The Daily Wire Strikes Back(stage): Canceling Cancel Culture
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 58 minutes
Words per Minute
221.6379
Summary
The culture war is on, and we are recruiting more and more people to join our side in the fight. Today we discuss everything from Gina Carano joining the resistance, to what it's like changing tires in an ice storm.
Transcript
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Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage canceling cancel culture
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is available now. The culture war is on and we are recruiting more and more people to join our
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side in the fight. Check out me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and the God King Jeremy
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Boring as we discuss everything from Gina Carano joining the resistance to what it's like changing
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tires in an ice storm. Take a listen. Welcome to the Daily Wire Strikes Back stage. I'm Jeremy
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Boring, lowercase g, lowercase k, God King. Tonight, we're going to be talking cancel culture in an
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effort to answer the age-old question, just how rich is the left trying to make us with all this bull
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crap? Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't let big tech track what you do.
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Anonymize your web browsing at expressvpn.com slash backstage. I'm joined per uge by Smokey Mike
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Knowles, by Matholomew Walsh, by the ghost of Andrew Klavan, and by the finest Ben Shapiro clone money
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can buy, still cheaper than the original. And of course, by the lovely one herself, Mrs. Elisha Krause,
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here to take your questions. Elisha. Hey, how are you guys doing? And welcome to the Empire Strikes
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Backstage. The Daily Wire Strikes Backstage. Although I don't know why you guys want to be
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relating to the Empire. I thought that we were the good guys and the woke mob that tried to cancel
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Gina was the Empire. But anyway. You're overthinking this, Elisha. You're overthinking it.
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Sorry, I'm just trying to be accurate, God King. Anyway, it has been one of the biggest months in
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the Daily Wire history, and we are so excited. I love the Sunday special with Gina and Ben. And
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we're going to tell you guys, this is just the beginning. Ben still needs to introduce Gina and
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I so we can be BFFs and go for many petties. And then she can teach me how to be a badass so I can
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beat up Michael Knowles. But if you're just as excited as I am, then you can be a part of this huge
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movement by joining us at The Daily Wire. As always, I will be answering your questions tonight
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throughout the show. And only Daily Wire members can ask the questions later on throughout the show
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tonight. And if you're not a member, then you ask, oh, how can I become a member? Well, just head on
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over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, and you can get 25% off if you use the code DEBUNKED. That code
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is very specific because it is also the name of Ben Shapiro's new show, DEBUNKED, in which he talks about
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massive leftist myths that he is going to debunk every single episode. The first episode is this
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Friday, February 26th. Be sure to check it out. But after you go to dailywire.com slash subscribe,
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use code DEBUNKED for 25% off because who doesn't love a good sale? I know I do. Stereotypical,
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right? So go to dailywire.com slash subscribe, use that code DEBUNKED, ask the questions. I'll throw
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them to the guys later throughout the night. Thanks, Alicia. Fellas, we had an unbelievable
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last two weeks because the left has decided in their infinite wisdom that making us just
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insanely wealthy is their top priority. They've decided that they're going to cancel many, many
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valuable Hollywood entertainers. And we have decided that we are going to make movies with
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those people, specifically with Gina Carano. Alicia mentioned the Sunday special, Ben. It really
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was. I think it may have been the best Sunday special ever. Gina telling her side of the story
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was just remarkable. I want to talk about what happened to Gina specifically for the three or
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four people who live under rocks and didn't pick up on it. But what I really want to talk about
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is the bifurcation of the culture, the bifurcation of the economy, the tragedy and the comedy of the
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whole thing and the opportunities that it presents. So will you mind walking us just briefly through
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Gina's story? So, I mean, the way that Gina told it, and first of all, you should watch the Sunday
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special because it really does allow you to see her side of the story in her own words. And Gina is
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just a lovely human being, just a wonderful, lovely human being. I had her over for a Friday night
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dinner. So we actually had Chavez together. It was really nice. My kids loved her. And what happened
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to Gina basically is that she tweeted a bunch of stuff that Disney didn't like. None of it was
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particularly horrifying or controversial. And they fired her. I mean, it really is that simple.
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It started off when she had tweeted a joke about the pressure that people receive online to put
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their pronouns in their Twitter profiles. She had put in her Twitter profile, beep, bop, boop,
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which is actually pretty funny. Droid noises. And Disney called her into a room and they wanted her to
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have kind of the woke mob do a Zoom session with her. And she said, I don't really want to do that.
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I want to actually get in a room and talk with actual human beings. And they finally kind of let her do
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that. And then they would not let her do any press basically from then on. They cut her out of all of
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the press materials for the Mandalorian, even though she's one of the bigger stars in the show.
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And then you fast forward and post-election, she started tweeting things that are fairly well
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accepted in conservative circles. Like if you want to crack down on voter fraud, perhaps there should
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be voter ID. She tweeted that like two days after the election. And people are like, oh, this means
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that she is in favor of lies about the election. No, that's not what she tweeted. And then a few days
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later, she tweeted something about how Americans should remove the mask from their eyes so they can see
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what's actually going on with regard to COVID. Again, this is a fairly mainstream conservative
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position, even for people like me. Plus, it doesn't even protect you from the virus.
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If it's on your eyes. If it's on your eyes. Yeah. In any case, that was really not particularly
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controversial. And then she tweeted out this meme that was just a picture, very famous picture,
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from the Holocaust of a Jewish woman running away from German soldiers. And the text next to it was
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fairly generic. It just said these sorts of evils don't happen in a vacuum. They start off with
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people dehumanizing other human beings. And if you treat people horribly, then eventually you could
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end up at this place. And so you should remember this when you treat people horribly because of
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their politics, which is a fairly reasonable generic statement. Now, I'm not a huge fan of
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Holocaust comparisons because I generally feel that most of them are overwrought, but there is nothing
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remotely anti-Semitic about this one. And in the world of Holocaust comparisons, this one ranks like the
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lowest 10% in terms of controversial, because that's a pretty generic statement about
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dehumanization of other people. In fact, I've seen the Auschwitz Memorial Museum put out very similar
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tweets, actually, about the generic nature of dehumanizing other people and how that leads to
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problems down the road, including death for people. And so, you know, this turned into a big hullabaloo
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with Disney and Lucasfilm deciding that it was time for Gina to be ousted. Apparently, this had been in the
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works for a couple of months. They had been meaning to announce her as a spinoff star from The Mandalorian
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in one of their own series. They had canceled that in December, and they were looking for an excuse to
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canter. They used this as the excuse to canter, despite the fact that Pedro Pascal, the actual
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star of The Mandalorian, had tweeted out a meme comparing Auschwitz to kids being held in cages
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in 2018 using a picture that was from the Palestinian Authority in 2014. And it was, of course, no blowback
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to that. So basically, after they canceled her and she found out about this, essentially via the social
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media, the way we did. The way we did. Right. I mean, we found out about the exact same time that
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Gina did. They didn't even give her the courtesy of a call. They just said, you're not coming back.
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That's it. In social media. Right. And and we saw this here at Daily Wire and we reached out.
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I reached out to her personally and I said, listen, this is it's really tragic what's happening to you
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because it's not about the money. It's about the dream. If you ever go to Hollywood and you work
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with folks in Hollywood and pretty much all of us, except for Matt, have actually have actually done
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this. People who move out to Hollywood, move out there because their dream is to be in a show like
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The Mandalorian. I mean, it's the biggest show in TV right now and to have a starring role in that
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and to take that away from somebody summarily and to destroy their career in the process because
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they released a statement saying essentially she was an anti-Semite and that she was a racist and
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all this stuff. It categorized people on the basis of religion and ethnicity. Right. I mean, it's just
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a lie. It's just not true. And they and and for them to do that was an act of cruelty. It was an act
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of true cruelty. So we called her up and and I said to her, you know, it's terrible what's happening to
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you, but it's a real opportunity to punch back at these bastards. And we should punch back at them
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because nobody has ever said to them, you know what? Fine. You want to cancel me? I'm not canceled
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because there's a whole side of the political aisle that doesn't agree that I should be canceled.
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And so, you know what? I'm just going to go do my own thing over here. And so that's when we
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announced and she good for her because it was an act of bravery on her part for us. Yeah, it was an
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opportunity right for us. It was I mean, I'll be to be honest with you. Whenever somebody in mainstream
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in mainstream culture is canceled, I put in a call. So I probably put in over the course of the last
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four or five years, at least 50 calls to various mainstream figures have been canceled for bad reasons.
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It's something that I just do on regular, whether liberal or conservative. There are many people
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on the left I've done this for. And Gina was just another person who was like that. But Gina really
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took up the opportunity and said, OK, let's do this. Now, there's an opportunity. I've been wanting
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to do this anyway. I don't deserve to be canceled. And Americans need to be able to stand up for
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themselves. So I'm happy to come over here and I'm happy to make a movie with you guys. And we could
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not be more pumped up about it. Our audience certainly couldn't be more pumped up about it. It's the biggest
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week in the history of The Daily Wire. I think people miss that Gina Carano is a real human. I mean,
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sometimes you read these stories about us or about political figures or about entertainment figures
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and we're two-dimensional. And that makes sense because we come to you on a screen, which makes
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us two-dimensional. Also because we have no souls. Yeah, I personally am two-dimensional.
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But Gina's an actual human. They took her career away from her. Her agent dropped her. Her attorney
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dropped her. Her publicist dropped her. They took all the tools necessary to have a career away
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from her. They took the biggest show away from her. They took her ability to pay her bills away
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from her. They took her good name away from her. Lucasfilm called her aberrant, said that she
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categorized people on the basis of religion and ethnicity, which she did not do. I mean,
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it's defamation because it is 100% untrue. That's not even a possible interpretation of the things
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that she has said. The fact that we were even able to get her on the phone in that situation,
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I think, is fairly remarkable. She was having what must be one of the worst days
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that a person can possibly endure when their career and their good name have already been
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short of having a serious health problem. That's about as bad as it gets right there.
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But you know, the terrific thing about it and the reason I'm so glad you guys acted,
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I really, I hate to compliment you because you know who you are. But still, I really am happy you
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acted is because we all support free speech. And that means when they take an Alex Jones off the air,
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I'm offended. I think Alex Jones should have a platform. I think he's a loon. But he should
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have a platform because who cares? You know, we can defeat it. We can defeat his craziness.
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But the thing is, we're defending a guy that we don't agree with, that we think is out of his mind.
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Here's a case where this woman did literally 0% wrong. Her tweet, and I'm with you,
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I don't like Holocaust comparisons because they're over the top. But she didn't really even deal with
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that. She was making a perfectly valid point that you begin by dehumanizing people and you end by
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hurting them. And that's what is happening in our society. It's a perfectly valid point.
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We're defending somebody who was actually wronged. And that is a terrific position to be in because
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the left has been very clever and they go after the people on the end.
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And they proved her point too, because they, not that they're going to cart her off to a
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concentration camp, but they dehumanized her by, by labeling her anti-Semite, by lying about her,
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saying her, saying that she was, was, you know, categorizing people based on race and
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ethnicity. That's just flatly wrong. They know that they're lying, but they figure, well,
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she deserves to be lied about and to be slandered because she's wrong about all these other things.
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There are two aspects of this that I want to talk about. I actually want to talk about Holocaust
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comparisons generally. And I want to talk about what it means that they canceled someone
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absolutely free. Expressvpn.com slash backstage. Head over there right now. Michael. Yes. They
00:12:33.280
canceled her for nothing. Yeah. Why did they cancel her? They canceled her because it's very wrong
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to make any comparison to the Holocaust, especially after we just had literally Hitler be president for
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four years. So you're not, you can't do that sort of thing. You know, it, this is what is most
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chilling to me. We all support the American free speech tradition in the, in this room. The left
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does not. We all support it, but we all think there are, there are some things that if you, you know,
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if you walk up to the water cooler and you say Zig Heil, or, you know, you do something, I think you
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should lose your job. I don't think you should be allowed to keep your movie or whatever. I think
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there are some things that are out of bounds. There are always things that are out of bounds.
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What this woman did was make an absolutely mainstream opinion that we all, everybody left,
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right and center would have agreed on even five or six years ago. But now they have so moved the
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goalposts in this country that if you, if you have an American flag outside your house, you could be.
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I'm actually not sure that this is right. I think that she was canceled for nothing because it was
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nothing. I think that we're living through a change in what cancel culture is and what the woke mob
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wants, that it's no longer about enforcing their rules. I think that it's, it's like the great
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terror. I think it's just the imposition. Yes. Yeah. I think that the arbitrariness of it,
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I think the randomness of it is actually part of the terror. If they can take down Gina for nothing,
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then they can take down you for, well, you see this happening. I mean, the rules are changing
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every single day. I mean, they're changing every single day and things that are overtly non-racist
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are now being treated as racist. I mean, you'll have Don McNeil losing his job at the New York
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Times for using the N word to describe why using the N word is wrong, right? And in which situations
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using the N word is wrong. See the guy over at Slate, Mike Peska, right? We're not big fans of
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Slate over here. Slate fired a guy for saying that maybe we should have a discussion about when use of
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the N word is appropriate in like, for example, quoting someone who used the N word. And they were,
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and people at Slate were like, nope, can't have that. They, they laid Mike Peska off. The, I think the most
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ridiculous example of somebody being canceled for non-racism that I've seen in the recent past
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is not really even Gina, although that was ridiculous. I think that it's what's going
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on with Chris Harrison over at the bachelor, right? So I'm not, I'm not a fan of the bachelor
00:14:48.620
because I am a man. I have testosterone that runs in my body, but there, this is one of the
00:14:54.280
cultural institutions of the United States over the last 25 years, right? I mean, it's been going
00:14:57.820
since 2002. It has been, the bachelor has been on the air for a majority of my lifetime on this
00:15:04.680
planet, right? It's been on forever. And right. And the, and the bachelor basically just collapsed
00:15:10.460
over the course of the last month because there's a, the first black bachelor and he was dating one
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woman. There was a woman named Rachel Kirkconnell when she committed the heinous sin of in 2018,
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going to a party at a plantation that was dubbed a plantation party or something. And she wore like
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a Scarlett O'Hara dress. Antebellum party. Antebellum party. Okay. And the idea was that this was
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racist because you can't have an antebellum party without acknowledging the sins of slavery,
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which again, I just hate to note this. Unless you're governor of Virginia. Well, right. Then
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you can dress up as whatever you want, right? But, uh, but I hate to note this for everybody,
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but if you wear a costume from virtually any historic period prior to 1820, that culture had
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slavery, right? I mean, like if you, if you dress up as a Viking and there was, there was slavery back
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then, if you dress up as a Roman, there was lots of slavery back then. In any case, the, the idea was
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that she was a racist for having gone to this party in 2018. So the, the bachelor who spoiler
00:16:02.260
alert for women who are still watching the bachelor, but it's out of the bag. Now he ended up picking
00:16:05.680
this woman, right? Rachel Kirkconnell is the woman he ended up picking at the end of the bachelor.
00:16:09.880
And so he put out a statement on February 3rd in which he said, you know, she should be given a
00:16:13.960
little bit of grace. Social media shouldn't be going after her. They shouldn't be digging up her
00:16:16.460
parents voting record. Like give her, give her a break. And so Chris Harrison, the host was on a show
00:16:21.080
with Rachel Lindsay, a former host of the, she was the, the former bachelorette, first black bachelorette,
00:16:25.520
I think. And she was interviewing him and Chris Harrison said, you should give her a little bit
00:16:29.460
of grace, right? Social media shouldn't be judged, jury and executioner. People should be treated with
00:16:32.740
a little bit of grace. She can explain herself. And Rachel Lindsay then suggested that Chris Harrison
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for saying she deserved grace ought to apologize and essentially lose his job. And then a couple
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of weeks later, like just this week, Matt James, who originally had defended Rachel Kirkconnell and was
00:16:47.620
dating Rachel Kirkconnell. He put out a statement over the last 24 hours saying that Rachel Kirkconnell was
00:16:51.940
essentially a racist, that Chris Harrison was a racist, that the bachelor was racist. And that
00:16:56.240
it was, it was unthinkable that Chris Harrison could have said what he said in front of Rachel,
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Rachel Lindsay, who then was forced to do, and I quote, the emotional labor, the emotional labor
00:17:05.880
of explaining to him the history of racism and slavery in this country. Emotional labor. First of all,
00:17:11.000
what, what in the F is emotional labor? I've seen actual physical labor. My wife's done it several
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times. It's much, it's much the same. I can't even make this joke. It is so over the top.
