The Ben Shapiro Show - June 27, 2023


They Want You Fat, Stupid, And Lazy


Episode Stats

Length

48 minutes

Words per Minute

209.5685

Word Count

10,199

Sentence Count

719

Misogynist Sentences

22

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary

A fascinating piece by Ryan Burge, a scholar on religion and marriage, examines the fact that the kind of key identifiers of success in the world generally exist among the religious population in the U.S., and they are declining among everybody else. The reason that this is the case is because as education increases, religious belief also increases to a certain extent, which is sort of the reverse of what we ve been told. Those who are most likely to attend services weekly are those with a graduate degree; those who are least likely to go are those who have a high school diploma or less. And one of the other things that correlates with that is income. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to attend church on a regular basis. But when you identify that with marital status, what you find is that married people go to religious services weekly at a far higher rate than people of any other marital status. And that means that the people who are at your local church are probably the most educated, in your community, the best educated, and the more educated among us who never go to church. And the more you have a higher income you have, the better you are likely to be a Christian. But if you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending weekly religious services is about double the rate of folks who don t go. This is hard to ignore and should sound some major alarms for any person of faith concerned about the large state of American society. and should be a major concern for any one of faith . . . and especially if you re concerned about what s going on in your local churches and your community. . . The church needs to do more to reach out to people who aren t involved in the social institutions that are not involved in social justice in any way . or in any other social institution including your local community or your community . in order to make sure they re involved in your social life . and not just in church the church is doing their fair share of the social justice work of social justice, to do their part to promote social justice and access to social opportunities so that they can be a good neighbor , not just good enough, but good enough if they re good enough for you to be good enough . to be good enough and good enough? is the key to the good ol for you


