A Republican state rep just killed himself after sexual molestation allegations, Joe Biden makes a power move, and Democrats are getting out of control in Alabama. Ben Shapiro talks about it all on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. Plus, a bizarre New York Times article that makes no sense whatsoever, and a crazy story about a GOP state rep in, I guess, Kentucky who shot and killed himself days after denying allegations of sexual misconduct. Ben also talks about 9/11 and why God loves all people no matter what they do, no matter who they are, and why we should blame the accuser, not the accuser. And, of course, Ben talks about how to deal with the aftermath of a tragedy like this and why you should never blame anyone but yourself for a tragedy that happens in your own life. Thanks to our sponsor Mancrates for sponsoring the show! ManCRates is the surest way to become a real man, and you too can become a REAL MAN! Get 5% off your order at ManCRATES.COM and you'll get 5% OFF your order of 5-star reviews and 5% of your entire purchase when you place it through ManCRATE CRUDE CRATE CRATE. That's 5 stars and a 5 star guarantee! It's not a cheese of the month club, it's a high-five guarantee of course! You'll get five-star service that makes you a better man, not just better at being a man, but a better than you, you'll become a man. . - Ben Shapiro's ManCRATCHES! Ben's not here to make you better, he's here to help make you feel good, you're there to help you feel better, you can help you be a better guy, not only better, and he'll help you become a better dude, too. Ben's here for you, too! - he's gonna help you, he'll be there to make it so you can be better at it. - you can do it, too, you know who you're gonna be better than that, right? and he's there to support you, so you don't have to be there for it, right there, too you can make it, you won t have to do it with him, right he'll know it, so YOU can be there, right you'll have it, he won't have it too?
00:00:00.000A Republican lawmaker just killed himself after sexual molestation allegations, Joe Biden makes a power move, and Democrats are getting out a little bit over their skis over Alabama.
00:00:15.000Okay, so we have a lot to get to today.
00:00:18.000As always, a crazy article from the New Yorker, a bizarre sort of study that comes out from the New York Times that makes no sense whatsoever, and, of course, this crazy story about a GOP state rep in, I guess, Kentucky, who shot and killed himself after allegations of sexual molestation.
00:00:34.000We'll talk about all of that in the fallout.
00:00:35.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at ManCrate.
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00:02:08.000Apparently, there is a GOP lawmaker in Kentucky who shot himself days after denying allegations of sexual misconduct.
00:02:14.000So according to a report from a local radio station, his name is Representative Dan Johnson, and he reportedly shot and killed himself on a bridge in Mount Washington, Kentucky.
00:02:22.000Police told WDRB they've recovered the gun that he used.
00:02:26.000The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting published an expose with an accuser who is a friend of his daughter saying that Johnson raped her when she was 17.
00:02:34.000She alleged the assault took place in 2012 at a New Year's Eve sleepover party when he was a pastor.
00:03:47.000So, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say this guy had some mental trouble before he shot himself.
00:03:51.000The reason I'm gonna say that is because of references like 9-11, PTSD, 24-7, 16 years of sickness that will take my life, I can't handle it any longer.
00:04:01.000It's obviously a tragedy for the guy's family.
00:04:05.000It does raise the question as to what standard of proof we're going to hold for politicians.
00:04:09.000Because one of the big problems that we've seen is so many people saying that Roy Moore was innocent, for example, in Alabama because they didn't want to believe all of the evidence that had been brought forth by accusers.
00:04:18.000It is absolutely rational and reasonable to say that you don't have to believe all women.
00:04:23.000Okay, meaning not all women are equally credible because not all people who accuse people of crimes are equally credible.
00:04:30.000This believe all women schtick, it's a little bit strong.
00:04:33.000If we believed all women and then stopped our evidentiary findings at that, we would just be jailing guys willy-nilly without any due process whatsoever.
00:04:40.000And in the public sphere, we'd be throwing people out of the public sphere without any regard for the credibility of the accusers at all.
