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Oct. 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:34
The Media Sexual Harassment Scandal | Ep. 405
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So, why are the media still madmen, apparently?
Well, the rest of corporate America has moved on.
We'll talk about that.
Plus, the breaking news on the Hillary-Russia dossier.
Pretty shocking stuff.
And the JFK files are released, and we checked the mailbag.
So, lots coming up.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So the big news as of yesterday was that NBC correspondent and fabled investigative journalist Mark Halperin, the guy who wrote Game Change, and he was about to write a new book about the Trump campaign that was going to be turned into a series by HBO, that he had been apparently responsible for an innumerable number
Allegedly, of incidents of sexual harassment or assault, where he would press himself up against women with his genitals, where he would grope them, where he would say things that were wildly inappropriate.
I want to talk about that, and I want to talk about the widespread nature of this thing in the media.
And it does seem to be worse in the media than it is in, for example, corporate America, at least by the numbers and by the evidence, and at least by anecdotal evidence.
Talk about all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so I'm going to start today by talking about the Halperin allegations.
So there are a bunch of people who have now come forward, a bunch of women who have now come forward and accused Mark Halperin of sexual harassment and or assault.
Now one of the problems is people conflating these two things because, you know, I think as a society we just need to be careful about what we call things for legal reasons.
So sexual assault is where someone is legitimately threatening to commit battery on you, right?
It's actually battery if someone grabs you against your will, but it is assault, they call it sexual assault, if you are threatening to do that.
So that is one thing.
Sexual harassment is where I guess you're telling dirty jokes at the office.
And sexual harassment, there are some fuzzy lines with regard to sexual harassment because you can tell the same joke to two women and one of them may take it offensively and another may not.
Or a woman may hear the same joke from two men and one may tell it offensively and one may not.
Sexual harassment is a little bit more fuzzy.
There are certain things that are clearly sexual harassment, right?
A guy coming up to a girl and telling her she has a nice ass.
Clearly sexual harassment.
Not necessarily sexual harassment if a guy says a dirty joke just to a group of people and there's some women there.
Or if he says it to a woman and he had told the guy five minutes before.
So...
You know, I just want to keep these distinctions in mind.
What is not in question is that Mark Halperin is allegedly responsible, the NBC news reporter, that he is allegedly responsible for some serious sexual harassment slash sexual assault.
So in a new report from the Washington Post, a woman named Diana May alleges that she was sexually harassed by Halperin back in 1994 when she was a young researcher at ABC News.
According to May, she had asked Halperin for help with a story, and he had her come into his office.
Come over here, she recalled him saying, sit down and I'll give you the information.
He then motioned to his lap, and she was shocked and wanted to refuse, but she considered how Halpern was a rising star as the political director at ABC News at the time, and was a favorite of then World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings.
So not to injure her career, she reluctantly sat down on his lap, where she alleged that He was in full, we shall say that he was in full flight mode.
She said that this routine occurred three or four times, leaving her confused, shaken, and ashamed.
She said, I didn't know what to do.
He was important.
He wasn't my superior, but he was clearly in a superior position to mine.
I didn't say anything.
I didn't know how to at the time.
I knew it was wrong.
Another accuser, Emily Miller, Has also come forward after the CNN allegations were published.
He has been basically tossed out of the industry.
His book was canceled.
He was fired.
Apparently, she suggested that she was attacked by Mark Halperin as well.
She was once a producer at ABC News where Halperin spends a good portion of his career.
So presumably, you know, that took place when they were both at the network.
There's a, you know, this is not the only allegation.
There's another allegation from CNN.
There's a woman at CNN who's a former producer and she says that she was trying to interview with Halperin and Halperin offered her a business card.
She showed up And she says, I don't quite remember what we talked about.
I do remember him asking me to sit down next to him on the couch, as during an interview.
I thought it was awkward to sit on the couch when I was perfectly comfortable sitting in the chair across from his desk, but I complied, and I also remember him sitting a little too close to me.
At one point, I felt a bit uncomfortable, and I stood up to thank him for the meeting.
That's when he leaned in, tried to kiss me, and attempted to do a bit more.
I didn't want to offend the man in charge of political programming at ABC News, and I tried to be courteous and apologetic and practically ran out of the office.
She said that she finally landed a position at CNN on Larry King Live, and she said she would never book Halperin again as sort of her minor revenge on all of this.
So one of the things that I think is worth asking here is why this seems so common in Hollywood and in the media at large.
So I've already talked about the Hollywood values, you know, the casting couch mentality, this idea that women are expected to sleep with directors and producers in order to get jobs, and the reality that many women do do that in order to get jobs, or do that in convincing themselves that it's a fine thing to do when they're really doing it in order to get jobs.
That's not putting the blame on the woman, that's putting the blame on the man and saying this is a system in which women have had to work and many women have gone along with it rather than speaking up about it, which is clearly true on any objective level.
One of the questions you have to ask is why this is happening so much in the media.
And it appears to have happened to pretty much every woman in the media, right?
Here's a panel from S.E.
Cupp over on CNN, and here's a panel of women, and they basically all say that they've been sexually harassed.
I'm in this little room, and I put my ear in to hear him.
And he says, welcome, S.E.
I just want you to know I've been calling you C. Cupp around the office.
I thought, you're an idiot.
What an idiot.
I'm miked, you're miked, you're saying this on an earpiece.
And I thought, okay, we're not even in the same location.
And I'm pretty sure that was just sexual harassment.
To sexualize a body part of mine, joke about it, where other people could hear it, on my first day.
Okay, and all of these women told very similar stories, and these kind of things do happen a lot at media companies.
