Ben Shapiro is back with all the news you need to know about the latest in the world of politics, economics, and pop culture. Today's show is a mashup of the top news stories from the past 24 hours, including the latest on the Trump administration's failed attempt to bring down inflation, the latest from the UN's call for the U.S. to stop supporting "sex mutilation surgery" on children, and a new report on transgender children being forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery in public schools. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll read it out to you in the next episode. Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about this podcast! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's the worst thing a politician has ever said to you? 4:30 - The American Medical Association seeks a crackdown on anyone who bucks the radical gender ideology orthodoxy 6:15 - Brose dies at the box office despite a $30 million marketing campaign 7:00s - Elon Musk runs afoul of Ukrainian war hawks 8:30s - What are your thoughts on Elon Musk and the Ukraine War Hawk hawks? 9:15s - Is there any truth behind the Elon Musk tweet? 11:40s - Who's going to save the world? 12:20s - Why you should be worried about the future of the world economy? 13:00 14:00- What are you should do with your money? 15:40 - What is the best thing you can you can do? 16: What s going to do about the most important thing you should you're going to get out of your bank account? 17:00+ 17:10s - How much money you can expect from the world in the future? 18:20 - What s the best way to make money in the 21st century? 19:30- Why you have nothing to lose? 21:40- What s your biggest takeaway from this episode? 22: How much do you have to pay for it? 25:00 Is it better than $1, or $2,000, $5,000 or $3,000? 26:00 Does it get better than that? 27:00 | What s better than you got nothing to get more than $5?
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00:02:43.000Well, we now know that if you buck the radical gender orthodoxy, the radical gender ideology, they will come after you.
00:02:50.000We know this because school boards have been questioned by parents about transgender bathrooms, about the care for their own children at public schools.
00:02:59.000And the response has been from school boards to basically go to the DOJ and ask for a crackdown on parents.
00:03:04.000Well, now we have supposed medical organizations writing an open letter to Merrick Garland, the attorney general of the United States, calling for an actual legal crackdown on people who report on what is going on at hospitals that are essentially butchering children, because that's what it is.
00:03:19.000When you are performing gender mutilating surgery, sex mutilating surgery on children, what you are doing is butchering them.
00:03:25.000When you are injecting small kids with puberty blockers, pretending that has no long-term impact without any evidence to back that notion, you are butchering the kids.
00:03:33.000And the fact that you have so many of these hospitals that are now doing this, that are treating this as though this is standard of care.
00:03:46.000The data do not exist for this notion.
00:03:48.000The vast majority of kids who express some sort of gender confusion will desist from that over time.
00:03:53.000The vast majority at this point of gender confusion is being driven by societal mania.
00:03:57.000Promoting that sort of gender confusion is the highest form of parenting.
00:04:01.000And to immediately take a kid who expresses some sort of confusion about conformity to gender stereotypes and say, you must be a member of the opposite gender, we're going to socially transition you in school.
00:04:10.000And then we're going to inject you with a bunch of cross-sex hormones.
00:04:12.000And then we are going to prepare you for sterilization and mutilation further along down the line.
00:04:18.000And then we're actually going to, once you hit 15, 16, 17 years old, cut off healthy breast tissue.
00:04:23.000We are going to cut off penile tissue.
00:04:26.000We are going to create fake vaginas, or we're going to carve off arm flesh, and we are going to create fake phalluses to sew onto.
00:04:37.000But it is amazing how many of our institutions, institutions we all used to have faith in, have been completely overrun by the radical left and now the radical left in charge of these institutions is militarizing and weaponizing those institutions against anyone who would point out that what they are doing is quite terrible.
00:04:52.000So here is the letter from the American Medical Association as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association.
00:05:02.000I know many, many doctors who are members of the AMA, and they do not have an alternative because the AMA is an organization that essentially provides accrediting services to hospitals.
00:05:11.000The AMA can essentially end your career if you refuse to go along with whatever diktats they are pushing.
00:05:17.000There's no rival organization that is anywhere near the size and scope of the AMA.
00:05:21.000And so I know doctors who are attempting to create alternatives to the AMA or to the AAP.
00:05:26.000But those alternatives don't exist right now.
00:05:28.000And so that monopoly means that these organizations, which again are run by a cadre of very political, very left-wing activists.
00:05:35.000Then simply market capture the medical community and then cram down a fake standard of care that has nothing to do with the betterment of children in the name of woke ideology.
