All Episodes
Previous Next
March 28, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:41
Roseanne Is Back! | Ep. 505
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Roseanne is back with vengeance.
Journalism collapses on all sides.
And Senator Ted Cruz stops by, so we've got a big show for you.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
I do have many, many, many thoughts on the Roseanne premiere.
It had huge ratings, and we'll get into all of that.
I do think it's an important cultural moment, but not quite in the way that I think a lot of Republicans want it to be a huge cultural moment.
First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tripping.com.
When you plan a vacation, finding a place to stay that'll make everybody happy is usually really difficult, particularly for the right price.
And if you have a family, this is certainly true, right?
If you have small kids and you're staying in a one-bedroom hotel room, it is just disastrous, which is why you need Tripping.com.
Because Tripping.com lets you compare every home from the world's top vacation rental sites in one place to find the best deal on your perfect vacation rental.
My wife and I only use vacation rentals now.
We need a kitchenette or a kitchen so that we can actually cook.
So, this is what Tripping.com is for.
Vacation rentals are better.
We're talking more privacy, more space for everyone under one roof.
You really haven't experienced a great vacation until you've done one outside of a hotel room.
And instead gone to Tripping.com and gotten a vacation rental, a home away from home, again, washer, dryer.
If you're a parent, you're a young parent, or you just, you don't want to pack that heavily.
You don't want to bring a week's worth of clothes.
You just want to bring two days worth of clothes.
You need the washer, dryer.
Well, Tripping.com, make sure that you have all of these amenities.
Best of all, at Tripping.com, you can join the millions of travelers who find more savings with rates up to 80% less than traditional hotel rooms.
So if you're planning spring break on the beach in Florida, it's Tripping.com.
It doesn't matter if you're going to Lake Tahoe.
Tripping.com is everywhere.
And this year, save time and money when you book the vacation home of your dreams.
Tripping.com slash Shapiro.
That's T-R-I-P-P-I-N-G dot com slash Shapiro.
Tripping.com slash Shapiro.
Use that slash Shapiro so they know that we sent you and find your perfect vacation rental.
OK, so the big news of the night was cultural news.
So Roseanne Barr is back.
She'd been absent from the public scene for about 20 years.
Roseanne actually went off the air The show Roseanne went off the air in 1997.
So it's been 21 years since Roseanne Barr was on the air with a regular sitcom.
She did some reality TV stuff, but she wasn't world famous anymore.
And now she's back and she is back with a vengeance because the ratings on her show were just unbelievable.
Looking at the ratings right now on Roseanne's show, The Revival of Roseanne premiered to a massive ratings.
We are talking from Entertainment Weekly, an impressive 5.1 rating, which is almost unheard of.
It is the highest rated comedy telecast on any network in nearly four years since the premiere episode of The Big Bang Theory from 2014.
18.2 million viewers among adults 18 to 49, which means that it was even more for older episodes, obviously.
So this was bigger than This Is Us during any of its regularly scheduled episodes.
In the adult demo, it trumped Sunday's 60 Minutes episode with Stormy Daniels.
It's amazing, right?
It actually was higher among total viewers than its 1997 finale 21 years ago.
And the audience grew slightly from the first quarter to its second, which is a pretty good sign.
This was Tuesday's highest rated entertainment telecast in six years among young adults and ABC's best results in the time slot since 2006.
Okay, that is a massive, massive hit for ABC if those ratings hold up for Roseanne.
What's fascinating about this is a lot of people on the right are very excited about this.
This is the cultural moment, right?
Because Roseanne Barr is a Trump supporter.
And Roseanne's character in the show is a Trump supporter.
She talks about how she voted for Trump in the very first episode.
But a note of caution, okay?
Roseanne is not a conservative show.
It's not even close to a conservative show.
In fact, I think it's pretty clever and nefarious in how non-conservative it is.
And it's worth going back to the history of Roseanne and talking a little bit about this.
I happen to be an expert on this, because I wrote an entire 400-page book about television called Primetime Propaganda, in which I talked with the producers of the original Roseanne, including Marcy Carsey, who was the woman behind it originally.
And the way you can tell that this show has some pretty skewed politics, even though it has a Trump supporter who's not being portrayed as a complete nincompoop, the reason you can tell that the politics of the show are skewed is because the New York Times is treating it well.
Vox.com, treating it well.
All of the leftist publications are saying Roseanne is great.
Why?
Because the actual theme of the show is that the only reason you would vote for Trump is for non-cultural reasons.
The show is one big lie about Trump.
The show is one big lie about conservatives.
The lie that the show tells is that the reason people voted for Trump is because they were dissatisfied with the economy and because they were looking to give Donald Trump a chance to fix it.
That it wasn't about cultural issues.
That's not true.
Okay, in 2016 Donald Trump did not win because there was a bunch of dispossessed white people who decided they need a better way of doing economics and so they turned to Trump.
That's not what happened.
What happened is that culture war was at the front of everyone's mind.
2016 was a cultural war.
Everyone knew it.
There was a culture war over race and over feminism and the left knows this too.
And what they're trying to suggest is that the only conciliation that can take place in the country can take place on economic issues.
Now, this is how Hollywood views politics.
It's very important to know.
This show is produced in Hollywood, right?
OK, this is supposed to be a show about the Midwest and a downtrodden family in Ohio or some such.
But the reality is that the politics of this are pure Hollywood.
In Hollywood, you are allowed to be libertarian.
You are not allowed to be socially conservative.
In Hollywood, if you say, listen, I vote Republican because I want lower taxes, people sort of nod.
They go, OK, fair enough.
Or if you say, listen, Hillary was a bad candidate.
I just wanted to give Trump a shot because I thought maybe he could do something on the economy.
Everybody says, all right, kind of get it.
That's OK.
I can handle it.
There are a couple of things you are not allowed to say in Hollywood.
Those things that you are not allowed to say are a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl.
You're not allowed to say this in Hollywood.
You will lose your job.
If you say that transgenderism is a mental disorder, you will lose your job in Hollywood.
You're not allowed to say that, for example, same-sex marriage is not traditional marriage and they're not the same thing and they're not of equal moral value.
If you say that in Hollywood, you will absolutely lose your job.
You will never work again in Hollywood, in this industry.
If you say things like abortion is wrong and abortion is a sin and abortion is murder, if you say that sort of stuff in Hollywood, you will not work again.
I remember I interviewed Patty Heaton, who's very pro-life, and I asked her, "Patty, do you think that you've lost jobs because of your conservatism?" And I remember she first said to me, no, I don't think so.
And then she called me back 24 hours later.
She said, I called around.
I found out I lost six specific jobs because of my pro-life positions.
So the way Hollywood works this is, sure, we can be conciliatory.
Sure, we can reach across the aisle.
Sure, we can have American unity again, but only if you accept our social agenda.
And that's what Roseanne was really about.
And this is why The New York Times is propping up Roseanne the show.
