The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： Mueller Report ENDGAME

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00:00:37.980 Hey everybody, this is Michael.

00:00:39.520 You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage,

00:00:43.000 where I join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the man who will one day fire me for real,

00:00:47.820 Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture,

00:00:52.560 and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers.

00:00:55.540 Without further ado, here is Backstage.

00:00:58.740 The President of the United States is not a crook.

00:01:01.980 I mean, mostly.

00:01:03.700 Hey guys, welcome to the Daily Wire Mueller Report special coverage.

00:01:08.000 I am here, joined as always by my good friend Ben, we never said collusion.

00:01:12.960 Shapiro, Michael, we never said collusion.

00:01:15.020 Klavan, and we're going to be unpacking the events of the day, and really the events of

00:01:22.520 the last week.

00:01:23.020 It's been a remarkable news cycle, but we know that what's on everyone's mind right

00:01:26.400 now, of course, is the report finally released in redacted form this morning and being debated

00:01:32.500 on every cable news channel in the world as we speak.

00:01:36.120 But who wants to watch that crap when you can sit here and enjoy a little smoke and whiskey

00:01:39.940 with us and pontification?

00:01:41.940 Lots of pontification.

00:01:43.280 Hey, roll the opening graphic.

00:01:44.320 We didn't fake laugh at the beginning.

00:01:58.780 Oh, well.

00:01:59.240 We were fake laughing in our hearts.

00:02:01.520 On the inside.

00:02:02.480 I think it's such a serious, serious day in which very serious people are saying serious

00:02:07.440 things.

00:02:08.520 I've never gotten more use out of my Tumblr than today.

00:02:11.060 I've been on Twitter, basically, since 5 in the morning so far.

00:02:15.080 It's fantastic, and you're also going to die.

00:02:18.160 Obviously, we want to jump right into talking about the report, and I think that the best

00:02:21.060 way to start, it's late enough in the day that everyone knows what happened today.

00:02:24.280 The day began with the Attorney General holding a press conference that was one of the more

00:02:28.000 spirited and delightful events of the Trump presidency thus far, in which he repeatedly

00:02:33.900 said that there was no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no American found by Bob

00:02:39.880 Mueller to have colluded with the Russians.

00:02:42.940 And then he also talked a little bit about the question, which I think is like the second

00:02:47.400 tier position of the Democrats, which is obstruction.

00:02:51.580 He basically said that the report outlines 10 instances of possible obstruction, that

00:02:56.560 there's a little bit of disagreement, maybe in spirit, between Mueller and his team and

00:03:00.980 the AG and Rosenstein.

00:03:03.540 But that in the end, there is not evidence to support a collusion charge against the president

00:03:09.140 or any of his people in his administration.

00:03:11.960 Or an obstruction charge.

00:03:12.560 I'm sorry, or an obstruction charge against the president or people in his administration.

00:03:18.260 Them's the facts.

00:03:19.900 Everything from that point forward is going to be the spin.

00:03:23.000 Does this completely exonerate the president, as many are saying?

00:03:25.860 Is that a factually accurate statement or merely a legally accurate statement?

00:03:29.780 Does this keep the president from having to face political troubles because of the Russian

00:03:35.180 narrative?

00:03:36.140 Does this open the door in a strange way for possible impeachment proceedings instead of

00:03:40.180 closing them off?

00:03:41.000 Those are the kinds of questions that I think we should jump right into.

00:03:43.260 But let's start by, you know, the 300 word, two minute version.

00:03:49.380 Each one of you, just give me your gut reaction, your fast response.

00:03:53.940 Shoot from the hip response to what this, put this in context from us from the point of

00:03:57.740 view of Ben Shapiro.

00:03:58.360 Well, I mean, it's what I expected.

00:03:59.680 And I've been predicting for weeks that all of the focus was going to be on obstruction

00:04:02.400 because since the Barr letter, it was pretty obvious that that's where all the action was,

00:04:05.760 that the Russian collusion nonsense that had been going on for two years, the suggestion

00:04:09.780 that Trump was in the back room on the phone with his buddy Vlad figuring out how to shift

00:04:14.380 votes in Wisconsin.

00:04:15.860 All that was a bunch of crap from the very beginning.

00:04:17.540 And I think everybody knew that.

00:04:18.780 And as time went on, the Democrats looked more and more ridiculous on that.

00:04:21.220 So they shifted to obstruction.

00:04:22.600 The obstruction stuff since the beginning, I've been saying, is also overblown in the sense

00:04:26.820 that it's pretty obvious that President Trump is very angry about this investigation and

00:04:31.280 lashes out in random directions because of that.

00:04:33.560 And that causes him to do unwise things.

00:04:35.400 And then his advisors say, stop doing that unwise thing.

00:04:37.300 Then he stops doing the unwise thing.

00:04:38.700 And most of the instances of supposed obstruction that happened here are that.

00:04:42.960 Now, there are a couple of things that are worthwhile noting about the report itself

00:04:46.160 and the structure of the report, because it really is.

00:04:48.700 This is the crux of it.

00:04:49.760 The crux of the argument is basically the definition of obstruction, which differs between

00:04:53.980 Barr and between Mueller.

00:04:55.520 So Barr's definition of obstruction is you have to show corrupt intent, and it has to

00:04:59.720 be connected to an activity that actually impedes the investigation of justice.

00:05:04.500 And that seems to be a much more traditional definition of obstruction of justice.

00:05:08.640 You actually have to do something that interferes with an investigation with corrupt intent

00:05:12.560 to stop the investigation.

00:05:13.980 Mueller's definition is far broader.

00:05:15.320 He talks about you could take an action that is completely legal, but if it has corrupt intent,

00:05:19.300 it suddenly becomes illegal.

00:05:20.480 He suggests that attempt to obstruct is also a thing.

00:05:23.040 So if you take an overt act toward obstructing, and then you don't actually obstruct, but

00:05:28.040 you have corrupt intent, that that counts as obstruction.

00:05:30.160 And this takes you to these weird places in the Mueller report where he suggests things

00:05:33.800 like if Trump tweets about Paul Manafort in the middle of the Manafort trial, that

00:05:37.660 could theoretically be construed as obstruction of justice in one way or another.

00:05:41.640 I think that definition is too broad.

00:05:43.580 I think that the Barr definition is much more likely to be close to what can actually

00:05:47.740 be prosecuted.

00:05:48.520 But the second point that is worthy of note here about Mueller is that Mueller basically

00:05:52.660 had four choices on what to do with the obstruction stuff.

00:05:55.520 Choice number one is he could have suggested that Trump is exonerated.

00:05:59.500 There's nothing here.

00:06:00.120 We're done.

00:06:00.980 Choice number two.

00:06:01.960 He's not exonerated, but there's not enough evidence to prosecute, which is very often

00:06:05.120 what prosecutors say.

00:06:06.020 And that's basically actually what he said about collusion.

00:06:07.860 He didn't even say exonerated on collusion, although effectively he did.

00:06:11.180 He said not enough evidence to prosecute on collusion.

00:06:13.540 He says that over and over in the early parts of the report.

00:06:15.980 Choice number three is prosecute him.

00:06:17.720 And choice number four is wash my hands of it.

00:06:20.180 All the evidence is in your lap.

00:06:21.220 I'm going to say nothing about it.

00:06:22.480 You take care of it.

00:06:23.560 And choice number four is the least justifiable of the four, because that's not actually his

00:06:26.860 job.

00:06:27.200 His job is to say whether the guy is prosecutable or not.

00:06:29.940 Not here's a bunch of random information and you do it, Attorney General Barr.

00:06:33.000 And if he is going to do that, isn't his title special prosecutor, not special investigator.

00:06:39.400 That's exactly right.

00:06:40.600 And so he should be making some sort of recommendation.

00:06:42.760 This is the point Andy McCarthy made.

00:06:43.860 And he's exactly right.

00:06:44.720 He should be making some sort of recommendation there.

00:06:46.940 What that says to me is that he knew full well and the Mueller team knew full well that

00:06:50.320 they did not have enough evidence to actually push for an obstruction of justice criminal

00:06:54.120 charge against the president.

00:06:55.220 But they were going to lay out enough evidence that if Democrats feel like impeaching on the basis

00:06:59.460 of President Trump telling people to lie to the press and telling people that

00:07:02.880 they should try to fire Robert Mueller, then that's up to the Democrats.

00:07:05.700 So it looks more like a roadmap to impeachment, the second part of it, than it does look like

00:07:08.780 a criminal investigation.

00:07:09.360 So I want to get to the question of impeachment and potential impeachment later after everyone's

00:07:13.120 had a chance to get their gut reaction.

00:07:14.360 But one follow up to what you just said.

00:07:16.660 The Attorney General has a standard for obstruction.

00:07:20.300 The special prosecutor has a standard for obstruction.

00:07:22.900 What's the legal standard for obstruction?

00:07:24.660 So the legal standard for obstruction, as I say, I think is closer to the definition put

00:07:28.700 forth by William Barr, which is that it has, if I don't screw this up, a couple of elements.

00:07:33.940 It has to be an attempt to obstruct justice in an actual proceeding with corrupt intent.

00:07:38.980 Those are the three elements.

00:07:40.100 So the corrupt intent is the one that really is at issue because there were actual proceedings.

00:07:43.920 Trump was obviously telling people to fire people.

00:07:46.640 He didn't go all the way through with it.

00:07:47.620 So there's a question of how far did he actually go?

00:07:49.520 Does that count as obstruction when there's no actual impact of the obstruction?

00:07:53.200 Mueller says no.

00:07:53.960 He says if you even try and you fail, that that's a crime also.

00:07:57.340 But the corrupt intent is really what it comes down to.

00:07:59.100 So there are two plausible reads.

00:08:00.600 Unlike in the Hillary Clinton investigation where their intent is not an element of the

00:08:04.560 crime when it comes to taking classified material and putting it on your homebrew server.

00:08:08.620 That is not an actual element of the crime.

00:08:10.600 She didn't have to intend to expose that to prying eyes.

00:08:13.040 My wife used to work at the VA.

00:08:14.520 When she was working at the VA, if she took classified material out to her car, if somebody

00:08:18.520 had grabbed that, it wouldn't matter what her intent was.

00:08:20.440 She would have had to pay some sort of penalty or go to jail.

00:08:23.040 Sort of superimposed intent as a standard.

00:08:25.360 That's right.

00:08:25.720 Here, intent is the actual core of the issue.

00:08:27.940 And that's why there are two—I want to be fair.

00:08:29.980 I really do want to be as fair as I can in analyzing this report.

00:08:32.520 I think there are two plausible reads of Trump's behavior.

00:08:34.660 One, I think, is more plausible than the other.

00:08:36.060 And that's the one that says there's no obstruction.

00:08:37.860 The yes, there is obstruction plausible read is the reason that Trump was doing all

00:08:41.920 this stuff, talking about firing Mueller, firing Comey, doing all this stuff is because

00:08:45.580 he thought that the investigation was eventually going to dig down to issues for him legally.

00:08:50.200 And thus, he was stepping in and trying to stop the investigation.

00:08:52.940 There's not tons of evidence for that, but I suppose you could read what's there that

00:08:56.600 way, maybe, if you stretch it.

00:08:58.340 The more plausible evidence is this is what Trump does, right?

00:09:01.920 Trump gets pissed, and then Trump tells people to fire people, and then he backs off firing

00:09:05.380 people.

00:09:05.680 Like, this is—I'm bewildered by people who are mystified by Trump's behavior here.

00:09:10.680 He was saying it out loud on Twitter.

00:09:13.100 He was saying it out loud on Lester Holtz.

00:09:14.740 He was pissed off that they wouldn't exonerate him, and so he fired Comey.

00:09:17.300 And then he was pissed off that Mueller wouldn't just leave him alone.

00:09:19.900 And he's like, well, maybe I should fire Mueller also.

00:09:21.600 And that's all that happened here.

00:09:23.320 And by the way, he has the constitutional authority to fire both Comey and Mueller.

00:09:26.940 We'll get to—are you suggesting the president of the United States has a loose tongue?

00:09:30.020 Come on, Ben.

00:09:30.660 Michael.

00:09:31.000 Well, this is actually the important point.

00:09:33.200 The report literally exonerates Trump in the sense that Bob Mueller doesn't come to a

00:09:38.520 conclusion on the question of obstruction, but we're not just here to leave academic

00:09:42.760 debates to be had among the public.

00:09:44.640 It's up to the attorney general and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein to come to

00:09:48.820 a conclusion.

00:09:49.780 They came to a conclusion.

00:09:51.100 He is practically exonerated, but he's exonerated in a more important sense for all of us.

00:09:56.680 People who hate Trump still hate Trump.

00:09:58.260 People who like Trump still like Trump.

00:09:59.640 People who were in the middle, maybe they got swayed a little bit.

00:10:02.680 It exonerates Trump in the sense that throughout this report, it shows he's gotten better at

00:10:07.080 his job.

00:10:08.140 The report spells out in excruciating detail that early on he made bad decisions.

00:10:12.900 He made rash decisions, reckless decisions, and it led to some trouble in the report.

00:10:17.460 But then you fast forward toward the end of it.

00:10:19.420 What happened?

00:10:20.140 He didn't fire Rod Rosenstein.

00:10:21.920 Very good decision not to.

00:10:23.260 He appointed William Barr.

00:10:24.920 Very competent, very credible.

00:10:26.720 He was the AG in the early 90s.

00:10:29.040 This is a very serious man.

00:10:30.980 He allowed the investigation to play out.

00:10:33.100 He didn't ultimately push to fire Bob Mueller.

00:10:36.540 And look what we got out of it.

00:10:37.760 We got an exoneration.

00:10:39.900 We got those great memes, the greatest day of Donald Trump's Twitter feed.

00:10:45.220 Politically, it played out very well.

00:10:46.980 Legally, it played out very well.

00:10:48.780 And I think it maintains, as much as it can, the credibility of the administration and of

00:10:54.020 the DOJ.

00:10:54.940 Andrew?

00:10:55.620 You know, I've got to use a little bit of my novelist superpower here because I want

00:10:59.380 to talk about the picture of Trump's character that came across.

00:11:02.740 Both of you guys hit on it a little bit, but it really struck me hard.

00:11:05.840 The two things in the report that really leapt out at me.

00:11:09.060 One was Mueller kind of mulling over, if you will, the obstruction case, the case of obstruction.

00:11:15.840 And he says almost in this bemused tone, he says, all of this happened in plain sight.

00:11:21.560 The things that Trump does, he does in public.

00:11:23.680 He goes on TV and says them.

00:11:25.280 You know, and it's very hard to prove criminal intent when a guy is sitting on television

00:11:29.880 saying, you know, I'm innocent.

00:11:31.620 Stop doing this to me.

00:11:32.600 You're fired.

00:11:33.320 I hate you.

00:11:33.940 You know, it's very hard to say, oh my God, this guy's plotting against.

00:11:36.500 And the other was the moment that, of course, got a lot of press of Trump hearing that a

00:11:40.280 special counsel had been appointed and saying, this is the end of my presidency.

00:11:45.440 I'm effed, you know.

00:11:47.020 And I thought that at the end of this, I liked Trump more because he is exactly who we think

00:11:53.580 he is.

00:11:54.200 There is nothing hidden about this man.

00:11:56.240 He, you know, he's a bit of a carny barker.

00:11:58.380 He's a bit of a liar.

00:11:59.360 But he's also a guy who really does want to do a good job as president.

00:12:02.740 He wants us to like him because he fixes things.

00:12:04.820 He's a person, he's exactly the person we knew we elected.

00:12:09.120 Donald Trump is the guy who puts pictures of himself with the prostitute that he, or

00:12:14.520 not prostitute, the stripper that he paid off.

00:12:16.700 He'll stand and pose in front of a picture of himself with the stripper that he paid off.

00:12:20.960 He's an open book.

00:12:21.700 He was talking to the French.

00:12:22.380 He's an open book.

00:12:22.980 He was talking about the French, about rebuilding Notre Dame.

00:12:25.040 And I was picturing Notre Dame with his big Trump across the top.

00:12:28.300 Trump.

00:12:28.540 And, you know, when you think about this, just for a minute, in terms of politics, you

00:12:32.400 have Barack Obama, who's this guy who pretends to be the messiah, but he's just a Chicago

00:12:36.820 Paul.

00:12:37.520 You have Hillary Clinton, who pretends she's talking about the good of America, and she's

00:12:41.880 this desiccated ruin of a corrupt human being.

00:12:44.400 And then you have Trump.

00:12:45.340 Who's Trump?

00:12:46.100 And it's like, there's something great about that.

00:12:48.680 Well, that's why.

00:12:49.300 There was that one line where he says, listen, why isn't my AG, Jeff Sessions, like Eric Holder

00:12:54.640 or Bobby Kennedy, and it's like, okay, that's fair.

00:12:58.180 I mean, kind of, you know, like he's wrong, but fair.

00:13:00.480 I know, exactly.

00:13:01.600 He's like, there's nothing phony about the guy, except that he's a phony, but he's an

00:13:05.340 open phony.

00:13:06.100 And I think it's just, there's something in politics that is incredibly refreshing about

00:13:10.400 this.

00:13:10.880 So, he's an authentic liar, as opposed to an inauthentic liar.

00:13:15.860 Exactly, exactly.

00:13:16.720 Yeah, he has a picture of all the lies that he told right on his wall.

00:13:19.260 It was a very good lie.

00:13:21.440 That was a great one.

00:13:22.340 I remember that one really well.

