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June 11, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:29

The Making Of A New York Times Smear Job | Ep. 798

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	The New York Times slams everyone on the right as a gateway to the alt-right, Pinterest allegedly cracks down on pro-lifers, and Trump's tariffs may be turning up roses.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show.
	I don't know what it is about Jewish holidays and the New York Times.
	I mean, I have an indicator, but nonetheless, we'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so as I say, I leave for a Jewish holiday, and every time I do, all hell breaks loose.
	I remember a couple of years ago, there was a Jewish holiday, and I come back from the Jewish holiday, and there's been an entire op-ed in the New York Times about how I'm a terrible person.
	And then, I left, I think, just last year for a Jewish holiday, and I come back, and there's a New York Times article about how we here at Daily Wire are bad.
	It's pretty much like every Jewish holiday.
	They schedule it out that way so that I have a really, really wonderful time coming back from the Jewish holiday, opening my computer, And seeing what stupidity has taken place.
	Well, this week's stupidity comes courtesy of the New York Times yet again.
	Apparently, there was an article.
	And the article, I guess, was on the cover of the New York Times Sunday edition.
	So I guess it was a Saturday article of mine.
	It was a Sunday edition front page article.
	On Sunday.
	And the article was titled, The Making of a YouTube Radical.
	And it was basically a story about a rando.
	The rando's name is Caleb Kane.
	And it's all about his supposed radicalization.
	Now, what's hilarious about the article is that the article talks about him being quote-unquote radicalized.
	He was never a member of the alt-right.
	He wasn't a white supremacist.
	He considered himself a tradcon, meaning a traditional conservative, until he moved over to the left.
	So in other words, he became a conservative by listening to YouTube videos, and they called him a YouTube radical.
	The graphic that they put up was a bunch of different kind of images of different YouTube videos.
	But they lumped together a bunch of YouTube videos that are completely dissimilar.
	So there is a picture of me there.
	I'm not mentioned one time in the entire article, by the way.
	There's a picture of me, and then there's pictures of people like Stefan Molyneux, who has some borderline white supremacist race theories at the very mildest that's the mildest way to discover to describe it you have people like alex jones you have people like paul joseph watson you have folks like milo giannopoulos and then you have like milton friedman was in this mashup like milton free so milton friedman and i are in the same category as milo giannopoulos and like richard spencer
	according to this particular this particular graphic on the cover of the new york times and And the article itself is incredibly stupid.
	The article itself is basically about how he watched some videos and it led him to other videos, which led him to other videos, which led him to become a tradcon.
	And then people were upset at him becoming a tradcon, so then he became not a tradcon anymore.
	That's the entire article.
	It's thousands of words long.
	Thousands of words.
	So, a couple of things to note.
	Number one, there's a full-on campaign by the left media at this point, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, from NBC to Media Matters.
	And I count Media Matters as part of the left media infrastructure.
	Any publication that calls Media Matters a watchdog group, you can tell, is on the side of Media Matters.
	There is this overt effort now on the part of all of these publications to suggest that the tech companies are basically leading people down the rabbit hole of alt-right white supremacist content by even allowing mainstream conservative content.
	That's the goal here, is to lump in everybody who's a mainstream conservative with people who are alt-right and then suggest that if you watch mainstream conservative content then inevitably you will be led down this rabbit hole.
	Now, this is absurd and bizarre.
	There are legitimately hundreds of thousands of people who listen to this show every day who are not even on the political right.
	There are hundreds of thousands of people who are on the political right and believe that the alt-right is evil, just as I do.
	But according to the New York Times and the Washington Post and all of these other outlets, basically, if you're on the right, you're going to slide gradually into white supremacism so long as you engage on YouTube.
	Now, the reason they are directing this at YouTube is because they are hoping to use YouTube in order to quash conservative viewpoints.
	They understand that there are certain shared fora where people post their views.
	Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, all the rest of those.
	Pinterest.
	And then what they're hoping to do, they understand conservatives aren't going to stop talking.
	So what they hope to do is make conservative speech so ridiculously outside the Overton window that all of these shared platforms have to shut it down.
	And they're hoping to do this in advance of the 2020 election.
	The timing is not a mistake here.
	It is not a coincidence here.
	Ever since the left decided that Hillary Clinton had illegitimately lost the 2016 election, And that you really want.
	Ever since that, they've been looking for a scapegoat.
	And the scapegoat that is the most convenient for them are the tech companies.
	And by attacking the tech companies, what the left hopes to do...
	is cause the tech companies to curb the content they allow on their platforms in advance of 2020.
	So the argument they are making is that the tech platforms didn't do enough to shut down the nefarious Ruskies, and therefore, they have to shut down everybody on the right in advance of 2020, or at least curb their reach, or at least elevate, quote-unquote, authoritative voices.
	So here's what this New York Times idiotic piece says.
	They say, Caleb Cain pulled a Glock pistol from his waistband, took out the magazine, and casually tossed both onto the kitchen counter.
	I bought it the day after I got death threats, he said.
	The threats, Mr. Kane explained, came from right-wing trolls in response to a video he had posted on YouTube a few days earlier.
	In the video, he told the story of how, as a liberal college dropout struggling to find his place in the world, he had gotten sucked into a vortex of far-right politics on YouTube.
	I fell down the alt-right rabbit hole, he said in the video.
	So, a couple of things, right off the bat.
	Number one, he didn't actually, he was so crazily right-wing, he didn't even own a gun.
	Until he became a leftist again and then talked about it on YouTube.
	Well, welcome, sir.
	Welcome.
	Enjoy the party.
	Now, I love how he lumps all of those things together.
	So, if you say that third-wave feminism is a dangerous ideology, which it is, Apparently, that is in the same box as believing that innate IQ differences are entirely to blame for racial disparities.
	Apparently, they're all the same.
	So, you see, even here, what the New York Times is doing.
	They're taking mainstream conservative ideas, like third-wave feminism is a bad idea and dangerous for a civilization, and they're lumping that together with the racist idea that all disparities are attributable to innate biological difference between people in different racial groups.
	They're just lumping those two together, like that's not a problem.
	I just kept falling deeper and deeper into this, and it appealed to me because it made me feel a sense of belonging, he said.
	I was brainwashed.
	Now, why in the world is this guy, Mr. Cain, Caleb Cain, why is he the center of a New York Times front page story?
	Because it supports the narrative.
	It's a piece of anecdotal data that supports the left-wing narrative that everybody who's in the alt-right originally started.
	As a member of the mainstream conservative movement, and then was radicalized by YouTube, and this is why we have to pressure YouTube into shutting down Steven Crowder, or shutting down Ben Shapiro, or shutting down Glenn Beck, or shutting down Mark Levin, or shutting down anybody who is on the right.
	Over years of reporting on internet culture, says this New York Times reporter, I've heard countless versions of Mr. Kane's story.