OK, again.
The show is funny, okay?
You can watch it.
It's well written.
Just like a lot of shows on TV, it's well written.
And I think that folks in the middle of the country who are finally feeling like, wow, now I'm finally getting my respect because there's a pro-Trump character who's not perceived as a complete jerk is on TV.
Fair enough.
But if you think that this show is not a left show, you're wrong.
It is a left show.
OK, so here's what The New York Times had to say about this.
When we last saw Roseanne Conner in 1997, the character was sitting alone on that old living room couch after revealing that her husband, Dan, had died of a heart attack and that all nine seasons of Roseanne had been a grief-induced fantasy about her family or something like that.
Now Roseanne is back, the fantasy is out, and Trump is in.
The show's Emmy-winning star Roseanne Barr returns Tuesday night to ABC with a nine-episode revival season.
Dan is back, too, once again played by John Goodman, as is daughter Darlene, Sarah Gilbert, who's also an executive producer and much of the original cast.
And here's what the New York Times gets it, okay?
Here's what the New York Times has to say about the original Roseanne, quote, Roseanne was a bonafide trailblazer the first time around, with its focus on blue-collar Americans, its diversity of LGBT characters, and its star, a woman who did not look or sound like a typical television female lead.
The new Roseanne is topical in its own ways, starting with Roseanne Connors' full-throated support for President Trump.
Ms.
Barr is a Trump backer as well, to the dismay of many fans.
She argued on Jimmy Kimmel recently that supporting Mr. Trump was critical to keeping Mike Pence from the presidency.
So Roseanne Barr is not a typical Trump supporter, okay?
The vast majority of people who voted for Trump Many of them are more fond of Pence than they are of Trump in terms of his policies, even if they like Trump's pugnacious persona.
So, it is worth noting that the real reason that the media are supporting this is because the original character of Roseanne Barr was not a conservative character.
I know this because I talked to the people who created it.
So, Marcy Carsey is the person who helped create the show.
Here's what she told me back when I wrote Primetime Propaganda in 2011, quote, you know, I'm of a liberal bent.
So obviously that's going to come out of the shows I was involved with.
I was raised in a moderate Republican, Eisenhower Republican family.
I'm very much a Democrat, but I understand people that have that kind of bent.
She says when we did Roseanne, the intent was to do a show about the millions, the 85% of households out there, where the woman had to work.
Not an upper class or upper middle class choice to work, but where the woman has to work.
The woman should be undereducated, should be not wealthy, should be natively smart, a working class heroine to represent the difficult lives that so many millions of people were leading.
So NBC rejected the initial concept.
They said that Roseanne was a fat woman nobody's going to watch.
This is according to Marcy Carsey, and so they brought it over to ABC.
Brandon Stoddard at ABC was the guy who helped push it.
it.
He said, I'll never forget this as long as I lived.
I showed the pilot to the affiliates.
There are a thousand and the wives and I'm scared to death.
I mean, it was really, really risky.
It was against the grain.
I also needed to hit really bad and I thought this could be it.
I was standing in the back of the room where there were a thousand people and the women are invited to watch it and the thing is playing.
They're laughing, laughing, laughing.
And she makes a speech somewhere about I'm a mom.
I'm supposed to be a lover.
I'm supposed to be a friend.
I'm supposed to be taking care of the teacher.
I'm handing out the food tonight.
She does the confused who am I role, which Roseanne did brilliantly.
And there was audible reaction by the women in the audience, They were like, "Yeah." And I went, "We've got a hit man." They completely got it because we were real.
Here is the point.
I mean, Roseanne's character.
It could have been a Bernie Sanders supporter just as easily as a Trump supporter in this show.
Because this is a class-based show.
It is not a moral-based show.
It is not a traditionally moral-based show.
It's not a traditional morality show.
The idea here is that Roseanne is blue-collar, and her family is blue-collar, and she doesn't like elites.
That's the appeal of the show.
So it's a very populist show, in a sort of classical populist sense.
And there's no reason why she wouldn't have voted for Bernie Sanders in the last election cycle in the primaries, as opposed to Trump, per se, which is a dramatic misread on who the Trump voters are, which, again, I'm going to explain in just a second.
Roseanne's original show, as The New York Times says, it was very pro-LGBT.
It imbibed all of the values of Hollywood.
It was basically an Archie Bunker character who happened to be on the left, a grumpy Quote unquote, blue collar conservative who wasn't actually very conservative at all.
In one episode of the original series, Roseanne told her daughter Darlene to use birth control even though the daughter wasn't yet having sex.
There's another episode in which Darlene admitted to using pot, speed and acid.
An episode in which Roseanne's son achieves a certain physical status for his genitals.
And she says, what about pitching the trouser tent, booting up the hard drive, charming the anaconda?
I mean, this was a very, very vulgar show.
And the show was designed to be vulgar.
It was vulgar for liberalism's sake.
Their most famous episode was one called Don't Ask, Don't Tell, in which Roseanne visits a lesbian bar with her friend Nancy and is kissed by Nancy's girlfriend.
And Frank Richard of The New York Times, of course, praised it.
So remember, this thing was a critical hit because the idea was that people in the middle America actually have the same values as people in Hollywood, they just have different economic priorities.
That is the lie that Roseanne tells.
John Goodman's character is constantly portrayed in the original series, and in this series as well, the first couple of episodes, as basically an idiot.
He's an adult who's kind-hearted, but Roseanne's really the boss of the place, and they used to show his butt crack all the time on national TV just to demonstrate how dumb John Goodman actually was.
He was kind of the bell-boy.
He's sort of the proto-Homer Simpson.
I read around the time Homer Simpson was coming around.
It was all about class warfare, but it was posed as a sort of political show.
But it's a politics of the left.
It's a politics of the left.
And I'm going to explain how that plays into the couple of episodes of Roseanne that premiered last night, because it really is quite fascinating.
And again, demonstrates that this show is a cultural reach out to conservatives.
Okay, so first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Thrive Market.
So, to look at me, you would say, look at that man.
That man has the body of a Greek god.
Well, you know how that happened?
That happens because I eat healthy.
I eat healthy.
And one of the ways I eat healthy is by shopping over at Thrive Market.
It's a revolutionary online marketplace on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable for everyone.
You can shop for thousands of the best-selling non-GMO foods and natural products, Always at 25 to 50 percent below traditional retail prices.
You can check out the Thrive brand market brand products because they are the highest quality ingredients at even more affordable prices than the current premium products carried on site.
Now, you ask me, Ben, what can you eat there?
Well, the answer is they have kosher food there because you can filter the catalog by your values and dietary preference.
So you can filter it by paleo, gluten-free, vegan, kosher, ketogenic.
You can shop for 90-plus values, also including non-GMO, sustainably farmed, fair trade certified, BPA-free, and more in just one click of a button.
No more reading labels because Thrive Market does all of the homework for you, which is just fantastic.
More than 70% of the Thrive Market catalog, by the way, cannot be found on Amazon's.
So go check it out.
You don't want to hang out in the parking lot with all those people driving Priuses and shouting about how they love Jill Stein over at the Whole Foods.
You don't want to overpay at Whole Foods.
Instead, go over to Thrive Market.
Here's how it works, okay?
Users get $20 off their first three orders of 49 bucks or more, plus free shipping.
Pretty solid deal.
Most shoppers spend more than $49 on the site anyway.
Do the math.
You spend $49 and Thrive automatically gives you back $20.
So your total purchase price becomes $30.
And you get that deal three times in a row when you go to thrivemarket.com slash Shapiro.
That's thrivemarket.com slash Shapiro.
get your instant 60 bucks of free groceries thrivemarket.com slash shapiro three orders of 49 bucks or more you get 20 bucks off each time it's just fantastic you're going to be eating healthier your family's going to be eating healthier and you get to skip that line at whole foods where you're sitting next to the lady who's jabbering on about how much she enjoys environmental music so check it out ThriveMarket.com slash Shapiro.
The healthy food without all the hassle.
ThriveMarket.com slash Shapiro.
Okay, so, back to Roseanne and this cultural moment.
Because a lot of people are saying this is the big cultural moment in the United States.
So here is what the first two episodes are about.
First episode is about Roseanne arguing with her sister about Trump versus Hillary.
And it turns out that her sister voted for Jill Stein.
That's the big punchline, is that the sister was, in fact, convinced by Roseanne that Hillary was so bad that she had to vote for Jill Stein, and she feels like she threw her vote away.
And it turns out that can they get along, Roseanne and her sister?
Sure they can get along, because they're not arguing over deep issues.
They're just arguing over You know, things like economics.
The real reason that Roseanne voted for Trump is because the economy was bad and because she felt like maybe give Trump a chance.
And the real reason that this sister voted instead for Jill Stein or Hillary Clinton is because she cares so much about health care.
There are not really any deep differences between us, you understand.
The deep differences on cultural issues and morality and values, those don't exist.
The only issues between us is how Hollywood thinks.
The only issues between us are interpretations of economic data.
This is how we're going to come together again.
There's only one problem.
We're not coming together around that, because the second episode of the show—I mean, it's mentioned in the first episode of the show—is that Darlene's son—Darlene is, of course, Roseanne's daughter in the show—her son is named Mark, and he likes to dress up in girls' clothing, right?
But here's what the producers said.
It would be wrong to assume that the nine-year-old character is transitioning or gay, so they asked executive producer Sarah Gilbert to explain why she created the role of Mark.
So they asked, does Mark see himself as a girl?
Sarah Gilbert said he doesn't.
That's something that got out of the press that's not true.
He's not a transgender character.
He's a little boy.
He's based on a few kids in my life that are boys who dress in more traditionally feminine clothing.
He's too young to be gay, and he doesn't identify as transgender.
But he just likes wearing that kind of clothing, and that's where he is at this point in his life.
These are the kinds of values that people actually voted for Trump regarding.
They felt like there was a cram down in Hollywood saying that you are not allowed to raise your kids with traditional gender roles.
And that if you do, it's mean and nasty and cruel.
One of the reasons that people voted for Trump is the cultural blowback.
It's because Trump is a culture warrior.
Donald Trump doesn't give a damn about economics outside of tariffs.
Donald Trump doesn't know anything about economics outside of tariffs.
But what Donald Trump does know is that there is a large feeling in the rest of the United States that the social values of New York and Los Angeles are actually not popular, and we feel like they're being crammed down our throats.
So what does Roseanne do?
Roseanne features a seven-year-old kid who is dressing in female clothing, and everybody around the house is going, that's OK, honey.
That's fine, honey.
And when John Goodman interjects and he says, well, maybe that's not so fine, they don't give him a good argument.
Instead, what they say is, well, I'm just afraid he's going to go to school and get beat up.
Here's a good argument, OK?
It is not healthy to avoid reinforcing certain gender roles.
It is not a healthy thing for children to be confused about gender.
The left wants to make a couple of arguments with regard to cross-dressing for children.
One of the arguments they want to make is, what difference does it make?
All clothes are equal.
Who does it really bother?
Well, if that's the case, then why do you care if I put my kids in corduroy slacks versus putting them in a dress?
What you're saying is my kids should be able to wear the dress, and it shouldn't be up to me whether I want my kid to wear corduroy slacks.
So clearly, you think the clothes make a difference.
And then there's the other issue.
They say, well, you know, what's traditionally feminine about?
What makes clothes feminine or masculine?
I mean, obviously you go to Ireland and there are guys wearing kilts.
Those are basically skirts.
Isn't that feminine?
The answer is every society in human history has had traditional male and female garb.
Virtually every society in the history of humanity has had traditionally male and female garb.
Because that is one of the ways that you inculcate boys into being men, is by saying that you are in fact a little man, right?
You are one day going to dress like a man.
You are one day going to be a man.
And that means that you should be trained in being a man.
You shouldn't train to be a girl.
You shouldn't train to be like your mom when it comes to dressing.
It's one of the reasons that the Bible is very strict about cross-dressing actually.
But the notion here is that traditional conservatives don't really exist, that really they're all fine with their seven-year-olds dressing up in dresses.
And if they're really tolerant, they would be.
What makes Roseanne and John Goodman good people is that they are allowing the seven-year-old to run around in a dress.
And if they didn't allow the seven-year-old to run around in a dress, then that would mean that they were mean, right?
By the end of the episode, John Goodman has fully accepted this.
And this is not actually the only socially left point that's made in Roseanne.
Roseanne also makes another socially left point.
So, back in the day when they originally premiered Roseanne, Roseanne was a very pro-abortion character.
In fact, she even considers aborting her child, one of her kids, in the later episodes of Roseanne.
And one of the things that happens in this series is that Roseanne, Roseanne's other daughter, not Darlene, comes back, she comes home, and she has decided that she wants to be a surrogate.
And she wants to carry somebody else's child.
Fine.
But now Roseanne finds out that her daughter actually wants to use her own eggs to be a surrogate.
So this would actually be Roseanne's grandchild, right?
And Roseanne says, well, wait a second, that's my grandkid.
And then her daughter makes an argument, the argument, my body, my choice.
And Roseanne says, you know what?
You're right.
Your body, your choice.
OK, that really isn't an argument about surrogacy.
That's an argument about abortion.
They just don't want to make an abortion argument because it turns out that abortion is not nearly as popular a political stance in 2018 as it was in 1997.
So, all of this is designed, again, to shovel a bunch of social left messaging into a supposedly conservative-friendly show.
So in many ways, it's actually more disturbing from a conservative point of view than openly left shows like Will & Grace.
Because Will & Grace just says what they think.
They just say conservatives are a bunch of nasty rubes who hate gay people, and we'll make fun of them all the time.
This show says, listen, Trump supporters are really all like us.
They're all social leftists, right?
Deep down inside, they're all social leftists, right?
They're people who like abortion, they like cross-dressing, and they're fine with early-stage transgenderism.
They're fine with all of these things, right?
It's just that they disagree on economics, and that's how we're going to come together.
Now, that actually achieves the same purpose as Will and Grace.
Because Will and Grace says, conservatives who believe all this stuff about same-sex marriage and transgenderism and abortion, those people are rubes and hicks and evil people.
Roseanne is almost saying the same thing.
She's just saying it backwards.
She's just saying, real conservatives don't care about those issues.
I mean, if they were to care about those issues, wow, those people would be awful.
Or if they were to say to the 7-year-old boy, You know, son, go put on a pair of slacks.
You know, son, take off the sequins.
If they were to say that to their kid, if the father were to step in and say, listen, I think it's important that you dress like a man because one day you will be a man.
And being a man is important.
And there are certain cultural totems that show that you want to be a man and that you're growing up to be a man, a responsible man.
Cross-dressing is not part of that.
Right?
If you were to say that to a child on national television, this would make you cruel, inhumane, nasty, barbaric, right?
Because these are the values the left wants to push.
So you end up in the same place with this wink and nod, with this wink and nod to the notion that they're actually pro-Trump or Trump-friendly.
And that just isn't really the case, okay?
They're Trump-friendly in name only, but again, They're Trump-friendly because they think that poor people will vote for Trump or Bernie because they're poor and downtrodden, not because those poor, downtrodden people actually may have values and go to—certain biblical values and go to church and think that Hollywood cramming down Laverne Cox on the rest of the country and suggesting that if you don't think that a man is a girl and a girl is a man, that you're a bad person is a bad thing.
So, it's a pretty amazing thing that Roseanne is attempting to do.
And this is, unfortunately, how so much of the left is working these days.
Another indicator of how the left is working these days.
So Kevin Williamson is a columnist over at National Review.
One of my favorite columnists, actually.
Terrific writer.
Real sort of iconoclast.
Writes things that are brilliant and also kooky.
But he's just been hired by the Atlantic.
It's really interesting.
Go back to Sunday.
And last Sunday I was on with Brian Stelter.
And Brian Stelter asked me about if I was criticizing the media all the time, why didn't I attempt to join a mainstream media outlet?
And I said, would you hire me?
And he sort of laughed, because the answer is, of course, CNN is not going to be in the business of hiring me.
They have my phone number.
I've met with people over at CNN.
These are not folks who are probably going to call me up and ask me to do a show, even though this show right here gets better ratings than pretty much anything else they have in daytime.
They're not going to do that.
Kevin Williamson is just another indicator of why.
So Kevin Williamson is very, very anti-Trump.
I mean, Kevin Williamson calls Trump's sons oudé and coussé.
Kevin Williamson has talked about—he called Donald Trump an ape on an escalator.
When Donald Trump announced for the presidency that Williamson could not be more anti-Trump.
It is not possible for him to be more anti-Trump.
And now the Atlantic wants to hire him.
And now the Atlantic is getting tremendous blowback.
They're getting tremendous blowback because Kevin Williamson has a couple of really kind of odd positions.
He has a position saying that he is in favor of the death penalty for women who actually obtain abortions, for example.
And this is unacceptable to the Atlantic.
It's OK to have people like Peter Beinart who are openly pro-Hamas.
But it's another thing for Kevin Williamson to make an argument that I think is wrong, but at least is sort of interesting, even if you don't think it's morally wrong, right?
I disagree with him.
But the idea is you can't have people who disagree with you over at the Atlantic.
So the entire leftist society, Kevin Williamson is not allowed to work at the Atlantic, and they're trying to force the Atlantic not to hire him.
There's a big piece by Sarah Jones over the New Republic in which she links Kevin Williamson's controversial sections with his non-controversial sections.
She says, how dare the Atlantic hire Williamson when Williamson says things like Laverne Cox had amputated her genitals and that she is an effigy of a woman.
Well, Laverne Cox did amputate his genitals.
I mean, there's no question that that's what happened.
I mean, vaginoplasty is an amputation of the penis.
I mean, that's just what it is.
There's no other way to put it.
But, you know, again, the idea here is that any conservative cannot be hired by a left outlet or a mainstream media outlet.
Just won't happen.
There's a really interesting thought experiment by a guy named Yair Rosenberg on Twitter.
He asked people on the left, OK, fine, you don't want Williamson?
Name a conservative.
That you would be okay with the Atlantic hiring, and people could come up with no names.
Because those names do not exist.
The way that the left defines the right is people who agree with us.
Right?
That's how Roseanne defines people who voted for Trump.
They're people who agree with us, they just disagree about Hillary stinking.
That's not what happened in this last election cycle.
There are serious, real differences between right and left, and you're not actually going to get to any serious sense of American unity without coming face-to-face with those differences instead of just eliding them and pretending we all agree that seven-year-old boys should be wearing girls' clothing.
Okay, before we go any further, ZipRecruiter.com.
So, ZipRecruiter.com, if you want to get the best employees, this is the place to go.
So, ZipRecruiter.com knows there's a smart way to recruit people, and they built a platform that finds the right job candidates for you.
They learn what you're looking for, they identify people with the right experience, and they invite them to apply to your job.
In fact, 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day.
ZipRecruiter, by the way, does not stop there.
They even spotlight the strongest applications you receive, so you never miss a great match.
The right candidates are out there, and ZipRecruiter is how you find them.
Businesses of all sizes use ZipRecruiter.
We use ZipRecruiter here at The Daily Wire, and you can use ZipRecruiter right now for free.
Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
That's ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
Again, ZipRecruiter.com slash Daily Wire.
When you use The Daily Wire, then you're able to post a job for free and check it out.
And again, 80% of all employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter.com get a quality candidate through the site in just one day.
It's the best way to up your game at your business, get rid of the employees who aren't doing their jobs, supplant them with employees who are, All right, well, so joining me is Senator Ted Cruz.
Senator Cruz, thanks so much for taking the time.
It's very cool that you're out in Los Angeles.
You can use dailywire.com so they know we sent you.
ZipRecruiter is the smartest way to hire.
Okay, so yesterday we had the opportunity to talk with Senator Ted Cruz.
And I want to jump right into this because it's a bit of a long interview.
So the senators stopped by.
Here's what it sounded like.
All right, well, so joining me is Senator Ted Cruz.
Senator Cruz, thanks so much for taking the time.
It's very cool that you're out in Los Angeles.
And welcome to the show.
Well, thanks, Ben.
Great to be with you.
So let me start by asking you about the Omnibus package, because obviously that just passed.
A lot of conservatives are very unhappy about it.
You voted against the Omnibus package.
Why did it pass?
Whose fault is it?
Where should we aim our pitchforks?
Look, the Omnibus is a total mess.
It's $1.3 trillion in spending.
It grows the debt.
It grows the deficit.
It grows just about every part of the federal government.
And it really is a product of the swamp.
The thing is, 2,200 pages.
And it was written in the dark of night.
It was written by really four people, by Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Paul Ryan, and Nancy Pelosi.
The other members of Congress, we didn't even get to see it until hours before we vote.
So I can promise you there is not a senator alive who's read all 2,200 pages of it.
I don't think any of the four supposed authors of it have read all 2,200 pages of it.
The Democrats' price for agreeing to anything is grow government massively and not accomplish conservative principles.
And unfortunately, an awful lot of Republicans in Washington rolled over and agreed.
So we were told that there was going to be regular order when Republicans got back into power.
Who's the big obstacle here?
Because it looks like the House is able to pass some of these bills through regular order, but it seems like everything stops dead in the Senate.
Well, look, in the Senate, we had no amendments on the bill.
There were a number of us.
Mike Lee and I were both pressing with, how about have it open for amendments?
And our leadership says, no, no, no, no, that's not practical.
It's not feasible.
Because we've cut a deal with Chuck Schumer, and if you have an amendment, an amendment might take out one of Chuck Schumer's priorities.
And then our deal's gone.
The system is a corrupt practice.
Now I will say, I think there were some meaningful victories in things we were able to keep out of the omnibus.
There was a big hard push from a number of more moderate and liberal Republicans to have tens of billions of dollars of bailouts for insurance companies under Obamacare.
I think that would have been a disaster.
The idea that we're bailing out the insurance companies, who are making record profits, While not honoring our promise to repeal Obamacare, while not lowering premiums, reducing regulations, expanding choice, expanding freedom.
I think that's nuts.
And we had a big battle in the conference.
I pressed very hard to keep the insurance company bailouts out of the bill and we succeeded.
We kept them out.
So, I mean, as a conservative, I've spent virtually my entire life being frustrated with the Republican Party because the Republican Party makes a bunch of promises about things they're going to do.
We give them the House.
We give them the Senate.
We give them the presidency.
And then very little of it gets done.
And when it does get done, it tends to be done in these vast bills that are a thousand pages long and always are a crap sandwich.
Is the problem here that Republicans are promising more than they can deliver or is the problem here that the crowd of conservatives were just not realistic about what is possible in a Senate with 51 votes and with, you know, a couple of Republicans who are at best very dicey on serious conservative priorities?
So is it an expectation problem or is it a promise problem?
So I actually think it's neither.
I think the problem is our leadership is not focused on delivering on our promises and having a systematic plan to accomplish that.
Look back at 2017.
2017, despite all of the political craziness, you and I are both aware of all the craziness in Washington.
Despite that, we accomplished a remarkable amount.
I think the four big priorities for 2017 were tax reform, regulatory reform, Obamacare, and judges.
And as the year came to a close, we had big wins on all four.
The tax bill was a huge win.
Reg reform, we're seeing every agency, job-killing regulations pulled back and reduced.
Obamacare is our biggest unfinished promise.
But even that, we did repeal the individual mandate.
I led the fight to include the individual mandate repeal and tax reform.
We got that done.
That's a big deal.
And judges have been an unmitigated home run, both on the Supreme Court, the federal courts of appeals.
You know, in 2017, we confirmed 12 federal appellate judges.
That's the most in the first year of a president's term in history.
Right.
All of those are big, big victories.
Now, if you look at those, Every one of those victories was done through legislative vehicles that only require 50 votes, that can't be filibustered.
What I'm urging my colleagues to do is in 2018, let's demonstrate that same seriousness of purpose and let's bring up and vote on major priorities.
Let's bring up and vote on making the individual tax cuts permanent.
Let's make the small business tax cuts permanent.
Let's vote on a full repeal, or if not, major reform of Dodd-Frank to free up capital for small banks that go and turn to small businesses.
Let's tackle Obamacare and rescind regulations that are driving up premiums and expand consumer freedom.
All of those we can do if, and here's the critical if, we tee up vehicles that only require 50 votes.
If we stay in the world of the omnibus where you need 60 votes, We're not getting nine Democrats.
Right.
So there are procedural vehicles that take 50 votes.
The two are reconciliation, which is how we passed the tax cut.
It's how we passed the Obamacare individual mandate repeal.
It's how we passed my amendment expanding College 529.
It's the biggest federal school choice legislation in history we passed last year.
The other avenue I've suggested is using NAFTA renegotiation as a vehicle for regulatory reform, but both of those you can do with 50 votes and they can't be filibustered.
If our leadership is willing to focus on, let's deliver on our promise.
this from for a long time, that Senate leadership has been unwell in its pursuit of these priorities.
I mean, this is going all the way back to your Obamacare filibuster, quasi filibuster back in 2013.
And so the real question that arises from all of this is, and I don't want to put you on the spot here, but is it time to replace Senator McConnell?
Because obviously, if the Senate majority leader is the, I mean, I think every conservative who's listening is saying, okay, well, we're with you on all these priorities, and we're hearing that we can do this.
So who's stopping us?
We know Chuck Schumer is against us.
We know Democrats are against us.
So if McConnell is the guy who's standing in the way, then what's the deal?
Look, I'm not going to get into right now sort of leadership politics and battles.
What I do think is we need a Republican leader.
Who is responsive to the will of the Republican conference, the will of the majority, and ultimately the will of the people who elected us.
And I will say, among Senate Republicans, there's a generational divide.
A divide between what I call the young Turks and the old bulls.
The young Turks I define as anyone really elected 2010 or later.
And that's a little more than half our conference.
It's a big chunk of the Republicans in the Senate.
The Young Turks, many of them are pushing for let's do more.
There's a real frustration.
Why are we not delivering on our promises?
And I'll confess, I'm doing everything I can to encourage the Young Turks.
Come on, guys.
We can actually stand up and deliver.
We can have a real plan to win.
Not just a plan not to lose.
Right.
But a plan to get the kind of victories we got in 2017.
You know, I was Deeply enmeshed, up to my eyeballs in all of those battles in 2017, especially the tax reform battle.
That was a huge victory.
Let's learn from our victories and let's do it again.
So I want to drill down on this for just one more second.
And that is, you know, when it comes to Senator McConnell, you keep saying leadership.
I assume his argument here would be that he's got a fractious caucus, that there are five or six Republicans who are not willing to go along with the rest.
You say 80 percent of the caucus wants to go along with you.
That leaves 20 percent that isn't when you have a 51 vote majority.
All you need is two who don't like what you're doing in order to say something.
Do you think that's a real concern or do you think that that's being exaggerated a little bit by leadership as an excuse for doing nothing?
Look, I think that's a very real concern.
I mean, we have 51 Republicans.
There is massive.
A massive ideological gulf.
It is hard to find an issue that Susan Collins and Rand Paul agree on.
The Democratic Party, they're unified.
They are all the party of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
They've all gone so far left.
They can unify.
Our party, there are big, big, big differences.
That being said, there are a lot of propositions you can get 50 Republicans for.
You know, that's a lot of what, you know, it's interesting.
Some of the media commentators have been puzzled at Cruz as consensus maker.
I mean, they sort of view that as a joke.
How could Cruz be a consensus maker?
It's real simple.
I believe in this stuff.
I didn't run for office just because I wanted an office in Washington, D.C.
It's not that great, I'll be honest with you.
It is lousy.
And you and I were talking about right before the show, look, I'm away from my kids every week.
I mean, this hurts to be away from my daughters.
There's only one reason to do it, and it's to make a difference in our country, to get conservative victories, to defend the principles we believe in, and so that focus We've got to get focused on doing that job.
And there are lots of things.
You know, before I was in the Senate, I was a Supreme Court litigator.
I've settled a lot of lawsuits.
The way you set a lawsuit, you sit down with the opposing party, you sit down with the clients, the principals, and you say, all right, what do you want?
What do you want?
Okay, no one's going to get everything.
Where's common ground?
What do we all agree with?
There are a lot of propositions.
You can get 50 Republicans on board.
Make the individual tax cuts permanent.
There's a very simple, real victory.
You know, the week after the tax cut plan passed, Bernie Sanders went on on one of the Sunday shows with Jake Tapper and Tapper said, said, well, look, this tax cut cuts the taxes for virtually every middle class taxpayer in America.
Isn't that a good thing?
And Bernie says, of course!
The problem is it's not permanent.
I remember this.
Yep.
And so I took that clip.
I retweeted it to the world.
I said, Bernie, I agree.
And I've drafted legislation to make it permanent.
Join me.
We can get this done right now.
Now, oddly enough, Bernie has been silent.
He didn't offer him enough pudding.
But, you know, look, that's a proposition.
We can get 50 Republicans.
On making the tax cuts permit.
We can get 50 Republicans, a lot of things on Obamacare, that we can get expanding health savings accounts.
We can get 50 Republicans on that, allowing people to use health savings accounts to pay for premiums.
That lets you use pre-tax dollars.
That reduces your effective premium rate 20 to 30 percent like that.
We can get 50 Republicans on that.
And what I'm going to be teeing up in the coming weeks, I've been having this conversation with a lot of senators who agree with me.
In the next couple of weeks when we get back in D.C., I'm planning to tee up to the whole conference and have a conversation.
Listen, is it really the case That as a conference, we're done.
We don't have any ideas anymore.
We don't want to accomplish anything.
I don't believe that.
If there are things we want to get done and we've got potentially a narrow window of time, nine months to get it done, then let's develop a systematic plan to accomplish those victories.
That's what what our leadership is doing right now is going to Chuck Schumer and saying, Chuck, what do you want to get done?
And let's have a plan to get that accomplished.
That, I think, is idiotic.
And it's why our base is so unhappy.
Okay, so final question for you.
2018, obviously, the polls don't look fantastic.
It's going to be very, very important for conservatives to get out and do something about it.
The question that I get a lot when I have folks like you, when I have senators on, is what are we supposed to do?
The grassroots conservatives, what can they do?
Because they sit around and they're really frustrated, and then that frustration bubbles to the top through tea parties or through Trump or through whatever it is, but then they feel constantly let down.
So what can they do right now to help foster what you're talking about?
What can they do other than sit around and grouse about it?
If you look at 2018, 2018 I think is going to be a turnout election.
It's not a persuasion election.
The Democrats agree with this, by the way.
If you look at how the Democrats are behaving, they have decided that the set of swing voters, of voters who are going to show up and vote in November but haven't decided if they're Democrat or Republican, that that's essentially a null set.
That doesn't exist.
For the last 15 months, what we've seen is the demise of the moderate Democrat, where even the so-called moderate Democrats, the Joe Manchins, the Heidi Heitkamps, their voting records are identical or virtually identical to Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
They're all tacking hard left.
Their objective is simple.
Turn out the far left.
And the far left, they're energized, they're angry, and they hate the president.
It is their motivating force and rage.
We're going to see in November record Democratic turnout.
In all 50 states, it's going to shatter records.
The question that will determine whether 2018 is a good election, where we win three, four, five Senate seats, we come back with a real functioning majority in the Senate, or whether we get blown out and have Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as the leaders in Congress, is going to come entirely down to conservative turnout.
The states that are up in 2018, there are more conservatives than liberals.
If conservatives show up, we'll do well.
My state in Texas, I'm up for re-election in Texas.
We're facing Democrats who are energized.
We just had earlier this month, a Democratic primary where Democratic turnout was up 100%.
Four years ago, it was 500,000.
This year it was a million.
Now, fortunately we had 1.5 million Republicans come out.
So we, we turned out conservatives, but we got to do that in November.
Um, I'm facing an opponent, Congressman Beto O'Rourke.
Right.
Who's running hard left.
He's running on open borders.
He's running on aggressive gun control.
He's running on socialized medicine.
He's running on raising taxes.
And on the far left, they're raising money like crazy.
My Democratic opponent is out raising me right now.
Wow.
And what happens every time the president says something, tweets something.
Thousands of Bernie Sanders leftists, their heads explode and they go online and they give 50 or 100 bucks to every Democrat they can find.
So one of the things the folks listening to you, look, the other side is energized and engaged.
For my campaign, I'd encourage you to come to our website.
It's TedCruz.org, sign up, volunteer, speak out, contribute.
We need the resources to mobilize conservatives.
And then I'd encourage one of the beauties of the modern age, of the social media age, Is you don't have to be, you know, Ben, you've got a show, you've got, you've got a media platform, you know, every one of your listeners has a platform also.
Every one of your listeners can engage their friends, mobilize their friends, make them laugh, make them care.
Every person listening to this show, I hope, number one, will contribute at TedCruz.org.
But number two, we'll focus on energizing and turning out conservatives for November and simultaneously holding Republicans accountable in Washington.
Guys, deliver on your promises.
Get more conservative victories to give everyone a reason to come vote.
Well, Senator Cruz, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
It's always great to see you.
And of course, we go all the way back to the David Dewhurst days.
It's good to see, you know, obviously how prominent you've become.
And we can only hope that you continue to be in a leadership position.
Hopefully that grows over time.
Thanks so much, Senator, for stopping by.
Thank you, Ben.
Well, it's great to have Senator Cruz on.
So, meanwhile, again, there's been a lot of talk about the prominence of Roseanne's show.
Roseanne's show did incredibly well last night, and the culture wars are still raging.
People are wondering why it is that the two sides are at each other's throats.
One of the reasons the two sides are at each other's throats is because the journalistic community has really failed in its basic duty.
To provide us with a common set of facts.
I want to talk about that in just a second.
But first, you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
For $9.99 a month, you can get the rest of this show live.
You can get the rest of Clavin's show live, the rest of Knowles' show live.
You can be part of our mailbag that we are doing on Friday here.
And whenever we do the conversation, you get to send in questions, all of that.
Plus, the annual subscription gets you this.
The greatest in all beverage vessels.
The leftist here is hot or cold mug.
It is just glorious in all of its various permutations.
You get that with the annual subscription, which is, in fact, less expensive than the monthly subscription.
Please, if you want to listen later, go over to iTunes or YouTube.
Please subscribe.
Please leave us a review.
It always helps us.
We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
One of the reasons the country is so divided right now, obviously, is because the way journalists have done their business is quite obviously terrible.
And it is true across the spectrum, okay?
It's true from right to left.
The media has just done a garbage job at providing facts and then logic.
Now, listen, I am an opinion host, right?
I make this very clear every single day.
I am a guy with an opinion and particular positions.
What I try to do, however, is present you with a certain number of facts, And then I try to connect all those facts and lead to my conclusion.
So you can try to figure out where in my argument I'm going wrong if you disagree with me.
What is the fact that I'm misstating?
Where exactly am I making a leap between fact A and fact B in order to get to conclusion C?
That's what I try to do on the show so that we can take this journey together and think along with one another.
But that's not something that's happening in the media, and the media seem okay with this.
The reason I'm talking about this is because Michael Wolff, who is the author of Fire and Fury, and has been widely discredited at this point, he made a series of comments to a student newspaper at Vassar College, which was his alma mater, and here's what he had to say.
It's an amazing statement.
Quote.
I am an observer.
I investigate nothing.
All I do is look and write what I see and what I hear.
And my job, which has nothing to do with truth, is to take what I see and what I hear and write in a way that readers can come as close as possible, as close as I came to the experience of doing this.
I want to be able to turn what I see into something that a reader says, oh, I see that too.
That line there, which has nothing to do with truth, is the key line.
And right now in media, media coverage has nothing to do with truth, which is one of the reasons why I think people are so polarized.
Because you can view one website and view a second website and come up with two completely different visions of the world.
But not only that, two completely different versions of the facts.
And it's happening on all sides.
So on the one side, for example, you have CNN.
CNN had a teen panel where teens were debating guns.
And again, this was CNN's way of propping up particular teens in order to generate support for gun control.
What would you consider success because of the movement?
An assault weapons ban.
Handguns are perfectly okay.
That fits into the Second Amendment.
We don't need people walking around with AR-15s.
Why are you telling everyone out there in America that you can't own a gun for your protection?
You know, I'm in fear walking around— I never said you couldn't.
It doesn't need to be for protection.
It's not a good gun for hunting, either.
Why are you telling— For hunting?
For sport?
It's not an efficient AR-15 gun.
It's not necessary.
My life is more important than a gun.
So solid TV there from CNN.
You can't understand what anyone is saying, but the point here is to have on a bunch of young students like a Linda Ellerbe show on Nick Jr.
in order to in order to discuss these issues.
The whole point here is, of course, to produce a particular agenda.
This is what CNN has been doing for weeks on the gun issues.
So the media coverage of this has been just egregious.
And then on the right, you have people like Alex Jones who are out there promoting the most radical version of critique.
First of all, you've seen people who are putting out false Falsehoods, open falsehoods about the Parkland students who they disagree with.
We don't do that on this program.
We just play their quotes and then we talk about why they're wrong, which I think is a different thing.
But Alex Jones is Alex Jones and he does an Alex Jones thing.
And a lot of his followers think this kind of stuff.
So he actually dubbed a Hitler speech over footage of David Hogg.
And I think David Hogg is a pretty terrible advocate for his position.
I think that he's wrong about pretty much everything.
But this is just demonstrative of the gap that's happening in journalism right now.
Authoritarianism is always about youth marches.
Here we go.
Okay, and if you can't see this, he's actually putting video of David Hogg over that audio of Adolf Hitler and putting it in black and white.
Now, is any of this designed to actually get to the truth?
Is any of this designed to actually Is any of this designed to enrich the country or get us to a point where we can have discussions?
Now, this is my problem with everything that's happening in the media right now, from Hollywood, from shows like Roseanne, to what's happening on Alex Jones, to CNN.
There's no attempt to even get to a common basis of facts so that we can have a discussion.
If there is no common basis of facts, there is no discussion to be had.
There cannot be a discussion if this is the case.
It's just, it's absurd.
Yeah, and again, this is happening not just— Listen, you wouldn't expect better from Alex Jones because Alex Jones is Alex Jones, right?
I mean, the guy— I sell supplements and I unbutton my shirt!
Oh my God, look at— Oh my God, I'm not wearing a shirt now!
That's Alex Jones' shtick, but you do expect better from CNN, you would assume, right?
I mean, I think we have a right to expect better from CNN.
That's how they pitch themselves, but— They were the same people who were putting on Michael Wolff every night.
I mean, Jake Tapper, admirably, was going after Michael Wolff.
He was one of the few.
Virtually everybody else in the media, MSNBC, CNN, all the networks, they were giving Michael Wolff enormous credibility, and he says he has nothing to do with the truth.
And then you wonder why it is that there seem to be alternative realities in the world of politics.
That's why there are alternative realities.
In the world of politics.
Now, meanwhile, there's some updates on the Stormy Daniels front.
It's just getting tawdry at this point.
I love S.E.
Cupp over on CNN Headline News, but she is making the case that Melania should leave Trump.
Here's what she had to say about it.
Melania may not have a political career to consider, but as First Lady, she is an inherently important figure in American politics.
And women are watching.
Particularly young women.
Melania should do for this generation of girls what Hillary Clinton did not do for mine.
And leave her jerk of a husband.
OK, so I have a couple of critiques.
I disagree with S.E.
that Melania should leave Trump for a couple of reasons.
She can if she wants, but there are a couple of reasons I don't think that Melania should leave Trump.
But the reason that I'm bringing this up is because it's pretty obvious that the Stormy Daniels stuff has just become gossip TV at this point.
Here's why I disagree with S.E.
for a couple of reasons.
One, Melania knew what she was getting into in the first place.
She was wife number three, and she was having an affair with Trump while he was married to wife number two.
So it's not like Melania didn't know it was coming, and she's been very obvious about this.
She was asked at one point whether Trump would have married her if she wasn't beautiful, and she said, would I have married Trump if you weren't rich?
I mean, this is a very transactional relationship.
Everybody knows this who's been watching it.
Second, they have a kid together.
OK, divorce is never good for the kid.
And Melania, again, knew what she was getting into when she had a kid with Donald Trump.
So, yeah, I disagree with Essie, but the point here is, again, this conversation has basically degraded.
You can see it on a CNN panel, again, CNN doing yeoman's journalist work.
This would be clip nine, a panel going off the rails about Stormy Daniels.
When Barack Obama was president, you were on CNN, on this very air, on this very network, and you know what you said?
Barack Obama doesn't love America.
What's the difference between Barack Obama and Roy Moore?
What's the difference between Barack Obama, Roy Moore, and Donald Trump?
I'll tell you what the difference is.
Barack Obama's a black man, and those two are white men.
It's all Jerry Springer garbage.
It's all Jerry Springer garbage.
We can stop it there.
I don't have to listen to this.
It's all Jerry Springer nonsense, and the Jerry Springer nonsense devolves into basically people tribally siding up, right?
So, CNN did an interview with a bunch of female Trump supporters, and they asked, you know, what do you think now that all these allegations have come out about Stormy Daniels?
And the female Trump supporters basically said, listen, you guys are going to tell me what you want me to hear, and I don't believe anything you have to say.
Here's what that panel looked like.
In order for somebody to come forward, you can be pushed by somebody else, right?
And so I think the thing is, is you're looking for a way to impeach my president that I worked very hard for.
Okay, and I think there are a lot of Trump supporters who feel that way, again, because the media have failed to do a good job in policing themselves and simply telling the facts.
They can give us their conclusion, but they have to tell us the facts first.
Okay, a quick thing I like, and then a quick thing I hate, and then I want to talk Passover for about 30 seconds here.
Things I like, number one, the thing I like today is that Bernie Sanders inspired an actual circus clown to run for office.
This is not actually a joke.
So according to Emily Zanotti over at Daily Wire, Stephen Loft is a former clown with the Ringling Brothers Circus and a former volunteer with both Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders' campaigns.
He also happens to have snagged the Democratic nomination in South Carolina's 5th congressional district, and he's going to take on Ralph Norman in November.
He promises that he will be a better clown in office than the current clowns in office.
He says they joke that the president and Congress are all clowns.
Well, in my professional opinion, they are the worst clowns I have ever seen.
So pretty spectacular stuff.
Of course, a Bernie Sanders inspired clown is running for office because he is right.
I mean, he is right.
OK, our politics is filled with clowns.
OK, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So Heineken has now released an ad and then they pulled the ad.
I'm going to show you the ad and then we'll try to figure out exactly what's wrong with the ad.
It's a bartender who's looking down at a beautiful woman at the end of the bar, and he's sliding her a beer, and it soars past a bunch of different people.
It soars past, it's obviously in a tropical place, it soars past a couple of black folks, and then finally it arrives at the end, and it's a light beer.
Right, and it says, sometimes lighter is better at 99 calories.
Okay, and the woman at the end of the bar, can we pause it on her?
Because, go back for a second, is there a way that we can pause it on her?
Because I want to see what she actually looks like.
Okay, stop it.
So this is not a white woman, right?
This looks like an ethnic woman, right?
She looks maybe Asian?
Is that right?
I mean, if you can see, Mathis, what's your take?
This obviously is not just a Russian lady, right?
I mean, this lady looks like, Maybe Latina?
It's kind of hard to tell what ethnicity she is, but she's obviously of non-WASP extraction.
So what was the criticism of this?
The criticism of this, it's an ad for Heineken Light.
Mathis, did you see anything wrong with this ad?
Was there a problem with this ad when it said, is light better?
Did you see it?
Okay, so the problem with this ad is that the ad shows the beer sliding past three black people and then arriving at a non-black woman at the end.
And so the idea is that this is a racist ad.
That the ad is saying that lighter skin is better.
And that's why he's sliding the beer to her.
Okay, if we've become this stupid and this sensitive, do you really think the people who made this ad were saying that light skin is better?
Really, that was the implication of the ad?
When you have a couple of people who look like maybe they're of Spanish extraction sliding beers to each other?
That's what you got from that ad?
You may be a little bit crazy if this is how far you are willing to go in the name of political correctness.
Okay, so, today is a Wednesday, and that means that normally we do a little bit of Bible talk.
Well, the Bible talk for today comes courtesy of the fact that this weekend begins the holiday of Passover, which is, I believe, my favorite holiday.
It's either that or Sukkot, which is the one where we sit in the booths.
And one of the things that people need to know about the holiday of Passover, which is, of course, all about the Exodus, is the Exodus is not just a universal vague thing.
So people in politics have used the Exodus story to justify virtually anything.
We've heard it used to justify the civil rights movement, I think appropriately.
Used to justify the gay rights movement, I think wildly inappropriately.
To use the transgender movement.
Again, the let my people go line is the one that's usually used.
Moses goes to Pharaoh, and he says, let my people go.
And this is supposed to be the end of the story.
But this is not the end of the story, folks.
That ignores a couple of things about the Exodus story.
One, the rest of let my people go, the phrase does not end at let my people go.
OK, what God actually says to Moses is he says, go to Pharaoh and say to him, quote, Thus says the Lord, let my people go that they may serve me.
Every time it says, let my people go in the Bible, it is followed with that they may serve me in the wilderness or that they may serve me.
The whole point is that God is saying people have to be freed of earthly tyranny so they can submit themselves to the yoke of heaven.
Right.
That is the point of the Bible.
The point of the Bible is that God is the boss and you are not the boss.
And liberty is necessary so that you can pursue virtue, not so that you can pursue vice.
And Western civilization seems to have forgotten that.
We seem to think that let my people go is the end of the invocation.
That once you say let my people go, there is no further moral duty, right?
No duty attaches to the right.
And once you sever, so that they may serve me, then let my people go basically just means leave me alone.
But it turns out that people then impose other sorts of earthly tyranny, because what they suggest is that now, in order for me to let your people go, that means that you have to invade my church and tell me what to do.
It means that you have to invade my home and tell me how to raise my child.
Let My People Go So They May Serve Me is the root and branch, I believe, of the Western civilized thought, which is, there are rights and there are duties, and these two things are inherently connected.
There are rights from government, there are rights that you have that pre-exists the state, those come from God, and those exist so that we can seek Him.
That is, without a religious, fundamental, moral basis to the United States, rights tend to disappear into a miasma of libertinism.
And that's what all the founders believed.
Adams thought that, Washington thought that.
That's the message of the Exodus.
The Exodus is very specific to a specific people who are supposed to be a light unto the nations.
It wasn't just God decided, I'm going to take one nation out of another nation and then I'm just going to leave them alone and tell them to do whatever the hell they want.
That was not the purpose.
The culmination of the Exodus story is at Sinai with the acceptance of the Torah by the Jewish people.
That's the purpose of the story.
It's to fulfill an earthly promise in terms of the land that the Jews are supposed to inherit, that God is a fulfiller of promises, that he keeps his promises, that he is true to you.
That is the message, message number one of the Bible.
And message number two is that you must be true to him as well, because your freedom is contingent upon you doing your virtuous duty.
So that is the real message of Passover.
Don't believe all the all the cheap hype about it's just about let my people go, because again, there are some missions that attach once you have freedom.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, 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 Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection