The woke left goes after Hogwarts Legacy for the supposed transphobia of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Plus, Matt Walsh humiliates a Democratic legislator over child genital mutilation, and former Twitter executives get grilled for censorship by congressional Republicans. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, and it's the most authoritarian force in American life right now. And that means that they are able to generate an outsized amount of attention and rage directed at particular people. The person who is on the chopping block today, and has been for a couple of years, is JK Rowling. And sure, she's even on the left. You'll remember that she foolishly decided to retcon Dumbledore into a gay dude. But then she refused to give in to the big one, which is: men can be women, and women can be men. And this means that there has now been a widespread attempted boycott of Hogwarts Legacy. And the idea here is that we have to make sure that no one engages in a game because the creator of the game does not agree with you on a very radical point of view? All of this despite the fact that, according to Forbes, there is a transgender character named Ryan Serona in the game. And by the way, Ryan's actually a witch, not a feminine one. But of course, that's not a second to realize I was not going to buy off of a witch who runs a tavern in Hogsmeade. Of course, she says she doesn't want to buy the game off of the woke left, right? Ben Shapiro: Is she a witch or a lesbian? What do you think of the Harry Potter video game that s a woman who does not want to be a woman to be considered a woman? And what does she think of a man who is a woman that can speak like a woman like a man like a girl like a boy like a guy like a dude like a male she s not a girl, or a girl who s a girl? - Is she not a witch not a woman, you re gonna buy it off of her off of it, right off of that? Plus, we ll find out on this episode of the show, right here on the other side of the internet? And we ll talk about that, right in the next episode of Ben Shapiro's new podcast, where she s got it all on the internet, right there on The Daily Mail? -- BONUS EPISODE!
00:00:00.000The woke left goes after Hogwarts legacy for the supposed transphobia of Harry Potter author J.K.
00:00:05.000Rowling, Matt Walsh humiliates a Democratic legislator over child genital mutilation, and former Twitter executives get grilled for censorship by congressional Republicans.
00:00:26.000It's the most authoritarian force in American life right now.
00:00:29.000And that is clearly true, particularly in the culture where they have the whip hand.
00:00:33.000And the simple fact of the matter is that the woke left occupies all of the slots in middle management and all the companies that decide exactly how culture is to be done.
00:00:42.000That is true whether we're talking about woke corporations in non-culture spaces or whether we are talking about culture itself.
00:00:49.000And that means that they are able to generate an outsized amount of attention and rage directed at particular people.
00:00:56.000The person who is on the chopping block today, of course, and has been for a couple of years, is J.K.
00:01:13.000Why isn't there anyone gay in Harry Potter?
00:01:14.000And she's like, well, I guess Dumbledore was gay.
00:01:16.000And then they had to make an entire series, Fantastic Beasts, dedicated to the proposition that we need a backstory for Dumbledore in which he likes dudes.
00:01:23.000Again, all of that is because the woke left always has the whip hand.
00:01:34.000Rowling is pretty invested in the idea that only women, biological women, can be women.
00:01:39.000And this has made her a persona non grata among members of the woke left.
00:01:43.000Again, despite the fact that she is a member of the political left herself.
00:01:46.000They've declared that she's a trans-exclusionary radical feminist because apparently you are a TERF if you believe in basic human biology.
00:01:54.000And this means that there has now been a widespread attempted boycott of Hogwarts legacy.
00:01:59.000Now, as we will see, wokeism doesn't actually succeed in the marketplace.
00:02:04.000It actually leads to tremendous failure in the marketplace, but it does succeed in pushing the Overton window to the left steadily and not all that slowly.
00:02:12.000According to Forbes, the highly anticipated Harry Potter video game debuted this week, but it's been plagued by controversy and boycotts as players grapple with whether to support J.K.
00:02:19.000Rowling's franchise in light of her history of comments widely seen as transphobic.
00:02:23.000Hogwarts Legacy is a role-playing game set in the Harry Potter universe and developed by Avalanche Software and published by Warner Bros.
00:02:32.000The game has garnered largely positive reviews on places like Metacritic.
00:02:36.000However, some fans and gamers are boycotting the game in protest of JK Rowling because, of course, she has said that men are men and women are women.
00:02:44.000Some popular game review sites like Kotaku, Polygon, and Eurogamer have not yet reviewed Hogwarts Legacy despite the review embargo lifting on Monday.
00:02:52.000Rowling's comments and voiced support for transgender people in their reviews.
00:02:55.000Jesse Earl, one trans YouTuber and writer, tweeted in December that unlike consuming previously owned Harry Potter books or films, purchasing Hogwarts Legacy while Rowling is quote, using her ongoing platform to target and also justify her continued targeting of trans people is hateful to trans people.
00:03:09.000Rowling responded accusing her of pure think.
00:03:12.000Some streamers on Amazon-owned Twitch platforms, including Will Overgaard and Nicotine, have publicly voiced opposition to the game.
00:03:19.000And the idea here is that we have to make sure that no one engages in a game because the creator of the game does not agree with you on a very radical point of view.
00:03:28.000All of this despite the fact, by the way, that apparently there is a transgender character in the game.
00:03:46.000That, by the way, would be the middle managers at Warner Brothers deciding that in order to avoid the flak, they're simply going to give in to the woke left.
00:03:53.000But Serona is a witch who runs a tavern in Hogsmeade Village, an NPC that the player can speak to.
00:03:59.000Serona doesn't outright say she is a trans woman.
00:04:00.000She implies it through her dialogue when she talks about her old classmates and says, took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard.
00:04:08.000Now, is that going to buy off the woke left?
00:04:09.000Of course it's not going to buy off the woke left.
00:04:29.000He's doing some good stuff this week, by the way.
00:04:31.000He actually donated a bunch of money to victims of the Turkish earthquake.
00:04:34.000And then he also did some stupid stuff, which is sort of what he normally does.
