The Ben Shapiro Show - The Epstein File Release FIASCO

00:00:00.000 Folks, we have a jam-packed show for you here today.

00:00:02.000 Vivek Ramaswamy will be joining us later to talk about his Ohio gubernatorial run.

00:00:06.000 We're going to do like a full breakdown of the Oscars.

00:00:08.000 I made a full breakdown.

00:00:09.000 I actually slogged through virtually all of the Best Picture nominees on your behalf, so we'll go through all of those, and we'll get to everything related to Ukraine and Doge.

00:00:20.000 But we begin today with...

00:00:22.000 Basically what appeared to be some sort of Geraldo Rivera reveal of the Epstein files.

00:00:27.000 Y'all remember that episode of Geraldo Rivera in which he tried to open Al Capone's vault and then he did and there was nothing inside?

00:00:33.000 Well, it was basically that.

00:00:33.000 And this has led to a bunch of speculation that secretly somewhere the Epstein files are still there.

00:00:39.000 And that actually the lack of justification for more material being out there is demonstrated by the lack of material.

00:00:48.000 This sort of stuff is annoying.

00:00:49.000 I want all the Epstein files out there.

00:00:51.000 Every single bit of it.

00:00:52.000 All of it.

00:00:53.000 As much unredacted as humanly possible.

00:00:54.000 The only parts, theoretically, that should be redacted are things to protect the victims.

00:00:58.000 Certainly nothing to protect the allegations against perpetrators.

00:01:01.000 I want to know exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was, who was opping him, because the question of how he made his money is a serious question, and why he was basically allowed by law enforcement to gallivant around performing atrocities against young women on behalf of powerful men with his Girlfriend, Paramore, and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and all the rest of this.

00:01:23.000 But that did not happen yesterday.

00:01:25.000 And I gotta say, I think that these distractions are really not great for the Trump administration.

00:01:30.000 They're really not.

00:01:31.000 The Trump administration has very serious work.

00:01:33.000 I keep saying this because it's important.

00:01:35.000 I want the Trump administration to be highly successful and there are important things to do.

00:01:39.000 We need to rebuild the American military.

00:01:41.000 We need to rebuild the American economy and unleash its dynamism.

00:01:45.000 We need to get our debt under control.

00:01:48.000 We need to cleanse DEI from all aspects of the federal government.

00:01:51.000 We need to reshape America's foreign policy around rising threats like China.

00:01:56.000 There's tons to do and not a lot of time to do it.

00:01:59.000 And so these sorts of shiny object distractions that don't materialize into anything, I think that they are a problem.

00:02:04.000 And I think that, again, they lend credence to the opponents of the Trump administration, which I don't want to happen.

00:02:10.000 Well, yesterday was kind of a bleep show, frankly, when it came to the Epstein file.

00:02:16.000 It is now Friday.

00:02:17.000 On Wednesday, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General of the United States, had announced that she would be releasing some new Epstein files, that there would be new files showing names that we hadn't seen before, materials that we hadn't seen before.

00:02:29.000 Here she was explaining.

00:02:31.000 You said last week that you have the Epstein files on your desk.

00:02:35.000 When can we see them and what's taking so long to release them?

00:02:39.000 I do.

00:02:40.000 Jesse, there are well over, this will make you sick, 200 victims.

00:02:46.000 200. So we have well over over 250, actually.

00:02:51.000 So we have to make sure that their identity is protected and their personal information.

00:02:58.000 But other than that, I think tomorrow, you know, the personal information of victims.

00:03:02.000 Other than that, I think tomorrow, Jesse, breaking news right now, you're going to see some Epstein information being released by my office.

00:03:11.000 OK, so in that clip, she says there will be new Epstein information released.

00:03:15.000 Buy her office tomorrow, and she says it's on my desk.

00:03:18.000 That's what the Attorney General of the United States says.

00:03:21.000 So, everybody all day long is waiting for the release of this information, like literally all day long.

00:03:26.000 And then, sometime yesterday morning, pictures start being released of a bunch of social media influencers who are holding up binders that supposedly contain new Epstein information.

00:03:37.000 And these social media influencers, many of these people are people with whom I'm friendly.

00:03:40.000 People like Liz Wheeler, who's just great.

00:03:42.000 I think Liz is terrific.

00:03:44.000 It was handed to Libs of TikTok and Jack Posobiec and a bunch of other people, right?

00:03:49.000 It was a big binder.

00:03:50.000 It said the Epstein files, phase one.

00:03:52.000 And people were holding them up kind of like trophies, which, you know, frankly, I think is sort of a bad look.

00:03:57.000 When you are talking about the release of criminally oriented documents about the abuse of minors, I don't think it's an amazing look to walk out holding this up as though you just won an Olympic medal.

00:04:09.000 But in any case, we then were like, okay, fine.

00:04:12.000 It's an odd way to release it, but can we see what's in it?

00:04:15.000 And then it turns out over the course of the day that the answer was there was basically nothing in it.

00:04:20.000 The binder was filled with stuff that we already knew.

00:04:23.000 And there's effectively nothing new in the binders.

00:04:27.000 And this became clear pretty quickly, actually.

00:04:31.000 So Anna Paulina Luna, who's leading up a task force in Congress to review the Epstein documents, put out a tweet at 210 yesterday, quote, I nor the task force were given or reviewed the Epstein documents being released today.

00:04:43.000 A New York Post story just revealed that the documents will simply be Epstein's phone book.

00:04:46.000 This is not what we or the American people asked for.

00:04:48.000 Get us the information we asked for instead of leaking old info to the press.

00:04:53.000 Okay, so nothing new here.

00:04:56.000 And so then the question became, well, what a bleep show.

00:04:58.000 I mean, you said there was going to be sort of a big reveal.

00:05:00.000 We're going to get some new information.

00:05:01.000 By the way, this is the second time this has happened.

00:05:02.000 We were told that the JFK files were going to be released and that was going to explode everything.

00:05:05.000 And that never happened because guess what, guys?

00:05:07.000 We kind of know all there is to know about the JFK assassination.

00:05:10.000 It's been more than half a century.

00:05:12.000 There have been many, many, many reports on it and lots of documents revealed.

00:05:16.000 This kind of conspiratorial angle that the right seems to have fallen in love with, that unanswered questions must be answered in the most perverse possible way.

00:05:27.000 And if the evidence isn't there, then we just keep saying that there is a lack of evidence, and lack of evidence is actually proof of evidence.

00:05:32.000 Again, I'm willing to follow this evidence wherever it leads.

00:05:34.000 I want the answers the same as you.

00:05:36.000 And unlike the JFK assassination, where, by the way, it was Lee Harvey Oswald, unlike the JFK assassination, where there's a plethora of video, forensic, and documentary evidence available, in the Epstein case, we really don't know what the hell happened.

00:05:48.000 We still don't know any of the key questions.

00:05:50.000 Who was running him if he was an op?

00:05:53.000 What exactly he was doing?

00:05:54.000 Who were the people on the island?

00:05:55.000 What kind of tapes he had?

00:05:56.000 All those are unanswered.

00:05:57.000 So I understand why there is so much dyspepsia over the Epstein case.

00:06:01.000 But if you're going to do a reveal, that means you better have some goods, right?

00:06:05.000 Something better come out.

00:06:06.000 And it didn't come out yesterday, and I think people are right to be angry about it.

00:06:09.000 I think that it is bizarre to release it to social media influencers as opposed to releasing it to many journalists.

00:06:16.000 I'm not talking about journalists on the left.

00:06:17.000 I'm talking about journalists on the right.

00:06:19.000 I mean, though the Washington Free Beacon has a bunch of excellent investigative journalists, we at The Daily Wire have investigative journalists.

00:06:24.000 We have, like, people who we hire, who we pay to actually go through documents at a legal granular level to do this sort of stuff.

00:06:31.000 Or you could just release all of it online and have us all peruse it.

00:06:34.000 I mean, that would be the best way to do this, is so that we could all see it.

00:06:36.000 The kind of release strategy was weird.

00:06:39.000 And then when it turned out there was nothing in it, then the repercussions began.

00:06:43.000 So, the repercussions began with a letter from Attorney General Pambandi to Kash Patel over at the FBI. And now Pambandi is claiming that Kash Patel is essentially having the wool pulled over his eyes by underlings who may be getting rid of documents.

00:06:59.000 Again.

00:07:00.000 I'd love to see the evidence of this.

00:07:01.000 If that's true, that's a criminal offense.

00:07:02.000 I mean, destroying relevant criminal documents would be a criminal offense and people should go to jail for it.

00:07:07.000 So if we're going to make those sorts of allegations, you shouldn't just throw them out there.

00:07:10.000 She wrote a letter saying, quote, Dear Director Patel, before you came into office, I requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

00:07:16.000 In response to this request, I received approximately 200 pages of documents, which consisted primarily of flight logs, Epstein's list of contacts, and a list of victims' names and phone numbers.

00:07:23.000 I repeatedly questioned whether this was the full set of documents responsive to my request and was repeatedly assured by the FBI. We had received the full set of documents.

