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Aug. 7, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

57:08

The Self-Pitying Media | Ep. 597

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Time	Text
	The media lament President Trump's cruelty, everything is racist, and Democrats look to the future.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Myriad and sundry topics for us to cover today.
	A veritable cornucopia of issues and commentary coming your way in just a second.
	But first, I want to remind you that we are actually taking The Ben Shapiro Show live this month to audiences in Dallas and Phoenix.
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	It's really gonna be a lot of fun.
	I can't wait to see you there.
	It's going to be just a blast.
	It's gonna be awesome.
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	All right.
	So, we begin today.
	With the update on the Alex Jones banning.
	So Alex Jones is, as I have said about 1 million times at this point, an insane person.
	Alex Jones is the guy who says that the government is attempting to turn the frogs gay.
	He is a person who believes that the Sandy Hook shooting was actually a false flag and that the dead kids were actually child actors, or at least that's something he expressed on his show.
	He has suggested the same thing about various other terrorist attacks.
	He suggested that the Syrian gas attack by the Syrian government was actually performed by the White Helmets.
	He says crazy, borderline libelous and slanderous things on a routine basis.
	He said a couple of weeks ago that Robert Mueller was forwarding child rape or some such, and that he wanted to get in a duel with Robert Mueller.
	Now, his supporters will say that all of this is just shock value entertainment kind of stuff.
	Whatever it is, it's garbage.
	But does that mean that Facebook and YouTube and Apple and all of these various social media platforms ought to ban his material?
	Well, not really on the basis on which they are claiming.
	If they wanted to say, listen, we're going to ban slanderous material, libelous material, we're going to ban material that incites violence, then that at least is a workable standard.
	But instead, all of these social media groups said that they are going to use hate speech regulations, essentially, to ban Alex Jones.
	And as I said yesterday on the program, hate speech is a really, really vague term.
	When you say hate speech over and over and over, and then you apply it to a bunch of random people and topics that you just disagree with.
	So I, Ben Shapiro, am participating in hate speech when I refuse to use your preferred pronoun as a transgender person, and Alex Jones is engaged in hate speech when he says that Children who were murdered in a mass shooting attack were actually child actors in a false flag.
	If you're going to equate those two things, then hate speech has no actual meaning.
	And this is the problem.
	The left actually wants hate speech to have no actual meaning, except for stuff they don't like.
	And the proof is in the pudding.
	The stuff that they want to ban is invariably stuff that is anti-left.
	Now, I don't think Alex Jones is a conservative in any serious way.
	I don't think that he's even on the right in any serious way.
	He believes in bigger government and a variety of issues.
	He is more a provocateur and an anti-left activist.
	There is a difference between conservatism and being anti-left.
	The Nazis were anti-left.
	They weren't actually American conservatives.
	There are a lot of folks who are anti-left who are not actually American conservatives.
	American conservatism is a very specific brand about limited government and God-given rights.
	With that said, Alex Jones is being targeted by the left because he doesn't like the left very much, even though he has some kind of common principles with them in terms of the size and scope of government.
	Well, the left is suggesting that social media ought to use Alex Jones to get a foot in the door.
	There's a CNN article today all about how CNN had basically pressured social media into banning Alex Jones.
	You remember just a couple of weeks ago, Facebook came out and they said, listen, we're not going to throw Alex Jones off the platform.
	And then just this week, they said, well, you know, maybe we'll do that after all.
	The problem is that once politicians and folks on the left get their foot in the door, once they feel that they have the leverage to knock out anybody they don't like under the rubric of hate speech, you can fairly well guarantee that that is exactly what they are going to do.
	Case in point, Chris Murphy, a senator from Connecticut.
	So he tweets out last night, Infowars, which is Alex Jones's excreable outlet, is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart.
	These companies must do more than take down one website.
	Their survival of our democracy depends on it.
	So this is Chris Murphy, an actual elected government official who is now calling on private companies to crack down on speech that he does not like.
	That's all this is.
	He is not suggesting any sort of principle that has any limits to it.
	He is not suggesting slander and libel be the rules.
	He is not suggesting that violence be the rule.
	He is suggesting that anything he doesn't like You know, anybody who he labels lying should be banned by Facebook and YouTube.
	What's hilarious about this is that the entire left, which has suggested that President Trump is awful, awful, awful, awful for shouting fake news at CNN, these same people who shout fake news at any outlet they don't like, they say that they should be able to push private institutions into banning speech.
	So my question to Chris Murphy was, okay, Facebook's a private institution, it can do what it wants.
	YouTube is a private institution, it can do what it wants.
	But you are a congressperson, right?
	You are a member of the Senate of the United States.
	You do not have the governmental power under the First Amendment to make a law abridging freedom of speech.
	So what you gonna do about it?
	You gonna try and regulate Facebook and YouTube?
	You gonna try and call them a monopoly and then break them up?
	You gonna try and nationalize social media sites because you actually, the government, wants to control what people can and cannot say?
	The fact is that even if the government owned a site like Facebook or YouTube, they would not be allowed to engage in any sort of content discrimination.
	Under the First Amendment, government sources are not allowed to engage in content-based discrimination and content-based bias.
	But the idea here really is that Democrats are going to punish all of these companies for not doing what they want.
	They're going to punish Facebook.
	They're going to punish YouTube.
	And that's the reason you've seen Facebook and YouTube respond in such over-the-top fashion to all of the Democratic complaints about fake news on their platforms.
	And we talked about this a few months ago when Mark Zuckerberg was called idiotically to the floor of the Senate to answer questions about Russian hacking and Russian interference in the election.
	Democrats had been saying, people like Dianne Feinstein had been saying, well, the Russians really affected the election with Facebook.
	Now, the evidence that the Russians affected the election with Facebook is extraordinarily minimal.
	I mean, I've seen the Senate documents on this sort of stuff, and what they basically show is a bunch of crappy Russian memes that are really poorly done and were seen by a minute number of people.
	I should know how the metrics works.
	We have one of the most active Facebook pages in America.
	The Ben Shapiro Facebook page is extraordinarily active.
	We have about 4 million followers and we generate legitimately hundreds of millions of clicks per year.
	But the Senate was suggesting that the entire election turn, the Democrats were suggesting the entire election turn on Russian fake news being distributed via Facebook.
	The reason they were making a big issue out of this is because they wanted to push Facebook into regulating stuff they don't like.
	And you're seeing Chris Murphy basically saying that openly.