00:17:19.700
I know if I make this joke, how mad Ben's going to be at me, but I will say this. The fact that he
00:17:25.660
used the term emotional labor is proof that they got to him. Yeah. There's no human being walks
00:17:31.160
around with the term emotional labor in their frontal lobe, except woke leftists. Yeah. And
00:17:35.840
that means that somebody came and sat him down and said, listen, uh, the girl you've been dating and
00:17:40.000
obviously like, she doesn't matter the show. That's the only reason you have a platform at all.
00:17:45.360
That doesn't matter. The only thing that matters if you want to keep have, if you want to keep
00:17:49.800
your house and your career and your good name is that you freaking get out there and walk the line.
00:17:55.740
That's right. And I mean, the, the utter cowardice of throwing under the bus, the girl you were dating,
00:18:00.500
right. And calling her racist. And then saying the guy who said exactly what you said, exactly what
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you said, like within days that that guy's a racist, but you, you're, you're perfect. Right. You're
00:18:08.840
perfect. That's amazing. By the way, I just have to add the capper to this. So again,
00:18:12.920
my producers who, uh, the only reason I know about the bachelor is because I have two producers.
00:18:17.180
Yes, they are. They're female. And, uh, they inform me of this TV remote. That's why
00:18:21.760
a producer savvy and producer Jessica. Uh, I will say that they keep me updated on this stuff on a
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granular level. Uh, and, uh, and they made me aware of a post from Rachel Lindsay that happened
00:18:31.680
in the middle of the black lives matter movement in the summer. And this post was a picture of Rachel
00:18:36.240
Lindsay standing. I kid you not in front of a Cadillac XT six. And the post was when I am
00:18:43.160
fighting on behalf of black lives matter, the way that I like to learn about black history is
00:18:47.220
through podcasts about black history that I listened to on my Bose sound system in my Cadillac
00:18:52.380
XTS capitalism. Number one always wins, but number two, like this is the person who is standing up
00:18:58.720
against the racism and of the capitalist evil American system. This is the person who's doing
00:19:02.580
emotional labor, emotional labor. You're standing in front of a Cadillac XT six and a sponsored ad
00:19:08.240
on Instagram to preach about black lives matter. And you're the person who's supposed to be the,
00:19:12.660
the great Pope of wokeness here. I mean, it's insanity. How dare you is what a, is what a grift
00:19:18.360
it all is. Correct. You know, 15 years ago, you were taught discussing in an academic context,
00:19:23.920
the use of the N word, and now you're fired. But if you're a black mom who wants her kid to go to
00:19:29.640
school, that can't happen because teachers unions are keeping you out. You know, if Bill Gates
00:19:35.000
literally put out a system for teaching algebra to black kids, where you got rid of the concept
00:19:40.760
of right and wrong. And I just thought like that, that may be, and I'm like, I've been around a long
00:19:47.140
time. That's one of the most racist, and so it's all a grift, you know, it's all, nobody's doing
00:19:53.620
anything for anybody, but this emotional panic is. And the corporations are right. It's white
00:19:59.680
America. Well, it is. I mean, this is what Shelby Steele writes about. It's a bunch of woke white
00:20:03.300
folks who get to maintain control over the auspices of power by saying black folks don't
00:20:07.060
have to do the work. It's our job to do the work. All you have to do is give me power and I can fix
00:20:10.900
all of these things. Exactly. And corporate America has bought into this, that, that, that
00:20:14.820
ridiculous anti-racism training that Coca-Cola, or as I now call them, woke-a-Cola.
00:20:18.900
Matt, you talked about this on your show. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's why we have
00:20:22.320
to stipulate, I think, with, with cancel culture that it is a left-wing phenomenon. This is the,
00:20:27.780
I know on the left, they always want to accuse the right of, oh, you're doing cancel culture
00:20:31.300
because we criticize someone for having, you know, for their opinion. But you know how people on the
00:20:36.440
left say that only white people can be racist because we have institutional power and black people
00:20:42.900
don't. Well, we know that that's totally bogus because number one, racism is a condition of the
00:20:47.340
heart. Anyone can be racist. Number two, we had a black president. You know, I consider that to be
00:20:50.920
institutional power, but with, with cancel culture, that actually is about institutional power. You
00:20:57.600
can't cancel someone unless you own the institutions. Yeah. Canceling someone is all about, they lose
00:21:02.740
their job, they lose the reputation, uh, they lose their credibility, they lose everything. We on the
00:21:07.520
right, unfortunately don't have the ability to do that. Um, only the left can do that. So the left,
00:21:12.580
so cancel culture is a left-wing thing. It's what the left does. And I think we need to be clear
00:21:18.220
about that in our definition of it, because that's, that's what I think it is. The collapse
00:21:22.820
of corporate America into wokeism is one of the great disturbing elements of the last several
00:21:27.120
decades. It really is amazing because we were all taught that after you leave college that you
00:21:31.000
were going to get in the real world and then the real world, there'd be a meritocracy and, and all of
00:21:35.180
the, all of the kind of emotional crap that you learned in college and the microaggression nonsense,
00:21:39.120
all that was going to stop. And it turns out those people just took over the institutions. And now
00:21:42.440
you get it twice as hard from the corporations and the corporations have a real interest in
00:21:46.420
promoting this stuff because number one, it's a great way to avoid liability, like discrimination
00:21:50.740
liability. You say, oh, you know, we hired Robin DiAngelo for 20 grand to teach all of our people
00:21:55.000
that they're racist. So, I mean, how can you sue us for that? And also all your woke staffers are the
00:21:59.700
ones who are most likely to sue you. So if you just give into them, then they won't sue you.
00:22:02.800
But has anyone sued yet? I mean, we're waiting for a white, they're at a point right now in these
00:22:07.120
corporations where they actually single out, they say, this is only for the white employees,
00:22:10.980
come to the room and we're going to tell you what a scumbag you are. Has any white employee actually
00:22:14.900
stood up and said, this is racial harassment? But look, look what happens when you, you know,
00:22:18.540
when, when Asian students sued Harvard, right? Wasn't white students suing about the affirmative
00:22:22.920
action policies. It was Asian students who were also disadvantaged. The Asian students sue,
00:22:27.100
what happens? Doesn't go anywhere. The DOJ under Trump looks into Yale for doing exactly the same
00:22:32.780
thing. They're disadvantaging white and Asian students in applications. What happens? The Biden
00:22:36.960
administration gets rid of it. So, you know, if, if I'm a white employee and I'm being told to be
00:22:41.640
less white and I think I'm pretty swarthy, how much less white can I get? If I'm thinking about
00:22:45.800
suing, I look at the track record of, of these lawsuits and I say, well, why would I waste my
00:22:49.780
money? That goes back to the institutional point that Matt was making. The institutions are now
00:22:57.600
completely corrupted from the inside by the woke. I want to talk about that a little bit more.
00:23:01.220
First, I want to talk about one of the most important things to me, which is me.
00:23:07.340
When it comes to being me, I like to spend as much time being me as humanly possible. And that
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means spending as little time doing the things that I don't want as is humanly possible. And
00:23:17.160
that's why I use stamps.com. When you're taking trips to the post office, you're not busy being
00:23:23.120
you. No, you're not doing the things that you want to do. This is not how a God King likes to
00:23:27.340
operate. That's why I recommend mailing and shipping online at stamps.com. Stamps.com allows
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cost of those expensive postage meters. Don't waste your time. Be like me. Sit at your
00:23:57.200
house. Don't go outside. Don't pay attention to anybody else. Look in the mirror. Occasionally
00:24:02.440
break away to send out a correspondence out to the hoi polloi at your computer by using stamps.com.
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You don't want to go to the post office. You'll want to go to stamps.com instead. There's nothing
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wrong with a post office. Post office is a perfectly wonderful place if you like to be around other
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human beings. I don't. Therefore, stamps.com. There is no risk if you use the promo code backstage,
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promo code backstage, stamps.com. Never go to the post office again and just, you know,
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enjoy being you for a minute. That is the first time I've ever heard the term hoi polloi in an
00:24:45.920
advertisement. Well, first of all, I was actually going to stop you. That is the best ad read you've
00:24:49.180
ever done. As somebody who does this professionally, let me just say, your skill set has grown,
00:24:55.060
Jeremy. I mean, like, I've heard you do some real bad ad reads. Some horrible ad reads. Some truly
00:24:58.580
terrible ones. Really bad. That was excellent. It was a really great segue in, and then it really
00:25:02.840
made it personal, and he made it about you. And you really took your time with it. It was really
00:25:06.280
excellent. That was really good. The fact that you were talking about you, that's when you glow.
00:25:10.220
That kind of glow comes over you. I mean, it was really impressive. There was one note that I wanted
00:25:14.340
to make as far as the fact that cancellation is a left-wing phenomenon. And it is, because it is
00:25:19.980
connected to institutional power. Occasionally, you will see sort of a right-wing cancellation
00:25:23.240
effort. So, for example, there was some talk about, in college, removing college scholarships
00:25:28.220
from kids who wanted to kneel for the national anthem or something. Like, I'm not a big fan of that
00:25:32.280
sort of thing. But it's not just that it's a left-wing phenomenon. It's that it's a left-wing
00:25:37.400
mindset. There's an actual mindset of cancellation that exists. And there's a study that I was looking at
00:25:42.620
the other day, that it's just a truly amazing study. It was quoted in Harvard Business Review.
00:25:47.640
What they did is they took a panel of people of wide variety of political opinion, went all the
00:25:52.560
way right to left, and then they offered them a model corporation. It was like Jobs Corporation or
00:25:57.820
something. And what they told them is that they gave them three examples. One, Jobs Corporation is
00:26:02.040
apolitical. How do you feel about it? You're like, okay, it seems like a nice corporation. Second was
00:26:06.720
Jobs Corporation is liberal. How do you feel about it? People are like, hmm, nice corporation. And then they
00:26:11.500
said Jobs Corporation is conservative. It dropped 33 points in the approval ratings. 33 points
00:26:16.860
entirely because the left decided that it was now an evil business. Right? So in other words, people
00:26:21.100
assume that corporate America is liberal. They assume it, right? That's why the first two results
00:26:25.620
are the same. That's why apolitical and liberal end up with the same result. It also shows you the
00:26:29.240
right does not care. The right is happy to shop wherever there is a good product. The left does care.
00:26:33.980
The left wants their wokeism infused into everything. Well, there is good news for us in this,
00:26:38.100
as you may have noticed, which is that, fine, you want to do this? You want to boycott any
00:26:41.940
business that's conservative? There's half the country that believes they should be able to shop
00:26:45.600
at businesses that are not going to shove this garbage down their throat. And we are happy to
00:26:48.460
start each and every one of those businesses and rake in the dough. That's right. Drew, this is where
00:26:52.020
the left, I think, has lost their mind. Illiberalism is nothing new, right? There's always been a streak
00:26:57.940
of illiberalism, even on the right. And the leftist is now illiberal. But if you go back to the 60s,
00:27:03.880
illiberals on the right would like burn Beatles albums. And you're, I'm sorry, the Beatles were
00:27:10.320
a band. They never got, they never got successful because all these illiberal conservatives burned
00:27:15.820
their records. No, of course, that's not how it works. There is a, there is going to be a reaction
00:27:21.140
against this idea of cancel culture that is going to make us more powerful to quote, well, the evil
00:27:28.940
empire. The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers.
00:27:33.360
That's the opportunity that they've given us. I think it's bad for the world that the left is
00:27:37.360
creating a dual culture. I think it's bad for the world that the left is creating a dual economy.
00:27:42.120
But I also think that to the extent that they've had almost unchecked power in the dominant culture
00:27:47.880
and in the dominant economy, only the creation now of the dual economy gives us the opportunity to
00:27:54.080
maybe one day make a better economy and a better culture that one day has a chance of being dominant.
00:27:58.960
And you know, this ties into your point on the arbitrariness of it, because I, I, I think it's
00:28:04.000
arbitrary when they say they have rules and they make up the rules on the spot and the rules change
00:28:08.620
day by day and they cancel you for whatever. But what is not arbitrary is the people that they're
00:28:12.900
canceling. Yeah. People that they're canceling tend to hold views very similar to what we think.
00:28:17.240
If you are in any way contradicting the left wing orthodoxy, you are liable to be canceled and
00:28:24.100
they'll make up some fake rule. This is exactly right. It's all, it's all pretextual. Yeah.
00:28:28.140
They're doing all of this on the basis of who do we want to cancel? And then how do we fit them
00:28:32.960
into the box of sin? But, but you know, this is, this is actually, I was speaking to my son,
00:28:37.160
Spencer Clavin, no relation, uh, today. And he, and he makes the brilliant point as he so frequently
00:28:42.820
does that this has a, an almost exact analog in the inquisition in that nobody expects it.
00:28:51.040
Nobody ever expects it. No, no, that, that they said, the Catholic church said in the inquisition,
00:28:57.040
we have this new technology, which is the printing press. How wonderful it spreads information. You
00:29:02.260
can now read the Bible. You can now have your own Bible. It's a, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing,
00:29:06.420
but it's spreading some bad information as well. And those people have to be burned at the stake and,
00:29:12.000
and put on the rack. Basically the Twitter terms of service. It was bad. Well, no, I was going to
00:29:17.440
say I'm in favor of the inquisition so far, but then when does it go wrong? The Twitter,
00:29:22.440
the Twitter terms of service are the same thing. We have this wonderful internet. It's spreading
00:29:26.360
information, but it's bad information. And those people have to be burned at the stake and put on
00:29:30.720
the rack. I know you guys are in favor of this. This is right. You saw that house democratic letter,
00:29:35.420
right? Those two house Democrats who wrote a letter, Comcast and AT&T and Amazon and every major carrier in
00:29:40.760
the country about inflammatory language and inciting language. They've brought in the definition of
00:29:44.600
inflammatory and inciting to anything they disagree with. Right. And then the idea is they're going to
00:29:47.740
cudgel corporations into doing their work, which by the way, does violate the first amendment. You
00:29:50.940
are not allowed to make private corporations into agencies of the government for purposes of
00:29:54.940
clashing the first amendment. There's case law on this, but they're trying it anyway. And this is,
00:29:59.540
this is what they're doing. I mean, did you see what Amazon is doing this week? Oh my goodness.
00:30:03.200
The hate speech standard. The hate speech standard with Ryan T. Anderson, who's pal of
00:30:07.140
some of us in this room, a head of the ethics and public policy center. He's a heritage,
00:30:11.600
formerly at Heritage Foundation. This guy is as mainstream and scholarly a conservative as it
00:30:16.780
gets. And he came out with a book a few years ago, greatest book title I've ever heard. When
00:30:21.080
Harry became Sally responding to the transgender. Really good book too. And it's a really good book.
00:30:26.180
And it's, it's actually not in any way an inflammatory book. By the way, it's a sensitive book.
00:30:29.420
It's a very sensitive. He has a bunch of stuff in there about how people who are suffering
00:30:32.240
from gender dysphoria ought to be treated humanely. And there's no excuse for treating people badly. I mean,
00:30:36.720
he's got a bunch of stuff in there that is, that is directly a rebuttal to sort of the
00:30:40.260
suggestion that people on the right don't care about. I don't know any serious person who doesn't
00:30:42.760
say that. Of course. This is the funny thing. Of course. This is not even an issue. But what
00:30:46.340
Amazon had done, they had taken off, you know, if the Confederate flag was really politically
00:30:50.560
incorrect, they took that offline or sometimes different symbols, they take that off. But they
00:30:54.220
had this standard. They said, we're not going to remove books for being politically incorrect
00:30:57.900
because they don't want to be seen as burning books or banning books as though it were the
00:31:02.100
Inquisition. Very quietly, they took away that exception. And now, I mean, we've got
00:31:08.180
a lot of books between all of us. By the way, Mein Kampf is still on Amazon. But Ryan Anderson's
00:31:11.980
book is not on Amazon. Unbelievable. You know, I got into a brief, I never do this, but I did
00:31:16.500
get into a brief Twitter debate with our friend David French, who basically feels there should
00:31:20.760
be no recourse because of the First Amendment. There should be no recourse when private entities
00:31:25.720
who are multinational, richer than most, two thirds of governments, they have more money
00:31:30.580
than two thirds of the government, collude together to essentially gut our rights. And
00:31:35.860
my feeling is, wait, the point of the First Amendment is to protect our rights. Our rights
00:31:41.100
don't go away because the First Amendment makes it difficult to cover a threat to them. But
00:31:45.760
the threat to our rights right now is in this collusion between companies that may not be
00:31:51.200
monopolies in and of themselves. But when they collude, they become essentially monopolies.
