It's the first episode of the new year, which means it's time to talk about the Oscars. Plus, the snow has finally stopped falling, and we have a cold open. Guests: Michael Moles, Ben Shapiro, and Drew Perla.
00:03:09.340If you would send me a Pendragon board game, I would actually play the Pendragon board game.
00:03:14.900Well, you can if you want to get your own copy, I'm not sending it to you.
00:03:18.080You can go to dailywire.com slash shop and you can watch the seven part series, which is getting rave reviews, by the way, all over the Internet.
00:03:25.860And my favorite part of it is it's getting rave reviews from people who like the Daily Wire.
00:03:29.760It's even getting rave reviews on the Internet from people who don't like the Daily Wire, people who probably hate conservatives all over the place.
00:03:37.720It's very I was actually I'm never gratified to look at Twitter because it's just a cesspool of villainy and scum.
00:03:44.280But actually, people really seem to love Pendragon because it's a great story.
00:03:48.040It's getting rave reviews from everybody all over the Internet, people who love the Daily Wire, people who hate the Daily Wire, people who probably hate conservatives.
00:12:57.440Kyle Rittenhouse was there, was not interfering with any police officers, was not sabotaging police officer operations, was not resisting police officers.
00:13:04.140He was there because the police officers weren't there and weren't doing anything.
00:13:15.920But you took a gun explicitly to go commit crimes, okay, interfering with the police, sabotaging police operations, obstructing what the police are doing, obstructing law enforcement is a crime.
00:13:57.400And it is explicitly to obstruct law enforcement.
00:13:59.860So if you take the gun and then your intention is to go commit crimes and then you end up getting shot in the process, to me, it's not even a close call.
00:14:15.040And I agree with what Ben said, that this is, to the people, especially on the right, again, there are some on the right who are saying, well, I believe in enforcing immigration law, but I don't like the way this is happening.
00:14:29.380Well, there is no way to do it that won't be ugly because it's easy enough to say, let's enforce our immigration laws.
00:14:36.380But the problem is we have millions of people here illegally.
00:14:53.980And so if you're not in favor of us enforcing immigration laws in an ugly way, then you're not in favor of us enforcing immigration law at all because there's no way to do it that isn't ugly.
00:15:04.880By the way, a crucial point on this gun Second Amendment argument from the libertarians who, you know, look, I love my libertarian friends.
00:15:13.440You can always count on them to undermine the right exactly at the moment that it, like, really matters.
00:15:18.500But I get the point in principle because I'm a Second Amendment supporter.
00:15:21.460I'm a gun owner, a lifetime member of the NRA.
00:15:23.600There is a deep conservatism to the wisdom of Johnny Cash.
00:15:32.020So, look, you can take your guns to town, but if you are going to obstruct law enforcement, you're going to put yourself intentionally in a very provocative situation where you will be committing crimes.
00:15:42.480Probably not the best idea to roll up with your cig in two magazines.
00:15:45.760By the way, his parents were interviewed by CBS News, a generally liberal news outlet, and they made the point, probably they shouldn't have admitted this, that he was not a regular carrier of guns.
00:15:56.620You know, he had his CCW, but this was a guy who never took his gun out, really, and all of a sudden he rolls up there with a weapon that has a hair trigger.
00:16:05.060The New York Post just reported that he had a broken rib from his last conflict with ICE agents, so he was already out there getting into violent scuffles.
00:16:13.300When I listen to Michael Moles sing Johnny Cash, it makes me think of my own mortality, and that makes me think of policy genius and the necessity for life insurance.
00:16:26.440It actually is very important that you get life insurance, obviously, because there is one thing that is going to happen to all of us aside from paying taxes and maybe being deported.
00:16:35.480And that is, we're all going to plots.
00:16:38.200Drew can speak to this more than I can, because as he sees that, that road shortening before him.
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00:17:50.920I think this is really actually just a trial run for Mother Nature for our colonization of Greenland.
00:17:56.240But we're not actually in Minneapolis right now.
00:17:58.720A Daily Wire reporter is, however, and we are joined by Jenny Tehr, who can infect our opinion with some actual facts that she is seeing on the ground.
