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Sept. 27, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:33
The Big Day | Ep. 628
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It's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing day for Christine Blasey Ford, one of Brett Kavanaugh's accusers, and Brett Kavanaugh will testify as well.
So that's all that matters today.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, yes, we will go wall to wall with all of the latest Suffice it to say, this is not going well for Republicans.
I will explain why for all of the reasons it is not going well.
Also, what the actual hearings should have been designed to do and what they actually were not designed to do.
We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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Okay, well, today is, of course, the big hearing day, and today is the day in which the Senate Judiciary Committee, after a long last...
Interviewed Christine Blasey Ford, who is the first accuser against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, to stop for just a second before we actually get into the accusations that Christine Blasey Ford made, we should recognize that there have been a number of allegations that have been made, and I want to go through them.
This is the one that matters.
Christine Blasey Ford is the one that matters because it is the most credible.
And it's the most credible because it is the one that rings the truest.
There are still questions about it, and this is the problem for Republicans.
From the very outset, it was unclear what Republicans were attempting to argue about these allegations.
Were they arguing that Christine Blasey Ford was lying?
I, for one, never argued that Christine Blasey Ford was lying.
I always believed that she sort of believed what she believed.
She'd come forward With these allegations before Brett Kavanaugh was even selected for the Supreme Court when he was just on the shortlist.
And there's evidence that she had talked about it back in 2012.
I was never somebody who suggested that Christine Blasey Ford was lying.
I question whether her memories might not have been correct because memories change over 30 years.
I question whether, more importantly, the evidence was sufficient to knock Brett Kavanaugh out.
And this was always the big question.
The big question to me was, is an allegation alone, no matter how credible, without any corroborating evidence whatsoever, is that enough to stop a nomination?
That's really the question, because no matter how credible a witness is, it's going to be he said, she said, if they're the only people in the room.
And in this particular case, Christine Blasey Ford had suggested there were other people at a party when she was 15 and Brett Kavanaugh was 17.
She says that at that party, Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge forced her into a room, turned up the music, and Kavanaugh forced her onto a bed where he attempted to take off her clothes and then placed his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.
There's no other witness that has verified this count.
Mark Judge has denied it.
I think he should be subpoenaed, but Mark Judge denied it.
Brett Kavanaugh denied it.
She says there were other people at the party.
We'll get into her specific allegations in a moment, including one of her close friends who has denied that she was at any party with Brett Kavanaugh.
So there is no corroborating evidence.
We don't know date.
We don't know location.
We don't know time.
We don't know how she got there.
So even if she's telling the absolute truth, there is no way to actually corroborate any of her story.
The reason that matters is because this was happening in a quasi-public setting.
There should be some corroborating detail.
If you look at situations involving Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there are ways that you can corroborate at least the people who are telling the story at the time.
As I mentioned on the show, when I was in high school, I've said 15, but I believe I was actually 13 or 14 because it was my sophomore year of high school.
When I was in high school, I was abused by some kids in my class.
I remember where it was, I remember who the kids were, and I should be able to lock down the date if I just look at a yearbook or look back at a calendar.
And I can find people to corroborate the story.
There's no corroborating evidence here, and Blasey Ford has been unable to really corroborate any of that.
Now, does that mean she's lying?
No, it doesn't mean she's lying.
It doesn't mean she's lying at all.
And so what this comes down to is, is the allegation itself enough?
If you believe the allegation itself is enough, all that mattered today from the hearing is that Blasey Ford was emotional when she spoke about this because she obviously experienced the trauma and experienced pain.
Both of which I believe, by the way.
I believe that she did experience some trauma and she is experiencing pain.
I don't doubt any of that.
But the question becomes, without any other corroborating evidence, is that enough?
And so that just made today basically a sort of public An assessment of her performance.
Was her performance credible?
Was her performance believable?
Was her performance emotional?
Which is kind of gross.
I mean, that is kind of gross.
The fact that the public question was going to come down to how well could this alleged attempted rape victim tell her story?
Because in that sense, if she had been more robotic, would we not have believed her?
If she had come off a little bit less collected, would we not have believed her?
If she had not come across emotional, would we not have believed her?
Those are uncomfortable questions.
But that's why Republicans never should have gotten into this line of questioning in the first place.
The question always should have been, listen, even if we believe your story, there's no corroborating evidence and we have a denial on the other side.
That means that there is some burden of proof to come forward with some form of corroborating evidence and you just haven't supplied that.
Because Republicans didn't do that, the hearing turned into, is Christine Blasey Ford a credible witness?
Is she a believable witness?
And what you'll see is a lot of folks on the right saying she's not credible, she's not believable, because her memory was skewed in other areas.
But her contention, and I think it's not a completely unfair contention, is, well, I may not have remembered the actual date of this happening, but I certainly remember the feeling of being pushed down on a bed, having a guy jump on top of me, put his hand over my mouth, and I remember his face.
That's not an incredible suggestion.
That's not non-credible.
That's relatively credible.
When bad things happen in your life, you remember the specific bad thing that happened in your life.
You don't necessarily remember well the surrounding circumstances.
The problem is there's no way for us to adjudicate whether her memory is faulty or not because there's no corroborating evidence.
