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June 30, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:10
For The Sexual Left, Confusion Is The Point | Ep. 1287
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According to ESPN, a woman is a he, a she, and a them.
Ranked choice voting is now systemically racist, and Ibram Ghendi tries and fails to explain how he's not actually a racist.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay.
So yesterday I was browsing the world of sports and I came across an article that was so astonishing in its stupidity and confusion, that it forcibly struck me.
I mean, it really was the single worst piece of writing I have ever seen.
And the reason it was the single worst piece of writing I've ever seen is because it is utterly incoherent.
I want to read it to you.
It's about a person named Licia Clarendon, the WNBA's first openly non-binary and transgender player.
It's by a person named Katie Barnes.
Okay, here is the piece.
I'm gonna read you the first three paragraphs, and you will immediately not understand anything.
Okay?
This is a thing that a human wrote.
wrote, Leishia Clarendon wrapped their hand around the back of a fussy newborn, looking up at them in the maternity recovery room at a Bay Area hospital.
A nurse had just shown Leishia how to cradle the baby in a football hold, and Leishia rested the soft skin of the baby's back against her own left forearm and held the baby's head in her hand.
Okay, so at the beginning, you're like, okay, so we were talking about a non-binary person who wants to be called them.
Within the same paragraph, this person is now being called her.
But wait.
Baby C, they them because the baby doesn't have a gender either.
Okay, we're now working in this bizarre universe in which a baby comes out, we know whether it's a boy or a girl, but we pretend we don't know whether it's a boy or a girl because literally you can change your gender up to the day you die, and then after you die and after your body decays and all that's left is your bone structure, scientists a thousand years from now can also know whether you're a boy or a girl.
In any case, They them.
Baby C, they them, gurgled and squirmed at Lecia's touch.
Lecia accepted shampoo from the nurse, silently wondering if it would be appropriate for black hair.
With her right hand, she gently rubbed her fingers through the silky curls of Baby C's full head of hair.
So, so far, it's a woman, right?
A woman who identifies as they-them.
That's what you can get from the first couple paragraphs.
Here's where things take a sideways turn.
It was December 21st, 2020, Baby C's birthday and first wash day.
LeShea's wife Jessica, she her, had just given birth to Baby C by cesarean section after a 29-hour labor after carrying the baby for just over 41 weeks.
As Jessica recovered, LeShea found himself alone with his first child.
I know what you're thinking.
What?
But he never expected to have these first moments alone with baby.
See, Lashia and Jessica had planned for a vaginal birth and for these moments to be shared. Exhausted and weak, Jessica joined Lashia and baby see in the recovery room.
Thirty minutes later, Lashia held the baby up to Jessica's chest to assist with baby sees first meal. As Jessica drifted off, Lashia placed baby see back in the hospital bassinet.
He removed his shirt and sat down. Lashia picked the baby back up, cradling baby see against their chest. So in the first several paragraphs of this piece, we now learn that Lashia Clarendon is referred to as wait for it. They, them, her, she, he and him.
We're going to go ahead and get started.
Now this makes a mockery of language, right?
You have no idea.
You now have less information about Laetia Clarendon than you did at the beginning of the piece.
You don't know anything about Laetia Clarendon.
If you just read this piece, if you're an alien from outer space or a normal English speaker, either of the two, and you read this piece, you would not know whether Laetia Clarendon is a boy or a girl or anything else.
It makes no sense.
It's deliberate confusion.
It's deliberate confusion.
And if you mention that it's deliberate confusion, then you are called a bigot.
If you point out that this is absolutely nonsensical, that the terms he and she and they have quite specific meanings in English.
He refers to males.
She refers to females.
And they generally refers to the plural.
Unless it is a they at the end of a sentence and it is referring back to a she or he antecedent, typically.
But here you have all of these terms being used for one person.
The only purpose here is to convey less information with language.
It is to isolate you more.
It's to make you feel more confused.
For the sexual revolutionary left, confusion is the point.
Boys and girls, they're not supposed to mean anything.
They're all social constructs.
Unless sexual orientation is invoked, in which case it's not a social construct, it's a biological reality.
But also, you can shape your sexual orientation and choose it over time.
They can be bisexual or pansexual or gay or lesbian or straight at any time.
They can identify as any of those things.
But they are both biologically immutable and also social constructions, according to the radical left.
We have now entered the world of Michel Foucault in which language is just power.
The arbitrary shifts in language are designed to promote power, just as in an authoritarian governmental system.
