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Dec. 18, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:21
Is Trump Finally Winning? | Ep. 439
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Time Text
Republicans are finally on the verge of a breakthrough.
President Trump has a strategy to deal with Robert Mueller.
The Democrats are trying to defend Al Franken.
And I will have a full and complete breakdown of Star Wars, complete with spoilers.
But don't worry, I'll do that near the end of the show.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, yes, I have so many thoughts on the new Star Wars film, I cannot even begin to explain.
So many thoughts, indeed.
And I will get to all of them a little bit later in the program.
We will also talk about President Trump, who finally, it seems, has the Democrats on their heels.
It's the end of the year, and Democrats don't really seem to know quite what to do.
We'll talk about all that in just a second.
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Okay, so we begin today with the latest on the Mueller investigation.
So it now appears that Robert Mueller, the special investigator into Trump-Russia collusion, he's obtained tens of thousands of Trump transition emails.
Now you may ask, what exactly do the Trump transition emails have to do with collusion during the election cycle?
The answer, of course, is nothing.
But this is sort of the problem for the Mueller investigation, which seems to be falling apart pretty quickly.
All of the crimes they are now investigating have to do with secondary crimes, lying to the FBI, maybe transition stuff, but nothing to do with that central contention, right?
That Trump and the Russians worked together to rig the 2016 elections against Hillary Clinton.
This was the entire motivating factor behind the investigations in 2016.
It's been the entire reason Democrats have been so animated about it now.
So Special Counsel Mueller, Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.
The emails included 12 accounts, one of which contained about 7,000 emails.
The accounts include the team's political leadership and foreign policy team, according to the sources.
Apparently Mueller did this perfectly legally.
He went through the GSA, the General Services Administration.
They host the transition email system, and they have capacity to read all these emails.
The transition emails include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation processes, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, et cetera.
What does that have to do with collusion?
The answer is pretty much nothing.
And meanwhile, while Mueller is going after Trump over supposed collusion that we have no evidence exists, We now know that the Obama administration was colluding with Russia to help Iran.
So this is a story out of Politico, European version.
Pretty amazing story.
I reported this over at Daily Wire today.
There's clear evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Russian government to free an Islamic terrorist responsible for the deaths of Americans in order to appease Iran to pave the way for the Obama administration's Iran nuclear deal.
This is a report from Josh Meyer of Politico.
Then it reports that Ali Fayyad A Lebanese arms dealer and quote, suspected top Hezbollah operative, whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was captured by the Czechs in 2014.
Fayyad had been indicted in the US.
Now, you would expect the Obama administration to move for him to be extradited, correct?
Nothing of the sort.
The Obama administration did not push for extradition.
Instead, Fayyad ended up in Lebanon, where he's back at his terrorist work.
He's particularly active in supplying weapons to the barbarous Syrian regime.
That's not the only thing the Obama administration did on behalf of Lebanese terrorists.
According to the Politico, administration officials also blocked or undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives.
And when Project Cassandra agents and other investigators sought repeatedly to investigate and prosecute Abdullah Safiyyedine, Hezbollah's longtime envoy to Iran, whom they considered the lynchpin of Hezbollah's criminal network, the Justice Department refused.
In other words, the Obama administration was working with the Russian government to make sure that there was no crackdown on Hezbollah because they were afraid it would take off the Russians.
We also know President Obama was offering flexibility to the Russians in the middle of the 2012 election, saying that he had flexibility after the election cycle if Putin would just back off all of his concerns about missile defense for the moment.
All of which is to say, there's a lot more evidence of actual Russian collusion among the Obama administration members than there is among the Trump administration members at this point, at least with regard to elections and even with regard to policy.
Because it turns out that even what Mike Flynn was trying to do, i.e.
get Russia to not push a resolution at the UN condemning Israel, didn't work.
So the actual evidence of collusion is basically nil, which means that Trump has the upper hand now in the investigation.
Apparently Trump is pretty sanguine about it.
There's a report out today that Trump expects Mueller to basically clear Trump himself in the very near future.
And that's why Trump said over the weekend, he was asked, are you going to fire Mueller?
And here was his answer.
The president last night quashed Capitol Hill rumors that he was poised to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.
No, I'm not.
No.
What else?
What are you surprised?
Okay, so he's obviously angry at the press for saying that he's going to fire Mueller as well he should be.
And I think that he's right when he says, you know, are you surprised?
Like guys, I know you want me to do it.
I'm not going to do it.
Why should he do it?
Mueller's investigation has already been compromised by the people who are inside of it.
It's already been shown to be at least in part political, or at least there are those suspicions.
There's not evidence that he did anything, so why would he fire Mueller?
Why not just wait it out?
That is the question I asked on Friday.
Why not just wait this out?
And it appears the president has come to the same conclusion, especially because it appears the president is now winning on a series of subjects.
Tax cuts are supposed to be voted on tomorrow in the House and the Senate, so we will have a tax reform bill before Christmas.
That tax reform bill does lower taxes for virtually everyone in the United States, including corporations.
You may have quibbles with the way that it's structured.
I have quibbles with it, too.
It is a good bill.
It also gets rid of the individual mandate as it currently stands.
That means you will not be mandated to buy your crappy Obamacare program anymore.
The left says, well, that's terrible because now people are going to lose their health insurance.
Well, the people losing their health insurance are people who don't want to buy their health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
So this is a big win for Trump if this happens.
It's sort of partial repeal of Obamacare included in the tax reform.
And Trump obviously is very excited.
There's a report out today that the last quarter's growth has been revised upwards to almost 4% GDP growth, which is an amazing level of growth.
We haven't had that in years.
Here is President Trump talking about that yesterday.
The economy now has hit 3%.
Nobody thought it would be anywhere close.
I think we can go to 4%, 5%, and maybe even 6% ultimately.
Each percentage point is $2.5 trillion.
We are back.
We're really going to start to rock.
We need this as our final push, and you're going to see some numbers that are great.
But most importantly, you're going to see great job numbers.
Jobs are going to come pouring back.
Into this country, which we need very much.
OK, so there have been good quarters before.
There was a good quarter in Q3 of 2014, for example.
We grew at something like 5%.
But if Trump has this sustained level of growth, he's going to do just fine, or at least he's going to be in better shape.
And he knows it.
He knows it.
And that's why you're seeing all the Republicans come out now and say, well, let the investigation go forward.
Who cares?
Just let the investigation do what the investigation is going to do.
No biggie.
