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Sept. 19, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:37
The Culture Wars | Ep. 385
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Time Text
The culture war has begun, have they?
We're going to talk about the Emmys.
We'll talk about whether CNN likes boobs.
Yeah, really.
And we'll also talk about President Trump golfing towards Hillary's back or something and then tweeting about it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So all the things are stupid.
Welcome back, it's Monday.
Yeah!
Everything is very stupid this week.
We'll be talking about the Emmys in a little while.
But before we talk about the Emmys, first I want to talk about all the things political that are actually important or quasi-important for a couple of reasons.
One is because the Emmys are less important than what's actually going on.
I'm going to give you the entire narrative.
And then, also because if we show too many clips of the Emmys, then Facebook gets mad at us.
We'll be showing clips of the Emmys a little bit later in the show.
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Okay, so.
As I say, I could begin with the Emmys, but before I get to the Emmys, I really want to talk about why I think President Trump won.
Now what's really interesting is when you talk about why President Trump won, I know it's sort of an old topic, but there's a phrase that's used very frequently.
You'll see a piece of news and somebody will say, that's why Trump won.
And you'll see a piece of news and somebody will say, that's why Trump won.
You notice it's never a piece of news that actually has to do with politics.
It's never a news that has to do with politics per se.
It's always something that has to do with the culture.
It's always a kindergarten forces young kids to be confronted with transgenderism.
Or a baker is forced to cater a same-sex wedding.
It's always stuff like that.
This is why Trump won.
Or somebody gets mad at a right-winger for some stupid reason.
They decide to fire Brendan Eich at Mozilla Firefox, and you say, ah, that's why Trump won.
It's never about the issues.
The reason I say this, and the reason I think this is deeply important, is because it's very easy to get caught up in the idea that President Trump won because of a particular political viewpoint.
I don't think that's correct.
That's important because right now President Trump is obviously in the middle of a shift toward the middle.
He's obviously shifting his politics from what people would consider the normal hardline right, the kind of Ann Coulter populist right.
He's shifting from there to many democratic policies and there are a lot of pundits, people like Ann, who have been saying, well he's going to lose his support base, right?
This is the perspective of Steve Bannon as well, that he ran on all these populist issues and that's why he won.
I don't actually think that's why he won.
You know, Ross Douthat, during the election cycle, a guy who's sort of more mainstream traditional conservative than than Coulter or Bannon, he was saying the whole time that Trump won because he talked about issues nobody had talked about before.
Tariffs and trade and higher taxes and all this kind of stuff.
I really don't think that's what it was.
I think that a lot of the support for President Trump was attitudinal.
I think a lot of it was about attitude.
I think most of it was about culture.
And that's why the Emmys matter.
We'll get to the Emmys in a little while here.
But that's why the Emmys matter because if you watch the Emmys, the Emmys will drive more votes into President Trump's column than anything he does in terms of straight policy this year or next.
The culture war is what people are hit with in the face every day.
They're not hit with policy every day.
Most of the policies you live with are made at the local and state level.
They're not made at the federal level.
Your life probably did not change all that much when President Obama was president on a policy level.
It changed somewhat, right?
I mean, our tax rates went up and down.
If you were in a business, you had to deal with the Obamacare shtick.
But if you're just a normal employee of a company, Your life probably did not change radically thanks to President Obama, or thanks to George W. Bush, or thanks to Bill Clinton, or thanks to Ronald Reagan.
The fact is, in our mass media era, what matters most is the culture war.
Everyone wants to focus in on the political war, what matters most is the culture war.
And I'll show you why this is.
President Trump's in the middle of a policy shift, and the shift is pretty thoroughgoing.
Tom Cotton, who's been an ally of the president, senator from Arkansas, he was ripping on President Trump's plans with regard to the DREAM Act over the weekend.
Now remember, President Trump campaigned on the idea that everyone has to go.
We have laws.
We're a country of laws.
Right?
This was his shtick.
This is what he said.
And now President Trump says we're going to re-enshrine President Obama's Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals.
We're going to legalize everybody between the ages of 16 and 31 by 2012 and who had arrived in the country before 2007 and doesn't have a criminal record.
We're going to legalize all those people.
We're going to make Congress do it.
And we're not going to stump for a wall.
And we're not really going to do much about our border problem.
But we're going to give the Democrats what they want.
So Tom Cotton was on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd and he was basically saying this is the worst amnesty ever.
It's the biggest amnesty ever.
It's going to be just terrible.
Give me a definition of amnesty because it's in the eye of the beholder.
It feels particularly when it comes to this debate on the right side of the spectrum here.
What is your definition of amnesty?
Well, amnesty is giving legal status to people who came here illegally.
But the core debate is not over what is... So you believe this is amnesty for DACA?
Well, if you pass the so-called DREAM Act, it'll be the single biggest amnesty in the history of the United States.
Even bigger than the 1986 amnesty, which Ronald Reagan said was his biggest mistake in office.
But the core debate here has never been about legal status for these 700,000 or so people.
It's been, how are we going to control the negative side effects of that?
Which is undercutting American jobs and wages.
My legislation, the RAISE Act, would do that.
And deterring more illegal immigration.
I mean, put yourself in the shoes of a parent in El Salvador right now.
Okay, so Tom Cotton is talking policy here.
