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Sept. 19, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:01
Justin Trudeau's Face Plant | Ep. 864
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Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada, emerges in pictures of blackface, the Fed's lower rates, but President Trump is enraged anyway, and Democrats host teens to talk about climate change.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
Yeah, that's a thing that's happening today.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada.
He's handsome Bernie Sanders, as I like to say.
And Justin Trudeau has made a career out of being insanely politically correct.
He has campaigned on political correctness and sensitivity, and he's a feelings guy, right?
I mean, when he's not snowboarding and when he's not teaching elementary school, he's prime ministering and talking about feelings.
Well, it now has emerged that there are two separate instances in which Justin Trudeau wore either brownface or blackface.
Now, I do want to make clear That there are gradations to wrongness here, okay?
This is not, not only my model, I think this is particularly obvious to anyone who is living, right?
If you are dressed Al Jolson style in 1920s, dressed in blackface in order to mock black people, that is not quite the same thing as you dressed up as Michael Jackson in 1985 when the Thriller video was huge.
One is to pay tribute to Michael Jackson, the other is to make fun of black people.
Obviously there is a difference.
I've asked Juan Williams at Fox News if this seems correct to him.
He says yes.
Okay, so the question is, what was Justin Trudeau actually doing wearing brownface or blackface?
Now it turns out there are two instances of Justin Trudeau doing this.
Okay, so according to Time Magazine, Justin Trudeau, Canada's Prime Minister, wore brownface makeup to a party at the private school where he was teaching in the spring of 2001.
Time has now obtained a photograph of the incident.
The photograph has not been previously reported.
The picture was taken at an Arabian Nights-themed gala.
It shows Trudeau, then the 29-year-old son of the late former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, wearing a turban and robes, with his face, neck, and hands completely darkened.
The photograph appears in the 2000-2001 yearbook of West Point Grey Academy, a private day school where Trudeau was a teacher.
Okay, so this is when he was 29, which is not super young.
Earlier this month, Time obtained a copy of the yearbook, The View, with the photograph of Trudeau in brownface from Vancouver businessman Michael Adamson, who was part of the West Point Grey Academy community.
Adamson was not at the party, which was attended by school faculty, administrators, and parents of students.
He said he first saw the photograph in July and felt it should be made public.
And that was not the only picture of Justin Trudeau to emerge.
Trudeau then came forward and said that he had worn blackface makeup in high school to sing Deo, a Jamaican folk song famously performed by Harry Belafonte.
And there is this picture of him from a high school yearbook dressed up in an afro and with his face darkened, presumably to sing Deo.
And then tape has now emerged of him dressed in a very similar outfit in which he is singing Deo.
Here was Global News reporting.
They did confirm to us last night that we are looking at Justin Trudeau in this video.
You can see that he has blackface makeup on.
It's covering his face, neck, his arms and hands, and you can see between the tears in his jeans there that he also appears to have the makeup down his legs as well.
This, as you mentioned, is the third image of him within about 12 hours that has come out.
Okay, so there are two separate incidents that we are talking about here.
They're a bunch of images, but two separate incidents.
One is this Arabian Nights party in 2001, when he was teaching at a private school.
And the other is apparently from the early 1990s, because he graduated from high school in the early 1990s.
So Justin Trudeau comes out and he makes a statement, and his statement is basically, this is racist stuff.
I didn't think of it as racist at the time, but it clearly is, and I apologize.
I take responsibility for my decision to do that.
I shouldn't have done it.
I should have known better.
It was something that I didn't think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do.
I made a mistake when I was younger, and I wish I hadn't.
I should have known better then, but I didn't, and I did it, and I am deeply sorry for it.
Okay, so I think he's handling it, frankly, the way he should handle it, right?
He's taking responsibility.
He's saying that what he did was wrong and he should have known better, but he didn't know better.
So this raises a few issues.
One is the gradations issue, right?
How bad is the activity itself?
And there are gradations of wrong, right?
Just like in all of life, there are gradations of categories of wrong.
So that's issue number one, categories of wrong.
The second question is, if you participate without intent in racism, are you a racist?
And this is an interesting question, because there are lots of people who do stuff that they don't realize is racist at the time or discriminatory at the time.
Not even discriminatory, engaging in stereotypes.
Discrimination implies that you have actively stopped somebody from advancing in society.
Racism may just amount to you involving yourself in stereotyping.
Can you engage in racist activity, like dressing up in blackface, without knowing that it was wrong?
Does that make you a racist?
And then finally, there's the third question, which is the question of timing and the question of can people change over time and what kind of society we want to have.
So let's go through these questions one by one and try to break this down in rational fashion.
And remember, I don't like Justin Trudeau as a politician.
I think that Justin Trudeau is wrong on nearly every issue.
I think that he stands with the woke-skulled in general.
And so there is a tremendous irony to the fact that so many of these blackface or brownface or makeup photos are now coming out about people who have spent careers trying to ruin other careers based on stuff that people have said 30 years ago, right?
Justin Trudeau stands firmly in the woke-skulled category.
And so there's something deliciously ironic about the fact that now the crowd is coming for him.
