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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:52
Elizabeth Warren's 11 Progressive Commandments - Rebutted!
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We are going to take a quick tour through Elizabeth Warren's 11 commandments of being a progressive, which is to be basically on the left.
But first, a little bit of background about the blonde, blue-eyed Fokah Huntess, who has claimed in the past to be descended from Cherokee and other Native American stock.
She first listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools directory of faculty in 1986, the year before she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
She continued to list herself as a woman of color, I think it's 132nd Cherokee, she claims, until 1995, the year she accepted a tenured position at Harvard Law School.
The moment that she got tenure, in other words, couldn't be fired, she declined to list herself as a not very visible minority.
Now, at the time for hiring in the early 90s, Harvard Law School was embroiled in a very fierce debate over the lack of diversity in the faculty.
An African-American law professor named Derrick Bell took a two-year leave of absence in order to protest the hiring policies at Harvard Law School.
Students were holding frequent demonstrations and the Massachusetts Commission against discrimination had filed a probable cause finding against the school for denying tenure to Claire Dalton, a liberal instructor.
And the guy who was in charge was asked of hiring, how aggressively is the Appointments Committee pursuing women and minority faculty members?
This guy replied, very.
So Harvard hired Warren for a temporary position in 1992 and the law school reported a Native American woman on its federally mandated Affirmative Action Report.
The program did not report a Native American woman for 1993 through 1995, during which time Warren was back teaching at Penn.
Now, the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines American Indian or Alaska Native employees as those, quote, having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America, having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America, including Central America, and who maintain cultural identification through tribal affiliation and And this is important.
So you can't just, well, there's family story or family lore that says someone way back may have married a native.
You actually have, because anyone could say that, right?
And so you actually have to have an official tribal affiliation or community recognition from the tribe.
And Warren would not qualify as a Native American under these guidelines because she does not meet the second requirement, official affiliation with the tribe or community.
And that is important.
I mean, she's a law professor, so she would know this kind of stuff.
And I did some work on diversity programs in the nineties as well, in my former life as a business fellow.
And so she never verified the stories of her Native American ancestry, but she checked it off, and undoubtedly it was a factor in her hiring, given that these were fairly mandated standards at the time.
Now, she says that it didn't have anything to do with my hiring and so on, but she's repeatedly refused to release any documents that might support or deny.
This.
She also, um, so she has a couple of proofs.
So she says, well, my, you know, there's a family portrait of a guy with high cheekbones and all Native Americans have high cheekbones and therefore, right?
And that's kind of racist, which is also showing up in the 11 commandments for progressives.
But, um, the other is that she says that her parents were forced to elope because their mother had both Delaware and Cherokee Native American ancestry.
And she told the story repeatedly, but this was debunked.
It's turned out to be completely false.
There's an article showing her parents were married in a religious ceremony 20 miles from their hometown and the hometown paper proudly announced the wedding within days after the ceremony was performed on January 4th, 1932.
In other words, If they eloped, they weren't very good at it, right?
To elope, you go a long way away and marry in secret.
You don't get married 20 miles from your hometown in a public religious ceremony and then announce it in the paper.
So this is, um, this is not true.
Now, Professor Warren has also claimed, as we said, that people who hired me for my jobs have all made very clear they didn't even know about it until long after I was hired.
Well, that's, you know, if you have a program to hire women of color and you don't find out if the woman has, you know, as she's claimed in the past, then you're really not doing your job very well.
So we can assume that that's probably not true.
In fact, she admitted to the Boston Globe recently that she herself had told both Penn, the University of Penn and Harvard, that she was a woman of color prior to her hiring as a full-time professor by Harvard.
So another piece of evidence that she provided was that in 1984, she contributed.
I can't believe we're talking about this stuff, but it is actually important in terms of character.
And we'll get to why in just a moment.
Amen.
So there was something called the Pow Wow Chow Cookbook, which was published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum of Muscogee, Oklahoma in 1984.
The book's publishers claimed that all the recipes in the book were contributed by descendants of the Five, as they called them, Civilized Tribes.
Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.
Each recipe contributor identified the tribe from which he or she claimed to descend.
In Senator Warren's case, she claimed to descend from the Cherokee tribe in each of her published recipes.
Two of these recipes were actually plagiarized.
Cold omelets with crab meat and crab with tomato mayonnaise dressing and fabulous lying in a white wine sauce were copied from a 1975 New York Times News Service article by Pierre Frany.
I guess when you plagiarize prior to the internet, it's pretty tough to get away with it later on.
So there's no evidence to support her claim of Cherokee ancestry.
There is evidence, however, that shows that her great-great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Crawford, was a member of the Tennessee Militia in the 1830s who rounded up the local Cherokee as the first step in their forced Trail of Tears journey to Oklahoma.
So why is this important?
So there are sports teams that have sort of Indians with mohawks and tomahawks as their insignia, and this is considered to be an exploitation of the suffering of the indigenous people of the Americas, who of course died by the millions after the Western Europeans came to basically invade and commit genocide against them.
through biological warfare, smallpox-ridden blankets, and so on.
This is under some debate, whether it's an official genocide or not.
To the people who are dead, it's probably with scant comfort what was happening, but this is a monstrous act of murder and the extermination and degradation of a native people.
And to exploit people's sympathy for the suffering of natives in order to get yourself a professorship at Harvard is absolutely wretched.
It is absolutely wretched behavior.
So if there was a country after the Holocaust, right, if there was a country that gave preferential hiring policies to Jews, And somebody who had absolutely zero evidence for being a Jew claimed to be a Jew.
In other words, was exploiting the suffering of the Holocaust in order to advance their career.
This would be considered an absolutely unholy thing to do.
A monstrous lapse of judgment.
So, it is important.
It is important as a matter of character.
And the fact that it has really gone on this long, that it's been disproven so much, and that she's still a public figure, only shows you the degree to which the left really do protect their own.
So, let's have a look at some of her commandments of being a progressive.
One, we believe that Wall Street needs stronger rules and tougher enforcement and we're willing to fight for it.
This plays into the emotional argument from the left around the crash of 2007-2008 that wiped out 40% of America's wealth and is in the process of continuing to do so.
That there was this huge deregulation and in the wild west of the free market Companies just went hog wild and shafted everyone because there wasn't this government oversight.
And this ties into family myths or ideas that children need to be rigidly controlled and things enforced otherwise they go full on tribal and throw piggy off a cliff in Lord of the Flies situations.
That without strict government oversight people just go completely crazy and plunder the planet.
This is not true.
It's not even remotely true.
Regulation increased under Bush and it's just not the case.
There was no massive deregulation of the industry that occurred.
It's just a myth.
So when the government screws things up, they have to find a scapegoat.
Otherwise people question the value of the government.
The scapegoat in this case, as it always is, the government hyper-regulates something which then produces what's called regulatory capture.
So the government starts regulating the financial industry And then the financial industry supplies people to write those regulations and gives huge amounts of money to politicians.
Those politicians then give favorable legislation and bailouts to the companies and there's no regulation that occurs at all.
It's actually just, it's a way of promoting favoritism among the largest corporations, because the largest corporations have the most money and the biggest legal departments, so it creates a barrier to entry and gives the largest companies strong access to political power through campaign contributions, which can't be matched by the smaller companies.
This idea that this, you know, well these guys went crazy and we just put bigger fences around them and they'll be lovely and nice and domesticated is is completely false and uh... so for example right so During the time that these companies were going hog wild, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, was responsible for policing them.
And what happened?
So this is a quote from an article.
During the past five years, the SEC OIG, Office of Inspector General, substantiated that dozens of SEC employees and or contractors violated commission rules and policies, as well as the government-wide standards of ethical contact.
by viewing pornographic, sexually explicit, or sexually suggestive images using government computer resources and official time.
More than half of these workers made between $99,000 and $223,000 a year.
All these cases took place over the past Five years.