00:18:14.840Well, you know, we've been out with ICE in Minneapolis on a ride along with them, and we saw just the chaos unfold the second we went down there.
00:18:27.160So just to give you an idea is we started out the day going to the ICE office where agitators were already outside.
00:18:35.220The second any of those vehicles came out, anytime ICE officers were going out to make arrests, there was what they call the spotter standing on the corner waiting for them, monitoring their movements, reporting things like their license plates, what the cars look like, what those agents and officers look like.
00:18:52.260And then the second we were hearing an arrest site, so we were maybe within five blocks of an arrest site, you started to see people just gathering on every street corner.
00:19:06.400And by the time we got to, let's say, the apartment complex where one of the arrests they were trying to make was happening, it was already so loud.
00:19:15.260Everyone was already alerted to ICE's presence in the area that that target didn't come out that day.
00:19:23.260They're up against people who are exposing their whereabouts, their locations, getting in their way on top of that, because as we were leaving, we saw a situation unfold that thankfully didn't get as intense as some of these stories we've seen about these shootings, but could have gone that way with those agents trying to deescalate vehicles who were blocking them in the roadway.
00:19:45.860So they didn't want them there, so they didn't want them there, but when they tried to leave, they didn't want them to leave.
00:19:50.220It was very ironic, and then as they were leaving, one of those vehicles, a driver behind the wheel of a Tesla hit one of our cars in the convoy and then exited the area before they can make an arrest.
00:20:05.240This is what they're seeing on the ground, this is what they're up against, so not only were they not able to make an arrest, and we saw a similar situation unfold before that, this is also just an assault on their ability to go out there and conduct these operations safely.
00:20:22.380They're coming home with the trauma of all this, but also physical injuries now.
00:20:29.200Jenny, did the guy in the Tesla hit them intentionally with the car?
00:20:33.440Yeah, it appeared so, because as he was driving by those officers, he was taunting them, so he rolled down the window at one point, and he said, I'm illegal, come and get me.
00:20:48.780They know they can't impede law enforcement.
00:20:51.220I mean, there was this whole media narrative going around that ICE is just arresting U.S. citizens indiscriminately.
00:20:57.080No, they're arresting people who are here, who are getting in their way, who are assaulting them, who are committing federal crimes in doing so, and they have the right to.
00:21:08.920Those officers are given the power to make arrests of U.S. citizens who are trying to get in the way of their own arrests of illegal immigrants.
00:21:16.540And then, of course, you know, they're not put into immigration detention.
00:21:20.560They're handed off to people like the U.S.
00:21:25.440So, yes, they have the authority to do this, and they are making arrests of people who are openly getting in their way.
00:21:33.100You know, Jenny, what do you think is the ā you've been riding along with the ICE officers, and what is the morale like given the situation?
00:21:40.000And what are their thoughts on ICE leadership?
00:21:41.860Because obviously we've seen some turmoil inside ICE leadership or patrol leadership.
00:21:46.300The president has deployed Tom Homan to Minneapolis.
00:21:48.720It seems that he is moving Greg Bovino at least out of this realm, you know, to another area of the country.
00:21:55.140What are people feeling down on the ground there?
00:21:56.960Right, so I think this was perfectly, you know, came to light when I had Border Patrol agents messaging me yesterday, some of my sources, saying that they're happy that some of them are getting to leave.
00:22:12.760Because this has been really hard for them to go through, to be in these environments where they're not only just having to assess the threats that are present when you're making an arrest already,
00:22:27.300but now there's this added threat of outside organized agitators who are communicating on radios, who are 3D printing whistles.
00:22:36.080I mean, I saw some of that, too, that they're handing out to try to obstruct these arrests.
00:22:43.060And that change has been that the Trump administration has taken figures like Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino out of Minneapolis and had sent him back to the border.
00:22:54.040He's been relieved of his duties as the commander of at-large operations.
00:22:57.940He was the face of these aggressive immigration operations in cities like New Orleans, now Minneapolis.
00:23:04.840He was in Chicago, and he was representing Border Patrol, which Border Patrol has a role in immigration enforcement.
00:23:12.440Traditionally, it's been along the border in border towns.
