The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： Mute This Debate Edition

00:00:00.000 Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you. The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage is right around the corner, and you do not want to miss it. Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars. It is going to be all that and more. Take a listen.

00:00:19.180 Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage, mute this debate edition. I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parks as your friendly neighborhood God King. That's lowercase g and lowercase k, and we're glad you've tuned in.

00:00:31.040 Will Trump's performance be a departure from his last debate appearance? Can Joe Biden contain his rage if his family's scandals are mentioned? How much of the word hunter will Trump be able to utter before he's completely muted by the moderator? Are there any actual undecideds at this point who'll be swayed one way or another based on this circus show? Probably not. Stick around, though, and you'll find out.

00:00:48.840 Roll, opening graphic.

00:01:04.420 Joining me to discuss all of this and more, we have the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles.

00:01:10.580 Coming up after the debate, we will also be joined by the lovely Elisha Krause.

00:01:15.040 Reminder, stick around after the debate live stream for some instant analysis from us here on Backstage.

00:01:20.220 If you're an All Access member, make sure you're watching this over on our discuss page at DailyWire.com, because we will be joining all of our All Access members in the live chat, reading your comments, and taking your questions during the course of the actual debate.

00:01:33.020 If you're not a DailyWire Insider or All Access member, join now.

00:01:36.940 We'll give you a 20% off discount with the coupon code DEBATE, exclamation point.

00:01:41.380 That is DEBATE, exclamation point.

00:01:43.320 The exclamation point is to make it confusing.

00:01:45.980 Also, if you're an All Access member and you want your question read live on the air, submit them in the chat.

00:01:51.680 Elisha will be joining us later in the show, as I mentioned, and she will be getting your questions to us.

00:01:56.800 Gentlemen, what the hell is about to happen?

00:02:02.740 Literally anything.

00:02:03.780 The last time we were gathered together in this very room was the first presidential debate.

00:02:09.180 This is the third presidential debate.

00:02:11.020 There was no second presidential debate.

00:02:12.560 On account of the first presidential debate was an unmitigated disaster any way you cut it.

00:02:18.100 What do you guys expect is going to happen tonight?

00:02:20.680 Well, I think that Donald Trump got the message.

00:02:23.060 I mean, I think at first he was kind of saying, oh, that was great, I beat Biden up, but the polls didn't really reflect that.

00:02:29.320 They didn't reflect as much damage as the press would like to say there was, and what really hurt him after that was getting the flu.

00:02:35.520 I mean, that's what really got him.

00:02:37.120 I think that really damaged him in the polls.

00:02:40.140 But, you know, last time I said, I think the big surprise is going to be how much Trump now knows.

00:02:46.540 And that actually was true for the first five minutes of the last debate until chaos ensued.

00:02:51.580 So I'm sort of hoping he has that enough restraint to let that come out.

00:02:55.940 They have this mute button that could help him because it'll allow Biden to talk.

00:03:00.740 The more Biden talks, the more a fool he makes of himself.

00:03:03.520 So possibly this could be a good comeback for Trump.

00:03:06.560 But if there's some way that Trump can stomp on that, you can almost bet he will.

00:03:10.660 Michael, what do you think?

00:03:11.500 I agree with this mute button idea.

00:03:13.920 Everyone is saying that the mute button is going to be used against Trump.

00:03:17.760 And I'm sure that's what the moderator will try to do.

00:03:20.580 The thing is, it would actually help Trump if he gets muted during Joe's answers.

00:03:25.840 And the reason for that is not because Trump doesn't have good quips.

00:03:28.140 He actually does have pretty good one-liners.

00:03:30.140 It's because Joe Biden does much, much worse the more time you give him.

00:03:35.840 And so whereas the Trump strategy last time was put Joe off his feet, Joe actually does pretty well when he gets off his feet.

00:03:42.520 The guy is a slick politician.

00:03:43.820 He doesn't know what state he's in, but he's pretty good at politics.

00:03:46.500 And where he doesn't do very well is where he has time to finish.

00:03:49.920 And so I actually think, I'm sure the Presidential Debate Commission was trying to hurt Trump.

00:03:53.740 But I actually think, unwittingly, they may have helped him.

00:03:56.620 But Ben, will they use the mute in a way that doesn't appear to be an overt attack on the president?

00:04:02.480 Does the media have enough discipline at this point to even come off with the appearance of objectivity?

00:04:07.640 I think they'll be careful here because I think that the last thing that they want is to keep underscoring this message, which is that they are biased against Trump.

00:04:15.020 Now, they obviously are biased against Trump.

00:04:16.520 They obviously hate Trump.

00:04:17.460 I mean, you saw NPR today announce they will not cover the Hunter Biden story under any circumstances, which is your taxpayer dollars at work on behalf of Joe Biden.

00:04:24.520 I mean, it's an in-kind contribution by NPR with your taxpayer dollars.

00:04:28.060 It's basically tax fraud.

00:04:29.020 But with that said, I think that they will be, I would say, fairly generous before they actually hit the mute button.

00:04:35.220 And I think that more than that, Trump, I think, is going to be a lot more disciplined when it comes to not talking over people because he recognizes that was a bad thing.

00:04:40.980 The bigger question is going to be what his angle has to be tonight because, I mean, we can all disregard the polls and we can say that Trump is ahead and then the debate doesn't matter.

00:04:48.860 But if you think that the debate actually matters and that this may be Trump's last attempt to turn this thing around, the question is what should his message be?

00:04:55.560 And there are two possibilities.

00:04:56.500 Possibility number one is that he goes directly after the Hunter Biden issue, which has been percolating for the last two weeks.

00:05:02.220 The media have been trying to cover it up.

00:05:03.680 Joe Biden, right before the debate, decided to issue a statement denying that he ever had held stock in a Hunter Biden business or discussed business with Hunter or any of that.

00:05:11.880 You could see Trump try to go after it.

00:05:14.660 I think the problem there is that it's kind of a complex story and Trump is not a good storyteller.

00:05:18.600 He's a good joke teller, but he's not a good storyteller.

00:05:20.480 And there is a difference.

00:05:21.060 Tucker Carlson is very good at laying out all of this stuff A to Z.

00:05:23.720 But Trump is not he kind of speaks in slogans and he speaks in Twitter isms.

00:05:28.280 So he's more likely to just go straight to the punchline of a story without actually laying out any of the details.

00:05:32.740 I think his better policy tonight is probably going to be to just remind everybody that the economy was going great guns until covid hit.

00:05:38.940 And that if the Democrats take charge, they're now talking about making Bernie Sanders secretary of labor, which is insane.

00:05:43.560 They're now talking about raising taxes so high that 50 cent is off the bandwagon that that I think might bear more fruit than, you know, he's got to mention that Joe Biden is corrupt and that he's got corruption problems.

00:05:55.920 But I think if he makes that the chief issue in the debate, it'll quickly get bollocks up, especially because, you know, the moderator is going to then ask Trump to detail exactly how Biden is corrupt.

00:06:05.160 And Trump just does not have the capacity to ferret out all of those particular thickets.

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00:08:50.220 So, I actually agree with Ben.

00:08:52.380 I think that the president's trap tonight is the actual Hunter Biden email scandal.

00:08:56.200 And that's because I don't think that he's going to be very effective at explaining it.

00:09:00.080 It's not the kind of thing that explains well in a two-minute segment, right?

00:09:02.820 It's not the kind of thing that you explain well with a quip.

00:09:04.480 I think the president can make the point that Joe Biden is corrupt.

00:09:07.700 And the funny thing is, if he does, tomorrow, there will be a 180 in the media,

00:09:11.960 and every network will actually cover the Hunter Biden email story for the first time

00:09:15.380 to repudiate whatever it is that the president says.

00:09:18.120 I think that the president's actual, the most important thing is don't swing,

00:09:22.300 don't be the cat who chases the laser, right?

00:09:24.540 Don't go after the shiny object.

00:09:26.260 The president needs to actually remind the American people that this modern left is utterly radical,

00:09:32.940 that there's a kind of revolution happening in the country.

00:09:35.800 It's not an election that's ultimately about policy.

00:09:38.880 Almost every election in my lifetime has been about policy differences.

00:09:41.720 And listen, policy differences can be life or death.

00:09:45.140 Abortion, a life or death policy disagreement between the right and left.

00:09:48.340 Health care, life and death policy disagreement between the right and left.

00:09:51.840 Your right to bear arms, gun control.

00:09:54.080 There are many issues, policy issues, that are very important.

00:09:56.580 But this election is not fundamentally about policy distinctions.

00:09:59.520 It's about the actual structure of our government.

00:10:02.840 It's about our rights from free exercise, free speech, the right to bear arms, due process, equal justice.

00:10:10.840 It's about our norms.

00:10:12.760 It's about our institutions.

00:10:14.660 They want to alter fundamentally the Senate by doing away with the filibuster.

00:10:18.380 They want to alter the Senate fundamentally by using simple majorities to add states

00:10:23.080 so that the Senate is disproportionately left-leaning forever.

00:10:26.480 They want to change the nature of the Supreme Court, which is, for 151 years, had nine justices.

00:10:32.080 They'd like to pack that and have more justices.

00:10:33.920 They want to do away with the Electoral College.

00:10:35.860 They want to do away, really, even with the 50-state federalistic way that we elect presidents

00:10:40.380 and go to this national mail-in ballot sort of scheme that they have.

00:10:44.640 I mean, really, making the USPS a major part of our election process in the way that they are

00:10:49.320 is the first step in nationalizing our elections.

00:10:51.880 They want to do all of those things so that there is never another policy disagreement

00:10:55.080 between the two parties because there is only one party and there is only one set of policies.

00:10:59.700 That can't be allowed to happen.

00:11:01.260 That's the argument that the president needs to make.

00:11:03.000 He needs to make the point that they want to change everything, and it's not even a peaceful revolution.

00:11:07.800 Go walk the streets of Portland.

00:11:09.480 Go walk the streets of Seattle, and you'll see that it's actually in the early stages of being a hot revolution,

00:11:15.140 and the only chance of stopping them is right now by getting out and voting.

00:11:19.000 Will the president have that discipline, Michael?

00:11:20.880 This is a great point, actually, the difference between this policy or that policy

00:11:25.380 and what does the government look like.

00:11:27.780 It reminds me of Scalia's dissent in the Obergefell decision, which redefined marriage.

00:11:32.700 He said, listen, the question of how the law defines marriage is not of particular interest to me.

00:11:38.200 What is of interest to me is who rules me.

00:11:41.820 What is the rule of government?

00:11:43.020 And, you know, since the beginning of the Trump administration, this idea of the deep state, the bureaucracy, the administration has been creeping up a lot.

00:11:50.420 Do we, the people, run the country?

00:11:51.660 Do we have a constitutional government?

00:11:52.840 Or do we have something different that the progressives gave us?

00:11:55.460 I think he can hit on that very well.

00:11:58.160 He can actually hit on the Joe Biden corruption as well.

00:12:02.060 He can say Joe Biden was in office for 50 years.

00:12:04.220 He didn't accomplish anything for the people.

00:12:05.720 He accomplished a lot for himself.

00:12:07.220 And now we've got this question.

00:12:08.640 What kind of government do you want?

00:12:10.060 You know, one important thing that you brought up before is where the voters are.

00:12:14.040 The conventional wisdom is that he has to sway.

00:12:16.140 Trump has to sway.

00:12:17.040 The independents, the people haven't made up their minds.

00:12:18.900 But I agree with you, Jeremy, that there really aren't that many undecided voters.

00:12:23.840 And Trump, either by strategy or just by instinct, and I really think it's his instinct, I really think it's a limitation on what he's capable of doing,

00:12:31.240 has been playing the game that Molly Hemingway identified very early on, which was get the people who love you to come out.

00:12:39.060 Because the one thing where he, the one place where he is winning is on enthusiasm.

00:12:43.120 It is really difficult to read these polls which show Biden ahead and then see the rallies that Trump is staging

00:12:49.060 and compare them to the graveyard shift that Biden is doing.

00:12:54.220 I mean, nobody turns out.

00:12:55.200 When you've been dead for five years, the graveyard shift is for a demographic.

00:12:58.040 It's a pretty good thing.

00:13:00.180 There may not be a lot of enthusiasm for Biden, but there is a lot of enthusiasm against Trump.

00:13:04.260 And that really is the key to the election, which is why shifting the focus to Biden has,

00:13:08.360 it's been a failure of the Trump campaign that he's been unable to shift any focus, not for one iota of a moment, to Biden, not for a millisecond.

00:13:15.200 And so, yeah, I think Biden made a crucial error today in something that he said in an interview and then tweeted it out.

00:13:20.320 He said, America is an idea and we've never lived up to the idea.

00:13:23.040 And I just thought to myself, like, that would be a great thing for Trump to bring up.

00:13:28.460 This idea that America has always kind of sucked, that America was an idea, but that we've never in our entire history lived up to that idea.

00:13:34.560 So not when we were liberating the concentration camps, not when we were ending segregation,

00:13:39.380 not when we were electing Barack Obama president of the United States,

00:13:41.440 like at no point in all of American history have we ever lived up to our own ideals.

00:13:45.340 That is obviously a lie.

00:13:46.620 It's a really disdainful version of how you see the country.

00:13:48.860 I actually want to come back and talk about that a little bit more after the debate.

00:13:51.360 I think it's a really important point.

00:13:52.780 It's a it's a huge gaffe by Joe Biden and it merits our scorn.

00:13:56.960 And I think it merits some of our attention tonight.

00:13:58.600 First, I want to talk to you guys about fatherhood.

00:14:01.220 I became a father almost four months ago.

00:14:03.460 And now, you know, you hear those studies about how they have little boys and little girls sit in a circle and they observe them.

00:14:10.080 And over time, the little girls lean in and the little boys lean out because the little boys are looking for threats

00:14:14.740 and the little girls are looking for community and looking for conversation.

00:14:17.720 I've always been in there gabbing with the gals.

00:14:20.320 And now I'm like a sharp eyed predator trying to protect my flock.

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00:14:33.680 You have your own reason why you want to protect your home.

00:14:35.760 Mine is like this big and sings herself to sleep.

00:14:38.180 Yours might be, you know, something less wonderful than my daughter.

00:14:41.820 But whatever it is, it's your right to protect it.

00:14:43.820 Your home matters to you. For one, it's probably the most valuable valuable asset you own in its own right.

00:14:49.140 So it seems kind of worth protecting.

00:14:50.740 Ring has security products for every corner of your house inside and out.

00:14:54.240 Best of all, you can see it all in one simple app with ring.

00:14:57.080 You can keep an eye on your home no matter where you are right from your phone.

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00:15:07.100 You can even interact with them.

00:15:08.060 You can communicate with them.

00:15:09.280 You won't be caught unawares.

00:15:10.860 And a big thing that's happening in L.A. right now is people steal your mail.

00:15:14.180 They steal the packages they get left on your stoop that you order because of the pandemic.

00:15:18.480 Ring gives you the ability to protect not only your home, but also your family and your property.

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00:15:28.160 Keep an eye on every piece of your house.

00:15:30.340 Every one of us here has ring.

00:15:32.700 We've all had great stories.

00:15:33.960 You've probably heard some of our stories that we've had with ring.

00:15:36.520 We've seen some amazing things.

00:15:37.880 I heard my gate slam this weekend, two weekends ago, and it was a Saturday morning.

00:15:43.320 I'm laying in bed.

00:15:43.960 My gate slams.

00:15:45.000 I'm like, what on earth is going on?

00:15:46.700 Look at the camera, and there is a stranger in my backyard trying to sleep on my patio furniture.

00:15:53.180 So I don't have to go down there and put myself in danger to see what's going on.

00:15:56.800 I was able to deal with it safely because I was able to protect my house with Ring.

00:16:01.520 Benjamin, you've been using Ring longer than any of us.

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00:16:22.380 I want to remind you guys to stick around after the debate live stream for some instant analysis from us here at Backstage.

00:16:27.540 By instant analysis, I mean we'll be going, what?

00:16:29.600 Did you see that?

00:16:30.320 Oh, my gosh.

00:16:30.840 If you're an All Access member, stick around right now over at DailyWire.com.

00:16:35.520 Head to the Discuss page and we'll be there with all of you live chatting, reading your comments, taking your questions as we watch what is sure to be the most consequential presidential debate, I think, in living memory.

00:16:48.240 Certainly, no incumbent has gone into a debate with more on the line than President Trump does today.

00:16:55.040 Join us over at DailyWire.com.

00:16:57.060 All Access, 20% off with the debate coupon code, DEBATE!

00:17:01.480 That's DEBATE!

00:17:03.000 If you forget the exclamation point, that's because you're a normal human, but you will not get your 20% off.

00:17:10.480 All right, everybody.

00:17:11.360 We'll see you over there right now.

00:17:12.520 I think we're going to tune in to the presidential debates, and we'll catch up with you right after.

00:17:17.120 Well, welcome back to the Daily Wire backstage.

00:17:26.520 I'm here with Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro to recap on what I'm hoping you all just watched as we did, which is the second debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

00:17:36.300 Reminder, if you're not a Daily Wire insider or All Access member, you can join during the course of this broadcast for 20% off with the coupon code DEBATE.

00:17:45.280 And now they have removed the exclamation mark, so all you have to remember is just DEBATE, D-E-B-A-T-E.

00:17:51.500 We just saw the most civilized debate.

00:17:55.300 I think even if you go all the way back to the Democrat primaries, this was the most civil debate.

00:17:59.580 Much different in tone than what we saw last time.

00:18:03.000 How do you think it played for the president, Michael?

00:18:04.560 I think Welker did a good job.

00:18:06.080 I don't want to overstate that.

00:18:07.560 I think she went easier on Biden.

00:18:09.800 I think she went tougher on Trump.

00:18:11.920 There's no doubt about that.

00:18:13.020 But overall, she did a very good job, and she did infinitely better than Chris Wallace.

00:18:17.980 Trump thanked her for it, which was good.

00:18:20.520 And Trump knew what he was doing this time.

00:18:24.760 He learned.

00:18:25.620 He took the lessons.

00:18:27.000 And most importantly of all, it's not just he knew when to let Biden talk, but he knew when to emphasize what Biden had just said.

00:18:34.040 You heard it right at the end there.

00:18:35.400 Biden said, yeah, I'm basically going to get rid of the oil industry.

00:18:38.000 And he said, hold on.

00:18:39.140 Before we move on, that's a big deal.

00:18:41.340 And he said it about three or four times because otherwise they were going to gloss over it.

00:18:44.720 Very important.

00:18:45.520 And it really could sway some votes to Trump.

00:18:47.740 Drew, what did you make of it?

00:18:48.640 The last time we watched the debate, I said the debate was a tie on points, and Trump lost.

00:18:54.020 And Trump lost because he didn't let Biden talk.

00:18:56.080 He didn't let Biden show himself for what he is.

00:18:58.220 He made himself overly aggressive.

00:18:59.980 He made himself a bully.

00:19:00.900 I thought this was a wash on points, and Trump won.

00:19:03.680 And he won because two narratives went down the drain.

00:19:06.580 The narrative that Biden can't stand for 90 minutes and speak semi-coherently, he did.

00:19:11.820 And the narrative that Donald Trump is the devil from hell.

00:19:14.940 And I think that that is the more powerful narrative.

00:19:17.040 That's the narrative that's been being sold to us for four years by the mainstream media and just about everybody else in the elite communications industry.

00:19:26.200 And Trump just destroyed it.

00:19:27.820 He was helped, as we all said he would be.

00:19:30.360 He was helped by the rules that made him, forced him to have some discipline.

00:19:34.120 He is not a disciplined guy.

00:19:35.500 He looked disciplined.

00:19:36.420 You heard what he was saying.

00:19:37.900 And what he was saying, basically, was Joe Biden doesn't know what he's talking about.

00:19:41.820 And I think that's pretty clearly the case.

00:19:43.860 I think he had a couple of great lines that will resonate with people.

00:19:46.980 Who built the cages, Joe, was probably the best one.

00:19:49.760 That's kind of the one that I think will resonate for the longest time.

00:19:53.600 The press tomorrow is going to say, isn't it wonderful that Joe Biden is sentient?

00:19:56.900 But I think what people saw was a president who knows what he's doing, basically, and a guy who's just a standard issue politician who's been in government for 47 years.

00:20:06.680 This is the kind of debate that brings out the people who were thinking, I don't like Trump.

00:20:12.040 I voted for him before, but now I won't.

00:20:14.060 Now I think they can come back and say, no, wait a minute.

00:20:16.720 He is the guy I thought he was.

00:20:18.180 I think that's a great point.

00:20:19.080 Ben, what did you make of it?

00:20:20.300 Yeah, no, I totally agree with that last point.

00:20:21.780 I mean, after having cut that video this week talking about how I'll vote for Trump because, you know, despite all of the character flaws and all those problems and everything that we know about him, the bottom line is that when you look at the alternatives, this is the better alternative for the country.

00:20:32.360 It makes you more comfortable voting for him.

00:20:34.380 After the last debate, I think a lot of people got very uncomfortable voting for him because of his behavior.

00:20:38.400 I think after his COVID behavior, people got very uncomfortable voting for him.

00:20:41.060 You saw it in the polls.

00:20:41.800 They started to immediately separate.

00:20:43.380 I think you're going to see the polls start to come back together a little bit here.

00:20:45.640 And I will say that I thought that the only aspect of this where he did not handle himself really well, actually, was about the first 15, 20 minutes.

00:20:53.860 I thought the first 15, 20 minutes before he got to the actual lockdown of it, when they were just talking about how you handled COVID generally, I thought that Biden was very on message the first 15 to 20 minutes.

00:21:02.880 Just I mean, it was a lying message.

00:21:04.040 It was an untrue message, right?

00:21:05.440 He keeps saying over and over that everybody has died because of Trump.

00:21:08.160 And I wish that Trump would have just said to him, Joe, how many lives would you have saved considering that people all over the world are dying of this thing?

00:21:14.020 How many lives did Andrew Cuomo not save and Gretchen Whitmer and various other people who took exactly your political recommendations?

00:21:20.460 But I thought that after that, he acquitted himself, I thought, incredibly well, actually.

00:21:24.860 That's about as good as you're going to see Donald Trump on a debate stage.

00:21:28.180 And as you were mentioning, Michael, I thought that there were several moments where he jumped in and he really hammered home a point.

00:21:34.880 And this is where he really is good, right?

00:21:36.120 He's a hammer in search of a nail.

00:21:37.120 And sometimes he stumbles on a nail and he hits it really, really hard.

00:21:40.080 So there were three or four of these times.

00:21:41.500 He did it over and over with you've been here for 47 years.

00:21:45.240 You've been here for eight years.

00:21:46.560 You did nothing.

00:21:47.380 I thought the weakest moment of the debate for Biden by far was that moment where Trump turned to him and said, so where were you?

00:21:53.240 Why didn't you do anything?

00:21:54.060 And there's this long pause.

00:21:55.400 And then Biden says we had a Republican Congress.

00:21:57.260 Well, that isn't even true.

00:21:58.520 He had a Democratic Congress up through 2010.

00:22:00.440 So, I mean, he has to lie about it.

00:22:01.860 And then Trump comes back with, well, you could talk to them, right?

00:22:04.940 I mean, it was actually a really good moment for Trump.

00:22:06.940 I thought that the moment where he went after him on criminal justice reform, again, same kind of thing.

00:22:12.360 I thought that he hammered him pretty well on the Hunter Biden stuff.

00:22:15.940 Although, again, he wasn't able to draw the whole narrative.

00:22:18.380 But just the fact that now the media are going to have to come out and explain what Trump was talking about, which is going to be the story, right?

00:22:24.320 After this is going to be Trump lied about how much money Joe – there's no evidence that Joe Biden took direct money from the Russians.

00:22:29.420 He didn't take $3.5 million.

00:22:30.980 But they're going to have to explain that Hunter Biden actually did receive money via the mayor of Moscow's wife.

00:22:35.460 And what does that mean?

00:22:36.340 And he was smart enough to keep saying the Biden family, right, as opposed to just Joe Biden personally.

00:22:41.320 So, you know, I think that he'll get fact-checked up the wazoo.

00:22:44.140 I think some of it will be deserved.

00:22:46.040 But I think that in the end, this was a much, much – I mean, an infinitely better performance for Trump.

00:22:52.760 And if you are somebody who is on the fence, not about which candidate to support, but on the fence about you kind of like Trump or at least you're okay with Trump.

00:22:59.640 And you're wondering, you know, is it really worth it for me to go out and vote for him in one of these swing states?

00:23:03.260 I think you feel a lot more comfortable going out and standing in line and voting for the guy after this.

00:23:06.740 Can I just make one other point?

00:23:08.400 Yes.

00:23:08.540 On the fact-checks, I think if there's any even semblance of fairness in the fact-checks, Biden loses.

00:23:14.380 He lied several times on major, major, major points.

00:23:18.200 Trump got some things – made some inaccuracies.

00:23:20.740 But Biden looked into the camera and lied repeatedly.

00:23:22.960 The trouble is, Drew, if I had some ham, I could make a ham sandwich if I had some bread.

00:23:27.340 There is no such thing as a fact-check.

00:23:28.960 The fact-checks are Democratic left-wing opinion, Collins.

00:23:32.260 But you're right.

00:23:33.100 If there were, it would be.

00:23:34.080 Yeah, no, I mean, Joe Biden openly said in that debate that not a single human being lost their private health insurance because of Obamacare.

00:23:39.580 I mean, that was literally called the number one lie of the year by PolitiFact just a few years ago when Barack Obama suggested that you wouldn't lose your doctor or lose your insurance under Obamacare.

00:23:48.360 And literally millions of people were kicked off of their private health insurance because many of those insurance plans became illegal under Obamacare.

00:23:54.040 But the biggest lie – but the biggest lie of the night, and it's gone completely unchecked now at two consecutive debates, is that if you lost someone to COVID-19, that is Donald Trump's fault.

00:24:05.720 COVID-19 has killed people all over the world and, to the president's point, killed more people in New York than anywhere else in this country.

00:24:13.700 The fact that they allow Joe Biden to say that, that there won't be a single fact-check about it, is evidence of what Michael is saying, which is that fact-checking sites right now are really just the most front-facing piece of the Democrat propaganda machine.

00:24:27.340 It's a real vulnerability for conservatives and one that we as a group probably need to think a little bit more about.

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00:25:55.420 I do use Stamps.com, Jeremy.

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00:26:23.420 So before we get to any of the other important policy clips,

00:26:27.040 I want to get to the most important clip of the night because it is indeed the most important clip

00:26:31.620 in the history of American politics.

00:26:33.880 And that is clip number 12 in which Joe Biden, well, you just have to see it to believe it.

00:26:41.740 You know what?

00:26:42.600 North Korea, we're not in a war.

00:26:44.500 We have a good relationship.

00:26:45.880 You know, people don't understand.

00:26:47.160 Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.

00:26:50.900 We have a lot of questions to get to.

00:26:52.280 We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe.

00:26:59.980 Listen, I'm no history.

00:27:03.300 That guy right there.

00:27:04.560 He was a pal.

00:27:05.660 He was a pal, Hitler.

00:27:06.940 I always liked him until he invaded Europe.

00:27:09.300 If he hadn't invaded Europe.

00:27:10.980 Then I thought, maybe he's not as nice as I thought he was.

00:27:14.020 I feel like Daniel Dale might want to get right on that one over at CNN.

00:27:18.240 I mean, the guy does spout lies at an unbelievable rate.

00:27:21.500 I mean, the fact that Trump is the one who always gets fact-checked with these huge,

00:27:25.460 enormous, long lists of fact-checks.

00:27:27.100 I mean, Joe Biden, for a long time, has been an incredible liar.

00:27:30.240 I mean, he's been lying in politics like a rug since the 1980s,

00:27:33.600 when he was claiming to, you know, have a railroading background or some such

00:27:37.660 that was actually Neil Kinnick's background.

00:27:39.280 So there's nothing new about that.

00:27:40.920 But he did lie, like, many, many times tonight.

00:27:43.920 Like, a lot of times.

00:27:44.940 So here's Joe Biden lying in one single statement.

00:27:49.660 He is on both sides of a particular issue.

00:27:53.140 Roll clip number three for us.

00:27:57.480 And I don't look at this in terms of the way he does.

00:28:00.280 Blue states and red states.

00:28:01.640 They're all the United States.

00:28:03.100 And look at the states that are having such a spike in the coronavirus.

00:28:08.000 They're the red states.

00:28:09.320 They're the states in the Midwest.

00:28:10.800 They're the states in the upper Midwest.

00:28:12.200 That's where the spike is occurring.

00:28:13.640 That's enough.

00:28:13.980 In fact, he backchecks himself.

00:28:16.000 I don't see red states or blue states.

00:28:18.280 And the red states suck.

00:28:20.040 You know, by the way.

00:28:21.600 But if I did.

00:28:23.600 I mean, also, I do love that he's now just overtly hijacking Barack Obama's slogans.

00:28:28.160 Yeah, that's right.

00:28:28.820 I made one up the other day.

00:28:29.760 I think it goes like this.

00:28:31.040 Yes, we can.

00:28:32.320 I think that's it.

00:28:33.300 In fact, as the son of a black father and a white mother, I feel like I unify.

00:28:38.780 He kind of threw Obama under the bus, though.

00:28:41.320 He kept saying, I was the vice president, not the president.

00:28:43.580 If I'd been the president, I would have done things as well.

00:28:45.600 The best point is where he just face planted Bernie.

00:28:47.600 I will admit that I did get a bit of a thrill when he absolutely took Bernie and gave him the swirly.

00:28:52.180 I mean, he just stuck his face directly in the toilet and fly.

00:28:54.240 It was fantastic.

00:28:55.200 It was a good clip.

00:28:55.860 There was that one point where it was about Medicare for all.

00:28:58.260 He kept saying, well, I'm not a socialized medicine guy.

00:29:00.420 I don't listen to these crazies in my own party.

00:29:02.800 I'm not going to tell you that.

00:29:03.600 It turns out that he was actually lying about his own policy, of course, because everyone knows the public option is the first step to getting rid of private insurance.

00:29:10.120 Because once you can subsidize a public option and you can use that public option in order to cram down low drug prices on the pharmaceutical companies,

00:29:16.560 and presumably you would have to mandate that doctors and hospitals take that public option in order to make any of this work,

00:29:22.240 well, then you've already taken the first step to getting rid of private insurance.

00:29:24.640 But it was pretty glorious to watch him just absolutely disown Bernie Sanders, who's now wandering around in Vermont, wondering what he's done with his life.

00:29:31.640 I wonder if there will actually be a consequence to throwing Obama under the bus.

00:29:36.080 Obama is a thin-skinned man.

00:29:37.840 Obama has no sense of humor about himself.

00:29:39.840 Obama sees himself.

00:29:41.400 He doesn't love Biden.

00:29:42.660 And he sees himself as a religious figure, not a political figure.

00:29:45.420 He was reluctant to endorse Biden.

00:29:47.220 He essentially endorsed Biden after Biden seized the nomination.

00:29:49.600 And he didn't go on the road for Biden during the general election until today or yesterday.

00:29:55.880 Literally, it was this week.

00:29:57.080 And now, how are they going to go out on the road tomorrow when Biden threw him under the bus?

00:30:04.120 You know, there's this other issue, which is that back in the 80s when Biden was plagiarizing people, he did it.

00:30:10.260 First of all, there was no Internet, so they couldn't check it.

00:30:12.200 And he was plagiarizing foreign politicians over in Ireland.

00:30:15.160 Now he's plagiarizing politicians that he worked for in America.

00:30:18.200 They were the president.

00:30:18.900 People can look it up.

00:30:19.900 That's one issue.

00:30:21.000 We keep calling Biden a liar.

00:30:23.160 And he tells lies, so he's a liar.

00:30:25.000 But I think the thing that's more definitive about Biden is that he's a cynic.

00:30:29.640 He doesn't care about the truth.

00:30:31.720 It's not that he's actively.

00:30:32.720 He just doesn't care.

00:30:34.060 And so he can actually say two completely opposite things in the same sentence.

00:30:39.800 Because when you've been in politics for 47 years, you actually know that the truth doesn't matter.

00:30:44.740 This is one of Trump's best moments, and nobody's going to talk about it tomorrow, but I think it played, which was when Trump said, Biden was saying, oh, look at your kitchen table and you're reaching for your bed and all this.

00:30:56.540 And Trump said, you know, is that all you've got?

00:30:58.640 Is that all you've got old politician stuff about the kitchen table and your bed?

00:31:02.600 It was so good.

00:31:03.080 And I think that was just in a moment that undermined Biden completely.

00:31:06.440 And every time he went back to it, every time Biden went back to the technique, it came back into your mind.

00:31:11.340 That's right.

00:31:11.720 I heard that.

00:31:12.880 It was the Christie Rubio moment, right?

00:31:14.120 It was the Christie Rubio moment.

00:31:15.220 Yes.

00:31:15.600 Where Rubio kept saying the same thing.

00:31:17.180 And then Christie jumped in in the 2016 early debates.

00:31:20.840 And and just for those who missed it, and Christie jumped in and said, what you're going to say now is this whole thing about make no mistake, blah, blah, blah.

00:31:28.260 And then Rubio immediately came back with it.

00:31:30.240 That was fantastic because it was highly irritating that after being hit on his family, he went to this pre-planned line about they don't care about my family.

00:31:38.020 They don't care about your family.

00:31:39.480 They care about all you should be caring about your family.

00:31:42.520 You, the American people.

00:31:43.740 And Trump was like, go F yourself.

00:31:45.680 It's ridiculous.

00:31:46.780 It actually is about your family.

00:31:48.340 And I was like, you know what, good for him because it is bullcrap.

00:31:50.000 I mean, it just is.

00:31:50.620 It's bullshit.

00:31:51.160 I'm sorry.

00:31:51.560 Like when when when Joe Biden turns to camera and there's nothing I hate more in life than the sincere voice.

00:31:57.840 I hate it.

00:31:58.680 I hate it.

00:31:59.640 I hate it in politics.

00:32:00.720 People go down to the low register and they look to camera.

00:32:03.080 They're just talking out here.

00:32:04.240 And all of a sudden they go like this.

00:32:05.160 And now I'm very sincere.

00:32:08.560 So you're not a big Don Lemon fan is what you're saying.

00:32:11.480 Oh, my God.

00:32:11.980 It's just absolutely the worst.

00:32:13.400 Even our friends who do it.

00:32:14.500 Right.

00:32:14.660 Like Ted used to do it during debates.

00:32:16.080 And I'd be like, don't do it, Ted.

00:32:17.180 Stop it, Ted.

00:32:17.860 Don't do it, Ted.

00:32:18.660 And and but like when Biden did that and he's been doing it consistently throughout the debates.

00:32:23.260 And Trump was like, that's pathetic.

00:32:25.100 You wrote that.

00:32:25.860 You prewrote that.

00:32:26.560 Nobody knows you prewrote that.

00:32:27.840 I was like, you know, it kills me to flatter Ben here.

00:32:31.240 But actually, you did this to Piers Morgan.

00:32:33.360 And it was it was it's a great tactic that Republicans should pay attention to.

00:32:36.780 When you went on Piers Morgan's show to debate gun control, you knew exactly what he was going to do.

00:32:40.860 And you say, OK, here's what Piers is going to do.

00:32:42.360 He's going to come out.

00:32:43.020 He's going to stand on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, which he was planning.

00:32:46.880 He was going to do that.

00:32:47.920 And it totally put him off guard.

00:32:49.260 And it was the same thing here.

00:32:50.040 When you can call out the the contrived tactic that your opponent is about to use, it is so devastating.

00:32:57.080 And Trump Trump used it to great effect.

00:32:58.680 Yeah.

00:32:58.960 Sorry, one more quick note on the China stuff.

00:33:02.460 And I think this he didn't explicate the China stuff particularly well.

00:33:05.620 He kind of threw out some accusations, kind of like chum in the water, hoping that the sharks are going to circle around and feed off of it.

00:33:11.200 The one thing that he did create was the fact that Joe Biden went over the top.

00:33:16.480 So Biden didn't just say, I never received money from any foreign deals, which, OK, fine.

00:33:21.260 He said, my son never did anything wrong.

00:33:23.400 Hunter never did anything wrong.

00:33:24.780 Nobody's ever said Hunter has done anything wrong.

00:33:26.660 That's just a lie.

00:33:27.460 Hunter Biden himself has admitted that he went around jet setting using his daddy's name to pick up bags of cash.

00:33:32.180 And now he's got an ad.

00:33:33.860 So all Trump has to do is cut that ad.

00:33:35.880 That's right.

00:33:36.120 I want to talk about the Hunter Biden stuff in detail because it's the big story of the week, the big story of the day.

00:33:40.160 And it was obviously a big issue in this debate.

00:33:42.900 But first, I want to talk about the Second Amendment.

00:33:45.380 Now, more than ever, our Second Amendment is under assault.

00:33:48.160 The left, as we discussed earlier in the program, the left, we're not debating the left today on policy.

00:33:53.080 We're debating the left on the fundamental structures of our government.

00:33:56.060 They actually want to do away with the protections of the First Amendment, the protections of the Second Amendment, the protections of the 14th Amendment.

00:34:02.560 They want to do away with the Electoral College.

00:34:04.440 They want to do away with the filibuster, which, while not constitutional, is a major norm in our system of government.

00:34:09.820 Well, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the very first thing that they made sacred was the right of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their government.

00:34:17.280 And back then, there wasn't social media to limit it either.

00:34:19.880 That's Amendment 1.

00:34:20.860 The Second Amendment is essential.

00:34:22.480 It's the bulwark against encroachment into that First Amendment.

00:34:27.140 The Second Amendment is there to protect us from government intrusion.

00:34:30.620 It's there to protect us from tyranny.

00:34:32.900 That's the reason it comes right after the Second Amendment.

00:34:35.420 I'm a gun owner.

00:34:36.380 I'm a rifle.

00:34:37.240 Huge responsibility.

00:34:37.980 I like to make other people gun owners.

00:34:40.100 I like to take other people to buy their first firearms.

00:34:42.060 I like to take other people to buy their first rifles.

00:34:44.600 And one of the things that I tell them at all times, I don't even like to shoot.

00:34:47.660 I don't love to hunt.

00:34:48.660 I don't like to go to the shooting range.

00:34:49.980 I own a rifle because I believe it's my civic responsibility to own a rifle.

00:34:53.660 And I want to own the rifle that's contentious.

00:34:55.700 I want to own the rifle that the left wants to take away from me because that's my civic responsibility, too.

00:35:00.300 I'll tell you the truth.

00:35:01.540 If the left wasn't coming for our guns, I wouldn't own any guns.

00:35:04.620 If the left wasn't coming for AR-15s, I wouldn't own any AR-15s.

00:35:08.500 But the very fact that they want them means that I have a responsibility to own them, and I have a responsibility to own one that will work, one that will serve me if, God forbid, I'm ever put in a position of needing to use it.

00:35:19.280 Bravo Company Manufacturing, our friends at BCM, they understand this.

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00:35:26.820 It's because BCM believes that the same level of protection should be provided to every American.

00:35:31.500 You shouldn't have the rich Hollywood elite getting better protection than you.

00:35:35.140 You shouldn't have government officials getting better protection than you.

00:35:38.000 And the difference between private and professional, in both cases, if you need a firearm, you need it to work.

00:35:43.260 The people at Bravo Company Manufacturing assume that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas.

00:35:55.060 With that in mind, every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans.

00:35:59.700 The people at BCM feel that it's their moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the end user when it's not just a paper target, but someone coming to do you harm, someone coming to deprive you of your rights.

00:36:13.360 BCM works with leading instructors and marksmen from top levels of America's Special Operation Forces, from the Marine Corps of Force Reconnaissance to U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, connecting them with other Americans.

00:36:23.820 These top instructors teach the skills necessary to defend yourself, your family, and others.

00:36:30.260 It's not just a right to own a firearm. It's a responsibility. You should do it.

00:36:34.460 And if you're going to do it, you should own something that's going to work.

00:36:37.280 To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, go over to bravocompanymfg.com.

00:36:41.700 You'll discover more about their products, their special offers, and their upcoming events.

00:36:45.340 That's bravocompanymfg.com.

00:36:48.060 But what you really need to do is just go to YouTube, because these guys are geniuses at marketing.

00:36:53.120 They really understand how to use the Internet, which is as important a skill to protect your rights and to protect the future of your rights as firearm ownership is.

00:37:02.780 And our pals over at BCM really understand it.

00:37:04.560 They make really entertaining videos, and you will learn a lot about what they do.

00:37:08.560 YouTube.com slash bravocompanyusa.

00:37:11.620 That's YouTube.com slash bravocompanyusa.

00:37:15.060 So, Hunter Biden.

00:37:20.000 The media has basically blacked out all information about Hunter Biden for the last week.

00:37:25.600 As we said in the beginning of the show, NPR put out a statement in which they said,

00:37:29.020 we're not going to talk about the Hunter Biden story because we don't want to.

00:37:32.220 I mean, that's essentially what they said.

00:37:33.880 We don't think it's news because we don't like that it's news.

00:37:36.900 Donald Trump used this opportunity tonight to make absolutely sure that everyone in America, even people, listen, we live in a bubble.

00:37:44.920 We live in conservative media.

00:37:47.040 Everybody we know has been talking about it for a week.

00:37:48.960 People who, you know, watch the CBS Evening News after a hard day's work probably did not know any of these accusations until tonight.

00:37:56.640 The president did a fantastic job.

00:37:58.400 And while I agree that Kristen Welker did a fairly good job tonight, the one place where she really intervened to save Joe Biden was in the very first exchange when the president came at at VP Biden specifically about his family's history of corruption.

00:38:15.280 And she didn't want Biden to be angry.

00:38:19.460 She didn't want Biden to make a mistake.

00:38:20.880 So she kept trying to pull it away and pull it away.

00:38:23.260 But Biden demanded to be heard.

00:38:24.380 So we had a lot of back and forth on this.

00:38:25.740 My question, well, let's in fact, let's play clip 5A here and let people hear what what was said.

00:38:33.000 Joe got three and a half million dollars from Russia and it came through Putin because he was very friendly with the former mayor of Moscow and it was the mayor of Moscow's wife.

00:38:43.260 And you got three and a half million dollars.

00:38:45.440 Your family got three and a half million dollars.

00:38:47.540 And, you know, someday you're going to have to explain why did you get three and a half.

00:38:50.680 I never got any money from Russia.

00:38:52.320 I don't get money from Russia.

00:38:53.400 And then let's roll right into 5B when the when to Ben's point, Biden really over overstates his claim here.

00:39:00.560 Vice President Biden, you may respond and then I want to follow up on the election security.

00:39:08.060 I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.

00:39:12.440 We learned that this president paid 50 times the tax in China, has a secret bank account with China, does business in China.

00:39:21.780 And in fact, is talking about me taking money.

00:39:25.540 I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever.

00:39:30.700 I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever.

00:39:35.800 And then later he says, my son has not done anything wrong.

00:39:40.080 Those aren't I mean, those are those are definitive statements.

00:39:43.940 Will they hold up, Ben?

00:39:45.440 Well, I think there's a possibility the first holds up.

00:39:47.540 I mean, we've seen his we've seen his tax records.

00:39:50.120 There's nothing in there that suggests that he's received foreign money.

00:39:52.700 It is also possible that he can claim he didn't receive foreign money if Biden is holding the cash and trust somewhere.

00:39:57.400 I mean, that's also possible for him if you were really to kind of parse these things.

00:40:01.680 But I think that in all likelihood, he probably has not seen money directly.

00:40:06.020 I think my guess is that if you really had to boil this thing down, just looking at what we've seen, he probably said to Hunter Biden, go with God, use my name, go make bank.

00:40:15.220 And I think that that's pretty obvious.

00:40:16.540 I mean, Hunter Biden has said that fairly publicly.

00:40:19.040 And that's fairly corrupt in and of itself.

00:40:22.020 You know, whether he was personally benefiting from it or not, if your kids are making money off of your name while you're vice president of the United States and you're taking them on Air Force Two to go pick up giant checks in China, that is not a particularly good looking thing.

00:40:32.760 That did not require these emails in order to reveal that the part where he overextended himself is that statement about Hunter when he said nobody's ever indicated that Hunter did anything wrong.

00:40:41.280 Well, I mean, they're in some indications considering the two of his business partners are now in jail for fraud.

00:40:44.860 So it feels like there are some things that are that he probably did wrong here.

00:40:47.980 Yeah, there's also this issue that we know that Joe Biden has lied about this before because Joe Biden said, I never spoke about my son's business dealings with him ever once.

00:40:58.760 But his son contradicted that in an interview, I believe, with New York magazine.

00:41:02.480 It was with one of these magazines where he said, yeah, I talked to my dad and my dad said, you better know what you're doing.

00:41:07.640 He then, Hunter, went on a television interview and said, yeah, I never talked to my dad.

00:41:11.420 And the interviewer, to her credit, said, well, what about this business of you better know what you're doing?

00:41:15.840 He goes, yeah, well, look, but that was the end of the conversation.

00:41:18.680 Well, actually, no, it wasn't even a conversation.

00:41:21.220 Yeah, that's right.

00:41:22.000 It wasn't a conversation.

00:41:23.600 That's the story.

00:41:24.560 And I'm sticking to it.

00:41:25.420 So he has no credibility.

00:41:26.880 And it's also a matter of narrative, which is a very important thing.

00:41:30.220 The narrative that Biden has been selling is that Trump is bad.

00:41:33.040 I'm good.

00:41:33.840 And that's just not true.

00:41:35.780 You know, people sent Donald Trump to the White House because they had the feeling that the government was no longer responsible to them.

00:41:43.020 It was kind of a scam.

00:41:45.120 It was what my kids call an op, you know, that there was a Republican Party and a Democrat Party.

00:41:50.720 But really, no, it was really just a party that was snuggling up to the public trough and somehow sucking up this money.

00:41:59.280 Joe Biden.

00:42:00.180 Which, by the way, the president said, he said, I became president because of you.

00:42:03.900 That's right.

00:42:04.620 And the thing the thing is, they said, drain the swamp.

00:42:08.460 Joe Biden is swamp thing.

00:42:09.860 He is the guy who has kind of lived.

00:42:12.060 He's brought his family together and they have lived off his influence.

00:42:16.400 Whether or not I agree with Ben on this.

00:42:18.820 It's still unclear whether or not Joe Biden himself benefited in terms of dollars from what Hunter Biden was doing.

00:42:26.380 But that he allowed Hunter Biden, an obviously messed up guy, to profit off his influence is very clear at this point.

00:42:33.680 He lied about it.

00:42:35.020 I'll actually push back on Drew and Ben.

00:42:36.760 And there are funny there are funny alliances that form on this show.

00:42:40.500 It's quite often Jeremy and Ben versus Drew and Michael.

00:42:43.620 But then every now and then it's Jeremy and Drew versus Ben and Michael.

00:42:46.900 And today, I don't know where Michael is yet, but it's definitely Jeremy versus Ben and Drew.

00:42:51.620 Where did Joe Biden's big ass house come from?

00:42:53.820 Bingo, buddy.

00:42:54.520 Totally.

00:42:55.300 Totally.

00:42:55.600 This is the actual thing.

00:42:57.060 Is there evidence that this particular chart?

00:42:59.160 No.

00:42:59.740 Joe Biden has been in the government since he was literally too young to be sworn in constitutional.

00:43:06.760 He was elected to the Senate and he had to wait for his birthday in order to be sworn in because he was too young.

00:43:13.220 Forty seven years he's been in government.

00:43:15.260 Where did the big house come from?

00:43:17.000 Where did the luxury travel come from?

00:43:19.020 And it's not just Joe Biden.

00:43:20.820 I think that when the story of this era is written, one of the one of the enormous scandals that people will look back on is how people can spend an entire life making one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in government service and somehow have net worths of thirty eight million dollars.

00:43:36.160 And you can say, oh, well, he wrote some books.

00:43:38.160 He wrote a book and it did ten million dollars of business.

00:43:41.220 That's amazing.

00:43:42.260 A book that did ten million dollars of business might have paid him five million.

00:43:45.940 And of that five million, he paid the government half.

00:43:48.400 Yeah.

00:43:48.660 And that does not give you a net worth.

00:43:50.660 I mean, that's the thing.

00:43:51.540 That's right.

00:43:51.880 You don't even you wouldn't even make 50 percent of the.

00:43:54.100 So, OK, let's say he made ten million dollars on it.

00:43:56.360 What does he take home?

00:43:57.000 A million or less.

00:43:58.440 Right.

00:43:58.580 And then he pays half of that to the government.

00:44:00.100 The numbers, I suspect, don't add up.

00:44:02.540 Now, to Ben's point, I don't know that you're going to find a, you know, a W-2 or something from Joe Biden taking money from some Ukrainian oligarch.

00:44:10.320 But some some money has made its way into Joe Biden's pocket.

00:44:14.140 So this is the thing about this, because I actually is weird, but I kind of agree with both Jeremy and Ben on this.

00:44:18.740 Yeah, that the money, the real money that Biden has made, he made after he left office and these as these guys typically do.

00:44:25.680 Obama did it, too.

00:44:26.760 He made a lot of money after he left office.

00:44:28.800 Bush, but but the loans and the houses and the things that you get, the kind of easy mortgages that you get and the easy loans that you get.

00:44:37.500 Those are things that come from the swamp.

00:44:39.220 And Joe Biden has accepted it all.

00:44:41.100 He is a swamp creature.

00:44:42.680 He is the face.

00:44:44.280 He is the face of the government that they sent Donald Trump to Washington.

00:44:48.740 In 2008, The New York Times reported this, right?

00:44:50.900 I mean, in 2008, The New York Times, before it was verboten to report anything bad about Joe Biden, they reported back in 08 when Trump, when Obama was considering him.

00:44:58.180 They talked about how he got a sweetheart loan from some people back in Delaware on he was able to buy a piece of land under market value in order to do that, which we know Barack Obama, by the way, also did with his neighbor back in Chicago.

00:45:08.920 So politics allows people who want to influence you to do these kind of not quite illegal, but kind of scuzzy things in order to make clear to you exactly where your bread is buttered.

00:45:18.680 And we know that Hunter's been doing that for years.

00:45:20.380 I mean, it's been known for a very long time that Joe Biden, who is from Delaware, which is a state that is, you know, very often used in order to incorporate businesses.

00:45:28.220 But also Scranton is anywhere else where people might be.

00:45:30.540 Right.

00:45:31.120 I mean, he's really from Delaware.

00:45:31.860 Michigan, Texas.

00:45:33.080 Delaware is credit card land.

00:45:34.420 And we all we all know that he's been a lobbyist, essentially, for the credit card companies for a very, very long time.

00:45:38.880 And his son was working for some of the credit card companies.

00:45:41.160 I mean, again, all this was reported by The New York Times in 2008.

00:45:44.180 So it is true that he has a long history of just being a typical politician who is making a good living off of being a politician in public service.

00:45:51.900 And Trump hit him hard on that today.

00:45:53.760 I think that the foreign ties sort of highlight some of that stuff and they make it more relevant today.

00:45:59.600 It makes it feel like an October surprise.

00:46:00.960 But the truth is that I'm not sure that you needed it if anybody had any sort of level of awareness about what exactly the government is, because you can write that story about nearly every politician in Washington, D.C., all of whom seem to enter the government being middle class and then all leave the government being in the top one percent.

00:46:15.960 And by the way, Bernie Sanders is worth a million bucks and has a lake house.

00:46:18.900 Right.

00:46:19.060 As somebody who was a reporter in my youth, I keep going back to the image in my mind of those 1940s movies of reporters, the guy with a snap rim hat and the press card and the hat band, you know.

00:46:29.860 And he's typing on his typewriter and Cary Grant comes in and says, you know, I've got a story for you.

00:46:34.780 The leading candidate for president has been basically profiting off influence peddling in in his while he was vice president.

00:46:44.720 And the reporter says, yeah, I'm not going to cover that because, you know, there's no governing authority, as Al Gore would say, over that really makes it illegal.

00:46:52.280 No, this is it is corruption.

00:46:54.660 It doesn't have to be illegal.

00:46:55.860 There are plenty of things that are not crimes that are wrong and are bad.

00:46:59.720 And Joe Biden has done all of them.

00:47:01.440 And I think that this is the thing, the fact that the press is trying to cover this up.

00:47:05.700 And I don't believe they've succeeded, by the way.

00:47:07.480 I believe this is they've actually brought this story to the fore by trying to cover it up.

00:47:12.540 The fact that the press is trying to cover it up is a point in Donald Trump's favor.

00:47:16.700 It says to the people that the the communications industry and the Democrats it supports and the institutions it supports is against you and doesn't really care what you think.

00:47:27.140 And I think we also need to give Trump credit for a tactic that he used here, which is he didn't get into the exact precise way that the money went from Ukraine or from China or wherever.

00:47:37.620 He made this broad statement, which is, as Ben says, going to invite all of these fact checks.

00:47:42.300 Namely, he said, Joe Biden, your family made three and a half million bucks.

00:47:44.780 How did they do that? I think it's actually good to get the fact checks because it's going to elicit much more press.

00:47:51.580 The media were trying to ignore it to begin with.

00:47:53.320 It's going to elicit all this press and it's going to put them on the defensive because they're going to have to say, no, Biden didn't get the three and a half million.

00:47:59.180 His son got the three and a half million from then.

00:48:01.800 Any way you explain it, people are going to be exposed to more of the story, which in itself isn't is a very ugly story.

00:48:07.800 I will say one of the one other area where I thought that Trump really excelled, putting aside the Hunter Biden stuff for a second.

00:48:12.500 I thought that when he got to his anti-lockdown program, I thought that was very, very strong stuff and I thought it was deeply necessary.

00:48:19.760 So the first 15 minutes, which was all about Joe Biden lying that everybody died because of Trump.

00:48:23.540 And if there's an empty chair at your dinner table, it's because of Trump.

00:48:26.200 And if there's a bad man hiding in your closet with a knife, it's because of Trump.

00:48:29.940 And if you get cancer, it's because of Trump.

00:48:31.500 And if your dog crapped the carpet, it's because of Trump and all this.

00:48:33.880 You know, after after all that was done and Trump looked at him and he said, right, but you're Captain Lockdown over here.

00:48:40.100 And Biden was like, well, you know, I really am only going to lock down if it's what the science is like.

00:48:44.700 Well, I've got lots of people in the bureaucracy and, you know, Anthony Fauci is one of them.

00:48:47.820 But I'm not just going to listen to one guy if they say lockdown.

00:48:50.120 I thought that's that's good stuff.

00:48:52.520 I don't think most Americans are in the mood for further lockdown.

00:48:55.360 And the heavy bet that Democrats are placing right now is that people are continuing to be absolutely petrified of the virus.

00:49:01.820 And I got to tell you, I think in L.A. that's true.

00:49:04.420 So now I'm in Florida.

00:49:05.280 I don't think it's true.

00:49:06.220 I don't think it's true.

00:49:07.100 I think in a lot of swing states, people are not petrified of the virus.

00:49:09.500 I think that people are treating the virus with the appropriate level of risk.

00:49:12.920 I think people are generally out and about living their lives.

00:49:16.220 What I'm seeing here in South Florida, which, again, is hotly contested territory, I think Trump is going to win the state.

00:49:20.420 I think the reason that Trump is going to win the state is because there is there's enormous enthusiasm, particularly in the Hispanic community, actually, for Trump in the state of Florida.

00:49:30.160 But I think beyond that, people are not shutting down the way they do in California.

00:49:34.880 In California, people seem pretty sanguine about like, OK, so I'm never going to my business again.

00:49:39.240 OK, so Disneyland is just going to be closed forever.

00:49:41.360 Well, Disney World is open here and they haven't had massive infections.

00:49:43.700 All the schools are open here and they have not had massive infections.

00:49:46.100 In certain counties, they have mask mandates.

00:49:47.720 Most people are abiding by them, but there doesn't seem to be just this generalized level of mask shaming that you see in some of the heavy blue areas.

00:49:54.800 I think if there is a secret Trump vote out there that manifests beyond the polls, and this really is the question, right?

00:50:00.220 Is out of the polls so super wrong?

00:50:01.600 Is there this big hidden Trump vote?

00:50:03.160 If it's there, I think it is manifest in the number of people who are irritated by the overt level of government control that has been exercised by the Democrats with regard to lockdown.

00:50:12.300 And there are a lot of people out there who are going, listen, I'm OK with the masks.

00:50:15.280 It's like when Biden holds up the mask and he acts like it's the be all end all, you know what?

00:50:18.920 Fine.

00:50:19.180 I wear a mask when I'm I'm more pro mask than all you guys.

00:50:22.280 I'm you know, I wear a mask when I'm out in public and I'm near other people.

00:50:25.400 I think that it's a good idea to wear it when you're in close contact with other people.

00:50:28.180 I've been told this by people, including Scott Atlas, that when you're in close contact with other people, they should wear a mask.

00:50:32.500 But that doesn't mean shut down my life.

00:50:35.540 And if there's an uptick in a school, I don't think that means that you shut down the entire school.

00:50:39.140 And when you and when when Trump says, I will say Kristen Welker really blew it on one hour.

00:50:42.860 There was one line she said, and I smote my forehead, like physically smote it, which hurt.

00:50:48.100 And that was when he when Trump said young people are fine.

00:50:51.980 That is 100 percent true.

00:50:54.320 OK, young people are fine.

00:50:55.660 They are much more fine from this than they are from the flu.

00:50:57.480 There have been a grand total of last count as of yesterday, 74 Americans under the age of 15 who have died of covid out of several hundred thousand infections at this point.

00:51:06.560 Right. That is compared to some 470 Americans who died of flu in the last flu season under the age of 15.

00:51:12.240 And Trump said it's not particularly dangerous for young people.

00:51:14.960 And Kristen Welker said, well, yes, but they can get it and they can transmit it.

00:51:18.500 And it was like, OK, so they take measures to prevent them from transmitting it.

00:51:22.500 And and and and if the teachers are young, then that's OK.

00:51:27.060 And if the teachers are not so young, then you keep them out of the classroom.

00:51:29.340 And by the way, the evidence on transmission from kids tends to be that older kids transmit it and younger kids do not transmit it nearly as much.

00:51:36.240 And that's why you haven't seen massive outbreaks in school.

00:51:37.860 So I thought that was a very strong point for Trump.

00:51:39.840 And I was glad to see him argue that I thought he was shockingly good on minimum wage.

00:51:42.820 He actually understands that basic idea.

00:51:45.040 So there are a couple of moments where he actually said things.

00:51:47.400 And I thought, well, I didn't realize that he could articulate it that well.

00:51:49.940 So we've got the lovely Elisha beaming in, not from her normal closet, but beaming in from the Ronald Reagan Museum in beautiful Santa Barbara, California.

00:52:00.160 Elisha, you have some questions from our Daily Wire subscribers?

00:52:03.500 Absolutely.

00:52:04.100 The big question everybody wants to know is, did tonight's debate change anyone's minds?

00:52:08.400 And because of all the early voting, does it really matter?

00:52:11.980 Yeah.

00:52:12.140 So I'll take a shot at that.

00:52:13.580 I don't think that tonight's debate changed anyone's mind about who, about which worldview they would rather see emerge victorious in the election.

00:52:21.460 But I think, and as the guys were saying earlier, I didn't weigh in.

00:52:24.240 I think that it did change people's minds perhaps about whether or not they can vote for Donald Trump as a personal moral decision.

00:52:31.640 I think that one of the reasons that the last debate didn't hurt Trump overly is because people are pretty dug in in terms of the two camps at the moment.

00:52:39.140 But that still isn't great for Trump because being fully bought in to the conservative vision for the country still doesn't make it easy to vote for a guy with the personal failings that Trump has.

00:52:50.540 And that last debate was so difficult to watch for this reason.

00:52:55.560 It was so poisonous and turned people off.

00:52:57.860 I think this made you see Donald Trump in a different way, probably the best light that we've seen him in in any debate in the time that he's been in public life.

00:53:06.980 And and that it perhaps will give people the the ability to say, yeah, I can get behind that.

00:53:12.540 I can get behind that.

00:53:14.080 As far as the early vote, by the way, quick note on the early voting.

00:53:17.380 So there is a question as to whether the early voting is a reflection of new voters coming in or whether it's just banking the old voters, meaning maybe it's all the people who are already highly motivated to vote who are standing out there voting.

00:53:28.820 And they would have voted on Election Day.

00:53:30.000 Now they're just voting early because they can vote early.

00:53:31.960 So that that is unclear right now.

00:53:33.980 They're saying maybe 50 million people have already voted, which is insane.

00:53:36.680 First of all, it just shows the bullcrap that early voting is.

00:53:39.180 I mean, really, you should not be allowed to vote until Election Day unless you have some sort of physical incapacity to vote in person.

00:53:44.780 You should be in a line.

00:53:45.800 You should be voting Election Day.

00:53:46.880 And if you've got to wait a couple hours to do that.

00:53:48.640 Well, I'm sorry to break it to you, but that ain't the end of the world.

00:53:51.260 I'm sorry that treating it like the media.

00:53:54.220 Every time there's a long line, they're like it's voter suppression.

00:53:56.860 OK, seriously, it's voter suppression because there's a line because there's a line.

00:54:00.480 It's voter suppression.

00:54:02.080 Like last I checked, voter suppression was like people with hoses and dogs and clubs beating the living crap out of you because they don't want you to vote.

00:54:08.540 Not you had to wait in line while watching Netflix on your eye on your eye.

00:54:11.940 And when did the left decide it dislikes lines?

00:54:14.100 Every single policy that they come up with forces us to stand in line.

00:54:17.140 What is it?

00:54:17.620 What is it that Churchill said about about socialist Great Britain after the war?

00:54:22.420 He said it was cutopia.

00:54:25.880 Bread lines are good.

00:54:26.860 At the end of them, there is bread.

00:54:28.360 Yeah, exactly.

00:54:29.300 Alicia, what are people saying?

00:54:31.460 All right.

00:54:31.840 The other thing then is this is for everyone based on tonight and where the polling is.

00:54:36.700 I know you've talked about a little bit.

00:54:37.800 Obviously, Pennsylvania came up a lot because it's an important Rust Belt swing state.

00:54:41.820 Where do you guys think?

00:54:43.100 What are your election predictions as of now?

00:54:45.420 There is there is one important issue here.

00:54:48.400 I agree.

00:54:49.180 Generally, probably didn't sway too many people other than people who are a little bit more moderate Republicans who are now feel more comfortable to vote for Trump.

00:54:56.260 But this issue of I'm going to destroy the oil industry, which Trump really hit Biden on that, that is going to matter for some voters.

00:55:04.880 Now, how large an effect that's going to have, I'm not so sure.

00:55:07.400 But going after fossil fuels, going after natural gas or oil or or any of those industries that that could move some boats in Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania could decide the election.

00:55:16.660 Yeah. So here's here's my view of this.

00:55:19.740 And Kristen Soltz's Henderson, the pollster, sort of laid this out on my show today.

00:55:23.320 Basically, there are two sets of states that you need to watch on election night.

00:55:26.180 One is the Sun Belt states and the other is the Rust Belt states.

00:55:29.460 If Biden wins North Carolina, the election is essentially over early.

00:55:33.540 If Biden wins Florida, the election is essentially over early.

00:55:36.880 Those are the ones that are going to start to come in early because those are East Coast states.

00:55:40.140 Right. Pennsylvania will start to come in fairly early as well.

00:55:42.480 But you're probably this is what happened with Romney.

00:55:44.240 I remember when when North Carolina and Florida started to move against Romney, it was like, oh, OK, this is going to be it's going to be over fairly early, even though I think Romney ended up pulling out North Carolina narrowly.

00:55:53.900 Once he lost Florida, it was dead over.

00:55:55.340 So Trump needs to win the following states.

00:55:57.740 He needs to win Arizona.

00:55:59.020 He needs to win Florida.

00:56:00.000 He needs to win North Carolina.

00:56:01.780 And then he needs to win one of the following three states, the Rust Belt states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.

00:56:06.540 Now, famously, Hillary Clinton had built up that blue firewall.

00:56:09.080 So the question right now really in my mind comes down to Pennsylvania.

00:56:12.620 I think the entire election may hinge on Pennsylvania, which is why Trump is going to go full broke on the he's banning fracking.

00:56:18.800 He's getting rid of the oil industry.

00:56:20.660 He's got to win Pennsylvania.

00:56:21.800 If he if he doesn't win Pennsylvania, it is basically over because the chances that he loses Pennsylvania and Michigan, but somehow pulls out Wisconsin.

00:56:28.120 I think that's going to be very difficult for him.

00:56:31.140 I think there's a good shot that, as I say, I think that he's going to win Florida.

00:56:34.360 Florida tends to overperform for Republicans.

00:56:35.880 That's why DeSantis is governor here instead of the the meth addict in a hotel room with the with the gay porn star guy, Andrew Gillum.

00:56:44.260 But I'm I think North Carolina will trend red.

00:56:47.800 I think that that that Rust Belt, which nobody expected him to win last time, it's going to be it's going to be harder for him.

00:56:53.560 And it's really going to come down to Pennsylvania in the main.

00:56:55.860 And so that that's why that last the thing you mentioned there, Michael, is the thing.

00:56:59.360 I mean, if he's able to really hone in on the fracking and the he's threatening your job and he's threatening your future, that that's going to have to be the ballgame for him because that's where he's going to have to put his chips.

00:57:08.900 This one other narrative here.

00:57:10.740 I don't know what's going to happen.

00:57:12.220 I got to be absolutely honest.

00:57:13.740 I'm not a gambling man in general, but I will put a flutter on something.

00:57:17.140 I wouldn't put a nickel on this race.

00:57:18.900 I do not know who's going to win.

00:57:21.200 I'm not a person who dismisses polls.

00:57:24.060 I don't think the pollsters are are trying to deceive us or anything like this.

00:57:28.600 And they've been fairly accurate in in in the midterms.

00:57:32.880 They were fairly accurate, actually, in some ways in the Hillary Clinton Trump election.

00:57:39.040 But something is really discordant in what I'm seeing.

00:57:44.600 I am seeing Donald Trump go out there and speak to thousands of people who show up.

00:57:49.420 I'm seeing Joe Biden go out and speak to nobody.

00:57:51.560 And I'm seeing people I'm seeing people who say, you know, I didn't vote like one is Ben Shapiro, who I didn't vote for Trump before.

00:57:58.500 I'm going to Trump vote for Trump now.

00:58:00.340 I'm not seeing anybody who said I voted for Trump before, but I'm going to vote for Biden now.

00:58:04.700 Something is wrong.

00:58:05.560 And the move in identification and people who identify as Republicans, which is something like between five and eight points, a shift from people who identified as Democrats to identifying as Republicans.

00:58:18.540 There is another narrative here where Trump wins by a landslide.

00:58:22.740 I'm not saying that's going to happen.

00:58:24.120 I really don't know what's going to happen.

00:58:25.780 But there is something terribly wrong.

00:58:27.840 So discordant between the polls and what I'm seeing with my own eyes.

00:58:30.640 I agree with you.

00:58:31.640 Trump could win 49 states or lose 49 states, or he could win by three votes in Wisconsin and think it's litigated for 20 years.

00:58:37.780 Or Joe Biden could die of COVID-19 next Tuesday.

00:58:40.920 It's 2020.

00:58:41.940 It's 2020.

00:58:42.720 And then we'd have a constitutional crisis because legitimately the Constitution does not answer the question of what happens in an election in which one of the candidates dies.

00:58:51.760 You could say, oh, it'll be then Kamala wins.

00:58:54.900 That's not actually how it works.

00:58:56.560 All of that to say, I agree with you, Drew.

00:58:59.660 When you read that it's Biden 10, Biden 14, that 56 percent of people say Trump doesn't deserve a second term, all these numbers that we keep seeing, obviously very discouraging.

00:59:10.680 When you drive around, you don't see Biden flags and you don't see Biden rallies when the NBA finals are down 70 percent from the numbers that they had just one year ago.

00:59:24.720 Now, you would probably think the numbers might even tick up because nobody's been able to go to games in person.

00:59:30.620 TV's all you have.

00:59:31.900 That's obviously a political activity that's happening.

00:59:35.600 There are there are these strange signs that make you think it is actually possible that that are that our accounting system is so broken either by intent or by simply not changing with the times that we're missing.

00:59:52.040 And we're just not going to know that until election night.

00:59:55.340 And to Ben's point, we could know it one hour in.

00:59:58.300 If if Florida drops blue, you know, one, not even an hour, 15 minutes after the polls close on the East Coast, right, then all of it was right.

01:00:07.540 All of it was true.

01:00:09.260 If if the night goes well for Donald Trump, there is going to be there's going to need to be a reckoning in the way that we approach these questions, which which was not true in 2016.

01:00:18.840 The polls were not radically wrong in 2016.

01:00:21.240 But if Donald Trump has a big night on election night, the polls will have been actually fundamentally wrong.

01:00:27.700 And by the way, this is something that the pollsters say and they point this out is that the polls were wrong in Romney's direction in 2012.

01:00:34.340 Right. So they were wrong against Donald Trump in 2016.

01:00:36.820 They were wrong in Romney's direction in 20 in 2012.

01:00:39.580 Romney is supposed to be very competitive in Ohio.

01:00:41.340 Right. He was supposed to be very competitive in Pennsylvania.

01:00:43.240 He held this big rally in the last days.

01:00:45.600 And the polls were saying it was super close.

01:00:47.060 And then he just got absolutely blown out in both Ohio and Pennsylvania.

01:00:51.020 So, I mean, at some point we're going to have to if they're wrong again, at some point, all the pollsters have to learn to code because this is just.

01:00:57.580 It's too wild.

01:00:58.480 The one the one area where I will say that I think the debate could matter that nobody's actually talking about is it's not just about comfort level with voting for Trump.

01:01:05.360 It's about Republicans showing up to the polls generally to vote for Senate candidates, which may be the most important thing that happens, because if the Republicans lose the Senate and Biden is elected, prepare for Armageddon.

01:01:14.600 I mean, it's just going to be a disaster in every possible way.

01:01:17.320 And there are a thousand close races.

01:01:19.020 Right.

01:01:19.420 Maine is a close race.

01:01:20.620 North Carolina is a close race.

01:01:21.920 Michigan is a close race.

01:01:23.620 We've got close races in in two close races in Georgia.

01:01:26.820 We've got close races basically across the board in Montana, in Colorado, in Arizona.

01:01:32.900 A lot of Republicans are up for reelection in Iowa.

01:01:36.900 It's a bad map for Republicans in the Senate.

01:01:38.840 It's a terrible map for Republicans in the Senate.

01:01:41.100 And all of this stuff, all those races are pretty close.

01:01:43.400 So even if Trump is outside the margin of error in some of those states, if he ticks up the polls just a little bit for the Senate candidate, then he will have done a world of good for the Republican Party generally.

01:01:53.100 Yeah, that's absolutely right.

01:01:54.300 Alicia, I want to get a few more questions in from our DailyWire.com subscribers.

01:01:58.260 Absolutely.

01:01:58.860 Some all-access members, you guys just talked about the Senate there.

01:02:01.360 That was a question that was brought up.

01:02:03.060 Of course, Trump talked about Republicans regaining Congress.

01:02:06.720 Do you guys think that that's even plausible?

01:02:08.900 No.

01:02:10.260 It's unlikely.

01:02:11.400 I mean, anything's possible, but it's not likely.

01:02:13.040 Tell us how you really feel.

01:02:14.040 No, this is not possible.

01:02:15.380 It's not possible.

01:02:16.220 This I will put money on.

01:02:17.140 There is no way on planet Earth.

01:02:19.320 By the way, I mean, nobody's talking about this, but one of the real disasters for Republicans, if it does occur, will be something nobody has talked about yet.

01:02:25.580 And that is the regaining of state legislatures and governorships by the Democrats, because in 2020 is redistricting and census, right?

01:02:32.340 I mean, they could fundamentally reshape how Congress is elected and take the House away from Republicans for 10 years based on the redistricting and the census.

01:02:39.700 So you picked a bad time to quit sniffing glue here.

01:02:44.000 I mean, it turns out to be a bad year.

01:02:45.440 Any year ending in zero is a very, very bad time for the Republican Party to have a rough year.

01:02:49.460 Along those lines, do you guys think that there will be an increased interest in the removal of the Electoral College?

01:02:57.620 Only if Trump wins.

01:03:00.220 I think either way.

01:03:02.100 I think if the Democrats win, actually, that's when they'll push it forward.

01:03:06.440 It is an amazing thing that they don't like the First Amendment.

01:03:09.760 They don't like the Second Amendment.

01:03:11.040 They don't like the Electoral College.

01:03:12.400 And they want to pack the court because Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution.

01:03:15.600 I do think there is this movement to democratize everything, which, you know, that's the way they use that term.

01:03:23.960 I don't think that's really what democracy would call for.

01:03:26.440 But they want to erode all of these safeguards that are in our Constitution and move to this much more egalitarian type of system.

01:03:32.200 The one thing impeding this, though, and it's what I think has preserved the Electoral College over the years,

01:03:37.000 is that whoever wins, if they make the argument that the Electoral College is illegitimate somehow,

01:03:43.080 then they're saying that their own victory is illegitimate because the Electoral College elects the president.

01:03:47.940 So I think that is one sort of pushing on the brakes toward abolishing the Electoral College.

01:03:54.660 But probably in the long run, if we continue down this more egalitarian path.

01:03:57.500 We lose the Electoral College not to a national election.

01:04:00.640 It would require an amendment to the Constitution, which they can't pull off.

01:04:05.280 We're going to lose the Electoral College when we start losing more and more state houses

01:04:08.280 because the movement that's afoot where the Electoral College is concerned is actually a nullification movement at the state level

01:04:14.780 where people are just essentially deciding as state governments that whoever wins the majority nationally

01:04:21.400 will get all of the so-called national popular vote, which does not exist.

01:04:26.940 There is not a national election for president in this country.

01:04:29.520 But they've made up this term, the national popular vote,

01:04:31.900 and they're saying whoever wins it gets all of our electors, no matter who won, in our actual state.

01:04:37.900 And many states have already passed this.

01:04:40.100 And so I actually think that that's what happens to the Electoral College.

01:04:42.800 I agree with that.

01:04:43.520 There's a backdoor way of doing it also where they just proportionally split it,

01:04:47.300 where instead of it being a winner-take-all for the electors,

01:04:49.300 instead they proportionally split it by vote.

01:04:51.180 And you can see that happening for sure.

01:04:52.860 By the way, it is worth noting that the Democrats pushing for the quote-unquote most democratic system,

01:04:57.700 it would not be the most democratic system, right?

01:04:59.240 It would still be a two-party system.

01:05:01.100 If you're going to push for, quote-unquote, pure democracy,

01:05:04.220 then basically you have to, at that point, you need a parliamentarian system

01:05:07.920 so that coalitional politics are actually required.

01:05:10.080 Because otherwise, you literally have a 51% party cramming down on the other 49% of the population

01:05:15.680 anything they damn want.

01:05:16.820 And that is just, that's pure mob rule through popular vote, which, I mean, if they want that,

01:05:22.520 it's amazing how fast people, it is truly amazing how fast people don't remember,

01:05:27.720 how fast they forget history.

01:05:29.340 I mean, it was pure majoritarian mob rule in states that allowed for Jim Crow.

01:05:33.060 I mean, that is what was happening.

01:05:34.240 Yeah, and they also don't know what actually goes on in parliamentarian systems.

01:05:39.060 It's funny, when you're an American, people will often, when they're unhappy with the results

01:05:42.780 of an election, come to you and say, we've got to get rid of this two-party system.

01:05:45.940 We need a third party to rise.

01:05:47.580 The two-party system's broken.

01:05:48.840 The two-party system's flawed.

01:05:50.500 The two-party system makes us radical.

01:05:52.220 But the truth is, the two-party system defeats radicalization.

01:05:56.580 It homogenizes all political beliefs.

01:05:58.720 If America had a parliamentary system with numerous parties, there would be actual Nazis

01:06:05.300 in our Congress.

01:06:07.580 Actual Nazis, like swastika-waving actual genuine Nazis.

01:06:11.920 And when they got elected the first time, there'd be three of them or four of them,

01:06:15.760 and we'd all be kind of outraged and ashamed, and we'd be embarrassed.

01:06:18.920 But someone would have to make coalition with them eventually, because somebody, in order

01:06:23.640 to get to that 51%, to get to that governing majority, they'd have 49.5%, and they've just

01:06:29.700 got to find somebody to agree with them, that 1.5% more to give them the majority, and they'll

01:06:33.760 go make a deal with the devil, literally, and make a deal with the Nazis.

01:06:36.660 And then the next election after that, you'd have 48 Nazis get elected to parliament, because

01:06:41.000 now it's been mainstreamed.

01:06:42.380 Now, instead of taking people who might drift over toward those radical views and pulling

01:06:47.660 them into the mainstream, you instead validate those radical views and make it a mainstream

01:06:52.340 idea to be a radical, and that's why, when you go to Europe, there are major communist

01:06:57.480 factions in every parliament and every Western democracy in Europe.

01:07:01.380 There are genuine white supremacist movements that have parliamentary representation in almost

01:07:07.540 every parliament in Europe.

01:07:09.640 I mean, parliamentary systems swing radically, and they also, and this is why people like Ruth

01:07:18.380 Bader Ginsburg, like them, they get a lot more done, because they essentially grant

01:07:23.080 ultimate power to the prime minister during the prime minister's tenure, because it would

01:07:28.780 be like if every time you elected a president, he got the Senate and the House and the Supreme

01:07:32.780 Court all to agree with him at the same time, because it requires that confidence in the

01:07:37.620 prime minister in order for him to become prime minister.

01:07:39.700 And so they're very effective at getting things done.

01:07:42.440 But America's great success is in that we don't let politicians do very much.

01:07:47.180 You know, we all get frustrated, oh, the government doesn't do enough.

01:07:49.480 It doesn't, it does plenty.

01:07:51.300 And it's, it would be even better if it did half as much.

01:07:54.000 Like, you want to know why Texas is so successful?

01:07:56.260 We only let the legislature get together once every two years.

01:07:59.100 They can only do half as much bullcrap as the state houses in most other states.

01:08:03.460 So I really think this move toward democracy, Michael, or democratic, you know, true democratic

01:08:09.820 representation is a horrible idea, would do terrible, it would destroy everything that's

01:08:14.980 made America what America is.

01:08:17.700 Alicia, we're going to take one more question.

01:08:19.900 Awesome.

01:08:20.540 Last question is, can a president really mandate a mask requirement until 2022?

01:08:26.680 Nope.

01:08:28.020 I mean, you know, yes and no, right?

01:08:30.280 We're living under the dictatorship of the lab coats right now.

01:08:32.980 We're apparently we've farmed out all of our governance to like Fauci and formerly Dr.

01:08:37.260 Scarf, although she seems to have left the scene.

01:08:39.280 So the answer is no.

01:08:40.940 I mean, certainly in a constitutional system, you can't do that.

01:08:42.900 But because we net, we now are governed by these bureaucrats much more so there, there

01:08:47.160 is, there is a world in which they can exert much greater control than probably our founding

01:08:51.800 fathers would have expected.

01:08:52.820 Yeah.

01:08:53.280 Good luck.

01:08:53.720 I won't do it.

01:08:54.300 So now what happens to your plan?

01:08:55.700 This is how all left-wing plans are.

01:08:57.320 All left-wing plans say, if everyone would do everything that I want all the time,

01:09:02.520 then I would get my preferred result.

01:09:04.660 And the problem with their system is that there's guys like me who say, well, I won't

01:09:08.380 do it.

01:09:08.720 So now your whole frickin' plan just collapsed.

01:09:10.740 What are you going to do about it?

01:09:11.760 And ultimately what they do about it is they put us in gulags so that people like me can't

01:09:15.540 get in the way of their utopia.

01:09:16.640 And then it turns out their ideas don't work anyway.

01:09:19.140 But the first problem with their idea is that we won't all do it.

01:09:22.740 The second problem with their idea is after they kill all of us off, the idea is actually

01:09:26.440 revealed to be absolute crap.

01:09:29.140 But no, the president doesn't have that kind of power.

01:09:30.840 I want to thank everyone for tuning in tonight.

01:09:33.120 It was a long night, but it was, I think, on the whole, a very good night for conservatism,

01:09:38.680 a very good night for the president.

01:09:40.200 What will come of it?

01:09:41.360 We'll know in about two weeks' time.

01:09:43.440 Thanks, everybody.

01:09:43.840 Daily Wire Backstage is produced by Robert Sterling.

01:09:54.300 Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring.

01:09:56.740 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

01:09:58.980 Our assistant director is Pavel Wadowski and our technical producer, Austin Stevens.

01:10:03.180 Editing is by Jim Nickel.

01:10:04.900 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.

01:10:06.480 And our audio assistant is Robin Fenderson.

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01:10:10.660 And hair and makeup is by Nika Geneva.

01:10:12.440 Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production.

01:10:15.440 Copyright Daily Wire 2020.

The Michael Knowles Show - October 23, 2020

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