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Nov. 25, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:38
Virtue Signaling Isn’t Science | Ep. 904
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The American Medical Association pursues an anti-science agenda, Yale students invade the Yale-Harvard football game, and Michael Bloomberg officially enters the race.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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Okay, so I want to begin today with a non-impeachment related story.
That's because, frankly, I'm tired of the impeachment stuff.
I don't think it's going anywhere.
We'll get to those updates in a little bit, but the media's outsized attention to impeachment is obscuring the fact that there's some deep systemic change going on in the United States with regard particularly to hot button social issues.
And a lot of this is being pushed by Folks who have an anti-science agenda inside the scientific community.
Today's example, it's actually coming from last week.
So late last week, the American Medical Association, according to the AMA website, gathered physician and medical student leaders from all corners of medicine at its interim meeting to shape guiding policies on emerging healthcare topics.
Ooh, ah.
The AMA's House of Delegates is the policy-making body at the center of American medicine.
The policies adopted by the House of Delegates today, this would have been last week, like last Wednesday, Thursday, included, quote, The AMA supports state and federal bans on conversion therapy.
Now, let me be clear before I go any further.
When it comes to conversion therapy, no one, no one is in favor of electrocuting kids in order to make them not gay.
No one is talking about that.
No one is in favor of electroshock therapy for kids who are suffering from gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria, however you decide to use that term.
When the AMA talks about conversion therapy, they are talking about your ability to bring your child to a psychologist and the psychologist Being able to tell your child that your child is in fact the sex to which he or she belongs.
That's what the AMA is talking about.
They want to ban that.
That's what they're saying explicitly.
The AMA now wants to develop model state legislation and advocate for federal legislation to ban so-called Not only banning that, right?
or conversion therapy for sexual orientation or gender identity.
So not just with regard to you have a kid who's 12, thinks he is sexually confused about his orientation, and you want to take him to a therapist, and the therapist might be able to help him clarify some of those feelings or might be able to help your kid out of the struggle without telling them that they are explicitly gay, for example.
Not only banning that, right?
Not only banning that, and not just banning it for adults, but not just banning for children, banning it for adults, right?
So what the left would like is for there to be taxpayer sponsors sex changes But if you are 21 years old and you are bothered by your sexual orientation and want to talk to a psychologist, it would be illegal for the psychologist to talk to you about this in any way other than to affirm that you are indeed gay.
But we're not just talking about...
Homosexuality here or sexual orientation.
We are talking specifically about gender identity.
So you bring your five-year-old to a psychologist because your five-year-old is expressing that they believe that they are a member of the opposite sex.
The AMA wants to ban the psychologist from telling your kid that your kid is actually a member of the sex to which they belong.
So you bring your five-year-old son to the doctor because your five-year-old son keeps maintaining he is a girl.
The AMA wants to ban any therapy that does not say that your kid is a girl.
That's what the American Medical Association... Okay, this is not science, as we will see.
According to the AMA, the support for legislative bans strengthens AMA's long-standing opposition to this unscientific practice.
Okay, first of all, let's just be frank about this.
There's not a lot of evidence with regard to the various therapies that have been applied with regard to gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria, as we'll get to.
The AMA heard testimony, including first-hand accounts regarding the specific harms triggered by conversion therapy, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal thoughts and attempts.
AMA Board Member William Kobler, M.D., said it is clear to the AMA that the conversion therapy needs to end in the United States given the deliberate risk of harm to LGBTQ people.
Conversion therapy has no foundation as scientifically valid medical care and lacks credible evidence to support its efficacy or safety.
Hey, now, again, they want to make sure that if you bring your child to a doctor because your child is expressing gender confusion, we're not even talking sexual orientation anymore, gender confusion, that that would be illegal across the country.
Across the country.
Which, by the way, is the first step.
Toward folks on the social left suggesting that if you're a parent and you and your child goes to school and expresses that they're confused about gender and you don't affirm that your child is a member of the opposite gender that you are in fact a derelict parent and Child Protective Services comes for you, right?
This is the direction we are moving and we are moving there incredibly quickly with the support of organizations like the AMA which are cutting directly against science.
When I say they are cutting directly against science, I mean they are cutting directly against science because what exactly is the basis for this suggestion that that Quote-unquote conversion therapy, meaning talk therapy with your kid, is not only ineffective but counterproductive.
It is one study, and one study alone, and the study happens to be junk science.
It is one study, and it is politically driven, and it is junk science, and the AMA is using that to say that your psychologist can't engage in what basically is cognitive behavioral therapy with your kid.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, by the way, is basically the only form of psychology that is known to work.
The basic theory of cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, is that you, as a person, you have thoughts, which leads to feelings, which leads to actions.
And when it comes to fighting depression, what psychologists typically do is they teach you to disconnect thoughts, feelings, and actions.
So your thoughts should not necessarily lead to feelings, and those feelings shouldn't necessarily lead to actions.
Basically, the AMA wants to ban that with regard to children, with regard to children who are experiencing gender confusion, who may not understand the difference between boy and girl.
And they're basing this all on one study, basically.
One study.
And they're open about this.
They're basing it on one study completely.
That study was a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
Okay, and the study is just garbage.
I'll explain in just one second.
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Okay, so, as I say, the American Medical Association, on the basis of literally one study, is now calling for a nationwide ban on what they call conversion therapy.
And the very term conversion therapy is an attempt to conflate bad old conversion therapy, meaning, like, people being electroshocked when people thought they were gay, right, which no one is for, again, for the fifth time this show, With the basic idea that if I bring my kid to the doctor, my kid is gender confused, that the doctor is allowed to tell them that they are actually their genetic self, right?
That they are actually a boy, or they are actually a girl.
The AMA wants to ban that outright.
They want a federal ban on that, from the federal government.
And they are basing this on one study, and the study is done by an activist.
Of course.
Because nothing in this area has anything to do with science.
The person who released the study is a guy named Jack Turbin.
He's the lead author.
Jack Turbin happens to be an activist on this issue.
And he states openly that the study was done in order to prove a case that he already believed.