00:04:37.000He announced that he is not going to play Hogwarts Legacy.
00:04:40.000And the reason he's not going to play Hogwarts Legacy is not because he is in principled fashion angry that JK Rowling is such a transphobe.
00:04:46.000He's not going to do it because he says he's a coward.
00:04:48.000Which, okay, I mean, points for honesty here, Hasan.
00:04:51.000The only reason why I'm not playing this game, and I know a bunch of other people are not playing this game, is because we know that it's not worth it to get f***ing bullied endlessly and called transphobic endlessly when we have massive queer communities and audiences.
00:05:21.000And that's precisely why so many f***ing people that would otherwise like play it, maybe even raise money for, you know, charities or whatever.
00:05:36.000Okay, it's kind of an amazing thing to go on your own show and then just admit that you're a coward and that you won't say the thing because you're so afraid of your own fanbase.
00:05:44.000I mean, he literally said the only reason he's not playing is because people who quote-unquote chirp-chirp-chirp are basically bullying him into not playing the game.
00:05:54.000Later, he tried to walk this one back.
00:05:56.000He went on Twitter, he said, People who want to boycott the game aren't wrong to hate J.K.
00:06:04.000Most people have no idea and don't care about J.K.
00:06:05.000Rowling at all, and they just want to go to Hogwarts.
00:06:08.000Okay, well, I mean, you may be correct about the failure of the boycotts, but they've already won.
00:06:14.000By getting people like Hasan not to play the game, by bullying him, they've achieved their goal.
00:06:19.000Now, again, there is a massive gap that has now been exposed between the market, which hates wokeness, and the people who actually push the cultural window to the left.
00:06:29.000There is this huge gap because Hogwarts Legacy is dominating Twitch right now.
00:06:34.000According to Kotaku, the open world Harry Potter RPG is now the most popular game on the live streaming platform.
00:06:41.000And yet, all of the commentators, and the gamers, and all the people who are on the internet, the people like Hasan Piker, they're openly saying that it's not wrong to boycott it, that in fact, they themselves are not going to play the game out of pure fear of their own audiences.
00:06:56.000So much for the idea that capitalism rules all or that capitalism always wins.
00:07:01.000It does win when it comes to money making, right?
00:07:04.000This game will continue to make money, but it doesn't win when it comes to the culture.
00:07:07.000I want to talk a little bit more about that in just a second.
00:08:06.000Head on over to puretalk.com, enter promo code SHAPIRO, save 50% off your very first month, and stop giving money to the corporations that actually hate your guts.
00:08:13.000So again, the goal in the culture space is to continue pushing things over and over and over again to the left.
00:08:22.000And you can see how this has had an impact in the real world.
00:08:27.000It's had real political, real-world impact, but it's also had massive impact in terms of the kind of entertainment that people consume.
00:08:35.000So yesterday, Disney made several simultaneous announcements.
00:09:06.000They're going to try to have the best of both worlds.
00:09:07.000They're going to try to provide legacy content that parents still want their kids to see while mainstreaming in a bunch of left-wing social content.
00:09:14.000So they simultaneously announced yesterday 7,000 layoffs.
00:09:18.000And they want to make sequels to Toy Story Frozen and Zootopia.
00:09:23.000They have no new good ideas, apparently.
00:09:25.000So they're doing Toy Story 5, which I thought Toy Story 4 was the end of the story.
00:09:29.000You thought Toy Story 3 was the end of the story.
00:09:30.000Then they're like, we're back with Toy Story 4, which is good.
00:09:32.000And then they're like, well, they're now off into the sunset.
00:09:36.000Woody is going off to an island somewhere to be with Bo Peep or whatever.
00:09:40.000And now apparently they're bringing it back for Toy Story 5, because why the hell not?
00:09:44.000We'll all be long dead and gone when they're making Toy Story 82.
00:09:47.000Frozen 3 is apparently going to come out again.
00:09:51.000When I say come out, I mean that all the same people who are boycotting Harry Potter legacy or Hogwarts legacy, all those same people, I guarantee, I mean, they're already on the internet stumping for Ilsa to just come out as a lesbian.
00:10:20.000In any case, You can see the simultaneous pressures that Disney is under.
00:10:24.000From their middle management, there's a lot of pressure to move to the woe.
00:10:27.000From the market, there's a lot of pressure to go back to legacy content.
00:10:30.000And CEO Bob Iger is stuck in the middle.
00:10:33.000He announced that he was cutting 7,000 employees in hopes of finding $5 billion in savings.
00:10:38.000He announced that the company would be dumping another round of necessary installments to the Toy Story Frozen and Zootopia franchises, according to AV Club.
00:10:46.000Apparently, the company is also bringing Avatar rides and experiences to Disneyland in California.
00:10:50.000They already have that over at Disney World.
00:10:54.000Iger says, I have enormous respect and appreciation for the dedication of our employees worldwide.
00:10:59.000He said that about two seconds after respecting his employees into unemployment, as the AV Club points out over at The Onion.
00:11:08.000So again, this is just proof positive that many of these companies are running headlong into the woke diktats and they're feeling the impact of all of that.
00:11:18.000So who actually is doing this at these companies?
00:11:41.000There's a fascinating paper out from Nikolaj Foss at Copenhagen Business School and Peter Klein at Baylor University and the Norwegian School of Economics called, Why Do Companies Go Woke?
00:11:53.000And what they find is that going woke is an emergent strategy that is largely shaped by middle managers rather than owners, top managers, or employees.
00:12:04.000They suggest that broader social and cultural trends tend to reinforce the process.
00:12:08.000In other words, if you're a middle manager, the best way for you to ensure your own future employment is to go woke.
00:12:14.000Because it means that if you get fired, then you get to yell at your former employer about how they are racist and terrible.
00:12:19.000If you go woke, it is a protection mechanism.
