The Matt Walsh Show - Friendly Fire: ICE. Ice. (And The Oscars) Baby.

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

It is very unclear what is going on between Washington and Minnesota right now. A few days ago Tim Walz compared ICE officers to Nazis, then he turned around and worked with them, so naturally we brought in Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan to explain reality. Daily Wire reporter Jennie Taer joins to share what she saw on an ICE ride along in Minneapolis amid the protests, and the guys also get into all the Oscar movies you have not seen, and neither have we. Ep. 07 - - - Today's Sponsors: PolicyGenius - Head to https://policygenius.com/FIRE to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. Kalshi - Visit https://kalshi.com/friendlyfire to see live prediction markets and sign up today to trade on the outcomes that matter most to you. - - - Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe 🍿 The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is here. Episodes 1 & 2 are now streaming exclusively on DailyWire+         Episodes: https://dwplus.watch/ThePendragon Watch Jennie Taer's mini-doc following ICE agents in Minneapolis: https://dwplus.watch/MinneapolisICEMiniDoc 🍿 Real History with Matt Walsh available now, exclusively on DailyWire+!         Episodes: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory         Subscribe here: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📙 Andrew Klavan’s NY Times best-selling non-fiction book, "The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness" has been nominated for an Edgar Award! Available for purchase here: https://dwplus.shop/KingdomofCain - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Don't take your guns to town, Bill, leave your guns at home. When I listen to Michael Mulls sing Johnny Cash, it makes me think of my own mortality. This could be the whole show. It's just puns. I'm in a bad mood. It should not have been nominated, by the way. Here we go. You know what? That is the most offensive thing you have said in this entire episode. Save it. Save it for the show.

Three days ago, Tim Walz compared the ICE officers to Nazis. and then yesterday he collaborated with them. So I guess Tim Walls is now a Nazi collaborator. It's very unclear what's going on between Washington and Minnesota right now. We will get into it. We will get into all of the Oscar movies that you haven't seen. We haven't seen them either, but we have very, very strong opinions. This is Friendly Fire.

Guys, do you know what that is called? That's called a cold open. And I can tell you speaking from Nashville, it's a very cold open here. It's a real chilly, hence my sweater. Matt, you're always kind of lumberjacking, wearing all of your flannel, et cetera. But Drew, Ben, you're in relative warmth. No, no, no. Wait, it snowed here.

I'm close to D.C. And we had enough snow that I had to go out twice and shovel my walks. And now my entire body hurts and I have a cold. So I think that's my contribution to the weather. Are you still corporeal or is it just a ghost? What's that? Is that the ghost of Drew or is that real physical? By the time the show is over, I will be transparent.

That is, yeah. Well, you're always transparent, Drew. But, you know, down here in Florida, it's cold also down here. It was like in the mid-60s today. It's vicious. There's like a biting wind, got it down to like wind chill factor down to like 58. Brutal. Just vicious.

Michael, are you doing this show by candlelight? What's with the lighting in your office? I'm so fortunate. that so I would have been, I would have just been Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining, speaking of Oscar movies right now, had I not been rescued by my buddy and put up in a beautiful Airbnb with a podcast studio across the street. So I'm actually, I'm feeling great. And because it's not Candlemas yet, I'm still wearing my Christmas decorations. I'm feeling, I'm feeling good. I think I might do the show from here forever. Did you, Matt, have you survived

the snowpocalypse? I'm in my element. I'm cold, dark. no one around. No one can access me. Like I love this. I would do this every, I would do this all year round. One question I have, I know with the power going out in a lot of places,

some people are trying to figure out things to do. Have you guys been sitting around with your family playing the new Penn Dragon board game? Yes. If you would send me a Penn Dragon game, I would actually play the Penn Dragon board game. Well, you can, if you want to get your own copy, I'm not sending it to you. You 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.

And my favorite part of it is, it's getting rave reviews from people who like the Daily Wire. It'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. It's very, I was actually, I'm never gratified to look at Twitter because it's just a cesspool of villainy and scum. But actually, people really seem to love Pen Dragon, because it's a great story. It'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, they love it.

The only way that you can watch it is to become a Daily Wire Plus member. And this is what you're going to get. What was it like, Merlin, to be alone with God? Is that who you think I was alone with? You're your father. I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. All men know of the great Taliesin. Who am I, father?

How the gods should... All for my soul. Princess Garris, the savior of our people. I know what the bull God offered you. I was offered the same. And? There is a new pirate work in the world. I've seen it.

God, he sacrifices, what he loves for us. We are each given only one life singer. No. And we're given another. I learned of Yazoo the Christ. And I have become his follower. He's waiting on a miracle. And I think you can give him one.

Mr. Jesus, he is the only hope for men like us. Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the great life. Great light, great darkness. Such things mattered to me then. What matters to you now, mistress of lies? Nephew. My king. Many lives must be lost before you accept the power.

You were born to wield. So clinging to the promises of a God who has abandoned you. I cannot take up their sword again. You know what you must do. what you must do. There's a Hollywood reporter story. Did you see this about how people are angry because they want to watch Pan Dragon,

but they can only do it if they're Daily Wire Plus subscribers. There's a whole fantasy contingent to people who are like, this looks fantastic and I can't wait. Oh, no. No, I can't. No. No, here's my credit card. No.

So speaking of the freezing cold, another shooting in Minneapolis. Some people are pretending to be shocked. Maybe some people really are shocked. I don't know. It kind of reminds me, you know, it's, that very sad shooting of Renee Good and then the lesbian partner comes out and she says, why did the guns have bullets in them? And I just thought, man, you guys have, you just don't understand reality at all. You don't understand that their consequences follow from actions.

