The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： Earth Day from Lockdown Edition

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00:00:30.740 The most important holiday of the year is here, Earth Day.

00:00:35.040 A time to recognize this holiday's pioneers and enthusiastic followers

00:00:38.820 and spend hours making fun of them from the comfort of our homes.

00:00:43.120 Daily Wire backstage, Earth Day from Lockdown Edition is here.

00:00:46.820 So join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, the God King, Jeremy Boring,

00:00:51.360 along with a rare appearance from Matt Walsh as we discuss the wonders of Earth Day

00:00:56.800 while we are all locked indoors.

00:00:59.240 It's all that and so much more.

00:01:00.780 Take a listen.

00:01:01.980 Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage, Earth Day from Lockdown Edition.

00:01:05.440 I'm your host, Jeremy, the lowercase gk boring.

00:01:08.020 And because we are good global citizens who don't want to burn fossil fuels or spread the Rona,

00:01:12.920 I'm being joined remotely tonight by Ben.

00:01:15.260 What coronavirus?

00:01:15.720 I just don't like people.

00:01:17.100 Also, Andrew, oh my God, he hasn't died yet, Klavan.

00:01:21.500 And, of course, Michael, he still technically works here, Knowles.

00:01:24.980 Actually, the truth is that Ben and Drew are, in fact, remote today.

00:01:42.760 Ben, because we can't afford to lose him, and Drew, because we can't afford to insure him.

00:01:46.780 But other than that, it will be backstage, as always.

00:01:50.180 From her basement, we still have the lovely, even during the apocalypse, Alicia Krause.

00:01:54.120 Hello, Alicia.

00:01:55.220 I am here, although I think this basement is a lot nicer than the Michael Knowles broom closet

00:01:59.400 that Ben likes to throw Michael into.

00:02:01.460 Hey, guys, I'm glad you're all still alive and well, mainly Drew.

00:02:04.280 You've been in my prayers every night.

00:02:05.740 And I just wanted to remind everyone that for the members that are watching at home,

00:02:09.420 if you want to ask the guys questions tonight, head on over to dailywire.com,

00:02:13.320 navigate to that shows page, and then be sure to open up the backstage box

00:02:17.280 and type your questions for all of the guys into the chat box over there.

00:02:20.840 And we've got a cool discussion happening after the show tonight.

00:02:23.660 So, only members get to ask questions.

00:02:25.820 So, if you're not a member, be sure to head over to dailywire.com

00:02:28.840 to become a member and ask those questions for the guys tonight.

00:02:33.280 Thanks, Alicia.

00:02:34.380 You know, I think people are going to want us to talk about things other than the Rona.

00:02:37.480 The news has mostly been depressing for the last month.

00:02:41.020 People are locked in their homes.

00:02:43.440 And, you know, we've done a good job, I think, during our all-access here at the Daily Wire,

00:02:48.160 which we've been doing every day during the lockdown,

00:02:50.340 to talk about other things, be a little bit more lighthearted.

00:02:52.500 And I want to do that today.

00:02:54.040 Obviously, it's the 50th anniversary of Earth Day,

00:02:57.600 or as I like to call it, National Tire Burning Day.

00:02:59.760 So, maybe we can talk a little bit about, you just got to take it off.

00:03:03.040 What, this?

00:03:04.020 I can't take it.

00:03:04.440 I don't want to get the Rona.

00:03:05.600 Are you kidding me?

00:03:06.320 All right, fine.

00:03:07.480 Fair enough.

00:03:08.260 I think this is like a Class C felony in L.A., but that's fine.

00:03:11.080 We will talk about things other than the COVID-19.

00:03:15.900 But I do think we should start off,

00:03:17.000 because we haven't all been together to have a conversation about this since it's been going on.

00:03:21.020 Obviously, since the last time we were together, the world has changed in many ways.

00:03:24.880 And I would argue that it's changed at least twice.

00:03:28.160 First, we had the onset of COVID-19.

00:03:31.260 Very little was known about it.

00:03:32.440 There was a lot of room for concern.

00:03:34.420 We took the dramatic actions that we've taken, mostly at the state and local level around the country.

00:03:40.540 Then we went through the period of just unbelievably rapid job loss.

00:03:44.980 We're still in that period.

00:03:46.280 The number is 22 million officially right now.

00:03:48.440 But that's just the people who've actually been able to file for unemployment.

00:03:51.260 We all know the real number is 25 million, 27 million, 30 million, astronomical by any measure.

00:03:57.500 And now we're sort of moving into this third wave of the crisis.

00:04:00.420 It's five weeks on.

00:04:01.540 We know in large measure what the initial economic damage is.

00:04:05.960 We know a lot more about the virus than we knew five weeks ago.

00:04:09.260 We know which models were pointing us in the right directions,

00:04:12.100 which models may have been sort of overly pessimistic.

00:04:15.380 And we know what has happened in certain locales.

00:04:18.740 You know, there's a global pandemic, but there's certainly an epidemic in New York City.

00:04:23.860 There was an epidemic in the north of Italy.

00:04:25.900 We've seen countries like Sweden take novel approaches.

00:04:29.180 We've seen some of the states here begin to contemplate reopening.

00:04:32.300 Some of them as soon as Friday of this week, beginning a measured process of reopening.

00:04:36.440 So we're disarmed with so much more information than we had.

00:04:39.360 I thought maybe the best way to open up would be to kind of go around the horn and just have everybody weigh in on where you are in this moment.

00:04:45.900 Not necessarily where you've been when we didn't have as much information as we have now,

00:04:50.160 but where you are right now, where you think this is going, just to sort of set the stage for the rest of the conversation.

00:04:55.180 Ben, why don't you kick it off for us?

00:04:57.340 I mean, I think that we're now kind of hitting stasis.

00:04:59.820 What I mean is I don't think that there's going to be any deus ex machina.

00:05:02.980 I think people were sort of hoping that there would be some cure that came along that fixed everything,

00:05:07.260 that the vaccine would either be accelerated or there would be some sort of treatment that made this thing a lot less dangerous than it is.

00:05:12.280 That's not going to happen.

00:05:13.260 I think people are still being misinformed by the media about this.

00:05:15.300 I think the media are lying to them that if there's widespread testing, then you won't get it,

00:05:18.400 which is not what testing is designed to do.

00:05:20.020 It's designed to trace hotspots and quash them so they don't exceed the medical capacity.

00:05:24.840 I think people thought that flatten the curve meant that once we were done,

00:05:27.180 then we could just go back to our regular lives because we would all be safe.

00:05:29.560 I don't think that was ever accurate.

00:05:31.100 I think that politicians and the media were deliberately misinforming people about all of that.

00:05:35.020 And that's led to outsized expectations as to what the recovery is going to look like.

00:05:39.020 I think that most Americans at this point are trying to assess their level of personal risk.

00:05:43.020 I think many Americans are still waiting for the government to sort of fix this.

00:05:46.440 The government is not going to fix this.

00:05:47.600 The government is going to have to allow people to go out and use their best judgment as to whether they want to work,

00:05:54.320 how they want their lives to go.

00:05:55.680 If you're young and you are healthy, presumably you're going to want to work.

00:05:58.780 You just have to stay away from people who are older and people who are more vulnerable.

00:06:01.860 If you can't do that, then, you know, that's sort of my situation, right?

00:06:04.220 I'm at home mainly because while I'm young and I'm healthy and I'm really not worried about me,

00:06:08.640 I have parents who are over here 13 hours a day helping to take care of my kids.

00:06:11.660 I have three under seven and I have a newborn baby and no help.

00:06:15.060 So my parents are over here a lot, so it would endanger them if I went back into the office, in my opinion.

00:06:19.200 But that's arguable.

00:06:20.500 What is not arguable at this point is that we live in a free country,

00:06:23.240 and that means that free citizens are going to have to be given at least the leeway to use their best judgment about what they want to do.

00:06:29.580 If you feel like you're in a riskier subcategory, you're not going to go back.

00:06:32.040 If you're in a less risky subcategory, you will go back.

00:06:34.340 But so that there are not externalities, people will be masking, people will be engaging in social distancing.

00:06:38.260 We're all going to end up doing what Sweden did.

00:06:40.120 The only question is how long each state waits to go back to what Sweden did.

00:06:43.840 And yet we see online this idiotic binary between everybody go back and just smooch each other on the beaches en masse

00:06:49.960 or alternatively lockdown forever until the end of time, until the vaccine is found.

00:06:54.820 Neither of those is realistic.

00:06:56.280 We're going to end up all doing Sweden and the only question is one.

00:06:58.260 Michael, where are you at on this?

00:07:00.300 I agree certainly with Ben's point that we're all going to end up doing Sweden and we could have avoided a lot of misery had we done that.

00:07:07.000 I think this is the most outrageous political power grab of my lifetime.

00:07:11.300 It has been based apparently now on ignorance at best and lies at worst.

00:07:16.760 The doomsday models did not come true.

00:07:18.880 Those who were skeptical of the experts absolutely were right to be skeptical of the experts.

00:07:23.300 This slogan that we've heard, which is a perfectly worthwhile slogan, flatten the curve, has been totally misunderstood and warped by the media.

00:07:30.860 What people seem to think flatten the curve means is that fewer people will get it and fewer people will die.

00:07:35.480 That's not what it means.

00:07:36.380 The purpose of flattening the curve is so as not to overwhelm our health care system.

00:07:40.600 But of course, if you are not getting an overwhelmed health care system, which we are not seeing anywhere in America, including in New York,

00:07:47.140 and if you do not have a vaccine, which we do not currently have, and the experts tell us we're not going to have for 18 months,

00:07:53.480 then flattening the curve is absolutely pointless.

00:07:55.940 It means we're all going to get it at some point anyway.

00:07:58.360 It's going to make it through society.

00:08:00.280 And so you could either have that occur and go on basically with business as usual while taking precautions and protecting the frail and the infirm and Drew, obviously.

00:08:10.080 Or what you can do is shut down the economy and throw 22 million people out of work and destroy lives and see huge upticks in suicide and drug overdose.

00:08:19.560 It was just painfully incompetent.

00:08:21.740 And the people who were still pushing it are out of their minds at best.

00:08:26.480 Andrew.

00:08:28.480 Yeah, I can't agree with that at all, I got to say.

00:08:31.380 I think that this thing came down the pike.

00:08:33.820 It's not a question of the ultimate numbers.

00:08:35.840 It's a question of how many people die and how short a time and how small a space.

00:08:40.720 And if Broadway in New York is lined with corpses, you know, it's going to have a major, major effect on the entire country.

00:08:47.700 So this thing, I am really, here's what I'm happy about.

00:08:50.460 Let me start there.

00:08:51.520 I'm really happy that Donald Trump has negotiated his way through a major crisis without seizing power.

00:08:58.340 This is one of the few times I've ever seen a crisis, I can't remember a crisis,

00:09:02.100 when the federal government didn't seize power, when in fact he ceded power, he cut back on regulations that were holding things up.

00:09:10.060 If he can keep that going when the crisis passes, I think it will actually be a net win for us.

00:09:16.400 It's kind of easy for me to be, you know, when a writer is quarantined, how does he even know?

00:09:21.620 It's kind of the way writers live their lives alone.

00:09:24.540 But I'm very cognizant that there are people who can't work from home, who are hurting, as you say, people being out of work.

00:09:29.800 So now, as Trump has said, we have this kind of narrow space we have to negotiate, where we have to bring people back to work,

00:09:38.220 we have to get the economy started again, and we have to keep people relatively safe,

00:09:41.700 because we don't want a second flare-up, which would really damage the economy.

00:09:46.760 The thing is, here and there, there have been people like Bill de Blasio in New York,

00:09:52.000 and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, who have abused their power.

00:09:55.380 There have been police officers who have really not acted like American police officers and have been overbearing.

00:10:01.560 And those things, because we get them on the Internet right away, they seem like they're happening everywhere, but they're not, actually.

00:10:08.200 I think that this has been handled relatively well, given the fact that it was something we didn't, we'd never seen before,

00:10:14.760 that came out of nowhere, that we weren't sure what was going to happen.

00:10:17.040 And even though people who, like me, who said these computer models are unreliable, I don't know what I'm talking about.

00:10:24.540 I mean, I just happen to know that computer models are unreliable.

00:10:27.200 I'm not a doctor, and I think that Trump did the right thing.

00:10:30.020 He listened to his medical people.

00:10:31.360 Now he's listening to his financial people.

00:10:33.320 And it's just one of those, diseases are bad.

00:10:36.860 You have to keep calm and carry on.

00:10:38.540 And now it's time to slowly, carefully move back into a moving economy again.

00:10:44.960 The one thing I will just say is I do not think, I'm very big on systemic threats to freedom.

00:10:51.580 Bureaucracy, Supreme Court decisions that are stupid, you know, laws that take away from the Constitution.

00:10:58.040 I don't see a systemic threat to freedom here.

00:11:00.320 What I see is a crisis that has been handled to the best of the people's ability, not knowing what they didn't know.

00:11:06.400 Well, I'm certainly the most radical of the four of us.

00:11:10.660 I was opposed to the government shutdowns from the very beginning.

00:11:13.100 I think that if I had ever believed a model that said two and a half million Americans were likely to die over the course of, you know, nine or ten months,

00:11:22.260 maybe I would have thought that the actions being taken by the government were merited.

00:11:25.880 I never believed those models.

00:11:27.920 I think that what's actually going to happen is we're going to lose, you know, 100,000 people,

00:11:31.980 which is probably in line with, you know, maybe it's twice as bad or even three times as bad as a particularly bad flu year.

00:11:42.100 But comes nowhere near heart disease, comes nowhere near what cancer kill in the country.

00:11:46.900 I think that I'm willing, even though I was against the lockdown, I'm willing to say that that based on what Donald Trump knew or what Gavin Newsom knew or or other governors or mayors around the country five weeks ago,

00:12:00.160 I can understand why they may have been scared into taking the initial actions that they took.

00:12:05.560 But I agree with Michael and I agree with Ben that now there's no there's no longer any question really as to what's about to happen.

00:12:13.660 We have no cure. We're not going to have a cure.

00:12:15.460 We have no vaccine. Maybe we'll have a vaccine in 18 months.

00:12:19.160 Maybe we won't have a vaccine in 18 years.

00:12:21.540 You know, they say there's no cure for the common cold and the common cold is a coronavirus.

00:12:25.640 These things are notoriously difficult to come up with vaccines against, to come up with cures for.

00:12:31.860 And so where we are today, as opposed to five weeks ago, I don't I don't want to rehash.

00:12:36.280 I was right and you were all wrong.

00:12:37.620 I mean, I definitely knew that we shouldn't do this and we did.

00:12:39.640 And then you should all have that rubbed in a little bit.

00:12:41.960 But there's not beyond a gloating.

00:12:44.620 There's no point in relitigating it.

00:12:46.320 I'm not suggesting that we need to run people out of town for the decisions they made five weeks ago.

00:12:50.360 What concerns me are the decisions being made right now.

00:12:52.540 Why is any part of the country still locked down now that we have realized that this is the blitz that we're just going to have to do to your point.

00:12:59.980 Keep calm, carry on and do our part.

00:13:01.520 As Churchill said, this is something that we're just going to have to endure.

00:13:05.300 There is no silver bullet coming.

00:13:07.820 You know, there's a poll out today by Reuters that says 72 percent of Americans believe that we should not open the economy and go back to work until medical professionals and politicians tell us that it's safe.

00:13:21.120 And that actually illustrates just how bad the messaging has been on this by politicians in the media for the last five weeks, because it is not going to be safe.

00:13:30.480 There's going to be COVID tomorrow.

00:13:33.480 There's going to be COVID a week from now.

00:13:35.340 There's going to be COVID a month from now.

00:13:36.940 We'll be lucky if there isn't COVID a year from now.

00:13:39.120 It's possible that COVID-19 is just with us to stay in some form, that it's just something that we'll always have to deal with from this point forward.

00:13:46.460 You can say that five weeks ago we didn't know what we didn't know, and that may validate some of the decisions.

00:13:52.000 But today we actually know.

00:13:53.560 There is no difference between opening tomorrow, a week from now, a month from now.

00:13:57.760 Whenever we open, whenever people begin going back to work, they are subjecting themselves to the risk of getting this.

00:14:04.600 Probably at some point most of us are going to get it.

00:14:07.560 There's probably no way out but through.

00:14:09.780 So while I certainly think that there are steps that we need to take to be as responsible as we can be,

00:14:14.460 ultimately I don't think that there's any, I think there's basically nothing for it but to take it.

00:14:19.540 Drew, you bring up the idea of, if we saw bodies on Broadway, that that would certainly have a psychological effect.

00:14:26.740 I don't doubt that there would be a devastating psychological effect of that.

00:14:31.060 I also, though, would say that every day that this lockdown continues, you cannot have 30 million fighting-age young people,

00:14:37.160 particularly low-income people, people who don't have savings, out of work for any prolonged amount of time

00:14:42.760 without worse damage than any momentary trauma that we could absorb.

00:14:48.040 And I fear that that's what we're on the brink of.

00:14:50.300 I agree with you, Drew, that the mom being arrested on the playground today is not a sign of systemic lack of liberty,

00:14:59.320 although any lack of liberty I object to.

00:15:01.160 If they take one morsel more freedom than is absolutely required to get us through the crisis,

00:15:07.880 I'm going to bucket that, and I think they certainly have and are.

