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Nov. 10, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:49
Should Republicans Dump Moore? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 415
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Alabama Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore is hit with serious sex allegations.
So is Louis C.K., and we'll check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So the sickness has not yet lifted from me.
Like Doc Holliday, I'm going to have to be sent out to the desert to cough up a lung.
But before any of that happens, we will get to the news of the day.
I'm going to talk at length about Roy Moore.
How seriously should we take these allegations?
Are they credible?
What should Roy Moore do?
And why is it that everyone always seems to jump to the defense of a person so long as they are on their political side?
We'll get to all of that, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birchgold.
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Okay, so the big breaking news over all of the day yesterday and most of the day today is Roy Moore, the very controversial Alabama Senate Republican nominee.
He is, he was hit with a series of allegations by the Washington Post.
30 sources have talked to the Washington Post about Roy Moore's alleged history of when he was in his early 30s trying to go out with women who are anywhere from 14 to 18 years old.
The most serious allegation is brought by one particular woman who was 14 years old named Leigh Corfman and she alleges sexual assault by Roy Moore when he was 32 and she was 14.
The allegations themselves are sickening.
There are some people today who are trying to make light of the allegations by saying, well, you know, he's 32 and she's 16 or 17.
Is that such a big deal?
I am 33 years old.
I'm exactly the age that Roy Moore was when Roy Moore was apparently doing this stuff.
The idea of even going anywhere near a high school freshman is so perverse and sickening.
And anyone who ever tried to do that to my sister or my daughter, I would be very tempted to grab my shotgun from my safe, drive them to a remote spot, and take them out.
Really, if someone were molesting my 14-year-old sister, that would be the proper solution.
Now, the question is whether these allegations are true or not, but here's what the Washington Post says, and we owe it to the people who have spoken on the record, by name, to at least take the allegations seriously.
And the reason I say that is there's this tendency on some people, on part of some people, On both the right and the left, to basically let things go when it's your side.
Right, so Teddy Kennedy drives a car off a bridge, there's a woman in the back, she dies.
But Teddy Kennedy's really an important politician, he's part of the Kennedy family, so we let it go.
Bill Clinton, he can molest the help, doesn't matter, so long as Bill Clinton is for abortion.
Nina Burleigh of Time Magazine says that she would perform oral sex on him as long as he keeps abortion legal.
Right, we see this with Donald Trump in the last election cycle.
All these allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment hit, and a lot of people say, well, you know, lesser of two evils.
You still gotta vote for him, or at least we still, we at least have to voice support for him.
Now, I'm not going to equate voting for a candidate with necessarily supporting everything that the candidate is, does, and has done in the past, because there is more to it than that, but there is a moral question here as to whether you are allowed to either vote or support a candidate who does these sorts of things, and This is something that I had serious problems with during the election cycle.
The lesser of two evils mentality, particularly in politics, will lead to the worsening of all of our politicians.
Because basically, it allows you to get away with anything, right?
Teddy Kennedy can murder someone, and that's totally fine, so long as Teddy Kennedy votes the right way.
Bill Clinton can molest the hell, totally fine, so long as he votes the way, the right way.
Donald Trump will be the right way on abortion for the right.
Therefore, who cares whether he was saying that he could grab women by the P word, and then there were allegations of sexual assault by a number of women, some of whom were underage, right?
All of this goes by the wayside.
I hate this stuff.
I hate it.
The reason I hate it is because in the end, the American people are going to have to decide what kind of people we are.
Are we the kinds of people who care so much about the policy and so little about the character of our politicians that we are willing to elect the worst people in America just to defeat the other side?
Or are we going to have to get together and collectively bargain together against our own immorality?
Because what we have here is a basic classic prisoner's dilemma.
I've talked about game theory on the program before.
A prisoner's dilemma is essentially a situation in which your dominant strategy is to do the worst possible thing.
So, to elucidate what a prisoner's dilemma is for purposes of this discussion, think of two guys.
It's the movie L.A.
Confidential, starring Kevin Spacey, and in that movie, they capture two suspects, they put them in separate rooms, and then they tell each suspect, if you rat on the other guy, then we will let you off.
But if you do not rat, and the other guy rats you out, you're gonna get the max sentence.
If you both rat on each other, then you're going to get somewhere in the midway, right?
You're gonna get, instead of a 10-year sentence, you'll both get a five-year sentence.
So the best solution for these guys would be to not testify to anything, right?
The best solution would be for them to keep their mouths shut because then they'd be released.
The second best solution for both of them is if they testified the other guy did something wrong, right?
So if they both testified the other guy did something wrong, that's the best possible solution because if you say the other guy did something wrong, you get out and the other guy goes to jail, right?
Well, the problem is, unless you really, really trust the other guy, you're both gonna cheat.
You're both gonna say the other guy did something wrong, you're gonna tell on each other, and you're both gonna go to jail.
That's what's happening here with regard to bad people who are politicians.
Right?
The right doesn't trust the left.
Rightly so.
We don't trust that the left is gonna uphold any sort of moral standard with regard to their candidates.
We look at all of these politicians that they've supported, despite how disgusting they are, and we say, well, if you're not gonna support, if you're not gonna withdraw support from politicians who do disgusting things, why should we?
Why should we hamper ourselves by handing you an Alabama Senate seat by not supporting somebody like Roy Moore?
This is immoral logic because there's an actual moral... The difference between a normal prisoner's dilemma and this is that there's an actual moral imperative for people to come out against sexual assault.
That does not exist in a normal prisoner's dilemma situation.
But you can see why everyone is falling into this trap, right and left.
The left looks at the right, they say, you supported Trump, why shouldn't we support Clinton?