I have the Andrew Breitbart question here. I don't mean to be cruel. It's tragic the guy was killed. But so what? Let's say you examine this film from every possible angle and it turns out the ice agent was in the wrong. Does that mean we shouldn't deport? People? people who are here illegally. I mean, they're here illegally. ICE is there to get rid of people who are here illegally. No one is above the law, as we know, because they were charging Trump with like, you know, littering and sending him away for, planning to send him away for life. So what difference does it make? I mean, let's say it was a bad shooting. They're just enforcing the law. Why are these people who are organized by Marxist, you know, thugs all around the

country and taking like nine counties out of all the counties in America and turning them into battle zones? Why are they justified by a bad shooting? I don't think it's also a question. I'm not saying it was a bad shooting, but even if it was, who cares? Right. On your point, Drew, so was it a bad shooting? Because there's all this stuff and a lot of misinformation going around the internet. One of the questions was, well, maybe he had been disarmed before the ice agent shot.

And but even in that case, would it necessarily have been an unjustified shooting? Only one of us went to Harvard Law School. I'm loath to turn to him for an answer on this. But then is there any, does that mean it's a bad shooting? The cops got to go to jail or something? I mean, so not necessarily. So the basic legal standard is the same in all of these cases, which is does a reasonable officer believe that he's an eminent threat of grave physical harm?

And so the question becomes, did the officer who shot him know that he had been disarmed because there's this kind of scrum? And then you can see that the gun appears to be removed by one of the agents, but not the agent who shot him. And then somebody yells gun, and there may in fact be an accidental gun shot, an accidental discharge from Preddy's gun by the officer or the gun just went off. So if you're an officer and you're standing there and you hear someone yell gun and then a shot goes off and you don't know that the gun has been removed from the guy, then you absolutely could fear for your life. You could fear imminent threat of grave physical harm. And so the shoot could absolutely be good. That's typically why you have full investigations under these circumstances. As to Drew's question as to why this shapes the underlying sort of policy, the answer is that it doesn't. But this has been a chaos operation from the beginning for Democrats in an attempt to obstruct federal law. I mean, that's really what this is. This has been driven by Democratic. from the very start. The idea is that enforcement of federal law is some sort of grave sin.

And you can see it in the statistics. So very early on, the administration was deporting nearly all criminally legal immigrants because they were starting in red states and they were working with cooperative precincts. And they were going to jails and taking people who are criminals and then deporting them. And then all of the Democrats decided they were going to obstruct that. And now ICE still has a job, which is to deport people. And so the people they're deporting are not getting they're not getting them from jails, right? They're actually going to the streets. They're having to like round people up.

And when they do that, the percentage of criminal illegal immigrants, I mean, they're all criminals, but people who have committed an independent crime aside from being an illegal immigrant, that percentage has dropped from something like 87% early on to about 50% today and it's going down pretty rapidly. That's because of sanctuary city status. It's because of sanctuary state status. And so what that means is, here's the thing. Americans don't like ugly pictures on their TV.

This is one of the great problems with media generally is that there's great information that's wonderful but the ubiquity of ugly pictures on your TV makes it nearly impossible to do the things that have to be done in ugly areas and that's true when it comes to military operations and it's true when it comes to policing and it's true and the craziest part so the craziest part on the ugly pictures I didn't think this was real I had to go back to the tape and check it 10 different times they so the the guy in this case his name is Alex Pretty and we have an expression we who like the Latin language nomin est omen and so in the guy

is it not to beat up on the dead he isn't all that pretty MSNBC changed his picture they ran with an AI generated picture to make him look like a supermodel or something and they did it completely straight-faced and what it made me think is look maybe it was some editor didn't know what he was doing maybe it was intentional for some bizarre reason but it made me think look when when the MSM the establishment media put these images on TV they're obviously working in concert with the Democrats who were trying to cause chaos who were trying to undermine the law enforcement. And so I'm always skeptical of that. I always say you can't really believe anything on the establishment media. Now I can't, I literally can't believe the pictures. They are running a different picture, even of the guy who is at the center of this case. This to me

seems like something actually has changed. And to Ben's point about ugly pictures, you know, I've worked with police a lot as a reporter and it takes a lot of cops to bring a person down without just killing him. Most cops, if they want to take you down, they can do it single-handedly, but they're going to break your legs, you know.

They swarm people in order to keep them from being hurt. And this guy, you know, once you shout gun, I've seen this with my own eyes a number of times. Once somebody shouts gun, everything is different. You know, everything is like, I do not, this, cops do not want to go home with a bullet in their head. You know, they don't want to go back to their wife and say, sorry, honey, I'm dead, you know, because I didn't react fast enough. And when they take these videos and they look at them frame by frame, it drives me crazy because they didn't happen frame by frame. They happened all at once, and we can hold our police to high standards, but we can't hold them to robotic standards where they can see everything in slow motion. The whole thing is, to me,

you know, as you say, it's a chaos operation. We already know that George Floyd, a drug-addicted thug, you know, who's elevated to the point of being a saint by the media, and then we were told that the riots that came out of his were mostly peaceful. We already know it's all lies. You know, it's all lies. And if in this case, the cop was in the wrong, if he did something, wrong. That's one thing, but it has nothing to do with the overall story, which is these guys came in 20 million strong. They all have to go. They all have to go. And also, to me, to me, it's not even a close call. Like, you took a gun. Okay, this is another point that's really, it really annoys me. I see even some people on the right saying, well, hey, you know, we believe

in the Second Amendment and we've got to be consistent here. I've seen some people draw comparisons between this and Kyle Rittenhouse. Hey, man, let's, let's be fair. To completely, I've actually diametrically opposite situations. Kyle Rittenhouse was there, was not interfering with any police officers, was not sabotaging police officer operations, was not resisting police officers. He was there because police officers weren't there

and weren't doing anything. In this case, Alex Pretty took a gun. Okay, that part is fine. Like, yes, you can carry a gun in the United States of America, I believe in the Second Amendment. But 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. He brought a gun to do that. And maybe his intention was not to go kill the officers, but his intention certainly was all these people, none of them are protesters. This is not a legitimate protest at all. I mean, it's worth establishing. This was not a protest happened afterward, but this was not a protest. He was simply there. They are coordinating. They are coordinating. I mean, we talked about this on my show. Now, other people have gone into these signal

