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March 5, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:28
Hollywood’s Night Of Posturing | Ep. 488
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Time Text
Hollywood mocks Trump, postures about sexual harassment, and generally annoys everybody who doesn't live in Hollywood.
We'll talk about it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so this is the show that we do after the Oscars where everybody on the left gets super annoyed after all the virtue signaling and all the politics of last night and all the politics that Hollywood routinely shoves in the faces of Americans.
If you respond to that, it's considered bad taste.
Never mind that it was pretty stacked politically from the left.
Never mind that it was openly acknowledged by the people on the stage.
If you respond to that, then you see you're being triggered.
If you respond to that, if you point out that it's political, if you point out that Hollywood is pushing a particular political agenda, this makes you the bad guy.
We'll talk about all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so as I say, one of my great irritations in life is this game that is played by folks in Hollywood in the entertainment community where they make a bunch of content and they do it with politics explicitly in mind.
And then if you respond to that, then it's you who are being oversensitives.
So, if you say that The Shape of Water, aka Grinding Nemo, a movie in which a woman has sex with a fish, but only after she is helped by a communist, a gay guy, and a black woman, and she herself is mute, she helps a fish escape to her bathtub where she has sex with it, If you say this may have some left leanings, if you say this may have some political messages, then you are saying, how dare you mention that shit?
It is a great piece of art.
How dare you?
Who do you think you are?
Right?
It doesn't matter that people who have worked on the movie say it's political.
It doesn't matter that critics have said it's political.
It doesn't matter that viewers know it's political, because it's obviously political.
If you point out that it's political, no.
How dare you call it SJW Splash?
You're oversensitive.
You're ruining the art.
Just terrible.
If you mention.
They call me by your name, which won Best Original Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay last night.
If you mention that that's a story about a 24-year-old dude seducing a 17-year-old dude, which means that the dude who he's seducing is underage, and that if you made that movie about a man and a woman, this would now be part of the Me Too movement.
Or if you mention that if that guy who's 24 was named Kevin Spacey, he'd be banned from Hollywood for doing that in real life.
No, how dare you?
It's a beautiful love story that has no political agenda at all.
None.
No political agenda.
If you mention that there were a slate of movies last night that were mediocre at best, but were praised to the skies because of the intersectionality of the people who made them.
So, for example, Lady Bird.
Meh.
Just a meh movie.
As Sonny Bunch puts it correctly, it is a longish episode of Roseanne.
If you say that, if you point out that Greta Gerwig's movie is like, eh, it's not the worst movie ever, but it's not the best movie ever, that's because you must hate women.
If you don't pay attention, If you think that Black Panther was like a good action movie, like a nice good action flick, but it wasn't the most important movie of all time, you are politicizing it.
Not the New York Times, which ran a thousand pieces, a thousand thing pieces, about how it was the most important movie ever.
Right?
If you say it may not be the most important movie ever, then you are the problem and you're triggered.
Here's the deal, folks.
I'm not angry about any of this.
I'm not upset about any of this.
I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of people who overtly state that they are acting in political fashion.
And the minute you say, well, you know, I'm not really fond of politics being shoved in my face.
They go, oh, clown nose on.
No, we're just, we're just your jesters.
We're just your entertainers.
We're just here to entertain.
So, what really ripped the mask off last night is Jimmy Kimmel made a joke in the middle of the Oscars.
First of all, of course Jimmy Kimmel was asked back because now he is, as Guy Benson puts it, the Pope of Hollywood.
He is the secular Pope.
And Jimmy Kimmel, who somehow has elevated himself from staring at boobs on The Man Show and asking women to find out what's in his crotch with their faces, legitimately, right?
He's moved on from that to being the Me Too, anti-gun, Pro-Obamacare spokesperson for the left.
So he was asked last night to do his routine, and his routine was predictably not funny in the slightest.
So, here's my honest take on the Oscars.
I did not watch one minute of this live, and I was much happier for it.
I watched the highlights later.
Okay, so I'm taking some of this on faith.
That he wasn't good last night, I'm taking that from the critics and the ratings, which were abysmal.
I'm taking it also from seeing clips of him, because they're not funny.
I can't overall give you, like, every minute of the Oscars, because I didn't watch every minute, because I have a happy life.
And there's no reason why I, like most Americans, should have to suffer through this garbage.
But in any case, Jimmy Kimmel rips the mask off of what Hollywood has been saying for years.
But it's so funny.
When Hollywood says things, we're allowed to take it seriously.
But if we say it in the conservative movement, then we're bad.
We're terrible.
So here's what Jimmy Kimmel said last night.
Of the nine Best Picture nominees, only two of them made more than $100 million.
But that's not the point.
We don't make films like Call Me By Your Name for money.
We make them to upset Mike Pence.
Okay, and the reason that gets a big laugh is because it's true.
It's because it's true.
So people are saying, well, you think the author of Call Me By Your Name?
It's a joke!
You think the author of Call Me By Your Name was really thinking of Mike Pence?
No, I don't think he was thinking of Mike Pence specifically, but I'm sure that the author of Call Me By Your Name was thinking, I'm making a very significant film because it's important that Americans see that homosexual love stories are just as real and intense as heterosexual love stories.
I promise you that that was going through his head.
Because of course it was going through his head.
You wouldn't expect anything else to go through the guy's head.
Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with him.
Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with his motive.
But to suggest there's no political motive at all is silly.
Now, when I did my book, Primetime Propaganda, in 2011, I went and I spoke to dozens, a hundred, people who are like the top creators in Hollywood.
The people who created Friends, the people who created Soap, the people who created Golden Girls, the people who created America's Funniest Home Videos.
