Mueller has access to thousands of Trump transition emails. Republicans are finally on the verge of a breakthrough. President Trump has a strategy to deal with Robert Mueller. The Democrats are trying to defend Al Franken. And I will have a full and complete breakdown of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, complete with SPOILERS. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us your own podcast recommendations! Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date on all things political and current events. Today's episode features: - The latest on the Mueller investigation - Is there any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion? - What does that have to do with the Iran nuclear deal? - Is it possible that the Obama administration colluded with the Russian government to get rid of Iran's nuclear program? - Is this a good or bad thing? - And is this even a good thing at all? Thanks to Ring for sponsoring the show! Get $150 off a Ring of Security Kit when you go to Ring.That s Ring. That s Ring, that's Ring, That's Ring! Ben Shapiro's favorite product that keeps your home safe, and keeps you in the loop on what's going bump in the night! Thanks, Ben Shapiro Ring of security kit, when things go bumping in your night out and you know what it's going to keep you safe, keep your family safe, you'll immediately know what you're going to know what to look out for in the dark, and keep your house safe, no matter where you go. . Thanks Ring, you're not in your house, Ring. Ben, that s going to save up to $150, you know that you'll be safe, so they know that we sent you, you sent me a bunch of stuff like that! . . . and I can t wait to hear about it! - Ben, Ben, That s RING OF SECURING YOU, Ring's Floodlight Cam, get $150 OFF $150 at Ring, so you know you'll know what that's gonna keep you out of trouble, you ll know that it's not going to go bump in your doorbells, and you'll get it, right, you can do it, you won t be there, right?! RING of Security kit, right now, when you can save $150 by ringing in the doorbell, right?
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00:01:56.000Okay, so we begin today with the latest on the Mueller investigation.
00:02:04.000So it now appears that Robert Mueller, the special investigator into Trump-Russia collusion, he's obtained tens of thousands of Trump transition emails.
00:02:11.000Now you may ask, what exactly do the Trump transition emails have to do with collusion during the election cycle?
00:02:19.000But this is sort of the problem for the Mueller investigation, which seems to be falling apart pretty quickly.
00:02:23.000All of the crimes they are now investigating have to do with secondary crimes, lying to the FBI, maybe transition stuff, but nothing to do with that central contention, right?
00:02:31.000That Trump and the Russians worked together to rig the 2016 elections against Hillary Clinton.
00:02:36.000This was the entire motivating factor behind the investigations in 2016.
00:02:39.000It's been the entire reason Democrats have been so animated about it now.
00:02:46.000Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.
00:02:58.000The emails included 12 accounts, one of which contained about 7,000 emails.
00:03:02.000The accounts include the team's political leadership and foreign policy team, according to the sources.
00:03:07.000Apparently Mueller did this perfectly legally.
00:03:09.000He went through the GSA, the General Services Administration.
00:03:12.000They host the transition email system, and they have capacity to read all these emails.
00:03:16.000The transition emails include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation processes, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, et cetera.
00:03:27.000What does that have to do with collusion?
00:03:44.000I reported this over at Daily Wire today.
00:03:47.000There's clear evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Russian government to free an Islamic terrorist responsible for the deaths of Americans in order to appease Iran to pave the way for the Obama administration's Iran nuclear deal.
00:03:58.000This is a report from Josh Meyer of Politico.
00:04:03.000A Lebanese arms dealer and quote, suspected top Hezbollah operative, whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin, was captured by the Czechs in 2014.
00:04:19.000The Obama administration did not push for extradition.
00:04:22.000Instead, Fayyad ended up in Lebanon, where he's back at his terrorist work.
00:04:25.000He's particularly active in supplying weapons to the barbarous Syrian regime.
00:04:29.000That's not the only thing the Obama administration did on behalf of Lebanese terrorists.
00:04:33.000According to the Politico, administration officials also blocked or undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives.
00:04:39.000And when Project Cassandra agents and other investigators sought repeatedly to investigate and prosecute Abdullah Safiyyedine, Hezbollah's longtime envoy to Iran, whom they considered the lynchpin of Hezbollah's criminal network, the Justice Department refused.
00:04:51.000In other words, the Obama administration was working with the Russian government to make sure that there was no crackdown on Hezbollah because they were afraid it would take off the Russians.
00:04:58.000We also know President Obama was offering flexibility to the Russians in the middle of the 2012 election, saying that he had flexibility after the election cycle if Putin would just back off all of his concerns about missile defense for the moment.
