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Jan. 8, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:17
Oprah For President? | Ep. 448
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So, Hollywood is full of self-righteous hypocrites, Oprah takes the Golden Globes and wants to run for president, and Steve Bannon is still on the rocks with a very stable genius.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
No Disneyland for anyone.
Okay, this weekend was terrible.
It was just terrible.
It was mostly terrible because Hollywood can't get over itself.
Watching Hollywood talk about sexual abuse and sexual harassment is like watching NFL executives talk about concussions and then pat themselves on the back for it.
It's just absurd.
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Okay, so.
I am very annoyed, always, by these Hollywood events.
These Hollywood events always annoy me, because I grew up in Hollywood.
And Hollywood is filled with the most self-righteous and yet despicable people that you will ever meet in your life.
Hollywood is filled with people who engage in sexual harassment and abuse.
In fact, Hollywood as a town was built on sexual harassment and abuse.
I don't mean that figuratively.
I mean that the, I don't mean that in an exaggerated fashion.
I mean that a huge percentage of Hollywood films, a huge percentage of Hollywood starlets got their starts on the Hollywood casting couch Virtually every major producer in town at one time or another has thrown his power around as well as his genitals.
The idea that this is not the dominant, the predominant mode of how casting is done in Hollywood and has been done for decades, I think is a bit of a stretch.
The fact is Hollywood is pretty degenerate.
It always has been on these matters.
And there are a lot of women who are willing to engage with that, knowing the risks, knowing that they were going to come here and be sent to the casting couch.
I've showed you in the past films that make open jokes about this.
It's all about Eve.
There's some open jokes about Marilyn Monroe using the casting couch.
This is not something that is brand new from Hollywood.
Hollywood suddenly gets hit for it, and suddenly everyone's very surprised.
Not only that, they're there to virtue signal.
It's just great.
They're there to come along and signal to you not only that they are wonderful leftists, but also that they are just shocked and appalled by what's happened in Hollywood.
They're here to joke about all of the terrible things they've done.
As I said at the top of the show, it's like watching NFL executives joke about concussions or Penn State executives joke about pedophilia.
You can't do this, OK?
Hollywood has an entire event dedicated to patting itself on the back for how much it's standing up to the sexual harassment scandal that's happening in its own industry and to which many of the people who were testifying last night were party in the first place.
We'll go through all of this, but let's start with Seth Meyers' opening monologue.
So Seth Meyers begins by slapping Hollywood, and then, of course, he has his obligatory slams against Trump.
He's too lazy to actually write any new jokes about Trump, so instead he just hijacks jokes that were told last year by Hugh Laurie, I believe it was, at the Golden Globes, about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Here is Seth Meyers again, an overrated comedian who masquerades as a political thinker.
Here he is doing his opening monologue.
Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen.
There's a new era underway, and I can tell because it's been years since a white man was this nervous in Hollywood.
This is old.
This is lazy.
There's nothing new here.
And the idea, oh, look, we're all going to laugh now about white men being in power.
We're all going to laugh now about men being sexist.
We're all going to laugh about how men are on the run in Hollywood.
Except that half this crowd cheered Roman Polanski.
Half this crowd stood up and cheered Woody Allen when he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Golden Globe six years ago in 2012.
Harvey Weinstein, on this stage, was feeded as a god by Meryl Streep, who last night was talking about Me Too and Time's Up.
And it's not just Seth Meyers.
Debra Messing arrived and decided that it was time to slam E!
Channel for the so-called pay gap.
The implication being that E!
doesn't pay its female hosts enough.
Debra Messing, the multimillionaire, Who's a terrible actress, by the way, and blocked me on Twitter.
Not because I just called her a terrible actress, but long ago.
She blocked me because, I guess, she would cancel her subscription to the New York Times after the New York Times did a profile of me that did not rip me as a racist, because I'm not.
Deborah Messing decides that now's a good time to virtue signal about the pay gap.
She wasn't the only one, by the way.
What's the name of the lady from Friday Night Light?
Connie Britton.
Right, so Connie Britton shows up last night wearing a shirt.
That says something like poverty is sexist.
It said poverty is sexist.
The shirt cost $380.
Not a joke.
$380.
And after she spilled champagne on it, then it was worth $700.
So well done, Connie Britton.
Poverty is sexist.
But she's not the only hypocrite.
Here's Debra Messing, a very, very wealthy woman for being a garbage actress on a show that was really about the gay guy and about the shrill, high-pitched woman and not about her at all.
Here is Debra Messing talking about the pay gap at E!
You know, I was so shocked to hear that E!
doesn't believe in paying their female co-hosts the same as their male co-hosts.
I mean, I miss Kat Sadler, and so we stand with her, and that's something that can change tomorrow.
So much heroism, so much strength, so much Normandy-like bravery.
My God!
Standing on the red carpet, wearing a gown worth probably several thousand dollars, talking about the pay gap that obviously is just brutal for women at E!, whose entire job consists of standing alongside men at E!, both of whom talk about celebrities all day.
Let's be real about this.
Women in the entertainment industry, in the talent side of the entertainment industry, are not getting destroyed by sexism.
Okay, they are in terms of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
That's a different issue.
But in terms of the pay gap, the idea that Natalie Portman and Jennifer Lawrence are being destroyed by sexism, or that the women at E couldn't just go to their bosses and say, listen, either pay me more or I'll leave.
Here's the thing about the free market.
