00:00:00.000So, this right here is what happens when you leave one of the most important works about the West in the hands of the Hollywood elite with a budget of $280 million.
00:00:08.000This right here is what you get for one of the most expensive films in probably all of history.
00:00:51.000But Hollywood, when given a story as precious and crucial as the Chronicles of Narnia, turned it into a glam rock spectacular featuring David Bowie and Led Zeppelin.
00:01:00.000Of course, they did the same thing with Lord of the Rings, which is about good and evil and a rebuttal of fascism and isolationism.
00:01:05.000They did it with Superman, where you can't say truth, justice, and the American way anymore.
00:01:09.000It's liberal agiprop, kind of day in and day out, the complete desaturation of Western values.
00:01:14.000Well, here at the Daily Wire, we're fighting it and we're winning.
00:01:17.000I'm going to show you the unbelievable thing we're doing in just one second.
00:01:26.000The deracination of the most fundamental ideas of the West, right?
00:01:29.000Meaning, robbing it of its meaning, just emptying it out through the most pervasive parts of our culture, film and movies.
00:01:35.000That's one of the things we launch our company to do.
00:01:37.000C.S. Lewis, when he wrote Chronicles of Narnia, the question was why did he write a children's book that's basically a retelling of the Christian story?
00:01:45.000And what he said was this Why did one find it so hard to feel?
00:01:49.000As one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ.
00:01:53.000I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to.
00:01:55.000An obligation to feel can freeze feelings and reverence itself did harm.
00:01:59.000The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical.
00:02:03.000But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.
00:02:12.000Could one thus not steal past those watchful dragons?
00:03:00.000Because when you take crucial Western texts and you empty them of their value, when you just take Western ideas and you just kind of destroy them in the name of what?
00:06:37.000By the stats, people are as or more interested in our serious examination of Soviet tyranny and human freedom and the value of God in our lives than they are, certainly, about a film, including hot people running around in bathing suits, which means people are starved for content, they are starved for meaning, and they want meaningful properties.0.56
00:06:59.000And then we're going to follow that up with a one night run in 100 theaters nationwide.
00:07:02.000It comes out on dailywire.com only November 11th.
00:07:06.000And here's what we wanted to do we wanted to do something that was actual quality, that's just good, not just that's missional and that has a message, but that's actually awesome, that's top shelf filmmaking.
00:08:06.000Even, listen, even people who hate us are, shall we say, shocked.
00:08:11.000Will Summer, who has not exactly been a friend to Daily Wire or to our entertainment enterprises, he tweeted out the new Ben Shapiro movie starring Roblox and Nick Nolte has an incredible James Franco reveal.
00:08:43.000It's a serious, intelligent piece of art with a real cast and a talented director with a distinct visual style, exactly the kind of film we should be making.
00:08:55.000Not spending too much on your cell phone bill.
00:08:56.000I know that's a masterful transition into an advertisement, but Pure Talk will make it happen for you.
00:09:01.000Head over to puretalk.comslash Shapiro and instead of paying too much for your cell phone service, instead get Pure Talk's best unlimited plan for just $29.95 a month for the rest of your life.
00:10:02.000It's important because our culture is starved for a basic defense of Western values and art that reflects the serious questions we all have in life.
00:10:12.000That doesn't mean that every film we make here at Daily Wire is going to be a serious drama.
00:10:17.000Ourselves to winning the culture on all fronts.0.98
00:10:19.000Sometimes we're just going to make a fun action movie like Run, Hide, Fight, Infidels or something.
00:10:22.000But we as a company are dedicated to the proposition that our civilization is worth defending on every front, including the artistic front.
00:10:38.000Which is what I wrote about the Stalin era.0.63
00:10:41.000Because unbelievably enough, we have now arrived at a point in American history where people don't even remember how terrible our enemies in the world are.0.84
00:10:49.000Let's say you wanted to destroy America in favor of one of these systems.
00:12:06.000Nearly half of the members of the DSA, according to Manhattan Institute's Stu Smith, nearly half of the members of their leadership body identify as communists.