	Now, again, Facebook and YouTube, they have the capacity and the power and the ability under the First Amendment to do whatever they want.
	They are a private company.
	But once you get government officials sounding off and suggesting that various sites should be shut down in order to, quote-unquote, save democracy, that's burning the village in order to save it.
	Once the government says you have to shut down outlets in order to save democracy, you have to start thinking about whether that is actually a destruction of democracy in order to, quote-unquote, save democracy.
	If you think that America hangs on a knife's edge because InfoWars is out there, Then I would suggest that perhaps you have the wrong idea of what a republic is.
	The whole basis of a republic is that the people are smart enough to see past the stupidity of places like Infowars.
	That the vast majority of people are not taken in by Alex Jones's shtick.
	And the fact is that if we're going to get into the business of banning companies that routinely engage in fake news, there are a bunch on the left who we ought to be looking at.
	But we shouldn't get into that business because it's a dangerous business.
	And this is why, if Facebook and YouTube want to go after Alex Jones on the grounds that he is committing certain acts that could theoretically violate legal lines, that is one thing.
	But if they want to set up this soft standard that can then be manipulated by the Democrats, that is completely another.
	And it is astonishing to me that folks on the left don't see how this could be turned on the other ear.
	The same people who are complaining that Trump calls the media fake news, these same people have no problem with Facebook and YouTube banning InfoWars.
	And again, I'm not saying that InfoWars and CNN are on the same level.
	I know that's an unpopular thing to say among conservatives, but CNN and InfoWars are not on the same level.
	CNN actually does report the news, and when they get things wrong, they get things wrong and apologize for it, generally speaking.
	They are biased in their approach to the news.
	That is the big flaw with CNN.
	But if you are just to look at the number of true things that CNN says on a daily basis versus the number of true things InfoWars says on a daily basis, there is no comparison.
	CNN is not promulgating the conspiracy theory that Pizzagate is real.
	I'm not going to pretend CNN and Alex Jones are exactly of the same ilk, because I don't think that they are.
	However, if we're going to get into the business of policing speech, it's hard to see where you draw that line and why you would draw that line in a way that doesn't include InfoWars, but does include CNN, or does include Daily Cause, but doesn't include InfoWars, or does include Huffington Post, but doesn't include Daily Wire.
	Very difficult to see limiting principles here.
	And limiting principles are the necessity of a legal system.
	If you're a lawyer, what you're looking for is a law that can be equally applied across the board.
	If the law is just a tool of the powerful, that's when you start to have problems.
	And right now, the law is becoming a tool of the powerful who are attempting to club companies like Facebook and YouTube into line.
	This is why even when conservatives say they want to regulate Facebook and YouTube, Steve Bannon has said this, I think, no, it's more dangerous than it's worth.
	And it violates First Amendment principles.
	You shouldn't be regulating private companies just because you don't like what the private companies are doing.
	There's a lot of talk today about, well, you can never launch a competitor to Facebook, you can never launch a competitor to YouTube.
	Why not?
	Facebook started as a competitor to MySpace.
	Are you saying that we can never create a competitor to a company that was founded in what, 2007?
	I'm old enough to remember when Yahoo was the dominant search engine and then Google took over.
	I'm old enough to remember when AltaVista was the dominant search engine before Yahoo.
	So, there's this weird idea that pervades America that companies that are very powerful today were always powerful and always will be powerful.
	The reality is that companies drop in and out of the stock market and off the top 100 on a regular basis.
	The number of really long-lasting companies in the United States without government subsidies is actually pretty low.
	There's pretty high turnover in business, which is to say, if Facebook continues to be bad at its business, there will be a competitor that is launched.
	If YouTube continues to ban ad revenue for a variety of various content creators, there will be alternative sources that are created that are not YouTube.
	So there is a solution to material you don't like on YouTube or Facebook, and that is don't watch it.
	It is not push Facebook and YouTube to ban all of that sort of material.
	Now to talk about another idiotic attempt to cram down government in just one second.
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	All right.
	So.
	Speaking of leftist attempts to involve government in areas where it shouldn't be involved, I have to bring up this tweet that was shown to me by our very own Senya.
	Full credit to Senya for spotting this idiocy.
	Dylan Matthews over at Vox.com, the font of much of America's stupidity.
	I would say that Vox has more impact on America's stupid than Infowars does.
	Because Vox actually purports to be a non-conspiratorial website that just prints dumb crap on a regular basis.
	And this is not to say that every writer over at Vox is bad.
	I'm fairly good friends with a couple of writers over at Vox, actually.
	But Dylan Matthews is just... He's a first-year econ student who should have failed.
	He says, getting to Canada style health care costs would require cutting doctor salaries a lot.
	33 percent for primary care, 52 percent for orthosurgeons.
	That's fine.
	They'll live.
	But it's important not to undersell the political difficulty.
	No, it's not fine.
	And this just demonstrates the lack of understanding of how exactly medicine works.
	He's citing a study that shows that doctors in America are paid significantly more than doctors in other parts of the world.
	It shows that in Australia, doctors make about half what they make in the United States.
	In Germany, they make about 70%.
	In the UK, they make about 86% of what they make in the United States.
	The pre-tax earnings net of expenses in the United States as of 2008 was about $186,000 for a doctor.
	Believe it or not, that's actually not a lot of money for a doctor.
	The reason that's not a lot of money for a doctor is number one, that is the average.
	There are a lot of doctors making below that and a lot of doctors making above it.
	If you're a dermatologist, you're probably making half a million dollars a year.
	If you are a primary care physician, there's a good shot that you're making less than $186,000 a year, depending on where exactly you are practicing.
	But if you lower the amount of money, forcibly lower the amount of money that doctors are making, do you think more or fewer doctors are going to go into the business of doctoring?
	My wife and I, you know, we paid our bills and we had to spend on her college and medical school education.
	We spent, let's see, four years of UCLA plus four more years of medical school.
	So that would be a grand total of somewhere in the neighborhood of $350,000?
	$300,000 on her medical education?
	And then she had a three-year residency, and in residency, residents are paid virtually nothing.
	They're paid basically less than minimum wage.
	If you actually average out the number of hours they work to the salary that they make, which is very often like 50 grand, then you're actually averaging out to below minimum wage numbers for people who have been trained to take care of you.
	If you start cutting the salaries and she's not going to get to work until she's 30, right?
	She's actually not her birthday is coming up.
	I won't say how old my wife is.
	She wouldn't care actually if I did, but her birthday is coming up next week.
	Happy birthday, sweetheart.
