's like, oh, well, Trump, what a dummy.
What a dummy.
So, well done, media, for covering that which truly matters and demonstrating that you are not at all out of touch with normal Americans who, it turns out, eat millions and millions of McDonald's burgers every single day.
All right, meanwhile, controversy continues to dog the Republican Party surrounding Steve King.
So Steve King, as you recall, is a Republican congressman from Iowa.
He has said a lot of things in the past that were interpretable one of two ways.
In a way that made him look like a racist, and in a way that did not make him look like a racist.
And then he said something over the weekend, late last week, that was just outright racist, in which he questioned Why it was that people were upset with the terms white supremacist and white nationalist.
And this drew the fire of top Republicans from the Senate and from the House as well.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, he slammed Steve King.
He said that his comments were unworthy of his elected position.
A significant statement, though, coming tonight from the leader over here in the Senate, Mitch McConnell.
He stopped just short of calling for him to resign.
He says in a statement, in part, quote, Rep.
King's statements are unwelcome and unworthy of his elected position.
If he doesn't understand why white supremacy is offensive, he should find another line of work.
Okay, and then Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, came out and he said something very similar.
He said that Steve King should probably resign.
I don't think there's a room for Steve King's comments in polite company, or in the Republican Party, or for that matter, in Congress.
I think you ought to step aside, and I think Congress ought to make it very clear he has no place there.
Okay, and we'll get to Senator Tim Scott in just one second.
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Okay, so Tim Scott, senator from South Carolina, the sole Republican black senator.
He was on Fox News yesterday talking about Steve King's comments, and here was his take.
Steve King's comments are antithetical to what is, in fact, the American dream.
The durability of the American dream is the strength of the American spirit.
And what he did was he struck against the American spirit.
So he weakened the spirit.
And when that happens, our nation is less competitive globally.
Okay, so Tim Scott is not wrong about any of this.
The point that I'm making is that Steve King says something really bad and all of his committee assignments were removed.
So there are now three Republican Congress people who have no committee assignments.
Two of them are under indictment.
The other one is Steve King.
So the Republican caucus punishing Steve King in a very real way.
He's being primary.
He probably will lose that primary as he should.
A lot of us have already maxed out for his primary opponent based on the comments that he made.
But, according to the left, this is never enough.
Because the truth is that everyone in the Republican caucus is like Steve King.
Why?
Because Steve King agrees with a lot of the Republican caucus on certain legislative priorities.
So, in other words, if somebody agrees with you on legislative priorities, but they also happen to believe some really terrible things, then this means that you also believe those really terrible things, even if you disassociate from that person's terrible belief and that person.
As an example, there's a guy named Adam Serwer over at The Atlantic.
He writes an incredibly intellectually dishonest piece today talking about President Trump and saying that President Trump is just like Steve King.
I'm going to get to that in just one second.
So here's what he says.
He says,
His attempts to expel undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to public safety and their American family members, his elevation of an ostentatious partisan to the Supreme Court, his implementation of a policy of child abuse as a deterrent to illegal immigration, his abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, his Justice Department's green lighting of police abuses, his attempts to weaken the political power of minorities targeted by his policies, and other acts of state violence and disapproval against religious and ethnic minorities, too numerous to name.
All of them follow the underlying logic of Trump's response to Charlottesville, that extremism in pursuit of white power is no vice, and defending the rights of those who threaten that power is no virtue.
So in other words, if there is a person in your caucus who declares that they have no problem with white supremacy, this means your entire agenda is clearly driven by white supremacy.
And I love that Surwer just links together Trump's immigration policy and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
What does the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court have anything to do with white supremacy or white nationalism?
Nothing.
And then you wonder why folks on the right grant the benefit of the doubt to people on the right when it comes to statements they make that can be interpreted one of two ways.
It's because people on the left spend all day, every day, calling everything remotely conservative racist.
If you keep doing that over and over and over, it's going to lead normal conservatives to immediately, in knee-jerk fashion, defend things that are vaguely worded, saying, okay, well, you guys are just interpreting that in the wrong possible way, because that's what you do with everything.
You do with everything.
You suggest that appointing Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is racist.
You suggest that the Justice Department treating the police departments around the nation without an iron fist, that that is racist too.
So if this guy says something big and you treat it as racist, I'm going to take that with a grain of salt.
Now, maybe it turns out the person ends up being a racist.
