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Dec. 7, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:01:24

Shot Through The Hart | Ep. 675

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	Kevin Hart loses his Oscar gig, Democrats fulminate over voter fraud in North Carolina, and we'll check the mailbag.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Well, I will admit I am bleary-eyed after partying it up at the White House Hanukkah party that happened yesterday.
	We flew in same day, we flew out same day.
	So my wife and I did have an excellent time at the White House Hanukkah party.
	So thank you to the Trump White House for throwing a real shindig.
	It was really nice.
	We'll get to all of the news momentarily.
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	Okay, so the big story of the day.
	Is that the Oscars have now decided to dump Kevin Hart, or rather Kevin Hart decided to dump himself.
	So Kevin Hart is a comedian and an actor who you've seen in such classic films as the one with Dwayne The Rock Johnson and the other one with Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
	He is mainly a sidekick in a lot of these films.
	He's a funny guy.
	I like Kevin Hart's work before.
	You know, I liked his work, but now Kevin Hart Who was picked to host the Oscars, which is the worst gig in Hollywood, because there has not yet been a host at the Oscars who is treated well.
	He was picked to host the Oscars, and he was very excited about it.
	Until the social media mob came a-calling.
	So what did they do?
	They started filtering through all of his past tweets, because this is what we do now.
	We go through tweets that are eight years old to try and destroy people on the eve of their greatest career triumphs.
	And I guess we feel better about ourselves for doing this.
	I guess that Americans feel great when we tear people down with tweets that are legitimately a decade old, because now we feel like we've made a step in favor of tolerance.
	But have you really made a step in favor of tolerance by digging up An old anti-gay tweet by Kevin Hart from 2011 and then destroying his career?
	Do you think Kevin Hart probably thinks the same things in 2011 that he thinks now?
	Do you really think that he'd make that joke right now?
	And by the way, how would you feel if everybody were digging up everything you ever said 10 years ago and using that as an opportunity to destroy your career?
	Well, that's exactly what happened with Kevin Hart.
	So here's how it started.
	On Tuesday, The Motion Picture Academy announced its big-name host for the 2019 Oscar ceremonies.
	It was going to be comedian Kevin Hart.
	But then, all of these tweets surfaced, and Hart went back and he started deleting all of these past tweets.
	And then, he posted a video statement on Instagram Thursday, saying he's not going to get all worked up over the craziness.
	He said, Which is a rational response to people finding stuff that you disagree with 10 years ago.
	There's been a lot of talk online recently about people going back and just purging their social media posts specifically because they don't want to be held to account for stuff that they said 10 years ago and that they now disagree with.
	The Hollywood Reporter declared the issue a full-blown crisis on Thursday.
	It is deeply necessary that we destroy the career of somebody who tweeted something 10 years ago because it makes people have bad feelings.
	We don't want people to have bad feelings, guys.
	We can't have bad feelings at the Oscars.
	The Oscars is just, it's so wonderful.
	It's such a time of warmth, you know, when they yell at Republicans and talk about how religious people are stupid, and then give awards to movies that nobody's ever seen on the basis of their intersectionality.
	They give awards to women having sex with fish, and they give awards to how it is to grow up young and gay and black in the inner city, and movies that nobody has ever seen nor anyone will ever see.
	And then they tell us how they are better people than we are.
	That's what they really need.
	They need more of that.
	What they don't need is comedians who are actually funny.
	They don't need people who actually make jokes.
	They need people who are woke.
	And if we don't have enough people who are woke, then obviously we have failed in our attempts to make the world a better place in Hollywood.
	And so, after all of this was said, it was time for Kevin Hart to go.
	Kevin Hart had to be thrown out of the room because Kevin Hart made all of these terrible, no good, very bad, unacceptable jokes.
	There's an article today by a person named Owen Gleiberman who no one's ever heard of and will never be of any use in life.
	And I say this because this is what critics do when they are deciding to tear somebody down.
	Owen Glaberman writes, I'm not a person who tends to have a censorious attitude towards stand-up comedians.
	One of their jobs is to give voice to the audacious, the outrageous, the rudely incorrect.
	Yet.
	Whenever they say yet, after they say, you know, I love comedians.
	I love how they make jokes.
	You know, jokes that are transgressive.
	As every joke is.
	Like, name your favorite joke.
	Unless you're talking about, like, dad jokes for your kids.
	Honestly, everyone's favorite joke transgresses some sort of taboo.
	Every single person's favorite.
	That's what makes the joke funny, is the shock effect.
	It's the incongruity.
	It's the fact that somebody said something true you're not allowed to say.
	Right?
	That's why everybody likes comedians that cross lines.
	But, according to this columnist, there are certain lines that cannot be crossed.
	Owen Gleiberman at Variety.
	Kevin Hart's comic tweets about the LGBTQ community, which consists basically of the aggressive flaunting of a lot of dumb and angry homophobic stereotypes.
	Here's one of them.
	"Yo, if my son comes home and tries to play with my daughter's dollhouse, I'm gonna break it over his head and say in my voice, 'Stop, that's gay,' can leave you with a slightly queasy feeling." First of all, if you think that's like the worst joke anybody ever told, let me ask you a question.
	Does anybody think that it was not a joke when he tweeted that he was legitimately going to go home and find a dollhouse and break it over his son's head?
	Does anyone think that was in Kevin Hart's heart when he said that?
	Or is it possible that he was just making fun of the stereotype?
	Or is it possible that he doesn't want his son to be gay?
	Which, okay, you may not like that, but it's his kid.
	He says, yet most of the tweets date back seven or eight years, according to Variety.
	And no, it's not as if Hart should be banned from stand-up comedy, or that we should now organize a boycott of The Upside, his upcoming buddy farce with Bryan Cranston.
	Yet Kevin Hart was not.
	The right choice to host the 91st Academy Awards ceremony on February 24th, 2019.
	And so it's a good thing he's stepping down.
	Those tweets marked him as the wrong person, the wrong host, at the wrong time.
	Because seven years ago, back when same-sex marriage was not legal across the country, he said a thing.
	My god, the thing that he said!
	Okay, how woke are the folks in Hollywood?
	They're so woke that one of the movies that's now being considered an Oscar frontrunner is this movie called Green Book.
	Nobody's gonna see this movie, it's already failing at the box office because it is obviously Oscar bait.
	It is the story of basically a guy who didn't make The Sopranos, he's like an Italian mob reject, who's driving a gay black man through the South in 1962.
	I know, riveting stuff.
	Now, you can't wait to see it, right?
	But, this is perfect to Oscar bait because it gets to say that Americans are simultaneously both rubes and good-hearted, both racist and wonderful, and that gay black people have so much to teach white Americans in every possible way, right?
	It's this kind of movie.
	Well, this movie was Oscar bait until Viggo Mortensen, who plays the Italian fellow, the Italian stereotype, until Viggo Mortensen went up on stage and he was talking about changes in the United States over the past 60 years, and he said there was a time in American history where people could casually use the word bleep.
	And the word bleep was the N word.
	And he just said it.
	Oh, no.
	Worst thing ever.