One regional office staff accounted that the SEC tried to access pornographic websites nearly 1,800 times using her SEC laptop during a two-week period.
She also had about 600 pornographic images saved on her laptop hard drive.
Fortunately, that hard drive was not being run by the IT department at the IRS.
A senior attorney at SEC headquarters admitted to downloading pornography up to eight hours a day, according to the investigation.
To add insult to injury, he actually also filed for a Kerpel Tunnel Syndrome injury.
Just kidding.
Boy, now those are some offices where you really want to knock before going in, right?
The Inspector General's report said, in fact, this attorney downloaded so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.
And that's some horrifyingly fascinating stuff.
So let's have a look at, in the document of course, there is a number of, we can see the websites that these people went to.
So the first is ladyboyjuice.com, analsins.com, which I don't believe is incomplete wiping, hotgoo.com, which I don't think is about grouting in Florida, trannytit.com, dot com not also I'm sure very savory hi boobs dot com which I believe is a review of the movie Gravity erection photos dot com
I'm sure that is construction site ladyboys xxx dot com if xxx is in the title I'm imagining that lady in the ladyboys might be a bit of an exaggeration gay demon dot com Femdomblog.net.
What else do we have here?
Nextgay.com.
Really the whole mess just goes on and on.
buckskinbuffet.blogspot.com.
Cafe buckskin.blogspot.
I don't know what buckskin is.
I have no idea.
Somebody just told me what camel toe was the other day, to which I went, ah!
So I leave it to you to figure out the degree to which the government is going to be highly effective at policing.
Maybe if the people who are doing bad things in the finance industry post sex photos on the internet, then the SEC might actually be able to find a way to find them.
Number two from the 11 commandments.
We believe in science and that means we have a responsibility to protect the earth.
This of course I assume is a reference to global warming or global cooling or climate change and so on.
And yeah, we believe in science and that means we have a responsibility to protect the earth.
Fantastic.
So what I would assume she means by that is, because she's obviously a very intelligent lady, what she means by that I assume is that we need to get the federal government or the Fed, which is tightly related to the federal government, the Federal Reserve to stop printing so much money and stop borrowing.
Because printing a lot of money and borrowing and spending really stimulates consumer consumption and consumer demand, thus destroying the earth, right?
So inflation, money supply, debt, all of the Cocaine up the nose of the Western economies is really causing us to despoil the earth at a highly rapid manner.
So we need to, of course, move to Bitcoin or privatize the currency so that people can have a stable currency which doesn't promote massive consumptionism.
Also, inflation, of course, provokes consumptionism because if your money is worth less next year, then you want to spend it or convert it into materials or goods or real estate or houses or something in the here and now because your money is basically bleeding to death on the floor.
And so I'm sure that she's talking about that.
But of course, she's not.
She's talking about a massive expansion of government power.
You know, one of the reasons why agricultural prices are so high and why your grocery bill is so high is because massive amounts of agricultural land in the world has been turned over to biofuels production.
And this is all nonsense.
is.
She says, we believe that the internet shouldn't be rigged to benefit big corporations and that means real net neutrality.
Well I'm going to do a presentation on net neutrality so maybe I'll skip that other than to say government involvement in the oversight of media from print to radio to television to the internet and onwards has been massive and the amount of government control and regulation over the internet is enormous and uh... you know the US has the most laws of any country in the world and probably the most laws of any country throughout history
I think the federal registry has over a million laws and regulations that go on, and that's just the registry, let alone the criminal code, let alone the tax code.
If you put all the regulations that apply to US citizens in a single room, an airplane hanger and a microfiche probably wouldn't be enough.
And so the idea that we just don't quite have enough laws or regulations or controls is deeply insane.
And again, from a law professor, it can only be empty-headed populism.
We believe, she says, that no one should work full-time and still live in poverty.
That means raising the minimum wage.
Well, of course, raising the minimum wage drives inflation, which then causes the minimum wage to have to be raised once more.
But for those who don't know, and I think this is really interesting to figure out, so the minimum wage was originally Calculated in the 1960s at a buck and a quarter.
