In a world where women s sports are being transformed, The Daily Wire calls foul with the most triggering comedy of the year. This week, host Alex Blumberg is joined by the director, writer, star, and key grip of the new film Lady Ballers, and they discuss how the idea for the film came to life. Plus, a look at the trailer for the new movie, and how it came to be. Guests: Director, Writer, Star, Director, Producer, and Co-Creator of Ladyballers, Shelix Vellian; Producer, Writer and Director of the film, Kevin Spacey. Thanks to our sponsor, Daily Wire, for sponsoring this episode. Thanks also to Producer, Editor, and Editor-in-Chief of Daily Wire for supporting the film. Thank you also to Director and Writer, Kevin SPACEY, for coming up with the idea, and for being a part of the team behind Ladyballer, a movie about women's sports in America's first female-led professional basketball team. Special thanks and shout out to Producer and Director, KevinSpacey for the trailer, and Producer, SELVES VELCHER. for the music, which was produced and edited by Bobby Lord, for the score and sound design, and editing, and thanks to Editor-In-Chief, John Rocha, for producing and mixing, and mastering the score. . Thanks to Director, Director and Editor, Jeff Perla, and Audio Engineer, for all of the music and production design, for this episode, and our sound design and mixing and mastering and mastering of the song "Ladyballers" by the band "The Good Girl" by The Good Girl, The Bad Girl, the Good Girl. and the rest of our theme song by the Bad Girl "Lady Ballers." by The Bad Boy, the Bad Boy "The Bad Girl's Guide to the Lady Baller" by by , and , and in the video editing, & (featuring , "Lady baller, and "The Lady ballers " by . . and our ad music by ( ) by the , we hope you like it! and we hope it makes you all enjoy it, please leave us a review on Apple and tweet us what you think about it, we'll send us your thoughts in the comments section!
00:00:19.000You have to have actual skills to be a key grip.
00:00:22.000So, I want to show the trailer, we're going to watch the trailer, then we're going to react to the trailer, and then we're going to talk about how this movie came to be, because it's absurd on every possible level.
00:03:41.000I originally went to them and I said, you guys should like go try out for a bunch of ladies leagues.
00:03:46.000And that became not possible because, as it turns out, most ladies leagues don't allow in actual men.
00:03:52.000And they weren't willing to go the full distance in terms of what it would require in order to, you know, the actual hormone treatments and everything to play in some of the ladies leagues.
00:04:03.000Well, I think the thing that you have to understand is that I was getting ready to leave the country to go make our Pendragon series on July 9th, and somewhere about mid-March, I thought, wouldn't it be great if between today and July 9th, we wrote and produced an entire feature film?
00:04:21.000And so, yeah, the Crane Boys mentioned the idea that you had given them, and it had been in the back of my mind that, you know, We really should be making the movies that only we can make.
00:04:32.000In fact, I think that's a line that you had come up with.
00:04:35.000What are the things that only we can do?
00:04:37.000And so I thought, well, obviously, there has not been a true comedy made since Barack Obama became president.
00:04:44.000I mean, Barack Obama destroyed three things.
00:04:52.000Other than that, he was a perfectly average president, you know?
00:04:56.000It became impossible to tell a joke during the Obama administration because Obama made this sort of pact with culture shapers that they should change their fundamental understanding of themselves.
00:05:07.000In the case of comedians, they should no longer mock the absurd, but they should be agents for social change.
00:05:13.000The head writer of SNL famously said that they would make no jokes about Barack Obama.
00:05:19.000There's literally nothing funny about this man.
00:05:21.000It is as though he is carved from a single piece of pure obsidian, which in itself is one of the funniest things that anyone has ever said, because if anything, it was, you know, half of a slab of pure obsidian and the other was snow white marble.
00:05:38.000But this is the view that they took of Obama, because of his sort of singular religious affect, you couldn't make any jokes anywhere, ever.
00:05:44.000And you've seen, I mean, comedy has changed fundamentally in that era, and Hollywood stopped making these kinds of films.
00:05:49.000You go back to the early 2000s, you have some of the great comedies, you know, probably ends, culminates with Tropic Thunder, starts with Dodgeball, ends with Tropic Thunder.
00:06:02.000I think our audience misses those movies.