00:23:14.960They're not used to operating in these urban environments, and they're more indiscriminate.
00:23:19.840They were brought in when Secretary Noem, according to sources, and her close aide, Corey Lewandowski, decided that the operations should focus more on numbers,
00:23:32.080that they should have more of a quota than the focus being on quality arrests, than getting the worst of the worst.
00:23:40.660So we saw that shift, and that's when Border Patrol really came in to boost the numbers, to get more people off the streets who are here illegally,
00:23:49.320not necessarily going after people with the worst criminal histories first, which was how the mass deportation campaign started.
00:23:57.620Holman, however, Tom Holman, the border czar, who's now been brought in to replace Bovino, is in the camp of wanting more of those quality arrests.
00:24:07.160He wants us to get those really hardened criminals off the streets, and he's an ICE guy.
00:24:14.240And so Trump brought him in and said, report directly to me, which is interesting because he's not asking him to report to the DHS secretary.
00:24:22.580And he's saying, you know, possibly we're hearing that they could be looking at changing the target list, saying maybe we should shift and go after more of the worst of the worst.
00:24:34.960And then also a lot of this depends now on, is Governor Walz going to deliver on letting people be handed over from the jails into ICE's hands for arrest,
00:24:50.360rather than continuing to perpetuate these really dangerous sanctuary policies?
00:24:55.960I'm hearing that the local police are also helping, now finally helping ICE keep the protesters back.
00:32:08.940He then did it again with Alex Preddy, which is why he should be the person in charge of this whole effort.
00:32:13.600I frankly think that Kristi Noem has outstayed her welcome already.
00:32:17.340The Calci markets, by the way, they are one of our sponsors.
00:32:20.140They suggest 50% of people think that she's out by May.
00:32:23.960I don't think that would be inappropriate.
00:32:24.980It seems to me that the vast majority of things that Kristi Noem has done involve headlines in which she is spending certain amounts of money on either transportation or get up in order to take photos in front of particular situations.
00:32:38.420She works at the pleasure of the president and for the president.
00:32:41.620And part of that is making the president's agenda more palatable and understandable to Americans.
00:32:46.400And if you're not going to do that, then really you shouldn't be the person in charge of that department, which is the reason I think why Gregory Bovino was moved out of his position as well, because he went out there and suggested that Alex Preddy was attempting to massacre people.
00:32:58.080And then he went on all the shows on Sunday and had to walk that back or pretend that he never said it.
00:33:02.260And this sort of thing undermines public support for a very important mission, which is the mass deportation that the Trump administration is trying to pursue.
00:33:10.160Political capital matters, support for ICE matters.
00:33:13.760So the polls have shown that back in 2019, ICE was basically even with the American people.
00:33:24.020The chaos operation run by Democrats and the bad PR job that has been done by members of the administration in the aftermath of that.
00:33:32.040If the administration looks like the adult in the room and Democrats look as though they are basically the abolish ICE, let everybody run free party, that's a political win for Republicans.
00:33:41.400Now, as far as where this ends up, I think the Democrats could very easily win the battle and lose the war, meaning I think that they could set up these domains of utter lawlessness.
00:33:50.640And it turns out they did this in 2020, and it worked for them a little in 2020.
00:33:54.800By 2024, Donald Trump was president again, because it turns out people do not like abolish the police.
00:34:01.700And so we have this kind of temporary gut level reaction to seeing, again, those ugly pictures on our TV.
00:34:06.500But then if the policy that accompanies the ugly pictures is even worse than the policy that was present before the ugly pictures, then you end up with a backlash.
00:34:15.620So I think the Democrats could step too far on this the other way.
00:34:18.460But again, I think that I think Noam has not done a good job as DHS, frankly.
00:34:22.500So, OK, so if the point is that the only real errors here have been in certain messaging.
00:35:22.960Monday, Trump speaks to Tim Walls on the phone.
00:35:26.860Tuesday, Tim Walls's troops, Minnesota State Patrol, go in and start arresting actual protesters.
00:35:33.160By the way, not even like Alex Pretty fake protesters, like real protesters, albeit the kind who get violent because that's what happens in Minneapolis.
00:35:57.300Yes, the messaging needs to be tight, of course.