GOP Senator Lankford, I believe he's from Oklahoma, he comes forward and he says, yeah, there's no reason to end this investigation at this point.
Yeah, it's very serious to be able to have someone inside.
What they've got to determine is, was he directing the investigation one way or the other while he was on the investigation?
Is that something they can go back and repair and look and see if there's any kind of bias that's in it?
Obviously, I don't think it taints the entire process, but it certainly taints that season of it, and it's something you should look at with any political investigation that he was on at the time.
And the good news for President Trump is that even if the investigation goes badly for him at this point, it's been so politicized that there's going to be a bevy of people who come out and say this thing is just too political.
Jeanine Pirro, of course, will lead the way on Fox News.
She says that the FBI agents involved should be jailed.
Now, this is over the top, but it's also the angle a lot of people are going to take no matter how this investigation goes.
It all started when Cardinal Comey destroyed our FBI with political hacks to set events in motion to destroy the Republic because they didn't like the man we chose to be our president.
Well, it's time to take them out in cuffs.
Okay, so this is obviously over the top from Jeanine Pirro, but there will be a lot of people who do sort of say this, right?
Who move in this direction, and Trump knows it.
So Trump has the upper hand now.
He has the upper hand on policy.
It's the end of the year, and it appears he's actually going to get some things done.
He knows the investigation doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, and so the Democrats are panicked.
In a second, I'm going to talk about The insane media bias being exhibited in pursuit of President Trump.
And it really is insane, and how they're exploding all over themselves.
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Okay, so the media are beginning to pick up on the fact that President Trump actually is in not terrible shape going into 2018.
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Okay, so the media are beginning to pick up on the fact that President Trump actually is in not terrible shape going into 2018.
Now, the Congress could be in terrible shape going into 2018.
And Trump could be in good shape, right?
And this is sort of the problem that you're seeing for President Trump.
It was true for President Obama also.
So Trump tweeted out this morning.
That you shouldn't take congressional losses as a referendum on him, right?
Here's what he said.
Remember, Republicans are 5-0 in congressional races this year.
Well, I mean, that doesn't count Senate races.
The media refuses to mention this.
I said Gillespie and Moore would lose for very different reasons and they did.
I also predicted I would win.
I don't know why I is in scare quotes there again.
The president needs a remedial course on scare quotes.
Republicans will do well in 2018.
Very well.
And so, I mean, number one, I guess this is a prediction that we can now take to the bank because he's good at predicting things as the president.
But this idea that Congress is going to go well because Trump is going well is not really accurate.
That said, Trump's accomplishments this year are greater than they appeared like they were going to be, say, three months ago.
Not only do we have Gorsuch, we have 12 appellate court nominees who have been confirmed.
We have a tax bill that looks like it's going to go through, repeal of the individual mandate on foreign policy, the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the kickback against the Iran nuclear deal.
The president is moving.
I mean, there's no question that Trump and Congress are moving.
They're moving slower than I would like.
Their first real major legislative accomplishment will be this tax reform, but it is a major accomplishment for him, and he needs it badly.
Right now, the poll on the tax bills are not great.
There's a new Monmouth poll out today showing 26% approve, 47% disapprove.
50% think their own taxes will go up versus 14% who say down.
You know why that is?
That's because of the media.
And this is why when President Trump rips the media, I think that it would be wonderful if the president would stick to the facts.
Because there are so many reasons to dislike how the media cover these things.
The media suggesting that people's taxes are going to go up is insane.
Factually speaking, the vast majority of human beings in the United States would get a tax cut.
The media keeps saying this is skewed toward the wealthy.
Well, what do you expect?
Non-wealthy people don't pay taxes in the United States.
The fact is, middle class, upper class people, those are the people who pay taxes.
And by and large, it's upper class people who pay taxes.
People who don't make a lot of money do not pay income tax in the United States.
So you think they're going to get a major tax break?
But all this misinformation does have an impact.
But what's amazing about this is the media do not understand why their credibility is going down.
Now, the media have basically expended their credibility to get Trump.
This is the trade they've been willing to make.
They're going to go out on a limb and say untrue things, plainly untrue things, in an effort to stop President Trump.
And then they're surprised when no one takes them seriously.
And they're angry that Fox continues to dominate the ratings.
And they continue to call Fox a propaganda network.
Brian Stelter on CNN yesterday, for example, he says, you know, Fox, they talk like propagandists over at Fox.
It's not like a propaganda network.
Kurt, what is going on here?
Well, I think you're seeing exactly that.
Fox News has basically become de facto state-run propaganda.
It's state-controlled, state-run television that is beginning to be excused directly from the White House.
I don't know how anyone can look at what's going on right now and not reach that determination.
Trump is creating his own reality.
But when you say that, it's not as if the White House is literally running Fox.
Or are you saying they are?
Well, if you look at the coverage, it sure seems like they are.
They have gone so far extreme.
I remember the days, Brian, when what you saw on pages like Breitbart were considered the fringe.
It was considered so far beyond the mainstream, not even Fox News would touch what was on those pages.
Now, Fox is going almost further than Breitbart.
And you have right now, at this second, there's an ad running in different markets with Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren advocating and attacking the Miller investigation.
Okay, so, you know, I like Kurt, but when Kurt does this and CNN humors it, this is a pot kettle situation, okay?
CNN suggesting that other networks are involved in propaganda.
Let me just show you a panel that was talking about President Trump and misogyny, okay?
If this does not look like propaganda to you, then I don't know what would.
Do you agree with Mike that this has helped Kirsten Gillibrand?
I do.
The one piece I disagree with is that President Trump, if this was a one-off, that would be one thing.
But this is a guy who was misogyny in his DNA, who ran as a misogynist.
I'm sure that wasn't on his bumper sticker, but that was part of who he was and who he ran as.
So this is completely aligned with that.
That's why people heard what they heard from the tweet.
Jen Psaki, CNN political commentator, also the former State Department spokesperson for Barack Obama, right?
But they're not a propaganda network, right?
It's not propaganda when Fareed Zakaria over at CNN says that the Republican tax plan is ushering in a bleak future, right?
The universe is going to end because of Republican tax plans.
The medium and long-term effects of the plan are clear.
A massive drop in public investment, which will come on the heels of decades of declining spending as a percentage of GDP on infrastructure, scientific research, skills training and core government agencies.
The United States cannot coast on past investments forever.
And with this legislation, we are ushering in a bleak future.
Really?
We're ushering in a bleak future because I get to keep more of my own money?
And I love this idea that we're going to stop spending.
Where are the spending cuts?
I'm missing the spending cuts.