00:31:55.580
And they're working in collusion with the government as well. Big tech, big government,
00:31:59.640
big business, big, big, big. If that's, if that is not a threat that needs to be dealt with,
00:32:03.880
and I don't, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I don't care how you deal with it, but it's got to be dealt
00:32:07.480
with. You cannot have a system where, whereby we cannot attack the threats to our speech. That's
00:32:15.860
I mean, that's the problem on the right, where you've got at least half that are allergic to
00:32:22.360
using the power of the government. Whereas on the left, there's wide agreement. Of course,
00:32:27.280
we're going to use the power of the government to do whatever we want. And I appreciate that on the
00:32:30.480
right, at least there's a debate about it. But it seems like there are some wide, you know,
00:32:35.340
pretty large, significant preponderance that basically they don't want to use the power of
00:32:39.440
the government to do anything at all. And I think that kneecaps us.
00:32:43.800
So I think there's a smart way to use the power of government and there's a, and there's a stupid
00:32:46.600
way. Of course. And, and I think that a lot of people are not distinguishing between the two.
00:32:50.480
And so you end up with a really dumb kind of version of the argument, which is we can either
00:32:53.980
do nothing or we're going to step in and just tell them exactly what they ought to do in all
00:32:58.900
circumstances. The reality is that what has really happened, and this goes back to the section 230
00:33:03.220
argument, especially when it comes to these platforms, is that what section 230 was designed to do
00:33:07.140
was it was designed to enshrine the ability for corporations to actually protect free speech.
00:33:13.320
It was not the opposite. What the, what section 230 was, was it, you know, just to get into a
00:33:18.760
little bit of, of legalism here, because people don't understand section 230 particularly well.
00:33:22.580
Section 230 does not make a distinction between publishers and platforms. Section 230 says when
00:33:26.360
you have an open thread, then you are not responsible legally for what appears in that
00:33:30.480
open thread. So Daily Wire is a private corporation. We're responsible for what we put up that's edited,
00:33:34.260
but our comments, we're not responsible for. If somebody puts up plagiarized material in the
00:33:38.180
comments, we're not legally responsible for that. And so that was an idea. The goal here was to
00:33:42.800
allow platforms to exist, because otherwise platforms literally would not exist. So what
00:33:46.700
section 230 did is it created an exception. The exception was specifically designed to allow
00:33:50.840
platforms to get rid of material that was pretty much widely agreed to be excessive. So somebody
00:33:56.480
posts pornography in our, in our comment section. So we can remove that. So we post obscenity or actual
00:34:00.740
incitement to violence. We can remove all of that. Instead, what has happened is as so often happens
00:34:05.540
with the government, the exception became the rule. So then it became the government is going to
00:34:09.380
tell corporations that if they don't use section 230 to crack down on all the material government
00:34:13.620
doesn't like, then they're going to come after those corporations. So the exception ate the rule.
00:34:18.540
So that exception was designed to be an exception, right? The idea was, there's going to be a broad
00:34:21.680
spectrum of ideas that were available. And only here and there were you going to kind of pinpoint
00:34:25.220
and remove material that was truly offensive or truly terrible. And instead,
00:34:29.480
Or truly, truly indecent, right? Because it's the Communications Decency Act.
00:34:33.400
Exactly. Or truly indecent. And instead, what happened is that the left basically seized upon this
00:34:37.740
opportunity to say, okay, well now what these platforms really should do is they should act
00:34:41.060
just like a publisher. They should edit all of the content. They should decide which books they
00:34:44.840
are willing to put out and which books they're not willing to put out. Not only that, we're going
00:34:47.160
to have congressional hearings. And we're going to say, as Dianne Feinstein says, if you don't do what
00:34:51.280
we want you to do, we will regulate you into doing what we want you to do. So if you actually wanted
00:34:55.120
to fix this, there's a good proposal on the table from Marsha Blackburn, our senator here in
00:34:58.360
Tennessee, to, to take away the catch all provision of section 230. Because originally section 230 says
00:35:04.260
that it allows you to remove content that's obscene, content that is, that is incitement
00:35:09.100
to violence, content that normally would be illegal, right? Like that kind of stuff. But
00:35:13.540
there's also a catch all provision that says, or anything otherwise objectionable. And so what
00:35:17.640
her bill does, it takes away the otherwise objectionable language. So now you cannot be
00:35:22.260
relieved of liability if you, if you just start willy nilly taking down stuff. And I think that
00:35:26.420
that's probably the right move. Yeah. You know, it's, it's funny how people are blind to the fact
00:35:30.840
that the enemy is, is always pools of power, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts. Absolutely.
00:35:37.560
So the left has this idea that the state is going to come in and make everything great,
00:35:41.680
but it doesn't understand that the state is a bunch of people with power. And the right has
00:35:45.020
this idea that big business is always going to be okay, but big business is also people with power.
00:35:49.800
And the left used to know this. The left used to know that corporations can be alternative
00:35:54.120
governments that have the power of governments and can, and can threaten you. You know, anybody with
00:35:58.280
power, anybody with power has to be controlled. It's simply that because the people we're trying
00:36:03.620
to protect are the ordinary guys, the little guys who have the right to speak. I would just define
00:36:07.840
power a little more specifically than that, which is, it's not about the bigness. It's about the
00:36:11.600
actual power to compel. That's right. Right. Because the problem is not big business. The problem is
00:36:15.300
big business working in collusion with government in order to restrict your rights. That's right.
00:36:18.500
That's the stuff that's actually dangerous because what we tend to do when, and conservatives tend to do
00:36:22.840
this too. We talk about big government versus small government. The question isn't big government versus small
00:36:26.040
government is what is it? What are the delegated powers of government and were they delegated?
00:36:30.020
Right. It is, it is there are specific purposes. The same thing is true of business. The question
00:36:33.220
isn't big business or small business. It is business acting in favor of free markets and free labor,
00:36:39.020
or is business acting against those things? Because I'm perfectly fine with a big business
00:36:42.840
that does all the things that are in consonance with freedom, being big and being competitive and
00:36:46.920
winning. Hypothetically, I actually want to talk a little bit about why corporations went wrong and why
00:36:51.060
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comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. You know, other than insinuating that you might
00:38:48.420
kill your wife, that was an excellent ad read. Or that my wife might kill me. That's true.
00:38:52.360
Yeah, you kind of went a little bit awry on that. I mean, it is true that the incentives sometimes get
00:38:57.120
misaligned. I mean, right now, if I were to do something terrible to my wife, she has much stronger
00:39:01.560
incentive to kill me than divorce me. I've been telling you that for months, you know. If I've ever found
00:39:07.660
having been thrown off the back of a train for the double indemnity, obviously, then you know
00:39:11.600
exactly what happened. If I ever am found floating face down in my pool with three gunshot wounds in
00:39:16.280
my back, I didn't just trip and hit my head in front of me, no matter what my wife said.
00:39:20.220
It was Hillary Clinton. It was Hillary. You irritated me. Speaking of people who might want to kill Ben,
00:39:24.080
Elisha. No, you have that all wrong. I like Ben. He signs my paychecks. It's Michael Knowles that I want to
00:39:30.720
get up. Uh-oh. You don't want to say happy birthday. By the way, it was Elisha's birthday
00:39:35.380
this week. Happy birthday. Thank you. She's at least 25 years old. I wish. I'm 35. Now,
00:39:42.900
if my husband decides to impregnate me again with another gorgeous child, I'm considered a
00:39:47.080
geriatric pregnancy, which is just really depressing. But thanks for the birthday, Elisha, guys.
00:39:53.800
There's a lot of lively chatter over on the chat box. And if you're like, well, hey, wait a second. I want
00:39:58.640
to chat with you on the chat box. Well, how do I do that? How do I ask the guys a question? Well,
00:40:02.160
then that means you've already given me an answer. You're not a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:40:05.540
You should head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and be sure to use the code of Ben's
00:40:11.780
new show, DEBUNKED, which comes out this February 26th. So be sure to take a listen.
00:40:16.660
DEBUNKED will get you 25% off. So be sure to go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the
00:40:23.340
codes DEBUNKED for 25% off. All right. This first question we have goes to the one and only
00:40:29.900
Matt Walsh, who is finally in the backstage studio. Fans have been asking for that for a very long time.
00:40:34.900
So welcome to backstage, Matt. People want to know on a very serious note, when will you be joining
00:40:40.600
Smokey Michael and the God King? And what instrument will you be playing?
00:40:45.080
I think it's like the third backstage. So I guess I didn't make enough of an impression the first two times.
00:40:48.800
Wait, Matt Walsh is here right now? It was definitely a temporary.
00:40:54.640
I do play the banjo. So I, you know, I mean, I can, I, yes, I can, I can pick up a banjo and make
00:41:01.580
noises with it. So I can do that, but you don't have to hammer it against. That's as far as my,
00:41:06.200
the real story is that my wife bought me a banjo. It was, when we first got married, she bought me a
00:41:11.220
banjo. It was my first birthday as a, as a married person. And cause I had been giving,
00:41:16.460
making all this noise about how I wanted to learn the banjo and she bought it for me.
00:41:20.720
And then what that meant was that for the next, really for the last 10 years, it just kind of
00:41:24.720
sits there and she'll just periodically say, so you never learned that banjo, did you?
00:41:32.500
And how many other instruments do you play? Cause people want some options here.
00:41:36.280
No, I don't play all. I'm very good at not playing every instrument.
00:41:40.640
Don't you say that you're as good at every instrument as you are?
00:41:44.080
By the way, completely side note, but Matt and I were outside and the conversation turned to the
00:41:49.860
full masculinity of the show. And, um, and we decided to create a, um, a masculinity ranking
00:41:55.600
of the hosts on the show. And I have, it has, it has a, it has but one standard. How many children
00:42:01.080
have you sired? So by this ranking, it goes, Matt, then me, then you, right? Yeah. And then you,
00:42:07.900
and then you. Well, my tied for last place. Yeah. All right. I was going to tweak that out that Ben
00:42:13.060
Shapiro said, I'm the, the manliest guy at the daily wire. It's been said, I mean,
00:42:18.060
he's a lumberjack and he has like 83 children. So Jeremy and I are the least toxic people in this
00:42:22.500
entire room. That's pretty good. I did admit though, that you, uh, so we have four kids,
00:42:27.880
but the first two are twins. Right. So it was kind of a two for one deal for the same number
00:42:31.440
of pregnancies. So that's right. But I'll happily take, I think the beard gives me the tiebreaker.
00:42:35.360
I'll actually say though, that I think one of the things that matters is,
00:42:39.680
can you change a tire? I mean, we're probably still tied for last.
00:42:42.120
I would say that's probably true. Maybe it mixes up the top three.
00:42:45.100
I not only can change a tire, but have changed many tires frequently on rain-soaked freeways.
00:42:50.620
Why? Don't you have AAA? It was before you had AAA.
00:42:53.860
Are you a pauper? No, you didn't even have phones.
00:42:56.420
What went wrong with tires when they were made of phones?
00:42:59.680
That's how long ago it was. There were only tires.
00:43:02.080
Peru changing a tire. I know, exactly. It was like BC, you know.
00:43:09.400
No. Have you seen me? Have you ever changed a tire?
00:43:12.100
I changed a tire once. I was visiting LA before I lived there and I, I was too cheap to get a good
00:43:17.500
rental car. So I did a rent-a-wreck. I was driving a 91 Plymouth Breeze around, you know.
00:43:22.720
I will tell you, then I go in, I figured out how to do it. It was the manliest I've ever felt in my home.
00:43:27.920
By the way, there's a much higher chance that Alicia has changed a tire than I have changed a tire.
00:43:32.280
Yeah, Alicia's definitely changed a tire. I will say, though, that I had a blowout this weekend.
00:43:37.240
And in my day, I grew up in rural Texas, I changed a lot of tires, you know. I used to be,
00:43:41.380
when I was a Ute, I would, like, stop and help other people change their tires when they're broke
00:43:45.660
down on the side of the road. It seemed like the thing to do. But I've become soft.
00:43:49.380
And I was driving, we had this huge snowstorm, as did, you know, almost the entire south,
00:43:57.020
And it reeked holy hell on the roads here, right? All the freezing, all the ice.
00:44:04.300
So my wife and my baby and I, we rented a little Tesla. I thought maybe it'd be fun to have a
00:44:08.720
Tesla. Elon Musk is cooler than me. And so I rented this Model 3 from a great family. It was cool,
00:44:13.940
pulled up to get this Tesla. It's really cold outside. I get out of the Uber. I'm walking up,
00:44:18.660
this young 17-year-old kid comes out of his house. And I said, hey, man, good to meet you. He goes,
00:44:24.520
oh, yeah, it's real cool to meet you. And I said, yeah, I'm Jeremy. He goes, yeah, I know.
00:44:29.100
And I was like, oh, we live in a town where we're famous. We're used to living in a place where people
00:44:36.260
either didn't know who you were or hated you. Now we live somewhere where people are kind to us and
00:44:42.680
like us. And so I rented this Tesla from this kid. I drive it home and park it in the garage. And then it
00:44:49.720
dumps like 12,000 pounds of snow. And I didn't get to drive the car for a week. So finally, I've got
00:44:54.800
one day left on the rental Saturday. And I jump in the car. I want to see if the baby seat will fit,
00:44:59.160
throw the baby seat in the back. We go for a ride. And I promptly hit one of these newfound potholes
00:45:04.160
at full freeway speed and knock the tire off the rim. Oh, my gosh.
00:45:08.240
The good news is, in a crisis with my wife and my child in the car, I was able to figure out how to
00:45:15.620
call roadside. That's good. I was able to solve that. I was able to get them on the phone. And
00:45:19.860
they told me that they would be there in four hours. Oh, apparently a lot of people were broken
00:45:24.840
down on the side of the road. You know, the last time I got a flat tire, which now, I don't know,
00:45:29.220
about five, six years ago, I was in a very expensive BMW. And I was out in the middle of
00:45:34.960
nowhere. In the trunk, right? Yeah, I was in the trunk. The coyotes, literally coyotes were circling
00:45:40.920
around me. And I thought, well, I know how to change a tire. And I took out the jack from this
00:45:45.480
very expensive BMW and opened it up. And it cracked in half in my hands. And I thought,
00:45:51.480
I guess people don't do this anymore. It was a prop. By the way, I mean, being as close to death
00:45:57.380
as you are, did it ever occur to you that that would have been like the coolest way to die?
00:46:00.860
Like just like mauled by coyotes and broken down on the side of the road after getting out of your
00:46:04.260
BMW. That would have been the headline. I was. Is there ever. Is there ever. Is there ever.
00:46:08.460
Coyotes. Author of a werewolf cop. At your age, is there ever a time when coyotes aren't circling you?
00:46:14.660
Vultures up ahead. Most of the vultures. They travel with me. I feel like they should pay,
00:46:20.820
you know, pay my fare. Alicia. That all those stories just revealed that I was more manly than Ben
00:46:29.820
at my most pregnant with my second child because I put a spare tire on my family wagon because it
00:46:35.480
was also a four hour wait, even though L.A. did not get a blizzard. So yay that.
00:46:45.680
Good point. All right. The next question goes to the God King. Jeremy Boring. This subscriber
00:46:51.180
must not know about Daily Wire 2 because they want to know if the Daily Wire, you know,
00:46:56.260
it's entering into entertainment. You know, you're expanding all of the shows. You're bringing
00:47:00.180
on new talent. You're writing and scripting movies. They want to know about sports. Yeah. Well,
00:47:04.900
as you say, they obviously haven't been fans of the Daily Wire for long because we do very
00:47:10.460
intensive sports coverage every. Is it three? Three? Every three years. Four. Four years. World Cup.
00:47:17.300
Yeah. I mean, whenever the World Cup happens, I cannot be bothered to know. Yeah. We do the Daily Wire 2
00:47:23.660
coverage of the event. Michael and I have been covering it very well, lo these many years. Other
00:47:29.760
than that, if you're talking about real sports that people are interested in that aren't anti-American
00:47:34.580
and that should be played by a first world country, I think it's a great idea. We have talked about it.
