No Moral High Ground, Just Political High Ground | Ep. 433
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A breaking piece of news with regard to Roy Moore allegations, Al Franken fallout, plus CNN does its best to go after Trump on Russia and falls directly on its face, as does the entire media.
I'll tell you about that one.
Plus the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So, the news coming fast and furious today.
If my energy level seems a little bit down, it's just because I was back from San Francisco.
I was there last night doing Sam Harris' podcast.
It was really entertaining and fun.
Sam's a really good guy, and while we disagree strenuously on issues regarding religion, we have a lot of agreement about how arguments are to be approached, and so it was a really entertaining and good time.
That podcast should be up, I think, in the next couple of weeks sometime, so you should listen for that.
I want to get to all the latest news, particularly a piece of breaking news with regard to Roy Moore's chief accuser.
There are really two chief accusers in the Roy Moore case.
One is a woman named Lee Corfman, who says when she was 14 years old that Roy Moore attempted to molest her, and a woman named Beverly Young Nelson, who accused Roy Moore of basically putting her in a car and almost attempting to rape her when she was 16 years old.
She's the one, of course, who came out with the yearbook, the signed yearbook.
We'll talk about a breaking piece of news in that case that really throws Beverly Young Nelson into credibility crisis.
We'll talk about that in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Quip.
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Okay, so...
The breaking piece of news this morning is that Beverly Young Nelson, you remember her, we played significant portions of her audio when she first broke news, was sitting next to the excorable Gloria Allred that she was allegedly molested by Roy Moore, the Senate Republican candidate in Alabama, when she was 16 years old.
So all the way back in 1977, she claimed that Roy Moore had met her at a restaurant, was hitting on her, wrote her a note in her yearbook, and then one night when she When she didn't have a ride home, he offered to give her a ride, brought her around the back, in the car, locked the door, and then proceeded to try to molest her.
That was her claim.
And she trotted out this yearbook as proof that she knew Roy Moore, because Moore said he never even met her.
He didn't know who she was.
So she trotted out this yearbook.
And Moore said, it's a forgery.
And she said, it's not a forgery.
And actually, Gloria Allred went even further.
Gloria Allred said, the entire thing, the entire thing is genuine, and the entire thing was written by Roy Moore.
Well, a very bad thing happened on the way to Beverly Young Nelson's credibility.
And that is that Beverly Young Nelson admitted in an interview with ABC News that she wrote part of the inscription.
Now, she didn't write, according to her, the actual note.
She didn't write Roy Moore's actual signature.
But she did write the date and the place underneath.
Right, now the reason that this is a problem, I'll show you, I'll show you what she had to say.
The reason this is a problem is because if they had just come out at the very beginning and they had said, Roy Moore wrote this note, and then to remind myself of where this was, I wrote the date and the place underneath, right, just like you would on the back of a photo, everybody would have gone, oh, okay.
Especially because there's now a second note that Roy Moore wrote a graduation card to a 17-year-old that looks very much like this note, right?
The signatures look pretty much the same.
But, because people were automatically saying this was a forgery, and because Gloria Allred refused to turn it over to any sort of impartial third-hand source, or second-hand source, or refused to turn over to any sort of handwriting expert, because of all that, this now throws the entire story in jeopardy.
Here's Beverly Young Nelson talking about this and admitting that she wrote the little inscription under the note.
Young's proof that she knew Moore, her yearbook with this inscription.
But Moore and his supporters have called into question that inscription, noting the writing under the signature appears to be different.
Let's look at Beverly Nelson.
Everybody knows her yearbook is a forgery.
Nelson says she did make notes to the inscription, but the message was all Roy Moore.
Beverly, he signed your yearbook.
He did sign it.
And you made some notes underneath.
Yes.
Okay, so how, number one, does the GMA reporter who's reporting this not ask why?
When were the notes made?
What were the specific notes made?
Right, it says the date and the place, the steakhouse that apparently she worked.
Now, does this throw the entire story into severe credibility crisis?
Not quite, because Roy Moore said he never knew the woman.
He said that the restaurant didn't exist.
The signatures, again, look the same.
They should submit it now to an independent handwriting expert.
They should have already.
Gloria Allred is a hack.
It's unbelievable to me that Gloria Allred didn't submit this in the first place.
But there is a tendency to run too far with the story.
So I'm seeing headlines today.
There's a headline from Breitbart Bombshell.
She admits she forged the signature.
No, she did not admit she forged the signature.
What you just saw is the entirety of the tape.
The actual headline over at Breitbart right now, I want to make sure that I don't steer you bum on what exactly their headline is.
Bombshell!
More accuser admits forging yearbook.
Silence for weeks as evidence of hoax grew.
Right.
Moore admits admits forging yearbook.
She did not admit forging the yearbook.
She admitted to writing a note underneath the signature.
So, again, this throws her credit.
Two things can be true at once.
One, her credibility can be it can have serious problems now because she didn't admit this from the start.
And because Gloria Allred openly stated the entire thing was written by this woman.
But it's also true that she didn't admit to forging the entire note.
She specifically says she didn't forge the entire note in this particular element.
So I don't know why people have to lie about what... I really don't know why people have to lie about what exactly she admitted in order to throw this woman's credibility into crisis.
I don't really understand how that's the case.
It's confusing to me.
But, again, it does have a real credibility problem, and there are going to be a lot of people who hang their hats on this peg.
Now, again, she's not the only accuser against Roy Moore.
There's another accuser who says she was molested when she was 14.
That was the one that was tracked down by the Washington Post.
There are a bunch of other women who say that Roy Moore was dating them and trying to kiss them and hit on them when they were under the age of 18.