00:35:59.560But if they don't scale back and all we get is, OK, Tom Homan's leading it now and Walls backs down and in his own words, says that he's a Nazi collaborator.
00:36:09.300That looks like a political win to me.
00:36:11.540I'm looking I'm looking at this and seeing a potential political win, too.
00:36:14.860I think you're actually right about this.
00:36:16.680I mean, what I've what I'm seeing is that in this conversation with Walls, Trump must have said something that that got his got him to cooperate, possibly threatened to expose the fact that he's obviously a homosexual serial killer.
00:36:29.340In his spare time, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, just judging by his body language.
00:36:36.780But but I mean, something he must have said something to get him on board because it does look it does look different to me today and it looks different in a good way.
00:36:44.600And I think it's a good thing to have Homan in there because of his messaging and also because he's just good at this.
00:36:51.860Yeah, I think, Drew, your point here, I think, is well taken.
00:36:55.320And I think that, you know, the the Tim, my guess is that what Trump said to him is something like, OK, we're going to keep enforcing federal law.
00:37:02.680What is your recommendation for how we do this differently?
00:37:04.820He probably put it back in his lap and said, you're saying you don't want us to do this.
00:37:09.180Because we can't stop enforcing federal law.
00:37:11.100And if you get in the way of us enforcing federal law, I will declare the Insurrection Act and then you will have a real problem on your hands inside your state because it's going to look like you're going up against the federal government.
00:37:20.320And that has a long and inglorious history in American law.
00:37:23.860By the way, it won't just look like that.
00:38:00.600And then they say, would you like to spend billions upon billions of dollars deporting Abuela?
00:38:04.200Then they say, no, we only want the criminal illegal immigrants.
00:38:06.200So you have to drill down into what Americans kind of revealed preferences are on this thing.
00:38:11.300And again, I'm not saying that that doesn't mean that we should pursue massive mass deportations.
00:38:15.720I'm just saying that there's a reason why Tom Homan and the rest of the administration keep saying the phrase criminal illegal immigrants, because that's the area where you have 9010 approval.
00:38:24.260When you're talking about people who have already committed other crimes, if you start with those people, you're never going to run into political headwinds.
00:38:31.080You're just going to win from beginning to end.
00:38:33.560Where things are going to start to get much dicier is in situations in which you are unleashing tens of thousands of federal agents in areas and doing these sort of mass deportations, because then you get the ugly pictures on your TV again.
00:38:46.600So we would just do well to acknowledge political reality as much as we acknowledge the reality of reality, which is that mass migration has done tremendous damage to the country and needs to end.
00:38:56.520And there's also the fact that we can get rid of a lot of people in quieter ways just by making it impossible for them to work.
00:39:04.320There is, though, you know, just to give a little grace to these guys, including Bovino, there are a lot of clips going around from Minneapolis of the protesters, the agitators arguing and saying, you know, you're just rounding people up, you know, indiscriminately.
00:39:19.920And you'll have the ICE officers say, we are targeting this guy, you know, this guy who's wanted for domestic violence, this guy who's got, you know, a felony or a misdemeanor or whatever.
00:39:28.240And so I actually do think that these raids are clearly quite targeted.
00:39:32.380It's not like they're just showing up to Home Depot, though they would be justified in doing that as well.
00:39:36.840So, yes, as there there has been a PR failure.
00:39:52.820So what's the difference in the United States where they're where they're sanctuary cities, which is a city basically in violation of federal law.
00:40:01.240And so when you look at that, look, this is clearly they're trying to do a repeat of the summer of love, albeit, thankfully, to Matt's point in the winter, which makes it better for us.
00:40:12.520If Trump scales back now that he will have taken every wrong lesson out of the summer of love.
00:40:16.800So you've got to keep the pressure up.
00:40:18.320But it looks to me like this is a political operation.
00:40:21.680And then you get all these reports that the lieutenant governor of Minnesota was allegedly in the signal chats helping to direct some of this stuff.
00:40:29.180You have state representatives who are calling for resistance, actively obstructing law enforcement.
00:40:34.300You know, at what point do we bring the hammer of the law down on the officials who are helping to conspire for all of this?