00:07:30.000 Late yesterday, I learned from a source the FBI field office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein.

00:07:37.000 Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files.

00:07:41.000 When you and I spoke yesterday, you were just as surprised as I was to learn this new information.

00:07:44.000 So this is her saying, someone, someone out there in FBI land is covering things up.

00:07:48.000 It's not your fault, Cash, and it's not my fault, A.G. Pambondi.

00:07:51.000 It is the fault of these unspecified members of the New York office of the FBI who are destroying documents or hiding things, which again, criminal offense.

00:07:59.000 People should go to jail if that is true.

00:08:01.000 Quote, This is her kind of blaming Kash Patel, but letting him off the hook.

00:08:19.000 The DOJ will ensure that any public disclosures of these files will be done in a manner to protect the privacy of victims and in accordance with law as I have done my entire career as a prosecutor.

00:08:27.000 I am also directing you to conduct an immediate investigation into why my order to the FBI was not followed.

00:08:31.000 You will deliver to me a comprehensive report of your findings and proposed personnel action within 14 days.

00:08:35.000 I appreciate your immediate attention to this important matter.

00:08:38.000 I know we are both committed to transparency for the American people.

00:08:40.000 I look forward to continuing to work with you to serve our president and our country.

00:08:43.000 Okay, so first of all, her issuing that letter publicly is a way of shifting blame.

00:08:47.000 I mean, there are a couple ways of reading it.

00:08:48.000 One, This is totally true, that actually there's somebody in the FBI offices who is scurrilously hiding away thousands of pages of documents that we have never seen and shredding them in the backroom.

00:08:57.000 Okay, again, if that's the case, that should not just be a matter of the records show up at the offices of the DOJ. That should be a matter of people who are doing that thing should not only be fired, be prosecuted.

00:09:07.000 Okay, so that's a very serious allegation.

00:09:10.000 Or the other way you can read this is, this is pretty humiliating, that Pam Bondi thought that she had new stuff.

00:09:15.000 Nobody in her office bothered to check whether it was new stuff.

00:09:18.000 They released it to a bunch of social media influencers in order to get clicks, and then it turned out there was nothing in the files.

00:09:24.000 Those are the possibilities.

00:09:26.000 So Liz Wheeler, who again is excellent, loved Liz as a human being, she put out a statement, quote, President Trump and A.G. Pambani committed to releasing the Epstein files.

00:09:35.000 The FBI was told to deliver the files to Bambani.

00:09:37.000 They did, about 200 pages.

00:09:39.000 Bambani smelled a rat because there was nothing juicy in the 200 pages, just flight logs and Rolodex and phone numbers.

00:09:43.000 No smoking gun.

00:09:45.000 Still, Bondi promised to release the documents, so she prepared a binder of them.

00:09:49.000 Then, last night, a whistleblower contacted Bondi and revealed the SDNY was hiding potentially thousands of Epstein files to find Bondi's order to give them all to her.

00:09:56.000 We're talking recordings, evidence, etc., the juicy stuff named.

00:09:59.000 These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Cash, and you.

00:10:02.000 Be outraged that the binder is boring.

00:10:03.000 You should be because the evil deep state lied to your face.

00:10:06.000 The binder is powerful because it's tangible physical evidence of the disgusting stunt the SDNY tried to pull.

00:10:10.000 Okay, the binder is not powerful.

00:10:11.000 The binder is empty.

00:10:12.000 It is.

00:10:13.000 And if Pam Bondi wanted to say this, she could have just said this without the reveal of the binder.

00:10:18.000 Again, this looks like a low-level bureaucratic screw-up, and now people who are backfilling the story.

00:10:21.000 I'm just going to give you the honest story.

00:10:23.000 That's what it appears to be.

00:10:24.000 I wish I didn't have to say that.

00:10:25.000 But again, the American people deserve answers to these questions, not either obfuscation or silliness.

00:10:32.000 And if it turns out, by the way, that there are no thousands of pages of documents, and then they're not revealed because they don't exist, then this, of course, is only going to feed the fire of, well, you know.

00:10:41.000 Absence of evidence is actually evidence.

00:10:44.000 If it's not there, it must be because it once was there and we never got it.

00:10:48.000 You want to feed conspiracy theorists?

00:10:49.000 This is the way to do it.

00:10:51.000 Again, I want full release of everything forthwith.

00:10:54.000 And the Trump administration is in charge, both the FBI and now the AG's office.

00:11:00.000 So there are no excuses left.

00:11:02.000 Either reveal it all or say it has already been revealed or prosecute the people who actually got rid of the documents.

00:11:09.000 Those are your three choices.

00:11:10.000 There are no other choices.

00:11:11.000 Don't blame everybody else.

00:11:13.000 Like, do the thing.

00:11:14.000 Give us the stuff.

00:11:15.000 And if the stuff ain't there, tell us that the stuff ain't there and tell us why the stuff ain't there.

00:11:19.000 Well, listen, we deserve to see the Epstein documents obviously, obviously.

00:11:24.000 And we also deserve our freedom.

00:11:26.000 Because this country was founded on freedom.

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00:13:29.000 So, again.

00:13:32.000 Why am I upset about this?

00:13:33.000 I'm upset about this because, number one, we deserve answers to the Epstein questions.

00:13:36.000 The whole case is insane and ridiculous, and the fact that we don't have answers at this point in time is just disgusting.

00:13:43.000 Two, I'm annoyed because if the Trump administration is going to make a big deal out of this sort of stuff, you have to be professional about how you do it.

00:13:50.000 These are serious issues.

00:13:50.000 And by the way, this also applies to the House Judiciary Committee.

00:13:53.000 And again, I love the people on the House Judiciary Committee.

00:13:55.000 I'm friends with many of them.

00:13:56.000 You don't do what you did yesterday.

00:13:58.000 Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee.

00:13:59.000 Put out a link and they said, this is the link to the new FBI files.

00:14:03.000 And then it was a rickroll.

00:14:04.000 I'm sorry, it's not a joke.

00:14:06.000 The mass of underage girls and trafficking of underage girls to prominent men.

00:14:10.000 That is not a subject for jocularity.

00:14:14.000 Take it seriously.

00:14:16.000 I mean this across the board.

00:14:18.000 Seriousness of purpose is going to mean seriousness of result.

00:14:22.000 And if it's unserious, then all you're going to end up doing is distracting people with shiny objects over here.

00:14:27.000 Not getting the job you need to get done over here with the other hand.

00:14:31.000 And that's just not what you're looking for here.

00:14:33.000 It's not what you're looking for.

00:14:35.000 The level of distraction has to come down.

00:14:37.000 It does.

00:14:38.000 Because there are serious things to be done.

00:14:39.000 Trump has appointed an amazing cabinet.

00:14:41.000 His cabinet is filled with stars.

00:14:44.000 He's got a big agenda.

00:14:46.000 Things to do.

00:14:46.000 A short time to do them.

00:14:49.000 These sorts of distractions either put up or shut up.

00:14:53.000 We're now joined on the line by journalist and TV host Emily Austin.

00:14:55.000 She left the White House yesterday.

00:14:57.000 With, again, that binder of the Epstein files.

00:14:59.000 I want to get the inside story on how that went down.

00:15:01.000 Emily, thanks so much for joining the show.

00:15:02.000 So why don't you tell us what happened yesterday?

00:15:04.000 Obviously, a lot of controversy online about the release of the Epstein binders, which didn't really contain much that was new, apparently.

00:15:11.000 Why don't you tell us what actually went down at the White House?

00:15:14.000 Right.

00:15:14.000 So, initially, we were invited to the White House, a delegation of, you know, Republican, conservative media, independent journalists, influencers, whatever you want to call it, to meet with Vice President J.D. Vance.

00:15:25.000 And then, to our surprise, Kash Patel joined, and then Pam Bondi came, and it was a really nice, you know, environment, and we were being briefed on policies that they implemented, etc.

00:15:33.000 Now, coincidentally, that morning was the morning that Pam Bondi received the exact binder we received on her desk.

00:15:39.000 In which we didn't open it in the briefing, but later on, like everyone else, we find out that, like you just said, there's not much new information about here.

00:15:47.000 But the point of the binder that everyone seemed to be missing was that this is what the FBI gave Pam Bondi and expected us to be satisfied with these files rather than being outraged that they're withholding thousands of documents and being outraged at us for being the messengers trying to show you this is what The Attorney General received.

00:16:06.000 This is what we received.

00:16:07.000 It's a step in the right direction, but all the outrage towards the media personalities that were there rather than the FBI corrupt agents that are holding this information is just kind of ironic, and it's just dividing the party for no reason.

00:16:21.000 I mean, one of the things that is kind of sort of bizarre about the whole situation is it sounds like there was not an actual plan to simply handle the social media influencers, these binders, but the binders were there and then they were handed to you guys.

00:16:31.000 It sounds like it was kind of sprung on a lot of the social media influencers.

00:16:34.000 You had no intention of going there and being the kind of source of revelations about the Epstein documents when you went there.

00:16:39.000 Yeah, it definitely wasn't planned.

00:16:42.000 It wasn't our intention to.

