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July 17, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:38

The 2024 Republican Race Is ON

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	So, over the weekend at the Family Leadership Summit, Tucker Carlson had the opportunity to interview a bunch of Republican candidates for president.
	Essentially all the major Republican candidates for president, with the exception of maybe some minor candidates like Chris Christie, and of course one very big major national candidate, Donald Trump, who did not show up to be questioned by Tucker Carlson.
	Now, Tucker, of course, is very warm toward Trump.
	He's made that clear on a wide variety of podcasts of late.
	And so it's been interesting to see Tucker actually ask Trump some difficult questions, as we'll get to in just a minute.
	Trump actually stumbled over himself a little bit this weekend when he was on with Maria Bartiromo.
	But what was kind of fascinating about Tucker's interviews with the various candidates is how much Tucker and his issue set have become sort of national priorities, at least among Republicans in the primaries, apparently.
	The reason I say apparently is because there's not a ton of support to the idea, just statistically speaking, that the base Republican voter cares deeply about issues like, for example, the war in Ukraine.
	The base Republican voter may have some strong feelings about the war in Ukraine, but it doesn't make the top 10 list of priorities.
	It's become more of a litmus test in the same way that in 2016 support or opposition to the Iraq war became a litmus test.
	But it really isn't sort of the top issue, but it became a top issue in Iowa at this particular Family Leadership Council event.
	There are a couple of issues that became kind of key issues that the American public and Republicans...
	Just don't care all that much about.
	Which may be sort of Tucker's point, is the idea that domestic concerns ought to trump foreign concerns, but Ukraine took center stage at this event over the weekend in Iowa.
	And it was sort of fascinating to see how the race has launched for various candidates based on issues like this.
	Again, I'm gonna say that Ukraine is not a top issue for anyone, because by polling data, it isn't a top issue for nearly anyone.
	Here's the latest polling data from Gallup on Americans' top issues.
	Economy in general, 14%.
	High cost of living or inflation, 10%.
	Federal budget deficit, 3%.
	Lack of money, 2%.
	Gap between rich and poor, 2%.
	Okay, then you look at the non-economic problems.
	The government or poor leadership, 18%.
	Immigration, 8%.
	Unifying the country, 6%.
	Crime and violence, 5%.
	So where exactly does Ukraine land?
	It lands presumably under foreign policy, foreign aid, and focus overseas, 0%.
	Zero percent.
	But it became sort of the issue du jour.
	And I think the reason for this is because ever since Donald Trump, there's been an attempt inside the Republican Party to capture the issue set that Trump supposedly stood for.
	And there have been a thousand takes on what exactly drove Trump's success in 2016.
	I've always thought that these thousand takes are too sophisticated by half.
	Well, he had Rust Belt policy because he was going to reshore American jobs.
	Or he was more isolationist on foreign policy, and that's what really drove support inside the Republican Party for Donald Trump.
	I don't think it was any of those things, because Donald Trump actually, in certain areas, was rather interventionist.
	Remember that he fired a couple of missiles into Syria.
	For example, he assassinated Qasem Soleimani, who is one of the heads of the Iranian terror regime.
	But what it really was about was pretty simple and remains pretty simple.
	The support for Donald Trump.
	Donald Trump is a giant orange pulsating middle finger to the left.
	That's all Donald Trump is.
	He's a very famous person who has an extraordinary amount of public recognition.
	This was true in 2016.
	And he was actually not spitting on people who lived in the middle of the country and lived in the Rust Belt.
	He actually kind of liked those people.
	He didn't see those people as people who were going to be abandoned by the economy, people who needed to be kind of thrown away.
	He respected those people and so they respected him.
	It was really quite simple.
	Everything that was Donald Trump was reactive to a media environment and a Democrat media complex that hates people who live in the middle of the country, particularly rust belt white people who have a high school degree.
	Those people particularly felt dispossessed by the political system, and Donald Trump reached out to them on a personal level.
	And that's why Donald Trump's support among those folks is extremely durable.
	It's not his issue set.
	So what's sort of fascinating is to watch as intellectuals, including Tucker, try to cram an issue set into Trumpism.
	And that issue set supposedly is, for example, being anti-entitlement reform or being more isolationist on foreign policy.
	And what that makes for is this sort of bizarre dynamic where Republicans are trying to hit on the issue set that made Donald Trump Donald Trump.
	All the Republican candidates are trying to do this.
	And the answer is it ain't the issue set, guys.
	The thing that makes Donald Trump Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
	That's it.
	He's one of one.
	Now, you can also be a giant pulsating middle finger to the left, right?
	That is a thing you can do, but you can't do that with an issue set.
	You actually have to do that with a tremendous amount of aggressiveness in a space that is unfriendly to you.
	We'll get to that in just a little while, because when you see what the DeSantis campaign is intending on doing, it looks as though they're about to get much more aggressive.
	In sort of opposing territory.
	But we have to go through how candidates are responding to Tucker's issue set.
	And again, I think that I agree with Tucker a lot.
	I disagree with Tucker a lot.
	Everybody knows this.
	But one of the things that's fascinating about what Tucker did is Tucker is trying to essentially cudgel some of these candidates.
	Into taking up positions that he himself likes, but those issues aren't necessarily top issues for Republican voters, and watching as candidates scurry to try and avoid the wrath is fascinating.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
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	Okay, so Tucker, there are a couple of big headlines that came out of the TuckerConFab over the weekend.
	Headline number one was the Tucker versus Mike Pence exchange.
	Now, as I say, one of the things that has obviously been happening right here is the attempt by Tucker to go after Mike Pence in particular ways.
	So Mike Pence is a candidate who really does not have a path.
	He does not have a path because Donald Trump frankly lied about him for two months in the aftermath of the 2020 election, suggesting that Mike Pence had the singular power vested in him by the Constitution to overturn the results of state certified elections.
	He did not have the power to do that.
	He never had the power to do that.
	That was a bizarre legal theory.
	It was promoted by John Eastman.
	I know John.
	John's a nice guy, but that was a bizarre legal theory.
	John knew it was a French legal theory, and the idea that Mike Pence had the capacity single-handedly to overturn the election would be absurd.
	Think about how absurd that would be.
	Let's say in the upcoming election, Donald Trump wins certified state votes across the country, and Kamala Harris just throws out the vote.
	Do you think that's what the Constitution does?
	Of course, that's not the answer.
	That's not what the Constitution does.
	In any case, Donald Trump said that for like a couple of months.
	Mike Pence was the vice president at the time who certified the election and put a final stamp, which he had to do by constitutional duty.
	And ever since then, he has been enemy of sort of some parts of MAGA world.
