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Sept. 11, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:22

The Strategy Is Failure | Ep. 1093

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	Democrats block a COVID relief bill.
	Joe Biden continues to futz and struggle while the media cover for him.
	And Netflix comes under fire for a film containing disturbingly pedophilic images.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
	Visit ExpressVPN.com slash Ben before we get to all the news.
	And it is a varied and wild news cycle.
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	OK, so we begin at this hour with a quick note that today, of course, is September 11th, which is a good time to remember that we're supposed to be a unified country.
	I know these are incredibly divisive times, and people look at each other across the aisle and we think, how about a national divorce?
	We don't seem that we want to live in the same country anymore.
	It's amazing to say that it's been nearly 20 years since 9-11, but for those of us who are old enough to remember 9-11, it was a formative experience for a lot of us.
	I know a lot of people who shifted from left to right in the aftermath of 9-11.
	I know a lot of people who had a revivified sense of what it meant to be an American after 9-11.
	It turns out that when America is under attack from an existential threat, When Americans are being murdered by the thousands in America's biggest and greatest landmarks.
	Americans tend to resonate to that and remember what it is that was supposed to bring us together as Americans.
	And frankly, it's incredible that in the midst of a great pandemic, we can't even do that again.
	In the midst of a global pandemic that has taken, at this point, nearly 200,000 or about 200,000 American lives, that we can't come together and at least recognize why exactly we like each other or why we want to occupy the same country.
	And maybe it is that it's just been too long since 9-11 for people to remember exactly how we felt on the morning of 9-11 as we watched terrorists plow two civilian airliners into the Twin Towers, and as we watched them plow another civilian airliner into the Pentagon, and as a fourth civilian airliner went down in a field in Pennsylvania.
	But for those of us who are old enough to remember, we remember the gut-wrenching horror of watching our fellow Americans, people we had no idea their politics, we had no idea what they believed about the world, having to hurl themselves from the highest stories of the World Trade Center, people with families, people with children, watching as firefighters charged into those buildings knowing full well that they would probably die doing that and trying to save other people's lives.
	Knowing full well that people who are joining the military and making sacrifices most of us were not willing to undertake to go overseas and protect America, that this was indeed a great country and a country worth upholding.
	And that is worth remembering again.
	That is worth remembering again, that what unites us is supposed to be so much more than what divides us.
	Unfortunately, in today's day and age, maybe it's because we haven't faced down A 9-11.
	Maybe it's because we haven't had the spectacularly horrifying images on TV of what happened on 9-11 hit the United States.
	Again, maybe because COVID isn't an external enemy so much as just an ever-present threat.
	Maybe, for whatever reason, we have not come together.
	Instead, we have decided to stab each other, tear each other apart, and see each other as enemies rather than friends, as enemies rather than brothers and sisters.
	Good indicator of this today on Twitter.
	There's a trending hashtag Hashtag all buildings matter.
	Now the ideological contortions you have to go through in order to tweet that and believe that you're saying something good, relevant, or moral are pretty astonishing.
	So presumably this has meant this.
	This hashtag all buildings matter is meant as a rebuttal to the all lives matter rebuttal to black lives matter.
	So in order to try and understand the logic of this, you have to go back to what Black Lives Matter was supposed to represent.
	So Black Lives Matter, as I've said before, is a term of semantic overload.
	It can mean several different things.
	One, it can be the inarguably true and obvious proposition that Black Lives Matter in the United States, which we all agree with.
	Then it could mean the Black Lives Matter organization, which is a radical neo-Marxist movement.
	And then it could mean the Black Lives Matter movement more generally, not the organization, but the movement more generally, which argues that America is systemically racist and dislikes black Americans and discounts black bodies and tries to harm black Americans, a proposal for which at this point in American history, there's not only no evidence, there's significant counter evidence.
	Okay, All Lives Matter was meant as a rebuttal, generally speaking, to that second contention, which is that everybody agrees that Black Lives Matter because Black Lives Matter just as much as everybody else's life.
	Okay, so, people who are advocates of Black Lives Matter decided that they were going to hashtag All Buildings Matter, as though the comparison where you say that the World Trade Centers matter while all buildings matter equally.
	Okay, this makes no sense.
	This makes no sense.
	Because the argument of Black Lives Matter is that black people are being disproportionately targeted, that America is systemically racist, Okay, that is a bad argument.
	There's not a lot of data to back that.
	In fact, as I say, there is significant counter data to back that.
	The hashtag, all buildings matter, presumably suggests that certain buildings were not targeted.
	Well, we know which buildings were targeted.
	And in fact, we know why we were upset that those buildings were targeted, not merely because they were landmarks, but because as it turns out, they were holding thousands of human beings, black, white, and green.
	Anybody who thinks it's an intelligent point to tweet out all buildings matter at this point is an idiot.
	And everybody understands that they're an idiot or should understand that they're an idiot and that they're not making a good point about Black Lives Matter or anything else for that matter.
	But to use 9-11 as an anniversary...
	For divisiveness.
	To suggest that 9-11 ought to immediately be channeled into a debate about Black Lives Matter is kind of wild.
	The only thing that makes it not wild is, of course, if you buy into this theory that America is inherently bad, then you end up in the Ta-Nehisi Coates position of writing about the fact that you watched 9-11 happen from your apartment rooftop, smoked pot, and felt nothing.
	That's something that Ta-Nehisi Coates has actually written about in his books.
	Because America is so systemically terrible that he didn't feel anything while watching 9-11.
	This is something that he wrote in, I believe, Between the World and Me.
	If you believe that, then there really is nothing that can hold America together anymore.
	So if 9-11 doesn't mean anything to you because you weren't born, that's one thing.
	But if you're old enough to remember 9-11, if you're old enough to remember what it felt like, and you don't still have that churning gut feeling every time you think of the horrors of that day, and you still can't think why people would fly a flag in the aftermath of 9-11.
	I remember this.
	I mean, we all remember this.
	All the flags that went up all around the United States in solidarity with each other.
	They have the feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood that came along with 9-11.
	The final realization that we were all part of the same country and that it was a country worth upholding, that we are a good country.
	That when shown against in stark relief with so many other places around the world, including the ideologies of places like Afghanistan and the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
	When you're placing the United States in stark relief with any place else on earth, this is an amazing, amazing place with amazing people.
	Heroes.
	People that don't know other people who they are willing to sacrifice their lives for.
	We should be reminded of that as we approach a contentious election when it appears that violence in the streets is a real possibility.
	We should remember all of that.
	Okay, in just a second, we're going to get to the news of the day.
	First, let us talk about the fact that you need better employees.
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	Okay, so news of the day.
	The Democrats continue to block COVID relief.
	The media are covering for them.
	So what you've seen is Senate Republicans fail to advance bill.
	Senate Republicans fail to advance bill.
	No, that's not what happened here.
	What actually happened here is that Senate Democrats, who are in the minority, utilized that Jim Crow relic, according to Barack Obama, the Senate filibuster, to filibuster a COVID relief package.
	Kamala Harris voted in favor of that filibuster.
	So Democrats used the filibuster to kill a COVID relief package just a few weeks after using that Jim Crow hallmark, the filibuster, in order to kill police reform proposed by Republican Senator Tim Scott.