00:12:23.000In other words, if you're a middle manager and you say, I wanted to wreck my company in a left-wing social direction, the people at the top of the company are like, oh God, we can't fire this person anymore.
00:12:31.000If we fire this person, they're going to claim discrimination.
00:12:34.000Again, the people at the top of the company have been bullied into silence by the ridiculous kind of legal architecture that's been set up around HR at our major companies.
00:12:44.000And the people at the bottom don't care.
00:12:46.000They just want to go and do their jobs.
00:12:47.000The people in middle management are, in fact, erecting the boat at a lot of these major corporations in terms of the wokeness.
00:12:54.000Which is why you see, for example, very often companies do a woke thing and then have to back off of it.
00:12:59.000There was another case of this yesterday when Airbnb had to back off of a ban that they had sent to Lauren Southern's parents.
00:13:05.000Lauren Southern is a very right-wing political commentator.
00:13:09.000The company had actually sent an email, Airbnb, to her parents informing them their account with Airbnb was being canceled because they are, quote, closely associated with Southern, whose account with the company is banned.
00:13:20.000The message said, quote, we've removed you from the Airbnb platform because your account is closely associated with a person who isn't allowed to use Airbnb.
00:13:26.000This means you'll no longer be able to book reservations on Airbnb.
00:13:31.000Southern tweeted out, my parents just got banned from Airbnb for being related to me.
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00:15:15.000Okay, so speaking of that, middle management core, the people who make the decisions that shift the culture and turn corporations into woke corporations.
00:15:22.000This is because if you're a middle manager, you're one of two types.
00:15:29.000The people at the top of the company are generally tasked with creating profitability for the company, creating efficiencies for the company, taking advantage of new market innovations.
00:15:38.000But if you're in middle management, you basically have been given one of two roles.
00:15:43.000Going woke protects your own job because once you go woke, nobody can fire you.
00:15:46.000And two, protect against downside liabilities for the company.
00:15:50.000This is the entire HR departments and major corporations.
00:15:53.000And so the woke have a major advantage here.
00:15:55.000And this means that when the heads of companies simply go to sleep, the middle management takes over.
00:16:00.000And we talk about the deep state in the federal government.
00:16:03.000Donald Trump takes over the presidency, and then there are a bunch of career bureaucrats who are existing in the executive branch, and they just work against his interests because their interests are not his interests, for example.
00:16:12.000And Trump didn't know enough about the workings of government to just go in and fire everybody, for example.
00:16:16.000Well, the same thing is true of major corporations.
00:16:18.000Very often, the people who found the corporations do so with innovation and creativity and market responsiveness as their chief goals.
00:16:25.000But pretty soon, they have to staff up at the middle level in order to delegate power downwards, right?
00:16:29.000They can't run every single aspect of the company.
00:16:31.000Well, in doing so, in delegating power to a bunch of middle managers who are rent-seeking, they want to maintain their own jobs, and liability minimizing, they want to minimize liability to themselves and to the company, You end up with middle managers in control of the company because the people at the top have basically delegated their way out of power.
00:16:46.000And that's precisely what happened over at Twitter.
00:16:48.000So yesterday, there is a hearing on the Hill, quite fascinating, with regard to Twitter.
00:16:55.000The Republicans hauled in all of the old employees of Twitter to talk about why exactly they had decided to, for example, shut down the New York Post story on Hunter Biden prior to the election, or why they had banned particular accounts.
00:17:09.000The middle managers at Twitter, people like Yoel Roth over at Trust and Safety, or Vijaya Gaddy, the legal advisor over at Trust and Safety.
00:17:15.000They were forced to answer some of these questions, and their answers are terrible.
00:17:18.000And demonstrate, full-scale, how it's the middle layer of these companies that is really, really the problem.
00:17:22.000And why, by the way, Elon Musk can come in and fire all the middle managers, and the company can still run.
00:17:27.000So Joel Roth yesterday, he made an astonishing statement.
00:17:30.000Again, this guy was the head of trust and safety at Twitter, which is about as Orwellian a title for a company division as is possible.
00:17:36.000And Roth said, the big problem with unrestricted free speech is it leads to less speech, not more speech.
00:17:44.000Twitter found that users were unhappy with the company's approach to content moderation and that this dissatisfaction drove people away from the service.
00:17:54.000This has consequences for what we mean by free speech on social media.
00:17:59.000Again and again, we saw the speech of a small number of abusive users drive away countless others.
00:18:06.000Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.
00:18:11.000And it was our job in Trust and Safety to try to strike an appropriate balance.
00:18:18.000And if people feel bad, they don't engage in free speech.
00:18:20.000So we have to strike an appropriate balance by determining what can be said and what can't be said.
00:18:24.000This right here would be the liability minimization position.
00:18:28.000And you can see that taking sort of full scale with regards to the Hunter Biden story.
00:18:33.000So Yoel Roth was asked by Republican congresspeople, again this is the former head of trust and safety at Twitter, he was asked by Republican congresspeople, why exactly did you take down the Hunter Biden laptop story and then ban accounts that just retweeted it?
00:18:45.000Mr. Roth, did the government tell you that the Biden laptop story was fake?
00:18:50.000didn't on their own, presumably in order to minimize the possible political fallout from allowing the story to go forward.
00:19:05.000On October 14, 2020, Twitter blocks the New York Post story on the Hunter Biden, the New York Post story on Hunter Biden and suspends their account.
00:19:14.000The night before, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends you an email.
00:19:18.000The email says this, heads up, I will be sending a teleporter link for you to download 10 documents.
00:19:50.000He says, we had lots of meetings with the FBI, right?
00:19:53.000Lots and lots of meetings with the FBI.
00:19:54.000So basically he was catfished by the FBI is what it sounds like here.
