Dec. 14, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:08
3930 Sexual Civil War | Michelle Malkin and Stefan Molyneux
After the depravity of Harvey Weinstein was exposed and the floodgates of sexual assault and harassment allegations opened up in the mainstream media - the United States of America finds itself at a dangerous crossroads. Michelle Malkin joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the importance of innocent until proven guilty, how allegations have been weaponized against political opponents and gender conflicts moving forward. Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist, a senior editor at Conservative Review, the host of Michelle Malkin investigates on CRTV, and a New York Times best-selling author – writing six powerful books including her most recent: “Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers.”Website: http://www.michellemalkin.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/michellemalkinCRTV: http://www.crtv.comYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio here with Michelle Malkin, a syndicated columnist, a senior editor at Conservative Review.
There's no way we'd talk to a junior editor.
I want everyone to know that right now.
The host of Michelle Malkin investigates on CRTV and a New York Times bestselling author writing six.
Amazing books, including her most recent, Sold Out, How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crap Weasels Are Screwing America's Best and Brightest Workers.
MichelleMalkin.com and CRTV.com to check out her work, which I strongly urge you to do.
Michelle, thanks so much for taking the time today.
Thank you. Feels kind of like we're in a new age of weaponized accusations of sexual impropriety.
Now, for those who are, I guess, have a couple of tree rings under the belt, this sort of reminds me a little bit of the 90s with Bill Clinton and with some of this with Clarence Thomas and so on.
And probably because of the absence of alternative media, it didn't metastasize in the way that the Harvey Weinstein scandal has metastasized to the point where now it's coming out a lot in Hollywood.
It's coming out a lot, of course, in Washington, in politics.
I think a little bit in the sports world, I think academia is going to be the big one still to come.
But it is an amazing and powerful moment to have both...
An excavation of these kinds of sexual crimes in the world and also the fear that it is turning a little toxic and that they might have a certain kind of Salem witch trial feeling an aspect to it.
What's your view of where we stand in this process?
I think what I'm most worried about now, reflecting on the year's worth of these so-called journalistic investigations, which are essentially proxy political witch hunts, is the idea that you are going to have every last journalist,
particularly female journalists now, vying for awards and honors based merely on regurgitating Anecdotes of supposed victims, accusers, whose stories are procured and procured after 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years at convenient points in time in the electoral process.
I think it's a huge danger.
I think that it borders on journalistic malpractice to cast these so-called I think we're going to talk about these investigations as news gathering, when in fact what they are doing is manufacturing narratives.
And there's no checks and balance within these newsrooms that are dominated by ideologues.
And increasingly, Stefan, are being populated by feminist bloggers who are able to just, you know, go through this revolving door and magically, you know, appear at, you know, one end of the Washington Post headquarters one end of the Washington Post headquarters as journalists.
You know, that revolving door never happens the other way where you have conservative-leaning journalists, you know, who might have a journalistic interest in debunking false allegations of sexual assault or rape.
as I've been doing over the last year, who can then Don the mantle of mainstream journalists and do their work and pursue what is clearly, you know, on the part of these left-wing feminist bloggers, an agenda. It is an agenda, and to a large degree, outside of the Hollywood stuff at the moment, which has taken down some prominent leftists, it is generally focused on conservatives.
And one of the things that troubles me, there's an old saying in philosophy that says that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
And accusations of sexual misconduct are so damning to someone's reputation and somebody's personhood that to me, if you're a reporter, if you do not have corroboration, if you do not have independent evidence, if you do not have...
Any kind of methodology for establishing the he said, she said stuff to any kind of veracity, I'm just not sure that it's even remotely right to publish stuff.
I mean, with the Weinstein stuff, it was different.
With a lot of the other stuff, there's been multiple witnesses.
There are photographs with Al Franken and so on.
So I think on those aspects, one can.
But the law simply cannot handle disagreements about the content of...
Interactions that cannot be independently verified from 40 years ago.
There's no way the legal system can handle that in any way, shape, or form.
