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Nov. 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:22
The Garbage Fires To End All Garbage Fires | Ep. 420
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Even sexual harassment and assault can be made into partisan issues.
President Trump finally sounds off on Judge Roy Moore plus Al Franken, and we go to the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So yesterday I said that we were in the midst of a flaming garbage fire in American politics.
How wrong I was.
We were only on the edge of the flaming garbage pile yesterday, but today we are definitely in the center of the flaming garbage heap.
After all the fallout from Al Franken, after the fact that it now appears that every Democrat will end up standing with Al Franken, and it appears that every Republican, or a lot of Republicans, will end up standing with Roy Moore, it appears that no one really cares about bad conduct, which is very upsetting to me personally, because I don't like that.
But we will talk about all of these things in just one second.
First...
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Okay, so there's a bunch of fallout from Al Franken and Roy Moore.
And I want to begin with a piece in today's Washington Post.
So yesterday, there were a bunch of Democrats who sort of pretended that they cared about Al Franken.
So the allegation against Al Franken, again, is that he groped a woman while she was sleeping.
This woman, her name is Leanne Tweeden?
Yeah, Leanne Tweeden.
She's a talk show host out here in Los Angeles, and she alleges that Al Franken groped her while she was sleeping, and then during a rehearsal, He had written a kiss into a scene when he was a comedian and said he rammed his tongue down her throat, which is just disgusting.
And so all of this had created an enormous amount of controversy.
In fact, we can start with Leigh-Anne Tweeden talking about Franken.
Here is what Leigh-Anne Tweeden had to say about Frankenstein's Clip 9.
The world that you're making for your children, for your two-year-old and for your four-year-old, you realize that you are making it better for them.
I don't know the genders of your children, but it actually doesn't even matter.
I have a boy and a girl.
Okay, well, but both of them need to be impacted by this, right?
Not just the girl.
You know, you always... Sorry.
Nothing to be sorry about.
I didn't think I was going to do that, but you know you do.
You want to leave.
You know, you try to set examples for your children, right?
You want to leave the world a better place.
Okay, and so the allegations against Franken are obviously serious enough that yesterday a bunch of people said, well, we'll start a Senate Ethics Committee investigation.
And Franken himself calls for a Senate Ethics Investigation.
There's only one problem with this.
It's total nonsense.
Between 2006 and 2017, or between, rather, 2007 and 2016, there were 613 different Senate Ethics Investigation requests.
How many punishments were handed down?
How many sanctions were handed down?
Zero.
Giant zero.
So, when Democrats say, yeah, we're treating Al Franken with the gravest seriousness, no, you're not.
Plus, what would you have an ethics investigation about?
There's a picture of him trying to grab her boobs while she's sleeping.
What exactly is the investigation going to be?
Senator Franken, did you try to grab that woman's boobs?
Senator Franken.
There's a picture of it.
But it was a joke.
Ethics committee.
Well, there's a picture of it.
Him.
I take the fifth.
Like, what is the investigation going to be about here?
Exactly.
And now we know, okay?
The fact is that the left is willing to throw people under the bus when they're no longer useful to them, but they want to stick with them when they are useful, right?
When it's Bill Clinton, now they can throw Bill Clinton under the bus.
There have been a bunch of articles this week about how Bill Clinton should have resigned in 1998.
Thanks for getting around to it 19 years late, gang.
And now, there are a bunch of articles about how Al Franken should stick around.
So there's a woman named Kate Harding, who's the co-editor of Nasty Women, Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America.
So she's a feminist, right?
She hosts a podcast called Feminasty, which sounds like death on the ears.
And here is what, and she wrote a piece for the Washington Post today called, I'm a feminist, I study rape culture, and I don't want Al Franken to resign.
Yeah, I'm freaking shocked.
She says, as a feminist and the author of a book on rape culture, I could reasonably be expected to lead the calls for Al Franken to step down, following allegations that he forced his tongue down a woman's throat, accompanied by a photo of him grinning as he moves in to grope her breasts while she sleeps.
It's disgusting.
He treated a sleeping woman as a comedy prop, no more human than the contents of Carrot Top's trunk, and I firmly believe he should suffer social and professional consequences for it.
But I don't believe resigning from his position is the only possible consequence, or the one that's best for American women.
Cynics on both the right and left will presume I am passing by this particular steam tray on 2017's smorgasbord of feminist outrage because Franken is a Democrat, and so am I. I was even his proud constituent for two years.
In the most superficial sense, this is true.
And that's not just the most superficial, that's like the only sense.
There is no deeper sense.
That you'd think Franken is going to vote the way you want him to vote, and so you're fine with this.
This is just a variation on the old Time Magazine columnist Nina Berle's comment about Bill Clinton that she'd be willing to offer him oral sex so long as he kept abortion legal.
And we're seeing this on both sides of the aisle now, and it's just gross.
And I think it's something we need to come to grips with, our own grossness as humans, before we can actually fix it.
People talk about raising awareness, so I'm not into raising awareness when it's counterproductive, but I think it is about raising awareness when it comes to examining your own political motives, because I think that we all have political motives, and that leads us into certain cul-de-sacs of partisan aggression that I think are negative.
She says, It's meaningless to say it's because I'm a Democrat without asking why I am a Democrat.
If you understand what it means to be a Democrat today, that is, why it makes sense to vote blue over red in this highly polarized political environment, you can understand why it might not make the most sense to demand Franken's resignation effective immediately.
I'm a Democrat because I'm a feminist who lives under a two-party system.
I am not a true believer in the party, nor in any politician.
I'm a realist who recognizes we get two viable choices.
