The emphasis on leftist messaging in comic books is killing the appeal of comic books. On Monday, Marvel Comics admitted what those of us who actually read comic books have known all along. The emphasis on "diverse" heroes and villains is killing their appeal. How can Marvel and DC fix this problem? They have to go back to what they do best: make new characters awesome, then worry about whether they re diverse later, or use a historic character to infuse new life into the universe. Or else they'll just keep reinventing classic characters to appease the feelings of social justice warriors. Ben Shapiro argues that it's not racism or sexism that s driving people away from Marvel, it's a feeling of irritation that classic characters are being redrawn and recast in order to assuage feelings of "social justice warriors." Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the Daily Wire. He is also a regular contributor to The Daily Wire and the Weekly Standard and has been featured on CNN and the New York Times. He frequently writes for The Weekly Standard, and is a frequent contributor to Playboy and The Hollywood Reporter. Ben Shapiro's new book, "The People's Guide" is out now, which you should definitely check out. If you like what you hear, you'll love Ben Shapiro on the Ben Shapiro show. Check it out! Subscribe to his new podcast, "Ben Shapiro's Truth or Fiction" wherever you get your news and gossip, and let us know what you think of it! and why you should be reading Ben Shapiro s latest book recommendations for your next book recommendation or TV show or movie recommendation. Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro? Thank you for listening, Ben and Ben on the show, right here at Vulture Ben on The Daily Mail? - on Vulture and Vulture. - Vulture's newest issue of Vulture? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts by clicking here. Subscribe at The FiveThirtyEight.co/Ben Shapiro: Subscribe and review Ben on Podchaser. And don't forget to tell a friend about Ben on Insta-ism? . Vulture is a great place to talk all things Ben on this and other things that Ben Shapiro did on the road and more! on The Six Things Ben on Six Things He Read on The Five Things He Said on the Sixteenth?
00:00:00.000On Monday, Marvel Comics admitted what those of us who actually read comic books have known all along.
00:00:04.000The emphasis on leftist messaging in comic books is pretty much killing the appeal.
00:00:08.000David Gabriel is the vice president of sales at Marvel and he said that comic book retailers were reporting a drop-off in interest in the new diversity-oriented comics.
00:00:16.000He said, quote, What we heard was that people didn't want any more diversity.
00:00:19.000They didn't want female characters out there.
00:00:20.000That's what we heard, whether we believe that or not.
00:00:22.000I don't know if that's really true, but that's what we saw in sales.
00:00:25.000Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up.
00:00:32.000Okay, it's not racism and sexism driving people away from Marvel.
00:00:35.000It's a feeling of irritation that classic characters are being redrawn and recast in order to assuage the feelings of social justice warriors.
00:00:41.000Iron Man is Tony Stark, he is not Riri Williams.
00:00:44.000Captain America is Steve Rogers, he is not Sam Wilson.
00:01:27.000With Black Panther, they hired Ta-Nehisi Coates to write the comic, which immediately became a big bestseller for them this year.
00:01:32.000The comic, by the way, is actually unreadably bad, but at least Marvel tried doing diversity the right way here.
00:01:37.000In the DC Universe, Harley Quinn, who was a marginal character 20 years ago, is now a major bestseller because she's interesting, not because Batman had to become Batwoman.
00:01:45.000But the comic book industry keeps attempting to slam its constituents over the head with social justice messaging.
00:01:51.000And that's actually killing the quality of comics.
00:01:53.000See, for example, Batman, Advocate for Trayvon Martin, or Captain America, Illegal Immigration Defender, both of which happened last year.
00:01:59.000Turning iconic characters into avatars of social justice actually kills sales.
00:02:03.000It's throwback comics doing most of the heavy lifting at this point.
00:02:06.000Marvel and DC should take note that it's not American racism driving that choice.
00:02:10.000It's Americans' discontent with the left's willingness to sacrifice quality,
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00:03:41.000Okay, so the big story of the morning was late-breaking.
00:03:42.000It actually broke a little bit over the weekend, but now it's been confirmed from Eli Lake at Bloomberg.
00:03:46.000So originally it was broken with Mike Cernovich,
00:03:59.000For some reason, the White House is now funneling stories to Mike Cernovich, which makes very little sense because he has very little credibility.
00:04:05.000But Eli Lake then confirmed it, and so did Maggie Haberman over at the New York Times.
00:04:09.000So, Eli Lake of Bloomberg has now reported that Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice,
00:04:15.000Repeatedly, requested information from the intel community on members of the Trump transition team and campaign, unmasking them to an audience beyond the intel community in the process.
00:04:24.000Now normally, when you get a raw intel feed, and you're a member of the political branches, they basically black out all of the people who are American citizens caught up in the intel.
00:04:34.000So let's say you're listening to the Russian embassy.
00:04:45.000It'll just black it out, because it's not important if there's no crime being committed for people to know who this is, because they're afraid of exactly this sort of thing.
00:04:52.000The whole point of masking is to prevent the dissemination of information about innocent Americans who are not actually doing anything criminal.
00:04:58.000So, what happened is that apparently, according to Lake, in February, the National Security Council Senior Director for Intelligence, Elliot Cohen Watnick,
00:05:06.000discovered Rice's multiple requests to unmask U.S.
00:05:09.000persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities.
00:05:12.000He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel's Office, who reviewed more of Rice's requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
00:05:21.000The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations, primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also, in some cases, direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials.
00:05:34.000official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition, such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters, and plans for the incoming administration.
00:05:46.000Now just last month Susan Rice was on TV and she denied she knew anything
00:05:49.000About members of the Trump transition team being caught up in incidental intelligence gathering.
00:05:55.000As Eli Lake also points out, the revelation that Rice requested the documents would also help explain why House Intel Chair Devin Nunes went to the White House a couple of weeks ago.
00:06:04.000Because he could only see the logs of what Rice was doing, not from Congress.
00:06:08.000He actually had to go to the White House to do that because that's where she used to work.
00:06:11.000It would also explain why Adam Schiff, the Democrat on the House Intel Committee, basically has now gone silent over the weekend after seeing those documents at the White House.
00:06:19.000This is a huge story for the Trump White House.
00:06:21.000Now, does it mean that Trump was right to say that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration?
00:06:26.000No, there's still no evidence that he was wiretapped by the Obama administration.
00:06:28.000There is, however, tremendous evidence now, and it is building day by day, that the Obama administration was seeking to compile all of the intelligence information in which the Trump team was incidentally swept up, and then disseminated it broadly, which led to it being leaked.
00:06:44.000That is the Obama administration targeting Trump team officials.
00:06:47.000That is the Obama administration, without any sort of evidence of nefarious activity, targeting the Trump team.
00:06:51.000They're not doing it specifically by saying we're going to plant a wire in Trump's office, which is the next step, but it is them saying we have a higher level of suspicion and we're going to unmask Trump team members in the process, which is truly a big story.
00:07:05.000And the media have been ignoring that story in favor of focusing in on Team Trump, which is really silly.
00:07:12.000Because again, we have no evidence on Trump-Russia.
00:07:15.000We have no evidence that Obama wiretapped Trump.
00:07:19.000What we do have evidence of, again, and I'm being very specific about this because I want to be truthful and I want to be clear.
00:07:24.000I, unlike so many others in this field, I actually care about what is true and what the facts are.
00:07:29.000As opposed to what backs a particular narrative.
00:07:31.000So Trump's narrative that Obama was wiretapping him or surveilling him, that is not true.
00:07:35.000He was not being wiretapped or surveilled in targeted fashion.
00:07:38.000He was being targeted, in targeted fashion, by Susan Rice, according to this report, the National Security Advisor under Obama, who is always the fall person, right?
00:07:46.000She's always the person they trot out to do the dirty work because she's an Obama loyalist.
00:07:50.000She was, in fact, unmasking all of the Trump team officials by going to the intel community and requesting raw intelligence be provided to her
00:07:58.000And then disseminating that apparently broadly, it was widely dispersed across the government.
00:08:02.000That meant lots of people knew that Mike Flynn was talking.
00:08:31.000If Team Trump knew about this, and apparently the White House General Counsel's Office knew about it, why didn't they just declassify this information and blow it out there?
00:08:41.000Why instead try to funnel it through House Intel?
00:08:43.000Maybe the idea here is that they knew that they had their trust compromised with the American people?
00:08:47.000And that if they trotted this out, everybody would accuse them of bias, so instead they tried to funnel it out through the House Intelligence Committee?
00:08:54.000But that's a question that has yet to be answered.
00:08:56.000And then, of course, the last question is a small one, but an annoying one, which is, why in the world is the Trump administration trying to leak information to places like InfoWars and ZeroHedge and Cernovich?
00:09:05.000ZeroHedge is actually much better than InfoWars and Cernovich.
00:09:08.000Why are they using them as the outlets, as opposed to, you know, if you're gonna leak, then leak to outlets that have a higher level of public trust.
00:09:14.000I mean, forget about what I think of those outlets.
00:09:16.000Those are not outlets with a high level of public trust.
00:09:18.000If you're gonna leak, leak to somebody like Eli Lake, who actually has a level of public trust.
00:09:23.000Well, all of this is leading the Democrats to sheer panic, because they do not actually have anything here.
00:09:30.000The left keeps focusing in on Trump-Russia, and Adam Schiff, Representative Schiff, he basically admitted, we've got nothing.
00:09:36.000I mean, there's no hard evidence linking Trump to Russian collusion.
00:09:39.000Whether or not there was collusion among members of the Trump campaign or surrounding the Trump campaign, Trump advisors, can you say definitively that there was collusion?
00:09:50.000There were people affiliated with the Trump campaign who were working with Russians to time the release of damaging information about Hillary Clinton that had been hacked either from John Podesta or the DNC?
00:10:04.000I don't think we can say anything definitively at this point.
00:10:07.000We are still at the very early stage of the investigation.
00:10:11.000The only thing I can say is that it would be irresponsible for us not to get to the bottom of this.
00:10:16.000We really need to find out exactly what the Russians did, because one of the most important conclusions that the intelligence community reached is that they are going to do this again to the United States.
00:10:29.000So we can say, you know, conclusively, this is something that needs to be thoroughly investigated, but it's way premature to be reaching conclusions.
00:10:40.000And basically there he's saying, no, we don't have any evidence of this whatsoever, so what exactly are you going to do about it?
00:10:48.000And Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who's been bashed around a lot for not being a particularly great surrogate, she's exactly right when she says the media are talking about something of which there is very little evidence at this point.
00:10:56.000The media constantly wants to talk about something that doesn't exist instead of something that does.
00:11:01.000We have spent the last couple of months doing major policy initiatives and rollouts in the forms of executive order, rolling back regulations, creating an environment
00:11:13.000So in any case, the Democrats are panicking over all of this, and so their language is becoming more and more extreme.
00:12:11.000Dem targeting sanctuary cities is a way for them to tell mayors and other folks around the country, one, that they're sticking to what I think is a very unconstitutional and un-American policy, and trying to intimidate us into being what I've called fugitive slave catchers, to run around and do their bidding in our cities.
00:12:32.000And if we refuse to do that, then it makes it difficult for them to continue their policy because they don't have the resources
00:12:45.000The fact is that illegal immigrants are not slaves in the United States who are attempting to escape bondage, which is against both God's law and man's law, okay?
00:12:52.000The idea that people who are coming into the country illegally and we don't know who they are, that you shouldn't be helping out the feds to figure out who they are...
00:13:00.000But this is the, this is the language that is escalating now.
00:13:02.000The Democrats think that because Trump won, their answer is to escalate their language.
00:13:06.000They don't understand that the reason that Trump won, I just spent some time in Pennsylvania, and I just spent some time in Indiana, and I just spent, I'm spending time now in Florida.
00:13:14.000The reason that Trump won is because there was a whole group of people in America who feel like they were forgotten by the Democrats because the Democrats were too focused on inflammatory language dividing American from American.
00:13:23.000To worry about their jobs, to worry about their lives.
00:13:27.000But the Democrats are thinking, they're looking at Trump and instead of seeing that Trump appealed to a certain number of people who felt forgotten by the Democrats, instead they think that Trump won because Trump was loud.
00:13:38.000So here's Nancy Pelosi getting even louder and more obnoxious.
00:13:41.000Well, it's always been Paul Ryan's agenda.
00:13:44.000If you look at the Ryan budget of the last couple of congresses before now, you will see that the agenda... When did Donald Trump sign on to that?
00:13:53.000I think when he decided to become the nominee of the party.
00:13:57.000Bought into the deconstruction of government, the radical right-wing agenda.
00:14:03.000I don't even know if Donald Trump will go as far as the Republicans in Congress.
00:14:07.000People say, well how long will it take for the Republicans in Congress to say enough Donald Trump?
00:14:12.000I said don't wait for that because their agenda is very similar to his.
00:14:17.000If you look at their budget over the last few years, if you look at their
00:14:22.000Opposition to anything to do with the environment, climate change, and the rest.
00:14:26.000If you look at their anti-woman agenda, LGBT agenda, you name it, they've been there.
00:14:33.000Okay, so, again, getting more and more extreme in the rhetoric.
00:14:35.000Now, what this may help them do, what this may help them do is win back the House.
00:14:39.000So, Nancy Pelosi did this in the aftermath of Bush winning in 2004.
00:14:42.000After 2004, she got more and more extreme.
00:14:45.000And right now, Trump is cruising for a bruising in the House.
00:14:48.000He's probably going to keep the Senate because there are too many Democratic seats up for play.
00:14:51.000But in 2018, the House races do not look good for Republicans.
00:14:55.000Right now, when the president of the United States is below 40%, the chances that he's going to retain the House become lower and lower.
00:15:02.000But again, the Democrats are just going to get more extreme in their language.
00:15:05.000That's not going to help defeat Trump.
00:15:07.000It is going to help drive his approval ratings down.
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00:16:43.000Okay, so Tom Perez is the head of the DNC and he, like Nancy Pelosi, like this Newark mayor, he thinks that the way Democrats are gonna win is by mirroring Trump's rhetoric rather than mirroring Trump's positioning with regard to blue-collar workers.
00:16:56.000So here's Tom Perez ranting about the GOP.
00:16:58.000January 20th was undeniably an important day in this country, but January 21st was far more important!
00:17:41.000We don't get to say how dare he curse anymore.
00:17:43.000Okay, that cat is long out of the bag.
00:17:45.000But it does demonstrate that the Democrats, as always, take exactly the wrong lessons out of their loss.
00:17:51.000Instead of figuring out that they need to appeal to the same people that Trump won away from the Obama acolyte, they instead have decided to double down on his sort of rhetoric.
00:17:59.000As we continue here, I want to talk about Donald Trump's credibility, what Donald Trump is doing right, what Donald Trump is doing wrong, and now what an opportunity he has and how he needs to push it forward.
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