It's the last show of the year, and what a show it shall be. President Trump signs into law his tax reform, Nikki Haley becomes our spirit animal, and The Mailbag becomes our mailbag. Plus, a list of corporations that are now giving bonuses and raises to people because of the tax cut that just passed the Senate and the House and was signed into law by the President in Texas, and a look at what's going to happen to the stock market now that the federal government has more money to spend. Plus, we answer your Mailbag questions! Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us your favorite podcasting platform so we can keep you up to date on what s going on around the world. Thanks for listening and Happy Holidays! Ben Shapiro Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, Recorded in Los Angeles, CA and produced by Riley Bray and Wenndy Art: Mackenzie Moore Editor: Will Witwer Music: Hayden Coplen Editing: Joseph McDade Cover art by Ian McKinnon Logo by Jeff Kaale (c) Copyright 2019 by Dee McDonnell All rights reserved. Used by the author and copyright of the author unless otherwise specified. All Rights Reserved. The White House Correspondent's Note: We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode of the show is copyright infringement. All credit given to any other works used in the show, other works produced by any other person's credit and credit is property owned by the artist or service provided by any third party. . Thank you for any credit given credit given away or other such credit, credit taken out of this episode by the right owner of the song written or any other credit credibiz or credit given out in this piece or credit by any credit in any such person's use of any such credit? Thanks to Mr. Ben Shapiro, LLC - Ben Shapiro is a registered agent, and the credit is a client of Ben Shapiro - in any credit done by Mr. Shapiro, etc. - Thank you, Mr. or Mr. B. ? , & his good friend, , and his good gracelessness, - and all other credit is is a real estate agent ( ) and etc., .
00:00:47.000You have time to listen to a 15-minute segment that basically brings you all the points of the book, because that's all you're going to remember anyway.
00:01:05.000Well, this is why you need the Blinkist app.
00:01:06.000The Blinkist app gives you, in what they call blinks, 15-minute summaries of the main points of 2,000 of the best-selling non-fiction books in America transformed into powerful information packs.
00:01:17.000Now you can feast your mind on key ideas from top best-selling non-fiction books.
00:01:22.000Things like Flow, which talks about how to achieve more happiness in your work life, to Why Nations Fail, talking about
00:02:30.000We gave you a list yesterday of corporations that are now giving bonuses and raises to people and hiring more people because of the tax cut that just passed the Senate and the House and was signed into law by the President in Texas.
00:02:41.000New Braunfels-based Rush Enterprises is planning to give each of its employees a $1,000 bonus after President Trump signs the tax reform bill into law.
00:02:49.000The commercial truck dealer said all of its approximately 6,600 U.S.
00:02:52.000employees will receive the one-time payout, which will cost about $6.6 million.
00:02:57.000In Wisconsin, Associated Bank said it would boost its minimum hourly wage to $15 and pay workers a $500 bonus.
00:03:03.000Their current minimum wage is $10 an hour, so that's a 50% increase.
00:03:07.000The company said that its moves would affect about 3,000 employees.
00:03:10.000In Idaho, Malaluca Inc., which is run by Frank VanderSloot, VanderSloot's a Republican, he said in a phone interview that his 2,000 workers would get a one-time bonus of $100 for every year they've worked at the company.
00:03:20.000They have about 150 employees who have worked there for 20 years or more.
00:03:23.000The average employee will get about an $800 bonus.
00:03:26.000In Hawaii, the Royal Hawaiian Heritage Jewelry, they've decided to open a second shop.
00:03:32.000And this is going to happen all over the place.
00:03:34.000This is going to happen as businesses decide they have more money to spend, and hiring should go up, investment should go up, even if there are stock buybacks.
00:03:46.000Because they get to spend those dollars, they invest those dollars, and you know what you want to buy better than the federal government knows what you want to buy.
00:03:52.000Now, the left has lost their mind over the tax cut, obviously.
00:03:58.000And it's really interesting because it sort of betrays what they actually think of America and what they think of your capacity to keep your own money.
00:04:05.000So Elizabeth Warren, for example, she has an interesting take.
