The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： Defending America… From Itself

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00:00:30.280 Hey, Michael Knowles here.

00:00:31.440 The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage,

00:00:33.340 defending America from itself, is right around the corner.

00:00:36.620 This episode will be terrific, entertaining, wonderful, handsome, swarthy.

00:00:40.680 It will leave you speechless, controlling words, controlling minds.

00:00:44.080 Available now, wherever books are sold.

00:00:46.540 Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring,

00:00:49.020 as we discuss everything from my new book to transgender athletes competing in the Olympics.

00:00:53.540 And if it's good that Juneteenth is now a national holiday.

00:00:56.680 Spoiler alert, it's not.

00:00:57.840 Take a listen.

00:01:00.000 We don't do them anymore?

00:01:03.540 I don't do them anymore.

00:01:04.840 Fair.

00:01:05.560 Welcome to Daily Wire Backstage, defending America from itself.

00:01:09.100 I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k,

00:01:12.440 and we're glad you have tuned in.

00:01:14.560 Is President Biden planning to just hand the presidency over to Kamala and claim the gold

00:01:18.820 medal in recognizing my white privilege Olympics?

00:01:21.340 It would be a good move for him.

00:01:23.020 Will the left's push to abolish the American flag be enough to wake people up to the poison

00:01:27.020 that is critical race theory?

00:01:28.340 Did Michael Knowles really write a book with actual words in it that is a diagnosis of the

00:01:32.740 losing strategy conservatives have taken to combat the left's assault on liberty, virtue,

00:01:36.720 decency, the Republic of the Founders, Western civilization, and this show?

00:01:40.820 Frankly, I'm speechless.

00:01:43.500 That was you.

00:01:44.580 That wasn't me.

00:01:45.420 That was you this time.

00:01:46.360 I feel so dirty.

00:01:47.240 You should.

00:01:47.960 This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:02:07.640 Don't like big tech and the government spying on you?

00:02:09.940 Visit expressvpn.com slash backstage.

00:02:13.560 Joining me, the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, the Michael Knowles.

00:02:16.960 We're very glad you're here.

00:02:18.440 We're very glad that Matt Walsh isn't.

00:02:19.800 He's been showing us up lately, so we decided to do the show without him.

00:02:23.040 Plus, he's on vacation.

00:02:24.840 Plus, he's very expensive.

00:02:26.460 From pronouns to microaggressions, there's no question that political correctness has

00:02:30.260 been rapidly seeping into every corner of American society, and that's why Michael

00:02:34.620 Knowles wrote Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds, and it's available everywhere

00:02:39.060 that books are sold right now.

00:02:40.560 So go to your local bookstore or grab one off Amazon today.

00:02:43.260 If you're a fan of Michael Knowles, then you should be a Daily Wire member and help keep

00:02:47.200 him employed.

00:02:48.020 Believe me, it is literally the only way you can help keep him employed.

00:02:52.240 Go join at dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:02:55.260 You'll get 20% off of your membership with code JUSTICE in honor of our newest content

00:02:59.800 offering, Created Equal, Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, a terrific documentary about

00:03:04.800 Supreme Court Justice Thomas' battle to the highest court in the land.

00:03:09.820 If you'll remember, this particular documentary was mysteriously removed from Amazon, but it

00:03:14.880 absolutely was not canceled.

00:03:16.780 Again, that's dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:03:19.900 Sign up and snag that 20% off membership with code JUSTICE.

00:03:23.520 If you're a current Daily Wire member, well, you can get your questions into the chat box

00:03:27.000 right now for our Q&A later on tonight.

00:03:30.980 These intros just get longer and longer, and I don't feel like it's done, right?

00:03:34.400 We're done, right?

00:03:35.520 It's not my best.

00:03:36.280 Thank you for tuning in.

00:03:37.120 Less work for us.

00:03:37.800 So, what's going on in the world?

00:03:41.480 There is a whole lot.

00:03:42.880 I'm actually very lucky because, do you know why I wrote the book Speechless?

00:03:47.940 For the money.

00:03:48.580 I wrote it purely for the money.

00:03:50.360 This is great, man.

00:03:51.180 You can buy a lot with 50 bucks.

00:03:53.020 No, I wrote the book Speechless in part because I thought it would be funny if, there's the

00:03:57.300 dink.

00:03:57.860 I thought it would be funny if you start with a book that doesn't have any words to follow

00:04:03.220 that up by writing a book that is entirely about words.

00:04:06.380 I just got a kick out of that idea.

00:04:08.100 Yeah.

00:04:08.200 But I wasn't convinced that this would be the issue.

00:04:12.280 You know, I signed this book contract almost two years ago.

00:04:14.980 Yeah.

00:04:15.120 I didn't know that would be the issue.

00:04:15.680 I mean, you're almost Barack Obama.

00:04:17.420 Like, you almost blew through, had to repay, got another book deal.

00:04:20.900 Exactly.

00:04:22.080 That has become sort of the issue at the very moment.

00:04:26.360 Big tech crossed the Rubicon, obviously, when they kicked Trump off of all of the platforms.

00:04:30.900 But it's not just that kind of censorship.

00:04:32.740 You're seeing it now.

00:04:33.760 The radical transgenderism is going to the Olympics and nobody's allowed to say boo about

00:04:37.520 it.

00:04:37.820 You're seeing it, obviously, with what we're allowed to discuss in the public health apparatus

00:04:41.260 and everything in between right now.

00:04:43.340 There's even a tie-in with Clarence Thomas.

00:04:45.520 I write about the Thomas confirmation at length in the book because that was a big shift, I think,

00:04:50.600 for a lot of people maybe who weren't totally conservative to realize, wow, this political

00:04:54.480 correctness thing is a big problem.

00:04:55.920 Our friend Andrew Breitbart, that was the defining moment of his political transition.

00:04:59.840 Well, I mean, first of all, congratulations on a book that has words in it.

00:05:02.460 I did endorse this one, not facetiously.

00:05:05.840 And it actually is quite an impressive accomplishment.

00:05:09.840 It opens with Lewis Carroll and then it gets more pretentious from there.

00:05:14.580 I felt Lewis Carroll, that was too pedestrian to really, you know, you had to go much further.

00:05:19.760 You know, I was impressed because, you know, Ben and I have sort of talked about, you know,

00:05:23.760 made fun of you for writing a book with no words in it.

00:05:25.820 But now, having read this, I feel like all your books should have no words.

00:05:29.720 This is the proof.

00:05:30.860 I'm going back to my original.

00:05:32.080 I'm just in it for the cigars.

00:05:33.260 If you guys can see, we're smoking speechless Michael Knowles cigars on the show tonight.

00:05:38.380 And they're good.

00:05:39.000 They are very good.

00:05:40.400 This is something that I got a real genuine kick out of.

00:05:44.460 Drew, you've written about 5,000 books in your life.

00:05:47.040 Ben, you write about, what, seven or eight books a year, I think.

00:05:53.640 And you kind of turn them out.

00:05:54.580 And we don't even notice.

00:05:55.620 We don't even pay attention.

00:05:56.900 And then I publish one book ever.

00:06:00.380 We were popping champagne in the back.

00:06:02.660 We were pre-gaming the back stage.

00:06:03.880 It's like when your kid says his first word, like anybody else could do it.

00:06:06.300 But this is, you know, a kid.

00:06:08.900 Yeah, that's right.

00:06:09.700 We actually have a few questions from DailyWire.com subscribers about the book.

00:06:13.600 So this one, Michael, for you.

00:06:15.240 Congrats on the book, Michael.

00:06:17.080 What triggered you into writing this book?

00:06:19.000 How long did it take for you to write it?

00:06:21.240 The thing that got me to write it is I actually, I mean, I felt that my first book was my magnum opus.

00:06:27.660 And I felt it was extremely true in a Thucydidean sort of a contribution to Western civilization.

00:06:34.100 But I did want to write a real book because, one, I had a few things to say.

00:06:40.660 But moreover, I wanted to write a real book with an argument and not just a kind of light book because I don't think I want to do it again.

00:06:48.000 I don't know why you people do it.

00:06:49.600 It is agonizing, especially if you put some research into it.

00:06:52.540 You know, it takes months and months of research.

00:06:55.260 Then you lay, I don't know about you, I'm so obsessive about every little comma, every little, it's just, it's not, no, not you.

00:07:01.640 You've already finished another book by the time they're doing the first edit on the book.

00:07:04.780 Well, my book comes out July 27th.

00:07:07.660 And I'm halfway through writing a novel right now.

00:07:09.880 I'm just in my spare time.

00:07:10.780 Really?

00:07:11.220 Yeah.

00:07:11.620 So, like, yeah, we all have different writing styles.

00:07:14.180 Yeah.

00:07:14.400 And I know Drew is more of a craftsman.

00:07:16.280 Like, I know that you read over your work and you really spend time with it.

00:07:19.520 And for me, it's like Mozart.

00:07:21.100 It just comes to me in four paragraphs.

00:07:22.900 I really never go back and there are no errors, as they say the other day.

00:07:26.180 So, pretty much, I don't have to edit.

00:07:27.520 It's just, like, thousands of words at a time, no mistakes.

00:07:30.040 It's beautifully flowing.

00:07:31.120 St. Michael prays for over every word.

00:07:33.360 I do.

00:07:33.660 You know, Thomas Aquinas was known for dictating multiple books at a time to his various secretaries.

00:07:40.140 So, that's something to aspire to.

00:07:42.080 This next question is for the whole group.

00:07:44.380 Group.

00:07:45.760 What are the books?

00:07:46.640 They changed the question.

00:07:48.160 Wait a second.

00:07:48.500 Literally, the next question in the teleprompter said, group.

00:07:52.900 So, then I think, well, I got time.

00:07:54.320 I'll smoke me a cigar.

00:07:55.440 Maybe try to get this thing going.

00:07:56.600 Then I'll look up and read the question.

00:07:58.040 They'd change out the question.

00:07:58.960 You know what the producers did?

00:08:00.060 Hoodwinked.

00:08:00.460 You know what the producers did?

00:08:02.140 They were controlling words and thereby controlling minds.

00:08:05.920 I'm speechless.

00:08:07.040 Yes, you are.

00:08:09.740 No, there's no ding.

00:08:10.980 It's a production team.

00:08:12.180 Yeah.

00:08:12.820 Michael, what are your book's pronouns?

00:08:15.520 That's a great...

00:08:17.240 My book's pronouns are whatever the opposite of the New Zealand weightlifters' pronouns.

00:08:22.700 Whatever that is, I don't want any part of it.

00:08:25.840 Well, that's a great thing for us to talk about.

00:08:27.320 I mean, it's been an unbelievable week in sports where apparently every single person

00:08:31.900 going to the Olympics now is transgendered and wants to burn our flag.

00:08:36.540 So, Drew, walk me through these various stories.

00:08:38.940 It's terrible.

00:08:39.860 I mean, I'm sorry.

00:08:40.960 I do not understand.

00:08:41.920 You know, I saw a guy, a newscaster in, I think it was Australia, saying, I cannot understand

00:08:46.620 why anyone would object to this.

00:08:47.960 I cannot...

00:08:48.820 But I thought, wait, you literally cannot understand why a man lifting weights on the

00:08:54.280 girls' team because he calls himself a girl is not as good...

00:08:56.980 And you're a journalist?

00:08:57.640 Yeah.

00:08:58.320 Well, I mean, honestly, the whole thing is so ridiculous.

00:09:00.520 Shout out, quick shout out to my friend Leon, because my friend Leon has a story.

00:09:04.720 His wife just gave birth to their seventh child.

00:09:07.960 So they've been very productive.

00:09:08.840 Wow.

00:09:09.060 And so this happened this week.

00:09:12.140 And apparently when the child came out of the mother, the doctor then turned to him

00:09:16.560 and said, do you want me to announce your child's gender?

00:09:20.000 And Leon said, if you can't, you shouldn't be a doctor.

00:09:23.480 And this is not difficult stuff.

00:09:26.360 First of all, I think what this really shows, and this is very sad news for the feminists,

00:09:29.600 is men are apparently unbelievable at everything, including being women.

00:09:33.320 Like, they're just unbelievable at it.

00:09:34.580 Like, this guy has apparently only been a woman for, like, six years, and only been weightlifting

00:09:39.380 as a woman for six years.

00:09:40.920 And he immediately becomes the oldest female weightlifter in Olympic history?

00:09:44.800 Yeah.

00:09:45.100 I mean, men are unbelievable at this stuff.

00:09:47.080 It's just, it's incredible.

00:09:48.300 Like, men are great at being men, and they're unbelievably good at being women.

00:09:51.960 As I have been saying, as I have now been saying for many years in the future, all the best

00:09:57.600 women will be men.

00:09:58.560 This is my whole theory, though.

00:10:00.780 There's a lot of people who say that men are under attack, and I don't actually believe

00:10:04.320 that's the case.

00:10:05.020 No, women are under attack.

00:10:06.000 Femininity is under attack.

00:10:07.260 And what people are saying to women is, you only have value if you are men, and therefore

00:10:11.780 men have to be less manly so that women can be manly and compete with them.

00:10:15.900 That's the problem.

00:10:16.580 The problem is women, and the problem is women because women add a certain non-materialistic,

00:10:21.840 non-Marxist, non-spiritual idea to human life.

00:10:26.960 But no woman will ever be able to win any sporting competition again if this thing really

00:10:31.460 takes root, right?

00:10:32.720 Every single, it won't just be that, you know, the New Zealand guy is the best weightlifter.

00:10:36.960 It'll be that the, also the guy from Australia is the second best weightlifter.

00:10:40.740 Today, it came out just today, actually, that there was another person who's qualified in

00:10:44.740 the NCAA, transgender woman, so biological man, who is qualified to run in the NCAA races,

00:10:51.000 but violates the Olympics rules on how much the estrogen versus testosterone levels are

00:10:56.240 or something like that.

00:10:57.340 And so this person has now been barred from running in competition at the Olympics.

00:11:00.720 So I really, really look forward to the International Olympic Committee explaining why one of these

00:11:05.780 transgender women is actually a woman, but one of these transgender women is not actually

00:11:09.140 a woman.

00:11:09.720 Yeah, well, it's also, it's ironic because we're told that your body has nothing to do with whether

00:11:14.540 you're a man or a woman, but we're also told that the actual essence of our sex now is just

00:11:19.780 the amount of testosterone in us.