How many votes do you think are actually mobilized by this kind of policy?
The answer is, I don't think that many.
I don't think that many.
This is why Trump feels so free to move.
Clinton did the same thing.
On the left, there was this idea that Bill Clinton was some great sort of leftist leader.
Bill Clinton cut deals with the Republican Congress on a regular basis.
They called it triangulation.
Triangulation just means that he was going to do popular stuff with the opposite party, and his own base didn't care because, again, Bill Clinton was a culture warrior, and all that matters is the culture war.
Another example of President Trump moving to the left, Heidi Heitkamp, who's the senator from North Dakota.
She's a Democrat.
She's in serious trouble in her next Senate race.
Trump has been out there campaigning with her, saying she's a wonderful woman, Heidi Heitkamp.
Now she's out there saying that she wants to do an infrastructure deal with Trump.
I can tell you that he, I think the president realizes that the best policy comes from bipartisan discussions.
And he wanted to host one and tell us that he's very interested in our input.
And so Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly and myself were invited to sit down with John Thune from South Dakota, Orrin Hatch from Utah, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, and Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania and really spend a lot of time visiting about, you know, what our expectations were for tax reform, try and figure out where the sweet spot is.
But we also talked about infrastructure and being from New York.
I mean, there's a major shift to the left by President Trump.
Now, he was talking about this during the campaign that we're going to spend lots on infrastructure, but obviously this is not typical mainstream conservatism.
We complained when President Obama dumped a trillion dollars, or close to it, in his stupid stimulus package that didn't do anything for the economy.
Now Trump's doing the same thing.
Do you think it's going to lose him a lot of votes?
I don't.
How about the Paris Accords, right?
This is a big win for conservatives, the idea that Trump was going to pull out of the global warming-oriented Paris Accords.
This was in an accord that supposedly committed us to moving toward a zero net carbon emissions economy.
Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, now he's walking it back.
He's saying, well, Trump might actually stay in the Paris Accords now.
Again, the right was celebrating this.
Do you think that Trump's going to lose a lot of votes because of this?
But there's a chance that if things get worked out, both on the voluntary side from the U.S., the voluntary restrictions for the U.S., that it could change, but then also with China, there's a chance the U.S.
could stay in the accord.
Is that right?
I think under the right conditions.
The president said he's open to finding those conditions where we can remain engaged with others on what we all agree is still a challenging issue.
Okay, so again, another issue where President Trump is obviously moving to the left.
Is it going to lose him a lot of votes?
Here's why I don't think it's going to lose him a lot of votes.
I don't think that it's going to lose him a lot of votes, because the truth is, most people didn't vote for Trump thinking he was an ideologue.
It's amazing.
Democrats are finally now becoming to come around on this.
They're finally beginning to figure this out.
Adam Schiff, Democrat from California, he says just this, that Trump's only ideology is being pro-Trump.
Yeah, there were some of us who were saying this during the entire campaign.
Democrats, though, were saying that Trump was Hitler, right?
Trump was Hitlerian.
It's that culture war that matters, not the policy war.
Because what Schiff says here is basically right.
Trump does not have an ideology.
He's just going to do whatever he thinks is good for himself.
Well, it doesn't make me question that because I think all of us recognize that outreach for what it is, and that's purely transactional, purely something that will come up from time to time when the president decides it's in his personal interest to work with Democrats.
This is a president, look, who has no ideology.
He's not conservative.
He's not liberal.
The only consistent theme seems to be he's pro-Trump.
He's for his own personal interests.
Okay, all of that's true.
All of what he said there is true, but that doesn't actually make much of a difference because, again, The idea here is that in the culture war, you are pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
Again, there's the political side, where Trump is all over the place.
But nobody actually pays attention to that.
What people pay attention to is the narrative.
The media narrative.
The cultural narrative.
This is something Andrew Breitbart, one of my mentors, was very big on.
This idea that the culture was upstream of politics.
That what we imbibe from the culture around us is much more important than the politics of a given situation.
And this is particularly true of Trump.
Again, Trump is currently governing like a moderate Democrat.
Okay, what he's done over the last couple of weeks has been stuff that is straight from the Democrat playbook.
It is not from the conservative playbook.
But, in a cultural way, Trump is offensive to the left, and the left is offensive to the Trump people, and therefore, there is a war going on, even though he's now currently governing with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Pretty amazing stuff, and I'm going to get to that culture war in just a second, and why I think that President Trump, this is one area where I think Trump is quite astute.
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Okay, so.
Why doesn't any of this matter?
Why doesn't it matter that all of the issues that Trump ran on and that conservatives celebrate, he seems to be moving away from.
Now he's moving away from his hard stance on immigration and Ann Coulter's going nuts.
He's moving away from his hard stance on the Paris Accords.
And some people on the right are saying, dude, what the hell?
He's now moving toward infrastructure, which was a populist Steve Bannon talking point for a long time.
Why doesn't any of that seem to matter?
Why is it that his shift on ideology doesn't seem to matter?
Even Democrats are recognizing that he doesn't have ideology anymore.
Why doesn't any of that seem to matter?
And the answer is because of the culture wars.
The culture wars are all that matter.
They're all that matter.
Here is why President Trump is going to continue to maintain his base.
Okay?
He tweeted this out yesterday.
This is a gif or a jif.
