Kevin Hart loses his Oscar gig, Democrats fulminate over voter fraud in North Carolina, and we ll check the mailbag. - Ben Shapiro's Hanukkah Party at the White House. - Air Filters - If you want to breathe clean air that's not going to set you back, and it's not blowing out your HVAC, then you really need to be thinking about getting some new air filters. - The Oscars have now decided to dump Kevin Hart, or rather, Kevin Hart decides to dump himself, and he was very excited about it until the social media mob came a-calling. - There's a lot of talk online recently about how people are going back to their old tweets and purging them because they disagree with stuff they said 10 years ago. - How would you feel if someone dug up an old anti-gay tweet from a decade ago and used it to destroy your career? Do you think Kevin Hart probably thinks the same things in 2011 that he thinks now? - And by the way, what would you think if someone were digging up your old tweets were a step in favor of tolerance? What would you do in the same situation? Today's mailbag is brought to you by Filterbuy.co.nz/TheBenShapiroShow Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our other podcast choices! Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcast.co/thebenshapiro Show Subscribe to our new podcast Listen to our newest episode of the Ben Shapiro on the Hill Podcasts and we'll send you a review of your thoughts on the latest episodes of the show on the show Ben Shapiro s new episodes of The FiveThirtyEight podcast. Subscribe and review Ben Shapiro is a big fan of The Six Sigma on iTunes! and other podcast recommendations! Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro Thank you for listening! - The Six Figure Rule Subscribe, review, rating and review on Apple Music, review on Podcharts and much more! Enjoyment? Subscribe & Retweet! Leave us a review on iTunes and share the podcast on your favorite streaming platform? Send us your thoughts about the show? & we'll be listening out to your thoughts and reviews on your podcast choices? and share it on the next episode of Ben Shapiro Podcast?
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00:01:49.000Is that the Oscars have now decided to dump Kevin Hart, or rather Kevin Hart decided to dump himself.
00:01:53.000So Kevin Hart is a comedian and an actor who you've seen in such classic films as the one with Dwayne The Rock Johnson and the other one with Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
00:02:04.000He is mainly a sidekick in a lot of these films.
00:02:11.000You know, I liked his work, but now Kevin Hart Who was picked to host the Oscars, which is the worst gig in Hollywood, because there has not yet been a host at the Oscars who is treated well.
00:02:21.000He was picked to host the Oscars, and he was very excited about it.
00:02:24.000Until the social media mob came a-calling.
00:02:27.000They started filtering through all of his past tweets, because this is what we do now.
00:02:31.000We go through tweets that are eight years old to try and destroy people on the eve of their greatest career triumphs.
00:02:36.000And I guess we feel better about ourselves for doing this.
00:02:39.000I guess that Americans feel great when we tear people down with tweets that are legitimately a decade old, because now we feel like we've made a step in favor of tolerance.
00:02:49.000But have you really made a step in favor of tolerance by digging up An old anti-gay tweet by Kevin Hart from 2011 and then destroying his career?
00:02:56.000Do you think Kevin Hart probably thinks the same things in 2011 that he thinks now?
00:02:59.000Do you really think that he'd make that joke right now?
00:03:02.000And by the way, how would you feel if everybody were digging up everything you ever said 10 years ago and using that as an opportunity to destroy your career?
00:03:10.000Well, that's exactly what happened with Kevin Hart.
00:03:13.000On Tuesday, The Motion Picture Academy announced its big-name host for the 2019 Oscar ceremonies.
00:03:20.000It was going to be comedian Kevin Hart.
00:03:22.000But then, all of these tweets surfaced, and Hart went back and he started deleting all of these past tweets.
00:03:27.000And then, he posted a video statement on Instagram Thursday, saying he's not going to get all worked up over the craziness.
00:03:33.000He said, Which is a rational response to people finding stuff that you disagree with 10 years ago.
00:03:42.000There's been a lot of talk online recently about people going back and just purging their social media posts specifically because they don't want to be held to account for stuff that they said 10 years ago and that they now disagree with.
00:03:53.000The Hollywood Reporter declared the issue a full-blown crisis on Thursday.
00:03:57.000It is deeply necessary that we destroy the career of somebody who tweeted something 10 years ago because it makes people have bad feelings.
00:04:04.000We don't want people to have bad feelings, guys.
00:04:06.000We can't have bad feelings at the Oscars.
00:04:08.000The Oscars is just, it's so wonderful.
00:04:10.000It's such a time of warmth, you know, when they yell at Republicans and talk about how religious people are stupid, and then give awards to movies that nobody's ever seen on the basis of their intersectionality.
00:04:19.000They give awards to women having sex with fish, and they give awards to how it is to grow up young and gay and black in the inner city, and movies that nobody has ever seen nor anyone will ever see.
00:04:31.000And then they tell us how they are better people than we are.
00:04:40.000And if we don't have enough people who are woke, then obviously we have failed in our attempts to make the world a better place in Hollywood.
00:04:48.000And so, after all of this was said, it was time for Kevin Hart to go.
00:04:53.000Kevin Hart had to be thrown out of the room because Kevin Hart made all of these terrible, no good, very bad, unacceptable jokes.
00:05:01.000There's an article today by a person named Owen Gleiberman who no one's ever heard of and will never be of any use in life.
00:05:07.000And I say this because this is what critics do when they are deciding to tear somebody down.
00:05:11.000Owen Glaberman writes, I'm not a person who tends to have a censorious attitude towards stand-up comedians.
00:05:16.000One of their jobs is to give voice to the audacious, the outrageous, the rudely incorrect.
