The Ben Shapiro Show - Trump’s Victory Tour Continues!

00:00:00.000 Alrighty, folks, we have a ton to get to today on the show.

00:00:02.000 We're going to bring you everything from the L.A. fires.

00:00:04.000 We are also going to be talking about the Jimmy Carter Memorial, at which Donald Trump obviously dominated the proceedings, plus a review of the worst movie I have seen in, I don't know, five years.

00:00:17.000 It is also being touted as the probable Academy Award Best Picture winner.

00:00:21.000 We'll get to all that.

00:00:22.000 First, a reminder, all of us here at The Daily Wire will be live as DW goes to D.C. for the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

00:00:29.000 Watch live and join the fight at dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:00:33.000 All right, so the latest in Los Angeles, the death toll has now risen to 10. After three days of raging wildfires, according to the Wall Street Journal, at least five infernos were burning simultaneously around Los Angeles, engulfing entire neighborhoods, destroying more than 10,000 structures, upending daily life in a historic disaster.

00:00:50.000 You're talking about tens of thousands of acres that have been burned.

00:00:53.000 You're talking about thousands of structures that have been burned as well.

00:00:56.000 We are now starting to learn.

00:00:58.000 That at least one of these fires was almost certainly arson.

00:01:01.000 It would be shocking if many of these fires weren't arson, actually, because one of the problems when you have a big wildfire like this in California is that very often you end up with copycats who then want to see what happens if you light a fire in the middle of high winds.

00:01:15.000 And so, obviously, you're talking about massive, massive damage.

00:01:19.000 Economic losses from the blazes, according to the Wall Street Journal, have been estimated in the tens of billions.

00:01:24.000 Tens of thousands of people have been displaced.

00:01:27.000 200,000 people are without power across the wider Los Angeles area.

00:01:32.000 Almost 400,000 people were under mandatory evacuation orders, according to Robert Fenton Jr., regional administrator at FEMA. Pacific Palisades has essentially been burned to the ground.

00:01:43.000 Fire has destroyed or damaged some 5,300 homes, businesses, and other buildings.

00:01:49.000 The footage from above is absolutely shocking.

00:01:52.000 Fox News' Jonathan Hunt was on the ground describing flattened LA neighborhoods that he says resemble bombed-out World War II cities.

00:01:59.000 We're seeing a very different day to yesterday.

00:02:01.000 Yesterday was a day of terror.

00:02:03.000 It was a day of fighting.

00:02:04.000 It was a day of struggling simply to survive for many people.

00:02:09.000 Today is more...

00:02:10.000 A day of reckoning and a day of recognition of exactly what this fire did.

00:02:15.000 And as you take a look at this one home in the heart of the Pacific Palisades, that is the end result for hundreds and hundreds of homes.

00:02:25.000 It really is quite breathtaking when you look at this and you look at entire neighborhoods that have gone.

00:02:31.000 I think when people say It's like a war zone.

00:02:35.000 It's a terrible comparison.

00:02:36.000 There is nothing like a war zone other than a war zone, having been to a few of those.

00:02:40.000 But when you look at the pictures and the aerial pictures that I know you've seen of some of the neighborhoods here, it does remind me of some of those pictures from World War II and English cities during the Blitz.

00:02:53.000 Completely and utterly flattened.

00:02:56.000 Thursday afternoon, there was yet another fire that broke out in the West Hills neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley.

00:03:01.000 This one almost certainly was arson.

00:03:03.000 It quickly grew to nearly 1,000 acres.

00:03:05.000 New evacuation orders and warnings were issued.

00:03:08.000 The wind conditions remained very problematic.

00:03:10.000 One of the big issues here is that even after all of this is over, even after these fires have been contained, it's going to be hell to rebuild all of this stuff.

00:03:18.000 Many of these homes were not fully insured because it turns out it's difficult to actually get fire insurance in California and in Los Angeles in particular, thanks to regulatory hurdles and thanks to cost of insurance.

00:03:30.000 The rebuilding of these homes, particularly in places like Malibu, Pacific Palisades, that's going to get tangled up in red tape for years because this is how California does development.

00:03:39.000 You're going to have years-long efforts to rebuild these homes that are tangled up in all the environmentalist bureaucracy that prevents you from building an additional bedroom in your home in Malibu.

00:03:50.000 So all those people who vote Democrat and live in Malibu, they're about to find out the hard way what it means when you actually have to work through all of the bureaucracy.

00:03:59.000 That has hampered the daily life of Californians for years.

00:04:04.000 FEMA Administrator Deanna Criswell says, we know it's going to take a long time to get the debris out.

00:04:07.000 We know this recovery is going to be complicated, but it is doable.

00:04:10.000 Karen Bass is suggesting that she's going to try to clear red tape to aggressively rebuild affected areas.

00:04:15.000 But again, how much that's going to be followed as time goes on is anybody's guess.

00:04:21.000 Some of the estimates right now suggest the LA wildfire.

00:04:24.000 Would be the costliest in American history.

00:04:26.000 One JP Morgan analyst has estimated total economic losses at close to $50 billion.

00:04:32.000 Huge, huge, insane numbers, obviously.

00:04:37.000 And people who live in California are apoplectic.

00:04:40.000 I mean, it's for reasons like this.

00:04:42.000 The poor running of the state.

00:04:44.000 That I left the state.

00:04:45.000 That we took our business, The Daily Wire, with us.

00:04:47.000 That we took tens, dozens of employees, almost 100 employees from California.

00:04:50.000 That I moved my family from California.

00:04:52.000 That my in-laws moved from California.

00:04:53.000 That my parents moved from California.

00:04:55.000 The mismanagement in California is dramatic.

00:04:58.000 And it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican in California today.

00:05:02.000 There's only one party that has been running this state for decades at this point.

00:05:06.000 And so if you don't like the way public policy is being done, there's only one party you get to point at.

00:05:11.000 This is a point that's being made by Anna Kasparian over at the Young Turks.

00:05:15.000 She tweeted out, California, and especially LA, is controlled by Democrats.

00:05:19.000 They are responsible.

00:05:20.000 No more passing the buck.

00:05:21.000 Our mayor, who was in Ghana as fires exploded in our city, cut the fire budget by $17 million. 0.99

00:05:26.000 Endless amounts of money funneled to bleep, scammer, homeless nonprofits.

00:05:29.000 We're the highest taxed, yet we have encampments and squalor everywhere.

00:05:33.000 Even worse, we don't have enough firefighters to respond to the absolute disaster we're experiencing right now.

00:05:37.000 Rather than conserve the record rain we got last year, we just rained it into the ocean.

00:05:40.000 We're a failing city run by a sick excuse for local government.

00:05:43.000 You want to radicalize people against the modern Democratic Party?

00:05:46.000 Send them to L.A. Again, I'm friendly with Anna Kasparian.

00:05:50.000 Anna's honest.

00:05:51.000 That is a correct take.

00:05:53.000 This is being mirrored, obviously, by people who are native Californians, ranging from Mel Gibson, who lost one of his homes in California to the wildfires, to Joe Rogan, who, of course, used to operate out of California before he moved his offices to Austin, Texas.

00:06:10.000 Here are Rogan and Mel Gibson going after Gavin Newsom, the grease-haired governor of California.

00:06:15.000 We were just talking about the wildfire situation and how crazy it is that they spent $24 billion last year on the homeless.

00:06:25.000 Yeah.

00:06:25.000 And what do they spend on preventing these wildfires?

00:06:29.000 Zero.

00:06:30.000 Zip.

00:06:31.000 Zip.

00:06:31.000 And in 2019, I think Newsom said, you know, I'm going to take care of the forest and maintain the forest and do all that kind of stuff.

00:06:37.000 He didn't do anything.

00:06:38.000 Didn't do anything.

00:06:38.000 And then on top of that, they cut the water off.

00:06:41.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:06:41.000 Yeah.

00:06:42.000 It's all funny.

00:06:42.000 And then I think all our tax dollars probably went for Gavin's hair gel.

00:06:46.000 I don't know, but it's like, you know, it's sad.

00:06:49.000 It's like the place is just on fire.

00:06:51.000 Well, the whole state is just so poorly managed.

00:06:54.000 It's so frustrating and confusing.

00:06:57.000 And then he gets on TV and pretends like everything's great.

00:07:01.000 California is the best.

00:07:02.000 We have the best state.