All right, I don't think Justin Trudeau would be out there defending a Republican in the United States if the same thing happened today, right?
So I'm not defending Justin Trudeau's original behavior, but I am going to say I don't think that Justin Trudeau deserves to lose an election based on this, nor do I think that Justin Trudeau deserves to be judged as a human being based simply on these incidents, and I'll explain why.
So let's begin with that first question.
Are there gradations?
The answer is yes, there are gradations to this.
As I mentioned at the outset, Al Jolson dressing up in blackface in 1910-1920 is a very different thing than Justin Trudeau dressing up as Aladdin in Arabian Nights in 2001.
One is meant specifically to be derogatory toward black people.
It is meant to denigrate black people.
It is meant to make fun of black people.
The Harry Belafonte Afro is closer to that.
It's closer to that, but even there, I really don't think that Justin... I have doubts that Justin Trudeau in the 1990s was doing anything other than just trying to shock people by being transgressive.
I highly doubt that Justin Trudeau meant blackface in the same way that Al Jolson and company in 1910, 1915 meant blackface.
The sort of Amos and Andy kind of stuff.
I really don't think that that is what we are talking about here.
There are gradations of wrong.
You can still say that the activity is racist, but there are gradations of racism too.
Okay, so that's point number one.
Point number two is the question as to what the intent was.
So when Justin Trudeau says, I participated in something racist, but I didn't know it was racist, That's a really interesting way to put it, and I kind of think that that model is worth exploring a little bit.
The reason being that people very often unconsciously do things that hurt other people.
We see this constantly in the realm of human behavior.
People will transgress into territory that they didn't realize crossed a line, and then when they're informed that it crossed a line, they say, oh, well, I really didn't mean to say that.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that that was an offensive thing.
I didn't realize I'd now engaged in a stereotype that's really not where I'm meant to go.
So can you engage in a racist behavior without intent?
Two things can be true at once.
The behavior can be racist, and also, you are not necessarily a racist for engaging in the behavior if you don't have the intent to be racist.
I do think that intent is an element of the crime when it comes to racism.
And broadening out the definition of racist act to make the person who engaged in it a racist human, Without any sort of question of intent being brought to bear seems weird to me.
So, to take a perfectly obvious example, let's say that you have a person who is very much on the political left who dressed up as Michael Jackson in 1985 at some sort of event.
Is that the same thing as a member of the KKK dressing up as Michael Jackson at an event in 1985?
I don't think it is.
I really don't think it is.
I think that intent is an element of the crime, meaning that the crime is exactly the same from an objective point of view, but intent does matter to determining the character of the human being who is engaged in this.
And this brings us to the third point, and that is, do you think that Justin Trudeau has matured or gotten better or what does his career say?
Does his career say that this is a guy who's a racist?
Does his career say that this is a guy who's anti-Arab because he dressed up in brownface in 2001 or anti-black because he dressed up in blackface and danced around as Harry Belafonte in 1990?
What exactly is Justin Trudeau as a human being?
When you're voting, you're basing your vote on what you think of the human being in total.
And I said this about Ralph Northam, too.
Again, a politician I despise for his policies.
I know personally, his policies are awful.
I mean, this is a person who went out there and talked basically openly about the possibility of infanticide.
I still said that when that photo came out of Ralph Northam, in what really was a truly egregious photo, does that characterize him for the rest of his life?
And do we want to live in a society where he can go back 20 years and nobody has a- We have a time machine that only works in one way.
I'll explain in just one second about the time machine that is our current politics.
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Okay, so Trudeau makes the statement and To go back to the point I was making, right now we live in an era in politics in which apology is considered a sin.
If you say, I did something 20 years ago, but that's not me, we say, ah, but you did it 20 years ago, didn't you?
Ah, you're a bad person because you did it 20 years ago.
And we're going to bring it up.
And we're not going to let you explain it.
We're not going to let you explain how you've transformed or why you now recognize that the thing you did 20 years ago was bad.
This isn't a parole hearing.
This is a public shaming.
Right?
This is a malice struggle session.
And we are going to bring up the thing you said in the past.
And it doesn't matter if you have repented it.
It doesn't matter if it embarrasses you.
And it doesn't embarrass you just because it's public.
It embarrasses you that you ever did that thing.
And none of that matters.
And so what you end up with is a political class in which everybody is encouraged to double down.
So when Trudeau does what I think is the right thing here and says, yes, it was me, my responsibility, it was a racist thing.
I didn't know it was a racist thing.
And that doesn't characterize me as a human being.
I don't know what more you expect from him.
We have a time machine that only works in one way.
And that time machine is excellent at going back and finding stuff and bringing it back to the future, right?
Going back and getting the sports book and bringing it back to the future.
But there's one problem with the time machine, and that is in the here and now, we do not allow you to justify your behavior, apologize, explain.
We don't allow that.
And also, when we go back in time to go get the Biff sportsbook from 1955, We don't also inform you what's gonna happen in 20 years.
Meaning we don't tell you how the standards are going to change.
We don't even question you at that time because we don't have a time machine that works that way.