I've worked with a lot of women at media companies who are in the talent side of the business, and because beauty is a commodity in TV, it just is, okay, that's the way this works in the media, that means that there are a lot of men who think they can get away with saying nasty things to women about their body parts or about how they look.
You know, again, there are certain people who, like, Elisha Krauss is like a sister to me, so we make jokes with each other all the time, but I would never make jokes to anyone else because we're close friends, but Alicia has gotten sexually harassed by people who are at former companies.
And she's told me about this.
And it's very, very common.
And one of the questions that you have to – here's Kristen Powers making the same sort of claim.
You know, I've been harassed so many times I can't even count.
And I don't come out and publicly talk about them in large part because it's still true, I think, that most women feel and I feel that you will pay a price for it.
And that when you look at the women who have come out, certainly in the media, the people who have made the accusations against Roger Ailes, for example, really I think with one exception, which we've been making Kelly, the rest of them haven't been able to be employed again.
And she's correct about this.
So there are a few things that I think are worth saying about why this happens so much in the media.
And also, where is this fuzzy space?
Because there is a problem for women, okay?
If you're sexually harassed in the workplace, and you go to HR, and it's a he-said-she-said situation, unless it's legally actionable, it makes it very difficult for anybody to do anything about it.
Not all sexual harassment situations are legally actionable, even against the company.
Because remember, the standard legally for sexual harassment against a company are discriminatory work environment.
excuse me, a discriminatory work environment is not an individual guy sexually harassing you.
It's the creation of an entire element, right?
It's the creation of an entire business environment that is sexually harassing.
That's what you can sue a company for.
If a random guy works for a company and sexually harasses you, you couldn't sue Daily Wire if one person at Daily Wire sexually harassed a girl.
You couldn't sue the entire company.
You could report it to HR, and then HR would have a responsibility to look into it.
But in order to meet the legal standard for suing the company itself, you would actually have to show a legally harassing environment that had been promulgated by the office.
Now, in the media, there's something else that's happening.
And it happens in religious institutions, too.
Very powerful institutions where people feel like they have something to lose are places where they are less likely to speak out.
So I was talking with my business partner, Jeremy Boring, yesterday.
Jeremy used to work in Hollywood a lot, and he took a lot of meetings in Hollywood.
He was telling me about one meeting he had with the studio head.
Where this particular studio head was talking about a particular actress with his female assistant in the room.
And this studio head apparently said about the actress, you know, I'd bleep her.
Wouldn't you bleep her?
And he turned to the girl.
And he said, wouldn't you bleep her?
You know, if you had a bleep, wouldn't you bleep her?
And they said, well, even if you didn't have a bleep, you would do this to her and describe the very graphic sexual act.
And Jeremy said to me, you know, one of the things in Hollywood is that this is so common That it took him by surprise because he felt like if I were in a Walmart boardroom, you know, the girl's name was Juliet or something, then this wouldn't be called Walmart anymore, this would be called Juliet Mart, right?
If the head of Walmart had said that to Juliet, some assistant, This would now be called Juliet March.
She'd sue him for sexual harassment, and she'd win.
And she'd take the entire company away.
But in Hollywood, it's super duper common.
And that's because a lot of people are making this trade-off decision that it is not worth speaking up because they're afraid of the career ramifications.
So that means that two things have to change.
One is that we actually have to fight against a culture that suggests that women can't get jobs anymore if they accuse someone of sexual harassment or sexual assault.
That definitely has to be fought.
And the point that is being made here by Kirsten Powers, that a lot of women who complain about this stuff are then blackballed, that people think they're a litigation risk.
That's absolutely true.
And that's why we have to have hard lines, harder lines.
We as a society have to sit down and decide what constitutes legitimate sexual harassment that is worthy of review so that we can tell when a woman is actually complaining for the right reasons or when she's complaining because she's being oversensitive.
You know, in 90% of cases, it'll be the right reasons.
In 10% of cases, it may be because she's oversensitive.
But the problem is that without any hard lines, it's very easy for people to shy away from it and just say, oh, she's oversensitive.
I'm not hiring her.
She's a litigation risk.
Why would we do that?
So the first thing that has to be done is we have to draw some hard lines as a society, and the second thing that has to be done is we have to determine as a society, you know, we have to re-evaluate what is worth subjecting yourself to in order to get ahead in a particular business or in a particular institution.
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Okay, so...
The final point I want to make here is an institutional one.
There is a draw to the camera.
One of the reasons this is happening in the media a lot is because there's a draw to the camera, and men know this, and men are exploitative.
If given power, men will be exploitative because anyone in a position of power will be exploitative.
Women in positions of power tend not to be sexually exploitative in the same way that men are because men's sex drives are not the same as women's sex drives.
Men with power will debase themselves and debase other people for sex more commonly than women will.
The camera offers an unnamed power.
So the reason you see sexual assault covered up so often in religious institutions is the idea that the people who are committing the sexual assault have a direct pipeline to God, and so they have a unique capacity to pass on that power to others.
And so people feel like, well, if this person is saying it, they must be more moral, they must have a special, you know, direct line to God, and therefore there's nothing that I can say about it.
And this happens a lot in religious communities.
It happens in public schools because, you know, there are a lot of small children, but In Hollywood, it happens a lot more than anywhere else, I think.
And it happens a lot more in the media than anywhere else, I think, also because of the power of the camera.
So, it's not just, you know, a lot of these women who want to appear on TV, you know, they want to appear on TV not because the money is so great, but because there is something magical about a camera.
In a mass cultural phenomenon, it's something we have to get over as a society, the camera has a certain power.