	So it seems like Democrats are very much willing to use Jim Crow relics when it serves their interests.
	They're willing to use any institution of power or get rid of any institution of power in pursuit of their goals, which is one of the reasons why Republicans have very little trust that Democrats are going to abide by any rules of the game when it comes to upholding American institutions.
	It's one of the reasons why I, among other conservatives, am deeply fearful that Democrats, who have now pledged that they wish to pack the courts, that they wish to get rid of the Senate filibuster, that they wish to add states, could systematically change the nature of American government if they achieve a majority in the Senate and the presidency of the United States in 2020.
	So why are Democrats doing this?
	The answer is obvious.
	They would love to see the economy tank just before the election and ensure that Joe Biden wins election.
	According to the New York Times, prospects for any additional stimulus to address the coronavirus pandemic's devastating toll before the election darkened considerably on Thursday when a whittled down Republican plan failed in the Senate on a partisan vote.
	Democrats voted unanimously to block the proposal from advancing, calling it inadequate to meet the mounting needs for federal aid in the latest indication of a lack of political will to reach an agreement, even as critical federal aid for individuals and businesses has run dry.
	It was a nearly party-line vote whose outcome was never in doubt.
	The proposal amounted to a fraction of the $1 trillion plan Republicans had offered in negotiation with Democrats, who in turn were demanding more than twice as much.
	Well, the reason that the Republicans then proposed a slim-down bill is they said, you can't agree on any of the ancillary stuff in the bill, so let's just at least agree that we should extend some unemployment benefits for a little while.
	We should make sure that people have enough money to pay their rent for the next month or so.
	A failure to compromise would leave millions of jobless Americans in potentially dire straits as they exhaust traditional jobless benefits and states run out of additional funds Trump steered to the unemployed by executive order last month.
	It would also strand a wide swath of small business owners who have endured steep drops in revenue as the pandemic chilled economic activity.
	Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, said, quote, Along with the pandemic of COVID-19, we have a pandemic of politics.
	Looking to the House, or for that matter, our colleagues across the aisle, is a sort of dead-end street.
	This is right.
	Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Republican, said Congress isn't going to pass more COVID-19 relief before the election.
	And again, the reason for this is because Democrats have decided that they will benefit from a lack of relief at this point.
	Remember, Democrats have never met a spending bill they don't like, except for this one, because the spending bill that they don't like is the one that would presumably help Trump have a possibility of winning re-election or help Republicans who are in very contentious Senate races.
	There are a lot of very close Senate races around the nation right now.
	So, combine the alarmism that Democrats are performing about COVID and the possibility of a second wave in New York, New Jersey, with their unwillingness to push forward relief, and it's pretty obvious what is going on here.
	People are playing politics.
	The media are helping out by immediately running headlines about how the Republicans have failed here.
	It's the Republicans who failed.
	It's not the Democrats who are obstructionists.
	It's the Republicans who failed.
	Meanwhile, the same media are pushing the idea that the virus is continuing to be a complete threat to all Americans of all sorts.
	The New York Times ran with a research letter from Harvard that talked about how COVID-19 is, quote, a life-threatening disease in people of all ages.
	That research letter from Harvard found that among the 3,222 young adults hospitalized with COVID-19, 88 died, about 2.7%.
	1 in 5 required intensive care.
	1 in 10 needed a ventilator to assist with breathing.
	Among those surveyed, 99 patients, 3%, could not be sent home from the hospital or were transferred to facilities for ongoing care or rehabilitation.
	The study, quote, establishes that COVID-19 is a life-threatening disease in people of all ages.
	Okay, now, the reason that this study is incredibly stupid is because, of course, number one, the people who are young that you are talking about are largely people with pre-existing conditions.
	Over one-third were obese, one-quarter extremely so.
	Roughly one in five had diabetes, one in seven had hypertension.
	But more than that, you're talking about the number of people who got COVID who were then hospitalized.
	You're talking about a subset of a subset of a subset.
	You're talking about young people who got COVID, who were then hospitalized for COVID, and who had preexisting conditions.
	Yes, it turns out that a disease can be very dangerous to people who are already hospitalized.
	But the question is, how many of those people are actually hospitalized in the first place?
	When you're talking about young people, the answer is not very many.
	Young people are not being hospitalized at a high rate when it comes to COVID-19.
	But again, there's a narrative that is attempting to be driven by the media, and that is COVID is an ever-present threat, particularly to everybody in the United States, including young people.
	This is an anti-data perspective.
	It's the reason why the AP ran a story yesterday suggesting that three teachers had died because schools reopened.
	None of the three teachers actually died as a result of contact with students.
	So you're just seeing alarmism in the media combined with Democratic intransigence on providing any sort of relief before the election.
	The conclusion they want you to draw is that this is an unchecked pandemic about which the federal government is doing nothing.
	And that, of course, is Donald Trump's fault.
	Now this has been driven forward, of course, by Trump's foolhardy decision to speak with Bob Woodward and then say on tape to Bob Woodward that he downplayed the pandemic.
	As I said yesterday, the narrative that is being driven by this is actually not true.
	So the narrative that the Democrats are trying to drive is that Trump lied, people died.
	That Trump knew full well in early February this thing was airborne and super dangerous, way more dangerous than the flu, and then he lied about it for months.
	Okay, this assumes a level of knowledge and intent on the part of President Trump that I think is utterly not in evidence.
	As Bob Woodward himself recognized, the reason he didn't report Trump's comments at the time is because he didn't know whether Trump was puffing or knew what the hell he was talking about because literally no other health official was saying that this thing was airborne and multiple times as deadly as the flu in early February.
	That was not a thing that was being said.
	Okay, nonetheless, Jonathan Karl of ABC News questioned Trump about that yesterday.
	He said, why did you lie to the American people?
	And as we will see, the Biden campaign is already running ads on this.
	Why did you lie to the American people and why should we trust what you have to say now?
	That's a terrible question and the phraseology.
	I didn't lie.
	What I said is we have to be calm, we can't be panicked.
	I knew that the tapes were, these were a series of phone calls that we had, mostly phone calls.
	And Bob Woodward is somebody that I respect just from hearing the name for many, many years, not knowing too much about his work and not caring about his work.
	But I thought it would be interesting to talk to him for a period of, you know, calls.
	So we did that.
	Okay, so again, why would you speak to Bob Woodward?
	Because you thought it was interesting?
	Like, this is just setting a trap for yourself.
	And then yesterday, of course, Trump then talked about how much TV he had watched, which is always a bad look in the middle of a pandemic or a presidential election.
	He talked about all the shows that he had watched over the past 24 hours, which of course provided fodder for Joe Biden.
	I watched some of the shows.
	I watched Liz McDonald.
	She's fantastic.
	I watched Fox Business.
	I watched Lou Dobbs last night.
	Sean Hannity last night.
	Tucker last night.
	Laura.
	I watched Fox and Friends in the morning.
	You watch these shows, you don't have to go too far into the details.
	They cover things that are, it's really an amazing thing.
	Okay, so as we'll see, this became fodder for a Biden ad.
	Again, the entire Biden campaign is predicated on the fact that he can stay in his basement and just rip on Trump and the media will do his heavy lifting for him.