00:05:45.000Dear Attorney General Garland, on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and the Children's Hospital Association, collectively representing more than 270,000 physicians and more than 220 children's hospitals across the country, We write to urge you to investigate the organizations, individuals, and entities coordinating, provoking, and carrying out bomb threats and threats of personal violence against children's hospitals and physicians across the United States.
00:06:09.000Because if you are actually coordinating bombing threats on a hospital, that's criminal activity.
00:06:13.000You don't have to urge the DOJ to investigate that.
00:06:16.000That is a criminal activity, both state and federally.
00:06:19.000There are federal laws on the books that prevent you from committing these sorts of acts.
00:06:23.000And if we are talking about actually carrying out a bomb threat or a threat of personal violence, that, of course, has been illegal forever in the United States.
00:06:30.000I'm not allowed to threaten you with personal violence.
00:06:40.000The keyword there is provoking because what they mean by provoking is telling the truth about what we do at our hospitals and driving people to object.
00:06:48.000And then some fringe characters out there go and threaten violence.
00:06:51.000And so we're going to blame you for that.
00:06:52.000You reporting is what is creating the threat of violence.
00:06:55.000And so you have to be stopped by the DOJ from reporting that keyword provoking.
00:07:09.000Barack Obama was not responsible for Dallas police officers being shot by a Black Lives Matter activist.
00:07:13.000Bernie Sanders was not responsible for Republican congresspeople being shot by a Bernie Sanders acolyte.
00:07:19.000Donald Trump was not responsible for people doing acts of violence in his name unless he actively called for the violence to be done.
00:07:25.000And this is also true of people who are just committing the crime of reporting on what children's hospitals are doing to healthy 16-year-old girls who are now having mastectomies.
00:07:41.000From Boston to Akron to Nashville to Seattle, children's hospitals, academic health systems, and physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based healthcare.
00:07:48.000Evidence-based is a real mush word here because there is no evidence to suggest that the best treatment for a kid who expresses some level of gender nonconformity is to pretend they are a member of the opposite sex and then move them onto the path towards sterilization.
00:08:01.000These attacks have not only made it difficult and dangerous for institutions and practices to provide this care, they've also disrupted many other services to families seeking care.
00:08:08.000In one hospital, a new mother was prevented from being with her preterm infant because the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit was on lockdown due to a bomb threat.
00:08:14.000Children's hospitals across the nation have substantially increased security, in addition to working with local and federal law enforcement, both on their main hospital campuses as well as across their ambulatory delivery sites in order to ensure the safety of patients, families, and medical staff who work there.
00:08:26.000In addition, some providers have needed 24-7 security.
00:08:29.000Children's hospitals and their medical staffs continue to face increased threats via social media, including to their personal accounts, coupled with harassing emails, phone calls, and protesters at healthcare sites, there's elevated and justifiable fear among families, patients, and staff.
00:08:40.000Now, up until they get to that last sentence, you're thinking, okay, those are all criminal acts, right?
00:08:44.000If you call in a bomb threat to a neonatal intensive care unit and kids can't actually get the care that they need at the ICU, obviously it's a crime.
00:08:52.000But you're now lumping that together with protesters at healthcare sites.
00:08:55.000So if somebody shows up with a placard outside the transgender child care unit over at Vanderbilt University, then this is now equivalent to issuing a bomb threat?
00:09:07.000It's the equivalent to threatening to shoot a doctor?
00:09:09.000That is what the AMA, the AAP, and the Children's Hospital Association are essentially saying.
00:09:13.000And to make that perfectly clear, they get to the next paragraph, quote, these coordinated attacks threaten federally protected rights to health care for patients and their families. The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals, resulting in a rapid escalation of threats, harassment and disruption of care across multiple jurisdictions. Our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms.
00:09:39.000We now urge your office to take swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals, and entities responsible.
00:09:45.000Okay, so that is an amazing, amazing statement.
00:09:57.000They're talking about anyone who talks about these issues on the regular.
00:09:59.000Anybody who just plays audio of members of these children's hospitals talking about what they do to kids.
00:10:05.000If you just play the audio, this amounts to sharing false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals.
00:10:13.000Resulting in rapid escalation of threats.
00:10:15.000Again, notice how they're not actually drawing the line between I report on a thing and then the threats occur.
00:10:20.000They're not saying that I provoked the threats in the sense that I actually called up somebody and told them to make a threat or that I called myself to make the threat or that I told somebody that threats are a good thing.
