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Nov. 21, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:34
Your Taxpayer Bucks Pay For Congress’ Sexual Kicks | Ep. 422
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An 88-year-old congressperson gets hit with sexual harassment allegations, and we will explain how congresspeople get away with it.
Plus, so does Oliver Stone, and so does Charlie Rose.
So pretty much everybody is getting hit with sexual harassment allegations, and that's because everything is hot garbage.
We'll explain why.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So I guess that we have to set that workplace counter back to zero.
You know, like the one that says, no sexual harassment allegations today, we have to set that one all the way back to zero from one yesterday.
Every single day, there are new prominent people who are being hit with sexual harassment allegations and we'll go through them.
We'll also explain how it is that Congress gets away with it because they have this very sophisticated system where you're not able to detect Which Congress people were actually sexually harassing or sexually molesting to help.
We'll talk about that.
Plus, I do want to get to a theory that I have going about why it is that modern society has actually seems to have accentuated the incidents of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so let's talk about the latest allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assaults.
So the latest allegations are against John Conyers.
Anyone who is surprised by this has not been following politics very long.
The Michigan representative John Conyers was caught on a plane a few years back looking at Playboy.
So it is not particularly shocking that John Conyers is the type of guy who is trying to hit up the help.
According to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, they've obtained a bunch of documents from a complaint There's a woman who filed, who settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 from Conyers.
She says she was fired because she would, quote, not succumb to his sexual advances.
In 2015.
I have to say, I don't know what it is about Congress.
Is there something that enlivens the prostate in Congress?
Is there something in politics that just allows men's prostates to work longer than normal?
Because John Conyers in 2015 was 86 years old and was apparently hitting up the interns for sexual favors.
I hope everything, all the plumbing is working correctly for me when I'm that age, but I also know that I'm not going to be hitting up 20-year-old interns when I'm 86 years old.
In any case, documents from the complaints obtained by BuzzFeed News include four signed affidavits Three of which are notarized from former staff members who allege that Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the powerful House Judiciary Committee, repeatedly made sexual advances to female staff that included requests for sex acts, contacting and transporting other women with whom they believed Conyers was having affairs, caressing their hands sexually, and rubbing their legs and backs in public.
Four people involved in the case verified the documents are authentic.
And the documents also show, this is the important part, the secret mechanism by which Congress has kept an unknown number of sexual harassment allegations secret.
A grinding, closely held process that left the alleged victim feeling, she told BuzzFeed News, That she had no option rather than to stay quiet and accept a settlement offer to her.
her.
She said, I was basically blackballed.
There was nowhere I could go.
BuzzFeed is withholding the woman's name at her request because she fears retribution.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that Congress's Office of Compliance paid out $17 million for 264 settlements with federal employees over 20 years for various violations, including sexual harassment.
But these new documents show exactly how this works.
So the woman who settled with Conyers launched the complaint, according to BuzzFeed News, with the Office of Compliance in 2014, alleging that she was fired for refusing his sexual advances and ended up facing a daunting process that ended with a confidentiality agreement in exchange for a settlement of more than $27,000, which, by the way, is a nothing settlement.
I mean, if you were wrongly fired after your boss demanded sex from you and you only get $27,000, that is a nothing of a settlement.
The settlement came from a conure's office budget rather than the designated fund for settlements.
Congress doesn't have an HR department.
Instead, congressional employees have 180 days to report a sexual harassment incident to the Office of Compliance, which then leads to a lengthy process involving counseling and mediation, and requires the signing of a confidentiality agreement before a complaint can go forward.
So you can't even complain.
You actually have to go direct to a court and try to sue, or you have to go through this compliance process that requires you to keep your case a secret, which is really horrifying.
After this, an employee can choose to take the matter to federal district court, but another avenue is available, an administrative hearing after which a negotiation and settlement may follow.
And the agreement says that the complainant agrees she will not disseminate or publish or cause anyone else to disseminate or publish in any manner disparaging or defamatory remarks or comments adverse to the interests of Representative John Conyers, the office of Representative John Conyers, or any of the office's present or former employees.
A lot of members of Congress have said that this raises major concerns.
Members have argued that 90 days is too long to make a person continue working in the same environment with their harasser, that interns and fellows should be eligible to pursue complaints through this process, and that it is unfair for the victim to have to pay for legal representation while the office of the harasser is represented for free by the House's counsel.
In this case, one of Conyers' former employees was offered a settlement in exchange for her silence that would be paid out of Conyers' taxpayer-funded office budget, and then they would rehire the woman as a temporary employee, and they would pay her through employee funds, so it looked as though she was still working and then she was let go, as opposed to there was a settlement to let her go after she was sexually harassed.
The draft agreement was unsigned.
Congressional employment records match the timing and amounts outlined in the document.
A law clerk who represented complained and said the process was disgusting.
He said it's a design cover-up.
You feel they were betrayed by their government just for coming forward.
It's like being abused twice.
So, well done, Congress, for creating a process that protects Congress people against their own sexual misconduct.
Apparently, a bunch of women have come forward about Conyers.
Apparently, the employee said in her affidavit that Conyers made sexual advances toward her.
I was driving the congressman in my personal car and resting my hand on the stick shift.
Conyers reached over and began to caress my hand in a sexual manner.
The woman said she told Conyers she was married and not interested in pursuing a sexual relationship.
She said she was told many times by constituents it was well known Conyers had sexual relationships with his staff and said she and other female staffers felt this undermined their credibility.
A male employee said he witnessed Conyers rub the legs and other body parts of complainants in what appeared to be a sexual and inappropriate manner.
Conyers said he needed to be more careful because bad publicity would not be as helpful as he runs for reelection.
He ended the conversation saying he would work on his behavior.
Great behavior by another member of Congress.
So again, here's the process.
You have 180 days to report your incident.
Then you have mandatory counseling.
Mandatory counseling can be waived, apparently.
The employee is forced to sign a confidentiality agreement to even continue.
