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July 21, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:51
The Juice Is Loose! | Ep. 345
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People tend to hang out with people they like.
That usually means people with whom they share values and community and life experiences.
But now, it appears that our political polarization has grown so wide that Americans who voted differently in 2016 don't want to hang out with each other.
That, at least, is the story from the Pew Research Center with regard to leftists.
That study found that 47% of liberal Democrats stated that if a friend voted for Donald Trump, it would strain the friendship.
For all Democrats, it was 35%.
For Republicans, that number was just 13% when applied to Hillary Clinton.
Now, Maybe that number would have changed if Hillary had won.
But there's more than a whiff of elemental scorn Democrats hold for Trump voters.
They don't see what was so bad about Hillary that would necessitate a vote for Trump.
They think a vote for Trump could never be made in a good-faith effort to help the country, but it was rather just an endorsement of Trump's worst behavior.
This feeling, combined with the fact that leftists live in bubbles, as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out, 47% of people who voted for Clinton had zero Trump-supporting friends.
That means that the left will continue to polarize and pillory.
Only 28% of Democrats today say they aren't stressed by talking with those who differ on Trump, which means that the vast majority of Democrats won't even deign to discuss the issues.
That leads to less knowledge of the typical Republican and the lazy intellectual construct that turns Trump voters into an other to be opposed on grounds of supposed bigotry.
That scorn will in turn drive more and more conservatives into Trump's arms.
Much of the Trump movement was built on a reactionary and justified anger against leftist character assassination.
The left solution, unfortunately, seems to be just more character assassination.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
So many things to talk about today.
I'm gonna get to a lot of Hollywood because I saw Dunkirk last night and it is just a stunning film.
I want to talk about why it's so good.
I also want to show you a trailer that I think is legitimately one of the worst trailers with major stars ever made.
It's really spectacularly bad and I love it so much because it's so bad.
But before we get to any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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Okay, so a lot of breaking news happening actually right now.
So the biggest breaking news, and this literally broke about five minutes ago as we're filming this, is that Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary, has now resigned, telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of New York financiers Anthony Scaramucci As communications director, according to the New York Times, Mr. Trump offered Mr. Scaramucci the job at 10 a.m.
The president requested Mr. Spicer stay on.
Mr. Spicer told Mr. Trump he believed the appointment was a major mistake, according to a person with direct knowledge of the exchange.
So, that's all we know at this point.
Anthony Scaramucci, for people who don't know, was actually a major Obama donor.
He ended up moving into the Republican camp after that.
I think that he was on the RNC committee, the finance committee in 2012.
And then he was a supporter of a bunch of other candidates before he got to Trump.
He was a Scott Walker supporter and then he was a backer of Jeb Bush.
So he's much more sort of establishment Republican.
And he's being brought in.
Apparently, Steve Bannon was very unhappy with the choice of Anthony Scaramucci.
It looks like the ascendant wing of the Trump administration is the more establishment wing of the Trump administration, meaning Anthony Scaramucci, Gary Cohn, who's a career Democrat, is now being discussed as a cabinet member, the new head of the Fed Reserve, perhaps.
According to NBC News, comms is what Anthony does.
It's how he built his business.
The guy knows media.
He's been a good advocate for the president.
So I love this.
NBC News says, Well, no, now he's gone.
So it's amazing how you get all these conflicting reports out of the Trump administration.
I think the reason that Scaramucci is Considered kind of a Non-entity or somebody who shouldn't have the job by a lot of Trump supporters is because he wasn't on the Trump bandwagon from the beginning and therefore They think that he should not be allowed on the inner circle And this is one of the issues that Trump has had is trying to figure out who should be allowed to work with him Who should he trust and there the people have been with him for a long time are?
Upset that he seems not to trust them so much anymore so case in point be Jeff Sessions so yesterday Tucker Carlson came out When he was ripping up President Trump for ripping on Jeff Sessions.
As you recall, we played you some of the New York Times interview yesterday in which Trump said that he would never have hired Sessions if he knew that Sessions was going to recuse himself.
Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter, both longtime Trump supporters, came forward and said, listen, stop messing with Sessions.
Sessions is one of your earliest supporters.
He's one of the good guys on this team, particularly with regard to immigration.
Why are you ripping on your own base?
And there is a feeling that there's some confusion inside the Trump White House about staffing.
That is only being exacerbated by a new report yesterday from the Washington Post revealing that academic discussions have been ongoing at the White House regarding President Trump's pardon power.
Apparently they're having lots of talks about what he can do with pardons.
Can he preemptively pardon family members?
Can he preemptively pardon himself?
Like, this is really in the Washington Post.
Trump has asked advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members, and even himself in connection with the Russia probe, according to one of those people.
A second person said Trump's lawyers have been discussing the president's pardoning powers among themselves.
You know, I would imagine that at every point you have lawyers who are discussing the pardon power.
I'm not sure what they'd be discussing exactly except for what is he capable of pardoning.
Like if he pardons a crime now and the new evidence comes out later, does the pardon cover that maybe?
There's a lot of talk this morning about if he would pardon himself, would that actually be legal?
Could he pardon himself?
Because The president obviously has plenary pardon power.
He can do what he wants with pardons.
He can pardon anybody, right?
I mean, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.
So you could have something like that.
But are you allowed to pardon yourself?
That would not save his political career, by the way.
If you pardon yourself, the chances that you're going to be impeached are pretty high.
But none of this looks good, okay?
If you're into the appearances of politics, you can still believe that Trump has never done anything wrong.
That Trump is clean as the driven snow and that he has nothing to hide.
But he needs to stop acting like he has something to hide if he actually wants you to believe that, right?
The first paragraph of this Washington Post story says some of President Trump's lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president's authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.
Yesterday, the spokesperson for his legal effort regarding the Russia investigation quit.
I quit.
He also fired his lawyers, and he hired some new lawyers in the Russia investigation stuff.
So all of this doesn't look good.