	An aimless young man, usually white, frequently interested in video games, visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction, and is seduced by a community of far-right creators.
	Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out.
	Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
	The common thread in many of these stories is YouTube and its recommendation algorithm.
	Well, there's another common thread, which is that when dispossessed young men go looking for content that appeals to them, they might be able to find the content that appeals to them because they are dispossessed young men.
	In other words, these are human beings who are created with the capacity for free will.
	And this means they get to choose which videos they access and which videos they believe.
	But according to YouTube, if you watch a video of me ripping the alt-right, which is like every other video of me online, if you watch a video of me ripping the alt-right, this inevitably leads you to the alt-right.
	This is how you end up at the idiotic media coverage of a couple weeks ago, where the media tried to blame me for an attack on a synagogue, which is the most asinine contention I could possibly imagine.
	But the New York Times continues, But, and it's the but that matters here, Critics and independent researchers say YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things, a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens.
	Ah, it's YouTube's fault.
	It's YouTube's fault.
	Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google.
	By the way, if you are a design ethicist, this should answer the question as to whether these big tech companies are designing the algorithms with certain values in mind.
	They've been saying all along, no, no, no, they're just following the traffic.
	They actually had a position called a design ethicist at Google.
	Tristan Harris says, if I'm YouTube and I want you to watch more, I'm always going to steer you toward crazy town.
	Weird that no one on the left has ever suggested that YouTube should maybe disassociate from, say, the Young Turks on the left.
	No one has ever suggested that YouTube disassociate from far-left views.
	Weird.
	Odd.
	Because it turns out that some people have been radicalized by those sorts of videos as well.
	In recent years, social media platforms have grappled with the growth of extremism on their services, says the New York Times.
	Many platforms have barred a handful of far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists, including Alex Jones of InfoWars, and tech companies have taken steps to limit the spread of political misinformation.
	YouTube, whose rules prohibit hate speech and harassment, took a more laissez-faire approach to enforcement for years.
	And this is where the New York Times is trying to push.
	The New York Times is trying to push by saying that this laissez-faire approach has been a complete failure and is causing people to be radicalized.
	Because radicalization never happened before the YouTube algorithm and because YouTube has the temerity to leave conservative views on their platform.
	What's funny about this is they're really not blaming YouTube's algorithm.
	In the end, this article, as you will see, does not blame YouTube's algorithm and suggests that the algorithm needs to be changed so that it doesn't benefit some of the fringe views.
	Instead, they basically argue that YouTube should crack down on mainstream conservative views because there's no difference between mainstream conservatism and far-right alt-right views.
	We'll get to more of that in just one second.
	First, we need to talk about your freedoms.
	They are, in fact, in danger.
	You hear me talk all the time on the show about the growing attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech.
	You can see today's show is all about the attack on the principled nature of freedom of speech.
	And we've talked Repeatedly on the show about the attacks on religious freedom that come as a consequence of the radical growth of government.
	Well, now's a great time to tell people like Baronelle Stutzman, a small business owner, floral artist, and grandmother who was sued by her state's government and the ACLU for simply declining to create custom floral art celebrating an event that conflicted with her Christian beliefs.
	We had Baronelle on our radio show last week.
	She could lose her business, her home, and her life savings if she loses.
	This is why Alliance Defending Freedom exists.
	ADF provides free legal services to Barronelle and others whose freedoms are under assault.
	ADF will ask the U.S.
	Supreme Court to hear her case, but ADF cannot do that without your help because ADF relies on donations to fight for your freedom.
	If this attack can happen to someone like Barronelle, it can happen to somebody like you as well.
	The left does not care about basic free speech standards.
	Not liberals, the left.
	Will you fight for Barronelle and protect your freedom?
	Please give generously.
	All donations are, in fact, tax deductible.
	And if you donate $75 and above, you'll receive an exclusive free speech shirt.
	Go to ADFlegal.org slash Ben to donate right now.
	I love ADF, they do amazing work.
	They really are a great organization.
	Go check them out right now.
	ADFlegal.org slash Ben.
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	Okay, so this New York Times piece, which again, lumps in everybody on the right, continues.
	With 2 billion monthly active users uploading more than 500 hours of video every minute, YouTube's traffic is estimated to be the second highest of any website behind only Google.com.
	According to Pew Research Center, 94% of Americans aged 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service.
	Like many other Silicon Valley companies, YouTube is outwardly liberal in its corporate policies.
	It sponsors floats at LGBT pride parades, its chief executive endorsed Hillary Clinton, In reality, YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides.
	Weird.
	Weird that you say this and then the entire article's about the right.
	Odd.
	Very odd.
	I can't imagine why the New York Times would do that.
	And then they say, I love this, it has also been a useful recruiting tool for far-right extremist groups.
	Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members red-pilling, an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs.
	Well, since you just said that 94% of people aged 18 to 24 watch YouTube, I can imagine that's true.
	This is like saying, guess what helps people change their viewpoint?
	Television.
	Ooh, television!
	It's the television's fault!
	A European research group, VoxPol, conducted a separate analysis of 30,000 Twitter accounts affiliated with the alt-right and found the accounts linked to YouTube more often than to any other site.
	Because it's the most linked site on the internet.
	That would probably be it.
	Becca Lewis, who runs a garbage study for data and society, a study that was so dumb that they basically had to retract their own findings.
	OK, this study basically suggested a seven degrees of separation.
	It was six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with politics.
	It was basically like, OK, so Dave Rubin interviewed me and I have interviewed Steven Crowder and Steven Crowder has interviewed Stefan Molyneux.
	Therefore, Dave Rubin And Dave Rubin also once interviewed, like, Mike Gatto, the Democratic Assemblyman.
	Therefore, Mike Gatto is linked to Stefan Molyneux.
	They're all the same.
	It's just, it's ridiculous.
	That was her idiotic study.
	She says YouTube has been able to fly under the radar because until recently, no one thought of it as a place where radicalization is happening.
	But it's where young people are getting their information and entertainment.
	It's a space where creators are broadcasting political content that, at times, is overtly white supremacist.
	Okay, then the article gets back to this Mr. Cain, this Caleb Cain, who's a very, very important human.
	human.
	I visited Mr. Cain in West Virginia after seeing his YouTube video, denouncing the far right.
	We spent hours discussing his radicalization to back up his recollections.
	He downloaded and sent me his entire YouTube history, a log of more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries dating to 2015.
	Okay.
	Right there, they should have ended the article.
	Okay.
	If you've watched more than 12,000 videos and more than 2,500 search queries on YouTube dating back to 2015, you're spending a lot of time on YouTube.
	There may be some other issues with you.
	And also, is every single one of those videos to blame?
	Because you know what one of the videos he watched was?
	Jimmy Kimmel.
	Probably Jimmy Kimmel is to blame.
	These interviews and data points form a picture of a disillusioned young man, an internet-savvy group of right-wing reactionaries, and a powerful algorithm that learns to connect the two.
