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Oct. 26, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:16
Is Everything Sexual Assault Now? | Ep. 404
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Alrighty, did George H.W.
Bush sexually harass actresses?
And why is Mark Halperin in the news?
And also, why was the left actually cheering in abortion yesterday?
Not just saying it was okay, cheering it openly.
Plus, we're going to talk about the divisions inside the Republican Party.
Are Steve Bannon and Donald Trump really in charge of the Republican Party now?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So many interesting things to talk about today.
It's not often that we get a news cycle as interesting as this one, and we will talk about all of them.
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Okay, so we begin today with this story that has been making the rounds on Twitter and in the news that George H.W. Bush supposedly sexually harassed some actresses.
So let me give you the information, and then I'll explain my perspective on this.
So basically, this week there was an actress named Heather Lynn.
She was most famously on Turn, where she played Abigail, and she accused former President George H.W.
Bush of sexual harassment in 2014, when Bush was 91 and already in a wheelchair.
Bush apologized through his spokesman on Wednesday morning, saying that President Bush would never intentionally cause anyone distress, and he sincerely apologizes if his attempted humor offended Ms.
Lynn.
And then, They released another statement, and here is the statement that they released.
Okay, quote, So, Deadspin, of course, doing the hard yeomanly work of reporting, found out that the dirty joke that Lynn referred to in her statement went something like this.
Apparently, a tipster passed word about the Heather Lynn incident to Deadspin.
We were told that Bush had, during a photo op, groped her and told her that his favorite magician was David Coppifield, while fondling her.
Which, I mean, okay.
Really, is that human?
In any case, so here, there was another actress who came out, and she said that he'd done the same thing.
There's this actress named Jordana Grolnik, and she was working at a main production of Hunchback of Notre Dame when Bush attended.
And she said, we all circled around him and Barbara for a photo.
I was right next to him.
He reached his right hand around to my behind.
And as we smiled for the photo, he asked the group, do you want to know who my favorite magician is?
And as I felt his hand dig into my flesh, he said, David Coppefeel.
Okay, so the reason I'm smiling is because this is all ridiculous.
Because it's ridiculous in one sense and not ridiculous in the other.
I mean, just the image of a 93-year-old president shouting David Copperfield as he grabs someone is a little bit humorous.
In any case, there are a couple things about this that I think are worthy of note.
Is President H.W.
Bush, is George H.W.
Bush now in the throes of dementia?
So he has Parkinson's disease.
There are associations between Parkinson's disease and dementia.
Over the past eight years or so, I've heard from people he has been slipping a little bit, has President H.W.
Bush.
And so if you go to an old age home, people act inappropriately all the time.
Now, there's two types of old people who act inappropriately.
Some who are actually suffering from dementia, and some who just feel like, screw it, F it to life, I'm old, I can do what I want.
If this is the latter, then I'm not going to make excuses for this behavior, because here's the reality.
If my wife were groped on the behind while some old guy shouted David Copperfield, I would not be a happy camper.
And I assume neither would she.
Now, this idea that it's okay because Bush is old or because he was a war hero, I don't buy that.
If it's okay, it's only okay because he was, you know, in the throes of dementia, right?
If you want to say that he's not responsible for his actions, then that's something I buy.
But this idea that it's not some form of sexual harassment for him to do that, I don't buy if he is doing this out of his own free will and volition and there's no mental attitude.
And I will give you the case in point, bringing back our old campaign shoe, right?
I used to have a shoe on the desk or put it on the other foot.
If this were Bill Clinton, I think Bill Clinton grabbed a woman's butt and shouted, David Coppefeil.
Everyone on the right would go nuts and say, right, because this is Bill Clinton.
So there are people who say, right, because Bill Clinton has a record of this, H.W.
doesn't.
That's true.
But that's why I suggest that maybe we ought to hold off until there's more information on exactly what H.W.' 's mental state is.
But people who are making light of this, I don't think that it's something that ought to be completely made light of or dismissed out of hand.
People are saying that Heather Lynch should be ashamed for even saying anything about it.
I just don't, again, I'm really more torn on this than I think a lot of other people are.
On the right.
Okay, and maybe that's an unpopular point of view, but frankly, I don't really care.
I think it's inappropriate for guys to grab girls behind and shout cop a feel, whether they're 23 or 93, if they are in control of their actions.
And just because you've done some good things in your life doesn't mean everything becomes good.
This is one of my chief complaints about how people gauge human beings.
They'll say, he's a good man.
And then by saying he's a good man, they mean everything that he does forever, we have to see as good.
Good people do bad things.
Good people do stupid things.
Overall, the judgment can be that a person's good, and the person can still do some dumb things, or still do some bad things.
In any case, this is case in point of sexual harassment number one from today's news.
Case in point number two is one that the left will immediately say is not sexual harassment in any way, and that's because the person at issue is Ellen DeGeneres, and Ellen DeGeneres is a famous and well-beloved Hollywood lesbian.
So, the reason that that is relevant, her sexuality, is because Ellen DeGeneres tweeted this out yesterday.
This is a tweet.
of her on Katy Perry's birthday.
And it's a picture of Ellen DeGeneres staring directly into Katy Perry's cleavage from about six inches away as her partner, Portia de Rossi, laughs next to her.