Legitimately, every show that was a top show from the 1950s all the way forward to the 2000s, I interviewed somebody from that show.
And the message that I got from virtually everyone is, of course we put our politics in our films.
Of course we put our politics in our TV shows.
Would you expect us to do any differently?
And the answer was, no, I don't expect you to do anything differently.
But the great lie that they hid behind was, well, we put our politics in there not because we are propagandists.
No, no, no, no, no.
We put our politics in there because it's what the audience demands.
When we make a show like Friends, and we have a lesbian wedding first season.
Or when, in later seasons, Ross and Rachel have a baby out of wedlock and they're in love with each other but we don't let them get married because that would be too conventional.
When we do all of that, that's just because the audience wants to hear that perspective.
It's something the audience wants to hear.
And look, the ratings prove it.
And were the ratings for Friends good?
Yes, they were.
But Kimmel points out the truth here.
The truth is, Hollywood would make that stuff no matter what.
Because people in Hollywood want to feel good about themselves.
It's so funny.
People talk about the D.C.
cocktail parties.
Talk about the D.C.
cocktail circuit.
They talk about how all these people in D.C.
want to get together and go to these she-she parties where they hang out.
That actually happens in Hollywood.
Okay?
Talk to anyone who has worked in Hollywood.
These cocktail parties?
They're not as common in D.C.
They are really, really, really common in Hollywood.
Everybody in Hollywood goes to cocktail parties.
This is how they get jobs.
And one of the ways they get jobs is by talking to each other about how they virtue-signaled this year.
They talk to each other about what kind of difference they're making for the world.
Just like the ridiculous fictional creators of Google in Silicon Valley.
They go around talking about how they're going to make the world better through better compression algorithms.
This is what they do.
They go around talking about how their film really made a difference in lives.
This is how they think, because if they really thought that they were around to just make movies of people clubbing each other with sticks, and that we all laugh and enjoy them because, hey, we all like movies, they wouldn't feel very fulfilled.
There's a movie called Sullivan's Travels from the 1940s, a great movie.
And the whole movie is about this guy who wants to make comedies.
He's a comic writer and he makes comedies, these very famous comedies.
And then he decides he wants to make his deep film because he feels unfulfilled.
He feels like he hasn't made his contribution to the art.
And so he goes out on the road as a homeless guy.
And he experiences all sorts of craziness and suffering.
All this terrible stuff happens to him.
And he comes back and he realizes he ends up in a chain gang.
And they showed these guys comedies at night, some of his comedies.
And he realizes that's me doing something for the world.
That's something Hollywood folks do not understand.
They don't want to make their comedies.
They don't want to just do what it is that we enjoy them doing.
They don't want to make Thor Ragnarok.
They want to make Call Me By Your Name.
They may make Thor Ragnarok so that they can pay the bills, but what they actually want to make is Call Me By Your Name.
And so when Jimmy Kimmel says, when he reveals there, that what they're actually doing is making films specifically designed so that they can feel good about themselves, that it makes them feel good to slap Mike Pence, it makes them feel good to slap people in the middle of the country, that is true.
Now, when Jimmy Kimmel says it, we can all take it seriously.
But if I say it, then it's because I'm politicizing the issue.
I remember we did the exact same thing with regard to, for example, Joe Biden.
So, back in the early 1990s, there was a show called Murphy Brown.
Murphy Brown had Cameron, uh, what was the name of the woman, Candace Bergen, playing the lead.
Candace Bergen had a baby out of wedlock.
And Dan Quayle said, "This is not good for the country.
It is better if you have mothers and fathers having babies on TV." This is propaganda from the left.
And Dan Quill was ripped up and down.
It was his Murphy Brown moment.
How dare he suggest that this was politics?
It wasn't politics.
It was just TV.
It was just TV.
And then Joe Biden came out in the mid-2000s, right after, or late 2008, 2009.
He came out, and he was talking about Murphy Brown, and he was talking about Will and Grace, and he said, of course TV has changed minds.
Without Will and Grace, would people have been so accepting of same-sex marriage?
And the answer, of course, is no.
Propaganda has an effect.
That effect is to propagandize.
That's the intended goal.
And so when Jimmy Kimmel says that they put profit aside to make some stuff like Call Me By Your Name or The Shape of Water, this is true.
Does that mean it's deeply wrong and deeply... No!
They can do whatever they want.
It's a free country.
That's fine.
But...
Me acknowledging that they're political is no different than them acknowledging that they are political and that profits, while important to make sure that they boost their industry, their business is no different from my business.
The difference is I'm honest about it.
I am here to push a certain political point of view, to push principles that I think are important.
I'm not doing it just to respond to the market.
In fact, I take pride in the fact that we at The Daily Wire don't just respond to the market.
It's why we make certain editorial decisions.
It's why we don't show the names and faces of mass shooters.
I'm sure that hurts us in the click count, but that is something we are willing to do.
We're willing to take a hit.
And I'm honest about the hits that we are willing to take for a particular political view.
It's why I never fell onto the Trump train to the extent that I was talking about everything being mega, mega, mega genius, and I'm sure I would have made more money if I had done that.
Because there are certain principles I think are important.
The difference is Hollywood has principles it thinks are important, but they lie about it.
They won't tell you that.
They will say that they are just there to make entertaining content and the politics are secondary.
Utterly untrue.
Not true.
Kimmel makes that suggestion.
Kimmel is correct.
What Kimmel says here is right.
And you have to keep that in the back of your mind when you watch the rest of the Oscars.
Because what the Oscars really are about We're not just a moment for Hollywood to award the best filmmakers and to show you what's best in film.
It's not about that at all.