Okay, so that's Christine Blasey Ford.
I want to mention these other allegations to demonstrate But not every allegation necessarily ought to be believed just on the basis of the allegation.
So Debra Martinez said in a piece in the New Yorker earlier this week on Sunday, the New Yorker reported that Martinez had alleged that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a frat party at which he was drinking while he was at Yale University.
But the New Yorker piece is extraordinarily weak.
According to the publication, she was hesitant to speak publicly because, quote, Her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident, and she was, quote-unquote, reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh's role in the alleged incident with certainty.
So even she says that she didn't know what happened, this particular accuser, only after, and this is a direct quote from The New Yorker, six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorneys did she decide to come forward.
No corroborating witnesses have come forward.
Then, yesterday, there was an accusation made by Julie Swetnick, who was a woman brought forward by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels.
And 2020 Democratic candidate for president.
And according to her sworn declaration, she saw Kavanaugh get drunk in high school and then grope girls against their will, as well as spiking punch with quaaludes in alcohol and participating in a gang rape line at multiple parties.
That's her description.
Swetnick says she went to approximately 10 parties at which such events took place.
Sorry, it's Deborah Ramirez, not Martinez.
Swetnick says she went to 10 parties at which such activities took place.
She says she was the victim of such a gang rape, but is unclear in her declaration Whether Kavanaugh participated, Avenatti refuses to answer simple questions on her behalf.
He has not made her available to testify.
She says there are other witnesses, but none have come forward to, again, an accusation with no corroborating evidence.
The New York Times put it kindly, quote, none of Ms. Swetnick's claims could be independently corroborated by the New York Times and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, declined to make her available for an interview.
And then late on Wednesday afternoon, a fourth allegation came forward.
This was from NBC News, reporting that the Senate Judiciary Committee was inquiring about another allegation of misconduct.
They reported that an anonymous woman said that her daughter's friend was physically assaulted by Kavanaugh in a Washington, D.C.
area bar while he was drunk.
She said when they left the bar, under the influence of alcohol, they were all shocked when Kavanaugh shoved her friend up against the wall very aggressively and sexually.
There were at least four witnesses, including my daughter.
The daughter has not come forward.
The woman has not come forward.
None of the witnesses have come forward.
So another uncorroborated, in this case, anonymous allegation made against Brett Kavanaugh.
Now, maybe Kavanaugh did some of this.
Maybe he did none of this.
We don't know any of those questions.
What is certainly true is that there is not a court of law in the United States, civil or criminal, that would either convict or punish based on just the allegations alone.
There's no way to do that.
So, in a country where there is due process, it seems to me that an allegation alone should not be enough to support the destruction of a man's life and a man's career, no matter how credible the person telling the story.
And this is what Republicans failed to say in the lead up to this hearing.
Instead, the narrative was put out there that maybe she was lying, or maybe she was politically motivated, but that was never the question.
We live in a system where due process actually matters.
And that due process doesn't necessarily apply in the court of public opinion, but if we're going to be intellectually honest about how we actually assess situations, we have to have something beyond a mere allegation.
Maybe it's that there are multiple allegations, and all the allegations have similar elements, as in the Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein cases.
Maybe it's that there's corroborating evidence that some of this stuff happened, as with Roy Moore.
But an allegation alone, it seems to me, is really weak sauce.
And if that had been the case, nothing in the hearing with Christine Blasey Ford would have changed anything today.
Nothing would have changed anything.
Because not only did she not provide any corroborating evidence, what she actually showed is that the only memory she seems to hold clearly is the actual incident itself with Kavanaugh.
Everything else, her memory seems particularly hazy.
And again, that doesn't answer whether this happened or not.
And it doesn't even answer whether she is correctly remembering what happened with Kavanaugh or not.
What it is suggesting is that memory itself is variable.
And not only that, it suggests that without any other corroborating evidence, which she actually weakened today, right?
She weakens the possibility of corroborating evidence today.
She did not strengthen the possibility of corroborating evidence.
Nothing she said today.
brought additional evidence to the table.
It was just her telling her story in her words.
So you have to ask yourself, what changed between yesterday and today?
Last night, she put forward her actual statement.
Her statement was written.
It was very similar to what she had told the newspapers.
It's very similar to what she had said in a letter to Dianne Feinstein and a representative in California named Anna Eshoo.
None of that changed.
The only thing that changed is that we actually put a face to the accusation.
If that's the case, then what we really had today was an emotional appeal.
And listen, I felt the emotional appeal too.
Because it's hard not to watch a woman who's experiencing pain that she attributes to a dire trauma, right?
To an incident that any of us would have responded with fury to and say, okay, well, that's now more credible.
But is it more credible because she said it out loud?
Is it more, as opposed to credible, does it provide any level of objective verification of the events she speaks of because she said it out loud?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
And if it does, you have to ask yourself what exactly changed?
What exactly changed?
Now, this was a loss for Republicans.
And I'll explain why it was a loss for Republicans in just a second.
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Okay, so back to the setup for the hearing.
What Democrats wanted out of the hearing was something very simple.
A binary.
She's lying or she's not lying.
That was the binary.
And Democrats said, we believe her, she's not lying.
And what they were hoping to do by that is suggest that anyone who didn't believe her was therefore a sexist and doesn't believe women who are credible.
But that really wasn't the question.
Again, the question for this hearing should have been, even if you believe she is not lying, are allegations without any corroborating evidence whatsoever, none, zero, zilch, any corroborating evidence, are those allegations enough to finish a guy's career?
That's how Republicans should have played this.
They should have said, we don't know whether to believe her or not.
We may find her credible, but we can't have a standard of evidence in this country.
Where people are denied a career and a life based on unverifiable and unverified allegations from a vague time in the past where there should be public witnesses and there are none.
That's what Republicans should have been arguing.
Instead, they allowed Democrats to turn this into, is she believable or is she not?
And the answer is, yeah, she's believable.
There's nothing about her that suggests that she's not believable.
Listen to her tell her story.
So here is Ford.
She told her story.
And what you'll see is that Republicans had appointed A woman named Mitchell, who's a prosecutor, to question her.
And this woman basically went after the fact that Blasey Ford's memory has lots of holes in different places.
But Blasey Ford basically defeats all of those attempts with a simple statement, which is, I may not remember everything else in my life, but I remember that time the guy jumped on top of me, put his hand on my mouth and tried to rape me, right?
That's all she had to say.
It takes everything else off the table.
If Republicans had said before that, listen, It sounds like what happened to you was awful, but we have a guy over here who denies it.
You've provided no other evidence.
And then they'd asked her, okay, well, you can't provide any other evidence.
Can you help us?
Can you help us establish another chain of evidence?
If Republicans had done that, then maybe this turns into something else.
Instead, what it turned into is we're supposed to doubt her because of various questions about her history of flying, or we're supposed to doubt her because she has not been completely forthcoming about her polygraph, or stuff like that.
They're trying to kind of I am here today not because I want to be.
I am terrified.
believable.
Again, it's hard to claim that an attempted rape account is false because she fibbed about her dislike for flying.
If in fact she fibbed about her dislike for flying.
We'll get into all of that in just a second.
Here is what Ford talked about today.
I am here today, not because I want to be.
I am terrified.
I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.
Okay.
So she obviously is pretty collected here.
And then she goes on to say that she believed that Kavanaugh was going to rape her.
I was pushed onto the bed and Brett got on top of me.
He began running his hands over my body and grinding into me.
I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me.
And I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy.
Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes.
He had a hard time because he was very inebriated and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath my clothing.
I believed he was going to rape me.
Okay, so obviously this is very affecting testimony.
There's no way not to watch this and feel enormous sympathy for the person who's telling the story.
Does it give you any corroborating detail?
No.
And that's why how you frame the question matters an awful lot.
And this is why when Ford actually got to being asked, okay, could you have mistaken Brett Kavanaugh for somebody else?
And she answered, it was very bad for Republicans.
Here are the two clips that really made the most hash of Kavanaugh.
Here is clip 20.
This is Ford talking about how she fully remembers all of this happening.
How are you so sure that it was he?
The same way that I'm sure that I'm talking to you right now.
It's just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that sort of, as you know, encodes that neurotransmitter, encodes memories into the hippocampus.
And so the trauma-related experience then is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.
So what you are telling us is this could not be A case of mistaken identity?
Absolutely not.
I can't guarantee that there weren't a few other people there, but they are not in my purview of my memory.
Would it be fair to say there were at least four others?
Yes.
Okay, so there is where she sort of changed her story.
But again, it doesn't matter because the Republicans had not established what exactly they were trying to do there.
And this was part of the problem with the format.
So you see Blasey Ford said, listen, it's imprinted on my memory that somebody tried to rape me.
And then she says all the other details were hazy.
And then when Republicans, the woman questioning is Rachel Mitchell, who is this Republican special counsel, when she pushes back and she says, okay, well, What about the fact that you've now changed your story multiple times on how many people were at the party?
Blasey Ford says, right, I don't remember that stuff so well because that's not when I was being raped, right?
So she preempted the attack by essentially stating, this is the only thing that I can remember really well.
And this is the problem.
And this was underscored by the next thing she said, where she was asked specifically about what she remembers the most.
And this is the quote that's going to be played a thousand times tonight on cable news.
Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.
The uproarious laughter between the two.
And they're having fun at my expense.
And you were the object of the laughter?
I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed.
Two friends having a really good time with one another.
Okay, so this opened a bunch of questions for Republicans, none of which they were willing to take, right?
They could have called Mark Judge to rebut.
That's the guy who she claims is in the room with Kavanaugh.
He's already said under oath that he was not there for any of this and he doesn't know what any of this was, but it would have been worthwhile to question him.
But here's the point.
What Republicans did with this hearing was a huge mistake, because what they did is they basically brought in a special counsel to talk to this accuser.
And then they split it up.
They had her ask a question for five minutes, and then they let Democrats grandstand for five minutes.
And so there was never any line of continuity trying to establish what it was they were trying to establish.
What should have happened is you got Mitchell out there, says, listen, whether we believe your story or not, and you seem like a credible, very nice person who suffered an awful trauma, we need to try and find some detail we can corroborate here so that we can move forward with the seriousness of the allegations.
And so now I'm going to ask you a series of questions that are designed to elicit just that sort of corroboration.
And then at the end you say, okay, well, if we couldn't find corroboration, we can't find corroboration.
Instead, Republicans started asking questions that went to flaws in her memory, but that don't undermine her central case.
Meanwhile, Democrats ask questions like, how did it feel when a guy was trying to rape you?
Who do you think is going to win that PR battle?
Because that's what this has become, right?
I mean, this is a PR battle.
This is not a question as to the truth or falsity of the allegations, unfortunately.
Democrats are not interested in that.
Republicans don't seem particularly interested in that.
Nobody's really interested in the truth or falsity because there's no way to find that out.
So this has become a political tool.
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Okay, so as I say, the way that this was formatted for Republicans was bad because if they had been trying to establish that there were no corroborating details and if they had been trying also to establish that Democrats manipulated the process, there were ways to do that.
Because the truth is, there are holes in Ford's testimony.
She was asked specifically, for example, What year did this take place?
Because earlier she had said it took place sometime when I was in high school, then she had narrowed it down to the specific summer, and she never really gave an excuse as to why that happened.
She was specifically asked about whether she gave her psychiatrist's records to the Washington Post, for example, because the first account that she had told of this story to someone, not her husband, was to her psychiatrist.
This sort of locked it into a timeline back in 2012.
She's claimed medical privilege on those records.
She has not handed them over to the actual Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would kind of be important because you'd want to see if there are discrepancies in her account of the events.
She hasn't handed those over, but she did hand them to the Washington Post.
How do we know she handed them to the Washington Post?
We know she handed them to the Washington Post because it said so in the Washington Post story.
The Washington Post story explicitly said that she gave her psychiatrist's records to the Washington Post, but when she was asked about it, suddenly she didn't remember, which does raise questions about the capacity of her memory, for example.
A full or partial set of those marriage therapy records to the Washington Post.
Um, I don't remember.
I remember summarizing for her what they said.
So I'm not quite sure if I actually gave her the record.
Okay, so obviously she did give them the record.
Is she misremembering?
You don't know, right?
Speaking of misremembering, we were told last week that Christine Blasey Ford could not show up on Monday for a hearing because Christine Blasey Ford had a fear of flying.
This was a serious question because in the past week, there have been a bunch of more unverified allegations that have come forward that seem timed by Democrats.
I mean, it's just a giant coincidence that all these allegations come forward from Monday through Thursday, and they all start breaking in the news this week.
Well, Blasey Ford's original claim, or at least the claim of her lawyers, is that she couldn't show up on Monday because, number one, she didn't want to be questioned on that side of the country, and number two, she had a fear of flying.
Well, it turns out that her fear of flying has not prohibited her, I assume she has a fear of flying, but it hasn't stopped her from flying in what she considers important circumstances.
Circumstances ranging from surf trips, to visiting her family on the East Coast every year, to coming in August To Maryland, I think to Delaware, to take a polygraph test.
So in other words, she flies an awful lot.
And yet somehow she couldn't fly, but then she did fly to get to this hearing.
She didn't take a car across the country.
She flew across the country.
Well, that raises questions about how Democrats have manipulated the timeline here.
Again, the person who's been done the most disservice by the Democrats is Blasey Ford.
She's been under tremendous disservice because let's say that she's telling the absolute 100% truth, it looks manipulative no matter how this was played because Democrats were in fact manipulating the process.
Dianne Feinstein did not come forward with the allegations for eight weeks.
Dianne Feinstein did not release it to the FBI.
Dianne Feinstein did not question Kavanaugh about it, either in public or in private.
The Democrats turned down a private hearing for Ford.
Right?
The Republican said, you want to do this behind closed doors?
Let's do it there.
Nope.
The Republican said, what if we send our representatives to you and question you out west?
Nope.
Instead, they said, she has to come east, but she can't fly.
But then she turned out to fly.
Rachel Mitchell points this out.
That was certainly what I was hoping was to avoid having to get on an airplane.
But I eventually was able to get up the gumption with the help of some friends and get on the plane.
When you were here in the mid-Atlantic area back in August, end of July, August, how did you get here?
Also by airplane.
I come here once a year during the summer to visit my family.
In fact, you fly fairly frequently for your hobbies, and you've had to fly for your work.
Is that true?
Correct, unfortunately.
So folks on the left were mocking this, like, oh, well, who cares about her flight?
Well, it goes to the Democratic manipulation of the process, because again, we were told that Democrats just wanted to get down to facts, but it turns out they were delaying the timeline for obviously political reasons.
All of which still does not go to the key point of this case.
And I get back to the key point of this case over and over again because I think it really is important, not just for this nomination, which I'll explain what I think is going to happen with it in just a second, but it's also important because of what's going to happen with future nominations.
Is it enough to have a credible allegation of something bad happening, uncorroborated by a fact?
A fact.
Okay, there's no corroborating fact here.
None.
None.
It's not just me saying this, by the way.
Jake Tapper even made this point on CNN last night, that there's no real corroborating evidence for any of this, because it turns out there's no corroborating evidence for any of this.
By not setting the standard, Republicans really did Kavanaugh a disservice and did themselves a serious disservice.
Democrats are saying that Kavanaugh obviously should withdraw.
This in and of itself is sort of self-defeating.
I'm not sure why they think that he should, like they're saying he should withdraw.
Why not just call for there to be a vote?
Why not just put Republicans on the record?
It seems to me that if Democrats really wanted to put Republicans feet to the fire, they would say, no, he shouldn't withdraw.
Make Republicans say whether they believe or not.
That would be the smart political move.
I don't think President Trump is actually going to pull the nomination.
The reason I don't think Trump is going to pull the nomination is because President Trump tends to believe that accusations by women are very often false.
He feels he's been victimized by such accusations.
In some cases, he certainly has not been victimized by some accusations.
President Trump did a presser yesterday, and here's what he had to say about the situation.
This, of course, was before the hearing.
But I've had a lot of false charges made against me, really false charges.
I know friends that have had false charges.
People want fame, they want money, they want whatever.
So when I see it, I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television where they say, oh, Judge Kavanaugh, this or that.
So when you say, does it affect me in terms of my thinking?
With respect to Judge Kavanaugh?
Absolutely, because I've had it many times.
Okay, the reason this is a giant fail is because this is President Trump falling directly into the trap the Democrats have set for him, which is President Trump saying, I've been accused falsely a lot of times, therefore Kavanaugh has been accused falsely a lot of times.
Except that there are a lot of allegations of President Trump engaging in really bad behavior with women, sexually abusive behavior with women.
And President Trump was caught on tape, lest we forget, saying he grabs women by the genitals.
Not the same thing as Brett Kavanaugh, who maintains his complete innocence in all of this.
But this does set the mindset for the president to not believe any of this.
He doesn't believe it about himself.
And he also, like, I think that if you give President Trump a lie detector test, a polygraph really only detects stress.
It really detects whether you think you are lying.
It doesn't detect whether you are telling the truth, but it detects whether you might think you're lying and supposedly raises stress levels, not particularly scientific.
If you hooked President Trump up to a lie detector, to a polygraph machine, my guess is that everything President Trump says would always pass the lie detector test because he actually believes all the stuff that he says.
The problem is that he has now set it up, is Ford lying or is she not?
Well, what this means is I don't think that Trump pulls Kavanaugh's nomination.
I think Trump leaves Kavanaugh's nomination no matter what happens.
And Kavanaugh, I can't imagine, is going to be able to rebut the testimony.
No matter how much sympathy he shows, you can't rebut the testimony of a woman who claims that you were lying on top of her trying to rape her.
Pretty difficult to rebut that.
I don't think Trump pulls the nomination.
I think instead what happens is probably that Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine Probably vote against Kavanaugh's nomination.
That kills the nomination.
Trump blames squish Republicans for finishing Kavanaugh.
His base is happy because he didn't pull the nomination and he fights.
And by the way, I don't think he should pull the nomination because again, I think there should be a standard of corroborative evidence that is presented if we're going to start pulling nominations.
But.
I don't think Trump pulls the nomination.
I think he lets this thing go down in flaming defeat.
I think he nominates Amy Coney Barrett.
And then Democrats get what they want, which is a referendum in November on whether Republicans should control the next Supreme Court seat.
If Republicans do not have a majority in November of the Senate, there will be eight people on the Supreme Court from here until 2021.
Democrats are not going to allow President Trump to fill the seat.
That's what this has always been about.
This is always for Democrats, not for Ford, for Democrats.
This has always been about political manipulation for the press.
It's been about political manipulation as well.
There are too many members of the press who have treated allegations as verified facts.
There are too many members of the press who have treated evidence-free allegations as absolutely Justified?
We're going to get to all of that in just a second.
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All right.
So I do want to get into the press's behavior and Democratic behavior today at the hearings, because again, I'm not going to say that Christine Blasey Ford is a political actor.
I am going to say that Democrats and the media have acted in entirely political fashion surrounding the Kavanaugh accusations.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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So the treatment of the Democrats is really what's been egregious in all of this.
Republicans have basically said, we will do whatever Ford wants in terms of having her here.
We are willing to hear allegations.
I will say that I think Republicans should have subpoenaed Mark Judge.
I don't understand why they didn't subpoena Mark Judge if they think that they are trying to get down to the facts.
Democrats have been political with this since the beginning.
Dianne Feinstein was political with this since the beginning.
The media have been political about this too.
Why?
Well, look at the way that they treated, at least many in the media, not everyone in the media, look at how many in the media treated the Michael Avenatti allegations from yesterday.
So an allegation comes forward, a woman claims that Brett Kavanaugh was part of a gang rape gang back in high school.
She said there were tons of witnesses.
Not a single witness comes forward.
She claims that she went to 10 separate parties at which there were these gang rapes and drugging of women, which does beg the question as to why would you go back?
I mean, when's the last time you went to a party, you saw a gang rape line and people drugging the punch and you're like, you know what?
There's one of these next week.
I'm coming back.
I gotta see whether it just goes differently next time.
And then do that 10 times.
It turns out, by the way, that the woman who makes the accusation was three years older than Brett Kavanaugh, graduated in 1980, which suggests that she was actually a college woman, like a full-grown woman, going to high school parties, watching gang rape lines happen, and then saying nothing, which is weird in and of itself.
But the way that many in the media treated this was a massive headline.
It was repeated over and over and over without a lot of these questions being asked.
I will point out one person who did ask the question.
CNN's Jake Tapper did grill Michael Avenatti on this, and Avenatti obviously had no answers.
That, by the way, did not stop Dianne Feinstein from today, in the hearing, suggesting that there are three separate credible allegations against Kavanaugh, which there are not.
There's one seriously credible allegation against Kavanaugh, in my opinion.
That's Ford.
Even that has no corroborating evidence.
The other two, from Deborah Ramirez and from the Swetnik, I think that those are significantly less credible, the least credible is Swetnick, for precisely the reasons Jake Tapper is about to show you.
I mean, just to say he was present is a really egregious lack of specificity when you're talking about charges this horrific.
And I'm not saying that I don't believe them, I'm just saying, what exactly are you saying, or is she saying, that he did?
Jake, I disagree completely with what you just said.
Let me be clear about something.
This is not my declaration.
These are statements by my client.
These are her statements about what happened.
Okay, well, that doesn't help at all.
And Tapper, of course, is exactly right about all of this.
I should note on Mark Judge, Republicans did interview Mark Judge.
Democrats refused to participate in the interview of Mark Judge.
That doesn't mean they shouldn't have publicly subpoenaed Mark Judge.
I think that they probably should have.
But It turns out that Avenatti's entire allegation from yesterday begins to fall apart.
In Miami-Dade County, according to Politico, a Miami-Dade County court docket shows a petition for injunction against Swetnick was filed March 1, 2001, by her former boyfriend, Richard Vennessy, who told Politico the two had dated for four years before they broke up.
Thirteen days later, the case was dismissed, not long after an affidavit of non-ability to advance fees was filed.
According to Vinnacy, Swetnick threatened him after they broke up and even after he got married to his current wife and had a child.
So, he says, this is a direct quote from her former boyfriend, quote, Didn't matter.
The media repeated this stuff.
And I will point out, again, there's some diversity in the media.
You have people like Jake Tapper, who I think does try to be honest.
This is why I respect Jake.
And then you have people like Don Lemon, who really does not try very hard on CNN.
Here's Don Lemon on CNN saying that Brett Kavanaugh is like Bill Cosby.
Based on?
He doesn't say.
Right now, a Supreme Court nominee faces two allegations of sexual assault or misconduct from his time in high school and his time in college back in the late 1980s.
Kavanaugh denies that they ever happened.
When Bill Cosby was initially accused, many people for many years could not believe it.
The women's accounts were questioned.
It took a very long time and a lot of investigating and multiple proceedings before there was a verdict as to the truth of what really happened.
Okay, so that is not helpful at all, obviously.
There's no corroborating evidence, but it doesn't matter.
He's just like Bill Cosby.
It doesn't matter that Bill Cosby admitted openly to using quaaludes on women.
Kavanaugh's exactly like that.
And it's not just him.
Obviously, you've got Katie Tour over at MSNBC.
Who did exactly what Democrats are apt to do, which is suggest that anybody who doubts corroborating evidence says that the accusers are all liars.
Again, I'm not claiming Deborah Ramirez is a liar.
I've not claimed in this entire show, or any other show, that Christine Blasey Ford is lying.
I have said there's not corroborating evidence.
Why?
Because facts don't care about your feelings on this one.
There is no corroborating evidence.
I feel terrible for these women as well.
Corroborating evidence is necessary for you to buy an account.
You can't just buy an account because someone told you the account.
In just a second, I'm going to play what Katie Turr had to say to Kavanaugh's lawyer, and then I'm going to show you other evidence of the media playing this as politically as humanly possible.
So, Jeffrey Toobin on CNN, he, he, so we'll get to Toobin in one second.
First, let's do Katie Turr.
So, Katie Turr, Was questioning Kavanaugh's lawyer about the Deborah Ramirez allegations.
And of course, she doesn't ask her, why do you doubt the why do you doubt the accusations?
Then the lawyer can say, listen, I don't know whether to doubt the accusations or not.
I can tell you there's no corroborating evidence.
And instead, it's why do you think she's lying?
I don't have to believe somebody is lying to suggest that their account may be faulty.
I don't have to believe that somebody is like this happens all the time in your daily life, in your daily life with people you love.
They tell you stories and you think, is that really how it went?
That's what people you love.
My wife is sitting behind the camera today.
There are times when my wife will tell me something that happened, and I'll say, is that really how it went?
And then she'll say, well, more often she says this to me.
I'll tell her how something went.
She says, is that really what you said?
And I'll think about it some more, and I'll say, no, not exactly.
Here's what I actually said, right?
That sort of thing happens all the time with people you actually like.
I assume my wife likes me.
It is a truth that in order to have questions about somebody's account, it doesn't require you to think that they're lying per se.
But the media have decided to buy into the Democratic binary.
Either you believe the women wholeheartedly, everything they say is verified truth without any doubts to memory or corroborative evidence.
Or you don't believe any of these women because you think that women are liars.
You believe the myth of Eve, the liar, bringing the apple to her husband.
You hate all women.
This is the narrative the Democrats and many members of the media have been trying to promote.
Here's Katie Tour doing just that yesterday.
Are you calling her a liar?
I'm not calling her a liar.
I think she has known about this for a while, supposedly, and so has Mr. Avenatti.
He waived this on some of your programs since last weekend and said he knew about it, and he never went to the police as an attorney.
I know what my obligation is.
It's to my client.
And if I had represented her, it would have been my duty to go to the police immediately.
But this is the question, right?
The question is what mattered there, not the answer.
The question was, are you saying she's lying?
If that's going to be the standard from now on, it's going to be impossible for anyone to escape any hearing unscathed, ever.
Because anyone can come forward with any allegation.
And then all you say is, do you believe the woman?
Is she lying?
Are you saying women lie?
Well, we don't know whether somebody is lying or misremembering or telling the truth unless there's actual evidence.
You could have said the same thing about Tawana Browley.
You could have said the same thing about Crystal Mangum in the Duke La Crosse case.
You could have said the same thing about Jackie from UVA.
You could have said the same thing about Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia.
All those women, it turns out, were not telling the truth.
I'm not saying any of these women are not telling the truth.
I'm just saying, I don't know.
Neither do you.
Were you there?
Unless you were.
And if you were, you should probably come forward and testify, I think.
But if you were not there, you don't know.
You don't.
I don't know either.
My tendency is to believe Christine Blasey Ford's story, but I don't have enough corroborating evidence to finish a guy's career based simply on the allegation.
By the way, I think there are a lot of folks on the Democratic side who would be more honest if they said the same thing about people like Juanita Broderick.
When Juanita Broderick accused Bill Clinton of rape, the answer the Democrats gave was, she's not credible.
Why?
What made her non-credible?
What they could have easily said is, well, her story is credible, but there's not enough evidence for me to corroborate it, which is the actual objective truth about things people tell you in real life.
But when it comes to politics, we all suspend this.
When it comes to politics, we all suspend the way that we normally work in the realm of the real in order to defend people we like or to target people that we dislike.
For example, Senator Patty Murray, she comes forward, and again, playing politics, she says that anybody who claims that this is a smear campaign, well, that frightens me as a woman.
Well, it is a smear campaign by Democrats to bring forward a bunch of unverified allegations with no corroborating evidence.
There's no question that is.
But what Patty Murray is doing is, again, drawing that crucial binary.
Democrats know they have a massive advantage right now with female voters.
A lot of that is driven by President Trump.
It really is.
Look at the polls.
From 2012 to 2016, Republicans lost women in droves.
They've been losing women in droves ever since.
Democrats know that they can just plow a wedge between men and women on a voting basis if they can credibly accuse Republicans of being sexist.
That's the game, and Patty Murray is playing it.
The message that this is a smear campaign frightens me as a woman that, once again, we are saying to women out there, don't come forward.
You're going to be accused of smear campaigns.
No one's going to believe you.
Stop.
Do the investigation.
Okay, they are doing an investigation, and then you yell at them for doing the investigation.
It's not just members.
The worst of all is, of course, Jim Acosta from CNN, who's just a garbage heap.
I mean, Jim Acosta is just, just awful.
Yesterday, Jim Acosta asks President Trump at his presser why he doesn't call on a female reporter.
This is just the worst kind of grandstanding.
What difference does the question make whether it comes from a female reporter or a male reporter?
If you put the exact same words in somebody's mouth, you should get the same exact answer, is my opinion, because I treat people as individuals.
According to Acosta, though, Trump won't call on female reporters because he's a sexist or something.
If you don't mind, after I'm finished, if Weijia or Hallie or Vivian or one of our female colleagues could go after me, that would be great.
Mr. President, just to follow up on these allegations against Brett Kavanaugh— What does he mean by that?
Explain.
What does that mean?
I think it would be great if a female reporter— What does it mean?
No, what does it mean?
I think it would be great if a female reporter would ask you a question about this issue.
So if you don't mind— I wouldn't mind that at all, no.
I wouldn't mind it at all.
All right, well, let me— Wouldn't make any difference to me.
All right.
Go ahead.
Good for Trump.
Okay, that's the actual correct answer, but you can see what Acosta's trying to do.
That's reporting.
So much reporting.
So much journalisming from Jim Acosta, who loves him some Jim Acosta.
Find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
My goodness.
But that, of course, is the narrative that's being drawn.
Okay, so, how does all this play out?
It probably plays out with Kavanaugh going down.
It probably plays out with Kavanaugh losing the vote, or being withdrawn, and then all hell breaking loose.
And Democrats proclaiming victory, and Republicans proclaiming that they were stabbed in the back, and things just get uglier.
Because corroborating evidence doesn't matter, and we're not honest enough to actually set a standard beforehand as to what constitutes evidence that somebody's career should be finished.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, Things that I like.
I'll remind you that when we say believe all women, nobody actually believes we should believe all women.
Nobody actually believes that because we have to actually look at each account on its face.
We have to determine whether somebody is telling the truth or not.
The way you do this is through corroborating evidence.
So, I take for my example today, the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.
The book To Kill a Mockingbird is, of course, one of the great books in the English language.
I think, you know, people always say, what's the great American novel?
To me, it's either Moby Dick or To Kill a Mockingbird.
The movie of To Kill a Mockingbird is a, it's a great movie, although Gregory Peck cannot do a southern accent for his life.
But the score is really tremendous.
Elmer Bernstein did the score, just a beautiful, beautiful score.
It used to be the ringtone on my phone, actually, the score for To Kill a Mockingbird.
But here is, here's a little bit of the preview of To Kill a Mockingbird, and then I will explain why this is relevant.
And now, happily, To Kill a Mockingbird becomes a motion picture, and its memorable characters come vividly alive.
That's Scout.
Some people call her Jean Louise Finch, but she insists on Scout.
And that's her brother, Jim.
Just a boy until the day he learns there is evil in the world.
The movie's terrific, and the score is great, obviously.
Gregory Peck won Best Actor for his performance in this, which, again, is weird because he didn't do a southern accent, but in any case, the movie's great.
One of the reasons that I bring up this movie is because the movie is entirely about, or at least the main part of the movie, is about an actual false allegation of rape against a black man by a white woman who was actually sexually abused by her father.
And the way that the accusation is overridden in the court is not through a he said, she said.
It's through corroborative evidence.
It's through the fact that Tom Robinson, who's the black man, actually gets up and shows that he was not physically capable of hitting this woman on a particular side of her face because his arm is withered from a cotton gin accident from his youth.
The point here is that evidence still matters.
Okay?
Due process still matters.
And whether I believe Christine Blasey Ford or not, That is secondary to whether any standard is necessary in order for us to destroy somebody.
Is any standard other than the allegations self-justifying?
That's the big question today.
That's the question nobody's going to ask, and it's the only question that in the end really matters for the future of the country when it comes to nominations, due process, or any sort of trial in the court of public opinion.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So the thing that I hate today, Don Lemon of CNN, again, I've already hit Don Lemon earlier, but he really, he really outdid himself yesterday.
I don't know, I don't know what he was on yesterday, but it was solid stuff.
He was talking about Ted Cruz going to a restaurant in Washington, D.C.
And there, he suggested that Ted Cruz, so what happened is, Ted Cruz goes to the restaurant, a bunch of activists start yelling at Ted Cruz about Kavanaugh, and he is forced to leave the restaurant with his wife.
Here is Don Lemon explaining why this is totally cool.
I don't like it, but it is one reason I'm not a public official, that I'm not running for office.
In a way, I think it goes with the territory.
I don't like that they were blocking his wife.
But that's what he signed up for, and as a strict constitutionalist, which Ted Cruz is, he knows that it's protected under the First Amendment.
First of all, it's a lie.
It's not protected under the First Amendment to go into a private establishment and yell at people until they leave.
That is not protected under the First Amendment.
It isn't.
There's a lot of speech, thank God, in this country that's protected under the First Amendment.
I can't enter your place of business and just start screaming at you.
That is not actually protected by the First Amendment.
But Don Lemon saying that he signed up for this?
Yeah, I'm sure he'd feel exactly the same way if Republicans came and yelled at Don Lemon.
Who, by the way, is a major media figure.
Did he sign up for this?
I don't think Don Lemon signed up for this.
I don't think I signed up for this.
I don't think Ted Cruz signed up for this.
I don't think Trump signed up for this.
I don't think Bill Clinton signed up for this.
I don't think people sign up for harassment in a law-abiding country.
I don't.
But according to Don Lemon, apparently, they do.
The other thing I have to say that I hate today, Jeet here is a An alleged journalist over the Atlantic and he tweeted this out in the aftermath of some allegations that were that were dumped yesterday.
So Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a Kavanaugh investigative summary that included an anonymous claim of rape forward by Kamala Harris's office that turned out to be complete nonsense.
Two interviews and a written statement from a man who believes that he, not Kavanaugh, actually was responsible for the assault.
And so Jeet here tweeted out, it's incredibly irresponsible to release this stuff, a dump of raw gossip with only the intent of muddying the waters.
Apparently mirrors are illegal over at the Atlantic.
What do you think the last several weeks have been?
Okay, this is raw gossip or personal accounts with the intent of muddying the water.
Okay, particularly this week.
Put aside Blasey Ford, who again has no corroboration for her statements.
This week, we've seen several attempts at muddying the waters coming from Michael Avenatti, coming from The New Yorker, all of it uncorroborated, all of it raw gossip intent at muddying the waters, but apparently it only applies to one side of the aisle.
This is what's so irritating about all of this.
None of this is really an attempt to get down to who should be on the Supreme Court or standards of proof.
None of this is really an attempt to get down to even the basic truth of what happened because there's no way to do that without corroborating evidence.
All of this is political and anybody who tells you difference is lying to your face.
We will be back here tomorrow with all of the fallout because I'm sure it will be magnificent in its horror.
We'll be back here with all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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