	He pointed out that there was a time when people said the N word, but he said the N word in pointing out there was a time people said the N word.
	That means he probably likes to say the N word.
	So we now have to make sure that this movie wins no Oscars.
	What I love is that Hollywood, in purging itself of anyone of a different viewpoint, of anyone who once made a joke, of anyone who makes a reference to something that happened in history, In purging themselves, they declare themselves tolerant and open-minded and empathetic.
	Here's what Owen Gleiberman over at Variety writes.
	This is the most publicity he will ever get, Owen Gleiberman.
	Yes, that's right.
	Black Panther is going to be nominated for Best Picture.
	Which, come on.
	I mean, I like Black Panther.
	I gave it a good review.
	And what exactly are movies about?
	This year, they're about spectacular heroism and the liberation of new voices.
	Black Panther.
	Yes, that's right.
	Black Panther is going to be nominated for Best Picture, which, come on.
	I mean, I like Black Panther.
	I gave it a good review.
	I enjoyed the movie.
	It was nominated for Best Picture.
	The Death of Stalin was not nominated for Best Picture.
	Black Panther is a B-plus, A-minus rate Marvel movie.
	And it's gonna be nominated for Best Picture because woke!
	Woke!
	They're about love and heartbreak.
	A star is born, which is not going to win.
	They're about feminist desperation and delicious conniving.
	The favorite, which is about lesbians in 1870s Britain or some such.
	They're about the intersection of a time and a place and a family in Roma.
	But what all great movies are about on some level is empathy.
	Yeah, because that's what I do.
	For me, when I decide to go out to a movie with my wife on Saturday night, what I say to her is, Sweetheart, which movie do you think is the most empathetic?
	Let's go to that one.
	Not the one with the explosions.
	Not the one with, you know, Tom Cruise jumping into a moving helicopter or something.
	The one that I desperately want to see is the one that is most empathetic.
	That's my thing.
	And if a movie doesn't have deep empathy, I don't want to see it.
	I mean, it's the reason I love Taken.
	It's because of the empathy underneath Liam Neeson saying that he's going to find you and he's going to kill you.
	That's what I love most about Taken.
	It's the reason that I really love Lord of the Rings.
	It's about all the empathy.
	It's not about, you know, the adventure or the plot or the character.
	It's about the empathy.
	And what's more, Hollywood is all about empathy.
	That's what they are.
	Owen Gladman says they have been.
	And still are.
	Movies, the supreme vehicle for putting ourselves in the shoes of people who aren't us.
	To watch a great movie is to reduce that difference between the people on screen, whoever they might be, and the people in the audience, to nothing.
	That, in a nutshell, is the miracle of movies.
	These days, it's all too easy to talk about black films, or women's films, or gay films, or films for wizened retirees for Miami.
	But the glory of cinema is that no movie is for any one person at the expense of anyone else.
	They're all for everyone.
	They're not just about crossing boundaries.
	They're about melting them down.
	And that's why we have to melt Kevin Hart down into nothing and destroy his career.
	Because of empathy, guys.
	Empathy!
	It's why Viggo Mortensen can't win an Oscar this year.
	It's because of empathy.
	And the folks in Hollywood who are the most intolerant people, except when it comes to apparently First-name, first-line producers raping people.
	Then they're super tolerant.
	They're fine with that for, like, decades.
	But an old joke by a comedian?
	No!
	We cannot do that.
	The public scrutiny of what The Hollywood Report as the hundreds of problematic past jokes began with one particular bit in 2010.
	As Yahoo explained Wednesday, in Hart's 2010 comedy special, Seriously Funny, he did a bit that had him saying that his biggest fear was his son growing up and being gay.
	He said, keep in mind, I'm not homophobic.
	I have nothing against gay people.
	Be happy.
	Do what you want.
	But me, as a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.
	And then he launched into stories about how his son, then three, having his first gay moment with a friend and how he needs to nip it in the bud by screaming at it, at him, stop it, that's gay.
	Hart has since spoken about the joke, saying that it was about his own insecurities as a parent, reiterating he's not homophobic, saying he wouldn't tell that joke today because when I said it, the Times weren't as sensitive as they are now.
	That's really the issue, right?
	The joke is the exact same thing, it's just everybody is way more sensitive now.
	And let's be real about this.
	What percentage of parents in America would prefer that their child be homosexual, with all the problems that entails, personal, political, and emotional?
	Come on.
	He's a comedian.
	It's what he does for a living.
	But I guess we can't have any nice things anymore.
	GLAAD has sprung into action.
	They contacted the Academy, and we'll get to Kevin Hart's abject apology.
	In just one moment, then we'll talk about who really should host the Oscars in just one second.
	But first, let's talk about that dirty mouth of yours.
	I'm not talking about your curse words.
	I'm talking about the fact that you haven't been cleaning your mouth properly with a good toothbrush.
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	Okay, so Kevin Hart finally quit, and here is what he had to say about this.
	Here is his explanation.
	I just got a call from the Academy, and that call basically said, Kevin, apologize for your tweets of old, or we're going to have to move on and find another host.
	Talking about the tweets from 2009-2010.
	I chose to pass.
	I passed on the apology.
	The reason why I passed is because I've addressed this several times.
	This is not the first time this has come up.
	I've addressed it.
	Regardless, Academy, I'm thankful and appreciative of the opportunity.
	If it goes away, no harm, no foul.
	Okay, but then he came out later and he did in fact issue an apology and then said that he would step away from this because he understood.
	I'm sure he got calls from his agents telling him that he needed to step away or the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation would destroy his career.
	Here's what he tweeted.
	Oh, great.
	I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year's Oscars.
	This is because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing, talented artists.
	I sincerely apologize to the LGBT community for my past and sensitive words from my past.
	Oh, great.
	Well, I guess the world is back to normal.
	Everything's great.
	Kevin Hart isn't hosting the Oscars.
	Good job, everybody.
	World saved.
	You guys fixed everything in Hollywood.
	Congratulations.
	All I can say is hashtag OscarsSoWhite.
	So, well done, everyone.
	You got the short black man barred from the Oscars because you had to make sure that he did not outrank anybody else on the intersectionality scale.
	Pretty amazing.
	Joy Reid, by the way, over at MSNBC still has a job despite nearly identical post from a nearly identical period.
	But that's because she is a black woman, not a black man.
	And as we all know, that ranks her higher on the intersectional pyramid.
	So she can get away with those old tweets that she claims somebody hacked her and placed into her internet archive, which is an obvious lie.
	So, Kevin Hart.
	We bid a fond farewell to you, and we see that you can no longer make a joke in American society eight years ago.
	So, who exactly should host the Oscars?
	Well, let's talk about this thing.
	I think that perhaps Lena Dunham should host the Oscars.
	Why?
	Well, we know she's seriously funny.
	We know she's funny because the critics keep telling us that Lena Dunham is super funny.
	Now, Lena Dunham has never really done a funny thing, or, you know, written a funny thing, or said a funny thing, but we know she's funny because the woke critics tell us that she is very funny.
	And what about this new scandal where it turns out that she lied about having evidence that her close friends did not engage in sexual assault?
	How about the fact that she lied about that?
