Best of the Program with Mona Charen ｜ 9⧸26⧸18
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
161.73009
Summary
On today's show, Glenn is joined by Dr. Michael Rechtenwald, a clinical professor at NYU, and author of the new book, "Sex Matters," to discuss the latest in the Brett and Christine Ford case.
Transcript
00:00:08.560
This is Jeff Fisher, Jeffy, and Pat Gray and I did the last little bit of the broadcast
00:00:14.460
because Glenn started us out today after taking yesterday off thinking he'd come back,
00:00:25.740
He's still feeling kind of crappy, so we took over for him.
00:00:29.180
But the show itself, he started out with Courage as a Muscle.
00:00:32.480
He talked about how you have to work to be courageous.
00:00:37.040
He talked again for a few minutes to clinical professor NYU Michael Rechtenwald.
00:00:43.020
And we also, Pat and I, talked to Mona Sharon, Outrage Culture, about her new book, Sex Matters.
00:00:49.300
And we covered a little bit of the Kavanaugh case throughout the entire broadcast
00:00:54.300
because no one knows for sure if Ford is going to show up to testify.
00:01:01.360
So we'll get your thoughts and our thoughts on that on this podcast, the Glenn Beck Program.
00:01:07.060
You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:01:51.700
that sounds peaceful and nice doesn't it that was washington dc antifa harassing ted cruz and his
00:02:04.240
wife as they tried to have just a date night in an upscale dc restaurant the group followed cruz
00:02:10.180
into the building surrounded them yelled in their faces and even surrounded their table
00:02:15.800
antifa filmed the entire thing as one of their members badgered senator cruz with a barrage of
00:02:22.080
ridiculous questions about brett kavanaugh the couple eventually had to flee the restaurant
00:02:28.100
what are we turning into america antifa was very proud of themselves they of course uh took to
00:02:36.840
twitter claiming the entire operation in a long tweet thread which included the video of the
00:02:42.140
entire event it concluded with this quote this is a message to ted cruz brett kavanaugh donald trump
00:02:49.020
and the rest of the racist sexist transphobic and homophobic right-wing scum you are not safe
00:02:56.080
we will find you so now let me recap here for a minute antifa tracked down a public figure in a
00:03:04.660
public place harassed him yelled at both cruz and his wife then used the twitter platform to make it
00:03:12.640
go viral and added a threat to boot now we've been asking twitter to show us some sort of standard that
00:03:20.520
users can look to so we know what is or isn't suspendable or bannable offense on their platform
00:03:27.580
it appeared we finally got that when they banned alex jones now if you remember right why was alex jones
00:03:35.080
banned twitter had claimed that he had engaged and targeted and and harassed uh cnn reporter oliver
00:03:43.980
darcy they stated and i quote tweets designed to threaten belittle demean and silence individuals
00:03:53.380
have no place on this platform so here is a serious question for the ceo of twitter jack dorsey
00:04:01.960
how is what antifa did to senator cruz and his wife any different at all to what you banned alex jones
00:04:10.240
for in fact alex jones seems tame in comparison they targeted two people at a public space they harassed
00:04:20.340
them belittled demeaned and tried to silence them they even went a step further and added an actual
00:04:26.540
threat this is miles worse than what alex jones did to aliver oliver darcy as of this morning the
00:04:33.520
washington dc antifa twitter account at smash racism dc is still active here's another question
00:04:42.920
but this one is to silicon valley or maybe to that young dreamer who's starting a tech company out of
00:04:49.500
their garage the free market is ripe to completely dethrone the social media landscape found a
00:04:57.960
company on the basis of actual freedom and actual free speech it is way past time for twitter and
00:05:06.660
facebook to be pushed off of their pedestal this is the best of the glenbeck program
00:05:15.500
i did a podcast with lewis house um he does the number one podcast the school of greatness
00:05:26.040
fascinating fascinating uh conversation with this guy really open and honest i really really like him
00:05:32.980
but uh towards the end he asked me what it what is greatness what makes greatness and to me it is
00:05:41.160
courage and i want i want to play just a little bit of it this podcast just came out uh lewis house
00:05:46.600
uh and school of greatness here's how i answered that question my son was probably 10 he was taking
00:05:53.540
karate taekwondo he corrects me and uh he didn't realize that when he was going to get his first belt
00:06:01.720
that there were going to be parents there there were going to be crowd here's my son who's grown
00:06:06.500
up around me he's terrified of crowds okay probably for a good reason yeah he's terrified of crowds at
00:06:14.540
this time and uh we start walking in and he sees people he's like i i'm not doing this dad i can't do
00:06:20.100
this i can't do this it was the first time i saw my son like that and um i said son it's no big deal
00:06:26.480
