Best of the Program with Heather Mac Donald | 9⧸24⧸18
Episode Stats
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Summary
Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Brett Kavanaugh, has come forward with a new allegation against him. She claims that he thrust his penis into her face when they were drinking at a party in the early 1980s. He denies it.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, it's Monday back in the studios in Dallas, Texas.
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Today's episode, we begin with the new allegation released by the New Yorker magazine.
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But I kind of started a different place than usual.
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I started doing some research this weekend on how does this end?
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And it takes us to a story that many of us know already, but we don't really know how it happened.
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It's an amazing tie that I don't think you're going to get anywhere else on the Kavanaugh debate.
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Heather MacDonald is a former professor who was into postmodernism,
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and she really kind of outlines what we really have to do when it comes to our colleges and our civilization as it begins to melt down.
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And postmodern social justice continues to change our world.
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Ted Cruz, the anti-Texan Beto, who won the debate.
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Also, the amazing ad that has six siblings out of, I think, nine siblings that are saying,
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this Republican brother of ours, he's not helping.
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I'll tell you why and so much more on today's podcast.
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You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
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Another allegation was lobbed at Kavanaugh last night.
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This one comes from Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh,
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who told the New Yorker that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face, causing her to touch it.
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She claims that both of them were highly intoxicated.
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First of all, the story should have never made it to print.
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It is telling that the New Yorker ran it while the New York Times and Washington Post have stayed away.
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Ramirez admits that she had spent six days, quote,
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assessing her memories before really, truly recalling what had happened.
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significant gaps in her memories of the evening.
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Like the Ford allegation, no one can collaborate.
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And Kavanaugh has flat out denied it has ever happened, as has many people that she said were there.
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They have all come out now since and said, I have no recollection of this even happening.
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So how did this make it into a national publication?
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Have the rules of journalism changed or suddenly spontaneously combust?
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It's just that there are no real rules of journalism anymore.
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Advocates and torchbearers have taken their places.
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And in the digital world where you can assassinate someone's character in 0.7 seconds, go ahead, try it.
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It'll take you 0.7 seconds for Google to come back with 128 million results.
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If someone can make a false claim on Twitter, it'll be retweeted 10,000 times plus.
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The correction, if it even comes from the original poster, will only get, what, 10 or 20 tweets, maybe?
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That's what Democrats are doing to Kavanaugh now.
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It's amazing what we're seeing in our country right now.
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Is this the country that you want your kids to grow up in?
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Social justice in the postmodern world means that it doesn't matter if Kavanaugh did it.
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It doesn't matter if it happened to these victims because it has happened or something like it has happened to other victims.
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And it all balances out in the end, or so they think.
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I just ask any of anybody who is so sure of themselves today, on one side or the other, if this were happening to you, would you think this was a fair process?
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The left has taken this hearing and completely turned the rules upside down.
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The term reasonable doubt has always meant that if it exists, you have to assume the person is innocent.
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These people on Twitter yesterday were all absolutely positively sure Kavanaugh was guilty.
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Well, I'm not absolutely positively sure he's not.
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How could you possibly, based on two people, that their stories fall apart once it leaves them?
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There's no evidence, not one single corroborating witness to any of these claims.
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Now, that's enough to get you laughed out of a courtroom.
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But for some reason, the, quote, resistance wants reasonable doubt now to shift toward the accuser.
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Keep in mind, these are the same people, the very same people, who are supposedly for criminal justice and prison reform.
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Haven't we been in a society that will believe the white woman instead of Emmett Till?
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This one white woman's testimony, who claimed he touched her, he grabbed her, and he made lewd comments to her?
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If reasonable doubt shifts towards the accuser, can you imagine how full our prisons will be?
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Can you imagine living under a government where reasonable doubt always sides towards the prosecution?
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If there is no evidence, if there are no witnesses to any of these claims, I'm sorry, but Kavanaugh must get confirmed.
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Now, if they have witnesses and we have reasonable doubt, well, he probably should be concerned.
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But if we can get to a point to where it's clear, to all of us who are honest, then he should go away.
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Senate Democrats know the game they're playing.
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The Supreme Court confirmation hearing is just a tool of the left used to influence another court.
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You know, this has been coming for a long time.
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We've accepted it from each of our parties for a while.
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Do you remember when, uh, uh, when, oh, who was it from Arizona?
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The Mormon from Arizona, Pat, or Nevada, Nevada.
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When Harry Reid stands up and says, you know, Romney, I got a call.
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But he knew that the press would take it and run with it.
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Our president, Rafael Cruz, was involved in the plot to assassinate Kennedy.
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But it got into the press and poisons the well.
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Kavanaugh, now, Stormy Daniels' attorney, is now saying that he was part of a rape gang.
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This is not the first time that this has happened.
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But I wanted to go back into history and see, how does this play out?
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Well, if you go back in time, especially if you go back to the party politics, looking for the third president of the United States, who is going to be?
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Now, Adams had already seen what the press can do and what pamphleteers could do.
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And so he comes up with the Sedition Act, which is absolutely against everything that we ever said we were for in America when it comes to the press and freedom of speech.
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But he had enough of people just lying in the press.
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And Jefferson thought that Adams had betrayed the republic and also because he thought he was going to go to war with France and he was going to start a foreign war.
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And during the election, the two of them start to lob charges against each other.
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Jefferson, or at least the people around Jefferson, he never said this because he was above it.
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But his campaign accused President Adams of having a, quote, a hideous, hermaphroditical character, which neither has the force or firmness of a man nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.
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Adams, his team responds, well, Jefferson is a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father.
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So his mom is an Indian squaw, and his dad is half white and half black.
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It went down from the, it ended with those guys, I think Adams made the claim that if Jefferson was going to be president, all of your daughters would be raped and there would be heads on pikes all the way down the streets.
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She told a clergyman of Jefferson that Jefferson was one of the most detestable of all mankind.
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But in trying to find out, how does this end, how have we corrected this course before?
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Let me tell you a story you probably haven't heard.
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There was a pamphleteer, his name was James Callender.
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James Callender was a guy, he was Scottish, and he came in, and he was on the side of Jefferson, and he was a pamphleteer.
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And he would pretty much say pretty much anything, like Adams is a hermaphrodite.
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And he would print these things and pass them out.
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Jefferson, of course, was far too good of a fellow to be involved in anything like that.
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The thought was at the time that Jefferson had hired Callender to say these things.
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He gets the stiffest penalty of any of the players of the press under John Adams.
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He's fined $200, and he has to go to jail for six months.
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And when Jefferson becomes president, he pardons Callender.
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And you, you know, I think you might owe me some money, too.
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What about the $200 and, you know, some of, so what did he say about combat pay?
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Well, he says, look, Jefferson paid me to tell these stories.
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Unfortunately for Jefferson, Callender had letters from Jefferson, including payments for the things he wanted him to say.
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So all of a sudden, now Jefferson is exposed as this liar.
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Well, the people who support Jefferson, they won't have any of it.
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And so they decide that they're going to start a new rumor.
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And so the supporters of Jefferson, who are just trying to protect the president, the supporters start circulating the rumor that, that Callender actually is such a bad guy.
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Because Callender is the kind of guy who abandoned his wife while she was dying of venereal disease.
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And I was with her every step of the way, unless I had to work.
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But because the supporters of Jefferson were so intent on getting, making sure they protected their political guy, Callender does something else.
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Callender releases a rumor that Thomas Jefferson had been making babies with Sally Hemings.
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Now, when that failed, when that failed to catch on at the time, he immediately switched the story and said, oh, he's been making babies.
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He's been having an affair with his neighbor's wife.
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This ends in some lies coming back to haunt, sometimes up to a century or two later, to continue to destroy and smear.
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The DNA evidence proved that it was someone in the Jefferson family.
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That rumor was published in a newspaper, in an op-ed, but it wasn't saying that Jefferson did it.
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It was actually a smear to get people to not vote for Thomas Jefferson.
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But the smear, originally, was something that apparently people knew in the area, that Thomas Jefferson's brother was a sot.
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And Thomas Jefferson's brother was using the slaves as breeders.
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The original rumor was not about Thomas Jefferson.
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But perhaps that wasn't good enough for Callender.
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So, before we all jump to our team jerseys, before we all say, I am absolutely positive,
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let's just remember that how we behave and what we say and what we do can last centuries
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and have ramifications that we have no idea are coming.
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And maybe more importantly, remember that whatever we create, whatever this system of justice is,
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our children are going to have to live under it.
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Heather McDonald was on with us a couple of weeks ago, and I was running really late,
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and we ran out of time, and I was really bummed, because she is, she's an amazing, amazing woman.
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She is also with the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor for the City Journal.
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She also has her roots in deconstruction and postmodernism.
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She's the author of the book, The Diversity Delusion.
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Well, thank you so much for having me on again, Glenn.
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So we were just getting into some good conversation, and we had to cut our conversation short last time.
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Let me pick it up, because you've written some really fascinating things about Brett Kavanaugh.
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Bring me up to speed and the audience up to speed on what your thoughts are on this whole mess.
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Well, so far, Glenn, the conservative response has been a completely legitimate one,
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which is to say that the timing of the charges brought against Kavanaugh are completely spurious,
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shows that this is simply intended to scuttle the nomination as opposed to getting to the truth.
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There have also been legitimate questions about the credibility of his accuser, Professor Ford,
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pointing out that for somebody who's allegedly traumatized by this allegedly searing event,
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she can't even remember what year it occurred, where the House was, that this party was,
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where she was allegedly assaulted by Kavanaugh.
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But I think it ducks a more fundamental question, which is that even if it were true,
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what she alleged, should that outweigh Kavanaugh's clear record in public service
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and the three-and-a-half decades of life in which he has participated in the public sphere?
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And again, I'm just putting aside for a moment all the questions of credibility.
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I think what we're seeing here is the fruition of the feminist mentality that reverses the order
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of the realm of public action, public ideas, a civilization that is seen as too male,
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and putting that below issues of eros and personal involvement.
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As far as I'm concerned, let's take this out of the current Kavanaugh situation
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and imagine a hypothetical from a liberal perspective.
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One of the most liberal lions of the Supreme Court was William Brennan.
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He massively expanded the welfare state, the defenses for criminal defendants.
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If he had, as a 17-year-old, engaged in some boorish, adolescent, aggressive, alcohol-fueled male behavior,
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would a liberal really say that that one unprecedented and unrepeated incident
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should undercut a lifetime of contributions to the liberal exposition of the Constitution?
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And I would imagine they would say that it shouldn't.
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So, Heather, haven't we already decided this as a society, though?
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Because we've already decided that if you are tried and convicted of even murder,
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Because as long as you don't repeat it, what you do under 18
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should not be held against you for the rest of your life.
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So, I'm not saying that he's innocent or guilty.
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I don't know why we're even discussing it with the amount of evidence that we have.
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Society has already said, look, if you're under age,
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we're not going to hold that against you as long as you've reformed.
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Well, you know, there's some, if you've committed murder,
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I think that you are going to be tried as an adult.
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And we are not, obviously, obeying the law here.
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You know, the Senate Judiciary Committee is twisting itself into knots
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to try and accommodate these last-minute accusations
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that are being brought forward clearly to torpedo.
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But even if that were not the case, if juvenile records were not sealed,
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to me it is simply preposterous to think that a one-time incident
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a public intellectual who is involved in the world of ideas,
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that that counts more than what his contributions have been as a federal judge.
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And certainly, again, if we want to bring it back into a feminist perspective,
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but if we want to say that a public figure's treatment of females
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should be influential in how we evaluate his public career,
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he has been a leader in the treatment of females as clerks,
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he was the first judge to have an all-female class of clerks.
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His female clerks have been unanimous in testifying to his character.
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And when you're a clerk for a judge, that's not an easy gig.
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that's the kind of scenario where it comes out, is it not?
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This is the very domain where Eros comes into play.
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If there had been any hint of this, it would have come out.
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If it turned out, let's say, that James Madison,
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who was one of the prime architects of the theory of the separation of powers,
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one of the most important contributors to the Federalist Papers,
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understanding how to try to restrain government power,
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which was the big accomplishment of the slow patient evolution of constitutional thinking in Europe,
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again, I argue that is not relevant to his contributions to public life.
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to say that we should actually reconsider James Madison's contributions,
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I do not agree that that takes away from his accomplishments.
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and I don't think we can have revisionist history.
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Winston Churchill, was he a good guy or a bad guy?
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Well, if you lived in India, he was a really bad guy.
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We are both flawed and great at times as human beings.
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You know, if Kavanaugh, let's say Kavanaugh did this,
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I would look at this as something that happened in 1982,
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is there any evidence that he didn't learn from this?
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If he is still doing it, if he was still doing it,
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but it also happened 35 years ago with nothing else.
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And I guess I'm taking a very absolute out there position.
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There is, apart from this completely groundless charge
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which all of the people that were allegedly at the party deny,
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the feminists are trying to take our civilization down, Glenn.
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They are denying the realm of ideas and public action,
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which is a different realm which drives men and women insane,
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that that and women's sort of grudge matches about that
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the feminist war on what is perceived as male civilization
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and, you know, death of all kind of moral standards.
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We're talking to Heather McDonald about Brett Kavanaugh,
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you wrote an article called The Feminist Narcissism,
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that the most salient fact about this alleged episode
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this is kind of what society was pushing, wasn't it?
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that we could strip away the traditional methods