00:07:03.000 We have the most amazing economy.

00:07:05.000 You're out of your mind, dude.

00:07:07.000 You've ruined this state. 0.98

00:07:08.000 You personally ruined it.

00:07:10.000 Well, it's the same team that was up in San Francisco.

00:07:13.000 They came down to L.A. and they're doing what they did in San Francisco.

00:07:16.000 San Francisco is kind of like apocalyptic now.

00:07:19.000 It's true.

00:07:20.000 All of this is true.

00:07:22.000 As the editors at the Free Press put it this morning, California loves to spend increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money consistently chases after bad.

00:07:29.000 Newsom has spent some $22 billion to combat homelessness since he took office, and yet there's been a 3% increase in homelessness in the past year.

00:07:37.000 Newsom made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants.

00:07:41.000 This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.

00:07:47.000 The city of Los Angeles allocated $1.3 billion to combat homelessness last year.

00:07:51.000 Although the city comptroller found half the money has gone unspent.

00:07:55.000 The LA Fire Department got a good deal less than that.

00:07:57.000 $837 million, a budget that has since been cut by $17 million.

00:08:02.000 And by the way, it's not just a matter of that.

00:08:04.000 It's who you staff at these places.

00:08:06.000 It's who you staff at these places.

00:08:08.000 In what has to be one of the most insane clips I have ever seen, under any circumstances, there's a clip that was being passed around X yesterday, of the LA Fire Department Assistant Chief, a woman named... 0.85

00:08:21.000 Christine Larson, who is a large LGBTQ plus woman, and she is answering the question as to what she would say to someone who says, you don't have the physical capacity to carry my husband out of a burning building.

00:08:37.000 Here's what she says.

00:08:40.000 You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it's a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you.

00:08:47.000 It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better.

00:08:52.000 Is she strong enough to do this?

00:08:54.000 Or you couldn't carry my husband out of a fire?

00:08:56.000 Which my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.

00:09:01.000 What the actual F? That is the most insane. 0.75

00:09:05.000 They put that out as a promo.

00:09:07.000 That is the most insane thing I have ever seen.

00:09:10.000 Like, truly, one of the most insane things I have ever seen right there.

00:09:13.000 This person is the assistant chief of the LA Fire Department, saying openly, being asked, can you carry my husband out of...

00:09:22.000 Now, the proper answer would be, I can do anything a man can do.

00:09:25.000 But this person is too honest, this Christine Larson.

00:09:28.000 Instead, she says, well, my first question would be, he put himself there in the first place, didn't he?

00:09:36.000 Excuse me?

00:09:37.000 You are literally a firefighter.

00:09:38.000 It is your job to carry people out of burning buildings.

00:09:41.000 Not to blame her.

00:09:43.000 Her whole shtick there is you need to have sympathy for the people who are in the midst of a tragic situation like a fire, which is why you need people who look like you. 0.81

00:09:50.000 A dumb argument, but at least an argument that lives somewhere in the general vicinity of rationality.

00:09:57.000 But the same person who's saying empathy, empathy, is saying if there's a dude who's, say, in a wheelchair and couldn't get out. 0.98

00:10:04.000 And I cannot get him out.

00:10:05.000 Well, it's his own fault he put himself there.

00:10:08.000 The left-wing argument, which is, if it's my responsibility, it's your fault, it applies across the board.

00:10:15.000 Carrying that man out of that building is her responsibility, but it's your fault.

00:10:20.000 Well, perhaps you feel unprotected by, you know, law enforcement and the people who are supposed to protect you after listening to that LA Fire Department Assistant Chief.

00:10:29.000 I mean, I feel less protected.

00:10:31.000 But here's the thing.

00:10:31.000 Going online unprotected is like leaving your door unlocked when you leave your house.

00:10:35.000 Maybe you trust some of your neighbors.

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00:12:17.000 Hey, the same thing, by the way, is true for the left when it comes to criminality.

00:12:37.000 It is your responsibility not to commit a crime.

00:12:40.000 But...

00:12:40.000 If you do commit a crime, it's probably somebody else's fault.

00:12:44.000 Because in the end, for the left, responsibility must be destroyed.

00:12:48.000 Responsibility must be destroyed in the name of a better society.

00:12:52.000 And if everything burns down, I suppose everything burns down.

00:12:56.000 That woman, by the way, is the head, I believe, of the DEI department of the LA Fire Department, allegedly making somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000 a year in taxpayer money.

00:13:07.000 But what's going wrong in LA, they asked.

00:13:09.000 This is so crazy.

00:13:10.000 That's so crazy and evil, by the way.

00:13:12.000 That is an evil statement. 0.87

00:13:14.000 It is evil to say, can you carry this man out of the burning building?

00:13:19.000 Literally your job.

00:13:21.000 I'm sorry, did he get himself put there?

00:13:23.000 Well, it's his fault he's there. 0.94

00:13:25.000 The hell is wrong with you, people. 0.99

00:13:28.000 The hell is wrong with you. 1.00

00:13:29.000 Seriously. 0.92

00:13:30.000 If this is how you choose to run the system, then that's on you, I suppose. 0.99

00:13:36.000 Perhaps this should be a wake-up call to people voting for this kind of trash. 0.97

00:13:39.000 In the face of actual real life. 0.97

00:13:43.000 Adam Carolla went off on all of this yesterday, my friend Adam Carolla.

00:13:47.000 Here he was going off on California and LA City governance.

00:13:51.000 You guys all voted for Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles.

00:13:55.000 You all voted for Gavin Newsom.

00:13:56.000 And now you get what you get.

00:13:59.000 Oh, now that your house is on fire.

00:14:01.000 Well, now you're thinking about something else.

00:14:04.000 Now you want to know what's going on.

00:14:06.000 What's going on around here?

00:14:07.000 All these people.

00:14:09.000 Who are deep blue Democrats are now going to have to pull a permit to rebuild.

00:14:16.000 And when they start running into the bureaucracy and the red tape, they're going to start going nuts and they're going to vote for Rick Caruso next time because they want to get...

00:14:24.000 That's all Trump says.

00:14:25.000 We're going to pull back the regulations.

00:14:27.000 By the way, this is correct. 0.97

00:14:30.000 Democrats govern these places like trash, which is why people leave. 0.98

00:14:35.000 And it's all fun and games until their house is on fire. 0.98

00:14:37.000 And then it ain't fun and games.

00:14:39.000 Meanwhile, the LA mayor, Karen Bass, she was calling for unity.

00:14:44.000 There's always the move when you've done an awful job.

00:14:46.000 Here is Karen Bass, the LA mayor, and it is amazing.

00:14:49.000 This person was nearly picked as vice president of the United States by Joe Biden in 2020. That's how bad the Democratic Party is.

00:14:56.000 Here she is calling for unity.

00:14:59.000 Thank you, supervisor.

00:15:03.000 One voice.

00:15:04.000 That is the way we speak and that is the way we stand here united.

00:15:09.000 Los Angeles will stand united and stand strong.

00:15:13.000 Well, I mean, I feel better.

00:15:15.000 Don't you?

00:15:16.000 She was, in fact, confronted by a reporter seeking an explanation for what was going on.

00:15:20.000 And she got pretty tense about it.

00:15:24.000 My question to you is what explains this lack of preparation?

00:15:29.000 And rapid response.

00:15:31.000 Let me just say, first and foremost, my number one focus, and I think the focus of all of us here with one voice, is that we have to protect lives, we have to save lives, and we have to save homes.

00:15:45.000 Rest assured that...

00:15:48.000 But that did not happen.

00:15:48.000 Rest assured, let me finish.

00:15:50.000 Rest assured.

00:15:51.000 When that is done, when we are safe, when lives have been saved and homes have been saved, we will absolutely do an evaluation to look at what worked, what didn't work, and to correct or to hold accountable any body, department, individual, etc.

00:16:11.000 Unreal.

00:16:12.000 Unreal.

00:16:12.000 How about we screwed up?

00:16:14.000 Because clearly you did.

00:16:16.000 Clearly you did.

00:16:17.000 Now, speaking of one of the big screw-ups of our generation, Gavin Newsom, remember, Gavin Newsom was widely touted as a possible replacement for Joe Biden before they shoveled Kamala Harris in there to lose to Donald Trump.

00:16:27.000 Gavin Newsom was tripesing around Southern California, pretending to give a bleep about what was going on down there.