00:04:08.000Her basic notion here is the reason corporations are now giving bonuses and raises is because they're trying to propagandize to their workers.
00:04:14.000Not because they actually like their workers or help their workers.
00:05:02.000Home Depot, right after the Senate passed the tax bill a couple of weeks ago, Home Depot CEO, executive, is interviewed and said, so what are you going to do with all of this money that Home Depot has?
00:05:17.000They're going to do really well on this.
00:05:19.000Was it we're going to raise wages for our employees?
00:05:33.000They said what we're going to do is we're going to do stock buybacks.
00:05:37.000In other words, we're going to use whatever money comes in to pump up the price of our stock.
00:05:42.000Okay, so what's hilarious about this is, number one, the Democrats were claiming for years that the stock market growth of the Obama administration was clearly a reflection of his underlying solid economy.
00:05:52.000Except the job growth didn't keep up because the stocks were actually stock buybacks, right?
00:06:13.000I, along with my executive team, people I work with, the president of the company and the CEO of the company, we run the company together.
00:06:20.000We actually do care about our employees.
00:06:22.000If you went to our Christmas party yesterday, the only employee who got a bad gift at our Christmas party was Michael Knowles because he's a bad employee.
00:06:29.000He got coal that I gave him for Christmas.
00:06:31.000But aside from that, it was in a Tiffany's box, so I guess it was nice a little bit.
00:06:35.000And one day, if Michael really puts himself under pressure, that coal will become a diamond.
00:06:38.000It was actually me exhorting him to work.
00:06:42.000Everybody at the company is relatively happy because we are interested in keeping them employed.
00:06:47.000And if they're good at their jobs, we give them raises.
00:06:49.000And if they're good at their jobs, we retain them.
00:06:51.000And if they're bad at their jobs, we fire them.
00:07:14.000All of the unions exist in the public sector, where they're unionizing against the government.
00:07:18.000But in the private sector, people have decided that they're going to have better luck instead of unionizing, just going and talking to their employer about a raise, which is correct.
00:07:27.000But the idea from the left is precisely the reverse.
00:08:26.000It will take all your money, all your children's money.
00:08:28.000If we're going to talk about caring levels, corporations versus government, corporations care a hell of a lot more about making sure that you are employed as long as you are doing work for them than the government cares.
00:08:40.000The government will just tax the hell out of you if you earn, and they'll give you money if you don't, because the government is interested in your dependency or in sucking money out of your pocket.
00:08:46.000Those are the only two things the government is interested in on a fiscal level.
00:08:51.000Either taking your money or turning you into a dependent.
00:08:55.000Government is not interested in boosting you or giving you a hand up.
00:08:58.000The Democrats will say, we just want to give you a hand out because it's a hand up.
00:09:03.000And then they promote policies that make sure that people stay in poverty.
00:09:06.000They pay people to stay off the work lines.
00:09:09.000They want welfare increased so that people don't have to work jobs.
00:09:12.000This is why you have Nancy Pelosi saying things like, we want to make sure that you are not burdened by job lock.
00:09:17.000That you're not locked into a job you don't want to do.
00:09:20.000That fundamental difference between how you view private industry and how you view government undergirds this entire thing.
00:09:27.000And in a second, I do want to discuss what happened at the UN, because that was a major development over at the UN yesterday with Nikki Haley really taking charge.
00:09:35.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at USCCA.
00:09:39.000So, if you're a gun lover, it's time for you to listen up.
00:09:41.000How would you like to head to the range tomorrow with a brand new gun?
00:11:12.000Whenever people speak at the UN, it looks like they're speaking in the bathroom at a Macy's.
00:11:16.000But in any case, here's Nikki Haley really bashing people about the head.
00:11:20.000The United States is by far the single largest contributor to the United Nations and its agencies.
00:11:27.000When a nation is singled out for attack in this organization, that nation is disrespected.
00:11:34.000What's more, that nation is asked to pay for the privilege of being disrespected.
00:11:40.000The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation.
00:11:51.000We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world's largest contribution to the United Nations.
00:11:58.000And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.
00:12:13.000Okay, none of these countries that are voting against the United States ought to take their foreign aid for granted.