00:11:21.180 It's the most reductive thing possible.

00:11:23.340 The aspect of this, though, that I find really troubling is I think it goes back a ways.

00:11:29.540 Like, for a moment, I thought that this transgender craze was totally new and it's taking everything

00:11:33.560 by storm.

00:11:33.920 And it might actually upset feminism or it might upset same-sex marriage, you know, which

00:11:39.200 is argued against it in some ways, right?

00:11:41.340 Right.

00:11:41.520 Or in this way is very different than I can change my entire...

00:11:44.120 Fluidity.

00:11:44.620 ...sex.

00:11:44.980 Yeah, the fluidity.

00:11:46.280 But I think I'd like to blame all of this on the feminists.

00:11:49.660 And the reason I would like to do that is the essential argument of transgenderism, if

00:11:55.460 one can even say there is an argument, it's a little out there, is men and women are exactly

00:12:00.820 the same.

00:12:01.160 Men can become women, women can become men.

00:12:02.940 So it's expressed differently, but really one is the same.

00:12:05.980 This was the same argument for same-sex marriage, that the union of two men and the union of

00:12:10.520 a man and a woman is exactly the same, right?

00:12:12.700 It's the exact same category.

00:12:14.080 And it's the same argument of second-wave feminism, that women are exactly the same,

00:12:19.220 they can do every single thing just like the men.

00:12:21.920 A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

00:12:24.400 It seems like this goes...

00:12:25.540 But it's also the opposite argument.

00:12:27.080 Because it's saying that I'm a woman because, you know, I want to keep house and

00:12:31.100 I want to bake cookies and that makes me a woman.

00:12:33.480 So actually it's saying that the essence of women is lipstick and stilettos.

00:12:37.580 Yeah, exactly.

00:12:38.080 By the way, this is...

00:12:38.720 Which, by the way, look, I look great in it.

00:12:40.320 This is a game that you see from the left all the time, is to hold two completely mutually

00:12:45.340 exclusive premises.

00:12:46.800 Yes.

00:12:47.160 And therefore, if you argue with one, then they hit you with the other.

00:12:49.380 Right?

00:12:49.840 And this happens, you know, in the realm of critical race theory as well.

00:12:52.740 Richard Delgado and Gene Stefanczyk, who are two of the founders of critical race theory,

00:12:56.660 they hold that there are essentially four tenets to critical race theory.

00:12:59.640 The first tenet to critical race theory is that white supremacy is in the air around

00:13:03.660 you.

00:13:03.980 It pervades everything.

00:13:04.920 It's like the force.

00:13:05.700 It pervades the air around you.

00:13:06.960 It unifies all living things.

00:13:08.540 Right?

00:13:08.720 The second principle is that white people are incapable of understanding their own racism.

00:13:14.980 Right?

00:13:15.080 That white people are basically unable, but they benefit from it.

00:13:18.660 They all benefit from it.

00:13:19.660 Then there are two completely mutually exclusive tendencies inside critical race theory.

00:13:23.600 One is that race is a social construct, and the other is that we can define you purely

00:13:27.900 by your race.

00:13:28.740 Race is a social construct, and it's been constructed by the powerful over time in order to subjugate

00:13:32.500 other people.

00:13:32.960 But also, because you are part of this social construct, either white or black, you are

00:13:37.560 unable, if you're white, to identify racism or understand it.

00:13:40.380 And if you're black, you're totally able to understand and identify racism in a way you

00:13:44.020 can't even explain to white people.

00:13:45.820 Well, the problem is, the minute you argue with one of those premises, they immediately hit you

00:13:48.780 with the other premise.

00:13:49.500 That's right.

00:13:49.780 So if you say, well, that sounds like racial essentialism to me, I'll say, well, no.

00:13:52.440 I say that race is a social construct.

00:13:54.660 And it's the same thing when it comes to transgenderism.

00:13:56.600 There are a thousand mutually exclusive arguments inside the arguments regarding transgenderism.

00:14:01.460 One is that gender is completely fluid, but also that stereotypes are apparently so rooted

00:14:06.540 in your innate gender biology that if you abide by a stereotype that is a stereotype, it's

00:14:13.960 also essential.

00:14:14.940 It's a stereotype that's constructed, but it's also not constructed.

00:14:17.620 It's also essential.

00:14:18.640 If they play this game long enough, what you realize, and I think this is the premise of

00:14:21.640 your book, really, is that when you school around with language this much, when you make

00:14:25.680 words this valueless and contentless, what it really is about is what they have always

00:14:30.660 accused the institutions of being about which is power.

00:14:33.500 This is what Foucault says.

00:14:34.620 Foucault always says that everything in the end, language, everything, is about power.

00:14:38.300 That is all projection.

00:14:39.460 For Foucault, everything is about power.

00:14:40.980 Yeah.

00:14:41.200 Because he wishes to use language as a tool of power in order to accomplish what he wishes

00:14:44.500 to accomplish.

00:14:45.000 I have one, I almost never make predictions because I feel like the future is unknown.

00:14:50.020 My one prediction is that 1984 is going to be canceled, but pretty soon they're going

00:14:53.820 to start to say that Orwell was, we shouldn't be reading Orwell, because it is Orwell.

00:14:57.540 I mean, it is every single thing that they do is predicted in that book.

00:15:00.780 The rewriting of history, the use of words, all of this, everything that you're saying

00:15:04.160 is all in that book.

00:15:05.340 It's all outlined in 1984.

00:15:07.100 So eventually they're going to have to say like, no, we shouldn't be selling this.

00:15:09.740 When they cancel 1984 and when they cancel Huxley, people can still read about it in

00:15:14.180 Speechless.

00:15:14.680 But actually, to your point, Ben, I mean, your point is this excellent one, which is the

00:15:21.840 left argues from these contradictory premises.

00:15:25.060 But my argument in Speechless is that political correctness is this purely negative campaign.

00:15:30.960 When we talk about critical race theory, which is a derivation of critical theory broadly,

00:15:34.240 comes from Marx's statement that we need the ruthless criticism of all that exists.

00:15:39.060 It's just trying to knock stuff down, deconstruct, debunk, and just bring it all to rubble.

00:15:44.440 So we have this idea of human nature in the West, which is that we're body and soul.

00:15:49.080 There's basically a simple idea.

00:15:50.280 It's called hylomorphism, to use the technical term of Aristotle.

00:15:52.980 And the left has these two completely opposite ideas of human nature.

00:15:56.660 One, we're just material.

00:15:58.140 We're just meat puppets.

00:15:59.200 All of our hopes and dreams are just, you know, synapses in our brain firing off.

00:16:03.220 The other one, that we're pure spirit.

00:16:05.920 You know, I look like a dude.

00:16:07.000 I've got an atom zap.

00:16:07.800 I've got a low voice.

00:16:08.320 But no, if I say I'm a woman, I'm really a woman.

00:16:11.180 They'll go back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence.

00:16:14.320 But the object is always to destroy the true and traditional understanding of the art.

00:16:19.480 But nothing is, I'm sorry.

00:16:21.160 That's all the time we have.

00:16:22.380 I have to talk about policy genius five minutes ago, or I'm going to need some insurance.

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00:16:31.100 which is essentially that this beautiful daughter came into my life one year ago today.

00:16:35.620 Thank you, thank you, thank you.

00:16:37.500 Is it today?

00:16:38.460 Today, yeah, one year ago today.

00:16:39.720 Wow, happy birthday.

00:16:41.000 And, you know, when you're, like, gazing down at this precious new life, at this precious new life in your hands,

00:16:46.020 all you can think about is your death.

00:16:48.140 You're like, you have been rebuked by life itself.

00:16:51.220 Your mortality is now on bold at this point.

00:16:52.580 You're not allowed to die.

00:16:53.480 And so you start thinking, like, I have responsibilities.

00:16:58.660 And to quote Ben Shapiro, unless you're a total horrible human being,

00:17:03.780 you have to do something about this responsibility.

00:17:05.940 So I thought, well, I'm going to get some life insurance.

00:17:08.120 We've been talking about policy genius.

00:17:09.720 Policy genius advertises on each of your shows.

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00:17:24.000 Why compare?

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00:18:13.880 That was a great ad read.

00:18:14.880 I'm speechless.

00:18:15.400 I'm speechless.

00:18:15.900 Oh.

00:18:16.220 How big is it?

00:18:18.840 Boom.

00:18:19.680 Guys.

00:18:20.040 They're nuts.

00:18:20.320 There we go.

00:18:20.840 Okay.

00:18:20.960 My God.

00:18:21.380 What are you falling asleep in there?

00:18:22.500 I mean, we're bad.

00:18:23.400 But I mean, like, you work for us.

00:18:24.980 We pay you.

00:18:25.560 You should at least be honest.

00:18:26.700 So, Drew, I actually want to get back to the point that you were about to make.

00:18:29.020 One of the things I've observed by way of segue is that, you know, there's all this talk about

00:18:35.080 how the sexes are interchangeable.

00:18:36.460 Yeah.

00:18:36.600 But the net result in almost every measurable area seems to be that when men transition into

00:18:43.600 women, they dominate all women.

00:18:45.940 When women transition into men, they are unable to dominate all men.

00:18:49.980 I'm talking about in sport.

00:18:50.900 I'm talking about in physical areas.

00:18:54.080 Doesn't that very discrepancy prove that the whole thing is nonsense?

00:18:59.320 It's the end of the question.

00:19:00.200 No one has objected to a woman, a trans man, playing in men's sports because they'd come

00:19:06.460 in number 50 of 50.

00:19:08.180 You know, that's why.

00:19:09.380 So, it's not actually a problem.

00:19:11.080 And that's why I feel it is.

00:19:12.700 Because there is a difference.

00:19:14.360 But the thing about it is.

00:19:15.340 Yes, mammalian species are sexually dimorphic.

00:19:17.640 Also, I feel like we are sort of species-centric here in the West.

00:19:20.560 Yeah, like nobody else has.

00:19:22.000 Like, I've noticed that there are other mammalian species, and all of them have this peculiar

00:19:25.720 tendency toward sexual dimorphism, in which there are two sexes that reproduce with

00:19:29.680 one another.

00:19:30.060 One called the female, and one called the male.

00:19:32.480 But I think we should ask ourselves what it is about women that these guys want to extinguish.

00:19:38.360 Because that is the thing about feminism.

00:19:40.820 Simone de Beauvoir said women should not be allowed to choose to be homemakers because

00:19:44.660 too many of them will do it.

00:19:45.960 And you think, like, well, what is the problem with that?

00:19:48.740 What is the problem with making a home?

00:19:50.520 Well, she says.

00:19:52.020 She gives the answer.

00:19:52.900 She says.

00:19:53.420 And she was arguing with Betty Friedan, a subject I actually discuss in Speechless.

00:19:57.400 And Betty Friedan was a radical.

00:19:58.920 Did you read a book?

00:19:59.260 She said, it's actually a better book.

00:20:00.720 I don't know.

00:20:00.960 We'll get it on the next episode.

00:20:02.040 They'll ding it.

00:20:02.960 Betty Friedan, a radical feminist in her own right, said, hold on.

00:20:06.920 Whoa.

00:20:07.180 Hold on a second, Simone.

00:20:09.140 I think that women should be able to choose if they want to go to work or they want to

00:20:12.000 stay home.

00:20:12.320 That's fine.

00:20:12.560 And Simone de Beauvoir said, no, that is not conducive to liberation.

00:20:17.260 And we need to force women out of their false consciousness to truly be free.

00:20:21.220 Well, see, this is what I wanted to say before when you said that political correctness is

00:20:24.860 negative.

00:20:25.680 It's only negative.

00:20:26.960 Really, nothing is only negative.

00:20:28.440 Nothing that human beings do because human beings act in their own interest.

00:20:31.640 So when they're tearing something down, they're tearing something down for a purpose.

00:20:34.280 And this is why I keep going back to the idea that this is a move for power.

00:20:39.900 I mean, it's got to be.

00:20:41.180 It's the essential materialist essence and motive.

00:20:46.120 I think there's something more than that.

00:20:48.420 And this goes to a sort of, again, back to critical race theory.

00:20:51.300 There's a lot of intertwining here because these are all sort of springing from the same

00:20:54.320 root.

00:20:54.940 And that root is this fundamental belief that human beings are replaceable widgets who

00:21:01.500 are, in essence, exactly the same.

00:21:03.440 And therefore, any inequality of outcome can be chalked up to the evils of the system.

00:21:07.120 And so when you look at the inequalities between the sexes, the most obvious inequalities

00:21:12.000 between the sexes are that women are capable of this superpower where they produce another

00:21:15.440 child, they produce another human within them, and then have that baby.

00:21:18.460 This is a thing men cannot do, contrary to popular opinion.

00:21:20.940 Only women are birthing persons.

00:21:22.540 And then men have their compensatory power is that they have great upper body strength,

00:21:28.160 right?

00:21:28.360 Like, these things don't match up in terms of human importance, by the way.

00:21:31.100 You'll notice that the thing women do preserves the human species at an extraordinary rate,

00:21:35.240 while men picking up heavy objects very often also drop those heavy objects on each other

00:21:38.520 or themselves.

00:21:40.020 But we win medals.

00:21:41.240 But we are capable of...

00:21:42.480 That's why they give you medals, because it's useless.

00:21:44.620 Exactly.

00:21:45.320 But if you need a mover, you don't call a woman.

00:21:47.960 And if you need a baby born, you're probably not going to call a man, right?

00:21:50.480 Just as a general rule.

00:21:51.500 So what the left has decided is basically, if you can remove the most obvious differences

00:21:56.900 between men and women, and these are the two most obvious differences between men and

00:22:00.260 women, just to the outward eye, then you can treat everybody as though they are innately

00:22:04.160 exactly the same.

00:22:05.200 And if they are innately exactly the same, then you actually have a plausible argument

00:22:08.960 that any system that ends in inequality at the end is inequity, right?

00:22:14.120 And this is the same argument that you see being made with regard to race in the United

00:22:17.220 States.

00:22:17.520 Anytime there's an unequal outcome by race, it must be that the system itself is racist.

00:22:21.400 This is explicitly Ibram X.

00:22:22.740 Kennedy's argument, right?

00:22:23.620 Any inequality of outcome must be inequity in the system.

00:22:26.060 Because otherwise, you're suggesting that some people are inferior at things, and other

00:22:29.280 people are superior at things, and that's racist.

