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July 24, 2023 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:01:29

Barbie Is Garbage, But You’re Not Allowed To Say So

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	Okay, so as apparently everyone on earth knows, I went to see the Barbie movie on Friday at the behest of my evil and cruel producers who dragged me there so that we could, you know, do a review of it that apparently has millions of views.
	The tweet in which we announced that I had actually seen the Barbie movie has something like 60 million views at this point and the outrage in the media is astonishing.
	Because I did like a 43 minute review of the film in which I went through it point by point and talked about how terrible the film is.
	And it is truly awful.
	If you want to know how bad it is, just listen to the Sunday episode of this show that we released this week in which I go through pretty much all the aspects of the movie that are particularly bad.
	And a lot of the reviewers knew that it was bad going in.
	You could see it in the reviews.
	They were doing what I like to call peeling.
	Peeling is where you see a movie by Jordan Peele, usually, and you pretend that it's good because you like the politics of the films.
	You pretend that Get Out is not just a good movie, it is the greatest movie ever made.
	You pretend that Us is an actual good movie when it's actually quite a bad movie.
	You pretend that you care deeply about Nope because Jordan Peele made it.
	Because it doesn't matter if the movie's good or if it's bad.
	So you could call it Gerwig-ing too, right?
	This is where Greta Gerwig makes a film and everybody's like, eh, or it's not very good.
	But she made it and it has the right politics.
	Therefore, it is wonderful.
	So I do this review.
	I put out this tweet and everybody loses their mind.
	I mean, loses their mind.
	There are articles about my review of this movie in sources as diverse as Newsweek, NBC News, The Daily Beast.
	Everyone's covering the fact that I did not like this movie and that I made a video in which I parodically Oppenheimer the Barbie materials.
	I take like a match and I light the Barbie stuff on fire.
	And this apparently is terrible.
	How?
	No, no, it can't be.
	The reaction to me burning A Barbie car with like a Barbie and Ken in it is like the reaction of the Islamic world when someone burns a Quran in Sweden.
	It's totally crazy.
	I don't even like.
	Wow, guys.
	Wow.
	I mean, there's an article in NBC, NBC News dot com.
	The Internet is roasting Ben Shapiro for hate watching Barbie while dressed like Ken.
	Apparently being dressed like Ken now amounts to you wear black jeans and a black shirt.
	And the question was whether I had purposefully worn that outfit to the Barbie movie.
	No, I hadn't seen it, guys.
	That's just what people tend to wear a lot is like a, you know, like a black t-shirt and black.
	I didn't realize this was like a rare and unique bird.
	It was like, it was like a, it's like some sort of rare pheasant in the wild to wear a black pair of jeans and a black shirt when I go out.
	In any case, NBC News says polarizing conservative commentator Ben Shapiro hated Barbie so much he aired his complaints in a 43 minute video review, which included an edit of himself setting fire to Barbie dolls in protest.
	But the Internet has been flaming Shapiro instead.
	My favorite thing is when they declare the Internet.
	It's like when they say history has judged the Internet, the entire Internet, guys.
	Did you know that?
	I mean, sure, like 98 percent of the Internet is people watching porn right now, but the entire Internet is very, very upset.
	They're super, super duper upset.
	Oh, no, it's so terrible.
	Many online poked fun at the intensity of his apparent rage, highlighting he went so far as to buy movie tickets and obtain Barbie dolls to burn before he recorded himself protesting it for more than a third of Barbie's runtime.
	So this is one of my favorite critiques, is where they're like, oh my God, you spent money on the tickets to go see a movie that you reviewed?
	Yeah, now let me explain to you how the market works.
	Do you know how much money we made off of the YouTube video that has now been viewed in excess of 1.2 million times reviewing that movie?
	I promise you, it's way more than we spent to go buy those Barbies and some matches and a barbecue.
	I promise you.
	And then people were tweeting like, Ben Shapiro is 40 years old.
	Right.
	I'm a 39.
	I'm a 39 year old dude with a very, very popular show who reviewed a cultural phenomenon that is Barbie.
	And unlike all of these single women with wine and cats who went and loved this movie, I have four children.
	So yeah, I have a very full and productive life and I took time out of my busy schedule to watch this two-hour bleep show.
	And it was bad.
	So I was upset that I'd spent two hours watching a very bad movie that has been told, we've been told, is like the greatest movie of all time.
	The Daily Beast did this too.
	The Daily Beast has an entire article.
	Ben Shapiro roasted, roasted!
	The real question I have here, and this is a serious question and actually has some fairly serious ramifications, is why the outrage over me not liking the film?
	I'm just confused.
	So I understand that everybody on the left has this face tattoo syndrome nonsense, where you put something out that is wildly culturally controversial, like Barbie.
	As I said in the review, Barbie is a movie that was marketed to children.
	It is a movie that, though it is PG-13, was clearly marketed at moms and their 8-year-old girls, because who plays with Barbie's 8-year-old girls?
	I know, because I have a 9-year-old girl.
	And so, it was clearly marketed at that group.
	And then it was a bait-and-switch, because the entire movie is a feminist diatribe about the evils of the modern patriarchy.
	And so they do this, they mainstream, they mainline in a bunch of left-wing social gobbledygook into a movie that is supposed to be sort of a fun romp through Barbieville.
	And then when you notice, they get very upset.
	That's the face tattoo syndrome that I've talked about a thousand times on the show, right?
	When you go into Starbucks, there's some weirdo with a face tattoo and you look at them, they're like, what are you looking at?
	You're like, your face tattoo, the thing on your face that you put there so that I would notice it and comment, that thing.
	But if you comment in the wrong, but what they really want is approval.
	If you comment in the wrong way about Greta Gerwig, Who, again, they're giving the Jordan Peele treatment, or the Taylor Swift treatment, or the Beyonce treatment.
	Like, there are certain cultural figures, cultural idols, where if you criticize them, you have violated the sacred honor of the Vestal Virgins.
	You must not criticize.
	If you criticize, then you will be roasted on a spit upon the internet.
	Ooh!
	I want to explain why this is.
	Is there something, I think, deep going on here?
	Because there are certain things where if I criticize them, if I make fun of them, if I talk about them on the show, then no one cares.
	But there are certain things where if I do make fun of them on the show, then everyone cares and the entire internet goes berserk.
	And if I make fun of Cardi B on the show for like 15 minutes, the entire internet goes aflame with memes about me making fun of Cardi B.
	But if I, like, have a spat with Nicki Minaj, nobody cares.
	Like, there are certain figures who are just, like, beyond.
	They're in the pantheon, and if you criticize them, you have violated the sacredness of the space.
	So what is this sacred space we're talking about?
	I'm gonna get to it in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	What exactly is happening here?
	Okay, to understand, you have to understand that Greta Gerwig is now representative of an actual religious worldview.
	When I made the kind of quirky comparison between the reaction to me burning the Barbie dolls in this review and flaming the movie, and the reaction to fundamentalist Muslims over the burning of the Quran, It's not all that frivolous comparison.
	There is an actual religious worldview that cannot be attacked.
	And if you attack that religious worldview, if you say that religious worldview is bad and wrong, then this means that you are a heretic and you must be punished.