00:10:30.000They're saying that by reporting on a topic, you have now created the threat.
00:10:34.000Which, by the way, ends virtually all journalism in the United States.
00:10:37.000It's hard to think of a story that does not result in some additional risk to the target of a story.
00:10:42.000I'd literally pick a political story, any of them.
00:11:33.000Or the Trevor Project, which puts out routinely bad data, skewed data.
00:11:38.000They take bad science and then they craft that into some sort of narrative promoted by medical associations.
00:11:43.000And if you report on this, then they say that the DOJ should crack down on you.
00:11:47.000They're openly saying that they are calling on big tech to crack down on anyone who descends from the prevailing nonsense they continue to purvey.
00:11:54.000Quote, our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms.
00:12:00.000Reporting, playing their own tapes for them.
00:12:02.000And don't you trust the AMA or the AAP on this sort of stuff?
00:12:06.000You can't even trust the fact-checkers on simple things like, did Kamala Harris say that Hurricane Aid would be passed off on the basis of equity?
00:12:12.000And literally she said that over the last 48 hours and every fact-checking organization then came out and said she was not saying that.
00:12:21.000And we now have the institutions that are supposed to be the most trusted institutions, you know, the institutions of medicine.
00:12:26.000If we were to talk about the single most trusted institution in the West, it would have to be the medical institutions, right?
00:12:32.000Because the simple fact is that over the course of the last couple of centuries, life expectancy has risen.
00:12:36.000Death rates have dropped and that means you've had this explosion in life expectancy and in population.
00:12:42.000And so these are the people we're supposed to trust with the health of our children.
00:12:45.000But then they say that if your kid comes in, your little girl comes in one day and she wants to wear a cowboy hat, maybe she's a boy and we should start calling her Bobby.
00:12:52.000And then we should start shooting her full of hormones.
00:12:54.000And if you disagree with this, they will blame you for anyone who threatens a children's hospital.
00:12:58.000Not only that, they're calling on the, again, it's a letter to the AG.
00:13:17.000I don't use that word lightly because fascism has an actual meaning.
00:13:20.000But when you call for the actual prosecution of your political opponents, specifically based on the fact that they are doing things like reporting the things that you say, that is like black letter fascism.
00:13:32.000They continue along these lines attacks against healthcare institutions that threaten violence, intimidation, and physical harm have left hospitals, staff, and their communities shaken.
00:13:38.000Families seeking care at these institutions as well as those providing their care fear for their personal safety in the wake of these attacks.
00:13:46.000On behalf of the patients and families we serve and the physicians we represent, we thank you for your attention to our request.
00:13:51.000And again, they use phrases like gender affirming care, which is just a propagandistic phrase.
00:13:56.000Gender affirming care is one of the most Orwellian phrases in human history.
00:14:02.000They should call it sex denying care because gender is a made up concept in the first place.
00:14:07.000Gender is supposedly the idea that there are social standards that apply to males that don't apply to females and females that don't apply to males and they are all social constructs which is absolutely not true because gender is indeed connected to sex.
00:14:18.000There's a reason why men and women act differently and those are biologically ingrained.
00:14:23.000That does not mean that every stereotypical activity of a woman can't be participated in by a man or vice versa but it means that generally speaking there is a dichotomy between men and women that is biologically based And that is undeniable because it exists in the primate kingdom as well.
00:14:40.000But if you say this much, then this alone, I suppose, is provocative.
00:14:46.000This is scary stuff and it should be scary stuff because it is part of a broader agenda on behalf of the left to suggest that anybody who doesn't go along with this wicked agenda, it is wicked, that anybody who doesn't go along with this, Their kids should essentially be taken away from them.
00:15:02.000Because after all, they're abusing their kids.
00:15:04.000The best, the finest among us are people who are the parents who say that their kids are trans.
00:15:09.000Now, you wonder why the transgender phenomenon is occurring in specifically blue areas, and it is.
00:15:16.000If you look statistically, it is extraordinarily high rates of transgender identity in places like LA, New York, Chicago, like all the big left-wing centers.
00:15:24.000You're seeing a massive increase in gender non-conforming identities.
00:15:29.000You're not seeing it in rural Alabama.
00:15:32.000Now, the left says that's because of bigotry.
00:15:33.000If it weren't for bigotry, I guess all of us would be doing that.
00:15:35.000It would just be widespread across the earth.
00:15:37.000It had been bottled up, apparently, up until now, throughout civilization.
00:15:41.000But now, magically, we've reached an evolutionary bottleneck where suddenly, magically, huge swaths of children are now gender non-conforming.
00:15:48.000They're gender non-binary widgets who could be members of the opposite sex.
00:15:52.000Or, alternatively, what we have here is Munchausen syndrome by proxy for a lot of parents who are being told by the media and by medical associations that what makes you a good parent is being so deeply attuned to the needs of your child that before they can even speak, you can see that they're actually a member of a non-binary class.
00:16:08.000That they are actually a member of another sex.
00:16:10.000And the best thing that you can do is not voice the expectations of society on them.
00:16:14.000Instead, voice the expectations of a left-wing social agenda on them.
00:16:18.000Instead, pretend that gender is completely a social construct, but transgenderism is not a social construct in any way, shape, or form.
00:16:24.000This thing that's been invented over the course of the last 20 years.
00:16:26.000I'm not talking about gender dysphoria, which is an actual condition.
00:16:28.000I'm talking about the broad, widespread, societal creation of a phenomenon known as transgenderism, where a man without any sort of persistent gender dysphoria can simply declare he is a woman, and we immediately start using his pronouns and treating him as a woman.
00:16:41.000Pretending this, adherence to this, makes you the most sensitive, the most gracious, the most independent-minded parent ever, the most sympathetic parent.
00:16:51.000And then you wonder why parents are doing this to their kids.
00:16:55.000If you don't, then the left will come after you.
00:16:58.000There's an amazing story from Luke Rosiak over at Daily Wire.
00:17:00.000This is precisely, I would assume, the kind of story that the left doesn't want reported.
00:17:05.000The story is about this big walkout at Virginia schools over Virginia's transgender policy.
00:17:10.000Now, lest you forget, the transgender policy in Virginia is that you cannot socially transition children at school without telling their parents.
00:17:18.000If Bobby comes to school and says, I want to be called Jane, it used to be in Virginia that everyone at school could start calling him Jane, treating him as a girl and never tell mom and dad.
00:17:28.000So the new governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, he came in, he changed that policy.
00:17:32.000He says, kids, parents have to be involved in the care of their children.
00:17:38.000Maybe a thousand students, a couple thousand students, which, you know, is it across a dozen schools or a hundred schools, however many schools it was.
00:17:46.000It was 12,000 people walked out of class across presumably hundreds of schools.
00:17:51.000Those are numbers, but they're not unbelievable.
00:17:54.000Number's big enough to get media attention.
00:17:56.000So what is the- One of the groups behind the walkout is a Virginia pro-trans group with Democratic ties.
00:18:02.000And it's saying that it will help gender-confused students leave their families and re-home them with new queer-friendly guardians instead, according to eternal materials obtained by the Daily Wire.
00:18:11.000The Pride Liberation Project, which also says it can give money to students who run away and hide from their parents.
00:18:16.000garnered a glowing headline September 27th, when it organized 12,000 high schoolers to walk out of class to protest a draft policy saying schools should not hide a student's gender transition from parents.
00:18:25.000Though billed as an organic group of high schoolers, taking the lead in the materials was Aryan Rawal, a college student who worked for a Virginia Democratic state lawmaker.
00:18:32.000Materials from the group's internal message board show its plans go much further than a walkout, and resources for Outed Students Channel, created by Rawal, said the group would help children run away from their parents and arrange for them to be placed with new queer-friendly guardians.
00:18:46.000I mean, technically speaking, in any other context, we'd call that kidnapping.
00:18:49.000If you're an adult and you're encouraging a child to run away and house themselves with another adult, typically that would fall under the rubric of kidnapping, at least colloquially speaking.
00:18:59.000It's good because the parents are the bigots.
00:19:01.000If parents say to their kid, you know, honey, you may be confused.
00:19:04.000You may want to think this one through before you start the Gender non-conforming hormones?
00:19:10.000And start preparing to have your penis cut off?
00:19:13.000If a parent says that, we need to rehouse that kid immediately.
00:19:16.000We need to put them with a different set of queer-friendly parents.
00:19:20.000According to Raul, quote, we're creating this channel as a way for everyone to understand the mutual aid and support resources the PLP has available for outed and in-crisis students.
00:19:27.000For full transparency, this channel is catered to outed students who are facing familial rejection or need to leave their home for another reason.