00:05:51.000Kevin Hart's comic tweets about the LGBTQ community, which consists basically of the aggressive flaunting of a lot of dumb and angry homophobic stereotypes.
00:05:59.000"Yo, if my son comes home and tries to play with my daughter's dollhouse, I'm gonna break it over his head and say in my voice, 'Stop, that's gay,' can leave you with a slightly queasy feeling." First of all, if you think that's like the worst joke anybody ever told, let me ask you a question.
00:06:13.000Does anybody think that it was not a joke when he tweeted that he was legitimately going to go home and find a dollhouse and break it over his son's head?
00:06:20.000Does anyone think that was in Kevin Hart's heart when he said that?
00:06:23.000Or is it possible that he was just making fun of the stereotype?
00:06:27.000Or is it possible that he doesn't want his son to be gay?
00:06:30.000Which, okay, you may not like that, but it's his kid.
00:06:33.000He says, yet most of the tweets date back seven or eight years, according to Variety.
00:06:37.000And no, it's not as if Hart should be banned from stand-up comedy, or that we should now organize a boycott of The Upside, his upcoming buddy farce with Bryan Cranston.
00:07:07.000Okay, how woke are the folks in Hollywood?
00:07:10.000They're so woke that one of the movies that's now being considered an Oscar frontrunner is this movie called Green Book.
00:07:16.000Nobody's gonna see this movie, it's already failing at the box office because it is obviously Oscar bait.
00:07:20.000It is the story of basically a guy who didn't make The Sopranos, he's like an Italian mob reject, who's driving a gay black man through the South in 1962.
00:07:34.000But, this is perfect to Oscar bait because it gets to say that Americans are simultaneously both rubes and good-hearted, both racist and wonderful, and that gay black people have so much to teach white Americans in every possible way, right?
00:07:47.000Well, this movie was Oscar bait until Viggo Mortensen, who plays the Italian fellow, the Italian stereotype, until Viggo Mortensen went up on stage and he was talking about changes in the United States over the past 60 years, and he said there was a time in American history where people could casually use the word bleep.
00:08:08.000He pointed out that there was a time when people said the N word, but he said the N word in pointing out there was a time people said the N word.
00:08:15.000That means he probably likes to say the N word.
00:08:18.000So we now have to make sure that this movie wins no Oscars.
00:08:21.000What I love is that Hollywood, in purging itself of anyone of a different viewpoint, of anyone who once made a joke, of anyone who makes a reference to something that happened in history, In purging themselves, they declare themselves tolerant and open-minded and empathetic.
00:08:35.000Here's what Owen Gleiberman over at Variety writes.
00:08:37.000This is the most publicity he will ever get, Owen Gleiberman.
00:09:28.000For me, when I decide to go out to a movie with my wife on Saturday night, what I say to her is, Sweetheart, which movie do you think is the most empathetic?
00:10:15.000Movies, the supreme vehicle for putting ourselves in the shoes of people who aren't us.
00:10:19.000To watch a great movie is to reduce that difference between the people on screen, whoever they might be, and the people in the audience, to nothing.
00:10:24.000That, in a nutshell, is the miracle of movies.
00:10:26.000These days, it's all too easy to talk about black films, or women's films, or gay films, or films for wizened retirees for Miami.
00:10:33.000But the glory of cinema is that no movie is for any one person at the expense of anyone else.
00:10:51.000And the folks in Hollywood who are the most intolerant people, except when it comes to apparently First-name, first-line producers raping people.
00:11:07.000The public scrutiny of what The Hollywood Report as the hundreds of problematic past jokes began with one particular bit in 2010.
00:11:14.000As Yahoo explained Wednesday, in Hart's 2010 comedy special, Seriously Funny, he did a bit that had him saying that his biggest fear was his son growing up and being gay.
00:11:21.000He said, keep in mind, I'm not homophobic.
00:11:24.000But me, as a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.
00:11:28.000And then he launched into stories about how his son, then three, having his first gay moment with a friend and how he needs to nip it in the bud by screaming at it, at him, stop it, that's gay.
00:11:36.000Hart has since spoken about the joke, saying that it was about his own insecurities as a parent, reiterating he's not homophobic, saying he wouldn't tell that joke today because when I said it, the Times weren't as sensitive as they are now.
00:11:50.000What percentage of parents in America would prefer that their child be homosexual, with all the problems that entails, personal, political, and emotional?
00:12:38.000It's better than that piece of crap that you get from one of those weird novelty companies that the person tosses in the back of the closet and then hands back to you seven years from now.
00:12:46.000It has sensitive sonic vibrations, gentle enough on your sensitive gums, a built-in timer with guiding pulses to remind you When to switch sides.
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00:13:00.000Quip doesn't require a clunky charger.
00:13:02.000It runs for three months on one charge, which is awesome.
00:13:05.000And you can even give the gift prepaid refills for a year to make sure that they are never using old, worn out, or ineffective brushes because they can be delivered on a dentist recommended schedule every three months for just five bucks.
00:13:50.000I just got a call from the Academy, and that call basically said, Kevin, apologize for your tweets of old, or we're going to have to move on and find another host.
00:14:01.000Talking about the tweets from 2009-2010.
00:14:17.000Okay, but then he came out later and he did in fact issue an apology and then said that he would step away from this because he understood.
00:14:22.000I'm sure he got calls from his agents telling him that he needed to step away or the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation would destroy his career.
00:14:58.000You got the short black man barred from the Oscars because you had to make sure that he did not outrank anybody else on the intersectionality scale.
00:15:05.000Joy Reid, by the way, over at MSNBC still has a job despite nearly identical post from a nearly identical period.
