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Oct. 17, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:16
The Great Hollywood Collapse | Ep. 396
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We have returned.
Yes, indeed.
We are back.
And there is so much to talk about, from Harvey Weinstein to a New York Times op-ed that targeted The Daily Wire last Thursday night.
Plus, we will be talking about Sgt.
Bo Bergdahl, who just pleaded guilty to desertion, and what that says about the Obama administration's honesty problems.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So once again, there will be no Disneyland for anyone.
I came back, and things remain just as bad as when I left, and in some ways worse.
So thanks for that.
Appreciate it, everyone.
Well done.
We'll get to all of the news.
There's plenty to talk about, for sure, ranging from Harvey Weinstein.
I've not been able to give my Breakdown on the Harvey Weinstein scandal because that actually broke after I left for vacation.
But I have a lot of thoughts on that that go to sort of what Hollywood is all about and what needs to happen if you don't want Harvey Weinstein's to be the future of the industry.
I also want to talk about some good moves that President Trump made while I was away.
Plus, I will definitely have some comments that I'm going to begin with about this New York Times op-ed that targeted me personally and also targeted The Daily Wire.
But before we do any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors.
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Okay, so apparently all hell broke loose last week.
And I was off for the last three days of the week.
I want to start by responding to this op-ed because I've gotten a lot of mail about it.
While I was out, there was a full op-ed in the New York Times coming after me personally, as well as the Daily Wire, from a woman named Jane Coaston.
Obviously, I don't know her work very well, so I can't speak to the rest of her work, but basically, the idea was that I am somehow a guy who only panders to the right, and this is the hallmark of the right these days, is just pandering to the right.
What I do know from Jane Koston is that she is a lefty.
She's a liberal.
And Jane Koston has written pieces like this one from MTV News titled, quote, On the Punching of Nazis, subtitle, I Support It.
This is back in January.
She said, if a Nazi is in your presence, can you ever punch the Nazi in the goddang face?
The answer is simple.
Of course you can.
And then she says that, should you?
Yes.
Yes, you should.
You should punch Nazis in the goddang face.
You should do so repeatedly.
If you see more Nazis, you should punch them too.
So she sounds like a very tolerant and diverse individual, which is just wonderful.
And she titled her piece on me, The Hollow Bravery of Ben Shapiro.
So the first thing is that I would just like to note here, I have never called myself brave.
In fact, I don't really consider myself brave, because I reserve that title for law enforcement, you know, people who put themselves in harm's way to protect others.
I'm a guy who goes on campus, and I give talks, and I have security, and I'm probably the safest guy in the room, as I've said in a thousand interviews.
So, for me, my job is not about bravery.
My job is about saying things that I think are true, and then you take them, or you leave them.
The idea that I have ever proclaimed that I am the hallmark of bravery is just absurd.
But the piece itself is really designed to attack the entire conservative movement and me as sort of a supposed dot leader in it.
So here is what Jane Koston writes.
She writes, Ben Shapiro, the conservative writer, prides himself on speaking bold truths to liberal power.
His schtick goes something like this.
Set up a speech in a progressive bastion, ideally a college campus full of coastal elites who have never left their bubble.
Spar with snowflakes who are offended by something he says about race or gender, or perhaps even believe he never should have been invited in the first place.
Post the exchange on the internet and use it as proof that the cultural consensus is stacked dramatically against conservatives.
As Mr. Shapiro has put it, the left has run out of aggressors to target.
Instead, they've become the aggressor's self-righteous morality police dedicated to wiping out dissenting thought.
Well, the reason I say that is because Berkeley, like the University of California, run by Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, staffed entirely by Democrats at the highest level, decided that I needed 600 police officers in order to speak at Berkeley.
As I've said again 1,000 times the year before, I showed up with no security.
I had my security team, but there were no police officers necessary.
It's not me that's making this issue on campus.
It is not I. I am not the one who is designing these problems on college campuses, nor do I even like them.
I mean, you can talk to people from my team.
They will tell you, before we do every lecture, I say, I really hope this one is nice and calm.
And as far as the idea that I don't want to have people in the room with whom I can discuss, I've been debating people on the left for a long time here.
I mean, I debated Cenk Aygar, like, Two, maybe three months ago, I debated a panel of people, including the NAACP president in Spokane, Washington, and Charles Mudedy from the Seattle Stranger when I was up in Seattle.
I debated Shama Sawant, who was the Socialist City Council member in Seattle.
I'm going to have a discussion with Sam Harris, with whom I strenuously disagree on religion.
I'm going to have a discussion with him up in San Francisco in December.
In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of many people on the right who debate people on the left more than I do.
Like, high-ranking people on the left more than I do.
I debated Sally Cohn last year.
I debate people on the left all the time.
This idea that I'm out there looking for snowflakes to melt is just patently absurd.
In fact, I've said in my own lectures, I said in the Berkeley lecture, I believe, I said that the easiest thing in the world is to find some College leftists to trigger, but that's not my job.
My job is to say things I think are true in front of audiences full of leftists and conservatives.
I wish more people who are on the left would show up.
I mean, I always, I have a standing rule.
Look at every one of my lectures for the last year and a half.
I have a standing rule.
If you disagree with me, raise your hand and go to the front of the line.