I think it's Portia de Rossi, correct?
I'm pretty sure.
And Katy Perry is kind of smiling into the camera slightly awkwardly.
And it says, happy birthday, Katy Perry.
It's time to bring out the big balloons, right?
A direct reference to her breasts.
Now, let me just suggest, if any man tweeted out this exact photo, this exact photo, if Ellen's head were Harvey Weinstein's head, we would be talking about how this was more evidence of sexual harassment in Hollywood.
Ellen DeGeneres is a very, very powerful host.
And the fact that Katy Perry seems to be smiling here is not The issue, right?
I mean there are plenty of pictures where Harvey Weinstein is posing with smiling women who he sexually harassed or sexually assaulted.
The fact is that there's a double standard with how we treat these situations and as I've been now saying for weeks, we need some sort of singular standard as to what constitutes appropriate behavior and what does not.
Ellen DeGeneres is a lesbian which means that this is You know, her acting upon objects of her sexual desire.
If a man did the same thing, we would be saying, this is totally inappropriate, how dare he?
And it doesn't matter that Katy Perry's smiling, it just shows how toxic masculinity has infused everyone.
The whole point here is the double standard.
And the double standard applies everywhere.
Mark Halperin.
It just was essentially fired from NBC News.
He said he resigned or took time off to spend more time with his genitals.
But in any case, Mark Halperin, the accusations are that he allegedly sexually assaulted up to five women, sexually harassed or assaulted up to five women, that he would push them up against the wall, grope them, press his genitals against them.
This is Mark Halperin, the guy who wrote Game Change, very famous reporter, he's on NBC News every day, has talked about sexual assault in the most In the most indignant of terms, sexual assault is horrible, sexual harassment is horrible, and then meanwhile in the back room he's grabbing the interns apparently.
This goes to show you also, not only do we have a double standard with regard to people we like, we have a double standard with regard to ourselves.
The stuff that we do, human beings have a unique capacity to do this.
We can engage in many of the sins that we condemn other people for, and the mark of a good human being is that you think enough about this to think whether, in fact, you are upholding the standard that you seek to promulgate, that you're upholding the standard that you seek to push.
If you're not doing that, then we all need to do better, and I think we can all do better on these scores.
But the reason I'm pointing out these three differing scenarios, the HW, the Ellen DeGeneres, and the Mark Halperin situations, is because these double standards have been in place for a very long time, and we need to decide as a society what sort of behavior we are willing to accept.
I think the behavior should be this.
Men do not touch women without their permission.
That's the behavior.
Right?
We're done here.
And it's not the same thing if a man asks out a girl to a bar.
It's not the same thing if a man says that a girl is beautiful today.
It's not the same thing if a man says that he likes a girl's dress.
Okay, a woman's dress.
Not the same thing at all.
We need to make some actual separations here.
Instead, what I feel like this has devolved into is now we're just, as usual, conversations in America devolve into, who's the victim today?
And then we all come out and say, it's terrible that person was victimized.
And then we set no standard by which we can determine whether someone is a victim or not until they proclaim themselves a victim, at which point we say they're a victim.
Right, so if we had found out the H.W.
Bush-Heather Lynde thing just through a third-party source, not through Heather Lynde, then we would have had to decide as a society, is this something okay or not?
She declared that she was offended, therefore it was bad.
If she had declared that she was not offended, then it would have been fine.
Action is not subjective when it comes to societal standards.
It's not subjective.
You don't get to decide whether an activity is good or bad for me.
I, as a member of society, determine whether an activity is good or bad.
And I'm getting kind of tired of this routine where something is not harassment so long as I'm not offended, but it is harassment if I am offended.
We're going to need to draw some lines if we actually want to enforce those lines.
I want to talk a little bit about another story that's pretty devastating out of the state of Texas yesterday.
And then I want to get into what I really want to talk about today at length, which is the split inside the Republican Party.
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Use that slash Ben so your first hour is free and so that they know Okay, so, in other news that was making a splash yesterday, the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, the D.C.
Court of Appeals, ruled that a 17-year-old illegal immigrant could abort her baby in the United States without going through the hoops that Texas law requires.
So here's the story.
The 17-year-old girl jumped the border while she was pregnant and then decided to obtain an abortion.
Under Texas law, minors have to receive parental consent or a judicial waiver for an abortion, and Texas bans abortion after week 20.
So the clock was sort of ticking here.
She wanted to get an abortion before week 20 so that it would be legal, even though, you know, she jumped the border illegally.
And while the young woman ended up receiving a judicial waiver, she then had to schedule a sonogram and a consultation with a doctor, which is also under Texas law.
They say you have to actually look at what the baby is before you kill the baby so that you are not abiding by the mythology that this is just a cluster of cells.
I mean, this is what a 16-week-old baby looks like.
Okay, when we talk about she aborted a 16-week-old baby yesterday, this is what a 16-week-old baby looks like.
Do we have that graphic?
Yeah, this is what, I mean, it's a human, right?
I mean, I've seen the ultrasounds of my own children at this age.
To pretend this is anything other than a human baby is just to be scientifically illiterate and also block yourself from basic facts.
In any case, she was kept in the detention center, so she couldn't go to her appointment.