I've still not decided how I wish to pronounce that word.
Here he is.
Okay?
And it's a jif of him hitting a golf ball that hits Hillary Clinton in the back and knocks her over.
He retweeted this yesterday from an account called "Effed Up Mind" except it didn't say "Effed." And I'll acknowledge it's a pretty funny gif.
We used a similar gif with regard to pepper balls, him hitting the golf ball and then it hitting that guy in the ads.
This I find slightly less funny.
It's still a little funny, but the part that's not so funny about it is that the President of the United States is the one who's actually retweeting it.
It really is not particularly appropriate for the President of the United States to retweet things about him physically assaulting a fellow presidential candidate, let alone a female presidential candidate, because again, the left is just going to cry sexism.
But his base loves this, okay?
So long as Trump is willing to be quote-unquote politically incorrect and tweet this stuff, then he's gonna love it and the left's gonna hate it.
So he's using the culture war in order to avoid the political war, okay?
In other words, this is WWE.
In WWE, I can't say I'm a WWE connoisseur, but I know this much.
You have the stock villains, and you have the stock heroes, and they fight each other, and sometimes they switch places, and the villain becomes the hero, and the hero becomes the villain, but everybody is playing a particular kind of role.
And in the end, they go out back and they drink with one another.
It's not they actually hate each other.
It's all acted.
President Trump doesn't hate Hillary Clinton.
She was at his wedding.
President Trump doesn't hate the left.
He's making deals with them right now.
But as part of the culture war, he does.
Culturally, he doesn't like them.
And that's the part the American people see.
The American people see the culture.
They see that President Trump dislikes the left on a cultural level.
He's willing to retweet stuff like this that shows malice with regard to Hillary Clinton, and they like that.
It doesn't matter that he's cutting deals with all of her friends.
Chuck Schumer's good friends with Hillary Clinton.
Nancy Pelosi is good friends with Hillary Clinton.
None of that matters because, again, it's cultural.
Tucker Carlson, I think, gets this exactly right with regard to Trump, and it's why Trump has his finger on a pulse a lot of us don't follow.
You know, a lot of us are very interested in data, and so we like polls.
And polls are great!
I mean, data is better than no data.
That being said, Tucker Carlson is right, and I think Trump is right when he says that Trump grants a lot more credibility to watching TV than he does to polls, and I think that there is some... I think there is something to that.
I think there's something smart about that.
Here's Tucker Carlson explaining.
But I think more broadly, he believes that television is a pretty clear window into what people care about.
He believes that television producers, especially of highly rated shows, understand what the public is interested in.
What it fears, what it wants, what it loves.
And so the TV programming is in some ways a more accurate reflection of the public mood than polling.
That's his view.
He said it to me.
And, um, that's one of the reasons he watches a lot of television.
You know, whether that's true or not is an entirely debatable point.
Okay, but I think that's actually, I think it is sort of true.
Right?
I think it is sort of true.
I think that if you're looking, I think it's actually very smart and very astute for President Trump.
Now, it may just be that he likes watching TV, but it's also true that what we watch on TV may be more indicative of what we truly feel than what we tell pollsters.
It's a different process.
When you watch TV, that's sort of instinctual, right?
You get up in the morning, or you're going to sleep at night, you flip on the TV, you put on what you enjoy, you don't feel judged, and then you watch what you watch, and they're measuring the ratings.
That's not the same thing as when a poster calls you and says, what do you think of X?
Now you have to go through a conscious process.
Daniel Kahneman talks about this in sort of a different context, the idea that you have almost two systems in your brain.
You have System 1, which is the fast-moving, instinctive system, and then you have System 2, which is the rational system that sort of overrides the instinctive system when you kick it in.
And we tend to mistake things that we're doing in System 1 for things that we're doing in System 2.
So, TV is done through System 1.
You want to watch something?
You flip on the TV, you watch whatever feels good and makes you feel good in your tummy.
And then there's System 2, which is what you tell pollsters.
Somebody asks you a question, you consider, you create a rationale, you create a worldview, and then you answer the question.
What is more accurate?
And when you go to vote, are you voting with System 1 or System 2?
I think you're voting with System 1, and I think you're justifying it with System 2, at least the vast majority of voters.
I think the vast majority of voters have a gut feeling about a particular candidate, and they decide how they're going to support that candidate, and then they make up an excuse later.
I think a lot of people who were instinctively put off of President Trump on the left, it wasn't that they hated his policies because he was closer to their policies than any Republican candidate of my lifetime.
No, it was that he himself made them feel yucky, and so they found a rationale for not voting for him.
And I think the same is true on the right with Hillary Clinton.
They didn't like Hillary Clinton.
They had an instinctive dislike of her.
Some of it was political.
A lot of it was personal.
And therefore they came up with a rationale.
Now the danger of that is that politics is not actually done in the System 1 way.
Politics is not instinctive.
Politics is where we try to create policy.
And policy has to be done with System 2.
It has to be well thought out.
So what happens when you have a population that's voting based on System 1, this instinctive, quick, make-the-move system in your brain, But the policy that we need is based on System 2.
What if we're electing people because we instinctively like them or dislike them, but what we actually need to be doing is engaging System 2, thinking about the policy.
In other words, we should be thinking more about the DREAM Act and infrastructure and the Paris Accords than we are about Trump hitting a golf ball and hitting Hillary Clinton in the back and retweeting it.