That is my standing rule.
The idea that I'm not out there trying to convert people, that I'm not out there trying to do outreach, that all I care about is the viral videos that come from these exchanges, it's just, there's no evidence to this whatsoever.
In any case, Jane Coaston says, quote, It's true that campuses tend to be hostile places to conservatives like Mr. Shapiro, Charles Murray, and Heather McDonald, but the notion that they are the cultural underdogs is bogus.
Really?
We're not the cultural underdogs?
Heather MacDonald and Charles Murray aren't the cultural underdogs?
When Charles Murray went to Middlebury College, a leftist professor I think broke her collarbone thanks to the students over there.
Charles Murray was just shut down again over the weekend.
We're not the cultural underdogs?
Have you seen the culture?
You might say we're not the political underdogs.
I think that's sort of true.
I mean, in Berkeley I am the political underdog, but across the country I don't think I am because I think that the vast majority of people agree with most of what I have to say, but...
The notion that we're not cultural underdogs is absurd.
She says, what Mr. Shapiro does on campus is shadowboxing, meant to pander to his conservative fans, whose values dominate mainstream American culture.
Okay, no evidence that conservative values dominate mainstream American culture.
In fact, virtually all of the evidence is on the other side, on all of the major social issues of the day without, perhaps aside from abortion, there's no question that there is a leftist-slash-liberal consensus on cultural issues.
She said, if he wants to be genuinely brave, he'd challenge some of the wrongheaded ideas Okay, a couple of things here.
The idea that I don't challenge wrong-headed ideas held by some of my fans, again, you have to be ignorant of my work in order to say this.
Fully ignorant of my work in order to say this.
For the last two years, I've taken a very controversial position with regard to President Trump, who, lest Jane Coaston forget, is rather popular among people who support me.
I was the initiator of good Trump, bad Trump.
I created good Trump, bad Trump.
I'm the guy who had on my desk for months a shoe.
We called it the put it on the other foot shoe.
We actually took this shoe, and when Trump would do something, I would say put the shoe on the other foot, imagine Obama did it, and then let's try and see whether this is something that's good or not.
I've been very critical, not only of President Trump, but I wrote a piece this morning about why it's bad for a bunch of MAGA-hatted dummies to shut down a liberal speaker, a leftist speaker, Xavier Becerra, the Attorney General of California, over at Whittier College.
And the idea that I don't criticize people on the so-called right side of the aisle is patently absurd.
Again, I've criticized the alt-right incessantly, repeatedly.
When I left Breitbart, I criticized Steve Bannon.
I criticized Steve Bannon when he was appointed to the campaign.
I don't know where she's getting this, but all I will say is that it is utterly in disconnect with reality.
And anybody who watches this show knows that that is the case.
Anybody who listens to the show knows this is the case.
We try to be intellectually honest about our conservatism.
It seems to me that what Jane Coaston really wants is for me to be on the left.
This is the same critique that I heard from a lot of people on the left who didn't like the never-Trump Republicans, because they said, why don't you just vote for Hillary?
Because Hillary's awful.
Okay, Jane, just because I disagree with some people on the right about things doesn't mean I have to agree with your crappy point of view.
If your idea of dissent is that I have to agree with you, then I dissent from your dissent.
No.
I think you're wrong.
I think that most of the stuff that you write is wrong.
And guess what?
I can do that.
Maybe the reason I disagree with you is because I think you're wrong.
So what does she use as the example of us pandering?
So she picks one example, right?
This one example that has been used by the left over the last week when I was on vacation.
She says, And then she says the animated video is actually the second one the Daily Wire posted this past weekend on the subject.
The other carried the subtle title, quote, Christopher Columbus actually was a great man.
So the second video I think is actually quite good.
The second video is from Michael Knowles, and it is a full breakdown of the entire history of Christopher Columbus.
It is full of information.
Kostin, of course, just takes it for granted that Christopher Columbus was a bad guy, so I'm sure she didn't even bother to watch the video, which is chock full of references to actual primary documentation.
You should go watch Knowles' video.
It has over a million hits.
It is quite good.
The other video, I didn't like.
It didn't meet editorial standards.
I was on vacation.
As soon as I found out about it, I wanted to pull it down.
It was a satire video.
So I wanted to, you know, I was conflicted in the sense that I don't like pulling down satire.
I think that satire, you get a broader range than just you would in a normal video.
And so I made the mistake of leaving it up for 24 hours.
Over that 24 hours, I became increasingly disconcerted with the video.
I really was not a fan of it at the beginning.
Over the next 24-25 hours, I really watched it a few more times and found that it crossed lines for me that I didn't want crossed.
And I took it down and I issued an apology personally for the video being on the site in the first place.
Which is, as far as I'm aware, what you are supposed to do when a bad video goes up on your site.
So... Okay, if I really wanted to not tick off my right-wing fans, I would have left the thing up, wouldn't I?
And then, Kostin spends the next, like, three paragraphs talking about not The Daily Wire, but The Federalist, the site run by a friend of mine, Ben Domenech.
And she talks about the Federalist pandering to the right, forgetting, of course, that the Federalist has run a number of pieces disagreeing on major issues with other members of the right, that the Federalist has a pretty wide variety of opinion.
