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Sept. 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:59
Did Trump Just Deflate Football? | Ep. 389
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The NFL may be on the ropes, and President Trump may have put them there.
The left demonstrates its definite scorn for the middle of the country, and we'll talk about one of the worst movies ever made.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So the vortex of stupidity continues to whirl, and you are a part of it, my friends, as am I.
There's no way to escape the Category 5 stupid hurricane that has descended upon the United States and that continues each and every day.
We'll talk about all of the things.
Thank you.
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Okay, so, the football controversy, the NFL controversy will not die.
The ratings were apparently slightly up on Sunday over the previous year, but that's because people were tuning in to see the controversy.
Next week, watch for the ratings to plummet as people simply tune out and demonstrate that they're not interested in watching a bunch of players who they feel are ungrateful for being in the United States of America and who are kneeling about the anthem and the flag.
So, one of the things that I've been talking about for years on this program now is the idea that two bubbles have formed in the United States.
It's not just one bubble.
You know, we on the right like to say, well, Hollywood's its bubble.
Media, that's their bubble.
There are two bubbles.
There's the bubble of those of us on the right and the bubble of those of the people on the left.
In the right bubble, we look at the people kneeling and we say everyone who's kneeling is doing so because they hate the anthem and the flag.
Right?
The reason that you kneel during the anthem is because you don't like the anthem and you think that America is a problematic place imbued inherently With racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia.
And that's why you're kneeling.
It's because you don't like the flag.
And there's some evidence to this.
Colin Kaepernick, when he first knelt, said, I'm doing this because the flag doesn't stand for black Americans, which is just absurd.
It's just asinine.
It was the flag of the United States that was carried into battle by the black regiment during the Civil War that you can see in the movie Glory.
You know, the flag has always stood for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the development toward a better America.
That's what the flag has always stood for, which is why smart civil rights protesters back in the 1960s weren't burning the flag.
They were marching with the flag and saying, this is our flag.
This is our America.
That's a smart way to protest.
A stupid way to protest is to kneel through the national anthem and to kneel as the flag is honored.
That's just a dumb way to do it.
So if you're on the right, The way that you see this battle is all the people who are kneeling originally were kneeling because they don't like the country, and the people who are kneeling with them today are probably kneeling because they also don't really like the country too much.
Then there's the way the left reads this, which is people are kneeling because they think the country is not all that it can be, and they are kneeling to demonstrate that the flag is not really being upheld, even though symbolically it matters.
It's because it matters symbolically that we have to protest it.
And therefore, that's why Kaepernick and company were kneeling originally, and now all the people who are kneeling now, it's not even because they agree with Kaepernick, it's because they don't like that President Trump called for a boycott of the NFL, and called for the NFL to fire everyone who was kneeling.
So, there are two reasons for the kneeling.
Reason number one is because America just isn't what it's supposed to be, it's not all it's cracked up to be, so kneel for the national anthem.
And reason number two is to protest Trump.
Okay, and these two visions of what exactly is happening, it demonstrates, it's sort of like the movie Rashomon.
I mean, there's a bunch of, there are multiple viewers of a single event, and they're each taking what they want from that event.
On the right, we're taking away there are a lot of people who don't like the country.
On the left, they're taking away that there are a bunch of people who want to stand against America's fundamental values, and kneeling is the way to protest those people.
So that's the actual, that's actually what's going on.
From an objective, if you're an alien coming in from outer space watching all of this, this is what you would say, right?
There's a bunch of different perspectives on the same event.
Now I tend to think a few things.
One, kneeling for the national anthem is dumb.
Kneeling for the flag is dumb.
Again, you'd be better off grabbing the flag and saying this is my flag, I stand with the flag against these forces that stand against American values.
So the kneeling is stupid, it's just, it's pointless.
And it's bad PR.
On the other hand, the people who were kneeling yesterday are not quite the same thing, or Sunday, not quite the same thing as Colin Kaepernick kneeling.
They're not all the same people.
Colin Kaepernick was basically kneeling by himself by the end of his career, and the people who were kneeling yesterday, a lot of them were people who were not on board with Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the anthem in the first place, but they wanted to show solidarity for the right to kneel.
In the same way that you sometimes see people sort of spite protest in order to piss off the other side.
So there's some of that going on too.
So let's see how this plays out.
So you can see that on a political level, this is very beneficial for Trump and Pence.
So President Trump has an inerrant nose for the controversy that is most likely to polarize the country in his favor.
He's actually quite good at this.
And he's done it repeatedly.
So the left claims after the travel ban, oh, Americans hate the travel ban.
It's just going to be terrible for Trump, the travel ban.
The travel ban wasn't terrible for Trump.
Most Americans were fine with the travel ban.
The left doesn't understand that.