But that's not how we work.
That's not how we work.
And that's a problem.
And it also goes to why culture matters so much.
People say things like, well, if you don't like the Emmys, why do you even care what the Emmys have to say?
The reason people care what the Emmys have to say is because the Emmys are cultural.
Because when you turn into the Emmys, when you tune into that channel, What you are doing is you are turning off your political brain in an instinctive way.
And then you're either going to react badly to it or react well to it.
It's very polarizing in a way that policy generally isn't.
I mean, it really is quite fascinating.
When I talk policy with folks on the left, I disagree with them radically on policy.
But when we are both engaged in a conversation about policy, the passion level is much lower.
Even if we really disagree.
Why?
Because we're not engaged in the emotional part of our brain.
Right?
It's not your amygdala that's firing.
It's your prefrontal cortex, right?
You're actually using the rational part of your brain.
But when it comes to who you vote for, people get super passionate.
Like, it's so funny, I can talk with a Democrat all day long about what is the best healthcare policy.
And I can make the case that the best healthcare policy is one that is based on the notion that healthcare is a good, not a right.
And I can explain that.
And they can explain it right back to me.
But, if I say, listen, Obamacare sucks.
Their immediate response is not, okay, let's talk about why Obamacare sucks, or whether it's good.
The immediate response is, you racist jackass.
Why?
Because system one has kicked in.
Because culture has kicked in.
It's why, if you look at the polls.
Fascinating.
If you look at the polls, Obamacare is significantly less popular than the American Affordable Care Act, or whatever they called it.
The ACA, the Affordable Care Act.
The Affordable Care Act always pulled higher than Obamacare.
Always.
And it's the exact same thing.
Why?
Because System 1 is in tune when you say Obamacare, and System 2 is in tune when you say Affordable Care Act.
It removes it from the instinctive system.
A little bit.
A little bit.
And then, once you get even less instinctive, then people look at the policy and they hate it again.
Really kind of interesting stuff.
That's why we in the media tend to focus around flashpoints.
If you look at the flashpoints in American politics, they very rarely have to do with policy and they usually have to do with something sexy in the news.
So, for example, here's a sexy thing in the news right now.
There are riots in St.
Louis.
So if you haven't been watching, There are all these protests in St.
Louis regarding this guy named Jason Stockley.
Jason Stockley was a police officer who shot a guy named Anthony Lamar Smith in 2011.
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There were basically riots in St.
Louis last night.
A bunch of properties broken into, burned down.
I think it was 80 people arrested.
A cop was hit in the head with a brick.
Pretty brutal.
The media have focused on the peaceful nature of some of the protests, but it's gotten so bad that U2 and I believe Ed Sheeran were both supposed to do concerts in St.
Louis.
They had to cancel them because the police couldn't defend the concerts.
This is a lot like what we were sort of expecting to happen in Berkeley and the police showed up and shut it down.
In St.
Louis they haven't been able to shut it down and so you've seen tremendous property destruction.
Why?
Because of the story about this police officer named Jason Stockley.
So in 2011 he killed a guy named Anthony Lamar Smith.
I will give you one guess as to the races of the people involved and why it's a national issue.
Yes, you got it.
That's right.
Jason Stockley, the cop, is white.
Anthony Lamar Smith is black.
And so basically, the case is this.
Anthony Lamar Smith was in the middle of a drug deal, and the police were staking him out.
He ran from the police after ramming them with his vehicle.
And then, he finally crashed into an SUV.
Jason Stockley popped out of the car, he ran over to the car, he took out his gun, there's about a 15 second gap, and then Jason Stockley shot Anthony Lamar Smith.
He claimed that Lamar Smith was going for his gun, and that he had warned him not to, and that he shot him at basically point-blank range.
People in the prosecution, this guy was prosecuted, this cop, suggested that Jason Stockley had gone in with the intent to murder Anthony Lamar Smith and killed him and then planted a gun on him.
So here is some of the tape.
You can judge for yourself what you think happened here.
Here's some of the tape as to what happened.
So what you'll see, I'll describe it for you if you're listening.
And what you'll see is Anthony Lamar Smith gets in his car.
The cops pull up behind him.
He tries to pull up against the curb.
Then he realizes he's trapped.
So he backs into the cop car.
Two cops emerge with their guns drawn.
The driver refuses to stop.
One of the cops is holding what looks like an AK-47, which he's privately an owner of.
So it's not as though the cops issue that.
So here you see it from a different angle.
Anthony Lamar Smith panics.
He backs into the cop car in an attempt to get out of there and drives away.
So he basically comes very close to hitting this police officer.
The police officers hop back in their car.
The police car dash camera video isn't the best quality, but look closely.
It starts at the Church's Chicken at Riverview and Thecla.
You can see the time stamp, December 20, 2011, a rainy day.
The officers had stopped a car in a suspected drug deal.
Here, you can see officer Jason Stockley exit the police cruiser.
In his hand, his own personal weapon, an AK-47, a violation of department policy.
He raises his hand to a car coming towards him, then points the AK at the car.
As the car drives away, Stockley then pulls his department-issued weapon and fires it.
Then he runs back to the police cruiser.
And he and the officer driving the cop car take chase at high rates of speed.