00:12:18.000Now, there are two types of foreign aid that the United States grants.
00:12:21.000It represents foreign aid, by the way, about 1% of the American federal budget every year.
00:12:24.000What's breaking the bank is not foreign aid, but we can use this as a tool.
00:12:28.000You know we give like $100 million to Zimbabwe every year, like in human and development aid?
00:12:33.000True, it says $135 million every year to Zimbabwe, which was until five minutes ago run by Robert Mugabe, one of the worst people on planet Earth.
00:12:42.000There have been studies that show that foreign aid does virtually nothing.
00:12:44.000When you sign a check to a dictator, the dictator takes the check, immediately cashes it, builds himself a new palace, buys himself a couple of new female bodyguards, and then goes about his daily business.
00:12:54.000By shtipping the bodyguards and murdering his own people.
00:12:57.000Foreign aid, unless it is specifically channeled to the right areas, doesn't do a whole hell of a lot.
00:13:02.000And the UN doesn't do a whole hell of a lot.
00:13:04.000The idea of attaching strings to the system makes a lot of sense.
00:13:08.000Now, what's funny is that there are people on the left who don't believe this.
00:13:10.000So, Philip Mudd is one of these people.
00:13:45.000No such thing as a free lunch, internationally or nationally.
00:13:48.000But what this really betrays is that there are a lot of people in the United States, living in the United States, who do not actually see the United States as a force for good in the world.
00:14:15.000We're cruel, we're overreaching, we're sort of a bull in a china shop.
00:14:19.000Sure, we try to do the right thing, but we usually do the wrong thing.
00:14:22.000And then there is the more traditional and correct view of America's role in the world, which is that we are the greatest force for freedom the world has ever seen and ever known.
00:14:29.000And the fact is, where American boots have set foot, freedom follows.
00:14:33.000I'm not going to talk about whether we should have been in every war that we've been in, but where America was present, there was freedom, and where America was removed, the freedom went away.
00:14:42.000This is true in Vietnam, where when we pulled out of Vietnam, South Vietnam, a free country, turns into a communist hellhole.
00:15:09.000I mean, all of Europe would be speaking German right now if it weren't for the United States, including Britain.
00:15:14.000So the idea that the United States has been a nefarious force on the world stage, or that we have strings attached, we should have strings attached because our strings are good.
00:15:21.000Our strings are usually things like, we would like you to free up your press.
00:15:25.000We would like you to not oppress women.
00:15:26.000We would like for you to support United States foreign policy in strengthening our interests around the world.
00:15:45.000And by the way, it was going a lot better in Iraq until President Obama decided to precipitously withdraw from Iraq, leaving in his wake an Iranian-backed regime and ISIS in the west of the country, in the northwest of the country.
00:15:57.000So, this view that the United States is being terrible by attaching strings to our funds, it's my money.
00:16:06.000So if it's my money, then I get to determine what happens with it.
00:16:09.000This notion that the government has a role in taking my money and then spending it on whatever stupid thing Robert Mugabe wants to spend it on, it verges on taxation without representation, is the truth.
00:16:20.000Now one of the things that's always interesting is that the UN votes, as I talked about yesterday statistically, insanely and routinely, all the time, they vote against Israel.
00:16:30.000A huge percentage of all the votes they've ever taken in the UN General Assembly are against Israel.
00:16:34.000And the people who vote against Israel are typically, there are a lot of people who abstained yesterday.
00:16:38.000The people who voted against Israel are largely located in areas with large Muslim populations, Europe, or in the Muslim world itself.
00:17:57.000Again, they'd be speaking Hitler if it weren't for us.
00:18:00.000But the idea that Germany is going to tell Israel, a country full of Jews, about the same population of Jews come to think of it as were slaughtered in the Holocaust by the Germans and their allies, that they're going to tell Israel where to put their capital is beyond absurd.
00:18:16.000The antisemitism in Germany is on the rise.
00:18:27.000Now there's a lot of European antisemitism that's based off of new Muslim migrants and also secular leftists who believe that Israel is a nefarious force for Western imperialism.
00:18:40.000When telecommunications manager Mikhail Tanayev emigrated to Germany in 1998 from his native Russia as a teen, his Jewish faith didn't matter to classmates or neighbors.
00:18:48.000But now, he says, when I arrived in Germany, I never saw such displays.
00:18:52.000But now there are thousands of people who are burning Israeli flags in the streets.
00:18:56.000In 2006, Germany recorded 1,500 anti-Semitic incidents.
00:19:00.000That was a massive increase from previous years.
00:19:02.000According to a recent survey in Western Germany, 62% of Jewish respondents said they experienced anti-Semitism in their everyday lives.
00:19:09.00028% said they were victims of verbal attacks or harassment in the past year.
00:19:12.000When I visited France, my wife and I were afraid to go in particular districts.
00:19:16.000While I was wearing a yarmulke, I wore a baseball cap instead.
00:19:19.000When I was in London, I think I've told this story on the show.
00:19:22.000When I was in London, there was a situation where we went to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.
00:19:50.000And while every British person there was walking over and strangling Hitler, these young Muslims went over and put their arms around Hitler like he was Uncle Hitler and began taking pictures.
00:20:02.000It's on the rise in places like Sweden.
00:20:03.000Not just because of radical Islam, but also because of a secular movement that sees religious education as backwards and non-progressive.
00:20:11.000Nordic countries maintain opinion corridors for acceptable ideas in the public square, and those opinion corridors do not include religious people very often.
00:20:23.000It may be true that not everyone anti-Israel is anti-Semitic, but everyone anti-Semitic is certainly anti-Israel, and there is pretty significant crossover between the two groups.
00:20:31.000Okay, well, as we continue, I want to get to the mailbag.
00:20:34.000I want to do a particularly long mailbag, because it's a year-end mailbag.
00:22:04.000She says, So the reason that... First of all, let's start with a problem with Google.
00:22:25.000If you Google trickle-down economics, you are only going to get the failures of trickle-down economics.
00:22:28.000That's because it's a term that was not coined by the right.
00:22:31.000It was a term that was coined by the left.
00:22:33.000The right calls it supply-side economics.
00:22:35.000Look up supply-side economics on Google, and you will come up with a myriad of examples in which supply-side economics has worked.
00:22:42.000Supply-side economics is the idea that if you give producers back their money, they're going to produce new and better products, and that generates its own demand.
00:22:48.000Supply generates its own demand, basically.
00:22:50.000So if you generate cheaper product, not crap nobody wants to buy, but if you make product cheaper and better, people will want to buy it.
00:22:57.000If you invent new products, that changes the way people live.
00:23:06.000Apple created a product, you wanted the product, you went out and bought the product.
00:23:11.000What the left likes is what they call demand-side economics.
00:23:13.000Demand-side economics is the idea that if you give a bunch of money to a bunch of people that they'll spend that money and that will jog the economy.
00:23:19.000It won't jog the economy in the sense of making people's lives better generally because the products aren't going to get any better.
00:25:06.000Well, as far as the brainwashing from the schools, I would suggest private school, homeschooling, take over your local school board.
00:25:21.000You really do have to be very, very involved.
00:25:24.000As far as are my kids as smart and analytical as I am, my three-and-a-half-year-old, it's hard to tell for the one-and-a-half-year-old boy because that dude's just, I mean, he's just running around the whole time.
00:25:33.000I haven't seen a lot of analysis from him other than no and also cheese.
00:26:07.000Okay, Arya says, Okay, so what Trump can do is shut up.
00:26:15.000I mean, really, this is what Trump has to do.
00:26:17.000Trump needs to be quiet, because if he keeps talking, it makes him more unpopular.
00:26:21.000Also, he needs to go out and talk about his accomplishments.
00:26:24.000He needs to go out and talk about how to unify Americans.
00:26:27.000He can have fun, but I think that it's a mistake for him to, I think it's a big mistake for him to go on Twitter and use Twitter the way that he has the past year.
00:26:35.000I'm hoping that we're beginning to see some discipline from Trump.
00:26:37.000Listen, there will be losses in the House.
00:26:40.000But those losses can be mitigated if the economic climate continues to be good and if Trump can make himself less unpopular.