You know, there are these girls going wild, kind of softcore pornography videos that have become very, very popular.
And basically all they are, is this company goes to places like Cancun, and they show up with a camera.
And they say to girls, take off your, take off your, show us your bleep.
Right?
And girls will do it.
Right?
Girls will do it.
Is that sexual harassment by the cameraman?
Well, yeah, I mean, it is.
But girls will do it because there's a camera there.
The camera is not magical.
The camera is not magical.
The reason that if an exec at Walmart said that, he'd immediately be sued for sexual harassment is because there's nothing magical happening in that boardroom.
You're selling like, you know, baby clothes.
But the presence of the camera, the possibility of the glittering fame, the possibility of Tinseltown, this has been true for a hundred years, It is a draw for everyone, including women, and men use that draw in order to get someplace.
That's something that has to end, and as the media fractures, I hope that we're going to see less of this, not more.
You know, when there are a limited number of cameras available, then people would do anything to get in front of those cameras.
As the media fractures, I hope that this will become less and less common, specifically because you can have a camera on your own, put it up on YouTube, and never have to worry about moving through an executive office with Mark Halpern gesturing for you to sit on his lap.
We need to get over the romance with the camera.
And that's true for everyone, viewers and participants alike, because again, the camera does not offer some sort of magical power.
Okay, I want to talk about the Clinton-Trump dossier and what exactly it means.
So, this has been a big story this week, and my opinion on it has sort of been evolving over the course of the week.
So at the beginning of the week I thought maybe this is a little bit overblown.
Then more evidence came out and I thought this is really not particularly overblown.
And now I think it's not overblown, But some people are taking it a step too far in their analysis.
So I'm trying to be as intellectually honest as I possibly can about the information that we have about this this Steele dossier and the information that came out earlier this week that Hillary Clinton, her campaign, had basically funded it.
So here is the backdrop.
The backdrop is that for nine months we have been hearing that Donald Trump is the President of the United States because he colluded with Russia.
And no one has been able to define what exactly collusion means, right?
The pieces of evidence that have been presented are essentially seven.
I mean, name the pieces of evidence here in favor of the quote-unquote Trump-Russia collusion theory.
So, piece of evidence number one is that Trump said bizarrely warm things about Russia.
Piece of evidence number two was that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, had very close ties with the Russian government.
Piece of evidence number three was that his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, had some close ties with Russia today and apparently with the Russian government.
Fourth piece of evidence is that former Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page apparently had close ties with the Russian government.
Fifth piece of evidence was that Donald Trump Jr.
apparently approved of a meeting with a Russian-connected lawyer under the auspices of being from the Russian government and wanting Trump to win.
Piece of evidence number six was that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and then went on national television and basically said that he did it because Comey was pressuring him on Russia.
And the final piece of evidence, it was this week, that Trump's data firm, which was owned by the Mercer family, called the Cambridge Analytica, had apparently reached out to Julian Assange, who is apparently, according to most accounts, a Russian cutout, in an attempt to gain access to Hillary's missing emails.
That is all the evidence.
None of that evidence is final evidence of actual collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
That's a lot of smoke, but no fire.
And for a year, we've been hearing the fire is coming, and there's been no evidence of the fire yet.
Now they're saying, by the way, that Mueller's big report is supposed to break before Thanksgiving, which will be a media feeding frenzy.
But if he doesn't have any more evidence than that, there's nothing there.
So for a year, we've been hearing Trump has to be impeached.
Trump is corrupt.
Trump Russia.
It's the end of the world.
Trump Russia.
Okay.
Now, with that as backdrop, here is what we found out this week about Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Russians.
So for months, members of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton campaign lied, apparently lied, about whether they had funded the creation of an anti-Trump opophile called the Steele The Steele dossier we all found out publicly about in January.
That was the dossier that BuzzFeed released.
That included all sorts of wild allegations, some of which have been confirmed about meetings between Trump officials and Russian officials, and some of which have yet to be confirmed and are frivolous at best, the stuff about Trump being peed on by Russian prostitutes and such.
All of that was released by BuzzFeed in early January.
The only reason that we found out about it was because we now know that it was being passed around Washington and that James Comey had presented a two-page summary of some of the charges in there to President Trump himself.
That's why BuzzFeed released it.
Okay, so, the Democrats said they had not been behind that dossier.
We now found out this week that they lied, and that, in fact, Mark Elias, who is a lawyer for the Hillary Clinton campaign, had basically funneled the money to Fusion GPS to go compile the dossier.
The person who compiled the dossier, under Democratic auspices, was Christopher Steele.
Christopher Steele is the wife of the Steele dossier.
He's a former MI6 spy.
He went over to Russia, and then he had talks with a bunch of people in the Kremlin.
Apparently, the allegation is that he passed them money, that possibly American money was passed to the Russian government in order to secure information about Donald Trump.
The file itself, according to Byron York of the Washington Examiner, includes several sources from the Kremlin, including a senior Russian foreign ministry figure, a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin, and a senior Russian financial official.
Now, let's say that all those people had met with Donald Trump Jr.
and provided him information.
Everyone would say, collusion, collusion, collusion, collusion, impeachment.
Hillary Clinton actually did that.
If you cut out the middleman, what you're seeing here is the Hillary Clinton campaign paid the Russian government, or worked with the Russian government, to find oppo against Donald Trump.
That's the exact allegation that is being made against the Trump campaign.
So, ironic at best, and criminal at worst, and I'm not the only one saying this, Jonathan Turley, professor over at Georgetown of Law, he says the allegations against Hillary Clinton thus far are more criminal than those against President Trump.
It's good to have something that's more recognizable as a criminal allegation.
