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Nov. 14, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

52:17

Moore Comes Unmoored | Ep. 417

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	The Roy Moore campaign is on the rails after another accuser emerges.
	Plus, the left finally acknowledged that Bill Clinton is probably a rapist, but they don't seem to acknowledge just why they ignored it in the first place.
	We'll discuss all of it.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	OK, so the latest news is that Senate Republican contender from Alabama, Roy Moore, was hit with another allegation yesterday, a very credible allegation from a woman who is now 55 years old.
	She says when she was 16 years old, Roy Moore essentially tried to rape her.
	We'll talk about that, but we will also talk about this op-ed from the New York Times that truly is astonishing and I think shows just why the Evil people in politics are going to continue to gain credibility and actually gain in the public consciousness as opposed to losing the public consciousness.
	It's an article from the New York Times that's truly astonishing today.
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	Okay, so I want to start with this article from the New York Times.
	I'll get to the allegations against Roy Moore in just a second, but first I want to give you the background because a lot of people on the left have been wondering, why is it that so many people on the right, why is it that so many people on the right are constantly You know, making excuses for bad behavior on their own side.
	This seemed like a question that was being asked a lot during the last election cycle.
	I asked it too.
	I said, you know, we were the party that said the character mattered.
	We were the party that suggested that the president of the United States should not be involved in sexual misconduct.
	And now we're nominating Donald Trump.
	And I thought that was an open, honest question.
	But the reality is that many people on the right, as I discussed yesterday, are responding directly to the left embrace of Bill Clinton.
	The Bill Clinton years broke the country as far as the question is whether character matters in their politicians.
	There are always two perspectives on whether character matters in politicians.
	Going all the way back to the founding, there was the delegate version of representation and there was the sort of responsibility version of representation.
	So the delegate version of representation goes like something like this.
	The character of the person you elect doesn't matter so long as they do what you want.
	It doesn't matter if they're a good person.
	It doesn't matter if they're a smart person.
	So long as they are doing your bidding, you could elect a dog to basically hit a button in the Senate and you'd be just fine.
	This is the delegate model of representation.
	Then there's what the founders thought.
	Edmund Burke, philosopher John Stuart Mill thought this.
	That when you elect a representative, the whole point of having a representative government as opposed to a democratic government is that a democratic government is all about the idea that the people get to vote on every issue.
	A representative government is about the idea that you elect representatives so you can delegate to them the responsibility to do independent thinking, independent research, and come to their own conclusions.
	So that means you have to trust the character of the people that you actually elect.
	This is why there's an inscription on the White House from John Adams that says, may none but good and wise men sit in this house.
	Essentially.
	The idea that character was innately bound with good legislation was something the founders really believed and was part of American politics for centuries.
	That broke down during the Clinton years.
	Because during the Clinton years, there have been bad people who were president before.
	JFK was a bad guy.
	LBJ was a bad guy.
	There have been lots of people who were bad guys who were president before, but It had never been part of the public consciousness just how disgusting some of these politicians were.
	The press did not cover at all the allegations against JFK.
	Instead, they turned him into a white knight on a shining horse, or an iron shining knight on a white horse, or whatever the phrase is.
	And in any case, When Clinton came about and all the allegations started to break about what a disgusting person he was, the left came to his defense.
	And what the left says is everyone lies about sex.
	They said that the accusers were a bunch of, uh, they were sluts and nuts.
	Right?
	This was legitimately a phrase that was used.
	They were a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.
	This was one of the things that some of the Clinton defenders were saying.
	People like Nina Burleigh from Time Magazine.
	She was saying that she didn't care about Clinton's sexual peccadillos because she would be willing to offer the president oral sex so long as he kept abortion legal.
	So...
	This is a very lowbrow way of saying that it's the delegate model of representation.
	So long as he votes the way I want, it doesn't matter if the guy is a complete scumbag.
	Well, now, that logic has turned in on itself for the Democrats, because so many people on the right are basically saying the same thing now.
	They're basically saying, who cares how Roy Moore votes, right?
	This is the David Horowitz perspective.
	Or rather, who cares how Roy Moore acts?
	Who cares if he tried to rape a 14-year-old girl?
	Who cares if he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old?
	None of that matters, so long as he votes the right way on abortion.
	And the left is objecting to this, I think rightly so.
	So, now what is the left doing in response?
	Well, now the left is trying to rewrite history.
	They are trying to explain why they defended Bill Clinton, but they think that it's absolutely wrong to defend Roy Moore or Donald Trump when there are allegations against them.
	And so what they've decided to do, as their solution, is throw Bill Clinton under the bus, but defend their behavior at the time.
	So, there's a piece by Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times that is astonishing in its unconscious honesty about how the left viewed Bill Clinton.
	So I'm going to go through it because I think that this informs.
	You want to know why we are where we are in politics?
	It is because of things that happened when I was a child.
	It's because of the, it's because of the 1990s when the entire political left decided that character no longer counted.
	And then the right learned the lesson that if character no longer counted, it shouldn't count for anybody.
	So here is what Michelle Globerg writes.
	She says, on Friday evening, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes sent out a tweet that electrified online conservatives.
	Quote, as gross and cynical and hypocritical as the right's what about Bill Clinton stuff is, it's also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.
	Hayes' tweet inspired stories on Glenn Beck's The Blaze, Breitbart, and The Daily Caller, all apparently eager to use the Clinton scandals to derail discussions about Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, who's accused of sexually assaulting minors.
	Well, that's not accurate.
	It's not accurate that the right was talking about Bill Clinton during the Roy Moore stuff because they were trying to dismiss allegations against Roy Moore.
	I was one of the first people to say that Roy Moore should step out of the race.
	And I was mentioning Bill Clinton because I was pointing out the hypocrisy of the left in going after Roy Moore.