There are no spending cuts.
This is one of the problems with the bill.
I would prefer there be spending cuts.
This idea that, oh, well, we definitely need more money for infrastructure.
We definitely need more money for scientific research.
That's really where the cuts are happening here.
What is he talking about?
If there are cuts, those cuts are going to come in the form of Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security.
That's where the real spending is occurring.
It's not occurring.
In the off-brand spending categories.
In the big spending in the United States, 66% of the federal budget, two-thirds of the federal budget, is consumed by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
That's where restructuring needs to take place.
But you wonder why the media is losing credibility at the same time they're attacking the tax plan as the end of the world?
Americans have a bad opinion of this because the media still has power.
Now, this is one area where I think the right is wrong.
The right has been saying for years, well, we now have the upper hand.
Nobody listens to the media anymore.
People have stopped listening to the media on their character descriptions.
When the media say that Trump is a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, all this stuff, The American people largely just ignore because they'll make their own judgment on that.
When it comes to the material in bills, the American people don't have time to read a 1,000-page tax bill, and they tend to take the talking points that they see on the TV.
So if you just watch Fareed Zachariah, what you would assume is that the Republicans just cut spending by an enormous percentage, as opposed to cutting taxes by an enormous percentage.
Because nowhere in there does Fareed Zachariah talk about what actually happens to your taxes.
A tax plan is about tax reduction.
A spending plan would be about spending reduction.
There's nothing about spending in the tax plan.
This just demonstrates, again, the left wants to say Fox is a propaganda outlet.
Listen, Fox has its slant, but the media have their own slant, and President Trump is not wrong to knock the media's slant on all of this.
The media have been imploding and destroying their own credibility on this stuff for quite a while, so it's not a tremendous shock.
And this sets up a serious problem for Democrats.
A really serious problem for Democrats.
Not only will he survive, it appears, it appears the Mueller investigation is not really going to go anywhere.
If that happens, you're going to watch the media implode.
And this sets up a serious problem for Democrats, a really serious problem for Democrats.
It sets up a problem that the Democrats have set up outsized expectations for their own party.
The entire Democratic base believes that Trump is on the verge of falling over.
If you talk to a Democrat, it sounds like Trump is going to be impeached tomorrow, or Trump is going to resign tomorrow, or Trump is going to die tomorrow.
This is how Democrats talk.
Keith Olbermann said this when he resigned.
Well, my job here is done, because it turns out...
President Trump is going to leave.
They're talking this nonsense for a while, and they're making it sound as though they're on the verge of impeaching President Trump, but the truth is, they have no intention of doing any of those things.
They're not going to impeach President Trump, because it would not be politically beneficial for them to impeach President Trump.
If they were to move against President Trump, Trump would actually gain in the polls, the same way that Bill Clinton gained in the polls in 1998 when the Republicans moved for impeachment.
If they were to go after Trump unfairly, there would be a rally around the Trump effect.
It's the opposite of what they want.
And so the Democrats are now stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They have been promising that Trump's agenda is going to fail.
It's not.
They have been promising that President Trump is going to leave office, an ignominious disgrace.
Not that he's not going to be re-elected, but that he's going to have to resign due to financial impropriety, corruption, collusion with the Russians.
That's not going to happen either.
And the Democrats are beginning to sense that they are in serious trouble here.
The Democrats are beginning to sense that if they push this thing too hard, there could be a real problem for them.
So Doug Jones, the recently elected senator from Alabama, Democrat, he was asked, should President Trump be—should he resign over sexual harassment allegations?
And Doug Jones knows there's going to be blowback to him and other Democrats if they push this way.
So here's Jake Tapper rightly pressing him on it, and Doug Jones basically saying, no, we're going to leave Trump in place.
Where I am on that right now is that those allegations were made before the election.
And so people had an opportunity to judge before that election.
I think we need to move on and not get distracted by those issues.
Let's get on with the real issues that are facing people of this country right now.
And I don't think that the president ought to resign at this point.
We'll see how things go.
But certainly those allegations are not new.
And he was elected with those allegations at front and center.
And remember, Nancy Pelosi came out and said she was not going to support impeachment right now.
Major Democrats have been saying they're not going to support impeachment.
In fact, major Democrats sound like they want to try and work with Trump because they know that Trump may not be going anywhere, okay?
The incumbent always has a major advantage going into a presidential election.
So Democrats have sold their base a bill of goods, and that is going to come home to them in a serious way.
It could, seriously, in 2020.
I'll explain why in just a second.
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Okay, so, here's the problem for the Democrats.
They've made all of these big promises to their base.
Trump is gonna go.
We've got him on the ropes.
He's on the verge of falling apart.
What happens if they don't deliver?
What happens if they don't deliver?
What happens if they start moving along the lines of Tim Ryan?
Tim Ryan is a Democratic representative from Ohio who says that he may want to work with President Trump now.
What happens if the Democrats decide to be practical instead of feeding the pie-in-the-sky frenzy that the Bernie bros want, or the Hillary Heritans are interested in?
Here's Tim Ryan explaining that he'd like to work with the President.
And what I'm saying is that this isn't going to do it.
President Bush said, cut taxes on the wealthiest.
It's going to lead to growth.
Wages are going to go up.
That, in 2001, 2, and 3, that was the decade with the least amount of growth we've had since the Great Depression.
And what I'm saying is, we need to take down dilapidated homes.
We need that trillion dollar infrastructure bill that the president promised.
How in God's name are we going to pay for that if we're borrowing $2 trillion from China to do the tax cuts?
OK, what if Trump comes forward early next year with his giant infrastructure plan?
What if he calls their bluff?
What if he says, listen, I spent time on the taxes.
OK, the tax bill, it's done.
Now, you wanted your infrastructure bill.
I'm going to give it to you.
What do Democrats do?
Do they embrace him?
Do they run away from him?
Or do they do what Bernie Sanders does?
Bernie Sanders is going to be the only intellectually coherent Democrat.
He says he's going to vote against the tax cuts.
And then he says he'll vote for the infrastructure bill with the knowledge that if Democrats retake Congress, they'll have to raise taxes.
Is that a winning plan?
Trump may have the Democrats in a bit of a trap here because if he cuts taxes and people see a little bit more money in their mailbox and it turns out their taxes didn't go up, they went down.
My taxes, I'm one of the few people in America whose taxes will go up in all likelihood thanks to the Trump bill.
But most people will have a tax reduction.
If you have that tax reduction, and then Trump comes along and says, I want the infrastructure bill, and Democrats vote with him on infrastructure, that puts them in the position of now having to argue that they want to raise your taxes again.