00:47:39.860
I think it'd be a lot of fun to create a deeper collaboration with our friends over at Outkick.
00:47:44.300
They have a great attitude. They're absolutely hilarious. Clay Travis is kind of a hero. He's
00:47:48.480
right here in Nashville. You know, we could. But if he covered soccer, no doubt. No, we could. We
00:47:53.360
could call it Daily Wire 3. We could. So we can. We can keep Daily Wire 2, but then we can put the
00:47:58.720
sports. So there's Daily Wire 1. Yeah. Which is politics. Politics. There's Daily Wire 3, which is
00:48:04.260
sports. Yeah. And Daily Wire 2 for, you know. That other thing. The other thing. It's a great idea.
00:48:11.460
The every four years thing. The next question is for Drew. Drew, people want to know what
00:48:16.860
projects are you working on now that you have a little more free time since you don't have your
00:48:20.960
daily show. And more importantly, are there any people that will work with you in Hollywood since
00:48:26.040
you're a very open conservative? No. There are no people in Hollywood. But I am as busy as I have
00:48:33.600
ever been. Well, you got to stand that coffin really. Sanding the coffin. You got to be ready.
00:48:39.680
It could happen any minute. But no, I'm as busy as I've ever been. I just sold. I'm so delighted
00:48:46.460
that I just sold to Thomas Nelson, the Christian publishers who published my memoir. I sold my
00:48:52.900
essentially the sequel to my memoir, which is about literature and the Gospels.
00:48:56.760
Does it have a better title? No. It's called The Truth and Beauty. So you'll hate it.
00:49:02.640
It would be so much better if it was called Yet Another Thing. The Better Thing.
00:49:06.980
I am writing. You know the thing. You know the thing. I just finished a draft of the script we're
00:49:16.100
going to do here, I hope. And another project script. And I've got a new series of mystery
00:49:22.580
novels coming out. So I'm as busy as I have ever been. And it's only because of my hatred for Knowles
00:49:29.460
that I've come here at all. So I can insult him. That's good. Because when he plots, there'll be
00:49:35.120
just this whole trunk filled with unfinished manuscript that we can put out there one by one.
00:49:39.640
Did you take insurance out on me? Policygenius.com.
00:49:47.460
All right. Talking about scripts. Ben, everyone in the chat wants to know,
00:49:52.400
have you seen a script for Gina's movie? What will it be about? And when is it coming out?
00:49:56.780
Yeah. So actually, this question is better directed at Jeremy. So I will say that there
00:50:02.420
are active and ongoing talks about what exactly the script should be. I know that Jeremy is
00:50:06.280
wading through scripts right now looking for the right project. But because it is a development
00:50:11.520
process and because we're working on a very personal level with Gina, it's going to take
00:50:15.620
a little bit of time for us to find exactly what we want to do.
00:50:18.100
I think it's important for people to understand that part of what Gina wants in building this
00:50:22.860
next stage of her career is not just to be an actress for hire, but to be a producer.
00:50:25.700
She wants the ability to actually help craft the story to put her mark on whatever her next project
00:50:31.160
is. We're working once again with our friends over at Bonfire Legend. Dallas Sunier is going to
00:50:36.580
produce Gina's film. He read 60 scripts over the weekend. I looked at him. He was a shell of a man.
00:50:44.340
You know, he couldn't tell you about any of them. He'd be like, which one did you like best?
00:50:47.640
He goes, well, there's a Western and a spaceship. And I'm like, okay, get some sleep. Send me the 15 or 16
00:50:53.480
best scripts, which he has done. And we're, and we're working our way through them.
00:51:04.660
What we're learning from Drew is he's never going to retire. And if he does retire, then he'll end up
00:51:10.540
in the trunk eaten by coyotes or something. If Ben's wish comes true. All right. So then the next
00:51:14.980
question, since the God King answered that, the God King answered that last one. So Ben,
00:51:20.260
I'll toss this one to you. It's a very good question. Somebody wants to know, hey, I've become a Daily Wire
00:51:24.560
subscriber, but what are you doing to protect yourself against big tech? As we saw with Parler and other
00:51:30.120
conservative sites that are just shut down because people like Google and Amazon say, hey, we're not
00:51:35.800
going to allow you on our servers. Have you guys protected the Daily Wire and the subscribers against
00:51:41.340
So we definitely have been working on figuring out alternative platforms that we could shift over to
00:51:45.560
in case something like Amazon Web Services, what they did at Parler ever happens to us. We've
00:51:49.880
expended enormous time and energy and some money on exactly this sort of question. Again, I'm going to
00:51:55.340
miss, I'm going to redirect the question to Jeremy, because if for people who don't understand how the
00:51:58.780
Daily Wire works, basically all business questions go here and all ideological questions go here and
00:52:04.120
all questions about cigars go there and all questions about not paying the bills go there
00:52:07.720
and all questions about just general malaise and cynicism go there. That's basically the breakdown.
00:52:15.820
And if you want somebody who's nice to you, then Alicia's here too.
00:52:17.780
Yeah, that's right. I'll say that as Ben said, yeah, we've expended a lot of time into this question
00:52:22.600
since what happened to Parler took place. The truth is the problem is greater than any company is going
00:52:28.400
to be able to answer. You know, Amazon Web Services controls the servers for 50% of the entire
00:52:36.940
World Wide Web. It's an unbelievable amount of infrastructure. So when people are like, why don't you
00:52:42.760
build your own servers? It'd be like if in 1982, the telephone companies had gotten involved in
00:52:50.380
censorship and somebody had said, well, why don't you just build your own phone company? And my answer
00:52:54.340
would be, okay, it took 100 years to run phone lines to every rural household across a continent.
00:53:02.400
That's what you're talking about. And what if we build all these servers? We go raise $100 billion
00:53:07.700
or a trillion dollars to build the kind of infrastructure on the server side that you need.
00:53:12.260
And then Amazon never actually acts against another conservative, but the ISP providers do.
00:53:20.560
Like the problem that faces conservatives is so vast. And to take on any part of it would take
00:53:26.180
the wealth of a small nation to try to conquer. And then that may not be the attack vector. There are
00:53:32.180
like 100 attack vectors that need to be solved. So what I really believe needs to happen here is
00:53:36.900
several things. On one hand, we need not to reinvent all of this, but to diversify our reliance on any
00:53:45.180
one platform. So to Ben's point, we're looking at other potential data facilities, some that you
00:53:51.060
might be able to put yourself on, some that you might be able to actually use as almost a shadow
00:53:55.400
server where we're constantly being updated on a backup server. And if something happens,
00:53:59.180
you can very quickly and seamlessly move yourself over. Very expensive, not as expensive as building
00:54:03.620
Amazon Web Services. But more than that, I think what needs to happen is conservative millionaires
00:54:10.480
and billionaires need to change the way that they think about technology. There's a reason that
00:54:15.620
Amazon can kick you off. It's that conservatives have no power at Amazon. There's a reason Facebook
00:54:20.740
can kick you off. Conservatives have no or very little power at Facebook. There's a reason that
00:54:24.800
Twitter can treat you the way they do. You don't have a problem of conservatives being run out of
00:54:29.560
their homes because conservatives are great at real estate. You don't have a problem of
00:54:33.200
conservatives running out of gas. Conservatives are great at energy. There's just these different
00:54:36.900
spheres that draw people with different mentalities. And I think the proof that conservatives don't have
00:54:44.140
the mentality necessary to solve this problem is actually in the question, are we building our own
00:54:50.600
servers? The answer to the problems of bifurcated use of technology is not that we build what they
00:54:59.520
currently have. There are conversations happening all over the world right now in real time that
00:55:05.980
make servers obsolete. There are people talking about blockchain. There are people talking about
00:55:10.500
things beyond blockchain, the names of which I don't know. There are kids with backpacks going to
00:55:14.860
left-wing billionaires and left-wing venture capital funds and left-wing angel investors and creating
00:55:20.780
the future. And we're not a part of those conversations either. And the answer to how do you
00:55:26.120
solve the problem of it took a century to build all those phone lines isn't to go try to replicate
00:55:32.500
that. It's to invent the cell phone. And until we change our mentality, we're just going to lose on
00:55:37.580
whatever the next thing is to whatever the next thing is. And we're going to build some crappy
00:55:41.200
alternative version of what they've already got. And it's not it's just going to further ghettoize
00:55:45.660
us. We have to completely change the way that we think about. Can I ask a follow up a question to
00:55:49.960
this? Because one of the things that is very frustrating to me is that conservatives seem
00:55:55.540
very, very reluctant to think that there may be legal remedies here. But it does seem that
00:56:01.200
at some point, this is a new technology. And the new technology needs new law. And it needs new law
00:56:08.980
to make sure that all of us have a chance to speak. If this is the way we speak to one another,
00:56:13.660
and it is, we should be able to speak to one another no matter what our political beliefs are.
00:56:18.860
And so isn't there some place for lobbying? Let me say two things. I'll say two things and then
00:56:24.240
I'll let the lawyer talk. The first one is conservatives need to embrace lawfare. It's
00:56:29.200
deeply distasteful. It's horrible. It's against our, but we actually need to embrace it because
00:56:34.720
those are the weapons being used against us. That's the battle. But I'll also say this.
00:56:39.140
One reason that the Daily Wire, we're not safe, but we are far less likely to be kicked off of
00:56:45.940
servers than is Parler. It's because Parler wasn't conducting any actual economic activity.
00:56:53.480
Parler is a free platform and everybody who's using it is using it for free. They don't have
00:56:57.280
a vast ad network. If some big tech company were to knock the Daily Wire off of their servers because
00:57:05.260
of speech or something like that, we have over a hundred employees. We do millions and millions
00:57:12.580
of dollars worth of business. We have tens of millions of fans. We have ads on our website
00:57:18.500
every day doing hundreds of thousands of microtransactions. That goes all the way to
00:57:24.460
the Supreme Court. There's actual damages. And one thing that you have to keep in mind when you talk
00:57:29.200
about the law is the concept of damages. And the damages are just fundamentally different
00:57:33.180
where we're concerned. This is why it happens. I mean, it's a sorry state of affairs,
00:57:37.840
but they're not unsophisticated about who they target. Yeah, I know that.
00:57:41.480
They target people who have the weakest opportunity to challenge them.
00:57:46.360
Yeah. And this is one of those areas where you're starting to see some state action, right?
00:57:50.160
Rhonda Santos has talked about going after some of the tech companies and making it so that they
00:57:54.300
can't do this sort of stuff. Extending anti-discrimination law toward politics in the arena
00:57:59.140
of technology, particularly free speech platforms. And it seems to me that if we've restricted
00:58:02.940
freedom of association so strongly in this country, that we already have anti-discrimination law that
00:58:06.440
applies to every single element of American life, except for your politics, right? You can't
00:58:11.300
discriminate against somebody on the basis of religion, sex, age, disability, anything. And
00:58:15.680
nobody is in favor of that sort of discrimination, but it used to be that freedom of association meant
00:58:19.720
that you just sort of had to deal with the fact that sometimes people didn't want to hang out with
00:58:22.240
you. But the left has completely made that obsolete, right? You have to hang out with whoever the left
00:58:25.880
says you have to hang out with, and you have to do business with whoever the left says you have to do
00:58:28.720
business with. I think there's going to be a strong move made, particularly in red states,
00:58:32.680
against some of these corporations saying, if you guys start booting people, then we are going to
00:58:37.700
take legal action against you. You're going to have violated our state law.
00:58:41.160
Is there a concern that you can no longer have ideological organizations, for example,
00:58:48.100
that the Daily Wire would have to hire left-wing activists to be employed?
00:58:52.380
So you'd have to create actual legal carve-outs. You'd have to say, if you're an overtly partisan
00:58:56.200
organization, then you can do this. In the same way that there are religious carve-outs for
00:59:00.000
anti-discrimination law, right? So you'd have to do that for overtly political organizations. It
00:59:03.980
would pose a problem for 501c3s particularly. There are a lot of political 501c3s that have
00:59:08.080
a conservative or a liberal bent. And because they're non-profit, they can't be overtly associated
00:59:12.960
with the party or not associated with the party. And so it could get very muddy very fast. I mean,
00:59:17.020
listen, in my preferred world, as much as I hate discrimination, I hate cracking down on freedom
00:59:21.720
of association more. In the same way that as much as I hate vile speech, I hate cracking down on free
00:59:26.400
speech more. But it seems like that chip may have already sailed. So as long as that chip has already
00:59:30.060
sailed, then the only alternative left is going to be an extension of anti-discrimination law into
00:59:34.460
the field of politics that already exists in a place like California. It's just never been
00:59:36.980
enforced really. And this is such an important key because we can say, well, we don't like this.
00:59:41.240
I really wish we lived in a different world. But as you say, Jeremy, we've got to play with what
00:59:46.440
we've got. You know, politics involves eternal principles. It also involves applying those principles to
00:59:51.740
real circumstances that are all always changing. And if we want to survive, if we want to be smart
00:59:56.740
about this, then you've got to you've got to play the game. And there's a difference between using
01:00:00.440
the weapons that are the weapons of the battlefield and using the logic that they use. I'd always.
01:00:05.840
Right. I agree with this. I totally agree. It's what we always said about mutually assured
01:00:08.520
destruction. Right. When we launched Truth Revolt, we said we hate the tactics that we're about to
01:00:11.500
use. Right. As soon as you guys stop using them, we'll stop using them. Right. Right. And I think that
01:00:14.880
that's accurate as far as a lot of these things, which is, you know, there's only one thing that is worse than
01:00:19.880
having a nuclear weapon and that's everybody else having one and you not having one. Right. And that's
01:00:24.080
right. And it always bothers me. We play this hypocrisy game with the left, which I think is
01:00:28.620
actually destructive. So the left says, you know, you said it was a dark day when Obama was elected.
01:00:34.120
Dark means that you didn't like the color of his skin. You think, like, that's not what it meant. But you
01:00:38.820
said this, which is accepting their terms of battle. Yeah. And I don't I don't agree with this at all.
01:00:43.920
I mean, I I'm really offended by the racial pathology of the left. I think it is. I think
01:00:50.520
it is irreverent to the human condition. I think that the to treat people according to the color of
01:00:57.480
their skin is a wrong. And I think it's wrong no matter what color their skin is. I don't care if
01:01:03.100
they're hypocrites about it. I want it to stop. I want to say that. No, you know, if you're a black guy
01:01:09.220
who did a bad thing, you did a bad thing. You're a white guy who did a bad thing. You did a bad thing.
01:01:13.340
I don't care. I'm taking people as they come. And the idea now that they they're selling to us that
01:01:18.200
anti that being a non-racist is racist. Yeah. Is insane. Right. You can't you can't be non-racist.
