The Ben Shapiro Show - Woke Voldemort Comes For Harry Potter | Ep. 1665

00:00:00.000 The woke left goes after Hogwarts legacy for the supposed transphobia of Harry Potter author J.K.

00:00:05.000 Rowling, Matt Walsh humiliates a Democratic legislator over child genital mutilation, and former Twitter executives get grilled for censorship by congressional Republicans.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:13.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:26.000 It's the most authoritarian force in American life right now.

00:00:29.000 And that is clearly true, particularly in the culture where they have the whip hand.

00:00:33.000 And 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.

00:00:42.000 That is true whether we're talking about woke corporations in non-culture spaces or whether we are talking about culture itself.

00:00:49.000 And that means that they are able to generate an outsized amount of attention and rage directed at particular people.

00:00:56.000 The person who is on the chopping block today, of course, and has been for a couple of years, is J.K.

00:00:59.000 Rowling.

00:01:00.000 Rowling is apparently the worst person in the world. 0.56

00:01:00.000 J.K. 0.56

00:01:02.000 Sure, you say, she's the person who wrote Harry Potter.

00:01:05.000 And sure, she's even on the left. 0.95

00:01:06.000 You'll remember that she foolishly decided to retcon Dumbledore into a gay dude. 0.59

00:01:10.000 There was nothing in the books that suggests that he was gay. 0.65

00:01:12.000 But then she was pushed.

00:01:13.000 Why isn't there anyone gay in Harry Potter? 0.80

00:01:14.000 And she's like, well, I guess Dumbledore was gay. 0.98

00:01:16.000 And 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.

00:01:23.000 Again, all of that is because the woke left always has the whip hand.

00:01:26.000 And J.K.

00:01:26.000 Rowling gave in to a point.

00:01:29.000 But then she refused to give in to the big one, which is men can be women and women can be men.

00:01:33.000 It turns out that J.K.

00:01:34.000 Rowling is pretty invested in the idea that only women, biological women, can be women.

00:01:39.000 And this has made her a persona non grata among members of the woke left.

00:01:43.000 Again, despite the fact that she is a member of the political left herself.

00:01:46.000 They've declared that she's a trans-exclusionary radical feminist because apparently you are a TERF if you believe in basic human biology. 1.00

00:01:54.000 And this means that there has now been a widespread attempted boycott of Hogwarts legacy.

00:01:59.000 Now, as we will see, wokeism doesn't actually succeed in the marketplace.

00:02:04.000 It 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.

00:02:12.000 According 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.

00:02:19.000 Rowling's franchise in light of her history of comments widely seen as transphobic.

00:02:23.000 Hogwarts Legacy is a role-playing game set in the Harry Potter universe and developed by Avalanche Software and published by Warner Bros.

00:02:29.000 Games.

00:02:30.000 It will be released on February 10th.

00:02:32.000 The game has garnered largely positive reviews on places like Metacritic.

00:02:36.000 However, 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.

00:02:44.000 Some popular game review sites like Kotaku, Polygon, and Eurogamer have not yet reviewed Hogwarts Legacy despite the review embargo lifting on Monday.

00:02:51.000 Others have denounced J.K.

00:02:52.000 Rowling's comments and voiced support for transgender people in their reviews.

00:02:55.000 Jesse 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.

00:03:09.000 Rowling responded accusing her of pure think.

00:03:12.000 Some streamers on Amazon-owned Twitch platforms, including Will Overgaard and Nicotine, have publicly voiced opposition to the game.

00:03:19.000 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.

00:03:28.000 All of this despite the fact, by the way, that apparently there is a transgender character in the game.

00:03:36.000 I'm not kidding you.

00:03:37.000 Apparently, Hogwarts Legacy actually does have a transgender character named Serona Ryan.

00:03:43.000 Again, it's according to Forbes.

00:03:46.000 That, 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.

00:03:53.000 But Serona is a witch who runs a tavern in Hogsmeade Village, an NPC that the player can speak to.

00:03:59.000 Serona doesn't outright say she is a trans woman.

00:04:00.000 She 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.

00:04:08.000 Now, is that going to buy off the woke left? 0.92

00:04:09.000 Of course it's not going to buy off the woke left. 0.93

00:04:13.000 Of course not.

00:04:14.000 They're still angry.

00:04:16.000 And one of the people who is most hilariously involved in this controversy now is Hasan Piker.

00:04:21.000 He used to be associated with the Young Turks, and now he is a gamer who declares himself a socialist while buying himself mansions.

00:04:28.000 Really good socialist, Hasan Piker.

00:04:29.000 He's doing some good stuff this week, by the way.

00:04:31.000 He actually donated a bunch of money to victims of the Turkish earthquake. 0.99

00:04:34.000 And then he also did some stupid stuff, which is sort of what he normally does. 0.98

00:04:37.000 He announced that he is not going to play Hogwarts Legacy. 0.99

00:04:40.000 And 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.

00:04:46.000 He's not going to do it because he says he's a coward.

00:04:48.000 Which, okay, I mean, points for honesty here, Hasan. 0.66

00:04:51.000 The 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.

00:05:10.000 That's it. 0.97

00:05:11.000 Everybody, everybody knows, everybody f***ing knows how much leftist motherf***ers love to chirp on the internet. 0.98

00:05:18.000 They got no power. 0.99

00:05:19.000 All they do is chirp, chirp, chirp.

00:05:21.000 And 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.

00:05:33.000 You know, they're not doing it. 0.94

00:05:36.000 Okay, 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.

00:05:44.000 I 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.

00:05:54.000 Later, he tried to walk this one back.

00:05:56.000 He went on Twitter, he said, People who want to boycott the game aren't wrong to hate J.K.

00:05:58.000 Rowling.

00:05:59.000 She's awful. 0.97

00:06:00.000 Except it's fruitless, no matter how much trans folks want to push for it. 0.99

00:06:02.000 It's like trying to boycott Disney.

00:06:04.000 Most people have no idea and don't care about J.K.

00:06:05.000 Rowling at all, and they just want to go to Hogwarts.

00:06:08.000 Okay, well, I mean, you may be correct about the failure of the boycotts, but they've already won.

00:06:14.000 By getting people like Hasan not to play the game, by bullying him, they've achieved their goal.

00:06:19.000 Now, 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.

00:06:29.000 There is this huge gap because Hogwarts Legacy is dominating Twitch right now.

00:06:34.000 According to Kotaku, the open world Harry Potter RPG is now the most popular game on the live streaming platform.

00:06:39.000 So the market loves Hogwarts Legacy.

00:06:41.000 And 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.

00:06:56.000 So much for the idea that capitalism rules all or that capitalism always wins.

00:07:01.000 It does win when it comes to money making, right?

00:07:04.000 This game will continue to make money, but it doesn't win when it comes to the culture.

00:07:07.000 I want to talk a little bit more about that in just a second.

00:07:10.000 It's pretty amazing stuff.

00:07:11.000 Speaking of woke companies.

00:07:12.000 Now, your wireless company probably is spending money on a bunch of causes you don't particularly like.

00:07:16.000 I'm talking AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile.

00:07:18.000 These are not companies that are aligned with you politically.

00:07:20.000 If you are giving them your money, then there is a good shot they are spending that money on things that you do not approve of.

