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Feb. 9, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:06

Woke Voldemort Comes For Harry Potter | Ep. 1665

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Time	Text
	The woke left goes after Hogwarts legacy for the supposed transphobia of Harry Potter author J.K.
	Rowling, Matt Walsh humiliates a Democratic legislator over child genital mutilation, and former Twitter executives get grilled for censorship by congressional Republicans.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	It's the most authoritarian force in American life right now.
	And that is clearly true, particularly in the culture where they have the whip hand.
	And the simple fact of the matter is that the woke left occupies all of the slots in middle management and all the companies that decide exactly how culture is to be done.
	That is true whether we're talking about woke corporations in non-culture spaces or whether we are talking about culture itself.
	And that means that they are able to generate an outsized amount of attention and rage directed at particular people.
	The person who is on the chopping block today, of course, and has been for a couple of years, is J.K.
	Rowling.
	J.K.
	Rowling is apparently the worst person in the world.
	Sure, you say, she's the person who wrote Harry Potter.
	And sure, she's even on the left.
	You'll remember that she foolishly decided to retcon Dumbledore into a gay dude.
	There was nothing in the books that suggests that he was gay.
	But then she was pushed.
	Why isn't there anyone gay in Harry Potter?
	And she's like, well, I guess Dumbledore was gay.
	And then they had to make an entire series, Fantastic Beasts, dedicated to the proposition that we need a backstory for Dumbledore in which he likes dudes.
	Again, all of that is because the woke left always has the whip hand.
	And J.K.
	Rowling gave in to a point.
	But then she refused to give in to the big one, which is men can be women and women can be men.
	It turns out that J.K.
	Rowling is pretty invested in the idea that only women, biological women, can be women.
	And this has made her a persona non grata among members of the woke left.
	Again, despite the fact that she is a member of the political left herself.
	They've declared that she's a trans-exclusionary radical feminist because apparently you are a TERF if you believe in basic human biology.
	And this means that there has now been a widespread attempted boycott of Hogwarts legacy.
	Now, as we will see, wokeism doesn't actually succeed in the marketplace.
	It actually leads to tremendous failure in the marketplace, but it does succeed in pushing the Overton window to the left steadily and not all that slowly.
	According to Forbes, the highly anticipated Harry Potter video game debuted this week, but it's been plagued by controversy and boycotts as players grapple with whether to support J.K.
	Rowling's franchise in light of her history of comments widely seen as transphobic.
	Hogwarts Legacy is a role-playing game set in the Harry Potter universe and developed by Avalanche Software and published by Warner Bros.
	Games.
	It will be released on February 10th.
	The game has garnered largely positive reviews on places like Metacritic.
	However, some fans and gamers are boycotting the game in protest of JK Rowling because, of course, she has said that men are men and women are women.
	Some popular game review sites like Kotaku, Polygon, and Eurogamer have not yet reviewed Hogwarts Legacy despite the review embargo lifting on Monday.
	Others have denounced J.K.
	Rowling's comments and voiced support for transgender people in their reviews.
	Jesse Earl, one trans YouTuber and writer, tweeted in December that unlike consuming previously owned Harry Potter books or films, purchasing Hogwarts Legacy while Rowling is quote, using her ongoing platform to target and also justify her continued targeting of trans people is hateful to trans people.
	Rowling responded accusing her of pure think.
	Some streamers on Amazon-owned Twitch platforms, including Will Overgaard and Nicotine, have publicly voiced opposition to the game.
	And the idea here is that we have to make sure that no one engages in a game because the creator of the game does not agree with you on a very radical point of view.
	All of this despite the fact, by the way, that apparently there is a transgender character in the game.
	I'm not kidding you.
	Apparently, Hogwarts Legacy actually does have a transgender character named Serona Ryan.
	Again, it's according to Forbes.
	That, by the way, would be the middle managers at Warner Brothers deciding that in order to avoid the flak, they're simply going to give in to the woke left.
	But Serona is a witch who runs a tavern in Hogsmeade Village, an NPC that the player can speak to.
	Serona doesn't outright say she is a trans woman.
	She implies it through her dialogue when she talks about her old classmates and says, took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard.
	Now, is that going to buy off the woke left?
	Of course it's not going to buy off the woke left.
	Of course not.
	They're still angry.
	And one of the people who is most hilariously involved in this controversy now is Hasan Piker.
	He used to be associated with the Young Turks, and now he is a gamer who declares himself a socialist while buying himself mansions.
	Really good socialist, Hasan Piker.
	He's doing some good stuff this week, by the way.
	He actually donated a bunch of money to victims of the Turkish earthquake.
	And then he also did some stupid stuff, which is sort of what he normally does.
	He announced that he is not going to play Hogwarts Legacy.
	And the reason he's not going to play Hogwarts Legacy is not because he is in principled fashion angry that JK Rowling is such a transphobe.
	He's not going to do it because he says he's a coward.
	Which, okay, I mean, points for honesty here, Hasan.
	The only reason why I'm not playing this game, and I know a bunch of other people are not playing this game, is because we know that it's not worth it to get f***ing bullied endlessly and called transphobic endlessly when we have massive queer communities and audiences.
	That's it.
	Everybody, everybody knows, everybody f*ing knows how much leftist motherf*ers love to chirp on the internet.
	They got no power.
	All they do is chirp, chirp, chirp.
	And that's precisely why so many f***ing people that would otherwise like play it, maybe even raise money for, you know, charities or whatever.
	You know, they're not doing it.
	Okay, it's kind of an amazing thing to go on your own show and then just admit that you're a coward and that you won't say the thing because you're so afraid of your own fanbase.
	I mean, he literally said the only reason he's not playing is because people who quote-unquote chirp-chirp-chirp are basically bullying him into not playing the game.
	Later, he tried to walk this one back.
	He went on Twitter, he said, People who want to boycott the game aren't wrong to hate J.K.
	Rowling.
	She's awful.
	Except it's fruitless, no matter how much trans folks want to push for it.
	It's like trying to boycott Disney.
	Most people have no idea and don't care about J.K.
	Rowling at all, and they just want to go to Hogwarts.
	Okay, well, I mean, you may be correct about the failure of the boycotts, but they've already won.
	By getting people like Hasan not to play the game, by bullying him, they've achieved their goal.