	It suggests that YouTube may have played a role in steering Mr. Kane and other young men like him toward the far-right fringes.
	It also suggested that in time, YouTube is capable of steering them in very different directions.
	Okay, well now you really don't have a point of your article, right?
	So you're saying that YouTube could direct you to the far-right.
	Also, it could direct you to the left.
	Which means you're an independent human with the capacity to click on things.
	Congratulations.
	And then they have a chart.
	It shows the number of political videos that this guy watched each month.
	It says the right-wing content Mr. Kane viewed in 2015 and 2016 often consisted of videos by Stefan Molyneux with titles like Social Justice Warriors Always Lie and The Global Warming Hoax.
	And then it says Mr. Kane also watched many videos by members of the so-called intellectual dark web.
	That would be a group in which I'm involved.
	Like the popular comedian Joe Rogan and the political commentator Dave Rubin.
	It's Joe Rogan's fault.
	It's Joe's fault.
	Amazing.
	It's amazing.
	So he watches a video by Stefan Molyneux and a video by Joe Rogan.
	It's Joe Rogan's fault.
	Clearly.
	Oh!
	Amazing!
	So, um, then why is this a story?
	I'm confused.
	Why is this a front page story with a graphic of me?
	I'm just a little confused.
	Also, I'm confused why this guy Caleb Kane is an important human because he made a video.
	Like, welcome to the world where everybody makes videos.
	From an early age, Mr. Kane was fascinated by internet culture, says the New York Times.
	As a teenager, he browsed 4chan, the lawless message board.
	Okay, well that would be a pretty good indicator that the guy was ripe for radicalization already by the time he was a teenager.
	4chan is a lot more radical than YouTube in terms of general content.
	He played online games with his friends, devoured videos of intellectuals debating charged topics like the existence of God.
	Well, clearly that's a problem.
	The internet was an escape.
	Mr. King grew up in post-industrial Appalachia, was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents.
	He was smart, but shy and socially awkward.
	He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters.
	Broke into press, he resolved to get his act together.
	He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything.
	YouTube.
	One day in late 2014, YouTube recommended a self-help video by Stéphane Molyneux, a Canadian talk show host and self-styled philosopher.
	Mr. Molyneux, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, had a political agenda.
	He was a men's right advocate who said that feminism was a form of socialism and that progressive gender politics were holding young men back.
	He offered a conservative commentary on pop culture and current events, explaining why Disney's Frozen was an allegory about female vanity or why the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer was proof of the dangers of rap culture.
	Mr. Kane was a liberal who cared about social justice, worried about wealth inequality, and believed in climate change.
	But he found Mr. Molyneux's diatribes fascinating, even when they disagreed.
	And then apparently, he started watching a lot of Molyneux videos, he watched some Paul Joseph Watson, and then he watched a lot of videos on feminism, and then he watched some racist videos, but he never actually became racist.
	Okay, this is the part that's hilarious.
	So, he says that he never became an actual racist.
	He says, these people weren't all shouty demagogues.
	They were entertainers, building their audience with satirical skits, debates, and interviews with like-minded creators.
	These creators were active on Facebook and Twitter too, but YouTube was their headquarters, the place where they could earn a living by hawking merchandise and getting a cut of the money spent on advertisements that accompanied their videos.
	And then he says that he felt alienated and he started being programmed by the algorithm to watch particular other ads.
	Here's the best part, okay?
	So finally, you get to the point of all of this.
	He is asked whether, in fact, he ever turned into a racist after watching all this stuff.
	Quote, Mr. K never bought into the right's most extreme views, the far-right's most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate.
	Still, far-right ideology bled into his daily life.
	He began referring to himself as a trad con, a traditional conservative committed to old-fashioned gender norms.
	He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.
	It was kind of sad, said Zelda Waite, a friend of Mr. Kane's from high school.
	I was just like, wow, what happened?
	How did you get this way?
	I love that for the New York Times, people ask questions like, what happened?
	How did you get this way?
	Because you date an evangelical Christian woman and because you fight with your liberal friends.
	So if you're not a liberal and you date a conservative, obviously there is something wrong with you.
	And then they focus in on Molyneux a lot.
	I mean, this article is largely about Stefan Molyneux.
	But again, I'm confused as to why it is, why it is that this particular person is being profiled when he was never sucked into Stefan Molyneux's kind of alt-right worldview.
	And then, I love this, in 2018, nearly four years after Mr. Cain had begun watching right-wing YouTube videos, a new kind of video began appearing in his recommendations.
	These videos were made by left-wing creators, but they mimicked the aesthetics of right-wing YouTube.
	One video was a debate about immigration between Ms.
	Southern, Lauren Southern, and Stephen Bunnell, a liberal YouTuber known as Destiny.
	Cain watched the video to cheer on Southern, but Mr. Bunnell was a better debater, and Mr. Cain reluctantly declared him the winner.
	Mr. Kane also found videos by Natalie Wynn, a former academic philosopher who goes by the name ContraPoints.
	Ms.
	Wynn wore elaborate costumes and did drag-style performances in which she explained why Western culture wasn't under attack from immigrants or why race was a social construct.
	And then it talks about how wonderfully funny and engaging all of these people are on the right.
	And then he says, well, he became left-wing.
	Oh, well, so it's a happy story.
	So this is a happy story in the end.
	And then he came out and he said that he didn't like all of the stuff that he had watched before and then people were mean to him.
	The New York Times spends, I kid you not, several thousand words on this story.
	And they have pictures, again, of Milton Friedman and me alongside pictures of actual alt-right racists who I've spent many years ripping.
	Hey, the goal of the New York Times story is obvious.
	Kane's story is not all that interesting.
	There's nothing there.
	So the question is, why did the New York Times dedicate this much space to it?
	The reason the New York Times dedicated this much space to it is because this is part of a hard push by the left in advance of the 2020 election to silence right-wing views.
	That's what this is.
	That is why they are lumping in everybody on the right.
	That's why they are suggesting that YouTube's algorithm, not that people watch my videos and that YouTube's algorithm wrongly directs them to alt-right videos, a proposition with which I would generally agree, but the idea is that my videos should not be promoted.
	And Crowder's videos should not be promoted.
	And anybody else who's on the right, their videos should not be promoted.
	Like mainstream right-wing figures, their videos should not be promoted.
	Jordan Peterson shouldn't be promoted.
	Joe Rogan shouldn't be promoted.
	That's the goal of the New York Times.
	Shut down debate.
	This is from your free press.
	Delightful, folks.
	I have some more evidence of this in just a second.
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	I have lots of friends who have Okay, so, it's not just this New York Times piece.
	This asinine New York Times piece about a guy who was a liberal, who then watched a lot of YouTube videos and considered himself a traditional conservative, until he went back to being a mild-mannered, good liberal.
	That's not what the New York Times piece is about.