Now back in the day, let me just get my text up here, so the minimum wage in the two years before 1966 was five ninety percent silver quarters, so a buck and a quarter.
That 90% silver dollar and a quarter is about $25 in today's money, right?
So before they started debasing the currency and going off the gold standard in order to print massive amounts of money to have both the warfare and the welfare state, right?
To run the Vietnam War and to have the war on poverty and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the massive expansion of welfare, which is basically the single mom state.
Before they debased the currency, quarters were 90% silver, and that's one of the ways in which they could not debase the currency, because you actually had to have the silver to make the quarters.
Now, if you took quarters from 1965, and they were 90% silver, and you converted them to what silver is worth right now, it's about 25 bucks.
So if the minimum wage had stayed at about $1.25 an hour, and the central bank had not debased the money supply, Then minimum wage workers would be about two to three times better off in terms of real purchasing power than they currently are.
Even though the minimum wage is almost six times the amount prior to 1966.
So, to sum up, because of the money supply inflation run by the central banks, the minimum wage is nearly six times as high, but buys less than half as much.
Let's put it another way.
So a pre-depacement quarter So this is a quarter from 1965.
Can still buy you a gallon of gas because of the silver content, with change left over.
A gallon of gas cost about 15 minutes of minimum wage labor in the early 1960s.
Now gas has actually gotten cheaper relative to gold and silver money since then.
A minimum wage worker in 1963 could work for 10 minutes and then send the wages of those 10 minutes to 90% silver dimes worth about four of today's dollars.
Forward in time and buy a gallon of gas.
It takes today's minimum wage worker about three times as long to earn that same gallon.
And I put links to all of this stuff below.
This is from the Dollar Vigilante.
So there's nothing wrong with the minimum wage.
I mean, the problem is that the money has been broken and debased.
And she's clearly educated enough to know about all of this stuff, but of course she doesn't want to talk about that.
She says, number five, we believe that fast food workers deserve a livable wage and that means that when they take to the picket line, we are proud to fight alongside them.
To me there's a kind of subtle racism in all of this.
So a lot more blacks and Hispanics than whites are stuck at fast food outlets and minimum wage jobs.
And for a lot of non-minorities, you know, you get a minimum wage job when you're a teenager or you're living alone and then you sort of move on and you move up.
She's basically saying, when she says people stuck at minimum wages basically trying to raise families and so on, this is what a livable wage is, she's talking a lot about blacks and Hispanics and other minorities.
And she's saying that they can't move on and move up like white people do.
And therefore they have to just have government force employers to give them more money because they can't find ways of earning more money or becoming more valuable or moving on or moving up.
I think it's pretty racist to say that, and I'm not a big fan of this kind of approach.
I mean, the minimum wage affects fewer than 1% of American workers, and the majority of those are not raising families.
But if she's saying that blacks and Hispanics need government help in order to give them minimum livable wages, as she calls them, I think that's pretty racist.
So she says, number six, we believe that students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.
And it's true that the price of education has risen 900% in recent years.
It's absolutely horrendous and brutal.
It may not be a huge and massive mystery as to why.
So at the same time that Elizabeth Warren is saying, we believe, That students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.
Elizabeth Warren was paid... Are you ready?
Grab your seat.
Elizabeth Warren was paid $429,981 as a Harvard Law professor from 2010 to 2011.
Let me say that again.
She's saying that students shouldn't pay too much for their education.
Her bill as a professor, what she was paid for as a professor, $429,981 from 2010 to 2011.
Remember, this is a professor.
Three or four months off in the summer, sabbaticals.
You only have to work really a couple of hours a week teaching classes.
Your TAs in general will do the marking of the exams.
So, at an hourly rate, it's basically infinity.
And you have tenure, you can't be fired.
I mean, it is really one of the most plum jobs in this or any other planet.
Now, the question of why the price of education is going up so much is fundamentally due to... the answer is fundamentally due to government involvement, as it usually is when the prices go way up in any particular field.