00:12:16.000In their December 2025 newsletter, the members of the DSA's Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Tse Tong's 132nd birthday.
00:12:25.000Hassan Piker, who dresses up as Mao Tse Tong.
00:12:29.000He was on with a host named Ziwei, and he said that his dream for America is a united Soviet republic of the U.S.
00:12:36.000Now, what is your dream for America?0.72
00:12:38.000Full blown United Soviet Republic of the United States.0.61
00:12:44.000He is dressed as Mao in this interview.
00:12:47.000I just want to point out to you that we now have unsealed footage of what happened at Tiananmen Square.
00:12:52.000This, of course, was from the late 80s when there was an attempt to stand up to the Chinese regime.
00:12:57.000And basically, the Chinese just mowed people down.0.81
00:13:49.000So, again, just a reminder when you dress up as Chairman Mao and then you run around talking about how it's a disaster, as the Sun Piker has said, that the Soviet Union fell, they're not hiding the ball anymore.
00:14:01.000Tsar Mamdani, at his literal inauguration as mayor of New York City, said that he wanted to replace the individual with the warmth of collectivism.
00:14:43.000In those who fund television ads that blanket the airwaves with misleading and bad faith attacks about Claire, Brad, and Dari.
00:14:50.000Those who would rather spend far more on political contributions than they would ever be made to pay in taxes.0.51
00:14:59.000In AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu's wars.
00:15:16.000They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.
00:15:24.000You know, when he says the old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born.
00:15:29.000Again, when he says that, he is quoting Gramsci, who also said, The violent conquest of power necessitates the creation by the party of the working class of an organization of the military type, pervasively planted in every branch of the bourgeois state apparatus, capable of wounding and inflicting grave blows on it at the decisive moment of struggle.
00:15:50.000Eugene Debs, of course, the famous American socialist, who was essentially a Bolshevik fellow traveler in his later iterations.
00:15:57.000He said, In this alert and inspiring assemblage, our hearts are with the Bolsheviki of Russia.
00:16:02.000These heroic men and women, those unconquerable comrades, have by their incomparable valor and sacrifice added fresh luster to the fame of the international movement.0.82
00:16:11.000Again, nothing is new, but it was once old.
00:16:15.000And the Democratic Party is ingesting this stuff at scale.
00:16:19.000At scale, pretending that the Soviets were fine, pretending that the Soviets were good, mirroring, by the way, all the same propaganda that the Soviets put out about everything from America to Israel.
00:16:31.000It's the same picture over and over and over.
00:16:34.000I mean, it's why, for example, Code Pink is launching a tour in China while a grand jury investigates the Singham Network funding in the United States.
00:16:45.000Code Pink, the far left organization, literally went to China in order to marvel at the bicycles.
00:16:52.000It's like Tucker Carlson at a supermarket in Russia or something.
00:16:55.000So here we are in China, and there's something I wonder if you notice.
00:17:23.000And I would never leave it unlocked in Washington, D.C. What are you trying to say about the people in Washington, D.C., Medea Benjamin?
00:17:30.000But beyond that, again, this idea is from the communists that a brand new human will flourish if you just repress the people enough.
00:17:38.000And this is now spread throughout the West.
00:17:40.000According to CNN, the Spanish cabinet has now allowed a U.S. extradition request for one James Fergie Chambers, an American millionaire and Gaza donor, to proceed to Spanish courts in a decision his lawyers warn will set a dangerous precedent for the defense of the Palestinian cause in Europe.
00:17:54.000Chambers is an heir to the Cox media portion.
00:17:57.000He cashed out three years ago for a reported $250 million.
00:18:00.000And of course, he is a supporter of pretty much everything, including October 7th and calling the United States the Great Satan.
00:18:23.000But here's the thing everybody has an opinion about the American dream itself, whether it's alive, whether it's dying, whether the government is helping people to achieve it or making it harder.0.92
00:18:41.000Those are the questions behind my debate on the American dream with Scott Galloway, who again is on the other side of some of these questions.