00:05:10.000All of which is to say, there's a lot more evidence of actual Russian collusion among the Obama administration members than there is among the Trump administration members at this point, at least with regard to elections and even with regard to policy.
00:05:21.000Because it turns out that even what Mike Flynn was trying to do, i.e.
00:05:24.000get Russia to not push a resolution at the UN condemning Israel, didn't work.
00:05:28.000So the actual evidence of collusion is basically nil, which means that Trump has the upper hand now in the investigation.
00:05:34.000Apparently Trump is pretty sanguine about it.
00:05:36.000There's a report out today that Trump expects Mueller to basically clear Trump himself in the very near future.
00:05:41.000And that's why Trump said over the weekend, he was asked, are you going to fire Mueller?
00:06:28.000And it appears the president has come to the same conclusion, especially because it appears the president is now winning on a series of subjects.
00:06:34.000Tax cuts are supposed to be voted on tomorrow in the House and the Senate, so we will have a tax reform bill before Christmas.
00:06:39.000That tax reform bill does lower taxes for virtually everyone in the United States, including corporations.
00:06:44.000You may have quibbles with the way that it's structured.
00:06:49.000It also gets rid of the individual mandate as it currently stands.
00:06:52.000That means you will not be mandated to buy your crappy Obamacare program anymore.
00:06:56.000The left says, well, that's terrible because now people are going to lose their health insurance.
00:07:00.000Well, the people losing their health insurance are people who don't want to buy their health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
00:07:05.000So this is a big win for Trump if this happens.
00:07:07.000It's sort of partial repeal of Obamacare included in the tax reform.
00:07:12.000There's a report out today that the last quarter's growth has been revised upwards to almost 4% GDP growth, which is an amazing level of growth.
00:08:17.000GOP Senator Lankford, I believe he's from Oklahoma, he comes forward and he says, yeah, there's no reason to end this investigation at this point.
00:08:24.000Yeah, it's very serious to be able to have someone inside.
00:08:26.000What they've got to determine is, was he directing the investigation one way or the other while he was on the investigation?
00:08:32.000Is that something they can go back and repair and look and see if there's any kind of bias that's in it?
00:08:36.000Obviously, I don't think it taints the entire process, but it certainly taints that season of it, and it's something you should look at with any political investigation that he was on at the time.
00:08:45.000And the good news for President Trump is that even if the investigation goes badly for him at this point, it's been so politicized that there's going to be a bevy of people who come out and say this thing is just too political.
00:08:54.000Jeanine Pirro, of course, will lead the way on Fox News.
00:08:56.000She says that the FBI agents involved should be jailed.
00:08:58.000Now, this is over the top, but it's also the angle a lot of people are going to take no matter how this investigation goes.
00:09:04.000It all started when Cardinal Comey destroyed our FBI with political hacks to set events in motion to destroy the Republic because they didn't like the man we chose to be our president.
00:09:19.000Well, it's time to take them out in cuffs.
00:09:24.000Okay, so this is obviously over the top from Jeanine Pirro, but there will be a lot of people who do sort of say this, right?
00:09:30.000Who move in this direction, and Trump knows it.
00:09:43.000The insane media bias being exhibited in pursuit of President Trump.
00:09:48.000And it really is insane, and how they're exploding all over themselves.
00:09:51.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Thrive Market.
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00:12:52.000And so, I mean, number one, I guess this is a prediction that we can now take to the bank because he's good at predicting things as the president.
00:12:58.000But this idea that Congress is going to go well because Trump is going well is not really accurate.
00:13:03.000That said, Trump's accomplishments this year are greater than they appeared like they were going to be, say, three months ago.
00:13:09.000Not only do we have Gorsuch, we have 12 appellate court nominees who have been confirmed.
00:13:13.000We have a tax bill that looks like it's going to go through, repeal of the individual mandate on foreign policy, the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, the kickback against the Iran nuclear deal.
00:13:26.000I mean, there's no question that Trump and Congress are moving.
00:13:28.000They're moving slower than I would like.
00:13:30.000Their first real major legislative accomplishment will be this tax reform, but it is a major accomplishment for him, and he needs it badly.
00:13:36.000Right now, the poll on the tax bills are not great.
00:13:40.000There's a new Monmouth poll out today showing 26% approve, 47% disapprove.
00:13:45.00050% think their own taxes will go up versus 14% who say down.
