After all the fallout from Al Franken, it appears that no one really cares about bad conduct. Even sexual harassment and assault can be made into partisan issues. President Trump finally sounds off on Judge Roy Moore, plus Al Franken. And we go to the mailbag. Guests: Leigh Ann Tweeden, a talk show host, says Al Franken groped her while she was sleeping, and Leanne Tweeden says he rammed his tongue down her throat during a rehearsal when he was a comedian and said he tried to kiss her. Thanks to our sponsor, Quip! Quip is a new company refreshing the way people brush their teeth. It s an electric toothbrush that packs premium vibration and timer features into an ultra-slim design, half the cost of bulkier brushes. It's a battery-powered toothbrushes that also lets you know that you don t have to bring your toothbrush with you on the road. We're good to go! Shout out to Quip for sponsoring the show! Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. His work can be found on all social medias, if you search for "Ben Shapiro" and "The Ben Shapiro Show." He can be reached at ben.shapiro@whatiwatchedtonight.co/theflicktr.ee/TheBenShapiroShow. He also writes for the New York Times, and is a regular contributor on the radio show "The View From The Top" and radio show on SiriusXM's Morning Mashup, where he also hosts a podcast called "The Real Reel" and hosts a show on his own radio show. If you're looking for a hot take, be sure to check out his podcast on the Real Talk Radio show on all things politics and culture and social media, Ben Shapiro's podcast on The Real Talk. You can reach Ben Shapiro on social media on . and his podcast is . He's also on The Ben Shapiro Podcast on , if you're on Insta: or if you like what he's drinking, on , and he's on The podcast on the Podcast is on Instapaper, and Insta on on Social Media: , or INSTAGRAM: . Also, check out Ben Shapiro s Insta is Can't Say It Anymore?
00:00:21.000We were only on the edge of the flaming garbage pile yesterday, but today we are definitely in the center of the flaming garbage heap.
00:00:27.000After all the fallout from Al Franken, after the fact that it now appears that every Democrat will end up standing with Al Franken, and it appears that every Republican, or a lot of Republicans, will end up standing with Roy Moore, it appears that no one really cares about bad conduct, which is very upsetting to me personally, because I don't like that.
00:00:43.000But we will talk about all of these things in just one second.
00:00:47.000I want to say thank you to our friends over at Quip.
00:00:49.000So, if you are concerned about not just your oral hygiene, but your actual health, then you should be concerned about how you brush your teeth, because there actually is connection between how you brush your teeth and things like heart health according to studies.
00:01:50.000It's the toothbrush that I use, and it's also great if you want to bring it on the road, as opposed to other electric toothbrushes that have a huge, you know, kind of recharging mechanism.
00:02:23.000She's a talk show host out here in Los Angeles, and she alleges that Al Franken groped her while she was sleeping, and then during a rehearsal,
00:02:30.000He had written a kiss into a scene when he was a comedian and said he rammed his tongue down her throat, which is just disgusting.
00:02:35.000And so all of this had created an enormous amount of controversy.
00:02:40.000In fact, we can start with Leigh-Anne Tweeden talking about Franken.
00:02:43.000Here is what Leigh-Anne Tweeden had to say about Frankenstein's Clip 9.
00:02:46.000The world that you're making for your children, for your two-year-old and for your four-year-old, you realize that you are making it better for them.
00:02:53.000I don't know the genders of your children, but it actually doesn't even matter.
00:03:22.000You know, you try to set examples for your children, right?
00:03:25.000You want to leave the world a better place.
00:03:27.000Okay, and so the allegations against Franken are obviously serious enough that yesterday a bunch of people said, well, we'll start a Senate Ethics Committee investigation.
00:03:35.000And Franken himself calls for a Senate Ethics Investigation.
00:04:21.000The fact is that the left is willing to throw people under the bus when they're no longer useful to them, but they want to stick with them when they are useful, right?
00:04:26.000When it's Bill Clinton, now they can throw Bill Clinton under the bus.