00:06:03.000And there's never been anything funnier or more mockable or more laughably absurd in the mainstream part of our culture than letting grown-ass dudes beat up women by calling themselves chicks.
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00:08:34.000That's the craziest part of this, is that basically there was a script, you ended up going through and rewriting a lot of the script, you ended up directing the film, you ended up being the star of the film, and that was basically demanded by circumstance, because there are more actors who are willing to be in the film because of all of what you're doing.
00:08:51.000I was getting ready to go to Europe on a location scout, and I sat down two writers, that have worked with us in the past, Brian Hoffman and
00:08:59.000Nick Sheehan, both really talented guys and I said, guys, I'm leaving for two weeks. When I
00:10:27.000I suppose it shouldn't have been, but to hear these already canceled conservative actors who've wanted to do things with us, just unwilling to touch the material.
00:10:36.000And that's when sort of the idea of, well, what if it was just us?
00:10:41.000What if The Daily Wire truly made the movie that only The Daily Wire could make?
00:10:45.000And we all had some trepidation about that going in.
00:10:52.000I can't imagine any better way that it could have gone, because if we had gotten any of those actors, yes, they would have had skills that we don't have.
00:11:00.000They wouldn't have taken the jokes as far as we took them.
00:11:03.000They wouldn't have been willing to go the distance.
00:11:05.000And our guys, particularly Crane and Co., Jake Crane, Blaine Crane, and David Cohn, they committed themselves so completely to this process.
00:11:14.000And I was telling you in the makeup chair before we started, like, The physical stuff they subjected themselves to, you know, both from, like, body transformation, losing weight, gaining muscle, all of that piece of it, but then just also all the stunts, the hard days we were working.
00:11:33.000We had an 18-hour day our last day, and these guys, you know, they were elite athletes before they moved into the sports commentary space, and you see it when you work with them, just absolute dedication and completely hilarious.
00:11:49.000And of course, pretty much everybody cameos in this thing.
00:12:02.000It is, it is exactly what, anyone who knows that you're funny, which is apparently no one on the left who never understand when you're making a joke, but anyone who actually watches your show will be like, there goes Ben.
00:12:26.000I mean, like, Ted has been itching for this all his life, since he was doing high school drama, and then somehow ended up in the United States Senate and also running for president.
00:14:14.000And there are cameos that we haven't announced yet.
00:14:16.000Some other people who show up and get some laughs for us, which, you know, as the days draw toward the actual premiere, we'll release some of that info.
00:14:25.000So I want to go through some of the tweets that people have been sending.
00:14:29.000Most positive, I would say the reception on Twitter particularly has been astonishingly good.
00:14:34.000I mean, it's been probably 20 million views at this point on Twitter, somewhere in that neighborhood.
00:14:38.000Also, we talk about this as though it's a controversial issue because the left pretends that it's a controversial issue.
00:14:45.000Virtually every human being alive today, and every human being alive until today, has known that men should not compete against women in women's sports.
00:14:54.000I mean, that Blaine clip where he's picking up the girl and throwing her to the mat, I mean, first of all, it's hilarious.
00:15:02.000But also, it's hilarious because it's absurd and that you'd never be allowed under any circumstances.
00:15:07.000And that is actually happening in the actual world.
00:15:14.000I can say watching that beef shot was difficult.
00:15:17.000I mean, we had a great professional stuntwoman, a true pro.
00:15:21.000She's wearing, you know, a skeletal body armor, basically, that's made to do this sort of thing, and it still hurt.
00:15:29.000I mean, Blaine is lifting her off the ground and slamming her into the mat.
00:16:21.000The movie is absurd, but it's only as absurd as the real world.
00:16:26.000We're just choosing to frame it in a way that allows you to laugh at it.
00:16:29.000I think this movie is less akin to dodgeball.
00:16:32.000Tonally it's like dodgeball, but thematically it's much less dodgeball and it's much more What was your movie that you turned me on to about Stalin?
00:18:48.000Yeah, and I knew that it was there, but it had not occurred to me that people would see the similarity, because, I mean, frankly, it's transphobic to see the similarity.
00:18:56.000So Juana Mann is the tragic tale of a basketball player in the UBA, not the NBA, the UBA.
00:19:03.000And he ends up being expelled from the UBA, and it's basically Tootsie, but basketball.