Governments are subsidizing education massively, giving huge amounts of money to universities.
The universities then do this, with all that money, they just build a whole bunch of new stuff and hire a bunch of new people and then they have to pay for all of this stuff because the government doesn't cover it all and then they start raising tuition.
Governments are also subsidizing education with loans and grants and forcing banks to give loans and grants to students and therefore the demand for it is massively increasing.
So, students are entitled to get an education without being crushed by debt.
Well, if the government stops giving lots of money to universities, and if universities, sorry, if the government stops giving lots of money to people who want to attend universities, particularly for economically non-productive fields, then you won't have this problem.
I mean, education is something you don't need to go to school for.
Of course, with the internet and libraries and so on, you can get a fantastic education, just go to the Khan Academy for heaven's sakes.
You can get a fantastic education.
Almost all of the university materials that are taught in even the Ivy League schools are available online for free.
And so you don't need to go to school.
I mean, you could, of course, just go and take the exam that the schools provide without having to show up in classes and all that.
So this is a completely inefficient way to get people educated.
Like most things the government's involved in, it kind of frees us in time and you end up with this post-medieval academe situation, which doesn't make any sense.
given the availability and distribution of knowledge in modern technological environments.
But there is a very real reason why the government wants to crush students by debt.
And Noam Chomsky has talked about this.
Basically, governments are threatened by intelligent individuals who question the status quo.
And the Flynn effect, which is that IQ tends to raise every successive generation, means that governments are finding it harder and harder to manage a more and more intelligent population.
Once the pigs can pick the locks, then you have to invest in more expensive locks.
And so how does the government combat the Flynn effect?
In other words, the people who are getting more and more intelligent and therefore questioning the system more.
Well, it subsidizes their education and gets them locked in a death spiral of debt to the point where they're just paranoid, freaked out, worried, have to work, live at home, and aren't going out protesting and questioning the system.
So the debt noose is really around the windpipe of those who might cry out for change in the next generation.
So it works for everyone, of course, except the future generations.
And also, look, I mean, obviously Elizabeth Warren getting a billion dollars an hour as a Harvard Law professor, her education was a very good investment.
And this is my father, PhD in Geology.
He was looking for gold in South Africa, and his PhD was paid for by the company he ended up working for.
So they said, "Well, we'll pay for your PhD, "but you've got to come work for us a while afterwards." In other words, his job was guaranteed by the market demand for his PhD.
And this, of course, could work in a number of fields, not necessarily art history, although there are curators who would want that kind of stuff, but you really want market demand to drive very expensive education, unless you're, you know, a trustiferian dilettante who just wants to go and read for fun, if not profit. a trustiferian dilettante who just wants to go and read So there should be a pull from business for the most expensive degrees.
Hospitals would pay for doctors to get there, medical licenses and so on.
That's how it should work, of course, and then you look at things like basket weaving and art history, or my own particular field of history, then this is a hobby, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you shouldn't necessarily get government money for a hobby.
She says, we believe that after a lifetime of work, people are entitled to retire with dignity, and that means protecting Social Security, Medicare, and pensions.
Well, I mean, the boomers are going to get vastly more out of, particularly Medicare, than they ever paid in.
Three to four times more.
So...
I mean it's just theft.
It's theft from the richest generation to the generation with the fewest economic opportunities in a couple of generations.
So it is... If the government is going to take basically fifteen percent of your income for your life then you're kind of hostage to social security because they've taken it from you and the only way you can get it back is to apply.
So if they take your money hostage you have to negotiate to get it released back to you.
But if people get to keep their own money then They don't actually need, and they'll do far better than they would under the government's social security system.
If you take my stuff, then I'm going to have to negotiate with you to get it back, which is called a vote.
But it's got nothing to do with protecting people's...
Dignity in the old age or whatever.
We believe, I can't believe I have to say this in 2014, we believe in equal pay for equal work.
So the leftist cliche that I think she obviously means that women are underpaid relative to men has been disproven so many times that I'm simply, you can just go look at Dr. Warren Farrell's work on this.
