Democrats go back to defending Al Franken. The media continued to push Republicans to declare

President Trump racist and Iran escalates. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

Oh man, I hope you had a wonderful weekend, a news-packed weekend, as it turns out.

We begin this morning with this insane contention

from the New Yorker and Jane Mayer. So Jane Mayer, you'll recall, is the reporter from the

New Yorker who went after Brett Kavanaugh. She reported the story of Deborah Ramirez,

who was apparently drunk as a skunk and claimed that Kavanaugh, when he was back in college,

flashed himself to her, and it took her days on end to think about it and then determined that it actually was Brett Kavanaugh. There were no other witnesses. Nobody else could say that it was Brett Kavanaugh. Jane Mayer reported this with a straight face over at the New Yorker because Brett Kavanaugh is a bad, bad, bad man. Well, now, Jane Mayer is out there trying to rehabilitate Al Franken. Now, what's so fascinating about this is that there was a question with regard to the left.

And this question, I think, is deeply important as to whether the left abides, many in the media left, particularly, abide by their own principles.

This becomes very important when it comes to assessing how American parties and politicians and how Americans

themselves are reacting to one another. See, here's the thing. If you want to set a common

standard within a circle of trust, it's not very difficult. You go to your church and you say,

listen, all of us were against X. And you're all invested in being against X because you know

you share this group of common principles. But that changes if, for example, you're all invested in being against X because you know you share this group of common principles.

But that changes if, for example, you're in a sporting event.

So let's take the example of a sporting event because politics has now become more like sports

and less like us as a common group trying to find some future together.

In a sporting event, let's say that you're a player in a sporting event.

And the guy on the other side is cheating. So you have two choices. One is you can be as honest as the day is long. You can say, well, you know, that guy's going to cheat, but I'm going to play the game the right way. Now, that is indeed the right thing to do. It also heightens the chances that you're going to lose, because presumably the person wouldn't be cheating unless it was heightening their chances of winning. So what you end up with in sports when it comes to cheating is a sort of prisoner's dilemma. So for folks who don't know what a prisoner's dilemma is, a little bit of basic game theory for you. So the prisoner's dilemma is based on a situation in which the police arrest a couple of suspects in a crime. And they say to suspect number one, here's the deal. If you rat on your friend, we let you off, we convict your friend. If you do not rat on your friend and your friend rats on you, you're going to go to jail for 10 years and your friend goes free. If neither of you rat, then you're both going to go to jail for two years. If both of you rat, then you end up both going to jail for like five years. Right? So it's a little bit complex, right? So you have to think of the stakes here. Are you going to rat on your friend or you're not going to rat on your friend? So if you trust your friend, you don't rat because if neither of you rat, then you're both going to go to jail for maybe a couple of years, but that is better, presumably, than every other scenario

except for the scenario

where you rat and your friend does it. then you're both going to go to jail for maybe a couple of years, but that is better,

presumably, than every other scenario except for the scenario where you rat and your friend doesn't. Right? So the best option here is for you to cheat. Just on a personal level, the best option is for you to rat out your friend, and your friend, that sucker, doesn't rat on you. And he ends up with the entire 10-year sentence and you go free. But if you rat on each other, you end up with five years. So the question becomes, how much do you trust your partner in crime? Well, when it comes to politics where it's adversarial from the outset, or in the sporting event that I'm talking about, where it's adversarial from the outset, the other guy cheats. And your best option is not going to be to allow him to cheat and you don't cheat.

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