00:19:09.000And he ends up going to the WUBA, and playing in the WUBA, and falling in love with his roommate, but of course he's supposed to be a girl, and this creates all sorts of... It's exactly, it's the plot of Tootsie, but with lowbrow and basketball.
00:19:22.000But, to compare that to this is just sick.
00:19:25.000I'm sorry, as I say, how dare you compare Lady Ballers, a movie about beautiful trans women, with Juana Man, a movie about a man pretending to be a woman.
00:23:50.000I would say an emotionally difficult day to see the places where people were murdered.
00:23:57.000I just did a talk with the prime minister and I think there's, I mean, obviously there are three things that need to happen in the Gaza situation.
00:24:08.000I mean, there's no choice but to Kill those who insist on murdering civilians.
00:24:17.000They're not going to change their mind.
00:24:19.000And then the second thing is to change the education so that a new generation of murderers is not trained to be murderers.
00:24:28.000And then the third thing, which is also very important, is to try to build prosperity.
00:24:34.000Okay, this, what he's saying right there, that's an excellent three-pronged plan for destroying Hamas and other radical terrorist groups.
00:24:40.000You kill the people who murder the civilians, that means Hamas and its allies, you overhaul the education system in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are run by parties who hate Jews and seek the destruction of Israel, and you bring economic prosperity.
00:24:51.000Only after those steps are fulfilled can there be talk of some sort of peaceful settlement of the conflict, because only at that point will there be partners willing to make peace.
00:25:00.000This also happens to be the only strategy that has ever worked.
00:25:03.000Counterinsurgency strategies directed at hostile populations can only be successful over time.
00:25:08.000If the most militant members, the terrorists, are killed, the population is re-educated away from hatred, and economic prosperity becomes possible.
00:25:15.000And make no mistake, the population of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is indeed wildly hostile to Israel and deeply anti-Semitic.
00:25:56.000This is a triumphant parade of Hamas family members and friends.
00:26:02.000Again, look how many children are in the crowd here.
00:26:04.000Look how many kids here are mocking outside these Red Cross vans, civilian children who are inside the Red Cross vans being returned to their families.
00:27:49.000The model for such counterinsurgency tactics is the British counterinsurgency against communist revolutionaries in Malaya from 1948 to 1960.
00:27:56.000By the time that counterinsurgency had started, the British had already had forces in country for about a century.
00:28:02.000According to historian Andrew Roberts and General David Petraeus in their new book, Conflict, the Malayan campaign was a mixture of stick and carrot, quote, Providing people with electricity, drinking water, schools, clinics, and property rights proved a powerful disincentive for them to support Maoism.
00:28:15.000But a heady enticement of security had a dialectical partner.
00:28:19.000Firm discipline for those who disobeyed.
00:28:21.000This, by the way, included, in some cases, strictly rationing diets to, like, half daily calorie count.
00:28:27.000The British leadership also knew this strategy would take a very long time.
00:28:30.000The general in charge of the operation said he would, quote, shoot the bastard who says this emergency is over.
00:28:35.000Eventually, after more than a decade, the British did win.
00:28:39.000Israel can secure its future too, but only if it takes the time and effort necessary to do so.
00:28:44.000And this means ignoring the stupidity of those who want a quick ending to what will be a long struggle.
00:28:50.000The first step in that struggle, destroying Hamas, what Elon Musk said, is what Israel is going to have to do.
00:28:57.000That's what Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu makes clear.
00:28:59.000Here he was yesterday in a live chat with Musk.
00:30:03.000We've seen it in the Gulf states, and we see that when you visit Dubai, or when you visit Abu Dhabi, or when you visit Bahrain, you see something entirely different.
00:30:23.000In fact, Hamas apparently just transferred control of the entire Bibas family, which includes a four-year-old and a 10-month-old, to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another terrorist group, apparently for money.
00:30:33.000Hamas military leader, Yahya Sinwar, apparently appeared personally to the hostages in the tunnels to show them his power.
00:30:40.000One hostage was forced to write a ridiculous letter before her release, talking about how Hamas had, quote, treated her daughter like a queen while in captivity.
00:31:21.000But what Israel does not have a right to do, in my view, is to kill 12,000 people in six, seven weeks, two-thirds of whom are women and children.
00:31:59.000But the idea here is to create a vague definition that leaves open the possibility of withdrawing aid based on Israel's current Gaza actions.
00:32:06.000On Friday, President Biden said conditioning aid would be a, quote, worthwhile thought.
00:32:09.000Yesterday, National Security Advisor Spokesperson John Kirby wouldn't rule it out either.
00:32:14.000So the approach that we're taking with Israel and, quite frankly, with our partners in the region is working.
00:32:19.000It's getting aid into people that need it.
00:32:26.000And quite frankly, we continue to urge, and will continue to urge, the Israelis as they conduct military operations to do so with the utmost care for innocent civilian life.
00:32:40.000I think he would say exactly what he said to y'all yesterday when he got asked this question.
00:32:44.000It's a worthwhile thought, but the approach that I'm taking now is working.
00:32:48.000The approach that we're taking now is working.
00:32:53.000The idea that you handcuff the party that is attempting to protect itself, the democracy, the democratic ally, in the face of a giant terror group is ridiculous.
00:33:02.000It's also foolishness for people to treat the quote-unquote two-state solution as though that idiotic nostrum represents a true solution.
00:33:10.000It instead holds out the hope that the more pressure is applied to Israel, the more death brought to Israel's citizenry by terrorists, the more international pressure put on Israel, The more Israel will then concede to those very terrorists, which of course prolongs the conflict.
00:33:23.000Does anyone really want a terrorist state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
00:33:27.000Because that's exactly what would exist if Palestinian statehood were declared today.
00:33:32.000As apparently the ridiculous government of Spain would wish.
00:33:35.000Hamas would end up the governing party in a new state with control over its border and its weaponry.
00:33:39.000Do you think the possibility of global conflict is larger or smaller under those circumstances?
00:33:44.000Now, President Biden has been more stalwart than I would have expected so far, but his language on this matter is insipid.
00:33:49.000Here's what he tweeted, quote, A two-state solution is the only way to guarantee the long-term security of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people.
00:33:55.000To make sure Israelis and Palestinians alike live in equal measure of freedom and dignity, we will not give up on working towards that goal.
00:34:01.000Can you imagine in the middle of World War II, if the President of the United States had tweeted out, what we really need is a peace agreement between America and Japan in order to end this terrible bloodshed and leave the Japanese fascists in charge of Japan.
00:34:18.000Listen, the two-state solution may eventually, down the line, become a possibility.
00:34:22.000But ironically, talk about it, prematurely prevents that possibility from ever materializing because every incentivization of terrorism increases terrorism, thus making such a solution absolutely impossible.
00:34:33.000Because what happened on October 7th was the culmination of three decades of large-scale terrorism pursued by the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, So what needs to happen?
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00:36:44.000Grab this incredible deal right now at DailyWire.com slash subscribe before it disappears So when it comes to lack of moral clarity in the West, that is pretty much everywhere.
00:37:00.000If there is one face of lack of moral clarity of the next generation of idiots that we have created through the toxic combination of legacy media attention, social media, and wokest philosophy, that face is the ridiculously dumb face of Greta Thunberg.
00:37:14.000Who continues to be treated as though she has something worthy to say.
00:37:19.000She was always a foolish child who's running around the globe saying dumb things to adults who wanted to feel better about themselves by allowing a foolish child to yell at them for the cameras.
00:37:30.000And she's a very privileged person, this Greta Thunberg.
00:37:33.000And so that gave her the ability to basically drop out of school and go to a bunch of adult symposiums and yell at them about how the next generation demands of you.
00:37:42.000Those random things include degrowth, deindustrialization, and all the rest.
00:37:46.000Well, it turns out that that radically anti-Western viewpoint isn't confined to her environmentalism, which of course is just part and parcel of a broader intellectual rubric.
00:37:55.000The idea that you want to stop global warming doesn't have to be connected with degrowth.
00:37:59.000It doesn't have to be connected with a belief in the innate evils of the West, but it virtually always is.
00:38:06.000And Greta Thunberg is just a symptom of this.
00:38:08.000So, she was caught on tape just last week in Stockholm shouting about anti-Zionism.
00:38:13.000What the hell does Greta Thunberg have to say about Israel?
00:38:17.000I didn't notice, for example, that the people of Gaza and the Arab-Palestinians living In the West Bank are particularly concerned with environmental issues.
