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Nov. 20, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:52
WARNING: Category 5 Tweetstorm | Ep. 421
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It's a Monday, which means even more sexual harassment scandals.
Plus, President Trump enters upon a Category 5 tweet storm.
And we'll talk a little Federalist Papers, too.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
It's Thanksgiving week!
Yay!
We made it!
We're almost there, guys.
We're almost to the end of the year.
Thanksgiving is coming up, of course, on Thursday, and I know we're doing a video here about things that I'm thankful for.
Yes, I, your humble host, am actually thankful for some things, unbelievably enough.
We'll tell you about that a little bit later this week.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Texture.
So, particularly in this day and age, magazines are actually vital reading.
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Okay, so we'll begin today with some breaking news.
This from the New York Times.
So the New York Times has now suspended famed reporter Glenn Thrush over allegations of sexual harassment.
So what makes this sort of interesting is that Thrush is one of these guys who's been virtue signaling about sexual harassment for quite a while.
He posted a Facebook note just a couple of weeks ago blasting political journalist Mark Halperin over allegations of sexual misconduct against young female journalists.
He stated, quote, Young people who come into a newsroom deserve to be taught our trade, given our support, and enlisted in our calling, not betrayed by little men who believe they are bigger than the mission.
Only one problem.
It turns out that the married Thrush apparently has a bad habit of getting sloshed with younger female journalists and then coming on to them.
In one instance, a 20-something young reporter was so upset by such an alleged incident that she told her friend who texted with Thrush.
Vox reports, quote, Three young women I interviewed, including the young woman who met Thrush in June, described to me a range of similar experiences, from unwanted groping and kissing, to wet kisses out of nowhere, to hazy sexual encounters that played out under the influence of alcohol.
Each woman described feeling differently about these experiences, scared, violated, ashamed, weirded out.
I was and am angry.
Details of their story suggest a pattern.
All of the women were in their 20s at the time.
They were relatively early in their careers compared to Thrush, who was the kind of seasoned journalist who would be good to know.
At an event with alcohol, he made advances.
Afterward, they, as I did, the columnist here is actually one of the people Thrush came on to, thought it best to stand good terms with Thrush, whatever their feelings.
So there's a lot of this going around in Hollywood, in journalism, in politics, where something bad happens and women don't say anything because they're afraid it's going to ruin their career.
They're afraid there's going to be blowback.
from inside the establishment.
And that's not an irrelevant fear.
It's happened to a lot of women in Hollywood.
It's happened to a lot of women in journalism.
The woman in the story, the writer of the story, Laura McGann, just five years ago, Thrush, quote, slid into my side of the booth, blocking me in.
I was wearing a skirt and he put his hand on my thigh.
He started kissing me.
I pulled myself together and got out of there, shoving him on my way out.
And apparently Thrush then told the entire newsroom that McGann had come on to him, not the other way around.
McGann told her seniors at Politico, There are a bunch of things that need to be asked here that are, I think, worthwhile asking.
and that he has, quote, "done things I am ashamed of, "actions I have brought great hurt to my friends and family.
"I am working hard to repair the damage that I've done.
"The New York Times has suspended Thrush "pending an investigation." There are a bunch of things that need to be asked here that are, I think, worthwhile asking.
The first question that's worthwhile asking is, the entire journalistic community that's coming down on politicians in Hollywood, how many of them are guilty of the same sort of conduct?
It now seems that this sort of conduct is common across the board, particularly in high-profile industries.
I'm not sure that it's happening as much in sort of typical business, in typical business areas, because you can switch businesses relatively quickly.
But if you're in a specialized industry like a journalism or Hollywood, where fame matters, Then I feel like the rates of this are much higher, which creates this sense of hypocrisy.
All these people who claim to be feminists who are going out there and sexually harassing or abusing the people who are trying to make their way in the world.
Hal Perrin is the first one, obviously, from Politico.
And now you see Glenn Thrush, who is working over at Politico now at the New York Times.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
The other thing that happens is you see some of these accounts.
And it's hard to put your finger on where exactly can you say the sin has now taken place.
The reason being that it seems like a bit of a moving target.
So in Thrush's situation, there are a bunch of stories in this Vox piece in which Thrush would get drunk with a female colleague and then he would go in for a kiss or he'd kiss her and then she would get uptight and walk away.
Is that full-on sexual assault?
Is that like Al Franken grabbing a woman's breasts while she's sleeping?
Is that the equivalent of Roy Moore going after a 14-year-old?
Like, there seem to be gradations here that everybody is ignoring in the rush to throw everyone out.
Now, I'm okay with throwing everyone out so long as we have a consistent standard for how we apply this.
One of the ways that you could tell that Glenn Thrush was a creep And then you could say if these stories are correct.
One of the ways that in the old sort of traditionalist morality that we could easily say Glenn Thrush is a creep is Glenn Thrush is married and Glenn Thrush is trying to make out with women, not his wife.
Right?
That would be the hard line.
In 1945, if a married guy tried to make out with a woman who's not his wife, we would all go, that guy's gross.
But now, thanks to the sexual revolution, we're supposed to assume that that's totally fine unless she doesn't consent.
But consent is a murky area in the sense that Sometimes, I mean, there's one case where the woman says she went back to her hotel with Glenn Thrush, they were both drunk, she was partially unclothed, she decided she didn't want to go any further, and he left.
And then she says, I don't feel like I was sexually exploited or abused, but there she is in the story anyway.
So is that a situation of sexual abuse or exploitation?
Is it the power dynamic that makes it bad?