And it is such a destructive allegation to make that if there are any inconsistencies in the story, there should be a lot of research to find out what's going on.
And there just isn't.
And this weaponization of accusations is extraordinarily dangerous, I think, because it means we're not discussing ideas, and it also means that genuine allegations are going to get lost in the mix.
Yes. I mean, essentially what you have, it is a weapon.
It's a bazooka.
And if you put that bazooka in the hands of, you know, pink pussy-hatted adolescents, essentially, intellectual adolescents, people are going to get hurt.
People are going to lose not just their reputations and their jobs, but And their careers, but possibly their freedom.
And it's not just possibly, because we know that there are, you know, some 2,000 people who have been exonerated since, I believe, 1983.
And many of those cases involve false allegations of sexual assault and rape.
And you put your finger on it too, Stefan, when you talked about the lack of any kind of methodology in the newsroom.
Getting two or three of an accuser's friends To tell you that, yes, she told us a couple of years ago, and here's an email, does not satisfy my criteria for corroboration.
And I think that we would benefit greatly from the wisdom and the experience and the expertise of people who do this for a living, who have to vet false allegations, people who are Criminal profilers, people who are behavioral psychiatrists and psychologists.
I sat down a couple of months ago with Dr.
Brent Turvey, who is a forensic expert and who just wrote a textbook, an entire textbook on false allegations, not merely of rape, but other crimes ranging from property crimes to Medicaid fraud to racial hoaxes.
And there is a clear methodology At least when you're dealing in the criminal justice system with, for example, establishing a linkage analysis.
If you're going to claim that one of these predators Has some sort of MO or has certain proclivities, then you actually have to have some method of establishing that it is a real link and that you're not just asserting it.
And so just that alone, if you apply that to the Roy Moore context, it's not clear that one could You know, make such a valid linkage analysis.
But where is the debate in the newsrooms or in these journalistic professional societies about how they go about establishing whether or not these claims are true and, in fact, if these links actually do exist among the half dozen or 12 or 13 or 15 women that are coming forward 40 years after alleged incidents?
And I'm always confused because, to me, a false allegation—I mean, there's a part of me, and it may be kind of Old Testament or old school, but there's a part of me that says, if you accuse someone of a crime and it turns out that you were lying, then you should get the sentence— The lack of negative consequences for people who are misrepresenting what happened,
who are proven to be liars, who are proven to have falsified documents, who are proven or who recant or who withdraw their stories and so on.
The lack of negative consequences for this to me is also particularly chilling because it means, of course, people respond to incentives.
And if you can gain attention and notoriety and approval and praise and all of the, you can be on TV, you can be flown all over the place.
And if it turns out that what you said is not true, you've suffered no negative consequences, that seems to be entirely lopsided in terms of incentives.
Yes.
And I think that this is a legacy of Tawana Brawley.
In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, it was the 30th anniversary of the Tawana Brawley hoax.
And look what's happened 30 years later.
Sorry, just for the listener, if you want to go over a few of the details about that, that's well worth it because it's kind of gone down the memory hole for a lot of people.
Yes. She was a teenager who disappeared for four days and And then suddenly reappeared in a trash bag with racial epithets and the word bitch in charcoal on her own body.
And she alleged that she had been gang raped over the course of four days by a group of white men, including a local county prosecutor, Steve Pagonis.
And this really was the advent of Al Sharpton's career, along with two of his vulture attorney racial demagogue cronies.
And the three of them basically hijacked the entire city.
And it was with the enabling liberal media That this hoax was perpetrated for weeks until a neighbor came forward and said that she had actually seen Tawana Brawley crawling into the trash bag.
A grand jury concluded that the entire thing was a hoax.
Steve Pagonis, the local county prosecutor, sued, and he was awarded a six-figure settlement, which he has still yet to collect on.
Tawana Brawley was never prosecuted for lying about a crime, and as you pointed out, lying about a crime is a serious crime.
Didn't even get a slap on the wrist, was able to change her name, and now works as a nurse in Virginia, evading payment of the civil settlement to Steve Pagonis.
So if there are no criminal consequences, And you have all of these strong incentives, whether it's the media attention and fame or civil settlements.
So many of these women go on to sue their alleged accusers, and it's just a wrong on top of a wrong.
So there's no wonder that you can draw a straight line from Tawana Brawley to Duke to the University of Virginia.
This is still continuing to happen on college campuses today.
And to the extent that any of these young, innocent men are able to prove that they are innocent, they're still not allowed to go back to the schools that they were kicked out of, and they live with that stigma the rest of their lives while their accusers scoop up awards from social justice associations and get, you know, on Vogue magazine, Women of the Year covers.
Well, this is an astounding thing as well, because not only do there not seem to be any negative consequences, the positive consequences are enormous.
And it is to me also quite fascinating to see the left now particularly squirming under the lack of due process as this happens to take down some of their own stars.
And it's like, well, if you weren't sitting there saying that the lack of due process and even the avoidance of due process, the inability to confront your accuser, the inability to have a lawyer present in these kangaroo courts that happen on campuses.
If you weren't concerned about due process there, you know, cry me a river when this inevitable boomerang happens.
This is why we want due process even for our worst enemies.
This is why we want free speech for the most egregious, egregiously wrong people.
Because if you surrender that principle sooner or later, even if the only thing you care about is your own well-being, it's going to come back and bite you. - That's exactly right.
And so it's noxious when you have a creep enabler like Nancy Pelosi all of a sudden realize, have epiphanies about the preciousness of due process when it's her pet Democrat pervs who are under fire.
You know, I will say that over the last year that I've been covering these cases, and in particular the Daniel Holtzclaw case, that I have been very heartened.
That there are people on both sides of the ideological spectrum that I've met that are truly principled and committed to guaranteeing due process for men who are falsely convicted and falsely accused.
But they are few and far between.
And then the length of time that it takes to exonerate a falsely convicted person just adds to the disgrace and the injustice.
I mean, the average amount of time to exonerate a falsely convicted person is 11 years.
And it's only through...
Pro bono efforts or charitable efforts, nonprofits, mostly, that you're able to get proper legal representation.
And in fact, there are very few lawyers out there who are prepared to fight these battles and have the wherewithal to see them to the end, to rewrite these tales of injustice.
And of course, the prosecutors, they don't pay personal.
They don't pay out of their personal pocket or comes out of general taxpayer funds and so on.
So even they don't suffer any particular negative consequences.
If malfeasance was involved in wrongfully putting people in jail, and I was thinking about Daniel, of course, is it two years now, two years or so that he's been in there.
The other aspect which is coming out, which is, it's kind of one of these death by a thousand paper cuts or this trickling, this, you know, this $17 million in taxpayer money paid out over the last 20 years to resolve violations, some of which, of course, would be sexual in nature by employees of Congress.
So I think it's to be quite fascinating because why people want to be in politics, I mean, it's always an interesting question to me because it just seems like such a crap fest.
But I wonder, I have this sort of vague thesis that after Bill Clinton was defended by feminists for his protection of Roe v.
Wade after his repeated sexual exploitations and harassment of women...
I think that was just a big flag saying, if you're a creepy sexual guy, the Democrat Party is the place for you.
Because as long as you're willing to support abortion and as long as you're willing to support other things that the feminists want, they will create this phalanx around you, like this Wonder Woman shield, I guess a bit more pear-shaped than Wonder Woman.
But you will get this shield.
The media will shield you.
The feminists will shield you.
The political power class on the left will shield you.
So I think that a lot of people ended up saying, well, you know, if I want to be a creep...
Being in the Democrat Party is the way to go.
And if I really want to be a creep, being a congressman is the way to go because it's going to be paid for by the taxpayer and it's going to be sealed.
And the unsealing of this seems to me kind of job one.
How on earth can you vote for people if you have no idea how egregiously they have violated other people's personhood in the most despicable ways?
And, of course, reporters should be all over this.
But, of course, the most important thing they're trying to do is figure out, A... How many Diet Cokes Donald Trump drinks a day?
And B, how many hours of television he's supposed to watch?
Rather than, I would suggest, C, finding out who is a serial creep in Congress.
Yes. Well, it is exposing so much disingenuousness on the part of self-proclaimed feminists in the media, as well as in the cesspool of the Democrat Party.
And, you know, it extends beyond Bill Clinton.
I mean, Teddy Kennedy was the original Democrat perv creep.
And in a deadly way, too.
And it's so, the reckoning, you know, that we're having now, all of the second thoughts of all of these enablers now able to take to the pages of the New York Times to say, ooh, Maybe Kent Starr was right.
But, you know, are they doing it because they really actually believe that?
Or again, because it's all of the game playing of trying to reclaim the moral high ground, as it were?
I don't know.
But I will tell you that my own experience in the swamp is what led me in part to move my family away from it.
And, you know, I'd never had any of the kinds of experiences that we're seeing in the news now.
But it is a dirty, grimy, values-challenged place.
And it doesn't matter if there's a D or an R by the name of most of the denizens who have We haven't gotten the kind of exposure we need of that culture because people are so much not just of it but in it and unable to take a view from where I live now, 14,000 feet.
And see it for what it is and portray it for what it is.
You're such a nice person. Values challenged.
Saying that Washington is values challenged is like saying that I'm Mohawk challenged.
It's a very, very nice way of putting it.
That's very nice. Now, this I think also is interesting regarding all of these allegations and what might sort of play out.
Because I wonder, I've always been kind of confused By this view of there's a rape culture and men are predators and there's this horrible patriarchy that's oppressing and demonizing everyone else and so on.
I've never quite understood where this comes from because I'm a nice guy.
All my male friends are nice guys.
Wouldn't dream of doing anything nasty like this.
And it's like, I think I'm starting to understand where some of the leftists are getting this view from because they seem to be surrounded by extraordinary orc-style creeps.
men who are around you for men as a whole.
I mean, I guess if I was surrounded by a phalanx of Harvey Weinstein grabby fingered clones, I'd probably think that masculinity was kind of toxic to begin with.
But you're not saying anything about men as a whole or the patriarchy.
You're kind of saying about the people that you're around, the men that you're around, and consequently your own nature.
And I think to me, that's one way of cracking the code as to why it seems that negative patriarchy is so omnipresent for these people, because I think all the men around them are pretty crappy.
Yes, it is the wildest kind of psychological projection.
And I have to say...
You know, having grown up outside of these power centers in the small rural area in South Jersey, having attended college in a small town outside of Cleveland, and then having lived all over the country, and especially the last more than a decade now in the Rocky Mountain West, Most men are not like this.
Most of the men that we expose our family and ourselves to are honorable, upright people.
And sure, they may come from all parts of the political and ideological spectrum, but they do not do the kinds of things that Harvey Weinstein in his robe or Charlie Rose in his robe or Matt Lauer and his various toys in his locked dungeon at 30 Rock did.
And these strange swamps and cesspools of predatory men and women who are completely defenseless, that's the other part of the equation that I'd like to get to, too, because when I worked in New York and DC and LA,
There was a very noticeable and distinct prototype of female who was willing to do anything and say anything to get ahead.
And the idea that someone like Angela Lansbury is not allowed to say out loud that, yes, many times women are culpable for the kinds of things that they say that they are victim of.
That's the kind of culture that I was getting away from.
And, you know, the types of radical feminists that I met at Oberlin that I now see, you know, inhabiting these newsrooms are so much of the toxic feminist-y problem, you know, in the public square.
And Lena Dunham, by the way, was one of them, an alum of Oberlin College as well.
Yes, with her own accusations as well.
It sort of reminds me of when I was doing my master's degree and I was talking to this woman who was quite the feminist.
And she was telling me this hair-raising story of how she got a flat on the highway in the middle of nowhere.
And don't you know, Michelle, a guy in a pickup truck stopped.
And her heart was pounding and she was terrified.
She's like, why the heck was I so anti-gun?
I'm going to need to defend myself.
And she just basically had the story of how this guy...
In a red baseball cap, helped her to change her tire and then drove off.
And she said this like it was just astounding, like a statue in Japan came to life.
You know, it's like, no, this is pretty common.
You know, oh, you're someone in need.
We're going to stop and we're going to help.
And it was just like she had discovered a new species of man who was helpful and not predatory.
And it's like, I don't know who you've been hanging out with, but that's not as uncommon as you might think.
Yeah. Yeah. I've marveled at all of the stories of the supposed predators in these journalistic circles, the liberal male journalists who have always enjoyed that shield that you were talking about that surrounds Democrat politicians.
And the thing is that, just as we've been talking about with the false rape allegations, I think that we're going to know in 12 to 18 months that You know, possibly half of these allegations turn out to be false.
And I would like to know if those liberal male journalists are going to learn something.
And I also would like to know if some of them might possibly start to get interested in better reporting on these false allegation stories.
And policing some of these feminist journalists that I'm telling you about.
Sabrina Eardley is not the only one out there who's been let loose to damage men's lives.
Well, I hope that you're right.
My skepticism is that it is a lot easier to repeat horrifying allegations than it is to learn how to reason and debate and work from first principles.
And I think the kind of people who end up flinging this kind of mud are not the kind of people who end up saying, well, you know, we've got to reevaluate this.
because as soon as they say, well, women can lie about these things, as can men, therefore we need to have standards, therefore we can't repeat everything, they lose a very powerful weapon in their arsenal of political dominance.
And they then do have to start learning something about political philosophy, reason, evidence, argumentation, and they might lose.
And slander is so much easier.
Unfortunately, in a relatively corrupted culture, slander is so much easier.
I think you kind of need a different kind of person, which is, again, where, you know, CRTV, what I do, Michelle Malkin investigates.
This is where it comes along.
I don't know that we can teach them to be like us, but I do hope that people will start listening to us a lot more than them, because I think it might just be an either or situation.
You're either going to go to people who are going to manipulate you or people who are going to inform you.
And I think given the rise of what we're doing and the diminishment of the mainstream media, people are making the wiser choice.
I hope so, too.
I'm not going to lie and say that I don't have some small amount of schadenfreude watching so many of these liberals squirm when the weapons are turned and the tables are turned on them.
But I do still hold out this ultimate hope that they will learn from their own experiences, having to climb out of the bottom of a pit, the pit of false accusations, and do some good in the world.
But until then, yes, I mean, that's what we're about.
And, you know, I live this sort of dual existence, because on the one hand, I make my living as a cable news pundit out there pontificating about politics.
But for me, especially the last year, has been so edifying to do this kind of investigative work and to really be able to undertake the search for truth and take people along with me on that journey.
It's something that you do every single day.
You know, with your videos.
And so the work that I'm doing at CRTV really has been the most gratifying work that I've done over the last quarter century.
Oh, schadenfreude.
For breakfast, for lunch, and for dinner.
No, it's a beautiful thing. And I do...
The one thing I don't have much patience for is when the mainstream media, which has been...
They've been liars and bullies because they've had almost unquestioned dominance and power up until the rise of the internet and the alternative media.
Whenever... You know, they make their money to a large degree in the past.
They made their money by lying about good people.
And now when good people are turning around and telling the truth about the media, suddenly they're appalled and they feel bullied and they're so frail and they're so fragile.
And it's like, oh, come on, you cry bullies.
Suck it up. You've been doing it for about 300 years.
It's okay for you to get a tiny taste of your own medicine.
After you've been administering poison and we administer medicine, I think you can live with it.
So, Thanks so much for your time today.
I look forward to people's comments below.
Just wanted to remind people, you've got to pick up this book, Sold Out, How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Belkway Crap Reasons Are Screwing America's Best and Brightest Workers, a fascinating expose on the H-1B visa scam and other things which are triggering mass unemployment in America.