The right looks at the left and says, you supported Clinton, why shouldn't we support Trump?
Each looks at the other and they say, you guys support bad guys, why shouldn't we support bad guys?
And so we all end up supporting bad guys.
We need to have a bargain with one another as Americans.
Everyone needs to say, I am not going to support bad people.
Now, here are the allegations about Roy Moore.
The easy way out for people on the right has been over the past 48 hours to basically say, well, it's not been proven.
One of the problems with sexual assault allegations is it's very difficult to prove them, right?
Particularly 40 years after the fact.
If you believe Juanita Broderick, but you don't believe Leigh Corfman, you need to ask yourself why.
Does it have something to do with politics?
Or is there something more credible about Juanita Broderick than Leigh Corfman?
I don't think there really is.
I think that Leigh Corfman seems relatively credible.
And again, You know, one of the questions here is going to be, does this fall apart over time?
Does the story fall apart over time?
You know, Roy Moore denies the allegations, but you have to judge for yourself.
And I think that we all have to be intellectually honest.
Do you doubt the story or do you doubt the story for political purposes?
Do you doubt that the story is true or do you doubt it because you want to vote for Roy Moore or because you want to support Roy Moore?
Here's the allegation.
On Thursday, The Washington Post dropped a bombshell report on Alabama Senate Republican nominee Roy Moore.
They allege he engaged in a sexual assault of a 14-year-old and that he solicited multiple other underage women some four decades ago.
So according to the Post Report, this is over at Daily Wire, in 1979, Moore, then 32 years old, allegedly met a 14-year-old girl named Leigh Corfman outside a courtroom.
He asked for her phone number, picked her up at her home, took her to his home, where he, quote, took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes.
He touched her over her bra and underpants, she said, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.
After that, she asked him to take her home, and he complied.
Okay, now, there's...
That would be just one allegation, but there are multiple allegations of Moore propositioning women who are very, very young.
Three other women between the ages of 16 and 18 say Moore propositioned them during that same period.
The Post adds that none of the women say that Moore actually forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact, so it is slightly different than this most egregious allegation.
According to the Post, Wendy Miller says she was 14 and working as a Santa's helper at the Gadsden Mall when Moore first approached her.
16 when he asked her on dates, which her mother forbade.
Debbie Wesson-Gibson says she was 17 when Moore spoke to her high school civics class and asked her out on the first of several dates that did not progress beyond kissing.
Gloria Thacker Deason said she was an 18-year-old cheerleader when Moore began taking her on dates that included bottles of Matias Rose wine.
The legal drinking age in Alabama was 19.
The last one, you see the Washington Post trying to stretch a little bit.
You know, a 32-year-old guy dating an 18-year-old girl is not my cup of tea.
But, suggesting that the real wrongdoing is that she drank.
Okay, underage drinking is a thing in the United States.
The idea that 18-year-olds don't drink is just silly.
In any case, you know, approaching 14-year-olds for dates?
And 16-year-olds for dates?
And 17-year-olds for dates when you're 32 years old?
Yuck.
Yuck.
So Moore denies the allegations.
Korfman, by the way, voted for President Trump in 2016.
She says she did not come out earlier on this story because she is thrice divorced and has children and was afraid that her story would be doubted.
So a lot of people on the right are saying this looks like a coordinated hit.
There's one month out from an election and Roy Moore suddenly is being hit with these charges.
It looks like an oppo dump.
Why are all these women coming out now?
Now, what the Post says is, as soon as we started talking to these women separately, we went down to start reporting on this race.
This is what the Post says in the article.
We started reporting on the race.
We were ignoring it because it wasn't that important.
It's an Alabama Senate race.
The Republican always wins.
But we decided to go down and report on it.
And when we did, there were these rumors about Roy Moore doing all these things.
We went and we reached out to all of these women.
They all spoke on the record.
They all gave their names and they all told similar stories.
So that adds some credibility to these particular allegations.
So the question becomes, number one, whether people should support more, and the second question becomes whether more should be moved off the ballot involuntarily.
It's very difficult to get more removed from the ballot.
If you do that, you can't replace them with anybody else.
There's a sore loser law in Alabama that makes it nearly impossible for the Alabama Republican Party to replace them on the ballot.
Now you remember, back all the way to 2002, The Democrats had a similar problem with a senator named Bob Torricelli, Bob the Torch Torricelli.
He was involved in corruption, and the New Jersey Democrats sued to have him removed from the ballot and replaced on the ballot by someone else.
And the court ruled that was okay, which was a violation of the law, and a lot of Republicans were very upset about it.
Well, this is a similar sort of situation.
So Roy Moore is denying all of this.
Here is his statement.
He says, The Judge Roy Moore campaign for U.S.
Senate issued a statement responding to yet another baseless political attack by the Washington Post, a paper that has endorsed Judge Moore's opponent.
Moore campaign chair Bill Armistead released the following statement on Thursday afternoon, quote, Judge Roy Moore has endured the most outlandish attacks on any candidate in the modern political arena, but this story in today's Washington Post alleging sexual impropriety takes the cake.
National liberal organizations know their chosen candidate Doug Jones is in a death spiral and this is their last ditch Hail Mary, so he's relying on the media bias charge.
Again, that carries some weight.
Right, you do have to say that the media bias charge carries some weight when the media, you know, the same Washington Post way back when, I believe it was actually Newsweek way back when, was quashing Lewinsky stuff.
But, you know, the Washington Post is against Roy Moore, but that's not changed the credibility of the accusers, right?
The accusers are named again.
That story, by the way, is still out there.
The Post has not retracted that story.
the judge's opponent, and for months they've engaged in a systematic campaign to distort the truth about the judge's record and career and derail his campaign.