At one point, they crash into a tree but continue to pursue the white car.
A camera inside the squad car also capturing that jarring moment.
You can hear the officers yelling.
Prosecutors say at one point, Stockley says, quote, going to kill this expletive.
Several minutes later, the cruiser catches up with the white car and rams the cruiser into it.
Again, the moment of impact seen from inside.
Back on the dash cam, Stockley and his partner are seen rushing up to the car.
Moments later is when prosecutors say Stockley on the right.
Okay, so then, what happens is that you see him go back into his car, dig through his backpack, and then it's unclear what happens.
in part, is exactly what Stockley does after the shooting. - Okay, so then what happens is that you see him go back into his car, dig through his backpack, and then it's unclear what happened.
So, was this a murder or was this not a murder?
So they waived the right to jury trial, and instead they went directly to a judge, which you can do, I guess, in the state of Missouri.
And the judge ruled that he was not guilty.
That doesn't mean that he was not guilty in the technical sense, in the full-on guilt and innocence sense.
It means that he's not guilty according to the letter of the law, because you have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
So, there are a couple of things that I think are worth noting.
One, Anthony Lamar Smith was involved in a drug deal, tried to use his car to ram police officers, ran away from the police officers at a high rate of speed, endangering people.
And then, according to the other officers there, you can hear on the tape, one of the other officers shouts, gun.
You can hear him shout, gun.
And then the officer, Jason Stockley, shoots Anthony Lamar Smith.
As far as the idea that he planted a gun in the car and that there was no actual gun in the car, when I looked at the tape, I didn't see a situation in which Stockley actually had the opportunity to plant a gun without other cops around.
So that means all the other cops would have had to be in on it.
The prosecution never bothered to call the other cops to testify that he had planted a gun, which suggests either that everyone missed it or that Stockley didn't do it.
So here is what the judge ruled, okay?
The judge ruled that the that he it had not been proven that he planted the gun prosecutors argued that the presence of stockley's dna on the gun proved that the gun must have been planted by the officer the defense countered that stockley heard his partner yell gun and saw the driver's hand on a gun as this car sped by him stockley testified he does not draw his service revolver and fire until he saw smith reaching around inside the vehicle after it was stopped he said smith changed his demeanor suggesting So these are the two varying cases.
So these are the two varying cases.
Stockley testified after the shooting, he found the gun tucked down between the seat and the center console, and he rendered the gun safe by unloading cartridges from the cylinder and then left the gun and the cartridges on the passenger seat.
So the judge said it's a fact issue that Central, whether Smith had the gun when he was shot, he said the state's contention the officer planted the gun was not supported by the evidence.
Why?
Because a full-sized revolver was too large for the officer to hide in his pants pocket and he was not wearing a jacket and if the gun had been tucked into his belt it would have been visible on a bystander's video.
This is what the judge ruled.
How about the outburst saying that he was going to kill this guy?
So the prosecutor said that this was clear intent.
The judge said lots of things happen when you're in the middle of a high-speed chase.
He was saying stuff.
Okay, bottom line is, this is a pretty controversial ruling, but is it clear that this cop murdered the guy?
I don't think it's absolutely clear the cop murdered the guy.
I don't think that it's absolutely clear in any way.
Again, the legal standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Now the reason that this is important Is because what you see, once again, is this is a cultural issue, not a policy issue.
On policy, we all agree.
Supposedly, right?
Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
And we all agree that cops should not shoot innocent people.
So on a policy level, we all agree with this.
And we agree that if there is evidence that this is a racist shooting, the guy should go to jail.
Everyone was appalled when there was that case in South Carolina where Walter Scott, a black guy, was shot in the back by a cop and you can see the cop planting a gun next to Walter Scott.
I believe that he was convicted later.
But in any case, there was a hung jury.
In any case, everyone was appalled if he was not convicted.
But this is a major public policy issue nonetheless, even though it has nothing to do with policy.
Why?
Because it's cultural.
Because it's cultural.
Meaning, people react by saying, this is indicative of a system that's racist, or they react by saying, this is indicative of a bunch of people who are always going to say that the system is racist, even without evidence that the system is racist.
These cultural issues shift more votes than anything that President Trump does on policy.
Policy does not shift votes in the same way that culture does, and that is because of the mass media.
So that's why the Emmys matter.
That's why the Emmys matter.
So finally, at long last, I want to get to the Emmys.
The Emmys did not get great ratings last night.
They did not get terrific ratings because they're not very good.
Nobody watches these award shows anymore.
And they still get huge ratings against other TV.
But this was a very, very low-rated Emmys.
Part of that is because people are alienated by culture being used to foment politics.
Part of it is because all the TV shows that are now being rewarded are TV shows that a lot of people have never seen.
Nobody watched The Handmaid's Tale.
I mean, in terms of relative numbers, nobody watched The Handmaid's Tale.
The shows that were up for awards were Westworld, basically, Handmaid's Tale, and Stranger Things.
Those were the three that were up for a lot of awards last night.
Handmaid's Tale basically swept.
And it swept because of politics.
So people were not going to tune in to watch a bad book become a bad TV series and then get awarded a lot.
So the politics made a difference.
This is the thing that Hollywood really doesn't understand.
If they were a little bit less overt in their politics, they'd actually be much more effective in shifting the cultural debate.
But it's the culture war that truly matters.
People like Trump because they hate the Emmys.
People like Trump because they hate Stephen Colbert.
People like Trump because they hate what they saw last night with a bunch of rich Puffed up, arrogant elitists who suggest they know best for the rest of America while living in their palatial estates off of Sunset Boulevard and avoiding their taxes by banking offshore.
That's what people see when they watch the Emmys.
That culture war matters a lot more than where Trump is on the Paris Agreements.
So long as Trump continues to show scorn for Hollywood, so long as he shows scorn for leftist cultural institutions, he's going to get away with whatever policy he wants to get away with.
Before I get to that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
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Okay, so now on to the Emmys.
So, Stephen Colbert opens up the Emmys.
And he opens with this musical number.
This is everything.
This is everything that Americans like about Trump because they hate this.
They hate this from Hollywood.
They're sick of being lectured.
They're sick of being told that they're wrong.
They're sick of being told that they're rubes.
They're sick of being told that there's no such thing as gender.
They're sick of being told that gender is a construct in the mind.
They're sick of being told that America is a backwards place for women and black people.
They're sick of being lectured.
That's what Hollywood does.
And when Trump doesn't do that, Trump wins.
Doesn't matter about the Paris Climate Accords, because who cares?
What does matter is that he hates Stephen Colbert.
So here's the beginning opening musical number.
Dear friends, the next time the world's problems make you feel the blues, turn on any channel.
Well, except the news, because troubles aren't so troubling when you see them in HD.
The world's a little better on TV.
So don't you worry about global warming or the Middle East.
Walk on the bright side with the recently deceased.
My HBO Go Password is Sexbot 123.
Everything is better on TV.
When the world's so scary, you close your door and hide.
Open up, let archer slip inside.
Uh, crazy.
Watch, this is a...
You learn it feels so good to...
So, you know, again, the whole thing is a rip on the news, right?
So the news is terrible.
So, you know, again, the whole thing is a rip on the news, right?
So the news is terrible.
The news is terrible.
What about people who think the news isn't that terrible?
I mean, like, there's like half the country that thinks that the news isn't, like, it's not, the stock market's up, right?
I mean, like, people are getting their jobs back.
This idea that everything is garbage and that we're all going to die.
I just, there's not a lot of evidence of that.
And then we finally get to the end of this.
And I don't know if we can fast forward to the graphic where we have The Handmaid's Tale.
At the very end of this little musical number, there's a, there's, he brings out a bunch of people to dance for The Handmaid's Tale.
And it's a bunch of people in basically spandex lingerie outfits individually.
Including a bunch of dudes, right?
Because transgenderism, yay!
So, if you're watching this at home, and you're annoyed by this, and every five seconds there's a Trump joke, you're like, okay, well, listen, if I have to choose between Hollywood and Trump, I'll choose Trump.
The cultural issues matter.
And Hollywood needs to understand this, because if they were smart, what they would do is shut up.
If Hollywood were smart, they would shut up.
They really would.
They would go back to making entertaining things without a lot of the political messaging.
The reason being, they are providing Trump the wall to bounce up against.
Trump is rubber.
He's a rubber ball.
He just bounces up against things.
And if he bounces up against Hollywood, the rest of the American people will bounce right with him.
They don't like Hollywood.
We like to watch it.
That doesn't mean we like you.
We like to watch Floyd Mayweather box too, but he's a jerk.
That doesn't mean we like you.
And if we're forced to choose between Floyd Mayweather and anyone else, we'll choose anyone else.
And if we're forced to choose between the Hollywood morality and anyone else, we'll choose anyone else.
And then, let's say Hollywood shut up for a second.
Let's say that Hollywood would stop with this nonsense where they feel like they have to promulgate their politics every five seconds.
If Hollywood actually shut up about it, Trump wouldn't have anything to moan about.
We'd actually have to focus in on his policy, and then we could get to some good discussions.
Hopefully we could move him to the right.
Hopefully we'd start to care about policy again.
As a conservative, I want to care about policy, not about the Emmys.
We'll go through some more of the Emmys in just a second, but for that, you're gonna have to subscribe.
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All righty, so the opening musical number wasn't even the bad part, right?
That was pretty mild stuff.
Then we got to Colbert's opening monologue, and his opening monologue really was pathetic.
Of course, there's no way anyone could possibly watch that much TV other than the president, who seems to have a lot of time for that sort of thing.
Hello sir, thank you for joining us.
Looking forward to the tweets.
Okay, so he made a bunch of Trump jokes all throughout the evening.
It never stopped at any point.
And then they brought out at one point Sean Spicer to mock Trump and to mock himself.
So Spicer was of course played by Melissa McCarthy, who won an Emmy last night for playing Spicer.
Alec Baldwin won an Emmy for playing Trump.
Kate McKinnon won an Emmy for playing Hillary.
So basically everyone won an Emmy for playing the part of political people, which just demonstrates the merger between politics and entertainment.
That we only care about the... if we have to choose between Alec Baldwin and Donald Trump.
Donald Trump wins that battle every time.
In any case, in the middle of this, Sean Spicer is brought out to make a joke about himself and the left loses their minds over this.
Sean, do you know... This will be the largest audience To witness an Emmys, period!
Both in person and around the world.
Okay, so again, what's funny about this, listen, I think it's funny that he did this.
I think that it's funny that Sean Spicer participated.
Although, I've objected in the past to all of these politicians participating.
If we're gonna do it, this is funnier than Obama just showing up on random shows, or Biden showing up on random shows, because he is the butt of the joke.
The left went nuts over this.
They went crazy.
Again, culture wars matter more than politics.
The culture war matters.
Sean Spicer comes out, makes a joke about himself.
He's mocking himself here, right?
He's mocking his whole Trump had the biggest audience in history shtick from the inauguration.
And what's the upshot?
Melissa McCarthy says she was insulted that he stole her joke.
Really?
People on the left were insulted that Sean Spicer had been normalized.
These are the same people who say that Chelsea Manning is a hero.
These are the same people who say that Chelsea Manning... Vice ran a headline today that said Chelsea Manning is the purest soul on the internet.
What in the hell?
But these are the people who say Sean Spicer must never be normalized.
Ben Rhodes, who's National Security Advisor under President Obama, and who blatantly lied about the Iran deal to the American people for years.
He said, how could we normalize Sean Spicer?
Again, culture wars, culture wars.
And then it gets worse.
Jane Fonda, right?
The lady who sat on a Viet Cong gun, pointed, a North Vietnamese Army gun, pointed at American soldiers.
And Lily Tomlin, they show up to mock President Trump into a nine to five routine.
Yeah, well, back in 1980 in that movie, we refused to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.
And in 2017, we still refuse to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.
Oh, so much courage.
So much courage.
Wow, you refuse to be- Well, frankly, he doesn't care about you.
When is he trying to control you?
What did he do?
Again, this is what Hollywood doesn't understand.
Their culture war makes this into a culture war, not a political war.
And then Kate McKinnon gets up, and she's the one who played Hillary Clinton on SNL.
And you'll recall that she actually sang hallelujah after Hillary Clinton lost.
Like a weepy hallelujah tribute to Hillary Clinton.
Because it's so clear she wanted Hillary to win.
And she gets up and she thanks Hillary Clinton.
I don't remember Chevy Chase thanking Gerald Ford for playing Gerald Ford.
Here's Kate McKinnon.
Thank you to Fern and Suze, my L.A.
moms.
Thank you, Jack.
I love you.
Um, what else?
Thank you.
I want to, on a very personal note, I want to say thank you to Hillary Clinton for your grace and grit.
And thank you, my mother and sister!
I'm so proud of you, mom!
I love you!
Okay, thanking Hillary Clinton on a personal note.
Thank you so much!
This is why the ratings are low for the Emmys.
It's why culture is not only losing its impact, it's losing its voice.
It's why it's not even really pushing Americans to the left anymore because it's so blatant.
And it's also why Trump is winning.
Trump is winning because of people like this.
Trump is winning because so long as it's a culture war, Trump can win.
But here's the problem.
So long as it's a culture war, Republicans can win, but conservatives won't.
Okay, the only thing that conservatives can win on, we can use the culture war to win, but then we have to have a political war where we push for policy.
It is not enough to react to Kate McKinnon.
It's not enough to react to Stephen Colbert.
You then have to promulgate good policy, not move to the left.
Okay, so just because you hate the Emmys doesn't mean you should support President Trump's policies, even if you think that he's right and the Emmys are wrong.
Okay, time for a couple of things I like, then some things that I hate.
Things that I like.
Over the weekend, I read a book I'd never read before, actually, the book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
This is a very famous book.
It was much more famous probably first half of the 20th century.
It's one of the very early kind of suspense novels.
And the movie, it won Best Picture in 1940, Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.
Joan Fontaine was sisters with Olivia de Havilland, so that's why they look so much alike.
But the basic story is that Joan Fontaine is this kind of Young girl, very naive, who marries Lawrence Olivier's character Max de Winter, and Max de Winter has this very shadowy past.
He lives at this ginormous palatial estate called Manderly, and she is brought in after the death of his first wife and marries him.
And here is a little bit of the preview of the movie.
The movie is quite good.
The book is better.
Announcing the return of the most glamorous motion picture ever made, David O. Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock bring you the Grand Slam prize winner that made motion picture history.
Winner of the Academy Award, voted by America's critics as the best picture of the year.
And now, as a result of a national poll, winning new honors, as audiences throughout the country vote to see it again.
The Selznick Studios successor to Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, brought to the screen with all the warmth and emotion that made millions of readers acclaim Daphne du Maurier's bestseller as the most exciting love story of our time.
Okay, one of the things that I like about this preview is that it actually references the book, right?
How literate is a preview when it actually references specific passages from the book and shows how closely it hues to the book?
Kind of cool.
The adaptation is very good, and this is very early Lawrence Olivier.
Watch him in this, and then watch him in Marathon Man.
And that's a transformation.
Okay, other things that I like.
This is a pretty amazing video.
There's a 66-year-old bodybuilder, who I guess is colorblind, and his family got him a set of these very expensive glasses that allowed him to see color for the very first time.
So here he is seeing color for the first time in his life.
What is this?
Put them on.
- I don't know. - There's sunglasses. - How does it look?
Oh, that's weird.
Look at the balloons.
Can you see with our eyes now, baby?
What colors do you see?
Those.
You see colors now?
- Oh, the trees are neat. - Now you have rose-colored vices, baby. the trees are neat. - Now you have rose-colored vices, baby. - The sun is a Now you see with our eyes.
- Nice.
Do you like the balloons? - It is pretty amazing how, I mean, the technology that we have now to be able to do these kinds of things is truly incredible.
And also, there's something wonderful about the fact that when we finally experience something wonderful in life, we're almost reduced to children again.
You get that feeling from him.
It's pretty amazing.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So...
Today's thing that I hate.
Clay Travis is a commentator on Fox Sports and I'd be remiss if I did not comment on this because it was just making the entire office laugh hysterically last week.
Clay Travis was on CNN with Brooke Baldwin and I'm not sure the name of the other fellow and he decides to drop his slogan.
So apparently Clay Travis is sort of almost a quasi Howard Stern-esque Sports figure like he drops obscenity on his show and he does this kind of man show vibe And he dropped one of his slogans and Brooke Baldwin was not prepared for it.
And here's how it went I think that's a bad move.
I'm a First Amendment absolutist.
I believe in only two things completely.
The First Amendment and boobs.
And so once they made the decision that they were not going to allow a conservative, non-sports related commentary, they couldn't do it either.
Hold on, hold on.
I just want to make sure I heard you correctly as a woman anchoring this show.
What did you say?
You believe in the First Amendment and B-double-O-B-S?
Boobs.
Two things that have only never let me down in this entire country's history.
The First Amendment and boobs.
So for somebody to come on CNN and to say something like the only thing I believe in in a discussion about something... I'm still there too and I just want to make sure I'm hearing you correctly.
B-O-O-Z-E or B-O-O-B-S.
Because as a woman, I'm...
As in boobs.
I believe completely in the First Amendment and in boobs.
Those are the only two things I believe 100% in in this country.
And by the way, Jamel has absolutely nothing to do with the background at all.
Did you notice that?
He went straight to that.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I did go straight to that.
Guys, why would you even say that live on national television and with a female host?
Why would you even go there?
I say it live on the radio all the time because it's true and that's what I do.
Okay, so there are a few things that I think ought to be noted about this.
First of all, is it appropriate for Clay Travis to say First Amendment and boobs on national TV in the middle of a news show?
Of course it's not appropriate.
It's ridiculous, okay?
But the part of this that's so absurd is the, that's so sexist.
How could you say such a thing?
That's so sexist and horrifying.
Okay, it's not sexist to say men like boobs.
Evolutionary biology suggests that men are attracted to secondary sexual characteristics, including breasts.
If women have trouble with that, then I would suggest that they argue with a biology textbook.
There are a lot of women who work at this office.
I showed this to my wife.
My wife thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever seen.
It's so absurd.
It's so ridiculous.
Okay, it's just possible.
Is it possible that we can just say stuff is stupid without us being deeply offended by it?
You can even see in this clip, if you go back to the beginning of the clip, you can see when he first says it, Brooke Baldwin wants to laugh.
Like you can see she's about to laugh and then she stops herself and she decides that it's time for her to get offended.
Like watch her expression when he first says it.
She actually starts to laugh because she realizes how stupid this whole thing is.
And then she realizes that she has to get offended because society mandates that we all get offended about stupid nonsense now.
So here's what watch.
Watch Baldwin's face in this.
I just want to make sure I heard you correctly as a woman anchoring the show.
You can see she wants to laugh, right?
Because it's hysterical.
He just said boobs in the middle of the show for no reason.
Okay, we're all five-year-olds.
That's funny.
Come on.
And then, is it appropriate again?
No, it's not appropriate.
Does it lower the discourse?
Yes.
But for God's sake, I mean, we're talking about vulgarization of the discourse.
President Trump is the president.
Yeah, I think vulgarization of the discourse.
I think that ship may have sailed a while ago.
I can lament the ship sailing, but I'm not going to pretend that this is even close to the outer limit of the ship sailing.
Okay, and CNN doesn't get to complain about that either.
Here was their New Year's episode 2016.
And the decision all night has been, should it be a tattoo or a piercing?
I mean, what are you thinking?
The people want to know what crazy, silly... Let me ask.
Let me ask.
Cathy, I think Cathy.
Anderson might hear me wrong.
Cathy, what should I do?
Nipple, nipple, nipple, nipple.
No, don't.
I love you, Cathy.
I love you.
You don't want to hear my opinion.
Cathy Griffin says nipple, nipple, nipple over a piercing.
This is on live national TV, CNN, right?
Okay, so if we're going to like whine about national discourse, like CNN, take a look in the mirror again.
I can say that our discourse has gone down the toilet, and I can also say that we don't have to be deeply offended by Clay Travis liking breasts.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to pretend to be deeply offended.
I think Jon Podhoretz's line about this was exactly correct.
Was this appropriate?
No, but you sort of have to agree with the sentiment.
Alright, fair enough.
We'll be back here tomorrow with all other things stupid and ridiculous.
Again, that's another one of those that falls under, this is why Trump won, right?
Cultural issues.
People getting offended over a guy saying he likes boobs?
One reason that Trump won.
Everything is stupid.
Apparently there's a story out today, by the way, and there's an old prophecy that's been interpreted to say that the world will end on September 23rd.
If it does, I can't say that we've lost a lot, according to this particular show.
We'll be back tomorrow.
Please, world, try to do better.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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