The Ben Shapiro Show - September 23, 2026


The Narnia Fight Is Splitting the Right. Here's My Take.

Hosted by
Mentioned
I Don't Care If The Trump Administration "Banned" CNN

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

199.64

Word count

2,226

Sentence count

158


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So let's just get this straight.
00:00:03.000 Probably the greatest work of Christian apologetics, made metaphor for children, is being turned into the main character, who stands for Jesus, is being made into a David Bowie bisexual rock singer based lion voiced by a left wing actress.
00:00:22.000 I'm trying to make it magical.
00:00:26.000 What the actual fuck?
00:00:33.000 This story, it sounds unimportant.
00:00:35.000 Actually, it is not unimportant because, as my mentor and friend Andrew Breitbart used to say, culture is upstream of politics.
00:00:41.000 It's why we're in the entertainment game here at Daily Wire.
00:00:44.000 Okay, so I log on to the internet this week and I see something totally crazy.
00:00:47.000 So, The Chronicles of Narnia is, of course, being remade now by Netflix, and they hired Greta Gerwig, for some reason no one can discern, to be the director of this thing.
00:00:56.000 And she released an image of Aslan, who is the metaphorical Jesus figure in The Chronicles of Narnia.
00:01:03.000 And the metaphorical image has now been made into a lion with two variantly colored eyes.
00:01:10.000 Why did she do that?
00:01:11.000 Well, according to Empire Online, she did this because she wanted to channel David Bowie.
00:01:16.000 She wanted to channel, and not only that, she wants the voice of Aslan, the lion in Chronicles of Narnia, to be Meryl Streep.
00:01:24.000 And she said, I wanted someone who's profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self seriousness, someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight.
00:01:35.000 So, C.S. Lewis is, of course, the most famous Christian apologist of the last century and a half.
00:01:40.000 In the Chronicles of Narnia, he lays out his philosophy on Christianity basically as a metaphorical fairy tale designed for kids.
00:01:49.000 And who's open about this?
00:01:50.000 Here is what he intended with the books a direct quote from C.S. Lewis about what the books were supposed to be Supposing by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency.
00:02:06.000 Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?
00:02:09.000 I thought one could.
00:02:10.000 In other words, the sort of cynicism with which people approach religion, the sort of tiredness and hackneyed nature of going to a church, he can strip that away by making it into a story that people want to read, by making it into a metaphor.
00:02:24.000 Now, again, the goal here was to teach children in the West about the values of Christianity and about the story of Christianity via metaphor.
00:02:32.000 That is the goal of the story.
00:02:34.000 We're not talking here.
00:02:36.000 About some strange take on the Gospels for adults, like The Last Temptation of Christ or some movie comedy that mocks Jesus.
00:02:42.000 We're talking about a tool that was intended originally by its author to introduce Western kids to Christian ideas and figures.
00:02:48.000 Only a sick culture would take that thing designed for kids and pervert it and turn it instead into a vehicle for secular politics.
00:02:55.000 That is what Hollywood is actually doing.
00:02:58.000 This is where you come into the Greta Gerwig of it all.
00:03:00.000 So Greta Gerwig, of course, directed Little Women.
00:03:03.000 She is sort of a feminist take on Little Women, and she directed Barbie, which is, of course, an atrocity.
00:03:06.000 You can see my very famous review in which I literally burn.
00:03:10.000 Barbie dolls.
00:03:16.000 Just a thing that we did here at the Daily Wire offices.
00:03:18.000 But Greta Gerwig is sort of an interesting person.
00:03:20.000 She's a person who is a little bit Christianity curious.
00:03:23.000 She used to go to church fairly regularly.
00:03:25.000 She has said so.
00:03:26.000 She says she appreciates Catholicism, but she was Unitarian.
00:03:30.000 Unitarian is basically if the symbol for Catholicism is a crucifix, the symbol for Unitarianism is a question mark.
00:03:37.000 But she's also said that the reason that she was attracted to Catholicism was because of the Virgin Mary.
00:03:43.000 Which she openly connects with pagan energy.
00:03:45.000 Here's what she said It feels like this God the Father thing is a bit alienating for me, but to engage with the idea of a woman as the mother, it seems like it's connected to a more pagan type of religion.
00:03:54.000 And she also said, I am interested in what women do in spaces that are primarily male, in structures that are patriarchal.
00:04:00.000 Most religions and religious institutions fall into this category.
00:04:04.000 So, in other words, her goal is to read left wing social values, particularly feminism, into traditional religious values.
00:04:12.000 And Hollywood decided she was perfect.
00:04:14.000 Maybe she was the only person that Hollywood knew went to church sometimes, I guess.
00:04:17.000 So they handed off the movie franchise to her.
00:04:20.000 And her first moves were to hire a woman, Meryl Streep, a very, very left wing woman, to voice Aslan, the metaphorical representation of Jesus in the books.
00:04:28.000 Obviously, an incredibly male character.
00:04:31.000 And then to create imagery around Aslan that's designed to mimic a rock star bisexual David Bowie.
00:04:37.000 Honestly, this stuff is so depressing.
00:04:38.000 Hollywood taking iconic Christian metaphors and then turning them into secularist nonsense.
00:04:42.000 It's so depressing.
00:04:43.000 It makes you just want to go to sleep.
00:04:44.000 But you actually need better sleep in your real life.
00:04:47.000 Not just when you want to be depressed and go to sleep, but when you actually need to sleep.
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00:06:45.000 So, again, why isn't this frivolous?
00:06:46.000 Why does this matter?
00:06:47.000 Well, because in any society, how you teach your kids is how you view your society and how you view your aspiration for the future.
00:06:55.000 If you take religious iconography designed for kids and you turn it on its head for the sake of subversiveness, again, for kids, that is stupid and wrong.
00:07:04.000 It is one thing to do this sort of thing for adults.
00:07:05.000 Adults are adults and they can discern.
00:07:07.000 This is a children's story designed to appeal to children.
00:07:11.000 And what Hollywood is doing here is trying to subvert the basic ideas of Chronicles of Narnia.
00:07:17.000 And then they'll say, Why are you so exercised?
00:07:18.000 Again, this is face tattoo syndrome.
00:07:21.000 Face tattoo syndrome, as I've described on the show, is where you go into your local Starbucks and there's some weird dude behind the counter with a gigantic face tattoo.
00:07:28.000 And when we stare at the face tattoo, the guy growls at you, What are you looking at?
00:07:31.000 It's like, Well, I mean, it's the face tattoo.
00:07:34.000 If you take a cherished and beloved piece of children's literature that is a metaphor for the New Testament, and then you decide that you're going to get a left wing director to subvert, All of the assumptions of that piece of work.
00:07:47.000 And then we notice that is not our fault.
00:07:49.000 That is your fault.
00:07:50.000 For the leftists in the audience who are pretending not to get it, this is like if the Daily Wire decided to do a Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic for kids, right, designed to teach them social values and feminism.
00:08:00.000 And then we cast Bill Cosby in the title role, right?
00:08:03.000 It would be weird and it would not be good.
00:08:05.000 Okay, so this is what Hollywood is doing, but this is also where we are increasingly as a culture and as we can all feel it.
00:08:13.000 We have moved beyond a sort of pure and innocent love for our basic civilizational principles.
00:08:18.000 Everybody is now ironic about all of these things or openly mocking of all of these things.
00:08:22.000 When somebody talks about the stuff that our parents and grandparents used to take for granted as fundamentals of our society, we're not kind of slightly embarrassed by them.
00:08:30.000 God, freedom, family, the American flag.
00:08:34.000 All those terms sound strangely parochial and anachronistic.
00:08:37.000 They sound like a throwback to the 1950s.
00:08:39.000 What are you living in the 1950s, white picket fence land?
00:08:42.000 Don't you know we're more sophisticated than that?
00:08:44.000 Now, I don't think most Americans like that.
00:08:45.000 I think most Americans actually resonate still to those ideas.
00:08:49.000 Maybe that's why President Trump won twice, because he is, again, anachronistic.
00:08:53.000 Now, I used to make fun of the MAGA hats when they first came on the scene because they look ugly.
00:08:57.000 MAGA hats look like that thing that your grandparents used to hand you at the family reunion in 1997 in Colorado or at the Mall of America in Minnesota or something.
00:09:08.000 But maybe that was the point because Trump had this kind of throwback feel to him.
00:09:11.000 And many Americans still pine for that feeling that actually we don't have to feel embarrassed at basic and obvious things that are good about the West and about America.
00:09:19.000 That, by the way, is why people have been so excited about Run, Hide, Fight Infidels because in the movies we make, America is good and America's enemies are bad.
00:09:27.000 And if you don't like it, well, you can F off.
00:09:29.000 You can stick it where the sun don't shine.
00:09:31.000 In fact, if you give us a really particularly bad review, we'll probably feature it in our advertising campaigns.
00:09:37.000 Hey, Run High Fight Infidels, again, for those who haven't seen it, you should go on over to Daily Wire right now and you should go check it out because it is the hottest moving entertainment piece that we have put out at the Daily Wire ever.
00:09:48.000 I mean, it truly is astonishing the level of success of that film.
00:09:53.000 Every significant movement in history has started with protests.
00:09:55.000 You're a traitor!
00:09:55.000 Uncle Tom!
00:09:56.000 This is our generation's civil rights!
00:09:59.000 I have no idea what the protest is about.
00:10:01.000 Given the current climate, should a figure as polarizing as Clay Saunders even be allowed on campus?
00:10:01.000 Bingo!
00:10:07.000 Ah, can you hear me okay?
00:10:08.000 Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Friedman.
00:10:10.000 This is a decision I cannot fight.
00:10:12.000 Islam will conquer the West.
00:10:13.000 Assalamualaikum.
00:10:16.000 Are we paying attention?
00:10:21.000 They've taken over the building.
00:10:22.000 They're downstairs and they've blocked the doors.
00:10:25.000 I seek forgiveness from Allah the Almighty.
00:10:29.000 We cannot.
00:10:30.000 Run and hide.
00:10:31.000 Muhammad is the messenger of God.
00:10:34.000 There is no God but Allah.
00:10:37.000 What do you say?
00:10:39.000 We turn those SOBs into a fine red mist.
00:10:44.000 As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go.
00:10:47.000 They call that leapfrog.
00:10:48.000 Stretch them out and listen.
00:10:51.000 You need a course in safe weapons handling.
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