where they coordinate with each other, they give license plates, they show up, and it is explicitly to obstruct law enforcement. So 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, it's not even controversial. I mean, it might be controversial to a lot of people, but the substance of it, it's not controversial. This is clearly all on you. And I agree with, you know, what Ben said, that this is, you know, 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. Well, 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. But the problem is we have millions of people here illegally. And so we need them to leave. And the problem is, well, they don't want to leave. That's why they're here. And so the only way to get them to leave is to grab them physically and drag them while they're kicking and screaming. there is no nice way to do it. And 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. By the way, a crucial point on this gun, Second Amendment argument from the libertarians who, you know, look, I love my libertarian friends. You can always count on them to undermine the right exactly at the moment that it really matters. But I get the point in principle because I'm a Second Amendment supporter. I'm a gun owner, a lifetime member of the NRA. There is a deep conservatism to the wisdom of Johnny Cash. Don't take your

guns to town, Bill, leave your guns at home. So 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. Probably not the best idea to roll up with your SIG in two magazines.

By 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. You 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. The 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. Yeah. I know. When I listen to,

you know, when I listen to Michael Mulls saying Johnny Cash, you know, it makes me think of my own mortality. And that makes me think of policy genius and the necessity for life insurance. It 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. And that is we're all going to plots. Drew can speak to this more than I can because as he sees that, that road shortening before him. Put off out the door. Yeah, exactly. He knows life insurance is important. And that's where our sponsor policy genius comes in. You can start the new year with clarity. And security lock in your life insurance today. Policy Genius, of course, is an online insurance marketplace

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Real users have gotten 20-year, $2 million policies for just $53 a month. Head on over to PolicyGenius.com slash fire to compare life insurance quotes from top company, see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com slash fire. You know, I have to say, I'm thankful to Knowles for singing like Johnny Cash because it made death seem not so bad. That's really nice. That's, oh, listen, as we're all here, we're stewing because it feels like we're all in

Minneapolis right now, not then, but the rest of us, it's pretty chilly. I think this is really actually just a trial run for Mother Nature for our colonization of Greenland. But we're not actually in Minneapolis right now. A Daily Wire reporter is, however, and we are joined by Jenny Tare, who can infect our opinion with some actual facts that she is seeing on the ground. Jenny, I know. This is not something we're used to around here. Jenny, what are you seeing in Minneapolis? Yeah. Well, you know, we've been out with ICE in Minneapolis on the rise. along with them and we saw just the chaos unfold the second we went down there. So just to give you an idea is we started out the day going to the ice office where agitators were already outside.

The second any of those vehicles came out, anytime ice officers were going out to make arrests, there was what they called a 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. And 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. And 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. Everyone was already alerted to ICE's presence in the area that that target didn't come out that day. So this is what they're up against. They'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 de-escalate vehicles who were blocking them in the roadway. So they didn't want them there, But when they tried to leave, they didn't want them to leave. It 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. This 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, you know, also just an assault on their ability to go out there and conduct these operations safely. They're coming home with the trauma of all this, but also physical injuries now. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount? New vehicle discount. Storage discount.

How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit USAA.com slash auto discounts. restrictions apply. Jenny, did the guy in the Tesla hit them intentionally with the car? Yeah, 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. That's how brazen these people are. They know that this is a crime. They know they can't impede law enforcement. I mean, there was this whole media narrative going around that

ICE is just arresting U.S. citizens indiscriminately. No, 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. Those officers are given the power to make arrest of U.S. citizens who are trying to get in the way of their own arrests of illegal immigrants. And then, of course, you know, they're not put into immigration detention. They're handed off to people like the U.S. Marshals and the U.S. attorney prosecutes them. So, yes, they have the authority to do this and they're they are making arrests of people who are openly getting in their way. You know, Jenny, what do you think is the, you've been riding along with the ICE officers and

what is the morale like given the situation? And what are their thoughts on ICE leadership? Because obviously we've seen some turmoil inside ice leadership or patrol leadership. The president has deployed Tom Homan to Minneapolis. It seems that he is moving Greg Bevino, at least out of the, out of this realm, you know, to another area of the country. What are people feeling down on the ground there. Right. 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 because 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, but now there's this added threat of outside organized agitators who are communicating on radios, who are 3D printing whistles. I mean, I saw some of that, too, that they're handing out to try to obstruct these arrests. So they're happy to see a change, and 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. He's been relieved of his duties as the commander, the commander of at-large operations. He was the face of these aggressive immigration operations in cities like New Orleans, now Minneapolis. He was in Chicago. And he was representing Border Patrol, which Border Patrol has a role in immigration enforcement. Traditionally, it's been along the

border in border towns. They're not used to operating in these urban environments, and they're more indiscriminate. They were brought in when Secretary Noam, according to sources and her close age, Corey Lewandowski decided that the operations should focus more on numbers, that they should have more of a quota than going, than the focus being on quality arrest, than getting the worst of the worst. So 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, not necessarily going after people with the worst criminal histories first, which was how the mass deportation campaign. started. Holman, however, Tom Holman, the Borders are, who's now been brought in to replace Bovino, is in the camp of wanting more of those quality arrests. He wants us to get those really hardened criminals off the streets, and he's an ice guy. He was head of ice before this. And 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. And he's saying, you know, possibly, hearing that they could be looking at changing the target lists, saying maybe we should shift and go after more of the worst of the worse. And then also a lot of this depends now on is mayor, is governor walls going to deliver on letting people be handed over from the jails into ICE's hands for arrest rather than continuing to perpetuate these really dangerous sanctuary policies? I'm hearing that the local police are also helping now finally helping ICE keep the protesters back. Have you seen any of that?