	What the New York Times piece is about is the evils of the right.
	And how the right will suck you in with their nefarious videos on the YouTubes.
	And really how YouTube should shut this thing down.
	And YouTube is already eager to please.
	This is true for all of the tech companies.
	YouTube is eager to please.
	They are looking to avoid scrutiny by left-wingers who continue to blame them for all of the ills in the world.
	And it's not just YouTube, it's also Pinterest.
	So Pinterest is apparently owned by Google.
	James O'Keefe just got a whistleblower from Pinterest to talk about how they are silencing particular voices on Pinterest.
	One of the voices that they are silencing on Pinterest is live action and Lila Rose.
	According to a new project by Project Veritas, this is Daily Wire reporting, it presents a series of accusations of political and ideological bias against conservatives, Christians, and pro-lifers behind the scenes at Pinterest, a social media platform with some 300 million active monthly users.
	Since the report was first released, Pinterest reportedly has taken action concerning one of the allegations.
	In a video that includes testimony from a whistleblower who works for Pinterest and whose identity is concealed in the video, O'Keefe presents internal documents provided by the whistleblower showing what appear to be various means of censoring content, including a porn site block list that includes liveaction.org, which is a pro-life site run by Lila Rose.
	So in other words, if you are against abortion, they listed you on the porn site block list so that your content could not appear.
	Some of the other content that was censored by the site was content from yours truly.
	Here is James O'Keefe talking about it in a video from Project Veritas.
	The Pinterest insider also saw how, quote, white supremacist, unquote, content, like Ben Shapiro's commentary, for instance, goes from identified to censored.
	This is if Ifeoma or Ife-Ozoma calling Ben Shapiro a white supremacist.
	Some would say that, well, that's just her giving her opinion on a private Slack board.
	What do you say to that?
	So this was actually in a war room where policy makers were making decisions about content and there was follow-up action made to these posts.
	What sort of actions do they take on Shapiro content that you've seen?
	So they made an advisory document about this type of content, and then this advisory content ended up in our sensitive terms list, which is content that has to be manually entered that then affects all the content that comes into home feed, search, people's recommendations, etc.
	Okay, so they are limiting what you can get in a search.
	This is what the New York Times wants from YouTube, too.
	This is what the New York Times wants from Google.
	This is what the New York Times wants from Pinterest.
	This is what the Democrats want.
	What Democrats would like is for all of these various outlets to feel the pressure from the media so strongly that they simply start censoring conservative content.
	It's not just me, by the way.
	According to the Daily Wire, reporting on this Project Veritas report, among the claims presented by the whistleblower is that my content was censored in a zero-tolerance movement, terms related to Christianity are blocked from autocomplete, a video series exposing Planned Parenthood was included in a censor list as a harmful conspiracy, and liveaction.org was included on a list of porn sites blocked by the platform, meaning no links to its content could be produced by users.
	And then you've got the CEO of Google, who's openly coming out and saying, listen, we are trying to determine what exactly hate speech is.
	What's amazing here, truly, is to watch, as members of the media, this is Axios, on HBO, right?
	Both supposed free speech content.
	HBO used to be the place that was totally free speech.
	HBO was not cable, so you could curse.
	HBO was the place where you could see full frontal nudity, because no censorship.
	We hate censorship.
	Well now Axios on HBO is interviewing the head of Google and trying to get the guy to basically establish hate speech standards that will be used by Google to shut down particular content.
	There is no good definition of hate speech.
	That definition simply does not exist.
	And the danger in trying to define hate speech in any real way is that folks on the left are likely to label anything from the right hate speech as that New York Times piece exposed you to, showed you.
	Here is the CEO of Google, though, trying to suggest that he's going to somehow implement a standard for hate speech that does not exist under American law, nor should it exist under American law.
	More recently we have introduced, just like today we do this in search, we rank content based on quality.
	And so we're bringing that same notion and approach to YouTube so that we can rank higher quality stuff better and really prevent borderline content.
	Content which doesn't exactly violate policies which need to be removed.
	But which can still cause harm.
	And so we are working hard.
	It's a hard computer science problem.
	It's also a hard societal problem because we need better frameworks around what is hate speech, what's not, and how do we as a company make those decisions at scale and get it right without making mistakes.
	Okay, well, you're not getting it right and you will make mistakes.
	I mean, this was shown last week with YouTube banning actual historical coverage of the Nazis because YouTube's algorithm couldn't determine what was historical coverage of Nazis and what was neo-Nazi content.
	Some of the most disturbing stuff there is when they say, well, you know, we're going to get rid of borderline content, or we're going to limit borderline content.
	So explain to me how The Daily Wire, for example, should be treated as borderline content, while Huffington Post should be treated as non-borderline content.
	You're going to have to explain that one to me.
	And if you believe that Google and YouTube and Facebook aren't going to elevate left-wing sources above right-wing sources, you're out of your mind.
	Of course they are.
	When they talk about the authoritative sources that they like, those authoritative sources are in fact the mainstream media outlets that are currently pushing for the limitations.
	What they're looking for, in effect, is a crony capitalism that is effectively a business type of collusion.
	It's actually much closer to monopolistic interference than it is to free markets or free minds.
	Because what's happening here is that the New York Times, CNN, a lot of left-wing outlets are looking at the future of the internet and they're concerned.
	And rightly so.
	They're concerned that the market is dissipating their influence.
	And so what they are doing is they're going to the tech companies and they're saying, listen, we are going to attack you incessantly.
	We're going to attack you incessantly as creating violence.
	We're going to attack you incessantly as radicalizing people.
	We're going to attack you repeatedly, continuously.
	We're going to do this all the time until you elevate our content and de-platform and de-elevate content that we don't like.
	Now, even if I agree with a lot of the content being banned, meaning that I agree that some of that content is gross, I don't think that it should be banned.
	The reason is because I don't trust these companies to make those sorts of decisions.
	I trust the American people to make these decisions.
	And it is astonishing to watch media outlets that purportedly worry about Donald Trump cracking down on freedom of the press spending front page space and time on HBO trying to condemn tech platforms for being open fora.
	It really is an amazing thing.
	And there are only a couple reasons to do it.
	One is ideological and one is market based.
	The ideological reason is because they don't like that there are views that they don't like that are gaining credence.
	And the market-based reason is that there are all of these other outlets that are gaining all sorts of credibility and credence and money and making lots of money, and they are afraid that their influence is dissipating.
	So they are creating a false monopoly again with the help of the tech companies.
	They're going to restore the media monopoly that existed back in the 1980s and the 1970s by using the tech bros to shut down everybody else.
	That's what's going on here.
	OK, in just a second, I want to get to the Trump tariff plan.
	How has that actually created immigration policy?
	Was it a win or a lose for President Trump?
	What actually happened there?
	Because it seems like there's a lot of confusion still.
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	OK, so we're going to get to President Trump and his tariffs and Mexico trying to crack down on immigration in just one second.
	First, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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	All righty, so now the latest on President Trump and his tariff push on Mexico.
	So late last week, I gave credit on the show to President Trump because there were a bunch of reports that President Trump was going to be able to leverage a significant concession from the Mexican government.
	That significant concession was a safe third country provision.
	So the United States has what's called a safe third country deal with the Canadian government.
	What that safe third country deal does, it says that if somebody is trying to escape a human rights abusing country, And they want to get out and they go to Canada.
	They have to apply for asylum in Canada.
	The first country that they reach is the country where they have to apply for asylum.
	So you can't go to Canada and then apply to asylum in the United States because then it really is more just you want to come to the United States.
	It really isn't about you applying for asylum.
	We have a safe third country provision with Canada.
	Well, we'd like one of those with Mexico.
	And there was talk last week, late last week, like Thursday night, The Mexican government was going to give us one.
	That finally, we were going to get a deal with Mexico, where if people entered Mexico from Guatemala or El Salvador, that people would first have to apply for asylum in Mexico before they could apply to enter the United States.
	And President Trump's tariffs were given credit for that.
	And President Trump came online on Friday and he said that the tariffs would not go into effect because he'd made some sort of deal with Mexico.
	So we have a bunch of conflicting reports on this.
	What exactly the Mexican government gave up?
	Did they give up anything?
	Did they make concessions six months ago?
	And then basically Trump's people sold that to him as new concessions to avoid the tariffs?
	All of this is eminently unclear.
	So the Washington Post has a piece today called How Mexico Talked Trump Out of Tariff Threat With Immigration Crackdown Pact.
	Says Mexican negotiators persuaded President Trump to back down from his tariff threat by agreeing to an unprecedented crackdown on Central American migrants and accepting more expansive measures in Mexico if the initial efforts don't deliver quick results, according to officials from both governments and documents reviewed by the Washington Post.
	The enforcement measures Mexico has promised include the deployment of a militarized National Guard at the Guatemalan border, thousands of additional migrant arrests per week, and the acceptance of busloads of asylum seekers turned away from the United States border daily, all geared toward cutting the migrant flow sharply in coming weeks.
	The measures described by officials from both sides and included in Mexican negotiating documents reviewed by The Post appear to be more substantial than what the Mexican government has attempted thus far during the precipitous rise in migration to the United States border.
	Since heralding the pact in a Friday night tweet, Trump has fumed at criticism that he capitulated to Mexico and that his accord amounts to a series of previously agreed to measures.
	Trump officials on Monday described the accord as a breakthrough.
	The president considered Mexico's plan aggressive enough to suspend his tariff threat, even though he liked the idea of imposing the duties over the howls from members of his own party.
	U.S.
	officials say they were particularly impressed with Mexico's pledge to deploy up to 6,000 National Guard troops to its border region with Guatemala.
	Mexico described its plan to U.S.
	officials as the first time in recent history that Mexico has decided to take operational control of its southern border as a priority, according to Mexican government documents.
	Such language amounted to the kind of rhetorical shift Trump officials were looking for from the leftist government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who last year dismissed migrant enforcement in Mexico as dirty work at the behest of the United States.
	Trump said Monday his deal with Mexico was fully signed and documented and has provisions that have not yet been fully disclosed.
	On Monday afternoon at the White House, Trump said that the agreement has been locked in and will be announced very soon.
	Most asylum seekers who reach the U.S.
	are now processed and released into the United States interior.
	Mexico has repeatedly said it will not agree to a safe third country accord that would require it to take in U.S.
	bound asylum seekers transiting its territory.
	But Mexican officials have been willing to negotiate something that would function similarly if responsibility for asylum seekers were shared among others in the region.
	They say asylum changes would require approval from the Mexican lawmakers.
	Trump said in a tweet Monday he will impose tariffs if the regional asylum overhaul does not pass.
	So, it is not clear at this point what exactly is in place and what exactly is not in place.
	However, if a safe third country provision ends up being enforced and it was done so because President Trump threatened tariffs, then good for President Trump.
	My fear was that President Trump simply wanted to use tariffs on Mexico because he likes tariffs, not because he actually hoped to achieve an immigration breakthrough.
	If he achieves the immigration breakthrough, well then he gets credit and I was 100% wrong and I am more than happy to admit it.
	I like being wrong when it's good for the country.
	However, there is a major controversy.
	There are mixed messages being sent.
	The New York Times reports the Mexican foreign minister said on Monday that no secret immigration deal existed between his country and the United States, directly contradicting President Trump's claim on Twitter that a fully signed and documented agreement would soon be revealed.
	In a second, I'll explain how this controversy is continuing to unfold.
	Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico's top diplomat, said at a news conference in Mexico City, there is an understanding that both sides would evaluate the flow of migrants in the coming months.
	If the number of migrants crossing the U.S.
	border is not significantly reduced, he said, both sides have agreed to renew discussions about more aggressive changes to regional asylum rules that could have a bigger impact.
	Ebrard said, let's have a deadline to see if what we have works.
	If not, we'll sit down, look at the measures you propose and that we propose.
	The public statement served as an official response to several days of tweeting by Mr. Trump.
	Now, as I say, I don't want these tariffs to go into effect.
	They are very bad for the economy.
	They're very bad for Trump, by the way.
	If the economy tanks, he has no shot at re-election.
	I think that the tariffs generally are a bad idea.
	If, however, the tariffs were useful in leveraging a good immigration deal out of the Mexican government, good.
	But now the Mexican government seems to be waffling.
	So it is unclear, at this point, what, if anything, has been signed.
	There's been no public documentation put forth at this point.
	There was a US-Mexico joint declaration that Trump announced with fanfare on Friday.
	It mentioned further public action.
	It said that the countries agreed to continue their discussion on the terms of additional understandings to address irregular migrant flows and asylum issues to be completed and announced within 90 days.
	American officials said on Monday Trump appeared to be referring to an agreement in principle to revisit the migration situation in 45 days and again in 90 days.
	There was apparently significant disagreement on Monday between the Mexican government and American officials about what the negotiators actually agreed to regarding further action.
	So, as I said, when President Trump achieves an actual victory here that is documentable, I will give him 100% credit.
	As it stands, this looks a lot like when President Trump was in North Korea and President Trump was suggesting Over and over again that he had reached some sort of breakthrough with Kim Jong-un that turned out not to be true.
	So I think that we can trust but verify.
	So, sure, happy to give President Trump credit on a breakthrough.
	Now we'll have to verify.
	Do the migrations go down?
	Is a safe third country provision in the works?
	Will any of this stuff actually happen?
	Trump didn't specifically mention the safe third country provision on Monday, but he said they would have an agreement they would announce very soon.
	It's all done.
	That is not what was described by the foreign minister for Mexico.
	Ebrard said they will propose a safe third country.