There were many of those women.
There are reports that he was banned from the local food court at the mall.
All of that said, is this a problem for Beverly Young Nelson?
It is, but it shows the dishonesty of our politics, number one, that Gloria Allred didn't admit this stuff up front, and number two, that GMA didn't bother to press the questions, and number three, that people are now saying that this discredits the entirety of the signature and the note, because it doesn't.
Okay, so all of those things can be true at once.
It can also be true that this doesn't really change some of the underlying other allegations.
People are using this to dismiss all the allegations.
All the other allegations are now dismissed because there is this problem with Beverly Young Nelson's credibility.
That seems to me overkill as well.
So with all that said, I'm trying to give you the most intellectually honest take I can.
It's a serious problem for her credibility.
It's a serious problem for Gloria Allred, who once again demonstrates to the world that she is terrible at her job and is a hack lawyer and a troll.
But It doesn't carry all the heavy weight that I think a lot of people want it to carry.
The weight that says that Roy Moore is now off the hook.
I think that's a little bit of a stretch.
All that being said, Roy Moore is going to win.
There's no question that Roy Moore is going to win this election now.
He's going to win the election by 8 to 10 points.
He was already winning the election.
These charges had started to fade in the public memory, and not only in the public memory, but in the minds of a lot of conservatives, because conservatives have made the concerted effort now, the concerted move, that they have decided that when the initial attack on somebody like Roy Moore is initially over an issue where they agree with Roy Moore, then all further attacks will be attributed to malice, bad motivations, and fraud.
It's not just with Roy Moore.
This is true for Donald Trump, too.
When the initial attacks on Donald Trump were suggestions that his right-wing views made him unpalatable, then when there were later suggestions that were of a more personal nature, everybody just chalked that up to media animus for Donald Trump.
The same thing is true of Joe Arpaio.
Joe Arpaio in Arizona is now apparently considering a run for the Senate.
He told the Daily Beast, That he is seriously, seriously, seriously considering running for the U.S.
Senate to replace Jeff Flake.
He'd obviously have an upper hand in the primaries, specifically because of all the media attacks on him, because he had to be pardoned by President Trump.
And that means that a lot of people on the right think that he's a martyr to the cause.
That he's somebody who is anti-illegal immigration.
He is somebody who used to dress up his prisoners in pink outfits.
We like that sort of stuff since we don't like crime and we don't like illegal immigration.
And the initial media attacks were on that stuff, not on corruption in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which apparently did exist.
They paid a $3.5 million settlement to a local newspaper after trying to arrest newspaper reporters for reporting on a subpoena.
But all of that Put to the side, one of the things that unites the sort of feeling for Trump and Roy Moore and Joe Arpaio is this feeling like if the initial attack on them was over their conservatism or over their right-wing views, then all further attacks must be discredited based on the malice of the media.
And the media doesn't help its own case when it doesn't press Beverly Young Nelson for a better explanation of why they didn't come out with this fact earlier, why it was weeks before they came out with the fact that the last two lines of this thing, at the very least, according to Beverly Young Nelson, were written by Beverly Young Nelson.
So, yeah, I think that Republicans are being a little disingenuous if they say that all allegations against Joe Arpaio are false because the initial attack on Joe Arpaio was wrong, or all the allegations against Roy Moore are false because the initial attack on Roy Moore was wrong over the Ten Commandments stuff.
Look, the fact is that Roy Moore says a lot of stuff that is inappropriate.
He says a lot of stuff that is bad.
But because, again, I think that you basically have ten seconds in the public eye to make people's minds up about what exactly you are, that once their minds have been made up, it's almost impossible to change them.
And this is actually what the social science data tends to suggest.
That when you walk down the street, you make a decision within the first ten seconds of meeting someone whether you like them or not.
And it's very difficult to change your opinion.
The same is true in politics.
The first impression is the lasting impression that people have about you with regard to politics.
The first impression about Roy Moore is that he was a very religious guy who took the Ten Commandments seriously and wasn't going to bow to judicial supremacy.
And that image has basically carried him through all of the credibility questions about him.
It carries him through saying ridiculous things, right?
In just a second, I'm going to play you a quote by Roy Moore himself that if any Democrats had it, the right would be going nuts.
But the right doesn't care because anything that is used to attack Roy Moore is now being seen as bad faith.
Here is a little bit of the tape that I'm talking about.
Roy Moore was asked by The Guardian about Ronald Reagan once saying that the Russians were the evil umpire and the focus of evil in the modern world.
And here was Roy Moore's answer.
He said that Russia was the focus of evil in the modern world.
You could say that very well about America, couldn't you?
Do you think?
Well, we promote a lot of bad things, you know?
Like?
Same-sex marriage.
That's the very argument that Vladimir Putin makes.
Well, then maybe Putin is right.
Maybe he's more akin to me than I know.
Okay, so if any Democrat said that, right, that America is the focus of modern evil in this world, and then they cited, say, not same-sex marriage, but low taxes, and then they said maybe Putin is right, we'd lose our minds.
But Roy Moore says that it's totally fine, again, because people have made up their mind about Roy Moore already.
The same is true, there's a quote apparently, and I don't want to put too much stake in this quote, I'll read it to you and then I'll tell you why.
According to the LA Times, Roy Moore in September was asked about when he last thought America was great, because he's run very much on the Make America Great Again kind of bandwagon.
And Moore apparently acknowledged the nation's ugly history vis-a-vis race and racism.
And then he said, I think it was great at the time when families were united.
Even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.
Our families were strong.
Our country had a direction.