	Shouldn't that bar her from the Oscars?
	No!
	No, it shouldn't!
	Come on!
	Why should that bar her from the Oscars?
	Obviously, she was colonized by the patriarchy.
	Okay, this is literally what she said.
	She said that this is not her fault.
	It's not because she's a creep and a bad person.
	It's because she was colonized by patriarchy.
	I am not kidding you.
	She actually said this.
	That it was the patriarchy that had taken over her brain.
	Well, now that she's blamed the patriarchy, I guess we can move on, and Lena Dunham should host the Oscars.
	I have another idea for hosting the Oscars as well, and this person would be Hannah Gadsby.
	So Hannah Gadsby may, in fact, be the least funny person on planet Earth.
	And I know, I have this running tally of people who are the least funny comedians and most annoying comedians on planet Earth, and Samantha Bee tops the list.
	Why not Samantha Bee, by the way?
	She's super woke.
	I mean, she called Ivanka Trump a C-word.
	I mean, that's woke as it gets right there, calling another woman the C-word.
	Why not Samantha Bee?
	I mean, she's a woman.
	That's intersectional.
	Okay, but maybe not Samantha Bee.
	Maybe Samantha Bee isn't intersectional because she's a straight white woman, so we can't have her.
	Well, let's think.
	Who else could be on it?
	Maybe Trevor Noah.
	How about Trevor Noah?
	He's a black guy.
	We could have him, and he could just replace Kevin Hart.
	He has a bunch of anti-Semitic tweets in his past, but nobody seems to care about that at all, because the Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition.
	But I think the best pick of all, the best pick of all, the one that really sums up where we are comedically, and in terms of entertainment, and in terms of social media mobbing, is Hannah Gadsby.
	Now, you will recall Hannah Gadsby from such specials as I'm as boring as hell and everyone praises me for it on Netflix.
	That's not the actual title of her Netflix special, but it should have been.
	It's a better title than, more accurate, Truth in Advertising.
	Here's Hannah Gadsby.
	If you've never seen Hannah Gadsby's work, consider yourself lucky, but not for long, because I'm going to play some of it for you.
	She was at the Women in Entertainment Summit, and she gave a powerful speech, because this is what I want from my comedians.
	Powerful speeches.
	We need hard hitting.
	You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men?
	Because it's only good men who get to draw that line.
	people to reward movies no one has ever seen or will see.
	That's what we need, Hollywood.
	That's what we have all been demanding for years.
	We need more Hannah Gadsby.
	I want more of this.
	This, Hannah Gadsby, go.
	You know why we need to talk about this line between good men and bad men?
	Because it's only good men who get to draw that line.
	And guess what?
	All men believe they are good.
	Women should be in control of that line.
	No question.
	Oh, my.
	The humor.
	I mean, the wit.
	When I listen to that, I go.
	But that's just me laughing at her because she makes no sense.
	But most people who listen to this, they think to themselves, is that a funny person?
	Like a person with humor?
	What was funny is when Hannah Gadsby came out with her Netflix special, there were reviews.
	And the reviews were like, uh, it's not funny at all.
	It's basically just a screechy lesbian yelling at us.
	For an hour.
	That's what the reviews said, but my favorite part of the reviews was like, yeah, so it's basically a motivated, politically oriented lesbian, and I just mentioned her sexuality because she makes this very much part of her monologues, you know, yelling at us for an hour.
	But maybe the problem is us.
	Maybe the problem is that humor itself has not been properly analyzed and properly experienced, and that humor itself is targeting.
	I mean, it's the real humor.
	The real comedy lies in there being no comedy at all.
	It's like modern art.
	Real art lies in an empty roll of toilet paper pasted to a poster board just like my daughter would do for a school project.
	Maybe that's real art and now they're doing this with comedy.
	Kevin Hart is not real comedy.
	Kevin Hart is mean.
	Kevin Hart is mean, because eight years ago, he joked about how he didn't want his three-year-old son to be gay.
	My God!
	But Hannah Gass... That's the new comedy.
	And I just, I think that we should gear all of our entertainment toward the fulfillment of woke of woke expectations about life.
	I think that would be the best thing.
	Won't we all be happier then when nobody laughs ever and we all just sit around glaring at each other but knowing in our hearts that we're empathetic?
	When we just sit around destroying each other's career by digging through each other's old tweets but we know deep in our heart we're doing it out of sympathy for the other?
	Won't that make America so much better?
	Ugh.
	How the social media mobbing and the motivated social justice warrior left have made this country worse in virtually every possible way, it's on full display with regard to the Oscars.
	Okay.
	In just a second, I want to get to this big breaking story from the New York Times that President Trump long ago had illegals working at his golf club.
	I know it's very, very important.
	Plus, we're going to get to Democratic complaints about voter fraud in North Carolina.
	What exactly is happening there?
	We're going to break that down for you in just one second.
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	All right.
	So the New York Times is firmly convinced that now, again, they have President Trump in the crosshairs.
	I know.
	Very exciting stuff.
	How are they going to get him this time?
	They have a front page story.
	A front page story about how there are illegal immigrants who have worked for President Trump's golf course in New Jersey.
	Really, this is now front page.
	Like, we rehashed all of this back in 2016, but now we're going to bring up this story again because empathy.
	Empathy!
	So, here's Miriam Jordan reporting.
	During more than five years as a housekeeper at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Victorina Morales has made Donald J. Trump's bed, cleaned his toilet, and dusted his crystal golf trophies.
	When he visited as president, she was directed to wear a pin in the shape of the American flag adorned with a Secret Service logo.
	Because of the outstanding support she has provided during Mr. Trump's visits, Ms.
	Morales in July was given a certificate from the White House Communications Agency inscribed with her name.
	Quite an achievement for an undocumented immigrant worker.
	Ms.
	Morales' journey from cultivating corn in rural Guatemala to fluffing pillows at an exclusive golf resort took her from the southwest border, where she said she crossed illegally in 1999, to the Horace County of New Jersey, where she was hired at the Trump property in 2013 with documents she said were phony.
	She said she was not the only worker at the club who was in the country illegally.
	Well, here is the thing, okay?
	This woman, and another woman named Sandra Diaz, who was undocumented when she worked at Bedminster between 2010 and 2013, they violated federal law.
	Presumably they were using a false social security number.
	The two women said they worked for years as part of a group of housekeeping, maintenance, and landscaping employees at the golf club that included a number of undocumented workers, though they could not say precisely how many.
	There is no evidence.
	I love this is buried down in paragraph 5 of this piece.
	Paragraph 6?
	There is no evidence that Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status.
	But at least two supervisors at the club were aware of it, the women said, and took steps to help the workers evade detection and keep their jobs.
	This whole article is designed to yell at President Trump because he's harsh on illegal immigration because there were illegal immigrants who worked for him.
	Ooh!
	Now, first of all, I'm from California.
	That means that I know almost no one who has not had an illegal immigrant work for them.
	Now, I'm a rarity in California in that I actually ask for evidence of citizenship before I employ somebody.
	But I think I've told this story before.
	I remember we were looking for a nanny for our youngest, for our oldest kid.