So this is the exact argument, the exact argument, that is now being used to back Roy Moore.
She says, isn't that hypocritical?
I hear you asking because Republicans won't do the right thing.
We shouldn't either.
But if the short-term right thing leads to long-term political catastrophe for American women, I think we need to reconsider our definition of the right thing.
Okay, so this is the exact opposite of the argument.
I mean, it's the same argument, actually, that's being made.
It's just the photo negative of the argument that's being made by a lot of people who are backing Roy Moore saying, listen, if Doug Jones gets in the Senate, he's going to vote for abortion.
I hate abortion.
So if I have to choose, I'll choose to vote for Roy Moore.
It's the photo-negative argument.
And the problem is, if both sides make this argument, we will get people who are alleged sexual molesters and sexual assaulters in the Senate Chaka Block.
They will be there all the time.
None of this is going to change.
Change comes about when we realize that the ends don't always justify the means.
We realize that, yes, I would not vote for Doug Jones.
Yes, I would not vote for Al Franken.
But that doesn't mean that just because somebody is bad, I have to vote for their opponent, or I can't find a third solution.
I can't find some sort of write-in solution.
So all of this is very upsetting and disappointing, and it makes us feel like we have nothing in common, because we don't.
We don't have anything in common.
If we're to the point where we believe that sexual molestation or sexual assault allegations can be put by the wayside because it's more important to defeat the other side, then we can't live in a republic with each other.
We just can't.
I mean, the end of the republic has basically come.
Now, with all of this happening, you can see that the politicians are using this particular mentality as a way to maintain power.
And this is happening on both sides.
So, you know, for example, Roy Moore has been hit with all of these terrible allegations.
He's coming back now, and he's saying that Mitch McConnell should step down.
So the more partisan Roy Moore gets, the more he knows he's protected.
The harder a position he takes, the more fiery a position he takes, the more he knows that there are people who are going to rally to his side to quote-unquote oppose the other side.
So here is Roy Moore attacking Mitch McConnell, saying McConnell should be the one who steps down, not me.
Well, I want to tell you who needs to step down.
here wearing my cross and American flag pin amidst allegations that I have not rebutted in any serious way.
Mitch McConnell is the one who should step down.
Listen, I'm not a fan of Mitch McConnell, but this has nothing to do with McConnell.
But again, the more partisan you can make the argument, the more you know that people will rally to your side.
So here is Roy Moore saying this.
Well, I want to tell you who needs to step down.
That's Mitch McConnell.
There's been comments about me taking a stand.
Yes, I have taken a stand in the past.
I'll take a stand in the future.
And I'll quit standing when they lay me in that box and put me in the ground.
Well, that's weird.
And then Bob Menendez does the same thing from the other side.
So Bob Menendez was not acquitted, but there was a mistrial in his trial yesterday.
And so he comes out and he turns it into a partisan issue, knowing that his own side will rally around him as they were going to.
Democrats would not even answer the question whether if Menendez was convicted they would expel him from the Senate.
They might keep him there, right?
Now Menendez is coming out and making this partisan and making it even more partisan.
We now live in a dynamic where the more partisan you can make any issue, any personal issue, the better chance you have of surviving it, right?
Bill Clinton was able to turn sexual molestation allegations, sexual misconduct allegations.
He was able to turn those allegations in his own favor by suggesting that it was a vast right-wing conspiracy.
You're seeing more do the same thing.
It's a vast left-wing and establishment conspiracy.
You're seeing Bob Menendez do the same thing on corruption.
It's a vast right-wing and racist conspiracy.
Here's Menendez doing that yesterday.
To those who left me, who abandoned me in my darkest moment, I forgive you.
To those who embraced me in my darkest moment, I love you.
To those New Jerseyans who gave me the benefit of the doubt, I thank you.
To those who were digging my political grave so that they could jump into my seat, I know who you are.
So he's making it partisan, right?
Everyone who backed him, he'll remember and he will love you.
I mean, this is mafioso-type language, right?
And if you didn't back him, I'll remember you and I will never forget you.
Your name will be emblazoned on my memory forever.
Again, if you can use partisanship to distract from your own misconduct, then we're just gonna get the worst of the worst in every situation.
Okay, so finally, here's what happens.
The poll in Alabama right now with Roy Moore, the latest poll from Fox News shows that Roy Moore is down eight.
I don't believe that poll.
I think that a lot of people are lying to the pollsters, and I think that the race is actually much closer than that.
The reason I believe that is because if you look at the Alabama results for the last several election cycles, What you see is that no Republican candidate in Alabama since 2002 has won less than 60% of the vote.
So Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state like 2 to 1.
So the idea that he's losing by eight points would be truly shocking.
But you know that with that said, he is, you know, apparently in a tight race, he's losing the race and he won't step down.
And as I've said before, the only person who could really step in and put an end to Roy Moore's run here would be President Trump.
So we'll get to President Trump's reaction to all of these things.
Finally, he's speaking out, but not in the way that I would like.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so, President Trump is finally sounding off about Roy Moore, but he's not actually speaking.
So he sends out Sarah Huckabee Sanders to talk about it.
So what is his position?
So Trump, who has a position on everything, right?
He had a position on Jemele Hill at ESPN.
He said she should be fired.
He said that Colin Kaepernick is a son of a bitch who should be fired.
Right, even though he wasn't really in the NFL at the time.
And, you know, I may agree with his assessments on people who kneel for the anthem, and I may agree that Jemele Hill, not that she should be fired, I don't think she should have been fired, but that she was wrong in her assessment of politics.