00:19:35.000Well, that's a pretty broad carve out there.
00:19:37.000Need to leave their home for another reason?
00:19:56.000You might be housed with a, don't worry that you're being housed with a, with a group of adults who are specifically opening their home just to kids who are running away from their parents because they have been indoctrinated into this cult of gender identity.
00:20:09.000That's for, you know, that is bad news, but the real bad news, that's not really bad news, according to the bad news, they might be white.
00:20:17.000You as a parent, you're thinking about this and you're thinking, wow, the thing about that, that person who's housing my child and trying to indoctrinate them into an insane ideology is that they're taking my literal child and putting them in their house and trying to indoctrinate them in a cultish, faddish ideology that will ruin their life.
00:20:32.000But for the left, the big issue is that this person might be white.
00:20:36.000Quote, We may not be able to provide you that housing the same night, but we anticipate we can secure someone to take you in within one to two days.
00:20:42.000We'll work with other supportive adult organizations in the region to find you someone who can provide you a kind and affirming home.
00:20:48.000The group raises money using the Democratic platform, ActBlue.
00:20:52.000They also offer to pay for Ubers, Lyfts, and other passes if they need to leave immediately.
00:20:59.000By the way, it also promised to falsify documentation to hide a minor's activities from their parents.
00:21:03.000There is a section titled covers alibi that says, quote, if you attend an event or protest, we can work with you to craft a valid non-queer reason for you to have been there.
00:21:10.000Sometimes this may be a bit challenging, but we can use official sounding non-queer related email addresses, email addresses from prestigious universities and other resources.
00:21:18.000So we can help you cover up what exactly your parents don't know.
00:21:23.000Okay, if this is not a danger to children, I don't know what's a danger to children.
00:21:28.000But don't worry, these are the people who care about your kids, and anybody who points this out is the real danger at this point.
00:21:33.000We'll get to more on all of this in just one second.
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00:23:51.000Again, all of this suggests the ascendancy of an intolerant, terrible left-wing culture That refuses the possibility of any dissent, right?
00:24:01.000If you're a parent and you descend from radical gender ideology, maybe your kids should run away from you.
00:24:05.000Or maybe, in the end, we should be like Canada.
00:24:07.000We should consider actually removing your kid from your home using child protective services.
00:24:10.000If you are a reporter on these issues and you just repeat their words, then presumably Big Tech should ban you and the Attorney General of the United States should investigate you.
00:24:18.000And what's more, if you fail to go to a movie promoted by members of the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign, happy face emoji, pound sign, hashtag symbol, carrot sign, tilde, little squiggly thing that goes over the Spanish letters, if you fail to go to a movie that is made By people who are ensconced in that agenda.
00:24:40.000In fact, the entire agenda of the movie is that.
00:24:54.000And this is why it is apparently headline news that the movie Bros has now died at the box office.
00:25:00.000So Bros is supposed to be a groundbreaking film.
00:25:03.000And again, I've talked about this before, that there is there's something I call face tattoo phenomenon, which is where You know, you walk into the Starbucks.
00:28:41.000Um, does that seem like a thing that you'd like to see?
00:28:45.000Does that, like, I didn't even play you the whole trailer.
00:28:47.000I just played you like a little bit of it.
00:28:48.000Is that, is that something that you are desperate to see?
00:28:50.000Are you like rushing out to see that right now?
00:28:52.000So, um, I can give you a few reasons why people did not see this movie.
00:28:55.000One, what was the, I just want to know what the elevator pitch for this movie was.
00:28:58.000Seriously, what was the elevator pitch where they're like, people are going to be dying to see This romcom.
00:29:02.000I'm just going to read you a few details.
00:29:04.000I will fully admit I have not seen the movie.
00:29:06.000I have no intention of seeing the movie, just like apparently every other human being in the United States, with the exception of Billy Eichner's immediate friend circle.
00:29:12.000So I'm just going to read you a review from somebody who has seen the movie because Kyle Smith apparently was forced to see the movie for the Wall Street Journal because he gets paid to actually review these things.
00:29:19.000So here is what he writes about the film.
00:29:22.000He says, Mr. Eichner, who stars as Bobby, a New York podcaster who's starting what he calls the first LGBT plus history museum, has a lot of thoughts to get off his chest, most of them dyspeptic, about both gay life and perceptions of it.
00:29:32.000Near the start of the movie, Bobby says that the catchphrase love is love is a lie, that gay people were forced to deploy it in order to win equal treatment.
00:29:39.000In reality, he contends, gay sex and relationships differ greatly from heterosexual norms.
00:29:43.000Mr. Eichner then sets out to prove that thesis.
00:29:45.000But by the way, I think that he's actually correct about this, right?
00:29:50.000Pretending that gay relationships are like male-female straight monogamous relationships as a typical matter is not true.
00:29:57.000So him proving that, the problem is not, people don't generally want to watch that.
00:30:01.000It happens to be the case that the best way to sell a monogamous gay relationship is as the same as a male-female relationship in nearly all respects except one of the persons is of the same sex as the other person.
00:30:12.000But when you kind of turn over that rock, and it turns out that Billy Eichner's sex life is like gay orgies, and that's what everybody was fighting for, that people were like... Okay, so.
00:30:24.000And it turns out that's what the movie is.
00:30:26.000The culture of gay men, as Mr. Eichner and Mr. Stoller depict it, is one in which wild dance parties, drugs, and the availability of random internet hookups forestall emotional bonds.
00:30:34.000Bobby prides himself on never seeking any kind of lasting attachment to any of the men he sleeps with.
00:30:38.000So does the guy who catches his eye at a rave, the mild-mannered lawyer Aaron, a genial Luke McFarlane.
00:30:42.000As loud, pushy, and neurotic as Bobby is, Aaron is cool, confident, and poised.
00:31:48.000Do they get married and do they have kids?
00:31:50.000This is the unspoken stakes of every rom-com ever, is will the male and female fall in love and then form a family?
00:31:55.000Because it turns out all of society rests on the formation of male-female family units and pair bonding and the creation of children and raising of them.
00:32:02.000That's the stakes of rom-coms, which is why rom-coms typically feature young, Marriageable age and childbearing age people.
00:32:10.000There are a few rom-coms like really old people, but those are not the ones that most rom-coms are about, right?
00:32:15.000Most rom-coms are like Sandy Bullock at the age of 30 and Bill Pullman at the age of 32 and they're falling in love, right?
00:32:38.000So, I wonder, I mean, so again, elevator pitch was gay dudes having a lot of promiscuous sex, maybe they'll do it with not other gay dudes, but just with each other for like a few months.
00:32:50.000Also, just to note here, romcoms, straight men don't like them.
00:32:55.000Straight men have to be dragged to romcoms by their girlfriends or wives.
00:32:58.000There are zero straight men in the history of humanity who have ever been on like a Friday night.
00:33:37.000It turns out that that I know that failing the Bechdel test is actually not a it's not a good strategy for bringing in audiences to the romcom, right?
00:33:58.000Women want to see women fall in love with men in a romcom.
00:34:01.000That is what, since Pride and Prejudice, this has been the case.
00:34:04.000So the pitch was, what if we do a romcom, which dudes don't want to see, So, and also women won't want to see it because it's two dudes banging each other.
00:34:24.000And then, when it fails, predictably, because the trailer looks bad, because the topic is not something that is wildly interesting to either straight men or women, generally, lesbian or straight, the and then it dies on the butt.
00:34:40.000The answer is because you're a bigot, because you're a bigot.
00:34:45.000So by the way, the funniest thing about Billy Eichner calling everybody a bigot is that he actively alienated all possible audiences for his film.
00:35:11.000Probably it's a way for him to, you know, mainstream his ideas of love.
00:35:16.000And then somebody else recently and a couple of days ago tweeted about how there were some booze in the theater for his for his crap trailer and he tweeted out amazing thank you for shouting back i'm hearing stories like this about the bros trailer in theaters so let me just say those people we didn't make bros for them we made it for smart people with good taste excited to be releasing it in the middle of a culture war uh you lost I mean, you shouldn't declare a culture war and then just get destroyed, which is exactly what happened.
00:35:46.000Because again, not because people are bigots, but because you have chosen to run directly into the teeth of pretty much All movie-going publics ever?
00:35:54.000And also into the teeth of what most people consider to be decent values.
00:37:34.000But he says, it's because you're a bigot, right?
00:37:36.000That's just the world we live in, unfortunately.
00:37:38.000Even with glowing reviews, great Rotten Tomatoes scores, an A Cinema score, etc., straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn't show up for bros.
00:37:45.000And that's disappointing, but it is what it is.
00:38:03.000And it is special and uniquely powerful to see this particular story on a big screen, especially for queer folks who don't get this opportunity often.
00:38:14.000So, uh, I'm sorry that your movie failed.
00:38:18.000I'm not really sorry your movie failed, actually.
00:38:20.000I think that it is a sign of the health of the Republic that your garbage movie, which apparently promotes promiscuity punctuated by small periods of monogamy, did poorly.
00:38:31.000But it is just indicative of the intolerance of a value system that declares itself the most tolerant value system on the block.
00:38:40.000One final note on this topic, because this tweet just cannot be ignored.
00:38:43.000So Lena Dunham, who I've been reliably informed is still a human, and also did a show, which I've been told starred Billy Eichner in it, right?
00:38:55.000Okay, so Lena Dunham, she tweeted out with no apparent sense of irony, quote, When I go, I want my casket to be driven through the New York City Pride Parade with a plaque that reads, quote, She wasn't for everyone, but she was for us.
00:39:20.000Declaring herself a gay hero and saying that she wants her casket driven through a pride parade because she's just, she's declaring herself this way.
00:39:34.000Well, sadly for Billy Eichner, there weren't enough Lena Dunham's on planet Earth to make his film a success.
00:39:41.000And so we weep a final tear for a film that is bombing on the level of Ishtar.
00:39:46.000In just a second, we are going to get to the latest in Ukraine, where Elon Musk is now in a bleep fight with the Ukrainian government.
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00:41:44.000Meanwhile, As the Russian government fails in Ukraine to consolidate any of its gains, they annexed all of these areas and now they can't even defend any of these areas.
00:41:56.000We talked about this pretty substantially yesterday on the show.
00:41:58.000The risk continues to rise because Vladimir Putin is being boxed in.
00:42:01.000And at a certain point, there are only a few possibilities.
00:42:03.000One, Vladimir Putin goes, best case scenario, Vladimir Putin, he gets the message, he leaves Ukraine entirely, and then he just sort of sits around, everything's okay.
00:42:13.000Or do you think he's going to do exactly what Stalin did when he was losing the Winter War in Finland in 1940 and dump hundreds of thousands of troops back in there in a mass offensive?
00:42:22.000Or, worst case scenario, do you think that he maybe fires off a tactical nuclear weapon?
00:42:26.000on the battlefield in Ukraine. That's a possibility too. By the way, it is worth noting here that even if Vladimir Putin were to leave Ukraine and his regime were to destabilize, the people who are likely to take over are not going to be democracy-minded liberal people. It's not going to be Navalny taking over Russia. The people who are all surrounding Putin are maybe harder core than even Putin is. We're talking about people like Shoigu, who's the current head of the military.
00:42:49.000We're talking about his spy chief over at the FSB.
00:42:51.000The people who are surrounding Putin are the most likely people to plant a knife between Putin's shoulder blades or defenestrate him by chucking him out a third story window like he does to most of his enemies.
00:42:59.000Those people are not anybody's best friends either.
00:43:02.000So there are not a lot of great outcomes here, all of which prompted Elon Musk to put out a tweet regarding what should happen next in Ukraine.
00:43:11.000So what he tweeted out was four suggestions under the heading Ukraine-Russia peace.
00:43:53.000There's a poll with the answers yes or no.
00:43:55.000No was winning, pretty substantially, and Musk thinks that that is because of bot attacks.
00:44:00.000But, he says, quote, this is highly likely to be the outcome in the end, just a question of how many died before then.
00:44:05.000It's also worth noting that a possible, albeit unlikely, outcome from this conflict is nuclear war.
00:44:08.000And so, what he is saying here is not wildly out of the box.
00:44:11.000Henry Kissinger has said something very, very similar.
00:44:13.000A lot of I've said stuff that's similar about there needs to be some sort of off ramp here because if you're looking to avoid the worst case scenario, which would be the firing of a tactical nuclear weapon, which wouldn't necessitate as General David Petraeus suggested, like mass NATO bombing of Russian assets, which means direct war between NATO and Russia, which increases the likelihood of use of a tactical nuclear weapon.
00:44:47.000This thing could spiral out of control.
00:44:48.000Now, it's possible it's all a big bluff.
00:44:50.000It's possible that Putin is just bluffing.
00:44:52.000It's also possible that the most likely scenario here is that the West acts like it cares about this topic.
00:44:58.000And then by this time next year, they've started to wind down the funding.
00:45:01.000Russia has started to reconsolidate some of its gains in Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea.
00:45:05.000And they end up claiming that territory anyway, just with a lot more dead people.
00:45:09.000Hey, there are a lot of options here that are on the table.
00:45:12.000But what Musk is suggesting here is not totally crazy.
00:45:15.000And it is worth noting here that Elon Musk also put Starlink over Ukraine to ensure that people in Ukraine actually have internet access in the middle of this at a cost of about $80 million to himself.
00:45:25.000As he tweeted, we gave Starlink to Ukraine and lost $80 million in doing so while putting SpaceX and myself at serious risk of Russian cyber attack.
00:45:32.000Okay, but you are not allowed to say this.
00:45:34.000To even suggest that maybe there needs to be a negotiated solution to this thing is a real problem.
00:45:40.000So, for example, you had the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany responding directly to Elon Musk by basically suggesting that he F off.
00:45:59.000I mean, this is like the people of Finland 1939-1940 saying we are not going to do a negotiated settlement.
00:46:04.000But the question is whether there are a lot of other options in Ukraine.
00:46:09.000And, again, unless the West is willing to go all out here, which is a point that Neil Ferguson, the historian, has made, that the West is not just going to have to shore up Ukraine on a military level, they're going to have to shore them up on an economic level.
00:46:20.000They're going to have to make them a ward of the West for the foreseeable future, unless they're willing to really escalate this thing in terms of the weaponry being provided to Ukraine, and in terms of the economic aid being provided to Ukraine.
00:46:30.000Well, then the likelihood is that Russia freezes out Europe during the winter, gradually over time, interest in this thing wanes, and Russia reconsolidates a lot of ground.
00:46:39.000Being realistic about this thing does not mean that you're anti-Ukraine.
00:46:42.000I'm very much pro funding Ukraine to fight Russia.
00:46:45.000All I'm saying is that we have to be realistic about how far we're willing to go.
00:46:49.000The West has a very nasty habit of over committing verbally and then not actually fulfilling those commitments.
00:46:53.000Just ask the people of Afghanistan who right now are suffering from mass starvation and complete subjugation at the hands of the Taliban.
00:47:00.000Speaking of which, by the way, Joe Biden, right?
00:47:03.000He apparently just left a bunch of Afghan interpreters behind.
00:47:15.000If, however, it is a long-term commitment, the United States does not have the appetite for that sort of stuff.
00:47:20.000The United States does not have the appetite for long-term war.
00:47:23.000This is why, according to the LA Times, During the last 12 years, one Afghan interpreter worked as an interpreter for U.S.
00:47:31.000government contractors training Afghan National Police and Army forces to do his job.
00:47:35.000But this interpreter failed a counterintelligence screening after mixing up the Western and Afghan calendars when telling an agent the date of a work trip in Pakistan.
00:47:41.000As a result, this guy was fired and his application for a U.S.
00:47:44.000visa was denied in 2021, just a few months before the remaining U.S.
00:47:47.000troops left his country as the Taliban took power.
00:47:51.000The rapid and disorganized exit from Afghanistan a year ago left many people in danger under Taliban rule.
00:47:55.000Among them are interpreters like this one guy who apparently referred to themselves as blacklisted and said they were unjustly barred from getting visas promised to Afghans who helped the U.S.
00:48:05.000advocacy groups such as the International Refugee Assistance Project say thousands have been affected.
00:48:10.000The State Department declines to comment on all individual cases.
00:48:13.000But again, this just reminds you that we did actually leave hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan in our rush to get out.
00:48:19.000One of the things that the West must be very careful of is do not overpromise.
00:48:23.000If you're going to make a promise, deliver on the promise.
00:48:26.000And again, you can do that in the short term with an actual off-ramp.
00:48:29.000If there is no off-ramp ever, we can pretend that we're going to keep doing this forever.
00:48:33.000But the realistic history of the United States on foreign policy shows we will not.
00:48:37.000Ask the people of Kurdish areas of Iraq.
00:48:45.000All over the world, there are people who have allied themselves with the United States on the assumption that the United States would give open-ended guarantees of their security.
00:48:52.000And over and over and over, the United States public gets tired of that sort of stuff and withdraws.
00:48:57.000And so, before the same happens in Ukraine, it might be worthwhile trying to get to some form of settlement that actually looks not like nuclear war.
00:49:04.000Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
00:49:06.000We'll be back here with much, much more after Yom Kippur.