Turbin claims that the study was, quote, the first study to show that gender identity conversion efforts are associated with adverse mental health outcomes, including suicide attempts, and that previous reports showing the negative effects of conversion therapy have focused on efforts to change a person's sexual orientation rather than gender identity.
And then Turbin turned to its political and legal value.
He said, this is important because some experts continue to advocate for gender identity conversion efforts for young children.
It's not a conversion.
It's not a conversion.
You are what you are.
Unlike sexual orientation, where your feelings are the actual thing at issue, when it comes to gender identity, what is at issue is that your feelings are at odds with your actual biology.
This is a very different thing.
Sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same in a variety of ways, including the fact that gender identity is inextricably connected with your biology and your biology is reflected in your gender identity.
And pretending that when the two are at odds, that this is not a big problem is ridiculous.
When it comes to sexual orientation, again, your feelings are your feelings, but they are not at odds with your biology.
Okay, when you're gender, when you're, when you are saying that your identity is in direct conflict with your biological sex, that is not a conversion attempt to say your biological sex exists and you need to change your thinking about your biological sex.
That's absurd.
Turbin said, we hope our findings contribute to ongoing legislative efforts to ban gender identity conversion efforts.
In other words, the study was done explicitly with this goal in mind.
And as it turns out, like many studies that are done with a specific end in mind, the study happens to be a piece of crap.
It was published with vast coverage in the media just last week.
In the J, in the, or in September, in the JAMA, the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
These were researchers affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital.
They also happen to be professionals who are associated deeply with the LGBTQ cause.
There are a bunch of problems with this study.
And there's a good deconstruction of this study by a professor of sociology named Mark Regnerus.
The biggest problem with the study is that it is a self-defined survey.
In other words, it's an opt-in.
So it was a survey that went out to a bunch of people who were deliberately identified as people who had relationships with transgender causes.
So it's basically like sending a survey to activists.
In other words, it is non-representative.
And not only is it non-representative, it misses the entire point.
It misses the entire point because if you send a survey out to people who identify as transgender and you ask them whether quote-unquote transgender conversion therapy worked for them when they were kids or whether it was damaging, what do you think they're going to say?
That's like sending out a survey to a bunch of divorced adults and asking them how marriage therapy went and whether it's useful or whether it made them feel bad.
They're divorced.
You would imagine that marriage therapy made them feel bad.
It's ridiculous.
I mean, it's like sending out a survey to people who have had a recurrence of cancer and asking them whether chemo made them feel bad or whether it helped them.
Yes, well, once you know they've had a recurrence of cancer, then the chemo didn't help them all that much, did it?
Well, the problem is this.
For a huge, huge number of kids who experience gender confusion at some point in their young lives, they grow out of it.
Like, 80% of kids who experience gender confusion when they're 5, 6 years old grow out of it.
And that's low-end estimates.
Anywhere from 50 to 80% at the low end.
None of those kids got surveyed.
None of these people got surveyed.
Instead, you surveyed the people who are most likely to identify It's an absurd survey.
On its face.
Not just that.
and are openly identifying as transgender, what do you think they're going to say when they said they saw a psychologist who said to them that they were a member of their original sex?
It's an absurd survey on its face.
Not just that.
As Regnerus points out, the study fails to define or even distinguish what it even means by gender identity conversion therapy.
Right?
Conversion efforts.
It comes from a solitary question respondents were asked.
Quote, did any professional, such as a psychologist, counselor, or religious advisor, try to make you identify only with your sex assigned at birth?
In other words, try to stop you being trans.
That's the survey question.
Okay, so that is literally anyone who did not just give you perfect affirmation of the idea that you were a member of the sex to which you were claiming identity.
And they're saying that that is in and of itself damaging.
So anybody who once said to you, no, you know what?
You're not a woman, you're a man.
That was conversion therapy under this particular definition.
Steven Levine, a psychiatrist and long-time gender identity expert, highlights the quandary facing professionals attempting to counsel transgender patients on the biological, social, and psychological risks posed by any treatment approach.
Such risks are real and ought to be discussed, but if you don't give somebody ethical, informed consent, then that is trying to stop you from being trans.
So in other words, if you say to somebody, listen, if you actually want to commit a surgery where you mutilate your genitals, I mean, that is what the surgery does, that is gonna carry with it certain risks.
It's going to be a very hard process.
It's going to carry with it certain medical risks.
If you say that, that could be seen as gender identity conversion therapy under this survey.
As Regnerus points out, the authors of the JAMA psychiatry study following the USTS's survey measurement aren't interested in subtleties.
The authors paint an entire class of cautious therapeutic approaches as intrinsically harmful, sending a clear message to psychiatrists and psychotherapists alike.
Scientifically, we learned nothing of the respondents' motivations for interacting with the professional in the first place.
You don't even know whether people were depressed going in and depressed coming out.
Also, as Regnerus points out, the data come from a non-random opt-in survey, the USTS, that only targeted networked, self-identified transgender or non-binary persons by advertising their survey among active transgender, LGBTQ, and allied organizations.
Which again, is not only a non-random sample, you are specifically targeting people For whom the therapy did not work, right?
I mean, that is, again, the base point here.
If you keep targeting people for whom a therapy didn't work and ask them whether the therapy is harmful or helpful, they will of course tell you that the therapy is harmful.
But this is not a representative cross-section.
In fact, it's not even a representative cross-section of transgender people.
As Regnerus points out, when compared with the 2017 study of the demographic characteristics of transgender adults from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a population-based sample, the USGS respondents are really dissimilar.
They have double the unemployment rate.
They have double the number of male-to-female identity.
I mean, almost triple.
Actually, triple.
Only 18% are married versus 50% in the BRFSS, so it's a completely non-representative sample, and you can't weight the sample, because, again, the sample is the sample, and that's the poll results.
That's like taking a poll of only Republicans asking how they feel about Obama, and then weighting the sample.
It doesn't help you at all.
Also, the study then builds on dubious perceptions of representativeness by reporting confidence intervals, which is just nonsense.
In sociological terms, that only works for probability samples, but this is not a probability sample, so that makes no sense at all.
And then, of course, the authors are not interested in putting their implied causation to the test.
Instead, a subtext of injustices committed against the respondents infuses the study, suggesting a decidedly external locus of control in the lives of transgender Americans.
The narrative is interrupted only once, when the authors admit that it is possible that those with worse mental health or internalized transphobia may have been more likely to seek out conversion therapy rather than non-conversion therapy, suggesting conversion efforts themselves were not causative.
But apparently that's not worth considering beyond that one line in the study.
On the basis of this one single garbage study, the entire AMA just voted.
It was actually a small section of the AMA, but now it represents the entire AMA, decided to vote in favor of pushing federal legislation banning psychologists and psychiatrists from informing children that they are in fact the sex of their birth.
This is not only non-scientific, it is politically driven crap, and it's incredibly dangerous.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, now this has been a long-time trend, unfortunately, with regard to political hot-button issues.
In the American Psychiatric Association, which produces the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, for example, and in the AMA, is politics driving medicine and not the other way around.
This is why the DSM-5 reclassified Gender Identity Disorder not as Gender Identity Dysphoria, but as Gender Dysphoria.
Based on no evidence, by the way.
Nothing changed about the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder.
Instead, they simply listed it as Gender Dysphoria, and then they acknowledged, in the DSM-5, why they did this.
They said it was to remove stigma.
Right?
They said when it comes to access to care, many of the treatment options for this condition include counseling, cross-sex hormones, gender reassignment surgery, and social and legal transition to the desired gender.
To get insurance coverage for the medical treatments, individuals need a diagnosis.
In other words, they're even saying that if it had been up to them, politically, they would have removed gender dysphoria as a diagnosis at all from the DSM-5.
Which is insane!
So you walk into the doctor and you say, listen, I feel like a lady today.
I feel like a natural woman.
And the doctor's supposed to go, perfectly normal.
Everything's good.
But, just so we can make sure that you're covered by your insurance, we'll call it gender dysphoria.
But really, there's nothing wrong with you unless you get depressed because of your gender dysphoria.
They say part of removing stigma is about choosing the right words.
Replacing disorder with dysphoria in the diagnostic label is not only more appropriate and consistent with familiar clinical sexology terminology, it also removes the connotation the patient is disordered.
But of course your gender identity is disordered.
Ultimately, the changes regarding gender dysphoria in DSM-5 respect the individuals identified by offering a diagnostic name that is more appropriate to the symptoms and behavior they experience without jeopardizing their access to effective treatment options.
There is literally no evidence that gender identity disorder is not a disorder.
All of this was just determined by a bunch of politically active people inside the APA.
And you've seen the same thing inside the AMA.
Now, why does all of this matter?
Because the goal in all of this is to use science as a lever in order to bully parents.
This is where this is going, right?
The headlines on that original study that I talked about, which is again, a garbage study, has serious, serious flaws with it.
Here is the study from the Washington Post headline.
New York Daily News.
Except that the study was again flawed from the outset.
Severe psychological distress in transgender people, study says.
Science magazine.
New study reveals risks of transgender conversion therapy.
New York Daily News.
Trans adults who try professional help to change gender identity are twice as likely to commit suicide.
New study finds.
Except that the study was again flawed from the outset.
It was specifically based on people for whom the therapy had obviously failed.
It did not survey anyone who had previously identified as trans and grew out of it.
Which again, is up to 80% of people who had some form of sexual identity confusion.
Meaning gender identity confusion.
It's absolute nonsense.
Okay, but based on this, based on this, apparently, apparently that is enough to change the entire medical diagnosis of a specific subset.
And then the goal is going to be exactly what it has been for years.
Again, it's not going to stop with your kid has a problem and you can't bring them to a psychologist or a psychiatrist to get some even Even watchful waiting, right?
There are a few different treatments that have been considered here.
One is the overt rejection.
No, this is not true.
The second is watchful waiting, which is you don't affirm the chosen quote-unquote gender of the child.
Instead, you just say, listen, we're going to wait on this, and we're going to help you through whatever pain you're experiencing, and then we'll see if you grow out of it or you don't.
That itself could be classified as gender conversion therapy.
Instead, the left only wants gender affirmation.
Only gender affirmation.
And they will push this through.
Okay, the way this will work is that eventually, as soon as a kid goes to a public school, and the public school hears that your kid is saying that they are a member of the opposite sex, and the kid comes home, and you say, no you're not, you're a boy, if you're a boy, you're a boy, and your kid goes back to school, they'll call CPS on you.
That is where this is moving.
There's a great piece in National Review about all of this, the latest issue of National Review by Madeline Kearns called The Tragedy of the Trans Child.
And she talks specifically about the ridiculousness of where all of this started.
She says humans are a sexually dimorphic species.
Females produce eggs and bear offspring.
Males produce sperm and impregnate females.
The existence of disorders of sexual development, or more imprecisely and potentially offensively, intersex persons and the need for greater social understanding of them in no way collapses this distinction.
In the 1950s, the relationship between the terms sex and gender, the latter of which applied chiefly to grammar, began to change as sexologists coined the phrase gender identity to denote the sex that one believed one was.
And then, of course, there was a very famous case in the 1960s where a psychologist named John Money conducted a twin study in which a male baby, Bruce Reimer, with a damaged penis was raised as a girl.
His brother, Brian, was raised as a boy.
Money instructed the parents to raise their children to believe that Bruce was really a girl called Brenda.
To make a long story short, both brothers ended up killing themselves.
I mean, that is not particularly surprising given the fact that biology is biology.
The fact is that children cannot make rational decisions.
Not providing them the care that they require is an act of evil.
And you are seeing medical professionals cave into political correctness specifically because they don't want to buck up against the prevailing political winds.
There's a reason that you are seeing the number of people identifying as transgender skyrocketing across the world.
I mean, skyrocketing in Britain, skyrocketing in the United States.
Britain has a huge gender youth clinic, sorry.
It is now around, apparently, In 2009, they took in 100 kids a year in 2009 at this huge youth clinic in Britain.
Now, they are taking in 2,500 kids a year.
Do you think that is a natural reflection of biology or do you think that maybe this has to do with the politically correct notion that if your kid is gender identity confused, that the best thing you can do is immediately get them into a program that reinstills the confusion?
Sky News reported hundreds of young transgender people are now seeking help to return to their original sex, but you're not allowed to talk about any of this in the general medical community.
If you do, you are considered a science denier.
Psychology Today published that study I talked about before, with the Harvard psychiatrist and medical researcher Jack Turban, where he published the summary.
A bunch of medical professionals pushed their critiques in the comments.
Psychology Today simply deleted their comments.
This is all misinformation, or a huge percentage of it is misinformation, but as long as you pretend that it's science, you can pretend that people who stand in favor of actual biological science are the actual science deniers, and that their children should eventually be removed from them.
By the way, if you think that that's a scare tactic, I promise you, it's already coming to Canada, and it is not long before it comes to the United States as well.
These sorts of culture wars do matter.
You saw this in James Younger in Texas.
It's going to come to the rest of the country.
It will, if the social left has its way, the radical social left.
I would imagine even most liberals don't believe in this sort of nonsense.
But the media do, and so they will continue to push it.
In a second, we'll get to more bad science being pushed as virtue in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile, speaking of bad science being pushed in the name of virtue, over the weekend, something incredibly stupid happened.
So there was a Harvard-Yale football game.
Hundreds of climate change activists swarmed the field during halftime of the football game.
They delayed the action for nearly an hour as students chanted OK Boomer while police made arrests and issued summonses for disorderly conduct.
Absolute stupid idiocy.
Here's a little bit of the video, what it looked like.
Students sitting on the field, in the middle of the field.
People cheering.
Oh, so much virtue.
Insane levels of virtue.
There they are, on the field at the Yale-Harvard game.
Striking on behalf of... No one understands.
Striking on behalf of what?
Protestors sat at the 50-yard line at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut.
Arms linked and chanting as banners echoed calls for urgent change, championed by lawmakers and activists around the country.
This is an emergency, one sign read.
Yes, I am sure that we are going to deprive third world peoples of their access to carbon-based fuels because a bunch of privileged yuppies who go to Yale and Harvard tell other privileged yuppies at Yale and Harvard they need to cut their investment in carbon fuels.
Absolute idiocy.
A Yale spokesperson expressed disapproval of the interruption.
A Harvard representative said the school respectfully disagrees with divestment activists over how to confront climate change.
Naturally, the students were thrilled.
The administration allowed this to go on, by the way.
The Yale authority should have immediately arrested everybody because that is just a public act of criminality.
And I promise you, if that had been 500 kids rushing the field to protest on behalf of not aborting babies, they would have been arrested within five seconds, and you wouldn't get the large cheers.
Officials asked protesters to leave very nicely.
They always have to be very delicate with these kids.
Another 100 students unaffiliated with the divest movement walked onto the field to join them.
Some fans booed said the protest humiliated the schools, because it did.
Chuck Crummey, 68, who attended the game with his son, a former Yale football player, said, They're all supposed to be intelligent people.
Looks like there's a lot of common sense missed their generation.
Goes to show this generation is all about themselves and not a football game.
Roy Emanuelson said of Yale, which entered the game 8-1, They're playing for the Ivy League title here, maybe costing the Ivy League championship.
By the way, because of this delay, which lasted an hour, the game almost had to be called on behalf of darkness, because they don't have lights at this stadium.
Police arrested the protesters.
They didn't plan to leave the field any other way.
They want to show that they are real heroes.
Real heroes.
They're just like MLK going to Birmingham jail.
That's exactly what's happening here.
New Haven police didn't provide comment.
The protest caused a delay of little over an hour and caused the game, which went into double overtime, to end in near darkness because the Yale Bull does not have lights.
Naturally, what you saw is a bunch of Democrats cheering this thing.
Advocates of divestment have expressed impatience as school officials say true independence from fossil fuels is impossible to achieve and argue they can use their positions as shareholders to sway companies' practices.
Apparently they want Yale and Harvard to stop investing in any company that uses fossil fuels, which is to say all the companies.
Hey, Harvard's captain then virtue-signaled over all of this.
Of course, Harvard's captain.
You know, Harvard wasn't competing for the Ivy League championship.
Harvard stinks this year, from what I can see.
And I say that as a Harvard Law alum.
Here's Harvard's captain talking about how vital it was for students to delay a Harvard-Yale football game to demonstrate that climate change is bad, and the sun is bad, and people using carbon fossil fuels is bad.
At this moment, both of our institutions continue to invest in the industries destroying our futures.
And when it comes to the climate crisis, no one wins.
Harvard and Yale can't claim to truly promote knowledge while at the same time supporting the companies engaged in misleading the public, smearing academics, and denying the truth.
That's why we're joining together with our friends at Yale to call for change.
In solidarity with my friends at Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard and Fossil Free Yale, who disrupted today's proceedings, many of my teammates and I are wearing orange wristbands, the color of the divest movement, after the game.
We're coming together to call upon Presidents Bacow and Salovey to divest from the fossil fuel industry now, for the sake of our generation.
Really, for the sake of your generation, you're going to divest from fossil fuels?
What does he think it took to make the iPhone that he's presumably speaking into?
He's wearing a Nike shirt.
Do you think Nike might use a little bit of fossil fuels?
Just a little bit?
The whole thing is absurd.
It's absurd.
None of this is designed to actually accomplish anything.
It's all designed to virtue signal on behalf of crap solutions that don't actually accomplish what they seek to accomplish.
The same people who are pushing this kind of stuff say that we can't Use natural gas, which has been solely responsible in the United States for every decline in emissions.
And also, we are not supposed to use nuclear power, which would be the other available alternative.
It's just silliness.
Harvard has about $39 billion of endowment investment in fossil fuels, and Harvard faculty members are calling for divestment from all of that.
But of course, that would require basically divesting from every major company, because all major companies have at least some investment in fossil fuels.
All absolute silly towns nonsense.
But again, we'll get to the Democratic presidential candidates pushing this stuff.
You want to make Trump president forever, this is a pretty good way of doing it.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to the rest of this virtue signaling by these Democrat crazies.
And then we'll get to the 2020 race where Michael Bloomberg is jumping in.
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Okay, so Yale has already divested partially from fossil fuels, but its chief investment officer, David Swenson, said that overhauling the university's investment portfolio would be foolish because, quote, we would all die if fossil fuel production stopped, which is true.
That's true!
He said every one of us in the room is a consumer.
Also true!
The whole thing is idiotic, and the fact that Yale authorities went along with it, the fact that Yale let these kids stop the game for an hour to be obnoxious, It's pretty ridiculous on its face.
But this is what we do now.
This is what we do.
As we'll see in a second, the left loves disrupting cultural events to push stupid politics.
So Bernie Sanders was super happy with all this.
Well, first of all, Bernie went dancing over the weekend.
I just had to play you this tape because Bernie dancing is always a sight to behold.
Here is the geriatric socialist cutting the rug, tripping the light fantastic at one of his campaign stops.
It is a thing that actually happened.
My favorite is when he sort of loses the beat and things start to get very awkward.
So that's going to happen any second.
There we go.
Now he's just like, I don't even know why I'm here.
Oh, man.
Bernie.
Bernie just cutting loose from 1932.
Good stuff.
Well, he tweeted support for these idiot protesters.
He tweeted out that he was very happy with them.
He tweeted, when people, when people come together to stand up for justice, we win.
You're going to have to explain how people win because a bunch of people stopped a football game.
Congratulations to the young people demanding a sustainable future for our planet.
We are with you in this fight.
By the way, all those young people, you know what they can do today?
They can give up those Harvard and Yale scholarships for third world people who wish to come here and not engage in fossil fuel use the rest of their lives.
They can do that.
Or, alternatively, they can pretend that they are very virtuous while they go down there and selfie themselves with their iPhones created with the use of fossil fuels.
Julian Castro, the most irrelevant of all possible Democratic candidates, said, Oh, well, are you inspired or are you just pandering to young people who don't know what they're talking about?
protect their futures.
I'm inspired by their efforts to hold their universities to a higher standard.
Oh, well, are you inspired or are you just pandering to young people who don't know what they're talking about?
Tom Steyer, who has blown something like 300 – last I heard it was like a couple hundred million dollars on his quixotic presidential campaign that currently has 0% support.
He says, these students have it right.
Nobody wins when we're complicit in climate injustice.
Institutions like Harvard and Yale must be leaders in the fight to address the climate crisis.
Really?
I mean, they're doing all the research.
And then you've got AOC, who naturally, with her massively impressive degree from BU in economics, Tweets, activism disrupts the present to change the future with an emoji of a globe.
Wow, she used a globe emoji, guys.
She's serious.
She's very serious.
That's a globe emoji.
You know what that means?
That means that she's thought this one through.
Activism disrupts the present to change the future.
Any other nostrums and truisms you'd like to dump on us here, AOC?
Absolute genius.
I mean, this sort of stuff is why it's almost impossible to take many climate change activists seriously.
They don't provide solutions.
Okay, so I did a speech at Boston at, uh, actually this one was at Baylor University last week.
In the speech at Baylor University, I spent probably 15 minutes talking about climate change.
I talked about possible solutions, and one of the things that I talked about is the fact that according to the left, there's no need for a solution.
This is all about yelling at the problem.
If you just yell at the problem, then it's gonna go away.
So if you show up at a Yale-Harvard football game, and you yell at the problem, then magically it gets better.
But this is what so many on the radical left desire.
They don't want solutions.
They just want to yell about problems.
And then they want to claim that they're victims when people point out that what they are doing is dumb.
If you point out that this was a dumb protest that delayed a football game and nearly led Yale to lose its Ivy League championship, which, you know, look, in the grand scheme of things, is that a big deal?
No, but there are players on the field.
It's a football game.
It's not time for your climate activism.
You want to do climate activism?
Sit outside the stadium.
You'll get plenty of attention.
But by disrupting and then being cheered on by Democrats, this is the same kind of garbage that students were doing in the 1960s, taking over universities and the authorities were basically sitting there allowing people who are disrupting to prop their feet up on the desks and take over administrations.
You wonder why more and more Americans look skeptically at college.
This would be the reason.
But that's not the limit of the support for dumb activism.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has an incredible piece in the New York Times today called The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the would-be James Baldwin who can't write or speak nearly as well as James Baldwin, and happens to live off the fat of the land while complaining about how terrible America is.
I mean, that dude is doing just fine.
He's writing comic books for mainstream audiences.
They're not very good, by the way.
And complaining about how America is terrible.
But praised, because obviously he writes with purple passion.
Coates has a piece called The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick, in which he likens Colin Kaepernick to Muhammad Ali, who, lest it be forgotten, lost several years of his career to protesting the Vietnam War.
He likens him to Jack Johnson, who was banned from boxing for the great sin of being involved in an interracial relationship.
Colin Kaepernick was benched for Blaine Gabbard in 2015 because he stunk.
The immortal, Hall of Fame NFL player, Blaine Gabbard, he was benched for him.
And then, a few months later, he decided, you know what, I'm gonna do him an anneal for the National Anthem, and then he's made millions of bucks off of it.
And then, over the last couple of weeks, he played this game with the NFL where the NFL offered him, basically, a combine tryout.
And he proceeded to ignore them, hold his own combine tryout, and then suggest that he was so good in the combine tryout that only racism could explain why he wasn't being signed by an NFL team.
Well, maybe it's the fact that you're not very good and you're a pain in the ass.
Maybe it's those two things combined.
Manny Ramirez can be a pain in the ass until Manny is no longer hitting .330.
Colin Kaepernick can be a pain in the ass so long as he is not one of the worst quarterbacks in the league.
At that point, you lose your job.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a long piece today about how Colin Kaepernick is a victim of American society.
And he compares him to Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson, who is a singer, who's a black communist, and also was blackballed because of his communism, and the Dixie Chicks.
Who, by the way, made a deliberate choice to go extremely political in the country music realm.
What did they think was going to happen?
I mean, Ta-Nehisi Coates is so over the top.
Every one of his columns is basically comparing two things that are completely unalike.
He literally compares Colin Kaepernick to the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction in the South.
He called that cancel culture.
That wasn't cancel culture.
What is he even talking about?
I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but what happened to Colin Kaepernick is not in any way similar to the Compromise of 1877, which led to a century of Jim Crow.
And running roughshod of the KKK and lynching.
What is he talking about?
He compares Colin Kaepernick to detention of Japanese Americans during World War II.
He says, speaking as one who has felt the hot wrath of Twitter.
Ah, he's a victim too.
I'm not without sympathy for the morally panicked who fear their kids are not right, who are not alright.
But it is good to remember that while every generation believes in invented sex, every preceding generation forgets it once believed the same thing.
Besides, all cancellations are not created equal.
Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Brett Kavanaugh at his Supreme Court confirmation hearings of sexual assault, was inundated with death threats, forced from her home, driven into hiding.
Dave Chappelle, accused of transphobia, collected millions from Netflix for a series of stand-up specials and got his feelings hurt.
First of all, nobody cancelled Christine Blasey Ford.
That's a bunch of evil people targeting people with death threats.
Nobody's in favor of that.
The point with Dave Chappelle is that the cancel culture trying to come after Dave Chappelle was idiotic because he's a man who tells jokes.
But what happened to Colin Kaepernick is not cancel culture, the man was given a million dollar contract with Nike to kneel for the national anthem and suck at football.
And now he's complaining about sucking at football.
But Ta-Nehisi Coates, again, this is all virtue signaling, as a substitute for actual virtue.
Ta-Nehisi Coates says, it seems Mr. Kaepernick's sin, refusing to stand for the national anthem, offends the NFL's suddenly delicate sensibilities.
The NFL let him kneel for a year and a half, and let everyone else in the NFL kneel too.
The NFL didn't punish anyone for kneeling.
The NFL allowed NFL players to run out on the field in the middle of the Michael Brown scenario, shouting, hands up, don't shoot, with their hands in the air, which was a total and complete lie, slandering police officers across America.
But, Coates says, While the influence of hashtags should not be underestimated, the NFL has a different power at its fingertips, the power of monopoly.
Effectively, Mr. Kaepernick's cancellation bars him from making a living at a skill he has been honing since childhood.
It is true he has found gainful employment with Nike, but only so much solace can be taken in this, given that Mr. Kaepernick's opponents occupy not just boardrooms and owner boxes, but the White House.
Well, so do his friends!
Ta-Nehisi Coates is doing just fine, and he's helping out Colin Kaepernick.
Again, Nike is one of the world's biggest companies.
This is a sobering process that began with the broadcast beatings of civil rights marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965, then accelerated with the recorded police brutality against Rodney King, has achieved its zenith with the social media sharing of the executions of Walter Scott, Laquan McDonald, and Daniel Shaver.
Are we really comparing all of these things?
And we're comparing those to Colin Kaepernick?
He says the new cancel culture is the product of a generation born into a world without obscuring myth, where the great abuses, once only hinted at, suspected, or uttered on street corners, are now tweeted out in full color.
Nothing is sacred anymore, and most important, nothing is legitimate.
Least of all, those institutions charged with dispensing justice.
And so justice is seized by the crowd.
He says this is suboptimal, but the choice would now seem to be between building egalitarian institutions capable of withstanding public scrutiny or further retreat into a dissembling fog.
It's funny to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates say this.
Ta-Nehisi Coates was one of the chief editors over at The Atlantic when they decided to cancel my friend Kevin Williamson for the great sin of being pro-life.
But he's saying we need egalitarian institutions willing to stand up to the cancel culture, except it depends on which part of the cancel culture he opposes.
Oh man, the virtue signaling is strong with this one.
But again, the virtue signaling is all about how America sucks, so that's real virtue.
Okay, meanwhile, 2020 race heating up.
Man, there was some very hot news over the weekend and obviously disturbing news over the weekend.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who I am not a fan of, obviously.
I think every ruling that she has issued in a major case has been wrong.
She was treated for chills and fever.
Over the weekend and discharged from the hospital she's now 86.
She's had a series of health scares in the past year.
Her symptoms apparently abated after treatment with IV antibiotics and fluids.
She had surgery for lung cancer and radiation for pancreatic cancer in the past year.
If something were to happen to her, I mean, the tenor of American politics, which is always so incredibly high, would just skyrocket dramatically.
Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg is jumping into the race, and Michael Bloomberg has set some rules for Bloomberg News, covering him and covering the presidential race, which should tell you where all of these news organizations were from the very beginning, because the only thing that's wrong with what Michael Bloomberg's news organization has to say about how it covers the race is that Michael Bloomberg is now being honest about it.
So first, here's Michael Bloomberg's ad for the presidency.
He's released his first ad.
He's going to spend a boatload of his own money in order to start garnering some support.
The person hardest hit, if Michael Bloomberg should start to garner some support, could theoretically be Joe Biden, but I think probably he cannibalizes Pete Buttigieg instead.
Here's Michael Bloomberg, his first ad.
Mike Bloomberg started as a middle-class kid who had to work his way through college, then built a business from a single room to a global entity, creating tens of thousands of good-paying jobs along the way.
He could have stopped there.
But when New York suffered the terrible tragedy of 9-11, he took charge, becoming a three-term mayor who brought a city back from the ashes and brought back jobs and hope with it.
Mike Bloomberg for president, jobs creator, leader, Okay, so the fact is Bloomberg's going nowhere in this race, but his presence in the race does shake things up if he starts to gain at least a little bit of support from the institutional investors who might go to Biden or who might otherwise go to Buttigieg.
Okay, meanwhile, Bloomberg News has announced its policies with regard to how it's going to cover this race.
So they're shutting down Bloomberg Opinion.
Bloomberg Opinion is now shut down because Michael Bloomberg is running for president.
So according to Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwaite, he says the place where Mike has had the most contact with editorial is Bloomberg Opinion.
Our editorials have reflected his views.
David Shipley, Tim O'Brien, some members of the board responsible for those editorials will take leave of absence to join Mike's campaign.
We'll suspend the board.
There will be no unsigned editorials.
But then we get to the best part.
So Bloomberg's newsroom is now overtly saying, according to the editor-in-chief, the newsroom will not be investigating Bloomberg and they will extend the same policy to his rivals in the Democratic primaries.
We cannot treat Mike's Democratic competitors differently from him.
For the moment, our investigations team will continue to investigate the Trump administration as the government of the day.
If Mike is chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate and Trump emerges as the Republican one, we will reassess how to do that.
So in other words, this has always been a tool of Michael Bloomberg.
And the line between news and editorial?
Was never clear.
Because if it were really clear, they would have just said, listen, we're going to keep reporting on everybody, including Michael Bloomberg, because the line between news and editorial has always been clear.
But they are now openly admitting that the newsroom was not separate from the editorial room.
So now the newsroom has been specifically tasked with not investigating Michael Bloomberg, which means they can't investigate any of the other Democrats, because otherwise it becomes a partisan tool.
Then they have to admit that this was always Michael Bloomberg's tool, the newsroom.
And so they're saying, we just won't go after the Democrats, but we'll continue to go after Trump.
Which means now this is a Democratic newspaper, right?
I mean, that's the only way to read this.
Mikkel Thwaite says, I think this is a structure that can cope with many eventualities.
No doubt many of you are already thinking of possible complexities that may arise.
My response is, let's get back to work.
We can spend a long time debating what ifs.
I would rather we got on with the journalism and let that speak for itself.
Pretty incredible.
Pretty incredible that they are now pushing.
Bloomberg is now saying, we will investigate Trump.
We will not investigate any Democrat because Bloomberg is a Democrat and we can't investigate him.
So we won't investigate any of the other Democrats.
It's an amazing, amazing statement about where the media are, because we know that this is the same thing happening at the New York Times, right?
We know this is the same thing happening at the Washington Post.
We at the Daily Wire are honest enough to admit our biases and explain that the division between news and editorial is not a solid line, that there is opinionated news that goes in.
But Bloomberg News didn't say that for years.
For years it was, this is an objective news source, Bloomberg News.
And you get the same thing from the New York Times, the same thing from the Washington Post, and this statement completely blows all of that up.
Because again, it is now Michael Bloomberg's newspaper admitting, we are not going to investigate Michael Bloomberg because he owns us, and so we won't investigate any of the Democrats, because that wouldn't be fair.
And then maybe if he's the nominee, and then, so what what?
If he isn't the nominee, they go back to investigating the Democrats?
Is that the way that this works?
Pretty astonishing stuff.
Meanwhile, by the way, Pete Buttigieg is about to get the Elizabeth Warren treatment.
He's been climbing in the polls and now he is going to be targeted at the center of this 2020 campaign because he's leading in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Meet the press when after Buttigieg over the weekend.
Expect for many more attacks like this in the coming weeks.
She's reinforcing a point that many people have made.
You can't engage in an oppression derby.
The Jews, the blacks, the Italians, the gays.
By the way, you're always going to lose.
Whatever derby, you're always going to lose.
Somebody always feels oppressed.
I mean, if you ain't in Kentucky, it's bad.
So what's interesting is that she also had to deal with the gauntlet that had been thrown down is that black people are more gay.
I mean, more homophobic, right?
So now you're thinking, if I come at him, then it reinforces the perception of black people being more homophobic.
Okay, so again, this is going to be a real problem for Pete Buttigieg.
Prepare for Buttigieg to take a turn at the bottom of the heap.
Alright, time for some things I like and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, there's a fairly solid understanding in most American historical writing that America's founding was Deist.
That most of the major American founders were Deists who didn't necessarily believe in the specific The specifics of Christianity, this is certainly true of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and mostly true of John Adams as well.
But, there were a bunch of founders who obviously were deep and believed in Christians, and of course, even the deists were heavily involved in a philosophy of Christianity.
Even if they did not believe in some of the miraculous claims of Christianity, that was certainly true of John Adams, who said that the Constitution was written for a moral and religious people and was utterly inadequate to the cause of any other.
There's a good new book out by Mark David Hall.
From Thomas Nelson called did America have a Christian founding that sort of takes the other side of the view that America did in fact have a Christian founding.
Now my own view of this is that the Christian roots, the Judeo-Christian historical and moral roots of the founding are fairly obvious.
That the founding of America, yes, was based on the writings of John Locke and the writings of Montesquieu, but it was also based on an underlying ethos that was derived from both a notion of British citizenship and from a Judeo-Christian ethic that was prevalent in the United States and in the West at the time.
And that the American Revolution was not designed to forcibly separate the American people from those Judeo-Christian ethics.
In fact, it was designed to wed them to the ethics in the social sphere, while allowing government to operate free of religious bigotry at the top level.
The book is definitely an interesting source.
Did America Have a Christian Founding?
by Mark David Hall.
And worth reading, along with a book that I recommended last week about America's Revolutionary Mind by C. Bradley Thompson.
Those are both interesting, interesting books.
OK, other things that I – you know, let's do a quick thing that I hate.
So the New York Times is now suggesting that there has been a vast spike in support for a public option because a lot of voters are not interested in Medicare for all.
The Democrats, of course, are pushing Medicare for all incredibly hard, but a bunch of Democrats are realizing that this is a big mistake and so they've been pushing for the so-called public option.
So we need to explain what the public option is and why the public option is a bad idea.
Republicans push very hard against a public option in Obamacare.
Many Democrats were not comfortable with a public option in Obamacare.
Why?
Well, a public option basically suggests that if you are not employed, then you are immediately enrolled in Medicare.
This creates two separate problems.
Problem number one, employers now have an interest in downgrading you to part-times that you are covered by Medicare.
And then they don't have to take care of your medical insurance.
Two, the people who are most likely to end up on a public option are the people who are the sickest and the oldest and require the most care, which means that they are not risk pooled with other people.
It means that private insurance is going to be upcharged by doctors in order to compensate for the fact that Medicare tends to undercharge.
Medicare's reimbursement rates are somewhere from 60 to 80 percent.
Private insurance is somewhere over 100% usually, and what that means is that if you are in the private insurance sector, your costs will go up as the public option grows.
Either you'll have to pay additional tax dollars in order to pay for all of the new people who are on the public option, or you'll have to pay through additional premiums.
And then one of two things happens.
Either the public option is real crap, in other words, it's not as good as the private option, doctors don't take it, doctors either have to be forced to take it, right, which is a cram down, Or, doctors are not forced to take it, in which case a lot of doctors decide they are not going to work with the public option because it undercharges them, right?
It underdelivers in terms of their payments.
In which case, again, they either have to be forced or the government has to raise the reimbursement rates.
If the government raises reimbursement rates to the point where it's competitive with private insurance, then the government and Democrats and employers will use that as an excuse to push for a single-payer healthcare system.
At which point, when everybody is thrown onto the single-payer healthcare system, then the entire system goes back to being a system of scarcity.
So what you could see is the government rev up spending on a public option in order to compete with the private option.
The private option goes defunct through regulation and through mandates.
And at that point, we have a single payer healthcare system, at which point the spending ratchets back down and you end up with all of the evils of Medicare for all.
So it's always been seen by most analysts, the public option as step one toward a Medicare for all system.
Well, Democrats are pushing this right now because they understand that the final outcome is not something Americans want.
They get that Americans are not pleased with the idea of being thrown off their private insurance, so instead they're looking for a step-by-step approach.
According to the New York Times, they believe that this is going to gain credibility.
The New York Times says the proposal would allow people of all incomes who aren't old enough for Medicare to choose health coverage through a new government-run plan that would compete with private insurance known by the less-than-catchy shorthand public option.
That means, again, the only people who are actually going to enter this public option are going to be people who are too sick to get private insurance, people who are unemployed, or, if the public option is really ramped up, people who are pushed into the public option because the public option is actually really good for the moment, and then private insurance collapses, there's no reason for competition, and then the monopoly kicks in.
A decade ago, the issue created such deep internal demissions among Senate Democrats, they ultimately dropped the idea from their bill, even though the public option was strongly favored by many liberals and a majority of House Democrats.
But now, it seems as though a public option is looking like a safe moderate position and even a realistic policy goal, according to the New York Times.
Warren says that she would start her presidency by pushing for a public option.
About two-thirds of voters like the idea of a public option or a Medicare buy-in, according to several recent national polls, until they are told about the cost, of course.
Large majorities of Democrats and Independents favored a public option in Kaiser's November poll.
Why?
Because they think someone else is going to be on the public option, not them.
They think, I'll get to keep my medical insurance.
It won't cost me more money.
Yeah, it's going to cost you more money, either through taxes or through your up-charged private insurance, which is used, again, to pay the doctors who are mandated to take the public option.
Dr. Alexandra Argosinski, 56, an internist who buttonholed Biden about his plan in Concord, said, I think our goal should be to try to get everybody in America to have health insurance.
I think the easiest and fastest way is what Biden is proposing to have the public option.
Polls suggest voters have become unnerved.
This is the New York Times.
By the price tags of the Warren and Sanders Medicare-for-all plans, support for such an approach has narrowed in recent months as people begin to understand what it would actually involve.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll of voters in Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 62% of those who are undecided or are still persuadable believe a national Medicare-for-all plan that would eliminate private insurance is a bad idea.
62%. 62%.
The public option plans offered by Biden and Buttigieg would require much less federal spending than Warren's $21 trillion proposal.
By the way, that's a wild underestimate.
It would actually cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $33 trillion.
Biden says his plan would cost $750 billion over 10 years.
Buttigieg says it would cost $1.5 trillion.
It would cost a lot more than that because there has never yet been a government spending program that was underestimated.
That was overestimated in terms of cost, rather.
Biden and Buttigieg's plans would automatically enroll uninsured Americans into the new government health plan and allow anyone else to opt in if they wish.
Both candidates would offer more generous premium subsidies than the Obamacare provides and cap people's premium costs at 8.5% of their income.
People with premium subsidies would have deductibles of about $1,000 or less.
So basically, there'd be a very small opt-in mandate.
Your premium cost would be 8.5% of your income, which is not going to pay for the amount that's going to be taken out of a public option, obviously.
Warren is proposing it overtly as a bridge.
She says that it'll be there for three years, and then everybody's gonna love it so much that they're gonna opt into Medicare for All.
Yeah, good luck.
Good luck.
But the fact is, even the public option is a bad option.
The public option has long been seen, again, as a first step toward nationalized healthcare, and trying to play it as some sort of a wonderful idea that is popular with the American people is really... It's a stretch, it's a stretch, but everything looks moderate.
I mean, once you get to the point where a public option is seen as moderate, you've gone too far to the left.
And everybody sort of acknowledges that a public option is a bad idea.
Sima Verma is administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
She has an editorial from July called, I'm the administrator of Medicaid and Medicare.
A public option is a bad idea.
This is according to the Washington Post, right?
She says, a common proposal, the public option, would introduce a government-run plan into the commercial health insurance market or alternatively allow consumers under 65 to buy into Medicare.
Simply calling something moderate doesn't make it so.
As an administrator of the two largest public healthcare programs in the country, Medicare and Medicaid, I can say these programs face major fiscal challenges.
Those who seek to expand them do so because of their expected lower price tag on premiums, but there's a simple explanation that makes the low cost considerably less alluring.
Public programs pay healthcare providers less than private payers.
According to a study in Health Affairs, private insurance in 2012 paid hospitals approximately 75% more than Medicare did for similar inpatient services.
Medicaid payment rates were even lower than Medicare rates.
That's why a substantial proportion of providers, 30%, don't accept new patients on Medicaid.
Rather than expand public programs for future generations, Americans are more interested in protecting the viability of these programs into the future.
Further, low prices imposed on doctors and hospitals can't stop health care costs from rising, and they continuously do, because someone has to pay the bill.
Namely, everybody in the private insurance market.
At the same time, a public option is backed by the federal government, which creates a host of problems.
Public options can turn to taxpayers to bail them out, but private players have no such luxury.
So they have to compete for consumers, but without market pressure on the bottom line, an expanded government plan would balloon uncontrollably, crowd out private options, push consumers off private plans, and reduce choice as private plans flee the market.
Which, of course, is exactly what's going to happen, and this is the plan.
So anybody who sees Buttigieg and Biden's plan as some sort of moderate trade-off is just getting the answer wrong.
It is not correct.
Okay, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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