00:22:31.880 Or alternatively, maybe some people are making bad decisions, and other people are not making

00:22:35.380 bad decisions, and that's always going to fall disproportionately, no matter which group

00:22:39.160 you pick, if you split it halfway down the line.

00:22:40.700 What's fascinating to me about this is Thomas Sowell has written about this extensively, and

00:22:43.700 I can't remember the exact term he uses, but it's something like...

00:22:46.540 The quest for cosmic justice.

00:22:47.640 No, he calls it the unbeatable fallacy, the fallacy that simply will not die in the face

00:22:52.020 of the facts.

00:22:52.500 He wrote a book that's maybe about 30 pages, a tiny little book called Discrimination and

00:22:57.240 Discrepancy, yeah.

00:22:58.280 Discrimination and Disparities.

00:22:59.400 Disparities.

00:22:59.900 And it's just a brilliant, brilliant book that absolutely destroyed...

00:23:04.060 He is our greatest living...

00:23:04.680 Well, this is the thing.

00:23:06.200 This is what I want to say.

00:23:07.300 Our greatest living public intellectual is a black man.

00:23:11.340 Ibram Kendi is not an intelligent man.

00:23:13.600 He's not an intellectual.

00:23:14.540 He's just not.

00:23:15.240 I'm sorry.

00:23:15.720 The things that come out of his mouth are not the sorts of things that people who read

00:23:19.060 say.

00:23:19.500 And Thomas Sowell is this...

00:23:21.920 I mean, come on.

00:23:23.360 This is a majority white country in which the greatest public intellectual alive is a black

00:23:29.660 man.

00:23:30.320 Second grade, too.

00:23:31.120 Clarence Thomas.

00:23:31.780 Well, right.

00:23:32.400 And Clarence Thomas.

00:23:33.240 But nobody celebrates him.

00:23:34.760 Nobody celebrates him.

00:23:35.120 They put up instead statues to George Floyd, this thug, basically, and they let this guy

00:23:40.820 go inside...

00:23:41.340 By the way, I did predict this.

00:23:42.240 I said that in the future, the only...

00:23:43.840 I told Jeremy this like six months ago.

00:23:46.000 I said, in the future, the only statues that will ever be built in the United States are

00:23:49.800 people who are purportedly victims of the system.

00:23:51.900 There will never be a statue of a hero again in the United States because heroism is not

00:23:55.640 permanent.

00:23:56.520 And every human being is flawed.

00:23:58.360 So the minute you put up a statue to a hero, immediately you're going to get people saying,

00:24:01.380 yes, but he also did X, Y, and Z.

00:24:03.040 Whereas victimhood is permanent and infallible.

00:24:05.620 If you were a victim of something, it doesn't matter what you did the rest of your life.

00:24:08.400 Right?

00:24:08.520 If you are George Washington and you were the father of the country, but in a time when a

00:24:13.280 huge percentage of the population held slaves, and most civilizations did, you held slaves,

00:24:17.920 we cannot have a statue up to you.

00:24:19.140 If you're George Floyd and you spent literally the entirety of your adult life participating

00:24:22.720 in criminal behavior, but you died at the hands of a police officer, then we can make

00:24:26.760 a statue of you because, again, your victimhood is irreplaceable, but heroism is always shaded

00:24:31.020 by the fact that human beings are...

00:24:32.280 Well, you know, on 9-11, the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is coming up, which is the defining political

00:24:37.480 event of my lifetime.

00:24:38.420 Yeah.

00:24:39.180 And how we've forgotten that, by the way.

00:24:40.560 Unbelievable.

00:24:40.860 Antietam was the defining political event of my career's lifetime, actually.

00:24:44.840 Oh, what a battle it was.

00:24:47.080 And we, at that time, I remember being really offended by this idea.

00:24:51.260 People would say, you know, 3,000 heroes died in the Twin Towers.

00:24:56.900 And I would think, no, that is not what a hero is.

00:24:59.360 That's right.

00:24:59.800 Many heroes died in the towers.

00:25:02.000 The firefighters.

00:25:03.000 The firefighters.

00:25:04.000 Undoubtedly, there were heroes among other people who were in the towers as well.

00:25:07.740 Well, cowards died in the towers.

00:25:11.360 Child molesters probably died in the towers.

00:25:13.660 And crooks died in the towers.

00:25:15.200 And they were all victims.

00:25:17.860 From the point of view of justice against the actual crime that was committed against

00:25:22.100 them by al-Qaeda, every one of them deserves to be avenged by a just system.

00:25:28.360 But being a victim does not make you a hero.

00:25:31.340 Yes.

00:25:31.620 You can't interchange those two terms.

00:25:34.520 But now, the two terms are completely synonymous.

00:25:37.500 And you'll notice in the case of Clarence Thomas, an heroic figure, I think, and a really

00:25:42.580 terrific figure, he never even got the statue to be taken down when they built the Black

00:25:47.280 History Museum.

00:25:47.980 Right.

00:25:48.320 That's right.

00:25:48.560 Which, by the way, I object to the Black History Museum, one, because the building is

00:25:52.100 hideous, and two, because it suggests that black people shouldn't be in the American History

00:25:55.960 Museum, right?

00:25:56.560 It's like it's a totally separate thing.

00:25:57.540 But when they built it, they utterly marginalized Clarence Thomas in it.

00:26:01.540 They gave Anita Hill better seating than they gave to this great conservative legalist.

00:26:06.740 Well, I think part of this has to do with the very structure of narrative in a world

00:26:11.440 in which heroism generally requires that you are defending something worthwhile.

00:26:15.740 Right.

00:26:15.820 That's what heroism generally requires.

00:26:17.280 But because we've removed values from our system, and we don't believe that there are

00:26:20.080 that many things that are worth defending anymore, now what heroism has been reduced to

00:26:23.220 is overcoming an obstacle.

00:26:24.220 The pathway to heroism is there's an obstacle, and you have to overcome it.

00:26:28.360 So victimhood is inherently part of that process, right?

00:26:30.880 If there's no obstacle for you to overcome, you're not a hero in this particular vision.

00:26:35.160 Now, the way that we used to define heroism typically is, like, for example, if you asked

00:26:40.740 me who my heroes are, I would say my parents.

00:26:42.720 The obstacles they had to overcome, pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

00:26:46.000 Right.

00:26:46.080 They lived in the freest country in the history of the world.

00:26:48.180 They lived in a household where they loved each other.

00:26:50.060 They were middle income, and then over time grew to be upper middle income.

00:26:54.840 And the obstacles they had to overcome were sort of everyday obstacles.

00:26:57.480 They're my heroes because what they were defending was hearth and home and family, and they were

00:27:01.240 raising children in a traditional way.

00:27:03.320 But that's not heroism that makes movies, right?

00:27:05.760 The heroism that makes movies is something bad happened to X.

00:27:08.500 And what we've so become addicted to victimhood that we now prize victimhood above everyday

00:27:12.840 heroism to the extent that if you make a victim of yourself through your own choices,

00:27:16.280 you are considered more heroic than the person who actually acts responsibly.

00:27:20.100 So, for example, my parents, again, married, and this is true for literally hundreds of

00:27:24.660 millions of people across the United States, black, white, and green.

00:27:27.320 The people who are championed in the movies and on TV are single.

00:27:31.000 You will never see two-parent families championed as a heroic story.

00:27:34.400 You'll see a single mother championed as a heroic story because single mothers are overcoming

00:27:39.180 an obstacle.

00:27:39.760 Now, in many of those cases, the obstacle was self-made, but it's still overcoming an obstacle.

00:27:44.220 And so victimhood is so tied into our narrative structure, it's hard to overcome.

00:27:47.580 You're making a wonderful point about victimhood because so much of this, as we constantly

00:27:50.860 are saying, is a perversion of Christianity.

00:27:53.160 And one of the things that built Christianity was martyrdom.

00:27:55.660 And the idea of martyrdom was that you were willing, that you had something beyond life

00:27:59.640 itself that was more valuable than life itself, and were willing to actually stand there and

00:28:03.740 be eaten by a lion, which sounds incredibly disgusting and painful to me, because you were

00:28:08.520 defending an idea.

00:28:10.040 Now, that is a beautiful thing.

00:28:11.280 People who die for ideas.

00:28:12.420 I mean, I'm Martin Luther King, who says, look, they're going to kill me, but I've done

00:28:15.320 an important thing.

00:28:16.420 This does move you.

00:28:17.600 But when you take the values out of it, what are you?

00:28:20.180 What are you?

00:28:20.580 But this is exactly, so the George Floyd situation is a perfect example of this, right?

00:28:24.740 I mean, Rosa Parks is a person who made a sacrifice, a planned sacrifice, which, by

00:28:28.240 the way, I don't think makes her sacrifice any lesser.

00:28:30.200 In fact, I think it makes it smarter, right?

00:28:31.340 They actually planned it out in advance, and it was an actual smart thing they did.

00:28:34.720 She actually made a sacrifice.

00:28:36.140 Martin Luther King made sacrifices, right?

00:28:37.540 There are many people over the course of the civil rights movement who have made actual sacrifices in

00:28:40.920 pursuit of a higher ideal.

00:28:41.660 Also, George Floyd did not willingly make a sacrifice in pursuit of a higher ideal.

00:28:45.680 George Floyd did not die for an idea.

00:28:46.920 Correct.

00:28:47.280 He died.

00:28:47.900 He died committing a crime.

00:28:48.780 He died, I mean, almost undoubtedly, at least in part by accident, even though he was convicted

00:28:54.060 of, Chauvin was convicted of first-degree murder.

00:28:57.480 Yeah.

00:28:57.720 But the reality is that even if he was convicted of first-degree, even if it was a murder, he

00:29:01.920 didn't die because he willingly went to his death in order to achieve acts, right?

00:29:05.280 And again, this is not a rip on George Floyd.

00:29:06.900 It's a rip on Nancy Pelosi, who literally declared that he was a martyr in the same way

00:29:10.280 that people have martyred themselves.

00:29:12.420 To be a martyr means to stand for a higher ideal and then die for that higher ideal, not

00:29:16.180 to die, and then be retroactively considered a martyr because the ideal that you can now

00:29:20.760 propagate off the death of that person is a benefit to you.

00:29:23.260 But isn't this just evidence that, as the great political philosopher Bob Dylan points

00:29:27.360 out, everybody's got to serve somebody, and we now pretend that we're an irreligious,

00:29:31.840 totally secular country, total separation of church and state.

00:29:35.080 We have a very rigid liturgical calendar.

00:29:38.000 We're in the holy month of pride right now.

00:29:39.940 We've got new liturgical saint feast days added all the time.

00:29:43.480 We just had a new one added.

00:29:44.740 And it's just, I'm not even really knocking it in as much as man has religious longings.

00:29:49.240 We obviously long for something beyond this mortal point.

00:29:51.200 By the way, you're totally right about that.

00:29:52.760 One of the things that's driven me up a wall, and it is being, like, people refuse to acknowledge

00:29:57.540 this, is there's this move that is now being made all the time, that somebody will, Ron

00:30:02.040 DeSantis will sign a bill saying that women can have their own leagues and men don't compete

00:30:06.260 in those leagues.

00:30:06.880 And people will go, during Pride Month?

00:30:09.860 During Pride Month?

00:30:11.880 Or how dare you sign a bill against critical race theory during Black History Month?

00:30:17.360 On Juneteenth, right?

00:30:18.900 You saw Eric Adams did this.

00:30:19.860 Eric Adams is like, did you even see that Catherine Garcia and Anastasia?

00:30:22.760 Andrew Yang were campaigning against me together on Juneteenth?

00:30:26.060 It was like, I wasn't aware that Juneteenth was established specifically to prevent people

00:30:28.780 from campaigning against you because you're black.

00:30:30.400 That's weird.

00:30:31.760 But that is treated in the same way that Jews treat, like, I can't believe that they started

00:30:36.780 a war on Yom Kippur, you know, like the holiest day in the Jewish calendar in 1973, right?

00:30:41.400 Those aren't the same thing.

00:30:42.680 Like, if you're going to have a Pride Month because you want to demonstrate that you're out

00:30:47.540 and you're proud, fine, whatever.

00:30:49.920 Although I think that the country declaring Pride Months of any sort, like literally any

00:30:53.320 sort, divisive and silly.

00:30:54.600 Yeah, it was like a gluttony month.

00:30:55.600 Humility month.

00:30:56.440 But putting that aside, the notion that, like, we can now use this as a cudgel to beat you

00:31:01.540 and claim that you're a bigot because you're doing it during Pride.

00:31:03.820 I mean, it obviously is religious treatment of a rather irreligious subject.

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00:32:17.700 my staff has to work around all of my laziness and bad attitude and agoraphobia, I think it's

00:32:23.700 fair to say, agoraphobia, but also because time is money, because getting in your car, driving

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00:33:11.180 Never go to the post office again.

00:33:13.640 I won't.

00:33:14.840 You know, is it what's funny about your...

00:33:16.040 I'd like to bring the conversation back to Knowles' book, and I'd like to mention the

00:33:22.760 title of the book, but it keeps spinning around so I can't...

00:33:24.760 Oh, it's speechless.

00:33:25.380 It's speechless there.

00:33:26.880 I'm sorry, I've only got the back cover, but you know, it seems to me one of the greatest

00:33:30.680 acts of censorship that the left has performed, and maybe the essential, central act of censorship,

00:33:36.380 was under the guise of this made-up idea of the separation of church and state, was banning

00:33:42.380 the discussion of religion and the teaching of religion from the public square.

00:33:45.700 And we accepted this.

00:33:47.400 I think the right accepted this, and we thought, that's fair.

00:33:50.020 You know, why should one religion be put over another?

00:33:54.060 But in fact, in doing that, we gave up the entire argument for our country.

00:33:57.320 We gave up the essential argument for our country, and can no longer actually make the

00:34:01.340 argument for the rights enumerated, you know, for the ideas enumerated in the Constitution,

00:34:07.220 and also for the spirit expressed in the Declaration, all of which are dependent upon the idea that

00:34:13.240 our rights are God-given.

00:34:14.320 Well, if we had a true separation of church and state, which is a preposterous idea, by

00:34:18.620 the way, and I debunk it in this book.

00:34:22.180 What's the book?

00:34:22.740 It's called Speechless Controlling, Words Controlling, Mindset, but you might not have

00:34:26.420 heard of it.

00:34:26.780 Even I'm tuning out at this point.

00:34:29.280 But if you really had a firm separation of church and state and religion really had to

00:34:34.600 be banned from the public square entirely, one could not read the Declaration of Independence

00:34:39.000 on the 4th of July or any other day.

00:34:40.960 And this is one of the shortcomings of sort of the assumptions that were made by the founders

00:34:45.080 in their time.

00:34:46.280 They assumed, because they say that they held particular truths to be self-evident, that

00:34:50.100 the waters in which they were swimming philosophically were common and well understood.

00:34:55.480 And so if you read the Declaration, you read the Constitution, they are implicitly filled

00:34:59.760 with all sorts of Judeo-Christian language.

00:35:01.720 And if you read the founders' language, they're constantly citing the Bible.

00:35:03.860 It's the number one most cited document in any of the founders' writing.

00:35:06.920 I mean, they've gone through all their writing, and they cite Locke sometimes, and they cite

00:35:10.000 a lot of Blackstone, and they cite various people.

00:35:13.140 But the number one document, by far, it's not close, is the Bible.

00:35:16.080 And that's because that was the sort of error that they actually were breathing all the

00:35:19.660 time.

00:35:20.440 And because that was implicit to them, but was not made explicit, there was a move to separate

00:35:26.820 off what was explicit from what was implicit.

00:35:29.000 And we lost what was implicit.

00:35:30.160 And when you have only the explicit, but you lose the entire fundamental basis, the entire

00:35:33.260 thing collapse.

00:35:33.520 In the same way that when you look at Picasso's early work, it's just paintings, right?

00:35:37.500 When you listen to jazz, they're not playing the wrong notes.

00:35:42.220 In order to deconstruct something, in order to critique something, I'm a critic of a lot

00:35:50.120 of American evangelical theology.

00:35:55.260 Because I teach the Bible.

00:35:56.840 But you have to actually know something before you can criticize something, before you can deconstruct

00:36:02.060 something.

00:36:02.180 There's a lot of value in critical thinking.

00:36:04.480 There's a lot of value.

00:36:05.480 The founders, if you take, you know, Adams famously said to Thomas Jefferson, if the two

00:36:09.680 of us were to behold the Shekinah glory, we still would be skeptical.

00:36:13.600 Like, they weren't religious in the way that we think of people being religious.

00:36:19.820 In some ways, they were far more religious, though, because they took a position of critiquing

00:36:25.840 certain ideas from deep understanding, from deep literacy.

00:36:30.040 But more than that, and it applies to you, too, is that you actually believe in the Bible

00:36:36.300 so that we're arguing about something.

00:36:38.120 It's a common frame of reference.

00:36:40.140 We have a common frame of reference and of faith, and of faith.

00:36:42.900 So that if we get in an argument and I can cite a Bible verse, you have to respond with

00:36:47.600 a Bible verse.

00:36:48.220 You cannot just say, oh, take that book away.

00:36:51.700 And I think that that's the position they've put us in, basically, is they've taken the book

00:36:55.160 away.

00:36:55.260 Yeah, and not just the Bible, although the Bible, fundamentally, that's the fundamental

00:36:59.360 document they've taken away.

00:37:00.740 But in taking away all of our understanding of our own history, they've given us just the

00:37:06.160 criticisms.

00:37:06.860 Yeah.

00:37:07.340 But what they think they're doing is criticizing.

00:37:09.100 What they're really doing is playing wrong notes.

00:37:10.420 But it's also even...

00:37:11.260 They didn't bother to learn.

00:37:12.860 They didn't learn how to do it, yeah.

00:37:13.880 Even if you want to read criticism, I like reading criticism, right?

00:37:17.080 I mean, what the left has done is this little trick where they pretend that critical theory

00:37:21.420 is critical thinking.

00:37:22.860 And they've actually made this...

00:37:24.020 It's not.

00:37:24.720 It's its own horrific academic, pseudo-academic movement.

00:37:28.020 But in order to criticize something or to read criticism and commentary, as you say,

00:37:33.880 you need to know what you're talking about.

00:37:35.480 Even if you don't believe a single word of the Bible, you consider yourself the staunchest

00:37:39.780 atheist or the most tuned-out agnostic.

00:37:42.300 You simply cannot understand any work of literature or history, for that matter, for the most part,

00:37:48.020 if you haven't read the Bible.

00:37:49.460 And what is the one book that you're just not allowed to read in the public schools?

00:37:52.440 That's right, yeah.

00:37:53.020 It's the Bible, the foundation of the civilization.

00:37:55.400 There is a great line in G.K.

00:37:57.400 Chesterton, this is one of my favorite lines, because it concisely says what I'm always trying

00:38:01.940 to say, where he says, break the conventions, obey the commandments.

00:38:06.060 And in other words, there's plenty of room for originality.

00:38:09.800 There's plenty of room for criticism.

00:38:11.320 There's plenty of room for progress.

00:38:12.600 But all of it should be in keeping with the traditions that brought us here for the simple

00:38:16.380 reason is that's what gave us our values.

00:38:18.220 If we're arguing, the problem with the left is you're always arguing, they're arguing for

00:38:21.940 our values.

00:38:22.840 Yeah.

00:38:23.240 But they don't want any of the conventions or the commandments that bring us those.

00:38:27.720 So here's a question from a DailyWire.com subscriber.

00:38:30.720 You could become one right now and get 20% off if you head to DailyWire.com and use promo

00:38:34.680 code JUSTICE.

00:38:35.860 For the whole group, our tax money goes to pay for abortions, goes to pay for schools,

00:38:39.880 to brainwash our children, to bail out states that have crappy governance, among many other

00:38:44.280 issues we find stupid, evil, or both.

00:38:46.600 My question is, is there a line in the sand where we conservatives decide to stop paying

00:38:51.640 taxes?

00:38:52.780 Well, you put it that way.

00:38:53.800 Sign me up.

00:38:56.760 Sounds great.

00:38:57.680 I mean, so the reality is that the only reason that people pay taxes in the end is because

00:39:03.120 there's a giant gun attached to the other end of you not paying a tax.

00:39:06.080 Yeah.

00:39:06.240 I mean, the government has the power of compulsion.

00:39:09.420 The real question you're asking is, why would you obey the edicts of the federal government

00:39:12.660 and when does the federal government lose legitimacy?

00:39:14.700 That's really the underlying question to paying taxes.

00:39:16.760 Because let's face it, no one wants to pay taxes.

00:39:19.340 No one likes paying taxes.

00:39:20.520 I moved from California to Florida in part to avoid paying certain taxes.

00:39:23.260 So the answer to that is at the point where you do not have any other options except

00:39:30.200 to fight back.

00:39:31.300 And I don't think we're at that point yet.

00:39:32.480 Number one, because this country is so closely divided.

00:39:35.140 Number two, I think a lot of people just do not understand the arguments at all.

00:39:38.320 And our mission in part is to inform people and allow people to awaken to arguments they've

00:39:43.780 never heard before because all these institutions are so unbelievably dominated by the left.

00:39:47.800 And number three, I'm putting a lot of faith these days in states.

00:39:50.020 I just think that states are going to end up providing the only bulwark in the end against

00:39:53.960 the predations of the federal government, which is why it's wonderful that our company

00:39:58.580 is located in a state where Governor Lee is presiding.

00:40:01.300 It's wonderful that I live in a state where Governor DeSantis presides.

00:40:04.820 Drew, unfortunately, lives in a state where the governor either dressed in blackface or in

00:40:11.320 a KKK outfit and there is no third choice.

00:40:13.260 Which is worse.

00:40:15.280 Hey, we have the only black governor in America.

00:40:17.900 Oh, wow.

00:40:19.800 Wow, man.

00:40:20.400 But I think that the bottom line is, and I hear this argument about abortion also, you know,

00:40:24.620 people will be like, well, at one point you stand up and you do violence.

00:40:26.700 And the answer is when all other options are exhausted.

00:40:29.400 Read the Declaration of Independence, right?

00:40:31.340 The founders were, the entire reason behind the Declaration was because they say that dissolving

00:40:38.300 the bonds that tie one people to another is such a significant, consequential act cannot

00:40:44.820 be taken lightly.

00:40:46.340 And so they have to make a robust defense of what they're about to do.

00:40:49.880 It's not just like, oh, we don't like it.

00:40:51.540 We don't like the cut of your jib.

00:40:52.440 We're kind of tired of this.

00:40:53.520 We don't like that you do some things that are, no, no, no.

00:40:55.820 It has to be, as you say, you have, it's like just war theory, right?

00:41:01.880 There are no other options.

00:41:03.040 Other options must have been exhausted.

00:41:03.980 And the other thing I want to point out to the people who suggest we need a national divorce,

00:41:09.000 first of all, there's no such thing as a peaceful national divorce.

00:41:11.940 That just doesn't happen.

00:41:13.080 So if you're actually saying you're willing to take up a gun and start shooting your relatives,

00:41:17.000 I don't think we're there yet.

00:41:18.320 I don't want to do that.

00:41:19.460 I think we should not be as flippant about it.

00:41:21.280 But also, they're making the same mistake that has caused us to lose every single aspect of the country.

00:41:27.800 Namely, they're saying, let's disengage.

00:41:30.040 Let's just give up.

00:41:31.280 How about we just do what these parents are doing at the local school boards and go in and say,

00:41:35.780 no, you don't have the right to completely pervert my country.

00:41:38.420 Oh, my gosh.

00:41:39.100 We've got video of one of these fathers speaking out against critical race theory.

00:41:42.740 If you guys didn't see them, you probably talked about it on your shows.

00:41:44.540 This is so good, though.

00:41:45.740 Can we play that?

00:41:47.400 The only race it is is the human race.

00:41:49.120 I never raised my sons to see anybody as a color.

00:41:52.200 The color was never even discussed in my house at all.

00:41:55.080 All we know is that as children grow, they just see other kids, and they'll just immediately start playing.

00:42:00.120 There is no child see them and like, why is his skin color like that of mine?

00:42:03.360 We never discussed that.

00:42:04.700 When it all comes down to it, people are just people.

00:42:07.060 My sons never had a talk about white people, about Asian people.

00:42:10.040 All they know is that they were people.

00:42:11.920 They were their friends.

00:42:12.660 They played with them.

00:42:13.320 They never once came home and said, dad, my white friend across the street, they just said my friends.

00:42:17.880 This is happening all across the country, parents standing up at school board meetings and objecting for the first time.

00:42:23.600 Michael, you bring up this idea that disengagement is a conservative predisposition, and it's the reason that we lose.

00:42:31.380 I've been talking for a long time.

00:42:32.760 I think that one of the major problems in American conservatism is that American conservatism is largely comprised of American Christians.

00:42:39.400 American evangelicals have a multi-hundred-year tradition or longer of being obsessed with eschatology, being obsessed with the idea that the world is going to end right away.

00:42:52.040 Christ is going to come back, and justice is going to be wrought on the earth.

00:42:56.080 Listen, I have no problem with eschatology.

00:42:59.120 I have a problem with a fixation on eschatology to the point that it causes you to remove yourself from reality.

00:43:06.780 So we're very good at winning elections.

00:43:09.640 There are more Democrats than there are Republicans in the country, and yet we disproportionately win presidential elections.

00:43:16.040 Why?

00:43:17.120 Well, because every election is the most important election of our lifetime, and the next election doesn't matter at all because Jesus is going to come back,

00:43:25.140 because I have a big supply of my patriot food buried in the backyard, and I have 10,000 rounds of .223 ammunition.

00:43:31.680 We're doomsdayers.

00:43:33.180 These are all good.

00:43:33.940 Hold on.

00:43:34.140 You're now convincing me of the other side.

00:43:35.600 We're doomsdayers, and we're not optimistic.

00:43:37.820 And my rebuke of the American evangelical tradition of eschatology is that God commands optimism from the very beginning of Genesis.

00:43:49.320 Be fruitful and multiply as a commandment that predates sin entering the world.

00:43:53.260 Hope is a theological virtue.

00:43:54.520 Hope is a theological virtue.

00:43:56.580 Lift up now thine eyes is one of the most recurring terms in the book of Genesis, meaning from the very beginning,

00:44:02.520 God is saying, have optimism, look toward a future.

00:44:06.200 And it's one of the great ironies that the left is more optimistic about the future than conservatives.

00:44:12.280 We disengage.

00:44:13.400 They plant seeds for generations.

00:44:15.520 They plant.

00:44:16.480 They sow a harvest that they will not reap for 40 years.

00:44:20.280 We disengage, and then we're surprised when they win.

00:44:22.140 This is exactly right.

00:44:23.320 But I think it's inherent in conservatism to a certain degree.

00:44:26.240 There's a wonderful Gilbert and Sullivan line, every child that's born alive is either born a little liberal or a little conservatize.

00:44:32.700 And I think that there's something to that, because one of the things that a conservative can see is that if you pull the string, the suit might fall apart.

00:44:40.880 That any little thing that you do might cause the destruction of everything we have.

00:44:44.340 And so they've kind of got a negative point of view, not to mention any names.

00:44:48.500 But no, you know, I think there's...

00:44:50.360 I'm so much more pessimistic.

00:44:51.920 It's true.

00:44:52.400 Jeremy and I, this is the nature of our friendship, is that basically we get on the phone, and we're going to have a nice, uplifting conversation.

00:44:57.780 How bad do you think it's going to go?

00:44:59.360 It's going to be so much worse than that.

00:45:00.660 I have no idea.

00:45:02.540 It's true.

00:45:02.960 They compete.

00:45:03.760 And I think that that leads to people.

00:45:05.580 I hear this from conservatives all the time.

00:45:07.240 It's over.

00:45:07.940 Forget it.

00:45:08.480 You want to fight?

00:45:09.200 Forget it.

00:45:09.600 It's over.

00:45:09.860 And my family, when we sink into the mud, the last thing you're going to see is my career.

00:45:14.100 Although what's ironic about that is that actually of the people on this particular show, the two who kept arguing that there will be future elections are actually the supposed two pessimists in the room.

00:45:23.040 But when it comes to the sort of argument over what we can do at the local level, I mean, I'm so heartened by the anti-CRT movement.

00:45:32.200 I'm saying it's most heartened.

00:45:33.120 I've been more heartened, actually, I think, than the Tea Party movement.

00:45:35.760 The Tea Party movement was a, quote, unquote, small government movement.