So she sued, and the government contended that she had options for leaving federal custody, right?
She could just go home.
Right, they could deport her.
They could send her back to her home country, or she could find a sponsor, you know, she could find somebody who's willing to take her in, that would then be her legal guardian, the legal guardian would give permission, and then she'd be good to go.
But the idea the Texas law would have to change because she's an illegal immigrant, that's something Texas wasn't willing to do.
So the D.C.
Court of Appeals instead ruled that this woman had a right to an abortion.
The woman immediately headed off to an abortion clinic before it could be appealed, and she went and had the baby killed.
She said, Again, abortion is not just a matter between you and God.
It's a matter as to which society has a say, just as if you were to murder a baby after birth.
We all have a say in that.
That's not between you and God.
That's between you, the baby, society, and God.
Right?
We all have a say in this one.
The part of this that's really horrifying is not just, you know, a girl having an abortion at 16 weeks, which is inherently horrifying from any view that places the sanctity of human life at the center.
It's horrifying the way that some people on the left responded.
So the ACLU tweeted this out.
They tweeted, breaking, Justice prevailed today for Jane Doe.
She was able to get an abortion early this morning.
Hashtag justice for Jane.
Yay, dead baby!
Justice for Jane.
This is one movement that I've seen on the left that really is quite horrifying.
This idea that abortion is not something to be ashamed of or to be morally conflicted about, it's something to celebrate.
That her obtaining an abortion is a victory for justice in the United States.
Certainly not justice for the baby.
Okay, a baby at 16 weeks is about the size of an avocado.
It's 4 1⁄2 inches long, head to rump, about 3 1⁄2 ounces.
The legs are developed.
The head is more erect.
They've started growing toenails.
The heart is pumping about 25 quarts of blood every day.
Okay, a baby has an independent blood type, has an independent DNA.
You saw the picture.
I mean, the baby's a baby.
But the left celebrates nonetheless.
Treating the U.S.
as an abortion haven should be something of which we are deeply ashamed.
And the idea that you come to the United States and therefore you have a right to an abortion, and even if you're here illegally, is pretty astonishing to me and should be astonishing, I think, to a lot of other folks.
Now I want to get to the topic that has preoccupied me this morning.
There's an article over the Daily Beast that I find quite fascinating about the future of the Republican Party in the aftermath of Jeff Flake, in the aftermath of Bob Corker, in the aftermath of all of these people who are leaving the Republican Party or retiring or suggesting that it's the end of the Republican Party and all the rest of it.
One of the theories that has been out there is that Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are now solely in charge of the Republican Party, and that these people cannot be stopped.
That basically, they run the place.
So Sam Stein, Asawin Soobsang, I think that's how it's pronounced, and Lachlan Markey have an article today out of the Daily Beast, and it says, Establishment Republicans agree.
Steve Bannon is kicking our ass.
So far this cycle, even his critics concede he's encountered light pushback.
party, there's one fact that both sides increasingly agree on.
The forces being ushered by Steve Bannon are currently winning.
The former White House chief strategist and chairman of Breitbart News has pledged to purge the GOP of its squishy establishment members, a delineation he said extends to everyone in the Senate save Ted Cruz, which is ironic considering how Breitbart went after Ted Cruz in the primaries.
So far this cycle, even his critics concede he's encountered light pushback.
And then Rick Wilson, who is an anti-Trump GOP strategist, he compared Bannon to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which is a wild overstatement.
They say he's funded by billionaires.
He has a shallow, catchy message that appeals to marginally educated fanatics and the like.
And the idea here is that Bannon is now the force inside the Republican Party.
That if you oppose Trump, you cannot survive on anything.
Not just you oppose him generally, you oppose him on any issue, you will not survive and Bannon will lead the charge.
So I'm trying to break down this theory because I'm trying to see what exactly is true and what is not here.
Number one, there seems to be an idea out here that philosophical Bannonism and philosophical Trumpism are on the rise.
This is the nationalist populist movement we've heard so much about that says that we have to close all our borders and we can't engage in trade anymore and that immigrants are not welcome here anymore and that we ought to spend enormous amounts of money on public works projects and all of this, right?
This is the nationalist populist sort of far-right European movement and this is what's on the rise in the United States, we are told.
I do not see the evidence of that.
I don't see the evidence of that.
The reason I don't see the evidence of that is there's a poll that's out today from Pew Research Center, and they do a political typology looking at fishers on the right.
And they break down conservatives into several different groups.
They're core conservatives, country-first conservatives, market-skeptic Republicans, and new-era enterprisers.
So core conservatives are basically described as people Who believe that the future of the country is bright and that involvement in global economy is good because it provides the U.S.
with new markets and opportunities for growth.
And they believe that immigration is generally good because it's providing more people for the economy to work with.
And they believe that the government has already done enough on environmental regulations.
And they believe that the United States has basically achieved racial parity, at least in terms of law.
You know, this is sort of the core conservative message.
That by far represents the largest share of politically engaged Republicans.
43% of politically engaged Republicans are core conservatives.
I am a core conservative.
I know because they have a little quiz over at Pew Research, and you can tell which one you are.
I am a core conservative, okay?
So I am with the majority, or at least the plurality, of the politically engaged Republicans.