Because we were told back in 1998 that there was nothing to the power dynamic stuff when Bill Clinton was shtupping his secretary.
What exactly is the thing that makes it bad?
So, it used to be there were some pretty bright lines as to what made things bad.
The brightest line, of course, was don't have sex until you're married.
Right?
That was the brightest line.
It was.
Now, some people didn't, a lot of people didn't keep that line, but I'll tell you what they did keep was getting married after they got pregnant.
So, some fascinating sort of historical statistics.
Even colonial era America, I think it was something like one third of all babies born in colonial era America were born before nine months to a married couple, meaning that somebody got knocked up and then they got married.
But because marriage was the standard, this meant that we at least had some area where if you walk past this line, we know that you just did something wrong.
Some objective view, right?
Something that doesn't rely on the subjective sense of what the people involved are saying.
Now, there's certain cases that clearly don't, right?
Clearly, rape does not involve a grey area, right?
There's no grey area with regard to rape.
Certainly, you know, a guy walking up to a girl and just ramming his tongue down her throat.
That's obviously sexual assault, and that does not apply a grey area.
But where two people are drunk and they start making out, and then the girl says no, and the guy walks away, You know, this is where you get into dicey territory, particularly in Title IX cases on campus where a guy and a girl get drunk, they've been told that they can be as sexually libidinous as they want to be, and then they go to bed together, and then three days later the girl says that she was sexually exploited or raped.
What we need are some objective measures.
This is not to say the girl wasn't sexually exploited or raped, maybe she was, but we need some sort of objective measures that we as a society can take a look at and say this is really bad behavior.
In this case, one of the things that makes it relatively easy is that we are still using, we don't want to admit it to ourselves, but we are still using the old concepts.
In our sexually permissive society, we like to pretend that we're not using old concepts here, but the fact is if Glenn Thrush were a single man who were the same age as the women he was drinking with, he'd be being treated very differently than a 50-year-old guy who's going after 20-somethings while he's married.
We're still using traditional sexual concepts even when we don't want to admit it.
That's one of the things that's so funny about so much of leftist perspective on these sorts of issues is that they attempt to break with traditional concepts of sexual mores.
They try to say that those things are hackneyed and stupid and we need to leave those behind.
They try to say that Mike Pence is a crazy man for not wanting to dine alone with women, not his wife.
How could he?
It's terrible and awful.
And yet, as soon as somebody does something like this, we immediately revert back to traditional sexual mores, right?
They're using my standard now, right?
This is more my standard.
I look at Glenn Thrush and I say, this is gross.
How dare he?
That's my standard, okay?
I mean, I was famous until I was 24 years old as the Virgin Ben, right?
Because I used to advocate publicly and still do for virginity until marriage.
They're holding by my standard now.
The left is now holding by my standard that a man should not touch a woman unless they're married, essentially.
That a man should not touch a woman unless he has explicit permission from the woman.
That drunken revelries that go wrong are a bad thing.
Now the left comes at it from the angle of radical subjectivity, and this is where you get into dicey territory.
Because when I say radical subjectivity, I mean that the situation can be exactly the same, as in exactly the same.
And if the woman perceives it differently than the man, And it's reasonable to perceive it either way.
We have to take the woman's word for her perception.
That's dangerous territory because what is the man supposed to expect?
So what we've decided to do instead is become puritanical about sex from the left, right?
This is why you have no-means-no rules in places like California on campus where you're basically supposed to have a signed checklist before every aspect of sex.
Like every single, can I touch your arm now?
Can I touch your leg now?
You're supposed to actually ask before every single one of these things, which has never happened in the history of sex.
The left, because the left refused to draw any clear lines, now they have to fall back on drawing new lines that are both unclear and over-restrictive.
Now, this is not to defend Glenn Thrush.
I think Glenn Thrush obviously sounds like a scuzzbag.
But it is to show that the vagary that the left has created with regard to the sexual revolution has not been of benefit to women.
In many cases, it's actually been of damage to women.
And this is why I think, because these lines are not clear, I think it's so obvious that men will use the vagueness of the lines in order to cross lines that no one would want them to cross.
Bad men will use the fact that things are vague to suggest, well, You know, maybe it wasn't, like, totally consensual, but it was kind of consensual, wasn't it?
Right, so in that category falls, for example, Russell Simmons and Brett Ratner, according to a woman named Carrie Klauson-Kaligi.
Carrie Klauson-Kaligi is a model, and she told the LA Times in a Sunday report that she met Russell Simmons and Brett Ratner at a casting call in 1991 when she was 17.
She said they brought her over to Simmons' house to show her a music video they were working on, and that's when the music mogul started to pull off her clothes.
I looked over at Brett and said, help me, and I'll never forget the look on his face, she said.
In that moment, the realization fell on me that they were in it together.
She says that Russell Simmons tried to have intercourse, but she resisted and he ended up forcing oral sex.
Khaligi said she tried to take a shower because she felt disgusting, and there Simmons essentially raped her.
He penetrated her without permission.
She claims to have told at least three people about this incident.
So, these guys should go to jail, right?
If this is what happened, these guys should go to jail, obviously.
The question is, And what was in Russell Simmons' mind that he thought that this was okay?
So Ratner and Simmons say, quote, Right?
Everything that was consensual.
So, there's two ways of reading that.
One is that they just have completely different accounts of the situation and one of them is lying.
And the other is that there is this weird gray area that now exists with regard to consent, where if a guy pushes a girl hard enough and then she says yes for a moment, she feels like she's been violated because she has been violated from her point of view, but the guy doesn't feel like he's been violated because he's achieved the cherished yes, even by using all sorts of exploitative methods.