	Now, again, there is a massive gap that has now been exposed between the market, which hates wokeness, and the people who actually push the cultural window to the left.
	There is this huge gap because Hogwarts Legacy is dominating Twitch right now.
	According to Kotaku, the open world Harry Potter RPG is now the most popular game on the live streaming platform.
	So the market loves Hogwarts Legacy.
	And yet, all of the commentators, and the gamers, and all the people who are on the internet, the people like Hasan Piker, they're openly saying that it's not wrong to boycott it, that in fact, they themselves are not going to play the game out of pure fear of their own audiences.
	So much for the idea that capitalism rules all or that capitalism always wins.
	It does win when it comes to money making, right?
	This game will continue to make money, but it doesn't win when it comes to the culture.
	I want to talk a little bit more about that in just a second.
	It's pretty amazing stuff.
	Speaking of woke companies.
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	So again, the goal in the culture space is to continue pushing things over and over and over again to the left.
	And you can see how this has had an impact in the real world.
	It's had real political, real-world impact, but it's also had massive impact in terms of the kind of entertainment that people consume.
	So yesterday, Disney made several simultaneous announcements.
	Disney has been suffering.
	They lost, apparently, 2.4 million subscribers.
	Now, they have a bajillion subscribers.
	They can afford to lose 2.4 million subscribers, but That is a damaging thing for them.
	And the reason for that is a widespread perception that Disney does not like you and does not like your values.
	This is a major problem for them.
	They decided to jump both feet into the culture of wars, and now they're getting punished for it.
	But are they going to direct themselves away from that?
	The answer is probably not.
	They're going to try to have the best of both worlds.
	They're going to try to provide legacy content that parents still want their kids to see while mainstreaming in a bunch of left-wing social content.
	So they simultaneously announced yesterday 7,000 layoffs.
	And they want to make sequels to Toy Story Frozen and Zootopia.
	They have no new good ideas, apparently.
	So they're doing Toy Story 5, which I thought Toy Story 4 was the end of the story.
	You thought Toy Story 3 was the end of the story.
	Then they're like, we're back with Toy Story 4, which is good.
	And then they're like, well, they're now off into the sunset.
	The gang is leaving.
	They've all retired.
	Woody is going off to an island somewhere to be with Bo Peep or whatever.
	And now apparently they're bringing it back for Toy Story 5, because why the hell not?
	We'll all be long dead and gone when they're making Toy Story 82.
	Frozen 3 is apparently going to come out again.
	When I say come out, I mean that all the same people who are boycotting Harry Potter legacy or Hogwarts legacy, all those same people, I guarantee, I mean, they're already on the internet stumping for Ilsa to just come out as a lesbian.
	This is not a fake thing.
	It's a real thing.
	They've been pushing this since Frozen 1, and the clamor began to grow in Frozen 2, and now they're really pushing it for Frozen 3.
	It'll be fascinating to see if Disney caves to their own middle-management wokest.
	And they're making Zootopia 2 as well.
	I don't know where the clamor was for Zootopia 2, by the way.
	Was Zootopia like a massive hit?
	In any case, You can see the simultaneous pressures that Disney is under.
	From their middle management, there's a lot of pressure to move to the woe.
	From the market, there's a lot of pressure to go back to legacy content.
	And CEO Bob Iger is stuck in the middle.
	He announced that he was cutting 7,000 employees in hopes of finding $5 billion in savings.
	He announced that the company would be dumping another round of necessary installments to the Toy Story Frozen and Zootopia franchises, according to AV Club.
	Apparently, the company is also bringing Avatar rides and experiences to Disneyland in California.
	They already have that over at Disney World.
	Iger says, I have enormous respect and appreciation for the dedication of our employees worldwide.
	He said that about two seconds after respecting his employees into unemployment, as the AV Club points out over at The Onion.
	So again, this is just proof positive that many of these companies are running headlong into the woke diktats and they're feeling the impact of all of that.
	So who actually is doing this at these companies?
	That really is the big question.
	Who is doing this kind of stuff?
	The answer is actually not the people at the top of the companies.
	People at the top of the companies, the very, very top of the companies, those people do answer to the bottom line.
	They would like to see shareholders increase their market.
	It really is not the people with the lowest rungs.
	Those people don't care.
	Those people want to go in every day, do their work, and go home to their families.
	It's the people in middle management.
	There's a fascinating paper out from Nikolaj Foss at Copenhagen Business School and Peter Klein at Baylor University and the Norwegian School of Economics called, Why Do Companies Go Woke?
	And what they find is that going woke is an emergent strategy that is largely shaped by middle managers rather than owners, top managers, or employees.
	They suggest that broader social and cultural trends tend to reinforce the process.
	In other words, if you're a middle manager, the best way for you to ensure your own future employment is to go woke.
	Because it means that if you get fired, then you get to yell at your former employer about how they are racist and terrible.
	If you go woke, it is a protection mechanism.
	It's an HR problem if you go woke.
	In other words, if you're a middle manager and you say, I wanted to wreck my company in a left-wing social direction, the people at the top of the company are like, oh God, we can't fire this person anymore.
	Now we're stuck.
	If we fire this person, they're going to claim discrimination.
	Again, the people at the top of the company have been bullied into silence by the ridiculous kind of legal architecture that's been set up around HR at our major companies.
	And the people at the bottom don't care.
	They just want to go and do their jobs.
	The people in middle management are, in fact, erecting the boat at a lot of these major corporations in terms of the wokeness.
	Which is why you see, for example, very often companies do a woke thing and then have to back off of it.
	There was another case of this yesterday when Airbnb had to back off of a ban that they had sent to Lauren Southern's parents.
	Lauren Southern is a very right-wing political commentator.
	The company had actually sent an email, Airbnb, to her parents informing them their account with Airbnb was being canceled because they are, quote, closely associated with Southern, whose account with the company is banned.
	The message said, quote, we've removed you from the Airbnb platform because your account is closely associated with a person who isn't allowed to use Airbnb.
	This means you'll no longer be able to book reservations on Airbnb.
	Southern tweeted out, my parents just got banned from Airbnb for being related to me.
	They've never booked anything for me.
	They don't represent me in any way.
	They aren't publicly political in any way.
	How is this sane in any way?
	And Southern's tweet quickly went viral.
	And then Airbnb claimed they made a mistake and reinstated her parents' account.