00:40:40.720To include the mayor of Minneapolis, that's one of the reasons why, you know, when Trump said he had a good conversation with Jacob Fry, and I get this, you know, this is how Trump does business.
00:40:51.780He talks to someone, even if they're a huge scumbag and they have a nice conversation.
00:40:55.260And then Trump likes him for like 24 hours and hates him again.
00:40:58.800But Jacob Fry, I mean, this guy, like we can't look past the fact that this is the same guy who was fomenting and facilitating mass rioting in 2020.
00:41:11.420He just did this exact same thing again.
00:41:14.180We're repeating it five, six years later.
00:41:16.760And that's why I think that if, yeah, we could talk about honing the PR message a little bit.
00:41:23.000That's one thing, but to scale back in the slightest and also for there to be no consequences at all.
00:41:29.600To your point, Michael, if there are no consequences for any of these actual public officials at all who've been involved in this, then I think it's a, it's a massive, massive loss in the end.
00:41:39.780And it only, it only just going to guarantee more in the future.
00:41:42.220Walsh has already been chased out of office by his own corruption.
00:41:44.420So there's that, you know, he's not really, he's not really running for anything ever again.
00:41:49.160I mean, I don't know what, what I don't know.
00:41:50.580I mean, I could see, I could see Walls trying to transition this into a presidential run.
00:41:54.340The person who's most grateful for, honestly, the person who's the most grateful for all of this is Tim Walls.
00:41:59.280He was in the middle of a fraud scandal when all of this erupted.
00:42:02.600And now he's going to look like a hero to a huge segment of the Democratic Party base.
00:42:07.780One thing that is worth noting here is, again, the last 10 years have just proved that a huge swath of our population is unbelievably bored and also susceptible to the idea that there is great fun to be had in making trouble.
00:42:18.300Really, I mean, when you watch people out in the streets blowing whistles to obstruct ice operations, whether it's that or the summer of love or any of the rest of this kind of idiocy in the streets that we've been watching, and it seems to be becoming more and more common.
00:42:31.840And I think we do have to ask ourselves the question, what the hell is wrong with this society in which large swaths of working age people are finding the time and effort to go out in the middle of the freezing cold in order to agitate?
00:42:44.260I mean, that speaks to a sort of unwellness that I think is pretty astonishing.
00:42:49.880And it seems to be, you know, relegated to certain populations.
00:42:54.880And here it seems like white liberal ladies in the suburbs are one of those populations.
00:43:00.440It seems to be disproportionately attending some of these operations in Minneapolis.
00:43:04.820I mean, I wonder what the sort of societal problem that we're experiencing that is generating all of this is.
00:43:09.400The three words, it's Marvel movie morality.
00:43:15.380It's this extremely simplistic view where the liberals are always the good guys and the conservatives are always the bad guys.
00:43:21.980And worse than that, it's a Marvel movie anthropology.
00:43:26.060One of these agitators picks up a flashbang, one of these non-lethal grenades.
00:43:30.620Like, clearly she saw it in some movie and she goes to throw it, blows her finger off.
00:43:34.340It's going around on the anti-ice social media pages right now.
00:43:37.120Or the idea that you can drive your car into a cop and then when the cops pull their guns out, the lesbian partner says, why did the gun have bullets in it?
00:43:47.540After Alex Pretty was shot, the woman who was filming this whole thing, who could have tried to intervene, who could have tried to pull him off the cops, when they shot him, she goes, what?
00:43:57.460Like, she had never been more surprised by anything in her life.
00:43:59.620These are people who take their entire view of history, anthropology, and morality from comic book movies.
00:44:07.060And they go out and they meet reality.
00:44:09.820And the part that I feel sorriest for them about is they seem genuinely surprised by it.
00:44:15.180That's how divorced from reality they are.
00:44:16.800You know, I have to say, too, though, I was reading an article about our pal, Nick Fuentes, and what the complaints are of people who go and look at him.
00:44:26.580One of the things that really bothers me about Fuentes is I keep hearing people say how talented he is and how funny he is.
00:44:32.820Like, the reason this bothers me is one of my few talents is spotting broadcast talent.
00:44:37.040He's a moderate third-level broadcast talent.
