Omarosa says she s got tapes, Jim Acosta makes a mockery of himself once more, and the Oscars decide to change things up. Ben Shapiro is on the road next week, and you don t want to miss it! Also, if you need to relax over the summer, stressed out over the news, about your job, well, the best way to ensure that your stress is alleviated is by heading over to Zeal, because Zeal is the place where you can get a massage on demand. You don t have to go to a spa, you don't have to wait in line, you DON T HAVE to pay exorbitant prices. They bring the spa to you. And you can do it on the spur of the moment, in as little as an hour! To help you get started, our listeners can get 25 bucks off their first massage with promo code BenShapiro. That s 25% off your First Massage with Promo Code: BENSHAPIOLEVEL. It s just $25 and you get a 5 star massage in as much as you get. Ben is in no way affiliated with Zeal, but it s a great place to get a five star massage, and it s just great for you! So go check that out and get your first massage in less than an hour and a chance to get 25% of your first in-home massage! If you like what you get, you can be there in no matter what time zone you re in, you ll get 20% off the service you re getting, you ve got 25% more than you re used to get, that s $25 off your first massage. you ll be getting 25% OFF your first Massage, plus free shipping when you go to Zeal! Want to become a member of Zeal? You ll get a 20% discount when you sign up for a 5-star massage? You get a discount on your first 1-hour rate when you use promo code BEN SHAPOLEVEL? and get a coupon that gets you an additional $5,000 when you re-up to $50 or $50,000 in total, you get an ad-free version of the service, and a discount of $25,000 gets you get 5-day VIP membership when you become a patron gets a maximum of $75,000, and they also get a FREE 15% discount?
00:00:14.000You know it's a long night when you come in hot like that right off the top.
00:00:17.000Just really solid stuff to open the show right there by blowing the intro.
00:00:21.000So that's what happens when the alarm goes off in your house at one in the morning and you're just creeping around your house trying not to wake up your kids at one in the morning and then of course it turns out that it's all a malfunction.
00:00:30.000I do actually have news to get to today, but I have to remind you that next week we are actually taking
00:00:36.000Our show, on the road, to audiences in Dallas and Phoenix.
00:00:47.000It's going to be a blast and I can't wait to see you there.
00:00:48.000Also, I want to remind you that if you need to relax,
00:00:51.000Okay, if you've just been stressed out over the summer, stressed out about the news, about your job, well, the best way to ensure that your stress is alleviated is by heading over to zeal.com, because Zeal is the place where you can get a massage on demand.
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00:01:21.000Scheduling, booking, payment, fast and easy.
00:02:28.000That the woman who played a villain on The Apprentice would actually end up taping Donald Trump.
00:02:32.000Donald Trump has suspected pretty much everyone of taping him, but it turns out that the two people who actually did tape him are his own lawyer and Omarosa Manigault.
00:02:39.000According to the Daily Beast, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's personal attorney and fixer, isn't the only one with secretly recorded audio of the president.
00:02:45.000Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell the Daily Beast that Omarosa Manigault, the infamous former Apprentice star who followed Trump to the White House, secretly recorded conversations
00:02:54.000With the president, conversations she has since leveraged while shopping her tell-all book, which is titled Unhinged, right?
00:03:00.000She's going to make every buck that she can off of being associated with Trump.
00:03:04.000She was a nobody when Trump found her.
00:03:18.000For months, it has been rumored that Manigault has clandestinely recorded on her smartphone tapes of unspecified private discussions she had in the West Wing.
00:03:25.000Audio actually does exist and even stars Trump
00:03:28.000One person confirmed to the Daily Beast they'd heard at least one of the recordings.
00:03:31.000Multiple sources said that the recorded conversations are anodyne everyday chatter, but they did appear to feature Trump's voice, which grants her additional credibility in pumping her book.
00:03:39.000The media, of course, will treat her with all sorts of respect.
00:03:43.000There's this phenomenon in the media where if you rip on a Republican figure and you were once a friend with the Republican figure, then you get this sort of
00:03:51.000Grand new respect, a strange new respect.
00:03:54.000Suddenly you are taken very seriously.
00:03:56.000If you used to work in the Trump administration and then you turn on Trump, you're Michael Cohen, then all of a sudden everybody's like, ooh, Michael Cohen, great truth teller.
00:04:25.000So, none of that is particularly good.
00:04:27.000Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani is on the road trying to gin up support for the President in the Mueller investigation.
00:04:33.000As I have suggested before, the idea of putting Donald Trump in a room with Robert Mueller is the height of stupidity.
00:04:38.000There is no way in hell that the President of the United States should sit down with Robert Mueller.
00:04:42.000He doesn't have a legal obligation to do so, according to Supreme Court rulings.
00:04:46.000There's a Supreme Court ruling in U.S.
00:04:47.000v. Nixon which suggests that the President of the United States can be subpoenaed for evidence.
00:04:52.000If there's physical evidence, like the Watergate tapes, then he can be subpoenaed for that.
00:04:56.000But it is absolutely unclear whether the President of the United States has to sit down with members of the Justice Department, which he runs, or the FBI, which he is the head of.
00:05:07.000Right now, Trump is negotiating with Mueller to sit down with him.
00:05:10.000Apparently, Rudy says that if Trump sits down with Mueller—Rudy Giuliani, of course, being Trump's lawyer—Rudy says that if Trump sits down with Mueller, they shouldn't cover two topics, the firing of James Comey and the discussions about Michael Flynn with James Comey.
00:05:25.000As you recall, Michael Flynn was the president's former national security advisor.
00:05:28.000After he was fired, James Comey suggested that he might be prosecuted.
00:05:32.000The president of the United States said to him that he would like it if Comey could find his way clear to letting Flynn off the hook because he's a good guy.
00:05:40.000And then, of course, he fired James Comey.
00:05:42.000The suggestion here is that Trump doesn't want to talk to Mueller about issues of obstruction of justice, because there are really three areas in which Trump bears possible legal liability.
00:05:52.000Two of them, I think, are particularly weak.
00:05:54.000The first one is that Trump theoretically could be caught up in a conspiracy charge.
00:05:59.000A conspiracy charge involves you and I decide that we're going to rob a bank.
00:06:02.000So we get together and we make a plan to rob a bank.
00:06:05.000We have now committed conspiracy to rob the bank.
00:06:07.000But there has to be an underlying crime.
00:06:08.000There has to be something we were going to do that was criminal.
00:06:11.000If you and I get together and we drop a conspiracy to go down to the grocery store and shop, that is not a crime because there is no underlying crime.
00:06:18.000Well, the question is whether there is an underlying crime in which the president of the United States was involved.
00:06:24.000Okay, so there's no evidence whatsoever that Trump either knew about any conspiracy between the Trump team and the Russian government, or even that a conspiracy between Team Trump and the Russian government was happening.
00:06:48.000Legal charges are not the same thing as doing bad things, as a lot of people found out with regard to Hillary Clinton.
00:06:53.000It turns out that destroying a server that you create may not actually be legally prosecuted, but it is still a bad thing to do, and you may lose an election because of it.
00:07:01.000So, that's area number one, is the conspiracy area.
00:07:03.000Area number two is the obstruction area, and here the idea would be that if the President of the United States tried to shut down the Mueller investigation, or tried to obstruct the Mueller investigation in any way, then perhaps he can bring a charge.
00:07:14.000That's really weak, because Trump is the head of the executive branch.
00:07:17.000If he fired Mueller tomorrow, that wouldn't actually be obstruction.
00:07:19.000Obstruction would be if he tried to hide evidence, or if there was a pending judicial proceeding and he tried to bribe somebody, or if he went to Mueller and he ordered him to come up with a particular result on the investigation.
00:07:29.000So, obstruction is weak sauce, unless Trump goes in front of Mueller and says, in front of Mueller,
00:07:35.000That he intended to fire James Comey to stop the investigation.
00:07:38.000If he says that, then you have a pretty cut-and-dry obstruction charge.
00:07:41.000That would be a serious problem for President Trump, which is why Trump doesn't want to talk to Mueller about any of that.
00:07:46.000And then finally, you have the biggest issue for Trump, which is why he shouldn't talk to Mueller at all, and that is lying to the FBI.
00:07:52.000The president has an unfortunate habit of saying everything that comes into his head.
00:07:57.000He has a severe case of dysentery of the mouth.
00:08:01.000I mean, it's just diarrheic overflow of the mouth.
00:08:03.000And when he is in front of a lawyer, that is a really bad problem.
00:08:06.000As I said on Fox yesterday, on Kennedy's show, if you are a person who wants to be taken seriously, but not literally, don't go into law.
00:08:15.000Law is all about taking people literally, not just seriously.
00:08:18.000Trump says a lot of stuff where we all kind of go, yeah, that's just Trump being Trump.
00:08:21.000Lawyers don't do that, particularly prosecutors.
00:08:23.000So Trump would be foolish to sit down with Robert Mueller.
00:08:25.000Well, Rudy Giuliani was on with Sean Hannity yesterday, and Hannity asked him, like, why are you even having these talks in the first place?
00:08:53.000I mean, what do we need to know that this is a totally illegitimate investigation based on a report, a dossier that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats?
00:09:00.000So Sean asks the correct question, which is, OK, well, then why don't you just fire Mueller?
00:09:05.000If this whole thing is illegitimate, why don't you fire him?
00:09:07.000And why would you talk about sitting down with Team Mueller?
00:09:11.000And Giuliani essentially said, well, we know there will be political blowback also.
00:09:16.000If this thing is not over by September, it's going to be a problem.
00:09:19.000I'm not sure that Team Trump has the greatest strategy here, but Giuliani can only do, as a lawyer, what his client wants him to do.
00:09:28.000All of that said, these are criminal questions.
00:09:32.000The political question is how much this affects the Republican Party going into the midterm elections in 2018.
00:09:37.000A lot of Trump fans think all this stuff doesn't have any impact on congressional elections.
00:09:41.000I'm very skeptical of that point of view.
00:09:43.000There's a good piece by Sean Trend over at RealClearPolitics today talking about the actual statistical trends going into the 2018 elections.
00:09:53.000On Tuesday night, which we talked about here yesterday in Ohio's 12th congressional district and across the country, the results were fully consistent with a Democratic wave in the House washing up on our shores in November.
00:10:02.000While there's still time between now and then, there's not a lot of time, and we're at the point where these elections start to be suggestive, if not fully predictive.
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00:12:23.000The wedgie guarantee would have been very helpful to me in high school.
00:12:26.000Tommy John is so confident in their underwear that if you don't love your first pair, you can get a full refund with the best pair you'll ever wear or its free guarantee.
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00:12:34.000They sold those things out in just six weeks, but now it's fully back in stock.
00:13:04.000How many of you actually know who your congressperson is?
00:13:06.000I would wager that most people who vote in elections probably don't even know who their congressperson is, or if they do know, they don't know much about them.
00:13:13.000People use mental shortcuts to determine for whom they are going to vote.
00:13:17.000They use the R or the D a lot more than they use the name of the candidate in their particular district, which is why it is very indicative
00:13:24.000of whether a district will go in one direction or another, what the constituency of that district is.
00:13:28.000So in our plus-10 district, it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is, the Republicans should win, unless what you are seeing is a wave against Republicans.
00:13:36.000This means that all elections are national.
00:13:38.000One of the great lies that we've been told about politics is that all politics is local because of the prevalence of media.
00:13:44.000Because most people who are engaged in politics are reading newspapers or listening to shows like this one or watching Fox News or CNN.
00:13:50.000All elections are basically nationalized at this point, which is why Republicans swept through in 2010 on a national platform, a national Tea Party platform.
00:14:00.000And it's why right now Republicans who are running locally in the hopes that they can avoid the stigma of Trump
00:14:07.000Trump is a drag on a lot of these Republican congressional tickets.
00:14:10.000He is not a boost to them because he is the national issue.
00:14:13.000Now, the Republicans do have national issues they can campaign on.
00:14:16.000It's the same national issue they campaigned on in the Georgia 6th District, and that is Nancy Pelosi should never be Speaker of the House.
00:14:22.000Nancy Pelosi is a full-on wild left disaster.
00:14:26.000The idea that she should be running policy from the House of Representatives is frightening and should be frightening to a lot of folks.
00:14:31.000Why Republicans are not running nationally, the real answer is because they feel like if they run nationally, they're going to get hit with the Trump.
00:14:38.000And President Trump is such a volatile quantity that if you cross President Trump, there's a good shot he'll go on Twitter and then he'll knock you off with your own base.
00:14:46.000If the president really wants to maintain Congress, what would be helpful in the next 90 days is for the president not to be particularly loud, not to be particularly vocal, and for Republicans to campaign against Democrats.
00:14:56.000I said yesterday, if you want to win elections, you have to make Democrats the issue.
00:14:59.000If you want to lose elections, make Trump the issue.
00:15:02.000Right now, President Trump is the issue, and it's a problem for Republicans.
00:15:05.000When Democrats become the issue, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the headline of the day, that's really good for Republicans.
00:15:11.000And you're actually seeing that in the polling right now.
00:15:14.000The polling keeps opening and closing.
00:15:15.000There's this gap that keeps opening and closing and opening and closing.
00:15:18.000It's very reminiscent of 2016 when Hillary Clinton would open these big gaps against President Trump and then within days they would close up again because
00:15:27.000The question was, who is the referendum on?
00:15:32.000If the referendum was a referendum on Hillary, the lead went away.
00:15:35.000And that means the Republicans must turn every issue to Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tom Perez and Keith Ellison and the radicalism of the Democratic Party.
00:15:47.000Now, speaking of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you'll remember that yesterday on the show, I offered money out of my own pocket to sponsor a debate with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or even a Sunday special with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:15:59.000Shockingly, we have not actually heard back from the Ocasio-Cortez campaign.
00:16:04.000I have my doubts that she is willing or interested in talking about these issues with anybody who can ask her a serious question.
00:16:10.000I think the reason for that is probably because she says silly things on a routine basis.
00:16:16.000I mean, the fact that she's propped up as one of the great minds of our time is astonishing to me.
00:16:21.000The same left that said that Sarah Palin was a doofus and a dunce and mocked Sarah Palin inordinately.
00:16:26.000I can see Russia from my house, a thing that Sarah Palin never said.
00:16:29.000And that became the stigma of Sarah Palin.
00:16:37.000These same people keep praising Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as some sort of world-beating genius when it comes to politics.
00:16:43.000She did an interview with Chris Cuomo.
00:16:45.000Chris Cuomo is not the world's toughest interview.
00:16:48.000At least not with regard to Democrats.
00:16:50.000And he stumps her, not because he is a stump of wood, but because she legitimately has no capacity to answer basic and simple questions.
00:16:58.000So, for example, she was asked about how she's going to pay for all of her government programs, and she described how Medicare is going to save us all money.
00:17:06.000This is an astonishing statement made by a human whose brain apparently is at least partly functional.
00:17:12.000Here she is trying to explain why Medicare will save money.
00:17:14.000See if you can spot the flaw in her logic.
00:17:17.000People talk about the sticker shock of Medicare for all.
00:17:19.000They do not talk about the sticker shock of the cost of our existing system.
00:17:24.000Americans have the sticker shock of healthcare as it is.
00:17:28.000And what we're also not talking about is, why aren't we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who die because they can't afford access to healthcare?
00:17:37.000That is part of the cost of our system.
00:17:39.000Why don't we talk about the cost of reduced productivity because of people who need to go on disability, because of people who are not able to participate in our economy, because they're having issues like diabetes or they don't have access to the healthcare that they need.
00:17:54.000I think at the end of the day, we see that this is not a pipe dream.
00:17:57.000Every other developed nation in the world does this.
00:18:13.000The Washington Post has given that claim before Three Pinocchios, by the way.
00:18:16.000Like, that's just, it's just not true.
00:18:18.000But my favorite part of that clip is where she explains, with a straight face, that one of the costs that we don't take into account when we look at our healthcare system is the cost of funerals.
00:18:29.000I just want to note that even if you believe that Medicare lengthens life, which is a dubious proposition, there are studies that suggest it does not, even if you believe that it does, at the end of that life, everyone gets dead.
00:19:21.000The idea that we save two trillion dollars, a claim that Ocasio-Cortez makes here.
00:19:24.000That earned a three Pinocchios rating from the Post.
00:19:26.000That's the claim that I'm specifically talking about that Ocasio-Cortez makes here.
00:19:29.000The best one, the best part of this interview, though, was when she was asked about the Democratic leadership.
00:19:34.000Even Ocasio-Cortez can't defend the fact that Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the House Democrats.
00:19:38.000She gives an answer here that is very much akin to the answer that Miss South Carolina once gave about maps in the Miss Universe contest, in the Miss USA contest, when she was asked about what kids need in schools.
00:19:50.000And she said she thinks they need maps.
00:20:24.000If you cannot defeat this, you don't deserve to be in office.
00:20:27.000And I don't mean defeat her in a district that is very heavily Democrat.
00:20:30.000I mean, if you can't use this to nationalize your message, I honestly don't know what you are doing, making a living from this particular area of human life.
00:21:16.000Just answer a few questions, snap some photos, a licensed doctor remotely reviews your information, recommends the right treatment for you,
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00:22:42.000I mean, we don't need HBO's money, but...
00:22:45.000If you don't think there's a media bias, the fact that Jim Acosta and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been on Colbert and we have never received a single phone call from a late night show is sort of, and it's not just us.
00:22:55.000I mean, you're never going to see any of the major hosts on the right ever invited on any of these late night shows because these late night hosts don't actually want to have to have an argument with these folks.
00:23:04.000They just want to invite on fellow lefties that they can talk with and feel comfortable with.
00:23:08.000Jim Acosta, who is definitely not, definitely not a self-aggrandizing jerk.
00:23:13.000Jim Acosta is definitely not a self-infatuated person, right?
00:23:16.000He's certainly not a guy who believes himself to be the great savior of the media.
00:23:21.000He is certainly just fighting for you, the people.
00:23:24.000And then it's a picture of him looking in the mirror at himself.
00:23:34.000Which, okay, first of all, he actually, there's somebody else taking this picture, right?
00:23:38.000He has to have a guest, somebody else who's in the room with him, stage this photo so that he can look, like, it never occurs to him how self-aggrandizing and arrogant this looks.
00:23:49.000The truly incredible part of this particular photo is the fact that Jim Acosta is looking at Jim Acosta in the mirror, smiling smugly to himself, and he handed somebody his phone, presumably, to take that well-lit picture of him looking like a hero looking into the mirror.
00:24:03.000I mean, the funny part of this is that Jim Acosta sees himself looking in the mirror, and he sees Superman, and the rest of us see that guy from The Hangover who's lost his front tooth looking in the mirror.
00:24:57.000That last sentence makes no sense at all.
00:24:59.000And the fact that he had to think about that and write that up and memorize it beforehand, that doesn't make any sense.
00:25:05.000If the media were actually part of the government, at least the argument makes sense.
00:25:09.000Although that suggests that there are people in the government who can never be enemies of the people, which I think is blatantly untrue.
00:25:14.000There are plenty of governments all over the world that are enemies of their own people.
00:25:17.000But that last line, that a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people, there's no such thing as an enemy of the people, you know who used to say that?
00:26:03.000Well, they're going to focus on a three-hour broadcast, because right now it's approximately 37 hours, the Oscars.
00:26:08.000I think the last time I actually watched a full Oscar telecast, it's got to have been at least 10 years since I watched a full Oscar telecast, because why in the world would you?
00:26:16.000And one of the reasons nobody watches the Oscars anymore is because every film that is nominated is basically, which is the most social justice warrior film.
00:26:23.000So last year was The Shape of Water, which was a social justice film about a woman having sex with a fish.
00:26:29.000And her little gang of friends who are going to help fight the American government with the help of, I am not kidding you, this is the plot of The Shape of Water, a communist doctor, a gay man, and a black woman who is put upon by her husband.
00:26:43.000And the woman who is the main character is a mute.
00:27:56.000The only filmmaker who is even somewhat commercial, whose films will be nominated anymore, is Christopher Nolan, and even he has not won a Best Director Oscar, which is just insane.
00:28:06.000Instead, you'll get pictures like Moonlight winning.
00:28:09.000Even La La Land, which is an artsy film that did well at the box office, even there, it lost to Moonlight a coming-of-age story about a gay black kid.
00:28:17.000So, the Oscars have been kind of out of touch with what the American people are actually interested in paying money to see at the theaters for a long time.
00:28:24.000Well, the way that they are fixing this is they are creating a new category designed around achievement in popular film, which automatically implies that there is also achievement in unpopular film, right?
00:28:34.000Achievement in unpopular film, that's the stuff that Hollywood likes to make, and then achievement in popular film is the stuff where, basically, they're going to do the MTV Movie Awards.
00:28:41.000Where it's like, oh, here's where we nominate Black Panther, and here's where we nominate Thor Ragnarok, and here's where we nominate the Avengers films.
00:28:47.000We'll put all the superhero films in one category, and we'll pretend that they're not actually quality, and then we'll have all of our quality films that no one saw, but that we feel make us special at cocktail parties.
00:28:57.000And this is because Hollywood is an insular little island all to itself, in the same way that the media have become this insular little island all the way for itself.
00:29:08.000It's basically an acknowledgement that the folks in Hollywood hate you.
00:29:11.000That they are taking your money to make movies like Mission Impossible, and then they're taking some of that money and siphoning it off into the real projects they care about.
00:29:19.000The story of the lesbian transgender little person who overcame all odds to become the head of a prostitution ring.
00:29:28.000Legitimately, that's almost the plot of that film that Scarlett Johansson was supposed to star in, that no one would have seen, except that Scarlett Johansson was in it.
00:29:36.000My favorite part of that story, by the way, is that the social justice warriors killed that film outright because they said Scarlett Johansson should not star in it, and now that film will never get made and never get distributed.
00:29:50.000They're not going to focus on making stuff that people want to see.
00:29:52.000They're going to continue to separate off the stuff they want to make from the stuff people want to see, and then patronize the audience by suggesting, here is the award for the rubes, and then here is the award for those of us who really, really matter.
00:30:26.000Yeah, again, Hollywood is completely out of touch as well.
00:30:28.000This out-of-touchness is something, this culture war is something where the Republicans really could do some serious damage if they chose to do so.
00:30:34.000Speaking of the culture war, I'm going to play you this clip from Mila Kunis because it really does suggest how broadly the culture war has spread.
00:30:41.000And it has some relevance to the conversations we are now having about race in the country, believe it or not.
00:30:46.000But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com to subscribe.
00:30:48.000So for $9.99 a month, get the rest of the show live, get the rest of Clavin's show live and Knowles' show live.
00:30:53.000We have some brand new stuff that is coming for subscribers.
00:31:33.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:41.000Okay, so speaking of Hollywood being out of touch, Mila Kunis, who is a very big star, although she's in a new movie with Kate McKinnon that's basically a spy thriller no one will see.
00:31:49.000It's getting terrible reviews, but I'm sure that's just because of sexism.
00:31:54.000It's because of sexism, because it has two female leads.
00:31:57.000I do love the idea that what women really want to watch at the movies is women.
00:32:02.000I don't know where this idea came from in Hollywood, that all women want to do is watch Eat, Pray, Love, or that they want to watch an action movie with women.
00:32:12.000I don't know a single woman, like not one, who is desperate to watch an action flick with a female lead.
00:32:19.000I was under the impression that most women kind of like men.
00:32:22.000I was under the impression that they would rather watch Tom Cruise run around than watch Mila Kunis run around.
00:32:26.000Most men would rather watch Tom Cruise run around than watch Mila Kunis run around because Tom Cruise runs faster than Mila Kunis.
00:32:32.000And there's this sort of Hollywood absurdity where you have these 90-pound women who are kicking 300-pound guys in the chest, and the guys are, like, flying through glass windows, when in reality, the 300-pound man would take the kick and then take the woman by the leg and chuck her, right?
00:32:44.000I mean, Hollywood has these bizarre notions.
00:33:14.000They tried this with Atomic Blonde, in which they basically substituted Charlize Theron for a man in like every possible way, including the lesbian sex scenes, and the movie wildly underperformed because it turns out that when you watch a female character, you'd actually like her to have certain indicative female stereotypical attributes that
00:33:31.000Okay, but all of that is beside the point.
00:33:32.000Mila Kunis is in this new movie and she's being interviewed about why she is pro-choice.
00:33:36.000And the answer to why she's pro-choice is because she legitimately has never met a pro-lifer.
00:33:57.000Now, I don't know any Republican in America who's never met a pro-choicer.
00:34:01.000And I talked to hundreds of thousands of Republicans, right?
00:34:04.000I don't understand why it is that so many folks on the left have never met a pro-lifer, except that every view on the right must be castigated as horrible and evil.
00:34:12.000Here's Mila Kunis talking on a podcast with Marc Maron about why it is that she is pro-choice.
00:35:09.000is a group particularly of white people in the middle of the country who have a gap not with black people so much as with other white people on the coast.
00:35:18.000There's this weird idea on the left that there's this thing called whiteness.
00:35:20.000I was listening to a podcast with my friend Jane Koston over at Vox.com, and she was doing the podcast with Ezra Klein.
00:35:29.000Basically, the three people who are on it are Ezra Klein, who is sometimes thoughtful on the left and sometimes just wrong and nearsighted, and Jane, who I think is thoughtful, and Dylan Matthews, who's basically the Leroy Jenkins of that show.
00:35:41.000Like, he just kind of runs in randomly and shouts, Leroy Jenkins!
00:35:46.000Why he's just spouting the typical lefty line.
00:35:48.000In any case, they were talking about all of this talk lately about racism and whiteness and why it is that ripping on white people is different from ripping on black people.
00:35:57.000And their suggestion was that you can't be racist really against white people.
00:36:00.000You can only be racist against black people was sort of the implication.
00:36:36.000It is not between people of different colors.
00:36:39.000And in a second, I want to read you a little bit of this piece from my friend David French, which really hits this on the nose and really speaks to the gap that has emerged between the media and the rest of the country and Hollywood and the rest of the country.
00:36:49.000OK, so we played that clip of Mila Kunis and Mila Kunis says she's never heard of anybody who's pro-life in the country.
00:36:55.000Jim Acosta, who is completely out of touch with the middle of the country and every so often
00:37:00.000The middle of the country sort of rears its ugly head and they go, ooh, let's send somebody out there.
00:37:04.000As though they're Steve Irwin in the Outback.
00:38:08.000And basically what French argues is that when you have all these people like Milo Kunis who say, you know, I don't care about whiteness in the country.
00:38:14.000Whiteness can decline at any rate I want it to decline at, and that's totally fine.
00:38:20.000Which is a perspective with which, like, I don't care about race.
00:38:26.000And even if I were white, I wouldn't care.
00:38:27.000I mean, in certain cases, I'm perceived as white.
00:38:30.000I don't care how many white people are in the country versus how many black people are in the country.
00:38:34.000I care about the stuff inside their heads.
00:38:35.000That's the stuff I actually care about.
00:38:38.000But the point that French is making is when people on the left talk about whiteness, people like Mila Kunis, presumably, or people like Jim Acosta, or people on the left in these little bubbles, they're really not talking about whiteness.
00:38:48.000They're talking about white people in the middle of the country they don't like, because Mila Kunis is not giving up her job anytime soon for a person of color, and neither is Jim Acosta.
00:38:56.000They're talking about a certain white cultural elitism that pervades the coast and that they feel they are in agreement on as long as they pander to a bunch of people of color.
00:39:06.000That's what they're really talking about.
00:39:08.000So when they rip on whiteness, they're not ripping on the whiteness of Portland, Oregon.
00:39:11.000What they're really ripping on is the whiteness of Tennessee.
00:39:13.000What they're really ripping on is the whiteness of Texas, which, by the way, is going to be predominantly Hispanic in the very near future.
00:39:19.000So this is really the culture war that is being fought right now.
00:39:23.000And it's because people fail to take into account anything remotely resembling a multiple regression analysis that you end up with these simplistic takes on politics.
00:39:31.000So a multiple regression analysis for people who didn't take stats courses in college, when you are determining how many factors lead to a particular outcome, you can basically create, you can do this with an Excel spreadsheet, basic statistical analysis, you can create formulas that try to correlate
00:39:48.000A particular phenomenon with the factors leading to the phenomenon.
00:39:51.000So, for example, you want to figure out which factors lead to being an NBA player.
00:39:55.000And so you determine what percentage of black people are NBA players, what percentage of tall people are NBA players, what percentage of athletic people are NBA players.
00:40:03.000How do each of these things factor into playing in the NBA?
00:40:06.000And that multiple regression analysis will show you that blackness has very little to do with playing in the NBA, but being very tall does have something to do, and athleticism has something to do with playing in the NBA.
00:40:15.000Well, you may look at the NBA and say, oh, blackness is an asset in the NBA.
00:40:21.000Because you actually did a multiple regression analysis.
00:40:24.000Well, if you're looking at the gaps in this country, people on the left see disparity.
00:40:28.000And the first thing they do is they leap to race.
00:40:30.000The reality is that we have to look at all of the cross-cutting other factors before we go to race, because race is a secondary characteristic.
00:40:40.000It's just the color of your skin, really.
00:40:42.000And the attempt by the left to blame everything on racism, to say that every inequality between groups is rooted in American bias and racism.
00:40:50.000If you're going to go there, first, I would suggest that you rule out more obvious factors that could be contributing to those statistical disparities.
00:40:56.000So, for example, there's this tweet that came out about the wealth gap.
00:40:59.000It now has some tens of thousands of retweets.
00:41:01.000And it says, white people get $50,000 checks from their elderly grandparents.
00:41:04.000Black people are buying their elderly grandparents groceries.
00:41:08.000The suggestion, of course, being that white America is racist and that's why black people are poor.
00:41:12.000Now, is it true that historical racism has a lot to do with the continuation of a wealth gap, particularly in terms of home ownership and historic wealth?
00:41:22.000But if you're looking at the rates of progress in America, that has very little to do with historical racism.
00:41:28.000Rates of progress in America are much more tied to individual decision making.
00:41:31.000And you can tell this with a multiple regression analysis.
00:41:33.000It has much more to do with choosing to marry the woman who's going to bear your children.
00:41:37.000It has much more to do with getting a job and finishing high school.
00:41:39.000These are the things that make you wealthy in America.
00:41:41.000The fact that the left has this flattering view of itself where it is on the side of everything that is good and true and not in favor of quote-unquote whiteness.
00:41:50.000What they really mean is we're not in favor of the white people in the middle of the country.
00:41:53.000We're the good white people and we can show you we're the good white people by criticizing other white people but not giving up anything that we actually hold dear in these little enclaves of wealth and power and privilege.
00:42:03.000And that's the reason you have this culture gap in the country that is widening every single day.
00:42:09.000OK, so I want to talk about a couple of stories that the media have been ignoring, and then we'll get to a thing I like and a thing I hate.
