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Dec. 14, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:41
Will Sexual Allegations Cross A Line? | Ep. 437
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A Republican lawmaker just killed himself after sexual molestation allegations, Joe Biden makes a power move, and Democrats are getting out a little bit over their skis over Alabama.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so we have a lot to get to today.
As always, a crazy article from the New Yorker, a bizarre sort of study that comes out from the New York Times that makes no sense whatsoever, and, of course, this crazy story about a GOP state rep in, I guess, Kentucky, who shot and killed himself after allegations of sexual molestation.
We'll talk about all of that in the fallout.
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Okay, so this is a crazy story.
It broke last night.
Apparently, there is a GOP lawmaker in Kentucky who shot himself days after denying allegations of sexual misconduct.
So according to a report from a local radio station, his name is Representative Dan Johnson, and he reportedly shot and killed himself on a bridge in Mount Washington, Kentucky.
Police told WDRB they've recovered the gun that he used.
On Monday, The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting published an expose with an accuser who is a friend of his daughter saying that Johnson raped her when she was 17.
She alleged the assault took place in 2012 at a New Year's Eve sleepover party when he was a pastor.
Johnson dismissed the allegation.
He said, It is the season.
Last election, it seemed to be racism.
This election, it seems to be sexual impropriety.
He left a suicide note as well, and the suicide note was heavy on God references.
He basically said, here's what the suicide note said.
He posted it on his Facebook page before shooting himself, obviously.
The accusations from NPR are false.
God and only God knows the truth.
Nothing is the way they make it out to be.
America will not survive this type of judge and jury fake news.
Conservatives take a stand.
I love God and I love my wife, who is the best wife in the world, my love forever.
My mom and dad, my family, and all five of my kids, and nine grandchildren, two in tummies, and many more to come.
Each of you, or a total gift from God, stay strong.
Rebecca needs you.
you.
9-11-2001, New York City, WTC, PTSD 24/7, 16 years is a disease that will take my life.
I cannot handle it any longer.
It has won this life, but heaven is my home.
Please listen closely.
Only three things I ask of you to do if you love me is, quote, blame no person.
Satan is the accuser, so blame the devil himself.
Forgive and love everyone, especially yourself.
Most importantly, love God.
P.S.
I love my friends who are family.
God loves all people, no matter what.
So, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this guy had some mental trouble before he shot himself.
The reason I'm gonna say that is because of references like 9-11, PTSD, 24-7, 16 years of sickness that will take my life, I can't handle it any longer.
It's obviously a tragedy for the guy's family.
It does raise the question as to what standard of proof we're going to hold for politicians.
Because one of the big problems that we've seen is so many people saying that Roy Moore was innocent, for example, in Alabama because they didn't want to believe all of the evidence that had been brought forth by accusers.
It is absolutely rational and reasonable to say that you don't have to believe all women.
Okay, meaning not all women are equally credible because not all people who accuse people of crimes are equally credible.
Not all men are equally credible.
This believe all women schtick, it's a little bit strong.
If we believed all women and then stopped our evidentiary findings at that, we would just be jailing guys willy-nilly without any due process whatsoever.
And in the public sphere, we'd be throwing people out of the public sphere without any regard for the credibility of the accusers at all.
I saw Joe Biden trying to take advantage of this sort of moral panic that set in by saying he wishes he had done more for Anita Hill.
Over to the Clarence Thomas allegations.
The allegations about Clarence Thomas is that Clarence Thomas once made a remark, I believe, about a pubic hair on a Coke can.
And this was supposed to make sure that he was not a Supreme Court justice.
And it turns out that there are a lot of serious questions about Anita Hill's story.
They've now made a documentary about her on HBO.
Democrats are trying to say that Clarence Thomas should step down over all of this without any real evidence that any of this ever happened.
The evidence is very sketchy, at best, from Anita Hill.
So, we do have to be careful with all of this.
The reason that I said, and I said this all along, the reason that I thought the Roy Moore allegations were true is because Roy Moore did a very poor job of defending himself.
There were a multiplicity of allegations.
All of the verifying details were present.
Now, is it possible that Roy Moore is innocent?
Sure, it's possible he was innocent.
It's possible, but I don't think it was probable.
But we have to have an evidentiary standard in our own head.
I think Tucker Carlson made this point last night pretty well.
He said that he'd been falsely accused of sexual harassment before, and he told his story.
Now, maybe all of these people are guilty as charged.
Sexual harassment is real and apparently common.
So it could be.
How common is it?
Well, it would be nice to know that, but that would require facts, which are one of the many things these cases lack, along with names and dates and the specific nature of the crimes alleged.
Details matter because, in the end, they add up to proof.
Proof is what ensures that the innocent aren't punished.
And protecting the innocent is the very essence of Western justice.
Unfortunately, we are moving in the opposite direction, toward a standard where to be accused means to be judged guilty.
And one of the big problems with the conflation between sexual harassment and sexual assault is that we actually have statistics on sexual assault, and it is not nearly as common as the media are making it out to be.
I mean, the number of women in the United States who have been raped is extraordinarily low by percentage.
Every one of those is an evil act.
Every rapist should be castrated or killed, in my opinion.
At least jailed for life.
But the problem that we have here is that there are no standards that are being applied.
The only standard that seems to be applied is what is useful and what is not politically.
Now, again, should we be taking all of this stuff seriously?
Yes, when an accuser comes forward, we should take it seriously because there are cases where politicians are really responsible for evil things.
