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May 30, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:31
The TRUTH Behind The Debt Ceiling Agreement
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Well, it was always going to happen.
The debt ceiling was going to be raised and some sort of debt crisis was going to be averted, mainly because it was not really in anybody's interest for the debt ceiling to be hit.
It was not in Republicans' interest for the debt ceiling to be hit, because every time that has happened, it has not really redounded to their benefit electorally.
And it certainly was not in Joe Biden's interest for the debt ceiling to be hit, because if a recession hits on his watch, then it puts his re-elect efforts in jeopardy.
So the only question was going to be whether Joe Biden was going to cave or whether Kevin McCarthy was going to cave.
Now, we have to define the terms of what it means to cave here.
There are a few different descriptions of what it could mean to cave under these circumstances.
Number one, the real definition here is Joe Biden set the groundwork.
Joe Biden said, I will not negotiate.
He said it over and over and over.
I'm not going to negotiate on the debt ceiling.
I'll negotiate over the budget.
I won't negotiate on the debt ceiling.
His entire team went out there and for 97 days said they would not negotiate on the debt ceiling.
And then he negotiated on the debt ceiling and actually gave away some fairly significant concessions to Kevin McCarthy.
So that is one definition of caving.
If, however, you wish to take another definition of caving, and that is Republicans going along with any part of the Democratic agenda that basically Republicans should have threatened to shut down the government until Joe Biden became Ronald Reagan, or better yet, Until it became Calvin Coolidge.
If that was your definition, then, presumably, McCarthy came.
And so the question as to how you view this debt ceiling bill is largely about the gauge against which you gauge the bill.
Okay, so, the measure against which you gauge the bill.
So, are you trying to measure the debt ceiling compromise bill against what you wish would happen?
Like, what would be the best possible outcome?
Or are you trying to measure it against the worst possible outcome?
The worst possible outcome here would have been for Republicans to simply cave to Joe Biden, give him the clean debt ceiling bill, which is what Republicans historically have done, and let him spend as much money as he could possibly want.
That would be the worst case scenario for the Republicans.
The worst case scenario for the Democrats would have been that Republicans shut down the government, presumably.
But that was not going to materialize because, again, that's not even a worst-case scenario for the Democrats because they end up then winning elections on the basis of that.
The worst-case scenario for the Democrats, presumably, is that Joe Biden caves to the extent that he gives serious, real concessions.
Okay, well, if you are looking at who escaped the worst-case scenario, Republicans escaped their worst-case scenario significantly more than Democrats escaped their worst-case scenario.
Whenever a deal gets made, this is the essence of deals, whenever a deal gets made, everyone is unhappy.
If a deal happens where one side is very happy and the other side is very unhappy, well then, you know who won the deal.
When both sides are kind of unhappy, that's most deals.
And again, I think the one of the things that you were saying, we're going to go through the details of the debt ceiling bill that is now going to be voted upon in the House is very likely to pass.
One of the things that you are seeing in the commentariat on the right side of the aisle is proper, true critiques of the debt ceiling bill, of the budgetary process.
All the things they are saying are true.
We should redo all of the entitlement programs.
We should be looking at systemic debt in the United States.
We should be looking at vastly scaling back the administrative state.
Sure, we should be doing all of those things.
And in the best of all possible worlds, we would do those things.
Also, Joe Biden is the president and Democrats run the Senate.
So, in realistic world, Were those things going to happen?
How much could McCarthy actually pry out of the cold, dead hands of Joe Biden?
I mean, that really is the question.
And so again, I say it again, when you look at this debt ceiling bill, I agree with every critique of the debt ceiling bill from the right.
It does not tremendously lower the arc of spending in the United States.
It does not redo the entitlement programs.
It does not suck away all the power of the administrative state.
All of that is true.
Are you measuring the bill against what you wish the bill would be?
Or are you measuring it against what Republicans were, what was possible to get with a Democrat president and a Democrat Senate?
Now, I'd like to remind everybody here that Republicans didn't exactly scale back to spending when Donald Trump was president.
And normally what you would say, in a normal sort of political cycle, what you would say is that when Republicans have unified power, meaning the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, when they have those things, that is when they should tremendously scale back spending.
And yet, ironically, if you look at the history of party politics in the United States over the course of the last hundred years, what you see is that spending actually tends to get scaled back only when there's a split in the government.
When Republicans have unified control of the government under George W. Bush, when they
have it under Donald Trump, they actually blow out the spending.
When Democrats have control of government, unified control of government, they blow out
the spending even more.
Only when there's a split in government is there any sort of hold back in the spending.
And listen, as somebody who's very fiscally conservative, somebody who believes that the systemic $31 trillion debt problem of the United States will come back to bite us in the ass, I tend to be kind of a pessimist when it comes to the idea that our political actors are incentivized in order to make serious systemic change to our spending.
Instead, I think it's very likely that the United States is going to follow the pattern of every other Western country that racks up too much debt.
We're going to hit a cliff.
When we hit the cliff, we're going to have to take austerity measures.
Because when has a state ever sort of hemmed it back in?
The last time a state hemmed it back in, I believe, was Canada in like the 1970s.
It's been a long time since a Western state looked at itself in the mirror and said, 30 years from now, we're going to have a massive debt problem and it's going to be a bomb and it's going to go off in our economy.
Let's fix it now.
Preemptively solving problems is not what politicians do.
They tend to kick the can down the road.
So from that perspective, McCarthy forcing Biden to the table, forcing Biden to give concessions, you have to at least say that on a political level, that is a good play by McCarthy.
So according to the Wall Street Journal, lawmakers returning to Washington on Tuesday will face intense pressure from leaders on Capitol Hill and the White House to support the debt ceiling bill and overcome opposition on both the left and the right.
For now, Biden and McCarthy appear on track to gain enough bipartisan support to suspend the debt limit.
The measure could still run into procedural obstacles, complicating the race to avoid an unprecedented default.
The legislation's first test comes on Tuesday when it goes before the House Rules Committee, which acts as a gatekeeper for legislation coming onto the House floor.
Two conservative Republicans on the committee, Representative Chip Roy of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, have said they oppose the deal already.
The committee is made up of nine Republicans and four Democrats.
So the Republicans could lose a couple of votes and still pass this thing out of the House Rules Committee.
We'll get into the details of what exactly is in here and why.
