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Sept. 17, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:58
The Kavanaugh #MeToo Moment | Ep. 623
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Brett Kavanaugh's accuser comes forward, a brutal murder in Israel, and Hurricane Florence touches down.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, this will be a fascinating show as subterranean evils take place apparently beneath our feet.
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But we'll be discussing the actual news in just a second.
A lot of news to get to.
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Alright, so big news over the weekend.
Finally, the accuser of Brett Kavanaugh has come forward.
So, as you recall, all the way back last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, in a last-ditch attempt to stop the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, decided to bring forward an anonymous letter.
She did not actually reveal the letter, she just said she had such a letter that accused Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's pick to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, it accused Brett Kavanaugh of some unspecified offense.
So, Dianne Feinstein's original letter With regard to all of this, her original statement with regard to all of this was this quote, I've received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
An individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further.
And I've honored that decision.
I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities and people like me said, what the hell is that supposed to mean?
I don't know who the lady is.
I don't know what exactly the allegation is.
I have no way of checking this allegation.
And so basically you just saying now, here's an allegation.
I'm not going to tell you what it is.
That is supposed to somehow end all of the hearings about Brett Kavanaugh and we're supposed to just remove him from consideration.
Well, now it turns out that the woman in question has come forward and she has leveled an allegation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh from when he was 17 years old.
Apparently, this is a letter that was originally sent to Dianne Feinstein July 30th, 2018.
So, you may begin by asking why exactly if Dianne Feinstein had this since July 30th, 2018, did she not bring it up at Kavanaugh's hearings?
That'd be a good question.
You might ask why she didn't refer to the FBI earlier.
That'd be a good question.
You might ask why she didn't make it public earlier.
That'd be a good question.
You might ask why she didn't show fellow Democrats the letter.
That would be a good question.
None of those questions would be answerable because Dianne Feinstein did all of those things.
She did not reveal it to her Senate colleagues.
She did not reveal it to the press.
She did not reveal it to the FBI.
She did not ask Brett Kavanaugh about it.
She waited until after Kavanaugh had already testified and then she came forward with this allegation and then sort of dumped it into public, which looks like a dirty political smear.
Even if the allegations are true, it looks like a dirty political smear.
It does call into question the seriousness of the allegations when Dianne Feinstein treated them so unseriously.
But here is, in fact, the actual allegations in the letter.
Apparently, this letter was originally sent to a congresswoman in California named Anna Eshoo from California.
She sent Ford's letter on to Dianne Feinstein.
Here is what the letter said from July 30, 2018.
Dear Senator Feinstein, I am writing with information relevant in evaluating the current nominee to the Supreme Court.
As a constituent, I expect that you will maintain this as confidential until we have further opportunity to speak.
Brett Kavanaugh physically and sexually assaulted me during high school in the early 1980s.
He conducted these acts with the assistance of Redacted.
That's what the original letter said.
They redacted the name.
The name, it turns out, according to the New Yorker, is a guy named Mark Judge, who's also written for the Weekly Standard and has become sort of a respected conservative writer.
We both were once two years older than me and the students at a local private high school.
The assault occurred in a suburban Maryland area home at the gathering that included me and four others.
Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stairwell from the living room.
They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help.
Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with Judge, who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh.
They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state.
With Kavanaugh's hand over my mouth, I feared he may inadvertently kill me.
From across the room a very drunken judge said mixed words to Kavanaugh ranging from go for it to stop.
At one point when judge jumped onto the bed the weight on me was substantial.
The pile toppled and the two scrapped with each other.
After a few attempts to get away I was able to take this opportune moment to get up and run across to a hallway bathroom.
I locked the bathroom door behind me.
Both loudly stumbled down the stairwell at which point other persons in the house were talking with them.
I exited the bathroom, ran outside the house and went home.
I have not knowingly seen Kavanaugh since the assault.
I did see Judge once at blank, where he was extremely uncomfortable seeing me.
I have received medical treatment regarding the assault.
On July 6th, I notified my local government representative to ask them how to proceed with sharing this information.
It is upsetting to discuss sexual assault and its repercussions, yet I felt guilty and compelled as a citizen about the idea of not saying anything.
I'm available to speak further should you wish to discuss.
I am currently blank, in confidence blank.
Okay, so that is the full text of the letter that Dianne Feinstein had in her possession.
There are several questions about this letter.
First of all, we don't know where this actually happened.
We don't actually know where it happened, because it says it was in a suburban Maryland area home, on an unspecified date, at an unspecified time, with unspecified others.
So, what we have here is a basic, she said something happened, and then both guys who were supposedly involved have denied that anything like this ever happened.
So Kavanaugh has released a pretty strong statement saying, I'm happy to come back and testify anytime you want me to.
This never happened.
Absolutely.
Mark Judge came forward, he said, this never happened.
And that's not stopping Democrats from saying that Kavanaugh's nomination should be pulled.
Again, the real thing that should happen here, in reality, if Democrats are going to take this seriously, the real thing that should happen here is that the lady, whose name is Christine Blasey Ford, and who is apparently a professor at Palo Alto College, She should be called to testify in front of the committee, and then Kavanaugh should be called to rebut her testimony.
If we're going to treat these allegations with any level of seriousness, that's how this is supposed to go.