00:04:29.000There have been a bunch of articles this week about how Bill Clinton should have resigned in 1998.
00:04:33.000Thanks for getting around to it 19 years late, gang.
00:04:35.000And now, there are a bunch of articles about how Al Franken should stick around.
00:04:37.000So there's a woman named Kate Harding, who's the co-editor of Nasty Women, Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America.
00:04:44.000She hosts a podcast called Feminasty, which sounds like death on the ears.
00:04:49.000And here is what, and she wrote a piece for the Washington Post today called, I'm a feminist, I study rape culture, and I don't want Al Franken to resign.
00:04:58.000She says, as a feminist and the author of a book on rape culture, I could reasonably be expected to lead the calls for Al Franken to step down, following allegations that he forced his tongue down a woman's throat, accompanied by a photo of him grinning as he moves in to grope her breasts while she sleeps.
00:05:12.000He treated a sleeping woman as a comedy prop, no more human than the contents of Carrot Top's trunk, and I firmly believe he should suffer social and professional consequences for it.
00:05:19.000But I don't believe resigning from his position is the only possible consequence, or the one that's best for American women.
00:05:24.000Cynics on both the right and left will presume I am passing by this particular steam tray on 2017's smorgasbord of feminist outrage because Franken is a Democrat, and so am I. I was even his proud constituent for two years.
00:05:35.000In the most superficial sense, this is true.
00:05:36.000And that's not just the most superficial, that's like the only sense.
00:05:41.000That you'd think Franken is going to vote the way you want him to vote, and so you're fine with this.
00:05:44.000This is just a variation on the old Time Magazine columnist Nina Berle's comment about Bill Clinton that she'd be willing to offer him oral sex so long as he kept abortion legal.
00:05:53.000And we're seeing this on both sides of the aisle now, and it's just gross.
00:05:56.000And I think it's something we need to come to grips with, our own grossness as humans, before we can actually fix it.
00:06:01.000People talk about raising awareness, so I'm not into raising awareness when it's counterproductive, but I think it is about raising awareness when it comes to examining your own political motives, because I think that we all have political motives, and that leads us into certain cul-de-sacs of partisan aggression that I think are negative.
00:06:18.000It's meaningless to say it's because I'm a Democrat without asking why I am a Democrat.
00:06:22.000If you understand what it means to be a Democrat today, that is, why it makes sense to vote blue over red in this highly polarized political environment, you can understand why it might not make the most sense to demand Franken's resignation effective immediately.
00:06:32.000I'm a Democrat because I'm a feminist who lives under a two-party system.
00:06:35.000I am not a true believer in the party, nor in any politician.
00:06:38.000I'm a realist who recognizes we get two viable choices.
00:06:40.000So this is the exact argument, the exact argument, that is now being used to back Roy Moore.
00:06:50.000But if the short-term right thing leads to long-term political catastrophe for American women, I think we need to reconsider our definition of the right thing.
00:06:56.000Okay, so this is the exact opposite of the argument.
00:06:59.000I mean, it's the same argument, actually, that's being made.
00:07:01.000It's just the photo negative of the argument that's being made by a lot of people who are backing Roy Moore saying, listen, if Doug Jones gets in the Senate, he's going to vote for abortion.
00:07:14.000And the problem is, if both sides make this argument, we will get people who are alleged sexual molesters and sexual assaulters in the Senate Chaka Block.
00:07:50.000If we're to the point where we believe that sexual molestation or sexual assault allegations can be put by the wayside because it's more important to defeat the other side, then we can't live in a republic with each other.
00:08:12.000So, you know, for example, Roy Moore has been hit with all of these terrible allegations.
00:08:18.000He's coming back now, and he's saying that Mitch McConnell should step down.
00:08:21.000So the more partisan Roy Moore gets, the more he knows he's protected.
00:08:24.000The harder a position he takes, the more fiery a position he takes, the more he knows that there are people who are going to rally to his side to quote-unquote oppose the other side.