00:26:57.000Okay, Emanuel says, any word back about the Rosie harassment?
00:27:00.000So what he is referring to is that today,
00:27:03.000Sadly, Rosie O'Donnell has some sort of sad obsession, sad sexual obsession with me, which is horrifying in every conceivable way.
00:27:11.000And she tweeted out, I told you yesterday that she tweeted that she wanted me to suck her bleep, but her bleep was male genitalia, which is weird.
00:27:19.000And I responded that she should stop being homophobic and sexually harassing people.
00:28:53.000And Jews, like a Jew who believes in Judaism, not because I'm ethnically Jewish.
00:28:56.000And Judaism is a Zionist religion that suggests that there should be Jewish rule in the Holy Land and that it was a biblical promise.
00:29:04.000Now, what's interesting is people take that to mean that there has to be a kingship in the Holy Land.
00:29:08.000The Bible is, as I've said before, I think I talked about it this week in the Bible segment, the Bible is really ambivalent about state power.
00:29:14.000It is not big on the idea of theocracy, per se.
00:29:18.000But the idea that there ought to be a Jewish state based on foundational Jewish principles
00:29:23.000It's true for a few reasons, among them anti-Semitism and the tremendous outpouring of anti-Semitism that has existed throughout history, and also the idea that a country ruled by Jewish principles will be a good country, just like a country ruled by Christian principles in the United States is a good country.
00:29:39.000We're going to do a little bit more of the mailbag in just a second.
00:29:43.000But first, you know, I think I'm going to have to break here on YouTube and Facebook.
00:29:47.000So for $9.99 a month, you can get the rest of this mailbag and things I like and things I hate.
00:29:51.000And I have a Christmas message for you that you're going to want to see today.
00:29:54.000So, for $9.99 a month, you can get your subscription to Daily Wire, you get the rest of the mailbag, get to be part of the mailbag, you get to be part of our show live, you get everything that you could possibly want in life, except for the thing that you get with the annual subscription, which is this, the very greatest, in leftist tears, hot or cold, tumblers.
00:30:48.000And subscribe to our YouTube channel as well, where we have a Christmas video out today that is simultaneously humiliating and hilarious.
00:30:54.000So if you want to see me dramatically humiliated, then go check out that Christmas video as well by subscribing to YouTube.
00:30:58.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:06.000Alrighty, so Morgan asks, Ben, when your kids are old enough to watch Star Wars, will you show them in the order you saw them as a child or in the order of the saga?
00:32:33.000Because if you watched Rogue One and then Episode Four, then it just fits right in.
00:32:36.000But the whole point is that they re-slotted in a new movie, which is super cool, and then it transitions right into Episode Four, which is really awesome.
00:32:58.000This is the big gap for Trump, is that so much of his policy is good and so much of his rhetoric is horrible, that if he can get his rhetoric, you know, in a better direction, then it won't be very hard to support him, will it?
00:33:20.000Not because, because I think that if you're a law-abiding citizen in the United States then you should have the right to vote.
00:33:26.000But I also think that the Constitution was designed to prevent welfare.
00:33:29.000And I think that we are going to have to make a move to convince people that they are not, that they should not be dependent on government.
00:33:36.000The barrier, by the way, between the presence of welfare and the non-presence of welfare, I do not think is people who are on welfare.
00:33:41.000I don't think it really is as simple as everybody on welfare votes Democrat and everybody not on welfare votes Republican.
00:33:46.000I think that we're going to have to make a move toward convincing people that they ought not be on welfare in the first place.
00:33:50.000That takes a moral shift in the culture.
00:33:52.000And that's something, I mean, that's what I do every day.
00:33:53.000That's why I'm here, because I think that's actually important.
00:33:56.000Not really, which is why I think that you should marry somebody who has the same ideological viewpoint you do.
00:34:00.000Okay, that's because he wasn't raised in a Jewish family.
00:34:01.000He was raised in an ethnically Jewish family where they like bagels and lox and think that everybody is anti-Semitic, and they visit Shul once a year on Yom Kippur and break for lunch.
00:34:24.000OK, so I'm going to challenge that contention that Jewishness makes you reform.
00:34:29.000I mean that Jewishness makes you a liberal.
00:34:31.000Jewishness makes you a leftist if by Jewishness you mean ethnic cultural identity and not religious identity.
00:34:36.000Because I guarantee you, whichever host that is on Patek of America, their level of Jewish observance is probably lower than many Christians I know.
00:34:43.000Stefan says, Can you explain the difference between the Reagan tax cuts and the tax cuts that just passed?
00:34:47.000So the Reagan tax cuts, my understanding is that they were largely individually based.
00:34:50.000They were all about lowering the individual tax rates.
00:34:54.000The top tax bracket was dropped from something like 70% to 28%.
00:36:33.000The best evidence for God, as I have said on the show before, and as I say in debate with Sam Harris, which I think is going to, he'll be putting that out pretty soon if he hasn't already.
00:36:41.000The basic idea is that if you believe in free will, if you believe in human reason, if you believe in our capacity to understand the universe, if you believe in a predictable universe with laws that govern it, if you believe we do not live in a chaotic universe without meaning, if you believe that you can derive ought from is, then you need to believe in a divine creator.
00:37:00.000Okay, and that's not an argument for the Bible, but that is an argument for God, right?
00:37:04.000That's the Aristotelian argument for God, is that there is a rationale behind everything.
00:37:09.000If you believe there's a rationale behind everything, then you believe in God.
00:37:14.000And if you believe, as Aquinas did, that that rationale is
00:37:19.000Here's sort of the argument that Aristotle makes.
00:37:21.000The argument that Aristotle makes for the unmoved mover is not that everything has a cause and therefore there's God.
00:37:27.000Because then leftist and atheists just say, well, does God have a cause also?
00:37:32.000The idea is that everything that you see in front of you at one point was another thing that was actualized.
00:37:39.000Something has potential and there's the potential in the actual.
00:37:42.000Like this piece of paper right here, this has the potential to be ash.
00:37:46.000But it requires fire in order to make it ash.
00:37:49.000Now fire itself also had a potential at one point, right?
00:37:52.000It was a match, and it was a piece of wood, or it was a rough surface.
00:37:56.000So it had the potential to be fire, but it was not fire.
00:37:59.000So in order for something to become actual, in order for potential to be actualized, it has to be acted upon by something that is either fully actual, or something that is a combination of the actual with its own potential.
00:38:12.000The idea here would be that there is something that lies behind everything that is purely actual.
00:39:44.000You mentioned it was a mistake to have an income tax.
00:39:46.000What would you do instead if it were up to you?
00:39:48.000Other than huge spending cuts, of course.
00:39:50.000So, I think there's a strong case for a national sales tax on transactions.
00:39:56.000The government taxes, basically, because transactions can only take place in the public square to a certain extent.
00:40:03.000A consumption tax seems to me more useful than an income tax, because no business of the government is what kind of money I make, but presumably if I'm acting in the public square, then they may have more of an interest in the transactions in which I take part, although they should not obviously restrict consensual transactions.
00:40:25.000publicly run prisons, I would assume, is that you don't want to set up a corrupt system whereby privatized prisons are attempting to create more criminals.
00:40:34.000But I don't really have a problem with privatized prisons, particularly if you hold them liable for mistreatment of prisoners.
00:40:40.000If they actually sign contracts with the state that say that we can sue you if you mistreat the prisoners, if you harm the prisoners, that actually creates more accountability, not less.
00:42:15.000Recently, there's been some controversy when a local synagogue wouldn't allow a married lesbian couple to join the membership, even though they were separate members when they were single.
00:42:21.000They've since started their own shul, which promotes acceptance of all.
00:42:24.000It's caused a bit of controversy in the neighborhood, where some are saying a religious institution should adhere to a religious standard.
00:42:29.000Others are pointing out there are plenty of people who sin.
00:42:31.000Why should this scene be held to a different standard regarding membership in the shul?
00:42:34.000I was wondering what your take is on modern orthodox shuls taking on same-sex couples as members.
00:42:38.000So, my answer is they cannot join as a couple.
00:42:41.000The answer is that from a religious standard, they cannot join as a couple.
00:42:44.000They do not get the same rights as married couples.
00:42:45.000They should not be treated as a married couple because that's the religious standard.
00:42:48.000Now, I don't think the government has anything to do here, but the religious standard in Judaism is that homosexuality is a sin, not homosexual orientation, but homosexual activity.
00:42:57.000You wouldn't allow somebody to join your Orthodox shul who came in every day, who came into the shul on Saturdays with their cell phone blaring and saying, I'm a non-Sabbath observant Jew, and I'm here to daven.
00:43:11.000It's one thing if they come in with the cell phone in their pocket and it goes off and everybody's a little bit awkward, but the whole point here is that glorification of sin in an orthodox context is not a cool thing.
00:43:20.000So, I think that's right that they're allowed to be members when they're single.
00:43:23.000Now that they're married, if they want to join as single members, that's fine, but I don't think that's what they want.
00:43:27.000What they really want is for the entire community to change its standard of marriage to meet them, and that seems to me an imposition on the community.
00:43:34.000OK, so we have more questions, but we'll have to save those for next year.
00:43:40.000We'll have to save those for next year.
00:43:41.000Now, a quick thing I like, and then a thing I hate, and then I have a quick message of things, actually.
00:44:13.000It's these guys who come and kidnap a child, and John Wayne is the grandfather, and John Wayne goes after them.
00:44:20.000And he brings along a couple of his sons, who are the uncles of the kid.
00:44:24.000And in the movie, one of his sons is actually played by Patrick Wayne, John Wayne's real son.
00:44:29.000The movie takes place in supposedly 1908,
00:44:32.000So you see, there's a couple of cars, but he's riding horses, and so there's also this sort of Western versus modern conflict that's going on, where John Wayne represents sort of the Old West, and you need the Old West to come into the modern world and save people when the bad guys show up.
00:47:35.000We spend a lot of time on the show, a lot of time on the show, talking about politics and the daily battles they're in.
00:47:40.000And one of the things I've been thinking about over the last couple of years, and I'm writing a book about it now, is we're so angry at each other all the time.
00:47:46.000Americans are so angry at each other over politics, over tax cuts, and Obamacare, and foreign policy.
00:47:52.000And the reality is we must have a common vision, a common purpose.
00:47:56.000We must feel like we're part of the same team.
00:47:59.000And one of the ways to do that is to recognize that we are all seeking human happiness in a communal purpose based on virtue.
00:48:06.000So this Christmas, don't just spend time enjoying with family.
00:48:09.000Think about how to be a more virtuous human being next year.
00:48:11.000Think about how to be a better person, not just in terms of interpersonal connections, but how you can be better in terms of thinking about your obligations to your family, to the world.
00:48:21.000How can you make yourself more successful?
00:48:23.000If we all think about those things, if we think about our individual purpose, how we can succeed in our own lives, if we think about our communal purpose, what brings us together around common shared principles, then we'll finally have a country worthy of preserving again, and a country where we can act on that founding vision that brought us all together in the first place, and that I think has been fragmenting in the past couple of years.
00:48:43.000We are all brothers and sisters, whether we recognize it or not.
00:48:47.000And in the end, we're part of the same family, but that family has to have a common purpose, not just a common heritage.
00:48:52.000So, let's think about where to go from here.
00:48:54.000I also want to thank everybody who works on the show over here at The Daily Wire.
00:49:25.000And finally, thank you to our audience.
00:49:28.000This has been an unbelievable year for The Daily Wire.
00:49:30.000It's been an incredible year for The Daily Wire.
00:49:32.000We literally went from a site that did not exist two years ago to a site with 100 million page views a month.
00:49:37.000We went from a podcast that did not exist two years ago to a podcast that is downloaded well in excess of half a million times a day and that is viewed another half a million times on Facebook.
00:49:54.000Thanks for being part of what we're trying to do here.
00:49:56.000And thanks for giving us a rational hearing.
00:49:58.000And if you're on the other side in particular, thanks to you for actually spending some time out of your comfort zone and listening to some folks on the other side.
00:50:03.000Because I think that it makes the country better if we all do that.