	As we'll talk about in just a second, these middle managers are the people who are controlling the direction of the culture.
	They're controlling the direction of business in the country, even more so than the market.
	Because in order to protect against downside liability, companies are just caving to the woke middle management core.
	This is particularly true over at Twitter.
	We'll get to that in one second.
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	Okay, so speaking of that, middle management core, the people who make the decisions that shift the culture and turn corporations into woke corporations.
	This is because if you're a middle manager, you're one of two types.
	This is why you're a middle manager.
	If you were truly creative and entrepreneurial, you wouldn't be a middle manager.
	You'd be at the top of the company.
	The people at the top of the company are generally tasked with creating profitability for the company, creating efficiencies for the company, taking advantage of new market innovations.
	But if you're in middle management, you basically have been given one of two roles.
	One is to protect your own job.
	Going woke protects your own job because once you go woke, nobody can fire you.
	And two, protect against downside liabilities for the company.
	This is the entire HR departments and major corporations.
	And so the woke have a major advantage here.
	And this means that when the heads of companies simply go to sleep, the middle management takes over.
	And we talk about the deep state in the federal government.
	Donald Trump takes over the presidency, and then there are a bunch of career bureaucrats who are existing in the executive branch, and they just work against his interests because their interests are not his interests, for example.
	And Trump didn't know enough about the workings of government to just go in and fire everybody, for example.
	Well, the same thing is true of major corporations.
	Very often, the people who found the corporations do so with innovation and creativity and market responsiveness as their chief goals.
	But pretty soon, they have to staff up at the middle level in order to delegate power downwards, right?
	They can't run every single aspect of the company.
	Well, in doing so, in delegating power to a bunch of middle managers who are rent-seeking, they want to maintain their own jobs, and liability minimizing, they want to minimize liability to themselves and to the company, You end up with middle managers in control of the company because the people at the top have basically delegated their way out of power.
	And that's precisely what happened over at Twitter.
	So yesterday, there is a hearing on the Hill, quite fascinating, with regard to Twitter.
	The Republicans hauled in all of the old employees of Twitter to talk about why exactly they had decided to, for example, shut down the New York Post story on Hunter Biden prior to the election, or why they had banned particular accounts.
	The middle managers at Twitter, people like Yoel Roth over at Trust and Safety, or Vijaya Gaddy, the legal advisor over at Trust and Safety.
	They were forced to answer some of these questions, and their answers are terrible.
	And demonstrate, full-scale, how it's the middle layer of these companies that is really, really the problem.
	And why, by the way, Elon Musk can come in and fire all the middle managers, and the company can still run.
	So Joel Roth yesterday, he made an astonishing statement.
	Again, this guy was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, which is about as Orwellian a title for a company division as is possible.
	And Roth said, the big problem with unrestricted free speech is it leads to less speech, not more speech.
	Who appointed this guy?
	Twitter found that users were unhappy with the company's approach to content moderation and that this dissatisfaction drove people away from the service.
	This has consequences for what we mean by free speech on social media.
	Again and again, we saw the speech of a small number of abusive users drive away countless others.
	Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.
	And it was our job in Trust and Safety to try to strike an appropriate balance.
	Because people feel bad.
	And if people feel bad, they don't engage in free speech.
	So we have to strike an appropriate balance by determining what can be said and what can't be said.
	This right here would be the liability minimization position.
	And you can see that taking sort of full scale with regards to the Hunter Biden story.
	So Yoel Roth was asked by Republican congresspeople, again this is the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, he was asked by Republican congresspeople, why exactly did you take down the Hunter Biden laptop story and then ban accounts that just retweeted it?
	Mr. Roth, did the government tell you that the Biden laptop story was fake?
	No, sir, they did not.
	didn't on their own, presumably in order to minimize the possible political fallout from allowing the story to go forward.
	On October 14, 2020, Twitter blocks the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden, the New York Post story on Hunter Biden and suspends their account.
	The night before, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends you an email.
	The email says this, heads up, I will be sending a teleporter link for you to download 10 documents.
	It's not spam.
	Please confirm receipt when you get it.
	Two minutes later, 624 p.m., you respond back, received and downloaded.
	Thanks.
	Hey, and Roth then said, well, yeah, I was coordinating with the FBI, but they didn't tell me any of this.
	He's the middle manager.
	This is what he's tasked with doing is to minimize liability.
	The FBI tells him to jump and he says, how high?
	In fact, they even apply, imply that he should jump.
	And he says, how high should I jump?
	He says, we had lots of meetings with the FBI, right?
	Lots and lots of meetings with the FBI.
	So basically he was catfished by the FBI is what it sounds like here.
	Matt Taibbi, a respected reporter who published much of the Twitter files, said, quote, Twitter's contact with FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
	Now I want to better understand why he would suggest that.
	Mr. Roth, while at Twitter, how many meetings did you have with the FBI?
	I couldn't say for sure.
	More than 10?
	That's a reasonable estimate.
	More than 20?
	I couldn't say for sure.
	More than 50?
	That seems a bit high.
	Okay, so dozens of meetings with the FBI.
	And then he was asked the real takeaway.
	Did the government actually just tell you that Hunter's story was fake or hack?
	And he says, no, they didn't tell us that.
	Because again, they didn't have to.
	That is the whole point here.
	When you are in a position of mid-range power, you do the thing that is necessary in order to protect yourself, your job, and what you think is liability for the company.
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	All right, so, Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter Trust and Safety, he says, like, the government didn't even actually have to tell us that the Hunter Biden story was fake.
	We just assumed it was.
	In 2020, Twitter noticed activity related to the laptop that, at first glance, bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 Russian hack and leak operation targeting the DNC.
	And we had to decide what to do.
	And in that moment, with limited information, Twitter made a mistake.
	They did make a mistake, but then they didn't fix the mistake.
	As former legal head Vijaya Gaddy said, we should have reinstated the accounts that were tweeting out the Hunter Biden story.
	But we didn't.
	We just left them closed.
	This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials.
	Relying on its long-standing practice not to retroactively apply new policies, Twitter informed the New York Post that it could immediately begin tweeting when it deleted the original tweets, which would have freed them to retweet the same content again.
	The New York Post chose not to delete its original tweets, so Twitter made an exception after two weeks to retroactively apply the new policy to the Post's tweets.
	In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated the post account immediately.
	Yeah, but they didn't, did they?
	They didn't, did they?
	And the reason they didn't is, once again, these are people who are covering their own ass.
	They have some ideological agreements with the woke left, and then they also like to cover their own asses.
	Speaking of the woke left, you want to talk about, like, the middle management classic employee.
	Here is a Twitter, quote-unquote, whistleblower, employee named Annika Collier Navarroli.
	And she said, what was our job over at Twitter?
	Our job over at Twitter was to restrict speech.
	And so we did.
	If a high-profile individual like any member of this committee or President Trump tweeted something controversial, it was sent to my team's desk.
	Every day, we had to decide whether a particular piece of content equated to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
	I mean, this shows you everything you need to know.
	The person whose job it was to decide what could be said and what could not be said is citing a bad law case.
	The fire in a crowded theater standard has not been a standard in American law for nigh on a century at this point.
	It was originally in a case during World War I called Schenck versus United States.
	And in Schenck, the case was about people who were distributing anti-war pamphlets, and the Woodrow Wilson administration went after them.
	And the Supreme Court said it was akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.
	That has not been the standard in American law for a long time, and she's still using it.
	Because again, she's one of the wokest, right?
	The middle management is two groups, the actual woke and the cowards.
	That is the middle management of so many of our major corporations.
	And the actual woke at our companies, right?
	The middle management woke.
	Those people are incentivized by an entire public superstructure of actual activists.
	And that's how Democrats responded to this.
	So you have this Twitter hearing and the Republicans call in their witnesses, Democrats call their witnesses, and then Democrats come to the defense of Twitter.
	Twitter banning good information on COVID.
	Stuff that was just mirroring stats from the CDC.
	I remember there were tweets that I could not tweet about actual stats.
	Twitter would take that stuff down.
	And this is cheered by the Democrats because, after all, they are activists.
	They're not answerable for the profit margins of these companies or the success of these companies.
	It's an inside-outside game.
	Here, for example, is a Democratic representative named Robert Garcia telling these Twitter executives who shut down the dissemination of information that they saved lives.
	But I especially want to thank you for your work around the pandemic.
	The pandemic took over a million American lives, 1,300 in my own city back home, and your decisions in content moderation actually saved countless lives in this country, including the work you did by moderating or banning members even of this committee who peddled and lies and were actively causing death and harm to others.
	And so for that work on content moderation, I want to thank you.
	I want to thank you.
	Of course, the middle management are answering to Garcia.
	They're not answering to the dictates of the shareholders of their companies.
	They're answering to AOC, who's out there declaring that the laptop story was half fake.
	The only thing I know about AOC and things that are half fake is all of her photo ops are at least half fake, whether it is her fake crying outside a parking lot at a detention center.
	I haven't seen her down by the border any time recently.
	Well, Joe Biden is interning tens of thousands of people, presumably.
	or at least thousands of people. And I haven't seen her crying outside the houses of the victims of crime from illegal. I have seen her pretending that she's getting handcuffed at particular rallies where she is detained briefly. We're talking about half fake Congress people.
	Ocasio-Cortez is at least half fake, but she says the Hunter Biden laptop story was half fake. So she's grateful to Twitter for shutting it down.
	They're weaponizing the use of this committee so that they can do it again. A whole hearing, about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.
	That is why we are here right now.
	And it is...
	It's just an abuse of public resources and abuse of public time.
	We could be talking about health care.
	We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.
	We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights.
	But instead, we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-fake laptop story.
	I mean, this is an embarrassment.
	Half-fake laptop story.
	What's an embarrassment is this person in Congress with her giant glasses.
	She's such a ridiculous person.
	But this is the thing.
	The activist class wants the middle management to shut down the debate.
	That is their goal.
	For example, Representative Jared Moskowitz, Democrat from Florida.
	He actually tried to cover for the Biden laptop story being suppressed.
	He was like, yeah, it's good that it was suppressed.
	I'm happy it was suppressed.
	I mean, this is, he's like a RadioShack.matrix guy who copied files off a private citizen's hard drive.
	Okay?
	That's your entire theory is based off of.
	I want to use his words.
	This is his own words.
	Your guy, your leaker, the guy who gave you the information.
	There have been several attempts by several individuals to modify and insert fake data.
	I do know there has been multiple attempts over the past year and a half to insert questionable material into the laptop.
	There is no evidence that any questionable material was inserted into the laptop.
	Hunter Biden left his laptop at a computer repair shop because he's a high garbage human.
	He was he was high beyond reason.
	And he just left.
	It wasn't the only laptop he just left lying around, by the way.
	But, again, this is also Democrats can defend the sort of censorship regime that they like.
	And AOC, of course, was back for more of this.
	AOC, yesterday, literally asked the former members of Twitter if they could have worked harder in banning libs of TikTok.
	Kaya Raychick, who's done the absolutely, apparently, devastatingly awful work of actually just revealing clips of people speaking in their own words.
	So here she was calling on the Twitter heads to have banned libs of TikTok more.
	Libs of TikTok have been suspended like five times.
	Here's AOC, all in favor of censorship.
	Mr. Roth, are you familiar with this account?
	Yes, ma'am, I am.
	Are you aware that from August 11th to August 16th, that account posted false information about Boston Children's Hospital, claiming that they were providing hysterectomies to children?
	Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the account.
	And are you aware that this lie was then circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?
	Yes.
	And are you aware that all these claims, which I have reiterated, were false, culminated in a real-life harassment and ultimately a bomb threat to the Boston Children's Hospital?
	Yes, I am aware.
	And this account is still on that platform today.
	So, I'm just gonna point out that Boston Children's Hospital, according to ABC News, says that they offer gender-affirming hysterectomies to eligible teenagers.
	So that wasn't a lie at all.
	She just wants people she doesn't like shut down.
	She doesn't like libs of TikTok because sometimes libs of TikTok makes fun of AOC.
	This is the game, folks.
	You have a bunch of activists in Congress, activists in the press, people who are not answerable to market conditions.
	And they find a bunch of allies in the middle management of major companies.
	And those allies then use the pressure from the outside as an excuse to pressure their superiors and their inferiors at these various companies in order to do the woke work.
	And a bunch of people, also in middle management, who seek to tamp down the risk to their company from outside political pressure, they cave to it.
	That is the entire game.
	From Disney to Twitter to Hogwarts Legacy, that is the game.
	And it takes something to stand up to this sort of pressure.
	It really does.
	Because what the left is really, really good at on these particular issues is shifting the burden of proof.
	So, for example, the burden of proof when it comes to saying that men are men and women are women is now on you.
	You now have to Take an act of courage to say that men are men or women are women.
	I suppose you could be a coward like Hasan Piker and just not play a game because people are yelling you in the comments.
	Or you could actually do something courageous.
	The entire press reflect the whims of the activists because they are in fact activists.
	Perfect example, a headline from Yahoo News today reflecting the Associated Press headline, quote, Montana bill would let students misgender classmates.
	Look at the shift in the burden of proof there.
	Let students misgender classmates.
	The core assumption is that the moral thing to do is to force students to call other students by a fake gender.
	But if Bob comes in and says, I'm Jane, all the other students must immediately reflect this by law, says the Associated Press.
	The burden of proof now shifts to you to explain why you should be able to explain the truth.
	Now, the reality is, all this bill does, it says that students are allowed to say true things in school.
	According to the Associated Press, Montana schools would not be able to punish students who purposely misgender or deadname their transgender peers under a Republican-backed legislative proposal that opponents argue will increase bullying of children who are already struggling for acceptance.
	So, again, the burden of proof is on now people who just say true things.
	It is no longer on people to explain why everybody else should have to reflect their delusions.
	It takes courage to stand up to that, which is why I want to single out a couple of courageous folks today.
	One of them, of course, is my colleague over at Daily Wire, Matt Walsh.
	So Matt, speaking in his own capacity because he's really passionate about the issue, he was invited to speak at the Tennessee House Health Committee hearing regarding a bill that would ban sex change treatment on minors.
	And he then unleashed in what is, I think, one of the most viral clips I have ever seen.
	It was pretty amazing.
	He was being questioned by a media matters lackey Over in the Tennessee house, a Tennessee Democrat about the fact that 20 years ago, Matt was doing a radio show and he was talking about the definition of age in American society and how way back when it was considered marriageable age at 16 and this Tennessee Democrat tries to suggest that Because Matt had said that, this means that Matt should also be in favor of 16-year-olds being able to consent to cutting off their own genitals.
	Here is Matt reversing the entire argument on this Tennessee legislator, and listen to the silence, it's amazing.
	I was talking about the fact that people tended to marry young historically, and that's all that that was about.
	How does that relate to this subject?
	Just curious of your definition of if you feel like people who are adults at 16 should... Well, people who are adults at 18, but actually your brain is not fully developed until you're 25.
	So we should be having a conversation about whether we should even be doing these surgeries to people at 18.
	But certainly before 18, it's absurd.
	I mean, do you think that a 16-year-old can meaningfully consent to having their body parts removed? Do you? No? We do not. Yeah, we ask the questions, it's not...
	No?
	That silence is the person looking around in bewilderment at being asked a very simple question.
	And then, the person then says, I'll do the asking of the questions here.
	Yeah, because again, when the burden of proof is reversed, when suddenly common sense has the right of way, and it is now your job to explain why common sense is wrong, you have no answers.
	So, it takes actual courage to stand up to the cultural forces at play here, the domination of the woke and the middle management woke that have now permeated our society.
	It also takes courage in business to actually run a profit.
	Believe it or not, it's hard to run a business.
	Here at Daily Wire, one of the things that we like to do is run profit.
	This is one of the reasons why we actually use Stamps.com.
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	I like using stamps.com.
	That's why Daily Wire has been doing so for literally years.
	Set your business up for success by getting started with stamps.com today.
	You can sign up with promo code Shapiro for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale.
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	Deal.
	Also, The Daily Wire is now seeking our first ever vice president of social media to join our team in Nashville, Tennessee.
	This person will oversee a large team that reaches 95 million plus viewers across our social platforms.
	This leader is going to serve as our social and content strategy lead to help us continue scaling our pages and platforms across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snap, and more.
	It is the perfect role for somebody who loves to roll up their sleeves and work alongside their team, as well as somebody who can think strategically about the content we actually put on social media for more info and to apply.
	Go to dailywire.com slash Ben.
	Click careers.
	That's dailywire.com slash Ben today.
	Okay.
	Speaking of people with courage to stand up to the woke left, there's an amazing piece over at the free press.
	This is Barry Weiss's new publication.
	It's by a person named Jamie Reed.
	Jamie Reed is a lesbian woman who is married to a trans woman, meaning she's actually married to a biological man.
	So it's kind of a strange situation for a lesbian, but that's not the story.
	The story is that this person used to work at a trans clinic and now is calling out those clinics for what they are doing, which is essentially mutilating children.
	She says, quote, I'm a 42 year old St.
	Louis native, a queer woman and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.
	My worldview has deeply shaped my career.
	I've spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations, children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor, For almost four years, I worked at the Washington University School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, with teens and young adults who are HIV positive.
	Many of them are trans or otherwise gender non-conforming, and I could relate.
	Throughout childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself.
	I'm now married to a trans man.
	Okay, so she is married to a biological woman who says that she's a man.
	Together, we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.
	All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St.
	Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.
	The center's working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on.
	This premise was shared by the center's doctors and therapists.
	Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.
	During the four years I worked at the clinic as case manager, around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors.
	The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences, including sterility.
	I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there.
	By the time I departed, I was certain the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to do no harm.
	Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
	Today, I'm speaking out.
	I'm doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue and the ways my testimony might be misused.
	I'm doing so knowing I'm putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.
	Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down, but I can't in good conscience do so because what is happening to scores of children, writes this lesbian woman who worked at a gender clinic, is far more important than my comfort.
	What is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.
	So what exactly is happening?
	Well, as she points out, The population of people who are claiming gender dysphoria has shifted radically from teenage boys to teenage girls.
	She says that she was concerned about the shift in the population.
	But she said anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.
	She said frequently our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had.
	We had patients who said they had Tourette's.
	They didn't.
	That they had tic disorders.
	They didn't.
	They had multiple personalities.
	But they didn't.
	The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.
	They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion.
	When I said clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
	To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist, usually one we recommended, who they had to see once or twice.
	To make it more efficient, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition.
	The next step was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
	That is all it took.
	Amazing, amazing stuff.
	Many encounters with patients, writes this woman, emphasize to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds.
	But the center downplayed the negative consequences and emphasized the need for transition.
	There are no reliable studies showing that gender dysphoria is going to be increased by the use or is going to be decreased by the use of these sorts of drugs.
	Indeed, the experiences of many of these centrist patients prove how false these assertions are.
	Here's an example.
	On Friday, May 1st, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient.
	Oh dear, I'm concerned the patient does not understand what bicolutamide does.
	I responded, I don't think we start anything, honestly, right now.
	Bicalumetide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer.
	One of its side effects is it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts.
	The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and a feminizing agent for boys.
	It has a long list of side effects.
	This patient experienced one of them, liver toxicity.
	And the story goes on and on and on and on.
	Why has none of this been reported by legacy media?
	Why is it left to Barry Weiss to actually report this sort of stuff over at her newsletter?
	And the answer is it takes courage to do this.
	And the media are dominated by woke leftists.
	And corporations are dominated by people who cower to the woke leftists or are woke leftists themselves.
	Good for Barry.
	Good for the woman who wrote this piece.
	If people don't stand up, if people take the coward's way out, the people who pay the price are, of course, the ignorant among us, who are indoctrinated into this pathetic cult.
	Okay, meanwhile, when Joe Biden is out there trying to restart his 2024 presidential run, There was one weird circumstance during the State of the Union that's been getting some press, and I feel like we probably ought to comment on it.
	For those who missed it, there was this very weird moment where Jill Biden was entering the chamber, and she walked over to Doug Emhoff, who is the husband of Kamala Harris, and they kissed.
	Like, on the lips.
	It was weird.
	And I'm not saying that there was anything untoward going on.
	I'm just going to say it was very, very, very weird.
	And I hope, as my friend Jeremy Boring put it, that they're very happy together.
	Here's Joe Biden and Doug Emhoff.
	Well, that was strange.
	change.
	And I don't know if I like that at all or if anybody does.
	So Kamala Harris was actually asked about this on Spanish language television.
	And she said, no, I haven't watched the video.
	I don't know, but I do know that the first lady and the second gentleman are working arduously with what we are doing with my husband against anti-Semitism.
	Very important.
	So, arduously, they were working on all of this.
	Things are going great in the Biden administration.
	Joe Biden himself has now been asked more about why classified documents are being found nearly every day at his various properties.
	And he told PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff, he said, I've been informed by other lawyers not really to speak about this, which is always a great sign.
	You said just possessing classified documents is, you said, totally irresponsible.
	So what was totally irresponsible but the fact that you had some?
	What they've informed me not to speak to this issue to any way try to prejudice the investigation that's going on.
	Hmm.
	Is that what's happening right now?
	Okay, so Joe Biden is a very weak president.
	The fact of the matter is that Joe Biden is running in the low 40s in terms of approval rating.
	And so he has to figure something out going into 2024.
	And so what he's figured out is that he's going to go full Bernie.
	Now, it's not a totally crazy strategy.
	Joe Biden is looking at the woke intersectional base that he thought was going to lead him to victory in 2020 and 2022.
	And he's saying, you guys aren't all that durable.
	I'm just noticing that if I really want to win a sweeping victory, I need to carve back into the base that Donald Trump started to take from the Democratic Party, that blue-collar, white, working-class base, many of whom do not like the wokeness.
	So the Democratic Party has a bit of a problem on its hands.
	There's a giant rift inside the Democratic Party between the college-educated, woke crowd and various minority groups.
	And the blue-collar base that Joe Biden would like to reach out to.
	He's trying to do both at the same time.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden headed to Wisconsin on Wednesday, taking the economic pitch he delivered during the State of the Union on the road, ramping up his criticism of a Republican proposal on entitlements that led to lawmakers heckling him during his primetime speech.
	He sought to explain to the public in his address on Tuesday how they stand to benefit from trillions of dollars in spending.
	And then he went to Wisconsin and he said, the economy has grown at a solid clip.
	Folks, I hate to disappoint, but the economic plan is working.
	To do what?
	Achieve record high inflation and bring us back to the same levels of unemployment that we had before the pandemic?
	Except actually a little worse, because there should be more people working at this point.
	But this is Joe Biden's shtick, is to embrace every element of the Bernie Sanders agenda.
	According to the New York Times, Biden aims to win back white working-class voters through their wallets.
	Jonathan Weissman writes with his call for a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.
	President Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been prepping for two years, a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.
	Whether or not Biden can persuade a divided Congress to act on his remaining plans, the money from the laws he has already passed has just begun to flow.
	The surge of hiring is coming.
	Many of those jobs will be in the industrial battlegrounds Democrats either took back from Trump in 2020 or will need in 2024.
	But, says the New York Times, I love the New York Times, Democrats will have to match those jobs against Republican appeals aimed at white grievances.
	That's what it's about, guys.
	It is the good, wonderful Joe Biden versus the white grievance Republicans.
	Or maybe Joe Biden has allied his progressive Bernie Sanders economic agenda with an extraordinarily woke social agenda, and that's an ugly combo.
	Maybe you guys are going to have a bit of a hard time reaching out to the white working-class voters while you are simultaneously declaring that America is systemically racist and biased on behalf of white working-class voters and also their traditional moral viewpoints on everything ranging from transgenderism to same-sex marriage is passé.
	By the way, it is worth noting here that Joe Biden's economic plans, again, they are not actually working.
	Jerome Powell said the labor market's surprising strength is underscoring why bringing the inflation down will take longer and require higher interest rates than many investors have been anticipating, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	A government report Friday showing hiring accelerated in January was certainly stronger, stronger than anyone I know expected, said Powell on Tuesday.
	He said, it kind of shows you why we think this will be a process that takes a significant period of time.
	So the economic plan is not working, which leaves Joe Biden with one final rhetorical trick, and that is to suggest that Republicans are trying to steal your Medicare and Social Security.
	So he was on the road doing this routine.
	A lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare.
	Well, let me just say this.
	It's your dream, but I'm going to my veto pen, make it a nightmare.
	I might have been a better man, and I'm married.
	And then I met where I couldn't get to the bathroom in time.
	That wasn't a nightmare.
	That was just yesterday.
	Actually, the media are duly doing his work, despite the fact that Republicans have said that right now they're not talking about Social Security or Medicare.
	Jeff Stein over at The Washington Post has a piece called Social Security.
	Medicare brawl awaits Washington, even if not this year.
	So that is a tacit acknowledgement that Joe Biden is lying and that that brawl is not in fact coming while he is president.
	But they have to they have to make some sort of pitch.
	And so the pitch they're going to make is they're going to lie.
	They're going to suggest over and over and over again that Republicans are out to steal your quote unquote entitlements.
	Now, the reality is that if we don't restructure entitlements in some way in the future, then everything will come to a crash and call.
	As I've said for a long time, that is the most likely outcome is austerity measures forced on the United States by extraneous circumstance, by a failed system.
	But Joe Biden actually does not have a lot to run on here.
	And particularly that economic message, which is going to end in stagnation, allied with his woke message.
	He is very, very weak, which is why it is important that the Republicans actually run a candidate who can win.
	And this brings us to our latest episode of Good Trump, Bad Trump.
	Okay, so.
	Today, is there a good Trump or bad Trump?
	So, President Trump, you know, he's the only declared candidate at this point.
	We are expecting that there will be more candidates who jump in.
	But Donald Trump, which one do you think it's going to be?
	Here we go.
	Oh, no.
	Yes, indeed.
	It is.
	Yes, it's bad Trump.
	Bad Trump is here today.
	And he came in the form of accusing Ron DeSantis, who he sees as his chief rival for the nomination of, quote, grooming high school girls.
	He put out a message on Truth Social with a picture.
	It's a picture of this old stuff, by the way.
	This has been out there for a while.
	Of Ron DeSantis from when he was a high school teacher in 2001-2002, which means he was 23 or 24 years old.
	And he was teaching at a high school.
	And after graduation, some of the students invited him to a party.
	And he went to the party.
	And so, there was a picture of Ron DeSantis with three girls who had apparently already graduated.
	It is absolutely unclear as to whether they're even drinking alcohol or anything.
	But Trump said, he tweeted out, quote, No way!
	That's not Ron, is it?
	He would never do such a thing.
	And he is retweeting a meme that says, Here is Ron DeSantimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher.
	So, first of all, it's just ugly and stupid.
	Like, it's really, really ugly and stupid.
	It's particularly stupid coming from a man who likely started the Miss Universe pageant just so that he could see women unclad.
	I mean, Donald Trump's record with women does not really allow him to make this sort of attack on Ron DeSantis at all.
	Also, it happens to be a BS attack.
	There's no evidence that anybody did anything wrong in any of these photos or in any of these pictures.
	It doesn't matter, he's still accusing him, apparently, of preying on high school girls.
	really ugly stuff. DeSantis is doing what he should be doing, which is he's just, it is like, it's honest to God, like watching an adult fight a small child.
	And you have the adult who's holding the kid out here by the forehead while the kid just swings wildly in every direction. Here's Ron DeSantis, who's busy being governor of the third largest state in the country, talking about how he's not going to respond to this kind of nonsense. And he's going to focus instead on, you know, being governor.
	I face defamatory stuff every single day I've been governor.
	That's just the nature of it.
	But I have a platform to fight back. A lot of these other people that are more little, they don't necessarily have a platform to fight back. And so in terms of our reforms, I really want to empower them more so than people that occupy high positions like me.
	It just goes with the territory. You got to have a thick skin. It's also just.
	Practically speaking, I would not take time out of being governor to be fighting lawsuits.
	It's just not practical in terms of what we're doing.
	And I'd also just say this.
	I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden.
	That's how I spend my time.
	This is the proper response by Ron DeSantis, obviously.
	And it's one of the reasons why I think Trump feels like the air is a little bit out of the balloon.
	Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, today, things I like.
	So I was encouraged by one of my producers to watch the Best Picture nominated film, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, All the Time, Forever.
	It's actually just called Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
	And here is a little bit of the trailer.
	This is Wang.
	This is Wang.
	Mrs. Wang, are you with us?
	I am paying attention.
	Now you may only see a pile of receipts, but I see a story.
	I can see where this story is going.
	It does not look good.
	What's happening?
	Penguin.
	Devlin, I'm not your husband.
	I'm another version of us from another universe.
	I'm here because we need your help.
	Very busy today.
	No time to help you.
	So I will give this movie...
	Seven out of ten.
	So I know a lot of people are just in love and love and love with this movie and it is fun and creative.
	It's a bit of a mess.
	When I say a bit of a mess, I mean kind of a lot of a mess.
	I think it's kind of a philosophical mess.
	I think that it's filled with plot holes.
	The action sequences are Pretty amazing, actually.
	The sort of bizarreness of it, it's just all non-sequitur jokes over and over and over.
	And so, it's a little bit long.
	I mean, the movie's like 2 hours and 20 minutes.
	It really should be about an hour and 50 minutes.
	You could easily cut 20 minutes out of this film.
	It also has a bunch of kind of odd Bizarrely pornographic references that are completely unnecessary to the telling of the story.
	It's just in the middle of a fight because it's supposed to be all about like bizarre things happening.
	It's essentially multiple universes that are being collapsed into one.
	A bunch of forces are being drawn from one universe into another universe and all this.
	But the stuff that happens to be drawn from one universe into another universe is all really weird and gross.
	So there's a lot of that kind of stuff.
	But, overall, it's at least something creative.
	So the basic premise of the film is that, I'm gonna screw up some of these names, so forgive me, Michelle Yao, who plays Evelyn, is a very unsatisfied middle-aged mother who works at a laundry that she and her husband, who's played by Ki-Hai Khan, who is, his name is Waymond in the movie, but he's better known as Short Round from when he was a child in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and who turns in really a phenomenal performance.
	He's really, really great in this.
	Michelle Yao is excellent, but Ki-Hai Khan is like the best thing in the movie by a long shot.
	Anyway, Evelyn is married to Waymond, and the two of them own this laundry together, and they're being audited by the IRS.
	Jamie Lee Curtis plays the IRS agent named Deirdre, and they have a daughter named Joy, played by Stephanie Hsu.
	So Joy is a lesbian in the obligatory Hollywood move.
	Okay, fine.
	It's fine.
	It's plot significant in the sense that one of the lessons that the parents are of course supposed to learn, because this is Hollywood, is that whatever lifestyle your child engages in requires your love and acceptance.
	You knew that was coming.
	But what makes the movie kind of interesting and moving is that it is supposed to be a battle against nihilism.
	So the basic premise is that Evelyn is deeply unsatisfied with her life.
	Her husband may be handing her divorce papers.
	Her daughter doesn't like her very much.
	She's being audited by the IRS.
	Everything kind of sucks.
	And then, a portal to other universes opens.
	And she finds herself in a battle for the preservation of the universe from a villain, also played by the same actress who plays her daughter.
	And it is her daughter.
	Because her daughter has become sort of a nihilist, partially because of lack of mom's love.
	So because mom is kind of nihilistic and depressed, daughter has also become nihilistic and depressed, and it's sort of about how they find connection with each other and save each other from nihilism and depression, and how Wayman, the husband, also does this.
	So it's a very nice sort of family movie, except that it's done in a quasi-pornographic and violent guise.
	At the heart of it is sort of a nice family story about family loving each other and sticking together.
	And parents reaching out to children and children reaching out to parents and all the rest of that stuff.
	Where I will say that it is a philosophical muddle is the basic premise is again that nihilism is somehow debunked.
	The meaninglessness of the universe is somehow debunked by the fact that for a brief moment in time you have people who you love and who love you.
	And I don't find that philosophy particularly compelling.
	I know this is a very prominent philosophy on sort of the secular left and people who think of themselves as spiritual but not religious like it a lot as well.
	That we live in a cold, heartless, deep, dark universe in which your life means nothing and eventually everything will be eaten by the sun anyway and you will end up as worm food.
	And so what really life is all about is just finding people who love you and people who you love.
	Now, I'm all for love.
	I love my wife.
	I love my kids.
	I love my family.
	They're wonderful.
	They provide extraordinary meaning in my life.
	But in order for that to be durable, in order for that to be more than just fleeting feelings, that requires long-term commitment.
	And long-term commitment has to be justified by a higher moral rubric than merely what pleases me in a given day.
	Because otherwise, you end up with atomistic individualism.
	Because what if my family doesn't please me?
	What if it turns out that the sort of commitments I'm called upon to make make me miserable?
	And I end up working at a laundromat, living above it in a crappy apartment with an obnoxious kid.
	So the way out that the movie provides is not, I think, sufficient for the challenge that the movie also provides.
	The philosophical challenge of the movie is the daughters, again, drawn to nihilism.
	The mom is also drawn to nihilism, but they save each other by reaching out to each other and loving one another.
	And again, I think that sounds really Nice on paper, I do not think it works in reality.
	I think that people have to be oriented toward a higher purpose and cause than merely quote-unquote kindness or niceness.
	I don't think that's actually enough to sustain a civilization or even a family.
	I think the family has to be oriented toward something higher.
	The obvious answer here would be God and religion, but since we've ruled that out of bounds on the left wing of Western civilization, all they can come up with is sort of these happy feelings, but the happy feelings again are temporary.
	And it doesn't explain why it would be wrong, for example, for mom to just say, you know, what actually makes me happy is ditching my husband, is ditching my obnoxious kid and just going off and doing whatever it is that I want to do.
	And it would be hard to see from inside the moral universe created by these critters why that would be wrong.
	Why would you condemn Evelyn for that?
	And you would.
	I mean, you'd be watching the movie and you'd be like, there's something wrong with that lady.
	Why is she doing that?
	In fact, there is one alternate universe where she doesn't have her husband or her kid and she's seen as lesser for that.
	But I don't know by what moral rubric that's the case.
	Are they making a utilitarian case for the happiness that is to be found in marriage and children?
	If so, I don't think that's strong enough to actually sustain in the face of a full-scale nihilistic argument that argues all of this is meaningless in the end anyway.
	But is the movie kind of fun and enjoyable?
	Yeah, it is.
	You have to put aside your philosophical objections.
	You have to put aside the fact that if you don't want to see people weirdly with rubbery hot dog fingers groping at each other, or if you don't wish to see people inserting Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate.
	rectums during the middle of a fight. If that's not something that you're into, then this is not the movie for you. Again, it was not that part of the movie was not part of the movie for me, but overall, is it an enjoyable film and is it creative? Yeah, it is. Should win best picture?
	No, it shouldn't. Top Gun should win best picture. Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate. So one is there is this story from Seymour Hersh that is getting wide traffic on the interwebs, suggesting that America took out the Nord Stream Now, you'll recall that very, very early in the Ukraine war, the Nord Stream pipeline was damaged and suddenly Russia was unable to pump oil through the Nord Stream pipeline.
	It was totally unclear who had done it.
	The New York Times called it a mystery.
	The Biden administration denied any knowledge of it.
	Seymour Hersh is a very controversial quasi-journalist.
	I say very controversial quasi-journalist because he did some work during the Vietnam War that was widely praised, for example, over the My Lai Massacre.
	That's what made him famous is his reporting of the My Lai Massacre.
	But later on, he wrote a bunch of stories that were very bizarre.
	He suggested, for example, that every detail about the killing of Osama bin Laden was not true.
	And then he suggested also that the sarin gas released by the Assad regime in Syria was actually not released by the Assad regime.
	So he's had some real problems with his research before.
	He also made allegations in a book called The Dark Side of Camelot about the John F. Kennedy assassination that turned out to be really questionable based on hearsay.
	So you have to take everything the guy says with at least a grain of salt.
	However, If what he's arguing here is true, that's a serious problem.
	So what he argues in his latest article is that the United States basically bombed Nord Stream and did so without any sort of congressional approval or authorization.
	That would be a forward military offense by the American military.
	He suggests that the U.S.
	Navy's Diving and Salvage Center planted a bunch of explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines.
	Last June, he says, the Navy divers operating under the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as Ball Tops 22 planted the remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
	Two of those pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade.
	A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational.
	Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border, and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joe Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
	So the CIA says, quote, this claim is completely and utterly false.
	Adrian Watson, a White House spokesperson, said, quote, this is false and a complete fiction.
	The sourcing on this is super thin.
	So again, I would just like to remind everybody how thin that sourcing is in the interest of objectivity here.
	I know that there are a lot of people who are jumping on the story.
	If, indeed, the Biden administration launched forward attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline without congressional authorization and the President of the United States did that, that is a serious scandal.
	So, that is worth noting, but it is also worth noting that Seymour Hersh has been wrong on an awful lot of things and has tended to rely on some bad information in the past.
	Alright guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
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