00:15:10.880 But I agree that that isn't the real threat to our future freedom.

00:15:13.560 But I do think that we're facing the greatest threat to freedom that we've ever faced in my lifetime,

00:15:17.920 and probably in the lifetime of anyone,

00:15:20.900 with the small exception of the very small handful of people who still are alive,

00:15:25.840 who are veterans of the Second World War, the living memory of most Americans.

00:15:31.580 It's not COVID-19, and it's not even this lockdown.

00:15:34.380 It's the consequence of the lockdown.

00:15:36.160 30 million unemployed people in a presidential election year

00:15:39.140 when the woke left is openly calling for out-and-out socialism

00:15:43.380 is a fundamental threat like nothing that we face politically in our country in my lifetime.

00:15:49.060 That's actually the thing that I'm the most concerned about,

00:15:50.760 and the main reason that I think we have to become realists about COVID

00:15:53.860 so that we can fight the real battle that I think we're in,

00:15:57.360 which is the battle against an ascendant socialist ideology in the country

00:16:01.000 that now has a huge base of unemployed people

00:16:03.480 to go and promise money and welfare and dependency to

00:16:07.760 who are desperate and actually need something.

00:16:09.900 And so they're more likely candidates for that

00:16:12.540 than people who have a job and are able to provide for their family are.

00:16:16.380 Let's talk a little bit more about this.

00:16:17.760 We'll get a little bit more conversational.

00:16:19.100 But first, when you're shut down,

00:16:21.120 and there's absolutely nothing for you to do except argue with Drew,

00:16:23.860 you may wonder, how can I, because those of you who know,

00:16:28.260 Drew, he likes to argue the old-fashioned way.

00:16:31.000 Pen and ink, probably quill in his case.

00:16:34.440 Strongly worded letters with stamps on the back,

00:16:37.580 wax seals on the back, are exchanged rapidly.

00:16:40.960 Dear sir, I'm sitting in the smallest room of my home.

00:16:44.120 Your letter is before me.

00:16:45.380 Soon it will be behind.

00:16:46.380 The classic Drew rebuttal.

00:16:47.660 How does one do such a thing when you can't even go to the post office?

00:16:52.920 And that's where our friends over at Stamps.com come in.

00:16:55.800 Because with Stamps.com, you have basically the entire postal service

00:17:00.260 at your disposal, on your computer, right there from the safety of your home.

00:17:04.580 It's a remarkable service.

00:17:06.180 Stamps.com, it beats the post office even in the best of time.

00:17:12.100 Here's what I'll say.

00:17:12.760 When one can go to the post office, does one prefer to go to the post office?

00:17:17.880 And now one has very little choice.

00:17:19.960 Simply use your computer to print U.S. postage 24-7,

00:17:22.780 any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send.

00:17:26.380 Once your mail is ready, just leave it for your mail carrier,

00:17:28.620 schedule a free package pickup, or drop it in a mailbox.

00:17:31.540 No human contact required.

00:17:33.320 It's that simple.

00:17:34.260 You'll get five cents off every first-class stamp

00:17:36.420 and up to 40% off of USPS shipping rates.

00:17:39.440 And now, in addition to offering discounted U.S. postal service rates,

00:17:42.780 Stamps.com also offers UPS services with discounts up to 62%.

00:17:47.840 Plus, Stamps.com, you won't even have to pay UPS residential surcharge.

00:17:52.860 Ben, every letter I've gotten from you in the last three years

00:17:56.140 has been sent via Stamps.com.

00:17:59.380 I think you were the first adopter of any of us.

00:18:02.720 Oh, yeah.

00:18:03.160 I've been using Stamps.com even before they were actually an advertiser on the show.

00:18:06.400 Stamps.com is indeed a no-brainer.

00:18:07.840 You don't want to be schlepping your stuff over to the post office right now.

00:18:10.540 In many cases, you can't schlep your stuff over to the post office right now.

00:18:13.840 My listeners and our listeners get a special offer.

00:18:15.760 It includes a four-week trial, plus free postage and digital skill.

00:18:18.420 No long-term commitment.

00:18:19.560 Just head on over to Stamps.com.

00:18:21.060 Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage.

00:18:23.200 Type in Shapiro.

00:18:24.220 That is Stamps.com.

00:18:25.560 Enter code Shapiro, and you get that awesome, awesome deal.

00:18:27.860 You'll save yourself tons of money and tons of time.

00:18:30.440 And all the hassles associated with going into a public area where people are coughing on packages,

00:18:35.380 go to Stamps.com and use that code Shapiro for the special deal.

00:18:39.200 Sometimes at home when I'm about to open a package, I still cough on it, though,

00:18:42.740 just so that I can kind of feel normal.

00:18:44.160 Yeah.

00:18:44.440 Just so I can kind of feel normal.

00:18:45.740 Drew, you're the person, I think, of the four of us,

00:18:49.280 there's certainly room between my position, Ben's position, Michael's position.

00:18:53.460 It sounds like your position may be the most unique of the four of us.

00:18:58.840 So why don't you kind of respond maybe to what you heard the three of us say

00:19:01.660 and give us a little bit more detail about where you are.

00:19:04.740 Yeah.

00:19:05.140 I mean, I think the whole thing about statistics, you know,

00:19:07.300 the lies, damn lies in statistics, is that when you say so many people die of a heart attack,

00:19:13.440 so many people die of a flu, this is just the way it is,

00:19:16.240 that's not really what's happening so far.

00:19:18.640 Again, there's a lot of things we don't know, and it's important to know that we don't know.

00:19:22.160 And there's a lot of people on Twitter who've gotten these Twitter medical degrees

00:19:25.940 that seem to just come with turning on Twitter.

00:19:28.920 You know, I mean, you don't have to go to college for a lot of things.

00:19:31.220 But to be a doctor, I think it's a good thing, you know, to go to school.

00:19:34.420 And the thing about the statistics here is that when 3,000 people died in one day in New York,

00:19:40.900 we went to war for 20 years.

00:19:42.460 We're still at war because those 3,000 people die.

00:19:45.320 That's 20 years of war.

00:19:46.760 700,000 people have died of, Americans have died of AIDS in 40 years.

00:19:50.900 And our entire attitude toward gay people has gone through a revolution mostly because of that.

00:19:56.060 It's really not all about statistics, and it really is all about humanity.

00:20:00.660 And when I say if something hit New York, and if I'm looking at my TV or my computer,

00:20:06.320 and I'm seeing bodies lined on Broadway, everything is going to change forever.

00:20:10.580 And if you think people are unwilling to come out now, after they see that,

00:20:14.540 they're going to be completely unwilling to come out.

00:20:16.460 So I think the problem is, look, I really love my liberties, and I'm very fierce about defending them.

00:20:24.160 But I defend them against things that I think long-term are threats to them.

00:20:28.080 And because Donald Trump is president right now, and because his interests align with mine,

00:20:32.520 he wants to keep people safe, if only for his own political fortunes.

00:20:36.240 He wants to reopen business, if only for his political fortunes.

00:20:39.660 Because he's the president, I'm not worried about what they're doing.

00:20:44.140 I think they're doing the thing that they feel they have to do.

00:20:46.900 And they do have, as Donald Trump might say, the best information.

00:20:50.640 They have the best information of anybody.

00:20:52.360 And they're doing the thing that I think should be done.

00:20:55.000 So I guess what I feel is like, yeah, you know, if you could just eliminate the shouting,

00:21:00.660 if you could, you know, just suck out the shouting out of the air for a minute,

00:21:03.780 all the you didn't do this first and you didn't do that,

00:21:05.880 what you would see is a threat came down the pike.

00:21:08.980 We shut down to keep the hospitals, to flatten the curve so that the hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed.

00:21:14.000 Things obviously, as they always do, they didn't turn out the way the experts think they did,

00:21:17.720 but they had to do what they had to do.

00:21:19.140 Now we have got to go back to work, but we've got to go back to work in such a way

00:21:22.680 that there is not a massive flare-up of this thing so that people shut down again.

00:21:28.340 Because I think that would be the worst thing that could happen to the economy.

00:21:31.580 And I am really cognizant, very cognizant of the people out of work.

00:21:36.120 Again, with statistics, it's not so much how many people are out of work,

00:21:39.400 it's how long they're out of work.

00:21:40.620 If everybody on earth is out of work for 10 minutes, that's not so good.

00:21:44.180 If, you know, if 30 million people are out of work for a year, then we've got a real problem.

00:21:48.160 So what I'm concerned about is that we start the economy in a smart way.

00:21:53.080 That seems to be the idea.

00:21:55.160 There's going to be, I love the fact that Trump, you know, remembered the word federalism.

00:21:59.380 And that's actually what he was doing.

00:22:01.860 You know, he's like, he doesn't know what it's called.

00:22:04.080 He said, I think they call it federalism or something.

00:22:05.860 He doesn't know what it's called, but he's doing it.

00:22:07.300 So each governor is actually in a position to do what has to be done,

00:22:11.300 which is the way federalism is supposed to work.

00:22:13.500 And, you know, I just think it's sad, but this is what we should be doing.

00:22:18.180 And the problem for me with the, you know, the Churchill thing,

00:22:21.060 and there's no way out but through, there's no enemy here.

00:22:23.680 It's just a germ.

00:22:24.460 It's just a bug.

00:22:25.500 The enemy is China, and we have to deal with that later.

00:22:27.500 But this is just one of those terrible things that happens.

00:22:31.200 And I think they're handling it as best they can.

00:22:33.260 Let me at least ask a follow-up.

00:22:34.280 When I say there's no way out but through, it's because there is no way out but through.

00:22:37.640 What is the alternative?

00:22:39.200 Like, do you believe that sometime in the foreseeable,

00:22:41.840 in the amount of time that we can keep the economy shut down,

00:22:44.260 let's call that a couple more weeks, maybe another month,

00:22:47.320 do you believe that there will be some externality, to use Ben's word,

00:22:51.160 that comes along and mitigates this disease for us?

00:22:53.600 Or do you believe, as I do, that, no, we are actually just going to have to go through this?

00:23:00.140 Well, I think that it's all a question.

00:23:02.360 Look, you know, there's not really a lot of wiggle room here.

00:23:05.620 It's all a question.

00:23:06.260 We have to restart the economy.

00:23:07.700 We agree about that.

00:23:08.880 But we also have to keep vulnerable people as safe as possible for as long as possible

00:23:12.820 and hope there will be externalities.

00:23:15.080 I've been very disappointed in Israel.

00:23:16.600 You've got a whole country full of Jews.

00:23:18.000 They can't cure a disease.

00:23:19.000 I mean, what the hell, Ben?

00:23:20.700 What's going on here?

00:23:22.580 But no, seriously.

00:23:25.520 I do look forward to all the people who are boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning Israel,

00:23:29.520 not taking any of the things that Israel develops.

00:23:31.560 They'll do it later.

00:23:32.180 That'll really be.

00:23:32.720 Suddenly not so much.

00:23:34.540 They're going to boycott the day after the vaccine comes out, but not before then.

00:23:39.320 In terms of sort of long-term threats, and Drew, you mentioned long-term threats.

00:23:42.640 There are a couple of threats, and on these I agree with Jeremy,

00:23:45.480 that you cannot have 30 million people unemployed this quickly.

00:23:49.380 The government is not capable of filling in that gap.

00:23:51.980 We cannot float this kind of money interminably.

00:23:54.360 I think there are a lot of people who are very happy to float that kind of money interminably.

00:23:57.240 It's not that I think that people are interested in shutting down and locking down forever

00:24:01.620 because they're malicious or evil.

00:24:03.280 I think that what's happening here is that if you are a Democrat governor and you look at the lockdowns,

00:24:07.920 you're saying to yourself, okay, so I'm supposed to balance people's free economic enterprise

00:24:12.800 with human life.

00:24:14.100 If I'm going to err on the side of human life, and also this happens to support sort of my

00:24:18.400 political agenda, if a lot of people end up unemployed and then I have to grow government

00:24:21.240 in order to fill that gap, that actually isn't the end of the world.

00:24:23.580 So it kind of is, you almost get a twofer.

00:24:26.080 If you are somebody who is saying, well, you know, if we have a lot of unemployed people

00:24:29.360 for a very long time, and then those people go out and decide that they need to vote in

00:24:34.680 people who are going to completely remake the nature of American rights,

00:24:39.060 then people who want to reopen are going to be like, okay, let's reopen faster.

00:24:41.760 I agree with you. This is one of the times I've been most grateful that Trump is president

00:24:44.560 because he is not obviously attempting to do that, right? He doesn't want that.

00:24:47.320 He wants people to go back to work. He wants to go back to something approaching normal.

00:24:53.240 People have been asking, why has this become such a partisan issue, the reopening?

00:24:57.320 And I think the reason it's become so partisan is because a lot of people are rightly suspicious

00:25:01.080 that there are people who are looking to employ the Rahm Emanuel mentality of let no good

00:25:06.400 crisis go to waste.

00:25:07.580 There are some people in the New York Times who are talking routinely about, we need to

00:25:11.180 do Medicare for all now. We need to have a federal jobs guarantee. We need permanent universal basic

00:25:15.420 income. We need wealth taxes, right? Basically the entire standards born agenda. We need that in

00:25:20.380 order to solve the pandemic. And oh, look, an excuse for us to do that is the pandemic, right?

00:25:24.120 The making of pandemic politics normal. I love that Trump hasn't been doing that. I mean,

00:25:28.320 I'm really grateful for that. I think, first of all, all Americans should be grateful for that

00:25:31.400 because guess what? The reason federalism exists is because Utah is not New York.

00:25:35.320 And when we talk about lockdown policies, one of the real problems has been the universality of

00:25:40.100 the policies, right? Not all areas ought to be treated equally. And that I'm sure we all agree on.

00:25:44.160 I mean, the idea that Georgia should be opening at the same time as New York City is asinine. I mean,

00:25:48.760 New York City is going to have a major problem for a very long time. And until they have an

00:25:53.080 extraordinary testing regimen in place in New York City to be able to almost block by block identify

00:25:57.580 hotspots and contact trace them, it's going to be nearly impossible to open up New York City.

00:26:01.760 I mean, New York City is the disaster area in the center here. And yes, that's an American city.

00:26:07.680 And yes, if the system is overwhelmed there, that has consequences for the rest of the country.

00:26:11.640 But it doesn't have as many consequences for the rest of the country as the federal government,

00:26:15.880 if it were run by a Democrat, coming in and literally shutting all economic activity

00:26:19.140 from Utah to Georgia to Florida to Idaho, right? These places are not similarly situated. So I'm very

00:26:25.400 grateful that there is local rule. I'm very grateful that there is federalism. And I'm grateful that right

00:26:29.520 now there's someone in the White House who doesn't want to use the crisis as an opportunity to remake

00:26:32.800 America. I'm suspicious that there are many Democrats who seem eager to use the crisis as an

00:26:37.380 opportunity to remake America in ways that confirm their prior political predilections. And that's why

00:26:43.440 it's pretty important that people get back to work if they can, as soon as possible, if you can work

00:26:47.820 from, and again, responsibly, right? The key word here is responsibly. And I think that the media are

00:26:51.760 nutpicking. I think the media are going to rallies and finding people who are taking off the masks and

00:26:55.600 carrying around Confederate, like Nazi flags and suggesting that lockdowns are Nazi Germany

00:27:00.840 and yelling at nurses. And like, it's easy to nutpick. But the truth is that the vast majority

00:27:05.440 of people who are protesting to get their jobs right now are people who are not wanting to get a haircut

00:27:09.920 as morons on Lemon suggested on CNN. They're losing their jobs. They're in food lines for like,

00:27:15.180 they never thought they would be going to a food bank. Who the hell thinks they're going to go to a

00:27:18.140 food bank? Like huge numbers of people who are doing this. And they're right. They're right to want to go

00:27:22.120 back to work. It has to be done responsibly. And what that means to me is looking at the risk

00:27:25.860 factors for each population. One of the ways I think the media and the politicians have been so

00:27:30.240 irresponsible is using one COVID case fatality rate that is wrong, by the way, using that as a

00:27:35.900 blanket, right? So originally the who said that this was going to be not the band, the garbage Chinese

00:27:40.740 front organization, the who they had suggested that there was a 3.4% case fatality rate from this

00:27:46.400 thing. That is obviously untrue. The actual case fatality rate from this thing is probably somewhere

00:27:50.160 between 0.3 and 0.6%. And that is a lot higher than the flu. And when you combine that with the

00:27:54.880 fact that the, the replication rate, the infection rate is at least three times higher than the flu

00:28:00.120 or at least, or about three times higher than the flu, you could easily just by doing some simple

00:28:03.520 math, realize that if you lose 50,000 people in a year from the flu, that the number from this is

00:28:07.860 going to be 450,000 people, right? You're going to multiply it by nine because you're going, you're

00:28:11.480 getting three times the infection rate and three times the actual death rate. But that is mostly people

00:28:17.580 who are older, right? I mean, the death rates for people who are obtaining this and are above the

00:28:20.700 age of 80 are staggering and horrifying. If you're below the age of 40, the chances and healthy and

00:28:25.760 you don't have a serious preexisting condition, the chances that you die from this are almost,

00:28:30.180 are incredibly minimal. I mean, very, very low. If you're under the age of 20, you're not dying from

00:28:33.860 it, right? If you're under the age of 40 and you are healthy, the chances are excellent. When I say

00:28:38.000 excellent, I mean like one in 1,000, like 999 out of 1,000 people who get this and are under the age of

00:28:42.620 40 and healthy are not going to die from this. And so we should be looking at tranching back in

00:28:47.240 populations that are least susceptible. It's kind of ridiculous that the media not only ignore this,

00:28:53.460 but push out a countervailing narrative, right? What they'll say is things like, well, yeah, sure,

00:28:57.720 it's hitting mostly older people and people with preexisting conditions, but it could kill anyone.

00:29:01.340 That is utterly unhelpful information.

00:29:03.120 What couldn't kill anyone? Anything could kill anyone. Michael, you're the youngest person here and

00:29:07.480 probably the only one who will survive.

00:29:08.880 I am the safest one. I think Ben and Drew are totally right on this federalism point. I think

00:29:14.080 Trump has exhibited very good judgment here in deferring to federalism and to the governors.

00:29:19.920 Unfortunately, the problem is that the governors and the mayors have not exhibited that judgment. And

00:29:24.720 that's what this is about. You know, the reason that this has become a partisan political issue

00:29:28.420 is because politics is partisan. And the left has this idea that they want to remove the political

00:29:33.700 questions from our debate and just export all of it to our exalted experts like Dr. Fauci. And he can

00:29:39.900 make all of our decisions for us without debate. But of course, that's not what politics is.

00:29:44.100 And so, of course, the question is, are the lockdowns helping? Did they prevent the bodies in

00:29:49.140 the street in Broadway? And I think, look, deferring with 2020 hindsight, deferring to Andy Cuomo,

00:29:54.640 he faced a tough decision. He did what he thought was best. The problem now is the politicians who are

00:30:00.120 not changing their ideas based on the new information. And so, obviously, that did not

00:30:04.820 happen. The lockdowns work when they prevent the hospital system from being overwhelmed and when

00:30:09.740 you can stall long enough to get a vaccine. Neither of those things are happening. OK, so now it seems

00:30:15.180 likely that the lockdowns will cause more damage, more deaths than had they not happened. Again,

00:30:19.720 hindsight's 20-20. But the problem now, you see Andy Cuomo doubling down. You see Eric Garcetti,

00:30:25.040 the worst mayor in America, mayor of L.A., he said three weeks ago, he said, there is no projection

00:30:30.540 in which in two weeks L.A. doesn't look like New York, you know, mass death, chaos like Italy.

00:30:36.700 And then the trouble with making predictions is eventually you get to see if they're true or not.

00:30:41.020 It did not come true. L.A. is doing fine. On the day it turned out that his projection was false,

00:30:46.380 do you know what he did? Did he change his mind? Did he lighten up? Did he let people go back to work?

00:30:50.240 Now half of Angelenos are unemployed? No. He doubled down that very same day and extended

00:30:56.020 the lockdown. To me, that seems like an abuse. And that seems like poor judgment, which is

00:31:00.460 all we're asking of our politicians is their judgment. And I don't think a lot of them have

00:31:05.040 shown. And the worst lack of judgment that we're seeing is turning criminals out onto the streets,

00:31:11.000 which like we're seeing crime. Crime rates are starting to soar. We had actually an incident here

00:31:17.360 at The Daily Wire where at 545 in the morning, one of our critical staff, and we are, because we're

00:31:23.220 media, we are considered an essential organization. Nevertheless, 90% of our staff is working remotely.

00:31:28.420 But there are a handful of people who have to be here to make sure that the broadcasts are able

00:31:32.320 to go out and they start their day very early. Someone drove, one of our employees drove in at

00:31:36.500 545 in the morning. Someone pulled out of a parking lot and started following them.

00:31:40.440 We have gates on our parking garage. The gate opened. The employee came in. The person gunned

00:31:47.720 the gas and flew in after them and pulled up behind them and blocked them. Of course,

00:31:51.620 it's 545 in the morning. It's pitch black outside. The person is wearing a mask and now is blocking

00:31:56.600 our employee in. Fortunately, we have armed security in the building and armed security saw this happen,

00:32:01.920 ran down to the parking garage and had a confrontation with the person. And we were able to get them out the

00:32:07.320 door without any extreme incident. To me, though, there's no question what was happening. And it's

00:32:14.080 that with so little activity out there with so few people, so many people so desperate, there's just

00:32:20.620 an increase in crime. I know we're all also a little bit edgier than usual being shut in with your loved

00:32:26.580 ones day after day after day makes you, you know, love them just as much. But I heard something in my

00:32:35.060 house a few nights ago. We sleep on the second floor. I heard something downstairs that normally

00:32:40.040 wouldn't have startled me at all. Under the circumstances, I was more startled than usual.

00:32:43.780 That's why I'm glad that we all have Ring at our home. Wow. What a segue this guy. I'm getting better.

00:32:50.460 I'm just getting better. There's no question about it. Ring is great because without getting out of my

00:32:55.980 bed, I can see what that noise was downstairs. Well, maybe not what the noise was, but I can sure see

00:32:59.720 what it wasn't, that it wasn't someone in my home. Ring gives you protection at every corner and helps

00:33:04.720 create custom affordable security for your home. Ring detects motion when people come onto your

00:33:09.040 property. And Ring's video doorbells lets you answer the door and check in on your home anytime

00:33:13.580 from anywhere. And as we all know, from anywhere just means from your bedroom, the only place you're

00:33:18.360 allowed to go today. This is also great. Listen, right now we're having a lot of things shipped to

00:33:23.180 our house. You know it's not good, especially when crime is up. They have stuff sitting on your stoop

00:33:27.900 for too long. You want to know when something gets dropped at your front door. You want to be

00:33:31.060 able to keep an eye on your property. Ring helps you do that. Ring helps you stay connected to your

00:33:35.480 home anywhere in the world. If there's a package delivery, a surprise visitor, you get peace of

00:33:39.460 mind knowing that your loved ones are safe and that that was only your small terrier rummaging around

00:33:44.560 downstairs and you're really something of a coward. Hypothetically. Ben, you use Ring.

00:33:50.360 I do indeed use Ring and I keep track of my children. And also I scout out future vacation spots like my

00:33:55.960 other bedroom and also the kitchen. So Ring is really useful this way. If you are looking,

00:34:01.740 it's like Travelocity now for your actual life. Ring is great. I mean, I've been using it for years

00:34:07.020 to keep me safe because I received an inordinate number of death threats. Now the good news is that

00:34:11.680 all those people are quarantined too. But at the very least, I can keep track of my kids on my

00:34:15.160 property. And as Jeremy says, you can keep track of anything going on on your property or at your front

00:34:19.540 door anytime, all the time. Right now they've upgraded a lot of their stuff. They've got the Ring Video

00:34:24.520 Doorbell 3 upgraded with additional security features and works on any home. You can see and

00:34:28.420 speak with visitors with the HD Video two-way talk. They've got dual-band Wi-Fi, which makes it more

00:34:32.180 flexible and reliable connection. Plus, they have a quick-release rechargeable battery pack so you can

00:34:36.540 recharge this thing super easily. Get a special offer on the Ring welcome kit when you go to ring.com

00:34:40.860 slash backstage. That welcome kit includes the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and the Chime Pro. That is all you

00:34:45.980 need to start building that custom security for your home today. Just go to ring.com

00:34:49.900 slash backstage. That is ring.com slash backstage. Go check them out right now. Ring.com slash backstage.

00:34:56.960 So we're going to hear from our Daily Wire insiders who are able to write in at dailywire.com

00:35:02.140 and ask questions. Alicia sorts through those questions and brings us only the very best. But

00:35:06.860 before we do that, we're going to give you time to get your questions in by becoming a subscriber. If you

00:35:11.600 join as an All Access or Insider Plus member right now using the promo code backstage, not only will you

00:35:18.020 get an additional 10% off, but you will get a second, yes, a second Leftist Tears Tumblr, and you can get

00:35:23.820 your question in on the show. Head over there and do that. Before we take questions, though, there is one

00:35:29.180 other major event happening in the world today besides nothing, which is what we're allowed to do,

00:35:34.780 and that is that today is the day every year when we commemorate the beautiful Gaia, when we commemorate

00:35:43.920 the murder and composting of a woman more than 50 years ago, when we celebrate our right as Americans

00:35:50.940 to catch actual tires on fire, to blot out the drones which are trying to spy on us from above.

00:35:57.160 Yes, that's right. It's National Tire Burning Day. Michael, tell us a little bit about how we got this

00:36:01.580 holiday. This year, Jeremy, marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and that's a long

00:36:07.660 time to be around, 20 years longer, to be precise, than the life of Holly Maddox, who was beaten and

00:36:14.020 murdered at the age of 30 by one of Earth Day's leaders, Ira Einhorn. Yes, the media portray a

00:36:19.720 bright picture of Earth Day, happy hippies celebrating nature, but there's a darker side to this pantheistic

00:36:25.380 bacchanal that the tree huggers don't want you to know about, namely that the co-founder was a lunatic

00:36:30.780 killer who took his environmentalism so seriously that he composted his girlfriend's body in a

00:36:36.280 trunk. Einhorn spoke at the first Earth Day celebration in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970.

00:36:42.600 Seven years later, his girlfriend dumped him, at which point he flew into a rage and murdered her.

00:36:47.420 But like so many leftists before and since, Einhorn wasn't held responsible for his crime,

00:36:53.060 at least not at first. In fact, one year after the murder, I kid you not, Harvard gave Einhorn a job

00:36:59.800 lecturing at the Harvard University Institute of Politics. The Harvard administration welcomed the

00:37:05.920 yippee with open arms, gushing in the student newspaper that Einhorn offered a perspective

00:37:10.620 different from anybody else's, you can say that again, and that he would contribute to the richness

00:37:15.280 of our program. Einhorn was finally caught the following year when a strange red-brown liquid began

00:37:21.240 to leak from the ceiling beneath his apartment, at which point the environmental activist jumped bail

00:37:27.000 and fled the country for 17 years before being extradited back to the states in the late 1990s.

00:37:34.680 Since then, the environmental movement and its sycophants in the mainstream media have done

00:37:39.320 everything they can to distance themselves from Einhorn. The other founders have disavowed him.

00:37:44.540 Time magazine ran a spread calling the story fake news. But the historical accounts remain,

00:37:50.160 and even Big Green can't deny the photos of Einhorn on stage addressing the crowds at the first Earth

00:37:57.780 Day event in Philly 50 years ago today. Happy Earth Day, everybody.

00:38:02.700 So the water is cleaner, the sky is clearer, but don't go upstairs for the love of God.

00:38:09.940 If you want to ask us questions about the Rona, about Earth Day, about where you can burn your tire,

00:38:16.500 head over to dailywire.com and become a member. Alicia, what kind of questions are we hearing so

00:38:22.380 far today? Well, I think an Earth Day applicable one. It's very important. I'm a big fan of this

00:38:28.200 show, and I just want to make it known that not all ogies are like the Tiger King, but a subscriber

00:38:34.820 wants to know if there was a Tiger King of the Daily Wire, who would it be? And I just want to add

00:38:40.320 that obviously Knowles is Carole Baskin, right? That I'm Carole Baskin? No, no. You're the Carole

00:38:47.320 Baskin of the Daily Wire. I want to be that weird guru, like, sex cult guy. I forget his name,

00:38:52.540 but that's the one I want. Doc Antle. Doc Antle.

00:38:54.620 No, there's no question Jeremy is Doc Antle in this particular cast.

00:38:59.400 Fair enough. And there's also no question that Knowles is basically the... What's the name of the

00:39:08.360 guy who steals the zoo? Oh, yeah. Yeah, what is that guy's name? That's a good guy to be. I like

00:39:13.640 that. There's no question he's that guy, right? I mean, like, going to Vegas, pretending that he's

00:39:16.960 super rich, but Jeff Lowe. Jeff Lowe. He's definitely Jeff Lowe. Joe Exotic, you know, hard to peg who

00:39:25.220 Joe Exotic is. I actually have an answer. I mean, you do, because I was going to go,

00:39:29.280 Clavin is certainly the reality TV producer sitting there in the hat, right? I mean, there's no question

00:39:33.780 that that is, Clavin is. I filmed it all. It was some crazy crap. Yeah, that guy was terrific.

00:39:38.980 I got to say, though, and this won't mean much to the folks at home, but we have a senior accountant

00:39:43.920 on our team, one of our great, one of the best employees in the company. His name is Matt. I'll

00:39:48.940 spare his last name in case anybody wants to... For his future employment. Yeah. And he has a mullet

00:39:53.060 already. He came into the office. He's been working from home for the last five weeks. He came into

00:39:58.360 the office to do some accounting, temporary accounting work that someone just had to be

00:40:02.460 here legally to do. He's always had a mullet and handlebar mustache. In quarantine, it has

00:40:08.760 become sublime. It is a thing of such beauty. All that's missing is the bleach, and he will

00:40:16.120 be Joe Exotic. And I got to say, I don't know what tiger piss smells like, but that guy had

00:40:21.940 been in quarantine for quite some time when he walked down the halls. It is possible he has

00:40:26.640 big cats. Yep. By the way, quick note. I mean, Elisha, I hate to do this to you,

00:40:30.920 but there is no question you're Carol Baskin. There is no question you're Carol Baskin, right?

00:40:34.960 I mean, can we all agree on this? Eric is in serious trouble. I mean, the fact of the matter is

00:40:39.980 who this company is like, oh, animals. Animals are great, and I would love to protect animals.

00:40:44.520 Animals are wonderful. And also, no one else. I will have all of the animals. I'll have all of them.

00:40:50.640 And also, Elisha, for those who watch the show, they understand that Elisha is incredibly

00:40:55.060 charming and wonderful. Hi, little cats and kittens. And then, behind the scenes,

00:40:59.240 she is a vicious, vicious killer. Just a killer.

00:41:02.500 There's just, this is the easiest casting decision we've ever had to make here at the

00:41:06.240 Daily Wire. Elisha Crass' Carol Baskin is a no-brainer. Ben just knows that because he's

00:41:11.060 seen me at 6 a.m. for four years in a row. Correct. Absolutely correct. Absolutely correct.

00:41:16.620 We are all our true selves at 6 a.m. with a lovable liberal who will not be named. All right,

00:41:22.960 next important question. Drew touched on it a little bit, and you guys were kind of debating

00:41:26.680 about this at the top of the show. Subscriber was interested to know, do you guys think that

00:41:30.360 the Democrats partly want us to say quarantine, shelter at home, lockdown, whatever you want

00:41:34.520 to call it, as long as possible so the economy continues to fail, and then that hurts Trump

00:41:39.720 in the election in November? Correct. Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's no question about it. I mean,

00:41:46.000 you know, the one thing that has really come out, and it's something I just hammer at,

00:41:49.860 and I think it's so important, is our media are really the worst people in the country. I mean,

00:41:54.880 there are guys that they are letting out of prison now who are not as bad as the people who work in

00:42:00.160 the news media. I mean, they have been irresponsible. I didn't mention that the guy who pulled into our

00:42:04.480 parking garage at 545 looked suspiciously like Chris Cuomo, but it couldn't have been him because

00:42:09.280 he was still in the basement. He was in the basement. Well, you know, I mean, when Brian Stelter said

00:42:15.320 he missed his deadline because he had to crawl into bed and cry, you know, I thought of all the

00:42:21.220 times in American history when men have said, you know, like, give me liberty or I'll crawl into my

00:42:25.520 bed and cry or, you know, or remember the Alamo because I'm crying for our pre-Alamo life, you know,

00:42:30.660 all the great men in history who've acted like Brian Stelter. And this is what they're displaying to

00:42:35.820 people outside of the media world is just absolutely terrifying. And one of the things I think that

00:42:43.200 has actually been in a serious way, a bad thing is that it's hard to get information. I mean,

00:42:49.020 I'm reading charts, I'm reading, you know, medical things, but if you're watching the news, you have

00:42:54.740 no idea what the facts are unless you are reading the, maybe the wall street journal, watching Brett

00:43:00.400 Baer's show on Fox, you have no idea what the facts are. So yeah, I definitely think to answer the

00:43:05.520 question, I definitely think there are Democrats, many Democrats who, as Jeremy was saying, and Ben was

00:43:10.900 saying that want to manipulate this crisis into socialism. And there are also Democrats who would

00:43:16.560 like just to see the world burn basically. So that Donald Trump, uh, loses in November. Anybody who

00:43:22.840 votes for Joe Biden to handle this crisis deserves every single thing that they get. I don't even

00:43:28.300 want to think about what you deserve. By the way, is Matt Drudge, the Joker from the dark night?

00:43:33.540 I do not believe that Drudge is running that site anymore.

00:43:38.880 No. Yeah, I don't think so. I don't, I think he's actually just like Bruce Wayne from the

00:43:43.040 dark night because he's a super rich guy who's not running a website anymore. And whoever bought

00:43:47.640 it from him is doing it.

00:43:49.180 Yeah. I mean, there's no question that the coverage at Drudge in terms of what he chooses

00:43:54.320 to link, uh, is extraordinarily alarmist, right? I mean, if you, if you read nothing but Drudge,

00:43:58.860 you will come away so alarmed about the state of the world that you will, you will lose your

00:44:03.040 mind. And then when you actually look at the studies that are coming down, you're, you're

00:44:05.700 concerned, but not, but not in a state of, you know, screaming hair on fire alarm, unless

00:44:12.000 you're a member of a vulnerable group, right? I mean, which is, which is really where, where

00:44:14.760 we ought to be as far as sort of the intent of Democrats. I think that it's worth noting

00:44:18.200 that I think the intent of the media is in part to just slam Trump. I'm not even sure

00:44:22.820 it's, I want the economy to tank and therefore I want lockdown. It's Trump is anti-lockdown.