So we've seen some state police that are keeping back riders who were trying to go into a hotel. They said Gregory Bovino was staying. We saw just one instance of that. And that could be a glimpse into what this deal was that Trump had discussed with the governor there. But we're still waiting to see what comes to fruition. We know Holman himself met with the governor this morning. And so there's still ongoing talks. There's still ongoing negotiations into what access ICE will have when for years and years and years, Minnesota has been releasing illegal immigrant criminals out of jails and hasn't been cooperating with ICE, hasn't been sharing immigration status at all with them.

and when they're lodging detainers, when they're putting a formal request in with a, let's say, county or city jail saying, you have this person in your custody that we're aware of who's an illegal immigrant who's committed a crime. When you are going to release them, please give us a call, hold them, you know, for a short period of time, we'll come and get them. And they haven't been doing that. Now, Jenny, if we do shift focus here and we only go after the most hardened face tattooed, you know, murderers of the rapists of the murderers kind of people.

Can we send you, since you're already there, to go round up all the other ones? I don't know if that's in your job description. I know you're more doing like journalism and stuff. But in any case, you're doing great work out there. Thank you very much for the report. And we'll look forward to an update next time. Well, that is our reporter, Jenny, who's on the ground in Minneapolis. Obviously, we've been expanding our reportage and our reportorial base pretty extensively.

And that's only because we have supporters like you, people who are members. And we need more members so that we can do. more reporting on the ground in places like this. Head on over to Daily Wire Plus. Get your membership right now. You won't just be getting all the great stuff we have over here. You'll also be helping us bring actual great reporters to the places that need reporting on. I want to hear about what this change in strategy means from the red, blue political level.

Is this a win for Trump? Is this a loss for Trump? Did Walsk get something? But before we talk about the present, Mr. Walsh, I want you to tell us about the past. Yeah, we have a new show that I'm really excited. I'm obviously very excited about, you know. It's called real history. So we just debuted last week the first episode of this series

where we just look at historical episodes that are much, much talked about, but not talked about honestly, especially by the school system and the media and all of our institutions. And the first episode, we talked about slavery, giving the real kind of history of slavery, the real context for it, and what slavery in America looked like as opposed to other parts of the world. And we've just filmed a couple other episodes as well

that I'm even more excited about. And that might prove to be even more controversial, which I think is great. So stay tuned for all that. Can we just jump right into back to the subject again? Because you asked about, is it a political win for Trump? I think that for sure, and this cannot be stressed enough, it is a massive, massive, massive loss and failure.

if Trump scales back at all in the slightest bit in response to what's happening in Minneapolis. I mean, I don't think it's exaggerating to say if he does that, it's the end of his presidency. It could very well be the end of any hopes for Republicans in 20, you know, even in the next presidential election. You can't, what is that, what message does that send? The only message that sends to the left is like, okay, well, here is the, here's the formula. If you don't want, if we don't want, if we don't want actual deportations, mass deportation, If ICE shows up in your city and you think they're doing too much, well, just get all your buddies together, show up and get out there in the street, start riding and cause chaos.

Yeah, bring your gun with you. Go out there and sabotage and that's the way to get what you want. We saw what happened in 2020 when the left was just allowed to basically run roughshod over the entire country. That's exactly what they did for months. And many people died and billions of dollars of damage. and that's all that we are ensuring. And also keep in mind that as many other people have pointed out, it's the wintertime right now.

And so one of the reasons why this hasn't completely exploded, like powder keg style, the way that it did in 2020, I think is that it's because of the weather. And as we get into the summer months and it gets warmer, if Trump doesn't clamp down on this, and that means not only keeping up the deportations, keep ice, keep doing what you're doing, but also, you know, we need mass deportations.

Now we also need mass arrests of the people who are doing this. You know, the only thing about this, though, that bothers me. The administration has made some missteps, and missteps cost you politically. I mean, the minute these things happen, they come out and say this guy was a terrorist or he was, you know, gunning to massacre, you know, ICE agents, which does not seem to be the case. And it's not wrong for him for Trump to correct that, to correct that trajectory, to bring in Tom Homan, who seems much, I saw him just on Morning Joe, and he was great. You know, he's the only guy in the administration who knows how to communicate what they're

actually trying to do and what they're thinking. So I don't think it's a complete disaster. I agree with you in the general point, Matt, but I think it's not a complete disaster if he corrects the way the administration is handling these incidents in order to communicate what it is we're doing. Homan was great about saying, this is what we're doing, this is who they're stopping us from arresting. These guys are rapists, they're murderers, the killers, we want them out.

And it does seem like they were kind of, I don't know, it did seem. Correct it. What do you make? Like, correct it in what way? What do they need to correct? Well, first of all, when a guy, when a guy gets shot in a demonstration in a free country, you don't immediately come out and say that he was doing things that he may not have been doing because it makes you look like your, it makes the administration look untrustworthy.

So now you've got an untrustworthy press on the left and then you've got an untrustworthy administration. It becomes an equal, you know, an equal battle. It shouldn't be an equal battle. The administration should be saying, okay, we're going to look into. to this, we'll examine what happened, but it doesn't change the fact that we are getting illegals out of the country. That's the message, and they didn't do that. I totally agree with this. And to this point, obviously, Christy Nome is under serious fire as head of DHS. I think that fire

is completely appropriate, frankly. This is the second straight incident in which she has completely mischaracterized the events that we can see with our own eyes. She first suggested that Renee Good was attempting to run down not one but multiple police officers. And then she claimed and then she claimed that Alex Preddy was attempting to massacre, like murder, police officers, showed up with a gun in order to do so. Which again, that is not what the tape seems to show to. I think most people, again, that is not to suggest that the shooting isn't a legally justifiable shooting.