00:16:43.000 Whoever didn't want to post it or publish it necessarily didn't have to.

00:16:47.000 They definitely did not have to.

00:16:50.000 One thing I definitely want to debunk is that there's this narrative going around that we were like paid or instructed to leak it or we were encouraged to do.

00:16:58.000 Literally, nobody was encouraged to do anything.

00:17:00.000 Obviously, we're independent journalists.

00:17:02.000 If there's something in there to leak, of course we want to leak it.

00:17:05.000 And one thing that people are forgetting is Trump did make a promise that he was going to enable the independent journalists and not only rely on traditional media.

00:17:13.000 One thing that was mentioned yesterday was that they want to start getting, you know, more conservative, independent journalist resources in the press room.

00:17:19.000 They want Breitbart to be able to have access.

00:17:21.000 They want more than just Fox News and CNN and CNBC to be able to have access.

00:17:25.000 But then it seems like when they give access to the independent journalists, like everyone's mad about it. - So let's talk for a second about the sort of action that happened after that.

00:17:36.000 So the binders are given to you guys.

00:17:38.000 Some people walk out.

00:17:39.000 They're sort of holding them up triumphantly, which, again, I'm not sure it's an amazing optic, but that happens.

00:17:43.000 And then the revelation comes out that the binders themselves don't contain much new information.

00:17:48.000 And right after that, Pam Bondi then releases a letter publicly calling on Kash Patel to investigate SDNY for not releasing the documents.

00:17:55.000 I mean, I guess my question is, why didn't you just release that letter in the first place?

00:17:59.000 Why the whole sort of rigmarole with the binders as opposed to just say publicly, we found out from an informant inside SDNY that things are being destroyed.

00:18:09.000 Kash, go investigate it and go do this.

00:18:11.000 I'm not sure what the point of the binders was.

00:18:13.000 I think my take on it was that they wanted outrage.

00:18:16.000 I don't think they wanted it directed at us, but they wanted it more so.

00:18:20.000 We requested the Epstein files.

00:18:21.000 They gave us a bunch of baloney and a binder.

00:18:23.000 They expect us to be satisfied with it.

00:18:25.000 So everyone should be very unsatisfied with it.

00:18:27.000 And now it's Kash Patel's job to get the remaining files.

00:18:30.000 And it wouldn't have happened, by the way, that letter, until the whistleblower from SDNY came out and said, hey, we're actually sleeping on a bunch of files here in the New York Bureau.

00:18:37.000 You know, you should get on it.

00:18:38.000 If that hadn't happened, I don't know where we'd be today.

00:18:41.000 Why the whole...

00:18:43.000 I think it was a publicity stunt where it's saying, hey, look, this is what we got.

00:18:47.000 We don't buy it.

00:18:48.000 We're going to investigate it.

00:18:49.000 And regarding the whole leaving the West Wing with the binders up in the air, I'm going to be very blunt about this.

00:18:55.000 They were not supposed to do that.

00:18:57.000 We were instructed when we got the binders that they want Pam Bondi to have the first say in it, and then we can be the first ones to have the access on it.

00:19:05.000 There were a bunch of reporters outside of the West Wing waiting for the UK's Prime Minister to come.

00:19:09.000 They lifted their binders.

00:19:10.000 We were on a, I call it an embargo for three hours.

00:19:12.000 They said, don't blow till 3.30.

00:19:14.000 I honored that.

00:19:15.000 A few others honored that.

00:19:16.000 A few others clearly did not.

00:19:17.000 And they kind of ruined it for the whole team and actually made it a lot worse than what it was.

00:19:23.000 Well, Emily, really appreciate you coming on and clarifying what happened.

00:19:26.000 Thanks so much for your time.

00:19:27.000 Thank you.

00:19:28.000 Well, speaking of distractions that people don't need.

00:19:31.000 Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan arrived in the United States yesterday.

00:19:34.000 They, of course, are American citizens.

00:19:36.000 They're dual citizens, or in the case of Andrew Tate, I believe he has seven citizenships.

00:19:40.000 And he showed up in the United States.

00:19:42.000 The reporting was the Trump administration had put significant pressure on the Romanian government to allow them out of their house arrest in Romania so they could come to the United States.

00:19:51.000 As I said yesterday on the show, I don't know the legalities here.

00:19:54.000 I don't know whether it is in the interest of Romania to do that.

00:19:56.000 I don't know whether it was American pressure that actually secured their release.

00:19:59.000 All I can say is anyone who is celebrating their arrival in America has a screw loose because these are some of the worst people in the world.

00:20:05.000 They are not good people by their own admission, just by their own stated comments.

00:20:09.000 These are not people you would want to have anywhere near your wives, daughters, or families, unless you're an insane person.

00:20:15.000 Well, President Trump was, in fact, asked about the arrival of the Tates and all of the talk about how the Trump administration had pressured for their release.

00:20:22.000 And here was President Trump yesterday saying, no, I don't know anything about this and don't want any part of it.

00:20:26.000 So good for President Trump.

00:20:28.000 Andrew and Tristan Tate landed in Florida today on a private jet after being released from custody in Romania.

00:20:36.000 They are accused of human traffickers, not thought of as good people in many circles.

00:20:44.000 Did your administration pressure the Romanian government to release them?

00:20:49.000 I know nothing about that.

00:20:52.000 I don't know.

00:20:52.000 You're saying he's on a plane right now?

00:20:54.000 Yeah, I just know nothing about it.

00:20:57.000 We'll check it out.

00:20:58.000 We'll let you know.

00:21:01.000 So, again, I think President Trump saying I have no interest in this particular topic is the right approach.

00:21:06.000 And anybody in his administration who decided to make this top priority, I'm confused why that was a top priority at all.

00:21:12.000 Unless you have evidence that they were being mistreated in some deep and abiding way by the Romanian justice system as well as the British justice.

00:21:21.000 Well, we have no involvement in that.

00:21:30.000 I read about it through the media.

00:21:32.000 Clearly, the federal government has jurisdiction whether they want to rebuff his entry into the United States.

00:21:38.000 And I have confidence that whether it's Pam Bondi or Kristi Noong, that they will be looking at that.

00:21:42.000 I do know our attorney general, James Uthmeyer, is looking at what state hooks.

00:21:48.000 And jurisdiction, we may have to be able to deal with this.

00:21:53.000 But the reality is, no, Florida is not a place where you're welcome with that type of conduct in the air.

00:22:02.000 I don't know how it came to this.

00:22:04.000 We were not involved.

00:22:06.000 We were not notified.

00:22:06.000 I found out through the media that this was something that was happening.

00:22:10.000 Again, this is a pretty large split that's now emerging inside the right wing of the party between people.

00:22:16.000 Who really don't want anything to do with, you know, self-professed pornographers, self-described misogynists, people who are Muslim converts who proclaim that Islam should actually dominate the UK, who stand for Yahya Sinwar and Hamas.

00:22:30.000 For some reason, there is a part of the party that seems warm toward this stuff simply because it's oppositional in some way to left-wing agenda items.

00:22:38.000 Although, again, the solutions seem to foment, actually, a lot of left-wing agenda items such as, for example, sexual promiscuity.

00:22:45.000 And then there's part of the party which is like, nope, not interested in any part of this.

00:22:48.000 And it seems as though President Trump actually is on the same page here as Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.

00:22:52.000 And obviously, you can hear Governor DeSantis saying, listen, we're going to look at the legal authorities.

00:22:56.000 If there's prosecutions that need to be brought in the state of Florida, we will look at them.

00:23:00.000 But as far as whether the state of Florida is excited to have them here, the answer is absolutely not.

00:23:05.000 That is the proper response to this.

00:23:07.000 Well, it's good to know that there are some good people in our government because there are also bad people in our government at the IRS, and they are after you.

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00:25:15.000 That is the proper human response to this on the part of the right.

00:25:19.000 Good for Trump.

00:25:20.000 Good for DeSantis.

00:25:20.000 Again, these are not distractions that are necessary in a time where actual heavy work has to get done.

00:25:26.000 Speaking of which, Today, Vladimir Zelensky is heading to the White House to sign an agreement handing over rare mineral rights to the United States.

00:25:36.000 President Trump is very excited to secure that deal.

00:25:39.000 Yesterday, he hosted Keir Starmer, the left-wing prime minister of the UK. And President Trump, again, he's great with people and he's very friendly with humans.

00:25:48.000 And so here he was with Keir Starmer praising his accent, which is a pretty classic Trump right here.

00:25:53.000 We look forward to welcoming you in the United Kingdom.

00:25:56.000 Thank you once again.

00:25:57.000 Thank you very much.

00:25:58.000 What a beautiful accent.

00:26:01.000 I would have been president 20 years ago if I had that accent.

00:26:04.000 Okay, Kier Starmer's job was to sort of warm President Trump up to the idea that the United States would help to provide security guarantees in Ukraine.

00:26:18.000 It turns out that the best way to warm President Trump up to security guarantees in Ukraine actually is to sign economic deals with President Trump.