And this is very reminiscent of how the Democrats played it with Anita Hill.
They waited until the last minute with Clarence Thomas' hearing, then they brought forward Anita Hill, who alleged that That Justice Thomas had sexually harassed her.
The allegations were really, really shaking.
I'll go through in a second the Anita Hill allegations, because I want to show by comparison that these are even more shaking than the Anita Hill allegations.
But here is the Washington Post talking about Ford.
So Ford now does an interview with the Washington Post.
She finally says she's going to come forward.
Speaking publicly, for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 80s, Kavanaugh and a friend, both stumbling drunk, Ford alleges, corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
While his friend watched, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it.
When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
Okay, now, number one, let's start with the allegation itself.
If that allegation is true, That's a pretty horrible allegation.
That is an allegation of actual sexual assault.
If you push a girl on a bed and you lie on top of her and you try to pull off her clothes and cover her mouth with your hand while she's screaming, that's a bad allegation.
That's not hijinks.
That's not you playing around.
That's a bad allegation.
And that's an allegation that, if it can be substantiated in any way, would be disqualifying from the Supreme Court and, frankly, from the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals.
I mean, if that allegation is true, then he shouldn't be on the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals either.
But the article continues, and here's where it starts to get dicey, because she provides no substantiating evidence.
Her story has changed over time.
As you would imagine, since it's a 36-year-old story, the story is two years older than I am as a human being.
And we're supposed to now take it at face value.
Let's just be frank about the way that human memory works in the first place.
Human memory is not a snapshot.
If I ask you about something that happened when you were 15, chances are that it's going to change a fair bit, particularly if it's emotionally invested.
It just is.
Witness testimony is not particularly good.
The reason statutes of limitation exist in the first place, it is beyond the statute of limitations presumably, which is presumably why the FBI didn't investigate, also because there's no way for them to investigate it.
The reason the statute of limitations exists in the first place is because it's an urge to people to come forward with criminal behavior so we can investigate it and convict people on the basis of evidence.
Otherwise, this is exactly what you end up with.
Unverifiable memories from a time that is not even specified, and then we're supposed to simply jump to the conclusion that it happened because a woman said that it happened.
Now again, maybe it happened.
I'm not saying the woman made it up.
I don't know whether she made it up.
I don't know that she's misremembering the incident.
I don't know any of that stuff.
You don't know it either.
The only person who knows any of this stuff are the people who are in the room, two of whom deny that this ever happened.
So before we jump to everything that a woman says about something that happened 40 years ago, she suddenly has keen snapshot memory.
It's very interesting.
All the people who say that we have to take at face value every accusation from years and years and years ago and all of its myriad details without any corroborating evidence, all those same people are the same people who generally point out in criminal trials that witness testimony is quite unreliable.
Which it is.
Witness testimony is very unreliable as a general rule.
And it's going to be even more unreliable when you're talking about something that happened to you in many cases.
And anyway, The Washington Post continues, Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh's friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling.
She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom.
Now here's where it gets dicey.
Here's where it gets really dicey for this particular account.
Maybe there's a way to substantiate it.
Maybe there's not.
The problem is she hasn't actually given a date as to when this happened.
So even if Brett Kavanaugh were to say, listen, I was at summer camp that month.
I was out of town.
Because she didn't give a specific date, that wouldn't help him at all.
So how the hell is he supposed to, you know, how is he supposed to maintain his innocence when he doesn't even have enough details to argue with the details?
Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012 when she was in couples therapy with her husband.
This should raise red flag number one.
Okay, so this thing originally happened 36 years ago, so now we're saying she only even talked to her therapist about it three decades later.
This is very different from the Roy Moore case, for example.
In Roy Moore's case, there are several corroborating details.
First of all, the women who are accusing him named specific times and places, and it was corroborated that he was in those places at those times.
Two, There were multiple women.
Three.
Those women gave contemporaneous statements.
So they told their friends and family what had happened at the time.
At the time.
So, when I was 15 years old, I was abused by members of my high school class.
People knew that because there were witnesses there, and I told people at the time.
Here, the witnesses all deny that it happened, and she told no one at the time that it actually happened, making her the only person who can actually testify as to the veracity of this actually happening.
And she's going to have to answer some questions if we are going to come away with the conclusion that Kavanaugh absolutely did this and therefore should be disqualified and we ruin his life as an attempted rapist at age 17.
We're going to talk a little bit more about this.
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Make sure that you are Okay, so here's where it gets dicey again.
Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012 when she was in couples therapy with her husband.
four-week trial stamps.com once more click on the radio mic at the top of the home page and type in shapiro okay so here's where it gets dicey again ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012 when she was in couples therapy with her husband the therapist notes portions of which were provided by ford and reviewed by the washington post do not mention kavanaugh's name but say she reported that she was attacked by students from an elitist boys school who went on Highly respected and high ranking members of society in Washington.
Okay, so first of all, the therapist's notes don't actually include Kavanaugh's name, but her husband says that she mentioned Kavanaugh's name.
Now, I've heard from alleged rape victims that very often therapists do not include names in their therapist's notes.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I'll assume that it's true for the sake of argument and suggest that that doesn't really cut against her.
But the next part does.