	Because when he steps out of the basement, things get very ugly for him.
	We'll get to Joe Biden in just one second.
	First, let's talk about how now is not a great time to go to the auto parts store.
	In fact, as it turns out, Never is a great time to go to the auto parts store.
	You're going to go there.
	It's going to cost you too much money.
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	They might offer you an upsell based on whether you are a commoner or whether you are an auto parts pro.
	Instead, why don't you just go check out rockauto.com?
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	Check them out at rockauto.com.
	Head out to rockauto.com right now, see all the parts available for your car or truck.
	And write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box?
	So they know that we sent you.
	Again, write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box?
	So they know that we sent you.
	Okay, so Joe Biden, his entire campaign has been predicated on Orange Man Bad, and he continued that trend yesterday.
	He put out an ad about Trump.
	Why is Trump watching so much TV?
	And again, All Trump has to do is not.
	All Trump has to do is not.
	Just deprive Biden of the air, and Biden will keel over, politically speaking.
	Because once he actually has to talk, as we'll see, Joe Biden gets himself in all sorts of trouble, all sorts of hot water.
	Anyway, here's the Biden ad against Trump.
	I watched some of the shows.
	I watched Liz McDonald.
	She's fantastic.
	I watched Lou Dobbs last night.
	Sean Hannity last night.
	Tucker last night.
	Laura.
	And then it runs a counter of U.S.
	COVID deaths yesterday versus minutes of TV watched.
	And then it concludes, minutes of television watched, 480 US COVID deaths yesterday, 1,176.
	Now, I have a question.
	If Trump were watching less TV, would fewer people have died?
	The answer, of course, is no.
	But again, this is Trump kind of shooting himself in the foot.
	Now, the reason I keep saying that Trump has to avoid giving Biden this sort of air, this sort of oxygen, is because when Biden is deprived of the Trumpian oxygen upon which he lives, he keels over.
	So yesterday, Joe Biden had a rough day in terms of interviews.
	There's a reason that on 9-11 he has decided he's not going to politic.
	He says he's pulled all of his ads.
	I've seen no evidence he's pulled all of his ads thus far on 9-11.
	He says he's not going to do any interviews today, which maybe that's about 9-11 or maybe it's about the fact that he doesn't like doing interviews.
	I mean, the past several days he has done like one interview and it went really, really poorly.
	In any case, here's how the interviews went yesterday for Joe Biden.
	So in the middle of an interview, he mocked Trump over Trump making claims about Biden's health.
	And he lost his train of thought in the middle of mocking Trump.
	For going after his mental health.
	Here is Joe Biden wandering off into the blithery wilderness.
	I mean, this idea of, you know, slow Joe.
	Anyway, I shouldn't laugh about it because Anyway, Donald Trump, just look at us both.
	Watch us and determine whether or not you think I'm misleading anyone.
	Not you personally, but the public.
	You know, look at me.
	Judge me based on... I know what the job takes.
	Um, yeah.
	Slow Joe.
	Why would they call me Slow Joe?
	And what's over here?
	Is there pudding?
	Is it early bird time?
	Yeah, that's that's a good look.
	OK, Brett Baer asked Biden's spokesperson, because this has come up recently, whether Biden is using a teleprompter during interviews, because there's an interview that he was doing with some labor union in which somebody asked him a question and he literally says in the interview, I want you to scroll up.
	Now, as somebody who operates with a teleprompter, I don't use this teleprompter on the show.
	I'll tell you exactly when I use the teleprompter.
	The only time I ever use the teleprompter on the show is if I'm reading an ad, which you'll know, or if I'm making a pitch for the subscribers, which you'll know, or at the very beginning, like that little intro at the beginning of the show.
	That's the only time I use the teleprompter.
	All the other times, I'm not using the teleprompter.
	I'm just staring into camera.
	And when I do interviews, I'm not using the teleprompter either.
	Because during interviews, that'd be incredibly distracting and very weird.
	No one uses a teleprompter during interviews.
	That's called cheating, right?
	You don't do that.
	But Joe Biden's spokesperson was asked whether Biden uses a teleprompter during interviews, and he has literally no answer.
	It's very, very awkward stuff.
	Has Joe Biden ever used a teleprompter during local interviews or to answer Q&A with supporters?
	Brett, we are not going to engage... This is straight from the Trump campaign's talking points.
	Yeah, they're using it.
	And what it does, Brett, is it's trying to distract the American people.
	They're using it.
	They talk about it every day.
	Can you say yes or no?
	They talk about it every day, Brett, because they don't have a coherent strategy.
	Well, you have an answer.
	Yes or no.
	Brett, they talk about it every day because they don't have a coherent argument for why Donald Trump deserves re-election.
	Correct.
	Correct.
	Because the fact is that Joe Biden is using teleprompter during interviews because he is in declining mental health.
	We all know this.
	His decline is obvious to everyone.
	And that's why his interviews are going really, really badly.
	to distract from that fact. I understand, but you can't answer the question. Correct. Correct.
	Because the fact is that Joe Biden is using teleprompter during interviews because he is in declining mental health. We all know this. His decline is obvious to everyone. And that's why his interviews are going really, really badly. He did an interview with Jake Tapper yesterday in which he did a bunch of stuff that really was not beneficial to Joe Biden. So he suggested that.
	You didn't.
	He did.
	He tried to deny Trump credit for renegotiating NAFTA.
	So he had said over and over that he wanted to renegotiate NAFTA.
	They never did it.
	And Tapper was like, well, Trump did it.
	Shouldn't you give him credit?
	And Biden's like, no.
	And Tapper looks at him incredulously.
	It's pretty amazing TV.
	Now when you ran for president and when Barack Obama ran for president, you both said you would renegotiate NAFTA.
	You didn't.
	He did.
	Does he deserve credit for that?
	No, I think we remember he didn't.
	He wasn't the one that pushed that particular one in the past.
	The House amended the bill.
	He renegotiated NAFTA and you didn't, is the point.
	I mean... Because we had a Republican Congress that wouldn't go along with us renegotiating it.
	But doesn't he deserve some credit for that?
	It's better.
	The USMCA is better than NAFTA.
	It is better than NAFTA.
	Um, so, um, yeah.
	Yeah.
	That pause from Jake Tapper is everything.
	Like, can you believe this guy?
	It's pretty, it's pretty amazing.
	So good stuff right there from Joe Biden.
	Speaking of good stuff from Joe Biden, he also said that it was not a bad idea to give China most favored nation status when it came to world trade, which is a weird take considering that China has used its most favored nation status to cheat on trade to strengthen its own regime and to ensure that it can continue with its perpetuation of tyranny in Hong Kong, as well as in Chongqing province.
	Here is Jake Tapper questioning Biden and Biden again, making a boo-boo.
	A lot of people think that Allowing China into the World Trade Organization, which you supported, extending most favored nation status to China, which you supported, those steps allowed China to take advantage of the United States by using our own open trade deals against us.
	Do you think, in retrospect, that you were naive about China?
	No.
	Here's the thing.
	In the context of that, we want China to grow.
	We wanted China to grow.
	I mean, if Trump can't use that in an ad, we wanted China to grow.
	As China, meanwhile, unleashes the coronavirus on the rest of the world and completely destroys Hong Kong's freedoms and subjects a million and a half Uighur Muslims to genocidal tyranny.
	Yeah, good job there, Joe.
	Again, this is why Trump has to deprive him of the oxygen of Trump.
	You just got to stop with the Trump stuff.
	If you stop with the Trump stuff, all you get is this crazy old bat.
	In a second, we're going to show you more of the crazy old bat.
	We'll get to that in just one moment.
	First, let us talk about the fact that when you are running a business, HR issues can absolutely kill you.
	You don't start a business to worry about HR, but HR issues can come and bite you directly on the butt.
	We're talking wrongful termination suits, minimum wage requirements, labor regulations.
	You need somebody who's going to handle your HR.
	You just do, particularly as your company grows beyond being a few people.
	HR manager salaries, they are not cheap.
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	I mean, it's just something that as a business owner, I'm telling you, get your HR in order.
	OK, so back to Joe Biden.
	Probably Joe Biden's biggest boo-boo in that Jake Tapper interview is he essentially says that the reason that Trump won in 2016 was because of racism.
	He suggests that counties that voted twice for Barack Obama and then flipped to Trump did that because of inherent American racism in response to Trumpian dog whistling.
	So we are now back to Barack Obama, the bitter clingers are the bad guys, and Hillary Clinton, the deplorables are the bad guys.
	Why Democrats feel the necessity to constantly go to, it's a bunch of racists supporting my opponent.
	Now vote for me.
	I don't understand it other than just the deep-rooted disdain that so many Democrats have for people who live in the middle of the country and in rural areas particularly, and their own self-righteous belief that they are the only anti-racism crusaders in the country, and therefore that anyone who opposes them, whether it be Mitt Romney, who Joe Biden, remember, said wanted to put y'all back in chains, or Donald Trump, that all of those other people are racist and the people who support them are racist.
	Here is Joe Biden calling his political opponents racist.
	We're in Macomb County, Michigan right now.
	This is a county that President Obama and you carried twice, and then President Trump carried by 12 percentage points in 2016.
	Why do you think so many of these voters turned against the Democratic Party in 2016?
	I think it was the feeling that they were taking for granted.
	I don't know that for a fact.
	And I think that he used that dog whistle on race.
	Now it's a bullhorn.
	Okay, so, again, is that smart politics by Joe Biden?
	The answer is no, which is why, again, Trump's biggest political malfeasance here is putting himself front and center.
	I know Trump likes the attention.
	I know he wants the camera on him.
	The more the camera is on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the more they talk, the worse it is for them.
	As I have said before, elections are a referendum on one of the two candidates.
	Whoever the referendum is on loses.
	In 2016, the misimpression from the media is that what was going to happen is it was going to be a referendum On Donald Trump.
	It was not, in fact, a referendum on Donald Trump.
	It was a referendum on Hillary Clinton.
	It was a referendum on Hillary Clinton because she had a 30-year history of alienating American voters, which is why, even though she won the popular vote by driving out votes in California and New York, in the middle of the country, people did not show up for her.
	Donald Trump won Wisconsin with fewer absolute votes than Mitt Romney lost Wisconsin in 2012.
	So that ain't about Trump driving out new votes.
	That is about people not showing up for Hillary Clinton.
	Well, the same thing could easily happen with Joe Biden because the more you see of him, the less you like him.
	So Donald Trump needs to remove himself from the stage, right?
	Stage left, followed by Barrett.
	Like, get off the stage right now, President Trump, and let Joe Biden be the center of attention.
	You don't have to be the center of attention.
	The more Joe Biden is the center of attention, the worse he looks.
	Now, meanwhile, the entire culture has decided to press forward with its narratives on racism because they think that this is the way they're going to drive Trump from the stage, is by suggesting that America is systemically racist across the board and every cultural institution will be hijacked in order to push forward this particular push.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	In a second, we're going to get to the cultural Narratives that are being pushed, and we'll get to people blaming climate change for the fires in California.
	As it turns out, that is not particularly accurate.
	We'll get to that in a second.
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	Also, another great episode of the Sunday Special.
	It is coming up this weekend.
	Former Secret Service agent, conservative political commentator Dan Bongino You can get the two biggest scandals of our time wrong in the media.
	You can say Spygate was a hoax.
	It wasn't.
	And Collusion was real.
	in the riots and looting taking place across the country.
	So head on over to dailywire.com or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever else you get your podcasts.
	Here's a little bit of what the Sunday special sounded like.
	You can get the two biggest scandals of our time wrong in the media.
	You can say Spygate was a hoax, it wasn't, and collusion was real, it wasn't, and you get a Pulitzer Prize.
	Alrighty, so go check that out right now.
	It is definitely worth the watch, really, really interesting stuff.
	Meanwhile, you are watching the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	♪ Hey ♪ Bye.
	Meanwhile, the culture wars continue apace.
	So, last night was the NFL opener.
	I can assume that the ratings are going to suck this year just like they sucked last year.
	It turns out that when you politicize everything people want to remain apolitical, people get uptight.
	And I understand all of the folks out there on the left who keep saying, you know, you keep saying you just want sports to be sports.
	When were sports ever just sports?
	When it didn't infuse the field of play.
	That is the answer.
	You want the actual answer?
	The answer is when it didn't infuse the field of play.
	Athletes always spoke out about stuff.
	Charles Barkley was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the early 90s, wearing, like, chains, suggesting that he was a slave, right?
	I mean, like, this has been a part of American sport for a long time.
	When Americans start to get uptight is when they sit down to watch the game, and then they are preached to.
	That is not the same thing as athletes speaking out.
	Athletes have always spoken out, and that's fine.
	They're Americans.
	They get to speak out just like everybody else.
	Doesn't mean that we have to take their...
	They're words with any level of seriousness.
	Like, I don't think LeBron James actually knows anything about politics.
	I think he knows very, very little about politics.
	That is not his field of expertise.
	I know nothing about rebounding, and LeBron James knows nothing about politics.
	But that doesn't mean that when I turn on a game and I am preached at by a bunch of people who know nothing about politics, that's not alienating.
	Within the confines of the court, within the confines of the field, people expect to get a product that has to do with the court or the field, not a bunch of propaganda about particular political points of view.
	This is why the NFL is so unbelievably stupid for getting super political on the field of play.
	So the NFL has decided that they're going to put giant letters reading, end racism in end zones.
	Which of course will totally end racism.
	Like all the white supremacists out there, they're gonna look at the end zones of the NFL, and they're gonna be like, wow!
	That end zone says to end racism, done!
	Hiring discrimination, finished!
	Redlining, soft redlining, self-segregation.
	It's over, man, because that says end racism in the end zone.
	Okay, what this really is is corporate virtue signaling, so the NFL will continue to make bucks from people who purchase based on political likes and dislikes.
	What it really ends up doing, of course, is removing all ability to have just normal kind of non-political water cooler talk, which is kind of important, right?
	When you hang out with your friends, you spend most of your time talking about politics?
	Or did it used to be that football was like the go-to at Thanksgiving, when you had nothing else to talk about with your crazy uncle, regardless of your political side?
	You couldn't talk about anything, so you talked about how much the Lions suck.
	That was the way this used to work.
