The Michael Knowles Show - The Daily Wire Backstage： 2019 Predictions Special

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, this is Michael. You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire

00:00:04.380 Backstage, where I join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the man who will one day fire me

00:00:09.320 for real, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture,

00:00:14.760 and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers. Without further ado, here is Backstage.

00:00:20.600 Fake laugh in three, two, one.

00:00:22.980 Oh, you. Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage 2019 prediction special, where we will tell you

00:00:32.080 with absolute certainty what will happen this year, starting with me exercising my well-known gift for

00:00:37.080 clairvoyance, a prediction that I have not yet voiced anywhere else. You will have heard it first

00:00:41.700 right here. Prediction 2019, Elizabeth Warren will seek the Democratic nomination for president.

00:00:48.900 No way. Uncanny. Am I right? I don't buy it.

00:00:52.320 Smoke them, peace pipe.

00:00:53.320 What do you think your chances of winning are?

00:00:54.800 Well, if I had to guess, I think I'd say it's about 1-2020-th.

00:00:59.040 Yeah!

00:01:12.120 All right, all right.

00:01:13.240 I'm sorry, I was reading the president's Twitter feed today, so I just...

00:01:15.840 We're allowed to laugh at it, right?

00:01:17.240 I don't know.

00:01:17.820 We're allowed to laugh at it.

00:01:18.800 I was told I was not allowed to laugh at it.

00:01:21.620 It's very not funny.

00:01:23.000 It's not funny.

00:01:24.340 Wait, wait, wait. Just so people know, the president tweeted our meme.

00:01:28.720 Right.

00:01:29.640 What's not funny about that?

00:01:31.740 That's right.

00:01:32.440 But it's not funny because it degrades conservatism to have a president who tweets this sort of stuff.

00:01:37.300 My favorite thing that happens on Twitter now, by the way, the best thing of 2018...

00:01:41.620 You're the Donald Trump as president, right?

00:01:43.340 Yeah.

00:01:43.940 This is my point.

00:01:45.120 It's like somebody's tweeted.

00:01:46.320 Somebody said to me today, they were like, okay, so if Obama had done this, you would

00:01:49.400 have been so angry.

00:01:50.540 But if Trump did it and you're laughing at it, it's like, right, because they're two different

00:01:53.260 humans.

00:01:54.160 I have a four-year-old daughter and I have a two-year-old son.

00:01:56.800 And my two-year-old son sits on my shoulders and then hits me on the head.

00:02:00.100 And I get mildly angry.

00:02:01.980 If it were my four-year-old daughter, I get a lot more angry.

00:02:03.840 They're very, very different human beings.

00:02:05.920 If President Obama, who aspired to be Nelson Mandela, were tweeting out this sort of stuff

00:02:09.320 in fully hypocritical fashion, I'd be a lot more angry than Donald Trump, who aspires

00:02:13.440 to be in the WWE Hall of Fame.

00:02:15.380 And he's actually achieved his life goal, right?

00:02:17.420 He's in the WWE Hall of Fame.

00:02:18.980 Whereas Obama was never Nelson Mandela and did say this kind of stuff on a quasi-regular

00:02:22.880 basis.

00:02:23.700 So we're allowed to laugh.

00:02:24.980 Come on.

00:02:25.300 If you can't laugh at this stuff.

00:02:26.800 And the president is tweeting our memes.

00:02:28.920 I mean, let's get onto the basic and important things.

00:02:31.340 My favorite thing, though, on Twitter now is that no one will let you make a joke about

00:02:34.740 anything.

00:02:35.220 Yes.

00:02:35.460 And one of the things that they always say is, was that some sort of attempt at a joke?

00:02:39.920 It's like, there are no attempts at jokes.

00:02:41.900 It may not have been a very good joke, but I fully made it.

00:02:45.540 We're living in a quiet place.

00:02:47.420 I said this on the show.

00:02:48.820 We're living, you have to keep your voice down, because otherwise they come and get you.

00:02:53.820 They tear you to pieces, you know?

00:02:55.180 Yeah, the only way to survive is, is it Bird Box or is it a quiet place?

00:02:58.380 I think Bird Box is a quiet place with blindfolds or something like that.

00:03:01.240 Yeah, exactly.

00:03:02.100 And now, do you know this?

00:03:03.220 They have the Bird Box Challenge, where they're telling people to send out videos of themselves,

00:03:08.240 blindfold, doing ordinary tasks blindfold, and people are getting hurt.

00:03:13.120 What?

00:03:13.600 It's like Darwin.

00:03:14.460 Can we tell everybody to walk into traffic to the Bird Box Challenge?

00:03:17.760 It's like Darwin is still operating.

00:03:19.320 You can't do that on Twitter.

00:03:20.460 And it's threatening self-harm.

00:03:21.400 That's right.

00:03:21.800 Self-harm or the harm of others, which we learned a lot about today also.

00:03:24.500 We'll get to that.

00:03:25.360 But first, I'm going to continue with these scripted introductions.

00:03:28.360 I am Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k.

00:03:35.620 By the way, it's always important to Drew that I point out, it's God King of the Daily Watch.

00:03:39.900 I'm not a general God King.

00:03:42.160 Not of Egypt or China.

00:03:44.040 No.

00:03:44.560 I have no actual power.

00:03:45.680 Also joining me today, as per usual, these three muckety-mucks right here.

00:03:52.400 Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, hosts of the Ben Shapiro Show, Andrew Klavan Show, and Michael Knowles Show, respectively.

00:04:00.020 Did I use that right?

00:04:01.400 I think I used that right.

00:04:02.800 And yet, only one of these fellas has had the honor of being Twitter banned because of Brussels sprouts.

00:04:09.600 That's right, Brussels sprouts.

00:04:11.640 And I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

00:04:12.900 As always, we're graced by the lovely and talented Elisha Krause, who not only brings the sole semblance of professionalism to the show,

00:04:20.340 she also brings your burning questions to us, hot off the internet.

00:04:23.960 Elisha, tell those subscribers.

00:04:25.360 In defense of Brussels sprouts that are delicious with honey embroiled.

00:04:28.240 Can we cut her, Mike?

00:04:31.540 If I get fired over that and Michael hasn't been fired over, oh, I don't know, all the Michael things, I won't hold.

00:04:38.100 He has a fair point.

00:04:39.040 Hey, guys, it's going to be a fun night.

00:04:41.100 And for everyone watching at home, if you want to send us those really interesting questions that you have,

00:04:45.860 just type them in in the chat box on the Daily Wire livestream over at dailywire.com.

00:04:50.540 And remember, only subscribers get to ask those questions.

00:04:53.840 So if you're not a subscriber, first of all, why not?

00:04:56.780 Did somebody in your life not love you and didn't get you a subscription for Christmas?

00:05:00.300 How dare they?

00:05:01.000 But if you're not a subscriber and you're like, hey, I want to give myself a belated Christmas gift,

00:05:05.700 head on over to dailywire.com, click on the red subscribe button at the top of the page to become a subscriber tonight,

00:05:11.600 and then get all those questions in, and I'll be tossing them to the guys.

00:05:15.180 Elisha, thank you.

00:05:16.320 And as I continue down the path of smoking this delicious Rocky Patel,

00:05:21.000 who, by the way, sent us, like, an ashtray and some delicious cigars and this actual lightsaber.

00:05:27.000 I may go after Darth Vader with this thing.

00:05:30.620 It's great.

00:05:31.820 Very kind of them.

00:05:33.120 We are suckers for free cigars around here.

00:05:35.780 We will not do a free ad for anything.

00:05:38.440 Literally, I've had family members who write to me, and they're like, Jeremy, you know.

00:05:42.400 The rent's due.

00:05:43.460 Come on.

00:05:44.440 Oh, Uncle Tom needs this.

00:05:45.640 Granny's sick.

00:05:46.540 Granny's sick.

00:05:47.040 Not a chance.

00:05:47.720 You send us a cigar.

00:05:48.920 Oh, yeah.

00:05:49.600 Anything.

00:05:50.480 I'll wear your, I'll tattoo your name on my face.

00:05:52.760 I don't care.

00:05:53.140 So we're going to be talking, doing something that we haven't done before.

00:05:57.220 Typically, the show is not especially political.

00:06:00.620 We get into the deeper things, the finer things, the philosophical.

00:06:03.820 But we are going to do a rundown of the news.

00:06:07.360 This is because the only one of us with an actually successful podcast suggested

00:06:12.180 that what people want to hear about from these political pundits is politics.

00:06:17.280 We're going to test it with, like, 15 minutes on politics.

00:06:19.740 But first, we're going to talk about Policy Genius, who makes it possible for us to,

00:06:24.720 I actually don't want to blame them for what they make it.

00:06:27.780 Policy Genius, who provides a great product.

00:06:30.420 It's not their fault.

00:06:30.440 It's not their wonderful service.

00:06:31.960 This is exactly right.

00:06:33.060 So Policy Genius.

00:06:33.900 You know, I've been thinking a lot about death these days.

00:06:35.640 One of the reasons for that is because I am deathly sick, and also because I want to

00:06:38.580 die having to be here an extra two hours today with these gentlemen.

00:06:42.180 But thinking about death makes me think, you know, perhaps I should have life insurance.

00:06:45.660 And fortunately for me, I do, because I'm a foresighted, rational human being.

00:06:50.000 But you should also be a foresighted, rational human being.

00:06:52.160 You should also have some life insurance.

00:06:54.420 And that's where Policy Genius comes in.

00:06:56.020 Getting life insurance is one of the more intimidating parts of becoming a full-fledged

00:06:59.120 adult.

00:06:59.400 So if you're into adulting or other misuse of nouns as verbs, then perhaps you should go

00:07:03.540 check out Policy Genius right now.

00:07:04.860 They have a website that makes it easy for you to compare quotes, get advice, and get covered

00:07:08.940 without extra fees or commissioned sales agents.

00:07:11.680 You can apply online.

00:07:12.600 The Policy Genius Advisors handle all the red tape.

00:07:15.740 They negotiate your rate with the insurance company.

00:07:17.720 In minutes, you can compare quotes from all the top insurers and find the coverage that

00:07:20.780 you need at a price you can afford, all part of their best price guarantee.

00:07:23.700 They don't just do life insurance.

00:07:24.660 They also do disability insurance, homeowners insurance, auto insurance.

00:07:27.620 They help you with all these things.

00:07:29.100 If you've been intimidated or frustrated by insurance in the past, if you're like Drew

00:07:32.060 and you're close to death and you're just looking for another possible life insurance

00:07:35.520 policy...

00:07:36.000 It's a pre-existing condition with me, yeah.

00:07:39.300 Then go check out PolicyGenius.com right now.

00:07:41.480 Again, in minutes, you can compare quotes and apply.

00:07:43.580 You can do the whole thing on your phone right this very instant.

00:07:45.620 Policy Genius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.

00:07:48.180 Go check out Policy Genius right now.

00:07:50.440 And again, I'm grateful that I already have Policy Genius so that if I commit suicide halfway

00:07:54.480 through today's show, then presumably I'll have some sort of coverage.

00:07:57.520 It's usually an exemption.

00:07:58.360 There can be no suicide jokes, right?

00:08:01.500 We're not allowed to make suicide jokes.

00:08:02.360 So it is true that today I was banned by Twitter for 12 hours, although it wound up being for

00:08:09.600 about 45 minutes.

00:08:10.460 This was for the best reason.

00:08:11.680 Yeah.

00:08:11.920 I was banned because Daily Wire's senior editor, Emily Zanotti, made the biggest fake news tweet

00:08:19.640 of 2018, coming in like right down to the wire on the 31st.

00:08:24.520 She said that the best recipe for Brussels sprouts, if maybe you grew up not liking to eat vegetables,

00:08:30.260 the best recipe for Brussels sprouts is something with olive oil and honey and honey and...

00:08:36.060 They're disgusting.

00:08:36.940 Disgusting.

00:08:37.340 I retorted that an even better recipe for Brussels sprouts, a little salt, a little pepper,

00:08:43.480 dash of paprika, then you do a splash of Worcestershire sauce, you brown a little bacon in a cast

00:08:49.700 iron skillet, then you throw it all away and sear your face off because that would be better

00:08:54.920 than eating Brussels sprouts.

00:08:56.140 That's better to me.

00:08:57.520 I wake up this morning with an alert from Twitter saying, I'm not kidding, that there

00:09:03.100 are people in this world who care about me and that I am not alone and a link to a suicide

00:09:08.660 hotline because they had determined that I was a danger to myself and was advocating

00:09:15.880 people harm themselves over this tweet.

00:09:18.720 I've always felt you were a danger to others, but I've never felt you're a danger to yourself.

00:09:22.700 Absolutely to others.

00:09:23.760 Are you kidding me?

00:09:24.440 Have you ever seen me in a kitchen?

00:09:27.560 Fortunately, I have a friend even more famous, successful than myself, Ben Shapiro, who was

00:09:34.700 able to intercede on my behalf, and the lords of Twitter decided that, in retrospect, my

00:09:41.340 joke about not eating leafy green vegetables was, in fact, a joke about not eating leafy

00:09:45.660 green vegetables.

00:09:46.500 And not a national encouragement of suicide.

00:09:48.260 Not an encouragement of suicide.

00:09:49.340 It's funny, but it's not, I mean, you're funny, your part is funny, but they're not funny.

00:09:53.220 This is not funny.

00:09:53.960 This is, to me, one of the biggest stories of last year, that they are on the warpath.

00:09:58.040 This never happens to left-wingers, never happens to liberals.

00:10:01.320 Oh, no, Drew, it was just an accident.

00:10:02.460 It was a bod.

00:10:03.700 But the thing about it is, even though they restore you, and even though you can appeal

00:10:07.900 to Jack, and he puts you back, it makes you think twice about what you say, and that's

00:10:12.940 the point.

00:10:13.260 That's right.

00:10:13.560 That is the point.

00:10:14.240 It's just, you know, you cover it for me.

00:10:15.060 I had some great material about asparagus.

00:10:19.200 There's no way I'm going to do it.

00:10:20.220 Lost forever.

00:10:21.140 You'll never get it.

00:10:21.760 It really is, the key is that it probably was a mistake.

00:10:24.340 It probably was some agent who was just an idiot who did that.

00:10:27.100 But when you flip a coin a hundred times, and it keeps coming up heads over and over

00:10:30.560 and over and over, at a certain point, you think the coin is rigged.

00:10:32.680 Because it is.

00:10:33.780 I mean, there's no chance that if somebody on the left had been hit with a warning about

00:10:38.000 this sort of thing, that the agent would have said, you know what, I'm going to hit that

00:10:40.160 suspend button for 12 hours.

00:10:41.440 Clearly, this person is a threat to themselves or others.

00:10:43.660 But I'm sure that the person had heard of Jeremy or had heard of us, and was like, well,

00:10:47.240 they're conservative.

00:10:47.960 I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

00:10:49.240 Yeah.

00:10:49.360 Yeah.

00:10:49.480 And if Jeremy and I were not friends, and Jeremy were just relegated to the obscurity

00:10:54.960 which he so richly deserved, the chances that Twitter ever would have gotten back to him

00:11:01.040 or heard about it or recanted are pretty close to zero, right?

00:11:03.540 Jeremy would still be banned.

00:11:04.500 He'd still be suspended.

00:11:05.320 I mean, I don't have a blue checkmark.

00:11:07.120 Right.

00:11:07.260 This is an outrage, actually.

00:11:08.960 That is an outrage.

00:11:09.880 This is an outrage.

00:11:10.000 You are, after all.

00:11:10.940 I am.

00:11:11.260 My chihuahua has a blue checkmark on Twitter.

00:11:13.520 You deserve a blue checkmark.

00:11:14.540 I am certifiable, but not verifiable.

00:11:18.560 But it does speak to how the left, quote unquote, tolerates humor.

00:11:22.320 I mean, obviously, the most high-profile example, this is what they've been doing to Louis C.K.,

00:11:25.900 which is just unbelievable.

00:11:27.860 Which, by the way, that material about the shooting was funny stuff.

00:11:30.580 Hilarious.

00:11:31.080 It's funny.

00:11:31.740 My favorite thing about that is that he told three jokes that were supposedly offensive, right?

00:11:34.720 He told the Parkland students joke, which is a very, very funny joke.

00:11:37.400 It's a funny joke.

00:11:37.720 And then he said the stuff about gender neutrality, which is like, eh.

00:11:40.820 Yeah.

00:11:40.940 And then he made an Auschwitz joke, which was probably the least funny and most offensive.

00:11:44.540 of the jokes.

00:11:45.200 Right.

00:11:45.460 And no one cares about the Auschwitz jokes, right?

00:11:46.940 That's right.

00:11:47.460 That's right.

00:11:47.480 That one completely, by the wayside, is, ah, the Jews, they can fend for themselves, as

00:11:49.960 always.

00:11:50.400 It's like, oh, well, let me make fun of the Jews.

00:11:51.820 The Holocaust is a big scam.

00:11:53.180 It didn't really happen.

00:11:53.800 Right.

00:11:54.020 Well, that too.

00:11:54.440 Yeah, that's right.

00:11:57.140 Well, thanks for getting us demonetized on YouTube.

00:11:59.360 Appreciate that.

00:12:00.120 Hey, Jack, are you watching?

00:12:01.480 Hey, everybody.

00:12:02.440 So, I just want to say for the record, you guys, that I don't think people should end their own

00:12:06.860 lives.

00:12:07.800 I don't think people should unjustly take the lives of others.

00:12:10.500 Yeah.

00:12:10.620 And I don't deny that the Nazis were terrible people who committed a grave atrocity and

00:12:15.660 attempted genocide of all the Jews.

00:12:17.380 Too late.

00:12:17.880 Your account's gone.

00:12:19.000 Too little too late.

00:12:20.380 Too little too late.

00:12:20.880 But, I mean, first of all, Louis C.K. is probably my favorite working comic of the last 20 years.

00:12:26.460 His stuff is really, really funny, and it has been for years.

00:12:30.340 And the fact that he's a personal shambles is, like, number one, no excuses.

00:12:34.340 He's a personal shambles.

00:12:35.140 But have you seen this town?

00:12:36.900 Yeah.

00:12:37.200 Like, I love all these people in Hollywood.

00:12:38.740 Oh, Louis C.K., his mistreatment of women.

00:12:41.080 I've never heard of anything like this, except at everyone at every party you've ever been to.

00:12:44.980 Have you ever met a comedian who was like, yes, I'm a very sane person, and everything's going to be great?

00:12:48.220 Oh, I've got to be home by six for dinner.

00:12:49.920 They're known for being non-neurotic and deeply happy and really fulfilled and solid citizens is what they're known for.

00:12:55.060 But they couldn't even just say, listen, he's been banished, and we must relegate him to the outer darkness.

00:13:00.080 We have to banish him to the cornfield, and he has to stay in the cornfield.

00:13:02.800 He comes back, and he makes the mistake of telling some jokes that conservatives aren't going to.

00:13:07.100 Like, if he'd come back and start just yelling about George W., or he'd come back and start yelling about Trump, no problem.

00:13:11.680 Then it would be like, is it time to welcome Louis C.K. back?

00:13:13.820 Let's have an honest discussion.

00:13:15.080 Even better would be if he had come back and talked about himself, not made any punchlines.

00:13:21.120 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:21.420 Right, the Hannah Gabbard version of humor.

00:13:22.820 This is my favorite.

00:13:23.760 This is my favorite.

00:13:25.260 It's the Hannah Gabbard humor, which is comedy is only comedy if you don't laugh at it.

00:13:29.300 The less you laugh at it, the better it is as comedy.

00:13:31.900 We have to rewrite what we've already rewritten, biology, because men and women don't exist.

00:13:35.320 We've already rewritten language, because pronouns are no longer biological.

00:13:38.260 We've already rewritten religion, because we have to remove particular books that are too offensive to people.

00:13:41.900 We've already rewritten politics, because it turns out that the Senate is supposed to be popularly represented or something.

00:13:47.080 That's news.

00:13:47.460 And now we're rewriting the definition of the word comedy.

00:13:51.040 To mean tragedy.

00:13:52.680 Right.

00:13:52.980 To mean, well, actually, just boredom.

00:13:55.060 To mean just absolute sheer boredom.

00:13:57.060 Why was Louis C.K. banned in the first place?

00:14:00.820 He may have been a pervert, but he always asked permission first.

00:14:03.800 I mean, I don't know.

00:14:04.180 That is true.

00:14:05.100 By the left's own standards, you had consent.

00:14:07.700 You know, can I masturbate?

00:14:09.460 So Sonny Bunch.

00:14:10.100 Yes, you can.

00:14:10.660 Please.

00:14:11.180 By the way, Sonny Bunch had the best take on what exactly Louis C.K. is going to do.

00:14:14.020 I think he's totally right about this.

00:14:15.240 I think that when, I would not be surprised if this was leaked, and people around Louis C.K. knew it was going to be leaked.

00:14:21.380 And then what his actual comedy routine is going to be, is the first half of his comedy set will be all of this kind of conservative-friendly comedy.