Now again, if you had some clear lines about sexual activity, all of this would become obsolete.
You wouldn't have to do any of this.
You'd say Russell Simmons invited a 17-year-old girl to his house and then had sex with her, or tried to force her into sex.
That's gross, not just because of the consent issue, but because Russell Simmons, much older guy, there's a, this is, this is just, you know, deep down, that this is immoral activity.
I don't know if, is Russell Simmons married?
He might be.
I don't know the answer to that, but in any case, Clear lines, the left likes to say that clear lines are overbroad.
But the problem is that the left draws its own lines that are overbroad too.
Whenever it comes to lines regarding sexual behavior, you're going to catch up some people who are really not supposed to be in that category.
The question is whether there can be any clear conviction that something is wrong or not.
We on the right, traditional moralists, we have a pretty idea of what's right and what's wrong when it comes to sexual activity.
The left has no such ideas.
This leads to a fair bit of confusion.
And I know there are a bunch of people on the left who listen to the show and they're saying, well, my value is consent.
The point I'm making is that when it comes to sexual activity, there's a lot of vagueness regarding consent.
There is.
Let's be completely honest about this.
The notion that when people have sex, and I'm not saying normatively.
Normatively would be great if there was complete transparency with regard to consent.
But in the real world of sexual relationships, there is not always this clear consent relationship.
There just isn't.
I mean, how many times do you see movies where a guy will be badgering a woman and she's saying, no, no, no, no, no, and it turns into yes?
Right?
That's not an excuse for the guy to keep pushing.
It isn't.
That's not what I'm saying.
The point that I'm making is we have a culture that constantly says that women want it.
I mean, that's the entire music culture.
We have a movie culture that says that women want it.
We have an entire culture of film that says that half the time when women say no, what they really mean is yes.
And we have an entire feminist movement that spent 40 years trying to convince women that it was just as libidinous as men, and that consent can be had under any circumstances.
There's a lot of murky area here and now the left is trying to claim that it's black and white.
Well, I want it to be black and white.
I have rules.
I want to know what the left's specific rules are.
And I want to know what their specific definition of consent looks like so we can all apply it and we can determine whether it is correct or not.
By the way, I'm on the side of all of these women, by the way, who say that they did not consent to these relationships because, again, I'm the prude.
I'm the prude.
I think it's wrong for guys to ram their tongues down women's throat.
I think it's wrong for Glenn Thrush to go drinking with women and then make out with them without their permission.
Even if the woman says that she's totally into it for the first five minutes and then she says no, I think it's wrong for him to have initiated this stuff.
So I'm pretty strict on this stuff and it's amazing to see the feminists join me on this side of the aisle.
Okay, so, with all of that said, I want to get to the Trump Category 5 tweetstorm in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Zeal.
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By the way, just a quick note about the sexual consent issue and the vagary on the left.
You're still seeing this vagary on the left because one of the fascinating things is you see some people on the left saying that Bill Clinton should have resigned in 1998 now.
But the excuse they use for why he should have resigned varies.
So some of them say it's because of Juanita Broderick, because of the rape allegation.
It's true.
A few of them say it's because of Lewinsky.
But a bunch of people on the left say that Lewinsky was totally consensual.
But was he totally consensual?
He was pressuring her into the sex.
She was 18.
He was 45.
He was married.
My rules are very clear.
That's the nice thing about my rules.
They're super clear.
And they protect women.
They work on behalf of women.
If a woman wants to consent under my rules, she can consent, but she has to be extraordinarily clear about it.
And that clarity sometimes comes in the form of, you know, like a wedding ring.
Like an actual commitment!
So I think these are useful things to keep in mind.
When you formulate a rule, you should try to create a rule that it's obvious when the rule is broken and when it's not.
I think the left has failed here.
Okay, so now I want to introduce something new.
So we've had good Trump, bad Trump for well over a year on this program, a year and a half on this program.
But now we have to introduce something new.
And that is, you know, sometimes Trump says things and they are just so magnificent.
They are just so rhetorically brilliant that we need a new category.
It's not really good or bad.
It's Eloquent Trump.
And so we now introduce to you, Eloquent Trump.
Ah yes, Eloquent Trump.
So, on this date, yesterday, yesterday on this date in 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave a very famous speech.
He gave a speech that we all know as the Gettysburg Address.
It took place on this date, this specific date, November 19th, 1863, so yesterday.
And in it, he declared that we as a union were going to have to stand together, and that the better angels of our nature were going to bring the country together, and that we have to Not sacrifice.
These people should not have sacrificed their lives in vain.
That has been matched only by Donald Trump.
So Donald Trump says he can be the most presidential president outside of Abraham Lincoln.
And I think he proved that yesterday when he tweeted this about LeVar Ball.
So remember, LeVar Ball's son, LeAngelo, I don't know what the obsession is in the family with Le.
It's LeVar, LeAngelo, and what's the name of the kid?
Lorenzo?
So in any case, the letter L is big there.
LeVar, his son, LeAngelo, was arrested in China for shoplifting.
And as you recall, Trump got him out of prison and then demanded a thank you, to which the son acquiesced.
And I said at the time, like, this is kind of babyish that the president wants a thank you for getting an American citizen out of prison in China.
But in any case, you know, the son said thank you.
Well, then they asked LaVar about it.
And LaVar said, I'm not going to thank President Trump.
I'm not going to thank him because LaVar is also a member of higher intelligence.
He obviously is a high IQ guy.
And so what he said is, Trump didn't visit my son in prison.