Mary Catherine Hamm, who was a never-Trumper, is on that site.
So is Molly Hemingway, who was a very pro-Trump writer, is on that site.
And then what does she use as her example of real pandering?
She said that publication had a black crime tag on its website until two weeks ago, which included an article titled, If you don't want police to shoot you, don't resist arrest.
And so, a couple of things on that.
Number one, black crime tags.
Tags, you know, most of the editors at a site don't know that the tag is there, right?
A tag is an HTML thing.
It's not like every single story gets filed away as a black crime story.
There's a tag that somebody in the back end is hitting that puts the HTML in black crime for this site.
Now, I don't think there should be a black crime tag, neither did the Federalist, which is why they removed it.
Okay, but again, this whole idea here is that conservatives are just catering to their base.
Now what I love about this article is that Jane Coaston is catering to her leftist base in the New York Times.
So this entire article is not a rebuke to anyone on the left.
It's not her speaking truth to power on the left.
It's not her saying to the left that people like me should be able to speak at Berkeley.
No, instead it's Jane Coaston pandering to her own leftist readers and then accusing us of doing that to our right-wing readers.
And then what she's really upset, of course, about is that I am not on the left.
So she says that I believe that transgender people have a mental illness, and then she says that's just terrible.
Okay, have I been unclear about my perspective on this?
There's a video of me that's been seen 35 million times talking about this.
Like literally 35 million times.
So I've not been unclear about this.
And she finishes up by saying, I reached out to Mr. Shapiro to ask him about the Columbus Day video.
She did.
And I emailed her back the statement, which we had already put out, or were putting out at the time.
And then I added a one-line comment.
She said, he sent over a statement apologizing for it, saying it engaged in broad-based stereotyping, which she also posted on Twitter.
In the email, he added, quote, I think there's a lot of political ground to be gained in pandering to your own side and confirming their biases.
I strive not to do that.
And then she finishes, and yet he and vast swaths of the conservative right who decry groupthink still do.
To tell strident college students to examine their own politics and embrace real debate is brave.
To insist on the same from those on the right would be even more courageous.
Again, she has not watched a single speech I have ever done on the right.
Not one.
I guarantee you she has not watched a single speech I've done on campus.
If she has, then I don't know if she had the mute on, but that is patently crazy.
Okay, the idea that I have not told college students on the right to examine their own politics?
Half of my speech at Berkeley was devoted to why the alt-right is stupid, and why identity politics of the right is bad, and why if you think that Mexico and China are responsible for your lost job, you're probably wrong.
Okay, so again, all of this is just dumb.
All of this is just dumb, but it demonstrates something that I think is more important, and that is that the left is so concerned with finding enemies that they will find enemies everywhere.
And I want to expand on that and talk about who the real enemies to public discourse are, the people who are really pandering to the base in just a second.
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So, here's the point here.
People on the right should never expect that folks on the true left, people who are intellectually dishonest, are going to grant them credit for speaking truth to their own side, because it's not going to happen.
If you tick off the left enough, they are just going to accuse you of pandering to your own base.
That's all that's going to happen.
It doesn't matter what you actually say.
It doesn't matter what you actually do.
It doesn't matter whether you've gone out of your way to try and be intellectually honest about your own perspective, or whether you've criticized people on your supposed own side.
None of that matters to the left, because for the left, they must paint a picture of right-wingers as a bunch of red meat-eating zombies who simply want to consume information that they like.
You know, they don't worry about that on their own side, but they worry about that on the right.
Never mind the fact that most conservatives read things on the left.
Most conservatives, you know, are in a culture that is dominated by the left.
Despite Jane Koston's evidence-less propositions to the contrary, the fact is that the mainstream American media culture is dominated by the left.
It's not dominated by people like me.
Okay, Daily Wire has become a very big site, thank God, but it is not a big site in comparison to places like Huffington Post.
The fact is, the left still dominates the media conversation.
And for Jane Coaston to deny that, and for her to suggest that those of us on the right are merely in the pandering business, is to demonstrate her own ignorance.
You want to know who is in the pandering business?
Somebody who is hailed by the left as a moral hero.
is Jimmy Kimmel.
So Jimmy Kimmel was hailed for the past three, four, five weeks, ever really since the Obamacare attempts by the senator from, oh, what's the name of the senator who was on his show?
In any case, I can't remember the name of the senator, Bill Cassidy, Cassidy.
In any case, Jimmy Kimmel did a whole rant about Bill Cassidy and Obamacare, how terrible it would be if Obamacare were repealed.
It was evidence-less, it was fact-free.
I did an entire rebuttal of it here on the show that went viral.
And Jimmy Kimmel has been hailed as a moral leader because he spoke out on gun control and because he spoke out on healthcare.
And he accepted this mantle.
He obviously thinks that he has a voice in this.
He's not just a comedian, he has a voice in this.
And as a citizen, he feels the necessity to use his platform.
Now, he has every right to do that, right?
He has every right to do this whole thing.
What I said was, when Jimmy Kimmel did this routine, that he was the moral arbiter for the country.
And he posed himself as that, right?
He said things like, you are immoral if you disagree with me.
This was the implication of his Las Vegas rant.
That if you disagreed with him, you were immoral.
You want people to die because you're being paid off by the gun lobby.
