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May 25, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
32:55
Ep. 309 - Is It Okay To Body-Slam Reporters?
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On Wednesday, Rasmussen Reports released its daily presidential tracking poll.
It put President Trump at 48% approval.
That's a four-point jump in two days from Rasmussen, a five-point increase from his recent low of 43% on May 16th.
Now, it is worth noting that other polls are far less favorable to Trump.
Two contemporaneous polls, The Economist and Gallup, have him at 40% and 38% respectively, and Fox News has him at 38% too.
But!
If the Trump bump is real, it makes a bit of sense.
That's for three reasons.
Number one, Trump isn't tweeting.
I know a lot of Zach-lites like when he tweets, but because Trump is overseas and busily traveling the globe, he's not up at all hours watching MSNBC and CNN and tweeting nasty notes to the hosts or retweeting botched summaries of Fox and Friends chyrons.
He's also not pouring more gasoline on the Trump-Russia kindling the media have said.
He hasn't tweeted.
about FBI Director James Comey, or reports that he told intelligence officials he'd appreciate it if they'd exonerate him or any of the other anonymous material coming out of the media daily.
That means that these stories tend to die quickly since anonymous stories aren't being confirmed by Trump's own hand, and since Trump isn't insisting that his communications team rush to the nearest microphone to parrot his talking points.
Most of the damage on the Trump-Russia stuff has been self-inflicted, and that's easy to see when Trump stops inflicting said damage on himself.
Second, the country isn't collapsing.
Trump left the country, the country's fine.
The left promulgates this myth, whereby the president must sit at the controls of the airliner that is the United States each and every day, lest we all go full zombie apocalypse on one another and the plane crashes into a building.
Instead, Trump is out of the country, partying it up with glowing orbs and swords, and the country's getting along pretty much just fine.
Nobody's dying.
Nobody's panicking.
In other words, a predictable government is the best available option.
And Trump gallivanting around reminds us all he's not capable of screwing it up this badly.
Terrorism is a winning issue for Trump.
This is the third point.
The terror attack on Monday obviously helped Trump politically because the left is so damn irresponsible about it.
Trump's perspective.
Fewer unvetted Muslims in the West means fewer unvetted Muslims killing other people in the West.
And that's eminently correct.
His skepticism of the radical Islam resonates far better than the left's asinine John Lennon imaginesque pseudo-philosophy.
Trump was elected to bomb the bleep out of ISIS.
Seeing the slaughter of eight-year-old girls at a pop concert reminds people that's a task worth pursuing.
President Trump should be making notes.
When he comes back to the U.S., he should be the same President Trump we're seeing abroad.
Muted but strong, a bombastic showman when the time is right.
If he does all that, maybe we can get this thing back on the rails.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So we have a huge show coming up for you today, coming up in just a couple of minutes.
We're supposed to have Senator Ben Sasse from Nebraska, whose book, The Vanishing American Adult, our coming-of-age crisis and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance, is now number three on the New York Times bestseller chart.
I'm a big fan of Senator Sasse's, obviously one of the last honest conservatives in Washington, D.C.
Hopefully we can get the technology worked out.
He's supposed to call in, so we'll chat with him about the issues of the day.
We're also going to talk about what's happening in Montana, where a Republican candidate for a special election congressional seat literally body-slammed a reporter.
And we'll talk about why it is that we continue to vote for people who body-slam reporters, and why it is that that's actually somewhat understandable.
We'll get to all of that, plus the mailbag.
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So, let's jump right in with Senator Ben Sasse.
Senator Sasse, thanks so much for joining the show.
Really appreciate your time.
Thank you for having me on.
I'm grateful for the invite.
Okay, so, Senator Sasse, I do want to ask you about your book, but first, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about the news of the day.
I just want to get your basic take on how we should be looking at this situation in which a congressional candidate in Montana has apparently body slammed a reporter.
It's been confirmed, basically, by a Fox News report.
You know what should I think obviously everybody of goodwill can look at this and say this is ridiculous But how should Republicans be treating this because now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place They're in the middle of an election.
They don't want to see a Democrat win a seat How do you think Republicans ought to be treating this?
Yeah, so I've been in Commitments all morning back-to-back so I know almost nothing current on it except for just the the top-line fact of what happened last night and it seems to be pretty obvious that If you are seeking a job as a public servant, one of your most fundamental duties is to teach American civics.
And since the First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment and of American civics, That means many, many, many things, but one of the most basic things the First Amendment means is you don't body slam a reporter.
You celebrate the First Amendment.
Well, I appreciate your candor on that, Senator Sasse.
I think one of the big problems is obviously that if leadership in both parties doesn't say the same thing that you do, then what you end up with is sort of prisoner's dilemma.
I'm going to explain that a little bit to the listeners.
You end up with a sort of prisoner's dilemma where people feel, okay, I have to pick the second worst choice, and obviously we're electing a congressman, we're not electing a pastor, and that means that even if somebody does something that I find abhorrent, he's going to be a better legislator than somebody else, but the leadership of both parties needs to stand together and say that when, and it's a problem because they won't do it, that when people act like this, that they should not be seated, in my opinion.
I don't know what you think about that.
Yeah, so I'm shooting straight with you that I've had zero conversations with anybody about where any of the leaders are on an issue like that, or whether or not there's been a call for that joint press conference.
But let's just distinguish between short-term and long-term, because here's what I really care about.
I get that in a short-term basis, all through life, people are often presented with choices that feel like a lesser of two evils discussion.
That's not where I spend any of my energy.
I spend all of my time and energy on this, which is, what are we doing now to build a country where the American people will understand our shared narrative as a people, and where there will be more public trust 5 and 10 and 15 and 20 years from now?
Because we are not one election away from the eschaton.
We're not one election away from electing the guy who will drive some majority that's going to pass all their great legislation and they're going to bring about utopia.
America is centered in the local communities where people work and worship and where they're designing the next great app and where they're persuading people to join the Rotary Club.
And politics is to provide a framework for that.
And right now, our politics is so lame and boring and stupidly short-sighted that it always feels like people think they're trying to make the lesser of two evils choice that will bring about heaven on earth.
It's not coming via this city.
I'm talking to you from D.C.
And this city is filled with people who are just not interesting enough to project your grand hopes and dreams on.
And so I think that one of the first duties of all politicians is to announce that politics isn't the center of our life.
And Senator Sasse is one of the things we love so much about you.
So, your new book, which I really want to get to, The Vanishing American Adult, Our Coming-of-Age Crisis, and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance.
It's debuting at number three on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.
And this is actually a book, folks.
I mean, it's not just a politician wrote a memoir and now you should go buy it because the politician needs to make money and put his kids through college.
Although I assume that Senator Sasse would like to put his kids through college with the money.
But I think that the book itself is actually an important look Why it is that our common culture is eroding.
We talk a lot on the show, Senator Sasse, about the social capital that used to undergird American society.
And that's basically what your book is about, correct?
Exactly right.
The social capital is the term we should have in screaming lights in these conversations, because that's what's eroding.
And then all the politics are dysfunctional downstream from that poisoned river.
And so I think that, first of all, this book is 100 percent not about politics.
It's 99% not about policy.
The tiny point that it touches on policy is recognizing that education needs to be radically reformed and there's going to be different kinds of job training in the future when people are disrupted out of work and jobs at 40 and 45 and 50 and 55 years old.
But the vast majority of the book is about exactly what you flagged, which is social capital.
The American experiment recognizes that in a broken world, You're going to have structure.
You're going to have order.
You're going to have security.
There's going to be restraint.
But what we want, and the American founders wanted, what I think the vast majority of the American people actually want, if you put the choice to them, is they want self-control, self-governance, self-discipline, self-restraint, not power and discipline and restraint coming from another, from a political center.
And right now, this city, D.C., is so populated by folks whose only long-term thought is about their own incumbency that they come to think that politics are the center of life.
Anybody who thinks that politics are the center of life is not well-suited to be an American politician.
So, Senator Sess, I want to ask you a question that I was asked last night at Northwestern.
I was speaking there about a lot of these same exact issues.
And it's, I think, the hardest question for politicians, particularly.
And that is, it's easy to a certain extent to say, here's what we need to do if we're starting from scratch, right?
You're 20 years old.
You're not married yet.
And now you're planning your life.
And I assume that your book is making the case that you need to get married.
You need to bring your children up in a place where there is social capital.
We need to make connections with each other at the local level, at our churches and community level, in a de Tocquevillian sense.
What do we do about the person who's already made a decision that takes them out of that?
So, you have a single mom, she's already made the decision, a bad decision, that she was going to get pregnant out of wedlock, now she has the baby, and she maybe doesn't have that support network.
What do we do about that?
You know, I call on people to provide charity, but for some people, they say that's not enough of an answer.
What do you think we ought to be doing about that?
Yeah, it's a very fair question.
So, you know, we live east of Eden, we live in a fallen world where things are broken, And we're all, in my world view, we're not only all sinners, we're also all sinned against.
And so everybody's always got grievances and pain, and some people have pain that's much more substantial than others of us have ever experienced.
And so the first thing we need to do is have a shared understanding of what we can and can't accomplish in the world.
And what you want is a world where people are finding meaning in their local community, where they have meaningful work, where they have families, Where they have social capital, where they have friendships, where they have intergenerational relationships, where they have the time and space to wrestle through the really big and important questions, which are so much bigger than politics.
And what we're really describing there is neighborhood.
What you want people to have is neighborliness.
You want them to have friendships.
You want them to have meaningful work.
And so we need to start by admitting that there is scar tissue in the world, but scar tissue is often to be celebrated because scar tissue is the foundation of future character.
There's healing and there's repair.
There's rebuilding that happens.
among neighbors and friends as they work through those problems together.
Charles Murray sometimes uses the line that government's job is to take the difficulty out of things.
But you've got to be clear about what things you want the government to take the difficulty out of versus not.
I want the government to take the difficulty out of walking home from a restaurant late at night.
I don't want there to be violence in anybody's neighborhood when they're walking home from a restaurant or walking home from work late at night.
But I don't want the government To take the difficulty out of cleaning up puke for my six-year-old in the middle of the night.
Because if the government tries to come into my house and solve that problem, what it'll actually do is create passivity in me.
And it turns out, as I have three kids, 15, 13, 6.
I've had many, many sleepless nights over the course of my life where my kids are sick in the middle of the night, and my wife and I are on the edge of arguing with each other about why the other one didn't do enough to prevent this stupid thing from happening, you know?
Why would you let your kid eat that apple slice off the floor of the athletic arena?
That's the food poisoning that made him sick.
But you know what happened?
When we had to together clean up that puke in the middle of the night, we have a shared experience that was the foundation of future love, future healthy nostalgia, future character.
And my kids, they feel that we care for them because we do, but we've demonstrated it at real moments in time.
And so I think that you're flagging all of the brokenness of different neighborhoods and different social capital and different community.
Government, we should talk about it because there are things that government should do to mitigate some of the suffering, but we first have to have a shared understanding that government can't possibly bring about utopia.
Government won't be effective at helping us clean up from a sick kid in the middle of the night.
So we have to understand that government is limited and bounded.
Then let's have a meaningful argument.
I'll say one more thing here.
I think it's important to distinguish between our commitments, your and mine, to limited government and to small government.
Because you and I believe in both of them.
But limited government is far more important than small government.
Limited government is understanding that government is not utopian and that rights precede government.
Government isn't the author or the source of our rights.
Small versus medium-sized government should be what the debate is between the Republican and the Democratic Party.
How much intervention should there be in the economy?
And there could be Democrats who, if they would give a full-throated defense of limited government and then make their argument for medium-sized government, I might vote differently than they would, but we could stand together at the kind of press conference you're talking about and reaffirm basic American values and virtues.