	We said it will have to be with the UN Human Rights Council and it will have to be regional.
	He said Mexico preferred a regional asylum agreement that would review the flow of migrants across Mexico and Central America with a number of countries, including Panama and Brazil.
	So I think this whole thing is still in flux is the bottom line.
	Now, the good news is that President Trump can snap back those tariffs pretty much any time he wants.
	So there's a pretty strong incentive for the Mexican government not exactly to screw around with President Trump.
	But maybe if they apply a delay tactic, maybe if they delay this thing all the way until next year, they hope that a Democrat will be elected, at which point open immigration begins again.
	I will say that President Trump's strategic use of tariffs with regard to China has not been exactly the serious problem that I think everyone thought that it was going to be.
	Now, it has been a serious problem in terms of the economy.
	The economy is more brittle.
	Growth is slowing.
	All of that is true.
	But the amount of Chinese leverage that they are willing to apply at this point does not appear to be all that high.
	China does have more to lose than the United States.
	And as I've said before, there is a case to be made that the Chinese government ought to be pressured in a way the Mexican government is not pressured.
	The Mexican government should be pressured to stop the migrant flow, but the Mexican government is not an open adversary of the United States.
	China really is.
	And the good news is that China's attempts at leveraging the United States are so far a giant fail.
	There's an article in the Washington Post talking about how China's hints that it will choke off rare earths access in the United States is not in fact that easy.
	David Lynch writing for the Washington Post.
	He says, China dominates the global market for rare earths materials and has been threatening to take them hostage in the deepening trade conflict.
	Just the suggestion that Beijing could starve American factories of essential materials has sent rare earth prices soaring over the past month with dysprosium oxide used in lasers and nuclear reactor control rods up by one third.
	But the alarm overlooks the rise over the past decade of alternative sources of rare earths and ignores the difficulties China would face in implementing a ban, including the prospect of widespread smuggling and the likelihood of hurting countries that Chinese authorities may prefer not to alienate.
	So President Trump has been applying leverage to China, and he is right to do so.
	We'll see how the Mexican negotiation, which I'm more skeptical of, plays out.
	Again, I'm hoping that the president's strategy there pays off and that we see some real gains.
	I will say that the media, obviously, they're jumping to the conclusion that Trump has got nothing in exchange for backing down from his tariff threats.
	You have Anderson Cooper, the very objective journalist on CNN, not waiting to see, but instead jumping in and saying that this was all about nothing.
	Their story says, and I'm quoting now the lead, the deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the U.S.
	over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.
	In other words, whatever might be coming down the pike when it comes to what has already transpired, all the drama, all the talks, all the threats of what amounts to waging economic warfare on a major trading partner and ally, We're all about nothing.
	OK, well, maybe they were, and maybe they weren't.
	We don't know yet, is sort of the issue.
	So I think that Trump's adversaries are going to declare that this is a big loss for Trump.
	But honestly, where is the big loss for Trump, exactly?
	So he threatened tariffs.
	The tariffs didn't go into place.
	That seems like a win for US citizens.
	I mean, tariffs are a tax on us.
	And maybe he gets something out of this.
	Maybe he doesn't.
	We will find out soon enough.
	But everybody's sort of jumping to a conclusion, I think, is doing just that, jumping to a conclusion.
	Well, meanwhile, the Democrats hosted John Dean on Capitol Hill yesterday.
	This is an absurdity.
	It's an absurdity.
	So Democrats decided they would host John Dean, who is a partisan hack, on Capitol Hill.
	And it didn't go great for him.
	Basically, he has suggested that every Republican president since Richard Nixon is, in fact, Richard Dixon.
	He was the former White House counsel to President Nixon.
	He was involved in Watergate.
	And he suggested that President Trump is not mentally well and mentally fit to serve.
	Here is him suggesting that Trump can't be president.
	The last time I appeared before your committee was July 11, 1974, during the impeachment inquiry of Richard Nixon.
	Clearly, I'm not here today as a fact witness.
	I accepted the invitation to come here today because I hope I can give a little historical perspective on the Mueller report.
	In many ways, the Mueller report is to President Trump Okay, really?
	You can tell the Democrats are desperate when they're calling in John Dean.
	State a little differently.
	Special Counsel Mueller has provided this committee with a roadmap.
	OK, really?
	You can tell the Democrats are desperate when they're calling in John Dean.
	If you call in John Dean, the guy from 1974 who called President Bush a Watergate style president, if you're inviting that guy and that's the best you can do, I would recommend that you guys get some better candidates.
	Because if you're relying on John Dean to take down the president, you may be in serious trouble.
	OK, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like.
	Over the weekend, I read a terrific book by Alan Greenspan called Capitalism in America, a history along with Adrian Woolridge.
	It is a really readable, easy history of the economics of the United States.
	It talks about the US's free market economy.
	It talks about how FDR changed that free market economy.
	It talks about the relative growth rates in the U.S.
	economy over time.
	It talks about everything from free trade to monetary policy, and it is very readable, okay?
	It is not a hard book to read, so go check it out.
	Capitalism in America.
	By Alan Greenspan, who's a devotee of Milton Friedman, among others.
	So apparently, apparently, I've been told by the New York Times Milton Friedman was basically an alt-righter.
	But Alan Greenspan was one of his acolytes, and of course ran the Fed.
	Check it out, Capitalism in America by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Woolrich.
	Definitely worth the watch.
	Okay, other things that I like today.
	So, let's see.
	Okay, well, you know what?
	Let's get to a bunch of things that I hate, because there's a lot to hate today.
	So let's do it.
	Well, I will say that I sort of like and hate this.
	Feminist Sophie Lewis is now admitting that abortion is a killing.
	She just said it's the sort of killing that we like, which at least is deathly honest.
	I mean, that's good.
	I wonder if she will be censored on Pinterest the same way that Lila Rose and Live Action have been.
	Here she is explaining that abortion is a form of killing, but it's a good form of killing.
	You know, like the kind of killing of people that we don't like.
	That kind of killing.
	Abortion is, in my opinion, and I recognise how controversial this is, a form of killing.
	It is a form of killing that we need to be able to defend.
	I am not interested in where a human life starts to exist.
	I see the forms of making and unmaking each other as sort of continuous processes.
	Um, okay.
	I see the forms of making and unmaking each other as a continuous process.
	That seems like that's a, that's pretty much what Jack the Ripper had to say about prostitutes right there.
	The forms of making and unmaking each other.
	It's a continuous process.
	You know, when I gut this prostitute over here, that's pretty much, I'm just unmaking her, right?
	I mean, we're all making and unmaking each other all the time, aren't we?
	I mean, really, is that such a big deal?
	I just unmade her intestines.
	I mean, that's like, but they're making themselves and you're making them and I make, I mean, like, okay.
	Well, at least she's honest.
	Points for honesty to abortion lady.
	It's a form of killing she likes.