00:15:26.000I remember the days, Brian, when what you saw on pages like Breitbart were considered the fringe.
00:15:30.000It was considered so far beyond the mainstream, not even Fox News would touch what was on those pages.
00:15:35.000Now, Fox is going almost further than Breitbart.
00:15:37.000And you have right now, at this second, there's an ad running in different markets with Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren advocating and attacking the Miller investigation.
00:15:47.000Okay, so, you know, I like Kurt, but when Kurt does this and CNN humors it, this is a pot kettle situation, okay?
00:15:54.000CNN suggesting that other networks are involved in propaganda.
00:15:58.000Let me just show you a panel that was talking about President Trump and misogyny, okay?
00:16:03.000If this does not look like propaganda to you, then I don't know what would.
00:16:07.000Do you agree with Mike that this has helped Kirsten Gillibrand?
00:16:12.000The one piece I disagree with is that President Trump, if this was a one-off, that would be one thing.
00:16:18.000But this is a guy who was misogyny in his DNA, who ran as a misogynist.
00:16:22.000I'm sure that wasn't on his bumper sticker, but that was part of who he was and who he ran as.
00:16:26.000So this is completely aligned with that.
00:16:28.000That's why people heard what they heard from the tweet.
00:16:31.000Jen Psaki, CNN political commentator, also the former State Department spokesperson for Barack Obama, right?
00:16:37.000But they're not a propaganda network, right?
00:16:38.000It's not propaganda when Fareed Zakaria over at CNN says that the Republican tax plan is ushering in a bleak future, right?
00:16:44.000The universe is going to end because of Republican tax plans.
00:16:47.000The medium and long-term effects of the plan are clear.
00:16:50.000A massive drop in public investment, which will come on the heels of decades of declining spending as a percentage of GDP on infrastructure, scientific research, skills training and core government agencies.
00:17:05.000The United States cannot coast on past investments forever.
00:17:09.000And with this legislation, we are ushering in a bleak future.
00:17:46.000In the big spending in the United States, 66% of the federal budget, two-thirds of the federal budget, is consumed by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
00:17:53.000That's where restructuring needs to take place.
00:17:55.000But you wonder why the media is losing credibility at the same time they're attacking the tax plan as the end of the world?
00:18:02.000Americans have a bad opinion of this because the media still has power.
00:18:05.000Now, this is one area where I think the right is wrong.
00:18:07.000The right has been saying for years, well, we now have the upper hand.
00:18:12.000People have stopped listening to the media on their character descriptions.
00:18:15.000When the media say that Trump is a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, all this stuff,
00:18:19.000The American people largely just ignore because they'll make their own judgment on that.
00:18:22.000When it comes to the material in bills, the American people don't have time to read a 1,000-page tax bill, and they tend to take the talking points that they see on the TV.
00:18:30.000So if you just watch Fareed Zachariah, what you would assume is that the Republicans just cut spending by an enormous percentage, as opposed to cutting taxes by an enormous percentage.
00:18:37.000Because nowhere in there does Fareed Zachariah talk about what actually happens to your taxes.
00:18:45.000A spending plan would be about spending reduction.
00:18:48.000There's nothing about spending in the tax plan.
00:18:50.000This just demonstrates, again, the left wants to say Fox is a propaganda outlet.
00:18:55.000Listen, Fox has its slant, but the media have their own slant, and President Trump is not wrong to knock the media's slant on all of this.
00:19:01.000The media have been imploding and destroying their own credibility on this stuff for quite a while, so it's not a tremendous shock.
00:19:08.000And this sets up a serious problem for Democrats.
00:19:11.000A really serious problem for Democrats.
00:19:12.000It sets up a problem that the Democrats have set up outsized expectations for their own party.
00:19:29.000I mean, the entire Democratic base believes that Trump is on the verge of falling over.
00:19:32.000If you talk to a Democrat, it sounds like Trump is going to be impeached tomorrow, or Trump is going to resign tomorrow, or Trump is going to die tomorrow.
00:19:49.000They're talking this nonsense for a while, and they're making it sound as though they're on the verge of impeaching President Trump, but the truth is, they have no intention of doing any of those things.
00:19:59.000They're not going to impeach President Trump, because it would not be politically beneficial for them to impeach President Trump.
00:20:04.000If they were to move against President Trump, Trump would actually gain in the polls, the same way that Bill Clinton gained in the polls in 1998 when the Republicans moved for impeachment.
