Christine Ford, a 51-year-old research psychologist at Palo Alto University in California, has come forward with her account of Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her when they were in high school in the 1980s. She says he pinned her to a bed and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming.
00:07:48.060If somebody is, especially in this circumstance, if you have something, you give it to the FBI and you say, look, I don't think this guy should be the judge.
00:08:20.700But if you tried to rape someone, um, you know, you, you need to have more than just you saying it.
00:08:29.740If it's anything but rape, because remember this story started with he and his friends locked this girl in a room and then ran away laughing.
00:10:55.340And I wasn't, I wasn't aware of this until relatively recently.
00:10:58.300But, you know, the whole thing that happened, I would say the 80s and 90s, where there was a lot of cases of repressed memories being brought up.
00:11:25.480You're throwing, you're, you're throwing people under the bus.
00:11:28.120They're committing suicide because of your fake made up memories that you might think, but only because a psychotherapist is working, is working that.
00:11:40.020And it's, and this is what's so crazy about it because you have a 30 year old plus allegation of something that, depending on, I mean, the, the initial reports, right.
00:11:50.500Were, were that it was not all that, uh, and it was anonymous and it was not all that, uh, well, it was locking someone in a room or something.
00:11:57.000And that's, which seemed like a high school prank, right?
00:12:02.360And so does everybody that, everybody that he knew apparently.
00:12:06.060Now it's been elevated to, you know, sexual assault, which is a serious claim.
00:12:09.500Um, but it just, the fact that it comes out in the middle of a Supreme court, uh, uh, you know, uh, hearings, not even in the hearings, the letter doesn't, they don't release it.
00:12:57.620Because they think if they can get to the elections and take the Senate back, they have a chance of either, you know, holding off and not giving Trump any nominee or forcing him into taking some very watered down pick.
00:13:10.400But it's interesting because you have a, a situation where Brett Kavanaugh, it has, we have taken every possible defense away from Brett Kavanaugh.
00:13:23.700He can't, he's denied it, but that doesn't matter.
00:21:05.140How you see now statues coming down of tyrants all around the world.
00:21:09.940They take the statue of King George and they actually melt the statue and make 42,000 musket
00:21:18.720balls, bullets, out of the statue of King George.
00:21:23.560America's separation from Great Britain was officially now in writing.
00:21:28.440So, I want to talk to you a little bit about, and this is a whole section in the book.
00:21:33.360I come back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution several times in the new book.
00:21:38.520It's coming out tomorrow, Addicted to Outrage.
00:21:41.100And I explain, I think, I actually, I like it very much, the Declaration of Independence as the greatest breakup letter of all time.
00:21:50.760If you, if you make that a Dear George letter, I translate it from, you know, old-timey English into, you know, a contemporary breakup letter.
00:22:11.600It's a, it's a, a breakup letter that says we have to separate because you're an abusive boyfriend and we don't want any of that.
00:22:21.680But what's more is it starts with, hey, George, you know, we got to break up because there's a lot of, there's a lot of things going on and things that you're doing.
00:22:33.280And every time I try to bring things up, you only make it worse.
00:22:38.520But I, I want to tell you who I am because you don't seem to get it.
00:26:45.340Again, that's where the Constitution comes in.
00:26:48.740Because men are flawed, you better check on them.
00:26:53.220You better make sure that anybody who gets power is so compartmentalized and so many people are checking on them so it can never get out of control.
00:37:46.300The one thing I have found in common with people who are spitting themselves out of the out of the system on both sides and are saying we're in trouble.
00:37:57.980They all have read Jonathan Haidt's books.
00:38:00.680This is an exceptional book and I believe a must read for everyone in this audience.
00:38:07.780It's called The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and he joins us now.
00:38:39.100So, the book is about this very strange change that happened on college campuses around 2015.
00:38:48.720Many of your listeners will have heard of these strange events, the shouting down of speakers, the claiming that students need warnings before they read a Greek myth or a story that has violence or racism in it.