But he's been completely silent on Roy Moore for over a week, even though he endorsed Roy Moore after Roy Moore won the primary.
So finally, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is trotted out to answer questions about Roy Moore.
And what this does demonstrate, by the way, is that Sean Hannity and the White House are very much in coordination because, as you recall, Sean Hannity, the night before last, came out and said that he wanted to let the people of Alabama decide.
The White House is giving exactly the same message.
So that is a shift.
Apparently there were reports that Sean had been getting calls from Bannon and from the White House saying, back off Roy Moore a little bit.
So the White House is also backing off of Roy Moore.
Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that Trump thinks the people of Alabama ought to decide, which is a truism.
Again, I said this yesterday.
You know, when people say things like, let the people decide, what they're really saying is that they are not going to take a position.
That's really what they're saying.
And that's stupid, okay?
Trump has taken a position on everything.
I mean, literally everything.
All the things Trump has taken a position on, but here he chooses to go strategically silent.
The reason that that's bad is not just because I think it's immoral, even though I do think it's immoral.
The reason that I think it's bad is because Donald Trump is one of the very few people in America who could actually make a difference in this Senate race and actually make sure that Republicans keep the seat without that seat being Roy Moore's.
Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though, basically kicking the can down the road.
The president believes that these allegations are very troubling and should be taken seriously, and he thinks that the people of Alabama should make the decision on who their next senator should be.
So that's a no, he thinks Roy Moore should stay in?
Look, the president said in his statement earlier this week that if the allegations are true, then that Roy Moore should step aside.
He still firmly believes that.
Okay, so, you know, that doesn't mean anything, right?
We now know what we know, okay?
Nothing further is really gonna come out here.
The idea that if true, he should step aside, but let the people of Alabama decide?
Again, the people of Alabama will decide, right?
But he can have an impact on this race.
If he were to come out and say, Roy Moore, get out.
People of Alabama, you know, don't lose this Senate race because of Roy Moore.
That would actually have an impact in this race, but that's not what's happening here.
And then, you know, and then Trump tweets, but so Trump doesn't say anything about Moore, right?
But he does have some things to say about Al Franken.
So the allegations come out about Franken.
He's been completely silent on Twitter, right?
He's been over in Asia.
This was the excuse for him not commenting on more.
He comes back, and now he's on Twitter late at night.
And so Trump starts tweeting about Al Franken.
So he tweets, the Al Frankenstein picture, and it's Frankenstein, right?
But he spells Frankenstein I-E instead of E-I.
Again, spell check.
He says, the Al Frankenstein picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words.
Where do his hands go in pictures two, three, four, five, and six while she sleeps?
And then he continues along these lines, and he says, and to think that just last week he was lecturing anyone who would listen about sexual harassment and respect for women.
Leslie Stahl tape?
The Leslie Stahl tape is a reference to him making jokes about sexually abusing Leslie Stahl while she's asleep or something.
Now, so, you know, Trump is perfectly willing to sound off about Franken.
Now, a lot of people on the right love this about Trump, that he's not shy about sounding off about political opposition.
And when it comes to the partisan battles, this is the thing that they really enjoy about Trump, is that Trump is always happy to throw a punch in the other direction.
This is also a really stupid strategy, okay?
The reason this is a stupid strategy is we are now going to get a full week of talk about all of the sexual harassment and abuse allegations against Donald Trump, okay?
There were something like 15 or 16 women who made sexual assault or harassment allegations against Trump at the end of the last election cycle.
We had not yet had the Harvey Weinstein blow up, so now we're gonna get to redo all of that, which is really, really exciting.
And it's one of the reasons, by the way, I think that Trump has not actually Come out and openly condemn more.
Because the problem is that once you condemn more, once you get involved in these issues, now it comes back around to you.
Right?
Just as Trump says, you know, Al Franken was talking about sexual harassment in a negative way, but then he was sexually harassing people.
It's very hard for Trump to be the leader, the tip of the spear on sexual harassment and abuse.
Right?
Huckabee Sanders was specifically asked by a reporter over at Fox News about this, right?
Here's Huckabee Sanders being asked to comment on the allegations against Trump.
We should find one set of allegations very troubling and on the other we shouldn't pay attention to them at all or we should totally disbelieve them.
Well I think the president has certainly a lot more insight into what he personally did or didn't do and he spoke out about that directly during the campaign and I don't have anything further to add beyond that.
Okay, so basically, we're going to keep silent on this because we don't want the blowback to come back around.
This is the problem with having our standards.
We have our own double standard.
Okay, we have our own double standard, and then our politicians pay the price for the double standard.
On the one hand, we say that if they're on our side, we don't care.
And on the other side, on the other hand, we say if they're not on our side, we do care.
That double standard has ramifications for politicians, because it means that Trump is going to want to condemn Al Franken, but if he condemns Al Franken, it's going to come back around to Trump, and then the right is going to have to suggest that the allegations about Trump are not credible, but the allegations against Franken are super credible, which I don't buy, by the way.
I think the allegations against Trump were credible during the primaries, or during the general election.
I, again, don't say that you shouldn't have voted for Trump to stop Hillary, but I do think that Yeah, I didn't.
You know, I didn't vote at the top of the ticket because I take these things very, very seriously.
So, you know, the idea that we can have as a people this double standard in our mind, that has to change.
So, either we're going to say as a public, we're going to say as a public one of two things.
We care about these allegations enough to get rid of people.
Doesn't matter their political affiliation.
Or we don't care enough to get rid of people.
Doesn't matter their political affiliation.
We're gonna have to make that decision.
Otherwise, we just have this hypocritical standard.