00:19:59.000Matt Taibbi, a respected reporter who published much of the Twitter files, said, quote, Twitter's contact with FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
00:20:11.000Now I want to better understand why he would suggest that.
00:20:15.000Mr. Roth, while at Twitter, how many meetings did you have with the FBI?
00:20:47.000When you are in a position of mid-range power, you do the thing that is necessary in order to protect yourself, your job, and what you think is liability for the company.
00:20:54.000And this is how things keep getting moved to the left.
00:20:58.000Speaking of things getting moved to the left, your tax dollars got moved to the left over the last several years.
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00:21:57.000All right, so, Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter Trust and Safety, he says, like, the government didn't even actually have to tell us that the Hunter Biden story was fake.
00:22:08.000In 2020, Twitter noticed activity related to the laptop that, at first glance, bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 Russian hack and leak operation targeting the DNC.
00:22:37.000This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials.
00:22:43.000Relying on its long-standing practice not to retroactively apply new policies, Twitter informed the New York Post that it could immediately begin tweeting when it deleted the original tweets, which would have freed them to retweet the same content again.
00:22:58.000The New York Post chose not to delete its original tweets, so Twitter made an exception after two weeks to retroactively apply the new policy to the Post's tweets.
00:23:06.000In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated the post account immediately.
00:23:34.000If a high-profile individual like any member of this committee or President Trump tweeted something controversial, it was sent to my team's desk.
00:23:44.000Every day, we had to decide whether a particular piece of content equated to yelling fire in a crowded theater.
00:23:52.000I mean, this shows you everything you need to know.
00:23:53.000The person whose job it was to decide what could be said and what could not be said is citing a bad law case.
00:24:00.000The fire in a crowded theater standard has not been a standard in American law for nigh on a century at this point.
00:24:05.000It was originally in a case during World War I called Schenck versus United States.
00:24:10.000And in Schenck, the case was about people who were distributing anti-war pamphlets, and the Woodrow Wilson administration went after them.
00:24:18.000And the Supreme Court said it was akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.
00:24:21.000That has not been the standard in American law for a long time, and she's still using it.
00:24:24.000Because again, she's one of the wokest, right?
00:24:26.000The middle management is two groups, the actual woke and the cowards.
00:24:30.000That is the middle management of so many of our major corporations.
00:24:33.000And the actual woke at our companies, right?
00:24:38.000Those people are incentivized by an entire public superstructure of actual activists.
00:24:43.000And that's how Democrats responded to this.
00:24:45.000So you have this Twitter hearing and the Republicans call in their witnesses, Democrats call their witnesses, and then Democrats come to the defense of Twitter.
00:24:52.000Twitter banning good information on COVID.
00:24:54.000Stuff that was just mirroring stats from the CDC.
00:24:56.000I remember there were tweets that I could not tweet about actual stats.
00:25:11.000Here, for example, is a Democratic representative named Robert Garcia telling these Twitter executives who shut down the dissemination of information that they saved lives.
00:25:20.000But I especially want to thank you for your work around the pandemic.
00:25:23.000The pandemic took over a million American lives, 1,300 in my own city back home, and your decisions in content moderation actually saved countless lives in this country, including the work you did by moderating or banning members even of this committee who peddled and lies and were actively causing death and harm to others.
00:25:45.000And so for that work on content moderation, I want to thank you.
00:25:50.000Of course, the middle management are answering to Garcia.
00:25:52.000They're not answering to the dictates of the shareholders of their companies.
00:25:57.000They're answering to AOC, who's out there declaring that the laptop story was half fake.
00:26:02.000The only thing I know about AOC and things that are half fake is all of her photo ops are at least half fake, whether it is her fake crying outside a parking lot at a detention center.
00:26:11.000I haven't seen her down by the border any time recently.
00:26:13.000Well, Joe Biden is interning tens of thousands of people, presumably.
00:26:17.000or at least thousands of people. And I haven't seen her crying outside the houses of the victims of crime from illegal. I have seen her pretending that she's getting handcuffed at particular rallies where she is detained briefly. We're talking about half fake Congress people.
00:26:35.000Ocasio-Cortez is at least half fake, but she says the Hunter Biden laptop story was half fake. So she's grateful to Twitter for shutting it down.
00:26:40.000They're weaponizing the use of this committee so that they can do it again. A whole hearing, about a 24-hour hiccup in a right-wing political operation.
00:28:35.000It wasn't the only laptop he just left lying around, by the way.
00:28:38.000But, again, this is also Democrats can defend the sort of censorship regime that they like.
00:28:42.000And AOC, of course, was back for more of this.
00:28:44.000AOC, yesterday, literally asked the former members of Twitter if they could have worked harder in banning libs of TikTok.
00:28:50.000Kaya Raychick, who's done the absolutely, apparently, devastatingly awful work of actually just revealing clips of people speaking in their own words.
00:28:58.000So here she was calling on the Twitter heads to have banned libs of TikTok more.
00:29:02.000Libs of TikTok have been suspended like five times.
00:29:05.000Here's AOC, all in favor of censorship.
00:29:08.000Mr. Roth, are you familiar with this account?
00:29:13.000Are you aware that from August 11th to August 16th, that account posted false information about Boston Children's Hospital, claiming that they were providing hysterectomies to children?
00:29:27.000Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the account.
00:29:30.000And are you aware that this lie was then circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?
00:29:37.000And are you aware that all these claims, which I have reiterated, were false, culminated in a real-life harassment and ultimately a bomb threat to the Boston Children's Hospital?
00:29:52.000And this account is still on that platform today.
00:29:54.000So, I'm just gonna point out that Boston Children's Hospital, according to ABC News, says that they offer gender-affirming hysterectomies to eligible teenagers.
00:30:15.000You have a bunch of activists in Congress, activists in the press, people who are not answerable to market conditions.
00:30:19.000And they find a bunch of allies in the middle management of major companies.