00:15:10.000But that's because she is a black woman, not a black man.
00:15:13.000And as we all know, that ranks her higher on the intersectional pyramid.
00:15:16.000So she can get away with those old tweets that she claims somebody hacked her and placed into her internet archive, which is an obvious lie.
00:15:40.000We know she's funny because the critics keep telling us that Lena Dunham is super funny.
00:15:43.000Now, Lena Dunham has never really done a funny thing, or, you know, written a funny thing, or said a funny thing, but we know she's funny because the woke critics tell us that she is very funny.
00:15:55.000And what about this new scandal where it turns out that she lied about having evidence that her close friends did not engage in sexual assault?
00:16:03.000How about the fact that she lied about that?
00:16:04.000Shouldn't that bar her from the Oscars?
00:16:28.000That it was the patriarchy that had taken over her brain.
00:16:30.000Well, now that she's blamed the patriarchy, I guess we can move on, and Lena Dunham should host the Oscars.
00:16:34.000I have another idea for hosting the Oscars as well, and this person would be Hannah Gadsby.
00:16:39.000So Hannah Gadsby may, in fact, be the least funny person on planet Earth.
00:16:43.000And I know, I have this running tally of people who are the least funny comedians and most annoying comedians on planet Earth, and Samantha Bee tops the list.
00:17:10.000We could have him, and he could just replace Kevin Hart.
00:17:13.000He has a bunch of anti-Semitic tweets in his past, but nobody seems to care about that at all, because the Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition.
00:17:19.000But I think the best pick of all, the best pick of all, the one that really sums up where we are comedically, and in terms of entertainment, and in terms of social media mobbing, is Hannah Gadsby.
00:17:28.000Now, you will recall Hannah Gadsby from such specials as I'm as boring as hell and everyone praises me for it on Netflix.
00:17:35.000That's not the actual title of her Netflix special, but it should have been.
00:17:38.000It's a better title than, more accurate, Truth in Advertising.
00:19:00.000That's what the reviews said, but my favorite part of the reviews was like, yeah, so it's basically a motivated, politically oriented lesbian, and I just mentioned her sexuality because she makes this very much part of her monologues, you know, yelling at us for an hour.
00:20:04.000Won't we all be happier then when nobody laughs ever and we all just sit around glaring at each other but knowing in our hearts that we're empathetic?
00:20:12.000When we just sit around destroying each other's career by digging through each other's old tweets but we know deep in our heart we're doing it out of sympathy for the other?
00:20:18.000Won't that make America so much better?
00:20:22.000How the social media mobbing and the motivated social justice warrior left have made this country worse in virtually every possible way, it's on full display with regard to the Oscars.
00:20:33.000In just a second, I want to get to this big breaking story from the New York Times that President Trump long ago had illegals working at his golf club.
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00:22:58.000During more than five years as a housekeeper at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Victorina Morales has made Donald J. Trump's bed, cleaned his toilet, and dusted his crystal golf trophies.
00:23:08.000When he visited as president, she was directed to wear a pin in the shape of the American flag adorned with a Secret Service logo.
00:23:13.000Because of the outstanding support she has provided during Mr. Trump's visits, Ms.
00:23:16.000Morales in July was given a certificate from the White House Communications Agency inscribed with her name.
00:23:22.000Quite an achievement for an undocumented immigrant worker.
00:23:24.000Morales' journey from cultivating corn in rural Guatemala to fluffing pillows at an exclusive golf resort took her from the southwest border, where she said she crossed illegally in 1999, to the Horace County of New Jersey, where she was hired at the Trump property in 2013 with documents she said were phony.
00:23:39.000She said she was not the only worker at the club who was in the country illegally.
00:23:46.000This woman, and another woman named Sandra Diaz, who was undocumented when she worked at Bedminster between 2010 and 2013, they violated federal law.
00:23:52.000Presumably they were using a false social security number.
00:23:55.000The two women said they worked for years as part of a group of housekeeping, maintenance, and landscaping employees at the golf club that included a number of undocumented workers, though they could not say precisely how many.
00:24:08.000There is no evidence that Mr. Trump or the Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status.
00:24:14.000But at least two supervisors at the club were aware of it, the women said, and took steps to help the workers evade detection and keep their jobs.
00:24:20.000This whole article is designed to yell at President Trump because he's harsh on illegal immigration because there were illegal immigrants who worked for him.
00:24:28.000Now, first of all, I'm from California.
00:24:30.000That means that I know almost no one who has not had an illegal immigrant work for them.
00:24:35.000Now, I'm a rarity in California in that I actually ask for evidence of citizenship before I employ somebody.
00:24:40.000But I think I've told this story before.
00:24:42.000I remember we were looking for a nanny for our youngest, for our oldest kid.
00:24:47.000And there was a, we used an agency to try and find a nanny.
00:24:50.000And we said straight at the beginning, we need somebody who is an American citizen.
00:24:54.000And one of the women who interviewed, really nice lady who obviously just wanted to be here to work and At the end of the interview, we said, you know, we're interested in hiring you.
00:25:08.000I felt really terrible about it, obviously, because this is obviously a good person who is trying to just make a living.
00:25:14.000That does not alleviate the problem of breaking the law.
00:25:17.000And the New York Times writing these long pieces about how Donald J. Trump's golf course without his knowledge of hiring illegal immigrants, well that means that law enforcement is bad.
00:25:25.000It's really a ridiculous, ridiculous emotional appeal.
00:25:28.000Especially in a time when, let's be real about this, the people who are preventing All of us, from being able to rationally check whether somebody is an illegal immigrant before hiring them, those are the folks of the left.
00:25:39.000The New York Times can't have it both ways.
00:25:41.000Either it's bad that Donald J. Trump has illegal immigrants working at his New Jersey golf club, or it's good that he has them working at his golf club.
00:25:47.000If it is bad that he has them working at his golf club, which presumably is what they're saying, then how can the New York Times be rooting For folks like Nancy Pelosi, who says that under no circumstances will the Democrats fund a border wall.
00:25:57.000Here is the incoming Speaker of the House.
00:26:39.000And Chuck Schumer also was criticizing President Trump for being harsh on the border.
00:26:43.000He says that President Trump is risking a government shutdown with his temper tantrum over border funding.
00:26:48.000We don't want to see the government shut down over Christmas.
00:26:51.000Even though President Trump seems to brag that he wants one.
00:26:55.000The only way, the one and only way, We approach a shutdown as if President Trump refuses both of our proposals and demands $5 billion or more for a border wall.
00:27:11.000Okay, so solid stuff from the Democrats who are simultaneously complaining that illegal immigrants are working at Trump's golf course and then ensuring that illegal immigrants can work at President Trump's golf course.
00:27:20.000Speaking of abiding by the law, the Democrats are very upset over what looks like pretty obvious election fraud in North Carolina's 9th congressional district.
00:27:28.000There's a piece over at BuzzFeed News today about a guy named Chris Easton.
00:27:31.000He's 47 years old, not registered to any political party, and he works in construction.
00:27:35.000He's into camping and boating and has lived in this rural town most of his life.
00:27:39.000What Chris Easton does not do is vote.
00:27:47.000He's just not the guy casting the ballot.
00:27:49.000Eason told BuzzFeed News he signed a blank absentee ballot in the now-contested November 6th general election, didn't actually pick any candidates, and then handed the unsealed ballot to the man at the center of an unfolding election fraud scandal, a guy named McCray Dallas.
00:28:02.000Sure enough, public records show his absentee ballot ended up signed, sealed, and witnessed to the county board of elections with Eason's name on it.
00:28:15.000It's unclear if any boxes were actually ticked off.
00:28:17.000Election officials told BuzzFeed News that if a fully blank ballot were sent in, it would be registered and tabulated as zero votes.
00:28:23.000Records show a ballot was registered for Eason in the November 6th race.
00:28:26.000This information has been forwarded to our investigators, said the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement spokesperson, Patrick Annan.
00:28:31.000It is becoming pretty clear that there was election manipulation in this particular North Carolina congressional race.
00:28:37.000CNN reports the Democrat Dan McCready, who got 905 fewer votes than Republican Mark Harris in this ninth district race, has now withdrawn his concession in that race.
00:28:46.000The state elections board has refused to certify the results as it investigates potential misconduct with absentee ballots, making it the last undecided House contest in the country.
00:28:54.000The board could ultimately order another election.
00:28:56.000McCready had previously conceded the race to Harris, but withdrew that concession On Thursday, his reversal comes as the state elections board as well as local and state prosecutors investigate whether Leslie McCray Dallas, a veteran operative in Bladen County who was hired by a consulting firm, the Harris campaign paid 400 grand, altered absentee ballots or collected them from voters, but never turned them in.
00:29:15.000Dallas earned more than 23 grand working on six campaigns dating back to 2010.
00:29:19.000And in most of those races, Dallas candidates received a disproportionately higher percentage of absentee votes in Bladen County.
00:29:26.000Well, apparently, McCray Dallas was going around and collecting absentee ballots from people like at their door and then filling them out as he pleased or discarding them as he pleased.
00:29:35.000And then turning them in to screw with the voter counts.
00:29:38.000Earlier on Thursday, North Carolina Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse told CNN he would support a new election if the election board proves allegations of fraud are true and impacted the outcome of the race.
00:29:48.000He said, We're not ready to call for a new election yet.
00:29:50.000I think that we have to let the board of elections come show their hand if they can show this conceivably could have flipped the race in that neighborhood.
00:30:29.000First, let's talk about your ancestry.
00:30:32.000There's an article yesterday in the New York Times that Elizabeth Warren had basically destroyed her political career on the shoals of taking a genetic test showing that she was whiter than Wonder Bread.
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00:33:37.000Please subscribe over at SoundCloud and iTunes as well, so you can get our Sunday specials, which come out each and every Sunday with a prominent thinker and a prominent political personality or cultural personality.
00:33:58.000So the Democrats are claiming that Republicans are engaged in voter fraud in North Carolina.
00:34:02.000And it looks like one of the operatives was allegedly engaged in voter fraud in North Carolina, which is a serious, serious problem.
00:34:08.000If so, they should invalidate the election.
00:34:10.000But there's something that we should pay attention to here.
00:34:12.000This Leslie McRae Dallas character, who is now under all sorts of scrutiny in the North Carolina 9th, because it would mean that the Democrats win 41 seats in the House.
00:34:20.000The worst, by the way, off-year election loss by percentage terms, really since World War II, which is pretty brutal.
00:34:25.000In any case, Leslie McCray Dallas has a long history of such activity, with Democrats too.
00:34:32.000The problem is when Republicans complained about it, Democrats and the media ignored it.
00:34:36.000Mr. Dallas has a felony record and a history of financial fraud, and his workers sparked what slowly swelled into another bitter electoral impasse in a state that seems perpetually engulfed by them.
00:34:46.000The known claims are concentrated in Bladen County, which has about 33,000 residents, and the neighboring, far larger Robeson County.
00:34:52.000Bladen County, where election officials work in a simple brick-and-glass building on South Cypress Street, just behind a shopping center with a Dollar General and a furniture store, recorded the state's highest rate of absentee ballot requests, 7.5% of registered voters, compared with less than 3% in most of those other 99 counties.
00:35:08.000A strikingly large number of those ballots, 40%, were never returned.
00:35:11.000In Robeson County, 62% were not returned.
00:35:14.000No other county had a rate higher than 27 percent.
00:35:17.000Harris won 61 percent of submitted absentee ballots in Bladen County.
00:35:21.000Well, it turns out that Leslie McCray Dallas has a long history of working with various campaigns, various and sundry campaigns.
00:35:28.000State records show that beginning in 2009, at least seven Democratic and Republican candidates paid him for work in local and state races, including campaigns for the legislature, district attorney and county sheriff.
00:35:39.000Separately, Campaign finance records in Mecklenburg County showed that Mr. Dallas worked for a city council candidate in Charlotte, the state's largest city.
00:35:46.000He was just a known figure, said former state representative Ken Waddell, a Democrat who hired Mr. Dallas after receiving a recommendation.
00:35:52.000To me, it appeared like he just liked politics.
00:35:55.000Mr. Waddell had no complaints about Mr. Dallas's integrity during the campaign, but recalled disagreements about where to place signs in the district.
00:36:01.000Years earlier, though, Mr. Dallas's character had come into question after one of his employees died in an automobile accident.
00:36:07.000The Fayetteville Observer reported in 1991 that Mr. Dallas and the woman he eventually married had, after the employee's death, taken out a six-figure life insurance policy in the man's name by forging a signature and backdating a document.
00:36:19.000Dallas listed himself as the primary beneficiary and then collected benefits.
00:36:22.000He was eventually sentenced to a short prison term, and now it turns that he was engaged in political fraud.
00:36:28.000But after prison, In other words, this is just a bad guy with bipartisan ties.
00:36:59.000In California, there are 26 seats that went Democrat on the night of the election.
00:37:05.000There are a bunch of seats in California that were still up for grabs.
00:37:07.000Every single one of them turned Democratic.
00:37:09.000This has led a bunch of people in the intelligentsia, folks like Nate Silver, the elections analyst, to say, right, because all of the ballots that were counted after, all the absentee ballots that came in, those are disproportionately Democratic voters who are voting.
00:37:22.000Okay, so we shouldn't be suspicious of those at all.
00:37:25.000Well, I'm a little suspicious, not that there are people who are necessarily forging ballots, although we don't know, because you don't know until you know, but I am suspicious of a procedure that makes room for exactly that sort of fraud.
00:37:38.000According to Andrew O'Reilly over at Fox News, Despite holding substantial leads on Election Day, many Republican candidates in California saw their advantage shrink and then disappear, as late-arriving Democratic votes were counted in the weeks following the election.
00:37:50.000While no hard evidence is available, many observers point to the Democrats' use of ballot harvesting as a key to their success in the elections.
00:37:56.000Now, regardless of whether you think that election fraud took place in California, this is an awful law.
00:38:03.000Anecdotally, there was a lot of evidence that ballot harvesting was going on, said Neil Kelly, the registrar for votes in Southern California's Orange County.
00:38:10.000In Orange County, once seen as a Republican stronghold in the state, every House seat went to a Democrat after an unprecedented 250,000 vote-by-mail drop-offs were counted, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
00:38:21.000Democrats say, oh, that's just everyone voting.
00:38:23.000But what ballot harvesting is, ballot harvesting suggests that if I have an absentee ballot, it can only be turned in if I mail it, if I mail it myself, or if I give it to a family member to turn in.
00:38:36.000Now, anyone can turn in anybody else's ballot.
00:38:39.000So this means that Democratic operatives have been paid to go door-to-door and pick up people's ballots in order to bring them to the ballot box.
00:38:47.000Do you think that they're going to be even-handed in how they collect those ballots?
00:38:51.000Do you think that they are going to collect all the ballots and try to turn them in?
00:38:54.000It's about every vote being counted or every Democrat vote being counted.
00:38:56.000And besides that, why should we believe that partisans would never, ever, ever pick up a ballot that has, for example, an empty slot left in the governor's race and just fill it in?
00:39:07.000Doesn't this leave room for a bit of fraud?
00:39:09.000Wouldn't you want non-partisan election officials, I don't know, overseeing elections?
00:39:14.000According to Neal Kelly, the registrar of voters, he said people were carrying in stacks of 100 and 200 of them.
00:39:19.000We had multiple people calling to ask if these people were allowed to do this.
00:39:23.000Two years ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law AB 1921, which legalized the so-called practice of ballot harvesting.
00:39:29.000That's exactly what I was talking about before.
00:39:31.000Democrats in the state argued that the bill was meant to make it easier for people to vote.
00:40:00.000Except, of course, It probably is not just fine.
00:40:03.000OK, meanwhile, there has been a lot of talk in recent days about the supposed election, election ridiculousness that is happening in the aftermath of Republicans losing the governorship in Wisconsin.
00:40:16.000A lot of talk about how the Republicans in Wisconsin are restricting, restricting the ability of the governor to do things in Wisconsin.
00:40:23.000Now that there's a Democrat in charge of the governor's house in Wisconsin, people say, oh, look, this is election fraud.
00:40:32.000If you don't like what the legislature is doing, legally speaking, you know it is a great way to stop them from doing it.
00:40:38.000A great way to stop them from doing that is to, I don't know, elect Democrats to the legislature.
00:40:43.000Noah Rothman has a good piece over at Commentary Magazine today.
00:40:47.000He says, He says, have you heard there's a coup underway in Wisconsin?
00:40:51.000When the Democrats had to retake the statehouse in January, Wisconsin Republicans convened a lame-duck session of the legislature with the intention of passing a series of bills aimed at curbing the new governor's authority.
00:41:00.000The measures cover a range of activity.
00:41:02.000There's transferring the power of appointments to an economic development board back to the legislature, prohibiting the governor from banning guns in the state capitol, and unilaterally withdrawing from the state legal challenges to Obamacare without legislative consent.
00:41:14.000And so people are like, oh my gosh, look at them.
00:41:15.000They're trying to curb the power of the governor.
00:41:18.000Except that this stuff has been happening for years.
00:41:22.000As Case Western University law professor Jonathan Adler helpfully reminded American political observers in 2016, attempts by partisan legislators to handcuff incoming executives of the other party is practically tradition in North Carolina.
00:41:34.000When the governor's mansion changed hands in 72, 84, and 88, legislative Democrats were behind the effort to rein in the new Republican governor's appointment power.
00:41:42.000And that's not just in North Carolina.
00:41:44.000Following a statewide electoral rebellion against New Jersey Governor Jim Florio in 1991, the Democratic Party lost control of both legislative chambers.
00:41:52.000On the eve of decennial reapportionment, and with New Jersey set to lose a congressional seat, that would have left Republicans in control of the federal redistricting process.
00:42:00.000So legislative Democrats spent the lame duck session ceding legislative redistricting authority to an independent commission.
00:42:06.000When Republican Bruce Rauner won an upset victory over Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, legislative Democrats moved in the lame duck to truncate the length of the term to which the governor could appoint a comptroller.
00:42:16.000Had former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry been elected to the presidency in 2004, Governor Mitt Romney would have been legally obliged to appoint his replacement to the U.S.
00:42:24.000That replacement presumably would have been a Republican.
00:42:26.000The Democrats in the state legislature couldn't have that, so they overrode Romney's veto and stripped his office of senatorial appointment power.
00:42:50.000The fact that normal politics as it operates is a business in which people Break each other's heads, but that we only as a media pay attention to when one side's head is broken is really absurd in every possible way.
00:43:04.000Okay, now I do want to make a quick comment on the justice reform bill, the criminal justice reform bill that is now moving its way through the Senate.
00:43:13.000There are a lot of questions about whether this thing should pass or not.
00:43:15.000I will admit to being conflicted about it.
00:43:17.000I have friends on both sides of this particular debate politically.
00:43:20.000And by nature, I'm somebody who likes to see criminals stay in jail for longer.
00:43:24.000I'm not a big believer that releasing criminals from jail tends to end with them in happy jobs because just generally the recidivism rates for people, particularly in federal prison, are extraordinarily high.
00:43:36.000Is there a case to be made that people are being kept in prison for too long for nonviolent crimes, for example, after showing evidence of good behavior?
00:43:43.000I think there's a case to be made with regard to that.
00:43:45.000I just think that we ought to be very wary about who we release from these prisons.
00:43:48.000With that said, the First Step Act seems to be a moderately drafted bill.
00:43:53.000The debate over the bill is basically between two sides.
00:43:56.000One that says we can't allow governors more capacity to let prisoners out of prison.
00:44:00.000And another side saying, well, We do need to make provision for people who have participated in good behavior.
00:44:06.000Mike Lee is on one side, Tom Cotton is on the other.
00:44:08.000Tom Cotton says that the First Step Act is bad.
00:44:11.000He says that instead of early release, proponents say it merely provides incentives for inmates to participate in programs, but he says this is nothing but a euphemism.
00:44:19.000If the bill is passed, thousands of federal offenders, including violent felons and sex offenders, will be released earlier than they would be under current law.
00:44:28.000The governor and the wardens of the particular prisons, they have to determine, usually the wardens and the parole officers, have to determine that somebody is non-violent before these people can be released back into society, which is generally how this stuff works anyway.
00:44:40.000It just makes them easier to do all of this.
00:44:42.000I'm not averse to the idea that if people have paid their debts to society, they should be let out of prison.
00:44:46.000I am deeply wary of changes made to the criminal justice system that make it easier for wardens to Unleash criminals back into society in order to save money on budgets, for example.
00:44:58.000And I know there are folks who are skeptical that that will happen.
00:45:02.000So I'm not quite as skeptical that there won't be political actors who seize on federal legislation to try and let people out of prison as early as possible and then hide the crime statistics, which is what's happened in California.
00:45:32.000Were there things you wanted to say you didn't?
00:45:34.000Thank you for all that you do to expand civil conversation and open dialogue.
00:45:37.000So, there are a bunch of folks in the office who are fans of Pastor MacArthur.
00:45:41.000I honestly had never really engaged with his material, And I was eager to speak with people who were ardent Christians in the lead up to Christmas.
00:45:51.000It is that time of the year, and so in the past several weeks, and in the coming weeks, on the Sunday special we have had on John MacArthur, we're having on David Limbaugh on this Sunday special.
00:46:00.000I believe that Bishop Barron is coming in in the near future to discuss religion.
00:46:06.000Also, so I will say that when it comes to the Sunday Conversation, the format that I use for the Sunday Conversation, the Sunday Special, is typically that I am pretty deferential toward the guest.
00:46:15.000So I don't like to get into debate on specifics very often.
00:46:19.000I like to stay and keep it at kind of a 30,000-foot level on big ideas because you only have an hour.