00:07:25.000 That is not going to happen if you switch your company over to Pure Talk for your phone service.

00:07:29.000 Pure Talk is the antidote to woke wireless companies.

00:07:32.000 They're proudly veteran-owned.

00:07:33.000 They employ a U.S.-based customer service team, and they will not spend money on the causes that they particularly hate.

00:07:38.000 Pure Talk's service is fantastic.

00:07:39.000 They have one of the largest networks in the country.

00:07:41.000 In fact, they share a tower network with one of the big guys.

00:07:44.000 Switching on over to Pure Talk in as little as 10 minutes is easy.

00:07:46.000 You can keep your phone and your phone number as well, and your first month is guaranteed risk-free.

00:07:50.000 If you're not completely happy with the service, you will get your money back.

00:07:50.000 Tried?

00:07:52.000 I switched all of my business calls over to Pure Talk.

00:07:55.000 This year, make it a goal to support the companies who actually don't hate your guts.

00:07:57.000 Go to puretalk.com, enter promo code SHAPIRO, save 50% off your very first month.

00:08:01.000 That's puretalk.com, promo code SHAPIRO.

00:08:04.000 Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.

00:08:06.000 Head 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.

00:08:13.000 So again, the goal in the culture space is to continue pushing things over and over and over again to the left.

00:08:22.000 And you can see how this has had an impact in the real world.

00:08:27.000 It's had real political, real-world impact, but it's also had massive impact in terms of the kind of entertainment that people consume.

00:08:35.000 So yesterday, Disney made several simultaneous announcements.

00:08:37.000 Disney has been suffering.

00:08:39.000 They lost, apparently, 2.4 million subscribers.

00:08:42.000 Now, they have a bajillion subscribers.

00:08:44.000 They can afford to lose 2.4 million subscribers, but That is a damaging thing for them.

00:08:50.000 And the reason for that is a widespread perception that Disney does not like you and does not like your values.

00:08:56.000 This is a major problem for them.

00:08:57.000 They decided to jump both feet into the culture of wars, and now they're getting punished for it.

00:09:02.000 But are they going to direct themselves away from that?

00:09:03.000 The answer is probably not.

00:09:06.000 They're going to try to have the best of both worlds.

00:09:07.000 They'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.

00:09:14.000 So they simultaneously announced yesterday 7,000 layoffs.

00:09:18.000 And they want to make sequels to Toy Story Frozen and Zootopia.

00:09:23.000 They have no new good ideas, apparently.

00:09:25.000 So they're doing Toy Story 5, which I thought Toy Story 4 was the end of the story.

00:09:29.000 You thought Toy Story 3 was the end of the story.

00:09:30.000 Then they're like, we're back with Toy Story 4, which is good.

00:09:32.000 And then they're like, well, they're now off into the sunset.

00:09:34.000 The gang is leaving.

00:09:35.000 They've all retired.

00:09:36.000 Woody is going off to an island somewhere to be with Bo Peep or whatever.

00:09:40.000 And now apparently they're bringing it back for Toy Story 5, because why the hell not?

00:09:44.000 We'll all be long dead and gone when they're making Toy Story 82.

00:09:47.000 Frozen 3 is apparently going to come out again.

00:09:51.000 When 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.

00:10:01.000 This is not a fake thing.

00:10:02.000 It's a real thing.

00:10:03.000 They've been pushing this since Frozen 1, and the clamor began to grow in Frozen 2, and now they're really pushing it for Frozen 3.

00:10:09.000 It'll be fascinating to see if Disney caves to their own middle-management wokest.

00:10:14.000 And they're making Zootopia 2 as well.

00:10:16.000 I don't know where the clamor was for Zootopia 2, by the way.

00:10:18.000 Was Zootopia like a massive hit?

00:10:20.000 In any case, You can see the simultaneous pressures that Disney is under.

00:10:24.000 From their middle management, there's a lot of pressure to move to the woe.

00:10:27.000 From the market, there's a lot of pressure to go back to legacy content.

00:10:30.000 And CEO Bob Iger is stuck in the middle.

00:10:33.000 He announced that he was cutting 7,000 employees in hopes of finding $5 billion in savings.

00:10:38.000 He announced that the company would be dumping another round of necessary installments to the Toy Story Frozen and Zootopia franchises, according to AV Club.

00:10:46.000 Apparently, the company is also bringing Avatar rides and experiences to Disneyland in California.

00:10:50.000 They already have that over at Disney World.

00:10:54.000 Iger says, I have enormous respect and appreciation for the dedication of our employees worldwide.

00:10:59.000 He said that about two seconds after respecting his employees into unemployment, as the AV Club points out over at The Onion.

00:11:08.000 So 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.

00:11:18.000 So who actually is doing this at these companies?

00:11:19.000 That really is the big question.

00:11:21.000 Who is doing this kind of stuff?

00:11:23.000 The answer is actually not the people at the top of the companies.

00:11:26.000 People at the top of the companies, the very, very top of the companies, those people do answer to the bottom line.

00:11:30.000 They would like to see shareholders increase their market.

00:11:35.000 It really is not the people with the lowest rungs.

00:11:37.000 Those people don't care. 1.00

00:11:37.000 Those people want to go in every day, do their work, and go home to their families. 1.00

00:11:40.000 It's the people in middle management.

00:11:41.000 There'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?

00:11:53.000 And 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.

00:12:04.000 They suggest that broader social and cultural trends tend to reinforce the process.

00:12:08.000 In other words, if you're a middle manager, the best way for you to ensure your own future employment is to go woke.

00:12:14.000 Because it means that if you get fired, then you get to yell at your former employer about how they are racist and terrible.

00:12:19.000 If you go woke, it is a protection mechanism.

00:12:22.000 It's an HR problem if you go woke.

00:12:23.000 In 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.

00:12:31.000 If we fire this person, they're going to claim discrimination.

00:12:31.000 Now we're stuck.

00:12:34.000 Again, 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.

00:12:44.000 And the people at the bottom don't care.

00:12:46.000 They just want to go and do their jobs.

00:12:47.000 The people in middle management are, in fact, erecting the boat at a lot of these major corporations in terms of the wokeness.

00:12:54.000 Which is why you see, for example, very often companies do a woke thing and then have to back off of it.

00:12:59.000 There was another case of this yesterday when Airbnb had to back off of a ban that they had sent to Lauren Southern's parents.

00:13:05.000 Lauren Southern is a very right-wing political commentator. 1.00

00:13:09.000 The 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.

00:13:20.000 The 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.

00:13:26.000 This means you'll no longer be able to book reservations on Airbnb.

00:13:31.000 Southern tweeted out, my parents just got banned from Airbnb for being related to me.

00:13:34.000 They've never booked anything for me.

00:13:35.000 They don't represent me in any way.

00:13:36.000 They aren't publicly political in any way.

00:13:38.000 How is this sane in any way?

00:13:41.000 And Southern's tweet quickly went viral.

00:13:43.000 And then Airbnb claimed they made a mistake and reinstated her parents' account.

00:13:46.000 As we'll talk about in just a second, these middle managers are the people who are controlling the direction of the culture.

00:13:52.000 They're controlling the direction of business in the country, even more so than the market.