	There's a really serious undertone to a lot of this stuff.
	I mean, I actually got some death threats over the Barbie movie.
	I'm not kidding you.
	There were people on Twitter who were literally tweeting out about, like, can we do something about this Shapiro?
	Like, over a Barbie movie.
	And you have to wonder why.
	Well, the answer is because there's an ideology.
	It is the ideology of the sexual revolution that has been promulgated by the social left in this country.
	And it lies at the center of everything they think, everything they feel.
	And if you question it, then you must atone.
	You must.
	You must be brought to heel.
	Spanish Inquisition style.
	It really is fascinating.
	That ideology places at the center of human life the sense of self-identity
	that cannot be abridged by anyone else.
	If you say, for example, that women should have children,
	that they should get married, that men should get married,
	that men should have children.
	If you say that the height of human aspiration is not in fact sexual pleasure
	or quote unquote individualistic pursuit of subjective success,
	That actually there are things you should do in this life that are higher and better.
	If you do that, that is a violation of the agreement that we all have, which is to place at the center of our being a narcissistic view of self.
	How do I know this?
	Because Greta Gerwig says so.
	And this is the reason that Greta Gerwig is now a religious figure for the left.
	I mean, truly, not like they worship at an altar, not like they actually bring her sacrifices or something like that.
	But in the sense that if you violate the idolatry of Greta Gerwig, if you say that Greta Gerwig is an overrated director and an overrated writer, and that her ideology is false and does not ring true, and that it's not even cohesive, that if you watch the Barbie movie, one of the great ironies of the Barbie movie is there's a deep unhappiness that flows throughout it.
	Why?
	Because the very beginning of the film is little girls discarding dolls that teach them
	motherhood for dolls that are about consumerism.
	And then the entire movie is about all the unhappiness that results there from.
	And then the very end of the movie is Barbie actively embracing the parts of her that allow
	I mean, there is this kind of bizarre undertone of Greta Gerwig's own unhappiness with her life and Greta Gerwig's actual view of what it means to be a happy woman in today's life.
	So Greta Gerwig has a religious worldview.
	I mean, she truly does.
	And she talks about it.
	This is not me talking about it.
	This is Greta Gerwig, the director and writer of the film, talking about it.
	Greta Gerwig did an interview with Vogue in which she talked about writing Barbie.
	And she talked about co-writing this film with Noah Baumbach, who is her longtime romantic partner.
	They're not married.
	I believe they have a couple of kids together.
	And she said that before she made the movie, she wrote an abstract poem about Barbie.
	She wouldn't read the poem to Vogue, but she compared it to the Apostles' Creed.
	This is her language, not mine.
	The Apostles' Creed, of course, for those unfamiliar with Christian doctrine, is an affirmation of certain core Christian beliefs.
	It's been part of Christian liturgy for centuries at this point.
	Gerwig apparently wrote her own version of the Apostles' Creed, but about Barbie.
	She wrote an Apostles' Creed, but about Barbie.
	Not only that, apparently, she saw the Barbie movie as a way of rebutting certain presumptions about the Bible itself.
	So, for example, the Vogue article points out a biblical parallel with Barbie, according to SlashFilm.com.
	It's notable that Barbie was invented in 1959, but her boyfriend Ken wasn't invented until 1960.
	In the film itself, narrator Helen Mirren points out that Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a good day if Barbie looks at him.
	It would seem that Ken was begat of Barbie, created specifically to be her companion and worshipper.
	Gerwig draws a direct parallel or perpendicular to the book of Genesis.
	She said, quote, Ken was invented after Barbie to burnish Barbie's position in our eyes and in the world.
	That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.
	So again, there is there is something that is deeper than mere sort of cultural stupidity happening here, and that is that Greta Gerwig is channeling a reverse biblical morality into a movie like Barbie that is directed at children.
	That is the thing that is happening here.
	And you're not supposed to notice that.
	And if you do notice that, it makes you bad because this is, in fact, a religious impulse.
	Modern society has gotten rid of the saints.
	Modern society has gotten rid of Judeo-Christian traditional values or demeaned them as completely superfluous.
	In fact, the entire Barbie movie is about how relationships between men and women, women and men, are actually stupid and impossible and fraught with tension.
	And basically, separation is the only, separate but equal, is the only way to do a proper Barbie land.
	In the bizarre Barbie world that has been created by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her longtime romantic partner.
	Baumbach, of course, is also famous for having written a marriage story which is about two absolutely self-absorbed narcissistic people who end up getting divorced because they want to pursue their petty careers in New York and Hollywood.
	And they don't give a damn about their kid.
	I mean, these are people who both drink deeply from the well of sort of secular humanist leftism.
	And that is an idolatrous worldview in and of itself, but it demands that you be part of the idolatry.
	And if you say no, actually, the morality that you're promulgating is stupid and counterproductive, and that when you promulgate it to kids, it's actually bad.
	When you say that sort of stuff, you have violated a religious precept.
	People are treating this as though you have violated religious scruple because you have.
	And there's, there are lots of spoilers in yesterday's review of Barbie or the weekend's review of Barbie.
	But there is one speech that America Ferreira makes in the Barbie movie that basically is the Apostle's Creed of feminism.
	And it spilled right out there in the middle of the movie.
	It's not like they were hiding the ball here.
	There's no subtlety to this movie.
	It's being hit in the head with a sledgehammer repeatedly with the nostrums of third wave feminism.
	So America Ferreira gets up at one point in the movie.
	And she says this, I found the exact quote, quote, it is literally impossible to be a woman.
	You are so beautiful and so smart.
	She's talking to Barbie at this point.
	And it kills me.
	You don't think you're good enough.
	Like we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
	You have to be thin, but not too thin.
	And you can never say you want to be thin, but you also have to say you want to be healthy.
	But also you have to be thin.
	You have to you have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.
	OK, none of this is true, by the way.
	There are women of all shapes and sizes who live happy marriages, who have happy lives.
	The notion that women can't ask for money because that's correct.
	You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.
	You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.
	You're supposed to love being a mother, but also don't talk about your kids all the damn time.
	By the way, I'm not sure who this is describing.
	Everyone I know talks about their kids all the time, and it's wonderful.
	You have to be a career woman, but always be looking out for other people.
	You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane.
	But if you point that out, you're accused of complaining.
	You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women.
	Because you're always supposed to be part of a sisterhood, but always stand out and always be grateful, but never forget that system is rigged.
	So find a way to acknowledge that, but always be grateful.
	You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line.
	It's too hard.
	It's too contradictory.
	And nobody gives you a medal or says thank you.
	And it turns out, in fact, not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
	I'm so tired of watching myself and every other single other woman tie herself into knots so people will like us.
	And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know.
	That is the Apostle's Creed, apparently, that appears in the middle of the film.
	I mean, Mariko Freire literally says this.
	There's a hero shot of her, like an upshot of her doing all of this.
	And Margot Robbie looking on adoringly as she says all of these ridiculous, silly things.
	That it's impossible to be a woman in modern society.
	Yeah, try being your grandmother.
	Seriously.
	Try being your grandmother operating without a washing machine, with six kids, in a home where it's her job to make sure that everything runs on time.