That is to say that her literal job is to say the process is going to take place. We're going to uncover everything. We are going to abide by the law and we're going to keep abiding by the law. I know that's the way to do it because Tom Homan has been doing that consistently. He did it with Renee Good. He then did it again with Alex Pruddy, which is why he should be the person in trying to of this whole effort. I frankly think that Christy Noem has outstayed her welcome already. The Cal She Markets, by the way, they are one of our sponsors. They suggest 50% of people think

that she's out by May. I don't think that would be inappropriate. It seems to me that the vast majority of things that Christy 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. She works at the pleasure of the president and for the president. And part of that is making the president's agenda more palatable and understandable to Americans. And 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 Freddie was attempting to massacre people.

And then he went on all the shows on Sunday and had to walk that back or pretend that he never said it. And 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. political capital matters, support for ICE matters. So the polls have shown that back in 2019, ICE was basically even with the American people today. They're 27 points underwater. That is not because ICE is doing things differently than they've ever done it. It is because of two factors.

The chaos operation run by Democrats and the bad PR job that has been done by members of the administration in the aftermath of that. If 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. Now, 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.

And it turns out they did this in 2020, and it worked for them a little in 2020. By 2024, Donald Trump was president again because it turns out people do not like abolish the police. They also do not like abolish ICE. And so we have this kind of temporary gut level reaction to seeing, again, those ugly pictures on our TV.

But then if the policy that accompanies the pictures is even worse than the policy that that was present before the ugly pictures, then you end up with a backlash. So I think the Democrats could step too far on this the other way. But again, I think that I think Noam has not done a good job as DHS, frankly. So, okay, so if the point is that the only real errors here have been in certain messaging, okay, fair enough, that happens. I mean, look, these are very difficult operations. We haven't seen a massive national push for mass deportations. Really, as far as I'm concerned, since the 1950s, since Operation Wetback.

You know, Obama would sometimes gloat when it was convenient that, you know, they call me the deporter in chief or whatever, but it was really just turnaways. He wasn't leading full-scale operations to get rid of these guys. So I'm willing to give the administration a little grace here. But my question then is, okay, if it's a PR issue, then who is going to win the PR war? Because, you know, maybe Walls and the Democrats in Minnesota say, ha, we got Bovino's skull, his scalp. He's out of town now.

and see Trump is talking to Tim Wals. But then I look at the sequence of events. Tim Wals comes out. He says, these face tattooed gangsters are basically Anne Frank and federal law enforcement are the Nazis. And they're going to write a book about this someday. Then that was Sunday. That was Sunday. Monday, Trump speaks to Tim Wals on the phone.

Tuesday, Tim Wals's troops, Minnesota State Patrol, go in and start arresting actual protesters. By 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. So then I see, okay, you lose Bovino and then who are they inserting instead, Tom Homan, who is much more the face of the mass deportations? I'm looking at this. Maybe it's rose-colored glasses, but I don't really think it is. I agree with Matt.

They can't scale back even one little bit. I agree with you guys. Yes, the messaging needs to be tight, of course. But if they don't scale back and all we get is, okay, Tom Homan's leading it now and Walls backs down and in his own. words says that he's a Nazi collaborator, that looks like a political win to me. I'm looking, I'm looking at this and seeing a potential political win too. I think you're actually right about this. I mean, what I'm seeing is that in this conversation with Walsh, Trump must have said something

that got his got him to cooperate and possibly threatened to expose the fact that he's obviously a homosexual serial killer in his spare time. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Just judging by his body language. I mean, that's all I'm going by. But I, but I mean, 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. And I think it's a good thing to have Holman in there because of his messaging. And also because he's just good at this. He just does a good job. And he's a typical American guy. Yeah, I think it would, Drew, your point here, I think is is well taken. I think that, you know, the, the, my guess is that what Trump said to him is something like, okay, we're going to keep enforcing federal

law. What is your recommendation for how we do this differently? You probably put it back in his lap and said, you're saying you don't want it to do this. So what do you recommend? Because we can't stop enforcing federal law. And 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. And that has a long and inglorious history in American law. By the way, it won't just look like that.

He invoked 1863, Tim Walls. He threatened to call up Minnesota troops to fight the federal government. I mean, this is as clear an insurrection as there is. 100%. And so I think that Trump probably said that. I think Walls backed off of the thing. I think he's probably going to claim some sort of titular victory by getting Bovino out of there. But the reality is also this.

And I think it's something that everybody ought to keep in mind about just the way our politics are done. If you ask Americans, would they like to cut the federal government dramatically? They always say yes by huge numbers. And then if you ask them what specific programs they want to cut, the answer is none of them. And if you ask Americans, would you like to deport 20 million illegal immigrants? They all say yes. And then they say, would you like to spend billions upon billions of dollars deporting Obuela then they say, no, we only want the criminal illegal immigrants.

So you have to drill down into what Americans kind of revealed preferences are on this thing. And again, I'm not saying that that doesn't mean that we should pursue mass deportations. I'm just saying that there's a reason why Tom Holman and the rest of the administration keep saying the phrase criminal illegal immigrants, because that's the area where you have 90-10 approval. When 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 headwins. you're just going to win from beginning to end. Where things are going to start to get much diceier is in situations in which you are unleashing,

you know, 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. So we would just do well to acknowledge political reality as much as we acknowledge the reality which is that mass migration has done tremendous damage to the country needs to end. And 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, then, you know, they'll self-deport. There is, though, you know, just to give a little of grace to these guys, including Bovino, there are a lot of clips going around from Minneapolis of the protesters, protesters, the agitators

arguing and saying, you know, you're just rounding people up, you know, indiscriminately. And you'll have the ICE officer say, we're 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, whatever. And so I actually do think that these raids are clearly quite targeted. It's not like they're just shown up to Home Depot, though they would be justified in doing that as well. So, yes, there has been a PR failure. There's no question about that. I think we all have to grant, though.

There was always going to be some kind of PR failure. It was always going to be very difficult. And it's always Minneapolis. You know, it's always Minneapolis. It seems to be only Minneapolis. So what's the difference? In the United States, where they're sanctuary cities, which is a city basically in violation of federal law.