	I was saying that they should embrace a standard where they throw Bill Clinton overboard too, and Ted Kennedy, and JFK, and Harvey Milk, and all the people who are molesting, you know, young women.
	All these people should be thrown overboard by the left if they wish to remain consistent here.
	The left doesn't want to remain consistent, so they're going to accuse us of hypocrisy even if I'm not a hypocrite, even if I think that Roy Moore is guilty.
	In any case, Michelle Glover continues, despite the right's evident bad faith, I agree with Hayes.
	In this hashtag MeToo moment, when we're reassessing decades of maleness behavior and turning open secrets into exposés, we should look clearly at the credible evidence that Juanita Broderick told the truth when she accused Clinton of raping her.
	Slow clap for coming to the correct conclusion 25 years after the fact.
	Slow clap for that.
	Juanita Broderick came out with her allegations in like 1992, and she alleged that Bill Clinton took her into a room and forced himself on her and physically raped her, and that there was a dinner afterward that she attended where Hillary Clinton came up to her, patted her on the hand, and she said, meaning keep your mouth shut.
	The left, for two decades, has been ignoring Juanita Broderick and pretending that Juanita Broderick didn't exist.
	During the last election cycle, when the Trump campaign brought up Juanita Broderick, the media quashed interviews with Juanita Broderick.
	They said, this is old news, why would we cover this?
	Only now, when the election's over, and when they're trying to look to weaponize all sexual allegations against the right, do they finally admit that this stuff happened against Bill Clinton.
	It isn't complicated.
	Condemn rapists.
	Condemn sexual assaulters.
	She says, At the same time, and here's where you start getting the excuses, here's where you get the, yeah, sure, we crapped all over Juanita Broderick and Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky.
	Sure, we dumped heaps of garbage on them and destroyed their lives.
	Sure, we did all the things, but you know why we did that?
	We did that because of the right.
	Because the right was politicized.
	That's why we did it.
	She says, at the same time, looking back at the smear campaign against the Clintons shows we can't treat the feminist injunction to believe women as absolute.
	The believe women is in quotes in her piece.
	Okay, so the idea here is that the smear campaign against the Clintons means that you get to crap all over a bunch of credible allegations?
	The same exact logic.
	What's hilarious is this article is supposed to be kind of against Roy Moore.
	The exact same logic could be used for Roy Moore, right?
	The people who are defending Roy Moore today say that this is a smear campaign launched by the Washington Post and the left-wing media 30 days before an election in order to get Roy Moore.
	That's what they are alleging.
	So by her logic, the right should look at Roy Moore and say, well, maybe these accusers are full of it.
	I mean, after all, this is a smear campaign from the left.
	Obviously, they're trying to win the Senate seat.
	It's amazing.
	Amazing.
	Even at the same time, they're throwing Bill Clinton under the bus.
	And now they can throw Bill Clinton under the bus in complete safety.
	Hillary Clinton has lost the presidency.
	Bill Clinton is not the first lady.
	They can take his desiccated political corpse and throw it out the window of the train.
	No problem whatsoever.
	But even when they do that, they have to blame the right for it.
	They have to suggest that because the right was trying to smear Clinton, that meant that these women should not be believed.
	It's an incredible statement.
	It demonstrates full scale the immorality of the left on these particular issues.
	Really amazing stuff.
	Wait a second.
	It's easy to imagine Breitbart doing that?
	Wait a second.
	It's easy to imagine Breitbart doing that?
	It's easy to imagine Breitbart doing that?
	Okay, this is what the entire right accused the media of doing with Donald Trump.
	And Herman Cain.
	And Clarence Thomas.
	And a bunch of other Republican figures.
	And now it's the right-wing media that's going to militarize this?
	The Clinton years, this piece continues, in which epistemological warfare emerged as a key part of the Republican political arsenal, shows us why we should be wary of allegations that bubble up from the right-wing press.
	So, she starts off by saying, I believe Juanita Broderick, and then she dispenses eight paragraphs explaining why she shouldn't have believed Juanita Broderick.
	She says, at the time, the reactionary billionaire Richard Mellonscape was bankrolling the Arkansas Project.
	Which David Brock, the former right-wing journalist who played a major role in it, described as the multi-million dollar dirty tricks operation under the Clintons.
	Yeah, quote David Brock, the head of Media Matters, now a multi-million dollar dirty tricks operation against Republicans.
	Various figures in conservative media accused Bill Clinton of murder, drug running, and using state troopers as pimps.
	Brock alleges that right-wing figures funneled money to some of Clinton's accusers.
	Okay, does that mean that you can't believe the accusers?
	Because what she seems to be saying is you shouldn't believe them.
	So do you believe them or do you not believe them?
	Here's what she concludes.
	In this environment, it would have been absurd to take accusations of assault and harassment made against Clinton at face value.
	Really?
	Would it have been absurd to take Juanita Broderick at face value?
	Would it have been absurd to take Paula Jones at face value or Kathleen Willey at face value?
	When they made credible allegations of rape and sexual assault?
	Was that really that absurd?
	Because, no, it wasn't.
	No, it was not.
	Right, she says that Willie accused not only Bill Clinton of groping her and rubbing his erect penis on her and pushing her hand to his crotch, but accused the Clintons of having her husband and then her cat killed.
	Must we believe that too?
	The answer is no, you don't have to believe that allegation, but you have to disprove the other one.
	You have to at least, I thought that the idea behind Me Too is that we have to at least take seriously the other allegation.
	And then she dismisses the Paula Jones stuff.
	Even though Bill Clinton settled for hundreds of thousands of dollars out of court, she says that Paula Jones' claim must have been nonsense as well.
	And then she finishes this way, this is amazing, she says, Of the Clinton accusers, the one who haunts me is Broderick.