Arbitrary shifts of the rules that you're supposed to know and you get punished if you find yourself in breach of those rules.
They are designed to simply re-enshrine and reinforce the power of the system over you.
Radical shifts in language where words suddenly don't mean what they meant five seconds ago and where if you use the word in its traditional sense, you have now crossed some invisible line.
You become a bigot.
This is a way for the social left to rule your life.
It is a way for the social left to out you, to treat you as a bigot.
I have a new book coming out called The Authoritarian Moment.
And one of the things that I point out in The Authoritarian Moment is that this power game has now infiltrated virtually every institution of our society.
To even point this out puts you at risk of censorship from the big tech companies.
To even point this out makes you a person who shouldn't be welcomed into polite conversation.
We now identify each other as members of the ruling class, and there is a ruling class in the United States.
The way that you are identified as a member of the ruling class, the people who deserve to rule, is you put pronouns in your profile.
If you put pronouns in your Twitter profile, it's not an indicator that there was any confusion about who you were.
We all know who you were because we have eyes and we have ears and we have minds, right?
We can identify people based on objective characteristics.
The whole purpose of putting a pronoun in your profile is not even to demonstrate solidarity because you've demonstrated nothing.
We don't really know anything about your politics simply based on what pronouns apply to you.
All it is is a way of signaling that you speak the vocabulary, that you speak woke.
It's a socially authoritarian method of ostracizing people who think in terms of traditional objective metrics.
Now, how stupid is this particular ESPN story?
I use this as an example because this is the cover story at ESPN Magazine, by the way.
So the reason I use this is because not only is this supremely confusing and designed to be confusing, there's an editor's note attached.
The editor's note says this, quote, Again, if you are non-binary, meaning you don't actually have a gender, how are you transgender?
Are you a woman who became a man?
Are you a woman who became nothing?
Are you a woman who became a genderless widget?
Like, what exactly are you?
The terms transgender and non-transgender suggest that you change your gender from one to the other, typically.
Non-binary means that you don't identify as any gender.
So these two terms should be somewhat mutually exclusive, they're not, right?
Lachia Clarendon, who identifies as transgender and non-binary, uses he, him, she, her, and they, them pronouns interchangeably.
We do so throughout this piece.
We also introduce the preferred pronouns for others who appear in this story and for whom pronouns are used.
Okay, so instead of the editors, doing what editors typically do, which is make sure that language conveys information.
This is what editors and writers are designed to do.
There's a postmodern discourse in literature in which language is not supposed to convey information.
It is instead supposed to enshrine certain moods, it's supposed to generate certain feelings, but typically the purpose of language is to convey information.
This is true in the animal kingdom as well.
Whether it's clicks and chirps from animals or whether it is the human voice, the goal is generally to convey more information.
Except now.
Now the goal is to convey less information because the true idea is to elicit from you whether you object to this and thus can be ostracized safely from the membership in the new ruling class.
And this is nothing new.
There's an article, we talked about it on the show way back in April in the New York Times called A Guide to Neopronouns.
So you are confused by all of this?
Well, let the New York Times guide you through all of this.
You will be more confused by the end than you were at the beginning.
According to the New York Times, non-binary pronouns have become widespread.
A 2019 Pew Research study found, already, that 1 in 5 Americans knew someone who uses non-binary pronouns.
And then, there are neopronouns.
A neopronoun can be a word created to serve as a pronoun without expressing gender, like g and ger.
A neopronoun can also be a so-called noun-self pronoun, in which a pre-existing word is drafted into use as a pronoun.
Noun-self pronouns can refer to animals, so your pronoun can be bun, bun-self, and kitten, kitten-self.
Others refer to fantasy characters, vamp, vamp-self, prin, ses, princess-self, fae, fair, fair-self, or even just common slang like innit, innits, innitself.
So, is this for real, says the New York Times?
Yes.
And, around any leading-edge behavior online, trolling, hijinks, and bad faith collide indistinctly.
For those unfamiliar with the culture surrounding neopronouns right now, it's likely impossible to distinguish between what's playful, what's deeply meaningful, and what's people being mean.
Many neopronoun users are dead serious, and are also part of online communities that are quick to react swiftly to offenses.
A popular Twitch streamer who goes by AndyVMG recently apologized after jokingly tweeting that her pronouns were bad AF, which led many neopronoun users to accuse her of transphobic invalidation of their identities.
AndyVMG wrote on Twitter, it wasn't meant to mock people who use neopronouns.
However, I've since educated myself on the matter and spoken to people who use neopronouns, and I see why what I said was hurtful.