Our time machine is only good at grabbing crap from the past and bringing it to the now.
It is not good at going back and talking to you in the then.
So we have no idea what was in Justin Trudeau's mind when he dressed up as Harry Belafonte.
We have no idea what was in Justin Trudeau's mind when he dressed up as some dude in an Arabian Nights thing and put on brown makeup.
And we really don't have a clue.
And we don't have any ability to ask him because, again, the time machine don't work that way.
So instead, we have a time machine that brings back all the bad stuff, but doesn't allow us to explore your mind at the time.
So we are supposed to speculate on your mind at the time, based on that activity and no other data.
We're not allowed to take into account anything you've ever done since.
And we're supposed to pretend that you're the same person now that you were then.
And we're supposed to read your activity in the worst possible light with the worst possible intent, even though the evidence of intent is lacking.
That's the world that people want to create right now.
Now listen, I want Justin Trudeau to lose that election.
And I'm not speaking on behalf of a political point here.
I'm speaking on behalf of a culture of forgiveness in society that makes us able to live with one another.
Because I promise you that if we get a time machine and we go back into everyone's past, there will be something that is embarrassing.
And then the only question for the left really becomes, have people engaged in enough of a struggle session that we allow them to go?
And by struggle session, that means that you cave to certain political priorities.
Somehow, Ralph Northam has been able to survive the ire of the left, mainly because he is on the left.
Justin Trudeau will be able to self-flagellate enough that people will let him go on this thing.
Maybe he pledges to build some affordable housing.
Maybe he pledges to have meetings with local Muslim groups to demonstrate how sorry he is.
All of this.
But the reality is we don't know what was in his head at the time, we have no capacity for forgiveness, and we also fail to recognize that stuff that happened 20 years ago happens in different contexts.
What we have here is a very short-term representation of the longer-term problem that we now see in teaching American and world history, which is, we go back to 1790, and we look at Thomas Jefferson, we're like, that dude owned slaves.
What an evil piece of crap.
What an evil ta- You're a better person than Thomas Jefferson.
And maybe you are.
Maybe you are.
There were people at the time who knew that what Thomas Jefferson was doing was wrong.
In fact, Thomas Jefferson himself wrote words to the effect that he sort of knew what he was doing was wrong.
All of that may be true.
But you weren't there, and so you don't really know, do you?
Because you didn't grow up.
In an era in which slavery was common.
You didn't grow up in an area where slaves worked the plantation and that was considered the normal.
That doesn't justify the time and it doesn't justify the slavery.
It does mean that people grow up and live in the context in which they grow up and live.
And a hundred years from now, people are going to look at pretty much everything we do and say, look at those awful barbarians.
And you're gonna say to yourself, well, yeah, what makes you better than me?
Well, you're not gonna say anything, because you'll be dead.
But if you were alive, you would be saying to them, what makes you better than I am?
You weren't living in that context.
You don't know, like, you know things now that we didn't know then.
You hear this from your parents, you hear this from your grandparents.
You hear this all the time.
And it's true.
It's true.
And if we have no capacity for forgiveness of the stuff that people have done in the past, there's no way to move forward from that.
Because otherwise, we could club each other over the head about this stuff all day long.
But in order for us to have a productive conversation politically and as a society generally, we do have to assume good intentions in the now.
It doesn't mean I have to assume good intentions 20 years ago, but we do have to assume good intentions in the now unless you can provide evidence that that is untrue.
And an old photo from 20 or 30 years ago does not prove that your intentions in the now are bad.
And if the idea is that we are going to now change the assumption and assume that your intentions in the now are bad because of something bad that happened, and the only way for you to demonstrate your good intentions is to do what I want, then this isn't about alleviating problems at all.
It's really just about bullying.
It's really just a bully tactic.
I don't think that motivations matter too much when it comes to talking about facts.
It is a fact that Justin Trudeau did this stuff.
But I think that when it comes to the way in which we castigate somebody like Justin Trudeau, the motives do matter.
And if you're motivated not by your outrage at Justin Trudeau dressing up in 2001, by the fact that you don't want him elected Prime Minister of Canada again, then you're doing decency wrong.
Again, this cuts against my political interest.
I don't like Justin Trudeau.
But that's pretty much the entire point.
If you want to live in a society with other human beings, you're going to have to say, grow up and be an adult.
Honestly, grow up and be an adult.
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OK.
So when I say be an adult and I say it's time to be an adult, one of the things that happens when you are a small child is you think that your parents are perfect.
You think your parents are perfect.
You grow up thinking that they are all wise, they are all knowing, they are supremely moral.
And if you have respect for your parents, you retain that respect for their moral authority as you get older.
But as you get older, you also start to see something weird, and that is that your parents are human beings.
That as you become an adult, you realize your parents are other adults.
And adults are adults.
And that means that your parents have made mistakes in their life.
And now you have a choice.
Do you wish to spend the rest of your life castigating your parents for the mistakes they made with you on a personal level?
Do you wish to blame your parents for all of your problems in the here and now?
Or do you wish to recognize that your parents had problems of their own?
That they maybe mishandled stuff?