	The story she tells about Clinton recalls those we've heard about Weinstein.
	She claimed they had plans to meet up in a hotel coffee shop, but at the last minute he asked to come up to her hotel room instead where he raped her.
	Five witnesses said she confided in them about the assault right after it happened.
	It's true she denied the rape in an affidavit to Paula Jones' lawyers before changing her story when talking to federal investigators.
	But her explanation that she didn't want to go public but couldn't lie to the FBI makes sense.
	Put simply, I believe her.
	So, buried in this article about believing Juanita Broderick is the fact that she thinks Bill Clinton's a rapist.
	But most of the article is why it was okay not to believe Bill Clinton was a rapist when the allegations were made.
	Why?
	Because that would have helped the right.
	And she concludes this way, she says, It's fair to conclude that because of Broderick's allegations, Bill Clinton no longer has a place in decent society.
	Okay, if you think that, didn't he no longer have a place in decent society 25 years ago when he was running for president?
	Seems to me rapists didn't have a place in decent society in 1992 the same way they don't in 2017.
	Because we should remember, it's not simply partisan tribalism that led liberals to doubt her.
	Discerning what might be true in a blizzard of lies isn't easy, and the people who spread those lies don't get to claim the moral high ground.
	We should err on the side of believing women, but sometimes that belief will be used against us.
	Well, then you're not erring on the side of believing women, are you?
	I love that line.
	We should remember it's not simply partisan tribalism that led liberals to doubt her.
	It was simply partisan tribalism that led people to doubt Juanita Broderick.
	That's what the entire thing was about.
	There's no question that that is what the entire thing was about.
	And now they're accusing the right of the same thing with some degree of truth.
	With some degree of truth.
	But this started on the left and then it infected the right.
	That doesn't mean the infection on the right is okay.
	It isn't.
	It's disgusting.
	Okay, just because somebody, just because the left had political herpes and now the right has acquired political herpes does not make political herpes good.
	But to pretend that this is something that's unique on the right or the left now has the capacity to say their herpes have been cured at the same time they're defending their acquisition of herpes to begin with is disgusting.
	Before I go any further, we're going to talk about Roy Moore and what's happening with Roy Moore, who clearly needs to step down from this race.
	We'll talk about that in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Saucy.
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	Okay, so all of this leads up to the latest allegations about Roy Moore.
	And the left is just in stitches over this.
	The left is chortling over the wonder and glory of the Roy Moore allegations.
	And that is because the Roy Moore allegations are really bad.
	Okay, so we'll start with the less disturbing allegations.
	Ready for this?
	Here's the less disturbing allegation.
	According to the New Yorker, which has been doing good work on the Harvey Weinstein stuff, so before everybody goes, the New Yorker is just biased to the left, and that's why they're going after Roy Moore.
	They also broke all of the news about Harvey Weinstein.
	Here is what they say.
	They say that Roy Moore, in the early 80s, was a regular visitor to the local Gadsden Mall and he was banned from the mall.
	They say that, according to this columnist, He spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people, including a major political figure in the state, who told me they'd heard over the years that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teenage girls.
	Some say they heard this at the time, others in the years since.
	These people include five members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town, several people who hung out at the mall in the early 80s, and a number of former mall employees.
	The Moore campaign did not answer requests for comment.
	The stories that say that they've been heard for years have been swirling online for days.
	People are saying that he was banned from the Gadsden Mall and the YMCA for soliciting sex from young girls.
	Teresa Jones, the Deputy DA in Ottawa County, she told CNN last week it was common knowledge that Roy dated high school girls.
	Greg Legat is 59.
	He was from 1981 to 1985 an employee at a store that was in the Gadsden Mall.
	He said the mall was the place to be and he says he saw more there a few times even though it was his understanding that he had already been banned.
	He said it started around 1979.
	I know the ban was still in place when I got there.
	He recalled a Gadsden police officer named J.D.
	Thomas who worked security at the mall.
	He said, J.D.
	was a fixture there when I was working at the store.
	He really looked after the kids there.
	He was a good guy.
	He said, if you see Roy, let me know.
	He's banned from the mall.
	Okay, people being banned from the ball because they're trolling for teenage girls, that is not a good sign.
	And then it gets worse.
	So yesterday, there was a lot of talk right before, during our show, I told you about how Gloria Allred was going to be holding a press conference with an accuser.
	And I suggested that Gloria Allred's presence was an indicator that there may be a problem with the story, because Gloria Allred is a publicity hound.
	Then came the press conference.
	And the press conference was devastating.
	The press conference was devastating.
	So here is the press conference itself.
	The woman in this story is a woman in Beverly Young Nelson.
	She was 16 years old when the alleged attempted near-rape took place.
	And here she is describing what exactly happened to her and then-District Attorney Roy Moore.
	Instead of answering my questions, Mr. Moore reached over and began groping me and putting his hands on my breasts.
	I tried to open my car door to leave, but he reached over and he locked it so I could not get out.
	I tried fighting him off while yelling at him to stop.
	But instead of stopping, he began squeezing my neck, attempting to force my head onto his crotch.
	I continued to struggle.
	I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him.
	I was terrified.
	She was 16 years old at the time, and something that people should know is that she, like the first woman who accused Roy Moore of sexually molesting her when she was 14 years old, she's a Trump supporter as well.
	Like, everyone in Alabama's a Trump supporter, so that shouldn't come as any surprise to anybody.
	So, these allegations are very credible.
	She also said that she knew Roy Moore and she had proof that she knew Roy Moore.
	She said that she worked at a restaurant until 10 p.m.
	at night, and basically it was 10 p.m., she got off shift, her boyfriend couldn't pick her up, so Roy Moore offered to give her a ride home, brought her in a car around the back of the restaurant, and then attempted to force himself on her.
	She says that Roy Moore had frequented this restaurant a lot, and she said that he actually asked to sign her yearbook, that there came a point where she had gotten her yearbook, and Roy Moore specifically asked, can I sign your yearbook?
	And she said yes, and yesterday she actually pulled out the yearbook.
	And Roy Moore's signature appears in that yearbook.
	It looks just like his signature from today.
	Unless she went ahead and forged this for no apparent reason.
	It says, to a sweeter and more beautiful girl, I could not say Merry Christmas.
	So, making Christmas great again, Roy Moore.
	This is Christmas 1977, Love Roy Moore, D.A.
	So he actually signed it with his position, and then he signed it with the date, right, 12-22-77, and then it said Old Hickory House, right, so he even signed the location.
	Roy Moore's response to all of this was to suggest that all of this was basically, all of this was nonsense, that he didn't know her, There's a picture of her, by the way, you can see there on the bottom, you can see the picture of her from her high school yearbook.
	And, you know, she was, apparently she competed in beauty pageants and contests and such, and more used to come in and flirt with her, she says.
	Roy Moore responds to all of this.
	And here's Roy Moore's response.
	I want to make it perfectly clear.
	The people of Alabama know me.
	They know my character.
	They know what I've stood for in the political world for over 40 years.
	And I can tell you without hesitation, this is absolutely false.
	I never did what she said I did.
	I don't even know the woman.
	I don't know anything about her.
	I don't even know where the restaurant is or was.
	And if you look at This situation, you'll see that because I'm 11 points ahead, or 10 or 11 points ahead, this race being just 28 days off, that this is a political maneuver.
	Okay, so he's going to blame it on a political maneuver in exactly the same way that Michelle Goldberg tries to blame not believing the accusers, Juanita Broderick, on political maneuvering.
	So you can see, the exact mirror logic of the Clinton years is now being used by Roy Moore.
	And one of the things that's really, you know, Very difficult about this entire situation is that everyone, because they're looking at these allegations through the political lens, and it's impossible not to look at it through the political lens, they are now turning this into a battle between the establishment and the non-establishment.
	There's a report out today, the only major Republican who is not disassociated from Moore in the aftermath of those very credible allegations that were made by this woman yesterday.
	Literally, the only Republican who has not yet disassociated is Donald Trump himself.
	Trump is supposed to come back into town, I believe, today, and we'll see what he has to say.
	Apparently, according to Politico and sources around the president, he's actually tempted to support more in spite of all of this, which would not be surprising given what we know of President Trump's proclivities in terms of bucking the so-called establishment.
	Turning this into an establishment versus anti-establishment fight versus a don't support people who I can assume there are credible allegations of child molestation.
	That seems to me a wrong moral move, a very, very bad moral move.
	But again, it goes to the idea that everyone who doesn't support Roy Moore is basically a cuck establishmentarian who is willing to back down from the Clintons.
	And everybody who's willing to fight is willing to stand with Roy Moore because the left is just so evil and just so bad.
	You're a wimp if you don't stand with Roy Moore.
	So you can see this from Moore's coordinator in Alabama calling all of the Republicans lightweights who are saying that he should step down.
	You're telling the voters of Alabama, if you choose your senator, that we are going to try to nullify your vote, therefore you don't have constitutional right to vote in Alabama, because we are going to work our best to nullify your vote if you vote for Roy Moore.
	That's the message I get from that.
	I don't know how you perceive that, but to say if the voters of Alabama vote for Roy Moore, you're all wrong.
	And I know more than you do.
	Us Republican senators know more than you do.
	And we're going to nullify your vote through some kind of mechanism in the rules of the Senate.
	That's what we have from Senator Cory Gardner.
	That's kind of a breach of the Constitution that I don't think folks in Alabama will rest well with.
	Okay, so this is what it's going to turn into now.
	Now it's going to turn into, they're going to try to turn this into a battle between establishment and non-establishment over an issue that really has nothing to do with the establishment or non-establishment.
	Right?
	Good moral people should look at allegations and see whether they are credible or not.
	And the left has ignored this for 25 years and the right is beginning to ignore it now in response to the left.
	Like, Sean Trent from RealClearPolitics basically sums this up incredibly well.
	He says, if you don't understand the logic as to why so many of these people seem to be okay with what's going on with Roy Moore, why so many people seem to be backing away from all of this, you have to understand that this is all born of the Clinton years.
	He sums it up really well.
	He says, I don't think you can underestimate the degree to which many conservatives have this attitude.
	A, we fought a battle over whether character counts and got our asses handed to us, and B, liberal leaders always circle the wagons around their guys and ours always cave.
	I think that's exactly right.
	I think it's the logic a lot of people on the right are using.
	I think it's an immoral logic.
	I think that the left did not actually win that battle.
	I think the reason George W. Bush was elected president is because the left didn't win that battle.
	But I think that there are a lot of people on the right who believe that, and so they're going to continue down this path where only the real fighters are willing to stand up for child rapists or alleged child rapists.
	Okay, I'm going to continue along these lines and talk about whether this kind of misconception inside the Republican Party That being a policy hard-ass and being willing to go along with disgusting people are tied together because there seems to be this misconception that I think needs to be separated out.
	But I'm going to talk about that in just a second.
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	Okay, so...
	Another Moore defender was doing the same thing yesterday, basically suggesting that it's OK if Roy Moore has these accusations because, hey, I think that Obama did cocaine and people don't think Obama did.
	I mean, this seriously happened on television last night is Brandon Mosley.
	He writes for a site called Alabama Political Reporter.
	He said he believes Roy Moore.
	Here is his defense.
	If you go back and you don't elect anyone who's ever done anything wrong, we wouldn't have had Barack Obama.
