Ben Shapiro reviews a movie, and the media loves him for it. And then they roast him for wearing a black shirt and jeans to watch a movie dressed as a Barbie and lighting it on fire. Also, Ben Shapiro buys tickets to a movie theater to protest a movie that he doesn t like, and then he burns a bunch of Barbie dolls to protest that movie. And it's a good thing he's wearing black and a black t-shirt, because that's pretty much the only thing you should be wearing when you're watching a movie you don't like, right? Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator who has a problem with the movie "Barbie and Ken" and he wants to burn it. And he's not the only one who's upset by it, because the entire internet is too. And the media's reaction to his review of the movie is...well, let's just say it's not good, and not good at all, and that's not even half as good as the reaction to it is to a guy who's actually seen the movie and decides to burn a Barbie doll to protest it, is even more bad than he'd like to be offended by it. It's pretty bad. And that's what we're all about to talk about in this episode of Thick & Thin, hosted by John Rocha and Matt Knost, which is a show about all things Thick and Thin, and also about everything else. and everything in between. This episode is a must-listen to this episode, and we hope you enjoy it! Also, if you like it, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and tell us what you think about it. We'll be listening to it in the comments section. We're listening to your thoughts on it and we'll be talking about it in a future episode. on the next one, so we'll talk about it on the pod. in the next few days. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. - John Rachael Crowell - John R.S. and Matt McKinnon and Matt Taffer Thanks for listening, Matt, Matt and Matt, we really appreciate your support, love you, love ya, bye, bye. Matt, bye! Love ya. <3 - Your continued support is much appreciated, bye - Matt, your support is so much, bye - Matt
00:00:00.000Okay, 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.
00:00:12.000The 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.
00:00:20.000Because 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.
00:00:27.000If 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.
00:00:35.000And a lot of the reviewers knew that it was bad going in.
00:01:15.000There are articles about my review of this movie in sources as diverse as Newsweek, NBC News, The Daily Beast.
00:01:22.000Everyone'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.
00:01:29.000I take like a match and I light the Barbie stuff on fire.
00:01:35.000The 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.
00:02:07.000That's just what people tend to wear a lot is like a, you know, like a black t-shirt and black.
00:02:11.000I didn't realize this was like a rare and unique bird.
00:02:15.000It 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.
00:02:24.000In 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.
00:02:35.000But the Internet has been flaming Shapiro instead.
00:02:37.000My favorite thing is when they declare the Internet.
00:02:39.000It's like when they say history has judged the Internet, the entire Internet, guys.
00:02:56.000Many 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.
00:03:06.000So 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?
00:03:13.000Yeah, now let me explain to you how the market works.
00:03:17.000Do 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?
00:03:25.000I promise you, it's way more than we spent to go buy those Barbies and some matches and a barbecue.
00:04:00.000So 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.
00:04:10.000The 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?
00:04:19.000So 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.
00:04:26.000As I said in the review, Barbie is a movie that was marketed to children.
00:04:30.000It 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?
00:04:37.000I know, because I have a 9-year-old girl.
00:04:39.000And so, it was clearly marketed at that group.
00:04:41.000And then it was a bait-and-switch, because the entire movie is a feminist diatribe about the evils of the modern patriarchy.
00:04:48.000And 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.
00:04:58.000And then when you notice, they get very upset.
00:05:00.000That's the face tattoo syndrome that I've talked about a thousand times on the show, right?
00:05:03.000When 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?
00:05:06.000You're like, your face tattoo, the thing on your face that you put there so that I would notice it and comment, that thing.
00:05:12.000But if you comment in the wrong, but what they really want is approval.
00:05:14.000If 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.
00:05:21.000Like, there are certain cultural figures, cultural idols, where if you criticize them, you have violated the sacred honor of the Vestal Virgins.
00:07:22.000Okay, to understand, you have to understand that Greta Gerwig is now representative of an actual religious worldview.
00:07:29.000When 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.