Again, you can view every one of these bills as a giant failure from the perspective of our government cannot hem itself in.
Our government has generated more debt than any government in the history of humanity.
Probably all governments combined in the history of humanity is the size of the debt that we have run up here in the United States.
You can recognize all of that and still recognize that maybe this is the best that McCarthy could pry out of Biden.
Or if you could pry it a little bit more, it wasn't like so much more that you're going to get an amazingly better deal and avoid the debt limit being hit.
I try to be realistic with my audience.
Again, the easiest thing in the world when it comes to this business is to take the absolutely purest view that what Republicans should do is completely shut down the government, hit the debt limit, and let everything burn to the ground in order so that what Joe Biden is going to... So what's he going to do?
Is he going to just revise his entire view of spending?
He is the president.
He is sitting in the White House.
Being realistic about that means that what Republicans should focus on is winning Back to the White House, winning races as opposed to bitching about Joe Biden being in the White House and the Democrats controlling it.
Hutz, we win some races and then we actually do the hard work of governing.
That would be the thing that is worth aiming at.
And if you can gain some sort of concessions from Joe Biden after he started off saying he wouldn't even negotiate, that seems like a political win for McCarthy at the very least.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so again, when it comes to this debt ceiling deal, we're gonna go through the details in just a moment.
Think about the framework you're using to examine the deal.
Measure it against what you wish American government worked like?
The deal's crap.
Measure it against what you can get out of Joe Biden?
The deal may be the best that you can get out of Joe Biden.
You can hold those two thoughts simultaneously.
It's not the best deal in the world because that deal was not available.
Joe Biden is a very bad president.
The Senate of the United States is run by Chuck Schumer.
All those things you can hold in your mind at the exact same time.
I remember this sort of recapitulation of a battle that happened All the way back in, what was it, 2014?
When Senator Ted Cruz from Texas decided that he was going to essentially hold up the budgetary process in order to shut down funding for Obamacare.
And a lot of Republicans cheered him on because they said, OK, well, he's going to force Obama to make some sort of concession.
And instead, what happened is, was Obama going to ever repeal Obamacare on the basis of Ted Cruz filibustering?
Very unlikely, considering that, again, Barack Obama was the president and Obamacare was named after him.
And in that case, you can at least say that Cruz was speaking on behalf of a party that had control of the House and the Senate at the time.
In this particular case, the Republicans don't even have control of the Senate.
They have a very slim control of the House.
So prying concessions out of Joe Biden on this sort of stuff?
It's not a massive victory, but it's definitely a victory over Joe Biden, which is why Joe Biden was resisting it for so long.
Okay, so to understand what is exactly in this debt ceiling deal, you have to understand how spending works in the United States.
So the way that spending works in the United States, there's two types of spending.
There's mandatory spending and there's discretionary spending.
Mandatory spending, which amounted to 31% of the federal budget back in 1970, now constitutes about two-thirds of the federal budget.
In 1970, that would be Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
Okay, those programs alone.
That's the mandatory spending in the United States, meaning it's already written into the law.
Unless you restructure those entitlement programs, you're not touching that.
That represents two-thirds of federal spending year-on-year in the United States.
Then, you have discretionary spending, which used to be the vast majority of spending in the United States.
And believe it or not, Defense is not mandatory spending.
Defense is discretionary spending, meaning it's decided on every single year.
It's not written into the law.
You have to have a budget process where you decide how much money to allocate to defense.
Defense represents something like 45% of all discretionary spending in the United States, and the rest is split among all of the various other elements of the government.
So again, the amount of discretionary spending as part of the budget is actually fairly low at this point.
All debt ceiling bills are designed to lower discretionary spending because no one is actually touching the entitlements.
Entitlements are the third rail of American politics.
You say obvious truths like social security is not sustainable.
The demographic base of the United States is not large enough to sustain social security.
The economy is not growing fast enough to sustain social security.
Social Security, for example, should be converted for people under the age of 50 to private savings accounts if they wish to opt out, right?
Sir, if you say things like this in American politics, you get ripped up and down.
So the mandatory spending of the United States, which was not going to be touched anywhere in here, it remains mandatory.
The only question is what happens with the discretionary spending.
So with regard to this discretionary spending deal, that's what it is.
To raise the debt ceiling in return for essentially holding discretionary spending steady.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal holds non-military spending roughly flat for the 2024 fiscal year from this year after factoring in some appropriations adjustments.
The deal sets a 1% cap on spending increases for the 2025 fiscal year.
House Republicans portrayed the 2023 spending level as a rollback to fiscal 2022 levels.
The deal also includes a provision that forces a 1% cut in government spending if all 12 appropriations bills are not passed by the end of this year.
So what that would mean is that basically we hold the budget steady this year as opposed to last year.
Now, critics of the deal are saying, correctly, we spent more money than God in the last year.
So you're just holding steady at the amount of money that you spent last year.
This isn't a real cut.
Correct.
It is a cut to future spending, which means it's not a cut.
It's a holding steady.
But there's a key element that is necessary to understand.
When the Wall Street Journal says that the deal holds non-military spending roughly flat, what the deal means is, let's say that you have $10 and that $10 is allocated to discretionary spending last year, which means we're going to spend $10 this year because we're holding it flat.
And let's say that normally the military budget compromises four out of those $10.
Well, we have now capped the flat non-military spending, but military spending can continue to go up, which means there will have to be some cuts in the non-military spending portion of this bill.
The military spending, theoretically, could go up to $6 out of those $10, which means cuts to the other programs that used to be the $6 and now are the $4.
You see how the math is working here?
That the portion of discretionary spending, that is non-defense spending, is actually, under this budgetary deal, likely to shrink somewhat.
Because the military budget, with a House Republican majority, is likely to grow.
Military spending in fiscal 2024 would be roughly at the level of Biden's fiscal 2024 budget request.
That's a 3% increase to $886 billion.
The deal would cut up to $21.4 billion the IRS had planned to use to boost tax enforcement and modernize its technology.
So we're going to get rid of some of those agents, presumably.
Congress had provided about $80 billion to those plans last year.
About $1.4 billion of that money would be taken back from the agency immediately.
The rest could be used in 2024 and 2025 to prevent cuts to other federal programs.
The deal also claws back about $30 billion in unspent money Congress passed to battle the pandemic.
So again, these are all cutting around the edges issues because we spend, you know, six, seven trillion dollars in this country every single year.