01:01:25.080
So I the true the racist or anti-racist. There's no third category called non-racist. That's why I
01:01:31.060
think that's why I think cancel culture is so dangerous, because what it does is it makes people
01:01:34.620
afraid to say your entire premise is wrong. So this is this is the biggest thing. I think that when
01:01:40.860
we talk about cancel culture, it's easy to point to the big circumstances of cancel culture like
01:01:44.700
Chris Harrison or or Gina. But the reality is the people that affects most are the people who are
01:01:50.340
the low level employees at Disney. That's right. Because they are the people it affects most are
01:01:53.820
not people like the people sitting in this room who talk for a living. Right. Or do business at a
01:01:57.720
high level in politics. The people that affects the most are the people who work for Coca-Cola and who
01:02:01.580
make forty five thousand dollars a year and don't have the labor mobility to be able to just move over
01:02:06.240
to Pepsi, especially when Pepsi is teaching the exact same kind of stuff. What cancel culture is
01:02:09.840
about is intimidating everybody into silence. It's not even about canceling anybody. It's about
01:02:13.560
putting a head on a pike. Yeah. And the more heads you put on pikes, more people are scared to speak
01:02:17.020
out. And they know that, which is why they're going to keep putting heads on pikes. In fact, it is
01:02:19.780
imperative that they keep putting heads on pikes because the minute that the heads on the pike
01:02:23.480
stop, somebody might push back against their dominance. And that's why that's why I get so I get so
01:02:27.780
disgusted. I'm almost at the point with cancel culture when a high profile person gets canceled
01:02:33.320
and they start apologizing like Chris Harrison did. Right. Agree. I'm at the point where I despise
01:02:39.360
you more. Right. For apologizing that I do that I do despise the mob for canceling you in the first
01:02:44.640
place. Like Chris Harrison is such a perfect example. And we didn't even mention that in that
01:02:49.160
interview that we originally talked about, he he was it was at he was so circuitous in in standing up
01:02:57.620
to he could not have been less aggressive in what he said. And he kept articulating. He kept he kept
01:03:04.800
reiterating that, well, I'm not defending her and I don't really know. And she might be a racist. But
01:03:09.000
look, guys, maybe just maybe we shouldn't be destroying people's lives over this. And they
01:03:14.120
still cancel him anyway. And then what does he do? He falls to his to his knees and apologizes and
01:03:19.060
admits he says, yeah, I am a racist. I mean, he he accepts their their accusations against him,
01:03:24.460
even though he's not a racist. If you do that, then you're just as bad as them. And you're also
01:03:29.340
all the other the smaller people, the people you're talking about who don't have this kind
01:03:33.320
of platform, you're throwing them under the bus, too. You're not just as bad as them. You're
01:03:37.800
actually worse because you're you're you've got all of their vices and cowardice. But they're not
01:03:43.300
cowardice. I mean, they're actually that's why that's why I just want to say the the genre of the
01:03:48.320
public apology. Yeah. Has to go away. Even if what you did was wrong. Now, Chris Harrison's case,
01:03:54.200
all these other cases, Gina Carano, like they didn't do anything wrong. But even if you did
01:03:58.300
something wrong and the cancel culture is coming after a great example, still don't apologize for
01:04:02.220
Morgan Wallen. I don't know if you guys track this story. One of the biggest country stars. Oh,
01:04:06.220
yes. In the world has a new album out. It's fantastic. He's a bit of a hellraiser, probably
01:04:12.420
not our kind of guy. He gets home from a long night of partying. He's not being a very good
01:04:17.120
neighbor. He gets out of a couple of pickup trucks in front of his house. Some of his buddies
01:04:21.500
they're honking on the horn. I know it's one 30 in the morning or something in a bit. And
01:04:25.920
he's yelling at some of his buddies and he uses a series of jocular pejoratives to describe
01:04:34.100
his buddies, none of which is his actual friends. None of which can be said on this show. He calls
01:04:40.220
them nincompoops and jerks. Poopy breath, all of it. Then his neighbor, who's probably rightfully
01:04:51.240
ticked off at the guy. It's one 30 in the morning. You're trying to sleep. Apparently on their security
01:04:55.320
camera, their doorbell camera, the next morning realizes that you can hear him using these words
01:05:01.480
against his friends. And one of them is that one word that no one in America is allowed to say,
01:05:06.720
except for all of Hollywood, uh, children at church. Uh, if you're of a particular race.
01:05:13.680
Yeah. Um, and so for this total Soviet style erase erasure, he is dropped by his label. He is dropped
01:05:23.800
by his songs are climbing the charts. He's dropped by his label. He's dropped by both of the major radio
01:05:29.900
entities in the country who, who collectively own all of the radio stations. He's dropped by his
01:05:36.620
country music awards took him off. The country music awards disqualifies him. The AMA, everybody
01:05:41.240
disqualifies him. He, he said something distasteful. He said several distasteful things. He said one thing
01:05:49.120
that we as a society know there are special rules around. I actually don't accept those rules. I don't,
01:05:54.740
uh, agree with those rules, but there's no denying the existence of those rules. Um, nevertheless,
01:05:59.980
he said it in a non-racial context to his friends privately. It was captured essentially by a
01:06:05.520
disgruntled voyeuristic neighbor. Uh, and for this, we've erased him from, from civilization. He didn't do
01:06:11.740
anything wrong. He did do something gross. Yeah. He didn't do anything wrong. He did not do anything
01:06:18.300
racist. The apology that he put out to the people who have destroyed his life on the basis of nothing
01:06:26.560
grants them, right? Grants them their premise. Will they give him his career back? Of course,
01:06:34.080
they're not going to give him his career back, but there's no redemption. Think about the asymmetry
01:06:39.720
here for a second too, because when you say he didn't do anything wrong, well, he did something
01:06:43.380
wrong. He came home late. He woke up his neighbors. He was a jerk, you know, so he's using words. He
01:06:47.220
shouldn't use, but he didn't use them, but he didn't use them in the way that is the racist way
01:06:50.940
to use that word. You can find a black guy and shout the N word at him, right? If you're thinking
01:06:54.840
about what sort of punishment these sorts of things should entail, should it entail destroying your
01:07:00.520
entire life and erasing you from society? There's no proportionality here. This is the thing though,
01:07:04.480
that I think that too many conservatives don't understand, which is this is the fight that we're
01:07:09.600
in. So we're not in the fight where we have to storm Normandy, where we have to come off the
01:07:14.560
ships and the machine guns are coming up. This is the fight we're in. And so, and so when you say,
01:07:19.220
oh, this is going to cost you money, or this is going to cost you your job, or this is going to
01:07:24.020
cost you your friends. This is the fight we're in. And those guys who storm Normandy actually got
01:07:28.600
bullets in the head and were killed, lost their lives. And I'm worried that like, we don't understand
01:07:34.380
as a, as a half of the country, we don't understand that the losses we're suffering are the losses you
01:07:42.200
suffer when you are in a fight that has to be won. And you're going to, and you're going to,
01:07:45.760
you're going to suffer those losses anyway. That's what if the cancel mob is coming after you,
01:07:49.680
what you have to understand is there's a very good chance that they, that they will destroy your
01:07:53.060
life. They might not. I mean, you might, you might beat them. Gina Carano beat them. You might not
01:07:58.260
beat them. They might destroy you, but that's going to happen anyway. And so what you could decide right
01:08:02.920
now is whether you're going to have your dignity on the way out. Morgan Wallen decided that he's not
01:08:07.120
going to have his dignity because he apologized to these people. Here's the thing about an apology.
01:08:10.640
You apologize to people who you have actually harmed. And so if Morgan Wallen had gone to his
01:08:16.920
neighbors and knocked on their door personally without any cameras there and said, listen, if I,
01:08:21.260
you know, if you had to hear that, I'm so sorry. I apologize to you. That was obnoxious.
01:08:25.160
Had a few too many. I should have gotten home earlier. Sorry. And then if he had just gone and
01:08:29.140
done his video thing and said, listen, I, I spoke to my neighbors. I'm not going to tell you what that
01:08:33.260
conversation was. It's none of your business, but to all you people out there that are trying to
01:08:36.700
destroy me, I do not apologize to you because you were not harmed by what I did. You don't
01:08:41.420
really care. You're excited for the opportunity to destroy my life just because you get a kick out
01:08:45.620
of it. So I do not apologize to you if you were offended. I'm glad you were offended. That's all
01:08:49.840
I have to say about it. You've got to do this. And the thing is, if he had said that, he'd be in the
01:08:53.920
same spot today that he is anyway. And it really, but I do think there's a special duty that adheres to
01:08:58.960
people who have the power to do that. Because if Morgan Wallen had done that, it would have meant a hell of a
01:09:03.120
lot more than the local employee at Coca-Cola, right? When we, when we like what we did with
01:09:07.500
Gina, I think is, is, and I mean, pat ourselves on the back, but we deserve a pat on the back.
01:09:10.660
We're Mother Teresa. I mean, like, and I think the audience knows this, which is why we had the
01:09:16.800
best week we've ever had in the history of the company over this. The, the, by, by putting our
01:09:21.880
money where our mouth is and saying, we're not going to allow people to be canceled. That was a
01:09:26.480
statement in the culture. And that's a statement that more business people need to make.
01:09:29.100
I mean, I'll be real with you. I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow. I tried to reach out to
01:09:34.000
Morgan Wallen. Right. I mean, I would, I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow because I don't think that
01:09:36.680
what Morgan Wallen did was intended to harm black people. And I don't think that what he did, did
01:09:41.020
harm black people. Right. I think that what he did was be an ass. Right. And, and guess what?
01:09:45.640
Being an ass is a bad thing to do. And again, you should apologize to his neighbor, but that is a
01:09:49.880
legal thing to do in the United States. And sometimes people are asses and there should be
01:09:52.620
forgiveness available to people who are asses. And again, and again, the president of the United States
01:09:57.040
won't help schools open. So black people can send their children to get educated.
01:10:01.880
The real things aren't happening. You know, there's a phrase that, that Jeremy once said,
01:10:05.780
uh, in a, in a very similar sort of cancellation situation. And it, it resonates here. And that is
01:10:11.200
that, uh, cowards get their friends killed. And that's, that's really what we're talking about
01:10:14.900
here because it's not just that they're a coward because they're backing down in the hopes that
01:10:18.300
they'll get their career back. It's the cowardice that gets everybody else killed because now you've
01:10:21.860
set the new standard and you've reinforced the standard. This came up originally in the context of
01:10:25.860
Mark Duplass, who of course is this famous director, producer, actor who committed the
01:10:30.760
grave sin of once having said a nice thing about me on Twitter, right? He came to the office. I gave
01:10:34.380
him an hour and a half of my time. I'd cancel him for that. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, of course,
01:10:37.860
but I gave an hour and a half of my time. We talked about the second amendment stuff. I was very nice
01:10:41.320
to him. And as he was leaving, I said, for your own sake, do not post on social media that you were
01:10:45.520
here because they're going to wreck you for it. And a couple of weeks later, he got it into his head
01:10:48.620
that he was going to do a nice thing. And he tweeted out, I miss, I disagree with Ben Shapiro about a lot of
01:10:52.280
things, but he did a nice thing for me when he didn't have to, and he's well-intentioned. He got
01:10:55.260
hit so hard that he not only pulled down that tweet, he then issued a groveling apology, right?
01:10:59.400
And then what ended up happening on the back of that groveling apology is that James Gunn came out
01:11:02.780
and defended him. And then everybody on the right resurfaced James Gunn's old material, and James Gunn
01:11:06.480
ended up getting fired, right? And I ended up defending James Gunn in this bizarre situation. So I was like,
01:11:11.400
Dan knows, like just by existing, I took out half the Marvel universe. And what Jeremy said at the time is,
01:11:17.020
the thing about cowards is they rarely get themselves killed. They get all their friends killed.
01:11:20.240
Because when you duck out of the battle, what you end up doing is granting the opposition their
01:11:24.360
entire premise. And that premise is then used against all the people who heretofore were your
01:11:28.480
friends. And so that's exactly right. You should only, apologies are a wonderful thing when you have
01:11:32.720
done a wrong thing. If you want to have a good marriage, apologize first thing in the morning to
01:11:35.760
your wife, right? But the reality- Every morning. It doesn't matter what you're done. It's the first word
01:11:41.500
out of your mouth in the morning. But when it comes to public policy, the issuing of these malice
01:11:47.200
struggle session apologies for things that you haven't done wrong to people you have not wrong.
01:11:51.520
When people issue apologies and they say, to everyone who was offended by this, well, no,
01:11:55.780
if you're offended by this wrongly, I'm sorry, your emotions may even be authentic. But that does not
01:12:00.040
mean they are justified. And you do not deserve an apology. Well, you know, on this point of Maoism,
01:12:04.900
I think that's actually the perfect term. There was this phenomenon in the 70s with the New York
01:12:09.140
Radical Women's Group. They coined the term, or sort of popularized the term, consciousness raising.
01:12:14.320
And there were these famous meetings where you'd get all these housewives to come together
01:12:17.740
and they would, I call them wine and cheese soirees. They'd just complain the whole time.
01:12:22.200
And there's a famous essay about this by Carol Hainish. And she says that there was a woman who
01:12:26.700
came and she said, you know, before I came here tonight, ladies, I had no idea how oppressed I was,
01:12:32.340
but darn it when I am so oppressed and furious and aggrieved. Yeah. And you see this now,
01:12:37.860
people trying to convince themselves to be aggrieved and offended by some public comment that no one
01:12:43.540
cares about. I want to say one thing in Mark Wallen's, is it Mark? Morgan. Morgan. I'm sorry.
01:12:48.480
I just had a, in Morgan Wallen's defense. And that's that, I think that for us, we live in
01:12:55.160
this space and we know about this fight. I think when, when they come for you and you haven't
01:13:00.140
thought about these things in advance. That's a really good point. They are taking your life and
01:13:04.580
your name. We talked about it with Gina. And you think you can save it. And your good name away.
01:13:08.500
Not just that. Everybody who's surrounding you is telling you to do it. Yeah. I mean,
01:13:11.240
honestly, the best thing that happened to Gina and this whole thing is that her agency didn't
01:13:14.260
dump her. Yeah. Because if her agency hadn't dumped her, we would have called her up and
01:13:17.680
you know, her agent would have said, don't take their call. No way. Don't take her call. Because
01:13:20.860
if you work with them, you'll never work in this town again. Now, the reality is they were never
01:13:23.580
going to let Gina work in the town again anyway. Right. Right. But her agent would have said, no,
01:13:26.940
maybe in a few years, you know, you go away for a while. You kind of earn your way back in with
01:13:30.440
bit parts. I guarantee what happened with Morgan Wallen is that his initial reaction was probably,
01:13:34.360
I don't even know what is going on right now. And his agent got on the phone with him and his agent probably
01:13:38.700
said to him, listen, you need to issue an apology right now. Maybe we can put out this fire right
01:13:42.340
now and then the news cycle will move on. But you need to at least issue the apology to this. And
01:13:46.340
and if you if you've never been through the fire, it is egregious. I mean, it is it is truly one of
01:13:51.360
the worst. I can tell you that as a person who gets trended on Twitter, approximately every two
01:13:55.760
and a half weeks. Right. I mean, it is never fun, whether it is justified or unjustified. It is
01:14:00.380
never fun. And that's just somebody who does it professionally. Right. Basically trend on Twitter
01:14:03.840
professionally. If you are somebody who only trends once in your life and that time is
01:14:08.540
because you are losing your job and your livelihood and it's a tsunami of media coverage,
01:14:12.700
like a tsunami, because the more you trend, the less big the bumps are, honestly, like in terms
01:14:16.780
of the differential from norm. Like the normal for me is that I get mentioned on Twitter a lot. And
01:14:20.700
then on a few days a month, I get mentioned like a super lot. But if you're Gina, you don't get
01:14:25.600
mentioned on Twitter all that often, except for people who are saying they enjoy you in the
01:14:27.940
Mandalorian. And then one day you are the only thing that everyone in the country. And the trend is
01:14:32.480
followed by a deluge of emails, often phone calls. And it's overwhelming. And people don't know
01:14:37.580
that it passes to, you know, before we started, Matt and I were talking about media matters who do
01:14:42.600
nothing, but they sit around and they listen to us and try and twist our words and publicize our
01:14:48.180
shows and publicize our public. They try to, they try to make us sound like terrible people for things
01:14:52.460
that we say, which in context are, aren't actually not terrible at all. And I have to admit, it's a
01:14:58.160
terror. You're going to hate me for this. I actually have pity for them. Yeah. Like that's your job.
01:15:03.380
Your job is to like try and make other people look bad and to listen to us and try. And I just
01:15:07.500
think like, you know, at the end of your life, like you're going to stand before the throne of
01:15:10.800
God and he's going to go like, what did you do? Yeah. Well, I, you know, no, these are damaged
01:15:16.480
people. There's no question about that. And it does get to your point, which is I don't, I don't need
01:15:21.720
to accept their standard. You know, if they, if, if they basically on the left, all they exist to do
01:15:26.180
is call us all racist every day. And then one day a clip of Joe Biden goes around and it's,
01:15:31.360
he stumbles on his words cause it's a day that ends in Y and he sort of sounds like he said the
01:15:36.240
N word. And then we all sort of giggle about that. I don't care. I don't think he really said that.