00:08:31.000So here is Roy Moore attacking Mitch McConnell, saying McConnell should be the one who steps down, not me.
00:08:36.000Well, I want to tell you who needs to step down.
00:09:37.000Now Menendez is coming out and making this partisan and making it even more partisan.
00:09:41.000We now live in a dynamic where the more partisan you can make any issue, any personal issue, the better chance you have of surviving it, right?
00:09:48.000Bill Clinton was able to turn sexual molestation allegations, sexual misconduct allegations.
00:09:54.000He was able to turn those allegations in his own favor by suggesting that it was a vast right-wing conspiracy.
00:10:34.000Everyone who backed him, he'll remember and he will love you.
00:10:38.000I mean, this is mafioso-type language, right?
00:10:40.000And if you didn't back him, I'll remember you and I will never forget you.
00:10:44.000Your name will be emblazoned on my memory forever.
00:10:47.000Again, if you can use partisanship to distract from your own misconduct, then we're just gonna get the worst of the worst in every situation.
00:10:56.000Okay, so finally, here's what happens.
00:10:58.000The poll in Alabama right now with Roy Moore, the latest poll from Fox News shows that Roy Moore is down eight.
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00:12:55.000He said that Colin Kaepernick is a son of a bitch who should be fired.
00:12:58.000Right, even though he wasn't really in the NFL at the time.
00:13:00.000And, you know, I may agree with his assessments on people who kneel for the anthem, and I may agree that Jemele Hill, not that she should be fired, I don't think she should have been fired, but that she was wrong in her assessment of politics.
00:13:10.000But he's been completely silent on Roy Moore for over a week, even though he endorsed Roy Moore after Roy Moore won the primary.
00:13:16.000So finally, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is trotted out to answer questions about Roy Moore.
00:13:21.000And what this does demonstrate, by the way, is that Sean Hannity and the White House are very much in coordination because, as you recall, Sean Hannity, the night before last, came out and said that he wanted to let the people of Alabama decide.
00:13:31.000The White House is giving exactly the same message.
00:13:34.000Apparently there were reports that Sean had been getting calls from Bannon and from the White House saying, back off Roy Moore a little bit.
00:13:40.000So the White House is also backing off of Roy Moore.
00:13:42.000Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that Trump thinks the people of Alabama ought to decide, which is a truism.
00:14:00.000All the things Trump has taken a position on, but here he chooses to go strategically silent.
00:14:04.000The reason that that's bad is not just because I think it's immoral, even though I do think it's immoral.
00:14:08.000The reason that I think it's bad is because Donald Trump is one of the very few people in America who could actually make a difference in this Senate race and actually make sure that Republicans keep the seat without that seat being Roy Moore's.
00:14:18.000Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though, basically kicking the can down the road.
00:14:21.000The president believes that these allegations are very troubling and should be taken seriously, and he thinks that the people of Alabama should make the decision on who their next senator should be.
00:14:32.000So that's a no, he thinks Roy Moore should stay in?
00:14:34.000Look, the president said in his statement earlier this week that if the allegations are true, then that Roy Moore should step aside.
00:15:35.000He says, the Al Frankenstein picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words.
00:15:39.000Where do his hands go in pictures two, three, four, five, and six while she sleeps?
00:15:43.000And then he continues along these lines, and he says, and to think that just last week he was lecturing anyone who would listen about sexual harassment and respect for women.
00:15:51.000The Leslie Stahl tape is a reference to him making jokes about sexually abusing Leslie Stahl while she's asleep or something.
00:15:58.000Now, so, you know, Trump is perfectly willing to sound off about Franken.
00:16:02.000Now, a lot of people on the right love this about Trump, that he's not shy about sounding off about political opposition.
00:16:06.000And when it comes to the partisan battles, this is the thing that they really enjoy about Trump, is that Trump is always happy to throw a punch in the other direction.
