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June 7, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:50
The Kim Kardashian Pardon | Ep. 555
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Samantha Bee does not apologize.
President Trump pardons a drug trafficker at Kim Kardashian's behest.
And the Mueller probe befuddles and unfolds.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, we have a lot to get to today.
I have a bunch of announcements that I need to make right here up top.
First of all, our events are happening in August.
They're happening in Dallas, and they're happening in Phoenix.
And you should go check out the tickets right now in Dallas and Phoenix over at dailywired.com slash events.
The tickets are going fast.
We are almost sold out, I believe, in Dallas.
And we are approaching almost sold out in Phoenix.
So check that out right now at dailywired.com slash events.
Again, the tickets are available at dailywired.com slash events.
We are doing a Father's Day livestream, so we're doing that Tuesday, June 12th, 7 p.m.
Eastern.
Jeremy Boring, the Daily Wire God King, will host a roundtable discussion with me, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Nollis.
We'll sit there and say nothing the whole time but be paid handsomely for it.
We'll discuss what fatherhood means, even though Michael isn't a father, and we'll discuss why fathers matter, how fatherhood will stand up against an increasingly male culture, And if you're a subscriber, you can write questions to us at dailywire.com.
You go in, you follow, you type it into the chat window, and we'll pick up those questions.
Again, that is Tuesday, June 12th, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific.
You can find our special live stream on Facebook and YouTube, so make sure that you do not miss it.
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Okay, so we begin today with Samantha Bee.
Samantha Bee, you'll recall, just about a week ago, Well, she got herself in hot water because she suggested that Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, the daughter of the president of the United States, was a feckless C-word.
Why?
Because Ivanka Trump had the temerity, the utter gall, the unmitigated sort of audacity to put up a picture of herself with her kid.
And in doing so, she then had somehow offended the left because the left was all concerned about children being separated from their parents at the border, which is an operation of law as ruled by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
So, Samantha Bee goes on national TV and she calls Ivanka Trump a feckless seaward, and then she suggests that Ivanka Trump should actually go try to have sex with her father in order to get him to change immigration policy, which is just wonderful.
Excellent stuff.
Well, Samantha Bee was off for the rest of the week after that.
Well, she was back last night and she was going to give her apology.
Now, here's the wonderful thing about apologies from the left.
If you're on the left, you know, there's that old that old movie love story where the slogan was being in love means never having to say you're sorry.
Love means never having to say you're sorry.
OK, well, being on the left means never having to say you're sorry.
Laura Ingraham had to put out like a full apology for saying that David Hogg, a Parkland survivor, was whiny about his college admissions and she got boycotted for that.
Samantha Bee called the daughter of the President of the United States a feckless C-word and suggested she should try to dress sexy to seduce her own dad.
And then she goes on TV and does a, like, seven-minute quasi-apology that is not apology in the slightest.
And, of course, the media are letting her off the hook.
And they're saying that she is just an emissary of genius.
She's just an emissary of goodness.
She's an emissary of rightness.
So here's Samantha Bee, who, it will be noted, has not said a funny thing in years.
Right?
And the last time she was funny was when she was actually just the sidekick on The Daily Show.
Now she's not funny at all.
Now she goes for what we like to call clapped-er in the business.
It's not laughter.
It's where everybody goes... Right?
And then there's kind of like a couple of laughs.
And they're not really laughing.
It's more like smiles and clapping because you agree with the person.
You know, just like you're doing right now at this show.
It's like that.
Except I'm not a comedian.
Samantha Bee's a professional comedian.
Okay, so here's Samantha Bee.
Here's her quasi-apology that is not an apology at all last night on TBS.
And of course, she'll just go right back to business because that's the way it works.
If you're on the left, Then you get some claptor and people pretend that you didn't do anything wrong.
If you're on the right, then we cancel your show or we boycott you.
And even if you apologize, we say that is insufficient.
Even if you are clearly mentally ill, as Roseanne Barr is, obviously.
Samantha Bee gets to go on with her life like nothing happened and lecture us in the process.
This is my favorite part.
Is Samantha Bee lecturing me?
I'm not the one who went on national television and called someone a feckless c-word and suggested they have incest with their own father.
That wasn't me.
That was Samantha Bee.
But she's gonna lecture me and she's gonna lecture Republicans.
Because Republicans were really bad.
How do we know that?
Well, because they're Republicans.
That's how we know they're bad.
Okay, so here is the exorable Samantha Bee who has, I will say, walked away.
I've been saying for more than a year now that there is a running gun battle between a series of leftist comedians.
To be the least funny comedian on the left, and that included Amy Schumer, and that included Lena Dunham, and that included Trevor Noah, and it included Samantha Bee, but Samantha Bee, I mean, she is now Secretary.
She's just busting out of the pack.
She is eight lengths ahead.
Nobody else is even in camera view.
Here's Samantha Bee doing her apology last night.
You know, a lot of people were offended and angry that I used an epithet to describe the president's daughter and advisor last week.
It is a word I have used on the show many times, hoping to reclaim it.
This time, I used it as an insult.
I crossed the line.
I regret it.
And I do apologize for that.
The problem is that many women have heard that word at the worst moments of their lives.
A lot of them don't want that word reclaimed.
They want it gone.
And I don't blame them.
I don't want to inflict more pain on them.
I want this show to be challenging, and I want it to be honest, but I never intended it to hurt anyone.
Okay, can we pause it for a second?
You never intended it to hurt anyone?
Every day on this show, she calls someone an awful name.
Like, an awful name that I would never use.
She does it every single night on her show.
Like, all the time.
And when she suggests that she's trying to reclaim the c-word, this is the same sort of stupid logic that I hear with regard to people who use the n-word.
I'm trying to reclaim the n-word, make it a term of empowerment.
Why?
Why don't you say it's a bad word and people shouldn't use it?
Right?
The n-word is such a bad word that we're not even allowed to say the full n-word.
Which seems to me appropriate.
I feel like the C-word is the same sort of thing.
I've never tried to reclaim the K-word.
I don't go around at Shoal, at my synagogue, saying the K-word to people.
You know, let's reclaim this slur that's been used against Jews for a century.
Instead, let's say it to each other, man.
I mean, let's reclaim that thing publicly.
What's up, my K-word?
Like, I wouldn't do that because that's idiotic.
As I mentioned last week, I wouldn't do that.
Like, Jess, is this something you do in your community?