01:15:40.300
I don't, I don't think he is some bigot. I don't think that I just think it's playing into their
01:15:46.100
game, pointing out a hypocrisy that they don't care about cause they don't care about the rules
01:15:50.300
anyway. They just don't like us. I would much rather do what I'm going to do. I would much rather
01:15:55.040
build culture, make movies with people we want to work with, do those sorts of things than worry
01:15:59.940
about their stupid rules, which change every day. Well, that's right. I mean, this is the thing
01:16:03.260
that I cling to is that racism is an actual philosophy, which I don't hold. I don't think
01:16:08.820
any of the people in this room hold. It's not a slip of the tongue. It's not something that you
01:16:13.820
might've said that was untoward. It's not even a moment of anger when some tribal glitch in your
01:16:18.440
brain goes off. It's an actual way of life. I know racists. They, they actually think the things
01:16:24.220
that these, you know, people are being canceled for. I just don't accept the terms. I do not
01:16:29.780
accept the terms of the argument. I don't accept that. As you say, if, if somebody shouted a word,
01:16:35.080
he shouldn't shout. Well, that's a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a racist thing. This
01:16:38.960
thing you're talking about the bachelor. I just think it's absurd, especially, especially because
01:16:44.080
we know it's a grift because of the governor of Virginia who doesn't get canceled for it because
01:16:48.300
then a Republican. I'll even go a step further. Shouting a racial pejorative is not necessarily
01:16:54.060
racist. That's right. That's right. No, you're absolutely right. Doing something racist does not
01:17:01.120
necessarily make you a racist. It means you did a racist thing. So there are, there are actually
01:17:05.740
even, there's an even another gradiation, which is, I think a very interesting point you just made.
01:17:10.100
Sometimes people in their worst moments actually do succumb to the worst thoughts. That's right.
01:17:14.860
That doesn't actually define them. You know, people say all the time, like.
01:17:18.740
And this is not to let them off the hook. This is to point out that there are gradations of sin.
01:17:22.240
There are gradations of sin. And what the left has decided is there are no gradations of sin.
01:17:25.020
There is just the damned and the woke. And that's it. That's right.
01:17:27.640
There, there, this thing that people used to say back in college, it's like, well, you know,
01:17:30.940
you'd, you'd have a couple too many drinks and you'd say something you shouldn't about one of your
01:17:34.520
buddies or whatever. And you'd apologize the next day. And they'd be like, no, what you say when you're drunk is
01:17:38.920
that's who you really are. I saw the real you, uh, because all your inhibitions were gone. You said what you really
01:17:43.420
believe. And that never resonated with me. Yeah, that's ridiculous. What I actually thought was, no, when my
01:17:49.720
inhibitions were gone, when my rational mind was gone. When I was only given into my vices and basest passions.
01:17:57.560
You're, you're, you're saying that that's the real me, but no, the real me is all of the things that I've built on top of
01:18:03.840
my worst impulses. That's right. Right. All the things that I've built on top of my intrinsic tribalistic way of looking at
01:18:10.260
things or my selfish ways of looking at things or my, you know, vain ways of looking at things or my
01:18:15.720
hateful way. We, we all have the seed of sin in us. What we build on top of that is the real us.
01:18:22.060
This is why we, you know, uh, when I was talking about, uh, rush a lot of this week, as we all were
01:18:27.000
and thinking about rush. Uh, and, um, uh, you know, I was really, uh, obviously I think all of us were
01:18:32.600
really just moved by the passing of this guy and all these liberals celebrating his death and publishing
01:18:38.280
things that he had said, some of which were untoward. Most of the things they published,
01:18:44.040
he never said, but now and again, he said something that I thought, like, I don't agree
01:18:48.700
with that. And I don't think probably rush. If you pushed him to the wall would agree with it,
01:18:52.140
but he spoke three hours a day live to people. That's more 30 years. That's 30 years. People
01:18:57.740
speak to their spouses. You do not speak to your spouse a day. And I, and I, and I, what I say to all
01:19:03.640
these people is you ever say anything to your spouse that you're glad didn't become. I mean,
01:19:07.960
this is what I have, but this is what I wrote in the New York times, which frankly, I'm shocked
01:19:11.660
that they solicited an op-ed from me. I will, I will say, uh, they took out a slap I had at the
01:19:16.740
New York times in that piece. There was originally, I know I mentioned the fact that the headline in
01:19:21.620
the New York times about rush was that he had like turned talk radio into an aggressive right-wing
01:19:25.380
attack machine. And their headline about Ayatollah Khomeini was thoughtful religious leader,
01:19:28.560
right? Um, but, but the, um, but the, the point that I was making is that what the left did with
01:19:35.000
rush is what they are going to do with all of us. They're like the, so in, in Judaism, uh, so to
01:19:40.280
teach you all about a different religion. So in Judaism, Satan is not a character who's opposed
01:19:45.480
to God. That's not what Satan is. Satan is known as the accuser because he's essentially the
01:19:48.900
prosecutor. The idea is that after you die, Satan comes and he basically is the one who is going to
01:19:53.660
try you in court before God. And he's the one who strings together all of your sort of
01:19:58.340
worst moments. Right. And, and that is what this is. And this will come for all of us. I said in
01:20:03.960
the piece that it wouldn't have mattered if it had been Tucker or if it had been Sean or if it had me,
01:20:07.240
or if it had been you, or if it had been anybody who was prominent on the right, the reaction would
01:20:10.740
have been the same because all our lives would have been, would have been a compendium of the
01:20:14.740
worst moments of us taken out of context and robbed of all meaning, right? That's all it would
01:20:19.500
have been. And that's what you saw in the CNN montage, right? The montage of rush was like Sandra
01:20:22.480
Flock and it was the AIDS stuff from 1988, right? And it was, it was all this, it was like the,
01:20:27.360
out of the 30 years of material, what are the six worst things he did? And can we use those things
01:20:32.420
to rag on him? Can we use those things to characterize his entire life? And we should
01:20:36.540
all refuse to accept this frame. We should refuse to accept this frame. The reality is that we are
01:20:41.300
all a compendium of all the things that we've done over the course of our life, most of which people
01:20:44.300
never see. And for those of us who are in public life, yeah, the, the notion that everything that you
01:20:49.420
do can be boiled down into one bad tweet or one bad moment. All that really is, is because it can be
01:20:54.840
done to anybody, all that anybody, but it doesn't, but it isn't, but because it can be done to
01:21:00.160
anybody, that's how you know who they hate, right? Cause you can do it with anybody, literally
01:21:04.020
anybody. Right. And, but there's only one side of the aisle that they choose to do this to. Those
01:21:07.840
are the people that they cancel. And so don't accept the standard that this is how people should be
01:21:11.000
characterized. I think it's so important for us to reject this framework for the sake of our
01:21:15.680
children. Yes. Because our, our children, I mean, somebody, please think of the, let's actually
01:21:23.540
think of the children because our kids, uh, not my kids, but so many kids are, are starting out on
01:21:29.120
social media at the age of like eight years old. And, um, or even if they started social media at 14
01:21:34.960
or 15 and, and just everything they think that everything that enters their head is documented
01:21:40.460
forever online. And you got to think about what we're, what we're starting right now with this
01:21:44.880
cancel culture. If it continues like this 30 years from now, all of our children are ruined.
01:21:49.880
Their, their lives are ruined. I'm legitimately grateful to God that I grew up before cell phone.
01:21:54.660
Right. You know, also on this rush point, I mean, you figure these kids are going to be on social
01:21:59.540
media all the time. Imagine what's going to crop up. Imagine if you've been on air for three hours a day
01:22:04.300
for, for 30 years and your job, by the way, is to be provocative, especially earlier on in the
01:22:09.200
career. And the best thing they got on you is an AIDS joke you made in 1989. Can you imagine that?
01:22:16.080
I think like I wake up in the morning, right? We, we actually pray this sort of thing. It's like,
01:22:20.420
God have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. You think of these lines from Shakespeare of like,
01:22:24.560
I could accuse myself of such things that it would be better that my mother had not born me.
01:22:29.680
All the sins we all commit. That's the best they got on the guy. He's pretty clean.
01:22:33.480
Pretty well. And we're taken out of a con. Like the other thing we're doing is we're not taking,
01:22:38.220
of course, the time when these things were said into context at all. And we, and we, you know,
01:22:42.960
forget about 1980. We're going back to the 1840s and saying like, whatever someone did back then,
01:22:48.060
we're going to hold them to the standards of the year 2021, which of course is complete madness.
01:22:52.400
I mean, as somebody who was writing publicly from the time I was 17, I can say the great majority of
01:22:56.040
the things I regret having written occurred between the ages of 17 and 22. Right. Right. Like,
01:23:00.020
because when you're first starting out, number one, you're trying to get attention. And number two,
01:23:03.480
your thoughts aren't fully formed. Right. Right. If you don't get better at what you do over time and become a
01:23:06.860
better thinker over time, you're not being a human being. Yeah. Right. That's just called
01:23:09.800
maturing. And so what the, and the media celebrate this stuff. This is how it's the easiest form of
01:23:14.940
fake journalism, right? This is the other things that the media have made an entire model. The same
01:23:18.620
people who whine about the fact that we get good traffic over at daily wire because we happen to be
01:23:22.180
conservative and then say that we're clickbait. These are the same people who will run a 3000 word piece
01:23:27.180
about some jackass of a 19 year old student who decides to out a high school cheerleader who once texted
01:23:34.500
something about learning to drive and quoted a rap lyric with the N word in it and get her kicked
01:23:39.940
off the university of Tennessee cheerleading team. The New York times actually did that. The New York
01:23:43.540
times ran a long piece about this, this terrible student. I mean, this guy's a terrible person who
01:23:48.600
literally held, there's a 15 year old girl as she got a driver's permit. She put up a video on her
01:23:53.300
phone saying something. I can drive now N word. And it was obviously meant to quote a rap lyric. I mean,
01:23:58.720
clearly meant to quote a rap lyric. Soft R. This was not an epithet aimed at racial. And everybody
01:24:03.780
acknowledged this, right? This is fully obvious. And this jerk decided, because he was in her class,
01:24:08.880
he decided that he was going to hold on to this video. He waited until two, I think it was three
01:24:12.720
years later. Just kept this video around. Wait until three years later when Black Lives Matter
01:24:16.920
happened. And she made the grave misfortune of posting something in support of Black Lives Matter.
01:24:21.840
And he said, well, you say you support Black Lives Matter. You said this, boom, puts out the video.
01:24:25.520
Well, the University of Tennessee withdraws her cheerleading scholarship, which was her dream,
01:24:30.200
was to be on the University of Tennessee cheerleading team, which is one of the great
01:24:32.940
cheerleading teams in the country. She had to withdraw her entire admission from University of
01:24:37.280
Tennessee over this. We are creating an unlivable culture. It is only livable for people on the hard
01:24:42.280
left. And by the way, everybody knows this. Everybody. It's not even going to be livable for
01:24:46.620
them. Ultimately, it's not. Yeah. Revolutions eat their own. Revolutions eat their own. Every one of them
01:24:52.380
is going to burn. All the people, like you talk about our publicists over at Media Matters and
01:24:56.560
Sleeping Giants and Judd Lum Lum and Kevin Roos and Kara Swisher. They don't know. They're all doomed.
01:25:03.060
Right. Not because of us. Yeah. Not because of us. Yeah. Because they're not 23. Yeah. They're not
01:25:09.000
woke 23-year-olds. The woke 23-year-olds will one day eat them for lunch. Yeah. Yeah. Think of poor
01:25:16.600
Trotsky. You know. Trotsky thought he had it so well. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever hear a ringing in your
01:25:21.300
ear, guys, it's an ice pick. An ice pick. And it ain't us bringing it. It ain't us. But that's why,
01:25:25.660
you know, sometimes you hear people on the right and they'll lament this happening to some of the
01:25:28.380
counselors. Nope. Nope. They deserve every bit of what they've got coming to them. They built this
01:25:33.920
and they deserve what they have coming to them. I can object to it happening to them and still
01:25:36.820
recognize that they have exactly what they built coming to them. It's really interesting to me who
01:25:41.440
has always, you know, I've been an artist all my life. Half the people I know are gay. I've worked with
01:25:46.920
all these gay people. I've always enjoyed their company. They're hilariously funny. All this stuff.
01:25:51.060
I once went snorkeling with Ryan Anderson when Harry became Salic. So I'm, Ryan and I together as
01:25:56.540
one gay guy. Yeah, that is. I mean, I don't know. But I remember back in the day, seriously, liberals,
01:26:03.360
liberals who wouldn't come back to my house because they met a gay person there. They wouldn't come back
01:26:08.360
to see me because they'd come to a party and there was a gay couple there. And those same people,
01:26:13.500
those same people are walking around with their rainbow flags now and canceling anybody. And I
01:26:18.560
just think like it's all malarkey. This is the thing that really gets me. It's all a grift. It
01:26:24.020
has nothing to do with the happiness of gay people, of black people, of women, of trans. It has nothing
01:26:30.580
to do with any of that. Is the world happier because of cancel culture? It is much, much more.
01:26:34.640
Well, this is, by the way, this is sort of the thesis of the, my first book with words is this kind of
01:26:40.060
wait a minute, wait a minute. This is shocking. We'll see if I can finish it. But that political
01:26:44.520
correctness basically replaces moral codes with speech codes, the old moral codes with the new
01:26:48.440
speech codes. So it matters much less what you do. It actually doesn't really matter at all what you
01:26:52.260
do. It matters what you say and the imposition of that because the word is my fair lady, isn't it?
01:26:57.400
It's like, it doesn't matter what you do as long as you say it correctly. I think about this with
01:27:00.540
the actor Armie Hammer. Yeah, Armie. Who you guys know was many years ago, a good,
01:27:06.120
a good friend of mine, a good pal of mine. And in later years, we've not been close. Our paths have
01:27:11.880
taken us in different directions and he doesn't share our politics, but still a guy I'm very fond
01:27:16.040
of. And he said some things on to some gals that are hard to read. Yeah, they're weird. He expressed
01:27:25.720
sexual predilections to them. And for that, he's being erased from the world. I don't even understand
01:27:32.340
the story. This is my point. So Armie says, you know, I want to eat toes and I'd like to eat your
01:27:38.040
rib and some other things. Right. And who among us has it? Ribs are delicious. Oh, wait, human.
01:27:44.600
Oh, if just taking back what Adam once gave. If Armie didn't need anybody. Yeah, right. Right.
01:27:53.940
Armie didn't drug and sodomize a 13-year-old girl like Roman Polanski did. And Harrison Ford flew to
01:28:04.400
France to give him an honorary Oscar. Yeah. Like, this is why I don't get this. It's only what you
01:28:09.440
say. He expressed some words. He expressed some dark fantasies. No, but wait, as I understood the
01:28:16.800
story, he has some kind of weird sexual fetish that he performed on some of these girls who were
01:28:23.140
there, they didn't stop him from doing this. I'm not understanding. I don't understand what he's
01:28:27.320
being canceled for. Like, in other words, like I saw what he was doing. He engaged in consensual sex.
01:28:32.660
Yeah. And he said that he would like to eat a rib or eat a couple of toes. Yeah. In some direct
01:28:37.240
messages. And for this, he must be destroyed. Now, I'm not making a moral defense of. No. Yeah,
01:28:42.300
it is. It is definitely very disordered. But I am saying what, what did he do? I'm just trying to think of
01:28:47.780
huntings, to be honest with you. Oh, come on. Come on. No, yeah, there are a lot of good ones.
01:28:53.120
Talk to me after the show. That was an interesting story because it should, because Cosmopolitan
01:28:59.260
Magazine actually published an article after that defending cannibalism fetishes. That's right.
01:29:06.500
And I read, I read the article for some reason. Who doesn't? Yeah, I was, you know, I read the article
01:29:10.660
for some reason and it just struck me that, that this is kind of off the topic a little bit,
01:29:15.100
I guess, but it's just our culture has no language anymore to condemn any kind of perversion. Yeah.
01:29:22.700
Because it's all about consent. And so the only language, the only, the only moral rule we have
01:29:27.960
left is consent. And that's, everything comes down to consent. And as long as people consent,
01:29:31.540
then we have no language with which to condemn anything. And so this article was going through,
01:29:37.280
you know, it couldn't just come out and say, well, this is wrong to want to eat people. That's weird
01:29:41.700
and wrong. It couldn't say that. So instead it was trying to figure out how, well, he didn't really
01:29:46.280
have consent. Well, you know how they did this, the greatest version of this, forget, forget Army's
01:29:50.780
thing, was Marilyn Manson. Marilyn Manson is being accused by the actress Evan Rachel Wood,
01:29:55.360
who's very left-wing, but just testified on this and some other women of engaging in very sort of
01:30:01.340
bizarre sexual behaviors. We're not just talking about fantasies anymore. And the thing is,
01:30:06.480
these women were in longstanding relationships with him. And so when Evan Rachel Wood,
01:30:10.180
and I really take her side in this, but she's saying, well, I know we were in a consensual
01:30:14.320
relationship, but it wasn't really consensual because, you know, I was brainwashed. He
01:30:19.400
manipulated me, you know, fine. I, I totally understand that argument, but that argument
01:30:24.960
doesn't work in the modern liberal framework. I actually don't, I actually disagree with you
01:30:28.880
guys about this. I, I think I agree with a fundamental point that you're making that consent
01:30:33.940
isn't the ultimate definition of morality, but consent is consent. But that doesn't mean that
01:30:39.720
consent isn't a standard. Yeah. I don't, I actually. And it's a legal standard for sure.
01:30:43.980
Most of all, that is the only standard that the left applies. So how do you cancel somebody on
01:30:47.200
the basis of violating a standard you have not violated? Right. Right. I mean, I can understand
01:30:51.880
conservatives saying that's weird and perverse and it's always wrong. It's always wrong. We're
01:30:56.260
not going to be patronizing businesses with people who want to eat each other's toes because
01:30:59.560
it's weird. But for liberals, for whom literally nothing is off limits so long as it is consensual,
01:31:05.120
there is no, there is no basis for canceling. It's a weak, it's a weak standard. So, but the,
01:31:09.400
but the point is they, they've, if, if your standard for judging the morality of a sexual act is,
01:31:15.200
is something like love, uh, devotion, are you respecting the dignity of the other person?
01:31:20.780
Well, then you don't have to talk about consent at all because that's included in the love,
01:31:24.020
devotion and dignity bit. Yeah. But you get rid of all that and it all comes down to, to,
01:31:27.960
to consent. And that's why you have all these, you know, all these cases on college campuses,
01:31:32.320
a woman wakes up the next day, she had consensual sex with a man, but she feels used and cheap and
01:31:37.960
dirty. And, and, and she, and she was used, you know, she was used like an object, but she did
01:31:42.740
consent to it. And the problem is not that she didn't consent. The problem is that it was not
01:31:46.500
sex with dignity and love, but she doesn't have that language. So instead she figures, well,
01:31:50.920
this feels wrong. I didn't really give consent. So I must, yeah, I must not have gotten given,
01:31:54.780
given consent, even though I did. That's a great, that is a great point. That is absolutely,
01:31:58.140
you know, cause it is a great point. And until you say you're taking Rachel Evan Wood's side,
01:32:02.740
I'm, I'm, I'm sort of taking her side. I'm not taking it all the way where I disagree with you.
01:32:06.120
I agree with everything you just said as a moral standard, but I'm not, I'm not saying that
01:32:09.700
Marilyn Manson for the, for the, the sort of consensual acts that he's being accused of it
01:32:14.960
not being consensual or something. I'm not, I'm not saying you ought to go to jail. I think you're
01:32:19.660
making the same point that Matt is. He's not, you're not saying that you take Evan Rachel
01:32:22.600
Wood's side in the sense that he has violated some sort of left-wing cultural standard and ought to,
01:32:27.900
or civil law to be more civil law. It ought to be ended that way. I think you're just saying
01:32:31.520
what Matt is saying, which is that I fundamentally though, object to the idea that you can retroactively
01:32:38.320
remove consent because of regret. But the point that Matt is making is such a perceptive one,
01:32:45.860
which is that people aren't actively, it's a lie. In other words, when they say that they're
01:32:50.500
retroactively removing consent, the only moral standard they have is consent, but they know they
01:32:54.820
feel like something wrong just happened to them. So they do not have the language to express
01:32:58.380
what morality has been violated other than by retroactively saying that the only value they
01:33:03.320
have was violated. Since I know it was bad, it must not have been consent. There's a huge irony here
01:33:07.760
though, which is that you have these left-wingers grappling at this very traditional definition
01:33:13.160
of consent and liberty, the kind of Aristotelian or old classical Christian idea, which is that if
01:33:19.560
you're constantly in vice and sin, you're not actually free, right? The man who sins is a slave
01:33:24.960
to sin. The example I use is the heroin addict. By the kind of modern leftist standard of liberty,
01:33:30.760
the heroin addict is the freest guy in the world, right? As long as he's got a couple bucks in his
01:33:34.100
pocket, he can shoot up, he can pursue his appetites however he wants. But we all know the
01:33:38.940
heroin addict is the least free person on earth. This is the thing, you know, you and I like the show
01:33:44.420
Billions. And it features this guy who's a prosecutor who is a masochist. He's a sexual
01:33:52.380
masochist. And it begins, and he's, you know, for me, like masochism, sadomasochism is like you
01:33:57.360
flick people with a towel, you know, but this is like sticking cigarettes on people. It's like,
01:34:01.620
it's not, it's not a joke, you know, but he's in a loving relationship with his wife where they do
01:34:06.600
this thing. And what you're left with is something's wrong with him. Yeah. You know, it's not,
01:34:12.180
it's not that they're doing anything illegal and it's not even that they're outside of a loving
01:34:15.980
relationship because for a large period of the show, they're actually in a loving relationship,
01:34:20.140
but something's the matter with him. And, and it's, you know, it's when I look at, uh, the guy
01:34:25.640
who's supposed to be a girl who's in the, uh, now the health and human services, but Rachel Levine.
01:34:30.740
Yeah. I think like, you know, I have nothing but sympathy for this person, but something's wrong
01:34:37.140
with them, you know, there's something's the matter with them. And I think that like,
01:34:40.300
we have to be able to talk about that without necessarily, uh, moral judgment, but at least
01:34:46.720
with some kind of understanding. Because right now the argument is, well, you can do whatever
01:34:49.480
you want as long as you consent to it. But the question then is, well, if there's something
01:34:54.540
that's a little wrong, maybe we do need to qualify. But two things can be true at once,
01:35:00.620
which is you can do anything that you consent to as long as you're an adult, but that doesn't
01:35:04.160
make it right. That's right. And this is something that, and this is, this is something,
01:35:06.900
and this is an ethos that is completely foreign to the left, right? This is where they're running
01:35:11.780
into trouble because the ethos that you can do something wrong, but still it can be wrong.
01:35:17.600
It's something that the left fundamentally does not accept, right? It's why they're now cracking
01:35:20.400
back against freedom of association and freedom of speech and all individual rights, right? If you
01:35:23.680
can misuse freedom of speech, that means that freedom of speech should actively be curbed.
01:35:27.680
If you misuse freedom of association, freedom of association should, should actively be curbed.
01:35:31.180
The right understands that there is a difference between the right to do wrong and the possibility
01:35:36.700
of doing wrong with that right, right? That you can, you can abuse a right, but that doesn't
01:35:41.340
vitiate the central right that you're talking about. The left fundamentally does not understand
01:35:44.980
this. So what this creates is this bizarre situation where they'll know something is wrong
01:35:48.640
and they can't explain why it's wrong or which rule it has violated. Right. And so they have
01:35:52.940
to post facto create a rule that allows them to bar that thing, right? Because, because they can't
01:35:58.440
accept the idea that somebody could do something wrong and also it wouldn't violate any of their
01:36:01.440
chief principles because in essence, they're authoritarian, right? In essence, everything
01:36:05.260
they don't like ought to be banned. Yeah. And so if they can't even come up with a good reason in
01:36:08.400
their own head why it ought to be banned, they will come up with a new rule or they will spin the rule
01:36:12.100
so that that thing ought to be banned. And that's incredibly dangerous.
01:36:14.700
This is my only question for any leftists ever, really. This is what, this is what I would ask if I
01:36:19.340
got to ask a question at a Democrat debate is, is there anything that you believe is bad that should not be
01:36:27.220
banned by government? Yeah. Is there anything you believe is good that should not be mandated by
01:36:32.340
government? Right. You're right. You know, it's so, it's, it's incredibly biblical even for your half
01:36:37.960
of the Bible. Uh, no, it's incredibly biblical that we talk about why God allows, uh, evil. And there's a
01:36:45.460
large body of, uh, discussion about this. And one of the ideas is that because he believes that men have
01:36:51.860
to be free and men and women have to be free in order to love God, in order to serve God freely.
01:36:57.360
But that means that you can not do that. And so that's, that's the relationship of power to the
01:37:03.560
people who are less powerful is yes, you have to have the right to do things that are wrong.
01:37:08.100
But I do think, I think that doesn't mean they're right.
01:37:12.240
Yeah. I do. I do think though, the left is saying something even more radical, which is they're
01:37:16.980
saying, I'm not really free. You know, in the case of Evan Rachel Wood or something, she's saying,
01:37:20.960
I'm not free to consent for whatever reason, you know, I was manipulated or whatever. And this
01:37:26.400
actually gets to something the founding fathers talked about. This gets to something that sort of
01:37:31.600
classical Lord Acton talks about, actually classical theorizers of, of liberty, which is to be free,
01:37:38.840
you actually have to be a moral and religious people in the words of John Adams, or you need to
01:37:43.800
practice the virtues and cultivate that. The point of liberal education is to do this, right? It's
01:37:49.160
why we take little kids who are just basically appetite machines and doing everything that's
01:37:53.420
bad for them. We educate them in their liberty and hopefully they can kind of tame it and be able
01:37:59.640
to master that. But what the left is saying is we don't have that. We're just appetite machines.
01:38:04.980
Well, so one of the things that happened and just philosophically, that was a really radical shift
01:38:10.860
in sort of how Western thought went, is that it used to be that people perceived natural law in
01:38:16.000
the way that the Catholic Church perceived natural law, which is you can look at the way that nature
01:38:19.480
is constituted and you can derive from it rational rules as to how the world should work and natural
01:38:23.620
rules of virtue as to how you should live your life, right? And that that is embedded in the laws
01:38:27.640
of nature and nature is God, as is the language of the Declaration of Independence. And the, there was a
01:38:32.780
shift that happened, particularly in the 19th century, from the idea of natural law to nature as guide,
01:38:38.860
right? As in scientific nature, as in if something happened to you and it was natural to you, you had
01:38:43.640
a natural desire, then this meant that this natural desire was justified. And you see, this is, you can
01:38:48.920
see this in, I mean, to be, you know, as sort of cretinous as possible in terms of public culture.
01:38:54.520
If you look at Lady Gaga's born this way, right? This is the argument. If it is natural for you to do,
01:38:58.500
it is therefore good for you to do. Well, that is the precise opposite of what natural law suggests,
01:39:02.080
which is it may be natural for you to have a particular inclination, but the world around you suggests a
01:39:06.700
particular set of rules. And you are supposed to incline yourself toward that particular set of
01:39:10.240
rules in violation of your own, right? Because man was meant to reason. But the, the, the, this
01:39:16.100
goes back to, I think the, another fundamental distinction that the left is, is now attempting
01:39:20.960
to conflate. There was an entire editorial in the New York Times today that was kind of fascinating.
01:39:25.320
And it was a complaint about why Western philosophy was so focused on separating man from animals.
01:39:29.880
I don't know if you guys saw this. It was kind of fascinating. It was, it was an entire essay about
01:39:33.320
why do, you know, all of Western philosophy is dedicated toward the idea that man is not the
01:39:37.400
same as a squirrel. And this is very bad. We should actually allow man to just be the same as a
01:39:41.600
squirrel because squirrels are natural and squirrels have, and, and human beings are natural. And we
01:39:45.980
should acknowledge we are not just our reason. We are not just our prefrontal cortex. We are all of
01:39:49.360
the elements of us, right? And Western philosophy was built around the idea that we are not the same
01:39:53.860
as animals specifically because Western philosophy was built around the idea that man was made for a
01:39:58.140
purpose. And that purpose was to reason. That purpose was to use our brains in order to seek out
01:40:02.980
God and to seek out the rules to live a virtuous life. And the left has attempted to vitiate that.
01:40:08.160
This is why Darwinian theory did so much damage to religion, not because there's anything that
01:40:13.020
doesn't fit in terms of evolution and religion. You can square that circle for sure. But what really
01:40:18.220
finished it was the idea that man is an animal. And once you treat man as an animal-
01:40:22.020
And there's no fixed nature. Nature's evolving.
01:40:24.700
Right. But, but more importantly, that, that you, there is nothing better about the prefrontal
01:40:29.100
cortex than the amygdala. Yep. Right. There's nothing, there's nothing preferable about being
01:40:32.300
a reasonable person as opposed to being an emotional person or a person who just follows
01:40:35.880
their passions, follows their nature. And by the way, it's worth pointing out when Woodrow
01:40:38.740
Wilson are, you know, sort of first, the worst president in American history. Yeah. The first,
01:40:42.940
you know, and the first left progressive president, he who destroyed the entire country,
01:40:46.660
when he writes about what is progress, what is progressivism, he uses that exact example. He says,
01:40:52.220
the constitution is based on the science of Newton, fixed laws, permanent nature, all these sorts of
01:40:58.400
things. But we know that's bunk. We now live in the age of Darwin. I don't think Woodrow Wilson,
01:41:03.460
he understood Darwin very well anyway, but he says, Darwin, nothing's fixed. It's all just kind
01:41:08.200
of a continuum, man. We're not that different. And therefore throw out all those permanent laws.
01:41:13.180
Have we gotten, have we gotten to a point where, cause I've been thinking about this a lot. Have we
01:41:16.900
gotten to a point where the whole conversation around rights is, is just hopeless? Uh, because
01:41:24.780
we can't, you get a hundred Americans into a room and you ask them what, what does, what does it mean
01:41:29.480
to have a right? What is a human right? And you're not going to get even a 50% agreement. Nobody has
01:41:33.880
any idea even what these things are. We don't have the same, we don't have the philosophical grounding
01:41:37.420
for it. Well, that's, we got to a point where this is where we, you know, maybe we stop, maybe we
01:41:42.640
as conservatives stopped framing our arguments so much around rights and find a different framework
01:41:46.780
for it. Like, so for example, um, uh, abortion. And so for, for so long pro-lifers would say we
01:41:54.080
have a right to life and that, that actually raises a lot of questions. Like what, what do
01:41:58.940
you mean a right to life or a right against whom? Who are you claiming this right against? Right,
01:42:04.300
exactly. If you have a right to life, does that mean that you can't be executed and so on? Um,
01:42:08.540
maybe a better R word would be responsibility. And so what we should be saying is, and I believe we
01:42:14.860
do have a right to life understood a certain way, but maybe we should be saying that, um,
01:42:19.920
a parent has a responsibility to their child. And what that means at a minimum is that you
01:42:25.520
can't kill your child. You have to provide for them. We all agree with that. When it comes
01:42:29.100
to born children, you let your kids starve to death, you go to jail. So kind of traditional
01:42:32.600
conservative framing. Right. Maybe it's maybe a responsibility. When I got into this brief
01:42:36.660
Twitter exchange with, uh, David French, one of the things I said was you, you are endowed
01:42:42.360
by your creator with certain rights and government is instituted among men to ensure those rights.
01:42:48.700
So if those rights are under threat, it doesn't matter where they're under threat from government
01:42:52.660
has a right to stop that threat. And many, many people came on this, this Twitter thread and said,
01:42:58.660
oh, any argument from God is absurd. Yeah. But the problem, the problem with that is that's actually
01:43:04.420
the axiom of our civilization. It is the self-evident truth that doesn't have to be proved. It only has
01:43:10.920
to be asserted because everything else is built on top of it. You can't remove it. You cannot
01:43:15.380
remove that assumption. And we shouldn't be afraid to make that assumption because it's
01:43:19.060
the axiom. Well, there's a, there's a common argument that the founders consistently made
01:43:23.280
and which they were right about, which is that the other half of right is duty, right? Rights
01:43:27.100
and duties were just the flip side of each other. Your right to life is my duty not to kill you.
01:43:30.220
Yeah. Right. And, and your right to free speech is my duty not to inhibit your free speech.
01:43:33.640
And we all understood this fundamentally. What we have done is we have dumped the duty and we have
01:43:37.660
kept the rights. And so once you dump the duty, then you can have rights against anyone for
01:43:41.580
anything because you have no duty not to infringe on them. I just want to say dump the duty is a
01:43:45.400
funny phrase, but go ahead. It is. I think I'm very, uh, yeah, it's true.
01:43:49.260
Not that we're childish here. I think on that elevated note, I want to do something that we
01:43:54.400
haven't done in a while. I want to, this has been a great conversation. Uh, I want to wrap out the
01:43:58.760
show with 10 rapid fire questions from our dailywire.com subscribers. Alicia is going to bring them
01:44:04.560
to us. Here's the rules. What, whoever the question is, uh, addressed at, they're the
01:44:09.860
only one to make an answer. And it's a, and it's a fast pithy answer. We want to get through 10
01:44:14.500
rapid fire questions. Alicia. All right. The first question goes to Michael Knowles. A dailywire
01:44:21.380
member wants to know they live in a liberal Mecca and they're considering leaving like the dailywire
01:44:26.400
did, but should they be considering this? And what do you think their options and decision
01:44:30.820
making should be considering they don't have a job or housing situation set up yet?
01:44:34.960
Well, you're probably more likely to get a job in a cheaper house and a conservative place. So I think
01:44:38.860
those are both marks actually in favor of coming here. I love it. I wish we came here sooner. I love
01:44:44.360
being in a red state and specifically in Tennessee. All I will have a caveat here is I feel I got a lot
01:44:54.400
out of growing up in left-wing places because I learned all the stupidest arguments and it cost me a lot
01:44:59.600
of time and it impelled a lot of bad behavior, but I feel I came out stronger and wiser for it.
01:45:04.540
That was a constructive process. However, if you're already formed and comfort is your,
01:45:09.320
is your goal, come on over baby. Tennessee is fabulous.
01:45:13.640
All right. This question goes to Matt. People want to know, do you think that the general public
01:45:19.280
or major corporations will ever grow a spine and just say no to the woke mob and the Twitterati?
01:45:25.020
No. No. I think Matt took that, like those instructions a little too seriously. Can we
01:45:36.760
give him like 280 characters? I think he said it all. All right. Drew, who would win a cage
01:45:45.960
match between Gina Carano and the entire Daily Wire team? Oh, we'd be killed. Are you kidding?
01:45:50.700
She'd kill us. In my youth, I might've given her one, I might've gotten one slug in, but now it's,
01:45:56.720
it's over. Yeah. Media matters. In his youth, Andrew Klavan would have punched a woman.
01:46:03.460
Headlines write themselves. All right. Jeremy, people want to know what kind of cigars are you
01:46:10.300
guys smoking? I'm not smoking tonight. So I'm going to kick the question over to Mickey.
01:46:15.100
Little Davidoff Colorado Claro, not a super duper expensive cigar, but it's got six years age on it
01:46:20.960
from our buddies at our old shop in LA. Ben, it is award season, even though it seems a little
01:46:26.940
weird in this age of COVID and people want to know what are your Oscar picks? Oh my God. Well,
01:46:31.880
all the ones that they've talked about for Oscars this year absolutely suck or I haven't seen them.
01:46:35.960
So I really haven't seen many good movies this year. Run, hide, fight should win all of the
01:46:39.480
Oscars. Aside from, aside from run, hide, fight, the unproduced Gina Carano film should obviously
01:46:44.340
also be nominated for next year's Oscars. 2022. 2022. I, you know, I'm trying to think of anything
01:46:49.880
that's really, have you guys seen anything of this year? I'm like, I'm really, I'm really trying to
01:46:53.360
all the Oscar movies. It's like, call me by your moonlight or some nonsense and no one watches it.
01:46:57.280
Gentleman was, was that this year? Cause that was a good guy. Richie film. Okay. I'll have to,
01:47:01.640
I'll have to give that one a look. Really fun. I got nothing. All right. Uh, Jeremy, this,
01:47:06.560
this question is for you. A daily wire member wants to know which actor are you kind of hoping
01:47:11.440
gets canceled next? So you guys can snatch them off. Well, I have a list. Uh, I, I, I hate to say
01:47:18.320
an answer to that, but it's so terrible. I will say that on the same day that fire Gina Carano,
01:47:23.040
uh, was trending, uh, fire Chris Pratt was trending and for God's sakes, Hollywood, please,
01:47:32.060
I love me some Chris Pratt out of all the Chris's he's obviously the best. Alrighty. Uh, Michael,
01:47:40.100
do you think that we need more conservatives going into politics or going into cultural positions like
01:47:44.800
filmmaking and producing and editing and all those things? Well, I think the answer is yes. And I also
01:47:51.000
think it's a little bit of a blurry distinction, you know, because obviously politics, the biggest
01:47:55.320
definition of it is what we all do together, but it's a, it's a two pronged approach because
01:47:59.780
forget elected politicians, they're always going to be sociopaths running for that.
01:48:03.500
It's the bureaucracy that we lose in the actual administrative state and the entire cultural
01:48:08.540
apparatus. And we just don't have anybody in any of those areas. So we, we need to go into both and
01:48:14.000
both, both are important. I don't think it's only when the culture and forget about politics. And I
01:48:18.320
don't think it's only focus on bureaucratic politics and ignore it and technology and tech and
01:48:23.140
everything. Yeah. Matt, uh, earlier on Twitter, I saw that you retweeted Tommy Lahren. She said Trump
01:48:29.940
DeSantis 2024. You said you agreed with half of the ticket other than, other than Ron DeSantis.
01:48:36.900
Who would you pick? Like, what are your top three for the GOP in 2024? I don't have a top three. I like
01:48:42.780
Ron DeSantis. Um, I, I hate almost all politicians. So for me to even say I like him is, is me going out
01:48:49.300
on a limb and I, I give him, you know, that we've got three years, four years left before. So he
01:48:53.780
could easily disappoint me, but I'll be ready to toss him to the curb if he does. But, um,
01:48:57.920
Ron DeSantis is great. He's got the governor of my excellent new state, Florida. He is a stud.
01:49:04.640
And I really feel we don't have time to get into all this. It's supposed to be rapid fire,
01:49:08.360
but I feel very strongly that, uh, Ron DeSantis on the top of the ticket is a great idea. Trump on the
01:49:15.180
top of the ticket. I don't know if we want to do all this again in 2024. Um, so I, I hate to
01:49:21.200
interrupt because I said we had to be rapid fire, but Candace Owens could, would be formidable if she
01:49:26.040
actually decided to make good on her tweet threat. It is true. It would be formidable. It is a true
01:49:30.600
story. I wouldn't want to run against her. I also, just to put a little plug in here, I would like to
01:49:35.140
be the first podcast host, you know, so there's other, there are other Republican politicians who could
01:49:40.420
be out there. Wouldn't mind doing a podcast. Yeah. I'm just throwing that out there.
01:49:44.380
Something I'm encouraging people to do. We all know Michael is hoping that Ben runs,
01:49:50.060
so then he can get his radio slot. That's true. That's the way I could actually become the first
01:49:53.640
podcast host. If I took his podcast. Drew, do you plan on double masking? No, I don't even single
01:50:01.560
mask. I only wear a mask when I walk into a store and on the front of the store, it says you have to
01:50:08.400
have a mask to, you have to wear a mask to enter the store. Otherwise I haven't worn a mask since this
01:50:13.480
whole thing beginning. I mean, Drew's immune to death. That's what happens after you've been
01:50:16.840
dead for five years. If I were, if I were going to die, I'd have died already. Let's face it.
01:50:21.240
I just say, I know I'm not supposed to speak, but, uh, but on the mask thing, I discovered this
01:50:25.600
weekend that when you're wearing a suit jacket, if you wear the neck gaiter, which is my move and
01:50:30.200
you wear it around your neck, it actually looks like an ascot. Um, so it's kind of, it kind of
01:50:33.820
works like that. So yeah, no, I haven't done, I haven't done anything that anything that Anthony
01:50:39.720
Fauci says I do the opposite. I've heard that I've heard that, um, I did an Anthony Fauci
01:50:46.300
impersonation the other day and, uh, I heard from a lot of our listeners that your Anthony
01:50:50.140
Fauci impersonation, this is the only nice thing I've ever said to Michael Knowles. I don't know
01:50:53.460
what you're talking about. In 10 or 15 years, maybe I'll have done a good impression.
01:51:01.000
That is good. Solid stuff. We know how Ben feels about Fauci and the vaccine, but Ben,
01:51:10.300
somebody wants to know if you get the vaccine, is it okay? I know it's against Jewish law to get
01:51:14.660
a tattoo, but this Daily Wire subscriber wants to know, would you get it tattooed on your arm or
01:51:18.820
somewhere that you got the vaccine? So then you don't have to wear a mask anymore and you can go to
01:51:21.980
a baseball game. As I've been hearing you talk about a lot on your podcast. So a couple of things.
01:51:26.160
One, Jews not big into tattoos. Two, Jews super not big into governments giving you tattoos.
01:51:31.880
Right? I think it was an optional. It was optional so that you can go with your dad to a White Sox game.
01:51:37.920
It sounds weird to me. Like, I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but it's kind of
01:51:41.320
uncomfortable. I mean, uh, you know, but, um, yeah, I'm, I'm not in favor of, as a general liberty
01:51:48.260
matter, I'm not in favor of the idea that you should be barred from all public places unless
01:51:51.920
you have a vaccine green card. I do think that our public officials are doing us an enormous
01:51:57.300
disservice in continuing to lie to us and say that you can't go back to regular life after
01:52:01.880
you've had the vaccine. It's literally the only tool that we know of right now that is going to
01:52:05.840
give you the kind of safety, particularly if you're older from the disease that would reduce
01:52:10.620
this to below the risk of the flu. I mean, if you get these vaccines, these vaccines are 99%
01:52:14.660
effective in preventing death, 95% effective in preventing serious illness and 90% effective in
01:52:19.860
preventing transmission. So this bizarre idea that after you get the vaccine, you're going to be
01:52:23.680
still living with the mask and socially distancing in 2022 is anti-science. It is bizarre. And it
01:52:28.840
actually encourages people not to get the vaccine. Cause if I'm 37 and I'm thinking to myself, okay,
01:52:33.440
well there's may, there may be like the risk of getting a little sick from the vaccine. I won't
01:52:36.440
feel so good. I don't know what the long-term effects of the vaccine are. And listen, if I get COVID,
01:52:39.900
I'm not going to die anyway. I'm 37. And then you tell me, okay, but you can go back to regular
01:52:44.480
life. I might think to myself, okay, that, that seems like it's worth the risk. But if you keep
01:52:48.160
telling 25 year olds that they can't go back to regular life after they get the vaccine,
01:52:51.960
who in their right mind would get the vaccine? And you have all of these idiots like Fauci
01:52:55.840
saying, you may, maybe we'll never go back to our regular life. Maybe we'll never do it. Never.
01:53:00.820
And it's like, what are you, why, why? It's, I mean, it's a scientific miracle. Right. First of all,
01:53:07.060
that we've been ripping on big business a lot. Let me just say that the greatest thing in the world
01:53:10.480
is big pharma, big pharma. They're unbelievable at what they do. And the only problem,
01:53:14.440
they generated a cure for a disease in less than a year. It's unbelievable. But, but as far as kind
01:53:19.000
of the general concept of the government mandating vaccine cards to go anywhere, uh, that, that raises,
01:53:24.900
I think, serious Liberty concerns. I think frankly, people would start forging them to go wherever
01:53:28.520
they want anyway. They're, they're, they're making the same mistake now that they made in March.
01:53:32.400
Again, it's just being replayed because in March they told everyone don't wear masks. It's stupid
01:53:36.860
to wear masks. The surgeon general said people stop wearing masks. And the reason they said that is
01:53:40.340
because they didn't want us to run out and they didn't trust us to not run out and buy all the
01:53:43.520
medical masks. And then they wanted it to go to all the nurses and not to us. And so for now,
01:53:47.640
now with the vaccine, they're doing the same thing again, where they're saying, Oh no, you know,
01:53:52.540
if you get the vaccine, you still have to wear the mask, uh, because they don't trust people who
01:53:58.660
aren't vaccinated to not wear the mask, because they think that if they, if they start allowing
01:54:02.280
people to, well, if you wear them, if you, if you get the vaccine, you don't have to wear a mask
01:54:05.360
and think everyone's not going to wear it. They're not trusting. They seem to, they seem to think
01:54:09.120
there are three choices here and there are only two, right? They think that there is a third choice
01:54:12.440
where everybody gets vaccinated and then doesn't go out and party. There's only two choices.
01:54:16.700
Everybody gets vaccinated and parties and nobody gets vaccinated and parties. There is no third
01:54:21.640
choice where everybody continues to lock down until the end of time, especially after being
01:54:24.940
vaccinated. It's idiotic. Like this is one thing that Israel is doing right with the vaccine.
01:54:29.020
They've done a lot of things right. But one thing they're doing right, I mean, they have shot in a
01:54:31.540
shot night at the bars. They're telling people like, come and get a shot and we'll give you a free shot.
01:54:35.600
They're encouraging people to actively do this. And that is a, that is a smart thing to do.
01:54:41.280
Yeah. All right. Uh, Matt, people want to know how is it finally being a daily wire HQ in Nashville
01:54:49.500
and how different is it doing your show from there? Uh, it's pretty nice. I have a, I have a
01:54:54.400
series of complaints that I could, uh, much of them having to do with the break room. Uh, there's a lot
01:55:01.200
of, you know, the other day I wanted to grab some half and half and all they had was coconut milk and
01:55:05.480
like soy milk and almond milk. I have everything except for, for real milk. Um, there's also a lot
01:55:12.760
of seaweed related snacks that I don't really understand. It must be an LA thing, but I think
01:55:18.940
you should take it up with your supervisor. I will. I've already registered with HR, but they
01:55:23.720
thought that away. So said it wasn't a valid complaint. They're not going to be investigating
01:55:28.880
that. Too bad. So sad. Michael Knowles. I heard from a little birdie maybe named Dave Rubin that
01:55:34.380
he's slightly bitter that the night before the daily wire announced their move to Nashville,
01:55:37.780
you claimed that you were staying here in California. I was there. He wants to know,
01:55:41.960
was it worth it? So there were, there were a couple, couple of these nights. Rubin never forgave
01:55:47.360
me for this. Now in my defense, nobody tells me nothing around here. Okay. In my, in my defense,
01:55:53.880
seriously, these guys, they're not telling me stuff. To be fair. I didn't want you to come.
01:55:56.840
Yeah. Please, Dave, get Knowles to stay. But it was funny because I was at Dave, this was actually,
01:56:03.440
we had our, truly our farewell dinner. It was a, you, me, Drew, uh, Adam Carolla, Prager was there.
01:56:09.900
And then we all, you guys, I think you guys were already gone at this point. And then we really
01:56:12.960
hightailed it. But I was at Dave's place and he said, you know, Knowles, you know, Knowles,
01:56:18.000
we're going to just take back California and we're going to, you know, we're going to just win
01:56:23.140
back the hearts and minds and get rid of Newsome. And I was like, yeah, man, hell yeah. We're
01:56:27.320
going to, yeah, FOA and yeah, all this stuff. And then like six hours later, it was like, yo,
01:56:31.240
bye Dave. I'm going to Tennessee. See you out there, buddy. So what you're telling me is that
01:56:35.420
you're a liar who personality mirrors. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. You ever think
01:56:40.440
about acting? Yeah, maybe, you know, I might. Is there a part in that Gina Carano movie? Dave Rubin ain't
01:56:46.660
staying in California. No, he'll be, he'll be in Florida tomorrow. It's like, you're going to walk
01:56:50.780
outside. We're going to grow old together as Jews in Florida.
01:56:53.140
Alicia, how many questions have we done? At least like one and a half. We've done more
01:57:00.380
than 10, but I'm just still like rolling through them because I, you know, you hadn't stopped
01:57:03.980
me. Last question. All right. Last question goes to you, God King. And it kind of piggybacks
01:57:09.760
on you asking if Michael, if he had considered getting into acting, which he hadn't done in
01:57:14.060
a while, unless that's what he's doing every day on his podcast. Will any of the Daily Wire
01:57:21.100
talent be making cameos in the upcoming Daily Wire entertainment scripted shows?
01:57:26.340
Ooh, wouldn't you like to know, fair audience? All that I'm willing to say on this topic is
01:57:32.400
yes. I meant to say, ah, listen, be sure to tune in for Ben's first episode of the hit
01:57:41.880
new show debunked this Friday. We just know it's going to be a hit Ben's in it. The series
01:57:45.440
will be available exclusively to Daily Wire members to you. So use code debunked to save
01:57:50.520
25% off your membership today over at dailywire.com. Don't miss the opportunity to see Ben brandish
01:57:56.060
facts and logic. I want, in my original draft, I said facts and or logic. Someone has obviously
01:58:01.280
corrected the teleprompter. Thanks again for joining us for the Daily Wire,
01:58:05.360
the Empire Strikes Back stage. We will see you next time.