00:13:23.340 So, if the president's ever looking for a new special prosecutor, you know where he

00:13:28.380 could turn?

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00:14:53.080 Yeah.

00:14:53.340 We hire a lot of people at the Daily Wire.

00:14:55.200 Turnover is unfortunately high because Ben and I rule with an iron fist.

00:14:59.520 And ZipRecruiter is a great term.

00:15:00.340 Because I tell you to fire people, and unlike Trump's advisors, you're like, okay.

00:15:05.160 If that were true, Knowles would definitely not.

00:15:06.780 So, interesting that you, I mean, a lot of similarity in your takes on the situation.

00:15:14.300 I rarely agree with Drew.

00:15:17.680 I actually do think that there's a certain charm to the fact that Trump is Trump.

00:15:21.420 You know, I thought it was funny when everybody was in a lather a week or two ago about Trump visiting Mount Vernon

00:15:27.180 and saying that if George Washington were smart, he would have put his name on it.

00:15:30.540 That was great.

00:15:31.020 That was great.

00:15:31.280 So his name was still famous.

00:15:32.520 So, yes, we would remember him.

00:15:35.080 Yes, we would remember old George.

00:15:37.640 See, I think that Trump in that statement is both serious and kidding.

00:15:42.560 I think that he's serious in that as a real estate mogul, he thinks, oh, you know, people drive by this all the time.

00:15:49.440 They don't remember the old dead guy.

00:15:50.560 Yeah, he's Vernon.

00:15:51.500 He's Vernon.

00:15:53.060 My favorite was when he talked about how the slats didn't fit correctly and how he would build it better now.

00:15:57.900 Right.

00:15:59.300 Because that was built in, like, 1750.

00:16:01.300 Yeah, that's right.

00:16:02.000 That would be why.

00:16:02.700 We learned a thing or two about building slats in the ensuing several hundred years.

00:16:07.720 I want to talk a little bit about this impeachment question because the president's legal troubles are over.

00:16:12.600 You say he was completely exonerated.

00:16:14.640 That is untrue.

00:16:15.540 I would push back on that.

00:16:16.440 He was practically exonerated is what I mean.

00:16:18.300 He was legally exonerated in this moment, absolutely certain.

00:16:23.200 He, it's a victory for the president.

00:16:25.960 He deserves the victory.

00:16:27.240 I do think if we look back at the history of how this came to be, that it was an unfair hit by Democrats from day one against the president.

00:16:35.420 To say that it completely exonerates him, we don't know.

00:16:40.020 None of us sitting here know what did or didn't take place.

00:16:43.140 The report talks about how they used encrypted apps at the time to have conversations that we'll never have access to.

00:16:48.320 And we have, listen, in our country, you're innocent until proven guilty.

00:16:52.020 So legally, the president has been completely exonerated, completely, this is behind him.

00:16:57.580 But his political worries are a different thing because impeachment is not a legal proceeding.

00:17:03.040 It's a political proceeding.

00:17:04.100 Well, it's both legal and political.

00:17:06.180 It's supposed to have a legal aspect and a political aspect.

00:17:09.140 But these days, does it?

00:17:10.920 I don't know.

00:17:11.240 You just have a criminal grounds for impeachment is the point, right?

00:17:13.060 High crimes and misdemeanors are poorly defined.

00:17:16.480 Right.

00:17:16.760 I mean, it can be whatever you decide it is today.

00:17:19.440 Now, Democrats would be fools to move on this, honestly.

00:17:22.140 I think so, too.

00:17:22.740 Because the American public are not up for this.

00:17:25.400 They are tired of this.

00:17:26.260 They are bored with it.

00:17:27.660 You know, they want to know what the outcome was because, I mean, this is infinity war, right?

00:17:32.020 I mean, like, this is the culmination of two years of the MCU being built out here.

00:17:36.580 And then finally, you get this report.

00:17:38.260 But after this, I don't think Americans really want to hear that much about it.

00:17:40.840 I think Americans are bored with it and they want to move on to 2020.

00:17:43.100 And in terms of politics, the obstruction thing is almost impossible.

00:17:46.380 The obstruction case is almost impossible to make if there's no crime proceeding.

00:17:51.460 Underlying crime.

00:17:51.740 Right.

00:17:52.100 I mean, that's what Barr was saying.

00:17:53.460 He was saying there's no—

00:17:54.000 I'm talking about politically.

00:17:54.640 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:17:55.600 And also, there's no great narrative here for Democrats.

00:17:58.200 So who's the victim exactly?

00:17:59.760 Don McGahn?

00:18:00.780 Robert Mueller?

00:18:01.480 Robert Mueller got to finish his job.

00:18:02.800 He never fired him.

00:18:03.900 Don McGahn stuck around at the White House.

00:18:06.500 Jeff Sessions eventually left.

00:18:08.100 But they don't like Jeff Sessions, so why do they care?

00:18:09.480 There's no great story for Democrats to tell because collusion was about Trump not just

00:18:14.720 being bad at his job or corrupt.

00:18:17.200 Collusion was about him being a traitor.

00:18:18.700 And that, of course, fell apart.

00:18:20.080 Now you're going to make the case that he's a doofus or that he's corrupt and that he tries

00:18:24.880 to manipulate the legal system.

00:18:26.240 He's Trump.

00:18:27.200 Like, he's a guy who openly says things like, before I was a politician, I used to try to

00:18:33.540 pay off politicians to do what I wanted.

00:18:35.000 This is a guy who, like, goes out and admits crimes in public.

00:18:38.180 And so the American people have already decided on this.

00:18:40.460 I mean, I said to someone earlier today, everything for, like, all this stuff is already baked

00:18:44.380 into the cake.

00:18:44.960 I mean, old shoes, rat feces, it's all in there, man.

00:18:47.620 I agree.

00:18:47.880 It's all in the cake.

00:18:48.880 And we all either like the cake or we don't like the cake.

00:18:51.400 And we're all OK with the cake or we're not OK with the cake.

00:18:53.340 And when we compare that cake to Bernie Sanders, that's really going to be the question of 2020.

00:18:56.220 So we agree that Democrats would be foolish to pursue impeachment.

00:18:59.560 But there's a wing of the Democratic Party that will almost force it, right?

00:19:01.920 Because if you're AOC or you're Ilhan Omar or you're Rashida Tlaib, and that's your wing

00:19:06.580 of the party, and you have to make a populist appeal as to why the old guard Democrats are

00:19:10.740 no longer in touch with the Ute of America, then this is the move that they will make.

00:19:14.940 I mean, AOC, did you see that clip of her earlier this week asked about impeachment?

00:19:17.960 They said, yes, of course I would impeach.

00:19:19.420 And they said, oh, on what grounds?

00:19:20.940 They said emoluments.

00:19:22.420 They said, name three.

00:19:23.480 She goes, emoluments.

00:19:24.120 And then they go, well, what's the second?

00:19:25.900 She goes, tax fraud.

00:19:27.420 There's been no allegation of tax fraud.

00:19:29.180 And then they're like, and what would the third be?

00:19:30.640 And she goes, I'd stick with tax fraud.

00:19:32.640 It was like Rick Perry with the three departments.

00:19:34.620 She had nothing.

00:19:35.840 But she knows that the right answer for the base is got to push for impeachment.

00:19:39.340 And she said we should impeach him for the tax law passed by both houses of Congress,

00:19:43.820 signed by the president.

00:19:44.980 That's somehow a high crime or misdemeanor.

00:19:47.820 I mean, the woman's an idiot.

00:19:49.480 But there are some points to be won here against the sort of mainstream Democratic Party,

00:19:54.820 if you're on the wings, by saying that they are insufficiently woke and insufficiently committed

00:19:58.540 to the cause.

00:19:59.300 In the same way that there are a lot of people who are scoring points off of Mitch McConnell

00:20:01.880 during the government shutdown in 2013, suggesting that he was insufficiently committed to ending

00:20:05.300 Obamacare.

00:20:06.160 And it's like, OK, well, he's a cuck, that Mitch McConnell.

00:20:09.120 Now, of course, you love him because he's giving you justices.

00:20:11.140 But there was that move.

00:20:12.760 And so I think that you could see that move inside the Democratic Party.

00:20:15.400 Nancy Pelosi thinks she's got this thing locked down.

00:20:17.020 She doesn't have her party locked down, not by any stretch of the imagination.

00:20:20.620 I totally agree.

00:20:21.120 She is basically whistling past the graveyard.

00:20:23.560 She's lost all control.

00:20:24.360 Plus, she's been taking these shots, very thinly veiled shots at AOC, at the freshman

00:20:30.180 congresswoman.

00:20:31.000 So it's not as though their party is on solid ground or unified at all.

00:20:35.260 I think impeachment, I would be surprised if they don't push for it.

00:20:38.740 I think Pelosi will stymie it.

00:20:40.440 But, you know, that's going to be another divisive thing for the party.

00:20:45.040 And every 2020 presidential candidate, of course, is going to have to endorse impeachment because

00:20:48.720 otherwise.

00:20:49.300 I want to know, I want to know, though, what happens to these guys who are selling not the

00:20:53.820 obstruction narrative, but the collusion narrative.

00:20:55.680 The guys like Adam Schiff, you know, I mean, I mean, that guy, I've called him a McCarthyite.

00:21:00.180 And I don't I don't use those terms like they do on CNN, just throw them out there.

00:21:03.860 He's a literal McCarthyite.

00:21:05.040 He's a literal guy who says, I have in my hand proof of collusion, but I can't tell it to

00:21:10.200 you.

00:21:10.500 And then suddenly it's gone.

00:21:11.800 You know, it's and so well, he never said collusion, only William Barr.

00:21:18.600 They've shifted those goalposts are moving dramatically to obstruction of justice.

00:21:21.880 I mean, those moved so quickly.

00:21:23.140 It made your head spin.

00:21:23.820 It was like two years of he's a Russian agent.

00:21:25.700 And now it's he was mean to Bob Mueller.

00:21:27.940 It's like, I'm sorry that that is they overshot the mark by so much here.

00:21:31.740 And here's the thing, as we've been saying for years at this point, all the Democrats had

00:21:36.240 to do was not be insane.

00:21:38.040 That's all they had to do.

00:21:38.900 I know.

00:21:39.220 I know.

00:21:39.480 And they just can't do it.

00:21:40.680 Right.

00:21:40.820 They could they could have just spent the last couple of years saying about Trump and Team

00:21:43.960 Trump.

00:21:44.460 Why is he so nice to Putin all the time?

00:21:45.920 Yeah.

00:21:46.120 Like, why is he doing that?

00:21:46.940 And why did he lie to the American people about Trump Tower?

00:21:48.820 Because he did.

00:21:49.240 He lied to the American people about still negotiating for Trump Tower Moscow.

00:21:52.280 And then he went out publicly and lied about it.

00:21:54.340 And that's true.

00:21:55.120 He did lie about it.

00:21:55.920 And one of the things that is like you may find it you may find it refreshingly, refreshingly

00:21:59.880 charming that he's open about the fact that he's dishonest.

00:22:02.760 But what I find refreshing is he goes and he says, like, you know, go fire Mueller.

00:22:07.400 And the guy doesn't do it.

00:22:08.460 And he doesn't do it.

00:22:09.480 You know, I mean, he's kind of like he's kind of like he's he's got a he's he's a New Yorker.

00:22:13.800 He's a New Yorker.

00:22:14.380 He's a New Yorker.

00:22:14.920 He's a New Yorker.

00:22:15.920 But he is deeply dishonest.

00:22:17.600 And the report makes clear that he's deeply dishonest, that he he did instruct people to

00:22:21.340 lie to the press.

00:22:22.120 And you might say, yeah, the press stinks.

00:22:24.260 Deserve it.

00:22:24.720 Yeah.

00:22:24.880 The press deserve it.

00:22:26.200 Nevertheless, that is saying on the pages of your paper, when you when you speak to the

00:22:31.660 American public, do not tell them the truth.

00:22:33.860 That was the goal.

00:22:34.560 Well, that's why whenever he has said fake news, I've said, yes, there is such a thing

00:22:37.680 as fake news.

00:22:38.180 But I don't trust Trump's application of the label where Trump will apply the label fake news

00:22:41.500 to anything he doesn't like.

00:22:42.460 And then he'll send people out like Sarah Huckabee Sanders to lie about it.

00:22:44.620 And I think that's wrong.

00:22:45.300 I mean, can we still just say it's wrong?

00:22:47.320 Let's just do that.

00:22:48.280 It's wrong, right?

00:22:49.320 Like it's wrong.

00:22:49.740 There's no question.

00:22:50.780 We're not it's not we're not dealing with right right and wrong.

00:22:53.260 We know right from wrong.

00:22:54.520 And of course, you're right about all that.

00:22:56.700 What I'm talking about is Trump goes on TV and says, I'm lying to you now and I'm going

00:23:01.440 to keep lying to you because that's what I want to do.

00:23:03.500 Whereas Barack Obama descends from heaven and then sends Susan Rice out.

00:23:08.160 I agree about this.

00:23:08.860 So it just is there something charming about a rogue?

00:23:12.720 That's fair.

00:23:13.660 That's totally fair.

00:23:14.180 So if you're watching this right now and you want to ask us a question, go over to dailywire.com.

00:23:19.440 Become a subscriber.

00:23:20.360 Dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:23:22.420 You could afford yourself if you become an annual subscriber.

00:23:25.120 This delightful leftist tears hot or cold Tumblr, which runneth over on a day like today.

00:23:30.320 And you can also ask us questions.

00:23:31.840 Alicia is going to come in and bring us the first round of questions right now.

00:23:35.300 But while she's getting mic'd up, I want to talk about another one of our great sponsors

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00:25:15.680 And we are proud to be endorsed by them and use them at the office for sure.

00:25:18.540 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:25:19.480 So, Elisha, come on in here.

00:25:20.700 We want to hear from some of our daily life subscribers.

00:25:22.880 And Noles, try not to kill her baby.

00:25:25.380 I'm two of us, so take that.

00:25:30.960 Wow.

00:25:31.720 Guys, it's not even that smoky this evening.

00:25:34.380 Thank you.

00:25:34.540 I didn't know you were in this city.

00:25:35.740 I just assumed we were beaming you in from some other city.

00:25:38.520 This is great.

00:25:38.940 From God's country?

00:25:39.620 This is great to have you here.

00:25:40.680 From the middle of Oklahoma?

00:25:42.400 I don't know.

00:25:43.160 The aura of the room has just changed radically.

00:25:44.860 It did.

00:25:45.400 For a better room for you.

00:25:46.460 Yeah.

00:25:46.760 That's right.

00:25:47.260 Everybody's like, wait a second.

00:25:50.060 What happened there?

00:25:51.220 So, I'm sure that Daily Wire subscribers, like everybody else in the country, have a lot

00:25:54.560 to say on a date like today.

00:25:56.160 What are they writing in with?

00:25:57.560 Everyone is wondering what the hell is happening.

00:25:59.740 Can I say that word?

00:26:01.360 By the way, I'm really annoyed.

00:26:02.720 When I found out I got to be in here, I thought that I was going to have my Nazi anthem entry

00:26:07.000 music from the greatest musical of all time.

00:26:09.180 Oh, yeah.

00:26:10.720 Hey.

00:26:11.880 That's fascist.

00:26:12.760 You're everywhere.

00:26:13.520 Yeah.

00:26:14.020 For those who missed it, Maggie Haberman was very upset that apparently the

00:26:17.200 Marine Corps band at the White House was playing Edelweiss while they were introducing

00:26:21.760 William Barr or something.

00:26:23.480 Like, why is that?

00:26:25.540 I think she misunderstood that movie.

00:26:27.480 I'm pretty sure.

00:26:29.340 It's a song written by two Jews about a guy resisting Nazis.

00:26:33.740 And the song's bad because she saw the recapitulated version on Man in the High Castle.

00:26:40.480 She watched it backwards.

00:26:42.080 I don't know.

00:26:42.420 I don't know what she did.

00:26:43.120 Anyway.

00:26:43.320 I'm raising Nazis, though, because my two oldest girls are going to be singing Do

00:26:46.720 Ray Mee at their school variety show next week.

00:26:49.000 Wow.

00:26:50.000 I'll hide in my attic.

00:26:51.100 Yeah.

00:26:51.340 But I think everybody really wants to know, like, you tune into Fox News, they're saying

00:26:56.220 one thing, you tune into CNN, they're saying another.

00:26:58.840 So what the heck is going on?

00:27:00.380 So the answer is neither of the two things that are being said.

00:27:03.280 So don't buy, really.

00:27:04.280 So there are a lot of people on Fox News who are going with the, he's totally exonerated.

00:27:07.600 He did great.

00:27:08.660 Trump's been awesome throughout.

00:27:09.980 Totally honest.

00:27:11.000 Honest.

00:27:11.380 He's off the hook.

00:27:12.700 And then everybody on CNN's like, he's going to hell.

00:27:15.480 And not only is he going to hell, he's guilty of all crimes, including murder.

00:27:19.560 And it's like, none of that is true.

00:27:21.140 Okay, so I know you're going to do your Fox News.

00:27:23.240 You can do that in a second, Knowles.

00:27:24.620 But here is the reality of the situation.

00:27:26.440 There are 220 pages about him telling people in his administration to lie to other people,

00:27:30.820 including the public.

00:27:31.640 That ain't great for him.

00:27:33.080 I mean, that's not great.

00:27:34.220 Like, he's not going to jail over it.

00:27:35.480 He's not going to be prosecuted over it.