00:26:25.000 That seems to be one of President Trump's key levers is that if you are willing to allow the United States to make money, then obviously we have more interest in helping to defend you, which seems perfectly rational.

00:26:37.000 Kier Starmer pushed the idea at this joint press conference that any peace in Ukraine has to be directed at being a lasting peace.

00:26:43.000 You don't want something temporary, which would seem to be obvious.

00:26:45.000 I think my views on Putin are pretty well rehearsed.

00:26:49.000 Rehearsed and pretty well known.

00:26:52.000 And my concern is that if there's a deal, and I hope there is a deal, that it must be a lasting deal, that it's not a temporary measure.

00:27:00.000 And that is why I think it's really important that Putin knows that this deal, a historic deal, which I very much hope comes about, is there and it's a lasting deal and that we're able to deal with.

00:27:17.000 Any inclination he has to go again or go further.

00:27:21.000 And again, by the way, Trump is sitting here nodding, and President Trump then reiterates that idea.

00:27:25.000 He's like, yeah, the whole point of a deal is that the deal holds.

00:27:27.000 You don't want a deal where we sign an agreement between Ukraine and Russia, including the EU, and two weeks from now, Russia's invading again.

00:27:34.000 That's not something anybody wants.

00:27:37.000 It sounds as though one of you completely trusts President Putin, and one of you doesn't trust him an inch.

00:27:43.000 Have I got that right?

00:27:44.000 And why do you trust it?

00:27:45.000 No, look, you know, it's trust and verify.

00:27:48.000 Let's call it that.

00:27:49.000 And I think we both can be that way.

00:27:51.000 You have to verify, because you never know what's going to happen.

00:27:53.000 I know a lot of people that you would say, no chance that they would ever deceive you.

00:27:59.000 And they're the worst people in the world.

00:28:01.000 I know others that you would guarantee they would deceive you.

00:28:04.000 And you know what?

00:28:05.000 They're 100% honorable, so you never know what you're getting.

00:28:09.000 No, I have confidence that if we make a deal, it's going to hold.

00:28:14.000 Now, one of the things that was hilarious is that in this press conference, Trump was asked in front of Starmer about his comments last week that Zelensky was a dictator.

00:28:22.000 I just want to point out here that all the people on the right who felt the necessity to go out of their way to defend those comments were making a rather large tactical error.

00:28:31.000 Again, President Trump says many things off the cuff.

00:28:33.000 I've said this for literally a decade about President Trump, is that on his tombstone, after 120 years, President Trump's tombstone is going to read 45th and 47th presidents of the United States.

00:28:43.000 He said a lot of bleep.

00:28:44.000 A lot of the stuff that President Trump says is meant for effect.

00:28:48.000 Some of it is meant as bargaining position.

00:28:50.000 Some of it just blurts.

00:28:51.000 So the entire Republican Party infrastructure shaped itself around him calling Vladimir Zelensky a dictator when Vladimir Zelensky is actually not a dictator.

00:28:59.000 He's the elected leader of Ukraine.

00:29:00.000 He can't hold another election in the middle of a massive war in which millions of your citizens are now living abroad, hundreds of thousands of your young men are on the front lines, and hundreds, thousands of more Ukrainians are living in Russian-occupied areas in Donbass and Crimea.

00:29:14.000 The Constitution does not actually allow it.

00:29:16.000 That is a unified governmental position and non-governmental position in Ukraine, by the way.

00:29:20.000 The opposition parties, who don't even like Zelensky, say he's not a dictator.

00:29:24.000 And it was totally fine to say that even last week.

00:29:26.000 Even after Trump had said that he was a dictator, it was totally fine to say that's not actually true.

00:29:30.000 It didn't undermine Trump.

00:29:31.000 It didn't undermine any peace efforts.

00:29:33.000 And yet you saw an enormous number of people on the right who started kind of shaping their opinions to meet what was an off-the-cuff comment by President Trump.

00:29:40.000 How do I know it was off-the-cuff?

00:29:41.000 Because yesterday he said so.

00:29:43.000 So in this press conference, he's asked, what about this whole Zelensky's a dictator thing?

00:29:47.000 And Trump's like, me?

00:29:49.000 Was it?

00:29:49.000 Really?

00:29:50.000 Here we go.

00:29:53.000 Did I say that?

00:30:00.000 I can't believe I said that.

00:30:01.000 Next question.

00:30:05.000 And he's kind of like giving a little smirk there.

00:30:07.000 He knows he said it, but he's like, you know, what are you going to do about it?

00:30:10.000 So herein lies the point for people who are in my position.

00:30:14.000 You don't always just have to mirror the thing that President Trump is saying to understand what he is attempting to do.

00:30:20.000 You don't have to buy into the idea that Ukraine, quote unquote, started the war in order to suggest that the proper solution to the war is an off-ramp that everybody agrees has to happen, in which Russia basically maintains control of Donbass and Crimea.

00:30:33.000 Security guarantees are given to Ukraine, and economic redevelopment happens in Ukraine that the United States makes money off of.

00:30:40.000 All of that is fine and dandy, and you don't have to repeat sillinesses that are untrue in order to achieve any of that.

00:30:47.000 Well, yesterday during this Keir Starmer meeting, there was also a rather amusing moment where President Trump called on J.D. Vance to basically just shellac Keir Starmer over speech restrictions in the UK.

00:30:59.000 And this is like, when you call J.D. on this stuff, it's like J.D. from the top rope.

00:31:04.000 Here we go.

00:31:04.000 I said what I said, which is that We do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the U.K. and also with some of our European allies.

00:31:13.000 But we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British, of course, what the British do in their own country is up to them, but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.

00:31:27.000 And so that is something that we'll talk about today at lunch.

00:31:29.000 Again, you can see how much J.D. is enjoying that sort of stuff.

00:31:35.000 And Trump has been using the vice president in this way.

00:31:38.000 He'll be in press conferences and be like, J.D., say something mean.

00:31:41.000 And J.D. will be like, okay, man, it's go time.

00:31:43.000 And then he'll just go for it.

00:31:44.000 And I will say it is a pretty effective use of the Vice President of the United States.

00:31:49.000 Speaking of which, I would be remiss if I did not comment on the Vice President that we narrowly avoided.

00:31:52.000 So Tim Walz is still out there being a giant, inflatable, and a used car lot weirdo with his strange hands and odd motions and all the rest of it.

00:32:02.000 It is still amazing to me that Kamala Harris decided this, of all the humans on Earth, had to be her VP pick.

00:32:07.000 Just incredible.

00:32:08.000 So, he was on a show yesterday, and he suggested that the country has now been stolen by fascists and Nazis.

00:32:14.000 Now, this is someone who loves America.

00:32:18.000 You see the nonsense that's being put forward on that.

00:32:21.000 We're going to need your voice there, because I would just end with this.

00:32:25.000 And we're seeing it in these town halls.

00:32:27.000 That charismatic leader's not going to come there.

00:32:29.000 You know, I see the pundits on TV.

00:32:32.000 What's wrong with the Democratic Party?

00:32:34.000 What's wrong is our country's being stole by fascists and Nazis, and we're trying to do all we can to try and do it.

00:32:40.000 Okay, keep going with this.

00:32:44.000 Seriously, that guy almost was vice president of the United States.

00:32:47.000 He was like this close.

00:32:48.000 America really dodged a bullet, not just literally as in President Trump dodged a bullet, but really dodged a bullet here in not having these clowns at the top of the American political hierarchy.

00:32:59.000 Seriously.

00:33:01.000 Amazing.

00:33:01.000 Really, truly, good job, America.

00:33:03.000 Good job, because we almost had that thing.

00:33:06.000 We almost had it.

00:33:08.000 All right, folks, coming up is a very stacked show today.

00:33:10.000 Vivek Ramaswamy is going to be stopping by.

00:33:11.000 He, of course, has announced his run for Ohio governor.

00:33:14.000 Also, we are going to do our full review of the Oscars, which are happening on Sunday.

00:33:18.000 I know you didn't watch the movies, but sadly for me, I did.

00:33:21.000 But first, it all goes down.

00:33:23.000 Tuesday night, 9 p.m.

00:33:24.000 Eastern, President Trump addresses Congress, laying out his America First agenda on immigration, the economy, and national security.

00:33:29.000 You already know we're going all in.

00:33:30.000 Kick things off with Backstage Live, 8.30 p.m.

00:33:33.000 Eastern Time, where the entire crew breaks down what's at stake and sets the stage for President Trump's speech.

00:33:37.000 Then we watch the full speech together, live on Daily Wire Plus.

00:33:39.000 No spin, no nonsense.

00:33:40.000 And when Trump is done, we're just getting started.

00:33:42.000 The gang is back for real, unfiltered analysis you're not going to get anywhere else.

00:33:45.000 This is history in the making.

00:33:46.000 Do not sit on the sidelines.

00:33:48.000 Watch it all live Tuesday night on Daily Wire Plus.

00:33:51.000 Subscribe now at dailywire.com.

00:33:52.000 Well, earlier today I had the opportunity to sit down with Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:33:55.000 Vivek, of course, friend of the show, ran for president last time around, was part of Doge briefly, and now he's declared his running for the Ohio governorship.