And yes, it goes hidden for years and years and years.
I mean, the case in point Would be Denny Hastert.
It came out that Dennis Hastert, who's the former House Speaker, right, the former Republican House Speaker, he has now been banned from having contact with anyone under 18 years of age unless an adult is present who's aware that he pled guilty in a hush money case related to the sexual abuse of teen boys, according to new restrictions imposed by a federal judge.
The restrictions state, quote, we shall not have contact with any person under the age of 18 except in the presence of a responsible adult who is aware of the nature of his or her background and current offense and who has been approved by the probation officer and treatment provider.
He never faced sexual abuse charges because the statute of limitations had expired, but he did plead guilty in October 2015, Hastert, to structuring bank transactions to pay off an accuser.
Now, the reason that I bring all of this up is because I think that as these accusations become more and more common and more and more covered, and as people leap to knee-jerk responses about particular politicians or people, we do have to think about how easy it would be to manipulate the system.
It would be relatively easy to manipulate the system, because male-female relations are not always cut and dry.
It would not be that difficult for a woman and a man to perceive relationships in different ways, and then for the woman to tell all of her friends in the way that she perceived it, and suddenly you have an account that she says she was raped, and she told all of her friends at the time, and the guy says, wait a second, that was consensual.
One of the things that I think is a problem is avoiding the necessary thinking that we have to do about these issues in order to virtue signal.
So one of the people who's virtue signaling today is Morgan Spurlock.
Morgan Spurlock, of course, is the documentary filmmaker, and he wrote this letter on Twitter telling readers that he wasn't asking who will be next.
He was asking, when will they come for me?
This is his way of doing a mea culpa.
The way that he is doing a mea culpa is by basically saying that he's part of the problem, right?
This is the way that he's going to get off is by virtue signaling.
Not by asking serious questions about whether he actually hurt a woman, or whether he did something wrong, or whether he's being falsely accused, but instead by simply saying, I'm just going to assume that I did something wrong and now let me off the hook.
And you're going to see more and more men doing this, and it doesn't actually solve the problem as to what sort of behavior is acceptable and what sort of behavior isn't.
So here's Morgan Spurlock's letter that he posted on Twitter bit by bit.
I bet he said, as I sit around watching hero after hero, man after man, follow at the realization of their past indiscretions, I don't sit by and wonder who will be next.
I wonder when will they come for me?
You see, I've come to understand after months of these revelations that I am not some innocent bystander.
I am also part of the problem.
And whenever somebody says I'm part of the problem, you can bet that they actually did something they want to cover up for.
And now they're going to get out in front of it.
Here's what he says.
I'm sure I'm not alone in this thought, but I can't act blindly as though I didn't somehow play a part in this.
And if I'm going to truly represent myself as someone who has built a career in finding the truth, it's time for me to be truthful as well.
I'm part of the problem.
So this is the third time already he's saying he's part of the problem.
He says, over my life, there have been many instances that parallel what we see every day in the news.
When I was in college, a girl who I hooked up with on a one night stand accused me of rape.
Not outright.
There were no charges or investigations, but she wrote about the instance in a short story writing class and called me by name.
A female friend who was in the class told me about it afterward.
I was floored.
That's not what happened, I told her.
That wasn't how I remembered it at all.
In my mind, we'd been drinking all night and then went back to my room.
We began fooling around.
She pushed me off.
We laid in the bed and talked and laughed some more and then began fooling around again.
We took off our clothes.
She said she didn't want to have sex.
We laid together and talked and kissed and laughed and then we started having sex.
Lightbright, she said.
What?
Lightbright, that toy, that kid's toy, that's all I can see and think about, she said.
And then she started to cry.
I didn't know what to do.
We stopped having sex and I rolled beside her.
I tried to comfort her to make her feel better.
I thought I was doing okay.
I believed she was feeling better.
She believed she was raped.
That's why I'm part of the problem.
Well, that's not really clarifying the issue, right?
Now it's basically saying that a woman's subjective perception of a situation, which can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, we as the public are simply supposed to believe that subjective account.
You can't destroy people's lives or careers based on subjective accounts of events that are in conflict.
This is where we get into some really dicey and uncomfortable territory, because we all know sexual assault is bad.
We all know sexual harassment is bad.
And I'm, you know, a fortunate guy.
I've never been in any of these scenarios, right?
I was a virgin until I was married, famously one of the most famous virgins until marriage in American history, probably.
You know, and that was, yeah, I think a good decision.
One of the reasons I think it was a good decision is because I don't have any instances like this in my past, but...
You can see how any subjective interpretation of a problem can now become a national issue.
Spurlock says, Well, I don't know that that is just as bad.
If you say something to a woman, I really don't think that's just as bad as groping a woman's breast, for example.
It was really harassment.
It was verbal and it was just as bad.
Well, I don't know that that is just as bad, right?
If you say something to a woman, I really don't think that's just as bad as groping a woman's breasts, for example.
He said, "I would call my female assistant hot pants or sex pants when I was yelling to her from the other side of the office." Right?
So he's a pig, but I think there's a difference between a pig and somebody who is evil, per se.
He said, "Something I thought was funny at the time, but then I'm not going to say, 'I'm not going to say anything.' He says, Right, so this is you being a douchebag.
This is objective, right?
The reasonable man standard says you are a douchebag, right, if you do this sort of stuff.
That you're a bad guy if you do this sort of stuff.
But he's conflating subjective interpretations of open events with objective, verifiable situations where he's being a bad guy.