Is that a winning political argument?
Does this sound like a winning political argument from Bernie Sanders?
But if you Democrats take control, are corporate taxes going up?
I think we're going to take a very hard look at this entire tax bill and make it a tax bill that works for the middle class and working families, not for the top 1% and large multinational corporations.
But there's no question that in order to achieve all of the things you want, taxes are going to have to go up on corporations.
If they're down to 21 as a result of this legislation, you can't find the money anymore.
Absolutely, yes.
In my view, absolutely.
Okay, so amazing, right?
Trump may have them boxed in because he's actually decreased the tax revenue and increased the spending, forcing Democrats to embrace the increased spending and also to embrace an increase in taxes.
Now, here's the problem for Democrats.
If they're trapped this way, and if they don't move against Trump, if they don't try to impeach the president, what do they do next?
Where do they go?
You could easily see a Democrat in 2020 running on a primary ballot.
This is Ben Domenech's point at The Federalist.
I think it's a good one.
You could easily see Democrats going so crazy that Trump is still in office in 2020 that they decide to nominate a Dennis Kucinich type.
Some actual mutt case.
They decide to nominate somebody so crazy, far to the left, That the guy is pledging the moon.
And then that person goes crazy during the election cycle.
And they lose to Trump again.
Right?
You can see Trump winning re-election on the back of this.
Now, listen.
None of this is to say that Trump has the upper hand in 2018.
Okay?
Because the statistics just don't back that up.
But if Democrats think that Trump is just going to fade into the woodwork, they've got another thing coming.
Especially because the Democrats can't even get their own house in order.
There's a story out today that four Democratic senators now want to keep Al Franken.
Remember two weeks ago when the Democrats were saying that they wanted the moral high ground on sexual harassment and sexual abuse?
That was predicated on the notion that Roy Moore was going to win that Senate seat in Alabama.
He did not win that Senate seat in Alabama.
And so now the Democrats are left, basically, with their pants around their feet.
Because what do they do?
They can have the moral high ground, but they're going to have to oust their guy.
And the Republicans don't have the moral low ground anymore because they didn't embrace Moore.
So what exactly did the Democrats do?
So now the Democrats are trying to walk it back.
The Democrats don't want to be in a position of calling on Trump to resign, number one.
And number two, the Democrats don't actually want to lose half their senators because of sexual harassment allegations when the Republicans don't have to do the same thing.
Remember, Roy Moore lost, so it doesn't look like the Republicans support sexual abuse and harassment.
Okay, so that's actually a political win in some ways for the Republicans.
So now there are four separate Democratic senators who are saying they want Al Franken to stay, because they're afraid of the precedent that this is going to set.
Showing once again that, as I said two weeks ago, this is not about seizing the moral high ground, it was about seizing the political high ground.
The Democrats now think they don't have the political high ground, so they want Franken reinstated.
Joe Manchin of West Virginia, he said, quote, Pat Leahy, the nutcase Democrat from Vermont, the nutcase Democrat from Vermont, He had called for Franken to leave.
Apparently he secretly told Franken he regrets doing so.
Two other senators who sided against Franken have apparently told Politico they'd like to see Franken stay.
So now the Democrats are trying to rehabilitate this guy who was photographed nearly grabbing a woman's boobs and has been apparently alleged multiple times to have grabbed women by the butt.
Now they're trying to rehabilitate that guy.
So the Democrats are a mess there.
Unbelievably enough, Chris Matthews has now been caught up in the sexual harassment scandal.
There are allegations that Chris Matthews, or as they say, paid a settlement to a former employee.
Apparently what happened is that according to Daily Caller, Chris Matthews had got up in the morning, come out of the show, went in the office, and said a bunch of sexist things to women.
Unbelievable!
This is what they said over on NBC.
on NBC.
According to NBC News, NBC paid severance to a female staffer in 1999 who accused Chris Matthews of sexual harassment.
Matthews was making inappropriate jokes and comments to this female staffer in front of other people, and NBC News reported that a confidentiality agreement could not reveal the amount given to the staffer, but the Daily Caller reported that it was $40,000.
An MSNBC spokesperson told NBC News that during that time, when the matter was brought up, Matthews also received a formal reprimand for what he did.
Alrighty, so now Chris Matthews is in trouble, and now it turns out that Linda Sarsour, shock of shock, is in trouble.
There's a story out today.
Again, the Democrats set this standard because they wanted the moral high ground on, they wanted the political high ground on sexual harassment, and now they're going to have to get rid of it because all of their own people are getting caught in the net.
According to the New York Post, controversial Muslim activist and Women's March organizer Linda Sarsour bullied an underling to cover up sex abuse allegations in her Brooklyn office.
Asmi Falfabab told the Daily Caller that a man repeatedly rubbed his crotch on her while she worked for the association under Sarsour in 2009.
But when Falfabab reported the abuse, Sarsour, a self-proclaimed feminist and co-founder of the Women's March organization, fat-shamed the woman and threatened to blacklist her from political jobs.
The woman told the website, quote, she oversaw an environment unsafe and abusive to women.
Women who put Sarsour on a pedestal for women's rights and empowerment deserve to know how she really treats us.
Apparently, the Daily Caller spoke with a bunch of other people about this and they confirmed it.
So it appears that women's march organizer and feminist icon Linda Sarsour was involved in all of this.
So the Democrats are now going to have to give up the moral high ground to regain the political high ground and the irony is just too rich.
It'll be hilarious if Al Franken is the most well-known sexual abuser in the Senate after Roy Moore loses his Alabama Senate race and the Democrats end up with the egg on their face for having to re-embrace a guy who they threw overboard five seconds ago.
Well, in just a second, I want to talk about things I like and things I hate.
But, you know, I want to actually reverse that today.
So the way that I'm going to do things today, because I have such a long take on Star Wars, is I want to start with our discussion of the Federalist Papers.
So typically, we do the Federalist Papers at the end of the show, but now we're going to do the Federalist Papers a little bit earlier.
So we've been doing a Federalist Paper every week, and we are now up to Federalist Number 8.
So Federalist Number 8 is written by Alexander Hamilton.
And Alexander Hamilton in this Federalist paper discusses at length how American wars would be more bloody than European wars.
This is his excuse for saying that America needs to be one country as opposed to many.
So here is what Alexander Hamilton says.
In this country, the scene would be altogether reversed.
He says that we'd be more bloody than European wars, because in Europe, you have a bunch of small standing armies that basically fight one another, but they don't threaten civil liberties.
