Friendly Fire: Fauci's Fabrications, A Socialist Repents & Blowing Up Bus Lanes

The Ben Shapiro Show

The podcast discusses Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey,' debating its Christianization of Homer’s tale and the cultural backlash over casting choices like Ellen Page. It also covers political commentary on Fauci, conservativ

Key takeaways

• Nolan's 'Odyssey' reinterprets Greek myth through a Christian lens.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. The new Honda City isn't just made to drive, all new Honda City. Isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. to know before we begin, because we haven't done one since, did you guys see the worst movie ever made by Hollywood in the history of images? I mean, well, what I've been told, what I've been told is that the Odyssey, the Odyssey, the better movie would have been for there to be a man who goes around, killing everyone, banging the lady who's not his wife for 10 years, and then killing all the chamber bates. That would have been better, probably. Now that you put it that way, I am actually coming around to Walter's point of view. Now I see the flaws in the picture. That's it. I just don't know what we're going to. If I can't complain about the Odyssey for the next 10 weeks, I don't know. Like, what are we going to talk about? There's nothing left to talk about. I got a letter from somebody complaining that they had turned, they turned Odysseus into a weepy a girl man. So I sent him the passage in Homer where he weeps like a woman. And I said, you know, you think this is an argument between good people and bad people. It's really an argument between people who know what they're talking about and people who have no idea what they're talking about. What's funny about it is that I feel like we're all having the same argument about like that we all kind of agree on what the movie is kind of trying to do. Yeah. We just have disagreements on whether that's a good thing or not. Right. Like, like, I think that, you know, I heard, I heard your take on a Drew and I think it was basically the same take as my take on it. which I think was also... You were more enthusiastic, I thought. You were more enthusiastic, I thought. I like Nolan better than you guys like Nolan. Yeah, I mean, but as a piece of, as a piece of, like, morality. What he was trying to do thematically is obviously he was taking sort of the ghost of Christian morality and pouring it into the vase of Greek story. Because, I mean, and I think we all sort of agree with that. I thought that that's like kind of a good thing. Because, again, if you wanted... I think, listen, I get where Matt's coming from because he loves apocalyptic, right? Apocalyptic is, here's what pre-Christian morality looks like, and then here comes Christianity, oh, thank God. Right. I mean, that's what Apocalyptic. Right. Everything is horrible. And then, oh, thank God, the conquistadors are here. And I get that. But that wasn't going to happen at the end of Homer's the Odyssey because no one comes at the end of Homer's the Odyssey to save you from pre-Judeo-Christian morality. Yeah. You're just stuck in that world where Odysseus is the hero, who, again, bangs everything. in sight and then kills all the chambermaids. So, like, that's not like an amazingly evocative story for a film. So, again, you could make Northman. It just, Northman does no box office. I don't understand, though. You know, I thought it was an aesthetic problem. Like, I didn't think his take really did quite graft on aesthetically onto it. I just, I didn't believe that Odysseus was saying those things, even as he was played in the movie. Even as the character was played in the movie, I didn't believe that those would be his problems. But so what? I mean, so it's a summer. movie that's incredibly entertaining for three hours, which is hard to do. And so it doesn't all, you know, it's not the smartest movie in the world. But so what? You know, what's Nolan supposed to do is his job to sort of make everybody feel that their point of view is being represented in his movie. And by the way, I just want to say one thing, Ben, I would much rather hear you overpraise a director that you love, which is a wonderful thing to love a director. You know, there's directors that I love more than they deserve, but I just love their work. I would much rather hear that than a bunch of conservatives cranking that somehow they didn't get the ideological, you know, diatribe that they wanted from somebody. There's also on the ideological point, like Ben, you're completely right that he's Christianizing the story in a very overt way. He invokes the golden rule. There's a baptism scene. The big turn at the end is like literally confession. There is a scrim and he is confessing his sins to his wife. And, you know, that is part of the Western tradition. And he, he lets you know he's doing it. Because the Ellen Page part comes from Virgil. It doesn't come from Homer. It's his character Sinon. And though that the Sinon character does kind of take the place of Achilles in the Hades scene. So maybe that's why it was leaking that she played Achilles. But in any case, he's reading the poem through Virgil, through Dante in particular, the fact that Ulysses or Odysseus sails off at the end is part of Dante's telling of it. And so Dante is obviously Christianizing the story. But the difference is when Dante does that, he puts both Sinon and Odysseus in like the deepest depths of hell. And here, you get Odysseus at the end sort of whining and crying. And then he goes off to sail into the sunset. But it's like it is the most boomer lib version of that, which is he's really upset for the whole movie. And then he cheers up when he takes his wife on a cruise. So you don't get that to a party. But the Greeks did this too, you know. The Greeks identified with the Trojans too. They wrote the Trojan women. They, you know, Odysseus cries for the Trojan women in Homer. They identify with the defeated. Well, here's the thing that annoys me. I'm just, are we supposed to think that Christians living in the United States or Jews living in the United States, people who are part of the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, shall we say, living in the United States in the year 2026? are somehow angry at the Christianization of Greece. Like, some of us actually wrote books on why that was a good thing. Right? Like, I think all three of us may have written books on why that's kind of a good thing. And so, like, the idea that, like, what we needed was, like, the pure Greek brutality. Well, we weren't fans, okay? Like, my people have, like, entire fast days dedicated to the Greeks destroying things, right? We have entire holidays around Jewish revolts against the Greeks, right? And it turns out Christianity is largely built around the idea that, that Greece had to be Christianized, that Greek morality was not enough. I mean, this is what Paul is doing, not to lecture people on Christianity. But this is why, like, when I see Christians who are very upset about, so listen, I get all of the Ellen Page of it, and it's ridiculous and stupid. And I agree with all of that. And I also, listen, I sort of get the Lapidaniangal that didn't bother me very much. Because you're like lectures. No, I'm sorry. I'm taking you off. What the hell, of course. Yeah, sorry. Because she's in the movie for three minutes. And also, I'm just telling you, Diane Kruger does not look like a Greek judge. Okay, Diane Kruger, everyone's like, wow, shouldn't Helen look like Diane Krueger? I don't know. Is Diane Kruger, you know, like, a hun? She's in German. I'm pretty sure that the people from like the Teutonic forests of Germany were not great resemblances to the short brown women of Greece in the year 1,500 B.C. or BC. Like, it's just silly. I was saying to Knowles before you showed up that like the attack on Ellen Page, and I agree with you, Ben. I thought it was very brief. but every woke decision he made was bad. It did bring the movie down a little bit. But the idea that Ellen Page is a mentally ill woman who's pretending to be someone she's not. That defines every actress. If you take that out, there are no actresses left in Hollywood. Maybe Merrill Streep, she looks a little sane. But all the rest of them, they're mentally ill people pretending to be what they're not. There's sort of a broader, there's a broader point here, Drew, that I wanted to ask about. And that is, I think the conservatives, at a certain point, culturally, we have a tendency to have our own farts. Like, it's like, oh my gosh, I don't like that Ellen Page's in this movie, therefore we'll do zero business. It's like, no, this movie was always going to do gigantic business. Like, can we please stop with this? And this is a matter of tactics, which I think will appeal to you, Knowles, because you're very big into, like, you should launch wars that you can win. Yeah. You should not launch wars that you're going to lose. Okay, like, this movie was always going to make a fortune because it is beautiful to look at. Yeah. And the last one hour of it is actually incredibly well done and exciting. Even if you think that the first couple hours are slow, the last hour of it is really compelling. and it's Christopher Nolan, and he's got every major star in the world in this film. It was always going to do big business. And so this kind of bizarre thing that the Wright did, which is like, Ellen Page's in it, therefore, we'll do no money. And therefore, anyone who even says that they kind of like it must be cast out, must be thrown out of it. Like, what are you doing? Just on a tactical one. On this point, it's also a category error. It's a category error, though, because it's not like putting that clown trans guy on a beer can, which is essentially endorsing the fact that he's wearing women face and really disrespecting women by pretending to be one. These are actors. They're all nuts. They all have like weird lives and all that. They go on and they pretend to be someone else. That's part of the arts. I mean, the women, men were playing women in Shakespeare's Day. You know, they've done it before. It's like, it's part of the arts. The arts are weird and they're crazy. It's not the same thing as selling beer or selling some object. So the entire thing is ridiculous. Is Ellen Page because she's got problems? She's never supposed to work again? I don't care if she's in a movie as long as she's, I didn't think she was very good in this, but I think, you know, I don't mind her working. What's that, what's that got to do with me? I also, I also, it's an annoyment, but I go ahead and knows. I have a kind of Straussian take on this, and it's like the, the esoteric reading is always, the line between that and wishcasting is very, very thin, kind of intrinsically. But on all the woke stuff, which you point out, Drew, like all of it, every bit he did was just so insane and it all blew up. But, you know, the story, ultimately, is about the greatest trickster ever. The story is about the greatest deceiver, fraudster, trickster of all time. And you didn't really get that in the Odysseus character. Like, Odysi... One of the critiques of the movie is Odysseus just wasn't Odysseus. He was, it was like Oppenheimer, too. It wasn't really Odysseus. But I wondered if it's... Because Nolan didn't just go a little bit woke, it wasn't like, he didn't just, like, pick an ethnically ambiguous Helen of Troy. He picked a woman who called herself dark as night. Like, he picked, like, a very, very black actress. He didn't, he didn't just pick, like, a gay guy. He picked like the tranny lady to play the stand-in character for Achilles. It was so in your face. And I wondered, did he go that far to make a point? Was this his own kind of Odyssean trickster way to generate publicity, to win an Oscar with the DEI? I don't know. I'm just, maybe I'm reading too deeply, but he's a very smart guy. I think the rage publicity was probably a point in his mind. I think it may have been, you know. Just to get us everybody angry. talking about. The general point of the film, which again, I think you can boil down the morality to the film too, there is a golden rule that was instituted by, in the movie it's the gods, but God, right, in our conception, there's a golden rule that God said to do. And if you violate that rule, then sin is infectious, sin is infectious, and it actually has externalities. And those externalities come back and bite you. And sometimes the only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to sin again, but that's a sin that causes you to go into exile. That is an incredibly biblical message. That is not, that is actually like, That was the thing that they got me about. And again, you can even quibble with all these things. And I agree with a lot of the critiques of the film. And if I were going to rank Nolan films, this one comes in, like, top of the second tier of Nolan films for me. This isn't like one of his top three films. But again, sort of the overblown, like, we must have a malice struggle session over the Odyssey. It's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. Well, speaking in struggle sessions, you know, there was one on Capitol Hill today with Fauci. Also speaking of great deceivers and one of the worst fraudsters in history. So we'll get to that. It's friendly fire. Friends are these, who needs enemies? Friends are these, Scootty, enemies. Hey. Hey, Ben, before we get into Fauci, I do have to ask, why are you dressed in a Vladimir Zelensky costume? Okay, here's the actual honest answer. The actual honest answer is that it's really, really hot where I am. So we just filmed a show, and we are in like an old mansion in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it's like Europe here. There's no air conditioning. And so I cannot, wear a jacket. And so they gave me the shirt, which normally I'd wear with a jacket. And then I just decided, just because I have to flex, that I was not going to, you know, wear the jacket. And also because I want to fire drones. Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to fire some drones in Moscow. So I decided that in honor of Vladimir Zelensky's meeting with the president and the president's shifting back to the side of good against Russia, I'm going to dress up like Vladimir's. The real answer is I'm in like a cloak closet in Cincinnati is the actual real reason. So what are you doing? Can you tell us why you're in Cincinnati or no? This is this very secret project. It's not like the most secret project, but we are doing a new show where I'm interviewing the top names in business and finance about sort of the future of the economy and AI and technology. And so I was interviewing somebody for that. So it should be a great show. All right. That's coming out soon. All right. That's exciting. Can we beat up on Anthony Fauci? He was on, oh, I think we have a, do we have a clip from the show? Here's a simple truth. Almost nobody wants to say out loud. The world you're living in right now is about to disappear. Not in a century, not in a generation. soon. Artificial intelligence, biotech, energy, capital markets. Every foundation of the modern economy is being ripped up and re-poured at the same time. One day in the very near future, we're all going to wake up and the world around us will be unrecognizable. Now,