00:42:17.000First, there's this story that it's really amazing.
00:42:20.000And the media are covering the story, but they're missing, I think, the punchline.
00:42:24.000OK, so it turns out there's an Islamic man who was arrested last week at a New Mexico compound where 11 children were abused.
00:42:29.000He was training the children to commit school shootings, according to newly released court documents.
00:42:33.000Now, if you look at the headlines today, all of the headlines are, man was training children to commit school shootings.
00:42:39.000There was a big factor that was missing from the headlines.
00:42:42.000OK, so this is a case where the media's failure to do a multiple regression analysis is kind of obvious, right?
00:42:47.000What they will say is, well, this just shows that the culture of gun ownership in the United States is leading to school shootings.
00:42:52.000Well, maybe it has more to do with the ideology of the person who is training children to shoot up schools.
00:42:57.000Maybe it has to do with the fact that the guy was a radical Islamist.
00:42:59.000The court filings say, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was conducting weapons training with assault rifles at the compound near the Colorado border where 11 hungry children were found in filthy conditions.
00:43:09.000His father, by the way, is a guy named Siraj Wahhaj.
00:43:11.000He was named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
00:43:17.000Ironically, that is also a person, I believe, who's been linked to Siraj Wahaj, if I'm not mistaken.
00:43:23.000He was named by Linda Sarsour as one of her mentors, if I'm not mistaken.
00:43:30.000So, Linda Sarsour, of course, is one of the leaders of the Women's March, and she is just a delight.
00:43:35.000She praised Imam Siraj Wahaj just a few years ago.
00:43:42.000Instead, they will headline with the idea that it is the guns.
00:43:45.000They will also not headline the fact that the Parkland Broward County school system knew full well that the shooter in Parkland had gone to them multiple times to ask him for help.
00:43:56.000They turned him down, then he went and shot up a school.
00:43:58.000Instead, we'll get a non-multiple regression analysis in which we do not learn the other factors leading to the school shooting in Parkland.
00:44:04.000Instead, we learn that it was really about the guns.
00:44:07.000Now, the truth is, according to the local 10 News in that area, throughout the more than 15 years this shooter spent in the Broward County school system, staff members reported violent outbursts and antisocial behavior.
00:44:18.000Others noted periods where his behavior and academic performance markedly improved.
00:44:22.000The document was originally redacted, but an electronic copy made public by the school district contained information underneath the blackout portions.
00:44:29.000And what it found is that he actually kept going in there for help, and they kept sending him away until he shot up a school.
00:44:37.000But that's not the story that the media will actually tell you today.
00:44:39.000The story that the media will tell you is that it's all about the guns.
00:44:42.000The media have an interest, people have an interest in simplifying complex questions down to their most obvious basics.
00:44:49.000But you actually have to determine which factors, how many factors are important in determining cause and effect.
00:44:56.000You can't just say there's a disparity or there's an event and it happened because of this thing.
00:45:00.000You instead have to look at all of the factors that were involved in it and determine which factors were most likely to have contributed heavily to this possible outcome.
00:45:08.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:46:37.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:46:42.000So over the past 48 hours, Israel has been hit with legitimately 150 rockets from the Gaza Strip.
00:46:48.000Now, you will not see this in the media.
00:46:49.000Speaking of stories you won't see covered in the media, you'll never see this in the media because when Jews are being shot at by Palestinians, it's not a story.
00:46:56.000When Jews shoot back at Palestinians, it's a story.
00:46:59.000So when Israel goes in with overwhelming military might and attempts to knock out Hamas bases, which invariably are located in civilian areas because Hamas knows that they will make a headline every time a civilian is killed,
00:47:49.000The United States would go in and knock out the entire government and then replace it.
00:47:53.000I mean, when Al Qaeda murdered 3,000 Americans, we knocked down two Islamic countries, two of them, okay, when they killed 3,000 citizens with some airplanes.
00:48:04.000Israel took 150 rockets over the past 48 hours.
00:48:07.000They did some very specific targeted pinprick bombing.
00:48:11.000And you watch, that'll be the story, right?
00:48:12.000The story will be the civilian that was killed because Hamas plants all of its headquarters underneath hospitals.
00:48:18.000Here's what the video actually looks like when rockets are flying and you have five seconds to get your kids underground.
00:48:29.000You can see the smoke rising from another rocket.
00:48:37.000I mean, these things are landing in civilian areas, they're landing in streets.
00:48:44.000The media's bias is never more apparent than when you see their coverage of this conflict.