That's F-A-R-R-E-L-L.
It's, and Thomas Sowell, S-O-W-E-L-L, his work on this, it's just been disproven so many times that it's just ridiculous.
Women do get paid for the work that they do.
In fact, they get paid slightly more than men for the work that they do, with the exception that if they take time off to have kids, which a lot of them do, then they're worth less.
Isn't that shocking?
If you're not in the workforce and if you spend a lot of time raising children, you are worth less.
And she knows all of this, right?
I mean, if you're going to talk about a topic, then you need to do the research about the topic.
You're going to make public statements.
So she's either talking out of her ass, which is ridiculous and irresponsible, or she knows better, but she's playing to the masses, which is reprehensible.
We believe that equal means equal, and that's true in marriage, it's true in the workplace, it's true in all of America.
Actually, it's not true in all of America.
Equal means equal.
I don't have the power to create taxes and government programs, so that's all nonsense.
We believe that immigration has made this country strong and vibrant, and that means reform.
The Democrats, as I talked about in the Truth About Immigration presentation recently, which you should really check out, The Democrats know that when they bring immigrants into the country, those immigrants will overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
And so they can't convince Americans in general of the virtue and value of their ideas, so they want to import people who will vote for them and also play to the voting base who want their relatives to come into the country.
We believe that immigration has made the Democratic Party strong.
The Democratic Party is not an organic party.
It survives on handouts from mostly public sector unions, which is not democratic, not voluntary.
It's forced association.
The workers are forced to pay the union dues, and then the union members hand it over to the political parties, regardless of whether the worker actually supports those political parties.
Forced association is a violation of freedom of association, of course.
And so the Democrat Party gets its money, I mean from Hollywood and so on.
Hollywood is dependent on unions, right?
So they have to toe the line.
So they're dependent on Hollywood, they're dependent on public sector unions, and they're dependent on the votes of immigrants.
It's not anything to do with the free choice of the average American.
Number 11.
And we believe that corporations are not people.
That women have a right to their bodies.
We will overturn Hobby Lobby and we will fight for it.
We will fight for it!
I talked about this recently in a shift show, birth control is not a health care right.
It is like saying, I have a right to eat, so give me a tub of icing.
Tastes good, may not be that great for you, but it's certainly not an essential nutrition, and so on.
So, these cliches, I hope, you know, It certainly is my hope that people are just getting eye-rollingly bored of these uninformed, economically illiterate irrational and anti-empirical cliches that constantly come out of the left.
So it's my hope that people will recognize that this woman who is strongly suspected of having stood on the graves of millions of Native Americans in order to bolster her own career possibilities is pretty reprehensible.
And the degree to which she has never studied anything that opposes her belief system is also reprehensible.
You know, one of the things that I learned about in college and as a debater uh... from uh... high school onwards was you must be able to argue the opposing position you must have incorporated the opposing arguments to what it is that you're putting forward and uh... it doesn't sound like she's ever had any exposure to any information that counters her leftist cliches.
The idea that she wants to put the government more in charge of things uh... that the government is somehow going to regulate the financial industry I mean, it's completely insane.
It's like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of your retirement fund.
The government is in debt to the tune and has unfunded liabilities to the tune of $170 to $180 trillion dollars when the U.S.
economy is only $14 to $15 trillion a year in gross.
So, the idea that the agency that sells off the unborn, that debases the currency, that starts wars, that has extra-legal powers from an imperial presidency, that almost never seems to bother going through Congress anymore, that any of this is where we want to put our most sensitive and dependent people, our most sensitive and dependent Social issues is completely insane.
Governments all around the world have been convicted in any rational court of judgment of rampant fraud, inflation, murder.
Of course America now has More blacks in prison than were slaves in the South during the height of slavery.
It is absolutely wretched.
And so it's my hope that people will start becoming incredibly bored of these unbelievably tedious cliches.
Because when you get bored of something, it actually stimulates creativity towards reason, evidence, and the light of true rational illumination.
Thank you so much for watching.
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