The left doesn't understand that when President Trump says polarizing things on a wide variety of topics, when he says that, when he does sort of macho posturing, most Americans don't care about that.
And the left doesn't understand that when Trump says Colin Kaepernick is an SOB for kneeling during the anthem, there are a lot of Americans who feel the same way.
And when people kneel, Trump wins that battle.
And you can see how the right is trying to frame the battle as don't protest the flag of the national anthem.
And the left is trying to protest, is trying to frame the entire debate as a debate about the First Amendment.
So here's Mike Pence framing it in terms of the flag and the national anthem.
We've all got a right to our opinions.
But I don't think it's too much to ask the players in the National Football League to stand for our national anthem.
And I know the people of Alabama agree.
Because, you know, patriotism is what unites us.
It's about respect for the flag, respect for the country.
And most importantly, it's about respect for all those who fought And I think that Pence is exactly right, of course, which is why I've always opposed flag burning and kneeling on the flag and pictures of Bill Ayers standing on the flag.
I think it's disgusting.
I think all of that is quite gross.
So this is how the right's attempting to frame it.
You see groups like the NRA doing the same thing.
The NRA released an ad yesterday, last night, that essentially says the same thing.
For the land of the free and the home of the brave.
From high school gyms to towering stadiums, every time I see our flag wave, I feel a humbling reminder of the brave who keep and have kept us free.
I stand to honor the sacrifices of the generations before me.
Heroes who charged into battle through bombs and bullets, who lost their brothers and still push through, fighting for every inch of our freedom.
I stand for my brothers who can't stand anymore.
Men who hunted terrorists to the ends of the earth.
Who sacrificed their bodies and their lives so that we could peacefully live ours.
I stand for the children, the spouses, and parents whose family made the ultimate sacrifice for us.
Right, so you can see how political framing happens here, right?
And it's actually quite a good ad here, right?
This is an attempt to frame this specifically as all the people kneeling are doing a disservice to service members and spouses and children of people who have died in combat protecting the flag and protecting our national unity.
That's the way the right is framing this.
Now here's the way the left is framing it.
It's like we're living in two separate worlds.
We're living in two separate worlds.
Here's Hillary Clinton framing this in a completely different way.
It's as though you're watching two separate narratives happening at the same time.
Protest is a part of the American way of life, and it's something that I'm very proud of, whether I agree or disagree.
I think peaceful protest is part of what has helped us make progress, learn more, be a better country over time.
Okay, and this is what I don't like about what President Trump did, is that these were both principles that we generally believed, right?
Pretty much all Americans believed this, that you should stand for the flag, you shouldn't disrespect the flag, you shouldn't disrespect the anthem, and also that what Hillary Clinton is saying about peaceful protest is basically correct, that we in America have always valued peaceful protest, we've always valued dissent, we think that that's a valuable thing.
But now, the left has basically grabbed hold of the dissent-is-patriotism banner, and the right has grabbed hold of the actual banner, and now they're going to war with each other.
Is that good for the country?
I don't think it's good for the country at all.
And then the left takes it too far.
So if that were the only battle, then I would say, okay, easy consensus, right?
Easy to come together about this.
Very simple.
We can bridge this gap immediately.
Stop kneeling for the anthem.
And, or at least understand why we criticize you for kneeling for the anthem.
It's bad to kneel for the anthem.
And also, if you want to kneel for the anthem, you know, that's your business, but we have a right to criticize you for doing so.
Very easy consensus.
But then, Hillary Clinton decides to take this even further, and I'll explain that in just a second.
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Okay, so, as I say, the normal battle should be, it should be easy to fix.
Standing for the national anthem is appropriate, kneeling is inappropriate, but this is America, you're allowed to do it.
Everybody calm down, right?
That's the easiest way to do this.
Trump overstepped on the one end by using the flag to bash people who were kneeling to the extent saying that they ought to be fired, and then Hillary Clinton oversteps her boundaries, not by defending the First Amendment, but by then implying that anyone who opposes people who kneel is a racist.
So here's Hillary Clinton doing that routine.
I think it's deeply troubling that the president would be attacking black athletes for expressing their opinions peacefully.
Okay, attacking black athletes?
As I said on Fox News last night, President Trump is pretty equal opportunity in who he attacks.
I mean, Hillary Clinton gets it on the chin from President Trump virtually every single day, and she's been not a relevant part of America's political scene for nearly a year at this point.
So, the idea that Trump is only attacking black athletes?
Really?
I mean, he was attacking his own Attorney General the same way, like, six weeks ago.
So, no, that doesn't wash at all.
But again, what we have here is, I don't know if you've ever seen Louis C.K.' 's comedy routines.
I think Louis C.K.' 's really funny.
He has a comedy routine called, uh, called, Of Course, But Maybe.
And his comedy routine goes something like this.