And then there's mandatory mediation, a mandatory cooling off period.
You file a formal complaint or you go to federal district court or administrative hearing.
So all of this is required to be kept secret.
Just a terrible process and needs to be redone immediately.
Congress protecting itself through all of this.
Meanwhile, the media continue to protect themselves to a certain extent.
Charlie Rose is now under fire.
Yes, you heard that correctly.
Charlie Rose, who is now 76 years old?
Again, amazing.
Apparently, eight women have told the Washington Post that longtime TV host Charlie Rose made unwanted sexual advances on them, including lewd phone calls, walking around naked in their presence, or groping their breasts, buttocks, or genital areas.
He's just a charmer, is Charlie Rose.
It is worth noting that the go-to move for a lot of sexual harassers seems to be showing up naked wearing a robe.
Like, apparently Weinstein used to do this.
Very weird.
Like, I don't know why guys think this is attractive to women.
Although, I guess they've been watching too many porn movies.
This idea that you show up naked and a woman's just like, oh yeah!
I don't know what in the world would possess men to believe this.
This is a bunch of nonsense.
The women were employees or aspired to work for Rose at Charlie Rose from the late 1990s to as recently as 2011.
They ranged in age from 21 to 37 at the time of the alleged encounters.
Rose is now 75.
The CBS canceled his show.
PBS and Bloomberg have also dropped him.
Five of the women spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of Rose's stature in the industry, his power over their careers, or what they described as his volatile temper.
So I have a few notes on all of this.
Note number one is it is amazing to see how many women say that the reason they didn't come forward is because they were afraid of repercussions within the industry.
And it is true.
There are repercussions, okay?
I said this yesterday.
In Hollywood, in journalism, in politics, there are repercussions for women who speak out against people who sexually harass or sexually assault them.
Their names are forever linked with these people.
It's hard for them to get a job elsewhere because now they try to apply for a job, and people at this new job say, well, maybe the complaint was false.
Maybe she's just, you know, the kind of person who's constantly complaining about things, and we don't want to hire her.
She's a sexual harassment risk.
She's going to go to the HR.
She's going to sue.
Do we really want to hire that person?
So women stay silent.
But there's something else, and that is, we in American society, you know, it's funny.
We all like to say, well, how did all these people knew this was going on?
Okay, we all vaguely knew that a lot of this was going on in politics.
Because it's always gone on in politics.
There are three types of power here.
There's money, there's fame, and there's power.
All three of those exist in all three of these professions.
Journalism, in Hollywood, and in politics.
And we have idolized these people.
We have idolized these people.
Because we have to ask ourselves a question.
Why is it that so many of these guys think they can get away with this?
Why did Charlie Rose think he could get away with sexually harassing 22-year-old girls when he was in his 70s?
Why do you think he could get away with just asking them to come over his house and then showering publicly, naked, and then hitting on them?
Like, what made him think that it was okay?
Well, misconduct thrives when there's no accountability.
Historically speaking, we've always had powerful men who exhibit atrocious behavior.
Typically, those were members of the aristocracy.
Typically, those were kings, right?
Those were people who could actually exercise power over somebody.
There were people who could, you know, there's no real evidence that prime anocta ever took place, the idea that nobles would actually go into peasant villages and on the night of a wedding grab the bride away and have sex with her.
That's sort of mythical, but the idea that it did exist came from peasants who were saying, this is how lords and ladies sort of treat us.
That there are these aristocrats, that there are these landed classes who would treat people badly because they had power over you and how could you fail to accede to their requests.
I talked about that movie Mudbound.
There's that feeling, not with regard to sex in the movie, but with regard to just generalized treatment.
That if somebody has power over you, sometimes you gotta keep your head down and there's nothing that you can say about it.
So the question is, in an egalitarian, free association society like ours, why is it that so many of these guys thought they could get away with it?
I mean, you could see people getting away with it in a time when kings could behead political opponents, in a time when aristocrats could throw you off their land and ensure that you never were able to work anywhere else and you turned into a starving beggar.
But in an area where, you know, women are free to work all over the United States in various industries, why were all of these powerful men, why did they believe they could get away with it and why did they get away with it?
And this is a sad truth about Americans.
We treat our new aristocracy the same way peasants treated the old aristocracy, with deference.
We treat Hollywood with deference.
We treat politicians with deference.
We treat journalists with deference.
Elite status in each of those industries doesn't just mean that they have opportunities for brutality, but there's a knowledge that if you engage in this sort of brutality, people are going to look the other way.
A lot of Americans seek to curry favor with the powerful, and so there's going to be a lot of opportunities for these guys to engage in sexual misconduct.
Does anyone really think that women were dying to meet Harvey Weinstein?
The reason women wanted to meet Harvey Weinstein is they thought that he could help their career.
So that creates the opportunity for misconduct.
And then, there is the failure of consequences for misconduct, and that's because the public offers no consequences.
Sometimes victims were blamed, right?
Think of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
Sometimes victims were blamed.
Sometimes the darkest side of humanity, there's a dark side of humanity where people do look down on victims in certain situations.
This happens throughout world history, where people are victimized and we look down on them.
Why didn't they stand up for themselves?
Or, well, you know, she had it coming.
This kind of disgusting thought.
But we have to stop with the idolatry, okay?
You can't idolize the aristocracy, whether you're talking about the modern-day aristocracy or whether you're talking about the aristocracy that has existed historically.
Okay, so that's point number one.
Point number two.
I'm seeing this rush to Mia Culpa on Twitter, and it's really irritating.
So there's a guy named Ben White, who's the political chief economic correspondent, and he tweeted this morning, my gender is terrible.
Well, the good news is your gender is fluid, so you can change it anytime, Ben.
But he says, my gender is terrible.
Time politics editor Ryan Lee Beckwith tweeted this morning, or yesterday, not tweeting tomorrow, just retweeting women.
Men, join me.
The idea being that men are inherently pigs and evil, and if we just rush forward to disown our own sex, then therefore we'll have done some great grand good.