it's no big deal it's just parents he's like i can't do this i said okay let's get in the car
00:06:31.000
so we get in the car we're driving back and i'm thinking how am i going to teach him
00:06:35.140
he said are you mad i said no i'm not i'm not i'm just trying to figure out how i can help you
00:06:45.100
get back to the house i take him into my office and in my office i have you have to come to my
00:06:51.420
house sometimes all over my walls in the office it's kind of uh it's layered the the pictures and
00:06:58.560
the things are all just layered on top of each other okay and they're all people from history
00:07:06.740
and moments and you know anywhere from one of the guys who uh was the guy in vietnam that was in the
00:07:15.560
hanoi hilton who blinked his eyes to say i've got the stuff he wrote all framed in there
00:07:21.100
next to winston churchill next to gandhi and rosa parks and all of them and i sat there and i'm
00:07:28.420
trying to think what do i say to my son and i look up at all these people and i said
00:07:32.400
why do i have all of these pictures and all of these items from history on my walls in my office
00:07:44.700
and he said because they're all heroes and i said yeah they are but that's not why i have them
00:07:51.780
and he said because they weren't afraid and i said oh son and i started with wallenberg raul wallenberg
00:08:05.660
who is one of the greatest heroes in history and i said i'm guessing he was terrified
00:08:14.580
i'm guessing and i know enough because i've read his own words i know that winston churchill was
00:08:22.180
terrified i know that george washington was terrified i know the guy who was having his arms
00:08:28.480
pulled out of his sockets in a vietnamese prison camp was terrified but they did it they did it
00:08:41.880
exercise exercise and become great little steps of courage will make you a great man or a great woman
00:09:02.260
hi it's glenn if you're a subscriber to the podcast can you do us a favor and rate us on itunes
00:09:18.380
if you're not a subscriber become one today and listen on your own time you can subscribe on itunes
00:09:24.140
thanks our blaze sponsor for making this broadcast and this uh television uh televised broadcast
00:09:29.480
possible yeah it's um if you've ever uh heard of home mortgage theft five seconds you know just how
00:09:38.000
bad that can be um these these new thieves this is a new process that's fast growing they can they can
00:09:44.800
find your mortgage and your title and steal it in 15 minutes so these people came in uh to uh show me
00:09:52.500
exactly how fast i i can't believe the things that i've done to protect myself they said actually
00:09:58.960
makes it worse glenn yeah makes it worse and if you don't find out about it early you're screwed for a
00:10:04.460
very long time go to home title lock dot com and they'll put a barrier around your title and your
00:10:09.740
mortgage it's home title lock dot com right now you can get your hundred dollar search for free when
00:10:14.660
you sign up at home title lock dot com so a few weeks ago i started reading a book called springtime
00:10:20.500
for snowflakes and i stopped about halfway through because i really really liked it but i wanted to
00:10:26.240
make sure i knew who this author really was uh because if you look at his resume how's it look pat
00:10:33.260
it looks like he's uh an atheist perhaps uh extremely liberal communist communist yeah not extremely
00:10:44.040
liberal communist yeah uh he was professor at nyu uh another sign of communism i mean it's a it's it's
00:10:52.600
it's quite amazing um he described himself in the past as a libertarian communist which i asked him
00:10:59.300
about in the podcast but i want to show you the results of this podcast came out last saturday and
00:11:05.140
i've been seeing a ton of these letters have come in glenn while listening to saturday's podcast i
00:11:12.500
wept i knew what your guest said was happening but i didn't know how to put it into words and who to
00:11:18.500
tell i didn't know what to do i was too busy working three jobs raising my daughters going through a
00:11:24.540
divorce to research it all let alone and i just let it control my life this podcast all capital letters
00:11:31.360
must be heard by everyone in the united states please don't downplay it or mention it only in
00:11:37.400
passing this is important it must be heard i couldn't agree more i listened to it twice myself
00:11:44.460
this weekend because i learned so much michael reckenwald is uh with us now michael how are you sir
00:11:51.480
i'm doing very good glenn how are you doing i'm great um i really enjoyed meeting you and uh and
00:11:58.920
talking to you tell me tell me quickly for those who don't know your journey tell quickly that story
00:12:05.180
okay yes you know as you said when i was a left or libertarian communist published widely in
00:12:13.080
communist circles read very widely looked up to as a kind of an example for you know what marxism or
00:12:20.260
communism could be and then i came out against the social justice movement back in 2016 in october and
00:12:28.880
i was roundly attacked by thousands of people on the internet and hundreds of people inside of my
00:12:36.180
university put on paid leave quickly uh damned by a group calling themselves the diversity equity and