Maybe it turns out that Steve King ends up being a racist.
But when you first say things, am I supposed to take it at face value?
When you legitimately say everything is racist?
But here's the point.
When new evidence arises, Republicans change their view.
When new evidence arises, then Steve King is punished.
And the Republican caucus react.
You know what has not happened inside the Democratic caucus?
Any sort of reaction whatsoever to the open anti-Semitism of some of its members.
None.
It's truly incredible.
Folks like Ilhan Omar, who has said that Israel is deceiving the world.
You have folks like Rashida Tlaib, who, as I mentioned yesterday, invited an actual terrorist supporter to her swearing-in.
This guy actually supports Hezbollah openly.
You've got Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who meets and dances with anti-Semite Al Sharpton, a guy who helped incite riots in Crown Heights against Jews, who once called Jews diamond merchants and white interlopers, and ranted, if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.
Sharpton is still a member in respect in the Democratic Caucus.
There are 21 different members of the Democratic Caucus who have met with and taken pictures of Louis Farrakhan.
None of them have disassociated from Louis Farrakhan, so far as I'm aware.
None.
And Democrats aren't forced to do it.
It's really amazing.
Now, there are a few journalists.
Jake Tapper at CNN has asked Democrats about this before.
But Democrats have never actually attempted to cleanse the anti-Semitism from their ranks.
Why?
Because Jews are not part of the intersectional mission.
Being anti-black, you know, that obviously is banned inside the Democratic caucus, as well it should be.
But, being anti-Jewish, not so much, because Jews are just normal white people, except very successful, even more successful than normal white people, so they've benefited from white privilege, which means that Jews are not historic victims, which means that if they're the victims of anti-Semitism now, we simply ignore it.
Because it's not a reflection of an underlying American political problem.
It's really incredible.
Tamika Mallory, the Women's March leader, she was on The View yesterday.
And she was treated with kid gloves by everybody on The View with regard to Louis Farrakhan and her association with Louis Farrakhan, whom she has called the greatest of all time.
Except for Meghan McCain, who asked her the only question that most members of the media will never ask a Democrat, which is, why don't you just condemn his anti-Semitism?
And watch as Tamika Mallory tries to slip out of it.
It's incredible.
The Women's March unequivocally condemns anti-Semitism, bigotry... You condemn Farrakhan's remarks about Jewish people.
Yes, and we have repeatedly... I don't speak for Jewish people, but I think I'm just confused.
These remarks are... I mean, it goes on death to Israel over and over again.
We did not make those remarks.
But you're associating with a man who does, publicly.
I don't agree with many of Minister Farrakhan's statements.
You condemn them?
I don't agree with these statements.
At the end of the day, you won't condemn it.
No, no, no.
Right.
And you can see Meghan McCain nodding her head.
You won't condemn it.
Because she won't condemn it.
Because Democrats will never condemn any other member of the intersectional coalition they feel will forward their goals.
In other words, racism and anti-Semitism on the part of leftists are totally, it's totally fine, according to vast swaths of the Democratic Party.
On the right, at least we try to police.
Maybe we fail in policing sometimes.
I'll admit that the right sometimes fails to police properly.
But at least we try.
And it is a point of high irritation to me that whenever the right cleanses somebody from their ranks, whenever the right reacts to people like Steve King in the proper fashion, that the left's first move is, well, that Steve King was ever in your caucus in the first place is kind of telling, don't you think?
You know what's more telling to me?
What's more telling to me is that the Democratic Party is more than happy to accept open anti-Semites into its ranks, cheer them, call them the fresh faces of the Democratic Party, and pretend like nothing is wrong and that the real discrimination exists on the right.
It's absolutely maddening.
When will the media start asking Democrats to actually condemn Louis Farrakhan?
When will the media start asking Democrats why it's totally fine to appear three chairs down from Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin's funeral?
Why don't they ask Bill Clinton that question?
Why?
I promise you, if David Duke showed up at somebody's funeral and a Republican were standing three chairs down, that Republican would never stop being asked about it.
But apparently, in Democrat world, none of this is relevant.
You never have to worry about being discriminatory in any way.
So the Republicans are doing the right thing on Steve King.
But you should notice, that for the left, doing the right thing is never enough.
Because it's not really about doing the right thing.
It betrays ill motivation, when your only goal is to put your boot in the face of someone trying to do the right thing.
