All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 12, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
16:51
Ep. 232 - Hollywood Hates Trump. And America Hates Hollywood.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The week after this election, senior editor of ThinkProgress, Ned Reznikoff, penned a screed online about his unfortunate experiences with his neighborhood plumber.
Here is the harrowing story, as quoted by roving journalist Michael Tracy.
He said, quote, I wanted to share an experience from earlier today.
This afternoon, I had a plumber over to my apartment to fix a clogged drain.
He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional, but he was also A middle-aged white man with a southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this week's news.
And while I had him in the apartment, I couldn't stop thinking about whether he had voted Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish, and how that knowledge might change the interaction we were having inside my own home.
I have no real reason to believe he was a Trump supporter or an anti-Semite, but In my uncertainty, I couldn't shake the sense of potential danger.
This is real, folks.
I was rattled for some time after he left.
I'm very privileged insofar as this sense of danger is unfamiliar to me, and I know I feel it much less acutely than a lot of other people right now.
I'm still a straight white guy who can phenotypically pass for gentile.
Plus, my first name is pretty waspy.
This is Ned Resnikoff writing the day after the election, or two days.
But today was a reminder that unambiguous social interactions now feel unsafe and unpredictable in a way they never did before.
And even if Trump is gone in four years, I don't expect to ever reclaim that feeling of security.
That's just one more thing you voted for if you voted for him.
Woo, okay then.
Certain radical leftists constantly attribute motives to random people without knowing those people.
Plumbers, it turns out, don't want to murder you just because they are plumbers.
It turns out many plumbers are even Democrats.
People with southern accents are not out to murder Jews en masse.
If you feel like you're living in near-Nazi Germany because a random plumber came to your house at your request to fix your shower and then was polite but had a different accent and different profession than you, you might be a political hypochondriac.
Well, stop hyperventilating and get out a bit more.
But the bubble only grows because people only associate with people with whom they agree, particularly on the left.
Conservatives, we're confronted with leftist ideas and leftists personally on a pretty regular basis.
There's only one conservative cable news source, Fox News.
There's only one major conservative national news publication, the Wall Street Journal.
And even there, the reportorial side of the Wall Street Journal leans left.
Hollywood, the universities, ESPN, dominated by the left.
Conservatives can't escape leftism.
Leftists can escape conservatives.
So, when their bubble is punctured, they freak out.
It's why leftists are far more likely to defend someone on Facebook for their politics than people are on the right.
This sort of paranoia, it means it's going to be kind of difficult to live together.
And if you can't hire somebody to unclog your toilet because you're afraid they're secretly a brown shirt, it's going to make it kind of tough to share a political system.
Maybe leftists ought to take a step back and recognize that people with whom they disagree, or people they don't even know, aren't the awful evil villains they picture in their heads.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so much to get to today.
We are back!
Yay!
New year!
We're back and this is going to be an exciting year.
We have lots of plans here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
Lots of new surprises lurking around every corner.
But first, we have to say hello to our advertisers.
Texture.com.
If you're somebody who's addicted to magazines or even reading just individual magazine articles, Texture.com is the best.
So, Texture.com is a service that allows you to pick and choose from various different magazines and subscribe basically to a bunch of magazines at the same time and check out their archives.
It's normally $9.99 a month and you get access to over 200 magazines.
If you sign up right now at texture.com slash ben, you get a 14-day free trial so you can check it out, see if you like it, And they have all of the kind of top magazines and everything from sports to news.
They have everything from People Magazine for you or your wife to Time Magazine to Reader's Digest.
My wife is a big Reader's Digest fan to Entertainment Weekly.
And if you feel like learning the one million new sex positions, they have Cosmo as well.
So they have lots of different magazines that you can access over at texture.com.
And it is a great service.
If you're addicted to information like I am, texture.com is the place to go.
Texture.com slash Ben.
My wife loves it.
I love it.
I'm a big fan of the service.
Okay, so we come back.
And on the day we come back, naturally, the big story is Hollywood.
Because what would a day be without Hollywood celebrities telling us what to think and what to believe?
See?
After that election, where 60-some-odd million Americans said that they really didn't care what Hollywood thought, Hollywood went all Kanye West.
I'm going to let you finish.
They basically said, we're going to lecture you.
And we said, no, no.
And they said, I'm going to let you finish, but here's our lecture.
And then they proceeded to lecture us.
So we had just celebrity after celebrity at the DNC, and celebrity ad after celebrity ad during the election cycle, and now we've had celebrity ads directed at electors, and we've had celebrity ads directed at the press, and we've had celebrity ads directed at everything but the child molesters in Hollywood.
But they are still not tired of lecturing us because, obviously, if they have a forum, then they must lecture.
Well, last night was the Golden Globes.
First thing to point out.
About the Golden Globes.
Everyone always says the day after the Golden Globes or the Oscars.
God, that show was awful.
I've been alive for 32 years.
33 next week.
Or I've been at least out of the womb for that amount of time.
And in that amount of time that I have been sentient, I will say that I have never gone to the office the day after one of these big Hollywood events and people go, wow, the Oscars was great last night, wasn't it?
No one has ever said that.
So, last night's Golden Globes was indeed atrocious, but they're all atrocious, because it's a bunch of Hollywood celebrities celebrating each other and telling each other how wonderful they are, and then we're all annoyed because we think that they're not that wonderful, but we go and pay money to see them anyway, and then we watch them on TV congratulating each other, and then we're like, God, those elitists!
And then we turn on our TV to watch the elitists congratulate each other.
Okay, so it's a little hypocritical, the whole exercise, but...
I do think that conservatives have a reason to be annoyed when these events are infused with politics, and there are two reasons for that.
One is, Hollywood is supposed to be our face to the rest of the world, and it was during the 30s, 40s, 50s.
It was sort of the American face to the rest of the world.
What we presented to the rest of the world as America came out of Hollywood, and still globally, what people think what America is, they think of product from Hollywood, because most foreigners have not been to the United States, and so if they think of country America, They tend to think of some movie that was made about country America or a TV show about country America.
If they see something about Texas, they're more likely to know Texas from a movie like Hell or High Water than they are from having visited Texas.
So we all have sort of a stake in the image that Hollywood projects of what America is.
And when Hollywood skews solely to one side, I think we have a right to be a little angry.
And Hollywood is very insular.
Hollywood is not just insular.
Hollywood does discriminate against conservatives.
To prevent that alternative viewpoint from coming out.
I wrote a book about this called Primetime Propaganda.
And I went basically undercover and talked to a bunch of top Hollywood producers.
And they admitted openly to me on tape that, yes, they discriminate against conservatives.
And, yes, they bias their programming to the left.
They thought I was a member of the left because my last name is Shapiro and I was wearing a Harvard Law baseball cap.
So they figured Harvard Law grad with the Jewish last name got to be a leb.
And obviously I wasn't.
But, yes, there's discrimination in Hollywood.
And that is a reason for conservatives to be upset.
That's reason number one.
Reason number two is that there used to be in the United States this idea that, yeah, there was politics.
And, yeah, there was entertainment.
But entertainment was, for lack of a better term, to use the leftist term, entertainment was sort of a safe space.
When you went to the office the day after the World Series, you could talk about the World Series without talking politics.
When you watched the football game, you could have over your friends on the other side of the political aisle and you could have fun talking about sports without having to worry about politics.
When you went and you saw a movie, when you watched a season of Game of Thrones, you could watch a season of Game of Thrones and not have to be bothered with whether A head that was on a pike in season one was actually a leftover head of George W. Bush because the producers didn't like George W. Bush.
By the way, that actually happened in season one of Game of Thrones, a show that I really enjoy.
So it's – when Americans feel like their common spaces are being ripped away from them, when I feel like I can't have a conversation with someone on the left about Game of Thrones because they're going to start lecturing me about Trump, I watch entertainment to get away from that.
I do it for a living, right?
There's a reason I don't even watch House of Cards.
I don't like watching political TV shows because I think that I do politics as a day job.
When I watch a TV show, I want to be lost in the escapism of it.
If there's a message I want it to be subtle, let me tease it out myself.
I don't need to be hit over the head with the unsubtle political musings of a bunch of 105 IQ actors.
It's not something I'm into.
So people have a reason to be upset when they turn on the Golden Globes and you're watching because your wife wants to see all the pretty dresses or because you want to see whether that TV show you liked is going to get any awards.
It's very annoying to be slapped in the face with, by the way, you're a bad person.
We're going to sit here and tell you, as we consume your product, you're going to tell me I'm a bad person?
We're the ones who watch your shows.
We're the ones who put the $20 million in your pocket.
Okay, so virtually every Virtually every presenter last night felt the need to mouth off about Donald Trump.
This happened over and over.
And just to give you an idea, Jimmy Fallon led off by targeting Donald Trump.
This is clip six.
This is the Golden Globes, one of the few places left where America still honors the popular vote.
Game of Thrones is nominated tonight.
- All right, that was great as well.
The show has so many plot twists and shocking moments.
A lot of people have wondered what it would have been like if King Joffrey had lived.
Well, in 12 days we're going to find out.
And you might remember Manchester by the Sea for being the only thing from 2016 that was more depressing than 2016.
The film Florence Foster Jenkins is nominated.
The character has been dubbed the world's worst opera singer.
And even she turned down performing at Donald Trump's inauguration.
It's tough to book.
Of course, as always, the ballots for tonight's Golden Globes were carefully tabulated by the accounting firm of Ernst & Young and Putin.
But here we go.
OK, so again, joke after joke, all of them lame.
And people who are watching at home, they might think, OK, well, where were you guys?
You didn't make a single joke about Obama for eight years.
And in fact, Obama sent a letter to all the celebrities that I think went in their swag bag at the Golden Globes.
And it wasn't really, I mean, that's not a joke.
I'm pretty sure that he wrote a letter that went to all of the various celebrities.
I know he had a big celebrity event on Friday night.
He sent a letter to all of them.
They partied till 4 o'clock in the morning.
That was the first time that anybody at the White House had been awake to take a 3 a.m.
phone call.
is when they were partying with the celebrities.
Not with Benghazi, but with the celebrities.
But that wasn't all, right?
You have Hugh Laurie.
For some reason, Dr. House was there and he was in "The Night Manager." He's a good actor, Dr. House, but he was there targeting Donald Trump as well. - I suppose made more amazing by the fact that I'll be able to say I won this at the last ever Golden Globes.
I don't mean to be gloomy.
It's just that it has the words Hollywood, Foreign, and Press in the title.
I just don't know what... I also think that to some Republicans even the word Association is slightly sketchy.
Okay, first of all, folks on the left should not rip on freedom of association since it's folks on the left who want to use government to cram down their rules on religious communities.
But all of this was just prelude to Meryl Streep.
So Meryl Streep is the great goddess of Hollywood.
Everyone worships at the altar of Meryl Streep.
I've never been a particularly big Meryl Streep fan.
I think early in her career, she was really good.
And then later in her career, she's gotten very mannered and you can see the gears turning all the time.
And you're always kind of watching and going, wow, she's really good at crying.
You never get to the point where you're like, wow, I really feel emotionally affected by her tears.
It's always like, wow, she was great when she cried, wasn't she?
That was really awesome.
In any case, not a critique of Meryl Streep's acting skills as much as a critique of what she said.
So last night she does this speech, and her entire speech is a Lifetime Achievement Award.
And it took a lifetime for her to give the speech, which she goes up there with cue cards, and she rips on Donald Trump for basically about three and a half minutes, four minutes, And we will go through it because I think it is important to note why Americans are angry at this.
Now, let me say, she has every right to do this.
She has every right to do this.
It's a free country.
I don't think that anybody should be super-duper crazy upset about the fact that an actress in lefty Hollywood gave a lefty Hollywood address to a bunch of other Hollywood lefties.
I think it's absurd that the left went, what an act of heroism.
What heroism?
It's always amazing.
For the left, heroism amounts to saying stuff they agree with.
Normally, heroism is bravery in the face of adversity.
That's a pretty good general definition.
In order for that to happen, there needs to be some adversity.
There's not a lot of adversity in a Hollywood crowd of people, precisely two of whom, in that entire crowd, voted for Trump.
It's like Vince Vaughn and Mel Gibson, right?
That's the entire crowd.
But she obviously is the bravest woman who ever lived because she said something in front of a bunch of other Hollywood celebrities while wearing a $12,000 gown and having her hair done and making lots of money to be in movies like Florence Foster Jenkins, which no one have ever seen.
But we will go through all of that in just a moment.
First, we have to say hello to our advertisers at DSTLD.
So if you need jeans, and jeans are your thing – I wear jeans pretty much every day, and jeans are extraordinarily expensive.
You need to go to DSTLD.com right now.
DSTLD, they have luxury grade denim starting at 75 bucks.
The jeans are really good, they're really comfortable, and they are really quality.
They last.
You can wash them A lot.
I've worn my jeans many a time, and they are very comfortable.
They look good.
My wife tells me I just look phenomenal in them.
Of course, that could be just her trying to get access to the checkbook, but I have no way of telling, so I'll take her at her word.
But the jeans themselves are really comfortable.
They look really good, and they are much cheaper than they would be if you went to a top-line store.
$75 at dstld.com.
They ship to you directly.
They guarantee the fit, and if they don't fit, they'll send you a new pair.
Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press.
and they will be a staple in your closet for years.
DSTLD.com, distilled.com.
Slash Ben, you go to slash Ben, you get $10 off.
So that means you get it for $65 a pair of jeans instead of $75.
Okay, so we'll play a little bit of Meryl Streep's speech, and then we'll break for a second.
So here is Meryl Streep last night at the Golden Globes going off.
Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press.
Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said, you and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now.
Think about it.
Hollywood, foreigners, and the press.
First of all, Hugh Laurie has to be sitting there right now, and I love whenever they have the cutaway shots of other adoring actors who, they all hate each other.
They hate each other.
And they all go to the shots, and they're like, oh, I love Meryl.
God, I wish she were dead.
I mean, that's what all the faces are always in the audience at these events.
But Hugh Laurie has to be steaming.
He's like, it was my joke first.
It was my joke first.
But in any case, she goes on like this.
First of all, Quick note, and then we'll go to break.
That is that she says there that Hollywood foreigners and the press are the most vilified people in America.
They spent the entire night ripping on the people who live in flyover country.
They spent the entire night ripping on the rubes who voted for Donald Trump or didn't vote for Hillary Clinton.
The entire night.
Yes, you're right.
I'm sure that you are so vilified.
People hate you so much, Meryl Streep.
What a victim you are.
Oh, poor baby.
Yeah, the press is vilified.
I'm part of the press.
It turns out that a lot of the time we deserve the vilification.
Sometimes we get it wrong, sometimes we fib, sometimes we lie.
And we deserve that.
But the idea that being vilified is the end of the world?
Look, you guys vilify Trump at every opportunity.
If you're going to dish it out, you've got to take it a little bit.
This whole, we're victims because people are mean to us, routine, gets a little old when everybody in this room could buy the entire rest of America three times over.
It's a little bit galling to hear these limousine socialists talking about how vilified they are, how rough it is for them.
Okay, well we have to break there on Facebook and YouTube, but we will continue.
over at The Daily Wire, and you can subscribe right now for $8 a month at dailywire.com.
You can become an annual subscriber.
I think we're in the final days of our deal where we send out signed copies of my novel, True Allegiance, and we have a Shapiro store coming up.
I think a Shapiro store, a Klavan store, those are both coming.
You can get access to the rest of the podcast visually, plus you can become part of the mailbag.
We have lots of goodies coming if you become a member.
$8 a month will get you access to dailywire.com, so go over there and subscribe right now, or listen to the rest of the podcast later on iTunes or SoundCloud or do both, preferably.
But check us out.
▲
Export Selection