00:34:03.000 We had a chance to sit down together.

00:34:04.000 Here's what it sounded like.

00:34:05.000 Well, joining me on the line is Vivek Ramaswamy, who has now declared his run for the governorship of Ohio.

00:34:12.000 Vivek, welcome to the show.

00:34:13.000 It's good to see you, Ben.

00:34:14.000 So, let's talk about why you decided to run for governor of Ohio.

00:34:18.000 There's a lot of things you...

00:34:19.000 Could have done.

00:34:20.000 You decide that you want to remain in the sort of public service area and you want to run for governor of Ohio right now.

00:34:24.000 You are prohibitively ahead of the rest of the field in the polling of the endorsement of President Trump, Elon Musk as well.

00:34:29.000 What made you want to do this?

00:34:31.000 Yeah, look, I looked at my impact on the future of the country.

00:34:34.000 I had run for U.S. president.

00:34:35.000 One of the things I reflected on, Ben, is many of the issues that I discussed, even on my presidential campaign, have to now be addressed by the states, by strong governors.

00:34:45.000 Then you look at what President Trump is doing in Washington, D.C. I think he's going to be very successful in the next two years.

00:34:51.000 But that means a lot of those programs, from education to healthcare, are going to be shifted down to the states and to the people where they belong.

00:35:00.000 So if you skate to where the puck is going in terms of driving a real change in the country, I think the center of gravity in politics is going to move to the states.

00:35:09.000 Saving the country is going to belong to the states after President Trump has done his part.

00:35:14.000 And then for me, there was the broader question of just staying in public service and public life.

00:35:17.000 There's obviously, in many ways, you could wake up many days and say there's better ways to live than that.

00:35:22.000 I came from the business world and we live a blessed, comfortable life.

00:35:25.000 But my reason for remaining in this is that, first of all, I believe in excellence.

00:35:29.000 I want my home state.

00:35:31.000 I was born and raised here.

00:35:32.000 I'm raising my two sons here.

00:35:34.000 I want my state not just to be one of the best in the Midwest, but the best in the country.

00:35:39.000 And there are just so many basic fixes that you could bring to a state like Ohio.

00:35:43.000 They're just really basic that would accomplish that, that I felt a sense of duty to do it right here at home.

00:35:50.000 And you and I, we both live the American dream.

00:35:52.000 My wife's lived the American dream.

00:35:54.000 We want our kids to live that same American dream.

00:35:56.000 And we're pretty passionate about having an impact.

00:35:59.000 And we're grateful for what the country and the state have given us.

00:36:02.000 And so in some sense, this is just our way of giving back.

00:36:05.000 The state of Ohio has been moving significantly to the right over the course of the last several election cycles.

00:36:09.000 I'm old enough to remember when it was a bellwether state.

00:36:11.000 Now it is a fairly solidly red state.

00:36:13.000 What are some of the biggest problems that are facing the state of Ohio that you'd want to cure and focus in on as governor of the state?

00:36:20.000 Yes, it's not California.

00:36:21.000 It doesn't require a U-turn.

00:36:22.000 But I would say it is a conservative state, you're right, in its electorate.

00:36:26.000 It's time for the state to actually be governed like a conservative state.

00:36:30.000 And there I see room for progress and actually stepping on the gas.

00:36:34.000 Thinking about the basic table stakes on economic policies, you got to be a zero tax state.

00:36:38.000 Find a path to become a zero tax state.

00:36:41.000 There's eight other states that have done it.

00:36:42.000 There's no reason we can't do it right here in Ohio.

00:36:45.000 Bring down the property tax burden.

00:36:46.000 You know, I think with my own instincts in the long run, I'd love to see that get to zero, but at least bring it down to a reasonable place.

00:36:53.000 Slash and burn the regulatory state.

00:36:55.000 In some ways, I want to see Ohio become a special economic zone for the rest of the country at the heart of the Midwest.

00:37:01.000 For really any entrepreneur, for industrialization, for production, the natural gas timelines, for building a new pipeline in this state, we've got great natural resources underneath our ground.

00:37:12.000 Drill Baby Drill belongs in Ohio, and not a lot of people are actually even aware of the natural resources we have.

00:37:17.000 And yet it takes 18 to 36 months to get a new permit when that should be six months or less.

00:37:22.000 And so the sum total of that is when you look at other states across the country.

00:37:26.000 Texas and Florida are number one and number two.

00:37:29.000 When it comes to people moving into the state versus out, Ohio's number 38 today.

00:37:33.000 And I see an opportunity over the next eight, ten years for Ohio to find its way actually to number one on that list.

00:37:40.000 And that might sound unrealistic today.

00:37:42.000 But if you look at the first industrial revolution, Ohio was the leading state in the country.

00:37:47.000 And I think with a strong governor, I'm motivated.

00:37:50.000 I think we can get there again.

00:37:52.000 I'd say the other distinctive part of my candidacy, and this is really what gets me going, Ben, is...

00:37:58.000 Not just making sure that we're at the forefront economically, but to be able to do something that no other state has actually done is leading in the crisis of educational achievement in America.

00:38:09.000 That's a 50 state problem right now.

00:38:12.000 Our kids aren't excelling in math and reading and writing.

00:38:15.000 Even if we talk about conservative solutions like school choice, which I'm a strong proponent of, ardently in favor of, we also have to take aim at looking at how we revitalize our public schools on their own terms.

00:38:27.000 And I just, for my part, refuse to stand by and watch idly as China laughs at our gradual decay into oblivion when 75% of 8th graders in this country aren't even proficient in math according to international standards.

00:38:40.000 In fact, there's kids in other countries where English isn't even their first language now doing better on English proficiency than our own kids here.

00:38:49.000 And just to speak some hard truths, I found that people, frankly, in both political parties.

00:38:54.000 Aren't too patient.

00:38:55.000 They don't want to hear this message because it hurts to hear.

00:38:58.000 But if you care about somebody, you tell them the truth.

00:39:00.000 And I think being a true conservative state governed according to conservative principles means targeting that educational achievement deficit.

00:39:08.000 Yes, beat the DEI. Yes, beat the woke.

00:39:10.000 I mean, I led the crusade on that, and I believe in all of that.

00:39:13.000 But there's a deeper failure here as well as it relates to just raw educational achievement on math, reading, writing, physical education.

00:39:24.000 Civic education.

00:39:25.000 And I think we as conservatives need to step up in directly tackling those deficits.

00:39:30.000 And that's one way where I hope to set the standard for the rest of the country, the Ohio standard, we could call it, for the way the rest of the states, I think, need to catch up as well.

00:39:39.000 Vic, one thing that's distinguished you from a lot of other Republicans is your focus on economic dynamism, on innovation.

00:39:44.000 That's a really important thing for the Republican Party.

00:39:46.000 It's also a really important thing for the Midwest.

00:39:48.000 There's sort of been this model that's been applied by really a lot of sort of blue governors in the Midwest.

00:39:53.000 Regulate and subsidize, regulate and subsidize.

00:39:55.000 You heavily regulate and then you subsidize all of your political friends with taxpayer dollars and somehow this is supposed to bring jobs back or spur particular friendly industries.

00:40:04.000 And what you're talking about is something different, which is take the shackles off of American industry in places like Ohio and you will get naturally an incredible level of growth.

00:40:13.000 That's exactly right.

00:40:14.000 And I say that the reason to flash and burn the regulatory state and over-bureaucratization and regulation and taxation Isn't because that's a more important objective than standing for American workers and manufacturers.

00:40:27.000 It is because it is the best way to lift up American workers and manufacturers.

00:40:31.000 And I'm keen to make sure that our Republican Party doesn't make some of the mistakes as Democrats have made in these blue states in the Midwest as well.

00:40:39.000 The right answer isn't to foster greater dependence on the government and justify that with a new victimhood culture.

00:40:46.000 The right answer is to find a path to independence from the government.

00:40:49.000 That's actually true compassion.

00:40:51.000 That's not cruelty, that's compassion.

00:40:53.000 Things like work requirements for Medicaid, for welfare, that's even in the long run been good for the people who receive it.

00:40:59.000 It's not good to be dependent on the government permanently in this handout welfare state.

00:41:04.000 That leads to depression, anxiety, fentanyl, suicide, opioid usage, as we've seen in so much of this part of the country.

00:41:11.000 And so it's really good for nobody.

00:41:13.000 And, you know, the left has made that mistake for years, and we've been good at calling that out, and we should, and we've won.

00:41:18.000 We won decisively in November.

00:41:20.000 I think for that victory to mean what it should in the long run, I think we in the Republican Party, in the conservative movement, in the pro-American movement, owe it to ourselves to stick to the principles that made America great the first time around.

00:41:34.000 And there I see President Trump doing a great job in Washington, D.C., downsizing that federal government, taking aim at the tax rates, taking aim at the type of things that have held back the American economy.

00:41:44.000 But we've got to stay true to that North Star rather than getting distracted in other...

00:41:49.000 Other directions, I would just say.

00:41:50.000 And the way I want to lead Ohio, I want to embody those same principles of excellence, of dynamism, rejection of victimhood, rejection of dependence on the government, embracing capitalism.

00:42:02.000 Yes, I don't think that's a bad word.

00:42:04.000 Capitalism and meritocracy.

00:42:05.000 Not crony capitalism, but the real thing.

00:42:08.000 I want Ohio to be the state that leads the way where freedom is our heritage, excellence is our destiny.

00:42:14.000 And we've got to remember that.

00:42:15.000 I think that's true in America.

00:42:17.000 And I think it's every bit true here, I believe, in the heart of America, right here in Ohio.

00:42:22.000 It's a state where you have 60% of the population of North America within a single day's drive of where we are right now, led the way in the 19th century, led the way in the early 20th century.

00:42:32.000 I'd like to see Ohio occupy that leadership position again with some friendly co-opetition.

00:42:37.000 Let's just say with Texas and Florida, I'd like to see Ohio be in that vanguard of states that actually shows the country what's possible.

00:42:44.000 That's Vivek Ramaswamy running for governor of Ohio.

00:42:47.000 I'm sure that he is well positioned in this primary.

00:42:49.000 Vivek, if people want to give to your campaign or help out, where should they go?

00:42:52.000 Go to vivekforohio.com.

00:42:54.000 Appreciate support across the country because it's about lifting Ohio up, but it's also about setting a standard for the rest of the country.

00:43:02.000 That's the standard we hold ourselves to, and I appreciate support from anybody, however big or however small.

00:43:07.000 It's a big movement here.

00:43:08.000 That's Vivek Ramaswamy.

00:43:09.000 Vivek, good luck in the race.

00:43:10.000 I'm sure we'll check back in.

00:43:12.000 Thank you, man.

00:43:13.000 All righty, folks.

00:43:14.000 So, of course, the Oscars are this weekend, and we're going to go through the various categories.

00:43:19.000 I'm going to handicap the Oscars for you.

00:43:21.000 I have actually seen virtually all of the best picture films at this point.

00:43:26.000 I know.

00:43:26.000 I suffer so that you don't have to.

00:43:28.000 I'm going to be joined in this journey by producer Phil, who's sort of our in-house film expert.

00:43:33.000 And actually, Phil is quite good at this.

00:43:35.000 How many of these films have you actually seen that are nominated for Best Picture, Phil?

00:43:37.000 I have not seen Wicked.

00:43:39.000 I have not seen I'm Still Here.

00:43:41.000 And I have not finished The Substance yet.

00:43:45.000 Okay, so this is good because our crossover here is not super high.

00:43:49.000 The only ones that I've actually not seen are A Complete Unknown.

00:43:52.000 I haven't seen Conclave.

00:43:53.000 I've read the book, so I figured I didn't need to see the movie.

00:43:56.000 And I haven't seen I'm Still Here.

00:43:58.000 All the others I've seen.

00:43:58.000 So this should be a good crossover.

00:44:00.000 I think the only one that neither of us have seen here is probably I'm Still Here.

00:44:04.000 So, okay.

00:44:05.000 Between the two of us, I think we can do this.

00:44:07.000 Let's try.

00:44:08.000 What's bizarre about this Oscars is how many nominations.

00:44:12.000 First of all, Emilia Perez racked up.

00:44:14.000 Emilia Perez racked up an enormous number of nominations.

00:44:16.000 13 nominations.

00:44:17.000 The Brutalist racked up 10. And Wicked racked up 10. And Emilia Perez started off, this happens now almost every year at the Oscars, where Emilia Perez was the frontrunner and then there was...

00:44:27.000 Woke blowback, and then Emilia Perez was not the frontrunner.

00:44:30.000 We've seen this so many times.

00:44:32.000 We saw this with Green Room.

00:44:33.000 We saw this with La La Land.

00:44:34.000 This sort of stuff tends to happen a lot.

00:44:36.000 What's bizarre about the anti-woke blowback on Emilia Perez is that it is the wokest, most horrible film ever, perhaps.

00:44:42.000 And yet, somehow, there's anti-woke blowback because the person who was nominated for Best Actress, a dude, had a bunch of bad old tweets that apparently mean the entire film now has to be thrown out entirely.

00:44:53.000 Now, the film should have been thrown out entirely in the first place because it sucks, but...

00:44:56.000 That blowback has now led to a sort of race for who is going to replace Emilia Perez as the frontrunner.

00:45:04.000 Right now, my understanding, Phil, is that the frontrunner is Inora.

00:45:08.000 Is that right?

00:45:09.000 Yes, it is.

00:45:11.000 Got the Palme d'Or, and it has won pretty much every single Best Picture award you can think of, except for the SAG Ensemble Award, which went to Conclave.

00:45:21.000 So I want to go through each of these, and we'll do some capsule reviews of these particular films.

00:45:26.000 So Anora, as we say, is now the frontrunner.

00:45:28.000 It's directed by Sean Baker.

00:45:29.000 Sean Baker did The Florida Project, which actually I kind of liked, and also did Red Rocket, which I did not like, and Tangerine, which I did not like.

00:45:36.000 And Sean Baker is kind of this auteur director.

00:45:40.000 Who apparently has no capacity to write because Enora is truly an awful film, like truly a very, very bad film.

00:45:46.000 The plot of the film is sex worker, meaning a prostitute, meets Russian oligarch son.

00:45:55.000 Russian oligarch son really likes this girl that he is paying to have sex with him routinely while he plays video games and marries her almost on a whim.

00:46:05.000 And then Russian family is like, this isn't happening.

00:46:08.000 Nothing happens for about an hour.

00:46:10.000 And then they kind of chase him around town.

00:46:12.000 He disappears.

00:46:13.000 They chase him around town.

00:46:14.000 Finally, they uncover him.

00:46:15.000 She realizes, as she should have from the beginning, that he's a douchebag.

00:46:19.000 And they give her a little bit of money to go away.

00:46:22.000 She takes the money to go away.

00:46:23.000 And she flirts with one of the henchmen who's been sent to separate them.

00:46:27.000 I think that's a fair summation of the plot.

00:46:30.000 Yeah, that's pretty fair.

00:46:31.000 And can you believe that, I guess, the director one time liked one Tulsi Gabbard?

00:46:36.000 Tweet, and they're trying to cancel him for that?

00:46:38.000 That's hysterical.

00:46:39.000 First of all, again, it is amazing.

00:46:40.000 These movies are terrible.

00:46:40.000 I mean, it's a truly awful film.

00:46:42.000 It offers no character development.

00:46:45.000 I think my favorite part of the film is there's a scene where Anora, who's the prostitute, is being confronted by the henchmen of the Russian oligarch's parents, or the Russian oligarch parents, and the henchmen call her a prostitute in front of her, and she can speak Russian.

00:47:02.000 And she starts screaming at them.

00:47:03.000 And all I could think of is, well, you are.

00:47:06.000 I don't understand your objection.

00:47:08.000 Literally, the whole movie is supposed to be an almost unapologetic look at sex work, meaning like, girls love it.

00:47:13.000 It's super fun.

00:47:14.000 There's nothing wrong with it.

00:47:15.000 It doesn't damage your soul or you in any serious way.

00:47:18.000 Even though, again, sort of the underlying thematic is that what she's actually looking for is to be a married woman.

00:47:23.000 In a normal relationship, and then she can't have that because she is, you know, a prostitute.

00:47:28.000 And so the film is in conflict with itself.

00:47:29.000 On the one hand, it wants to glorify sex work.

00:47:31.000 On the other hand, the thing that she actually is looking for is to not be a sex worker but to actually be, you know, like a traditional housewife who is taken care of, which is kind of hilarious.

00:47:39.000 And I think perhaps the most fascinating part about this film is that it's been characterized as a Cinderella story.

00:47:46.000 The problem is you can't have a Cinderella story where Cinderella is utterly unsympathetic.

00:47:50.000 Right.

00:47:50.000 I mean, Cinderella in this particular film is, again, a sex worker who basically takes advantage of what appears to be a 70 IQ, 18-year-old kid, in order to get to his money.

00:48:02.000 And somehow this is this makes her a heroine of the story and a victim of the evils of a society that won't accept the sex workers.

00:48:10.000 Is that so that was my take is 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 90 percent from the audience.

00:48:15.000 I don't know what the audience is thinking other than their their only fans login was lost or something.

00:48:19.000 So the Brutalist has also been nominated for for 10 Academy Awards.

00:48:25.000 I have many, many thoughts on The Brutalist, actually.

00:48:29.000 I will say it's at least interesting.

00:48:31.000 There's some things that are going on.

00:48:33.000 I don't...

00:48:34.000 Like the political take of the film, I think there is one move that is made near the end of the film.

00:48:38.000 And again, spoiler alerts all over, guys.

00:48:40.000 Like, if we're going through the films, you're going to have to actually deal with it.

00:48:42.000 The Brutalist is beautifully shot.

00:48:44.000 It's really well directed.

00:48:46.000 The acting is across the board excellent.

00:48:49.000 Guy Pearce particularly is terrific in this film.

00:48:52.000 It makes no political sense at all.

00:48:53.000 So the entire basis of The Brutalist, for those who haven't seen it, is a Holocaust refugee arrives in the United States.

00:49:00.000 It turns out that he is a sort of master architect from the Bauhaus School.

00:49:04.000 And he ends up doing the library for a very rich magnate played by Guy Pearce.

00:49:10.000 Guy Pearce originally doesn't appreciate it and yells at him and doesn't pay him.

00:49:14.000 And then Adrian Brody's character, who is this Hungarian artist, eventually he finds the Hungarian artist, tracks him down and says, I realized what you did here is a masterpiece and I want to commission you to make a giant community center in honor of my mother.

00:49:30.000 And so the whole movie is about the conflict between these two characters where Guy Pearce, He respects the talent of the Hungarian, but he doesn't like the Hungarian.

00:49:40.000 But he kind of loves the Hungarian.

00:49:42.000 It's like this bizarre love-hate relationship that he has with the Adrian Brody character.

00:49:46.000 And the whole kind of thematic of the film is America is xenophobic.

00:49:49.000 There's sort of a weird, badly done Zionist plot in The Brutalist.

00:49:54.000 The big problem is, number one, the case for Zionism is not only that the Jews need a place to go because everybody is constantly persecuting the Jews, which is true.

00:50:03.000 The case for Zionism is also, I mean, just as a Zionist, the case for Zionism is that there is a biblical basis to it.

00:50:07.000 The Judaism actually believes that there is a holy land promised by God to the Jewish people.

00:50:12.000 That's never dealt with in the film.

00:50:13.000 And so what you end up with is Israel as sort of a repository of almost anti-American hatred, that basically what Israel is is a place for people to run away from America.

00:50:22.000 Now, if you're going to set it up that way, then what you have to do is basically show that Adrian Brody and his entire family are deeply mistreated by America.

00:50:29.000 And so from the very outset, this is the director, Brady Corbett's job, is to show that America is not all that it's cracked up to be.

00:50:36.000 From literally the first shot in the film, which is this big shot where you see the Statue of Liberty coming upside down, and you see Adrian Brody scramble up to the surface of the ship that's taking him from Europe to the United States, and then the camera swivels upside down, and so you get the upside-down Statue of Liberty.

00:50:48.000 You know right from the outset, this is going to be an America sucks movie.

00:50:51.000 And by the end, you also have a cross upside down, so it turns out that America is rooted in Christianity, and Christianity sucks, which is why Jews apparently are victims or something.

00:50:58.000 The problem is...

00:50:59.000 Adrian Brody is not a victim in this movie until about three-quarters of the way through the movie, meaning that Guy Pearce treats him badly at first, and then there's a read on this movie where Guy Pearce is actually, for most of the movie, the hero of the film, meaning he is a very rich person who finds an impoverished European immigrant, recognizes his talent, pays him an enormous sum of money to make him a monument on a hill that serves no purpose other than the charitable and in honor of his mother, hires a Jewish lawyer to bring his family from Europe.

00:51:27.000 And get them out of a DP camp in Austria.

00:51:30.000 Have them live on his property, right?

00:51:32.000 These are not the actions of, like, a typical movie villain.

00:51:34.000 And so the entire movie is based around the idea that Guy Pearce is a villain, but then the first three quarters of the movie don't set that up.

00:51:40.000 So what do they do?

00:51:41.000 They add in a rape scene in which Guy Pearce literally rape Adrian Brody's character.

00:51:46.000 Now, by this point in the film, Guy Pearce is supposed to be probably 60, and Adrian Brody is supposed to be probably 50 in the film at this point.

00:51:54.000 It's just, it's absolutely bizarre, except that they had to do it, because otherwise Guy Pearce can't be portrayed as the villain, and so they're making flesh, the implication of the movie, which is that basically America, its immigrant population for its talents, and then treats them badly so much so that they want to leave.

00:52:09.000 The politics are really perverse and disgusting.

00:52:12.000 It's a very well-directed film, but because the politics are so perverse, and because, again, the vast majority of the plot does not support the conclusion, All of this feels very shoehorned in the last quarter of the movie is kind of my take on it.

00:52:24.000 I think, circling back to the scene you were just talking about with Guy Pearce and Adrian Brody, I feel like that was the least subtle thing possible.

00:52:32.000 I feel like 99% of the audience was able to understand the allegory and the metaphor that he was going for, and then he just had to have that scene and have Guy Pearce explicitly say the things that you knew that he was thinking.

00:52:45.000 Whereas just like 40 minutes ago, they had that scene between Harry and Zophia that implied something similar, but it was a much higher degree of subtlety that I think worked cinematically because it was showing, not telling.

00:53:01.000 And again, I think that Brady Corbett had to do that.

00:53:04.000 The question becomes, why did they even do that?

00:53:05.000 And I think the reason he had to do that is because otherwise the setup is Adrian Brody's being really, really oversensitive here, right?

00:53:10.000 He's like, okay, fine.

00:53:11.000 So the guy doesn't like you.

00:53:12.000 How many people like their boss?

00:53:14.000 How many people like the people who pay?

00:53:15.000 I mean, aside from, obviously, all of our employees, like Phil loves me.

00:53:18.000 But aside from that, I mean, clearly.

00:53:20.000 I mean, it's not that we pay him to say that.

00:53:21.000 He actually does.

00:53:22.000 But, you know, most people don't feel like that they have to love the person who is paying them to do a thing.

00:53:27.000 And so the problem is that unless you set up that Adrian Brody is literally a physical victim, then you cannot actually set up the rest of the sort of moral of the film, which is...

00:53:37.000 Again, made perfectly obvious in the last part of the film, because they fast forward to 1980, and now there's a big tribute scene to Adrian Brody's character, and they explicate that when he created this bizarre monument on the top of a hill in Pennsylvania, that actually it was supposed to be taking elements from Dachau and Birkenau.

00:53:55.000 So the idea was there's some sort of continuity between Nazism and American industrial capitalism, which is just, I'm sorry, sick and perverse in every way that is possible to be sick and perverse.

00:54:04.000 And anybody who takes away...

00:54:06.000 From, you know, world history, that there is a similarity between people shoving you into a gas chamber and murdering you and your entire family, and people commissioning you to build a tower on a hill in Pennsylvania.

00:54:19.000 I don't know how far you have to have your head up your ass to come to that conclusion, but apparently that's about as far as Brady Corbett has his head up his ass.

00:54:25.000 Okay, Conclave.

00:54:26.000 I read the book, and so I could not put myself through the movie.

00:54:29.000 The book was interminable enough, and I say that as a fan of Robert Harris, the guy who wrote the book.

00:54:34.000 I've read a bunch of his books.

00:54:35.000 So for those who missed it, I did like a little capsule review of Conclave, the book, as well, before the movie even came out, telling you what it was going to be, and indeed it is that thing, because the movie is the book.

00:54:46.000 basically pope dies time to appoint new pope college of cardinals all get together winner spoiler alert intersex person because it turns out that all the cardinals who find this out after the person is is made pope it turns out they all decide that it's important to violate all the vows they've ever taken in order to maintain the fiction that this person is actually just a genetic male as opposed to an intersex person who's actually female so you have a lady pope is sort of the is sort of the idea of this film

00:55:12.000 yeah i felt like i was watching a shamalan movie in a way because it was like this political thriller about who is going to ascend to the seat of the pope and then all of a sudden the pope has ovaries it's like you're watching split it's about multiple personality disorder and then all of a sudden he becomes the hulk right bruce willis is Exactly.

00:55:29.000 Exactly.

00:55:32.000 The Catholic Church is mean and too conservative and needs to liberalize the movie.

00:55:37.000 I think my biggest issue, too, is that they don't really process that revelation that he has ovaries and a uterus.

00:55:44.000 He kind of just says it, and then the film ends a minute later.

00:55:48.000 Yeah, well, I mean, that's true in the book also.

00:55:50.000 There's like a brief kind of internal monologue that the main character, who's played by Ralph Fiennes in the movie, does, where the main character is like, well...

00:55:58.000 I could say something, but I really shouldn't say something.

00:56:01.000 Okay, I guess I won't say something, which is really stupid because really the entire debate theoretically should be about that thing.

00:56:07.000 You should have a whole movie about them debating.

00:56:08.000 We just appointed a pope.

00:56:09.000 What do we do now?

00:56:12.000 There's the legality.

00:56:13.000 I don't know any of those procedures.

00:56:15.000 Is that revocable?

00:56:16.000 How exactly does that work?

00:56:17.000 In this way, the sort of surprise ending, Conclave is very much like Nickel Boys.

00:56:23.000 is a movie about a school.

00:56:26.000 It's based on an actual real school in Florida that was a reform school in which apparently students were abused for decades.

00:56:34.000 Some of them were killed and apparently buried in a field.

00:56:37.000 And bodies have actually been found.

00:56:39.000 There have been reparations that have been paid to some of the families in the state of Florida over all of this.

00:56:43.000 There's some controversy over whether this was just a generalized evil reform school that basically victimized all the people who went there or whether it was particularly racist.

00:56:51.000 It's one of the controversies over the Florida school.

00:56:53.000 Nickel Boys is a novelization by Colson Whitehead that turned into a movie.

00:56:56.000 And the movie is fine, but it's not particularly revelatory.

00:57:03.000 The reason I'm comparing it to Conclave is because the twist ending is that the character you think you've been watching the whole time, who's kind of in the future, in the late 1980s, who's deciding whether or not to go and reveal what happened at the school, that character you think is one character the whole time, and it turns out it's another character.

00:57:18.000 The character you think it is was actually killed earlier in the film.

00:57:21.000 This person took that person's name and lived out his life, basically.

00:57:25.000 That doesn't change anything fundamentally in the film.

00:57:27.000 This is one of my problems with some twist endings in films.

00:57:29.000 At least in Conclave, you can make the case that that actually has some impact.

00:57:33.000 In Nickel Boys, it really wouldn't have mattered at all whether the switch ever took place.

00:57:36.000 If one of the boys had been killed and the other boy had lived, that would have made no difference to the actual plot of the film.

00:57:42.000 I think it's more of an explanation for why the kid didn't come forward.

00:57:45.000 Because he was actually, you know, inhabiting somebody else's life.

00:57:47.000 Maybe that's the explanation.

00:57:49.000 But there's nothing particularly that changes what happened during the story that one character lived and the other died.

00:57:55.000 You could easily have just left it alone.

00:57:57.000 And I think the shock value of the switch is supposed to be like the big revelation and it just didn't do anything for me.

00:58:02.000 As far as it being directed, well, yeah, I mean, I think it's directed fine.

00:58:05.000 I think it's interestingly directed, Nickel Boys, because it kind of takes various perspectives.

00:58:09.000 It's done from first person.

00:58:11.000 So you see the camera in the place of the person for one character and then you see it switch and you see the same scene from the character of the other person.

00:58:19.000 And so, you know, it's kind of a cool directorial trick.

00:58:22.000 But we've also seen that with things like, for example, 1917. So I don't think there was anything particularly new about that per se.

00:58:30.000 It's fine.

00:58:31.000 I don't think it's an amazing film by any stretch of the imagination.

00:58:34.000 The substance.

00:58:35.000 Okay, so I did not hate the substance as much as I thought I would hate the substance.

00:58:39.000 I don't think it's...

00:58:41.000 Anything special.

00:58:42.000 I think it's a body horror film.

00:58:44.000 I think that it's being given all sorts of plot.

00:58:46.000 It's just because Demi Moore gets naked.

00:58:47.000 And the entire plot of The Substance is Demi Moore is an aging actress and she's fired from her job by close-ups of Dennis Quaid eating shrimp.

00:58:57.000 And then at a certain point, she's given notice.

00:59:02.000 She gets in a car crash and at the hospital somebody gives her notice of a thing called The Substance that allows her basically...

00:59:08.000 to separate into two beings.

00:59:09.000 One of them is a young version of Demi Moore, like a young, hot Margaret Qualley version of Demi Moore, and one is older Demi Moore, and they have to switch off week to week.

00:59:17.000 So the basic idea is that her soul or her brain, whatever she is, inhabits one body and then inhabits the other body week to week, and then of course there starts to be tension because she wants to stay in the younger body.

00:59:29.000 But then every time she goes back to the older body, her older body is more depleted because the younger body has essentially been drawing life force from that.

00:59:35.000 The end of it is, of course, as with most horror films, you know, some sort of sick horror explosion involving lots of blood.

00:59:42.000 The movie kind of peters out around an hour 15, and then for 45 minutes it just kind of hovers there.

00:59:47.000 Nothing really happens between an hour 15 and kind of two hours.

00:59:50.000 This movie at an hour and a half would have been a nice little horror flick.

00:59:52.000 At two hours, it's really, really overlong.

00:59:56.000 It's interesting that you told me that this film is about the evils of sexism in America because Vanity Fair told me it was a stealthy trans allegory.

01:00:03.000 Yeah, well, Vanity Fair is high on their own supply.

01:00:05.000 And that was, of course, by a person I believe named Emily St. John or something who is a trans person.

01:00:10.000 St. James, yeah.

01:00:10.000 St. James.

01:00:11.000 Emily St. John is the novelist.

01:00:12.000 Emily St. James is a trans person who believes that every movie is about him.

01:00:17.000 And the substance is absolutely not a trans allegory.

01:00:20.000 It is about...

01:00:20.000 Women aging in Hollywood and how they feel a lack of self because they are aging and because everybody is mean to them because they're older, which is clearly not true of Demi Moore, who's getting more work now than she's had in 20 years, by the way.

01:00:32.000 The thing that works in Late Night with the Devil doesn't work for me here in the substance, just thematically, is that the very basis of the substance is that fulfillment is to be found in sort of youth and beauty for women.

01:00:43.000 And so when she goes back to being Margaret Quiley, and now she's young.

01:00:46.000 Instead of utilizing her youth and beauty to actually do productive and interesting things, she basically Fs around.

01:00:52.000 I mean, that's essentially what she does as a young woman, right?

01:00:54.000 She parties and she has sex with her.

01:00:56.000 The idea that, like, what a woman wants most out of life, the fulfilling thing that is going to cause her to want to relive her life is to essentially, you know, act like a teenager is really, really stupid.

01:01:09.000 And so I don't think the movie flows in that way.

01:01:13.000 And you know what would have been useful, actually, is...

01:01:16.000 If she'd gone back and she said, I want to relive my life.

01:01:18.000 You know what would have actually worked?

01:01:19.000 If she'd gone back and said, I want to relive my life as a young woman, I want to get married and have kids.

01:01:22.000 Right?

01:01:23.000 That would have actually created some real dramatic tension.

01:01:25.000 Because then you would have had sympathy for the idea that she wants to stay a young woman and not be an old woman again.

01:01:28.000 Like, she has to relive her life because she made some bad choices.

01:01:30.000 But it's none of that.

01:01:31.000 Because, of course, Hollywood could never possibly think that a young woman would want to get married and have kids.

01:01:36.000 That sounds like a Daily Wire Plus original.

01:01:38.000 It does.

01:01:39.000 So we're scripting it in real time.

01:01:40.000 And finally, there's Wicked.

01:01:41.000 If you want to see my review of that, then you can.

01:01:43.000 Obviously, that did a lot of traffic because I liked Wicked.

01:01:45.000 So, of these pictures, the best picture, the only one that people are going to be watching 10 years from now is Dune Part 2. Agreed.

01:01:52.000 The rest of these kind of suck.

01:01:53.000 Wicked is fine.

01:01:54.000 So you think, in an ideal world, Dune Part 2 would win Best Picture?

01:01:58.000 Yes.

01:01:58.000 Who's going to win?

01:01:59.000 I think, given the momentum, I think Enora will probably win.

01:02:03.000 I think there's too much controversy with the others.

01:02:05.000 And somehow the movie about prostitution and sex work with enormous amounts of pornography is the least controversial nominee on this list.

01:02:12.000 But it just shows you where Hollywood is, right?

01:02:13.000 Anora is the America is evil because it doesn't like sex work.

01:02:16.000 The Brutalist is America's xenophobic.

01:02:18.000 A Complete Unknown is just walk the line.

01:02:20.000 Conclave is the Catholic Church is transphobic.

01:02:23.000 Amelia Perez is society is transphobic.

01:02:26.000 Nickel Boys is America is racist.

01:02:27.000 The Substance is America is sexist.

01:02:30.000 The top three contenders are Anora, the Brutalist and Conclave.

01:02:35.000 Out of the three...

01:02:36.000 Which one do you think deserves to win?

01:02:38.000 I mean, I think all three are bad.

01:02:41.000 And again, I'm speaking out of turn here because I haven't seen Conclave.

01:02:45.000 I've only read the book.

01:02:46.000 But my assumption is that the most interesting of those three is The Brutalist, which is at least attempting to do something thematically and at least is well-directed and well-acted.

01:02:54.000 Well, folks, there is your rundown on everything Oscars-related.

01:02:57.000 I know it's a bit lengthy, but there are a lot of films there.

01:02:59.000 And we'll give you, I'm sure, our full review of the Oscars themselves on Monday.

01:03:03.000 All righty, coming up.

01:03:04.000 There's a new patriotic documentary that is coming out called Brothers After War, all about what happens to American soldiers after war.

01:03:11.000 We're going to talk with the director of that film.

01:03:13.000 Speaking of which, you actually should come subscribe at Daily Wire Plus because we have tons of amazing stuff that is happening.

01:03:18.000 We've got all of our movies, obviously.

01:03:20.000 The Matt Walsh stuff.

01:03:21.000 Am I racist?

01:03:22.000 What is a woman?

01:03:23.000 We've got All Access Live, which we did yesterday in which I answered your questions.

01:03:26.000 We also have episodes of The Search with people like Elon Musk and Megyn Kelly and Vivek.

01:03:30.000 If you're not a member, you need to become a member today.

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The Ben Shapiro Show - February 28, 2025

The Epstein File Release FIASCO

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