	I think he did cocaine.
	Um, Bill Clinton supposedly smoked marijuana.
	Okay, what?
	Okay, so again, this sort of whataboutism is not good.
	But the left did it, and so does the right, and it's really not a positive development.
	And I think, again, that it's being tied to attitude.
	So why do I think that Trump is tempted not to throw Roy Moore under the bus?
	I think the reason he's tempted not to throw Roy Moore under the bus is it seems like the people who are most ardent about throwing Roy Moore under the bus are also the people who are anti-Tea Party and people who are anti-Trump.
	You know, the Jeff Flakes of the world.
	Jeff Flakes said he'd support a Democrat before he supported Roy Moore.
	No, the proper answer is you would support a write-in candidate before you would support Roy Moore or you would abstain from voting.
	That's the proper answer.
	Cory Gardner said, if Roy Moore wins, he should vote to be expelled.
	The Senate should vote to expel him.
	But the lead political figures who have been speaking out on this are the so-called cuck people, right?
	The people who are weak-kneed.
	There's been this tie.
	You have to understand, the entire Trump movement is not built on policy.
	It is built on attitude.
	And the attitude is always F you to the left.
	Okay, that's always the attitude.
	The attitude is a giant middle finger.
	And so in this situation, You can't say F you to the left when the bad guy is in your own party.
	If you believe the allegations against Roy Moore, there's no F you to the left here.
	There's just F you to Roy Moore.
	Right?
	Because you don't like people who allegedly, credibly molest 16 and 14 year olds.
	Right?
	That doesn't seem like an F you to the left as much as immorality is bad even when the left benefits.
	or could benefit.
	I mean, the fact is the left is benefiting right now.
	He's not running 11 points up in Alabama.
	He's running dead even.
	The Cook Political Report just moved Alabama, a Senate race, in which no senator has been elected a Democrat from Alabama since, I believe, 1994.
	It's been a long time.
	And they just moved this race to toss-up status.
	That is because of Roy Moore, not because of folks like me.
	In any case, the people who are speaking up most strongly have been people who are already politically opposed to Moore, right?
	So it's people like Mitch McConnell and Jeb Bush.
	Now, I said I was very discomfited with a lot of things about Roy Moore.
	I thought that Roy Moore's perspective on judicial supremacy was not actually wrong.
	That said, a lot of the people who are very critical of Moore when these allegations first broke were not necessarily critical because of the allegations.
	They were critical because of politics.
	So Mitch McConnell came out yesterday.
	He said he believes the woman and Roy Moore should step aside.
	This is before the second allegation came out.
	Do you believe these allegations to be true?
	I believe the woman, yes.
	And then Jeb Bush came forward and he said the same thing.
	He said that Moore should step aside for decency.
	We saw the comments from Senator Mitch McConnell about Roy Moore saying he needs to step aside.
	Would you agree with that?
	I would.
	I would.
	Because this is not a question of innocence or guilt like in a criminal proceeding.
	This is a question of what's right and what's wrong.
	And acknowledging that you're dating teenagers when you're 32 years old as an assistant state attorney is wrong.
	It's just plain wrong.
	Do you think with 27 or so days left that if the GOP were, if Mr. Moore were to step aside, that they would have the time to be competitive in that Senate race?
	I think so.
	I think so.
	But more importantly, we need to stand for basic principles and decency has to be one of those.
	And again, the problem here is that there are so many people on the right who now respond to the tone and tenor more than they respond to the information.
	The real question here is, is Roy Moore credibly alleged to have done these things?
	Do you think he's guilty or do you think he's not?
	And if the only people who are out there speaking on this are people like McConnell and Bush, this turns into a proxy fight about attitude as opposed to what it should be about.
	This is my biggest problem with politics in the modern age.
	Politics in the modern age seems to be almost entirely about the attitudes that we attribute to the other side as opposed to the facts on the ground.
	I don't care what's in Jeb Bush's head.
	I don't care whether he hates Roy Moore because Roy Moore is too fundamentalist.
	I don't care whether Mitch McConnell doesn't like Roy Moore because he feels that he'd be a hassle in the Senate.
	The question to me is whether Roy Moore should sit in the Senate if he did these things, and it appears that he did.
	That's the question.
	But instead, we don't want to answer the question.
	So when you don't want to answer a political question, there's an easy way to avoid answering a political question.
	This is true on both sides.
	You saw it in that Michelle Goldberg column, and you're seeing it now from people who are supporting Roy Moore.
	The question is, I don't want to answer a very simple question.
	Are these allegations credible?
	If they are, should he be in the Senate?
	I don't want to answer that question.
	So instead what I do is I say, the motivations of the people targeting Roy Moore are questionable to me.
	The motivations, right?
	You go to motivation.
	That's what Michelle Goldberg does too.
	Instead of saying, were the allegations of Juanita Broderick credible 25 years ago?
	She says, right, but the motivations of the people leveraging those allegations were not credible.
	If we just go after each other's motivations, and we just attribute to one another motivations, without any evidence, because it's convenient for us to do so, that's how bad things happen, folks.
	That's how bad people get elected.
	That's how Bill Clinton ends up President.
	That's how Roy Moore, despite credible allegations, ends up in the Senate.
	If we just sit around, accusing each other of bad motivations, instead of making independent moral judgments for ourselves, it absolves you of independent moral judgment, when you can just blame the other guy for his motives.
	Right?
	It's one of the most disgusting things I think about human beings, just about human nature.
	It's something that we ought to fight.
	You know, if somebody does something that you think, if there's an absolute moral question, is it wrong to steal?
	And then, instead of answering the question, is it wrong to steal?
	You say, yes, but the motivations of the people condemning thievery are really suspect.