He says war in America would be a lot more common.
He says in this country, the scene would be altogether reversed.
The jealousy of military establishments would postpone them as long as possible.
In other words, he says that if there were ever to be wars inside the United States, they would be supremely bloody.
Of course, Alexander Hamilton ended up being right.
difficulty overrun their less populous neighbors.
Conquest would be as easy to be made as difficult to be retained.
War, therefore, would be desultory and predatory.
Plunder and devastation ever marched in the train of irregulars.
The calamities of individual would make the principal figure in the events which would characterize our military exploits.
In other words, he says that if there were ever to be wars inside the United States, they would be supremely bloody.
Of course, Alexander Hamilton ended up being right.
The bloodiest war in American history is still the Civil War.
He said also that risk of invasion, the possibility that your state's going to be invaded by a neighboring state would make people less free because we'd create standing armies.
Now, the founders were really skeptical of standing armies.
The founders were not happy with the idea of a professional army that was a huge percentage of the population.
They understood that there might be a need for a small professional army, but the idea of a standing army that was going to basically be quartering itself in people's homes, or there's a big draft, this is not something they were in love with.
Alexander Hamilton says the risk of invasion would make people less free.
He said, quote, quote,
He says frequency of invasion will make people less likely to protest lack of liberty.
He says there's a wide difference between military establishments in a country seldom exposed by its situation to internal invasions and in one in which it is often subject to them and always apprehensive of them.
So this is Alexander Hamilton's excuse for why we need one country, not many.
Constant war or the threat of constant war would make it very difficult for the United States to survive as a free country.
So that's basically Alexander Hamilton's argument there.
Okay, so I want to break here on Facebook and YouTube.
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Is that coming out this week, Austin?
Yeah, so this week we have a Christmas video that you are not going to want to miss.
I wish I could miss it, unfortunately.
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All righty.
So time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
I wanted to leave a lot of time for things I like and things I hate because I have many a thought on Star Wars.
And so I'm again going to reverse this.
So instead of doing the things I like first and then the things that I hate, I'm gonna do things I hate first and then the things that I like because I...
have a sort of like hate thing about star wars but i want to do that last because if people don't want it spoiled if you're gonna go see it this weekend i want you to have the ability to tune out right before i do my giant star wars review okay so i'm not going to spoil it for you all of our producers have seen it so i'm not spoiling it for them they've all seen it so i'm not spoiling it for all those people but i'm going to say all the i'll do the entire show and then i'll get to my star wars review and for people who want to stick around for that um then you know you won't be Okay, so, first, the thing that I hate.
So, there's this insane story that has now come out about an entire transgender family.
It's a local news station in Arizona, they've run a glowing piece on a family that is in transition.
As in, the whole family.
So you've got Daniel Herret, the father of the family, a 41-year-old biological female who identifies as a man.
And then, there's Daniel's daughter, Mason, an 11-year-old biological female who now identifies as a boy.
And his son, Josh, a 13-year-old biological male, who identifies as a girl.
Harriet's fiancé is also transgender.
Shirley Austin is a biological male, described as tall and blonde and smiley, who claims to be a woman.
So in this picture you can see the blonde woman is a man, the black-haired man is a woman, the boy wearing the black shirt is a girl, and the girl wearing the white shirt is a boy.
This is the case that they are now making.
Okay, so I have my doubts.
Let me just suggest.
I have my doubts that all of this is entirely genetic.
Okay, there's this argument that's been made that everyone who is transgender, there must be some genetic factor that turns everyone transgender.
The idea that everyone in this family is transgender and there's no environmental impact, that a parent deciding that sex is arbitrary and can be changed that has no impact on kids, it's just insane to me.
In the same way that the suggestion That sexual orientation is completely genetic.
I'll admit that I think part of it is genetic, but the idea that all of sexual orientation is completely genetic, I find completely unconvincing, particularly because identical twins are not 100% of the time either gay or straight.
It's only about 50% of identical twins who are both gay or both, where both twins are gay.
Meaning that very often, identical twins who are biologically identical, one twin is gay and one twin is straight.
Which means there is an environmental component to this.
The point here is that if you have people who are preaching to their children that sex is completely malleable, and that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, this might be confusing to children.
And it might be damaging to children.
Because making a child gender dysphoric, heightening the chances your child is going to suffer from gender identity disorder, does not make their life easier, it makes it significantly worse and harder.
The reality is that maybe these kids are gay, right?
Sixteen to ninety percent of all kids who identify as transgender grow out of it, and most of them identify as gay or lesbian in the future.
But the idea that this entire family is just genetically gay, I mean, or rather just genetically transgender, I find very hard to credit.
If that were the case, transgenderism, I assume, would be a much wider phenomenon, and it is not, statistically speaking.
Josh says he was six or seven when he knew it was a girl.
I do wonder at what point Josh found out that his mother was in fact his father.
Daniel says that she knew she was trans, quote, Last year, Joshua wanted to join the Girl Scouts despite being raised a boy.
That's when Daniel was introduced to a word he'd never heard before, transgender.
When I finally looked it up, I realized, oh my gosh, they're trans and I know it's true because I am too and it's been my whole life.
Amazing how it never occurred to you until it turns out that other people in your family did that.
Confusing children is cruel.
Confusing children is evil.
Pretending that sex is completely malleable is evil.
And to subject children to this sort of activity is risky at best and harmful at worst.
Okay, so, time for some things that I like.
So, here it is, folks, your spoiler warning.
Okay, we've done your spoiler warning, you have been warned, and there's nothing I can do about it now.
If you've decided to go this far, you're gonna go with us the rest of the way.
Here's the preface.
Here's a little bit of the preview for Star Wars The Last Jedi.
And then I have many a thought.
Many a thought indeed.
When I found you, I saw raw, untamed power.
And beyond that, something truly special.
Something inside me has always been there.
Okay.
OK, so when we last left off our saga, just to recap, we left off The Force Awakens.
So you can stop the preview there.
When we left The Force Awakens, Rey had randomly been amazing at everything.
She was the ultimate Mary Sue in science fiction literature.
She literally came out of nowhere and was incredible with a lightsaber, such that Kylo Ren, who was supposed to be a guy trained in his youth, about the force, trained in using a lightsaber, gets defeated by her in a lightsaber battle the first time she's literally ever picked up a lightsaber, which is stupid.
Okay, and then they defeated the Starkiller base, which was the new Death Star, because every other movie we have to have a new Death Star, because no one ever has a practical new idea in the Star Wars universe, apparently.