00:16:34.000 You know, I guess that his reservation at the French Laundry was later in the evening.

00:16:39.000 There he was, walking around, looking like a bad guy from a 1980s movie, which is his typical look, right?

00:16:43.000 He's got on like the...

00:16:44.000 The aviator shades and he's got his hair slicked back and all this kind of stuff.

00:16:48.000 And a woman who has lost her home rushes up to him and says, so what exactly is it that you would say you do here?

00:16:54.000 What is your policy?

00:16:57.000 Gavin Newsom then lies to her.

00:16:58.000 He says, I'm on the phone with Joe Biden.

00:17:00.000 And she's like, okay, put it on speaker.

00:17:02.000 And he's like, well, I mean, I'm not on the phone with Joe Biden.

00:17:06.000 Here's how this went for Gavin.

00:17:07.000 Like the idea that this person ever could have been president is insane.

00:17:10.000 Insane.

00:17:11.000 And it should have been insane from the get-go. 0.94

00:17:13.000 Because Gavin Newsom is a terrible governor.

00:17:15.000 He's been a terrible governor for years.

00:17:18.000 Before him, Jerry Brown was a terrible governor.

00:17:20.000 California has had nothing but terrible governors for something like a quarter century at this point.

00:17:25.000 The last half-decent governor in the state of California was Pete Wilson in the 1990s.

00:17:29.000 It's been a while.

00:17:31.000 But here's Gavin Newsom making an ass of himself on camera.

00:17:35.000 Why was there no water in the hydrants, Governor?

00:17:39.000 That's all literally...

00:17:40.000 Is it going to be different next time?

00:17:42.000 It has to be.

00:17:43.000 Has to be.

00:17:44.000 Of course.

00:17:44.000 What are you going to do?

00:17:45.000 To fill the hydrants.

00:17:47.000 I would fill them up personally.

00:17:48.000 You know that.

00:17:49.000 I would fill up the hydrants myself.

00:17:53.000 But would you do that?

00:17:54.000 I would do whatever I can.

00:17:55.000 But you're not!

00:17:57.000 I see the...

00:17:57.000 Do you know there's water dripping over there, Governor?

00:18:00.000 There's water coming out there.

00:18:01.000 You can use it.

00:18:02.000 I appreciate it.

00:18:03.000 I'm going to make the call to address everything I can right now, including making sure people are safe.

00:18:10.000 Can I have an opportunity to at least tell people you're doing what you're saying you're doing?

00:18:14.000 Could somebody have a contact?

00:18:16.000 Can I have your contact information?

00:18:19.000 Yes, bye.

00:18:20.000 Yes, bye.

00:18:21.000 By the way, before that clip, she literally asks him, and he tries to brush her off by saying he's on the phone with Joe Biden.

00:18:28.000 And then she says, okay, can you put it on speaker?

00:18:30.000 And he says, I'm not on the phone with Joe Biden.

00:18:33.000 I've been cut off because of reception.

00:18:35.000 And the willingness, by the way, of Democratic politicians to use their phone as an excuse for not talking with humans is amazing.

00:18:41.000 It truly is.

00:18:43.000 Gavin Newsom, what a wonderful, wonderful man.

00:18:45.000 Meanwhile, Joe Biden did a presser yesterday, and it continued to go well for Joe Biden.

00:18:49.000 You'll recall that at his presser the day before, he announced the birth of his great-grandchild, which is exactly what the suffering people of Southern California were looking to hear.

00:18:58.000 Well, yesterday he assured everyone that he knows, that everyone in Southern California wants to know.

00:19:03.000 He says, we are going to keep at it.

00:19:05.000 Yeah, very comforting from the ghost of Christmas passed over here.

00:19:10.000 I also want everyone in Southern California to know we're going to keep at it.

00:19:14.000 We're sticking with this.

00:19:16.000 We expect there may be a temporary break in the winds, but in some areas, the winds are likely to continue well into next week.

00:19:23.000 And so we're going to continue to spend sending everything, literally every resource we can find that's appropriate to help the governor and the first responders.

00:19:35.000 Well, I mean, I feel better, don't you?

00:19:37.000 Then Joe Biden, being incompetent, told Kamala Harris to fire away. 1.00

00:19:42.000 Yes, by the way, he did this twice during this presser.

00:19:46.000 Madam Vice President, I know you're directly affected, so you fire away.

00:19:52.000 No pun intended.

00:19:56.000 I can't believe that I've been having to follow around this moob for four years. 1.00

00:20:02.000 Seriously, what a ridiculous human being. 0.99

00:20:04.000 Meanwhile, the blowback has begun. 0.99

00:20:07.000 Here's one Pacific Palisades homeowner saying, you know, L.A. made kind of a big mistake in electing Democrats for, I don't know, decades on end.

00:20:14.000 I think Los Angeles made a mistake.

00:20:17.000 Karen Bass does not serve the interests of L.A. residents.

00:20:21.000 Some of the decisions are nonsensical, such as cutting 17.6 million dollars from L.A. Fire Department's budget, but instead prioritizing homelessness, where roughly half of the funds of 1.3 billion dollars was not even spent.

00:20:37.000 And it just doesn't make any sense.

00:20:39.000 Where are her priorities? 0.98

00:20:42.000 What is her strategy?

00:20:43.000 Where is the plan?

00:20:44.000 She doesn't have one.

00:20:46.000 "She... that's true." That's true.

00:20:50.000 Meanwhile, LA County is seeing looting, and so this means that the LA County DA is now warning potential looters.

00:20:56.000 This is Nathan Hockman.

00:20:57.000 He was just elected to replace George Gascon, who is the Soros-funded candidate, the guy who just wanted to let all the criminals out onto the streets.

00:21:04.000 The backlash is beginning.

00:21:07.000 I want to also make clear to anyone who was thinking about taking advantage of it for their own personal illegal profit.

00:21:15.000 That those looters, those scammers, those people who are going to prey on vulnerable people who are looking to rebuild their lives, that they will actually be arrested, they will be prosecuted, and we will seek maximum punishment against them.

00:21:31.000 Those people who want to take advantage of this tragedy are despicable.

00:21:36.000 And I wanted to say a fair warning out to them right now, so there's no misunderstanding about how they will be treated.

00:21:46.000 Yes, maybe the hope for Democratic areas is that Democrats begin to wake up to the bad governance they have brought upon themselves.

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00:24:05.000 Ron DeSantis yesterday was at a presser, and people were getting very angry at Donald Trump because Donald Trump had been saying mean things about Gavin Newsom.

00:24:12.000 And Ron DeSantis was like, hold up a second.

00:24:14.000 I did hurricane response for the last several years, and Kamala Harris was ripping on me. 1.00

00:24:19.000 And let's be clear about this.

00:24:20.000 If this were a Republican who had botched this fire this badly, it would be endless news on a loop on CNN and MSNBC. Thank you.

00:24:32.000 Is it appropriate for people in your industry to try to create division and to try to create narratives any time these things happen?

00:24:40.000 Now, you're not as interested in doing that because Newsom is a D. If Newsom was a Republican, you guys would have him nailed to the wall for what they're doing over there.

00:24:50.000 And I know we've dealt with it.

00:24:51.000 We just assume in Florida, any time something happens, it's going to be politicized by the media.

00:24:59.000 I mean, he pointed out during this presser to DeSantis, last time there was a Cat 5 hurricane, Kamala Harris suggested that I wouldn't return her phone calls because I was being a partisan.

00:25:13.000 She'd never called at any other point during a natural disaster.

00:25:17.000 He's right about that.

00:25:18.000 Meanwhile, President Trump, he says, listen, I may not like Gavin Newsom, we'll have to deal with him.

00:25:22.000 He's the California governor.

00:25:22.000 Here was President Trump yesterday.

00:25:24.000 What's happened is a tragedy and the governor has not done a good job.

00:25:29.000 With that being said, I got along well with him when he was governor.

00:25:33.000 We worked together very well and we would work together.

00:25:35.000 I guess it looks like we're going to be the one having to rebuild it.

00:25:38.000 I mean, he is right about all of that.

00:25:41.000 He's right about all of that.

00:25:42.000 Okay, speaking of President Trump yesterday, there was a memorial service for Jimmy Carter in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. There were some great ironies to this.

00:25:52.000 One of them is that the Pete Hegseth tattoo, the one that has been so terribly, obviously brutal and terrible, the cross tattoo that is supposedly a Christian nationalist tattoo. 0.88

00:26:08.000 It turns out that that's actually not that.

00:26:11.000 That's actually just called the Jerusalem Cross, and it's a symbol that was literally used on the invitation for the Jimmy Carter Memorial and was also, you know, etched into the floor of the Washington Cathedral.

00:26:24.000 There's that.

00:26:24.000 Anyway, this event happens yesterday, and this is all part of the great rewriting of Jimmy Carter's legacy.

00:26:30.000 Jimmy Carter was an awful president, an even worse ex-president.

00:26:32.000 Truly a terrible, horrifyingly bad president. 0.98

00:26:35.000 A historically bad president.

00:26:37.000 From allowing Iran to fall to the Ayatollahs, to the taking of the hostages, the Iranian embassy, to the collapse of Afghanistan and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to record levels of inflation combined with unemployment.

00:26:51.000 Jimmy Carter was bad about pretty much everything. 0.54

00:26:55.000 I mean, truly an awful, awful president.

00:26:57.000 And then as an ex-president, actively lobbying against Ronald Reagan, actively lobbying countries to oppose George H.W. Bush in defense of Kuwait, actively standing for Hamas for the North Korean regime.

00:27:09.000 Wasn't a dictator on planet Earth.

00:27:11.000 Jimmy Carter didn't love.

00:27:11.000 Jimmy Carter was not just a bad president.

00:27:13.000 He was a bad expert, like a terrible expert.

00:27:15.000 But, you know, he was a president.

00:27:17.000 And that means that we now have to rewrite the history.

00:27:19.000 So the Wall Street Journal.

00:27:21.000 As a piece titled, Washington Remembers Jimmy Carter's Symbol of a Gentler Era, as Trump's presidency looms.

00:27:26.000 Symbol of a gentler era?

00:27:28.000 What era are you talking about?

00:27:29.000 1976 to 1998?

00:27:30.000 That's not a gentler era.

00:27:31.000 That's a horrible era in American history.

00:27:34.000 The 1970s were filled with crime.

00:27:36.000 They were filled with poverty.

00:27:38.000 They were filled with inflation.

00:27:39.000 They were filled with war.

00:27:40.000 It was really, really, really bad, actually.

00:27:43.000 Quite terrible.

00:27:44.000 Nonetheless, the rewriting continued apace.

00:27:47.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the nation's five living presidents gathered to honor former President Jimmy Carter in a pomp-filled funeral service at the Washington National Cathedral, a moment of solemn respite from the Capitol's political tensions in preparations for a new administration.

00:28:01.000 So Joe Biden got up and spoke, and the man just does not own a mirror.

00:28:06.000 He does not own a mirror.

00:28:07.000 Here he was explaining that Jimmy Carter reminds us that we have an obligation to stand up against abuse of power, says the president who pardoned his own son.

00:28:17.000 Pardon his own son, not just for the crimes of which he had already been accused, but of all crimes.

00:28:22.000 Here is Joe Biden, endlessly corrupt president of the United States, talking about abuse of power.

00:28:28.000 You know, we have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor.

00:28:36.000 And to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all, the abuse of power.

00:28:44.000 Oh, well, great.

00:28:47.000 Stuart Eisenstadt, Carter's domestic policy advisor, spoke of Carter's political leadership, which had been tarnished by events, including the crisis, in which Iran held more than 50 Americans hostage for the last quarter of his presidency.

00:28:56.000 He said Carter restored integrity to government after the Watergate scandal.

00:29:00.000 That's not true, actually.

00:29:03.000 Actually, Gerald Ford did that, which is why Gerald Ford almost won, by the way, in 1976. And then Jimmy Carter got absolutely swamped in 1980. But the sort of fascinating part of this ceremony was the treatment of Donald Trump.

00:29:16.000 So clearly, Donald Trump is not in the good graces of people like the Bush family.

00:29:20.000 The Bush family doesn't like Donald Trump.

00:29:21.000 That, of course, is not a giant shock.

00:29:23.000 Donald Trump was pretty rough on Jeb, and he has effectively called George W. Bush a war criminal and all the rest of this.

00:29:28.000 So they don't like each other very much.

00:29:30.000 And George W. Bush has sort of a history of being cozy with the Obamas.

00:29:35.000 He and Barack are famously sort of friendly, as are Laura and Michelle.

00:29:41.000 And so there was a point at which George W. Bush did not greet the Trumps.

00:29:45.000 But then gave a sort of belly tap to Obama.

00:29:48.000 Here was that.

00:29:51.000 It was W and Laura.

00:29:56.000 And they kind of walk right by the Trumps.

00:29:59.000 Obviously, there's some bad blood there.

00:30:01.000 That's not the only bad blood in the room, by the way.

00:30:04.000 Kamala Harris was there with Doug Emhoff, who, again, I just cannot stand.

00:30:12.000 She looked back and saw Donald Trump joking with Barack Obama and the expression on her face.

00:30:16.000 She looks like she wants to just commit an act of first degree murder. 1.00

00:30:20.000 Yeah, that is very unhappy person right there.

00:30:30.000 By the way, the Bidens and Harris's are also not talking, which is hilarious.

00:30:34.000 Again, all of the sort of gossip channel rumor milling here is really quite fascinating.

00:30:41.000 The big clip to come out of this was Donald Trump and Barack Obama chuckling together.

00:30:45.000 We have no idea what Trump says here to make Obama chuckle, but he does something.

00:30:50.000 And let's be real.

00:30:51.000 I mean, I know President Trump is a very funny human.

00:30:53.000 He's just a very funny person.

00:30:55.000 And he's constantly joking.

00:30:57.000 He's constantly riffing.

00:30:59.000 And here he was.

00:31:00.000 was he says something and it cracks obama up okay so um was that orange hitler the threat to the republic that we've all heard about See, this is the thing. 0.64

00:31:16.000 This is the thing when you look at this.

00:31:17.000 When I say that Trump's victory tour is continuing, it is a victory over the idea that Trumpism or MAGA or Donald Trump himself is some sort of Hitlerian authoritarian movement set to dominate the country and destroy all mechanisms of democracy.

00:31:32.000 The thing that really was restored here was, in fact, a sense of normalcy in the last election cycle because...

00:31:38.000 Democrats kept saying over and over and over, this isn't normal.

00:31:40.000 You know what normalcy looks like?

00:31:42.000 You know what normalcy looks like?

00:31:43.000 It looks kind of like Donald Trump and Barack Obama joking around.

00:31:49.000 And it kind of looks like not L.A. on fire.

00:31:52.000 Like, you have to choose between Donald Trump making wild statements and things kind of going on as normal and you living your life and things getting handled.

00:32:00.000 And also, everybody's saying very kind, progressive, and empathetic things.

00:32:04.000 Except if your house is on fire, in which case it's your fault you're stuck there.

00:32:08.000 Well, I think that I'll choose the first.

00:32:09.000 The first seems more normal to me.

00:32:11.000 Donald Trump saying mean things to Gavin Newsom and then the country running seems a lot more normal to me than, you know, entire cities on fire while the LA mayor says DEI things.

00:32:22.000 The left's definition of normalcy is not, in fact, normal.

00:32:25.000 And this is the thing.

00:32:26.000 The left has kept saying over and over, Donald Trump is not normal.

00:32:28.000 He's not normal.

00:32:29.000 It's so not normal. 0.66

00:32:29.000 Oh my God, it's a dictator. 0.66

00:32:32.000 Obama is sitting there laughing.

00:32:33.000 Is he laughing at Hitler's jokes?

00:32:35.000 What's happening right there?

00:32:36.000 How could he laugh?

00:32:38.000 That, I think, should be the big takeaway there.

00:32:41.000 Aside from the fact that no one should ever again perform the song Imagine, the worst song in the history of the world. 0.99

00:32:46.000 Truly an awful, egregious, immoral piece of trash. 0.88

00:32:51.000 And honestly, as one ex-poster suggested, when Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood performed Imagine at this memorial service for Jimmy Carter, the luckiest person in the room was Jimmy Carter. 0.99

00:33:02.000 Because he wasn't alive to see it.

00:33:04.000 Here we go.

00:33:05.000 Imagine no possession.