But he says, I'm part of the problem.
Then there's the infidelity.
I've been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I've ever had.
So now this just turns into him coming out as, now he's, I mean, talk about virtue signaling.
Virtue signaling is where you confess every sin that you've ever done in order so that you look virtuous, right?
He says, over the years, I would look at each of them in the eye and proclaim my love and then have sex with other people behind their backs.
I hurt them and I hate it, but it didn't make me stop.
The worst part, like, why isn't he telling this to his priest?
Why is he telling this to us?
Because the worst part is, I'm someone who consistently hurts those closest to me.
From my wife to my friends, to my family, to my partners and co-workers, I've helped create a world of disrespect for my own actions, and I am part of the problem.
And what caused me to act this way?
Is it all ego?
Or was it the sexual abuse I suffered as a boy and a young man in my teens?
There we go.
Abuse that I only ever told to my first wife for fear of being seen as weak or less than a man.
So now we're going to blame his past for all the decisions that he's been making.
Is it because my father left my mother when I was a child or that she believed he never respected her so that disrespect carried over into their son?
Or is it because I've been consistently drinking since the age of 13?
And the sexual dalliances, were they meaningful?
Or did they only serve to try and make a weak man feel stronger?
I don't know.
None of these things matter when you chip away at someone and consistently make them feel like less of a person.
I am part of the problem.
We all are.
This sort of sort of gut spilling that's happening now, I don't think that it's particularly helpful to the conversation.
We as a society are going to have to...
Determine what we think is objectively verifiable, what evidence we find on behalf of particular allegations, what standard of behavior it now requires us to end somebody's career or damage their livelihood, and then we're going to have to stick with that.
Because what I don't like is this constantly shifting standard by which the only thing that matters is the sort of Is the sort of uncomfortable realizations people come to and then we let them off the hook.
Or the idea that every subjective interpretation of a series of events must be taken with equal credibility.
Okay, before I go any further here, I want to talk about the fallout from Alabama.
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Okay, so, meanwhile, in Alabama, the fallout continues, and it is pretty obvious that everyone on the Democratic side is a little bit overeager.
A lot of people on the Republican establishment side are a little bit overeager.
We'll start with the Republicans.
So, Bob Corker, of course, comes out and he says that he's really, really, truly happy with the result in Alabama.
I've tried to reach Dick Shelby this morning to let him know how proud I am of his state and what he did.
And again, I know this is not something that I know we're supposed to cheer for our side of the aisle, if you will, but I'm really, really happy with what happened for all of us in our nation, for people serving in the Senate to not have to deal with what likely we were going to have to deal with should the outcome have been the other way.
Okay, so this kind of stuff from establishment Republicans only gives more fuel to the fire of the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican Party, of the Roy Moore wing of the Republican Party.
This idea that you're supposed to be happy about what happened in Alabama, I think, is a huge mistake by quote-unquote establishment Republicans like Horker.
You can be upset that a Democrat just took the office.
You can be happy that Roy Moore is not in office.
You can think that that was a terrible choice that was foisted upon the vast majority of Alabamans, most of whom stayed home.
But to be overtly happy that a pro-abortion Democrat took that Senate seat, I don't think is appropriate.
Again, I think if he had said, I'm happy Roy Moore lost, but I'm not happy that Doug Jones is in the Senate, I think that's perfectly appropriate.
I'm also happy that Republicans don't have to deal with the specter of an alleged child molester among their ranks, making headlines every day for conservatives.
But I think that for Bob Corker to go out on a limb and say that he's happy altogether with the full result in Alabama is a mistake.
And all it's going to do is it's going to lead a lot of people on the right side of the aisle to say, oh, look at these establishment cucks.
They're fine with losing.
They like losing.
It's because they wanted to lose, right?
The real motivation here is they wanted to lose the seat, and they were just using Roy Moore as an excuse.
They really want to stop Trump.
That's the logic that a lot of people in the Bannon wing of the party want to use.
It's not correct, but Bob Corker lends it credence, and I think that's a mistake.
He's not the only one, by the way.
John McCain came out and he was ripping on President Trump's talk of fake news.
I've been similarly critical, but here's what John McCain tweeted.
He said, Press Freedom's annual report shows record number of journalists in prison worldwide in 2017, including 21 on fake news charges.
President must understand his harmful rhetoric only empowers repressive regimes to jail reporters and silence the truth.
I think, again, this is nonsense.
This is blaming Trump for stuff that is not really Trump's fault.
I don't like Trump's fake news shtick when he applies it to real news.
I don't like him applying it to full outlets, like saying CNN is fake news.
A lot of stuff on CNN is fake news.
But CNN itself is not fake news.
You can't discount every fact ever reported on CNN.
But the idea that Turkey is imprisoning journalists because Trump is saying the words fake news is absurd.
All these repressive dictatorial regimes are going to do that anyway.
Blaming Trump is really a foolish thing.
Again, this is what drives people to believe that they need to support people like Roy Moore because the establishment is so all fired out to get Trump or so all fired out to lose seats because they want to stop the quote-unquote Trumpian agenda, even though there's no real agenda.
Now, it's not just establishment Republicans who are overeager here.
It's also Democrats.
Who are overeager.
So Democrats have been making fools of themselves in the aftermath of the Doug Jones election.
They think that now it's going to be nothing but victories from here on in.
And so they're ratcheting up the rhetoric.
Now they think that they're going to get Trump.
Now, what they don't understand is there is a major difference between a presidential election and a Senate election.