You get the same thing from white people who intend there's a racist crime, white person against black person.
We've got a bunch of white people saying, I'm ashamed for my white privilege.
This is a trendy habit.
And this is really galling.
The reason that it's galling is because it goes to something deeper here.
You know, conservatives, traditionalists, they look at what's happening right now in Hollywood and journalism and politics and we say, yeah, yeah.
No, it's not a surprise.
I'm sorry.
It's not a surprise to anyone.
Not just because prominent people have always done this, but because human beings are inherently capable of sin.
Conservatives look at human beings differently than people on the left do.
People in conservative circles, particularly traditional and moral circles, they look at human beings and they say, we are all capable of sin.
Men particularly have certain sins that attach to their nature.
Men are more driven to treat women like sex objects than women are driven to treat men like sex objects, for example.
That's just the way it is.
That's not an excuse, and it's a justification in the sense that that is how men are, but it's not an excuse for bad behavior.
And that is why what conservatives say is if men have a tendency to do this bad thing, That is why we must have prophylactic rules.
That is why we have to train men not to do these things, and train men to be gentlemen, and set up rules that protect women.
That is why conservatives are all about rules.
I really do love the G.K.
Chesterton notion that the difference between the left and the right is how we treat rules.
The left comes to a fence in the middle of a field and says, I see no reason for this fence, and they dismantle the fence.
The right comes to the fence in the middle of the field and they say, I don't see a reason for this fence.
I'm gonna go learn what the reason for this fence is, and then if the reason is bad, I'll dismantle the fence.
Okay, the fences that existed for thousands of years were built up around the idea that men were inherently sinful, that men had these drives, and that you needed to build fences around men.
Specifically, I mean, this is a very Torah-based concept, a Judaic-based concept, the idea of fences around the Torah.
You're gonna build up prophylactic rules that prevent people from engaging in behavior they otherwise would behave in.
You know, conservatives have always said that men left unchecked will act like pigs.
We recognize that men tend to see women as potential sex objects, and that without boundaries, men would treat women as sex objects.
But in order to combat that behavior, it wasn't that conservatives sat around and nodded at that behavior.
We said, no, here's a bunch of rules that can help combat that behavior.
Right?
Here's some of the rules, right?
Social expectation that sex would be connected with marriage.
That you would actually have to commit to a woman in order to have sex with her.
This is a very conservative notion.
Why was it constructed?
To protect women.
To protect women.
So you didn't have men going around and victimizing women sexually.
The idea was that women would not be expected to have sex with men unless it was in the confines of a committed relationship, and men would not be able to have sex with women unless it was in the confines of a committed relationship.
Marriage was set up to protect women.
It was not a patriarchal institution for the betterment of men.
Most men are not interested in commitment.
That's part of human nature.
It's part of male nature throughout species.
Encouragement of marriage prior to sexual activity.
That's something conservatives always said.
Get married before you have sex.
That's how I was brought up.
One of the reasons for that is that you know what a marriage ceremony does?
It provides objective measures of consent.
That's what a marriage ceremony is.
It is a man saying in front of an entire community, I am now going to protect this woman.
And a woman saying in front of an entire community, I am now going to be protected by this man and I consent to our sexual relationship.
That is an inherent part of marriage.
That sort of objective knowledge is good.
Because the counter-suggestion, right?
Think about it.
The counter-suggestion is that it's not so clear that consent has been had in non-marital situations where consent has not been publicly proclaimed.
It's amazing.
We're setting all up these yes-means-yes rules here in California.
We're setting up... I call them no-means-no rules.
That's not what they are.
They're called yes-means-yes rules in California.
Yes-means-yes rules are the... You have to sit there with a contractual checklist.
You know, move down the checklist.
Can I touch your leg?
Yes.
Can I touch your butt?
Yes.
Can I kiss you?
Yes.
Right?
And now we're gonna actually, like, go down the checklist?
Of course, there's no proof of this thing unless it's actually written, so apparently you need a yes-means-yes physical checklist in places like California.
That's not, number one, how sex works, but number two, what that's doing is it's actually trying to do the same thing that marriage did before.
Marriage was a public proclamation that now you are in a committed and consensual sexual relationship with someone.
And the implication was that without that marriage, we don't know.
We don't know whether the woman consented or not.
We just don't know.
That was one of the sort of backhanded ideas behind marriage.
Also, the idea that We'd have carefully cultivated rules of contact between men and women.
Right?
Not with regard to the workplace, but in many religions, prescribed physical contact, right?
There's something in Judaism called Shomar Negiah.
The idea is that you're not supposed to actually touch a woman, even, until you're married.
You're not supposed to touch her.
Now, most people, even in the, I would say, most young Jewish guys in the modern Orthodox community don't hold by this.
But the idea was you set up these prophylactic rules specifically so that you don't end up mistreating women.
Right?
There is a rule that is basically the Pence rule in Judaism.
It's called yichud, and the idea is that you're not supposed to be alone in a room with a woman to whom you're not married with the door shut, specifically to minimize the possibility of sexual misconduct by a man.
All of these things were based not on the idea that men shouldn't control themselves, but based on the idea that a lot of men don't control themselves, and that's why we should have rules preventing men from getting into situations that put women at risk.
That was the idea here.
The left wants to hold two simultaneous ideas.
Men are pegs and men can be taught not to be pegs.
And we can maintain rules that don't restrict men in any way.
That's idiotic.
Either men are pegs or men are not pegs.
Or at least men have the capacity to be pegs.
Conservatism were all about this idea that there were rules.
That men could not be universally trusted not to sin against women.
You know, let's put it in terms leftists can understand.
You know, they like gun control?
Let's call it male control.
Complete with background checks, mandatory training, a fulsome male enforcement structure.
You gotta go ask dad for permission to marry the girl.
If the girl, if something bad happens to her, dad will come over and beat the living crap out of you, right?
These were all based on sort of conservative sexual notions.
Not because they're trying to victimize women, but precisely the opposite.
Now, here's what the left said.
The left said, ah, men are still mistreating women though.
You got all these rules and men are still mistreating women.
It can't be that the rules are not Broad enough.
The rules are too broad.
It must be that the rules themselves are to blame for the exploitation.
If we just retrained men, if we somehow perfected human nature and made it so that men didn't see women as sex objects anymore, maybe if we could just teach men, maybe if we could just re-re-enshrine certain basic feminist notions in men, then all of this would go away.
And you know what else?
We'll get rid of all these rules, because these rules are really just hallmarks of a patriarchal past.
I don't see the reason for this fence.
I'm removing this fence.
In fact, the fence may be the reason that people are jumping the fence.
If you get rid of the fence, maybe they won't jump the fence anymore because there won't be a fence.
So they got rid of marriage.
It was patriarchal.
Marriage had taught men that women were property.
Thus, we had to kill marriage.
Sexual taboos had taught men that women were dangerous seductresses.
Therefore, we have to kill those sexual taboos.
And then men will go back to seeing women as human beings, full and upright, as opposed to sex objects.
Chivalry had taught men that women were weak and could be exploited.
So get rid of chivalry.
Did it result, as the left had thought, No, it did not.
No, it did not.
And so now the left is ad hoc trying to put new rules back in place.
Now the left is trying to put rules that they're not even clear on back in place.
I saw, for example, a poll yesterday that showed that 25% of American women said that a man asking a woman for a drink was sexual harassment.
Is that a more reasonable rule than the idea that sex should be confined within marriage?
Is it really a reasonable rule that if a guy asks a girl for a drink, that's sexual harassment?
Or that if a guy says to a girl that she looks pretty, that this constitutes sexual harassment?
The rules that the left are now setting up are actually significantly more puritan than the rules that conservatives set up over the course of thousands of years that were tried and tested and largely worked.
Are women safer now?
So we got rid of all the rules and now we've constructed this new set of rules that are completely inexact, by the way.
Like, absolutely inexact.
They're really ad hoc.
They're just made up on the spot.
Right?
If a woman gets drunk with a guy, they both have sex and they both have a good time, then it's totally consensual and fine.
If a woman and a man both get drunk, they have sex, the next morning the girl says that that was terrible, then it was rape.
Right?
How exactly are we supposed to distinguish these rules that are set up on the basis of radical subjectivism?
The left has created a society where you know that there are landmines everywhere, but you don't know exactly where the landmines are until it's too late and you've stepped on one.
In fact, we learn where the landmines are by people stepping on them.
All of this is not to say there shouldn't be rules.
The case I'm making is that there should be consistent rules.
And the left is so funny because on the one hand they're saying rules make people worse, and on the other hand they're setting up through the back door all of these rules that are non-equally applied, arbitrarily applied, used as a club to beat down other people, or are insufficient to protect women.
All of these things.
In other words, the sexual behavior rules that have been set up by the left are completely unworkable.
And what's being shown right now is how completely unworkable they are.
There is no place more leftist than Hollywood.
Sexual harassment is a way of life here, okay?
I've lived my entire life in Hollywood.
Every woman that I know who works in Hollywood has been sexually harassed or assaulted.
I do not say this with any shred of exaggeration.
Every.
Single.
One.
I do not know any who have not been sexually harassed or assaulted in Hollywood by people for whom they worked generally.
I really don't.
Okay?
And I don't think that's rare.
Hollywood, this is maybe the most commonplace in the world because Hollywood is a meat market, okay?
And men treat it like a meat market.
And they take the absence of these rules, these conservative rules.
They were supposed to be chivalrous with regard to women.
They were supposed to marry women before they have sex with them.
They were supposed to abide by certain careful rules of conduct with regard to male-female relationships.
They took all of the 1960s morality, turned it on its head, and abused women.
And we're going to talk about that in Deconstructing the Culture today.
We're going to talk about how this has pervaded the culture.
It's true in journalism, too.
Journalism is a very left field.
You're seeing all of these powerful men in journalism doing exactly the same thing.
Oh, the woman's liberated.
She's liberated.
She'll go out to her drink with me, we'll both get drunk, and then we'll go back to my place, even though I'm married.
We're liberated now.
Is that a protection for women?
Or is that an invitation to a problem?
Apologizing for men's gender is not going to help.
So the solution that we've seen from some of these folks is, what if I just apologize for my gender?
You know, men are pigs.
Okay, that's a good starting place, but all people are capable of sin, which is why we need to set up prophylactic rules.
There is a purpose to rules.
Only a proactive reinstitution of checks and balances in society is going to help.
And in order for us to get there, we're going to have to recognize that human behavior is not eminently malleable.
In fact, human behavior is pretty rigid.
And the notion that you can ignore the rigidity of human behavior because you just wish to and you wish it were different, that's not going to help anybody.
Okay.
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Okay, so these are very serious topics, but we do not treat them seriously because we don't treat anything seriously in the United States anymore.
We basically treat everything like a joke.
Sexual harassment becomes very serious business when it's a political opponent of yours.
When it's a political ally, then you just sort of brush it off.
So there are a bunch of Actresses on SNL and writers and producers on SNL, 36 women wrote a letter in support of Al Franken, who, you know, there's a picture of grabbing the boobs of a sleeping woman, so he's a class act.
Representative Jackie Speier, who has been talking about how there are members of Congress who are sexually depraved, she comes out and she says she's not going to ask Franken to resign.
Democratic commentator, our contributor Sally Cohn, came out today and tweeted, time for Al Franken to go.
Wrong is wrong.
And the Democrats need to show they strongly and consistently stand for women's rights.
You are not willing to go that far, though.
Just to be clear, you are not calling for his resignation tonight.
Well, I may be calling for his resignation at some point, but I think that... But just not yet, is what I'm saying.
You're not there yet.
Yes.
I'm not there yet.
Okay, she's not there.
So what exactly would make her be there?
Nobody ever has a consistent standard on what would make you be there.
I've been pretty consistent on this.
Democrats are simply not—we don't treat any of these subjects with real seriousness.
We mock seriousness.
And then we suggest, when things get really bad, that we're going to be serious.
You watch.
Within six months, we'll be back to the fully partisan reinterpretation of sexual harassment and assault again.
This feels like a turning point.
It feels like an inflection point in American culture.
And I hope that it is because I think that pigs should be cast out on their ear.
But do I think that's really where this is going?
No, because I think too many people have a stake in the current system and in protecting men, more importantly, who have engaged in impropriety under the current system.
I think there are too many members of the media, too many members of politics, too many members in Hollywood.
People who need to get away with this in order for people to continue having careers.
I don't think that this is going to fundamentally transform the way that this society works, particularly because we're not willing to reinstitute rules that are actually answerable.
So instead, we're just going to fall back on stupidity.
And that's where we are now.
Last night, speaking of stupidity, last night CNN had a 20-minute interview with LeVar Balls.
LaVar Ball is this loudmouth moron whose child Lonzo Ball plays for the, is that his name?
Yeah, yeah, Lonzo Ball.
He plays for the Lakers and he has a garbage jump shot.
He's basically benched because he's shooting 30% from the field.
He's, you know, just awful.
It's amazing to me you get drafted not knowing how to shoot a basketball.
Like, this seems to me the number one priority.
But in any case, his father, LeVar, had started... He's made a name for Lonzo basically by being a loudmouth and saying his son is better than Michael Jordan, which is absurd.
Michael Jordan could shoot and play defense.
And LeVar Ball then took on Donald Trump.
So his other son, LiAngelo, went to China and started shoplifting in China, which is a genius move.
And Trump got him free.
And then Trump did what Trump does.
He said, I want to thank you.
And LiAngelo Ball gave him a thank you, but LeVar Ball did not.
Instead, LeVar Ball ripped on President Trump, which led President Trump to suggest that he should have left LiAngelo in jail in China, which of course is very mature.
And then CNN decided that it was necessary to have a 20-minute interview with LeVar Ball, which is just, I'm not, I'll just play you some of this and you'll see how stupid the media are.
And then you wonder why we can't take serious issues seriously, because the same people who are discussing the quote-unquote serious issues are interviewing LeVar Ball for 20 minutes.
I would say thank you if he would have put him on his plane and took him home.
Then I would have said thank you Mr. Trump for taking my boys out of China and bringing them back to the U.S.
There's a lot of room on that plane.
I would have said, thank you kindly for that.
So, because he didn't take them home on the plane, no thank you.
Well, I'm just saying, that's how I would say thank you.
I'm just saying, you might say thank you a different way.
You just say thank you like it's just any kind of way.
It's not how you'll say thank you, it's when you'll say thank you.
I can tell you don't mean nothing about it.
Uh, what now?
So President Trump gets them out of jail in China, but the problem is the plane ride?
So, LeVar Ball, obviously a member of higher intelligence at work, even Shannon Sharp, who's come in for serious criticism on the Ben Shapiro show before, even he says, um, LeVar, you're being an idiot.
I can assure you, even the people that dislike President Trump the most would agree that LeVar Ball is in the wrong in this situation.
I guarantee you that.
You might dislike what he's done, what he's said, and who he is, but what he, he had some effect It sure seemed like it.
I agree.
It sure seemed like it.
Who was your son?
Your son the one that got President Trump involved in this.
You're right.
You should have been over there opening up 15, 25 pop-up stores, hopefully selling thousands and thousands of pairs of sneakers.
But your son couldn't keep his hands to himself.
Good for Shannon Sharp.
Okay, so I mean, when even Shannon Sharp is critiquing your intelligence, then you know that you've really fallen low, LaVar Ball.
So well done media for 20 minutes, 20 minutes.
I mean, my God, what a desert wasteland cable television has become and LaVar Ball can fill 20 minutes on your show.
Speaking of stupid things, Kathy Griffin is still out there complaining and suggesting, I don't know, wow.
Kathy Griffin is out there saying that she has been victimized by, you know, Hollywood is very, very pro-Trump.
You know this, right?
You don't know this because it's not true?
Oh, yeah.
So it turns out that she says she's not been able to get any work since holding up a severed head of President Trump, a mock-up of a severed head of President Trump that has less to do with the fact that Hollywood likes Trump because they don't than the fact that Kathy Griffin is terrible at her job.
But now she's making a living running around complaining about how everyone is mean to her.
So here we go.
I think I should be able to get my life back.
So, I know I took a picture that offended a lot of people, but this wall of crap has never fallen on any woman in the history of America like it has on me.
So, and by the way, I know about Eartha Kitt, and I very much encourage you to look her up.
But even Eartha Kitt didn't have, like, Fox News.
Uh, um, she's the most victimized woman in American history.
Do you see her hotel room?
Like, no.
She's not the most victimized woman in American history, okay?
She's not even staying in a Motel 6.
Like, every person who has stayed in a Motel 6 is more victimized than Kathy Griffin.
She's the most victimized woman in American history.
In American history, according to Kathy Griffin, no wall of crap has ever fallen on anyone more.
Not even like the five-year-old black girls who are attempting to go to school in an integrated school in Birmingham.
Even those girls.
The wall of crap never fell on anyone quite like it fell on Kathy Griffin.
Just astonishing self-centeredness in our media.
And guess what?
This is what we'll go back to.
The default here is not seriousness about serious topics.
The default is Kathy Griffin and LaVar Ball.
That's the default.
And the media will go back there and we'll forget about all the sexual harassment stuff, I fear.
You know why?
Because there's no rooted morality in the United States that requires us To abide by moral rules.
There is no rooted morality that says you as a human being are worth more than this.
Women and men.
That you have a soul.
You have an immortal soul.
And you are required, by God, by nature, you are required to treat other human beings with respect and decency because they are worthy of respect and decency.
We are an entertainment culture that treats people as disposable commodities and then we're shocked when people are treated as disposable commodities.
We should be shocked, because every so often we're shocked into an awake state.
I have a feeling that we're gonna fall back asleep again, which is really horrifying.
Okay, I have much more to say on this topic and others.
We're going to do a significant deconstructing of the culture today, involving many old songs that you will recognize, but have never really listened to the lyrics to.
Or if you have, and you let them get away with it, then shame on you.
But we'll talk about all of that.
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Alrighty, okay, so I want to briefly discuss a more serious topic, more serious than Kathy Griffin and LeVar Ball anyway, and that is this AT&T deal.
So there's been a lot of talk about the DOJ, the Trump DOJ, is going to crack down, they're filing a lawsuit to stop the merger of AT&T And Time Warner.
So it's not Time Warner Cable.
It's just Time Warner, the entertainment company.
The reason that the DOJ is supposedly stepping in is because what they fear is that AT&T is a distribution network, right?
They sell you your internet and they give you your cable.
And then they are going to privilege Time Warner content because they own Time Warner content, so they make double bucks, right?
So if you subscribe to HBO and you pay AT&T, then AT&T is basically buying HBO, and that means that you're paying AT&T twice.
The government really has no business here.
I don't think that this is an antitrust violation.
I think the vast majority of so-called antitrust violations do not exist.
In order for there to be a monopoly, you have to have 100% ownership over a particular area of American commerce.
AT&T and Time Warner aren't even in the same industry.
AT&T is in the distribution industry.
It's vertical integration.
AT&T is in the distribution network and industry, and Time Warner is in the entertainment industry.
It's the equivalent of AT&T buying MGM, right?
They're not the same thing at all.
And one acquiring the other actually, in some ways, can make commerce better.
It'll make it cheaper because AT&T presumably can charge less for HBO if you're an AT&T subscriber.
And also, AT&T does not control the telecommunications market.
AT&T is in competition with Verizon.
They're in competition with Sprint.
They're in competition with a bunch of other different companies.
And Time Warner, obviously, is in competition with a lot of other networks, including Fox News.
What this has led some people to believe is the real reason that Trump is cracking down, that the DOJ is cracking down, is because Time Warner contains CNN, and Trump doesn't like CNN, so he's trying to damage CNN.
The DOJ apparently wanted Time Warner to sell CNN away from Time Warner, to separate it off before it sold itself to AT&T.
Let's be blunt here.
The President of the United States hates CNN.
He's been tweeting about trains hitting people wearing CNN signs.
I mean, actual violence.
Okay, and I think that that is going to be relevant in these court cases.
It's why, you know, President Trump really should not have been speaking out about CNN and then using that as an excuse.
I mean, he'll say things like, the Washington Post, Amazon, Bezos consortium.
Right, and then if he would crack down on Washington Post, you'd have to imagine that it had less to do with law than it had to do with bias.
Now the same thing is sort of true of CNN.
He's free to criticize CNN, but he was talking openly during the campaign about how much he hated CNN, and then in the same breath saying that CNN Time War is trying to make a deal with AT&T.
That's not good stuff.
Okay.
Time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and then we have a pretty significant deconstructing the culture today.
So, things that I like.
So, Austin threatened to cut the show short because this is in things I like today, but it is indeed in things I like.
Justice League is in things I like.
It's not in things I love.
Okay?
It wasn't a great movie.
It's not even, I wouldn't say it's like a good movie.
I would say that it's an enjoyable movie.
There are parts of the movie that are enjoyable.
The villain in the movie is garbage, okay?
The worst part of the movie is that the villain, Steppenwolf, is just a nothing of a villain, right?
I mean, he's like a stock character, he's a 2D character directly from, not even a comic book, directly from like a sketchpad.
Steppenwolf is bad.
The CGI here has some real problems because they overuse it.
I don't understand why Hollywood thinks that That overuse of CGI is better than sparing use of CGI.
The best scenes in this movie use CGI sparingly.
They don't overuse it.
But, like, the entire conclusion, the last... I don't know why every movie now seems like we have to have a monster fight at the end that involves tremendous use of CGI.
It's just not my thing.
So those are the things about it that I don't like.
The other thing I don't like about it is that Ben Affleck, who appears to have developed a serious case of fat face, is... I thought in the last Batman v Superman, which I thought was wildly underrated by the way, I thought it was really mistreated by people at the theaters, The Director's Cut is actually a good movie.
The Director's Cut is a very enjoyable movie.
It is not a 40% on Rotten Tomatoes movie.
It is a 65% movie to me.
Batman v. Superman.
I watched it twice, okay?
I'm not gonna see Justice League twice, I don't think it was as good.
The only truly horrifying DC movie that I've seen in the last four years was Suicide Squad, which is truly a piece of rotten, pernicious garbage.
I mean, it's just horrible.
But, this is not that, okay?
It definitely has its moments.
The problem I have here is that Ben Affleck in Batman v. Superman plays sort of the Frank Miller Batman, right?
This guy who really enjoys making other people suffer and is kind of a sadist, which is kind of fun.
In this one, He turns into basically a block of wood.
He turns back into Ben Affleck in this one.
And he is clearly trying to hand over the reins of leadership to Wonder Woman because Gal Gadot is a breakout star, right?
She's terrific and she's really magnetic on screen.
The good things about this film, the introduction of the Flash, I think is actually done in a fun way.
I like the Flash's character in this.
There's one particular shot that is very, very funny in which the Flash is sort of the geeky member of the group.
It's not a giveaway.
When you look at the poster and you see that Superman's logo is included in the poster, it's not a giveaway that Superman appears in the film.
But there's a point where the Flash meets Superman, and let's put it this way, when they meet, it's very funny.
There's one little bit that's very, very funny.
I thought that the introduction of Cyborg is actually quite well done.
So I'm not a huge Cyborg fan in the comics, but I thought that they did a decent job with Cyborg.
I thought they really did a poor job with Aquaman.
Aquaman is one of the cooler characters in the comics.
I'll take that as a yes.
turned him into an annoying surfer dude.
He actually has some depth in the comics because he's a man stuck between two worlds, right?
He's sort of half Aquaman, half human.
Uh, and they, they don't really do that.
But in any case, here's some of the preview.
Okay.
So let me just say right here, this is the good stuff in the movie, right?
The character stuff in the movie is good.
I'll take that as a yes.
What?
The ring.
The world remains in mourning after the death of Superman.
Violence, acts of war, and terrorism are all on the rise.
I had a dream.
It was the end of the world.
Invasion.
I think it's something more.
Something darker.
Okay, so the CGI sort of battles.
The preview is actually better than the film.
The CGI battles that you see there are not particularly good.
They kind of stink, actually.
But it has its moments.
It's not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a basic rule of thumb, as I say, when it comes to Rotten Tomatoes.
If you want to use the Rotten Tomatoes score as sort of a proxy for how good a movie is, you have to subtract 20 points from every Marvel movie and add 20 points to every DC movie.
For some reason, DC, there's a real bias against DC in the critical community.
Again, I don't think this is a great movie, but I don't think it's a garbage movie.
And the way that they made out Batman v. Superman, particularly, was that it was a garbage movie.
I don't think that's exactly correct.
Okay.
Other things that I like.
So this was just funny.
So yesterday, they knocked down the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.
And this was much awaited.
The Weather Channel set up across the street.
The reason they set up across the street is obviously they're trying to see over this kind of cement barrier that you can see there.
And if they set up too close, then they don't have the right angle.
So they set up across the street, they're about to blow the dome, and then this happens.
8, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Come on, boss.
You can f***ing get out of the way, boss.
What the f***?
And then it's God.
Ha ha!
So people started photoshopping that bus into various other events.
Like, they had the bus driving in front of the game-winning hit from last year's World Series.
And they had the bus driving in front of, like, historic events, just as you're about to see them.
Like, the moon landing, they had the bus just driving in front of the camera.
Pretty spectacular stuff.
Very, very funny.
OK, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
So, thing that I hate, number one, comes courtesy of a person who I think is awful, Joy Behar.
So, Joy Behar, on the ex-Gribble show, The View, which is just... the combined IQ on that show has got to still be in double digits.
I mean, it is just a horrific show.
Every time I say that, I know I'm foreclosing my possibility of appearing on The View, but I really doubt that I'd ever get an invitation on The View because... I mean, let's be real about this.
If The View ever invited me on, it would be the most entertaining hour of television in the history of television.
I mean, it would be unbelievable, so...
The view.
If you want to double your ratings, have me on for an hour and see how it goes.
But just because of that, they will never have me on The View.
In any case, Joy Behar trotted out this old, tired argument that I'm so sick of hearing from people on the left.
It's so stupid.
It's untrue.
Here is Joy Behar.
It's kind of consistent, though, in a way.
When you think of a lot of these people who are inside choice, they're very big on the fetus.
But as soon as the child is born, they don't vote for additional help for the mother and the child.
They don't want to pay for that?
No, they won't pay for that.
Okay, this is a common argument.
Oh, it is what it is.
I mean, she knows it.
Once you're born, you're on your own.
Well, I don't know.
Okay, this is a common argument.
That is what it is, Sonny.
It is what it is.
Oh, it is what it is.
I mean, she knows it.
It will be Goldberg too.
Are you willing to raise this kid that you are demanding I have?
Okay, so we can stop it there.
Let me start, okay.
I'm demanding you have the, okay, so.
Let me make this, let's put this in the context of adult conversation.
Okay, now we're talking about adults.
I don't want you to murder your spouse.
I think it's a bad idea for you to murder your spouse.
Do I have to adopt your spouse?
Is it now my necessity that I have to bring your spouse into my home and provide for your spouse?
Or, do I just think it's a violation of human rights for you to murder your spouse?
This idea that in order for me to say you shouldn't murder your baby, that I have to pay for your baby is so nonsensical.
Now, we can have arguments as to what is the best policy for children.
We can have arguments over whether there is a real problem of incentivizing women to have children out of wedlock when the government is going to pay for them.
Because the single motherhood rate has skyrocketed in the years since welfare was instituted.
We can ask these questions.
We can say, is this policy the best one for incentivizing men to stay in the home and raise their children alongside women?
We can say, are these policies sustainable?
These are all real questions we can have.
Are they generous enough?
Should we do more for children?
These are questions that we can ask.
Does that have anything to do with murdering the baby?
This idea that I don't want you to kill someone and therefore I have to make them a part of my immediate family or pay for them is insipid.
It's insipid.
It's like saying that if you wanted to free the slaves in the South in 1863, well, I don't see you adopting slaves into your family.
I don't see you taking that slave and letting him marry your kid.
How about I don't like people being enslaved?
Like this utter disconnection.
It's a complete non sequitur.
But it's something that the left loves to use because they're trying to evade responsibility for the idea that it's fine for a woman to kill her baby because she's poor.
That's really what they're saying here.
They're really saying that if I'm not going to pay for your baby, you should be allowed to kill your baby, which is an insane argument that they would never actually make.
But that's really what they're saying.
If you get to the root of the logic, that is the logic that they are using.
Okay, other things that I hate.
There's a New York Times op-ed today saying that Charles Manson was actually a member of the right.
This is insipid.
Okay, Charles Manson was not a product of the counterculture.
What's funny about this column is that when you actually read the column, you can see that the author is getting so close to saying something true and then shies away from the true thing.
So the author is a person named Baynard Woods, who's a reporter and editor of the Real News Network, whatever that is.
And the piece says, Yeah.
This sentiment was most famously expressed by Joan Didion in her book, The White Album.
She wrote, "In a sense, it was true that the '60s ended abruptly on August 9th, 1969, is when the Manson murders took place, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brush fire through the community." When Zidane was right, we talked about this yesterday, Charles Manson was hanging out with the leading lights of his musical generation.
The Beach Boys recorded a Charles Manson song.
I think Clavin played it on his show yesterday.
Charles Manson was part and parcel of the leftist culture.
But here's what's funny, right?
Wood says Manson was a racist and a sexist, and therefore he must have been a right-winger.
Right?
Just like the alt-right.
He says, Mr. Manson was not the endpoint of the counterculture.
If anything, he was a backlash against the civil rights movement and a harbinger of white supremacist race warriors like Dylann Roof, the lunatic fringe of the alt-right.
Now, what's hilarious is that he stops one step short.
It is true.
Manson was a racist and a sexist.
And if you read his views on race war, they sound a lot like the views of the alt-right.
That part is true.
But he was also a member of the left.
Let's connect these two ideas.
Is it possible that the alt-right, in many ways, is an outgrowth of...
The left?
Is that a possibility?
Before you dismiss that possibility, recognize that the alt-right has been supremely critical, supremely critical of constitutional conservatism.
They've been supremely critical of individualism.
They say that they are for an identity politics for white people.
That is much closer in notion and orientation to an identity politics of race that the left embraces than it is to an identity politics embraced by the right.
It's one of the reasons why I find the alt-right so repulsive and disgusting.
Okay, time to deconstruct a little bit of culture.
So, we're looking at our culture right now and we are saying it's a smoking garbage fire, it's a smoking rubble heap of sexual assault and harassment.
Where could this possibly have come from?
Where would we see some early indicators that maybe this was going to happen?
And then you listen to rock music.
So, Half of rock music in the 1960s, apparently, was dedicated to the proposition that a 25-year-old shtupping a 14-year-old was fine.
The destruction of traditional sexual mores, the destruction of the idea that there were certain rules you shouldn't break and that consent was not the only standard, was replaced with this free-flowing era of free love, where basically if you said that it was fine to have sex with a girl, and the girl said okay, then it was fine.
So if you go back to Animal House, there's an actual scene in Animal House that is played for laughs, in which one of the characters, I believe it's Tom Hulse, has sex with, is it a 13-year-old girl in Animal House on the 50-yard line?
He has sex with like a 13-year-old girl, and it's played for laughs, right, in the middle of Animal House.
That's part of the plot, and it's treated as totally normal, right?
He doesn't know that she, he doesn't know how old she is, but it's totally fine.
Right?
It's totally fine.
It's played as just sort of a funny, oops, my bad.
If you look back at the film Shampoo with Warren Beatty, Carrie Fisher, who is I think 18 at the time, is playing, younger than 18, she's supposed to be playing 16 or 17, and she just has a casual sexual encounter with Warren Beatty, no problem, it's all fine.
Right?
This was the ethos of the 1960s and 1970s.
And you see it in the music.
Right, even this song by the Beatles, I saw her standing, there's still a popular old ballad, right?
I saw her stand, not really a ballad, but it's still a popular song.
I saw her standing, it was played on the Ed Sullivan Show.
Okay, listen to the lyrics for a second.
Okay, listen to just the beginning of the lyrics.
lyrics.
Okay.
So the first lyric there, she was just 17.
If you know what I mean, Okay, if you know what I mean was apparently like a side note added by John Lennon.
The age of consent in Britain at the time was 16.
So when they say if she was just 17, if you know what I mean, what they mean is she's not 17.
Right, she's just 17, but we're gonna pretend she's- she's not 17, we're gonna pretend she's 17 for purposes of this sexual encounter, right?
I mean, that's really what the song is about.
And it's not rare.
Okay, Ted Nugent had a song called Jailbait.
Okay, it's a pretty horrific song, right?
Here's Ted Nugent doing "Jailbait," and I will tell you what the lyrics are.
It continues along these lines.
It says, Jailbait, you look so good to me.
Jailbait, won't you set me free?
The lyrics continue.
Well, I don't care if you're just 13.
13?
What?
Yeah, that's in the lyrics.
Well, I don't care if you're just 13.
You look too good to be true.
I just know that you're probably clean.
There's one little thing I got to do to you.
Okay, this is in the lyrics.
And then later he says that maybe he'll go after her mom.
And then the police show up, right?
And he says, wait a minute, officer.
Wait a minute, officer.
Don't put those handcuffs on me.
What about her?
Hey, I'll share her with you.
Hey, this is part of the lyric of Jailbait by a huge star, Ted Nugent, who was recently at the White House, by the way, which shows you how our culture has, you know, basically included, you know, a bunch of people who probably would have been in jail for singing this sort of tune in 1930.
In any case, this is not the only one.
Here is a song from KISS, right?
The song is Christine 16 from KISS.
is.
She's been around, but she's young and clean.
I've got to have her.
Can't live without her.
Whoa, no.
Christine 16.
Christine 16.
And then you wonder where this permissive culture came from?
You wonder where this culture of sexual abuse came from?
You wonder why it is that men see women as objects when they're seeing 13-year-old girls as sex objects?
And when this culture is celebrating them for this?
These are all huge hits.
These are all major bands.
I'm not going far afield and getting you, like, satanic death metal, okay?
These are all major bands.
Kiss is a major band.
The Beatles are a major band.
Ted Nugent was a major star.
And the way you can see that radicalism has been mainstreamed is I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but Gene Simmons of KISS was on Fox News regularly for years, okay?
Ted Nugent was at the White House.
The Beatles are worshipped.
Worshipped!
Okay, this is the way our culture works.
And then we turn around and we're shocked?
When the bottom of the culture falls out?
We're shocked by this?
You can't have it both ways, folks.
You can't have a full sexual revolution in which you've tear out every fence available and you celebrate the people tearing out those fences as liberators.
You greet them as liberators when in fact they are great annihilators.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest and for our last show before the Thanksgiving Day weekend.
So, be here or be square.
Maybe we'll do the mailbag early.
Should we do the mailbag early?
Probably.
We'll do the mailbag early tomorrow, so that should be fun.
Okay, so we'll do that tomorrow.
Be here.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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