I mean, if your whole shtick here is, let all the doors be open, let everything come out, I'm draining the swamp, see what I have in here in my apartment, policemen, just come in and investigate, and then the next thing you do is immediately barricade three of the doors, people are going to start getting a little bit suspicious.
And so, you know, do I think that this means that Trump is guilty of anything?
No, I mean, there's alternative explanations that are just as plausible.
Like, for example, maybe the reason he doesn't want Mueller digging into his IRS records is because he is deathly afraid that Mueller is going to find that he's not worth anything like the wealth he said he was worth, right?
He's only worth two billion bucks instead of ten billion bucks.
Or maybe he's worth nothing, right?
Maybe it turns out that he's broke, right?
You just don't know until you get those IRS records.
So maybe he's afraid of that.
Maybe he's afraid that there's some sort of ancillary matter dealing with the IRS that he's going to be held accountable for.
And this is the problem with these special counsel investigations.
Again, The special counsel investigation was brought about because President Trump himself decided to open his big mouth.
He fired Comey and then he opened his big mouth on national television and said that he did it because of the Russia investigation.
That necessitated Rod Rosenstein appointing a special counsel.
The biggest opponent Trump has here is not the media.
The biggest opponent Trump has here is Trump.
The media is getting its material from Trump.
You can hate the New York Times.
You can think the New York Times is out to get Trump.
I think that they're out to get Trump.
I think they have an agenda.
But why is he giving a long interview with the New York Times in which he's talking about why he might fire Robert Mueller and why Jeff Sessions should never have recused himself?
It's just foolish.
It's just foolish.
Unless, there's only two possibilities here, right?
Trump, his worst enemy is his big mouth and he's doing things that look guilty because he just can't help himself because he has to talk all the time.
Super plausible.
And the other answer is it's possible that he actually did something that makes him guilty.
And that's really bad stuff.
And maybe he's doing all this for a reason.
Maybe as the Democrats suggest, he is actually guilty of something.
Because if you look at it from the Democratic perspective, let's do that for a second, okay?
For people on the right, I think it's important that both sides understand each other.
So on the left, Understand, no hard evidence of Trump-Russia actual collusion has taken place.
There's intent to collude from Trump Jr., right?
There's intent to collude from Manafort, presumably.
There's intent to collude from Jared Kushner, but there is no actual on-the-ground collusion, no payoffs, no quid pro quo.
You know, so from the perspective of the left, you need to understand we need more evidence in order for us to acknowledge that Trump actually did something illegal or even deeply wrong other than that meeting at this point, and Trump wasn't in that meeting as far as we know.
From the perspective of the left, I think the right needs to understand the perspective of the left here.
They're looking at this and what they see is a meeting between Trump Jr.
and a bunch of Russian lawyers that was basically paved with a promise that they were going to give Trump negative information about Hillary as part of Russia's governmental effort to support Trump.
And then you have Trump firing Mike Flynn for unspecified reasons after it comes out that Flynn has connections with Russia.
And then you have him firing his FBI director and saying openly that it's because of the Russia investigation.
And then you have him saying that he should have fired Sessions or never hired Sessions because Sessions was recusing himself from the Russia investigation.
And then you have a series of policy decisions that benefit Russia, including the decision this week by President Trump not to arm and fund Syrian rebels against Bashar Assad, right, which helps the Russian government.
So if you're on the left, you're looking at all these indicators and you're saying, OK, well, you know, I see a lot of dots here.
It's hard for me not to connect them.
And if you're on the right, you have to understand that perspective, because we did the same thing with President Obama, right?
We were very suspicious of President Obama.
I think it's more justified with Obama than it is for Trump, because I think that, frankly, Trump is more likely to make stupid mistakes and say dumb things than Obama was.
I think Obama was much more of a president by design.
I think that it's important we understand where we are so that we don't fall apart as a country because what I can foresee happening is some quasi-smoking gun comes out and the right says it doesn't mean anything unless it means everything and we just grow further and further apart as a people and I think that's a mistake.
I think we we can disagree on the implications of these facts but we should at least acknowledge what the facts are and why maybe the other guy thinks what he thinks.
Okay so With all of that said, Trumpcare continues to remain controversial.
And I think here it's important to point out the radicalism of the left on Trumpcare.
So nothing is happening with Trumpcare right now.
The repeal and replace effort is basically stalled because nobody knows what they want to do.
We've talked about that for the past several days.
But the rhetoric of the left continues to ratchet up.
So, for example, you have this professor, he calls himself a Beyonce professor.
That's really what he calls himself.
His name is Kevin Allred, and he's an adjunct part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, which is a hell of a title.
He taught a class there called Politicizing Beyonce, starting in 2010, because our institutions of higher education are the stupidest places on earth.
And Kevin Allred tweeted the other day, John McCain is pretty okay with taking away everyone's healthcare, so excuse me if I don't have a well of sympathy for his brain cancer.
There are Democrats who believe this sort of stuff.
Bernie Sanders, he says that he's not using violent rhetoric with regard to Trumpcare, but that's a lie.
Here's Bernie Sanders doing it over and over and over again.
Okay, I want to talk about the rhetoric then, Senator, because if you're going to sit down with people on both sides of the aisle... Some Democrats have branded Republicans the party of death, for example, calling the tax cuts in the Senate health care bill blood money.
You yourself have said Republicans are potentially killing Americans.
Is that rhetoric irresponsible, and does it provide an impasse to compromise if you're going to sit down with those very people that you've now said want to kill people?
Oh, no, I never said, that's not, you're using rhetoric that I didn't use.
Oh, am I?
These are followers.
I'm saying.
This is an ugly and cynical proposal.
This is a proposal which, if adopted, will result in thousands of Americans dying.
There's enormous pain and death for people all over this country by taking away the health.
Thousands of people will die.
Thousands of Americans will die.
Okay, so that was put together by Reagan Battalion.
Obviously, the democratic rhetoric on this is over the top to the point where you're seeing people take it seriously.
And as you know, I don't blame rhetoric for violence, because I think that there's always a contingent of crazy people who are going to be triggered.
But you have to say that As I've explained this before, if rhetoric is a circle and then crazy people are generally outside the circle, as you broaden the circle of rhetoric to get more and more violence or closer and closer to violence, you're going to end up triggering more and more people.
So those people who are outside the circle who wouldn't have been triggered by the rhetoric, they are going to be now encompassed in the circle as the rhetoric gets more and more violence.
I'm not going to directly blame Bernie Sanders for what happened yesterday in Nevada, but This sort of rhetoric does make things more polarized.
It does make things more volatile.
What I'm talking about, of course, is Las Vegas police released a video that has been non-covered.
I mean, if this had happened to a Democrat, it would be covered all over the media.
You've not seen it anywhere, right?
Las Vegas police released a video from surveillance cameras.
This is from Senator Dean Heller's office.
You can see this fellow standing outside the elevator over at Dean Heller's office.
He left a note threatening to kill Heller if he voted to repeal Obamacare.
The note actually said that if you repeal Obamacare, I'm going to die and I'm going to take you with me.
This sort of stuff is going to become more and more common.
As the Democrats continue to maintain that Republican policy murders people.
And so you have to understand on the left, one of the reasons people are so defensive of Trump is because the left is so crazy.
If the left would stop with their craziness, then people might stop defending Trump so ardently.
The reason that the right is defending Trump is because they feel like he's legitimately under threat, sometimes violent threat, from people on the left because of the rhetoric that's being used.
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Okay, so in other news, in other news, the OJ Simpson parole hearing happened yesterday.
I think that this is important because not only is it one of the first things that I remember as a kid, I remember when they wheeled in the TV for the O.J.
verdict, and I remember the racial polarization in our class.
All the white kids kind of put their heads in their hands, and all the black kids in the class started cheering when O.J.
was let off for obviously murdering his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman.
O.J. had his parole hearing yesterday.
The reason that this is important is because this was, I think, the very beginning of the complete merger between politics and celebrity.
People watched the O.J. trial as total entertainment, to the point that now we can actually make a series about the O.J. trial that's really entertaining, the people versus O.J. Simpson, and it gets huge ratings and Emmy nominations, and it's really good.
But this merger of politics and entertainment, it really was, I think, the beginning of the rise of the sort of reality TV star as political figure Because Ronald Reagan was an actor, but then he was the governor of California before he ran for president.
OJ Simpson had been an NFL star, and then he was an actor in some of the Naked Gun films, And then he commits this double homicide, these two slayings, and everybody in the world is watching this trial and treating it as entertainment, when it really is not entertainment, it's about whether a man murdered two human beings.
And the polarization that it brought off, the reality TV polarization was shocking, because remember this is in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, there's a widespread perception in the black community in LA at that time, and I think still, That the LAPD has race issues.
I don't think that's right now.
I think that there was some truth to it then.
And the fact is that a lot of black folks wanted to let OJ Simpson off the hook, not because they actually thought that he was innocent, but because he killed white people and they didn't really see why this shouldn't be a referendum on the LAPD as opposed to on OJ Simpson.
The polls at the time showed a plurality of black people said that he was innocent.
It was obvious that he was guilty from the get-go.
And so it polarized that way.
That's a conflict that has never really cooled down.
We have the after-effects of it in Ferguson.
We have the after-effects of it over in Baltimore.
We have the after-effects of it every time a white cop shoots a black suspect, or when a white non-cop shoots a black person, as in George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin.
In any case, this was treated as sort of a joke yesterday.
And it was kind of a joke.
I mean, O.J.
was convicted of armed robbery for stealing some of his own sports memorabilia.
This was in 2008.
He spent nine years in prison.
He had a 30-year sentence, 33-year sentence.
But this was treated as a joke.
But it wasn't a joke at the time.
It was a really polarizing period in American history.
And unfortunately, in the last few years, it seems to have come back again.
I want to show you sort of the insanity of this, because if you didn't live through it, it's almost impossible to know how crazy the OJ trial was.
I mean, Mathis is a fair bit younger than I am.
And I don't, Mathis, how old were you when OJ happened?
Were you even alive when OJ happened?
When you were a year old?
No, what was he?
It was 95.
That was two.
He was two.
So, like, I was eleven when this happened, and this was a major, earth-shaking incident.
If you didn't grow up with this, though, you don't understand what it meant when they cut into the NBA finals to show a white Bronco with OJ Simpson in it, running down the free width, AJ Cowlings at the head, and OJ threatening to kill himself.
I mean, it was legitimately insane time.
So, OJ, yesterday, he goes to the parole board, and everybody knows that the sentence that he got in 2008 was basically It was basically karma for him murdering two people.
It's demonstrative of the fact, when you watch some of this testimony, it's demonstrative of the fact that OJ was a very stupid man who obviously committed two murders and was used as a central rallying point for race baiters on all sides.
Here is OJ yesterday explaining why he should be let out of prison.
Well, as I said, the alternative to violence, of course, is I've always thought I've been pretty good with people, and I've basically spent a conflict-free life.
You know, I'm not a guy that ever got into fights on the street with the public and everybody, but as I said, They give you a bunch of little tools about how to talk to people instead of fighting, instead of throwing punches.
Tools that I've used here that, you know, it's how you talk to people.
It's the tone that you use.
The victim empathy was, once again, I I didn't really see that.
OK, he's led a conflict-free life.
If you believe that OJ Simpson has led a conflict-free life, raise your hands.
Not so fast, Ron and Nicole.
That's just amazing stuff.
And then he was let off yesterday.
So you have to understand, before this happened, the parole board took a selfie with OJ.
So you knew how this was going to go before it even started.
And that shows you, once again, the merger between politics and Celebrity is really insipid and disgusting.
It's why you now have Caitlyn Jenner talking about running for Senate in California.
It's why Ashley Judd talked about running for Senate in Kentucky.
It's why Al Franken is in the Senate.
This is all part of the same general phenomenon, that celebrity is celebrity is celebrity, and political celebrity is the same kind as everything else.
OJ was granted parole, even though this parole hearing really went poorly.
I mean, here's a clip of OJ trying to, he's supposed to be admitting to his crimes, right?
I mean, this is what you do in a parole hearing.
You admit to your crimes, and then you say, well, I'm very sorry I did that, and I'm never going to do it again.
Here's OJ talking about how he never did anything wrong.
They did an investigation.
And they came to the conclusion that it was my property.
They turned it over to me.
I have it now, you know?
So, I mean, it's kind of mind-boggling that they turned over to me property that I'm in jail for, for trying to retrieve, you know?
It was my property.
I wasn't there to steal from anybody.
And I would never, ever pull a weapon on anybody.
So you believed that the property was yours?
You wouldn't pull a weapon on anybody?
Like, really?
It's been ruled legally by the state of California that it was my property, and they've given it to me.
My question was, that's why you went into the... The property was yours.
Let me stop it there.
He's arguing with the parole officers.
They were going to clear him anyway because celebrity still has enormous currency.
I love that.
I would never pull a weapon on anybody.
Again, you chopped two people's heads off.
So I think that that lacks a little bit of credibility.
In any case, I want to go on to discuss what is the attempt by the Trump administration to move beyond the Russia stuff.
I also want to get into entertainment.
I want to spend a fair bit of time on the mailbag today.
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All righty.
So President Trump is trying to get beyond all the Trump-Russia stuff.
It would help if he got out of his own way, but he is doing some good things, and I want to discuss a couple of the good things that he is doing.
So, there's a report out that over the first six months, Trump promised that for every new regulation that he made, he would cut two.
So far, he is running circles around that, according to James Barrett over at Daily Wire, to the tune of 16 regulations eliminated for every new one proposed.
The idea that Trump hasn't done anything is not right.
I've said before that what Trump did was gorsuch and cutting regulations.
That remains true.
The 16 to 1 ratio comes via numbers presented in a report this week from the Office of Management and Budget that shows the administration is holding true to its vow to be business friendly.
That's why you wonder why the stock market continues to go up even with all of the unease around President Trump's behavior.
The reason is because there's a general perception he's not going to do too much to hurt business and he's going to do a lot to help it by removing regulations.
In Obama's final year in office, the Federal Register set the record for the highest page count ever at almost 82,000 pages.
This is a very good move by the Trump administration.
That is something that is worthy of pointing out and he deserves credit when he does things that are right.
They've identified nearly 300 regulations related to energy production and environmental protection and plans to rescind, review, or delay across the EPA and the Interior and Energy Departments.
This is a very good move by the Trump administration.
That is something that is worthy of pointing out.
And he deserves credit when he does things that are right.
So that is good.
Also, Mick Mulvaney was out there yesterday.
He is the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
And he is saying that it's time to push what he calls MAGANomics, right?
So Make America Great Again-nomics.
Okay, MAGAnomics is basically just conservative economics.
I mean, like, he's going to give you a list of talking points, they're all things we've been saying for years, but now everything has to be put, has to have the Trump brand on it.
Listen, I'm fine with that.
If Trump wants to put his brand on good things and then push them, that's fine with me.
Here's Mick Mulvaney discussing what they're going to do with tax reform.
Oh, the politics, obviously, is the art of the possible.
I don't think we've given up on that low possible corporate rate.
In fact, I'd love to see a 15% rate.
I'd love to see less.
But the truth of the matter is that we're still pushing for that lowest possible corporate rate we can.
Why?
You know, the Democrats will say it's a giveaway to big business.
It's not.
We're trying to get back to a healthy American economy.
We define that as 3% growth.
We introduced the term this week called MAGAnomics, which is sort of this unifying theme of everything we're trying to do to get the healthy, traditional American economy back on track.
And to have that, you have to have a lot of capital investment.
You have to make people more productive.
And that means businesses need to invest more.
And that's what we're shooting for on tax reform.
Okay, well, that's all good stuff, and I hope to see President Trump pursue that.
In order to do that, he's gonna have to get out of his own way.
As we say, you know, Spicer is out, Scaramucci is in, he's got a whole new set of lawyers on the Russia stuff.
He should put all of that to the side, and he should stop talking to the press, and he should just pursue what it is that he wants to pursue.
I think one of the big problems here is that he's not sure what he wants to pursue, but hopefully he can consolidate around something so we get some good policy out of this administration.
Okay, so we're going to do some things I like and some things I hate.
They're almost combined today.
So we're going to do things I like and things I hate.
Before we get to that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
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Okay, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
So, things I like.
I I saw this yesterday, and I have to say, this is the greatest trailer I have ever seen in my entire life.
It is a phenomenal, phenomenal trailer.
It's Michael Fassbender and J.K.
Simmons and Rebecca Ferguson, all these top-line stars, and it's basically a serial killer in Norway, okay?
So they're trying to do Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and it's...
Really amazingly bad.
It's so bad this trailer.
I really like Michael Fassbender as an actor.
I'll watch him in virtually anything.
I will watch this with great enjoyment.
It is called The Snowman and it is so horrifying.
I'll play it and then I will explain why I love this so much.
much.
It's like a parody.
A woman vanished last night.
We just found the body.
Prince.
And the head... is missing.
So great, the flopping fish.
He calls himself the snowman killer.
Hello, Mr. Police, says on the snow.
Yes!
I'm thinking that he's going after women that he disapproves of.
The only thing we know for sure is that he's playing games with us.
Yes!
Okay, so it's so great.
Pause it for a second.
Pause it for one second.
I want to play more of it because it's so wonderful.
Okay, so, first of all, it's like they took every line from every serial killer film that was the most cliched and it's like serial killer Mad Libs.
It's like he's totally insane.
The only thing we know is he's playing games with us.
And then they took the least threatening thing on planet Earth, a snowman.
Right?
Like the guy from Frozen.
Like the snowman.
And then they tried to make this into some sort of intimidating figure.
Okay?
So it's not even like clowns, which are creepy.
Like in IT, okay?
You have a creepy clown.
In order for you to make a creepy film, you can take something that's like a childhood thing, but it has to be inherently a little bit creepy.
So clowns are a little bit creepy just inherently.
It's a person with a mask on, That's a little bit creepy just to begin with.
But you can't take, like, Winnie the Pooh and make Winnie the Pooh scary.
There's just no way to do it, right?
Even if you're gonna do Chucky and make Chucky scary, it has to be, like, a deformed doll with, like, a cut on its head.
Like, it has to be scary-looking.
Okay, this is not scary.
It's just a snowman.
And, like, hello, Mr. Police.
Oh, it's so great!
I love it so much, and I just love that Hollywood is making films that, like, they got top-name cast because this is a best-selling novel, because people have no taste whatsoever.
You know, Dunkirk will probably open to $35 or $40 million this weekend.
It is the best film of the year.
This will probably open to $35 or $40 million the weekend that it opens, and it looks like it's going to be the worst film in history.
I need to play a little bit more of it just so you can hear that every single line is a cliché.
I'm telling you, it's a cliché Mad Libs.
It doesn't matter.
They took lines from, like, Insomnia, and then they took a line from Silence of the Lambs, and they took a line from, and then they took a, like, every serial killer movie.
They just took a random line from it and stuck it in.
I have to play a little bit more because I just can't stop watching this.
It's so addictive.
We need a way to lure him out.
Yes!
Be careful.
We don't know what we're dealing with.
Yes, we don't know what we're dealing with!
Hey, another snowman.
He's been watching us the whole time.
He's been watching us!
Cutting things up into little pieces.
He's taunting us.
He's taunting us!
If we don't find him, this is never going to stop.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
- Another missing moment.
- There's something we're not seeing.
- Yes, there's nothing we're not seeing.
- We celebrate the way this has brought us together.
- Anyone can see that he's trying to hide something.
- Anyone can see that he's trying to hide something.
Okay, I can stop it.
I'm sorry.
Every single... So the only scary thing in the entire trailer is, like, somebody with a mask on, right?
That's why you don't use snowmen as your prop in a horror film, guys.
Like, really, it's a snowman.
Like, I'm waiting to hear, "'Cause it's summer!" Like, from Frozen, right?
He's just gonna break into that.
The Snowman Killer.
Oh, so great.
So thank you, Michael Fassbender, for starring in what obviously is going to be the worst film in human history coming out in October.
I could not be more excited about this, and I will buy 17 tickets.
So I will be one of the people making this 400 million dollars.
The box office.
I love it so much.
Okay.
So now for a thing I actually really like, and that is I saw Dunkirk last night.
I went to the premiere last night at the Arclight, which meant I got a cool Dunkirk hat as well, which is awesome.
But in any case, I will show you some of the trailer.
It is a unique war film.
It is not Saving Private Ryan.
It is not Band of Brothers.
I'm not a huge Saving Private Ryan fan.
I am a huge Band of Brothers fan.
It is a very, very different film.
It is so creative and it is brilliant in a very different way.
way.
Here's some of the trailer.
The enemy tanks have stopped. - Why?
Why waste precious tanks when they can pick us off from the air like fish in a barrel?
barrel.
There are 400,000 men on this beach.
So it's really, it's a gripping film, but it's not gripping in the way that Saving Private Ryan's but it's not gripping in the way that Saving Private Ryan's opening scene is gripping, where you just get nonstop violence and people's guts being blown and the randomness of What you get from this is something very different.
Saving Private Ryan is done in classical style.
It's sort of done like, I always forget the name of the film that was nominated last year, Ridge, what is it?
Hacksaw Ridge, thank you.
I always mix it up with Heartbreak Hill or whatever.
Hamburger Hill is the Clint Eastwood movie from the 70s.
But in any case, that film is done in very classical style.
So is Saving Private Ryan.
You learn the backstory of the characters, and then it takes you in narrative form through an entire arc to a logical conclusion as to where this ends.
You don't get any of the characters' backstories in this.
There's three main characters or three main stories that are followed.
One is called the Mole.
The Mole is a reference to this bridge that is at Dunkirk.
The problem at Dunkirk was that not only were the British surrounded, but they were on a beach where it's a very, very shallow beach.
And the tide, when it comes in, it doesn't come in high enough for big boats to get in.
So a destroyer couldn't get in and just pick up people.
Instead, they had to have small ships trying to ferry things out, and they didn't have any ships because the British were afraid that the Germans were going to strafe the entire army and destroy all their ships as well as the army on the beach, thereby destroying their capacity to resist.
And they also weren't going to send all of their planes because if they did that, then those could all be shot down.
They wouldn't have the capacity to defend London.
So it's basically 400,000 guys stranded on this beach they can't escape.
And so it is the loneliest, most quiet, subtle war film I've ever seen.
When I say lonely, I mean like every shot looks like that shot of the 400,000 men standing in orderly queues on the beach as though they're waiting for ice cream, but they're really waiting to know whether they're going to live or die as they're being strafed from overhead.
When people die, it's not done in like, okay, there's in Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan fashion where there's like a leg over here.
It's actually done in almost classical fashion.
It's not a particularly bloody film.
You don't see people, you know, with their body parts torn off because that's not the point of the film.
Like, he just assumes that you know that war is going to be bloody, but what he does do is he shows you almost the casual violence of war, And he shows you the small actions by quiet people.
The whole point here is that most, it's amazing, most people in America no longer even know somebody who serves in the military presently.
There are about 2 million people who served active duty or are serving active duty.
In the military.
And there aren't all, you know, serving on various bases, but there are lots of people who are in the National Guard and such.
Especially in places like California and New York, it's a good shot you'll go your entire life without meeting somebody who is an active-duty military member.
And so, when you hear about a war, what you think about a war is not somebody who you know, it's just some disembodied person who's out there doing heroic things to try and save you.
And that's what this film takes on.
The reason that you're supposed to care about these characters is not because you know where they went to high school, and who they fell in love with, like in Hacksaw Ridge.
It's not because you know their personal views on matters.
It's because these are people doing heroic things and making difficult choices and sometimes doing cowardly things and making terrible choices in the midst of difficulty in order to survive, to fight another day, and fight Hitler.
He makes so many great directorial choices in this film.
One of them is that you never see the Nazis at any point in the film.
There's no point at which you see the Nazis.
The opening scene, you see that right at the beginning of the trailer where they're all walking through the town of Dunkirk and they're on the streets and these flyers are floating down saying, you're surrounded.
That scene...
The very next thing that happens, and this isn't spoiling anything, it's the first 30 seconds of the film.
You just hear gunshots, and they're stunningly loud.
So, unlike most war films, where the sound sort of just becomes overwhelming, in this film, every crack of a gunshot is stunning.
Like, it's startling.
It legitimately will jump in your seat, because it's so loud.
And it's meant to do that, because the idea is that every shot is equally... it's equally possible that it's deadly and gonna kill you.
And so they're walking down the street, these five guys, as you see there, and in the first 30 seconds of the film, you see them getting picked off one by one.
But you never see the Nazis at any point during this film.
You never see the Nazis.
The most you see of the Nazis is you see some Luftwaffen planes.
That's it.
And so the idea here is that these guys are fighting an unseen force, an enemy that they can't control, an enemy they don't know, and yet they are having to make these really, really difficult decisions.
So the three main stories are the one on the beach, as I mentioned, There was one by sea, so the story of Dunkirk is that a bunch of civilian vessels were commandeered by the British military, and civilians were told to go sail across this 26-mile stretch to Dunkirk and pick guys up from the beach.
So civilians were non-military members.
It was men, women, just sailing across the English Channel to pick up all of these members of the British military.
And 800 different boats did that.
Almost a thousand boats did that.
And so it follows this one, Mark Rylance and his son who are coming across to do that.
And you never really find out until the end why they're bothering to do it.
And then the third story is Tom Hardy plays an RAF pilot, a Royal Air Force pilot, who is engaged in these dogfights.
And what's fascinating about the film is that the mole, right, what's happening on the beach, takes a week.
What's happening with the sailor takes a day.
And what's happening with Tom Hardy takes an hour.
And they say this up front.
And how these stories meet up and are interwoven is really fascinating.
Again, the stylistic choice here is to focus on the actions of the men, not on who the men are.
And I think that's a deliberate attempt by Nolan.
So some people have found that off-putting.
People have said that they don't feel emotionally invested in the characters because they're not being given the backstory, they're not being given this whole thing.
But that's the point.
Okay, you don't have to be emotionally invested in who the soldiers are who defend civilization in order for you to be emotionally invested in their fight for survival and their fight for victory.
That's the entire point of the film.
And it really is, it's really a first-rate film.
It's one of those films where I walked out of it and it's kind of stunning.
It's more of an experience than it is a film.
And you walk out and you feel like you've experienced something.
You should go see it in IMAX if you can.
I saw it.
I didn't see it in IMAX.
I saw it in 70mm.
And it's just, it's first rate.
And the more you think about it, the better it gets.
The more you realize the kind of directorial choices he's making and why they're so good.
Okay, so time for a quick thing I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.
So, the thing I hate.
So, Jay-Z has been rapping about his infidelity, and Monica Lewinsky loves it.
Now this is really a thing, okay?
So according to the Daily Mail, Monica Lewinsky has now praised Jay-Z for speaking openly about cheating on his wife, Beyonce, on his latest album.
Lewinsky, who understands better than anyone the public cost paid for a high-profile affair, spoke about the iconic rapper's transgressions in an essay published by Vanity Fair.
In the piece titled Jay-Z, Prince Harry, Brad Pitt, and the New Frontiers of Male Vulnerability, the former White House intern praised Hubb for not ignoring the allegations hurled at him by Beyonce on her 2016 album Lemonade.
Jay-Z had a choice, Lewinsky wrote, having been called out publicly by his wife in her fierce 2016 album and video, he knew his fans wouldn't have blinked if his next album skimmed past the allegations.
That's not uncommon for men to do, and it's not as if we hadn't seen Beyonce and Jay-Z out in the world together since then, not to mention welcoming their twins to planet Earth.
Jay-Z could have ignored it all, but instead he chose a path of candor that will move the conversation forward and help others.
No.
Just no.
If Beyonce wanted to stay together with her husband, then she shouldn't have been talking about his infidelities publicly.
And if he wanted to stay together with her, not only should he not be committing infidelities, he shouldn't be out there talking about his infidelities publicly.
This is not a marriage, in my opinion, that is going to end well, because marriages where the partners talk about cheating on each other openly, that's not bound to go particularly well.
It's scuzzy behavior.
And some behavior can stay private, okay?
What happens between you and your wife... Actually, one of the weirder aspects of human nature is you'll see a husband who cheats on his wife and then he feels the necessity to tell her.
There's nothing more selfish than doing that, okay?
It's super selfish to commit infidelity in the first place.
But then to tell your spouse about it is even more selfish, because that's about you alleviating your guilt, not about you making your spouse's life better in any way.
It's about you now creating a choice for your spouse that your spouse never would have had to make except for you being an idiot and feeling the need to dump off your own guilt on your spouse.
So when they say that honesty is the best policy in these sorts of things, no.
Being good is the best policy, and then if you do something guilty, live with your guilt.
Don't dump it off onto other people.
The idea that we need a society filled with people who are Publicly proclaiming their infidelity is really a bad idea.
Okay, time for some mailbag.
Let's do it.
So, Josh Mayer says, So I am not in favor of net neutrality.
Net neutrality, as you'll see, it's very funny.
ideal outcome, capitalism, fix it or leave the government policies in place.
So I am not in favor of net neutrality.
Net neutrality, as you'll see, it's very funny.
A lot of the people who say that net neutrality is basically a giant giveaway to companies that are ISPs, internet service providers, they neglect to mention that net neutrality itself is a giant giveaway to places like Google and Netflix, right?
There are certain companies that eat up all the bandwidth on the internet, and net neutrality forces internet service providers to charge them the same amount for data as it would charge to anybody else as opposed to surcharging them for all of this.
Okay, Internet Service Providers get to compete with each other.
That would be the idea.
The problem that we've had with Internet Service Providers is that they're local monopolies that ensure that there are only two or three, at the most, companies, Internet Service Providers, that are actually in a particular area.
So, you're using a regulatory fix to fix a regulatory problem.
What you really should do is relieve all the regulations on Internet Service Providers in general, allowing people to build new infrastructure and then compete in the open market with one another.
Because there'll be some ISPs that charge Netflix more and some that charge them less.
There'll be some ISPs that charge small providers less, and let them compete.
And that competition will ensure a better internet.
Plus, I mean, the internet seems to be working pretty fine as it is.
I don't understand the huge issues that people are having with the internet that they think that needs to be fixed by some sort of overarching government system.
Nick says, Dear Ben, which state is your least favorite?
And since we're on the topic of California, why do you live there?
It seems like a hellhole.
So, California is a beautiful place that is governed like crap.
I live there my entire life.
The weather is really nice most of the time.
There is some culture here, despite all the talk about the lack thereof.
It's hard to say state.
I can tell you cities that I really don't like.
So I'm not a big fan of New York City.
It's fun to visit.
I would hate to live there.
I like seeing the sky.
I'm a suburban guy.
I grew up in the suburbs, so hard for me to live in New York, but the state of New York is great.
I mean, going to upstate New York is beautiful.
There are real areas of New York that are just wonderful.
Michael says, Hi Ben.
I recently watched a video by Jordan Peterson regarding job suitability for different IQ levels.
Thanks, Naomi.
This is actually a really, really good question.
So, this, I think, is the big question of the future of the workforce.
Thanks, Naomi.
This is actually a really, really good question.
So this, I think, is the big question of the future of the workforce.
The truth is, machines are good at doing some manual labor, but they're not good at doing all manual labor.
So machines are good at doing very specialized manual labor, like at factories, right?
If it's doing one thing over and over and over, machines are really good at that.
What machines are not really good at is doing many different tasks.
So, for example, you can have a Roomba that cleans your floor, but it's not going to be able to clean your table.
Right, so a person can do both of those things.
So manual labor is not going to go totally out of style for people who are not, you know, Phi Beta Kappa and actually need to work in manual labor.
But yes, we are going to have to develop skill sets.
As mechanization creates less need for manual labor, there is going to be a need for more creativity in the market.
The good news is that IQ doesn't always match up with creativity.
So there's a lot of people who are very creative who aren't necessarily world's brightest people.
Just look at Hollywood.
So we're all going to have to up our skill sets a little bit.
I don't think the market has ruled out low IQ people at this point.
When it starts to, then we are going to – if we get to the point – I've said this before.
If we get to the point where machines are basically providing such abundance that everybody – there's no need for – there's no need for markets because markets are created by scarcity – If you have the replicator from Star Trek, and it just creates everything that you could ever need, then you don't have to worry about things being created anymore, and then you talk about a universal basic income.
This is a very good question.
is it when a person from a Western country converts to an Eastern religion, they are considered enlightened?
But when a person from an Eastern country converts to Judaism or Christianity, they are traded to their culture.
Uh, this is a very good question.
Uh, the answer is because there is always a bias against the religion with which you grew up in Western civilization.
If you grew up in, in, in area where everybody's conservative and you become lefty, then you are considered a, an enlightened member of the upper class by people in the big cities.
Uh, And the same thing is true with regard to religion.
You are moving beyond your boundaries.
Never mind that if a person from the East converts to Judaism or Christianity, they are considered a heretic very often or they're considered a rube.
That's just because we as a society have learned to hate ourselves in a lot of ways.
Evan says, in what circumstance do socks go with sandals?
So, as someone who used to wear socks with sandals and found it extraordinarily comfortable when I was a teenager, I will say, in situations in which you are not publicly seen, that would be the proper answer.
Because, I gotta tell you, I'm not a big sandals fan in general, particularly for dudes, right?
Dudes should not wear sandals because feet are ugly.
So, dude feet, not something people want to see.
Put on some shoes.
It just looks smelly and terrible.
Like, please don't do that.
Okay, Chris says, So, I am not aware of Ted Cruz's votes on veterans benefits, so I'd have to look that up to confirm whether that is in fact true.
But, the general question, to say that veterans deserve entitlements due to the nature of their service, no, I don't think that's out of bounds at all.
I am not aware of Ted Cruz's votes on veterans benefits, so I'd have to look that up to confirm whether that is in fact true.
But the general question to say that veterans deserve entitlements due to the nature of their service, no, I don't think that's out of bounds at all.
I think that's part of the contract when they sign up, right?
You're telling them to go do the most violent, difficult job on planet Earth in many cases, and you're going to have to pay people a lot of money for that, including lifetime benefits in some cases.
It kind of...
Kyle says, "Hey Ben, how did you know you were ready for kids?
What advice would you give to a young couple out of college as to how to know when they are ready for kids?" So, two things.
One, you're never truly ready for kids.
You can make the decision that you think that you are financially prepared to take care of a child.
That's really what it was for us.
We were in a financial position where we were ready for kids.
And we felt that we had the time and resources to properly care for our children.
So from a logical perspective, that's true.
But when people say ready for kids, the implication is if I'm not ready for kids, then I should just not have a kid.
And the fact is that most kids who are born are not prepared for it.
Should you prepare if you can?
Yes.
You should make sure that your relationship with your spouse is ultra rock-solid, because having kids changes the nature of your relationship with your spouse.
Before you could focus solely on the other person in your marriage, and now you both have to focus on these new people who take over your lives.
So you better be solid before that happens.
So if you're financially, you know, on the upswing, and if you are solid with your spouse, then you can safely say you're ready for kids, but If you're not ready for kids, that doesn't mean that you can't be a good parent, or that you can't become ready for kids, or that it can't help you grow as a human being, and that you take responsibility for decisions that you make.
Nat says, Hey Ben, my little sister is 13.
She, like most kids, is very caught up in today's culture and politics because her idols tend to be liberal.
She's been developing a more liberal view of the world.
She already tends to look at conservatives in a bad light.
I was wondering if you had any advice on how I could go about helping her understand conservatism better without alienating her.
I'd appreciate it.
So, I think the first thing to say is that, you know, it's not good to label people you don't know as bigots without any sort of evidence that they are bigots.
Okay?
You are tolerant of all sorts of views.
If you consider yourself a liberal, you probably are conservative.
Because if you consider yourself liberal, it's because you want everybody to be able to do what they want, basically.
That's a libertarian position, not a leftist position.
Okay, leftists like to say that about sexual matters.
The right doesn't really even care about that stuff anymore, okay?
Libertarians don't even care about that stuff.
If I care about it on a religious level, I certainly don't care about it on a governmental level or on a public policy level.
So, you know, I think that she probably has a skewed view of what the right is because she's listening to people from the left.
The answer should be go listen to some people from the right and that way maybe you can determine whether what is being said about those people is true or not.
Alex says, What is your position on mandatory tipping?
I think the original tradition of getting a tip in advance for better service made sense, but now everybody demands a tip for everything, regardless of the level of service.
So, I am a pretty generous tipper.
I am ideologically opposed to tipping.
So, both of these things are true.
I'm a generous tipper because I think when people work hard, they deserve money, and I'm happy to give them that money.
However, Tipping is stupid, okay?
I'm with Dwight Schrute from The Office on this one.
I don't tip my proctologist and he's doing something more important than carrying my food seven feet from the counter to my table.
So this idea that you get a special tip because you carried food seven feet, like, how about this?
I would rather that you make a better wage and charge me more for the food than that I have to decide whether I'm a good person or not based on the tip I give.
That's it.
I mean, that really is what we do, right?
They've actually found this.
They've done studies of this, of tipping.
It's really fascinating.
And what they found is, they thought that originally people did tipping because it was reciprocal altruism.
That if you give a tip, somebody's gonna give you a tip back, but then they found that that makes no sense, right?
You never see the waiter again.
You never see these people again.
It's just that you don't want to be perceived by that waiter as a bad guy, so you give a tip.
So there's a moral judgment that's made about you based on the level of your tip, and you're making moral judgment about your waiter based on, you know, did they do a good job or not?
Are they a bad person?
I'm gonna give you a $2 tip just to show you.
And my grandfather used to do this.
If he didn't like the service, he'd leave a nickel.
Right, just to show them they didn't like the service.
Again, I don't think that any of this is relevant.
We all earn wages out here in the non-tipping world.
So I'm not a huge fan of tipping.
Although I will say that I think that if you're an employee, it's a great way to make some extra money.
Really what it is, is It's almost become a way to avoid taxes, because tips are generally given in cash.
And if you're a waiter, you can make a lot of money on the side that way.
Okay, David says, Hey Ben, as a fellow Game of Thrones fan, sometimes I have an issue with the over-the-top sex and violence.
Is there a way you justify the graphic nature of the show, or are we just huge nerds who are willing to accept it?
So, both.
Yes, the over-the-top sex and violence is over-the-top sex and violence.
Over-the-top violence doesn't tend to bother me very much, because I think that there are situations in which violence is necessary.
So, the over-the-top violence in Band of Brothers doesn't bother me, really, because I think there are situations in which violence is necessary, and violence against evil is necessary, and we should all see the wages of sin or death, and we should all see that, you know, bad things even happen to good people.
But, when it comes to the graphic sex in the first season, for example, and it is, it's very graphic, the first season is basically near-pornographic, I had problems with that.
I fast-forwarded through a lot of that because I thought that it was just HBO doing what HBO does.
Every HBO show, just to prove that they're HBO and they're pay access, they have some boobies just to show, oh, look, we're HBO and we can put boobies on TV.
And now they've decided to up the ante and say, oh, we're HBO so we can put a dinghy on TV.
You know, this is what they do.
Well, I don't think there's a way to justify it.
I think that you can say overall the show's great.
I think you can fast forward those scenes.
But I'm not going to justify what I think are bad artistic choices.
There are situations in which nudity on screen is actually useful to the story.
So I think of two cases in particular, Clockwork Orange, where there is some nudity on screen but it's directly designed to demonstrate the evil and vulgarity of the villains.
And what the brainwashing program has done to this one guy afterward.
And there's another movie called The Pawnbroker that I think I've recommended on the show before with Rod Steiger about a Holocaust survivor and there's one scene where he runs a pawn shop and a woman comes in and she bears her breast in front of him and it's used as a gateway for a flashback to his wife was in a concentration camp with him and she's being raped by a Nazi officer.
So there you have a case.
Both of those cases Typically are not erotic, right?
Both of those cases are rape scenes.
So I think in rape scenes very often you have to show that stuff in order to show how vile and evil rape is and why rapists should be castrated or killed because they're the most evil people on earth.
But in terms of like erotica, you know, showing erotic stuff on screen, I don't think that's hardly ever necessary.
In fact, the most romantic scenes of all time are rarely sex scenes.
Those are usually the most forgettable, right?
The romantic scenes are the ones that are from the 1940s.
Where, you know, people barely touch and the tension is just tremendous.
Most romance is sexual tension, not sexual release.
And it seems that most of today's movies focus in on sexual release and not sexual tension.
Okay, so, we will be back here next week.
Next week I will be traveling to Washington, D.C.
to testify before Congress.
And we'll give you all the updates on Berkley.
As of Monday, right now, Berkley is saying that they are going to try and give me a slot.
They pledge that they will make the event happen.
So thank you for all of your support, folks, and hopefully they'll fulfill that pledge.
We'll see.
They kind of jerked Ann Coulter around, so we'll see if they jerk me around as well, but hopefully they'll keep their pledge.
We'll give you the update.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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