You know what I mean? Yes. And 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. But they're trying to do that. It worked for them last time. If Trump scales back now that he will have taken every wrong lesson out of the summer of love. So you've got to keep the pressure up. But it looks to me like this is a political operation.

And then you get all these reports that the lieutenant governor of Minnesota was allegedly in the signal chat. helping to direct some of this stuff. You have state representatives who are calling for resistance, actively obstructing law enforcement. You 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? To 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. He talks to someone, even if they're a huge scumbag and they have a nice conversation. And then Trump, Trump likes him for like 24 hours.

and hates him again. I get that. But Jacob Fry, I mean, this guy, like, we can't, we can't look past the fact that this is the same guy who was fomenting and facilitating mass rioting in 2020. And now he's doing it again. He just did this exact same thing again. We're repeating it five, six years later. And that's why I think that if, yeah, we could talk about honing the PR message a little bit. That's one thing. But to scale back in the slightest and also for there to be no consequences at all. To 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. And it only just going to guarantee more in the future.

Walsh has already been chased out of office by his own corruption. So there's that, you know, he's not really, he's not really running for anything ever again. I mean, I don't know what, I don't know. I mean, I could see Wals trying to transition this into a presidential run. The person who is most grateful for, honestly, the person who's the most grateful for all of the system walls. He was in the middle of a fraud scandal when all this erupted, and now he's going to look like a hero to a huge segment of the Democratic Party base. So there's that. One 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. Really, 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 becoming more and more common. 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? And that speaks to a sort of unwellness that I think is pretty astonishing. And it seems to be, you know, relegated to certain populations. and here it seems like white liberal ladies in the suburbs are one of those populations. It seems to be disproportionately attending some of these operations in Minneapolis.

I mean, I wonder what the sort of societal problem that we're experiencing that is generating all of this is. I have three words. Yeah, go ahead. The three words, it's Marvel movie morality. It's this extremely simplistic view where the liberals are always the good guys and the conservatives are always the bad guys. And worse than that, it's a Marvel movie anthropology. Did you see this video, one of these agitators picks up a flashbang, one of these non-lethal grenades? Like, clearly she saw it in some movie and she goes to throw it, blows her finger off.

It's going around on the anti-ice social media pages right now. Or 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? After 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 shocked like she had never been more surprised by anything in her life these are people who who take their entire view of history anthropology and morality from comic book movies and they go out and they they meet reality and the part that I feel sorriest for them about is they seem genuinely surprised by it that's how divorced from reality

they are you know I have to say too though I was reading an article about our pala and Nick Fuentes and what the complaints are people who go and look at him. One of the things that really bothers me about Fuentes is, I keep hearing people say how talented he is and how funny he is. The reason this bothers me is one of my few talents is spotting broadcast talent. He's a moderate third level broadcast talent. He's got a sense of humor and he says things that are outrageous and makes you laugh. But he's not really, he's not a real talent like I've seen people be.

Like even some of the people in this very room have tons more. talent than he does. But he is speaking to something that is bothering people, which is this kind of transvaluation of all values where men are penalized for being men, where women aren't women, or women are actually encouraged not to be like women. Something is really strange in this country that is the left seeping through our media, which in my opinion is 100% corrupt. I mean, you've got like, you've got poor Barry Weiss. He's like this fleck of dust in the and they're all getting together to get rid of her. You know, it's like this one middle of the road lefty.

It's like too much for them to take because she's going to make people play fair. You know, this media machine, which is crumbling around us, as we see the Washington Post getting rid of all its people, it's crumbling, but it's not crumbling fast enough. And we still have a generation of people who are schooled in this machine, schooled in the academies, and actually believe the values of the left are values, which they're not. They're just an agitation, as you call it, a chaos operation. And I think that that is 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, to hook themselves to. Well, they have the churches that they can invade in violation of federal law. They do have. They scream at children. Isn't that why you going to churches to scream at children to Lake Pry? Do we think there's going to be any political consequence even for that stuff? Because to your point, Matt, you brought it up. Yeah, we want the illegals out.

People voted for mass deportations in 2024. We want that operation to continue. What about the agitators? Are they going to be rounded up? Are these people going to be held to account for violations of the FACE Act, say, or maybe other federal law? Or is Tim Wals? I mean, just to use the Tim Wals example, Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary came out, he said, I went to investigate fraud in Minnesota. Tim Wals would not give me a security detail. Amid all this craziness in Minnesota, it's been going on for five years. He wouldn't give me a security detail. That no longer looks like, oh, just some little knucklehead. That looks like thuggery. That looks like deep corruption. That looks like he might. have been conspiring in some of this fraud. Are any of these people going to be held to account? Okay, that's what I thought. Okay, great. Yeah. I agree. So far for the church thing, I think they've arrested two people who also were out of jail within 24 hours. And we know how that would go. We know how it would go if they were, you know, if they were outside of an abortion clinic and got arrested. They would not be out of jail even right now pending, you know, the trial and all that.

And then we know the situation with Don Lemon, who still has not been arrested. So 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. And if we're, and that's why I think the church thing, I don't know how many people invaded the church. It was dozens it looked like, or at least a dozen or around there. It was a lot. 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.

If that's it for that, then I think that is a very bad sign, you know, going forward. Yeah. I don't understand why we treat these guys so leniently either. I don't get it. Ben, is there any pred? My only thought was, is it just going to be hard because he can pretend to be a journalist? And that's why they don't want to do it because they don't want to lose because they're not going to get a law. Yeah.

I think that's right. I mean, I think I think that he will escape the, the clause of justice once again. Don Levin has thwarted, thwarted the mechanisms. He's like the Joker, you know. Exactly. He's doing it for you, the people. Ever since he allegedly groped that guy at Murphs Bar and the Hamptons, he just gets away with it every time. Deeply, deeply, deeply frustrating.

Well, I mentioned the Marvel movie morality. I haven't seen any of the movies this year. I don't think I've seen a single one. I guess it's Oscar season. I've heard about some of the movies. And certainly my lack of knowledge will not stop me from opining on it. Have any of you seen any of the actual movies? I've seen a few of them.

I have to admit, before we talk about the Oscars, in my business of crime writing, the Oscar is the Edgar Award named after Edgar Allan Poe. I've won two of them, and I've just been nominated for my sixth one for my book, Kingdom of Kane, which is nominated in the critical biographical category, so I just wanted to announce that.

But I've seen some of the, it's amazing that, you know, on the form that I have the PR form, I have to tell out and ask my pronouns. So you know how, what a great chance I have of winning, but still the nomination was a shock. You know, the films that I have seen, sinners and that one battle after another, and Frankenstein were all, all have the exact same problem. Incredibly brilliant, technical 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. The only thing that Gileermo del Toro can say is monsters are nice. You should sleep with them. Girls should sleep with monsters. And that's all he says in every movie. You just think like, you know, get a psychiatrist, work that out and come back and make a movie. It makes some sense, you know?

Sinners the same way. It's a steal from that Tarantino movie where everybody turns out to be a, it was dusk till dawn. And then, yeah, and the second half of the first half of it, it's beautiful. The music, fantastic. Acting is pretty good. But the second half of it makes absolutely no sense. And it ends up with this scene of murdering mean white people as a means of getting into heaven. You can't forgive people.

You have to kill them before you can actually get into heaven. And the same is true of that one about one battle after another. It's just violent left-wing propaganda, basically, romantic left-wing propaganda, romanticized. And at this point, I just kind of thought like, yeah, no. I mean, look, how can you, you can't say anything bad about DiCaprio is an actor. He's a good actor. All these people are really talented.

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Discover the Euphoria Elixir Collection by Calvin Klein. I 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. And then I think back, what was it now almost eight, nine, ten years ago, when the big hot movies were moonlight and shape of water. So at that time, the weird sex stuff was in vogue, and they pushed a movie about pederasty and a movie about having sex with a fish. and now left-wing violence is in vogue, and they push one battle after another, whatever, all these other movies.

And 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. And so I think, okay, well, that's a tell. You know, they're just pushing left-wing political violence now. They've been celebrating it at least since Charlie was assassinated. And, okay, at least that's it. a decent metric on where we are, on where our elites are. Does it have any connection to the actual popular culture? I sort of hope it doesn't. So, I mean, I was trying to count here. That's what 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 best picture nominees. I believe that I have seen of the 10, because they expanded this category when Dark Knight wasn't nominated way back when. They expanded the category. So now it's 10. And of the 10, I believe. Which, Ben, it's, it's, it's, should not have been nominated, by the way. Here we go. Dark night. You know what?

That is the most offensive thing you have said in this entire episode, Matt Walsh. That is a horrifying statement. And I hope that you enjoy your being frozen in darkness, getting no less than you deserve for that, for that comment. Just, just, dang it. Well, that didn't work. Anyway, there are 10 films that have been nominated. I believe I've seen six of them.

The ones that I've not seen yet are Begonia Hamnet, the secret agent, which is not available on streaming yet. I'm already Supreme, which is not available on streaming yet. One of the big problems here is that I've seen none of these films in a movie theater because, of course, movie theaters are basically dead. And so the notion that anyone is seeing a lot of these movies in the theater is just not true. Yes, I mean, the thematic of the Oscar is which movie is most likely to foment anti-right-wing violence? That is clearly the theme. The two movies that are currently being touted as the frontrunners for Best Picture are one battle after another, which is an Antifa fantasy flick about how a group of rebels decide

multiracial radicals and their kind of hapless white friend, Leonardo DiCaprio, decide that they're going to engage in anti-ice ice operations, right? They're going to free a bunch of illegal immigrants. They're going to, the big hero of the film is Benetio de Toro, who is the only competent terrorist in the film, who basically runs an underground railroad for illegal immigrants. The great villain in the film is Sean Penn, who's a guy with a black lady fetish and works for law enforcement and is gross and violent, obviously. And the entire United States is run by a secret group of white supremacists who wear polo shirts, right? That's the basis for one battle after another. And I wish I were joking, but that's actually

the plot of one battle after another. It is so subtle, so subtle, subtle as a brick. The acting in it, I thought was actually not particularly good. DiCaprio is fine. He doesn't have much to do is the truth in the film. And so the film is basically a giant fail. The other one that people have been touting now is sinners because sinners got so much so many nominations it 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 just in terms of the the direction it's it's beautiful to look at i mean i will say that the the the first hour of it is is i think beautifully directed it looks it looks great the acting is good uh the music there are a couple of songs that

really that really kind of move. It's kind of like a musical. It's basically a musical, but it's a musical about how black people need to break away and form their own country, and any white imprint on black people is actually white people attempting to steal their blood and their soul. That is the basic idea of the movie. That is why the vampires are led by a white Irish group, musical group. It'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. There's a lot of anti-Christian commentary about how Christianity is a religion that is that is foisted upon black people, but true blackness is animism and paganism from from Africa. That's where the real

black spirit lies. It's an incredibly racist film. It's a really racist film. It's also incredibly reductive of the black experience in America in kind of bizarre ways and also reductive of the actual development of music. If you're going to look at the blues and the kind of basis of it is it all takes place in the 1930s and these black. guys decide they're going to create a blues bar essentially. And this blues bar is where black people can be free. This is the basic premise of the film. And the entire idea and that the big kind of ballet hood scene is a scene where one of the guys is a black singer and he's throwing the guitar and he's singing the blues and it really is, it kicks ass. It's great. And 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. And so you have people playing the electric guitar and you have people from Africa who are walking around a drum and all of this. And then you have a ballet dancer, a black ballet dancer who moves through and you think to yourself, wait, hold up a second. I feel like that is not a historically black art form, the ballet. And also the guitar was not invented in Africa. And also the chord progression of the blues was not invented in Africa. And actually music, as it turns out, is a group event, just like culture is a group event, meaning that it is pulled from a number of different influences. You 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, but to pretend that there's no white cultural influence in the blues is, of course, silly any more than to not acknowledge that there's huge black influence in rock and roll would be really, really silly. And so this kind of reductive ideology is really dumb, but that's exactly why it's being celebrated. You know, the point on the religion, Ben, is just so funny that, because you hear this a lot, this is the whole point of Kwanza is like black people shouldn't celebrate Christmas. Christianity isn't for black people. I just pulled up, I'm happy to have my computer here. There is a saint in the church who goes back to the year 330 AD, who was so black that his name is St. Moses the black. That's that guy.