It is bad motivation.
You know, I tried to hesitate, honestly, I've been working.
I'm trying.
Do not attribute bad motivation to people because it's a bad way of doing politics.
It means you can't have an honest conversation with folks.
But it's hard for me not to see the bad motivation when somebody tries to do the right thing and people on the left kick them in the teeth directly, meanwhile patting on the back some of the worst people on earth.
It's hard for me not to see the bad motivation there.
In just a second, I want to talk a little bit more about acceptable discourse on the left versus acceptable discourse on the right.
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Okay, so speaking of discourse, it's totally allowed on the part of the left, but not on the part of the right.
We need to talk about Stacey Abrams.
So Stacey Abrams, who is the gubernatorial candidate in Georgia who lost a very narrow election that should have been a blowout.
She said a lot of very extreme things during her campaign.
She implied after her campaign that she had the election stolen from her, which is not true.
Then she made the claim that illegals should be allowed to vote.
Here's what she had to say.
What is your view about some municipalities, like San Francisco, who have decided that it's okay for some non-citizens to vote in local elections?
I'm not arguing for it or against it, but I will say, having been deputy city attorney, the granularity of what cities decide is so specific as to, I think, allow for people to be participants in the process without it somehow undermining our larger democratic ethic that says that you should be a citizen to be a part of the conversation.
So in some cases you would be supportive of non-citizens voting?
I wouldn't oppose it.
Okay, so I'm wondering why exactly that wouldn't apply on the state or federal level, considering that illegal immigrants have a stake in the American bargain as well.
Presumably they're living in the United States.
Democrats are very eager to have illegal immigrants vote in elections.
That doesn't mean that they want to be in favor of voter fraud, per se.
But it does mean that they have no moral problem with allowing people who do not actually pay taxes in the United States to vote in our elections.
She made some other comments in this interview that were quite fascinating.
She talked about how the shifting demographics of Georgia were shifting in her favor.
And you'll notice this sort of rhetoric is commonplace on the part of folks on the left.
They will say things.
They were saying things, Obama would say things like this from 2008 to 2016.
He would constantly say things like, there's a new day dawning in America because the demographics are shifting.
Because there are more minorities, there are fewer white folks, because the demographics themselves are shifting.
Now, that is dubious, because the reality is that ideas cross racial boundaries.
This is the essence of the American bargain and the essence of Western civilization and the Enlightenment ideal, is that your ethnicity does not decide how you think.
And so you can have 45% of Hispanics in the state of Texas voting for Greg Abbott for governor of Texas.
You can see a heavy percentage of Hispanics in Florida voting for Rick Scott for Senate in Florida.
Because it turns out that people are not defined by their racial characteristics or ethnic characteristics.
But Democrats have been talking for legitimately years about the idea that if there are more blacks and more Hispanics as a percentage of the population, that means they are more likely to win elections.
And then people on the right, right, people like Steve King, will pick up that mantle and they will make the same argument and they'll say, well, this is why we shouldn't have as much immigration from black and brown countries.
And you say, well, that's racist.
And you're right, that is racist.
That's silly.
Of course, we shouldn't bar people by ethnicity.
Of course, that's un-American to bar people by ethnicity.
It is similarly un-American to suggest that people are defined by their racial categories.
You can't simultaneously say that it's fine for the left to talk about how demographics are going to decide our future, but it's totally wrong for people on the right to say that demographics are going to decide our future.
Demographics, when it comes to race and ethnicity, are not going to decide our future.
The better argument, you would hope, is going to decide our future.
But the point that I'm making is that this rhetoric on the part of people on the left is considered totally acceptable.
Racism of intersectionality is totally fine on the left.
Racism that suggests that you are inherently defined by your grouped characteristics, totally cool on the left.
On the right, when that same argument is made, we recognize it for what it is, which is racism.
But the left gets away with this sort of stuff all the time.
I mean, here's another example.
So there's a piece today in the New York Times called, it's by a woman named Blair Dukesne, an investment advisor.
It says, consider firing your male broker.
Now imagine for a second that this piece were titled, consider firing your female broker.
You think that ever sees the light of day in the New York Times?
You think there's ever a piece in the New York Times, consider firing your female firefighters?
You think that ever happens?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Because people would basically recognize that for what it is, which is thinly veiled sexism.
The basic standard for hiring a stockbroker is not sex.