Now, I do want to talk a little bit about the generalized societal problem that's coming up with some of these sexual harassment allegations.
And that is, as I've said now for a couple of weeks, really six weeks since the Harvey Weinstein stuff broke, We as a society do not have a consistent standard that we are applying with regard to what sort of allegations to take seriously and what sort of allegations not to take seriously.
So, the reason that I say this is because we are treating sexual harassment allegations where a guy, you know, said something nasty and untoward to a woman the same as we are treating rape allegations.
And that seems to me not correct.
I think that you can condemn both, but I don't think they are worthy of equal levels of condemnation.
You know, for example, there is the actress Ellen Page.
And Ellen Page had this whole thing about...
My director she worked with, or a fellow actor she worked with, I can't remember who she's talking about, who had said something, was it Ratner?
It was about Ratner, I guess, who's had a lot of sexual allegations made against him.
And she says that Brett Ratner at one point made some sort of nasty lesbian reference to her on the set.
And this is bad.
It is bad, okay?
And he deserves to be condemned for that, obviously.
And then she says in that same allegation, in the same Facebook post, she says that at one point she was sexually assaulted by a grip.
These are not the same kind of thing.
They're both bad, but they're not quite the same kind of bad.
Rape and sexual assault are not the same thing as sexual harassment, and conflating the two actually ends up making light of sexual assault, because it allows people to shluff it off.
It allows people to basically say, okay, that's the same as saying something nasty.
Well, sexually harassing a woman and sexually assaulting a woman are not quite the same thing.
They're both bad, but they are different levels of bad.
It's bad to hit a child.
It's worse to kill a child.
It's bad to yell at somebody.
It's much worse to hit somebody.
So I think that we need to be careful about the standards that we apply and also the credibility of particular standards.
The reason that I've been so harsh on Roy Moore is because I find the allegations particularly credible because they're supporting details.
It's the reason I found Juanita Broderick to be credible.
I think they're supporting details.
She was in the place she said she was at the time she said she was.
There were contemporaneous people that she had told at the time.
But I think that one of the things that is going to happen now is the hysteria is so loud and so much that there's the possibility that we're going to jump to conclusions.
We shouldn't jump to conclusions.
I've called for a certain level of credibility, but I think that we should determine for ourselves what exactly that level of credibility is.
In other words, I'm calling for a standard because otherwise sexual harassment, sexual abuse, these are just going to become clubs that you can wield against the other side rather than a real attempt to cleanse the society of a grave evil.
So I think that's worth commenting upon.
Other comment that I want to make.
So yesterday I tweeted something and all these feminists went nuts because they didn't understand what I was saying.
I tweeted that it seems like the only solution here is robot politicians.
I was not specifically speaking about sexual harassment.
I was saying all of our politicians suck and a lot of politicians are willing to cover for people who suck.
Kirsten Gillibrand is one of them.
She came out yesterday and she said that Bill Clinton should have resigned in 1998.
She was literally campaigning with him six months ago.
So, no, okay?
All of our politicians are garbage.
You may get less sexual harassment if women, there are more women in Congress, I think you probably would, but that doesn't mean that the legislation would be any better or that they wouldn't cover for bad behavior, okay?
That's just the reality of the situation.
We as a society have abandoned a particular moral standard, and that moral standard comes with consequences.
None of this arises in a vacuum.
Sexual harassment, sexual abuse, these have always happened.
But we also used to have certain standards of behavior that we demanded from our politicians and that we demanded from people more generally.
Now we live in a society where Those standards don't exist unless we almost randomly decide that they exist again.
So set a consistent standard or don't have a standard at all.
But this kind of pick-and-choose routine is very dangerous for the heart of our politics.
Double standards don't work.
Okay, so before I go any further and I want to get to some things I like and things I hate and I really want to spend some time with the mailbag today, First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Upside.com.
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Okay, so...
Let's just go to some things I like and some things that I hate.
Because I really, I always kind of give short shrift to the mailbag and I don't want to do that this week.
So, things I like and things that I hate.
So, we'll start with things I like.
Yes, on the plane I had some very long flights and I got to watch a couple of movies.
One was Wind River.
The other one that I saw was The Lost City of Z. The marketing campaign for this movie was really quite terrible.
One of the reasons the marketing campaign was terrible is if you looked at some of the original posters, it was not clear this was a period piece.
This is a better poster for Lost City of Z. Makes clear that this is a period piece about exploration.
It is also true that the title...
I'm not a big Charlie Hunnam fan, I find him mannered, but Robert Pattinson gives a terrific performance.
called it The Explorer or something.
You know, something that actually, the interest of the film is not really in The Search for the Lost City of Z.
It's really in the biography of the central character of the film.
And the performances in this film are actually quite good.
I'm not a big Charlie Hunnam fan.
I find him mannered.
But Robert Pattinson gives a terrific performance.
I didn't even know Robert Pattinson could act.
As Mathis was pointing out to me before the show, both Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart can act.
But as Donald Trump said, she cheated on him like a dog, And she'll do it again, just watch.
So, Robert Pattinson is very, very good in this movie.
The movie is about an explorer named Fawcett, and he is searching for this city in the Amazon He thinks that there is this lost city in the Amazon, this sort of city of gold, and he goes searching for it, and he sort of leaves his wife and children behind.
His wife's played by Sienna Miller, who's quite good in the film, and all the performances, actually, across the board, except for Hunnam's, are pretty good.
So here is a little bit of the preview.
To dream, to seek the unknown, to look for what is beautiful is its own reward.
A man's reach should exceed his grasp.
Or what's a heaven for?