In fact, just two days ago, the Foundation for Moral Law sent a retraction demand to the Post for the false stories they wrote about the judge's work and compensation, but apparently there is no end to what the Post will allege.
That story, by the way, is still out there.
The Post has not retracted that story.
That story says that Roy Moore took about $200,000 from the Foundation for Moral Law for doing very little work.
And the statement continues, The judge has been married to Kayla for nearly 33 years, has four children and five grandchildren.
He has been a candidate in four hotly contested statewide political contests, twice as a gubernatorial candidate, twice as a candidate for chief justice.
He's been a three-time candidate for local office.
He's been a national figure in two groundbreaking judicial fights over religious liberty and traditional marriage.
After 40 years of public service, if any of these allegations were true, they would have been made public long before now.
Okay, now, that's not an argument I particularly like.
The argument that we would have known about this earlier?
Because we now know that there are allegations that are surfacing about a wide variety of public figures that nobody knew earlier.
Or if they did, they were rumored but never confirmed, right?
Harvey Weinstein was doing this crap for 20 years and we're finding about it now.
Denny Hastert was the Speaker of the House for the Republicans for several years.
Denny Hastert, it turns out, was molesting high school boys.
So this idea that it didn't come out for decades, therefore it must not be true, that's a little bit of weak tea.
It's a little bit of weak tea.
They say that the garbage is the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation.
You know, the question is whether Roy Moore is going to actually file a lawsuit.
Even if he files a lawsuit, no guarantee that the lawsuit is either going to succeed or that it proves that Roy Moore is innocent of the charges.
You can file a lawsuit and then later drop the lawsuit, right, without being countersued, presumably.
President Trump has sounded off.
According to the press secretary, she says that Trump said, quote, he believes if allegations are true, he will do the right thing and step aside.
He's calling for more to step aside if the allegations are true.
But that statement, if the allegations are true, is a pretty dicey one because, again, there's no way for anyone to confirm whether the allegations are true except based on the word of the person who's talking about this.
So, I know there are a lot of people who are thinking about, you know, why wouldn't these women come forward earlier?
Why did they keep silent for so long?
And I think that it is important to read some of the accounts of women who didn't come forward earlier.
I'm just trying to be intellectually honest as I can be about this because I don't know and you don't know.
I don't know whether it's true and you don't know whether it's true.
All we can do is go based on the allegations that are made by four different named women in the Washington Post report and somewhat substantiated by supposedly about 30 witnesses, right?
So, you know, people who were talked to at the time.
I'm going to get to why I think it's important to read the accounts of women who have kept silent for a long time about people who molested them in just a second.
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Okay, so...
There's what I think is kind of a heartbreaking account from Nancy French.
Nancy French is friendly with the Daily Wire.
She's the wife of David French, with whom I'm pretty good friends.
And Nancy has ghostwritten for a wide variety of right-wing public figures, ranging from David Clark to Sarah Palin.
And here is what she said.
is what she said.
She says,
When we got to my house, I was shocked that he walked me inside my dark house, even more surprised when he lingered in conversation, and thunderstruck when he kissed me right on the lips.
At 12 years old, I swooned over my good luck.
He picked me out of all the girls at church, but the relationship, especially after he moved on, reset my moral compass.
If all the church conversation about morality and sexual purity was a lie, What else was fake?
Now that the family of God felt incestuous, I rejected the church and myself.
Didn't I want the preacher's attention?
Didn't I cause this?
When I careened from faith, I made a series of poor romantic decisions that later almost cost me my life.
Still, I couldn't very well criticize the church because I was an utter emotional mess.
On Thursday, all of this came back to me after I read one sentence in the Washington The article was about allegations that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore sexually touched a teenager when he was in his 30s.
A sentence from Leigh Corfman, who was 14 at the time, jumped out at me.
quote, "I felt responsible," she said.
"I swallowed back tears as I read the rest.
I felt like I had done something bad, and it kind of set the course for me doing other things that were bad.
After her life spiraled with drinking drugs boyfriends, she attempted suicide two years later, In fact, she didn't come forward earlier because she worried that her three divorces and poor financial history would make people doubt her story.
This is one of the reasons why women don't come forward sooner, is because they do carry guilt when there are situations like this.
And sexual predators, this is well known, whether or not Roy Moore is one, is still questioned, you know, but...
It is true, sexual predators tend to target girls who are in a vulnerable state.
They tend to target girls who they can shed some sort of shadow on their credibility, if push had come to shove.
They'll target girls who are fragile emotionally, and seen as unstable, and then if the girl says something, they'll say that it was fabricated.
This is very well known, that this is something that older male sexual predators will do.
Okay, with all of this said, I'm going to leave it up to you.
When I say I'm going to leave it up to you, I'm going to say, here's my perspective, and then I'm going to say that you can have your own perspective.
I believe that these allegations are credible.
I believe the allegations are credible because this woman went on the record, and because there are multiple women who allege that Roy Moore reached out to them as teenagers.
And that he went as far as they would allow them to go, and then stopped when they said no.
Right?
The allegations seem consistent to me, and they seem credible to me.
With that said, would I support Roy Moore?
The answer is no, but that was not my line for supporting Roy Moore.
I think that Roy Moore has said things that would lead me not to support him anyway.
Now, there is a complex calculus that goes on, unfortunately, in politics with regard to the impact of particular races.
We are willing to accept more bad behavior from a presidential candidate because the presidency is so important.
We're willing to accept bad behavior from Senate candidates because the Senate is so important.
If this guy were running for dog catcher, would you vote for him?
The answer is no.
If this guy were running for Congress, would you vote for him?