00:16:12.000This is also a really stupid strategy, okay?
00:16:14.000The reason this is a stupid strategy is we are now going to get a full week of talk about all of the sexual harassment and abuse allegations against Donald Trump, okay?
00:16:23.000There were something like 15 or 16 women who made sexual assault or harassment allegations against Trump at the end of the last election cycle.
00:16:29.000We had not yet had the Harvey Weinstein blow up, so now we're gonna get to redo all of that, which is really, really exciting.
00:16:34.000And it's one of the reasons, by the way, I think that Trump has not actually
00:16:57.000Huckabee Sanders was specifically asked by a reporter over at Fox News about this, right?
00:17:00.000Here's Huckabee Sanders being asked to comment on the allegations against Trump.
00:17:04.000We should find one set of allegations very troubling and on the other we shouldn't pay attention to them at all or we should totally disbelieve them.
00:17:10.000Well I think the president has certainly a lot more insight into what he personally did or didn't do and he spoke out about that directly during the campaign and I don't have anything further to add beyond that.
00:17:22.000Okay, so basically, we're going to keep silent on this because we don't want the blowback to come back around.
00:17:27.000This is the problem with having our standards.
00:17:31.000Okay, we have our own double standard, and then our politicians pay the price for the double standard.
00:17:34.000On the one hand, we say that if they're on our side, we don't care.
00:17:37.000And on the other side, on the other hand, we say if they're not on our side, we do care.
00:17:40.000That double standard has ramifications for politicians, because it means that Trump is going to want to condemn Al Franken, but if he condemns Al Franken, it's going to come back around to Trump, and then the right is going to have to suggest that the allegations about Trump are not credible, but the allegations against Franken are super credible, which I don't buy, by the way.
00:17:55.000I think the allegations against Trump were credible during the primaries, or during the general election.
00:18:00.000I, again, don't say that you shouldn't have voted for Trump to stop Hillary, but I do think that
00:18:05.000You know, I didn't vote at the top of the ticket because I take these things very, very seriously.
00:18:10.000So, you know, the idea that we can have as a people this double standard in our mind, that has to change.
00:18:16.000So, either we're going to say as a public, we're going to say as a public one of two things.
00:18:19.000We care about these allegations enough to get rid of people.
00:18:22.000Doesn't matter their political affiliation.
00:18:23.000Or we don't care enough to get rid of people.
00:18:25.000Doesn't matter their political affiliation.
00:18:27.000We're gonna have to make that decision.
00:18:29.000Otherwise, we just have this hypocritical standard.
00:18:31.000Now, I do want to talk a little bit about the generalized societal problem that's coming up with some of these sexual harassment allegations.
00:18:37.000And that is, as I've said now for a couple of weeks, really six weeks since the Harvey Weinstein stuff broke,
00:18:42.000We as a society do not have a consistent standard that we are applying with regard to what sort of allegations to take seriously and what sort of allegations not to take seriously.
00:18:51.000So, the reason that I say this is because we are treating sexual harassment allegations where a guy, you know, said something nasty and untoward to a woman the same as we are treating rape allegations.
00:19:03.000I think that you can condemn both, but I don't think they are worthy of equal levels of condemnation.
00:19:07.000You know, for example, there is the actress Ellen Page.
00:19:11.000And Ellen Page had this whole thing about...
00:19:14.000My director she worked with, or a fellow actor she worked with, I can't remember who she's talking about, who had said something, was it Ratner?
00:19:20.000It was about Ratner, I guess, who's had a lot of sexual allegations made against him.
00:19:25.000And she says that Brett Ratner at one point made some sort of nasty lesbian reference to her on the set.
00:19:45.000They're both bad, but they're not quite the same kind of bad.
00:19:48.000Rape and sexual assault are not the same thing as sexual harassment, and conflating the two actually ends up making light of sexual assault, because it allows people to shluff it off.
00:19:55.000It allows people to basically say, okay, that's the same as saying something nasty.
00:20:00.000Well, sexually harassing a woman and sexually assaulting a woman are not quite the same thing.
00:20:03.000They're both bad, but they are different levels of bad.
00:20:13.000So I think that we need to be careful about the standards that we apply and also the credibility of particular standards.
00:20:20.000The reason that I've been so harsh on Roy Moore is because I find the allegations particularly credible because they're supporting details.
00:20:26.000It's the reason I found Juanita Broderick to be credible.
00:20:29.000She was in the place she said she was at the time she said she was.
00:20:32.000There were contemporaneous people that she had told at the time.
00:20:35.000But I think that one of the things that is going to happen now is the hysteria is so loud and so much that there's the possibility that we're going to jump to conclusions.
00:20:46.000I've called for a certain level of credibility, but I think that we should determine for ourselves what exactly that level of credibility is.
00:20:52.000In other words, I'm calling for a standard because otherwise sexual harassment, sexual abuse, these are just going to become clubs that you can wield against the other side rather than a real attempt to cleanse the society of a grave evil.
00:21:04.000So I think that's worth commenting upon.
00:21:34.000You may get less sexual harassment if women, there are more women in Congress, I think you probably would, but that doesn't mean that the legislation would be any better or that they wouldn't cover for bad behavior, okay?
00:21:42.000That's just the reality of the situation.
00:21:45.000We as a society have abandoned a particular moral standard, and that moral standard comes with consequences.
00:21:53.000Sexual harassment, sexual abuse, these have always happened.
00:21:56.000But we also used to have certain standards of behavior that we demanded from our politicians and that we demanded from people more generally.
00:22:20.000Before I go any further and I want to get to some things I like and things I hate and I really want to spend some time with the mailbag today.
00:22:25.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Upside.com.
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00:24:07.000The other one that I saw was The Lost City of Z. The marketing campaign for this movie was really quite terrible.
00:24:12.000One of the reasons the marketing campaign was terrible is if you looked at some of the original posters, it was not clear this was a period piece.
00:24:17.000This is a better poster for Lost City of Z. Makes clear that this is a period piece about exploration.
00:24:24.000I'm not a big Charlie Hunnam fan, I find him mannered, but Robert Pattinson gives a terrific performance.
00:24:28.000I didn't even know Robert Pattinson could act.
00:24:48.000As Mathis was pointing out to me before the show, both Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart can act, but as Donald Trump said, she cheated on him like a dog, and she'll do it again, just watch.
00:24:59.000So, Robert Pattinson is very, very good in this movie.
00:25:02.000The movie is about an explorer named Fawcett, and he is searching for this city in the Amazon
00:25:10.000He thinks that there is this lost city in the Amazon, this sort of city of gold, and he goes searching for it, and he sort of leaves his wife and children behind.
00:25:18.000His wife's played by Sienna Miller, who's quite good in the film, and all the performances, actually, across the board, except for Hunnam's, are pretty good.
00:25:25.000So here is a little bit of the preview.
00:25:27.000To dream, to seek the unknown, to look for what is beautiful is its own reward.
00:25:35.000A man's reach should exceed his grasp.
00:26:00.000Okay, so the preview is, you can see, it's beautifully directed, it's really well acted, it's really Oscar-bait, and it's been largely ignored.
00:26:08.000It didn't do any sort of business at the theater so far as I can tell, even though it's got a bunch of big-name actors and a really big budget and it's beautifully shot, there's a whole World War I sequence that's really well done.
00:26:22.000It sort of tries to be, and it sort of tries to be politically correct at the same time.
00:26:27.000There are a few kind of politically correct tropes in there, but it's well worth watching.
00:26:29.000Okay, so I have more things that I like and some things that I hate in the mailbag, but for that you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:26:35.000For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to dailywire.com.
00:26:39.000That means that you get the rest of my show on video live.
00:26:41.000It means that you get to be part of the mailbag.