And then we could argue about the stuff we vote on, but we'd recognize that the stuff that we're voting on is central.
It's not ultimate theological, philosophical dreaming.
Senator Ben Sasse, The Vanishing American Adult, terrific book, and Senator Sasse, one of the few honest men left in Washington, D.C.
Really appreciate it, showing that, you know, a phrase that is overused but under-understood, common sense still exists.
Thanks so much, Senator Sasse, for joining The Ben Shapiro Show.
Really appreciate your time and appreciate everything you're doing.
Thanks for the invite, Ben.
Have a great day.
Alrighty.
So, folks, meanwhile, I mentioned it to Senator Sasse there.
The big story of the day, obviously, is what's happening in Montana.
So there's a special election in Montana today.
The Democrat and the Republican are running pretty close together.
And it's now been thrown into turmoil because it looked like the Republican was going to win.
He's a guy named Gianforte, Greg Gianforte.
And Greg Gianforte, last night, Apparently, he was being asked a question by Ben Jacobs, who's a reporter for, I think, Politico?
But in any case, he's for The Guardian, and Gin Forte apparently grabs this reporter and body slams him.
And this guy tweets out last night that I was body slammed, my glasses were broken.
Here is the reporter, Ben Jacobs, here's his description of being attacked last night.
Figured he was standing around there just to reach out and get his response to the CBO score.
Um, that he'd been talking about, uh, that he'd been holding off his opinion on healthcare, at least on the stunt until he saw the CBO score.
Next thing I know, I'm being body slammed.
And, uh, he, uh, you know, he's on top of me for a second.
My glasses are broken.
It's the strangest, the strangest moment in my entire life reporting.
He grabs my recorder.
on my phone and but the audio should be up right now in the Guardian and uh yeah throws me down my glasses break he sort of I think I'm pretty sure he's on top of me wailing for a second and then screams at me to get the hell out um and uh yeah his staffer comes in it's just it's just very strange and mortifying because You know, I'm used to...
His description, obviously, until a lot of people on the right immediately go, well, we hate the media, so he must be lying.
Or, we like Jim Ford and we want him to win, so this must all be false.
Okay, as someone who has a little bit of experience in these arenas, where people claim that an assault or a battery is not an assault or a battery because we don't like the person who's being assaulted or batted around, or we do like the person who's committing the assault and battery, Uh, I have a basic standard on this.
I treat politicians like I treat every other human being.
And that is to say when they commit assault or battery, that is something wrong.
That is something bad.
Now, the right's immediate tendency, which was, oh, it couldn't have happened the way this reporter said it happened, That sort of fell apart when number one audio came out of the actual confrontation.
Here's what it sounded like.
There's no video.
But here's audio of the actual confrontation between this fellow, Gianforte, the Republican candidate in Montana, and this reporter, Ben Jacobs.
And we'll talk to you about that later.
Yeah, but there's not going to be time.
I'm just curious.
Speak with Shane, please.
I'm sick and tired of you guys!
The last guy that came in here, you did the same thing!
Get the hell out of here!
Get the hell out of here!
The last guy did the same thing.
You were the guardian.
Yes, and you just broke my glasses.
The last guy did the same damn thing.
You just body slammed me and broke my glasses.
Get the hell out of here.
I mean, the audio is about as clear as it can be, and then Fox News comes out and confirms the account.
Again, very reminiscent of past situations, but the Fox News reports that, as part of our preparation for a story about Thursday's special election to air on Special Report with Bret Baier, we arranged interviews with the top two candidates.
I joined field producer Faith Mangan and photographer Keith Rally and Bozeman for a scheduled interview with Gianforte.
The person writing is Alicia Acuna, who is a reporter for Fox News.
It says, at this point, Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.
Faith, Keith and I watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the reporter.
As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began yelling something to the effect of, I'm sick and tired of this.
Jacobs scrambled to his knees and said something about his glasses being broken.
He asked Faith, Keith, and myself for our names.
In shock, we did not answer.
Jacobs then said he wanted the police called and went to leave.