00:44:40.100He's got a sense of humor and he says things that are outrageous and that makes you laugh.
00:44:44.020But he's not really ā he's not a real talent like I've seen people be.
00:44:48.420Like, even some of the people in this very room have tons more talent than he does.
00:44:54.140But he is speaking to something that is bothering people, which is this kind of, you know, transvaluation of all values where men are penalized for being men, where women aren't women, where women are actually encouraged not to be like women.
00:45:08.580And something is really strange in this country that is the left seeping through our media, which, in my opinion, is 100% corrupt.
00:45:17.920I mean, you've got, like ā you've got poor Barry Weiss.
00:45:20.400He's like this fleck of dust in the machine, and they're all getting together to get rid of her.
00:45:24.400You know, it's like this one middle-of-the-road lefty.
00:45:27.060It's like too much for them to take because she's going to make people play fair.
00:45:32.100You know, this media machine, which is crumbling around us as we see the Washington Post getting rid of all its people, it's crumbling.
00:45:40.480And we still have a generation of people who were schooled in this machine, schooled in the academies, and actually believe the values of the left are values, which they're not.
00:45:49.160They're just an agitation, as you call it, a chaos operation.
00:45:51.640And I think that that is ā it's a serious problem because they don't have churches to go to, they don't have synagogues to go to, and they don't have any other set of values to hook themselves to.
00:46:00.020Well, they have the churches that they can invade in violation of federal law.
00:47:12.380We know how it would go if they were outside of an abortion clinic and got arrested.
00:47:16.060They would not be out of jail even right now pending the trial and all that.
00:47:20.520And then we know the situation with Don Lemon, who still has not been arrested.
00:47:24.860So it doesn't, there should be, it should be that there are many people suffering very severe consequences, but it doesn't appear that that's going to happen.
00:47:33.560And if we're, and that's why I think the church thing, I don't know how many people invaded the church.
00:47:37.860It was dozens, it looked like, or at least a dozen or around that.
00:47:41.340But if, if that's it, like if it's just those two and they end up getting slapped with a fine or they got to do a few days in jail or something, Don Lemon never goes to jail.
00:47:50.600If that's it for that, then I think that is a very bad sign, you know, going forward.
00:48:53.180I have to admit, before we talk about the Oscars, in, in my business with crime writing, the Oscar is the Edgar Award named after Edgar Allan Poe.
00:48:59.820I've won two of them and I've just been nominated for my sixth one for my book, Kingdom of Cain, which is nominated in the critical biographical category.
00:49:10.360But, but I've seen, I've seen some of the, the, uh, it's amazing that, you know, on the form that I had the PR form, I had thought it asked my pronouns.
00:49:18.000So you know how, uh, what a great chance I have of winning, but still the nomination was a shock.
00:49:22.680Uh, you know, I, the films that I have seen sinners and that one, one battle after another and Frankenstein, uh, we're all, all have the exact same problem.
00:49:33.940Um, incredibly brilliant technical, uh, talent went into making them look beautiful, but because the people have no philosophy that makes sense in the second half, they just completely unraveled because they don't know what they're saying.
00:49:48.600The only thing that Guillermo del Toro can say is monsters are nice.
00:50:25.300You have to kill them before you can get actually get into heaven.
00:50:27.920And, and, and the same is true of that, uh, of that one about the one battle after another, it's just left violent left-wing propaganda, basically, uh, romanticized.
00:50:37.280And at this point, I just kind of thought like, yeah, no, I mean, how can you, you can't say anything bad about DiCaprio is an actor.
00:50:46.240All these people are really talented and the talent is there, but each film unravels in the second half because the philosophy behind it or the outlet behind it makes no sense.
00:50:54.700I wonder about the timing though, because you mentioned these movies that promote left-wing political violence and they're the really hot movies this year.
00:51:02.160And then I think back, what was it now?
00:51:04.320Almost nine, eight, nine, 10 years ago when the big hot movies were Moonlight and Shape of Water.
00:51:10.480So at that time, the weird sex stuff was in vogue and they, they pushed a movie about pederasty and a movie about having sex with a fish.