00:20:11.000If they were to go after Trump unfairly, there would be a rally around the Trump effect.
00:20:23.000They have been promising that President Trump is going to leave office, an ignominious disgrace.
00:20:27.000Not that he's not going to be re-elected, but that he's going to have to resign due to financial impropriety, corruption, collusion with the Russians.
00:20:36.000And the Democrats are beginning to sense that they are in serious trouble here.
00:20:39.000The Democrats are beginning to sense that if they push this thing too hard, there could be a real problem for them.
00:20:43.000So Doug Jones, the recently elected senator from Alabama, Democrat, he was asked, should President Trump be—should he resign over sexual harassment allegations?
00:20:51.000And Doug Jones knows there's going to be blowback to him and other Democrats if they push this way.
00:20:56.000So here's Jake Tapper rightly pressing him on it, and Doug Jones basically saying, no, we're going to leave Trump in place.
00:21:01.000Where I am on that right now is that those allegations were made before the election.
00:21:06.000And so people had an opportunity to judge before that election.
00:21:10.000I think we need to move on and not get distracted by those issues.
00:21:13.000Let's get on with the real issues that are facing people of this country right now.
00:21:18.000And I don't think that the president ought to resign at this point.
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00:23:32.000What happens if they start moving along the lines of Tim Ryan?
00:23:34.000Tim Ryan is a Democratic representative from Ohio who says that he may want to work with President Trump now.
00:23:40.000What happens if the Democrats decide to be practical instead of feeding the pie-in-the-sky frenzy that the Bernie bros want, or the Hillary Heritans are interested in?
00:23:49.000Here's Tim Ryan explaining that he'd like to work with the President.
00:23:53.000And what I'm saying is that this isn't going to do it.
00:23:56.000President Bush said, cut taxes on the wealthiest.
00:24:51.000Trump may have the Democrats in a bit of a trap here because if he cuts taxes and people see a little bit more money in their mailbox and it turns out their taxes didn't go up, they went down.
00:24:59.000My taxes, I'm one of the few people in America whose taxes will go up in all likelihood thanks to the Trump bill.
00:25:04.000But most people will have a tax reduction.
00:25:06.000If you have that tax reduction, and then Trump comes along and says, I want the infrastructure bill, and Democrats vote with him on infrastructure, that puts them in the position of now having to argue that they want to raise your taxes again.
00:25:18.000Does this sound like a winning political argument from Bernie Sanders?
00:25:22.000But if you Democrats take control, are corporate taxes going up?
00:25:27.000I think we're going to take a very hard look at this entire tax bill and make it a tax bill that works for the middle class and working families, not for the top 1% and large multinational corporations.
00:25:39.000But there's no question that in order to achieve all of the things you want, taxes are going to have to go up on corporations.
00:25:44.000If they're down to 21 as a result of this legislation, you can't find the money anymore.
00:25:52.000Trump may have them boxed in because he's actually decreased the tax revenue and increased the spending, forcing Democrats to embrace the increased spending and also to embrace an increase in taxes.
00:26:03.000Now, here's the problem for Democrats.
00:26:04.000If they're trapped this way, and if they don't move against Trump, if they don't try to impeach the president, what do they do next?
00:27:22.000So now the Democrats are trying to walk it back.
00:27:24.000The Democrats don't want to be in a position of calling on Trump to resign, number one.
00:27:27.000And number two, the Democrats don't actually want to lose half their senators because of sexual harassment allegations when the Republicans don't have to do the same thing.
00:27:35.000Remember, Roy Moore lost, so it doesn't look like the Republicans support sexual abuse and harassment.
00:27:40.000Okay, so that's actually a political win in some ways for the Republicans.
00:27:43.000So now there are four separate Democratic senators who are saying they want Al Franken to stay, because they're afraid of the precedent that this is going to set.
00:27:49.000Showing once again that, as I said two weeks ago, this is not about seizing the moral high ground, it was about seizing the political high ground.
00:27:55.000The Democrats now think they don't have the political high ground, so they want Franken reinstated.
00:28:00.000Joe Manchin of West Virginia, he said, quote,
00:28:16.000Pat Leahy, the not-case Democrat from Vermont.
00:28:20.000Apparently he secretly told Franken he regrets doing so.
00:28:23.000Two other senators who sided against Franken have apparently told Politico they'd like to see Franken stay.
00:28:28.000So now the Democrats are trying to rehabilitate this guy who was photographed nearly grabbing a woman's boobs and has been apparently alleged multiple times to have grabbed women by the butt.
00:28:40.000Now they're trying to rehabilitate that guy.
00:28:44.000Unbelievably enough, Chris Matthews has now been caught up in the sexual harassment scandal.
00:28:48.000There are allegations that Chris Matthews, or as they say, paid a settlement to a former employee.
00:28:53.000Apparently what happened is that according to Daily Caller, Chris Matthews had got up in the morning, come out of the show, went in the office, and said a bunch of sexist things to women.
00:29:17.000Matthews was making inappropriate jokes and comments to this female staffer in front of other people.
00:29:23.000NBC News reported that a confidentiality agreement could not reveal the amount given to the staffer, but the Daily Caller reported that it was $40,000.
00:29:31.000An MSNBC spokesperson told NBC News that during that time, when the matter was brought up, Matthews also received a formal reprimand for what he did.
00:29:40.000Alrighty, so now Chris Matthews is in trouble, and now it turns out that Linda Sarsour, shock of shock, is in trouble.
00:29:46.000Again, the Democrats set this standard because they wanted the moral high ground on, they wanted the political high ground on sexual harassment, and now they're going to have to get rid of it because all of their own people are getting caught in the net.
00:29:55.000According to the New York Post, controversial Muslim activist and Women's March organizer Linda Sarsour bullied an underling to cover up sex abuse allegations in her Brooklyn office.
00:30:06.000Asmi Falfabab told the Daily Caller that a man repeatedly rubbed his crotch on her while she worked for the association under Sarsour in 2009.
00:30:15.000But when Falfabab reported the abuse, Sarsour, a self-proclaimed feminist and co-founder of the Women's March organization, fat-shamed the woman and threatened to blacklist her from political jobs.
00:30:36.000Apparently the Daily Caller spoke with a bunch of other people about this and they confirmed it.
00:30:40.000So it appears that women's march organizer and feminist icon Linda Sarsour was involved in all of this.
00:30:46.000So the Democrats are now going to have to give up the moral high ground to regain the political high ground and the irony is just too rich.
00:30:51.000It'll be hilarious if Al Franken is the most well-known sexual abuser in the Senate after Roy Moore loses his Alabama Senate race and the Democrats end up with the egg on their face for having to re-embrace a guy who they threw overboard five seconds ago.
00:31:04.000Well, in just a second, I want to talk about things I like and things I hate.
00:31:09.000But, you know, I want to actually reverse that today.
00:31:13.000So the way that I'm going to do things today, because I have such a long take on Star Wars, is I want to start with our discussion of the Federalist Papers.
00:31:20.000So typically, we do the Federalist Papers at the end of the show, but now we're going to do the Federalist Papers a little bit earlier.
00:31:24.000So we've been doing a Federalist Paper every week, and we are now up to Federalist Number 8.
00:31:28.000So Federalist Number 8 is written by Alexander Hamilton.
00:31:32.000And Alexander Hamilton in this Federalist paper discusses at length how American wars would be more bloody than European wars.
00:31:40.000This is his excuse for saying that America needs to be one country as opposed to many.
00:31:46.000So here is what Alexander Hamilton says.
00:31:49.000In this country, the scene would be altogether reversed.
00:31:51.000He says that we'd be more bloody than European wars, because in Europe, you have a bunch of small standing armies that basically fight one another, but they don't threaten civil liberties.
00:31:59.000He says war in America would be a lot more common.
00:32:01.000He says in this country, the scene would be altogether reversed.
00:32:03.000The jealousy of military establishments would postpone them as long as possible.
00:32:07.000In other words, he says that if there were ever to be wars inside the United States, they would be supremely bloody.
00:32:11.000Of course, Alexander Hamilton ended up being right.
00:32:13.000The bloodiest war in American history is still the Civil War.
00:32:36.000He said also, that risk of invasion, the possibility that your state's going to be invaded by a neighboring state, would make people less free because we'd create standing armies.
00:32:44.000Now, the founders were really skeptical of standing armies.
00:32:46.000The founders were not happy with the idea of a professional army that was a huge percentage of the population.
00:32:52.000They understood that there might be a need for a small professional army, but the idea of a standing army that was going to basically be quartering itself in people's homes, or there's a big draft, this is not something they were in love with.
00:33:04.000Alexander Hamilton says the risk of invasion would make people less free.