If you are easily replaceable, and I'm sorry to tell you this, but women at E and men at E are probably pretty replaceable.
It doesn't seem like a particularly tough job.
Then maybe you ought to ask for a raise less often rather than more often.
I mean, you could start an e-channel, honestly, and pay everybody $30,000 a year and be staffed up the wazoo.
I mean, there are people who are beautiful working at Coffee Bean every single day who would die to work for $35,000.
I don't know what Coffee Bean pays.
Maybe it's more than that.
But there are people who would die to be working on E!
and be on TV every day for $35,000.
In any case, there's Debra Messing complaining about that.
Mary J. Blige comes out and she says, you know, in the new Me Too moment, I will kill you if you touch me.
But there's something that she doesn't say, which kind of bothers me here.
Here's Mary J. Blige.
Oh, I've had the fight since I was five years old.
I haven't had anybody approach me like that since I've been in the music business.
But ever since from five to 17, I've been going through hell with sexual harassment.
So, you know, by the time I got to the music business, it was like, don't touch me.
Oh, I'll kill you.
Okay, so first of all, that's great that she had that attitude.
It's horrible what happened to her as a child.
I would like to hear her name the names of the guys who tried to touch her in the music industry.
This is the one thing that was so shocking about last night.
You watch all of this, and what you see over and over and over is that nobody's willing to name any names.
They're just willing to talk about broad problems, broad American sexism, broad sexual harassment.
But no one's willing to name any names, which means all these guys get away with it.
And half of them are in the room.
Half of them are in the room.
Natalie Portman, I thought, was the most egregious offender last night, just in terms of being obnoxiously smug.
She gets up and they're talking about the all-male directors who are nominated.
Which women should have been nominated last year that I missed?
Like Patty Jenkins for Wonder Woman?
Who should have been nominated exactly?
In any case, here's Natalie Portman suggesting and whining about all-male directors.
We are honored to be here to present the award for Best Director.
And here are the all-male nominees.
Oh, burn!
Burn, mitches!
Okay, we're like, what in the world?
Like, oh my God.
What bravery.
Stunning, stunning bravery.
Natalie Portman, worth millions and millions of dollars for being not a very good actress.
Yay, Natalie Portman.
Oh man, she struck back against the patriarchy that time.
Boom!
Roasted!
Oh, Hollywood is so smug and so irritating.
I mean, I'm famous for being smug, and they outclass me by orders of magnitude.
Okay, so, before I go any further, and we'll talk about Oprah, because I have many a thing to say about Oprah Winfrey and her presidential runs.
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All right.
So all of this was prelude to the big story of the evening.
The big story of the evening was Oprah Winfrey.
Oh, Oprah.
So stunning.
So brave.
Such stunning bravery.
Such brave ex-stunnery.
It's just, it's so, so much bravery.
I can't even take it.
I just can't take it.
In fact, it was so brave that everybody lost their mind.
NBC tweeted that Oprah would be our future president.
Yes, really, the network, NBC, they tweeted nothing but respect for our future president.
Hashtag Golden Globes.
R, capital O-U-R.
Amazing.
Just amazing.
Your future president is going to be a lady who is extraordinarily rich, very good at connecting with audiences, and who is famous for vacillating in her weight for years and years.
That's just great.
I mean, honestly, we don't get to complain about reality TV stars and self-made billionaires being presidents of the United States, because the president of the United States is those things, right?
And then brags about them on Twitter.
Don't worry, we'll get to that in a little bit.
She was just so incredible last night.
She got up there and she finally spoke truth to power.
Sure, there are tons of pictures of her kissing Harvey Weinstein.
Sure, there's an actress who back in November alleged that she fell into Harvey Weinstein's trap because she saw Oprah hanging out with Harvey and figured Harvey must be a good guy.
Sure, Oprah Winfrey existed in this town for 30 years, making oodles of cash, becoming the most powerful woman in media, the queen of all media, and never had one word to say about sexual harassment and assault in Hollywood.
Sure, all of that's true, but the bravery, the stunningness, the stunningness McBravery, ah!
Just shocking.
Just stunning.
Reese Witherspoon tweeted out in the midst of all of this that Oprah Winfrey, that she was now going to date time differently.
She tweeted, quote, I will now officially divide time like this.
Everything that happened before Oprah's speech, everything that will happen after.
My God, it's just like Jesus.
It'll be B.O.
and A.O.
Before Oprah and after Oprah.
Just incredible.
Things have changed.
Can't you feel the change in the air?
Can't you feel all the men backing away from the sexual harassment and abuse because Oprah Winfrey got up and said some vague words?
I do.
I feel like everything changed last night.
Now, to be fair, Oprah's really good at this, right?
Oprah's actually a very good speaker.
She's very talented.
She's quite a good actress.
She's very good at connecting with audiences.
We've known all this for years.
She gets up.
Chris Chaliza at CNN said, you could have heard her giving this speech in Iowa.
You can almost imagine her running for president.
Have we learned nothing, people?
Nothing!
The entire media that suggests that inexperience is bad, that we don't need somebody with no policy, that we don't need somebody who doesn't know what the hell they're doing at the head of government.
And they're like, you know what we need?
Oprah.
Yeah, solid move.
Okay, so she gives this speech, and everyone is just over the moon about this speech.
It's just great.
She gets up there and she finally says enough.
She, Oprah, the queen of all media, finally says enough is enough.
Now, do I think that's anything special?
No, because I was under the impression that we all felt this way, right?