As you know, I've been very skeptical about the past Russian collusion claims as being a criminal matter, even though I supported the appointment of the special counsel after Comey was fired.
I've been cautioning, and many others have, that it really isn't a crime to collude.
And in the same sense, it wouldn't be a crime to receive information on the Trump side from a foreign national.
But the allegations against the Clintons could potentially be criminal.
It doesn't mean that they are criminal.
The $500,000 given to Bill Clinton might have been innocent.
The timing just might have been horrible.
But that would be a cognizable crime if a linkage was found.
In the same way, the allegation over the dossier does involve a potential violation of federal law.
The Federal Election Commission Act requires campaigns to state a purpose for any money spent over about $200 to sort of have an item description for each of those amounts.
There isn't an item description for this law firm for the amount of money that is being alleged to be given to this researcher.
Okay, so two things.
So this is a perfect case of whataboutism in the sense that what Hillary Clinton did here was wrong.
If the allegations were made about Donald Trump, would that make it right now?
Would it be okay now?
And this is where I think that this whole conversation seems to go off the rails a little bit.
So let's say that Hillary Clinton had been elected president, and we had found out that she was colluding with the Russian government to gain oppo on Trump, and she was president, and then she released all that oppo, and that's why she won.
Let's say all of that had happened.
Would we be crying impeachment right now?
You bet your ass we'd be crying impeachment right now.
We obviously would be crying impeachment right now.
So the allegations the Democrats are making about Trump are exactly those allegations.
Those have not yet been proven.
There's no evidence for them.
So just because Hillary did something that is apparently criminal here, or at least allegedly criminal, that does not necessarily mean that nothing criminal happened on the Trump side.
With that said, the allegations and the evidence against Hillary Clinton's campaign, much, much, much stronger than anything that has been proven by the, against the Trump campaign at this point.
I want to talk more about this and I want to talk about The Mueller investigation, the impact on the Mueller investigation in just a second.
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Now let's talk about how this impacts, the Hillary thing impacts the FBI investigation into Donald Trump.
So, on a political level, it impacts the investigation because now we're all saying, okay, so what the hell is the FBI investigating?
Why weren't they investigating Hillary Clinton?
Why weren't they investigating the Hillary campaign?
And in fact, there are now calls for the FBI to do exactly that.
The House is going to call James Comey in front of them again and ask him why he was not investigating Hillary's collusion.
So that's point number one.
On a political level, it makes perfect sense to say, OK, everybody's focused in on Trump.
Really?
Hillary was doing the same thing.
And again, I think that that's fair on a political level.
I don't know that it exonerates Trump from bad behavior if Hillary was also behaving badly.
There were allegations that the headquarters for Barry Goldwater were bugged in 1964 by LBJ.
That didn't necessarily get Richard Nixon off the hook for doing the same thing at the Watergate Hotel.
Let's talk a little bit about the actual impact on the FBI investigation.
So there are two elements of the FBI investigation that have been impacted.
One is that apparently the FBI obtained FISA warrants on Trump associates based on allegations in the Steele dossier.
The allegation from people on the right is that the FBI was therefore colluding with Hillary and Russia.
Basically, Hillary was colluding with Russia to come up with this dossier, and then the FBI took the unverified allegations in the dossier, threw them by a FISA judge, and then got that FISA judge to sign off on warrants to bug Carter Page and Paul Manafort, basically.
That's the allegation.
This seems to me evidenceless, until the evidence actually arises.
Meaning that it is quite possible that the FBI knew about the allegations in the dossier, and went and independently verified them.
Not everything in the dossier is false.
So people are saying the dossier is complete crap.
Some things in the dossier are clearly complete crap.
Some things in the dossier are not, right?
There have been actual verified meetings between some members of the Trump team and some members of the, you know, people who are associated with the Russian government.
In any case, not everything in the dossier is not true.
So it is quite possible that Comey, you know, again, I'm talking as a lawyer, so from a legal perspective, you can suspect whatever you want, but it's only what you can prove that matters.
From a legal perspective, there is no evidence that James Comey took unverified allegations from the dossier in cahoots with Hillary and then proceeded to throw them to a FISA judge so that we could get warrants on these guys.
Second allegation is that Comey, for political reasons, basically continued to fund the Steele dossier after Steele's name had been released and after the Democrats had stopped funding the Steele dossier, that he found this stuff interesting.
And for political reasons, he wanted to continue the funding into it.
It's also possible for legal reasons he wanted to continue the funding into it because he felt that there was actual illegality taking place and he wanted to investigate it.
After all, he was the head of the FBI.
So both of those don't see the evidence for that yet.
And I am someone who is deeply skeptical of James Comey and thought he was absolutely wrong last July when he exonerated Hillary Clinton.
I also thought he was wrong when he reopened in October.
I think he was a garbage FBI director, but that still does not prove the allegations that are being made here.
Final allegation that's being made is, or at least a claim that's being made, is by the editors over at the Wall Street Journal.
So they write today, "The fusion means that the FBI's role in Russia's election interference probe must now be investigated, even as the FBI and Justice insist that Mr. Mueller's probe prevents them from cooperating with congressional investigators." So again, I'm not sure that anything beyond suspicion, unverified suspicion, suggests that the FBI was not doing its job in the Russian probe.
Mueller is a former FBI director, and for years he worked closely with Mr. Comey.
Okay, that's been true forever.
So if you're saying that Mueller should accuse himself on that basis, that was true from the very start.
And I'm not sure why that is now coming to the fore now.
It says it is no slur against Mr. Mueller's integrity to say he lacks the critical distance to conduct a credible probe of the bureau he ran for a dozen years.