Gianforte looked at the three of us and repeatedly apologized.
At that point, I told him and Scanlan, who is now present, that we needed a moment, and then the men left.
A few things to be said about this.
I want to talk about the right's response to this because I think it's more interesting than the left's response.
The left's response is at least largely hypocritical, so we'll say about that briefly.
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Okay, so, the right responds to this news about Gianforte.
I was online last night when this happened, and half the right says, this is pretty terrible, and the other half of the right goes, well, it can't possibly have happened that way.
But, the people who are really egregious say things like, well, he had it coming.
If you believe that a reporter can be bodyslammed because you don't like reporters, then let me say to you that you are doing American wrong.
You are just being an American wrong.
Americanism does not constitute people bodyslamming reporters because you don't like the question, especially when the question was, can you give me, the actual question was, can you give me your opinion on the Congressional Budget Office score of the new health care plan?
That was actually the question.
And he was bodyslammed.
One of the people who I thought was just egregious last night was Laura Ingram.
She tweeted a couple of times.
Here was Laura Ingram's tweet.
She said, Politicians always need to keep their cool.
But what would most Montana men do if bodyslammed for no reason by another man?
Okay, we live in a civilized society.
In a civilized society, when somebody assaults you, the best answer, if you can do it, is to withdraw and call the police because a crime has been committed.
The best answer is not to get into tribal warfare where you then go and clock the guy with a bottle.
This routine where it's like the reporter wasn't manly enough because the reporter didn't stand up to being assaulted is just ridiculous.
And she continued along these lines, tweet 14, if we can grab that, 14.
Yeah, she said, did anyone get his lunch money stolen today and then run to tell the recess monitor?
Okay, if I had something stolen from me, I'd run to tell the police, wouldn't you?
But again, there's this notion that there's this macho, brash stupidity that really is like high school bullying that has emerged on the right side of the aisle.
It's existed for parts of the left for a long time, but it's emerged on the right side of the aisle where it's like civilization takes it back to you.
I'd rather have a macho guy there because strength, strength, power, power, strength, macho!
Okay.
You don't need your congresspeople to be macho.
You need them to be wise.
You need them to exercise values.
You don't need them to be body-slamming reporters.
So this sort of stuff is really gross.
And I will say that it has risen in the wake of Trump because Trump used to talk like this on the campaign trail.
That is true.
The left has jumped on this to immediately suggest that it's about Trump, that Gianforte did this and he's going to get away with it because of Trump.
I don't think that's right.
I think that Trump is a symptom of something deeper.
I think Gianforte is a symptom of something deeper.
Kirsten Powers, who is a person of the left, she says that it's really Trump's fault because he needs reporters all the time that this happened.
Isn't this possibly tied into the fact that we have a president that's constantly fomenting rage against reporters?
I mean, is it possible that there's some connection here?
We have a country that doesn't trust reporting.
No, no, but it's at a different level than it's ever been.
I mean, there's no comparison to the way it is today than even a year ago, frankly.
The absolute rage towards reporters.
Okay, this idea that Trump's rage toward reporters, that people who don't like reporters are the reason, maybe it's that Gianforte's a nut, is the reason this happened.
You can't do this, what Kirsten Powers is doing, because number one, Trump isn't in Montana, even.
And number two, the fact is that people on the left use this kind of language all the time.
So, for example, last night, CNN counterterrorism analyst was very angry at Trey Gowdy, who's on the House Intelligence Committee, and this CNN counterterrorism analyst said this about Trey Gowdy.
See, Phil, that's what's so frustrating.
Did collusion exist?
That's the burning question that everybody wants answered.
And then Brennan says, well, I know of contacts and communication.
Well, Trey Gowdy ought to have his ass kicked.
He knows the difference between intelligence and evidence.
Let me tell you something, Allison.
If you're an American citizen, and the National Security Agency collects intelligence at its intercepts of Russians who report what you've said, do you think it's fair to go to a court and say that's evidence that you did something wrong?
That's why the FBI is going to take a year or more to investigate this, because the American citizens involved in this Have a right to have evidence presented in a court beyond a conversation that a Russian official reports.
In my world, this distinction is black and white.
It's a hard line.
I know it's frustrating for the American people, but I hope they don't want evidence to be perceived as something that a Russian official says, and that's it.
You can be convicted on that.
Okay, so he actually goes ahead and he says that somebody should kick Gowdy's ass.
It's really ridiculous that people on the left can say that, and again, they'll say that this rhetoric causes no violence.
It causes no violence when Barack Obama says things like bring a knife to a gunfight, but it does cause violence when Trump says things like I'm going to defend somebody who punches somebody.
All of these things are wrong.
Okay, so now, with that said, I want to show you why it is that people are going to vote for this guy Gianforte anyway, and there's a logic to this.
We're going to actually get out the Glenn Beck chart.
We're going to get out the Glenn Beck whiteboard and do a full on chart.
Here we go.
So I know that game theory has become sort of a joke.
I know that people think that game theory, because on Twitter some guy badly laid out game theory.
But there's a real game theory reason as to why people are going to end up voting for Gianforte.
So this is a basic prisoner's dilemma.
In game theory, game theory is really about how two How two people play a game together, how they come up with a strategy.
And the problem is that there's no coordination at the top level between the Republican and Democratic parties to say that bad behavior means you won't be seated.
Bad behavior means that we're not going to side with you, we're going to pull support.
So what you actually have, and the right has said this for a long time, is the left will endorse any bad behavior so long as it serves their side.
We can't be the only ones who are virtuous.
And you can see how this leads everyone into worse behavior.
It leads to worse standards for everyone.
So, the way that Game Theory works is basically, this is the most basic form of Game Theory, it's the most famous form of Game Theory, this is called the Prisoner's Dilemma.
So, here you have Prisoner 1, okay?
And here is Prisoner Number 2.
Okay, and they're arrested for murder.
They both killed somebody together, and now they're arrested.
And so they do what they do in LA Confidential.
They put them in separate interrogation rooms, and they tell one of them, here's the deal.
The deal is this.
If you confess, and your partner does not confess, then you get off scot-free.
You can blame it on your partner, right?
You can just say, my partner did it, it wasn't me.
If both of you confess, you're both going to jail for five years.
If neither of you confesses, then we can't really convict you, so we'll put you in jail for, like, a year for some lesser crime.
And if you're the person who doesn't confess, if you're the person who stays silent and your other guy blames you, you're gonna end up spending 10 years in prison.
So that's what it looks like on the board here.
So, on the board, basically, each of these prisoners has two choices.
Choice number one is to stay silent.
Choice number two is to confess.
Right?
Choice number one, to stay silent.
Choice number two, to confess.
Prisoner one, prisoner two.
The penalty, as I just laid it out, is if somebody, if both of them are silent, if both of them are silent, then they both go to jail for one year.
Right?
If prisoner one confesses, and prisoner two is silent, then prisoner one goes free because he blames the other guy, and prisoner two gets ten years in prison.
If they both confess, they both get five years in prison.
And if, again, Prisoner 1 stays silent and Prisoner 2 confesses, then Prisoner 1 ends up with 10 years in prison and Prisoner 2 ends up with zero years in prison because the person who ended up confessing is the person who ends up Going free, basically.
So, how does this apply?
How does this make sense?
Okay, so, in the context of voting, when people say it's a binary choice, when people say the Democrats are going to cheat anyway, so it doesn't matter what you do, they're gonna cheat, the reason that both of these prisoners are going to end up confessing is because they don't trust each other.
If they trusted each other, they would end up here, right?
If they trusted each other, they would both shut their yaps, and they'd both spend a year in prison, and then they'd go free.
If they don't trust each other, if Prisoner 1 thinks that Prisoner 2 is going to confess, then he has two choices.
If Prisoner 1 thinks that Prisoner 2 is going to confess, then he's either going to spend 10 years in prison or 5 years in prison.
So he is going to confess also.
And if Prisoner 2 thinks that Prisoner 1 is going to confess, he has the same exact choice.
He can either spend 10 years in prison or he can spend 5 years in prison.
So if they don't trust each other, they're both going to confess.
And so you actually end up, this is the Prisoner's Dilemma, and this is what I believe they would call the Nash Equilibrium in this particular scenario.
This is where they would actually end up.
They would end up in this box.
If you don't trust each other, you end up in that box.
Now, the Republican Party and Democratic Party don't trust each other.
The Democrats think the Republicans are going to always elect the worst guy no matter what, and the Republicans think the Democrats are always going to elect the worst guy no matter what.
So they don't want to be in the position where the Democrats cheat, the Democrats put Teddy Kennedy in office and they don't care about it and it's fine, it's all good.
And then they're the ones who act virtuously.
They say, you know, we're not going to vote for our guy because he's a bad guy, and then we lose, and Hillary becomes president, and we lose, and this Democrat in Montana becomes president.
They don't want to end up in this box, so instead, they say, we'll vote for the crap guy, the guy who's a piece of crap, who body-slammed a reporter, and you end up in this box.
In other words, the distrust that we have for Americans with one another, we end up both making the second worst choice.
We both end up making the second worst choice, which for the country as a whole is basically the worst choice, because now both of you are in the worst situation.
The worst politician is always elected.
Everyone elects the worst politician, because you don't want to be the guy left out on the outside.
Now, this assumes two things.
It assumes, number one, that the person who is the criminal in this particular scenario is the best candidate and doesn't do any damage down the road.
I think that's a bad assumption.
I think that if Gianforte is elected in Montana, that Democrats will use that as a club to beat Republicans with for years, in the same way that they're now going to use Trump to beat Republicans for years.
So there are costs down the road, and I think that's what Senator Sasse was saying earlier.
Senator Sasse Was basically laying out that short-term, it looks like the best situation is this, but long-term, you're not going to really win much more doing that, and you're going to undermine your own credibility because you're a criminal.
So, that's the, that's sort of like, at least here, the contention would be you maintained your silence because you were innocent, right?
You didn't confess because you were innocent.
So that's the, right?
None of these scenarios in the prisoner's dilemma actually take into account, what if one of the people's innocent?
What if you're innocent?
Maybe you go to jail anyway, but if you're innocent, then you can't actually confess.
So that's the values argument, is that we're actually outside the scope of this entire argument.
For values reasons, we can't confess.
We have to remain silent.
Regardless of what the other side does.
But, from a pure sort of political pragmatism point of view, you're going to end up in that bottom circle.
So how do we cure that?
How do we cure that?
In order to cure that, we actually need leadership of both parties.
It can't be on the voters.
It has to be on the leadership of both parties, because we can't, it's going to be too hard to get all voters all across the country to say we're not going to elect people who body slam people, because clearly the voters, there's a huge percentage of them who don't care.
They don't care if a politician does something bad.
So what you really need is a common deal between the leadership of both parties, I'm talking about Schumer and McConnell and Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi, that they are not going to seat people Well, I would say convicted of crimes.
People who are convicted of crimes will not be seated in the Congress.
Right?
We're just not going to seat them.
And if we think that the evidence is sufficient that they will be convicted, then we will not stand by them.
Now, the leadership of both parties are going to do this because they don't want to lose the seat because then they lose their majority.
But that's what actually needs to happen.
You actually need to get to the point where instead of this, We are here.
In order to get from here to there, we actually need to have a deal between both parties.
You need to show your commitment.
And you can't pre-commit, just you.
The other person also has to commit and you have to trust them.
So we have to build a shared trust that we're not going to seat people who are absolute pieces of crap.
Okay, so that's the basic reason why people vote for the second worst option.
And that's also the reason why we do need a deal as Americans.
And we need to build up the social capital that Senator Sasse is talking about, otherwise we end up in that bottom right square.
And that's the worst thing for the country, because now we're all criminals and we go to jail for a long time.
That's basically the logic there.
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