	If she once she becomes a doctor, she will be in her 30s.
	And the fact is that she's already a doctor, but she won't be practicing doctor on her own until she's in her 30s.
	If you're going to make up for all that money, you actually are going to have to charge a lot of money in order to do it.
	If you want to lower the supply of doctors, all you have to do is forcibly lower the amount of money they can make.
	They'll live is not an answer to how you provide more supply of medical care.
	But this just shows the ignorance with which the left treats government intervention, whether it's with regard to Facebook or whether it is with regard to the medical system.
	Okay, meanwhile, the media have decided That they are the heroes.
	So the same people who say that they are the heroes for having Alex Jones banned from Facebook and YouTube and they think that bad media ought to be banned, they're very, very upset that the President of the United States has called them the enemy of the people and that he's mean to them and that he gives them the sads with a Z at the end of the word.
	He's just very, very mean.
	So there's an article over at CNN by a guy named Joseph Holt.
	He's an ethics professor at the University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business.
	And this article is so absurd, it's almost hard to describe the absurdity of this article.
	So here is what the article is titled.
	The press isn't the enemy of the people, it's the protector.
	Not all heroes wear capes, folks.
	Now, again, let me state for the 1,273,209th time that this is a bad thing.
	The President of the United States should not be calling Americans the enemy of the people unless they are legitimately engaged in attempted terrorist acts or have allied with a foreign power.
	Yet that is what happened Thursday at a White House press briefing.
	Now, again, let me state for the 1,273,209th time that this is a bad thing.
	The president of the United States should not be calling Americans the enemy of the people unless they are legitimately engaged in attempted terrorist acts or have allied with a foreign power.
	But with that said, is the press overblowing all of this?
	It's overblowing all of this because the press is very focused on protecting itself.
	They're not super focused on protecting the American people.
	I love this.
	It says, we thank soldiers.
	This is how the article concludes.
	We thank soldiers for their service because they devote themselves to protecting our freedoms.
	And we should.
	But we should also thank the media for the same reason, especially when the stakes have never been higher.
	If you actually believe members of the press are like American soldiers, you are an idiot.
	You're an idiot.
	Okay, President Trump has arrested zero journalists.
	Zero.
	How many journalists are in danger of being shot every day in the United States?
	The answer?
	Zero.
	Okay, and if they are shot at, God forbid, a place like happened in Virginia, It had nothing to do with Trump.
	And you'll see that there are members of the press who keep trying to suggest that President Trump is going to be responsible for the death of journalists.
	There's no evidence that has happened yet.
	There's a lot more evidence that Bernie Sanders is responsible for the near death of a bunch of Congress people than that Donald Trump is responsible for the death of journalists.
	And you have folks like Bret Stephens.
	Bret Stephens is a real never-Trumper.
	You know, there are people who use the term never-Trump to just mean somebody I don't like.
	Never-Trumpers are people who start saying silly things simply because they don't like Trump.
	I mean, people who are conservatives, or are conservatives, who say ridiculous things just because they don't like President Trump.
	So, Bret Stephens has become one of these people, even though I like a lot of what he has to say.
	This is really absurd.
	Max Boot is another.
	We'll talk about him in just a second.
	Bret Stephens writes for the New York Times, and he says that if journalists are shot, there will be blood on President Trump's hands.
	I think we are marching towards the day when someone who thinks that he is taking directions from the president and acting in the best interest of the American people against those of us presumptive traitors around this table, someone like that is going to do that in a major American newsroom.
	When that happens, Mr. President, the blood will be on your hands.
	Okay, did anybody say this about the President of the United States before Donald Trump, who was ripping on the police day in and day out, and then there was a terrorist, essentially, who went and shot a bunch of police officers in Dallas?
	I specifically wrote a column saying Obama was not responsible for that.
	He was responsible for an uptick of anger against the police, but he was not responsible for somebody going and shooting members of the police force.
	And yet now we have this sort of language emanating from the media.
	I find it deeply depressing that there are so many members of the media who seem intent on treating the media as a separate class from the rest of Americans.
	And this is what Americans are responding to.
	The media don't seem to care when Americans are attacked on a regular basis by politicians or when media members attack regular Americans on a regular basis.
	I remember when Joe Wurzelbacher, who was a plumber in the 2008 election, questioned President Obama, he was then Senator Obama, about his plan to raise taxes.
	And Joe Wurzelbacher, the media dug through his entire life.
	They dug through his entire life.
	The media have used inflammatory language about a variety of figures, both political and apolitical.
	And yet when it comes to the media being attacked, then all of a sudden the knives come out.
	Listen, again, I don't think the president should say this sort of stuff, but the media's defensiveness just demonstrates that their real interest lies in self-protection, not in standing up for the American people.
	And this is a serious problem.
	This is why they're still hosting people like Rosie O'Donnell.
	Rosie O'Donnell was on MSNBC yesterday.
	What does Rosie O'Donnell have to say about anything?
	Why is Rosie O'Donnell, who has not been relevant for a generation, even on TV?
	Well, she's there to piss off Trump.
	I mean, that's the only reason they're having her on.
	Here she is.
	He's a horrible, horrible human with no soul, and he has a very serious mental disorder.
	There are so many psychiatrists who are trying to get out the duty to warn.
	They wrote a book.
	This guy is in no means mentally stable enough to run this country, and he should be impeached, and every congressman who hasn't filed those articles should lose their job.
	Well, I'm so glad that we have Rosie O'Donnell to illuminate all of this for us.
	The media are just, they're the firefighters, they're the soldiers.
	Soldiers have on Rosie O'Donnell an actual crazy person to rant about the President of the United States.
	That's what actual soldiers do.
	They are just like the men and women on the front lines who are battling the Taliban.
	That's what our journalists are like, according to that idiot professor from Notre Dame writing at CNN.com.
	And then they wonder why we think the media are out of touch?
	They wonder why we think the media are out of touch?
	We think they're out of touch because it turns out they're out of touch.
	Okay, in just a second, I'm going to talk more about how out of touch the media are.
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	Okay, speaking...
	Of the media being out of touch.
	The media seemed to be under this wild misimpression that everything is racist.
	So Max Boot, another actual never-Trumper, right?
	He's a guy who has decided essentially that you should vote for Democrats based on Donald Trump.
	And Bret Stephens did the same thing.
	The way that you can tell the real quote-unquote never-Trumpers from the people who just didn't vote for Trump in 2016, but Didn't say that it was bad to vote for Trump and who might vote for Trump in 2020.
	The way you can tell is whether they are saying to vote for Democrats in the 2018 elections.
	So Max Boot says you should vote for Democrats in the 2018 elections.
	I believe Bret Stephens said the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.
	I know that, I know George Will has said that as well.
	Well, Max Boot has an entire article out today in the Washington Post, of course, wearing his trademark journalist hat.
	In which she says, right-wing commentators had a field day last week with the news that Sarah Jong, a young Korean-American hired to write about technology for the New York Times editorial board, had a history of attacking white people on Twitter.
	She was predictably pilloried as a racist by the usual suspects, and understandably so.
	As the Post noted, her tweets include, oh man, it's kind of sick how much I enjoy, how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.
	In the New York Times explanation that she had been countering the trolling she received from racists online doesn't make much sense.
	And he basically says that the right is correct about all of this.
	He says, "If Zhang had been targeting African-Americans or Jews, there's little doubt her career would be over, as in fact happened with the previous Times editorial board hire, who was quickly unhired because of her friendship with a neo-Nazi." Right, and he's talking there about Quinn Norton, who actually long ago had been friendly with a tech writer who then turned into a Nazi and was fired by the New York Times for once having been friendly with that person.
	So the right has a point about Zhang.
	Fine, is Max Boot.
	But where are their voices, when a far more prominent bigot is spewing hatred from a much more powerful platform?
	Friday night, President Trump tweeted, LeBron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon.
	He made LeBron look smart, which isn't easy to do.
	Okay, let me just get this straight.
	According to Max Boot, it is the same thing to tweet, cancel white people, as it is to tweet that LeBron James was interviewed by a dumb guy, Don Lemon.
	That's the same level of racism?
	You know how far afield you have to go to reach that conclusion?
	Now, I'm not one who has defended President Trump when I think that he has said racially charged things or even things that border on racism.
	When he was defending the Charlottesville marchers, I was first in line to condemn that because I thought that that was gross.
	But to suggest that this is racist, when he says about LeBron James that LeBron James is not smart or Don Lemon is not smart, is just ridiculous.
	And I love this.
	Max Boot says, "Granted, the very stable genius also sometimes spews charges of stupidity at white men, such as actor Robert De Niro and James Clapper.
	But an inordinate number of his attacks are directed against women and minorities." What exactly is that supposed to mean?
	Can you do it by percentage?
	Am I supposed to direct a certain percentage of my attacks against people of various races based on the population of the United States?
	So if 10% of my attacks on dumb people can be on black people, and then 70% have to be against white people, and some 15% have to be against Hispanic people, 50% have to be against women, 50% have to be against men.
	Only 2% can be against Jews.
	How is this supposed to work?
	I'm supposed to think before calling anyone stupid, I'm supposed to think about the proportionality of the name calling to the population of the United States?
	What in the world is Max Boot even talking about?
	He says, the kind of prejudice Trump exhibits is far more toxic and dangerous than Jung's remarks in which he suggested that white people should basically all die.
	You're right.
	President Trump saying he doesn't like LeBron James and he likes Michael Jordan, who happens to be, wait for it, a black guy.
	Right?
	That that's actually worse than what Sarah Jeong tweeted.
	He says, we have a long, ugly history of discriminating against and visiting violence upon African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian-Americans.
	Black people were lynched.
	Whites generally weren't, though a Jew was once.
	Asians were barred from coming here.
	Whites generally weren't.
	And while we have made real progress toward a more colorblind society, we are not there yet.
	And with Trump at the wheel, we are going in reverse.
	There are too many videos circulating online of police officers harassing, beating, even killing African Americans in situations where whites would have walked away unmolested.
	Again, he's going to have to show the proof that this is happening disproportionately to black folks as opposed to white folks based on race.
	There's a very famous case out here in California.
	Homeless man named Kelly Thomas.
	People don't know it across the nation because he was a white homeless dude who was beat to death by a bunch of cops.
	This is far from sympathizing with the victims.
	Trump attacks the African-American NFL players who protest police brutality.
	Very clearly, Max Boot thinks that Trump is a worse guy than Sarah Jean.
	He says there's a double standard on racism in the country and liberals are guilty as charged, but conservatives are far worse in their hypocrisy and their actions are far more destructive.
	Anybody who believes that conservatives are far worse on racism There's an entire theory from the left that racism is okay, actually okay, based on the ethnic identity of the person who is spewing the racism.
	There's an entire school of thought on the left called intersectionality that suggests that we can judge how valuable your opinion is based on your membership in a variety of victim groups.
	That is an actual tenet of the Democratic Party.
	Now, I may not like how people have gone soft on President Trump's Horrible statements at times.
	I may think that's terrible, but to pretend that that is endemic to the Republican Party in the same way that the intersectional identity politics is rooted in the Democratic Party is to ignore the reality of the situation.
	Donald Trump is a figure who I don't think has been good for racial tension in America.
	I don't.
	But if Donald Trump were to leave office tomorrow and Mike Pence were to take over, that would pretty much cure that particular problem.
	Hey, if a Democrat were to take over tomorrow, the problem would not only be cured, it would not only not be cured, it would be exacerbated in a pretty significant way.
	Because the Democratic Party has full-scale embraced the racist rhetoric of Sarah Jean.
	Remember, if a Republican were to be caught saying the same thing Sarah Jean were saying, that person would be finished.
	Their career would be over.
	And the only person who's gotten away with anything that I would say even remotely resembles that stuff is Donald Trump, and his statements have not remotely resembled what Sarah Zhang actually said.
	If Sarah Zhang were a Republican, she'd be out of a job right now.
	She is not.
	She's on the editorial board of the New York Times.
	That should demonstrate the institutional power arrangement that allows the left to get away with their racism.
	It's so funny.
	The left will say that racism is prejudice plus power.
	Well, if you want to talk about prejudice plus power, you're going to have to talk about the left that combines its own prejudice against various groups of people with the belief that that power should be enforced on behalf of those prejudices.
	That's an actual, that's a bigger problem, it is.
	And the attempt to paint Donald Trump as a racist based on these comments about LeBron James, it's not even remotely accurate.
	That's the part that's so crazy.
	If you want to go after Trump based on actual statements that are racially tinged, have at it.
	But you don't have to stretch to go there.
	In a second, I'm going to show you how far the left stretches to go there because it really is crazy.
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	I'm going to talk in a second about the media's continuing attempt to move beyond the bounds of rationality with regard to the race issue.
	But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
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	All right.
	So the left has decided that President Trump's comments about LeBron James are full scale racism, while Sarah Jung's comments about white people being canceled.
	That's not actually racist because she's Asian.
	Which is weird.
	Also, the left is really going to have to decide whether Asian Americans are privileged members of American society or whether they are discriminated victims in American society.
	Sarah Zhang went to Berkeley and she went to Harvard Law School.
	Asian Americans earn more on average than white Americans do by a pretty significant margin, and they are more highly educated on average than white Americans.
	So which is it?
	Should we discriminate against Asian Americans in admissions decisions at Harvard?
	Or should we label them victims of American society capable of saying cancel white people?
	I'm going to have to pick one woke leftist.
	In any case, Don Lemon says that the real racist is President Trump because President Trump has said mean things about LeBron James.
	This president traffics in racism and is fueled by bullying.
	From keeping children at the border in cages to bullying journalists at every one of his rallies and every chance he gets.
	Okay, so he, you know, he says this over and over and over and over.
	And again, linking this to LeBron James is pretty crazy.
	Democratic representative Tim Ryan, who wants to run for president based on the yoga vote.
	No, I'm not kidding you.
	He's actually said this.
	He's a representative from Ohio in a swing district.
	And he says he doesn't want to campaign on his blue collar credentials.
	Instead, he would prefer to campaign instead on the so-called yoga vote, yoga moms.
	Good luck with that, dude.
	Well, he says that Donald Trump is a racist because he was mean to LeBron James.
	Now, again, I don't think LeBron James is a bad guy.
	I said this yesterday.
	I think he seems, by all measures, to be a fairly good guy.
	He's a guy who married the mother of his children.
	I know it's a pretty low standard for being a good person in today's America, but he did.
	He married the mom of his kids, which is a good thing.
	He just founded a charter school, which is a very good thing.
	He's putting his own money into it.
	He helps out the community.
	He gives a lot of money to charity.
	All that said, saying that you don't like LeBron James does not mean that you are in fact a racist, but according to Representative Ryan, Donald Trump is a racist because of what he had to say about LeBron.
	The president is being racist?
	No question about it.
	I mean, come on.
	He's always got to find a black person.
	He's always got to find a brown person that he's got to prop up and make fun of to try to stimulate a certain portion of constituents that he has, a certain following that he has.
	Okay, so I just want to point out, here's a list of the people that President Trump has called low IQ or dumb.
	Mika Brzezinski, quote-unquote, dumb as a rock.
	Dumb as a rock, by the way, is his favorite, it's his favorite description of somebody.
	He's used, I searched his tweets, he has used dumb as a rock about 1,000 times in his tweets.
	Here's just a partial listing of the people he has called stupid.
	Mika Brzezinski, dumb as a rock, white person.
	Katie Tour, incompetent, white person.
	Jeb Bush, dumb as a rock, just like Mika, white person.
	Lindsey Graham, dumb mouthpiece, white person.
	Glenn Beck, dumb as a rock.
	Don Lemon, black person, dumb as a rock.
	Jennifer Rubin, untalented, a real dummy, low IQ, white person.
	Chris Steierwald and Mark Thiessen, Hey, the New York Times came up with a listing in January 2016 of all the people Trump had insulted online.
	very low IQ individual.
	Stuart Stevens, dumb guy.
	Bill Kristol, dopey.
	Rick Wilson, dumb as a rock.
	Sherry Jacobus, dumb.
	Bill Crosby, foolish, stupid, or getting bad advice.
	Jonah Goldberg, dumb as a rock.
	Rosie O'Donnell, crude, rude, obnoxious, and dumb.
	Bill Maher, stupid guy slash bad ratings.
	Chris Matthews, dumb as a rock.
	And scores of others.
	The New York Times came up with a listing in January 2016 of all the people Trump had insulted online.
	The total number was 487.
	487 people he had insulted individually online.
	I have like 120,000 tweets.
	I really doubt that I've insulted that many people directly on Twitter.
	I mean, for Trump, it's just a habit.
	And I haven't seen the racial breakdown.
	I'd like to see that.
	Is he really insulting black people at like a 50% rate?
	But the idea that everything he has to... The left only has a few adjectives it likes to use about people.
	Racist, stupid.
	Vicious.
	So they try to use all of them on Trump simultaneously.
	Not every comment Trump makes is racist.
	And when you say to people that Trump is a racist based on the LeBron James statement, all you're doing is actually undermining your own case.
	This is where the media really do themselves a disservice.
	These firefighters who rush to the fire.
	They spend as much effort on Donald Trump tweeting mean things about Don Lemon as they do when the President of the United States says something bad about Charlottesville.
	Like, legitimately the same effort.
	Hey, they're expending 100% effort all the time.
	It's not really bright.
	You shouldn't expend all of your energy in one place, particularly when that place happens to be stupid.
	And meanwhile, speaking of stupid, the West Hollywood City Council has now voted to recommend that Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame be removed.
	Now, there are a couple problems with this.
	First of all, his star on the Walk of Fame is not actually in West Hollywood, so this has the same relevance as Pyongyang deciding that the star on the Walk of Fame should actually be removed.
	We drove past the Star on the Walk of Fame the other day and people were crowded around it like it was the site of a killing.
	It was pretty wild.
	They had put up these pylons to protect the broken Star on the Walk of Fame.
	And now they have passed a resolution.
	Here's what they say.
	This is Mayor John Duran.
	He wrote, West Hollywood City Council unanimously passes resolution asking the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to remove the Donald Trump star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
	During a meeting, Mr. Durant had a vote.
	And the question I would like to ask is whether, in fact, Hollywood is filled with people who abuse women, minorities, immigrants, and the disabled.
	The answer, of course, is yes.
	Okay, I know a lot of people in Hollywood.
	I would just like to ask a question.
	And the question I would like to ask is whether, in fact, Hollywood is filled with people who abuse women, minorities, immigrants, and the disabled.
	The answer, of course, is yes.
	Okay, I know a lot of people in Hollywood.
	Let's just put it this way.
	If you're a woman in Hollywood, you have not been abused, you are in a minority.
	The number of women in Hollywood who have been abused by a powerful man is extraordinarily high because men in positions of power, particularly with women who would like to be a star, when those men say, get on that couch or I'm not hiring you, a lot of women will do that.
	And it's terrible and it's awful.
	Those guys all have stars on the Walk of Fame.
	They all do.
	Harvey Weinstein still has his star on the Walk of Fame.
	It has not been removed.
	Kevin Spacey still has his star on the Walk of Fame.
	The West Hollywood City Council doesn't care about that.
	They don't like Trump because if Trump were on the left, is there any doubt that they would be begging to put his star on the Walk of Fame?
	They're still looking for an excuse to put a Bill Clinton star on the Walk of Fame, even though he's never been in a movie.
	They're still looking for an excuse to put a Hillary Clinton star on the Walk of Fame.
	Being on the left or being on the right is the only thing that matters here.
	But the good news is, for the left, I guess, that according to Article 49 of the U.S.
	Constitution, once you remove Donald Trump's star from the Walk of Fame, he's no longer president of the United States.
	So that's very exciting stuff.
	I think that's what they're really attempting to do here.
	They're attempting to remove Trump from the presidency through sheer force of rage face.
	They're just gonna make rageful faces at things, and then hopefully Trump will sort of dissipate into the ether.
	Except, of course, that is not actually going to happen.
	But rage can help get out the vote.
	I mean, let's make clear that 2018 may not be a good year for the president of the United States.
	It may not be a good year for Trump.
	It may not be a good year for Republicans.
	But if you think that Democrats are going to win power on the basis of breaking Donald Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame or shouting racist at Trump repeatedly, you haven't been watching politics for the past several years.
	OK, meanwhile, the Democrats are struggling for an alternative vision, and their alternative vision is basically Trump is a traitor and let's be socialists.
	And I'm not really joking or exaggerating about this.
	Cynthia Nixon is seen as one of these figures who is going to be the future of the Democratic Party, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	Boom!
	Got her name right this time.
	Okay, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the new face of the Democratic Party, despite the fact that she knows no things.
	Okay, all the things she thinks she knows are things that are not true.
	She is... Okay, I'm not saying this because she's a woman or because of her race.
	She's a stupid person.
	Okay, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a bright egg.
	Now, I'm saying this only based on her public statements.
	I do not think that she's a good expositor of her viewpoint.
	There are many people on the left who agree with her, who I think are much better expositors of her particular viewpoint.
	I do not think that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is a wise spokeswoman.
	I think she's charismatic, but charisma and brains don't always come in the same package.
	And if you disagree with me, those of you on the left, think about what you think of President Trump.
	Okay, the fact is, charisma and brains, not exactly the same thing.
	In any case, she is considered the new face of the Republican Party, another person, or the Democratic Party, another person considered a rising star in the Democratic Party is Cynthia Nixon, who you remember for playing one of the... Miranda, is it?
	On Sex and the City?
	Right, the least popular member of the Sex and the City crew.
	You'll remember her from that.
	But now, she is running against Andrew Cuomo, the living block of wood who acts as New York's governor.
	She's running against him, and she's passionate about her agenda.
	What is her agenda?
	Well, she spoke at Nutroots Nation, which actually should be called Nutroots Nation.
	I mean, it's just where everybody goes to be an insane person.
	Cory Booker shows up and he does his weird jazz hands and talks about how socialism is the way and then holds up a sign saying America shouldn't have borders and Israel shouldn't have borders.
	Good luck with that, Cory.
	And then Elizabeth Warren shows up to basically announce she's running for president.
	Good luck with that as well.
	And what you really need is a more obnoxious version of Hillary Clinton who claims she's a Native American.
	That's going to work out great for you.
	Cynthia Nixon, though, summed up the new democratic platform in one statement.
	Here it is.
	I'm proud to be one of a small but growing number of candidates to identify as a democratic socialist.
	If being a democratic socialist means believing that health care and housing and education should be a human right, then I am a democratic socialist.
	Okay, and what she says is, if the Republicans are going to call us socialists anyway, maybe we should be socialists.
	First of all, if anybody ever uses the formulation, if being X means blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, they're lying to you.
	Okay, because usually what they're doing is they're saying, if, it's like, if being a communist means I just love puppies, then call me a communist!
	No, that's not what being a Democratic Socialist means.
	If you say that I think that Democratic Socialist means free healthcare, no, I think Democratic Socialist means you want to nationalize all major industries in the United States and abolish the profit margin, which is what the Democratic Socialist platform actually says.
	I think being a Democratic Socialist does not actually mean that you want to just add a bunch of redistributionist programs atop a capitalist edifice.
	That's not what your program actually says.
	Because it wouldn't be less popular if she went up there and she said, if being a democratic socialist means nationalize all the industries and put them under the direct control of government for redistributionist purposes, thereby killing profit motive and destroying every major industry in the country, then I'm a democratic socialist.
	She can't say that, because that's actually what Democratic Socialist means.
	So instead, she gets up there and she starts shrieking about, If being a Democratic Socialist means that I like to kiss babies, then that's me!
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	If that's her schtick, okay, I guess that's her schtick.
	But if the future of the Democratic Party is just declaring that you're a Democratic Socialist, which means unicorns and rainbow poop, then...
	I don't know what to tell you.
	Try running on that.
	Let's see how that goes for you.
	And if anybody on the right has any capacity to debate, they should be able to knock the Democratic-Socialist arguments down with legitimately the push of a finger.
	It really is that easy.
	The other program the Democrats are pushing, of course, is the idea that Trump is going to be removed from office via a deus ex machina that Robert Mueller will swoop in like a Valkyrie aboard his avenging horse, and then he will take out the President of the United States, a Democratic representative named Cicilline, It has come out now and says that David Cicilline from Rhode Island, he says that we can probably oust Trump based on the Trump-Russia stuff right now.
	Yeah, good luck with that.
	I think there's enough evidence there, certainly, to present this information to a grand jury.
	Obviously, Mr. Mueller and a grand jury will make that determination.
	But on its face, this is sort of prima facie evidence of a conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.
	And with Mr. Trump Jr.' 's admissions of knowing the purpose of this meeting based on those emails, I think he definitely has liability.
	Okay, well let's find out whether that is true or not, but if you are placing all of your faith in democratic socialism and Donald Trump is a Russian agent, I would say the Democrats have to come up with something better in the near future.
	Maybe not for the congressional elections, but for 2020 for sure.
	Okay, so now it's time for some things I like and some things I hate, correct?
	Yes, we are at that point in the show.
	Let's do it.
	OK, so things I like.
	I've started watching Big Little Lies with Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley.
	And I have to admit that I was kind of off-put by the marketing campaign for this particular show because I felt like it was just going to be like a female gossip show, essentially not geared toward men at all.
	And it turns out that the show is actually extraordinarily funny and well-written and pretty great.
	Reese Witherspoon, particularly, is just awesome.
	And I've always underestimated Reese Witherspoon as an actress, honestly.
	I've always not been super impressed by her, but she really shows range here.
	Was she nominated for an Emmy for this?
	She should have been if she was not.
	She's tremendous in the role.
	Nicole Kidman is quite good as well, although I find her character less believable.
	Shailene Woodley also shows her chops.
	It's a really, really good cast, and the writing is really sharp.
	I'm about four episodes in, and Honestly, it's an addictive show.
	It's a really, really good show.
	Here's some of what it looks like.
	Are you new to Monterey?
	Yeah, we just moved here a few weeks ago.
	You're gonna love it.
	You're so nice.
	This is Monterey.
	We pound people with knives.
	To death.
	Everybody wants to prove who's the richest.
	We're talking about viciously competitive people.
	And at the root of it was Madeline.
	Exactly how psychotic do you think I am?
	He's a lot younger than her.
	Celeste.
	She must be pretty, you know.
	So bad.
	We are so bad.
	Jane just didn't fit here.
	I thought it was nice for the nannies to get to know each other.
	You're not a Jane, it's not a nanny.
	It's so snippy and so caustic and so wonderful.
	And there are a bunch of great performances in it.
	The cast is universally quite good.
	But I will say that Ruth Witherspoon obviously has a medias role and she really does a lot with it.
	Go check it out.
	Obviously not for the kiddies.
	It's HBO, which means that for no reason at all, they just have to show breasts.
	This is like an HBO rule, is that every show that could easily be done without the showing of the breasts must show the breasts.
	HBO's like, if you're going to pay for cable, man, then we're going to show you some boobs.
	That's HBO's shtick, right?
	Game of Thrones would be exactly the same show without showing the boobs.
	Which is why it always used to be, you know, the basic campaign on Game of Thrones was that it was called sexposition, right?
	And whenever they would do exposition, they'd have somebody having sex in the background.
	So it's like, if you don't like what we're talking about, here's these two people doing it.
	That's sort of how HBO does its business.
	But you put aside sort of the random sex scenes.
	There's a couple that are necessary, but you put aside sort of the random sex scenes and the show is really, really good.
	So go check it out.
	Big Little Lies.
	OK, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	Okay, so, the Russian embassy tweeted out yesterday, yesterday was the anniversary, the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
	Okay, the bombing of Hiroshima was a horrific event.
	It was also generated by the fact that the Japanese would not surrender despite repeated attempts by the United States to get them to surrender.
	It was necessitated by the fact that a full-scale invasion of the Japanese islands would have required The death of probably a million people.
	It was necessitated by the fact that we asked them to surrender over and over.
	We leafleted the town beforehand, telling people to get out.
	And then we dropped the A-bomb and within days the war was over.
	Well, the Russian ministry, Russia is, the Russian government is just garbage.
	They're just, Putin is an evil piece of human debris and the people who work for him seem to be no better.
	Well, here is what they tweeted out yesterday.
	Today marks 73 years since the inhumane and horrific A-bombing of Hiroshima.
	Not a military target, but a city full of civilians, including women and children.
	First of all, important to note, the single biggest group of people who were actually killed in Hiroshima were members of the military because there were a lot of military members who were stationed in Hiroshima.
	August 6th, 1945 will forever remain a tragic date in human history.
	Such tragedy should never be ignored or forgotten.
	Hashtag never again.
	It says the country that was responsible for the gulags, the death of 20 million people, the halatomar, which is the forced starvation of forced collectivization of Ukraine, ending with the deaths of legitimately probably 3 million people minimum.
	The country responsible for the invasions and murder of people in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, the building of the Berlin Wall, responsible for the backing of the Viet Cong in Vietnam, responsible for the backing of the Maoist regime that ended with the murder of 40 million people or so.
	Yeah, talk to us about using the A-bomb to end World War II.
	By the way, also necessary to remember that Russia was on the wrong side of this war originally.
	As you recall, they were responsible for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was the treaty signed in 1938 between the Russians and the Nazis that essentially led to World War II.
	If the Russians never signed that treaty, the chances that World War II breaks out are significantly lower.
	Then Russia switched sides and we're all supposed to pretend that Russia was grand in that war.
	Russia was fighting for survival because the Nazis turned on the Russians.
	It was not that the Russians decided to attack the Nazis.
	It was the opposite.
	So, That's not to put down the sacrifice of the Russians when it came to fighting the Nazis, but it is to suggest that the Russian government run by Stalin was one of the most evil governments on the face of the earth and in human history.
	Probably the most evil government on the face of the earth in human history.
	The only one that could possibly challenge it, really.
	There are couples.
	There would be a couple that would be up there, right?
	So, Hitler would be up there.
	Stalin might rank higher than Hitler, honestly.
	And then, maybe above him is Mao.
	Mao killed more people.
	And Pol Pot would have to be up there in Cambodia as well.
	The Kim regime would have to be up there in North Korea in terms of evil regimes.
	So Russians, you're going to rip on us about our human rights record?
	You go after yourselves.
	You have no leg to stand on here.
	None.
	And worth noting, two days after the United States dropped that A-bomb on Hiroshima, Guess who entered the war against the Japanese?
	Oh yeah, that's right.
	The Russians declared war on Japan two days after the bombing of Hiroshima.
	So they were actually on the side of the country that dropped the A-bomb.
	So if they really don't like it, then maybe they shouldn't have done that.
	All right, other things that I hate.
	So there's an article that's just astonishingly great in its stupidity from Marie Claire.
	Is that how it's pronounced?
	Okay, good.
	And it's all about how skinny eyebrows are apparently problematic now.
	Everything is problematic.
	It's an article by Christina Chavez.
	Says, I'm Latina.
	I find Rihanna's skinny brows problematic.
	Jess, you are Latina.
	Are skinny eyebrows problematic?
	Okay, Jess is laughing and can, yes.
	No, they are not problematic.
	Because only stupid people sit around thinking about whether eyebrows are problematic.
	First of all, if someone should know about problematic eyebrows, let's just say, right here, okay?
	Check, check these babies out.
	I got these ones right off the rack.
	But, Here's what the article says.
	It says, I got my eyebrows threaded for the first time when I was 12 years old.
	As I walked out of the salon, admiring my new skinny brows, my mother stared at me.
	They gave you Chola brows, she gaffed, horrified before immediately making me swear to never thread them that thin again, because at the time, in the predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American city of Los Angeles, pencil-thin brows weren't seen as a fashion statement.
	They were seen as a gang affiliation, marking you as a Chola, a female gang member.
	Suddenly, I was the sixth grader with a hugely polarizing gang sign on her face, a sign I had been raised to furiously avoid and have avoided ever since.
	I'm so confused.
	So you're the racist?
	Right?
	Like, this seems like the article's basically saying that the person writing it's the racist, because she's the one who's— her mom is the one saying, like, if you get your eyebrows threaded in a particular way, that it's because you're— I wouldn't even know how to— I don't know Spanish, so I assume that's some sort of slur.
	Right?
	Chola?
	Jess?
	Help me out here.
	A female gangbanger.
	Oh my God.
	Get a life.
	Like, go out.
	Look at the sunshine.
	Make some friends.
	Get a career.
	Or sit around and worry about Rihanna's eyebrows.
	I think our society is too rich.
	Okay, I'm just gonna put it out there.
	If being a democratic socialist means I think that society is too rich and we are in the late stage of capitalism, then perhaps I am a democratic socialist.
	Because if you have the money to sit around worrying about Rihanna's eyebrows on your day, like in the middle of a weekday, if you don't actually have a job requiring you to do more than worry about how many hairs, the hair count on Rihanna, I'm just going to suggest that you need to find something better to do with your life.
	Okay, finally, let's deconstruct culture for just a moment.
	So, there's a very controversial story out now about Evangeline Lilly.
	So, Evangeline Lilly is the star of Ant-Man and the Wasp.
	She became famous originally because she was in the show Lost, which was one of my favorite shows of all time, up to the point when they completely destroyed the show in the fifth and sixth seasons.
	Yeah, even through the fifth season, it was okay.
	And then they ruined everything!
	They ruined it.
	Season six.
	Damn you, Damon Lindelof.
	Damn you to hell.
	In any case, one of the big problems, supposedly, that happened on the set is that Evangeline Lilly said in an interview that she was made to feel cornered on the show's set about doing partially nude scenes.
	Creators and executive producers J.J.
	Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Jack Bender, and Carlton Cuse issued a joint statement apology for the alleged problems on the show.
	They said, Our response to Evie's comments in the media was to immediately reach out to her and to profoundly apologize for the experience she detailed while working on Lost.
	We have not yet connected with her but remain deeply and sincerely sorry.
	No person should ever feel unsafe at work, period.
	So she claims that she was mortified and trembling after filming a specific Lost scene.
	She said, In season three, I'd had a bad experience on set with basically being cornered into doing a scene partially naked, and I felt I had no choice in the matter.
	And I was mortified, and I was trembling.
	And when it finished, I was crying my eyes out, and I had to go on and do a very formidable, very strong scene thereafter.
	And then she says, in season four, another scene came up where Kate was undressing, and I fought very hard to have that scene be under my control, and I failed to control it again.
	And so then I said, that's it.
	No more.
	You can write whatever you want.
	I won't do it.
	I will never take off my clothes on this show again, and I didn't.
	Okay, so I am confused by what, like, I'm gonna need a more specific definition of being cornered into doing a scene partially naked.
	Did they, like, chain her to the set?
	Did they threaten to fire her?
	Did they threaten consequences?
	Remember, Evangeline Lilly was the second lead on this show, right?
	Matthew Fox was the first lead, and then Evangeline Lilly was the second lead.
	And is the idea really here that if she had said, listen, I'm not doing that, that they would have forced her?
	Like, they would have caned her?
	Or they would have suspended her from the set?
	Or replaced her on the show?
	She's not making any of those allegations, so she's going to have to be a little bit more specific about what happened here.
	Also, I'm just going to say I find it very, very difficult to believe.
	Maybe it's true in her case.
	Maybe Evangeline Lilly is one of the few infamous modest actresses in Hollywood.
	But Hollywood actresses typically go into these roles knowing that there is a chance that they are going to have to take their clothes off at a certain point.
	And on a network show, we're not even talking about like Evangeline Lilly Showing her all, right?
	It was a network show.
	It's actually against FCC standards for her to actually get fully... I mean, this is what I say, HBO's a pay cable channel, so they can get as nude as they want, but you don't actually see that on network television.
	By most standards, the stuff that she did for Lost is pretty mild for TV.
	Now, am I saying she's being dishonest here?
	No.
	I mean, maybe that's how she felt.
	I am saying that the idea that she was cornered into it, I'm going to need to see some more evidence of that before I jump to the conclusion that she was indeed cornered into it.
	And again, it would be good to have, listen, I hope all actresses hold by the standard that they don't want to get nude on film.
	I think that the country would be a better place if we had more of that.
	So good for her for saying she's not going to do it anymore.
	I just find it difficult to believe that a lot of Hollywood actresses actually feel that way.
	I don't think a lot of Hollywood... I mean, we live in an era when critics actually say that actresses are brave for getting naked on film.
	It's an actual sign of bravery.
	You're baring your soul when you bare your breasts, is sort of the idea.
	I've always thought that was idiotic.
	If Evangeline Lilly agrees, I'm on her side.
	But the immediate jump to, she must have been victimized on the set, based on, I don't know, is a little bit much for me.
	Okay.
	Other elements of the culture to deconstruct.
	So, LeBron James is apparently now going to create a series called Shut Up and Dribble, in which he is going to take advantage of the fact that Laura Ingraham once said about him that he ought to shut up and dribble.
	He is going to do this show on Showtime, he's going to serve as an executive producer on a three-part documentary, and it's going to look at the changing role of athletes in our fraught cultural and political environment through the lens of the NBA.
	Do I think that we actually need more commentary from members of the NBA about politics?
	They can do what they want.
	I mean, it's free country, say what you want, but I'm not going to give extra credibility to NBA players about matters political simply because they're good at a different skill set.
	I don't think that, for example, musicians have a skill set that involves politics.
	If I said, you know, first of all, there was this whole idea that came out when Laura Ingraham said, shut up and dribble, that she was being racist about LeBron James.
	Really?
	She said about the Dixie Chicks, or as white as white can be, shut up and sing.
	So it really has nothing to do with that?
	I think inflation between celebrity and skill sets that cross the boundaries of celebrity is not good for the country.
	I don't think LeBron James is a political expert because he's good at basketball.
	I think he does a lot of wonderful charitable things.
	But I'm not going to pretend that I think that he's an expert on tax policy or financial policy.
	And I think that being sucked into the realm of celebrity as politician has not worked out well for anyone involved as a general rule.
	OK, well, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest updates.
	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 Karamina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

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