	That is a case that I can at least understand.
	So, well done there.
	That's good stuff.
	Okay.
	Other things that I hate today.
	So, there are two pieces.
	One from the New York Times and one from the Washington Post.
	One is from a kind of conservative, Henry Olsen, and one is from a person named Aaron Bastani.
	This one I particularly like from Aaron Bastani, the title of the piece from the New York Times.
	The world is a mess.
	We need fully automated luxury communism.
	Hmm.
	Now, I'm puzzled by the title.
	I will I will fully acknowledge I find this puzzling because those words do not make sense.
	That is that is like saying what we truly need is a red, blue, green, blue grass.
	Don't know what it means.
	That's a sentence, technically a sentence.
	Not words that make sense in order.
	We need a fully automated luxury communism.
	We need a... communism.
	Thank you, Aaron Bassani.
	So, what exactly does this stupid article say?
	It says, it starts with a burger.
	In 2008, a Dutch professor named Mark Post presented the proof of concept for what he called cultured meat.
	Five years later, in a London TV studio, Mr. Post and his colleagues ate a burger they had grown from animal cells in a laboratory.
	Secretly funded by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, the journey from Petri dish to plate had cost $325,000, making theirs the most expensive meal in history.
	Fortunately, the results were promising.
	Hany Rützler, a nutrition scientist, concluded the patty was close to meat, but not as juicy.
	The next question was whether this breakthrough could be made cheaper.
	Much cheaper.
	The first cultured beef burgers are likely to enter the market next year, at approximately 50 bucks each.
	But that won't last long.
	Within a decade, they will probably be more affordable than even the cheapest barbecue staples of today, all for a product that uses fewer resources, produces negligible greenhouse gases, and remarkably, requires no animals to die.
	So far, this is a pretty stirring representation of how awesome capitalism is, isn't it?
	And they're talking about how private funding created a burger that will be cheaper than regular burgers and also avoid many of the side effects of burgers.
	So, it's a pretty good case for capitalism.
	But remember, this is an article about communism.
	Wait, it's not just barbecues and burgers.
	Last year, Just, a leader in cellular agriculture, cut a deal to start producing one of the world's tastiest steaks, Wagyu.
	A company called Endless West, which also makes grapeless wine, has started to produce Glyph, the world's first molecular whiskey.
	Luxury could be coming to all.
	The case of cultured food and drink, far from a curiosity, is a template for a better, freer, and more affluent world, a world where we provide for the needs of everyone in style.
	But how do we get there?
	To say that, well, I mean, I think that we just explained how we got there, didn't we?
	I mean, weren't the first few paragraphs all about how all these private companies are creating awesome new stuff that will become insanely cheap because of the free market?
	So I think you sort of answered it.
	We could just stop the article there, but no, we still got 600 words to fill.
	So according to this genius columnist, Aaron Bastani, so he says, How do we get there?
	there to say the present era is one of crisis borders on cliche it differs from the dystopias of george orwell or aldous huxley or hell in the paintings of hieronymus bosch it is unlike europe during the black death or central asia as it faced the galloping golden horde and yet it is true ours is an age of crisis i swear this was written by a high school junior getting a c and like to say it differs from other dystopias And then, let me show you how many books I've read.
	All from my high school English class.
	George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
	Also, I've heard of the Black Death guys.
	He says, we inhabit a world of low growth, low productivity, and low wages.
	Well, not low wages.
	That is not true.
	Low productivity, historically speaking, not even close to true.
	Low growth is kind of true, and that's mostly because of government interventionism.
	This is a world where billions, mostly in the global south, live in poverty, a world defined by inequality.
	Actually, the world is defined by a massive reduction in the amount of inequality between the poorest and everybody else, considering that 80% of the global extreme poor have been lifted out of global extreme poverty since 1980 by capitalism.
	But remember, this is an article about communism.
	The most pressing crisis of all, arguably, is an absence of collective imagination.
	Yes, that is arguable.
	That is an arguable contention.
	That the biggest crisis is an absence of collective imagination.
	If I were going to go with, like, biggest crisis, I would say, let's see, collapse of traditional morality might be up there.
	Probably the crisis in Syria, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people.
	I'd say maybe disease and poverty in Africa.
	There are a few.
	Failure of collective imagination.
	Whenever people talk about collective imagination, understand what they really mean by collective imagination is one person at the head of a massive government who imposes their ideas on everybody else.
	Because you know what is the collective imagination in the free market?
	That is the collective imagination.
	It's all of our individual imaginations, but in a market.
	Collective imagination is where there's somebody at the top bossing people around.
	The term collective imagination, in fact, is somewhat self-defeating because imagination is by nature individual.
	Now, we can work in groups and toss ideas back and forth to each other, but the idea of a collective imagination, a hive mind, so to speak, the reason that a hive mind doesn't really work that way is because a hive is subservient to the queen bee.
	But this columnist says, it is as if humanity has been afflicted by a psychological complex in which we believe the present world is stronger than our capacity to remake it.
	As if the very essence of humanity, if there is such a thing, is not to constantly build new worlds.
	This is such bad writing.
	My goodness.
	If we can move beyond such a failure, we will be able to see something wonderful.
	The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for all.
	Automation, robotics, and machine learning will, as many august bodies from the Bank of England to the White House have predicted, substantially shrink the workforce, creating widespread technological unemployment.
	But that's only a problem if you think work is something to be cherished.
	For many, work is drudgery, and automation could set us free from it.
	Okay, well, for many it's not, so that's a problem.
	But also, you're gonna have to give people something to do.
	And it turns out that communism doesn't give anything for people to do.
	They sit there and they take things.
	Gene editing, this is one of the funny things about people who promote socialism and communism.
	There's this weird idea that if you promote socialism, you promote communism.
	That what will spring free is a bunch of itinerant poets.
	Who sit around writing about the beautiful flowers and creating a world of art.
	I remember that Nancy Pelosi said this about so-called job lock, right?
	She said that people were locked into their jobs for healthcare and that was a bad thing.
	We needed to disconnect healthcare from your job by presumably nationalizing it so that you could write poetry.
	Now, I know a lot of people without jobs, very few of them, except for producer Nick here, actually sit around writing poetry or going and learning to mine for gold.
	Very few of them.
	Most people who are unemployed are pretty depressed and pretty unhappy because they don't have a lot of stuff to do.
	But this article continues by talking about how as we make things more and more prosperous, well now we can try communism.
	He says, I love this, he says the consequences are far-reaching and potentially transformative of the of the increasing technological Hey man, technological achievements, hey man.
	For the crises that confront our world today, technological unemployment, global poverty, societal aging, climate change, resource scarcity, we can already glimpse the remedy.
	But there's a catch.
	It's called capitalism.
	It has created the newly emerging abundance, but it is unable to share around the fruits of technological development.
	Okay, if you really believe that capitalism has been unable to share around the fruits of technological development, I ask you, how many people in the United States have cell phones?
	I ask you, how many people in the United States have microwaves and cars?
	Everybody takes this stuff for granted because of capitalism.
	Communism creates nothing.
	Communism redistributes what is there until it kills off the goose that creates the golden eggs.
	He says, a system where things are produced only for profit, capitalism seeks to ration resources to ensure returns.
	No, that's not how capitalism works.
	Capitalism works through competition.
	Free markets work through competition.
	Just like today's, companies of the future will form monopolies and seek rents.
	The results will be imposed scarcity when there's not enough food, healthcare, or energy to go around.
	This has not been the history of capitalism.
	The only enforced monopolies are ones that are enforced by the government.
	Government monopolies are monopolies too, and result in far more scarcity than free market economics.
	But according to this columnist, we have to go beyond capitalism.
	Many will find this suggestion unwholesome.
	To them, the claim that capitalism will or should end is like saying a triangle doesn't have three sides or that the law of gravity no longer applies while an apple falls from a tree.
	But for a better world, it is an imperative.
	We can see the contours of something new.
	A society as distinct from our own as that of the 20th century from feudalism or urban civilization from the life of the hunter-gatherer.
	It builds on technologies whose development has been accelerating for decades.
	To grasp it will require a new politics.
	Fully automated luxury communism.
	What the hell does that even mean?
	So we've gone through the entire article, I still don't understand what fully automated luxury communism means.
	It doesn't mean anything.
	All it means is that capitalism is awesome, but you like communism, so you're gonna say communism over and over.
	Well done, New York Times.
	My goodness, if your case for communism is basically that technology is gonna solve all of our problems, you just made the unwitting case for capitalism, thank you very much.
	Now, on the right, you're seeing some folks who are making an unwitting case against capitalism, or a witting case.
	One of those people is Henry Olsen.
	So, Henry Olsen is a really interesting commentator.
	He comes from sort of the Tucker Carlson conservative school of thought that suggests that free markets are the problem.
	He had a piece in the Washington Post called, Conservative Elites Love to Defend Market Orthodoxy, Don't Fall for It.
	Well, I love that everybody who disagrees with Henry Olsen is now an elite.
	I believe that just in terms of probably income and education, it's fair to say I'm an elite.
	In terms of my opinion on politics, I am not an elitist.
	I've always made this distinction.
	I've never understood this sort of connection between quote-unquote elites and elitists.
	And Ronald Reagan was an elite.
	He was not an elitist.
	Donald Trump is an elite.
	He is not an elitist.
	An elitist is somebody who believes they should run the world for everybody else.
	That is the opposite of free market libertarianism, which suggests that you should make your own choices without the government cramming down choices and subsidies upon you.
	Anyway, Henry Olson says...
	There's been a debate brewing within the world of conservatism ever since Donald Trump won the GOP nomination.
	Some on the right bitterly oppose his divergence from Republican economic orthodoxy and are fighting to defend the role of economic markets in society against what they perceive as attacks from other conservatives.
	These elites may be right to be afraid, but that's because at heart, they are more libertarian than they are conservative.
	I think you and I are defining conservative differently, then, because it turns out that conservative is about conserving the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.
	Many of those liberties are tied into the free market.
	Such libertarian-minded opinion leaders have criticized Trump's call to rule out reform for Social Security and Medicare.
	They ignored his calls to dramatically increase spending on infrastructure.
	They savaged his views on trade.
	Trump's overwhelming victory in the primaries should have shocked them out of their ideological slumber.
	Instead, they're like the French Bourbon monarchs, who, upon being restored to the throne, remembered nothing and forgot nothing about the reasons they were overthrown in the first place.
	Okay, Donald Trump, and then he name-checks me, right?
	He suggests that Fox News television host Tucker Carlson's rather mundane point that today's global economy contributes in part to the economic and social decline in many parts of the United States was scorned by leading lights such as David French and Ben Shapiro.
	Right, we talked about it on the show.
	Because my point was that the moral failings of the United States are far more linked to the moral history of the United States in the 1960s than they are to the fact that you can get a cheaper product from China.
	Like, I don't think people are failing to get married because we signed NAFTA.
	I think people are failing to get married because our society has disdained marriage for generations.
	The marriage rates started to decline far before the effect of so-called kind of trade imbalances began to be felt.
	I mean, marriage rates in the United States started to decline in the 60s.
	When the economy was still pretty good.
	Now, what's hilarious, and by the way, the economy is still pretty good.
	I mean, we have an all-time low unemployment rate right now.
	But according to Henry Olson, here's where we get to the point.
	When I say that the left is pushing for communism, but they're really in favor of capitalism, like that article from the New York Times, and then you have people on the right who are pushing for government involvement in the name of conservatism, that's Henry Olson.
	This is fascinating.
	He says this.
	My libertarian-oriented friends will not want to hear this, but we live in the garden that Franklin Delano Roosevelt made.
	Now, this should be anathema to conservatives.
	If somebody comes to you and they say, you know, we just have to accept the new form of government that FDR brought about.
	FDR was about as close to a socialist dictator in the United States as we had, except for maybe Woodrow Wilson, as we've had in the United States.
	He wasn't able to get all of his plans through, but the National Recovery Act was a fascist piece of legislation in which the government overtly gave a stamp of approval to particular businesses that abided by the government's diktats.
	FDR's muddling with the economy lengthened the Great Depression by eight years.
	Minimum.
	FDR led to the second great- There were two Great Depressions, basically.
	There was one that was from 29 to 33, and then there was one that kicked in again from 37 to, basically, World War II.
	FDR's economic policy was disastrous, and he created all of the economic unsustainability that we have seen.
	He created the roots of the union system that destroyed America's car industry.
	He created the roots of the social security system that is bankrupting us in the future, and Medicaid and Medicare, systems that comprise now 66% of the federal budget.
	So when you hear a conservative say something like, I mean, that's an amazing, amazing statement.
	If you're a conservative and you believe that your role is basically to conserve FDR, I don't think that's particularly conservative.
	You can make the argument that that's what should be done on a practical policy level because you can't get through a more libertarian program.
	That I understand.
	But if your argument is that FDR's basic economic structure, in which he derided malefactors of great wealth, regulated the banking industry, debased the currency, and did all sorts of other things to undermine the fundamental free market nature of America's economy, that that was a good thing, and that we have to maintain that?
	I don't know how that strikes a chord with anybody who believes in the Constitution of the United States, or the economic philosophy that created the great majority of America's wealth.
	All righty.
	Well, that was a lot, but we'll be back here tomorrow or later today.
	If you want two more hours of content, you're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	President Trump wins big on his deal with Mexico.
	Of course, the mainstream media don't give him credit for it.
	We will examine what is really in the deal.
	Then, another social media platform bans conservatives and Masterpiece Cake Shop owner Jack Phillips gets sued for a third time by radical leftists.

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