Next come what they call the country-first conservatives.
These are people who are unhappy with the nation's course, they're highly critical of immigration, and they're wary of U.S.
global involvement.
So this would be the nationalist populist group.
It's a much smaller segment of the base, according to Pew Research, a much smaller segment of the base.
Then there's the market skeptic Republicans, and these are people who say banks and financial institutions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.
So these would be, these are, rather, sorry, The opposite.
Most of them say that banks and other financial institutions have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.
So this would be the populists.
Okay, this is a very small group.
And then finally you have the new era enterprisers, who are sort of open borders, open trade.
And they say everything is great, but they also want more regulations of the environment.
This would basically be the Jeff Flake wing of the party.
So when you break it down, what you see is that by far the largest group, by far the largest group, are people who are the core conservatives.
Right?
43% of all politically engaged Republicans.
And then a much smaller percentage are market-skeptic Republicans, who would be the nationalist populists and country-first conservatives, and then the new-era enterprisers.
So where is the shift toward Trump?
If the idea was that President Trump was going to be the guy who ushered in a new era of philosophy, or that Bannonism was on the rise, there's not much to actually suggest that's true.
There's really not much to suggest that's true.
Instead, what it looks like is that core conservatives still are the moving force inside the party, and core conservatives, along with the New Era enterprisers, along with Jeff Flake, would represent 59% of the Republican Party.
That is a solid majority.
Those numbers really haven't changed.
So Trumpism and Bannonism are not a thing.
There's no philosophically consistent Trumpism or Bannonism.
The other proof of this is the fact that all of the candidates that Bannon himself has approved of don't agree with each other.
So there's this idea that Bannon's philosophy is now ascendant in the Republican Party.
That's not true.
Okay, Roy Moore has very little in common with Danny Tarkanyan, the guy who Bannon has endorsed in the Nevada Senate run.
They both have very little in common with Ted Cruz, who apparently Bannon likes.
They have very little in common.
With Kelly Ward, Roy Moore is sort of more in line with Kelly Ward than Danny Tarkanian is.
There's a congressman named Michael Grimm out in New York, who's pretty socially liberal as far as I can see, and Bannon has endorsed him.
None of these people have anything in common, right?
They're all over the place.
So why is Bannon endorsing them?
I'll explain in just a second.
What this suggests is that Bannonism and Trumpism are not a philosophy driving the Republican Party.
This is why I objected to Jeff Flake's analysis yesterday, in which Jeff Flake suggested that it's hard for a pro-free markets, pro-immigration Republican to get elected.
That is not true.
59% of Republicans agree with that basic principle, according to this Pew poll.
So no, that's not true.
Okay, so, maybe if it's not the Bannonism as a philosophy or Trumpism as a philosophy driving the future of the Republicans, it's Trump or Bannon themselves.
And here again, I disagree.
The reason I disagree is because Trump went to war on behalf of Luther Strange in Alabama, and Luther Strange lost.
Steve Bannon tried to take credit for Luther Strange losing, but the fact is Luther Strange was going to lose anyway because Roy Moore was the outsider, and Roy Moore was way more well-known than Steve Bannon was in Alabama.
Steve Bannon is an afterthought in Alabama.
And the fact is that Steve Bannon's Breitbart didn't even back Roy Moore in the original primary in Alabama.
They backed Mo Brooks, who finished third.
So this idea that Bannon has some sort of outsized influence as a human being, like as a person, like he's the leader of a movement, it's not true.
He has a lot of money from the Mercers behind him, but he's not somebody who's actually leading the movement.
He's not somebody who's actually crafting the movement around him, and he is the great leader.
Again, there's not a lot of evidence to back any of this.
There's not a lot of evidence to back any of this.
So what exactly is going on?
What exactly is going on here?
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Okay, so if it's not that Trumpism and Bannonism are dominant in a sentence, if it's not that Trump himself is the moving force in the Republican Party, or Bannon isn't the moving force in the Republican Party, then what exactly is going on?
Why are Trump and Bannon important figures?
Why are we even talking about them?
Well, I think it has much more to do with attitude than anything else.
What exactly unifies all of the candidates that Bannon's endorsing?
What exactly unifies all of the candidates that Trump has backed?
What unifies the support for Trump?
It's all attitude.
It's a feeling from Republicans that Republicans have been squishes for too long.
That Jeff Flake was a squish.
That he was more intent on earning strange new respect from the left than he was on actually fighting for conservative principles.
This is why the right is a lot more tolerant of Ben Sasse, who's very anti-Trump, than it is of Jeff Flake.
Sasse is widely perceived as somebody who's actually conservative, because he is.
He has the third most conservative voting record in the United States Senate.
But we're willing to overlook, you know, a lot of his anti-Trump rhetoric, at least Trump supporters are, because he is very conservative and because he's shown that he's willing to fight the left.
If you're willing to fight the left, then you can fight Trump too when Trump does something wrong.
But if you're not willing to fight the left and it seems like all of your criticism is reserved for Trump, people assume bad motivations.
And I think not entirely without cause.
Not entirely without cause.
The truth is that the Republican Party has been motivated by an anti-establishment anger since 2009.
Long before anyone knew about Trump.
Long before anyone knew about Bannon.
No one cared about Trump.
Trump was just some guy who did The Apprentice.
And Bannon was just some schmuck who walked around Los Angeles pretending it was important.
Steve Bannon was not a thing in 2009.
In 2009, the movement started to cast out these Republican establishment types who apparently had caved to the Democrats.
The Tea Party was launched in opposition to Republican establishment types.
Mitch McConnell was already a curse word in 2009-2010 among Republicans.
He was.
This is just a fact.
Dave Brat defeated Eric Cantor in I think it was 2010 specifically because of this.
Dave Brat defeated, I want to see when he was elected, so sorry, I guess he was elected in 2014.
Dave Brat defeated the incumbent Eric Cantor in 2014 In a huge shock, because this had already been a burgeoning movement.
Trump wasn't running, Bannon wasn't important at that point.
So what exactly happened here?
The answer is there's a lot of anger.
There's a lot of anger.
And some of it is proper, and some of it is correct, but some of it is not.
Some of this is, some of this is not.
And this is the problem.
What is driving the Republican bus right now is the anger.
The elephant has always been anger.
The elephant in the room has always been anger.
Some of that time it's been directed in proper directions against Obamacare, against stimulus packages, against establishment Republicans who are weak.
But some of the time, the person who has hopped up atop the elephant is leading the anger elephant in the wrong direction.
And the anger elephant is basically willing to go wherever there is the most anger.
It feeds off of anger.
I wrote a piece this morning based on a George R. R. Martin short story.
This George R. R. Martin short story, which I really like, it was a short story called The Monkey Treatment.
And the monkey treatment is about this guy named Kenny Dorchester, this obese, fat guy, and he wants to get skinny, and one day in a restaurant he runs into a guy he used to go to basically a Jen and Craig program with named Henry Maroney.
And Henry Maroney is looking skinny, he's looking a little bit gaunt, but it looks like he's lost a ton of weight.
And so, Kenny Dorchester asks Henry Maroney, where'd you do this?
He says, well, there's this place where you can get the monkey treatment.
And so, Kenny goes there, and the monkey treatment is exactly what it sounds like.
It is literally a monkey.
It turns out it's an invisible monkey.
It's literally a monkey that jumps on your back, and then whenever you try to eat something, it grabs the food out of your hand and eats it.
And over the course of the story, the monkey continues to grow bigger and bigger.
It's a horror story.
The monkey continues to grow bigger and bigger and bigger until it's this 800-pound gorilla on top of his back.
Kenny Dorchester has lost the weight, but now he's basically reduced to nothing but skin and bones.
In the very end of the story, he ends up basically throwing himself from the eighth story of a building.
He survives by crushing the monkey on his back.
And then he goes right back to eating enormous amounts of food.
This is the basic idea.
The reason that I cite this story is because I think that's sort of what the anger monkey has become on the right.
I've said for many years that I think one of the problems with anger is that anger has to be properly directed.
Righteous indignation is a useful thing.
And righteous indignation is something worthwhile.
Andrew Breitbart wrote a book by that name.
Being indignant, being angry because something has angered you is worthwhile, if it has a specific target.
But what is not worthwhile, what is not useful, is this misdirected anger at anything and everything, and whoever seems the angriest, whoever projects anger the best, becomes your ally.
If you project a swagger, a machismo, then somehow this is going to mean that you are a bigger fighter.
This is why the he fights thing worked for President Trump.
It worked for President Trump because he was pushing that anger.
And so it was easy for him to hop atop the anger elephant.
But if the anger elephant is – if Trump goes up against the anger elephant, the anger elephant wins, which is exactly what happened in Alabama.
If Bannon goes up against the Anger Elephant, the Anger Elephant wins.
Bannon does have a gift, and so does Trump, for channeling the Anger Elephant, but they are not in charge of the Anger Elephant any more than the rider is in charge of the elephant if the elephant really wants to buck him.
The biggest problem for conservative Republicans who oppose Trump is that they have to acknowledge that a lot of the anger is justified and then they have to channel that anger in positive directions.
They can't just say all anger is wrong because that's not true and they can't just say all anger is right because that's not true either.
They have to say some anger is right and some anger is wrong and here's how I propose channeling our outrage and here's why the outrage is justified.
The outrage is justified when you're talking about things against which it's justified.
It is not justified just as a generalized sense of grievance.
And if we don't realize that, then the anger is going to take over the party and destroy the party.
The anger is going to reduce conservatism.
This is how Republicans treated anger.
In 2009, we felt like the Republican Party was fat, it was morbidly obese, it was lazy, it didn't fight, and so we took the anger monkey and we put it right on the back of the obese Republican Party.
And the anger monkey immediately started eating all of the goods.
And that was good for a while, right?
We were taking away democratic power all across the state legislatures.
We were winning 13 governorships.
We were winning 1,000 seats across the country.
We were winning the House.
We were winning the Senate.
All of that was good.
But there came a point at which we stopped depriving the anger monkey of food, right?
We just kept feeding it.
And the anger monkey just kept eating.
And now we are being reduced to the sad sack of bones, conservatism is at least, When it goes up against the anger monkey.
So the anger monkey has to be deprived when the anger monkey is not correct.
And that requires us to use our reason and not just our amygdala, okay?
Emotional response is not enough anymore at this point.
Okay, so I do want to talk at length about the latest on the dossier, the Trump-Russia dossier that people are going nuts over.
But first, I have to say goodbye over on Facebook.
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So with all this said about the anger monkey, what is the proper angle to take with regards to President Trump?
The proper angle to take with regard to President Trump is exactly the same angle that I've used with every other president, and that I used for Trump during the campaign.
It is the good Trump, bad Trump model.
When Trump does bad things, you criticize him heartily.
And when he does good things, you praise him heartily.
But I'll tell you two things that you don't do.
You don't do the everything Trump has ever done is bad, because that's not true, because that's not how human beings work.
And you don't do the everyone should just shut up and ignore what Trump is doing, because that's not right either.
When Trump does something wrong, then he should be hit for it.
So here are the two things you should not do.
The first is Jeff Flake basically saying, despairing of the party, I can't win a primary because I'm too anti-Trump, because I am too glorious, too wonderful.
The reason Jeff Flake can't win a primary is because he's perceived as an establishment squish because he moved to the left upon being elected to the Senate and then he spent the rest of his time bashing Trump without ever once lifting a finger against the left.
And so people perceived him as a squish but that's not the way he's gonna play it.
Well the bottom line is if I were to run a campaign that I could be proud of And where I didn't have to cozy up to the president and his positions or his behavior, I could not win in a Republican primary.
That's the bottom line.
It's not that you have to just be with the president on policy.
You can't question his behavior and still be a Republican in good standing, apparently, in a Republican primary.
I don't see the evidence for that at all.
I really don't.
Jeff Flake was, again, really unpopular.
He was down to 18% approval rating.
He was really unpopular upon being elected.
So that's just not factually accurate.
But this idea that the Republican Party has to be thrown under the bus in order to save Trump, that's something Trump wants you to believe and it's something Jeff Flake wants you to believe.
I don't think it's something that's true.
The other thing you shouldn't do is what Ted Cruz did here.
I like Senator Cruz.
But when Ted Cruz says, you know, everybody in Congress should just shut up and stop talking about Trump.
We've got a job to do.
When Trump says bad things, you have to speak out because you still have moral credibility on your own, right?
You're still an individual with the capacity to say when bad things happen, regardless from whom these bad things spring.
Here's Cruz making this point.
Well, look, I think everybody should stop.
Bickering and engaging in just personal attacks.
I think we should focus on doing our job.
That's what my focus is.
I'll tell you every day, walking down the hall of the Capitol, that there is a swarm of reporters like Locust that stands on me.
And they want to comment on, so-and-so said this, so-and-so said this, and it's like you're back in junior high.
I really don't care who passed a note to the cute girls in pigtails.
We got a job to do, damn it.
And so all of this nonsense I got nothing to say on it.
Everyone shut up and do your job.
Okay, well, you should have something to say when the nonsense actually impacts policy.
There are some times when it's just Trump mouthing off about Bob Corker or something.
And they're, you know, like, really, that's between them.
But when Trump says stuff that's actually egregious, when he attacks a gold star widow, for example.
Then you should sound off, and if you're not sounding off, I think you're doing something wrong just from a moral point of view.
I don't think the Republican Party opposes that.
I don't think most conservatives oppose that.
I think most conservatives just want to know that you're not more interested in tearing down Trump than you are in fighting the left.
That's all most conservatives want to know.
That's all.
And if you're willing to do that, I think you win a primary.
But if you are more concerned with tearing down Trump personally than you are with fighting bad stuff wherever you see it, whether it's the left or Trump, then I think that it's going to be hard for you to buy credibility in a Republican primary.
Okay, so, in other news, an FEC complaint has now been filed against the Hillary Clinton campaign.
This is according to Mediaite.
The DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign violated campaign finance laws by failing to accurately disclose payments related to the so-called Trump dossier, the nonpartisan campaign legal center said in a complaint filed today with the Federal Election Commission.
According to recent reports in the media, Mark Elias, who also serves as the Clinton campaign lawyer, paid OPPO research firm Fusion GPS to produce the dossier, which exposed alleged connections between Trump and the Russian government.
It also contained salacious allegations about Trump's personal escapades.
There are a couple issues that still have to be resolved, as I said yesterday, about the Trump dossier in order for Hillary and her team to have done anything deeply wrong.
Number one, you can pay for OPPO research.
Number one, you can pay for OPPO research.
People do it all the time.
There are two questions.
One, why did they lie about it?
Why did Mark Elias say that they had nothing to do with paying for the OPPO research?
Number two, Did Hillary Clinton or people on her team know that Christopher Steele was being funneled information by members of the Russian government?
The dossier itself contains all of this, okay?
The dossier itself.
Byron York points this out.
describes one source as, quote, "a senior Russian foreign ministry figure." It describes another source as a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.
Dossier source C is a senior Russian financial official.
So this does raise questions as to whether Christopher Steele was basically acting as go-between for Russian intel that was trying to dig up dirt on Trump and then pass it through the election system in an attempt to screw up the election system.
If Hillary knew that was the case, then it looks a lot more like the Donald Trump Jr.
situation, right?
The Donald Trump Jr.
situation was, somebody emailed him, said, I have a lawyer from the Russian government who wants to talk to you because Russia wants to help, and Trump Jr.
says, sounds great, maybe they have OPPO.
That was basically the story.
And it turns out the OPPO didn't pass hands, nothing may have come of it, but it showed Trump Jr.' 's willingness to work with members, people who are close to the Russian government in order to do this.
It is possible that's what happened here if Christopher Steele was working with the Russian government to come up with this information.
We don't know that, and we don't know that Hillary Clinton knew that was true, even if she knew the dossier existed.
So those are questions that still have to be answered, but the idea that there was some sort of collusion on the other side going on is not as implausible as it was four days ago.
Let's put it this way.
And Trump makes exactly that point.
Here is President Trump saying, the hoax is all turned around now.
They lost it by a lot.
They didn't know what to say, so they made up the whole Russia hoax.
Now it's turning out that the hoax has turned around, and you look at what's happened with Russia, and you look at the uranium deal, and you look at the fake dossier, so that's all turned around.
Okay, so one of the big questions here is whether it discredits the entire dossier, that some of these allegations that were in the dossier were false, or whether some of the allegations were true.
The reason that's important is because the FBI investigation is at least in part predicated on some of the allegations inside the Steele dossier.
Apparently some of them have actually been confirmed, meetings between Trump officials and Russian sources, for example.
Most of them have not, right?
Like the pee tape.
The idea that Trump, there was tape of Trump hiring prostitutes to pee on a bed that Obama and his wife slept on in Moscow or something.
But even people on the left are beginning to recognize that this is a problem for Hillary Clinton.
A New York Times reporter named Nick Confessori, he said yesterday, openly, that this situation looks sort of like the reverse of the Trump Jr.
Russia meeting.
Donald Trump Jr.
and another campaign official's meeting with the Kremlin-connected Russian attorney.
We've been reporting on that, ostensibly to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton.
How is this different from that?
It's kind of a mirror image, and look, you know, parties engage in opposition research all the time.
Admittedly, this is an extreme example to hire a former intelligence agency, but these firms like Fusion GPS are There is a market for them.
Companies and trade associations pay them for this research.
Sometimes campaigns perform this kind of research on their own.
I've gotten plenty of research documents from the RNC under President Trump, and I've gotten research documents from the DNC under Tom Perez.
Right, so the only question of separation, people are trying to say that it's exactly like the Trump Jr.
thing.
The question of separation is, did the Hillary Clinton campaign know that the information was coming from the Russian government?
Did Steele know the information was coming from the Russian government and is therefore compromised?
Did the FBI know all of that?
If all those parties knew, then you can actually make the case that there was some sort of collusion going on with the Russian government.
If you can't, then you're saying that without any basis in evidence.
So all I'm suggesting is that we be objective about how we view the situation, what the evidence says, and what the evidence does not.
Where Trump is on more solid ground is where he continues to rip on Hillary Clinton and the Obama DOJ and FBI for allowing the uranium sale to Rosatom in 2010.
This was, of course, the scandal in which Hillary Clinton was the head of the State Department, the State Department gave the green light.
to the Russian Atomic Energy Agency to pick up 20% of all U.S. uranium supply.
At the same time, the FBI knew that the Rosatom was attempting to corrupt truck drivers and engage in lawbreaking inside the United States.
Meanwhile, the Russian government was giving the Clinton Foundation oodles of cash.
Here's Trump going off on that yesterday.
Well, I think the uranium sale to Russia and the way it was done, so underhanded with tremendous amounts of money being passed, I actually think that's Watergate modern age.
He may be right.
I mean, it is not good.
I don't really like the Watergate comparison, generally, because there is actual evidence and hard proof, but it's not great stuff.
Now, it is also worth noting that everyone's hands look a little bit dirty here.
There's a story out today that Trump's data guru from Cambridge Analytica was reaching out actively to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks is largely assumed to be a Russian cutout for help in locating and publicizing 33,000 missing emails from Hillary's private server.
Again, this demonstrates willingness by Trump officials to reach out to people connected with Russia for information.
So all of this is dirty.
All of this is ugly.
The question is going to be how much of it broke the law and how much of it amounts to actual collusion with a foreign government that has interests that are opposite to those of the United States.
Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then a very brief, big idea.
So, things I like today.
So, as I said, over my vacation I read War and Peace.
It took a while.
It was long.
It is quite good.
I was rereading an essay that my father showed me yesterday from Commentary Magazine.
I'm trying to remember the author of the essay on Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
And it really is a fabulous essay explaining Tolstoy's view of human relationships and why it is that Tolstoy is so gifted at getting inside people's minds to express the joy of living as opposed to Dostoevsky, who is very focused on sort of the pain inherent in living.
The book Anna Karenina is a fabulous book.
I remember the first time I read Anna Karenina, I was, I think, 13.
And it is, I loved it then, I love it now.
Levin, who is one of the main characters of the book, he's sort of a secondary character in a certain sense, because Anna Karenina's kind of love triangle with her husband and Vronsky is the main part of the book, but Levin and his falling in love with the Marion Kitty presents the other part of the book.
Levin's Discovery of why life is, at the end of the book, is one of the great uplifting passages in all of world literature.