You are the Explorer?
Give me your hand.
I wish to find a lost city.
What you seek is far greater.
Okay, so the preview is, you can see, it's beautifully directed, it's really well acted, it's really Oscar-bait, and it's been largely ignored.
It didn't do any sort of business at the theater so far as I can tell, even though it's got a bunch of big-name actors and a really big budget and it's beautifully shot, there's a whole World War I sequence that's really well done.
So it's well worth watching.
It is not an uplifting film.
It sort of tries to be, and it sort of tries to be politically correct at the same time.
There are a few kind of politically correct tropes in there, but it's well worth watching.
Okay, so I have more things that I like and some things that I hate in the mailbag, but for that you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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All righty, so a couple of other things that I like.
So I'm trying to do a little more things I like this week because the news has been just such a dumpster.
It's just been terrible.
And speaking of bad news, it's now breaking that it looks like the tax reform bill is at least on the ropes.
Senator Ron Johnson has said he's not going to vote for it as it currently stands.
Lisa Murkowski's saying she's not going to vote for it as it currently stands.
So they're basically one vote away from the thing collapsing.
But let's do some good news, okay?
So this I thought was just super cute.
So this came from ABC News.
There's a little five-year-old kid who's coming back from kindergarten on the school bus.
and his three-year-old sister is waiting for him.
And this is just adorable.
If you can't see it, he's just giving her a big hug and carrying around.
And then they're walking home to you.
It's super cute.
So, as a parent of two, this is the best thing.
The worst thing in the world as a parent is when your kids are beating the crap out of each other.
It's really hard to watch.
But when my daughter, who's older, she's three and a half, when she treats my son really well and when she gets up in the morning, he loves her.
I mean, he's obsessed with her.
She gets up in the morning, he gets up earlier than she does.
And then, her name is Leah, he goes, Yeah.
And then he runs into her room because he loves her so much.
And then she'll give him a big hug.
It's the cutest thing in the world.
So this kind of stuff is really fantastic.
Apparently, they used to fight a lot.
And now that he went to school, she realizes what she's missing.
And she's happy when her brother comes home.
So that's just cute stuff.
Okay.
Other things that I like.
So Orrin Hatch, senator from Utah, finally lost it with Sherrod Brown.
Sherrod Brown is a senator from Ohio, and just a terrible, terrible senator.
And he was ripping on the tax reform bill, suggesting that it hurts the middle class, which is absolutely untrue.
The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of Americans, particularly in the middle class, got a tax cut from this bill.
And Orrin Hatch basically laid the wood to Sherrod Brown for suggesting otherwise.
I come from the poor people.
And I've been here working my whole stinking career.
For people who don't have a chance.
And I really resent anybody saying that I'm just doing this for the rich.
Give me a break.
I think you guys overplay that all the time, and it gets old.
And frankly, you ought to quit it.
Mr. Chairman, the public believes that.
I'm not through.
I get kind of sick and tired of it.
True, it's a nice political play.
Well, Mr. Chairman, with all due respect, I get sick and tired of the richest people in the country.
Regular order, Mr. Chairman.
Getting richer and richer.
Regular order.
We do attack.
Regular order.
Middle class.
Regular order.
And over and over again.
How many times do we do this before we learn this?
Okay, and then Hatch went off on him some more.
So, you know, again, it is a really tired talking point, this idea that it's the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
There's no evidence of that.
The poor have gotten richer, the rich have gotten richer over the past 30 years, for sure.
And the idea that tax cuts solely benefit the people at the top of the spectrum is just not true, considering that the people at the top of the spectrum are paying nearly all of the net income tax in the United States.
Okay, time for some things I hate, and then we'll mailbag it up.
Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate.
So Hillary Clinton, yesterday, she was asked about an investigation into her.
And why is she still here?
Like, why is she still bothering everyone?
Someone suggested that she's sort of become the Rick Astley of politics.
That you just get Rickrolled into playing videos of Hillary Clinton.
I think that's basically correct.
Also, she apparently shops in the wardrobe fashioned by Maria in By Julie Andrews in Sound of Music.
She gets all of her clothes made from curtains.
In any case, here is Hillary Clinton talking about why an investigation into her would be an abuse of power.
If I try to take myself out of it, which you know is kind of hard because it's personally offensive that they would do this, but taking myself out of it, this is such an abuse of power.
And it goes right at the rule of law.
Okay, so it goes against the rule of law when she's investigated, but it doesn't go against the rule of law when Jim Comey of the FBI coordinates with the Obama administration to let her off without evidence.
Yeah, so I love this for Hillary.
It's an abuse of power when she is investigated, but not an abuse of power when she's let off for no reason.
That's really exciting.
Also, I don't understand why she's wearing, like, a necklace made from balls from a ball crawl at Giggles and Hugs.
That's confusing, too.
Okay, so enough making fun of Hillary's wardrobe.
Let's make fun of art.
So, there is a Christie's There's a Christie's auction the other day, and there are a couple of pieces of work that went for a lot of money.
So there was a da Vinci painting of Jesus that went for $450 million, which suggests that somebody has too much money on their hands.
And it doesn't look like Jesus.
It looks kind of like the Mona Lisa with a beard.
It's not good.
But that was not the bad painting.
The worst painting was this, okay?
So there is an artist, I guess, named Cy Twombly.
Now, I will acknowledge, I don't know much about modern art, mainly because I think most modern art is supreme garbage.
But Cy Twombly is a modern artist who executed a series called the Bacchus series.
Ooh, really deep, really meaningful.
Okay, this painting apparently sold yesterday, or a couple days ago, for $40 million.