Okay, now, again, the idea here that these neopronouns, kitten, kitten self, express just the same amount of information as a person saying that the person, a biological woman, is both he and she and them.
Precisely nothing.
The only thing that it expresses is a person who is either unable or unwilling to identify with reality.
That's all.
But the whole point is that you too are now supposed to be drafted into this movement to normalize delusion.
You're supposed to be drafted into this movement to normalize delusion.
And this notion that personal identity, that how I identify, must be reflected by the society at large.
And if you refuse to go along with my moral vision of society, if you refuse to clap and cheer along, you have denied me my identity.
You have undermined me as a human being.
And corporations, because so many corporations are in the business of catering to clientele, right?
This is what corporations do.
Corporations are going to sell you what you want to buy.
Well, right now, what people want to buy is a vision of themselves, and that vision of themselves can be anything.
And so corporations are simply going to celebrate whatever you believe you are in order to make money, right?
So this has led people on the right to say capitalism is the problem.
Capitalism is not the problem.
Capitalism is just not designed to be the moral imprimatur.
Okay, capitalism is the greatest system for the distribution and increase in wealth in human history, without a doubt.
But capitalism is not inherently tied, the system itself, is not inherently tied to anything beyond provision of services and products to people who want them.
And so if you are a business and you are seeking to cater to people, and those people have immoral wants, capitalism will serve those wants the same way that it would serve somebody who has a moral want.
In other words, the lack that we are seeing in American society right now is not the result of economics.
The lack that we are seeing in American society right now is a result of lack of a moral basis, a moral foundational grounding in reality.
The reality that we are embodied human beings.
We are not just a free-floating spirit inside a meatball.
We are actually an embodied thing, which means that our biology and our soul are connected.
And that means that we cannot ignore our biology or treat our biology as though it were our enemy.
But that's precisely what the left seeks to do.
The left not only seeks to treat our biology as an enemy, the left seeks to treat you as an enemy if you even notice the fact that objective facts, which allow us to have conversations with one another, by the way, that if objective facts exist and you acknowledge the existence of these objective facts, you are now engaged in an act of bigotry.
Because I'm denying your identity.
Subjectivism now rules the day.
And anybody who insists on objective uses of language that we can share, because there has to be A term that means something in order for us to both use it and understand one another.
If you insist on that, you're now engaged in an act of bigotry.
All of this is a power game.
All of this is a power game.
The confusion, the meaninglessness, that is the point.
Because if you can make everybody confused, and then if you can use that confusion in order to instill in everybody else the idea that if you refuse to acquiesce to the confusion, this makes you the bad guy.
Well then, you are just as arbitrary in your use of power as most authoritarians are.
And we have a set of cultural authoritarians who are joining us in the guise of tolerance and acceptance, which is not what this is.
And we'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so.
There is a certain zero-sum game between subjectivism and objectivism.
Between objectivity and subjective self-interpretation.
If people who believe that subjectivity ought to rule the day win, objective language loses.
If objective language loses, we can't have a conversation with one another.
Because the minute you use a term, and then I use the exact same term, In its traditional sense.
And you claim now that this is bigotry.
Basically what you're saying is it is not possible for any two human beings to understand each other.
This is how the sexual left is part of the general, radical left.
Because the racial left says the same thing.
The racial left says that there's a certain racial essentialism wherein black people cannot understand white people and white people cannot understand black people.
And thus, you can't have an honest-to-God, open conversation about the decision-making that leads to success in a society because we can't understand each other's experiences or each other's identities.
And this is being reinforced by every major force in our society right now, particularly our cultural forces.
And cultural forces, by the way, in a free society like the United States, or at least a fairly free society with regard to government, cultural forces bleed upward into politics.
And we've always said that culture is upstream of politics, and that is exactly right.
Usually, the law follows the culture.
The culture has decided to validate the notion that subjectivity ought to rule.
And then the law, which is supposed to be an objective tool.
Once the law becomes subjective, it really is authoritarian.
Once the law is just subjectively interpreted to go after particular people, that is the definition of authoritarianism.
Once it bleeds up into the law, you got a real problem on your hands, and that's exactly what has been happening.
And this is how you end up with, for example, situations like we have apparently at an aquatic center in, of all places, Pella, Iowa.
According to Breitbart.com, the Pella Aquatic Center in Pella, Iowa has confirmed to a newspaper it allowed a teenage girl to go topless and use the men's restroom and locker room because she said she identified as a man.
According to the Iowa Standard, she shared the facility with boys and men of all ages.