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Well, folks, the federal government and our media and our society at large have decided that it is very, very important that we promote fatness and stupidity and laziness.
00:00:07.000 There's a fascinating piece out by Ryan Burge, who's a scholar on religion and marriage, over at his substack or his blog, graphsaboutreligion.com, in which he examines the fact that the kind of key identifiers of success in the world generally exist among the religious population in the United States, and they are declining among everybody else.
00:00:26.000 And this is sort of a fascinating phenomenon to look at.
00:00:29.000 There are a bunch of charts that he puts up to show this.
00:00:31.000 So, for example, he puts up a chart showing that as education increases, religious practice or religious belief also increases to a certain extent, which is sort of the reverse of what we've been told.
00:00:43.000 The reason that this is the case is because he's talking about not just people who identify as atheist or agnostic, he's talking about people who identify as none of the above.
00:00:51.000 So when you look at people who are not religious in any way, or people who just are disassociated from religion, what you find is that people with some high school education, 32% of them believe in none, right, in these polls.
00:01:05.000 28% of high school graduates are a none.
00:01:10.000 26% of people went to trade school, but by the time you get to a master's degree, only 20% of people who have a master's are nuns, right?
00:01:17.000 The nuns are people who suggest, of course, that they have no belief in religion or they're just unassociated with religion entirely.
00:01:23.000 Not just atheists and agnostics, but people who say none.
00:01:26.000 So as Ryan Burge points out, the trend is unmistakable.
00:01:29.000 Those who are most likely to attend services weekly are those with a graduate degree.
00:01:33.000 Those least likely to attend are those with a high school diploma or less.
00:01:37.000 And one of the other things that that correlates with is income.
00:01:40.000 So what you will see is that the share of people who attend weekly by education and income level, the more educated you are, the more income you have, the more likely you are to attend church.
00:01:50.000 On a regular basis, which is precisely the reverse of what society tells you, what the media tell you.
00:01:53.000 What the media tell you is that it's the most educated among us who never go to church, and it's the least educated among us who always go to church, and that actually is not true.
00:02:01.000 When you identify that with marital status, what you find is that married people go to religious services weekly at a far higher rate than people of any other marital status.
00:02:10.000 So what that means is that the people who are at your local church are probably, in your community, the best educated, the most likely to be married, and the most likely to be parents as well.
00:02:19.000 Because what you find is that the share of people who attend weekly religious services based on marital and parental status, by far, people who are married and parents attend religious services far more clearly.
00:02:31.000 So here's the thing, take religion out of the mix for a second.
00:02:33.000 The identifiers of success in American life, married, kids, high income, education, those are now correlating extremely highly with religious practice.
00:02:43.000 This is the point that Ryan Burge is making and he's right.
00:02:46.000 He says the results are hard to ignore and should sound some major alarms for any person of faith concerned about the large state of American society.
00:02:52.000 Increasingly, religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a quote-unquote proper life.
00:02:56.000 College degree, middle class income, married with children.
00:02:58.000 If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don't.
00:03:04.000 So Ryan reads that as a critique of the church.
00:03:06.000 The church needs to be more welcoming and it needs to find ways to reach out to people who are not married, people who don't have middle class income, people who are not college educated.
00:03:13.000 But there's a way to read this in reverse and that is that the rules that the elite of our society, marital elite, the parental elite, the income elite, The educational elite have applied to themselves are very different than the rules they've promulgated to the rest of society.
00:03:26.000 And you see this very clearly in the social science data.
00:03:28.000 Charles Murray wrote a phenomenal book called Coming Apart, probably a decade and a half ago, in which he examined differences among white communities because he's been ripped up and down for talking about racial disparities.
00:03:38.000 So he decided to do a book talking about sociological differences within white communities.
00:03:42.000 And he segregated out two separate white communities.
00:03:46.000 One, I believe it's called Newtown, one is called Fishtown.
00:03:48.000 Newtown was like the high-income group.
00:03:49.000 The high-income group had people generally who were married, generally people who had kids.
00:03:54.000 Generally, people who are involved in social institutions and people who are low income are the opposite.
00:03:59.000 Now, if you look at the media or if you look at the way the government treats this, it's precisely the opposite.
00:04:03.000 They pretend that the people who are most likely to be successful in our society are single female Berkeley graduates with no children who hate God and hate the church.
00:04:11.000 Those are the people who are most likely to be successful if you watch TV.
00:04:15.000 But those in real life are not the people who are actually successful.
00:04:17.000 In other words, the message that society is promulgating is precisely the opposite.
00:04:21.000 of reality.
00:04:22.000 And that has real-world consequences, because it bleeds down to the people who are aspiring to be at the top of the hierarchy in American society.
00:04:31.000 It's a point that you can see throughout American history.
00:04:34.000 There was always sort of a group of people that everyone aspired to be.
00:04:37.000 If you go back to the 1930s, for example, I've used this example before, if you look at pictures from the Great Depression of people who are waiting in line at food distribution centers, at charity services, there are people who are wearing suits.
00:04:49.000 If you look at today's billionaires, they dress like schlobs.
00:04:52.000 The aspirational has now become an aspiration to kind of be the lowest common denominator, as opposed to the aspiration is to be the highest.
00:05:00.000 Well, here's the thing.
00:05:01.000 Whenever people see people who are successful and everybody knows what success is, we can all pretend we don't know what success is.
00:05:06.000 We know what success looks like.
00:05:07.000 Successful marriage, successful raising of children, successful in your community, successful in terms of income, successful in terms of education.
00:05:13.000 We all know what that looks like.
00:05:15.000 We as a society have decided that because we don't like the results of that, we're going to pretend that the measuring stick doesn't exist.
00:05:20.000 But the measuring stick does exist, and we all know about the measuring stick.
00:05:23.000 And so innately, we look to the people who are successful by all those measures in our society.
00:05:27.000 And those people used to be loud and proud about what it was that they did in their personal lives, what it was they believed.
00:05:32.000 But now they've decided that the measure of true virtue is to do precisely the opposite.
00:05:36.000 The measure of true virtue is to say, sure, I live that way.
00:05:39.000 Sure, you know, I don't send my kid to a public school.
00:05:42.000 I send my kid to a private school.
00:05:43.000 Sure, I'm married.
00:05:44.000 Sure, I got an education.
00:05:46.000 Sure, I followed all the rules that a traditional religious society would actually have me follow.
00:05:50.000 Sure, but you know what?
00:05:52.000 Because I'm an elite, I'm going to promulgate a new morality that includes you.