00:39:00.580So, strange things began to happen, and my co-author, Greg Lukianoff, he had this brilliant diagnosis.
00:39:09.380He himself was subject, he'd had suicidal depressions, he's prone to depression, and he learned cognitive therapy, which is where you learn to question your assumptions and clean up your thinking.
00:39:19.860And once he did that, he began to notice that the students were doing the exact same cognitive distortions that he had learned not to do.
00:39:28.020They were catastrophizing, oh, if a student, if a speaker comes to campus, you know, people will die.
00:39:34.360This is disordered thinking, and Greg noticed that students were doing this.
00:39:38.120He runs the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and so he diagnosed that students, that colleges are somehow conveying these ideas that are really, really bad for students.
00:39:49.320Students are taking them to heart and thinking themselves into a depression.
00:39:53.220So, that's sort of the back story to the book.
00:39:56.760The three ideas that you refer to, sorry, I had to do that little background.
00:40:01.780So, the three ideas, what we conclude in the book, as we've listened to students, as we've read a lot about what's going on, and I'm a professor at New York University, so I'm in the thick of things here,
00:40:11.800is that there are three really, really bad ideas, and here they are.
00:40:15.320What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
00:40:19.500Number two, always trust your feelings.
00:40:22.680Number three, life is a battle between good people and evil people, and if we can get students to believe all three, we can't guarantee that they will fail,
00:40:33.140but we really set them up for a life of weakness, complaint, grievance, and failure.
00:40:38.940So, Jonathan, I have a book that is released tomorrow, and I rewrote it, and I wish I could rewrite it again, because I've learned so much as I'm writing.
00:40:53.940I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but you're like, you get to the end, you're like...
00:41:33.260So, nobody's trying to destroy students.
00:41:36.800I think what's happening here, the best idea I can share with you and your listeners to understand the craziness that is broken out,
00:41:45.700not just on university campuses, but across so many of our institutions,
00:41:49.580is that social media has put us all in a game in which the way we get prestige is by calling out others,
00:41:57.880or at least, let's just start with students.
00:42:00.080Young people who grew up with social media, everybody's always trying to figure out, what can I do that will gain me respect?
00:42:08.640We actually care about respect and prestige more than we care about money.
00:42:11.580I'd even say many of us care about money.
00:42:14.460Once you're above a certain level, people care about money primarily for the prestige it gives.
00:42:18.600So, social media changed the basic connectivity of society so that all you have to do is criticize someone online or join in with the criticism,
00:42:29.680And so, what you have to see is this is not about people trying to destroy students, certainly,
00:42:38.080but people are playing out their political battles.
00:42:40.460They're using others as pawns in a way, and they're setting up a playing field in which kids just trying to get by and get by socially end up hurting each other.
00:42:49.940Okay, so that is the, I think that's the addiction part, that's the end of the dog, the tail of the dog in a way.
00:42:57.280I think the, what you talk about is, you know, this helicopter parent madness that went on,
00:43:05.400that this is the first generation that, we're seeing the results now of children that could do no wrong,
00:43:12.700received, you know, praise no matter what they did.
00:43:15.900And we're seeing that generation now, and they can't handle the stress.
00:48:32.340It will go out and it will post it on the 100 job sites.
00:48:35.200But there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are qualified looking for a job but may not be right for you.
00:48:42.400What ZipRecruiter does is not just go out and post it.
00:48:50.320And it then goes out and it searches all of the resumes.
00:48:54.120If somebody hasn't applied for your job but their resume is out there, they will find that resume and then contact the person and say, there's a perfect job for you.
00:49:05.560You just have to contact these people.
00:49:07.860Then, when you get all your resumes in, they highlight it and order it so you never miss the right person.
00:49:29.660Anybody who I think is a game changer individual, somebody who is really, who gets it and is actively engaged in trying to think differently and do things like save freedom of speech.
00:49:43.840They are all fans or have read Jonathan Height's books.
00:49:59.140The Coddling of the American Mind is the book.
00:50:01.800Jonathan, I'd like to get through the next two problems so then the next segment we can actually talk about some of the solutions that you have in your book.
00:51:10.920And this is the basis of most pop psychology, that if you're spending your life feeling angry, feeling cheated, it's up to you to change the filters.
00:51:23.360Life is complicated and you get to decide which filters you're going to use.
00:51:28.000And instead, what's happening on college campuses, and it goes back much earlier, is because we're afraid of hurting kids' feelings, a goal is in part to be sensitive and caring.
00:51:40.260We think that if someone presents an idea that a student finds threatening or invalidating, if it invalidates a current idea, that can be painful.
00:51:49.580Well, we don't want students to experience pain.
00:51:52.320And so this whole idea of safe spaces, that if a speaker comes to campus, and one of the first cases was at Brown University, they were going to have a debate between two feminists,
00:52:03.640one of whom believed that America is a rape culture, one of whom believed that America is not a rape culture.
00:52:10.440And that's a great thing to talk about at a college campus at Brown University.
00:52:15.520And because some students at Brown thought, well, what if a student at Brown had been raped?
00:52:20.080It would be too painful for her to hear someone say that America is not systemically a rapist kind of society.
00:52:56.000Isn't that what a university is supposed to do?
00:52:59.680If I'm paying my money, I want someone who will take everything that I believe is true and throw me up against the wall and make me prove it.
00:53:13.340Make me look at all of the different things so I know how to find truth and I've been awakened so I know what's true to me.
00:53:31.060So the traditional idea of a university, I mean, we can trace it all the way back to Plato's Academy in ancient Greece.
00:53:39.120If you have a community of people who argue and debate and discuss but are bound together by norms of friendship,
00:53:47.520so if you just get people yelling at each other in the public square, it doesn't do any good.
00:53:51.700But if you have a community that retires, that steps outside of downtown Athens and they have a place where they meet and they discuss love and justice and beauty,
00:54:01.160and they have these spirited debates that Plato wrote about, well, that's wonderful.
01:00:22.180You coming from the right, me coming from the left, and recognizing that the people on the other side,
01:00:28.320while you may think that they are causing harm, their goal wasn't to cause harm.
01:00:32.660They are pursuing moral virtues as they see it, and that is the road to resolving it.
01:00:37.720I'm guessing the technique that you use when you address hostile audiences is you start either by acknowledging something you think they're right about
01:00:45.460or acknowledging something you think you were wrong about.
01:01:01.940So I think the skills we need as a country now are basically the skills of forgiveness, acknowledgement, reaching out to people, humility.
01:01:11.960I think I've spoken to a number of Christian audiences in the last month or two, and I often go back to the Sermon on the Mount and the advice at the end, you know, well, you hypocrite.
01:01:25.380First, take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.
01:01:49.280But its point is, you know, when social progress fails and all of these lies come undone, the Gods of the Copybook Headings with Terror and Slaughter Return, basically it means you will find eternal truths again.
01:02:08.520No matter how hard you work against it, it will reset itself.
01:02:12.600And the reason why I bring this up is because I'm finding it difficult to navigate on both sides people who say or want to say, I told you so.
01:02:45.960And it feels like to a conservative that this stuff has come from the universities, have come from the eggheads, and we have been saying, no, that doesn't work.
01:03:24.280Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.
01:03:28.080My top suggestion for anyone listening who has kids of any age, go to letgrow.org.
01:03:35.460It's an organization started by Lenore Skenazy, who wrote the book Free Range Kids.
01:03:39.540And it gives you ideas for how you can help to prepare your child for the road of life ahead, even when the schools are going to be trying to protect the child from negative experience, that they're going to try to change the road for the child.
01:04:00.560So we have a lot of suggestions in the book for ways that you can help your kids grow strong, ways you can encourage the schools to improve, ways you can encourage universities to improve, to go back to the kind of university you described before.
01:04:12.420That's going to really challenge people, push them up against the wall and make them learn to defend their ideas or change their ideas.
01:04:23.880Jonathan Haidt, coddling of the American mind.
01:04:27.420And you mentioned a bunch of his research in your book as well, Addition to Our Age, because a lot of it's just really important and supports all the things that, you know, I think I'd argue conservatives have been talking about for a long time.
01:05:32.760And he said, but because you use some of my language and you probably know what language it is, if you're a conservative, because it's the language that you're like, oh, you know, I bet he suspect.
01:05:42.600Uh, I use the language of both sides unknowingly at the time.
01:05:50.020Uh, and that opened him up to start to listen and go, wait a minute.
01:05:56.740And as he was looking at the language, he figured this all out and figured out, no, we're coming at, we're arguing about two different things, even though we know, even though we think we're arguing about the same thing.
01:06:20.620Assume that your kids are more capable this month than they were last month.
01:06:25.740Each month, ask them what tasks or challenges they think they can do on their own, such as walking to the store a few blocks away, making their own breakfast, starting a dog walking business.
01:06:36.620Resist the urge to jump in and help them when they're struggling to do things and seem to be doing them the wrong way.
01:06:43.860Trial and error is slower, but it is usually better as a teacher than direct instruction.
01:06:50.780Uh, let your kids take more small risks.
01:06:54.740Let them, let them learn from getting bumps and bruises.
01:06:59.400Uh, learn about free range kids movement and incorporate her lessons, uh, into your family's life.
01:07:10.820She's one of my, she has such a great perspective on the world and it's so, it's so weird because everything in me factually knows that all of this is right.
01:07:22.260And I know logically that all of these things are right.
01:07:26.840Of course, kids could walk to the store a few blocks away.
01:07:29.000But your feelings, crime is way down and it's safer than ever, but of course they should lose from their bumps and bruises.
01:07:34.420But like, as a parent, I don't want my kid to get hurt.
01:07:41.700What if they go and they get, what if something does happen?
01:07:43.720What if they wander out into the street and get hit by a car?
01:07:45.560And I, I've come to the conclusion at least in my life, and I, uh, I will admit this, that I think it's, we look at this as, uh, an instinct that is, we are overprotecting our kids.
01:07:57.240In reality, I think it's actually a selfish instinct.
01:08:00.840I, I think you look at it as, I don't want to be the parent that everyone is looking at and saying, oh my gosh, like, why would you let your kid ride the subway on their own?
01:08:12.340Which is how Lenore kind of came into the public eye.
01:08:14.800You know, it's you wanting to protect yourself because you don't want to be the idiot who lets your kid go to the store and then gets kidnapped or hit by a car.
01:08:22.820And it's in, and of course, like it's a, you don't want that relationship to end because you make a silly mistake and don't tell them that one time that they should jump off.
01:08:32.080You know, they're jumping off something into the pool and you, you don't warn them that time.
01:08:35.880And when they jump off, they hit the side and they become paralyzed.
01:08:39.140You don't want, you don't want that to be on you.
01:08:42.340Obviously you don't want it to happen, but the motivation for the helicopter parenting is not because you think it's going to happen.
01:08:47.820It's because you don't want to be on, on the hook for it.
01:08:54.560He says, you know, let your kids go, let your, you know, encourage them to walk or ride bicycles to and from school at the earliest age possible.
01:09:03.040He says, you know, let them go explore, but print this out.
01:09:07.640This is in the book, but print this out.
01:09:10.360It's a little card that you give to your kid.
01:09:13.100He said, laminate it and give it to your kid.
01:09:15.440And when somebody comes up to your kid and says, where are your parents?
01:09:19.660Have them explain this and hand it to the, to the person.
01:11:10.520You're looking for somebody that can sell your home, can sell your home fast, is the expert, is not the person that is doing this, you know, part-time, has the same kind of values that, that you have.
01:11:22.700Everybody who is, you know, on our staff is a, is a fan of the show.
01:11:26.960Um, and again, they don't work for us, but, uh, it's like we're a big family.
01:11:32.740We have 1,500 agents all across the country, so if you're looking to sell your home, these are the people with the right marketing plan.
01:11:39.780These are the people who are tried and true in your area.
01:11:43.300They know your home, they know your neighborhood, and they have the plan to be able to sell it.
01:11:49.100So, you're looking to buy or sell a home and you need somebody on your side?
01:14:16.000All right, let's talk about democratic socialism here for a second because they're, you know, they're big into the, it feels, feels, feels, feels.
01:14:23.660You know, they've got a bad case of the feels.
01:15:35.580$5.4 trillion for guaranteed jobs, $1.4 trillion on just the student loans that are out, $1.3 trillion on free college, paid family, medical leave, Social Security.
01:15:58.340$40 trillion is quite a bit of money, and the taxes that you talked about raising to pay for this, to pay for your agenda, only count for two.
01:16:09.000And we're going by left-leaning analysts.
01:24:10.300If you shut the doors of Planned Parenthood, you would have to eliminate the number of abortions that occur annually because of Planned Parenthood more than 19 times to be able to equal this.
01:24:26.540Progressives, you've been fighting to repeal the Second Amendment with hopes of stopping all gun-related homicide.
01:24:34.760The incredible global life-saving achievement that capitalism and the United States are responsible for, equivalent to more than 630 years worth of gun-related murders.
01:25:04.820I'm going to look at those things more than I look at Twitter.
01:25:08.700You know, last hour we were talking to Jonathan Haidt, who is just a brilliant, brilliant scholar, researcher, a guy who was a progressive.
01:25:32.260He's woken up, changed, and now is fighting.
01:25:36.940He started a new organization, 2,000 college professors that are saying, this is crazy.
01:25:42.820We have to stop the safe zones trigger warnings, and we need freedom of speech on campus.
01:25:48.440I think some good things are happening, and they're happening from people who used to be on the left.
01:25:54.460Yeah, I think there's a—a lot of this is feeling, right?
01:25:59.240People get angry, and they use emotion to try to, you know, express some sort of virtue or whatever.
01:26:08.000And I feel like there's a pushback now against that.
01:26:10.660People don't—people—I mean, America was built as a logical place, you know?
01:26:15.180I mean, it's a place that is supposed to look at these things honestly.
01:26:19.400Judge me by the content of my character.
01:26:44.160Like, I mean, you know, one of the things a lot of these people kind of fall in this umbrella that people call the intellectual dark web, right?
01:26:50.140Where people are saying, you know what?
01:26:51.760Maybe I want to actually have an honest conversation and explore the nuance of this situation a little bit.
01:26:56.560But the fact that dark web is attached to it shows, you know, how—
01:44:56.900You're totally ignoring the big story of the day,
01:44:59.000which is a guy in the background of a weather report flashed the white supremacy signal that we all know and have known forever that is a white supremacy signal.
01:45:10.300It's the one that's on the top of the buildings with a big spotlight, and it looks like a bat in the sky?
01:46:39.820In February 2017, 4chan's board discussed ongoing tactics to try to get their idea to go viral.
01:46:47.020To any who haven't seen the original thread, our goal is to convince people on Twitter that the OK hand sign has been co-opted by neo-Nazis.
01:48:39.860Sony was tricked into malicious links because they were sent via Facebook and Twitter.
01:48:45.800The employees opened it up, and it was North Korean-controlled malware, and we know how that ends.
01:48:51.320There are so many stories like this over and over and over again.
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01:50:05.200Could have been her freshman year, right?
01:50:07.180She doesn't remember, also, the location where it occurred, who owned the house where it occurred, or how she got to the house where it occurred.
01:50:16.040She also didn't tell anyone until 2012, so she waited 30 years to tell one soul, and that was her therapist.
01:50:24.560She said she was attacked by people who were from an elitist boy school who went on to become highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.
01:50:32.240However, she also said that there were four boys who attacked her, double the amount she's now saying attacked her.
01:50:39.700And she says that was the therapist screwing it up, because you know how similar the words four and two sound?
01:50:45.500At the time, it's her screwing that up.