The incident happened on June 16th.
According to two people at the Aquatic Center, the incident did indeed happen.
The Aquatic Center policy allows it to happen.
The assistant manager told the Iowa Standard, the policy says anyone can wear the clothing necessary in line with their gender identity, rather than biological sex.
The policy is set by the City Council, according to the Aquatic Center's assistant manager.
In addition to concerns for the young children exposed to this, as well as the men and boys, a resident said it's dangerous for the young minor girl to expose herself.
Which, of course, is true.
Apparently, this isn't the only incident.
So, this sort of stuff is bleeding over into policy.
We saw a video emerge from a spa in Los Angeles recently, in which a black woman is complaining at the counter because apparently there is a biological man who is walking around in the women's section of the spa with his junk hanging out.
And the SPA said, no, no, no.
He's just identifying as what he identifies as.
We have no rules on this sort of thing.
Objective reality is to be put aside.
And now this has been shrined in federal law.
They have Justice Gorsuch idiotically ruling in Bostock that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was meant to protect men who say they are women in the same way that the law protects women.
Which is, of course, incredibly silly.
So you've got the law pushing it.
You have culture pushing it.
By the way, the insulting nature of this to women is truly amazing.
Apparently, a transgender woman has now taken the state Miss USA crown in Nevada.
Right, and basically this is a tribute to the surgeons, because let's face it, when it comes to Miss USA contests, which are beauty contests, which are supposed to have, presumably, some sort of non-subjective beauty standards, in order for a biological man to win a Miss USA contest, that person would have had to have tremendous hormone treatment and surgery.
It wouldn't just be like a normal biological man without surgery and hormone treatment walking into the Miss USA contest and winning the contest.
And so what this really speaks to is stereotypical beliefs about female beauty, which I thought the left opposed until five seconds ago, but apparently the left is very into it right now.
Here's the first transgender Miss Nevada Cataluna Enriquez, a biological man, explaining the breakthrough nature of this, which again is less a tribute to tolerance than it is a tribute to how surgeons and doctors can treat people and make them look like members of the opposite sex without actually changing their underlying biology.
It's amazing because it's Pride Month and it's the 52nd anniversary of Stonewall so it's a special moment for my community.
I'm the first trans woman and a trans woman of color and it's time that our voices are heard.
When I was young I said that one day I hope to see someone like me on stage in Miss USA and there just happened to be I was the person that I needed.
Okay, so all of culture is pushing the idea that men can be women.
And in fact, the best women, as it turns out.
And it's pushed, you know, in every arena of our society.
And we're supposed to celebrate all of this as though this is some sort of societal breakthrough.
That pretending men can be women and that terms have no meaning, that all this is a societal breakthrough.
And what it leads to, in the end, is a lot of suffering, particularly directed at children.
There's a piece in Daily Wire today by Amanda Prestigiacomo talking about a woman in Australia who's now writing that her gender-confused daughter is going through early menopause and she's quote, so proud of him.
And we have 15-year-olds who are being treated with heavy doses of testosterone to stop them from having periods and to go through early menopause to prepare them for life-altering surgery when we have not actually checked out the longitudinal effects of this stuff in any serious way.
There are consequences to this.
But again, the personal is political.
The personal is... The personal is political.
What you do in your own personal life is now considered to be what the law should be for everybody else.
And again, what that's really designed to do is say that if you have any standards for your own children, if you have any standards for meaning in society, if you go to church, if you simply believe in natural law, all of this makes you the actual target.
In just one second, we're going to get to the situation in New York, which is quite hilarious.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, I do want to talk to you about how this sort of radical leftism with regard to subjectivity also applies to race.
So when it comes to the radical left on race, again, the confusion is the point.
You're not supposed to have any objective standards for how we measure people's performance.
If you use objective standards for how to measure people's performance, this is now considered racist.
In the same way that it is considered sexist now.
If you say, objectively speaking, there's a man and there's a woman and they are not the same thing.
If you point that out, this is bad with regard to sex.
Because again, the confusion is the point.
You set up all these varying standards that don't have any consistent basis for them, and then you use them as a club against everybody that you don't like, who disagrees with you and actually holds to objective standards.
The same thing holds true on race.
And this leads to some incredibly racist places, because basically what you have is the racial radicals in our society, which has increasingly taken over the entire Democratic Party.
You have them basically saying that any objective metric used with regard to performance is inevitably going to consign black people to doom.
Which is a pretty racist idea.
The wokes and the racists have a lot in common.
They both seem to believe in the inferiority of black people or their inability to perform at the same levels as white people, which is fairly incredible.
And many of them will just acknowledge this openly.
For example, there's a video that went viral yesterday of a New York K-12 educator suggesting that black students do not think analytically.
Black people, we are relational people.
We are people of context.
Like, it's very Western and European to dissect and analyze and take apart things, whereas Afrocentric schooling or Afrocentric spirituality or African epistemology or ways of knowing, everything is connected.
So this is why education is not working for so many students of color, because we are context-driven people.
Okay, so the person speaking right there, by the way, is Maria Acanelli, Ph.D., the founder and lead education consultant of Aguirre Learning, an organization that has helped hundreds of school leaders and organizations embrace, strategize, and enact positive change.
Also, this person apparently teaches as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University.
Okay, that's sort of racism that she's speaking there, in which she basically says that black people think relationally, but black people do not think in terms of analytic skill.
I mean, that's an astonishing statement.
But it goes back to the basic deconstructionist idea, which lies behind both the sexual radical policies and the racially radical policies, which is that objective metrics and objective abilities to adjudicate what goes on in the world, all of any attempt to be objective about the world that surrounds you, what that really is, is your own Western bias.
It is how you value objectivity that is the problem.
Because maybe we should just not value objectivity.
It's not that facts aren't facts.
Facts can be facts.
It's that you think facts are important.
Facts aren't important.
That's a cultural hallmark of whiteness.
It's a cultural hallmark of Western imperialist culture.
This is why you had that exhibit in the National Museum of African American History over at the Smithsonian, specifically saying that things like timeliness and hard work were white behaviors, which is insane.
Anytime anybody tells you that merit-based activities are racist, you should immediately begin to wonder whether they are attempting to divide and use power.
Because that really is what they are attempting to do.
One of the people who does this the most is Ibram X. Kendi, of course.
Ibram X. Kendi basically says that if you use anything like objectivity, if you ever suggest that individually-based rights are the fundamental basis for a free society, or that people ought to be treated equally, under the law, without regard to their race, this makes you a racist.
So he was asked about his own racism by Joy Reid, who of course is fully in line with the Ibram X. Kendi playbook.
Kennedy is one of the great grifters of our time.
He's a sloppy thinker.
To say that he's a thinker, I think, is an insult to thinkers.
He's an incredibly sloppy thinker.
His book, How to Be an Antiracist, is one of the great racist atomes in modern American history.
He's a person who is a fascist.
I mean, he has openly suggested there ought to be a Department of Antiracism at the federal government level, unelected, and their job would be to strike down any state, federal, or local policy that ends with inequality of outcome.
So here's Ibram X. Kennedy trying to explain why what he's saying is not racist when it pretty clearly is racist.
Black people are also dying at the highest rates from COVID-19.
Maybe they should also receive vaccine first.
Maybe they should also receive vaccine first.
Maybe we should have a system in which those who have the greatest needs are provided with what they need, but they call that reverse discrimination.
They call that discrimination.
They're against that.
How are we going to create equity and justice for all if we're providing the same resources to middle-income people as we're providing to billionaires?
Okay, so what Ibram Kendi there is saying is he's talking specifically about COVID policy.
Okay, what he's saying about COVID policy, this just shows the nonsensical nature of what he argues.
First of all, he argues that he's not saying that white people are racist.
He's just saying that complicity in the system makes you a racist.
And also, if you're white, you're complicit in the system, just by nature.
I mean, that really is his argument.
What he's saying about COVID there is so typical of how we are supposed to think about objective metrics.
So COVID-19 policy is what he's talking about there.
You'll remember there was a big debate when it came to tranching out vaccines, in which many people, myself included, said the single greatest variable that explains COVID and how it affects people is age.
If you're older, you're much more likely to die of COVID.
If you're younger, you're much less likely to die of COVID.
Abraham Kennedy, because he only sees the world in terms of race, he says, well, if you're black, you're more likely to die of COVID than if you are white.
Okay, well, that is seeing through like the tertiary or, you know, way down on the list, like the ninth place factor, because the reality is you have a bunch of complications that cross streams with race.
You have age, you have obesity, you have underlying health conditions.
If we were to trench out vaccines based on race, as opposed to based on age, you would end up with more dead black people, as we explained at the time, because you'd be ignoring the older black people in favor of the younger black people, because black America is demographically younger than white America.
So what you'd end up with is more black people getting the vaccine, but also more black people dying.
Ironically.
Okay, but Ibram X. Kendi doesn't care about any of that.
Because objectivity, statistics, math, these things are bad.
These things are very bad.
And this is how you end up with stories over and over in the New York Times in which you just ignore data and objective metrics in favor of a softer sense that there is supposed to be an outcome.
Right?
In favor of subjective sense, that what I want from the world is what the world must give to me.
And the government must be my tool in making that happen for me.
So, for example, today in the New York Times, there's an article about Target store closings in Baltimore.
Now, the reason that the targets are closing in Baltimore is pretty obvious.
Baltimore is a very violent place.
It has extremely high levels of shoplifting.
There's not a lot of family income in Baltimore.
The education system sucks.
There's a lot of crime, right?
None of these make for a very safe place to open a Target.
And every time there's a riot, people loot the Target.
That is a very bad way.
Like, Target opened these stores in order to service the local community.
They found that they could not service the local community profitably, so they closed the stores.
Instead, the New York Times suggests that it must be racism.
Because again, to look at objective metrics, to look at actual complicating factors, would be to undermine the power argument that they are making.
It is a power argument they are making.
They should have power over you.
And if we have to throw the stats out the window, and objective, we will do that.
Here's the New York Times.
When Target announced it was opening a store in Mondowman, a predominantly black neighborhood in Baltimore, struggling with crime and poverty, it seemed like a ticket to a turnaround.
And from the start, it was a practical success and a point of community pride.
The store, which opened in 2008, carried groceries, operated a pharmacy, and had a Starbucks cafe, the only one in this part of Baltimore's West Side.
People came from across the city to shop there, helping to soften the Mondowman's area's reputation for crime and the looting that followed protests over the 2015 death of Freddie Gray.
who was fatally injured while in city police custody.
As an employer, Target seemed to cater to the community's needs, making a point of hiring black men, providing an office in the store for a social worker to support the staff.
Elijah Cummings was known to shop there.
But in February 2018, with almost no warning or explanation, Target closed the store.
Now, you may notice the timeline here, right?
This is the New York Times saying this must be, it must've been a profitable, magical store, right?
I mean, everything's going great.
Here's the timeline.
They opened in 2008.
In 2015, the entire store was looted.
In 2018, they closed.
Apparently, it's racism.
According to the New York Times, residents, especially those without cars, lost a convenient place to shop for quality goods.
And a marker of the community's self-worth was suddenly taken away.
Well, you know what should be a marker of a community's self-worth?
Whether the community makes decisions capable of supporting a target.
Whether the community is capable of working with the police to quash crime, whether the community is capable of providing a social framework necessary to ensure that kids go to school and get educated, and that there are not people looting the target.
The presence of the target is merely a symptom.
The absence of the target is merely a symptom.
There are underlying causes to whether a target locates in a particular area.
But if you point this out, then of course, you are not validating the subjective assessments of people who live in a particular area.
Reverend Frank Glantz, pastor of Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in Mount Dowman, says, to open a store like Target in an African-American neighborhood gave this area legitimacy.
When the store closed, it was like saying, you are not worthy after all.
Right?
It's Target's job to validate people who live in this area at loss to their own profit.
It is their job to validate the subjective sense of self-worth that people hold in a particular area.
It is not the job of people in a particular area to facilitate an environment in which a target can stay.
You may notice that there are black communities all over the United States that have targets.
This is not one of them.
The reason that this is not one of them is because of the high crime areas.
It is because of the behavior of members of the community.
Again, it's all about how people react to you.
It's not about how you act.
Because if you're going to focus in on equality of outcome without looking at the behavior of individuals, then what you are inevitably going to do is suggest that the system is rigged against individuals.
Three years later, according to the New York Times, the store remains empty.
Its closing still stings.
Mondowman residents and Baltimore officials have granted $15 million in subsidies to help develop the property.
Many national retailers have faced criticism in the past for failing to open in black and poor communities, creating food deserts, or a lack of access to quality goods.
Again, the notion is that national retailers are responsible for the food deserts, as opposed to the lack of ability to create a store that is profitable in particular areas.
In Montalban, Target invested in a struggling area, but the outcome was almost more disheartening.
The company ultimately decided that despite its social goals, the store wasn't financially successful enough to keep open.
The closing is a sobering reminder of the realities of capitalism.
You see, it's capitalism that is to blame.
Always, always.
In a moment when corporations are making promises to support black Americans, saying their commitment to racial equity is stronger than ever.
It can't be underlying behavior of people in a community that make these stores not profitable.
It's capitalism itself that is the problem.
It is all a power game.
It's a power game.
And that is truly Unpleasant for the future of the United States.
There's another article in the New York Times today all about this by a person named Samuel Getachow.
He graduated from 2020 from Oakland Technical High School in California.
This is in the New York Times.
And he's the 2019 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate.
And apparently he talks about being a valedictorian in Oakland and how at a particular school there are not a lot of black valedictorians.
He's talking about some black valedictorians.
And he talks about how it took 106 years for Oakland Tech to award the honor of valedictorian to a black male student.
And that valedictorian Who was a person by the name of Ahmed Mohammed.
He said, why me?
I don't know.
But for all those who didn't get to maximize their potential, for all those who had the ability but lacked the opportunity, I owe it to them to appreciate this history made by the people who put me in this position.
We owe it to them to make sure that while I may be the first young black man to be our school's valedictorian, I won't be the last.
Okay, all of that is fine.
But then this person writing in the New York Times says we owe it to them to be more dedicated to dismantling racism than to congratulating them for being among the few to thrive despite it.
That requires an examination of the structures that helped us thrive but weren't available to others.
Okay, but we're not actually going to look at the structures that helped these people to thrive.
We're not going to look at two-parent families, for example.
We're not going to look at charter schools.
Instead, we are going to suggest that schools that are disproportionately Asian and white because they have entrance exams and not enough black students, unfortunately, are performing well on the entrance exams, it's because they're racist.
Of course, of course.
Subjectivity in public policy and in social policy, subjectivity are the hallmark of authoritarian thinking.
Alrighty, coming up, we are going to be getting to Gwenberry, who continues to be at the top of the news.
Plus, we'll get to the New York mayoral race, because this is truly an astonishing story from the New York mayoral race.
First, let us talk for a second about what your kids are watching and learning.
Disney+, these days, is just pushing left-wing propaganda.
That's all they do, apparently, on Disney+.
It's amazing.
I have Disney+.
I will not let my kids watch Disney+, unless I am picking the specific show, and typically it's an old movie.
Okay, that is not the case with PragerU.
PragerU has launched a massive new K-12 education program.
Thousands of educators and parents have already signed up.
Check it out at prageru.com forward slash kids.
PragerU has tons of free kids shows, books, magazines, with the pro-American values that aren't being taught in schools or most kids shows.
The PragerU website has everything you need to get your young family through what is happening in our country right now.
You want your kids to learn about the nation's founding principles and be proud of them?
How about passing on values you care about, like truth, freedom, responsibility, hard work, equality, under God?
If you want your kids consuming content that actually supports your values, go to PragerU right now.
Show your children their animated shows, books, and magazines.
Most importantly, support PragerU in their efforts to take back America's education.
Subscribe now, don't miss PragerU's incredible free kids content.
Visit PragerU.com forward slash kids today and go check them out.
Alrighty, in just one second we'll get to the New York City mayoral race, which is an astonishing fail.
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♪♪ Alrighty, meanwhile, absolute chaos breaking out in New York.
I mean, it really is kind of an amazing thing.
So, last night, there is this shocking new information.
So the way that New York's mayoral race works is that there's ranked choice voting.
As I've explained on the program before, basically, you choose your top five candidates.
If your first candidate doesn't end up in the top two, then we actually don't throw out your ballot, right?
Then we go to your second choice.
For the mayor.
And then if your second choice doesn't make it, we move down to your third choice for mayor.
So everybody's vote gets counted, but sort of in order of preference.
And the goal of ranked choice voting, of course, is to mean that you don't have to really strategically vote anymore.
Now, instead of strategically voting, you can just kind of pick the order of your candidate preference, and then it all comes out in the wash.
I'm actually not a super giant opponent of a ranked choice voting.
It just needs to be tabulated a lot more quickly.
So last night, There was this news that came out where after the initial round of balloting, without counting the absentee ballots, Eric Adams had been up by about nine points in the mayor's race.
He had had like 31% compared to Catherine Garcia, who had had like 22%.
Maya Wiley was at like 21%.
Andrew Yang was way down at 11%.
Okay, but that was before they had kicked out all of the lower-ranking candidates and then checked everybody's second choices.
So last night, there was information that broke suggesting that Maya Wiley was out and that Catherine Garcia had closed the gap almost entirely.
According to those results, the original results, again, had this thing split 20 different ways, with Eric Adams having like 35% of the vote, and then Maya Wiley having like 26% of the vote, and Catherine Garcia having 23% of the vote.
Then, after the ranked choice ballots were taken into account, Maya Wiley was eliminated.