The notes say that four boys were involved.
Well, that's a pretty major discrepancy.
So if the notes say that four boys were involved in her alleged rape, and then she says that her alleged attempted rape, and then she says that two boys were involved, how do you rectify that discrepancy?
Well, she says that the therapist just got it wrong.
There was an error.
There are four boys at the party, but only two in the room.
Hey, there's discrepancy number two.
Fifteen is not late teens.
session the following year, which presumably she has provided since the therapist isn't I mean, there's client therapy and therapist privilege.
And when she was being treated for what she says have been long term effects of the incident, Shoford described a rape attempt in her late teens.
Hey, there's discrepancy number two.
15 is not late teens.
15 is early teens.
15 is mid teens at best.
It's not your late teens.
Your late teens is when you're 19.
Your late teens are 18, 19.
It's not 15.
If somebody says to you, a 15-year-old, you wouldn't think late teens.
You'd think that's a 15-year-old, right?
It's mid-teen.
It's, in many cases, in some cases, prepubescent.
In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in a 2012 session, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her, and prevented her from screaming.
He said he recalled his wife used Kavanaugh's last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court, Unclear exactly from this post account in what context Kavanaugh's name was mentioned.
So he said he recalled that Kavanaugh's last name was used, but did that mean he was one of the four boys, one of the two boys, the boy who was on top of her?
Not clear from the Washington Post account.
So there are a bunch of questions to be asked.
about all of this.
Kavanaugh completely denies this stuff.
He says, I categorically and unequivocally denied this allegation.
I did not do this back in high school or at any other time.
Judge says it's just absolutely nuts.
I never saw Brett act that way.
And he said that there was there's no illegal activity at any time.
I'm going to give you more background on this in just a second.
So here's the story about Christine Ford.
Christine Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University.
She teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training grad students in clinical psychology.
Her work has been widely published in academic journals, which supposedly means now that she's credible.
Well, again, the credibility of the statements is at issue.
We'd have to take them seriously no matter who gave them.
She contacted the Post through a tip line in early July, when it had become clear that Kavanaugh was on the shortlist of possible nominees to replace Kennedy, but before Trump announced his name publicly.
A registered Democrat who has made small contributions to political organizations.
She contacted her congresswoman around the same time and then in late July she sent a letter to Dianne Feinstein in the letter before describing the incident and said she expected her story to be kept confidential.
Then she signed the letter as Christine Blasey, the name she uses professionally.
Though Ford had contacted the Post, she declined to speak on the record for weeks as she grappled with concerns about what going public would mean for her and her family and what she said was her duty as a citizen to tell the story.
So in other words, she went to the Washington Post, she refused to go public with the statement, she refused to go on the record with the statement, and then they basically ran with this.
Feinstein found a way to leak this a couple of days before the vote.
Now, here is the questionable part.
Why bother telling the Washington Post about this if you're not going to go public with it unless you just want to smear Kavanaugh?
Now, there's a possibility that maybe what she wanted to do is she said, listen, I don't want to get involved, but I would love it if the reporters at the Washington Post could track down what actually happened here.
But obviously the reporters at the Washington Post could not track down what actually happened here because they didn't run with the story independently.
That sort of stuff happens all the time, by the way, that as a reporter, As a journalist, people come to you with pitches, and then you check out the pitches.
Sometimes they check out, sometimes they don't.
You take some pitches, you don't take others.
Many of the people who are involved in pitches are self-interested actors.
You know, all of that is just the way journalism works, but it's evident that if she came to the Post and the Post couldn't track anything further down, they weren't going to run with it.
So instead, they're running solely on the basis of this vague statement that she has now given.
And then she tells the Post that she engaged Deborah Katz, a Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases.
On the advice of Katz, who said she believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford took a polygraph administered by a former FBI agent in early August.
The results concluded Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.
Okay, well, there are a few things to point out here about polygraphs.
First of all, polygraphs are inadmissible in courts of law because polygraphs are wildly, wildly unusable.
Aldrich Ames, who was an actual spy for the Russians in the 1990s and 1980s, Aldrich Ames, he actually passed a polygraph test twice while he was an active spy for the Russians.
So, there's that.
Also, the question that was asked on the polygraph was whether a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate, not whether the allegations themselves were accurate.
So, if I tell you a story, and the story is not true, and then you write down the story, and then you ask me whether the story that I just wrote down reflects the story you told me, that is a different question than whether the story you told me is true.
I could read you a bedtime story about the cat in the hat, And then if you write that down and then you say, did I just write down the story that you told your daughter at bedtime?
I'd say yes.
Does that mean that the story of the cat in the hat is factually true?
Not really.
So it's important to actually read what the Washington Post report says.
By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward, calculating that do so would upend her life and probably would not affect Kavanaugh's confirmation.
Why suffer through annihilation if it's not going to matter?
She said.
Well, that's a bunch of nonsense.
Obviously, this was going to upend the entire process.
Everybody knew it.
This bizarre notion that it was not going to affect this in any way if she had come forward.
And with evidence is just silly.
Her story leaked.
On Wednesday, The Intercept reported Feinstein had the letter and then Feinstein had not released it to her colleagues.
And then she released her statement.
The FBI redacted the state and the name from the letter and then sent it to the White House.