00:30:23.000And those allies then use the pressure from the outside as an excuse to pressure their superiors and their inferiors at these various companies in order to do the woke work.
00:30:32.000And a bunch of people, also in middle management, who seek to tamp down the risk to their company from outside political pressure, they cave to it.
00:30:52.000Because what the left is really, really good at on these particular issues is shifting the burden of proof.
00:30:58.000So, for example, the burden of proof when it comes to saying that men are men and women are women is now on you.
00:31:02.000You now have to Take an act of courage to say that men are men or women are women.
00:31:08.000I suppose you could be a coward like Hasan Piker and just not play a game because people are yelling you in the comments.
00:31:12.000Or you could actually do something courageous.
00:31:15.000The entire press reflect the whims of the activists because they are in fact activists.
00:31:19.000Perfect example, a headline from Yahoo News today reflecting the Associated Press headline, quote, Montana bill would let students misgender classmates.
00:31:28.000Look at the shift in the burden of proof there.
00:31:31.000The core assumption is that the moral thing to do is to force students to call other students by a fake gender.
00:31:38.000But if Bob comes in and says, I'm Jane, all the other students must immediately reflect this by law, says the Associated Press.
00:31:45.000The burden of proof now shifts to you to explain why you should be able to explain the truth.
00:31:50.000Now, the reality is, all this bill does, it says that students are allowed to say true things in school.
00:31:56.000According to the Associated Press, Montana schools would not be able to punish students who purposely misgender or deadname their transgender peers under a Republican-backed legislative proposal that opponents argue will increase bullying of children who are already struggling for acceptance.
00:32:08.000So, again, the burden of proof is on now people who just say true things.
00:32:12.000It is no longer on people to explain why everybody else should have to reflect their delusions.
00:32:17.000It takes courage to stand up to that, which is why I want to single out a couple of courageous folks today.
00:32:22.000One of them, of course, is my colleague over at Daily Wire, Matt Walsh.
00:32:25.000So Matt, speaking in his own capacity because he's really passionate about the issue, he was invited to speak at the Tennessee House Health Committee hearing regarding a bill that would ban sex change treatment on minors.
00:32:35.000And he then unleashed in what is, I think, one of the most viral clips I have ever seen.
00:32:41.000He was being questioned by a media matters lackey Over in the Tennessee house, a Tennessee Democrat about the fact that 20 years ago, Matt was doing a radio show and he was talking about the definition of age in American society and how way back when it was considered marriageable age at 16 and this Tennessee Democrat tries to suggest that Because Matt had said that, this means that Matt should also be in favor of 16-year-olds being able to consent to cutting off their own genitals.
00:33:10.000Here is Matt reversing the entire argument on this Tennessee legislator, and listen to the silence, it's amazing.
00:33:17.000I was talking about the fact that people tended to marry young historically, and that's all that that was about.
00:33:30.000Just curious of your definition of if you feel like people who are adults at 16 should... Well, people who are adults at 18, but actually your brain is not fully developed until you're 25.
00:33:42.000So we should be having a conversation about whether we should even be doing these surgeries to people at 18.
00:33:50.000I mean, do you think that a 16-year-old can meaningfully consent to having their body parts removed? Do you? No? We do not. Yeah, we ask the questions, it's not...
00:34:16.000That silence is the person looking around in bewilderment at being asked a very simple question.
00:34:20.000And then, the person then says, I'll do the asking of the questions here.
00:34:25.000Yeah, because again, when the burden of proof is reversed, when suddenly common sense has the right of way, and it is now your job to explain why common sense is wrong, you have no answers.
00:34:35.000So, it takes actual courage to stand up to the cultural forces at play here, the domination of the woke and the middle management woke that have now permeated our society.
00:34:45.000It also takes courage in business to actually run a profit.
00:34:48.000Believe it or not, it's hard to run a business.
00:34:50.000Here at Daily Wire, one of the things that we like to do is run profit.
00:34:52.000This is one of the reasons why we actually use Stamps.com.
00:34:55.000Stamps.com lets you print your own postage and shipping labels directly from your home or office.
00:34:58.000It's ready to go in minutes, so you can get back to running your business sooner.
00:35:02.000Postage rates just increased again, but Stamps.com offers the best discounts in the industry.
00:35:06.000They've teamed up with the USPS and UPS to get you huge mailing and shipping discounts of up to 86% off.
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00:35:20.000We're talking no lines, no traffic, no waiting.
00:35:22.000And I like the post office, but I don't like standing around at the post office.
00:35:48.000Also, The Daily Wire is now seeking our first ever vice president of social media to join our team in Nashville, Tennessee.
00:35:53.000This person will oversee a large team that reaches 95 million plus viewers across our social platforms.
00:35:59.000This leader is going to serve as our social and content strategy lead to help us continue scaling our pages and platforms across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snap, and more.
00:36:07.000It is the perfect role for somebody who loves to roll up their sleeves and work alongside their team, as well as somebody who can think strategically about the content we actually put on social media for more info and to apply.
00:36:30.000Jamie Reed is a lesbian woman who is married to a trans woman, meaning she's actually married to a biological man.
00:36:37.000So it's kind of a strange situation for a lesbian, but that's not the story.
00:36:40.000The story is that this person used to work at a trans clinic and now is calling out those clinics for what they are doing, which is essentially mutilating children.
00:36:49.000She says, quote, I'm a 42 year old St.
00:36:51.000Louis native, a queer woman and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.
00:36:54.000My worldview has deeply shaped my career.
00:36:56.000I've spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations, children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor, For almost four years, I worked at the Washington University School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, with teens and young adults who are HIV positive.
00:37:09.000Many of them are trans or otherwise gender non-conforming, and I could relate.
00:37:11.000Throughout childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself.
00:37:15.000Okay, so she is married to a biological woman who says that she's a man.
00:37:19.000Together, we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.
00:37:25.000All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St.
00:37:30.000Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.
00:37:33.000The center's working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on.
00:37:37.000This premise was shared by the center's doctors and therapists.
00:37:40.000Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.
00:37:44.000During the four years I worked at the clinic as case manager, around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors.
00:37:48.000The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences, including sterility.
00:37:53.000I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there.
00:37:57.000By the time I departed, I was certain the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to do no harm.
00:38:03.000Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
00:38:09.000I'm doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue and the ways my testimony might be misused.
00:38:14.000I'm doing so knowing I'm putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.
00:38:18.000Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down, but I can't in good conscience do so because what is happening to scores of children, writes this lesbian woman who worked at a gender clinic, is far more important than my comfort.
00:38:27.000What is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.
00:38:34.000Well, as she points out, The population of people who are claiming gender dysphoria has shifted radically from teenage boys to teenage girls.
00:38:42.000She says that she was concerned about the shift in the population.
00:38:47.000But she said anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.
00:38:51.000She said frequently our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had.
00:38:54.000We had patients who said they had Tourette's.
00:39:00.000The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.
00:39:04.000They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion.
00:39:07.000When I said clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
00:39:16.000To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist, usually one we recommended, who they had to see once or twice.
00:39:22.000To make it more efficient, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition.
00:39:26.000The next step was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
00:39:35.000Many encounters with patients, writes this woman, emphasize to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds.
00:39:42.000But the center downplayed the negative consequences and emphasized the need for transition.
00:39:47.000There are no reliable studies showing that gender dysphoria is going to be increased by the use or is going to be decreased by the use of these sorts of drugs.
00:39:58.000Indeed, the experiences of many of these centrist patients prove how false these assertions are.
00:40:52.000Good for the woman who wrote this piece.
00:40:55.000If people don't stand up, if people take the coward's way out, the people who pay the price are, of course, the ignorant among us, who are indoctrinated into this pathetic cult.
00:41:07.000Okay, meanwhile, when Joe Biden is out there trying to restart his 2024 presidential run, There was one weird circumstance during the State of the Union that's been getting some press, and I feel like we probably ought to comment on it.
00:41:20.000For those who missed it, there was this very weird moment where Jill Biden was entering the chamber, and she walked over to Doug Emhoff, who is the husband of Kamala Harris, and they kissed.
00:41:54.000And I don't know if I like that at all or if anybody does.
00:41:59.000So Kamala Harris was actually asked about this on Spanish language television.
00:42:03.000And she said, no, I haven't watched the video.
00:42:05.000I don't know, but I do know that the first lady and the second gentleman are working arduously with what we are doing with my husband against anti-Semitism.
00:42:14.000So, arduously, they were working on all of this.
00:42:17.000Things are going great in the Biden administration.
00:42:20.000Joe Biden himself has now been asked more about why classified documents are being found nearly every day at his various properties.
00:42:26.000And he told PBS NewsHour, Judy Woodruff, he said, I've been informed by other lawyers not really to speak about this, which is always a great sign.
00:42:35.000You said just possessing classified documents is, you said, totally irresponsible.
00:42:41.000So what was totally irresponsible but the fact that you had some?
00:42:45.000What they've informed me not to speak to this issue to any way try to prejudice the investigation that's going on.
00:42:57.000Okay, so Joe Biden is a very weak president.
00:42:59.000The fact of the matter is that Joe Biden is running in the low 40s in terms of approval rating.
00:43:05.000And so he has to figure something out going into 2024.
00:43:07.000And so what he's figured out is that he's going to go full Bernie.
00:43:10.000Now, it's not a totally crazy strategy.
00:43:14.000Joe Biden is looking at the woke intersectional base that he thought was going to lead him to victory in 2020 and 2022.
00:43:21.000And he's saying, you guys aren't all that durable.
00:43:24.000I'm just noticing that if I really want to win a sweeping victory, I need to carve back into the base that Donald Trump started to take from the Democratic Party, that blue-collar, white, working-class base, many of whom do not like the wokeness.
00:43:36.000So the Democratic Party has a bit of a problem on its hands.
00:43:38.000There's a giant rift inside the Democratic Party between the college-educated, woke crowd and various minority groups.
00:43:45.000And the blue-collar base that Joe Biden would like to reach out to.
00:43:48.000He's trying to do both at the same time.
00:43:50.000According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden headed to Wisconsin on Wednesday, taking the economic pitch he delivered during the State of the Union on the road, ramping up his criticism of a Republican proposal on entitlements that led to lawmakers heckling him during his primetime speech.
00:44:02.000He sought to explain to the public in his address on Tuesday how they stand to benefit from trillions of dollars in spending.
00:44:07.000And then he went to Wisconsin and he said, the economy has grown at a solid clip.
00:44:10.000Folks, I hate to disappoint, but the economic plan is working.
00:44:15.000Achieve record high inflation and bring us back to the same levels of unemployment that we had before the pandemic?
00:44:20.000Except actually a little worse, because there should be more people working at this point.
00:44:25.000But this is Joe Biden's shtick, is to embrace every element of the Bernie Sanders agenda.
00:44:31.000According to the New York Times, Biden aims to win back white working-class voters through their wallets.
00:44:36.000Jonathan Weissman writes with his call for a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.
00:44:39.000President Biden on Tuesday night acknowledged rhetorically what Democrats have been prepping for two years, a fierce campaign to win back white working-class voters through the creation of hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs that do not require a college degree.
00:44:51.000Whether or not Biden can persuade a divided Congress to act on his remaining plans, the money from the laws he has already passed has just begun to flow.
00:44:58.000Many of those jobs will be in the industrial battlegrounds Democrats either took back from Trump in 2020 or will need in 2024.
00:45:05.000But, says the New York Times, I love the New York Times, Democrats will have to match those jobs against Republican appeals aimed at white grievances.
00:45:13.000It is the good, wonderful Joe Biden versus the white grievance Republicans.
00:45:17.000Or maybe Joe Biden has allied his progressive Bernie Sanders economic agenda with an extraordinarily woke social agenda, and that's an ugly combo.
00:45:44.000By the way, it is worth noting here that Joe Biden's economic plans, again, they are not actually working.
00:45:48.000Jerome Powell said the labor market's surprising strength is underscoring why bringing the inflation down will take longer and require higher interest rates than many investors have been anticipating, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:45:58.000A government report Friday showing hiring accelerated in January was certainly stronger, stronger than anyone I know expected, said Powell on Tuesday.
00:46:03.000He said, it kind of shows you why we think this will be a process that takes a significant period of time.
00:46:09.000So the economic plan is not working, which leaves Joe Biden with one final rhetorical trick, and that is to suggest that Republicans are trying to steal your Medicare and Social Security.
00:46:20.000So he was on the road doing this routine.
00:46:22.000A lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare.
00:46:41.000Actually, the media are duly doing his work, despite the fact that Republicans have said that right now they're not talking about Social Security or Medicare.
00:46:49.000Jeff Stein over at The Washington Post has a piece called Social Security.
00:46:54.000Medicare brawl awaits Washington, even if not this year.
00:46:57.000So that is a tacit acknowledgement that Joe Biden is lying and that that brawl is not in fact coming while he is president.
00:47:03.000But they have to they have to make some sort of pitch.
00:47:04.000And so the pitch they're going to make is they're going to lie.
00:47:06.000They're going to suggest over and over and over again that Republicans are out to steal your quote unquote entitlements.
00:47:11.000Now, the reality is that if we don't restructure entitlements in some way in the future, then everything will come to a crash and call.
00:47:16.000As I've said for a long time, that is the most likely outcome is austerity measures forced on the United States by extraneous circumstance, by a failed system.
00:47:26.000But Joe Biden actually does not have a lot to run on here.
00:47:30.000And particularly that economic message, which is going to end in stagnation, allied with his woke message.
00:47:34.000He is very, very weak, which is why it is important that the Republicans actually run a candidate who can win.
00:47:40.000And this brings us to our latest episode of Good Trump, Bad Trump.
00:49:38.000There's no evidence that anybody did anything wrong in any of these photos or in any of these pictures.
00:49:42.000It doesn't matter, he's still accusing him, apparently, of preying on high school girls.
00:49:46.000really ugly stuff. DeSantis is doing what he should be doing, which is he's just, it is like, it's honest to God, like watching an adult fight a small child.
00:49:55.000And you have the adult who's holding the kid out here by the forehead while the kid just swings wildly in every direction. Here's Ron DeSantis, who's busy being governor of the third largest state in the country, talking about how he's not going to respond to this kind of nonsense. And he's going to focus instead on, you know, being governor.
00:50:10.000I face defamatory stuff every single day I've been governor.
00:50:18.000But I have a platform to fight back. A lot of these other people that are more little, they don't necessarily have a platform to fight back. And so in terms of our reforms, I really want to empower them more so than people that occupy high positions like me.
00:50:33.000It just goes with the territory. You got to have a thick skin. It's also just.
00:50:37.000Practically speaking, I would not take time out of being governor to be fighting lawsuits.
00:50:42.000It's just not practical in terms of what we're doing.
00:51:14.000So I was encouraged by one of my producers to watch the Best Picture nominated film, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, All the Time, Forever.
00:51:21.000It's actually just called Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
00:51:23.000And here is a little bit of the trailer.
00:52:47.000I mean, the movie's like 2 hours and 20 minutes.
00:52:49.000It really should be about an hour and 50 minutes.
00:52:50.000You could easily cut 20 minutes out of this film.
00:52:52.000It also has a bunch of kind of odd Bizarrely pornographic references that are completely unnecessary to the telling of the story.
00:53:00.000It's just in the middle of a fight because it's supposed to be all about like bizarre things happening.
00:53:05.000It's essentially multiple universes that are being collapsed into one.
00:53:10.000A bunch of forces are being drawn from one universe into another universe and all this.
00:53:14.000But the stuff that happens to be drawn from one universe into another universe is all really weird and gross.
00:53:19.000So there's a lot of that kind of stuff.
00:53:22.000But, overall, it's at least something creative.
00:53:24.000So the basic premise of the film is that, I'm gonna screw up some of these names, so forgive me, Michelle Yao, who plays Evelyn, is a very unsatisfied middle-aged mother who works at a laundry that she and her husband, who's played by Ki-Hai Khan, who is, his name is Waymond in the movie, but he's better known as Short Round from when he was a child in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and who turns in really a phenomenal performance.
00:54:22.000It's plot significant in the sense that one of the lessons that the parents are of course supposed to learn, because this is Hollywood, is that whatever lifestyle your child engages in requires your love and acceptance.
00:54:52.000And then, a portal to other universes opens.
00:54:55.000And she finds herself in a battle for the preservation of the universe from a villain, also played by the same actress who plays her daughter.
00:55:04.000Because her daughter has become sort of a nihilist, partially because of lack of mom's love.
00:55:08.000So because mom is kind of nihilistic and depressed, daughter has also become nihilistic and depressed, and it's sort of about how they find connection with each other and save each other from nihilism and depression, and how Wayman, the husband, also does this.
00:55:19.000So it's a very nice sort of family movie, except that it's done in a quasi-pornographic and violent guise.
00:55:26.000At the heart of it is sort of a nice family story about family loving each other and sticking together.
00:55:32.000And parents reaching out to children and children reaching out to parents and all the rest of that stuff.
00:55:36.000Where I will say that it is a philosophical muddle is the basic premise is again that nihilism is somehow debunked.
00:55:46.000The meaninglessness of the universe is somehow debunked by the fact that for a brief moment in time you have people who you love and who love you.