He says, of course, of course, we all understand that peanut allergies are things that we should be careful of and we should make sure that nobody around a kid who has a peanut allergy should have a peanut because we have to protect those kids.
I mean, it's just something we have to do as a society.
Of course we have to do that.
But maybe if we just let people carry around peanuts, this would all be over in a generation.
Right?
This is Louis C.K.' 's routine.
The problem that we have in politics right now is that everybody is now doing of course but maybe.
Everybody is now doing of course but maybe.
So Trump is saying things like, of course it's bad when people kneel for the anthem.
Of course, and of course dissent is okay.
But maybe all those people should be fired.
Maybe all those people should be fired.
Because, I mean, if they got fired, then no one would be kneeling for the anthem.
And then on the other side, you have Hillary Clinton doing, of course, but maybe.
Of course the flag's important.
Of course the national anthem is a good thing.
Of course that's true.
But maybe President Trump is a brutal racist.
But maybe he's a brutal racist.
And maybe people who stand for the flag are actually evidencing some sort of brutal racism.
Because of the but-maybes that we're all doing right now, everybody's in conflict.
If we just stuck with the of-courses and we skipped the but-maybes, we'd all be fine.
Because of course we all agree on this stuff.
There's no major disagreement on this stuff.
Even between people like me and Colin Kaepernick.
Okay, he may not agree about the flag and the national anthem.
He may not agree about those things.
We have a serious disagreement there.
And we may have a serious disagreement about police procedure.
But we actually agree on the value of dissent, I assume.
I assume we actually agree on that.
We at least go halfway, but now we don't even go halfway.
Now we're in total disagreement because of the butt maybes.
Okay, so you can see the media is finally starting to catch on to this game.
Trump is making serious political hay here.
He's getting people to rally around him.
You can see that, we'll show you in a second how the NFL is really stuck between a rock and a hard place, but the media is beginning to catch on that Trump is playing a game and they are falling for it.
Here's CNN's Jim Acosta, the least self-aware reporter in America, talking about how Trump, is Trump trying to wage a culture war, is he?
Yeah, you think?
This morning he's putting out a tweet praising NASCAR, which obviously is geared towards a different demographic, and the way they stand and respect and honor the flag.
Is he trying to wage something of a culture war?
Okay, so is he trying to wage a culture war?
First of all, the left started this culture war by politicizing sports.
I have been saying this for years.
I have been saying this for a long time.
Trump did not start this war.
He's just escalated the war.
That's all.
He's just escalated the war.
And by the way, this notion that the NASCAR has a supremely different demographic from football is just not really true.
According to Statista Online, the distribution of the television audience in 2013, 77% of the television audience for the NFL was white, 77%.
15% was black, 8% was Hispanic.
So the vast majority of the NFL audience is still white.
So the suggestion that Trump is doing this because he hates black people, I just don't see the evidence of all that.
You know, it's kind of ridiculous.
In any case, what's happened now is because Trump has polarized the country even further than it already was on this, and then the left has responded by polarizing even further by saying that everyone has to kneel, everyone must kneel before Zod.
Now the NFL is stuck between a rock and a hard place, because their audience is 77% white, and there are a lot of people in that audience, white, black, and Hispanic, who are not interested in doing this routine where they watch a bunch of people protest that America is a racist, terrible, terrible country.
They're not interested in doing that routine.
So Rush Limbaugh, I think, is actually a good case study.
Not just because Rush is a right winger, obviously, but because Rush is the biggest football fan on radio.
I mean, Rush is a super giant football fan.
So much so that ESPN tried to have him on Sunday NFL Countdown about 15 years ago.
And here is Rush saying that for the first time in a long time, he didn't watch any football on Sunday.
I was personally saddened.
I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
It was not a decision made in anger.
It was genuine sadness.
And it is sad.
It is sad that these common symbols are being ripped away.
If you're an NFL owner or you're an NFL player, though, you are stuck now between a rock and a hard place.
Because on the right, they're saying you need to stand for the anthem.
And because Trump threatened, because Trump basically said, I want everyone to be fired, the NFL should change its rules, let's boycott.
Now, if you're an NFL player, even if you don't like the kneeling, you feel the necessity to stand by your teammates.
Because if you're playing on a team, you tend to stand by your teammates and their rights.
If you're an NFL owner, you don't want to alienate the NFL Players Association, nor do you want to alienate your own players by saying, I'm going to force you to stand.
But at the same time, if you don't force your players to stand, you're alienating the audience.
So the Dallas Cowboys last night tried to have it both ways.
The Dallas Cowboys, basically Jerry Jones came out, the owner of the team, Trump supporter.
He came out and he kneeled down, he knelt with all the players before the anthem.
So the idea was that we're going to kneel to show free speech rights and to demonstrate that we care about equality, and then during the anthem, we're going to stand up.
So we're going to split the baby.