00:14:28.200 And the second half will be, look what terrible people we all are for having laughed at all of this.

00:14:32.240 And I know how terrible we are, because I'm a terrible person, too.

00:14:35.420 And then you see the left have to reevaluate their opinion of Louis C.K.

00:14:39.220 And then he does a full reversal in the second half of his act.

00:14:41.720 I hope that's not true.

00:14:42.900 I desperately hope it's not true, because, you know, also, this whole, the new Louis C.K. is a curmudgeon.

00:14:49.740 These people were praising him for his transgressive comedy.

00:14:53.340 Right.

00:14:53.680 Five seconds ago.

00:14:54.440 That's what he did.

00:14:54.700 He does an entire routine, and it is a hysterically funny routine, called Of Course But Maybe.

00:15:00.420 Have you ever seen this routine?

00:15:01.380 It is one of the great comedy routines of the last 15 years,

00:15:03.720 in which he talks about all of these things that are deeply taboo.

00:15:07.780 And he says, of course they're terrible.

00:15:09.180 Of course they're terrible.

00:15:10.240 But maybe.

00:15:11.120 So, for example, he says, you know, if you have a bunch of, of course.

00:15:14.540 Of course it's true that we have all these kids, and they have peanut allergies.

00:15:17.740 And we wouldn't want children in school to be exposed to peanuts, and they die of their peanut allergies.

00:15:22.560 So, of course, if you know some kid in the class has peanut allergies, then we should ban all the peanuts and all the peanut-associated products.

00:15:28.580 But maybe, if we didn't, then, like a generation, there wouldn't be any more peanut allergies.

00:15:34.260 Like, is that?

00:15:35.680 So, like, you're telling me that that's, like, making fun of kids with peanut allergies dying is not off-limits.

00:15:41.700 But making fun of the, not even the Parkland kids who died, which would be terrible,

00:15:46.140 but making fun of the kids who survived to be on the cover of Time magazine, that's taboo.

00:15:52.100 You know where he started to lose them, too?

00:15:54.080 Because this has been building with Louis for a while, even before the masturbation scandal or whatever.

00:15:59.760 He told this joke that went viral, where it was an of course, but maybe.

00:16:02.820 So, of course, abortion is nothing.

00:16:05.340 It's just, like, using the bathroom.

00:16:06.620 It doesn't matter at all.

00:16:07.740 Either that or it's the killing of a human life.

00:16:10.060 And it was one of these, of course, but.

00:16:11.740 And it went viral, and it really started this, I don't know, just a few months later, all of a sudden, every leftist.

00:16:18.440 They're coming from Bill Burr.

00:16:19.360 I've become a bit suspicious that this, the whole Me Too movement is a way of killing off people that they, that are getting in their way.

00:16:26.440 Like, Bernie Sanders is now caught in his grip.

00:16:28.500 All the women in his campaign are complaining that they were treated badly and all this.

00:16:31.780 I'm just wondering if they're just trying to get the old man out of the way so they can get to people who might actually win the presidency.

00:16:36.260 I mean, I think there are certain people who are authentic and sincere about this, of course, of course, of course.

00:16:40.160 Of course, but maybe.

00:16:41.280 There are some people who will use any political cover to club their political cover.

00:16:45.760 The thing about the Louis C.K. fit in particular, because you bring up that, you said it as a joke, but it's actually important.

00:16:52.040 He actually had consent in every instance.

00:16:54.020 He did, yeah.

00:16:54.420 And people listening at home.

00:16:56.060 He was sick, but he wasn't a rapist.

00:16:56.900 That's right.

00:16:57.200 People listening at home think, who would ever consent to letting a man masturbate in front of you?

00:17:02.900 Never mind the fact that Sarah Silverman and her sister and others say that they did, like, by their own admission, that they consented to it every time.

00:17:09.320 But the truth is, it's because people don't understand that what Donald Trump said in the latter days of the election about grabbing when you're famous, women will allow you to grab them.

00:17:20.280 And he wasn't advocating sexual assault.

00:17:23.160 He was saying, when you're famous, women will consent to things that they would not.

00:17:28.480 So the average mom, Paul, out in middle America listening to a story about Louis C.K. is like, well, it's just not plausible that someone would let you do these things.

00:17:37.240 Yeah.

00:17:37.300 Meanwhile, Gene Simmons has had sex with 5,000 women while looking exactly like Gene Simmons.

00:17:46.940 And also being Gene Simmons.

00:17:49.080 One of the uncovered aspects of the Harvey Weinstein story, I think we all probably agree that Harvey Weinstein should have that guy from No Country for Old Men with a cattle thing and hit him in the forehead.

00:17:58.740 No question.

00:17:59.560 He's a terrible, terrible person.

00:18:00.600 But they're trying to keep him from releasing the emails he got from the women he slept with or annoyed.

00:18:07.340 Why?

00:18:07.680 Because they were all willing because they wanted the part in the movie.

00:18:11.180 And I think that that is an untold part of the story.

00:18:13.300 I agree.

00:18:13.560 And you cannot, you cannot, the New York Times has tried it, you cannot come out and say, well, yeah, I did it to get the part, but it's just not fair.

00:18:20.540 You know, that's life.

00:18:21.560 Right.

00:18:21.700 Well, it is amazing how the feminist movement will say that a woman who completely is as promiscuous with her body as she wants to be, if you say that that's maybe a bad decision, then this makes you a sexist, an oppressive sexist.

00:18:31.960 You're blaming the victim.

00:18:32.340 But if she does all that, and then she decides later that that was a mistake because the guy was bad, then she's, so basically she can go back in time.

00:18:41.660 She's got, like, the Marty McFly time machine.

00:18:43.300 Yeah.

00:18:43.600 And she can redefine the level of consent.

00:18:45.920 The New York Times ran an op-ed saying sometimes yes means no, and men have to be sensitive to that.

00:18:50.260 I thought, not me.

00:18:52.020 To me, you know, you speak those words.

00:18:54.360 I mean, I actually agree with that on the moral level.

00:18:57.420 Of course.

00:18:58.180 Of course.

00:18:58.720 And we all agree with that.

00:18:59.560 But there's no way to enforce that.

00:19:02.480 There's just no enforceable mechanism for that.

00:19:04.400 No, you're asking us to be gentlemen, which I am 100% in favor of.

00:19:07.320 We all agree with that.

00:19:08.080 Exactly.

00:19:08.580 Yeah.

00:19:08.820 That's right.

00:19:09.320 Yeah.

00:19:09.340 It's, yeah.

00:19:10.240 All this is disturbing.

00:19:11.300 Yeah.

00:19:11.740 It's all very disturbing, and it leads to a world where all justice is arbitrary justice.

00:19:18.080 That's the actual worst aspect of all of this, and we haven't talked enough about it, I think, about it on the right,

00:19:23.720 that we rightly say that the state should be constrained by, like, you know, the Constitution, for example,

00:19:30.420 which enumerates what rights, in its original intent, enumerated what few rights the government was going to have.

00:19:36.180 The federal government had and the state governments had.

00:19:38.920 We do that because we know that an arbitrary exercise of state power is evil.

00:19:44.340 Well, and criminal law is no different.

00:19:46.980 That's still the state determining.

00:19:49.320 But cultural mores wind up being exactly the same.

00:19:53.720 When you take a modern cultural moment and you rewrite history to judge the people of the past by the standards of the moment that we're in now,

00:20:03.500 in contravention of the actual circumstances in which they live, you're committing an egregious injustice against them.

00:20:09.600 You're making the very idea of justice obsolete.

00:20:12.300 And this is the same thing at the border as if Donald Trump could speak an English sentence, he would explain that when you are basically, I'm sorry, I pushed your imagination too far.

00:20:22.200 But when you say, you know, the border should be governed according to whether I have a sad picture of a child from Mexico standing there, that is basically saying it's all about your feelings.

00:20:33.720 It's all about your compassion.

00:20:34.820 But, you know, Donald Trump has a good intuition here because he's a showbiz creature, which is he knows that when you put the little sad kid at the border, you get that picture.

00:20:42.980 That's very powerful.

00:20:43.680 So he puts the sad mother whose kid was killed by an illegal alien.

00:20:47.680 And we could talk, I mean, one thing I think the right should do, there were studies from Fusion, there were studies from, it was reported in the Huffington Post, from Amnesty International.

00:20:55.300 60 to 80 percent of women and girls who cross that border illegally are raped and sexually assaulted on the journey.

00:21:00.660 What about them?

00:21:01.240 Where's that image?

00:21:02.220 Where's that moral case?

00:21:03.580 And why isn't anybody saying, look, you know, pass a law, enforce the law.

00:21:07.660 Instead, you have Chuck Schumer waving a pen around.

00:21:09.820 I mean, one of the most shameful moments, I thought, in our political history is Chuck Schumer waving a pen around saying, Trump could solve this with a pen.

00:21:17.440 You go like, yeah, a king could solve it with a pen.

00:21:20.120 But here we have guys called senators, Chuck.

00:21:22.940 And they pass laws, and that's how we do things.

00:21:25.560 And this is why, like, I generally oppose decriminalization efforts, so I don't like the decriminalization of marijuana.

00:21:31.400 I tend to have fairly libertarian leanings on this and think that marijuana should be legal.

00:21:36.260 Because you're a huge pothead.

00:21:37.020 Because I'm a huge pothead.

00:21:38.420 But thinking that something should be legal is not the same as thinking that we should not enforce the laws against while we have them.

00:21:45.140 That's right.

00:21:45.520 Because the state should not be able to arbitrarily determine who gets something enforced upon them and who doesn't.

00:21:51.620 When you have that, you basically have these banana republics where bribing the guy who makes those arbitrary decisions is actually the path.

00:22:00.200 But nobody said a word when King Barack decided he was not going to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act.

00:22:05.760 That was enlightened.

00:22:06.980 Well, now you bring us to Donald Trump's spectacular press conference.

00:22:14.380 His glorious.

00:22:15.820 But before we could talk about that, we have to talk about dental hygiene.

00:22:20.120 And in particular, Quip.

00:22:22.000 I love Quip.

00:22:22.700 Quip's the best.

00:22:23.480 It's the best.

00:22:24.140 So you all use Quip.

00:22:25.400 I do use Quip.

00:22:25.800 I'm going to confess that I'm the only person here who has not used...

00:22:29.160 Oh, that's why you're missing two molars.

00:22:31.080 That's right.

00:22:32.040 You're on a good one.

00:22:33.520 Show me on it, you guys.

00:22:34.580 Show me on it.

00:22:35.280 Yeah, I mean, the way that you can tell Quip is so great is because there's a horrible picture of me in Vanity Fair.

00:22:39.240 My teeth look fantastic.

00:22:42.540 The teeth look just great.

00:22:43.820 And that's because I use Quip twice a day.

00:22:45.360 Why is Quip so good?

00:22:46.100 Well, it's an electric toothbrush.

00:22:47.060 But it's not just any electric toothbrush.

00:22:48.440 First of all, you don't have to use the stupid charging stand.

00:22:50.800 So it goes dead on you all the time.

00:22:51.900 You stick a battery in the base of it, and it's good to go until the battery dies, which is months and months and months of time.

00:22:56.720 And it has these timed vibrations, so you're going to be brushing the exact right amount of time.

00:23:01.120 You're not going to be spending like 15 seconds, and you brush your teeth, and you're done.

00:23:03.540 And then it turns out that you end up like Jeremy, toothless and friendless.

00:23:07.420 Instead, you end up with...

00:23:08.860 Oh, he was friendless before he was toothless.

00:23:11.200 Instead, you actually brush the appropriate dentist-recommended amount of time.

00:23:14.360 Also, when you go to Quip.com and you use Quip.com slash Backstage, you can also get, for a discount, new brush head sent to you on a regular schedule,

00:23:22.960 which means that you're not going to have to worry about the fact that you've been using the same brush head for the last five years.

00:23:27.700 And so that cold you had five years ago is still in danger of roaming around your mouth.

00:23:31.160 I do get attached to them.

00:23:33.620 I don't know what that is.

00:23:34.440 Quip is one of the first electric toothbrushes accepted by the American Dental Association.

00:23:38.200 I love Quip.

00:23:38.700 Everybody here loves Quip.

00:23:39.720 Quip starts at just $25.

00:23:40.640 If you go to getquip.com slash Backstage right now, you get your first refill pack for free.

00:23:44.940 Again, that's first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Backstage.

00:23:49.460 That's getquip.com slash Backstage.

00:23:51.560 Go check it out right now and keep your mouth cleaner than this show is.

00:23:54.900 I'm legitimately going to get one.

00:23:56.540 You have to get one.

00:23:57.320 And then the next Backstage, I'm going to give an honest assessment as to whether or not I like it.

00:24:02.820 And I'm definitely going to like it because they sponsor our show.

00:24:07.300 That's honest.

00:24:07.900 You know what sold me on it is we were, it's funny because we actually have conversations about our sponsors sometimes off camera.

00:24:16.040 And just yesterday, Julia, who works here, and Michael and I were talking about how I'm the only human who still uses like a $2 over-the-counter toothbrush.

00:24:24.740 Like a gorilla.

00:24:25.200 What are you doing?

00:24:25.840 And Julia said that she had gotten a quip for Christmas because the guys are always promoting it and that it was terrific.

00:24:32.400 And I thought, well, I'm kind of at this point a jerk if I don't get a quip for it.

00:24:36.160 The question is how people can tell the difference between the toothbrush and Julia.

00:24:39.560 Wow.

00:24:41.100 That's not...

00:24:41.720 Me too.

00:24:42.400 You mean because quip toothbrushes look so cool and sexy?

00:24:45.800 Yeah, they're sleek and beautiful.

00:24:47.560 Because Julia's like a fish.

00:24:48.780 If she turns sideways, she disappears.

00:24:51.040 Julia is very petite.

00:24:53.780 She's a skinny person.

00:24:54.480 And it's a beautiful girl and you should be a fan of yourself.

00:24:57.340 Donald Trump.

00:24:59.240 Who?

00:24:59.740 Donald Trump, the president of these United States, held a press conference.

00:25:03.520 We're going to talk about it.

00:25:04.300 But before we do, Elisha Krause, who is holding a kind of press conference of her own in which she talks directly to the people and then tells us what the people said.

00:25:14.140 What are the people saying?

00:25:15.440 But only the subscriber people because we're not the United States and we don't have to talk to all the people.

00:25:20.100 Speaking of talking to all the people, my conspiracy coroner theory is not going to happen in 2019.

00:25:25.620 I thought that Speaker Pelosi might not invite Donald Trump.

00:25:28.400 But you mentioned our next backstage looks like it's going to be State of the Union on January 29th.

00:25:33.400 That tweet just went out a little bit ago.

00:25:34.900 Oh, my goodness.

00:25:35.580 Speaker Pelosi did invite the president.

00:25:37.200 So Tuesday, January 29th, next backstage.

00:25:39.940 If he accepts the invitation.

00:25:41.440 Please tell me he doesn't.

00:25:43.040 It's my least favorite spectacle in all of American politics.

00:25:45.460 I actually thought it would be such a win-win if she didn't invite him.

00:25:48.240 It would be great.

00:25:48.700 I was kind of betting on it.

00:25:49.500 It would be great.

00:25:49.880 Yeah.

00:25:50.160 And he could just send a letter.

00:25:51.180 He could do what George Washington used to do.

00:25:52.420 Yes.

00:25:52.900 He could just send a letter.

00:25:54.020 And it would be a Trumpian letter.

00:25:55.080 It would be like, this is the greatest speech you've ever seen.

00:25:58.360 It's unbelievable.

00:25:59.880 Fantastic.

00:26:00.400 It's just a besoures entry for terrific.

00:26:01.920 But we do have questions from our subscribers.

00:26:05.720 Anthony wants to know, he says that all of y'all have been discussing your 2019 predictions

00:26:09.760 for United States politics, but what's a hope that you have for the Daily Wire in 2019?

00:26:15.200 Well, you know mine.

00:26:17.440 See you guys.

00:26:21.080 He said it out loud.

00:26:22.120 If you say it out loud, it can't come true.

00:26:23.660 Did you know that?

00:26:24.340 That's true.

00:26:24.860 If you say it three times, though, a guy.

00:26:26.400 Did I?

00:26:27.260 Or did I just imply it?

00:26:29.720 I was very careful, I think.

00:26:32.040 Okay, so anybody have any wishes for the Daily Wire other than the obvious?

00:26:35.460 Well, I will say, at the risk of, I don't think I've ever said anything nice to you,

00:26:39.400 so at the risk of flattering you, I will say that your radio show starts on Monday.

00:26:42.820 I think it's going to be huge.

00:26:44.480 Well, thank you.

00:26:44.900 I appreciate it.

00:26:45.340 That's very nice of you.

00:26:46.240 And at the risk of flattering me, my book also comes out this year.

00:26:49.180 That's happening too.

00:26:49.980 You know, you brought your book, I'm not really annoyed about it.

00:26:51.980 You brought your book out.

00:26:52.660 My book, Another Kingdom, is coming out at the same time as yours.

00:26:55.500 You scheduled it.

00:26:57.100 I want you to give away copies of my book with your book.

00:26:59.780 Everyone should just buy it.

00:27:00.820 They should just buy the audio book, though, of Another Kingdom.

00:27:03.420 Are you recording?

00:27:04.160 I'm doing the audio book, baby.

00:27:05.460 Yay, you didn't tell me.

00:27:06.160 I am.

00:27:06.680 I'm doing it next week.

00:27:07.440 There you go.

00:27:08.000 None of these things involve the Daily Wire at all.

00:27:10.640 Oh, yeah, sorry.

00:27:11.520 These are your personal projects.

00:27:13.980 I can't believe how selfish I don't make any money off of anything you just said.

00:27:19.360 We'll give you some money.

00:27:20.060 Oh, man.

00:27:21.400 Elisha, what's next?

00:27:22.740 All right.

00:27:23.160 Well, apparently Jeremy wants Daily Wire to make more money in 2019, so sign up and subscribe.

00:27:28.540 And how.

00:27:29.060 This question from Brooke is, everyone has a price.

00:27:32.500 So what do you all think that the Democrats will ask for if Trump never backs down on the

00:27:36.280 wall in return for the funding of the wall?

00:27:40.560 I don't think they're going to back down.

00:27:41.620 I think he will.

00:27:42.100 So I think it's a moot point.

00:27:43.280 You think he will back down?

00:27:44.480 Yeah.

00:27:44.680 I think that it'll come to a point where he just says, now there's a Democratic Congress.

00:27:47.980 To hell with these guys.

00:27:48.840 I have to sign something.

00:27:49.780 I'm the president.

00:27:50.680 I think it'll be some sort of pittance where he says, there's border funding provided,

00:27:56.140 and I'm going to fungibly use that money for a wall.

00:27:58.460 Let's just leave it vague.

00:27:59.260 Well, I mean, I actually, the timing of the Syria withdrawal is kind of curious, because

00:28:03.800 he positioned the wall as national security.

00:28:06.700 He said, we can build it out of the Pentagon.

00:28:08.480 And then all of a sudden, he says, we're pulling all the troops out of Syria.

00:28:11.040 They've got, what is it, 15 billion allotted for the effort in Syria.

00:28:15.640 He was only asking five billion for the wall.

00:28:17.500 That only buys you, I think, a block and a half of the wall.

00:28:19.980 But still, he's got 3x that.

00:28:21.820 But I think it'll be leverage to use that Pentagon money to build a wall.

00:28:25.420 My favorite is when you think there's strategy involved in anything that's going on.

00:28:27.660 That's not a strategy.

00:28:28.460 It's one of my favorite things.

00:28:29.220 I want to compliment you on the use of the word fungible, an excellent word.

00:28:32.200 But I think that's exactly what's going to happen.

00:28:33.680 I think they're going to have undesignated money.

00:28:35.600 So Nancy Pelosi doesn't have to lose face.

00:28:38.300 But at the same time, Trump can say, oh, she can say, well, if you want to waste it on a wall,

00:28:42.460 go ahead.

00:28:42.980 I'd use it for something else.

00:28:44.400 But then he'll say, yeah, well, I promise the wall.

00:28:44.680 I use it for these poor, sick children.

00:28:46.240 And he says, and I want a wall that's made of spikes.

00:28:48.460 I want it made of children.

00:28:49.640 That was great when he tweeted out the actual pictures of the steel slats.

00:28:54.980 And he had, like, circled the pointy ends.

00:28:58.180 That was so great.

00:28:59.100 I was just hoping that he would decorate it with the heads of his enemies.

00:29:02.100 He did not use the word fungible, unfortunately.

00:29:04.120 No, he did not.

00:29:04.740 He puts the fun in fungible.

00:29:06.460 I mean, how does the president win in a world where even if he gets the $5 billion,

00:29:11.480 he will legitimately be able to, as you say, build a block and a half of wall?

00:29:15.820 And that'll be in the moment of political victory.

00:29:18.420 But if two years from now the president's going into re-election and he's saying,

00:29:22.720 we started building a beautiful wall.

00:29:24.680 It is 180 feet longer than it was when I became president.

00:29:28.640 After all this circus, I don't think people are going to buy that.

00:29:30.920 Oh, no, no, it's not going to matter.

00:29:32.100 It's not going to matter one iota.

00:29:33.080 Because he's just going to say, I built these three inches of beautiful, gleaming, golden wall.

00:29:38.400 And my enemies would not have built these three inches of beautiful, gleaming, golden wall.

00:29:43.140 That's all.

00:29:44.280 This is getting a little scary, Shapiro.

00:29:45.880 I just don't, I don't think there are that many conservatives who deeply care whether he does it or not.

00:29:51.480 I think they care about the feeling that he wants to do it.

00:29:54.360 I think that so much of politics has become about this, about this.

00:29:57.200 I read something, I'm trying to remember from whom today, saying, I think it was Jonathan Chait,

00:30:02.480 saying that conservatives are not transactional with President Trump,

00:30:06.440 that they don't like him for transactional reasons.

00:30:08.540 And I think that's half right and half wrong.

00:30:10.200 He's right in the sense that if he didn't deliver half of his policy proposals,

00:30:15.040 conservatives would probably be okay with that.

00:30:16.640 But the transaction that they're actually into is the feeling that he would like to do that.

00:30:20.000 Meaning that if he had the power to do it, he probably would.

00:30:22.120 I don't know, though.

00:30:22.680 Ask Ann Coulter.

00:30:23.740 I mean, ask his biggest supporters.

00:30:25.500 Listen, I think that Ann Coulter is the only honest transactional person with regard to President Trump.

00:30:30.800 If she got the wall, she was going to be happy with him.

00:30:32.840 If he was not going to build the wall, then she wasn't going to be happy with him.

00:30:34.340 Heather McDonald over at Manhattan Institute wrote an article in City Journal today or yesterday saying

00:30:39.140 what Trump should do is he should say, okay, forget the wall.

00:30:42.700 Give me money for E-Verify.

00:30:44.200 And then really put them on the spot.

00:30:45.580 But he can't do that because they want to hear that word.

00:30:48.280 They want to hear the wall, the wall, the wall.

00:30:49.620 Plus, I disagree with E-Verify completely.

00:30:51.680 But your strategic point is great.

00:30:53.240 Alicia, it is my New Year's resolution.

00:30:55.260 I have hereby resolved, as God King of the Daily Wire, that we will get to a third subscriber question

00:31:01.520 these subscribers actually give us, you guys.

00:31:04.340 They're hard-earned mammon in every month's dollars.

00:31:08.240 And they get to ask us these questions.

00:31:09.840 So we can serve both the God King and mammon.

00:31:12.340 A little typical joke there.

00:31:14.720 All right, this question comes from Alex.

00:31:16.600 It's for Ben.

00:31:17.300 He wants to know, do you think the left is going to be so fragmented in 2020

00:31:20.860 that they won't be able to pull support behind one candidate?

00:31:24.720 Hmm, maybe it sounds like the GOP in 2016.

00:31:27.300 And if they can pull support behind one candidate, who do you think it will be?

00:31:30.780 So, number one, I do think there's an actual possibility of a brokered convention for the Democrats.

00:31:34.340 I do think there's the possibility that you see such a split that it's impossible for them to put it together.

00:31:38.540 Because remember, they got rid of the superdelegates and they rejiggered their primary process.

00:31:41.300 So that means that what you actually could see is a bunch of people with a bunch of different delegates

00:31:44.800 and people actually brokering at the convention if enough interesting candidates run.

00:31:49.100 Now, I think, if I had, it's a prediction episode, I will predict that Beto O'Rourke is the nominee.

00:31:54.000 And when all is said and done, that the media mobilizes behind Beto.

00:31:57.240 Beto is out Bernie-ing Bernie right now.

00:31:59.460 And he is, basically there are three parts of the Democratic Party.

00:32:02.920 There's the intersectional base.

00:32:04.200 There is the kind of old school Democrat Hillary Clinton base that still exists.

00:32:09.100 And there is the socialist Bernie Sanders side.

00:32:11.980 And you have to have a foot in at least two of those three categories in order to have a shot at the nomination.

00:32:15.740 Well, Bernie is really only in one of those.

00:32:18.280 He's not in intersectionality land and he's not in Hillary land.

00:32:20.880 And if you look at Biden, Biden is really in Hillary land and not very much in Bernie land

00:32:24.760 and not really very much in intersectionality land.

00:32:27.100 Beto is not in intersectionality land, but he is in both Bernie land and traditional Hillary land.

00:32:31.760 And he's doing a pretty good job pandering to intersectionality land as well with the help of the media.

00:32:36.820 So I think that the enthusiasm is going to be behind him.

00:32:39.920 I think that Bernie missed his mark in 2016.

00:32:41.400 He is an Irishman who self-identifies as Hispanic.

00:32:43.840 That's true.

00:32:44.340 That's pretty interesting.

00:32:45.280 It actually matters, though.

00:32:46.420 I mean, it really does.

00:32:47.440 If his name were Robert O'Rourke, he would be done.

00:32:49.660 That's right.

00:32:50.060 But he goes by Beto and so that changes everything.

00:32:52.420 He's, I think that the Democrats, once they get to the general, they'll mobilize to stop Trump

00:32:57.180 because Trump is the great unifier.

00:32:58.760 We saw this in the 2018 elections.

00:33:00.900 Listen, I mean, we could do right now odds making on the 2020 election.

00:33:05.880 I'm pessimistic.

00:33:06.860 I'm pessimistic just because after 2018, you have presidential levels of turnout and Republicans show up.

00:33:12.740 I mean, Republicans did show up in 2018.

00:33:14.140 And we got swamped by nearly nine points in the popular vote.

00:33:17.080 That is ugly.

00:33:18.300 I mean, that's worse than it was in 2006.

00:33:20.080 I mean, it's really, really bad.

00:33:21.840 And President Trump's popularity in places like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, he'll still win Ohio.

00:33:29.000 But I think he's going to have some trouble in a lot of the other swing states.

00:33:31.520 All he has to do is lose, like, one of those states.

00:33:34.060 And he's pretty much done.

00:33:35.720 So, you know, if I have to put his re-election odds right now, I would say that he is, like, a 40% chance at being a winner versus almost any Democrat that comes out of the pack, except maybe Elizabeth Warren.

00:33:48.820 But because she's just terrible.

00:33:50.860 By the way, I'm shocked at how terrible she is.

00:33:52.800 Like, I'm shocked at it.

00:33:53.660 I didn't think it was possible for anyone to be as terrible as she is.

00:33:57.540 But her mechanically drinking beer on an Instagram, like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who can act like an authentic 29-year-old because she's authentically 29.

00:34:06.260 Right.

00:34:06.560 Correct.

00:34:06.740 But Elizabeth Warren being like, bring me a beer, husband.

00:34:10.920 Yes.

00:34:11.420 Bring me a beer.

00:34:12.100 My sweetie, my darling.

00:34:12.860 Oh, my God.

00:34:13.500 He's like, ah.

00:34:14.840 You know what was amazing, too, about her announce?

00:34:16.840 When she came out and said, I'm forming the Exploratory Committee, she did that press conference.

00:34:20.840 And one of the first questions, a reporter said, how do you answer the people who like you, they like your policies, but they worry you're not electable because you're a fraud?

00:34:28.980 And she had no answer.

00:34:30.440 Yeah.

00:34:30.560 She's had years to come up with an answer.

00:34:32.340 She still has none.

00:34:33.160 I thought it was a little stranger that her Exploratory Committee was a scout who went up to the top of her head to see if the cavalry was rubbing that.

00:34:40.320 I mean, what do you guys think the odds are on re-election right now?

00:34:42.980 If you have to peg it now.

00:34:43.740 I'm not saying, like, if things change radically.

00:34:45.480 If I had to peg it now, I would peg it at 50-50.

00:34:47.720 And I know that's a little bit…

00:34:49.300 Weasley.

00:34:49.780 Weasley.

00:34:50.420 I'm not saying you're a weasel here.

00:34:52.460 Yeah.

00:34:53.160 Just weasley.

00:34:54.120 I think that's the important thing.

00:34:54.860 My New Year's resolution was to be so much nicer than it was last year.

00:34:57.720 I'm not saying you're a weasel.

00:34:59.180 But I think the reason is a lot of the people, the GOP suburbanites who showed up and didn't like Trump are not going to vote for Kamala Harris.

00:35:09.920 They're not going to vote for Beto O'Rourke.

00:35:11.220 And they will show up again.

00:35:12.360 And they will vote for Trump in that situation.

00:35:14.100 So that's what raises my hopes for him.

00:35:16.120 The guy, you know, the guy had a great first year.

00:35:18.320 He really did.

00:35:18.880 I mean, when you look at these achievements, he rolled on that in the second year that he had – the things that he did in the first year made the economy take off.

00:35:27.700 And it just depends how crazy he gets because I really do believe that this Russian collusion thing, where he has a point, he has a legitimate point, but I think it's driving him a little nuts.

00:35:37.560 Like he's gotten – he doesn't even promote the things that he's done.

00:35:40.520 He doesn't even go out like any other president would do and say, look, look what I did.

00:35:44.220 You know, I did this stuff.

00:35:45.000 It's all this hyperbole.

00:35:46.540 Like his first tweet of the new year, which was the all caps, just, you know, sit back and enjoy.

00:35:51.260 Sit back and enjoy.

00:35:51.720 Or whatever it was.

00:35:52.720 Happy New Year to the haters.

00:35:54.420 The only person who's going to do that is me.

00:35:56.160 But the fact that it was in all caps was basically everything because the truth is things are pretty good.

00:36:00.940 Like we all went on vacation.

00:36:01.880 There was a government shutdown.

00:36:02.860 Did anyone feel like everything was terrible?

00:36:04.720 Like when we all logged off Twitter for five minutes, we were like, yeah, everything's kind of great.

00:36:08.620 Doesn't it feel like the government's shut down?

00:36:10.340 No.

00:36:10.640 The only thing that will make you feel bad is turning on social media or looking at your retirement savings account right now.

00:36:16.160 Because the markets have taken a severe hit and his trade policy does have something to do with that.

00:36:21.760 That's what Apple said today.

00:36:22.660 And I don't think they're completely wrong.

00:36:24.180 But with all of that said, it's the feeling of sheer unadulterated panic that reeks off the man that is really his biggest problem.

00:36:32.880 He doesn't give you a feeling of quietude.

00:36:35.360 What you want in a president, it really is an important thing.

00:36:37.120 What you want in a president, and W did have this, was a feeling like, you know what, I can go to sleep at night.

00:36:42.640 It's not going to be chaos when I wake up in the morning.

00:36:44.500 It's just going to be a normal day and the sun will rise in the east.

00:36:47.540 Even with Obama, who is awful, who is predictably awful, who is awful in predictable ways.

00:36:51.480 And what people, I think, actually want is not to be bothered.

00:36:55.060 We all live at a certain level of stasis in our lives, even if our lives suck.

00:36:58.420 You live at a certain level of stasis.

00:36:59.780 This is why they've done all sorts of social science studies.

00:37:02.300 And what they find is that people, their average level of happiness across the course of their life doesn't change all that markedly.

00:37:07.420 You'll see spikes or you'll see shocks.

00:37:09.200 But it pretty much returns to normal right after the spike or the shock because we're used to a certain level of stasis in our lives.

00:37:15.160 Trump upends the stasis so regularly that it makes you feel uncomfortable.

00:37:18.880 It makes you feel like, I can't take an hour break without Jim Mattis stepping down.

00:37:22.440 I can't take an hour break without Trump tweeting or something.

00:37:25.040 General Mattis being fired.

00:37:27.380 One of the things we like about Trump, though, one of the things I like about Trump is his war with the media, who absolutely deserve it.

00:37:35.000 They deserve everything he gives them.

00:37:36.380 But the reason it works so well is because he is them.

00:37:39.180 He does the same thing.

00:37:40.860 Whenever there's a Republican in government, the press mobilizes to create that exact sense of chaos so that when things actually do go wrong,

00:37:47.900 like the hurricane in New Orleans under George W. Bush, you think it's the end of a long train of chaotic things.

00:37:53.660 But it's not really.

00:37:54.420 It's just the first time they could get their hands on him.

00:37:56.100 They could lay a glove on him.

00:37:57.120 The problem with Trump is that he hits back, but he creates the same level of chaos.

00:38:01.860 Right.

00:38:02.060 And so for the gift we get of the press being slapped around, which is a joy and a delight to behold,

00:38:07.380 we also get the sense that everything is kind of unnervingly awful when things are really pretty good.

00:38:12.940 Yes.

00:38:13.180 However, I will say because we're in this very shallow moment of culture where politics is everything, where we elected a reality TV store, where all we do is talk politics, we don't talk culture, we don't talk movies, we don't talk religion.

00:38:24.720 I think people want a little bit of excitement, and I think he brings that show business and he brings that excitement.

00:38:31.300 And the one good thing about Pelosi taking over right now is he does a lot better against an adversary than he does when it's just him running the show.

00:38:41.040 He does a lot better.

00:38:41.580 That's an interesting take.

00:38:42.300 I like that.

00:38:42.400 That's my first one.

00:38:43.300 I decided I was going to have one interesting take.

00:38:45.780 I do think that's true.

00:38:46.780 I think Trump needs an enemy, and he will create enemies if he doesn't have them.

00:38:50.620 He doesn't have that problem now.

00:38:51.740 Right.

00:38:52.100 And he's certainly going to have that.

00:38:53.700 But I do think that if the Democrats had any brains at all, we all know this, the biggest mistake they can make is to nominate somebody who's radical and feels like they're going to upend the system.

00:39:03.360 The best thing they could do right now is run a Warren G. Harding 1920 return to normalcy campaign.

00:39:07.180 Right.

00:39:07.340 This has all been crazy.

00:39:08.400 They're not going to do that, are they?

00:39:09.060 No, but this is the point that I'm making, and it speaks to what we're saying, which is that the American people are entertained out at this point.

00:39:16.840 It's why if they would just run Joe Biden, I think they'd win all 57 states, right?

00:39:22.140 Because people do want to go back.

00:39:26.300 People don't think in terms of policy.

00:39:28.080 Yes, this is right.

00:39:29.140 So no one on our side wants to go back to the policies of the Barack Obama administration.

00:39:34.080 But there are millions of people who would like to go back to just the kind of feeling that even Republicans who didn't like things that were happening during the Obama era at least felt like, as you said,

00:39:45.480 it was sort of like there was a method to the madness.

00:39:48.420 So in a way, we even sort of resigned ourselves to being in opposition to what the Obama administration was doing.

00:39:54.040 It felt like a steady pressure.

00:39:55.120 Right.

00:39:55.260 Well, it's what the Joker says in The Dark Knight, right?

00:39:57.440 When the Joker says, he's not wrong, right?

00:39:59.860 When the Joker says in The Dark Knight that everybody is okay with terrible things happening so long as there's a plan.

00:40:04.500 But when there's no plan, everybody feels like it's chaos.

00:40:07.200 And Trump is the Joker, right?

00:40:09.000 He's the guy setting piles of money on fire.

00:40:10.820 And even if things are pretty good.

00:40:12.680 And listen, everybody in this room, I think it is safe to say, wants to see Trump in a second term as opposed to any of the Democrats that we aren't really talking about.

00:40:19.820 And so when we're saying all this, we're saying all this with the idea in mind that President Trump, if you were to listen to this, just stop.

00:40:27.680 Like it's just, I know you think that this is the gal that brung you and you got to dance with the gal that brung you.

00:40:32.060 I mean, first of all, that would be a unique thing for the president to actually dance with the gal that brought him, right?

00:40:35.760 He's never actually done that before.

00:40:36.900 Ben, Ben, you just said he's listening.

00:40:39.680 Don't say those things.

00:40:41.200 Fair enough.

00:40:41.680 But the fact that he thinks that what got him here was that feeling of chaos, and that's true.

00:40:47.480 But that's a different thing.

00:40:49.380 The girl wants to date the bad boy until she decides to get married to him, at which point she wants him to cease riding the motorcycle and hanging around in dive bars.

00:40:56.220 This speaks to Selena Zito's theory, which I think is a pretty good theory, that these wave elections that we keep saying are waves for the other side, are waves for the Democrats, are waves for the Republicans,

00:41:05.300 are really the country trying to get the car to the center of the road where most people live, and it's just veering right and left.

00:41:11.760 Well, that's why if Obama had governed from the center, he would have won 80% of the vote in 2016.

00:41:16.480 I mean, yeah, no question.

00:41:17.560 In 2012.

00:41:18.160 If Obama's first term is the biggest missed opportunity in the last century.

00:41:23.260 I mean, I know you and I agree that 2012 broke the country.

00:41:26.000 I think 2012 destroyed the country in so many ways.

00:41:28.700 We took an honorable guy, Mitt Romney, and we just trashed him.

00:41:31.600 And it trashed Romney, too.

00:41:33.060 Trashed Romney, too.

00:41:33.480 I mean, you can see that from that outback this week.

00:41:35.280 I'm happy to trash Romney these days.

00:41:36.220 We can get to Romney in a second.

00:41:37.580 First, in a bad economy, as Daily Wire God King, the guy who's responsible for making sure you all get paid,

00:41:45.380 one of the tricks to getting you all paid is a concept that I made up when I was skipping college.

00:41:51.240 And I was thinking, if you want to make it in business, if you want to make it economically,

00:41:54.220 if you want to have more than you used to have, and this is what I came up with, it's called buy low, sell high.

00:42:02.480 This is why he's the Dodger.

00:42:04.160 Gosh.

00:42:04.940 I got to write that down.

00:42:06.160 Right now, the market is down.

00:42:10.020 Buy low.

00:42:11.080 But where could you do such a thing?

00:42:13.880 Robinhood.

00:42:14.800 The fact is that if you are looking to invest, then you actually have to know something about investment.

00:42:19.460 And one of the ways to get to know about investment is to actually invest your money at least a little bit

00:42:23.660 and play with the market and get to learn the market.

00:42:25.800 And that's where Robinhood is really great.

00:42:26.960 It's an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptos, all commission-free.

00:42:31.160 They strive to make financial services work for everyone, not just the wealthy.

00:42:35.080 There are a couple of people in the office who we work with who use Robinhood,

00:42:37.500 and they've shown me how the app works.

00:42:38.700 It really is beautiful and provides you all sorts of great information.

00:42:41.520 It has a no-commission fee cost structure, so you're not losing all the profits on the trades that you are making.

00:42:46.340 It'll give you all sorts of data as well.

00:42:47.720 Easy-to-understand charts, market data, you place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone.

00:42:51.620 It'll aggregate groups for you, so if you're interested in things like the 100 most popular or entertainment sectors,

00:42:56.400 it'll group lists for you and then give you a buy, hold, sell rating for every stock.

00:43:00.220 So it's giving you all sorts of information to play with.

00:43:02.500 And you learn by doing.

00:43:03.300 I mean, this really is true.

00:43:04.100 It's true at every job you've ever held.

00:43:05.380 You learn by doing.

00:43:06.100 The same thing is true when you're trading in the market.

00:43:08.440 Robinhood right now is giving our listeners a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build your portfolio.

00:43:13.040 Sign up right now at dailywire.com.

00:43:15.300 Sorry, dailywire.robinhood.com.

00:43:17.520 That's dailywire.robinhood.com.

00:43:19.620 Go check it out right now.

00:43:20.840 I've looked at the app.

00:43:21.420 It really is beautifully constructed.

00:43:22.980 And again, that no-commission fee structure is really spectacular.

00:43:25.760 Dailywire.robinhood.com.

00:43:27.360 Great way to learn to invest.

00:43:28.340 Yeah.

00:43:29.340 And tell them that the God King told you to buy low.

00:43:35.600 Good time to get some Apple stock.

00:43:37.300 It is a good time.

00:43:37.720 This is actually one of the great benefits of Robinhood is I'm financially illiterate.

00:43:41.700 And it teaches you along the way.

00:43:44.420 He has literally no skill sets.

00:43:46.000 I know.

00:43:47.260 He fills up.

00:43:48.500 This is why, you know, as we all know, my wife takes care of me.

00:43:52.340 I'm an artist.

00:43:52.880 She didn't take care of me.

00:43:53.780 He's a captain man.

00:43:54.620 In a dumpster, yeah.

00:43:56.060 But I have asked them to give me this, sign me on to Robinhood so I can learn this stuff.

00:44:01.400 So that I can finally get rid of the old woman, you know.

00:44:06.060 So we built today's episode as the 2019 prediction.

00:44:10.160 Oh, the prediction episode.

00:44:11.220 The prediction special.

00:44:11.940 So I want to talk about what we think is about to happen, but I also first want to talk about the things that did happen.

00:44:18.820 We didn't have a retrospective because our Christmas episode was like on November 8th.

00:44:23.260 Beginning of December 8th.

00:44:23.920 It was so early.

00:44:25.740 And much to Ben's chagrin, all we talked about was like the history and theology of Christmas.

00:44:30.300 It was Michael Moles doing 15 minutes on Advent.

00:44:32.780 So should we get back now to the Anthony or...

00:44:35.720 Just get me a hot cast iron fry.

00:44:38.320 So I want to talk about what you think was the greatest political moment of 2018.

00:44:47.220 It's easy for me.

00:44:48.200 Yeah, I think we probably all have the same one.

00:44:49.760 It's got to be the Kavanaugh confirmation.

00:44:52.240 I mean, they threw hell at us, basically.

00:44:55.960 They pulled out all the stops.

00:44:57.460 And not only did we win, not only was Kavanaugh confirmed, but they were revealed as being who they are.

00:45:03.980 They were revealed as willing to destroy any human being, any principle of American governance to get what they want.

00:45:10.840 And the people saw it, and I think it's going to reverberate.

00:45:12.880 These are the things that seep into the culture.

00:45:15.080 These are the things that you don't even know what the effect is until 10 years later when you look back and say, you know, from that moment, something happened.

00:45:21.640 I remember feeling when it happened, this is the pinnacle of the Trump administration, at least the first term.

00:45:27.360 And I remember thinking, enjoy it, because soon the midterms are coming, and then you'll be depressed.

00:45:33.260 And that was exactly the way it turned out.

00:45:35.280 I thought it was a beautiful moment, because everything they did was not just wrong.

00:45:39.620 It was bad.

00:45:40.500 It was bad what the left did, and they stopped them.

00:45:43.040 And that's a great thing.

00:45:44.020 Well, the Lindsey Graham 2.0 was the best thing.

00:45:46.660 Lindsey Graham.

00:45:47.100 Ever since John McCain died.

00:45:48.340 Lindsey Graham.

00:45:49.700 Yeah, Lindsey Graham 2.0, which was such an improvement.

00:45:52.620 I mean, the upgrade was just tremendous.

00:45:53.760 And it was a reminder that when we tell that whole story, the one name that we don't really say very much is President Trump, who actually did the right thing, right?

00:46:01.560 He stuck with Kavanaugh.

00:46:02.360 He didn't remove him.

00:46:03.200 And he gets credit for that, for sure.

00:46:05.180 But it was that Trump was not in the headlines every day.

00:46:07.300 The Democrats were in the headlines every day.

00:46:08.780 And so this is going to be the question going forward for 2020.

00:46:11.320 Who's going to be in the headlines every day?

00:46:12.700 If the Democrats are in the headlines every day with impeachment and with whatever nonsensical plans they're pushing and with free education for everybody and free health care for everybody and all their garbage, then Trump has a shot at re-election.

00:46:24.080 If Trump is in the headlines every day, then not.

00:46:26.500 And the case in point is that if we had had that 2018 election the day after Kavanaugh, Republicans hold the House and the Senate.

00:46:32.160 I agree.

00:46:32.380 And it didn't.

00:46:33.900 For the next three weeks, President Trump went out there and jabbered about the caravan, and we got clocked.

00:46:38.420 And so all we need to do is let the Democrats just give them enough, I know, a lot of suicide today, but give them enough rope.

00:46:45.780 And they are fully capable.

00:46:46.940 And they'll hit themselves with the front.

00:46:47.680 Correct.

00:46:49.260 I actually think this brings me to one of my 2019 predictions, which is if one of the great, possibly the greatest 2018 political moment is the Kavanaugh hearing process,

00:46:58.320 I think one of the great disappointments for the right in 2019 is going to be seeing how Kavanaugh actually works as a jerk.

00:47:09.020 There are some of us who are doubtful.

00:47:10.500 What we forget is that he was hand-selected by Kennedy to be Kennedy's replacement.

00:47:16.440 And we all, because of this sort of partisan reactionary movement on the right that's so strong right now,

00:47:23.840 he gets nominated and we immediately go,

00:47:25.500 Oh, he's the greatest. Trump's going to be better at the Supreme Court than anyone who's ever lived.

00:47:29.380 Kennedy picked him to continue Kennedy's legacy on the court.

00:47:32.940 You've got to remember, though, a lot of conservatives were pulling for other people.

00:47:35.880 Amy Barrett, other people.

00:47:37.980 And it was really when the Democrats came out and accused him of being a gang rapist.

00:47:42.340 That was really everyone then galvanized behind him.

00:47:45.260 But he might be a disappointment.

00:47:46.620 The one thing I don't think he'll be a disappointment on is it just happens to be a hobby horse of mine is Chevron.

00:47:52.080 Right. No, this is right. He'll leave it on Chevron.

00:47:53.960 That's a big one.

00:47:55.240 For people who don't know what Chevron deference is, basically, administrative agencies all have these adjudicatory bodies where if you have a problem with the EPA,

00:48:02.980 you have to then appeal the EPA's decision to the administrative body within the EPA that makes these decisions.

00:48:08.120 And there is a big question as to whether a court can then review that decision, whether an administrative agency is subject to review de novo,

00:48:14.740 meaning that they can actually look at the case itself and then overrule the EPA's interpretation of its own law.

00:48:20.060 And Chevron deference basically says that unless there's a plain error that was made in the reading of the statute,

00:48:24.980 then you have to give the administrative agency all sorts of leeway to do this.

00:48:28.020 Well, Kavanaugh, to his great credit, has said that doesn't exist if the EPA is ruling for its own benefit.

00:48:34.700 And we don't have to take their word for anything, in other words.

00:48:37.080 We can review each of these cases without any sort of deference.

00:48:39.400 He's against Chevron deference, which is one area where he is really good.

00:48:41.800 So if we all basically agree on the number one political story of 2018, let's argue over the number two political story of 2018.

00:48:48.640 What stood out for you, Ben?

00:48:50.600 You know, I would have to say that the social media collapse has been the big one.

00:48:55.120 I mean, the kind of building rage against Twitter and Facebook, and some for good reason and some for really bad reason.

00:49:02.860 So I think that the, unsurprisingly, I think conservatives are correct to be deeply skeptical that a bunch of leftists who design algorithms in Silicon Valley are going to be honest with them about how exactly these algorithms are then applied.

00:49:14.280 So people on the leftists said, well, you know, Daily Wire does really well over at Facebook.

00:49:18.220 You know, and we do.

00:49:19.060 I mean, we have a great team.

00:49:20.240 We have a great social media team.

00:49:21.760 We do really well with Facebook.

00:49:23.300 That's true.

00:49:23.920 But it is also true that early in 2017, Facebook decided basically to destroy the entire right on Facebook.

00:49:29.460 And we were part of that.

00:49:30.360 And so when Facebook or YouTube or Twitter crack down on people, they're only cracking down on people on one side of the aisle.

00:49:36.560 They're not cracking down on people on the other side of the aisle.

00:49:38.720 And so I think that's a legit concern because all the people in Silicon Valley really do have the sort of hoolie view of what they're supposed to do on Silicon Valley.

00:49:46.600 The don't be evil Google schtick.

00:49:49.300 Then they think don't be evil means crack down on people who are on the right.

00:49:51.800 It's as Tim Cook of Apple said, it'd be a sin if we allowed people to say hateful things on our platforms.

00:49:57.320 Well, you're not God.

00:49:58.160 You don't get to decide that.

00:49:59.040 But he said he was, basically.

00:50:00.760 He said that inner voice was going to guide him.

00:50:03.360 That was sacred.

00:50:03.640 I mean, when you use the word sin about your own judgment, then pretty much you are saying that you're not.

00:50:07.920 Our friend Alan Estrin from PragerU, you were in this conversation.

00:50:11.260 You may be able to recount it better than I can.

00:50:13.900 His whole thing about the Apple 1984 ad.

00:50:16.920 That's right.

00:50:17.280 Do you remember his speech about that?

00:50:18.640 Of course not.

00:50:19.400 I was tuned out for the entire thing.

00:50:20.940 But there really is this great irony in that night.

00:50:23.620 For those who don't remember, the 1984 ad with Apple, the Mac is coming out, and they run down the movie theater aisle.

00:50:29.820 They smash the brainwashing Big Brother, and they're going to be the new creative, innovative disruptors.

00:50:35.800 They are now Big Brother.

00:50:36.980 They are now 1984.

00:50:38.340 Tim Cook is.

00:50:38.880 But here's the, so those are, I think, legit criticisms.

00:50:42.480 Here are criticisms I do not think are legit.

00:50:44.880 So I think that all of the people who are deeply, maybe you guys disagree with this,

00:50:48.140 all the people who are deeply worried about the invasion of our privacy by, like, Facebook,

00:50:52.460 which is taking public data and then selling it.

00:50:54.460 If you're stupid enough to put a bunch of your information on Facebook on a free platform,

00:50:58.740 what do you think they are doing with that information?

00:51:01.020 Like, how did you think they were making their money?

00:51:02.680 Did you think that they were just making their money by you sitting there and not looking at ads?

00:51:05.820 Like, how did you, I think no one, I think no one really cares about the privacy.

00:51:10.520 I totally agree with you.

00:51:11.580 I think it's all censorship.

00:51:12.620 So I think that people care about censorship, but I think the reason that you're seeing bipartisan

00:51:16.080 disapproval of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter has nothing to do with the actual reason that

00:51:21.360 the left is saying, right?

00:51:22.300 So the left is saying it's all about privacy and my concerns with privacy and what all these

00:51:25.640 companies are doing with my info.

00:51:27.060 No.

00:51:27.520 What the left is actually concerned with is controlling the censorship.

00:51:30.080 That's right.

00:51:30.340 And so what they are actually upset about is that Donald Trump won in 2016, and they think that

00:51:34.220 if they can control the social media by basically threatening them with legislation on the basis

00:51:38.440 of privacy, then they can get all their social media friends in Silicon Valley to turn off

00:51:42.520 all the right-wingers for 21.

00:51:43.360 Let me push back on this, and then I'll...

00:51:45.680 It's important because we say that as Americans, and it's true, but the left had an agenda,

00:51:51.280 sort of a universal agenda for the last century before this moment, and we're seeing it play

00:51:55.700 out in Europe, and I worry that we're going to see it here, which is this whole GDPR movement

00:52:00.220 in Europe, that there's basically the European Union passed a law that went into effect a

00:52:04.700 few months ago about how websites that operate anywhere where a European citizen might be

00:52:12.400 able to interface with it.

00:52:13.420 So it actually applies to American companies here, that the way that we store and deal with

00:52:19.040 user data is now regulated by the EU and subject to fines, and the fines can be $20 million.

00:52:25.720 And so you may have noticed if you go to websites over the last three or four months,

00:52:30.340 maybe undoubtedly all of your favorite websites have started doing this thing where you have to

00:52:34.120 like elect to use cookies, right? And that's not like the letter of the law of the GDPR movement,

00:52:41.880 but it's a result of the GDPR. The reason it all happened on one day, that's the day that

00:52:45.540 GDPR went into effect. It's going to cost companies like Google and Facebook billions of

00:52:49.860 dollars in Europe. But for smaller operations like the Daily Wire, it presents real challenges.

00:52:53.720 It actually makes us question whether or not we should make our content available in Europe at

00:52:59.400 all, because it's so onerous, the restrictions on how you can use data now. And so while I agree

00:53:05.600 that in the exact moment we're in, the left actually doesn't care about privacy. They only

00:53:10.200 care about sort of pressuring these social media organizations to not let Donald Trump get

00:53:14.820 reelected. They do have a secondary agenda, which is control everything and take everybody's money.

00:53:19.880 And they are going to do that in the name of privacy.

00:53:22.820 Well, see, this is why I think some of the arguments on the right are a little bit clueless.

00:53:26.100 And I actually wanted you to address this because you explained it to me and I've been explaining

00:53:29.700 it to other people and it's important. When we hear right-wingers say, well, they're private

00:53:33.960 companies. They have a right to do whatever they want, essentially. That's not true. First of all,

00:53:38.840 the First Amendment protects our right to free speech from the government, but our right to free

00:53:43.960 speech comes from God. And so if you have essentially a monopoly on information, you have

00:53:49.720 to be stopped from censoring people. You have to be stopped. And you explained to me why that is

00:53:54.380 perfectly legal and perfectly within the realm of capitalism to do that. And I think you should talk

00:53:58.840 about it because most people don't understand it.

00:54:00.860 Yeah, so it's based on this thing called the Communications Decency Act. And there's a section of it,

00:54:06.120 Section 230, which basically applies here. What it comes down to is a question of liability.

00:54:11.640 That there's a reason that major news publications have fact checkers. There's a reason that if the

00:54:19.540 New York Times, for example, were to write a story about Ben in which they say, you know, Ben is known

00:54:25.260 to lure children to his house who are then never seen again. Yeah, true. I mean, you're right.

00:54:31.120 They have no evidence. That's the point. There's no evidence.

00:54:34.040 Ben would have a legal case against the New York Times for publishing libelous

00:54:41.180 slanders. Defamation. Defamation of character. Yeah. Because they're a publisher. Right. And

00:54:46.480 because they have editorial control over what they publish. And if they're publishing things

00:54:50.400 that are knowingly untrue and meant to do someone harm, they open themselves up to pretty extreme

00:54:55.880 legal liabilities. So enter Silicon Valley, enter Google, enter YouTube, enter Facebook,

00:55:01.780 enter Twitter, enter Instagram. They, in theory, are not publishers. They're platforms.

00:55:07.080 Their argument is, we don't publish anything. We open up a platform for you, the user, to

00:55:13.580 publish. No one could publish Facebook. There's millions of posts. No one could publish YouTube.

00:55:18.380 They're like a phone line. There's billions. They're like a phone line.

00:55:20.480 Exactly. And so they say, we can't be held responsible if slanderous, libelous, defamatory

00:55:27.760 things are said on our platform. Right. If I got on the phone with Jeremy and I said

00:55:31.440 something bad about Drew, you wouldn't hold the phone company responsible.

00:55:33.480 You couldn't sue AT&T over your conversation. Right. So the government agreed. And they

00:55:39.380 said, we won't hold you responsible for the things that are published on your platforms

00:55:43.660 by users if you remain a free and open platform. Now, of course, as even with free speech, famously,

00:55:52.740 you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, right?

00:55:54.940 Well, that's sort of an overrule, but yeah.

00:55:56.020 Yeah. But there are some like very general, you know, can't threaten violence.

00:56:01.020 Right. You're not allowed to threaten violence. You're not allowed to incite violence.

00:56:03.920 But generally speaking, and the argument that was made by these tech companies at the time

00:56:07.240 was we're going to not play a political role. We're going to allow people to publish their

00:56:12.000 opinions. And for that reason, they received shielding by Congress from lawsuits. Now they're

00:56:19.980 saying, well, we have a responsibility. It would be a sin if we didn't. We have to execute editorial

00:56:26.900 control over things that are being written to make the world a better place, to make

00:56:30.620 the world a friendlier place, make the world a more generous place. And the argument is,

00:56:33.900 well, cool. If that's true, a lot of terrible things are said about us on your platform.

00:56:39.820 A lot of untrue. A lot of things meant to incite harm to us.

00:56:43.480 Yeah. Now you're a publisher. Now you're a publisher.

00:56:45.800 Which is why if I had been Alex Jones, the asshat who was banned from Twitter and thinks

00:56:51.520 that they're making the frog say, if I had been Alex Jones when I was banned from Twitter,

00:56:55.700 which he should not have been, I would have filed two concurrent lawsuits. In lawsuit number

00:57:01.660 one, I would have sued Twitter for removing me, for removing my opportunity to publish my

00:57:13.340 own views on their free and open platform. Lawsuit number two, I would have sued Twitter

00:57:18.220 for all of the horribly defamatory things that were published on their platform about me in the

00:57:24.520 wake of me being suspended. And I would have made Twitter defend in two separate cases in on the one

00:57:30.720 hand, explain how you're not liable for the slanderous things that were published about me,

00:57:36.960 while on the other hand, saying that you have no editorial.

00:57:39.900 That's exactly right. And if the right were not so clueless about this stuff,

00:57:44.460 we basically just want to be on Twitter. And so when Alex Jones goes, and nobody likes Alex Jones,

00:57:49.460 the guy's a loon, you know, nobody defends him, but he needs to be defended.

00:57:53.840 Of course he needs to be defended. Of course he does.

00:57:55.340 I'll just defend this one point. They are turning the frickin' frogs gay, aren't they?

00:58:00.420 They're making the frickin' frogs gay, you guys.

00:58:02.580 But nothing's wrong with that.

00:58:04.940 Yeah, but what's wrong with that? Who am I to judge?

00:58:06.440 Who are you to judge a gay frog, for crying?

00:58:08.440 Well, I mean, if Kevin Hart had said that, then they'd get him from the Oscars. By the way,

00:58:11.380 I think that the only people who are willing to host the Oscars are probably in this room at this point.

00:58:16.240 That's the way this works.

00:58:17.060 No, and I think what happened to Kevin Hart, I mean, to me, this is the stuff that is absolutely terrible that's happening.

00:58:23.960 Well, so I've coined this word that I'm definitely trying to get catch on. It's going to be fetch.

00:58:27.700 I'm really trying to get this word caught. Woke scold.

00:58:30.740 I actually like this word.

00:58:31.600 I think it's pretty good.

00:58:32.760 Because these people, they are woke scolds. This is what they do.

00:58:36.280 And it can be used as a verb also, in the fashion that we use all nouns as verbs now.

00:58:39.420 How many of them are there?

00:58:40.020 So this is my point. I don't think there are that many of them.

00:58:43.800 So I think there are maybe, I think there are hundreds of thousands. I don't think it's tens of thousands.

00:58:48.980 But I think that the ones who are super active and actually get this stuff done,

00:58:52.320 I think you're talking about a group of 500 people.

00:58:54.100 Really, I think that, and these are the people who call up Tucker Carlson's advertisers and bug them.

00:58:58.120 These are the people who decide that they're going to go after Kevin Hart on Twitter.

00:59:02.560 It's basically like Sleeping Giants and Media Matters.

00:59:04.780 And what they do is they sit around all day because they're bored and terrible, awful people.

00:59:08.340 And rich.

00:59:10.340 And what they do is they then mobilize to harass one person and ruin that person's life for a day.

00:59:17.400 And then that person goes up the chain and says, my life was ruined today.

00:59:19.760 And somebody says, you know what, it'll just be easier for us to disassociate from this human being.

00:59:23.200 And you know how I know that this is true?

00:59:24.600 Because we have used this tactic ourselves.

00:59:26.500 So Jeremy and I, before we ran Daily Wire, we ran a group called Truth Revolt.

00:59:29.980 Oh, right.

00:59:30.380 You were there.

00:59:30.860 I was there.

00:59:31.200 And Truth Revolt was specifically designed as a mutually assured destruction group.

00:59:35.040 We said this openly, that we hate the tactics we're using, but the left needs to learn that they can't just bully people into silence.

00:59:40.320 And so what we would do is if there was somebody who said something terrible, like Martin Bashir, saying that he wanted to defecate into Sarah Palin's mouth, do we actually think that Martin Bashir should lose advertisers over that?

00:59:50.300 Not really.

00:59:50.820 I think he's a schmuck, right?

00:59:51.640 I mean, I think people shouldn't watch a show, but I think advertisers should be able to advertise wherever they want.

00:59:55.700 But we had a group of activists, and we told all of our activists, call this line at this advertiser and tell them, you don't want to see their advertising on Bashir's show.

01:00:03.980 Now, the advertiser doesn't know whether these people were actually shopping with them or getting insurance with them or any of that kind of stuff.

01:00:10.840 All they know is that that day, their entire customer service team was overwhelmed with like 30 phone calls.

01:00:16.040 And that was the entirety of it.

01:00:17.260 It was like 30 people who would call.

01:00:18.520 And then the advertiser would be asked on Twitter or publicly, are you going to keep advertising on Martin Bashir after he said X, Y, and Z?

01:00:26.120 And they would feel inconvenienced for like a minute.

01:00:28.460 And then they would say, okay, we're pulling our advertising.

01:00:30.480 Okay, well, the reason that I'm bringing this up is not because this is a good tactic.

01:00:34.400 It's not.

01:00:34.920 That's the reason I'm bringing it up.

01:00:37.000 Advertisers need to understand that a bad day does not mean that if you kept advertising on Martin Bashir, you would lose your entire business.

01:00:43.500 And this is also true on Twitter.

01:00:44.660 It's true of comedians.

01:00:45.400 And this is why Bill Burr, God bless him, is never going to be taken down by these people.

01:00:49.460 Because if these people ever tried to take down Bill Burr by saying, like you said X 10 years ago, he'd just say F you.

01:00:54.820 F you is the most single, it's the single most powerful tool.

01:00:57.400 So what?

01:00:58.180 So what?

01:00:59.180 The person who used to say this to me was Andrew Breitbart, right, who took as much flack as anybody that any of us have ever known.

01:01:04.200 And he always used to say, and it was hard for him because he's a human being, right?

01:01:06.920 And I take a lot of flack too, and it's hard, as we all do in this room, actually.

01:01:10.980 He always used to say, walk towards the fire.

01:01:13.080 That one of the empowering things in being on the right, and I think Trump has done this for a lot of people, is the feeling like they're shooting the arrows.

01:01:19.480 And it feels like, you know, Boromir at the end of the first Lord of the Rings that you're getting hit with arrow, arrow, arrow.

01:01:26.600 But at a certain point, you realize the arrows actually don't hit you, that they bounce off you, that just saying, you know what, go screw yourself, most people don't care about anything.

01:01:35.900 And you know what?

01:01:36.860 You know, I've actually taken a fairly big hit for my opinions.

01:01:40.320 I think I can say financially I've taken a really big hit.

01:01:43.180 I lost contracts in Hollywood that were worth, I'm sorry, but they were worth millions of dollars.

01:01:48.800 We'd pay you a lot more if your opinions were better.

01:01:50.520 But, you know, in the end, if you're an American, who wants to live afraid?

01:01:57.960 Who wants to live silent?

01:01:59.180 I mean, this is, we all go and talk to college kids, and they always come up and they ask the question, how can I say this and that?

01:02:05.000 And what they really mean is, how can I say this and that without consequence?

01:02:07.680 And the answer is, you can't.

01:02:09.100 You can't.

01:02:09.840 This is what being an American is all about.

01:02:11.840 And we all carry the culture, every one of us carries the culture in our two hands.

01:02:15.480 We have a responsibility to take some hits.

01:02:17.640 I've got to tell you, this is shocking, but speaking of those college kids, I'm actually more pessimistic than Ben on this, on the woke fetches, on the woke scolds, which is that I don't think it's terribly small.

01:02:28.320 I think it is, in the broad American population, it's very small, but it skews so young.

01:02:33.680 Well, that's true.

01:02:34.320 And there are so many of these young kids.

01:02:36.080 Jerry Seinfeld said this.

01:02:36.520 Well, it feels powerful.

01:02:37.320 It gives them a feeling of power.

01:02:38.360 It gives them a feeling of power.

01:02:39.660 And Seinfeld said he won't play college campuses anymore because they call everything racist.

01:02:44.400 They call everything sexist.

01:02:45.700 I mean, I see a lot of it.

01:02:47.760 We all do.

01:02:48.240 And all they have to do is make it slightly.

01:02:50.740 The people that the woke scolds are aiming at are the people who are decent but kind of apathetic and don't want to be bothered.

01:02:56.040 Those are the actual people they're aiming at.

01:02:57.420 Not at me and not at Tucker and not at...

01:02:59.480 What they're really aiming at, and this is one of the great unspoken truths of America, they're aiming at boards of directors of corporations who are risk-averse.

01:03:10.640 And the unfortunate reality is that the corporate board in America has given us the left-wing agenda.

01:03:19.680 Almost everything that we actually think is wrong in the culture is being promulgated by probably people who donate to Republicans.

01:03:27.540 They make a lot of money sitting on boards.

01:03:29.400 They probably go to the country club.

01:03:30.700 They've all eaten at Mar-a-Lago, but they're so risk-averse in their business that they give us frivolous sexual harassment policies.

01:03:39.160 They give us pulling money out of anybody who says an opinion that they agree with but that gets any heat brought on them.

01:03:46.000 They fund all the colleges.

01:03:46.960 They fund all the colleges.

01:03:48.840 I mean, it's too big a topic for us to go to today, but we should, on one of these in the future, really talk about the danger.

01:03:56.560 How can we win back?

01:03:58.580 How can we give metal and spines to these board members at these companies?

01:04:02.940 Because if they would fight the wars, we wouldn't be losing.

01:04:06.320 But first we have to talk about a good corporation.

01:04:09.040 A good company.

01:04:10.420 A great company.

01:04:11.580 A company with company in their name.

01:04:13.340 These guys are absolute...

01:04:13.960 That's how serious they are.

01:04:14.880 I mean, but these guys are legitimate badasses.

01:04:17.860 They are badasses.

01:04:18.100 The folks over at Bravo Company Manufacturing.

01:04:20.500 So you know that all of us here in the room are big believers in the Second Amendment, believe in our Second Amendment rights,

01:04:24.680 believe in your right to keep and bear arms to protect all of your other rights.

01:04:27.480 Well, Bravo Company Manufacturing was started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago

01:04:31.440 to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.

01:04:34.200 BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American,

01:04:37.500 regardless of whether they're a private citizen or a professional.

01:04:39.920 BCM is not a sporting arms company.

01:04:41.680 They're there to make weapons that will function properly when the time comes to use them if your life is, God forbid, in danger.

01:04:47.600 Each component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.

01:04:51.840 BCM feels a moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the user when it's not just a paper target.

01:04:57.820 They work with all the leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's Special Ops Forces,

01:05:02.760 from Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance to U.S. Army Special Ops Forces,

01:05:05.920 who can teach the skills necessary to defend yourself.

01:05:08.200 To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.

01:05:12.920 You can discover more about their products, special offers, and upcoming news.

01:05:15.680 Again, that's bravocompanymfg.com.

01:05:18.600 If you need more convincing, go check them out at YouTube as well.

01:05:20.640 YouTube.com slash bravocompanyusa.

01:05:22.340 I've talked to the founders of the company.

01:05:23.620 These are guys who do not give a damn about what anybody has to say about them.

01:05:27.800 All they care about is providing the best life-saving product directly to you.

01:05:31.940 bravocompanymfg.com.

01:05:32.860 That's bravocompanymfg.com.

01:05:34.500 Go check them out right now.

01:05:35.220 You know, this, though, points to something.

01:05:37.020 I agree with everything you just said about risk-averse corporations.

01:05:39.600 But we have to add into that that the shift from a manufacturing economy to an information economy

01:05:44.020 is a shift from people who are good at making things like these guys, right, like Bravo Company,

01:05:49.100 to people who specialize in emotion.

01:05:51.820 And they are naturally leftist.

01:05:53.420 And the corporate world has turned more to the left as we have shifted more to an information

01:05:58.440 economy.

01:05:59.380 And this old idea that the Republicans are the friends of corporations is no longer entirely

01:06:05.460 true.

01:06:06.000 I mean, I think there's truth to that.

01:06:07.560 And I'm not sure about whether it's emotion.

01:06:09.520 But I do think that it has something to do with the idea that a material product on the

01:06:13.400 shelf is what it is, right?

01:06:14.500 The piece of metal that you're buying on the shelf.

01:06:16.300 You've got to do a good job.

01:06:17.100 Right.

01:06:17.660 In the end, it's going to be judged by the quality of the product that's on the shelf.

01:06:21.000 Whereas technology is going to be judged by all of these other vague things that you

01:06:24.520 feel about the company, which is why you see all these corporations now branding the most

01:06:28.220 leftist possible fashion.

01:06:29.200 Because they feel like the conservatives, the thing is, they do rely on the goodwill of

01:06:34.360 conservatives, right?

01:06:35.260 They rely on the fact that conservatives see a commercial that we find a little offensive.

01:06:39.740 And we're not going to care enough to boycott their product.

01:06:41.380 But they've reached out to this whole broad new group of people because that broad group

01:06:45.360 of new people is really interested in exactly that kind of virtue signaling.

01:06:50.360 You see this with Nike and Colin Kaepernick, right?

01:06:52.620 They figure no conservative is actually going to not buy a Nike shoe.

01:06:54.880 We'll just go buy whatever shoe is best because that's how we're used to purchasing products.

01:06:58.020 But everybody on the left who's deeply concerned about politics is going to be suckered into

01:07:01.860 spending their hard-earned dollars with a capitalistic company that is using sweatshop

01:07:05.280 labor in China because Colin Kaepernick is kneeling on a poster for them.

01:07:09.980 There goes Nike as a potential advertiser.

01:07:13.080 But it is true.

01:07:15.040 When I said that, you know, the apathetic person in the middle, there's a reason.

01:07:18.080 The left is smart.

01:07:18.760 What they are doing is they are paring away the people around the Overton window.

01:07:23.280 They're gradually closing it.

01:07:24.420 So they're not going directly for the center of the Overton window.

01:07:26.340 They're not just saying, okay, no more Shapiro.

01:07:28.320 Instead, what they're doing is they're saying, well, let's start with like Alex Jones.

01:07:31.300 Everybody hates Alex Jones because he's a schmuck.

01:07:32.840 And I'm like, yeah, you're right.

01:07:33.920 He's a schmuck.

01:07:34.420 But, you know, you can't throw him out because if you throw him out, then you could throw everybody

01:07:38.820 out and say, well, but if you think that he shouldn't be thrown out, that's probably because

01:07:41.560 you agree with him.

01:07:42.540 And then you should be thrown out alongside him.

01:07:44.480 I saw this happen a couple of years ago when there was all this talk about should you be

01:07:47.580 able to punch a Nazi?

01:07:48.980 And the idea was that if you say that Nazis have a First Amendment right to speech, you

01:07:52.760 agree with the Nazi.

01:07:54.020 Or if you say there's a First Amendment right to use the N-word, that means that you're in

01:07:56.980 favor of using the N-word, which is nonsensical.

01:07:59.260 It's disgusting.

01:08:00.120 No, and the left used to agree with us.

01:08:01.940 The ACLU defended the Nazis' right to speak.

01:08:03.960 Well, and the ACLU is the best possible sort of witness test for what has happened in the

01:08:09.060 country.

01:08:09.600 Where the ACLU recently came out and they said, we are not going to defend the due process

01:08:15.060 rights of Justice Kavanaugh.

01:08:16.660 We're not going to defend his due process rights because it might offend people.

01:08:19.720 We can't.

01:08:21.000 There's such a thing as too much due process.

01:08:23.140 You're like, you're the ACLU.

01:08:24.860 It's literally in your name.

01:08:26.100 It's like, just take the C and the L out, right?

01:08:28.140 Civil Liberties Union.

01:08:28.960 But this is where it's going, is to scare everybody into silence.

01:08:33.960 And when Trump came forth, I think this was really his main pitch, was more than anything

01:08:37.460 else.

01:08:37.740 I think his main pitch was that he was a giant pulsating middle finger to everything, including

01:08:41.000 this stuff.

01:08:41.820 And people were like, okay, well, if he can say that, then I can say that.

01:08:45.220 And the problem is that, and this has been the problem for President Trump historically,

01:08:49.680 is that it is so worthwhile to do that.

01:08:52.400 It is really worthwhile to be able to say F you on topics where we have to stand on our

01:08:56.540 hind legs and do that.

01:08:57.760 But we do have to ourselves be careful to continue being decent human beings, even as we do.

01:09:02.380 That's absolutely true, but we do have to take responsibility for the fact that we let

01:09:06.960 the culture slide so far that only a boar like Trump would break the rules and say what

01:09:12.500 that's being said.

01:09:14.060 We just got here.

01:09:15.280 But actually, but here's the thing.

01:09:17.580 A little gray.

01:09:18.040 I actually disagree that it would take, that only a boar would do it.

01:09:23.780 I just think only a boar could get away with it.

01:09:26.080 Meaning that, like, I've been doing it my entire career, right?

01:09:28.780 You've been doing it too, like, we all know people who have been deeply politically incorrect

01:09:32.860 for their entire career, but they haven't gotten away with it.

01:09:35.200 The reason that Trump got away with it is because his level of fame was so high that

01:09:38.920 it was impossible to destroy him.

01:09:40.240 The media created him, and then they couldn't destroy the Frankenstein.

01:09:42.260 And he also understood, he understood the principle of not apologizing, of never looking

01:09:45.960 back, of even when you say the wrong thing, just keep on going.

01:09:49.060 But it takes, you know, like, I'm a tremendously polite person in real life, and it's really

01:09:54.120 hard to do that.

01:09:54.900 You have to be able to say, I insult you, I don't care.

01:09:57.760 You know, and it takes a certain kind of person to do that.

01:09:59.400 Well, and that is, but therein lies the problem, is that, you know, as a good person, your first

01:10:05.740 reaction to somebody saying you did something bad, and believe it or not, I try to be a

01:10:09.000 good person.

01:10:09.460 I know.

01:10:09.940 It's what the funny hat is for, and the whole thing.

01:10:11.760 We try not to tell people.

01:10:12.540 I know.

01:10:13.040 It's a dirty little secret.

01:10:14.620 But when somebody says something you did is wrong, your first reaction as a good person

01:10:19.160 is, okay, maybe.

01:10:20.560 Yeah.

01:10:20.880 Let me really think about that.

01:10:22.480 You hurt somebody's feelings.

01:10:23.100 You don't want to do that.

01:10:23.580 Perhaps you'll even apologize.

01:10:24.880 Right.

01:10:25.100 Exactly.

01:10:25.620 And it's not terrible to apologize.

01:10:28.180 So we've got this new feeling is almost too strong in the other direction.

01:10:33.160 I just feel like the country's swinging wildly side to side.

01:10:35.560 It was apologize for everything.

01:10:37.260 And then Trump came along, he said apologize for nothing.

01:10:39.120 Right.

01:10:39.320 And the right answer is apologize for the wrong things.

01:10:41.420 When you're wrong.

01:10:41.920 Right.

01:10:42.380 But which, if we all just kind of basically abided by the rules that we learned when we

01:10:46.760 were seven, the country would be that much better.

01:10:48.820 Like all those Republicans who used to lose, like George Bush and George Bush.

01:10:52.920 And Mitt Romney.

01:10:54.400 This is the thing that bothers me is that we take, there's a utility to what Trump does,

01:11:02.100 even though much of what he does is wrong.

01:11:04.120 Right.

01:11:04.460 That's right.

01:11:04.760 And we, so many on our side have seen the utility and they refuse to make the distinction

01:11:10.800 between what's right and wrong.

01:11:11.880 And so you're seeing bad behavior now from many people, even, even friends of ours, I

01:11:16.160 won't name them.

01:11:17.040 You're seeing bad behavior from many people on the right because of this new sort of FU

01:11:21.300 attitude.

01:11:21.920 Right.

01:11:22.020 That's what I was going to say a minute ago about the gospel that I often tell people

01:11:25.500 that my view of the gospel is that we have basically complete forgiveness in Christ.

01:11:31.700 And that because of that, that we have freedom from legal moral restrictions in our relationship

01:11:38.600 with God, doesn't mean anything about our relationship with each other or anything, but

01:11:41.360 in our relationship with God, that that's been covered and that there's now a new way

01:11:45.560 to live.

01:11:46.000 And the new way to live isn't based on regulation, but it's based on sort of relationship.

01:11:50.260 People always immediately respond to this by saying, so you're saying I can just kill

01:11:54.500 people and cheat on my wife.

01:11:56.040 And I always say, they think that they're revealing a hole in my theology.

01:11:59.360 They're revealing a hole in their character.

01:12:01.560 They're saying, they're saying if I had grace from God, the first thing I would do is murder

01:12:07.060 people and cheat on my wife.

01:12:08.240 It's like the purge.

01:12:09.180 Yeah, exactly.

01:12:09.760 And I worry that we're saying that a little bit on the right too, where it's like, instead of

01:12:13.180 saying that we've been freed from, from what was wrong with the restrictions of the, of

01:12:18.080 the Obama era, that there were so many things that were true that we couldn't say.

01:12:22.200 We, we now are embracing the Trump freedom and feel free to say the things that we shouldn't.

01:12:27.140 It's such a deep point.

01:12:28.060 And by the way, I sort of, I have to say, I sort of agree, I mean, as the, as the Jew

01:12:31.160 in the room, I sort of agree with the critics because I do think that human nature is to

01:12:34.460 say that if you were given the capacity for running room, that you would do whatever you

01:12:39.000 wanted because people historically have basically done whatever they wanted when giving running

01:12:42.740 room.

01:12:42.980 And so that's why it's not enough to do away with all of the old rules that the left was

01:12:49.140 trying to push on us.

01:12:50.620 We do have to re inculcate virtue.

01:12:53.080 And that's where, that's where the other half of Trump is missing, right?

01:12:56.000 Trump, Trump is great at knocking down rules and all of us cheer when the bull in the China

01:12:59.900 shop breaks the China that needs to be broken.

01:13:02.180 It's not just that he's breaking China that doesn't need to be broken.

01:13:05.160 It's that we do need a new set of China there, right?

01:13:07.540 I mean, there, there actually does need, we need to be able to serve dinner, right?

01:13:09.960 But it would help, it would help if George W. Bush, decent man, had not expanded entitlement

01:13:16.240 spending, had not attacked every country on earth trying to spread democracy.

01:13:20.040 It would help if Mitt Romney had not put Obamacare in Massachusetts.

01:13:24.600 It would help, in other words, if these guys were actually conservatives as well as being

01:13:28.740 But it would also help if Donald Trump didn't say that the Soviet Union was right to invade

01:13:34.300 Afghanistan.

01:13:35.460 I mean, there's a lot going on.

01:13:36.140 No, no, of course.

01:13:37.260 It's time to talk to some of our DailyWire.com subscribers who pay the bills around these

01:13:42.620 parts.

01:13:42.920 It's time to talk to Elisha Krauss.

01:13:45.180 Even better.

01:13:45.940 I'm over here in Subscriber Central, which I found out, it's really uncomfortable.

01:13:49.920 And then someone said, no, no, no, it's not a broom closet.

01:13:52.200 It's Knowles' studio.

01:13:54.860 Even though you can't fire him, you did give him a really crappy hold.

01:13:58.500 I just want everyone to know that.

01:14:00.480 That was Ben's doing.

01:14:01.540 Yep.

01:14:01.920 Ben actually personally designed it.

01:14:04.480 This question comes from Joel Jay, and he wants to know why Michael Knowles and other

01:14:08.380 strong conservatives seem to hate vegetarians and vegans.

01:14:11.320 Is it possible to truly be conservative and non-meat eating?

01:14:15.160 Does this not impact how the GOP sees suburban voters?

01:14:19.220 I don't hate vegetarians and vegans.

01:14:21.020 I love vegetarians and vegans, and I want them to be happy.

01:14:24.020 And one of the ways to be happy is to eat veal, one of the most delicious meats.

01:14:27.960 Foie gras is very good.

01:14:29.980 The problem with veganism, not vegans.

01:14:32.800 Vegans are confused.

01:14:33.780 And I want them to see the light.

01:14:35.480 Is that veganism is morally incoherent.

01:14:37.840 How many vegans do you know who are pro-life?

01:14:40.220 Very few.

01:14:40.800 Maybe they exist, but there are very few.

01:14:42.380 Most vegans I know.

01:14:44.020 Very left-wing.

01:14:45.000 Very in favor of abortion.

01:14:46.900 But part of this is the moral incoherence here.

01:14:49.380 Does anyone really believe that an oyster is more conscious than a carrot in any measurable way?

01:14:55.100 I don't think so.

01:14:55.980 Not really.

01:14:56.960 It's a total inversion of the natural order.

01:14:59.740 We, biblically speaking, have dominion over the land and the sea.

01:15:03.120 We are conscious beings.

01:15:04.680 We use our reason.

01:15:06.020 We are biologically built to consume meat.

01:15:08.480 It is good for us.

01:15:09.420 Vegans always look kind of sickly and weird.

01:15:11.480 They do.

01:15:11.700 And they're always imposing their will on all of us.

01:15:13.640 It's a total inversion of the natural order.

01:15:15.480 And the left, as we always say, gets everything totally wrong.

01:15:19.140 They turn comedy into tragedy.

01:15:21.220 They turn everything upside down.

01:15:23.300 Politically correct means not correct, right?

01:15:25.680 All of these various things.

01:15:26.960 This is another example of them getting it wrong.

01:15:29.160 And if they would stop serving the environment as though the environment were above them,

01:15:33.160 it were some god of theirs, they would learn that we are designed to serve products of

01:15:37.920 the natural environment to each other on dinner.

01:15:40.520 I have a theory about veganism and vegetarianism.

01:15:45.480 vegetarianism that's going to be the most unpopular thing that I've said all night.

01:15:49.620 But I want us to get back together in 50 years.

01:15:52.420 And we'll raise a glass to Drew.

01:15:56.680 I'm still going to be here.

01:15:59.360 And talk about whether or not my prediction has borne out.

01:16:03.300 I know where you're going and I will agree with you.

01:16:05.000 I think that the next frontier in human morality is toward vegetarianism.

01:16:08.340 Totally agree with this.

01:16:09.340 What?

01:16:09.780 You know who else thought that?

01:16:10.800 Hitler.

01:16:13.120 Totally agree with this.

01:16:14.580 I've said this before.

01:16:15.160 It actually raises an interesting question for me about morality versus righteousness,

01:16:20.360 which is we sometimes conflate the two and we try to make God a moral being.

01:16:26.360 But the problem is that morality exists within a societal framework.

01:16:31.640 But God is a righteous being and righteousness flows from God.

01:16:35.800 It's not a human-made construct.

01:16:38.640 And so there's an interesting question about can morality actually improve across a given

01:16:47.020 civilization, across a given amount of time, while righteousness within that civilization

01:16:52.180 decreases?

01:16:53.240 And so here's an example of this.

01:16:56.580 It is the case that in Eden, man did not eat meat.

01:17:01.340 But it is also the case that upon the expulsion from Eden, God killed the first animals to provide

01:17:06.880 not food, but...

01:17:08.320 Nice jackets.

01:17:08.720 To require fur, fur for the lovely ladies.

01:17:15.400 Over time, however, and I know you can't, it's naive to say as we progress, we get better

01:17:20.120 because, you know, the 20th century is the most bloody century in human history.

01:17:24.100 But there are aspects that become better from a sort of moral point of view.

01:17:28.340 Doing away with polygamy, doing away with child marriage.

01:17:33.380 You know, the Virgin Mary was probably 14 years old when she conceived Christ, but none

01:17:37.820 of us think that it's a bad thing that 14-year-olds aren't married off to 30-year-old men today.

01:17:43.240 We think that that's a probably moral improvement within society.

01:17:47.840 It doesn't make them immoral to have done it at the time because they didn't live in the

01:17:51.320 framework of our current society.

01:17:53.360 You know, they needed polygamy to build civilizations in the beginning.

01:17:56.440 They needed women to get married and have children very young when the life expectancy

01:18:01.180 was very short.

01:18:02.580 And so you had to create children early on.

01:18:05.920 There's other things that are maybe less justifiable, but still represent shifts in morality.

01:18:10.840 Slavery.

01:18:11.720 You know, we had...

01:18:13.160 Slavery was ubiquitous across almost all cultures on all of the earth.

01:18:16.980 And then an awakening came in our consciousness.

01:18:19.560 And now, you know, I say George Washington, one of the greatest men to ever live, oversaw 300

01:18:24.160 slaves.

01:18:24.560 Sometimes if I oversaw just one, you would all agree that I need to be right.

01:18:28.740 Because I don't live in that moral construct.

01:18:31.000 And I do oversee one.

01:18:34.700 You can't sell him off.

01:18:35.800 I can't get rid of him.

01:18:36.780 He keeps trying to sell me off.

01:18:37.900 Who would buy him?

01:18:38.780 And so there's an interesting question to me.

01:18:40.300 I think the left is going to turn to vegetarianism and veganism and animal...

01:18:45.100 This sort of really expansive view of animal rights over the next 50 years.

01:18:49.620 I think that's the next frontier.

01:18:50.740 Yes, this is right.

01:18:51.060 Can I...

01:18:51.620 But my question is, is it a moral improvement?

01:18:56.000 It's obviously the case that without the eating of meat, we would not have, as a race, we could

01:19:03.180 not have gotten...

01:19:03.940 We're a human race.

01:19:04.840 We could not have gotten to where we are today.

01:19:06.880 But there is a question.

01:19:08.320 Once you live in a nation so rich or on an earth so rich...

01:19:13.560 Or once you have the capacity to make protein without the slaughter of animals.

01:19:16.640 Growing steaks without animals now.

01:19:18.540 See, I think...

01:19:19.080 Does it change the morality of killing animals?

01:19:20.800 So here's where I think the big distinction lies.

01:19:23.320 So I'm actually...

01:19:25.440 Believe it or not, as a big meat eater, I think that in 100 years, people are going to

01:19:31.020 look back and think that we're all barbarians.

01:19:32.420 I agree.

01:19:33.180 And I think that...

01:19:34.540 And I could see myself moving toward this, but not on the basis of animal rights.

01:19:40.080 So here's where I think that there's a big distinction.

01:19:41.920 I think there's a difference between human duty and animal rights.

01:19:44.540 Where the animal rights crowd is coming from is that animals are basically the same as

01:19:47.640 human beings.

01:19:48.240 And this is why whenever I'm asked this question, it's like, well, you care about unborn babies,

01:19:51.360 but you don't care about the slaughter of a cow.

01:19:52.940 It's like, right, because a baby's a baby and a cow's a cow and they aren't the same thing.

01:19:56.360 But people in the animal rights movement are always assuming the commonalities between

01:20:00.300 animals and human beings, which I completely deny and do not accept.

01:20:03.900 With that said, the idea that if I have the capacity to receive nutrition, like full nutrition,

01:20:09.940 let's assume, from sources other than the death or suffering of animals,

01:20:13.480 that seems to me not an immoral concept.

01:20:17.180 As long as I maintain that distinction between the worth of a human and the worth of an animal,

01:20:20.380 I think that where we start to backslide, and this is what's been happening, is people

01:20:24.060 say that humans and animals are the same, therefore don't eat meat.

01:20:27.460 Not humans and animals are not the same, therefore don't eat meat.

01:20:30.240 But it is possible that you can arrive in a future where it is more moral not to eat meat.

01:20:35.880 But that doesn't mean that people who ate meat in generations past were less moral.

01:20:39.420 But the part of this that I agree with is I do believe that the mass reduction of meat

01:20:45.560 has caused animals to be actually maltreated.

01:20:48.620 And they do share the creation with us.

01:20:50.300 And I think as soon as the last child on Earth is well fed, I'm going to start to worry about this.

01:20:54.900 And I think it is worth worrying about.

01:20:57.300 The other thing is I do believe that meat is going to be produced without animals.

01:21:01.320 Right.

01:21:01.520 And at that point...

01:21:02.520 Technology will solve everything.

01:21:03.840 Technology will...

01:21:04.420 There is a distinction.

01:21:05.500 There's a distinction to draw.

01:21:06.560 I think you're right.

01:21:07.460 I agree we shouldn't be cruel to animals.

01:21:09.020 I agree with C.S. Lewis.

01:21:10.340 You shouldn't...

01:21:10.980 The reason not to be cruel to animals is not because of the...

01:21:14.020 The animal doesn't have any rights, but it's because it deadens your humanity.

01:21:17.320 Right.

01:21:17.780 But I do remember a certain ancient people who developed very strict rules for how to slaughter

01:21:22.900 animals, you know, in a very specific way.

01:21:26.000 I don't see anything wrong with that at all.

01:21:28.540 I don't see anything...

01:21:29.740 You don't see anything wrong about it, but those rules were developed in a societal construct

01:21:34.400 where the eating of meat was a requirement for the thriving of the civilization.

01:21:38.820 I'm looking...

01:21:39.580 I'm asking a moral question about an emerging future where that may not be the case.

01:21:43.600 And if my theory is right, then it may necessarily be the case that we eventually, in the end

01:21:51.940 times, in whatever the final analysis is, that we might live in the most moral human society

01:21:58.220 that's ever existed, but the least righteous one.

01:22:01.000 Because we will have constructed a morality that reflects God, but doesn't contain him

01:22:07.200 in any way.

01:22:07.420 This is what's so wrong with the guys like Steven Pinker, who says everything is going

01:22:10.660 great, and everything is going great, things are getting better, but that you can live

01:22:14.240 in a happy, completely well-developed society that is morally atrocious.

01:22:18.240 When you're aborting 50 million babies a day, and everybody's happier, that's not a good

01:22:23.380 thing.

01:22:24.220 That's not a positive thing.

01:22:26.320 Elisha.

01:22:26.800 Elisha.

01:22:27.800 This question is...

01:22:28.800 Throw us another.

01:22:29.260 Yep.

01:22:29.660 Yep.

01:22:29.920 This one is for Andrew, and I love it when we do the conversation, and people always

01:22:33.600 seem to ask Andrew detailed relationship questions.

01:22:36.640 So Locke wants to know, do you ever hear back from those people that you end up giving

01:22:40.320 the relationship advice to?

01:22:42.000 I do, in fact, and it's been incredibly humbling to say that people...

01:22:48.740 Good for you that something humbled you.

01:22:49.880 I know.

01:22:50.360 It's amazing.

01:22:51.120 It hasn't had the effect of humbling me, but it is...

01:22:54.120 Oh, you need to be humbling, too.

01:22:55.360 Exactly.

01:22:55.840 I know we're happening to somebody else.

01:22:57.560 But yes, apparently this advice has been very useful.

01:23:00.540 In a way, it's not as shocking as all that.

01:23:02.840 I have been in a 40-year romance with the same woman we have had one argument in 42 years.

01:23:09.360 Seriously, one fight.

01:23:10.460 We haven't had one disagreement.

01:23:11.480 We disagree all the time.

01:23:12.380 But I think that I do understand what it is that people do that keeps them from being happy.

01:23:18.500 And some of the letters I get in the mailbag, it's so clear what they're doing that even

01:23:23.860 they must know.

01:23:24.860 They just need somebody to say it.

01:23:27.320 I said, I think it was at UCLA, a kid came up to me and he said, you know, you told me

01:23:31.380 to man up and no one had ever said that to me before.

01:23:34.400 Well, then the bar is very low, you know, because nobody's saying to these kids, be a man.

01:23:38.120 This is so true.

01:23:38.680 Be a man.

01:23:39.160 I was having this conversation with Jordan Peterson, who, of course, is doing this for

01:23:41.460 a lot of young men, particularly.

01:23:43.040 And we were looking at each other and going like, Jordan's main message, clean up your

01:23:46.320 room, is something that every father should say to every son.

01:23:48.960 And he's filling up stadiums of 2,000 people to hear him say, clean up your room.

01:23:52.400 That's a sad fact.

01:23:52.900 Right.

01:23:53.140 Half of my shtick is doing exactly the same thing that you're doing, which is, you know,

01:23:57.560 man up, take control of your own life.

01:23:59.140 It's a free country.

01:23:59.920 All you're guaranteed is adventure.

01:24:01.060 Go make something of yourself and make a series of responsible decisions that end in

01:24:04.000 a good result.

01:24:04.660 And all of this is so revolutionary in a society where we expect everybody to clean up after

01:24:08.680 each other that it's actually drawing massive crowds, which is a hopeful thing, but

01:24:14.340 also kind of a sad thing, right?

01:24:15.880 I mean, stuff that was taken for granted 40 years ago is now revelatory.

01:24:19.540 On a personal note, I have to say that I sometimes, having found God late in life and having it

01:24:25.360 been such an infusion of joy into my life, I sometimes have said to God, why did it have

01:24:30.500 to take 50 years, you know?

01:24:32.160 Because it's like crossing the desert, you know?

01:24:34.260 You could have just walked straight into Jordan and it would have taken 10 minutes, you know?

01:24:38.380 And I really think the reason is I've explored every stupid idea before getting the right

01:24:44.480 answer.

01:24:44.760 And that's very helpful when you're talking to people who are exploring those ideas.

01:24:48.160 Alicia.

01:24:48.880 All right.

01:24:49.260 Chelsea says, hey, crew, I have some friends who are joining the Democratic Socialists of

01:24:52.840 America and seem militant about the philosophy.

01:24:55.520 Do you have any ideas on how to convince them of the errors of their ways?

01:24:58.860 I do.

01:24:59.480 And I don't think it has anything to do with logical arguments against socialism.

01:25:04.020 This is an unpopular point of view.

01:25:05.820 There are myriad logical arguments, historical, philosophical arguments against socialism.

01:25:10.620 I don't think that's actually the appeal.

01:25:12.500 I think the appeal for these kids is on a much more base level.

01:25:16.940 I think it has to do with intersectionality.

01:25:18.860 I think it has to do with skin color.

01:25:20.480 I think it has to do with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being Jenny from the block in the Bronx, even

01:25:25.680 though she grew up in northern Westchester.

01:25:27.200 I think that's really where it comes in.

01:25:28.760 And you have to make emotionally compelling narratives.

01:25:32.160 We talk about this all the time out here in Hollywood.

01:25:34.820 You have to tell emotionally compelling narratives about the horrors and the ravages of socialism

01:25:39.640 and communism and about the wonders of free markets and capitalism.

01:25:45.900 And I think if you talk about the statistics, 600 million people lifted out of poverty in 30 years,

01:25:51.620 just in China, basically, because of capitalism, because they liberalized economies, the awful ravages of Cuba.

01:25:57.500 You're just speaking in numbers that people are not comprehending.

01:26:01.180 But if you talk about the family, the individual, if you talk about Ji Song-ho,

01:26:05.800 that guy who was in North Korea, lost his limb because of communism.

01:26:10.220 He had to crawl across a river, ducking guards and bullets to make it to freedom and to show the joy on his face,

01:26:17.220 lifting up that walker that he's walking with.

01:26:20.140 And you compare that to the ravages that are still in that country.

01:26:24.160 That is much more compelling.

01:26:25.660 And it allows people, especially young people who have been denied moral arguments their whole lives,

01:26:30.320 to really cling to something.

01:26:31.700 I think that's going to stick a lot better than statistics.

01:26:33.580 I agree.

01:26:34.140 And I also think the moral argument, the thing that conservatives do all the time is they talk about the fact that socialism doesn't work.

01:26:39.020 And while that's true, it's also just wrong.

01:26:41.900 Even if it worked, it is wrong for you to go out and work hard to make money.

01:26:46.640 And for me, because I got elected to something, to take that money away and say, I know better how to spend it.

01:26:50.220 And that really is what the DSA pitch is, right?

01:26:52.920 The DSA pitch basically is you're a better person because you're a socialist.

01:26:57.400 And that is the chief obstacle you have to overcome when you're arguing with folks is you have to make them understand they're not a better person for being a socialist.

01:27:03.220 It actually makes you a worse person because you are now espousing a philosophy that says that you deserve my stuff because you're breathing.

01:27:08.140 And that's not a thing.

01:27:09.120 Yeah, you're a thief.

01:27:10.000 Alicia.

01:27:10.720 All right.

01:27:11.260 All grads, I hope I'm saying that right.

01:27:13.100 Maybe it's just a username.

01:27:14.100 So sorry if I'm pronouncing it wrong.

01:27:15.580 He wants to know, should Trump have a contest for Meme of the Week and Tweet the winner every Wednesday night?

01:27:20.480 We won.

01:27:21.960 A hundred percent he should, right?

01:27:23.720 Well, you know, before we go any further, it was a big name for Michael.

01:27:26.540 Next meme.

01:27:26.700 I can't do the impression.

01:27:27.880 Next meme.

01:27:29.840 Before we go any further, I do have to, this is the only time I'm ever going to do this.

01:27:32.940 I need to throw this to Michael because you have to get his Alexander Ocasio-Cortez retelling.

01:27:36.920 We've gone through this entire episode without the, this is his big moment, guys.

01:27:40.800 Thank you.

01:27:41.180 The only use he has had in several years.

01:27:43.240 This better not just be live.

01:27:44.440 We better have this tape of Ben complimenting me here.

01:27:47.740 This was the great, this was a Christmas gift.

01:27:49.740 This happened on.

01:27:51.180 Also, please explain why it matters.

01:27:52.440 Like why this is important.

01:27:53.440 Because you're getting a lot of flack.

01:27:54.440 People saying like, why are you so down on AOC?

01:27:56.740 Like explain the whole thing.

01:27:57.440 So AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she sent out this tweet.

01:28:02.040 Really, it was a social media intern who sent out a very stupid tweet, but it was this tweet

01:28:06.100 of her congressional plaque and it said, don't be fooled by the plaques that I got.

01:28:09.980 I'm still, I'm still Alex from the Bronx.

01:28:12.560 This is her appeal.

01:28:13.500 She's this scrappy girl.

01:28:14.720 She says it.

01:28:15.380 Trump's going to deal with this girl from the Bronx.

01:28:18.140 She's not from the Bronx.

01:28:19.360 She's not from the Bronx.

01:28:20.760 I'm not from Brooklyn.

01:28:21.580 She's not from the Bronx.

01:28:22.400 We grew up in neighboring towns in affluent northern Westchester, one of the richest counties

01:28:28.640 in the country.

01:28:29.500 She grew up in the much richer, much less diverse town next door, Yorktown Heights.

01:28:35.060 I grew up in Bedford Hills.

01:28:36.600 I don't pretend to be from the, I went to the Bronx once a week as a kid to go grocery

01:28:40.200 shopping, see people.

01:28:41.440 Maybe she went once a week.

01:28:42.840 When she got called out on this during her campaign, she then changed her tune on her

01:28:46.880 campaign bio.

01:28:47.500 She said, oh, my life was defined by commuting.

01:28:50.580 You can't commute to a public school.

01:28:51.740 She lived there her whole life.

01:28:53.260 Her father was an architect.

01:28:54.640 She then said, well, I grew up in two worlds.

01:28:57.220 She didn't grow up in two worlds.

01:28:58.320 So I was just tweeting this out there.

01:29:00.280 I said, the average household wealth in the Bronx is $400,000.

01:29:03.300 The average household wealth where you grew up is three times that.

01:29:06.320 The median income was this.

01:29:07.580 The median income was that.

01:29:08.700 People were getting so upset by this.

01:29:11.000 It is a fraud.

01:29:12.340 It is a fraud that she is perpetrating.

01:29:14.200 And this is the Liz Warren moment for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

01:29:17.900 The way that you know, by the way, that this really hurts her, that this really matters

01:29:21.580 to her, is I'm sitting on my Christmas vacation.

01:29:24.340 I'm sitting there swilling Chablis, having a grand old time, a few martinis in, and she

01:29:30.400 is tweeting about this for a day because she knows this is a big weakness for her.

01:29:35.240 It is the central fraud.

01:29:36.820 And her appeal, which I think is emotional and intersectional and identity politics, is

01:29:42.060 total fiction.

01:29:43.560 She went to a place with great public schools.

01:29:45.520 It was totally affluent.

01:29:46.760 When she got to go to a private college, she's politically savvy.

01:29:49.980 She won that seat.

01:29:51.220 But this claim that she's this scrappy upstart up by her bootstraps, this is why we need

01:29:55.800 socialism, is a total farce.

01:29:57.880 We should tweet this at her every single day.

01:30:00.060 We should constantly remind her of this.

01:30:02.140 So the reason the people I think were asking was because, at least I seriously got asked

01:30:05.980 this by a member of the media today.

01:30:07.600 Well, is the right doing the right thing by pointing this out?

01:30:09.960 Because why aren't they just pointing out the fact that she's shallow and doesn't know

01:30:12.240 anything, which is obviously true, right?

01:30:13.760 She doesn't know any of the things.

01:30:15.740 So why are they focusing on her background?

01:30:17.740 And what I said is because she uses her lack of knowledge, she shields her lack of knowledge

01:30:21.560 with reference to her story.

01:30:23.520 That's right.

01:30:23.780 Basically, every time she's asked, how are you going to pay for stuff?

01:30:26.260 She says, I'm just a girl from the Bronx, and we'll figure it out because I'm scrappy.

01:30:30.120 And it's like, well, you're going to need to do better than that, right?

01:30:32.240 You're going to actually need to actually give me some logic behind your ideas.

01:30:36.260 And if you're going to say that your formative experiences are what caused you to believe

01:30:38.980 these things, then the formative experiences better match up with the things that you believe in.

01:30:43.060 She is a genuinely dangerous ignoramus.

01:30:45.080 I mean, I have to say, first of all, the fact that she's pretty, I said this on the show

01:30:48.700 today, that the combination of moral emptiness and a hot body is a bad, dangerous combination.

01:30:55.200 I know this from personal experience.

01:30:57.860 True, you're not that hot.

01:31:01.100 It can lead you down some pretty bad places.

01:31:03.340 And I think that she has that thing that exemplifies her generation.

01:31:06.480 She thinks if she speaks with passion, and she moves her hands, and she looks at you

01:31:10.740 bright, that that changes the words coming out of her mouth into something true.

01:31:13.920 And it doesn't.

01:31:14.760 The things that she says aren't true, and they're uninformed to the absolute bottom line.

01:31:20.080 So let's talk to another subscriber.

01:31:21.940 One thing we haven't talked enough about on today's show is how people can become subscribers.

01:31:26.560 And if you go to dailywire.com and become a subscriber for 100 bucks a year, not only do you get

01:31:32.980 to ask maybe, let's be honest, we're going to get to maybe six questions.

01:31:36.480 But you get to see the archives of all the shows, the full video versions of all the

01:31:41.120 shows, and starting next week, you'll get to see the two-hour live video of the new Ben

01:31:47.280 Shapiro show, National Syndicated Radio Show, which is going to launch in like 127 markets

01:31:51.420 or something next week.

01:31:52.220 That should be great.

01:31:53.180 Yep, looking forward to it.

01:31:55.160 Got nothing else.

01:31:56.160 Yeah, he is looking forward to it.

01:31:57.520 I got to save my voice, man.

01:32:00.380 Alicia.

01:32:01.120 All right, Dana says that this question is for Ben.

01:32:03.160 She wants to know why you called Jeremy, Jeremy.

01:32:05.300 Jeremy.

01:32:06.900 Yeah.

01:32:07.960 Yeah.

01:32:08.400 It's never really occurred to me.

01:32:10.220 I mean, I didn't realize I started speaking with your southern drawl, I guess.

01:32:14.020 It was the cowboy hat that did it.

01:32:15.400 Yeah.

01:32:15.580 You put that on.

01:32:16.140 Here's the problem with being named Jeremy Daniel Boring.

01:32:19.880 Daniel, if you haven't seen it written down, it's spelled in my instance D-A-N-I-A-L.

01:32:24.680 No.

01:32:25.020 Instead of I-E-L.

01:32:25.960 I did not know that.

01:32:26.380 It's a Persian spelling.

01:32:27.100 Jeremy is just a terrible name.

01:32:32.080 I'm from a town of very, very few people.

01:32:34.500 In my graduating high school class, there were four Jeremys.

01:32:37.360 Because in 1979, it was suddenly popular to name your kid Jeremy.

01:32:41.460 So I got named.

01:32:42.840 My first name possesses no hard consonants.

01:32:45.160 First of all, if you're going to have sons, your options are biblical characters and kings

01:32:48.940 of England.

01:32:49.620 That's it.

01:32:50.260 This is correct.

01:32:50.920 Those are the only options.

01:32:52.220 With hard consonants.

01:32:53.200 With hard consonants.

01:32:53.980 You have to have hard consonants.

01:32:55.320 My name is Jeremy, which is pronounced by almost everyone, including Ben Shapiro, Jeremy,

01:33:01.000 which basically translates attitudinally to punch me in the face.

01:33:07.180 There will never be a president Jeremy.

01:33:10.580 So my parents may be recognizing the mistake.

01:33:13.840 As soon as they wrote it down, probably they felt shame and kind of didn't like me.

01:33:18.180 But they had already started writing, so what do you do?

01:33:20.000 So they said, well, give him a better middle name.

01:33:22.480 Daniel.

01:33:23.180 It's a good class.

01:33:23.700 It's a biblical name.

01:33:24.940 The justice of God.

01:33:26.200 Dan, Daniel, right?

01:33:28.420 And D-A-N-I-E-L, L being the God of the Bible.

01:33:33.240 But that's not what they did.

01:33:35.000 They wrote it D-A-N-I-A-L.

01:33:37.560 Well, it turns out there is a God who is not the God L.

01:33:42.360 And that God is Allah, the God A-L.

01:33:45.080 So my name now is the justice of Allah, which they followed up with my last name, Boring.

01:33:54.600 So my actual Christian name, which is proof that I will never be president of the United

01:33:59.520 States, is punch me in the face, the justice of Allah stole God.

01:34:05.040 And that's the way we think of you.

01:34:06.340 And we let parents name children in this country without having to register it with the state

01:34:10.360 for a second.

01:34:11.400 Go Canada.

01:34:12.240 Alicia, what's next?

01:34:14.960 All right.

01:34:15.540 This question comes from Joshua.

01:34:16.940 And he wants to know, what is one fundamental political topic that you all disagree on?

01:34:21.820 Huh.

01:34:22.440 That's a good question.

01:34:23.400 Well, there was the one we had earlier.

01:34:25.480 Yeah.

01:34:25.700 Although we sort of agree more than we...

01:34:27.700 Yeah, it's kind of vague.

01:34:29.300 What is...

01:34:29.660 Do we all disagree with?

01:34:30.780 I mean, it's hard to think...

01:34:32.040 It's a fairly central one, though, the one that we were talking about earlier.

01:34:34.660 I agree.

01:34:36.180 It's somewhat nuanced.

01:34:37.220 And I want to keep it short because we have a few more things we have to get to today.

01:34:39.580 But there is a central question about the role of government in shaping economy connected

01:34:46.300 to the role of economy in shaping society.

01:34:50.200 And that's a...

01:34:51.060 It's too nuanced.

01:34:52.600 Do you want me to introduce kind of where this came from?

01:34:54.180 Please.

01:34:54.560 So where this sort of came from is that Tucker Carlson did a very interesting monologue last

01:34:57.900 night in which he essentially suggested that the economy of the United States built on capitalism.

01:35:03.280 Capitalism was built on the idea of providing the best good at the best possible price.

01:35:07.020 But that did not actually fulfill the needs of human beings.

01:35:09.980 The needs of human beings for jobs and for meaning.

01:35:12.220 And so we ought to reconstruct the economy in such a way that it helped provide for families

01:35:16.420 and helped provide jobs.

01:35:17.660 This is sort of the point that both Henry Olson has made and Warren Cass has made,

01:35:20.840 that there are shortcomings to capitalism that can be cured by sort of paring around

01:35:24.600 the edges of capitalism to ensure that people have jobs that give them meaning in their lives.

01:35:28.940 And these jobs then provide the foundation for families.

01:35:31.400 And I was very critical of this.

01:35:32.780 You can watch my interview with Tucker, in which we actually get into this a lot.

01:35:35.980 And my perspective was that capitalism is not what had undermined the family,

01:35:40.540 that basically what had undermined the family was a lack of religion and that that lack of

01:35:44.460 religion has destroyed the fundamental basis for capitalism, which is why we are now sliding

01:35:49.960 away from capitalism, that you actually need a virtuous society in order to maintain that sort

01:35:53.740 of freedom.

01:35:54.820 And I think where the debate came in is that Drew believes that the economy, my view is that

01:36:00.100 virtue and economics are rarely linked.

01:36:02.620 I don't think that virtue and economics really have much to do with one another.

01:36:04.960 I think that's sort of a Marxist view, that if you change the economy of the situation,

01:36:08.520 then you necessarily change family structure.

01:36:11.320 You know, Drew's view is a little different.

01:36:12.660 Drew, what's your view?

01:36:13.340 I think the thing that we were disagreeing about is I really seriously believe that conservatives

01:36:18.000 find themselves in a bind.

01:36:20.280 And the bind is this.

01:36:21.720 We believe, I believe, that John Adams was right when he said, we've written a constitution

01:36:26.020 for a religious people.

01:36:27.320 And I think we are increasingly an irreligious people.

01:36:30.460 And even the 70% of people who identify as Christians are not Christians as John Adams

01:36:35.080 would have understood it.

01:36:36.240 And a lot of the people who say that they have no religion are not atheists, but they

01:36:40.380 have gone off into what Drew thought would call bad religion.

01:36:43.460 To me, if you are selling, who are you selling the constitution to if you're selling it to people

01:36:48.580 who don't believe in God?

01:36:49.740 Because not only does religion shape the moral view of people, it also shapes their view of

01:36:55.480 what a human being is.

01:36:56.800 In order to believe that you are a human being with essential dignity who has God-given rights

01:37:02.040 to freedom, you have to believe in a God who gives you those rights to freedom.

01:37:06.280 So in other words, what I think is when you say to a 12-year-old, a poor 12-year-old whose

01:37:11.800 mother is a crack addict hooker and whose father hasn't been around since he was born, you

01:37:16.820 say, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, you're talking a language that that kid does not

01:37:21.120 understand.

01:37:21.980 And when you leave that kid to fend for himself and he joins a gang because that's the only

01:37:27.240 family he'll ever get, and then you say, well, that's just bad behavior, I think the

01:37:31.060 conservatives are exercising a fundamental misunderstanding of the way people are.

01:37:36.820 The man who pulls himself up by his bootstraps in that situation is an anomaly.

01:37:40.760 He's an exception.

01:37:41.580 He's an exceptional human being.

01:37:43.200 The kid who is lost in that situation needs help.

01:37:46.220 Now, where you and I agree, that I want that help to come as close to the community as

01:37:51.180 it possibly can.

01:37:52.160 I mean, this we agree on.

01:37:53.120 I want it to come, if it has to come from the state, I'll go with that, but I want it

01:37:56.800 to come from the church instead.

01:37:58.160 And that's why I support a lot of these guys who go in, the monks who go into Newark and

01:38:02.780 raise kids, essentially.

01:38:04.240 That's where a lot of the answers come from.

01:38:06.560 But in the meantime, you cannot leave people to die.

01:38:09.660 You cannot leave a 12-year-old in that situation to fend for himself because he won't.

01:38:14.300 And surely you would say that the government, there was a relationship between economics

01:38:19.580 and the family in so much as government intervention in the economy during, say, the 1960s, led

01:38:25.400 to immediately a breakdown of the family.

01:38:27.740 Right.

01:38:28.000 So I guess the contention I would make is that government has the capacity to destroy the

01:38:31.480 family.

01:38:31.780 It doesn't have the capacity to recreate the family.

01:38:33.580 Sure.

01:38:33.960 Yeah, sure.

01:38:34.280 And I think that the mistake that I'm seeing from Tucker and from Oren Kass and some other

01:38:39.240 folks is that it'll reinstill virtue in the people to change the economy.

01:38:45.720 And I don't think that's right.

01:38:46.960 I think the virtue has to predate the economy.

01:38:48.820 That's where we agree.

01:38:50.640 Right.

01:38:50.840 That's where we agree.

01:38:51.440 But I think where we disagree is when you say things like, in the meantime, you can't

01:38:55.080 just let people starve.

01:38:56.320 I'm not saying nobody wants kids who are in this situation to starve.

01:39:00.300 But where we disagree, I know, Jeremy, this is where you disagree, is the idea that the

01:39:05.280 government providing for that doesn't have more costs than benefits, meaning that when

01:39:08.940 the government comes in and says, OK, now we're going to provide a social safety net,

01:39:11.900 you're creating a perverse incentive structure that encourages more creation of 12-year-olds

01:39:16.500 who are going to be dependent on the government.

01:39:18.040 And the proof of that is the last 50 years of government largesse.

01:39:20.480 I think there was a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal.

01:39:22.520 I believe it was by Phil Graham.

01:39:24.080 I don't want to pin him with it if it wasn't, but I believe that's who wrote it, where he said,

01:39:27.960 a lot of these redistribution programs have seriously helped people economically.

01:39:33.700 And at the same time, they've seriously created a culture of dependency.

01:39:37.500 And that's the problem that we face.

01:39:39.240 And I think the way into this is to attack the culture of dependency through theology and

01:39:46.420 through philosophy in order to start to pare back this system that has actually had real

01:39:53.720 benefits.

01:39:54.260 And I think there's two points of disagreement for me.

01:39:56.340 One of them, I think Ben and I share, I disagree with that article.

01:39:59.940 I disagree with the assertion that these programs have fundamentally increased people's economic

01:40:05.740 prosperity.

01:40:06.480 I don't think they have.

01:40:07.080 I don't think that's right.

01:40:07.880 I think you're wrong.

01:40:08.360 The poverty rate in the country is dropping faster before the implementation of welfare

01:40:11.340 than it was after the implementation of welfare.

01:40:12.980 But the fact is that the people who live in poverty now live at the level of middle class

01:40:17.580 people in the 80s.

01:40:18.180 And that's because of capitalism that has nothing to do with redistribution.

01:40:20.880 No, that's not true.

01:40:21.400 It does have to do with redistribution.

01:40:22.720 Then why were living standards better in 1950 than in 1900?

01:40:26.180 There wasn't socialism or redistributionism between 1900 and 1950, and economic standards

01:40:30.200 rose dramatically.

01:40:30.980 In between that.

01:40:31.640 Yes, but they rose between 1900 and 1920.

01:40:34.040 I can pick any period of American history in which capitalism reigned, and living standards

01:40:37.520 always get better.

01:40:38.360 Capitalism raises people up.

01:40:40.400 Capitalism is magic.

01:40:41.500 It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

01:40:42.740 There's no question about it.

01:40:43.840 But in order to have people who are free, they need to have a conception of themselves as

01:40:47.900 people who deserve to be free.

01:40:49.420 And I think we've lost that conception.

01:40:51.260 If you don't start there, you're lost.

01:40:53.340 Well, that's another part I agree with.

01:40:54.400 That's another part we agree on.

01:40:55.280 I think there is one other point of disagreement, though.

01:40:57.640 And I won't put these words in Ben's mouth, because it may be that this is my unique disagreement.

01:41:03.340 Your son actually helped me understand this.

01:41:06.500 You think of politics in very practical terms.

01:41:11.500 I do.

01:41:12.000 And I think about politics in very ideal terms.

01:41:15.180 Right.

01:41:15.800 But this is, that's absolutely true.

01:41:17.300 I think that you cannot achieve your practical ends if we forsake the ideal arguments.

01:41:24.200 I'm not talking about idealism in the sense of that we disconnect our beliefs from the

01:41:31.160 consequences of our beliefs.

01:41:32.640 But I'm talking about it in an aspirational sense.

01:41:35.600 What bothers me about Trump, for example, is that Trump does not even speak the language

01:41:42.560 of aspiration toward the ideals on which this country was founded.

01:41:45.920 He has accomplished some practical successes for us.

01:41:51.100 But in winning the battles, I worry that we're losing the war because we're not even

01:41:54.780 fighting the war.

01:41:55.380 We're forsaking the war.

01:41:56.400 And I think part of our point of disagreement when we get into these conversations, and many

01:41:59.820 other things that we disagree about, is because I'm not willing to give up my aspirational

01:42:06.820 views of what we should stand for.

01:42:08.800 It's why I talk more about theology, and you talk more about people's needs, even in religious

01:42:14.120 conversations.

01:42:14.680 You talk about the struggling man, and I talk about the glory of God.

01:42:18.660 Because you're the God king.

01:42:20.380 That's a slight overstatement, but it's just a way of thinking about our different perspectives.

01:42:23.340 You know, though, what strikes me about this is I don't think any two of us have the identical

01:42:28.400 view on basically any issue whatsoever.

01:42:31.660 And yet, on major political issues, we almost agree entirely, I mean, on almost every issue.

01:42:37.420 Why is that?

01:42:38.280 It's because there is a sort of coherence to conservative thought.

01:42:41.800 But unlike the left, the left is ideologically homogenous in progressivism, but the right has

01:42:48.640 so many variations of it.

01:42:50.560 There's neoconservatism, traditionalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, on and on and on.

01:42:56.220 And so I think various combinations and mixtures of these influences is why none of us have exactly

01:43:02.140 the same opinion.

01:43:02.820 I think it's also because the hot button issues have been so skewed outside of the rational

01:43:08.280 that I really believe that rational people who actually think about a lot of these hot

01:43:13.080 button issues with any sense of values are going to come to agreement on a lot of them.

01:43:15.960 Because if I say abortion, the left's position is on demand.

01:43:19.160 Like, we're all going to agree that's asinine, right?

01:43:22.160 If you were, and this is true with, if I say, you know, redefining male and female, and the

01:43:26.660 left's view is that they don't exist.

01:43:28.260 Like, what else are rational people supposed to say?

01:43:30.820 But I'll bet you that I'll give an issue where I think that we probably do have pretty

01:43:34.500 significant disagreement.

01:43:35.560 I know we do, actually.

01:43:36.580 It's on climate change.

01:43:37.760 So on climate change, I actually see no serious reason to doubt the idea that the world is

01:43:43.400 getting warmer over the course of time and that human activity is responsible for at

01:43:46.420 least a majority of that warming.

01:43:47.740 I don't know about a majority, but some of them.

01:43:49.420 I think at least 50%.

01:43:50.620 I don't know that it's, I don't know that it's, you know, 95%, but at least 50%.

01:43:54.220 But my disagreement with the left comes when they start saying, and the solution to that

01:43:57.740 is to tax all of the developed countries so that all of the developing countries can continue

01:44:01.080 to pollute the earth to the extent that the climate continues to warm.

01:44:04.600 I know Jeremy is not a climate change fan, right?

01:44:08.080 Yeah, I'm a skeptic.

01:44:09.020 You're a real skeptic.

01:44:10.200 And I'm not sure where you guys are on this issue.

01:44:13.080 I mean, I do believe that there are always two questions with the left.

01:44:15.840 The first thing is the issue, and the second thing is their solution, which is the government

01:44:19.820 should take over everything.

01:44:20.980 And I think that no socialist, no government solution is going to work here.

01:44:24.940 It's going to be a technological solution.

01:44:26.760 I'm not against some investment in that kind of solution, but basically I think some guy

01:44:30.960 in a garage will invent a battery that can contain, you know, wind created energy.

01:44:34.960 And there's even another level of skepticism, which is skepticism not of the warming or cooling

01:44:39.400 or not of the, even the anthropogenic part, the man-made part, but of the catastrophic

01:44:43.560 part.

01:44:44.140 Right, that's correct also.

01:44:45.260 I am skeptical of that.

01:44:46.220 I'm skeptical of that.

01:44:46.980 Because, you know, even the worst prediction is that it will take 10% off an economy that's

01:44:52.820 going to grow something like 300, 400% in the time it will take to take 10%.

01:44:56.960 We can afford that.

01:44:57.660 That's a good deal.

01:44:58.380 Yeah, it's a great deal.

01:44:59.320 This is the point that was made by William Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Prize in

01:45:01.860 economics.

01:45:02.160 That is the worst prediction of it.

01:45:03.700 And most people think it's going to be more like 5%.

01:45:06.220 So, you know, I'm just very skeptical of the sky as well.

01:45:09.180 If we can't accept that over the course of the next century.

01:45:11.680 Yeah.

01:45:12.280 Human ingenuity has been pretty good.

01:45:13.740 Yeah.

01:45:14.080 About, about 60 problems.

01:45:15.420 Exactly.

01:45:15.460 So if it costs us 5% of our economy in a time when the economy grows by 400%, and in the

01:45:21.700 meantime, some clown invents a battery that's going to solve the problem, eh, you know,

01:45:25.480 I just thought that worked.

01:45:26.860 Yep.

01:45:27.220 Elisha, I want to take one more question, and then there's two last things that we have

01:45:31.960 to talk about before we can let people go for tonight, but mostly because I made promises,

01:45:37.100 you guys.

01:45:37.620 And like Robert Frost's poem, which is now in the public domain, promises to keep and

01:45:41.840 miles to go, but mostly miles to go.

01:45:43.940 You know what that's about?

01:45:44.760 It's about suicide.

01:45:48.460 Elisha, share one last question with us from our Daily Wire subscribers.

01:45:51.200 Do we have a Daily Wire suicide hotline?

01:45:53.880 So when I tell you that I'm making Brussels sprouts for dinner tonight, you don't try

01:45:57.260 to burn your face off?

01:45:58.560 With Brussels sprouts.

01:46:00.380 All right.

01:46:01.080 I guess this question is for Ben and Michael.

01:46:03.820 Ben Shapiro quotes on the Daily Wire subscriber page.

01:46:06.260 Which wants to know, do Ben and Knowles have a bet on whose book will sell the most copies?

01:46:10.680 And does that bet involve Knowles' maybe unemployment?

01:46:15.140 So we do not have a bet.

01:46:16.860 I would not make that bet.

01:46:17.760 The last bet I made with Knowles I lost.

01:46:19.800 It was about the 2016 election.

01:46:21.340 He has never let me forget it.

01:46:22.700 I'll tell you what.

01:46:23.500 I would, I think this book, I read your book.

01:46:26.920 I'm not just saying this because you could defenestrate me right now and throw me out the

01:46:29.960 window.

01:46:30.540 It's very good.

01:46:31.340 It's really good.

01:46:32.140 I think it's going to sell a zillion copies.

01:46:34.000 It's very important.

01:46:34.920 It's better than all the other popular books that have come out recently.

01:46:38.160 I really mean that.

01:46:38.920 Well, thank you.

01:46:39.540 That's why I don't know that it's going to sell 250,000 copies, right?

01:46:42.940 So I, but I would still be willing to bet that my book sold more or will sell more if

01:46:48.040 you give me odds again.

01:46:49.320 Four to one.

01:46:51.560 Alicia, thank you.

01:46:52.480 Thank you to our dailywire.com subscribers for all you do to keep our, well, to keep us

01:46:58.640 employed.

01:46:59.860 The last two things I want to talk about tonight, one of them is pretty important and one of

01:47:04.240 them is really just a hat tip to a loyal fan.

01:47:07.640 It's New Year's.

01:47:08.940 Everyone is making resolutions.

01:47:10.580 They always do.

01:47:11.800 I think people like us tend to kind of roll our eyes at New Year's resolutions on account

01:47:17.220 of how most people don't keep them for very long.

01:47:19.080 But there's something aspirational and beautiful about a New Year's resolution.

01:47:23.060 You know, a new year, which is after all, an arbitrary day on a calendar, nevertheless

01:47:27.560 gives people a sense of reset.

01:47:29.720 It gives them the opportunity to reassess, to start anew.

01:47:33.800 And when people do reassess and start anew, there are some very predictable places in their

01:47:37.740 lives where they try to make improvements.

01:47:41.300 And so I thought it'd be a fun exercise if each of us talked about one of the sort of

01:47:46.220 common New Year's resolutions and shared not a gimmick, not a scheme.

01:47:51.420 We're not selling anything.

01:47:52.720 We're not trying to set people up for false hope.

01:47:54.680 But actually just share an actual piece of insight or piece of wisdom that you've accumulated

01:47:58.980 in your life that might help a person make substantive change in those areas and not

01:48:03.620 just fleeting change in those areas.

01:48:06.860 So for me, my New Year's resolution, believe it or not, has been to disconnect a lot more

01:48:10.420 from social media.

01:48:11.500 It's driving my family up a wall.

01:48:13.200 It's driving me up a wall.

01:48:14.340 When I went on vacation, it actually taught me a lesson.

01:48:16.460 It was the first vacation I'd had in a couple of years where I actually did a pretty good

01:48:19.400 job of disconnecting from social media, where I wasn't flipping through my phone or trying

01:48:22.420 to keep up with the news.

01:48:23.420 Part of that was because in the past, I've taken vacation during actual work times.

01:48:26.640 This time, it was between Christmas and New Year's, so everybody was on vacation, so

01:48:30.080 nothing was happening except the president telling seven-year-olds that Santa doesn't

01:48:33.380 exist anymore, which I did text to each and every one of you with the notation, Merry

01:48:39.500 Christmas.

01:48:40.720 But it is true that social media makes you miserable.

01:48:44.880 I want people to be on social media to the extent they keep up with the news and they're

01:48:47.940 informed.

01:48:48.700 But the need for information, the feeling that your brain craves information, it really isn't

01:48:53.040 craving the information.

01:48:53.880 It's craving the feeling of scrolling your thumb.

01:48:55.380 And you can get so much more done by just leaving your phone in the other room.

01:49:01.960 Like, really, this is my new thing.

01:49:03.460 The way that I'm dealing with it is I have a prophylactic rule.

01:49:05.920 Just like with Judaism, the prophylactic rule about not working is that you don't use

01:49:09.280 electricity and you don't drive, you don't do all these things.

01:49:12.480 The prophylactic rule for me is that when I get home at night, I take my phone, I plug

01:49:16.380 it in in my room.

01:49:17.180 It is away from me.

01:49:17.920 It is not on my person.

01:49:19.200 And that way, I'm not checking my phone all the time.

01:49:21.580 And then I have a book at my disposal.

01:49:22.960 And if nothing's happening, then I read the book.

01:49:24.740 Because if all the hours that I spent on social media, I spent reading, I mean, I'm smart

01:49:29.040 now.

01:49:29.060 We'd all be a lot for it.

01:49:30.200 I mean, come on.

01:49:32.640 So there's my New Year's resolution.

01:49:35.280 That's a very good one.

01:49:36.360 I have a New Year's resolution, which is to write a book with words.

01:49:40.520 This is a very discreet New Year's resolution.

01:49:43.020 And it's sort of funny.

01:49:43.820 Good for you, dude.

01:49:44.460 I know, I know.

01:49:45.360 You know, I really felt.

01:49:46.340 I'm going to warn you that it's really counterproductive.

01:49:48.620 I'm not going to make any money.

01:49:51.080 I know.

01:49:51.960 And the reason I bring this one up in particular is because it is not grand.

01:49:57.200 It is not open-ended.

01:49:58.540 It's actually, you know, I mean, you've written a lot more books than I haven't written.

01:50:02.960 But, you know, it is a contained activity.

01:50:05.000 And I think a lot of times New Year's resolutions go wrong because they're so open-ended.

01:50:09.100 I'm going to get healthier.

01:50:10.220 I'm going to read more.

01:50:11.480 I'm going to go to the gym.

01:50:12.680 I don't know.

01:50:12.920 I'm going to eat better or something.

01:50:13.940 And it's really easy to lose that.

01:50:15.860 But with a really discreet activity and project, you can fail.

01:50:21.000 You can fail to do it or you can do it.

01:50:23.080 And the clock is ticking.

01:50:24.160 The movement watch is ticking.

01:50:25.300 And it's never going to go backwards.

01:50:27.120 And I think New Year's resolutions, I've just found, have always worked better when there's a time limit on them.

01:50:32.440 And Dennis Prager says that the written word is the mirror of the mind, right?

01:50:35.560 That if you want to become associated with your own thoughts, organize them and write them down.

01:50:40.920 That doesn't reflect very well.

01:50:42.640 I was going to say, it's a good reason for you not to write a book.

01:50:44.520 Yeah, that's right.

01:50:45.120 This book is going to say they're making the frogs here.

01:50:47.040 They're making the frogs here.

01:50:47.980 They're making the frogs here.

01:50:49.960 Well, first of all, I want to say that I think New Year's resolutions get a bad rap.

01:50:53.440 I think the studies show that they actually do help people.

01:50:56.120 That, you know, plenty of them go by the boards, but plenty of them also stick.

01:50:59.740 I have a very obscure New Year's resolution, but it is a real one because I don't usually make them at all.

01:51:05.000 To live.

01:51:05.940 What's that?

01:51:06.540 To live.

01:51:07.000 To live, yeah.

01:51:08.320 That's always my resolution.

01:51:09.840 Every day, that's my resolution.

01:51:11.200 But, you know, last year I reread a lot of Aristotle, who I was a big fan of, but I reread him as a Christian.

01:51:18.740 And one of the things that Aristotle teaches is that virtue is a habit, and habits are formed by repeated exercise of those habits.

01:51:27.200 If you tried out my religion, we've been big into this for a really long time.

01:51:30.320 No, I mean, I think that I want to pay a lot more attention to what one philosopher calls the liturgies in my life,

01:51:38.700 the things that you go out and do that have inherent in them an idea of what a better life is.

01:51:44.560 If you go out trying to make money, for instance, then your idea is that that will give you a better life.

01:51:49.480 And I'm all for making money and all this.

01:51:51.020 It's not about that.

01:51:51.880 But I want to make sure that there is enough habit in my life that focuses me on the things that I really care about, which are two things, really.

01:52:00.700 One of them is trying to tell the truth, and the other is trying to tell the truth in a beautiful way.

01:52:04.560 And I just want to make sure that those are habits that I continue to pay attention to.

01:52:09.940 It's not so much about doing them.

01:52:11.460 It's doing them with a conscious, zen-like mind that I'm quite good at.

01:52:16.140 And I want to make sure I do it more.

01:52:17.920 That's fantastic.

01:52:18.560 One of the things that I've thought about over the last couple of years, and it's because I've been a beneficiary of some wisdom that was shared with me, which I'll get to, I want to help people make more money.

01:52:30.320 And I haven't cracked the code on exactly how I'm going to do it, other than I'm going to use some opportunities, for example, even on this show, to make a point of talking about it.

01:52:40.720 Because we don't.

01:52:41.160 People look in, and perhaps they think that three out of four of us are successful in life.

01:52:48.560 And it breeds a lot of problems in the human heart.

01:52:54.620 It can breed resentment towards people who you think are being successful.

01:52:58.160 It can breed a distorted view of the world, and social media contributes to this, where you think people are more successful than they are.

01:53:05.080 But one thing that I discovered in my life early on, and that I've seen with a lot of young people, in particular young religious people, is that while they may espouse a belief in, say, capitalism or incentive-based economics,

01:53:24.600 in sort of philosophical terms, in their own lives, they have shame about success, and shame about making money, and a fear of allowing themselves to prosper.

01:53:35.700 And I suffered greatly from that for most of my life.

01:53:39.980 I worked as hard as anyone I knew I would not accept pay for my work.

01:53:45.580 And two people really spoke into my life at a very similar time about this.

01:53:50.260 One of them is a friend of mine, Frank Brunner.

01:53:52.840 And another one is Ben Shapiro, who came into my life around that time and said,

01:53:56.680 Why do you do all of these things for free?

01:53:59.060 And the truth is, there was a reason.

01:54:02.360 I didn't understand it about myself what the reason was.

01:54:05.020 I came to understand over time that it was a kind of cowardice, that I took a lot of big risks.

01:54:13.040 You know, I mean, I moved to L.A. from a small town.

01:54:15.360 I was going to be an actor, a writer, a producer, and I had opportunities to take capital from people and produce films,

01:54:22.240 take capital from people and found companies, Declaration Entertainment, with our friend Bill Whittle,

01:54:28.160 Spiral, The Arroyo, Jonathan Hay, others.

01:54:30.240 Or I had the opportunity to step in and help run this organization of conservative Hollywoods, many thousands of people.

01:54:38.000 And it was always on very financially tenuous footing.

01:54:42.260 And so I didn't take any money for running that organization.

01:54:45.120 The funny thing is, if you look back across that same period of time, millions of dollars went through my hands.

01:54:49.980 And I paid out salaries to other people.

01:54:52.560 So when I was running that organization of that nonprofit of Hollywood conservatives,

01:54:57.640 I was paying staff, but I didn't pay myself.

01:55:01.500 When I was running, doing The Arroyo, I was making sure that, you know, we didn't have a lot of money,

01:55:05.760 but every person got their check every day when we were running Declaration Entertainment.

01:55:09.680 I made sure that Bill Whittle was making a good living and that Jonathan Hay was making a good living.

01:55:14.980 Nowhere in there was I rewarding Jeremy.

01:55:17.160 And when I say not at all, I mean not at all.

01:55:19.280 And I came to see it's because I had a fear of being kind of found out that if I paid myself and the project failed,

01:55:31.740 that I would sort of be revealed as some sort of fraud.

01:55:34.920 But if I didn't pay myself and the project failed, no one could accuse me of having had bad motives.

01:55:41.800 No one could accuse me of it having failed on the basis of me having my hand in the cookie jar.

01:55:50.860 But of course, the opposite was true.

01:55:52.720 Many of those companies may well have succeeded had I tied my economic future to them.

01:55:58.180 Had I had skin in the game, then I would have had incentive to have worked even.

01:56:02.340 And I worked hard. I don't want you to think that I was phoning it in.

01:56:05.320 But I wasn't phoning it in as though my economic life depended on it,

01:56:08.080 because my economic life did not depend on it.

01:56:11.180 And Ben used the very colorful analogy that my problem wasn't lack of urine.

01:56:20.300 It was the direction in which I peed.

01:56:23.540 When a good wind is blowing, you do well to turn the other way.

01:56:27.660 And of course, that was right, that I had plenty of effort,

01:56:31.260 but I wasn't putting my effort in the right directions.

01:56:34.420 I wasn't letting these values that I espouse of free markets and incentives actually apply to my own life,

01:56:40.640 that I thought that I was somehow morally above my own ideas of what would work for other people.

01:56:46.400 And I talk to young Christians in particular, young conservatives,

01:56:50.160 and I find that so many people have similar issues where they think they're too good for their actual worldview.

01:56:59.540 And you shouldn't be, because having not had very much money and having had more money, having more money is better.

01:57:05.120 Money doesn't make you happy.

01:57:06.820 Money doesn't solve all of your problems.

01:57:08.860 But growing up in a small town, growing up middle class, much more blessed than many of the people around me,

01:57:18.560 nevertheless knew a lot of economic struggle in my life and witnessed far more around me economic struggle.

01:57:25.140 And economic struggle does wear on the soul of a man.

01:57:29.580 It sure does.

01:57:29.940 It makes it, you have a responsibility to yourself to reward, to make sure that you are getting reward for your work.

01:57:36.820 You have a responsibility to your family to make sure that you're being rewarded appropriately for your work.

01:57:42.100 So I want to find ways to help people see past this particular fear, the fear of allowing themselves to succeed.

01:57:49.380 It manifests in non-economic ways too, of course.

01:57:52.180 I want people to allow themselves to have the successes in life that they should that will make their lives better,

01:57:59.300 their family's lives better, their church's life better, their society's life better,

01:58:03.240 and find ways to give practical advice to that, but also sort of this high-level philosophical advice.

01:58:08.820 So basically, if three of us keep our New Year's resolutions and one of us doesn't, it'll be a better world.

01:58:13.120 Finally, it is the 127th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien and our...

01:58:22.120 Man, he's old.

01:58:22.780 He is one old dude.

01:58:23.800 He's an old man.

01:58:24.580 What's his sequence?

01:58:26.100 He's still working at the top of his game, though, I gotta say.

01:58:29.340 Beloved by 99.99999% of religious people in the West.

01:58:37.180 Beloved by 99.99999% of conservative people in the West.

01:58:42.520 Especially Catholics, by the way.

01:58:45.720 99.99999% of Catholics.

01:58:49.260 The one exception.

01:58:50.700 Michael Knowles.

01:58:51.880 Michael Knowles.

01:58:53.540 Why you gotta hate?

01:58:54.460 I am...

01:58:55.720 This is one of these issues where I don't like Tolkien.

01:58:59.060 I've tried to read all of the books.

01:59:01.720 When I was a little kid, I tried to read The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings.

01:59:04.300 I said, okay, I don't like the books.

01:59:06.340 I'll go to the movies.

01:59:07.400 I went to the movies.

01:59:07.980 I walked out of the movie.

01:59:09.020 I got so bored because they were in the damn woods for, like, three hours.

01:59:13.360 And I just went, get me out of the woods.

01:59:15.080 I can't...

01:59:15.360 And yet, I know...

01:59:16.120 Look, I know.

01:59:16.780 I'm actually gonna admit.

01:59:18.100 I know that I'm holding a wrong opinion.

01:59:20.540 I know...

01:59:21.120 I keep...

01:59:21.660 Every year, I try to convince myself to like Tolkien.

01:59:24.840 Can't do it.

01:59:25.480 Ben, level this guy.

01:59:27.400 You're fired.

01:59:28.320 This was the moment.

01:59:30.560 Yeah.

01:59:30.700 Why Tolkien?

01:59:31.940 Well, I mean, if you actually read The Lord of the Rings books, he has a very clear vision

01:59:38.020 of good and evil that is, I think, fundamental to understanding of, number one, all fantasy

01:59:43.620 literature, but also an understanding of world building and rule setting that is kind of

01:59:50.280 transformative in literary history.

01:59:52.460 Mostly the reason that conservatives, I think, are very fond of Tolkien.

01:59:55.460 And I'll admit, I'm a rube when it comes to Tolkien.

01:59:58.020 I'm not a Tolkien scholar.

01:59:59.620 I'm also a...

02:00:01.180 I'm so much of a rube that I like the movies better than I like the books.

02:00:04.200 I like The Hobbit.

02:00:05.200 I think that the long passages of poetry in Lord of the Rings are nearly unreadable.

02:00:10.500 I'm with you.

02:00:11.020 And I think that the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the books is significantly

02:00:16.200 worse than the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the movie.

02:00:18.740 And I'm not talking about one of the nine endings of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in

02:00:21.820 the movies.

02:00:22.460 But the reason is because the very idea that there is a West that is worth upholding is embodied

02:00:27.680 in the nature of Tolkien's writing and in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, particularly the

02:00:31.680 idea that there is something worth fighting for, that there are people who do not believe

02:00:34.820 in these same principles and that there are real things that divide people.

02:00:38.340 And this doesn't mean that everybody who disagrees with you is an orc or a monster, but it does

02:00:42.540 mean that to pretend that there aren't people with monstrous ideas in the world who are fundamentally

02:00:47.220 seduced by power itself is a great misnomer.

02:00:50.860 I mean, that's the real, obviously that's the great revelation of the Lord of the Rings

02:00:53.480 trilogy is that the real bad guy doesn't exist out there.

02:00:57.780 The real bad guy exists in here.

02:00:59.380 That's why the best moment in all of Lord of the Rings is, spoiler alert for people who

02:01:04.340 haven't read the books or seen the movies, is when the ring actually seduces Frodo because

02:01:08.360 you've actually been waiting.

02:01:09.220 I remember seeing it in the theater and I deliberately held off from reading the books until I could

02:01:12.500 see it in the theaters because I didn't know it was coming and I kept myself shut off.

02:01:15.760 So I didn't know what the ending was going to be.

02:01:16.800 And you go for three movies with this entirely long journey with these huge battle sequences

02:01:21.360 and you think that you are rooting all three movies for Frodo to toss the ring in the fire.

02:01:25.680 That's what you think you're waiting for.

02:01:27.300 And then Frodo doesn't, right?

02:01:28.720 The ring seduces Frodo.

02:01:30.220 And it's so satisfying as a viewer and as a reader because what you realize is that you

02:01:35.540 haven't been waiting for him to toss the ring in the fire because that would have been

02:01:38.600 anticlimactic.

02:01:39.320 If he just walked in and threw the ring in the fire, then you're waiting for him to be

02:01:42.360 seduced by the ring to remind you that the ring actually is powerful, that the ring actually

02:01:46.060 means something.

02:01:47.180 And that notion that power is seductive and that you're thinking that you can wield the

02:01:52.900 power.

02:01:53.520 Then if only you had the power, then you'd be able to fix the world.

02:01:56.940 That if you, if you were given the ring and you had the ability to be invisible and sneak

02:02:00.620 around and do what you want and control other people that you'd, you'd make a utopia out of

02:02:05.400 it.

02:02:05.540 No, you wouldn't.

02:02:06.120 You'd be just like Sauron, right?

02:02:07.500 We're a deep down.

02:02:08.460 We are all Sauron unless we give up the ring, really not just to, not just generally,

02:02:13.120 but we give up the ring to the idea that there is a plan in the universe that is beyond any

02:02:16.780 of us and that we're going to have to let go at a certain point because faith exists in

02:02:21.000 letting go.

02:02:21.780 Right.

02:02:22.220 It's interesting that you bring up the orcs because the orcs are like the instruments of

02:02:26.940 evil in the Lord of the Rings, but they're, but all of the truly sinister characters aren't

02:02:32.380 orcs at all.

02:02:32.780 That's right.

02:02:33.240 They're all people or elves or, you know.

02:02:36.640 Humanoids.

02:02:37.160 Human, they're, they're, they're all people.

02:02:38.400 Right.

02:02:39.080 And there are people who've been seduced by either the power that they have or the

02:02:45.960 power that they don't.

02:02:47.380 And one of the things I love about the Lord of the Rings is that I kept waiting to see,

02:02:52.460 because like you, I had not read the books when I first saw the films.

02:02:54.920 I kept waiting for the reveal of what the power of this ring was other than making you

02:02:58.780 invisible.

02:03:00.280 And you really never see anything.

02:03:03.640 So what is the great power of the ring?

02:03:05.440 It's actually a very subtle idea.

02:03:06.780 And it's just that you would be hidden from man and God that it kind of goes back to our

02:03:11.640 previous conversation that you could, that you could function in this world apart, wholly

02:03:17.260 apart from judgment, wholly apart from consequence, wholly apart from the perspectives of other

02:03:24.740 people.

02:03:25.300 And that, that really lies at the heart.

02:03:27.960 It's such a, an insight by Tolkien of what lies at the heart of almost all true evil, even,

02:03:34.240 even, you know, the evil within it's, it's the, the belief that we could be apart from

02:03:40.520 God who sees all, but who, who then wouldn't see you.

02:03:44.420 And I think one of the things that I find really fascinating is that if you watch a game of

02:03:49.560 thrones, which is a wonderful TV show, which makes no moral sense at its basis, George RR

02:03:54.600 Martin is an atheist and all throughout a game of thrones, there are religions and the religions

02:04:00.180 always turn out to be frauds or fake, but, but the effect of religion is always there.

02:04:05.120 People come back from the dead and he said, where were you?

02:04:06.880 I was nowhere.

02:04:07.740 It makes no sense whatsoever.

02:04:09.280 There's no religion in Tolkien.

02:04:11.300 There's no religion in Lord of the Rings because Tolkien understood what Shakespeare understood,

02:04:15.020 which is that the Christian religion or the, I'll even say the Judeo-Christian religion,

02:04:19.340 it simply is the world.

02:04:21.560 It is the way the world is.

02:04:23.160 And so Tolkien never has to mention God.

02:04:25.180 He never has to show anybody pray.

02:04:26.700 It's simply the way the world works is the way the Judeo-Christian vision says it works.

02:04:32.840 And Shakespeare understood exactly the same thing.

02:04:34.700 People always say, Shakespeare's a secular writer.

02:04:37.020 If he is, I'll be damned.

02:04:39.040 Because he's not.

02:04:39.880 Everything that happens, there is a moral arc.

02:04:42.660 You bend that moral arc, there are consequences.

02:04:45.380 And Tolkien understood it and that's what makes that book so powerful.

02:04:48.200 Even though I agree with you, it's overwritten, it's overimagined.

02:04:51.520 The movies work on a dramatic level far better.

02:04:54.080 But even so, you know you are in the midst of a vision of the world that has been handed

02:04:58.520 down to this guy for 2,000 years and he gets it.

02:05:01.780 He understands it and he sees the world in those terms.

02:05:03.700 And that makes it a brilliant book.

02:05:05.160 But Michael Knowles doesn't get it.

02:05:06.320 You know, this conversation is reminding me that I love essays about Tolkien.

02:05:11.140 I love the book.

02:05:12.260 I can't get into the elves and all.

02:05:13.900 I can't get into it.

02:05:14.840 It's those long conference scenes where they talk for 50 years.

02:05:18.060 Please.

02:05:19.020 He's a sad, sad man, Michael Knowles.

02:05:21.620 That's it for The Daily Wire backstage.

02:05:23.440 Our first episode of 2019.

02:05:25.560 We will be back on January 29th.

02:05:27.280 It was actually announced in real time while we were on the show for President Donald Trump's

02:05:31.040 State of the Union Address to the Joint Session of Congress.

02:05:33.880 We will bring you all of our blistering rage.

02:05:38.120 Rage.

02:05:38.660 Rage.

02:05:39.700 And we look forward to seeing you there.

02:05:41.020 Come visit us in the meantime over at DailyWire.com.

02:05:43.120 Thanks to all of our subscribers and everybody who, you know, made it this far.

02:05:46.340 Fake laugh in three, two, one.

02:05:47.560 Is your home's title still in your name?

02:06:01.140 With one forged document, scammers can steal your home title and equity.

02:06:04.820 But now you can protect yourself.

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02:06:10.580 urgent alerts to changes, and if fraud happens, they'll spend up to a million dollars to fix

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02:06:28.860 in your name.

The Michael Knowles Show - January 03, 2019

The Daily Wire Backstage： 2019 Predictions Special

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