	And so he doesn't really have a path toward the nomination.
	Well, Tucker decided to jump on that by going after Pence with regard to Ukraine.
	Now, again, I think that Ukraine is a litmus test for a lot of Republicans, because what Republicans are looking for from Ukraine is, what is America's national priority there?
	I've said all along, I don't think America's national priority is quote-unquote democracy in Ukraine, any more than America's national priority is democracy in Saudi Arabia.
	The simple fact is America has national interest in Ukraine because Ukraine provides an extraordinary amount of grain, because Ukraine is a gateway to Europe, because it is a pathway for natural gas flowing into Europe, because you do not want the Russians to be able to consolidate territory and then use that In its partnership with China, because you want to dissuade China from invading Taiwan, so you actually have to show some stones when it comes to sovereign giant countries invading surrounding countries to which they have territorial claims, supposedly.
	So there are a lot of American national interests in crippling the Russian military and preventing them from invading Ukraine again.
	I've also said That Zelensky isn't going to get what he wants, right?
	Zelensky is not going to get back all of Donbass.
	He's not going to get Crimea.
	None of that's going to happen.
	So the best thing that Joe Biden and the West could be doing right now is negotiating back channel with Putin and saying, listen, you're going to keep part of Donbass.
	You're going to keep part of Crimea.
	We're going to give security guarantees to Ukraine.
	The war is over.
	That's what actually should happen here.
	Now, I've heard no actual countervailing response from either side, which is kind of weird, right?
	From the people who are like, Zelensky, full out, full victory.
	They know he's not going to get that.
	And yet they keep preaching it.
	And they keep putting the onus on Zelensky to somehow surrender territory, which he's not going to do.
	And on the other side, the people who are saying that we shouldn't be supporting Ukraine in the war.
	The question I have is, OK, so what do you mean by that?
	Like on a practical level, do you mean that America right now should stop providing military support to Ukraine at all?
	In which case the Russians walk into Kiev.
	Is that like a thing that you are OK with?
	Like, really, what are the alternatives?
	I just want to hear, like, a practical, on-the-ground alternative.
	I don't want to hear the pie-in-the-sky, winning, winning, winning, from one side.
	And I don't want to hear the pie-in-the-sky, Ukraine is really bad and we should just stop support, because I don't think that's what you mean.
	I don't even think Tucker wants Russia to take over Kiev.
	I mean, I've never heard him say so, so I'd be surprised if he actually wants that to be the case.
	Okay, so, he's questioning Mike Pence about Ukraine.
	What does he actually wish to get from Mike Pence?
	So, a lot of this primary with regard to Ukraine is about the idea that you have to show that you care more about America than Ukraine.
	Now, of course you should care more about America than Ukraine.
	I mean, duh.
	You should care more about America than any other country.
	Of course, you're an American.
	Like, this is not really... America's national interest does not match the national interest of every other country.
	Those countries have their national interest.
	America has its national interest.
	Okay, there's a clip that was going around, it was out of context, and there are some people, I won't name names here, who deliberately took this clip out of context and then tried to suggest that what Mike Pence was saying here is that he doesn't care about American cities.
	That is clearly not what he is saying here.
	Again, I don't totally agree with Mike Pence on Ukraine, but that's not what he is saying here.
	And so this attempt that has now been made to kind of cram one issue set into the Trump phenomenon and then to suggest that everybody who disagrees with you doesn't care about America full scale, I think that's ugly stuff and I don't like it very much.
	Here was Tucker with Mike Pence.
	You are distressed that the Ukrainians don't have enough American tanks.
	Every city in the United States has become much worse over the past three years.
	Drive around.
	There's not one city that's gotten better in the United States.
	And it's visible.
	Our economy has degraded.
	The suicide rate has jumped.
	Public filth and disorder and crime have exponentially increased.
	And yet, your concern is that the Ukrainians, a country most people can't find on a map, who've received tens of billions of U.S.
	tax dollars, don't have enough tanks.
	I think it's a fair question to ask, like, where's the concern for the United States in that?
	Well, it's not my concern.
	Tucker, I've heard that routine from you before, but that's not my concern.
	I'm running for president of the United States because I think this country's in a lot of trouble.
	I think Joe Biden has weakened America at home and abroad.
	And as President of the United States, we're going to restore law and order in our cities, we're going to secure our border, we're going to get this economy moving again, and we're going to make sure that we have men and women on our courts at every level that will stand for the right to life and defend all the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution.
	Anybody that says that we can't be the leader of the free world, and solve our problems at home has a pretty small view of the greatest nation on earth.
	We can do both.
	Okay, so what was taken out of context here is that Tucker says to him, your concern is not about the cities, your concern is about the tanks in Ukraine.
	And Pence says, that's not my concern.
	OK, so the way that was read and it was deliberately promoted in the media this way, and it's just not true, was that Mike Pence isn't concerned about American cities.
	He is concerned about the tanks.
	He literally is saying the opposite.
	He's saying my chief concern is not the tanks in Ukraine.
	I'm concerned about all of it.
	You're proclaiming I don't care about what happens in the cities.
	So here is where I start to have a bit of a problem.
	I think that part of the movement inside the Republican Party to cram an issue set into Trumpism is dishonest.
	It is dishonest to suggest that if we took the money that we are using in Ukraine and we poured it into Detroit, Detroit would be a blooming place filled with joy and wonder.
	That's not true.
	We've poured trillions of dollars into poor cities in the United States over the course of the last 50 years.
	That is not the chief problem that is happening in America's inner cities.
	Now, you can make the case we shouldn't be giving the aid to Ukraine, but these two things do not have to do with one another.
	The aid that we are giving you to Ukraine is not money that would otherwise be flowing into the great font of joy and wisdom that is the governance of the city of Chicago.
	That's not how any of this works.
	And I'm wondering when that actually became a conservative principle, that if you just pour more government money on it.
	Here's what government is really good at.
	Government is really good at putting people in jail and breaking things.
	Those are the things the government is good at.
	You know what government is terrible at?
	Building things, building cities, building up jobs, building all this crap.
	Again, this is not a case for aiding Ukraine that I'm making right here.
	The case that I am making is that if you are linking together spending in, say, military
	matters to, we should take that money and we should just pour it on top of Washington,
	D.C., and then magically all the crime will go away.
	That is a democratic point.
	That is not a conservative or Republican point.
	And yet that has been the issue set that has been sort of picked up from Trumpism.
	And I don't understand it because that's not how Trump governed.
	That's actually not what Trump was promoting.
	Trump said things like that, but he said things that were not like that also.
	And so every Republican candidate who is sort of running to that perspective, I think is making a category error.
	We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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	Now when I say that the Trump issue set is not.