We won't actually kneel during the anthem, so we're not disrespecting the anthem or the flag, but we are going to protest President Trump by kneeling before the anthem.
The problem is, everybody in the stadium thinks that Trump is sort of right about the kneeling, and so they say, okay, you're really siding with all the players who are kneeling before the anthem.
This is one of the dark places that we've gone in sort of our First Amendment discourse, is if we don't like how you exercise your First Amendment rights, then we suggest that the First Amendment itself is the problem.
Or that if you stand up for the First Amendment, you're standing up for the worst excesses of the First Amendment.
I get this all the time.
You know, I make the case that people should be allowed to speak on college campuses.
And then people say, so, are you for Nazis saying that they want to roast Jews?
And it's like, well, no, I'm not for that, but they have the right to say that kind of stuff, right?
We live in America.
People do the same thing all the time on the left, right?
They do this with religious bankers.
When I say that I think you should be able to own and operate your business the way that you see fit, and then the left says, what?
Are you for discriminating against black people and gays?
And I say, well no, I'm not actually for that.
I'm not for that at all, but you have a right to do what you want with your own business.
Rights inherently contain the capacity to misuse those rights.
The problem is, when you symbolically stand up for the right, by participating in the same sort of act as the people who are misusing the right, then you're going to be lumped in with them, and that's what happened with the Cowboys last night.
So here's what happened last night with Jerry Jones and the Cowboys, and listen to the crowd.
They wanted to show unity, but they were very adamant about wanting to separate that message from the national anthem.
Sean?
All right, Lisa, as they take a knee collectively, boos can be heard from this sellout crowd in Arizona.
And you can hear the audience booing, of course.
And they are booing because, again, they are identifying the kneeling because of the symbology, the symbolism of the kneeling.
The people are booing.
They weren't booing until they knelt.
The minute that they knelt, people lumped them in with Colin Kaepernick.
And this is how this conflict is going to go for the NFL.
If you kneel, we're going to lump you in with Colin Kaepernick.
If you don't kneel, we're going to lump you in with Trump.
These are the two choices now.
We didn't have to make that choice before, but now that's the choice that popular media are forcing us to make.
It's the choice Trump wants to make.
It's the choice Pence wants to make.
It's the choice that on the left, Hillary Clinton wants you to make.
They want you to pick sides.
Are you with LeBron James and Steph Curry and Colin Kaepernick?
Are you with Jerry Jones and Bob Kraft?
Or are you with Donald Trump and Mike Pence and the soldiers?
Right?
That's the choice people want you to make.
This is not a choice you have to make.
You can be for the soldiers, don't kneel, and you can also be for Colin Kaepernick's right to kneel, right?
You can do both of these things.
But because the NFL is trying to thread this needle, they're gonna end up just destroying themselves.
And you can see it.
Yesterday, I paid homage to a guy named Alejandro Villanueva, right?
Alejandro Villanueva was an offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and he served three tours in Afghanistan.
He was an Army Ranger, and he came out during the anthem, The rest of the Steelers team stayed in the locker room.
Villanueva came out and put his hand over his heart for the anthem.
And I said, well, that's, I think, a courageous move.
Yesterday, he was forced to apologize after the left came after him.
Shannon Sharp said that Villanueva was just totally wrong.
How dare Villanueva go out there alone?
He humiliated his teammates.
Shannon, was Bill Nuevo right or wrong?
I believe he was wrong in this situation, Skip.
I believe he put his personal feelings and beliefs in front of that of the team.
And this is a team.
Now, what we know about the military, the military asks a man to put his life, his or her life, in the hands of another man.
True.
When you go outside of that protocol, people's lives are at risk.
That is correct.
That's what Colonel Jessup said and a few good men.
Okay, again, this is so stupid.
So I love the idea from Shannon Sharp that how dare he, how dare Villanueva put himself ahead of his team, his personal feelings ahead of his team.
What do you think Colin Kaepernick was doing?
Do you think that he actually went through the 49ers locker room and asked permission before he did what he did?
So you're allowed to put your opinion ahead of the team when you're kneeling for the anthem, but you're not allowed to do that when you are standing up for the American flag.
Villanueva ends up apologizing for all of this because, again, this is the problem.
Now you're being forced to make a choice.
You're either with your team, and therefore with Colin Kaepernick by extension, or you're with Donald Trump.
That's a crappy choice.
Most Americans don't want to make that choice.
We're going to show you the tape of Villanueva apologizing, which I just think is awful, in one second.
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Okay, so here is this Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman being forced to apologize because he didn't stand by his teammates.
Because you either stand by the people who are kneeling, or you're a bad guy now.
Regardless of this plan, very few players knew that I was going to the tunnel because I only asked the team leadership.
And so because of that, I didn't give them an opportunity to stand with me during the National Anthem.
That is the very embarrassing part on my end and what transpires because when everybody sees an image of me standing by myself, Everybody thinks that the team and the Steelers are not behind me and that's absolutely wrong.
It's quite the opposite.
They all would have, actually the entire team would have been out there with me.
Even the ones that want to take a knee would have been there with me had they known these extreme circumstances that at Soldier Field, at the heat of the moment when I got soldiers, wouldn't have veterans texting me that I have to be out there?
I think everything would have been put aside from every single one of my teammates, no doubt.
So because of that, I've made Coach Tomlin look bad, and that is my fault, and that is my fault only.
Okay, no, it's the sealer's fault for not going out there and figuring this thing out beforehand.
That's their fault, okay?
And it's not Villanueva's job to stay in the locker room with his idiot teammates who won't come out for the anthem.
If they want to come out and lock arms, and some of them kneel and some of them don't, that's fine.
But to rip on Villanueva as though he did something totally wrong for coming out, after serving three tours in Afghanistan, all these guys can just, you know, stick it where the sun don't shine.
Really, really obnoxious.
And again, this is the sort of thing where people are not going to watch the NFL because of it.
So the NFL is going to get absolutely hammered in the ratings next week.
You watch for it.
Meanwhile, the left is getting more and more snarky about this.
So as you see the posturing from some people on the right about the flag and the anthem and the idea that everybody who is protesting in any way must hate the flag and the anthem, I'm going to show you some scorn from the left that is truly off-putting and demonstrative of just why what Trump said is so effective politically.
We're going to go through all that.
Particularly Spurs coach Greg Popovich said some pretty amazing things yesterday.
LeBron James too.
We'll go through all of it.
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All right.
So the left scorn is truly astonishing.
And this is the part where Trump triggered the left into making the mistake of going full Kaepernick.
Never go full Kaepernick.
Again, the winning strategy for the left here was, we stand with the right of people to kneel even if we disagree with their kneeling.
That's the proper strategy.
The left cannot help themselves, and so they feel the necessity to rip America generally.
So here's Greg Popovich, who's a very left guy, the coach of the San Antonio Spurs, very brusque fellow, talking about how America is an embarrassment to the world now.
We're countries in embarrassment in the world.
This is an individual actually thought that when people held arms during the games that they were doing it to honor the flag.
That's delusional.
Absolutely delusional, but it's what we have to live with.
So you've got a choice.
We can continue to bounce our heads off the wall with his conduct, or we can decide that the institutions of our country are more important, that people are more important, that the decent America that we all thought we had and want is more important, and get down to business at the grassroots level and do what we have to do.
Okay, so the idea that everybody is embarrassed by the United States.
First of all, the idea that we're an embarrassment to the world to whom?
What, we embarrass the Germans?
Ooh, whoop-dee-frickin'-do.
Like, anyone cares about that?
What, do we embarrass Zimbabwe?
Do we embarrass Communist China?
Do we embarrass Putin?
Like, who do we embarrass?
Do we embarrass Syria?
Those sorts of statements are so obnoxious that they're just ridiculous.
And then Popovich said stuff, he went on to say that if you're a white person in America, you never understand what it's like to be black.
If that's the case, you cannot have a functioning republic.
The whole point of a functioning republic is that you can think beyond your own self-interest and think about what's good for the country and try to get in the head of somebody else and get in their shoes.
The idea that inherently, if you're a black person, that you can, if you're a white person, you can never understand what it's like to be somebody black, well...
That's really stupid, particularly because there are lots of different types of white people and lots of different types of black people.
It plays directly into the racist stereotypes that underlie Kaepernick's nonsense.
And this is, again, this is where the left is going.
The left is fully embracing the radicalism now.
Trump has forced them out of the closet, and they're embracing the radicalism.
Dan Patrick, talk show host, he says, you know, the American flag, it's just not the same thing to black Americans and white Americans.
The flag represents something different to other people.
Certainly white people can look at it and go, that flag, hey, my father fought.
My dad was Marine.
I mean, I might have to sit down and have a discussion if my father were alive to say this is what's going on, but hopefully you could have a dialogue that says this is why they're doing it.
It's not about the flag.
It's about far more than that to them.
The flag is not the same thing to them as it is to us.
And I'm saying white America.
The flag is not the same thing to black people as it is to white people?
Really?
I think the flag is the same thing to everybody.
I think that we should all have, as Americans, we have a common stake in the future of the country and in the history of ideas in the country.
I don't think that unity is impossible in the country.
See, this is where I divide from the left and I divide from President Trump.
I don't think that unity is impossible on these sorts of issues.
I think that we can find unity in saying the American flag stands for what's best about America, and we are always attempting to perfect the country in pursuit of that goal.
And we shouldn't protest the one symbol that we hold in common.
I mean, we have so few now as it is.
But again, the left's radicalism, it's just, when people say that Trump is the divider, Trump is a divider, he is not the divider.