00:26:42.000So if you subscribe right this minute,
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00:26:50.000You also get the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, the rest of Michael Knowles' show live.
00:26:53.000We're gonna start doing a new show on Fridays that should be pretty great, where we just sit around and discuss culture, me and Klavan and Knowles and Jeremy Boring, the god-king of Daily Wire.
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00:27:23.000I will call it a mug, just to spite Steven Crowder.
00:27:28.000If you just want to listen later, go over to YouTube, subscribe, make sure that you go to iTunes and SoundCloud, subscribe there, and leave us a review.
00:28:39.000But when my daughter, who's older, she's three and a half, when she treats my son really well and when she gets up in the morning, he loves her.
00:30:27.000The poor have gotten richer, the rich have gotten richer over the past 30 years, for sure.
00:30:32.000And the idea that tax cuts solely benefit the people at the top of the spectrum is just not true, considering that the people at the top of the spectrum are paying nearly all of the net income tax in the United States.
00:30:42.000Okay, time for some things I hate, and then we'll mailbag it up.
00:30:48.000Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate.
00:30:50.000So Hillary Clinton, yesterday, she was asked about an investigation into her.
00:31:18.000She gets all of her clothes made from curtains.
00:31:19.000In any case, here is Hillary Clinton talking about why an investigation into her would be an abuse of power.
00:31:25.000If I try to take myself out of it, which you know is kind of hard because it's personally offensive that they would do this, but taking myself out of it, this is such an abuse of power.
00:31:41.000Okay, so it goes against the rule of law when she's investigated, but it doesn't go against the rule of law when Jim Comey of the FBI coordinates with the Obama administration to let her off without evidence.
00:34:22.000It says, the painting's basic looping motif was a recurring theme in Twombly's art.
00:34:25.000This form fascinated him for several years.
00:34:27.000In the meandering scrawl of the blackboard paintings of the late 1960s, he explored its capacity to convey, through repetition, a sense of single, continuous fields of energy.
00:34:35.000Here, Twombly revisited and developed this line in an epic scale.
00:34:55.000Not to get into deep philosophy here about art, but one of the things that makes art art is a certain amount of skill.
00:35:01.000To be an artist means that you have perfected your craft.
00:35:04.000There's a difference between somebody like me, who's very good at violin, and somebody who's legitimately virtuosic on violin, and the difference is that person has more craft than I do.
00:35:10.000I've talked about art and craft before.
00:35:12.000I've talked about the idea that craft requires skill, and what I hate about modern art
00:37:44.000It's been natural since childhood, I assume.
00:37:47.000There are certain kind of facial tics that everyone has, and that's just one of mine.
00:37:51.000The other one that I have is when I'm thinking, I tend to kind of roll my eyes a little bit, and I've been working on that one because it annoys me and my wife.
00:38:01.000So if you have any suggestions, Kyle, we're perfectly willing to take those under advisement.
00:38:05.000In response to that article, a liberal friend of mine commented, saying,
00:38:23.000Well, actually Venezuela is a better example of socialism since it has more government running of resources.
00:38:28.000So socialism and communism are based on state ownership of resources.
00:38:31.000If you want to talk about heavy regulation and redistribution of resources, that really is less socialism than it is what they call sort of modified capitalism.
00:38:39.000Germany is much more along those lines than it is, like Germany is closer in economics to the United States than it is to Venezuela.
00:38:46.000And the idea that because Germany has extensive social programs that it is a socialist country is just not true.
00:38:53.000In the same way that people say Denmark is a socialist country except that it has some of the lowest corporate tax rates on planet Earth and some of the laxest business regulations.
00:39:01.000They have very high personal income tax rates.
00:39:03.000And they have a social safety net that's very extensive.
00:39:05.000They've had to cut all of that back because they're bankrupting themselves.
00:39:08.000So even Germany isn't a good example of how you can have a lasting economic success.
00:39:12.000Like, Germany has had some economic success in the European context compared to their economy in the United States.