00:04:46.000I saw Joe Biden trying to take advantage of this sort of moral panic that set in by saying he wishes he had done more for Anita Hill.
00:04:53.000Over to the Clarence Thomas allegations.
00:04:54.000The allegations about Clarence Thomas is that Clarence Thomas once made a remark, I believe, about a pubic hair on a Coke can.
00:05:01.000And this was supposed to make sure that he was not a Supreme Court justice.
00:05:03.000And it turns out that there are a lot of serious questions about Anita Hill's story.
00:05:06.000They've now made a documentary about her on HBO.
00:05:09.000Democrats are trying to say that Clarence Thomas should step down over all of this without any real evidence that any of this ever happened.
00:05:15.000The evidence is very sketchy, at best, from Anita Hill.
00:05:19.000So, we do have to be careful with all of this.
00:05:20.000The reason that I said, and I said this all along, the reason that I thought the Roy Moore allegations were true is because Roy Moore did a very poor job of defending himself.
00:05:27.000There were a multiplicity of allegations.
00:05:29.000All of the verifying details were present.
00:05:31.000Now, is it possible that Roy Moore is innocent?
00:05:55.000Well, it would be nice to know that, but that would require facts, which are one of the many things these cases lack, along with names and dates and the specific nature of the crimes alleged.
00:06:05.000Details matter because, in the end, they add up to proof.
00:06:09.000And one of the big problems with the conflation between sexual harassment and sexual assault
00:06:42.000The problem that we have here is that there are no standards that are being applied.
00:06:45.000The only standard that seems to be applied is what is useful and what is not politically.
00:06:49.000Now, again, should we be taking all of this stuff seriously?
00:06:53.000Yes, when an accuser comes forward, we should take it seriously because there are cases where politicians are really responsible for evil things.
00:06:59.000And yes, it goes hidden for years and years and years.
00:07:02.000It came out that Dennis Hastert, who's the former House Speaker, right, the former Republican House Speaker, he has now been banned from having contact with anyone under 18 years of age unless an adult is present who's aware that he pled guilty in a hush money case related to the sexual abuse of teen boys, according to new restrictions imposed by a federal judge.
00:07:18.000The restrictions state, quote, we shall not have contact with any person under the age of 18 except in the presence of a responsible adult who is aware of the nature of his or her background and current offense and who has been approved by the probation officer and treatment provider.
00:07:31.000He never faced sexual abuse charges because the statute of limitations had expired, but he did plead guilty in October 2015, Hastert, to structuring bank transactions to pay off an accuser.
00:07:40.000Now, the reason that I bring all of this up is because I think that as these accusations become more and more common and more and more covered, and as people leap to knee-jerk responses about particular politicians or people, we do have to think about how easy it would be to manipulate the system.
00:07:57.000It would be relatively easy to manipulate the system, because male-female relations are not always cut and dry.
00:08:04.000It would not be that difficult for a woman and a man to perceive relationships in different ways, and then for the woman to tell all of her friends in the way that she perceived it, and suddenly you have an account that she says she was raped, and she told all of her friends at the time, and the guy says, wait a second, that was consensual.
00:08:18.000One of the things that I think is a problem is avoiding the necessary thinking that we have to do about these issues in order to virtue signal.
00:08:27.000So one of the people who's virtue signaling today is Morgan Spurlock.
00:08:29.000Morgan Spurlock, of course, is the documentary filmmaker, and he wrote this letter on Twitter telling readers that he wasn't asking who will be next.
00:08:37.000He was asking, when will they come for me?
00:08:40.000The way that he is doing a mea culpa is by basically saying that he's part of the problem, right?
00:08:43.000This is the way that he's going to get off is by virtue signaling.
00:08:46.000Not by asking serious questions about whether he actually hurt a woman, or whether he did something wrong, or whether he's being falsely accused, but instead by simply saying, I'm just going to assume that I did something wrong and now let me off the hook.