	They're religious fundamentalists, and I don't like that.
	then you're just avoiding answering the question.
	You're justifying your own immorality by attributing motives to somebody who you don't even know.
	And that's what I see happening so much.
	And so what this has resulted in is an unconscious connection for many people on both sides of the political aisle between being radical on politics, being anti-establishment on politics, and being willing to go along with bad guys.
	Because if you're willing to go along with bad guys, that just shows that you're hard-nosed enough to know that your opponents are really nasty people who must be defeated by any means.
	If you're hard-nosed enough on POTSC, if you know the country's really in trouble, then you know that the left has bad motivations in going after Roy Moore, and therefore it doesn't matter.
	You don't have to answer the question as to whether Roy Moore is guilty or not.
	This is a moral cop-out.
	It is a moral cop-out, and people who are engaging in it should acknowledge that they are engaging in a moral cop-out.
	I'm not a Jeff Flake fan.
	I'm not a fan of Jeb Bush.
	I would not have voted for him in the primary, and I didn't.
	I'm not a fan of Mitch McConnell.
	That does not change the basic question.
	Did Roy Moore do it?
	Unless you can show why you don't believe that he did it.
	Uh, credibly, then I don't know why you would support Roy Moore in this race, particularly when there's still time.
	And this, by the way, is an area, and I've talked, I've been critical of President Trump intervening in particular races.
	I felt that he hasn't done enough in some cases, or that he's overstepped his boundaries in others.
	This could be an area where Trump really demonstrates some leadership.
	What Trump needs to do with Roy Moore right now is President Trump needs to come out and he needs to say, listen, I didn't endorse Roy Moore in the beginning.
	I didn't endorse him because I thought he was a loser.
	It turns out that these allegations, they kind of look like he's a loser.
	You shouldn't vote for Roy Moore.
	Everybody should write in Jeff Sessions, right?
	You should tell his attorney general, run for your old seat.
	He doesn't like Jeff Sessions anyway.
	He hates Jeff Sessions.
	So you could kill two birds with one stone.
	He should say, everyone should go out and vote for Jeff Sessions tomorrow in the Alabama State Senate.
	The other thing that could happen, right, the other thing that could be very easy to do is, I believe the other senator from Alabama is Richard Burr, if I'm not mistaken.
	So you could say to Richard Burr, I want you to drop out of your Senate seat right now and run for the open Senate seat in a write-in campaign, and then we'll have another special election that doesn't involve Roy Moore for your Senate seat.
	This is the Ari Fleischer solution.
	There are a couple of solutions that are still on the table, but the longer Trump dilly-dallies around, the longer Trump refuses to say anything, and if he just comes out and he says, listen, I think Roy Moore should step down, but that's all I've got to say on the matter.
	He's going to need to do more than that.
	He needs to rally his base to vote for someone who is not Roy Moore, because otherwise you're going to end up with a split vote.
	And as much as people in Alabama, there's a base of people who like Roy Moore and have allegiance to Roy Moore, many more people in Alabama have allegiance to Donald Trump than have allegiance to Roy Moore.
	This is one area where Trump really could make an outsized difference in the wake of allegations like this.
	He wasn't able to arrange people behind Luther Strange, and I don't think he should try to at this point, but I do think that he should stop, I do think that he should leverage his capacity to try and replace Roy Moore with somebody who is more palatable.
	What I don't think that he should do is continue along the lines laid out by Representative Mo Brooks, the David Horowitz line.
	Even if he did it, I'll be voting for Roy Moore.
	Here's Mo Brooks making exactly that case.
	He says, He says, Roy Moore will vote right.
	Hence, I will vote for Roy Moore.
	Okay, that's the delegate model of representation.
	Vote for a person who may rape children so long as he votes right on the issues.
	I think that Trump needs to fight against this.
	But, you know, I have my doubt the character will ever...
	We may have reached the breaking point for character in American life, where we've just decided that character legitimately doesn't matter in American life anymore, and that would be a very, very sad point.
	Okay, I want to get to what I think is a giant nothing burger about Donald Trump Jr.
	in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at ProFlowers.
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	Okay, so, meanwhile, uh, the media are completely, uh, off the rails about this new report that suggests that Donald Trump Jr.
	was messaging with WikiLeaks.
	I don't think there's a lot here.
	I really don't think that there's very much here at all.
	You can see that CNN was going nuts over this.
	They were suggesting that this just demonstrates that active collusion took place.
	No, and I will explain in just a moment.
	According to new reporting in The Atlantic magazine, three full weeks before running mate Mike Pence denied the campaign was, quote, in cahoots with Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr.
	was absolutely in touch with, you guessed it, Wikileaks.
	Wikileaks, you'll recall, was the organization the U.S.
	intelligence community believes was chosen by the Kremlin to spread hacked information damaging the Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
	What is so fascinating is how the communications, in the form of Twitter direct messages, mesh with certain points on the campaign timeline that we already know quite well.
	For instance, October 2nd, Trump friend and former advisor Roger Stone tweets that damaging material is coming from WikiLeaks.
	The next day, October 3rd, Trump Jr.
	messages them, asks them, what's coming?
	On the 5th, Stone says there is a payload coming from WikiLeaks.
	On the 7th, the U.S.
	intelligence community says it believes Russia was behind the DNC hacks, and WikiLeaks begins releasing the hacked DNC Podesta emails.
	A month later, the 12th of October, WikiLeaks messages Trump Jr.
	asking him to link to one of their items.
	Two days later, he tweets it out.
	And on that same day, the 14th, Mike Pence denies any collusion with WikiLeaks.
	It is, to say at the least, fascinating.
	Okay, so this idea that there was some sort of deep-seated collusion going on, unfortunately, the record sort of belies this.
	So according to The Atlantic, according to a source familiar with the congressional investigations into Russian interference with the 2016 campaign, who requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, on the same day that Trump Jr. received the first message from WikiLeaks, he emailed other senior officers with the Trump campaign, including Bannon, Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, including Bannon, Conway, Brad Parscale, and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, telling them WikiLeaks had made contact.
	Kushner then forwarded the email to campaign communications staffer Hope Hicks.
	At no point during the 10-month correspondence does Trump Jr. rebuff WikiLeaks.
	Okay, does this show deep-seated collusion?
	Does this show deep-seated collusion?
	I will explain why not in just a moment.
	But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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	Okay, so why is it that this Donald Trump Jr.
	Russian operative story doesn't really work?
	First of all, we already knew that Donald Trump Jr.
	was happy to work with WikiLeaks.
	Okay, we already knew that Donald Trump Jr.
	and the Trump campaign were happy to reach out to the Russian government.
	We know that because Donald Trump Jr.
	basically admitted that.
	Does that mean the collusion actually took place?
	actor months ago that he loved the idea of coordinating on Hillary Clinton and OPPO.
	Um, no.
	The head of Cambridge Analytica, which was the data operation for the Trump campaign, reached out directly to WikiLeaks to ask for material from Hillary's private server.
	Does that mean the collusion actually took place?
	No.
	Okay, so here is the actual correspondence.
	On September 21st, 2016, WikiLeaks let Trump Jr. know it had guessed the password to an anti-Trump website.
	Trump Jr. forwarded that info to campaign officials.
	That was the end of it.
	On October 3rd, 2016, WikiLeaks asked Trump Jr. to retweet something.
	Trump Jr. already had retweeted it.
	On October 14th, 2016, Trump Jr. told Trump Jr. to retweet something.
	tweeted out a link from WikiLeaks that they had sent him via direct message.
	He probably would have.
	Anyway, the rest of the correspondence is WikiLeaks asking for stuff from Trump, and Trump refusing to even respond.
	They asked for Trump's tax returns, and Trump Jr.
	did not even respond to that.
	Is this earth-shattering stuff?
	Does this demonstrate full-scale collusion that tipped the election to Hillary Clinton?
	No, of course not.
	That's not what it demonstrates at all.
	It demonstrates, again, willingness, but we know about the willingness, so nothing has actually changed here.
	Nothing has actually changed in any serious way.
	So, yeah, I'm not sure why this is such a, it seems like a giant nothing burger to me, to be quite frank.
	Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll deconstruct the culture.
	So, things that I like.
	When I first, there are very few movies where I try watching them once, I hate them, and then I go back later and I re-watch them and I really like them.
	In fact, this may be the only movie like that that I can think of.
	So, a few years back, I tried watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, and I thought, man, this thing is just slow.
	I mean, it is.
	It is a slow movie.
	There's no question.
	It is a slow movie, and there's a narrator, which I generally don't like in films, and I watched it again this week.
	I had only gotten through, I think, the first half an hour the first time.
	I got through the entire movie this time.
	It did take me two days, but I did get through the entire movie.
	It is free from Amazon Prime, I believe.
	And it is actually not just a good movie, it's a very good movie.
	It's a beautifully shot movie.
	Brad Pitt, who cannot act, is quite good in this.
	Casey Affleck was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
	Now, he may be an utter scumbag as a human being.
	There are all these allegations about him mistreating Lemon.
	But he is a terrific actor.
	Talent falls on the good and the evil alike.
	He is a really first-rate actor.
	And his performance as Robert Ford in this is really quite good and quite tragic.
	It is a very complex story about why Jesse James is sort of worshipped by the American public, even though Jesse James is really a terrible person.
	But even Jesse James is a shaded character.
	It's really, really interesting, and it's got so many great character actors.
	The cast of this thing is really fantastic.
	I was looking at the cast the other day.
	I'm trying to remember who else is in this.
	Mary Louise Parker plays Brad Pitt's wife.
	She sort of has a bit part.
	Casey Affleck.
	Sam Rockwell plays Charlie Ford, who's Robert Ford's brother.
	Jeremy Renner is in it, playing Wood Hite, before Jeremy Renner was anything big.
	Sam Shepard plays Frank James, and he's terrific.
	Garrett Dillahunt, who's really one of the underrated character actors of our time.
	He also plays two parts on Deadwood.
	He's in it.
	Paul Schneider plays Dick Little, and he is terrific in it.
	So there's really great character actors, and the movie itself is really, I think, quite good, and demonstrates that good and evil have shades to them.
	So, good movie, really worth a watch.
	Okay.
	Okay, time for a thing that I hate.
	Okay, so, the left has decided that a guy named Brett Talley should certainly not sit on a federal court in Alabama.
	Now, I have some objections to this simply because I know Brett.
	So, Brett and I are friends.
	We were friends at Harvard Law School, and the idea that what they're trying to What they're trying to do to him is basically bring a bunch of random information and suggest that it is indicative of a crazy guy.
	Okay, that is not true.
	Brett is a very down-to-earth, solid, conservative, constitutional conservative.
	We were classmates at Harvard Law School.
	We were in Federalist Society together.
	Here is his record.
	Because they're saying he's never actually tried a case.
	He's never tried a case.
	Okay, first of all, transactional lawyers don't always try cases, right?
	There are many transactional lawyers who are judges and never tried a case.
	That's number one.
	Number two, clerking for judges is a credential for becoming a judge.
	You don't have to be a trial lawyer in order for you to sit on a court.
	That's a stupid criticism.
	Early in his career, he was an associate at Gibson Dunn Crutcher, which is one of the top law firms in the country.
	He was a law clerk to Joel Dubina on the U.S.
	Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
	He was a law clerk to Judge Scott Kugler of the Northern District of Alabama.
	He works for the DOJ.
	He went to Harvard Law School.
	He was the articles editor for the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, which is sort of the conservative journal over there.
	He was a speechwriter for Rob Portman and a senior writer for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.
	And he's published—well, what the left is now jumping on is they're saying, well, he was a member of a true ghost-hunting committee.
	He writes ghost stories.
	Like, he's been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award.
	He writes horror novels, which is actually kind of cool.
	But I guess we're supposed to crap all over him because he's an interesting guy.
	Now they're suggesting that he's not qualified because he has never tried a case.
	And the ABA, of course, rated him not qualified to be on the federal judiciary.
	They have also rated a bunch of conservative people not qualified.
	He, quote-unquote, displayed a degree of partisanship unusual for a judicial nominee on his blog.
	He denounced Hillary Clinton as Hillary Rotten Clinton.
	So I guess that if you oppose Hillary Clinton and think that she's rotten, you're no longer qualified to sit on a federal court.
	Instead, you have to pretend that she's wonderful.
	And he expressed support for the NRA.
	Oh, no.
	Oh, no.
	No other judges have ever supported the NRA, I am sure.
	Just asinine.
	You know, the idea that you can't have political opinions and sit on a federal court has always been an issue for me.
	Because it only applies to one side of the political aisle.
	Ruth Bader Ginsburg can work for now for years.
	And that's totally fine.
	You know, she can give speeches on a routine basis excoriating the right and excoriating Trump, and that's cool.
	But Brett Talley, he commented on a blog about politics.
	That means that he can't be a judge.
	They're also saying, you know, how dare he fail to disclose that he was married to Ann Donaldson, who's the chief of staff to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, saying that that is a conflict of interest.
	Talley didn't mention his wife when describing his contact with lawyers for the White House.
	Yes, I'm sure he was trying to, I'm sure he was trying to hide that.
	I'm sure he really thought he was going to get away with his wife works for the government.
	Again, the idea that it's an oversight seems slightly more palatable to me, but it just demonstrates that we do this routine now that's really, really dumb and really irritating, where we pretend that judges have no political proclivities whatsoever.
	The question is, will he make a good judge?
	I know Brett.
	I know his constitutional philosophy.
	He will make a better judge than any of the people on the left who are currently sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States.
	So, you know, this is a wild overreach on the part of the left, but that's nothing new.
	Okay.
	Last week I didn't deconstruct the culture, so I'm going to do a very, very brief deconstruction of the culture this week.
	I know a lot of people were excited about me deconstructing the song Rockstar by Post Malone.
	So Post Malone is a white guy who does sort of rap reggae.
	I guess he follows me on Twitter, so thanks for following, Post.
	But here is a bit of his song, Rockstar.
	Rockstar.
	Okay, so this is pretty typical kind of rap.
	It's sort of reggae-slash-rap.
	So the lyrics to this thing are all about effing hoes and popping pillies.
	Man, I feel like a rock star.
	My brother's got that gas.
	They always be smoking like a rasta.
	Effing with me, call up on an Uzi and show up.
	Man them shotas.
	I assume that's shotguns.
	When my homies pull up on your block, they make that thing go gratatata.
	Okay, so.
	This is not my favorite stuff, as you know.
	And whenever I analyze rap genre, rap and R&B genre, very often it's to critique this particular aspect of the culture.
	The glorification of drugs and violence and effing hoes.
	It's amazing that an entire genre of music is allowed to talk about women this way, and meanwhile we're supposed to pretend that it's okay.
	Well, we've decided as a society this kind of stuff is not to be said about women, except if you're recording these kinds of songs.
	But what is the left upset about?
	Are they upset about the content of this?
	Are they upset about the drugs and the effing hoes and the shooting people stuff?
	No, they're not upset about any of this.
	What they are upset about is cultural appropriation.
	Because you see, Post Malone is white.
	This is from the LA Times, circa December.
	He's a white culture vulture, cynically appropriating African-American culture.
	He's received more attention than his meager talent deserves.
	He's a rich kid whose parents essentially paid his way into music.
	He says, there's a thing that says they bought 50,000 of my songs on iTunes.
	Apparently his hit single is White Iverson.
	He says, my dad's not a baller.
	I have no idea where he'd get the money for that.
	What I find interesting about the left is that they're very upset about the cultural appropriation that Post Malone is apparently engaging in by taking tropes from rap and using them being a white guy from an upper middle class background, I suppose.
	Here is my problem with that.
	I too am upset with cultural appropriation of bad things in culture.
	I don't think anyone should be appropriating things about effing hoes and blowing people away.
	So Post Malone may be very talented, but to critique him on the basis of cultural appropriation is an astonishing thing.
	So the problem here is that if you were black, it would be okay, but he's white, so it's not okay for him to say these things?
	One of the problems with rap culture is that these things are present in the first place.
	If you want to correct this, if you don't want people culturally appropriating garbage, maybe you shouldn't make garbage for people to culturally appropriate.
	How about we start with that?
	The problem here is not that Post Malone is white.
	The problem is that the message that he's promoting in this song is the same as the message that's promoted throughout the rap community, and apparently, without which you cannot rise to the top of the R&B rap charts.
	Okay, that's the problem here.
	So, you know, I wish that he would use his talents to promote better messaging, and if he's gonna culturally appropriate, you know, appropriate the musical stylings if you wish, but please, don't culturally appropriate the worst aspects of a rap culture that glorifies stuff like this.
	It doesn't make it okay.
	Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
	With lots more, I'm sure, on the political scene.
	We'll be broadcasting from New York tomorrow.
	I'm going to be on Fox & Friends Live tomorrow.
	I'm also going to be the one lucky gentleman on Outnumbered tomorrow.
	So I will see you live from New York tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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