Again, I'm not sure that that proves the point.
I mean, you could just as easily say that as a former FBI director, he knows where all the bodies are buried and says he could best serve the country by resigning to prevent further political turmoil over that conflict of interest.
So my opinion on this is that this seems to be jumping the gun, right?
Suggesting that Mueller has to go because he knows Comey.
If he felt that way, that was true months ago.
Suggesting he has to go because now the FBI is being accused of things for which there's no evidence yet.
You know, that also seems to me to be jumping the gun at best.
To say that the entire investigation should just be shut down on the basis that both parties did it, that's at least a more honest opinion on what's happening here.
And again, I think that This investigation is gonna go forward.
My strong hunch is that Mueller's not gonna find anything, that what we know is what we know, and that Mueller is gonna come forward with a couple of things.
The media will blow out a proportion, but there will be no hard evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and then this will all be over.
That is my strong hunch on all of this, but I wanted to give you, as objective a perspective on this as I can, which is that there appears to be criminal activity, or at least alleged criminal, very, very strong evidence of criminal activity from the Hillary camp.
There is not nearly as strong evidence in the Trump camp I don't know this is an excuse to shut down the special counsel investigation or to fire Mueller.
That's my basic take on all of this.
Okay, I want to talk about the, I do want to talk about the mailbag, well we're going to do the mailbag, also I want to talk about some policy implications of this continuing and ongoing Republican infighting in just a second, but first You're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com.
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Okay, so with all the Republican infighting that is still taking place, it's interesting.
I'm listening to a lot of people who I really respect, people with whom I agree largely on their assessment of President Trump in terms of character, and it seems to me that they are missing a key point, a lot of them, with regard to the Jeff Flake fallout.
There's still a lot of fallout from Jeff Flake and his speech on the Senate floor in which he ripped into Trump and suggested the Republican Party had now become prisoner to Trump and Bannon.
And that is, I don't think that's, again, I think that's an over-read of the situation.
Their suggestion seems to be that if you're critical of Trump in any way, that they will, that everyone in the Republican Party will come after you and primary you and finish you.
I don't think that's right.
I don't think that's right.
I think that you can be critical of Trump when he does things, and I think you can be critical of him as president, I think you can say he's doing great damage to the country as president for some of the things that he is saying and doing in terms of undermining American unity.
I think you can say all of those things as long as you say also that Trump and you are on the same page when it comes to some of these agenda items.
You know, that you are.
I mean, Jeff Flake voted 95% of the time with President Trump in the Senate, but he didn't focus on that at all.
He spent all of his time talking about all of the downsides of Trump and none of his time talking about, you know, the things that Trump is doing right.
And I think you do have to give a more objective view of Trump rather than the overall.
See, here's the thing.
You know, we could talk about the overall.
I did all the time.
I talked about the overall aspect of Trump during the 2016 election.
When you were forced to come to a conclusion about Trump.
You were forced to come to a, I'll vote for him or I won't vote for him.
But now, the question is not, do you support Trump or do you not support Trump?
Because what does that even mean in practical terms?
Like, I don't even understand this idea of, I don't support Trump right now.
Maybe you don't support some of the stuff he does, but your support means nothing to him.
Right?
You're not giving him money, really.
You're not voting for him.
We're not going to vote again on Trump.
We're not going to have a referendum on Trump again for another three years.
So what does it mean to support Trump?
This is why I say you can support some of the stuff he does and really not support some of the stuff that he does, and that seems to me, as a senator, your job.
It doesn't seem to me that you need to do an overall assessment of Trump as president every single day.
It seems to me that you can say, when Trump does stuff like this, it's really gross, or I think President Trump has character flaws that are leading him down a really dark path here, and I wish he would do better.
But this idea that you have to go out every day and you have to talk about Trump being a boob, you know, and that's the entirety of your comment, that's what's taking off the base, because the implication is that it is so eminently obvious that you'd have no support that everyone who supports him is adult.
And that I think is why people are offended by Jeff Flake.
And that is why also I think that, you know, this notion that the party has now been taken over by Trump to such an extent that good conservatives can't be elected ignores the fact that you can be a good conservative and still elide the Trump issue, or you don't even have to elide the Trump issue so long as you're willing to speak To speak objectively about what Trump is doing, right?
When he cuts regulations, that's a good thing.
When you say the Trump administration is cutting regulations, that's great.
His response to Charlottesville was abominable.
I think most people on the right go, okay, I can live with that assessment.
What they can't live with is you going out there and saying that Trump is completely unfit for the office in the sense that you will never support him under any circumstances, whatever the policy ramifications, because that's where you go a bridge too far.
I don't support Trump as a person.
I'm not a big fan of Trump as a person, but some of the things that he's doing are good things, and I support those things.
So I think that that's a better assessment of the situation.
Okay, meanwhile, the Republicans still aren't able to pass anything, and again, that's not totally on President Trump.
Better leadership would be helpful here, but we're gonna get what we're gonna get.
Nancy Pelosi says that by Christmas we will have a DREAM Act.
Justin Amash is complaining about the budget that just passed the House.
It's a major budget that continues to increase the deficit.
Nancy Pelosi says we will have a DREAM Act by Christmas, so things are going swimmingly.
I think President Trump is inclined to be supportive.
He said he is.
I take him at his word.
And that because the American people support the DREAMers.
Not because we were so persuasive, but because the American people support the DREAMers.
So I'm optimistic that we'll celebrate, hopefully Thanksgiving, but more likely Christmas, with a DREAM Act passed.
That'll be great.