We went through it in detail here on the show.
You know, you pose yourself as the moral voice of the country.
I said, who died and made Jimmy Kimmel the moral arbiter?
Well, because that went viral, Jimmy Kimmel, without responding to me by name, responded to me directly on one of the Sunday shows.
Here was Jimmy Kimmel responding, and I want you to note, who do you think is pandering here?
Who do you think is pandering?
Am I pandering for standing up for a perspective that I have held my entire political career, have spoken out for openly and honestly for 15, 16, 17 years, or I'm 33, so I've been doing this since I was 17, so 16 years.
Right?
Is it me?
Am I the one pandering when I say things that I think are true to the right and to the left?
Or is it Jimmy Kimmel?
Because I'm going to show you a clip of Jimmy Kimmel in which he openly acknowledges that he's basically pandering and he doesn't really care.
Here's Jimmy Kimmel.
You've heard there's one conservative commentator in particular who says, who made Jimmy Kimmel the moral arbiter?
I'm not.
I mean, yeah, I agree with him.
I'm nobody's moral arbiter.
I mean, you don't have to watch the show.
You don't have to listen to what I say.
Like three years ago, I was So you don't mind if Republicans turn off your show?
and the Republican numbers went way down, like 30% or whatever.
And, you know, as a talk show host, that's not ideal, but I would do it again in a heartbeat.
So you don't mind if Republicans turn off your show?
They're not watching anymore?
I wouldn't say I don't mind.
I mean, I'd love for everyone, I want everyone with a television to watch the show.
But if they're so turned off by my opinion on health care and gun violence, then... I don't know.
I probably won't want to have a conversation with them anyway.
Okay, so it's that last part that's the telling part.
So number one, when he says he didn't appoint himself a moral arbiter, I'm glad.
I wish the media would stop appointing a moral arbiter then.
And I wish that he would stop talking in these passionate moral tones about everyone who disagrees with him being the Antichrist.
Like, that would be nice if he would cut that out then.
If he's not the moral arbiter, then he should stop posing as one.
And that final comment is the one where I say he's pandering.
That final one where he says, if people disagree with me so much on these topics that they just turn off the TV, then I wouldn't want to have a conversation with them anyway?
Well, if somebody said that to me, right?
If somebody said, there are a bunch of people who are turned off by your rhetoric, what do you say about that?
I would say some of the same things that Jimmy Kimmel said, right?
I would say, listen, they have a right to watch the show, they have a right not to watch the show.
What I would say is, maybe they should listen to my perspective, and I'll listen to theirs, and we can have a discussion.
I say this in every speech.
In every speech, I say this.
Okay?
I always say that I want the conversation to take place.
I want more people on the left to listen, and I want to hear their ideas, too, so we can go back and forth on this.
Okay?
It's Jimmy Kimmel saying, basically, if you don't want to watch the show, so long, see ya.
Right, that is not the voice of somebody who wants to convince.
That's the voice of somebody who wants to pander.
So if Jane Coaston wants to write a piece...
If Jimmy Kimmel really wants to debate these issues and have an honest conversation about them, I'm more than happy to come on his show and I'm more than happy to have him on mine.
of did on his show, I'm saying the media appointed him moral arbiter and he seemed happy to accept that and happy to revel in it until the point where I called him out, at which point he immediately backtracked.
So I'm glad he's backtracking.
I'm glad Jimmy Kimmel doesn't think of himself as a moral arbiter.
If Jimmy Kimmel really wants to debate these issues and have an honest conversation about them, I'm more than happy to come on his show and I'm more than happy to have him on mine.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Okay.
So I want to talk about Harvey Weinstein because this has been the brewing scandal for a long time here.
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Okay, let's talk about Harvey Weinstein.
So I've lived my entire life in Hollywood.
I grew up in Hollywood.
My mom works in Hollywood.
I have met Harvey Weinstein.
I met him one time.
I was at the Four Seasons having breakfast with a friend of mine named David Suiza, who's the editor over at the LA Jewish Journal, and David introduced me to Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein was a jerk, but he did not sexually harass me, which apparently makes me the only person in a 300-mile radius he did not sexually harass.
Um, so, um, for what that is worth.
In any case, uh, Weinstein now, obviously, they're saying there are hundreds of cases in which he sexually assaulted, harassed, or raped people.
Uh, so, that is, uh, is shocking but not surprising.
The reason I say it's shocking but not surprising is that this has long been a part of Hollywood culture.
To pretend otherwise is just foolish.
And unlike in, for example, the Catholic Church, which is against these things, This has always been a long, if not celebrated, then winked at, nodded at, grinned at, laughed at part of Hollywood culture.
It has been.
The casting couch has been part of Hollywood culture since the very beginning.
And to pretend otherwise is just to let Hollywood off the hook for a certain perspective on human sexuality that is seriously perverse and leads to really dire consequences.
The reason the left wants to ignore this, of course, is because the Hollywood view of human sexuality that allowed for this sort of misbehavior and evil to accrue and occur for literally decades on end is something that the left sort of holds in high regard, and that is the transactional nature of sex.
So, let's talk a little bit about the casting couch for just a second.
So, first of all, here's a little bit of Hollywood history.
It was built on sexual peccadillos, and in particular on the casting couch.
Here is a long list of people who are involved in using the so-called casting couch.
For those who don't know the phrase, casting couch means that there's a director, he has to cast a part in his film, and so he'll go to a hot starlet, or upcoming starlet who has ambitions, and say to her, you want a shot at this role, you want a screen test, darling, get down on that couch.
That's what the casting couch meant.
Here are some of the people who engaged in it.
Louis B. Mayer, the founder of MGM.
Apparently, he sexually assaulted teenage Judy Garland.
There are stories about him with Judy Garland on his lap when she was 16 years old and him fondling her breasts.
This goes back a long time.
Arthur Freed, legendary producer, allegedly exposed himself to Shirley Temple when she was 11 years old.
She wrote that in her memoir.
Harry Cohn.
A guy so hated in Hollywood that there was an old joke that used to go around about Harry Cohn that his funeral would be the most well-attended event in the history of Hollywood, because everyone wanted to make sure he was dead.
But Harry Cohn had a long history of sexual abuse, apparently.
Daryl Zanuck reportedly solicited prospective starlets on a routine basis.
Howard Hughes not only slept with starlets consensually, but apparently had a casting couch himself.
And this was a running joke in Hollywood for years, okay?
It's part of the movies.
All About Eve won Best Picture in 1950.
It's a terrific film.
I've recommended it here on the actual show.
This joke involves Marilyn Monroe.
So you're going to see here a very, very young Marilyn Monroe.
This is one of Marilyn Monroe's first screen roles, in which she had a speaking role anyway.
And she plays an up-and-coming woman who's attempting to break into the theater.
She has a bit part.
George Sanders is playing a theater critic named Addison DeWitt, and he's been squiring Monroe's character around.
Basically, she's sleeping with him so that he will squire her around town, and then he passes her off to the producers, right?
The way that he's going to pass her off to the producers is have her essentially used as a sexual object by the producers in order to solicit a part.
This is an open part of the film, right?
I mean, this is part of the joke.
Here it is from the film.
Then you two must have a long talk.
I'm afraid Mr. DeWitt would find me boring before too long.
You won't bore him, honey.
You won't even get a chance to talk.
Claudia, come here.
You see that man?
That's Max Fabian, the producer.
Now go and do yourself some good.
Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Because that's what they are.
Now go and make him happy.
All I want is a drink.
Leave it to me.
I'll get you one.
Thank you, Mr. KB.
Well done.
I can see your career rising in the East like the sun.
Okay, and then she ends up getting an audition, but not getting the part, and then she asks Addison DeWitt for his advice.
He says, go try the same thing in Hollywood.
Okay, this is in the New York theater circles.
This has always been a part of Hollywood.
It's always been a disgusting, horrible part of Hollywood.
To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality.
Okay, Harvey Weinstein is the worst example of what happens in Hollywood, but it is ridiculous to suggest he is the only example of this happening in Hollywood.
There are a number of starlets who have talked about this over time.
I'm talking about virtually all of the major ones have talked about it.
Joan Collins talked about it.
Marilyn Monroe described the town as being, she said that, this is from her autobiography, she said producers treated Hollywood, quote, like an overcrowded brothel.
A movie that many more people have seen than All About Eve, although All About Eve is a great movie.
The Godfather, this is part of the plot.
Don't you remember in The Godfather?
Right, Jack Woltz.
You remember the guy who ends up with a horse head in his bed?
Do you remember the conversation that leads to the horse head in his bed in The Godfather?
It's Jack Woltz, this famous Hollywood producer, who's sitting with Tom Hagen, and he says to him, and this is a direct quote, Johnny Fontaine never gets that part, right?
Johnny Fontaine ruined one of Woltz International's most valuable proteges.
I was gonna make her a big star.
And let me be even more frank, just to show you that I'm not a hard-hearted man.
That's not all dollars and cents.
She was beautiful.
She was young.
She was innocent.
She was the greatest piece of ass I've ever had.
That's in the Godfather.
Everyone knew in Hollywood about this for decades.
It's still going on in Hollywood right now.
It's still going on in Hollywood right now.
Power means that power combined with transactional sex leads to sexual abuse.
Power plus transactional sex leads to sexual abuse.
Not just for women who are openly raped and their consent violated, but for women who are essentially forced into the position of having to sleep with guys they don't want to sleep with in order to make their way to the top.
That system has been in place for a hundred years in Hollywood, and that's not a justification for the system, folks.
This is me ripping on Hollywood's morality.
This is me ripping on the transactional nature of sex and beauty in Hollywood.
This has been true forever.
Famous actresses, like Ellen Barkin, she comes out and she says that Harvey Weinstein's evils, that everyone knew about them for years.
But Rich, famous actors and actresses, said nothing.
Okay, where were you?
Once you became rich and famous, wasn't it incumbent on you to out these people?
If you actually want to change the system, you can't wait till Harvey Weinstein gets out and then you tell your horror story about Harvey Weinstein.
You want to talk about hollow bravery?
To me, that's hollow bravery.
Because now Harvey Weinstein's already outed.
You want actual bravery?
Tell us who the bad guys are so that we can root them out.
If you want to change the system, you have to get rid of the bad guys.
And the only people who are capable of making that move are people who are already the stars.
They're the people who are already the stars.
Because if you're up and coming, if you're 18, you're trying to get a job in Hollywood, you're trying to make your way, It's sort of like the deal that a lot of baseball players made with steroids in the early 2000s.
Right?
You can either languish in AAA or you can take the steroids and go for the millions of dollars.
Is that an immoral decision?
Yeah, it's an immoral decision.
It's an understandable one.
It's also an understandable decision.
The same thing happens to be true with a lot of these young Hollywood actresses and actors who come to Hollywood looking for a career, and the difference between them being Tom Hanks and them being a guy working at the Coffee Bean is what they're willing to do in a bedroom with a producer.
The only way that that system gets broken is if the people who are already stars dedicate themselves to rooting this out, and that means naming names.
Because bad people will continue to do bad things so long as they have these jobs.
Names have to be named.
Back to the transactional sex point.
Again, men in power have always used sex for transactional purposes, and this doesn't just exist in Hollywood.
This has existed in public schools.
It exists in churches and synagogues.
It exists in politics.
Obviously, Bill Clinton comes to mind.
This is what Bill Clinton did to Kathleen Willey.
All of this has been happening for years.
But it only stops when the public shows that they are not willing to accept the transactional nature of sex.
That sex means more than just, I'm trading sex for a part.
I'm trading sex for a role.
I'm trading sex with power, for power.
There is a value to sex beyond the ever-present physical stimulus.
It is more than just shaking hands.
So long as society treats sex that way, it's going to be very difficult to curb these impulses.
It's gonna make it harder to curb these impulses.
Either sex means something or it doesn't.
If sex is just a handshake, well then, a handshake can close a business deal.
But if sex is more than that, then we ought to look askance at the casting couch, even if the women are consenting to be on it.
Because that sort of consent is not real consent, in my view.
That sort of consent is a power relationship.
You know, this is where I'm more feminist than a lot of people on both the right and the left.
That sort of power relationship is an exploitation of women.
And society needs to disapprove of this.
Can it be done?
Sure.
Society did in the past.
In fact, society so disapproved of the Hollywood treatment of sex in the 1920s that the Catholic Legion of Decency led a boycott against Hollywood, and that boycott led Hollywood to actually reflect the values of the time in its own films.
They had a voluntary thing called the Hays Code.
The Hays Code existed from the 1930s to the 1960s, and that's why you have all of these movies where every kiss is closed mouth, Were there no sex scenes?
Why, from the 1930s to the 1960s, you don't see people in bed together?
Why men and women sleep in separate beds?
All of that is a reflection of the Hays Code.
Did the Hays Code go too far in some ways?
Yeah, I think it did, but was it a reflection of the fact that the American people were not willing to go along with Hollywood's view of sex?
Yes.
And the American people have to not be willing to go along with that view of sex, and they have to extend a better, a more sanctified view of sex into their own lives as well.
So I think that that's what I have to say about Harvey Weinstein.
I think also, by the way, that every community should look to its own here.
I do think that every community should look to its own issues with regard to sexual power dynamics and see whether they are upholding standards of their communities or whether they are undermining those standards.
This, again, I think is the difference between churches and synagogues in Hollywood.
I think, as I showed you in this movie, this has always been an openly accepted part of Hollywood culture.
It was never an openly accepted part of church culture, which is why it's so ridiculous that the media have decided to make, you know, every time there's a sexual scandal in the Catholic Church, the media decide that they're going to make this about priests being celibate.
But when there's a sexual scandal in Hollywood where sex scandals are the rule, not the exception, then it's, well, why are we making a big deal about Hollywood?
This happens everywhere.
Because in one area it's endemic to the culture and celebrated in the culture and in one it is abhorred.
Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about Hillary Clinton's response to this in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
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Okay, so Hillary Clinton, I think, is a perfect example of somebody who has accepted the leftist view of sex and power.
and yet proclaims that she doesn't.
This is why you see people like me saying that Hollywood is full of hypocrisy.
By the way, this is not to let up on the hypocrisy of people who made light of Donald Trump's language with regard to this.
Was I surprised by Trump?
I was not surprised by Trump in the P-word grabbing video.
I was not surprised by that because I don't think Trump is conservative.
I think Trump is Hollywood.
I think Trump is New York and Hollywood, right?
Trump looks more at home in All About Eve than he does in The Bible Belt.
So his sort of ethics with regard to sex are obviously Hollywood ethics with regard to sex.
So I wasn't really surprised by that.
But people who excused it for Trump and then made excuse and then and then go after Weinstein or who made excuses for Weinstein for years and then went after Trump, they're all hypocrites.
Anyway, here's one of those hypocrites, Hillary Clinton, who is going after Trump while basically ignoring the fact that there is someone whose last name rhymes with Glinton, who she is married to, who engaged in precisely the same sorts of activities.
I did not know.
I mean, everyone knew rumors about him.
Not specific cases, but everyone knew that Harvey Weinstein, apparently, in his circle, was a little bit, you know, Well, all I can tell you is that I did not hear those things.
Look, we just elected a person who admitted sexual assault to the presidency.
So there's a lot of other issues that are swirling around these kinds of behaviors that need to be addressed.
And I think it's important that we stay focused and shine a bright spotlight and try to get people to understand how damaging this is.
And the women coming forward is the only way that that story will be told.
Okay, the women coming forward is the only way that story is going to be told.
Hmm.
Juanita Broderick, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky, all bubbleheads, all liars, according to Hillary Clinton.
It's so funny, the left is very upset if you say this about Hillary Clinton, but Hillary does not have any credibility to speak on this issue whatsoever.
She did participate in covering up her husband's peccadillos, and to pretend otherwise is ignorant.
And then, of course, she blames sexism endemic to society.
Okay, if Hillary Clinton really cared about this stuff, she would have outed her husband long ago.
But she is a perfect example of somebody who married to power and overlooked this sort of behavior in order to get away with it.
You wonder why the right was willing to quote-unquote overlook Trump?
One of the reasons the right was willing to overlook Trump is because he was running against Hillary Clinton, who was part of the problem as well.
I think sexism and misogyny are endemic in our society and I do try to take readers on a journey with me and obviously I use Bill's story and Barack's story to tell how galvanizing
They were because people immediately saw this arc of, you know, from, you know, poverty in Hope, Arkansas, you know, from a biracial family in Hawaii, how really impressive and exciting their stories were.
I'm a middle-class girl from the middle of the country, and so I always struggled with, like, okay, so what's my story?
And it suddenly dawned on me that I was the beneficiary of these radical changes in, you know, women's rights and opportunities that... Hillary Clinton is the anti-feminist when it comes to this.
Understand something about feminism, okay?
Originally, feminism... I think you can stop it there.
Originally, feminism was designed against things like the casting couch.
Feminism was designed against the madmen theory that women had to go to bed with their bosses in order to progress in the company.
That's what feminism was founded upon.
Hillary Clinton made excuses for her husband, married into power, and then used that power for her own benefit.
This is part of the leftist culture.
Again, you can't proclaim that Harvey Weinstein is an absolute piece of crap under all circumstances.
There are no reservations about that.
But you cannot proclaim that the culture that created Harvey Weinstein has nothing to do with the promulgation of many more people like Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood.
I mean, look at Twitter right now, and what you're going to see is a bunch of Hollywood stars who condemned Harvey Weinstein, and then five seconds later there's some woman on Twitter who says, I was at a Golden Globes party five seconds ago, and Ben Affleck was grabbing my ass.
Like, really, this happened on Twitter.
This is all happening on Twitter in real time.
Because this is part of the culture out here.
It is.
And as part of a broader left-wing culture, that is a problem.
There are lots of problems in right-wing culture, too.
And I'm happy to talk about those when those arise.
The problems of sexual harassment at Fox News, I should have talked more about it at the time.
But the reality is that what we are watching right now is much more endemic to the culture of Hollywood than it is at Fox News.
It wasn't like Fox News, they were releasing shows making jokes about sexual assault.
Or if they were, I missed it.
In any case, I want to talk about some moves that President Trump made while I was out of town.
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Okay, now it's time for me to bust a few myths.
So, over the last week, President Trump has taken a bunch of actions that are actually quite good, or don't do much.
And the left is going nuts over them.
So let's start with this thing that President Trump is somehow going to cause the collapse of Obamacare because he's so evil and so terrible.
So, Chris Murphy...
From Connecticut.
Ever someone who is moderate and well-reasoned in his stances loses his mind, his head explodes, actually on television like the end of Kingsman.
And he explains that Trump is putting a gun to the head of constituents by defunding some of the Obamacare exchanges.
He is literally setting the entire healthcare system on fire just because the president is upset that the United States Congress won't pass a repeal bill.
Okay, we can stop it there.
First of all, he is not literally setting the entire healthcare system on fire.
The healthcare system is abstract.
It would be very difficult for him to do so unless he headed on over to Health and Human Services and started a fire in a broom closet somewhere.
You can't literally set things on fire that are not physical commodities.
So, in any case, let's talk about what President Trump actually did on healthcare.
Hey, Avik Roy is sort of the go-to expert with regard to healthcare regulations and law.
It's pretty complex, but I will use Avik Roy's framework here because I think this is exactly right.
So here is what he says.
He says, "On Thursday, President Trump issued an executive order covering three areas: One, allowing small businesses to pool together to purchase health insurance; Two, restoring the ability of individuals to buy short-term plans exempt from some Obamacare rules; And three, examining ways to make employer-funded health savings accounts more flexible.
The left says that this is going to destroy the healthcare system.
And then he said that he was going to stop dispersing cost-sharing subsidies until Congress appropriates the funds for them.
Okay, the last one is the one that he's talking about, that no longer is the federal government just going to willy-nilly decide to fund Obamacare exchanges.
That is correct, because it is illegal.
When Obama did it, it was illegal.
Obama doing it was in violation of Obamacare law.
Obama decided he didn't care and did it anyway.
Trump threw it back to Congress.
If Congress wants to use the Obamacare subsidies as leverage to make changes to Obamacare, then they damn well should.
That would make a lot of sense.
Trump didn't do anything wrong there.
As far as these other changes, allowing small businesses to pool together to purchase health insurance The idea here is that supposedly this will exclude certain small businesses, that basically the way it works right now is that you're not allowed to discriminate under Obamacare based on previous health history, at least with regard to large businesses.