00:40:26.000My wife and I are going away for Thanksgiving, but we are doing Thanksgiving dinner in the evening early because we need to have my mom's cooking.
00:41:51.000Was meant to be taken supremely literally along those lines, but I'm not sure how you would convey that the Earth is hundreds of thousands of years old and evolution existed in a document that was created 3,000 years ago for people who had no idea what evolution is, had no idea what species were, had no idea about periods of time.
00:42:11.000I mean, how do you explain carbon dating?
00:42:12.000So, yeah, I think that God has a bit of a rough road to hoe in terms of communication with human beings.
00:42:18.000He's always bound by the capacity of human beings to understand, which is pretty clear even from the biblical text.
00:42:22.000When Moses said, to God, let me see your face, and God says, I can't let you see my face or you'll die.
00:42:28.000Perfect communication between God and man is not a real possibility, in the sense that everything is always going to be filtered through the prism of the mind, and God knows that.
00:42:37.000Josh says, if the founders were alive today to see what America has become,
00:42:40.000What do you think they might wish they could go back and change or do differently?
00:42:43.000Well, I think that the problem, well, listen, I think if the founders were alive today and, you know, many of them were not raised in a context in which slavery was appropriate, they would abolish slavery right off the bat.
00:42:55.000I think that they would also be a little bit less sanguine about the power of the judiciary.
00:42:59.000I think that they would also tremendously oppose the power of the bureaucracy and they would put restrictions in the Constitution against it.
00:43:07.000The Constitution is a pretty good document.
00:43:08.000I'm not sure what exactly they would change in order to prohibit what happened, because all of the problems with the Constitution in terms of government growth have been specifically variations from the Constitution.
00:43:18.000So that's not because the founders embedded anything in there that's wrong.
00:43:21.000They might have taken some of the anti-federalist critiques a little bit more seriously about the possibility of growth of federal power, but it's also important to recognize that at the time, they were fighting against the Articles of Confederation, which were the weakest form of government known to man, essentially.
00:43:33.000Ryan says, So the idea here is that you are, you know, should you vote for somebody who is moral but disagrees with you?
00:43:37.000Or should you vote for somebody who is questionable but agrees with you?
00:43:50.000So I, again, I'm going to reject the false binary that we live in a system where we can't select moral men who agree with us.
00:43:56.000But if the false binary is would I rather have people who are personally saints but vote for socialism versus would I rather have people who are child molesters but agree with me, if that is the false binary we are creating, of course you would have to say that you would vote for the person who most represents your priorities.
00:44:31.000The idea that how you vote in this election impacts how the country moves in future elections is a fact.
00:44:36.000The moral character of a country is built off of repeated trials and errors.
00:44:40.000Okay, you don't get to take one election and take it and crystallize it and say this is the only election that has ever mattered in the history of the world.
00:44:46.000When you do that, you end up in a world of false binaries and that's how you end up with a bunch of bad choices.
00:44:50.000I think that how you vote in elections, how you decide this, makes a difference.
00:44:55.000If you were to ask me, is it worth sacrificing one election so we can have a better country where there's the possibility that everyone requires good people to be in office?
00:45:03.000And so next time my choice isn't between a questionable conservative and a socialist saint, it's between a socialist saint and a conservative saint, then that's something that I think is worth sacrificing for.
00:45:13.000I think that if we all hold by that standard, then we'll have more saints in office and fewer sinners.
00:45:19.000And more saints who agree with us in office, and fewer sinners who agree with us in office.
00:45:23.000So, the whole premise of my logic on this, politically, is that sometimes you have to take a short-term loss in order to make a long-term gain.
00:45:32.000But I think that we live in an era where
00:45:34.000If you think that we can't take a short-term loss, that it's the end of the world if we lose something, or that even the possibility of losing means that we have to vote a certain way, everything is crisis point.
00:45:45.000A lot of exigent circumstances require you to make bad decisions, and I think that that's where we are repeatedly in politics, and I don't think that's where we ought to be.
00:45:55.000Lynn says, Ben if you were given the task to run a high school without the Department of Education getting in your way, what would you be teaching the students and why?
00:46:27.000I'd be teaching people that happiness is reliant on you being a virtuous human being and here are the ways that you can make your life more enlightened and more virtuous.
00:46:36.000By the way, the founders agreed with me.
00:46:38.000George Washington talked routinely about this being the role of education in a free society.
00:46:42.000A society that does not inculcate virtue in the young is likely to crumble when they're old.
00:46:46.000If not, how are judges able to block these executive actions?
00:46:55.000The basic rule, I believe, is that the federal funding must be tied to something that has to do with it being a sanctuary city.
00:47:02.000So this was ruled during, I believe, the Reagan era, because Reagan tried to remove federal funding from certain states that were not cracking down on drunk driving in the way that he wanted.
00:47:13.000And so what they said is that the funding that he's removing has to be somehow logically connected to the cause that he's attempting to push.
00:47:19.000You can't just randomly remove all funding
00:47:23.000Michael says, So, the greater overarching cause that these sexual assault charges stem from is, again, failure to teach virtue.
00:47:28.000Teaching boys not to rape is easy, but if it has no context, if you're not teaching boys an affirmative virtue,
00:47:45.000Then they're likely to fall into temptation more often.
00:47:49.000The same thing is true for young women who are being told that, listen, sexual assault is not the fault of women, it's the fault of the people who do the sexual assaulting.
00:47:56.000But you're increasing risk when you tell people that a libertine sexual order in which consent is the only value is likely to lead to happiness.
00:48:34.000So Christian, as you may have seen, in my debates, when I say, if you're gonna have a government-run system, it should look like the Swiss healthcare system, I think that's right, but I don't think that a government-run healthcare system is the best healthcare system.
00:48:45.000Switzerland provides universality and quality, but not affordability.
00:48:49.000It's very, very expensive in Switzerland, but is the United States willing to absorb those costs?
00:48:54.000I'm not sure the United States is willing to absorb those costs.
00:48:57.000Also, you need to worry about the creation of new products and services as opposed to the redistribution of existing ones, and a capitalist market is the best way to do that.
00:49:08.000Braden says, Ben, I'm 22 years old and married, making a good living.
00:49:11.000My wife wants a baby, as do I. However, I'm afraid to be a dad because I didn't have one growing up and don't have all great reference points to go off from my youth.
00:49:19.000Well, Braden, I think that the fact that you acknowledge this as a problem is one of the reasons why it sounds to me like you're going to be in good shape to have a kid.
00:49:25.000Recognizing your own flaws as a person, recognizing your own shortcomings in your childhood, things you want to do better, is a great way to raise kids.
00:49:33.000Because it means that you're going to be thinking.
00:49:36.000If you're truly worried about sin, if you're truly concerned about your own level of sinfulness, you are less likely to sin than if you're blithe about your sin.
00:49:43.000And if you're truly worried about making mistakes, that means you're gonna think twice before you make those mistakes.
00:49:47.000So, what I would say is that you sound, I think you and your wife, it sounds like, would make very good parents.
00:49:53.000And, you know, if you're looking for great reference points, then try to find people who you think are great parents, get close to them, and try to learn from them.
00:50:00.000And try to put yourself in situations where you can learn from other men you admire.
00:50:05.000My dad always said this when I was growing up, that he liked to have friends where I could look up to them also and admire them.
00:50:10.000And people who treated me well as well.
00:50:12.000I think that you can do that too, and I think that'd be a worthwhile thing.
00:50:14.000Okay, so, we will be back here on Monday.
00:50:17.000Hopefully the world will not implode in our absence.
00:50:19.000It's gonna be Thanksgiving week next week, so let's try to have a happy week, that'd be nice.
00:50:23.000Have a great weekend, I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.