00:44:27.000 Therefore I want lockdown, right? I, we are going to set up a bar that no one can clear.

00:44:31.160 And this is why you see Anderson Cooper repeating obvious idiocies like we're not going to be safe

00:44:35.300 until we have 20 million tests a day. Okay. So now you set up a standard that no one is ever

00:44:39.040 going to clear. That isn't about him like wanting the economy to tank. I think that's about him

00:44:43.100 setting up a standard that no one could possibly meet. And you see this in the media, in the

00:44:46.660 coverage of the ventilator stuff, right? Rich Lauer hit a great column on this at national

00:44:49.560 review, talking about the fact that the ventilators came, Trump did it, right? The ventilators

00:44:52.760 showed up where they were supposed to show up. There was no shortage of ventilators. And all you

00:44:56.460 were getting for weeks on end was where are the ventilators and Trump gave them. And then it was

00:44:59.280 like, Oh, what, what was that a story? Ventilators? Oh, well, what happened there? It really is more

00:45:03.500 about getting Trump than anything else from the perspective of what bars they're setting that

00:45:08.600 need to be, that need to be exceeded in order for the lockdowns to end. Again, I think that some of

00:45:13.380 this is unconscious. I think that if you are a, if you are a Gretchen Whitmer, you're thinking I'm

00:45:17.840 going to get blamed for, for every excess death. I'm a politician. I'm getting cheered for my lockdown

00:45:22.160 policies. And if things stay locked down, well then I also get to pursue some of my broader

00:45:28.300 policies, like extending the scope of government. So it's not that she is choosing between competing

00:45:33.460 priorities. It's that all the priorities line up behind what she wants, right? I mean, it's not like

00:45:38.200 the economy versus lost life. It is, we can avoid lost life. And also I can shape the economy in a way

00:45:43.620 that I think is actually better for the country at the same time. So the competing priorities tend to

00:45:47.580 not even be there. Instead, it's just reinforcement. This is what you see with Garcetti, right? Garcetti,

00:45:51.260 as Michael says, I don't know how you can name him the worst mayor in the United States. Bill de

00:45:55.300 Blasio is a human being and is a mayor of a major state. I mean, Bill de Blasio, I mean,

00:45:59.280 Garcetti's awful. I mean, make no mistake. Garcetti is a garbage heap of humanity. I mean,

00:46:03.440 the man shut down the turn-offs on Mulholland Drive. On Mulholland Drive, those turn-offs are

00:46:08.300 the size of like my couch over here, right? Those are postage stamps. And he had somebody go out there

00:46:13.360 with yellow tape and tape them off as though we're going to have like mass gatherings on the turn-offs

00:46:18.060 on Mulholland Drive. And by the way, you just drive over to Burbank and Burbank, where they are not

00:46:22.280 crazy. They have signs in the park that say, you should act responsibly. So there are a bunch of

00:46:27.140 people at the park, and they're all 20 feet away from each other, acting responsibly in the open

00:46:30.620 air where you're not going to get coronavirus, because it turns out, you know how you get

00:46:33.400 coronavirus? Being stuck in small rooms with other people. Being outside is actually a very,

00:46:38.200 very good thing. Bill de Blasio... I generally agree with everything you just said, except that

00:46:41.940 defense of Governor Whitmer, who you say that she's acting out of self-interest. She's acting out...

00:46:47.560 She's obviously trying to punish the November criminals, and I don't think there's any...

00:46:51.280 I don't think there's any question about it. Alicia, do you have one more question for us?

00:46:54.520 I do. Somebody actually has a question, kind of along the line of the governors and their

00:46:58.360 overreach here. People want to know, what do you guys think that places like Michigan and

00:47:01.740 California are going to do when it comes to reopening of churches and synagogues? I know

00:47:05.420 here in California, Newsom keeps talking about events under 50 people. Does that mean that my

00:47:10.560 church is going to have to have 10 services a day and rotate out 50 people at a time?

00:47:14.980 Michael?

00:47:15.460 Yeah, I actually think the issue here is more the religious leaders than it is the governors of those

00:47:21.260 states. Some governors have been overzealous and they're arresting pastors and spying on

00:47:25.400 people going to drive through church. That's obviously an overreach. But when I look at

00:47:28.880 California, all of the churches and the synagogues had already capitulated by the time the state got

00:47:33.560 involved. The Catholic church completely closed down before the state ever raised a voice about it.

00:47:39.080 So I think, frankly, more of the onus is going to be placed on those religious leaders. I don't think

00:47:44.840 it's a fight that the liberal governors are necessarily going to pick. You know, de Blasio,

00:47:50.380 mayor of New York, was blowing off steam and he said, I'm going to shut down buildings,

00:47:54.600 church buildings permanently. That obviously is ridiculous. I don't think that would ever happen.

00:47:59.400 But I frankly, I place a little bit more blame on the religious leaders here than I do the liberal

00:48:05.160 governors. And, you know, my feeling on liberal governors. Well, the one thing I just wanted to say

00:48:09.300 that, you know, my church went online very early. And the fact that you don't have to shake people's

00:48:14.020 hands and wish them God's peace has just been a real benefit. And I'd like to see that just

00:48:20.120 included in all church services forever, that you just don't have to talk to other people or shake

00:48:24.440 their hands. My problem is that in the absence of being able to greet everyone with a brotherly

00:48:28.720 kiss, I'm not sure if I'm straight. I will say that when I am actually very grateful to a lot of the

00:48:38.160 church and synagogue leadership for being early on this, the Orthodox community got smoked. I mean,

00:48:42.020 absolutely destroyed in New York and New Jersey. The number of the number of people who died of

00:48:45.580 this because disproportionately elderly populations, a lot of intergenerational contact,

00:48:50.120 big parties in Israel, they had a major hit, a major hit because of Purim, because that happened

00:48:54.160 right at the beginning of this. And I actually remember for myself and my family, I started to

00:48:59.000 actually pre-lockdown on Purim. Like we went to Shul and I looked around and I felt like this is kind

00:49:04.160 of uncomfortable. And we were invited to a party and I said, OK, my parents are here. We're not going to

00:49:07.380 the party. We just can't do that. And so we sort of started that early. I think that it is smart

00:49:13.420 that churches and synagogues are socially distancing. You also know, by the way, that if

00:49:18.100 there are outbreaks at churches, you know who's going to get blamed. And we see this already in

00:49:21.780 sort of the New York Times' treatment of the Orthodox community in New York, which, by the way,

00:49:25.220 again, shut down pretty early. There are certain very core areas that didn't shut down. And you're

00:49:29.980 seeing those stories covered in excess. But Israel, they shut everything down. If things go wrong,

00:49:35.380 recognize that the media is going to be looking to blame. I mean, they're already preemptively

00:49:39.460 declaring that Brian Kemp killed a million people in Georgia, right? They're going to preemptively

00:49:42.960 be looking to blame churches and synagogues. One question for Knowles, real quick. What's up with

00:49:47.620 your boy? I mean, can you get your Pope under control? I know, I know. You're talking about

00:49:51.960 the Earth Day stuff. You're over there ripping on Earth Day. You might want to talk to your man over

00:49:56.420 there because that's who put out the biggest load of pagan garbage I have seen in quite a while.

00:50:01.540 So you know what? Nature is taking revenge on you. Last I checked, that was a pagan thing,

00:50:06.020 not a Christian thing. No, I mean, this is the issue. I saw this. He actually made the first

00:50:10.020 version of these comments like two weeks ago, and then it came out today. So what I always like to

00:50:14.680 do, whether it's true or not, is say that to Papa Francesco, he's been a mis-translated.

00:50:19.780 People don't understand what he's saying. And now, you know, unfortunately, the Pope sort of

00:50:25.420 encourages this confusion. So I read exactly what he said in the Italian, however he said it.

00:50:30.000 And what he's saying is there's an old Spanish idiom, right? And he's kind of going on and then

00:50:35.020 using this to suggest to the secular press that he's saying that the Earth is going to condemn us

00:50:39.940 for our sins or something. And this is really a problem because if what he is doing is what the

00:50:45.100 press is reporting on, then he's engaging in what's called the pathetic fallacy. Not just pathetic like

00:50:49.400 it's no good, but pathetic meaning it's attributing to inanimate objects human emotions and human

00:50:55.420 desires, which is obviously ridiculous. And one hallmark of this papacy has been encouraging

00:51:01.540 these kind of confusing things in the press. He keeps talking to the journalists who are

00:51:06.360 allegedly mistranslating him. So just a filial bit of advice to the Holy Father is maybe don't talk to

00:51:13.440 the liberal press. I don't know. I'm probably not going to get an answer on that one.

00:51:16.560 Yeah, I suspect you're going to come up dry, buddy. One of the things I've been doing during this,

00:51:21.320 during the shutdown, is trying to broaden my horizons a little bit. I've been listening to

00:51:26.940 so many audio books. I listened to Another Kingdom, Drew's fantasy masterpiece. I wanted to

00:51:35.420 listen to the second volume of Another Kingdom, but Drew forgot to release the audio book when he

00:51:40.920 released the second installment of Another Kingdom. Drew, first of all, what's up? Are we going to get

00:51:46.560 Another Kingdom, too? Yeah, it should be. Noel's recorded it, I believe, and I don't know why it

00:51:52.560 hasn't come out and why they messed up. They messed up not bringing it out at the same time as the book,

00:51:57.660 but you did record it, right, Noel? So it must be on its way. We did, and I actually, when I was called

00:52:02.300 in to record it, it was right at the beginning of, are we going to lock down? So I actually burned

00:52:07.520 through this audio book. I did it in like two days. So I did these six days, you know, sessions. It is

00:52:13.620 done. It's in the can, and it should be online soon. I listened to, so far, Drew's book, 1776. I'm

00:52:19.240 going through the Eric Larson book right now, The Splendid and the Vile, about Churchill in the

00:52:22.680 first year of the war. It's terrific. I'm listening to them all on my Raycon earbuds. The Raycon earbuds,

00:52:29.380 fabulous earbuds. You need a new pair of wireless earbuds. You should get something stylish,

00:52:33.300 comfortable, long-lasting, with quality audio, but don't take half your paycheck. That's where

00:52:38.640 these Raycon earbuds come in. Their newest model, the everyday E25 earbuds, are the best ones yet.

00:52:45.140 Six hours of playback time, seamless Bluetooth pairing, more bass, and a more compact design

00:52:49.680 that gives you a nice noise-isolating fit. Raycon's wireless earbuds are so comfortable,

00:52:54.020 perfect for conference calls, video chats, binging podcasts, listening to Drew's books,

00:52:58.160 if they're available. It is the perfect earbud, and I will tell you, it's actually, you don't look

00:53:03.420 like an insect when you wear the E25s. When you wear your Raycon earbuds, they're very discreet.

00:53:08.940 They're very high-tech looking. It's just a fabulous product. I think every one of us here

00:53:12.820 has a pair. Michael, you've got a pair, yeah? I do. I love them. They're fabulous. The thing I like,

00:53:17.580 I'm a very vain person, obviously. I want to look good while I'm listening to my music. I don't want

00:53:22.340 to look like some weirdo with random things popping out. They sound amazing. They look really good,

00:53:26.800 and they're very comfortable, too. Ben? Well, I can tell you my favorite thing about the Raycons,

00:53:30.740 they have a variety of fits for your ear, and if you have a weird ear, not to say I do,

00:53:35.400 but if you do, then they have a card that comes with a variety of fits, and you can actually tailor

00:53:39.260 the fits to your ear, which is great. Right now, you get 15% off your order at buyraycon.com

00:53:43.320 slash backstage. That would be buyraycon.com slash backstage for 15% off Raycon wireless earbuds.

00:53:49.640 Buyraycon.com slash backstage. Again, buyraycon.com slash backstage. You get 15% off those Raycon

00:53:55.100 wireless earbuds. Go get your pair. Every now and then, our director of production,

00:54:00.020 Mathis Glover, comes up to me with an idea. In five years, none of them have been very good,

00:54:05.780 but he does often come to me with ideas. He came to me this week with an idea to find out who is

00:54:11.240 the greatest American, and he thought that we could arrive at this by a simple intuitive quiz,

00:54:18.020 and that's how we came up with this segment called, Who is the Greatest American?

00:54:22.120 All right, so welcome to the quiz. What we're trying to do here is determine who among the

00:54:37.600 Daily Wire hosts is, in fact, the greatest American, and there's only one way to find

00:54:42.540 out, and that's to test our knowledge of the bald eagle.

00:54:45.580 Okay, I'm going to not get any of these rights. Okay, okay, okay.

00:54:49.560 Question number one. Bald eagles are only found in North America. That's true. I'm going to say true.

00:54:56.540 Nailed it.

00:54:57.880 I'm going to go false.

00:54:59.240 False.

00:55:00.220 Uh, I think that's false. I think they're found in China as well.

00:55:03.200 False.

00:55:04.060 Well, I don't know. I figured there are zoos elsewhere.

00:55:06.340 That was wrong. It was true. They're only found in North America. That's what I meant.

00:55:09.480 That's what I was trying to say.

00:55:10.440 In what year did the bald eagle become the national emblem of the United States?

00:55:17.500 1776.

00:55:18.440 Correct.

00:55:19.360 Yeah, I know.

00:55:22.300 1788. Answer C.

00:55:23.780 Correct.

00:55:24.820 Damn it. 82?

00:55:27.860 I should have gone with 82.

00:55:29.840 Say 1776.

00:55:31.200 Correct.

00:55:32.000 Okay, incorrect. 1782. Okay, so the musical 1776 is incorrect. Okay.

00:55:36.500 It's either B or C. I'm going to guess 1788.

00:55:39.220 Correct.

00:55:39.700 Ah, come on. 1782. I knew it was one of those. All right.

00:55:43.440 How much does an average adult bald eagle weigh?

00:55:47.020 You know, the last time I weighed one, uh, I don't know. Let's see.

00:55:51.560 I don't know. I've never, I've never roasted one.

00:55:53.900 D. 24 pounds.

00:55:55.140 Four.

00:55:55.900 Damn it. 12.

00:55:57.560 Damn it. I keep, ah, damn. Can I get redos?

00:56:00.260 Mmm.

00:56:00.920 24 pounds.

00:56:02.540 Four.

00:56:03.700 No, incorrect. 12. 12, yeah. A lot of feathers on the, on the bald eagle.

00:56:08.220 12 pounds.

00:56:08.940 Yeah, yeah. Come on. That's the way. Now we're, now we're cooking. Now we're rolling.

00:56:15.600 Benjamin Franklin didn't want the bald eagle to be the national symbol of the United States. Which bird did he want? He wanted the turkey.

00:56:20.200 That, that, that I know is right.

00:56:21.960 He wanted the turkey.

00:56:23.220 I actually know the answer to this question because this is an actual interesting question, right? It was the turkey who wanted to be the, uh, the national symbol.

00:56:32.540 Turkey.

00:56:33.780 I think he was joking about that, but that's fine. I'll take any correct answers I can.

00:56:37.640 Where would you find the most wild bald eagles?

00:56:40.120 Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Ohio, California.

00:56:43.060 My guess is either Alaska or California. Um, uh, California?

00:56:47.980 Florida.

00:56:48.740 Alaska? Okay. Okay. Well, I, I had it down to the final two.

00:56:52.340 Oh, Alaska.

00:56:53.040 Alaska. I'm, I'm going to say Alaska because I, the last time I was in Alaska, I was in a town that was like filled with bald eagles. And unless they were migrating to Louisiana, I would say Alaska.

00:57:03.720 All right. That's like three, that's like three bald eagle questions in a row. I got right.

00:57:09.880 I'm going to say Alaska. See.

00:57:14.020 Nice.

00:57:14.860 All right. How long until the bald eagle reaches maturity?

00:57:18.120 That'd probably be another 20 years.

00:57:21.020 It's because of the drinking. You know, I say if he wouldn't go out to the bars all the time, he would become mature. Get a job. Get a job, bald eagle.

00:57:27.560 How long until the bald eagle reaches maturity and sports the signature snow white head and tail?

00:57:32.320 Oh, I have no idea. Um, one year.

00:57:35.620 Four.

00:57:36.600 I don't know. Four years. My God. Uh, they age like a movie star.

00:57:42.080 Well, in my lengthy study of bald eagles, which I was planning to do, but never got around to, I'm going to say six months.

00:57:48.700 Four.

00:57:49.400 Ah, what is it? Four years before he gets bald. Huh? Yeah. Well, it took me 23.

00:57:54.180 Uh, they don't have the signature white head and tail until they're three years old.

00:57:57.880 Four.

00:57:58.320 Oh, four years old. How fast can the bald eagle move when chasing prey?

00:58:03.960 B, 60 miles an hour.

00:58:05.740 Four.

00:58:06.380 Ah, I'm going to go with 75 miles per hour.

00:58:09.340 Four.

00:58:10.320 100 miles an hour? God dang, that's a great bird.

00:58:13.620 Oh, 60 miles an hour.

00:58:16.000 Four.

00:58:16.980 Incorrect.

00:58:17.880 D, 100 miles an hour. Wow. We picked a cool animal, guys. Good job, founders.

00:58:23.280 Male bald eagles are usually larger than females.

00:58:27.840 True.

00:58:29.140 Four.

00:58:30.620 Yikes.

00:58:31.780 America's always been a matriarchy. John, John Wayne said that once.

00:58:34.940 Uh, I'll say true.

00:58:36.440 Four.

00:58:37.660 False. Okay.

00:58:38.640 So, my knowledge of the animal kingdom is wildly flawed, guys.

00:58:44.180 Well, that's false.

00:58:46.360 That sounds like a trick question that's going to be false, but I'm going to say true.

00:58:49.520 Four.

00:58:50.040 All right. They just look larger because they're holding the remote.

00:58:52.700 Where does a bald eagle usually build its nest?

00:58:56.180 Sturdy ledge of a cliff?

00:58:58.000 I don't know.

00:58:58.560 Four.

00:58:59.160 No.

00:58:59.900 Top of a tall tree in the... I'll say on the ledge of a cliff.

00:59:02.880 Four.

00:59:03.660 Usually build their nests in the top of a tall tree.

00:59:05.840 B. On the sturdy ledge of a cliff.

00:59:10.680 I don't care that that's wrong.

00:59:12.240 It's so romantic and dramatic that I'm still going to stick with that one.

00:59:16.180 What size was the largest bald eagle nest ever recorded?

00:59:21.700 Let's see B. Five feet deep, 500 bucks.

00:59:24.020 Four.

00:59:24.960 Ah.

00:59:25.520 You know, I'm just going to go for it.

00:59:26.440 30 feet deep, 6,000 pounds. Why the hell not?

00:59:29.100 No, I know that's wrong.

00:59:30.840 D. 20 feet deep, 4,000 pounds.

00:59:32.640 Yeah, I should have gone with the SAT strategy, which has always picked the second to least crazy answer.

00:59:37.600 I don't know. Five feet deep, 500 plus pounds.

00:59:40.220 Four.

00:59:40.940 Ah.

00:59:41.620 How big was it?

00:59:42.540 20 feet deep, 4,000 pounds. Oh my gosh.

00:59:46.100 I'm going to go all the way. 30 feet deep, 6,000 pounds.

00:59:48.980 Four.

00:59:50.180 20 feet deep, 4,000 pounds.

00:59:52.720 So I overestimated the greatness of the bald eagle in this one regard.

00:59:57.800 How old was the oldest bald eagle living in the wild?

01:00:00.200 Well, they only mature when they're 4, so I'm going to go 23.

01:00:03.420 Four.

01:00:04.420 No.

01:00:05.160 23 years old.

01:00:06.480 Four.

01:00:08.060 38.

01:00:08.800 Oh my gosh.

01:00:09.600 Um, I'm going to say 15.

01:00:11.340 Four.

01:00:12.060 I'm going to say the oldest one was C, 38 years.

01:00:16.860 Boom.

01:00:17.680 How did they date that eagle?

01:00:18.780 How did they figure that out exactly?

01:00:20.800 They like show up every year.

01:00:22.100 Yeah, exactly.

01:00:22.780 They chop them in half and check the rings inside.

01:00:24.500 Like, how did that work?

01:00:26.280 Name as many movie and or song titles with the word eagle as you can.

01:00:31.780 Oh my gosh.

01:00:32.860 I can't do that at all.

01:00:34.220 Uh, let's see.

01:00:35.120 Where Eagles Dare.

01:00:36.480 Fly like an eagle.

01:00:38.320 Eagle Eye.

01:00:39.700 Um, Night of the Eagle.

01:00:41.520 Um, Iron Eagle.

01:00:43.040 What was that song, The Wind Beneath the Wings, I Can Fly Like an Eagle?

01:00:47.360 On Eagle's Wings.

01:00:48.440 That's that horrible pop Christian hymn.

01:00:51.380 I'm sure there is a song called The Eagle, so I'll just say The Eagle.

01:00:54.380 When the eagle flies.

01:00:56.700 That's a real movie, right?

01:00:57.580 Legal Eagle.

01:00:59.000 Did I mention Fly Like an Eagle?

01:01:00.660 Did I get that one?

01:01:01.600 I'm sure there's a punk rock song called Spread Eagle.

01:01:04.200 Then what'd I get, like six?

01:01:05.400 I have no idea.

01:01:07.160 Oh, two.

01:01:07.700 Okay.

01:01:08.100 All right, well.

01:01:08.700 That's all I got.

01:01:09.400 I don't know.

01:01:10.200 I give up.

01:01:11.040 That's it.

01:01:11.660 I'm dead.

01:01:12.000 Eagle is not my thing, guys.

01:01:13.600 Whatever.

01:01:14.120 It's over.

01:01:14.540 It's all over.

01:01:15.340 All right.

01:01:15.740 Well, that was, uh, humiliating.

01:01:17.840 I'm pretty comfortable with that.

01:01:19.600 And the answers that I got wrong, uh, I, I think I'm still going to stick with.

01:01:23.580 Because the bald eagle is not a real animal in my mind, but just a mythical, larger-than-life

01:01:29.020 symbol of America.

01:01:30.140 And so, no answer could be too grandiose for that.

01:01:33.500 Jeremy, you are the greatest American.

01:01:41.860 In fairness, I wrote the questions and still missed three, so it probably doesn't count.

01:01:45.940 But we did have, we have this lovely prize.

01:01:48.960 As the greatest American, I, uh, have been bequeathed by Mathis this beautiful bald eagle

01:01:54.780 shirt.

01:01:55.340 Is nobody going to acknowledge that John Voight was in that video?

01:01:58.340 John Voight was in that video?

01:02:00.120 Ah, crazy.

01:02:01.740 The, the question I thought was going to be on there is which is more delicious, the

01:02:04.880 bald eagle or the humpback whale?

01:02:06.500 Uh, in which case...

01:02:08.140 The answer is yes.

01:02:09.000 The answer is always yes.

01:02:11.460 I want to talk about our friends over at Bravo Company Manufacturing, one of the great

01:02:16.060 companies, almost as great as the bald eagle.

01:02:18.060 These guys love America so much.

01:02:19.940 When the founders crafted the Constitution, the very first thing they did was to make sacred

01:02:24.440 the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their government.

01:02:28.900 Uh, freedom of religion.

01:02:31.800 Freedom of the press.

01:02:33.600 Freedom of speech.

01:02:35.060 Freedom to petition the government for grievances.

01:02:37.760 Freedom of assembly.

01:02:39.060 Freedom of the press still exists, so the First Amendment, eh, it's still, it's still

01:02:43.240 doing pretty well.

01:02:43.840 The second right that they enumerated was the right of the population to protect the

01:02:48.100 First Amendment using force.

01:02:50.180 You know how strongly we believe in these principles here at the Daily Wire, and that's

01:02:53.580 why we are all four gun owners.

01:02:55.920 Many, uh, all four of us, many of our other employees, I believe, uh, Michael, you and I

01:03:01.880 are both owners of Black Rifles, and we can say with certainty that Bravo Company Manufacturing,

01:03:07.120 one of the great companies, they were started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two

01:03:11.220 decades ago.

01:03:12.280 Bravo Company Manufacturing builds professional-grade products which are built to combat standards.

01:03:17.220 That's because Bravo Company, they don't believe that, uh, your gun is for hunting.

01:03:21.860 They don't believe that your gun is for sport.

01:03:23.880 They don't believe that your gun is for, uh, a nice ornament above your mantle.

01:03:28.260 If you live in some movie house, uh, do people really put guns above their mantle?

01:03:33.220 They believe, uh, as we do, that the, your weapon is for your protection, the protection

01:03:38.900 of yourself, of your family, and for that reason, uh, if you're an American and you own

01:03:43.040 a firearm, you need that firearm built to combat standards.

01:03:45.840 You need that firearm to be, uh, built with rigorous standards so that you can depend on

01:03:50.520 it if, God forbid, you're ever called upon to use it for the purpose for which it was

01:03:54.600 actually created, Ben.

01:03:57.280 To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, they're awesome people.

01:03:59.920 Head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.

01:04:01.780 You can discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news.

01:04:04.840 That is bravocompanymfg.com.

01:04:07.340 Really stellar, stellar folks.

01:04:08.920 You should check out their awesome videos.

01:04:10.240 Meet the people who make their products at youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa.

01:04:14.460 Now's a good time to be armed, I think.

01:04:15.740 So I think bravocompanymfg.com would be a good stop for you on the interwebs today.

01:04:20.940 And check out their videos to youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa.

01:04:23.740 Fantastic videos that they put out, by the way, very informative.

01:04:27.040 A lot of, very entertaining.

01:04:28.640 And it's the, it's not only the right of an American to own a firearm, I believe it's

01:04:32.500 the responsibility of an American to own a firearm.

01:04:35.260 Head over to Bravo Company Manufacturing.

01:04:37.220 With us today, by popular demand, because people often write in.

01:04:41.520 And when they write in, one of the things that they say is,

01:04:44.560 Matt Walsh isn't on the show.

01:04:47.340 When are you going to have Matt Walsh on the show?

01:04:49.880 Why isn't Matt Walsh on the show?

01:04:51.540 And I always say, because Matt Walsh lives on a freaking farm on the East Coast.

01:04:55.960 He checks for sunlight twice a year.

01:04:58.900 He raises his kids, he raises his kids and he does his show from his home studio.

01:05:03.600 I have met Matt Walsh 0.5 times in all of my years in the conservative.

01:05:09.300 But since we're all doing the show remotely now, it seems perfectly natural to invite on

01:05:14.800 our colleague, Matt Walsh.

01:05:17.160 Matt, are you with us?

01:05:17.680 I'm here.

01:05:19.900 I think I'm here, right?

01:05:21.180 You are here.

01:05:22.620 I am here.

01:05:23.200 Okay.

01:05:23.580 You are the Daily Wire host with the finest beard.

01:05:25.800 I'm just going to go ahead and say it.

01:05:26.880 Wow.

01:05:27.860 Well, I guess it's just between me and you.

01:05:30.720 So you have given me that title then.

01:05:33.740 Occasionally, Drew has a nice beard.

01:05:36.080 In fact, Drew, the last time I saw you, you had a beard.

01:05:39.340 I have a beard.

01:05:40.220 It's just white.

01:05:41.160 So you can't see it.

01:05:41.960 Is that what's going to happen?

01:05:45.220 Not to you, bud.

01:05:47.380 I'm waiting for it to grow in someday.

01:05:49.440 Never do.

01:05:49.860 Matt, we've all kind of gone around the horn and given an update about where we are on

01:05:53.680 the current billings on COVID and the government response.

01:05:56.900 I think we should give you that same opportunity.

01:05:58.940 Just give us a brief catch up of where you are on the topic.

01:06:02.360 Well, I've been ready to get things opened up again for weeks now.

01:06:08.880 So I'm glad that some states are starting to do that.

01:06:11.220 I don't know if you guys mentioned the report in the New York Times about the UN raising the

01:06:17.320 concern of 150 million people globally who could be on the brink of starvation because

01:06:21.400 of the lockdown and the ramifications of that.

01:06:24.720 So when you look at that and then you also factor in, of course, in this country, the

01:06:29.880 homelessness and drug overdoses and suicide, there's a very good chance that many more

01:06:35.740 people will die because of the lockdown than we have saved by the lockdown, especially when

01:06:41.160 you consider I'm not convinced we've saved a single person from the lockdown.

01:06:44.040 We may have just sort of put off their death temporarily.

01:06:48.440 So is that worth the price?

01:06:50.380 And I would say definitely not.

01:06:51.980 And then when you factor in, of course, civil liberties and everything, it's just I think

01:06:55.740 it's been it's been maybe maybe the greatest blunder by the American government in history.

01:07:01.180 It could end up being their worst blunder in history when all is said and done.

01:07:04.980 That's an interesting point that you raise that we that we may not have actually saved

01:07:08.300 any lives from the lockdown.

01:07:10.640 And I think this is something that we we have talked about.

01:07:13.000 We haven't gotten very specific on this show.

01:07:14.500 And that's the Ben, you've talked about this on your show.

01:07:16.680 The idea that flattening the curve doesn't actually change the total area of the curve,

01:07:21.040 the area of the curve representing the total number of people who are sort of encompassed

01:07:25.160 in the curve, that when you when you flatten it, you also extend it out.

01:07:29.000 And since you can't extend it backwards because time moves linearly, you're just extending it

01:07:33.060 out in front of you into the future.

01:07:35.800 How how are right now?

01:07:38.220 How are Dr.

01:07:38.680 Fauci?

01:07:38.980 How are the other people who are leading sort of the federal government's response to

01:07:43.160 this?

01:07:43.380 The so-called I won't say so-called experts.

01:07:45.560 There are certainly experts at things at which I'm not an expert.

01:07:48.740 I don't know if that means that we should defer the running of the country to them,

01:07:51.500 but they certainly know more about virology and epidemiology than I do.

01:07:54.600 What are the the experts been saying right now about the actual projected death toll as

01:08:00.020 a result of the lockdown?

01:08:03.320 So the the the latest that I've seen is still from that IHME study, which was obviously being

01:08:08.780 downgraded in real time.

01:08:09.700 And it was a curve fitting study.

01:08:10.960 It wasn't a study where they were sort of trying to intuit what factors went into this.

01:08:14.940 They were just looking at various curves in various countries and then basically averaging

01:08:17.860 them.

01:08:18.520 And as more information came in, the studies got more accurate.

01:08:22.000 They're suggesting still last I checked about 60,000, 61,000 deaths in the United States.

01:08:27.280 That's by the end of June, I believe.

01:08:30.620 So now everybody is talking about that second wave.

01:08:32.840 And I was pointing out when it came to these models, particularly that particular IHME study,

01:08:37.700 that that study cuts off August 1st.

01:08:40.200 So if it cuts off August 1st, you don't get any of the second wave.

01:08:43.040 And one of the things that Sweden has been trying is, of course, to try and reach some

01:08:46.780 level of herd immunity so that when a second wave comes, it's more of a ripple than a

01:08:50.120 second wave.

01:08:50.760 One of the concerns here is that as kids go back to school and as people start to sort

01:08:54.060 of go back to normal, that there will be a massive second wave in the fall.

01:08:57.360 Now, I will say that if the U.S.

01:09:00.000 health care system had been completely swamped, that would have been a very, very bad thing.

01:09:02.760 It would have meant additional deaths because some people who needed care were not going

01:09:06.720 to be able to get care the way that it was in Italy.

01:09:09.600 Also, if you happen to like our private health care system, there would never have been a

01:09:13.140 better case against the U.S.

01:09:14.080 private health care system than if we get swamped by Italy.

01:09:16.360 If it turns out that there are just people dying in the ER wards waiting for a ventilator,

01:09:21.640 then the calls for Medicare for all would have been a lot, a lot worse than they have been

01:09:26.500 even so far.

01:09:27.440 I want to push back just a little bit with something that I haven't heard a lot of people

01:09:29.900 drawing attention to.

01:09:30.860 And that's the fact that actually our health care system is largely shut down with the exception

01:09:35.600 of the response to COVID-19 itself.

01:09:37.860 A lot of hospitals, no elective surgeries, but it's not just no elective surgeries.

01:09:42.100 I know people who are pregnant who have not been able to get in and see a doctor in the

01:09:46.240 last month.

01:09:46.960 I know people personally who have not been able to get chemotherapy for their cancer treatment

01:09:50.540 within the last month because hospitals are laying off staff.

01:09:54.560 They can't bring people in.

01:09:55.580 They're afraid of the liability of bringing people in with COVID rampaging the way that it

01:09:59.960 is in particular people with cancer or other diseases.

01:10:02.540 Do you think it's possible, you know, 600,000 people die in the country every year just from

01:10:07.100 cancer?

01:10:07.680 If you take one month of cancer treatment off of the table, I mean, you could see 60,000

01:10:13.700 extra fatalities in the country just from the care that we're not giving people in other

01:10:17.900 high-risk categories.

01:10:19.400 Have you seen any science around that yet?

01:10:21.940 Well, the number of excess deaths, I mean, so far, the number of excess deaths this month

01:10:26.260 is a lot higher than it was this time last year.

01:10:28.660 So, you know, to suggest that on the tail end, there might be more death, again, that is

01:10:32.800 possible.

01:10:33.640 But I think that it's hard to imagine that the tail end death rate for what are basically

01:10:39.220 emergency surgery was still available during this time.

01:10:41.320 If you're talking about elective surgery, which again, for many people is not elective, right?

01:10:45.640 Some of those surgeries are deeply important, hip replacement surgeries and all that.

01:10:49.640 But then, you know, that's bad stuff and it means that it's going to have to come back

01:10:53.060 online.

01:10:53.360 Even Andrew Cuomo is now allowing those things to come back online in New York State.

01:10:57.440 With all of that said, you know, I wouldn't want to downgrade what has happened over the

01:11:02.340 past month.

01:11:02.900 I mean, we have seen, when people compare this to the flu, for example, I know a lot of

01:11:07.360 people have been objecting to any of those sorts of comparisons.

01:11:09.900 First of all, I think that comparing viral diseases to viral diseases makes sense, but there

01:11:13.620 are ways in which this is not like a flu.

01:11:16.060 One way this is not like a flu is that the entire death toll for a year in a completely

01:11:19.640 open environment with a vaccine available for the flu is maybe 30 or 40,000, anywhere

01:11:24.700 from 20 to 60,000 in a year.

01:11:26.360 We've seen 46,000 deaths in the United States effectively in three and a half weeks.

01:11:29.920 I mean, that is an extraordinary toll.

01:11:32.280 And if the lockdowns end and people do not socially distance, and again, I think that's

01:11:36.620 the best it's going to be.

01:11:37.500 I don't think there's a world where the lockdown ends and everything is hunky-dory and a lot

01:11:41.800 of people don't die.

01:11:42.520 I think a lot of people will die.

01:11:43.540 I think the question is going to be, are people responsible enough to be trusted with their

01:11:47.260 liberty such that they are not going around coughing on each other, going to highly populated

01:11:51.040 areas and infecting each other?

01:11:52.640 I do trust the American people with that liberty.

01:11:54.340 I think that this is what you saw in Florida, right?

01:11:56.640 In Florida, Ron DeSantis left a lot of the beaches open because guess what?

01:11:59.920 You're not going to get this on a beach if you stay six feet away from other people,

01:12:02.640 right?

01:12:02.820 And that's why the objections to what was going on in Jacksonville were absurd.

01:12:06.060 Even Dr.

01:12:06.500 Birx was pretty cautious on this stuff.

01:12:07.820 He was like, are you guys kidding?

01:12:08.480 There have been 20 cases in Jacksonville and people are six feet away from each other.

01:12:12.480 Matt, I want you to speak if you can to something Ben just said.

01:12:15.400 The only place, Ben, I'll push back is when you say 30,000 to 60,000 people die in America

01:12:20.000 from the flu in a year.

01:12:21.520 But that's not quite right.

01:12:22.920 The flu season is a fairly short piece of the year, three, four months.

01:12:26.360 So of course-

01:12:26.860 No, that's a calendar year.

01:12:27.700 I mean, the flu dies off during the summer and then it comes back during the fall.

01:12:30.300 I mean, during a calendar year, 30,000 to 60,000 people, 20,000 to 60,000 people will

01:12:34.080 die.

01:12:34.460 We've seen nearly that many people die in a month.

01:12:36.160 And there's no question that in this month, we've seen an unbelievable number of fatalities.

01:12:41.980 Certainly that's true.

01:12:43.280 It has yet to be seen, will COVID die down also during the summer?

01:12:46.120 Will it also have that sort of seasonal aspect to it?

01:12:49.320 Matt, the one interesting piece of what Ben just said, though, is we do have a vaccine for

01:12:55.300 the flu.

01:12:55.840 So we have 30,000 to 60,000 people who die every year from the flu in this country with

01:13:00.300 a vaccine.

01:13:02.500 What do you think is our hope where things like treatments and vaccines are concerned?

01:13:06.800 What are you seeing out there that gives you hope?

01:13:08.400 And what are you seeing out there maybe just as a realist?

01:13:11.740 Yeah, I can speak as a realist.

01:13:12.860 I mean, in terms of what treatments are on the horizon, I can't really speak to that.

01:13:16.840 All I can do is listen to what the doctors say in terms of a vaccine.

01:13:20.160 And I haven't heard anyone, any knowledgeable person predict that we're going to have a

01:13:24.380 vaccine within a year.

01:13:25.640 I mean, we're looking at a year, two years.

01:13:27.700 If they even come up with a vaccine, that's the other thing.

01:13:29.500 We're acting as though it's definite there will be a vaccine.

01:13:31.820 There might not be one.

01:13:32.460 But if there is one, it's going to be years.

01:13:34.200 You know, it's going to be quite a distance in the future.

01:13:36.640 So the point is, you know, Ben raises, well, can we trust Americans with their liberty?

01:13:41.660 Well, eventually we're going to have to, no matter what.

01:13:44.860 And so it seems to me, it seems to me either we can trust people to go out and be responsible

01:13:50.200 or not.

01:13:50.960 And if we can, then what was the point of the lockdown?

01:13:54.000 Because we could have just done that to begin with.

01:13:55.960 And if we can't, then we're going to have to face that eventually anyway.

01:13:59.180 And I don't see what delaying it really accomplishes because, yeah, we avoided overrunning the

01:14:04.140 hospitals in the last couple of months, but it doesn't mean that it can't happen whenever

01:14:08.080 we do open up because we're going to have to open up before the vaccine comes.

01:14:13.020 The other thing I'd also raise is we're looking at this and it's way too immediate.

01:14:16.420 Like we're looking at, you know, what's happened in the last month or two months.

01:14:19.460 We're trying to solve the problem in a span of months.

01:14:22.320 Really, the story is going to be told over the course of many years.

01:14:25.440 I mean, even something like, look at the Great Depression.

01:14:27.560 People point out that during the height of the Great Depression, suicide rates actually

01:14:31.200 did not spike.

01:14:32.640 And that's the claim anyway.

01:14:34.560 But if you look at the late 1930s, you did see a spike in suicide rates.

01:14:39.440 And I think the reason is because people are having their lives destroyed.

01:14:42.600 They don't kill themselves immediately.

01:14:44.220 It's just it's an over a course of time.

01:14:46.040 And then they just give up and they fall into despair.

01:14:48.740 So we have to look at this.

01:14:50.540 We have to take a we're expecting results way too quickly, I think.

01:14:54.580 And we're judging things in a much too immediate fashion, I think.

01:14:57.720 Yeah, because that is the question.

01:14:59.320 You know, I think to Drew's point, when you're looking at these politicians and they've got

01:15:03.960 something, they have no idea what it is.

01:15:05.800 China's been lying.

01:15:06.620 The WHO has been lying.

01:15:08.260 Sure, you give them a little bit of grace because they want to err on the side of caution.

01:15:12.400 That's fair enough.

01:15:13.300 But we did not overwhelm the hospital system.

01:15:15.720 I think now there's a lot of evidence we would not have overwhelmed the hospital system.

01:15:19.700 We don't know yet.

01:15:20.540 I mean, I guess we'll have more data on that as this goes on.

01:15:23.460 Was this more widely spread than we thought it was?

01:15:25.700 Did it hit us earlier than we thought it did initially?

01:15:28.880 Who knows?

01:15:29.720 If the lockdowns did not do anything to mitigate the overwhelming the hospital system, if that

01:15:35.620 wasn't a factor, then we need to reassess immediately.

01:15:38.140 Because then to Matt's point, it will have served no purpose other than, I suppose, a

01:15:43.340 psychological purpose.

01:15:44.440 We feel good that we're doing something.

01:15:46.900 And perhaps a fact finding purpose.

01:15:48.400 Like we sure we didn't know five weeks ago the things that we know today.

01:15:51.320 Exactly, yes.

01:15:52.220 This is why I always objected to the lockdown, but I'm willing to concede that I was an extremist

01:15:57.020 on it and that perhaps the lockdown was warranted five weeks ago.

01:16:00.760 The question is, does it continue to be warranted today?

01:16:03.140 Drew, you have a unique experience that I don't believe any of the others of us tonight have,

01:16:08.320 which is you've done work with suicide hotlines.

01:16:11.980 You're married to a professional therapist who helps people deal with these psychological

01:16:17.640 problems and some of the hardships that can befall a person in life.

01:16:21.840 What kind of concerns do you have about increased suicidality and even generational problems,

01:16:27.840 like the generational effects of unemployment, alcoholism, increased rates of suicidality,

01:16:33.700 increased rates of teen pregnancy?

01:16:35.340 Do you think those are legitimate concerns or do you think it's too early for those to

01:16:38.740 be things that we're overly worried about?

01:16:41.240 Well, it's too early to know whether they'll happen, but they're certainly legitimate concerns.

01:16:45.000 And, you know, this goes back to an old argument, you know, we always had where I say you've

01:16:49.680 always said, well, if your community falls apart, you should move.

01:16:52.680 And that may be true, but that's not what happens.

01:16:54.800 And when people's lives and communities fall apart, they die, you know, and that is something

01:16:59.280 we've saw because of the Obama economy.

01:17:02.380 And it could happen again if we suffer that kind of depression.

01:17:05.340 Matt is absolutely right.

01:17:06.480 It doesn't happen right away.

01:17:08.020 Being isolated is terrible for depression.

01:17:11.900 Marriages that have tensions in them.

01:17:13.500 I mean, I'm thanking God every day that I love my wife so much because if you're stuck

01:17:17.980 in a, you know, it's terrible for her because she's stuck with me, but I'm like stuck with

01:17:22.760 her and it's great.

01:17:23.620 You know, if you're stuck in a marriage that's tense and now you've got to really deal with

01:17:27.340 those things and know where to go, that can be a real stressor.

01:17:30.860 And the isolation can be a terrible, terrible thing.

01:17:34.020 So yeah, this is going to be, you know, I'm not going to predict suicides because I just

01:17:40.480 don't know.

01:17:41.020 I really don't know what's going to happen.

01:17:42.600 And I think that that's the most important thing.

01:17:44.320 None of us knows yet what is going to happen or how this is going to play out.

01:17:47.540 I'm hoping the economy will rumble back to life in a good way.

01:17:51.280 But over time, absolutely, this is a real thing.

01:17:54.500 And the people in the press who are saying that if you are talking about the economy,

01:18:00.280 you don't care about human life are just idiots because economy is human life.

01:18:05.260 The economy is how we live.

01:18:07.440 It's how we support one another.

01:18:08.600 It's how we find meaning in our life.

01:18:10.000 It's how we have dignity in our life.

01:18:11.360 And we saw under the Obama economy what happens to people when they don't have that.

01:18:15.780 So yeah, it's definitely a concern.

01:18:17.520 Ben.

01:18:18.360 I mean, I would also urge people who are conservative not to rely too heavily on the argument that

01:18:23.120 when the economy goes down, people will be suicidal or there will be deaths of despair

01:18:26.300 simply because that is betting an unsure thing against a sure thing, which is the number

01:18:31.420 of bodies that are piling up on this thing that it's sort of, I just don't think that's

01:18:34.620 an easy argument to make.

01:18:35.660 I think the argument that nobody will make, but it's the honest argument, is that quality

01:18:38.900 of life matters too in this country.

01:18:40.720 I mean, the idea that somehow it does us no damage, that we just have to stack up the

01:18:45.780 way Andrew Cuomo put it today.

01:18:46.800 We just have to stack up pure loss of life against all other factors.

01:18:50.920 Single factor analysis sucks no matter how you slice it.

01:18:53.660 Single factor analysis is the worst analysis you can do.

01:18:55.840 It's true statistically.

01:18:56.900 It is true in life.

01:18:57.920 That is not how people actually make considerations.

01:19:00.640 I mean, the fact is that if you, Andrew Cuomo is saying things like, well, if we could save

01:19:04.640 one life, then we should do whatever.

01:19:06.000 That is the last refuge of the rogue, that particular argument.

01:19:09.980 And to pretend that public policy isn't the weighing of priorities, including, by the way,

01:19:13.580 the priority of not being broke and watching your life's dreams destroyed and watching your

01:19:17.520 family fall apart.

01:19:18.320 You may live, but your life may suck an awful lot, right?

01:19:21.120 Last I checked, the conflict between capitalism and communism wasn't purely about the number of

01:19:24.600 lives to be saved.

01:19:25.420 It was also about the kind of life that people wanted to live.

01:19:27.780 And that sort of stuff is incredibly important.

01:19:29.800 I mean, you're seeing tens of millions of people who never thought that they were going

01:19:32.600 to be on a food line.

01:19:34.820 Now, waiting in line for a food bank after having expended their entire life savings to

01:19:38.940 start a restaurant, then having it forcibly shut down by the government in the middle

01:19:41.720 of this thing.

01:19:42.500 And then you're seeing people like Don Lemon on TV saying, well, you know, these are just

01:19:45.040 people who want a haircut.

01:19:45.980 You know, go F yourself, dude.

01:19:47.680 And if the consideration is supposed to be that there are, you know, that if the consideration

01:19:55.580 is supposed to be just purely along one axis, which is the loss of human life, then obviously

01:20:01.500 that does implicate the sort of bubble argument.

01:20:03.740 OK, fine.

01:20:04.140 Well, then let's all lock down.

01:20:05.060 Let's go into bubbles.

01:20:05.740 Nobody ever drives again.

01:20:06.740 Nobody ever works again.

01:20:07.760 That's when you get into the arguments that you've seen some people getting criticized for

01:20:11.060 on Fox News.

01:20:11.740 But that argument is begged by the attitude of some people on the left, which is the only factor

01:20:16.040 that we should be concerned about in any way is purely the number of lives lost.

01:20:21.080 Because, again, quality of life matters.

01:20:22.680 I mean, my God.

01:20:23.340 That brings me to my last question while we have Matt with us.

01:20:25.760 You know, there's five religious men broadcasting here today.

01:20:31.360 Only one of us is correct in our theology, which means that it can't be the two who agree

01:20:35.340 with everything that the Pope says.

01:20:37.240 Not this Pope, but just other Popes.

01:20:38.880 Just generally.

01:20:39.240 Just the Popes generally.

01:20:40.700 And we all know that it's not Drew.

01:20:42.960 Wait, I'm the only one with a direct connection.

01:20:50.540 Five religious men.

01:20:52.160 And we are obviously going through something that has massive spiritual implications in

01:20:56.520 the country right now.

01:20:57.260 In fact, my view is that one of the reasons that we've seen the level of panic that we've

01:21:01.380 seen.

01:21:01.560 And I love it when people say, there's no panic.

01:21:03.160 There's only us trying to do the absolute right thing.

01:21:05.500 And then we have snitch lines for what to do with our neighbors.

01:21:08.400 Obviously, obviously there's panic in the country right now.

01:21:11.700 Huge tension in the country.

01:21:13.300 My view of it is that at least in part, it's because we're, you know, we stand on the shoulders

01:21:19.260 of the greatest generation who defeated war, disease, poverty, and death in the West, in

01:21:24.280 particular in America.

01:21:25.620 And we are a generation of people who've just not contemplated mortality.

01:21:32.020 Matt, what do you think about the sort of spiritual piece?

01:21:34.720 What does this reveal about us?

01:21:36.840 And what might we do to address it?

01:21:39.800 I think you're exactly right.

01:21:40.680 I think people are coming up against the reality that we are mortal.

01:21:44.580 And you see that even in far less dramatic circumstances.

01:21:48.420 You think back, it feels like 10 years ago now, but Kobe Bryant, remember when Kobe Bryant

01:21:53.100 died?

01:21:53.480 Not that long ago.

01:21:54.340 And it was the biggest story in the world for a week.

01:21:55.960 And I think the reason why that stuff, celebrity deaths and so on, affect people so much is

01:22:02.380 just because it makes us think about the fact that, oh my gosh, I'm going to die.

01:22:06.120 And here's this person who was a part of my life, at least in a peripheral sense, and is

01:22:09.760 gone now.

01:22:10.340 Uh, so I'll be gone soon too.

01:22:12.840 And, and then this even more, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a reality.

01:22:16.240 Death is out there.

01:22:17.560 Uh, and then it becomes this awkward thing because you do want to make the point that,

01:22:22.040 listen, um, you know, death is not the worst thing in the world.

01:22:25.560 It is going to happen to all of us.

01:22:26.900 We don't want to give up everything just to avoid death because it's a fool's errand anyway.

01:22:31.660 Um, and that's, and that's just not the right or dignified way to live.

01:22:35.540 When you try to make that point, of course, you get descended upon by the media.

01:22:38.240 Look at, uh, the Lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan, Dan Patrick.

01:22:41.500 Yeah.

01:22:42.060 Yeah.

01:22:42.240 He, he made this point and said, uh, that there are, there are things worse than death.

01:22:45.700 And I would, I would rather risk my own life to preserve a civilization for my children,

01:22:50.520 which is, which is the right attitude for a parent to have.

01:22:53.800 But of course people act like that's some sort of nihilistic suicidal, uh, position when

01:22:59.180 it's the exact opposite.

01:23:00.360 That's the position of someone who realizes that life is meaningful.

01:23:03.940 And if you realize that life is meaningful, you also realize that it's not the most meaningful

01:23:07.660 thing in the world.

01:23:08.860 And I think that's what we're, uh, we're missing.

01:23:10.260 Glenn Beck was also descended upon by the vultures in the media for making a similar point three

01:23:15.060 weeks ago.

01:23:15.720 It was actually a really good point.

01:23:17.380 His, his point was, there are things that I'm willing to die for, and I'm willing to die to

01:23:21.920 keep 30 million of my countrymen, uh, from going through that kind of despair.

01:23:26.480 He wasn't calling for recklessness, but he was calling for a shift in perspective.

01:23:29.980 Michael.

01:23:30.380 Yeah.

01:23:30.660 This was the thesis of one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan's

01:23:35.280 A Time for Choosing.

01:23:36.260 He said, the people to our left, they say better red than dead.

01:23:39.840 I mean, Andrew Cuomo more or less said that today.

01:23:42.420 And he said, that isn't true, but when did this idea begin?

01:23:45.420 Should Moses have refused to lead the Israelites out of Egypt?

01:23:48.240 Should Christ have refused the cross?

01:23:49.640 Should the Patriots at Concord Bridge have refused to fire the shot heard down, heard

01:23:53.360 around the world?

01:23:54.220 There are things in life that are worth dying for.

01:23:57.320 Of course there are.

01:23:58.060 And there's something really beautiful about, uh, this carnage of coronavirus.

01:24:02.360 There's actually a little beauty hidden, tucked away there as a silver lining, which is that

01:24:06.300 it began basically on Ash Wednesday, which is the, you know, the beginning of Lent when

01:24:11.260 you have what's called the memento mori.

01:24:13.060 You were told, remember man, you were dust and to dust you shall return.

01:24:16.380 One of my earliest shows during this whole pandemic was called, we're all going to die.

01:24:20.800 Statistically, the vast majority of us are not going to die from coronavirus, but we are

01:24:24.880 going to die.

01:24:25.880 And, you know, if there's anything positive about being in isolation, it gets you away

01:24:30.360 from all the distractions of life and you start to contemplate the eternal questions.

01:24:33.920 And that can either be very uplifting or absolutely terrifying.

01:24:37.360 Yeah.

01:24:37.940 Probably more terrifying when you're Drew's age.

01:24:39.980 It's not, you know, actually not though.

01:24:44.760 It's actually, it's actually the other way around.

01:24:46.400 I mean, at some point, uh, you feel like you've lived at some point.

01:24:49.060 You feel like, uh, you did some of what you were sent to do.

01:24:51.880 Uh, you've, you know, in my case, my life has been, uh, insanely joyful and, uh, I, God

01:24:58.080 owes me absolutely nothing.

01:24:59.540 Uh, but, but to Michael's point, what he said is really true.

01:25:02.840 Is there the one positive thing about this is to stop for a minute, to get away from

01:25:07.560 distractions, to get away from the business of your life.

01:25:09.720 For those of us who are not necessarily in, in desperate financial straits, it does give

01:25:14.660 you a moment to sort of say, well, wait a minute, what was, what was I doing that for?

01:25:17.660 Why was that so important?

01:25:19.220 What, one of the aspects of American life is that it really is full of good stuff.

01:25:25.320 It's full of machines and it's full of food and it's full of wine.

01:25:28.820 And it's just got a lot of stuff, uh, to enjoy that can make you think that life is

01:25:33.680 everything, that this is, that this moment is everything.

01:25:36.300 Uh, the, the fame that can be gotten just by going on Twitter, uh, is fame that, uh, you

01:25:41.460 know, poets would have died for a long time ago or now everybody has it.

01:25:46.280 Everybody's everybody's yeah, exactly.

01:25:47.940 Everybody's, uh, everybody's got it now except poets, except poets, but, but no, you know,

01:25:53.860 suddenly you, you realize that there's a reason, uh, rich, famous people commit suicide.

01:25:58.280 There's a reason they are, they're unhappy and they drink and they have a thousand divorces

01:26:01.840 is because suddenly you find that's actually not what life is about.

01:26:04.820 Uh, life is about a lot of other things.

01:26:06.780 And when you have a certain amount of time to confront your mortality, but also to confront

01:26:11.640 the quiet, just the sheer quiet of not being distracted.

01:26:15.360 Uh, it can be very edifying.

01:26:17.240 Welcome to Shabbos.

01:26:19.020 Bitch.

01:26:23.100 He's the host of the Matt Walsh show.

01:26:25.020 Matt Walsh, thank you for joining us.

01:26:26.480 Uh, and thanks for being a great contributor to daily wire, even though you are rarely

01:26:30.600 a contributor to backstage.

01:26:32.500 Well, I, and I just say that, uh, I want to predict that our friend Jason over at media

01:26:36.920 matters is going to, he's going to that moment, that moment from Michael, when he said that

01:26:41.760 there's something beautiful about the carnage, that's going to be on Twitter tonight.

01:26:44.900 I'm just predicting that that guy, Matt, that guy is beautiful for media matters.

01:26:48.660 Explainer for media matters.

01:26:49.720 He doesn't mean the dead people and all of the carnage.

01:26:52.260 The carnage, he doesn't mean any of that.

01:26:54.480 He's just, I don't know if they're worse than you guys.

01:26:56.960 Let them take Knowles.

01:26:57.700 Knowles, go.

01:26:58.380 Go.

01:26:58.660 The thing that you guys don't know.

01:26:59.880 Just cart them away like the Ghanaian, like the Ghanaian grave carriers.

01:27:03.340 Just go.

01:27:03.880 Just go, Knowles.

01:27:04.540 The thing that you guys don't understand about that guy, Jason, and all the other people

01:27:07.680 at media matters, I'm actually paying them.

01:27:10.060 They're my publicist.

01:27:11.080 The only reason people watch my show is they cut my clip.

01:27:13.780 So I'm very grateful to them.

01:27:15.100 Matt, thank you for being with us.

01:27:16.460 One of the things that I've done since the last time that we were all together, and it's

01:27:21.720 actually not because of COVID.

01:27:24.700 I had actually started contemplating it before and even taking the first steps, is I actually

01:27:29.840 went to Policy Genius and bought a life insurance policy.

01:27:33.840 I felt they've been great sponsors.

01:27:35.300 The show, my wife and I, neither of us have had a policy beyond our limited policy that

01:27:39.840 we both have for our employers.

01:27:42.060 And I wanted to go through the whole process with Policy Genius.

01:27:44.600 I went over to policygenius.com.

01:27:47.100 It took mere minutes to get a quote.

01:27:50.300 Even during this difficult time that we've been in, when most of LA, most of the country

01:27:53.760 has been shut down, they still sent health professionals out to our home to take blood

01:27:58.200 and do the sort of physical examinations that they need to do to be able to qualify us for

01:28:03.300 these policies.

01:28:04.020 And I can't speak highly enough about this remarkable service, Policy Genius.

01:28:08.900 You know, we're always prone to get things wrong.

01:28:13.260 That's just life.

01:28:13.920 But there are also things we can get right on the first try.

01:28:16.600 Shopping for life insurance can be one of the latter instead of one of the former.

01:28:20.200 That's where Policy Genius comes in.

01:28:21.940 Policy Genius makes finding the right life insurance a breeze in minutes.

01:28:25.560 And it was truly minutes.

01:28:27.340 You can compare quotes from the top insurers to find your best price.

01:28:30.700 You could save $1,500 or more a year by using Policy Genius to compare life insurance

01:28:34.900 policies.

01:28:36.120 I'll go ahead and tell you a little bit more because I did want to go through the whole Policy

01:28:40.480 Genius experience.

01:28:42.360 But I'm also what they call a cheapskate.

01:28:45.260 And so once I got my quotes from Policy Genius, I will confess to you that I went to a whole

01:28:50.240 other carrier and got a quote before I decided to pull the trigger.

01:28:54.100 And Policy Genius blew them away.

01:28:55.720 I won't say who I got that quote from.

01:28:57.520 It is someone well known in our space who also offers life insurance.

01:29:02.200 Policy Genius absolutely came in with the best quotes, made it super simple both for myself

01:29:07.300 and my wife.

01:29:08.420 And life insurance is not the only thing that they offer.

01:29:11.000 You can also get your home auto insurance, disability insurance.

01:29:14.360 Take care of yourself.

01:29:15.140 Take care of your loved ones.

01:29:15.960 Now's a good time.

01:29:16.880 While we're all contemplating mortality, it's also good to think about what happens in the

01:29:20.980 wake of our mortality.

01:29:22.640 Who do we leave behind?

01:29:23.780 What kind of needs do they have?

01:29:24.860 What sort of responsibilities do we actually still have?

01:29:29.140 We incur those responsibilities now and they remain even after we're gone.

01:29:34.180 Life insurance is one of those.

01:29:35.560 Being able to provide for your family is one of those.

01:29:37.900 And you can do that at PolicyGenius.com.

01:29:39.920 Ben.

01:29:40.820 Well, here's the deal, folks.

01:29:42.220 There are lots of things in life that you regret.

01:29:43.780 I regret having hired Knowles.

01:29:44.800 I'm going to regret it more in the coming days after what he just said, the idiot.

01:29:49.120 But the fact is that one of the things you shouldn't regret is buying life insurance through

01:29:52.660 PolicyGenius because you will be doing it right.

01:29:54.480 Go check out PolicyGenius right now.

01:29:55.780 In just a few minutes, you can find your best price and apply at PolicyGenius.com.

01:29:59.060 We all get things wrong from time to time.

01:30:00.600 At least get your life insurance right with PolicyGenius.

01:30:04.680 I believe that we have Alicia Krauss back with us to bring us some questions from our DailyWire.com

01:30:09.640 All Access and Insider Plus members.

01:30:12.500 Alicia.

01:30:13.400 Absolutely.

01:30:13.800 And for people that want to be able to ask questions during this backstage or future

01:30:17.620 backstages, by the way, be sure to head on over to DailyWire.com because there's that

01:30:21.120 special special happening right now where you can get not one but two leftist tears tumblers.

01:30:27.280 So all the more reason, even if you live alone and you're sheltering at home alone and you

01:30:31.040 don't feel like doing the dishes while you just chill on the couch and eat snacks and watch

01:30:34.720 Netflix all the time, then that's okay.

01:30:36.540 You can have two to rotate out while you wash or hopefully you're a good conservative who's

01:30:42.200 gotten married and is making lots of babies so then you and your spouse can have one too.

01:30:45.660 So head on over to DailyWire.com.

01:30:48.200 That's if you become a DailyWire Insider Plus or an all-access member, then you can get the

01:30:53.680 10% off code using Backstage over at DailyWire.com.

01:30:56.720 All right, this is an interesting question because we've talked a lot before.

01:30:59.620 I mean, in American politics in general, every guy seems to get elected to office and four

01:31:04.480 years later, they have aged an insane amount, right?

01:31:08.400 So do you guys think that Donald Trump has aged at all in the last four years or has he

01:31:12.560 aged more since all of this COVID stuff happened?

01:31:15.140 Donald Trump has not aged a day.

01:31:17.160 Not a minute.

01:31:17.760 It's unbelievable.

01:31:18.220 Not a minute.

01:31:18.980 No, you know, the reason for this-

01:31:21.100 They're just-

01:31:21.980 They're sort of like, go ahead, Noles.

01:31:24.060 You make your joke and then I'll make mine.

01:31:25.160 This is, I mean, it's not, it's almost not even a joke that you saw Obama age like 300

01:31:30.120 years in the eight years he was in office because he hated being president.

01:31:33.540 He loved campaigning.

01:31:34.660 He was really good at that, but he was not good at being president.

01:31:37.580 And Trump, it's like he gets younger every day.

01:31:40.640 He loves fighting with Jim Acosta so much that he is now holding daily press briefings.

01:31:46.340 The guy, he's like, he's going to be 10 years old by the time this is all over.

01:31:51.060 Okay, so now I'm going to make my joke.

01:31:52.580 Okay, so have you ever left, like, I remember,

01:31:55.160 back in the days when my family did not keep kosher and you would get, like, McDonald's

01:31:59.380 fries and then you would just sort of, like, leave them in the car, right?

01:32:03.180 And then you'd come back, like, a year later and there was no mold on them.

01:32:07.880 They looked exactly the same.

01:32:10.440 That's Donald Trump.

01:32:11.400 It turns out that organic does not do you good.

01:32:14.540 When your entire diet, your entire life consists of nothing but fast food and Diet Coke, it's

01:32:19.420 actually like formaldehyde for the body.

01:32:21.560 Like, at a certain point, you just become that, right?

01:32:24.560 He's actually, you don't need a wax figure of Donald Trump.

01:32:27.420 Donald Trump is a wax figure of Donald Trump.

01:32:29.640 Yeah.

01:32:30.180 I believe it was Jay Leno who said once that you could bury a chicken McNugget.

01:32:36.800 A thousand years later, someone could be digging.

01:32:38.980 They'd find it and they'd go, ah, a chicken McNugget.

01:32:40.980 This is exactly, exactly right.

01:32:44.680 And as opposed to, like, Joe Biden, right?

01:32:46.540 Like, Joe Biden is somebody who, it seems, tried to stay healthy, ate a salad every once

01:32:51.640 in a while, but then he tried to backfill this thing.

01:32:53.520 You can't backfill it, okay?

01:32:54.660 If you're going to go full fake, you got to start at, like, age 20 and eat nothing but

01:32:58.740 artery-hardening food and just never exercise, right?

01:33:01.540 You got to keep that life force in place.

01:33:03.080 Never exercise ever because we all know that expends your life force.

01:33:05.760 Biden, like, goes for walks and he challenges people to push-up contests and the plastic

01:33:10.720 surgery was an attempt to backfill time and so what's happened is that it's had an outsized

01:33:14.540 impact on him to the point where his forehead actually now extends from the middle of his

01:33:17.600 face all the way to the back of his head and the rest of his face has actually been crammed

01:33:21.500 into the bottom half of his face.

01:33:24.040 His eyes are now millimeters away from his mouth and that has not happened with Donald

01:33:28.640 Trump.

01:33:28.800 Donald Trump is just, he's like the portrait, he's like the portrait of Dorian Gray.

01:33:34.580 He, he, he never ages except he's the, except the reverse because the portrait is, is, is

01:33:41.260 also him, right?

01:33:42.780 The portrait is just a mirror for Donald Trump.

01:33:44.800 All of his sins never actually accrue to anyone and also they do not age him.

01:33:49.260 It's pretty incredible.

01:33:50.240 What sins?

01:33:50.700 Donald Trump likes to live a life where you don't really have to ask for forgiveness.

01:33:53.200 That's a great point.

01:33:54.000 Fair.

01:33:55.380 You know, uh, when Obama finally, finally endorsed the last man in the room because the potted,

01:34:02.120 the potted plant with vote for me finally fell over.

01:34:04.540 So he said, all right, I'll endorse Joe Biden.

01:34:06.340 And I start, and I heard that voice again.

01:34:08.560 I have to say it was like a, a drill in my teeth.

01:34:12.580 It was just that droning, worried, pompous voice.

01:34:17.380 And then you hear Donald Trump and he said, they say, well, there's going to be a depression.

01:34:20.400 And he says, ah, I built a great economy before I'll do it again.

01:34:23.600 That's how you stay young forever.

01:34:25.020 It's like, what, what could you say?

01:34:27.600 There'll be a nuclear war.

01:34:28.520 I'll bring everybody back to life.

01:34:29.840 You know, I think that attitude, I think that attitude is just good for you.

01:34:34.540 Alicia.

01:34:35.420 All right.

01:34:35.920 Speaking of nuclear war that Drew just mentioned, um, somebody says Kim Jong-un with a question

01:34:40.560 mark and says that you guys should have no context necessary.

01:34:44.640 Well, that's fair.

01:34:45.500 I would say it's more like Kim Jong unlikely to be alive.

01:34:49.860 Am I right?

01:34:50.780 Am I right?

01:34:51.520 The most amazing thing about the Kim Jong-un story, because truly none of us know it's

01:34:59.060 a closed society.

01:34:59.960 It's very difficult to get information.

01:35:01.660 Donald Trump doesn't know, although he wishes Kim Jong-un well, uh, because he knows him

01:35:05.800 very well.

01:35:06.540 Um, I'm sure Dennis Rodman may have an inside scoop that we, the, the real story here right

01:35:13.200 now there, listen, there may be a story of a transition of power.

01:35:16.000 There may be a story of a complete new day for North Korea, but we have not arrived at

01:35:20.300 that story yet.

01:35:20.900 The story we have arrived at is how badly CNN handled the rollout of this story and how

01:35:26.420 there will be no mention made of it anywhere.

01:35:29.140 No consequences, nothing.

01:35:31.120 That's where we've arrived with the media is no matter what they do, no matter what prediction

01:35:35.360 doesn't come true, no matter what story is completely false, no matter what false narrative

01:35:39.060 they peddle, it gets memory hold so fast.

01:35:43.280 Ben, is that, is that because of the age of Trump?

01:35:46.040 Is it because of the age of the internet?

01:35:47.080 Or is that because, uh, the only place you would get such a story is from them?

01:35:50.300 It's just because there's no account, there's no accountability for mainstream media.

01:35:52.640 You know for a fact that if Daily Wire had jumped on that and reported it first, suddenly

01:35:55.480 that appears in every single Google result for a year, right, for us.

01:35:59.120 But if it's CNN that does it, then CNN is still a reliable, trusted source that people

01:36:03.100 should trust for their news.

01:36:04.580 I mean, that is just the bias that is inherent in the industry that we are in.

01:36:08.500 There actually is another buried story here too, which is that people are like, oh, you

01:36:11.720 know, Kim Jong-un's sister might take over.

01:36:13.580 Remember five minutes ago when the media were basically bowing down to Kim Jong-un's sister?

01:36:17.160 Yeah.

01:36:17.440 Remember she went to the Olympics and the whole thing was, she's so gorgeous and look at

01:36:20.860 her and she slay queen.

01:36:22.700 Well, she may actually be slaying people.

01:36:24.900 She may actually be slaying queen, right, in very short order.

01:36:28.100 And it's going to be fun to watch the media.

01:36:31.600 I will say, I'm looking forward to the obits for Kim Jong-un, number one, because he's

01:36:36.000 a horrible human being and there are very few people who deserve to die, but he is definitely

01:36:38.920 one of them.

01:36:39.660 But if Kim Jong-un were to plot, the obituaries would just like, would be, he's not an austere

01:36:46.760 religious scholar quite, like al-Baghdadi, but would he be beloved, rotund scratch golfer?

01:36:53.660 Or would he be, would he be well-known, well-known unicorn sanctuary founder?