There's a serious difference between a White House election and a Senate election in Alabama.
How do we know this?
Because Donald Trump was alleged to have done a lot of very improper and nasty things.
He won anyway.
If Roy Moore had been running against Doug Jones in a national election for the presidency, I'm not sure that Doug Jones loses.
I mean, I'm not sure that Doug Jones wins.
Because, again, once the stakes are raised, that means more people are going to show up regardless.
As I said yesterday, if it's a dog catcher race and Roy Moore runs, he loses by 1,000 points.
If it is a local city council race and he runs, he loses by 500 points.
If it is a Senate race, he loses by 2 percentage points.
And if it's a presidential race, I'm not sure he loses at all.
We tend to ignore the stuff that we don't like about people for partisan purposes, the more important the office becomes.
But Democrats are now thinking that they can use the Roy Moore playbook against Donald Trump.
So Tom Perez over at the DNC, he says that Trump isn't just a bad president, he's the worst president in American history.
What do you say to progressives?
You want to have a message that's not just anti-Trump, which I'm guessing also means it's not just about impeachment.
What do you tell those in the Democratic base that say, no, no, no, no, Mr. Chairman, They do want to talk impeachment.
What do you say to them?
Well, I say to them, here's where we agree.
This is the worst president, perhaps, in American history.
This tax way to wealthy people and very large corporations that don't need it is an abomination.
The worst president in American history?
We've had presidents like James Buchanan.
We can stop him here, he's an idiot.
We've had presidents like James Buchanan.
We've had presidents like Andrew Johnson, who was impeached.
We've had presidents like LBJ, who's a disastrous president.
We've had presidents like Woodrow Wilson, another disastrous president.
We've had Jimmy Carter be our president.
There are a lot of really bad presidents.
President Obama's on that list.
By the way, I don't think Obama's the worst president in American history.
I think Obama's top five bad.
But I don't think he's the worst president in American history.
There are a lot of presidents who have been more damaging than President Obama.
But the idea that Donald Trump is the worst president after a year?
What's he done that makes him the worst president in American history?
I don't think he's been a great president by any stretch of the imagination.
If I had to grade him now, I'd give him about a C-.
I like some of the things that he's done.
I think he's undercut that with a lot of his rhetoric.
I think if he had stopped tweeting and stopped talking, he'd be a B- president.
But the idea that he's the worst president in American history, this is Democrats getting ahead of themselves.
And if they think that they're going to be able to defeat Trump just by shouting at him, they tried that in the last election cycle, and it did not work.
You see, Bernie Sanders is doing this, too.
He's now accusing Trump of having severe emotional problems.
Like, why exactly a kook old socialist, a nutcase who honeymooned in the USSR and goes around talking about how we need to pay for everyone's college, make college free without any plan to pay for it, how he's talking about the serious emotional problems of Donald Trump You got a president who has been accused by many, many women of harassment, to say the least.
This is a guy who was on a tape seen by everybody in America essentially bragging About his sexual assault of women.
Do I think under those considerations of Al Franken resign?
Do I think the president should resign?
I do.
Do I think he will?
I don't.
But yes, I do think he should resign.
He should resign because he has severe emotional... The Democrats who are pushing this this hard, that Trump should resign, that he has to go, there could be a backlash here to the overreach.
They really could.
And when I say backlash to the overreach, I'm talking also about the media overreacher, because the media overreacher is pretty astonishing.
I mean, the level of media overreach is pretty insane.
So I want to show you some of the things the media have been saying about this Alabama race, because they're truly quite nuts.
So first of all, I'll start with this tweet that just came out.
This is about Trump, not the Alabama race.
David Leonhardt.
Who is a pretty good reporter over at the New York Times, or can be from time to time.
He says that after we published a list of Trump lies this summer, some of his supporters asked us to compare Trump to other presidents.
We've done so and just published the results.
And there's a chart.
It shows Trump has lied 103 times in his first year.
It says in his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.
It says Obama only told 18 lies his entire presidency.
And then you wonder why people don't trust the media?
You wonder why when the media go berserk, the media don't pay any attention to it?
It's because of stupidities like this.
You wonder why Trump says fake news and everybody sort of nods along?
It's because that's fake news.
If you think President Obama only told 18 lies his entire presidency, that's insipid.
It's absurd.
If you want to say he's a bigger liar than Obama, you can probably make a statistical case for it.
But to say that in eight years Obama told 18 lies, that he only told a lie like twice a year?
You have got to be kidding me.
You have got to be kidding me.
That Trump has told 103?
That is not a real statistic in any sense.
And you can see that the media are more than happy to tear Trump down.
There is a backlash to that.
That backlash only applies to Trump, by the way.
It didn't help Roy Moore very much in Alabama.
It may have helped him a little bit, but not enough.
It doesn't help Republicans in Virginia.
The anti-media line only helps with the president because the president really does have, is really receiving the brunt of media criticism.
But if Roy Moore says the media is coming after me, and what it turns out is that there are some pretty significant allegations against him, that just doesn't wash.
That said, the media obviously are attempting to tear down Trump.
So the Democrats who think that Roy Moore is the beginning of the end for Trump, no.
I mean, Scott Brown won a Senate seat, Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts.
Barack Obama was re-elected to the presidency two years later.
So the idea that Trump is done as president is just foolish.
Especially if the media continue to go crazy over Trump as much as they have.