00:08:56.000And you're going to see more and more men doing this, and it doesn't actually solve the problem as to what sort of behavior is acceptable and what sort of behavior isn't.
00:09:02.000So here's Morgan Spurlock's letter that he posted on Twitter bit by bit.
00:09:20.000Hey, whenever somebody says, I'm part of the problem, you can bet that they actually did something they want to cover up for, and now they're going to get out in front of it.
00:09:27.000I'm sure I'm not alone in this thought, but I can't act blindly as though I didn't somehow play a part in this.
00:09:31.000And if I'm going to truly represent myself as someone who has built a career in finding the truth, it's time for me to be truthful as well.
00:10:24.000Well, that's not really clarifying the issue, right?
00:10:26.000Now it's basically saying that a woman's subjective perception of a situation, which can be interpreted in a variety of different ways, we as the public are simply supposed to believe that subjective account.
00:10:36.000You can't destroy people's lives or careers based on subjective accounts of events that are in conflict.
00:10:42.000This is where we get into some really dicey and uncomfortable territory, because we all know sexual assault is bad.
00:11:59.000I've been unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I've ever had.
00:12:01.000So now this just turns into him coming out as, now he's, I mean, talk about virtue signaling.
00:12:06.000Virtue signaling is where you confess every sin that you've ever done in order so that you look virtuous, right?
00:12:10.000He says, over the years, I would look at each of them in the eye and proclaim my love and then have sex with other people behind their backs.
00:12:14.000I hurt them and I hate it, but it didn't make me stop.
00:12:16.000The worst part, like, why isn't he telling this to his priest?
00:12:20.000Because the worst part is, I'm someone who consistently hurts those closest to me.
00:12:24.000From my wife to my friends, to my family, to my partners and co-workers, I've helped create a world of disrespect for my own actions, and I am part of the problem.
00:12:37.000Abuse that I only ever told to my first wife for fear of being seen as weak or less than a man.
00:12:40.000So now we're going to blame his past for all the decisions that he's been making.
00:12:44.000Is it because my father left my mother when I was a child or that she believed he never respected her so that disrespect carried over into their son?
00:12:49.000Or is it because I've been consistently drinking since the age of 13?
00:12:52.000And the sexual dalliances, were they meaningful?
00:12:54.000Or did they only serve to try and make a weak man feel stronger?
00:13:03.000This sort of sort of gut spilling that's happening now, I don't think that it's particularly helpful to the conversation.
00:13:08.000We as a society are going to have to...
00:13:10.000Determine what we think is objectively verifiable, what evidence we find on behalf of particular allegations, what standard of behavior it now requires us to end somebody's career or damage their livelihood, and then we're going to have to stick with that.
00:13:23.000Because what I don't like is this constantly shifting standard by which the only thing that matters is the sort of
00:13:30.000Is the sort of uncomfortable realizations people come to and then we let them off the hook.
00:13:36.000Or the idea that every subjective interpretation of a series of events must be taken with equal credibility.
00:13:43.000Okay, before I go any further here, I want to talk about the fallout from Alabama.
00:13:45.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
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00:14:38.000Okay, so, meanwhile, in Alabama, the fallout continues, and it is pretty obvious that everyone on the Democratic side is a little bit overeager.
00:14:47.000A lot of people on the Republican establishment side are a little bit overeager.
00:14:52.000So, Bob Corker, of course, comes out and he says that he's really, really, truly happy with the result in Alabama.
00:14:57.000I've tried to reach Dick Shelby this morning to let him know how proud I am of his state and what he did.
00:15:07.000And again, I know this is not something that
00:15:14.000I know we're supposed to cheer for our side of the aisle, if you will, but I'm really, really happy with what happened for all of us in our nation, for people serving in the Senate to not have to deal with what likely we were going to have to deal with should the outcome have been the other way.
00:15:31.000Okay, so this kind of stuff from establishment Republicans only gives more fuel to the fire of the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican Party, of the Roy Moore wing of the Republican Party.