The answer is probably no.
But you have to decide whether you believe the allegations are credible, and then you have to take a good hard look inside yourself and determine whether you think the allegations are credible, but you're looking the other way because you think that it is more important to elect someone who has done bad things, but may implement an agenda that you like.
If that's the case, then we really have reached the point where character means nothing in American politics, like nothing.
And you're seeing this, right?
You're seeing this.
The Alabama State Auditor, a guy named Jim Ziegler, here's what he said, quote, Take the Bible.
Zechariah and Elizabeth, for instance.
Zechariah was extremely old to Mary Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist.
Also take Joseph and Mary.
Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter.
They became parents of Jesus.
First of all, I think it's kind of a misread.
From what I understand about the New Testament, the impression is that it was God who impregnated Mary, not Joseph.
But in any case, and also I'm not sure where it says that Mary was a young teenager when all of this happened.
It says that she was a Nara.
It said she was a young girl, but Nara can mean a 20-year-old.
In any case, there are a bunch of people who rushed to Roy Moore's defense Absolutely nonsense.
Of course you can be a victim 40 years later.
Henry, he said, "If they believe this man is predatory about the women, they are guilty of allowing him to exist for 40 years.
I think someone should prosecute and go after them.
You can't be a victim 40 years later, in my opinion." Absolute nonsense.
Of course you can be a victim 40 years later.
And then you're seeing the people who are the most invested in Moore's victory speaking out on behalf of Roy Moore.
So Steve Bannon, who tried to take credit for Roy Moore winning the primaries against Luther Strange.
Again, I don't think Bannon picked Moore.
I don't think Bannon's support of Moore actually pushed Moore to victory.
But Bannon has now tied himself to Moore's leg.
Now he's making the case in the same way that he made the case with regard to Donald Trump and the p-word tape, he's now making the case with regard to Roy Moore that it's the media that we have to oppose here.
The media report on alleged bad behavior, and we can't say that the bad behavior is bad.
We have to hit the media instead.
And this does draw a distinction here, right?
And this is the same distinction I made a little bit during the campaign, and that is, if you vote for Roy Moore while acknowledging that these allegations are credible, You know, I have doubts about whether that is good voting logic, but I think that it is possible for you to say I'm voting for a bad man to stop a pro-abortion zealot from entering Congress, for example.
I think that's possible.
It's not a logic I hold, because I think the character of our public servants matters, but I think that you can hold two thoughts at once, that somebody's a bad person and that you voted for them because of the lesser of two evils, right?
This is sort of the Trump argument.
But what you're seeing from some people on the right is they're actually attempting to minimize what Moore's allegations were, right?
They're not actually saying the allegations aren't true.
They're saying even if they are true, it's not a big deal.
This is a step even beyond voting for Moore.
This is excusing evil behavior if you believe the allegations are true.
Here's Steve Bannon basically doing that.
But it's interesting, the Bezos-Amazon-Washington post that dropped that dime on Donald Trump is the same Bezos-Amazon-Washington post that dropped the dime this afternoon on Judge Roy Moore.
Now is that a coincidence?
That's what I mean when I say opposition party, right?
It's purely part of the apparatus of the Democratic Party.
They don't make any bones about it.
Okay, this is quite disgusting.
The Washington Post is a major newspaper.
They run reports on lots of people.
It was the Washington Post that was doing a huge amount of research, actually, on Hillary's emails.
And despite all the rips on the mainstream media, and I'll get to the mainstream media in just a second and their hypocrisy, but for him to suggest that it's the Washington Post, it's just a hit job, dismiss the allegations out of hand because you don't like the allegations.
Steve is too smart for this, but Steve is just manipulative enough for this.
I know Steve really well.
Steve's smart, and him doing the Washington Post-Amazon-Bezos thing is just...
Steve knows better than this, but Steve is doing it because obviously Steve wants to be seen as the head of this Trumpist movement, and therefore he feels like he has to stand by Roy Moore.
Breitbart is out in full-scale defense.
This is not a shock to me.
I was there when Breitbart was out in full-scale defense of Donald Trump's P-word tape.
I remember it.
You were there.
You remember it.
I was there when they threw their own reporter under the bus after Donald Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed her by the arm hard enough to bruise her and then lied about it publicly.
I was there for all of that.
So it's no surprise to me that Breitbart has made itself into an arm of the Moore campaign and is now basically doing PR for Moore on this story.
Joel Pollack, who's an editor over there, and I know Joel pretty well, Joel was on MSNBC last night.
Again, these are not defenses that moral people should be making.
What Joel's about to say here is not a defense that a moral person should make.
The defenses to Moore should be one, these allegations are not credible, and here's why I think the allegations are not credible.
That would be the only real moral defense of this.
And then two would be, maybe he's guilty of all of this, but it's politics, everybody's dirty.
I don't like that defense.
I think it's gross.
I don't agree with it.
I think that we all should have basic standards for our public servants.
But that would at least be an intellectually honest argument.
Joel's about to make a very intellectually dishonest argument, I think an immoral argument here.
The 16-year-old and the 18-year-old have no business in that story because those are women of legal age of consent.
But that's not what the article said.
The article was talking about teenagers.
I mean, you can argue that maybe they shouldn't be writing about teenagers, but the point is it's not inaccurate.
My point is that the Post has successfully put a narrative out, at least on MSNBC and in other places, that there's this pattern of teenagers.
There's really, as far as we know, the facts could come out differently, but as far as we know, there's only one relationship that's been alleged that's problematic.
Okay, uh, no.
If you're making out with a 16-year-old at 33, that's a problem.
That's a problem.
Joel has daughters.
He knows better than this.
And if you're allowing yourself to become the shill of a campaign to the point where, you know, you're saying stuff about a guy on your own side you would never say about anyone on the other side, again, flip the script for a second.
If there are allegations that Bill Clinton had molested a 14-year-old and that he was asking out 16-year-olds and making out with them when he was 33, and an assistant DA, which is what Roy Moore was at the time, what do you think the right would be doing?
All I'm asking here is a little intellectual consistency.
Not because I want a Democrat to take the seat in Alabama.
God forbid.
I don't want a Democrat to take the seat in Alabama.
My preferred solution here would be a write-in candidacy from somebody to win that seat, which is quite possible.
Lisa Murkowski just did it in Alaska.
There's no reason you couldn't have a write-in candidacy for someone who's not Judge Moore.
But one of the things that I think is really gross is the capacity.
It's been amazing to me.
the capacity, the human capacity to rewrite history and fact in order to avoid cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing to me.
It's an amazing thing to me.
The fact that there are so many people who are willing to rewrite in their own heads the facts of a given situation so they don't have to feel bad about what they're doing, it is, to me, the number one problem with human beings just as a species.
Our biggest problem is that we are unwilling to live with cognitive dissonance.
We are unwilling to live with the fact that some of the people we may like politically are bad people or do bad things.
And so instead, what we end up doing is throwing all morals under the bus in order to protect people who we think are actually doing bad things.
Again, Joel making the case that a 33-year-old making out with a 16-year-old girl is not a problem is pretty amazing.
It's pretty amazing.
And pretty disgusting.
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Okay, so, none of this is to ignore the hypocrisy of the left when it comes to these sorts of sexual assault and sexual harassment allegations.
Bernie Sanders, for example, he comes forward, he says that Judge Moore should step aside.
I first have to ask you about this revelation about a man who could be your colleague in a matter of weeks, whether you think the Republican Party should rescind his nomination?
Let us hope that he will not be my colleague or anybody else's colleague.
You know, I think you have heard, Chris, that there are a number of Republicans who are saying that at this particular time, given these horrific charges against Mr. Moore, that it would be appropriate for him to step aside.
And again, it's a, you know, I may not, I may agree with Bernie Sanders, but where was Bernie Sanders on Bill Clinton?
Was he arguing for him to step aside?
And this is the logic that so many people are using today.
They're using this logic, I use this logic too, with regard to Bob Menendez saying, you know, it would be nice if the media presented, you know, one-tenth The effort on Bob Menendez that they will on Roy Moore.
Now people are saying, well, yeah, but they've got reporters at Bob Menendez's hearing, right?
They've got Politico and CNN has covered it.
It's true, but the New York Times is a very large newspaper, okay?
There are a lot of pages in that newspaper.
Is Bob Menendez on page one or is he on page A11?
You can cover stuff and still bury it.
Okay, so Newsbusters has done a pretty good study on this, and here's what they found yesterday, okay?
This is from September 6th to November 10th.
Okay, from 9-6 to 11-10.
Okay, they've covered, here are all the shows and how they have covered Bob Menendez, okay?
ABC's Good Morning America, again, this is over a month of coverage.
Actually, it's more than two months of coverage.
In two months of coverage, ABC's Good Morning America had mentioned it for a combined one minute, 48 seconds.
CBS This Morning, 22 seconds.
NBC's Today, zero.
ABC's World News Tonight, zero.
CBS This Morning, zero.
NBC Nightly News, zero.
Roy Moore, this is the first 24 hours.
Good Morning America, 7 minutes.
CBS This Morning, 5 minutes, 22 seconds.
NBC Today, 4 minutes, 22 seconds.
ABC World News Tonight, 2 minutes, 48 seconds.
CBS This Morning, 2 minutes, 46 seconds.
NBC Nightly News, 2 minutes, 38 seconds.
If you want to know why everybody is lowering their standards, it's because nobody has any standards.
If the media were consistent about this stuff, if the media said that corrupt people should resign, then everybody would be on the same page.
But it's very difficult for you to say that people of the other guy's party should resign, but people of my own party should remain.
That's a very difficult allegation to make.
Again, another one of the people who's been doing this is Stephen Colbert.
Stephen Colbert goes after, as you'll see, both Donald Trump and Roy Moore in this particular clip.
Besides the 14-year-old girl, the Post talked to three other women who say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18, and he was in his early 30s.
My God!
These accusations are so damning, voters are either going to force him off the ballot or make him president.
Okay, well, you know, that's not a Clinton joke, that's a Trump joke, obviously.
It's a Trump joke.
Now, I would just like to point out, Stephen Colbert has had David Letterman on his show multiple times.
David Letterman was apparently sexually harassing the help over at the late show.
That was the allegation, anyway.
So, and he had, I guess there was a settlement out of court and all the rest of it.
Which brings us to Hollywood, right?
We're going to get to Hollywood in just a second, where the sexual allegations are flying fast and furious.
And yet, you're seeing that this stuff was allowed to go on in Hollywood and everybody knew about it for 40 years and nobody did anything about it.
I do want to point out another area of media hypocrisy, and that is really media malpractice.
Said that I think Sean Hannity's coverage of President Trump has been rather sycophantic, but it was very unfair.
Last night, the entire left media jumped on Sean, suggesting that Sean had defended child molestation.
Here's Chris Hayes on MSNBC, suggesting that Hannity defended child molestation.
Over the past month, Senate Republicans have made it something of an art form out of ignoring questions about Roy Moore's basic fitness for office.
A man who was removed twice from the Alabama Supreme Court for ethical reasons.
A man who believes that, quote, homosexual conduct should be illegal.