Jess is Hispanic.
So, Jess, do you run around your community calling each other the S-word?
I assume not.
That's probably not a thing, right?
Like, people don't do this on a regular basis because it's idiotic, okay?
This is just an excuse that she's making for being a nasty person who likes to use the C-word publicly, and then she gets to claim it's all about empowerment.
She continues along these lines.
Samantha Bee, oh boy.
Many men were also offended by my use of the word.
I do not care about that.
That's hilarious!
I hate that this distracted from more important issues.
I hate that I did something to contribute to the nightmare of 24-hour news cycles that were all white-knuckling.
I should have known that a potty-mouthed insult would be inherently more interesting to them than juvenile immigration policy.
I would do anything to help those kids.
I hate that this distracted from them, so to them, I am also sorry.
Okay, stop right there.
Okay, so her real apology is that she did something that distracted from the underlying issue.
That was the whole point of her making the joke.
Okay, she's a smart lady, Samantha Bee.
She knows exactly what she was doing when she went on national TV and suggested that Ivanka Trump was a feckless c-word.
She knew exactly what was going to happen.
This went through writers.
It went through producers.
It was on the teleprompter.
She's reading from a teleprompter right now.
She doesn't have all the stuff memorized, obviously.
This is just silliness.
And when she says, I'm so sorry to distract.
I shouldn't have contributed to the 24-hour news cycle.
She wanted to make news, and so she said this.
It is that simple.
This is obviously more her attempting to make news than Roseanne Barr tweeting something out that was excorable at Valerie Jarrett.
Roseanne Barr on Twitter is a nut job.
This was scripted, right?
This was something that was produced.
So I don't buy this excuse making at all.
And also, by the way, this idea that I can't be offended for use of the c-word.
Why not?
I'm offended when somebody uses the n-word because vile, uncivil, disgusting behavior is vile, uncivil, disgusting behavior no matter at whom it is directed.
I thought that we're supposed to live in a society where if you see somebody use the c-word against somebody inappropriately, we're supposed to step in and say no.
I thought that was a good thing.
I thought I'm supposed to be offended on behalf of people who are being maligned.
I mean, isn't that what makes for a better society?
I guess now the idea is that if I'm a man, I can't object if a woman uses the c-word, even if she's calling another woman the c-word.
I just, I don't buy that at all.
I think it's idiotic logic.
But she continues with her non-apology apology, which the media will label brave, obviously.
If you are worried about the death of civility, don't sweat it.
I'm a comedian.
People who hone their voices in basement bars while yelling back at drunk hecklers are definitely not paragons of civility.
I am.
I'm really sorry that I said that word, but you know what?
Civility is just nice words.
Maybe we should all worry a little bit more about the niceness of our actions.
Okay, just one point.
You just want to point this out for one second.
So she says that we should worry about the niceness of our actions rather than the content of our words.
Okay.
Well, let's say that that's the case.
Why are you so pissed about everything Trump says all the time then?
Right?
This is obviously not true.
Why are you so angry about what Roseanne Barr says?
It turns out that words are kind of actions sometimes.
That doesn't mean they're violence.
It does mean that they are a kind of thing that has an impact in the world.
And pretend that words are all created equal or that whatever we say has no impact is silly.
That doesn't mean they should be restricted.
It doesn't mean that every word should be met with any sort of action.
It doesn't mean any of those things.
But to suggest that you are going to make a hard divide between stuff we say and stuff we do, Well, I think that applies in certain contexts.
That certainly doesn't apply to Samantha Bee's job, whose entire job is to stand in front of a camera and say words.
It's not like she's going out there, you know, handing out teddy bears at the border.
Samantha Bee's entire job is to say words into a camera that are written for her on a screen that moves before her, right?
I mean, that is her entire job.
And she obviously doesn't apply this logic to anybody on the right.
If I were to say the same thing Samantha Bee did, she'd be calling for my firing tomorrow, because that's what people on the left do.
So this sort of double standard is really quite absurd in every way.
She concludes with a little bit more of this non-apology apology, which the media cheered all the way.
Listen, I wanted to introduce you to some exciting new additions to our show.
These are our new mandatory censors, who will be with us from now on.
Don't be jittery, guys.
I talk fast, but you'll be fine.
That's right.
They're the best Montana farming censors in the entire business.
Unfortunately, this is what we have to do from now on.
I know.
I know.
It's some pretty foot-mopping stuff.
Okay, so this is the new thing, is that she's going to pretend that she's being censored in some way.
She hasn't been censored in any way.
TBS is allowing her to go on there, and if she wants to say feckless c-word tomorrow, they'll do that too.
It is worth noting, by the way, that her ratings stink.
Samantha Bee's ratings stink, as well they should, because she is not good at this job.
If you look at the posters all around town.
So I live in LA, which means that you see Emmy posters everywhere all the time, right?
You're driving around, you see on the bus stop, there's an Emmy poster for Samantha Bee.
And there is this hilarious thing that's going on right now where Trevor Noah has a bunch of his Emmy posters that are up and it features a quote from Samantha Bee.
And then Samantha Bee will put her Emmy poster up and it will feature a quote from Trevor Noah.
And then Jimmy Kimmel will put one up and it features quotes from Samantha Bee and Trevor Noah.
And they all have quotes about each other because they're all part of this ideological bubble where saying stuff like Samantha Bee says is not offensive in any way.
The only people who would be offended, of course, are these rubes out in the middle of the country who still think it's bad to say the C-word about people.
Now again, I'm not gonna do the whataboutism thing and point out here that there are people who said the C-word about Hillary Clinton, which I thought was wrong at the time, on its face.
But Samantha Bee is a thought leader, and that ought to make some sort of difference.
It won't, according to the left-wing media.
Okay, so.
I want to talk a little bit about Ben Rhodes, who is out there making some insane claims about how your control of information should be, about how your information that you see can be controlled.
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Okay.
So meanwhile, while Samantha Bee is out there setting the world ablaze with her bravery, Ben Rhodes, it's amazing.
We get so much of our information from the media.
We get so much of what we see from the media.
And that means that what we see is automatically filtered.
And Ben Rhodes wants that filter to be even higher.
So in the aftermath of 2016, when the Democrats were utterly stunned by the victory of President Trump, they suggested that what needs to change is the way that information gets to us.
The big problem is that we had information that was not filtered by the proper sources.