00:13:57.000 Because in order to protect against downside liability, companies are just caving to the woke middle management core.

00:14:02.000 This is particularly true over at Twitter.

00:14:04.000 We'll get to that in one second.

00:14:05.000 First, I gotta tell you, my sleep quality the last few weeks has been absolutely awful.

00:14:10.000 One of the reasons.

00:14:11.000 We have a brand new puppy.

00:14:12.000 That puppy is getting us up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and then my kids are waking me up very early in the morning.

00:14:16.000 When I get up in the morning, I need one substance to keep me awake, and that is my Black Rifle Coffee.

00:14:22.000 Black Rifle Coffee is the only thing keeping the show on the air at this point.

00:14:26.000 If it were not for my steady IV drip of Black Rifle Coffee, I would have been dead long ago.

00:14:32.000 Black Rifle Coffee is roasted by a veteran-led team of brilliant coffee creators here in the United States.

00:14:36.000 Their founder, Evan Hafer, has actually scoured the planet for the perfect beans, ensuring they've passed the most stringent standards of excellence.

00:14:41.000 They're constantly coming out with new roasts to try, like the most recent Beware the Delaware roast.

00:14:45.000 You can sign up for Coffee Club subscription and have Black Rifle Coffee delivered straight to your door on a schedule.

00:14:49.000 Not to mention, Black Rifle is doing amazing work for our nation's veterans.

00:14:52.000 This year alone, Black Rifle Coffee donated over 120,000 bags of coffee to veterans and first responders, while expanding their own team of active duty service members, veterans, and veteran family members.

00:15:01.000 Head on over to BlackRifleCoffee.com, use promo code SHAPIRO at checkout for 10% off your purchase and your first coffee club order.

00:15:06.000 That's BlackRifleCoffee.com.

00:15:08.000 Use promo code SHAPIRO for 10% off.

00:15:10.000 You can also find Black Rifle Coffee in grocery and convenience stores near you.

00:15:12.000 Black Rifle Coffee.

00:15:14.000 is America's Coffee.

00:15:15.000 Okay, so speaking of that, middle management core, the people who make the decisions that shift the culture and turn corporations into woke corporations.

00:15:22.000 This is because if you're a middle manager, you're one of two types.

00:15:24.000 This is why you're a middle manager.

00:15:26.000 If you were truly creative and entrepreneurial, you wouldn't be a middle manager.

00:15:28.000 You'd be at the top of the company.

00:15:29.000 The 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.

00:15:38.000 But if you're in middle management, you basically have been given one of two roles.

00:15:42.000 One is to protect your own job.

00:15:43.000 Going woke protects your own job because once you go woke, nobody can fire you.

00:15:46.000 And two, protect against downside liabilities for the company.

00:15:50.000 This is the entire HR departments and major corporations.

00:15:53.000 And so the woke have a major advantage here. 0.94

00:15:55.000 And this means that when the heads of companies simply go to sleep, the middle management takes over.

00:16:00.000 And we talk about the deep state in the federal government.

00:16:03.000 Donald 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.

00:16:12.000 And Trump didn't know enough about the workings of government to just go in and fire everybody, for example.

00:16:16.000 Well, the same thing is true of major corporations.

00:16:18.000 Very often, the people who found the corporations do so with innovation and creativity and market responsiveness as their chief goals.

00:16:25.000 But pretty soon, they have to staff up at the middle level in order to delegate power downwards, right?

00:16:29.000 They can't run every single aspect of the company.

00:16:31.000 Well, 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.

00:16:46.000 And that's precisely what happened over at Twitter.

00:16:48.000 So yesterday, there is a hearing on the Hill, quite fascinating, with regard to Twitter.

00:16:55.000 The 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.

00:17:09.000 The middle managers at Twitter, people like Yoel Roth over at Trust and Safety, or Vijaya Gaddy, the legal advisor over at Trust and Safety.

00:17:15.000 They were forced to answer some of these questions, and their answers are terrible.

00:17:18.000 And demonstrate, full-scale, how it's the middle layer of these companies that is really, really the problem.

00:17:22.000 And why, by the way, Elon Musk can come in and fire all the middle managers, and the company can still run.

00:17:27.000 So Joel Roth yesterday, he made an astonishing statement.

00:17:30.000 Again, 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.

00:17:36.000 And Roth said, the big problem with unrestricted free speech is it leads to less speech, not more speech.

00:17:41.000 Who appointed this guy?

00:17:44.000 Twitter found that users were unhappy with the company's approach to content moderation and that this dissatisfaction drove people away from the service.

00:17:54.000 This has consequences for what we mean by free speech on social media.

00:17:59.000 Again and again, we saw the speech of a small number of abusive users drive away countless others.

00:18:06.000 Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.

00:18:11.000 And it was our job in Trust and Safety to try to strike an appropriate balance.

00:18:17.000 Because people feel bad.

00:18:18.000 And if people feel bad, they don't engage in free speech.

00:18:20.000 So we have to strike an appropriate balance by determining what can be said and what can't be said.

00:18:24.000 This right here would be the liability minimization position.

00:18:28.000 And you can see that taking sort of full scale with regards to the Hunter Biden story.

00:18:33.000 So 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?

00:18:45.000 Mr. Roth, did the government tell you that the Biden laptop story was fake?

00:18:49.000 No, sir, they did not.

00:18:50.000 didn't on their own, presumably in order to minimize the possible political fallout from allowing the story to go forward.

00:19:05.000 On 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.

00:19:14.000 The night before, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends you an email.

00:19:18.000 The email says this, heads up, I will be sending a teleporter link for you to download 10 documents.

00:19:24.000 It's not spam.

00:19:25.000 Please confirm receipt when you get it.

00:19:27.000 Two minutes later, 624 p.m., you respond back, received and downloaded.

00:19:32.000 Thanks.

00:19:34.000 Hey, and Roth then said, well, yeah, I was coordinating with the FBI, but they didn't tell me any of this.

00:19:41.000 He's the middle manager.

00:19:41.000 This is what he's tasked with doing is to minimize liability.

00:19:44.000 The FBI tells him to jump and he says, how high?

00:19:46.000 In fact, they even apply, imply that he should jump.

00:19:48.000 And he says, how high should I jump?

00:19:50.000 He says, we had lots of meetings with the FBI, right?

00:19:53.000 Lots and lots of meetings with the FBI.

00:19:54.000 So basically he was catfished by the FBI is what it sounds like here.

00:19:59.000 Matt 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.

00:20:11.000 Now I want to better understand why he would suggest that.

00:20:15.000 Mr. Roth, while at Twitter, how many meetings did you have with the FBI?

00:20:20.000 I couldn't say for sure.

00:20:24.000 More than 10?

00:20:25.000 That's a reasonable estimate.

00:20:26.000 More than 20?

00:20:28.000 I couldn't say for sure.

00:20:29.000 More than 50?

00:20:30.000 That seems a bit high.

00:20:31.000 Okay, so dozens of meetings with the FBI.

00:20:35.000 And then he was asked the real takeaway.

00:20:37.000 Did the government actually just tell you that Hunter's story was fake or hack?

00:20:42.000 And he says, no, they didn't tell us that.

00:20:44.000 Because again, they didn't have to.