So small businesses will be forced to, small businesses will be forced to Um, be discriminated against.
Here's the way that Avik Roy puts it.
He basically says, the idea of association health plans has been around for a long time.
George W. Bush included them in his 2007 health reform proposal.
The idea is that individuals could get insurance from voluntary associations like the Sierra Club or a church group.
The Trump executive order claims to legalize association health plans, but actually it doesn't even do that.
It allows small businesses but not voluntary associations to pool together to buy insurance in bulk.
In fact, the order is even more modest than that.
Small businesses already have the ability to pool together.
Instead, the likely impact of this part of the executive order is minimal to zero.
So, basically, it has no impact.
Restoring the ability of individuals to buy short-term plans, again, that's good.
Examining ways to make employer-funded health savings accounts more flexible, that, too, is good.
But the left opposes all of these things because it wants to force people into health insurance through Obamacare.
Other things that Trump did that were good over the weekend or over the last week, he refused to recertify the Iran deal, but he did not withdraw from the Iran deal.
I think this is a mistake.
I think refusing to recertify the Iran deal is correct.
I think you should just withdraw from it.
So the idea was that he sort of split the baby.
There were three choices.
One was recertify the Iran deal.
Iran is in compliance with the Iran deal, because the Iran deal is specifically written so it's almost impossible for Iran not to be in compliance with the Iran deal.
That was why it was such a bad deal to begin with, which is why Trump should just get out of it.
Instead, Trump is saying, I'm not going to recertify because the deal is bad.
We're going to set some new conditions, and if Iran doesn't fulfill those conditions, then we'll impose sanctions.
Okay, better than nothing for sure.
It is splitting the baby a little bit, but Trump's statements on this were exactly correct.
Here is Trump talking about how Iran is a fanatical regime.
Today I am announcing our strategy, along with several major steps we are taking to confront the Iranian regime's hostile actions and to ensure that Iran never, and I mean never, acquires a nuclear weapon.
Our policy is based on a clear-eyed assessment Okay, we can stop it there.
This was good stuff from Trump.
This is excellent Trump.
Other excellent Trump, he withdrew from UNESCO.
UNESCO is one of the world's most garbage organizations.
That is the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
It has never been educational, scientific, or cultural.
It's basically been an Israel-bashing seminar.
In 2011, they declared that the Church of the Nativity, or 2012, they declared the Church of the Nativity was a World Heritage Site in danger.
Which is not true.
And then, they claimed that the Western Wall was not a Jewish site, which is insane.
They referred to the Temple Mount as the Al-Aqsa Mosque Plaza.
They called the Wailing Wall the Barak Plaza, and they called Israel the occupying power in Jerusalem.
The United States basically said, we're done here, and they withdrew from UNESCO.
It is my view that we should withdraw entirely from the United Nations, which is a stupid organization, but that would require a little bit more time for me to explain.
Okay, so we really don't have much time for things I like and things I hate, so I'll skip things I like today, and we'll do just one thing that I hate today, and that is David Brooks from the New York Times.
So David Brooks from the New York Times is the so-called conservative at the New York Times.
He's not conservative.
He once said that he liked Barack Obama.
He infamously said that he liked Barack Obama because he could tell by the crease in his pants that he was his kind of guy.
Which I don't make a habit of staring at creases in other dudes pants, it's just weird.
But in any case, that was his take.
Here is David Brooks from the New York Times explaining that the real reason that Trump has been bad on Puerto Rico is because the Puerto Ricans are brown.
There's been a lack of, there was total graciousness toward Texas, and graciousness toward Florida, but he's incapable of showing any compassion and graciousness toward people who are just trying to find drinking water in Puerto Rico.
And so the lesson is the lesson that we're all going to draw from that, that the people in Puerto Rico don't look like a lot of the people in Texas.
And I think that's probably a pretty fair judgment.
Okay, so, um, you know, no.
And here's the proof that no.
Here's a Puerto Rican delegate yesterday saying, uh, Trump gave us everything we asked for.
Again, you sort of have to disconnect Trump being stupid on Twitter from what Trump has actually done in Puerto Rico.
Again, the evidence is at best mixed on Puerto Rico, but I see very little evidence that Trump was willfully withholding aid from Puerto Rico because they look more brown than people in Texas.
Especially because, by the way, Texas has a heavy Hispanic population.
It's, I believe by percentage, the second heaviest Hispanic population in the nation after California, I believe.
In any case, here is this Puerto Rican delegate explaining.
I will tell you that everything the president said that he was going to send to Ireland, it's getting there.
The resources are there.
The help is there.
He instructed all his cabinet members to treat Puerto Rico as a state in terms of this hurricane.
Bottom line is there's plenty of reasons to criticize President Trump, and I am more than willing to do so when he does something wrong.
But the jump to conclusions in order to target people?
It's gotta stop, okay guys?
Evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence.
That holds true for Jane Koston, and that should also hold true for David Brooks over at the New York Times, as it should hold true for me when I make a claim.
We should all have the same, you know, basis.
Evidence for the claims we make.
Okay, we will be back here tomorrow, because we're not on vacation anymore.
So, fear not, we'll be back here tomorrow to organize all of the day's myriad events.
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