00:05:56.000 Now, the dirty secret about this is that what that really is is it's a form of ugly paternalism in which people at the top are saying that people at the bottom are incapable of rising, and that's not true.
00:06:04.000 It's not true.
00:06:05.000 The same things that got people at the top to the top are the things that can take anyone to the top.
00:06:11.000 But we have a society that's now dedicated to the opposite proposition, that there is some sort of injustice in the measuring stick itself.
00:06:17.000 And thus, we are no longer even going to shoot for the things that we all know to be good and true.
00:06:21.000 And here's the thing.
00:06:22.000 Once you remove the measuring stick, what you end up with is chaos.
00:06:24.000 You don't end up with equality.
00:06:26.000 You end up with just turmoil and chaos and unsuccess because you are subsidizing lack of success by removing the measuring stick for success.
00:06:34.000 All these rules are clear.
00:06:35.000 Go to church, get married, have kids, get a job, finish your education.
00:06:39.000 These rules are all very clear.
00:06:40.000 There's nothing new here.
00:06:41.000 We've known about these rules for at least a couple of hundred years.
00:06:45.000 There's nothing new in terms of a mobile American society from unsuccess to success.
00:06:50.000 But we have decided at the elite levels of American government and American media to obliterate All of those rules, and pretend that we have done somebody some good, and it's precisely the opposite.
00:06:58.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:08:12.000 Alrighty.
00:08:14.000 The precise opposite of the things that bring success are the things that our society promotes.
00:08:20.000 So to take a stupid example, our culture promotes people like Cardi B. Cardi B, I've ripped on her before because I think that she is a perfect example of virtually everything wrong with our society.
00:08:31.000 She is a rapper who used to be a stripper who bragged on tape about drugging and robbing men.
00:08:37.000 And she also happens to be a person who is deemed by our society as the height of sex appeal.
00:08:42.000 That sexual satisfaction is supposed to be attained by acting like Cardi B, or by imitating Cardi B. But the reality is that if Cardi B lives Cardi B's values, she ends up very unhappy.
00:08:54.000 So Cardi B is married to a person named Offset.
00:08:57.000 These were both of their given names.
00:08:58.000 They both came out of their mothers, and Cardi B's mom said, I shall call her Cardi B, and Offset's mother said, I shall call him Offset.
00:09:03.000 I don't know why not.
00:09:04.000 Onset, but Offset shall be his name.
00:09:06.000 And then these two lovebirds married one another, And they've had a rather fraught relationship.
00:09:13.000 And this is the model, by the way, for literally millions of people in the United States.
00:09:18.000 The thing that we used to model in the United States was, you know, a solid marriage that lasted for an entire lifetime in which you were dedicated to the upraising of your children.
00:09:25.000 But Cardi B's marriage has now splashed across page six.
00:09:29.000 So the latest claim within the beautiful marriage that Cardi B has presented, and again, she's the height of sex appeal.
00:09:33.000 She can't keep her husband dining in, but she's the height of sex appeal.
00:09:36.000 She took to Twitter Spaces Monday to address her husband Offset's claim that she effed another man.
00:09:41.000 So apparently, he put up an Instagram post, which is really just a delight.
00:09:47.000 By the way, they have two kids.
00:09:48.000 This is all gonna play amazing for the kids.
00:09:51.000 He put up an Instagram post that says, my wife effed a N-word on me, gang.
00:09:58.000 Y'all N-words know how I come.
00:10:00.000 Don't pay attention to that countryman, y'all.
00:10:02.000 apparently took that down, but she responded to that.
00:10:05.000 She said, first of all, let me say, you can't accuse me of all the things
00:10:07.000 you know you are guilty of.
00:10:08.000 Sing it with me, y'all.
00:10:09.000 And I see that it is easy for you to blame everything on me.
00:10:11.000 Yes, honey.
00:10:12.000 Listen, she went on, speaking directly to her listeners.
00:10:15.000 Don't pay attention to that country man, y'all.
00:10:17.000 So here is Cardi B talking in the most eloquent terms about the state of her marriage.
00:10:23.000 Don't pay attention to that country man, y'all.
00:10:26.000 Don't pay attention to the country man.
00:10:29.000 That space is the other day, that mother is spiraling and thinking, come on now.
00:10:35.000 I'm Cardi B. I think sometimes, but again, I'm Cardi B.
00:10:39.000 I was giving this to anybody.
00:10:41.000 It will be out.
00:10:42.000 I'm not just anybody.
00:10:44.000 Can't be no regular regular regular because they don't tell the world.
00:10:50.000 I don't even know how to translate that.
00:10:53.000 In any case, this is what is presented by the upper echelons of our culture as high culture.
00:10:59.000 We have to stop pretending that this is quote-unquote low culture in the United States because it's not.
00:11:03.000 This sort of stuff is promoted by every major media outlet in the United States.
00:11:06.000 It is promoted by every single major streaming service in the United States.
00:11:10.000 It is promoted as the height of American culture.
00:11:12.000 You are literally not supposed to say things like, this stuff is ugly and bad and her music sucks.
00:11:17.000 You're not allowed to say that sort of stuff without people going crazy on you.
00:11:20.000 That the message is promulgated by people like Cardi B or, for that matter, Nicki Minaj.
00:11:23.000 That this music is garbage and that it actually is promoting harmful messages.
00:11:27.000 Instead, we are supposed to pretend that it's a form of female empowerment and that people who follow its TikToks are likely to lead happier lives.
00:11:33.000 Well, here's the problem.
00:11:33.000 Cardi B is not leading a particularly happy marital life.
00:11:36.000 The people who are leading happy marital lives are boring fuddy-duddies.
00:11:39.000 The people who are being promoted by our society as the models of marriage are people like Cardi B. Obviously, these are the things that actually matter.
00:11:48.000 It's a society that promotes stupidity.
00:11:51.000 It's a society that promotes failed marriages or not getting married at all.
00:11:54.000 I mean, I'll give it to Cardi B. At least she actually got married.
00:11:58.000 70% of kids who are born in the black community today are born out of wedlock.
00:12:00.000 40% of kids in the white community, by the way, are born out of wedlock today.
00:12:05.000 Now, as we'll discuss in a moment, none of that happens in a vacuum.
00:12:07.000 You actually have to have a supporting governmental structure to promote all of that.
00:12:11.000 But that's not the only thing that we're promoting.
00:12:12.000 So we're promoting stupidity in relationships.
00:12:15.000 And we're also promoting fatness, right?
00:12:17.000 Because we have decided that we're going to obliterate all the measuring sticks.
00:12:19.000 So here's the thing.
00:12:20.000 Again, we all know innately what success looks like.
00:12:22.000 Success, when it comes to marriage, looks like you marry a person, you love that person, you stay with them until you die, you bring up kids with that person, your relationship deepens over time.
00:12:31.000 We all know what success looks like.
00:12:32.000 It's not a big mystery.
00:12:33.000 And yes, there is an ideal.
00:12:34.000 And it's not insulting to people who don't meet the ideal to point out that the ideal exists.
00:12:38.000 Okay, but the same thing exists in the physical realm.
00:12:41.000 We have decided that it's very, very mean and very, very bad to point out that people should, for example, be in shape.
00:12:45.000 So there's an entire article by a person named Daniel Pinnock about Lizzo.
00:12:50.000 So again, we're focusing a lot on culture today, but here's the reality.
00:12:53.000 I mean, I've looked at the actual numbers in the United States.
00:12:56.000 The number of people who form their values based on sheer politics in the United States is very low.
00:13:01.000 Most people do not get their values inculcated to them by watching Fox News or by watching shows like this one.