For four zero million dollars.
Okay, do you see this painting?
Do you see this?
My one and a half year old made this for my fridge yesterday.
Okay, that's what this looks like.
It's a bunch of swirlies with paint.
But the care, the genius of it, my god!
Okay, if this is worth $40 million, then I can crap something out worth $10.
Okay, that's insane.
So I just want to read you from Christie's, because Christie's was marketing it this way.
Collectively marking the culmination of Twombly's 50 years of painterly practice, the series comprises three distinct sets.
The first of these, six 8-feet-high portrait-forming paintings, was completed in 2004.
Towering over the viewer at more than 10 feet high and 16 feet wide, how'd you like to walk into your house?
And this is the entire wall.
If this happened, I would immediately spank my son.
If they'd actually—I wouldn't.
He's great.
But I would repaint the wall.
I mean, for God's sake.
If this is your entire wall, it looks like Charles Manson's been inside your house.
Ridiculous.
It says, on November 15th, the masterwork will lead the post-war and contemporary art evening sale at Christie's in New York.
It was executed using a pole, to which was affixed a brush drenched in rich vermilion paint.
Its bright red spirals seemed to both climb and fall.
Twombly allowed each of his marks to run down the canvas, suggesting the dripping of wine.
Or blood.
Or, like, paint.
Right?
It says, the painting's basic looping motif was a recurring theme in Twombly's art.
This form fascinated him for several years.
In the meandering scrawl of the blackboard paintings of the late 1960s, he explored its capacity to convey, through repetition, a sense of single, continuous fields of energy.
Here, Twombly revisited and developed this line in an epic scale.
This is such bullshit.
Okay, this is like... I'm sorry.
This is garbage.
And the idea that everything is art... Okay, you want to call this art, call it art.
Okay, but it's finger painting.
It's bad art.
Not to get into deep philosophy here about art, but one of the things that makes art art is a certain amount of skill.
To be an artist means that you have perfected your craft.
There's a difference between somebody like me, who's very good at violin, and somebody who's legitimately virtuosic on violin, and the difference is that person has more craft than I do.
I've talked about art and craft before.
I've talked about the idea that craft requires skill, and what I hate about modern art Is that it's much more about energy.
And it's all subjective.
I think that you can objectively say this is bad art.
I think there are certain objective standards.
And I think one of the standards you can apply is, how many people on earth could make this?
How many people on earth can make this?
Everyone.
Every person can make this.
There are elephants that can make this at the zoo.
They legitimately have zoos where elephants make art and they sell them for like 15 bucks and it supports the survival of the elephants.
That seems to be a much better spend than Cy Twombly's art.
The leftist idea that subjectivity creates its own value is so stupid.
That I can't even believe it.
Now listen, does this mean that the person who bought it has too much money?
Not necessarily.
It means that the person who bought it has terrible taste.
But the idea that art has no standards whatsoever is the death of everything, right?
It's true in music.
We look at people who play three chords and suddenly they're Beethoven.
We look at people who rhyme badly and suddenly they're Shakespeare.
The whole purpose of art is that you are supposed to be better at something than anyone else.
In no other arena of American life, or Western life, do we treat people like this.
Only in the artistic field do we do this.
You'd never do this with a plumber.
You'd never be like, the plumber wouldn't come in and screw up your pipes.
You'd be like, you know what?
He really used his creativity there.
You know, I can take a hammer and just beat on that pipe and it gives me a new sense of meaning.
Art is a job.
Art requires skill.
This is why all of the great artists spent years in apprenticeship.
They spent years perfecting their craft.
If I see something where I got up in the morning and all I would have to do is basically spit, On a canvas?
And this would now be art?
It makes me angry and I think it's stupid.
Okay.
And the person who bought it is a moron.
I don't care how rich they are.
Okay.
Time for the mailbag.
Thank you.
Benjamin writes, Dear Ben, what books do you recommend for a novice in the study of economic ideologies that easily explain the errors of socialism and communism?
Thank you.
Well, Hayek has a couple of books that are quite good on this.
The name of the Hayek book that is most famous, Roads of Serfdom.
That's the one that sort of explains the failures of socialist economics.
Economics in One Lesson is always the easiest economics book and it explains why Keynesianism is wrong.
There are a number of very good books.
Thomas Sowell's books on basic economics explain it as well.
Kyle says, do you practice the infamous Shapiro smirk in the mirror before your debates?
If I were to give it a name, like Blue Steel, what would you call it?
Well, I mean, I don't actually have a name for it.
I don't practice it.
It's been natural since childhood, I assume.
There are certain kind of facial tics that everyone has, and that's just one of mine.
The other one that I have is when I'm thinking, I tend to kind of roll my eyes a little bit, and I've been working on that one because it annoys me and my wife.
But I don't have a name for it.
We'll have to come up with one.
So if you have any suggestions, Kyle, we're perfectly willing to take those under advisement.
Lamberto says, "Hi Ben, recently I posted on Facebook an exercise describing the horrible situation in Venezuela due to their socialist policies.
In response to that article, a liberal friend of mine commented saying Venezuela is a bad example of socialism and Germany is a good example of socialism.
Why can't the US be as effective as Germany?
I didn't know exactly how to counter that statement.
Perhaps you can help me out." Well, actually Venezuela is a better example of socialism since it has more government running of resources.
So socialism and communism are based on state ownership of resources.
If you want to talk about heavy regulation and redistribution of resources, that really is less socialism than it is what they call sort of modified capitalism.
Germany is much more along those lines than it is, like Germany is closer in economics to the United States than it is to Venezuela.
And the idea that because Germany has extensive social programs that it is a socialist country is just not true.
In the same way that people say Denmark is a socialist country except that it has some of the lowest corporate tax rates on planet Earth and some of the laxest business regulations.
They have very high personal income tax rates.
And they have a social safety net that's very extensive.
They've had to cut all of that back because they're bankrupting themselves.
So even Germany isn't a good example of how you can have a lasting economic success.
Like, Germany has had some economic success in the European context compared to their economy in the United States.
It's not even close.
Well, it depends on which elements of the right you are talking about.
So, I would say this.
which the left is closer to the truth than the right.
Well, it depends on which elements of the right you are talking about.
So I would say this, there are certain elements of the right that sort of are libertarian in orientation, not with regard to government, which I think is right, but with regard to human nature.
This idea that we are all atomistic individuals and that any social standards are dangerous and there is no communal social fabric.
You know, the left acknowledges that there's a social fabric, they just think that the government has to force what the social fabric is.
So, if I have to choose between the idea that there is a social fabric and there is no social fabric, or the social fabric doesn't matter, Then I think the social fabric matters.
I don't think so.
You know, in terms of in terms of sort of the role of social fabric, it goes like this.
Libertarians are here and then there's the left and then there's the right over here.
So the left is actually closer to the right in terms of communitarian ideology with regard to social fabric than hardcore libertarianism.
But as far as generalized leftist ideology, I don't.
Thanks so very much.
Alex says, What's your favorite food to eat during Thanksgiving?
So stuffing is my thing.
I will put away entire pans of stuffing.
My mom makes an incredible turkey.
In fact...
My wife and I are going away for Thanksgiving, but we are doing Thanksgiving dinner in the evening early because we need to have my mom's cooking.
My mom is an excellent cook.
Mark says, God Emperor Shapiro.
That's flattering.
I guess that Clavin's been deposed.
I run a free speech group on my campus.
What would you say is the best way to deal with the radical leftists who try to silence us and heckle our event?
Expose them.
Get out a camera and show them being idiots and then get it to Daily Wire and we will put that up and we will mock them because that is one of our joys in life.
Emilio says, hey, is beer kosher?
And if so, what's your beer of choice?
So I'm not – I can't say I'm like a beer connoisseur.
Plain beer is always kosher because it's made from grain.
It's not made from grapes.
Flavored beer is not always kosher.
Usually when I'm out, I'll order something like a Heineken or something.
Kyle says, according to modern science, humans have been around for about 100,000 years, but the Bible states we have been here for about 7,000 years.
What's your opinion on that and evolution in general?
So I am not a fundamentalist with regard to timelines in the Bible, particularly in the creation period.
So there's a book that I like a lot by a guy named Gerald Schroeder.
I've recommended it on the show before, talking about how science melds with the Bible.
I mean, some obvious criticisms of the literalist interpretation of biblical dating.
Pretty clearly, for example, the Bible says at the very beginning, there was night and there was day the first day.
That happens before the earth has been created, before the sun has been created.
So, what is the timeline there?
Is that really a 24-hour period, or is that something very different?
So, I don't think that the Bible Was meant to be taken supremely literally along those lines, but I'm not sure how you would convey that the Earth is hundreds of thousands of years old and evolution existed in a document that was created 3,000 years ago for people who had no idea what evolution is, had no idea what species were, had no idea about periods of time.
I mean, how do you explain carbon dating?
So, yeah, I think that God has a bit of a rough road to hoe in terms of communication with human beings.
He's always bound by the capacity of human beings to understand, which is pretty clear even from the biblical text.
When Moses said, to God, let me see your face, and God says, I can't let you see my face or you'll die.
I think that's pretty much correct.
Perfect communication between God and man is not a real possibility, in the sense that everything is always going to be filtered through the prism of the mind, and God knows that.
Josh says, if the founders were alive today to see what America has become, What do you think they might wish they could go back and change or do differently?
Well, I think that the problem, well, listen, I think if the founders were alive today and, you know, many of them were not raised in a context in which slavery was appropriate, they would abolish slavery right off the bat.
I think that they would also be a little bit less sanguine about the power of the judiciary.
I think that they would also tremendously oppose the power of the bureaucracy and they would put restrictions in the Constitution against it.
But The Constitution is a pretty good document.
I'm not sure what exactly they would change in order to prohibit what happened, because all of the problems with the Constitution in terms of government growth have been specifically variations from the Constitution.
So that's not because the founders embedded anything in there that's wrong.
They might have taken some of the anti-federalist critiques a little bit more seriously about the possibility of growth of federal power, but it's also important to recognize that at the time, they were fighting against the Articles of Confederation, which were the weakest form of government known to man, essentially.
Ryan says, So the idea here is that you are, you know, should you vote for somebody who is moral but disagrees with you?
So the idea here is that you are, you know, should you vote for somebody who is moral but disagrees with you, or should you vote for somebody who is questionable but agrees with you?
So I, again, I'm going to reject the false binary that we live in a system where we can't elect moral men who agree with us.
But if the false binary is would I rather have people who are personally saints but vote for socialism versus would I rather have people who are child molesters but agree with me, if that is the false binary we are creating, of course you would have to say that you would vote for the person who most represents your priorities.
I get that.
But I don't think that that's the binary.
And I don't think that that is a recipe for a repeat election cycle.
So here's one of the things that I said about the 2016 election, and I'll say it again about Alabama.
Elections do not exist in a vacuum.
They're not one-time events.
The idea that how you vote in this election impacts how the country moves in future elections is a fact.
The moral character of a country is built off of repeated trials and errors.