00:39:39.000So they were considering over on The View, the bright minds over at The View.
00:39:42.000They were considering why it is that so many members of the MeToo movement are totally silent about the fact that Hamas raped like a bunch of women.
00:39:49.000There's a giant report in the Washington Post about Hamas raping women so hard their pelvises broke.
00:39:54.000Raping women and shooting them to death while they were still inside the women.
00:39:59.000Where are all the feminist rights organizations?
00:40:01.000Where's Linda Sarsour and the Women's March?
00:40:05.000Well, here's Whoopi Goldberg trying to explain why.
00:40:07.000I am still devastated where two months since this war has been underway by the silence from women's group in this country about the rape being used as an act of war in this attack.
00:40:17.000The fact that sexual violence was used against Israeli women in the major women's groups in this country have not come out and denounced it.
00:40:24.000This weekend Sheryl Sandberg put out a gripping video calling for it.
00:40:30.000It is the height of immorality and the fact that the United Nations Perhaps the reason they've been silenced is for the same reason that you just described.
00:40:37.000The UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has been silent, and the international
00:41:18.000You mean the people who rape women to death?
00:41:21.000Like that's what you would have to end.
00:41:23.000You know why Whoopi Goldberg is so silent on all of this?
00:41:25.000Because Whoopi Goldberg believes that Jews are just white people and white people are bad.
00:41:29.000That's why Whoopi Goldberg says this kind of stuff.
00:41:31.000This is the same idiot woman who suggested that Hitler killing Jews was white on white violence and was not in fact a form of racial discrimination.
00:41:45.000The reason she apparently is totally fine with people- This is silence is violence, Whoopi Goldberg, going out there and suggesting that if you didn't put the black square on your Facebook page in the middle of Black Lives Matter, it's because you hated black people, according to Whoopi Goldberg.
00:41:57.000Not because you disagreed with the basic premise, which is that black people are widely victimized in the United States, but because you hate black people.
00:42:03.000When Jews are actually victimized, when Jews are actually raped, Whoopi Goldberg's like, well, we do have to be, we have to keep quiet about that.
00:42:10.000Well, you know, we wouldn't want to exacerbate the conflict.
00:42:38.000But the reason Whoopi Goldberg believes all this is because, again, she buys into this oppressor-oppressor-racialist matrix, and that is an evil matrix.
00:42:50.000In just one second, we'll get to lack of moral clarity from our friends in the media.
00:42:53.000First, The Ben Shapiro Show is supported by Grand Canyon University, an affordable private Christian university with a vibrant campus in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona.
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00:44:46.000But when he gives monologues like the one that he did yesterday about Israel's activities against Hamas, I gotta say he's not both sides in it.
00:45:26.000Israel committed atrocities in 2014, in my estimation.
00:45:30.000It was a completely disproportionate response to what had happened.
00:45:33.000It looked more like revenge to me than a military strategy, and President Obama told them to call it off.
00:45:39.000Well, during that bombardment, I asked, at what point does Israel's current military strategy become the very terrorism it professes to be fighting?
00:45:46.000And today, I'm beginning to ask myself that exact same question.
00:46:12.000Proportion means that the means used to achieve a military end must be proportional to the military end.
00:46:19.000In other words, if I want to kill one bad guy, I can't just drop an A-bomb, right? That's what that means.
00:46:24.000But again, this idea that Israel has to be hampered in its military aims or that Israel
00:46:29.000has magical weapons where you wave the magic Harry Potter wand and all the bad guys disappear,
00:46:32.000but all the civilians are left over. That's not true. By the way, Piers was wrong in 2014.
00:46:38.000The fact of the matter is that in 2014, by the generalized statistics
00:46:41.000of the people who were killed in that particular conflict, about two...
00:46:46.000About 2,100 people were killed in that particular conflict by Israel in the Gaza Strip, and that was prompted by the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, as well as a series of rockets fired into Israel, as per Hamas's usual arrangement.
00:47:00.000In that conflict, according to the measurements available from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which is significantly more reliable than the UN or the Gaza Health Ministry, 36% killed were civilians, 44% were members of Hamas or other terrorist groups, and 20% were quote-unquote uncategorized males between the ages of 16 and 50, which typically means civilians who are associated with Hamas or one of the other terrorist groups.
00:47:24.000This sort of moral lack of clarity, of course, means that no one can win a war under these circumstances.
00:47:30.000There is no war that can be won by a Western power against a terrorist group embedded in a civilian population under the circumstances that Piers is describing as quote-unquote terrorism.
00:47:39.000It is not terrorism to try to kill people in the opposing terrorist group and they are hiding among civilians.
00:47:46.000Terrorism is when you go in and you slaughter civilians purposefully, not as collateral damage, purposefully as the goal of your attack, which is what Hamas did.
00:47:55.000Piers tried to extend this to questions that he was asking of Elon Levy, who's the spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister.
00:48:05.000By your admission, just a few moments ago, you said that they make it incredibly difficult for you to work out who is a Hamas terrorist and who is a civilian.
00:48:14.000That seems to me part of the problem that you have with the optics of this to the wider world, is that they're seeing horrible imagery.
00:48:23.000I mean it's just the worst thing I've ever seen all over social media.
00:48:28.000The worst thing we've ever seen were the atrocities that Hamas perpetrated on October 7th.
00:48:32.000I've not seen, thankfully, I've not seen what many journalists have seen which is the 45-minute film of that and I understand it's absolutely horrific and I'm not making any comparison.
00:48:45.000I would not say anything is worse than that so for the record.
00:48:48.000But The horrible imagery all day long, it is suggesting to people that there are thousands and thousands of thousands of women and a lot of children, maybe as many as five, six thousand children now, have been killed by these airstrikes and now the ground attack.
00:49:08.000And I think the problem that you have, and I say this respectfully, the problem you have is that you don't actually know how many Hamas terrorists you're killing.
00:49:20.000Okay, well, I mean, under those circumstances, who would?
00:49:24.000I mean, the answer is a lot, by the way.
00:49:27.000They do know, in approximate numbers, how many Hamas terrorists they have killed.
00:49:32.000But if the idea is that the only way that you can fight a terrorist group is presumably by knowing exactly, exactly how many terrorists you are killing, and only killing those terrorists, no one will ever win a war against a terror group again.
00:49:47.000By the way, when we talk about the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, it's very difficult to separate who is a civilian from who is not when you're talking about a 17-year-old male who is hanging out with Hamas.
00:49:56.000Is he a member of Hamas or is he a civilian?
00:49:58.000This also happens to ring true with regard to the statistics about quote-unquote children.
00:50:01.000You've heard that Israel is keeping women and children in prison.
00:50:05.000That many of the prisoners being released are women and children.
00:50:07.000In the same way you're hearing that described in the Gaza Strip.
00:50:11.000I mean, they are technically women and minors that are being held in prison for terrorist activity.
00:50:18.000Again, we don't have great statistics on any of that because since when have you in real time been able to count the exact number of people who are dying in a war?
00:50:27.000That you can't win a war under those circumstances.
00:50:29.000If the idea, again, is that immunity is bought by simply hiding among civilians, that means terrorists win every war from now until the end of time, and you have now created a massive incentive structure for them to hide among civilians in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
00:50:41.000So, in other words, the punishment for violation of the Geneva Conventions, according to Piers and many in the media, is immunity.
00:50:51.000By the way, even when Piers says he's not equating what happened on October 7th to what happened inside Gaza, he literally did so in his monologue.
00:50:57.000He literally said that this is now tipping over into the terrorism that Israel saw on October 7th.
00:51:06.000The West in general loses wars on this basis.
00:51:09.000And that is a serious, serious problem.
00:51:12.000And meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to trail in the polls.
00:51:17.000There's a new article out at RealClearPolitics from Sean Trent today.
00:51:22.000And he points out that right now, if you had to put betting money on it, Trump is the favorite.
00:51:27.000He says, in 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton for all of five days in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, each of those days in the immediate aftermath of the Republican convention.
00:51:35.000He led in 29 polls taken over the course of the entire campaign.
00:51:38.000In 2020, Trump never led Biden in the national RCP average.
00:51:44.000So, counting the LA Times tracker as a single poll, Trump led in a total of 24 national polls in January of 2020.
00:51:50.000This cycle, he has led in that many since mid-September.
00:51:53.000He's led in more polls in the past three weeks than he did against Biden in the entirety of the 2020 campaign.
00:51:59.000If you look at the state-level polling, Trump is currently up in virtually every battleground state.