00:45:38.560 It disbanded basically upon Republicans winning back office in 2010, and the Republicans took the heart right out of it because they kept spending.

00:45:45.840 And so there was no fight back.

00:45:47.880 And maybe there was never going to be any fight back or any way to fight back against that because when you're in Congress, your job is to, quote, unquote, get things done as opposed to having a mandate to not get things done, which is really what the mandate was in 2010.

00:45:58.120 But what we are seeing right now on the local level with people saying this cannot go any further is a wonderful and fruitful pushback that we are seeing from all sides of the political aisle.

00:46:09.740 And I will say I am really optimistic about 2022.

00:46:13.740 I'm optimistic about 2024.

00:46:15.280 I'm optimistic that the American people are starting to have enough of this crap because if you look at the polls on things like CRT, they are devastating for the Democrats.

00:46:23.600 There's a reason why in the last week alone, the Democrats have decided that suddenly voter ID, which was Jim Crow until the last 27 seconds, is now OK with them.

00:46:32.320 Stacey Abrams, I was never against voter ID, assuming, of course, that we are like guppies and have short term memory loss and Raphael Warnock doing the same thing in Georgia.

00:46:40.320 When the Democrats are starting to back off of their defund the police nonsense and because Eric Adams, of course, is probably going to win the mayoralty in New York running on the basis that we need stronger law enforcement, weaker law enforcement.

00:46:50.760 And you're starting to see Democrats go out there like Maisie Hirono, who's a nut, saying we're not the party of defund the police.

00:46:55.520 And Jen Psaki getting up and saying, no, it's the Republicans who are really.

00:46:58.240 She said this.

00:46:58.880 I'm not kidding.

00:46:59.600 She said it's the Republicans who are probably the party of defund the police.

00:47:03.100 They're starting to reverse on their own key principles because it turns out that once again, because American politics is so reactive, Democrats didn't understand their mandate.

00:47:12.100 When Trump lost in 2020, the mandate was don't be that guy.

00:47:15.480 But it was not get rid of all of his policies.

00:47:17.580 Americans broadly liked his policies.

00:47:19.040 They just had problems with him personally.

00:47:20.760 And Biden gets in.

00:47:21.900 He's like, well, it seems like my mandate is to, you know, and also and cream of wheat and come out and nuke America.

00:47:29.220 And everybody's like, whoa, dude, that's not what you were elected for.

00:47:32.080 Could he please not nuke us?

00:47:33.380 By the way, that was the most insane thing.

00:47:36.360 I'm so confused.

00:47:37.440 Like, so it was a huge controversy when apparently Donald Trump at one point allegedly suggested nuking a hurricane.

00:47:42.760 He didn't suggest nuking every gun owner in America.

00:47:46.120 Hands up, don't nuke.

00:47:47.080 That's what we're all saying now.

00:47:48.200 The president of the United States literally said yesterday that you shouldn't own guns or care about owning guns because, after all, if you got in a shooting war with us, we will send our F-15s and nuke you.

00:47:58.500 Ben, I've never wanted a gun more than this.

00:48:00.180 And the Taliban laughed.

00:48:00.960 I've got to stop you right there before we say too many mean things about Joe Biden, because, you know, look, I, my first book, my blank book was endorsed by the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, who reasons to vote for young men.

00:48:13.660 It's a great book for your reading enjoyment.

00:48:15.020 My new book, Speechless, actually did receive an endorsement from the sitting president of the United States, Joe Biden.

00:48:23.520 Take a listen.

00:48:25.680 Mike Knows wrote a book called Speechless Control.

00:48:28.600 Word Control.

00:48:29.860 Mindless.

00:48:30.580 Thank you, thank you, thank you.

00:48:32.080 For sharing the powerful story and for helping the country understand what's happening here.

00:48:38.740 And in case you were wondering.

00:48:40.240 He's a great and gifted writer.

00:48:41.960 I really mean it.

00:48:42.860 The honesty with which he stepped forward and talked about the problem and the hope that it gave me hope reading it.

00:48:51.740 True international depression.

00:48:54.280 Thank you, Mr. President.

00:48:55.880 And you're welcome.

00:48:59.200 That is amazing.

00:49:00.240 And also, I'm a little miffed that our editing team spent so much time on that.

00:49:04.960 Pretty obvious.

00:49:05.520 That was kind of worth it, actually.

00:49:07.520 Now, the amazing thing about that is that you could have just gone directly to Biden and asked him to say that.

00:49:12.680 Oh, yeah.

00:49:13.340 And he would have just said it.

00:49:14.460 Some version of it.

00:49:15.060 And then he would not have understood that he said it.

00:49:17.660 I mean, as I'm constantly saying, Joe Biden, it must be like a wonderful thing to be Joe Biden, right?

00:49:21.600 You wake up every morning and somebody tells you you're president.

00:49:23.960 That's just unbelievable.

00:49:24.780 I am.

00:49:25.800 That's wonderful.

00:49:26.640 I always wanted to be president.

00:49:27.440 I've always wanted to be president.

00:49:28.840 Here's a question for the group from our dailywire.com subscribers.

00:49:31.760 Do you think conservatives have a blind spot in video games and gaming culture the same way that we did in education and Hollywood?

00:49:39.020 Absolutely.

00:49:39.620 Tell us video games.

00:49:40.200 I do.

00:49:40.460 I am a video gamer, and I love them, and I think that they have been attacked by the woke, and they're trying to force them into wokeness, and they've succeeded to a certain degree.

00:49:51.180 But they succeed in all these things because conservatives aren't paying attention.

00:49:54.740 Video games are more popular than Hollywood.

00:49:56.820 They have been more popular than Hollywood for maybe 10 years.

00:49:59.620 They make more money than Hollywood.

00:50:01.060 They engage the imagination in a unique and original way.

00:50:06.660 They take people into what are usually acts of heroism against evil, so they're inherently conservative.

00:50:13.460 They're inherently religious in some certain sense.

00:50:16.340 They're a wonderful tool, and they bring young men into experiences, I think, that train them to the heroic mind.

00:50:26.480 And they're fun.

00:50:27.400 And they're fun, and they're artistic when they're done really well.

00:50:29.920 When I was in Afghanistan, a sentence I always like to say because I feel like Dr. Watson, when I was in Afghanistan, but I would see the soldiers go out and literally get shot at and then come back and play video games where they got shot at.

00:50:41.340 And I think that they were actually, you know, a way of training themselves to the heroic mindset.

00:50:46.680 And, yeah, they can be an art form.

00:50:48.940 They have once or twice elevated themselves to an art form.

00:50:52.220 And I think that they bring people, young men especially, into an imaginative world that can be very, very fruitful.

00:51:00.480 Obviously, they can be overplayed and overdone.

00:51:02.580 But we don't pay attention to any of this stuff, and it just drives me nuts.

00:51:05.840 So I want to talk about privacy because you are on the Internet.

00:51:10.560 That's how you engage with us.

00:51:12.680 And when you're on the Internet, your privacy is at risk.

00:51:15.820 We all take risks every day when we go online, whether we think about it or whether we don't.

00:51:19.980 We think our connection probably won't be interrupted by hackers.

00:51:22.680 We think our data probably won't be used against us.

00:51:24.740 But if you're using the Internet without ExpressVPN, it's like you're driving a car with no insurance.

00:51:30.760 Why would you take that risk?

00:51:32.060 Every time you connect to an unencrypted network at cafes, at hotels, at airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your private data, whether it's your passwords, your financial details, Michael Knowles' cell phone number, any of it.

00:51:45.060 Which we'll just give out.

00:51:46.900 Exactly.

00:51:48.820 ExpressVPN acts as an online insurance.

00:51:50.840 It creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet so that hackers can't steal your personal data.

00:51:57.040 It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.

00:52:02.960 And ExpressVPN is simple to use on all of your devices.

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00:52:09.580 Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash backstage.

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00:52:26.900 Don't drive without a seatbelt.

00:52:29.020 Don't drive without insurance.

00:52:30.700 Don't use the Internet without ExpressVPN.

00:52:34.280 Michael, I used up all my energy.

00:52:37.200 What do you want to talk about?

00:52:37.740 I'm glad that we focused on a little bit of hope because I do feel, you know, as you point out this line, my priest, Father George Rutler, has this line.

00:52:48.960 He says, difference between a Scottish optimist and a Scottish pessimist.

00:52:51.720 Scottish optimist says, or Scottish pessimist rather says things can't get any worse.

00:52:55.360 Scottish optimist says, oh, yes, they can.

00:52:57.380 And we do it all the time.

00:52:58.760 And I think there actually is great cause for hope.

00:53:02.040 One of my fears for 2022 and 2024, I think we could easily retake the House.

00:53:08.140 And I think that we could do well in 2024 if the elections are fair.

00:53:11.720 And I know we're not allowed to make any comments, you know, out of the big tech to shut us down.

00:53:15.820 But I'm just pointing out there's always fraud in elections.

00:53:18.340 Both sides are always trying to game the system.

00:53:21.180 And Democrats took a huge advantage by pushing widespread mail-in voting in some places in contravention of state constitutions, by pushing ballot harvesting, by pushing motor voter laws.

00:53:30.680 They've been doing this for decades, right?

00:53:31.860 This is nothing really new.

00:53:33.340 And I was really pleased to see that the Republicans on Capitol Hill have shut down the biggest election power grab that we have seen from Democrats possibly ever.

00:53:45.420 S1 and H.R. won the Corrupt Politicians Act.

00:53:47.640 But they had to.

00:53:49.000 You should have called it.

00:53:50.420 I'm very down on the Republican Party and our elected officials.

00:53:54.160 You know, during the first two years of the Trump administration, we controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress.

00:54:00.100 Republicans have controlled the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature in Texas for 19 years uninterrupted.

00:54:06.520 And what do we do when we have power?

00:54:08.840 Virtually nothing.

00:54:10.220 And everyone will always tell you why.

00:54:12.480 Well, there was this mitigating circumstance.

00:54:14.440 You know, we needed one more vote or we needed one more this.

00:54:17.380 At a certain point, though, you have to just realize, oh, no, they do exactly what they want to do.

00:54:25.140 They don't want to do anything that changes the fundamental argument in the country.

00:54:30.620 So, for example, the most unifying issue among Republicans is the abortion issue, the most important social issue, certainly, of the last half century.

00:54:40.960 If the right, if our politicians actually act decisively against abortion, then there's no reason to vote for them anymore.

00:54:49.420 I honestly think they think this way.

00:54:51.400 So, of course, they stood up and did the right thing where the Corrupt Politicians Act is concerned because they personally have something to lose.

00:54:58.800 If they let the Democrats completely remake elections in the country, they might lose their power to tell us they're going to do a bunch of things that they'll never, ever, ever do.

00:55:07.040 By the way, notice this issue that you're talking about, abortion.

00:55:09.920 This is the one issue that basically all the conservatives can agree on.

00:55:14.160 Notice, we've actually made some progress on abortion.

00:55:17.600 We've at least held the line.

00:55:19.080 Notice that that is basically the one issue that conservatives argue from the standpoint of justice.

00:55:25.280 So many other issues we argue from this kind of utilitarian or argument from efficiency.

00:55:30.460 Well, you go work around the edges and you increase efficiency.

00:55:33.160 But abortion is just, no, this is wrong and we're going to stand against it.

00:55:36.960 And I'm noticing, especially those parents showing up to the school boards, they're making arguments.

00:55:40.800 This is wrong.

00:55:41.760 This is right.

00:55:42.640 And we're going to stand for what's right.

00:55:43.620 Because they're humans.

00:55:45.200 They're not politicians.

00:55:46.040 They're not pundits.

00:55:46.920 They're actual people who want their children to be taught moral things.

00:55:50.060 And you're absolutely right about this.

00:55:51.720 And the other thing that I will say, because what you just said, I could not agree with more,

00:55:56.780 except that I do believe we are asking Republicans to do something that goes against the nature of politicians.

00:56:02.120 We're asking them to have less power.

00:56:03.900 And that means that they're paddling upstream while the left is riding the rapids right downstream.

00:56:09.880 And I think that is a more difficult job.

00:56:12.220 So here's a great question from a DailyWire.com subscriber.

00:56:14.780 At what point do we stop pointing out the left's hypocrisy?

00:56:17.940 They couldn't care less, and the sheep will never acknowledge the hypocrisy anyway.

00:56:22.520 Are we doing the wrong thing to point out that they're hypocrites?

00:56:24.540 I think it's important because there are a group of people in the middle who are under the fundamental assumption that the left is moral and the right is immoral.

00:56:31.560 Because that's the line that the left is consistently pushing.

00:56:34.460 So when you point out their hypocrisy, you're basically saying, no, you don't hold any sort of moral high ground, particularly on these principles that you yourself do not hold.

00:56:42.800 But the general critique, which is that the right needs to stop whining about the left being hypocritical and instead needs to just fight the left on its own terms, I think that there is certainly some truth to that.

00:56:53.040 I think that can go too far, and I'm a little afraid of that because I think that there is a push on the right right now to subvert our own fundamental principles with regard to, for example, liberalism on things like free speech in order to, quote, unquote, fight the left.

00:57:05.340 And that does not mean that there aren't things that we can do.

00:57:07.220 There are 100% things that we can do.

00:57:08.880 But I think that very often, on the positive side, the critique of hypocrisy suggests that you shouldn't try to shame people who can't be shamed, which I agree with.

00:57:19.460 On the other side, it seems to me that very often people who want to critique the right for pointing out hypocrisy really wants to subvert the fundamental principle, which is that there should be an evenly held standard across both right and left.

00:57:30.840 Instead, what they say is, OK, well, if the left is going to be hypocrites about things, then we should do.

00:57:34.080 We might as well just club them in the face using equally deplorable tactics.

00:57:37.520 Did you notice that I have some problems with them?

00:57:39.120 The problem with the hypocrisy argument, though, is it too often accepts the values of the left.

00:57:43.680 Yes, that's for sure true.

00:57:44.440 So if the left says, you know, we have strong women and we say, well, Hillary just married into power and our women are stronger,

00:57:52.600 and you think, well, maybe the answer is that strength is not the only virtue.

00:57:55.960 Maybe strength is a male virtue and there are other...

00:57:58.080 We tell this to Caitlyn Jenner a lot, right?

00:57:59.460 Yeah.

00:57:59.680 Where they would say, they would be using the argument, they're constantly saying, well, you know, when you critique anybody who's transgender, it's because you're transphobic.

00:58:05.120 And then they would critique Caitlyn Jenner and be like, well, now who's the transphobe?

00:58:08.260 You're the real transphobe.

00:58:09.040 You're the real transphobe.

00:58:09.980 Did you see the argument when the Supreme Court cases came out and Amy Coney Barrett voted to not take this case on Obamacare?

00:58:19.680 Right.

00:58:19.800 The third attempt to overturn Obamacare and the court didn't want to take it.

00:58:22.500 And there were some conservatives who came out and said, ha ha, oh, the left is going to be so embarrassed because they said that ACB was going to be the vote against Obamacare.

00:58:32.080 Ha, we showed them, take that libs.

00:58:34.200 And I think, well, if we keep owning the libs by upholding Obamacare, we're not going to have any conservative movement left.

00:58:39.680 However, I will say that Senator Whitehouse represents many, not many, but several liberals who I know belongs to an all-white club.

00:58:50.280 The guy's a thug to begin with.

00:58:51.600 He's been committing thuggery against the Supreme Court, trying to intimidate them into giving leftist decisions.

00:58:58.640 And now we find out he belongs to an all-white club.

00:59:01.020 And he says, well, it's a tradition.

00:59:02.680 Yeah, you know, it is.

00:59:04.140 And my feeling about that is you should have the right, you should definitely have the right to belong to an all-white club or a club that doesn't let Jews in or a club that doesn't let anyone you want.

00:59:11.260 But it means you're a schmuck.

00:59:12.460 But here's the thing about this.

00:59:14.900 OK, so this whole story is bizarre to me.

00:59:16.940 The reason this whole story is bizarre to me is because it is illegal to have an all-white club in the United States.

00:59:21.240 OK, it is patently illegal.

00:59:22.180 It is illegal under the Civil Rights Act.

00:59:23.220 You cannot have a club in the United States that bars black people explicitly.

00:59:27.040 That is not allowed.

00:59:28.640 So the reason it is an all-white club, it does not have explicit rules barring black members.

00:59:34.120 OK, because that would be illegal under both state and federal discrimination laws.

00:59:37.300 Instead—

00:59:37.820 Are you sure about that?

00:59:38.520 Yes.

00:59:38.800 A private club?

00:59:39.400 Yes.

00:59:39.620 I know a couple of private clubs that actually do have that.

00:59:41.740 That explicitly bar black people?

00:59:43.060 Well, they make it impossible.

00:59:44.380 OK, that's a different thing.

00:59:45.500 OK.

00:59:45.620 So this club apparently had rules for admission that they said they've had black members in the past.

00:59:50.940 They don't have black members now.

00:59:52.140 OK, so what Sheldon Whitehouse could have said, were he an honest human being, is our club have standards.

00:59:56.720 Sometimes there are black people who meet those standards.

00:59:58.680 Sometimes there are black people who don't meet those standards.

01:00:00.500 But the problem is he can't make that defense.

01:00:03.040 Right?

01:00:03.340 Because that defense—this is the point that everybody seems to be missing.

01:00:05.900 He couldn't make that defense because on a principled level, he cannot argue for standards based on merit.

01:00:11.520 Because if he makes an argument on standards based on merit, he undercuts his entire agenda.

01:00:15.660 That's right.

01:00:15.960 So this is how a club that is not officially all-white transforms into a quote-unquote all-white club,

01:00:21.340 even though all-white clubs are illegal in the United States.

01:00:23.920 So I agree.

01:00:24.420 I don't think all-white clubs should be illegal in the United States, but they are.

01:00:27.640 I think the Civil Rights Act actually has—

01:00:29.700 I agree with you also.

01:00:30.700 I mean, I've been a longtime proponent of freedom of association,

01:00:34.540 which was ended in the private sphere by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

01:00:37.540 And I think that that's a problem, but I want to know who the assholes are.

01:00:41.420 I want you to go to an all-white club so that I can go,

01:00:44.800 Oh, great.

01:00:45.820 There's an—I don't want to have to deal with this human.

01:00:48.220 But this is such a club against the right.

01:00:50.540 Do you remember they did this to Rand Paul?

01:00:53.260 And they do it often to people who make arguments for free association,

01:00:57.700 often on libertarian grounds.

01:00:58.800 You just make it on plain constitutional grounds, but on libertarian grounds.

01:01:01.600 And so you get perfectly amiable libertarian like Rand Paul.

01:01:06.260 And during his first rise to the Senate, you remember they said,

01:01:10.580 Well, Senator Paul, we're going to ignore what you're talking about right now on Obamacare or anything else.

01:01:14.940 Would you have voted for the Civil Rights Act?

01:01:18.160 And, you know, if you say no, or if you say I have certain problems with this,

01:01:22.480 your career is dead politically.

01:01:24.460 And yet, the arguments that Goldwater made at the time that kept him out of the presidency were quite right.

01:01:29.740 Yeah, I mean, you can see that there's certainly a central freedom.

01:01:32.120 Almost everything we're dealing with can really be traced back in some way to the Civil Rights Act.

01:01:35.280 I mean, this is the case that Christopher Caldwell makes in The Age of Entitlement, right?

01:01:38.120 Very good book.

01:01:38.600 And he's exactly right about it.

01:01:40.140 I mean, the fact is that you could say in 1964, on balance, it is so important to get rid of state-sponsored discrimination.

01:01:47.560 That is a temporary measure.

01:01:48.980 I will vote to curtail freedom of association.

01:01:52.140 And in fact, many of the proponents of the Civil Rights Bill suggested that this is going to be temporary.

01:01:56.480 In fact, Hubert Humphrey, right, one of the great proponents of the Civil Rights Bill,

01:01:59.360 suggested that it was never going to go as far as it has been taken in terms of legal precedent.

01:02:03.460 But to even point out that there are flaws in the Civil Rights Bill now is to suggest that you are indeed—

01:02:11.340 this is the game the left likes to play right now, is that if you are in favor of a right,

01:02:14.680 and the right can be misused, this means you are in favor of the misuse of the right.

01:02:18.320 That's right.

01:02:19.100 Right, which is just the greatest form of nonsense sophistry ever.

01:02:22.000 So as long as we're in the part of the show that's going to be clipped up by Media Matters

01:02:25.180 and shipped out to make us all more famous, here's the question.

01:02:28.260 If Juneteenth is a national holiday, why isn't Election Day a national holiday?

01:02:32.320 And wouldn't it allow us to finally say that we have ended voter suppression if it were?

01:02:36.880 Well, Juneteenth is a national holiday not because of the merits of Juneteenth.

01:02:41.000 I think people pointed out in Galveston, Texas, they said,

01:02:45.600 we've known about Juneteenth a long time.

01:02:47.220 That's true.

01:02:47.680 It was a local tradition in very small parts of the United States.

01:02:51.340 The reason that Juneteenth is a holiday is because it is being portrayed as a new National Independence Day.

01:02:57.640 The title of the bill was the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act,

01:03:00.660 and it's being promoted by people who are fans of critical race theory, who are fans of the 1619 Project.

01:03:05.840 It is a holiday that is being used to push resentment.

01:03:08.740 That's why the emoji on Twitter for Juneteenth was the red fist, right?

01:03:13.400 What is the symbol of communism, of black nationalism, had some other associations to it.

01:03:17.420 But it's a pretty good trick because, first of all, Trump supported making Juneteenth a national holiday.

01:03:20.920 And it is, you know, it's a good holiday.

01:03:23.760 It's just galling that it should be put forward by the people who haven't let black children go to school for a year and a half

01:03:29.280 and the people who have essentially destroyed the black family through their...

01:03:32.620 Well, I suppose this is the problem is people say, well, in theory, Juneteenth could be a good holiday.

01:03:36.940 And I say, sure, yeah, I guess if it were a holiday to acknowledge the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment.

01:03:41.400 But it just simply, in practice, is not that.

01:03:43.900 It's part of this broader leftist question.

01:03:45.080 Well, you actually can't have a holiday to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment

01:03:50.920 because that would acknowledge that at some point in the history, white people in America did something good about the issue.

01:03:56.020 As the sole person on the panel who probably would have voted for Juneteenth.

01:03:59.680 I mean, I thought Juneteenth is a fine national holiday.

01:04:01.700 I have no problem with it.

01:04:02.780 I really have no problem at all with Juneteenth.

01:04:04.660 In fact, I like the idea of a national holiday celebrating the greatness of a country that ended slavery through the death of hundreds of thousands of citizens.

01:04:11.560 I mean, I think we all agree with that idea.

01:04:13.400 The fact that it was immediate, the left was, they had such buyer's remorse over Juneteenth.

01:04:18.740 If you watch the media, they got angry that the Republicans had voted for Juneteenth.

01:04:23.580 They were mad about it.

01:04:24.460 They were like, well, yes, but there's so much more to do.

01:04:26.920 And Juneteenth is just a reminder of how much more there is to do.

01:04:29.280 Because you won't teach CRT.

01:04:30.920 Right.

01:04:31.280 And it's like, well, no, Juneteenth is a reminder of how amazing America is that we sacrifice several hundred thousand of our own people to end an evil institution.

01:04:38.240 But I will say that to Michael's point, that is what a good Juneteenth holiday would have been.

01:04:45.360 That's not actually what they have.

01:04:46.720 But we had these same arguments over MLK Day.

01:04:48.960 Okay, back in the 80s, we had these same arguments over MLK Day.

01:04:50.640 They didn't call it the MLK New National Independence Day.

01:04:53.760 Well, okay, so yes, but how many people have actually read the bill?

01:04:55.780 No one is going to call it the new National Independence Day, except for people who are like wild radicals.

01:05:00.660 Everybody else is just going to say, it's Juneteenth, I have the day off.

01:05:03.020 But don't you think—

01:05:04.100 In the same way that—and now what you're going to get is the same battle that the left has been losing over MLK for a while here, right?

01:05:10.420 Where they try to retcon MLK, right?

01:05:12.360 Where they say, well, this is their new thing.

01:05:14.240 MLK is going to be canceled, I think.

01:05:15.580 That's my prediction.

01:05:16.340 I agree with that because they've decided that the original iteration of Malcolm X was actually correct and that MLK is wrong.

01:05:21.980 But the original arguments over MLK Day were, it's going to promote radicalism, it's all about—and then what did it become?

01:05:28.000 It just became a simple tribute to the basic proposition in the I Have a Dream speech.

01:05:31.780 I mean, that's really what it became.

01:05:32.960 And that's what schoolchildren learned.

01:05:34.340 And you know what?

01:05:34.800 It's a pretty damn good thing that schoolchildren learned that since that is now the chief weapon being used against critical race theory.

01:05:40.760 So I think that Juneteenth is going to come out the same way.

01:05:43.460 I think what's going to end up happening is I think we're going to win this critical race theory fight, which is a revision of what Juneteenth actually is.

01:05:48.900 Juneteenth is a sign of American progress.

01:05:50.700 It is the Frederick Douglass fulfillment of the Independence Day pledge.

01:05:53.840 Frederick Douglass said, Independence Day doesn't apply to black people.

01:05:56.240 He said this before the Civil War because it didn't apply to black people because they were not independent.

01:05:59.740 They were slaves.

01:06:00.480 And then he said, but I trust that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States wrote a promissory note that's going to be cashed.

01:06:05.860 And Juneteenth is the cashing of the promissory note.

01:06:08.040 So that's wonderful.

01:06:08.800 Now we can also, so now we actually have, honestly, I like Juneteenth in the sense that now we can, I think with fairness, say to the left, we're celebrating Juneteenth because we celebrate July 4th.

01:06:20.000 So why won't you stand for the damned flag now?

01:06:22.560 Why are you kneeling for the flag?

01:06:23.860 You got to pick one.

01:06:24.720 You know, you like Juneteenth or you or you or you hate the flag.

01:06:27.600 You cannot do both.

01:06:28.400 I think you're much more optimistic, Ben, than people give you credit for.

01:06:31.840 Because the other aspect is they say, well, we need a holiday to celebrate the conclusion of the Civil War and what that gave us.

01:06:38.720 We already have that holiday.

01:06:39.980 That's actually what Memorial Day is.

01:06:41.880 It became more than that, but it was established after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

01:06:47.040 And I hope you're right, Ben.

01:06:49.000 I mean, I truly, that would be terrific.

01:06:50.800 But I do fear that there is this broad project that Hannah Nicole Jones put out in the 1619 Project, not so much to pervert facts, though she obviously did that in the thesis.

01:07:01.720 But as she said, the point of this is to reframe American history, to put slavery at the center of it.

01:07:07.300 And Obama said last year, he said Juneteenth, and maybe he'll lose this fight, but he said Juneteenth is not about a victory.

01:07:15.500 Juneteenth is only about the work that is done.

01:07:18.080 Here's the thing.

01:07:18.760 He lost the fight.

01:07:19.440 He lost the fight.

01:07:20.260 The fight's over.

01:07:20.800 When a thing becomes a holiday, nobody, except the Jews, celebrates holidays where you lose.

01:07:26.320 Right?

01:07:27.000 Seriously, like this is not a thing.

01:07:28.680 Like there's no holiday that America celebrates where we celebrate a bad thing about America.

01:07:34.000 Right?

01:07:34.240 Here's the day when we're going to celebrate all the crappy things about America.

01:07:37.220 So what people are going to take away from Juneteenth is this is the day America.

01:07:42.400 But what it will end up being for most children in the United States, I predict, and I don't think this is being too optimistic, I think it's pretty realistic, is it will be,

01:07:49.760 hey, look, I have a day off.

01:07:51.360 Why do I have a day off?

01:07:52.340 Because this is the day America ended slavery.

01:07:54.380 That's how people think.

01:07:55.320 That's as much deep as they go into politics.

01:07:57.360 And all these people who are like, and it's a reminder of the next hundred years of Reconstruction, people are going to be like, well, then why are we celebrating it?

01:08:04.620 See, this is the problem with the left's constant move.

01:08:06.620 They're constantly engaging in this self-defeating move, and it's kind of funny to watch.

01:08:09.420 They just did it this week with Carl Nassib, the linebacker for the Oakland Raiders or Las Vegas Raiders.

01:08:14.360 He came out as gay.

01:08:15.880 It's a historic moment.

01:08:17.180 He's this NFL player, active NFL player, comes out as gay.

01:08:20.700 Now, I thought to myself, well, first of all, there was this big hubbub over Michael Sam, you remember, back in 2013.

01:08:24.740 So I'm not sure what the deal was there.

01:08:27.180 But is it historic or is it not historic?

01:08:29.660 Because if it's historic, then you kind of have to say, hey, look how much more tolerant America has become of gay people in the United States that you have professional NFL players who are being celebrated for being gay in the United States in 2021.

01:08:43.560 Every time the left declares it's a historic moment, they immediately have to buy it back and go, oh, it's not historic because America, it just sucks even more.

01:08:49.460 This is why I agree with Ben on this.

01:08:51.320 I think that there is something galling.

01:08:53.760 Now we really need that ding.

01:08:55.480 Yeah, hold on a second here.

01:08:56.760 No, I think there is something galling about the Democrats using Juneteenth the way they are using it.

01:09:01.320 But there is a kind of time bomb in there that's going to blow up in their face.

01:09:04.600 I mean, they celebrate.

01:09:05.720 They celebrate so often, for instance, the Tuskegee Airmen who were heroes of mine because when I was flying planes,

01:09:11.100 I just loved all the different stories about fighter pilots because when you fly a plane, you suddenly realize fighter pilots are out of their minds.

01:09:18.760 They are the bravest people who ever lived.

01:09:21.040 And the only, seriously, the only person on Earth, on Earth, and I've met like every famous movie star there is,

01:09:27.040 the only person on Earth who ever overawed me was one of the Tuskegee Airmen who came on my show.

01:09:31.600 I think Harry Stewart was his name.

01:09:33.020 Yeah, unbelievable.

01:09:34.060 I was reduced to the level of like a stammering, you know, fanboy basically.

01:09:39.960 Because here was a guy who flew up into the air and fought Nazi pilots, some of the greatest fighter pilots ever,

01:09:46.160 and fought them in a country that wouldn't let him be who he was.

01:09:50.620 He had to fight just to become the pilot.

01:09:52.660 And he believed in that idea so much.

01:09:54.620 He believed in the country so much.

01:09:56.120 And he just said, I said to him, how could you go up and risk your life like that?

01:09:59.580 He said, I kept my eyes on the prize.

01:10:01.380 I kept my eyes on the prize because he knew the country was going to fulfill itself,

01:10:05.080 just like Martin Luther King knew the country and demanded the country fulfill itself.

01:10:08.720 And that blows up in the left's face again and again over time.

01:10:11.980 It's why they need Biden so badly.

01:10:13.680 Honestly.

01:10:14.260 Because Kamala Harris does not speak this language.

01:10:16.080 She does not speak this language.

01:10:17.280 Joe Biden, because he's an old school Democrat,

01:10:19.820 when he speaks about how he still is kind of patriotic about America,

01:10:23.960 I actually think that that is truer to kind of old Biden.

01:10:27.180 Yeah.

01:10:27.560 And I think that the hypercritical, critical race theory woke Biden that we're seeing right now,

01:10:32.020 it's almost, it's weird to watch him.

01:10:33.480 It's like he's speaking a second language.

01:10:34.660 He's uncomfortable.

01:10:34.920 He's speaking it awkwardly.

01:10:35.680 Whereas for Kamala Harris, that is first language, right?

01:10:38.260 Like when she's speaking about how America is great, that is second language to her.

01:10:41.600 When she's speaking about how America sucks, that's kind of first language to her.

01:10:44.080 And it is a generational difference.

01:10:45.640 I mean, Joe Biden was born in the 1940s.

01:10:47.440 So if you're born in the 1940s and you grew up in the United States in the 1950s and 60s,

01:10:51.740 no matter how far left you are, unless you're like full Howard's in,

01:10:55.180 you still have sort of a baseline appreciation for the United States.

01:10:57.620 Whereas if you grew up in the 60s and 70s, then you kind of have the opposite.

01:11:01.020 The first language you speak if you're on the left is how much America sucks.

01:11:03.940 This is a strange historical circumstance, by the way, that we've just had three boomer presidents.

01:11:10.200 Who were all born in the same year?

01:11:11.460 Who were all born in the same year.

01:11:13.060 And then we went back to a pre-boomer president.

01:11:17.160 That does actually worry me.

01:11:19.160 People don't really talk about this too much.

01:11:20.940 It does worry me a little bit about the future of the country.

01:11:23.300 I think that's 110, right?

01:11:26.860 But, you know, I think there's a reason for that.

01:11:28.820 And I think it's because I think that Americans think we can't take care of ourselves.

01:11:31.580 I think we are looking for parental figures.

01:11:33.520 And those parental figures are old because America is an older country now.

01:11:36.960 I mean, and so they're looking to old people to lead us and parent us

01:11:40.480 because finally they're realizing to a certain extent that the old people might know better than they do.

01:11:45.100 If they'd only realized that in the 60s, it would be a hell of a lot better off.

01:11:46.880 I actually want to correct myself.

01:11:48.600 I want to look at the numbers.

01:11:50.040 Obama might not be a boomer, right?

01:11:51.440 Obama's Gen X.

01:11:52.280 We had, it's actually stranger than what you outlined.

01:11:54.900 It is, yeah, yeah.

01:11:55.960 You had Bill Clinton, who I believe the year is 1942.

01:11:59.480 Yeah.

01:12:00.060 Clinton, born in 42, boomer.

01:12:02.280 George W. Bush, born in 1942, boomer.

01:12:05.880 Barack Obama, post-boomer.

01:12:08.040 Yes.

01:12:09.720 Donald Trump, born in 1942, the same age as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, boomer.

01:12:14.080 So we went forward a generation.

01:12:15.940 We went back to the boomers.

01:12:18.080 And now we've gone back even further to a pre-boomer.

01:12:21.420 For some, Joe Biden's older than Bill Clinton.

01:12:23.720 We've got to find the last Civil War veteran.

01:12:28.240 The last widow of a Civil War veteran just died.

01:12:31.260 I think that there's-

01:12:32.220 Before she could be elected president.

01:12:33.920 But think about that.

01:12:34.980 It makes a certain amount of sense because we're fighting all the old battles of the 60s still.

01:12:38.540 Yeah.

01:12:38.840 And we never got past that.

01:12:40.120 And so there's basically an empty generation of politicians between the age of about 68 and 30.

01:12:46.340 Like there's like this entire empty generation of politicians who were either sort of just kind of emptily following in the footsteps of the boomers.

01:12:52.580 But there was no harsh rejection of that so much.

01:12:56.340 And so it's-

01:12:57.540 There really has been a dearth in American life, right?

01:12:59.920 I mean, it's symptomatic of a culture that has serious decline issues.

01:13:03.500 Oh, absolutely.

01:13:03.960 So here's the question for the whole group.

01:13:05.360 Besides your own, which book from the other Daily Wire hosts is your favorite?

01:13:09.760 Oh, my goodness.

01:13:10.780 I hate to answer that because I'd have to say speechless because he's selling his book.

01:13:15.120 But I kind of like, you know, what's his name's right side of history?

01:13:19.940 That was pretty good, too.

01:13:21.520 Right side of history is good.

01:13:23.140 Mickey.

01:13:23.720 I have to say, you know, I really, I hate to give a sincere compliment of the gentleman on the stage here.

01:13:30.440 But I really have enjoyed all of your writing.

01:13:32.640 And Jeremy, you haven't published a book, but I have enjoyed your writing as well.

01:13:35.500 I have.

01:13:36.100 No, because even when I vigorously disagree with your outrageous heresy, it's very interesting to engage with.

01:13:41.600 And I learned something.

01:13:42.160 But I think my favorite one, beyond all the theological stuff that I love in Great Good Thing, beyond all that, I love Werewolf Cop.

01:13:51.740 I was going to say Werewolf Cop.

01:13:53.440 It's a great book.

01:13:54.760 I love it.

01:13:55.060 I love the title.

01:13:56.240 The title killed you and you probably sold a tenth of the copies.

01:13:59.460 There's the title that really killed me.

01:14:01.140 All the guys, you guys make fun of my titles.

01:14:02.440 That's the title that really killed me.

01:14:03.720 Werewolf Cop is a far better title than The Great Good Thing.

01:14:06.480 No.

01:14:07.400 Or your upcoming The Greater Gooder Thing.

01:14:10.100 You know, I've been sitting around stewing over this.

01:14:12.320 The Truth and Beauty is about Christ and Poetry.

01:14:14.160 It's about the truth and beauty.

01:14:16.020 It's a great title.

01:14:17.480 I don't think you understand what a title is.

01:14:19.460 Do you understand the titles are supposed to convey information?

01:14:22.560 Right?

01:14:22.980 Like, this is, like, you know, like, what the book's about.

01:14:25.340 Like, if I were to pick up a book called The Truth and Beauty.

01:14:27.220 It's about Jesus and Poetry.

01:14:27.960 It's the truth.

01:14:28.400 Well, how could I not see that?

01:14:29.480 Because it's not called Jesus and Poetry, Drew.

01:14:31.520 If you had called it Jesus and Poetry, I'd be like, oh, this is probably a book about Jesus and Poetry.

01:14:36.060 I think that the fundamental problem is that Drew is an old school writer who thinks that a title is part of the art.

01:14:42.340 I am a rich internet entrepreneur.

01:14:46.840 You understand that titles are headlines meant to elicit action from the audience.

01:14:51.640 Ten things you need to know about William Wordsworth.

01:14:54.000 Number eight will shock you.

01:14:55.200 Yes.

01:14:55.380 By Andrew Platham.

01:14:56.080 By Andrew Platham.

01:14:57.140 Thank you.

01:14:57.520 By the way, 100%.

01:14:59.360 I would publish that today.

01:15:01.440 Actually, the book that I like is also one of Drew's novels.

01:15:04.840 And as you did with me, the name completely escapes me.

01:15:08.000 But it is the newspaper man who's racing to stop.

01:15:11.720 Oh, the true crime.

01:15:12.620 Yeah.

01:15:13.520 Yeah, true crime is great.

01:15:15.180 Oh, thanks.

01:15:15.540 And the characterizations, particularly, are spectacular.

01:15:19.260 In fact, the characterizations at the beginning of Werewolf Cop are fantastic.

01:15:22.180 What Drew writes better than any American writer today is the inner monologue of a man.

01:15:29.400 This is right.

01:15:29.960 The thoughts of a man, you are the king of the crap.

01:15:33.420 I want Drew to write Dostoevsky, and Drew wants to write Mickey Spillane.

01:15:38.020 And it's like...

01:15:38.900 You should read Identity Man, which is...

01:15:40.440 Somebody described it as Dostoevsky meets Raymond Chandler, and I think that's probably fair.

01:15:44.840 Okay, but see, the thing is, I wanted to divorce you from Raymond.

01:15:46.860 Like, I also love Raymond Chandler, and I also love Mickey Spillane.

01:15:49.460 But the stuff that you do the best is the Dostoevsky stuff, which is why The Great Good Thing

01:15:53.340 is a really good memoir, right?

01:15:54.620 Because it really effectively is that thing.

01:15:57.140 Yeah, it's the inside of your mind.

01:15:58.820 There's too much nice stuff about Drew.

01:16:00.380 I don't know, I don't know.

01:16:01.140 I know, I'm going to...

01:16:02.100 I was just going to...

01:16:02.760 Here's a question for Jeremy.

01:16:07.820 Where's Jasper?

01:16:08.880 Here's the thing.

01:16:10.840 One year ago, I mentioned I was gazing into the face of my brand new beautiful baby daughter.

01:16:16.860 And one of my thoughts, as I told Ben, was, I should commemorate this beautiful moment

01:16:23.520 by buying a watch that I really, really want.

01:16:26.200 And I didn't.

01:16:27.220 Like, I put the well-being of my daughter first, and I've regretted it for 365 days.

01:16:31.500 Like, I really want that watch.

01:16:33.080 The other thing that I thought as I gazed into the eyes of my daughter was,

01:16:36.700 what is my dog going to do?

01:16:39.120 He doesn't like children.

01:16:40.220 My dog famously, his worst quality, does not like children.

01:16:43.440 Or Jews.

01:16:44.280 Yeah, it's true.

01:16:45.100 I was talking about his worst quality.

01:16:46.280 No, but he agrees with the dog.

01:16:48.140 The bad quality.

01:16:50.340 Actually, Dennis Prager always puts a little kippah on Jasper's.

01:16:54.140 Yeah, but Dennis is too big to be a Jew.

01:16:56.200 He looks at Dennis, he's like, who is this albino giant?

01:16:59.860 So, I was very nervous about how Jasper would react to my daughter.

01:17:03.880 And then we got home from the hospital with this little adopted baby,

01:17:07.740 and put her in the crib, and Jasper was whining and didn't know what to make of it.

01:17:11.180 And then he never went to work with me again.

01:17:13.640 He will not leave her side.

01:17:15.260 He's her little shadow.

01:17:16.840 That is adorable.

01:17:17.620 If you put her down for a nap, and then you leave the room,

01:17:20.540 he won't leave the room until she's asleep.

01:17:23.000 He'll stay up there until she's firmly asleep.

01:17:25.860 Then he'll come down and find her.

01:17:27.020 Oh, that's so cute.

01:17:27.540 It's the sweetest thing.

01:17:28.760 It is.

01:17:29.860 A question for the group.

01:17:31.400 Has Matt Walsh been using his vacation time to search for the real abuela?

01:17:35.000 You're his employers.

01:17:39.500 I mean, I want the insight.

01:17:40.880 What's going on?

01:17:41.540 Tune in next month for Backstage.

01:17:42.920 First of all, if he did, that would be unbelievable.

01:17:45.820 Right?

01:17:46.180 Absolutely.

01:17:46.540 My favorite moment of the entire situation,

01:17:50.840 not exposing AOC's hypocrisy and apparent lies, actually,

01:17:54.980 about poor little abuela,

01:17:56.160 but it was Matt Walsh's follow-up to it,

01:17:59.920 where he just tweeted out very simply,

01:18:01.540 Yes, it was the best.

01:18:02.040 I'm sorry, abuela.

01:18:03.380 I tried.

01:18:03.880 For the group, from a DailyWire.com subscriber,

01:18:10.180 Matt named his fans the Sweet Baby Gang.

01:18:12.900 What do you guys call your fans?

01:18:15.200 I call them recent customers with receipts or speechless,

01:18:19.200 controlling words, controlling minds.