	And there was a, we used an agency to try and find a nanny.
	And we said straight at the beginning, we need somebody who is an American citizen.
	And one of the women who interviewed, really nice lady who obviously just wanted to be here to work and At the end of the interview, we said, you know, we're interested in hiring you.
	What do your papers look like?
	And she said, oh, I don't have papers.
	I'm undocumented.
	I felt really terrible about it, obviously, because this is obviously a good person who is trying to just make a living.
	That does not alleviate the problem of breaking the law.
	And the New York Times writing these long pieces about how Donald J. Trump's golf course without his knowledge of hiring illegal immigrants, well that means that law enforcement is bad.
	It's really a ridiculous, ridiculous emotional appeal.
	Especially in a time when, let's be real about this, the people who are preventing All of us, from being able to rationally check whether somebody is an illegal immigrant before hiring them, those are the folks of the left.
	The New York Times can't have it both ways.
	Either it's bad that Donald J. Trump has illegal immigrants working at his New Jersey golf club, or it's good that he has them working at his golf club.
	If it is bad that he has them working at his golf club, which presumably is what they're saying, then how can the New York Times be rooting For folks like Nancy Pelosi, who says that under no circumstances will the Democrats fund a border wall.
	Here is the incoming Speaker of the House.
	Well done, everybody.
	Here she is discussing the non-existent border wall.
	Most of us, speaking for myself, consider the wall immoral, ineffective, inexpensive.
	And President said he promised it.
	He also promised Mexico would pay for it.
	So even if they did, it's immoral still, and then they're not going to pay for it.
	So we have a responsibility, all of us, to secure our borders north, south, and coming in by plane on our coast.
	We have a responsibility.
	But nobody's going to do it.
	North, south, east, west.
	Yeah, she's really with it, Nancy Pelosi.
	North, south, east, west.
	From every direction.
	From on top.
	Digging tunnels.
	On the bottom.
	And Chuck Schumer also was criticizing President Trump for being harsh on the border.
	He says that President Trump is risking a government shutdown with his temper tantrum over border funding.
	We don't want to see the government shut down over Christmas.
	Even though President Trump seems to brag that he wants one.
	The only way, the one and only way, We approach a shutdown as if President Trump refuses both of our proposals and demands $5 billion or more for a border wall.
	Okay, so solid stuff from the Democrats who are simultaneously complaining that illegal immigrants are working at Trump's golf course and then ensuring that illegal immigrants can work at President Trump's golf course.
	Speaking of abiding by the law, the Democrats are very upset over what looks like pretty obvious election fraud in North Carolina's 9th congressional district.
	There's a piece over at BuzzFeed News today about a guy named Chris Easton.
	He's 47 years old, not registered to any political party, and he works in construction.
	He's into camping and boating and has lived in this rural town most of his life.
	What Chris Easton does not do is vote.
	I just don't vote.
	I don't believe in it.
	Do nothing but lie anyway, Eason told BuzzFeed News about politicians.
	But technically, Eason does vote.
	He's just not the guy casting the ballot.
	Eason told BuzzFeed News he signed a blank absentee ballot in the now-contested November 6th general election, didn't actually pick any candidates, and then handed the unsealed ballot to the man at the center of an unfolding election fraud scandal, a guy named McCray Dallas.
	Sure enough, public records show his absentee ballot ended up signed, sealed, and witnessed to the county board of elections with Eason's name on it.
	That's what I'm telling you.
	McRae or whoever's doing this, they checked them boxes.
	I didn't, said Eason.
	I'd take a lie detector test on that.
	It's unclear if any boxes were actually ticked off.
	Election officials told BuzzFeed News that if a fully blank ballot were sent in, it would be registered and tabulated as zero votes.
	Records show a ballot was registered for Eason in the November 6th race.
	This information has been forwarded to our investigators, said the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement spokesperson, Patrick Annan.
	It is becoming pretty clear that there was election manipulation in this particular North Carolina congressional race.
	CNN reports the Democrat Dan McCready, who got 905 fewer votes than Republican Mark Harris in this ninth district race, has now withdrawn his concession in that race.
	The state elections board has refused to certify the results as it investigates potential misconduct with absentee ballots, making it the last undecided House contest in the country.
	The board could ultimately order another election.
	McCready had previously conceded the race to Harris, but withdrew that concession On Thursday, his reversal comes as the state elections board as well as local and state prosecutors investigate whether Leslie McCray Dallas, a veteran operative in Bladen County who was hired by a consulting firm, the Harris campaign paid 400 grand, altered absentee ballots or collected them from voters, but never turned them in.
	Dallas earned more than 23 grand working on six campaigns dating back to 2010.
	And in most of those races, Dallas candidates received a disproportionately higher percentage of absentee votes in Bladen County.
	What was happening?
	Well, apparently, McCray Dallas was going around and collecting absentee ballots from people like at their door and then filling them out as he pleased or discarding them as he pleased.
	This is the allegation.
	And then turning them in to screw with the voter counts.
	Earlier on Thursday, North Carolina Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse told CNN he would support a new election if the election board proves allegations of fraud are true and impacted the outcome of the race.
	He said, We're not ready to call for a new election yet.
	I think that we have to let the board of elections come show their hand if they can show this conceivably could have flipped the race in that neighborhood.
	So who is this shadowy operative?
	Who is Leslie McCray Dallas?
	Well, according to the media, he is a Republican operative.
	And he's an operative of the Republican Party who is seeking to skew elections purely on behalf of Republicans, on behalf of Mark Harris.
	And that's what is happening here.
	But there are some problems with that particular claim.
	We'll get into Dallas's record and also concerns about voter fraud suddenly cropping up.
	Amazing.
	When Republicans worry about voter fraud, it's obviously fictitious.
	When Democrats worry about voter fraud, it is obviously Republicans who are in favor of it.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let's talk about your ancestry.
	There's an article yesterday in the New York Times that Elizabeth Warren had basically destroyed her political career on the shoals of taking a genetic test showing that she was whiter than Wonder Bread.
	That is probably true.
	But you too can find out whether you are in fact as Native American as Elizabeth Warren.
	All you have to do is go over to 23andMe.
	Now through December 25th, the 23andMe DNA kits are on sale.
	These things are fun and they give you more information about yourself.
	I, for example, thought that I was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish.
	This was confirmed by 23andMe.
	That's right.
	I'm of pure bloodlines, stretching back hundreds of years in Litvak jewelry.
	And that's what I found out from 23andMe.
	Also, it gave me information about my tastes, why it is I don't drink too much coffee, for example.
	It gave me information about my health.
	It's really cool.
	Go check it out right now.
	The 23andMe DNA Kit is the perfect gift for everyone that you love.
	There's never been A better way to give the gift of genetic discovery to your parents, siblings, aunts, grandparents, it's really a lot of fun.
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	You can learn about wellness, muscle composition, turns out that I have incredible muscle composition, sleep movement, traits like ability to match musical pitch, Which, again, I do have a- Listen, I am a stud.
	And I just found that out from 23andMe.
	You can find out whether you are similarly studly by checking out 23andMe right now.
	And, now through December 25th, you get 30% off any 23andMe kit.
	Order your DNA kit at 23andMe.com slash Shapiro.
	That's the number.
	23andMe.com slash Shapiro.
	And then mail your results to Elizabeth Warren.
	If it turns out that you have more of a claim to tribal ancestry than she does, 23andme.com slash Shapiro.
	23andme.com slash Shapiro.
	Go check it out.
	And with that slash Shapiro, you get 30% off any 23andme kit.
	Go check out your DNA kit today by doing so.
	Also, make sure you go over and subscribe over at dailywire.com.
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	Now is the holiday season.
	Buy your friend, your family, the gift of Daily Wire.
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	I know, you can barely handle one hour of this awesomeness.
	Wait until there are two more hours that only you can see.
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	It's our live radio show.
	That we're going to be doing beginning next year.
	So that is all awesome stuff.
	Plus, you get all sorts of other goodies.
	You get the rest of this show live, you get the rest of Klavan's show live, and Knowles' show live.
	And don't miss Andrew Klavan's next chapter of Another Kingdom, performed by Michael Knowles.
	I don't know why it's performed by Michael Knowles, but we have to employ him somehow.
	Today, we'll be live streaming the first 15 minutes of episode 9, titled Rascal.
	Head on over to dailywire.com and subscribe to watch the full episode and get early access to upcoming episodes every Monday.
	The art is really cool.
	It's a really new and innovative concept in narrative storytelling.
	Go check it out right now at dailywire.com.
	Also, for $99 a year, you get all those great things and this.
	The very greatest in beverage vessels.
	I told you when I returned to Los Angeles that this would immediately activate.
	It would deactivate the cloaking device.
	And now you can see, in its full-fledged glory, the Leftist Tears Hydrocold Tumbler.
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	It's a lot of fun.
	Go check it out.
	We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
	So back to Leslie McRae Dallas.
	So the Democrats are claiming that Republicans are engaged in voter fraud in North Carolina.
	And it looks like one of the operatives was allegedly engaged in voter fraud in North Carolina, which is a serious, serious problem.
	If so, they should invalidate the election.
	But there's something that we should pay attention to here.
	This Leslie McRae Dallas character, who is now under all sorts of scrutiny in the North Carolina 9th, because it would mean that the Democrats win 41 seats in the House.
	The worst, by the way, off-year election loss by percentage terms, really since World War II, which is pretty brutal.
	In any case, Leslie McCray Dallas has a long history of such activity, with Democrats too.
	The problem is when Republicans complained about it, Democrats and the media ignored it.
	Mr. Dallas has a felony record and a history of financial fraud, and his workers sparked what slowly swelled into another bitter electoral impasse in a state that seems perpetually engulfed by them.
	The known claims are concentrated in Bladen County, which has about 33,000 residents, and the neighboring, far larger Robeson County.
	Bladen County, where election officials work in a simple brick-and-glass building on South Cypress Street, just behind a shopping center with a Dollar General and a furniture store, recorded the state's highest rate of absentee ballot requests, 7.5% of registered voters, compared with less than 3% in most of those other 99 counties.
	A strikingly large number of those ballots, 40%, were never returned.
	In Robeson County, 62% were not returned.
	No other county had a rate higher than 27 percent.
	Harris won 61 percent of submitted absentee ballots in Bladen County.
	Well, it turns out that Leslie McCray Dallas has a long history of working with various campaigns, various and sundry campaigns.
	State records show that beginning in 2009, at least seven Democratic and Republican candidates paid him for work in local and state races, including campaigns for the legislature, district attorney and county sheriff.
	Separately, Campaign finance records in Mecklenburg County showed that Mr. Dallas worked for a city council candidate in Charlotte, the state's largest city.
	He was just a known figure, said former state representative Ken Waddell, a Democrat who hired Mr. Dallas after receiving a recommendation.
	To me, it appeared like he just liked politics.
	Mr. Waddell had no complaints about Mr. Dallas's integrity during the campaign, but recalled disagreements about where to place signs in the district.
	Years earlier, though, Mr. Dallas's character had come into question after one of his employees died in an automobile accident.
	The Fayetteville Observer reported in 1991 that Mr. Dallas and the woman he eventually married had, after the employee's death, taken out a six-figure life insurance policy in the man's name by forging a signature and backdating a document.
	Dallas listed himself as the primary beneficiary and then collected benefits.
	He was eventually sentenced to a short prison term, and now it turns that he was engaged in political fraud.
	But after prison, In other words, this is just a bad guy with bipartisan ties.
	as a Democrat.
	He sought a seat on the local school board in 2014 and was defeated in a primary.
	He was unaffiliated when he ran for the Soil and Water Conservation District Board in 2016.
	He switched his party registration to Republican after the election.
	In other words, this is just a bad guy with bipartisan ties.
	The media only cover it when Republicans are implicated.
	And they're not covering at all the possibility of election fraud in California.
	It's a under There's no evidence of election fraud in California.
	That's not the question in California.
	There were 26 races.
	In California, there are 26 seats that went Democrat on the night of the election.
	There are a bunch of seats in California that were still up for grabs.
	Every single one of them turned Democratic.
	This has led a bunch of people in the intelligentsia, folks like Nate Silver, the elections analyst, to say, right, because all of the ballots that were counted after, all the absentee ballots that came in, those are disproportionately Democratic voters who are voting.
	Okay, so we shouldn't be suspicious of those at all.
	Well, I'm a little suspicious, not that there are people who are necessarily forging ballots, although we don't know, because you don't know until you know, but I am suspicious of a procedure that makes room for exactly that sort of fraud.
	According to Andrew O'Reilly over at Fox News, Despite holding substantial leads on Election Day, many Republican candidates in California saw their advantage shrink and then disappear, as late-arriving Democratic votes were counted in the weeks following the election.
	While no hard evidence is available, many observers point to the Democrats' use of ballot harvesting as a key to their success in the elections.
	Now, regardless of whether you think that election fraud took place in California, this is an awful law.
	Anecdotally, there was a lot of evidence that ballot harvesting was going on, said Neil Kelly, the registrar for votes in Southern California's Orange County.
	In Orange County, once seen as a Republican stronghold in the state, every House seat went to a Democrat after an unprecedented 250,000 vote-by-mail drop-offs were counted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
	So what is ballot harvesting?
	Democrats say, oh, that's just everyone voting.
	But what ballot harvesting is, ballot harvesting suggests that if I have an absentee ballot, it can only be turned in if I mail it, if I mail it myself, or if I give it to a family member to turn in.
	In California, they changed the law.
	Now, anyone can turn in anybody else's ballot.
	So this means that Democratic operatives have been paid to go door-to-door and pick up people's ballots in order to bring them to the ballot box.
	Do you think that they're going to be even-handed in how they collect those ballots?
	Do you think that they are going to collect all the ballots and try to turn them in?
	It's about every vote being counted or every Democrat vote being counted.
	And besides that, why should we believe that partisans would never, ever, ever pick up a ballot that has, for example, an empty slot left in the governor's race and just fill it in?
	Doesn't this leave room for a bit of fraud?
	Wouldn't you want non-partisan election officials, I don't know, overseeing elections?
	According to Neal Kelly, the registrar of voters, he said people were carrying in stacks of 100 and 200 of them.
	We had multiple people calling to ask if these people were allowed to do this.
	Two years ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law AB 1921, which legalized the so-called practice of ballot harvesting.
	That's exactly what I was talking about before.
	Democrats in the state argued that the bill was meant to make it easier for people to vote.
	But this seems kind of weird to me.
	Doesn't it seem weird to you?
	But it's not weird, because obviously, obviously, when Democrats engage in ballast harvesting, there's no possibility of fraud.
	It is only when a clear fraud is shown on behalf of a Republican, then we have to worry about voter fraud.
	Otherwise, we just have to pretend that there is no problem whatsoever in any of this in our elections.
	Integrity is just magic.
	It's just great.
	Everything is just fine.
	Except, of course, It probably is not just fine.
	OK, meanwhile, there has been a lot of talk in recent days about the supposed election, election ridiculousness that is happening in the aftermath of Republicans losing the governorship in Wisconsin.
	A lot of talk about how the Republicans in Wisconsin are restricting, restricting the ability of the governor to do things in Wisconsin.
	Now that there's a Democrat in charge of the governor's house in Wisconsin, people say, oh, look, this is election fraud.
	This is the this is tyranny.
	It's tyranny.
	It's not tyranny.
	If you don't like what the legislature is doing, legally speaking, you know it is a great way to stop them from doing it.
	A great way to stop them from doing that is to, I don't know, elect Democrats to the legislature.
	Noah Rothman has a good piece over at Commentary Magazine today.
	He says, He says, have you heard there's a coup underway in Wisconsin?
	When the Democrats had to retake the statehouse in January, Wisconsin Republicans convened a lame-duck session of the legislature with the intention of passing a series of bills aimed at curbing the new governor's authority.
	The measures cover a range of activity.
	There's transferring the power of appointments to an economic development board back to the legislature, prohibiting the governor from banning guns in the state capitol, and unilaterally withdrawing from the state legal challenges to Obamacare without legislative consent.
	And so people are like, oh my gosh, look at them.
	They're trying to curb the power of the governor.
	Except that this stuff has been happening for years.
	This has been happening for years.
	As Case Western University law professor Jonathan Adler helpfully reminded American political observers in 2016, attempts by partisan legislators to handcuff incoming executives of the other party is practically tradition in North Carolina.
	When the governor's mansion changed hands in 72, 84, and 88, legislative Democrats were behind the effort to rein in the new Republican governor's appointment power.
	And that's not just in North Carolina.
	Following a statewide electoral rebellion against New Jersey Governor Jim Florio in 1991, the Democratic Party lost control of both legislative chambers.
	On the eve of decennial reapportionment, and with New Jersey set to lose a congressional seat, that would have left Republicans in control of the federal redistricting process.
	So legislative Democrats spent the lame duck session ceding legislative redistricting authority to an independent commission.
	When Republican Bruce Rauner won an upset victory over Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, legislative Democrats moved in the lame duck to truncate the length of the term to which the governor could appoint a comptroller.
	Had former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry been elected to the presidency in 2004, Governor Mitt Romney would have been legally obliged to appoint his replacement to the U.S.
	Senate.
	That replacement presumably would have been a Republican.
	The Democrats in the state legislature couldn't have that, so they overrode Romney's veto and stripped his office of senatorial appointment power.
	In Massachusetts.
	Oh, look at this.
	These power grabs.
	They're so undemocratic.
	You know what actually happens when these power grabs happen?
	Either the people are unhappy with them and then they backlash against the legislature, or they are not unhappy at them.
	And this whole thing is just insane.
	The fact that normal politics as it operates is a business in which people Break each other's heads, but that we only as a media pay attention to when one side's head is broken is really absurd in every possible way.
	It's really ridiculous.
	Okay, now I do want to make a quick comment on the justice reform bill, the criminal justice reform bill that is now moving its way through the Senate.
	There are a lot of questions about whether this thing should pass or not.
	I will admit to being conflicted about it.
	I have friends on both sides of this particular debate politically.
	And by nature, I'm somebody who likes to see criminals stay in jail for longer.
	I'm not a big believer that releasing criminals from jail tends to end with them in happy jobs because just generally the recidivism rates for people, particularly in federal prison, are extraordinarily high.
	With that said...
	Is there a case to be made that people are being kept in prison for too long for nonviolent crimes, for example, after showing evidence of good behavior?
	I think there's a case to be made with regard to that.
	I just think that we ought to be very wary about who we release from these prisons.
	With that said, the First Step Act seems to be a moderately drafted bill.
	The debate over the bill is basically between two sides.
	One that says we can't allow governors more capacity to let prisoners out of prison.
	And another side saying, well, We do need to make provision for people who have participated in good behavior.
	Mike Lee is on one side, Tom Cotton is on the other.
	Tom Cotton says that the First Step Act is bad.
	He says that instead of early release, proponents say it merely provides incentives for inmates to participate in programs, but he says this is nothing but a euphemism.
	If the bill is passed, thousands of federal offenders, including violent felons and sex offenders, will be released earlier than they would be under current law.
	Mike Lee says that's not true.
	The governor and the wardens of the particular prisons, they have to determine, usually the wardens and the parole officers, have to determine that somebody is non-violent before these people can be released back into society, which is generally how this stuff works anyway.
	It just makes them easier to do all of this.
	I'm not averse to the idea that if people have paid their debts to society, they should be let out of prison.
	I am deeply wary of changes made to the criminal justice system that make it easier for wardens to Unleash criminals back into society in order to save money on budgets, for example.
	And I know there are folks who are skeptical that that will happen.
	I live in California.
	The governor did it here.
	So I'm not quite as skeptical that there won't be political actors who seize on federal legislation to try and let people out of prison as early as possible and then hide the crime statistics, which is what's happened in California.
	Okay.
	Time for a bit of mailbag.
	So, let's see what we got here.
	Grace says, Hi Ben, I really enjoyed the Sunday special conversation you had with Pastor John MacArthur.
	I was wondering if you'd tell us why you decided specifically to have Maude.
	Was it your personal decision to do so, or do you have a team that decides which guests to invite?
	Also, could you share some of your thoughts about that conversation?
	How do you think it went?
	Were there things you wanted to say you didn't?
	Thank you for all that you do to expand civil conversation and open dialogue.
	So, there are a bunch of folks in the office who are fans of Pastor MacArthur.
	I honestly had never really engaged with his material, And I was eager to speak with people who were ardent Christians in the lead up to Christmas.
	It is that time of the year, and so in the past several weeks, and in the coming weeks, on the Sunday special we have had on John MacArthur, we're having on David Limbaugh on this Sunday special.
	I believe that Bishop Barron is coming in in the near future to discuss religion.
	I love these religious conversations.
	Also, so I will say that when it comes to the Sunday Conversation, the format that I use for the Sunday Conversation, the Sunday Special, is typically that I am pretty deferential toward the guest.
	So I don't like to get into debate on specifics very often.
	I like to stay and keep it at kind of a 30,000-foot level on big ideas because you only have an hour.
	If you're asking me what I would have analyzed differently if I had more time, I certainly would have gotten into an analysis of Isaiah 53 with Pastor MacArthur, because the Jewish analysis of Isaiah 53, which is usually used as the proof text by Christians of Jesus' coming, that, in the Jewish view, is a bad misread of the Hebrew version of Isaiah 53, which is clearly referencing the corporate Jewish people as an individual And the way that you know this is that in Isaiah 49, Isaiah does exactly the same thing.
	So the suffering servant passage that is very often used as the proof text is interpreted very differently by Jews.
	That was the one area where I wish we had had more time to delve into it, but to do that would have required us to go verse by verse and actually analyze the verses, the way that they are written, and what they meant, and all of that, and that's pretty abstruse stuff.
	As far as the overall conversation, I thought it was fascinating.
	Obviously there are places of disagreement, but You know, my goal when it comes to discussing religion is very often to allow people to clarify their own views.
	And if I'm going to argue, the purpose of the argument is to allow that clarification to happen, not for me to defeat anyone in that particular argument.
	Joshua says, hey, Ben, Intersectionality is one of the biggest things people like you, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin all raise awareness of and try to fight.
	My question is, when did the idea and name intersectionality first come about?
	Love the show and all your speeches.
	Can't wait to hear you speak in DC next month.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate it.
	I'm speaking at the March for Life next month.
	When it comes to the philosophy of intersectionality, that philosophy really begins in the 1960s, when a lot of folks on the left basically suggested that American society was deeply racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and that the only way to fight back against those structures was to band together in a coalition of the dispossessed.
	Gloria Steinem wrote that women and other victimized groups could not actually achieve self-esteem in the current system.
	She wrote that instead, victims would have to bond, quote, with others who share similar experiences.
	From groups of variously abled people to conferences of indigenous nations, bonding with others in shared power, taking one's place in a circle of true selves.
	This is the idea of the left.
	The term itself was coined by a woman named Kimberly Crenshaw of Columbia University, and she came up with the term to describe this coalition of victims.
	It was called intersectionality.
	What she said was that human beings are members of various groups, racial groups and gender groups and religious groups and sexual orientation groups, and we can describe their lived realities by referring to the intersection between these groups.
	So, you're not an individual, you are a white heterosexual Christian male.
	Or you're not an individual, you're a black female lesbian Muslim.
	And these are different realities.
	Each one of these group identities is a different reality, and they intersect, and that's what creates you.
	And so we can then, on the basis of that, determine how victimized you have been in American society.
	Crenshaw herself acknowledged that the idea was to bully people who were not members of the intersectional groups, to force them to check their privilege.
	She explains, quote, acknowledging privilege is hard, particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion.
	But they must acknowledge such privilege or be accused of complicity in institutional racism.
	So that's where it comes from.
	That's the background of intersectionality.
	It is an evil ideology that divides people by group and deliberately does so in order to tear down the supposed hierarchy, keeping victims in place.
	Carla says, should the U.S.
	do anything about Venezuela?
	Well, first of all, we should ratchet up whatever sanctions we can on Venezuela.
	It depends.
	When it comes to purely humanitarian, purely humanitarian interventions, the question is always cost and benefit.
	Let's say that we could depose the Maduro regime in Venezuela with very little cost.
	Should we do it?
	Sure.
	Yeah, I mean, it depends on the level of cost.
	Should we have a plan for what happens afterward?
	Yes.
	When you have a country in relatively close proximity to your own that is collapsing into people eating dogs on the street and dying of starvation, if you can help, then you should, because these things tend to have externalities, including mass immigration into the United States.
	But that does raise the question of what the costs and the benefits are, and if we're not aware of those costs and benefits of intervention, you can easily get sucked into being the quote unquote world's policeman.
	Matthew says, Ben, why are natural, non-natural born citizens not allowed to be president, but are allowed to be in the legislature?
	Well, this is, originally the idea here was that we wanted natural born citizens to be president because we wanted people to have a sort of innate love of the land We wanted them to grow up here.
	We didn't want people who were immigrants coming here at age 37 becoming president at age 39 because they didn't sort of imbibe the social fabric of the United States.
	I think the argument still holds.
	I'm not sure that it holds quite as much now as it did back in 1789 when immigration was basically a question of, were you born?
	There was such a division.
	I mean, historically speaking, there was a division between people who were new immigrants to the United States after the Revolutionary War and people who had immigrated to the United States and been part of a historic conflict with the mother country.
	Because it turns out that in those days, most of the people immigrating were still coming from another country that had just fought a war with the people who were in the United States.
	I think there was a lot of fear that a new immigrant would come here, and then you'd get basically a Tory reconciliation with the crown.
	Let's see.
	Michael says, Hey Ben, I live in Birmingham, Alabama.
	We had a shooting recently at a local mall.
	at a local mob.
	Protesters have been shutting down roads and businesses for the past week because of it.
	They're also contacting the employers of people who criticize them online and getting them fired.
	Do you think this mob rule threat has an end in the near future?
	Is there anything we can do on the ground to stop this fascistic threat?
	Thanks for taking my question.
	I think that the social media mobbing is not gonna stop anytime in the near future.
	That would require people to go weapons down, and I don't think that's going to happen.
	I think people have too much of an incentive to destroy each other.
	They get virtue points, all their friends pat them on the back, and they figure we'll never come around and eat them.
	It will.
	It will.
	I do not.
	I wish that I had the time to do so.
	I used to play fantasy baseball, but I don't really have the time, unfortunately.
	Love the show.
	Christians have the book of revelations, but what is the Jewish viewpoint on end times, the end of the world?
	So there's a lot of, just like everything else in Judaism, a lot of argument over what happens in the end times.
	I tend to hold by my monadian perspective that in the end times, basically a political revolution will take place in which The Jewish state is recognized in which peace becomes the natural state of the world to a certain extent, in which the Jews are left alone and respected, in which monotheism becomes the dominant way of life, and that nothing else will really change.
	That's Maimonides' view.
	There are other views that suggest that miracles will take place and that things will change radically, and that in the end, the more Kabbalistic view is that human beings will, they're sort of a spiritual A spiritual end of the world in which human beings reunite with God in a spiritual way, and that's sort of the end of the physical world, but that one is way down the line.
	Okay, one more question.
	Let's see.
	Okay, so I'll do two more in distinction to what my producers want me to do.
	So John says, in a recent episode, you said you believe Jimmy Carter's an exorable human being.
	Why do you believe that?
	I believe he's an exorable human being because he travels over to the Middle East, hangs out with terrorist groups, and blames the Jews for their own existence.
	That's why I think he's an exorable human being, even though there are certain parts of his record that are wonderful, like helping homeless people and Habitat for Humanity.
	I think that he is self-absorbed, I think he is terrorist-friendly, and I think that his perspective on politics is infused with a deep-seated level of anti-Semitism.
	Lee says, Dear Ben, Last semester I took a course in body image detailing the problems of beauty sexualization and ideal appearance in American and Western culture.
	Predictably, it promoted body positivity, disowned white privilege beauty, and somehow insinuated in our material that the rise of the late 80s and 90s strict beauty trends stemmed from conservatism.
	Of course.
	I personally believe that trends of promoting body positivity, specifically plus sizes and above, are doing more harm than good.
	Same time, I think our culture is becoming more and more sexualized by the year.
	I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on the matter.
	Where do you think beauty and sexual promotion in advertising and media should be more restrained, since some still need to rely on models to promote swimwear, lingerie, and other consumer products?
	Thanks.
	Okay, so first of all, I have serious doubts that Western standards of beauty are simply a result of a bunch of men getting together in a room and voting on what's hot.
	I don't think that's how this works.
	I think that biology dictates what men are into, and Maybe it changes based on the area of the world in which you are, that the sort of correlation between the health of a woman and her weight, for example, differs by culture.
	That it used to be that in a lot of older cultures, if a woman was slightly overweight, if she was slightly soft-egged, this was an indicator of more health than if she was really rail-thin because maybe she had tuberculosis or something.
	But, you know, those are social cues to a certain extent, and those are biological cues to a certain extent.
	The idea that men have ever been into What we would consider unattractive women is not true.
	It's just not a thing.
	And the idea that all beauty standards are simply social byproducts is not true either.
	As far as the question of promoting body positivity, Listen, I think that people should feel positive about their body to the extent that their body does what it needs them to do.
	Meaning, are they healthy?
	Are they attractive enough to attract a mate?
	Are they going to live a long time?
	Can they function?
	That's what we should really be worried about.
	And that's what I'm going to teach my daughter.
	And that's what my sisters believe also, is that you want to be beautiful for your spouse because you don't want your spouse to be unhappy with how you look.
	But really what weight is about, for example, is health more than simply beauty standards.
	Because as we all get older, we all get less beautiful.
	With that said, the idea that everyone is equally healthy at 200 pounds is just absurd, and that part is just silly.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I like, and then a couple of things that I hate, and then we'll leave.
	So, things that I like.
	Since it is Hanukkah, we'd be remiss if we didn't play a little bit of Hanukkah music.
	The most famous Hanukkah song is a song called Ma'oz Tzur.
	It is also known by people who are not Jewish.
	As rock of ages, here's a little bit of the audio of the Israeli Philharmonic playing Ma'oz Sur Yeshua Ti, rock of ages, hear my prayer.
	Here it is.
	Now, it's a beautiful tune, and the actual lyrics are hardcore.
	Okay, the actual lyrics to Mao Zedong, hardcore lyrics.
	Oh, mighty stronghold of my salvation, to praise you is a delight.
	Restore my house of prayer, and there we will bring a thanksgiving offering.
	So far, so good.
	When you will have prepared the slaughter for the blaspheming foe, then I shall complete with a song of hymn the dedication of the altar.
	Reminding you, Hanukkah was about a war.
	So that was a thing.
	And then it keeps going and talks about the history of the Jewish people.
	It talks about the Purim story.
	It talks about the story about the days of the Chashmonaim, the Hasmoneans.
	Uh, Greeks gathered against me then in Hasmonean days.
	They breached the walls of my towers.
	They defiled all the oils.
	And from the one remnant of the flasks, a miracle was wrought for the roses.
	Men of Insight, eight days established for song and jubilation.
	Bear your holy arm and hasten the end for salvation.
	Avenge the vengeance of your servant's blood from the wicked nation.
	For the triumph is too long delayed for us and there is no end to days of evil.
	Repel the red one in the nethermost shadow.
	That'd be Esau, uh, which would be the Roman Empire.
	and the Greek empire in the nethermost shadow and established for us the seven shepherds.
	I said some mystical connotations at the end about the coming of the Messiah.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate, and then we'll get out of here for the weekend.
	So the stupidest thing that I've seen this week, and there have been a lot of stupid things, a male acapella group at Princeton University has pulled a Disney movie song from its act.
	What was the Disney movie song?
	You can guess.
	It was Kiss the Girl.
	Okay, here's the story according to the Associated Press.
	The Princeton Tigertones have performed Kiss the Girl, a song from The Little Mermaid, for years.
	During performances at the Ivy League school, a female audience member would be brought on stage to decide whether or not a man from the crowd could kiss her.
	Noah Wallstein, who wrote the column, claimed... There's a woman who wrote a column saying that it promoted toxic masculinity.
	She claimed the song's message is misogynistic and that too many women have been pulled on stage for unwanted encounters.
	I have seen a queer student brought on stage to have uncomfortably pushed away her forced male companion.
	I have heard of unwilling girls being subjected to their first kisses.
	I have watched mothers who have come to see their child's performance be pulled up to the stage only to have tension generated between them and the kid they came to support.
	Okay, the whole point is that you can say no, and I'm sure it's probably pretty funny if you go to a performance and they're singing Kiss the Girl and the girl's like, no.
	I'm sure that's actually part of the humor of this.
	Lighten up.
	Lighten up.
	My goodness.
	I mean, do people really have time to be this miserable all the time?
	Oh my God.
	Somebody did a performance of a song from a children's movie from 1989.
	No!
	No!
	And by the way, people were like, oh look, what was sexist in the movie as well.
	No, it wasn't sexist.
	Ariel was in love with Eric.
	She was pursuing him, right?
	She was pursuing him and she didn't have a voice.
	She couldn't say no.
	And what I do like about the song, Kiss the Girl, Is that it is actually a good description of how it is to kiss a girl.
	I know that the left thinks the way that you kiss a girl is that you actually take out a signed contract with a notary, like a public notary with a fingerprint, and then you get fingerprinted and notarized the consent form.
	And then you can kiss the girl, but only to the extent that she has indicated on the form 363.
	Right, so, will there be open-mouthing or no open-mouthing?
	Right, they have to check a box?
	That's not actually how things work.
	You dolts.
	Okay, so, making life more miserable every day.
	Speaking of making life more miserable every day, a Cleveland radio station has now pulled the Christmas date rape song, Baby, It's Cold Outside.
	I know this has become a common complaint now for folks on the left that the lyrics to Baby, It's Cold Outside are about women being raped.
	It's a creepy rape song.
	No one for 50 years thought it was a creepy rape song.
	Nobody was in their basement going, baby, it's cold outside.
	Now I'm gonna go kidnap a girl and rape her.
	What in the absolute F?
	I mean, it's just, it's so ridiculous and so insane.
	The Star 102 midday host said in an interview, people might say, oh, enough with the Me Too, but if you really put that aside and listen to the lyrics, it's not something I would want my daughter to be in that kind of situation.
	Okay, well, I'm glad that radio stations have decided to ban all rap music forever.
	I'm glad they've decided to ban every other rock song that's ever been written.
	I'm glad that they've decided that they are now going to deconstruct the culture with me, uncover the messages, and then ban all the songs.
	At least when I deconstruct the culture, it's to make you aware of what people are saying in their songs.
	It's not to just destroy the songs wholesale.
	It's amazing how the left has become censorious, much more censorious than the right has been any time in the recent past.
	Just incredible stuff.
	Okay.
	Well, we will be back here on Monday to break down all the latest developments.
	I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
	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 Caramina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

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