00:20:46.000 That is the whole point here.

00:20:47.000 When 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.

00:20:54.000 And this is how things keep getting moved to the left.

00:20:58.000 Speaking of things getting moved to the left, your tax dollars got moved to the left over the last several years.

00:21:02.000 If you're a business and you've been in business for the last five, six years, you've gone through a real rough go of it.

00:21:06.000 You probably overpaid your taxes during COVID.

00:21:08.000 A lot of people did.

00:21:09.000 If your business has five or more employees and managed to survive COVID, however, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to $26,000 per employee.

00:21:16.000 It's not a loan.

00:21:16.000 There's no payback.

00:21:17.000 It's a refund on your taxes.

00:21:18.000 The challenge is how to get your hands on it.

00:21:20.000 Head on over to GetRefunds.com.

00:21:21.000 Their team of tax attorneys are highly trained in this little-known payroll tax refund program.

00:21:25.000 They've already returned $1 billion to businesses that can help you as well.

00:21:28.000 They do all the work.

00:21:29.000 There's no charge up front.

00:21:30.000 You simply share a percentage of that cash that they get for you, so it really is all upside for you.

00:21:33.000 Businesses of all types can qualify, including those who took PPP, nonprofits, even those who had increases in sales.

00:21:39.000 Just go to GetRefunds.com, click on Qualify Me, answer a few quick questions.

00:21:42.000 This payroll tax refund is only available for a limited amount of time.

00:21:45.000 Head on over to GetRefunds.com.

00:21:45.000 Don't miss out.

00:21:47.000 Again, that is GetRefunds.com.

00:21:49.000 Make sure that you didn't overpay the government.

00:21:51.000 And if you can claw some of that money back, why wouldn't you?

00:21:53.000 Head over to GetRefunds.com, click on Qualify Me, answer a few quick questions, and get started today.

00:21:57.000 All 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.

00:22:06.000 We just assumed it was.

00:22:08.000 In 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.

00:22:20.000 And we had to decide what to do.

00:22:22.000 And in that moment, with limited information, Twitter made a mistake.

00:22:27.000 They did make a mistake, but then they didn't fix the mistake.

00:22:29.000 As former legal head Vijaya Gaddy said, we should have reinstated the accounts that were tweeting out the Hunter Biden story.

00:22:34.000 But we didn't.

00:22:35.000 We just left them closed.

00:22:37.000 This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials.

00:22:43.000 Relying 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.

00:22:58.000 The 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.

00:23:06.000 In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated the post account immediately.

00:23:11.000 Yeah, but they didn't, did they?

00:23:12.000 They didn't, did they? 1.00

00:23:12.000 And the reason they didn't is, once again, these are people who are covering their own ass. 1.00

00:23:16.000 They have some ideological agreements with the woke left, and then they also like to cover their own asses. 0.99

00:23:20.000 Speaking of the woke left, you want to talk about, like, the middle management classic employee. 0.95

00:23:23.000 Here is a Twitter, quote-unquote, whistleblower, employee named Annika Collier Navarroli.

00:23:27.000 And she said, what was our job over at Twitter?

00:23:29.000 Our job over at Twitter was to restrict speech.

00:23:31.000 And so we did.

00:23:34.000 If a high-profile individual like any member of this committee or President Trump tweeted something controversial, it was sent to my team's desk.

00:23:44.000 Every day, we had to decide whether a particular piece of content equated to yelling fire in a crowded theater.

00:23:52.000 I mean, this shows you everything you need to know.

00:23:53.000 The person whose job it was to decide what could be said and what could not be said is citing a bad law case.

00:24:00.000 The fire in a crowded theater standard has not been a standard in American law for nigh on a century at this point.

00:24:05.000 It was originally in a case during World War I called Schenck versus United States.

00:24:10.000 And in Schenck, the case was about people who were distributing anti-war pamphlets, and the Woodrow Wilson administration went after them.

00:24:18.000 And the Supreme Court said it was akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.

00:24:21.000 That has not been the standard in American law for a long time, and she's still using it.

00:24:24.000 Because again, she's one of the wokest, right? 1.00

00:24:26.000 The middle management is two groups, the actual woke and the cowards.

00:24:30.000 That is the middle management of so many of our major corporations.

00:24:33.000 And the actual woke at our companies, right?

00:24:36.000 The middle management woke.

00:24:38.000 Those people are incentivized by an entire public superstructure of actual activists.

00:24:43.000 And that's how Democrats responded to this.

00:24:45.000 So 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.

00:24:52.000 Twitter banning good information on COVID.

00:24:54.000 Stuff that was just mirroring stats from the CDC.

00:24:56.000 I remember there were tweets that I could not tweet about actual stats.

00:24:59.000 Twitter would take that stuff down.

00:25:02.000 And this is cheered by the Democrats because, after all, they are activists.

00:25:05.000 They're not answerable for the profit margins of these companies or the success of these companies.

00:25:10.000 It's an inside-outside game.

00:25:11.000 Here, for example, is a Democratic representative named Robert Garcia telling these Twitter executives who shut down the dissemination of information that they saved lives.

00:25:20.000 But I especially want to thank you for your work around the pandemic.

00:25:23.000 The 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.

00:25:45.000 And so for that work on content moderation, I want to thank you.

00:25:50.000 Of course, the middle management are answering to Garcia.

00:25:50.000 I want to thank you.

00:25:52.000 They're not answering to the dictates of the shareholders of their companies.

00:25:57.000 They're answering to AOC, who's out there declaring that the laptop story was half fake.

00:26:02.000 The 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.

00:26:11.000 I haven't seen her down by the border any time recently.

00:26:13.000 Well, Joe Biden is interning tens of thousands of people, presumably.

00:26:17.000 or 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.

00:26:35.000 Ocasio-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.

00:26:40.000 They'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.

00:26:51.000 That is why we are here right now.

00:26:54.000 And it is...

00:26:55.000 It's just an abuse of public resources and abuse of public time.

00:26:59.000 We could be talking about health care.

00:27:01.000 We could be talking about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.

00:27:03.000 We could be talking about abortion rights, civil rights, voting rights.

00:27:07.000 But instead, we're talking about Hunter Biden's half-fake laptop story.

00:27:11.000 I mean, this is an embarrassment.

00:27:13.000 Half-fake laptop story.

00:27:14.000 What's an embarrassment is this person in Congress with her giant glasses. 1.00

00:27:19.000 She's such a ridiculous person. 1.00

00:27:21.000 But this is the thing. 0.99

00:27:22.000 The activist class wants the middle management to shut down the debate. 0.61

00:27:25.000 That is their goal.

00:27:27.000 For example, Representative Jared Moskowitz, Democrat from Florida.

00:27:29.000 He actually tried to cover for the Biden laptop story being suppressed.

00:27:32.000 He was like, yeah, it's good that it was suppressed.

00:27:33.000 I'm happy it was suppressed.

00:27:46.000 I mean, this is, he's like a RadioShack.matrix guy who copied files off a private citizen's hard drive.

00:27:55.000 Okay?

00:27:56.000 That's your entire theory is based off of.

00:27:59.000 I want to use his words.

00:28:01.000 This is his own words.