The New York Times reported more details on the incident.
Then finally, this woman came forward and she says, These are the ills I was trying to avoid.
Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.
Kat says she believed Feinstein honored Ford's request to keep her allegation confidential, but regrettably others did not, which is nonsense.
And again, the letter was only sent to three places, presumably the Washington Post.
Feinstein.
And this woman, Anna Eshoo, who's a representative in California.
So, I'm not seeing any of that.
And then, finally, the Post report concludes.
After so many years, Ford says, she does not remember some key details of the incident.
She believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15.
Around the end of her sophomore year, Kavanaugh would have been 17.
She says that she knew them as friendly acquaintances.
She says she doesn't recall who owned the house, how she got to the house.
There's no way to lock down these details, even assuming that she is telling the truth.
There is no way to lock down these details.
And so we're going to have to hear more from her.
We're going to have to hear more from Kavanaugh.
And there is no substantiating evidence to any of this because she didn't tell anybody at the time.
The only person she told was a therapist in 2012.
Okay, now, how are people reacting to this?
I'll tell you that in just one second.
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All right.
So, Dianne Feinstein naturally is doing what you knew she was going to do, which is she is saying we should now delay the actual vote.
So, Feinstein has said that she wants all of this, she says it has always been Mrs. Ford's decision whether to come forward publicly.
Which, by the way, is why we should encourage women to come forward at the time.
It is very difficult to assess guilt or innocence 36 years after the event.
The influence of authority and power is extraordinarily difficult, which, by the way, is why we should encourage women to come forward at the time.
It is very difficult to assess guilt or innocence.
36 years after the event, Kavanaugh did not have power when he was 17 years old.
He was a teenage boy.
She was a teenage girl.
Okay, from the outset, I believe these allegations were extremely serious and bear heavily on Kavanaugh's character.
This is what Feinstein says.
Well, if that's the case, why didn't you ask him about them?
Why didn't you ask it?
He was right there in front of you, under oath.
Why didn't you ask him about them?
Like, legitimately, I don't understand the line of reasoning.
These were so serious that I hid them for months from my Senate Democratic colleagues, and then I released them at the last minute, without any name attached, and now I want a new hearing.
Well, just to clear his name, we should give Kavanaugh a new hearing.
Just to clear his name.
And just to get all the details, we should have Ford come and talk to the committee as well.
But it's... The Democrats are good at this game.
They are very good with the last-minute dropping of the smear, which, I mean, frankly, it looks like to me.
Again, maybe this is all true.
Maybe it is.
But the way Feinstein handles this makes it look like a smear.
That's just from any objective level.
Feinstein's behavior is the most questionable of anyone in this entire situation.
She says, Well, Feinstein did not treat it with seriousness.
She hid it from her Senate colleagues.
She did not report it to the FBI.
She did not report it to law enforcement.
and shaming of her will stop and this will be treated with the seriousness it deserves.
Well, Feinstein did not treat it with seriousness.
She hid it from her Senate colleagues.
She did not report it to the FBI.
She did not report it to law enforcement.
She didn't report it to the White House.
She didn't do any of those things.
She held it, and she held it, and she held it.
And then she released it at the last minute, and she expects the entire world to turn on the time.
She says, I support Mrs. Ford's decision to share her story, and now that she has, it is in the hands of the FBI to conduct an investigation.
The FBI has already said, how the hell are we supposed to conduct an investigation?
There's no specific allegation about a specific time and place.
What are we supposed to do?
Okay, it may be beyond the statute of limitations, and we also don't know what the criminal, the federal crime here is.
This is probably a state crime at best.
There was no transportation across state lines, so I'm not sure how this would be a Man Act issue.
So what exactly is the federal, what rises to the level of federal criminality here?
What statute would be implicated?
Not even sure.
So this should happen before the Senate moves forward on this nominee.
Jeff Flake has come forward, he says, we can't vote until we hear more.
And the same thing is being said by a bunch of other politicians already.
So I am not sure what the story here is.
Lindsey Graham has issued a statement saying that he will listen to any statement Ford wishes to make.
He says, if Ford wishes to provide information to the committee, I would gladly listen to what she has to say and compare that against all the other information we have received about Judge Kavanaugh.
He says, if the committee is to hear from Ms.
Ford, it should be done immediately so the process can continue as scheduled.
And then he says, I agree with the concerns expressed in the Judiciary Committee's statement about the substance and process regarding the allegations in this latest claim against Judge Kavanaugh, and he said it was disturbing that these uncorroborated allegations would surface now.
And Senator Grassley's office, Chuck Grassley on the Judiciary Committee, he says the same thing.
He issued a statement where he said it's disturbing these uncorroborated allegations from more than 35 years ago during high school would surface on the eve of a committee vote after Democrats sat on them since July.
If Ranking Member Feinstein and other committee Democrats took this claim seriously, they should have brought it to the full committee's attention much earlier.
Well, yes.
Instead, they said nothing during two joint phone calls with the nominee in August, four days of lengthy public hearings, a closed session for all committee members with the nominee where sensitive topics can be discussed, and in more than 1,300 written questions.
65 senators met individually with Judge Kavanaugh during a nearly two-month period before the hearing began.
And yet, this was not brought up.
Right?
Yet Feinstein didn't try to share this with her colleagues ahead of many of these discussions.
It raises a lot of questions about Democrats' tactics and motives to bring this to the rest of the committee's attention.
Well, yes.
And this is, again, reminiscent of the Anita Hill situation, which has now, it has now become gospel truth that Anita Hill was sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas.
They made an HBO movie about it, but there's a bunch of evidence to suggest that Clarence Thomas never harassed Anita Hill.
So, for example, one witness that Anita Hill called back during the hearings, There was a witness who said she was told details about the supposed sexual harassment while the two were living in Washington, but the witness wasn't living in Washington when Anita Hill worked for Clarence Thomas.
Hill followed Clarence Thomas around from job to job while supposedly he was sexually harassing her.
She said she did it for job security, but she was a federal employee, which is like the best job security you could ever have.
Hill made numerous supposed phone calls to her supposed sexual harasser after she stopped working for him.
So, like what?
You know, Hill actually denied she made the call.
She initially denied she made the calls, but the calls were in the phone logs.
Hill initially asked to be kept anonymous.
This is why it's so reminiscent.
Hill initially asked that she be kept anonymous about these allegations in the same way that this woman initially asked that she be kept anonymous about the allegations.
But if the allegations were actually true, just as in this case, if the allegations were actually true, then why would you care about being kept anonymous?
Because presumably, The only person in the room who knew that you did it was the other person who's being accused.
So they would know immediately who you were talking about.
So what does the anonymity matter?
Let's say that in the Anita Hill situation, Clarence Thomas had been asked about, there's a woman in your office who accuses you of sexually harassing her by talking about pubic hair on Coke cans.
Presumably Clarence Thomas would know immediately who he's talking about and would have just said, oh, you mean Anita Hill?
She's a liar.
People would have known who exactly was making the allegations immediately.
The same thing would be true here, right?
If this woman says, Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted me when I was 15, we were in a house with four other guys, he tried to pull off my bathing suit.
If Kavanaugh knew about that, he'd know exactly who it was and presumably people would start digging immediately.
So what's the point of the anonymity if the allegations are going to be leveraged?
The only way this works is if you make anonymous allegations that are vague.
Vague enough that they can't hurt anyone.
Hey, Hill lied five times about being told something from a Democratic staffer.
She later admitted to that under oath.
And a dozen females who worked with Thomas and Hill gave favorable testimony about Thomas.
We've seen the same thing about Kavanaugh.
So this looks a lot more like Anita Hill than it looks like Roy Moore.
This looks a lot more like Anita Hill than it does like Juanita Broderick.
There are serious questions to be asked about this tale, and just taking it at face value is not worthy of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
So, what I've suggested is that Ford be called.
If she turns down the call, they should have a vote.
End of story.
Because with this information, you can't turn down, you can't ruin everybody's life based on this.
There's no way to do this.
I don't know how you are supposed to ruin a man's life based on an allegation from nearly four decades ago that is vague enough that there's no way to refute it.
We cannot run our country this way.
Forget about judiciary hearings.
We can't run our country this way.
Because legitimately any man can be accused of anything at any time if we run our country along the lines of these allegations.
I am the cleanest person in American public life.
When it comes to sexual matters, there's no question.
I'm the cleanest person in American public life.
I was a virgin until I was married.
The first woman I made love to was my wife.
This is the only woman I've ever made love to is my wife.
I'm absolutely clean on this stuff.
There is nothing to stop any woman I was alone with in a room when I was in law school from coming forward and claiming that I sexually assaulted her in some way.
There's nothing to stop that.
And what would I do to refute that?
Once the allegation has been made, how do you rebut it?
That sort of question does have to be asked when it comes to matters as serious as this.
And the higher people get in public life, the more likely that the stakes are high enough that somebody could say something that's untrue, or it's possible that this woman is misremembering the situation, or it's possible that, in her own mind, the situation went one way and it didn't go the other way.
I'm not even questioning this woman's honesty.
All I'm suggesting is that as an objective observer, I need more than this before I say that Brett Kavanaugh should be run off the Supreme Court on a rail.
And this is not coming from somebody who's like the biggest Brett Kavanaugh fan.
I didn't think that President Trump should have picked Brett Kavanaugh as his first pick.
I was for Amy Coney Barrett.
I mean, it would have been hard to make a sexual allegation about Amy Coney Barrett.
But, with all that said, is this enough?
No, it's not enough and we cannot have this as the precedent for killing judicial nominations or this will be, there is no bottom to this ladder.
I mean, it just keeps descending if that's the case.
Okay.
I want to get to some other news that happened over the weekend.
But first, let's talk about your internet security.
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Okay, so I do want to get to an awful, awful story from Israel.
I want to get to...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
More and more frequently, I'm getting her name right.
And she apparently is now cutting weird album covers.
I'll explain what I mean in just a second.
But first, you're going to have to go over to Facebook and check us out over there.
And coming up this Tuesday, September 18th, 6.30 p.m.
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Alrighty, so, meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gotten herself in a little bit of trouble.
Why has she gotten herself in a little bit of trouble?
Well, she's gotten herself in a little bit of trouble because she doesn't know how to answer basic questions about things.
First, she got herself in trouble last week because, for a socialist, she sure dresses like a non-socialist.
So, these are a couple of pictures of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, apparently, From her new album, Your Money, My Fun.
And here's a picture of her.
Apparently, one of her numbers she cut with the Village People, which is pretty great.
Here she is sitting on the stoop, gazing into camera a la John Lennon.
And she's wearing apparently like $700 shoes and a $2,700 outfit.
So this whole outfit cost something like $3,500.
So she is a good little socialist spending other people's money.
So how did she respond to the allegations that she is buying very, very expensive things?
She says, No, we get it, and we're also not the alt-right.
Not everyone on the right who criticizes you as a socialist for spending $3,500 on an outfit.
Not all of those people are alt-right.
Also, we understand the concept of magazine shoots.
You don't seem to understand the concept of a magazine shoot, which would actually be about you putting your best foot forward as a democratic socialist.
She says, you don't get to keep the clothes.
Duh.
Which is weird.
She says, I don't pretend to fight for a living wage and Medicare for all.
I do it.
Yeah, mm-hmm.
And then she says, get used to me slaying Lukes, L-E-W-K-S, because I am an excellent thrift shopper.
I don't know what a Luke is or why you would kill it.
Is this a thing?
Like, maybe I'm out of touch with the children.
Am I out of touch with the younger generation already?
I'm only 34 years old.
Am I already out of touch with the people who are 17 years old?
I mean, how old is this woman?
This woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I think she's like 28, right?
So she's of my generation.
I wasn't aware the people of my generation said ridiculous things like slaying Lukes.
I don't know what it is to slay a Luke.
Like, the only person I know who tried to slay a Luke was Kylo Ren.
And even he failed.
It is very difficult to slay a Luke.
So I don't know what that is, slaying Lukes.
L-E-W-K-S, slaying a Luke.
Oh, okay, so I've been informed.
It's coming in right now, fast.
I've been informed by Alex Zangaro, our producer, who all only has the most up-to-date information, that a Luke is a really nice outfit.
I don't know how Alex knows that.
I'm going to have to ask him some questions later about his level of knowledge on these matters.
But I will admit that I don't know what the hell she's talking about or why she is dressed like a member of an alt-rock indie band in a magazine.
So there's that.
But that was, of course, not the worst thing that she did over the weekend.
She also was asked specific questions by Jake Tapper at CNN.
Jake asked her some actual serious questions like, you're going to spend a crap load of money Where is all this crap load of money going to come from?
And she basically said, well, it is a crap load of money, so it's going to come from the bot.
Because she has no actual answer for where the money is going to come from.
And so it sounded like this.
So where is the other $38 trillion going to come from?
Well, one of the things that we need to realize when we look at something like Medicare for All, Medicare for All would save the American people a very large amount of money.
And what we see as well is that these systems are not just pie in the sky.
Many of them are accomplished by every modern, civilized democracy in the Western world.
It is an externality, if you will, of unprecedented amounts of student loan debt.
I'm assuming I'm not going to get an answer for the other $38 trillion, but we'll have you back and maybe we can go over that.
So, slow clap for Jake right there.
I mean, this is why I still love me some Jake Tapper on more than one occasion.
Pretty spectacular stuff.
So I assume we're not going to get any sort of answer on where all this came from.
So yeah, that's right.
You're not going to get any answer on where all this came from because it's all pie-in-the-sky nonsense that you throw out there for the for the rubes who who eat this stuff up and pretend that spending 38 trillion dollars is no big deal and that we can all just come up with this money no matter what.
There's a reason.
That socialist democratic countries are starting to move toward the right.
They're having to embrace either austerity, or immigration restrictions, or they're just kicking the can down the road.
But none of this is going to end well for countries that blow out the budget the way that we are.
And by the way, that's not unique to Democrats.
Republicans are blowing out the budget exactly the same way Democrats would be, except if Democrats actually gain control, they're going to pass a bunch of mandatory spending that's going to make all of the debts and deficits we have right now look like child's play.
OK, well, meanwhile, this is an awful story from the land of Israel.
A man named Ari Fold was murdered over the weekend.
Ari Fold was an activist.
He lived in Efrat, which is a quote-unquote settlement.
What people need to know about the settlements is that this is traditional land of Israel.
The Jews have every right to settle in these places.
And the city of Efrat is, I mean, it's like Beverly Hills.
It's a really nice area.
Ari Fold has spent an awful lot of time covering the media, particularly media bias in this particular area of Israel.
He came to Los Angeles not all that long ago.
We were supposed to do a meeting and it just sort of fell through.
But he was stabbed to death over the weekend.
He's a father of four.
Lior Shirke, a friend of the victim, told a news agency that Ari was like his name implied.
It means lion in Hebrew.
He was very involved in explaining and defending the good reputation of the state of Israel on the internet and before the citizens of the world.
He was about to launch a new Hasbara site to reveal the truth about Israel in English.
He was a good friend who knew you would stand by you and protect you in any situation.
A lowly terrorist came up behind him in a cowardly way, stabbed him.
Ari was one of the fighters in the Efrat emergency squad.
We didn't expect anything less of him.
Even after he was wounded, Ari engaged with the terrorist and chased him as he was bleeding and managed to respond and shoot at the terrorist.
He actually wounded the terrorist and stopped him from attacking other folks.
The video looks like this for folks who can watch.
Uh, you can actually see in the corner of the screen, uh, Ari Fold is standing there and then he is, uh, attacked from behind, uh, by a- by a terrorist, and then he's wounded.
I mean, he- he died of these wounds.
And he is chasing the terrorist down, uh, and he- and he shoots the terrorist.
and the terrorist is wounded but does not die.
Fold then collapses because he has been stabbed in the back and he would later die of his wounds.
There is an actual GoFundMe that is up for Ari Fold and for his children.
I urge you to do the same.
I'm not sure if it's tax deductible.
I don't know the answer to that, but you should check it out anyway.
His kids have been left without pretty much anything, and obviously, he has four of them.
So, absolutely terrible story, and a solid reminder that these are the folks that Israel is dealing with.
This man's family, the attacker's family, 17-year-old, The attacker's family will be given some sort of reward by the Palestinian Authority.
They will be given a monetary reward for stabbing an innocent Jew like Ari Full.
Just a terrible, terrible story.
His brother also relayed a message about who he was.
Just awful, but not unpredictable.
By the way, he's an American citizen.
There's a reason that the Trump administration has been withdrawing all of its support from the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization.
It's because they support stuff like this, and they're exactly right to do so.
Now, speaking of the Trump administration, over the weekend, the hurricane touched down.
The hurricane has claimed several lives already.
There's one year old that was swept away after her mother lost her grip.
People didn't get out.
There are always some people who don't get out of the way of these hurricanes or are unable to get out of the way of these hurricanes.
The death toll and the evacuations are indeed rising.
As of this hour, Wilmington, North Carolina has been entirely cut off by floodwaters from the tropical depression, Florence.
So all of this is bad stuff.
The media, of course, are incessantly covering the way that the Trump administration is handling it because They're looking for any sort of opening.
And they, of course, are very interested to demonstrate that the president doesn't care about the victims of hurricanes.
So they're more than happy to have on the FEMA head a guy named Chris Long.
I'm trying to remember his is Brock Long.
And he's the administrator of FEMA.
He defended President Trump.
On Sunday, over the dispute over the death toll in Puerto Rico.
This is why it was so foolish for the president to have said anything about the death toll in Puerto Rico, because now we get to fight this on national TV, which doesn't look good.
Here was FEMA's Brock Long trying to defend President Trump on the death toll in Puerto Rico.
You know, look, these studies are all over the place.
The Harvard study was done differently.
Studies a different period of time versus the George Washington study.
There's a big discrepancy whether it's direct deaths or indirect deaths.
Yeah, I don't know who they interviewed within my agency.
They may have looked at funeral benefits to help, you know, calculate whatever number and that's a number, you know, that's the only number that we would really be able to contribute to any study going forward.
OK, well, what he's saying here is not false.
And I talked about all of this last week, the variability of studies from deaths and natural disasters.
It's difficult to come up with a hard number.
But the fact that this is an argument that the Trump administration is having at a time when all focus should be on actually saving people.
They can walk and chew gum at the same time for sure, but public focus should be on helping folks.
It's just silly for the Trump administration to do that.
Again, once again, the Trump administration on policy very often does the right thing and on rhetoric.
They very often undercut themselves, and that's a really unfortunate thing that I wish they would avoid.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Yom Kippur is coming up on Tuesday night.
That is the Day of Atonement.
So I will be out Wednesday of this week.
Who's filling in for me on radio?
I believe that is Drew.
So Andrew Klavan will be filling in for me on radio.
But in any case, I'll be in Shul, davening, and praying.
And over the last holiday over over Rosh Hashanah, I was able to jump into a book that I've been meaning to get to for a long time.
It's a book called The Prime Ministers by Yehuda Avner.
If you are interested in sort of the history of the state of Israel at all, if you're interested in the inside story about all the controversial decisions made basically between 1947 and 1983, 84, the Lebanon War, then you should check it out.
The Prime Ministers by Yehuda Avner.
It's a really quick read and it's it's really exciting and Avner served under four different prime ministers.
Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin.
Begin really is sort of the heart of the book because Begin was by far the most imposing prime minister in Israeli history.
And he was also a foundational figure in Israel's formation.
I get a lot of questions about books you should read about Israel.
This is definitely a new one that I've read that's on the list.
So go check it out.
The Prime Ministers by Yehuda Avner.
Couple of things that I like real fast.
I do love it when Democrats simply come out with what they actually think of the American people.
And Joe Biden is doing it now.
So Joe Biden came out over the weekend and he suggested that President Trump supporters are the dregs of humanity, which is if you're looking to win an election, I'm not sure how this is helpful particularly, but go for it, man.
This time, they, not you, have an ally in the White House.
This time, they have an ally.
They're a small percentage of the American people.
Virulent people.
Some of them the dregs of society.
Okay, so some of them are, and again, he's unspecified, these dregs of society, but insulting the voting base always goes well.
So Hillary Clinton learned that when she called everybody deplorables.
Barack Obama called everybody bitter clingers and alienated half the country.
Now Joe Biden is calling people the dregs of society.
Don't forget, he is the best of what American politics has to offer.