Well, he got him out, so you probably should say thank you, but then Eloquent Trump showed up.
up.
So Eloquent Trump tweeted yesterday, now that the three basketball players are out of China and saved from years in jail, LeVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo, is unaccepting of what I did for his son and that shoplifting is no big deal.
I should have left them in jail!
Exclamation point.
Ah, Eloquent Trump.
I do love this stuff.
No, you shouldn't have left them in jail.
I'm going to talk about why this is important in just a second, but it was a pretty epic Trump yesterday.
And you just wonder, was he super bored yesterday?
Didn't like the football?
Like, what was going on with him yesterday?
He was back from his trip and he had a lot to get off his chest.
That was not the only eloquent Trump yesterday.
He also tweeted further about LeVar Ball.
He tweeted, So he should have left them in jail for a few more months because daddy was mean to Trump.
Um, okay.
Five to ten years in jail, but not to Father LeVar.
Should have gotten his son out during my next trip to China instead.
China told them why they were released.
Very ungrateful!
So he should have left them in jail for a few more months because daddy was mean to Trump.
Okay, so one thing here...
So a lot of people who are Trump supporters find this stuff absolutely hilarious.
It is hilarious, but it's hilarious and also tragic because, again, yesterday was the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.
Eloquent Trump.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Now, the left obviously goes crazy whenever Trump does any of this sort of stuff, so Brian Stelter on CNN says something ridiculous.
He says this is race-baiting.
Think about this.
He's just recently let the NFL kneeling controversy start to subside, start to fade away, and now here he is calling out these players and the families again.
I think it's immature at best, Fred, but it's really race-baiting at worst.
That's going to be debated.
That's going to be argued about.
But I want to put that on the table.
It sure looks like race baiting to a lot of people.
And by the way, the reason why I think these tweets are important, it's because they are a serious look.
OK, so it's race baiting.
OK, first of all, I'll show you it's not race baiting.
So more eloquent, Trump.
Trump was very eloquent yesterday.
I mean, he put on his cravat, he grabbed his pipe, he fired up the handle, and he ended up tweeting out this one, too.
This one about Jeff Flake.
So Jeff Flake, of course, is the senator from Arizona.
He's not running for re-election.
He said that he thinks that Trump is basically the end of the Republican Party.
And here's what he tweeted, more eloquent Trump.
Senator Jeff Flakey, he wrote Flakey, but the Y is in parentheses, who is unelectable in the great state of Arizona, quit race, anemic polls, was caught purposely on Mike, Mike is spelled M-I-K-E, saying bad things about your favorite president.
He'll be a no on tax cuts because his political career anyway is, quote-unquote, toast.
There's so much that is glorious about this tweet.
First of all, the revolutionary use of the scare quotes.
I don't know why Toast is in scare quotes.
I don't know why Mike is in scare quotes.
I don't know why Mike is spelled M-I-K-E as opposed to M-I-C.
I don't know why Jeff Flake was on top of some dude named Mike.
That's weird.
And I don't know why Jeff Flake was on top of that dude named Mike saying bad things about my favorite president, Abraham Lincoln.
I don't know why Jeff Flake was ripping on Abraham Lincoln.
I do love that Trump calls himself your favorite president.
He has the lowest poll numbers of any president in American history at this point in his presidency.
Astonishingly grand.
Favorite current president.
That's true.
Thank you, Austin.
It's true.
He is my favorite current president.
I don't know of any other current presidents.
So there was Trump on Jeff Flake.
So lots of eloquence happening yesterday.
The reason that I'm bringing all of this up Is because a lot of people on the right, they go, this is why Trump wins.
He wins because of these tweets.
Winning, winning, epic winning, maga, maga, underwater, upside down, 365 degree, 190,000 IQ, underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry, hippo's chest.
This is what they say.
Because you're talking about it today, aren't you?
Right, I'm talking about it today.
That's true.
You're right.
I will talk about what the President of the United States says.
The reason why this is a problem, folks, is for two reasons.
One, and this is all coming from a conservative point of view, One, it's not great for the country when the President of the United States is threatening to leave American citizens overseas in Chinese custody because daddy was mean to him.
That's not a great thing.
If Obama did that, we'd all go nuts, and rightly so.
Number two, Donald Trump is trying to make the last-ditch push for a tax cut right now, for serious tax cut legislation before Thanksgiving, or before Christmas.
One of the votes he's going to need is the vote of Senator Jeff Flake.
And now, he's saying that Jeff Flake is going to vote against the tax cuts, giving him full ability to vote against the tax cuts.
Like, this, if you want good legislation to pass, you know what would help?
If the President of the United States weren't Doug from Up, weren't the dog from Up, chasing every single squirrel.
His closing argument on healthcare reform, if you recall, was that Jeff Sessions was a poopy head.
His closing argument on the second round of health care reform is that the NFL player should stop kneeling.
And now his closing argument on tax reform is that he should have left a basketball player in China under custody and that a particular senator should be He'll rip out a particular senator and tell him to vote no on tax cuts because he's mean to him.
Like, I just don't.
Like, why?
Why?
And that wasn't it.
Then he went after Marshawn Lynch today.
So Marshawn Lynch is a fully-fledged adult.
I mean, if Marshawn Lynch is a running back for the Oakland Raiders, he used to play for the Seattle Seahawks.
They used to do a show up in Seattle.
And so he followed Marshawn Lynch closely.
Marshawn Lynch is one of the stupider members of the human race.
He's a very, very dumb individual.
And Marshawn Lynch, he's been famous for this for a long time.
And before anybody says that this is something racial, I say that people are dumb cross-racially all the time.
Marshawn Lynch is just objectively speaking a dumb-dumb.
And Marshawn Lynch yesterday sat during the United States National Anthem and then stood for the Mexican National Anthem, which makes no sense at all.
Okay, whatever you say about the American National Anthem, Mexico is a garbage, garbage government.
I mean, the government there has been a disaster for years and years and years and years.
I mean, the death rate in Mexico City is higher than in any other industrialized city in the world.
I mean, it's astonishing.
But he's standing for the Mexican National Anthem for some odd reason.
So he's a genius.
But Trump feels the need to tweet about that, right?
So here's Trump tweeting about that.
So Trump tweeted about Marshawn Lynch.
Says Marshawn Lynch of the NFL's Oakland Raiders stands for the Mexican anthem and sits down to booze for a national anthem.
Great disrespect.
Next time, NFL should suspend him for remainder of season.
Attendance and ratings way down.
Thank you, President Trump.
Like, I know that this is a fight you want to keep fighting because you think it's a political winner for you.
The reason that I'm upset about this is not just because it's time to make a final legislative push.
It's because he has 43 million Twitter followers.
43 million.
He's the President of the United States.
He has the ability to gather the media flies like a lamp.
Right?
I mean, it's an amazing thing.
And when he uses his Twitter for good, Then that is a wonderful thing.
I will show you him using his Twitter for good.
So yesterday, there's a Border Patrol agent who was murdered in an attack on the border.
This is according to NBC-DFW.
They said, authorities are searching Texas' Big Bend area for potential suspects and witnesses after a U.S.
Customs and Border Protection agent was fatally injured responding to activity there.
Border Patrol officials said the agents were on patrol in Culberson County in the Big Bend sector of the Texas border.
Agent Rogelio Martinez died Sunday morning as a result of injuries he and his partner sustained after responding to activity while on patrol on Interstate 10 near Van Horn, according to a statement from Border Patrol.
It wasn't immediately clear when the incident occurred.
Okay, so here's what Trump tweeted about this, and this is good.
He tweeted, Imagine if all of his tweets were on the news.
Another badly hurt.
We'll seek out and bring to justice those responsible.
We will and must build the wall.
Imagine if all of his tweets were on the news.
Imagine if all of his tweets were directed at, you know, policy and legislation.
And he can still say inflammatory things.
It's an inflammatory thing to say.
He can still say that.
And I will cheer that, because he is correct.
One of the reasons that you need a physical barrier in some of these areas is to prevent the drug cartels from crossing over and hurting border patrol agents or illegal immigrants from doing the same.
It's important to have methods of defense.
He tweeted again on this, right?
He tweeted as well.
With regard to the Border Patrol agents, this is clip eight, actually.
So he tweeted on policy also yesterday, not just on the Border Patrol.
Republican senators are working very hard to get tax cuts and tax reform approved.
Hopefully it will not be long and they do not want to disappoint the American public.
Okay, imagine if he only tweeted about tax reform and the wall.
Would that be better than saying LeVar Ball's son should remain in jail in China?
Yes.
Would it be better than alienating a sitting member of the United States Senate whose vote you're going to need on both the wall and the tax reform?
Yes.
Yes it would.
And yet that is not what President Trump was doing yesterday.
It's just, it's foolish.
It's foolish.
You know, so much for eloquent Trump.
Although I will say, I do love, the tweets give me something to talk about.
It's so funny, I saw some MAGA folks saying, Dinesh D'Souza, who I'm friends with, Dinesh said something like, you know, the media wants Trump to stop tweeting.
They want Trump to stop tweeting.
If he's so ineffective, why do they want him to stop tweeting?
The media don't want Trump to stop tweeting.
Are you crazy?
What do you think is raising MSNBC's and CNN's ratings?
If Trump stops tweeting, they'll actually have to treat him like a normal president.
That's the scariest thing in the world for them.
They want to treat him the way that they're treating him.
I want him to stop tweeting because I don't think that it's useful to his agenda.
Okay, so before I go any further, I'm going to talk about Roy Moore and the latest fallout from that, and Al Franken, another allegation against Al Franken coming out.
Plus, I want to talk about Charles Manson, so a lot to get to.
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Okay.
So over the weekend, the Democrats basically made clear that they're not going to get rid of Minnesota Senator Al That's despite allegations that Al Franken grabbed the boobs of a sleeping woman, Leanne Tweeden, who's a talk show host out in Los Angeles.
They said, don't worry, we're not going to get rid.
We would never get rid of Al Franken.
Al Franken will apologize, and he'll go home and reflect.
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure.
Well now, a second woman has come out and alleged that Al Franken is doing some booty grabbing.
So here is a woman, so a woman has said, this is according to CNN, that Al Franken inappropriately touched her in 2010, telling CNN he grabbed her buttocks while taking a photo at the Minnesota State Fair.
You know what, I gotta tell you, I get the feeling, it's really fascinating, I do get the feeling that there is a generation gap with regard to behavior of men.
I sort of get this feeling that there are a lot of men over the age of 60 who have grabbed a woman's ass without permission, and that there are fewer men under the age of 40 who have grabbed a woman's ass without permission.
Maybe I'm getting this completely wrong, but if I'm not, that would explain a few things as far as our politicians and as far as some of our producers.
The idea that Al Franken just goes to the Minnesota State Fair and grabs this lady's butt.
Apparently, her name is Lindsay Menz.
She's 33.
She now lives in Frisco, Texas.
So, back when this happened, she was 26.
She says she wanted to share an uncomfortable interaction that left her feeling gross.
According to Menz, she attended the Minnesota State Fair with her husband and father in the summer of 2010, almost two years after Franken was elected to the Senate.
Her father's small business was sponsoring a local radio booth.
She spent the day meeting various elected officials, political candidates, and celebrities, and taking photos with them as they stopped by the booth.
When Franken walked in, Menz and her husband, who also spoke with CNN, said they recognized him right away.
Menz said she had a brief and cordial exchange with the senator.
Then, as her husband held up her phone and got ready to snap a photo of the two of them, Franken pulled me in really close, like awkward close, and as my husband took the picture, he put his hand full-fledged on my rear, Menz said.
It was tightly wrapped around my butt cheek.
It wasn't around my waist.
It wasn't around my hip or side.
It was definitely on my butt.
She said it lasted three or four seconds.
She was like, oh my God, what is happening?
Her husband said he kind of reached around her and pulled her into him.
He pulled her in and pushed his head against her head.
It was over pretty quick.
And you can see the picture.
In the picture, her head is right next to her head.
Apparently, she turned to her husband and said, he totally grabbed my butt.
And then she posted on Facebook that same day that the senator groped her.
Um, you can't see the lower half of their body in these photos.
She said, uh, her sister said, sorry, but you two aren't Bibles width apart.
Um, and, uh, and men's then responded, dude, Al Franken totally molested me.
Creeper.
That is, that, that exchange is available on Facebook.
I only laugh because the lady's funny, apparently.
Um, she says that she is not, uh, she's not painting her story in the same light as Leslie Tweeden's.
She says that, She wants to say something.
If someone sees that I said something, maybe it would give them the courage to say something, too.
Franken has not made any other statement.
He said he respects women and doesn't respect men who don't.
Okay, I take pictures with literally thousands of people.
I mean, there are thousands of students, including many young college women, with whom I take pictures.
I can say with full confidence, never at any point have I ever grasped the ass of a woman with whom I am taking a picture.
Never, ever, ever, ever.
The only butt I have ever touched is that of my wife.
Okay?
This idea that you're gonna go and pout, like, it's so wild.
Like, who does this occur to?
That you're gonna go take a picture with somebody, and you're just gonna grab her butt.
Like, who?
It's astonishing.
It's truly astonishing.
So, I guess this is really common.
Apparently, it's common at work, even among men.
I think something like 40% of women say they've been sexually harassed at work.
No, it's some really high number.
And among men, they say 25% say they've been sexually harassed at work.
So, people are garbage.
I think that the bottom line here is that, what's funny, going back to these sort of traditional sexual mores for just a second, traditional conservatives, the reason we draw very strict lines is because we think that man is inherently capable of sin.
That man is not good and not bad, but that he's very capable of sin, and particularly in sexual matters he's capable of sin, and that's why we draw all of these lines around men.
It's one of the reasons why we have all of these rules.
The left said all those rules were stupid, got rid of all the rules, and then they're surprised when the fallout is bad for women.
Look at the Democrats here.
It's pretty astonishing.
So I want to show you the hypocrisy of the Democrats.
So Joy Reid, over at MSNBC, she says that she is very disturbed by the fact that many people are still supporting Roy Moore, the Senate Alabama Republican candidate who has been credibly accused of child molestation, or at least of ephebophilia, which is the molestation of girls who have hit puberty but who are still little girls, you know, 14-year-old girls.
Joy Reid says that she finds the fact that people still support more disturbing.
We're talking about something of such a different degree.
You know, you talked about all of the past scandals.
You talked about the Monica Lewinsky situation, which was a clearly improper relationship.
But we're talking about children.
We're talking about multiple allegations of the abuse of children and the fact that it's even a question I think speaks to the position that the Republican Party finds it in morally.
This should not be a question.
And the fact that people are struggling with whether or not they should continue to support Roy Moore for reasons of party, power, and tribe is incredibly disturbing.
Okay, so I actually agree on a basic level with Joy Reid.
The problem is that her Democratic Party colleagues don't agree with her on Al Franken.
So here's Bernie Sanders desperately spinning away from answering whether if Al Franken should resign over what is now obviously clear conduct.
Do you think that Al Franken should resign?
I think that's a decision for Al Franken and the people of the state of Minnesota.
My understanding is that Al is a very popular senator.
People in Minnesota think that he is doing a good job and his political future will rest with the people of Minnesota.
Okay, so thank you, Bernie Sanders, for demonstrating that this stuff is political all the way around.
And if people are drawing lines for political reasons to include Donald Trump and Roy Moore, but not to include Al Franken, that just demonstrates the lines never had any sort of reality in the first place.
I have condemned, you know, when there are allegations against Trump, I condemn Trump.
When there are credible allegations against Trump, I condemn Trump's behavior.
When there was tape of Trump talking about this stuff, I condemn Trump.
When it was Clinton, I condemn Clinton.
When it's Roy Moore, I condemn Roy Moore.
When it's Al Franken, I condemn Al Franken.
One thing I don't think you can accuse me of is inconsistency on these particular matters, because my standard has never changed.
But when the standard changes, you do have to ask yourself why, and the obvious answer is that Al Franken has a D by his name.
Okay, so I have things I like, things I hate in Federalist Papers coming up, but you're gonna have to subscribe for that.
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All righty.
So let's get to some things that I like and some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
So over the weekend, Netflix released a new movie.
It's kind of interesting, Netflix's model.
So now they're releasing movies on Netflix for subscribers, but also in theaters.
So you can actually see this movie in theaters.
You know, it doesn't demand to be seen in theaters, but it is a good movie.
It's an interesting movie.
The movie is called Mudbound by a guy named Dee Rees.
I don't know Dee Rees, but I don't know his work, but the movie itself is good.
There are some problems that I have with the film, more on the plotting level than on the portrayal level.
All the acting is quite good.
It's Carey Mulligan and Jason Clarke and Jason Mitchell and Mary J. Blige who makes an appearance, and she's quite good.
She actually underplays the part.
And Garrett Hedlum is kind of the main character, I guess.
But in any case, The film is about these two guys who go off to World War II, one of whom is a white guy and one of whom is a black guy, and they both live in rural Mississippi.
And the white guy comes back and the black guy comes back, and basically the black guy, who's been out fighting for his country, He is treated exactly as you would imagine in 1946 Mississippi and it's a really graphic film.
It's very difficult to watch at times but it does paint a picture of what life must have been like for a lot of black folks living in rural Mississippi in the 1940s.
It reminds us what racism really looked like in that time and place.
It also is about readjustment coming back from war.
It's about Really class.
A lot of it's about class because it demonstrates how poor white people, a lot of them used race as an excuse to look down on black people who are really of their same class.
There are a lot of things about the film that are really fascinating.
There are a couple of problems that I have with the film.
Here's a quick spoiler alert.
There is a relationship that is engaged in between the Garrett Hedlum character and the Carey Mulligan character that I think is utterly unnecessary and actually undercuts the plot a little bit.
I think that it actually does a disservice to some of the characters in the movie.
A lot of the movie is quite good.
You can check it out.
out.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Violence is part and parcel of country life.
I learned how to stitch up a bleeding wound, load and fire a shotgun.
My hands did these things, but I was never easy in my mind.
Way down in the water.
I held his heartbeat in my hand.
Way down in the water.
All that time he was gone, I only prayed for him.
Over there, I was a liberator.
People lined up in the streets waiting for us.
Sometimes I actually miss her.
She had me too.
You're the one I always talk about.
Our own and our own parts are the only way to get up from under their foot.
I don't want you walking for them.
I won't be walking for them.
I'll be walking for us.
off to fight for my country to come back and find a head and treasure a bit.
I don't know what they let you do over there, but you in Mississippi now.
You use the back door.
So what's good about this film is what it looks like from the film is that, you know, all the white people are bad and all the black people are good.
And that's not the case in the film.
Okay, we can stop the preview.
That's That's not the story of the film.
The story of the film is that it takes good white people to stand up to bad white people.
And that there are a lot of black people who are attempting with honor to live their lives in a horrifying place.
So, I think the film is definitely worth watching.
Okay, so other things that I like.
So Charles Manson's dead, so that's good.
Charles Manson should have died...
You know, 40 years ago.
He was on death row and then California suspended the death penalty.
There's a Supreme Court decision nationally that suspended, or at the California Supreme Court level, that suspended the death penalty.
And everybody who was on death row at the time had their sentence commuted to life in prison.
And instead, instead, Charlie Manson ended up living out his life and dying at age 83, which is just horrifying considering that Charlie Manson, Charles Manson, was a, was just The worst human being ever.
I mean, this is a guy who's responsible for dozens of murders.
He was responsible for the murder of Sharon Tate, then the wife of Roman Polanski.
She was 26 years old.
She was eight and a half months pregnant.
She's about to give birth.
And he sent his cult members into her compound and murdered her, murdered the baby.
Just an absolute piece of human debris.
People talk about whether he was insane or not.
He was sane enough and sociopathic enough to lead a cult movement.
And what's important to remember is that there are people on the left, and this is not exaggerating a case, there are legitimately people on the left who are praising Charles Manson.
Charles Manson was praised by some members of the radical left, including Bernadine Dorns.
So you remember Bernadine Dorn as the wife of Bill Ayers.
Bill Ayers, of course, was Weatherman Underground, so was Bernadine Dorn.
Well, after Charles Manson was, he had his people murder people and write pig on the walls, Bernadine Dorn praised him.
Bernadine Dorn actually said that she dug it.
Right, so it's really quite horrifying.
There were a few people on the Marxist left who suggested that this was just a form of class warfare and praised all of it.
Here's what Bernadine publicly announced in 1969.
in 1969, Bernadine Dorn.
She said, offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives and then eating a meal in the same room, far out, the weathermen dig Charlie Manson.
And this guy was a cult figure, not just among his cult members, but to certain extreme members of the left.
Now he'll be burning in hell.
Judaism doesn't believe in the idea of an eternal hell, but if it does exist, he will certainly be burning there, as well he should.
Evil, evil human being.
Garbage human being.
Other things that I like, aside from Charles Manson's death.
So I have to admit that this is really, really funny.
So Lena Dunham, who's made a career out of pretending to be a feminist while undermining women everywhere, I mean, really, by doing things like leveling false rape allegations at a guy who she names and then has to retract the name and abandoning animals.
I mean, she's just a bad person, Lena Dunham, all the way around, saying and bragging in her memoir about pleasuring herself next to her younger sister in bed I mean, just really a gross person.
In any case, she was now smacked down by Zinzi Clemons.
Zinzi Clemons is a leftist who happens to be black.
She said, it is time for women of color, black women in particular, to divest from Lena Dunham.
A writer for Lena Dunham and Jenny Conner's Lenny Letter has accused the former of hipster racism.
She says, it's time for women of color to divest from Lena Dunham.
She says, back in college, I'd avoided those people like the plague because of their well-known racism.
I'd call their strain hipster racism, which typically uses sarcasm as a cover.
And in the end, it looks a lot like gaslighting.
It's just a joke.
Why are you overreacting?
She says that one female in Lena's circles was, quote, known to use the N-word in conversation in order to be provocative, and if she was ever called on it, she would say, it's just a joke.
I was often in the same room with her, but I never spoke to her, only watched her from afar in anxiety and horror.
She said she decided to leave Lenny Letter after Dunham expressed her support for the girl's writer Murray Miller, who was accused of sexual assault by actress Aurora Perrineau.
Clemens wrote that one of my best friends was victimized in almost the exact same way by someone in Lena's circle.
It was never addressed.
He continues to move in those circles and has a powerful job.
So, pretty hilarious that the left is now eating itself and no one could deserve it more than the ex-Scribble Lena Dunham.
Okay, time for some things I hate.
Alrighty, so a couple of quick things that I hate.
Number one, there are a bunch of people on the right who pass this stuff around like it's really glorious.
There was a CNN broadcast yesterday from Alabama, and somebody ran up in the background and started shouting.
Here's what it looked like.
Today they are pretty much endorsing the Democratic challenger Doug Jones.
You see this bold headline here.
And this is what they say in part of their editorial, saying, quote, Do not make your voting decision based on who it will affect on a national stage.
Vote based on who it will affect in your hometown.
There's only one candidate left in this race who has proven worthy of the task representing Alabama.
He is Doug Jones.
Fake news, fake news, fake news.
I already conspired against Roy Moore.
I just-- it's a Roy Moore fan shouting, "Fake news, fake news, fake news." This does not do anyone on the right any favors when we suggest that this sort of behavior is useful.
The reason that it's not useful is not because CNN doesn't sometimes push fake news.
Sometimes they do push fake news.
The reason this behavior is not useful is because you ought to actually focus in on the fake news that they tell instead of just labeling things broadly fake news.
I still believe in things like true and false.
I still believe in those concepts.
I think the majority of Americans do.
And simply shouting that everything CNN ever broadcasts is fake news is a lie.
It is not true.
Just as when the left says everything Daily Wire says is fake news.
Not true.
You have to say what we said is wrong and what exactly that is and then we can talk about whether it was fake news or not.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, there are certain statements that you get to make in the United States if you're not a white person, that if you reverse the races would be utterly out of bounds.
There's an MSNBC panelist who yesterday was talking about threats to America.
Her name is Jamira Burley.
She's the founder of Gen Y Not.
Just awesome.
And here's what she had to say about threats to America.
This is nothing new.
What is interesting, though, is that white men continue to pose the biggest threat to Americans every single day.
It's been documented and verified that they are more likely to burn down churches, more likely to commit mass murders and mass shootings.
And so Jeff Sessions' reality and his assessment on these people, I think, is both lacking in facts and both reality.
Okay, so one, the reason this is coming up is because there's an FBI report on some members of Black Lives Matter, supposedly, or at least what they were calling black identity extremists, people who are sort of, people who are sort of
Yeah.
Black men are the greatest threat to human beings across the United States.
Like, what in the world?
But you can say this about white guys?
It's not even statistically true.
I mean, if we're talking about murder rate, and we're talking about groups of people who are disproportionately likely to murder, or rather, disproportionately involved in murder cases, let's put it that way, who represent a disproportionate share of murderers, it is not white people, actually.
That does not mean that black people are more likely to murder as like individuals or that white people are less likely to murder as individuals because of race.
That's silly.
And if the white people said anything like that, they would be accused of racism.
But MSNBC panelists can say this sort of stuff no problem and everybody just sort of shrugs.
Okay.
Time for a quick review of the Federalist Papers.
So, every week we go through new Federalist Papers.
Today happens to be not one of the most stirring Federalist Papers.
This one is Federalist Number 4 by John Jay.
Again, the Federalist Papers begins with this series of papers about why we shouldn't form separate countries, which has some relevance now that it seems like half the country wants to form separate countries.
But the idea in this Federalist Paper is we can't have a bunch of different elements of the United States.
We can't have a bunch of different regions that have their own foreign policy.
Because foreign nations will pit one region of the United States against another.
So John Jay writes this.
He says, whatever may be our situation, whether firmly united under one national government or split into a number of confederacies, certain it is that foreign nations will know and view it exactly as it is, and they will act toward us accordingly.
If they see that our national government is efficient and well administered, our trade prudently regulated, our militia properly organized and disciplined, our resources and finances discreetly managed, our credit re-established, our people free, contented, and united, they'll be much more disposed to cultivate our friendship Okay, so the reason that this is still important today is not because we have a bunch of regions.
It's because it is true that when the United States is internally divided on key issues, when we don't even have the same definition of what freedom looks like or what vision we have for the country, then our opponents overseas are going to see that and they're going to exploit it.
This was most obviously true during the Vietnam War, when a huge percentage of the country was attempting to actively undermine our presence in the Vietnam War, and Ho Chi Minh knew that full well and felt like if he held out long enough, we'd pull out, which is exactly what happened.
Obviously, terrorists felt the same way about the war in Iraq.
When the United States is internally divided on key issues, the rest of the world knows it.
This is not the case for bad unity, right?
Dissent is fine.
But we should recognize that there is well-motivated disunity, well-motivated dissent, and then there's just dissent for the sake of political gain.
Dissent for the sake of political gain ends up demonstrating to our foreign adversaries that we can be had.
And right now, I'm seeing a lot of that politically, and it's very disturbing.
Okay.
We'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest news on this Thanksgiving week.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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