00:15:43.000This idea that you're supposed to be happy about what happened in Alabama, I think, is a huge mistake by quote-unquote establishment Republicans like Horker.
00:15:50.000You can be upset that a Democrat just took the office.
00:15:53.000You can be happy that Roy Moore is not in office.
00:15:56.000You can think that that was a terrible choice that was foisted upon the vast majority of Alabamans, most of whom stayed home.
00:16:03.000But to be overtly happy that a pro-abortion Democrat took that Senate seat, I don't think is appropriate.
00:16:08.000Again, I think if he had said, I'm happy Roy Moore lost, but I'm not happy that Doug Jones is in the Senate, I think that's perfectly appropriate.
00:16:14.000I'm also happy that Republicans don't have to deal with the specter of an alleged child molester among their ranks, making headlines every day for conservatives.
00:16:22.000But I think that for Bob Corker to go out on a limb and say that he's happy altogether with the full result in Alabama is a mistake.
00:16:29.000And all it's going to do is it's going to lead a lot of people on the right side of the aisle to say, oh, look at these establishment cucks.
00:17:26.000You can't discount every fact ever reported on CNN.
00:17:28.000But the idea that Turkey is imprisoning journalists because Trump is saying the words fake news is absurd.
00:17:33.000All these repressive dictatorial regimes are going to do that anyway.
00:17:36.000Blaming Trump is really a foolish thing.
00:17:38.000Again, this is what drives people to believe that they need to support people like Roy Moore because the establishment is so all fired out to get Trump or so all fired out to lose seats because they want to stop the quote-unquote Trumpian agenda, even though there's no real agenda.
00:17:51.000Now, it's not just establishment Republicans who are overeager here.
00:20:06.000But I don't think he's the worst president in American history.
00:20:07.000There are a lot of presidents who have been more damaging than President Obama.
00:20:10.000But the idea that Donald Trump is the worst president after a year?
00:20:13.000What's he done that makes him the worst president in American history?
00:20:16.000I don't think he's been a great president by any stretch of the imagination.
00:20:19.000If I had to grade him now, I'd give him about a C-.
00:20:21.000I like some of the things that he's done.
00:20:22.000I think he's undercut that with a lot of his rhetoric.
00:20:24.000I think if he had stopped tweeting and stopped talking, he'd be a B- president.
00:20:27.000But the idea that he's the worst president in American history, this is Democrats getting ahead of themselves.
00:20:32.000And if they think that they're going to be able to defeat Trump just by shouting at him, they tried that in the last election cycle, and it did not work.
00:20:38.000You see, Bernie Sanders is doing this, too.
00:20:39.000He's now accusing Trump of having severe emotional problems.
00:20:42.000Like, why exactly a kook old socialist, a nutcase who honeymooned in the USSR and goes around talking about how we need to pay for everyone's college, make college free without any plan to pay for it, how he's talking about the serious emotional problems of Donald Trump
00:20:59.000You got a president who has been accused by many, many women of harassment, to say the least.
00:21:05.000This is a guy who was on a tape seen by everybody in America essentially bragging
00:21:22.000He should resign because he has severe emotional... The Democrats who are pushing this this hard, that Trump should resign, that he has to go, there could be a backlash here to the overreach.
00:21:32.000And when I say backlash to the overreach, I'm talking also about the media overreacher, because the media overreacher is pretty astonishing.
00:21:39.000I mean, the level of media overreach is pretty insane.
00:21:42.000So I want to show you some of the things the media have been saying about this Alabama race, because they're truly quite nuts.
00:21:47.000So first of all, I'll start with this tweet that just came out.
00:21:50.000This is about Trump, not the Alabama race.
00:22:58.000That backlash only applies to Trump, by the way.
00:23:00.000It didn't help Roy Moore very much in Alabama.
00:23:02.000It may have helped him a little bit, but not enough.
00:23:03.000It doesn't help Republicans in Virginia.
00:23:05.000The anti-media line only helps with the president because the president really does have, is really receiving the brunt of media criticism.
00:23:12.000But if Roy Moore says the media is coming after me, and what it turns out is that there are some pretty significant allegations against him, that just doesn't wash.
00:23:20.000That said, the media obviously are attempting to tear down Trump.
00:23:22.000So the Democrats who think that Roy Moore is the beginning of the end for Trump, no.
00:23:26.000I mean, Scott Brown won a Senate seat, Ted Kennedy's old Senate seat in Massachusetts.
00:23:32.000Barack Obama was re-elected to the presidency two years later.
00:23:34.000So the idea that Trump is done as president is just foolish.
00:23:38.000Especially if the media continue to go crazy over Trump as much as they have.
00:23:42.000So, for example, last night we found out that Omarosa, who was a contestant on The Apprentice and then was in the White House for nearly a year, she had left the White House.
00:23:50.000There was a story by April Ryan, who really hates Omarosa, suggesting that Omarosa had been forcibly ejected by Secret Service from the White House.
00:23:58.000Secret Service denied this, but you can see the chortling on CNN over what appears to have been fake news.
00:24:04.000Brooke, I'm gonna do what you can't do and what April and Simone are too good of people to do and that's just gonna be petty for a minute.
00:25:21.000Do you think we'd be better off if this president simply resigned after all this concern about his behavior in the past and his current comments, and turned it over to Vice President Pence?
00:26:11.000Okay, so this idea that he's going to resign and that we're one second away from resignation, it's one of the reasons why the Democrats have placed so much heavy burden on the Russia investigation.
00:26:19.000They think that they're five seconds away from impeaching Trump.
00:26:22.000Bret Stephens has an interesting column over at the New York Times.
00:26:24.000Stephens, of course, is maybe the last remaining quote-unquote never-Trumper.
00:26:28.000So one of the distinctions that people have been making, one of the labels people have been using wrongly, in the same way that neoconservative came to mean anyone who's for the Iraq war, even though neoconservative originally meant a bunch of people who were Marxist, who became conservative when they were disillusioned by leftism.
00:26:42.000It now became, you know, anyone who backed the Iraq War.
00:26:44.000The term never-Trumper has been applied to a bunch of people who are not quote-unquote never-Trump, who don't spend their days trying to take down Trump.
00:26:50.000So I was never-Trump during the election cycle, meaning I didn't vote for the president in the general election or in the primary.
00:26:56.000But once he was the president, that no longer applies, right?
00:27:02.000It didn't mean my belief that he could change.
00:27:04.000It didn't mean my support for his various policies.
00:27:07.000There are a few people who are quote-unquote never Trump who've sort of maintained this position that nothing Trump does can ever be right.
00:27:12.000Bret Stephens seems to be one of them over at the New York Times.
00:27:15.000And I like a lot of Bret's work, but that's the position that he's taken.
00:27:17.000But he has a column today where he says that Democrats are making a huge mistake.
00:27:21.000If they think that Trump is just going to be ousted because they don't like him or because his approval rating is 35 percent, they're neglecting the fact that the economy is still booming under President Trump.
00:27:29.000They're neglecting the fact that a solid tax cut will help the economy.
00:27:32.000That we had 3.3% GDP growth in the last quarter, that the stock market is at record highs.
00:27:37.000He says, with the economy good, if Trump could shut his mouth for five seconds, he'd win re-election and he could do so relatively easily because his governance has not been nearly as controversial or as difficult as has been the rhetoric that has surrounded him.
00:28:16.000In which he talked about having an insurance policy against Trump winning in August of 2016.
00:28:20.000It's not clear what that meant, but it's pretty clear that the Mueller investigation is compromised to a significant degree.
00:28:26.000That doesn't mean that Trump has the political wherewithal to actually fire Robert Mueller.
00:28:30.000And he's going to have a tough time doing it, considering that his Justice Department doesn't want him to do it.