00:46:25.000If you're asking me what I would have analyzed differently if I had more time, I certainly would have gotten into an analysis of Isaiah 53 with Pastor MacArthur, because the Jewish analysis of Isaiah 53, which is usually used as the proof text by Christians of Jesus' coming, that, in the Jewish view, is a bad misread of the Hebrew version of Isaiah 53, which is clearly referencing the corporate Jewish people as an individual And the way that you know this is that in Isaiah 49, Isaiah does exactly the same thing.
00:46:52.000So the suffering servant passage that is very often used as the proof text is interpreted very differently by Jews.
00:46:57.000That was the one area where I wish we had had more time to delve into it, but to do that would have required us to go verse by verse and actually analyze the verses, the way that they are written, and what they meant, and all of that, and that's pretty abstruse stuff.
00:47:08.000As far as the overall conversation, I thought it was fascinating.
00:47:11.000Obviously there are places of disagreement, but You know, my goal when it comes to discussing religion is very often to allow people to clarify their own views.
00:47:20.000And if I'm going to argue, the purpose of the argument is to allow that clarification to happen, not for me to defeat anyone in that particular argument.
00:47:27.000Joshua says, hey, Ben, Intersectionality is one of the biggest things people like you, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin all raise awareness of and try to fight.
00:47:35.000My question is, when did the idea and name intersectionality first come about?
00:47:42.000I'm speaking at the March for Life next month.
00:47:44.000When it comes to the philosophy of intersectionality, that philosophy really begins in the 1960s, when a lot of folks on the left basically suggested that American society was deeply racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, and that the only way to fight back against those structures was to band together in a coalition of the dispossessed.
00:48:02.000Gloria Steinem wrote that women and other victimized groups could not actually achieve self-esteem in the current system.
00:48:07.000She wrote that instead, victims would have to bond, quote, with others who share similar experiences.
00:48:12.000From groups of variously abled people to conferences of indigenous nations, bonding with others in shared power, taking one's place in a circle of true selves.
00:48:20.000The term itself was coined by a woman named Kimberly Crenshaw of Columbia University, and she came up with the term to describe this coalition of victims.
00:48:28.000What she said was that human beings are members of various groups, racial groups and gender groups and religious groups and sexual orientation groups, and we can describe their lived realities by referring to the intersection between these groups.
00:48:38.000So, you're not an individual, you are a white heterosexual Christian male.
00:48:42.000Or you're not an individual, you're a black female lesbian Muslim.
00:48:46.000Each one of these group identities is a different reality, and they intersect, and that's what creates you.
00:48:51.000And so we can then, on the basis of that, determine how victimized you have been in American society.
00:48:56.000Crenshaw herself acknowledged that the idea was to bully people who were not members of the intersectional groups, to force them to check their privilege.
00:49:02.000She explains, quote, acknowledging privilege is hard, particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion.
00:49:07.000But they must acknowledge such privilege or be accused of complicity in institutional racism.
00:49:13.000That's the background of intersectionality.
00:49:15.000It is an evil ideology that divides people by group and deliberately does so in order to tear down the supposed hierarchy, keeping victims in place.
00:49:47.000When you have a country in relatively close proximity to your own that is collapsing into people eating dogs on the street and dying of starvation, if you can help, then you should, because these things tend to have externalities, including mass immigration into the United States.
00:50:01.000But that does raise the question of what the costs and the benefits are, and if we're not aware of those costs and benefits of intervention, you can easily get sucked into being the quote unquote world's policeman.
00:50:12.000Matthew says, Ben, why are natural, non-natural born citizens not allowed to be president, but are allowed to be in the legislature?
00:50:19.000Well, this is, originally the idea here was that we wanted natural born citizens to be president because we wanted people to have a sort of innate love of the land We wanted them to grow up here.
00:50:29.000We didn't want people who were immigrants coming here at age 37 becoming president at age 39 because they didn't sort of imbibe the social fabric of the United States.
00:50:53.000I mean, historically speaking, there was a division between people who were new immigrants to the United States after the Revolutionary War and people who had immigrated to the United States and been part of a historic conflict with the mother country.
00:51:02.000Because it turns out that in those days, most of the people immigrating were still coming from another country that had just fought a war with the people who were in the United States.
00:51:08.000I think there was a lot of fear that a new immigrant would come here, and then you'd get basically a Tory reconciliation with the crown.
00:52:03.000Christians have the book of revelations, but what is the Jewish viewpoint on end times, the end of the world?
00:52:07.000So there's a lot of, just like everything else in Judaism, a lot of argument over what happens in the end times.
00:52:12.000I tend to hold by my monadian perspective that in the end times, basically a political revolution will take place in which The Jewish state is recognized in which peace becomes the natural state of the world to a certain extent, in which the Jews are left alone and respected, in which monotheism becomes the dominant way of life, and that nothing else will really change.
00:52:36.000There are other views that suggest that miracles will take place and that things will change radically, and that in the end, the more Kabbalistic view is that human beings will, they're sort of a spiritual A spiritual end of the world in which human beings reunite with God in a spiritual way, and that's sort of the end of the physical world, but that one is way down the line.
00:53:11.000I believe he's an exorable human being because he travels over to the Middle East, hangs out with terrorist groups, and blames the Jews for their own existence.
00:53:19.000That's why I think he's an exorable human being, even though there are certain parts of his record that are wonderful, like helping homeless people and Habitat for Humanity.
00:53:27.000I think that he is self-absorbed, I think he is terrorist-friendly, and I think that his perspective on politics is infused with a deep-seated level of anti-Semitism.
00:53:39.000Lee says, Dear Ben, Last semester I took a course in body image detailing the problems of beauty sexualization and ideal appearance in American and Western culture.
00:53:45.000Predictably, it promoted body positivity, disowned white privilege beauty, and somehow insinuated in our material that the rise of the late 80s and 90s strict beauty trends stemmed from conservatism.
00:53:56.000I personally believe that trends of promoting body positivity, specifically plus sizes and above, are doing more harm than good.
00:54:01.000Same time, I think our culture is becoming more and more sexualized by the year.
00:54:04.000I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on the matter.
00:54:06.000Where do you think beauty and sexual promotion in advertising and media should be more restrained, since some still need to rely on models to promote swimwear, lingerie, and other consumer products?
00:54:14.000Okay, so first of all, I have serious doubts that Western standards of beauty are simply a result of a bunch of men getting together in a room and voting on what's hot.
00:54:24.000I think that biology dictates what men are into, and Maybe it changes based on the area of the world in which you are, that the sort of correlation between the health of a woman and her weight, for example, differs by culture.
00:54:37.000That it used to be that in a lot of older cultures, if a woman was slightly overweight, if she was slightly soft-egged, this was an indicator of more health than if she was really rail-thin because maybe she had tuberculosis or something.
00:54:48.000But, you know, those are social cues to a certain extent, and those are biological cues to a certain extent.
00:54:54.000The idea that men have ever been into What we would consider unattractive women is not true.
00:55:01.000And the idea that all beauty standards are simply social byproducts is not true either.
00:55:08.000As far as the question of promoting body positivity, Listen, I think that people should feel positive about their body to the extent that their body does what it needs them to do.
00:55:23.000That's what we should really be worried about.
00:55:24.000And that's what I'm going to teach my daughter.
00:55:26.000And that's what my sisters believe also, is that you want to be beautiful for your spouse because you don't want your spouse to be unhappy with how you look.
00:55:32.000But really what weight is about, for example, is health more than simply beauty standards.
00:55:37.000Because as we all get older, we all get less beautiful.
00:55:39.000With that said, the idea that everyone is equally healthy at 200 pounds is just absurd, and that part is just silly.
00:55:46.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I like, and then a couple of things that I hate, and then we'll leave.
00:57:15.000And from the one remnant of the flasks, a miracle was wrought for the roses.
00:57:18.000Men of Insight, eight days established for song and jubilation.
00:57:21.000Bear your holy arm and hasten the end for salvation.
00:57:23.000Avenge the vengeance of your servant's blood from the wicked nation.
00:57:26.000For the triumph is too long delayed for us and there is no end to days of evil.
00:57:29.000Repel the red one in the nethermost shadow.
00:57:31.000That'd be Esau, uh, which would be the Roman Empire.
00:57:35.000and the Greek empire in the nethermost shadow and established for us the seven shepherds.
00:57:39.000I said some mystical connotations at the end about the coming of the Messiah.
00:57:42.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate, and then we'll get out of here for the weekend.
00:57:46.000So the stupidest thing that I've seen this week, and there have been a lot of stupid things, a male acapella group at Princeton University has pulled a Disney movie song from its act.
00:58:02.000Okay, here's the story according to the Associated Press.
00:58:05.000The Princeton Tigertones have performed Kiss the Girl, a song from The Little Mermaid, for years.
00:58:08.000During performances at the Ivy League school, a female audience member would be brought on stage to decide whether or not a man from the crowd could kiss her.
00:58:14.000Noah Wallstein, who wrote the column, claimed... There's a woman who wrote a column saying that it promoted toxic masculinity.
00:58:19.000She claimed the song's message is misogynistic and that too many women have been pulled on stage for unwanted encounters.
00:58:25.000I have seen a queer student brought on stage to have uncomfortably pushed away her forced male companion.
00:58:29.000I have heard of unwilling girls being subjected to their first kisses.
00:58:32.000I have watched mothers who have come to see their child's performance be pulled up to the stage only to have tension generated between them and the kid they came to support.
00:58:39.000Okay, the whole point is that you can say no, and I'm sure it's probably pretty funny if you go to a performance and they're singing Kiss the Girl and the girl's like, no.
00:58:47.000I'm sure that's actually part of the humor of this.
00:59:17.000And what I do like about the song, Kiss the Girl, Is that it is actually a good description of how it is to kiss a girl.
00:59:25.000I know that the left thinks the way that you kiss a girl is that you actually take out a signed contract with a notary, like a public notary with a fingerprint, and then you get fingerprinted and notarized the consent form.
00:59:35.000And then you can kiss the girl, but only to the extent that she has indicated on the form 363.
00:59:41.000Right, so, will there be open-mouthing or no open-mouthing?
00:59:48.000Okay, so, making life more miserable every day.
00:59:50.000Speaking of making life more miserable every day, a Cleveland radio station has now pulled the Christmas date rape song, Baby, It's Cold Outside.
00:59:57.000I know this has become a common complaint now for folks on the left that the lyrics to Baby, It's Cold Outside are about women being raped.
01:00:17.000I mean, it's just, it's so ridiculous and so insane.
01:00:22.000The Star 102 midday host said in an interview, people might say, oh, enough with the Me Too, but if you really put that aside and listen to the lyrics, it's not something I would want my daughter to be in that kind of situation.
01:00:29.000Okay, well, I'm glad that radio stations have decided to ban all rap music forever.
01:00:34.000I'm glad they've decided to ban every other rock song that's ever been written.
01:00:38.000I'm glad that they've decided that they are now going to deconstruct the culture with me, uncover the messages, and then ban all the songs.
01:00:44.000At least when I deconstruct the culture, it's to make you aware of what people are saying in their songs.
01:00:48.000It's not to just destroy the songs wholesale.
01:00:50.000It's amazing how the left has become censorious, much more censorious than the right has been any time in the recent past.