What Hollywood's Academy Awards are really about is what Kimmel is saying.
It is about the slap.
It is about making people in the middle of the country feel morally less.
It is about the suggestion that Hollywood is showing the best of itself.
It's Hollywood's book report at the end of the year, where they demonstrate why they should be there.
And according to Hollywood, the reason they should be there is not because they entertain us, not because they make movies we want to watch, but because they do important things.
And so they have to reward important movies.
And you can see Hollywood's shifting standards for itself over the course of Oscar history.
And I'll explain that in just a second.
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Alrighty.
So one of the reasons that you can see that Hollywood has shifted its view of itself is the change in the demographic of the people who actually watch Oscar films.
So it used to be that Oscar films between 1983 and 2000, 2003 really, virtually every Oscar film was a major winner in terms of the box office.
Virtually every Oscar film You did really well at the box office, at least the films that won Best Picture.
So I'm going to look up the list right now.
And I will tell you, there has not been an actual good movie that has won Best Picture at the Oscars, like a great movie that's won Best Picture at the Oscars, in my opinion, since 2010.
And there hasn't been a box office winner at the Oscars for nearly 15 years.
For nearly 15 years.
It's really an amazing, amazing thing.
Let's look back at the best picture winners.
So, 2016, the best picture winner was Moonlight, which made like five bucks at the box office.
Before that, it was Spotlight.
Fine movie.
Completely forgettable.
Again, I enjoyed Spotlight.
I think Moonlight is a fine film.
It was obviously the social justice winner because it was about gay black people in the inner city.
Whatever.
That's fine.
But that's not exactly designed to be a box office busting winner.
Spotlight won the year before that.
The year before that, it was Birdman, which I thought was just an excreble film.
I just thought it was an awful, awful movie.
12 Years a Slave, which I think is a very good movie, but not obviously one that's going to bust down the box office doors.
It's about slavery.
It is not a highly entertaining film.
I think it's a well-made film.
I don't think it's as well-made as, for example, Schindler's List.
But 12 Years a Slave is a good movie.
But is it like an all-time classic movie?
Probably not.
Argo, which is completely forgettable now.
Do you even remember Argo?
I remember when it won.
Like, I saw it.
It's fine.
It's fun.
But it's not like, Argo is not an important movie.
The Artist?
Right?
None of these movies made more than $5 at the box office.
The King's Speech was the last really great movie that I think was a big winner.
At the Oscars.
The Hurt Locker was the year before that.
Slumdog Millionaire, which did decently at the box office, but won over The Dark Knight.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
That was 2008.
It's been 10 years.
Does anyone even watch Slumdog Millionaire now?
It's a fine film.
I mean, I enjoyed it.
But it's not The Dark Knight.
No Country for Old Men is 2007.
That was the last big box office winner that actually did really, really well at the Oscars.
It was No Country for Old Men.
So that was 2007.
And before that was The Departed, which, meh.
Okay, Crash, the worst movie of all time.
Okay, Million Dollar Baby.
Again, okay, but sorry, movies about euthanasia don't exactly blow it up at the box office.
And then, by 2003, I think it was really in the Bush era that this happened.
2003, by the middle of the Bush era, you can see the shift for Hollywood.
The shift goes from, we are here to make movies that entertain you, to we are here to make movies that are specifically designed to say something.
Say something important.
Because before 2003, all of the movies that were winning were big box office winners.
The reason this is important is the people in Hollywood, the people who vote at the Academy Awards, see their role differently.
They see their role in life.
Seriously.
As we are here in order to, in order not to make big movies that make lots of money and earn us all enormous paychecks, that's something nice that we do.
But what we're really here to do is push the message.
And you can see that from the Oscar winners.
Because before that, it was Lord of the Rings, Return of the King.
It was Gladiator.
It was Shakespeare in Love, which did really well.
It was Titanic.
It was Braveheart.
It was Forrest Gump.
It was Schindler's List and Unforgiven.
It was Silence of the Lambs.
It was Dances with Wolves.
Right?
Every other year, it was a top 5 to top 10 box office movie that was winning.
And we haven't had one of those in like 15 years.
Okay, there's a reason for that, and it's because Hollywood does have messages it wants to promote.
So we're going to talk about some of the messages that they wanted to promote at the Oscars last night.
Okay, so, here, let's start with this.
And I think this says it all.
Last night, Emma Watson showed up to the Oscars with a new tattoo.
Her new tattoo said on it, Time's Up.
There was only one problem with her tattoo.
It did not have an apostrophe.
So she actually just has something that says, times up, which I don't even know what that means without the apostrophe.
So, you know, no regards for Emma Watson on her tattoo.
But this was the theme of the Oscars last night.
The theme of the Oscars last night were men were bad.
Men generally are bad.
But here's the thing.
Hollywood knows that men are bad.
And they're good about this.
They get it.
They get men are bad, particularly white men.
White men are really bad.
Hey, white men are terrible.
And the way that we know that white men are terrible is because Hollywood, on the one hand, was pushing diversity last night, meaning diversity of skin, not viewpoint, diversity of skin color, diversity of gender.
But when it came to men, you know, men, bad men, those people, they're just bad.
They're bad people.
Here's Jimmy Kimmel last night saying, what we really need in America is more men without penises.
Thankfully, Hollywood is there to provide them in ample supply.
Here is Jimmy Kimmel.
Oscar is the most beloved and respected man in Hollywood.
And there's a very good reason why.
Just look at him.
Keeps his hands where you can see them.
Never says a rude word.
And most importantly, no penis at all.
He is literally a statue of limitations.
And that's the kind of man we need more of in this town.
That's right.
What we need more is not virtuous men, not men who stand up for women, not men who use their aggression in positive ways, not men who get married and have kids, not men who use their penis properly.
No, that would be too limiting.
What we need is men without penises.
Now, it's really funny.
C.S.
Lewis once wrote an entire essay called Men Without Chests, and his entire essay is about when you have a civilization of men who have been scooped, their value has been scooped out, when they've been given nothing to live for, they become a problem.
They become problems.
Men Without Chests is one of the great essays in all of Western literature.
And the entire premise is, when you remove masculinity from men, you are doing them damage, and you are turning them into hulks of themselves, into husks of themselves.
And here you have a guy on stage at one of the most watched events of the year, talking about how it would be great if men had no penises.
It would just be fantastic.
Now, I know.
We're supposed to—oh, it's just comedy.
But then, the whole point of comedy is that there's an element of truth to it, is there not?
This is what we've been told for years.
If Hollywood says that men—at the very end of the show, by the way, Jimmy Kimmel reiterated this.
Like, at the very end of the show, Kimmel actually suggested that he wishes that he were a woman, which I don't know what the limitation on him is.
I mean, one thing that we have learned is that if you wish to be a woman, don't let anyone stand in the way of your dreams, man.
You can be a woman.
If Jimmy Kimmel wants to be a woman, he can make this happen.
If he really admires men without Then he presumably can actually go and take care of business.
I mean, this is something we can—it's a free country.
But— Again, this is the message that Hollywood wants to promote.
This is what Hollywood actually wants to push.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
OK, so that was the main message.
And so how did Hollywood take this on?
Because the truth is that the big problem in Hollywood, of course, has been aggressive men who have not had any moral limitations put on them, who scorn the fundamental institutions of Western civilization, like marriage and chivalry.
They scorn these things.
And then they have used their power positions in order to victimize women.
So how did Hollywood deal with that last night?
Did they face up to it?
Did they face up to it?
Of course they didn't face up to it.
So, here is, this was, I think, the key.
There are three Weinstein accusers.
Three accusers of Harvey Weinstein got up, and they were pushing the Time's Up movement.
So this is Selma Hayek, Annabella Sciarro, and Ashley Judd.
All three of them had accusations to make about Harvey Weinstein.
Annabella Sciarro was apparently blacklisted by Weinstein, Ashley Judd says that Weinstein abused her, and Selma Hayek called Weinstein a monster in the New York Times.
Now, I know all of that because I actually researched this stuff.
If you watched the show last night, you wouldn't know any of that.
You would just see three beautiful women on stage making extraordinarily vague references about something bad that happened in Hollywood.
We can't mention its name.
We can't talk about what happened.
We can say things like, time's up.
Or we can say, me too.
But those are buzzwords.
We don't actually know what happened.
Like, if you were just a bit alien and you came and you watched the Oscars last night, what you would assume is that Hollywood was rewarding itself for how it treats women, not castigating itself for how it treats women.
Because watch this, okay?
Watch the vague references.
As Jim Garrity at National Review says, this is all fortune cookie stuff.
Listen to what they actually have to say.
There's not one mention of sexual abuse, sexual assault, or sexual misconduct anywhere in this clip.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
And then they followed up this clip with a montage talking about how wonderful Hollywood is to women and black people and Indian Americans and the vast panorama of colors the cinemascope of Hollywood.
I'll get to all of that in a second.
I'll show you this clip because it really is an amazing thing how Hollywood ended around the biggest scandal that hit Hollywood over the last 50 years.
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Okay, so again, back to the Me Too moment at the Oscars.
So here are these three women, all of whom were victimized by Harvey Weinstein, apparently.
And you never get one mention of this.
Not one.
Here's what they had to say.
It's an honor to be here tonight.
This year, many spoke their truth, and the journey ahead is long, but slowly a new path has emerged.
The changes we are witnessing are being driven by the powerful sound of new voices, of different voices, of our voices, joining together in a mighty chorus that is finally saying, time's up.
Okay, do you have any idea what they're talking about?
Like really, I mean, if you just came in from the street, and you had no idea what was going on in Hollywood, you hadn't read any of the headlines, you hadn't done any of the research, would you recognize any of these three women, except you might say, okay, there's the lady from Double Jeopardy, and there's the lady from that movie about Frida Kahlo?
Legitimately, that's all you would see is just these people making really vague references to the diversity of voices, and then they follow up this diversity of voice stuff with a montage.
And is the montage about women who have been abused in Hollywood?
Is the montage about taking responsibility for that abuse?
See, here's the thing that Hollywood did last night.
They had Jimmy Kimmel get on stage and talk about how all men all over the world are responsible for evil against women, so it's everyone else's fault.
Maybe that includes Hollywood, but it really is everyone's fault, because it's penises that are to blame, of course.
Penises.
They're the worst.
Except, in fact, if there's a movie that wins Best Picture or Best Adapted Screenplay about a 24-year-old man having sex with a 17-year-old man.
Then penises are not the worst.
Then penises are great.
But penises are the worst when it comes to, like, male treatment of women.
Male treatment of other men?
You know, treatment of underage men, particularly.
Not a big deal, unless it's Kevin Spacey.
But if you find all this confusing, we can clear all this up for you, because we have a montage last night.
Over at the Oscars.
And the montage was all about how Hollywood, it turns out, is a welcoming place.
And now it turns out that they've turned the corner in Hollywood.
You see, before they even knew they had a problem, they had the cure.
And the cure was intersectionality.
What we needed was more people making movies based on identity, so that they could have a more diverse viewpoint, or something.
And somehow, this is going to cure the problem of men abusing women in Hollywood.
By the way, if you think any of this stuff is going to have a long-lasting impact on Hollywood, you've got to be joking.
That is going to have five seconds of impact.
The media will move on.
Within two years, men will be back to abusing women exactly the way they did before in Hollywood, because Hollywood has no moral standards.
I know.
I've lived here my entire life.
Here is the montage last night in which Hollywood, which should be doing penance, right?
They should be doing mea culpas.
Instead, they're there explaining that they are actually our moral betters.
I haven't raped anyone.
You haven't raped anyone.
You haven't sexually harassed or abused anyone.
You haven't made movies about people you've sexually harassed or abused.
But it's really Hollywood that has to tell you a thing or two.
So here's Hollywood explaining its mission in life.
This entire fall, the Me Too, the Time's Up movements, everyone is getting a voice to express something that has been happening forever, not only in Hollywood, but in every walk of life.
OK, pause it there for one second.
Sorry, OK, so number one, that Mira Sorvino was abused by Harvey Weinstein.
Did she say anything about that there?
No, she didn't.
No.
If you were watching that, you'd have no idea what she's talking about.
Continue.
Should they?
Some of our best work has come from turmoil.
We have been in denial about the things at work.
Some of my favorite movies are movies by straight white dudes about straight white dudes.
Now straight white dudes can watch movies starring me and you relate to that.
It's not that hard.
I've done it my whole life.
Okay, pause it right there.
And then there's the cheer, right?
There's the cheer for the guy from The Big Sick and from Silicon Valley, directed by the way, created by Mike Judge, who was a straight white man.
So there he is.
And that's the thing, right?
Now Hollywood is gonna pat itself on the back because look, look at all these new creators we're bringing to the fore.
Now, some of these movies are actually good, right?
The Big Sick is a pretty good movie.
Greta Gerwig's movie is not particularly good, but it got all sorts of plaudits.
The Big Sick is a better movie than Greta Gerwig's movie by a fairly long shot.
But there's Greta Gerwig talking about, she directed Lady Bird.
It's an amazing film.
How do we know?
Because she's a woman.
And this is the way we work now.
Right?
We have to know that only a woman can direct Batgirl.
Right?
Joss Whedon can't direct Batgirl.
Only a woman can direct Batgirl.
And only a black person can direct Black Panther.
And only, presumably, a transgender person can direct a movie about a transgender person.
And that's how we know if the movie's good.
Not whether it's good or not.
But because Hollywood is providing all sorts of representation, right?
Representation.
We don't have to be moral, but as long as we have intersectional representation, that is truly what matters.
So remember, this montage started with them talking about Me Too.
Remember, all the way back, like a minute and a half ago, when they were talking about Me Too?
Does anything here have to do with Me Too?
Does anything here have to do with Time's Up?
Not a thing.
Not one thing.
Zero things have to do with Me Too or Time's Up.
That this is the way that Hollywood elides its own moral culpability in one of the great scandals of late 20th and early 21st centuries, and then suggests that they're actually winning because Kumail Manjani used to have to watch movies by white guys and identify with the characters.
Like, listen.
I'm happy to identify with characters who are not of my race.
I've said this all my life.
I'm Jewish.
I've identified with characters who are not of my race my entire life, who are not of my religion, my entire life.
Did it ever bother me one iota?
No.
And do I think that, like, it's deeply important that now people identify with an Indian guy, or a Pakistani guy, because I think that Nanjani is Pakistani?
No, I don't think that that matters a lot either.
I mean, if the movie's good, the movie's good.
I don't care.
But apparently that's not the way Hollywood is supposed to work anymore.
We know that Hollywood is good because Hollywood is making movies with diverse people, whether or not the movies are good.
So you can continue with this montage demonstrating how much better the people of Hollywood are than you are as a human.
Thelma and Louise came out.
Oh wow, Thelma and Louise.
Terrible movie, by the way.
This changes everything.
We're going to see so many more movies starring female characters.
That didn't happen.
But this is now that moment.
OK, we can stop that.
OK, right there.
OK, so the idea now is we're going to get a lot of movies starring female characters.
Then now we're finally going to get more movies like Delma and Louise.
God forbid we should get more movies like Delma and Louise, one of the worst movies ever made.
I'm fine with female characters in starring roles.
Wonder Woman, I thought, was a very good movie last year.
And I like Al Gadot, so that's great.
But, again, how about quality movies?
I saw a study in the New York Times today, it was really funny, saying how many of the Best Picture winners, percentage of lines read by men versus percentage of lines read by women.
They neglect to mention the fact that the one that won last night was about a woman who is mute.
Okay, it's sort of hard to make that calculation when the woman in the movie is mute.
How about minutes of screen time?
That's a much better gauge of whether it's a male-centric movie or a female-centric movie than number of lines spoken by women.
There are a lot of great performances by women in which the acting is not in the lines.
Okay, we're going to get to Hollywood being better than you in just a second and their continued push for the notion that while they are, in fact, some of the least morally By the way, you want to know why Trump won?
This is why Trump won.
When you have a bunch of people from Hollywood lecturing you about how they are the great moral leaders, while making some of the least morally responsible films of all time, and being very irresponsible in their own personal lives, then yeah, that's...
No one's going to listen to you when you say that Lena Dunham should be our shining star of morality.
Okay, we're going to get to more of this in just a second, but for that you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
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All righty.
So let's talk a little bit more about the virtue signaling over the Oscars and how ridiculous it was.
So, my favorite point to this was, this is a thing they're doing now, where Hollywood stars meet the commoners.
They did this last year, where they brought a bunch of people into the Kodak Theater in the middle of the Oscars, and they did it again this year with a bunch of people who are starring in these movies that none of these people have ever seen, right?
They're all there to see A Wrinkle in Time, which is a kid's movie, which actually might make some money at the box office, but all these Oscar nominees, who no one's heard of, Walk into the theater and start interacting with the audience.
Oh, don't you see celebrities?
They're just like you.
They're just like you.
Okay, as someone who took, I think in the last week and a half, I probably took 2,500 pictures of people, people who are fans of the show and enjoy, there's nothing special about celebrities.
In fact, celebrities are some of the most empty people that you will ever meet, depending on what it is that they do for a living.
But this sort of We're here to hobnob with the common folks, with the hoi polloi, before we go back to our shining beautiful palatial estates on the hill and never see any of you again.
It really is kind of galling.
So here they are walking into the midst of the commoners and demonstrating to the commoners that they, too, are regular people before they go off with their million-dollar salaries and their special sports cars with their beautiful lovers.
Here they are last night.
Let's fire... Do not aim the hot dogs at the vegetarians.
Oh, there you go!
Ansel, go ahead and fire that thing into the crowd.
So, Armie Hammer is literally firing hot dogs into the crowd.
This is what we have become, right?
These are our betters, firing literally food into the crowd.
I mean, if there was ever a more symbolic Marie Antoinette let them eat cake moment than this, firing hot dogs into a crowd of commoners, ha ha!
We shall feed the commoners with these hot dogs from our giant hot dog gun!
And then they lecture us.
It's just unbelievable.
My favorite thing last night about the lecture was this.
So Kobe Bryant, who settled out of court on a sexual assault case, right?
He won an Oscar last night because there was a short film that was made out of his retirement letter about dreams of basketball or whatnot.
He won an Oscar last night, which means that Kobe Bryant has now won as many Oscars as Gary Oldman, which is really ridiculous.
So Kobe Bryant gets up there, wins an Oscar on Me Too Night after settling out of court many years back with a woman who accused her of raping her in a room in Colorado.
Here is Kobe Bryant dunking on Laura Ingraham in the crowd cheering.
Whatever form your dream may take, it's through passion and perseverance that the impossible is possible.
Well, I don't know if it's possible.
I mean, as basketball players, we're really supposed to shut up and dribble, but I'm glad we can do a little bit more than that.
Okay, there he is ripping Laura Ingram because we're supposed to shut up and dribble.
But it's so funny, the entire crowd is totally fine with Kobe Bryant, a guy who settled out of court on sexual assault charges, you know, doing this routine.
So just amazing.
These are our moral betters.
You can tell what Hollywood wants to push.
Again, the Oscars are not about Hollywood demonstrating its best.
It's about them demonstrating what they think is best about themselves to you.
That is what Hollywood is about.
So there is a song that was performed last night from the movie Marshall called Stand Up for Something, and I guess it was Common and Andra Day who are performing this song.
And I guess it's mostly like sort of a beat poetry about politics.
These days we dance between love and hate.
Don't know the date, so we stay awake.
A knee we take for our soul's sake.
New victory all for others' gain.
A president that chose with hate.
We don't control our fate because God is great.
When they go low, we stay in the heights.
I stand for peace, love, and women's rights.
Okay, they stand for peace, love, and women's rights, don't you understand?
When they go low, we go high, but we kneel for the anthem, and the president leads with hate.
Yeah, no politicking here.
But by the way, again, if I comment on politics, it's my fault.
You watch, the headlines after this show will be, Shapiro rips into Oscars because he's bitter about the— I didn't even watch it, man.
Okay?
Like, do what you want to do.
But I'm pointing out that the culture gap in this country, the cultural betterers, they wonder in Hollywood why we don't take them seriously on politics.
They wonder in Hollywood why there are so many people in the middle of the country who find Hollywood distasteful.
They wonder in Hollywood why it is that people in the middle of the country are only going to see their big-budget pictures and not any of their artsy films.
Maybe it's because you're constantly lecturing everybody in the middle of the country about how you're better than they are.
And then the minute that you say, listen, we don't like being lectured, they go, hey, we're just artists, man.
We're just artists.
You don't get to be propagandists, and admit that you're propagandists, and openly propagandize, and then pretend that you're just there for the art of it.
It doesn't work that way.
That's not the way that it works.
You can use messaging in your art, but that is messaging in your art, and you don't get to have it both ways.
This clown nose on, clown nose off routine is really irritating.
I think the greatest contrast here, by the way, is Common and Andra Day do this thing about, we're gonna kneel for the anthem.
Gary Oldman wins an Oscar, he thanks America, and listen to how the crowd responds.
I owe this and so much more to so many I have lived in America for the longest time and I am deeply grateful to her for the loves and the friendships I have made and the many wonderful gifts it has given me.
My home, my livelihood, my family, and now Oscar.
Thanks, America.
He talks about how great America is.
Dead silence in the hall.
Dead silence in the hall.
But big applause for Frances McDormand.
Of course, Frances McDormand wins Best Actress for what I thought was actually an overwrought performance in Three Billboards.
I liked Three Billboards.
I thought the movie was fine.
I thought the best thing in it was Woody Harrelson.
He's the only one who didn't win an Oscar.
Sam Rockwell, the guy who you'll remember from Iron Man 2, won an Oscar, and so did Frances McDormand, the woman you'll remember from Fargo.
She won an Oscar, too.
She got up at the end and she did a whole women's Women in movies routine, because, you know, if there's somebody who's really been victimized in the movie industry, it's Frances McDormand, who's now winning her second Oscar and has been working continuously for legitimately 25 years.
Here's Frances McDormand pushing inclusion riders.
She said this at the end of her speech, and nobody knows what she's talking about, but I will explain.
Because we all have stories to tell and projects we need financed.
Don't talk to us about it at the parties tonight.
Invite us into your office in a couple days, or you can come to ours, whichever suits you best, and we'll tell you all about them.
I have two words to leave with you tonight, ladies and gentlemen.
Inclusion rider.
OK, nobody knows what she's talking about.
An inclusion rider is a rider in contract that states that there must be parity with the number of women employees or black employees.
We have to have an intersectional contract.
Listen, she's happy.
If Frances McDormand wants to do that, that's fine.
That's fine.
But Hollywood ain't going to operate on inclusion riders because the reality is that Hollywood still needs to make a profit.
The sad truth of Hollywood is that none of the movies that won last night make Hollywood work.
Nobody watched the Oscars last night because of three billboards.
People watch the Oscars because of Thor Ragnarok.
Because that's how people engage with Hollywood.
People engage with Hollywood because of Black Panther and Thor Ragnarok and Wonder Woman.
And the reason they're not engaging with more serious content is because nobody in Hollywood will make more serious content that is not replete with nasty messages about traditional values or Hollywood's superiority to the rest of mankind.
The minute you make a serious Hollywood film that doesn't involve those things, that thing will do blockbuster at the box office.
But they won't do any of that.
They separate it into stuff that makes money and stuff that we have a message with.
And so long as they do that, then all the stuff that they outrun at the Oscars is the stuff nobody will watch.
And the stuff that actually makes it work is going to be all the money float stuff through Marvel or DC.
That's how all this is going to work.
Okay, so.
I want to move on from the Oscars and talk a little bit about President Trump's tariffs plan.
So, the president has now come out and says that it's time for a change on tariff policy.
Here is what he tweeted out.
He tweeted out that, quote, So, again, as I explained last week, tariffs are stupid.
Okay, so again, as I explained last week, tariffs are stupid.
The steel and aluminum industries are not dead.
And the stock market continues to drop because the president doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to these tariffs.
So, the stock market dropped immediately on opening about 100 points.
It is now up about 185 points.
It'll probably drop again.
It's very up and down right now because of the volatility in the stock market.
It's unclear what Trump is actually going to do on all of this.
It is true that Trump has promised this for a long time.
So, Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary who is most famous for falling asleep and drooling during meetings, he came out over the weekend.
He said no one should have been shocked by the tariff talk, which of course is true.
Almost a year ago, he commissioned the Commerce Department to do the studies on steel and aluminum.
They've been through any number of interagency reviews before they were released to the public.
So with a whole year of preparation, I don't know why anybody should have been so shocked.
OK, so he's right.
Nobody should have been shocked about this.
The only thing is that we were told that we shouldn't have to really pay attention to stuff that Trump was saying.
We should just pay attention to what he was doing.
If what he said during the campaign is what he does now, I'm going to be much less happy with his governance than I have been for the last several months.
Speaking of which, the media are making a big deal out of President Trump Over the weekend, he did an event and he praised China's president for life.
The president basically of China, the dictator of China, because voting ain't a thing over there, is now the president for life.
He's basically appointed himself to an endless term.
And CNN got hold of audio of Trump talking about this.
There's one thing Trump says that's disturbing and one thing the media is blowing wildly out of proportion.
Don't forget, China's great.
And Xi is a great gentleman.
He's now president for life.
You may want to give that a shot someday.
So we cut out some of the laughter there for time purposes, but the reality is that people are laughing all the way through.
When Trump says that he wants to give being president for life a shot one day, he's obviously joking.
He's obviously responding to the crowd.
That's what the media latched onto.
What they should have latched onto is the president talking about how wonderful a human being and how great Xi Jinping is, the president of China.
He is a communist dictator who represses his own people and leaves millions of people in suffering.
no, he's not a great guy.
No, he's not done a lot of great things.
And when the president praises the president of China that way, that is not a positive.
The president should not be doing that.
That's where people should really be directing theirire, not at the stupid line about president for life.
And no, he said that he thought that it was great that the president of China had declared himself president for life.
In that part, he was serious.
And that's absurd, of course.
You shouldn't have American leaders praising dictators.
That's just bad policy.
Now, speaking of bad policy, so all of these kids from Parkland are still going around doing a lot of media appearances.
A couple of these kids, Cameron Caskey, and I think this is David Hogg.
These are two of the kids you've seen the most.
They were on with Bill Maher over the weekend when they said some of the most obnoxious things ever.
If the goal here is to earn your way into America's hearts so that we pay attention to you on gun rights, this is not the way to do it.
Sincerely, I really do, to all of the generations before us, we sincerely accept your apology.
And we appreciate that you are willing to let us rebuild the world that you f***ed up.
Good luck trying.
OK, so that is the most obnoxious thing.
So what has that generation done, by the way?
Like, kids who are 17, what have millennials done?
Like, my generation.
I guess they formally label millennials people born between 81 and 96.
What have we actually done for the world, like the millennials?
The answer is, not a whole hell of a lot.
I mean, I think the baby boomers were pretty disastrous, but at least they gave us the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement.
What exactly have millennials done for the world?
Not much at all.
The arrogance of somebody saying that previous generations should apologize to us.
Guess what?
The world didn't start with you.
You live in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world, and previous generations have to apologize to you?
If you were born 500 years ago, you'd have been born into abject poverty by any global modern standard.
But we're supposed to pretend that these kids have been done some sort of essential wrong, not just by an evil shooter, which of course they were, but by an entire society of people who have done wrong to them.
All previous generations have not lived up to them.
Come on.
Come on, guys.
It's bad politics, it's bad press, and it's dumb.
It's not smart.
And again, it just tears America apart for no apparent reason, which I guess we're all now in the business of doing.
It's what we do at the Oscars, and it's what we do whenever there's a tragedy of which we all mourn.
We all have to tear each other apart.
It's just the thing that we're into.
OK.
Time for some things I like and some things I hate, and then we'll get to a Federalist paper.
Things I like.
So, something from Hollywood that I actually enjoy.
Maybe I have a bunch of people who are on the left, but it's a very enjoyable show.
It's a show, The Good Place.
If you haven't seen this show, it's very clever.
The entire premise of it is basically a woman dies and she goes to what is supposed to be heaven, but it turns out that on earth she was actually kind of a bad person.
Kristen Bell's character.
And so she's accidentally ended up in heaven, and she's trying to hide that from everybody because she's actually a bad person.
And the show is really good.
It actually gets better as time goes on.
So the first episodes are good.
The first couple episodes are really good.
It slows down for three or four, and then it gets a lot better.
You can go watch it at Netflix.
It's really worth watching.
And especially when the emissaries from hell come, it gets very, very funny.
So check this out.
This is The Good Place.
You, Eleanor Shellstrop, are dead.
Cool. - Foodie.
30 glasses of wine and no hangover.
This place rules!
These people might be good, but are they really that much better than me?
Did you fill your bra with shrimp?
No.
Yes.
So who's right?
Every religion guessed about 5%, except for Doug Forcett.
One night he got high on mushrooms and got like 92% correct.
This show's really funny.
What's funny about the show, actually, is it starts off as this very secular left version of what heaven is, right?
Everybody goes to heaven regardless of what they sort of did on earth, as long as they didn't take their shoes and their socks off on an airline flight, then they go to heaven.
And then it moves into some more interesting and convoluted moral questions.
Like, it's a show that makes It will actually drop references to Plato and Kant in the middle of the show, which is really fun, so check that out.
Okay, that's a thing that Hollywood is producing that I like.
Hollywood produces a lot of stuff that I like.
It's what makes me so upset when they pretend that they are not propagandists for particular viewpoints, particularly in their showcase, the Oscars.
Okay.
Okay, time for another thing that I like.
So, Bill Maher did something great last night, or on Friday night rather.
He was talking about the fake news drama, and he says that everybody is focusing on fake news because there is a lot of fake news out there, namely this perpetual outrage machine that seems to be dominating.
No wonder fake news resonates so much with Trump fans, because so much of it is fake.
Just nonsense made to keep you perpetually offended with an endless stream of controversies that aren't controversial, and outrages that aren't outrageous.
Because places like the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and Salon, they make their money by how many clicks they get.
Yes, the people who see themselves as morally superior are actually ignoring their sacred job of informing citizens of what's important, and instead sowing division for their own selfish ends.
All power to Bill Maher.
All kudos to Bill Maher.
That is exactly right.
The manufactured outrages of the day are just that.
They are stupid.
They are outrages that mean nothing.
And Maher is exactly right about this.
And the left traffic's in them.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So...
I could have devoted the entire show to things I hate, actually, if I had so chosen.
I could have just called it Oscars I Hate.
But instead, I will reserve one clip for Jordan Klepper over on Comedy Central.
So, speaking of Hollywood bias, there's not one right-wing or even remotely right-wing comedian on Comedy Central.
Like, there's no one of even mildly to the right tendencies.
If you are slightly to the right of Karl Marx, you do not belong on Comedy Central.
So Jordan Klepper has a new show on Comedy Central, which of course means he should be on CNN speaking about politics, because being a comedian means you should talk about politics, unless you're a comedian on the right, of course.
So here is Jordan Klepper on CNN talking about how it is time for America to get serious about guns.
I went through the process of what it would take for a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.
I talked to people on both sides of the Dickey Amendment and the argument with funding the CDC and quickly realized that in America there is so much more common ground.
I think it was really frustrating because that wasn't the narrative that was getting out into the public.
I did a special that was focusing on that.
Right.
As somebody who comes from Michigan, I have a lot of gun folks in my family and my surroundings.
Gun folks meaning people that own guns and want to ensure that there isn't gun control.
More gun control.
Well yeah, I think guns mean something different than what they mean in New York.
I would say, where hunting is an issue.
Right.
And so, for me, I felt like I was so frustrated because I got to talk to people who had guns and people who didn't have guns and saw that there was a different narrative here that wasn't being covered.
Okay, so there's Jordan Klepper from Comedy Central talking about how no one takes the gun debate very seriously because the small minority has a loud voice, etc., etc., etc.
Again, Comedy Central, not exactly an unbalanced, an unbiased source.
Okay, quick description of Federalist 18.
Thankfully, it's a federalist paper that is replete with historical retelling, so there's not a lot to say about it.
It's by Hamilton and Madison.
It's a continuation of why the Articles of Confederation are a failure.
In it, Hamilton and Madison give the example of the failure of the Grecian republics to avoid war with one another.
They talk about how the Grecian republics were basically constantly at war with one another because the confederate system under which they lived did not have a strong enough central government.
And they write, "Even in the midst of defensive and dangerous wars with Persia and Macedon, the members never acted in concert and were more or fewer of them eternally the dupes or hirelings of the common enemy.
The intervals of foreign war were filled up by domestic vicissitudes, convulsions, and carnage." And so the suggestion is a stronger centralized government will prevent the states from reaching out to foreign governments to form.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
with them against other states.
This, of course, has historically been true during the Civil War.
The South actually reached out to Great Britain in an attempt to make an alliance with Great Britain.
Any war like that is going to entail states reaching out to foreign sources and unending eternal discord inside the country itself.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover, Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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