The White House did agree to a key GOP demand, tightening some work requirements for federal aid, primarily by temporarily raising the age of people who have to work in order to receive food aid through SNAP.
That's the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
And people are whining about this on the left.
Oh my God, people are going to go hungry.
It's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Supplemental.
Like, it supplements you going and working.
The tentative deal would require able-bodied, low-income adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 54 to work to receive food aid.
Right now, if you are 50 and you have no dependents and you're able-bodied, you can still get SNAP without trying to work.
So they're raising that age to 54, which seems kind of fair.
You are able-bodied and 50, retirement age in this country, and until the age of 65.
So, uh, so there is that.
Currently, under rules resuming in all states by July, those adults can receive benefits for no more than three months within a three-year period unless they are working or enrolled in a work program.
The deal makes some under-the-hood adjustments to how states can decide to grant exemptions for individuals to the existing work requirement for food aid.
Currently, states can opt to drop the work requirements for up to 12% of recipients.
That's going to go down to 8% of recipients.
There's also some permitting of energy projects, including the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which presumably is some sort of concession to Senator Joe Manchin to get him to go along with the deal as well.
So again, are these massive, major changes to spending in the United States?
Not really.
I mean, there's some good stuff about this.
For example, the bill text applies Congress's PAYGO rule that requires new spending to be offset by savings elsewhere to executive actions, which means that if Joe Biden tries to spend money from the executive branch without congressional approval, he also has to show where he is cutting.
However, the text also says that the Office of Management and Budget, the White House's OMB, could waive the requirements if necessary for the delivery of essential services or necessary for effective program delivery.
And also, the OMB could basically single-handedly do that.
So that looks like a fairly empty requirement.
Joe Biden does have to resume collecting student loans and charging interest on them.
So all this crap about Joe Biden relieving student loans in the face of court challenge, all of that is going to stop.
Again, these are all concessions by Biden.
Remember, this process started with Joe Biden saying he would not negotiate on any of these things.
Remember, he said that.
So now Democrats are trying to play this as a victory for them.
It's not really a victory for them because a real victory for them would have been Joe Biden's agenda, which is raise the debt limit without any sort of strings attached.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
We'll analyze sort of the political calculus here.
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OK, so the GOP leadership, of course, is trying to pretend that there's like an amazing deal.
It's not.
It's it is a better than it is a better than garbage deal.
But it is still not an amazing deal because Joe Biden is the president of the United States.
I'm not going to fib to you guys.
The reality is that there is political gridlock in Washington, D.C.
Republicans were never going to get everything on their wish list, no matter how much they yell and shout about it.
And the idea that they were going to simply not fund the government going forward and then presumably lose every purple seat they have in the House in the next upcoming election cycle, that's not how politics works.
We can pretend that's how politics works, but it is my job to tell you how I wish politics works and then also how politics actually works.
Again, in a utopian world, in which I was president of the United States, and McCarthy was the speaker, and McConnell was the majority leader, in that world, we make massive cuts, right?
We cut all this stuff.
But that's not the world we live in.
And by the way, one of the reasons that we don't actually have control of the Senate is because we decided it was really, really important not to vote in Georgia Senate runoffs.
It was more important to complain about it.
Anyway, the Republicans, one of the big mistakes I think Republicans make with their own base is they're not honest with them.
So I think the Republicans ought to say, listen, this is not even remotely what we would love to see, but it's the best we can pry out of Joe Biden, because I think that most people understand that.
I also think most people are not interested in looking at a debt limit crisis in which the bond rating of the United States is wildly downgraded and there's more economic turmoil.
But here's what the Republicans are pitching.
They say this stops out of control inflationary spending by cutting spending year over year.
It doesn't really stop out-of-control inflationary spending, considering we're already in the middle of a cycle of massive inflationary spending.
It just means that Joe Biden can't continue to increase the budget from $6 trillion to $8 trillion to $10 trillion.
It claws back some money from COVID.
It reins in some executive overreach.
Again, admin pay go.
Since OMB can waive it, it seems pretty weak to me.
It restarts the student loan repayments.
All the things we've talked about.
All those things are, in fact, those are good things.
Now, Chip Roy and a lot of the Republicans are like, nah, we don't like any of this stuff, right?
We should have gotten way more out of this debt ceiling bill.
And again, I don't disagree with Chip Roy's critique.
I think everything that Chip Roy says here is correct.
The reason that Chip Roy says he opposes the deal, and again, I like Representative Roy.
I'm very friendly with Representative Roy.
I think that he is a Pure hearted conservative.
And if you look at the way that he is critiquing the bill, I agree with all of his critiques.
So he says that the Limit Save Grow Bill, which was the one passed by Republicans in order to pressure Biden, that one had essentially added $1.5 trillion to the debt ceiling, as opposed to this one, which has $4 trillion with the debt ceiling.
That originally the bill passed by the House had $131 billion cut to annual spending next year, shrank the federal bureaucracy to pre-COVID and capped growth for 10 years.
This one caps growth for maybe a couple of years and has $12 billion in top line cuts that are negated by other spending that could grow the federal bureaucracy.
It has minor work requirements as opposed to strong work requirements.
It had a full Reins Act.
So the Reins Act is a piece of legislation that allows Congress to basically override any attempt at regulation by the Biden administration.
Instead, they have admin pay go, which I mean, again, Chip Roy's critiques, all of them are right.
Two things can be true at once.
Everything Roy says is correct.
Everything that he's saying about this bill and its shortcomings are right.
The question is, were Republicans going to get that much more out of Joe Biden on this negotiation?
And I say, I remain a little bit doubtful that they were going to get a lot more out of Joe Biden on this particular negotiation.
Democrats have been pretty cavalier about blackmailing people over the debt limit, about government shutdowns and all the rest, because they think that it redounds to their benefit, actually.
In just one second, we'll talk about the fact that many Democrats are not particularly happy with this deal.
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Okay, so.
There are many Republicans who are not super happy with this particular debt ceiling deal.
And again, I understand it.
I get it.
Many Democrats are also very unhappy with this.
And again, given the fact that Democrats control the Senate and the presidency, that tells you a lot about what McCarthy has actually been able to leverage out of the Democrats here.
Remember, when McCarthy came into power, the idea was he wasn't even going to be able to be Speaker for very long.
He was going to get ousted by his own party.
And now he's actually pried some concessions out of Joe Biden.
So, Steini Hoyer, who is the former House Majority Leader, now he's one of the House Minority Whips, he says that the deal is not good.
He doesn't like the deal.
He's urging people to vote for it, despite the fact that he doesn't like the deal very much.
The White House is seeing blowback from other progressives, the Pramila Jayapal wing, the AOC wing of the Democratic Party.
According to Politico, the White House is now forced to basically go back to Democrats and say, it could have been a lot worse.
We really stood up to that Republican pressure, but that's not really correct.
White House aide said, quote, it protects the historic economic gains we've made,
really allowing one of the strongest recoveries on record to continue by taking the threat of default off the table.
It protects a set of historic legislative accomplishments.
According to a senior administration official granted anonymity to describe the lobbying strategy,
the argument being made to Democrats to vote for the bill has focused on how Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid,
the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS, and other programs are all being preserved and funded under the agreement.
Okay, but again, Joe Biden was not gonna cave on any of those things in the first place.
And there are a lot of Democrats are very upset.
One Democratic House member said, I don't think they've done a good job about communicating with members what's been happening.
People want to know why Republicans were briefed at 9.30 p.m.
Saturday.
We're not being briefed till five o'clock on Sunday.
Our leader hasn't even been given details on any of this.
Representative Stephen Horace Ford, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, voiced similar concerns.
So again, a lot of these sort of radicals on the Democratic Party side are pretty upset with Joe Biden over this entire deal.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy points out that, you know, we did pry Joe Biden off of his position that he was not going to negotiate, didn't we?
Back to February 1st, sat down with the president.
I said, let's work together.
To be able to raise the debt ceiling, but curve the amount of spending.
To let America be able to work again, cut red tape, get some work requirements to help people get back into work.
I think this agreement frames all that from limit, save, grow.
It doesn't get everything everybody wanted, but that's in divided government.
That's where we end up.
I think it's a very positive bill.
I want to thank Garrett Graves and Patrick McHenry for the hours that they put in from the very beginning.
I mean, no one thought at any given day that we would be where we are today.
The President said he wouldn't negotiate with us for 97 days.
He wouldn't even allow us to talk.
After we passed the bill, we were able to get in.
But it wasn't until the final two weeks that we would really be able to sit down and communicate with one another.
I do want to thank the President's team that he put together.
Very professional.
Very smart.
Again, McCarthy is, I think, doing his best to butter the bread here, but is it an amazing deal?
It's not an amazing deal.
Is it the best that McCarthy can do?
Yes.
Is it also, again, I think a victory over Biden?
I do think it's a victory over Biden, but I didn't want any of this sort of stuff.
That's why you have Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader.
He said, the lady doth protest too much.
He said, we didn't get bested, but it's pretty clear that they did.
The one thing Hakeem told me, there's nothing in the bill for them.
There's not one thing in the bill for Democrats.
Did you say that?
And how do you convince Democrats?
I have no idea what he's talking about, particularly because I have not been able to review the actual legislative text.
All that we've reached is an agreement in principle.
Now what I've consistently said- Did you even talk to him?
I talked to him yesterday afternoon.
I haven't talked to him since that point in time.
What I've consistently said, however, privately and publicly, was that the extreme Republican negotiating position and that the extreme bill that they passed on April 26, the Default on America Act, contained nothing that was consistent with Democratic values or American values.
Okay, so again, are Democrats super happy?
Probably not at this point.
It is a flex by McCarthy to win one over Biden on this.
And pretending that it's not a victory for McCarthy or that it's a complete Republican cave or something, it depends what you are measuring caving against, as I said at the very outset.
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And corporate America is going all in on this, which is a shockingly stupid move because it turns out that the American public has decided that they are not up for this, particularly since the ubiquity of the rainbow propaganda has now reached it down to the small children, which presumably is why Target has now lost $10 billion in market cap in 10 days.
According to the New York Post, Target has now lost $10 billion in market valuation over the last 10 days as the popular retailer continues to face backlash over its Pride-themed clothing line for children.
A week ago Wednesday, Target enjoyed stock value of $1.61 a share.
Following calls to boycott the Minneapolis-based retailer over its Pride collection, the value plummeted and closed Friday at $138.93 a share, which is a serious drop.
That's a 14% drop in value for the blue-chip stock.
Which translates to about a $10 billion drop in market cap.
That is the retailer's lowest stock price in nearly three years.
And listen, I'm a big fan of this idea that consumers should start exercising their choice when it comes to being propagandized to by various Outlets, by various members of corporate America.
See, what all the corporations have been betting on, they've been doing this for legitimately 20 years.
What they've been betting on is that the right doesn't care.
That the right is just gonna go and shop at Target regardless of whether Target is pushing pride nonsense during the holy month.
That, you know, you gotta get your kid a Lego set, so you're gonna go and get your kid a Lego set, and where do you go?
Well, Target's local and it's easily available, so that's where you're gonna go.
And nobody's gonna exercise market choice.
Well, as market choices become more available, it is easier for consumers to express their outrage on stuff like this.
And they should express their outrage on stuff like this.
Now, do I think that Target as a brand is completely finished?
No, I think that this is a shot over the bow at Target.
It's not done like Bud Light is done.
The reason that it's not done like Bud Light is done is because Bud Light, after hiring Dylan Mulvaney, and now making itself unsaleable to a wide swath of the American public that consumed its product, Bud Light was really vulnerable.
Why was Bud Light vulnerable?
Because it's super easy for you to go to the liquor store and pick up some Coors instead.
Super simple.
All it requires is you open the next door over and you pick up some Coors and you just don't pick up the Bud Light.
That's literally all it requires.
And so, Bud Light, how do they recover from that?
Their competitor, right next to it, in the fridge, is like the same price and probably a better beer anyway.
So as long as there are readily available alternatives, it makes it very difficult for Bud Light to ever kind of dig itself back out of this hole.
Target, it's a little bit different.
Target is a megastore.
It's where people do their shopping for everything from groceries to clothing.
And so what that means is that there are a lot of areas where Target is the most convenient place.
It means you can have sort of a short-term spasm of public rage against Target.
And eventually it's going to dissipate, which is why when it comes to corporate boycotts, I highly recommend that strategically speaking, I'm super glad this is happening with Target.
I think we should keep it up.
But I think we should also recognize what sort of the endpoint here is and pushing Target off of it.
Let's trans the kids material at the very front of Target, making it go to the back of the store.
That's at least a shot over the bow and people should take it as a shot over the bow.
The kind of brands that need permanent destruction and we are capable of exercising permanent destruction over those brands are going to be single product brands where an alternative is readily available.
That's where the fight's gonna be.
Now, it doesn't take that many of these for a lot of these stores to say the same thing that the computer says in war games.
The only winning move here is not to play.
Which, if corporate America went back to neutral, that's pretty much all we are looking for.
But it is clear that corporate America so far has not gone back to neutral, and this also requires a conservative intelligentsia that is willing to fight.
And there's a lot of the conservative intelligentsia that really is not, and is deeply upset about the idea of fighting back against this nonsense.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, meanwhile.
Corporate America continues to push forward this nonsense, despite the fact that Target is taking it directly on the chin.
And part of that is, again, because conservatives refuse, many of them, out of some bizarre sense of civility, to call this stuff out.
So I'm not sure how you don't call this stuff out, frankly.
I mean, Disneyland.
Okay, there's a clip that is now emerging from Disneyland.
There's a...
It's honestly, it's sort of painful to talk about the fall of Disneyland.
So I grew up with my family going to Disneyland.
Like as a kid, we went to Disneyland a lot.
We lived in Southern California and it was sort of like the place to go.
Like the best day of the year was your parents would take you out of school for no reason and take you to Disneyland.
It was amazing.
And then when we had kids of our own, we actually had annual passes at Disneyland when we lived in Los Angeles.
And so at least twice a month, we'd end up taking a Sunday and going with our very little kids to Disneyland.
And then when we moved to Florida, we went to Disney World.
And now, over the course of the last, like, three years, Disney World, Disneyland, they've decided that it's very important to woke themselves.
At the behest of people like Bob Iger, who is just one of the world's most ridiculously perverse political figures.
So this clip has now emerged from Disneyland.
There's something at Disneyland called Bibbidi-Bobbidi Boutique.
Bibbidi-Bobbidi Boutique is made for small girls.
That's what it's for.
For small girls to go get made up to look like princesses.
We did this for my, she's now a nine-year-old daughter.
We did this for my daughter when she was maybe four years old.
She loved it.
It was amazing when we bought her a dress and they do her hair up like a princess and it's beautiful.
Okay, well now, because Disneyland, which used to be a place that actually had a brand, so that brand involved basically enmeshing you in a fantasy world in which all the people, like if you walked down Main Street in Disneyland, the idea is you were in Main Street, 1920s America.
Same music, cobblestones, that's what it looked like.
And when you went into Fantasyland, the idea was it was all princes and princesses.
And yes, with gender-specific garb, because anything less would be ridiculous.
Well now they've decided that the personal sexual preferences of their employees take precedence over the brand itself.
Which, by the way, is brand death.
It's ridiculous.
Name another business.
I mean, I guess now it's a lot of businesses, but name another business 20 years ago where people were like, your personal value of individuality is now going to overcome the corporate brand.
In fact, this was a joke in office space, right?
The joke in office space was that your personalization extended to like the flair that you could work, meaning like small pins that you could wear on your uniform if you were at a restaurant.
That was like the extent of the individuality.
Now, your individuality has extended to the point where at Disneyland, you can be a man With a mustache, wearing a dress in front of small children.
So this is tape from Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boutique 2023.
Again, this is for small girls.
That's what it's for.
So my name's Nick.
I'm one of Fairy Godmother's apprentices.
I'm here to shop you around and make all your selections for the day.
Nick is a Fairy Godmother.
Nick is a total dude.
Like, wearing a mustache.
Wearing a mustache and guiding small children in there.
Because that's what you want to explain to your four-year-old child, is why this individual is wearing a dress and talking to small children about why he's a Fairy Godmother.
That's what you pay hundreds of dollars to go to Disneyland for, presumably.
And then Disney wonders why they are losing market share.
Maybe it's that.
Well, conservatives should call this stuff out because it's bad.
But some conservatives seem more concerned with, I will say, maintaining a perception of civility than they are in fighting the fight.
So I don't mean to single anybody else out in particular here, but there are a couple of examples of this over the weekend.
So Philip Klein, who's an editor over at National Review.
I enjoy a lot of Philip's work.
I think that a lot of the stuff he says is really intelligent.
This is not one of them.
So the account nwokeness on Twitter tweeted out pictures from Kohl's.
Kohl's, in honor of the holy month of pride, has put out LGBTQ pride gear for small babies.
Like onesies for small babies with the pride progress flag on them.
And Philip tweeted out, I don't have a problem with this.
If somebody wants to dress their baby in a pride onesie, why should it matter?
We're not talking about transitioning minors here.
It's just a shirt.
Well, it isn't.
It is an attempt to indoctrinate in a philosophy of sexual fluidity a small child.
That's what it is.
It's amazing to me that, like, educating small children, we all take a fair bit of time and thought to figure out how we wish to educate our children.
To pretend that it is a matter of absolute moral apathy whether a small child, like a baby, is wearing a trans flag, and that that has nothing to do with the future trajectory of the child.
It would be just a giant shock if that kid experienced sexual confusion as the kid gets older.
It'll come out of nowhere.
No.
I'm not, it's not a matter of moral apathy.
Morality that is taught to the children of this country.
That is not a matter of moral apathy to me.
I think it is an active evil to teach small children that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.
That is not a matter of apathy.
And the gear that you wear is of course associated with that.
Everybody recognizes this.
Whatever gear you wear.
If your child is wearing a piece of religious iconography, you can presume that the parents are going to teach a religious philosophy to that child.
If a child showed up at school wearing a Taliban flag, you can assume something about the parents and what that kid is going to be indoctrinated into.
And if the kid shows up at school wearing a trans flag, or it's a baby wearing a trans flag, you can figure out exactly what the parents are going to indoctrinate into that child.
Corporate America taking advantage of that with the certain knowledge that Republicans are going to be apathetic.
That's how they've been able to win for so many years.
Well, now Republicans are pushing back, and it's fascinating to see who is deeply uncomfortable with all of this.
So, David French, who, again, I'm friends with David, I don't understand why his beat now, he used to be a National Review, he used to be a lot more conservative, I think, in the way that he viewed the world.
His beat over at the New York Times is to say all the things to liberals about how much they hate conservatives, but as an apostate conservative, as a person who's too moral for the conservative movement.
That's the only way I can interpret a piece titled, Will DeSantis Destroy Conservatism As We Know It?
Now this is just, this is absurdity.
It's just absurdity.
And it's of a piece with pretty much everything that David is now writing for the New York Times these days.
The last few pieces are things like, the right is all wrong about masculinity.
Shrieking on Twitter is not a masculine virtue.
Or, a guilty ex-president.
E. Jean Carroll wins her suit against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation.
Or, Tucker Carlson's dark and malign influence over the Christian right.
Or Disney versus DeSantis?
How strong is the company's lawsuit?
So in other words, David's beat at the New York Times is to tell liberals everything they like to hear, but guised in the language of conservatism and from the most pure possible perspective of what conservatism could possibly be.
And so the idea now is that he suggested that Trump was a particular danger to conservatism.
So dangerous that not only did he not back him in 2016, he also wouldn't back him in 2020.
So again, the conservative movement was being damaged by Trump.
Now he's moved that to include Ron DeSantis, the only rival to Trump, who's within spitting distance of him in the primary.
And the reason that he's upset with Ron DeSantis, presumably, is because Ron DeSantis is taking up arms against corporations that are getting special benefits from the state of Florida.
He says, DeSantis, his primary victory would signal the transformation of conservatism.
Since 2016 wasn't a mere interruption of Republican ideology, one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene, but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.
DeSantis is ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition.
He fights the left.
When you understand that distinction between the two men, between Trump and DeSantis, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.
Who DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it.
DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms.
DeSantis attempts to regulate social media moderation.
He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations.
He's even banned private employers from imposing a COVID vax mandate.
Now, you can disagree with DeSantis on all of these things and still recognize that the forces DeSantis is fighting are quite nefarious.
And that in order to truly understand what DeSantis is doing on the corporate front, you have to understand the dirty combination of Democratic Party politics and corporate America cramming down politics on Americans via the market mechanism.
Which is in fact what is happening.
And when DeSantis goes after Disney and removes their special tax benefits, that in fact is not a betrayal of conservatism.
The special tax benefits shouldn't be given to corporations anyway.
That is insider cronyism.
But he says that, again, you have to oppose both Trump and DeSantis.
Now, this sort of idea that your purism is going to somehow win victories on behalf of a conservative worldview is absolutely beyond me.
Target should take it on the nose.
Kohl's should take it on the nose.
Disney should take it on the nose.
And this notion that only the purest, only the most pure people can ever represent us on every particular aspect In order for us to achieve utopia?
Good luck with that.
Because it isn't going to happen and you're going to lose every battle.
Or maybe you don't mind losing every battle.
Maybe you would rather have Joe Biden continue to be president and wreck the country.
Along all of these lines, if you're talking about who's more restrictive of free speech, Joe Biden versus Ron DeSantis, that is not a particularly close call.
Joe Biden is actively attempting to use the federal government to implement into law anti-discrimination law that basically cracks down on every religious institution in the country.
So there's that.
The Republicans are going to have to get wise to all of this.
I think most Republicans are wise to it, and that's why you're finally starting to see some backlash against corporate America.
Meanwhile, quick update on corporate spokesperson Dylan Mulvaney, who has single-handedly taken down the Bud Light brand.
So here is Dylan Mulvaney cosplaying as a woman while just apparently being a straight dude.
So I recently told my parents that I may be a little bit romantically interested in women.
And that was a big shock for them, considering the past 10 years of coming out as gay, then queer, then non-binary, then trans!
And I think it was just a bit of a shock.
So I tell my dad, and he goes, well, I would love to see you get a woman pregnant.
And I said, oh, no, no, no.
She would be getting me pregnant.
And then he said, what do you have a vagina now?
And I said, never say never.
And then I tell my mom and she goes, I would just love to see you own property one day.
And in California, that's sort of, you know, a parent's dream.
It's not having kids or getting married.
It's it's are you able to own a house?
Wouldn't that be nice?
Wow, that is the ideal, is to have a fake vagina and pretend that this can get you pregnant in some way by a woman?
This person does not understand basic biology.
So clearly, he's a woman.
I love that this ends with Dylan Mulvaney being like, my parents' dream for me is to own property.
Yeah, I'm sure that was, when you were growing up, I'm sure that was your parents' dream.
Your parents' dream was probably for you to be this, but with like a small house in the San Fernando Valley.
Alrighty, in just one second, we're going to get to corporate America's insane take on crime, Lululemon.
This story is the story of the day.
It's totally insane.
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Okay, meanwhile, corporate America, apparently they're now so delusional that it's, you know you've really reached the edge of delusion when it's not just that you're virtue signaling to the left in the hope that the right remains apathetic.
Like that's understandable given the last 20 years of right-wing apathy and the right-wing sticking its head in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be fine.
What's truly amazing is how many corporations have decided that against their own direct business interests, they are now going to go woke.
So the best example of the day is Lululemon, which sells really, really overpriced workout gear.
Like, to be fair, their workout shirts, they're nice.
Also, Lululemon is apparently insane on a corporate level.
So two former employees have now said that they were fired for allegedly breaking store policy at a Lululemon store in Georgia.
So apparently there is video of a robbery at this store in Georgia, this Lululemon, and the women who were working for the store called the cops and then they were fired for calling the cops.
Here's the report.
Lemon is defending its decision to fire two employees after a snatch and grab in Gwinnett County.
It was the latest in a string of robberies at the same location.
No.
No.
Seriously.
Get out.
Rachel Rogers and Jennifer Ferguson recorded the scene inside and outside the store.
They don't appear to try to stop the men, but they do say they did call police.
The Lulu Land Book says it has a zero tolerance policy for chasing or physically engaging with suspects during a robbery.
So what is the purpose of having people who work at a store, particularly in security?
Now, the reason that Lululemon presumably has this policy is because they are deeply afraid that the woke are going to come after them if they actually start prosecuting shoplifters.
So the entire business district of San Francisco has basically been emptied out of businesses because stores have gone so woke.
They're so afraid of the wokes that they've decided they would rather shut down their stores, but only after years of seeing mass shoplifting.
The truth is that we are now living in an environment in the United States where shoplifting is not done on the one-to-one kind of personal level.
Shoplifting, the way we think of it, is some 15-year-old kid goes into like the local A&P and steals a Slim Jim and puts it in their pocket.
That is not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about organized gangs of people who are running in and stealing thousands of dollars worth of gear from Lululemon, and Lululemon is so petrified of the possibility that they will be sued by the criminal That Al Sharpton will arrive and call them racist.
They're so scared that Ben Crump will be on their front doorstep that they've told their own employees.
Employees who, again, they work for the company.
That they're not supposed to call the cops, tape, any of this.
Jennifer Ferguson and Rachel Rogers told local outlets they reached out to authorities after a group of robbers came into their store in Peachtree Corners.
Despite company policy saying employees should not intervene in robberies.
They said, we're not supposed to get in the way.
You kind of clear a path for whatever they're going to do.
And then after it's over, you scan a QR code and that's that.
We've been told not to put it in any notes because it might scare other people.
We're not supposed to call the cops.
We're not really supposed to talk about it.
So Blue Lemon apparently has now put itself between a rock and a hard place because what they're afraid of is that there will be reports that there are robberies at the store.
People will stop going to the store.
So you just consider it a breakage for people to rob the store.
And they're afraid to just hire security at the stores because then they're afraid that they're going to be accused of racial profiling or some such nonsense.
A Lululemon spokesperson told Insider in a statement, the safety and security of its staffers and shoppers is top priority.
The company has policies and protocols in place to uphold a safe environment.
We take theft and vandalism very seriously, and our focus right now is supporting our educators as well as continuing to collaborate with local partners and law enforcement.
Company policy says that the women were likely fired for recording and interacting with the robbers rather than for calling the police.
So they don't want you taping any of it or posting it because criminality is not a public interest.
Instead, they just don't, they want it to remain a secret so that you can be inside a Lululemon store when it gets robbed by a group of shoplifters.
Corporate America, man, I gotta say, this has to be one aspect of managerial decline in the United States.
There's a theory of managerial decline at companies in which the founders of companies really take their business seriously.
And then after a certain point, they've been working for the company 10, 15, 20 years, and the founders decide to go out to pasture and they hand it over to the managerial elite.
A term by James Burnham.
And the managerial elite basically are just there to rent-seek.
They want their big salary, but they don't want controversy.
And so they make a bunch of risk-averse decisions.
Well, risk-averse decisions get you mass robbings of your stores.
That's what risk-averse decisions do.
Corporate America and the preserve of political cowards.
And what that means, if you're a coward, As my friend Jeremy Boringlice used to say, cowards don't get themselves killed, they get their friends killed.
And that's what's going to happen in one of these stores.
Eventually what's going to happen is that somebody will get killed at one of these stores by a shoplifter who comes in with a gun.
And security just isn't present because these stores were too afraid of the liability.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Okay, meanwhile.
The Trump vs. DeSantis race is currently heating up.
Donald Trump continues to sort of flail around looking for a political line of attack on DeSantis.
Most of his attacks on DeSantis so far have been calling him rabid DeSanctimonious.
Or making weird suggestions about various policy items that don't make a lot of sense.
So for example, Trump is now attacking DeSantis over Disney.
So you'll remember very early on, he said that DeSantis shouldn't be attacking Disney, it's gonna lose business for the state.
Now he's flipped, and he says, Disney has become a woke and disgusting shadow of its former self, with people actually hating it.
Must go back to what it once was, or the market will do irreparable damage.
This all happened during the governorship of Rob DeSantis.
I still am confused why Rob became a thing.
Like, is this to highlight the fact— Like, what's the lo— Somebody here needs to spell this out to me.
Is he calling him Rob because the idea is that he's too obscure for him to mention his actual name?
Because no one believes that.
Uh, or is it just that he doesn't— that he's robbing— Like, what is— Anyway.
This all happened during the governorship of Rob DeSanctimonious!
Instead of complaining now for publicity reasons only, he should have stopped it long ago.
Would have been easy to do, still is.
Okay, um, how?
Ron DeSantis literally took away their special tax district.
He's fought them in the press.
He's damaged them in the market.
What has Trump done with Disney aside from appointing Bob Iger to an advisory board back in 2016, apparently?
Anyway, he's still the frontrunner.
Trump is still the frontrunner.
DeSantis, however, seems to have hit on what I think is actually a fairly successful political line.
The successful political line here is that he is going to win.
Now, he's not saying that Trump lost in 2020.
What he is saying is that Joe Biden is the president right now, and I pledge that if you give me the nomination, I'll win, which is kind of what Republicans want.
I mean, if you're just looking at the thing Republicans want, it's to win.
Not complain about losing, but to actually win.
So here's DeSantis.
Most of the people that support you probably voted for President Trump twice.
And the first comment I hear over and over again is, why doesn't Ron DeSantis wait for President Trump's second term and then run?
And what is your best answer to that?
Why is right now the time for Ron DeSantis to run for president?
Because everyone knows if I'm the nominee, I will beat Biden, and I will serve two terms, and I will be able to destroy leftism in this country and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history.
At the end of the day, I've shown in Florida an ability to win huge swaths of voters that Republicans typically can't win, while also delivering the boldest agenda anywhere in the country.
Okay, so, again, that's the promise.
Now, you maybe don't believe it.
They believe Trump is the best shot at victory, but that is the line that DeSantis is going to have to pursue right here.
Now, embedded in that line is, of course, the notion that is obviously true, that Trump is not the president, that he lost us two Senate seats as conservatives in the state of Georgia in 2021, that he blew a bunch of Senate seats in 2022.
And that's all embedded in DeSantis' pledge of victory, whether you believe it or not.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
I like this one a lot.
This one's great.
So, apparently, there is some sort of Swedish dance show.
I guess it's like dancing with stars or something.
An environmentalist decided to crash the Swedish dance show.
And the cameraman was having none of it.
This is pretty spectacular.
Watch for the activity by the cameraman.
Give this guy a medal.
Okay, everybody's dancing.
They're dancing.
Okay, here come the environmentalists.
And they're coming in with their dust and their flag.
And they're standing there.
And then here comes the cameraman.
Boom!
Oh!
Directly to the face.
Yes!
And the dancers are still going.
They just keep on dancing.
Yes.
More of this.
Oh.
That's it.
Wow.
The camera just jacked up!
That was good.
I liked it.
More of this, more of this.
You run into a public space to obstruct things, and you get mashed.
I'm all for it.
This dates all the way back to that great tape of the idiot charging into the middle of Dodger Stadium onto the field to propose to his girlfriend, then security absolutely destroying him.
So I'm very much in favor of this sort of stuff.
And every time somebody does this as an art museum, I want to see somebody just tackle.
Like, hard tackle.
Forearm shiver.
More of this.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Alrighty, so, over the course of the weekend, Little Mermaid did pretty well.
It had sort of a solid holiday showing.
I think that the estimates were that it was gonna do like $130, $140 million at the box office.
Now, basically it's a cash grab.
Disney's run out of ideas, and so their new idea is, what if we just take all of our old animated movies and make them worse but put people in them?
Which seems not great.
And it did make a lot of money over the weekend, because again, people were looking for something to take their children to.
Kids movies tend to do pretty well over Memorial Day weekend, traditionally speaking.
Apparently, it grossed $10.3 million prior to Friday's full-day launch.
And over the course of the entire weekend, it grossed over $100 million.
Now again, among May releases to make over $10 million from the Thursday starts, there are only a couple that have failed to make a full $100 million.
The Little Mermaid has the fifth best Memorial Day launch behind Top Gun Maverick, Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, X-Men The Last Stand, and it was about a half million ahead of Fast and Furious 6.
So, those are big numbers, for sure.
I do not think that this movie is going to have tremendous staying power.
The reason I don't think this movie is going to have tremendous staying power is because they took what was a great score by Alan Menken and then they added some extra music with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
And Lin-Manuel Miranda, as I've talked about before, is I think maybe the single most overrated talent working today in both theater and Hollywood.
I, I, I, there are some moments to In the Heights, but overall, it's kind of meh.
And I am, I was an early naysayer on Hamilton, not for any of the woke reasons, but because
I thought that it just was overrated.
It seems to me that the easiest thing to do when writing lyrics is to make them incredibly
wordy and not use exact rhymes, which is Lin-Manuel Miranda's way.
I'm going to give you an example of Lin-Manuel Miranda being bad at his job now.
So one of the, they added a few extra songs.
One of the extra songs they added is a song from the seagull scuttle, who apparently in the movie is no longer a seagull.
He's some sort of other bird and also is no longer male.
It's now Aquafina.
Which, I don't know why Awkwafina's in things, but apparently Awkwafina, not the water, like an actual human who calls herself Awkwafina, she was in one of the Marvel movies, she plays Scuttle in this.
And they recorded a new song for The Little Mermaid, which of course has a really great score, the original.
This may be the worst song ever recorded.
This song right here, called Scuttlebutt.
Which is supposed to happen in the movie.
You remember in the animated movie.
If you remember the plot of Little Mermaid.
Not to explain the whole plot, but Little Mermaid wants to go live on land and be with Prince Eric, right?
And she's in the sea, and she has to make a deal with Ursula in order to give up her voice and get legs in return.
The transing of the mermaids.
In any case, she ends up going on shore.
And, uh, and she doesn't have a voice.
And there's one point near the end of the film where Scuttle comes and tells her that Prince Eric is about to propose to her, and she's super excited.
It turns out, of course, that that's not true, that he's about to propose to Ursula, who's made herself over as a witch, into, like, an actual woman.
In any case, that's this point in the movie.
In the movie, it takes, like, 20 seconds.
In the new live-action version, there's a full song that they inserted for no reason here with Awkwafina.
rapping about this.
It is called Scuttlebutt, and if ever our military men and women at Gitmo need to get information out of a terrorist, in short order, they need to play this at full volume for like 25 seconds.
This makes waterboarding look like a trip in the park.
This is audio death.
Here we go, Scuttlebutt by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Oh my, oh boy, here we go.
Uh oh.
Bye!
Hey, wake up, wake up, wake up!
What?
Hey, have you not heard that scat-o-bat?
Your bat?
No, the gossip, the buzz, the who say what, who does that, yeah, that scat-o-bat.
Well, I was flying over land and sea and here to the ground.
Then I came flying here for you to see and hear what I found.
Remember that swat?
Oh my god.
Stop it.
Stop it.
I can't.
I can't.
I just, I cannot.
I can't!
I can't!
Stop it.
How many seconds did we get through there?
How many seconds did we get through there before I had to stop that?
He wants to, you know when humans dust off their eyes like they're penguins.
Stop it, stop it, I can't, I can't, I just, I cannot.
I can't, I can't, stop it.
How many seconds did we get through there?
How many seconds did we get through there before I had to stop that?
That was like, I don't know, 35 seconds of it maybe?
Um, wow.
That song is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
That is a horrible song!
Whoa!
Now again, I don't hate literally everything Lin-Manuel Miranda does.
Like, there are a couple of songs from Encanto that are sort of catchy.
Although, again, I think that he is messy in the way that he does his lyrics.
But, that is just death.
So some of the YouTube comments on this thing are just spectacular.
Played this song on repeat out the window.
And dad, who left 20 years ago, came back with the milk to turn it off.
This song is legit catchy, kind of like the flu.
You know it's probably not gonna kill you, but that doesn't stop you from wishing for death every second you have to endure it.
This is undoubtedly one of the sounds ever made in all of human history.
Song is pretty neat.
Fits the theme of the movie well.
My 9 year old daughter said it sounds like pestilence riding his wailing pale horse.
Oh, it's not good, guys.
It's just not good.
It's bad.
So good luck to all the parents now.
If your child asks you to.
The good news is that you've been forced to play Disney songs for your kids, you know, just because your kids want to hear them.
Now you have a Disney song that you can play them in revenge.
We found it.
It is indeed Scuttlebutt.
One more additional note here on The Little Mermaid.
So, there's a New York Times reviewer, Wesley Morris, who just writes garbage.
So, Wesley Morris is a film critic?
Sort of?
And everything that he does is incredibly woke, of course.
Morris is gay.
This comes to play because here is his description of the movie.
He says, correctly, that the movie reeks of obligation and noble intentions.
But then he adds this term, quote, joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink.
They're missing.
Kink?
Why are you having kinky thoughts about The Little Mermaid, dude?
What in the?
Kink?
It's a children's movie, New York Times reviewer.
Kink.
All right.
That's great stuff.
All righty, guys.
The rest of the show continues right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
I'll be recapping the final episode of Succession on Max, not HBO Max anymore.
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