01:37:00.720 Like what exactly would be the headline in the New York Times about Kim Jong-un?

01:37:05.500 Unbelievable.

01:37:06.240 Alicia, we have time for one more question.

01:37:08.440 All right.

01:37:08.780 This is a fun question.

01:37:10.040 It kind of takes people's mind off of COVID for a little bit.

01:37:12.280 If there was one person from the past that you could bring back to life, who would it

01:37:16.060 be?

01:37:16.540 Drew.

01:37:17.740 No, that was my answer.

01:37:18.600 Gosh.

01:37:18.920 I thought you were going to say Ben, because Ben died over 30 minutes ago.

01:37:27.860 I don't mind you making fun of me.

01:37:30.580 I mind that you've got the best line of the show.

01:37:33.680 That disturbs me.

01:37:37.460 You know, it's funny.

01:37:38.760 I've been living a lot of, just because of stuff I'm writing, I've been living a lot

01:37:41.920 among the romantic poets who are my favorite, the English romantic poets were my favorite

01:37:45.880 poets, and I've always wanted to meet John Keats.

01:37:50.200 He lived for a very short time and did some of the greatest poetry in the history of the

01:37:56.140 world.

01:37:56.780 And I've just, he had an amazing mind and he was one of the very few poets who was a decent

01:38:02.460 human being.

01:38:03.820 And he's just been much on my mind of late and I just would love to sit down and talk

01:38:07.580 to him.

01:38:08.840 Michael.

01:38:09.880 You know, I guess I'd have to go with Dante.

01:38:12.280 I want to go like way back.

01:38:13.460 I don't want to say like Reagan or Washington or I want to go all the way back to Dante

01:38:17.520 because Reagan, you know, he was like a pretty quiet guy.

01:38:20.580 He didn't have a lot of friends.

01:38:21.540 He was, he was very loud publicly, but privately he wasn't.

01:38:23.840 Washington was apparently kind of stern.

01:38:25.580 I think Dante, he's a guy I could get like 10 or 20 drinks with and really probe him,

01:38:30.100 you know, and have a great time.

01:38:30.960 So I'm going for him also because there hasn't been a great poet since John Keats.

01:38:34.720 So, you know, I want to bring one of those guys back.

01:38:37.480 Ben.

01:38:38.900 I mean, the obvious answer is Moses because I have questions.

01:38:41.880 I have some serious, serious questions.

01:38:46.960 Yeah.

01:38:48.480 I will give an answer, but I'll also give a faux answer, which is a friend of mine once

01:38:52.440 said, it's too bad.

01:38:54.940 You can't bring Jesus back to life.

01:38:56.720 Imagine what he could have accomplished if they hadn't killed him.

01:38:59.940 Which if you're a Christian, if you're a Christian is one of the great.

01:39:03.440 You got to reread the story, you know, you got to reread.

01:39:05.700 Absolutely.

01:39:06.060 I probably would bring Washington.

01:39:10.040 I'm fascinated by Washington because he was such a singular figure historically.

01:39:14.180 There's very few men in all of history who were as central to the moment in which they

01:39:21.080 lived as he was.

01:39:21.900 Truly, if any other person had been in the position that he was in, I don't think we

01:39:25.420 would have had the country that we have.

01:39:27.160 That said, I'm sometimes struck by the fact that he died and his death is terrible because

01:39:33.060 he basically bled himself to death, right?

01:39:34.840 He basically killed himself by believing in a barbaric practice of bleeding when you have

01:39:40.420 a fever.

01:39:41.460 Otherwise, he'd still be with us.

01:39:43.540 And yet, his death came, as with almost every aspect of his life, his death came exactly when

01:39:49.620 it probably had to occur in order for us to remain America.

01:39:53.860 America, because as things fell into more and more disarray after he left office, there's

01:39:59.420 more and more call for him to sort of step back up.

01:40:01.840 You know, John Adams wanted to bring him back in a military capacity, bring him back as commander

01:40:06.320 in chief.

01:40:07.480 And so it's probably, it's fairly amazing that he did every single thing that he had to

01:40:12.360 do to give us a country, including dying, when he did.

01:40:14.620 Ben.

01:40:14.980 Guys, well, you know, we've all gotten this answer wrong.

01:40:18.060 And when I say the correct answer, you're all going to acknowledge it is the correct answer.

01:40:21.140 A person who you would bring back from death so that you could ask questions?

01:40:25.420 Absolutely.

01:40:25.620 Jeffrey Epstein.

01:40:27.100 Jeffrey Epstein.

01:40:28.180 Wars.

01:40:29.020 Jeffrey Epstein.

01:40:29.920 What did you say?

01:40:30.400 Jeffrey Epstein.

01:40:31.340 No, I, out of the news.

01:40:33.460 I honestly thought you were going to say Carole Baskin's first husband.

01:40:36.660 Right.

01:40:38.200 But Jeffrey Epstein has so much more to tell.

01:40:40.380 I mean, all Carole Baskin's first husband has to say is, that was a mistake.

01:40:45.680 But Jeffrey Epstein, man, that guy's got some stories to tell.

01:40:50.160 Yeah, another guy who probably died right when he had to, to save our country.

01:40:58.060 Alicia, what's your answer to this one?

01:41:00.100 I would say Hamilton, just because I want to know if he likes the play or not, and who

01:41:03.900 shot first.

01:41:04.360 No, he doesn't.

01:41:05.040 He does not like the play.

01:41:05.860 He doesn't like the play.

01:41:06.580 I'll answer it for you, Alicia.

01:41:07.600 He doesn't like the play.

01:41:08.520 I know you think he doesn't like the play, but I just want to know if he or not.

01:41:12.880 You're right, he's going to come back from 1803, and he's going to be like, you know

01:41:15.360 what I like?

01:41:15.760 This newfangled form we call rap.

01:41:17.600 I want him to school Lin-Manuel Miranda and be like, no, half of this is not historically

01:41:23.280 accurate, dude.

01:41:24.060 What the heck?

01:41:25.820 So, Alicia, stick around with us as I present my last question to the panel for tonight.

01:41:30.520 You know, as we talked briefly about, it's Earth Day.

01:41:33.540 Also, we're in the middle of a once-in-a-century traumatic event for the country.

01:41:37.520 Leave it to the left to conflate these two things.

01:41:40.020 And they also see a silver lining.

01:41:42.120 Their silver lining isn't what it can teach us spiritually to look at the kinds of tragedies

01:41:46.640 that are taking place around us.

01:41:48.100 To them, the silver lining is humans are dying and not burning fossil fuel.

01:41:53.220 This isn't a joke.

01:41:54.460 It's not hyperbole.

01:41:55.720 There was an actual story out today about how we've cut carbon emissions for 2020 by 6%.

01:42:01.320 And if we do that every year for the next 10 years, we'll be on track to accomplish the

01:42:06.740 Paris Climate Accords projections.

01:42:13.000 Ben, you got into a little bit of a war on Twitter over this today, which I always appreciate.

01:42:20.120 Well, yeah.

01:42:22.080 I mean, the guy's a tool bag.

01:42:23.220 I mean, Eric Holdhouse is the name of the guy.

01:42:25.560 So he tweeted out.

01:42:26.680 He's like, well, this just proves that we can do it, guys.

01:42:29.420 I was like, I have questions.

01:42:33.100 Like, a few hundred thousand people are dead and the entire world economy is destroyed.

01:42:39.280 So we could.

01:42:40.900 But we're one-tenth of the way they're been.

01:42:44.040 Exactly.

01:42:44.580 I feel like there's some downsides that are being ignored in this little calculation that you've done here.

01:42:52.340 And then, of course, he did the ridiculous Twitter trick, which is that when somebody who's more prominent than you retweets you or says something to you, then you change your Twitter handle to rip them.

01:43:01.940 And so his very clever riposte to me pointing out that perhaps the near apocalypse might not be the best solution to the possibility that the climate is going to warm by 1.5 degrees Celsius over the course of the next 100 years.

01:43:13.500 That perhaps the complete destruction of all we hold dear and the deaths of thousands of people who we like, that maybe that might not actually be the best possible solution to the fact that water level is going to rise by, like, you know, a foot over the course of the next century.

01:43:28.020 When I pointed this out, he went to Ben Shapiro is a racist, which I have to say was extraordinarily convincing.

01:43:32.740 I immediately recanted my prior position.

01:43:34.620 And now I am absolutely on board with mass numbers of people just dying because, I mean, that will obviously save the world if we can only save the world so that there are no people.

01:43:45.460 I mean, this is actually the real solution, right?

01:43:46.720 We just get rid of the people, right?

01:43:48.020 If it weren't for the people, the air would be beautiful.

01:43:50.140 The trees would be blooming.

01:43:52.160 I actually connected the whole house thing to, I'm going to rip on your boy again here in Knowles, but I connected it to the whole, Pope, nature is taking revenge.

01:43:59.880 It's like, I have something to tell you about nature.

01:44:01.760 I've been trying to warn people about nature for a long time.

01:44:04.200 I have a warning about nature.

01:44:05.800 And, Elisha, this one's for you.

01:44:06.800 This goes out to Elisha Krause, who loves her some nature.

01:44:09.140 Okay, I've been saying this.

01:44:10.300 Elisha can test to it because she was on morning radio with me for years.

01:44:13.320 Nature is trying to murder you.

01:44:14.880 This is nature's job.

01:44:16.480 Nature is trying to kill you.

01:44:18.000 Yes, nature will give you the bounty of her fruit until you're age 35, at which point you are susceptible to everything and you will die, right?

01:44:23.540 If you are just out there in the open, your life expectancy is like 35 years old, and then you're dead.

01:44:28.160 You're dead, right?

01:44:28.880 So, nature's been trying to kill us for an awful long time, and the idea that I ought to have sympathy for the rocks and the trees and the dung beetles in the absence of what they can do for, you know, intelligent human beings who are capable of helping other people and making the world a better place for other human beings.

01:44:43.880 Like, yes, I damn well do value my children over the trees.

01:44:47.640 Sorry, if I have to make the decision as to whether the air is minutely cleaner or my kids live another year, that is not a decision in any way, shape, or form.

01:44:55.320 And this notion that, like, we're supposed to prize nature for herself because nature is the true glory.

01:45:01.760 You know what nature's trying to do right now?

01:45:03.520 Right now.

01:45:04.020 She's planning.

01:45:04.920 You know what nature's trying to do?

01:45:05.860 Yeah, she's hiding right behind that wall.

01:45:07.640 That is correct.

01:45:08.620 Behind every wall, in fact.

01:45:10.180 Behind all the walls is nature.

01:45:11.940 And nature is waiting to murder you.

01:45:13.460 We developed an entire civilization to get away from nature, like a horror film, okay?

01:45:18.540 People who go camping.

01:45:19.720 Notice the people who go camping.

01:45:20.600 I'm glad you enjoy the camping.

01:45:21.760 We developed an entire civilization so you don't have to camp.

01:45:24.140 An entire civilization that has a permanent roof, right, with, like, running water and toilets so that you don't live in your own feces and have to drag animals out of their hidey holes and roast them over tiny fires.

01:45:35.240 The absolute worship of nature, I like hiking, too.

01:45:39.560 Okay, but can we be real about, like, what nature does and what nature is and how nature is amoral and wants to kill you?

01:45:43.920 But, Ben, one of the things that the guy actually said in that Twitter thread was, if we don't accomplish the Paris Climate Accord projections, in other words, if things aren't as they are now for a decade or more, he said, in our lifetime, our entire civilization will be destroyed.

01:45:58.940 And they say we're science deniers.

01:46:02.300 I mean, the same people who think that humans can live on Mars think that the temperature going up a degree and a half on Earth will destroy all civilization, not have consequences, destroy our civilization.

01:46:14.280 Michael?

01:46:14.560 You know, the timing of this is pretty amazing, exactly to Ben's point, which is that at precisely the same time that we are being told that the Earth, in its fury, concocted the coronavirus to wipe us all out because we, humanity, we're the true virus.

01:46:29.180 At the very same time, we are being told that we need to celebrate the Earth.

01:46:33.920 This is the greatest argument I've ever heard for pollution.

01:46:36.700 I'm going to go out when this is all over and buy a Hummer.

01:46:38.900 I'm going to drink out of 10 plastic straws at a time.

01:46:41.980 I think now's the time.

01:46:43.620 We've got to start polluting.

01:46:45.120 Yeah.

01:46:45.280 Oh, sorry, sorry.

01:46:46.040 I have to, we have to say, sorry.

01:46:48.700 Everyone, I need your comments on that amazing AOC tweet about the price of oil.

01:46:54.340 Okay, I just need your comment on this, right?

01:46:56.260 Because this was a signal moment in American political history, was the price of oil, the futures, dropped below zero.

01:47:01.880 It was like negative $36 a barrel.

01:47:03.600 So they would, like, pay you to just take a barrel of oil and wheel it over to your house and just leave it in the backyard.

01:47:07.540 And AOC's like, I can't think of a better time to invest in green energy.

01:47:12.440 It's like, remind me not to invest with the AOC hedge fund.

01:47:16.400 Okay?

01:47:18.620 That's not how investing works, you know.

01:47:20.420 They always say, really, buy high, sell low.

01:47:23.560 I think that's what the AOC hedge fund is telling you to do.

01:47:26.340 And it's also, it was a genuinely offensive comment because you've got tens of thousands of Americans,

01:47:31.860 hundreds of thousands of Americans, maybe, in the energy sector losing their jobs.

01:47:35.480 And she says, hmm, you'll love to see it.

01:47:37.540 You know, that's what you said.

01:47:38.600 You'd love to see it.

01:47:39.300 You know, this is, well, this is the thing that has been revealed is how incredibly much they detest the working classes.

01:47:46.720 They hate us.

01:47:47.460 They hate the people who work.

01:47:48.560 And I shouldn't include me.

01:47:49.720 I mean, people that they're supposed to be the defenders of.

01:47:52.600 Socialism is supposed to be workers of the world unites.

01:47:54.960 They hate them.

01:47:55.880 And I would just like to add that Earth Day, I always like to say this at least once on Earth Day.

01:48:00.640 There's only one interesting thing about the Earth, just one, and that's us.

01:48:04.700 The mind of man is the only interesting thing about the Earth.

01:48:07.720 When somebody once said to me, I would give up every human being to preserve the beauty of the tiger.

01:48:12.640 And I said, the tiger has no beauty except in the mind of man.

01:48:15.480 Nothing that exists that is of value exists except in the mind of man, excluding in the mind of God.

01:48:21.040 I will acknowledge that.

01:48:22.420 But here on Earth, here on Earth, everything, beauty, truth, morality, the worth of the Earth, all of it exists in the mind of man.

01:48:30.880 Take away the mind of man.

01:48:31.840 The Earth's just a rock floating in space.

01:48:33.940 And all of these people who worship Gaia and all of these people who worship isms, you know, socialism or feminism or whatever ism they worship, they don't understand it's all about us.

01:48:44.940 It's all about our good, our benefit, our closeness to our creator.

01:48:49.140 That's it.

01:48:49.760 Alicia, you like to sleep in tents and pee on rocks.

01:48:54.260 I think you're the only camper among us.

01:48:58.900 Are you trying to say I'm the manliest of you all?

01:49:01.020 Then yes, maybe.

01:49:01.760 But in my defense, as much as I like hiking and camping, and so does Drew, by the way.

01:49:08.080 How come y'all don't give him crap for that?

01:49:09.940 I am the one that has actually, like, gone hunting and knows how to skin a deer and was raised around cattle and stuff.

01:49:18.420 It's been interesting because you do know that people now are buying, like, laying hens en masse.

01:49:24.240 And there are suppliers all around the country that say that they're not laying chicks available until June.

01:49:28.280 So I'm going to wait and get a deal in July and August when all of this is blown over and finally get my Krauss house chicken coop.

01:49:34.260 And then when I deliver you guys fresh eggs, you will not be making fun of Mother Nature anymore.

01:49:38.780 No, we'll just be making fun of you.

01:49:39.920 I will be making fun of Mother Nature because I'm just going to note, there's a place, it's called a supermarket.

01:49:44.680 It sells eggs to me, like, right now.

01:49:46.540 Like, any time I want, any time I want.

01:49:49.400 I don't have to wait until June for you and your chicken to bring me eggs.

01:49:53.300 All I have to do is go down the block with, like, five bucks because cap, here's an ism, capitalism.

01:49:59.300 Oh, there it is.

01:50:00.560 The monies.

01:50:01.800 Because capitalism is not really an ism, that's why.

01:50:04.140 Well, that's true.

01:50:04.720 That's right.

01:50:04.960 It is a recognition of basic human freedom.

01:50:06.400 It is a recognition of basic human freedom, that's all.

01:50:08.400 It's just a corollary of basic human freedom.

01:50:10.140 Capitalism is, and in fact, even where people aren't free, markets exist.

01:50:12.880 Guys, thank you for tuning in and joining us for our lockdown edition of Backstage.

01:50:17.240 If you are a Daily Wire Insider Plus or Insider or All Access member, listen, we're grateful.

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01:50:40.120 and join us post-Backstage.

01:50:41.740 We do a discussion, that's where you can tune in, ask questions of me, Ben, Drew, Michael,

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01:50:51.840 Thanks, and we'll see you next time.

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The Michael Knowles Show - April 23, 2020

Daily Wire Backstage： Earth Day from Lockdown Edition

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