Andrew Yang was eliminated.
And virtually all of those votes ended up going to Catherine Garcia.
So suddenly it looked like Eric Adams only had 51% of the vote and Catherine Garcia had 49% of the vote.
And that was still before we had like 120,000 outstanding ballots that had yet to be counted.
So it looked very much possible that Catherine Garcia could become the mayor of New York, overcoming that lead that Eric Adams held in the initial balloting.
That's what it looked like.
Okay, so Eric Adams then started protesting the election.
You're never supposed to do this, by the way.
I've heard that this is very bad.
That if you start with the stop the steal stuff, then this makes you bad.
So Eric Adams, he put out a statement.
He said, the vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000 plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions.
We've asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the ranked choice voting projection.
We remain confident Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York because he put together a historic five borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, More affordable place.
OK, so when this first came out, people were like, oh, look at that guy doubting the results of elections.
How could he do such a thing?
That's what a schmuck.
Can't believe.
Well, now it turns out that Eric Adams was right.
According to The New York Times, quote, The New York City's mayor's race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city's board of elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a discrepancy.
The results released earlier in the day had suggested the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.
But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the Elections Board issued a cryptic tweet, revealing a discrepancy in the report, saying it was working with its technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.
By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked choice results would be available starting on June 30.
Then, around 10.30pm, The board finally released a statement explaining it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software.
So basically, they ran a simulation a few weeks ago, and then they just sort of forgot to scrub it.
And then they actually added it in to their actual vote tabulations.
When the board ran the program, it counted, quote, both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records.
The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.
For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale.
Skeptics had expressed doubts about the Board's ability to pull off the process, though it has been used successfully in other cities.
The Board of Elections released preliminary unofficial ranked-choice tabulations Tuesday afternoon, showing Adams narrowly ahead of Catherine Garcia and Maya Wiley eliminated.
But the results may well be scrambled again.
Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must then count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots.
Once they're tabulated, the Board will then take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds with a result not expected until mid-July.
So it's a complete, absolute mess.
Republicans have pointed out that processes like giant numbers of absentee ballots and failures of tabulation, there are ways to stop that through, you know, voter laws.
And then the left has immediately declared that all of that is deeply and horrifically racist, right?
In New York, this is happening and the person who just got hurt by it is the only serious black mayoral candidate.
Maya Wiley is not going to be the mayor of New York.
So that is awkward, to say the least.
If this had happened in Georgia, you'd hear every newspaper in the United States talking about the innate racism of the Georgia election system.
Instead, it's happening in New York, which is just a crap festival.
And now they're like, oh, well, you know, people make mistakes.
People make mistakes.
Maya Wiley did lace into the Board of Elections.
She said the error was, quote, The result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed and said, sadly, it is impossible to be surprised.
Once again, we've seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results.
Not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times.
The Board of Elections must now count the remainder of the votes transparently and ensure the integrity of the process moving forward.
She says, I'm confident that every candidate will accept the final results and support whomever the voters have elected.
I have doubts.
If Adams ends up losing, I have some serious doubts that Adams is going to accept the results of the election.
Instead, we may get a very Trumpy Adams take on the election, which would just be the height of irony.
Again, sophisticated New York proving itself to be less than sophisticated when it comes to actually running its city in pretty much every available way.
By the way, if it turns out that Andrew Yang and Garcia campaigning together ended with Yang's voters going to Garcia and thus putting her over the top against Adams, wait for the cries of racism inside the Democratic Party.
It's just going to be delicious.
It's just going to be wonderful.
I am here for it, to say the very, very least.
So once again, Democrats demonstrating that they are excellent at running cities.
And by excellent, I mean absolute horrific crap shows on every available level.
So I'm, you know, is it shredding fraud?
Yeah, just a little bit.
Remember, it was Georgia and Arizona and Florida and all the states that are passing new election laws to crack down on voter fraud, voter irregularity, to make people feel safer about their elections.
Those are the bad guys.
New York is filled with the good guys who can't perform a simple tabulation and then idiotically release the fake results to the general public and have to walk it back.
Yeah.
Pretty grand stuff there from the biggest city in the United States and the height of sophistication.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles Show.
Today, he discusses the story of Nike CEOs saying their brand is quote, of China and for China.
Yep.
You can hear more details over on Michael's show available right now.
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A ballot box issue throws New York City's mayoral race into chaos.
The NSA issues a non-denial denial that it's spying on Tucker.
And Nike's CEO describes his company as a brand of China and for China.
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