Tolstoy is always more uplifting than Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky is much more about looking at the fact that all of us are fallen creatures and can fall, and Tolstoy is about the fact that all of us have the possibility for uplift.
And there's sort of two sides of the same coin in that sense.
Tolstoy was a very conservative guy in certain ways.
And when you read his books, which are largely about, you find fulfillment in the sort of lasting love that comes with marriage and that comes with children and that comes with building a life together as opposed to romantic love.
A lot of people see Anna Karenina as Anna as some sort of proto-feminist figure, a heroic proto-feminist figure hemmed in by the constraints of society.
That's a complete misread of Anna Karenina.
That is not what the book is about.
The book is about why Anna is doing something wrong and why Levin and Kitty are doing the right thing.
That's what the book is about.
Terrific book, Anna Karenina, and not because of the way the left interprets it.
Too often.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So the thing I hate today is the use of Ivy League College to associate, to dismiss everything.
So yesterday, President Trump was being, you know, it was suggested that he was uncivil, that he was unkind and uncivil.
And so President Trump responded this way.
I don't understand.
I went to an Ivy League college.
I was a nice student.
I did very well.
I'm a very intelligent person.
You know, the fact is, I think I really believe I think the press creates a different image of Donald Trump than the real the real person.
I'm pretty sure that Trump creates his own image.
I mean, he's one of the most gifted image makers in the history of American life.
But the idea, this in and of itself demonstrates a certain lack of class.
If you think civility is connected to intelligence, you know nothing either about civility or intelligence.
Really, if you think civility, class, decency, these things are connected to intelligence, let me introduce you to all the people that I went to school with.
Okay, there are a lot of people who I went to school with with very high IQs.
I went to a junior high magnet school where you had to have an IQ above, you know, quote-unquote genius level IQ.
They gave you a basic IQ test to get into this magnet school.
And I was at the very low end of getting in.
And so there were people there with IQs of 180.
There were people there with IQs of 170.
And I remember thinking, half these people are going to end up in prison.
And sure enough, it turns out that some of them are actually in prison.
I can name a couple of them off the top of my head.
The reason being that intelligence and decency are not always aligned.
And so for Trump to respond to a question about civility and decency by saying, I went to an Ivy League college, is pretty ridiculous.
Also, by the way, intelligent people don't have to go around on a daily basis expressing that they are very smart people.
That's just not something that they have to do generally.
I know because I hang out with a lot of very intelligent people all the time.
But this is Trump's shtick.
I'm not going to fault him too much on that because this is his deal.
He also said yesterday he has one of the great memories of all time.
Really, this is what he said.
I was born with a certain intellect.
The fact is, you have to be born and blessed with something up here.
God helped me by giving me a certain brain.
It's this.
It's not my salesmanship.
It's what?
This.
You know what that is?
It's the brain power.
I have Ivy League education.
Smart guy.
I have, like, a very, very high aptitude.
I'm pretty good at English.
I always did very nicely in English.
I mean, like, I'm a smart person.
I'm very good at English.
Okay, again, this isn't going to turn into a riff on Donald Trump's intelligence level.
Suffice it to say, I think his own opinion of his IQ is probably inflated, but he said he has one of the great memories of all time.
Again, just showing once again that intelligence and decency are not always aligned.
Okay, time for the big idea.
So the big idea today...
By the way, that was not, again, that's not a specific group on Trump.
There are people on the left who think the same thing.
They think that because they live in big cities and they're very smart, that this therefore confers some sort of decency on them.
They're better people because of this.
No.
Being a decent person means acting decently, not being smart and reading a lot of Nabokov.
Okay.
The big idea today, very quickly, people have been using the term trickle-down economics a lot in the media recently.
That's because of the tax cuts that have been proposed, the idea that people at the top of the spectrum are going to get A lot more of their money back than people at the bottom of the spectrum, which makes sense, because they're paying a lot more of their money into the government.
And they say, this is trickle-down economics.
And what do you think?
That those rich people are just going to trickle that money down to other people?
No.
Trickle-down economics is a term that was not coined by the right.
It's a term coined by the left.
The idea here is that the people at the top of the income spectrum are the people most likely to invest in new products and services.
Why?
Because they don't have to worry about that extra income going toward feeding their families.
If you have an excess of capital, that excess of capital either goes into a bank, or it is lent out by the bank at risk to other places that are innovating, or the rich people go and spend that money on new innovations that make your life better.
People who are, as I've said many, many times, the person who's earning $40,000 a year and gets back $800, that's great.
That's terrific.
But that $800 is not going to create an iPhone.
Apple, getting its money back, is going to create an iPhone.
And the reason for that is because excess capital means investment in new products.
And the greater the concentration of excess capital, the greater the possibility of that.
You know, the idea is not to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, or from the rich to the poor.
The point is that everybody should be able to invest in the products they see fit, but the products that require the most research and the most time and expenditure are the ones that are going to change the most lives.
And so the idea that trickle-down economics is about some rich guy spending on a yacht, that's not really the suggestion.
The suggestion instead is that rich people, having more of their own money back, are likely to put it into a bank which will lend it out to other business projects, or they're more likely to invest it in up-and-coming business projects because they don't have to put dinner Okay.
We'll be back here tomorrow for The Mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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