So it, like, this is not some new thing. Like, you know, Christianity just came to black people yesterday. You know, it's been around black people basically from the beginning, but don't tell that to Hollywood. Isn't that the first, isn't it the Ethiopian, one of the first people to convert in the Bible? I mean, North Africans had a lot to do with the early developments of the churches. Yeah, let's say, just just a few of them. So by the way, the Kalshi, Mark, Mark. Again, they're one of our sponsors. They suggest that sinners is way up in the in the markets. Now it's up like it was five or six percent a week ago. Now it's up to 25 percent. One battle after another is still leading that. But yeah, I mean, the, you know, it is, it is a deeply

racist. It also kind of sucks, meaning the first half of it is good and then the second half of it is a mess. Once the vampires come, the whole thing really, really falls apart in pretty significant ways. It's not as racist as black countries. The Academy Awards, I think, lost all credibility. I 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. And so at that point, and by the way, you know, when that happened, I said, this is ridiculous. People said, well, have you even watched the movie? And the answer is, no, I never watched.

Like, I don't need to watch the movie. I can just tell you that it's ridiculous that Black Panther is this critically acclaimed film. So it's kind of lost all credibility from that point. Although I will say there are a couple of movies that were nominated that, it's not all bad. Like I actually do, I'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. I thought, I actually, Bagonia, I think was nominated as a best picture, right? And I saw that. And I thought I would hate it

because I figured, because I knew it was this story about a, this conspiracy, you know, implied a kind of like right-wing, basement-dwelling conspiracy theorist who kidnaps this female CEO and like holds her hostage in the basement. And so I thought it would just be this kind of

broadside against right wing conspiracy theories. And it wasn't quite that, or at least I think it was a little bit more complicated than that, the point they were making. And I thought it was an interesting movie. So that was one as well. And I thought Train Dreams was if you get, there's a little, there's some woke racial stuff in the beginning of the movie. You know, they got to show some of that. They got to cover that base. But then once you get past that, I thought it was a beautifully made movie that had really no plot at all, but I, I, I, uh, I enjoyed it anyway. Okay.

So this is my big problem. Okay. So I saw train dreams. No plot. F1 is just a popcorn flick. It's a, it's kind of a warmed over top gun. It's fine. It's fine.

It's a warmed over top gun maverick. Yeah. Right. Top Gun Maverick is just a better version of, of F1. And, uh, and it's, it's fine. Uh, sentimental value is another one of these art house flicks about how artists suffer in pursuit of their art and we should all care because they're artists and that means they're very, very important.

Sinners, we've discussed one battle after another. Frankenstein, 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. That's the entire basis of the Mary Shelley book. I'm reading it to my daughter right now. She's a little young for it, but we're doing it anyway. She's 11 and I'm reading it to her.

And 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. And 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. And because Giermore D'Ottor doesn't understand that, it's just a monster flick. It's a beautifully made monster flick, but it's a monster flick. And there's also this thing with sleeping with the girls want to sleep with the monsters,

like the guy's got a mommy place. He's got some kind of Freudian thing, like a throwback to, Freudian problems. And by the way, you should read the chapter in the Kingdom of Cane, which was nominated for an Edgar. I may have mentioned, you should read the chapter of Frankenstein and Kingdom of Kane. It's a totally original take on Frankenstein. It's really good. I think that what this speaks to, and again, this is what drives me up a wall. The writing in Hollywood has declined markedly. This to me is the biggest problem because the pictures are beautiful. The pictures are more beautiful than they've ever been. Right. The sound quality

is better than it has ever been. The quality of the camera work is better than it has ever been. You can do things with cameras you couldn't do. And the movies are not as good because the writing is just not good. And maybe that's because people have become too reliant on all of the rest of it. You know, they don't know what to do. No, it's because they don't know what they think, Ben. It's because I think that's really it. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and the beginning of Frankenstein is so beautiful that I thought, oh, I love this movie. I thought I was going to love it. The same thing was true of Nosferado. God, it was gorgeous. And I saw these. I saw Nosferado in the theater and it was unbelievably gorgeous, but they don't know what they believe because they're not allowed.

And the guy who makes Nosferado, the director's name, is obviously looking for God, but he can't quite, you know, find him or you can't quite admit. But this is why I think that the only two top contenders, they do know what they think. What they think is bad and wrong. But they know what they think. Right. But it doesn't make any sense, you know. Yes. I mean, internally it makes no sense.

But there's at least there's a through line. The through line is bad and stupid. But it is the through. But it is a through line. And a lot of these other movies are sort of wandering around in search of a in search of a through line. Yeah. And you can watch them. Go ahead.

So 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 or will know what it believes and just be really bad and stupid. Yeah, I think that's fair. Great. Okay. Well, anyway, it's been fun, guys. I hope you all stay warm.

Ben, you will be staying warm. And I guess I'll be able to join all of you for another chipper episode of Friendly Fire next time. In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are. Writers, thinkers, creators, people with stories still unfolding. That spirit lives on at Kingsley Manor, a community shaped by individuality, creativity, and lives well-lived. So when the conversation turns to what's next, it isn't about stepping away. It's about continuing the story. Explore your options at kingsley Manor.org, a nonprofit month-to-month senior community within the

Front Forge family.