So Ben Rhodes, a man who, as the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, Barack Obama, openly said that he had created an echo chamber for information in which he put out false information about the Iranian regime.
This guy says the government should ensure that Facebook feeds should be controlled by the government.
I mean, this is an amazing thing, what Ben Rhodes is about to say.
Here's what he said on MSNBC.
And frankly, the government also didn't have a lot of capacity to deal with this.
You know, we can't edit people's Facebook feeds and say, that's fake news and that's not.
And what worries me today, Andrea, is that we still don't have a lot of capacity.
And frankly, our government's probably not doing anything to prevent this.
And so the likelihood that the Russians are going to do this again in the midterm elections and the next presidential election is very high.
Okay, so he thinks that the government should now have more control over what it is that we can see.
This guy who used the power of government to crack down on what the American people could see and lied about it to the effect that now Iran, a terror sponsor, the greatest terror sponsor on planet Earth, has billions of extra dollars to pass around in pursuit of that terrorism, he thinks the government should be in charge of what we see.
The same people who find Samantha Bee funny want to control what you see.
That's the bottom line.
The same people who think that Samantha Bee is some sort of halcyon of feminism, That she has some sort of apex of free speech being utilized for truth?
These same people think that you ought to not be able to see my show, for example, on Facebook.
That Samantha Bee's show should be featured.
In fact, Facebook is starting, this is a new thing, they're starting their new watch feed.
Their watch feed is a bunch of shows that Facebook helps produce, and they're all from mainstream media outlets.
Facebook is not coordinating with a bunch of right-wing outlets.
They're not coordinating with Daily Wire to put out a various and sundry show with diverse points of view.
They're not doing that.
Instead, they're picking a few mainstream outlets and they're going to promote those mainstream outlets because Democrats have said that they should do so.
And then they wonder why we, on the right, are worried about the distribution of information.
We have a reason to be worried about the distribution of information.
Now, speaking of the distribution of information, there's a story that's trending on Twitter that I want to talk about briefly.
So there's a story that was going around today And it was it says no gays allowed, right?
This is what's trending on Twitter is no gays allowed.
So what's the story?
The story is that there was a guy in Tennessee who apparently put up a sign, right?
He put up a sign that said no gays allowed in his store.
And he put up this sign after there was the Supreme Court ruling that said that religious bakers no longer have to cater to same sex weddings.
Or at least this particular religious baker does not have to cater to a same-sex wedding.
And it was reported by USA Today as though this had just happened.
The owner of the store is a guy named Jeff Amix.
And he said, the Lord told me to.
He told me to stand.
It goes against my religion and what I believe.
I'll never accept it.
And then he replaced the sign with something said, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone who would violate our freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
And everybody on the left went off on this.
First of all, it's not that Jesus was a homophobe per se, but it's not that the New Testament is super pro-homosexuality.
Tennessee store to show devotions to noted non-homophobe Jesus.
First of all, it's not that Jesus was a homophobe per se, but it's not that the New Testament is super pro-homosexuality.
I mean, Romans is not particularly pro-homosexuality.
There are various places in the New Testament that demonstrate that they are not pro-homosexuality.
Peter Dow, who used to work for Hillary Clinton, he says, And then there's another story that came out, right?
signing claims.
I'm going to take more persecution than them because I'm standing for what I believe in.
Okay.
And then there's another story that came out, right?
And then he tweeted out the story.
And then there was various tweets coming out from people on the left.
Charles Blow, who's appropriately named over the New York Times, and he tweeted out the same story.
"Boy, gays are everywhere, probably even on staff "at your pathetic hardware store.
"Not everyone flies a flag.
"Tennessee hardware store puts up no gays allowed sign." Okay, there's only one problem with the story that all these people are tweeting out.
It's from 2015.
Okay, this guy put up his sign again, apparently this week, but the original sign was put up in 2015.
So the whole story here is that there's a nutcase in Tennessee who put up a no-gays-allowed sign in 2015 and then took it down within one day, and now he's put it up again, and we're supposed to believe there's a broad swath of Christians across the country who are no longer going to serve gay customers because of all of this.
Now, I'll be honest with you, I don't know one Christian who owns a store who's not going to serve a gay customer.
I know a lot of Christians who aren't interested in catering a same-sex wedding or being involved with something they perceive to be a sin, but I don't know any Christians who operate a normal business who do a sex orientation check, a sexual orientation check at the counter.
I've never seen that ever.
But the media are going to focus in on that, because the media want to push a particular narrative, and that narrative is that in the absence of government compulsion, Christians everywhere are going to be putting up no-gays-allowed signs in their stores.
Again, this story originated three years ago, and it's the same guy doing the same thing, but we're now going to pretend that it's something brand new and shocking, because the media have something to push.
Because the media have something that they need to show.
Now, I'll be honest with this.
Originally, when we reported the story, we only reported the part about 2015.
That was a mistake on my behalf over at Daily Wire.
It's a mistake I made while I was reporting the story.
We updated the story to correct it and to demonstrate the guy who had put back up the sign.
But it doesn't undermine the original critique, which is that if you're going to claim that this is happening all over the country, you can't pick the same guy who does this every three years and then say, oh my God, something brand new is happening.
We see this sort of media coverage, unfortunately, across the board in California.
There's a guy who's running out here for, I believe it was a state senate seat or the governor's seat, and he was a fellow who was a neo-Nazi, essentially, and there was one outlying poll that showed him at double digits in the outlying polls, and it turned out that he won 1.8% of the total vote.
But for weeks, all we had was nonstop coverage about how this was the new upswing inside the Republican Party, how this person presented a serious, dire threat to the state of America.
Now, listen, I think bad people are bad people, and they ought to be called out when they're bad people.
That's fine with me.
But to pretend that there is some broad conspiracy, some broad swath of people who are jumping on board here, And that all of America's Christians are going to put up No Gays Allowed signs, so that all of America's Republicans are actual secret Nazis.
There's an agenda that is happening, and that's why when Ben Rhodes says things like, the government ought to control your informational feed, the same people who are fibbing about this stuff, the same people who are exaggerating these cases to make them into a big deal, those same people That I find utterly and completely disturbing.
Now, speaking of things that I find utterly and completely disturbing, in just a second I want to talk about the Kim Kardashian pardon.
Because I know there are a lot of people on the right who are very fond of this Kim Kardashian pardon.
It wasn't Kim Kardashian who was pardoned, she didn't commit a crime.