00:52:06.000Mitt Romney never led Barack Obama in the RCP average in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Ohio.
00:52:27.000So here's what Sean Trent says, quote, In other words, analyzing this election correctly isn't just a matter of giving lip service to the notion that Trump can win this election.
00:52:33.000The correct position right now is that Trump is better positioned in the polls to win this election than any GOP nominee since at least 2004.
00:52:41.000Not only that, he habitually overperforms his polls.
00:52:43.000Frankly, if you're willing to set favorites this far out, you should almost certainly declare Donald Trump the favorite.
00:52:48.000Does this mean that Trump will win the presidency?
00:52:50.000There are good arguments why perceptions of the economy will improve between now and then, although maybe they won't.
00:52:54.000Perhaps Trump will underperform his polling this time, as the GOP did in 2022, although maybe he won't.
00:52:58.000There are good arguments Trump's criminal trials will erode his standing in the polls, although having watched Trump's scandals unfold for the better part of four decades, maybe they won't.
00:53:06.000This all makes for fun speculation, but when the conversation returns to what we do know, there's only one correct answer.
00:53:11.000Trump can win this election, and right now is well positioned to do so.
00:53:17.000Again, he's contending not only with fires on the foreign front, but also he's contending with the fact that people just don't think the economy is very good.
00:53:25.000There's an entire New York Times article titled, even most Biden voters don't see a thriving economy.
00:53:29.000Quote, a majority of those who backed President Biden in 2020 say today's economy is fair or poor, ordinarily a bad omen for incumbents seeking reelection.
00:54:44.000I look at all the press, look at that.
00:54:45.000The press is particularly excited about that, I can see.
00:54:53.000But look, all kidding aside, That's not all.
00:54:56.000On Thanksgiving two years ago, 100 container ships were waiting to dock in the ports.
00:55:01.000They were lined up, 100 long, out into the ocean.
00:55:05.000This year, there were less than 10, meaning that today, as folks start their holiday shopping, shelves are stocked, meaning that if major appliances like a stove or a fridge broke down over Thanksgiving, you can replace it faster and 9 percent cheaper than you did two years ago.
00:55:26.000Um, well, um, there's only one problem, which is no one believes that.
00:55:29.000Okay, according to The Hill, in 2022, the price for a classic Thanksgiving feast was $64.05.
00:55:35.000That was up more than 10 bucks than 2021.
00:55:40.000It declined a little bit in 2023, but it's still way, way, way higher.
00:55:45.000Costs are still 25% higher than they were in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The Hill.
00:56:16.000So, how did you get into this fight against anti-Semitism in the first place?
00:56:21.000I feel like I've been fighting this fight for a long time now.
00:56:25.000One year ago, leading up to Kristallnacht last November, I released a Holocaust educational docuseries called How to Never Forget.
00:56:33.000I grew up with Holocaust survivor grandparents from Hungary and Romania.
00:56:38.000And I grew up hearing their stories my whole life.
00:56:40.000So I've always been educated about the Holocaust, you know, not just in school, not just from movies, but from direct stories from my grandparents.
00:56:47.000And when my Zayde passed away four years ago at 97, I rewatched his Shoah Foundation testimonials.
00:56:54.000And my grandma's and I was like, I need to do something with this.
00:56:57.000So I actually went to Poland and filmed a whole series.
00:57:00.000So I've been now for the past year fighting antisemitism on my social media in person, going around speaking.
00:57:08.000And when everything happened with Israel, then I have now basically taken over my social media posting about it.
00:57:15.000So what is the uptick in antisemitism that you've seen been like since since October 7th?
00:57:20.000I mean, I think the actual statistic is 400%, they say.
00:57:24.000But what is happening online is something that anti-Semitism has always been here, right?
00:57:49.000So I'm seeing it directly to myself on social media, but every day we're hearing about news stories now, what is happening in schools and on the streets, at restaurants.
00:57:58.000People are boycotting restaurants because they support Israel.
00:58:01.000In some cases they're even boycotting restaurants that serve Israeli food that was happening in Philadelphia.
00:58:06.000So you've been doing some amazing activist work.
00:58:08.000You've been meeting with people on all sides of the political aisle to talk about anti-Semitism.
00:58:12.000For folks who don't watch or feed and haven't been following, what are the kind of stuff that you've been doing?