A man who once said Congressman Keith Ellison shouldn't be allowed in Congress because he is Muslim.
I anticipated a fake news attack.
I anticipated deny, deny, deny.
Washington Post is fake news.
What I did not anticipate was watching a bunch of conservatives today bend over backwards to defend molesting a child, and yet somehow that's apparently where we are.
I thought I'd lost my capacity for shock, but reading, like, these are just some of the statements from the local Alabama officials who are talking to Daniel Dale today at the Toronto Star about this behavior.
It was 40 years ago.
I really don't see the relevance of it.
She was 32.
She was supposedly 14.
She's not saying anything happened other than they kissed.
Other than being with an underage person, he really forced himself.
I know it's bad enough, but I don't know.
If he withdraws, it's five weeks to the election, that would concede to the Democrat.
There is no option to support Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee.
When you do that, you are supporting the entire Democrat party.
It's like, I felt, you were talking about this being profound.
It's profound in the sense that there's nothing that Roy Moore could do that is going to detach the party from him, it appears.
Okay, and then he went directly after Sean Hannity, suggesting that Hannity had personally defended child molestation.
That is not true.
Here's the actual clip of Sean Hannity talking about Roy Moore.
He did not say, there's a lot of crosstalk here, he did not say that it was a consensual encounter with a 14-year-old.
He was talking about consensual encounters with a 17 or 18-year-old.
He was apparently like 32, and he dated, one girl was 18, one girl was 17.
They never said he did, there was no sexual, there was kissing involved.
And then they're saying this one encounter with a 14- And it was consensual.
And consensual, that's true.
And there's, you know, I just- I mean, Sean is clearly not talking about the 14-year-old there.
So the media jumped on this.
Media Matters jumped on this.
They called for boycotts of Sean.
It just demonstrates how politicized all this stuff has become.
We should all be on the same page about this stuff happening, about how it's bad.
Right, and I think that the fact that we are not demonstrates how much politics has infused our lifeblood and poisoned the well, really poisoned the well.
Okay, so I want to talk about Louis C.K.
and the allegations against Louis C.K., but for that, you're going to have to go over to our website at dailywire.com and subscribe.
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So speaking of hypocrisy, the entire Hollywood infrastructure that spent years basically making excuses for everyone in Hollywood and ignoring it, but went after Donald Trump and is now going after Roy Moore, well, they got hit hard again yesterday.
Louis C.K., the allegations are, is that Louis C.K.
has a nasty habit of touching himself in inappropriate ways before unsuspecting women.
In 2002, Louis C.K., who, by the way, there's this, there's a sort of hot take online that you can't like Louis C.K.' 's comedy now that bad stuff has come out about him.
Louis C.K.
is freaking hilarious.
Okay, he's a really good comedian.
He's also a garbage human being, apparently.
Okay, so both things can be true at once.
We had a conversation in the hallway before the show about separating the art from the artist.
About whether you can still laugh at Bill Cosby's comedy from 1969, knowing what Bill Cosby did.
And I think the answer is, yes, you can still laugh at it, just don't give him your money.
Right, I think that you can still watch a Roman Polanski film.
You can still watch Knife in the Water and say it's a good movie.
And still say the guy who made it's a creep.
A guy is a rapist, right?
I mean, I think that you can do those things.
You don't have to, like, burn every Buffalo Bills tape you have from the 1980s because O.J.
Simpson killed his ex-wife.
I just think that it's important, just as a society, to recognize that.
Because otherwise, we'd start setting up these societal litmus tests that are very weird.
Like, you mentioned that you watched the Cosby Show.
I'm like, ooh, you must not care about date rape.
That's silly.
Okay, in any case...
CK apparently asked two female comedians in 2002 to come to his hotel room and then he proceeded to get naked and pleasure himself before them.
That was not his only time doing this.
He did it in 2003 to Abby Shachner apparently.
In 2005 to Rebecca Corey.
And this story from the New York Times resulted in the cancellation of the premiere of his new movie as well as Stephen Colbert's late night show appearance.
Apparently, in the new movie, there's a scene where Charlie Day, playing one of the characters, mimics publicly pleasuring himself, and in which characters appear to dismiss rumors of sexual predation.
This is really gross stuff.
And amazingly enough, you're seeing a lot of the Hollywood elites avoiding talking about it, for sure.
So you're seeing, like, Aziz Ansari apparently was asked directly about it.
He said, I have no comment.
How do you not have comment?
How is this tough?
Like, legitimately, how is this tough?
And again, these are allegations.
Let's say that Louis C.K.
had come out and denied them.
The women are on the record talking about them.
Would you deny them?
Alright, let's talk about Kevin Spacey for just a second, okay?
Because the allegations about Roy Moore and Kevin Spacey are actually quite similar.
The allegation about Kevin Spacey was that he took a 14-year-old to a party and then brought him into the bedroom and tried to sexually molest him.
The allegation about Roy Moore is that he picked up a 14-year-old and brought her back to his house and tried to sexually molest her.
Right?
Those are the allegations.
And the allegation is, by the way, exactly the same in the sense that when the 14-year-old said to Spacey, stop, apparently Spacey stopped, and when the 14-year-old said to Roy Moore, stop, Roy Moore apparently stopped.
Now, some people are saying, well, Spacey didn't deny the allegations, Moore is.
This is, you know, it's true that that is a significant difference.
It is also true that if Kevin Spacey had denied it, would you believe it?
Would you believe it if Kevin Spacey had denied it?
Or would you say, probably happened?
Especially since the actor was willing to go on the record.
Again, I'm just pointing out here, folks, try to be intellectually honest with yourself.
That's how you know whether you are acting in accordance with your morality, is if you ask yourself these tough questions.
And I'm not telling you which way you have to come down.
I told you how I come down, what I think is the moral thing to do.
But if you choose differently, that's your problem, it's a free country.
But at least be honest about what you're doing.
Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, in the mailbag.
So, Things I like.
There's a movie out by Noah Baumbach, who is not my favorite director.
I really don't like his work very much.
But the Meyerowitz stories on Netflix, which is now getting all sorts of, it's getting rave reviews and also it's getting buried because Dustin Hoffman was accused of sexual harassment and he stars in the movie.
He was seen as somebody who would be up for an Oscar nomination probably for this.
The movie itself is not Any great shakes.
It's nothing where you watch it and you're like, I'm blown away by this film.
But it is such a wonderfully backhanded critique of New York liberal culture that it's pretty spectacular from that perspective.
Like when you watch it as a conservative, it's sort of conservative porn.
It's sort of like you're watching it and you're realizing that the – I don't know if Baumbach meant it this way.
Probably not.
But the whole thing is a brutal critique of New York Upper East Side Jewish liberalism.
And it's a very Jewish movie, obviously.
The Mayor, what story is meant to be that way?
But it really has nothing to do with Jews because these people don't have anything to do with Judaism.
They're just New York liberals.
Here is a little bit of the preview.
You know, if this place is a client, that's why we could get a table so last minute.
That's why they gave us this bigger table.
I imagine they'll send some complimentary stuff, too.
$55 for a steak?
We're known for their meat here.
$35 for a salmon?
You get the salmon to blow you for that price?
Are you Harold Meyerowitz's son, Matthew?
Yes.
Mrs. Danny, also Harold Meyerowitz's son.
I didn't realize he had two sons.
And a daughter.
Dad, will you be okay here?
It'll be nice to spend time with Dad.
You know, I didn't get a lot of time with him growing up.
Dad, what the...
They picture it as a comedy, but it really isn't a comedy as much as it is sort of a dramedy.
So basically the characters are, you know, Ben Stiller is the successful son who is not artistic.
So here's sort of the plot.
You can pause the trailer.
So here's the plot, basically.
Dustin Hoffman is an aging sculptor, and he's never created anything that really is meaningful or great, but he's sort of a minor artist.
And his sons are Adam Sandler, who is a former pianist who is unsuccessful and has been basically a househusband taking care of his kid.
And his other son is Ben Stiller.
They're half-brothers.
They've married, the Dustin Hoffman character has been married four separate times, I guess, in the movie.
Annulled once, three divorces.
And he is a jerk.
He's a jerk who sees himself as a genius.
He basically ignored Adam Sandler when Adam Sandler was a kid, but he was very warm to Ben Stiller.
Ben Stiller didn't turn out to be artistic, but he went out and made a lot of money.
Adam Sandler ended up being kind of a house husband.
And so the whole movie is sort of about their relationship with Dustin Hoffman.
What's fascinating about it is that it's meant to, I think the movie is trying to say that art is worth it, but there is one key speech that Adam Sandler gives where he basically says, I have to think that my dad was a genius because otherwise he's just a jackass, basically.
And it does demonstrate, I think, in a backhanded way how the artistic community thinks about itself.
It's okay to be a bad person so long as you create good art.
I think embedded in here is one of the messages that is plaguing Hollywood right now.
That Hollywood actually believes that if you make good art, that justifies you being an awful human being.
And Dustin Hoffman sort of gets away with it in the film, being an awful human being.
But that's sort of the problem.
And I'm not sure Baumbach meant to say that, but if he didn't, he should have, because I think it's an important message.
Okay, things I hate.
So, I mean, the entire news cycle would be the thing I hate today.
The other thing that I hate is that Hillary Clinton is trying to claim that she and her movement are now responsible.
The fever in America has broken.
And now, Americans are finally coming back to their senses.
You know, I think the fever is finally breaking.
I think that Americans, as we saw last night, are saying, you know what?
We really like our health care.
We don't like hatred and bigotry.
And we don't want to get shot wherever we go in our country.
God, she's so terrible.
Okay, the hatred and bigotry is what's ending now, and we don't want to be shot wherever we go.
I mean, I can't imagine why.
I can't imagine why we didn't elect this woman president.
What a hereton.
The idea that anyone wants to be shot wherever they go, that's why we own guns, it's just asinine.
The idea that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just disgusting and asinine.
The fever's not going to break because everyone has a fever, okay?
The reason everyone has a fever is because our politics have taken over our morality, and Hillary Clinton is one of the main drivers in that.
Okay, time for the mailbag.
Calvin says, hey Ben, I'm a huge fan of yours, but I live in Australia.
Would you ever consider coming here to speak?
Yeah, actually we've had some invitations from Australia.
Big travel like that to Australia, it always means that we have to bundle together a bunch of speeches, so we are working on that.
We're also working, as I say, on a trip to the UK at some point in the relatively near future.
Menachem says, hey Ben, do you believe that aliens and ghosts exist?
I think that there's a better shot that aliens exist than ghosts exist.
I don't believe in ghosts in the sense that I don't think that, like, that corporeal beings are wandering around the hallways of your house.
And I think that once you're dead, you're dead.
I don't think that you're coming back to talk to people, except maybe in dreams.
But the idea that you're wandering around attempting to communicate with the living world is not something I buy.
I think the spiritual world and the physical world are somewhat separate.
The idea that aliens exist, possible.
I mean, there are a lot of planets out there.
Would they be intelligent?
Not necessarily.
But I think it's... It's implausible to me that there are that many planets and that many stars and nowhere has a one-celled organism lived.
You know, that I find implausible.
Kathy says, Hey Ben, you've held very strong political opinion since you were young.
Has having children changed any of your earlier positions?
Not really, because I think I like the way I was raised.
I mean, I think that one of the things that, when you have kids, what tends to change your positions is you tend to get a little bit stricter on moral matters, but I grew up in an area that was strict on moral matters, and I grew up in a good situation, so I never felt the need to buck them.
I think a lot of people move from sort of libertarianism toward conservatism when they have kids.
I was already conservative socially, so there's no place for me to move.
Janie says, I'm working on a paper concerning judicial review.
I've always been enticed by your objections to judicial review.
I've heard your rudimentary arguments against it, but would like to dive a lot deeper into the issue.
What works or authors do you recommend besides Waldron?
If judicial review were abolished, would there then be a need for written constitution?
There'd be a need for a written constitution so that we would at least have a document around Richard Raleigh, right?
You still have to swear your oath to uphold the Constitution in every office.
Judicial Review would just not make the judiciary the final repository of judgment on Judicial Review.
There are a bunch of books on Judicial Review and the problems with it.
Bork has talked about it extensively in Tempting of America.
There are also... I'm trying to remember the name of the fellow who... Very, very famous book on Judicial Review.
I'll have to look it up and I'll get back to you.
I'm sorry.
Kyle says, when you run for president, will you ask Steven Crowder to be your running mate?
I'll ask Steven Crowder to be my lifting mate.
He seems like that's more his thing.
Cedric says, hey Ben, do you also ship the Magnificent Leftist Tears tumbler abroad to Europe?
I don't know guys, do we?
I do not know the answer to that, so I'll have to find that out.
Rowan says, Dear Ben, the government has to provide essential services like police and fire protection.
Yet even with a flat tax, the richest taxpayers still pay much more in absolute dollars than the poorest taxpayers.
In other words, the rich are paying for the poorest police and fire services.
Why then is it any different if taxes are used to provide health care?
Well, I mean, it's different because the role of the government is different.
If you're asking why a flat tax is better than a progressive tax, it's because percentages are still proportionate.
And the idea of proportionality is still better than non-proportionality.
As far as what services are used, these are two separate questions.
The veracity of a flat tax versus What the tax dollars should be used for are two separate questions.
I don't think tax dollars should be used for healthcare, because in the end, your healthcare is individually your responsibility, whereas fire and police protection are in the end communal responsibilities, since fire can jump home to home, and because crime has communal effect.
Okay, Sarah says, hey Ben, you've advertised your ability to better my life via subscription to the Daily Wire.
Alright, so I'm an annual subscriber and a current student at UCLA, and I cannot get a spot to listen to you come speak next week.
Can I cash in on your offer to better my life by finding me an extra seat to attend?
Email me, Sarah, and I will do my best.
Well, I think that, first of all, I think that a lot of what Trump says on Twitter is really dumb.
by her SJW-ish friends at school and became anti-Trump without good reason other than how he handles himself on Twitter.
How do I go about positively persuading her to conservative ideas and red-pilling her without sounding condescending?
Well, I think that, first of all, I think that a lot of what Trump says on Twitter is really dumb.
I mean, this has been a thing that I've been saying for years now.
I think that you can uphold conservative principles without having to defend everything Trump does.
This is a big mistake I think people make.
So, don't let that be the hill you die on, in other words.
Don't die on the hill of Trump's Twitter is great.
That seems to be a bad hill to die on politically.
Hi Ben, I have heard your opinion on abortion numerous times as an avid listener.
My question is what is your opinion on the morning after pill?
I'm truly curious and appreciate your opinion.
So my opinion on the morning after pill is that the morning after pill is an abortion pill.
Again, once a human life has been conceived, meaning that the egg has been fertilized, then you are talking about the destruction of that Incipient human life.
And that is a problem to me.
Thanks.
No, I don't believe that government ought to be able to bargain on my behalf against my employer.
It is my job to bargain on my behalf against my employer.
limited government.
Do you believe in the government having labor laws such as a standard 40-hour workweek?
Thanks.
No, I don't believe the government ought to be able to bargain on my behalf against my employer.
It is my job to bargain on my behalf against my employer.
I am for private sector unions that do just this.
I am for private sector unions that do just this.
I am not for public sector unions that take advantage of tax dollars or legislation that restricts my right to contract with someone freely.
By the way, I do have an answer from our producers now.
We do in fact ship the tumblers overseas.
So if you're in Europe, feel free to subscribe and get the tumbler.
Mason says...
One passage of the Bible that has always interested me is the story of the Tower of Babel, which obviously comes right after the story of Noah.
I've always struggled with this passage because I don't see what would be wrong with the people building a city and a great tower.
I was wondering if you could elaborate on the meaning of this passage.
Sure.
So I actually was planning on doing this next week, but I may as well do it now.
The basic idea of the Tower of Babel is that it's communitarianism at its worst.
So the idea of the Tower of Babel is that they're not building the tower to better the lives of the inhabitants.
They're not building the tower in order to do anything useful.
It specifically says they're building a tower in order to challenge God.
In other words, the idea is that we are going to build these massive edifices to demonstrate the capacity of humans as a community to build amazing things.
And the Midrash, you know, a lot of the commentaries on the Torah, They talk about the idea that if a human being, the tower was so great, that if a human being would die in the building of the tower, they would just take the body and stack it into the tower.
And then we would stop to bury the guy.
The idea here is that this is much more like a fascist regime.
That it's a fascist regime that directs all of the communal labor toward the creation of these massive monuments, not toward the betterment of individuals' lives, not toward the betterment of family situations, but instead a community directed not toward the betterment of individuals with value, but directed instead
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