But, she was involved with a pardon, and I want to explain why I find this somewhat troubling in just a second.
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Okay, so a lot of people are very, very excited because yesterday, President Trump commuted the sentence for a woman named Dallas Johnson.
So Alice Johnson is a 63 year old grandmother.
This is what you will hear in all the headlines.
She's a 63 year old grandmother and as a 63 year old grandmother, she ought to have been let out of prison.
Here is my problem.
So President Trump has been rather inconsistent on the drug war.
I am somebody who is pretty libertarian on drugs.
I think that marijuana particularly ought to be decriminalized.
I don't think you should go to jail for for smoking marijuana or dealing marijuana.
I am not quite as certain about opioids because opioids actually rob people of their capacity to think in a pretty spectacular way that undermines the very basis of the Republic.
So I'm a little more torn on harder drugs like opioids or for example cocaine.
Trump has not been torn on any of this, right?
Trump has actually said in the past that he wants the death penalty for drug dealers.
Here's him at a rally like a month and a half ago talking about how he wants the death penalty for drug dealers.
But if we don't get tough on the drug dealers, we're wasting our time.
Just remember that.
We're wasting our time.
And that toughness includes the death penalty.
So I'm going to point out here is the inconsistency.
If you want to actually say that the drug war needs to be taken off the table, we need to change our laws, drug dealers should not go to jail for quite as long.
Once you hit the age of 60, we should think about releasing, whatever it is.
If you want to actually make a substantive policy change, that is one thing.
What actually happened yesterday is that President Trump decided to release a drug dealer, a drug trafficker.
Her name is Alice Johnson.
And Kim Kardashian was, of course, extraordinarily happy about this.
She tweeted out a bunch of stuff about Alice Johnson, so grateful to Donald Trump.
Jared Kushner and to everyone who has showed compassion and contributed countless hours to this important moment for Miss Alice Marie Johnson.
Her commutation is inspirational and gives hope to so many others who are also deserving of a second chance.
And she continued along these lines.
She said, I hope to continue this important work by working together with organizations who have been fighting this fight for much longer than I have and deserve the recognition.
And then she concluded, the phone call I just had with Alice will forever be one of my best Telling her for the first time and hearing her screams while crying together is a moment I will never forget.
Okay, and then there's this video going around yesterday of Alice Johnson being released from prison and here is what it sounded like.
Alright, so we are going to hear from Dan.
You see there Miss Johnson being reunited with her friends and her family.
They made that trip to meet her earlier this afternoon.
We heard this was going to happen.
It took a couple of hours or so for some of the logistics to be worked out, but then she was released just in time.
Okay, so then Alice Johnson came out and praised President Trump, said thank you to President Trump.
I'm going to give you the rest of the story in just a second.
I want to say to President Trump, I am going to make you proud that you gave me this second chance in life.
And I will not disappoint the American public or the world who has so much faith in me.
All I can say is thank you, President Trump.
And I love you, President Trump.
Thank you.
Okay, so here is the issue that I have with this.
The issue that I have with this is if you had said when President Trump was elected that he was going to go around pardoning drug dealers based on visits from Kim Kardashian, I think a lot of his base would have been unhappy because he was the tough on crime guy.
Now again, if you want to change overall policy with regard to the drug war, I think that's probably a very good idea.
The drug war has been a giant fail that has sucked trillions of dollars from the American economy.
I'm fine with that.
But the notion that President Trump is now going to be granting pardons Like he would on The Apprentice, that now we're gonna have the pardon show.
And that's basically what it's become some nights on Fox, where you have George Papadopoulos' wife going on Fox News and begging President Trump for a pardon, and you have Rod Blagojevich's wife going on Fox News and begging President Trump for a pardon, and now it becomes The Apprentice, where Trump just sits there at the end of a table, and instead of firing people, he pardons people.
I'm not a big fan of this.
I don't like celebrity mergers with politics.
Here's the problem.
Alice Johnson, maybe she's a good candidate for release, but I'm not sure why she is a specifically good candidate for release.
She's a 63-year-old woman.
Okay, she aged.
They say she's a grandmother.
Right, that tends to happen when you have kids when you go to jail.
You become a grandmother.
Being a grandmother is not a status you control.
Being old is not a status you control.
Now, she's been on good behavior.
Maybe she should be paroled.
There's no parole in the federal system.
Maybe that needs to change.
Maybe there should be changes to the actual criminal justice system.
Maybe there should be criminal justice reform.
But that's not Not the same thing as President Trump basically saying on the one hand let's strengthen the drug war and on the other hand saying let's let a drug trafficker out of prison.
By the way, this idea that she was uniquely innocent or something is just insane.
She was sentenced in 1996 to life in prison.
Why?
Because she was leading a multi-million dollar cocaine ring trafficking in 2,000 to 3,000 kilograms in involvement with the deadly Colombian Cali drug cartel.
The judge in that case, who now, by the way, sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and was confirmed to that seat by a 95 to nothing vote in the Senate, called Johnson, quote, cocaine trafficking ends with dead people on both ends of the business.
So we don't know how many people died because this woman trafficked in 2000 to 3000 kilograms of cocaine.
But here's how all of this started.
Mike Dotcom made a video about her and they said, does this grandmother deserve a life sentence?
And then they didn't really talk about her crime.
And Johnson told her story to CNN.
She said, after almost two decades together in a tumultuous relationship, my husband and I divorced in 1989.
Well, she didn't get involved with people selling drugs.
spiral out of control.
I lost my job and then my youngest son was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident.
No mother should have to bury her child.
The weight was unbelievable.
It was a burden I couldn't sustain.
I made some very poor decisions out of desperation.
I want to make this part clear.
I acknowledge I've done wrong.
I made the biggest mistake of my life to make ends meet and got involved with people selling drugs.
Well, she didn't get involved with people selling drugs.
She was the quintessential entrepreneur running the drugs.
It wasn't like some sort of accident.
It So all this talk about she's accepted her guilt and all the rest of it, again, maybe you let her out because she's old and she writes plays and she's not likely to go back to drug dealing after all of this.
But if you're going to make the case that you need to be harsher on drug penalties, then I'm not sure how you make that case simultaneous with, oh, she was a victim.
She wasn't the victim.
She got involved in drug dealing herself.
That was it.
She's a sentient human being.
And if you want to change the standard, change the standard.
But don't change it just because Kim Kardashian showed up.
And this is a bigger issue, okay?