00:18:47.000The debate is framed by an informative set of government facts from USA facts.
00:18:51.000Then Scott and I get into what those numbers mean, where we think the country should go from here.
00:18:55.000Agreeing on the facts doesn't mean agreeing on the policy.
00:18:58.000You can look at the same data and reach very different conclusions.
00:19:03.000There are some sharp differences, some common ground, an actual discussion beyond the usual political sound bites, rehearsed talking points.
00:19:08.000You should watch it, weigh the arguments.
00:19:25.000Well, you know, one of the reasons that the communists are ever able to take power is because you have downwardly mobile people who don't know what they are doing with their life.
00:19:32.000You don't need to hire those people to your company.
00:19:33.000You need to hire the people who are good for your company.
00:20:06.000And you just don't have time to waste going through a hundred different resumes, all of which declare that they love you so much, but then the person doesn't even remember you because they sent out that resume to a hundred different companies.
00:20:15.000ZipRecruiter helps you winnow it down, find the best candidates, And again, you'll get quality candidates very quickly, and you don't have time to waste.
00:20:21.000Try it for free at ziprecruiter.comslash daily wire.
00:20:42.000So there's this misnomer that's been going around, and that Americans seem to have widely accepted.
00:20:48.000Which is that Marxism, communism, these are kindness filled philosophies.
00:20:52.000You see Zorhan Mamdani talking about the warmth of collectivism.
00:20:55.000And in your piece, you recall what exactly communism looks like in practice.
00:20:59.000And obviously, we've made a film that very much explicates that.
00:21:03.000But, you know, this is part of a battle that I think a lot of Americans are going to need to fight in coming years, which is the forgetfulness of the American public about what communism actually does to the human soul, how people actually are manipulated under communism, what they actually act like.
00:21:16.000Why don't you talk a little bit about, as you say in your piece, what communism does to people?
00:21:22.000Well, by the way, the trailer for Confession looks fantastic.
00:21:25.000I'm really looking forward to watching it.
00:21:27.000There aren't enough films, I think, about that period of history.
00:21:30.000I mean, one of those I thought it was like Mr. Jones, but there are just shockingly few films depicting the horrors of kind of the shocking manipulative tactics and the mind games that the communists would play to extract mostly false confessions.
00:21:45.000So I'm really looking forward to the film.
00:21:47.000But to your question look, nearly half of the DSA's membership.
00:21:53.000They openly identify as communists, right?
00:21:55.000Like it's not a secret anymore that there's increasing support for communism, increasing visibility for the DSA.
00:22:01.000And in their newsletter, the Red Star Caucus of the DSA, they celebrated Mao's 132nd birthday.
00:22:10.000And so they're no longer playing this interesting game.
00:22:13.000They used to just say, We're not communists.
00:22:19.000And yet, when you heard them speak, you would never hear them quote, you know, like a Swedish political leader or some Norwegian political philosopher.
00:22:25.000They were always Quoting Mao Zedong, they were quoting Karl Marx, Lenin, Joseph Stalin.
00:22:31.000And so now, you know, the cat is out of the bag.
00:22:34.000And so I thought it was important to understand well, what is life like under communism, under Mao, who these people seem to love so much?
00:22:41.000And to me, the most important book to understand this is a book called Chinese Shadows by the Australian Belgian scholar Simon Lees.
00:22:48.000So he wrote this book in the 1970s, shortly after the Cultural Revolution in China.
00:22:53.000And he described this sort of atmosphere of electric tension, of this fear.
00:22:58.000And so this piece is titled How Communism Kills Kindness.
00:23:01.000Well, one way that it killed kindness was to make everyone incredibly suspicious of one another.
00:23:06.000So, when we talk about communism, people will often focus on the economic catastrophes, the famines, the shockingly high death tolls.
00:23:14.000But I was also interested in kind of the everyday, ordinary interactions between people.
00:23:19.000And so, people were suspicious of their friends, of their neighbors.
00:23:23.000People were denouncing family members.
00:23:26.000And there was this fear that even if you spoke about non political topics, that someone might accuse you of being an enemy of the regime.
00:23:35.000And during this Period, they were rewriting and revising the museum exhibitions.
00:23:40.000They were rewriting the textbooks in order to keep up with the latest fashionable orthodoxy of the day.
00:23:48.000And they were even doing this with individuals.
00:23:52.000So, you know, someone like Mao was described as being well off, or rather, someone like Mao was described as being a member of the working class, despite the fact that Mao himself was well off.
00:24:03.000He grew up with prosperous landowning families, family members, and yet he was described as a member of the working class.
00:24:09.000And If someone was actually poor and grew up in sort of dire poverty, they were often described as wealthy capitalists simply because they spoke out against the regime or were accused of speaking out against the regime.
00:24:23.000And so they were rewriting the history, the histories of individuals.0.61
00:24:28.000There's an old Soviet joke that I like here.0.90
00:24:30.000I think you'll appreciate, Ben, which is that under communism, the future is certain.0.84
00:24:35.000It is only the past that is unpredictable.
00:24:39.000And I think that it's such a great point because the reality is that we, We know what communism looks like, and it does, in fact, look the same in every place.
00:24:46.000And so, if you have softer versions of communism, which is now what is being promoted philosophically by people ranging from Bernie Sanders to Zorhan Mamdani, when you have that being promoted, it comes along with a softer version of these kinds of repressive tactics the attempt to rewrite history or rewrite reality, the abuse and misuse of language, the idea that freedom itself is somehow an imposition on the rest of society.
00:25:08.000The great promise of Marxism was that if we level all material circumstance, the human soul would change.
00:25:13.000And as it turns out, the great irony of Marxism is that when you try to level all material circumstance, the only choice you have is to crush the human soul.
00:25:20.000And that is the common thread in all of this.
00:25:23.000And that's why it's never been true that when Bernie Sanders says, I just want the Nordic model, but he's vacationing in the Soviet Union or hanging out in Cuba, that it's never been that these folks just want a capitalist system like, say, Norway with a bunch of social welfare systems stacked on top.
00:25:38.000Now, that's been an argument inside the West since basically the German progressive era of the late 19th century.
00:25:42.000That's not what they're talking about.
00:25:44.000And as you say, The cat is really out of the bag on this one because now you have the DSA, which openly stands these people.
00:25:49.000You have Hassan Piker, who is a great example of this just because he's the id of the Democratic Party.
00:25:53.000He just kind of goes out there and does it.
00:25:55.000He literally dresses up like Chairman Mao and makes excuses for the death of 40 million people in the Great Leap Forward or pretends away or hand waves away what happened in Tiananmen Square in pursuit of the so called greater good.
00:26:07.000The amount of cruelty that is required by communism is extraordinarily well documented historically.
00:26:12.000And yet in the West, people know virtually nothing about this.
00:26:17.000I mean, when you demolish economic hierarchies as they attempted to do in these communist societies, it's not as if people suddenly became completely egalitarian.
00:26:26.000Rather, a lot of that energy was rechanneled into political hierarchies.
00:26:31.000So now it wasn't about how much money you had, but it was about political favors, connections, being in good standing with the regime.
00:26:38.000And that actually turned out to be worse for people.
00:26:40.000It turns out that when you are free and able to achieve prosperity on your own and live in a free market society, That's actually healthier and people are happier in those societies versus you demolish that.
00:26:49.000And then suddenly the status game becomes, you know, who do I know?
00:26:53.000How do I get favors and that kind of thing?
00:26:56.000And then the other interesting thing here is that, you know, Marx himself, you know, he said something like, you know, once, yeah, once we achieve sort of superabundance and then everyone is equal and everyone has access to all of the material needs that they need to sustain themselves, then crime would wither away.
00:27:14.000And a lot of Marxists today believe something like that.
00:27:16.000They'll say, okay, well, the only reason people would commit crime is because their needs aren't being met.
00:27:20.000These same people will then say, the true criminals are the billionaires.
00:27:39.000He's an interesting case here because he sort of carries on in this tradition of using sort of working class aesthetics, this kind of cosplay.
00:27:48.000And during his campaign, he would wear a hoodie and eat a burrito on the subway and try to look like a man of the people.
00:27:53.000But we know he comes from an affluent background, upper middle class, but he talks a big game about being a Champion of the working class.
00:28:00.000And I find that there's an interesting asymmetry here, Ben, which is that if you were a non college graduate working class person and most of your supporters are non college graduate working class people, but you claim to be the voice of the college educated upper middle class, a lot of people would laugh.
00:28:18.000But you can be a college graduate member of the upper middle class and most of your support can come from upper middle class college graduates.
00:28:26.000And you say, okay, but I'm the voice, I'm the voice of the working class.
00:28:35.000But if you're at the bottom and you try to speak for people at the top, that's just unacceptable.
00:28:41.000And this is something that's been common again throughout communist revolutionary societies is one of the great things that Marx got pretty much everything wrong.
00:28:48.000As a predictive mechanism, Marxism is a total failure.
00:28:50.000And what people don't understand when they read Marx or look through Das Kapital is that if you were going to make a defense of Marx to say that he wasn't attempting a tyrannical repression, you'd have to make the argument that he was making a historically determinist argument, right?
00:29:02.000That he was saying that the inevitable Flow of history would move toward his position, not that there ought to be a violent class revolution that results in the death of millions of people, but that eventually history would move in his direction.
00:29:11.000There would be a misery of the workers, there would be late stage capitalism, and all that.
00:29:17.000It turned out the Industrial Revolution, for example, greatly enriched the societies that participated, and the immiserated societies were the ones that tried to level all income.
00:29:26.000He thought, for example, that Marxism would get its real footing in industrialized countries like Great Britain, and it turns out that Marxism instead was only able to achieve footing in the direly impoverished country of Russia and not.
00:29:39.000Started by the direly impoverished, led by, as you say, downwardly mobile, college educated elites, right?
00:29:45.000Lenin was a downwardly mobile, college educated elite.
00:29:48.000The same thing is true, by the way, of Ho Chi Minh, who studied in the West.
00:29:51.000The same thing is true pretty much everywhere.0.98
00:29:53.000All communist revolutionaries, yes, all communist revolutionaries are downwardly mobile people who believe that they have some sort of great truth that they must spread by speaking in the name of the proletariat because the proles, of course, are the people who are too ignorant, too stupid, or too poor to actually You know, design their own system or to participate in the current system.0.94
00:30:13.000And so one of the great ironies, and you see it really present in the DSA now, the DSA is disproportionately college educated white people who are downwardly mobile.0.92
00:30:22.000It is not disproportionately people who are diarrhea impoverished.0.53
00:30:24.000The diarrhea impoverished are very often voting either Republican or Democrat, depending on sort of their circumstance or their church attendance.
00:30:31.000But the people who are staffing up the DSA offices are a bunch of Columbia graduates in majors that are not likely to produce a lot of money afterward.
00:30:39.000And now they feel they're owed something.
00:30:40.000And so they're going to cobble together And speak in the name of the proletariat and then launch a revolution in their name.
00:30:46.000And as you say, you see Zorhan Mamdani doing this, pretending that he's a member of sort of the working class.
00:30:51.000Abdullah Syed is doing the exact same thing.
00:30:53.000Bernie Sanders is doing the exact same thing, right?
00:30:55.000All of these people are very well educated people who have lived in pretty solid material circumstances, but then cosplay as people who are members of the working class and then say, We are going to not only better your lot, but cure your souls by doing this sort of thing.
00:31:08.000And as you say in your piece, the great lie of Marxism is that the cure for soul sickness is a correction in material circumstance brought about by government tyranny.
00:31:18.000And what you actually end up with, inevitably, is the complete deadening of the human soul and the destruction of the human soul.
00:31:24.000If you read the works of Robert Conquest or if you read They read Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, or if you read Darkness at Noon, or if you read literally any literature about the Stalin era, which of course I'm very familiar with having, having written confession, but also what happened in China.
00:31:37.000What, what you see over and over and over again in all of this literature is that everyday common life became unlivable.
00:31:43.000You were not allowed to have a conversation with your wife, with, with your kids, because, I mean, the Soviet Union literally built an entire cult of personality around a fake story of a kid who informed on his parents and then was murdered by his parents.
00:31:55.000And they literally formed a cult of personality around this particular case and then treated that as sort of The way that you were to move ahead in the Stalin system was to inform on your parents, inform on your kids, inform on your neighbors.
00:32:06.000And this would give you the thing that you couldn't get through capitalist enterprise, it would give you a status in your community.
00:32:13.000Yeah, no, this is, I mean, that's precisely how communism kills kindness.
00:32:18.000And if you were a member of the wrong social category, then cruelty is the correct response, not kindness, not compassion.
00:32:27.000In that free press piece, I tell the story of the Soviet communist Lev Kopolev, who During Stalin's forced collectivization campaigns, Lev Kopalov describes being horrified at hearing the screams of children.
00:32:39.000And then, upon feeling compassion, he immediately reprimands himself because, you know, you shouldn't be feeling this way.
00:33:00.000And we're seeing, I think, some echoes of this today.
00:33:03.000Where, if you are a member of the wrong class or category, then you shouldn't feel sympathy.
00:33:07.000You actually should be celebrated for being cruel to that person.
00:33:10.000I cite one shocking statistic in that free press piece that after Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, was shot in the back, 41% of voters under 30 said that that was acceptable, that it was an okay thing to do, apparently because he was a rich CEO and therefore a member of the bad category, one of the dark elements or whatever the term that the Chinese used during the Cultural Revolution.
00:33:37.000I mean, a lot of people misunderstand this that you actually get it's easy to feel compassion for your allies and for your friends.
00:33:45.000But the real test of that human feeling is can you feel it for people who are members of disfavored groups or people that your group despises?
00:33:52.000So, you mentioned the downwardly mobile elites, Ben.
00:33:56.000So many people misunderstand, they think about class conflict, they think about sort of the Marxist framework of the capitalists versus the workers.
00:34:04.000But increasingly, what we're seeing, and we even saw this during the Russian Revolution, is that it's The battle isn't really between the haves and the have nots.
00:34:13.000It's between the haves and the have mores.
00:34:16.000So you have these downwardly mobile elites who were raised at the 99th percentile and now they're in their 20s and 30s and they've slipped to the 87th percentile.
00:34:26.000And therefore, we need to flip the game board over and have a socialist revolution.
00:34:30.000And so these people who have slipped downward a little bit, they're looking upward at the people who are wealthier than themselves.
00:34:35.000Very seldom do you actually see this kind of organic uprising, this imagined idea of the Oppressed and immiserated workers sort of coming together and toppling.
00:34:45.000Usually, they are, to the extent that they're involved at all, they're usually organized by a disaffected elite who can sort of discipline the movement and channel their frustration toward the goals of the ideology.
00:34:56.000And this connects with an idea that you and I have talked about this idea that I've been working on for a while luxury beliefs.
00:35:03.000So, in this book, Chinese Shadows, Simon Lees talks about how Western Maoists, Western intellectuals during that time in the 1970s, they praised Mao, they praised the Soviet Union, they loved communism.
00:35:17.000They were celebrating this, but they were not living under the actual regimes.
00:35:22.000The ordinary people who were suffering under communism, they didn't seem to feel any sympathy for.
00:35:28.000They got a lot of praise and a lot of applause from their intellectual circles and from their peers for being interesting and sophisticated and seemingly compassionate by supporting this ideology, but they were not the ones suffering from it.
00:35:40.000And that distinction between sort of advocacy and consequences is crucial to understanding the luxury beliefs framework.
00:35:58.000Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.