There are a lot of people who are quite divisive.
LeBron James decides that he has to sound off too now.
And here's LeBron talking about how stupid voters are, American voters are, for voting for Trump.
I don't think a lot of people was educated.
And I think that's one of the biggest problems that we have when it becomes vote time.
That people are just not educated on either the individual or what's actually going on in the state of the world right now.
Not like that particular state, but in the state of the world.
I don't think a lot of people are educated.
And they make choices and say things that's uneducated.
Okay, so uneducated this, uneducated this from LeBron James.
The people wasn't educated?
Weren't.
Again, that's not just being snarky.
Saying to people that they are uneducated about their vote and that's why they're voting the way that they are, maybe they just have different principles than you.
Maybe they have different beliefs.
Maybe they have different sources of information than you.
But again, this is all super polarizing stuff.
As I said yesterday, LeBron James ripping other people on their level of education.
The guy went directly from high school to the NBA.
He may be an intelligent guy.
I have no evidence that he's a dum-dum.
But I would not Put my vote on the peg of education if I went directly from high school to the NBA and that was my entire experience in higher education.
Again, you can say that people are making stupid, stupid votes.
That I think is fair on every side.
But to say uneducated when your educational background is what LeBron's is, is I think a little bit ironic at the very least.
So, again, the left falling into Trump's trap by becoming ever more radical is part of Trump's trap.
Jesse Williams, who's an actor that nobody's heard of since he did what was he on Grey's Anatomy or something?
And he hasn't done anything since.
But he hangs out so that he can say things about how America's terrible every so often on MSNBC.
So they took him out of storage, they un-mothballed him, and then they talked to him about the National Anthem protests.
I think, Thomas, it's also important to realize that this anthem thing is a scam.
This is not actually part of football.
This was invented in 2009 from the government paying the NFL to market military recruitment, to get more people to go off and fight wars to die.
This has nothing to do with NFL or American pastime or tradition.
This is to get boys and girls to go fly overseas and go kill people.
How dare the military show up and ask people to join the military?
You know, the military that defends this moron's right to speak?
How dare the military go to the NFL crowd and make as though the military is a useful thing?
Just horrifying.
So again, Trump has trolled the left into being as left as it possibly can be, and at the same time, he has made an unprincipled right give up on certain principles like The president of the United States should not be interfering with private business operations.
And they've given up on that because it's more important to shout about the flag and the national anthem.
So yes, everything remains just as stupid as it was yesterday.
Again, no Disneyland.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and then we'll deconstruct some culture.
So things that I like today.
Peter Thiel, who is a, he was a Trump supporter.
He is the co-founder of PayPal.
He's an investor in Facebook.
He's one of the top minds in Silicon Valley.
His original investment group in PayPal included people like Elon Musk.
It was like seven members and all of them have started billion-dollar companies.
A brilliant guy, Peter Thiel.
He wrote a book called Zero to One, Notes on Startups or How We Build the Future, and it's a really good book.
It's a short book, it's about 180 pages, very quick read, but it's got some deep thoughts about how you ought to think about your business.
And how you ought to think about your life.
And what I like about Thiel is that he's very optimistic in his vision for people taking control of their own lives.
He's very libertarian, Thiel.
And as am I. So that means that we have a lot in common.
And I think that Peter's book is quite good.
So go out and pick up the book, Zero to One, by Peter Thiel.
Okay.
Other things that I like.
You know, this thing belongs in Things I Hate.
So this will be the shortest Things I Like ever.
Let's just go directly to Things I Hate.
Okay, so let's begin with Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders did a debate on healthcare last night with Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham, which is just, ugh.
I mean, that's basically TV death.
You turn in for five minutes, and then the ratings must have been great on CNN for this thing because people tuned in for five minutes and they died at their remote, so Arbitron and Nielsen were still registering that they were watching because they have no idea they're dead.
Bernie Sanders of Vermont, he explains that healthcare is a right.
Why is healthcare a right?
Because everybody else says it's a right.
But that is not good enough.
Our job now is to come together to craft serious short-term solutions that addresses the real problems that exist.
High deductibles, high copayments, high premiums, high cost of prescription drugs.
But longer term, we have got to come together.
And finally conclude that as a nation, we cannot be the only nation, major nation on earth, not to see healthcare as a right.
Thank you very much.
We cannot be the only major nation on Earth not to see abortion as a right.
We cannot be the only major nation on Earth not to spend 80% of our GDP on social programs.
What is this nonsense about we can't be the only major nation on Earth to do X or Y or Z?
We cannot be the only... Bernie Sanders circa 1775.
We cannot be the only major nation on Earth not to have a king.
We must have a king.
Everyone else has a king.
Why cannot we have a king?
Have they even created pudding yet?
I do not think so.
So this notion that we are going to declare healthcare a right because France declares healthcare a right is the stupidest crap I ever heard.
Make an affirmative case for why saying that is going to make healthcare better.
But don't say that just because other nations say stuff, therefore we ought to say stuff.
I mean, this falls into the same category as Popovich saying that we're an embarrassment to the world.
Yeah, we only provide half the world's economic growth.
Yeah, we're the embarrassment to the world.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So there is an unbelievable op-ed in the New York Times today.
I don't know what's going on over at the New York Times editorial page, but they have obviously decided that it is deeply important to promote communism.
In the last several months, they've run the following headlines.
When communism inspired Americans, April 29th, 2017.
When the Harlem Renaissance went communist, August 21st, 2017.
Socialism's future may be its past, June 26th, 2017.
And, of course, why women had better sex under socialism, August 12th, 2017.
Today's entry, okay, this is what they tweeted out.
For all its flaws, the communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.
For all its flaws, let me read that again slowly so that you understand how stupid this is.
For all its flaws, the communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.
Yes, it taught them to dream big and then die.
The Great Leap Forward cost 40 million lives.
Overall, Chinese communism has cost 65 million dead people, 35 million of those are probably women.
Forced abortion in China has caused the death of, by some reports, Of at least 191 million female babies.
191 million female babies aborted since the Communist Revolution in China, according to some studies.
Which means that right now, China has a shortfall in women.
They have 30 to 40 million more men than women in China, which is actually a serious demographic problem.
When countries tend to have far more men than women, they're more likely to be militarized and go to war because you got a lot of horny guys hanging around who aren't married and don't have families.
But the New York Times op-ed says, no, no, no, you don't understand.
Communism was great for women.
So, here is the glowing reminisce, quote, The communists did many terrible things, my grandmother always says at the end of her reminiscences, but they made women's lives much better.
That oft-repeated dictum sums up the popular perception of Mao Zedong regarding women in China.
As every Chinese schoolchild learns in history class, the communists rescued peasant daughters from urban brothels and ushered cloistered wives into factories, liberating them from the oppression of Confucian patriarchy and imperialist threat.
You know what actually has created women's rights?
Capitalism, gang.
Not communism.
Capitalism.
Where are women freer today?
Communist China or the United States?
Or France?
Or Britain?
Or Germany?
Or Denmark?
All of which are capitalist countries, okay?
Denmark is far more like the United States than it is like China in terms of how its economy is run.
This notion that women were liberated.
Liberated to do what?
Starve?
This is all reminiscent of how the left talks about people like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, at least before people are eating dogs in the streets of Venezuela.
Fidel, he brought healthcare.
He brought healthcare to the people.
Sure, thousands of them are in prison for dissent.
Sure, they hate the island so much they're attempting to float off the island with 1950s cars and the tires inflated.
Sure, but he had healthcare, didn't he?
And literacy went up.
It's so ridiculous.
Here's what it says.
It didn't do anything.
So what it says is, while the communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made their interests subordinate to collective goals.
Stopping at the household doorstep, Mao's words and policies did little to alleviate women's domestic burdens like housework and childcare.
So it didn't do anything.
It just told women that they could be leaders of the re-education camps.
Again, the New York Times propping up communism is quite an amazing sights.
So, the left really, really out of the closet on this stuff now.
Okay, time for a little bit of deconstructing the culture.
So, deconstructing the culture today, why don't we begin with this incredible video.
You were talking about scorn of one side for the other.
There's a video that's now come out with a few actresses.
I don't actually know some of these actresses.
I guess one of them is Ellen Page.
I'm not sure who the other actresses are here.
But they cut a video For the AV Club and the Onion, talking about how they're not gonna date Trump supporters.
Good luck with that.
The bubble, the self-righteous bubble these people have created is quite amazing.
Now the sports world is bubbling itself off in the same way that the entertainment world is, that there's a Sports Illustrated cover showing a bunch of people in sports.
We all stand together.
Hollywood does this routine.
We all stand together.
Guess what?
The rest of America thinks you're just awful.
So here's this little video with Ellen Page and unnamed other people.
Who I will find out in just a moment saying they would never date a Trump supporter.
But I think in the end they, you know, everyone's starting to see sort of what's happening.
I don't want to go on because I can go on for way too long but like, um, no.
No, I don't think I could get an earful.
If you are a Trump supporter, well at any point because you've been saying this the whole time, but by this point, I'm sorry.
Exactly.
No.
Okay, no.
We never dated a Trump supporter.
Just never do it.
Okay, it's Kate Mara and Ellen Page and Amy Simons who are in a new movie that looks awful called My Days of Mercy, which looks just terrible.
Kate Mara and Ellen Page play lovers on the opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Page is Lucy, a woman who is vehemently opposed to the death penalty, while Mara's Mercy is in support of it.
Good luck.
All right.
So you wonder why Americans look at Hollywood and they say, we want no part of you.
This is why.
You wonder why movie receipts are down?
Part of it is because the movies are crappy.
Part of it is because the tickets are expensive.
And part of it is because you people keep alienating us and annoying us.
And the same thing is about to happen in the sporting world, in other entertainment news.
The Amazon has decided that it is imperative to show transgender full frontal nudity on TV.
They really did this the other day.
The person in the rear of this photograph is a man who has had a boob job.
That's all that's happened here.
Alexander Billings is the name of this of this actual transgender person who is intransparent um and uh and so they I don't know if we just have the picture or if there's the actual scene I hope just the picture because I don't actually want to see the scene in any case this person turns around and has breasts and a penis uh and this is supposed to be some sort of some sort of step forward for the transgender community now we're all supposed to I love the descriptions in the media It's pretty amazing.
In the media, in the Daily Beast, they say a thing.
It's just, it's just incredible because we really wanted to show her penis.
Her penis?
Excuse me?
So, on the one hand, again, this is just pushing more cultural boundaries so that we're supposed to pretend that all of this is, that this person is actually a woman.
But, on the other hand, there is something to the idea that the shocking vision of a man with breasts may dissuade some folks that this is actually a woman.
Because, when you see that, that's clearly a man.
So, good job Amazon for creating programming that just What's the point of all this?
What's the point of all this?
I mean, this is just what they do.
Okay, final note on deconstructing the culture.
I have no words for these things.
Final note, there's a movie called Mother, and our own Michael Knowles, who's wrong about virtually everything, is wrong about this too.
He says that the movie Mother is just...
a wonderful biblical allegory.
So the movie is a biblical allegory.
Darren Aronofsky is the worst director ever.
Darren Aronofsky is hot garbage.
Darren Aronofsky is the emoji movie shot on a handheld camera and with people shooting up.
That's Darren Darren Aronofsky.
Every Darren Aronofsky movie is the same.
It's all hysterical and ludicrous and filled with looks inside people's heads that no one cares about.
And it's always a dark, creepy place because Darren Aronofsky's a weirdo.
I mean, it His new movie, Mother, is another one of these routines in the same line.
By the way, if you ever want to watch a truly awful film, go watch Noah.
Noah's a truly awful film that does not understand the Bible.
So he's made a new film that's basically in the same vein.
It's Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem.
Javier Bardem plays a writer with writer's block who's supposed to obviously be God.
Jennifer Lawrence is supposed to be the Virgin Mary in this allegory.
It's such a bad movie that CinemaScore gave it an F.
You know how to get an F on CinemaScore?
You know how much you have to disappoint audiences to get an F on CinemaScore?
You have to basically shoot them in the head to get an F on CinemaScore.
The audiences will give Night Out, that crappy Scarlett Johansson film, those knockoff at the hangover.
They'll give that a B- on CinemaScore.
It's got an F.
And it got an F because it degrades into this bizarre orgy of blood and violence and fire.
And the whole idea is supposed to be that humanity, man and woman, come to this house that's owned by Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence, and they start ruining the house and making everything terrible.
And all these people start showing up because humans are a scourge on the earth, which was the same message that he promoted in NOAA, which is garbage.
Here's the preview.
They tried to pitch this as a horror film because they knew nobody would want to watch a movie about how human beings are garbage and ruin the earth.
So instead they tried to promote this as a normal horror film.
We spend all our time here.
I want to make a paradise.
She redid all of that.
Every last detail.
She breathed life back into every room.
Are you happy?
I love you.
Please, come in.
Hello.
Hey, look, a shaky cam.
Thanks, Darren.
He's a stranger.
We're just gonna let him sleep in our house.
Hello.
Hello.
Did you know he had a wife?
It's creepy!
Are they ghosts?
Is the house haunted?
No, it turns out none of that crap is true.
It's just all a really bad biblical allegory for a guy who has never really studied the Bible in any depth, and I believe Aronofsky's a self-proclaimed atheist.
So, note to self-proclaimed atheists, please stop making religiously allegorical movies.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Okay, I'm not making an atheist film.
I would suggest that you not make a religious film if you don't know what in the world you're talking about.
More evidence that Hollywood hates the country.
And that's exactly what Aronofsky said, by the way.
He said, audiences don't get it because they're illiterate.
Yeah, thanks, guys.
I can't imagine why all of us are turning off our TVs and ignoring you.
Okay.
We'll be back here tomorrow with the latest in the stupidity vortex as it continues to build into that Category 5 hurricane that will wipe all intellectual life from the planet.
Blech!
Do better today, guys.
Tomorrow, by the way, we'll be in Utah.
So if you're at University of Utah, I think we're sold out.
But there may be overflow rooms, so check it out.
But we'll see you there if you are.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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