I think right now, we're in the midst of something that I think is deeply stupid.
And that is treating our celebrities like politicians.
You know, in some cases, maybe that's ended up as a good thing, right?
President Trump has done some good things as president of the United States.
But right now we are ignoring actual necessity for expertise in politics on behalf of people who are famous.
So it's not that President Trump met with a bunch of criminal justice reform advocates.
And then decided, based on the weight of the evidence, that it was time to release Alice Johnson and restructure criminal justice reform.
Instead, it was Kim Kardashian came to the White House, he'd seen Kim Kardashian maybe in a sex tape or something, and then he decided, you know what would be great?
I will let her pick the next person that I pardon.
So there was that.
And then we also had this week the whole hubbub with the Philadelphia Eagles and Steph Curry and LeBron James talking about politics.
And then we had that story that I discussed a couple of days ago that Medicare and Social Security are going to be bankrupt in the next 15 years.
Which one of those stories got the least attention?
Obviously, it's the one about Social Security.
But there's a reason for that.
It's because human beings are pre-programmed to have an addiction to celebrity.
We care about what celebrities think.
This is how we work.
I'll explain in a second the science behind all of this and why we as rational human beings need to buck our addiction to celebrity Because it's going to have some real ramifications for our politics.
First, I just want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Legacy Box.
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Okay, so in just a second, I'm gonna give you all the science on why we worship celebrities.
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So what makes us better human beings, what makes us better citizens, is overcoming our own inherent biases, right?
We are born with certain biases.
Our brains are not completely plastic.
We are born with certain biases.
Babies already discriminate against outgroups.
Babies tend to be violent.
We have to, as we become older and more rational, use our rational capacity to overcome those instinctive biases that we have.
One of those instincts that we've not paid a lot of attention to, but we really ought to pay attention to, is our worship of celebrity.
It makes sense, right?
If you're in a small group, there are dominance hierarchies, as Jordan Peterson would put it, dominance hierarchies in smaller groups.
Dominance hierarchies just means somebody's the winner and somebody's the loser.
It's true in the animal kingdom.
It's true among human beings.
There's always somebody at the top of the food chain.
And because we were evolved to live in these small groups, that means that we look at the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, and we pay special attention to them.
Because when they give cues, then that may allow us more survival mechanisms.
If we are nice to the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, if we imitate the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, if we pay attention to the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, well now, take that small-scale social group and expand that out to 300 million people, the dominance hierarchy still exists, but the way that we judge dominance is fame and fortune, right?
Wealth, And being famous.
That's how we judge who's at the top of the dominance hierarchy.
And so without us even really understanding it, we have essentially this vestigial evolutionary overhang, where we still care what people at the top of the so-called dominance hierarchy think and wear, and all of these things, because we were evolved to do that at small group level, and now we do it at large group level, even though Kim Kardashian has no actual impact on our lives, even though LeBron James and Steph Curry have no actual impact on our lives.
I mean, this is not me suggesting this.
This is an evolutionary psychologist, Daniel Kruger, at the University of Michigan.
Well, now that addiction to celebrity has infected our politics because there's another bias that human beings suffer from.
So we suffer from a bias toward celebrity, a bias toward the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy, and then there's something called the halo effect.
The halo effect is if I see somebody beautiful, I also tend to think that person is smart.
If I see somebody beautiful, I think that person is nice.
If I see somebody rich, that person must be nice and also better looking.
This is just the way the human brain works.
We tend to attribute all good qualities to one person to whom we have attributed one good quality.
So when we look at celebrities, we think, oh, they must know things.
The line from Fiddler on the Roof is, when you're rich, they think you really know.
Well, that's basically correct.
When people are very wealthy or when people are very famous, we tend to think they know what they're talking about.
And that holds true even when it's pretty obvious they don't actually know what they're talking about.
So we take Samantha Bee seriously, even though she doesn't know what she's talking about.
And we treat Roseanne Barr as though she's a political tribal leader, even though Roseanne Barr doesn't know anything about politics and is extraordinarily volatile with a history of mental illness.
Well, President Trump is sort of a beneficiary of our worship of celebrity, and maybe that's had some good impacts in terms of policy, but it is not good policymaking.
The reason being that in the end, when you're making policy for 330 million people, when you're trying to determine the best policy with the fewest trade-offs, what you actually need are people who have studied these issues.
And when you're talking about crucial issues, like bankruptcy of Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid, going to Kim Kardashian for this stuff is not the right way to do it.
And the same thing holds true on criminal justice reform.
I'm very interested to hear what people who have studied criminal justice reform from right and left have said about this stuff.
I'm interested to hear what Heather McDonald has had to say about this sort of issue.
I'm interested to hear what some of the experts who have been put forward by the Trump administration in favor of criminal justice reform have to say about the issue.
I think there are good debates to be had about these issues.
I don't think that those debates can be had at the level of Kim Kardashian said we ought to let a drug trafficker out of prison.
I don't think that's the way that politics ought to be done.
But if we pay attention to experts, that's more boring.
It's more unfulfilling.
Here's what's really interesting about the way our government works right now.
On the one level, it is a celebrity government where we care about the president inviting the Philadelphia Eagles to the White House.
And on another level, we pay no attention to the actual experts.
The actual experts are the quote-unquote bureaucrats who are inside the executive branch who we don't elect or diselect.
That was not the way the founders envisioned this stuff.
The way the founders envisioned this stuff is the experts were the legislators that we elect.
We elected the experts.
Those were the people Those were the people who are supposed to be answerable to us.
So now we've got the worst of both worlds.
We've got celebrities who we don't elect, who are influencing people that we do elect, who aren't paying attention to the experts, and we have experts that we don't elect that we're not engaging in debate with.
So what we have is experts completely disconnected from the public, celebrities completely disconnected from the public, and the only people who are connected to the public are then kicking the ball over to either the celebrities or the experts.
None of this is good for the way that the country works.
Now, you may like the Alice Johnson pardon.
That's fine.
I'm not, like, freaking out.
It's not a pardon.
It's a commutation.
I'm not freaking out about it.
I don't think it's the worst thing that ever happened.
I don't think it's the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination.
But I do not like the basic notion here That we should spend all of our time paying attention to what celebrities think, I think it just makes for bad policy.
Now, speaking of that, the U.S.
Senate is considering right now the possibility of scaling back the White House's capacity to put tariffs on foreign products.
I think that this is about time.