	We need to cut off aid to Ukraine so that we can pay for the cities at home.
	And that spending money, that's actually not a Trump thing.
	Let me point out, that's actually not a Trump thing.
	Trump was deliberately asked about this by Maria Bargaromo over the weekend.
	He was specifically asked how he would stop the Ukraine war because Trump's been going around saying he would stop the Ukraine war in one day.
	You will notice something that Trump says here.
	He says the exact same thing that every practical politician has been saying.
	Keep the aid flowing to Ukraine so as to keep the pressure up on Russia.
	So at the same time that Trumpism is being reinterpreted, Trump is saying a different thing than many of his great expositors and interpreters.
	Here is Donald Trump asked how he would stop the war in Ukraine in one day.
	Notice it's actually no different than Lindsey Graham.
	You said you could end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.
	Yes, I could.
	How would you do that?
	I know Zelensky very well.
	I felt he was very honorable because when they asked him about the perfect phone call that I made, he said it was indeed perfect.
	He said he didn't even know what they were talking about.
	He could have grandstanded, oh, I felt threatened.
	Well, that's not going to be enough for Putin to stop bombing Ukraine.
	No, no, no, I'm not saying that.
	What I'm saying is that I know Zelensky very well and I know Putin very well, even better.
	And I had a good relationship, very good, with both of them.
	I would tell Zelensky, no more.
	You gotta make a deal.
	I would tell Putin, if you don't make a deal, we're gonna give them a lot.
	We're gonna give them more than they ever got, if we have to.
	I will have the deal done in one day.
	Okay, so in other words, the exact same policy that Joe Biden is currently pursuing.
	So again, this attempt to sort of pour content into the mold of Trump.
	Trump is a one-of-one.
	People like him because he's Trump.
	They don't like him because of the things that he is saying in terms of policy.
	They like him because of the thing that he is.
	In any case, Tucker used the sort of Pence out-of-context quote to go after Pence over the weekend.
	And you want to slam people for things they say?
	That's fine.
	You want to slam people for things that they kind of are not saying?
	I'm not super happy with that.
	I asked a self-appointed Christian leader about that, and I said, what do you think, as someone who spent his life advocating for religious freedom, about raiding nunneries and throwing priests in jail?
	And he said with a straight face, well, they, you know, they had the wrong views.
	Oh!
	Oh, so, oh, that, okay, I'm sorry, I didn't realize what the boundaries were.
	So you have religious freedom, or freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, As long as you stay within the lines, but if you express an unapproved view, then you go to jail.
	But that's freedom, isn't it?
	This person was joined by a chorus of people on the right.
	Yeah, shut up!
	Shut up!
	National Review wrote a piece this morning.
	Shut up!
	It's bigoted to notice that Christian clergy are being imprisoned in Ukraine.
	And my view would be, you know, maybe you care, maybe you don't, but if you're a Christian leader and Christians are going to jail for their views, you are required to say something.
	And if you don't, you're not much of a Christian leader.
	Okay, so this was presumably Tucker going after Pence because he asked Pence specifically about the attempts by the Ukrainian government to shut down the Russian Orthodox Church inside Ukraine because the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia is actually a Putin ally and has been preaching the war in Ukraine and many of the churches in Ukraine have actually been mirroring all that.
	Now again, I get Tucker's point with regard to the shutdown of religious freedom in Ukraine and the targeting of some of the Russian Orthodox churches or many of the Russian Orthodox churches in Ukraine.
	It is a little bit more complex than the idea that Mike Pence just doesn't care about Christians around the world.
	I'm just not a huge fan of the attempt to paint everybody who opposes a particular policy position as an enemy of freedom or as an enemy of the American people or as opposition.
	I just I don't think that that's true about many of these candidates.
	I disagree with a wide variety of these candidates, including Mike Pence on a lot of these issues.
	I actually agree with Tucker more than I agree with Mike Pence with regard to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Ukraine.
	But the attempt to sort of paint various candidates as malevolent forces in the world, I don't like very much.
	And you can sort of see this happening across the Republican Party.
	And this this does trouble me.
	And one of the kind of weird dynamics about what it is that we do for a living, commenting about politics, is the easiest thing in the world is to say things that people want to hear, and the hardest thing in the world is to say things that people do not want to hear.
	And what I'm seeing increasingly is an attempt to sort of say things that people want to hear, but present it as though you're saying something that nobody wants to hear.
	So to take another example from over the weekend, then we'll get back to sort of this presidential forum, because some of the answers are really interesting.
	So J.D.
	Vance was speaking at Turning Point USA yesterday.
	And J.D.
	Vance became famous for writing a book called Hillbilly Elegy.
	And listen, I like J.D.
	I think he's a good senator from Ohio.
	I supported him in his race in Ohio.
	Hillbilly Elegy is largely about how the entitlement state perverts the incentive structure for middle class and lower class white Americans in terms of income In the Midwest of the country.
	That's what Hillbilly Elegy is about.
	It's why he became nationally famous.
	Did JD.
	And you can see me talk with JD.
	I mean, I've done interviews with JD.
	Again, I supported him in his Ohio Senate run.
	But one of the things that J.D.
	says here is so patently sort of ridiculous that I think that it's worth noting.
	Because again, it ties into this whole idea that if you disagree with a particular policy position, it must be because you oppose the interests of Americans.
	And I don't like this.
	I just don't think it's true in the vast majority of cases.
	In some cases, it's 100%.
	In some cases, it is 100% true.
	I don't think it happens to be true in this case.
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	Okay, so, J.D.
	Vance, again, the reason I'm pointing out J.D., he's not running for president, but is this perspective that is now being promoted, which is that if you disagree with a particular policy position inside sort of the supposed MAGA right, even though, again, Donald Trump doesn't even believe a lot of this sort of stuff, That this means that you have you have exposed your disloyalty.
	I just I don't buy it.
	I don't buy it and I think it's rather demagogic.
	So here is JD Vance over the weekend talking about Ukraine and entitlements and what he's about to say does not make any logical sense.
	There's no issue that these people with Ukrainian flags in their bio are more obsessed with what they call an entitlement reform, but of course what they're saying is that they want to cut social security for the people who paid into it for a generation so that we can send more money to Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine.
	Do we want to do that?
	Absolutely not.
	Okay, can I just point out that the people with Ukrainian flags in their bios and the crossover with people who want entitlement reform, that Venn diagram is two separate circles.
	Those are two separate circles.
	The people with Ukraine flags in their bios are by and large Democrats who are supportive of Joe Biden.
	And none of them want entitlement reform.
	This idea that if you want entitlement reform, that's because you want to spend the money in Ukraine is bizarre and absurd.
