Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles discuss the moon landing, the Democratic response to President Trump's tweet about it, and the new Teen Girl Squad video celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the moon.
00:06:27.740I feel the necessity to break down behind the scenes for just a moment how this all went down after Jeremy came up with his brilliant idea.
00:06:35.740Okay, so the way this went down is that Jeremy talked about this video, and we thought to ourselves, Media Matters will watch this show.
00:06:41.740And because Media Matters will watch this show, this means that we have to take precautions.
00:06:45.740So for example, we will play the original cartoon so that people know that this is a parody of the original cartoon.
00:06:51.740A shot-for-shot parody of the original cartoon.
00:06:55.740Jeremy Boring, the God King, does not actually believe that Ilhan Omar was, quote-unquote, concentration camped in her gender by the President of the United States, a robot.
00:09:03.740But if you were an adult, you might think about, you know, adult things like the fact that one day you're gonna die.
00:09:08.740Now, one thing we did today is we put out the pictures of what we'd all look like on the face app.
00:09:12.740And some of us are closer to death than others.
00:09:14.740And what that means is that Jeremy looked pretty old, I look pretty old, and those look decrepit because he's younger than all of us right now.
00:11:01.740Well, I think that we should talk about Apollo to begin with because this week our friend Bill Whittle launched a new podcast about Apollo 11 called Apollo 11, What We Saw,
00:11:12.740to commemorate the 50th anniversary of, people sometimes call it mankind's greatest achievement.
00:11:17.740I don't think it's mankind's greatest achievement, but it is mankind's greatest adventure, mankind's greatest sort of achievement of the will.
00:11:25.740And it happened 50 years ago, the Saturn V took off 50 years ago yesterday, and the landing itself will have taken place this weekend.
00:11:33.740And one of the amazing things as you watch Bill recount this, you can pick this up anywhere where you can find a podcast, right?
00:11:45.740And the story is so riveting because you think you know the story, especially for those of us who weren't already old when it happened in 69.
00:11:54.740The amount of detail and the amount of care that Bill takes in telling the story, the personal side of the story and the technological, I think is really fascinating.
00:12:02.740And it brings up this question, I don't recall if we've ever talked about this question on the show.
00:12:08.740Why do people subscribe, especially on the right?
00:12:12.740There's actually a tendency toward this kind of thinking on the right to conspiracy theories.
00:12:17.740You know, there are more people today who believe that mankind never stepped foot on the moon than there were a year ago, more than the year before that.
00:12:25.740Every year since 1969, the number of people who doubt the event has increased.
00:12:32.740I figured the three of you would have some theories about it as well.
00:12:35.740I think it's an interesting conversation because of, you know, exactly the moment that we're commemorating right now.
00:12:40.740But I think it's an important conversation as well because a lot of our audience, obviously young, male, conservative leaning right of center, they're on the internet.
00:12:50.740And it is very easy to find yourself tripping down a trail.
00:12:54.740These guys will make very compelling cases for why things like the moon landing couldn't have and therefore did not happen.
00:13:07.740But there's this phenomenon that I call the preponderance of false evidence.
00:13:13.740And when you talk to people who buy into one of these conspiracy theories, they'll say, you know, why are there two shadows on the moon when there's only one light source, the sun?
00:13:22.740And you say, well, there's two light sources, the moon.
00:13:24.740And they'll say, aha, but the moon doesn't generate light.
00:13:26.740Well, no, but the moon reflects so much light that you can read a book at night 200,000 miles away on Earth on a full moon night.
00:13:34.740That's a lot of light to create shadow on the moon.
00:13:36.740And then they'll pause for just a second because they never considered that there are actually two light sources.
00:13:40.740And they'll say, why does the flag wave on the moon if there's no?
00:13:44.740And you realize that they've been duped, not by a single piece of evidence, but by the preponderance of false evidence.
00:13:52.740And because there's so much that isn't true, pointing out individual instances of truth isn't enough to change their thinking.
00:13:59.740And if you knock down too many of the lies that people believe in a row, they want to abandon the conversation altogether because you're expecting them to accept too many of their own mistakes in their process of logic.
00:14:13.740I think that's part of what motivates it on a very technical level, but on a philosophical level, what is it?
00:14:18.740I think you have a few theories on this, which I'll let you go into because you say them better.
00:14:23.740But I think one reason conservatives and right-wingers in particular are attracted to these ideas is it's one of conservatives' best attributes being turned against them, which is that we're skeptical of most of what we see in the mainstream.
00:14:38.740We are contrarian. If you're a conservative in 2019 America, you're pretty contrarian against the pop culture.
00:14:46.740You are distrustful of the government. You're distrustful of what your history teachers tell you.
00:14:50.740You are distrustful of what you read on the Coke can. And so you couldn't possibly, this fantastic story, this great achievement of mankind, you just don't believe it could happen.
00:15:01.740And so you're attracted to every single conspiracy theory, whether it's that we couldn't have survived the Van Allen radiation belt.
00:15:08.740We couldn't, the flag waved. We filmed it in Culver City right by my old apartment.
00:15:12.740We, where you, you just, it doesn't matter which theory gets you to that destination, even if the theories contradict each other.
00:15:32.740So there are the, there are the lies that we're told in the media that we all know are lies and that we can evidence are lies.
00:15:37.740The next step is the things about which we are skeptical, that we strongly suspect are lies, but which we can't prove are lies.
00:15:44.740And then there's the third, which are things that aren't lies and we can actually prove they're true, but we approach them with that same skepticism from the very beginning.
00:15:53.740And so we don't give credence to the actual evidence when it's.
00:15:57.740I, I, I take issue with the conservative part of this though. I mean, the thing that always strikes me about conspiracy theories is how unnecessary most of them are.
00:16:05.740If, if some, if Ben were to disappear, it would be fair to construct a conspiracy theory. What, what happened to Ben, you know? But that, although who wouldn't get rid of him?
00:16:13.740But, I mean, but, but, but most conspiracy theories, like Islamists say we're going to take down the World Trade Center.
00:16:20.740They take down the World Trade Center.
00:17:12.740It destroyed all the things that the left had been living with.
00:17:15.740So I think it's whose, uh, ox gets gored.
00:17:17.740With the moon, it's a little strange because what I think that, that people don't want to change their minds about is that we have been in decline.
00:18:34.740So there is this attempt to decry the history of the United States as inherently bad.
00:18:41.740So even if you accept that good things happened, they were the product of bad things, which means they weren't actually good things in the first place.
00:18:47.740And you're starting to see that merge with what is not really a conspiracy, but just a historical inaccuracy.
00:18:52.740The left going through and taking one by one American symbols and turning them into symbols of white supremacy.
00:18:58.740So you saw this fake story that went around from Yahoo News today about how Chris Pratt was wearing a don't tread on me T-shirt.
00:19:05.740You know, the flag that was the first symbol of the U.S. Navy and that has flown at everything from Metallica concerts to Second Amendment rallies.
00:19:12.740And the and the idea was that he had this was a white supremacist symbol.
00:19:16.740We know that the Betsy Ross flag in the last two weeks became a white supremacist symbol from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
00:19:21.740Why? Because they went on Gab and there were like three trolls who said, you know, it'd be hilarious if we take this symbol like the OK symbol.
00:19:28.740And we say the OK symbol or the three point symbol is actually white power because WP, see how it works.
00:19:33.740And then the entire left goes, wow, it's probably true.
00:19:37.740And the question isn't why the white supremacists do that. They do that for attention.
00:19:41.740They do that because they're trying to hijack the symbols.
00:19:43.740They've been doing that, of course, going all the way back to the American Nazi Party, flying American flags with giant pictures of George Washington in Madison Square Garden.
00:19:50.740The question is, why did the American left decide to go along with this?
00:19:54.740And the answer is because their agenda is basically the same, which is to take all of the aspects of American history and paint them with the worst possible brush in the same way that white supremacists are doing.
00:20:02.740So white supremacists seize the symbol. A normal person would go, no, I'm sorry, that's BS.
00:20:06.740This is not a white supremacist symbol. You guys are a joke.
00:20:08.740Instead, the left goes, maybe you're right. Maybe it was a symbol of white supremacy.
00:20:13.740And so you're seeing that with their take on the moon landing now, which is sure the moon landing happened, but was it really that great?
00:20:18.740I mean, it was the product of society in which segregation had only recently been banished.
00:20:23.740It was the product of society where men were disproportionately staffing NASA.
00:20:27.740Could it really have been that awesome if all that happened?
00:20:30.740And I said, well, you're missing the actual news part of us landing on the moon.
00:21:54.740So if, if, you know, the, the, the obvious example is if, if one runner is fast and one runner is slow, there's only one way you can get them to be, to run the same.
00:22:03.740That's to make the fast guy slow, right?
00:22:05.740So they have to tear down what they see as all the, as all the spikes of human accomplishment because they don't like who accomplished them.
00:22:12.740And they don't like that they were accomplished by only some people.
00:22:45.740And they put a man on the moon and they hate that we are in decline.
00:22:48.740That we actually, maybe we're not so perfect.
00:22:51.740Maybe we can't judge and hold in moral opprobrium every past person in history.
00:22:56.740Well, but this is our, the accomplishment of their age was putting man on the moon, splitting the atoms, saving the West from Nazism and from Imperial Japanese fanaticism.
00:23:04.740And by the way, destroying segregation in the United States.
00:23:19.740And it is quite an accomplishment considering the morals of our generation.
00:23:22.740But it really is, it is true though that everything they have, everything that they fight for, everything that they believe in, was created by the people who came before them.
00:23:32.740You think just a little bit of gratitude, a little bit.
00:23:35.740Well, Kate Winslet said, Kate Winslet said this week.
00:23:37.740And by Democrats, I mean mostly by Democrats, it was JFK's mission.
00:25:29.740And I never talk about the fact, I will right now, I never talk about the fact on my show that when I grew up, we were like middle, middle class.
00:25:36.740And when I say middle, middle class, I mean we had a 1,100 square foot house in Burbank with four kids in the house and one bathroom.
00:25:42.740And I shared a room with my three younger sisters.
00:25:44.740And my parents worked their asses off and they paid so that we could eventually not go to public school and I could start going to private school.
00:25:51.740Even then it was only for a couple of years at a time.
00:26:00.740You know, when I was in England and I was among all the mystery writers, you know, there was a big, big controversy about P.D. James, the great, one of the great ladies of British mysteries,
00:26:09.740who said I like to write about the middle class basically because they have more moral choices.
00:26:13.740So it makes them for a more interesting story.
00:26:15.740And they started calling her all kinds of unrepeatable names.
00:26:18.740And I was on a panel once, I said this is P.D. James.
00:26:20.740She underwrites your industry with her success.
00:26:23.740The least you could do is listen to what she's saying.
00:26:25.740The people in poverty don't have as much moral leeway as you do, as you get wealthier.
00:26:31.740That is why societies, as they get wealthier, get more moral.
00:26:34.740They become, they start to think about more things because they have more choices.
00:26:37.740All of that is built by the people who come before us and all of it should inspire gratitude.
00:26:43.740There's also this idea, and it actually takes some, you find it in religious settings quite often, where not only is poverty virtuous, which is obviously an evil thing to say, but sort of asceticism generally is virtuous.
00:26:57.740It occurred to me the other day that it's actually just the reverse side of the same coin of there's a belief that the purpose of religion is to bring order to chaos.
00:27:08.740And so the Bible thumping, rule of Biden, don't look left, don't look right, graceless, puritanical religious person believes that the-
00:27:50.740All the chaos can happen all around me, but I'm contributing to the chaos on behalf of God through not pursuing anything, sitting under the eucalyptus tree and contemplating my navel.
00:28:01.740And it occurs to me that the reality of God is that if there is a God, he must surely be the God of what is, not the God of what could have been or what might be.
00:28:18.740So what God wants from us is not that we stop the energy in the world and not that we not participate in the energy in the world, but that we trust that he is guiding the energies of the world.
00:28:28.740Maybe we try to align ourself with his chosen direction for the energies of the world, but we could have theological debate about the exact relationship that we're supposed to have with him.
00:28:55.740Well, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing that they did was protect our right to share our ideas, which it turns out may not have been a good idea given what we're doing here tonight.
00:29:03.740Without limitation by the government, that's the First Amendment, but then they created the Second Amendment so we could protect the First Amendment and, indeed, all the other amendments.
00:29:09.740All of us in the room here are gun owners.
00:29:11.740All of us not only want to protect our rights, but also want to protect our safety.
00:29:14.740Believe it or not, I think all of us in the room have gotten death threats.
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00:29:45.740The people at BCM assume that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, a law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas.
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00:33:54.740You know, one of the things that really pains me is whenever anybody in a debate, in a political debate, a political setting, starts talking about space, they sound nuts.
00:34:02.740And I remember listening to Dan Aykroyd, who is a nutty comedian actor.
00:34:07.740But I remember years ago saying, you know, we've got to get off this planet.
00:34:37.740But at the same time, if we hadn't had to do it in such a hurry, it might have happened through private industry.
00:34:42.740Well, there's a second piece to this, which is the motive of the government went from defeating the Soviet Union to working with the Soviet Union.
00:34:52.740When they originally built, were conceiving of the space station, the ISS, what became the ISS, they wanted a space station that would make it easier to mount missions to the moon and beyond.
00:35:06.740A place where you could go up to the station, then you could take off from the station and go further out into the solar system.
00:35:12.740But then they decided that it needed to be an international space station and the Russians were going to kick in like three cents on the dollar.
00:35:19.740And what they came up with was because Russia is a northern hemisphere country and all their holdings were very far north, Russia could not get to an orbit that would allow for a station from which you could proceed out to the moon and other places in the solar system.
00:35:38.740And so the entire reason they designed the station was so that we could go back to the moon much more economically so that we could go to Mars, so we could go to Saturn by 70 or whatever, they had all these ideas, right?
00:35:49.740So we want to build a station so that we can go back to the moon and Mars.
00:36:03.740Literally, for 30 years after that, the only purpose of the manned space component of NASA was basically so that we could build something together with the Russians.
00:36:13.740So we designed the space shuttle to build the space station so that the space shuttle would have a place to go.
00:36:21.740Well, this is like during the Obama administration.
00:36:22.740There were those news stories that the mission of NASA had become to flatter Muslims about their own scientific histories or something to that effect.
00:42:31.740So for those who don't recall, there is a World of Warcraft meme where there are a bunch of people and they are all sitting around and they are playing.
00:42:37.740They are making a plan to invade a particular room.
00:42:39.740And Leroy Jenkins is a character in World of Warcraft and he has gone out to make himself in the microwave some chicken.
00:42:45.740And he comes back and they are making the plan and he simply sits down in his controller and charges directly into the line of fire while screaming, Leroy Jenkins.
00:42:56.740President Leroy Jenkins decided over the weekend, you know what would be a great idea?
00:43:00.740AOC and Nancy Pelosi are beating the crap out of each other.
00:43:04.740I should go in there and just say something dumb.
00:43:07.740Like something as dumb and offensive as I can think of like on the spur of the moment, like right now.
00:43:11.740I don't know. I'll say that like all the progressive Congresswomen come from countries that suck and that they should go back to those countries that suck.
00:47:17.740I think that there is, to be intellectually honest, an argument that the tweet was racist.
00:47:23.740And the intellectually honest argument is that he said something clearly xenophobic, go back to your country, to a bunch of people, including people who were born here in the United States.
00:47:34.740The question is, if there had been a white member of the Justice Democrats, which of course there is not, would he have said the exact same thing?
00:47:39.740Or is he saying that because he's assuming they're all foreigners because they are brown in color?
00:47:43.740And we don't know the answer to that question.
00:47:44.740We don't know the answer, but I think people have suspicions one way or another.
00:47:47.740I think people on the right suspect he wouldn't have said it.
00:47:50.740And people on the right, I mean, he would have said it anyway because he says things.
00:47:53.740And people on the left suspect he only would have said it because it's about a bunch of brown people, because they do this with everything he says.
00:47:58.740Whenever he attacks a black person, for the left, it's because they're black.
00:48:01.740For the right, it's like, no, he attacks everyone.
00:48:03.740Have you met any Republican he has attacked?
00:48:07.740But the problem with all of this, obviously, is that he doesn't have to do that in order to achieve the, if you believe that there is any even gut level strategy to it, he doesn't have to do that to achieve that response, right?
00:48:20.740I mean, all he had to do was just dump on Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi in the second way he did it.
00:48:25.740And Nancy Pelosi would have rushed to the show.
00:48:28.740There's no question he made a mistake.
00:48:29.740Compare where we are a week ago to where we are today.
00:48:32.740I mean, this is why I think we all grant what he said was factually untrue, and it was an unfair attack to say, at least it was unfair for three of them, for three of the four that he was almost certainly alluding to.
00:48:44.740They're not going to go back to their other country.
00:48:45.740So a week ago, we have AOC, we have the whole squad feuding with Nancy Pelosi, and that's really enjoyable.
00:48:51.740Also a week ago, you had AOC's approval at, what, 22 percent?
00:48:54.740You had Ilhan Omar's approval at 9 percent, which is why Nancy Pelosi was jumping on them at that moment, because they look very politically weak.
00:49:01.740Among white, non-college educated voters, by the way.
00:49:51.740Why did Pelosi, why did Pelosi go out there and say, yes, he's a racist, she's...
00:49:55.740They're all talking about what a racist he is, is so that they don't have to do the thing, which is call for impeachment.
00:50:00.740They're saying that America's like Nazi Germany, that Trump is running concentration camps, Trump is Hitler, but they're not going to impeach?
00:50:07.740Until today, Al Green, the congressman, not the singer, makes moves to impeach the president, which is a fabulous position for conservatives to be in.
00:50:16.740It's a very difficult position for Nancy Pelosi.
00:50:18.740She's tried to avoid it now for over two years.
00:50:20.740It just seems to me, sure, more people are going to call Trump a racist, and they can point to a stupid tweet, or a stupid part of a tweet that was untrue, but it seems tactically we're in a better position today than we were...
00:51:04.740If you just let the Democrats burn themselves down, you're in good shape.
00:51:07.740Would they have rallied around the squad if not for this?
00:51:10.740Yes, because they would have to rally around the squad at some point because Trump was going to attack them at some point, just not in the dumbest possible way.
00:51:16.740Can we distinguish between the fact that Donald Trump is very good at picking his opponents and Donald Trump also then tries to club them with a rubber mallet?
00:51:23.740Like he like he he is very good at picking his enemy that he's great at.
00:51:28.740And then half the time his attacks are are done well and they kind of hit correctly.
00:51:35.740And then half the time he's just like a wild man fighting you.
00:51:39.740OK, there's the wild guy in your class and you don't want to fight him because he's crazy and you never know he's going to pull a switchblade or is going to pull like a rubber doll.
00:51:46.740You just don't know what it's going to be.
00:51:50.740But sometimes he does pull a rubber doll.
00:51:51.740OK, and the fact is that his attack on this group, he could have made an attack on the group that wasn't idiotic and that didn't border on racism.
00:51:58.740Or he could have done all those things.
00:55:57.740Today, this afternoon, she launched her first squad initiative of the new world.
00:56:04.740And her first squad initiative was, I'm going to the Palestinian territories where I'm going to do a propaganda effort on behalf of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, both terrorist entities.
00:56:13.740And I'm also going to push forward the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement against Israel, which has been declared anti-Semitic by, wait for it, Nancy Pelosi five weeks ago at AIPAC.
00:58:31.740If all of his staffers like him, and they know him, and they are interested in letting Trump be Trump, if he had what all normal people have, which is a prefrontal cortex that functions and says, don't do that thing, then he wouldn't need this.
00:58:43.740But he can let somebody else be the prefrontal cortex.
00:58:45.740He just writes a tweet, or he makes a video, and then he has somebody view the video and determine whether the video might be problematic.
00:58:52.740And then, after that happens, he doesn't-
00:58:55.74090% of them, they'd probably still let go.
00:58:57.740Almost 100% they would let go, because it's just him mouthing off or whatever.
00:59:14.740I've never seen a skinny person drink a Diet Coke.
00:59:15.740I mean, that's just a true tweet that he sent out.
00:59:17.740And you're right, we've all priced this in, but every so often he does something, you're like, oh God, was that, am I sure that was priced in quite enough yet?
00:59:26.740No, of course, but that's what makes him Trump, that's what makes him willing to take this wave after wave.
00:59:33.740I mean, he has turned the accusation of racism into a silence.
00:59:38.740Now, when they say the word racism, it's like nothing, ashes come out, because we've heard it so often.
00:59:45.740Well, okay, so there's another way of reading that, and this is a much more cynical way of reading that, and they're the ones who made racism a non-factor.
00:59:55.740Well, no, in one sense it makes him great.
00:59:57.740In one sense it means that he doesn't care enough about issues he should care about.
00:59:59.740What I mean by that is he does cross lines, like he did this Sunday, that are inappropriate to cross.
01:00:04.740The same person who doesn't care about accusations of racism enough to actually police himself should not be the person who is standing up to accusations of racism.
01:00:12.740Yeah, but this is another point by our pal Bill Whittle.
01:00:14.740He says the accusation of racism only bothers people who aren't racist.
01:00:17.740You know, the only people who get upset are guys like us who sit there and go like, no.
01:00:22.740I don't think you want to apply that logic to the president.
01:00:25.740No, what I'm saying about him is that he actually, look, he has done great things for people of color in this country.
01:09:55.740And one of the dangers in revving up your base is that you also rev up the other guy's base.
01:09:59.740And the whole point of revving up your base is that you don't want to rev up the other guy's base.
01:10:05.740The worst thing that can happen to Trump.
01:10:06.740Listen, every Republican is going to show up.
01:10:09.740Like, in 2016, every Republican in the world showed up to vote against Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton was, as we all know, demon spawn over the course of 20 years.
01:10:19.740For two decades, she'd been the most hated woman in American politics.
01:10:21.740Coming up in 2020, you're not going to have to make the case to Republicans that whoever the Democrats nominated, who, by the way, will not be Joe Biden because Joe Biden still has a shred of sanity left in him.
01:10:30.740And as some of us have been saying from day one, his first day was going to be his best day.
01:10:45.740And so they'll replace him with Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
01:10:47.740You're not going to have a problem getting Republicans out to the polls to vote against the media and vote against the left and vote against AOC and vote against Tlaib and vote against all these people.
01:10:56.740What you are going to have a problem with is if he doesn't be quiet, every Democrat in the world is going to, on a daily basis, feel the moral compulsion to kick him out of office.
01:11:13.740Between 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush picked up 11 million additional votes.
01:11:17.740Aside from me, can you name like five people and any of them in the middle of the country, in the districts that matter, that he has picked up?
01:11:24.740Can you name it to the altitude of 11 million votes?
01:13:46.740If there were one reporter still left in the country, that's the question I would ask.
01:13:50.740If you think we're running concentration camps, if you think we're Nazis, if you think the Betsy Ross flag is, you know, a sign of white supremacy, if you think our history is just, why would we let you run the place?
01:14:02.740You know, I mean, why would we do that?
01:14:44.740Possibility that it's a new streak that's sort of moving through the right and it's just going to get sort of embraced into the...
01:14:51.740It can't stay what it is right now, like this party is too narrow.
01:14:55.740It's possible that this just becomes a part of the sort of the ingredients of the Republican Party over time.
01:15:02.740Also possible that right now we don't see that the division is fatal in our party because we're ascendant in terms of the power of the president and the regulations in the court.
01:15:13.740But that the second that the presidency changes, we'll actually be left sort of where they are right now.
01:15:53.740I think that the idea that we are moving unstoppably into a global economy, into a global worldview, I think that that idea has hit a snag in the sense that a lot of people were being hurt by that and started to get upset about it.
01:16:11.740And a lot of people like their countries.
01:16:15.740When you move a million immigrants into a country that has 16 million people, you have done serious damage to that country, to the nature of that country.
01:16:25.740And suddenly people are saying, well, wait a minute.
01:16:27.740We kind of liked our neighbor being the son of the guy who lived there before.
01:28:46.740It was making the United States into the greatest commercial power in the history of the world,
01:28:51.740bar none, and driving the vast majority of the globe out of abject poverty.
01:28:54.740So when Donald Trump stood up and said to the people in the middle of the country who were killing themselves at such a rate that our life expectancy was going down,
01:29:03.740when he says I remember you, I have not forgotten you, and came into office and by deregulating actually created the jobs that Obama said could not be created, was he mistaken?
01:31:51.740He actually is the intellectual leader of the current Democratic Party, which tells you more about the intellectual state of the Democratic Party than about his intellect.
01:31:58.740But he did craft the party from an intellectual level.
01:32:45.740But, yeah, part of the reason why conservative movies or Christian movies are often very terrible is because we've just sort of ghettoized ourselves
01:32:52.740and because when we know that we are selling a product that is going to a specific audience,
01:32:59.740we put the ideology and we put the philosophy at the forefront and we allow that as a sort of shortcut to making a good story
01:33:07.740and casting good actors and all those sorts of things.
01:33:11.740And if you have to do that, they get their messages in a little bit more subtly and they own the industry.
01:33:15.740There's one other piece of this, which is every now and then a guy is born in some small town in some backwater state who can throw a hundred mile an hour fastball.
01:33:25.740And God touches the person who can throw a hundred mile an hour fastball.
01:33:41.740Mostly, though, if you take the hundred mile an hour fastball guys out, all the best baseball players are going to come from bigger towns.
01:33:49.740But if my hometown, Slayton, Texas, football team plays against any of the football teams from nearby Lubbock, Slayton will lose.
01:33:57.740It will lose not because there aren't talented people in Slayton, but because the total pool of people from whom we have to choose our football team in Slayton is so small.
01:34:04.740Lubbock has orders of magnitude more people from which they get to choose their football players.
01:34:10.740So with the exception of, by the way, even if you're born able to throw the hundred mile an hour fastball and you're from a very, very small town, when you do get to the professional league or you do get to college ball, you will be at a disadvantage.
01:34:23.740It may be temporary because of your gifts, but you'll be at a disadvantage because you didn't play against the quality of opposition that the guys in the bigger town played because they played other big towns.
01:34:32.740The truth is there are artists on the right and they work hard and they're trying. We have a lot fewer people from whom to choose.
01:34:41.740And so the quality that rises to the top over, you know, we may get the hundred mile an hour fastball guy one of these days.
01:34:46.740They don't have to count on the hundred mile an hour fastball guy. They've got everybody.
01:34:50.740It's also a funding problem, right? I mean, the people who fund conservative film, their general perception is, the first question they ask is, is it conservative enough?
01:35:02.740Where's the come to Jesus call, right? Like where's the, at the end of the movie, where's the thing where they say, and that's why abortion's wrong.
01:35:06.740And then the title of the movie is abortion is wrong.
01:35:10.740Well, this is the other, the other thing. I mean, great movies, and I don't even think movies are the question anymore because the movies are an outdated form, but great art is made by great artists.
01:35:19.740It's not made by great conservatives. It's not made by great Christians. It's made by great artists.
01:35:23.740And I think, I think just given the numbers, I think there could be as many great conservative artists and even good conservative artists as liberal artists.
01:35:32.740But let's face it, they're blacklisted. They are, they do not have, they do not have the venues to go to.
01:35:37.740But you do agree that the movies may be over, but everyone who spent their life making movies has a right to keep making movies and getting paid because it's not their fault that the global economy-
01:35:45.740And they should be paid as much as men.
01:37:04.740Except that we did have, we did have in that moment, we had an overall vision which could be defined in opposition to the slave states of the Nazis.
01:37:12.740But Burke is never as solid a sell as the French Revolution.
01:37:16.740There is actually a plus to this, I think, which is people used to complain 70 years ago that the parties were too similar and nobody had a clear ideological vision.
01:37:24.740And over time, the parties have become ideologically much more extreme.
01:37:28.740To quote Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
01:37:32.740Not sure I totally agree with it, but I just mean there is, if you follow ideas.
01:37:37.740The only part of it that he has a problem with is liberty.
01:38:13.740If that's all you're talking about, the culture is so sick that you're actually not doing any of the things that politics is supposed to permit, like the arts and like religion.
01:38:21.740I have to inject a religious argument here because I think that David Brooks, of all people, wrote a good column this week about how the thing about AOC.
01:38:33.740But the thing about AOC and Nancy Pelosi was really an argument over whether we were going to still have liberalism because Nancy Pelosi is far left as she is,
01:38:39.740is still a liberal in the sense that she believes in compromise and the system working and all that stuff.
01:38:44.740And I think that we're in this moment when liberalism is under attack.
01:38:49.740And I think it's under attack because it became a secular system.
01:38:52.740And as a secular system, I think it lost its reason for being.
01:38:55.740I think the reason we were liberals is because we were Christians.
01:39:25.740I mean, this point, I made this point on my program, you know, a few days ago that we have returned to a time where you can't actually, because there's no actual discussion to be had beyond a certain point about religion, because either I'm right or you're right.
01:39:36.740Either you're going to heaven and I'm going to hell or vice versa in most religions.
01:39:39.740Well, in politics, it's the same thing now.
01:39:41.740Now it's, if you don't vote Democrat, you are an evil person who is going to hell.
01:39:44.740And there are even, you know, they've got their votive candles to Robert Mueller and they've got their sacraments that you have to perform with recycling and abortion.
01:39:51.740And there are all these things, these little things that you have to do, and you have to pay lip service.
01:39:55.740We have Latin mass in the Democratic Party, where if you don't say precisely the right words about men and women and transgenderism, then we consider you a bad person who is destined to hell forever.
01:40:05.740If you tweet a bad thing, there's no forgiveness.
01:40:07.740It's the worst kind of religion, because there's not even any level of forgiveness.
01:40:10.740And so, without any grace, what you end up with is politics returning to religion and return to religious warfare, because if we have the absolute truth, why should we have this whole liberal construct in the first place?
01:40:20.740It is an amazing thing that, like, for all of human history, men were men and women were women.
01:40:25.740And we understood that that had a wide range of definition, but still, there was this essential fact.
01:40:40.740It's like, I believe that, and you are a terrible, terrible person for not thinking that.
01:40:45.740I just came back from this conference of evangelical teenagers, right?
01:40:49.740And I'm always a little odd there, because I basically think that a loving homosexual relationship can be tolerated and included within the Christian vision of humanity.
01:40:58.740And so, I'm always the guy who's kind of arguing for it.
01:41:03.740I don't think it's sacramental marriage, which is obviously the center of human life, you know.
01:41:07.740But I don't think people should be chased out any more than I think divorced people or fat people or lustful people or envious people should be chased away from the church.
01:41:17.740And I would even go further and say that I do believe that there is a state of homosexual relationship that isn't actually any more sinful.
01:41:26.740You know, it's off-center, but it's not necessarily sinful.
01:42:38.740We will talk about it the next time that we are together, which I believe will be at Backstage Live at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California on August 26th.