Okay, you don't get to take one election and take it and crystallize it and say this is the only election that has ever mattered in the history of the world.
When you do that, you end up in a world of false binaries and that's how you end up with a bunch of bad choices.
I think that how you vote in elections, how you decide this, makes a difference.
So, If you were to ask me, is it worth sacrificing one election so we can have a better country where there's the possibility that everyone requires good people to be in office?
And so next time my choice isn't between a questionable conservative and a socialist saint, it's between a socialist saint and a conservative saint, then that's something that I think is worth sacrificing for.
I think that if we all hold by that standard, then we'll have more saints in office and fewer sinners.
And more saints who agree with us in office, and fewer sinners who agree with us in office.
So, the whole premise of my logic on this, politically, is that sometimes you have to take a short-term loss in order to make a long-term gain.
But I think that we live in an era where If you think that we can't take a short-term loss, that it's the end of the world if we lose something, or that even the possibility of losing means that we have to vote a certain way, everything is crisis point.
A lot of exigent circumstances require you to make bad decisions, and I think that that's where we are repeatedly in politics, and I don't think that's where we ought to be.
Ryan says, sorry I just read his.
Lynn says, Ben if you were given the task to run a high school without the Department of Education getting in your way, what would you be teaching the students and why?
So I would be inculcating virtue.
So I would spend some time actually talking about the virtues and why they are important in pursuing human happiness.
This is something that we don't teach in high schools anymore.
I would also be pushing apprenticeships as opposed to particular classes in certain study areas.
I think that learning skill sets is actually a lot more important sometimes than learning knowledge that you may never use.
But virtue is my key component.
I'd be teaching people that happiness is reliant on you being a virtuous human being and here are the ways that you can make your life more enlightened and more virtuous.
By the way, the founders agreed with me.
George Washington talked routinely about this being the role of education in a free society.
A society that does not inculcate virtue in the young is likely to crumble when they're old.
If not, how are judges able to block these executive actions?
So, no, it's not against the law.
The basic rule, I believe, is that the federal funding must be tied to something that has to do with it being a sanctuary city.
So this was ruled during, I believe, the Reagan era, because Reagan tried to remove federal funding from certain states that were not cracking down on drunk driving in the way that he wanted.
And so what they said is that the funding that he's removing has to be somehow logically connected to the cause that he's attempting to push.
You can't just randomly remove all funding for a cause that is unrelated.
Michael says, So, the greater overarching cause that these sexual assault charges stem from is, again, failure to teach virtue.
on true allegiance, especially your signature, one day it'll belong to my son.
Well, I appreciate it, Michael.
So the greater overarching cause that these sexual assault charges stem from is again, failure to teach virtue.
Teaching boys not to rape is easy, but if it has no context, if you're not teaching boys an affirmative virtue, then they are likely to fall into temptation more often.
The same thing is true for young women who are being told that, listen, sexual assault is not the fault of women, it's the fault of the people who do the sexual assaulting.
But you're increasing risk when you tell people that a libertine sexual order in which consent is the only value is likely to lead to happiness.
That leads to riskier encounters.
Again, the evil is the fault of the evildoer.
But riskier encounters are likely to increase the proportion of encounters in which an evil event happens.
Roderick says, Ben, would you please explain net neutrality?
I've done that before, so I'm gonna skip that one.
You can look back at previous podcasts, because I have talked about that at length.
Christian says, hey Ben, I'm a big fan of the show from Switzerland.
I was wondering, is there any way in which the U.S.
could learn from the Swiss healthcare system?
I know it costs us a lot of money, but it seems to be working very well with the individual mandate.
Why hasn't the U.S.
considered such reform?
So Christian, as you may have seen, in my debates, when I say, if you're gonna have a government-run system, it should look like the Swiss healthcare system, I think that's right, but I don't think that a government-run healthcare system is the best healthcare system.
Switzerland provides universality and quality, but not affordability.
It costs a fortune.
It's very, very expensive in Switzerland, but is the United States willing to absorb those costs?
I'm not sure the United States is willing to absorb those costs.
Also, you need to worry about the creation of new products and services as opposed to the redistribution of existing ones, and a capitalist market is the best way to do that.
Okay, so final question here.
Braden says, Ben, I'm 22 years old and married, making a good living.
My wife wants a baby, as do I. However, I'm afraid to be a dad because I didn't have one growing up and don't have all great reference points to go off from my youth.
What, if any, is your advice on this?
Well, Braden, I think that the fact that you acknowledge this as a problem is one of the reasons why it sounds to me like you're going to be in good shape to have a kid.
Recognizing your own flaws as a person, recognizing your own shortcomings in your childhood, things you want to do better, is a great way to raise kids.
Because it means that you're going to be thinking.
I say this to people all the time.
If you're truly worried about sin, if you're truly concerned about your own level of sinfulness, you are less likely to sin than if you're blithe about your sin.
And if you're truly worried about making mistakes, that means you're gonna think twice before you make those mistakes.
So, what I would say is that you sound, I think you and your wife, it sounds like, would make very good parents.
And, you know, if you're looking for great reference points, then try to find people who you think are great parents, get close to them, and try to learn from them.
And try to put yourself in situations where you can learn from other men you admire.
My dad always said this when I was growing up, that he liked to have friends where I could look up to them also and admire them.
And people who treated me well as well.
I think that you can do that too, and I think that'd be a worthwhile thing.
Okay, so, we will be back here on Monday.
Hopefully the world will not implode in our absence.
It's gonna be Thanksgiving week next week, so let's try to have a happy week, that'd be nice.
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