00:33:27.000And he says that while standing armies are contemplated by the Constitution, with the lack of a Constitution they become certain.
00:33:32.000He says frequency of invasion will make people less likely to protest lack of liberty.
00:33:37.000He says there's a wide difference between military establishments in a country seldom exposed by its situation to internal invasions and in one in which it is often subject to them and always apprehensive of them.
00:33:47.000So this is Alexander Hamilton's excuse for why we need one country, not many.
00:33:50.000Constant war or the threat of constant war would make it very difficult for the United States to survive as a free country.
00:33:57.000So that's basically Alexander Hamilton's argument there.
00:34:00.000Okay, so I want to break here on Facebook and YouTube.
00:34:03.000But when we continue, I'm going to do some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:34:44.000It is just the greatest thing many have ever experienced.
00:34:47.000I'm not going to say everyone who's ever tried it has lived a long and happy life, but I will say that that's true for at least 100% of those people.
00:34:54.000So we will, you know, just get the cup.
00:35:15.000So, you will see that later this week if you subscribe over at YouTube, so become a subscriber there.
00:35:19.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:35:28.000Alrighty, so, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:35:32.000I wanted to leave a lot of time for things I like and things I hate because I have many a thought on Star Wars.
00:35:35.000And so I'm again going to reverse this.
00:35:37.000So instead of doing the things I like first and then the things that I hate, I'm gonna do things I hate first and then the things that I like because I...
00:36:00.000I'm gonna say all the, I'll do the entire show and then I'll get to my Star Wars review, and for people who want to stick around for that, then, you know, you won't be threatened by spoilers.
00:36:08.000Okay, so, first, the thing that I hate.
00:36:10.000So, there's this insane story that has now come out about an entire transgender family.
00:36:15.000It's a local news station in Arizona, they've run a glowing piece on a family that is in transition.
00:36:42.000Shirley Austin is a biological male, described as tall and blonde and smiley, who claims to be a woman.
00:36:47.000So in this picture you can see the blonde woman is a man, the black-haired man is a woman, the boy wearing the black shirt is a girl, and the girl wearing the white shirt is a boy.
00:36:58.000This is the case that they are now making.
00:37:04.000I have my doubts that all of this is entirely genetic.
00:37:08.000Okay, there's this argument that's been made that everyone who is transgender, there must be some genetic factor that turns everyone transgender.
00:37:13.000The idea that everyone in this family is transgender and there's no environmental impact, that a parent deciding that sex is arbitrary and can be changed that has no impact on kids, it's just insane to me.
00:37:26.000That sexual orientation is completely genetic.
00:37:29.000I'll admit that I think part of it is genetic, but the idea that all of sexual orientation is completely genetic, I find completely unconvincing, particularly because identical twins are not 100% of the time either gay or straight.
00:37:40.000It's only about 50% of identical twins who are both gay or both, where both twins are gay.
00:37:46.000Meaning that very often, identical twins who are biologically identical, one twin is gay and one twin is straight.
00:37:53.000Which means there is an environmental component to this.
00:37:55.000The point here is that if you have people who are preaching to their children that sex is completely malleable, and that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, this might be confusing to children.
00:38:05.000Because making a child gender dysphoric, heightening the chances your child is going to suffer from gender identity disorder, does not make their life easier, it makes it significantly worse and harder.
00:38:17.000The reality is that maybe these kids are gay, right?
00:38:20.000Sixteen to ninety percent of all kids who identify as transgender grow out of it, and most of them identify as gay or lesbian in the future.
00:38:26.000But the idea that this entire family is just genetically gay, I mean, or rather just genetically transgender, I find very hard to credit.
00:38:35.000If that were the case, transgenderism, I assume, would be a much wider phenomenon, and it is not, statistically speaking.
00:38:41.000Josh says he was six or seven when he knew it was a girl.
00:38:44.000I do wonder at what point Josh found out that his mother was in fact his father.
00:38:52.000Daniel says that she knew she was trans, quote, Last year, Joshua wanted to join the Girl Scouts despite being raised a boy.
00:38:58.000That's when Daniel was introduced to a word he'd never heard before, transgender.
00:39:01.000When I finally looked it up, I realized, oh my gosh, they're trans and I know it's true because I am too and it's been my whole life.
00:39:06.000Amazing how it never occurred to you until it turns out that other people in your family did that.
00:40:34.000When we left The Force Awakens, Rey had randomly been amazing at everything.
00:40:39.000She was the ultimate Mary Sue in science fiction literature.
00:40:42.000She literally came out of nowhere and was incredible with a lightsaber, such that Kylo Ren, who was supposed to be a guy trained in his youth,
00:41:00.000Which was the new Death Star, because every other movie we have to have a new Death Star, because no one ever has a practical new idea in the Star Wars universe, apparently.
00:41:07.000Okay, and so we start off this movie, and basically, it's as though the Force Awakens never happened, essentially.
00:41:13.000The First Order is still extraordinarily powerful, right?
00:41:29.000We're basically starting from the exact same point we started in Episode 4, where the Empire is in control, and literally, it is the beginning of Star Wars Episode 4, right?
00:41:38.000I mean, the Empire ship, the First Order ship, is chasing this transport vessel.
00:41:44.000It's literally the beginning of Episode 4.
00:41:45.000Okay, so, I'm gonna go through some of my minor problems with this, and then I will go through some of my major problems.
00:41:51.000So, I'll go through my bad things about this movie, and then my good things about this movie.
00:41:55.000Again, the first bad thing is The Force Awakens apparently never happened.
00:42:00.000I thought that it was a cheesy recasting.
00:42:02.000My biggest problem with the entire series is they can't decide in Star Wars land whether they want it to benefit from nostalgia, whether they want to make it a nostalgia-centric series, or they want to launch something new.
00:42:45.000In fact, my sister's middle name, one of my sister's middle names is Leia because I was such a big Star Wars fan because my parents asked me what I thought her middle name should be and I picked Leia because I was a big Star Wars fan.
00:42:57.000In the last movie, they killed off Han Solo for no reason.
00:42:59.000They turn Han Solo, who is one of the coolest, most roguish figures who becomes honorable in film lore, they turn him into a loser single dad who can't hold his crap together and gets killed by his whiny brat son for no reason at all.
00:43:14.000I remember leaving the theater from The Force Awakens and thinking, oh, that wasn't so bad.
00:43:17.000And then the more I thought about it, the more it made me want to tear my own teeth out.
00:43:21.000So if The Force Awakens had never really happened, I'd be a much happier camper.
00:43:25.000Also Han would be alive, which would be a lot better.
00:43:39.000These are minor problems, but there are some, like, basic kind of whole plot holes.
00:43:43.000It starts off with these bombers, right?
00:43:45.000These bombers that bomb a dreadnought.
00:43:48.000And the bombers, apparently, gravity applies in space, which is weird.
00:43:53.000Like, they actually just drop bombs onto the dreadnought in space.
00:43:57.000So unless there's an actual gravitational field, which I assume would be pulling the bombers toward the dreadnought, which they're not, I don't understand how the bombs fall down onto the dreadnought.
00:44:10.000That problem is also accompanied by another problem that is a logistical one near the end of the film.
00:44:15.000One of the good people, Laura Dern, in a bizarre turn, decides that she is going to run a transport vessel through a Star Destroyer using light speed.
00:44:26.000Why has no one ever thought of this in the history of Star Wars?
00:44:29.000Especially because if you recall in Return of the Jedi, there is an actual scene where a Star Destroyer goes down because someone does a kamikaze run, right, on the Star Destroyer.
00:44:37.000One of the ships kind of flies out of control, boom, goes right through the control tower.
00:44:42.000And down goes the entire Star Destroyer.
00:44:45.000Why has no one ever thought to use light speed as a weapon?
00:44:49.000You could just get rid of the entire first scene.
00:44:51.000Or, if they knew that light speed was usable as a weapon, why would they sacrifice a couple of medical ships, right?
00:44:56.000There's a point earlier in the film where a couple of ships basically run out of gas and they're blown apart by the First Order.
00:45:04.000If they know they have this tactic available, why not just turn one of those ships around and run at light speed right through the Star Destroyer?
00:45:09.000Like, this is the ultimate weapon in the universe.
00:45:11.000You could take down the Death Star this way, but apparently this has never occurred to anyone until Laura Dern and her purple hair.
00:45:33.000And this film, they show that he's super powerful because Rey is super powerful in the force and he's like throwing her around like nothing, right?
00:47:05.000The first thing you see of Darth Vader is him literally blowing open a door and strangling somebody, picking him up off the ground and strangling him.
00:47:11.000Then he dispatches Luke, the most powerful Jedi in history.
00:47:14.000He dispatches Luke by chopping off his hand and beating the crap out of him in Empire Strikes Back.
00:47:20.000Right, and he's basically beating Luke in Return of the Jedi until Luke basically taps into the dark side of the Force.
00:47:27.000So it takes him three movies to get there.
00:47:29.000Kylo Ren in the first five minutes of The Force Awakens, we find out, is conflicted, and then it turns out he can be bested by Rey, the ultimate Mary Sue, which means he's not scary.
00:47:37.000If you're gonna have someone scary heading up the First Order, that person can't be defeatable by a girl who just picked up a lightsaber for the first time ever.
00:47:43.000Now if you want to say the girl trained in it, fine, but she didn't train in it.
00:47:47.000She just picked it up and she's fantastic at it.
00:47:50.000Why exactly at this point in the film, at this point in the series, why should the Rebel Alliance be worried?
00:47:53.000Like, I don't know where they go for Episode IX.
00:48:12.000Now, I understand what they were trying to do.
00:48:13.000They were trying to make up for the fact that this movie... I feel bad for Rian Johnson, the director and the writer, because I feel like he was trying to make up for flaws in the other movies.
00:48:21.000So, in this movie with Rey, they were basically trying to cure one of the problems that was created by George Lucas with his stupid-ass midichlorians nonsense.
00:48:29.000So George Lucas had this whole thing about the Force runs in your bloodline, and this is how we know that you're powerful with the Force, and all this kind of stuff.
00:48:48.000It seems like she knows Han in The Force Awakens.
00:48:50.000It seems like everybody sort of knows who she is.
00:48:52.000But then it turns out that she's just some girl from the middle of nowhere.
00:48:57.000Which would have been fine, except you built it up like there was something interesting about her background.
00:49:00.000So you picked literally the least interesting background for her that you could find.
00:49:04.000And then, and I understand what you're trying to do.
00:49:05.000You're trying to make it that everyone can be participants in the force.
00:49:08.000We're trying to get out of Plato's Republic, where there are gradations of human, and into the democratic society where everyone can be a Jedi.
00:50:31.000Instead, she pretends like she has no plan, it's kind of evil, and then what happens is that Poe comes up with some stupid plan to go to intergalactic Monte Carlo with weird creatures that looks like it's from Harry Potter, and there are weird dog rabbits that run around, camel horses that run around, all so he can get a bunch of social justice warrior crap about income inequality.
00:52:36.000Rey is only not boring because she has interactions with Kylo Ren.
00:52:39.000Everyone is boring in the new scenario, and they're killing off all of the cool characters who made this thing into a legacy in the first place.
00:53:16.000The best moment in the movie, aside from the Kylo Ren, Rey team-up, which is the best part of the movie.
00:53:24.000Aside from that, the best moment of the movie is the part where Luke strides out of the cave, and Kylo Ren has every AT-AT fire on him, and then Luke just walks right out of it, right?
00:53:57.000So in one case, the force is used in two ways in this film that we've never seen it used before and we'll never see it used again.
00:54:03.000One, it apparently protects you from space death.
00:54:06.000So Princess Leia gets blown out into space.
00:54:07.000She's never used the Force at all that we've seen, except for one time when she used her mind to reach out to Luke's mind at the end of Empire.
00:54:15.000And now she can suddenly rescue herself from space and fly, which is a cool thing, I guess.
00:54:47.000Because in Empire, you recall, there's a point where Han Solo is invited by Lando to dine with Darth Vader, and he takes out his blaster and he shoots Darth Vader, and Darth Vader goes like this and stops the blaster.
00:55:24.000If you're going to do something new, you cannot just redo the original trilogy by having Kylo be Darth Vader, he's just like Anakin, he was conflicted, and now he's bad, and Rey is always good, and blah blah blah.
00:56:20.000All the way up to and including the whole thing where Ray tosses him the lightsaber and he goes, doom, and activates it right through the guy's face.
00:57:59.000Han just gets stabbed through the belly and thrown down another one of these incessant mine shafts that seem to be everywhere in Star Wars universe.
00:58:07.000But Luke actually gets to do the final tattoo in two suns, right?
00:59:26.000Instead, we're thrust back into sort of this binary universe where, okay, I guess Poe Dameron is going to take over for Carrie Fisher as the head of the rebellion, and Rey is going to be the new Luke, and Kylo's going to be the new Darth.
00:59:41.000So I guess this sort of ends the canon.