00:12:43.240
inclusion group and uh the scales just fell from my eyes glenn basically what happened i started seeing
00:12:50.040
the left for what it really is and it's uh you just scratch the veneer the thin veneer of
00:12:55.600
egalitarianism and so forth you what you come up with is a totalitarian left you told me in the
00:13:01.820
podcast and i'm i'm paraphrasing here so let me get your real you know your words but you told me that
00:13:08.140
at one point when you saw what was being done you know libertarian communism is more of a theory that
00:13:14.280
it was like next time we'll do it right um that's right and uh and you realized at one point
00:13:20.620
these people will will kill people we're what we're doing is we're we're going to do it wrong
00:13:26.360
again and these people it'll end up in in gulags and mass slaughter that's right i mean i saw you
00:13:35.200
know firsthand what communists say to each other and joking and passing and they relish the idea glenn
00:13:40.860
they relish the idea of putting a gun to somebody's head that they don't agree with they talk about it in
00:13:46.680
joking all the time and i was actually threatened with the same if i had my way quote unquote i would
00:13:52.620
put a gun to your head uh and things like that so the minute i crossed these people i saw what they
00:14:00.020
were made of and it scared the living damn living hell out of me glenn i mean it was very terrifying
00:14:05.720
and uh just turned my eyes and uh turned me around entirely tell me about the thing that i laughed at
00:14:12.760
and you said was the beginning of this journey um the the you know genders that you had to be called
00:14:20.380
and you posted yeah you posted on your twitter without comment and this is what started the ball
00:14:26.840
rolling yes uh you know back in september of 2016 which i call the debuting of uh social justice
00:14:35.120
ideology in the university uh for a number of reasons a student at the university of michigan when asked
00:14:41.800
what his pronoun choice would be and given the option to post it inside of his profile in the wolverine
00:14:49.680
system there chose quote unquote his majesty and i thought it was hilarious the send up of the
00:14:56.400
craziness and the attempt of these institutions to keep pace with the pronoun and proliferation as i call
00:15:02.980
it pronoun and gender proliferation and so i posted the article without a comment to facebook
00:15:10.420
and i went on to teach a couple classes back to back and by the time i got done with those classes
00:15:16.500
there were thousands and thousands of subthreads started condemning me uh calling me a transphobe
00:15:24.920
and uh accusing me of having committed discursive violence and being a traitor and so on and so forth
00:15:32.440
and discursive violence makes me laugh every time i'm sorry about that i know you have a cold yeah
00:15:39.040
uh discursive violence which is a crazy term but i you know it's probably too much to get into now but
00:15:45.120
uh and uh hundreds of uh direct messages from former friends uh telling me that i better recant or else and
00:15:54.060
so forth and i refused i said this is completely out of hand we're we're talking about a piece of
00:16:00.360
that this is a group of totalitarians dictating everything i can say and do and i just would
00:16:06.140
have nothing further to do with it i started that twitter handle anti-tc-nyu prof that very night and
00:16:13.120
started tweeting so michael your life has completely changed um you have you know all of your friends who
00:16:22.480
you thought were friends are no longer your friends what do you do for a living now i'm still an nyu
00:16:29.500
professor as a matter of fact instead of getting fired i think because i stood my ground and i
00:16:35.280
didn't back down and i didn't apologize because i've done nothing wrong i was actually promoted
00:16:40.080
two full ranks wow yes from assistant to full professor now my career here is probably limited
00:16:48.800
i'm at nyu and i have four years left on a five-year contract and i see no way of it getting renewed
00:16:54.020
because the same people that would be uh sitting on a committee to renew me are the people that shun
00:17:00.740
me 100 percent now i mean these are people that go ahead yeah these are people that won't get on an
00:17:07.120
elevator with me how are you how how are you um being viewed by the students because you were very
00:17:15.040
popular i'm still very popular with students and one of the main reasons is is they can tell and they
00:17:21.400
know that i'm not there to indoctrinate them into some left-wing ideology which is so prevalent it's
00:17:27.460
unspeakable i mean it's just the way things are uh everybody for the most part in the humanities and
00:17:33.720
social sciences is subtly but ever so uh clearly indoctrinating students to become leftists of some
00:17:40.040
stripe or another feminist marxist you name it but uh for me i don't do it and the students love me
00:17:46.680
michael this is pat gray um what what do you recommend to uh parents who are considering
00:17:53.300
sending their kids out to universities like nyu and ivy league schools he addresses this in the
00:17:59.360
podcast wait wait for the answer this is great i'd say i'd say i would start thinking about this at
00:18:05.740
kindergarten actually uh don't wait until they're ready to go to university the indoctrination is
00:18:10.620
happening at k through 12 uh and this may even be taking place at pre-k for all we know because
00:18:17.960
there are cases in which students in kindergarten are being uh being uh set up for transitioning to
00:18:27.180
another gender and there are parties for these transitions going on in kindergarten there was a
00:18:32.620
case of this in august in california where a student came home and told their mother or father that
00:18:38.200
they had uh one of their friends had a transition party which is a party to celebrate the transitioning
00:18:44.180
from one gender to another i have nothing against trans people but what i'm trying to say here is that
00:18:49.440
transgenderism is an ideology that's being foisted on us it's being actively promoted and it's starting
00:18:56.500
at the very youngest ages and so you know uh university level is far too late we have to start at
00:19:02.800
pre-k probably so michael you're a guy who you believed in marxism um communism but you it was the
00:19:12.220
the heart part that you connected to is that right is that right yes i mean i was uh you know i had ideals
00:19:20.860
about you know helping the downtrodden and helping those who have less and you know ameliorating the
00:19:27.680
suffering of of millions of people and i thought this was the best way to go about it because it
00:19:33.020
would equalize you know access to resources and so forth but i realized that as a matter of fact it
00:19:39.480
never does and any attempt to promote a sort of de facto equality ends in horror every single time as
00:19:48.120
we've seen historically and for some reason i couldn't see this when i was under this ideology i
00:19:53.660
couldn't see it and it took this turn you know and these scales falling off my eyes for me to be able
00:20:01.040
to see what was so evident to other people uh you know particularly on the other side and uh
00:20:07.000
and once i saw it i started to research it and i got into the history of communism and i read the
00:20:12.980
black book of communism and it makes it very clear that 94 million people have been killed
00:20:18.380
in communist regimes people have been killed by every single communist leader that's ever existed
00:20:25.320
so i mean i just don't know how i can explain how you know you get indoctrinated through the
00:20:31.560
university system and how difficult it is to break that indoctrination but i did break it it was broken
00:20:37.440
for me i should say and uh everything has changed michael um the name of the book springtime for
00:20:44.320
snowflakes obviously a tip of the hat to mel brooks why'd you choose that name it just came to me one
00:20:51.740
day glenn i don't know really when or how but all of a sudden it came it just popped into my mind and
00:20:56.580
i said well springtime for snowflakes and uh it just it just occurred to me i have no idea when how or
00:21:04.480
you know this took place but it did it just jumped into my mind springtime for snowflakes
00:21:08.640
uh and i told other people and they said that's a great title that is a great time people some people
00:21:14.820
tried to dissuade me from using it saying it was insulting our students but i don't think so
00:21:18.680
i'm not really i'm not really insulting students here i'm talking about the indoctrinators not the
00:21:23.520
students as such michael the um uh the um transition that you as you have made pat just said what was the
00:21:33.720
book that you just did brought up off air that he wrote uh something about atheists or agnostics
00:21:41.740
19th century british secularism yes that's yes so you were you were a guy that was agnostic or atheist
00:21:50.400
agnostic what happened i would never well i i know i would first of all just about agnosticism it just
00:21:57.860
means i don't know and i would never have uh been so conceited and so uh you know arrogant as to
00:22:04.000
suggest there's no god without you know proof because i mean you have to be god to say there's
00:22:09.080
no god i mean really that's what it comes down to yeah and therefore they're therefore the you know
00:22:14.160
it's impossible so i was always agnostic um i was a kind of an agnostic who prayed though uh i didn't
00:22:21.640
know more yet but i still prayed and uh you know that entirely changed i have uh with this whole
00:22:30.200
you know uh say this whole conversion i really to put it in there's no better term for it i've really
00:22:37.220
come to see that that you know i'm not i'm not an agnostic who prays i'm a believer who prays at this
00:22:42.800
point and i think that'll continue to grow uh hang on just a second longer because i'd like to turn our
00:22:49.360
conversations michael to what people do we just had a call from somebody who said i can't talk to
00:22:55.360
any of my friends i can't talk to my my family even about this this kavanaugh thing because they just
00:23:01.340
they're just angry and they just yell and we talked a little bit about this the principles and addicted
00:23:06.200
to outrage and i'd like to hear your your view of um of what we talked about on how to approach
00:23:14.960
people and who to approach to be able to uh start to have a better dialogue there's two books
00:23:21.980
that i want to uh assign if i may one is michael rechtenwald springtime for snowflakes
00:23:28.920
it is an in-depth look at exactly what we're talking about the the first step into understanding
00:23:36.920
how this is all connected is addicted to outrage my new book that came out by both of them online now
00:23:43.560
um wherever books are sold and uh i promise you you will not be disappointed and you will understand
00:23:49.340
the world uh that you're dealing with a little better and you it will change your course of action
00:23:55.360
michael welcome back to the program thanks glenn okay so let's talk about how do we deal with
00:24:03.900
how do we deal with people that um are are not seeing this and i think there's two groups
00:24:11.040
one the people who know exactly what it is and they're knowingly engaging in post-modernism
00:24:18.660
and as you say which has now become social justice uh and then there's those who just are kind of going
00:24:25.200
along and don't really understand yes i mean i think that you put a you put it in a football terms uh
00:24:32.680
using a football metaphor we're standing let's say at the 50 yard line and we're looking at
00:24:37.780
people along a spectrum left and right and we see that you know all the way down at the three yard
00:24:43.660
line is standing you know on the left side is antifa and we certainly aren't going to be approaching
00:24:47.780
them you know and on the far right there might be some unsavory characters like the alt-right that we
00:24:53.160
certainly won't be trying to include in our quorum but we need to try to build some consensus here
00:24:58.880
by uh addressing these issues straightforwardly and also to try to educate ourselves and inoculate
00:25:05.960
ourselves against this post-modern uh virus i'd say it's really what it is it's a virus that has
00:25:12.600
transmuted into social justice that is affecting all of us it's it's infiltrated almost every
00:25:18.960
institution from facebook to twitter to google to youtube to you know most corp most of corporate
00:25:26.460
america and most of the mainstream media uh and a lot of other areas so we're talking about a very
00:25:33.260
virulent strain of post-modernism that is really broadly infecting the entire population so how do
00:25:40.660
we deal with it we have to first recognize it we have to find out where it's coming from and what
00:25:45.300
their principles are then we can rationally oppose them we have to do that with rational thinking
00:25:50.760
but also with faith knowing that we're right because this is not uh this is not a happy
00:25:55.380
circumstance we're talking about they want to destabilize the family they want to destabilize
00:26:00.420
all the ontologies of society that is all the structures that keep us intact that keep some
00:26:06.900
adherence some adhesion some sort of you know order uh instead of utter chaos so this is really what
00:26:12.880
we're up against i think we need to start talking about it we need to educate ourselves we need to
00:26:17.260
inoculate ourselves we need to also take very close attention to what's happening to our children
00:26:22.760
and our grandchildren in school you know watch out for the language look at the books look at our two
00:26:28.660
books and see the kind of terminology that these students are going to be coming home with do you
00:26:33.340
agree with go ahead michael no yeah that's fine pay close attention to the to their to their utterances
00:26:39.640
do do do you agree with my thesis that if we don't understand what we're fighting against
00:26:45.200
and we fight it with outrage and anger that we're actually only making the problem worse
00:26:50.320
absolutely we're just fanning the flames uh that's all we're actually throwing uh alcohol or we're
00:26:56.540
throwing gasoline on the flames really is what we're doing it's just fanning the flames and building the
00:27:02.680
other side's outrage as well so we just have two outrage groups and it's just a matter of who who is
00:27:08.280
who's you know going to carry the day but that's not the way to go about it at all
00:27:12.120
we'd fan the flames by feeding into it it's kind of like a reciprocal process by which one
00:27:17.940
side's outrage feeds the others uh it's it's a kind of back and forth you know sort of a dialectic as
00:27:23.920
i would put it between these two groups and uh that's not what we want to do we we want to understand
00:27:29.820
and articulate we need to ask questions of the other side those who are rational enough to actually
00:27:35.300
listen to us we need to sort of defuse the situation first and foremost and how do we deal
00:27:41.520
with being shouted down all the time being called racist being called homophobes transphobes all of
00:27:48.680
the things that we have to deal with being called when we when we try to uh educate people on what's
00:27:54.480
going on try to answer that in 30 seconds michael yeah that's a tough one and we really need to keep
00:27:59.380
talking we need to point out that this this left this illiberal left is what i call them they are
00:28:04.860
shutting down our you know they're shutting down speech but they're also shutting down thought
00:28:09.880
they're shutting down different perspectives and they're making it impossible for people from
00:28:13.920
other perspectives to voice anything but then their ideas however outlandish they are succeed
00:28:19.320
regardless michael need to stop that michael thank you so much
00:28:30.140
are excited to have mona sharon syndicated columnist and senior fellow at the ethics and
00:28:48.300
public policy center joining us uh mona welcome to the glenbeck program
00:28:51.960
thanks so glad to be here um you just just to refresh people's uh memory you were uh the person
00:29:02.880
who kind of challenged everybody at the cpac meeting was it was that just this year just this
00:29:09.720
last cpac wasn't it yeah that's right um it's really easy to go into a scene like that and say
00:29:17.080
everything they want to hear we love trump this is great the republicans are fun and
00:29:21.940
and fantastic and doing a wonderful job you went a different direction and told them they were
00:29:28.920
they were hypocrites in part among other things uh and they didn't seem to appreciate that did they
00:29:35.140
uh what kind of feedback did you get after during and after cpac right so um look it's always easy um
00:29:42.820
as we're now seeing in the kavanaugh uh situation um to tell your own side exactly what it wants to
00:29:50.120
hear and um and so i i chose that moment to say look you know we we can't be hypocrites about these
00:29:58.600
these issues of you know respecting women and um and so forth and so i was you know at that it was at
00:30:05.820
that moment that um the roy moore controversy was at its uh full boil and i mentioned that the
00:30:12.900
republican party had endorsed roy moore following the president's lead had endorsed roy moore here
00:30:18.060
was a credibly accused teenager uh a man who dated teenagers and arguably um molested young teenagers
00:30:26.040
when he was in his 30s that's just not acceptable and people on our side chose not to believe it or
00:30:32.280
chose to overlook it or chose to just you know just bat it away but you can't do that it was was what i
00:30:38.200
was saying and and i was also critical of other aspects of um of our side but um but you know it's
00:30:45.300
just so rare in america today for anybody um uh to be able to say i'm i have an open mind about
00:30:53.180
accusations against somebody and i will wait for the evidence i mean this week has just been such a
00:30:59.440
nervous breakdown what the left has done um regarding kavanaugh is just assume that he's
00:31:06.500
guilty based on allegations alone without evidence i mean without more evidence let's put it that way
00:31:13.540
yeah and they seem to be rationalizing it in that uh this is not a criminal trial so there's no
00:31:19.900
presumption of innocence well that i i don't i don't buy into that because you can't just
00:31:26.040
change every rule because it's not a a criminal hearing no in fact um you know let's bear in mind
00:31:34.220
that um what we're saying then if you say well you know it's not a criminal trial it's just a job
00:31:40.580
interview and therefore you know you can you can engage in full for character assassination and pay
00:31:47.680
no price for it is that the kind of society we want to live in where a mere accusation unsupported by
00:31:55.020
convincing evidence will be enough to completely destroy a person's reputation i mean you know
00:32:01.800
people used to fight duels over their reputations reputation is still an incredibly important
00:32:08.400
uh thing i mean imagine if you've spent a lifetime um you know trying to live an upright life and people
00:32:16.560
regard you with respect and in the kavanaugh's case you're a federal judge and suddenly the whole
00:32:21.800
world thinks of you as a as a would-be rapist yeah it's just you know it will destroy his life
00:32:28.880
it's despicable and uh the sad fact of this uh me too hysteria and nobody wants women to be abused
00:32:39.300
or harassed or mistreated in any way but on the other hand you can't just start destroying everybody
00:32:47.320
in their career uh just on an allegation right and we're in a dangerous territory here correct and
00:32:55.520
you know what first of all so what a lot of the um feminists and the democrats are are saying is
00:33:02.620
we have to believe women because in the past women were not believed well it's a little more complicated
00:33:09.400
than that i mean yes it is true that um that in the past uh sometimes women um perhaps were um not
00:33:17.580
believed but we first of all um we do know that false accusations of rape have been made by women
00:33:26.780
women do sometimes lie about rape and with terrible consequences right i mean if you remember uh the
00:33:33.520
tawana brawley episode a few years back which brought reverend al sharpton to fame what did he
00:33:38.560
do he presented this teenage girl who claimed that she had been raped and and abused by four new york
00:33:44.040
city cops and um that turned out not to be true um there have been many many cases where women have
00:33:51.820
alleged things that haven't been true the uh the the other instance that comes to mind more recently was
00:33:58.620
um a rape on campus the rolling stone story uh in which a student alleged that she had been gang
00:34:05.460
raped at a at a fraternity in um at the university of virginia and you know everybody's stereotypes were
00:34:11.840
rolled out they said oh these frat boys you know that's just the kind of thing one would expect from
00:34:16.900
them the same sort of thing happened at duke where an exotic dancer or stripper or whatever
00:34:22.400
claimed that the lacrosse team had had raped her so so it's not unheard of for women to make false
00:34:30.140
accusations that's the first thing we have to understand and the consequence of a rape conviction
00:34:35.360
or a sexual assault conviction or or even a belief that somebody committed that crime are so severe
00:34:41.240
that of course we should guard against um you know flimsy uh or unproven accusations because the
00:34:48.960
consequences are so dire for the person who is accused um but the other thing we have to realize
00:34:55.380
as grown-ups is look in most instances of sexual assault it there are only two witnesses it does not
00:35:03.580
happen for the most part um in a public place and um and because of that of course it is hard to parse
00:35:13.300
what really happened it is he said she said and so we do look for other forms of corroboration um
00:35:21.040
and and those include whether the woman sought medical care right away did she tell other people
00:35:27.180
at the time uh you know did anybody uh see them together uh and so on and then also you look for
00:35:34.980
patterns of behavior so in the me too movement which i think broadly supportive of you know i i think that
00:35:42.080
men who abuse women uh should be held to account and they should be shamed and and punished
00:35:48.440
and but what's what's notable in the most um high profile cases that we've seen over the past year
00:35:56.240
or so um is that there are patterns of behavior that these these men when they behave this way toward
00:36:03.220
women it's not just one woman it's a whole bunch of women who come forward and say yes me too
00:36:08.420
and um and so now this this movement unfortunately which was really i think a beneficial thing for our
00:36:16.800
society is being transported transformed into a partisan cudgel to um to go after um kavanaugh and and these
00:36:27.520
you know these supportive statements are just they don't pass the the uh the minimal standards of
00:36:36.800
evidence of evidentiary um trustworthiness so for example the story that the new yorker ran
00:36:42.860
which i think is a is a disgrace to journalism the woman in question there was remembering something
00:36:49.780
that happened more than 30 years ago and was saying that she herself the the person making this accusation
00:36:57.240
was so unsure of whether it had been kavanaugh or not that she had to wait six days
00:37:03.800
and consult her memories and consult her lawyer before she could come forward and say to the new yorker
00:37:10.980
yeah i think it was him yeah the last 35 years weren't suspicious weren't sufficient
00:37:16.440
to consult her memories but the the last then the six days were those were those were really helpful
00:37:23.780
so so as we get uh as we're on the just the eve i guess of of the testimony of this woman uh before
00:37:32.560
the senate tomorrow if you had to guess uh what will be the outcome of this do you do you see uh
00:37:39.940
brett kavanaugh being confirmed well first of all um it's still apparently uh up in the air as to
00:37:46.900
whether um the first the whether christine lazy ford will even show up um people are not sure
00:37:53.080
diane feinstein recently said she wasn't sure so i think if if she fails to testify then there's
00:37:59.920
absolutely no question that he'll be swiftly confirmed um but or i shouldn't say no question
00:38:06.620
but very little doubt in my mind um if she does testify and is extremely persuasive then the the balance
00:38:14.280
might shift um it's it's incredibly high stakes um but um but we will see let's by the way for the
00:38:21.840
sake of our listeners let's clarify that this accusation is not the one the new yorker wrote about
00:38:27.480
this is the one that supposedly happened in high school um and um and and she um she too um you know
00:38:36.760
said that she that that uh she did not want to come forward um she made the accusation in an
00:38:44.060
anonymous fashion and then um when her name was outed she said yes she would come forward but when
00:38:51.000
the committee approached her and said fine we will hear your testimony in open session in closed session
00:38:57.300
we can send um a uh a group to california to hear your testimony there she said no to all these things
00:39:04.860
she said she didn't want to fly she said i mean she she seemed to be very squirrely about this
00:39:09.940
i don't know i mean it's um it's it doesn't sound um like she even now is really so sure
00:39:18.320
we're speaking um go ahead no and and therefore um her um her her case you know i i think she should
00:39:28.140
be heard i think people should make an independent evaluation but um but it does seem odd um the the
00:39:35.280
way she has behaved and of course we can get into this later the democrats have been appalling in
00:39:40.860
the way they've handled all of this we're speaking with uh uh syndicated columnist mona sharon about
00:39:46.880
the outrage culture um we last hour mona we were talking with uh michael rechnenwald who also has
00:39:54.260
seen his his share of vitriol uh from the left and we were we were talking about how we can come
00:40:02.480
together in this country and kind of heal the wounds and and move forward as a civilization and
00:40:09.840
i i i just we're trying to find our way to getting back to uh some unity because we're so divided in
00:40:18.220
this country and there's probably groups of people at least two groups the antifa people are never
00:40:23.020
going to join hands with us uh and on the other side of the spectrum the alt-right neo-nazis
00:40:28.760
aren't going to join hands with us anyway and we don't want to frankly so how do we find a common
00:40:34.120
ground where we can all come together and is it possible to get there and agree on things like
00:40:39.860
like capitalism like the bill of rights like the u.s constitution is that doable from where we are now
00:40:45.860
well we have to pray i mean one of the things that um that twitter has done i think is um amplify and
00:40:55.280
provide a um uh an echo chamber for all of our worst uh impulses and our most divisive uh voices
00:41:04.200
and um you know people who are on twitter a lot are the ones who think that we're on the verge of a
00:41:09.140
civil war in this country um it is incredibly um you know it's it's it's incredibly uh um poisonous
00:41:17.680
um at the same time you're so right to raise um the question of whether there are any things that
00:41:25.280
that unite us now um glenn thrush of the new york times posted uh recently you know is there any
00:41:31.140
institution or or thing about the united states that that we all agree on and somebody said well maybe
00:41:36.780
the military but there has to be more than that um that as you say the bill of rights um our history of
00:41:44.140
religious tolerance um you know the constitution um the you know love of uh love of liberty love of
00:41:52.220
human rights individual dignity all those things that that we have always prided ourselves on and um
00:41:59.140
look i one of the reasons that i did what i did at cpac um and do and and some of the other things that
00:42:06.780
i do is in an effort to say look i'm willing to criticize my own side please step up on the
00:42:14.000
other side be willing to be critical of your own side because it has to start there and once people
00:42:20.220
then give you credit for a certain amount of fair-mindedness that can be the beginning of
00:42:27.240
a conversation and some of the conversations that i've had with people who are sort of on the center
00:42:32.220
left have been very productive in that sense but i have to say that this week it's been really tough
00:42:38.560
i would love to see and i haven't i would love to see some people on the left saying whoa whoa whoa
00:42:44.520
whoa you know let's not railroad um judge kavanaugh and all men you know and or or men who went to prep
00:42:52.880
school or so on and so forth um and because we feel so passionately about you know abortion let's face
00:42:59.720
it that's those are the stakes that's why this thing has become so rancorous it's because the stakes
00:43:05.340
are roe v wade being overturned and the idea on the left seems to be all means fair or foul all means
00:43:12.960
have to be employed if it means destroying someone's um someone's uh reputation then that's all right
00:43:18.960
and you know some of the people on the left don't even realize that people like us are fair-minded
00:43:25.180
and are and are um are just trying to um to to to evaluate the evidence dispassionately they think
00:43:34.460
how could you possibly believe brett kavanaugh it's just it's really difficult um to bridge that divide
00:43:41.160
yeah we are definitely definitely in a tough uh place right now um so if people want to uh have access
00:43:49.200
to your your books your articles where would you send them so i have a website monacharon.com um they
00:43:57.060
can also uh find me at the um ethics and public policy um site um my work is published in national
00:44:05.080
review online it's uh available lots of other newspapers um recently uh i'm a syndicated columnist
00:44:13.040
and one of my um unfortunately this past uh within the past few weeks one of my um one of pat buchanan's
00:44:20.540
columns was put out under my name so i'm getting a lot of mail oh wow whoa whoa yeah so that was funny
00:44:26.840
but um but yes and people should um should go to amazon.com and uh check out my new book because
00:44:33.020
it's called sex matters and it describes how modern feminism got us into a lot of the difficulties
00:44:40.940
we're facing with uh sexual behavior and sexuality in general and uh differences between men and women
00:44:47.420
which they were very keen to deny and uh i think that that will um shed some light on where we are
00:44:53.520
it's called sex matters how modern feminism lost touch with science love and common sense sounds great
00:45:00.800
all right mona thank you appreciate it my pleasure the blaze radio network