So, for example, last night we found out that Omarosa, who was a contestant on The Apprentice and then was in the White House for nearly a year, she had left the White House.
There was a story by April Ryan, who really hates Omarosa, suggesting that Omarosa had been forcibly ejected by Secret Service from the White House.
Secret Service denied this, but you can see the chortling on CNN over what appears to have been fake news.
Brooke, I'm gonna do what you can't do and what April and Simone are too good of people to do and that's just gonna be petty for a minute.
Bye, girl.
Bye.
We did it already on the podcast, April, but bye, honey.
You have never represented the community.
You are skin folk.
We don't own you like Zora.
Goodbye, good riddance.
Goodbye.
Angela, you know I have much love for you, but you know what?
I don't delight in anyone's demise.
I'm not delighting in her demise.
I wish her the best, but I Okay, you can see all of the anchors chortling and laughing.
Oh, look, somebody got fired.
Black woman got fired from the Trump administration, and she deserves to go.
They're not the only ones.
Robin Roberts this morning on Good Morning America, she actually said bye, Felicia, about Omarosa.
She goes, bye, Felicia, right before she goes to break.
I mean, the chortling over Omarosa is really kind of galling.
And we're getting the same routine from MSNBC's Chris Matthews.
Trump's on the road.
She just resigned.
She just leaves.
I get up in the morning.
Come out of the show.
Come in here.
My suit's all wrinkled.
Don't even own an iron.
What do I need an iron for?
I just come in here.
I don't even go to sleep in a bed.
I just sleep in this chair with the rolling wheels on the bottom.
They roll me over.
They wake me up and they say, Go!
Boom!
Hardball!
Go!
Chris Matthews!
Go!
Do you think we'd be better off if this president simply resigned after all this concern about his behavior in the past and his current comments, and turned it over to Vice President Pence?
Would we be better off?
Tough question, but I'd love an answer from you.
I did not want to see this president go in place.
I'm in favor of these investigations that people are talking about, and certainly the investigation we're seeing on Russia.
And that's the only way we're going to be able to see a change is if the facts come out and there is, in fact, a reason through Congress for some kind of proceeding.
And right now, that's what we have to let happen.
But at the same time, we cannot let go.
And this is the message we heard from Alabama and Virginia, this economic message of people that want us to simply focus on these bread and butter issues and to stand up for them every step of the way.
Okay, so this idea that he's going to resign and that we're one second away from resignation, it's one of the reasons why the Democrats have placed so much heavy burden on the Russia investigation.
They think that they're five seconds away from impeaching Trump.
Bret Stephens has an interesting column over at the New York Times.
Stephens, of course, is maybe the last remaining quote-unquote never-Trumper.
So one of the distinctions that people have been making, one of the labels people have been using wrongly, in the same way that neoconservative came to mean anyone who's for the Iraq war, even though neoconservative originally meant a bunch of people who were Marxist, who became conservative when they were disillusioned by leftism.
It now became, you know, anyone who backed the Iraq War.
The term never-Trumper has been applied to a bunch of people who are not quote-unquote never-Trump, who don't spend their days trying to take down Trump.
So I was never-Trump during the election cycle, meaning I didn't vote for the president in the general election or in the primary.
But once he was the president, that no longer applies, right?
Never-Trump just meant my vote.
It didn't mean my support.
It didn't mean my belief that he could change.
It didn't mean my support for his various policies.
There are a few people who are quote-unquote never Trump who've sort of maintained this position that nothing Trump does can ever be right.
Bret Stephens seems to be one of them over at the New York Times.
And I like a lot of Bret's work, but that's the position that he's taken.
But he has a column today where he says that Democrats are making a huge mistake.
If they think that Trump is just going to be ousted because they don't like him or because his approval rating is 35 percent, they're neglecting the fact that the economy is still booming under President Trump.
They're neglecting the fact that a solid tax cut will help the economy.
That we had 3.3% GDP growth in the last quarter, that the stock market is at record highs.
He says, with the economy good, if Trump could shut his mouth for five seconds, he'd win re-election and he could do so relatively easily because his governance has not been nearly as controversial or as difficult as has been the rhetoric that has surrounded him.
And he's exactly right about that.
No, so the only person who can really get Trump in trouble and continue to get Trump in trouble is Trump.
One of the ways he could do that is theoretically by firing Robert Mueller.
Now, as I mentioned yesterday, there is this text message that was sent from a member of the Mueller team to his mistress.
He's married to his mistress.
In which he talked about having an insurance policy against Trump winning in August of 2016.
It's not clear what that meant, but it's pretty clear that the Mueller investigation is compromised to a significant degree.
That doesn't mean that Trump has the political wherewithal to actually fire Robert Mueller.
And he's going to have a tough time doing it, considering that his Justice Department doesn't want him to do it.
Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, he came out yesterday in testimony and said that he had not seen good cause for Trump to fire Mueller at this point.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, you said that you would only fire Special Counsel Mueller for good cause, and that you had not seen any yet.
Several months have passed since then.
Have you seen good cause to fire Special Counsel Mueller?
No.
Thank you.
If you were ordered today to fire Mr. Mueller, what would you do?
As I've explained previously, I would follow the regulation.
If there were good cause, I would act.
If there were no good cause, I would not.
And you've seen no good cause so far?
Correct.
Thank you.
OK, so he's basically saying that if Trump wants to fire Mueller, he's going to have to do it himself.
Now, as I'll explain later, Trump does have the power to fire Mueller.
He has an enormous amount of discretion.
In fact, he could actually call up Mueller right now, not just fire Mueller.
He could call up Mueller now and say, I want you to drop this investigation.
This investigation is over.
He could actually just do that.
He wouldn't even have to fire him.
He could call him up and order him to drop the investigation.
And then if Mueller refused, then he could fire him.
I'll explain that a little bit later in The Big Idea.
But the thing that is really important to notice here is that the Democrats are hanging their hat on an investigation that is already fatally compromised, whether or not Trump fires Mueller.
So the Roy Moore is out, therefore Donald Trump is done, that line is not going to wash.
It's not going to play.
That's not how this stuff works.
Right?
Republicans thought that after Ken Starr, Clinton was done, he left office with a 66% approval rating.
He picked up seats in 1998 elections.
And Al Gore should have won the 2000 election if he hadn't been one of the worst candidates ever.
If he hadn't actually been a walking block of wood.
Okay, so, I now want to turn to what is, to me, one of the more insane pieces I have seen recently.
The social left wants to have it both ways.
On the one hand, they want to say that sexual promiscuity and sexual liberation is a grand and glorious thing for everyone involved.
On the other hand, they want to say that everyone's subjective perception of sexual conduct must be taken seriously.
Well, you can't have it both ways.
Either sex is generally a good so long as it is quote-unquote consensual, and they never define exactly what level of consent is necessary because sometimes they say Monica Lewinsky could consent, sometimes they say she couldn't.
Sometimes they say 13-year-old girls can consent, sometimes they say they can't.
But in any case, the left has this weird ethos where they know bad when they see it, They have a Potter Stewart ethic with regards to that.
Potter Stewart's the guy who said that he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it.
The left has that with regard to sexual ethics more broadly.
So evidence of this.
Zoe Heller.
is a columnist for The New Yorker, and she writes an entire piece called In Defense of Adulterers.
They talk about how adultery is natural and normal and probably good.
So she starts off by talking about how our increasingly licentious behavior has not been reflected in more tolerant public attitudes toward infidelity.
We've become considerably more relaxed about premarital sex, gay sex, and interracial sex, but our disapproval of extramarital sex has been largely unaffected by our growing propensity to engage in it.
We're eating forbidden apples more hungrily than ever, but we slap ourselves with every bite.
According to a 2017 Gallup poll, Americans deplore adultery at much higher rates than they do abortion, animal testing, or euthanasia.
Now, by the way, I think adultery is less of a sin than abortion, because murder outranks adultery in the pantheon.
But in any case...
This columnist writes that there is something about adultery that we need to get over.
We just need to get over adultery.
And then they wonder why it is that men are not taking seriously admonitions about sexual morality.
In order for men to act in sexually moral fashion, or for women to act in sexually moral fashion, that must be built into a society that suggests male and female roles and what sex's role in life is.
I think that you can come up with a series of thou shalt not.
Thou shalt not do X, thou shalt not do Y. But the problem is a definitional one.
When you say thou shalt not commit adultery, well what about an open marriage?
Is that adultery?
Or thou shalt not commit, what if the wife is really mean to you?
What if your husband is not so nice and has not been helping you out at home?
The problem is that we as human beings have a strong tendency to redefine terms.
So, thou shalt not may seem clear on paper, but in practice, they get very unclear once human brains wrap around them, which is why you need an entire system of thought.
You need a worldview in order to effectuate thou shalt not.
We think that we can basically say thou shalt not on a societal level and everybody will follow it.
We can see that's not the case.
We've been saying thou shalt not sexually harass for the last 50 years in the United States.
Obviously that hasn't stopped a lot of men who have redefined sexual harassment and now we're redefining it again.
And now women are redefining sexual harassment.
Stuff they said was not sexual harassment 10 years ago is being treated as sexual harassment now and vice versa.
In any case, this New Yorker columnist writes, Traditional couples therapy focuses on the defense and enforcement of the monogamous pact and tends to side firmly and explicitly with the faithful spouse.
He or she is often referred to as the injured party, while the straying partner is labeled the perpetrator.
Right, because, you know, adultery.
The standard assumption is that the affair is a symptom either of marital dysfunction or of some pathology on the part of the perpetrator.
Sex addiction and fear of intimacy are the most common diagnoses, although lately a genetic predisposition to infidelity has been gaining traction.
This approach, writes an author whom, Esther Peril, I guess, is the author of a book on adultery, and this is a book review.
This approach, Esther Peril believes, does little justice to the multifaceted experience of infidelity.
Oh boy.
It demonizes adulterers without pausing to explore their motives.
Right, because sometimes motives don't matter.
You committing adultery is not a good thing.
If you want to cheat on your spouse, maybe instead of cheating on your spouse, you should control yourself or have a discussion with your spouse or get divorced if your marriage is that failing.
I love this.
Adultery isn't just something we should overlook or pretend away.
that acknowledging their generative possibilities.
I love this.
Adultery isn't just something we should overlook or pretend away, it's something we should celebrate.
She writes, "To look at straying simply "in terms of its ravages, This is a bunch of crap that is pushed forward by the left media.
unhelpful.
Affairs can be devastatingly painful for the ones betrayed, but they can also be invigorating for marriages.
Yes, I would like to see a statistical study on how many affairs were invigorating for marriages.
This is a bunch of crap that is pushed forward by the left media.
It's another one of these, you know, Charles Murray has a great book, I believe it's called Coming Apart, all about how basically there are a bunch of white liberals who live in big cities who don't abide by their own sexual morality that they propagate to the rest of society.
The Basically, Murray's thesis is that if you look at the perspectives on marriage in Los Angeles and New York among upper-class liberals, what you will see is that they are all married, and they all stay together, for the most part, and they all do not commit adultery.
They act in traditional sexual ways, basically, in the big cities, contra to the stuff they put out on TV, and then people who don't know better imitate that, and they end up with unhappier lives.
This is one of Murray's theses, and I think it has some real heft to it.
In any case, this author writes, Affairs can be devastatingly painful for the ones betrayed.
They can also be invigorating.
If couples could be persuaded to take a more sympathetic, less catastrophic view of infidelity, they would, she proposes, have a better chance of weathering its occasional occurrence.
When people ask her if she is for or against affairs, her standard response is yes.
Oh, yeah, I can't see how this would go wrong in any way.
Harrell, who is Belgian-born but practices in New York, is much sought after for her sophisticated, European-flavored insights into love and desire.
Because, clearly, if we want to look to a society that has a healthy sexual ethos that has not resulted in a mass drop in the birth rate and the importation of people from third-world countries in order to fill the labor gap that's been created, you know, If we want to look to a place that has completely destroyed the institution of marriage and has therefore reduced the possibility of happiness for a great number of people, perhaps we should look to Europe.
I always look to the French.
I always think the French, those are the people who I'm looking to for my sexual morality.
Mating and Captivity, the book that brought her public notice, was a sprightly disquisition on the anaphrodisiac effects of married life, in which she argued that the excessive value placed on communication and transparency in modern relationships tends to foster conjugal coziness at the expense of erotic vitality.
No, it is not original or radical.
The idea that, you know, you and your wife don't have to share everything with one another because that sort of kills the mystery, that's not new.
I mean, if you watch the musical The Fantastics, that's actually one of the concluding lines of the musical The Fantastics, which came out in the 1960s.
But what she also says is that adultery is basically okay in many situations.
She says, So this is the part I agree with.
Right?
That you have to work in marriage.
and of promoting ideas that are fundamentally hostile to the institution of marriage, it's difficult to find any real evidence for these charges.
Peril is more sanguine than others about the capacity of a marriage to withstand adulterate lapses, but her belief in coupledom is never in doubt.
She takes a very stern line on what she sees as the excessive sense of entitlement that contemporary couples bring to their relationships.
So this is the part I agree with, that you have to work at marriage, that you have to actually work at your sex life.
These are things that I think are important in marriage because the level of passionate, as Jonathan Haidt says, the level of passionate love in a relationship starts off here, at the top, and declines over time in the level of coupleship.
Basically, trust in marriage increases radically over time, companionate love.
That makes it, it moves it in a very You know, in a companionate direction.
All of that is true, but saying that adultery is therefore okay is really ridiculous.
She says she wants to address a traditional bias against cheating spouses to acknowledge the point of view of both parties, what it did to one and what it meant to the other.
In practice, it must be said her method seems to demand heroic levels of forbearance on the part of faithful spouses.
Yes, that would be that would be true.
That is exactly right.
But, you know, the entire idea of the left is that we're going to rewrite all of the sexual rules and then it will have no impact.
It will, in fact, make things better.
It has not made things better for the great majority of people.
Okay, so, I now need to break from Facebook and YouTube.
But we still have Things I Like, Things I Hate, The Big Idea coming up.
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Alrighty, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then the big ideas.
So, things I like.
We've been doing Beethoven music all week, but not the famous symphonies.
We've been doing other things.
So, this is from Fidelio.
Beethoven wrote one opera.
It's called Fidelio.
It's a troublesome opera in the sense that Beethoven had to rewrite it a couple of times.
He kept going back and changing the plot.
The basic plot of it is that there is a man who's been wrongly imprisoned.
The governor of the prison is the bad guy.
He's a tyrant.
And he basically wants this woman...
This woman tries to break her husband out of prison.
I believe, if I recall the plot correctly, the warden of the prison makes an offer that if she sleeps with him, he'll release her husband, I think.
That's right.
In any case, she ends up...
She calls herself Fidelio, but she is a woman.
She disguised herself as a man to try and break her husband out of prison.
But the best aria from this opera is the Prisoner's Chorus.
It's become famous, and it has a real resonance in an era when prison camps still exist, in an era when there are still tyrants who are imprisoning vast numbers of people for political purposes.
This guy's a political prisoner in the opera.
Here's a little bit of the Prisoner's Chorus from Fidelio.
The prisoners have been let out, and now they actually get to see the light for the first time in months.
CHOIR SINGS
- And Lord hear you say.
This is the first time they've seen the light in months and it's the glory of the light and the glory of freedom.
This was so controversial at the time when Fidelio first came out that it was only performed I believe once or twice when it first came out because the governor of the region was afraid that it was too political, that it was Trying to cast doubt on his control over the area.
And Beethoven was an intensely political guy, right?
The most famous story of Beethoven being political is that he was an admirer originally of Napoleon, whom he felt had brought an end to the French Revolution, but had also wanted to spread freedom and secularism around Europe.
And then so he dedicated the Eroica, his massive third symphony, which changed the face of music forever.
He dedicated that originally to Napoleon Bonaparte.
And then when Napoleon declared himself emperor, then he basically said that Napoleon is just another pig who wants to have power.
And he scratched out Napoleon's name on the cover page of the Eroica, the original copy of the Eroica.
He scratched it out so hard that there's actually a hole in the original cover page of the Eroica.
So Beethoven was a guy with some pretty strong political views.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So, the thing that I hate today is that CNN said something patently ridiculous yesterday.
So yesterday, somebody tweeted out something nasty at President Trump from Anderson Cooper's account at CNN.
And CNN claimed that Anderson Cooper had been at the gym, somebody went to his phone, took his phone out, unlocked it, tweeted something nasty at Trump, put it back in the locker, and left it there.
Yeah, that's not plausible.
The real answer is that probably half the people who tweet for Anderson Cooper are not Anderson Cooper.
That is not surprising.
Those of us who have big social media followings, I handle my own Twitter, but I do have people who post for me, for example, on Saturdays.
I'm not the one posting on my Facebook account on Friday night and Saturday because I don't use my computer at that time.
So it's not unusual for Anderson Cooper's assistants to probably tweet stuff out on Anderson Cooper's behalf.
Somebody who worked for him probably mixed up his own Twitter account with Anderson Cooper's and then tweeted it out.
CNN didn't want the blowback, so they blamed it on some rando at the gym who stole Anderson Cooper's phone in order to smack Trump or something.
That's really stupid, and it's foolish of CNN to lie because that's an obviously transparent lie.
Again, it undercuts their credibility to a time when the media really need to be pretty Solid in their credibility, considering the level of doubt that's been cast upon them.
So, sorry, I never do this, but I want to go back because there are a couple of things that I like that I actually missed today.
So there's one thing I like particularly that I need to show you.
This is just great.
So there's a wrestling match.
And between, I guess these kids are maybe seven years old, and one of the kids' siblings is in the stands, two-year-old, and the two-year-old thinks that his brother is in, his sister is in an actual fight, like she's in a wrestling match, and so the brother thinks his sister is in an actual fight, and so the little brother does what all men should do.
He rushes to the defense.
Here's the video.
So if you can't see it, these girls are having a wrestling match.
And here comes the two-year-old, rushing in.
Boom!
Taking down.
So he rushed in to tackle the boy.
It was a boy-girl wrestling match, I guess, because the kids are still young.
And the two-year-old rushes in and just takes down the boy.
I mean, that kid has a future.
That kid is a stud.
They say that some kids are sheepdogs, and some are sheep.
That kid's a sheepdog right there.
Love that.
I hope that my little boy does the same thing.
If ever my girl is in a fight, I hope that my little boy rushes in and kicks him.
That'd be wonderful.
One other thing that I liked.
You just have to laugh at this.
Kids are so wonderful, and this is why I'm so adamant about guarding their innocence, because it doesn't mean that kids are good.
Kids are not always good.
Kids can be little craps.
But kids are innocent, and the fact that they are innocent is what makes them so charming, is that they can be molded and shaped to be civilized adults, and leaving them to their own devices is foolish.
This is super cute.
So there's a Christmas pageant at a church.
And they wanted the kids to play the various parts.
So they had one of the kids playing a sheep.
A little girl playing a sheep in the manger.
And it went all wrong.
Here's what it looked like.
So the sheep just got up and stole baby Jesus.
And then made a run for it.
She's rocking the baby.
Look how the little girl's rocking the baby.
Okay, and then here comes Joseph to try and shove that baby back, or one of the Magi to try and shove that baby back down.
The sheep won't have it.
They're having a full-on fight.
Jesus is being kidnapped.
Amber alert for baby Jesus.
And then finally Mary got rough.
Pretty spectacular.
They get in a fight over preserving baby Jesus, and there are the kids just singing.
Pretty amazing.
Okay, so I will say this.
One of the things that is also very charming that is politically incorrect, but is true, is that that is a little girl.
And you can tell she's a little girl because she's cradling the baby.
She takes the baby out of the manger and starts cradling the baby.
I have a little son.
He's a year and a half old.
He does not care about the baby dolls.
My girl cares about the baby dolls.
The only time my boy cares about the baby doll is if my little girl's playing with it.
Then the boy wants in, because he just wants whatever she's playing with.
But, if he has his choice, he will take, like, she has magic wands, he takes them and he uses them as swords.
Like, he takes them and he walks around hitting people.
That's his thing.
So, there's a vast difference between little boys and little girls.
Okay, quick note on the big idea.
So, Every Thursday I talk about just a bigger idea that you should know about, and I talked about the fact that President Trump has the capacity as President of the United States to direct the end of investigations.
This has always been true.
So Professor Peter Markowitz at Cardoso School of Law says that the President has really strong powers over prosecutorial discretion.
He says, quote, President George Washington personally directed that numerous criminal and civil prosecutions be initiated and that others be halted.
It has been observed that President Washington's control over prosecutions was wide ranging, largely uncontested by Congress and acknowledged, even expected by the Supreme Court.
Thus, from the founding through the Civil War, presidents repeatedly invoked prosecutorial discretion authority in both civil and criminal contexts and repeatedly enacted categorical prosecutorial discretion policies.
The Supreme Court recognized and affirmed these practices.
If Trump were to call up Mueller tomorrow and say, I want you to end this investigation, He has full power to do that.
That is not an impeachable offense.
That is not a high crime.
It is not a misdemeanor.
It is part of his power.
Should he do that?
He should not.
He should just allow the investigation to go forward.
It's been fatally compromised at this point for a lot of folks, so it's not going to damage him, I think, in a serious way, even if some sort of, unless there's something serious that actually happened, I don't think that there's going to be a lot of fire to this particular smoke.
Okay.
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