I mean, everybody showed up to the Golden Globes last night wearing black.
There's a classier Golden Globes than we've had in years.
It wasn't people dressed like Lady Gaga breaking out of an egg at the Golden Globes red carpet.
Everybody just looked like it was the 1950s and they were wearing black dresses.
Actually, everybody kind of looked classy.
Maybe this should be the going rule there from now on.
But, you know, but and everybody shows up and they're talking about Time's Up and Me Too and everybody's trying to back away slowly from from anyone who is remotely associated from Harvey Weinstein and and Kevin Spacey.
And so I'm not sure what was so groundbreaking about all this, except that people want Oprah to run for president.
They were talking about this back in March and I'll go through it in a few minutes, whether Oprah could actually win when she runs for president.
But first, I want to go through the speech because it's been treated as just grand and glorious because she finally stood up for all the victimized women throughout history and over time.
Oprah Winfrey, so stunning, so brave.
There are a few problems.
She starts off by talking about how she is exactly the same as Sidney Poitier in 1964, right?
Sidney Poitier won a Golden Globe, I guess, in 1964.
And she said she watched it on TV, or he won an Oscar, I guess, in 1964, maybe, for In the Heat of the Night.
In any case, she says this.
Just clip one.
In 1982, Sidney received the Cecil B. DeMille Award right here at the Golden Globes, and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching.
As I become the first black woman to be given this same award.
Name them.
Name them.
Seriously, name the lives of the little black girls whose lives were changed because they saw Oprah Winfrey win this award.
Not by Oprah Winfrey making $3 billion over the course of her career.
Not by Oprah Winfrey becoming the most powerful woman in media over the past 30 years.
Not by Michelle Obama being First Lady, or Susan Rice being National Security Advisor, or Loretta Lynch being Attorney General, or Condoleezza Rice being Secretary of State.
Not by any of those things.
Right, not by any of these famous black women being in positions of power for years.
Not by the fact that the music industry is dominated by powerful black women.
Not by Beyonce.
Not by the fact that the entertainment industry is dominated by beautiful black women and powerful black women.
Not by the fact that black women dominate sports, not by Venus Williams or Serena Williams, not by any of those people.
It was Oprah winning a Golden Globe last night that changed everything, people.
It changed everything.
And let me tell you, black girls who are watching TV today, they are in exactly the same situation as she was in 1964, watching Sidney Poitier in his white tie and black skin, this is her words, get up and say what he says at the Oscars or at the Golden Globes.
Right?
It's exactly the same.
Is 64 2018 exactly the same?
Now, I hate this kind of virtue signaling.
I really do.
Because 2018, to pretend this is exactly the same, is not remotely true.
It's stupid.
It's overblown.
And to pretend this is some sort of groundbreaking moment is just sheer crappery.
It's just nonsense.
It's just stupidity.
Okay, but she didn't stop there, right, in her effort to garner support for her 2020 run.
Then she thanked the Hollywood Foreign Press.
And I love this still frame of Barbra Streisand, I think is pretty fitting, actually.
So we may just leave that.
But there is Barbra Streisand with, I guess, is that James Brolin?
I'm not sure who that guy is.
Maybe not James Brolin?
No.
Okay, in any case, here is Oprah Winfrey talking about the Hollywood Foreign Press and the power of the press, how special the press is.
They are so special people.
Let Oprah tell you about it.
I want to say that I value the press more than ever before as we try to navigate these complicated times.
Yes.
Yes.
Just yes.
And the people nodding.
And the people cheering.
Yes, the press!
Oh!
OK, let me explain to you something about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is 90 international reporters.
You know what they do all day?
They report on Hollywood.
This is what they do.
This is what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is.
You know what might have been a good story about Hollywood?
You know, for like the past...
80 years?
At any time in here?
You know what would have been a good story for them to report on?
The rampant sexual abuse and harassment that took place in Hollywood for decades by the most powerful men in the business.
That might have been a good thing.
Did they speak truth to power?
Did they uncover the secrets and the lies and the victims and the tyrants?
Did they do that?
She wants to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press for speaking up for truth.
Good job, guys.
You were just brilliant.
You're just fantastic.
Wonderful job.
I am so impressed.
Legitimately, the only members of the press who did anything about the rampant Hollywood abuse were people like Ronan Farrow.
People over at the New Yorker did some great work on this.
But the Hollywood Foreign Press Association did nothing, right?
I mean, the idea that they're being feeded as some sort of great truth-tellers in a world of lies is just ridiculous.
Also, I will acknowledge that the entire left focus on the power of the media and the power of the press, aside from when they can rip on the Catholic Church like they praise the press for going after the Catholic Church for its sex abuse scandals, I don't remember them being quite so over the moon about the power and necessary wonder of the press during the Obama administration.
Now we get movies like The Post, which, I gotta say, I have no desire to see this movie because if the trailer is that tendentious and obnoxious, I cannot imagine that the movie is going to be any better than that.
I mean, it is the most obnoxious trailer in human history.
Meryl Streep, oh, oh, you just watch me as I take on all the brutal men in the government And Tom Hanks rubbing her shoulders while she does that.
It just looks like a terrible movie.
I'll have to watch it and tell you how terrible, because now I've committed myself.
In any case, that wasn't the end of Oprah Winfrey and her glorious, grand, bravery-ridden speech.
Here she is.
She talks about speaking your truth.
My least favorite phrase in all of human history.
Speaking your truth.
Here we go.
What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.