00:33:10.000 This commie atheist terrible song. 1.00

00:33:14.000 I wonder if you can. 0.75

00:33:17.000 It's so bad.

00:33:22.000 By the way, this song is militantly anti-religion.

00:33:26.000 They're doing it in the Washington National Cathedral.

00:33:28.000 I can't deal with this song anymore.

00:33:30.000 It needs to stop.

00:33:31.000 It needs to stop.

00:33:31.000 Stop the song!

00:33:32.000 Stop it.

00:33:32.000 Can't do it.

00:33:33.000 So, in any case, President Trump...

00:33:36.000 is about to enter office and things are about to change.

00:33:39.000 And that is a very, very good thing.

00:33:40.000 Apparently, he is ready in close to 100 executive orders, according to one Republican senator.

00:33:45.000 We'll get into the details of some of those executive orders and what we know at this point in just one moment.

00:33:52.000 First, what has a woman sparked the cultural conversation? 0.99

00:33:55.000 Now, Identity Crisis, a powerful new film from The Daily Wire and Turning Point USA, goes even deeper, exposing the heartbreaking consequences of radical gender ideology while highlighting stories of resilience and courage.

00:34:05.000 In the pursuit of truth.

00:34:07.000 Starting now and for the next 72 hours, Identity Crisis is streaming for free on X. We chose to make it free for 72 hours because this is a story everyone needs to see.

00:34:15.000 The raw, unflinching truth about how this dangerous ideology is affecting children and families.

00:34:19.000 Creating bold, premium content like this is not easy.

00:34:21.000 It's costly.

00:34:22.000 It's important.

00:34:23.000 It's essential.

00:34:23.000 That's why The Daily Wire depends on your support to keep reshaping the cultural landscape.

00:34:27.000 Follow at Real Daily Wire on X, watch Identity Crisis, share it, and spread the word word.

00:34:31.000 Grateful to our partners at Turning Point USA for putting together this project with us.

00:34:36.000 Actually, a little bit later today, we're going to be dropping a full interview with Charlie Kirk, who, of course, is the founder and the head of Turning Point USA. Here's a little bit of what that interview sounds like.

00:34:45.000 Well, speaking of these gender issues, you guys at TPUSA, you're working with us.

00:34:48.000 We're working with you.

00:34:48.000 We're really excited about this.

00:34:50.000 To release this brand new documentary, Identity Crisis, which is all about the detransitioner movement.

00:34:54.000 We're really excited about this.

00:34:55.000 It's going to be released on January 10th for free on X for a couple of days.

00:34:59.000 And it goes...

00:35:00.000 To Daily Wire Plus exclusively, which we're also very excited about.

00:35:03.000 Tell me about the documentary.

00:35:04.000 Yeah, we've been working on this for a while, and we're so honored to be partnering with you guys on this.

00:35:08.000 It's a perfect partnership.

00:35:09.000 Look, Matt Walsh did What is a Woman?

00:35:10.000 And in some ways, this is not like a sequel, but this is a good accompaniment to that general idea, because this goes deep into the severity and the graphic brutality and the medieval nature of what transitioning actually is.

00:35:26.000 In some ways, it is the result of if you can't answer what a woman is, you're going to start chopping off 12-year-olds' breasts.

00:35:32.000 Then we get into the movie in great detail on the parents that lose their kids through divorce settlements and medical kidnapping.

00:35:38.000 This is not just a one-off thing.

00:35:39.000 This is happening with great detail across the country.

00:35:42.000 And Matt Walsh will say at best that the TNLGBT really is tyrannical. 1.00

00:35:46.000 It is full totalitarian control of your speech, of your children, of your body.

00:35:52.000 And that's what's so interesting is that it cloaks itself on its surface, the trans agenda, as live and let live.

00:35:58.000 Okay, meanwhile, so President Trump apparently is going to drop a bunch of executive orders.

00:36:03.000 There is talk that it may be up to 100 executive orders.

00:36:05.000 Most of those are going to be placeholders.

00:36:07.000 It'll be things like closing the border.

00:36:09.000 It's going to be, I assume, some executive orders that open up areas to drilling.

00:36:14.000 He wants legislative fixes, but he first needs to reverse many of the worst executive order decisions made by the Biden administration.

00:36:22.000 Obviously.

00:36:23.000 And President Trump is being pretty realistic, and so are his allies, with what exactly he's going to be able to do in his second term.

00:36:28.000 And I think this really matters.

00:36:30.000 I've mentioned this before with regard to the re-election of Speaker Johnson, or with regard to the discussion over what should go into a continuing resolution versus what should not.

00:36:39.000 I think all too often, people in my position, people in this sort of conservative or political commentariat, they conflate two things.

00:36:46.000 One is the principle, and one is the pragmatic.

00:36:49.000 And they just assume away the pragmatic.

00:36:51.000 They say, we want 100% of the pie, and if you don't give us 100% of the pie, you're not doing your job.

00:36:58.000 And that is a lie.

00:36:59.000 It's not true.

00:37:00.000 There are always pragmatic political considerations in a fractious democracy in which Republicans currently control the House by one or two seats and control the Senate by three.

00:37:10.000 That means that the policymaking aspect of all this is never going to be quite what you've been promised because we don't rule by dictatorship here in the United States.

00:37:20.000 And so I, for one, am not particularly disappointed to learn, for example, that Elon Musk has scaled back his ambitious pledge to slash at least $2 trillion from the federal budget.

00:37:29.000 Well, because as I said months ago, that ain't going to happen.

00:37:32.000 And the reason it was never going to happen is because if you wish to slice trillions of dollars from the federal budget, you need to look to the entitlement programs.

00:37:40.000 The discretionary spending is not going to find you trillions of dollars to cut.

00:37:43.000 It is the mandatory spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, that need restructuring.

00:37:48.000 No one's going to touch those.

00:37:50.000 And so that means that nothing happens.

00:37:52.000 And so Elon is now being a lot more accurate about that.

00:37:55.000 He said, I think if we try for $2 trillion, we've got a good shot at getting $1 trillion.

00:37:59.000 Okay, well, I'm fine with that.

00:38:01.000 If we get $1 trillion, that'd be great.

00:38:03.000 Meanwhile, President Trump's team has told European officials the true deadline for ending the war in Ukraine is several months.

00:38:08.000 Not 24 hours.

00:38:09.000 Well, of course.

00:38:11.000 I mean, again.

00:38:12.000 Everybody who's like, oh my God.

00:38:13.000 No, no.

00:38:15.000 This is the take him seriously but not literally thing.

00:38:18.000 When Trump says 24 hours, it's sort of like when the Bible says, and the land was quiet for 40 years.

00:38:24.000 Was it exactly 40 years or does it just mean a long time?

00:38:27.000 Not totally clear.

00:38:28.000 Not totally clear whether these are exact timelines.

00:38:30.000 As long as Trump gets it done and the solution is correct, that's the thing that really, really matters here.

00:38:39.000 Trump has also said it's going to be hard to bring down prices, which is true, but he's going to do it.

00:38:45.000 It will happen.

00:38:47.000 Again, Axios today is trying to suggest that reality bites Trump, but reality was always going to be part of the gambit.

00:38:52.000 That was always part of this.

00:38:55.000 And you know who knows this?

00:38:56.000 Smart Democrats.

00:38:57.000 So apparently the only smart Democrat in Congress is now John Fetterman. 0.98

00:39:00.000 So Fetterman votes with the Democrats like 90% of the time, but he's not a moron. 0.53

00:39:04.000 And so that means that he makes bipartisan overtures on particularly...

00:39:08.000 Popular issues like immigration or, say, the Middle East.

00:39:11.000 Well, now Senator Fetterman is planning to meet with President-elect Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

00:39:15.000 Fetterman said Trump invited him and he accepted.

00:39:18.000 He said, I'm the senator for all Pennsylvanians, not just Democrats in Pennsylvania.

00:39:22.000 I've been clear, no one is my gatekeeper.

00:39:23.000 I will meet with and have a conversation with anyone if it helps me deliver for Pennsylvania and the nation.

00:39:28.000 That's smart.

00:39:29.000 It's good.

00:39:31.000 And now, many of the former Fetterman staffers are really pissed, right?

00:39:34.000 The left has this...

00:39:36.000 Really nasty habit of suggesting that a conversation with somebody on the right ought to be verboten, just out of the gate.

00:39:43.000 This is true everywhere from my arena in the media, where if you're on the left and you are seen in public with a person on the right, this means you are very bad.

00:39:51.000 Two actual elected officials.

00:39:52.000 One former Fetterman campaign staffer said, quote, this is such a pick-me move by John.

00:39:56.000 I obviously hate it, but it's also kind of hilarious and epic.

00:40:00.000 Well, I mean, why do you hate it?

00:40:02.000 It's smart.

00:40:02.000 It's a smart thing to do.

00:40:04.000 By the way, I have to say, Fetterman reads the room as well as anybody in politics.

00:40:09.000 Really.

00:40:10.000 Fetterman was asked about Donald Trump and Greenland, and he joked that he was hoping to be Pope of Greenland, which is a hilarious line.

00:40:18.000 I'm sorry.

00:40:19.000 He got the assignment.

00:40:21.000 He got the assignment.

00:40:23.000 Meanwhile, Democrats continue to squabble over a path forward.

00:40:27.000 According to Politico, The Democratic Party's top two congressional leaders both agree the party lost big in the election over voters' economic fears and must now overhaul its pocketbook messaging to win again.

00:40:40.000 But some other New York Democrats are not so sure.

00:40:42.000 Interviews with nearly every New York House Democrat reveals variations on where they believe their party's push against Donald Trump should start, underscoring Jeffrey's challenge in leading a Big Ten caucus that ranges from socialists to blue dogs.

00:40:52.000 Some House members are less humbled by their party's election drubbing than others.

00:40:55.000 Some blame messaging.

00:40:56.000 Others blame culture wars.

00:40:57.000 Even if the most consistent theme emerging is the urgent need to wrestle back the economic narrative from the Republicans.

00:41:03.000 Well, again, I hope they do that.

00:41:06.000 I hope they keep yelling about how capitalism is bad in a country that generally is not in favor of socialism.

00:41:12.000 Keep doing it, guys.

00:41:13.000 And please keep preaching the wokeness. 0.72

00:41:15.000 More of that, please.

00:41:17.000 Meanwhile, two court decisions out yesterday.

00:41:19.000 One good, one very not good.

00:41:21.000 The good decision comes courtesy of a federal judge in Kentucky.

00:41:24.000 We struck down President Biden's effort to expand protections for transgender students, according to the New York Times, and make other changes to the rules governing sex discrimination in schools.

00:41:33.000 So you'll remember the Biden administration had idiotically attempted to expand Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to suggest that boys had to go into girls' bathrooms, even though Title IX is specifically designed to protect women.

00:41:47.000 In a 15-page opinion, Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote the Education Department could not lawfully expand the definition of Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity.

00:41:57.000 He said the entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex.

00:42:01.000 Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless. 0.60

00:42:06.000 That, of course, is totally true.

00:42:07.000 That is an excellent ruling.

00:42:08.000 It was always a ridiculous overreach by the Education Department under Joe Biden.

00:42:13.000 However...

00:42:14.000 There was another decision that came down yesterday, and this one was not particularly good.

00:42:20.000 This decision was about Judge Merchan and his sentence with regard to President Trump.

00:42:27.000 So the Supreme Court was considering whether or not Merchan's capacity to deliver a sentence on the sitting president of the United States ought to be vacated.

00:42:36.000 Well, they divided Supreme Court yesterday, greenlit Judge Merchan's determination to sentence President-elect Trump.

00:42:43.000 On 34 business records falsification counts on which he was found guilty in May in that ridiculous prosecution brought by the Manhattan Progressive Democratic DA Alvin Bragg.

00:42:53.000 Well, this morning, Judge Juan Marichan pronounced a sentence of unconditional discharge, which means that there will be no probation, there won't be any sort of home arrest or anything for Donald Trump.

00:43:03.000 He called it the only lawful sentence because, of course, Donald Trump has been...

00:43:07.000 And so he can't have any of this sort of stuff applied to him while he's the president.

00:43:11.000 Merchant said, quote, Sir, I wish you Godspeed as you pursue your second term in office.

00:43:15.000 Thank you.

00:43:16.000 There was a big hearing at the time.

00:43:18.000 The assistant DA Joshua Steinglass slammed Trump's, quote, threats to retaliate against prosecutors and all the rest.

00:43:24.000 Does it mean anything?

00:43:25.000 Well, Trump's lawyer called the sentencing a sad day for Trump and the country.

00:43:29.000 The prosecutor did agree with the unconditional discharge. 0.99

00:43:32.000 The whole thing is ridiculous and silly. 0.96

00:43:34.000 I think everyone sees it that way. 0.99

00:43:35.000 It's obviously.

00:43:36.000 Quite insulting.

00:43:37.000 But beyond the insult, effectively it came to naught.

00:43:40.000 But it is a good reminder.

00:43:42.000 If Donald Trump had not, in fact, been re-elected, if in fact Donald Trump had lost to Kamala Harris, Judge Juan Marichan would have hit him with the book.

00:43:48.000 Judge Marichan would have put him under house arrest.

00:43:50.000 He might have had him thrown into jail.

00:43:53.000 Trump was running against the possibility of being arrested for a completely specious non-crime based on his payoffs to Stormy Daniels in 2015-2016.

00:44:02.000 That's how narrowly we missed.

00:44:04.000 A true crisis in the United States.

00:44:07.000 And the number of times they've tried to get Donald Trump, the number of crises that we as a country have narrowly avoided and narrowly averted, the hand of God is on Trump.

00:44:14.000 I mean, I've said it before.

00:44:15.000 When God reaches his hand down and turns Donald Trump's head, fractions of a degree, and a bullet hits him in the ear, I'm not sure what else to make of that.

00:44:24.000 Well, folks, it is a Friday.

00:44:25.000 And my staff told me that it was mandatory that I watch what will probably win Best Picture this year.

00:44:32.000 You know, I... I try to keep abreast of the various movies that are nominated for Best Picture, even though there hasn't been a solid Best Picture winner in the Oscars for years and years and years at this point.

00:44:44.000 I'm trying to remember the last solid Best Picture winner.

00:44:48.000 It's been a while.

00:44:51.000 This year, the frontrunner is, believe it or not, a movie called Emilia Perez.

00:44:57.000 This movie was nominated for 10 Golden Globes.

00:45:00.000 It won for...

00:45:02.000 It is one of the worst movies ever made.

00:45:04.000 It is one of the worst.

00:45:05.000 It actually won Best Musical over Wicked.

00:45:07.000 Now, you know my feelings on the movie of Wicked.

00:45:10.000 I thought it was pretty good.

00:45:10.000 And I like the musical of Wicked.

00:45:12.000 At least the music is good and interesting.

00:45:15.000 This thing is horrible in every way it is possible for it to be horrible.

00:45:19.000 So, I'm going to try and break down this review into a few categories.

00:45:22.000 First, we're going to go through the actual movie, the plot.

00:45:25.000 We'll go through the performances.

00:45:26.000 We'll go through the...

00:45:27.000 It's a musical.

00:45:28.000 And then we'll get to the blowback. 1.00

00:45:30.000 So, let me first explain the premise of this unbelievably stupid, insulting, and morally vacuous film. 0.99

00:45:37.000 So, the premise of this film is that there is a gangland drug leader who is played by a person named Carla Sophia Gascon. 0.99

00:45:47.000 Now, Carla Sophia Gascon is a trans woman, which is to say a man.

00:45:51.000 In fact, Carla Sophia Gascon, in real life, identified as a male until the age of, I believe, 46 years old.

00:45:58.000 And then at the age of 46 in 2018, decided that he was, in fact, a she. 0.99

00:46:04.000 And decided to go through all of the various surgeries to make him look more like a her, I would say, rather unsuccessfully. 0.97

00:46:11.000 In this particular story, Carla Sofia Gascon plays, at the beginning of the film, a Mexican drug lord, like a head of a deadly drug cartel, who decides that it's not just that he wants to disappear and to enjoy his wealth.

00:46:26.000 He wants to disappear and become a woman. 1.00

00:46:28.000 He's always wanted to be a woman.

00:46:31.000 The lawyer he ropes into this scheme is played by Zoe Saldana, who is playing a person named Rita Mora Castro.

00:46:39.000 That's the lawyer in this particular film.

00:46:41.000 And she is going to be helping the newly named Emilia Perez become a woman. 0.98

00:46:47.000 And now there are complications that ensue.