That you need to forgive them that because you know your parents are good people who love you?
So, do you wish that the image of your parents as god-like Infallible figures who have never sinned is shattered as you get older.
And you have two choices.
One is to recognize they're human beings doing the best that they can and respect them and love them for that.
And the other is to maintain the image that they should have been these deeply infallible human beings who never made a mistake.
And thanks to their mistakes, all your problems are their fault.
Only one of those two mentalities leads a road to a happier life.
And that is the first road.
You saying, yeah, my parents, they're adults.
They made mistakes.
They love me anyway.
And in fact, you appreciate your parents more for being People.
Because in spite of all their foibles, in spite of all their flaws, they did all this incredible stuff for you.
Or, you can be a douche, and you can spend the rest of your life going around complaining that all the problems that your parents created in your life, it's your parents' fault, it's not your fault, because you are infallible.
You are perfect.
You have never made a mistake.
You can start seeing something in common with your parents, or you can say, well, adults should be infallible, I'm infallible, all my problems are my parents' fault.
Okay, that's what we have to question as a society.
When we look at prominent figures, or any figures really, when we look at our neighbors, we have to ask a question.
Do we expect perfection from everybody, or do we take the generally more true statement that everyone has sinned, and people are striving to do their best as a general rule in the face of their own sinful nature?
Do people make mistakes and progress from it?
Do we assume the worst of motives for every single act?
Or do we assume the worst of motives for political purposes?
If we're doing any of that stuff, we are doing being a human being wrong and we are making society worse.
And my fear is that with all this Justin Trudeau stuff, just as an example, And that the whole hubbub isn't making the society better.
Like, we can all be more sensitive about brownface and blackface, fine with me, but that that's not the purpose here.
That the purpose really here is to club people into supporting particular points of view, or club them into behaving in certain ways that really have nothing to do with sensitivity or morality.
And that the shaming tactics that are now being applied across a broad range of human activity are making the world unlivable.
And worse, and making people less likely to have fun, knowing that 10 years from now, you're never gonna be, you're not gonna live it down, right?
It's the reason why I tell high school students, when I speak on high school and college campuses, I tell high school students, college students, never post anything online, because the fact is they're gonna shift the lines, and all the stuff that is innocent today will now be considered terrible 10 years from now.
And maybe it is terrible today, but it hasn't occurred to anybody yet.
Because do you really think that if Justin Trudeau had shown up at that 2001, he's 29 years old, he shows up to that particular event wearing brown makeup, and one person had gone up to Justin Trudeau and said, you know, Justin, I'm really offended by that.
That really is offensive to me.
You think Justin Trudeau keeps on the makeup?
I don't.
I don't.
I have no evidence that Justin Trudeau does that.
But apparently we have to pretend that he would, that he's a vicious, vicious man, or that this is a vicious, vicious behavior.
And I don't know that anybody survives this standard.
I really don't.
I don't know how we live together if this is the standard.
In fact, I think it's a standard deliberately designed to keep us from living with one another.
Okay, meantime, in other news that is kind of making the rounds, the left is really pushing this one hard.
According to the Washington Post, Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Shane Harris reporting, President Trump's communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress, former officials say.
So that's a really complex headline.
So let's try and break it down.
So they say the whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S.
intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump's communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S.
officials familiar with the matter.
Trump's interaction with the foreign leader included a promise that was regarded as so troubling, it prompted an official in the U.S.
intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint.
with the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
So, another leak from the administration.
It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed.
It raised new questions about the president's handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationships with US spy agencies.
One former official said that the communication was a phone call.
The White House declined to comment late Wednesday night.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a lawyer representing the whistleblower declined to comment.
Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of urgent concern, a legal threshold that requires notification of a Congressional Oversight Committee.
So in other words, someone in the intel community filed a so-called whistleblower complaint.
A whistleblower complaint once filed means you can't be fired for having blown the whistle.
He fired a whistleblower complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General.
And the inspector general determined that the complaint was credible and troubling, and therefore Congress had to be notified.
The Congressional Oversight Committees had to be notified.
But the acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, has refused to share deals about Trump's alleged transaction with lawmakers, touching off a legal and political dispute that has spilled into public view and prompted speculation that the spy chief is improperly protecting the president.
The head of the DNI?
He said, no, I'm not turning that over.
So basically, he disagrees with the Inspector General of the intelligence community.
And this, once again, raises the big problem.
of unitary executive theory versus the idea that there are independent agencies within the executive branch.
So under Justice Scalia's unitary executive theory and the Constitution of the United States, once you delegate power from the legislature to the executive branch, everybody in the executive branch works for the president.
He's the head of the executive branch.
So if something happens that is bad within the executive branch, then the notion that those people can simply determine, in the absence of running it up the chain of command, what to do and then answer only to Congress creates serious balance of power issues.
Because what you really could end up with is the Congressional branch running the Executive branch.
You could end up with the Legislature running the Executive with a bunch of unelected officials who were appointed by Congress And then left there forever.
That is a serious problem.
You end up with an unanswerable branch of Congress in the bureaucracy.