	Yeah, you.
	You're a real victim.
	But this is the whole thing.
	The whole thing is that if you violate these religious scruples, people think, on the left, that they live without religion.
	They do not.
	They have a religion.
	Their religion is secular leftism, and the Apostle's Creed of it is the Apostle's Creed of the sexual revolution.
	And if you cross them, they become just as angry as any other inquisition.
	They become just as upset.
	If you trigger them by pointing this stuff out, they get extremely upset.
	And then they play it off like, oh, oh my gosh, I can't believe you did it.
	Oh, you look so...
	When we make a review of a film that's 43 minutes long, and we put that in the title, we're pretty sure we know what we're doing.
	Over here.
	When we set fire to Barbies, you know, for the shock value of it, and because it's funny, we know what we're doing.
	The joke is the joke.
	You can pretend not to get the joke, or you can just be offended by it, which is really what's happening here.
	So, I have a question for you.
	Why are you so upset?
	I don't like the movie.
	You like the movie.
	Okay.
	We can have those differences.
	Why are you so upset?
	What is getting your goat so much?
	I understand why I'm upset.
	What I'm upset about is the lie.
	I'm upset that you created a movie that is specifically designated for little girls to see it, and then what you decided to do is slide in a bunch of left-wing imagery and propaganda about how terrible little girls have it in the United States.
	I think that's awful.
	I think it's an awful thing to do.
	I understand why I'm upset.
	What I understand is why you're upset.
	Your movie made a crap load of money over the weekend.
	This movie made $160 million over the weekend.
	It blew the doors off the box office opening weekend.
	Now, I don't know, it's going to have the kind of repeat business that it's going to want to have.
	I don't think it's going to have any foreign business, but that's a different story.
	So what are you so upset about?
	One person who you already didn't agree with politically, didn't like the film, and yet you are so upset.
	Why?
	Has it ever occurred to you because you're more religious than I am?
	I'm the one here wearing the funny little hat that's testing my belief in God.
	But you guys are wearing your Barbie shirts in attestation to your idolatry of a sexual revolution moment that is played out and is riffed with deep unhappiness that you refuse to acknowledge and so you're going to externalize that into, I can't believe somebody said something bad.
	Must protect the precious.
	That's what's happening here.
	It's a form of idolatry, and it's amusing to watch you guys try to spin it away.
	And then you hear people on the left say things like, my kid isn't going to pick up on all this messaging.
	Oh, what do I care?
	You know, it's subtle.
	Because first of all, it's not subtle at all.
	There are certain movies where things will just fly right over kids' heads.
	I know, I have four of them.
	You know, there are certain things where you're watching and you're like, the joke hits me, but it doesn't hit my kids.
	There is no subtlety to this film at all.
	I mean, it is right in your face.
	There's literally speech about it.
	There are multiple speeches about it.
	In that same scene, there is a line in which In which Barbie says, either you have to be weird and terrible, or you have to be ignorant, essentially.
	Those are your choices in life.
	You either have to pretend that everything is fine, or you have to be weird and terrible like Weird Barbie.
	And Weird Barbie, who's played by Kate McKinnon, who, you know, is playing essentially lesbian Barbie, it is her, she just nods knowingly.
	This stuff's not subtle.
	Does this have an effect on little girls?
	Sure!
	Any movie that tells kids that if they have a particular situation in life, That they are therefore bound to be hurt and harmed by the patriarchy?
	That's not good for kids.
	And it was specifically directed at kids.
	And it is amazing to me that studio bosses in Mattel decided to hand over a billion dollar property to Greta Gerwig, who's an ideological warrior on behalf of the secular leftist nonsense.
	And then we're supposed to pretend that it means nothing.
	So again, I understand why I'm upset.
	I just don't understand why you're upset that I'm upset.
	What are you so upset about?
	What's getting your goat here?
	Maybe it's that if somebody crosses your apostle's creed, this makes them a heretic, and the heretics must be burned.
	In just a second, we'll talk about another heretic they're attempting to burn.
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	Okay.
	In other cultural news of the day, Jason Aldean continues to be ripped up and down for the great crime of creating a song where he says that in a small town, people don't tend to stand for riots.
	This apparently is incredibly bad.
	The media have been on him for a week about this, and Jason Aldean is doing the thing that you must never do.
	He's refusing to apologize.
	Good for him.
	So over the weekend, Jason Aldean did a concert in which he slammed the BS of people attacking him over this.
	Good for him.
	Here's what I want to say.
	A lot of things out there, and one thing I love, you guys know how it is, this day and age, cancel culture is a thing.
	That's something that If people don't like what you say, they try and make sure that they can cancel you, which means try and ruin your life.
	Ruin everything.
	One thing I saw this week was a bunch of Culture Music fans that can see through a lot of the bull****, alright?
	Good for him.
	Good for him.
	Because again, he violated the thing that you're not supposed to say, which is that maybe small-town community life has something going for it.
	What you're supposed to believe is that cosmopolitan values, left-wing social values that come from New York or San Francisco or LA, that these are the things that are supposed to govern everyday life, that their view of the universe ought to be your view of the universe.
	And if you say, wait, hold up a second.
	I actually think that people very often live better, more fulfilling lives in small communities with community cohesiveness.
	That's a thing that you're not supposed to say at all.
	And you're certainly supposed to apologize if you do say and Jason Aldean isn't doing that.
	And so they came after him.
	They tried to trump up a charge that he's a racist.
	That, of course, is not true.
	And he rebutted it and he said, no, good for him.
	But this is what the left is is into these days.
	If you violate their precepts, they just lie about you.
	That's their thing now is that they just truth is of no consequence.
	The only thing that matters is the agenda.
	Agenda Uber Alice for these folks.
	You can see this in the current non-troversy over the Florida curriculum with regard to African American black history.
	If you look at the black history curriculum in the state of Florida, it was written by a couple of black scholars.
	And the curriculum, there's nothing wrong with it.
	I've looked at it, it's 212 pages long.
	It's basically a series of guidelines.
	And a couple of the guidelines that were controversial is one said that slaves sometimes developed skills that they could use for themselves.
	And this was read falsely by Kamala Harris and the rest of the left to suggest that in Florida, people are being taught that slavery is good.
	That's absurd.
	Literally, what the curriculum says is that slaves took advantage of even the worst situations in order to better themselves, which is about the merit of the people who are being held in bondage, not about the greatness of slavery.
	That's stupid.
	In fact, Dr. William B. Allen, who is one of the black scholars who wrote this, he explained the agenda here.
	It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans.
	What was said, and anyone who reads this will see this with clarity, it is the case that
	Africans proved resourceful, resilient, and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes
	which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslavement. You would say
	that you're standing by these standards.
	You know, even though the Vice President was very verbose yesterday.
	Okay.
	Well, I will repeat to Mr. McCarty that I'm not claiming authorship, but I'm certainly willing to stand behind the work of my members in the task force.
	So the media are just glossing right over this, for the most part, in order to prop up the lies that Kamala Harris is telling.
	And again, Kamala Harris's lies are directed against DeSantis.
	and their motivations and intent.
	So the media are just glossing right over this for the most part in order to prompt
	in order to prop up the lies that Kamala Harris is telling.
	And again, Kamala Harris's lies are directed against DeSantis.
	And the reason that Kamala Harris is telling lies against DeSantis is because,
	as everyone knows, there's quite a decent possibility that there's some extraneous events in the election of 2024
	and Kamala Harris ends up at the top of the ticket.
	Joe Biden does not look good.
	It looks like he's collapsing in on himself.
	And what that means, if he is not healthy enough to run, is that Kamala Harris becomes the de facto Democratic nominee.
	If that happens, she thinks she may have to run against DeSantis.
	And so she's been trumping up this garbage that DeSantis is some sort of cruel, vicious racist.
	So last week, she did a whole speech claiming that blacks were that black history was going to be taught In such a way that slavery was upheld as some sort of higher good in the state of Florida, which is ridiculous and absurd.
	Here's Ron DeSantis responding to those charges over the weekend.
	I didn't do it and I wasn't involved in it.
	But I think what they're doing is I think that they're probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.
	But the reality is all of that is rooted in whatever is factual.
	They listed everything out.
	And if you have any questions about it, just ask the Department of Education.
	You can talk about those folks.
	But I mean, these were scholars who put that together.
	It was not anything that was done politically.
	Again, this isn't about the actual contents of the program.
	There's nothing wrong with the contents of the program.
	The entire thing is a trumped-up charge in the same way that the attacks on Aldean are trumped-up charge.
	The attacks on DeSantis on race are trumped-up charge that are designed to uphold Kamala Harris.
	That's really what this is about.
	It's about propping up Harris, who's deeply unpopular with the American people because she's the least talented politician of our generation or maybe any other.
	Biden campaign chair Cedric Richmond actually went on CNN with Jim Acosta.
	And ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
	And Cedric Richmond then blasted Ron DeSantis for quote-unquote attacking Kamala Harris.
	What's your response to what Florida Governor DeSantis had to say about this?
	Clearly, factually, he's wrong.
	Slavery was an abomination.
	It was utterly evil.
	And it had zero redeeming qualities.
	But I think that it further illustrates how far this Republican Party and these candidates are going to the right and to cater and pander to extremists in order
	to get support.
	And I think that Governor DeSantis, his campaign has been floundering.
	He's been looking for attention.
	And I think that he is now embarking on going as far to the right as he possibly can just
	to see if he can be the extremist candidate.
	Again, they're trumping this up in order to go after DeSantis.
	This is one of the things you have to understand, is that if you are seen as an enemy of the regime, if you are seen as an enemy of the ideological regime, again, the charges will just be trumped up.
	It doesn't even matter.
	It doesn't even matter.
	Which brings us to the January 6th indictment against Donald Trump.
	Now, as I've said before, Donald Trump, when it came to the classified documents stuff, on a statutory level, there's very little question that he probably violated the classified documents statutes.
	Does that mean he should be prosecuted?
	No.
	And here's the thing that everybody on the right is saying.
	The real reason you're going after Trump is because he violated your scruples, not because you're actually afraid of him violating the law.
	The thing that Trump has done that offended you so much, he did by running in 2015-2016.
	He was your best friend until then.
	You were handing him Emmy awards until then.
	And then you turned on him because he violated your religious precepts.
	Well, this is the perception of the right, and they're not wrong.
	Again, when you look at the contrast between the treatment of Donald Trump and the treatment of Joe Biden, which we're going to get to in a second because there's now breaking news on the Joe Biden business corruption front, which is way worse than anything that Trump has been accused of here.
	We're going to get to that in just one second.
	When you see that double standard, this is why people on the right are so intensely angry.
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	Okay, so speaking of the Donald Trump indictment, it is suggested that it is going to come down sometime this week.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, it's still unclear how soon Trump will be indicted, but Jack Smith has sent him a target letter.
	Apparently they did that on Sunday, July 16th.
	They gave him four days to say whether he would appear before the grand jury.
	Grand jurors have continued to hear witnesses in recent days.
	It could be this week.
	It could be next.
	It's unclear what exactly Trump will be charged with here, but according to the Wall Street Journal, a person familiar with the target letter said it refers to three statutes that could be the basis for the prosecution, conspiracy to defraud the government, obstruction of an official proceeding, and a civil rights violation that is often used in voting fraud cases.
	All three of these, unless they have serious evidence of obstruction, are really, really, really weak.
	Conspiracy to defraud the government is usually you try to steal money from the actual government of the United States.
	When it comes to obstruction of an official proceeding, you actually have to show that Donald Trump called somebody up and told them that he would, say, bribe them to change their testimony.
	A civil rights violation used in voting fraud cases is typically, like, I stopped you from voting or I actually falsified ballots and shoved them in a ballot box.
	It is not me saying something about a vote that I didn't particularly like.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump could be charged with at least one of two statutes passed following the Civil War and originally designed to prosecute conspiracies to keep newly freed black people from voting.
	But he didn't keep anybody from voting.
	So, again, it's going to be very difficult to see how that works.
	When it comes to the conspiracy to defraud the government, again, that particular statute was chiefly written to stop people from stealing money from the government.
	The broadly written statute prohibits agreement to obstruct the lawful function of the government by deceitful or dishonest means.
	One federal judge has suggested Trump violated it, but again, I've never seen it interpreted in this particular way on a practical level.
	And when it comes to obstruction of an official proceeding, again, they're going to have to prove that Trump essentially tried to bribe somebody.
	It's pretty clear at this point that the same people who went after Trump on everything else, all of the false fake Russia garbage, all those same people are very, very excited about all this, including, of course, Adam Schiff.
	Here's Adam Schiff.
	The fact that Adam Schiff is still treated as a sort of a person worth talking to over on MSNBC demonstrates the full corruption of the media.
	Considering that dude lied for four long years about having a smoking gun in his back pocket, showing that Trump was actually a Putin cat's paw.
	Here's Adam Schiff.
	I think these are the most serious charges that he faces yet, if indeed this grand jury or these grand juries indict.
	The Mar-a-Lago documents case was a threat to our national security.
	It's very serious.
	Obviously, the multiple business fraud counts in New York are also serious.
	But this is essentially a set of charges revolving around his efforts to stop the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history.
	It's hard to imagine a president being involved in more serious misconduct.
	He is so tiresome.
	He is so tiresome.
	And this is the game, right?
	The game from the left is it doesn't matter what you charge Trump with, you got to charge him with something.
	And then, of course, if we do that, then if you guys defend Trump from even spurious charges, this means that you're bad.
	The gall of people like Jen Psaki, so Jen Psaki over on MSNBC, she says, maybe this campaign is going to turn into keeping Trump out of prison.
	Well, I mean, you're the ones trying to put him in.
	So if it does, that would be on you, not on anybody else.
	I'm confused on how it's on Republicans saying that Trump shouldn't go to prison when you're the ones literally trying to put him in prison.
	The Washington Post published a piece that really stuck out to me about how intertwined Donald Trump's campaign has become with his legal defense.
	According to the piece, just over half of the money he raised last quarter went to an affiliated PAC that is footing his legal bills.
	Your Republican colleagues continue to support him, of course, but is this campaign becoming increasingly about keeping him out of prison?
	And how is that even allowed for him to use so much of that money for his own legal defense?
	It's all, it's all again, it feels like a game.
	It feels like a game.
	And the reason it feels like a game also is because we now have some pretty damn good information that Joe Biden is really, really corrupt.
	And that corruption extends to Hunter Biden as well.
	It really is amazing.
	We have two stories out over the course of the last 72 hours that call into serious question the quote unquote non-corruption of Joe Biden.
	First of all, it's pretty obvious from the beginning that Hunter was doing things abroad, picking up sacks of cash, and then some of that was making its way back to Joe.
	Again, I urge you to go look at all of the documents that are available from Hunter Biden's laptop, including texts in which he informed his own children that at least you don't have the pressure of picking up money for dad the way that I do.
	He literally says that in a text message to his own kid.
	He's like, yeah, well, at least you don't have to pay all of dad's bills.
	He said that, and we're all supposed to pretend that never happened, but now we have some corroborative information along those lines that, of course, are being soft-pedaled by all the media except for the New York Post.
	We'll get to that momentarily first.
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	Also, environmentalists, those hypocrites, they'll tell you to ride a bicycle.
	And meanwhile, they were flying in their private jets.
	I mean, if you're going to fly in a private jet, don't tell everybody to ride in a bicycle.
	Then they'll insist that you stop eating meat because of the cow farts.
	And then they are chowing down on Wagyu over at Davos.
	Well, I bet you do a better job of conserving the environment than, you know, John Kerry.
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	Okay, meanwhile...
	So the game for the left is you focus in on all the bad things Trump's ever done.
	You just ignore with a furious fervor everything bad about Hunter and Joe Biden.
	Now, Hunter Biden is not a news story because he's a derelict piece of crap.
	He is a derelict piece of crap.
	That's not why he's a news story.
	It's because he's funneling cash to his dad in almost certain likelihood.
	And there's a report that has now been released by Senate Republican Chuck Grassley, who's a serious guy.
	It's an FBI memo that makes quote-unquote unverified claims, just like, you know, a lot of unverified memos.
	And here is what it says.
	It is a confidential human source who reported the following.
	In late 2015 or 2016, during the Obama-Biden administration, this confidential human source was first introduced to officials at Ukraine natural gas business Burisma Holdings through a person named Alexander Ostapenko, The person who was the source for this report, Anne Ostopenko, traveled to Ukraine and went to Burisma's office that was located 20 minutes away from the city center.
	The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Burisma's interest in purchasing a U.S.-based oil and gas business for purposes of merging that with Burisma, for purposes of conducting an IPO in the United States.
	Burisma was willing to purchase that U.S.-based entity for $20 to $30 million.
	At the meeting was this source, a former business of the source, Ostopenko, Burisma's CFO, I presume Karina Zlovchevsky, who's the daughter of the Burisma CEO, and her husband.
	The conversation was in Russian.
	During the meeting, Podjarsky, who is the CFO, asked the person who's the source on this particular document whether the source was aware of Burisma's board of directors.
	The confidential human source replied no.
	Podjarski advised the board members included, quote, the former president or prime minister of Poland and Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.
	Podjarski said Burisma hired the former president or prime minister of Poland to leverage his contacts in Europe for all prospective oil and gas deals, and they hired Hunter Biden to, quote, protect us through his dad from all kinds of problems.
	CHS asked why Burisma needed to get CHS's assistance regarding the purchase merger of a U.S.-based company when Biden was on their board.
	Podjarski replied that Hunter was not smart and they wanted to get additional counsel.
	Apparently, CHS recalled that this meeting took place around the time Joe Biden made a public statement about former Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin being corrupt and that he should be fired or removed from office.
	The confidential source then told Slavchevsky, who was the head of the company, that due to Shokin, Viktor Shokin's investigation into Burisma, which was made public at the time, would have substantial negative impact on Burisma's prospective IPO in the United States.
	Slavchevsky then replied, quote, don't worry, Hunter will take care of all those issues through his dad.
	Uh, what?
	So, just to clarify, you'll recall that Joe Biden said publicly and openly that he got Viktor Shokin fired for corruption and threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine until Viktor Shokin was fired for corruption.
	Meanwhile, you have a confidential human source who is now reporting to the FBI that he was told by the president of Burisma, which paid Hunter Biden an ungodly sum of money, that Hunter Biden would basically get his dad to fire Viktor Shokin.
	Uh, does that require further investigation?
	You might think so.
	That seems like it might be kind of important.
	Grassley's office said the FBI told the senator the document was related to an ongoing matter.
	Meanwhile, the White House said, quote, it is remarkable that congressional Republicans
	in their eagerness to go after President Biden, regardless of truth, continue to push claims
	that have been debunked for years.
	These claims have reportedly been scrutinized by the Trump Justice Department
	attorney, and a full-time impeachment trial of the former president that centered on these very issues.
	And they've been found to lack credibility.
	Well, show me the full investigation.
	I'd like to see it.
	Did they interview everybody from Burisma?
	Did they even get a hold of anyone from Burisma?
	Did they talk to this confidential human source?
	That's story number one of the day.
	Then we've got story number two.
	This is the front page of the New York Post.
	Apparently, Hunter Biden would dial in his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, on speakerphone into meetings with his overseas business partners, according to testimony expected before Congress this week from Devon Archer, the first son's former best friend.
	Archer 48 is facing his facing jail for his role in a 60 million dollar bond fraud.
	He's scheduled to testify to the House Oversight Committee about meetings he witnessed that were attended by Joe Biden either in person or via speakerphone when Hunter would call his dad and introduce him to foreign business partners or prospective investors.
	One such meeting was in Dubai late in the evening of Friday, December 4th, 2015, after a board meeting of Burisma, which was paying Hunter 83 grand a month as their director.
	That is a lot of money, folks.
	Archer, who is also a director, is expected to testify that after dinner with the Burisma board, he and Hunter traveled six miles north to the Four Seasons Resort Dubai to have a drink with one of Hunter's friends.
	While they were sitting outside at the bar, Vazim Porzharsky, a senior Burisma executive, phoned to ask where they were because Burisma's owner, Mykola Zlovchevsky, needed to speak to Hunter urgently.
	Soon after, the two Ukrainians joined Hunter and Archer at the Four Seasons Bar, and Posharsky asked Hunter, can you ring your dad?
	Hunter then called his father, put him on speaker, placed the phone on the table, and introduced the Ukrainians to Joe Biden by name, as Nikolai and Vadim.
	He also said words to the effect that the Burisma bigwigs, quote, need our support.
	Biden agreed to the Ukrainians, but spoke only in vague pleasantries during the short call, and in other such interactions with Hunter's overseas business partners, Archer is expected to testify.
	Congressional investigators are expected to prove the reason Zlovchevsky requested the urgent phone call with Joe Biden.
	They're going to note the context.
	Three days after the speaker phone call, the then-Vice President, who was the Obama administration's point man for Ukraine, was due to fly to Kyiv to address the Ukrainian parliament, known as the Rada, about the poison of cronyism, corruption, and kleptocracy.
	Ten weeks before that call, U.S.
	Ambassador Jeff Pyatt had given a speech about corruption in Odessa, in which he targeted Zlovchevsky by name.
	By then, Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption.
	Within two months, he would seize four homes in Kiev, two plots of land in Rolls-Royce belonging to Slavshevsky.
	One month later, Shokin was fired after Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in USAID to Ukraine.
	In other words, as Shokin's probe gathered pace, Pazharsky, who is one of the people who is over at Burisma, ratcheted up pressure on Ukraine.
	In an email to Hunter and Archer on November 2, 2015, one month before the speakerphone call, Pazharsky explicitly demanded they use their influence to close down the criminal investigation against Burisma.
	This is insane.
	By the way, this is the second Hunter Biden business partner who's testified to this.
	Another former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, recalls Hunter offering to get his dad on the phone during a meeting by the pool at the Chateau Marmont in L.A.
	Bobulinski says, I'm also aware of other Biden family business associates confirming Joe would
	take phone calls from Hunter in the middle of business meetings and would weigh in via speakerphone.
	So in other words, here it seems to be that here is the way that this worked.
	The way that this worked is that everybody knew that Hunter was a go-between for Joe.
	Joe would get on the phone and say vague phrases, and then Hunter would spin that into an amazing amount of money for himself and for his family members, which presumably he would then distribute to his dad.
	Now, by the way, the money doesn't actually have to hit dad's bank account for Hunter to be spending money on his dad's expenses.
	Hunter could be covering house expenses.
	Hunter could be covering car expenses.
	Hunter could be covering all that stuff.
	And all Joe has to do is get on the phone every so often and say, fake things.
	Oh, I love my son, Hunter.
	He's really a good guy.
	And then Hunter would be like, thanks, Dad.
	Hang up the phone and turn to his friends at Burisma and be like, see, my dad's the vice president.
	He'll take care of it.
	And then, as it turns out, Joe Biden did take care of it in a way that helped Burisma.
	So what you have here is the motive, the means, and the opportunity, and the thing that actually happened.
	That's what you have here.
	According to not one, but two witnesses, right?
	Tony Bobulinski has already talked about this.
	Devon Archer is now also talking about this.
	Remember that time that Joe Biden said he had no knowledge of his son's business activities?
	Remember that?
	And he was lying?
	Remember that?
	Because he clearly is lying at this point.
	And again, all of that is coming at the same time as that other memo suggesting that Zlochevsky told an FBI informant in 2016 that he paid a $10 million bribe to Joe and Hunter Biden to ensure that Shokin was fired.
	Zlochevsky also allegedly claimed to have two recordings of conversations, including Biden, and another 15 recordings involving Hunter, as well as many text messages and two documents the informant understood to be wire transfer statements, bank records that record payments to the Bidens, presumably in exchange for Shokin's firing.
	Zlochevsky, in that document, calls Joe Biden the big guy.
	Archer also is expected to testify that the big guy was a nickname used by Hunter's business partners to refer to his dad.
	In a 2017 email to Hunter and Bobulinski, joint business partner James Gillier outlined percentage equity in CEFC, which paid a bajillion dollars to Hunter Biden, with 10% held by age, said Hunter, for the big guy.
	This is insane.
	So, by the way, do I think all this is going to break wide open?
	I do.
	I actually think this is all going to break wide.
	The media will do its best to squash it and pretend none of it's happening.
	You already have MSNBC's Ali Velshi just blowing off all these investigations.
	They're a waste of time, according to Ali Velshi.
	Now, if you thought a hearing with two IRS whistleblowers was going to be tame, you'd be wrong.
	That hearing quickly devolved when the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene displayed explicit photographs of Hunter Biden to the committee.
	This is the reality of the Republican investigation into the so-called Biden crime family.
	It's seemingly riddled with stunts and conspiracies.
	Another facet of the Hunter Biden investigation centers around his business dealings with the Ukrainian national gas company called Burisma.
	That little part is true.
	Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma.
	And Joe Biden did push Ukraine to remove its top prosecutor.
	But that was because the prosecutor was seen as categorically corrupt by the international community.
	Okay.
	Well, a lot of people are seen as categorically corrupt by the international community, including half of Ukraine.
	I didn't see Joe Biden putting a lot of pressure on that.
	Did you?
	This one just happened to benefit his son.
	And you now have multiple sources who are testifying to the relationship between Burisma, Hunter, and Joe.
	You're just going to blow all that away and tell about Donald Trump in January 6th?
	We're still doing this?
	You know, he's the president right now.
	The guy we're talking about.
	You know who's still occupying the White House?
	Hunter.
	He's still walking around the White House.
	After pleading guilty to crimes.
	Amazing.
	Amazing stuff.
	Okay, meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that the situation in Israel is about to break into civil war.
	This is all the headlines today.
	So, let me explain what's happening.
	When Benjamin Netanyahu's current coalition in Israel took over, it's a right-wing coalition.
	It is Likud, plus some right-wing settler parties, plus some right-wing religious parties.
	It's the most sort of right-wing coalition that's ever been elected in Israel.
	They proposed some changes to the Israeli judiciary.
	As I've discussed before on the program, the Israeli judiciary does not work like the American judiciary.
	The American judiciary is there to interpret a written constitution.
	There is no written constitution in Israel.
	The judiciary in the mid-1990s basically decided under the auspices of a man named Aharon Barak that they were going to simply weigh in on every debate, and one of the tools they were going to use to do this is they would simply overturn any law passed by the legislature in Israel that they said was unreasonable.
	Now, if that sounds vague to you, it's because it's wild and insane and vague.
	It's literally the court just saying, I don't like the law we're throwing out.
	It's quote-unquote unreasonable.
	Imagine if you had basically nine Ruth Bader Ginsburg's on the Supreme Court and anytime Republicans passed any law, she just said unreasonable and threw it out.
	That's basically how it's working in Israel.
	There are other problems with the Supreme Court in Israel, including the fact that effectively the Supreme Court selects its own successors.
	There can never be a political shift on the Supreme Court.
	So when the new coalition came into place, they vowed that they were going to remake the judiciary.
	And there are several things they wanted to do.
	One of those would be change how those judges are selected.
	Which is correct, it would make them more answerable to the legislature.
	That was jettisoned, at least for the moment, because of protests.
	The current piece that was just passed in Israel by the Knesset, by the majority in the Knesset, was just saying the judiciary still has the same amount of power it ever had, but it's not allowed to just throw out laws on the basis that they are unreasonable.
	Does that sound crazy to you?
	It shouldn't sound crazy to you, it seems pretty obvious.
	A judiciary is not a legislature, it's an unelected body of people who were appointed by their predecessors.
	They should not have the power to simply say, I don't like a law, therefore it is not a law.
	That is what you would normally call a dictatorship.
	If you have a person who is unelected who sits there and says that based on any reason whatsoever, I can simply say I don't like a law and so we're just not going to do it.
	That is effectively a dictatorship.
	It's effectively a dictatorship, pretty clearly so.
	So, what happened?
	The Knesset, the majority of the Knesset, tried to pass this after months of protests.
	And after they'd already watered down their original proposal, which was a lot more groundbreaking, they watered it down to just this provision, which is incredibly mild.
	And the protests continued, because it basically turned into a big party in the streets of Tel Aviv, and a lot of people in Israel sort of are enjoying the spectacle of being able to shut down streets, and they're sort of enjoying the idea that they can shut down the government.
	And what it's turned into, what it's morphed into, is the opposition in Israel Has effectively tried to grant a veto right to people who are against the elected government of Israel.
	So one of the things that's happened is that Israel has a sort of bizarre military system where everybody is drafted, but then there are certain groups of people who are volunteer reservists.
	So this is particularly true in the Air Force.
	In the Air Force, there are people who have to volunteer to come in once a week in order to keep up on their training in case of a war.
	And then if there's an emergency, they can actually be called back into duty, right?
	They can be activated because they're still part of the reserve, but they're volunteer reservists.
	They said, we are not going to come in for our training unless the government backs off of this proposal.
	And then there were 10,000 volunteer reservists who were like, we're not going to come in for our training unless the government backs off this proposal.
	Now, imagine in the United States for a second that members of the military, like large numbers of members of the military, simply said that if Joe Biden, for example, passes a law with Congress, not even a bad executive order, just a law with Congress, we're not showing up for duty.
	And not only that, we're going to shut down all the streets.
	And not only that, the major labor unions of the United States decided to shut down all the malls, all the schools, everything.
	Unless the elected government of the United States stopped passing a law.
	This would not look very democratic, would it?
	In fact, it would look like the opposite of democracy, because democracy is where you actually elect the leadership, and then the leadership gets to pass things, and if you don't like that, you have another election.
	And believe you me, Israel's had lots of elections.
	Like, five in the last four years.
	So they do elections a lot over there.
	So this notion that the people's voice is never heard is not true.
	They have an election again every five seconds over there.
	So you have a bunch of people in the streets claiming that they are standing in favor of democracy by obstructing the workings of the elected majority in the Knesset, which is absurd.
	And the boycott of the military by members of the military is unprecedented.
	Even going all the way back to, if you know a little bit of Israeli history, in 2006, The Israeli government, under the auspices of Ariel Sharon, pushed forward a pullout from the Gaza Strip.
	There were 10,000 or so Jews living at the northern end of the Gaza Strip, and the Sharon government decided they didn't want Jews living there, and they handed it over to the Palestinians.
	It ended up beautifully.
	Hamas took over.
	But when they did that, the so-called Gaza disengagement, there were mass protests.
	People did this.
	They shut down the streets.
	But no one said, I'm not going in for military duty.
	That is a new thing.
	And no one said, indefinitely, we're going to shut down the country.
	That is also a new thing.
	There's a difference between civil disobedience and we shut down the country for weeks on end.
	We shut down the malls.
	We shut down the banks.
	We shut down the schools.
	Imagine if this happened in the United States.
	It would be utterly undemocratic.
	Now the way that the press covers this in the United States, that the protesters are actually pro-democracy and saying that judges can't simply strike things down on the basis of reasonableness.
	That's somehow now anti-democratic, which is totally crazy.
	And if the current coalition in Israel were to acquiesce to this, if they were to say, your protests mean that we will not pass a law from now on, then they obviously don't have a government.
	At that point, the protesters run the government.
	They could say, we want a tax cut.
	And the protesters go back out in the streets and the reserves say, we're not serving.
	And then you don't actually have an elected government in the state of Israel.
	So they really, really had to do this.
	They didn't have a choice at this point.
	They tried a bunch of compromises.
	They offered everything.
	There's been no budging, no movement from the left.
	The coalition again watered down their own proposal over and over and over and over and the left simply said no.
	They're intransigent.
	Well, this is being used now as a wedge by Joe Biden, who wants to sort of attenuate connections between Israel and the United States.
	Joe Biden is now using this as a wedge.
	He's pretending that he's standing with the Israeli left by standing against judicial reform.
	Now, again, it's kind of ironic because Joe Biden's own party in the United States has proposed things like packing the United States Supreme Court.
	Joe Biden himself has said that the Supreme Court has undermined its own credibility here in the United States.
	He would like to wrest power away from the Supreme Court, you may remember.
	But in Israel, when they try to do that on much more solid grounds, it's anti-democratic.
	So what it's really about is Joe Biden is trying deliberately to undercut a lot of these strong ties between the state of Israel and the United States.
	He's abetted in this by idiots like Thomas Friedman, an incredibly stupid commentator whose only merit in commenting is apparently he goes to foreign countries and he listens to a taxi driver.
	Every Thomas Friedman column is I went to Iran.
	I talked to a taxi driver.
	Apparently, taxi drivers are like the greatest source of information all over the world.
	If ever Uber ends or taxis end and we go to automated driving, Thomas Friedman won't be able to write a column.
	He has an entire piece, however, called Only Biden Can Save Israel Now, which I'm sorry is just a ridiculous statement.
	It's like saying only Biden can save France or only Biden can save the UK.
	Name another country where somebody would say this kind of garbage.
	It's just silly.
	It's absolutely ridiculous.
	Thomas Friedman, who is a joke of a commentator, says, 50 years after the 1973 war, this Jewish democracy urgently needs another airlift to save it from being destroyed from the inside.
	It urgently needs resupply of hard truths, something only you can provide.
	Oh yes, Joe Biden is going to provide hard truths to the Israelis about how to run their internal business.
	Ridiculous.
	So, supposedly, he wants the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Treasury Secretary, Commerce Secretary, Secretary of Agriculture, everybody to call up Netanyahu and let them know that if they pass a judicial reform that says that the judiciary can't randomly strike down laws for no reason at all, that this will Undermine the shared strategic interest in the Middle East.
	So just to be clear, this is an administration that is currently trying to make common cause with the Iranian Ayatollahs who are trying to build a nuclear weapon.
	And Thomas Friedman is encouraging the Biden administration to call up Bibi Netanyahu and tell him that unless you do what I want you to do on the judiciary in internal matter, That we are going to start cutting ties, essentially.
	By the way, again, the idea that Israel's about to slide into a dictatorship is just crap.
	It's just not true.
	But it's been promulgated by the left so that, because when you suggest that your opponents are about to actually enter into a dictatorship, it basically justifies you doing pretty much anything, up to and including apparently advising members of your own community to divest from banks and move their money out and get out of the military and all the rest of this kind of nonsense.
	It's really, really stupid.
	The government had to do it, they really didn't have a choice.
	Because once your government is basically down to, you're passing the law, or you give up all control to protesters in the streets, and to unelected powers.
	I mean, one of those things looks more like fascism than the other.
	And it is not the people who are elected to a position to pass what is, by any measure, an incredibly mild rebuke to the judiciary.
	And by the way, you know where this is going to end?
	In the judiciary!
	Apparently, Yeah, Ira Lapid, who's the leader of the opposition, he's already going to file a lawsuit and he's going to go to the judiciary and there's every shot the judiciary will strike down the wall as unreasonable.
	That's the stupidity of this.
	There's every possibility that after all this is done, the judiciary is going to step in and say, well, you know, now that they've said we can't rule on the basis of reasonableness, we think that's unreasonable.
	And they just strike it down.
	Unbelievable.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	So, Elon Musk, he has now changed the logo of Twitter to X, I assume to sort of unify his brands because, of course, he is the SpaceX guy.
	And Twitter X is apparently going to now be a more fulsome media ecosystem, which, you know, good for him.
	If he can find a way to monetize that, that'd be good, because of course he has far more free speech
	than many of the other outlets that are out there.
	His goal is to presumably start doing video streaming and to monetize all of that, sort of bring in-house.
	So people were talking a little while ago about the threat that Facebook was going to provide
	via threads to Twitter, because they picked up like 10 million users
	in the first week or something.
	And I said at the time, that's not a comp, because they're just porting over everybody
	from Instagram to threads.
	And it turns out that, as per most situations, Threads is already losing its allure for users, adding urgency for new features.
	Apparently, data show user engagement has fallen 70% as executives focus on options like a chronological feed.
	The reason for that is, of course, it's not where the newsmakers go.
	If you're a newsmaker, you go to Twitter.
	And Musk knows that.
	Well, now it appears the threat is actually going the other way.
	Twitter is going to start getting much more into the video business, and that's going to threaten Facebook's stranglehold on a lot of video entities and short-form video and all of the rest.
	So, it'll be interesting to see what Elon Musk does.
	He's doing some seat-of-the-pants flying here, but it's worked for him so far.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	Alright, so thing that I hate number one.
	So, I've absolutely crapped all over Barbie Land and the Barbie movie because it's bad and its values are terrible.
	And as I've said, Greta Gerwig is essentially an icon of social left-wing thinking.
	Who better then to direct The Chronicles of Narnia?
	I'm not kidding you.
	According to Entertainment Weekly, the Barbie director has now been tapped to write and direct at least two films for Netflix based on C.S.
	Lewis' novels.
	She says, I haven't even started wrapping my arms around it, but I'm properly scared of it, which feels like a good place to start.
	I think when I'm scared, it's always a good time.
	Maybe when I stop being scared, it'll be like, maybe I shouldn't do that one.
	No, I'm terrified of it.
	It's extraordinary and it's exciting.
	So I'm just going to point out here that the Chronicles of Narnia are heavily Christian in content.
	C.S.
	Lewis, of course, one of the great apologists for Christianity of the 20th century.
	The Chronicles of Narnia are a very, very thinly veiled retelling of the Gospels.
	And the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Aslan is Jesus.
	I mean, there is clearly, and everyone knows this.
	I mean, it's not as though it's hidden.
	In the same way that the subtext of Barbie is not subtext, it's just text, the subtext of the Chronicles of Narnia is not subtext, it is just text.
	Well, why would you take somebody whose apparent social ethos is wild left-wing feminism and then hand that person the Chronicles of Narnia?
	What is the C.S.
	Lewis estate doing?
	What do they think they are doing by handing this over to Greta Gerwig?
	Honest to God, it's like having Spike Lee direct Pride and Prejudice.
	Like, what are you doing?
	That is not his ideology.
	Pride and Prejudice has some interesting ideological perspectives.
	Spike Lee does not mirror those perspectives.
	Only Hollywood would think, well, what if we took Greta Gerwig and we handed her one of the great Christian novels ever written for kids?
	Let's do that.
	I very much look forward to learning that the White Queen is victim of the patriarchy.
	And that she actually was victimized as a child by evil men, and that's why she became cruel and a witch.
	And the only way that she can truly be healed is by Aslan sacrificing his own patriarchal nature on the altar so she can be queen once again.
	I look forward to learning about that.
	Speaking of perversion of children's entertainment, so the new Snow White is going to be an abomination.
	How do we know it's going to be an abomination?
	Well, first, we had those pictures that showed that Snow White's seven dwarves are actually six large people, like normal-sized people, and one little person.
	But now, we actually have some verbiage from the lady who is Rachel Zegler, who is playing Snow White.
	Again, it's kind of weird because the left is very big on the distinction between white and brown.
	They're very big on this, racially speaking.
	And so, Rachel Zegler is of course diverse.
	She's a person of diverse background because she's Hispanic.
	As I've said before, Snow White is a story about a woman whose skin is as white as snow.
	That's not racist.
	It's just in the story.
	In the same way that Pinocchio is about a wooden doll.
	And if you make the doll out of aluminum, it's a kind of different story.
	Well, I noticed that now she is saying some things about what Snow White is going to be about.
	So Kathleen Kennedy, the entire crew over at You said you were bringing a modern edge to it on stage.
	have decided that never again will they do a traditional fairy tale because
	traditional fairy tales are very often about boys being heroes and girls
	falling in love with boys and that can't be that can't be at all no no more of
	this every main character will now be a female and every main character will be
	an empowered female hero who's a kick-ass lady and and so this is what
	Rachel Zegler says you said you were bringing a modern edge to it on stage
	what do you mean by that I just mean that it's no longer 1937 and we
	absolutely wrote a Snow White.
	She's not going to be saved by the prince.
	She's not going to be saved by the prince, and she's not going to be dreaming about true love.
	She's dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be, and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave, and true.
	And so it's just a really incredible story for, I think, young people everywhere to see themselves in.
	Snow White is running for president.
	Launching my campaign.
	There it is, right there, right?
	Launching my campaign.
	It's all political.
	It's all political.
	So, why not take a piece of IP, you know, like Snow White, first of all, one of the great animated IPs ever, and wreck it.
	You could do that.
	Also, you could take a fairy tale that has been so durable that it has lasted for centuries, and we'll just destroy it.
	We'll make it the same female empowerment story that every single Disney movie has been for the last 20 years.
	We'll do that.
	Except more so.
	She's not dreaming of true love.
	Because girls, by the way, girls should definitely not dream of true love.
	It'd be very, very bad for girls to dream of true love.
	Instead, what they have to dream of is being a single wine slash cat lady at 40 years old and maybe making partner at the big firm before realizing it's too late.
	She should have frozen her eggs.
	That is what we can all aspire to be.
	No more of this true love talk.
	Love?
	Bad.
	Now, what's weird is that no matter how much you tell little girls that they shouldn't aspire to true love, they still do.
	And then when they don't find it, they're very unhappy.
	I'm sorry to break it to you, but feminism has been a giant fail along these lines.
	The natural orientation of woman is to find man and to settle down with man and to have children with man.
	And the natural orientation of man is to find woman and leave his father and mother and cleave to woman and have children and protect them.
	I'm sorry to break it to Disney that this is the case and that no matter how many times you try to re-engineer the children, it's going to fail.
	It'll fail not because they won't listen, they will, but then they will be failures because they will have listened to bad advice.
	She's dreaming about the leader she knows she can be.
	Yes, she too can be a girl boss.
	Snow White, the story of girl bossing.
	So, I think we can all very much look forward to the magic of single wine slash cat lady and the six average sized people of diverse racial and sexual orientations plus one dwarf.
	I know I'll be looking forward to that with bated breath.
	It'll be phenomenal.
	And I'm sure when we do a review of it, that too will go viral.
	Because again, you're not allowed to criticize the religion.
	Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
	You're not going to want to miss it.
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