Okay, and so we start off this movie, and basically, it's as though the Force Awakens never happened, essentially.
The First Order is still extraordinarily powerful, right?
This is the new Empire.
They're still extraordinarily powerful.
It didn't matter to them at all that their Death Star got blown up.
Nothing matters.
And the Rebel Alliance is on the run, so it's like Return of the Jedi, and it's like the entire Star Wars series never happened, right?
The Empire was never defeated.
We're basically starting from the exact same point we started in Episode 4, where the Empire is in control, and literally, it is the beginning of Star Wars Episode 4, right?
I mean, the Empire ship, the First Order ship, is chasing this transport vessel.
It's literally the beginning of Episode 4.
Okay, so, I'm gonna go through some of my minor problems with this, and then I will go through some of my major problems.
So, I'll go through my bad things about this movie, and then my good things about this movie.
Again, the first bad thing is The Force Awakens apparently never happened.
Now, I'd be fine with that.
I didn't like The Force Awakens.
I thought that it was a cheesy recasting.
My biggest problem with the entire series is they can't decide in Star Wars land whether they want it to benefit from nostalgia, whether they want to make it a nostalgia-centric series, or they want to launch something new.
And so they decided to do both.
And what they ended up doing in the process was killing all of the old things in preparation for the new.
And that's nasty to my childhood, okay?
I come for the nostalgia.
Because I thought that the first, you know, the new episodes that George Lucas made were terrible.
The stuff I like is episode 4, 5, 6, right?
The stuff that everybody likes is New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi.
Couldn't care less about Phantom Menace or Revenge of the Sith or any of that crap.
4, 5, and 6 are where it's at.
I grew up with Han Solo.
I grew up with Luke Skywalker.
I grew up with Princess Leia.
In fact, my sister's middle name, one of my sister's middle names is Leia because I was such a big Star Wars fan because my parents asked me what I thought her middle name should be and I picked Leia because I was a big Star Wars fan.
Okay, so I am a huge Star Wars nut.
In the last movie, they killed off Han Solo for no reason.
They turn Han Solo, who is one of the coolest, most roguish figures who becomes honorable in film lore, they turn him into a loser single dad who can't hold his crap together and gets killed by his whiny brat son for no reason at all.
I remember leaving the theater from The Force Awakens and thinking, oh, that wasn't so bad.
And then the more I thought about it, the more it made me want to tear my own teeth out.
So if The Force Awakens had never really happened, I'd be a much happier camper.
Also Han would be alive, which would be a lot better.
Okay, so it starts with that.
Then, the Force Awakens, again, ends with the idea that the First Order might finally be on the run a little bit.
They are not at all.
So, okay, number two.
These are minor problems, but there are some, like, basic kind of whole plot holes.
It starts off with these bombers, right?
These bombers that bomb a dreadnought.
And the bombers, apparently, gravity applies in space, which is weird.
Like, they actually just drop bombs onto the dreadnought in space.
So unless there's an actual gravitational field, which I assume would be pulling the bombers toward the dreadnought, which they're not, I don't understand how the bombs fall down onto the dreadnought.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
That is one problem.
That problem is also accompanied by another problem that is a logistical one near the end of the film.
One of the good people, Laura Dern, in a bizarre turn, decides that she is going to run a transport vessel through a Star Destroyer using light speed.
It's a cool image.
Why has no one ever thought of this in the history of Star Wars?
Especially because if you recall in Return of the Jedi, there is an actual scene where a Star Destroyer goes down because someone does a kamikaze run, right, on the Star Destroyer.
Remember this?
In Return of the Jedi?
One of the ships kind of flies out of control, boom, goes right through the control tower.
And down goes the entire Star Destroyer.
Why has no one ever thought to use light speed as a weapon?
You could just get rid of the entire first scene.
Or, if they knew that light speed was usable as a weapon, why would they sacrifice a couple of medical ships, right?
There's a point earlier in the film where a couple of ships basically run out of gas and they're blown apart by the First Order.
If they know they have this tactic available, why not just turn one of those ships around and run at light speed right through the Star Destroyer?
Like, this is the ultimate weapon in the universe.
You could take down the Death Star this way, but apparently this has never occurred to anyone until Laura Dern and her purple hair.
Okay, another problem.
Snoke.
Okay, so they make Snoke out to be the big baddie in The Force Awakens.
And they make it, he's the big baddie, he's the scary guy, he's the new emperor.
And he's so powerful in the force that he can turn Kylo Ren from afar, right?
He never even meets Kylo Ren and he turns Kylo Ren away from Luke.
That's how powerful he is.
And this film, they show that he's super powerful because Rey is super powerful in the force and he's like throwing her around like nothing, right?
He just stops her.
From doing anything.
Right?
He's super duper powerful.
You never find out who he is.
You never find out what motivates him.
You never find out where he came from.
And he gets killed like that, right?
He gets killed like a, literally a hot knife going through butter.
He literally gets killed with a little trick by Kylo Ren that is so cheesy and silly that it makes very little sense.
It makes sense in Return of the Jedi, right?
They have an exact Return of the Jedi scene where you have the good guy and the bad guy, and they're both in front of the Emperor.
Now, in Return of the Jedi, it makes sense.
The Emperor says to Luke, take up your lightsaber, strike me down, you'll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Luke does it, and Darth Vader stops him, right?
That's cool, and it's dramatic.
Here, Kylo Ren basically just activates it with his mind.
Somebody quipped, if only they had lightsaber trigger control, this never would have happened.
If only the NRA had not stumped for no gun locks on the lightsabers, then Snoke would still be alive.
But the big problem is, of course, you can't build up a big baddie like that and then not tell us who he is or why he's there.
Fourth problem.
Kylo Ren, who is now the only interesting character left in the Star Wars universe, because they've killed everyone.
It is not intimidating.
This is not a problem with this film.
This is a problem with The Force Awakens.
In The Force Awakens, remember, it takes Darth Vader three films, three, to lose a battle or to be convertible to the light side.
It takes him three films.
The first thing you see of Darth Vader is him literally blowing open a door and strangling somebody, picking him up off the ground and strangling him.
Then he dispatches Luke, the most powerful Jedi in history.
He dispatches Luke by chopping off his hand and beating the crap out of him in Empire Strikes Back.
Right, and he's basically beating Luke in Return of the Jedi until Luke basically taps into the dark side of the Force.
So it takes him three movies to get there.
Kylo Ren in the first five minutes of The Force Awakens, we find out, is conflicted, and then it turns out he can be bested by Rey, the ultimate Mary Sue, which means he's not scary.
If you're gonna have someone scary heading up the First Order, that person can't be defeatable by a girl who just picked up a lightsaber for the first time ever.
Now if you want to say the girl trained in it, fine, but she didn't train in it.
She just picked it up and she's fantastic at it.
Why exactly at this point in the film, at this point in the series, why should the Rebel Alliance be worried?
Like, I don't know where they go for Episode IX.
Why should they be worried?
Rey is significantly more powerful than Kylo.
We know this.
We've seen it.
So where's the competition now?
No clue.
And General Hux is not exactly terrifying.
Like, General Hux is not the Emperor.
Okay, another problem.
Rey's backstory is terrible.
Now, I understand what they were trying to do.
They were trying to make up for the fact that this movie... I feel bad for Rian Johnson, the director and the writer, because I feel like he was trying to make up for flaws in the other movies.
So, in this movie with Rey, they were basically trying to cure one of the problems that was created by George Lucas with his stupid-ass midichlorians nonsense.
So George Lucas had this whole thing about the Force runs in your bloodline, and this is how we know that you're powerful with the Force, and all this kind of stuff.
It was always dumb.
Well, the problem here is that they made a big deal out of the last movie.
Who is Rey?
Where did she come from?
And it seems like for some reason she knows Han.
There's this weird kind of relationship.
You remember this, Austin?
It seems like she knows Han in The Force Awakens.
It seems like everybody sort of knows who she is.
But then it turns out that she's just some girl from the middle of nowhere.
Which would have been fine, except you built it up like there was something interesting about her background.
So you picked literally the least interesting background for her that you could find.
And then, and I understand what you're trying to do.
You're trying to make it that everyone can be participants in the force.
We're trying to get out of Plato's Republic, where there are gradations of human, and into the democratic society where everyone can be a Jedi.
I get it, I get it.
But, it's not dramatic in any real way.
Okay, another problem.
I didn't need that entire scene of Luke milking a sea cow.
That was just weird.
It was just weird and gross, and I wasn't big on it.
But a bigger problem with Luke is that Luke happens to be an incredibly crappy teacher.
So, Luke actually is making a good point.
The Jedi do suck at everything, okay?
The Jedi were involved in the original creation of the Empire.
The Jedi did fail to stop the Sith.
They basically emboldened the Sith.
The Jedi were not particularly successful at maintaining the Republic, so they stunk at everything.
So Luke is right about this, but he's also a bad teacher, right?
Ray comes and he says, I'm going to offer you three lessons.
The first lesson is, the force exists.
The second lesson is, feel this rock.
And there is no third lesson, right?
Not a good teacher.
That guy gets a bad review on collegeprofessors.com.
Okay, and also, Yoda showing up.
I wasn't being honest.
Okay, another problem.
Celebrity cameos, as I mentioned before.
Laura Dern with purple hair, no.
And Benicio Del Toro, my god, man.
Okay, which brings us to that entire storyline.
No!
No!
That entire storyline, no!
Okay, that's an entire stupid storyline.
Laura Dern's character could have just told Poe Dameron, guess what?
We're gonna send a bunch of transports to this random planet.
Could they not have just done that?
Instead, she pretends like she has no plan, it's kind of evil, and then what happens is that Poe comes up with some stupid plan to go to intergalactic Monte Carlo with weird creatures that looks like it's from Harry Potter, and there are weird dog rabbits that run around, camel horses that run around, all so he can get a bunch of social justice warrior crap about income inequality.
And animal rights.
There was a line in this movie so bad that I legitimately was thinking about walking out of the theater.
There's a line in this movie.
We're after Finn, who is useless, right?
He is useless.
And Rose, who is double useless.
They go to this stupid planet, and then they free the animals who have been abused.
Oh, this is how we know the Rebels are good guys, because they don't like animals being abused, right?
Okay, great.
Okay, this is a far cry, by the way, from Empire Strikes Back, where Han literally cuts open the belly of a, of a, of a, what is it?
Of a Tauntaun, thank you.
And stuffs Luke inside of it, right?
Now, we have to make sure that all of the rights of the animals are upheld, because this is deeply important.
Listen, I'm for animal rights, but what does Star Wars have to do with animal rights?
Like, what the hell?
And Finn turns to Rose and he says, well, I guess it was worth it.
You mean losing the entire galaxy was worth you going there to free a few camel horses that will be recaptured five seconds from now?
Was that the thing that was worth it?
And then, the worst line in the film, Rose turns to him, she takes a saddle off the camel horse dog, and she goes, now it's worth it.
What?
No, it's not.
Like, it's not.
Your whole job here is to get this hacker guy so you can go back to fake Death Star and hack the program.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Also, they should have killed Finn.
Okay, when Finn is riding at the end directly toward that giant blaster weapon, toward the battering ram.
He should have just died.
They should have killed him at the end of Force Awakens to add some gravitas.
This is my biggest problem.
They will not kill any of the new characters because they're trying to preserve the new characters.
Instead, they kill all of the old cool characters who I actually like.
I don't like Finn.
He's boring.
I don't care about Rose.
She's boring.
Rey is only not boring because she has interactions with Kylo Ren.
Everyone is boring in the new scenario, and they're killing off all of the cool characters who made this thing into a legacy in the first place.
Oh, which brings me to Rose.
Don't even get me started.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
Okay, fine.
Okay, Captain Phasma also.
Like, was she supposed to be a thing?
Like, because she wasn't a thing.
No.
Okay, Captain Phasma was, like, she's there for five seconds.
She's dressed up as, as, you know, it's Brienne of Tarth dressed as Boba Fett.
She's supposed to be so cool.
Finn, the janitor, takes her out.
Fail.
Okay, and a few more criticisms, then I'll get to the good stuff, okay?
So, one other criticism about Luke.
The best moment in the movie, aside from the Kylo Ren, Rey team-up, which is the best part of the movie.
Aside from that, the best moment of the movie is the part where Luke strides out of the cave, and Kylo Ren has every AT-AT fire on him, and then Luke just walks right out of it, right?
Super cool.
They then destroy the coolness of this moment by having it be basically a hologram, right?
He was using astral projection, because he's still back at stupid planet.
Why would you do that?
Why would you do that?
The entire coolness of it is that he's actually there stopping the blasters.
It's not cool if they're just shooting a hologram, because holograms can't be damaged.
We all know that.
Why would you do that?
So in one case, the force is used in two ways in this film that we've never seen it used before and we'll never see it used again.
One, it apparently protects you from space death.
So Princess Leia gets blown out into space.
She's never used the Force at all that we've seen, except for one time when she used her mind to reach out to Luke's mind at the end of Empire.
And now she can suddenly rescue herself from space and fly, which is a cool thing, I guess.
Like, I didn't know this was a thing.
Also, if that were a thing, why wouldn't the Emperor use it at the end of Return of the Jedi?
Right, Darth Vader literally takes the Emperor and throws him down a wormhole, essentially.
He throws him down the shaft, the mineshaft, right?
Why wouldn't, if he can float, why wouldn't he just float?
I'm so confused by this.
Okay, so that is one force thing that we didn't know about.
A second force thing we didn't know about is this astral projection nonsense.
It's so much cooler if Luke is actually there.
And there's precedent for it, right?
You could actually build that in.
Because in Empire, you recall, there's a point where Han Solo is invited by Lando to dine with Darth Vader, and he takes out his blaster and he shoots Darth Vader, and Darth Vader goes like this and stops the blaster.
You remember this?
So Luke is significantly more powerful than Darth.
How much more powerful?
Well, we would find out if they were actually there and he stopped a bunch of AT-AT barrage.
Right?
That would be amazing.
That's true, Kylo does do that in Force Awakens.
Kylo does stop a blaster in Force Awakens, that's correct.
He stops it in the air, right?
Yeah.
So Kylo can do it, but Luke has to be a hologram?
Why, why, why?
Okay.
Finally, this is the biggest problem.
Kylo should have sided with Rey.
If you're going to do something new, you cannot just redo the original trilogy by having Kylo be Darth Vader, he's just like Anakin, he was conflicted, and now he's bad, and Rey is always good, and blah blah blah.
You can't do that.
They were building up for this too, right?
Like, there's a point where Luke explicitly says that Rey does not resist the dark side.
And there's a point where he says that.
And you think, OK, well, maybe the dark side and the light side are actually one force.
There's this theory in the Star Wars universe.
And then there's that great moment where Kylo and Rey team up.
And you think, this is changing the entire nature of the Star Wars universe.
You've never seen this before.
The only team up you've ever seen is when Darth Vader makes a final decision right before he dies to toss the Emperor down the mineshaft.
That's the only time you've seen this in the Star Wars universe.
And it's super cool.
When I was in the theater, it's packed theater on Saturday night.
And the audience burst into applause.
Right?
The audience started applauding.
Everyone was blown away by that scene, right?
It's a great scene.
All the way up to and including the whole thing where Ray tosses him the lightsaber and he goes, doom, and activates it right through the guy's face.
Right?
That whole scene is great.
And then you immediately blow it?
Then you immediately blow it?
Because there's no real motivation for Kylo to say, let the transports all be wiped out still.
There's no motivation there.
Who cares?
Five seconds before this, he refused to fire on his mother.
Five seconds.
He's not the one who blew Princess Leia out into space.
He refused to do it.
So why does he want to kill her now?
Now he wants to kill her?
It doesn't make any sense.
So that's all the criticism.
Here's what's right with the film.
Number one, it is better than The Force Awakens.
The Force Awakens, for me, was just a disaster all the way through.
The reason being that, again, they took Han Solo and made him uncool.
Luke doesn't end up uncool in this thing.
Luke is cool.
I just think that his death is a little wasted.
Second, the Kylo-Rey connection really works.
This was something I didn't expect going into the film.
I thought, eh, Kylo, eh, Rey.
But the Kylo-Rey connection, they actually have some chemistry on screen.
And every scene where they're basically Skyping in to each other, all those scenes really work.
And the scene in the throne room really works.
The scene where they're working together, that's the coolest part.
And that's why you don't want it to end.
And that's why when it does end, you're annoyed, because they just went back to Same old, same old.
Okay, that lightsaber battle also works, right?
That lightsaber battle is one of... Really, that scene is one of the best scenes in all of Star Wars canon.
Right, that one scene.
I'm not saying the movie.
I'm saying that one scene is one of the best things in all of Star Wars canon.
Where Kylo turns and suddenly he and Rey are on the same side.
It's really cathartic and it's really cool.
And finally, the final thing that works is Luke's final fade-out works, just because it's a throwback.
He actually gets a death that I guess is deserving.
A lot better than Han, right?
Han just gets stabbed through the belly and thrown down another one of these incessant mine shafts that seem to be everywhere in Star Wars universe.
But Luke actually gets to do the final tattoo in two suns, right?
Gazing off into the distance thing.
And that worked, and it's emotionally resonant.
I just wish you weren't dead, because I think that it was a waste of death.
They should have ended the film probably after the Kylo Ray scene, and they should have made the entire Final part of that movie, the third movie.
That's probably what they should have done.
Okay, so, is it worth seeing?
Well, if you've watched this far, you've already seen it, because you've heard all the spoilers.
But, my biggest problem now is that I actually think this is the end of the Star Wars universe.
I think that this is the end of where Star Wars can go.
Because now, all the old characters are dead.
We've reached the end of the Skywalker family, essentially.
Ben Solo is a thing, I guess, but Kylo is his own sort of character, and they're gonna kill Kylo in the next film for sure.
So why would I show up to watch a movie without Luke?
Leia's dead, right?
In real life, Carrie Fisher's dead.
Han is dead.
Where are they going to go from here that's not just going to be more typical light side versus dark side stuff?
They were on the verge of doing something so great.
This is what annoys me.
They were so close to doing something unprecedented, right?
Let's say that Rey actually, that Kylo says, you know what?
You're right.
And he calls off the attack.
And he says to Rey, we're going to rule the galaxy together.
And that's the end of the film.
And you don't know what's going to happen.
How's Leia going to respond to this?
How Luke's going to respond to this?
Especially since Kylo, as you recall, just killed Han, right?
Wouldn't that, like, where would it go if...
It sets up all these possibilities.
Instead, we're thrust back into sort of this binary universe where, okay, I guess Poe Dameron is going to take over for Carrie Fisher as the head of the rebellion, and Rey is going to be the new Luke, and Kylo's going to be the new Darth.
So I guess this sort of ends the canon.
But it did have some moments.
It did have some... Okay, so there is my full take.
I think that's a pretty fulsome take on Star Wars.
And if you have thoughts on that, you're always free to email me or tweet me and tell me that I am wrong.
But we will be back here tomorrow.
The Republicans are set to vote on taxes tomorrow.
So that will be interesting.
We'll give you all the details.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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