I think it's beyond time.
Senator Bob Corker, who really is not a fan of the president, and the president is not a fan of his, he's put forward a bill to curtail presidential power on trade.
Apparently Trump called him and a lengthy call and told him to, to lay off the legislation.
And then Corker said that he was going to move forward with the legislation.
Anyway, as a general rule, I think the legislature should be in charge of tariffs.
It's not the job of the president of the United States to unilaterally decide misusing federal statutory law when we Tariffs are a tax.
If you tax products coming from China, you are forcing Americans to pay more for that product.
Doesn't hurt China that much.
It hurts the United States a lot.
The fact is that it hurts China in the sense China can't ship products to us.
But it hurts the American consumer, too.
It's a tax on the American consumer.
Now, if you're using tariffs in order to ratchet down Chinese tariffs on American products, that's one thing.
If you're doing it just because you like tariffs and you think it makes America more competitive and trade wars are easy to win, as the president has suggested, that is another thing entirely.
Again, just because President Trump is the president doesn't mean he knows what he's talking about when it comes to trade policy.
This should be kicked back to the Senate.
The fact that Republican senators are shying away from this shows their absolute cowardice on these issues.
This was a senatorial prerogative.
This is not a presidential prerogative.
I would be saying this no matter who was president of the United States in any circumstance.
Okay, so in just a second, I want to give you the update on the Mueller probe because there are a couple of updates that are worth noting here.
So let's begin with an update on James Comey.
So James Comey, who is just a self-serving, self-aggrandizing human being.
I've been very critical of James Comey.
I think he ought to have been fired by Obama.
I thought he ought to have been fired by Trump before Trump even came into office.
I said so at the time.
Well now, according to ABC News, the Justice Department's internal watchdog has concluded that James Comey defied authority at times during his tenure as FBI director, according to sources familiar with the draft report on the matter.
Shock.
And one source told ABC News that the draft report explicitly used the word insubordinate To describe Comey's behavior.
Another source agreed with that characterization, but could not confirm the use of the term.
In the draft report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is an apolitical body, like the IG's portion of the DOJ is not supposed to be political, also rebuked former Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
For her handling of the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton's personal email server, according to sources.
On Tuesday morning, President Trump complained of numerous delays in the release of Horowitz's final report, which is expected to run several hundred pages long and be released in the coming days.
The sources who spoke to ABC News were willing or able to address only a portion of the draft report's complete findings.
What is taking so long with the inspector general's report on Crooked Hillary and Slippery James Comey, Trump said on Twitter, hope report is not being changed and made weaker.
Well, there's no indication that the president has seen or will see a draft of the report before it's released, but Horwitz could theoretically revise the report before it is released.
I'll be obviously very curious to see what the IG report says.
I'm of the opinion that Comey was a terrible, terrible head of the FBI.
I don't find any of this particularly shocking.
You know, with all of that said, the fact is that You know, the facts will come out.
I want the facts to come out.
Now, meanwhile, President Trump is very angry, so is a lot of the right wing, over Robert Mueller because Robert Mueller apparently wants to view encrypted messages.
So, according to CNBC.com, special counsel Robert Mueller's team is requesting that witnesses turn in their personal phones to inspect their encrypted messaging programs and potentially view conversations between associates linked to President Donald Trump.
These witnesses are cooperating because Mueller does, in fact, have the subpoena power.
Mueller's team has been asking witnesses in the Russia probe to turn over phones for agents to examine private conversations on these various encrypted apps.
One of the reasons for this might be that Paul Manafort supposedly used encrypted apps in order to supposedly tamper with potential witnesses.
Maybe that's what Mueller is looking for.
But this has got people all hot and bothered because the more Mueller digs, the more people on the right are getting angry about it.
Sean Hannity was very upset about it last night.
He was saying to witnesses, listen, why don't you bash it?
He's saying this sarcastically, obviously.
Sean says, "Why don't you just bash your phones with a hammer?" Hillary got away with it.
I don't know.
If I advised them to follow Hillary Clinton's lead, delete all your emails, and then acid wash the emails and hard drives on the phones, then take your phones and bash them with a hammer into little itsy bitsy pieces, use bleach bit, remove the SIM cards, and then take the pieces and hand it over to Robert Mueller and say, Hillary Rodham Clinton, this is equal justice under the law.
Okay, so, you know, people are saying, well, Sean should now be indicted because he's encouraging people to destroy evidence.
Obviously, Sean is being sarcastic.
He's pointing out the double standard that exists between the Mueller investigation and the Hillary investigation.
I agree with that double standard, by the way.
I think that the Hillary investigation was absolutely botched.
I think that it was purposefully botched by the FBI.
I think if you want to talk corruption in the FBI, we should worry a lot less about Spygate until more evidence comes out.
We should worry a lot more about Hillary Clinton.
We should worry a lot more about the fact that the FBI was acting to essentially cover for Hillary Clinton When she was destroying emails knowing that they were classified, right?
I don't think Sean is wrong about all of that, but I do not appreciate the double standard.
I don't think just because Hillary was corrupt, that means that other people should be corrupt also.
Also, right now, the Spygate is running into some serious resistance from people who've actually seen the documents.
Now, one of the things that's been really funny about this is a lot of people in the media who are most exercised about so-called Spygate are people who also have not seen the documents, right?
They've seen the same number of documents that I have.
Meaning everything that's been publicly revealed.
But there's an open debate, and isn't much of a debate actually, inside Republican Congress over how much of Spygate is real.
President Trump thinks Spygate is real, but we now have Devin Nunes who suggested that at best maybe it's real, but he hasn't seen all the documents yet so he doesn't really know.
We've seen, we've seen, um, Trey Gowdy say that Spygate may not, in fact, be real.
And we've seen Speaker Ryan say that Spygate may not, in fact, be real.
So all I've said about Spygate remains.
As soon as the evidence comes out, happy to jump on board.
Until the evidence comes out, not gonna jump on board.
With that said, I would like to see somebody exercise, like, will somebody explain to Robert Mueller what the scope of this investigation is?
Or can we at least publicly find out what the scope of the investigation is?
I think that would be helpful because, like everybody else, I'm getting kind of tired of this nonsense.
Okay, so time for some stuff I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I watched the series from Stars of the White Queen, which is really entertaining, all about the War of the Roses, the very end of the War of the Roses.
And there's a good book on everything leading up to the War of the Roses for several centuries by Dan Jones called The Plantagenets.
So if you're interested in British history and you really like this stuff, Dan Jones' book The Plantagenets is well worth reading.
The warrior kings and queens who made England.
He also wrote a book on the War of the Roses.
Dan Jones, very interesting, very good writer.
So you should check that out if you're into reading history.
So that's worth seeing.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so we begin with Ocean's 8.
So Ocean's 8 is going to come out soon, is the assumption.
And the reviews are coming in, and it is amazing to see the political bias in the reviews.
The political bias in the reviews is astonishing.
Because when you actually read what people are saying about it, they are trying so hard not to say this is a bad movie.
It's exactly the same as Lady Ghostbusters.
Instead of them just saying, yeah, the movie kind of stunk, It's gotta be feminist, because it's filled with women, and they're women who are now doing it.
It's not Ocean's 11, which is men.
Now it's Ocean's 8, which is women.
And so that means that it has to be good, even if it's bad.
So here are some of the reviews.
Okay, Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly writes, Ocean 8's girls just want to have grand larceny conceit is kind of starry high glass goof the summer movie season was made for, even if it feels lightweight by the already zero gravity standards of the genre.
So what she's really saying at the end there is it's kind of bad and it's kind of fluffy.
But, you know, the girls just want to have grand larceny and conceit.
It's what movies were made for.
So the idea of the movie is really good.
The movie may kind of suck, but the idea of the movie is really, really good.
Here's the Guardians, Benjamin Lee.
Remember, all these people are on the left.
While great care has been taken in populating the film with infinitely talented performers, there's been less attention paid to the pros behind the scenes.
While Ocean's Eleven glided through its many sharp set pieces, Ocean 8's inelegantly plods.
The smoothness of Soderbergh's concoction, often smug yet mostly rather charming, has been replaced with a bland impersonality and the work of a disinterested hired hand.
Snappy, playful camera work and a deaf David Holmes score are sorely missed as Ross fills his film with plainly shot montages of superficial luxury that fail to feel quite as sumptuous as they should.
So that's a nice way of saying this movie is deathly boring and poorly shot.
And then there's Manohla Dargis of the New York Times.
So she credits the ensemble cast with keeping the picture afloat.
She says that Anne Hathaway is comedy gold, and she has fizz and delectable timing.
But she says the movie kind of sucks.
So this is the thing.
All of these reviews are basically the same.
They're all basically the same.
And all of the views...
Like, here's variety.
So in other words, because it's women, it's important, right?
It's more important than Ocean's Eleven was.
Ocean's Eleven wasn't very important because it had men.
male criminals, it lingers most, and not just for eight-year-olds, as a proudly scurrilous gallery of role models.
So in other words, because it's women, it's important, right?
It's more important than Ocean's Eleven was.
Ocean's Eleven wasn't very important because it had men.
Ocean's Eight is very important because women can be robbers too.
Women can be high-class thieves too.
Now, you may think to yourself, well, haven't there been movies made about female thieves Wasn't there a movie called Clute about a female thief with Jane Fonda, like, all the way back in the 1970s, in which I believe she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar?
I think she won, actually.
Haven't there been films featuring, like, Anne Hathaway as a criminal, like, in Dark Knight Rises, where she actually plays Catwoman?
Haven't there been films with women who play robbers?
The answer is yes.
There have been lots of them.
Thelma and Louise.
I mean, there have been lots of movies about this.
But no, it's very important.
In just the same way that Black Panther was very important.
I'm not saying Black Panther I thought was a good movie.
I enjoyed the movie.
But there's this sort of clarion call that went out from the tops of Hollywood that this is now an important movie.
Capital I. Important movie.
And that means that if the movie's good, it's fantastic.
It's the best movie that ever was made.
And if the movie is mediocre, then it's good.
And if the movie sucked, then it was mediocre.
It's an affirmative action for important movies.
I love this.
So basically, this is really boring.
All of these reviews are exactly the same.
have been hired and everyone is where they're supposed to be.
That level of planning makes the heist in Ocean's 8 run fairly smoothly.
As for the film itself, similarly curated with care, it gets the job done without ever being one for the record books.
So basically this is really boring, right?
Like all of these reviews are exactly the same.
They're blandly the same.
It is really, really funny.
is Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times.
Ocean's 8 has something to prove, and that determination is both its strength and its limitation.
It works hard, stays on point, delivers a few nifty surprises, and sometimes rises to a thrilling pitch of excitement, at least before the story peters out in its belabored third act.
What the movie refuses to do is dazzle or resonate or overstay its welcome, which is another way of saying it doesn't really linger.
As 8s go, it could stand to be a little crazier.
Again, they're working so hard not to say the movie sucks.
I've never seen critics work so hard not to say a movie sucks before.
Usually critics revel in writing bad reviews.
Really, like, if you're a movie critic and you get to write a bad review, it's juicy.
You get to sink your teeth into how bad the movie is.
You get to, like, pull out all the stops and be as mean as you want to be.
You get to triumph the insult comic dog.
Here, you can have comedy gold with the biggest Hollywood actresses on planet Earth.
I mean, these, like, universally.
It's like Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway.
Every major actress of the modern era is in this movie, and the movie stinks anyway.
I mean, if you can't make fun of that, I don't know what you can make fun of.
It's like making fun of the Los Angeles Lakers back in the early 2000s, when they got Gary Payton, Karl Malone, Shaq, and Kobe, and they somehow lost to the Detroit Pistons.
Right?
Like, there's no way to not make fun of that.
There just isn't.
Okay.
Other things that I hate.
So, Google has decided it's important to change its emojis.
So, this is a real thing.
So, there's big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google.
So, if you need any evidence of Google making this a priority, may I direct your attention to the salad emoji?
We've removed the egg in Android P Beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad.
The egg was too insulting for vegans, so they removed the egg in the salad emoji.
This is how you got Trump.
This is how you got Trump, you idiots.
My goodness.
You know what, I'm insulted by salad in general.
I'm insulted by people who say salad tastes good.
They're full of it.
They're liars.
Okay, anyone who says salad tastes good, and then they say, oh yeah, no, I'm gonna forego the bread.
I'm gonna go for a salad.
Yeah, you're a liar.
Okay, I'm talking to you.
Right now, you.
If you say, oh no, I love salad.
Lies.
OK, you prefer salad because you don't want to get fat.
Got it.
That's totally fine.