00:58:17.000Yeah, so I've been, you know, going to, you know, whether it's political, going to the White House and speaking about it there, or going to different schools, or going, you know, I just spoke at the rally in D.C., which was 300,000 people, which is an insane number of people to come together to support Israel and to combat anti-Semitism.
00:58:36.000And, you know, my following on social media was not built from my activism.
00:58:41.000It was built from my dancing, from my singing.
00:58:43.000You know, I've collaborated with people of all walks of life, all ethnicities, all races.
00:58:48.000So to use my social media to be posting about Israel, you know, was risky, some may say,
00:58:55.000but I felt that if I have the voice and I have the power to maybe educate someone,
00:59:00.000to share what's going on, I know that's what my grandparents would want me to do.
00:59:05.000What they, I wish they had a voice back then and wish the Jewish people had a voice back then
00:59:10.000to be able to voice what was going on.
00:59:12.000So I feel like it's our responsibility now with these platforms to make sure we use them and educate.
00:59:17.000I mean, it definitely is a brave thing to take a social media following
00:59:20.000that is on a completely different topic and swivel it over to something that's insanely serious
00:59:24.000and really threatening in the world right now.
00:59:33.000But for you to take a complete image that has been built from doing fun stuff, the singing and the dancing, and shift that over to something deeply serious, how have fans reacted to that?
00:59:43.000You know, when I first did the Holocaust series a year ago, I was nervous.
00:59:49.000I was like, people follow me to see me be happy, to see me dancing in the streets of Hollywood Boulevard, you know, to see me collaborate with Terry Crews.
00:59:57.000Like, no one's going to want me to sit here and do something very dark, very serious.
01:01:06.000But there also has been a lot of really positive, beautiful things that have come from it.
01:01:10.000So after doing that series about the Holocaust, and obviously you mentioned growing up in a home with Holocaust survivor grandparents, where do you think we stand with anti-Semitism in the world right now?
01:01:21.000It's crazy that it's 2023, almost 2024, and we are still here.
01:01:25.000And we are here, actually, not still here.
01:01:27.000We are in a place that we've, I don't think we've been since the Holocaust, you know?
01:01:33.000So people need to take this more seriously.
01:01:35.000I think that, this is why I keep saying this is how the Holocaust began, because people aren't taking this seriously enough.
01:01:43.000and to understand people think, oh, the Holocaust could never happen again, you know.
01:01:46.000But that's why Israel is so important.
01:01:48.000My Zayde would always tell me how important the state of Israel was
01:01:51.000because he felt if Israel was around that the Holocaust would have never happened.
01:01:55.000And that's why it's so important that we protect Israel and we stand for Israel
01:02:07.000And it's really a scary time that we're in right now.
01:02:11.000And I can't believe that we have to prove ourselves again.
01:02:16.000Back in the day, my Zady would tell me stories that he would have friends his entire life.
01:02:20.000And then all of a sudden, when all the announcements came out about how terrible the Jews were and all the propaganda, friends turned on him, started spitting on him in the street, started beating him up and saying, you dirty Jew.
01:02:31.000I mean, that's what's happening on social media, and you're having conversations with friends that you can't even imagine having.
01:02:37.000Like, a year ago, you would have never imagined having these types of conversations with them.
01:02:41.000So it's a really scary time we're in, and that's why it needs to be taken seriously, and to make sure that the never forget, never again doesn't happen again.
01:02:51.000Yeah, the denialism is particularly astonishing.
01:02:53.000I mean, when you look at the amount on social media of people who are just saying, none of this ever occurred, or Israel's exaggerating what happened, or the 40 beheaded babies, therefore all the babies are alive, or Israel's lying, or all of this, it is boggling to the mind, because for those who actually think that truth matters and that facts matter, it's pretty evident that for a huge percentage of the population, that just is not true.
01:03:15.000The narrative matters a lot more than the facts.
01:03:17.000It makes no sense that At first they were saying the hostages aren't like when people are in the streets pulling down the posters.
01:03:23.000There are videos of people saying they're not hostages.
01:04:14.000If you want to cut through the madness of all the top stories in politics, culture, and even religion, which is the foundation of politics and culture, then come check out The Michael Knowles Show, where you can join me for an authentically conservative perspective.