So the way the media has run with this is saying that Roy Moore says the last time America was great is when there was slavery.
I don't think that's what Roy Moore is saying, but it's certainly badly articulated.
It's another one of these cases where, because we distrust the media on the right, we want the entire context.
We don't trust them to tell the truth, and this is just another example of why that is.
So that distrust of the media allows people to take a molehill and make it into a mountain, in the case of Beverly Young Nelson and all the rest of the accusers.
It allows them the ability to hang their hat on pegs that are not Particularly sturdy.
Again, does this call Beverly Young Nelson herself into question?
Absolutely.
Does it call Gloria Allred into question?
Absolutely.
And I will only follow where the evidence leads.
When she first came out, I said I thought this was very credible.
I think it's a lot less credible now that you have this statement that she wrote in the yearbook herself.
Do I think it completely destroys her credibility?
No, I'm not willing to go that far, but it's a problem for her.
That said, for people to say this destroys all of the allegations against Roy Moore is an overkill that I think is pretty shameless.
Okay, before I go any further and I'll talk a little bit about Al Franken, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at USCCA.
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Okay, so...
While the Republicans are having all of this hubbub over Moore and whether Moore is guilty or innocent, and Joe Arpaio and Trent Franks.
So Trent Franks stepped down yesterday.
He says he's going to step down from Congress because two former female staffers are now complaining of sexual harassment.
Apparently, Franks said that he and his wife have been struggling to get pregnant and that he had discussed surrogacy with two women in the workplace and it caused them distress.
I'm confused as to why that exactly would be sexual harassment unless he said, I want to put a baby in you.
In which case, it is sexual harassment.
But if it was, you work here, I trust you, you seem like a nice gal, have you ever considered surrogacy?
I'm not sure why that's sexual harassment per se.
Like, I just, maybe the power imbalance?
But that doesn't seem like typical sexual harassment to me, so I'm not sure we're getting the entire story on that.
Well, all that breaks down on the Republican side.
The Democrats are preening.
The Democrats are walking around preening.
We are just the moral guideposts for the United States.
We are the most moral of the moral.
This is the new shtick that Democrats have been trying out on a regular basis.
Yesterday, Al Franken did a bad job with it, right?
He tried to grab the moral high ground, but That failed because Al Franken wasn't really willing to acknowledge that he'd done anything wrong.
Here's what Al Franken said yesterday in saying that he was going to resign.
Not that he did resign yesterday, but that he would resign in short order.
If Moore gets elected and is not thrown out of the Senate, I think there's a significant possibility that Franken actually retracts his retirement and says, you know what?
I'm going to stick around now.
If the Republicans aren't going to clean house, I'm certainly not going to leave over this.
Here's what Franken said yesterday.
Nevertheless, today I am announcing That in the coming weeks, I will be resigning as a member of the United States Senate.
I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls Okay, so there he does.
He also called himself a champion for women and said that the women who were accusing him had gotten it all wrong, but he's stepping down anyway.
It's hard for you to claim the moral high ground when you're blaming the women, right?
I thought the whole shtick here is that women always have to be believed, unless you're Al Franken.
And Franken himself, he, you know, he His accusers are angry at him, and I think for good reason.
One of the Franken accusers, she comes out and she says she's just appalled that Franken won't own up to the situation.
And so is there anything that for you would be justice?
I have to say that I'm so sad and appalled at his lack of response and him owning up to what he did.
I feel that he just keeps passing the buck and making it out to be something that we took his behavior the wrong way or we misconstrued something.
So it's hard for them to grab the moral high ground in any case while they are busy giving it away, but they're trying to grab the moral high ground anyway, right?
They're trying to say that Republicans don't understand the plight of women.
But we Democrats, we understand the plight of women.
Now, this is all cynical pandering.
I mean, what they're actually attempting to do is flip the script so they can go after more than Trump, right?
That's the whole goal here is that – Okay, we'll sacrifice one of ours, and then we'll use their bodies as a bridge in order to climb the ramparts of Trump and Roy Moore.
That's the whole goal here.
And you see Chris Matthews did the clearest and dumbest version of this.
So last night on his show, he got up, got on my show, got on my stage, and he talks about Democrats are the greatest people in the entire world.
They're just fantastic.
Go!
Jason, your thoughts about the possibly positive education that the public... I don't know how you can avoid the education in this.
The worst you can say about the Democrats is they're too pure.
And that's the stupid thing to say, but that's the worst thing you can say about it.
These guys set too high a standard for public office.
Yeah, that's clearly the worst thing you can say about Democrats.
They're too pure.
That's the only thing you can say.
I mean, the preening, just self-aggrandizing stupidity of this nonsense.
Monica Lewinsky's dress disagrees.
Ted Kennedy's sexual assault victims disagree.
The worst you can say about Democrats is that they're too pure.
But this is their new routine.
We have the moral high ground.
And you can see how cynical this is, right?
Democratic Representative Kathleen Rice, she comes out and she says, you know, really, the guy who should resign here is, of course, Trump.
Trump is the one who should really go.
Now, although Democrats, you know, came, our leadership came to this issue a little late.
They did call on the resignations that have happened and we need the Republicans to do the same thing.
We need Paul Ryan to stand up and be the leader of his party.
I know it's difficult for him to do that when the standard-bearer of the Republican Party for right now is the President of the United States and we know his history with this issue of harassment.
So my hope and my call is for Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership to get with the program.
And start forcing people out.
Why shouldn't he resign today like Franken did?
If you're being consistent.
Should he resign?
I have said before that he should.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Right.
That's the cynical move the Democrats are making, but they're claiming that they have the moral high ground while they're doing it.