00:46:49.000 So the basic plot of the film is reliant on one essential feeling about life.

00:46:56.000 And if you don't buy into this feeling, the entire movie is actually quite evil. 0.99

00:46:59.000 That feeling is, if you cut off your balls, this makes you a better person. 0.99

00:47:03.000 That is the basic premise of the film. 0.99

00:47:04.000 The basic premise of the film is, if you take a genocidally murderous drug lord, and this person wants to feel like a woman inside, and so gets a bunch of surgeries and hormone treatments, when that person emerges on the other side, that person is to be treated as a feminist saint.

00:47:24.000 Otherwise, none of the movie works.

00:47:26.000 And the whole thing becomes rather sinister.

00:47:27.000 Now, you may be saying to yourself, this thing plays like a comedy, and here's the thing it kind of does.

00:47:30.000 If you watch the film as a comedy, it is uproariously funny.

00:47:34.000 None of it follows.

00:47:35.000 It makes no sense.

00:47:36.000 All the things that are supposed to be serious are hilarious. 0.88

00:47:39.000 It is one of the most ridiculous things ever filmed, truly. 0.88

00:47:44.000 So, just to give you the basic plot outline, again, drug lord decides to become woman. 0.86

00:47:50.000 This drug lord is married to Jesse Del Monte, played by Selena Gomez. 0.98

00:47:55.000 Legitimately one of the worst actresses alive. 0.92

00:47:58.000 I mean, truly cannot act her way out of a paper bag. 0.95

00:48:01.000 Inanimate objects have more affect than Selena Gomez. 1.00

00:48:04.000 She's awful in literally everything. 0.99

00:48:06.000 So you've got the lawyer, who's facilitating the transition and post-transition life. 0.65

00:48:11.000 You have the drug lord, who is a man who wants to become a woman. 0.99

00:48:15.000 You have the drug lord's wife, played by Selena Gomez. 1.00

00:48:18.000 You have later the now transgender woman's lover, a person named Epiphan... 0.93

00:48:25.000 Epifania Flores, played by Adriana Paz.

00:48:29.000 So, just to spell out how the movie goes, this person goes and gets a transition.

00:48:36.000 The wife and two children who this person is abandoning to have a dick removal, they move to Switzerland with the drug lord's money. 0.70

00:48:46.000 Four years later, the drug lord, now a transgender woman, approaches the lawyer and says, I would like to... 1.00

00:48:53.000 Get in touch with my kids again.

00:48:55.000 And so I'm going to be pretending to be my own cousin living in Mexico.

00:49:00.000 I'm going to pay my ex-wife and the kids, the wife thinks he's dead at this point, to come live with me in Mexico.

00:49:09.000 Complications ensue because it turns out that the wife has a lover.

00:49:13.000 And not only that, so does Amelia Perez.

00:49:17.000 He, now a she, falls in love with a woman. 1.00

00:49:22.000 All of this comes as Zoe Saldana, his character, the lawyer, and Amelia Perez decide that not only is it time for Amelia Perez to return to Mexico as a woman, it is time for Amelia Perez to become an extraordinarily high-scale public figure whose job it is to uncover all of the bodies of people murdered by drug cartels.

00:49:43.000 At no point, by the way, does this drug cartel leader actually apologize to anyone for having, you know, murdered humans.

00:49:50.000 Instead, This person just traipses around explaining that it's very, very bad to kill people and bury their bodies in unnamed places and such.

00:50:00.000 By the end of the film, the drug cartel leader and his ex-wife have died in a car crash and the children now belong to the lawyer.

00:50:13.000 If you follow all of that...

00:50:14.000 Then congratulations to you.

00:50:17.000 Either you have a screw loose or you are great at following absolutely nonsensical applause.

00:50:20.000 Now, this is all accompanied by some of the worst music and some of the worst performances you have ever seen in a film.

00:50:26.000 Truly awful stuff.

00:50:28.000 Really, really awful stuff.

00:50:29.000 So let's go through that.

00:50:30.000 Because in a musical, the music should be good, you know. 0.98

00:50:33.000 But in this musical, the music is just absolute sheer unmitigated horseshit. 0.98

00:50:38.000 It's just awful. 0.95

00:50:39.000 It was written by a person named Camille, a French singer, and Clement Ducot.

00:50:43.000 A French film composer.

00:50:46.000 It's absolutely horrifyingly bad.

00:50:49.000 Let me give you some examples.

00:50:50.000 So, as we say, Zoe Saldana's character, who makes no sense, by the way, she's a lawyer who's supposed to be, I guess, a good, nice person, but she's introduced in the film defending a wife murderer and taking $2 million to help a drug cartel leader become a woman, but is supposed to be the moral center of the film, which makes no sense at all.

00:51:10.000 In any case, Zoe Saldana... 0.97

00:51:12.000 Is tasked by Emilia Perez to go find out about transition surgeries and what they mean.

00:51:20.000 Here is some of this musical number.

00:51:24.000 It's so bad you'll want to drill into your own ear hole using an electric saw.

00:51:31.000 There we go.

00:51:32.000 Hello, very nice to meet you.

00:51:33.000 I'd like to know about sex change operations.

00:51:36.000 I see, I see, I see.

00:51:40.000 Man to woman or woman to men? 0.89

00:51:42.000 Man to woman. 1.00

00:51:44.000 From penis to vagina. 1.00

00:51:48.000 Is it for you? 1.00

00:51:50.000 For me?

00:51:52.000 No.

00:51:53.000 What would you like to know about it, madam?

00:51:58.000 I want to know it all.

00:51:59.000 What is the protocol, the techniques and the risks?

00:52:02.000 How many operations?

00:52:04.000 How much time do you need?

00:52:06.000 This is the thing that's happening in your life right now.

00:52:16.000 Just don't try to fight it.

00:52:18.000 Just soak it in.

00:52:21.000 What is that?

00:52:24.000 Yes, yes, yes, yes!

00:52:26.000 I guess...

00:52:28.000 Oh, my God.

00:52:31.000 Oh, good Lord.

00:52:33.000 And it's all creepily staged.

00:52:35.000 You have people who have bandages all over their faces and bodies being wheeled around.

00:52:39.000 By the way, worst hospital ever.

00:52:41.000 Gotta say, terrible hospital.

00:52:42.000 No patient privacy happening around here.

00:52:44.000 Also, no actual measures taken to reduce the risk of infection, it appears.

00:52:48.000 In any case, Zoe Saldana points for effort in this film.

00:52:53.000 She's obviously trying to do something.

00:52:55.000 I don't know what it is she's trying to do.

00:52:57.000 Her character's awful.

00:52:58.000 She's a corrupt lawyer who takes millions of dollars from a drug cartel leader to cover up crimes and later turns around and uncovers the crimes while lecturing people in another number. 0.99

00:53:09.000 That number is called El Mal.

00:53:10.000 And this is where Zoe Saldana really goes off in the film.

00:53:15.000 She's dancing through a fundraiser because I say Amelia Perez has decided that now, having come back to Mexico, he she is going to be leading an effort to uncover the bodies of all those murdered by the drug cartels.

00:53:26.000 So now the lawyer for a drug cartel leader is, Is running around the room yelling at all the politicians about how they're all corrupt while doing sexually suggestive things.

00:53:38.000 That's essentially this number. 0.98

00:53:39.000 The hypocrisy is amazing. 0.82

00:53:41.000 And again, you might at some point say, well, wait, isn't she evil? 0.99

00:53:44.000 She works for a drug cartel leader.

00:53:46.000 And isn't the drug cartel leader kind of evil?

00:53:48.000 I mean, on every level, a drug cartel leader murdered people, abandoned his wife and children to go get a bunch of surgeries, then lied to his wife and children by bringing them back into his life.

00:53:59.000 To torture them, which we'll see in just a minute, emotionally.

00:54:03.000 Here is Zoe Saldana in another awful number called El Mal.

00:54:09.000 Look at Judge Santos.

00:54:10.000 There's good music here, guys.

00:54:11.000 Cares only about children.

00:54:13.000 Cartels kidnap them, steal them from their villages.

00:54:17.000 And Santos has their cases dismissed.

00:54:20.000 No evidence.

00:54:22.000 Talk.

00:54:23.000 All these people talk.

00:54:24.000 But now they are going to pay.