We'll get to the end of the year and the only major legislative achievement will be the DREAM Act, the very thing that Trump ran against.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Again, that's because of Republican disunity, but as I say before, disunity is not really because of Trump.
This disunity predated Trump, and Trump is a symptom as well as a cause.
Okay, time for some things that I like, and then some things that I hate, and then we will get to the mailbag.
And I want to actually take some time with the mailbag today.
So, things that I like.
So my daughter has been very into Sleeping Beauty lately.
This is sort of the second wave of good, of very solid Disney movies.
The first wave is Pinocchio and Bambi.
And the second wave is Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.
So there are still classics, but they're sort of more minor classics.
One of the things that's great about Sleeping Beauty is that the entire thing is basically scored to Tchaikovsky music.
So even the famous song in the middle is from Tchaikovsky's ballet.
And the animation is very stylized.
So my dad really dislikes it.
I think some of it is actually pretty cool looking.
My daughter, for some reason that frightens me, is a big fan of Maleficent.
So, we went to the Disney store yesterday, and she actually, she's getting a big kick out of dressing up.
They have a Maleficent costume.
She's getting a big kick out of dressing up as Maleficent.
In any case, here's some of the preview for Sleeping Beauty.
A beautiful maiden with a spellbinding destiny.
On her 16th birthday, she would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel.
From this slumber you shall wake.
When true love's kissed, the spell shall break.
Beautiful.
Okay, so one of the nice things about Sleeping Beauty is Sleeping Beauty is one of the last Disney movies, really.
I mean, it happened in, like, the 50s.
It's one of the last Disney movies where the prince actually does anything.
Right?
Think about this.
Like, every Disney movie, the prince doesn't do crap.
Right?
Really, since the 80s and 90s, the prince is basically just a guy who stands there, and every heroine, every Disney princess is the heroine who saves herself.
Right?
Pocahontas saves the world.
Mulan saves the world.
Uh, in Tangled, you have Flynn Rider, who's more active, which is why I like Tangled a lot.
Um, but, Frozen, there isn't, like, Kristoff, that movie makes no sense.
I really dislike Frozen very strongly.
I think Frozen is terrible.
Um, but, all of the modern Disney movies, Little Mermaid, the most active characters are all the women.
Like, by far, they're the females.
It seems to me that you can have more than one active character in a film, which again is why I like Tangled.
In Sleeping Beauty, Prince Philip actually does stuff.
Okay?
It turns out that there's a whole class of people who watch movies, who are young, but are not appealed to by a lot of the Disney stuff.
They're called boys.
They exist.
Okay, and I know that Disney makes movies like cars, but they're not boys, they're cars, right?
They're inanimate objects who have male voices.
Okay, they're the Disney princesses, and then every movie about a guy is about a car, right?
Or it's Monsters, Inc.
It's a monster, right?
At no point does a human male ever have the capacity to save anything in these films.
And this is something that annoys me generally because, again, the history of Western civilization is replete with sexism.
It is also replete with men saving women.
Okay, Western civilization and the building of Western civilization is largely predicated on the idea that men have to protect women.
So if you like chivalry, if you like the idea that a man has to protect a woman, then it seems to me that you should like a movie like Sleeping Beauty where a man is protecting a woman.
Okay, it's ridiculous to me that we can't make movies like this anymore.
Okay, other things that I like.
So yesterday, President Trump did something that I thought was quite good and I think is useful.
He got a little sentimental over his brother.
He was talking about the opioid epidemic and he was talking specifically about how alcoholism ruined his brother's life.
I learned myself.
I had a brother Fred.
Great guy.
Best looking guy.
Best personality.
Much better than mine.
But he had a problem.
He had a problem with alcohol.
And he would tell me Don't drink.
Don't drink.
He was substantially older, and I listened to him, and I respected, but he would constantly tell me, don't drink.
Okay, so, again, I think that, you know, this is good stuff from Trump, and I wish he would actually do more of this, right?
I mean, when he uses his voice in favor of useful things, I think that it's great.
Okay, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
So the JFK documents have now been released.
Rachel Maddow was ridiculing President Trump over the JFK documents because they were not all released.
So Trump had said, I'm going to release all of them.
Then he didn't release all of them.
And here's Rachel Maddow going after him for it.
The president, the White House, they appear to have really thought it was going to be release day.
Right?
They did the tweets.
They sent Trump to do his act like JFK act on the rope line at the Love Field tarmac yesterday and everything.
But when the clock struck midnight last night and no documents were released, and then this morning rolled around and nothing was released, and then today rolled on and nothing was released.
Finally, NBC News this afternoon got U.S.
intelligence officials to admit to them that Yeah, the work didn't.
The document spelling out what's supposed to be redacted, that didn't get finished.
Or maybe the dog ate it.
But it wasn't ready to go.
Okay, this is a stupid criticism to me.
Again, I think that Trump should always be more careful when he says things like, I'm gonna release all the documents, and then he doesn't, but this is a dumb criticism.
Here's what we do know from these JFK documents.
So the JFK documents don't show anything new, except for the fact that we now know that Lee Harvey Oswald apparently was having conversations in broken Russian with the head of the KGB's assassination unit in the months leading up to the assassination.
Okay, so that is not a grave shock.
It's also not clear that they were plotting JFK's murder.
It looks like Lee Harvey Oswald was kind of a crazy person, and if you know anything about Lee Harvey Oswald, you know he tried to claim asylum in Russia.
He went to Russia for several years.
He tried to claim asylum in Cuba just weeks before he shot JFK.
He was a communist.
He was a communist, former military member who turned communist.
He married a girl from Minsk.
And he had attempted to assassinate an American general, actually, in Dallas beforehand, and that had failed.
One of the things that I hate about all of the JFK conspiratorial theories is the willingness to ignore the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who was motivated by communism to kill JFK.
In fact, Jackie Kennedy famously stated, after she found out who Oswald was, that she was sad that JFK had to be killed by a silly little communist.
Why couldn't he die for something like civil rights?
So the left immediately attempted to swerve this into a critique of America.
JFK's assassination led into this leftist critique of America as a terrible place that couldn't stand the Camelot, the shining city on the hill that JFK stood for, and it was all of our collective American guilt that had killed JFK.
I hate this crap, it wasn't, it was a commie, a piece of crap commie who was attempting to reach out to the Russian government.
It is also amazing, one of the pieces of documentation here suggests that the Russian government suspected, the KGB suspected that LBJ was behind the JFK assassination, which shows a couple of things.
One, that they probably were not interested in assassinating JFK, and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted on his own.
And number two, That when you are a member of a fascist, your perception of how the government works is largely based on your own governmental system and your own perception of how governments work.
So, because in Russia, future leaders were often assassinated by prior leaders, and vice versa, They thought, okay, well, if JFK died, it was probably because there was some sort of coup attempt.
That's not how it works in the United States, and it just goes to show you when your mind is corrupted by bad government, that's where you end up.
Okay, time for the mailbag.
So it says, hello, Ben, if you were suddenly arrested, what would your friends and family assume you had done?
Honestly, my friends and family would probably assume that I had pissed off the wrong authorities and that I was being arrested for political reasons.
That would probably be the most likely scenario.
Hayden says, Ben, as a California conservative, I see our state legislature representatives and senators constantly passing legislation that directly harms California.
It seems the only way to combat this is to flip the state.
How do we turn California into a red state Electing Senator Shapiro would be a good start.
Well, good luck on that.
And as far as turning California into a red state, one of two things is going to happen.
Either people are going to get wise to how terribly things are being run, and there will be a movement toward the right, which I could see.
Or alternatively, things are going to get worse and worse and worse and worse, and the state will empty out, and then Republicans will come back in and retake the state.
That's also a significant possibility, because that'll just take a little bit longer.
This is my theory of political population movements, is that Republicans, conservatives, they move into an area, they immediately make it awesome.
They establish laws that protect property rights and don't tax everybody too much.
And then Democrats come in, and they decide to redistribute everything, and they ruin it.
And so the Republicans all leave.
And they go someplace that's slightly crappier in terms of climate, but they make it awesome anyway.
And then the Democrats all follow them there.
And then the Republicans leave.
So, if that's the case, then eventually all the Republicans will leave California, which is sort of happening, and then the Democrats will make it super crappy, but there won't be any economy here, so they'll all leave.
And then Republicans will reoccupy the ruins of California in 50 years and turn it red again.
Well, I mean, passing legislation would be good.
How about fulfilling some of his promises?
Reforming the immigration system would be a good start.
presidential term.
Well, I mean, passing legislation would be good.
How about fulfilling some of his promises?
Reforming the immigration system would be a good start.
Building the wall, as he said he would.
Repealing Obamacare, which he has not done.
Passing tax reform, which he has not done.
Passing some religious protections, which he has not done.
Any of those things would be good.
I'm not going to say he had a successful presidency just because the economy was good under him, because the economy wasn't bad in the second term of Obama, and he was not a successful president in my view.
So I really like Milton Friedman.
You know, I think that Free to Choose is a terrific book.
I disagree with some of his opinions, like universal basic income.
I think they lead to inflation and freeze the economy in place in some ways.
But I enjoy Milton Friedman's work a lot, and his explanations of economics on YouTube are fun to watch as well.
David says, you say the Shapiro story is coming.
When?
As I said earlier, it should be here by Christmas.
If I am wrong, then you can lash me with a wet noodle.
Timothy says, Ben, besides the Bible and your religious studies, what books have you read that have helped solidify your solid faith in Judaism?
What book, if any, would you recommend to a friend or acquaintance who is agnostic?
Keep up the great work.
So I've recommended a lot of these books on the show, and some of them are not Jewish.
So I've recommended things like Guide to the Perplexed by Maimonides this week.
But in more secular terms, I think that if you read a history of Western civilization that takes into account religious thought, it makes you more of a believer in the Judeo-Christian tradition at the very least.
As far as believing these specific claims of Judaism, such as Revelation on Sinai, there are a couple of good little tomes that I'll have to look up the titles of because They're good.
I will say that, you know, again, anytime you say that God spoke to humans, you have to take a certain leap of faith because that's just the way things work.
And one of the reasons that God created us was to take that leap of faith.
So I don't think it's out of bounds to say that God hides himself so we can take the leap of faith.
Mandy says, Hello Ben, I saw a YouTube video of you at 12 years old playing the violin.
Larry King said your dream was to be the first Orthodox rabbi in the Supreme Court.
Is this still an aspiration of yours?
No, neither half of that is actually an aspiration of mine.
So, I'm not really interested in spending the time necessary to get smicha, which is what it's called when you want to join the rabbinate.
You have to get a kosher version of this.
It comes from Israel.
I gave up on that dream long ago because there's no chance I would ever be nominated or be confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court.
Rocco says, what are your favorite and least favorite Halloween candies?
So just candies in general.
I am a – so you have to get a kosher version of this that comes from Israel.
Kosher Skittles are fantastic.
As I've said before, I love sour jelly bellies.
These are my favorite candies.
And actually, there's somebody at the Jelly Belly Factory who's a fan who sent me a bunch of jelly bellies, and so I thank him for that, because we have been enjoying that in the Shapiro household.
Those are my least favorite Halloween candies.
So first of all, everyone knows that candy corn is garbage.
Everyone knows it's hot garbage.
No one in human history has ever eaten candy corn above the age of seven.
All that candy corn just melts, it's gunk, it coats your teeth, it's disgusting.
Other candies that are bad?
First of all, there's no one worse than the horrible woman on your street who hands out apples.
Like, I love apples, but if you hand out apples as candy, you're a bad person.
If you're handing out, like, figs and dates, and what is this, the 13th century?
Figs and dates, ooh, we're gonna have a candy, I have certain objections to certain desserts generally.
One of my bugaboos is fruitcakes.
The idea of having, people have these fruit tarts, and they have the custard, and then they have the cut fruit on top of it.
Why would you ruin the custard with the cut fruit on top of it?
Why would you do that?
Fruit is fruit, and custard is custard.
Why would you possibly, Put the fruit on top of the custard and then it gets all gooey and disgusting on top.
You have to scrape off the fruit to get to the custard.
Why would you do this?
Okay, now you've got me on a dessert rant.
Okay, so college selection.
You have to go to a good college.
to do's in the next 10 years for a high school senior who wants to be a senator one day.
College selection, getting connected, things to study, et cetera.
Okay, so college selection, you have to go to a good college.
You don't have to go to a great college.
Getting connected, I would say that you have to do a lot of things for free to be successful.
Right?
For me, I wrote a lot for very little money or for free for a long time before I became successful in this arena.
And you have to do a lot of those things to make connections.
Reach out to everyone.
Things to study, you need to read constantly.
You need to constantly be updating yourself on topics.
So when Russia is in the news, you need to go and you need to look up some books on Russia and read books on Russia.
As I've said before, one of the weird things about politics is that if you've read a book on a subject, this puts you in the top 2% of Americans on this subject.
Because most people don't know anything about Russia.
And this is true, certainly, about places...
Like Niger, right?
If you're looking at Niger, no one knows anything about Niger.
No one knows a thing.
If you read an article on Niger, you've suddenly become an expert on Niger.
So reading constantly is the solution.
And then, obviously, you have to cultivate your ability with human beings.
It's something that I've been working on for years, but have not yet conquered, as my employees can tell you.
Emmanuel says, Hey Ben, in the 2012 RNC autopsy, one of the main points was the need for Republicans to do more outreach to minority communities, particularly Latinos, to ensure the party's long-term survival.
How necessary do you think this is?
As a Latino conservative, it seems like the Republican brand is being poisoned among Latino community members thanks to the president, even among family members who are staunch Republicans.
So, here's the thing that I think is true.
It is imperative that Republicans reach out to members of the Latino community, that reach out to Latinos.
I recommended years ago that Republicans start trying to learn Spanish.
I have infamously been attempting to learn Spanish for years and have failed dramatically in that task.
But, I do not think that the conservative message is limited to white folks.
Now, that said, I think the attempt to buy off Latinos with immigration reform is stupid.
The Latino community is very split on the idea that all illegal immigrants have to be legalized immediately, that all illegal immigrants should be given citizenship.
I think that you can take a reasonable position on immigration and Latinos will mostly agree with you, or at least many of them will agree with you.
And I think that Latinos, you know, like any other human being, And maybe an outsized proportion, because there's an outsized proportion of religious Latinos, believe in things like personal responsibility and have the capacity to believe in those things.
So, yeah, I think it's a mistake.
The stuff that I think really alienates Latinos from President Trump is the way he talks about Latinos, not even the policy prescriptions.
Like when he says things, like his initial speech, when he said Mexico's not sending us our best, they're sending us rapists and murderers.
No.
I mean, that's a very small percentage of the people who are crossing.
There are certain people who are, but the vast majority of illegal immigrants, I know, I live in L.A., half the people here are illegal immigrants.
Most of them are good, hardworking people who are trying to make a living.
Yeah, that doesn't justify jumping the border, but it is to, that is not what President Trump said.
And, you know, when he says things like a Mexican judge can't be trusted with his case because he's Mexican, you know, this sort of thing is not good outreach.
Alexander says, I'm 21, currently going back to school as an engineer.
I work a full-time job and go to school full-time.
My aunt has offered to pay my tuition, but I'd feel wrong to take it because I'm against students taking government money paying for a higher education.
What would you recommend I do?
Well, I mean, I don't think you have to reject a gift from your aunt.
I mean, I don't think that's quite the same thing as taking money from the government.
I don't even think you have to reject money from the government until the system itself changes.
I mean, I think there are a lot of people who are taking Pell Grants and trying to pay them back.
You know, the availability of a loan seems to me not an immoral thing to take advantage of.
I think it's immoral instead if you don't pay back that loan, and I don't think the loan should be offered in the first place.
But those are two separate questions.
As far as your aunt offering to pay your tuition, if you feel wrong to take it because you feel like you should pay your own tuition, Good for you.
If you feel guilty taking it, that's, you know, your business.
I don't think there's anything immoral about allowing your aunt the pleasure of providing for you.
You know, when you get a gift from your parents, I don't think that's the end of the world.
Chris says, I'm going to be a new father somewhere next year.
What is a good book to read to get prepared?
There are a couple of good books.
You know what, Chris?
I'll do this.
Next week, I'm going to recommend a bunch of good parenting books.
So instead of trying to name them off the top of my head, math has reminded me, next week when I do things I like, I will do a bunch of parenting books, things that are useful for parents to read, and you can listen to the show next week for all of that.
Okay, we will be back here on Monday for lots more fun and hijinks.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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