	Not anymore.
	So Roger Goodell made a huge mistake by first allowing Holland Kaepernick to kneel and then allowing everybody else to kneel.
	He should have said right from the outset the same thing that David Stern said back in the 90s.
	The national anthem is part of the game.
	You're going to stand for it.
	America is a good place.
	This doesn't seem particularly controversial.
	And if you want to say what you want to say off the field, enjoy.
	You have every right to say what you want to say off the field, on the field.
	You're working for the business.
	Which, by the way, is how every other business in America functions.
	You can talk about so many things that have happened to help our country get to a better place, and sports has been a big, big influence on that.
	And, you know, we're not here to make political statements.
	Here's Roger Goodell overtly politicizing the NFL now.
	You can talk about so many things that have happened to help our country get to a better place.
	And sports has been a big, big influence on that.
	And, you know, we're not here to make political statements.
	We're here to help make our communities better.
	Oh, so you're not here to make a political take.
	It's not political when you put end racism and end zones.
	The underlying supposition being that racism is indeed the chief factor in American life.
	It's not political, as it turns out, when you allow the players to put on their helmets the names of various supposed victims of American racism.
	So I guess we'll get a Michael Brown helmet, even though he was a person who attacked a police officer.
	We'll probably get a Jacob Blake helmet, despite the fact that he was an alleged rapist.
	We'll probably get a Rayshard Brooks helmet despite the fact that Rayshard Brooks attacked two police officers and tried to tase them after stealing a taser from one of them.
	How's the NFL gonna screen for that?
	I remember when the NFL wouldn't allow Dallas players to pay tribute to the cops after several cops were shot a few years back.
	But it's not political, you see, when Roger Goodell pushes this.
	Except for how political it is.
	So this all broke out into the open last night in a couple of ways.
	So the Miami Dolphins, who will go 2-14 this year, as is their wont, they stayed in the locker room for the National Anthem and then they released a statement about why they were staying in the locker room for the National Anthem.
	We need owners with influence and pockets bigger than ours.
	To call up officials.
	And flex political power.
	When education is not determined by where we reside.
	And we have the means to purchase what the doctor prescribed.
	And you fight for prison reform and innocent lives.
	And you repair the communities that were tossed to the side.
	And you admit you gained from it and you swallowed your pride.
	And when greed is not the compass, but love is the guide.
	And when the courts don't punish skin color, but punish the crime.
	Until then, we'll just skip the long production and stay inside.
	Oh, so bad poetry is what they're going to do.
	I also do enjoy how every single video that is ever cut by celebrities has them speaking in three word phrases and then cutting to another celeb.
	It really makes a huge difference.
	Also, I'm amused by NFL players who are among the highest earners in America, suggesting that only the owners have systemic power or money to actually help heal all of this stuff.
	And their big stand is going to be what?
	To stay indoors for the national anthem because the national anthem is super bad?
	America is to blame for all of the problems in American life.
	It's America and America's systems.
	Okay, so this again took sort of center stage last night.
	The Kansas City Chiefs, playing the Houston Texans.
	They did this in Kansas City.
	They had some socially distanced crowds there.
	A couple, it was like 17,000 fans showed up in Kansas City.
	And the players before the game decided to link arms in a show of unity.
	Now, I know that there are some people who think that this is, you know, this is better than kneeling for the anthem.
	It is better than kneeling for the anthem.
	I just, I literally don't understand what the show of unity is in favor of or against.
	Like, racism, bad.
	Yeah, I think we all agree on that, but if this idea is that you're making a show of courage by standing against racism.
	Also, death, bad.
	Cancer, bad.
	Can we get some shows of solidarity?
	And the underlying implication is what people object to, which is that America is a deeply racist country, and that if you don't stand, then you are obviously okay with racism.
	So people started booing this, and some people were shouting Trump 2020, and this led everybody in the sports media to get very, very upset, of course.
	What's really going to happen is people are just going to turn off because they don't like being called implicit racists if they don't enjoy being preached at about their evil racism for not supporting X, Y, or Z. The Denver Broncos put out a photo of their players going out to some sort of rally that said, if you ain't with us, you against us.
	And nobody knows exactly what they're supposed to be with or against, but here's my basic rule.
	If somebody ever says that to me, I'm against you.
	That is my basic rule.
	If you ever say, if you're not with us, you're against us, I'm against you.
	Because I'm not going to be blackmailed into that sort of ideological virtue signaling, that sort of partisan virtue signaling.
	It's not just sports, of course.
	It also happens along the lines of entertainment.
	So Netflix's CEO was out there propagandizing.
	You may have noticed that during the Black Lives Matter movement, Netflix began to propagandize on its main screen.
	They're putting forward black stories.
	And again, a lot of these movies are good.
	I've seen a lot of these movies.
	But the idea that Netflix is making a big difference by pushing education via movies, I'm sorry, this is just, sure, sure it is.
	So here was the head of Netflix talking about the consequences of slavery and how bad America is.
	This is a very, very rich man talking about the evils of the American system, of course.
	As a consequence of slavery, Jim Crow, and housing policy, black families in America have about 110th of the wealth of white families.
	If we're going to start to close that economic and power gap, we need black banks to be able to invest in the black community.
	If every major corporation takes 1% of their cash and deposits it in a black bank, it will be transformative in that sector.
	Okay, well, actually, the reason that people can't get loans typically has more to do with income and ability to pay back loans than the race of the people giving the loans.
	The fact remains that no matter who owns the banks, banks are not going to give loans to people who are unlikely to pay back the loans.
	And even if you take your money and put it in a black bank, unless the black bank is poorly run, it's not going to give loans to people who are unlikely to pay back the loans.
	Banks are in the business of making loans that they expect to receive income on.
	That is literally what they do.
	Which does bring up, all of this kind of corporate virtue signaling does bring up, this is the 50th anniversary of an essay that was written by Milton Friedman that is now getting all sorts of flack.
	I'll get to that in a second.
	First, I just want to make one more example of this.
	Lululemon, you want to talk about corporations' virtue signaling and making everything political?
	Lululemon put out a poster, I'm not kidding, a workshop, September 17th, a workshop to unveil historical erasure and resist capitalism.
	This is a real thing.
	Resist capitalism.
	Lululemon.
	The people who charge a hundred bucks for yoga pants for suburban rich white ladies.
	They want to decolonize gender and resist capitalism.
	Okay, so number one, I don't think you can decolonize gender through yoga pants.
	Yoga pants seem kind of gendered.
	Just gonna put that out there.
	For all the dudes in the audience, they know what I'm talking about.
	Turns out that yoga pants?
	Guy's kind of into them.
	Not wearing them, looking at them.
	That's just a reality of life.
	But beyond that, Lululemon resisting capitalism is a hell of a statement from Lululemon.
	I don't believe them.
	I don't believe them.
	But again, all of this is is.
	Based on a notion that we are a better country and we're a better society when our corporations get super political and when they start looking down the road at the rest of American society.
	Okay, this runs in direct opposition to an essay that was originally written by Milton Friedman about 50 years ago.
	Actually, exactly 50 years ago.
	It was an essay in which he talked about shareholder capitalism and he said that the basic job of a corporation is to pursue profit on behalf of its shareholders.
	Now, Milton Friedman was not an advocate of corporations engaging in regulatory capture, right, trying to set up monopolies. He was not an advocate of corporations trying to set regulatory standards such that no one else could get into business. He was not in favor of people violating labor laws.
	And that's not what Milton Friedman was talking about.
	What he was talking about is that when a corporation decides to virtue signal with somebody else's money, they're either taking money away from the shareholders or from their workers or from the consumers whose prices they have to increase.
	That the job of a corporation is to provide goods and services at the best possible price to the most possible consumers and to pay its employees What they deserve on the basis of making that sort of money.
	And competition ensures that the wages go up.
	Which, by the way, they have.
	Because when you have multiple companies competing for the same workers, then the wages go up.
	Okay, this is now considered very bad.
	And so the New York Times Magazine put together an entire issue, an entire compendium on the evils of shareholder capitalism.
	Because the real essence of corporations should be social do-gooderism.
	Because I want Netflix setting my social standards.
	As we'll see, may not be a great idea.
	I want Lululemon telling me about resisting capitalism.
	I want the NFL virtue signaling about race in America.
	That's what I want.
	I want Nike making statements about kneeling for the national anthem.
	Well, actually, all I want from my corporations is that they give me the products and services I want at a price that I am willing to pay.
	That is really what I'm looking for from them.
	And that they pay their employees what their employees deserve on the open market.
	That's pretty much it.
	Anand Garadhas, who writes for New York Times Magazine.
	He has an incredible piece in New York Times Magazine talking about the evils of shareholder capitalism.
	He says, today in America, somebody will be laid off right after his or her company announced record earnings.
	Someone's hours will be cut without notice.
	Someone's water will be poisoned by fracking.
	And among the pantheon of villains they can thank is Milton Friedman.
	Okay, Milton Friedman was not in favor of environmental degradation.
	In terms of cutting somebody's hours, that may be necessary in order to ensure that consumers still get the best possible price.
	In a competitive market.
	But this really goes to what you think the purpose of an economy is.
	And this is something that actually spans the gamut right to left.
	There are a lot of people on the right who believe that the purpose of an economy is to quote-unquote create jobs or provide meaning.
	That is not what an economy is for.
	An economy is to preserve property rights and get you the best products and services at a price you are willing to pay consensually.
	That's what a market is for.
	That is all the things a market is for.
	It is not to provide you meaning.
	It is not to provide you joy.
	It is not designed in order to provide you your purpose in life.
	That's supposed to be provided by social institutions, by family, by all the things that provide you meaning.
	And the market is not designed to quote-unquote create jobs.
	The market is designed to create jobs as a side product of creating goods and services.
	Right, that is what a market is designed to do.
	But everybody wants to turn the market into a human tool.
	This is why it drives me up a wall when I hear conservatives, people on the right, the kind of common good conservatives, talk about, well, you know, the markets weren't designed with human needs in forefront position.
	Well, the markets weren't designed, period.
	The market is based on a certain basic human truth.
	Your labor belongs to you, and you get to alienate it as you see fit.
	That's the entire thing.
	And property rights in your labor deserve to be protected.
	That's the whole market.
	It's just a recognition that you as an individual have rights.
	That is what a market is.
	It is not a system, quote-unquote, designed.
	It is not, quote-unquote, designed to achieve particular ends.
	It is a wonderful byproduct of that system that it happens to achieve particular ends.
	But it is a moral system because it assumes that you have control over your own labor and you can alienate it and make deals with others and engage in consensual back and forth with other people.
	But according to Anand Giridharadas, Friedman criticizes business people for straying from their lane, making money, and worrying about social good.
	Window dressing.
	Business people should not assume quote-unquote governmental functions of tending to the public welfare.
	And then he says, on that point, I actually agree, but here's the thing.
	Friedman militantly condemns the business person who enters the public realm to be charitable, to be kind to employees, to invest in the commons, because he wants all of these functions to be left to government.
	Okay, well, but that is the... I mean, that's kind of right.
	I mean, if a corporation takes money, and then takes the money and just gives it away, they are presumably taking it from shareholders who have invested their money, or they're upping prices in order to pay for that, or they're taking the money away from their workers.
	Those are the only sorts of money that comes into a corporation.
	What this really is, is an argument that capitalism is bad and corporations should run the world.
	It's amazing, the same people who say that corporations are evil, also say that they want corporations to donate to their favorite social justice causes.
	Corporations who fall for this are out of their minds.
	Because these same people are going to come after your corporations.
	Full scale.
	By the way, Anand Jharadhas' piece in the New York Times Magazine was so crazy, So crazy that the New York Times Magazine had to cut it.
	Okay, here's the end of the piece.
	quote, Milton Friedman's legacy is tragic.
	I'm not being hyperbolic.
	I'm being totally literal because I've seen their faces and have told their stories.
	When I say that a great many people needlessly suffered and died because he lived.
	Great many people needlessly suffered and died Milton Friedman's economic program was adopted more and more broadly over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, raising literally billions of people from abject poverty, slicing excessive poverty on planet Earth by up to 80% over the last several decades.
	Insuring free trade, insuring property rights, and all the New York Times Magazine can come up with is, well, probably he should have told corporations to engage in a virtue signaling.
	Okay, speaking of bad messaging, so there have been a bunch of wildfires in California.
	We can tell that there are a bunch of bad wildfires in California because we can look out the windows out here and the sun looks particularly orange.
	It looks like something, as people have noted, out of Blade Runner 2049.
	It is a really, really weird feeling to walk outside and the entire sky is covered with smoke.
	It is not completely unprecedented.
	We've had this every other summer probably for several years.
	The scale of the fires that are happening right now is pretty radical compared to recent years.
	This has led Democrats to immediately Here is supposedly devout Catholic Nancy Pelosi talking about the anger of Mother Earth, which is weird.
	Wildfires are happening because quote unquote, Mother Earth is angry.
	Here is supposedly devout Catholic, Nancy Pelosi, talking about the anger of Mother Earth, which is weird.
	Here is Nancy Pelosi.
	We have these fires in California and in the West.
	16 people have died in Washington, Oregon, and California, including a firefighter and a one-year-old baby.
	We are.
	Our firefighters have been so very, very courageous.
	Now we're again breaking records.
	Mother Earth is angry.
	She's telling us, whether she's telling us with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, fires in the West, whatever it is, that the climate crisis is real and has an impact.
	Okay, so it is not Mother Earth being angry.
	Climate change does have an impact on the severity of wildfires, but the major severity of wildfires is due to bad forest management.
	Michael Schellenberger writes over at Forbes magazine, It is not the case that California's fires have grown more apocalyptic every year, as the New York Times reported.
	In fact, in 2019, 2019 saw remarkably small amounts of acreage burn, just 280,000 acres compared to 1.3 million and 1.6 million in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
	John Keely, a leading forest scientist, says, I see the current California fires as a normal event, just not one that happens every year.
	He said on July 30th, 2008, we had massive fires throughout Northern California due to a series of lightning fires in the middle of the summer.
	It's not an annual event, but it's also not an unusual event.
	In fact, if you look at areas burned in California during prehistoric times, many, many more acres were burned in California.
	In fact, Keeley notes that since 1960, the variation in spring and summer temperatures explain 50% of the variation in fire frequency and intensity from one year to the next, but the half century since 1960 is the same period in which the U.S.
	government promoted, mostly out of ignorance, suppression of regular fires that most forests need to allow for new growth.
	It's not just right-wing sources saying this.
	ProPublica has an article by Elizabeth Weil pointing out that the prevention of megafires requires that you allow smaller fires to actually happen, and they have not allowed it to happen every year.
	So, instead, quote, we keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures.
	As a result, wildland fuels keep building up.
	At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier.
	Then, boom, the inevitable.
	The wind blows down a power line or lightning strikes dry grass and an inferno ensues.
	This week, we've seen both the second and third largest fires in California history.
	So, yes, prescribed and managed burns that have been completely ignored by both the federal and the state government.
	That would be the major reason why you're seeing these massive megafires.
	So again, government mismanagement has a lot to do with what we are seeing in California and the sort of paganistic, Mother Earth is angry with us, that's why we're seeing all this.
	You see this also when there's a hurricane?
	So when Jim Inhofe brings a snowball to the floor of the Senate and he says, global warming isn't happening, people mock him.
	When there's a hurricane and everybody on the left goes, this is because hurricanes are becoming so much more severe thanks to global warming.
	Nobody has the heart to point out the reason that hurricanes are more damaging is because there is more human structure in the way of those hurricanes, not because the hurricanes are either more frequent or more damaging in and of themselves.
	Alrighty, so I would be remiss today if I didn't do a deconstructing the culture.
	Okay, it's time for some deconstructing the culture.
	On the menu today is this film, Cuties.
	So I have some complex thoughts about this film, Cuties.
	Now, Cuties is a film that first made headlines on Netflix because the poster for Cuties is supremely disturbing the way that Netflix originally put it out.
	So Netflix put out a poster of these four little girls.
	I mean, and they are little, they're 11 years old.
	Okay, and as a father of two daughters under the age of seven, I can say that the way these girls were dressed was perverse and disgusting and pedophilic.
	And they are dressed completely inappropriately and horrifically and they are posing in very sexual images and all this.
	It's gross and Netflix had to take down the poster correctly.
	Then, there's the film.
	Now, many things can be true about the film simultaneously.
	One, the themes of the film are why over-sexualization of children are bad.
	That is the actual theme of the film.
	Now, the honest question to be asked about the film is when you cross the line, and this has been a long debated question in film, when you cross the line between depiction and exploitation.
	This has been a discussion in American film, really going back to the end of the Hays Code, when you started seeing movies like A Clockwork Orange, and people were saying, okay, this shows a pretty graphic rape scene.
	Is that exploitation and pushing of rape, or is it actually condemnation of rape?
	You've seen this in the context of violence, where ultra-violent movies are very often considered glorifications of the violence rather than condemnations of it or mere depictions of it, and so people get very upset about all this.
	This film falls squarely into that category.
	I think you can certainly make a fair case that the director in this particular film directed the camera in disgusting ways at 11-year-old children.
	Not only can you make that case, I think that case is fairly obvious from the actual footage of the film.
	The question is whether the director is doing that in order to make you uncomfortable with the way these kids are being depicted because that is part of a pop culture in which they are submerged.
	So the reason that I bring this up is because I think a lot of the people who watched the clips of the film didn't actually watch the film and they gave hot takes based on this.
	So this is why I'm going to provide a little bit of nuance because I've actually spent the time yesterday of watching this film and it is indeed incredibly disturbing and upsetting and difficult to watch.
	The clip that was making the rounds yesterday was this clip of these little girls dancing in very, very sexual ways.
	Okay, these kids are 11.
	Two of them are of African extraction or Arab extraction.
	One is from Senegal.
	I'm not sure where the other one is from in the movie.
	And then two of them are white, French.
	Again, this is a French movie.
	To explain the context of this clip, I have to explain the plot of the movie.
	So the plot of the movie is that there is a little girl, her name is Amy, she's 11 years old, and she is a Muslim girl who is living in a fundamentalist Islamic family in Paris.
	Her parents, her mom is in the movie, her mom is being forced to accept that the dad is going back to Senegal in order to bring a second wife, right?
	We find this out 15 minutes into the movie, that they've reserved a bedroom for the second wife.
	And that this little girl is being brought up in a culture that says that polygamy is good and that women should be forced to accept it thanks to the whim of Allah.
	Okay, this is made very, very clear in the film.
	This is not me, you know, as a quote-unquote Islamophobe saying that, okay, I'm not an Islamophobe, number one, but beyond that, That is not what the film says.
	So the film is making the point that radical fundamentalist Islamic culture is anti-woman, which happens to be obviously true.
	Any culture that says that one wife should be forced to accept another wife is an anti-woman culture.
	Monogamy is one of the great hallmarks of Judeo-Christian civilization in the West.
	So she lives in this radical fundamentalist Islamic household.
	And she's being forced to accept as the daughter of one woman that she's going to have like a new stepmom, basically, because daddy is off in Senegal bringing back the wife.
	Dad is not present the entire film.
	Upset with her own culture, she begins to engage with a highly sexualized group of young 11-year-old girls.
	The point of this girls group is that they are bad people.
	Right?
	That they've been completely misled by the culture.
	The parents are not there in any way, shape, or form.
	They're basically being raised by the internet.
	The point of the film is that these girls are being raised by the internet.
	And there are several scenes that prove this.
	Right?
	That these girls are ignorant about sex.
	That they don't know anything about sex.
	That all they know about sex is stuff that they are learning online.
	There's a scene where they're talking about the actual biological function of sex and they literally have no idea what they're talking about.
	There's a scene in which one of the girls finds a used condom.
	In a forest where they're hanging out, and she blows it up like a balloon because she literally has no idea what it is, and all the other girls freak out.
	These are little girls.
	They're 11.
	They're ignorant about sex.
	But they know what they see online.
	And what they see online is a bunch of women, grown women, who are acting in extraordinarily hyper-sexualized ways, and they understand that it makes these women popular, and that the culture values this, and so they start acting in those same ways.
	Now, the other girls in the group, because they are sort of more ensconced in French secular hedonism, They sort of understand where the appropriate lines are, but Amy does not, and so she continues to escalate her behavior to the point where she's taking shots of her crotch and she's putting them online.
	The point of the movie, she becomes a worse person for moving away from fundamental moral tenets and moving toward a social media culture that values women for their sexuality and values girls for their sexuality.
	And so she's constantly misinterpreting things.
	There's a scene where she attempts to sexually proposition.
	She steals a cell phone from her cousin, who's an adult.
	She attempts to sexually proposition him in order to get back the cell phone.
	He, of course, reacts very badly because she's 11.
	And the point is that she doesn't know where any of the lines are because she's being raised by the Internet.
	Because the Internet and our over-sexualized culture deliberately forces the internalization of hyper-sexualization into young teens, into pre-teens.
	There's a scene that is described in a lot of the descriptions in which a 16 or 17 year old girl shows her breasts on screen.
	That's because the girls in the movie are watching this happen online.
	They're watching that video online.
	And they don't at any point say, is what the girl is doing right or wrong?
	Instead, they just say, wow, look how many legs she has.
	Maybe we should do stuff like that.
	Okay, so, the point of the movie is that France has basically broken down into a society where, because of its multicultural ethos, it tolerates radical fundamentalist Islam, in which people are shipping in second wives from Senegal, on the one hand, and on the other hand is providing, as a lived alternative, the secular, hedonistic lifestyle that over-sexualizes children, and that there's bleed-over effect from that over-sexualized lifestyle from adults to children.
	So that's a pretty conservative message.
	Like, the actual message of the film is actually quite conservative.
	Now, the problem with the film comes in in the depiction, right?
	Does this film cross the line between depiction and exploitation?
	So there's a clip going around yesterday of these girls dancing.
	It is, you know, warning, spoiler warning, and not only spoiler warning, like, nausea warning right now.
	This clip is graphic.
	It is a graphic clip of these girls dancing in very sexual ways.
	They are 11 years old.
	It's disgusting.
	It is meant to be disgusting.
	Okay, and I'll show you kind of why It's meant to be disgusting.
	Okay, so here is the clip that was going around yesterday, and people were rightly outraged at this clip.
	Okay, you can see the adults reacting in the clip, not being upset that these girls are twerking, not being upset, and, you know, being kind of happy about it.
	And these girls are dancing very, very sexually.
	They're 11 years old.
	It's really, really disturbing for folks who can't see this, you know.
	And there are shots of crotches and shots of butts.
	Okay, and it is these kinds of shots that people are saying, how in the world is this being promoted?
	How in the world is this even being filmed?
	I mean, these are 11-year-old girls in real life who are being exploited.
	This way, you can see the adults are very excited about it.
	They're very happy about it.
	Okay, and then, the girls start to get more and more sexual.
	And they start to get more and more sexual because they've coordinated this dance based on a video that they've seen online that is very much like WAP.
	Okay, like these very sexualized, hyper-sexualized, lesbianic dances.
	That's a scene in the film.
	There's a scene in the film where the main character, who is, again, the Senegalese girl, is literally sitting in a session with the other women.
	The other women have scarves over their head and they're praying, and she's sitting with her earphones in, watching this sexualized, hyper-lesbian stuff, right, on her cell phone.
	As that scene goes on, you start to see cutaways of the crowd, and the crowd starts to get more and more disquieted because people in the crowd are realizing this is really over the top, this is really, really bad.
	The end of the scene, which was cut off online, was cut off for a reason.
	The end of the scene is this girl, the main character, weeping openly and stopping the dance because she realizes that she has been exploiting herself, that she has made herself a worse person.
	She runs away from the dance.
	The end of the film is her rejecting both the second wedding for her father and the hypersexualized culture in favor of sort of this generic childhood innocence.
	She puts on a sweater that kind of buttons all the way up to the neck because it's supposed to be modest.
	And then she goes and she jump ropes to try and regain her innocence.
	That's the end of the film.
	So, several things can be true at once, and I think it's important to actually watch things before you analyze what they are about.
	This may not justify why the film was made.
	The director of the film, by the way, has openly said that the reason the film was made is because she was a black woman who was of Senegalese descent and grew up in an Islamic household.
	She said she was walking through the park in France, and she saw a group of 11-year-olds dancing like this.
	And she was sickened by it, she says.
	And so she decided to make a movie trying to explore what in the world, as a culture, would we get to the point where 11-year-olds are dancing like this.
	She's talked about this openly in interviews.
	So several things can be true at once.
	One, I don't think that the director meant to hyper-sexualize the girls for the pleasure of pedophiles.
	Two, Netflix definitely, with its original poster, hyper-sexualized the girls for the purpose of pedophiles.
	Netflix, their original poster, was really, really bad.
	Three, the theme of the movie is that hyper-sexualization of children is not only bad, but that it springs from an adult culture that suggests that consent is the only value, and that bleeds down to people for whom consent is not possible.
	In ways that they don't themselves understand.
	That the hyper-sexualization of a society does bleed down to kids.
	That is a theme of the film.
	Third, that a culture that allows for no choice but a choice between a hyper-sexualized, secular humanistic vision of hedonism on the one hand, and Islamic fundamentalism on the other, is a society that is fated for the garbage can.
	That is a point that the movie is pretty openly making.
	Now the critics, because critics mainly hate the right, and the critics have sinned here too, because the critics mostly hate the right, they've decided that this is a story of female empowerment through leaving Islamic fundamentalism in favor of twerking.
	That's not what the film is about, the director has said that's not what the film is about.
	Okay, the real question that should be asked here is, should a film like this even be made, despite the messaging, if it has to depict images like this in order to be made?
	I think that's a fair question.
	I think it's a fair question.
	I think it's a very fair question to ask whether the film has to depict as much of this as it does in order to achieve its purpose.
	The director would probably tell you that her purpose in showing this stuff was to make you uncomfortable, was to deliberately make the viewer uncomfortable so you realize that so many people are complicit in this culture that bleeds down to little girls.
	My guess is that's what the director would say.
	Does that justify the behavior?
	I think the case can be made that it certainly does not.
	That 11-year-old girls, no matter what you believe, were actually exploited in the same way that Brooke Shields was exploited at 12 when she was forced to get naked in, like, Blue Lagoon.
	I think that case can be made.
	But I think, again, that it is important to recognize what the movie is, what it was meant to be, and what it kind of isn't.
	So that you can have a more fully-rounded discussion about it.
	Now, should you watch it?
	I don't think so, not unless you're willing to take, you know, an hour and a half of being clubbed about the ears by some of that imagery, which again is supremely disturbing.
	But is it possible for somebody to say that they think that the messages of the film are not about pedophilia?
	I mean, it's pretty obvious the messages of the film are not about pedophilia.
	So there is a fully rounded, shaded version of what exactly Cuties was about.
	Now, does Netflix deserve to be boycotted for airing Cuties?
	Well, it's directed at mature audiences.
	It specifically says that on the film.
	Netflix should have been boycotted over its original poster.
	There are a lot of films on Netflix that depict really bad stuff.
	The original poster was the problem.
	Okay, the film itself can be a problem.
	I can certainly see why you would think that it shouldn't have been made in the first place, and that it shouldn't have been receiving this sort of glorious coverage.
	On the basis of the images that it glorifies, right?
	Even if it was doing so in order to make you uncomfortable.
	Did it have to do that in order to make the point?
	John Nolte said this.
	I think he's probably correct.
	It didn't need to go this far in order to make the point.
	I totally get that.
	I kind of agree with it.
	The poster was the real problem because the poster obviously was directed at glorifying the sexual excess of children.
	That was the real problem.
	Okay, so now you have your movie guide to cuties.
	It's a little more complicated than I think most of the takes you're gonna get on it.
	Um, but I think that, you know, in all essence, we should, we should try to be fair when we watch these movies and note where they are wrong and where they are evil and where they're making an overall not terrible point.
	The movie can be exploitative and bad in the way that people view it, and it can also be making a fairly good point, actually, about the destruction of a culture that has no centralizing principles rooted in virtue and morality.
	Alrighty.
	We'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here on Monday.
	Don't forget to tune in to the Sunday special.
	We've got Dan Bongino this week.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here on Monday.
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