01:18:20.740 That's the proof, baby.

01:18:21.760 That's what I want to see.

01:18:22.780 I call all of my fans Laurel.

01:18:26.760 I've got one fan.

01:18:28.900 True.

01:18:29.840 Yeah, I just call my fans and ask them for money.

01:18:32.460 I don't know.

01:18:33.880 And I don't really call my fans anything.

01:18:39.000 I mean, so much of America loves me.

01:18:41.720 Frankly, it would be hard to, I think, box them in.

01:18:44.080 It's just too great.

01:18:44.840 Just call them America.

01:18:45.900 Exactly.

01:18:46.480 It's just too great a panoply of humanity for me to really...

01:18:48.980 Big of you.

01:18:50.100 You know.

01:18:50.720 As I would have expected.

01:18:51.680 So, a thought that's been on my mind, and we hit on it a little bit the last time we were together,

01:18:58.560 but I think that it...

01:18:58.740 Why do you drive on parkways?

01:19:00.680 You know.

01:19:02.480 I think it merits a little consideration.

01:19:05.120 And it's our...

01:19:06.180 We live in a remarkable time wherein we are almost a different species than all of the people who have come before us.

01:19:14.100 In the 20th century, I've said before, after the Second War, we in the West essentially defeated war disease, poverty, and death.

01:19:22.740 We essentially arrived at a place where the common tragedies that befell 100% of the population now are quite rare.

01:19:33.280 And I think there are a lot of consequences of this, many of them good, but there are negative consequences of this.

01:19:38.900 So, one example is, during the pandemic, the great fear that overwhelmed so many in the West about this disease.

01:19:46.380 Well, the reason that that great fear about a disease that had a fairly low mortality rate could exist is because of how successfully we have defeated disease.

01:19:55.260 If you go back 100 years, everyone died from some disease all the time.

01:19:59.580 Same with war.

01:20:00.660 One of the reasons so many of our soldiers return home and have horrible bouts of depression and even suicidality

01:20:09.940 is because their experience in war makes them so utterly unique.

01:20:15.680 There's no one with whom they can relate.

01:20:18.500 Whereas, if you go back a couple hundred years, there was a fighting season in which all fighting-age men went and fought.

01:20:26.520 And you would fight until it was time to go get the crops out of the ground, and then all the fighting was over for the year.

01:20:31.700 And so, you experienced horrors.

01:20:33.780 Terrible things would happen.

01:20:34.720 But you had every other man, every other person in your country with whom you shared that and could relate.

01:20:43.080 So, you weren't uniqued by the tragedy of the Bethel you.

01:20:46.400 I have a very dear friend who lost her son a little over a year ago.

01:20:52.640 And that event has become very defining in her life.

01:20:54.820 That tragedy has become very defining in her life.

01:20:57.420 But if you went back in time a hundred years, every single parent lost at least a child.

01:21:04.780 Oh, so many.

01:21:05.420 Or multiple children.

01:21:06.680 Every single child who came of age probably had lost their mother and lost siblings.

01:21:11.540 Death was such a constant companion that it didn't make you unique and therefore didn't define you.

01:21:16.940 War didn't make you unique, didn't define you.

01:21:18.800 Disease didn't make you unique, didn't define you.

01:21:21.080 And everyone lived in subsistent poverty, really, until the Industrial Revolution.

01:21:26.100 For that reason, we almost cannot relate to any humans who have ever gone before us.

01:21:32.980 And because we can't relate to them, we can only assume that they were somehow evil.

01:21:39.440 Like, you can't place your, it's almost impossible to place yourself in a time and in a place and in a reality, a circumstance that you've never experienced.

01:21:52.040 And so, I was thinking about this, it's funny to say this, but I was thinking about it in relation to the UFO conversation that we had the last time we were together.

01:21:59.380 That even the fact that we see something mysterious in the air and we think, our first thought is extraterrestrials, is because we live in a time and a place where we have so much fiction around us.

01:22:11.980 If you had seen that exact same phenomenon 200 years ago, it could have landed and E.T. could have walked off and you wouldn't have thought extraterrestrial even then.

01:22:22.460 You would have thought demon or you would have thought ghost or you would have, because in the reality in which you lived,

01:22:26.620 you had a completely different framework with which to understand the world.

01:22:30.800 And so, what I want to touch on here for conversation for the group before we close is, how does one overcome all the bias of now, for lack of a better term?

01:22:47.980 The fact that we can only think in the very narrow parameters of our own experience.

01:22:53.420 How can you understand your place in history?

01:22:55.940 How can you understand your place in the cosmos?

01:22:57.520 How can you understand your relationship with God?

01:22:59.880 How can you understand your relationship with the people on the earth today who don't live in western luxury?

01:23:05.900 How can you understand your fellow man if you cannot step out of your experience?

01:23:10.800 Did you see the headline that ran a couple of weeks ago?

01:23:14.520 It's, I forget which paper, they said,

01:23:15.780 Shocking new study from researchers concludes that the aging process cannot be stopped.

01:23:23.620 And I looked at that, I said, I'm scratching my head.

01:23:25.580 What does that?

01:23:26.360 Oh, that all the expert geniuses at all the top schools just discovered death.

01:23:31.500 They just discovered mortality.

01:23:33.220 We've totally lost a sense of that.

01:23:35.040 We've lost a sense, you see this in the religious sphere, we are no longer preparing to die.

01:23:40.600 We just don't see death happen.

01:23:41.700 We talk about forever wars because we've been in a country now for 20 years.

01:23:45.940 20 years, that's the blink of an eye.

01:23:47.840 The Brits used to judge their wars in not just decades, but centuries, you know, a hundred years war.

01:23:53.840 And even in America, I think, forget just us moderns where we think everything that is older than five minutes ago is somehow crazy and illegitimate.

01:24:02.000 Even in America, we really only judge history on the scale of 200 years.

01:24:05.360 People that came before us, they were people.

01:24:09.680 They were real people.

01:24:10.440 They actually thought about things.

01:24:12.080 The ideas that we're all discovering for the first time have been discussed for millennia, actually.

01:24:17.600 But I think this goes actually to why the left goes after the education system.

01:24:22.180 Because if we recognize that people have been grappling with these problems for a very long time,

01:24:26.820 some problems that we consider fixable political problems are just eternal difficulties that we're going to have to grapple with

01:24:34.360 that would give us a lot more grace for one another and to let us think more seriously about politics.

01:24:37.820 This is the great delusion of technology is that things improve.

01:24:41.640 And you read this, if you read Steven Pinker's book, he says things are so much better now.

01:24:45.300 Things are not better now at all except technologically and medicinally.

01:24:49.180 And it's wonderful.

01:24:50.680 Science is a wonderful human advance.

01:24:52.900 But it hasn't changed the human heart one little bit.

01:24:55.600 It hasn't changed people.

01:24:56.260 Right.

01:24:56.760 And one of the things that is both dangerous and also hopeful is that the generation younger than everybody in this room

01:25:04.040 will accept this stuff without even thinking about it.

01:25:08.620 It'll just be the air they breathe.

01:25:10.440 When Spencer, my son, was growing up, he and I played video games together.

01:25:15.320 Till about the age of 12, I was teaching him how to play video games.

01:25:18.840 But at a certain moment, he understood what it meant to sit with a controller and control the images on screen

01:25:25.640 in a way I never could.

01:25:26.740 You know, he could see a scene and understand it and see the mission that he was given before I could ever understand it

01:25:32.680 because he just grew up with this thing that was, to me, an actual miracle.

01:25:37.060 And so as these children start to learn, you know, this world, we can't possibly grasp the change that has taken place that you are outlining exactly.

01:25:47.340 The change is so huge that those of us who were born really even within 20 years ago cannot quite grasp what has happened to us.

01:25:56.420 They will be able to grasp it.

01:25:58.260 And the danger, of course, is that they'll walk into an evolutionary trap that they won't be able to get out of.

01:26:04.980 They will advance beyond femininity.

01:26:07.280 They'll advance beyond childbirth.

01:26:08.900 They'll have their children in little toasters in the kitchen and will not know what they have lost, the humanity that they've lost.

01:26:15.040 That's the danger.

01:26:15.980 But the hopeful thing is, is that they'll rediscover what you're talking about.

01:26:19.260 Even seeing, because all these machines will simply be part of their lives, they'll start to understand, oh, one still dies.

01:26:26.300 The eternal questions are still there.

01:26:28.540 Freedom versus authoritarianism will still be there, whether we care for the few or the many.

01:26:35.160 Still, those are always going to be tensions in human life.

01:26:38.280 And once those tensions come back into play, possibly they'll get more realistic.

01:26:42.540 And that's the hope, because they will understand.

01:26:44.600 I'm telling you, the people who are younger than anybody, you know, 19, 18, 17, they will understand this technology in immediate, instinctive ways that we just never will.

01:26:55.560 So I think that the reality is that we absolutely can understand people of the past, which is why we read documents of the past.

01:27:03.680 It's why we bother to read history.

01:27:05.920 It's why we bother to read the Bible.

01:27:07.040 It's why we see ourselves in David or in Moses or in Jesus or why we see ourselves in characters from fiction from 300 years ago.

01:27:14.620 It's why we watch movies that are rooted in those same exact archetypes, as Jordan Peterson would say.

01:27:19.560 But I think that this is why there's a fundamental war on human nature happening right now, is that as we defeated all of these forces that had been so present and ever-present and heavy in life,

01:27:32.220 as we defeated war and death and as we defeated poverty and as the world became richer and more connected and informational deficits could be remedied with a piece of technology that you carry around in your pocket.

01:27:42.280 As we did all of that, and as it turned out that the problems of human nature were, in some cases, exacerbated, made worse.

01:27:49.780 People have become crueler in many ways in Western society than they were even when I was growing up, like far crueler online than they are in real life.

01:27:56.660 People have become far more nasty toward one another.

01:27:58.860 People have become far more tribal, and you're seeing it happening in real time.

01:28:02.640 The answer to that from people who are at war with the basic religious concept, which is that there is a fundamental and universal human nature,

01:28:09.760 people who are at war with that have decided that the problem isn't our failure to recognize human nature and to adapt to human nature.

01:28:16.880 Our real problem is in acknowledging that human nature even exists.

01:28:20.520 So if we can just obliterate human nature utterly and completely, and we can do that with linguistic tricks,

01:28:25.500 we can pretend that human nature is all a social construct as opposed to biologically ingrained.

01:28:31.880 We can pretend, I mean, it is called human nature for a reason.

01:28:34.360 They can pretend that it has nothing to do with reality and that reality itself is an obstacle to your utter fulfillment.

01:28:40.540 This is why when people ask me to steal man Marxism, for example,

01:28:43.660 what I always say is that Marxism is a terrible economic theory, but it's actually a spiritual theory.

01:28:47.400 It's a spiritual theory that's been around a lot longer than Marx, and that spiritual theory is

01:28:51.200 if you restructure the systems in which you live, a new man will be generated.

01:28:54.860 A better man will be generated. A new sort of human will be generated.

01:28:58.120 And that new sort of human won't be susceptible to any of the things that actually make war and poverty happen, right?

01:29:04.700 Because war and poverty don't happen in a vacuum.

01:29:06.240 War and poverty happen because human beings are innately sinful, as every religious person knows, right?

01:29:10.240 One of the stupidest things I've ever seen said was said by Nelson Mandela, quoted online.

01:29:14.360 And it was that the natural state of humanity is prosperity, and poverty is artificial.

01:29:20.060 It is, of course, precisely the opposite.

01:29:21.860 The natural state of humanity is poverty, and prosperity is artificial.

01:29:26.000 And it is only because we recognize our own human nature and then built institutions to militate against that human nature

01:29:30.820 that we were able to rise above any of that.

01:29:33.060 And once we rose above that, and it turned out that happiness was not the consequence,

01:29:36.580 it turned out that we still couldn't fill that hole in the heart that God typically fills,

01:29:41.160 then we went to war with human nature itself.

01:29:42.680 And so if we wish to reconnect with history, if we wish to connect to other people,

01:29:47.320 like even have conversations with other people,

01:29:48.920 we're going to have to understand that the person sitting across the table from me

01:29:51.900 is not racially essentialist or even sexually essentialist.

01:29:55.040 At the bottom line, yes, there are essential characteristics about all of us because we are embodied humans,

01:29:59.580 because as Aristotle would suggest, we are in fact soul and body, and we are combined in one.

01:30:05.700 But by the same token, we share that exact thing, and we share all the same flaws.

01:30:12.080 And once we understand that, we're going to be a lot more understanding toward one another,

01:30:14.720 we can actually have conversations, and then maybe we can talk about actually solving some problems.

01:30:18.300 But white boys can't jump.

01:30:19.920 Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

01:30:21.020 Absolutely clear.

01:30:22.320 White men can't jump.

01:30:23.700 That's all the time that we have tonight.

01:30:25.140 Appreciate you hanging out with us, and we look forward to seeing you again here in about a month.

01:30:29.800 As always, thank you especially to our DailyWire.com subscribers.

01:30:34.580 If you want to get in on the action, head over to DailyWire.com.com slash subscribe right now.

01:30:39.700 Use the promo code JUSTICE for 20% off of your new membership.

01:30:43.380 And please go pick up, I hate myself for this,

01:30:46.160 please go pick up a copy of Michael Knowles' new book,

01:30:48.780 Speechless, Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.

01:30:51.900 You'll be glad you did.

01:30:53.460 I'll be glad you did.

01:30:54.960 Not because it's good for Michael,

01:30:56.300 but because it makes it look like we still have some clout out there.

01:30:59.860 We'll see you guys next time.

01:31:07.980 DailyWire Backstage is produced by Mathis Glover.

01:31:11.020 Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring.

01:31:13.280 Our technical director is Austin Stevens.

01:31:15.460 Our production manager is Pavel Witowski.

01:31:17.960 Studio and equipment management is by Patrick Kennedy.

01:31:20.700 And broadcast engineering is by Mark Herman.

01:31:23.160 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:31:24.580 Audio is mixed by Mike Horamina.

01:31:26.500 And our audio assistant is Israel McFarlane.

01:31:29.080 Playback is operated by McKenna Waters.

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01:31:33.400 DailyWire Backstage is a DailyWire production.

01:31:35.780 Copyright DailyWire 2021.

The Michael Knowles Show - June 24, 2021

Daily Wire Backstage： Defending America… From Itself

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