Again, two things can be true, that Franken probably should go.
And also the Democrats are using this for cynical reasons.
But the preening is a little much, right?
I mean, the Democrats proclaiming themselves on loan from God is pretty astonishing.
Nancy Pelosi did that as well yesterday.
She extended it, right?
Not only are they, Nancy Pelosi was defending Al Franken until five seconds ago, and John Conyers until five seconds ago.
Not only does it turn out that the Democrats have a direct pipeline to God when it comes to sexual harassment, they also have a direct pipeline to God when it comes to legitimizing We're not going to turn this country into a reign of terror of domestic enforcement and have the DACA, the DREAMers, pay that price.
But I'm optimistic.
I always have been.
God is with us on this.
Our country is great.
We know that greatness springs from the vitality that newcomers bring to our country.
God is with us.
Do you understand?
They're so holy now.
Don't you see the holiness that they have in getting rid of Al Franken has now translated over to everything, including DACA and the killing of human babies in the womb until the ninth month.
It's just amazing how this has happened.
So, before everybody jumps on their high horse and talks about how the Democrats, they're holy and now they're all wonderful and they're too pure, as Chris Matthews says, yeah, not so much.
Okay, so, I want to talk a little bit about media malfeasance.
This is an amazing story.
So, CNN Reported this apparent bombshell and they got it totally wrong.
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Okay, so, here is the story from CNN.
And this just shows you, you want to know why so many people are skeptical of the media, even on things like Roy Moore.
You cannot count out the fact that the media are willing to jump over any barrier in order to get Republicans.
They really are.
And so when you ask, when the left looks at us and they say on the right, how could you possibly, how could you possibly not just credit the media with great reporting when they report something?
It's because within three hours, half of this stuff gets discredited.
Half is a little much, but a certain percentage of the stuff gets discredited.
So, for example, there was a report from CNN, and the report from CNN said that on September 4th, there was an email that was sent to the Trump administration, to Donald J. Trump, to Donald Trump Jr., to other members of the administration, And that this email had a key code, a decryption key, for WikiLeaks that had not yet been released publicly.
That's a big scandal.
If it turns out, then that's one step removed from actual collusion, right?
If it turns out that the WikiLeaks people, at the behest of the Russian government, sent a decryption key to the Trump administration and the Trump campaign, And that the Trump campaign used it in order to go in and spy on Hillary Clinton's emails before those things were released publicly, that would look a lot like collusion, would it not?
It turns out every element of the story is bullcrap.
Every single one.
So first of all, the email was not sent on September 4th, before the WikiLeaks were leaked.
It was sent on September 14th, after they were already public information.
You didn't need a decryption key for public information.
Number two, there's no evidence that Donald Trump Jr.
or Donald Trump ever saw this email.
Number three, There's no evidence that the email itself is legit, that it didn't just come from some spammer.
So the way that this originally was run, the way the original headline was run, was something like, and I want to find if I can the actual headline, CNN report, Trump and Trump Jr.
got September 2016 email with decryption key.
Right, here's what David Wright from CNN tweeted, he tweeted, Candidate Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and others in the Trump Org received email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents according to email provided to congressional investigators.
Right?
Bombshell!
Before any of this was public, they were being offered a special in by WikiLeaks, aka the Russian government.
Except again, it turns out it may not have come from the Russian government, there's no evidence Trump looked at it, and the email came 10 days after the initial CNN report said, which means that the email came out after all the information was public.
I mean, this is a Brian Ross-level screw-up.
It is a massive, massive screw-up.
Somebody needs to get suspended for it, at the very least, because to misreport in that dramatic a fashion does a disservice to the Trump administration.
Then you wonder why Trump runs around shouting fake news.
You wonder why Republicans distrust reporting from places like the Washington Post.
You wonder why Republicans have now come to the conclusion that nothing can be trusted.
Part of it is because they're taking the message too far, but part of it is because there is a grain of truth, which is that a lot of the media are willing to jump on stories that have not been vetted and are not true in order to promulgate a particular narrative.
And this is just the best example of that.
Democrats are doing this too.
Representative Julian Castro, who has presidential aspirations, he comes out and he says that, don't worry, even though there really is no hard information connecting Trump and Russia at this point, disturbing things will definitely come out.
I mean, come on.
Well, as you know, I can't discuss most of that stuff now, but, you know, I told you months ago, and when I said it back then, I think it was considered a little bit brash, but I said, I think in April, that I thought that there would be people who would end up in jail.
And as I stand here now, I think that there are going to be some things that come out that will be very surprising and disturbing.
Pause it right there because I just want to read the chyron, right?
This was earlier yesterday and it says CNN exclusive.
Undisclosed emails show follow-up after Don Jr.
meeting with Russians at Trump Tower.
But the follow-up didn't actually have anything bad to that either.
There's no evidence that any follow-up was even responded to by the Trump people.
So everything that CNN is reporting, and when you watch CNN, half their coverage is about Russia stuff.
Not only is there no smoking gun, there's no bullet, there's no gun.
I don't even know what these stories are supposed to be proving when they're this bad.
And then again, it's amazing to me, people are wondering, how could it possibly be?
How could it possibly be that people don't trust the mainstream media?
This is why people don't trust the mainstream media, seriously.
Okay, meanwhile, there's more fallout over the Jerusalem situation.
So, Donald Trump, I have to give him credit for this tweet.
This tweet, he gets credit for it.
He says he's gonna move the embassy to Jerusalem, acknowledges Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, as I've said, a move of moral bravery and courage.
And he released this tweet, which is, I have to say, pretty funny.
He tweeted out above this, I fulfilled my campaign promise.
Others didn't.
Full credit to Trump.
This is exactly true.
Now, there's a lot of violence that has been breaking out around the world.
There are clashes in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, of course, is calling for an uprising because they're a terrorist group.
That's what they do.
One Palestinian protester has been shot dead.
But to be frank with you, the levels of terrorism that I've seen so far, the levels of violence that I've seen so far have been relatively innocuous.
So they say that there are rallies in Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Syria, and even America.
Ooh!
You mean people in Syria are angry?
Oh, noes!
You mean people in Iran are upset?
Well, I guess that changes everything, because Iran was our best friend before.
You mean Muslims in Malaysia are very upset about things?
Well, unless people are actually, like, getting hurt or killed, I don't really see... So what?
They're protesting.
Big, big freaking deal.
They protest over... If you said tomorrow, we're gonna have a day of rage, well, we'll call it the Nakba, right?
The day that Israel was established?
The Palestinians call the Nakba, the disaster.
We'll have a day of rage on that day?
You'd have the same people protesting.
It has nothing to do with Jerusalem.
It has to do with the fact they hate Israel.
It's that simple.
So Thursday, apparently, there were 16 Palestinians wounded.
They said that most of the injuries were from tear gas and rubber bullets.
And of course, you have all of the usual leftist suspects saying this is going to be the end of the world.
It won't be the end of the world.
Trump was right to do it.
I do want to point out how the media have exacerbated the situation.
So Richard Engel, the media like to embed in the Middle East in places like Gaza, and then they just stand around with cameras and watch people burn their own towns.
And then they treat it as though something heroic is taking place.
This is in Ramallah.
Ramallah is completely run by the Palestinian Authority.
The Israelis do not run Ramallah.
And Richard Engel, over on NBC, here is him reporting.
Good morning.
As you can probably see, clashes and civil unrest have broken out here in the West Bank.
We are on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
These protesters have begun setting fires, they're burning tires to create a smoke screen, and they are throwing stones and other debris.
It's difficult to see, but behind this smoke are Israeli troops.
And they have been firing volleys of tear gas occasionally to drive the demonstrators back.
All these protesters say they are here for one reason.
Because Palestinians, they say, will not give up on their right to Jerusalem, no matter what President Trump says.
Okay, well, look at the excitement from Richard Engel.
You can see the media are really turned on about all of this.
What would happen, let me just pose something.
What would happen if the media minimized the coverage?
In the same way that the media minimized the coverage of serial killers, but this seems to me very much like the coverage of the riots in Ferguson or the riots in Baltimore.
The media love this stuff and they egg it on and then they're surprised when violence breaks out.
That doesn't wash.
It doesn't wash at all.
Okay, so, in other news.
There are a couple of stories that are kind of astonishing today.
So one is with regard to yours truly.
So apparently I was supposed to speak at Concordia College.
Concordia College in Moorhead, I think it's in New Hampshire.
And they had funded it.
The Student Government Association had voted to fund it.
In November 30th, they had voted 13 to 10 to allocate about $7,000 to Young Americas for Freedom to fund one of my appearances.
And now student leaders voted 28 to 2 against funding it.
So they withdrew the funding.
More than 150 students and faculty filled Berry Auditorium for an hour-long discussion leading up to the vote that nullified a previous decision to have me.
And the SGA sent an executive email that said, SGA's first goal is to listen to, represent, and act on the feedback of its students, and there will be a motion put forward to rescind the funding.
You are welcome to add to the discussion during the meeting.
Some Concordia students, according to the motion to rescind funding, have asserted that Shapiro's harmful messages targeting LGBTQQYALZ communities and other marginalized identities is in direct opposition to the dedication of Concordia and SGA to support diversity, equity, and inclusion of all persons from all backgrounds and identities.
So this was an appeasement move.
It's pretty astonishing and pretty obvious.
Young Americans for Freedom at Concordia, they said bringing Ben Shapiro to campus would be a sign from Concordia College that they value intellectual and political diversity and that they care about the marginalized and underrepresented conservative voices on campus.
But they're not going to do it.
They've decided that it's not about diversity.
Instead, it's mostly about shutting down people who you don't like.
It's shutting down folks that you don't like, which of course we already knew from my experiences on college campuses before.
Speaking of free speech concerns, this isn't a formal free speech concern because I believe Concordia is a private college, they can do whatever they want.
It does demonstrate that their supposed commitment to free speech, however, is a joke.
But, you know, in terms of social censure for unpopular opinions that are true, This is an astonishingly bad story.
So there's a woman who's a porn star or was a porn star.
Her name was August Ames and she's 23.
She was found dead from an apparent suicide after she was bullied and branded a homophobe for refusing to shoot with a man who has sex with men on camera.
She made it clear she was not homophobic, apparently she's bisexual, or was bisexual, but she said that she wasn't going to do it for safety reasons.
So law enforcement sources said that Ames was found early Tuesday morning in Camarillo.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
We're told there's no indication of foul play or any other crime occurring.
Toxicology tests are being conducted while the death is investigated.
Close friends say she had suffered from long-term depression, and they believe a recent incident with online harassment may have contributed to her death.
The backlash was fierce when she took to Twitter on Sunday to warn women who had been tapped to replace her at EroticaX that the man she'd be working with has filmed with other men.
She said, whichever lady performer is replacing me tomorrow for Erotica X News, you're shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn just to let you know.
BS is all I can say.
Do agents really not care about who they're representing?
I do my homework for my body.
She was ridiculed as homophobic.
She wrote, not homophobic.
Most girls don't shoot with guys who have shot gay porn for safety.
That's just how it is with me.
I'm not putting my body at risk.
I don't know what they do in their private lives.
She says, how am I homophobic if I myself am attracted to women?
Not wanting to have sex with gay men is not homophobic.
They don't want to have sex with me either, so bye.
Okay, that seems to me completely fair, but the point that she's making here is a statistically true one, okay?
The rates of STDs among men who have sex with men are significantly higher than they are among men who have sex with women, right?
STDs among men who have sex with men are much, much higher.
They just are.
And the idea that a homosexual man or a man who's had sex with men is going to have sex with a woman, it increases her risk.
It increases her risk pretty dramatically, actually.
I'm looking up some of the statistics, if I can find them, from some of the more recent CDC statistics.
So, let's see.
Let's see if we can find something really quick here.
So, gay, bisexual, and other men who have had sex with men are 17 times more likely to get anal cancer than heterosexual men.
Gay and bisexual men are significantly more likely to have other forms of STDs.
CDC recommends sexually active gay and bisexual men test for HIV at least once a year.
Hepatitis C. Hepatitis B. Gonorrhea.
Chlamydia.
The rates are higher because they're higher.
I mean, there's nothing else to say about that.
And so the idea that this woman was basically run off Twitter and then she committed suicide over this, it demonstrates the insanity of the social censoring that goes on on social media like Twitter.
People digging up tweets that are 10 years old or finding a tweet that you said yesterday that's completely innocuous and then taking it out of context in order to hurt you.
It's just overboard.
It's all overboard.
And people need to rein it in.
There's a digital lynch mob that exists now, and it's pretty scary out there.
Okay, so, I do want to get to things I like, things I hate, and the mailbag.
We'll do a nice mailbag today.
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Alrighty, so let's do a quick thing I like and a quick thing that I hate, and then we will move to the mailbags.
So, things I like today.
I actually have a couple of things that I like today.
So, watching all this hubbub over particularly crappy candidates on both sides of the aisle, it reminds me of a movie called The Best Man.
This is not a well-remembered movie.
It's Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson, Edie Adams, very good cast.
The movie was written by Gore Vidal, so it is a left-leaning movie.
But the basic plot of it is that Henry Fonda is a former Secretary of State based on Adlai Stevenson, who's supposed to be running for president.
And Cliff Robertson is supposed to be based on Richard Nixon.
He's running for president, too.
Cliff Robertson's the bad guy.
Henry Fonda's the good guy.
And basically, they are the two leading candidates for president battling it out.
The question is who's going to win and what sort of dirty tricks they'll use at an open convention in order to win.
It's entertaining.
It's definitely entertaining.
And it does say something about, you know, what lengths people are willing to go to for power.
This is Secretary of State William Russell, candidate for President of the United States.
Is he the best man?
You have no sense of responsibility toward anybody or anything.
And that is a tragedy in a man, and it is a disaster in a president.
This is Senator Joe Cantwell, candidate for President of the United States.
Is he the best man?
You don't understand politics.
You don't understand this country.
This is Art Hockstetter, former President of the United States.
Will he back the best man?
Power is not a toy that we give to good children.
It's a weapon.
And a strong man takes it and he uses it.
To get here, some men will stop at nothing.
So the film itself is very entertaining and it's all about sort of the manipulations behind the scenes.
It's definitely a strained movie in the sense that a bunch of sort of wild coincidences happen at the same time and there's a lot of scandal going on.
It's an exaggeration of reality but it's a fun movie to watch and the acting is quite good.
Cliff Robertson particularly gives a very good performance in it.
Other things that I like.
So, believe it or not, DeRay McKesson tweeted something out that I like yesterday.
It was not anything of content or significance, but it was very funny.
Back in 1996, Patti LaBelle sang for Christmas, and Patti LaBelle was singing some song that I don't know.
She didn't know the song either, is the bigger problem.
So here's a little bit of the video of Patti LaBelle singing, and she realizes that she actually does not know any of the words that she's about to sing.
Thank you.
Hang on the mistletoe.
I'm going to get you.
Woo!
And it's the wrong words on the cue cards, I don't know the song!
And there's the wrong words on the cue cards.
I don't know the song.
This Christmas, I'm going to have them all I can.
Because I don't have the right words and I have the background singers.
Oh, I don't.
Woo!
This is going to be a very merry Christmas for you and me.
Okay, so it's worthwhile watching the whole thing.
It goes on for two minutes like this.
It's pretty amazing.
So thank you, Patti LaBelle, for giving us all a spot of cheer in a dark time.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.
Alrighty, so, thing that I hate today, there's this tweet that was going around yesterday that's just nuts.
It's from a feminist, of course, so I didn't even need to tell you that it was kind of crazy.
She calls herself Mrs. Claus, and here's what she tweeted.
Listen guys, let me clarify something for you.
When women's spaces say men are welcome, that's not true.
We're just scared to tell you no.
So, just to be clear, no means no, but yes also means no, so everything means no.
Unless yes means yes, but it probably means no, cause you're scared.
If you're wondering why men may be slightly confused about what the standards of behavior ought to be, it's folks like Mrs. Claus who are not making things any easier here.
Okay, time for the mailbag.
So, let's start with Robert.
Robert says, Ben, what is your view on mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients?
The answer is yes.
Good stuff.
The reason that you should have mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients is because there should be some strings attached.
If the idea on welfare is to get you back to work, we don't want you drugging out in your free time and then going and getting my taxpayer dollars to sponsor your drug habit.
Matthew says, Hey Ben, knowing that Trump has declared Jerusalem to be Israel's capital and promised to move the embassy, do you regret not voting for him last year?
Will you consider voting for him for re-election?
I personally feel I would switch my vote to him.
So, as far as regretting my vote, I could only base my vote on the evidence that was in evidence at the time.
So, I've said where I think that I was wrong about Trump, right?
I thought that I was wrong about him on Gorsuch.
I think he's governed much more conservative than the evidence suggested that he was going to, to that point.
I didn't think he was gonna do what he just did on Jerusalem.
He did it, and I've given him, I think, more than full points on that.
As far as would I consider voting for him next time?
Sure, I'd consider voting for him next time.
I'll look at the options that come up, and we'll see where we are in three years.
But yeah, of course I'd consider voting for him next time.
I considered voting for him last time.
So, you know, I think that you can only make your decision based on the evidence that was at hand at the time, but he has exceeded my expectations in a variety of ways.
In some areas he has not, and I've been clear on that as well.
Joseph says, Hi Ben, I believe from a theological and historical perspective, Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel, but how do I argue against those who contend that after 70 AD, the Jews were evicted through military means and thus lost their claim to the land?
Couldn't the Mexicans or Native Americans make the same historical and ancestral claims about the Southwestern United States?
The answer is no, the reason being because even after the expulsion of Jews in 70 A.D.
Jews had a continuous presence in the land and there was never an independent state of Palestine that existed outside of Jewish rule.
It was always part of a broader empire.
It was never an actual state or land that was run by an independent conglomerate of people.
That just never happened.
So, the longest lasting group of people, it's more like a native reservation than it would be like anything else, in the sense that Jews were always there and maintained a presence there.
And again, if you look at the original Native American treaties in the United States, before the Trail of Tears and the attempt to force Indians off their land, Native Americans off their land, I think there's a good case that those people should have been allowed to stay on their land.
Heather says, Hi Ben, I'm a big fan.
I greatly respect your values politically and personally.
My question is religiously based.
I'm a critical care registered nurse.
I've had some emotionally taxing events at work recently.
I've never considered myself a religious person.
Lately I've felt a desire for spiritual guidance.
I do not belong to a church nor does my family.
Do you have any advice on how I should begin?
Well, I think that...
You have to decide whether what you're looking for is a community experience or you're just looking for comforting religious thought, or deep religious thought.
I think that good beginning religious thought is C.S.
Lewis.
I like a lot of C.S.
Lewis's work.
You should go check out his religious thought.
I've recommended many of his books, including The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity on my show, even though I'm a Jew.
I think there's a lot in Mere Christianity, particularly in the first third before he gets to the super Christian part that I agree with.
And so that is worth checking out.
As far as the community that you're looking for, I would check out some churches, see where you feel welcome.
See where you feel like you find people who are thinking along the same lines.
If you have questions, it is the pastor or preacher or priest, somebody who is answering those questions in a fair and honest fashion.
Morgan says, Ben, how did you know you wanted to marry your wife and how long did it take for you to propose?
I knew I wanted to marry her for a couple of reasons.
So, I think that here's the typical pathway for men deciding they want to get married.
First, there has to be physical attraction.
Okay, this is just the reality.
When men are first attracted to a woman, it's because there's a physical attraction to the woman.
So my wife happens to be smoking hot.
So, this definitely was the initial draw, but in the first date, I dated a lot of women one time and decided I didn't want to date anymore because they were not either intellectually stimulating or have the same values.
Not only... there's more than just a spark there, is what I'm saying.
It's easy to find, I think, a certain level of chemistry, particularly sexual chemistry with people.
I don't think that's the hardest thing in the world to find.
What is hard to find is somebody who shares your values.
And my wife and I, on our first date, for three hours discussed free will and determinism and how many kids we each wanted to have.
I mean, we're dating for marriage.
And so, you have to...
I'm not saying sit there with a checklist, but you do have to have a group of things in your head that you want out of a spouse, and I don't mean like they're going to shine your shoes or make dinner for you.
I mean things like what kind of life do they want to build and what kind of values do they hold dear, because that's the stuff you're going to be able to build a future on.
Jonathan Haidt has a chapter in the Happiness Hypothesis about love, and one of the things he points out is that when you first meet your potential mate, then the level of passion, passionate love is, I think he calls it passionate love and companionate love.
is like here on the scale, and companionate love, meaning how well you know the person, how much you love them for who they are as a companion, is down here.
And this falls off within about six months.
Passionate love falls off within six months or a year, a couple years at the most.
It doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore, but it just is different.
I can tell you as somebody who's been married for 10 years, the feeling that you have for your spouse, particularly the kind of fiery need that you have for your spouse at the very beginning is not the same burning need that you have for your spouse throughout your life.
And the companionate love tends to rise.
So passionate love declines, companionate love rises.
That's the way it should happen because companionate love is more important when you're building a life and building a family.
Who you want to have sex with is a pretty arbitrary decision to a certain extent.
Okay, so Tanner says, Hi Ben, I have a quick question.
My older brother got a girl pregnant, he has only been dating for maybe a month and a half, does not know what to do.
He wants to settle down and get married with the girl, take responsibility for the kid.
She's unwilling to get married and take responsibility for the kid.
She wants to put the kid up for adoption, which my brother does not want to do.
I want to give him some helpful advice.
What should he do?
Here's my feeling.
If she's not going to take care of the kid, and he is not going to get married and adopt the kid, and have his spouse adopt the kid, or if your parents are not available to adopt the children, children need a mother and a father.
A single father is not a good solution.
A single mother is not a good solution.
If those are the only two solutions on the table, put the kid up for adoption, put them in a loving two-parent family.
It would be of benefit to the child.
The best outcome is biological mother and father bringing up child, on average.
Not for every family, but on average.
But it is more important that the child grow up in a two-parent family, a solid two-parent family, than that your brother be with his own child.
It would be an act of tremendous self-sacrifice by your brother, actually, I think, to put the child in the best living scenario, unless your parents are willing to adopt the kids.
The kid.
It's hard for me to say whether Trump himself has become more conservative.
I'll say that his policy has become more conservative.
His policy in the last week and a half, the last two weeks, has been as conservative as anything I've ever seen.
More conservative than I would say the Reagan administration in the last couple of weeks.
But as far as him personally, I never get into the business of reading what's going on in Donald Trump's head because I think that that's a risky business.
Jenna says, Hi, Ben.
After years of wanting to learn the violin, I finally coughed up the money and bought my first violin.
I've been taking lessons for a few months now, but I'm curious as to what advice would be when learning to play.
What is the most important thing to remember when playing?
Well, I mean, it differs based on your skill levels.
So when you become as good as I am, when you've been playing for 15 years, and you better be good at that point or quit.
When you've played, I've been playing since I was five years old.
So what you're thinking about then is making sure that there's musicality to what you're playing, that you're actually thinking about what you want things to sound like.
When you're at beginning stages, it is really practice, practice, practice.
Make sure that all the muscle memory is in place.
Metronome is your friend.
People tend to lose tempo.
Intonation is your friend if you have somebody who can play the piano with you.
That would definitely help because otherwise you end up with a sort of bizarre relative pitch.
Tyler says, what individual in American history has caused the most damage to the country?
This is a good question.
There are many individuals who have caused tremendous damage to the country.
I would say there's a very solid case for slaveholders.
I would put Woodrow Wilson up there.
I would put FDR up there.
I would put LBJ up there.
There are a number of demagogues who I think have driven public opinion in the wrong direction.
It's hard to name one person, but I would say that the legacy of slavery continues to cruelly divide our politics, even though we all agree that slavery is bad now.
Danny says, "I'm a cradle Catholic.
I take my faith extremely seriously.
However, in the past few years, I felt extremely drawn to Judaism, which is where my own Christian faith has roots.
This attraction has grown ever stronger, even through my own research and also because of your inspiration.
I wondered what your opinion was on Christians celebrating Hanukkah and Pesach." So the halakhic opinion is the Christians, the kind of the Jewish law opinion, is that Christians shouldn't celebrate these things.
I will, you know, add a bit of heresy here.
I think that it's fine for Christians to celebrate these things.
I think anything that connects you to the God of the Judeo-Christian religion is a good thing.
And Jesus celebrated Passover, so I don't really see the problem with this, per se.
So, in fact, my family has invited non-Jews over to Passover for years, and for Hanukkah parties.
So if you want to go for it, go for it.
Whatever makes you feel closer to God.
Christoph says, Ben, I believe your understanding of abortion to be somewhat flawed, or at least there's one part of your position you've not been clear about.
This pertains to when you define life to begin.
To introduce what I mean, let me pose a very practical question and one very applicable to good-hearted couples that want to have children, but are having difficulty doing so.
Do you support in vitro fertilization?
This procedure always results in the destruction of several embryos.
Are couples that pursue this method of fertility killing humans in the process?
So they are ending a human, a potential incipient human life.
IVF, I have always said that if you have the money to use every fertilized egg that's how IVF should be performed and in fact I've said this and there's a member of my synagogue who his wife had gotten in vitro and she had frozen the leftover egg and they were gonna throw it away and his wife said I don't think that that's moral.
They implanted the egg and they had a baby and this baby is now their child.
I think that every fertilized egg ought to be treated with the respect due to, at the very least, potential human life.
And so, if you're going to treat in vitro in the most moral possible way, you don't create fertilized eggs just for destruction.
Instead, you implant the number of fertilized eggs that you're willing to bear to fruition.
Michael says, Ben, what is your thought on the amount of money we spend on the military?
We spend It's less of an amount than what we spend the military money on.
In some cases, we're spending it on frivolous nonsense.
Weapon systems we don't need and all that.
But I don't really have a problem with us spending an enormous amount of money on the military.
I think it's one of the only decent functions of the government.
Let's see, Nicholas says, Wow, we're going back to like...
1880 here, this is great.
So I think that the government was not right to break up the trust.
I think a lot of trust busting was based on a fallacious assumption about how monopolies actually operated.
A lot of those monopolies were not actual monopolies.
And I think that a lot of the trust busting was basic class warfare that was taking place at the time.
To speak to specific trusts, I would actually have to do a little more research on that.
So I will do that.
Let's see.
Okay, final one.
Phillip says, as a small limited government proponent, what suggestions would you have to rationalize my desire to fund NASA to historic highs and literally shoot for the stars on outer space science exploration?
I get that low Earth orbit launches and deliveries to the ISS are best suited to private entities, but there seems to be very little motivation or reward for a private entity like SpaceX to explore for the sake of exploration.
Well, I think you'd have to talk to Elon Musk about that, because I believe that Elon Musk has actually talked about doing deep space exploration.
If it's privately fundable, I think that'd be great.
The only purpose for actual government funding of deep space exploration would be for defense purposes, or for the possibility of creating new cures to disease or something, creating new inventions.
As a general rule, I think that NASA funding non-connected to defense is a mistake and should be best left in private hands.
I do think private funding will fill in the gaps there, as SpaceX is showing.
Okay, so we'll be back here on Monday.
Have a wonderful weekend.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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