00:13:05.000 That's just not the way that it works.
00:13:06.000 That's not what the numbers show.
00:13:08.000 Most people get their values from either the local institutions in which they participate, which would normally be a church, or if they don't get it from the church, they're getting it from their surrounding milieu, which is usually social media.
00:13:18.000 And yes, culture, like Cardi B, has many, many, many more fans and followers than I will ever have because she is in the cultural realm.
00:13:26.000 And the same thing is true of Lizzo.
00:13:28.000 And so when you have an entire media infrastructure dedicated to the proposition that being extremely overweight is actually a sign of health and beauty, What do you think you're going to get?
00:13:36.000 You're incentivizing people to participate in that sort of behavior.
00:13:39.000 We'll get to more of that momentarily.
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00:14:45.000 Okay, so...
00:14:46.000 There is a piece by Daniel Pinnock, an actress, writer, and comedian, and star of the CBS sitcom Ghosts, and the creator of the one-woman show Body Slash Courage.
00:14:54.000 Oh man, will it be more stunning or will it be more brave?
00:14:57.000 She has a piece over at the Washington Post titled, What the Fat Shamers Don't Get About Lizzo.
00:15:02.000 And, um, she says this.
00:15:04.000 I understand why Lizzo took a beat from Twitter.
00:15:06.000 Last month, the Emmy and Grammy-winning multi-hyphenate artist, a classically trained flute-playing rapper, singer-songwriter, actress, and fashion mogul was under attack again from internet trolls bombarding her with vicious messages about her weight.
00:15:17.000 This time it got so bad she locked down her Twitter account writing,
00:15:19.000 y'all don't know how close I be to giving up on everyone and quitting.
00:15:23.000 I don't think that that was phrased in sort of the Shakespearean, the sort of old English.
00:15:30.000 Y'all don't know how close I be.
00:15:31.000 I don't think that's what she's gonna, anyway.
00:15:33.000 Lizzo embraces inclusivity for everyone who has a body.
00:15:37.000 Everyone who has a body, as opposed to what, the bodiless?
00:15:40.000 Who are the people who don't have a body?
00:15:41.000 Why isn't she including them?
00:15:43.000 She chants the mantra of body positivity for all humans, not just the fat ones.
00:15:47.000 Her songs, including Good As Hell and Truth Hurts, have resonated with millions of people as anthems of empowerment and self-acceptance.
00:15:53.000 Ah, self-acceptance and empowerment.
00:15:55.000 Now here's the reality.
00:15:56.000 If you want a path to unsuccess, you should follow the pathway of empowerment and self-acceptance.
00:16:02.000 Great way to fail in life.
00:16:04.000 Empowerment and self-acceptance?
00:16:06.000 means that you say that you are fine just as you are.
00:16:10.000 No one, no one, saints should not be fine just as they are.
00:16:14.000 The best people are people who are always striving to better themselves and to better the people around them.
00:16:20.000 You should not feel empowered just being you.
00:16:22.000 You shouldn't wake up in the morning feeling, I am my best me.
00:16:24.000 You are not your best you.
00:16:25.000 There is a better you out there.
00:16:26.000 And it's just a short distance away if you strive to change yourself.
00:16:29.000 And it's, again, when it comes to the treadmill of life, the treadmill is moving underneath you.
00:16:34.000 If you're standing still, you're moving backwards.
00:16:36.000 Either you're moving forwards or you're falling off the treadmill.
00:16:39.000 But empowerment and self-acceptance.
00:16:40.000 Quote, she lives freely and unapologetically.
00:16:42.000 Ah, this sort of language makes me just want to vomit.
00:16:44.000 Freely and unapologetically, as opposed to living in chains apologetically, whether twerking on the beach with her besties or modeling stylish crop tops from her shapewear brand, Yitti.
00:16:54.000 But for years, Lizzo has faced backlash from people made uncomfortable by her unabashed acceptance of herself, who'd rather see her concealed in oversized cardigans and potato sacks.
00:17:04.000 I love that the alternatives here are potato sacks or thongs.
00:17:09.000 I feel like there's a whole wide range, a magical range of clothing that fits between potato sacks and thongs.
00:17:17.000 What about her weight?
00:17:18.000 People say she's promoting obesity.
00:17:19.000 No, she isn't.
00:17:20.000 There's a difference between endorsing obesity and practicing self-love.
00:17:26.000 Well, not when her self-love involves promoting obesity.
00:17:30.000 There's a fairly high crossover right there.
00:17:32.000 When most people think of obesity, says this columnist, perhaps they think of skyrocketing BMIs, or overweight people with chronic diseases, or TV shows such as My 600-lb Life, or The Biggest Loser.
00:17:41.000 Lizzo is not promoting any of that.
00:17:43.000 She is just trying to exist while lifting others up.
00:17:45.000 That's such a lie, by the way.
00:17:46.000 She says the new standard of beauty is Lizzo.
00:17:48.000 And so does the media.
00:17:49.000 The media say Lizzo is a beautiful, beautiful woman.
00:17:51.000 She's beautiful at whatever her weight is.
00:17:53.000 She's got to be at least 150 pounds overweight.
00:17:56.000 But it doesn't matter because, again, this is the new standard.
00:17:58.000 Now, I have a question.
00:18:00.000 Is it a recipe for your success to imitate Lizzo's actions?
00:18:06.000 I love that this lady tries to turn Lizzo into a sort of fitness guru.
00:18:10.000 She got me back in the gym, says this columnist, seeing someone who looks like me not ashamed or hating her body while exercising changed my entire perspective on fitness.
00:18:18.000 Did it though?
00:18:19.000 As opposed to saying to yourself, maybe we actually should not.
00:18:24.000 Look like that.
00:18:24.000 And the way to not look like that is not just to go to the gym.
00:18:26.000 It's to actually change our diets.
00:18:28.000 Caloric deficit is a real thing.
00:18:30.000 But again, our culture says, does he even say such things?
00:18:32.000 He's judgmental and very, very bad.
00:18:36.000 And then you wonder why there's a backlash that comes in the form of some of the stupidest presidential campaigning in human history and people resonating to it.
00:18:42.000 So RFK Jr.
00:18:43.000 is running for the presidency.
00:18:44.000 He's going to run about 20% in the primary polls versus Joe Biden.
00:18:49.000 And the reason for that is because Joe Biden is a doddering elderly gentleman who looks like he is going to literally keel over and die in front of us.
00:18:55.000 RFK Jr.
00:18:57.000 is a person who has expressed a number of wild theories, and then also does a campaign where he takes off his shirt at the age of 70, pretty clearly on testosterone replacement therapy, for whatever it's worth, and looks pretty ripped, and then does some push-ups, and people were like fawning over this yesterday.
00:19:13.000 And so we can laugh at it.
00:19:14.000 And it is funny.
00:19:15.000 I mean, President, can you imagine Abraham Lincoln doing this as part of a presidential campaign?
00:19:20.000 Be weird.
00:19:20.000 Be real weird.
00:19:21.000 Calvin Coolidge is buffing down.
00:19:23.000 Very strange.
00:19:24.000 But is there a reason that this is receiving some sort of a support?
00:19:28.000 The answer is yes.
00:19:29.000 Because if the alternatives are 70-year-old RFK Jr.
00:19:33.000 Okay.
00:19:33.000 Let's go.
00:19:33.000 Okay.
00:19:33.000 prison yard doing workout or Lizzo twerking while fat, American society
00:19:39.000 knows what better better shape looks like. We can pretend we don't. Here was
00:19:43.000 RFK Jr. yesterday.
00:19:46.000 Let's go. There is a seven-year-old dude doing push-ups and honestly for a
00:19:53.000 seven-year-old dude this is this is pretty impressive. Now it is his final
00:19:56.000 set so he said he had to tweet out that this was actually his last set because he
00:20:00.000 only got like eight push-ups there but it doesn't matter This went viral, and the reason this went viral is, number one, he's a seven-year-old dude in really good shape, and also because it is a backlash to a society that says that it is actively good to ignore your weight, that it is actively good to ignore standards.
00:20:17.000 Now, none of this could be promoted in any sort of scenario where the government didn't support it, because it would turn out that unsuccess would lead to, for example, lack of income.
00:20:27.000 Lack of success in these various bad decision-making would have consequences, but we've constructed an entire utopian world in which bad activities, stupid decisions actually end up being rewarded by the government because we're supposed to treat bad decisions with sympathy the same way that we would some sort of medical condition.
00:20:42.000 We'll get to that momentarily.
00:20:43.000 First, We have a dog.
00:20:44.000 Our dog's name is Happy, and Happy is a delight.
00:20:47.000 Happy is a wonderful doggy, and our kids love him very much, which is why we want Happy to live a long and healthy life, and that is why we give him Rough Greens every morning.
00:20:55.000 The dog food you've been giving your dog is dead food.
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00:21:41.000 Okay, all of this brings us to the collapse of the institutions that were supposed to prevent this sort of thing.
00:21:49.000 And also to the building up of institutions that support the destruction of decent measures.
00:21:54.000 So I have to say that I'm a non-Catholic, but I'm a member of Western civilization, which means that I have a pretty strong stake in the papacy.
00:22:04.000 The Pope happens to have dominion over a billion people.
00:22:08.000 What he says matters an awful lot, and Pope Francis has been doing an absolutely horrendous job, actually, of guarding the values that he is supposed to be guarding as the Pope.
00:22:17.000 As a religious person, I would prefer to see Judeo-Christian religion flourish, because I think that Judeo-Christian religion has been the single greatest force undergirding a system of morality that allows for the values that create success.
00:22:29.000 Well, apparently, according to Fortune magazine, Pope Francis praised artists on Friday as true visionaries who can see, dream, and invent, as he welcomed 200 artists, filmmakers, and writers into the Sistine Chapel to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum's Contemporary Art Collection.
00:22:43.000 Francis acknowledged that some in the crowd, there was Andres Serrano of Piss Christ fame, sometimes used confrontation to make people think, but he said their aim was to find harmony and beauty.
00:22:52.000 You want to reveal reality also in its contradictions, and in those things that it is more comfortable and convenient to keep hidden, Francis said.
00:22:58.000 Like the biblical prophets, you confront things that at times are uncomfortable.
00:23:01.000 You criticize today's false myths and new idols, its empty talks, the ploys of consumerism, the schemes of power.
00:23:07.000 So, that is presumably why you invite a person who literally put a crucifix in a jar of urine and called it art.
00:23:19.000 It's hard to think of anything more self-defeating than that.
00:23:23.000 And many of our chief religious institutions have been doing sort of the same thing.
00:23:26.000 They've been mirroring the desires of the elites instead of mirroring the values that allow elites to become elites in the first place and give access to that elite status to literally everyone.
00:23:37.000 They're helping the elites destroy the ladder of success that got them where they are by following the values of modernity that are a complete fail.
00:23:45.000 Meanwhile, as I say, all of that has to be subsidized by some government, and that is what Joe Biden is doing.
00:23:50.000 So Joe Biden is now trotting out a new thing.
00:23:52.000 It is called Bidenomics.
00:23:54.000 What exactly is Bidenomics?
00:23:56.000 Apparently, Bidenomics is we just spray money at pretty much everything.
00:24:00.000 Bidenomics is all about ensuring that people who make bad decisions are subsidized.
00:24:05.000 And that's true in the economics sphere.
00:24:07.000 If you get into an industry that's failing, then presumably the Biden administration is going to hold you up.
00:24:11.000 If you are a person who is on food stamps and you don't want to work, the Biden administration tries to hold you up.
00:24:17.000 These are all very important things for Bidenomics to push.
00:24:21.000 According to Politico, this is a pivot into a new campaign message censored on Bidenomics shorthand for the administration's economic strategy of, quote, boosting the middle class through government investments rather than stimulative tax cuts focusing on the wealthy.
00:24:33.000 So here's the difference, by the way, between a government investment rather than a stimulative tax cut.
00:24:37.000 A tax cut is where you pay less taxes, and then you are rewarded or punished accordingly for your good or bad decision-making.
00:24:43.000 Because what you do with your money is now your fault.
00:24:46.000 What I do with my money, if I make a bad investment, I pay the price for that.
00:24:48.000 If the government takes my money and invests it in something bad, Then, presumably, I still pay the price for it, but you don't pay the price for it in some way.
00:24:57.000 And if you are at the bottom end of the scale and you're not paying taxes, then you really don't pay the price for it.
00:25:00.000 Instead, you're just taking money out of somebody else's pocket.
00:25:03.000 This is Bidenomics.
00:25:04.000 Senior Biden advisors Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon wrote in a new memo, quote, Implementing that economic vision and plan.
00:25:08.000 Decisively turning the page on the era of trickle-down economics has been the defining project of the Biden presidency.
00:25:15.000 So they're talking about Bidenomics.
00:25:17.000 That's the thing that really matters.
00:25:18.000 So what exactly is Bidenomics?
00:25:20.000 Bidenomics, again, is redistribution of income through various governmental means and subsidization of political allies.
00:25:28.000 That's the story of the American federal government really since the FDR days, but more importantly, since the War on Poverty, which has utterly restructured American society along the lines of promoting fat, stupid, and lazy.
00:25:40.000 You now get paid by the federal government to make bad decisions.
00:25:44.000 Here is Corinne Jean-Pierre promoting the phrase Bidenomics.
00:25:46.000 This apparently is their new... Again, I'm not sure how they think that makes it more popular since Joe Biden is a very unpopular president.
00:25:52.000 Thanks, Corinne.
00:25:53.000 I wanted to ask you about this new Bidenomics messaging push.
00:25:56.000 Can you just give me a sense first of, you know, how did you guys coin that phrase or why did you decide to go with that branding going forward?
00:26:03.000 You don't like Bidenomics?
00:26:05.000 No, I'm just asking.
00:26:06.000 I'm curious.
00:26:06.000 I think it's pretty clever.
00:26:07.000 It's pretty good.
00:26:09.000 Look, it makes good sense, Bidenomics, right?
00:26:14.000 It kind of flows off the tongue really well.
00:26:16.000 But in all seriousness, look, what you're going to hear from the president, I don't want to get ahead of him.
00:26:21.000 I think we've kind of laid out a little bit of what we are thinking, what we think the president's going to lay out, what he is going to lay out.
00:26:30.000 Certainly it's a vision, right?
00:26:31.000 It's a vision about growing the economy.
00:26:35.000 No, the actual vision, it is pretty clear, is not about growing the economy.
00:26:38.000 It's about restructuring American society.
00:26:39.000 And Joe Biden's been very clear about this.
00:26:40.000 He says that equity undergirds everything that he seeks to do, including, presumably, Bidenomics.
00:26:44.000 Equity is the lie that if we simply redistribute all income, then justice will be done.
00:26:49.000 Equity is the idea.
00:26:50.000 It's different than equality.
00:26:51.000 Equity is the idea that no matter what bad decisions you make, if there is a disparity, it is a result of American discrimination and the evils of our system.
00:26:57.000 So the system itself must be restructured.
00:27:00.000 Again, we've been talking about this in terms of marital morality.
00:27:02.000 We've been talking about it in terms of weight, and it's certainly true in terms of income and education level as well.
00:27:06.000 And then you wonder why the education system is failing.
00:27:08.000 It's because of precisely this mentality.
00:27:10.000 Again, the difference between the elites of today and the elites of yesterday in the United States is the elites of yesterday used to say, here's a series of rules that we followed and that everyone should follow.
00:27:19.000 These are good rules and we should promulgate them.
00:27:21.000 The elites of today say, here are a series of rules that we followed.
00:27:23.000 You don't have to follow those rules because we are better than you are.
00:27:26.000 We are innately, More meritorious than you are.
00:27:30.000 And so we could have actually bucked those rules.
00:27:31.000 We could have ignored all of those rules, and we still would have been successful.
00:27:34.000 Which means you really don't have a shot.
00:27:36.000 Even if you follow those rules, you won't be successful.
00:27:37.000 So we're going to restructure all of American society around the assumption that the people at the bottom rungs of the ladder, they're going to stay at the bottom rungs of the ladder, no matter what decisions they make.
00:27:44.000 So they may as well make really crappy decisions that make their lives worse.
00:27:48.000 What does that do?
00:27:49.000 Well, it makes everybody's life worse.
00:27:50.000 And that is what we are watching happening in real time.
00:27:54.000 And meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to be apparently as corrupt as the day is long.
00:28:00.000 Very bizarre situation.
00:28:01.000 He was doing a White House presser with Modi from India.
00:28:07.000 And he somehow dropped a joke about selling state secrets, which is where we are now.
00:28:11.000 Now we have not just presidents who may have committed crimes, presidents who openly joke about maybe committing crimes.
00:28:19.000 Honestly, if the best crop of candidates that our country has to offer is Joe Biden on the Democratic side, Donald Trump on the Republican side, and RFK Jr.
00:28:29.000 as the independent candidate, I don't even know what to say about that.
00:28:34.000 Here is Joe Biden, a mentally defunct human being with a long history of apparent corruption.
00:28:41.000 I was just thinking, anyway, I started off without you.
00:28:50.000 And I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things that we shared.
00:28:56.000 Oh my God.
00:28:57.000 And he says, all joking aside, I sold a lot of state secrets while you were out of the room.
00:29:02.000 Can you imagine if Donald Trump joked about, you know, selling state secrets while he was president of the United States?
00:29:09.000 Joe Biden is so confident that the media will never ever actually investigate this sort of stuff, that he just says this kind of stuff.
00:29:15.000 Now, we have Hunter Biden's attorney admitting that the WhatsApp text in which Hunter claims that Joe Biden is sitting next to him while they shake down a Chinese business person, who was a front person for the Chinese government, The attorney in Hunter Biden's case admits that that text is real.
00:29:31.000 And yet apparently there are no consequences to this whatsoever.
00:29:36.000 Which is why Joe Biden is joking about it fairly openly at this time.
00:29:41.000 Now, what's truly amazing is that the lawyer's statement, according to Breitbart, came on the same day that Breitbart News reported the Biden family received $5.1 million within 10 days of Hunter Biden's message to a CCP-linked businessman who worked with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC Energy, according to a 2020 Senate report on the Biden family.
00:29:59.000 The IRS whistleblower testimony revealed on Thursday that FBI investigators wanted to obtain the location data to confirm Joe Biden was in the room, but there's no confidence the FBI actually obtained that data.
00:30:10.000 So again, Joe Biden is openly joking about the corruption scandal that is now engulfing him in the full confidence that he will be covered up for by the media.
00:30:18.000 And he's not wrong about that.
00:30:19.000 Ana Navarro, the supposed Republican on The View, is out there repeating the talking point that what this whole story is about is what an amazing parent Joe Biden is.
00:30:27.000 I can't tell you how much his life has been marked by losing not one child, but two children.
00:30:34.000 And once you've lost a child, I think you are absolutely determined, it's even more urgent, it's even a bigger issue that you will not lose another one.
00:30:44.000 The Hunter Biden story.
00:30:47.000 The scandal, the this, the that, it's also the story of a father's love.
00:30:51.000 And Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son, Hunter, and will never treat him lesser than.
00:30:58.000 And so he is a father first, take it or leave it.
00:31:02.000 That's who he is, that is part of his heart.
00:31:05.000 There was 380 people at this dinner.
00:31:08.000 It's not like Hunter was sitting at Merrick Garland's lap.
00:31:12.000 It was a bunch of people, and I think part of the reason that Hunter Biden has been able to get out of addiction is because Joe Biden embraced him entirely the entire time.
00:31:25.000 When he was vice president, when he was candidate, when he was out of office, and now as president.
00:31:30.000 I mean, of course Joe Biden thinks he can get away with it.
00:31:33.000 He's got the entire media parroting this garbage.
00:31:35.000 The real story here is not whether Hunter Biden was a cutout for his dad making money.
00:31:40.000 The real story here is that Joe Biden is an amazing, amazing parent.
00:31:43.000 Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House, he's threatening impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland if the whistleblower allegations are true that Merrick Garland shut down all indictments of Hunter Biden on felony charges in various jurisdictions.
00:31:56.000 Miranda Devine says that Joe Biden met with his business partners 12 times.
00:32:03.000 12 different times and 12 different deals, perhaps.
00:32:05.000 So it's called, you know, Rob Walker, who was in on all this stuff.
00:32:09.000 Good friend.
00:32:09.000 He's all over all over the laptop.
00:32:12.000 So will this prompt you to do a impeachment inquiry?
00:32:15.000 Well, You apparently don't follow me on Twitter, because yesterday I laid out very clearly, by July 6th, because of the allegations from the IRS, because of the whistleblowers, and the DOJ are garland, what he is saying and what David Weiss are saying privately are two different things.
00:32:34.000 And if it comes true what the IRS whistleblower is saying, we're going to start impeachment inquiries on the Attorney General.
00:32:40.000 Because as a matter of fact, it shows that.
00:32:44.000 That is, um, you know, appropriate.
00:32:46.000 But we'll see if there's any follow-up on that.
00:32:48.000 Now, meanwhile, you might be thinking to yourself, well, maybe Republicans should work on, you know, winning the presidency away from Joe Biden.
00:32:54.000 Well, I have some unfortunate news for you on that score.
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00:35:06.000 Okay, meanwhile, Republicans have an opportunity to, you know, have Joe Biden not be in the White House,
00:35:10.000 but they would have to run a candidate likely to defeat Joe Biden.
00:35:14.000 So there's a brand new poll out from a Dem pollster called GQR.
00:35:19.000 It includes leaners, you know, people who lean one way or lean another.
00:35:22.000 What it finds is Biden over Trump plus two.
00:35:24.000 In the swing states, it shows that Trump and Biden are essentially tied, 49-49.
00:35:29.000 As far as Biden versus DeSantis, it shows DeSantis up one, 49-48.
00:35:31.000 So again, very close election.
00:35:34.000 But in the swing states, it shows DeSantis up 53-42.
00:35:38.000 And if we've learned anything, it's that most states in the union, they don't really matter when it comes to the presidential election because they're going to break 60-40 or 55-45.
00:35:46.000 There are a few states that really, really matter.
00:35:48.000 Really, only a few.
00:35:49.000 You're talking Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, That's nearly a complete list.
00:35:56.000 It's a very, very small list of states that is going to decide the election.
00:35:59.000 So the real question is not how the candidates would do nationally, because by popular vote, Donald Trump lost both the elections in which he was involved.
00:36:06.000 The real question is how they are going to do on the statewide level because, of course, Donald Trump won in 2016 and then lost those states in 2020.
00:36:13.000 So the real question is that.
00:36:15.000 Well, here's the thing.
00:36:16.000 If you wish to defeat Joe Biden, perhaps it would be good if your candidate was not embroiled in a bunch of ongoing legal dramas that involve him mainly doing dumb things.
00:36:26.000 Okay, so, as I've said before, two things can be true at once.
00:36:29.000 There is no way that if Donald Trump were a Democrat, he would currently be prosecuted for his classified documents treatment.
00:36:35.000 He just wouldn't.
00:36:36.000 Hillary Clinton did stuff that was very similar, as we pointed out a thousand times, and she was not, in fact, prosecuted.
00:36:41.000 Also, Donald Trump made this bed.
00:36:43.000 Donald Trump did a bunch of things that were incredibly stupid, and he did them on tape.
00:36:47.000 So just one of the charges in this documents case that is now going to be tried over in Fort Pierce, which by the way is pretty good for Trump because Fort Pierce is a pretty conservative area.
00:36:55.000 So you assume the jury pool is going to be more kind to Trump.
00:36:59.000 But one of the allegations is that Donald Trump not only had classified material after he left the White House, which is true of like a thousand different presidents and vice presidents and various officials, but that he kept it after he was told by the Department of Justice and the National Archives to turn it back over.
00:37:14.000 And then he had his lawyers go out there and attest to the FBI and the National Archives and the DOJ that he had turned over all the documents.
00:37:20.000 Meanwhile, he was hiding classified documents from his own lawyers so that he could essentially play with them for no reason.
00:37:26.000 And again, the left went nuts on this.
00:37:28.000 He had Jen Psaki suggesting that Trump's theory here was that he wanted to give documents to dictators.
00:37:33.000 Here is Jen Psaki over on MSNBC suggesting just that.
00:37:36.000 As you just alluded to, I mean, reading the itemized list of 31 documents and the clearance levels, as a former ranking member on the Intel Committee, there were five I's classifications there.
00:37:50.000 There were some of the highest level classifications.
00:37:54.000 And knowing what you know about former President Donald Trump, we know he has an affection for dictators.
00:38:00.000 Do you have concern, without us knowing at this point, of what he may have wanted to do with those documents?
00:38:04.000 No, I don't know.
00:38:05.000 But what I do know is that he seriously jeopardized our national security.
00:38:10.000 And the implication that he wanted to hand over documents to dictators or something is really, really, really stupid.
00:38:15.000 But you know what else is really stupid?
00:38:17.000 Keeping the documents.
00:38:18.000 There's no purpose to it.
00:38:19.000 And even Donald Trump kind of knows that, which is why in his interview with Brett Baier, he actually did what he very often does in these circumstances, and he fibbed.
00:38:27.000 So he said to Brett Baier, there's a tape of him.
00:38:30.000 And the transcript of that tape appeared in the indictment.
00:38:34.000 The tape was of him speaking to a group of women, some of whom are journalists apparently.
00:38:40.000 And it sounds like he's taking out classified documents and saying directly to them, these are classified documents.
00:38:46.000 I could have declassified them when I was the president, but I did not do so.
00:38:49.000 Which is kind of game set match as far as the actual legality of his actions.
00:38:53.000 If you say, I know these are classified documents, then you also know you shouldn't be holding them.
00:38:58.000 And if you say, I have no power to declassify them now, which he actually says on the tape, then you know you shouldn't have them.
00:39:04.000 So, for the thousandth time, it could be true that the prosecution is political in the sense that if he were a Democrat, it wouldn't be happening to him.
00:39:10.000 Also, why would he put a target squarely on his back this way?
00:39:14.000 In any case, here was Trump telling Bret Baier that the documents he's talking about in that tape are actually just newspapers.
00:39:21.000 When I said that I couldn't declassify it now, that's because I wasn't president.
00:39:25.000 I never made any bones about that.
00:39:27.000 When I'm not president, I can't declassify it.
00:39:29.000 And that's what you said.
00:39:30.000 You didn't declassify it.
00:39:31.000 I said that.
00:39:32.000 I said no, no.
00:39:33.000 I said I couldn't declassify it.
00:39:34.000 I could have declassified it.
00:39:35.000 But that wasn't a document.
00:39:36.000 There was no document.
00:39:37.000 That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things.
00:39:43.000 And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document.
00:39:47.000 I didn't have a document per se.
00:39:49.000 There was nothing to declassify.
00:39:50.000 These were newspaper stories.
00:39:52.000 Okay, these were newspaper stories, right?
00:39:53.000 He says that on national television, knowing the government has the tape.
00:39:58.000 Okay, the tape is now broken.
00:39:59.000 So here's the actual tape of Donald Trump talking about those documents, right?
00:40:02.000 We only had the actual text, sort of transcript.
00:40:05.000 Here's the actual tape.
00:40:07.000 It somehow got to CNN.
00:40:08.000 Of course, of course it did.
00:40:11.000 How do such leaks occur?
00:40:12.000 Who knows?
00:40:12.000 In any case, CNN gets a hold of this tape, and it turns out that he's not waving around newspapers, in all likelihood.
00:40:21.000 We have obtained what is expected to be a central piece of the government's case against Donald Trump.
00:40:26.000 The actual audio recording of the former president talking as if he's showing a highly classified document on U.S.
00:40:33.000 war plans against Iran, with people not clear to even know it exists, let alone what's in it.
00:40:38.000 Isn't that amazing?
00:40:40.000 This totally wins my case, you know.
00:40:43.000 Except it is, like, highly confidential, secret.
00:40:46.000 This is secret information.
00:40:49.000 Look at this.
00:40:49.000 You attack.
00:40:51.000 Hillary would print that out all the time.
00:40:53.000 She'd send it to Anthony Weiner.
00:41:01.000 By the way, isn't that incredible?
00:41:02.000 Yeah.
00:41:03.000 I was just saying, because we were talking about it.
00:41:06.000 And he said, he wanted to attack Iran.
00:41:09.000 You did!
00:41:10.000 This was done by the military, given to me.
00:41:16.000 I think we can probably, right?
00:41:18.000 I don't know.
00:41:19.000 We'll have to see.
00:41:20.000 Yeah, we'll have to try to figure out a...
00:41:21.000 Declassify it.
00:41:22.000 See, as president, I could have declassified it, but now I can't, you know, but this is
00:41:27.000 still a...
00:41:28.000 Yeah, now we have a problem.
00:41:29.000 Isn't that interesting?
00:41:30.000 Yeah.
00:41:31.000 Okay, he literally says that Hillary had papers like this and that they were probably sent
00:41:37.000 Anthony Weiner via server which means he's not talking about newspapers.
00:41:41.000 Again, should he be under the gun for this, legally speaking?
00:41:47.000 Not when Hillary isn't.
00:41:48.000 I mean, again, the injustice is clear.
00:41:49.000 Also, this is, I'm sorry, this is stupid.
00:41:52.000 It's unbelievably stupid.
00:41:54.000 Apparently he knew he was being taped in this tape recording.
00:41:57.000 I assume that, in fact, is the case.
00:41:59.000 I believe that Florida is a two-party consent state, which means that, with very few exceptions, virtually all conversations that take place that are taped in the state of Florida, and he was at Mar-a-Lago at the time, have to have the consent of both parties to the taping.
00:42:10.000 So he knew a tape recorder was on, and he is so arrogant that he thought that he could say into the tape recorder, here are a bunch of classified documents that I have right here.
00:42:19.000 And I could have declassified them, but I didn't.
00:42:22.000 And then he went on national TV and said that he was waving around newspapers, which pretty obviously is not in that recording.
00:42:28.000 Put aside everything else.
00:42:28.000 Is this a smart thing to do?
00:42:30.000 Is this a thing that is likely to win you elections?
00:42:32.000 Because here's my deal with Trump.
00:42:34.000 If he's going to be the nominee, I want to see him win.
00:42:36.000 I want Joe Biden not to be president anymore.
00:42:37.000 That is my top political priority come 2024, is I do not want Joe Biden to be president of the United States come January 2025.
00:42:44.000 He's a terrible president who is doing terrible things routinely, which means that if Trump is going to be the nominee, I would like to see Trump win.
00:42:50.000 Is this the sort of behavior that leads one to believe that victory is insight, that victory is inevitability?
00:42:56.000 Does it heighten your chances or lower your chances when you do this sort of stuff and you do it routinely?
00:43:01.000 He could still win.
00:43:02.000 I'm not saying that it's impossible for Trump to win.
00:43:04.000 I learned in 2016 you never say never because never sometimes happens.
00:43:08.000 With that said, is this the kind of activity?
00:43:11.000 that is likely to lead to excellent performance in a national election, particularly in swing states that he lost last time?
00:43:16.000 I have some doubts.
00:43:18.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:43:19.000 First, there's a lot of leftist propaganda out there.
00:43:21.000 Endless pronouns, critical race theory, sexually explicit books, and more, all easily accessible to minors, virtually all via our public education system.
00:43:28.000 There are literal fights taking place in public schools right now so that school boards can make sure that your child is indoctrinated with pornography, essentially.
00:43:36.000 Colleges, meanwhile, are dumbing down their courses to accommodate the average incoming freshman who can barely read and write at a 7th grade level.
00:43:42.000 And this is why you should be looking at Freedom Project Academy.
00:43:46.000 They have perfected online learning by offering live, on-demand, and homeschool courses for grades K-12.
00:43:51.000 Freedom Project Academy was built on Judeo-Christian values and classical curricula.
00:43:54.000 They're dedicated to mastery of subject matter and teaching kids how to think, not what to think.
00:43:58.000 Right now, you can save 10% on tuition when you enroll at freedomforschool.com.
00:44:02.000 That's freedomforschool.com.
00:44:04.000 Got a lot of people who are constantly asking about homeschool curricula and what exactly they should do with their kids, given that the public schools are a giant mess.
00:44:10.000 Well, why not check out freedomforschool.com?
00:44:12.000 While you're there, you can read about their teachers, preview videos about the courses, and request a free information packet.
00:44:18.000 It's not worth handing over another generation to the left.
00:44:20.000 Take back your child's education.
00:44:22.000 Freedomforschool.com.
00:44:23.000 That's freedomforschool.com.
00:44:26.000 Again, why hand over your kids to the predations of a public school system that wishes to turn them into a good little leftist apparatchik?
00:44:32.000 Instead, hand it over to freedomforschool.com.
00:44:35.000 Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then some things that I hate.
00:44:39.000 So, things that I like.
00:44:40.000 There is a very good series on MGM+.
00:44:42.000 It is called The Spy Among Friends, and it is about the British spy, Kim Philby, and the ferreting out of the so-called Cambridge Five, which is a series of communist spies in the British government who were essentially getting hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-Soviet dissidents murdered in Eastern Europe and inside Russia from the 30s to the 60s.
00:45:02.000 Here's a little bit of the trailer.
00:45:05.000 Why do you let the most dangerous Soviet penetration agent this country's ever known lead it?
00:45:09.000 On your watch?
00:45:12.000 It's quite a good series.
00:45:13.000 It is totally worth the watch.
00:45:22.000 First of all, I love the cast.
00:45:24.000 It's Damian Lewis, who's great.
00:45:25.000 You remember him from Band of Brothers.
00:45:27.000 And Guy Pearce, who's also terrific.
00:45:29.000 A really, really good cast.
00:45:31.000 Beautifully photographed, beautifully shot.
00:45:33.000 Great sound engineering.
00:45:35.000 It's really worthwhile.
00:45:36.000 And again, it's one of the few... It's kind of weird.
00:45:39.000 Over the past 10 years, Hollywood has suddenly recognized the Soviets were bad.
00:45:43.000 So it took them until 20 years after the end of the Cold War to recognize that the Soviets were actually bad now.
00:45:48.000 There was a movie that came out fairly recently that was all about Soviet atrocities in Ukraine.
00:45:54.000 And it took them only like, I don't know, 90 years to say that it was okay to make that movie.
00:46:01.000 The death of Stalin came out, I believe, 2017, 2016.
00:46:04.000 So now we're allowed to say the Soviets were bad after the Soviet Union fell, like, a generation after that.
00:46:09.000 We can point that out.
00:46:10.000 The reason it took so long, by the way, is because all of Hollywood was deeply enthralled to the Soviet Union for a lot of the Cold War.
00:46:16.000 For, like, a lot of the Cold War.
00:46:17.000 The Nazis were real bad, but the Soviets were kind of okay.
00:46:20.000 Not only okay, they were just misguided.
00:46:22.000 You see the same sort of mentality that now abounds about China in some quarters.
00:46:26.000 And this series puts to bed, once again, the theory that the Soviets had anything of value to give to the world.
00:46:32.000 They were one of the most nefarious forces, maybe the most nefarious force in the history of the world.
00:46:37.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:46:42.000 So I'm not a big fan of media outlets pretending that aspects of poverty and suffering are actually kind of cool things to do.
00:46:50.000 So CNN International is now featuring, I kid you not, a phenomenon that are called stir-fried stones.
00:47:00.000 And they're saying that this is China's latest street food fad.
00:47:05.000 That's not a euphemism when they say stir-fried stones.
00:47:09.000 They mean literally rocks that have spices on them.
00:47:12.000 Like, here's the video.
00:47:16.000 This Chinese stir-fry features rocks as the main ingredient, and social media calls it, quote, the world's hardest dish.
00:47:27.000 People are supposed to suck off the flavors, then spit out the rocks.
00:47:32.000 Hence the dish's name, soudio, meaning suck and dispose.
00:47:36.000 The dish originated in Hubei province and is said to date back hundreds of years.
00:47:42.000 It was reportedly passed down for generations by boatmen through their oral history.
00:47:50.000 Street vendors cook the pebbles with spices, chili oil, and garlic on a sizzling grill.
00:47:56.000 Each portion costs about 16 yuan, which is around $2.37.
00:47:59.000 Excited guys?
00:48:00.000 Would you like to suck a rock?
00:48:05.000 Okay, so things aren't going amazing in China, I think would be the takeaway here.
00:48:09.000 It's just a different culture where you are sucking rocks for nutritional value.
00:48:15.000 Or maybe things are not great in China.
00:48:20.000 Maybe it turns out that communist countries suck.
00:48:22.000 By the way, try marketing that in America, seriously.
00:48:25.000 You know it's a thing that nobody will eat in America, rocks?
00:48:28.000 America's got a lot of problems.
00:48:29.000 People aren't sucking on the rocks over here.
00:48:31.000 All right, you guys, the rest of the show continues right now.
00:48:33.000 You're not gonna wanna miss it.
00:48:34.000 We'll be joined by Aaron Ginn, co-founder and CEO of Hydra Host.
00:48:37.000 If you're not a member, become a member and use code SHAPIRO at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.