00:51:16.960And now left-wing violence is in vogue and they, they pushed one, one battle after another, whatever, all these other movies.
00:51:23.020And I think, okay, there's very little connection between the popular zeitgeist and the movies that win Oscars, but there seems to be a very tight connection between the zeitgeist in Hollywood, you know, the kind of fashions of the elite liberals and the movies that they put up.
00:51:38.280And so I think, okay, well, that's a tell, you know, that's, they're just pushing left-wing political violence.
00:51:41.960Now they've been celebrating it at least since Charlie was assassinated and, uh, okay, at least that's a decent metric on where we are, on where our elites are.
00:51:50.040Uh, it just, does it have any connection to the actual popular culture?
00:51:55.280So, I mean, I was trying to counter that as far as I was being distracted, not just because I couldn't deal with whatever Knowles was saying, but I was trying to write down the names of the, of the, uh, the best picture nominees.
00:52:05.760I believe that I have seen of the 10, because they, they expanded this category when Dark Knight wasn't nominated way back when, uh, they expanded the category.
00:52:13.420So now it's 10 and of the 10, I believe it should not have been nominated, by the way.
00:53:10.260The, the two movies that are currently being touted as the front runners for Best Picture are One Battle After Another,
00:53:16.220which is an Antifa fantasy flick about how a group of rebels decide, multiracial radicals, uh, and their, their kind of hapless white friend, Leonardo DiCaprio, uh, decide that they are going to engage in anti-ice operations, right?
00:53:31.900They're going to free a bunch of illegal immigrants.
00:53:33.460They're, they're going to, the big hero of the film is, uh, Benicio Del Toro, who is the only competent terrorist in the film who, who basically runs an underground railroad for illegal immigrants.
00:53:42.660Uh, the great villain in the film is Sean Penn, who's a guy with a black lady fetish, uh, and works for law enforcement and is gross and violent, obviously.
00:53:51.060And the entire United States is run by a secret group of white supremacists who wear polo shirts, right?
00:53:55.160That, that's, that's the basis for One Battle After Another.
00:53:57.600Uh, and I wish I was joking, but that's actually the plot of One Battle After Another.
00:54:00.700Uh, it is, it is, it is so subtle, so subtle, subtle as a brick.
00:54:04.940Uh, the, the acting in it, I thought was actually not particularly good.
00:54:09.000He doesn't have much to do is the truth, uh, in the film, and so the, the film is basically a giant fail.
00:54:14.200The other one that people have been touting now is Sinners because Sinners got so much, so many nominations.
00:54:19.900It is now the most nominated film in Oscar history, which is kind of watered down considering they've added a bunch of categories and also absurd on its face because Sinners is a B-level movie at best.
00:54:30.140Uh, just, just in terms of the, the direction, it's, it's beautiful to look at.
00:54:34.240I mean, I will say that the, the, the, the first hour of it is, is, is I think beautifully directed.
00:55:00.080Uh, that is why the vampires are led by a white Irish group, musical group.
00:55:05.600It's supposed to be, I assume some sort of commentary on white people stealing black music and then living off of the lifeblood of black people.
00:55:12.340There's a lot of anti-Christian commentary about how Christianity, uh, is a religion that is, that is foisted upon black people.
00:55:18.760But true blackness is animism and paganism from, from Africa.
00:55:23.460That's, that's where the real black spirit lies.
00:55:29.180It's also incredibly reductive of the black experience in America in kind of bizarre ways.
00:55:33.100Uh, and also reductive of the, the actual development of, of music.
00:55:37.680Like if you're going to look at the blues and, and the, the, the kind of basis of it is it all takes place in the 1930s.
00:55:42.380And they, these black guys decide they're going to create a blues bar essentially.
00:55:46.160And this blues bar is where black people can be free.
00:55:48.360This is the basic premise of the film.
00:55:50.120And, and the entire idea and that the big kind of Ballyhood scene is a scene where one of the guys is a black singer and he's strong the guitar and he's singing the blues.
00:56:00.160And then it goes into this fantasy where he's uniting all of the black influences of the past and all black people in the future.
00:56:06.880And so you have people playing the electric guitar and you have people from Africa who are walking around a drum and all of this.
00:56:12.280And then you have a ballet dancer, a black ballet dancer who moves through and you think to yourself, wait, hold up a second.
00:56:16.260I feel like that is not a historically black art form, the ballet.
00:56:20.080And also the guitar was not invented in Africa.
00:56:22.600And also the chord progression of the blues was not invented in Africa.
00:56:25.940And actually music, as it turns out, is a group event, just like culture is a group event, meaning that it is, it is pulled from a number of different influences.
00:56:34.680You can't take a single cultural thing that exists and not find cultural imprints from a dozen different cultures on it, some more than others.
00:56:42.460But to pretend that there's no white cultural influence in the blues is, of course, silly.
00:56:46.260Any more than to not acknowledge that there's huge black influence in rock and roll would be really, really silly.
00:56:50.880And so this kind of reductive ideology is really dumb, but that's exactly why it's being celebrated.
00:56:55.300You know, the point on the religion, Ben, is just so funny because you hear this a lot.
00:56:59.540This is the whole point of Kwanzaa is like black people shouldn't celebrate Christmas.
00:57:49.220One battle after another is still leading that.
00:57:51.540But, yeah, I mean, the you know, it is it is a deeply racist.
00:57:55.480It also kind of sucks, meaning the first half of it is good.
00:57:57.520And then the second half of it is a mess.
00:57:58.820Once the vampires come, the whole thing really, really falls apart in pretty significant ways.
00:58:03.020It's not as racist as the Academy Awards, I think, lost all credibility.
00:58:09.220I mean, if there's a moment you can point to, it's when they gave I think it was seven nominations to Black Panther, including Best Picture.
00:58:16.520And so at that point, and by the way, you know, when that happened, I said, this is ridiculous.
00:58:21.860People said, well, have you even watched the movie?
00:58:23.820And the answer is no, I never watched.
00:58:25.220Like, I don't need to watch the movie.
00:58:26.500I can just tell you that it's ridiculous that Black Panther is this critically acclaimed film.
00:58:32.520So it's kind of lost all credibility from that point on, although I will say there are a couple of movies that were nominated that it's not all bad.
00:58:40.160I'm not as down on modern filmmaking as maybe some of the rest of you guys here because I do think they're interesting movies and even really good movies that come out every year.
00:58:49.540I thought I actually begonia, I think, was nominated as a Best Picture, right?
00:58:54.400And and I saw that and I thought I would hate it because I figured because I knew it was this story about this conspiracy.
00:59:01.600You know, it was implied to kind of like right wing basement dwelling conspiracy theorist who kidnaps this female CEO and like holds her hostage in the basement.
00:59:10.880And so I thought it would just be this kind of broadside against right wing conspiracy theories.
00:59:18.820And it wasn't quite that, or at least I think it was a little bit more complicated than that, the point they were making.
00:59:23.740And I thought it was an interesting movie.
01:00:03.420Sentimental Value is another one of these art house flicks about how artists suffer in pursuit of their art.
01:00:09.140And we should all care because they're artists.
01:00:10.560And that means they're very, very important.
01:00:12.320Sinners, we've discussed one battle after another.
01:00:14.240Frankenstein, I was really disappointed by because, again, the source material, the reason people keep getting the source material wrong is the whole thing is about how secular atheism robs people of their meaning.
01:00:24.260That's the entire basis of the Mary Shelley book.
01:00:26.720I'm reading it to my to my daughter right now.
01:00:28.780She's a little young for it, but we're doing it anyway.
01:00:32.160And and the the entire thing is about how once you dispense with God, what you end up with is basically meat and how that robs people of their soul.
01:00:43.500And when you not just the monster, but the people who actually build the monster are robbed of their soul by treating people as though they have no soul and they are just pieces of meat, essentially.
01:00:51.320And because Guillermo del Toro doesn't understand that it's just a monster flick.
01:00:55.200It's a beautifully made monster flick, but it's a monster flick.
01:00:58.200And there's also this thing with sleeping with the girls want to sleep with the monster.
01:02:36.900So what we can look forward to is that the winners in the big award for our popular culture will either be meaningless and completely inverted from reality.
01:02:46.500Or it will know what it believes and just be really bad and stupid.