And I'm especially proud and inspired by all the women who have felt strong enough and empowered enough to speak up and share their personal stories.
Not a shot of Meryl Streep!
OK, Oprah's great at this, and I'm sure she's really emotional about this.
Let's put it this way.
Because I'm not Captain Emotion, I always get suspicious of emotion on cue.
But I'm sure she's really emotional about this.
She had a really rough childhood, did Oprah Winfrey.
I'm sure that her mother endured a lot of stuff.
All that said, that phrase, speaking your truth, is so obnoxious.
And then say, speak your truth and have a shot of Meryl Streep.
Meryl Streep, like Harvey Weinstein is a god, Meryl Streep.
That's how the press treat this?
Okay, there's no such thing as your truth.
I've said this a thousand times.
There's no such thing as your truth.
There is the truth and your opinion.
And when you say speaking your truth, that requires evidence.
Okay?
Evidence would be a good thing.
Now, I believe women who make these allegations as a general rule.
I do, but I have to weigh the evidence.
I have to weigh how credible the women are.
I have to weigh whether there are repeat accusations.
I have to review the nature of the man.
I actually have to look at the evidence on all of these accusations.
But this phrase, speaking your truth, needs to die, and needs to die slowly and horribly in the torture chamber used in The Princess Bride for Wesley.
Okay, it needs to die.
That phrase, speaking your truth, is just garbage.
Even people on the left are recognizing that it undermines their argument to say that.
Okay, but that's not the end of Oprah's, Oprah's silly, okay?
There's, and again, there's a lot in this speech to like.
There is, I mean, like, sexual harassment's bad.
Right, I'm on the side of that.
If I've not been clear about that, I've been saying this four months.
Okay, and for years, and for decades, like literally my entire career.
But, I'm going to get to what I think was the worst injustice that she did last night, Oprah Winfrey, in this speech, in just a second.
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Okay, so, concluding.
Oprah Winfrey's masterful, stunningly McBrave speech.
I'm just going to keep using those words over and over because that's what the media does.
I mean, if I read you the headlines on Oprah, now I'm going to be forced to read you the headlines on Oprah, okay?
I'm just going, like, right now, in real time, to Google News.
Oprah knew exactly what she was doing on Sunday night, CNN.
HuffPo, Oprah and Stedman hint she's open to presidential run.
Sources, Oprah Winfrey actively thinking about running for president.
Golden Globes 2018, how Oprah saved the night.
Oprah 2020, Golden Globes host Seth Meyers jokes it may be in the cards.
Oprah Winfrey triumphs at black draped Golden Globes.
I mean, just, eh.
Oprah speaks out to young girls in Cecil B. DeMille award speech.
Just so much heroism.
So much heroism speaking in a room full of other rich people who all are forced to agree with her by the news cycle.
About everything.
Because if they don't, then we'll all accuse them of sexual abuse or being complicit in it.
I mean, the thing about speaking truth to power is that it would be good to do that when there's actual risk involved.
She was the most powerful person in the media for the last 20 years.
She did not say a thing about this happening in Hollywood.
A thing.
And now she's being used as the point person on this?
She's the queen of bravery?
It's like Roger Goodell saying he's taking the lead on concussions.
I keep using that because it's the best example I can think of.
It's like the president of Penn State saying he's taking the lead on child sexual abuse.
You can't do that.
It's just ridiculous.
It's hypocritical and ridiculous.
And again, I agree with everything she's saying.
I agree.
But where was she six months ago?
Not even that long ago.
This is the part that really dragged me up a wall.
So she actually compares women who are being victimized in Hollywood to a woman who was raped by six men, six white men in 1944.
A black woman raped in Alabama and the guys were not prosecuted for it.
Here she is talking about it.
In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and a mother.
She was just walking home from a church service she'd attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road.
For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared to speak their truth to the power of those men.
But their time is up.
Oh, so much emotional.
Lecture us, Hollywood.
Lecture us on this.
Right?
Lecture us.
Because it's not like you are the scandal.
Yeah, you lecture me, Oprah.
Yeah, you lecture me.
I wasn't the one who was whining and dining with, you know, Harvey Weinstein five seconds ago.
The hypocrisy of it just drives me up a wall.
Listen, I'm glad that Hollywood is finally owning up to the issue.
Do I think there's going to be any material change in Hollywood, by the way?
No.
I think it's all going to die down in six months and things will go back right to what they were before because no one's naming names.
Does Oprah have a Rolodex?
She knows all these guys.
She got anything to say about any of them?
A name?
One?
How about that?
And the part that drives me up a wall here is the implication that America in 1944 is the same as America in 2018 with regard to allegations of rape, particularly cross-racial rape.
If a group of white men raped a black woman, not only would it be front page story across the nation, the president would sound off, every person in America would be calling for those guys to be strung up.
How do I know?
Because it was a national scandal when Al Sharpton claimed that Tawana Bradley falsely was raped by a bunch of white men.
It was a national scandal when the Duke Lacrosse guys were falsely accused to have raped Crystal Mangum, who was a black stripper in Duke.
And when that actually happened, we want those guys to go away forever.
To pretend that society now and society then are in any way similar, and that the Me Too movement is what changed that?
Guess what?
The Me Too movement didn't change that.
Everyone was against rape.
Everyone is still against rape.
We were against rape.
We are against rape.
We will be against rape for my entire lifetime.
And this pretend nonsense That 1944 is the same as now or that it requires the same kind of bravery?
No one should compare Recy Taylor to Oprah Winfrey.
Nobody should be comparing Rosa Parks to Meryl Streep.
If you are, you're out of your mind.
You're out of your mind.
And to compare America circa Alabama circa 1944 with America circa 2018.
In Hollywood, the repository of all the sexual abuse is just vomitricious.
It's just a bag of vomit.
OK, now, there's a lot of talk about Oprah should run for president off the base of this.
Because again, what courage.
What unbelievable courage.
By the way, I did note this last night and a bunch of people got mad at me for saying so.
How many times has Iran mentioned last night?
Waiting?
I didn't see it mentioned once.
Did anybody else?
I didn't watch the whole program because I'd rather have gouged out my eyes with a spork.
But if you actually were watching this thing, was Iran mentioned?
I like when she says, we side with women all over the world.
That would have been a good time to talk about maybe places around the world where women are being routinely victimized.
Not just in the United States.
And Oprah, by the way, cares about things happening around the world.
She founded a school for girls in South Africa, right?
She actually cares about stuff happening outside the United States.
Wouldn't now have been a good time in that speech to say, not just women here, but women in Iran, and women in Saudi Arabia, and women in Egypt, and women in, right?
Couldn't she have just listed those off in the middle of it?
But no, because Hollywood is deeply invested in Hollywood itself, and they have to show that they're leading the fight against themselves, which of course is not true at all.
Okay, so would Oprah Winfrey win a presidential election?
Number one, the person hardest hit last night is Joe Biden, because Oprah Winfrey would win the primaries.
Oprah Winfrey would obviously win the primaries, right?
Joe Biden would get shellacked by Oprah Winfrey, not just because Oprah Winfrey is black, but because Oprah Winfrey is deeply talented, and she spent 30 years building up a stock of goodwill with the American people, and particularly with women.
So let's talk more about the general election, because I think that if Oprah ran, she would almost assuredly win the Democratic primary nomination process.
Could she beat Donald Trump?
So, here's what she's got going for her.
There are about five arguments in favor and five arguments against.
First, she's the most famous woman in the history of mankind.
That's not really an exaggeration.
She's the most famous woman in media.
This is a time when people have access to information about other people at a rate never before known by man.
She's the most famous person ever.
Right?
She's so famous that Donald Trump has spent years praising her.
In April 2012, quote, Oprah will end up doing just fine with her network.
She knows how to win.
May 2014, the greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
Oprah Winfrey.
Right?
So he, so, so, you know, there are a bunch of arguments here.
In favor of Oprah.
She's a uniter, not a divider.
Her whole brand is, I bring people together.
I unite people.
I make people happy.
She's the warm and fuzzy, whereas Trump's whole brand is firing people and acting tough.
There would never be a bigger gender gap than Oprah versus Trump.
The gender gap would be enormous.
It would be like 90-10 for women for Oprah and 90-10 for men for Trump.
It would be an enormous, enormous gender gap.
And it goes on here.
I'm going to continue in just a second.
Talking about what exactly her qualifications for office are.
Her other qualifications here, third qualification, she has a terrific personal story.
Her personal story is really good.
Unlike Trump, who grew up super duper wealthy and then became super duper more wealthy, largely through branding power, she was born legitimately dirt poor in Mississippi to a single mom, raised in inner city Milwaukee, molested as a child, pregnant at 14.
She apparently miscarried.
She got into radio at 19 and made herself worth $3 billion.
And so her personal story is terrific.
She definitely checks the left's intersectionality boxes.
So she gets to say woman, black over and over, and that's what the left wants.
And the DNC yesterday tweeted out what would qualify women for office.
What would qualify a woman for, what would qualify, sorry, what would qualify someone for office?
Said, we need to elect more.
And then it's had a whole list.
Jewish women, Asian women, black women, lesbians, and just all, transgender women, like a whole list and said, we need more women.
So when it comes to the left view of what qualifies a person for office, Oprah's high on the list, right?
Black and woman.
She also has crossover appeal in a way that, for example, Hillary Clinton didn't, right?
Hillary was a woman, but other women didn't like her.
Oprah's a woman that other women really like a lot.
She polls well also, by the way.
As of March 2017, she had a 49-33 favorable rating.
Honestly, I'm shocked that her favorable rating is that low.
I would think it would be closer in the 50s.
She led Trump, and actually polled her against Trump, and she leads Trump right now 47-40 in the polls, which is not a blowout, by the way.
That's more like Hillary Clinton numbers than anything else.
So here are the drawbacks.
Here's why Oprah would probably not win if she ran.
One, she's wildly inexperienced.
Now, that doesn't hold a lot of stock anymore.
In the last two presidents who've had no experience, basically, entering high office.
Donald Trump had legitimately no experience entering high office.
Oprah's run her own business in the way Trump has.
It's going to be hard for him to say you have no experience when he had no experience.
She is far left.
Her politics will become an issue here.
Now, she wants to run as great uniter.
I'm the person who everybody agrees is emotionally connected.
That doesn't hold once you start running.
Once you start running, you become a polarizing political figure pretty quickly, and she is pretty far to the left.
She endorsed Obama in the 2008 primaries.
It probably helped him win the primaries over Hillary Clinton.
She traveled to Denmark in 2009 and openly praised socialism.
She's compared Trayvon Martin to Emmett Till, which is, again, just insane.
She's a pro-choice advocate.
She's made statements in the past like there have been millions of lynchings in the United States, which of course isn't true.
About 4,000 lynchings as far as I'm aware, which of course is terrible.
But then she has suggested a connection between the time of lynchings and now, by comparing Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin.
Nobody thinks of Oprah as political, but those politics will jump to the floor pretty quickly as soon as she starts running.
She also is kind of kooky.
I mean, people say that Trump is a conspiracy theorist.
Oprah's kind of a kook.
I mean, I know everybody wants to bury that, but aside from her various weight loss theories, she hosted Jenny McCarthy on vaccines numerous times.
She pushed, if you recall, the New Age silliness of the secret, which was this idea that through the power of positive thinking, you could heal yourself.
And then it became a national scandal when one woman who had cancer said, I'm gonna use the power of positive thinking to heal my cancer.
It did not work.
It was a fail.
Right, she went out and defended the fraudster James Fray, as you recall.
There was a major scandal for her.
She pushed nonsense about the meat industry.
They had the meat industry actually suing her.
So, you know, look, Trump is a conspiracy theorist, too, in a lot of ways, but the difference is that Trump is already so filled with mud, right?
He's covered with mud.
He's a mud monster.
Throwing more mud on Trump doesn't do him any damage.
Oprah's considered this sort of angelic character, and that means that if you throw mud at an angel, the spots are more likely to show on the dress.
Right, so there are also scandals that are going to hit her as well.
So every person has scandals in their past.
Oprah has some pretty bad ones.
The worst one was in 2009, her school that she runs in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy School for Girls, it was hit with a sex scandal, a sexual abuse scandal, actually two of them in two years.
So in 2009, there was a series of students who were sexually abused by other students.
The year before, there was a matron who allegedly sexually abused 15 girls.
Right.
She actually fought back by firing the headmistress and all the matrons and giving the girls her cell phone number.
But there will be digging into how much did she know?
Was she fully aware of it at the time?
The story sort of went away because she took the right measures.
But scandals hurt everyone.
If they hurt Mitt Romney, they certainly hurt Oprah Winfrey.
Finally, Oprah versus Trump.
Oprah would end up schoolmarming Trump a lot.
She'd end up doing a lot of what Hillary Clinton did.
She'd end up standing there, tutting him for his baseness and his cruelty.
It didn't work well for Hillary.
Now, Oprah doing it might be more successful, but I'm not sure schoolmarming works against Trump in any case.
So, before everybody gets over the moon about Hillary for president, I think there's some real holes in that particular theory.
I also think that the Democrats are probably going to nominate somebody who's more akin to Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, putting aside the Golden Globes, now, let's talk about President Trump's tweets.
So, over the weekend, President Trump had a lot to say about this book, right?
So, over the weekend, there's a lot to say for President Trump about this Michael Wolff book, Fire and Fury.
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All righty.
So the big controversy over the weekend is that the Michael Wolff book about Donald Trump The reason it was making the rounds, the new case against Trump is not that he's a Russian colluder, it's that he's a nutjob.
Now, let's be frank about this.
This has been a case against Trump for at least several years, that Donald Trump is not the most mentally stable human.
And if you follow his Twitter feed, I'm not gonna lie to you, he doesn't look like he is emotionally centered, shall we put it that way.
He's not exactly a practitioner of the art of the Tao, He's not somebody with a Buddhist sense of passivity.
Donald Trump is a guy who sounds off a lot, and he's very volatile, and everybody knows this.
And there's a lot of talk in this Michael Wolff book about how Trump is actually a crazy person, how he's actually mentally unstable.
Well, Trump decided to fight back against this in the most stable possible way.
He went on Twitter and mouthed off about it.
Here's what he said, quote, Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the fake news mainstream media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming, mental stability and intelligence.
And he continues, along these lines, he says, actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.
The like is actually in there, I'm not making that up.
It says, being, like, really smart.
Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard, and as everyone knows, went down in flames.
I went from a very successful businessman to top TV star.
And then he continues, to President of the United States, in parentheses, on my first try.
Technically not his first try.
He ran for the Reform Party nomination, I believe, in 2000.
He said, I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius, and a very stable genius at that.
Okay, a few comments on this.
If you are trying to demonstrate that you are a very stable genius, you should not tweet like this.
You should not.
The funniest thing I saw about this was that somebody tweeted out a picture of Mr. Ed with the caption, stable genius.
I like puns.
Solid, solid work.
But here's the problem.
If you want to show that you're smart and you deserve respect, you should not go full Fredo in Godfather 2 and demand respect.
I can handle things!
I'm smart!
I'm like everybody says!
I don't!
I'm smart and I want respect!
Yeah, and that's sort of everybody's reaction, right?
Michael's reaction there is pretty much the reaction shot for everybody after Trump tweets all of that.
Now, you can talk about whether you think he's stable.
You can talk about whether you think he's qualified to be president.
You can talk about all the good things that have happened under Trump.
And I agree with all the good things that have happened under Trump.
I've been—if I've not been clear about that, I really like the last eight weeks of policy particularly, but If you want to show that you are actually a very stable genius, do not channel Fredo.
It's just not a bright thing to do.
Like, advice to President Trump, please, for the love of God, put down the phone.
Just put it down.
You know what would convey that you're a very stable genius?
Putting down the phone.
Putting it down.
Like now.
Put it down.
I feel like I'm talking to my year-and-a-half-year-old son.
Put down the pone.
Right, he calls it a pone.
Put down the pone.
Okay, just stop.
When he does this, it is not helpful.
The reason that it's particularly unhelpful is because, right now, he's trying to fight back all of these allegations, and not just that.
You know, there are a lot of people on my side of the aisle, on the conservative side, who will say, listen, who cares how he acts?
All that cares is what gets done.
The reason people are considering Oprah Winfrey for president is because of how she acts, not because of what they think she's going to get done.
The reality is, what we perceive the presidential election to be, who we perceive the president to be, is what Trump, what Trump evidences in his tweets, not what he does in his policy.
We can justify his presidency to ourselves by talking about all the things he does in policy.
And that's great.
That's how I see the presidency in my dreams, right?
The presidency should be about the policies that you promulgate.
But that's not what exactly people see the presidency as.
They see the presidency as the stuff you say, and Trump is saying silly, silly things.
And not just that, he then activates Stephen Miller to go out on CNN.
Now, Stephen Miller had some words to say.
About Steve Bannon.
I agree with all of his words.
He calls Steve Bannon grotesque?
Agreed.
He calls Steve Bannon ridiculous?
Agreed.
Right?
And I know Steve Miller.
I know Stephen Miller.
I think Stephen is a very knowledgeable guy, particularly about immigration.
But on TV, he is just television poison.
He is just bad on TV.
If you want Stephen Miller to basically go after Steve Bannon, a statement from Stephen Miller, a public statement from Stephen Miller, released as a video, would have been much better.
Instead, he goes at it with Jake Tapper.
And here's the problem.
When I agree with what you're saying, and I'm still criticizing how you're saying it, it might be a problem with how you're saying it.
So Stephen Miller goes on with Tapper, and he refuses to answer any simple questions, which he could, right?
I could have done a better job ripping on Bannon in this interview than Miller does.
Miller goes out there, and instead, he just devotes 12 minutes to making a fool of himself.
And it's just not useful.
It's just not good.
And then he ends up being escorted from the CNN headquarters by security.
If you're trying to evidence that you guys are all very stable geniuses, No, just no.
Now, I know that Trump tweeted out that he loves this.
I know that Trump tweeted out that he thinks that this was just a great performance by Stephen Miller.
It was not.
OK, here, I will show you.
With respect to the Trump Tower meeting that he's talking about, he wasn't even there when this went down, so he's not really a remotely credible source on any of it.
It reads like an angry, vindictive person spouting off to a highly discreditable author.
The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction.
And I also will say that the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.
A phenomenon that was happening that you didn't see, a phenomenon that was happening that the rest of the political class didn't see, all these so-called political geniuses in Washington, Okay, this is where it goes off the rails.
If you just want to say that the book is just a grotesque, if you want to just say the book is fiction, that's fine.
But this whole, we got to go on TV and we got to treat the president like he's Kim Jong-un, and we're going to go around worshiping, we're actually going to get out a prayer rug and just bow down to Trump.
He is a genius.
He's the only one who is a genius.
He beat 17 other candidates.
Come on.
Okay, like, if you think this is helpful to Trump's prospects in 2020, you got another thing coming.
Okay.
In a second, we are going to get to some things I like and some things that I don't.
You know what?
Let's just do it.
Okay, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then we'll do some Federalist papers.
So, things I like.
Over the weekend, I got to see Jumanji.
It is fun.
Okay?
It's not Citizen Kane.
It's not meant to be Citizen Kane.
It is very funny.
I was actually kind of shocked that they didn't use the rock in more comedic ways.
The people who are actually funny in this film are Jack Black and Kevin Hart.
Jack Black is very funny.
The basic premise of the film is that there are these four teenagers who entered the game Jumanji.
If you remember the original Jumanji, it was the opposite, right?
It was Robin Williams pops out of the game and so do all the animals and it's freaking out the kids.
And I remember it was pitched as a kid-friendly film, the original Jumanji.
And when I saw it when I was like eight, it freaked the living You're all here for a reason.
Hey, person walking!
You should be thinking about who you are and who you want to be.
who are like 16 years old, 15 and up.
So it is PG-13 and it should be PG-13.
So in any case, here is a little bit of the preview.
- Spencer, Bethany, Fridge, Martha, you're all here for a reason.
- Hey, person walking.
- You should be thinking about who you are and who you want to be.
You'll have plenty of time to figure that out while you're cleaning out the basement.
- Are you gonna help or are you too pretty?
I'm too pretty.
Yo, what's this?
A game for those who seek to find a way to leave their world behind.
Jumanji.
Pick a character and you're that person in the game.
Which one do I pick?
I don't think it matters that much.
Loose Finbar.
Sounds like a badass.
I'll be the curvy genius.
Dr. Smolder Bravestone.
Guess I'm Ruby Roundhouse.
Okay, and then, of course, the...
It's not spoiling anything, but the funny thing is the characters they inhabit, so the big black football player ends up being Kevin Hart, right, Tiny, and the nerd ends up being Dwayne the Rock Johnson.
And then, of course, the big surprise is that the hot blonde chick ends up being Jack Black, right?
Right?
And so the entire film, Jack Black is basically channeling a teenage girl.
And it is quite funny.
So the movie is really enjoyable.
I saw it with my wife.
It's a good way to lose a couple of hours.
It's got its moments.
It definitely has its moments.
You know, I always feel this with comedies.
It's very rare I see a comedy and I feel like they couldn't have gotten a little bit more from it.
But you get enough from it that you're pretty pleased with it.
So it's pretty funny.
So check it out.
Jumanji.
Worth seeing.
Dwayne, The Rock Johnson only makes films that are funny and interesting, actually.
I have to say, I've become a big fan of The Rock.
OK, I will even watch Central Intelligence and think that's a good movie, because I think that Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a very funny human.
OK, so check that out.
OK, other things.
You know what?
I want to spend some time on the Federalist Papers here, so I'm just going to skip right over things I hate.
Guess what?
Too bad.
OK, so let's talk Federalist Papers.
The reason I want to spend some extra time today is because this is one of the more important Federalist Papers.
Every week we do a Federalist Paper.
Today we are on Federalist Number 10.
This is one of the most famous.
This one is by James Madison.
This is the one where he talks about how the organization of the Constitution of the United States Helps defeat the power of faction.
So what he says is, by a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
So what he says basically, a faction is any political group of people organizing against another group of people or organizing against a future interest.
He says there are two methods of curing the mischiefs of fashion.
The one?
A faction.
The one, by removing its causes.
The other, by controlling its effects.
There are, again, two methods of removing the causes of factions.
The one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence.
The other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.
So here's what he says.
He says, basically, if you want to stop factions from tearing a society apart, stop the majority from hurting the minority, or the minority from hurting the majority, there are only two ways of doing that.
The one is to get rid of the causes of factions, so make everybody think the same way.
The other is by controlling its effects.
If you want to get rid of everybody thinking differently, the only way to do that is by getting rid of liberty on the one hand, or by giving every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests through training.
He says that getting rid of the causes is a fool's errand.
He says if you destroy liberty, that's worse than the disease.
He says liberty is to faction what errors to fire, an ailment without which it instantly expires.
He says that getting rid of liberty is like getting rid of air because you want to get rid of bad animals.
You get rid of all animals.
He says that also having everybody agree is unwise.
He says as long as the reason of man continues fallible and he has liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.
And as long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinion and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on one another.
And the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.
In other words, what he's saying is even if you could try to reason everybody to the proper solutions, people are actually not driven by reason.
They're driven by passion and then they make excuses for the passions that they seek in politics.
He also points out faction is not going to be cured basically without fascism.
He actually dramatically foresees Marx.
He says that there will always be material inequality in a free society because people have different abilities.
He says the diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.
He says we're always going to fall into mutual animosities based on our varying viewpoints and different abilities.
And he says legislation means that we're judges in our own case.
If you were going to judge between the rich and the poor, you really can't have them just vote on it because now you're a judge in your own case.
So what do we have to do?
That leaves us with the second solution, and that is we have to control its effect.
So, if we have a minority seeking to impose on the majority, we don't have a problem, right?
Because the minority can't impose on the majority.
But what if a majority wants to impose on a minority?
Then we have a serious problem.
And he says no informal checks and balances will suffice.
He says either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered by number and local situation Unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression.
So what he says is if you have a big republic with lots of varying interests it's hard to actually motivate a majority to curb the rights of others.
He says pure democracy is going to fail because in a pure democracy you can just have the majority all over the place vote for one policy.
But a republic is better.
Right?
And then he differentiates between a democracy and a republic.
This is very, very important.
The reason it's important is because you'll hear people say stupid things like, America is a democracy.
America is not a democracy, it's a republic.
Or there's no difference between American democracy and an American republic.
There are two major differences, and Madison spells them out clearly.
He says, first, So you can have a bigger republic than you can have a democracy.
Very hard to have a democracy of 300 million because having 300 million people vote on any topic is going to fail.
citizens and greater sphere of country over which the latter may be extended.
So you can have a bigger republic than you can have a democracy.
Very hard to have a democracy of 300 million because having 300 million people vote on any topic is going to fail.
It's hard to even get people to vote for local dog catcher.
So what he says is, as far as the number of legislators, first, you can't have too many If you have too few, it begins to become an oligarchy.
And if you have too many, it's hard to get anything done.
And then he says, also, a large republic means that it will be difficult to coordinate interests.
In a small republic, you could have A majority that elects a couple of politicians and they become dictators.
But in a large majority, in a large republic, it's hard to get all of the interests to coordinate.
He says, the smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it.
The fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party.
And the smaller the number of individuals composing that majority, the smaller the compass within which they are placed.
So it's easy to become oppressive.
Instead, he says, we need localism on most levels, but broader republicanism for the big stuff.
He says the influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states.
A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction and part of the Confederacy, but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source.
You won't have Catholic rule or Mormon rule or Jewish rule or Protestant rule in the United States because there's too much diversity.
He says any bad policy should basically be cancelled out.
Any oppressive policy should be cancelled out.
Now, this was largely true in the United States, except for the massive injustice of slavery, in which federalism prevented the imposition of a better policy on the states.
It was a two-edged sword.
If there was bad policy in the states, the federal government didn't really have the capacity to stop it.
But if there was bad policy in the states in some other ways, then the federal government also didn't become that policy.
The federal government was never dominated by slaveholders.
It was dominated by people who were in favor of the states having their own policy on it, which is not quite the same thing.
In effect, it is.
But in theory, it is not.
In any case, the whole point here is that the diversity of viewpoints makes for a large republic A more liberty-oriented system, right?
You're not getting rid of faction, per se, so when people lament faction itself, that's silly.
You can't get rid of faction, but you can control its effects.
That's what Federalist No.
10 is about, and Madison very clearly lays out why.
Okay, so, we will be back.
We will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest news, and we look forward to seeing you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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