00:55:53.000And I don't find that philosophy particularly compelling.
00:55:55.000I know this is a very prominent philosophy on sort of the secular left and people who think of themselves as spiritual but not religious like it a lot as well.
00:56:02.000That we live in a cold, heartless, deep, dark universe in which your life means nothing and eventually everything will be eaten by the sun anyway and you will end up as worm food.
00:56:09.000And so what really life is all about is just finding people who love you and people who you love.
00:56:21.000They provide extraordinary meaning in my life.
00:56:24.000But in order for that to be durable, in order for that to be more than just fleeting feelings, that requires long-term commitment.
00:56:30.000And long-term commitment has to be justified by a higher moral rubric than merely what pleases me in a given day.
00:56:36.000Because otherwise, you end up with atomistic individualism.
00:56:39.000Because what if my family doesn't please me?
00:56:41.000What if it turns out that the sort of commitments I'm called upon to make make me miserable?
00:56:46.000And I end up working at a laundromat, living above it in a crappy apartment with an obnoxious kid.
00:56:53.000So the way out that the movie provides is not, I think, sufficient for the challenge that the movie also provides.
00:56:59.000The philosophical challenge of the movie is the daughters, again, drawn to nihilism.
00:57:02.000The mom is also drawn to nihilism, but they save each other by reaching out to each other and loving one another.
00:57:07.000And again, I think that sounds really Nice on paper, I do not think it works in reality.
00:57:10.000I think that people have to be oriented toward a higher purpose and cause than merely quote-unquote kindness or niceness.
00:57:15.000I don't think that's actually enough to sustain a civilization or even a family.
00:57:18.000I think the family has to be oriented toward something higher.
00:57:21.000The obvious answer here would be God and religion, but since we've ruled that out of bounds on the left wing of Western civilization, all they can come up with is sort of these happy feelings, but the happy feelings again are temporary.
00:57:33.000And it doesn't explain why it would be wrong, for example, for mom to just say, you know, what actually makes me happy is ditching my husband, is ditching my obnoxious kid and just going off and doing whatever it is that I want to do.
00:57:43.000And it would be hard to see from inside the moral universe created by these critters why that would be wrong.
00:57:47.000Why would you condemn Evelyn for that?
00:57:52.000In fact, there is one alternate universe where she doesn't have her husband or her kid and she's seen as lesser for that.
00:57:58.000But I don't know by what moral rubric that's the case.
00:58:02.000Are they making a utilitarian case for the happiness that is to be found in marriage and children?
00:58:06.000If so, I don't think that's strong enough to actually sustain in the face of a full-scale nihilistic argument that argues all of this is meaningless in the end anyway.
00:58:14.000But is the movie kind of fun and enjoyable?
00:58:17.000You have to put aside your philosophical objections.
00:58:18.000You have to put aside the fact that if you don't want to see people weirdly with rubbery hot dog fingers groping at each other, or if you don't wish to see people inserting Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate.
00:58:30.000rectums during the middle of a fight. If that's not something that you're into, then this is not the movie for you. Again, it was not that part of the movie was not part of the movie for me, but overall, is it an enjoyable film and is it creative? Yeah, it is. Should win best picture?
00:58:43.000No, it shouldn't. Top Gun should win best picture. Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:58:47.000Okay, so a couple of quick things that I hate. So one is there is this story from Seymour Hersh that is getting wide traffic on the interwebs, suggesting that America took out the Nord Stream Now, you'll recall that very, very early in the Ukraine war, the Nord Stream pipeline was damaged and suddenly Russia was unable to pump oil through the Nord Stream pipeline.
00:59:14.000It was totally unclear who had done it.
00:59:16.000The New York Times called it a mystery.
00:59:18.000The Biden administration denied any knowledge of it.
00:59:20.000Seymour Hersh is a very controversial quasi-journalist.
00:59:24.000I say very controversial quasi-journalist because he did some work during the Vietnam War that was widely praised, for example, over the My Lai Massacre.
00:59:36.000That's what made him famous is his reporting of the My Lai Massacre.
00:59:39.000But later on, he wrote a bunch of stories that were very bizarre.
00:59:44.000He suggested, for example, that every detail about the killing of Osama bin Laden was not true.
00:59:49.000And then he suggested also that the sarin gas released by the Assad regime in Syria was actually not released by the Assad regime.
01:00:00.000So he's had some real problems with his research before.
01:00:05.000He also made allegations in a book called The Dark Side of Camelot about the John F. Kennedy assassination that turned out to be really questionable based on hearsay.
01:00:16.000So you have to take everything the guy says with at least a grain of salt.
01:00:18.000However, If what he's arguing here is true, that's a serious problem.
01:00:22.000So what he argues in his latest article is that the United States basically bombed Nord Stream and did so without any sort of congressional approval or authorization.
01:00:28.000That would be a forward military offense by the American military.
01:00:35.000Navy's Diving and Salvage Center planted a bunch of explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines.
01:00:42.000Last June, he says, the Navy divers operating under the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as Ball Tops 22 planted the remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
01:00:56.000Two of those pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade.
01:01:03.000A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational.
01:01:08.000Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border, and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joe Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
01:01:18.000So the CIA says, quote, this claim is completely and utterly false.
01:01:21.000Adrian Watson, a White House spokesperson, said, quote, this is false and a complete fiction.
01:01:29.000So again, I would just like to remind everybody how thin that sourcing is in the interest of objectivity here.
01:01:36.000I know that there are a lot of people who are jumping on the story.
01:01:39.000If, indeed, the Biden administration launched forward attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline without congressional authorization and the President of the United States did that, that is a serious scandal.
01:01:50.000So, that is worth noting, but it is also worth noting that Seymour Hersh has been wrong on an awful lot of things and has tended to rely on some bad information in the past.
01:01:58.000Alright guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.