00:28:33.000Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, he came out yesterday in testimony and said that he had not seen good cause for Trump to fire Mueller at this point.
00:28:41.000In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, you said that you would only fire Special Counsel Mueller for good cause, and that you had not seen any yet.
00:28:50.000Several months have passed since then.
00:28:52.000Have you seen good cause to fire Special Counsel Mueller?
00:29:31.000He could call him up and order him to drop the investigation.
00:29:33.000And then if Mueller refused, then he could fire him.
00:29:35.000I'll explain that a little bit later in The Big Idea.
00:29:38.000But the thing that is really important to notice here is that the Democrats are hanging their hat on an investigation that is already fatally compromised, whether or not Trump fires Mueller.
00:29:46.000So the Roy Moore is out, therefore Donald Trump is done, that line is not going to wash.
00:30:29.000Either sex is generally a good so long as it is quote-unquote consensual, and they never define exactly what level of consent is necessary because sometimes they say Monica Lewinsky could consent, sometimes they say she couldn't.
00:30:41.000Sometimes they say 13-year-old girls can consent, sometimes they say they can't.
00:30:44.000But in any case, the left has this weird ethos where they know bad when they see it,
00:30:50.000They have a Potter Stewart ethic with regards to that.
00:30:52.000Potter Stewart's the guy who said that he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it.
00:30:56.000The left has that with regard to sexual ethics more broadly.
00:31:01.000is a columnist for The New Yorker, and she writes an entire piece called In Defense of Adulterers.
00:31:07.000They talk about how adultery is natural and normal and probably good.
00:31:10.000So she starts off by talking about how our increasingly licentious behavior has not been reflected in more tolerant public attitudes toward infidelity.
00:31:17.000We've become considerably more relaxed about premarital sex, gay sex, and interracial sex, but our disapproval of extramarital sex has been largely unaffected by our growing propensity to engage in it.
00:31:25.000We're eating forbidden apples more hungrily than ever, but we slap ourselves with every bite.
00:31:29.000According to a 2017 Gallup poll, Americans deplore adultery at much higher rates than they do abortion, animal testing, or euthanasia.
00:31:37.000Now, by the way, I think adultery is less of a sin than abortion, because murder outranks adultery in the pantheon.
00:31:51.000And then they wonder why it is that men are not taking seriously admonitions about sexual morality.
00:31:57.000In order for men to act in sexually moral fashion, or for women to act in sexually moral fashion, that must be built into a society that suggests male and female roles and what sex's role in life is.
00:32:09.000I think that you can come up with a series of thou shalt not.
00:32:12.000Thou shalt not do X, thou shalt not do Y. But the problem is a definitional one.
00:32:16.000When you say thou shalt not commit adultery, well what about an open marriage?
00:32:20.000Or thou shalt not commit, what if the wife is really mean to you?
00:32:22.000What if your husband is not so nice and has not been helping you out at home?
00:32:27.000The problem is that we as human beings have a strong tendency to redefine terms.
00:32:31.000So, thou shalt not may seem clear on paper, but in practice, they get very unclear once human brains wrap around them, which is why you need an entire system of thought.
00:32:38.000You need a worldview in order to effectuate thou shalt not.
00:32:42.000We think that we can basically say thou shalt not on a societal level and everybody will follow it.
00:32:47.000We've been saying thou shalt not sexually harass for the last 50 years in the United States.
00:32:51.000Obviously that hasn't stopped a lot of men who have redefined sexual harassment and now we're redefining it again.
00:32:56.000And now women are redefining sexual harassment.
00:32:57.000Stuff they said was not sexual harassment 10 years ago is being treated as sexual harassment now and vice versa.
00:33:02.000In any case, this New Yorker columnist writes,
00:33:05.000Traditional couples therapy focuses on the defense and enforcement of the monogamous pact and tends to side firmly and explicitly with the faithful spouse.