00:07:43.000There is an actual religious worldview that cannot be attacked.
00:07:47.000And 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.
00:07:54.000There's a really serious undertone to a lot of this stuff.
00:07:55.000I mean, I actually got some death threats over the Barbie movie.
00:08:43.000If you say that the height of human aspiration is not in fact sexual pleasure
00:08:48.000or quote unquote individualistic pursuit of subjective success,
00:08:52.000That actually there are things you should do in this life that are higher and better.
00:08:55.000If 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.
00:09:07.000And this is the reason that Greta Gerwig is now a religious figure for the left.
00:09:09.000I mean, truly, not like they worship at an altar, not like they actually bring her sacrifices or something like that.
00:09:14.000But 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.
00:09:31.000Because the very beginning of the film is little girls discarding dolls that teach them
00:09:36.000motherhood for dolls that are about consumerism.
00:09:39.000And then the entire movie is about all the unhappiness that results there from.
00:09:43.000And then the very end of the movie is Barbie actively embracing the parts of her that allow
00:09:50.000I 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.
00:09:59.000So Greta Gerwig has a religious worldview.
00:10:36.000The Apostles' Creed, of course, for those unfamiliar with Christian doctrine, is an affirmation of certain core Christian beliefs.
00:10:42.000It's been part of Christian liturgy for centuries at this point.
00:10:46.000Gerwig apparently wrote her own version of the Apostles' Creed, but about Barbie.
00:10:52.000She wrote an Apostles' Creed, but about Barbie.
00:10:55.000Not only that, apparently, she saw the Barbie movie as a way of rebutting certain presumptions about the Bible itself.
00:11:04.000So, for example, the Vogue article points out a biblical parallel with Barbie, according to SlashFilm.com.
00:11:09.000It's notable that Barbie was invented in 1959, but her boyfriend Ken wasn't invented until 1960.
00:11:13.000In 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.
00:11:19.000It would seem that Ken was begat of Barbie, created specifically to be her companion and worshipper.
00:11:24.000Gerwig draws a direct parallel or perpendicular to the book of Genesis.
00:11:27.000She said, quote, Ken was invented after Barbie to burnish Barbie's position in our eyes and in the world.
00:11:31.000That kind of creation myth is the opposite of the creation myth in Genesis.
00:11:37.000So 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.
00:11:51.000That is the thing that is happening here.
00:11:52.000And you're not supposed to notice that.
00:11:54.000And if you do notice that, it makes you bad because this is, in fact, a religious impulse.
00:11:59.000Modern society has gotten rid of the saints.
00:12:01.000Modern society has gotten rid of Judeo-Christian traditional values or demeaned them as completely superfluous.
00:12:06.000In 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.
00:12:14.000And basically, separation is the only, separate but equal, is the only way to do a proper Barbie land.
00:12:19.000In the bizarre Barbie world that has been created by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, her longtime romantic partner.
00:12:25.000Baumbach, 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.
00:12:36.000And they don't give a damn about their kid.
00:12:38.000I mean, these are people who both drink deeply from the well of sort of secular humanist leftism.
00:12:44.000And that is an idolatrous worldview in and of itself, but it demands that you be part of the idolatry.
00:12:50.000And 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.
00:12:58.000When you say that sort of stuff, you have violated a religious precept.
00:13:00.000People are treating this as though you have violated religious scruple because you have.
00:13:05.000And there's, there are lots of spoilers in yesterday's review of Barbie or the weekend's review of Barbie.
00:13:10.000But there is one speech that America Ferreira makes in the Barbie movie that basically is the Apostle's Creed of feminism.
00:13:17.000And it spilled right out there in the middle of the movie.
00:13:18.000It's not like they were hiding the ball here.
00:13:55.000There are women of all shapes and sizes who live happy marriages, who have happy lives.
00:14:00.000The notion that women can't ask for money because that's correct.
00:14:03.000You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.
00:14:05.000You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.
00:14:08.000You're supposed to love being a mother, but also don't talk about your kids all the damn time.
00:14:11.000By the way, I'm not sure who this is describing.
00:14:13.000Everyone I know talks about their kids all the time, and it's wonderful.
00:14:16.000You have to be a career woman, but always be looking out for other people.
00:14:18.000You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane.
00:14:21.000But if you point that out, you're accused of complaining.
00:14:23.000You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women.
00:14:27.000Because 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.
00:14:32.000So find a way to acknowledge that, but always be grateful.
00:14:35.000You 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.
00:15:17.000Try 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.
00:16:28.000I'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.
00:17:02.000Has it ever occurred to you because you're more religious than I am?
00:17:04.000I'm the one here wearing the funny little hat that's testing my belief in God.
00:17:07.000But 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.
00:17:49.000In 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.
00:18:17.000Any 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?
00:18:28.000And it was specifically directed at kids.
00:18:30.000And 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.
00:18:41.000And then we're supposed to pretend that it means nothing.
00:18:50.000Maybe it's that if somebody crosses your apostle's creed, this makes them a heretic, and the heretics must be burned.
00:18:56.000In just a second, we'll talk about another heretic they're attempting to burn.
00:18:58.000First, you may have seen the CEO of Innovation Refunds, Howard Mackler, on TV explaining how they've helped so many small businesses with their ERC tax refunds.
00:19:04.000The ERC is the Employee Retention Credit.
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00:19:39.000It might be able to help your business as well.
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00:20:00.000In 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.
00:20:25.000A 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.
00:20:33.000That'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.
00:20:55.000Because 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.
00:21:01.000What 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.
00:21:10.000And if you say, wait, hold up a second.
00:21:12.000I actually think that people very often live better, more fulfilling lives in small communities with community cohesiveness.
00:21:18.000That's a thing that you're not supposed to say at all.
00:21:20.000And you're certainly supposed to apologize if you do say and Jason Aldean isn't doing that.
00:21:43.000You can see this in the current non-troversy over the Florida curriculum with regard to African American black history.
00:21:51.000If you look at the black history curriculum in the state of Florida, it was written by a couple of black scholars.
00:21:56.000And the curriculum, there's nothing wrong with it.
00:21:58.000I've looked at it, it's 212 pages long.
00:22:01.000It's basically a series of guidelines.
00:22:03.000And a couple of the guidelines that were controversial is one said that slaves sometimes developed skills that they could use for themselves.
00:22:09.000And 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.
00:22:17.000Literally, 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.
00:23:13.000Well, 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.
00:23:22.000So the media are just glossing right over this, for the most part, in order to prop up the lies that Kamala Harris is telling.
00:23:30.000And again, Kamala Harris's lies are directed against DeSantis.
00:23:55.000It looks like he's collapsing in on himself.
00:23:56.000And what that means, if he is not healthy enough to run, is that Kamala Harris becomes the de facto Democratic nominee.
00:24:01.000If that happens, she thinks she may have to run against DeSantis.
00:24:04.000And so she's been trumping up this garbage that DeSantis is some sort of cruel, vicious racist.
00:24:07.000So 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.
00:24:17.000Here's Ron DeSantis responding to those charges over the weekend.
00:24:20.000I didn't do it and I wasn't involved in it.
00:24:23.000But 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.
00:24:37.000But the reality is all of that is rooted in whatever is factual.
00:25:06.000It'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.
00:25:12.000Biden campaign chair Cedric Richmond actually went on CNN with Jim Acosta.
00:25:16.000And ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
00:25:19.000And Cedric Richmond then blasted Ron DeSantis for quote-unquote attacking Kamala Harris.
00:25:25.000What's your response to what Florida Governor DeSantis had to say about this?
00:25:36.000But 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
00:25:57.000And I think that he is now embarking on going as far to the right as he possibly can just
00:26:06.000to see if he can be the extremist candidate.
00:26:09.000Again, they're trumping this up in order to go after DeSantis.
00:26:11.000This 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.
00:26:21.000Which brings us to the January 6th indictment against Donald Trump.
00:26:25.000Now, 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.
00:26:35.000Does that mean he should be prosecuted?
00:26:36.000And here's the thing that everybody on the right is saying.
00:26:37.000The real reason you're going after Trump is because he violated your scruples, not because you're actually afraid of him violating the law.
00:26:43.000The thing that Trump has done that offended you so much, he did by running in 2015-2016.
00:26:49.000You were handing him Emmy awards until then.
00:26:52.000And then you turned on him because he violated your religious precepts.
00:26:57.000Well, this is the perception of the right, and they're not wrong.
00:26:59.000Again, 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.
00:27:11.000We're going to get to that in just one second.
00:27:13.000When you see that double standard, this is why people on the right are so intensely angry.
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00:28:42.000It'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.
00:28:57.000All three of these, unless they have serious evidence of obstruction, are really, really, really weak.
00:29:01.000Conspiracy to defraud the government is usually you try to steal money from the actual government of the United States.
00:29:06.000When 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.
00:29:14.000A 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.
00:29:22.000It is not me saying something about a vote that I didn't particularly like.
00:29:27.000According 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.
00:29:34.000But he didn't keep anybody from voting.
00:29:36.000So, again, it's going to be very difficult to see how that works.
00:29:39.000When 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.
00:29:51.000The broadly written statute prohibits agreement to obstruct the lawful function of the government by deceitful or dishonest means.
00:29:57.000One federal judge has suggested Trump violated it, but again, I've never seen it interpreted in this particular way on a practical level.
00:30:03.000And when it comes to obstruction of an official proceeding, again, they're going to have to prove that Trump essentially tried to bribe somebody.
00:30:14.000It'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.
00:30:25.000The 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.
00:30:31.000Considering 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.
00:30:51.000Obviously, the multiple business fraud counts in New York are also serious.
00:30:56.000But 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.
00:31:04.000It's hard to imagine a president being involved in more serious misconduct.
00:31:13.000The game from the left is it doesn't matter what you charge Trump with, you got to charge him with something.
00:31:17.000And then, of course, if we do that, then if you guys defend Trump from even spurious charges, this means that you're bad.
00:31:23.000The 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.
00:31:29.000Well, I mean, you're the ones trying to put him in.
00:31:32.000So if it does, that would be on you, not on anybody else.
00:31:34.000I'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.
00:31:41.000The Washington Post published a piece that really stuck out to me about how intertwined Donald Trump's campaign has become with his legal defense.
00:31:48.000According to the piece, just over half of the money he raised last quarter went to an affiliated PAC that is footing his legal bills.
00:31:55.000Your Republican colleagues continue to support him, of course, but is this campaign becoming increasingly about keeping him out of prison?
00:32:02.000And how is that even allowed for him to use so much of that money for his own legal defense?
00:32:09.000It's all, it's all again, it feels like a game.
00:32:14.000And 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.
00:32:20.000And that corruption extends to Hunter Biden as well.
00:32:24.000We 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.
00:32:32.000First 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.
00:32:38.000Again, 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.
00:32:48.000He literally says that in a text message to his own kid.
00:32:52.000He's like, yeah, well, at least you don't have to pay all of dad's bills.
00:32:57.000He 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.
00:35:21.000It is a confidential human source who reported the following.
00:35:23.000In 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.
00:35:43.000The 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.
00:35:53.000Burisma was willing to purchase that U.S.-based entity for $20 to $30 million.
00:35:55.000At 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.
00:36:09.000During 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.
00:36:20.000The confidential human source replied no.
00:36:22.000Podjarski advised the board members included, quote, the former president or prime minister of Poland and Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.
00:36:28.000Podjarski 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.
00:36:40.000CHS 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.
00:36:46.000Podjarski replied that Hunter was not smart and they wanted to get additional counsel.
00:36:52.000Apparently, 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.
00:37:03.000The 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.
00:37:15.000Slavchevsky then replied, quote, don't worry, Hunter will take care of all those issues through his dad.
00:37:23.000So, 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.
00:37:33.000Meanwhile, 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.
00:37:46.000Uh, does that require further investigation?
00:38:27.000This is the front page of the New York Post.
00:38:29.000Apparently, 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.
00:38:41.000Archer 48 is facing his facing jail for his role in a 60 million dollar bond fraud.
00:38:45.000He'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.
00:38:57.000One 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.
00:39:07.000Archer, 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.
00:39:16.000While 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.
00:39:26.000Soon after, the two Ukrainians joined Hunter and Archer at the Four Seasons Bar, and Posharsky asked Hunter, can you ring your dad?
00:39:33.000Hunter 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.
00:39:41.000He also said words to the effect that the Burisma bigwigs, quote, need our support.
00:39:46.000Biden 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.
00:39:54.000Congressional investigators are expected to prove the reason Zlovchevsky requested the urgent phone call with Joe Biden.
00:40:00.000Three 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.
00:40:13.000Ambassador Jeff Pyatt had given a speech about corruption in Odessa, in which he targeted Zlovchevsky by name.
00:40:18.000By then, Viktor Shokin was investigating Burisma for corruption.
00:40:22.000Within two months, he would seize four homes in Kiev, two plots of land in Rolls-Royce belonging to Slavshevsky.
00:40:29.000One month later, Shokin was fired after Joe Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in USAID to Ukraine.
00:40:37.000In 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.
00:40:45.000In 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.
00:40:58.000By the way, this is the second Hunter Biden business partner who's testified to this.
00:41:02.000Another 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.
00:41:09.000Bobulinski says, I'm also aware of other Biden family business associates confirming Joe would
00:41:13.000take phone calls from Hunter in the middle of business meetings and would weigh in via speakerphone.
00:41:16.000So in other words, here it seems to be that here is the way that this worked.
00:41:22.000The way that this worked is that everybody knew that Hunter was a go-between for Joe.
00:41:26.000Joe 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.
00:41:34.000Now, 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.
00:41:39.000Hunter could be covering house expenses.
00:41:42.000Hunter could be covering car expenses.
00:41:44.000Hunter could be covering all that stuff.
00:41:45.000And all Joe has to do is get on the phone every so often and say, fake things.
00:42:21.000Because he clearly is lying at this point.
00:42:24.000And 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.
00:42:35.000Zlochevsky 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.
00:42:49.000Zlochevsky, in that document, calls Joe Biden the big guy.
00:42:53.000Archer also is expected to testify that the big guy was a nickname used by Hunter's business partners to refer to his dad.
00:42:59.000In 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.
00:43:17.000I actually think this is all going to break wide.
00:43:18.000The media will do its best to squash it and pretend none of it's happening.
00:43:21.000You already have MSNBC's Ali Velshi just blowing off all these investigations.
00:43:26.000They're a waste of time, according to Ali Velshi.
00:43:27.000Now, if you thought a hearing with two IRS whistleblowers was going to be tame, you'd be wrong.
00:43:33.000That hearing quickly devolved when the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene displayed explicit photographs of Hunter Biden to the committee.
00:43:41.000This is the reality of the Republican investigation into the so-called Biden crime family.
00:43:46.000It's seemingly riddled with stunts and conspiracies.
00:43:49.000Another facet of the Hunter Biden investigation centers around his business dealings with the Ukrainian national gas company called Burisma.
00:44:54.000When Benjamin Netanyahu's current coalition in Israel took over, it's a right-wing coalition.
00:44:58.000It is Likud, plus some right-wing settler parties, plus some right-wing religious parties.
00:45:02.000It's the most sort of right-wing coalition that's ever been elected in Israel.
00:45:05.000They proposed some changes to the Israeli judiciary.
00:45:08.000As I've discussed before on the program, the Israeli judiciary does not work like the American judiciary.
00:45:12.000The American judiciary is there to interpret a written constitution.
00:45:15.000There is no written constitution in Israel.
00:45:17.000The 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.
00:45:30.000Now, if that sounds vague to you, it's because it's wild and insane and vague.
00:45:34.000It's literally the court just saying, I don't like the law we're throwing out.
00:45:38.000Imagine 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.
00:45:45.000That's basically how it's working in Israel.
00:45:46.000There are other problems with the Supreme Court in Israel, including the fact that effectively the Supreme Court selects its own successors.
00:45:51.000There can never be a political shift on the Supreme Court.
00:45:54.000So when the new coalition came into place, they vowed that they were going to remake the judiciary.
00:45:58.000And there are several things they wanted to do.
00:46:00.000One of those would be change how those judges are selected.
00:46:04.000Which is correct, it would make them more answerable to the legislature.
00:46:07.000That was jettisoned, at least for the moment, because of protests.
00:46:10.000The 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.
00:46:23.000It shouldn't sound crazy to you, it seems pretty obvious.
00:46:25.000A judiciary is not a legislature, it's an unelected body of people who were appointed by their predecessors.
00:46:31.000They should not have the power to simply say, I don't like a law, therefore it is not a law.
00:46:35.000That is what you would normally call a dictatorship.
00:46:37.000If 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.
00:46:51.000The Knesset, the majority of the Knesset, tried to pass this after months of protests.
00:46:55.000And 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.
00:47:04.000And 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.
00:47:14.000And 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.
00:47:26.000So 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.
00:47:33.000So this is particularly true in the Air Force.
00:47:35.000In 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.
00:47:41.000And then if there's an emergency, they can actually be called back into duty, right?
00:47:44.000They can be activated because they're still part of the reserve, but they're volunteer reservists.
00:47:46.000They said, we are not going to come in for our training unless the government backs off of this proposal.
00:47:51.000And 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.
00:47:57.000Now, 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.
00:48:10.000And not only that, we're going to shut down all the streets.
00:48:13.000And not only that, the major labor unions of the United States decided to shut down all the malls, all the schools, everything.
00:48:19.000Unless the elected government of the United States stopped passing a law.
00:48:23.000This would not look very democratic, would it?
00:48:25.000In 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.
00:48:33.000And believe you me, Israel's had lots of elections.
00:48:38.000So they do elections a lot over there.
00:48:40.000So this notion that the people's voice is never heard is not true.
00:48:42.000They have an election again every five seconds over there.
00:48:44.000So 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.
00:48:53.000And the boycott of the military by members of the military is unprecedented.
00:48:58.000Even 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.
00:49:09.000There 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.
00:49:43.000Now 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.
00:49:51.000That's somehow now anti-democratic, which is totally crazy.
00:49:53.000And 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.
00:50:01.000At that point, the protesters run the government.
00:50:26.000Well, this is being used now as a wedge by Joe Biden, who wants to sort of attenuate connections between Israel and the United States.
00:50:33.000Joe Biden is now using this as a wedge.
00:50:34.000He's pretending that he's standing with the Israeli left by standing against judicial reform.
00:50:38.000Now, 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.
00:50:44.000Joe Biden himself has said that the Supreme Court has undermined its own credibility here in the United States.
00:50:49.000He would like to wrest power away from the Supreme Court, you may remember.
00:50:52.000But in Israel, when they try to do that on much more solid grounds, it's anti-democratic.
00:50:56.000So 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.
00:51:03.000He'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.
00:51:12.000Every Thomas Friedman column is I went to Iran.
00:51:38.000Thomas 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.
00:51:47.000It urgently needs resupply of hard truths, something only you can provide.
00:51:52.000Oh yes, Joe Biden is going to provide hard truths to the Israelis about how to run their internal business.
00:51:59.000So, 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.
00:52:20.000So 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.
00:52:27.000And 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.
00:52:40.000By the way, again, the idea that Israel's about to slide into a dictatorship is just crap.
00:52:45.000But 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.
00:53:04.000The government had to do it, they really didn't have a choice.
00:53:06.000Because 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.
00:53:17.000I mean, one of those things looks more like fascism than the other.
00:53:20.000And 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.
00:53:28.000And by the way, you know where this is going to end?
00:53:32.000Apparently, 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.
00:53:45.000There'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.
00:55:03.000Well, now it appears the threat is actually going the other way.
00:55:05.000Twitter 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.
00:55:14.000So, it'll be interesting to see what Elon Musk does.
00:55:16.000He's doing some seat-of-the-pants flying here, but it's worked for him so far.
00:55:19.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:55:25.000Alright, so thing that I hate number one.
00:55:27.000So, I've absolutely crapped all over Barbie Land and the Barbie movie because it's bad and its values are terrible.
00:55:34.000And as I've said, Greta Gerwig is essentially an icon of social left-wing thinking.
00:55:40.000Who better then to direct The Chronicles of Narnia?
00:55:46.000According to Entertainment Weekly, the Barbie director has now been tapped to write and direct at least two films for Netflix based on C.S.
00:56:13.000Lewis, of course, one of the great apologists for Christianity of the 20th century.
00:56:17.000The Chronicles of Narnia are a very, very thinly veiled retelling of the Gospels.
00:56:22.000And the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is Aslan is Jesus.
00:56:26.000I mean, there is clearly, and everyone knows this.
00:56:29.000I mean, it's not as though it's hidden.
00:56:32.000In 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.
00:56:38.000Well, why would you take somebody whose apparent social ethos is wild left-wing feminism and then hand that person the Chronicles of Narnia?
00:57:15.000I very much look forward to learning that the White Queen is victim of the patriarchy.
00:57:19.000And that she actually was victimized as a child by evil men, and that's why she became cruel and a witch.
00:57:24.000And 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.
00:57:33.000I look forward to learning about that.
00:57:33.000Speaking of perversion of children's entertainment, so the new Snow White is going to be an abomination.
00:57:40.000How do we know it's going to be an abomination?
00:57:41.000Well, 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.
00:57:50.000But now, we actually have some verbiage from the lady who is Rachel Zegler, who is playing Snow White.
00:57:58.000Again, it's kind of weird because the left is very big on the distinction between white and brown.
00:58:03.000They're very big on this, racially speaking.
00:58:05.000And so, Rachel Zegler is of course diverse.
00:58:06.000She's a person of diverse background because she's Hispanic.
00:58:09.000As I've said before, Snow White is a story about a woman whose skin is as white as snow.
00:59:08.000She's not going to be saved by the prince.
00:59:10.000She's not going to be saved by the prince, and she's not going to be dreaming about true love.
00:59:14.000She'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.
00:59:21.000And so it's just a really incredible story for, I think, young people everywhere to see themselves in.
00:59:59.000Because girls, by the way, girls should definitely not dream of true love.
01:00:02.000It'd be very, very bad for girls to dream of true love.
01:00:04.000Instead, 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.
01:00:19.000Now, what's weird is that no matter how much you tell little girls that they shouldn't aspire to true love, they still do.
01:00:24.000And then when they don't find it, they're very unhappy.
01:00:27.000I'm sorry to break it to you, but feminism has been a giant fail along these lines.
01:00:30.000The natural orientation of woman is to find man and to settle down with man and to have children with man.
01:00:36.000And 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.
01:00:43.000I'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.
01:00:51.000It'll fail not because they won't listen, they will, but then they will be failures because they will have listened to bad advice.
01:00:56.000She's dreaming about the leader she knows she can be.
01:01:00.000Snow White, the story of girl bossing.
01:01:01.000So, 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.
01:01:13.000I know I'll be looking forward to that with bated breath.