00:27:37.220 And so that part's crappy.

00:27:38.800 And then the part that's good is that there's no collusion.

00:27:40.720 And also, he's not going to jail over it.

00:27:42.400 So there's the upside.

00:27:43.500 There's the downside.

00:27:44.100 There's a short story.

00:27:44.900 All right.

00:27:45.240 The left is spreading an actual piece of fake news about this, though,

00:27:48.920 which they're taking out the line that you mentioned earlier,

00:27:51.220 which is he found out the special counsel had been appointed.

00:27:53.460 And he said, oh, no, my presidency's over.

00:27:55.560 I'm effed.

00:27:56.380 And they're taking this out as evidence that he committed a crime he felt guilt.

00:27:59.880 They don't read not two sentences down in that paragraph where he says,

00:28:04.780 everyone tells me when a special counsel gets appointed,

00:28:07.480 your presidency's over.

00:28:08.620 It stops your whole agenda.

00:28:09.880 You can't get anything done.

00:28:11.680 That is what he was referring to.

00:28:13.460 And the other aspect I have, because I agree.

00:28:15.160 Which means, by the way, that Fox News is closer to the truth than CNN, as usual.

00:28:18.500 And the reason that I think celebration is called for is, obviously,

00:28:23.280 a two-year investigation into anybody, much less Donald Trump,

00:28:26.840 is going to turn up a lot of dirt, a lot of ugly things about everybody that they investigate.

00:28:31.340 But my question is, on exoneration, how could this have turned out any better for Donald Trump,

00:28:39.260 given the fact that he is Donald Trump?

00:28:41.420 Right, exactly.

00:28:42.300 Is there any way this turns out better for him?

00:28:43.740 No, that's absolutely fair.

00:28:44.500 No, that's right.

00:28:45.500 All right.

00:28:45.820 Matt wants to know, does this report make Trump more or less likely to win in 2020?

00:28:51.680 Oh, I think more.

00:28:52.540 More?

00:28:52.680 I think, you know, right this minute, I would actually, I never bet on elections,

00:28:56.860 because I've seen Shapiro do it.

00:28:58.240 It's a disaster, you know.

00:29:00.500 Then you frame the check.

00:29:01.820 I know, it's ugly.

00:29:03.040 But, you know, right this minute, I would actually put money on Trump

00:29:06.380 when I see what the Democratic Party is doing to itself.

00:29:09.280 And when I see, you know, they've put themselves in this absurd position.

00:29:12.780 Because no matter what Trump did during this investigation,

00:29:16.020 I believe this investigation should never have taken place.

00:29:18.280 I do not believe the idea of Trump gathering with Putin in a huddle,

00:29:23.060 like on the football field, and saying, here's what we're going to do.

00:29:25.720 That was a complete fantasy from the beginning.

00:29:28.560 And I do not think that the, as far as I can see so far,

00:29:31.880 what they call the predicate for the investigation,

00:29:34.080 doesn't seem to have been sound.

00:29:35.760 I'm not yet ready to say that.

00:29:37.700 I think there's a scandal here.

00:29:39.700 But I'm not quite ready to say that I know there's a scandal here.

00:29:42.560 And I think that it just makes Trump look very sympathetic.

00:29:45.980 Even though all the information, all the bad information that we're hearing,

00:29:50.220 we knew already.

00:29:50.880 We already knew who he was.

00:29:52.560 But there's something about this that really gets him off the hook

00:29:55.220 and makes him look like beleaguers.

00:29:56.340 I think there's one other piece of this, because I agree with you, to my chagrin.

00:30:01.120 That's the end of your career.

00:30:02.640 I think it helps him in another way, too, which is that, listen,

00:30:06.660 30% of the country are so angry about Trump that they'll hold on to this.

00:30:13.120 He definitely obstructed it.

00:30:14.320 You're never going to reach them, but they were never going to vote for him anyway.

00:30:17.220 And then one of the things about the Trump presidency that really is offensive to me

00:30:20.740 is that there's 30% of the people on the right

00:30:23.080 who historically would have disagreed with Trump on a great many things

00:30:27.160 who now today, if Trump wakes up tomorrow and says the sky is red,

00:30:31.260 they will be all in that the sky is red,

00:30:32.980 and you're a cuck if you say that the sky isn't red.

00:30:34.640 I don't like that.

00:30:35.660 You're trying to say the sky isn't red?

00:30:37.120 He didn't say it, Michael.

00:30:38.420 He didn't say it.

00:30:39.000 Okay, never mind.

00:30:39.400 He said it, if he said it, if.

00:30:41.500 I'm offended by that.

00:30:43.340 Nevertheless, it is.

00:30:44.260 Those people are going to vote for Trump no matter what happens.

00:30:46.320 There is still some middle in the country,

00:30:48.600 and what this report does for people in the middle,

00:30:51.400 it isn't just that it exonerates the president from his legal troubles.

00:30:55.460 It immunizes him against future accusations from the left over the next two years.

00:31:00.440 Excellent point.

00:31:00.720 No matter what, they could find out that there are 500 bodies buried under Trump Tower

00:31:05.160 and that whoever murdered them wrote his name on them and then gilded it.

00:31:12.140 But were they shot in the middle of Fifth Avenue by Donald Trump?

00:31:14.420 It will not matter because everything will look like sour grapes

00:31:18.820 after a two-year investigation by the Democrats turned up nothing.

00:31:24.820 I don't think anything is actually going to change, by the way.

00:31:25.680 You don't understand the construction business in New York, I think.

00:31:27.980 I think that what it showed is that after Barr released his letter,

00:31:32.920 the polls really did not shift either for or against Trump.

00:31:35.560 And I don't think the polls are going to shift for or against Trump after this thing.

00:31:37.740 I think that it's just another thing that's another obstacle out of his way.

00:31:40.340 It was something that was looming out there that theoretically could have hurt him,

00:31:43.160 and now it's a roadblock that he's avoided.

00:31:45.120 I don't think that it significantly upticks his chances at the presidency

00:31:48.220 or downgrades his chances at the presidency

00:31:50.180 other than if you actually were counting on that deus ex machina finishing him,

00:31:54.200 as so many Democrats were.

00:31:55.340 But I guess what I'm saying is that this prevents future accusations

00:31:59.100 from becoming major impediments.

00:32:01.380 I mean, I think that's true, which is—I do think that's true,

00:32:03.400 and I think that's why you're seeing the Democrats immediately shift to an attack on Barr.

00:32:06.480 Right.

00:32:06.720 The suggestion is that Barr actually should prosecute him

00:32:09.080 and that somehow he's betrayed the message of Mueller by not prosecuting him.

00:32:12.280 That dog won't.

00:32:12.560 I agree that's going to work.

00:32:14.120 But don't you think also there's this thing—I mean, we all know this,

00:32:17.560 that the one thing leftists know, the one thing they know, is that we're evil.

00:32:21.220 And when I saw—you know, Alicia and I were talking about this on the Another Kingdom show—

00:32:26.460 that when I saw that Reagan was right about a lot of things,

00:32:31.180 it suddenly made me think, oh, wait, that the people who were saying he was right weren't evil.

00:32:34.860 The guys at National Review weren't evil.

00:32:36.820 What are they saying?

00:32:37.460 What are they talking about?

00:32:38.420 So when you see that Trump was not a Russian spy,

00:32:41.380 all that stuff about treason that they were talking—

00:32:43.500 John Brennan was spewing as if—

00:32:45.720 The vote of candles from Mueller.

00:32:46.680 Unbelievable.

00:32:47.680 Unbelievable.

00:32:48.420 All that stuff is gone.

00:32:49.660 Now people start to look around and say, well, things are going pretty well, actually.

00:32:52.800 The economy's going well.

00:32:53.980 There's more jobs in my state than there was.

00:32:54.780 Well, it's an opportunity for Trump to redirect.

00:32:56.240 So here's a question.

00:32:56.980 Do you think that we should—that Trump should, in fact, swivel and turn this into investigate the investigators?

00:33:03.320 Or do you think that he should actually turn to, you know, other issues that Americans care about now?

00:33:07.180 I think he should do both.

00:33:08.120 I do not think he should let these people off the hook.

00:33:10.200 I think this investigation was wrongly done.

00:33:13.520 I think that—I think that for the Obama administration to send what—no matter what you call them,

00:33:18.980 are spies into the opposition's—you know, they could have just gone to Trump and said,

00:33:23.540 you know, the Russians are coming.

00:33:25.820 You know, you want to look out for them.

00:33:27.160 They didn't do that.

00:33:27.960 No, I never thought of electronic surveillance and undercover operatives as spying.

00:33:31.840 I thought, how do you define spying, really?

00:33:34.340 So this does raise a question as to what you think the Trump-Russia investigation was and what it became.

00:33:38.920 So there's two theories that I find plausible.

00:33:41.160 One is that it was initiated under bad auspices and it remained bad.

00:33:44.700 And one is that it was initiated under kind of normal auspices and then it got bad.

00:33:48.280 Right.

00:33:48.500 Because by the end, when they were—I mean, one of the key elements that is very obvious from the Mueller report,

00:33:53.160 the Steele dossier is mentioned, I think, twice in 448 pages.

00:33:55.940 This was used as the basis for the FISA warrants.

00:33:58.440 It was used as the basis for Comey telling Trump about it.

00:34:01.380 It was printed in the press.

00:34:02.460 It was the only thing people talked about for two years, Trump being peed on by Russian prostitutes.

00:34:05.920 And it was all just a sheer load of garbage.

00:34:08.560 From the Russians.

00:34:09.400 Right.

00:34:09.840 And they were using it the whole time.

00:34:11.640 So it does—so I think it's pretty obvious that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and all the members of McCabe, Comey,

00:34:19.480 a lot of these members got caught up in their own—they were sniffing their own farts in the car.

00:34:24.040 And then they got too high on their own fumes, I think.

00:34:27.100 And it really put them in—so—but the question is whether that means that systemically this was initiated from outside by a James Clapper.

00:34:36.060 Was this initiated from the outside by somebody in the Obama administration?

00:34:39.080 Because you do read the report, and there's an awful lot of contact between Trump people and Russians.

00:34:44.040 And there is a lot of—and Trump was saying weird stuff and lying about Trump Tower in Moscow.

00:34:47.840 So I don't find it completely implausible that somebody in the FBI was like, you know, this is weird.

00:34:52.240 We should probably check this out.

00:34:53.680 And then they start to check it out.

00:34:54.760 And then within weeks, Peter Strzok picks it up, and he's like, Trump's a bad guy.

00:34:57.960 Clearly he's guilty.

00:34:59.040 Now let's just start pushing as hard as we can on what we've got.

00:35:01.200 All throughout the election, one of the things that concerned me the most about Trump—and there were several things, I've not been shy about it—his unrelenting praise or equivocation in regard to Vladimir Putin.

00:35:15.740 It was unseemly.

00:35:17.000 It was unique, sort of, in an American experience.

00:35:21.580 He was more consistent about that than he was about building a wall throughout the election.

00:35:25.400 In retrospect, I have a lot more context.

00:35:27.400 Now I've seen that Donald Trump routinely uses flattery as a mechanism for dealing with strongmen.

00:35:34.500 And now I understand that even though he was lying to us about it, Donald Trump was still hoping to do some business in Moscow and didn't think that he would become president.

00:35:42.120 He thought it was much more likely that he would leave this election needing to go build a tower in Moscow.

00:35:46.360 There's even the political angle.

00:35:47.620 There are many Republicans who view Russia as the geopolitical threat to the United States.

00:35:52.040 There are many Republicans who view China as the political threat to the United States.

00:35:55.420 Trump is clearly in the latter category.

00:35:57.760 He talked about it on the campaign trail.

00:35:59.320 And that gives context for some of the Putin stuff.

00:36:01.280 Nevertheless, we didn't have all of this context two years ago.

00:36:03.640 And it's not unfair to think that two years ago other people within the government were as concerned about the strangeness of the way that Trump spoke of Vladimir Putin as I was.

00:36:13.440 This is one of those rare cases where Ben and Jeremy are more generous than I would be.

00:36:18.800 I really feel that these guys panicked.

00:36:21.840 I think they saw this wrecking ball, this loose cannon, and he is a loose cannon, coming toward a deep state.

00:36:29.580 And it is a deep state.

00:36:31.020 And they thought this man has no right to come in here and mess with our institutions and mess with our power.

00:36:37.060 And he's got to be stopped.

00:36:38.520 And I think they oversaw it.

00:36:39.820 When you listen to James Comey, you hear it.

00:36:41.700 You hear what he's saying, that it was up to me to defend our nation.

00:36:45.640 It was up to him to do nothing except investigate and recommend whether somebody should be prosecuted or not.

00:36:50.660 All I'm saying is maybe we ought to wait.

00:36:51.960 No, of course.

00:36:53.020 Of course we should wait.

00:36:53.720 I'm seeing some people immediately jump to the conclusion.

00:36:56.600 And I didn't jump to the conclusion on Mueller, and I think that was right.

00:36:59.020 And I don't want to jump to the conclusion the other way.

00:37:01.140 I am absolutely willing to be proved wrong.

00:37:04.080 But the fact that he said things about Putin that I seriously disagree with.

00:37:08.740 I think Putin is a stone gangster.

00:37:10.720 And I don't think anybody should deal with him, including Obama when he sent him the reset button, all that stuff.

00:37:15.440 I thought it was nonsense.

00:37:17.300 But who investigates, using the FBI, a U.S. presidential candidate on the basis of not liking what he says?

00:37:26.460 It's insane.

00:37:27.440 We also haven't made enough of the FISA abuse.

00:37:30.240 The number of FISA applications that are rejected is quite different than the number of FISA applications that are granted.

00:37:37.120 And these initially were all rejected.

00:37:39.600 They were in that very small category that were rejected.

00:37:41.880 They were flimsy.

00:37:42.580 They were based on bizarre, contrived evidence.

00:37:45.380 I mean, this is why I think it demands that President Trump goes after this.

00:37:49.700 One, because you've got to attack, and he's an attack dog, and he does well when he's attacking.

00:37:54.360 But also, people are rightly really angry about this.

00:37:57.600 They're really angry that there seems to have been a bureaucratic attempt to overturn a presidential election.

00:38:03.860 Whether that is true or not, at least it has to be investigated.

00:38:06.200 I think what we all agree about is what this became.

00:38:09.400 And the only thing that we disagree about is what was the initiation.

00:38:11.620 What was the initiation, yeah.

00:38:12.880 And even to the extent that I say, use the word disagree.

00:38:15.380 We just don't know.

00:38:15.860 Maybe you'll be proven.

00:38:16.580 Exactly.

00:38:17.180 Exactly.

00:38:17.360 I'm just waiting for evidence.

00:38:18.560 Yeah.

00:38:18.900 Bravo Company Manufacturing.

00:38:20.120 Well, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was to make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by the government.

00:38:26.980 The second right they enumerated was the right of the population to protect that speech and their own persons with force.

00:38:31.400 We all in this room believe deeply in these principles.

00:38:33.900 I believe we are all gun owners, and owning a rifle is an awesome responsibility.

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00:39:39.740 You know something about Bravo Company and rifle ownership generally that I've never said before publicly, but I'll admit to you guys.

00:39:45.360 I pride myself on, since I've moved to L.A., I've created gun owners.

00:39:50.000 Like, I take a bunch of people.

00:39:51.600 Michael Knowles.

00:39:52.360 I think you.

00:39:52.780 You took me.

00:39:53.340 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:54.120 Many people, I've taken them to purchase their first firearm.

00:39:57.060 And one thing that I've never talked about is that I actually don't like shooting.

00:40:01.160 I grew up in Texas.

00:40:02.540 I've, you know, among the wild cottontails and jackrabbits of West Texas, I am known as Jeremia Sel Muerte.

00:40:11.840 I, you couldn't have put more rounds downrange than I have in my lifetime.

00:40:17.000 But the truth is I don't, I don't love it.

00:40:18.920 For some people it's a, it's a wonderful hobby.

00:40:21.420 For me, it's an awesome responsibility.

00:40:23.060 And I think that it is the responsibility of free men and women to own rifles.

00:40:28.280 And in particular, to own the unpopular rifles.

00:40:31.060 Because you have to make a stand that this is our right.

00:40:36.080 And the right, in order for the right to exist, it's like in copyright law, which we deal with so often in our business.

00:40:42.140 If you don't enforce copyright, you don't own copyright.

00:40:44.960 And it's the same.

00:40:45.840 I own black rifles so that I can preserve the rights of others to own black rifles.

00:40:52.660 It requires us to step up and take part in that responsibility.

00:40:56.540 We should take it seriously.

00:40:58.240 But you don't have to be a sportsman to understand why companies like Bravo, company manufacturing, are so important to the preservation of our free men.

00:41:06.640 And I have to say, on the other side of that, to paraphrase The Simpsons, the first time you ever showed me how to shoot an AR-15, I felt like God must feel when he shoots an AR-15.

00:41:16.840 Yeah, it was great.

00:41:18.480 By the way, quick note.

00:41:19.620 Everybody go subscribe right now at DailyWire.com.

00:41:21.720 If you're not subscribing, there's only one reason we're here, guys.

00:41:24.080 And that's to get you to subscribe to our...

00:41:25.940 And if they subscribe, then they can ask questions.

00:41:28.780 Excellent!

00:41:29.660 Wonderful point.

00:41:30.300 Well done.

00:41:30.700 Have any of them asked us questions?

00:41:31.740 How about that segue?

00:41:32.880 I like it.

00:41:33.540 All right, Michael, you know, Drew, you just mentioned some 2020 presidential stuff.

00:41:38.720 So, Michael, a brilliant subscriber, wants to know, do you think that the JV Democratic contenders are hoping for a brokered convention?

00:41:46.280 Ooh.

00:41:47.600 How do brokered conventions work now?

00:41:49.900 Because the Democrats, in order to steal the election from Bernie Sanders, they invoked these superdelegates, but then they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

00:41:59.980 And they changed their rules around superdelegates, which I don't understand all the implications.

00:42:06.140 Second ballot superdelegates kick in.

00:42:06.860 Second ballot superdelegates kick in.

00:42:07.700 So if it makes it to ballot two.

00:42:09.200 Right.

00:42:09.600 Then superdelegates kick in.

00:42:11.080 But they don't really want that.

00:42:12.240 What they really don't want is a position where Bernie Sanders has a plurality of the delegates, which is probably likely to happen at this point.

00:42:19.200 Because remember, for Democrats, it's not a winner-take-all system in virtually all of these states.

00:42:23.380 You win a percentage.

00:42:24.300 It's just delegates who are based on the percentage of the vote.

00:42:27.820 So it could presumably be much closer.

00:42:29.780 Oh, yeah.

00:42:30.180 You could certainly see a circumstance where Bernie wins, say, 40 percent of the vote in California.

00:42:34.380 Everybody else splits the other 60 percent of the vote.

00:42:36.600 He does the same thing in New York.

00:42:37.620 He does the same thing in Massachusetts.

00:42:39.140 You could see Bernie pretty easily walking away with about 40 percent of the delegates and the other 60 percent being split among four or five different candidates,

00:42:46.320 particularly, say, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and some of the others who are in the race.

00:42:50.860 And then it gets to the first ballot.

00:42:51.840 And Bernie is the frontrunner.

00:42:53.760 And then the question is, do they hand it to him or does he just play kingmaker and he has to go to the because what they don't want is the repeat.

00:43:00.640 Right.

00:43:00.780 What happens if in the second ballot he doesn't win first ballot and second ballot suddenly Joe Biden wins the nomination on the back of the superdelegates all saying we can't have Bernie be our nominee.

00:43:08.600 And then all the Bernie bros are just like, well, screw this.

00:43:10.600 I'm not going to vote.

00:43:11.680 See how you like Trump for a second term.

00:43:13.680 It's a problem for him.

00:43:14.620 And I'm not I'm not sure that anyone wants a brokered convention because of how ugly it would get, how how brutal it would get, except for us, it would be the greatest thing ever.

00:43:21.980 But I do think that some people are running for president who are not actually running for president.

00:43:26.840 I think it's very possible that Pete Buttigieg is running for governor right now and he's doing it by running for president.

00:43:32.320 He's not running for governor.

00:43:33.040 He can't win governor in Indiana.

00:43:34.480 He wants a VP slot.

00:43:35.540 He certainly couldn't have won governor when he was just a lowly South Bend mayor.

00:43:38.960 But I'm not I'm not totally convinced that he can't mount a campaign against Eric Holcomb with all of that free press that he's gotten.

00:43:45.100 I agree.

00:43:45.520 I think Holcomb still wins.

00:43:46.420 Indiana is trending real strong, right?

00:43:47.860 Indiana.

00:43:48.360 Yeah.

00:43:48.540 Indiana is a good is still a good holdout.

00:43:51.000 Kirsten Gillibrand, I think, is obviously running for VP.

00:43:53.260 I don't think she is so crazed.

00:43:56.060 Yeah.

00:43:56.160 Well, what if it what if it's some boring white guy who wins the nomination?

00:44:00.420 And Kirsten Gillibrand.

00:44:00.920 So you're going to pick a boring white chick?

00:44:02.380 It is so funny, though, how like the left loves to be yes, all women, but none of the women are polling well that are running for president on the Democratic ticket.

00:44:08.960 White guys.

00:44:09.680 Yeah.

00:44:10.160 You know, Kamala is polling better than all the other people who aren't Beto, Biden and Bernie.

00:44:15.600 All the other white guys, you know, but I still.

00:44:18.460 Beto, Biden, Bernie and Buttigieg.

00:44:19.680 And Buttigieg and Buttigieg.

00:44:21.000 Buttigieg is now upholding Beto.

00:44:22.620 Beto, by the way, is taking it right on the chin.

00:44:24.460 Yeah.

00:44:24.680 I mean, Buttigieg, I think he's toast.

00:44:26.100 I mean, Buttigieg has stolen all of his thunder.

00:44:28.380 And it's pretty amazing.

00:44:29.280 I mean, I guess that a fake Hispanic name and and speaking Spanish does not trump speaking Norwegian.

00:44:35.360 I think that no one deserves no one deserves to lose more than Beto because this concept that the Democrats have grabbed a hold of, that you should be able to fail your way up in electoral politics.

00:44:47.020 I love this concept.

00:44:48.080 You have to win an election in order to then win a bigger election.

00:44:53.960 Knowles will be president in 20 years.

00:44:56.680 Best selling author and president of the United States.

00:44:59.220 Please, God, no.

00:45:02.700 Alicia.

00:45:03.500 You want some more?

00:45:04.240 I want some more.

00:45:04.880 All right.

00:45:05.160 Akraz asks, criminal investigation ought to start with a crime and be followed to a person, not vice versa.

00:45:10.880 How are counterintel investigations supposed to be targeted?

00:45:14.300 So counterintelligence investigations, just legally speaking, are about looking into nefarious activities on the parts of foreigners, presumably.

00:45:21.660 And that's why this was begun as a counterintelligence investigation.

00:45:25.860 Now, the accusation is that it was started as a counterintelligence investigation specifically because the intelligence community could not come up with a crime to pin on Trump.

00:45:33.940 So instead, what they did was initiated it as counterintelligence specifically so they could go searching around for something nefarious.

00:45:40.580 And then once there was a nexus with Trump, then they sort of came after Trump.

00:45:43.760 But doesn't a special counsel have to have a specific crime?

00:45:46.620 I mean, shouldn't Mueller have actually turned this job down?

00:45:49.080 So this is what McCarthy argues, right?

00:45:50.600 Andrew McCarthy has been saying for a long time that the scope of the special counsel is not a counterintelligence investigation.

00:45:55.540 The scope of the special counsel is criminal activity that's actually taking place.

00:45:59.400 Now, the argument, I guess, to be made is that the accusation was criminal conspiracy by members of the Trump campaign by the time that Mueller came around.

00:46:07.080 But this does go to the initiation of the actual investigation in the first place prior to Mueller.

00:46:11.460 I mean, even Mueller in the report says, I'm not going to use the word collusion because it's not a crime.

00:46:15.980 Right, exactly, exactly.

00:46:16.600 But that really does bring up the question of whether he should have taken the job in the first place and said, you know, I can't fulfill the mandate of the special counsel.

00:46:24.560 Right.

00:46:24.800 I mean, you can investigate whether a crime occurred or not, I suppose, especially if it's obstruction at that point, right?

00:46:30.300 Because at that point, he was really appointed in the aftermath of the Comey firing.

00:46:34.320 So then it was the accused crime was obstruction, which is why I think there's so much focus on obstruction.

00:46:38.320 Again, I don't think Mueller did a terrible job with this report or anything.

00:46:40.980 Well, you know, I actually, I actually, I half agree with that.

00:46:44.900 Yeah.

00:46:45.160 I think that.

00:46:45.820 On the collusion stuff, I thought he did a fine job.

00:46:47.280 But Trump has that magical power to make people betray themselves, betray their own principles.

00:46:52.240 And Mueller did two things that I think really indicate how much he hated Trump and that he actually lost it a little bit.

00:46:59.700 But one is what you mentioned before, is that his job was to say yes or no, prosecute or don't prosecute.

00:47:05.460 Right.

00:47:05.680 And when he said, I'm not going to decide about obstruction, I thought it was just, I hate this guy so much that I can't admit the fact that I got nothing.

00:47:13.560 I cannot go after this guy in criminal intent.

00:47:15.780 I don't have criminal intent.

00:47:17.220 And I think that was really embarrassing for him.

00:47:19.900 It indicated that Trump got to him personally.

00:47:22.960 That's one read.

00:47:23.660 It could also be a kind of cowardice.

00:47:25.140 Well, OK.

00:47:25.820 He didn't want to end up like Comey coming to a conclusion.

00:47:28.900 But the other thing was the raid on Roger Stone.

00:47:31.920 And I have no sympathy for Roger Stone, the Michael Cones of this world, the people I really dismiss out of hand.

00:47:38.000 But you don't drop out of the sky like stormtroopers with CNN waiting in the wings to film it.

00:47:45.300 Coincidentally.

00:47:45.880 Coincidentally.

00:47:46.480 Coincidentally.

00:47:46.600 They did this to Lori Loughlin.

00:47:48.580 They showed up with SWAT to get Felicity Huffman.

00:47:51.940 Really, they do this.

00:47:52.840 Every time they think that somebody's inside destroying documents or possibly destroying documents, they show up with SWAT.

00:47:57.940 But what was Roger Stone going to be doing?

00:47:59.820 Destroy documents.

00:48:00.660 About what?

00:48:01.500 I'm not saying that this is a great procedure, but I don't think it's specific to Roger Stone.

00:48:04.620 I disagree, Ben, because Roger Stone was famously going around for six months before his arrest saying,

00:48:10.660 I can't make plans this weekend because I'll probably be arrested.

00:48:13.220 If he were going to destroy documents, they would have been destroyed months and months before the arrest.

00:48:17.840 Again, that this generalized procedure is good.

00:48:20.820 All I'm saying it is not specific to Roger Stone.

00:48:23.160 They did it to frickin' Felicity Huffman over a college admissions scandal.

00:48:26.320 Yeah, well, have you ever seen shifty eyes?

00:48:28.020 Shifty eyes.

00:48:28.720 Isn't she married to Bill Macy?

00:48:29.980 He's kind of a strange fella.

00:48:31.440 I'm just saying that there was something in this about...

00:48:33.580 The first one, I'm with you.

00:48:34.480 There's something in this that hinted that Trump got to Mueller at some level.

00:48:37.820 And yet, I thought, all in all, he did a fair, honest job for someone who hated the guy he was going after

00:48:43.740 and couldn't get his hands on him.

00:48:45.480 One more question, Alicia.

00:48:46.680 All right.

00:48:47.060 John Kay wants to know, why is it when you ask Democrats to live by their own policy proposals, they always punt?

00:48:54.520 Because their policy proposals suck, man.

00:48:56.520 Yeah.

00:48:56.920 Because who wants to live under that crap?

00:48:58.220 Of course.

00:48:58.700 Nobody wants to live under that crap.

00:48:59.680 That's the best thing about Bernie doing the whole...

00:49:01.240 I wrote a best-selling book.

00:49:02.660 It's like, yeah, join the rest of us in this room.

00:49:05.020 The moment for me that would have ended anybody else's career but Bernie's is when they asked him,

00:49:11.240 why you didn't just pay the taxes you think you should pay?

00:49:13.880 And there was that long, long moment when he couldn't answer.

00:49:17.120 And then he said, well, what about Trump?

00:49:18.740 And I thought, that's not an answer.

00:49:20.160 No, first he went after Martha McCallum.

00:49:20.960 Yeah.

00:49:21.200 First he said to Martha McCallum, why don't you do it?

00:49:22.600 After working on it.

00:49:22.980 And then Martha McCallum was like, I didn't propose a wild tax.

00:49:25.000 What the hell are you talking about?

00:49:26.280 It's amazing.

00:49:27.460 I mean, he has generated this durability that's pretty impressive.

00:49:31.920 Because he believes what he's saying.

00:49:33.040 The dirty little secret about Bernie is that Bernie is exactly the same as every other Democrat.

00:49:38.000 That's the actual dirty secret about Bernie Sanders, is that he says Medicare for all.

00:49:41.720 And okay, great, it's very radical in all this.

00:49:43.520 But he knows in his heart that's never getting done.

00:49:45.380 He knows that this is going to be, at best, an incremental plan.

00:49:47.940 And when Bernie does this routine, I hate capitalism so bad, there's the rich and the poor and all this routine.

00:49:53.160 The truth is that in the past, 20 years ago, he used to still say things like, yeah, capitalism generates a lot of wealth.

00:49:59.840 Now he avoids saying it because it's the only distinguishing mark.

00:50:02.460 It's the only distinguishing mark.

00:50:04.000 They are all promoting Norway.

00:50:05.400 They're all promoting Denmark.

00:50:06.720 So what distinguishes Bernie from everybody else?

00:50:08.280 That he got there first?

00:50:09.320 I mean, I guess that's a pitch.

00:50:10.580 But his real pitch, and everybody knows it, and this is why they got so mad when people mentioned he was a millionaire,

00:50:15.100 and then he couldn't handle it, and they were like, how dare you target Bernie over that?

00:50:18.220 He's a democratic socialist, not a socialist.

00:50:20.600 The reason they got mad is because they understand that his real pitch is that capitalism is inherently bad,

00:50:24.580 the same way that AOC's pitch is that capitalism is inherently bad.

00:50:27.660 But AOC is an idiot, and Sanders is a true believer, and I think that that is a difference.

00:50:32.760 That's possible.

00:50:33.620 I'm sorry, Michael.

00:50:34.100 This is a unique strength of Trump, though, just from a campaign perspective,

00:50:37.780 is because Trump is what you see is what you get with him.

00:50:41.080 And so with the Democrats right now, there's such a gulf between the appearance and the reality.

00:50:45.860 Even in the way their proposals are pitched, Medicare for all is very popular,

00:50:50.000 and then you get into any specific, and the approval ratings plummet to the ground.

00:50:54.780 Obviously, Kamala Harris wants to take our guns.

00:50:57.000 She's got a gun.

00:50:57.680 She's got armed bodyguards.

00:50:59.040 Beto and Bernie want to take all our money.

00:51:00.720 They underpay on their taxes, and they don't give any money to charity.

00:51:04.260 That gulf is so big.

00:51:06.380 Trump is just this bundle of honest, dishonest guys.

00:51:11.180 Authenticity.

00:51:11.880 Authenticity.

00:51:12.740 I've got to stop here for a second.

00:51:13.780 The best clip of the last year was Beto O'Rourke talking about his charitable giving.

00:51:19.640 Beto is the charity.

00:51:20.600 It was the best.

00:51:22.280 The best.

00:51:23.200 It was a narcissism off between Beto and AOC this week,

00:51:26.740 between Beto suggesting that his very presence is the charity.

00:51:31.640 And it's such an easy answer, right?

00:51:33.000 Somebody says something to you like, you know, my friend gave more charity than you.

00:51:35.940 Good for your friend, man.

00:51:36.960 That's awesome.

00:51:37.920 I wish that I had given more.

00:51:39.540 Exactly.

00:51:40.120 How hard is that answer?

00:51:41.020 It's so easy.

00:51:41.660 But instead he's like, I'm not home with my kids right now.

00:51:43.580 I'm here with you schmucks.

00:51:44.780 Shouldn't you appreciate me?

00:51:46.180 I mean, look at me.

00:51:49.400 But Beto's only the best because it's in AOC's clip about how she brings the future is incomprehensible.

00:51:58.960 You're wrong.

00:51:59.900 You're wrong.

00:52:00.360 I see it differently.

00:52:01.180 I see it as Beto's like, I'm going to show them what a true narcissist looks like.

00:52:05.460 And AOC's like, hold my cheeseburger.

00:52:07.400 I don't think anything better has ever happened on the Internet.

00:52:12.160 Not actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf.

00:52:15.040 Not life of Julia.

00:52:18.780 Not life of Julia.

00:52:19.680 AOC talking to us from 30 years in the future.

00:52:23.720 Magnificent.

00:52:24.140 There's not even, like, my favorite part of it is all of it.

00:52:27.560 But there is a takeaway that I think is very important.

00:52:30.800 It goes to your point.

00:52:31.780 You say that Bernie is actually no different than all the other Democrats.

00:52:36.240 I would challenge that.

00:52:37.760 Bernie is no different than all the Democrats except the so fresh, so face.

00:52:42.980 Right.

00:52:43.380 The ones who took him seriously.

00:52:44.560 The ones who took Bernie Sanders seriously.

00:52:45.900 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proudly calls herself a Democratic Socialist.

00:52:50.480 And that's kind of a radical position to take in the United States.

00:52:53.640 No one's ever, we don't use the term Democratic Socialist.

00:52:56.740 That's a European term.

00:52:58.240 It embraces a negative, a word that has a negative connotation in America historically, socialism.

00:53:04.160 But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a Democratic Socialist.

00:53:08.880 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Stalinist, Maoist, Marxist of the highest order.

00:53:15.900 What this video says is that for 30 years in the future, she looks back and says, my Green

00:53:23.360 New Deal changed everything.

00:53:26.000 It changed the way that we eat.

00:53:28.460 It gave free health care to all.

00:53:31.180 A federal jobs program guaranteed a job to everyone except the people who don't want to

00:53:36.380 work, who will not be required to work.

00:53:38.440 You said the biggest problem was that there was a labor shortage.

00:53:40.040 There was a labor shortage.

00:53:41.640 We're going to rebuild nature on behalf of nature.

00:53:47.800 We're going to change the 25% of the economy or so, which is how we gain our energy.

00:53:54.840 She says we're going to change full human interactions.

00:53:55.960 We're going to change our souls.

00:53:56.920 We're going to change our souls.

00:53:57.380 We're going to change how we raise our children.

00:53:59.540 That scared me the most.

00:54:00.480 The state will be responsible for how we raise our children.

00:54:03.660 And the truth is, I'm not, this is not hyperbole.

00:54:07.120 I'm not trying to just score political points.

00:54:09.520 The only two humans in the history of the world who have ever wrought change in a society

00:54:15.760 at the level that she suggests in that video are Stalin and Mao.

00:54:20.620 They literally changed fundamentally how even human interactions work.

00:54:26.620 I mean, the Reign of Terror was about the way that people have interacted with other people

00:54:30.960 for all of recorded history is not the way I want my people to interact.

00:54:34.800 It's five-year plans.

00:54:36.340 It's fundamentally changing the economy.

00:54:38.800 What she proposes is in no way less radical than those proposals.

00:54:43.160 What's amazing about it is she clearly saw the South Park episode where they made fun of Al Gore

00:54:49.320 because they made fun of Al Gore for his global warming alarmism.

00:54:52.800 They said he was going to stop man, bear, pig.

00:54:54.760 And the punchline of it was, he said, and then in 30 years people are going to look back

00:54:59.760 and say, thanks Al Gore, you're super awesome.

00:55:03.140 And that is this AOC video.

00:55:05.220 The part that goes, it's so abrupt that no one's mentioned it because it's just so shocking

00:55:10.320 is where she's talking about global warming and how it's going to destroy the world.

00:55:13.880 And then without any segue, she switches to full-scale socialism, bordering on communism,

00:55:21.740 jobs programs, eliminating poverty.

00:55:23.940 Wait, what about the environment, though?

00:55:25.680 Where did, wasn't, where are we talking about the green news?

00:55:27.820 That is the green news.

00:55:29.040 But if you don't envision it, you can't see it, Michael.

00:55:30.980 I mean, that's what I learned.

00:55:32.160 That's what I learned.

00:55:33.000 The best, seriously, there's so many great things.

00:55:35.160 It's so good when she starts off by saying, and then a brand new Congress was elected,

00:55:39.620 and I saw the faces of all the children who finally saw hope in me.

00:55:44.460 And then one of them grew up to be me.

00:55:47.460 And that's like the greatest thing anyone could grow up to be.

00:55:51.140 But she never worked as a bartender.

00:55:53.060 The new girl that took her place didn't work as a bartender.

00:55:55.160 The new girl had four jobs.

00:55:56.140 She did.

00:55:56.460 She had many jobs.

00:55:57.220 She's not satisfied with her life.

00:55:58.680 She never gets married, just like Julia, in life with Julia.

00:56:01.400 She's defined by her career.

00:56:02.780 And her career is that she starts off, after graduating college, digging in the bayous of Louisiana,

00:56:07.640 which sounds, like, terrible, by the way.

00:56:10.520 Was it replanting the mangroves?

00:56:11.540 Yeah, yeah, replanting the mangroves.

00:56:13.500 Who graduates colleges?

00:56:14.460 You know what?

00:56:14.700 I'm spending the next couple of years planting mangroves, man.

00:56:16.760 Not only that.

00:56:17.200 Who wants more mangroves, man?

00:56:18.680 They're terrible.

00:56:19.860 And then with the oil workers, with the out-of-work oil workers who have been shifted to replanting the mangroves.

00:56:25.340 But don't worry.

00:56:26.360 We've lost the knowledge about the land, so we bring in our Night of American friends.

00:56:29.640 Ha-ha!

00:56:30.120 Here they are.

00:56:30.900 And they will teach us the ways of nature.

00:56:33.160 And then they just kind of just shove them off the screen again.

00:56:35.360 Really, that's exactly what happened to the video.

00:56:37.140 It's amazing.

00:56:37.860 And then that girl, I can't remember her name, is a-

00:56:41.700 Aliyah or something.

00:56:42.420 Aliyah.

00:56:43.060 Yeah.

00:56:44.060 Then, not battle, not battle, Aliyah.

00:56:46.740 Did something different.

00:56:47.540 Anyway, she starts off planting mangroves.

00:56:49.900 And then she's like, you know what?

00:56:50.780 Can't handle it.

00:56:51.600 I'm going to go build solar panels.

00:56:53.540 And she goes and she builds solar panels.

00:56:55.000 She's an engineer at a solar panel plant.

00:56:56.640 It's like, how did you get qualified for all this crap?

00:56:58.740 I mean, wow, that's incredible.

00:57:00.780 You went from literally holding a shovel to being able to engineer solar panels?

00:57:05.040 Holy crap!

00:57:05.980 That's unbelievable.

00:57:07.440 This lady's a genius.

00:57:08.380 You know how she got that job.

00:57:09.000 And then she's like, you know what?

00:57:10.140 I can't engineer solar panels anymore.

00:57:11.880 I need to go mold the minds of preschoolers.

00:57:15.540 And we're going to pay our preschoolers.

00:57:16.620 It's a different world.

00:57:17.440 So we're going to pay our preschool teachers like $150,000 a year.

00:57:20.660 And that's going to come straight from my ass.

00:57:22.720 I mean, like, it's just going to-

00:57:23.900 Where is this coming from?

00:57:25.960 What is it?

00:57:26.780 And then the great thing about re- I mean, you write fiction, Drew, so you know.

00:57:30.640 You get to create entire worlds out of your imagination.

00:57:32.760 It may be the greatest video ever made.

00:57:34.220 It's so good.

00:57:35.120 It's so good.

00:57:36.000 She creates this entire magical world from purely her imagination.

00:57:39.200 In which she is the queen.

00:57:40.740 That's exactly right.

00:57:41.640 And it's obvious that she means to be president in that video.

00:57:44.660 This is what I was going to say.

00:57:45.160 The subtext is she's still taking the bullet train to D.C.

00:57:48.620 Correct.

00:57:49.040 But not to be a lowly congresswoman.

00:57:51.680 Someone took her slot, right, in Congress.

00:57:53.280 That means she's no longer a lowly senator.

00:57:55.000 By the way, she's wearing the same white outfit that she wore at the State of the Union.

00:57:58.180 She's got a little streak of gray.

00:57:58.480 And she's got the storm streak from X-Men.

00:58:01.780 So that's pretty exciting.

00:58:02.780 That's president's storm streak.

00:58:03.720 That's actually how we cured climate change, is that she actually started shooting lightning

00:58:07.600 from her fingertips, just like storm, and was able to control the climate.

00:58:11.200 She just sucks the climate.

00:58:11.700 I mean, if she knew how to do that now, what the hell is she waiting for?

00:58:13.880 We're all going to be dead in 12 years.

00:58:15.240 I mean, what the heck?

00:58:16.540 Another hurricane bomb is going to go off.

00:58:18.340 A hurricane bomb.

00:58:18.880 Oh, yeah.

00:58:19.420 As Miami sinks underwater for the last time.

00:58:22.260 Yeah.

00:58:22.960 You know, if you live in Miami, and you're worried about Hurricane Spencer, or whatever it

00:58:28.360 is that's going to come sink your city, you've got to go over to Policy Genius.

00:58:31.660 Wow.

00:58:32.140 This guy is a genius.

00:58:33.200 He's a Policy Genius.

00:58:34.180 He's a Policy Genius.

00:58:34.200 He's a Policy Genius.

00:58:34.220 He's a Policy Genius.

00:58:34.300 I'm going to go to Policy Genius and score you.

00:58:35.960 I'm going to buy him a Segway because he's so good at Segway.

00:58:38.680 Can we just sit in the corner?

00:58:40.380 And he hops on it?

00:58:40.480 And just every time you make a Segway, you just jump on it and just ride it around the

00:58:43.300 room and make it a Segway.

00:58:43.920 No, I think you guys aren't understanding.

00:58:45.500 What I'm saying is, if you live in Miami and your house is going to sink, you need insurance.

00:58:49.600 Oh!

00:58:50.760 Got you.

00:58:51.160 And our friends at Policy Genius.

00:58:53.480 Insurance.

00:58:53.920 I get it.

00:58:54.220 I get it.

00:58:54.700 I get it.

00:58:54.800 Put that together.

00:58:55.220 Well, let me tell you something.

00:58:55.840 Policy Genius is the easy way to buy life insurance online.

00:58:58.440 In just two minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers and find your best price.

00:59:01.980 Once you apply, the Policy Genius team will handle all the paperwork and the red tape.

00:59:05.480 No commissions.

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00:59:07.000 Just more time saved for you.

00:59:08.160 And Policy Genius doesn't just make life insurance easy.

00:59:10.420 They also make it easy to find the right home insurance, auto insurance, disability insurance.

00:59:13.940 They're your one-stop shop for financial protection.

00:59:16.000 So if you need life insurance but you're short on time, head on over to PolicyGenius.com and compare quotes.

00:59:20.620 Policy Genius is easy.

00:59:21.560 It saves you money, and not to belabor the point, but it is indeed fast.

00:59:24.500 Go check them out right now.

00:59:25.560 Policy Genius.

00:59:25.980 Spend less time comparing life insurance, more time doing literally anything else.

00:59:30.200 Check them out.

00:59:31.260 PolicyGenius.com.

00:59:32.260 Compare those quotes and it makes it really easy.

00:59:34.280 And they have all types of insurance.

00:59:35.400 And as Jeremy says, I mean, if you're about to drown, that's a really good time to get life insurance.

00:59:38.920 You know when the wrong time is?

00:59:40.360 After you drown.

00:59:41.120 Yeah, that's it.

00:59:41.700 After you drown, it's too late to get insurance.

00:59:43.000 That's a pre-existing condition.

00:59:46.380 Alicia, hang out with us for a little bit longer.

00:59:47.900 And if you want to get your question in, go over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe.

00:59:52.240 As Ben said, we're really here because we want your money.

00:59:56.120 We are unlike, well, all of the Democrats alive today, apparently, we are capitalists.

01:00:02.380 We want to provide you with a good or service, which we have and value very little, in exchange

01:00:08.100 for what you have that we value a lot, which is your money.

01:00:11.380 So please, go over to DailyWire.

01:00:12.620 And your friendship.

01:00:13.140 And your friendship.

01:00:14.440 And your money.

01:00:15.040 We said the money, right?

01:00:15.760 Fresh the money.

01:00:16.240 Isn't the real DailyWire the friends we've made a long time?

01:00:21.100 And the money.

01:00:23.280 DailyWire.com slash subscribe.

01:00:24.840 Get your questions in.

01:00:25.520 We're going to take a few more.

01:00:26.380 But first, I want to talk about another, I mean, really, we live, as you say, in the

01:00:30.700 perfect time, in the best timeline.

01:00:32.500 So much news happened since the last time that we were together.

01:00:36.340 And one of the more delightful things that happened is that somebody sprayed Michael

01:00:40.020 Knowles in the face with lavender oil on the lid.

01:00:43.240 I paid them for bleach.

01:00:45.520 I paid them for bleach.

01:00:46.160 I don't know.

01:00:46.620 I know.

01:00:47.420 They still don't know, by the way, which household chemicals they were.

01:00:50.760 All we know is they really, really made me smell great.

01:00:53.620 We know that they're really.

01:00:54.940 They left glitter on your sockless loafers?

01:00:56.520 Yes, I got glitter on my loafers.

01:00:58.000 The joke is on that assailant, though, by the way, because I'm a man of.

01:01:01.640 He got tackled and tased.

01:01:02.220 Oh, he got tackled and tased.

01:01:03.860 But also, what he didn't realize is I'm a man of Sicilian descent.

01:01:06.580 I was wearing much more cologne than he could ever spray on me.

01:01:09.960 There is no way.

01:01:10.560 I want to talk about that for a moment.

01:01:11.200 Also, if I'm going to pay a hit, man, my God, you just got to do everything yourself.

01:01:13.720 I know.

01:01:14.380 It's like, good help is hard to find.

01:01:14.800 I mean, it's a good, good help is hard to find.

01:01:15.420 If there are done here right now, I would just put an end to this nonsense.

01:01:17.500 He could only afford a super soaker.

01:01:19.240 I mean, that's a real.

01:01:20.000 There is a lot to laugh about whenever Michael suffers, and I think it's appropriate that

01:01:25.060 we do so.

01:01:25.460 But I actually want to talk about it seriously for a moment.

01:01:28.100 But first, let's play the clip of the attack on Michael.

01:01:31.700 Oh, yeah, let's.

01:01:32.160 Shut up.

01:01:32.820 Any opinion that this agrees with me.

01:01:40.280 I didn't think I was this intimidating.

01:01:44.840 Rob, can we get the close-up of the attack?

01:01:48.920 Here we go.

01:01:50.760 That's somebody having a good old time.

01:01:51.980 That guy is such a boss.

01:01:55.020 Oh, yeah, that guy made an NFL attack.

01:01:57.160 Yeah, he's an amazing guy.

01:01:58.760 He's an arm, body.

01:01:59.200 You know, came at him high.

01:02:00.040 That sergeant was amazing.

01:02:00.960 Really put him down.

01:02:02.880 That's enough of the clip.

01:02:04.060 By the way, that sergeant was like, this is the best day of my life.

01:02:06.460 Right.

01:02:08.500 I want to talk about two aspects of this from a serious point of view.

01:02:13.020 One is, this was obviously premeditated.

01:02:17.380 It's assault.

01:02:18.380 It's not assault with a deadly weapon.

01:02:19.920 But it's assault.

01:02:21.220 And it was also a conspiracy.

01:02:22.780 There were multiple people involved to make this happen.

01:02:24.580 They entered through a fire door that had to be opened from the inside.

01:02:27.180 One of the things that concerns me, the police acted very quickly and were grateful to them.

01:02:31.880 At the same time, they weren't able to secure the environment.

01:02:35.520 They weren't even able to keep the fire door shut.

01:02:38.140 Someone sneaks behind them as they're yelling at them during the fracas and opens the door a second time.

01:02:44.420 It could just as easily have been more people out there ready to storm in.

01:02:48.240 It could just as easily have been that that was a nine millimeter and not a super soaker.

01:02:51.780 And what it raises for me is something that we've talked about on the show before, and it's the state of higher education in America today.

01:02:59.420 I watched this video, and I'm left with the conclusion that you cannot prune this garden back to health.

01:03:06.600 It's time to till it, that we need to completely tear down the American higher education system and plant new trees in its place.

01:03:15.100 That if you are sending your children, if you're spending your money, if you're indebting yourself or allowing your children to become indebted so that they can go and become this in service of what?

01:03:27.680 33% of them, college graduates in America today, move back in with mom and dad when they get out of school.

01:03:32.360 What recommends this? If you're sending your kid, if you're paying your money, if you're an alumni of a university, alumni organizations raised $44 billion, with a B, billion dollars last year.

01:03:45.120 Every 12 months, $40 billion from people who presumably escaped alive from college and were still able to go on and make a living, which means that they were not utterly indoctrinated and destroyed.

01:03:57.020 And they're paying to make this happen. It's our fault that this is happening.

01:04:01.140 Well, I'll tell you something, because everyone's focusing on the guy who busts in. Somehow he gets in the back door.

01:04:07.600 He manages to get his squirt off of whatever that was. And luckily he got tackled and hauled out.

01:04:13.020 They're focusing on that. I think that's actually not really the scandal.

01:04:16.620 The scandal is this was premeditated. This highly motivated, relatively small group of students came in from the very first sentence I uttered.

01:04:25.140 They started screaming. You can't really hear it on the video because my mic was going to the broadcast.

01:04:30.600 They were screaming so loudly that the people in the room who came to hear the speech could not hear it. They could barely hear a word of it.

01:04:37.100 They screamed for 20 consecutive minutes. Then when I wouldn't shut up, they really thought they were going to get me to shut up.

01:04:43.320 When that didn't happen, they started to walk out, opened up that door, got a guy to come in to try to cover me and whatever that was.

01:04:49.020 When that didn't work, finally, these guys get hauled out by the cops. And the next day, a letter goes out from the chancellor of that university, Molly Agrawal.

01:04:57.820 And I assumed there would be some apology. I'm sorry. We invited a speaker to come. He was harassed, silenced.

01:05:04.620 They tried to shut him up. They physically assaulted him. And I'm sorry, this is not the way that higher education is supposed to be.

01:05:10.420 What happened instead from the third paragraph of that letter? He smeared me baselessly as a bigot.

01:05:16.440 He then went on and said, it's not good to get violent. But before you got violent, students, it was so wonderful how you stood up

01:05:25.000 and stood up to that protester who had extreme views like men are not women, which is the only actual view that I was espousing in this speech.

01:05:34.400 This chancellor of not just an American university, but a state university was endorsing the heckler's veto,

01:05:41.000 was saying that even when a speaker gets invited, shout him down, shut him up, silence him.

01:05:46.440 If you think that you might disagree with his views, it made me much more sympathetic to your point of view that we need to cut this off at the roots.

01:05:54.800 The chancellor literally says in his statement, in the statement about you, that you don't belong in our community

01:06:03.560 or you're a threat to our community or your values don't align with our community.

01:06:06.680 And I thought, who is our? Who is we?

01:06:08.820 Because you are an adult and you have been paid to create an environment not where you find common cause with little preening children,

01:06:17.760 but where you help little preening children become adults by teaching them education.

01:06:23.560 Your job is to teach them things that they don't know, not sympathize with everything that they know incorrectly.

01:06:30.300 You know, the only thing I disagree with what you say is that we have to destroy the educational system.

01:06:36.100 I don't think we have to do that any more than iPhone had to destroy the beeper.

01:06:39.560 I think we have to replace it. We just have to be better than they are.

01:06:42.900 And it will go away because it is now useless at the level of the liberal arts.

01:06:47.760 Knowles and I were at Texas A&M, a great place.

01:06:51.760 And we were talking to the major donors and alum afterwards, and they were saying to us,

01:06:56.580 you know, we have an agricultural department. It's all conservative.

01:07:00.080 We have an engineering department, all conservative. STEM, all conservative.

01:07:03.880 The only place where the liberals get in is in the liberal arts, history and literature.

01:07:09.300 But history and literature are what contain the basis of the ideas that created our capitalism, our system of government.

01:07:15.820 Created the engineering.

01:07:16.580 The engineering and the STEM.

01:07:17.940 And what we started talking about was forming a federalist society for shaping the minds of tomorrow's teachers of the liberal arts.

01:07:26.320 Because if you go in, I mean, I was teaching, I had a fellowship at Hillsdale.

01:07:30.920 And you go there and the children, children, the kids are incredibly sane, incredibly inspired,

01:07:38.180 because they're being taught the liberal arts at the level of the liberal arts.

01:07:41.960 They teach them classics.

01:07:42.740 They teach them classics.

01:07:43.860 I heard a story that really reached me, a wonderful woman with the great name of Reagan Kuhl.

01:07:50.300 And she said to me, you know, I came here, and they gave the, you know, the incoming speech.

01:07:56.980 And they said, we're going to teach you about the good and the true and the beautiful.

01:08:00.740 And she said she started to cry.

01:08:02.440 And she thought, why didn't anybody tell me about this before?

01:08:05.400 And I was so moved by that, because why didn't anybody?

01:08:08.740 If we start to tell people about that, if we build institutions that tell people about that,

01:08:12.980 not just at the university level, but at the K through 12 level,

01:08:16.400 I think those things will go away.

01:08:18.120 I think they'll shrivel up and die, just like the beeper industry did when the iPhone came out.

01:08:22.220 This, I think, is a genuine innovation, because the state of law,

01:08:26.160 certainly the state of constitutional law, was really dismal before the Federalist Society.

01:08:31.800 And if there were a Federalist Society for graduate students, for history and literature and all of these,

01:08:38.540 which obviously does not exist, and conservatives don't go into those fields,

01:08:42.260 because they know they're not going to get a job, they might not get into the program,

01:08:45.160 they're not going to get through the program.

01:08:46.940 It's actually very similar to the way that law was.

01:08:49.560 If we could do that, there actually might be a fighting shot,

01:08:52.780 because the situation is so, it's so much worse than even I thought.

01:08:56.900 I disagree with you guys.

01:08:58.080 I think that you're, I think that because you're men of letters,

01:09:04.080 because you're sophisticated, because you're well-educated, because you're well-read.

01:09:07.640 Because you're handsome, you have to see the discerning taste.

01:09:12.420 I only have about three of them.

01:09:14.100 Drew more so than Michael, because the beard, you know.

01:09:16.580 I think that for this reason, you all hang on to a romantic notion about what it could be,

01:09:22.040 and you think that, well, we could create our own versions of it that slowly reflect.

01:09:26.040 I think that all that message is going to accomplish is convincing people that,

01:09:29.740 well, I just need to find one that's better than one of the others.

01:09:31.740 And, you know, the one that I went to wasn't as bad as the,

01:09:34.180 like, I saw what happened to Michael on that campus,

01:09:36.000 but I went to University of Texas, and, I mean, there were some liberal professors,

01:09:39.600 but it was nothing like that.

01:09:40.540 So as long as I don't send my kid there, I'll send them here.

01:09:42.380 And you miss the point.

01:09:43.620 The thing is rotten to the core.

01:09:45.560 A tree blew down.

01:09:46.600 We had a big windstorm in L.A. two weeks ago,

01:09:48.540 and a tree in my neighborhood was knocked over by the wind.

01:09:51.480 This tree, two of us together couldn't put our arms around it.

01:09:55.080 It must be, the tree must have been a century old.

01:09:57.460 And I thought, how could the wind knock down such a substantial tree as this?

01:10:02.960 And when I walked by, the interior of the tree trunk was literally swarming with termites.

01:10:12.120 That's the state of higher education today.

01:10:14.080 I agree with you.

01:10:14.820 And the wind needs to come along and knock it down.

01:10:16.620 But my point on it is not, it's not that there's a romantic notion.

01:10:20.680 Certainly that's part of it, I suppose.

01:10:21.980 My point is the fear that if once you lose the liberal arts entirely,

01:10:28.280 I mean, let's say they're 99% gone now, once you lose that entirely,

01:10:31.900 that is the stuff that makes up your civilization.

01:10:34.600 What I disagree with is that the liberal arts can be destroyed

01:10:38.540 by the destruction of colleges that don't teach them anyway.

01:10:41.840 I think that you have to get rid of this antichrist so that people can see the actual Christ.

01:10:48.720 You have to get rid of the thing that purports to be the thing but is not the thing.

01:10:52.220 The only thing I'm being romantic about is the power of capitalism.

01:10:55.260 I think that if you give people the liberal arts as they are supposed to be given,

01:11:00.340 that you will replace these people.

01:11:02.140 You don't have to go after, you don't have to attack.

01:11:04.460 But this really starts, we're starting from the wrong end,

01:11:07.400 meaning we're starting with how do you change the colleges.

01:11:09.320 The truth is that the people that we're talking to right now are all employers.

01:11:12.800 You know, people who actually hire people.

01:11:13.980 You want to change the colleges, all you have to do is change the incentive structure.

01:11:16.300 Meaning that we at Daily Wire, instead of us looking at where somebody went to college to hire,

01:11:21.160 we should be looking at somebody else's credentials.

01:11:23.580 I mean, Jeremy went to a music college and dropped out.

01:11:26.400 I mean, you discussed this last time on Backstage.

01:11:30.380 Elisha, you went to college, but not for long.

01:11:33.680 Like less than a year?

01:11:34.800 Right.

01:11:35.140 So, I mean, the idea that college is innately linked to future success is a bunch of crap,

01:11:39.420 particularly in the liberal arts.

01:11:40.400 It is linked to future success in the hard sciences that we're talking about.

01:11:43.600 Those universities you should maintain in the hard sciences because there's no way to really screw those up too badly.

01:11:47.600 But I think when people come out of Hillsdale and they've been trained in the good, the true, and the beautiful,

01:11:51.680 they know something.

01:11:52.860 Well, I agree.

01:11:53.400 I'd hire somebody out of Hillsdale before I'd hire somebody out of Harvard.

01:11:55.720 That's it.

01:11:56.660 That's what I'm saying.

01:11:57.260 When we first got, when we finally got to the level where we were hiring people who weren't my personal friends,

01:12:02.960 we put together our first job description, and the person who put it together for us,

01:12:07.460 one of the requirements was a bachelor's.

01:12:09.320 And I said, you have to take that out.

01:12:11.700 Yeah.

01:12:12.000 And she said, no, it's good to know, you know, it's good to know people's educational background.

01:12:15.920 I said, it's not.

01:12:16.960 Yeah.

01:12:17.100 Your boss doesn't have a bachelor's degree.

01:12:18.680 How can I ask people to present a bachelor's degree when I don't know one?

01:12:21.020 I'm with you 100% on that.

01:12:22.320 I'm just saying that when we turn to colleges like Hillsdale and Franciscan that we both respond to.

01:12:27.600 Yeah, I have a, sorry to shift topics, but I have sort of another point with regard to what happened to Knowles.

01:12:32.800 It was a perfect example, and the letter was a perfect example, of how the left equates speech with violence.

01:12:37.060 Yes.

01:12:37.400 Which is the Ilhan Omar thing.

01:12:39.000 Yep.

01:12:39.180 You criticize somebody, and this is equivalent to inciting violence against them.

01:12:42.820 Because then why wasn't the speech that she made that we're criticizing, why wasn't that violence?

01:12:46.580 Correct.

01:12:46.940 How about anti-Semitism?

01:12:49.660 She talks about hate crimes against Muslims and all this.

01:12:52.260 Four times in three months, you said openly anti-Semitic crap.

01:12:56.180 Hate crimes are up, what, 37% or something, according to the same reports she likes to cite.

01:12:59.960 Those reports are dubious because they're more reporting agencies.

01:13:02.580 But I'm not a big believer that rhetoric incites violence unless you are actively calling for violence.

01:13:06.440 Calling for violence, right, right, right.

01:13:07.640 But if you're going to use her logic, then she incites as much violence or more than anybody.

01:13:11.360 I mean, she literally said the president of the United States was not human, which is worse than anything else that anyone has said about her on the right.

01:13:19.240 I mean, it's pretty astonishing to suggest that somebody is not a human being.

01:13:23.040 That is the essence of, there's an actual word for it.

01:13:25.620 It's called dehumanization, right?

01:13:27.500 And she engages directly in that.

01:13:29.160 How do Jews continually become invisible in this conversation?

01:13:32.960 Because the Jews actually, you know, have high economic health and because Jews are highly educated and because they don't fit into the intersectional box.

01:13:39.860 They're too successful.

01:13:40.560 Asians also, right?

01:13:41.900 Andrew Yang is a white guy, according to the left.

01:13:45.020 Really, I mean, this is how it works.

01:13:46.560 Asians are not minorities anymore, which is why they can be excluded from Harvard University.

01:13:51.060 So that means that the definition of minority is a failure.

01:13:55.000 Correct.

01:13:55.480 For the left, that's exactly right.

01:13:56.660 Because as soon as a minority is, you're seeing this with Buttigieg right now, is people saying, well, he's not really gay because he wasn't victimized in his life.

01:14:03.920 And it's like, well, he's pretty gay.

01:14:04.800 I mean, he's very good.

01:14:05.480 He's not as gay as you can get.

01:14:06.960 Right.

01:14:07.260 He's pretty gay, yeah.

01:14:08.120 I mean, but this gives a lot of credence to Candace.

01:14:10.780 This gives a lot of credence to Candace Owens because what they're saying to her and to all black people is you're only authentically black if you fail.

01:14:18.640 And if you don't fail, then you're not really black.

01:14:21.520 Or if you believe like us, right?

01:14:22.420 It's those two things, if you fail or if you believe like us, that there is this intersectional hierarchy that you have personally been able to overcome, but it's keeping everybody else down.

01:14:30.200 This is a victimhood mentality that is being promoted.

01:14:33.240 And they've actually, you know, the chain started with punch a Nazi, all conservatives are Nazis, punch a conservative.

01:14:38.920 And they're bringing it all the way out to not just conservatives, it's criticize somebody on the left.

01:14:45.320 This makes you a conservative.

01:14:47.020 Being a conservative means that you are a Nazi.

01:14:49.340 Punch a Nazi.

01:14:50.320 And they've gone all the way.

01:14:51.720 I mean, it really is all the way.

01:14:52.900 I saw a video of Candace walking onto a campus and a masked white person screamed obscenities at her.

01:15:00.340 And I thought, are you kidding me?

01:15:02.360 It's like the Democrats have reverted to what they were and have gone back to Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan.

01:15:07.920 And at root, it really is an attack.

01:15:10.100 I don't mean to transition to Notre Dame, but this is an attack on fundamental principles of Western civilization.

01:15:15.700 You white supremacists.

01:15:16.560 You Nazi.

01:15:16.640 You Nazi.

01:15:17.480 I read the Washington Post.

01:15:18.560 Sing Edovice.

01:15:18.920 Two times in three days, guys.

01:15:20.840 Two times in three days.

01:15:22.240 I said that Notre Dame, all I said, I thought this was the most anodyne thing I could possibly say.

01:15:26.860 And the most sympathetic.

01:15:27.260 But should you go on all-mart kind of say the same thing?

01:15:28.900 She said it was a mastery.

01:15:30.340 She said it was art and architecture.

01:15:31.800 Okay.

01:15:32.060 And I said, no, it's actually connected to something beyond art and architecture because I felt more for Notre Dame burning than I did if I had seen, for example, a great architectural wonder like Taj Mahal burn.

01:15:40.560 Because I have more, I mean, God forbid, that would be terrible.

01:15:42.900 But I have more in common with the civilizational history of Notre Dame.

01:15:47.180 Even though Notre Dame, even though the Talmud was a supremacist anymore.

01:15:50.160 I mean, it's astonishing.

01:15:50.660 I've got to tell you something.

01:15:51.480 It's astonishing.

01:15:52.280 I've got to tell you something.

01:15:52.780 I hate to say anything nice about you.

01:15:54.840 And I know you don't need me to defend you.

01:15:56.700 But I am so sick and tired of listening to people call you alt-right and far-right.

01:16:01.140 It's insane.

01:16:01.940 It's really bothering me.

01:16:02.940 It's insane.

01:16:03.240 The day I come in and see you punching yourself in the face and shouting anti-Semitic slurs at yourself.

01:16:09.760 That's the day I'll sign on to.

01:16:11.160 No, but seriously.

01:16:12.480 This is the Washington Post.

01:16:14.040 These are people who should know better.

01:16:15.860 They did it twice.

01:16:16.600 Twice.

01:16:17.660 In three days.

01:16:18.420 They did it with Tali Levin, who is a bag of garbage when it comes to journalism.

01:16:22.200 She was fired from the New Yorker because she labeled falsely an ICE agent, a neo-Nazi, for having a marine insignia.

01:16:28.980 He's a disabled ICE agent.

01:16:30.320 He lost the use of his legs in, I think, Afghanistan or something.

01:16:33.800 And she labeled him a neo-Nazi.

01:16:35.900 She teaches at NYU.

01:16:37.720 And she labeled me akin to Richard Spencer and then suggested at the end of the piece.

01:16:42.420 This is where it connects.

01:16:43.760 Right.

01:16:44.160 Who I despise.

01:16:45.000 I think he's the worst person.

01:16:45.880 And at the end of the piece, she says, and these are people who should be silenced.

01:16:48.560 And then I blow back on them.

01:16:50.200 I say, like, this is crap.

01:16:51.280 Right.

01:16:51.580 And they feel the blowback.

01:16:52.800 A day later, the next day, they print another piece with the same exact criticism, suggesting that because I said that Notre Dame is a symbol of Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian heritage,

01:17:04.040 and that we ought to reacquaint ourselves with the Judeo-Christian heritage, this was actually code for white supremacy.

01:17:08.780 And then the next line of the piece that was in today's Washington Post was Richard Spencer was more blunt.

01:17:13.560 So I'm being subtle.

01:17:14.300 I'm being subtle about my white supremacy.

01:17:15.880 By the way.

01:17:16.440 Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.

01:17:18.560 Really.

01:17:19.280 The other message here for conservatives out of two attacks on you as a Nazi in one week is actually scary.

01:17:25.960 And all conservatives, even the ones who go after you, should really take note.

01:17:29.120 You are as mainstream as they get.

01:17:30.760 Yep.

01:17:30.940 You are a mainstream.

01:17:31.860 You are a straight shooter.

01:17:32.800 Who is left, guys?

01:17:33.400 I know.

01:17:34.360 David Frum is the only, and even he, when he says things about immigration, he's out of the club.

01:17:38.560 I guess Anna Navarro is the only real Republican.

01:17:39.800 But why are they going after you?

01:17:41.280 They're going after you because you have a giant platform and because you're very successful.

01:17:44.420 And what the message is, is that any conservative, any conservative will be smeared not just as a little racist, not just as a little sexist, but as a neo-Nazi, as the most odious person in the entire country if you get a platform that's big enough.

01:17:58.520 Well, this is why, you know, five words that I hate to repeat over again, but this is how you got, six words, Trump.

01:18:04.380 Okay, this is how you got Trump right here.

01:18:06.420 Okay, this is how you got Trump.

01:18:07.460 You call everyone a neo-Nazi, and then everyone's like, okay, you know what, we're going to nominate the guy who just craps on you all day because we don't care.

01:18:14.040 Again, not to say anything nice about you, but you do have ideas.

01:18:17.960 You put forward your ideas.

01:18:19.060 I wrote an entire book.

01:18:19.840 You wrote an entire book about your ideas.

01:18:21.040 On Judeo-Christian heritage.

01:18:22.160 Let them come out and argue against your ideas.

01:18:24.140 And what's funny, they don't know anything about the alt-right because the alt-right rejects the term Judeo-Christian heritage.

01:18:28.440 Yes.

01:18:28.900 The very term Judeo-Christian is offensive to the alt-right.

01:18:31.220 The funny thing is, you went out and helped me buy a gun because the alt-right was after me.

01:18:36.000 They didn't come after me as bad as you, but they came after me pretty bad, and I started to think, you know what, these guys are threatening me.

01:18:41.380 If they come in, I'm going to kill these guys.

01:18:42.760 You know the other point?

01:18:43.860 People didn't notice this in the reporting about Notre Dame, but the people who were reporting on it are religiously illiterate.

01:18:50.740 There was one, they were talking about, there was this hero priest, chaplain in Paris, who ran in.

01:18:56.140 He saved the crown of thorns, a relic that was put on Christ's head, and he saved the blessed sacrament.

01:19:01.700 Blessed sacrament is the Eucharist.

01:19:02.960 It's the communion.

01:19:03.640 It's what you take on the salvific amuse-bouche, right, the little snack at the church.

01:19:07.800 This is known to all religiously literate people.

01:19:12.860 I forget if it was the Washington Post or the New York Times or both.

01:19:15.460 It was the New York Times.

01:19:16.740 They thought that this referred to some statue, and they reported this in the Grey Lady, all the news that's fit to print,

01:19:22.580 that he ran in and, I guess, carry out some giant statue of Christ on his back or something.

01:19:26.660 They didn't even know what the communion is.

01:19:28.400 They called it a statue of Christ.

01:19:29.960 That's amazing.

01:19:30.580 The BBC reported on this for hours without mentioning the word Christianity, without mentioning the word Christ or church.

01:19:36.560 And this is why I say at root, this is an attack on Judeo-Christianity,

01:19:41.600 because at the root, they are actually arguing the exact same thing the alt-right is arguing.

01:19:45.280 That's the irony.

01:19:46.060 They're arguing that if I say Judeo-Christian, I mean white.

01:19:48.840 That's right.

01:19:49.600 No, I don't.

01:19:51.300 No, I don't.

01:19:52.020 You know what the evidence is that I don't?

01:19:53.600 I'm a Jew.

01:19:54.640 I wear a yarmulke publicly.

01:19:56.460 I'm probably the most famous Orthodox Jew on planet Earth.

01:19:58.880 What are you talking about?

01:20:00.440 I know.

01:20:00.920 But it's like, if I argue that it's a principle, they say, no, no, no, you're just talking about whiteness.

01:20:05.060 And the alt-right says, you're not arguing about a principle, you're arguing about whiteness.

01:20:08.000 Well, I'm glad you guys meet.

01:20:09.040 You know, go hook up in the room over there, because you're closer to the alt-right than I am.

01:20:12.280 It's that famous Jordan Peterson interview where she keeps saying what you're saying.

01:20:16.300 Right, exactly.

01:20:16.880 Well, let the guy talk.

01:20:18.140 Ask him what he's saying, you know.

01:20:19.220 So I want to talk a little bit more about Notre Dame and sort of what it means.

01:20:22.940 Get past what the left is saying it means and get down to what it actually means.

01:20:27.280 But I think we should have a few more questions from our subscribers first.

01:20:32.420 Otherwise, I think you're sitting here for no reason.

01:20:33.800 Yeah, well, and if I've learned anything, when we get into really esoteric religious conversations, you can't save those for the very end.

01:20:39.220 Yeah, I mean, if I have to get a lot of sacramental lessons from Knowles here, our viewership plummeting by the way.

01:20:43.960 I keep complimenting Ben so I can just baptize him, like, really sneakily at the end.

01:20:47.440 I turn the other way and he kills me.

01:20:48.800 It's not left his tears in that tumbler.

01:20:52.660 It's holy water.

01:20:53.880 I'm just going to toss that on you at the end.

01:20:55.640 I actually think that they should make a movie.

01:20:57.960 Someone should make a movie about that priest because other things that he survived an attack by the Taliban and he works for the fire department of Paris and ran in and was praying with people and giving them last rites after the Bataclan massacre.

01:21:12.660 Yeah, he's amazing.

01:21:13.540 And now that he's saved the crown of thorns, I believe he's king of France, correct?

01:21:16.240 Yeah, he should be, if only he were.

01:21:18.380 Michael is an amazing subscriber because only subscribers can ask the questions, as we've talked about here.

01:21:24.480 I'm glad I get to say that now because I couldn't say that earlier during the conversation.

01:21:28.020 It was real weird.

01:21:29.040 But Michael says that he actually thinks he knows who it was that attacked Michael Knowles.

01:21:32.940 Really?

01:21:33.360 Yeah.

01:21:34.240 Ted Cruz's father.

01:21:36.200 I should have known.

01:21:38.300 All the marks were there.

01:21:40.240 Yep.

01:21:40.500 Are you sure it wasn't Ted Cruz himself, Mr. Zodiac?

01:21:43.120 Who knows?

01:21:43.700 It could have been.

01:21:44.280 That's up in the air.

01:21:45.060 We'll investigate.

01:21:45.900 You wouldn't be alive to tell.

01:21:47.300 Yeah, that's right.

01:21:48.380 When the Zodiac killer comes a-knocking.

01:21:51.460 You can just tell from the beard.

01:21:52.920 Ask Beto O'Rourke how it goes.

01:21:55.640 Rosemary wants to know, who do you guys think is going to be the first Democrat to drop out of the 2020 race?

01:22:01.300 Oh, boy.

01:22:04.020 Gillibrand.

01:22:04.860 Yeah, I don't even know if she'll make the ballot.

01:22:06.680 Gillibrand.

01:22:07.320 Just because she won't be able to get on stage at these debates.

01:22:10.240 Inslee.

01:22:11.340 What's that?

01:22:11.840 Inslee.

01:22:12.660 Oh, I kind of forgot about Inslee.

01:22:14.280 So obscure that, yeah.

01:22:15.320 Inslee.

01:22:15.600 But Gillibrand soon.

01:22:17.380 Gillibrand soon.

01:22:18.040 And no one will notice.

01:22:19.480 It's a tree falling in the forest right there.

01:22:21.300 The last Democrat to get out will be John Kasich.

01:22:24.580 Interestingly.

01:22:26.320 Guys, are you excited?

01:22:27.300 William Weld is running.

01:22:28.220 I can't wait.

01:22:28.680 Well, I actually was going to guess Bill Weld.

01:22:31.080 And he's a Republican technically.

01:22:32.580 I mean, the guy that used to be a libertarian that's now running as a Democrat.

01:22:35.120 Did you see his logo?

01:22:36.720 He tweeted out like...

01:22:37.420 Yes, with a badger or something.

01:22:38.500 With a badger or something.

01:22:39.540 And then there was Terry McAuliffe who tweeted out some photo of a crab on top of an alligator.

01:22:43.980 And the crab was labeled McAuliffe and the alligator was labeled Trump.

01:22:46.560 And I was like, what?

01:22:46.980 They're going to form up like a crabigator?

01:22:49.340 That's going to be their...

01:22:50.120 They're teaming up now for a Transformers movie?

01:22:53.780 Marie is asking, how much of what Trump has done that's wrong should we as conservatives be calling out?

01:23:02.100 Every bit of it.

01:23:03.100 And then we should point out all the good stuff he's done.

01:23:05.140 Because otherwise, here's the thing.

01:23:06.400 Here's the thing that people miss.

01:23:07.980 And I made this point to people.

01:23:09.720 Older Republicans don't seem to get it the same way the younger Republicans do.

01:23:13.660 When you talk about Trump, Trump's credibility is not on the line.

01:23:17.540 Your job is not to defend Trump.

01:23:19.180 Your credibility is on the line.

01:23:20.740 And when people talk with you, they're judging you.

01:23:22.800 They're not judging the person that you are talking about.

01:23:25.200 Unless you're talking with a close family member who's already prejudged you or something.

01:23:28.340 But if you're just talking with somebody else, they're going to judge your political credibility on whether you're honest with them.

01:23:33.100 And if they feel that you are being dishonest because you refuse to acknowledge the man's flaws,

01:23:36.500 they're not going to listen to anything else you say.

01:23:37.940 And they are less likely to vote for Trump.

01:23:39.480 If you want to alienate people who are winnable, the worst thing that you can do is lead with,

01:23:44.280 Donald Trump is an honorable man who treats women terrifically and never lies.

01:23:48.480 He is a MAGA genius.

01:23:50.040 No one will listen to the next word you say.

01:23:51.500 It's over.

01:23:51.920 And people will come back at you and say, you didn't talk this bad about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

01:23:55.900 And there is an answer to that, which is that one of the things you say is refreshing about Trump

01:24:00.560 is that he sort of wears his sin on his sleeves.

01:24:04.160 Trumpiness, yeah.

01:24:04.640 Yeah.

01:24:05.020 But for that reason, you also have to acknowledge it more openly.

01:24:07.740 I agree with you.

01:24:08.320 It's like our favorite joke about the man who has a great big orange for a head.

01:24:13.380 Right.

01:24:14.460 Or it's like that scene from Austin Powers where he can't help himself but say moly, moly, moly, moly, moly.

01:24:20.600 He goes, this guy has a giant mole.

01:24:23.300 You can't have credibility when you're ignoring the giant obvious thing.

01:24:28.240 But with more subtle men, you can take a more subtle approach.

01:24:32.880 Right.

01:24:33.540 And you can say about Trump, it's really not hard.

01:24:35.800 I'm puzzled why people don't just do this.

01:24:37.660 It's really not.

01:24:38.300 I understand we can't stand cognitive dissonance.

01:24:40.240 We're human beings.

01:24:40.680 But it is not hard to have a conversation where somebody says, you know, that Trump, he's a really bad guy.

01:24:45.740 And you say, listen, I think he's bad with women.

01:24:47.900 I think he's bad with this.

01:24:48.860 I think he's bad with that.

01:24:49.700 I think he lies a lot.

01:24:50.640 I also think that he's given me these 10 things and the candidates he's facing do all these bad things.

01:24:56.000 And so in a race between the two of them.

01:24:57.500 That's it.

01:24:58.240 Because he's also in a context.

01:25:00.100 You know, I'm reading VDH, Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump.

01:25:04.020 And I'm really impressed with it because he's not like he shows Trump exactly as he is.

01:25:10.680 He doesn't candy him up at all.

01:25:12.740 He doesn't paint him, you know, put lipstick on him at all.

01:25:15.220 He simply shows him in the context of his opposition.

01:25:18.060 And putting him in the context of his opposition, you think like, yeah, I'll take Trump.

01:25:22.340 This is the key that people always want to forget.

01:25:25.200 But context, detail, specificity, particularity actually is our friend.

01:25:30.300 And so you should never lie for Trump.

01:25:32.460 You should never lie.

01:25:33.720 You should never pretend for Trump.

01:25:35.240 You should be very honest and very detailed.

01:25:38.140 You should put him in his context because politics exists in context.

01:25:42.920 When you vote for Trump, are you voting for Trump because you'd rather vote for Trump over Calvin Coolidge or Ronald Reagan?

01:25:48.260 Yeah.

01:25:48.520 No.

01:25:49.300 But you'd rather vote for him over Hillary Clinton at this moment with these judgeships open, with this and this and this.

01:25:55.260 I think that's perfectly honest.

01:25:56.740 And it's and it's I think a true view of politics.

01:25:58.600 And it's funny.

01:25:59.000 People get on my case because I didn't vote in the last election cycle at the top of the ticket.

01:26:02.280 They say, well, now you're talking binary choice language.

01:26:04.060 And you didn't then because I was choosing between two timelines then we're now in one of the timelines, right?

01:26:08.640 The timeline is there.

01:26:09.440 Trump is president.

01:26:10.140 All the stuff that he is, is.

01:26:11.880 And nothing is foreclosed by voting for him in 2020 now that all that stuff is materialized.

01:26:16.700 Some of the stuff that I was worried about materializing has materialized with Trump.

01:26:19.800 Some of it has not materialized with Trump.

01:26:21.480 We're here.

01:26:22.200 So now it's a new situation.

01:26:23.260 So now we have two new timelines.

01:26:24.420 So now you have to choose between the two timelines that are on the table.

01:26:27.680 Yeah, I agree with that.

01:26:28.920 Alicia, one more question.

01:26:29.760 All right.

01:26:30.340 Billy is asking if a Democrat must win in 2020, do you think that Andrew Yang is going

01:26:35.960 to be the best option?

01:26:38.480 I mean, I like him the most.

01:26:40.460 I like him because he's he's different.

01:26:42.700 He's honest.

01:26:43.300 He seems to have some integrity.

01:26:44.620 He's completely insane.

01:26:45.820 And his view of politics is utterly wrong.

01:26:47.640 It is wrong to the core.

01:26:49.100 It is 100 percent wrong.

01:26:50.600 But I like that he's pretty honest about it.

01:26:52.680 And I like that he's also thinking beyond talking points.

01:26:55.500 He's also not an a-hole.

01:26:57.120 Yeah.

01:26:57.200 I mean, like, really, like, this is this is a central contention for me at this point.

01:27:00.560 It's a problem.

01:27:01.020 It's one of the reasons why, at the beginning, I looked at Buttigieg's nomination and I looked

01:27:05.520 at his run and I was like, OK, this guy seems like maybe the most normal of the crazy

01:27:08.880 people over there.

01:27:09.660 Like, he'll say he'll eat a Chick-fil-A.

01:27:11.340 He at least pays homage to people who own guns.

01:27:13.700 He doesn't pretend that they're all evil.

01:27:15.200 Like, seems kind of normal.

01:27:16.020 And then he started with the Mike Pence is out to get me and wants to put me in a gay concentration

01:27:19.360 camp and wants to shock me with conversion therapy.

01:27:22.880 And I was like, OK, well, he's done.

01:27:23.940 So I guess we're done with that.

01:27:24.800 But I mean, listen, lots of props to Yang for coming on the Sunday special.

01:27:29.040 And listen, I'll give more props to Bernie for actually going on Fox News.

01:27:32.740 Me too.

01:27:33.220 Like, the fact that if you treat people like human beings, it's one of my pet peeves now.

01:27:37.060 This has become a pet peeve for me.

01:27:38.100 So the best example I can think of is on people's birthday on Twitter, if they are on the left,

01:27:43.120 I will say happy birthday to them.

01:27:44.620 I'll say happy birthday to Jake Tapper.

01:27:46.220 I'll say happy birthday to Jane Koston.

01:27:47.680 I'll say happy birthday to anybody with whom I am at least relatively acquainted on the Internet.

01:27:52.860 Yeah, my birthday was March 18th.

01:27:54.880 Yeah, I don't care about you.

01:27:56.560 But it's amazing.

01:27:58.500 No one on the left, everyone on the left will text you happy birthday.

01:28:03.000 No one will publicly say happy birthday to you.

01:28:06.420 And why is that?

01:28:07.280 Because they don't want to treat you as a human being.

01:28:08.520 They don't want all their friends to say, how dare you humanize such a human being as this?

01:28:14.060 Well, this is what I hate most about the Democrats right now, is this.

01:28:17.740 So if a Democrat treats Republicans as a human,

01:28:19.900 I'm more likely to be in favor of that Democrat than any of the other Democrats on the stage.

01:28:23.580 I agree with you.

01:28:24.220 I will say this, though.

01:28:26.020 Somebody asked me at the University of Texas at Arlington yesterday, I guess it was,

01:28:32.780 which Democrat I would like to see win of all the – and I couldn't think of one.

01:28:37.540 I really couldn't.

01:28:38.800 We were stumped.

01:28:39.600 We were totally stumped at this talk.

01:28:41.240 What is that at UTA?

01:28:42.580 Yeah, we couldn't figure out, like, they're so far left.

01:28:47.260 They've gone so far.

01:28:48.760 I'll admit it.

01:28:50.120 I'd rather see Bernie win than any of these other cats.

01:28:52.120 Really?

01:28:52.520 Yep.

01:28:53.160 Because he won't get anything done.

01:28:55.080 He's totally crazy.

01:28:56.280 He'll be a full-scale disaster.

01:28:58.080 And I'm with H.O. Mencken on this one.

01:29:00.300 You know, give the people what they want and give it to them good and hard.

01:29:03.780 Let's not go half measures here.

01:29:05.180 I don't want Joe Biden.

01:29:06.060 I want Bernie Sanders.

01:29:06.840 I want you guys to own the guy who wants a 60% tax rate on people making 50 grand.

01:29:10.800 That's a little different than saying, is there a Democrat that you could support in good conscience?

01:29:15.880 You know, I get what you're saying.

01:29:17.320 Right.

01:29:17.600 But it's a little different.

01:29:18.400 No, of course not.

01:29:19.140 I mean, I don't see – they're all for abortion up until point of birth.

01:29:21.360 How can I support that?

01:29:22.180 What can you support?

01:29:23.360 There's a flip side to Ben's principle that you really want to support the candidate who treats Republicans like human beings.

01:29:29.800 On the flip side, you could support the Democratic candidate who treats Democrats like animals, which would be Amy Klobuchar as she throws desk furniture at them.

01:29:37.840 So either one, I think, could work.

01:29:39.740 So thank you to our subscribers who came over to dailywire.com and asked questions.

01:29:43.360 Thank you to Elisha for bringing them to our attention.

01:29:46.540 I have one last –

01:29:46.880 How is it in this room?

01:29:48.200 Not bad.

01:29:48.900 No, it's all right.

01:29:49.340 It's because only he's smoking.

01:29:50.740 I mean, it's a terrified air in here.

01:29:52.060 Yeah.

01:29:53.020 And he lost an IQ point.

01:29:55.500 Probably.

01:29:56.380 I do have one more thing I want to talk about.

01:29:58.240 You're smoking, you're a baby guy.

01:29:59.200 It's somewhat esoteric.

01:30:01.080 Somewhat esoteric.

01:30:02.400 Yeah.

01:30:04.320 One of the feelings that I had during the tragedy in Paris this week, the priest who ran in and saved, as you say, the crown of thorns.

01:30:15.520 I do not believe that to be the crown of thorns.

01:30:17.740 You say it is the crown that rested upon Christ's head.

01:30:20.200 I think it's a crown that Louis IX bought at a bazaar in the Middle East 1,200 years after Christ.

01:30:25.680 But I'm not only going to pick on Catholics, because that's not the entirety of my point.

01:30:31.060 It's only like 95 for you.

01:30:32.700 By the way, Knowles' face was like just sheer disappointment when you said that.

01:30:36.860 Knowles is like, please don't ask me on camera to say whether or not I think it's the crown of thorns.

01:30:39.600 I absolutely think it's the crown of thorns.

01:30:41.540 Stop.

01:30:43.760 So my point...

01:30:45.640 You and I, can we go out and just have a drink together?

01:30:48.380 I want to have a serious conversation.

01:30:49.680 My point is that for hundreds and hundreds of years, millions and millions of people have made pilgrimage to behold the crown of thorns, to pray at the foot of the crown of thorns.

01:31:05.480 Many of them have walked away from that, having had transcendent religious experiences.

01:31:10.340 Others have probably walked away feeling that their prayer wasn't granted and lost their faith, right?

01:31:14.880 Because human religiosity is a very complex thing.

01:31:18.440 The experience of God, I am willing to grant, may very well be, and in innumerable cases, in fact, is an authentic experience of God.

01:31:28.460 Though, you couldn't pay me enough to say that the crown of thorns that was in Notre Dame Cathedral ever rested on the head of Christ.

01:31:36.420 Similarly, in Israel is a garden tomb.

01:31:40.000 And it's interesting, if you've ever been to Israel, there are Protestant locations where certain things are said to have happened,

01:31:45.240 and there are Catholic locations where certain things are said to have happened.

01:31:48.440 And because Catholicism grew into authority at a time when most people lived mean, meager, terrible lives in medieval Europe,

01:31:58.540 when people spent most of their time outdoors, people, you know, like on Monty Python, they moved mud from one hole to another hole.

01:32:06.400 When they would walk into these great cathedrals, they had never seen anything like it.

01:32:10.520 They didn't feel the presence of God when they saw a sunset.

01:32:13.680 When they saw a sunset, what they felt was the onset of cold and fear.

01:32:18.440 And darkness.

01:32:19.040 And darkness.

01:32:19.900 But when they would make pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,

01:32:25.040 and they would see these gilded statues and these unbelievable buildings that took centuries to build,

01:32:31.220 that elevated the experience of what they were seeing.

01:32:33.640 When I see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I'm not a medieval mud farmer, and I'm not a papist.

01:32:39.440 And so when I see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I don't feel any religious experience.

01:32:43.040 When I go to the garden tomb, however, because I've spent my entire life in the West, indoors,

01:32:47.920 air-conditioned, well-fed, when I see, oh, this is what the scene would have looked like.

01:32:54.560 This is the exact aesthetic.

01:32:57.060 That transports me, because evangelicalism and Protestantism came later when we had modernity.

01:33:04.080 I'm being transported out of modernity to touch what once was.

01:33:07.700 The result is millions of Protestants have made pilgrimage to the garden tomb in Israel.

01:33:14.780 Millions of them have had religious experiences praying at the foot of the tomb, weeping at the foot of the tomb.

01:33:21.400 They will say to you, there is no question.

01:33:24.100 I visited the garden tomb.

01:33:25.340 There is no question that that is where the resurrection took place, because I felt God there.

01:33:30.440 And yet, the garden tomb is almost certainly not the tomb of Christ.

01:33:36.020 Almost certainly, meaning there is less than a 1% chance that the garden tomb in Israel ever held the body of Christ.

01:33:44.380 Millions of Protestants would be just as mad at me about saying that, as would be Catholics for saying that the crown of thorns is not the crown of thorns.

01:33:50.420 Well, you do have this great ability to offend every single person.

01:33:53.900 But herein is the question that I want to leave.

01:33:57.220 The question that I want to get each of you to weigh in on, because it really was kind of a startling and unsettling notion as I watched that beautiful building burn.

01:34:07.480 And I thought, what is it that we each believe of our religion, and Judaism undoubtedly has similar problems.

01:34:17.740 I'm just not expert to speak to them.

01:34:19.000 What is it that we believe that the God of Abraham actually identifies himself as truth?

01:34:28.040 He is not only the God of truth, he is truth.

01:34:31.220 The actual concept of truth is embodied in God.

01:34:34.460 What does it say that his people can have authentic experiences of the God of truth through fabrication, through things that are themselves almost certainly not true?

01:34:45.700 Can I answer that?

01:34:46.400 Please.

01:34:46.780 All right.

01:34:47.260 First, let me start with a story.

01:34:49.200 When I was in Israel, I had the same feeling as you.

01:34:52.040 When I go to the Catholic sites, and they tell me this is the place where this happened, and I know it's not, I feel there's a sentimentality that goes against my nature.

01:34:59.780 I'm not a sentimental person.

01:35:01.680 When I was in the Mount of Olives, there's a church there called the Church of the Rock.

01:35:05.000 And it's built around a rock.

01:35:06.580 And the rock is, by tradition, supposed to be the place where Jesus fell down, sweated blood, and prayed to God to let this cup of crucifixion pass from him.

01:35:14.720 And I walked in, totally cynical, completely, walked around the corner and thought, oh my God, this is the place.

01:35:21.100 And I was imbued with the Spirit.

01:35:25.100 It lasted for about an hour.

01:35:26.400 I walked around in a kind of daze of inspiration.

01:35:29.600 I don't know whether that's the place or not.

01:35:31.620 But I know that on that telephone, I got a call.

01:35:34.400 Jesus spoke in parables.

01:35:37.640 Those parables are untrue.

01:35:39.480 There was no man with two sons, one of whom became a prodigal, and the other one stood.

01:35:44.020 He knew there was no, that was an untrue story.

01:35:47.300 And he told that story, and yet, and yet, when he told that story, he was giving you a telephone on which the Spirit was calling.

01:35:55.300 I have a lot of sympathy for that.

01:35:57.040 I'm not a sentimental person, and I'm not a superstitious person.

01:36:00.000 And when I see things that aren't true, I have the same, you know I do, you know I have the same feeling of you of, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:36:07.880 But when somebody's on the other end of the line, I pick up the phone.

01:36:11.280 And I think that parables, stories, fictions are ways in which meaning comes to us.

01:36:17.860 Is it a slight distinction, though, that the parable wasn't, when Christ told a parable, he said, here's a parable.

01:36:24.280 He didn't say, this is true.

01:36:26.240 It's not a slight distinction, it's an important distinction.

01:36:28.920 You know, there are certain kinds of stories you tell, there was a man who had two sons.

01:36:32.800 It doesn't matter if it's true or not.

01:36:34.220 Certain kind of stories, I saved two people from a burning building.

01:36:38.180 It matters whether that's true or not, you know.

01:36:40.540 Brian Williams.

01:36:41.540 What's that?

01:36:43.500 He was there at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

01:36:45.580 We do want to distinguish between those stories, but we don't want to forget the fact that everything, in a way, is a story.

01:36:51.080 Life itself is a story, and it communicates.

01:36:55.160 I mean, I think this is the point of telling parables, by the way.

01:36:57.660 I think this is what Jesus was saying when he told parables, was not, oh, this is the meaning, but physical things have a meaning.

01:37:05.040 And I think that when we live that way, we live in truth.

01:37:08.060 And so I'm not as alienated by the crown of thorns, which I'm with you.

01:37:14.280 I don't believe that's the crown of thorns.

01:37:15.940 I'm not as alienated by that when it communicates to somebody the truth of the Christ of the Holy Sepulchre.

01:37:20.080 I think there's also, you know, for me, you know, I don't believe any of the stuff that you guys are talking about, right?

01:37:24.600 Yeah, well, you're going down.

01:37:25.760 Right, of course.

01:37:26.400 I mean, this is clear.

01:37:27.940 But when Notre Dame burned, I was very upset about it.

01:37:32.360 And Notre Dame has a pretty significant anti-Semitic history, right?

01:37:35.800 I mean, there are statues there that talk about supersession of Catholicism over Judaism.

01:37:40.060 The copies of the Talmud were burned right in front of Notre Dame in the 13th century.

01:37:44.860 And still, I felt something.

01:37:45.880 And the reason that I felt something was because we are all part of this same river of history in this civilization.

01:37:51.600 And I owe something to even the people who persecuted my people living in a civilization that is built on those foundations.

01:37:57.920 There's a lot of fossils in the fossil record here.

01:38:00.320 And that does not mean that I'm not standing atop a bunch of different layers of sediment.

01:38:05.280 And so there's something to that.

01:38:06.620 But I think as far as your more basic question, which is how do people get value from these things, I think that there's something else to it.

01:38:14.820 And that is we innately get value from things that other people have imbued with value.

01:38:20.300 Meaning that when I look at Notre Dame, the reason that that strikes me in a way that a new church burning would not is because that did take 200 years to build.

01:38:28.100 And that was blood and sweat and tears of people.

01:38:30.340 Those were people bringing ox carts full of stone from far off lands to build this monument to God.

01:38:36.000 182 years.

01:38:36.760 Yeah.

01:38:37.100 And there's something deeply wonderful about the idea, especially in a society where everything is supposed to be given to us like right now.

01:38:44.360 We want it right now.

01:38:45.280 And we're not supposed to think about tomorrow.

01:38:47.020 There is no tomorrow.

01:38:48.040 We're not supposed to even think about the national debt because that's too difficult for us to think about.

01:38:51.440 Think about the idea that you're going to start building a building that your great, great, great grandchildren will probably not live to see completed.

01:38:58.480 But you're going to start building it.

01:38:59.480 To me, that's the story of civilization and the story of religion, which is that you are not here to finish the task.

01:39:04.780 You are here to begin the task.

01:39:06.320 And so when you see people who have completed that task and when you see people go and spend their money to go and worship something even that I don't believe in,

01:39:15.960 I think the fact that they are even going to pay homage to God using their own money to pay homage to something that people have imbued with value,

01:39:24.260 even if I think that the thing itself doesn't actually hold the value, that is a testament to the place that God holds in human hearts that is ineradicable.

01:39:33.440 You cannot get rid of it.

01:39:34.340 And I think secular society has tried to erase it and suggest that people don't have that innate need for God, that innate yearning for God.

01:39:40.100 The yearning is still there.

01:39:41.280 And without any fulfillment of the yearning, the unhappiness is the only thing that's left.

01:39:44.840 You know, this is a major distinction in the response to Notre Dame between conservatives and radicals, because all myths are true.

01:39:53.240 All myths are true.

01:39:54.160 You don't believe in the certain relics or something.

01:39:56.720 Even legends, even the legends of saints killing dragons have some bit of truth to them.

01:40:03.020 They tell some truth.

01:40:05.140 And this is a big distinction that was drawn by the philosopher John Stuart Mill between the conservative Carlisle and the radical Bentham.

01:40:13.600 He said the radicals, what we would call now the leftists, when they see something like the Cathedral of Notre Dame or a relic or some tradition or some legend, they ask, is it true?

01:40:23.140 And what the conservative, like Carlisle, asks is, what does it mean?

01:40:28.000 What does the cathedral mean?

01:40:29.560 What does it mean that people have come on pilgrimages to this relic of the crown of thorns?

01:40:33.540 What does it mean that people have come up with this legend?

01:40:36.360 This legend has developed of some saint slaying a dragon.

01:40:39.560 What does that mean?

01:40:40.400 What does it say about us?

01:40:41.680 What does it say about where we come from?

01:40:43.060 What does it say about what we worship?

01:40:44.640 That is obviously the sane view.

01:40:47.000 That is obviously the humble view.

01:40:48.760 That is obviously the view that gives you awe and wonder and veneration and an appreciation of your society and civilization.

01:40:54.940 And there's another view that is just ready to rip it and burn it down.

01:40:58.780 It's obviously the view of Christ when he tells parables.

01:41:04.620 I mean, I think that is the message of parables.

01:41:06.640 And by the way, you know, if anything speaks to me of God's truth, it's the music of Bach.

01:41:12.600 And when I listen to the music of Bach, you and I, who disagree on the divinity of Christ, you and I are swimming in that stream.

01:41:19.780 And we're there together.

01:41:20.900 And that stream is carrying us to the same place.

01:41:23.140 Like, I have no, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you and I are going to be arguing about the truth in heaven.

01:41:32.580 You know, and that's you.

01:41:34.600 And that the stream of Bach, which speaks to us of God, is going to carry us there.

01:41:44.000 You know, I think that's exactly what you're talking about.

01:41:47.080 I agree with you 100 percent that the meaning of things is so much more important than their physical view.

01:41:52.320 And more interesting, by the way.

01:41:52.720 And more interesting.

01:41:53.440 I agree in as much as when the Taliban brought down those statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in the 90s.

01:42:00.620 I felt devastated by that.

01:42:03.860 Yeah, me too.

01:42:04.520 But the slight distinction that I want to make is that we here in this room are not Buddhists.

01:42:12.200 But we are all each in our way believers in the God of Abraham who defines himself by the truth.

01:42:19.500 So what's interesting to me, I completely agree with the meaning.

01:42:22.900 I completely agree with the communal experience of the millions of people who have made pilgrimage.

01:42:28.380 They spent centuries building and that that imbues it with power and meaning.

01:42:33.500 I completely agree.

01:42:34.880 The subtle question that I'm asking, though, is how is it that God, the God of truth, actually speaks to people through falsehood?

01:42:45.780 And maybe it's as simple as the crown of thorns recommends God, but God does not recommend the crown of thorns.

01:42:55.060 Maybe it's the garden tomb and the church of the sepulcher.

01:42:58.920 They both recommend God.

01:43:01.940 God may not recommend either the church of the sepulcher or the garden tomb.

01:43:06.280 But I've spent my life as a novelist telling stories that aren't true.

01:43:09.680 I mean, about people who don't exist.

01:43:12.480 And why?

01:43:13.460 Why do I do that?

01:43:14.660 But again, the subtle distinction is you don't claim that they're true.

01:43:17.180 The millions of people who make pilgrimage to the garden tomb and the millions of people who make pilgrimage to the crown of thorns do so on the basis that it is, in fact, the crown of thorns or that it is, in fact, the tomb of Christ.

01:43:29.600 But if people even knew that, so they'd just switch locations.

01:43:32.820 Meaning that, okay, so then they would just switch locations.

01:43:35.580 Like, to me, what is happening is a modern form of the korbanot.

01:43:38.700 It's just a modern form of sacrifice.

01:43:39.960 You're going to a place, to an altar, and you are sacrificing to God, and you are saying, here are all the things that I have brought with me.

01:43:47.000 And I'm sacrificing those in these place.

01:43:49.500 And the place happens to be the place.

01:43:52.500 But that's...

01:43:53.100 This is right.

01:43:53.660 But I think that, you know, if you told people, okay, so we find out through DNA analysis that the crown of thorns never was on Christ's head.

01:44:02.720 Okay, fine.

01:44:03.400 So then they just go to Notre Dame and they visit Notre Dame and they don't visit the crown of thorns.

01:44:07.420 And this is the distinction between veneration, which is such a foundational conservative principle, and worship.

01:44:14.440 They're not the same thing.

01:44:15.680 Nobody is going to worship the crown of thorns.

01:44:17.660 Nobody is going because of the crown of thorns itself.

01:44:21.120 They are going because it rested on the head of Christ.

01:44:23.480 They are venerating something which is an icon, which is transporting you to something much higher, to actually the same thing, whether you're going to the garden tomb or the church of the Holy Sepulcher.

01:44:34.880 What people who are not religious, I think, don't understand about people who are religious is that there is an if attached to most sentences.

01:44:40.660 Absolutely.

01:44:41.220 Meaning that people who are going there, I think that many people say, yes, this is definitely the crown of thorns.

01:44:46.740 And then there are a lot of people who are probably going and saying, well, if this is the crown of thorns, then I'm here to pay homage.

01:44:51.420 Right, right.

01:44:51.660 And I think that that's true for most religious pilgrimages.

01:44:56.080 I think that's true for most religion, period.

01:44:57.620 To me, it's everything about religion.

01:44:59.320 I mean, the very fact of Christ's incarnation is an admission by God that we can't see him, we can't reach him, we can't touch him without something in front of us that we know as ourselves, that we can recognize as ourselves.

01:45:12.680 It's all fiction.

01:45:14.100 All of life is fiction, as far as I'm concerned.

01:45:16.760 Even our bodies are a fiction.

01:45:18.980 Now you sound like Jordan Peterson.

01:45:19.820 Well, but no, because Jordan doesn't believe, I don't want to speak for Jordan, but it seems to me that he doesn't quite believe in the truth beyond the fiction.

01:45:29.760 And the thing is, I believe that's the only truth.

01:45:32.140 Like, I believe this body is not the truth of me.

01:45:35.800 This is a metaphor for what's happening on a spiritual.

01:45:38.360 That's right.

01:45:39.100 If you would like to write in and tell me how wrong I am about Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, throw Islam in there, Buddhism, or just women.

01:45:48.920 I won't read those.

01:45:53.240 Just things should be nicer to me.

01:45:55.620 Head over to dailywire.com, slash subscribe, write in your questions, and we'll be sure to get to them on our next episode of Backstage.

01:46:03.060 I don't want a fake laugh, do you guys?

01:46:04.760 No, I'm not into it.

01:46:05.600 How about an actual, authentic yawn in three, two, don't be a sociopath.

01:46:18.920 This Men's Mental Health Month, CAMH is confronting a silent crisis.

01:46:26.560 Did you know men account for 75% of all suicide deaths in Canada?

01:46:30.120 Many struggle alone, held back by stigma.

01:46:32.720 But there is hope.

01:46:33.920 CAMH is on the front lines pioneering breakthroughs and expanding access to compassionate support.

01:46:38.780 Your donation fuels this vital work so no father, son, brother, or family is left behind.

01:46:43.400 To join us in building better mental health care for men across Canada, visit camh.ca slash support men.

01:46:49.580 That's C-A-M-H dot C-A slash support men.

The Michael Knowles Show - April 18, 2019

Daily Wire Backstage： Mueller Report ENDGAME

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