But that runs up against situations like this, like what if the whistleblower complaint is actually a serious problem?
What if the whistleblower is actually making a complaint that is criminal in nature?
So this is where you end up with these sort of constitutional crisis questions.
The dispute is expected to escalate Thursday when Atkinson is scheduled to appear before the House Intelligence Committee in a classified session close to the public.
The hearing is the latest move by committee chairman Adam Schiff to compel U.S.
intelligence officials to disclose the full details of the whistleblower complaint to Congress.
McGuire has agreed to testify before the panel next week.
He declined to comment for the article.
According to Schiff, who has fibbed about this kind of stuff in the past with regard to Russia, the inspector general determined the complaint is both credible and urgent.
The complaint was filed with Atkinson's office on August 12th, a date on which Trump was at his golf resort in New Jersey.
White House records indicate that Trump had had conversations or interactions with at least five foreign leaders in the preceding five weeks.
Among them was a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin the White House initiated on July 31st.
Trump also received at least two letters from Kim Jong-un during the summer.
It also could have been the Prime Minister of Pakistan, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, or the Emir of Qatar.
So because Putin's name is on the list, this has led people to speculate that Trump made some sort of promise to Putin that was super-duper law-breaking, and that somebody in the intelligence community then notified the Inspector General, blew the whistle, and the Inspector General was like, okay, you gotta go tell Congress, and then the head of the National Intelligence Community said, no, you don't.
Statements and letters exchanged between the offices of the DNI and the House Intelligence Committee in recent days have pointed at the White House without directly implicating the president.
Schiff has said he was told the complaint concerned conduct by someone outside of the intelligence community.
The dispute has put McGuire thrust into the DNI job in an acting capacity with the resignation of Daniel Coats last month at the center of a politically perilous conflict with constitutional implications.
Schiff is demanding full disclosure of the whistleblower complaint.
McGuire is defending his refusal by saying that the subject of the complaint is beyond his jurisdiction.
In other words, a member of the intel community filing a complaint about the president, that doesn't fall under the intelligence auspices, right?
That's presidential activity.
And if the Congress wants to subpoena Trump and have him testify, or if the Congress wants to issue, you know, pass laws to that effect, they can do it.
Defenders of McGuire dispute he's subverting legal requirements to protect Trump, saying he's trapped in a legitimate legal predicament and he has made his displeasure clear to officials at the Justice Department and the White House.
By law, McGuire is required to transmit complaints to Congress within seven days.
In this case, he refrained from doing so because he turned to the Justice Department for some sort of guidance and they said, you're not allowed to turn this stuff over.
Legal experts, according to the Washington Post, say there are scenarios in which a president's communications with a foreign leader could rise to the level of an urgent concern for the intelligence community.
But they also noted that the president has broad authority to decide unilaterally when to declassify or classify information.
So in other words, if it was somebody in the intel community who is basically suggesting, oh, you know what?
We don't like that Trump gave this info to Putin.
All Trump has to do is say, boom, declassified.
We're done here.
So we are likely to find out, I think, in the very near future, what exactly the complaint against Trump is.
It'll be a big blow-up.
We'll wait to see, until then, exactly whether this is indeed a matter of deep and abiding concern, okay?
In just a second, we are going to get to the Fed rate making a move and President Trump being pretty unhappy about it.
But first, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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Our final question, because Kennedy from Fox Business Network stopped by and it was great.
Here's a little bit of what that sounded like.
Anytime something happens that feels like it's beyond our control, the knee-jerk is, we need more government, as if government is going to solve things.
Government naturally doesn't do that.
It's the opposite.
It's just layers and layers of suffocating bureaucracy that collapses under the weight of its own good intentions.
So Kennedy's stopped by a lot of libertarian talks.
If you're into libertarianism, this is a big thing.
So go check it out.
Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday special with Kennedy this weekend.
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Okay, so the Federal Reserve has decided that it is time to lower the benchmark interest rate of the Fed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point for the second time in as many months to cushion the economy against a global slowdown amplified by the U.S.-China trade war.
Now, President Trump had, of course, been calling on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates.
He wants them to keep lowering and keep lowering and keep lowering.
The idea being that if they do, that spurs borrowing and lending and that that will jog the economy.
See, there's this weird catch-22, politically speaking, that President Trump is in, with regard to the economy.
On the one hand, if the economy is really going gangbusters, if the economy is really super strong, there's no real reason for a rate cut.
If the economy is strong, you don't need to cut rates to, quote-unquote, spur growth and spur spending and boost lending and all of this.
If, however, the rates are continuously lowered, that indicates that Trump thinks that the economy is starting to turn south, which cuts against his re-elect efforts.
So which one do you want?
Do you want the rate cut and the implication that the economy is slowing?
Or would you prefer no rate cut and maybe the economy slows?
So that's the real question for President Trump.
Jerome Powell said, We don't know.
Which is sort of what he is supposed to be saying at this point.
Like, why are we forecasting further rate cuts?
If he really believed that we need a big rate cut right now, he'd just make one.
He wouldn't wait several months in order to make another rate cut.
He could just cut it right now.
U.S.
stocks wobbled and paired losses after the Fed's decision.
Treasury yields, which move inversely to prices, ticked higher, though held their recent range, meaning that people said, OK, maybe the economy is stabilizing a little bit.
Markets have been looking to the Fed for more concrete promises of rate cuts, but Powell has been reluctant to make any.
The trade-related risks are out of the Fed's control and difficult to predict.
Officials are divided over how to respond.
In other words, the tariff war is having a toll on the American economy.
If Trump were to cut some sort of deal with the Chinese, that'd probably help the economy, and then you don't need to cut rates.
But Jerome Powell has no idea what's gonna happen, because nobody has any idea what's going to happen.
Seven of the 10 Fed officials voted in favor of lowering the benchmark of federal funds rates to a range between 1.75% and 2%, with two Reserve Bank presidents preferring to hold rates steady, and one favoring a larger half-point cut.
The Fed also, on Wednesday, injected money into the banking system for the second day in a row to ease a crunch an overnight funding market said it would do so again on Thursday.
The operations are aimed at keeping the Fed funds rate in the central bank's target range.
That is not a crisis move.
So people are trying to see that as, okay, the Feds had to intervene in the banking system because people are withdrawing too much money from the banking system.
Okay, that's not what happened.
People are withdrawing money in expectation of paying their quarterly taxes.
Powell said that the funding issues And the Fed's operations have no implications for the economy or the stance of monetary policy.
And he continued to signal uncertainty about the trade war.
President Trump is pissed off anyway.
Soon after the Fed announced its rate cut, which he has been calling for, Trump lashed out.
He said, J-PAL and the Federal Reserve fail again.
He said, no guts, no sense, no vision, a terrible communicator.
Powell declined to talk about it.
He said, I continue to believe the independence of the Federal Reserve from direct political control has served the public well over time.
And he said that the Fed will continue to conduct monetary policy without regard to political considerations.
And bottom line is that we just don't know which direction the economy is going.
President Trump wants the rates cut because he figures, okay, what's the worst that can happen?
Well, let's say the economy is going strong.
If we cut the rates, maybe it'll grow even stronger.
The Fed did estimate that there would be growth this quarter, or its GDP forecast for 2019, slightly up to 2.1% or 2.2%, but that is not the kind of rate that President Trump was aiming for when he came into office.
He was suggesting 3 or even maybe 4% growth.
This obviously is not that.
The central bank now expects GDP to grow at a 2.2% pace.
Which again, is not great.
Okay.
Meanwhile, speaking of those presidential hopes, the 2020 Democratic candidates are at it again.
Elizabeth Warren, there's some talk about how she's broadening her coalition.
It is true.
Bernie Sanders has a very narrow coalition.
His coalition is basically white young people.
And Joe Biden's coalition is white old people and black people.
That is his coalition.
Elizabeth Warren has very solid support among white upper-class liberals, and then she has mid-range to low support among every other group, but there is room for her to move up.
The problem for Elizabeth Warren is that in order to steal more support from Bernie and finally overtake Biden in the polls, she keeps having to move left, and she keeps pandering, and she keeps getting worse.
Sort of read on Elizabeth Warren, broadly speaking, is that she's sincere Hillary Clinton.
I don't think that's right.
I think she's more talented than Hillary, but I don't think she's sincere in any way, shape or form.
I don't think she believes half the things that she is saying.
I think when she does the full-on woke routine, when she is suggesting she wants Medicare for all but she's not going to raise middle class taxes, and when she goes out and she starts playing the Hillary Clinton, men have no part in American history card, I don't think she believes any of this stuff.
It really is a radical departure from what she used to be when she was at Harvard Law School, for example.
So Elizabeth Warren spoke in New York City a couple of days ago and she dropped this astonishing line, we are not here because of men.
I am especially glad to be here in Washington Square Park.
I wanted to give this speech right here, and not because of the arch behind me or the president that this square is named for.
Nope.
We are not here today because of famous arches or famous men.
In fact, we're not here because of men at all.
We're here because of some hard-working women.
Oh, is that the whole story of New York City?
Is it, really?
I missed the part where men were completely irrelevant to the story of New York City.
Weird.
Weird.
If this is the pitch...
Again, this stuff is going to live on into the general election.
Her insulting George Washington and insulting men.
She's got a gender gap.
She understands she has a gender gap.
And she's trying to exacerbate the gender gap by appealing to women.
But I don't think that she's winning over additional women.
And that's particularly true in the areas of the country that she needs to win, does Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, the fact is that Joe Biden in a general election is still the most threatening candidate to President Trump for two reasons.
One, he feels non-threatening.
And two, he's got the legacy of Barack Obama to run on, and people still have warm feelings for Barack Obama personally, and they've extended those to Joe Biden.
But what you're starting to see from the Democratic Party is a turn away from even Barack Obama-era semi-rationality.
It's amazing.
Farhad Manjoo, Who is one of the ids of the democratic establishment, he writes over for the New York Times, one of the brilliant, myriad brilliant intellects on their editorial page, has a piece today called Barack Obama's Biggest Mistake.
And what is that big mistake?
That Barack Obama still believed heavily in free markets, even though Barack Obama was a massive interventionist into free markets.
He says, after the financial crash, Democrats had a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity presented by a careening global crisis.
Across the country, people were losing jobs and homes in numbers not seen since World War II.
If he'd been in the mood to press the case, Obama might have found widespread public appetite for the sort of aggressive, interventionist restructuring of the American economy that FDR conjured with the New Deal.
One of the inspiring new president's advisors even hinted that that was the plan.
And then he quotes Rahm Emanuel saying you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.
Now this seems to ignore the fact that Barack Obama tried to ram through Obamacare and really failed to do so in the fashion that he originally suggested and had to cut a bunch of deals and then got the Affordable Care Act and that was so unpopular that Democrats across the country lost their seats.
But according to Farhad Manjood the lesson of Obama is that the left didn't pull far left enough.
Farhad Manjoo said rather than try for a Rooseveltian home run, he bunted.
Instead of pushing for an aggressive stimulus to rapidly expand employment and long-term structural reforms in how the economy worked, Obama and his team responded to the recession with a set of smaller emergency measures designed to fix the immediate collapse of financial markets.
Did they?
He spent $4 trillion his first year in office.
He spent $700 billion on TARP.
He said the recession didn't turn into a depression, or on his stimulus package, rather.
He said the recession didn't turn into a depression.
Markets were stabilized.
The United States began a period of long, slow growth, but they could have done so much more.
He should have spent $1.2 trillion on government stimulus.
Instead, he only pushed for $800 billion.
Yeah, that was the big deal.
And of course, he failed to push for a radical restructuring of the American economy.
But now is the time.
Now is the time.
Of course, he's pushing for Elizabeth Warren.
He says, Elizabeth Warren really only pushed for going after big banks.
to rank at the top of mind for a Democratic electorate that is now choosing between Obama's vice president and progressives like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, who had pushed Obama during the recovery to adopt policies with more egalitarian economic effects.
Elizabeth Warren really only pushed for going after big banks.
That was pretty much her policy.
From this distance, as Farhad Manju, the history favors Warren's approach.
So the problem isn't that Barack Obama made business extraordinarily uneasy with his heavy hand of regulation, with his increases in taxes.
No, the real problem is that he didn't fully embrace the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders plan.
And this is the direction the Democratic Party is moving.
But in order to do that, they have to declare a complete break with the Obama years.
And that means declaring a complete break with Joe Biden.
And the new attack on Joe Biden, so they've tried a few.
Attack number one was that Joe Biden is too old.
That really has not gone very much of anywhere.
Attack number two is that Joe Biden is a racist.
That, again, is not really going to go much of anywhere.
And then there is attack number three.
And that is that Joe Biden is too nice.
And this one may actually work.
This may actually work because Democrats are ticked off.
Democrats hate President Trump.
They have been driven around the bend by Trump derangement syndrome.
A lot of Democrats believed in the aftermath of Barack Obama that Democrats would never lose an election again.
That was the demographic promise.
All the groups in America that were increasing in terms of their demographics were voting Democrat.
And therefore, there was no chance a Republican would ever win again.
The Obama 2012 coalition ushered in a new era in American politics in which you could lose heavy shares of the white vote and still win general election.
And then Donald Trump came along, and he beat Hillary Clinton, and Democrats had to cope with what had happened.
And so they could choose one of two narratives.
One is, Donald Trump represents a racist backlash, but it's an aberration, and it'll go away.
And the other one is maybe we ought to start thinking about some of those white voters we alienated with all of our intersectional identity politics nonsense.
And instead they chose the Donald Trump is an aberration, he's probably gonna go away.
And we need to treat Republicans like scum and treat everybody who disagrees with us like some sort of horrible person.
And this is how you arrive at the third attack on Joe Biden.
So we've had again, he's a racist, nope.
He's old, meh.
And finally, that he is too nice to Republicans.
In the New York Times today, there's a piece by Glenn Thrush titled, Joe Biden believes in the goodwill of Republicans.
Is that naive?
Now, first of all, Joe Biden basically called the Tea Party terrorists and suggested if you don't want your taxes increased, that you are not patriotic in the United States.
So I'm not going to completely buy this.
Joe Biden is a wonderful friend to Republicans line, at least not publicly.
Now, privately, he is good friends with a lot of Republicans.
I know a lot of rock ribbed Republicans who feel that Joe Biden is a nice guy.
They can talk with him, negotiate with him.
But according to the New York Times, that's very bad and it needs to be stopped.
So according to the New York Times, again, this is a news piece, not an opinion piece.
Mitch McConnell.
The Senate Republican leader and self-described grim reaper of liberal legislative dreams settled into a routine of sorts during Barack Obama's second term whenever he felt he was cornered by Democrats.
McConnell would rise from his chair in the Capitol, walk to his scheduler's desk, smile a tight smile, and ask, can we get Joe Biden on the phone?
That was precisely what happened in late 2012 when Republicans were in the minority and McConnell hit an impasse with Harry Reid over the elimination of Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy.
Again, this is a news piece.
It's unbelievable.
As a New Year's Eve deadline approached, Biden and Mr. McConnell hammered out an agreement in a dozen phone calls, aides to both men said, with Obama signing off on every move.
The two sides struck a deal that delivered some but far from all of what Reid wanted.
This year, as he runs for president, Biden cites that deal and others he cut with McConnell as proof of his skill in achieving bipartisan legislation in an otherwise hyper-partisan environment.
Biden said this month, I'll work with Mitch McConnell where we can agree.
He said there were some issues like gun control where there is no room for compromise.
That he would agree with Mr. McConnell on anything is a controversial statement for any Democrat to make these days, but in a sprawling field of 20 candidates, Biden stands out for his enduring belief in the goodwill of congressional Republicans.
He insists that the GOP has been bullied by President Trump, but that civility and compromise will return to Washington once Trump is gone.
Now, the reality is that Biden doesn't even believe that.
Biden believes that he could probably get a deal done now.
With Trump in office, he believes that deals are there to be done.
He's just saying that because he's running against Trump.
It's a view that has been branded naive and wistful by some Democratic rivals, as well as by the ascendant left wing of his party.
That criticism is particularly pointed with regard to McConnell, whose decision to block Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court elevated him from mere obstructionist to arch villain in the eyes of many Democrats.
Now, this attack may stick.
And the reason it may stick is because Joe Biden is violating a crucial rule.
That rule is you have to demonize Republicans as evil, horrible human beings.
And Biden does that sometimes, but other times he does not.
And Elizabeth Warren has fallen into the habit of doing it on a routine basis.
And Bernie Sanders, of course, does it all the time.
Well, this is the attack that could be a problem for Joe Biden, but the fact is that if you knock Biden out of the box with this attack, then you provide a parallel problem, and that's the problem for Elizabeth Warren.
There's a piece by Paul Starobin, journalist based in Orleans, Massachusetts, suggesting that Elizabeth Warren's critical vulnerability is that white working-class voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin aren't interested in her wild-eyed progressivism.
So in other words, all the stuff that makes Biden unpalatable in a primary, again, is the stuff that makes him palatable in a general and vice versa with Elizabeth Warren.
Alrighty, time for a quick thing that I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, there's a piece of good news today.
America's abortion rate has now dropped to its lowest ever.
Fewer pregnancies may be more responsible for the decline than state laws restricting abortion, says the New York Times.
This is, of course, what they're going to suggest.
Abortion in the United States has decreased to record low levels.
Good!
Fewer...
Children and incipient children in the womb being killed, good!
A decline that may be driven more by increased access to contraception and fewer women becoming pregnant than by the proliferation of laws restricting abortion in some states, according to new research.
Abortion rates decrease in almost every state.
There's no clear pattern linking these declines to new restrictions.
Right, but there is a clear pattern linking these declines to the restrictions in the sense that the overwhelming wave in American public opinion is that more and more people are recognizing that a baby in the womb is in fact a baby in the womb.
And that's driving both the laws and the trend on an individual level for people to have fewer abortions, just as in the opposite way in the 1970s, the weird assumption that children were not children, that abortion was a moral good, led to both a rollback in laws and to an increase in abortion simultaneously.
But that is a very good piece of news, and we should note it.
In other things that I like today, this is just a wonderful, wonderful story.
Lauren Zuka, who has been a guest on our radio program, She's a former Teen Vogue columnist, most famous for going at it with Tucker Carlson on his television show.
Well, according to a BuzzFeed News profile, her students in Feminism and Journalism at New York University filed a formal complaint.
Why?
Because it turns out she's terrible at her job.
According to BuzzFeed News, nearly four weeks after the course ended, her students sent a collective formal complaint to the heads of the NYU Journalism School about Duca's conduct.
Five out of the ten students had similar allegations against Duca and class structure.
They said that Duca didn't follow her own syllabus, that she spoke often and inappropriately about her personal life, that she would belittle and yell at students, and most pressingly, that she targeted one student in particular.
Apparently, she even used certain slurs to deal with a student, according to the BuzzFeed report.
They claim that she would disappear for 30 to 45 minutes per class to meditate, which is incredible.
She would belittle one student in particular, apparently.
The students described the course as, quote, a waste of six weeks for all of us.
And one student told BuzzFeed, it's frustrating to see as a student, as a young woman, see how somebody can so clearly take advantage of the system and capitalize on her supposed wokeness while not practicing what she's writing about.
Lauren Zuko responded to BuzzFeed, it's okay if I'm not a great teacher because I'm great at a lot of other things.
Which is just spectacular.
That is absolutely spectacular.
You weren't hired for the other things, lady.
You were hired for the teaching part of it.
And, by the way, a fond hello to Lauren Zuka's journalism class.
She came on my radio program and apparently, like, played the interview in the class while she was doing it.
It didn't go fantastically for her, so.
Lauren Zuka, professor to the stars.
Okay, you know what?
We're going to skip things that I hate today because we've run out of time, but we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
So we'll see you then.
Or see you here later today for two additional hours.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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