00:28:03.000 Your guy, your leaker, the guy who gave you the information.

00:28:07.000 There have been several attempts by several individuals to modify and insert fake data.

00:28:14.000 I do know there has been multiple attempts over the past year and a half to insert questionable material into the laptop.

00:28:23.000 There is no evidence that any questionable material was inserted into the laptop. 0.97

00:28:27.000 Hunter Biden left his laptop at a computer repair shop because he's a high garbage human.

00:28:32.000 He was he was high beyond reason. 0.97

00:28:34.000 And he just left.

00:28:35.000 It wasn't the only laptop he just left lying around, by the way.

00:28:38.000 But, again, this is also Democrats can defend the sort of censorship regime that they like.

00:28:42.000 And AOC, of course, was back for more of this.

00:28:44.000 AOC, yesterday, literally asked the former members of Twitter if they could have worked harder in banning libs of TikTok.

00:28:50.000 Kaya Raychick, who's done the absolutely, apparently, devastatingly awful work of actually just revealing clips of people speaking in their own words.

00:28:58.000 So here she was calling on the Twitter heads to have banned libs of TikTok more.

00:29:02.000 Libs of TikTok have been suspended like five times.

00:29:05.000 Here's AOC, all in favor of censorship.

00:29:08.000 Mr. Roth, are you familiar with this account?

00:29:11.000 Yes, ma'am, I am.

00:29:13.000 Are 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?

00:29:27.000 Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the account.

00:29:30.000 And are you aware that this lie was then circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?

00:29:36.000 Yes.

00:29:37.000 And 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?

00:29:50.000 Yes, I am aware.

00:29:52.000 And this account is still on that platform today.

00:29:54.000 So, 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.

00:30:07.000 So that wasn't a lie at all.

00:30:08.000 She just wants people she doesn't like shut down. 1.00

00:30:10.000 She doesn't like libs of TikTok because sometimes libs of TikTok makes fun of AOC. 1.00

00:30:14.000 This is the game, folks.

00:30:15.000 You have a bunch of activists in Congress, activists in the press, people who are not answerable to market conditions.

00:30:19.000 And they find a bunch of allies in the middle management of major companies.

00:30:23.000 And 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.

00:30:32.000 And 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.

00:30:41.000 That is the entire game.

00:30:43.000 From Disney to Twitter to Hogwarts Legacy, that is the game.

00:30:49.000 And it takes something to stand up to this sort of pressure.

00:30:51.000 It really does.

00:30:52.000 Because what the left is really, really good at on these particular issues is shifting the burden of proof.

00:30:58.000 So, for example, the burden of proof when it comes to saying that men are men and women are women is now on you.

00:31:02.000 You now have to Take an act of courage to say that men are men or women are women. 0.93

00:31:08.000 I suppose you could be a coward like Hasan Piker and just not play a game because people are yelling you in the comments.

00:31:12.000 Or you could actually do something courageous. 0.64

00:31:15.000 The entire press reflect the whims of the activists because they are in fact activists.

00:31:19.000 Perfect example, a headline from Yahoo News today reflecting the Associated Press headline, quote, Montana bill would let students misgender classmates.

00:31:28.000 Look at the shift in the burden of proof there.

00:31:29.000 Let students misgender classmates. 1.00

00:31:31.000 The core assumption is that the moral thing to do is to force students to call other students by a fake gender.

00:31:38.000 But if Bob comes in and says, I'm Jane, all the other students must immediately reflect this by law, says the Associated Press.

00:31:45.000 The burden of proof now shifts to you to explain why you should be able to explain the truth.

00:31:50.000 Now, the reality is, all this bill does, it says that students are allowed to say true things in school.

00:31:56.000 According 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.

00:32:08.000 So, again, the burden of proof is on now people who just say true things.

00:32:12.000 It is no longer on people to explain why everybody else should have to reflect their delusions.

00:32:17.000 It takes courage to stand up to that, which is why I want to single out a couple of courageous folks today.

00:32:22.000 One of them, of course, is my colleague over at Daily Wire, Matt Walsh.

00:32:25.000 So 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.

00:32:35.000 And he then unleashed in what is, I think, one of the most viral clips I have ever seen.

00:32:40.000 It was pretty amazing.

00:32:41.000 He 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.

00:33:10.000 Here is Matt reversing the entire argument on this Tennessee legislator, and listen to the silence, it's amazing.

00:33:17.000 I was talking about the fact that people tended to marry young historically, and that's all that that was about.

00:33:25.000 How does that relate to this subject?

00:33:30.000 Just 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.

00:33:42.000 So we should be having a conversation about whether we should even be doing these surgeries to people at 18.

00:33:47.000 But certainly before 18, it's absurd.

00:33:50.000 I 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...

00:34:11.000 No?

00:34:16.000 That silence is the person looking around in bewilderment at being asked a very simple question.

00:34:20.000 And then, the person then says, I'll do the asking of the questions here.

00:34:25.000 Yeah, 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.

00:34:35.000 So, 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.

00:34:45.000 It also takes courage in business to actually run a profit.

00:34:48.000 Believe it or not, it's hard to run a business.

00:34:50.000 Here at Daily Wire, one of the things that we like to do is run profit.

00:34:52.000 This is one of the reasons why we actually use Stamps.com.

00:34:55.000 Stamps.com lets you print your own postage and shipping labels directly from your home or office.

00:34:58.000 It's ready to go in minutes, so you can get back to running your business sooner.

00:35:02.000 Postage rates just increased again, but Stamps.com offers the best discounts in the industry.

00:35:06.000 They've teamed up with the USPS and UPS to get you huge mailing and shipping discounts of up to 86% off.

00:35:11.000 Plus, they automatically tell you your cheapest and fastest shipping options.

00:35:14.000 For 25 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for over a million businesses.

00:35:17.000 You get access to the shipping services you need to run your business directly from your computer.

00:35:20.000 We're talking no lines, no traffic, no waiting.

00:35:22.000 And I like the post office, but I don't like standing around at the post office.

00:35:25.000 I like using stamps.com.

00:35:26.000 That's why Daily Wire has been doing so for literally years.

00:35:28.000 Set your business up for success by getting started with stamps.com today.

00:35:31.000 You can sign up with promo code Shapiro for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale.

00:35:37.000 No long-term commitments or contracts.

00:35:38.000 Just go to stamps.com.

00:35:39.000 Click the microphone at the top of the page.

00:35:41.000 Enter code Shapiro.

00:35:42.000 That's stamps.com.

00:35:43.000 Click that microphone at the top of the page.

00:35:45.000 Enter code Shapiro for the special offer.

00:35:48.000 Deal.

00:35:48.000 Also, The Daily Wire is now seeking our first ever vice president of social media to join our team in Nashville, Tennessee.

00:35:53.000 This person will oversee a large team that reaches 95 million plus viewers across our social platforms.

00:35:59.000 This 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.

00:36:07.000 It 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.

00:36:15.000 Go to dailywire.com slash Ben.

00:36:17.000 Click careers.

00:36:18.000 That's dailywire.com slash Ben today.

00:36:21.000 Okay.

00:36:22.000 Speaking of people with courage to stand up to the woke left, there's an amazing piece over at the free press.

00:36:26.000 This is Barry Weiss's new publication.

00:36:29.000 It's by a person named Jamie Reed.

00:36:30.000 Jamie Reed is a lesbian woman who is married to a trans woman, meaning she's actually married to a biological man.

00:36:37.000 So it's kind of a strange situation for a lesbian, but that's not the story. 1.00

00:36:40.000 The 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. 0.58

00:36:49.000 She says, quote, I'm a 42 year old St.

00:36:51.000 Louis native, a queer woman and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.

00:36:54.000 My worldview has deeply shaped my career.

00:36:56.000 I'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.

00:37:09.000 Many of them are trans or otherwise gender non-conforming, and I could relate.

00:37:11.000 Throughout childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself.

00:37:14.000 I'm now married to a trans man.

00:37:15.000 Okay, so she is married to a biological woman who says that she's a man.

00:37:19.000 Together, we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

00:37:25.000 All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St.

00:37:30.000 Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.

00:37:33.000 The center's working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on.

00:37:37.000 This premise was shared by the center's doctors and therapists.

00:37:40.000 Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.

00:37:44.000 During the four years I worked at the clinic as case manager, around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors.

00:37:48.000 The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences, including sterility.

00:37:53.000 I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there.

00:37:57.000 By 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.

00:38:03.000 Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

00:38:07.000 Today, I'm speaking out.

00:38:09.000 I'm doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue and the ways my testimony might be misused.

00:38:14.000 I'm doing so knowing I'm putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

00:38:18.000 Almost 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.

00:38:27.000 What is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

00:38:31.000 So what exactly is happening?

00:38:34.000 Well, as she points out, The population of people who are claiming gender dysphoria has shifted radically from teenage boys to teenage girls.

00:38:42.000 She says that she was concerned about the shift in the population.

00:38:47.000 But she said anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.

00:38:51.000 She said frequently our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had.

00:38:54.000 We had patients who said they had Tourette's.

00:38:55.000 They didn't.

00:38:56.000 That they had tic disorders. 0.97

00:38:57.000 They had multiple personalities.

00:38:57.000 They didn't.

00:38:58.000 But they didn't.

00:39:00.000 The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.

00:39:04.000 They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion.

00:39:07.000 When 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.

00:39:16.000 To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist, usually one we recommended, who they had to see once or twice.

00:39:22.000 To make it more efficient, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition.

00:39:26.000 The next step was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

00:39:29.000 That is all it took.

00:39:32.000 Amazing, amazing stuff.

00:39:35.000 Many 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.

00:39:42.000 But the center downplayed the negative consequences and emphasized the need for transition.

00:39:47.000 There 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.

00:39:58.000 Indeed, the experiences of many of these centrist patients prove how false these assertions are.

00:40:01.000 Here's an example.

00:40:03.000 On Friday, May 1st, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient.

00:40:06.000 Oh dear, I'm concerned the patient does not understand what bicolutamide does.

00:40:10.000 I responded, I don't think we start anything, honestly, right now.

00:40:14.000 Bicalumetide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer.

00:40:19.000 One of its side effects is it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts.

00:40:22.000 The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and a feminizing agent for boys.

00:40:26.000 It has a long list of side effects.

00:40:28.000 This patient experienced one of them, liver toxicity.

00:40:32.000 And the story goes on and on and on and on.

00:40:34.000 Why has none of this been reported by legacy media?

00:40:37.000 Why is it left to Barry Weiss to actually report this sort of stuff over at her newsletter?

00:40:41.000 And the answer is it takes courage to do this.

00:40:43.000 And the media are dominated by woke leftists.

00:40:45.000 And corporations are dominated by people who cower to the woke leftists or are woke leftists themselves.

00:40:51.000 Good for Barry.

00:40:52.000 Good for the woman who wrote this piece. 1.00

00:40:55.000 If 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. 0.65

00:41:07.000 Okay, 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. 0.69

00:41:20.000 For 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.

00:41:30.000 Like, on the lips.

00:41:32.000 It was weird.

00:41:32.000 And I'm not saying that there was anything untoward going on.

00:41:36.000 I'm just going to say it was very, very, very weird.

00:41:39.000 And I hope, as my friend Jeremy Boring put it, that they're very happy together.

00:41:42.000 Here's Joe Biden and Doug Emhoff.

00:41:44.000 Well, that was strange.

00:41:53.000 change.

00:41:54.000 And I don't know if I like that at all or if anybody does.

00:41:59.000 So Kamala Harris was actually asked about this on Spanish language television.

00:42:03.000 And she said, no, I haven't watched the video.

00:42:05.000 I 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.

00:42:12.000 Very important.

00:42:14.000 So, arduously, they were working on all of this.

00:42:17.000 Things are going great in the Biden administration.

00:42:20.000 Joe Biden himself has now been asked more about why classified documents are being found nearly every day at his various properties.

00:42:26.000 And 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.

00:42:35.000 You said just possessing classified documents is, you said, totally irresponsible.

00:42:41.000 So what was totally irresponsible but the fact that you had some?

00:42:45.000 What they've informed me not to speak to this issue to any way try to prejudice the investigation that's going on.

00:42:54.000 Hmm.

00:42:55.000 Is that what's happening right now?

00:42:57.000 Okay, so Joe Biden is a very weak president.

00:42:59.000 The fact of the matter is that Joe Biden is running in the low 40s in terms of approval rating.

00:43:05.000 And so he has to figure something out going into 2024.

00:43:07.000 And so what he's figured out is that he's going to go full Bernie.

00:43:10.000 Now, it's not a totally crazy strategy.

00:43:14.000 Joe Biden is looking at the woke intersectional base that he thought was going to lead him to victory in 2020 and 2022.

00:43:21.000 And he's saying, you guys aren't all that durable.

00:43:24.000 I'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. 0.82

00:43:36.000 So the Democratic Party has a bit of a problem on its hands.

00:43:38.000 There's a giant rift inside the Democratic Party between the college-educated, woke crowd and various minority groups.

00:43:45.000 And the blue-collar base that Joe Biden would like to reach out to.

00:43:48.000 He's trying to do both at the same time.

00:43:50.000 According 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.

00:44:02.000 He sought to explain to the public in his address on Tuesday how they stand to benefit from trillions of dollars in spending.

00:44:07.000 And then he went to Wisconsin and he said, the economy has grown at a solid clip.

00:44:10.000 Folks, I hate to disappoint, but the economic plan is working.

00:44:14.000 To do what?

00:44:15.000 Achieve record high inflation and bring us back to the same levels of unemployment that we had before the pandemic?

00:44:20.000 Except actually a little worse, because there should be more people working at this point.

00:44:25.000 But this is Joe Biden's shtick, is to embrace every element of the Bernie Sanders agenda.

00:44:31.000 According to the New York Times, Biden aims to win back white working-class voters through their wallets.

00:44:36.000 Jonathan Weissman writes with his call for a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.

00:44:39.000 President 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.

00:44:51.000 Whether 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.

00:44:57.000 The surge of hiring is coming.

00:44:58.000 Many of those jobs will be in the industrial battlegrounds Democrats either took back from Trump in 2020 or will need in 2024.

00:45:05.000 But, 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.

00:45:12.000 That's what it's about, guys.

00:45:13.000 It is the good, wonderful Joe Biden versus the white grievance Republicans.

00:45:17.000 Or maybe Joe Biden has allied his progressive Bernie Sanders economic agenda with an extraordinarily woke social agenda, and that's an ugly combo.

00:45:27.000 Maybe you guys are going to have a bit of a hard time reaching out to the white working-class voters while you are simultaneously declaring that America is systemically racist and biased on behalf of white working-class voters and also their traditional moral viewpoints on everything ranging from transgenderism to same-sex marriage is passé.

00:45:44.000 By the way, it is worth noting here that Joe Biden's economic plans, again, they are not actually working.

00:45:48.000 Jerome 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.

00:45:58.000 A government report Friday showing hiring accelerated in January was certainly stronger, stronger than anyone I know expected, said Powell on Tuesday.

00:46:03.000 He said, it kind of shows you why we think this will be a process that takes a significant period of time.

00:46:09.000 So 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.

00:46:20.000 So he was on the road doing this routine.

00:46:22.000 A lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare.

00:46:26.000 Well, let me just say this.

00:46:29.000 It's your dream, but I'm going to my veto pen, make it a nightmare.

00:46:33.000 I might have been a better man, and I'm married.

00:46:35.000 And then I met where I couldn't get to the bathroom in time.

00:46:39.000 That wasn't a nightmare.

00:46:39.000 That was just yesterday.

00:46:41.000 Actually, 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.

00:46:49.000 Jeff Stein over at The Washington Post has a piece called Social Security.

00:46:54.000 Medicare brawl awaits Washington, even if not this year.

00:46:57.000 So that is a tacit acknowledgement that Joe Biden is lying and that that brawl is not in fact coming while he is president.

00:47:03.000 But they have to they have to make some sort of pitch.

00:47:04.000 And so the pitch they're going to make is they're going to lie.

00:47:06.000 They're going to suggest over and over and over again that Republicans are out to steal your quote unquote entitlements.

00:47:11.000 Now, 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.

00:47:16.000 As 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.

00:47:26.000 But Joe Biden actually does not have a lot to run on here.

00:47:30.000 And particularly that economic message, which is going to end in stagnation, allied with his woke message.

00:47:34.000 He is very, very weak, which is why it is important that the Republicans actually run a candidate who can win.

00:47:40.000 And this brings us to our latest episode of Good Trump, Bad Trump.

00:47:44.000 Okay, so.

00:47:55.000 Today, is there a good Trump or bad Trump?

00:47:58.000 So, President Trump, you know, he's the only declared candidate at this point.

00:48:02.000 We are expecting that there will be more candidates who jump in.

00:48:06.000 But Donald Trump, which one do you think it's going to be?

00:48:09.000 Here we go.

00:48:10.000 Oh, no.

00:48:11.000 Yes, indeed.

00:48:12.000 It is.

00:48:13.000 Yes, it's bad Trump.

00:48:15.000 Bad Trump is here today.

00:48:16.000 And he came in the form of accusing Ron DeSantis, who he sees as his chief rival for the nomination of, quote, grooming high school girls.

00:48:26.000 He put out a message on Truth Social with a picture.

00:48:30.000 It's a picture of this old stuff, by the way.

00:48:33.000 This has been out there for a while.

00:48:35.000 Of Ron DeSantis from when he was a high school teacher in 2001-2002, which means he was 23 or 24 years old.

00:48:43.000 And he was teaching at a high school.

00:48:45.000 And after graduation, some of the students invited him to a party.

00:48:50.000 And he went to the party.

00:48:52.000 And so, there was a picture of Ron DeSantis with three girls who had apparently already graduated.

00:48:59.000 It is absolutely unclear as to whether they're even drinking alcohol or anything.

00:49:04.000 But Trump said, he tweeted out, quote, No way!

00:49:09.000 That's not Ron, is it?

00:49:10.000 He would never do such a thing.

00:49:13.000 And he is retweeting a meme that says, Here is Ron DeSantimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher. 1.00

00:49:19.000 So, first of all, it's just ugly and stupid. 1.00

00:49:22.000 Like, it's really, really ugly and stupid. 1.00

00:49:24.000 It's particularly stupid coming from a man who likely started the Miss Universe pageant just so that he could see women unclad. 1.00

00:49:30.000 I mean, Donald Trump's record with women does not really allow him to make this sort of attack on Ron DeSantis at all. 1.00

00:49:36.000 Also, it happens to be a BS attack.

00:49:38.000 There's no evidence that anybody did anything wrong in any of these photos or in any of these pictures.

00:49:42.000 It doesn't matter, he's still accusing him, apparently, of preying on high school girls.

00:49:46.000 really 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.

00:49:55.000 And 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.

00:50:10.000 I face defamatory stuff every single day I've been governor.

00:50:15.000 That's just the nature of it.

00:50:18.000 But 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.

00:50:33.000 It just goes with the territory. You got to have a thick skin. It's also just.

00:50:37.000 Practically speaking, I would not take time out of being governor to be fighting lawsuits.

00:50:42.000 It's just not practical in terms of what we're doing.

00:50:45.000 And I'd also just say this.

00:50:48.000 I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden.

00:50:55.000 That's how I spend my time.

00:50:59.000 This is the proper response by Ron DeSantis, obviously.

00:51:03.000 And it's one of the reasons why I think Trump feels like the air is a little bit out of the balloon.

00:51:09.000 Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:51:12.000 So, today, things I like.

00:51:14.000 So I was encouraged by one of my producers to watch the Best Picture nominated film, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, All the Time, Forever.

00:51:21.000 It's actually just called Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

00:51:23.000 And here is a little bit of the trailer.

00:51:29.000 This is Wang.

00:51:32.000 This is Wang.

00:51:33.000 Mrs. Wang, are you with us?

00:51:35.000 I am paying attention.

00:51:39.000 Now you may only see a pile of receipts, but I see a story.

00:51:45.000 I can see where this story is going.

00:51:50.000 It does not look good.

00:51:54.000 What's happening?

00:52:04.000 Penguin.

00:52:09.000 Devlin, I'm not your husband.

00:52:10.000 I'm another version of us from another universe.

00:52:12.000 I'm here because we need your help.

00:52:16.000 Very busy today.

00:52:17.000 No time to help you.

00:52:18.000 So I will give this movie...

00:52:22.000 Seven out of ten.

00:52:23.000 So I know a lot of people are just in love and love and love with this movie and it is fun and creative.

00:52:28.000 It's a bit of a mess.

00:52:29.000 When I say a bit of a mess, I mean kind of a lot of a mess.

00:52:31.000 I think it's kind of a philosophical mess.

00:52:33.000 I think that it's filled with plot holes.

00:52:36.000 The action sequences are Pretty amazing, actually.

00:52:40.000 The sort of bizarreness of it, it's just all non-sequitur jokes over and over and over.

00:52:46.000 And so, it's a little bit long.

00:52:47.000 I mean, the movie's like 2 hours and 20 minutes.

00:52:49.000 It really should be about an hour and 50 minutes.

00:52:50.000 You could easily cut 20 minutes out of this film.

00:52:52.000 It also has a bunch of kind of odd Bizarrely pornographic references that are completely unnecessary to the telling of the story.