We've been told there was a new consilience in American politics between the left and the right.
We saw it at John McCain's funeral when Joe Biden was the voice of a new, wonderful politics where we all shared in what we believed.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that was all crap and we all knew that it was nonsense at the time.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So Anne Hathaway, who I think in the dictionary under white privilege, there's actually a picture of Anne Hathaway.
Anne Hathaway has now come out and denounced white privilege while accepting an award, because this is what we have to do now, is virtue signal along every line.
She ripped into white privilege at this same event that Joe Biden spoke at, this National Equality Dinner, the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner.
Human Rights Campaign is a pretty extreme left group.
And when I say they're an extreme left group, I mean that they have relationships with the Southern Poverty Law Center and they're constantly accusing people who are not actually homophobic of being homophobic.
In any case, Anne Hathaway felt the necessity to talk about how everybody who is not gay, black, Hispanic, a woman, all these people are actually privileged in American society.
Here's what it sounded like.
It is important to acknowledge that, with the exception of being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth.
That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cisgender, and that all races orbit around whiteness.
This myth is wrong.
Thank you.
I don't know what in the world this means.
I didn't realize that we were actually in space and gravitating around one another, like planets drawn to larger bodies.
I don't understand what this means.
And then she says that when she spent time with the LGBTQ community, her older brother is gay, she learned to reject the myth.
I appreciate this community because together we are not just going to question this myth, we are going to destroy it.
Let's tear this world apart and build a better one.
Tear this world apart and build a better one is a pretty good democratic slogan because, honestly, it's what they believe.
Never mind that this is the world that actually built the foundations for gay rights.
Never mind that what built the foundation for individual rights is, in fact, the Judeo-Christian tradition because those rights don't exist nearly anywhere else on earth.
We're all going to pretend now, I suppose, that the West is the worst place in the world for gays, and what we really have to do is tear down the entire system in order to make the world safe for gay people, even though America is safe for gay people.
And I say that as a Jew, right?
America is safe for Jews, too.
There are more hate crimes against Jews than against gays on a per capita basis, I believe, according to FBI statistics.
Again, this is all, at least they're close to on par.
This is all wildly overstated, but it wins her points with the brownie base that she needs.
She needs a group of people who are going to brown nose her no matter what she does, because this is what stars need these days.
And it doesn't matter that she's, when I say brownie base, that's what I mean.
And that's what she is looking for.
So is everybody else in Hollywood, which is why they are in turn brown nosing everybody on the left, in terms of the social justice warrior crowd.
Okay, here is a Federalist paper.
So we'll do a Federalist paper this week.
We're all the way up to Federalist number 45.
James Madison talks about the constitutional plan.
He specifically talks about the balance between the federal government and the states.
And it gets into some really interesting territory.
He argues that the convention was there to Promote human happiness, basically.
One of the big issues with the Constitutional Convention is that originally it was called in order to change the Articles of Confederation, not completely supplant them with something new.
He has to make the case that it's okay to just scrap them and do something new.
And the case that he makes is a pretty broad one and not a very good one, actually.
He says, were the plan of the Convention adverse to the public happiness, my voice would be reject the plan.
Were the Union itself inconsistent with the public happiness, it would be abolish the Union.
He says, but if the Union, as has been shown, be essential to the security of the people of America against foreign danger, if it be essential to their security against contentions and wars among different states, if it be essential to guard them against those violent and oppressive factions which embitter the blessings of liberty, if in a word the Union be essential to the happiness of the people of America, is it not preposterous to urge as an objection to a government
In other words, he says, human happiness requires us to override the rights of the states.
Again, this is a bad legal case.
It's a bad legal case.
It's a good emotional case, a bad legal case.
And it's a case that would actually, in some ways, lead to the tariff of abominations, the Civil War, a lot of the divisions between state and federal government that culminate in the bloodiest war in American history.
Madison still argues that the states still have a lot of power under the federal constitution.
And this, I think, is important to note because most of these state powers have now dissipated.
He says the state governments may be regarded as constituents and essential parts of the federal government, whilst the latter is no-wise essential to the operation or organization of the former.
In other words, the states run on their own.
The feds still need the states.
He says without the intervention of the state legislatures, the president of the United States cannot be elected at all.
That is the electoral college.
So it was specifically put there in order to give the states inordinate power as opposed to the direct population.
And now there's obviously calls to scrap the Electoral College.
He says they must in all cases have a great share in his appointment and will perhaps in most cases of themselves determine it.
And the Senate will be elected absolutely and exclusively by the state legislatures.
It used to be that senators were appointed by their state legislatures.
No longer.
Now they are appointed by direct vote.
I think it's a bad amendment and it's had a bad effect of basically turning all of our politicians into populists.
Even the House of Representatives, though drawn immediately from the people, will be chosen very much under the influence of that class of men whose influence over the people obtains for themselves an election into the state legislatures.
In other words, people will start with state assemblies and then they'll run for Congress.
That used to be more true.
It is not quite as true anymore.
State power has waned.
And for some good reasons, it has waned, but it has not overall been an unmitigated good.
It's just, I think, you know, the original balance drawn between the feds and the states has been abrogated in pretty significant ways.
That has some costs.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caramina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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