The Ben Shapiro Show - July 28, 2026


This Woke Journalist Just TRASHED The Odyssey


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

198.17

Word count

1,952

Sentence count

121


Transcript

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00:00:00.000 It turns out that taxpayers are now funding what they call My Gender Dolls at the National Center for Gender Spectrum Health at the University of Minnesota.
00:00:11.000 These dolls have swappable genitals because it's just as easy as that.
00:00:16.000 That's how transgenderism works.
00:00:17.000 We just swap some in and we swap some out, and there's no major problems that occur.
00:00:23.000 You get to fund this if you're a taxpayer in Minnesota.
00:00:24.000 So congrats to you.
00:00:26.000 Here's some of the images My Gender Dolls.
00:00:29.000 These dolls were designed for transgender and gender diverse artists.
00:00:33.000 They are intended to be a therapeutic tool for transgender and gender diverse kids to explore how they see themselves or how they'd like to see themselves in terms of gender identity and gender expression.
00:00:45.000 The My Gender dolls are made up of multiple layers, and the first of these are the bodies.
00:00:50.000 Because all kids should be able to see themselves represented, we have lots of different options for skin tones and body sizes.
00:00:57.000 Along with the choice of bodies, the My Gender dolls also include genitals.
00:01:03.000 Because kids can learn that all gender identities and gender expressions are valid no matter how your body looks.
00:01:09.000 There are lots of different ways to be a girl, a boy, or anywhere along a gender spectrum.
00:01:16.000 You get to pay for this in Minnesota.
00:01:17.000 You.
00:01:19.000 Oh, how future civilizations will look at us and they're not going to wonder how we destroyed ourselves.
00:01:23.000 They really are not.
00:01:24.000 Any civilization this stupid is cruising for a bruising, obviously.
00:01:28.000 And the stupidity has extended throughout the civilization in a wide variety of ways.
00:01:34.000 There's a story from the Wall Street Journal talking about how difficult singles have it.
00:01:38.000 Quote Carolyn Travis was smitten by a man she met in an entrepreneurship course.
00:01:41.000 It took a spreadsheet to realize the relationship was doomed.
00:01:44.000 After a few dates, the 27 year old debriefed her two best friends over lunch.
00:01:48.000 When she went to the bathroom, they got to work.
00:01:49.000 They plugged Travis's core values into an app one of the friends built to assess compatibility.
00:01:54.000 Then they entered everything they knew about her date, an engineer more than a decade her senior.
00:01:57.000 The spreadsheet crunched the numbers, and the result a portrait of incompatibility.
00:02:01.000 Her perspective shifted.
00:02:02.000 She saw him a few more times before breaking things off.
00:02:04.000 Now she uses the app called Spread to track all of her dating data.
00:02:08.000 Travis is among a cohort of spreadsheet singles or love hackers who believe data could hold the cure for their dating woes.
00:02:13.000 They say that dating apps that spit out an unlimited menu of potential partners make it too easy to miss obvious red flags.
00:02:19.000 Now, again, the idea of using data in order to determine whether your values are compatible with someone you didn't used to have to have a spreadsheet, you used to just have to have a brain, was really what it was about.
00:02:33.000 I will admit, by the way, a spreadsheet approach here is probably better than what most people are using, truly.
00:02:38.000 Most people right now are like, I'm using my gut, I'm in love with this person.
00:02:43.000 Sure, this person has 98 face tattoos and an earring that extends from ear to navel, but I can change him or her.
00:02:54.000 Okay, so listen, a spreadsheet, at least your prefrontal cortex is working enough to actually try to analyze the data.
00:03:00.000 But we used to have working prefrontal cortices in this country where you used to be able to actually tell the difference between your values and values that are not your values.
00:03:08.000 And the fact that we are now relegated to apps to try and do all of this, we have outsourced our basic thinking skills to an app.
00:03:14.000 Seems to me a bit of a problem, just societally speaking.
00:03:19.000 When you're running a business, it requires you to be an expert in about 20 different things hiring, sales, cash flow, compliance, marketing.
00:03:25.000 It's a never ending list.
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00:04:05.000 Again, that's supersure.comslash Shapiro.
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00:04:19.000 Obviously, there are a lot of people on the right who are trying to promote the idea that Christopher Nolan's Odyssey was going to be a giant box office fail.
00:04:26.000 I knew this was nonsense from the beginning.
00:04:27.000 It was never going to happen.
00:04:28.000 The movie was always going to be successful.
00:04:30.000 It was just a question of how good it was as to how successful it would be.
00:04:33.000 Well, it's week two returns were some of the highest returns in the history of the box office because it turns out the movie's really good, as I said.
00:04:40.000 And you can go watch my full review over at YouTube.
00:04:43.000 Well, there are some people on the right who've made, I think, some interesting critiques of the film and then some not so interesting critiques of the film.
00:04:49.000 But what's hilarious is that many of the critiques of the film on the right are now being mirrored by critiques on the left.
00:04:55.000 So, there's a woman named Emily Wilson.
00:04:57.000 Emily Wilson is the person who did sort of a woke translation of Homer, right?
00:05:02.000 Famously, she translated the opening line instead of, quote, sing in me, muse, and through me, tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, to tell me about a complicated man.
00:05:13.000 And there are a lot of critiques of her translation as being too simplistic and also being essentially left wing feminist.
00:05:22.000 Well, she hated the film.
00:05:23.000 She hated it.
00:05:25.000 And she hated it for many of the same reasons that, shall we say, the post liberal right.
00:05:29.000 Now, again, my own take on the film and the morality of the film is you could not make a version of the Odyssey that would be sympathetic to Odysseus under non Christian ethics without switching his character.
00:05:29.000 Hated it.
00:05:40.000 There was no way to do it.
00:05:42.000 Because in the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus goes and nails a lady on an island for 10 years while abandoning his wife.
00:05:48.000 You have to explain that somehow.
00:05:51.000 In the Odyssey, he goes around randomly killing scores of people.
00:05:54.000 And then when he goes back home, he hangs all the chambermaids.
00:05:57.000 See, he's not a great guy.
00:05:59.000 There's a reason that Dante had him in the eighth circle of hell.
00:06:01.000 So if you wanted to make The true to Homer version of the Odyssey, Odysseus is one of the worst people who has ever lived.
00:06:08.000 I mean, no one wasn't going to do that because no one's going to go see that.
00:06:12.000 So instead, he kind of used a Christian infused ethics.
00:06:17.000 Now, again, I'm not saying that he was sitting there with a New Testament when he came up with the plot.
00:06:20.000 I'm saying the same thing that the historian Tom Holland has said, which is that Western ethics is rooted in Christianity and therefore those ethics come through in the Odyssey.
00:06:29.000 Again, go watch my whole review.
00:06:30.000 But this is precisely what Emily Wilson is upset about.
00:06:34.000 So, there are a bunch of things she says here that are really, really funny.
00:06:41.000 She says, and it's a very, very long review, so we'll just read some of the hottest sections.
00:06:46.000 Quote The race neutral casting of Nolan's Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters, but there's nothing progressive about it.
00:06:52.000 Most of the non white actors, Zendaya, Lapita Nyango, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott, play versions of the black best friend whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist.
00:07:02.000 So, she's mad that the diverse casting.
00:07:05.000 Is in her view stereotypical because they're all just helping Odysseus and Penelope and Telemachus.
00:07:12.000 Quote, there are no gods, and yet shipwrecks and death are presented as the inevitable consequence of blinding the son of Poseidon and devouring the cattle of the sun.
00:07:19.000 Zeus's law is portrayed as being crucially important, and yet there is no Zeus.
00:07:23.000 No one's vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.
00:07:28.000 Ah.
00:07:29.000 Ah.
00:07:29.000 So, you know, again, what she wants is a more secular feminist version of the story and a more multicultural version of the story.
00:07:38.000 She says, Zeus's law is a version of archaic Greek Xenia, the idealized relationship between strangers, hosts, and guests who must treat each other with mutual respect, thereby forming multi generational bonds between unrelated families.
00:07:49.000 In the film, Xenia is filtered through contemporary American ideas about the importance of philanthropic charity.
00:07:54.000 Wealthy people should be gracious toward the poor and hungry in their midst without necessarily doing anything to mitigate their poverty.
00:07:59.000 So her problem is that Greek Xenia, she thinks, is better than the sort of American golden rule.
00:08:07.000 And she says, no one's odyssey, its narrative structure is gimmicky, the writing is abysmal, none of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words, there are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
00:08:20.000 There are no sex scenes and all the food looks horrible.
00:08:21.000 I wasn't aware that you go to a vision of the Odyssey and what you expected was the Food Network.
00:08:29.000 And of course, she says the most troubling ethical problem with No One's Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalizing the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people.
00:08:41.000 What a joy Emily Wilson must be at dinner parties.
00:08:43.000 My goodness.
00:08:46.000 And again, the idea is that the movie is not feminist enough.
00:08:51.000 That the sort of subtly Christian ethos of the thing is bad.
00:08:58.000 That essentially, you know, everybody is acting within American tradition, and that's a bad thing.
00:09:08.000 So, again, I think that it is sort of hilarious that many of her major critiques are critiques that are echoed by some of the people who are critiquing the film from these sort of post liberal rights.
00:09:19.000 Again, I'm not making the claim that Christopher Nolan's a conservative.
00:09:23.000 I'm making the claim that Christopher Nolan is basically an old style Democrat in all likelihood, who still believes in sort of some basic Western ideals.
00:09:33.000 And that it's infused into the movie in spite of significant problems with the movie, like, for example, the casting of Ellen Page.
00:09:42.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:09:44.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:09:45.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.