The basic standard for hiring a stockbroker is performance.
But this article makes the case that women, on average, outperform men in investments, and thus you should invest with women.
Which is an amazing statement, right?
I mean, that's a statement that you would not apply to any other area of American life with the sexes reversed.
You would not say that men, on average, outperform women at spatial tasks.
So you should never hire a woman to organize your office.
Right?
You wouldn't make that argument.
You'd say, well, is she good or is she not good?
But this is the case that is being made in the pages of the New York Times.
It says, when people picture a financial advisor, they typically think of a gray-haired guy who looks like Bernie Madoff, or perhaps a younger man like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Roughly less than 20% of financial advisors are women, a number that has barely budged for the past two decades despite rising gender equity in other fields.
But what has this overwhelmingly male workforce accomplished?
Banks and brokerage firms consistently rank rock bottom on lists of the most beloved companies and brands, and not by coincidence.
In 2015, the Department of Labor estimated that the cost of conflicted investment advice for retirement savers is more than $17 billion per year.
Then there are the roots of the financial crisis last decade.
So, it's about men.
Men created the financial crisis.
When something bad happens in society, it's men.
When something good happens in society, it's women.
Never mind that we're all just people, and maybe it's just people making bad judgments.
While neither sex is immune to shoddy behavior, says this columnist, research has shown that female investors are more likely than men to focus on a family's financial goals over their own absolute investment performance.
A study by Warwick Business School concluded that women outperformed men at investing by 1.8%.
For one, women avoid lottery-style trading and are more likely to focus on shares with good track records or on overlooked yet productive funds.
In one of my favorite papers, Boys Will Be Boys, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Terrence Odeon at UC Berkeley and Brad Barber at UC Davis found that accounts owned by women outperformed those of men because women traded a whopping 69% less than men and incurred less in trading costs.
Why did the men trade more?
The research indicates men regularly exhibit overconfidence in their ability.
So the idea here is that you should invest with women because women are hardwired naturally to be better at investment.
Which cuts against the argument, really.
It cuts against the argument that women are naturally the same as men.
Either women are better at investments for natural reasons or they are not.
This columnist concludes, Harvard's Kennedy School found the use of blind auditions for symphony orchestras increased the likelihood of female musicians being selected by as much as 30% to the shock of many conductors who did not believe they were biased.
The percent of female musicians in the five highest ranked orchestras in the nation increased by 15% over a 23 year period.
Similarly, innovative measures might be necessary to bring about changes in the business world.
By the way, I'm fine with this idea of basically blind music auditions, because who cares what your musician looks like?
I'm fine with the idea that you shouldn't know the sex of your investment advisor, you should just base it on performance.
I like metrics-based tests.
What I don't like is the idea that the metrics don't matter, that you take a woman over a man without regard to individual data.
I love this.
It says, whatever the path taken, the future of finance should be female.
It wouldn't just be more fair.
If the years of data are any indication, it's a future in which all of us would make more money.
Find me a good argument against that.
I mean, the argument is that women represent a vastly smaller percentage of total investment advisors.
I don't know what your statistical sampling is like.
I don't know the period that you're looking over.
I don't know whether women are investing in different types of funds or why they're investing in different types of funds.
I don't have enough data to know that women are naturally better at investments.
But if women are, on average, naturally better at investments, then I would expect that there will be a market move toward female investors, and that will be fine.
But the notion that right now we should be moving in that direction from the left is totally okay.
If I were to say the same thing from the right in any area of American life, I would immediately be called discriminatory.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about President Trump and NATO.
There's a story from the New York Times suggesting that Trump seriously considered us pulling out of NATO last year.
I'm gonna talk about that in just a second.
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In other news, the New York Times reports today that President Trump considered pulling out of NATO in 2018.
According to the New York Times, senior administration officials told the New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
You'll recall the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in the aftermath of World War II as a mutual defense organization directed against Soviet aggression in Europe.
The main goals of NATO were to keep the Soviets, were to keep the Germans down, keep the Soviets out, and keep the Americans in.
That was the basic statement.
Because they didn't want the Germans rising again and providing a continental conflict, they didn't want the Soviets encroaching into Europe, and they wanted to keep the Americans as the mutual protection force.
NATO has only been invoked in the past 30, 40 years once, with regard to the coalition defense of the United States and Afghanistan, actually.
Trump has always been anti-NATO.
He's talked before about how he thinks that NATO entangles us in alliances that are not good for us, and how people aren't picking up their fair share of defense, and we're picking up their defense bills, and all the rest.
So it's no secret that Trump has been at the very best mixed on NATO.
But now the New York Times is reporting that Trump seriously considered pulling out.
Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.
In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said, Mr. Trump told his top national security officials he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.
Now, the truth is, it is not a drain on the United States.
The fact that NATO has a mutual defense clause means that we are spending less on defense.
If, in fact, we did not have NATO, You would see Russian aggression into the Baltics, which would necessitate probably a European war in which the United States would be involved and spend an awful lot of money.
When the United States was involved in the Yugoslav War in the 1990s, it was not exactly cheap.
War is not a cheap endeavor.
At the time, Mr. Trump's national security team, including Jim Mattis, then Secretary of Defense, and John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, scrambled to keep American strategy on track without mention of withdrawal that would drastically reduce Washington's influence in Europe and could embolden Russia for decades.
Now the president's repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries about national security efforts amid growing concern about Mr. Trump's efforts to keep his meetings with Mr. Putin secret from his own aides and an FBI investigation into the administration's Russia ties.
In other words, there is no news here.
This news is a year old.
And pretty open, right?
I mean, we all knew that President Trump was saying these silly things about NATO.
We were all aware of it.
He said them quite publicly.
So what exactly is the New York Times breaking?
Nothing.
But people are going nuts anyway.
Well, Trump considered a thing and then didn't do it.
Ooh!
I'm much more concerned about what a president does than what a president thinks.
Even what a president says publicly is more important than what a president says privately, if it never sees action.
Because, who cares?
So he said some stuff to Jim Mattis, and Jim Mattis was like, that's a dopey idea, and Trump was like, okay.
Why is that news?
When Trump says it publicly, then it emboldens Russia.
Then it makes our allies feel uncomfortable.
But this New York Times article makes our allies feel more uncomfortable than anything Trump said privately to members of his own administration.
It's why leaks are really dangerous.
It's why leaks from the White House actually impact policy.
But the eagerness to smear Trump as a Russian plant by saying that he considered a policy he didn't actually effectuate is pretty amazing.
He is the president.
He could have done it.
If Trump were a Russian plant, don't you think that Trump would have just pulled out of NATO?
Like, pulled out, regardless of what his advisors had to say.
After all, his bosses in the Kremlin would have told him to do so, and he just would have done it.
I think we ought to wait until Trump actually makes a move for us to condemn a move that he didn't make.
I mean, come on.
Trump is rightly upset with all of these implications that he's a Russian agent.
He was asked about all of this yesterday by the press.
He said, no, of course I never worked for Russia.
This is absurd.
I never worked for Russia.
And you know that answer better than anybody.
I never worked for Russia.
Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it's a disgrace that you even ask that question.
Because it's a whole big fat hoax.
It's just a hoax.
Okay, so he says this, and then he backs that up with the fact that his new Attorney General nominee, William Barr, the guy who's going to oversee the end of the Mueller investigation, he has said openly and clearly that Mueller's investigation should be allowed to complete itself without outside interference.
His opening statement that he's supposed to give today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he says it is vitally important to let the Special Counsel reach the end of his investigation on Russia's interference with the 2016 campaign.
He says, I believe it is in the best interest of everyone, the President, Congress, and most importantly, the American people, that this matter be resolved by allowing the Special Counsel to complete his work.
I believe it is vitally important that the Special Counsel be allowed to complete his investigation.
I have the utmost respect for Bob and his distinguished record of public service.
That's the person Trump is nominating for his AG.
So where's the evidence of obstruction?
Anyone?
You got any shred of it?
Because I haven't seen any of it.
That's not stopping people from jabbering anyway, because obviously they're going to continue to back a case they don't actually have evidence for.
Okay.
Meanwhile, the judiciary has gone off its rocker in its attempts to stop Trump.
They've left behind the Constitution and basic legal interpretation long ago.
There are a couple of judicial rulings that have come down in the last 48 hours that are just nuts.
One of them upholds the Obamacare mandate on contraceptives.
So, the Obama administration, you'll recall, took a vague piece of legislation, Obamacare, and then they passed down a regulation in which they claimed that it was incumbent on every business in the United States, including religiously owned businesses and religious institutions, to provide for healthcare coverage that included abortion and contraceptives.
And in Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court struck that down for closely held corporations.
Well, the Trump administration came in and they rewrote the regulation.
They said, OK, well, not just closely held corporations.
Also, anybody who's religious who doesn't want to violate their own religious scruples doesn't have to provide contraceptive coverage.
A judge struck that down on the basis of nothing.
On the basis of nothing.
Because the judge just happened to like Obamacare.
And now we have another such ruling that broke this morning.
According to the Washington Post, a federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration's addition of a citizenship question in the 2020 census.
The president does have essentially plenary power over the census.
The census is one of the powers of the executive branch.
And there's nothing illegal about asking people their citizenship status.
I mean, wouldn't that be good data?
Why is it that so many people on the left don't even want to know how many illegal immigrants are in the country?
Could it be the number is far larger than we have been led to believe by folks in the media and on the left?
According to the Washington Post, in the first major ruling on the controversial question, U.S.
District Court Judge Furman of New York's Southern District Court ordered the administration to stop its plans to add the question to the survey without curing the legal defects identified in his opinion.
This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration's attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities.
I don't understand how it's weaponizing the census to ask people their immigration status.
It's not like the federal government is going to have an ICE agent next to the census worker.
It's not like the census worker asks somebody, are you an illegal immigrant?
And the person goes, yeah.
And the person immediately speed dials ICE.
And the truck pulls up and drags them back to Guatemala or something.
That's not what's going on here.
Plaintiffs in the trial include 18 states and several cities and jurisdictions along with civil rights groups.
Opponents of the question say it will reduce response rates in immigrant communities and make the constitutionally mandated decennial survey more costly and less accurate.
So they say people are going to avoid participating in the census because they're afraid that they're going to be deported.
Well, so?
I don't understand how that's illegal.
How is it illegal for us to ask about legal status just because people are going to avoid?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
I mean, we have Bureau of Justice Statistics stats about people's criminal status.
Seems like you'd have a pretty strong incentive not to comply with the BJS when they come seeking statistical information.
We don't say it's illegal to ask prison officials about all of this.
Pretty incredible stuff.
The judiciary has run roughshod, roughshod over any semblance of their legal role in the system.
In the Federalist Papers, I think it's Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton talks specifically about what happens when the judiciary becomes a political body.
He says it would actually remove the reason for there being a separate judiciary if the judiciary were to act in this way.
That has not stopped the judiciary from acting in precisely this way.
It's really ugly and it's really terrible.
Meanwhile, speaking of illegal activity, there's a lot of talk over the last 48 hours about the possibility of TSA officials striking.
In the New York Times, author Barbara Ehrenreich and former labor official Gary Stevenson actually called on the employees of the Transportation Security Administration to strike.
That's illegal, okay?
If you are a public service worker in the process of protecting taxpayers, you do not have the legal right to strike.
You work for the government.
You work for the taxpayer.
You don't work for the employer, like a private employer.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Stevenson say the time has come for a genuine old-fashioned strike, one with picket lines, chants, quick impulses, and the power to reignite the traditional fighting spirit of American labor.
First of all, if that happens, then Trump should fire everybody and hire scabs.
Second of all, Federal law is not vague on this in any sense.
Jim Garrity points this out.
He says, an individual may not accept or hold the position in the government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he participates in a strike or asserts the right to strike against the government of the United States or is a member of an organization of employees of the government of the United States or of individuals employed by the government of the District of Columbia that he knows asserts the right to strike against the government of the United States.
You're not even allowed to be a member of a group that says that they might strike.
Federal employees take an oath declaring, I am not participating in any strike against the government of the United States.
That's not stopping folks on the left from calling on the TSA to strike, simply to increase the pain that travelers feel, so that presumably they'll be more angry at President Trump.
This is the latest public union strike that we have seen, or proposed public union strike.
There's one going on in Los Angeles right now, where tens of thousands of teachers have walked off the job in violation of law.
This is why public sector unions are a disaster area.
You should not be allowed to unionize against the federal government.
You should not.
Your pay is set by legislation.
Your pay is not set by negotiation between you and a school board you elect.
It's a corrupt bargain in the first place.
And the fact that so many folks on the left are eager about public sector unions demonstrates that they see the government as a giant piggy bank.
They see the government as a giant grab bag of cash that they can stick their hand into at any available moment, and then they can use that money to re-elect the same people who are going to be negotiating with them.
They want to use government employment as an interest group.
So if they're going to use government employment as an interest group, if it's now an interest group, if working for the government is all about increasing the size of the government, then why exactly should Republicans go along with anything to end the government shutdown?
If it turns out that employment in the government is first and foremost just a way of paying off Democratic political constituencies, what's the political interest Republicans have in ending the shutdown?
Presumably very little.
Maybe Democrats forget about that when they're in the middle of a shutdown negotiation.
These shutdowns will end.
They will end.
But striking in the middle of a shutdown so that you can presumably make travelers feel the pain.
Not only is it illegal, it's bad policy.
And it shows why we should create a right-to-work situation inside the federal government, not just on the state level.
Alrighty, it's time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
There's been a lot of talk on the right and the left about IQ and intelligence.
And I am not averse to discussing the IQ measures.
I'm not averse to discussing what it means, how somebody scores on IQ.
I think that it's an important data point in deciding whether a disparity is discriminatory.
Meaning that if somebody says that One particular person has been discriminated against on the basis of race, for example, and it turns out that person of any race has a lower IQ than the person of another race.
Well, by an objective metric, it's not discrimination on the basis of race anymore, it's discrimination on the basis of IQ.
With that said, there's a lot of faith placed in IQ tests that seems unjustified.
Now, the IQ test is a rough metric for a certain number of variables.
The IQ test will tell you how well you concentrate, it sometimes tells you how well you can compute statistics quickly, how quickly you grasp concepts, but it doesn't necessarily say how deeply you grasp concepts.
It's good at determining who, on a very broad level, who is less intelligent and who is more intelligent, but it doesn't correlate all that highly with what they call greatness, meaning life success.
IQ doesn't necessarily correlate all that highly with earnings power.
In other words, for every IQ point that you gain, that doesn't mean that your earnings power goes up.
It doesn't mean that if you have a 165, you will, by necessity, be earning more than a guy with a 120.
There's a good book called Ungifted, Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman called The Truth About Talent, Practice, Creativity, and the Many Paths to Greatness.
It's important to remember all of this because in a time when people are sort of suggesting that America is breaking down along IQ lines, that America is breaking down where the people with high IQs are going to do great, And people with low IQs are basically screwed.
This book makes the case that that's not really true, that there are a bunch of different skill sets that are involved in human interactions and boiling that down to a simple number and then suggesting that that simple number decides everything is an overstatement of the power of IQ.
So IQ is a useful metric.
It can be an effective metric in particular areas, but it is not the totality of human intelligence or skill or talent.
And how many musicians have made an enormous amount of money despite being dum-dums?
It's a very different skill set being a scientist than being a performer, for example.
It's a very different skill set being a teacher than being a researcher.
And not all of these categories are easily covered by a simple IQ test.
And that's coming from somebody who is generally warm toward IQ tests.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so, the most important thing that I hate today.
Gillette put out an ad.
This is a really, really stupid ad.
This ad is all about how men have created a crisis of masculinity in America.
That men have trained their boys to be bad.
That men are somehow responsible for all of the ills in American society.
Here's a little bit of Gillette, which makes its money off of men.
Shaving.
Which, by the way, shaving is a gender construct.
His shaving is- that's something that society has placed on you.
So if we really want to get rid of the gender construct, we should put Gillette out of business.
Nobody should shave.
Men, women, nobody.
Just let your natural body hair grow free, Gillette.
Why can't you get over your own gender biases, Gillette?
In any case, Gillette runs a commercial all about toxic masculinity in order to virtue signal to the social justice warrior crowd.
Bullying.
The Me Too movement against sexual harassment.
Toxic masculinity.
Is this the best a man can get?
Is this the best a man can get?
Is it?
We can't hide from it.
It's been going on far too long.
Who's the daddy?
What I actually think she's trying to say.
boy who's been bullied.
It's been going on far too long.
And then we see men on TV sexually harassing women and boys watching.
Shut it off.
Who's the daddy?
What I actually think she's trying to say.
Making the same old excuses.
Boys will be boys.
Boys will be boys.
Okay, can you pause it there for a second?
So the idea here is that all men are sitting by saying boys will be boys when boys do bad things.
And there are a bunch of images here that just don't make no sense.
Have you ever been at a party where one boy is beating the living hell out of another boy and they're like seven?
And all the fathers are standing around by the barbecues going boys will be boys?
And there are certain areas in which boys are boys.
They are rambunctious.
They are aggressive.
They tend to fight each other more.
All of that's true.
But I have never remotely seen a situation where two boys are beating the crap out of each other, and the fathers are just standing around going, you know, boys will be boys.
You know how fast the dad steps in and stops that stuff?
Like, immediately.
And then I love this little scene that they've got of a man in an office building putting his hand on a woman's shoulder and saying, what I think she means is... Because that's totally equivalent to sexual harassment.
Maybe she didn't say something.
Maybe she said something dumb.
I mean, like we didn't see the rest of that conversation.
So the assumption is that men are constantly telling women to pipe down because they have to mansplain.
But a lot of cases of quote-unquote mansplaining, I mean, frankly, I mean, not to play into sexist stereotypes, but if we're going to talk about mansplaining, I've been in many, many more scenarios at a dinner party where the woman is womansplaining what the man just said.
And this happens all the time, all the time, because men are dunderheads and men say dumb stuff.
And then their wives have to step in and say, well, you know, Bob, I think what you really meant to say was, because when people say things that are dumb, other people want to explain away the things they said that are dumb.
But anytime a man, anytime a man says this to a woman now, it must be that it's immediately sexist.
And then you've got a bunch of men standing by the barbecues saying, boys will be boys, because that's what men have been doing for generations, is just shying, pretending that toxic masculinity and toxicity is no problem.
It's been too much male presence that has destroyed America.
That's really the message of this Gillette commercial, and it continues along these lines.
And then we get clips of Anna Kasparian from The Young Turks.
Come on.
And there will be no going back.
Because we, we believe in the best in men.
Men need to hold other men accountable.
Smile, sweetie.
Come on.
To say the right thing.
To act the right way.
Bro, am I cool?
Am I cool?
I think that's my favorite part of the commercial, is a good-looking girl walks down the street and a guy goes, oh-ho.
And another guy goes, hey, dude, not cool.
You cannot find that girl attractive.
Very bad.
I mean, if you walk up to her and you ask her for her phone number, immediately you are a part of rape culture now.
This commercial, which lumps in masculinity with toxic masculinity, as though it's been fathers inculcating toxic masculinity, is sheer nonsense.
You want to know what has created serious problems in American society?
It's a lack of men.
Over presence of men.
It's been dearth of men that has created massive problems in American society.
Today, according to the US Census Bureau, some 23% of American children live with a single mother.
That percentage has tripled since 1960.
As of 2012, 55% of black kids and 31% of Hispanic kids live with one parent, predominantly the mother.
And are they getting a male presence at school?
No.
It turns out 76% of teachers are female.
80% of social workers are female.
At the same time, toxic masculinity has risen.
So maybe it's that in the absence of a strong male presence providing guidance to young men, what you end up with is toxic masculinity.
Because it turns out, if you're getting your male influence from other teenagers, teenagers are stupid and more aggressive and they make worse decisions.
So it's not that there have been too many fathers inculcating bad ideas in their kids.
It's that there have been too few fathers around to teach their sons responsibility and decency.
That's the major problem in American society.
Not too much masculinity.
This is why it's so ugly when folks on the left merge masculinity and toxic masculinity.
When they suggest that, you know, it's really the presence of fathers and fathers have to rethink what masculinity means.
No, maybe what you need is more fathers who thought along the lines of traditional masculinity.
Being a gentleman, taking responsibility, providing.
Containing your emotions to the extent that they don't take control of you.
It's really, really dumb.
Again, the fact is that it is dearth of men that has created the massive problem.
70% of inmates grew up in a one-parent home as of 1987.
The Center for Children and Families found that 70% of gang members, high school dropouts, teen suicides, teen pregnancies, and teen substance abusers come from single mother homes.
So, maybe the best a man can get is a father.
Maybe the best a man can get is being a dad and a husband.
Maybe the best a man can get is not lack of masculinity, it's more masculinity.
Because traditionally, masculinity is what stands between innocent people and the wolves.
Okay, well we will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
And we'll be back here later today.
If you subscribe, you get two more hours.
So we'll bring you all the latest updates during the day.
I'm sure there will be lots of breaking news about hamburgers and much else.
We'll be back a little bit later.
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