00:54:30.000 I have no idea who choreographed this. 1.00

00:54:32.000 Choreography sucks. 0.99

00:54:33.000 The lighting is terrible. 1.00

00:54:35.000 The choreography is terrible.

00:54:37.000 There is no music.

00:54:38.000 You have the upper hand.

00:54:40.000 Everyone knows you.

00:54:41.000 No one knows me.

00:54:42.000 This is the singing man pretending to be a woman.

00:54:46.000 I'm Emilia Perez, a Mexican woman.

00:54:48.000 A woman like any other. 0.99

00:54:52.000 Okay, and then it just continues.

00:54:53.000 I can't take anymore.

00:54:54.000 It's just awful.

00:54:55.000 Just awful, awful.

00:54:56.000 Like, immoral, bad. 0.89

00:54:58.000 You're part of the system, lady.

00:55:00.000 You took the money.

00:55:02.000 You don't get to lecture.

00:55:02.000 Okay, anyway.

00:55:04.000 Again, this entire film is built around the premise that if you are transgender and you go through surgeries, this makes you a good person and excuses all of your past and future behavior. 0.89

00:55:14.000 Because let's talk about that behavior.

00:55:15.000 Now, Emilia Perez, who is a man who has transitioned into a fake woman, and who is lying to her own children, her own children, about identity. 0.66

00:55:26.000 There's a number where Emilia Perez goes into the bedroom of one of her children, her, meaning his, and lies down next to this child that can't fall asleep.

00:55:35.000 And the kid says, you smell like my father.

00:55:39.000 Okay, well, yeah, because you effed up that kid's life beyond all recognition. 1.00

00:55:42.000 First of all, you're a drug lord. 0.97

00:55:43.000 Second of all, you deprived that kid of a father so that you could play dress up. 1.00

00:55:48.000 Plus, by the way, the lyrics absolutely suck in this particular number. 0.99

00:55:52.000 I mean, really suck. 0.98

00:55:53.000 I'll explain why in just a moment. 0.98

00:55:59.000 He says, what are you doing?

00:56:02.000 And the kid says, you smell like papa.

00:56:07.000 I love it.

00:56:09.000 You look strange.

00:56:14.000 Yes.

00:56:15.000 Papa, papa, papa, papa, papa.

00:56:26.000 You smell like papa.

00:56:32.000 What?

00:56:35.000 You smell like the mountains.

00:56:37.000 Leather and coffee.

00:56:40.000 You smell like food.

00:56:42.000 Spicy.

00:56:43.000 Spicy.

00:56:44.000 And here is the man, dressed up as a woman, who has put his child through this, and we're supposed to be sympathetic to this person.

00:56:51.000 For some reason.

00:56:52.000 By the way, by the end of this movie, this person is treated as a saint.

00:56:55.000 As a saint.

00:56:56.000 Okay, now, I'll tell you why the lyrics really suck here. 0.88

00:56:59.000 I'm just going to list to you the things this person apparently smells like. 0.79

00:57:03.000 And this kid is apparently like a super smeller because here is what Papa smells like.

00:57:08.000 In order.

00:57:09.000 The mountains, leather, coffee, spicy food, sugar, lamb on the fire, the engine, diet coke with lemon ice and sweat.

00:57:18.000 Also, little stones warm by the sun, mint, mezcal, guacamole, dogs on car rides, cigarettes.

00:57:29.000 I don't know.

00:57:31.000 What?

00:57:33.000 Okay, man.

00:57:34.000 Who wrote this?

00:57:35.000 This whole musical was written by a person who had been hit in the head with a brick.

00:57:39.000 My goodness.

00:57:40.000 But all of this culminates in a heroic vision of the future.

00:57:44.000 So, as we know, this, um, the Emilia Perez's character falls in love with a woman, like an actual biological woman, played by Adriana Paz, and they have a whole love scene and everything.

00:57:57.000 And at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, well, isn't that kind of...

00:58:00.000 I mean, this obviously is a dude, meaning like a drug lord gang leader who has murdered people, maybe including this person's husband, and is currently having a sexual affair with the woman without explaining any of this. 0.63

00:58:14.000 Isn't that a little... 0.96

00:58:15.000 Like ladies in the audience. 0.99

00:58:17.000 Isn't that a little...

00:58:18.000 A little bit...

00:58:19.000 But it's fine and good.

00:58:22.000 Now, it's actually excellent.

00:58:24.000 And so by the end of this film...

00:58:26.000 There is a full scene.

00:58:27.000 The end of the film is a parade with a statue looking like the Virgin Mary of this trans woman drug cartel leader who engaged in mass murder and was never prosecuted for it and betrayed his wife and children.

00:58:44.000 And this person is a saint now because that's how the politics work here.

00:58:53.000 Because I dedicate this poem to the beloved, so loved, for a fleeting instant, to the woman of my night.

00:59:11.000 You mean, dude?

00:59:13.000 I guess.

00:59:13.000 The one who left at dawn.

00:59:18.000 Never speaking about herself. 0.57

00:59:19.000 Yeah, because she was a dude and a drug cartel leader to boot. 1.00

00:59:27.000 To she who drank from my fountains, whose mystery I miss.

00:59:34.000 Marching like a full-on saint statue of this person, like a distant star.

00:59:38.000 Oh my God.

00:59:39.000 Again, the whole thing.

00:59:41.000 Understand, this whole musical turns on one fundamental moral supposition.

00:59:46.000 If you are a person with gender dysphoria and you cut off your genitals or have hormone surgery, this means all sins, past, present, and future are wiped away. 0.95

00:59:56.000 All of them.

00:59:57.000 You can do anything to anyone at any time.

00:59:59.000 And you are fully justified in doing so because you have found your identity.

01:00:03.000 That's the thing that matters most.

01:00:04.000 Actually, they kind of spell that out right in the musical.

01:00:06.000 There is a song called Lady.

01:00:07.000 Again, another awful song.

01:00:09.000 This one is performed by Zoe Saldana and a person named Mark.

01:00:14.000 Ivanir, who is playing Dr. Wasserman, the genital mutilation specialist, who is the transing doctor.

01:00:23.000 And here is where Zoe Saldana explains the main thesis of the film.

01:00:29.000 There you go.

01:00:30.000 Lady, you know I only fix the body. 1.00

01:00:36.000 Skin bones, but I will never fix the soul. 0.79

01:00:43.000 If he's a he, she'll be a he. 1.00

01:00:46.000 If he's a she, she'll be a she. 1.00

01:00:49.000 If he's a wolf, she'll be a wolf.

01:00:51.000 If he's the wolf, you'll be his sheep.

01:00:55.000 Lady, I've been a doctor since I'm 24. I fight and fix, we'll never stop the war.

01:01:03.000 My dough is not God's dough.

01:01:08.000 Lady, will you please tell your mystery?

01:01:12.000 Instead of having plastic surgery, you'd better change ID. Doctor, I know you did a lot of studies.

01:01:26.000 Doctor, but let me say I disagree.

01:01:31.000 Here we go.

01:01:31.000 Here's the case.

01:01:33.000 Changing the body changes society.

01:01:36.000 Changing society changes the soul.

01:01:39.000 Changing the soul changes society.

01:01:42.000 Changing society changes it all.

01:01:44.000 Okay, so that's the actual line, right?

01:01:47.000 That's the actual line.

01:01:48.000 That, sure, this person's still a drug cartel lord who's doing evil things, but it's not about this person.

01:01:55.000 It's about society.

01:01:56.000 Changing society changes the soul, which changes society, which changes the soul, which is circular, but it doesn't matter because bad music.

01:02:04.000 Folks, it's absolutely awful.

01:02:07.000 Absolutely egregious.

01:02:08.000 It will be the worst Best Picture winner since Shape of Water.

01:02:11.000 I don't even know if this is worse than Shape.

01:02:14.000 Man, that is a brutal decision.

01:02:16.000 That is the Sophie's Choice of bad movies decisions. 0.93

01:02:20.000 Which one?

01:02:20.000 You're on Desert Island, and you only can watch one of these two movies for the rest of time.

01:02:25.000 Which one?

01:02:25.000 I mean, the third option is to drown yourself, and that may be preferable.

01:02:29.000 All right, in just a second, we'll get to all the societal blowback on this film. 0.98

01:02:32.000 There's a bunch of it, by the way.

01:02:34.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:02:35.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 10, 2025

Trump’s Victory Tour Continues!

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript