Ep. 2466 - China Declared War on Our Elections. This is How We Should Respond

Last night, President Trump gave a prime time address. And on its face, the President's speech was about election meddling. And in general, of course, he's right. We do need to pass the Save Act and Secure our elections. Of course, it's not Jim Crow 2.0 to require ID to vote, or to show proof of citizenship to register to vote. This is baseline rational stuff. But underneath the President's big speech last night was a lurking threat far greater than the question of even election interference or election security. And the President did not go nearly far enough on that threat. Media aren't covering that threat. No one seems particularly interested in covering that threat. And it is, in fact, the greatest external threat our country has ever faced. That threat is China. There are threats to America. There are lots of allies here in the United States, Bernie Sanders does open events with the Chinese, Hassan Piker, and his actual Chinese flag in the background, Zorn Mamdanis, China friendly, democratic socialist of America. And yes, a lot of big corporations who want to do business over there. China must be defeated. We'll get into what China is doing, what we need to do to respond. And somehow, main Democrats are succeeding in finding someone even weirder than Graham Platner to substitute for Graham Platner in that center. We'll get into all of it. This is the Ben Shapiro show. [MUSIC] Alrighty. So last night, the President did a prime time dress. It was mostly about election security. It was about 25, 27 minutes. And it was mostly a call to pass the SAVAC. I get it. We are leading up to the election. He's trying to activate the base to go out and vote in large numbers in the midterms, presumably, to preserve the possibility of passing the SAVAC in the last couple of years of his term because it looks unlikely to pass right now. Well, in the speech, the President unleashed some information about the voter rolls and the insecurity of current voter ID rules and a lot of other issues. And we should check all of it out. And President Trump is, of course, totally right when he says that election security is deeply, deeply important. I mean, I take this stuff seriously. You should take it seriously. We all should take it seriously. If we don't trust our elections, we have a systemic problem that is almost unfixable in the United States. And of course, I'm not particularly shocked that America's enemies take advantage of our open society, our good and just and exceptionally liberty oriented society. But here's the thing. The real story of the speech is what China was doing. Let's be clear. China is not a strategic opponent. They're not a country with whom we should seek a consolidated worry relations. They are an enemy. Period. They're an enemy. They're not a strategic opponent. They're an enemy. They're not just an enemy. They are the most insidious and dangerous enemy we likely have ever faced. Nazi Germany never put phones with their propaganda in the hands of your children, the Soviet Union. It didn't own trillions of dollars of American bonds. China is not only a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens that supports literally all of our enemies abroad that unleashed a global pandemic that killed millions of people and shut down the entire Western economy and that wants to develop artificial intelligence to take over our minds and outcompete our military. They're a country with global ambitions and their ambition runs right up against the United States. That's the actual story here. But let's start at the beginning. President Trump's focus last night on election security. So the president gets up because this prime time address was covered by some networks, but not others. This of course, ticked off the president who suggested maybe withdrawing the broadcast licenses of a particular networks that didn't decide to air his prime time address. That's not really going to happen in any case. The president forethically said last night that Americans deserve to know that their vote is secure. Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately in a system. And that is to make that system secure. One where cheating and interference are not just difficult, but virtually impossible. Unfortunately, the system we have today falls catastrophically short of that standard. Now again, he is not totally wrong about all this. And he outlined a bunch of areas of concern in his speech. He outlined China. And this is again, I think the deep underlying issue here, acquiring voter files. Here's the president had to say about that. Over a period of years starting during the 2020 election cycle, the people's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, another sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote, and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening. Now again, the accusation here is not the China hacked voting machines or changed voter tabulation outcomes or anything. It's that they gained access to hundreds of millions of voter records. Now again, some of that is public information, right? Your eye could gain access to a lot of voter records because voter registration is in many states' public information. The question is why they were doing that. And the answer is that they were doing that in order to manipulate American citizens. The idea was they were going to do a deep dive into the registration status of Americans and then use that information in order to target Americans. And the president contended last night that the members of the deep state, meaning people who are career appointees in the executive branch, who spent the year 2020 suppressing information about China meddling essentially on behalf of Democrats was the accusation. Members of the deep state, very, very famous group of people, many cases, in our intelligence agency work to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling. Covering it up from both the president and the American people like nobody thought was possible. U.S. spy agencies began learning about the compromise of voter registration files in 2020 when they discovered that tens of millions of voter data, think of that tens of millions of voters data in 18 states have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China. Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else and to the best of our knowledge. They did not inform Congress. Okay, so the president went on to claim that our elections are not secure and that we've been lied to about the security of our elections. The third set of documents we are releasing proves that for many years Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems dishonest almost all. Okay, now again, that is an exaggeration of the state of play. The reality is there are potential hacks to voting machines that does not mean that we have evidence that the machines were hacked or that the outcomes were changed or that hundreds of thousands of votes were simply dismissed or anything like that. Coming up the president, Rips on election machines, he says they're not working properly or at least they are vulnerable. But here's what you need working properly. Your cell phone coverage, you do. Now what would you do if a $100 bill just suddenly fell from the sky into your wallet? Well, if you've heard me talk about pure talk over the years and thought, yeah, maybe some day I'll do that. This would be that day because right now they are offering you three months for 15 bucks on any plan. It's one of the easiest recommendations I've ever made because again, this is a very, very, very good deal like a great deal again. In case you missed it. 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He did properly make the claim that Nicholas Maduro hacked certain voting machines in Venezuela with the help of the Chinese. Many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results on these terrible machines. Today we are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela. And that's exactly what happened conspiring to digitally rig their own country's elections in 2020. And that's what they did. Okay, so the president also to classified some documents regarding alleged voter fraud in Michigan. He claimed that the FBI had detected larger scale voter registration operations including people who were getting gift cards for fraudulent voter registration forms. Trump called it pay, play and cheat last night again. If all that's true, investigations and prosecutions. Let's do that. Let's do that. And then the president finally pointed out the idea that there are a bunch of noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. I'll explain what he means in a moment. According to the DHS review state voter rolls and public records. They identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, again, this is sort of in controversy. There have been studies that have been done that suggest the potential of non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections, but that's not the same thing as non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections just factually speaking. So for example, somebody is not born in the United States, they register to vote. In between the time they were born in the United States and they registered to vote, they were naturalized. Well, that doesn't automatically show up in the record search. So if you're just matching birth certificate, for example, to voter registration and you don't look up immigration status, then you might come up with the possibility of potential non-citizens registered to vote. Also the notion that you have widespread non-citizen voting in the United States. Again, that is yet to be substantiated at any real level. Maybe true, but we haven't seen lots of evidence to support that at this point. Bottom line is this though. When the president says that Congress should pass the save act, obviously that's true. The save act is significantly more prophylactic than it is corrective. What I mean by that is that it has a bunch of provisions that are designed to prevent the possibility of fraud. It is not in and of itself an acknowledgment that all sorts of American elections have been stolen. It is an acknowledgment that there are flaws in the system that can prevent us from losing faith in the electoral system. Here is the president's stumping for the save America acts last night. The most importantly addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress, Mars, pass the save America act. How easy is that to do unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn't do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad. Okay, well, I mean, I think that the people who oppose the save act generally, they are certainly a lot more loose about election restrictions than people who would like to pass the save act. And yes, there are some of those people who would love to cheat undoubtedly. The save act itself, you know, basically the provisions should be relatively uncontroversial. The House has already passed a standalone version of the save act in February of 26, obviously. And they're currently trying to overcome the 60 vote threshold in the Senate. The filibuster threshold, the president has talked about nuking the filibuster so his vice president, that's not going to happen. They've talked about linking the save act to a funding bill and then passing it through budget reconciliation, which doesn't actually require a 60 vote threshold. I think that's unlikely to happen. What the save act actually requires is mandatory proof of citizenship from voter registration. So driver's license is insufficient. It requires nation wide voter ID at the polls. It would purge the voter rolls of people who have more than one address. For example, it would give criminal penalties for election workers who commit voter fraud. I mean, all of that seems fairly common sense. Now our sponsor is over at CalShi. They suggest that actually not particularly high chances that Congress is going to pass the save act. It's currently at seven and a half percent on CalShi, which seems about right because again, not a lot of Democrats can assign on to the save act. You don't have enough Republicans who want to nuked the filibuster full scale on behalf of this thing. Okay, but, but let's be clear about what's actually the story here. Okay, so I think the president obviously is focused in an election security. He's been focused in on election securities since 2020, of course, in ways that I like and ways that I don't like. But the underlying story here and to me, the significantly more important story is who's doing the election subversion, who's doing it? So one declassified document, which appears to be from the sort of national intelligence wing. Again, some of these documents, whenever you compile intelligence reports, you have a bunch of inputs. Some of those inputs get ignored. Some of them end up in full on DNI briefings and all the rest of it. One of these documents said, quote, ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, trying to had extensive plans to utilize potential and then it's blacked out and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the US government. The China plans were designed to exploit US societal fissures and vulnerabilities to influence US and other audiences and by extension, US government decision making. The plans addressed several scenarios, including military conflict between the United States and China, as well as other potential crises. So China was attempting to exploit US fissures and vulnerabilities perceived or real including racial tensions. And here they were alleged that white people hate black people. Insight demonstrations and marches as evidence of racial divides. Based the level of conflict between police and anti-racism activists and feed any sense that US law enforcement resents US government and people of color. Again, did that stuff materialize in 2020? Of course it did. They wanted to ramp up political party disagreements. Disagreements seemed Congress and the Trump administration. They wanted to ramp up international propaganda and said this intelligence suggestion, trying to have developed capabilities to project themes on these topics into social media, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others, as well as mainstream media. They're a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior US government officials to influence public opinion on those officials. Now we should have suspected all this. This has been long time communist policy dating all the way back to the Soviet Union. These sort of subversion operations, demoralization operations, a Catherine Harrage, the former Fox News reporter. She had a report back in April that talked about this. She reported that the CIA, which was led by director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations in a formal way out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage, presumably this is the sort of deep state Trump is talking about. Apparently senior intelligence officials are accused of heavy-handed editing of a whistleblower's report about China's sweeping influence operations during the 2020 election cycle. In some instances according to Harrage, senior CIA officials are accused of taking pen to paper to strike sections because the intelligence assessments would help Trump. A senior intelligence official emphasized that in 2020, China was not held to the same standard as Russia and other adversaries, including North Korea, Iran and its proxy, Khesbala. The official said Chinese influence operations were consistently downplayed while Russian activities were routinely amplified. Now presumably that would be because the left suggested that Russia wanted Trump and China wanted Biden in 2020. The intelligence community assessment called cyber operations enabling expansive digital authoritarianism warned that Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US state's election voter registration data to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election. And Harrage points out that the currency I a director John Ratcliffe back in 2021 when he was the DNI indicated that the intelligence community had downplayed and politicized China's malign efforts concerning 2020. So here's the bottom line, of course election security, but election security is a defensive measure, right? It's our iron dome, it's our way of preventing foreign interference, but that is not sufficient. The underlying story here is not really about election securities, but the enemies who are seeking to wreck our system by using the means against us. If you actually would like to end the threat to the United States, you have to contain and strangle Chinese power. You must. China is not a strategic component. They are an enemy. They're an enemy. And so I don't think the president went nearly far enough last night. If you're saying the China was trying to thwart the 2020 election, if you're saying that China is analyzing voter data in order to manipulate Americans, then we are in an undeclared cold war with China clearly. And so here are some of the things that we should do and some of them are things that the president has tried, but he needs to do better on. Are you coming up? We'll get into what president Trump ought to do with regard to China first. I'm going to tell you what I need to do and the answer is sleep. And I need to sleep right now because we have a baby. So sleep is really important when you have a newborn. And we're getting up all the time. I have a lot more than I am. 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Sleep cooler this summer with bull and branch get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at bull and branch.com/benn with code Ben. That's B-O-L-L-A-N-D-B-R-A-N-C-H dot com slash Ben code Ben to unlock 15% off bull and branch.com slash Ben code Ben exclusions apply. One, we need to wreck China economically, wreck them. That means yes tariffs, of course. It means we need to crack down on our trade with China, but in order to do that, we have to cut better trade deals with our allies in the region. If you're going to make people choose between China and us, we have to offer a carrot to our friends and a stick to our enemies. It also means we have to radically lower our spending. We can't just keep selling our bonds to China. We cannot make the future of the country dependent on China holding our debt because that means anytime they want to hurt us, they just sell our debt into the open market and destroy our capacity to borrow. It means that we do have to reshore important manufacturing to countries that are not China. That doesn't mean all the way back home, which is very expensive sometimes. It means you have to go to allies. Sometimes you got to manufacture inside. say India, we need to draw closer to India. We need to go after the countries that trade in necessary valuables with China. We need to secure our supply lines with regard to rare earth minerals, for example. The United States is the economic gorilla on planet earth and we ought to throw our weight around with regard to China. This notion that we thrive and China thrives, China has played the markets against us. China has used a certain opening of their economy in order to maximize their own leverage and power. We need to reverse that. Second, we must rebuild the American military. This is not optional. This is necessary. The president has asked in the new National Defense Authorization Act, he has asked for a significant upgrade in our military capacity, including with regard to things like patriots and fads. Democrats are stalling this out on the basis that they're angry about the Iran War. Now, first of all, we should point out Iran does not exist as even a baseline military power without Chinese and Russian help. They don't. These are people who could not construct an IKEA box. But somehow they have fairly sophisticated weaponry courtesy of the Chinese. We need to build up our military and that means we need to get sophisticated about it. China is building massive drone capacity. We need to work with firms like, yes, Palantir and yes, and a real in order to develop sophisticated weaponry to stall out the Chinese threat. There is zero excuse for the American government purposely handicapping and kneecapping our own military capacity. And third, we have to crack down on China's technological infiltration of American society. That means we need to crack down on their information operations. It also means cracking down on nonprofits that act essentially as path pass through for the Chinese communist government. We need to end, for example, people dropping babies from China. We need to end student visas from China. Why are we educating hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who go back to China and bring stolen IP and knowledge back to our enemies? Now listen, there are a ton of people in positions of power who want to keep making nice with the Chinese Bernie Sanders has been doing a full on propaganda effort on behalf of the Chinese to undermine our AI industries and believe you me, the Chinese want nothing more than to destroy our forward capacity with AI. They want to destroy the lead that we currently hold in AI and they are succeeding because they are spreading a bunch of nonsense about data centers and how they are going to wreck our industrial farmlands and all this kind of stuff. Guys, there are 825 million acres of farmland in the United States. If we were to build all of the data centers, you could possibly want in the United States. You are talking about what? Four or five million acres total out of 875 million acres and it's not going to be built on farmland. And what are we talking about here? Meanwhile, some large scale businesses are trying to do business in China. This was the problem with Apple, for example. And the propaganda efforts are successful because there are very few politicians who are willing to stand up and say the truth about Trump is one of them, by the way. President Trump has reoriented the political landscape with regard to China until President Trump took office. Most American politicians were still preaching the idea that China was a strategic partner. Trump moved them from strategic partner to strategic opponents in large measure. But we need to go further than that. Right now, one third of Democrats have a full scale positive view of China. Only 14% of Democrats total call China an enemy. And young Americans in particular are awful on this. Just 32% of young Republicans see China as an enemy and only 10% of young Democrats do. And they're wrong because China is indeed our enemy. But they're not hiding the ball on this. So Matt Pottinger, who was President Trump's deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021 might Gallagher, congressman from Wisconsin 2017 to 2024 and the head of the China subcommittee. They wrote an article for foreign affairs back in 2023. Now what they said is whether she is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design G, of course, is the dictator of China. They said whether G is acting opportunistically or according to a grand design or almost certainly both. It is clear he sees advantage in stoking crises. He hopes will exhaust the United States and its allies. In fact, back in 2014, before she was the dictator, he wrote quote, the battle for mine control happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They will have the initiative throughout the competition and combat. When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don't have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory. They also points out Gallagher and Pottenger. Then in 2020, a guy who would go on to be the vice minister of China spy agency said quote, in the internet era, what is truth and what is allies already unimportant? What's important is who controls discourse power. These are our enemies and we need to fight them using all the means at our disposal. Which is why it is a good thing that Neville Roy Singham is now under criminal investigation for violations of tax and the Foreign Agents Registration Act. So Neville Roy Singham is an American who is essentially a Chinese cutout at this point. He is married to the founder of CodePink, another Chinese cutout. He is a benefactor of far left political clauses. He is currently under criminal investigation by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter. The investigation originally began with tax issues, according to CBS News. And also violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Now Singham has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into left wing political clauses. He also moved his business operations to Shanghai, which is typically not something you do if you're not a Chinese cutout. So who has Neville Roy Singham again? He stands behind a bunch of organizations ranging from CodePink to various coalitions associated with Democratic Socialists of America. And what does he think? Well, here he was in 2014, railing against the meritocracy. Wonder why I don't like politicians rail against the meritocracy? Well, because they share a baseline ideology, apparently, with Neville Roy Singham a Chinese cutout. I would despise inequality and I would never allow anybody to tell me that meritocracy or hard work had a damn thing to do with success in life. It was clear to me as a child that this absurdity of the middle class argument that hard work and smarts are what makes better people. It's a vicious lie and is so unfair to every child who's born to this world. Okay, so remember, meritocracy is bad. In fact, meritocracy is a lie, according to Neville Roy Singham. And of course, he says, wait for it, America and Israel are the most deeply racist societies on planet earth, which is very weird because it turns out that China is not exactly known, or it's racial comedy. America is the most deeply racist society in the world, perhaps with the exception of Israel. The two most deeply racist countries in the world are Israeli-United States. And of course, Neville Roy Singham also said in November 2025 that the biggest problem is we have to undo the damage done by World War II ideologically. Who does that sound like? Who spends an awful lot of time promoting the idea that World War II wrecks the West? Can't imagine. If we wanted, therefore, have a new world's order that is based on multilateralism that President Xi and CPC and China have proposed, we have to undo the ideological damage that has been done by the narrative of World War II. And I'm really proud, of course, that it was forcing Lancho here in China because I will tell you the majority of my friends in the global south do not know that 35 million Chinese perished. It's not a known fact in the majority of the world. It's very important that this story is told to the whole world because my friends in Latin America were shocked when they find this out. So China has a very important role and we in this forum have a very important role that envision a new multi-order, polarity order requires that, frankly, the deconstruction, a restoration is history, what really happened. Who really suffered? He's just a Chinese cut out and he sounds exactly like the woke right and the woke left. I mean that is who he is. And the sort of stuff has consequences again. If what we're talking about here is Chinese subversion of America, which has been a major factor, it's not that these gaps in American society don't exist, that these fishers and flaws don't exist in American society, they do. It's that our enemies are taking full advantage of them. And the radical uptick of the tone and tenor of all this has led to a surge in radical left violence already coming up. We'll get to left wing terrorism again. Some of this stuff is coming from abroad. The sort of propaganda that creates permission structures for violence. It's coming not from domestic sources. It's coming from the Chinese. It's coming from our enemies. But when you're online, the truth is you're not spending all that much time actually reading and consuming relevant information. You know what that's the most truth. Like the most truth. It's actually the most true every time you have say an app update. It's got 47 pages of legal language. You scroll right to the bottom and just hit agree. 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They do it all in one place. It's a super agency paid for by Super sure Insurance Agency LLC, a licensed insurance agency. So yesterday, the White House held a symposium essentially on radical left violence. On the resurgence of political terrorism largely on the left at the State Department. And Marco Rubio spoke and it was quite a brilliant speech actually. Here was the Secretary of State talking about the radical left and its permission structure for violence. This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred. Above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best. A revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists or anti-imperialists or communists or anarchist or Marxist, but the fundamental character is always the same. It's always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation. An overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. - You might call it lions versus scavengers. I mean, that is basically the entire theme of my last book and the Secretary of State, of course, is exactly right. And he points out that terrorists are the sort of apex predators here. Because when you take that ideology to its extreme, you actually have to violently destroy all the things you can't build. - The world communism and visions is a world without God. For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines. They attack railroads. They attack power grids and laboratories. The physical embodied symbols of power, and invention, and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great. - So Secretary of State, Rubio, he pointed out one of these threats materializing in the United States is indeed Antifa. Now, your recall back in 2020, the Joe Biden suggested that Antifa is not even an organization. This is in September of 2020. - I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right wing problem. This is a left eye direct. - This is a left wing problem. - We got white supremacists. - Antifa's an idea, not an organization. - You got it, not a solution. - Okay, and the idea that Antifa's not a threat again. Downplaying the threat doesn't make it not a threat. Secretary of State, Rubio went after Antifa yesterday. - We are facing an international. We are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other's attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance and sustain their operations through transnational funds. - Stephen Miller, top advisor to the president of the United States, he pointed out that one of the hallmarks of left wing terrorism is taking advantage of the openness of our society, which of course is exactly right. - One of the hallmarks of left wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence. This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears. When the leftist who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordered notion of justice, protest that we are violating his rights, understand that he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has been perpetrated against him. - I mean, this is right, and this is where our enemies really, really take advantage in a major way. It's much easier to exploit an open society than to infiltrate a closed society, for sure, a secretary of state, Scott Beeson, made an appearance at this particular symposium, and he pointed out that there have been attempts against his life. But I'm going to remind everyone in this room and all the media that I was the subject of an assassination attempt February 2024 by an adult left wing activist two hours after being sworn into my job. So any of you who want to report that this is fiction and does not exist, be there for the sentencing this August. - Okay, well, again, the left wing violence and the uptick and left wing violence is, of course, very real. And it is increasingly targeting. Precisely the targets they would think China, for example, would want to target. So we've been talking for a while here about the Chinese effort to undermine AI development in the United States. It is not a sort of natural alchemy. It's not a natural place for Americans to go. Now, a bunch of big centers get built that have a bunch of servers and data storage units in them. And that create legitimately tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of jobs. And they're basically built on land that is empty at the moment and all that. And suddenly a national alchray grows. I mean, now we've had this sort of thing before where people were very freaked out about big box stores like Walmart, for example. But at least with Walmart, it can make the case that Walmart was somehow putting the local guys out of business. Here, you're just talking about additional jobs. And yet, suddenly the AI backlash is growing. The data center backlash is growing, for example. So much so that according to the Wall Street Journal, tech executives now fear for their lives. According to the Wall Street Journal, the volume of digital threats targeting AI chiefs and data centers grew sevenfold between late February and May, according to LifeRaf, which scans social media and their archive for Fortune 100 companies. Some tech leaders have begun traveling with armed guards. Some say quiet on the topic of AI to avoid attention. Industry leaders who have been issuing dire warnings about the risks AI poses to the workforce have pivoted to talking about its potential benefits. So again, those threats are quite real. And I am not going to, I'm not going to buy the idea that all of that is fully organic, that this is coming from nowhere. And you can see the manifestation of left wing device of ideology in our biggest cities. Zorn Mamdani continues his communist takeover of New York City. According to the New York Post, he has now laid out a 68 page report focusing on what he calls an ambitious slate of tenant focused proposals, including legally recognizing tenant unions, directing housing, preservation and development to investigate every heat complaint citywide, and requiring landlords to disclose any AI generated or digitally altered images and videos in rental listings. So applicants are not misled by doctor departments. The biggest thing that he wants to do is that he wants to make the people who are screening potential renters by law, pay for the professional credit report or criminal background check or eviction history report. He says, well, you know, it's an insurmountable barrier for rent burdened tenants to actually pay for those reports. I mean, this is incredibly stupid because of course what's going to end up happening is that if you cost shift that stuff onto the person who's doing the rent, that person is going to shift that back onto the renter by increasing the rent. And if you ban them from increasing the rent, then they're just going to stop building new units. And they're going to get out of the business. If you withdraw the entire profit margin in building new apartments, no one will build a new apartment, which is exactly what's going to happen. Every single thing that Mamdani is doing right now is designed to actually drive up the price of rent. He will maintain the price of rent for some people and it will rise for everyone else, or the apartments will just go by the wayside in terms of upkeep and all of the rest. Man, all of this is rub bait, but it's rub bait rooted in the idea that essentially everybody who owns an apartment complex or manages an apartment complex has a scrooge mcduck bank in the back of their house and he just goes swimming around in the gold every night. It's incredibly stupid, incredibly stupid stuff. By the way, if you can't do a background check or a Viction History on all your tenants because it's too expensive and they prevent you from raising the rents, you know what you're actually going to do. You're just going to only offer rent to people who are willing to put all the money down up front. Because that way you have collateral to seize. You have something to seize. But of course, this sort of stuff, I guess, is popular in newfound communist centers like New York. Tony Marrero of the Hope attendance union is touting an end to the quote unquote "violence of evictions." And these are crazy people. I'm sorry, these people are crazy. This person is wearing a full face covering in the year 2026 flanged by the smart master himself, Zoran Mamdani, who has that grin plastered on his face like he's something out of the horror movie smile. And here you have this crazy lady wearing an N95 in 2026 along with her fishing hat with buttons on it. The use of the people making policy. Our city is turning the corner on tenant power. When we organize, we win results. The Mamdani administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of business as usual. She says she's wearing that because of all the small from the Canadian wildfires. We are no one else in the room is wearing one. But in any case, the New York City dramatic dysfunction is a result of communist governance. Of course, of course. Apparently NYC H a plumber supervisor Jacob Marckowski earned $465,000 from July 2024 through June 2025. That is more than the mayor and the city council speaker make combined. The NYCHA is the New York City housing authority and the plumbers and everybody else there, they're just making bank, absolute bank. 70 of the employees of the New York City housing administration have been charged with bribery and extortion in 2024. They're collecting less rent. Many of the families are unemployed. Essentially, you just keep driving up the prices. That is what is happening here. But the real goal here in the end is a socialistic government takeover of the means of production. It's been made very clear. You may recall the New York City housing director, C.O. Weaver, talking about property as a collective good. I think the reality is that for centuries, we've really treated property as an individualized good and not a collective good. And we are going to transition into treating it as a collective good and towards a model of shared equity. We'll require that we think about it differently. And it will mean that families, especially white families, but some C.O.C. family through our homeowners as well, are going to have a different relationship to property than the one that we currently have. This is what they want. A different relationship to property. The government is going to tell you what you can own and how you can own all of it. Now here's the Americans generally do not like this stuff. They don't. 68% of Democrats, according to the latest Harvard Harris poll, 68% of Democrats prefer free enterprise to socialism. Overall, 78% of Americans believe that we are better off with free enterprise than we are with socialism. Now when it comes to the meritocracy, it turns out that overall, 88% of Americans believe in a system rooted in merit and work as opposed to 12% believing that everybody should get the same regardless of the work they do. Even 86% of Democrats believe in a system that allows you to earn whatever you can based on your merit and your work. So what exactly do the propaganda have to do? They have to tell you that neither of those things is possible. There can be a merit and work-based system and that free enterprise systems are actually bad. And also they have to tell you one other thing. Socialism isn't actually what you see in say China or Cuba or Venezuela or the Soviet Union. Socialism is the extremely capitalistic system of Denmark because Denmark has universal healthcare. That is not correct. Denmark is a capitalist system that they bunch of significant social welfare programs is what we used to call a mixed economy, obviously. But this is why if you just deliberately confuse people, if you say socialism means universal healthcare plus capitalism people are like, "Oh, it doesn't sound so bad." If you never define the term, you can make it sound better than it is. And that is why that same Harvard Harris poll says that three and five people in America believe that under socialism you can own your own home. Same thing, by the way. Six in ten Americans believe that you can own your own business under socialism. Okay, what you're talking about now is not socialism. What you're talking about now is essentially state capitalism or mercantilism or economic fascism. It's a different thing. Okay, so the left always has to lie about what it is they are attempting to do. Now this comes along with a broader worldview for the left in which, I mean, again, the hard left worldview is that yes, you should get the same result no matter what you do. The meritocracy work, these are irrelevant and they're stupid. The Neville Roycingam idea. And that manifests, by the way, in being extraordinarily soft on crime. A bunch of stories now coming out that are pretty horrifying on Democrats being incredibly soft on crime. So for example, it turns out that this week, the Department of Homeland Security removed a convicted child's rapist who was actually pardoned by Tim Walls. That person's name was too Lou Vang in illegal alien from Laos. We've been convicted in 2006 of first degree criminal sexual conduct after repeatedly assaulting a girl between 2002 and 2004 when she was 10. Well, Walls then offered that guy a pardon. And he said, we can't be judged by our worst day. This is where Democrats are. I mean, this is just, I'm sorry, this is now just pure bane in dark night rises stuff here. Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can't all be judged by our worst day? And I want to be very clear, these are horrific crimes. They often are. They're horrific crimes, but we can't be judged by our worst day. No, I think that's actually the purpose of criminal law is to judge you by our worst day or at least to prevent you from having another worst day. Zarmam Donnie is so crazy about this stuff. He actually went to Reikers to watch the World Cup. This is where we are now. We literally just went to Reikers to watch the World Cup with a bunch of inmates. With the SMARMYGRAIN. I think we were incarcerated here on Reikers that paid to our part of the earth city. The World Cup has been a magical moment for the entire city. These are New Yorkers and they will be New Yorkers when they get out of Reikers. They're New Yorkers today and I wanted to make sure that we can celebrate this moment together. Celebrate the moment with the with the rapists and the predators and Reikers. This is this is insane. This is insane. And if that continues in the United States, we are going to have the end of the country on our hands if that ideology continues to percolate and grow. And again, it's percolating and growing in part thanks to domestic concerns, but not insignificantly thanks to the help of our of our foreign enemies. Now speaking of crime and getting away with it with the opportunity yesterday to sit down with a man who got away with crime for like, solidly a decade. Joining me online is Matthew Cox. Matthew is a former fraudster turned writer podcaster and consumer protection advocate who's actually once on the US Secret Service's most wanted list for title theft and mortgage fraud and then he did 12 years in prison before rebuilding his life. And today he uses that experience to educate people like us on the realities of these crimes and how to protect ourselves. Matthew, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Yep. Thank you for having me. So why don't we start by kind of explaining what the kind of crimes that you were convicted of? What kind of crimes did you participate in? How easy was it to get away with them? So home title theft is basically transferring the title to someone's house or maybe assuming someone's name and then borrowing money against the house. A lot of people think it's not possible, but it happens all the time and it's happening more and more as time goes on. It's happening a lot more now than when I was doing it. It's a very easy crime is becoming easier all the time. Simply because everything is done online at this point. When I was doing the crime, committing this crime, I actually had to physically go down to public records. I had to pull your title. I had to create the documents, go back to public records. I had to go into the bank. I had to go through the title company for the closings. All of that can be done sitting in your local coffee shop on their Wi-Fi using a cheap computer purchased over the internet. It's very easy now to commit this crime. Now, I think most of us assume because we're just used to the idea of trust and verification, that there's some sort of authentication process that happens here. Is there any authenticating these records when they're filed? Is there anybody checking to make sure this doesn't happen? No, no. That's what makes it. So from the standpoint of a title That's what makes it such a great crime, right? Nobody is looking, nobody's calling to verify. Anything filed in public records, as long as you check all the boxes, it has to be filed. So even if, let's say the clerk thought, "This document doesn't quite look right, but they checked all the boxes, they have to record it." They're not allowed to call the bank and say, is this satisfaction of mortgage correct? Did you guys send this to us? They're not allowed to call the homeowner and say, "Did you just sell your house or transfer the title, whatever the case may be?" They're not really legally allowed to do that. - So that's kind of incredible obviously, because I think then when we think about our biggest assets, when it comes to your home, obviously that's for a huge percentage of the population, most of their wealth actually lies. The idea that somebody can just go false to find the record, nobody checks it, and then all the money just gets taken out. I mean, that's the question. Once the property title was put in your name, as you did this, what would you typically do with it? So this is the thing, it depends on the house, right? Like if I've refinanced houses in the homeowner's name, while the homeowner was living in the house, and even when they had a lien on it, what I did was, you give it one example, I drove by the house, got the guy's name, I created a fake appraisal, saying, of course he owned the house, and the house was worth several hundred thousand dollars. I then went to several banks, I created a fake ID in his name, used a stolen social security number, and then went to the bank because the property was paid for free and clear, I actually satisfied the lien on the property, because it was paid for free and clear, the bank was willing to lend me money, even though the credit had no credit, even though the, sorry, even though the owner had no credit, 'cause I was using a stolen social security number, and I got several banks to lend me money on that home at the same time, and when the authorities found out about it, they actually showed up and dragged the homeowner downtown and questioned him for four or five hours, because they believed he was involved in the crime. That's just one example. I've also rented houses from people, and in their name borrowed money against the home, I have also, I've rented houses, I've also convinced homeowners to owner finance their homes, or just outright bought the house, and then borrowed money against it. I mean, it's a crime that had, you're just not really safe. That's what I'm trying to get at. It's just not people think, oh, I'm safe. A lot of people will think that they have a mortgage on their house. Let's say your house is worth half a million dollars, and you have a mortgage for, I don't know, $490,000, and you think, oh, I'm safe. I really don't have any equity for anybody to steal. That's irrelevant. I can simply create a satisfaction of mortgage from your title or from your mortgage company, file it downtown, and your mortgage disappears. And I can now borrow against that false equity in your house. So if you're the homeowner, this happens to you. When you first find out that this has actually happened to you, because again, most of the time when somebody comes to crime against you, a physical crime, you're on the scene. And it happens to you know about it, you report it, and the reaction is fast. But it took a while for the police to catch up with you, because how long does it take for homeowners to actually find out that they've been the victim? It could be months, months, and I'm long gone, by the way. I've borrowed half a million, a million, one point I borrowed, 1.3 million against a piece of property. And then by the time the homeowner is notified, I've already pulled the money out of the bank, and I'm gone. It could be months, as long as I continue to pay those mortgages, you may never be notified until like as eventually, you know, you just stop paying, and then you start getting foreclosure notices. So it's a long time. It's a very, it's unfortunately, it's a very safe crime for the perspective of the thief. So how long were you able to get away with this before you were finally caught? And how were you caught? I want to say the US attorney said I did it for a decade. I think that's a little bit longer than I actually did. Probably, let's say seven or eight years, I was also on the run for once they found me or caught up with me. I went on the run for three years and borrowed another three and a half million while on the run. I know it listed. I know it's horrible. I know I understand. But it's funny because it's for me, it was so long ago. And now I just, I was actually in prison and I used to watch the, I used to watch the info-murshaw for home title lock. And I used to think, wow, I would love to contact them because I noticed that nobody, no title thieves wanted to come on and talk about this. And I thought, you know, the reason this, the reason this exists is because people don't believe it's possible. And that's a problem. They're not looking out for themselves. They're not monitoring their title. And that's up, that is the main issue. And then even if they're notified by the police, what do you do then? I mean, you're not a lawyer, you know, the average person is not a real estate attorney. They don't have 30, 40, 50,000 dollars to, to hire a real estate attorney. And if you, if you have a company like, like home title lock, then they'll monitor the title once they notify you and you explain, yeah, no, I did not do that. They become an advocate for you and they will actually correct the problem for you. And so that's, that's, that's really kind of why I'm doing this. Well, it's an amazing story and a horrifying story for a lot of people who have never suspected this could happen to them. It's one of the reasons we partner with home title lock to make sure our audience has the opportunity to find out today if you're a victim of this silent and growing crime, head on over to home title lock.com, use promo code Ben to get a free title history report from home title lock. They're also going to give you a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection to give you that piece of mine. That's home title lock.com promo code Ben for a free piece of my Matthew Cox. Thanks so much for taking the time and for giving us that information. Really important stuff. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Alrighty. Well, if you think that home title theft is pretty crazy, I have something crazier. It's the main Senate race. So remember, a grand platner was ousted from that race. It turned out that the Nazi tattoo wasn't enough to out him. It was the multiple rape allegations that eventually did it realistically. The reason that he was ousted by the Democrats is because he was running behind Susan Collins. They decided to replace him. I will say the slate of possible replacements and main for the Democrats. It's not great, Bob. It's not the best. So one of the people running is one Ashley Web. Ashley Web is an openly trans and intersex woman, meaning a man who believes that he is a woman. Well, I will say there's a striking resemblance to grand platner. So I do have to ask at least the question. I'm just asking questions as people are fine. I'm doing whether grand platner just shaved put on a dress and got back into the race here. But Ashley Web, his campaign, Ashley Web, take no prisoners. That's the name of the great. Okay. Okay. Was asked about his credentials to be a senator. And here's what that sounded like. Ashley Web, what qualifications do you have to serve in the US Senate? Oh, I ran for office several times. Didn't win, but he did run. And then I'm a songwriter and then I write my own books and then I suppose my transparency. I wouldn't lie to the people and I wouldn't deceive the people like we're being deceived right now. Like I wouldn't lie to the people and I wouldn't deceive the people, said the man dressed as a woman. What why is Ashley Web running? Again, this is the person who wants to run against using Collins. Why is Ashley Web running? Well, because Ashley Web just wants to be able to use the ladies' bathroom, this rather large hulking dude. With the trans community, like we're being dehumanized, they say that we want to hurt people. I don't want to hurt anybody. I just want to use the bathroom. And if they want me to use the men's room, I will, but I don't want to be assaulted. I just want to poop is a okay. I guess Grand Platter was the best of the bunch. I guess. I mean, I thought, hey, man, they can't go like really the best you could come up with is Nazi tattoo multiple rape allegation guy. And the main Democrats are like, yep, that was best we could do. That's best we could do. It's like an episode of pawn shop. That was best they could do. There's another main Democrat named Elizabeth Dickerson who says that she is running because she is interested in the weather. But I did this because I'm very interested in climate and President Trump has done about everything he can do to strip away any protections that we have on climate. Electric. Man, the shining electricity from that candidacy. But don't worry, there were lots and lots of candidates, lots and lots of candidates. Some looking like accountants, some looking like refugees from the local bar night. Here was one main Democrat named Shana Bellows, who was asked about daylight savings. And here's how that went. The House of Representatives this week approved ending daylight saving time. Would you approve of that? Would you vote for that, Jennifer Bellas? Well, we had a debate about this in the state legislature. I'm sure Troy remembers. And I think there are reasons for and against, and I haven't read that House bill, but I will when I am Senator. Well, we know the general idea of ending the right saving time. Where do you stand? When I was in the Senate, I think I voted for it, but you'd have to go back and look at my record. You know what I'm talking about? It doesn't sound like there's a lot of conviction there. I tell you, I love it when it gets light in the warning and gets dark at eight o'clock or nine o'clock. That's my favorite summertime. Cool. And your favorite season is the one where we wear light sweater. Oh, goodness gracious. How about main Democrat and Nerov Shah? Did Nerov Shah have anything good to say? Well, let's find out. There are a lot of areas where grams policies and mine overlap. One that I think is particularly relevant this week is the need to finally abolish. Abolish ice. Abolish ice. Great. This is going well. All of them, by the way, are in favor of Medicare for all. They're all in favor of medical, Medicare for all. So the man, these progressive geniuses, here we go. We just said you're from Medicare for all. Is everyone on this panel? Dan, no? Yeah, I mean, yeah. Just checking. Just checking. That's a trade with the Canada state. I'm actually on Medicare. Oh, okay. Well, there you have it. Good story. Good story, dude. I'm on Medicare. Any other life stories you want to share? The whole thing is as an else. What do you think of daylight savings? Well, I really like it when it gets light in the morning and dark in the evening times. Cool story. Are you from Medicare for all? Awesome. What do you think about the war in Iran? Well, actually, I once went to a Persian restaurant. Cool story, guys. It turns out the Grand Planner was the most normie Democrat I think could come up with. Excellent job, man. Really great job. One of the debate commentators. And again, you got to love the local news, but here are the debate commentators who, again, this is like this is like the fourth line in a high school football team of commentators talking about the main about the main debate. Solid stuff here. When it comes to charisma, Planner had a lot of advantages. He was going to, I think, maybe mobilize people who aren't likely to show up to vote on a year when there's nobody running for president. And I don't think any of those people that we saw just now have that card to play. And I think they know it. They do know it. I mean, I love the Grand Planner. You're wondering why it was that they couldn't come up with somebody who was better than Grand Planner in the answer or there weren't any. What's going on up in May, guys? Like really, there's no one normal up there. Everyone up there is either Grand Planner, Tucker Carlson or the, or the trans woman who writes children's books and just wants to poop. Like is that, is that what, like, come on, there have to be some normies up in May. Come on, really? Maybe when Stephen King is writing all those horror towns up in May, like he's, are those just like historical fiction? Like what are we doing here? What are we doing here? I feel like I know some people. I know I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm mocking you a little bit, but I mean, like watch that debate. You deserve it a little bit. I make fun of New Yorkers most of the time, but I gotta say that, that's, that's a lot, that's a lot happening up there in May. You wonder why Susan Collins keeps winning? Yeah, she's a talented politician, but also maybe just by default. That's also possible. Alrighty, so I was, in fact, I have two more things that I want to hit on the show before we get to the member block. So one is idiot of the day. Now this could just be permanent idiot of the day. I'm gonna have to start a new segment called the idiot of the day, but he could just be the permanent face of idiot of the day. Taco Carlson just keeps talking about how awesome tyranny is. He loves feudalism. He loves tyranny. I look forward to his Aristotelian disquysition on slavery. Here he was with Amcon magazine. The American conservative magazine is basically a Buchananite Isolationist magazine. And here he was explaining that tyrannies are actually better than the United States because they're more responsive to the population, which only a person who has lived in America could say. Like truly, the utter stupidity of this human being is beyond reckoning. This is just dumb, my dude. I would say he'd use drop down his head as a baby, but he's gone through so many iterations. He must have been dropped down his head as an adult. Is it alp poisoning? Like what happened here? Seriously. The only power remaining is the power of the vote, political influence. And if that's fake, then you've got a system that's much less responsive to people or ordinary people than a lot of autocracies are. There are a lot of countries that we describe as tyrannies that are more responsive to their population than ours is. And I would name every Gulf country. They're all monarchies, all six of them are monarchies, the GCC. It's hereditary. You can't run for emir, okay? You're born into it or not. And yet those governments, I've seen it firsthand a lot over years, and I know some of those people, but they're really kind of aware at all times of what their population wants. And they make a good, I mean, they may blow a lot of money on hookers and private planes and all that stuff, and that's well documented. But they did not ignore the baseline concerns of their populations. I mean, well, that's for two reasons. One, they might be murdered by their population. And two, they then kill the people who they think are going to murder them. That's the actual way things work in the Middle East. Tyronees are more responsive to the population than democracy. Yes, famous famous famous thing that we know about tyrannies that is that the tyrants deeply care about the opinions of the population, which is why they are tyrannies. You might truly must hate America, truly hate America to believe that the Saudi royal government is more responsive to its population than the American government. I got a lot of problems with the American government. I understand it's unwieldy and it's annoying and it gets up in your business. But if the notion is that the normal Saudi citizen is more responded to by the Saudi royal government, then the American citizen is responded to by the American government. They're out of your damned mind. You're just crazy or stupid or both. You know what I wish for Tucker? I wish for Tucker to live in the systems that he so seems to love. Truly, he should live under a full scale tyranny with feudalism replacing the free markets. I feel like that would be better for him. Maybe one where the cities are all clean thanks to Sharia law. They're available. They're out there. They're out there, man. You could do it. I mean, the only thing I'll say for Tucker is apparently he's from Maine. So maybe it's in the water up there in Maine. Anyway, okay, onto the hottest movie of the summer in the Odyssey. So I did go see the Odyssey yesterday. And I will give my review in a second. First, the Odyssey actors did a cringe rap on Jimmy Fallon. It wasn't the best. Odysseus. Toulamacus. Penelope. Odysseus. Toulamacus. Penelope. And Helen of Toulamacus. Odyssey. After the alien. Hidden in a horse. On the war, I'm serious. Odyssey. Kitchen for Ithaca. Get past the Peloponnesian Peninsula. Odyssey. Mediterranean. Psycho-psyclobs. And crater is crazy. It's crazy. Why would you think that into Bacon Bits, you got to go on the road. Odysseus. Penelope. Toulamacus. Why did you think that? The way we was necessary. I remember that. Call it whatever. Solongers of this speed. Signs on sirens and shooters and shooters. And sila, corriptus, a bunch on the moon. Oh, no. Helen. Athena. A helpful and generous. Help me get home. Oh, no. Wantono. Tell me a muse of that hero who traveled so far in the White House. So basically, this is like the modern version of The Homer. And it just goes on for a way. 11, 12, 13 books. And 10, 12, 13 books. Didn't have to see this. Yeah, at least it expired at this point. That was unnecessary. Okay. So I'm going to give you my short form review. There will be a much longer form review that we'll do for YouTube. So make sure that you check that out. That'll come out. I'm sure later today or early tomorrow morning. Okay. So here's my short form review of the Odyssey. It's great. Okay. It actually is. It is great. Now, it is great. And it has some significant flaws. And the flaws are all the obvious ones that are already thinking about. Some of the ones that you're thinking about are not actually real flaws that Mara the movie going experience. There are a couple of them that really feel like when you have a chip tooth, or you have a chip tooth where it feels like a gaping grand canyon in your mouth, where everybody looks at you and they're like, ah, I don't even see the chip. And you're like, oh my god, I can't believe you can't see this thing. It feels enormous. Or it's like a stone in your shoe. And the stone is extraordinarily small. But it feels like you got a bolt or in your shoe. There are a couple of those in the Odyssey that are really irritating. So let me begin from the beginning. The Odyssey is obviously drawn from the events of Homer's the Odyssey, but thematically it is not totally in consonants. I will say with if you read the Robert Fagel's version of the Odyssey, it is not totally in consonants with sort of the character of the Odyssey. No one is trying to do something else with the character of Odysseus. It's the thing, by the way, I like. The thing that he's actually doing with Odysseus as a character is interesting. And you do have to do this, right? When you're adapting a piece of ancient literature, you have to somehow read in motivation to characters who may not have a lot. If you read the Odyssey, Odysseus's main motivation is just get home. And then it's essentially a series of episodes until he gets home. And then kills everybody and retakes the crown. But somehow you have to get human motivation in there. And no one does something really interesting with that. So again, couple of spoilers coming here. I mean, the spoilers are not dramatic, considering that this is a piece of literature that's been around for several thousand years at this point. But a couple of spoilers. So the main theme of the Odyssey, according to No one, is that Odysseus is in a sort of enforced self-exile because of his guilt over the loss of his men one and over his guilt at having perpetrated the Trojan horse, which is seen in the film as a sort of sin against the common rule of war. They're not supposed to take advantage of your opponent's hospitality or the gift of gift giving in order to in order to destroy. And so Odysseus has to live with the fact that he came up with his violation of law. His cleverness was violating the natural law in order to sack the city and then horrific things occur on the basis of that. And so he's experiencing this guilt. And so the movie is about him giving up control, realizing that he's sinned. And the idea in the movie is that because he committed that sin, a sort of violence has been unleashed on the world. And now you have that rule of war being broken. And now everybody's breaking that rule of war. And you have raiders who are coming in from the sea and all of the rest. And honestly, I kind of like that moral frame. That moral frame is really interesting and interestingly conservative in a bunch of ways. Because the idea that once you violate moral scruples and the natural law, you have broken something that's very hard to unbreak. That's a very that's a very conservative idea. And there's like an original sin. It is unfixable. At the end of the movie, Odysseus goes into exile. So if you remember your high school reading of the Odyssey, that is not what happens. You retake the crown. There is a version that was put forward of the epic of the Odyssey in ancient sources in which that is what happens where Odysseus goes into exile. So it's not there's no basis for it. There is some basis for it. Okay. So that's that's thematically what's happening. So you realize what Odysseus's motivation is, which happens about halfway through the movie. It feels episodic just like the Odyssey would feel episodic and feels a little bit slow. The movie's runtime is very long. It's almost three hours. And but the last half of the movie and in particular, the last hour of the movie kicks absolute ass. It's terrific. It's visually astounding because that's what Nolan does. Everything is beautiful. The sack of Troy is incredibly well filmed. Everything that happens on the boat is great. Okay. Now for those stones in the shoe or the or the chips in the tooth. So they're the ones that people are pointing out and then there are some ones that I think people are are putting too much focus on. The ones people are putting too much focus on Helen of Troy, Lapita, and Yongo. So a lot of people I said I was not bothered by this for a couple of reasons. One, Lapita, Yongo is beautiful woman. Second of all, the idea that everyone is going to be racially Greek. No one in the movies racially Greek. No one looks Greek. And that's a minute is not a Greek. Tom Holland is not a Greek. Charlie's Theran is not a Greek. The white people don't look Greek. Okay. So there's that. Number two, if the idea is I know a lot of people were upset about the idea that Helen of Troy, she's supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Okay. There's a line of dialogue where Nolan basically solves for this. Nolan has Penelope, teleodistius before he leaves. That the real reason that Agamemnon is declaring war is not particularly because he cares very much about his brother's wife going with Paris to Troy. The real reason he's doing it is because Troy is located on a trade route he wants to control. And this is a pretext for the war, which again, that's a smart kind of, that's a smart plot move because it removes the onus to say that this only happened because she was the most beautiful woman and that's the face that launched a thousand ships. And then the idea here is that that's the pretext for launching the ships. That's not the actual reason. Okay. I kind of like that. Okay. So, I think people who are critical of Zendaya as Athena in the movie and again, spoiler alert here. So, if you don't want to hear it, then don't. The reason that Zendaya is Athena in the movie is not because Athena looks like Zendaya. It is because during the sack of Troy, there is a moment where Matt Damon's Odysseus is looking at the carnage that is being carried out in Troy. And there is a young girl who is Zendaya, who's beheaded right in front of him. And he looks up and he sees a statue of Athena being beheaded at the same time. And now, identifies the statue of Athena with the girl who was beheaded because one of the themes is that you're supposed to treat other people as you would want to be treated, which of course is a biblical, not a Greek principle. But you should do that because they might be a god in disguise. And so, it's taking that theme and playing it out, which I honestly thought was very, very clever. So, those are two things people have been very upset about. I'm not upset about them at all. And they actually work for me in the film. And then there are a couple of things that really take you out of the film, like truly take you out of the film. So number one, the use of the words dad and mom, the use of modern vernacular is very weird and takes you out of the film. I just use mother and father and then you're not out of the film. This is my rule. Okay, if it takes me out of the film, if it takes me out of the film experience, then I'm going to get annoyed. And every time you have Tom Holland say dad or Robert Pattinson say dad, I get annoyed. So I'm like, it just didn't feel real. And I understand that no one's saying, well, people spoke vernacular Greek at that. Okay, I get it. I get it. But let's be real about how the movie going experience works. If I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for the one-eyed giant monster, the Cyclops, but I'm not willing to spend, but it takes me out of it. The dad stuff. That's a problem. And then there is the Elliott page of it. And I'm going to save that for the YouTube review. It's a real problem. It is an actual real problem. So in terms of thematics, I really like the Odyssey. In terms of the spectacle of it, incredible spectacle. Again, no one is the best living director when it comes to putting spectacle on screen. The second place would go to Danny Villeneweve, the Doon stuff. But if you want my full review, you're going to have to head on over to YouTube for that. Already folks, you think the show is over wrong? If you're a daily wear member, there's a lot more stuff that we are going to talk about. We're going to talk about immigration and Iran maybe get to a couple of questions from you, the people. But if you're not a member, now's the time to do it. 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