But can we stop with the gaslighting, please?
OK, the salad, what makes a salad good is the dressing or the cheese or the meat or the stuff on top of the salad.
Nobody, nobody ever has said, you know what?
I need a real treat tonight.
Give me some lettuce with a tomato on it.
No one has ever said that.
So I'm insulted by this emoji just because it's salad.
It should be immediately removed.
And instead, they should put, like, if you want to be nice to the vegans, put, like, vegan ice cream.
Okay?
Like, make it taste somewhat decent.
Like, stack some sugar on top.
How about just, like, a sugar cane?
How about that?
That's vegan, right?
Okay, salads.
Okay, so I guess I went off track here.
Salad's stupid, I guess, is the point that I'm making here.
Salad's gross.
And anyone who says differently is lying to you.
Okay, final thing that I hate today.
So, a Maryland Democrat decided that it was necessary to cut an ad insulting the President of the United States.
Why?
Because this Maryland Democrat happens to be pro-LGBT, and here is what the ad looks like.
I'm Rich Mattelino.
I'm running for governor to deliver progressive results and to stand up to Donald Trump.
Here are a few of the things I've done that already infuriate him.
I protected Planned Parenthood from the Republicans in Congress.
Take that, Trump!
I helped ban assault weapons in Maryland.
Take that, NRA!
I believe in public schools, not vouchers.
Take that, Trump!
And Betsy DeVos!
Yeah!
And what's the number one way I piss off Donald Trump and the Republicans?
Take that, Trump.
Okay, a few things about this ad.
So, number one, using children as little props.
Take that, NRA!
Ask the seven-year-old what NRA stands for.
No clue, right?
And then, like, do you think Trump actually is like, oh my God, they kissed.
Oh my God, the gay guys kissed.
Oh God.
Oh!
Like, you really think Donald Trump, you think really Donald Trump cares about that, like, deeply?
Donald Trump held up a rainbow flag at one of his rallies in 2016.
Do you think that Donald Trump, take that, Trump, like, really, if you think that part of the resistance is you effing your husband, like, I just, I'm so confused by this.
Like, if this is, really, like, do what you want to do, it's a free country, and, like, what?
Like, wow, you're gay, okay, that changes everything, somehow, but no one explains why, okay, but, what?
Like, I don't find this, like, who finds this, like, deeply offensive?
Who's like, ooh, take that, Trump.
I know every time, like, when I'm in the mood with my wife, I'm not like, take that, Obama.
Like, what in the world?
This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
And I love that they're throwing that out there, like, you know, okay, I guess.
You know, having sex with your boyfriend or your husband to own the cons, I guess that's a thing you can do.
I'm just confused as to why you think Donald Trump would possibly in a million years care about this and be insulted by it.
Like, even Mike Pence would not be insulted or care about this.
The insulting thing, honestly, about this ad is the insult that they think that I care about this.
They're like, oh my god, my life is broken now because you're gay.
Ooh, everything has changed.
You've totally devastated me.
Ooh.
I remember, there is a situation.
When I was interviewing, quick story, and then we will part.
So when I was interviewing for a law firm job in my Harvard Law School days.
So I graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, which means that you're going to get a job in law.
I had the worst interview record of anyone in the history of Harvard Law School, so far as I'm aware.
One for 32 in my interviews for Harvard Law School, because I had the titles of my book on my resume.
That's really not speculation.
The Office of Career Services told me to take it off my resume.
As soon as I did, I got two offers within a couple of weeks.
But, in any case, there was one situation in which I was interviewing at a major American law firm, a major law firm that had an outlet in Los Angeles.
And they do this thing when they bring you out to interview for your follow-up interview, and that is they fix you up with somebody who they think you'll get along with because they're trying to sell the firm.
They're trying to show you that the firm's a wonderful place to work, and that when you're working 2,200 billable hours reviewing pagination, that it's just going to be the best time you ever had, right?
Which is complete nonsense.
Anyway, so they decide, you know what would be great?
Ben Shapiro, right?
It's a Jewish name.
And he went to Harvard Law School.
Let's get a couple of Jews from Harvard Law School to take him out to lunch.
Okay, well, first of all, chances are it ain't gonna go that well because, first of all, I'm Orthodox.
Second of all, I'm conservative.
So, if you say Jews from Harvard Law School, that usually means, like, 98% of the time, radical left.
So, The couple of these Jews from Harvard Law School take me out to lunch, and this is supposed to be welcoming you into the intersectional clique that will be this law firm.
And it already started off weird because I said I wanted to, I could only eat kosher, so I'm happy to go to a not-kosher restaurant and have like a Coke or something.
And they're like, no, we have to go to a kosher place.
So, like, okay, that's nice of you.
There's only one kosher place at that point in downtown Los Angeles, and it is a falafel shop in like a hole in the wall.
So we're sitting there in our expensive suits, and we're eating falafel at this hole in the wall that is not air-conditioned in the middle of the summer.
And it's a guy and it's a girl.
And the guy is a radical environmentalist, and the girl is in a girl band, right?
She's also an environmentalist, but she puts on her resume that she is in a girl band.
It's like on her profile and everything.
So we're sitting there, and this guy reaches into his breast pocket, and he pulls out a column, and he starts reading from it to me.
And it's about gay marriage.
And it's about why I think that gay marriage and straight marriage are not societally equivalent, because I don't think they are.
And he starts reading this to me.
And he says, do you agree with this?
And I said, well, yeah, I wrote it.
So yeah.
And then and the girl then turns to me and she goes, well, I'm a lesbian.
And I said, so?
And she was, like, shocked by this.
Like, she actually thought I was gonna go, Oh my God, you're a lesbian?
That's changed everything!
What?
What?
You like chicks?
No!
No!
Oh!
You exist?
You're a real person?
No!
You know what?
I've changed everything.
I've decided I am now pro same-sex marriage.
I've decided that my entire biblical worldview is false.
Now that I've met someone who actually is homosexual, it's changed my entire life.
Okay, that didn't happen, obviously, because that's stupid!
That's stupid!
Do whatever you want!
It's a free country!
No one cares.
But the fact that people on the left think that they're, like, owning the cons by being gay?
All right.
All right.
If that's what floats your boat, if that's what gets you going at night, I guess that's a weird pickup line, but sure.
I mean, make your night better by owning Trump.
All right.
All right.
We'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more and hopefully less stupid news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and 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 Ford Publishing production.
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