	I don't want to spend money in Ukraine.
	And also, I do want entitlement reform.
	By the way, you know who agrees with that position?
	J.D.
	Vance circa 2010.
	When J.D.
	Vance was writing, this is a piece from J.D.
	Vance, December of 2010, talking about the federal budget, quote, Social Security, and especially Medicare, grow rapidly relative to tax revenue increases.
	Some policy experts estimate that Medicare will consume well over half of the budget by itself before my generation sees any benefits.
	Basically, our budget situation is bleak and it grows worse over time.
	The political obstacles intimidate more than the practical problems.
	The party of, um, limited government, the Republican Party, is also the party of the aging white person.
	The party's only solid constituency thus depends on the Medicare and Social Security benefits that are the biggest roadblocks to any kind of real fiscal sanity.
	The Democrats are similarly hopeless.
	J.D.
	Vance, 2010 Here's J.D.
	J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy, quote, if you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard.
	If you think it's hard to get ahead, even when you try, then why try at all?
	Similarly, when people do fail, this mindset allows them to look outward.
	I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he'd recently quit his job
	because he was sick of waking up early.
	I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the Obama economy and how it affected his life.
	I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them.
	His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions.
	But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself.
	There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherence by the day.
	That is J.D.
	Vance and the book that made him famous, Hillbilly Elegy.
	And you can make the case that Medicare, Social Security, that, you know, the changes that are going to have to happen should happen gradually.
	You can make the case against spending with the war in Ukraine.
	That's fine.
	But to link the two as though if you want some sort of entitlement reform, this is because inherently what you actually want to do is build a city in Ukraine.
	You care about Bakhmut or something.
	That's absurd.
	And it's not true.
	And so this is the part of the kind of modern movement inside the Republican Party.
	Everybody who disagrees with me is bad and badly motivated, whether it is Mike Pence or whether it is any other candidate.
	I don't buy it and I don't like it and I don't think it's true.
	I really don't.
	I think there are a lot of candidates in this race and they disagree about a wide variety of issues.
	And on the Republican side, I think by and large, they really care about the country.
	And I think it's a category error to pretend that the people who are talking to you in the ways that you like the best are therefore the people who are telling you the truth.
	Very often, it is precisely the opposite.
	Let me give you another example of somebody who's been doing this.
	Again, this is a person that I personally like.
	I'm friends with him.
	Vivek Ramaswamy is having a bit of a moment in some of the polling data.
	Which is great.
	Good for him, right?
	He's coming from literally nowhere.
	He's a 35-year-old guy who made a lot of money in the biotech sphere.
	We've talked about it.
	I did like a full two-and-a-half-hour search with him.
	I think Vivek is a brilliant guy.
	I think he's a bright guy.
	I think he's got a lot of future in him, obviously.
	But some of the stuff that he's saying at events like this, I understand it's a primary campaign.
	I get it.
	But they are clearly things that the crowd wants to hear.
	So, yesterday, or over the weekend, Tucker is interviewing Vivek.
	And he asked him about January 6th.
	And what Vivek says about January 6th, when people say that what people say in primaries might affect how things go in a general election, this would be a case in point.
	Anyway, here is Tucker asking Vivek about January 6th.
	And what Vivek says here is sort of half true.
	And it's half true in a particular way.
	I'll be very honest with you.
	You want to know what caused January 6th?
	There's such a temptation to say that there's one man whose name is unspeakable.
	No, first of all, it's QAnon.
	It's QAnon.
	It's QAnon.
	You wanna know what caused January 6th?
	Is pervasive censorship in this country in the lead up to January 6th.
	You tell people in this country they cannot speak, that is when they scream.
	Okay, so, a couple of things.
	Is pervasive censorship one of the causes of great outrage on the right side?
	Of course!
	Of course!
	I mean, duh.
	People like me have said that while I don't believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump in the sense that there were like big boxes, pallets of votes that were being shipped into Fulton County in the middle of the night, that the election was rigged in the informal sense, in the sense that you create all sorts of rules that benefit Democrats, including early mail-in voting, universal mail-in balloting, and ballot harvesting, and all this kind of, and then you shut down the media for a month before the election about Hunter Biden, and that's going to have an impact on the election.
	Of course, that part is true.
	But one of the things that no one would say on the stage is one of the reasons the January 6th happened is because Donald Trump said for two months that Mike Pence could unilaterally decide to overturn the election.
	Which is a bad thing, and Donald Trump should not have said it.
	He was not telling the truth about that stuff.
	It was not true.
	And now, the dynamic here apparently is, again this is politics, I get it, tell people what they want to hear, but I don't think that telling people what they want to hear is actually going to get you where you need to go.
	Because in the end, we're still going to have to live in a country together and we're still going to have to govern that country.
	And I think that you can walk and chew gum at the same time.
	I think you can say, censorship in the media was egregious and terrible and social media participated in it, that's going to need a real solution.
	I mean, listen, I run a company that is directly opposed to the outrageous kind of behavior that social media has played in affecting elections on behalf of Democrats.
	It's one of the things that we do.
	Clearly.
	But you also have to tell the truth with regard to bad things that happen when they come from your own side, for example.
	And I don't think that this sort of attempt to suggest that if you say that, that there's somehow an aspect of disloyalty, that this is...
	Again, I think that there's a lot of posturing.
	Let's just say that.
	There's a lot of posturing.
	Another piece of posturing that happened over the weekend.
	So, Tucker asked Asa Hutchinson about COVID.
	And he was asking him how many COVID shots he took.
	Now, Tucker had been asked in the past about how many shots he took, and he said, you know, that's none of your business.
	Which, by the way, is the proper response.
	None of your business is the proper response to how many shots did you take, because that is personal medical information, obviously.
	But here's Tucker going after Asa Hutchinson.
	Now, there are lots of reasons to go after Asa Hutchinson.
	I think Asa Hutchinson is a terrible candidate.
	I think Asa Hutchinson is weak as hell.
	I think Asa Hutchinson is awful on a wide variety of issues.
	I think there's a reason he's completely stalled out in this campaign and no one cares about him.
	This particular exchange, I think, is kind of interesting, however.
	One of the powers that government did usurp over the past several years is the right to decide what medicine you take in the form of COVID mandates.
	How did you feel about that?
	And how many COVID shots did you take?
	And how do you feel about it now, in retrospect?
	How many COVID shots did you take?
	Zero.
	But I think it's fair, and I can see that you recoiled when I asked you that question.
	And I don't think, honestly, you should be asking people about their medical care, but that became a matter of public policy.
	Okay, now, he said I don't think you should be asking people about their medical care directly after he asked Asa Hutchinson about his, about the number of shots.
	Now, Tucker says he took no shots, and that's fine.
	That's fine.
	I mean, sure.
	I'll also point out that Tucker worked at Fox News at a time when Fox News was deliberately forcing all of its employees to vax.
	All of them.
	We here at The Daily Wire, regardless of my personal decision on whether I got vaxed or not, and I did.
	I was vaxed.
	And if I had known now what I knew then, the opposite, if I had known then what I know now, would I have gotten vaxed?
	Probably not.
	I was a 37-year-old man in good physical condition, and we were lied to by the pharmaceutical companies and by the federal government.
	With that said, my company literally sued the federal government to prevent our own employees from vaxing if they did not want to.
	We sued the federal government, and we committed that we would never force an employee to vax.
	Now Tucker can talk about how he didn't get vaxed, that's fine for him, but he didn't say one word on the air about Fox News' mandates on vaccination.
	Listen, again, I think Tucker says a lot of wonderful and brilliant things.
	I think Tucker's one of the most talented people in modern media history, for sure.
	I think all of that is true.
	I also think that some of the virtue signaling that's happening right now with regard to the Republican primary and with regards to the Republican Party in general, is just not telling people the truth about what exactly is going on, and I find that a little bit of a problem.
	Okay, but all of that is beside the point, because the question really is, in the Republican Party, how this Republican nominating race is going to go.
	The reason all of this is relevant, by the way, is because this dynamic shapes how the Republican race is run.
	The way the Republican race should be won is actually very simple.
	Who is most likely to beat Joe Biden and to promote the conservative values that you want?
	Those are the two questions that matter.
	Who is the person who is most likely to promote the values you want in office and is likely to win?
	That's all, which means that theoretically people should be asked about the policies that actually matter to the American people most in, for example, a general election.
	This is one of the reasons why I'm sort of objecting to all the focus on Ukraine, for example, because the American people, by and large, do not care.
	As long as you'd say, and as long as it is true, that you care more about America than Ukraine, which is, I would imagine, virtually everybody in the Republican race, if not everybody in the Republican race, then all the rest of this is sort of irrelevant.
	But this became sort of a big topic over the weekend.
	Here was Tucker grilling, for example, Tim Scott on Ukraine.
	Our primary objective should only be to engage with America's vital national interests are being engaged in.
	Unfortunately, President Biden has no ability to understand and appreciate what that looks like.
	Wait, may I ask?
	So you're saying that it's in our national interest, vital national interest to degrade the Russian military, in other words, to fight Russia with other people's soldiers.
	I would say it this way.
	If you think about the world order that we established after World War II, if you think
	about a rules-based system, where does a rules-based system come from?
	It comes from this nation, our Judeo-Christian foundation, that says that there are rules
	of the road, that there is something called absolute truth.
	And we established that.
	As a part of that absolute truth, what we're trying to do is make sure that our home front remains safe.
	Keeping our home front safe means evaluating the actual threats to our country.
	The most immediate military threat that could happen is Russia.
	And here was Tucker asking Ron DeSantis the same question about Ukraine.
	Europe needs to do more.
	This is their backyard.
	We have NATO countries that don't produce support for their own defenses.
	And we're supposed to do it and we're taking away weapons and ammo that could go to respond to contingencies overseas.
	So we would do more in terms of the Pacific.
	And the goal should be to bring it to a conclusion.
	We cannot have a quagmire that goes on for years and years.
	And seeing Biden put those troops there, I can tell you, we cannot have American troops in Ukraine.
	That is a total non-starter.
	Okay, all of this is fine and dandy.
	Also, the point of differentiation against Joe Biden is really not going to be on this particular issue.
	Because when it comes down to the policy, as I say, I played a clip of Donald Trump talking about the policy.
	Right now, his policy is indistinguishable from that of Joe Biden, the way he's talking about it.
	Not distinguishable!
	Okay, so that means that really, if we're going to talk about which Republican candidate is best to take on Biden, you know what would be great?
	Is to ask the candidates How they would best take on Joe Biden.
	Because that seems like the real question.
	We'll get to that in a moment because that question is being answered.
	And we're, you know, we're going to answer that question before these primaries are over.
	So we'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Okay, meanwhile.
	If we are looking at the Republican primary, now the Republican primary is down to a really simple question.
	And it really is not about the internal policies here, because again, I believe that virtually all of the Republican candidates on the stage with Tucker or with anybody else, Trump, by the way, did not show up.
	And it's kind of amazing.
	The Blaze, which ran the debate, they had Carrie Lake on as a commentator.
	Carrie Lake is already a Trump surrogate.
	She is the losing gubernatorial candidate in Arizona.
	I'm sorry, she lost.
	She lost to a dead person, Katie Hobbs.
	It's amazing how bad candidates can lose to actual corpses like Katie Hobbs in places like Arizona.
	But Carrie Lake was on the telecast talking about how wonderful Trump was.
	Trump, who did not show up to the event.
	And so the question is going to be, listen, Trump, he doesn't have to show up to the event.
	He's the front runner right now.
	His prerogative.
	But the question is going to be, who is best poised to take on Joe Biden?
	Right now, the top two Republicans in the polls remain Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
	DeSantis is now shifting and he is moving.
	Right now, there are a couple of long shots who are raising some cash, right?
	Tim Scott has raised a bunch of money.
	He raised about $5.8 million in the last quarter.
	Nikki Haley raised $5.3 million.
	That is, you know, a drop in the bucket compared to the $20 million that DeSantis raised and the $17 million that Trump raised.
	Ron DeSantis is now shaking up his campaign as he should.
	He's shaking up his campaign because he has not gained traction yet in the polls.
	He's sort of been steady in the polls for a couple of months here.
	There's this big jump that everybody is comparing his current poll numbers to right after the 2022 election when, for just a second, Republicans realized that Donald Trump is very, very bad at picking Senate candidates and had Caused a lot of Republican electoral losses in 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022.
	And so they're like, okay, who else is out there who did really well?
	Oh, Ron DeSantis did great in Florida.
	So the polls spiked for DeSantis for a moment, and then everybody sort of went back to their original positions.
	But DeSantis has an uphill climb.
	Apparently he has fired roughly a dozen staffers.
	More dismissals are expected in the coming weeks.
	He's shaking up his big money political operations after less than a couple of months on the campaign trail.
	That's according to NBC News.
	And he is also going to be going into unfriendly territory.
	So according to Mediaite, He is going to do a one-on-one with Jake Tapper over at CNN.
	I assume this will be a little bit of rock'em, sock'em robots, which is necessary for DeSantis' campaign.
	Again, if the appeal of Donald Trump is he goes into unfriendly territory and he punches people in a debate, he says things to Hillary Clinton like, you'd be in jail, right?
	If that's the appeal, then you need somebody who will do that, who will go into unfriendly territory and will knock heads together.
	And has the actual track record to prove it.
	I mean, there are some Republican candidates who are going into unfriendly territory and doing a good job.
	I mentioned Vivek Ramaswamy a little bit earlier on, was critical of him.
	In this arena, Vivek has been very good.
	He's gone on a bunch of shows that are very unfriendly to him, and he has really taken aggressive positions.
	DeSantis is going to have to do the same, and now he is going to.
	So apparently he is getting ready to do a spate of interviews with sort of legacy media outlets.
	And again, I think he's going to treat these more as debate settings than as actual honest interview settings, which is what he should do because they're going to come after him with a hammer and with a hatchet.
	And how DeSantis performs in these interviews is going to be very critical to his pathway going forward.
	Because again, the question is going to be who can fight the media on the one hand and Joe Biden on the other.
	Meanwhile, Donald Trump is avoiding debate, which, again, it is his prerogative, but he is also setting himself up, I will say.
	He made a comment about Joe Biden dodging early debates against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he's actually setting the predicate for Biden also dodging a debate against him.
	I think a lot of Republicans are counting on the idea that Trump will get into a general election scenario with Biden and that the economy will tank, which maybe it will, maybe it won't.
	And then there will be a debate between Trump and Biden in which Biden basically is a corpse and Trump does a good job.
	I'm highly doubtful that Biden even debates Trump.
	I think there is every possibility that Biden says, I'm not going to debate an insurrectionist.
	And he just refuses outright to debate Trump.
	And Trump kind of set the predicate here.
	Here is Trump talking about why it's OK for Biden not to debate RFK Jr.
	and why he is not debating all the other Republicans.
	The Democrats don't want to do debates.
	I know Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr.
	want to debate.
	What do you think about that?
	Well, I understand why he doesn't want to do it.
	I mean, I truly understand why he doesn't want to do it.
	But they are, you know, there's a big difference.
	Although, in the case of RFK, I've seen polls where he's at 20 percent.
	That's not bad.
	But I understand why he doesn't want to do it.
	Look, when you're running for office and you have, in his case, let's say he has a 30 or 40 point lead, why would he do it?
	People are going to say, well, he can't do it.
	I actually think he can't do it, if you want to know the truth.
	I don't think he's capable of doing it.
	But why would he do it?
	Especially because of that, why would he do it?
	If he's got a 30 or 40 point lead, which is what he's got, I mean, I don't think RFK expects that he's going to be debating.
	He's a very smart guy, by the way.
	I don't think he expects to be debating Biden.
	Now, obviously, Trump here is talking about himself.
	This is why he's saying he's not going to debate the rest of the Republican field.
	He's not talking about Biden and RFK.
	He's talking about himself and the rest of the Republican field.
	Just be careful what you wish for, because I think that Joe Biden could use similar logic with regard to Trump.
	And again, a lot of people on the Republican side, including people like me, if Trump is the nominee, I want to see them debate, obviously.
	Here's Bartiromo asking him, like, you didn't drain the swamp.
	You didn't clean the executive branch.
	You said you were going to do all these things, and then none of them happened.
	I know the people now better than anybody's ever known the people.
	I know the good ones, the bad ones, the dumb ones, the smart ones.
	Oh, you didn't drain the swamp like you said you would.
	You didn't drain the swamp.
	I did.
	I fired Comey.
	I fired a lot of people.
	A lot of the people I had, I fired.
	I fired Comey very early.
	And, you know, there was a question as to whether or not you could.
	Okay, so, actually, he did not.
	I mean, in terms of drain the swamp, I mean, the deep state was there throughout his tenure, as he himself has said.
	Ron DeSantis also pointed out the other day, and this is, again, why Trump doesn't want to be in a debate.
	DeSantis points out he added $8 trillion in debt and built 50 miles of wall.
	Accurate.
	We've been very frank at our differences with respect to the former president.
	I mean, for example, he promised to drain the swamp.
	It got worse.
	He did not drain the swamp.
	He promised to have Mexico pay for a border wall.
	They did like 50 miles of wall.
	There's massive expansives still there.
	He said he was going to eliminate the national debt.
	They added almost eight trillion dollars to the debt in four years and of course in 2020 he turned the country over to Dr. Fauci and those lockdowns and the borrowing and printing really sent us on a bad course.
	I've been very very frank at that.
	So bet which Republican is going to be best tailored to take on Biden.
	That's going to be the story of the rest of this race.
	Don't get distracted in the weeds with all the rest of this, including anything that's attempted to draw support for positions that are not particularly honest.
	All that matters is who's going to be most conservative in office and who can beat Joe Biden.
	That's all that matters.
	Maybe it's Trump.
	It could easily be Trump.
	Maybe it's not.
	But the kinds of questions that are being asked to the candidates need to be tailored to that specific take, not to any other ancillary issues that benefit some at the expense of others.
	Meanwhile, on the Democratic side of the aisle, RFK Jr.
	is freaking out a lot of people in the media because he's actually polling fairly decently against Joe Biden.
	Joe Biden should be in the 90% range.
	He should not be in the 70% range.
	RFK Jr.
	should be in the 0% range, not in the 15 to 20% range.
	And yet RFK Jr.
	continues to draw some support.
	There was a bit of a mini controversy over the weekend that was kind of bizarre.
	With regard to RFK Jr.
	So he was on tape and he was talking specifically about COVID.
	And he suggested that COVID might have been a bioweapon engineered by the Chinese that was made less deadly for people of particular ethnicities.
	And this was touted as though he was suggesting that, for example, Jews had created COVID in order to avoid the targeting of Ashkenaz Jews.
	That's not actually what he is saying right here, I'll point out.
	So here are his comments and then here is what he was actually talking about.
	COVID-19, there's an argument that it is ethnically targeted.
	COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately.
	The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are because of the structure, the genetic structure, genetic differentials among different races.
	Of the receptors, of the ACE2 receptor.
	COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people.
	The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.
	So he was actually citing a study that was published in July 2020 that suggested that one particular receptor for the virus was not present in certain populations.
	Now, it appears that that study was misread by RFK Jr., but he was not Again, I'm rather attuned to anti-Semitism.
	I do not think he was making the claim that the Jews engineered COVID to avoid the deaths of Ashkenazi Jews.
	I'm pretty sure that's not what he was saying right there.
	And again, I'm not a huge RFK Jr.
	fan.
	I think that he is a conspiratorial thinker.
	I've pointed out when I think that he is overstating the case.
	For example, he's constantly making the case that if it's not autism, that if it's not vaccines that are increasing the risk of autism, then what is it?
	Which is a really, really bad scientific argument.
	That's like me saying to my wife, If it wasn't a robber who created this giant pile of dishes in the sink last night, who was it?
	Well, it could be another thing.
	I mean, it could be.
	So don't count me among Robert F. Kennedy Jr.' 's most ardent defenders.
	I've been more critical of him than many, but the notion that what he was saying there was like explicitly anti-Semitic or it was a conspiracy theory about Jews creating COVID or something, I think one of the things that's happening now is now the media, who are fairly warm to RFK Jr.
	for years and years and years, see him as a threat to Biden, and so they're starting to turn on him.
	You'll also notice that those comments didn't get any sort of the same sort of coverage as comments that he made to Shmuley Boteach, who leads the World Values Network, And in this particular interview, you'll hear RFK Jr.
	talking about strong support for Israel.
	And so again, what the media are focused on like a laser beam is anti-Semitism,
	supposed anti-Semitism from RFK Jr.
	in a comment that is fairly, certainly not anti-Semitism.
	Meanwhile, they're perfectly willing to overlook open anti-Semitism inside the Republican,
	inside the Democratic Party, which we'll get to in one second.
	Well, I can tell you there's nobody who's running for president right now in either party
	who will be a better friend to Israel than me as president and nobody who will articulate the moral case for Israel
	with the same erudition or the same persuasive power as me because I believe it in my heart.
	It's the.
	It's core to the values that I was raised with.
	My father was a key commitment of my father during his lifetime, to President Kennedy, to my Uncle Teddy, who played such a key role in assisting the Soviet Jewry to leave the Soviet Union during the 1980s to get to the United States and safe harbors in Israel.
	And that friendship with Israel and making the case for the moral case for Israel will be a key part of my presidency.
	Okay, so let me just point out here that, again, the media are very attuned to RFK Jr.
	He must have said something super antisemitic right there in that comment over dinner.
	When he's pretty clearly not.
	Meanwhile, Pramila Jayapal, who's the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, she was, like, openly anti-Semitic over the weekend.
	I mean, just, like, openly full-bore anti-Semitic.
	She was at Netroots Nation, which is a place for crazy people, and she was speaking about Israel, and she just calls it openly, just, it's a racist state.
	I mean, like, full, full anti-Semitic rant here from Pramila Jayapal.
	And inside the Democratic Party halls of power, like, they're going to, like, kind of tut-tut her, but they'll basically let it go, of course.
	Can I say something as somebody that's been in the streets and has participated in a lot of demonstrations?
	I think I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state.
	That the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy.
	That the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us.
	That it does not even feel possible.
	And I want you to know that while you may have arguments with whether or not some of us on stage are fighting hard enough, I do want you to know that there is an organized opposition on the other side, and it isn't the people that are on this stage.
	Right, so Israel is a racist state, says the lady about the country that has a 20% Arab population, where Arabs are fully a part of every part of the Israeli economy and fully part of everyday Israeli life.
	Meanwhile, the Palestinians, where there are literally no Jews, Jews do not live there because they will be murdered, they're doing just fine.
	The Democratic Party is generally okay with this.
	Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris Tweeted out a picture of herself with Reverend Jesse Jackson, saying, Reverend Jesse Jackson, you're one of our nation's greatest patriots.
	Thank you for widening the path for generations to come.
	In this moment, let us all model your lifelong commitment to progress and remain committed to the fight for freedom and justice.
	Jesse Jackson is a lifelong anti-Semite.
	He famously, in the 1980s, called New York, Hymietown, filled with Hymies.
	And he suggested, when Barack Obama was running for president, that he was going to finally wipe away the Zionist conspiracy inside the government and all the rest of this kind of stuff.
	The Democratic Party is not only okay with that.
	The Vice President of the United States tweets out her friendship and support for Jesse Jackson, who of course is also very close with Louis Farrakhan.
	So, this is the way that it works.
	Only certain types of anti-Semitism bother the Democrats.
	The types of anti-Semitism that may not actually be anti-Semitic, but may threaten Joe Biden's hold on power.
	Okay, meanwhile...
	Joe Biden, what is he doing amidst all this chaos?
	He's nibbling children in Finland.
	That's apparently a thing.
	Remember, this is a man who is with it.
	Here's a clip of Joe Biden nibbling a child in Helsinki, Finland.
	Okay, literally the only child that is acceptable to treat like this is if you are genetically related to the child.
	That is the only... A random child?
	What is wrong with this dude?
	Here he is.
	He's going up.
	He's like nibbling this kid.
	What the?
	What in the world?
	And look at this kid.
	This kid's afraid of him.
	She's shying away from him.
	Look at that.
	He's trying to kiss the baby.
	And the baby is like, get me the get me the hell away from this old smelly man.
	Get me out of here.
	What is wrong with this guy?
	What is wrong with this guy?
	I mean, it really is quite amazing that this is the current leader of the free world.
	He's very vulnerable.
	Republicans should choose wisely.
	The candidate they think is most likely to defeat him.
	OK, meanwhile, a quick thing that I hate.
	A couple things today.
	So one of my favorite things is when people have this very self-flattering view that is just not true.
	So MSNBC's Ali Velshi over the weekend, he uttered a comment that I could not let pass without comment.
	He said that there are no conspiracy theorists in the MSNBC audience, which is weird since if you poll the MSNBC audience as to how many of them believe that the Russians basically stole the 2016 election for Trump, I guarantee you it's a very, very high percentage.
	Here's Ali Velshi packing himself on the back.
	Two segments ago I talked about red states and Bidenomics.
	Again, my audience doesn't have conspiracy theorists in it.
	So what does this content war mean?
	What does this volume of information mean?
	I can sit here and book you guys on the show and we can debunk these conspiracy theories that my viewer didn't have in the first place.
	And the people out there who are bathing in this cesspool of conspiracy are not watching me.
	You're right.
	Nailed it.
	Nailed it.
	No one who watches MSNBC has ever believed a conspiracy theory.
	Yes.
	Great.
	Absolutely correct.
	Okay, meanwhile, this is the dumbest story of the day.
	I don't know why Disney wishes to destroy its own intellectual property, but if they're going to do so, then, you know, more power to them, I suppose.
	So they've now decided that apparently every redhead in the Disney universe will be recast as a racially diverse person.
	And this is how, for example, the Little Mermaid ended up as a person of color.
	It's something that somebody noticed.
	It's basically if you're a redhead in Disney universe, then they'll recast you.
	But now they're recasting everyone.
	So they've cast Snow White Snow White is now going to be played by Rachel Zegler.
	Okay, now, Rachel Zegler, you may know, again, her name is Snow White.
	Now, you might consider that racist, but that's also the name of the actual fairy tale.
	And in the actual fairy tale, it says, this is from the original 1936 Snow White.
	Skin as white as snow, right?
	That is literally in her name.
	That's why she has her name.
	So, I guess just to, like, screw with people, they're casting... Rachel Ziegler is a very talented person.
	I'm just... It's weird casting, you might say, right?
	Like, I don't understand.
	There's certain parts that are racially specific.
	I mean, very clearly so.
	They're not going to cast Tiana from The Frog Prince, Princess, whatever it is.
	They're not going to recast Tiana as a white lady.
	They're not going to.
	Even though you certainly could.
	But they're not going to.
	And we all know why, of course.
	Well, Snow White is like maybe the only racially specific white princess because it's in the name.
	And it's not like greatly evil if a person is cast as what the part is.
	It's very strange to me that if you cast Alexander Hamilton as a black person, that's totally fine.
	But if you cast Martin Luther King as a white person, that is totally unacceptable.
	Maybe you should cast people as like what the description of the part is.
	There are certain parts where the person is described as white.
	And that's okay.
	That's not the end of the world.
	So you have to be racially blind when it comes to a person who is cast for white physical descriptors.
	But you have to be racially diverse for everybody else is the way that this works.
	Um, it's a weird take.
	It's definitely, definitely a, uh, a weird take.
	So, um, she is, uh, I believe Colombian-American?
	Is, uh, is, um, Rachel Zeigler?
	And, um, she is, uh, yeah.
	Her father is of Polish descent, her mom is from Colombia.
	Or her maternal grandmother came from Colombia in the 1960s.
	So, in the new Snow White, Snow White is what people in the Democratic Party would call brown, right?
	I mean, like, Because people of color, they're brown people.
	This is what they would call it.
	Should be categorized in the census as non-white, according to the Democratic Party, playing Snow White.
	Okay?
	That's not the weird part.
	That's not.
	The weird part is the dwarves.
	So you may have realized that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves has dwarves, right?
	Because, like, they're dwarves.
	And that's, like, what they are.
	And one of the most characteristic things about the dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is that they are short because they are dwarves.
	Well, we have decided that this is very, very insulting.
	And so, the seven dwarves, so that's six racially diverse tall people, and one person who is a little person.
	Is my understanding.
	All of this, yeah, so one of the dwarves is also a woman.
	So that's, that's, you know, again makes for a very weird dynamic.
	Because as you recall from the original Seven White and the Snow Dwarves, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, as you recall from the original, they all live in one room together.
	So that's, that's definitely weird.
	This is, Apparently this is all because of Peter Dinklage, the guy from Game of Thrones, who at one point was like, they're casting a racially diverse Snow White, but you're still telling the story of Snow White and the seven dwarves?
	You're still making that effing backward story about seven dwarves living in a cave together?
	First of all, they're the heroes of the story, you'll recall.
	And then Disney said it was taking a different approach to avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original.
	Why is that a stereotype?
	What if they're just dwarves in the story?
	I don't understand.
	Like, it's so strange that you would think that way.
	I mean, truly, that's a strange thing.
	The heroes of the story are the dwarves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
	The prince isn't even useful in the story.
	The prince arrives at the very end and kisses Snow White and wakes her up.
	He didn't do anything about the witch.
	It's the dwarves who do something about the witch.
	They're like, you know, we can't have dwarves doing that.
	It has to be racially diverse tall people.
	Including, apparently, let's see that picture again.
	I mean, I just have to describe this for folks who can't actually see the picture.
	So let me describe the members of the dwarf community in the new live action Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
	You have one guy who looks like a member of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs because he's actually, you know, a little person.
	And then you have Jack Dorsey wearing some sort of like Russian hair covering.
	Looks like a Portland homeless person.
	And then you have a black female who came straight from the Brown campus.
	And then you have a black male.
	And then you have apparently a member of a very low-rent biker gang.
	A dude with long hair and a beard.
	And I assume that he is grumpy.
	You'd have to assume because of his face.
	And then Carrot Top.
	And then Gregory Hines.
	This is my... I don't understand the casting.
	So, apparently their goal is to just destroy whatever sense of believability the story has.
	Yes, to fairytale, you can cast it however you want, but it's literally in the description.
	This is the most physically descriptive of all titles.
	Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
	So now, apparently, the title of this movie is Hispanic Person, Six Large People, and a Little Person.
	Which seems like a different film to me.
	It seems like a different story.
	Hispanic person, six large people of racially diverse background, and a little person, sounds like a different story than Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
	It truly is an astonishing thing and yeah, I'm...
	Okay, so a few things.
	One, the live action cannibalization of actual IP is an amazing thing.
	Second, the destruction of actual good IP off of, in favor of new crappy IP
	is something Disney's been doing for a while and they're doing it with everything.
	They're doing it with everything.
	So they'll put like, they'll slap a warning sticker on Aladdin,
	they'll slap a warning sticker on Snow White.
	And then the thing that I actually wanna show my kid That's the thing they're actually making money off of.
	And they make these crappy live-action versions.
	And they're like, that's what we really wish Snow White and the Seven Dwarves were.
	A Hispanic lady, six racially diverse large people, and a little person.
	That's what we wish the story were.
	It's like casting Sleeping Beauty as an awake, ugly person.
	It's like the reverse of what this story is.
	And by the way, I'm just going to point out here, Disney does this with apparently every piece of content now.
	I've already told my children who are big Star Wars fans, like original Star Wars fans, that the last three movies just don't exist.
	Because this is what Disney does now.
	Kathleen Kennedy.
	What they do is they take all their good IP and they cannibalize it and destroy it in favor of crappy new IP that nobody cares about.
	Meanwhile, they won't even sell the old IP.
	If they really didn't like Aladdin or Snow White, they really thought these things were racist, they could put that IP up on the sales block, or they could just take it down entirely from their platform.
	They won't do that because they understand that what we're actually subscribing to Disney Plus for, if you're still subscribing, is for the old IP.
	So I just slow clap for all the morons in charge of marketing because, again, you know what would have happened?
	What would have happened if, for example, they just cast a talented white lady as Snow White and seven dwarves?
	You know what would have happened?
	Nothing.
	No one would have cared and would have made a lot of money.
	No one would have cared.
	But they're so interested in virtue signaling.
	They're so interested in cramming down on you, their version of what the world should be, that they are they are destroying their own IP in the process.
	Good for them.
	All right.
	I suppose in a weird way, they're putting their money where their mouth is.
	Bizarro world.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
	We'll be getting into the mailbag.
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