00:33:12.000He or she is often referred to as the injured party, while the straying partner is labeled the perpetrator.
00:33:19.000The standard assumption is that the affair is a symptom either of marital dysfunction or of some pathology on the part of the perpetrator.
00:33:25.000Sex addiction and fear of intimacy are the most common diagnoses, although lately a genetic predisposition to infidelity has been gaining traction.
00:33:30.000This approach, writes an author whom, Esther Peril, I guess, is the author of a book on adultery, and this is a book review.
00:33:37.000This approach, Esther Peril believes, does little justice to the multifaceted experience of infidelity.
00:33:43.000It demonizes adulterers without pausing to explore their motives.
00:33:46.000Right, because sometimes motives don't matter.
00:33:48.000You committing adultery is not a good thing.
00:33:51.000If you want to cheat on your spouse, maybe instead of cheating on your spouse, you should control yourself or have a discussion with your spouse or get divorced if your marriage is that failing.
00:34:08.000Yes, I would like to see a statistical study on how many affairs were invigorating for marriages.
00:34:11.000This is a bunch of crap that is pushed forward by the left media.
00:34:13.000Charles Murray has a great book, I believe it's called Coming Apart, all about how basically there are a bunch of white liberals who live in big cities who don't
00:34:37.000abide by their own sexual morality that they propagate to the rest of society.
00:34:41.000Basically, Murray's thesis is that if you look at the perspectives on marriage in Los Angeles and New York among upper-class liberals, what you will see is that they are all married, and they all stay together, for the most part, and they all do not commit adultery.
00:34:53.000They act in traditional sexual ways, basically, in the big cities, contra to the stuff they put out on TV, and then people who don't know better imitate that, and they end up with unhappier lives.
00:35:02.000This is one of Murray's theses, and I think it has some real heft to it.
00:35:07.000In any case, this author writes, When people ask her if she is for or against affairs, her standard response is yes.
00:35:24.000Oh yeah, I can't see how this would go wrong in any way.
00:35:46.000If we want to look to a place that has completely destroyed the institution of marriage and has therefore reduced the possibility of happiness for a great number of people, perhaps we should look to Europe.
00:35:57.000I always think the French, those are the people who I'm looking to for my sexual morality.
00:36:01.000Mating and Captivity, the book that brought her public notice, was a sprightly disquisition on the anaphrodisiac effects of married life, in which she argued that the excessive value placed on communication and transparency in modern relationships tends to foster conjugal coziness at the expense of erotic vitality.
00:36:26.000The idea that, you know, you and your wife don't have to share everything with one another because that sort of kills the mystery, that's not new.
00:36:34.000I mean, if you watch the musical The Fantastics, that's actually one of the concluding lines of the musical The Fantastics, which came out in the 1960s.
00:36:40.000But what she also says is that adultery is basically okay in many situations.
00:36:45.000She says, So this is the part I agree with.
00:37:12.000These are things that I think are important in marriage because the level of passionate, as Jonathan Haidt says, the level of passionate love in a relationship starts off here, at the top, and declines over time in the level of coupleship.
00:37:24.000Basically, trust in marriage increases radically over time, companionate love.
00:40:23.000She calls herself Fidelio, but she is a woman.
00:40:29.000She disguised herself as a man to try and break her husband out of prison.
00:40:31.000But the best aria from this opera is the Prisoner's Chorus.
00:40:35.000It's become famous, and it has a real resonance in an era when prison camps still exist, in an era when there are still tyrants who are imprisoning vast numbers of people for political purposes.
00:40:48.000This guy's a political prisoner in the opera.
00:40:51.000Here's a little bit of the Prisoner's Chorus from Fidelio.
00:40:59.000The prisoners have been let out and now they actually get to see the light for the first time in months.
00:41:36.000This is the first time they've seen the light in months and it's the glory of the light and the glory of freedom.
00:41:41.000This was so controversial at the time when Fidelio first came out that it was only performed I believe once or twice when it first came out because the governor of the region was afraid that it was too political, that it was
00:41:52.000Trying to cast doubt on his control over the area.
00:41:56.000And Beethoven was an intensely political guy, right?
00:41:58.000The most famous story of Beethoven being political is that he was an admirer originally of Napoleon, whom he felt had brought an end to the French Revolution, but had also wanted to spread freedom and secularism around Europe.
00:42:10.000And then so he dedicated the Eroica, his massive third symphony, which changed the face of music forever.
00:42:16.000He dedicated that originally to Napoleon Bonaparte.
00:42:18.000And then when Napoleon declared himself emperor, then he basically said that Napoleon is just another pig who wants to have power.
00:42:24.000And he scratched out Napoleon's name on the cover page of the Eroica, the original copy of the Eroica.
00:42:29.000He scratched it out so hard that there's actually a hole in the original cover page of the Eroica.
00:42:33.000So Beethoven was a guy with some pretty strong political views.
00:42:37.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:42:44.000So, the thing that I hate today is that CNN said something patently ridiculous yesterday.
00:42:48.000So yesterday, somebody tweeted out something nasty at President Trump from Anderson Cooper's account at CNN.
00:42:53.000And CNN claimed that Anderson Cooper had been at the gym, somebody went to his phone, took his phone out, unlocked it, tweeted something nasty at Trump, put it back in the locker, and left it there.
00:43:11.000Those of us who have big social media followings, I handle my own Twitter, but I do have people who post for me, for example, on Saturdays.
00:43:17.000I'm not the one posting on my Facebook account on Friday night and Saturday because I don't use my computer at that time.
00:43:22.000So it's not unusual for Anderson Cooper's assistants to probably tweet stuff out on Anderson Cooper's behalf.
00:43:27.000Somebody who worked for him probably mixed up his own Twitter account with Anderson Cooper's and then tweeted it out.
00:43:32.000CNN didn't want the blowback, so they blamed it on some rando at the gym who stole Anderson Cooper's phone in order to smack Trump or something.
00:43:39.000That's really stupid, and it's foolish of CNN to lie because that's an obviously transparent lie.
00:43:45.000Again, it undercuts their credibility to a time when the media really need to be pretty
00:43:49.000Solid in their credibility, considering the level of doubt that's been cast upon them.
00:43:52.000So, sorry, I never do this, but I want to go back because there are a couple of things that I like that I actually missed today.
00:43:56.000So there's one thing I like particularly that I need to show you.
00:44:02.000And between, I guess these kids are maybe seven years old, and one of the kids' siblings is in the stands, two-year-old, and the two-year-old thinks that his brother is in, his sister is in an actual fight, like she's in a wrestling match, and so the brother thinks his sister is in an actual fight, and so the little brother does what all men should do.
00:45:16.000But kids are innocent, and the fact that they are innocent is what makes them so charming, is that they can be molded and shaped to be civilized adults, and leaving them to their own devices is foolish.
00:47:00.000Every Thursday I talk about just a bigger idea that you should know about, and I talked about the fact that President Trump has the capacity as President of the United States to direct the end of investigations.
00:47:23.000It has been observed that President Washington's control over prosecutions was wide-ranging, largely uncontested by Congress, and acknowledged, even expected, by the Supreme Court.
00:47:31.000Thus, from the founding through the Civil War, presidents repeatedly invoked prosecutorial discretion authority in both civil and criminal contexts and repeatedly enacted categorical prosecutorial discretion policies.
00:47:41.000The Supreme Court recognized and affirmed these practices.
00:47:43.000If Trump were to call up Mueller tomorrow and say, I want you to end this investigation,
00:47:54.000He should just allow the investigation to go forward.
00:47:56.000It's been fatally compromised at this point for a lot of folks, so it's not going to damage him, I think, in a serious way, even if some sort of, unless there's something serious that actually happened, I don't think that there's going to be a lot of fire to this particular smoke.