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Oct. 23, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

55:23

Why Our Country Is In Serious Trouble | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 401

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	Did you think that it was even possible to make Gold Star Widows a partisan issue?
	Or did you think that it was possible to make sexual harassment and possible sexual assault a partisan issue?
	Well, if you thought not, you're wrong.
	Welcome to America 2017.
	Everything sucks.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Happy Monday, gang.
	Yeah, that's right, welcome back from the weekend.
	And as we come back from the weekend, it turns out the President of the United States is now in an open run and gun battle with a gold star widow, which is the, this is maybe the second time that he's decided to do this particular thing.
	We had this last time at the Republican, at the Democratic National Convention, when the Khan family decided to go political.
	In this case, there's a woman named Myesha Johnson.
	Her husband, David Johnson, was killed in Niger, Niger?
	Niger?
	I don't know how to pronounce it.
	Everyone's pronouncing it differently.
	I'll call it Niger because I speak English.
	And in any case, the widow went on Good Morning America and ripped into President Trump and President Trump responded.
	So we will talk about all of those things.
	Plus, we will talk about Bill O'Reilly.
	A big story came out over the weekend suggesting that he had paid $32 million for a sexual harassment suit to settle it out of court.
	That is a lot of money to pay someone if the allegations are not credible.
	In any case, we will talk about all of those things.
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	Okay, so, I have a lot to talk about today, and a lot of it is based around the idea that partisanship has completely eaten our politics to the point where basic facts are no longer worthy of consideration.
	So, let's consider a scenario.
	Let's start with President Trump and this widow, Myeshia Johnson.
	Let's talk about the possibility that we have what I've called before a Rashomon situation.
	I'm not the person who coined that term.
	Okay, the Rashomon situation, it's a movie by Kurosawa, and in Rashomon basically there's a murder that takes place, and there are four people who see the murder, but they all have a different recollection, because they were in different places at the time, they all have a different recollection of how the murder went down, who's responsible, how the murder was caused.
	And so this has become known as sort of a Rashomon situation.
	In this particular case, there's high potential for a Rashomon situation where President Trump calls up a gold star widow.
	The gold star widow, it sounds like, was probably politically oriented against Trump to begin with.
	She and her family were very close with Frederica Wilson, this Democrat congressperson from Florida who's very much on the left and who's talked about impeaching Trump for months.
	And the Congresswoman was present when Trump decided to call the widow of Sergeant La David Johnson.
	Remember, La David Johnson was killed in Niger or Niger was killed in October 4th in a mission went wrong.
	His body went missing for some 48 hours and we still don't know how he died publicly.
	In any case, the Congresswoman said that Trump had been really kind of cold during the call, that Trump hadn't remembered the name of the soldier who was killed, that Trump had said something to the effect of he knew what he was signing up for, the implication being, you know, he knew he might die, so big deal.
	And then John Kelly came out last week and said, listen, I was present for the phone call, too.
	That's not what he said.
	What he said was he was a brave man knowing that this is what you sign up for, which is a completely different read.
	Now, it is completely possible because this happens all the time.
	It's happened in your own life.
	that a conversation happened and two people took away precisely the opposite views of what the conversation was.
	You've had this with spouses, you've had this with family members, where you say something you think is completely innocuous and it is taken in the most offensive possible way.
	That is just one of the ways that the language works, that's the vagary of language.
	And if you go into a conversation with the precondition, with the pre-notion that the person you're talking to is opposed to you, the person doesn't like you, then it's possible to read their words in the worst possible way.
	That's what I actually think happened here.
	I don't think President Trump called up a widow of a soldier and decided to be cold and calculating and cruel.
	I don't think he even intended to do that.
	I don't think that he, in ignorance, would do that.
	That doesn't sound like President Trump.
	I mean, I've been very, very critical of President Trump, but even that one is a bridge too far for me.
	That said, it's certainly possible for the widow to take that away from the conversation.
	So, this morning, on Good Morning America, the widow finally appears.
	At this point, we've only heard from the mother-in-law, or really the aunt, of the soldier who was killed.
	We've heard from Frederica Wilson, we've heard from John Kelly, but we hadn't heard from the principals in the conversation, right?
	Trump said that he hadn't said any of this, but now you have the widow coming out, and the widow says, here's exactly how it went down.
	Here she is with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
	The questions that I have that I need answered is I want to know why it took them 48 hours to find my husband.
	Why couldn't I see my husband?
	Every time I asked to see my husband, they wouldn't let me.
	There are also a lot of questions about the phone call you received.
	From President Trump.
	I know you were in a car to the airport.
	Tell us what happened next.
	What he said was... The President?
	Yes, the President said that he knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyways.
	And I was, it made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said it.
	He couldn't remember my husband's name.
	The only way he remembered my husband's name because he told me he had my husband's report in front of him.
	And that's when he actually said, La David.
	So her suggestion is that her husband, LeDavid Johnson, that Trump didn't actually know the name of the person that he was talking about.
	So Trump immediately jumps to Twitter and starts tweeting about it.
	Again, is this useful in any way?
	Is there any usefulness to this at all?
	Of course not.
	There's no usefulness to this.
	So Trump tweets out, I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sergeant LeDavid Johnson and spoke his name from beginning without hesitation.
	Why?
	Why?
	Let's say that Trump is completely right here.
	Is this a fight he wants to get into?
	A fight with the woman who just lost her husband?
	In tragic situation?
	While he was serving as an American hero?
	Is this a fight he really wants to do?
	Is this a political winning fight?
	Now, I know that there are a lot of people on the right who do the, he fights routine.
	He fights, he fights, he fights.
	Okay, punching yourself in the balls isn't fighting.
	Okay, this is not smart.
	It's just not smart.
	It's also not classy.
	Okay, it's not classy to fight with war widows.
	Just a general rule.
	Okay, I have a general rule.
	And this, herein lies the problem.
	Everything can be made partisan.
	Because, sure, it's true that Trump can feel that he is justified in fighting back if he feels like he is being fibbed about.
	Sure, Trump has every right to speak how he wants to speak.
	There's a First Amendment in the country.
	But it is also true that we had a certain basic agreement in the country, and that was that the President of the United States ought to have a fair bit of respect for war widows, even ones who disagree with him.
	So what Maisha Johnson is saying here is nothing even close to as bad as what Cindy Sheehan said about George W. Bush.
	If you don't remember back to 2005, there was a woman named Cindy Sheehan.
	Her son was killed in Iraq.
	She was a far-left Code Pink person.
	I think she was one of the founders of Code Pink, actually.
	And Cindy Sheehan was a vocal critic of the Iraq War.
	And she condemned Bush as a war criminal.
	She suggested it was his fault that her son had died.
	Bush actually met with her, and then she complained he hadn't met with her.
	But how did Bush respond?
	So I want to show you a video of President George W. Bush, because it turns out that Honest to goodness, if you want a country that holds together, you know we've talked a lot about character these past two years.
	And some people have said, what's the use of character?
	All we need is the policy.
	Does the character really matter?
	Does the character of the President of the United States really make a difference?
	And this has been a serious conversation in the country really since the days of Bill Clinton, who had no character.
	Right?
	Does character matter in the Oval Office?
	And the answer is yes.
	The reason character matters in the Oval Office is for the same reason that character matters in your day-to-day life.
	The people that make you feel like you can lead a cohesive life.
	The people who make you feel like you live in a community.
	What creates social capital is character.
	Social capital, as Robert Putnam, the political scientist from Harvard, has said, social capital is the idea that as a society, we all have a certain given amount of trust in one another that allows us to act as though the other person is not going to screw us all the time.
	So, the higher your social capital, actually, the less you need contracts, right?
	The more lawyers you need, that's a good indication that you don't have a lot of social capital.
	Because why do I sign a contract with somebody?
	I sign a contract with somebody and I'm very meticulous about that contract because I'm afraid they're going to break it.
	Do I have a contract with my children?
	I have a marital contract with my wife, but it's a pretty short, sweet document.
	Right?
	Everyone has that in the Jewish community.
	It's called ketubah.
	But the idea is that in most of your major relationships in life, you don't have a contract.
	Why?
	Because your social capital is really high.
	Right?
	You have trust in that person.
	It's just a longer way of saying trust.
	And if we don't trust each other to have a generalized sense of what's appropriate and what's not, a generalized sense for what is sacred and what's not, then you're gonna end up in these running gun battles over stupidity every single day, and you're gonna be attributing to the other person bad motives all the time.
	So Cindy Sheehan, as I said, was really quite horrible to President Bush.
	I mean, she, again, accused him of being a war criminal, suggested that he had gotten America into the war in Iraq based on explicit lies, that he lied because he wanted to go to war in Iraq, that he was solely responsible for the death of her son.
	Here's how George W. Bush responded to Cindy Sheehan making all of these allegations in Crawford, Texas.
	You're referring to Mrs. Sheehan here, I think.
	I'm referring to any grieving mother or father, no matter what their political views may be.
	Part of my duty as the president is to meet with those who've lost a loved one.
	And so, you know, listen, I sympathize with Mrs. Sheehan.
	She feels strongly.
	About her position.
	And she has every right in the world to say what she believes.
	This is America.
	She has a right to her position.
	And I've thought long and hard about her position.
	I've heard her position from others, which is, get out of Iraq now.
	And it would be a mistake for the security of this country and the ability to lay the foundations for peace in the long run if we were to do so.
	Okay, and this is who George W. Bush was.
	This is why I have a lot of respect for Bush the man.
	As I said, I disagreed with him on a lot of policy, but this is a classy individual who is in the White House.
	I mean, there's a story that Dana Perino told.
	I don't remember if I actually told it.
	I think I referred to it the other day.
	But here's the actual story that Dana Perino told about George W. Bush visiting a grieving mother.
	And it's pretty amazing.
	So here it is.
	He visited a patient at Walter Reed Medical Facility.
	And right there, there was one situation in which one mom and dad of a dying soldier from the Caribbean were devastated.
	The mom beside herself with grief.
	This is from Dana Perino circa 2016.
	It was in her book.
	She yelled at the president, Wanting to know why it was her child and not his who lay in that hospital bed.
	Her husband tried to calm her, and I noticed the president wasn't in a hurry to leave.
	He tried to offer him comfort, but just stood there and took it, like he expected and needed to hear the anguish to try to soak up some of her suffering if he could.
	Later, as we rode back on Marine One to the White House, no one spoke.
	But as the helicopter took off, the president looked at me and said, that mama sure was mad at me.
	Then he turned to look out the window of the helicopter, and I don't blame her a bit.
	A tear slipped out of the side of his eye and down his face.
	He didn't wipe it away, and we flew back to the White House.
	That's what creates trust in a country.
	I may disagree with Bush on a particular war.
	I may disagree with Obama on a particular war.
	But if I don't believe that Obama believes that people who clearly have good motivations, you know, the families of people who have died in Iraq, or died in Afghanistan, or died in Niger, that those people have bad motivations, that those people have to be attacked, that those people... It doesn't matter what they say politically.
	At least when it comes to their child, or their family member, their husband, their wife.
	Those people have the right motivations.
	We cannot have a country with social capital where we trust each other if we're not willing to take the hit once in a while.
	If we're not willing to go out there and say, as Trump should have just said.
	Here's what Trump should have said.
	He said, listen.
	As the person on the other end of the conversation, I did not think that that was what I was saying.
	If that's how it was taken, then I fully apologize.
	But I don't believe that's what I said.
	I would never try to be callous.
	I would never in a million years try to be callous to anyone whose husband had served the country with such honor and distinction as Sergeant Johnson did.
	I would never do that.
	If it was read that way, then I fully apologize and I'm more than happy to meet with the widow and talk with her and try and clear the air because I think that it's important that we all be on the same page here.
	We all know what a hero her husband was.
	Instead of doing that, he's busy tweeting about how this isn't how it happened.
	How is that helpful?
	How's that helpful?
	And again, you can say that Trump is just telling the truth, but it's not helpful to him.
	If you want him to succeed as president, he must have social capital with the American public.
	If you want him to succeed, if you want him to be re-elected, understand not everything Trump does, not every fight he picks, is a winning fight.
	If he would pick fewer of these fights, he would be better off.
	You know, I think that there's this certain sense that's set in on the right, and it's set in on the left too, and it's very weird, okay?
	There's this sense that's set in on the right that no matter what Trump does, he is utterly untouchable, because after all, he was hit with everything, including the kitchen sink in the 2016 election cycle, and he won anyway.
	And so therefore, he can do and say whatever he wants, and he's never gonna lose his base, and he's not gonna lose another election, because after all, he beat Hillary Clinton, so why would he lose another election?
	This neglects two really important facts.
	One, George W. Bush in 2000 lost the popular vote by 500,000.
	He barely won the election.
	By 2004, when he beat John Kerry by about a million and a half, two million votes, he had picked up 10 million votes.
	Between 2000 and 2004, he picked up 10 million votes.
	And he picked up a lot of those votes because of 9-11 and the war in Iraq.
	He picked up 10 million and he only won by two.
	So, where is President Trump going to come up with the 13 million votes he's going to need to win?
	Remember, he lost by almost 3 million popular votes in this election cycle.
	So, that's problem number one for this perspective.
	Problem number two is he's not going to be running against Hillary Clinton again.
	Now, maybe the Democrats are stupid enough.
	This is the other side of the coin.
	Maybe the Democrats are stupid enough to run somebody who is as unpopular as Hillary Clinton.
	Maybe they decide they need to run Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris.
	Maybe they decide to be that dumb.
	Maybe they decide that they want to recreate Obama's intersectional coalition.
	And they fail again.
	But Republicans shouldn't be counting on that.
	Democrats seem to be counting on the fact that Trump has low approval ratings to mean that Trump is going to lose in 2020.
	That's idiotic.
	Trump had the same approval ratings now that he had before, and he won.
	Approval ratings don't mean a thing because he's running against someone.
	It's a binary election, as we learned.
	We were told a thousand times it was binary.
	So that means the Democrats are going to have to come up with somebody that can't just rail on Trump all day and hope to win.
	By the same terms, Trump can't hope to do whatever he wants to do and increase his approval rating and win re-election just by default, because that's not how this is going to work.
	Now, I want to talk a little bit more about things becoming partisan that absolutely should not be partisan in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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	Okay, so With all of this said, I want to talk about the self-assurance of President Trump and the assurance of the Democrats that all they have to do is attack Trump and then they can win.
	And then I want to talk a little bit about sexual harassment and the polarization regarding that.
	Okay, so here is the what I think is foolish self-assurance of President Trump that he can basically do whatever he wants and get away with it because so far he's been able to do whatever he wants and get away with it.
	Here's President Trump talking about his use of Twitter.
	I have friends that say, oh, don't use social media.
	See, I don't call it tweets.
	Tweeting is like a typewriter.
	When I put it out, you put it immediately on your show.
	I mean, the other day I put something out, two seconds later I'm watching your show.
	It's up.
	You're right.
	We're watching your Twitter feed.
	And, you know, they're well-crafted.
	I was always a good student.
	I'm like a person that does well with that kind of thing.
	And I doubt I'd be here if it weren't for social media, to be honest.
	I'm not going to mock the statement that he's a great student.
	He was a good student.
	He was always someone who did well with that sort of thing.
	Like, he's a smart person.
	I'm not going to spend too much time on that or the fact that he had three different spellings of the word council before he got it right.
	But beyond that, you know, the self-assurance that his Twitter is what sets the agenda.
	Listen, it's true.
	His Twitter does set the agenda, which is why he should be careful about how he uses it.
	Again, this is not coming from a place where I want to see Trump fail.
	You think I want him to stop tweeting so that he'll fail?
	I want him to stop tweeting so that he'll succeed as president.
	I want him to stop tweeting so he's not getting in useless fights.
	Okay, so this is the problem on the right.
	The problem on the right is a bunch of people on the right think Trump can do whatever he wants, and he'll get away with it because, after all, he's been able to so far.
	And then there's the problem on the left.
	The left has two choices in 2020.
	Again, I'm not in the business of giving advice to the left.
	The left has two choices in 2020.
	They can either recognize that they lost in 2016 and have been losing for the past several years, several election cycles, because they have remade their base, or they can continue to try and go back to the well.
	So there is the Clinton base from 1992-1996, and then there is the base And then there's the base from Barack Obama in 2012.
	Completely different coalition.
	Very, very different coalition.
	Now, first of all, if Democrats think that Trump is weak going into 2020, they're neglecting the fact that one president since 1968 has not won re-election.
	Right, without a significant third-party candidacy.
	George H.W.
	Bush only loses because Perot's there.
	But every other president has won two terms in office except for Jimmy Carter because Jimmy Carter was so freaking awful.
	And even Carter had to run against one of the great candidates in American history, Ronald Reagan, in order for him to lose in what was a close election up to the very end.
	Okay, so for Democrats to suggest that Trump is weak here is foolish on their part.
	They have two choices.
	One, they can try to remake the Bill Clinton coalition.
	They can go after those blue-collar voters, nominate somebody like Joe Biden, somebody like Bernie Sanders, go after the voters in Michigan that Hillary Clinton lost and couldn't drive out.
	They will have to acknowledge that Hillary was a garbage candidate.
	They'll have to acknowledge that Hillary was a terrible, terrible candidate and the real reason that Trump is president is not because Trump is good at this, it's because Hillary was quite awful at this.
	A lot of Democrats don't want to accept this.
	Okay, the proof is in the statistics.
	Hillary Clinton, let's put it this way, Donald Trump won fewer votes in Wisconsin in 2016 than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
	Romney lost the state in a walk.
	Trump won the state.
	No one showed up to vote for Hillary Clinton.
	Donald Trump won fewer votes in Michigan than George W. Bush did in 2004.
	Bush lost the state of Michigan.
	Trump won it in a walk.
	No one voted for Hillary Clinton.
	She stunk.
	They thought that they could just remake the Obama coalition, they could just go back to the well with this old white lady, and it didn't work that way.
	They figured, okay, if we lose a few black voters, a few Hispanic voters, no big deal, we can just drive up the women's vote.
	Didn't happen that way.
	If they decide to go back to the well with Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren because they're going to ignore the white working class again, they're going to ignore males or white women who are married, if they do that, they're going to lose again.
	So, they think that if they just attack Trump enough, then by default, they will win the election.
	I don't think that that's true in any sense, and that's why they're making a very foolish mistake.
	In the same way that Trump is making a foolish mistake by attacking Myeshia Johnson, the gold star widow, the media are making a very foolish mistake by attacking General John Kelly, a gold star father.
	So General Kelly, as we discussed last week, went out there, ripped Frederica Wilson, ripped the media.
	For turning this whole Gold Star family phone call thing into a fiasco.
	Again, I said everyone here deserves blame except for I think Myeshia Johnson and John Kelly.
	I think both of them are Gold Star family members and they have an added bit of credibility here.
	But the media have decided to jump on General Kelly anyway because Kelly is associated with Trump.
	So Thomas Friedman.
	Who has no moral authority.
	I mean, Thomas Friedman, the columnist from the New York Times, who's basically made a career out of flying around to various terrible countries, being put up in a hotel for a night, and then talking in glowing terms about how wonderful the country is.
	Thomas Friedman says John Kelly lost moral authority last week.
	How seriously should the public take this?
	Well, I think what's going on, Chuck, is a real crisis of authority.
	Something I talked about on the show once before, I quoted my friend Dov Seidman, who said, you know, there's a big difference between formal authority and moral authority.
	So we have a president who has formal authority, but I would argue he has lost all of his moral authority.
	That is why last week he had to bring out General Kelly, a four-star Marine general, because he still had Formal authority and moral authority.
	Unfortunately, General Kelly, by saying things that were provably false about that Congresswoman, really lost, I think, a lot of his moral authority.
	And now, we have a situation where the White House spokeswoman had to invoke his formal authority, that he was a four-star Marine General, to basically shut up the press.
	And I think that's the tragedy here.
	Like, everyone has lost their moral authority, and I think that's a real crisis.
	First of all, I don't think General Kelly lost his moral authority.
	What they're talking about is General Kelly made an allegation during that press conference that Frederica Wilson had dedicated a building in 2013, I believe, 2012, in which, and at that dedication of an FBI building, he said she bragged about achieving funding for the building.
	Now if you go back and you watch the speech, which I have, and I wrote a full transcript of it, she does spend about four minutes bragging, but she's not bragging about the building funding, she's bragging about the naming of the building, and she says that she was chiefly responsible for the naming of this building after these fallen FBI agents.
	Kelly may have gotten the content wrong with regard to what she was bragging about, but he was right that she spent several minutes bragging about what a wonderful job she had done.
	In any case, the idea that John Kelly lost his moral authority, let's put it this way.
	Is there anyone on the left who would be making this contention if a Gold Star family on the left had said the same thing?
	We were told that Cindy Sheehan had absolute moral authority.
	We were told that the Jersey Girls, who were the widows of people killed on 9-11, had absolute moral authority.
	I think that's a phrase used by Maureen Dowd.
	These people had absolute moral authority.
	It didn't matter if what they were saying wasn't true.
	They had absolute moral authority.
	The idea that John Kelly lost his moral authority because he attacked Frederica Wilson is just ridiculous.
	And you want to see the partisanship in the media, let me show you Kaiser Khan.
	So Kaiser Khan, as you recall, was the father of a Muslim soldier who was slain in Iraq.
	I think it was Iraq, rather than Afghanistan.
	And in any case, he was at the 2016 convention and he ripped on President Trump.
	Trump got into it with Kaiser Kahn's wife because he said Kaiser Kahn's wife was just standing there and he has no idea why.
	The implication being, of course, that Muslim women are silent and don't say anything.
	And it was a big hubbub, if you don't recall.
	So Kaiser Kahn now is back, right?
	He's on Face the Nation.
	And now he's going to talk about why he has moral authority to speak about politics, but Gold Star father John Kelly does not.
	I was shocked.
	I was shocked to see Citizen Kelly standing next to the President when he, when President could not have the proper word to condemn the attack on the blessed city of Charlottesville, Virginia by neo-Nazis.
	He stood, you could look at his face and his gesture in disgust, but he stood in support of That moment when Donald Trump could not condemn the attack that took place.
	Then again, instead of advising the president that restraint and dignity is the call of the moment, former General Kelly indulged in defending behavior of the president and made the situation even worse.
	So only he is allowed to speak politically.
	Only he's allowed to go up there to Democratic National Convention and talk about politics.
	So, again, everything becomes partisan.
	This wasn't partisan.
	Right?
	This wasn't partisan.
	Just like the NFL flag controversy was not partisan.
	There was basic bipartisan agreement that kneeling for the anthem was dumb.
	Now it's a partisan issue.
	There's basic bipartisan agreement that Gold Star families deserve our sympathy and our respect, even if we disagree with them politically.
	That was destroyed last year, and now it's been destroyed even more.
	All of these things, where we had consensus, are now gone.
	Frederica Wilson is openly attacking John Kelly, suggesting that Kelly was a puppet of the president.
	Again, is there anything from her lips about the respect for Gold Star families that she supposedly signifies?
	First of all, I have to say, I don't know how many hats this woman owns, but it is astonishing.
	I mean, this is a real repertoire of hats.
	As a hat aficionado, I enjoy a good hat.
	I have to say, respect to Frederica Wilson on the hats.
	Not a lot of respect for what she has done over the past week.
	You know, John Kelly is almost, I guess you could say he was a puppet of the President, and what he was trying to do was divert the attention away from the President onto me, and he basically just lied on me.
	And I don't like, I don't appreciate people lying on me.
	And that's what he did.
	I've been in politics a long time and most things don't bother me.
	You know, it just rolls off my back.
	I've been lied on before, but the character assassination that he went through to call me out of my name and empty barrel and all the work that I've done in this community.
	Not only does he owe me an apology, but he owes an apology to the American people because when he lied on me, He lied to them.
	Okay, so first of all, you should never lie on people because that's sexual assault.
	But beyond that, you know, when she says that, you know, Kelly is the puppet of the president, again, it's funny because Trump attacking Gold Star family is the end of the world.
	Frederica Wilson attacking Gold Star father.
	That's not the, again, now she can disagree with Kelly.
	But the way she should do it is she should say this.
	She should say, listen, I know that General Kelly has great experience with Gold Star families.
	I respect his experience with Gold Star families.
	With respect, the wife of a soldier says that she was offended by the President of the United States.
	I don't see why General Kelly would defend the President under those circumstances or give facts that are provably untrue about me.
	That does not undermine his moral authority.
	But it does say that just because you have moral authority doesn't mean what you're saying is correct on this score.
	Moral authority on Gold Star Families does not necessarily translate over into other areas.
	This is the way we could have a civil, decent conversation that builds unity in the public, but we're not going to do any of those things.
	So before I get to sexual harassment and sexual assault, again, becoming a partisan issue, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at RealtyShares.com.
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	Okay, so, again, I think that everyone is getting partisan because they think that if they attack the personalities on the other side, they'll win.
	Trump thinks that if he attacks the personalities on the other side, that this will somehow boost him.
	The left thinks if they attack Trump, then that will boost Trump.
	And then that will boost them.
	All of this is a problem.
	All of it destroys the social fabric.
	Now, listen.
	I like aggressive politicking.
	I think aggressive politicking is good.
	But I like aggressive politicking on the issues.
	I don't like aggressive politicking on the implication that your character is flawed because we disagree or because we interpreted the same event two different ways.
	And I think that this has gone sideways in a pretty significant way.
	Another way in which this has gone sideways, there are just certain aspects of American life that I feel like good people all agree on things.
	I've said this in my speeches.
	People say there's a rape culture, and I say, okay, who's pro-rape?
	Who's pro-rape?
	Like, name me the person who's pro-rape.
	I say this in my college speeches all the time.
	You know, who's pro-murder?
	Who is pro-racism?
	Like, name the people who are pro-racism, who think racism is a great thing, aside from, you know, some of the members of the alt-right.
	Or some of the members of the intersectional left.
	Like, name the people who think racism is an awesome thing.
	And the answer is, there are not a lot of people who believe those things, but there's a secondary problem that we do have to talk about, and that is the feeling that Even if you agree rape is a terrible thing, or even if you agree that sexual harassment and sexual assault are a bad thing, that when it's your own side doing it, you're willing to look the other way for the quote-unquote greater good.
	This is a common phenomenon.
	It's something that's fascinating to me.
	I think that this is actually how evil movements get started.
	I think that Nazi Germany got started not because the Nazis were clear and concise about what they were about to do to the Jews, but because there were a lot of people who felt like, well it's a lot of fringe rhetoric, that's a lot of garbage they're saying, but At least they're better than the communists.
	At least they're better than is a recipe for you approving bad things.
	At least they're better than is you winking and nodding at bad behavior in order to justify bad behavior on your own side.
	Because what it really should be is not at least we're better than, it should be Yes, this is garbage on our side, and it's bad on the other side, too.
	It's terrible on our side, and it's terrible on the other side.
	So, on the left, there's been this rush to condemn Donald Trump.
	And then, as soon as it was Harvey Weinstein, then everybody hid in the closet.
	And now there's an avoidance of naming more names.
	We know.
	We know.
	I mean, we've heard the stories from women.
	Women are out there saying, I was sexually assaulted.
	I was sexually harassed.
	They will not name the names.
	And I'm talking about major actresses who could afford to make this stand.
	They're not doing it.
	Why aren't they doing it?
	Well, in some cases, there are power relationships at stake, but in some cases, there's a feeling by some people on the left like, well, I'll condemn it when it's the Catholic Church, but when it's Hollywood, really?
	Like, do I have to go there?
	Maybe if I just quiet down.
	And on the right, there was this feeling about President Trump.
	We were loud and proud about how much we thought that Bill Clinton had sexually exploited women, but when Trump bragged about it on tape, then we were like, ah, big deal.
	Ah, big deal.
	A lot of people on the right felt that way.
	Or at least they felt like, it's bad, but is it that bad?
	Now, I'm not talking about voting for Trump.
	You can still vote for Trump, but you should at least have condemned that.
	You should have at least said, this is disgusting behavior, what he's talking about here.
	Like, this is not difficult.
	Again, I want to distinguish between a couple of different types of response to bad behavior that I'm talking about.
	One is situations in which you are at the lower end of the power imbalance.
	So I'm not talking about victims who are still trying to make a career in Hollywood and know that no one is going to stand up with them and that their career will be ruined for speaking out.
	I understand the moral conundrum that happens.
	I'm sure that there are plenty of women who are going on shows like Bill O'Reilly's who may have felt not good about how they were treated, But also understood that if they spoke out about it, they would never be appearing on Bill O'Reilly's show again, right?
	I'm sure there are women who felt that way.
	Just as I'm sure that there are women in Hollywood who feel like they've been sexually assaulted or harassed by producers and directors.
	We know them.
	They're talking about it.
	And have said, well, I'm not going to give up my career.
	Do I really want to give them the tool to destroy my career by going out and saying something that isn't going to be tried in a court and the guy will just continue to work?
	You know, is that a fight I can win?
	So there are people who say, is that a fight I can win?
	And the answer sometimes is no.
	I don't really feel a lot of blame for those people.
	That's group number one.
	Group number two are people who say, yes, what happened here is terrible.
	That doesn't make everyone in Hollywood terrible.
	Or, you know, President Trump talked about doing terrible things.
	Or Bill Clinton talked about doing terrible things.
	I'm still going to vote for him because he's better than the alternative.
	But that was a terrible thing.
	Not talking about that group of people either.
	I'm talking about the people who say, was it really that bad?
	Was it really that bad?
	There was a story that broke over the weekend, and the story was that Bill O'Reilly had allegedly signed a $32 million settlement of sexual harassment against a woman named Liz Wheel, I think, who was a lawyer who used to appear on Fox News a fair bit.
	$32 million is an enormous amount of money.
	For anyone.
	You know, to sign a settlement for $32 million, it does not tend to suggest that everything was evidence-less or easily disprovable, at the very least.
	Now, Bill O'Reilly's fighting back against this, as you would imagine, but obviously there's a serious problem inside Fox News.
	Roger Ailes had a problem, clearly.
	O'Reilly, clearly, had a problem.
	There were people who were beyond that, who apparently had problems, or at least they were looking the other way because these were powerful people.
	Powerful people are the ones who need to stand up.
	Powerful people are the ones who need to stand up and say something.
	So today, Megyn Kelly came out, and again, I want to show you that the partisanship here is so incredible, with regard to Megyn Kelly in particular.
	And I'll say, I'm friendly with Megyn.
	But here's what Megyn had to say about Bill O'Reilly.
	Bill had basically come out and said that all of this is trumped up by the left.
	Here's Megyn Kelly suggesting precisely the opposite today.
	However, O'Reilly's suggestion that no one ever complained about his behavior is false.
	I know because I complained.
	I wrote an email to the co-presidents of Fox News, Bill Shine and Jack Abernathy.
	An email I have never made public but am sharing now because I think it speaks volumes about powerful men and the roadblocks one can face in taking them on.
	I wrote, in part, perhaps he didn't realize the kind of message his criticism sends to young women across this country about how men continue to view the issue of speaking out about sexual harassment.
	Perhaps he didn't realize that his exact attitude of shaming women into shutting the hell up about harassment on grounds that it will disgrace the company is in part how Fox News got into the decade-long Ailes mess to begin with.
	Perhaps it's his own history of harassment of women, which has, as you both know, resulted in payouts to more than one woman, including recently, that blinded him to the folly of saying anything other than, I am just so sorry for the women of this company, who never should have had to go through that.
	So, Megan said that the response to this was the Fox brass saying they would take care of it and then allowing O'Reilly to go on that night and basically defend his commentary.
	Roger Ailes was still at the company at that point.
	Now, were there people inside Fox who knew what Roger Ailes was doing?
	Let's forget O'Reilly for a second.
	Who knew what Roger Ailes was doing?
	I'm sure there are people who knew exactly what Roger Ailes was doing.
	I'm sure that there are people who knew what the conditions were like, you know, around Roger Ailes.
	But, if they couldn't take down Roger Ailes, then you have a power imbalance situation.
	But how about all the women who didn't say anything?
	How about all the people who were around Ailes, who knew stuff was going on, who didn't say anything?
	You know, this to me is the same as Harvey Weinstein's driver who was saying that there were women getting into his car, and, you know, he was afraid to lose his job, but he could have testified about it.
	You know, this is...
	Power is something that corrupts, and loyalty to institutions beyond loyalty to ideals and decency is a serious problem.
	And it's something I see in politics across the board right now.
	It means the end of the country.
	You know, the title of this episode is, Are We Looking at the End of the Country?
	It means the end of the country when we don't have a common vision that includes a common decency, that includes a common basic idea that bad behavior is bad behavior, whether it's somebody I like or somebody I don't like who's performing that bad behavior.
	What I'm seeing too much of is bad behavior, but it's on my side, so eh.
	We talked about this a lot last year during the election cycle.
	And it's happened on both sides.
	And just because the other side does it doesn't mean it's okay for you to do it.
	I see this all the time.
	You people on the right.
	My principles.
	My principles.
	First of all, I hate this garbage, this my stuff online.
	M-U-H.
	My, as though you're a baby for saying my principles.
	I thought that the founding fathers of this country were deeply imbued with a sense of principle.
	I thought that being a religious person meant being principled.
	I'm not sure when principles became an insult, as opposed to something that we're supposed to stand up for, defend, and protect.
	I'm not sure when principles went by the wayside because, hey, we're in a fight and it's a blood match.
	If you feel like you're in such a blood match with the other members of America, that principles go by the wayside, that you're in such an actual war, that principles are now by the wayside, or that you can't at least express publicly, I'm putting aside my principle now to make a tactical decision to club everyone back in line on principle.
	If you can't even do that, you're just discarding them because, hey, principles, what do they matter in war?
	All's fair.
	Then we don't live in a country where we're brothers anymore or sisters anymore.
	We don't live in a country where there's any social capital or trust anymore.
	If you feel like your principles are now secondary to the fight, then we really are at war or you're misconstruing the situation.
	One of those two things.
	As we continue here on the Ben Shapiro Show, I want to talk about some Republican infighting that has been taking place.
	I also want to talk about some Democratic infighting that's been taking place and why all of this, why this partisanship, this decision that principles no longer matter has some real ramifications for how the government is run.
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	Plus, the greatest of all beverage vessels, the leftist tears hot or cold vessel.
	Now, there are some who have said that the fact it says leftist tears hot or cold means that I'm just being partisan.
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	This sort of all this matters is the fight mentality that I think is really corrupting the country.
	I talked about it a little bit in reference to George W. Bush's speech last week.
	I thought Bush's speech was a quite normal, good, decent defense of constitutional conservatism.
	And I think that people felt insulted because they are so entranced with this partisan bickering.
	Now, how does it matter beyond the social capital?
	How does it matter beyond the fact we don't trust one another?
	How does it matter that we don't have a common set of facts?
	So one of the things that I think has contributed to the fact that we don't have a common set of facts are the media, because the media have conflated their own opinions with their perception of the facts.
	I'm going to show you a new CNN ad.
	There's an amazing ad from CNN that I want to show you that just came out on Twitter today.
	This is an apple.
	want to show you how, you know, even in an attempt to quote unquote build social capital, the media are being dishonest.
	So here's CNN saying facts are fact, right?
	They're basically ripping off our slogan here at the Ben Shapiro show.
	They're ripping off my personal catchphrase.
	I have like a sitcom catchphrase.
	Facts don't care about your feelings.
	But here is CNN basically ripping that off in this ad.
	So it's a picture of an apple.
	This is an apple.
	Some people might try to tell you that it's a banana.
	They might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again.
	They might put BANANA in all caps.
	You might even start to believe that this is a banana.
	But it's not.
	This is an apple.
	And then it says, facts first, CNN.
	Okay, so I have a pretty obvious problem with this.
	You know, when you're saying, not because I don't think facts first, I do think facts first.
	My problem is when you conflate your opinion with the facts, you got a problem.
	What I've been trying to do, and I've really been making an effort, is present the facts as I see them, and then present my opinion.
	And you can see, okay, if my opinion is right or wrong, I'll give you my sourcing.
	Everyone who emails me asking for sources, I always give them sources so that they know where I'm getting my facts.
	Here's the problem with CNN.
	CNN says an apple is an apple.
	But then, CNN, on headline news, if I say, a man is a man and a woman is a woman, I will be physically assaulted on CNN headline news.
	Like, when I say a banana, it turns out it's still a banana, then presumably, it's a problem.
	Right, CNN has been doing this sort of stuff for a while.
	I mean, CNN runs this ad, and they legitimately have on, you know, on their website right now, there is a headline that reads this, okay?
	This is the headline on, there is a story from 2017, June 2017, about a trans man expecting first child.
	Okay, trans man, you should read woman.
	It's a woman who's been taking hormone treatment that gives this woman a beard, basically, and had breast surgery to reduce the breasts.
	And it says, my body is awesome.
	Trans man expecting first child.
	And then they say an apple is an apple?
	That is a woman.
	I mean, for purposes of this, the only reason, it turns out that woman gives birth to child is not a story, so CNN pursues its narrative by skewing the facts.
	If you're going to claim that there's a hard divide between objective fact and opinion, if you're going to claim that certain things are outright false and certain things are outright true, you cannot conflate opinion and fact.
	You cannot say that your opinion is a fact.
	There's another thing that's contributing to the rise in partisanship.
	We can't even agree on the fact.
	So we can't agree on principles, and we can't agree on facts anymore.
	And if we do agree on principles, then we have to go partisan over it.
	How does this have an impact beyond just the loss of social capital?
	It has a pretty significant impact in terms of how the government is run.
	So while we're all busy slapping each other silly over issues where we largely agree, like rape is bad, sexual assault is bad, sexual harassment is bad, Because we're too eager to defend politicians on our side?
	Because, you know, it's easy for us to look at Penn State and say, why did all those people look the other way?
	How dare they look the other way at Penn State?
	But then we look the other way?
	When it's our institution that's under fire?
	Or we say to the Catholic Church, how did you guys look the other way on child abuse?
	But then if it's inside our institutions, we look the other way?
	This is true in a lot of religious communities too.
	Okay, then we have to recognize that that destroys the society, but it also means that we are going to ignore actual things happening on the ground.
	So, to take an example, what happened in Niger, I still can't pronounce this properly, I'm going to look it up after the show.
	What happened in Niger, the killing of four American soldiers in Niger, there were two separate senators who came out and announced they had no idea that we even had troops in Niger.
	Chuck Schumer, who is the Senate Minority Leader, and Lindsey Graham, who is on the Foreign Policy Subcommittee.
	Lindsey Graham, both of them said, I didn't even know the United States has troops in Niger.
	Troops have been in Niger since 2013.
	Barack Obama wrote a letter to the Congress saying, I'm putting troops in Niger in 2013.
	Stephen Miller has a great piece on this over at FoxNews.com.
	It says U.S.
	Special Forces arrived in Niger in January 2013 on the orders of President Obama.
	They were then followed by about 100 military personnel and advisors with the intention of conducting unmanned reconnaissance missions over Mali in conjunction with French military forces.
	Reuters reported in February 2013 that France intervened in Mali, so we've had troops there for years.
	But the Congress didn't even know, because they're not doing their jobs.
	They're too busy engaging in the partisan hackery.
	And the partisan hackery goes something like this.
	If Obama approved the troops in Niger, the left goes yay.
	And if Trump approved the troops in Niger, then the right goes yay.
	But at no point does anyone say, should there be troops in Niger, and maybe Congress should have voted on this thing, rather than just using the broad authorization for use of military force from 2001 in order to give the go-ahead to these sorts of things.
	All of this has some pretty significant consequences for our society, for how our government works, it's a problem.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things I like.
	I was encouraged by my adoptive son and producer, Mathis Glover, to go see Blade Runner 2049 over the weekend.
	Mathis and I have a good crossover in terms of the movies that we like generally, and we have some disagreements about Ridley Scott, but Mathis said this morning that the reason this movie is good is because it's not Ridley Scott.
	He is absolutely correct.
	Ridley Scott is wildly overrated.
	In any case, Blade Runner 2049 is a significantly, significantly better film than the original Blade Runner.
	A lot better.
	Like, Blade Runner, the original, is basically Valium.
	It's visual Valium.
	So, it's got a cool look to it, although it looks really dated now.
	If you watch it, it's very hard to watch with a straight face.
	I know people are in love with the original Blade Runner.
	I know that a lot of people are just, they think it's just the most glorious film.
	They've watched the director's cut, and the second director's cut, and the third director's cut, and the grips cut.
	They've watched all of these things, but...
	I do not like the original Blade Runner.
	I've watched it twice.
	Each time I think, why do I not like this movie?
	The new Blade Runner, which is not directed by Ridley Scott, is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who is a very talented director who made Arrival, which I also recommended on the show.
	He made Blade Runner 2049.
	Here's some of the preview.
	It is a very, you know, scientific materialist view of the universe, basically, that what makes a human being is your sense of your own consciousness.
	There's no such thing as a soul.
	There's no such thing as unique human beings that androids can be people too, basically.
	You know, all of this is supposedly based on the Philip K. Dick story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
	One of the things about Philip K. Dick, like Stephen King, a lot of his A lot of his stories are used as source material for movies that have nothing to do with the actual material.
	The original Blade Runner has almost nothing to do with that short story.
	But in any case, the look of this movie is better than the original.
	The plot of the movie is better than the original.
	The acting in the movie is better than the original.
	It is very long.
	It is not a setting that you want to spend two hours and 45 minutes in, because it's very dark.
	It's film noir-ish.
	That was the mode of the original film.
	But here's the preview.
	Every civilization was built off the back of a disposable workforce.
	All right.
	But I can only make so many.
	Happy birthday.
	There is an order to things.
	That's what we do here.
	We keep order.
	The world is built on a wall that separates kind.
	Tell either side there's no wall, you bought a war.
	Okay, so the entire premise of the film is basically, are these androids people, or are these androids just androids?
	The film is incredibly cool-looking.
	It's a really great-looking film.
	And there's a bunch of kind of sub-areas of the film that are really interesting.
	Like Ryan Gosling's character, who's an android in the film, or at least that's what you think at the very beginning.
	I'm not going to give it away.
	But his character basically is in love with his iPhone, essentially.
	There's a female character who is created by a corporation to basically be what a man wants to be.
	And over time, It basically becomes its own personality.
	It gains its own personality and almost gains sentience.
	If you want to see a better version of that subplot, go see the movie Her, which is a really interesting film with Joaquin Phoenix that's quite fascinating about this exact storyline.
	But the film is really cool to look at.
	Harrison Ford turns in his only good performance in the last 15 years.
	I mean, Harrison Ford in this movie is what Harrison Ford should have been in Force Awakens if Force Awakens had been a good film, which it is not.
	There are a couple things that I think are cool about this film that people haven't noticed that are really neat.
	So people are saying, well, why is it called Blade Runner 2049?
	Obviously, the world isn't going to look like 2049 by this point.
	It is obviously an alternative history.
	You can see that right in the film.
	Even in the preview, there's a graphic of a ballerina dancing, and it says, Soviet Happy CCCP.
	So meaning that the Soviet Union is still around in this version of reality in Blade Runner 2049.
	A critique that I saw from Kevin Williamson of National Review that I like a lot is he said that there's this weird notion on the left that corporations are gonna take over the world and run everything and it's gonna be really oppressive and terrible.
	Name a corporation that's done that.
	Corporations have made the world significantly better.
	You're complaining about Google.
	Google is what allows you to do all the cool things you're doing right now.
	All of the corporations, we may not like how they run, and that's why we actually expect them to run more like public utilities when it comes to providing services to everyone.
	Those, I think, are real fears about corporations, but the idea that the corporations are going to take over and buy human beings and use them as chattel and all this kind of stuff, I don't see a lot of evidence of that.
	Corporations, people are suspicious of them.
	It's governments that do these sorts of things, not corporations, unless those corporations are basically being run by governments.
	Most of the evil corporations of the past have been government-run or government-owned.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	Okay, so we begin with the UK government has now announced that it wants the United Nations to stop using the term pregnant women in a UN treaty.
	Why?
	Because it excludes trans people.
	Okay, this is idiotic.
	Women are the only ones who can be pregnant.
	You know what defines a woman?
	The lack of a Y chromosome.
	End of story.
	We are done.
	That is all.
	Okay, that's all.
	We're done.
	When people talk about gender being separate from sex, what they're suggesting is that sex doesn't necessarily determine your attributes in terms of feminine or masculine.
	But that just means feminine or masculine.
	The attempt to say that a feminine man is actually a woman or a masculine woman is actually a man is idiotic.
	And if people are intersex, right, they have two sets of genitals, which happens on very rare cases, or they have Kleinfelter's syndrome, for example, then you would say this is a man with Kleinfelter's syndrome.
	Speaking ascientifically is foolish.
	Trans men are not women.
	Okay?
	And the idea that trans men are pregnant is ridiculous.
	A woman is pregnant.
	It is a man with a mental disorder known as gender dysphoria.
	Now, there are a bunch of people who have been saying, well, the DSM says gender dysphoria isn't a mental disorder.
	The DSM is heavily politicized.
	DSM-IV called it gender identity disorder and said it was a mental illness.
	DSM-V, based on no additional evidence, none, zero, zip, zilch, decided that instead of saying that it was in and of itself a mental disorder, instead we would say that it was not a mental disorder, it was only the depression associated with gender dysphoria that was a mental disorder, which has no logic to it.
	That's like saying schizophrenia is not a mental disorder.
	It is only a mental disorder if you are depressed because you are schizophrenic.
	Or it's more like saying that you have a body dysmorphia issue, that you're anorexic, for example.
	And that is not actually a mental disorder.
	It's only a mental disorder if you're depressed because of it.
	That's foolishness.
	In any case, to redo all treaties because we're gonna pretend men aren't men and women aren't women is absolutely asinine.
	In the mode of absolutely asinine, Katie Couric Who, I don't know why she's still relevant or why she's around.
	Katie Couric is going around, now she covers gender for National Geographic, I guess.
	So she's doing, National Geographic has decided to basically do clickbait.
	And that clickbait's gonna be how children are actually, not boys or girls, they're actually genderless, genderless balls of cells.
	And Katie Couric is going to illuminate this for us.
	And what determines it?
	How can someone's sex at birth, their anatomy, be different than their gender identity?
	I decided to get some straight talk about gender.
	I first saw Sam Killerman giving a TEDx talk.
	Sam has been studying gender for more than 10 years, and he even wrote a book about it.
	Okay, so first of all, it's called The Social Justice Advocate's Guide to Gender.
	That means it's not scientific.
	Social justice advocate means, here is my perspective and now I'm going to try and cram the facts into this particular box.
	Again, when I talk about partisanship, this is it.
	Okay?
	There are certain scientific facts.
	Everything that I have said in the past five minutes is a scientific fact.
	You can disagree on the interpretation of those facts, but those things are facts.
	To pretend that they are not is to be scientifically ignorant.
	But that is exactly what the media do on a regular basis.
	This angers me to no end because, again, it prevents us from having actual conversations about things that are happening.
	And that is, in turn, going to destroy our capacity to have political conversations.
	It's just foolishness.
	Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
	I hope that we'll have moved beyond the Gold Star Widow story because I would like to see some dignity restored to American public life on every side.
	That's not a critique specifically of Trump.
	On every side.
	That would be great.
	But I have little faith that will happen.
	So that's why we'll be here tomorrow covering it.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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