00:53:00.000 It's just in the middle of a fight because it's supposed to be all about like bizarre things happening.

00:53:05.000 It's essentially multiple universes that are being collapsed into one.

00:53:10.000 A bunch of forces are being drawn from one universe into another universe and all this.

00:53:14.000 But the stuff that happens to be drawn from one universe into another universe is all really weird and gross.

00:53:19.000 So there's a lot of that kind of stuff.

00:53:22.000 But, overall, it's at least something creative.

00:53:24.000 So 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.

00:53:51.000 He's really, really great in this.

00:53:52.000 Michelle Yao is excellent, but Ki-Hai Khan is like the best thing in the movie by a long shot.

00:53:59.000 Anyway, Evelyn is married to Waymond, and the two of them own this laundry together, and they're being audited by the IRS.

00:54:08.000 Jamie Lee Curtis plays the IRS agent named Deirdre, and they have a daughter named Joy, played by Stephanie Hsu.

00:54:15.000 So Joy is a lesbian in the obligatory Hollywood move. 1.00

00:54:19.000 Okay, fine. 0.80

00:54:20.000 It's fine.

00:54:22.000 It'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.

00:54:34.000 You knew that was coming.

00:54:35.000 But what makes the movie kind of interesting and moving is that it is supposed to be a battle against nihilism.

00:54:41.000 So the basic premise is that Evelyn is deeply unsatisfied with her life.

00:54:46.000 Her husband may be handing her divorce papers.

00:54:48.000 Her daughter doesn't like her very much.

00:54:50.000 She's being audited by the IRS. 0.99

00:54:51.000 Everything kind of sucks. 0.93

00:54:52.000 And then, a portal to other universes opens. 0.97

00:54:55.000 And 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.

00:55:02.000 And it is her daughter.

00:55:04.000 Because her daughter has become sort of a nihilist, partially because of lack of mom's love.

00:55:08.000 So 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.

00:55:19.000 So it's a very nice sort of family movie, except that it's done in a quasi-pornographic and violent guise.

00:55:26.000 At the heart of it is sort of a nice family story about family loving each other and sticking together.

00:55:32.000 And parents reaching out to children and children reaching out to parents and all the rest of that stuff.

00:55:36.000 Where I will say that it is a philosophical muddle is the basic premise is again that nihilism is somehow debunked.

00:55:46.000 The 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.

00:55:53.000 And I don't find that philosophy particularly compelling.

00:55:55.000 I 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.

00:56:02.000 That 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.

00:56:09.000 And so what really life is all about is just finding people who love you and people who you love.

00:56:15.000 Now, I'm all for love.

00:56:16.000 I love my wife.

00:56:17.000 I love my kids.

00:56:18.000 I love my family.

00:56:20.000 They're wonderful.

00:56:21.000 They provide extraordinary meaning in my life.

00:56:24.000 But in order for that to be durable, in order for that to be more than just fleeting feelings, that requires long-term commitment.

00:56:30.000 And long-term commitment has to be justified by a higher moral rubric than merely what pleases me in a given day.

00:56:36.000 Because otherwise, you end up with atomistic individualism.

00:56:39.000 Because what if my family doesn't please me?

00:56:41.000 What if it turns out that the sort of commitments I'm called upon to make make me miserable? 0.68

00:56:46.000 And I end up working at a laundromat, living above it in a crappy apartment with an obnoxious kid.

00:56:53.000 So the way out that the movie provides is not, I think, sufficient for the challenge that the movie also provides.

00:56:59.000 The philosophical challenge of the movie is the daughters, again, drawn to nihilism.

00:57:02.000 The mom is also drawn to nihilism, but they save each other by reaching out to each other and loving one another.

00:57:07.000 And again, I think that sounds really Nice on paper, I do not think it works in reality.

00:57:10.000 I think that people have to be oriented toward a higher purpose and cause than merely quote-unquote kindness or niceness.

00:57:15.000 I don't think that's actually enough to sustain a civilization or even a family.

00:57:18.000 I think the family has to be oriented toward something higher.

00:57:21.000 The 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.

00:57:33.000 And 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.

00:57:43.000 And it would be hard to see from inside the moral universe created by these critters why that would be wrong.

00:57:47.000 Why would you condemn Evelyn for that?

00:57:48.000 And you would.

00:57:49.000 I mean, you'd be watching the movie and you'd be like, there's something wrong with that lady. 1.00

00:57:51.000 Why is she doing that? 1.00

00:57:52.000 In fact, there is one alternate universe where she doesn't have her husband or her kid and she's seen as lesser for that. 0.91

00:57:58.000 But I don't know by what moral rubric that's the case.

00:58:02.000 Are they making a utilitarian case for the happiness that is to be found in marriage and children?

00:58:06.000 If 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.

00:58:14.000 But is the movie kind of fun and enjoyable?

00:58:16.000 Yeah, it is.

00:58:17.000 You have to put aside your philosophical objections.

00:58:18.000 You 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. 0.53

00:58:30.000 rectums 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?

00:58:43.000 No, it shouldn't. Top Gun should win best picture. Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:58:47.000 Okay, 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.

00:59:14.000 It was totally unclear who had done it.

00:59:16.000 The New York Times called it a mystery.

00:59:18.000 The Biden administration denied any knowledge of it.

00:59:20.000 Seymour Hersh is a very controversial quasi-journalist.

00:59:24.000 I 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.

00:59:36.000 That's what made him famous is his reporting of the My Lai Massacre.

00:59:39.000 But later on, he wrote a bunch of stories that were very bizarre.

00:59:44.000 He suggested, for example, that every detail about the killing of Osama bin Laden was not true.

00:59:49.000 And then he suggested also that the sarin gas released by the Assad regime in Syria was actually not released by the Assad regime.

01:00:00.000 So he's had some real problems with his research before.

01:00:05.000 He 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.

01:00:16.000 So you have to take everything the guy says with at least a grain of salt.

01:00:18.000 However, If what he's arguing here is true, that's a serious problem.

01:00:22.000 So 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.

01:00:28.000 That would be a forward military offense by the American military.

01:00:33.000 He suggests that the U.S.

01:00:35.000 Navy's Diving and Salvage Center planted a bunch of explosives on the Nord Stream pipelines.

01:00:42.000 Last 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.

01:00:56.000 Two 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.

01:01:03.000 A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational.

01:01:08.000 Now, 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.

01:01:18.000 So the CIA says, quote, this claim is completely and utterly false.

01:01:21.000 Adrian Watson, a White House spokesperson, said, quote, this is false and a complete fiction.

01:01:26.000 The sourcing on this is super thin.

01:01:29.000 So again, I would just like to remind everybody how thin that sourcing is in the interest of objectivity here.

01:01:36.000 I know that there are a lot of people who are jumping on the story.

01:01:39.000 If, 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.

01:01:50.000 So, 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.

01:01:58.000 Alright guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.

01:01:59.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

01:02:00.000 We will be getting into the mailbag.

01:02:01.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

01:02:02.000 Get your questions answered today.

01:02:04.000 Use code Shapiro.

01:02:04.000 Check out for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 09, 2023

Woke Voldemort Comes For Harry Potter | Ep. 1665

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript