Daily Wire Backstage: 2022 Season Finale
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 16 minutes
Words per Minute
217.18991
Summary
Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles join the Daily Wire's own Jeremy Boring to discuss the Dark Knight Rises and its implications for the future of Christopher Nolan's Batman franchise.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, this is Matt Walsh. Drop everything you're doing and check out the latest episode of Daily Wire backstage.
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You're going to hear Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and yours truly,
00:00:09.000
talking about all the important issues affecting you and your family.
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You don't want to miss it, unless you're a leftist, in which case, you're cancelled.
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Oh, Merry Christmas, everybody, and welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
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Don we now our gay apparel? Yes. Yes, we do. We donned.
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I am Jeremy Boring. I am joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles,
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and we're going to be talking about so many important things that we haven't even made up yet.
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You're in for quite a treat. But I want to tell you, before we get started,
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that at the end of this show, we're going to have an unbelievable members block.
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That's for our Daily Wire Plus members. If you're not a Daily Wire Plus member,
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head over to dailywireplus.com, click that subscribe button, grab a membership,
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join us for the rest of the show and the wonderful things we're going to discuss,
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including our Secret Santa, names were drawn, money was spent, and shenanigans will ensue.
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That's going to be in the members block, as well as our chance to answer questions from you,
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our members. Which brings me to sacrilege, which was spoken just moments before the cameras rolled,
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when one Matthew Bartholomew Walsh suggested that the Dark Knight does not hold up, end quote.
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I put it on for my kids. They're probably too young to watch it in the first place.
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My wife was shooting me dirty looks the whole time.
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I can't imagine why, because she's a good parent.
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It's been a while since I've seen it, but then I'm also reassessing it,
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and I'm thinking, like, first of all, the Batman voice really did bother me.
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The Two-Face storyline is an absolute afterthought.
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They turn them into Two-Face 30 seconds before the movie's over,
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I think it really is that Heath Ledger's Joker,
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you take that out of it, and it's just kind of a basic B-plus Batman film.
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And also, as a sequel compared to the original with Adam West,
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And I would like to add, I always liked the first movie best of everything,
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The first 45 minutes of Batman Begins is just spectacular.
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I think the first 45 minutes of Batman Begins are fabulous,
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than we're used to seeing villains used in film.
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you now have to watch Nolan films with the subtitles on
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so you can actually understand what the dialogue is.
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The honest answer is that he is a director with ambition.
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He tries to do interesting and fun and creative things.
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And so I actually cut a video that's going to come out shortly on YouTube
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And of the 13 films, 11 of them are either sequels or remakes.
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The only guy who now has a budget to make actual creative film
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But then I thought it would be a film about space
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and we spent the whole time listening to Anne Hathaway
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He beats you over the head with the message rather than...
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I will say, you allude to the film that's coming out next year,
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You know, the whole movie culminates apparently in the Trinity test,
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the first atomic explosion ever to happen on planet Earth.
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They have to figure out how to create an atomic explosion.
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He created his own stock of film that has ever been used.
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I've said many times of Nolan, I don't think...
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With the exception of Dark Knight, which I think may be a perfect movie
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He's the only filmmaker who could have made the rescue of Dunkirk.
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You know, when those ships show up on the horizon, it's supposed to be the moment when
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you stand up and cheer, and you're like, oh, there's a ship, you know?
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But do you think, if you take Heath Ledger's performance out of that film, is it still a
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I think it's a very good film, and Heath Ledger's performance certainly takes it to a whole other
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But even, I mean, I feel sort of out of place here, because I hate all of these movies,
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and I don't watch any of the superhero ones, and I'm not...
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I don't want to seem like a total Philistine and totally out of the culture, but has there
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been any great, like actually great movie in the last 30 years?
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The Lord of the Rings was the closest thing to a great movie.
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I have to say, I really believe that Godfather is the last great American movie.
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So, Clavin, this brings us right back to the conversation you and I were actually having
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So, I just was talking with Robert George from Princeton, and we were talking about art
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A great book has been written since about 1965 in the United States.
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I think maybe American Pastoral was written a little after that.
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And mostly as a critique of the current culture.
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But the reason for that is because art for nearly all of human history was directed at
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And then in the 60s, we decided that all of those questions had been decided in the negative.
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And so all art was directed at either upholding the system of morality and upholding the truth
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and justice of God or at denying that in transgressive ways.
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But without the standard there at all, when the standard is obliterated, there's nothing
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The scales of everything just become extraordinarily small.
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Another one I re-watched last week was No Country for Old Men.
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Which I think, the first time I saw it, I was...
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I was lukewarm on it, especially the ending, and I watched it after re-watching it several
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And it's particularly the end, the last scene, when he's talking about this dream of seeing
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his father and how he's waiting for him out in the cold, in the dark.
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But one of the reasons for that is because it's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, and Cormac McCarthy
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And that entire film is about the nature of fate and death.
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This is one of the reasons I couldn't get on the Top Gun 2 train, even though I enjoyed
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it as a spectacle, a kind of rollercoaster ride.
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You know, if you can't name your enemies, it's because you can't name what you're fighting
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And so it was a completely empty film, except for the beauty.
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I'm not knocking it as a kind of brainless entertainment.
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So I totally disagree with you, and I'll tell you the reason I disagree with you.
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And the reason I found the film moving is not because of the film.
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It's because of what it's actually fighting in the culture.
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Meaning that the enemy of the film is not in the film.
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The enemy of the film is a Hollywood that would never show a Taiwanese flag on the back
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A Hollywood that would never just have the United States military as the good guys.
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A film where a bunch of white men are competent at things.
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A film in which a traditional male-female couple actually gets together.
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Hollywood fights every single aspect of this, and this film didn't do any of that.
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It was actually sad to me to watch the film because I watched it and I enjoyed it.
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And I'm like, well, why aren't there more of this?
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And there aren't more of these because Hollywood refuses to make it.
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And there's no excuse for the plot to be so stupid.
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You could have written five lines that made almost every set piece work and actually make sense.
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I agree with everything that you're saying about what it means in the culture.
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And I'll say the one other thing I'll say about it.
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I think that it is the greatest nakedly nostalgic movie I've ever seen.
00:10:01.780
Because it somehow manages to do pure fan service, but in ways almost every time that bring maturity to the character.
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There's a line Robert Nisbet, who's a sociologist in the 50s, used about nostalgia.
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The reason nostalgia is sad, he says, is because nostalgia is what's left when the thing itself is worn away.
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And so the idea of the sacred, which is worn away in our culture, or the idea of the importance of male-female relationships, or the idea of the importance of competence and American patriotism, these have worn away.
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And so much of our culture now is built on nostalgia, and then we refuse to acknowledge that there were things about that time that were better.
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Not everything was better, but it's a culture that simultaneously tries to leech off of the things that were amazing about, for example, the 1980s and making Stranger Things.
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It's a place of terrible racism and homophobia.
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But we're all watching Stranger Things and feeling nostalgic because we're watching Stranger Things.
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You're watching something, and they're doing—I mean, even Disney Plus series like WandaVision, which are based entirely on nostalgia for old TV.
00:11:23.360
When you watch shows from the 50s, particularly, they start to get better in the 60s, a lot of the old shows from the 50s that are not, you know, the hour-long specials are really not very good.
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And you're nostalgic for that because what you're nostalgic for is a more innocent time when people actually took morality seriously,
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It's even worse than that because they've made movies.
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Recently, they made one called Schmigadoon, which was a takeoff on Brigadoon.
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Remember in Brigadoon, they go back and they find old Scotland, and they find this guy.
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A guy who's in a kind of loveless engagement with this woman in New York, and he finds that the old values bring him back to life, and he falls in love with the Scottish girl.
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They remade it where they go back into the Scottish, old Scottish town, teach them it's better to be homosexual, and it's better to, you know, have this.
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Then there was this movie that was just about going back into Ozzie and Nelson TV, and I cannot remember the name.
00:12:12.740
He goes back and he says, but, you know, the problem is you guys don't have sex, and you don't know anything life is about.
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Right, it's black and white, and as soon as they discover sex, then all the color comes into the world.
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So it's not only that they won't let you be nostalgic about what was worthwhile, they want to go back and ruin it, you know?
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Though it is worth remembering nostalgia is history after a few drinks, and part of our longing for that period is because the innocent time was our own childhood.
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So, you know, yes, the culture was more innocent in certain ways, but, you know, on this point of the nostalgic movies.
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I'm going to challenge you very briefly on that.
00:12:44.360
I watched, over the Thanksgiving break, I went to see my in-laws in Kansas, and my father-in-law, and the great tradition of father-in-law, father's in-law, was watching Gunsmoke.
00:12:55.700
I, the longest-running live-action television show of all time, made 645 episodes of this show.
00:13:04.160
I've never seen a single frame of it in my life.
00:13:06.920
I watched the last 15 minutes of an episode that he was watching, and I was so transfixed.
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I came home and downloaded Season 1, Episode 1 on Paramount+.
00:13:15.540
Now, as it turns out, I did not know this at the time, that is a lie, and someone should sue Paramount+.
00:13:20.360
It was actually, it's billed as Season 1, Episode 1, it's actually Season 7, Episode 1.
00:13:25.700
But what that means is that this is something like the 240th episode of Gunsmoke that I watched.
00:13:32.420
I believe it was shot in 1962, and like all television from the early 60s, the writing is sublime.
00:13:43.980
It never, it has no sentimentality anywhere in it, and I realized that all modern shows are about a character going on a journey in which he overcomes his flaws.
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And what's amazing about Gunsmoke is that it's about, it's about the justice of God walking among mortal men.
00:14:03.820
And among mortal men, there is nothing interesting at all about Matt Dillon.
00:14:10.460
The supporting characters who come through bring all of the color, all of the things that are interesting, because they have to encounter the justice of God.
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I would sit here, honestly, for 45 minutes and recount the entire plot.
00:14:29.200
I am nostalgic for something that I never even experienced before.
00:14:32.300
I've been watching a bunch of old films lately.
00:14:34.040
So over the last couple of days, I watched Battleground, which was a movie from 1949, and is sort of the predicate for Band of Brothers.
00:14:42.480
The movies that they made in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, some of the 60s, a little bit of the 70s, are really fantastic.
00:14:49.180
You can find that on, I mean, maybe part of the issue here is that you're talking about there are no great books.
00:14:54.400
Also, the issue with films, maybe people are just moving into different mediums.
00:14:57.180
The great storytellers these days are in different mediums.
00:15:00.540
Well, okay, so if Vince Gilligan was Russian in the 1870s, maybe he would have written Crime and Punishment.
00:15:15.520
Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are not about someone overcoming their flaws.
00:15:20.840
Chernobyl, I think, is one of the masterpieces of all time.
00:15:32.760
I mean, I think there are things on TV that are great.
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But if you read the Rotten Tomatoes reviews, everything is 100%.
00:15:39.340
But remember, there's this telescoping thing, too.
00:15:41.740
There's a lot of, you go back, I love 40s music.
00:15:44.940
When you go back and listen to 40s music, there's a lot of dross.
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Yeah, but if you look at the Oscar nominees from 1942.
00:16:02.100
An Oscar nominee is a great movie and a box office success.
00:16:05.040
So that's the other thing that's worth pointing out here, is that the things that we consider
00:16:08.700
now box office successes are capturing a tiny slice of the market.
00:16:12.080
The stuff that was a box office success was the thing that won the Best Picture Oscar
00:16:19.500
You would see movies like The Best Years of Our Lives was, I believe, the biggest box
00:16:24.080
And it is a two-hour, 45-minute treatise about what it's like for men to come back from World
00:16:32.020
And it was like the number one box office movie because people used to be mature in this
00:16:35.000
country and used to actually deal with real issues.
00:16:36.660
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You know, the thing about The Peripheral that got me is, it's William Gibson, who's a very
00:18:10.920
I don't really love that kind of science fiction writing because it has no characters in it.
00:18:15.860
He invented The Matrix, basically, before there was The Matrix.
00:18:20.920
However, the minute it started, I thought, who wrote the dialogue on this?
00:18:25.880
Scott B. Smith was, for two novels, the second best genre novelist in America, next to me.
00:18:31.780
And he wrote a book called The Simple Plan, which is just a wonderful book.
00:18:37.300
He was, to be clear, the first best genre title writer.
00:18:51.400
And a couple of the character things were good.
00:18:52.940
And ultimately, it's one of these multiverse movies.
00:18:56.560
Yeah, I mean, the end of it doesn't make a lot of sense.
00:19:00.960
The brother-sister relationship, particularly, is very nice.
00:19:05.760
And so in the part of one of the key inspector has to be a transgender woman.
00:19:10.660
Who's very, very obviously a transgender woman.
00:19:17.460
Although I'm never going to understand how John Turturro and Christopher Walken are supposed to end up to that.
00:19:30.680
You know, it's the outside where people will have these conversations.
00:19:34.460
Like, they're take-offs on, like, Park Slope, you know, conversations.
00:19:39.600
You know, back in the day, they didn't call World War I World War I.
00:19:58.700
My own dear, beloved, probably watching right now, grandmother, my lovely nana, asked me if I had watched Harry and Meghan.
00:20:09.360
I actually had to watch part of it for the show.
00:20:11.700
I went through it, you know, on behalf of the audience.
00:20:15.000
That woman gets more villainous every single day.
00:20:22.920
This, like, one of the greatest women of the 20th century is dead.
00:20:30.680
You're talking about transgender characters in movies.
00:20:33.020
Whatever occurred there, it was much more emasculating to watch Harry.
00:20:41.940
How come nobody ever asked these people what they have accomplished?
00:20:44.920
Elizabeth the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, you know, we have to say she accomplished something.
00:20:53.540
She held up the suitcase on that game show, right?
00:21:02.560
They cast her for her beauty in a game show where she holds up a suitcase.
00:21:07.720
And certainly, she would have been married into the royal family if she were 300 pounds and had a giant wart right here.
00:21:18.240
Like, every time you see any sort of post about some sort of peak human achievement, Elon Musk lands a rocket on a ship at sea, NASA lands their first lunar...
00:21:29.380
You know, fires off their first lunar mission in living memory and returns it safely to Earth, probably going to start a new manned space program.
00:21:37.620
There's always these comments that are like, well, why don't you try doing something for the country, the world we've got right here first?
00:21:53.600
And you're complaining because he doesn't give you his money.
00:21:58.260
It is exactly like the guys who pulled down statues.
00:22:00.200
This is one of the things that, again, to mention Top Gun, I think that there is just an anger against competence in our society.
00:22:10.540
Like, if you're competent, this is a sign that you are somehow discriminatory or bigoted.
00:22:13.620
Because competence obviously suggests a meritocracy.
00:22:15.640
Meritocracy suggests that maybe people in some mild way kind of deserve what they get as a general matter in life.
00:22:20.340
And we're never allowed to suggest that sort of thing.
00:22:22.640
And that's why, again, in Top Gun, when you're watching people be competent, I just realized I enjoy watching films and movies where people are competent.
00:22:30.240
And part of the reason it doesn't happen is because if it's a movie filled or a show filled with competent people, the writer actually has to be good at his craft.
00:22:36.920
If there's a bunch of incompetence, you can create the dumbest ways possible out of a corner.
00:22:40.500
You write yourself into a corner and someone just does a dumb thing.
00:22:43.880
If it's filled with competent people, that's actually difficult.
00:22:46.040
Because now you have to say, what would intelligent people do that would get them out of this situation or put them into this situation in the first place?
00:22:52.020
And so I think so much of the writing is so bad now.
00:22:57.240
And you're like, why would they possibly do that?
00:23:00.640
You watch movies all the time and read scripts.
00:23:07.160
Like, there's nobody who's competent on TV or in movies anymore.
00:23:10.120
I haven't ever heard, we've never discussed this idea of a sort of growing hatred of competence.
00:23:16.340
Well, growing hatred of competence and dignity.
00:23:18.580
I mean, that's what, when Meghan makes fun of the Queen and having to bow to the Queen,
00:23:30.740
I think athleisure wear is a communist plot to destroy the country.
00:23:40.420
And it speaks to a lack of respect for oneself.
00:23:50.880
Speaking of Harry and Meghan, you watch The Crown.
00:23:52.800
And my favorite scenes, it's when Elizabeth and Prince Philip are sitting to dinner alone.
00:24:02.580
When you engage in ritual, whether we're talking about political ritual, religious ritual,
00:24:12.880
And that's going to affect the way you think of yourself.
00:24:16.880
And I worry about it, like, personally, because I grew up in the 60s when it all fell apart.
00:24:26.000
And now I think, like, you know, I should have worn a tie my entire life.
00:24:33.060
Are we getting rid of ritual or just replacing...
00:24:41.900
You can't get rid of ritual because we have bodies and we're...
00:24:45.120
It is a replacement of ritual, but I think that actually...
00:24:47.700
We're pretending that the ritual went away and it didn't.
00:24:49.660
It transformed into a ritual of the catechism of poverty.
00:24:53.120
It used to be that everybody aspired to be rich.
00:24:55.080
And so you dressed like you were rich even when you were poor.
00:24:57.560
If you look at the people on the bread lines during the Depression,
00:25:01.080
they are wearing suits in the bread lines in the Depression.
00:25:03.640
And then now, you have people who are the embezzlers of billions of dollars at FTX,
00:25:10.200
and they're literally getting money given to them because they are wearing gym shorts
00:25:13.260
and a baggy t-shirt, and they haven't exercised, and they're slob.
00:25:17.160
You go into an L.A. restaurant, and you can always pick out the richest guy in the room
00:25:20.540
because he's wearing a ripped t-shirt and sweatpants, right?
00:25:26.860
And it's become this kind of cult of degradation and poverty.
00:25:32.060
Why did it take us so long to come up with these arguments, though?
00:25:33.880
Because when I was a kid, things like the rituals in Judaism where you wear a shawl,
00:25:39.520
and people say, well, why do you have to do that?
00:25:46.040
Well, you went to a reformer conservative school.
00:25:50.920
It says directly in the good book that you are supposed to wear fringes upon the corners
00:25:56.100
And in the Talmud, it talks about you're supposed to do this.
00:25:58.280
Actually, it says, uritamotol, you're supposed to look at them, and this is supposed to remind
00:26:03.520
You're supposed to wear a funny garment in order to remind—I mean, the reason we wear
00:26:07.780
It's supposed to remind you constantly that you're subject to a higher power.
00:26:11.540
But the entire corpus of Talmudic law was written in order to explain why you do this ritual.
00:26:15.320
I completely agree with you, and I also agree with what you're saying.
00:26:21.040
But this is actually a deeper point, because the reason they didn't know is because they
00:26:25.780
relied, and it was okay to just rely on the tradition.
00:26:30.240
And we have decided that that's no longer enough.
00:26:32.860
And I know this has been a drum I've been beating for a year now, quoting Oakshot to Michael,
00:26:37.520
But it is true that the vast majority of the things that we do in life are inherited traditions,
00:26:44.580
You didn't have to explain why it was that you—why it was important to dress well.
00:26:49.620
Why it was important—I mean, we've gotten so basic now that it's like,
00:26:52.360
why is it important to marry a person of the opposite sex as opposed to a person of any random gender?
00:26:57.440
I have to come up with an argument for this now, and I think because we were—because only the wisest
00:27:02.960
were people who had actually bothered to come up with sort of a rationale.
00:27:06.700
Everybody else just relied on the fact that there was a rationale, and they're like,
00:27:09.100
I don't need to know how to explain this, because why would I possibly need to know how to explain this?
00:27:12.880
You know, there's actually—here's a bit of what we would call in Hebrew Devar Torah, right?
00:27:17.860
So this is taught to me by a rabbi near where I live named Rabbi Goldberg.
00:27:22.720
So in Hebrew, the word for taste and the word for reason are the same word.
00:27:34.880
Because reason, just like you eat food to nourish you, but taste is what gives you pleasure
00:27:42.000
from the food, you do the rituals and you do the things in life to nourish you.
00:27:46.160
You don't actually have to have a reason as to why you're doing it.
00:27:53.040
The reason lives on top of the nourishing mechanism that is the rituals and traditions
00:28:01.600
We've basically said that every tradition is subject to tabula rasa reasoning.
00:28:06.420
Explain to me why everybody should wear a suit.
00:28:12.280
I mean, this is why Burke defends the naughtiest word that you're not allowed to say today,
00:28:17.880
Prejudice in its simplest form, which is prejudgment, which we all engage in all the time.
00:28:25.280
I cannot write a 50-page treatise on every single thing that I am going to do before I do it.
00:28:37.900
But now, in the last 50, 60 years, it has completely flipped such that every single little thing
00:28:45.820
that we would just take for granted out of common sense, we now have to provide some
00:28:51.280
That's why the best answer, I think, is the drum I'm always beating, is it's about burden
00:28:57.860
So if you're the one coming along challenging the thing that people have been doing for generations,
00:29:04.640
In fact, I'm interested to hear your challenge.
00:29:08.140
It's not up to me to defend what everyone's been doing forever.
00:29:13.040
And instead of asking people that, instead of saying, what's your issue with this?
00:29:18.880
Instead, we scramble around looking for justifications.
00:29:21.480
I think we should—we've already lost the game when we do that.
00:29:30.200
I think because people who are radical and challenge the tradition very often don't have
00:29:34.540
a reason and they're very passionate about it, I think that people of traditional bent
00:29:37.300
immediately look to short-circuit the conversation by looking for some sort of compromise.
00:29:42.620
And they always think that this will be the last compromise.
00:29:45.380
I mean, I think that's what you saw at the White House yesterday, right?
00:29:48.920
You get 12 Republicans in the Senate to vote in favor of enshrinement of same-sex marriage
00:29:59.280
He's telling you—in 2006, this same schmuck was on national television.
00:30:03.940
People may not know exactly what we're saying here.
00:30:05.760
You're talking about the president of the United States had a schmuck.
00:30:07.940
I mean that schmuck, the president of the United States.
00:30:11.540
Right, Mr. Schmuck president of the United States.
00:30:13.440
Because they finally passed this Respect for Marriage Act.
00:30:18.540
We only name acts that are precisely the opposite of what they are now.
00:30:21.500
The Inflation Reduction Act, the Respect for Marriage Act.
00:30:26.140
Soon it'll be the So You Can Keep Your Kids Act.
00:30:29.740
And so Joe Biden goes out there and he, in 2006, says,
00:30:33.400
we don't need a constitutional amendment to protect marriage
00:30:35.640
because everyone believes that marriage is between a man and a woman.
00:30:41.620
Why would you even want to pass a constitutional amendment?
00:30:43.720
We're now 16 years later, and he's basically, not basically,
00:30:47.840
You are a bigot, and probably, you are a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe,
00:30:51.340
transphobe, if you believe in traditional marriage rather than same-sex marriage.
00:30:57.280
I mean, I think we have a clip, actually, of the president of the United States
00:30:59.440
actually saying that racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia,
00:31:07.100
All the things I don't like are in the same box.
00:31:11.320
Racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, they're all connected.
00:31:21.240
This law and the love it defends strike a blow against hate in all its forms.
00:31:28.000
I love you guys so much, I will punch you in the face to enforce my perspective
00:31:33.280
And then he says that he kept saying over and over, this is the first step.
00:31:39.000
I was like, wait a damned minute, homophobe a second.
00:31:42.220
So just to get this straight, no pun intended, just to get this straight,
00:31:46.820
the original case was, don't criminalize what you do in our bedroom.
00:31:51.220
I mean, those laws were not enforced in the first place, all right, fine.
00:31:53.500
And then it was, well, we would like civil unions so that we can go visit our partners
00:31:57.580
in the hospital and bequeath property to one another.
00:32:01.720
And then they're like, well, we want same-sex marriage,
00:32:03.500
and it's going to be called the exact same thing as marriage.
00:32:05.100
And many of us were like, well, now you're starting to edging on our marriage.
00:32:07.820
But they said, well, no, no, no, how does that affect you?
00:32:09.920
If we get married, how does that affect your marriage?
00:32:11.680
And most people, not understanding the flaw in that argument, were like, okay, fine.
00:32:15.160
And then they're like, but we definitely, definitely will never say that your church
00:32:18.580
has to do what we want it to do, or that your business has to do what we want it to do,
00:32:21.700
or that we have to indoctrinate your kids with this stuff.
00:32:23.500
Or that we have to make sure that your educational institutions mirror all of our values.
00:32:29.540
Why in the world, unless you're an insane, stupid jackass, would you believe them?
00:32:35.640
Not only that, not only that, this thing that's happening with children,
00:32:38.520
like, you know, I'm past the point where anything shocks me, you know?
00:32:43.740
But this is, what shocks me is not that they're doing it to children.
00:32:47.000
What shocks me is that people have not shown up with pitchforks and torches, you know,
00:32:51.220
to say, like, that's great, you're going to do that, but now we're going to take you out
00:32:56.380
Joe Biden, in this speech, where he was, it demonstrates what the actual agenda is.
00:33:00.480
Because in this speech, where he was supposedly upholding the value of male-male monogamous
00:33:04.920
relationships, which was, again, the way that the left portrayed same-sex marriage,
00:33:08.720
was it's exactly the same as traditional marriage, except it doesn't produce kids
00:33:12.960
But then, he's in the same speech, saying that you have to be in favor of transing the kids.
00:33:19.800
What do these things have to do with one another?
00:33:21.540
They have nothing to do with one another, theoretically, but in reality, they have everything to do
00:33:24.360
with one another, because they're about the, everything, because they're about the destruction
00:33:27.240
of the idea that there is a distinction between the sexes that matters, and more importantly,
00:33:32.400
They're directed against the idea that there are intermediate institutions in society that
00:33:36.060
shape and mold us from family to religious community.
00:33:39.440
And the left considers these things actively bad, and these things have to be obliterated.
00:33:43.080
They will not stop until we are a society of atomized individuals on the one hand, and
00:33:46.480
an overarching national government on the other, and nothing in between.
00:33:55.920
They're the things that give men their motivations.
00:33:59.720
Well, they've done a great job of convincing women not to be women.
00:34:03.820
It was also so disingenuous, because they say, well, why do you care about what we do in our
00:34:08.120
own homes, and then what the direct consequence of what they do in their own homes is to light
00:34:13.220
up the people's home, the people's house in the rainbow flag, because obviously this is
00:34:18.480
This is a political question, but it was always BS anyway, because the libs go in, and they
00:34:22.900
tell me what kind of light bulbs I'm allowed to screw in in my bedroom, but we're not allowed
00:34:27.780
to have anything to say about what marriage is.
00:34:30.340
You can't grow grain to feed your own family, because it prevents you from engaging in interstate
00:34:35.700
That's right, and you know, the thing is, I actually do have, I have a right as someone
00:34:41.400
in self-government to discuss how people relate to one another and what the definition of marriage
00:34:46.580
is, and frankly, I think that we have a right to talk about what people, what happens in
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00:36:11.700
I'm saying that they say this is the first step.
00:36:17.380
So, Karine Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary.
00:36:20.080
She was asked a direct question by Brian Karam, who's one of the world's most untalented
00:36:25.920
And he asked her, but his question was actually the correct one from the left side of the
00:36:29.620
aisle, which is, why does this bill, the Respect for Marriage Act, which that's how I respect
00:36:35.640
people is I just completely redefine them into non-existence.
00:36:42.660
He says, so why does this bill enshrine bigotry?
00:36:49.800
She didn't even bother trying to say that it wasn't enshrining bigotry because, of
00:36:53.140
She believes that religion is a cover for bigotry.
00:36:56.280
And so all these morons, like, I'm sorry, Senator Mitt Romney and all of the morons who
00:37:01.700
voted on the Republican side of the aisle for this in the Senate.
00:37:04.320
I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of thinking that they're not malicious and that
00:37:12.980
Anybody who believes that the left is going to stop at this is out of their damned minds.
00:37:17.960
The only thing that stands between the left doing this at the federal level right now,
00:37:21.960
the only thing that stops that is the Supreme Court.
00:37:25.000
And that is cold comfort because, frankly, you don't know what the Supreme Court is going
00:37:31.720
And so this notion that the left is somehow going to come to an arranged agreement, that
00:37:39.740
And how, I mean, this is the black knight in Monty Python at this point.
00:37:45.920
It doesn't even make sense from their perspective.
00:37:48.220
Because if gay marriage is a human right, you have a human right to it.
00:37:52.060
And they often will compare denying gay marriage to, like, slavery.
00:37:58.840
So, you know, if it's a human right, then it would be correct that a church wouldn't have
00:38:05.200
Just like a church, a church could say, oh, well, in our religion, we believe in slavery.
00:38:09.100
That doesn't mean that you keep slaves in your basement because you don't, even from
00:38:12.180
a religious standpoint, you can't take away someone's basic human right.
00:38:15.000
So if we're agreeing that you have a human right to gay marriage, then it's not a far
00:38:21.960
It's just another step to say, well, of course, churches can't take away someone's human right.
00:38:25.520
Once you've agreed with that, you've already agreed to the destruction of religious liberty.
00:38:29.860
Actually, I've been thinking about that, too, and I'm not quite sure that holds together
00:38:33.460
because you can have a right to do something that's wrong.
00:38:36.700
I mean, we do have rights to do, we should have rights to do things that are wrong.
00:38:39.920
We can, you have the right to say things that the left doesn't believe that.
00:38:43.140
Also, Drew, you're talking to a couple of Catholics here.
00:38:47.940
The truth is, I'm actually not a believer that you have the right to do something that's
00:38:52.320
I think that you may have an immunity from the government in doing something that's wrong.
00:38:56.880
I'm trying to distinguish between the two because we're kind of sloppy about how we discuss
00:39:00.040
Well, you have a political right to say things that are ugly and stupid, and you know,
00:39:04.520
I personally think you have a political right to be a bigot.
00:39:06.580
But the left doesn't, but the left doesn't believe that, right?
00:39:08.520
So I'm saying from a less perspective, from the less perspective, if you have enshrined
00:39:13.480
gay marriage as a human right, then it's just, it's a logical conclusion that obviously churches
00:39:18.580
aren't allowed to deny that from their perspective.
00:39:21.360
So it's just, whether they say it or not, it makes no difference.
00:39:26.780
You see the whole thing is religious because Joe Biden, the most amazing thing that he did
00:39:30.680
at this signing ceremony, it wasn't bringing the drag queen who does the creepy stuff to the
00:39:34.540
kids, it wasn't bringing all the Hollywood celebrities.
00:39:37.420
And he said that this was exactly what the Declaration of Independence was all about.
00:39:47.180
There would have been a more coherent argument because what he said was the Declaration of
00:39:51.000
Independence talks about our natural rights that we have because they are secular values.
00:39:58.180
He said from the Declaration of Independence, which explicitly grounds those rights in our creator,
00:40:03.480
which grounds those rights in not being secular values, they are religious values, because
00:40:12.020
Also, I mean, the attempt to separate off natural rights and natural law is completely
00:40:16.380
Where is he even getting the term natural rights except for the rubric of natural law?
00:40:19.600
And natural law tradition is grounded in Judeo-Christian and largely Catholic theology.
00:40:32.720
It is the whole reason why there are so many people who wanted the government to grant gay
00:40:37.320
Because if you ask people why gay marriage is important, you already had all the benefits
00:40:44.440
You were getting all of the contractual benefits.
00:40:46.800
And the answer is because we want the moral imprimatur of the state, which is actually God,
00:40:51.380
determining for us what is right and what is wrong.
00:40:53.740
And now that God has spoken, none can speak counter to the great God of government.
00:40:57.340
And the state which can coerce you to affirm it.
00:41:06.660
They get upset when we talk about this because we have changed, the world is different.
00:41:15.440
We have made substantial social change, societal change, and there are people who've premised
00:41:20.900
their lives, ordered their lives around these concepts.
00:41:25.260
That's a consequence of social engineering is that you've engineered society.
00:41:31.300
So I have friends and they, they will hear us talk about gay marriage and they will say,
00:41:42.540
I want, you know, I want the, I don't want to go back to a time when I have to live in
00:41:49.680
fear and I don't want to go back in a time where I don't have, you know, the, the sort
00:41:53.120
of, um, civil rights, you know, the hospital rights, the bequeathing property rights, all
00:41:58.700
You just fix that with a few bills and contracts.
00:42:06.320
This is why I was, I was adamantly against gay marriage, adamantly against gay marriage.
00:42:12.180
I always believed that there were, that, that the most fabulous and creative people historically
00:42:17.960
ever to live, gay men, could probably create something fabulous for themselves that probably
00:42:23.280
would pass muster in society, but that wouldn't encroach on the very concept of marriage
00:42:27.480
I think the language around that matters a great deal.
00:42:32.380
And this is where I think the challenging part of the conversation is, is that since we,
00:42:39.880
you could say, don't say we, I opposed it, but we meaning.
00:42:45.540
Did, did change the definition of marriage to make it, marriage was always inclusive of
00:42:52.160
It just wasn't, it included them marrying, but now we have changed the definition of
00:42:57.260
marriage to say that a man can marry a man, a woman can marry a woman for better or for
00:43:01.040
Millions of people have ordered their lives around it.
00:43:02.980
People have adopted children on this, on this basis.
00:43:05.760
Again, you might say, I don't believe that two men should be able to adopt a child.
00:43:10.100
That, that isn't, I'm not saying, what do you believe?
00:43:12.000
I'm saying, they do, but can't we just stop it?
00:43:18.520
It's not the same as abortion, for instance, where, where you're actually committing a crime.
00:43:23.380
You know, if, if, if a man sleeping with a man is a sin, it's not, it, it's not a sin
00:43:30.800
But let me just, let me just, let me just, let me just, right.
00:43:34.920
That I think both you and Ben are talking about is this difference between the micro and
00:43:40.120
the macro, you know, if, if you have a friend and he's gay and he's sleeping with a, it really
00:43:47.700
We all, you know, we, there was just, there's a new biography of J. Edgar Hoover.
00:43:50.480
I mean, I'd prefer not to think too much about it.
00:43:53.120
But, but, but there's a biography of J. Edgar Hoover where Nixon would send him a Christmas
00:43:57.120
invitation to the Christmas party to him and his boyfriend, you know, because they
00:44:04.780
And it never, it never really has in American life.
00:44:07.440
People always knew this existed, you know, in, in, in certainly in sophisticated, you
00:44:11.740
know, coastal circles, people always knew this was going on.
00:44:15.120
But when the society says that this is a right, and this is something that this is on a par
00:44:21.740
with marriage, which is just a lie, then this, this, the society becomes a lying society.
00:44:28.220
We think like, there's always going to be abortions.
00:44:33.280
And that's an evil, but we live in a world with evil in it.
00:44:36.060
But when the Supreme Court says it's a right for you to kill that, then you become evil.
00:44:41.240
And so on this point, I mean, but this is why I was, I was trying to distinguish between
00:44:44.780
the language of rights that we were talking about earlier.
00:44:47.480
But I want to get, but I actually want to get down to this very practical question.
00:44:55.900
The Democrats were bragging today about how even the ones who voted for the Defense of Marriage
00:45:00.780
Act, like the president, got rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and they repealed it.
00:45:04.500
And so just like they repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, I think Republicans, if they
00:45:07.700
could ever muster a spine and some other anatomical features could repeal the quote unquote respect
00:45:15.660
To your point, Jeremy, people have ordered their lives, gay guys have ordered their lives
00:45:18.860
to create something that resembles more than was previously done, something like a marriage.
00:45:25.160
But they can continue to do that without the sacralization, as you're discussing then,
00:45:32.820
And so when I think back, just to use a personal example, two of my absolute favorite teachers
00:45:36.820
in high school were gay and, you know, just, and Republicans, by the way, and just great
00:45:51.020
But they, you know, they had a kind of committed, stable relationship long before gay marriage
00:45:59.520
I don't want to speak for them, but I don't think they supported the idea of gay marriage.
00:46:03.740
And people could continue to do that without the state pretending that it's the same thing
00:46:12.480
I don't just mean to single out the people who, you know, are attracted to the same sex.
00:46:16.120
I'm talking about single parent adoption, obviously wrong.
00:46:20.260
The IVF is so, I think is not moral, but it's obviously abused incredibly.
00:46:25.680
No fault divorce is at the heart of a lot of these problems.
00:46:29.120
And we could just, we could just get rid of it.
00:46:31.520
And there, and, and, you know, there are social consequences that come from that.
00:46:35.380
People will have children that, you know, and they're going to continue to raise them
00:46:41.040
We can do that because, because actually what we hear from the left, we heard from Biden about
00:46:48.520
And, and no, no one, no one can take away your ability to love another person.
00:46:52.140
It's of course you can continue to love whoever you want.
00:46:53.960
There was never any law preventing anyone from loving someone else.
00:47:00.220
Well, but I am saying that I'm not trying to be clever.
00:47:04.120
There is a difference between loving someone and living with them, having joint property and
00:47:09.420
The one thing that makes it different than abortion, you said that it's different than abortion.
00:47:13.220
I don't fully agree with the reasons you laid out, but here's one that makes it very different
00:47:18.400
If you, if you change from having abortion in your society, be lawful to not having abortion
00:47:24.560
be lawful in your society, you are stopping something from happening.
00:47:28.600
The individual act of abortion that will not happen because of that law changing is the
00:47:34.780
You can't do anything about the abortion that took place three days before this happened,
00:47:39.400
Wouldn't, it would have to be the same, I think, if you were to, to make these kinds
00:47:45.120
of changes to adoption law or gay marriage or any other thing.
00:47:47.960
Well, you're not going to take people's kids away.
00:47:49.460
You're not going to be able to break up the unions that they've created and the civil rights
00:47:54.260
Nobody was talking about doing that in the first.
00:47:56.640
I'm asking us to, I'm asking us to, none of us have said anything about this.
00:48:02.040
But what are we going to, no one's going to, I'm asking us to talk.
00:48:03.600
No one's saying that you're going to go in and say, hey, you, move out, move out from
00:48:09.260
Yeah, but there's no, there would no, be no legal mechanism even to do that.
00:48:12.200
I mean, first of all, kids get taken out of homes all the time because of abuses.
00:48:15.460
So that would continue, but it would, it wouldn't change.
00:48:21.120
I have to say that I kind of tend to agree with Knowles on this, at least in terms of aims.
00:48:25.000
I think that, you know, there's no reason to say we can't do something.
00:48:28.100
There's no reason to say that things can't change.
00:48:33.820
They can't go backwards, but that doesn't mean they can't go forward to a new thing.
00:48:36.940
We have to remember that before, it's not like gay people weren't being gay, but a lot
00:48:41.600
of them were being forced into situations that were degrading both to them and to the society.
00:48:46.060
I mean, when people were getting together in bathrooms and, you know.
00:48:52.960
Maybe not as bad as what we have now, but certainly it wasn't a good thing.
00:48:56.820
And so, yeah, I think there is a level of tolerance.
00:48:59.260
You can go forward into a new thing that is different than the thing we got.
00:49:03.740
And I don't know why, when they essentially feed us a crap sandwich, we can't say, this
00:49:09.860
Not to punt on the issue completely, but do we even have to get into the weeds of discussing
00:49:13.560
all the practical implications of how this will be implemented?
00:49:16.720
Because it's not actually ever going to happen in reality.
00:49:26.340
Like, they talk about the ideals and what they want.
00:49:28.520
And they don't get into the weeds at all about the practical, how we practically implement it.
00:49:32.940
And I think sometimes on the right, we do that almost too much.
00:49:35.360
We allow our, rather than just, right now, all that matters is the ideal, what marriage
00:49:42.760
And I'm all for upholding marriage and, and distinguishing marriage from gay marriage.
00:49:47.280
Like, even if all they had come up with, with was the term gay married, like, even that
00:49:55.340
By the way, if we could get rid of no-fault divorce, we would get rid of gay marriage.
00:49:58.000
The truth is, as intermediate steps to desacralizing marriage and reinstituting traditional marriage,
00:50:05.100
I mean, there, there are certain things that, that we certainly could, and in my opinion,
00:50:09.460
I mean, for example, we should get the federal government out of the business of marriage
00:50:12.500
entirely, which, because what business is it of the federal government in the first
00:50:19.760
But if we can't get there, then why don't we start with disestablishing it at the federal
00:50:23.820
level entirely, and then at least I will have the ability to have my state defined when
00:50:27.960
marriage looks like, can live in a state that actually agrees with me about what marriage
00:50:31.100
Or, here's another alternative, what if we defanged all of the insane structure of anti-discrimination
00:50:37.060
law that we've come up with that prevents people from actually making decisions about
00:50:41.940
And then they can make decisions about what are the consequences of whether they believe
00:50:47.340
Instead of having the government come in with this heavy boot and just stamp somebody
00:50:50.660
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00:50:56.580
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There's something, there's another point I think that's worthy of discussion here,
00:52:15.240
and that is just the simple fact that we can try to redefine whatever we want, but in the
00:52:19.180
same way that we are currently trying to redefine male as female and female as male, and it's
00:52:22.820
just a lie, and it's not true, there is only one marriage.
00:52:26.240
Yeah, we can try to redefine this as much as we want.
00:52:28.540
We can pretend that two men is the same as a man and a woman, and that the fundamental
00:52:31.840
basis of society is not a man, a woman, and a child.
00:52:36.380
And if we continue along these lines, the real consequence, yes, it'll be paid by people
00:52:40.460
in our society, and yes, it'll be paid by children who are indoctrinated with lies,
00:52:43.740
and yes, it'll be paid by a society that increasingly devalues the fundamental relationship that stands
00:52:50.540
But what's going to end up happening is that we as a civilization just will not be the winners.
00:52:54.360
That's all that's going to happen, because when you run directly up into the face of reality,
00:52:57.240
it turns out other civilizations don't have quite the same problems.
00:52:59.940
And so we can play this game as much as we want to play this game, and it's all fun and
00:53:03.920
games up until precisely the point that our society has no children, which we don't, a
00:53:07.800
society where people don't get married, which they are not, a society in which the center
00:53:10.900
of all human life is the sexual identity, which is essentially what we've now created,
00:53:14.840
and that will last about two or three generations, and then there won't be anything left to preserve.
00:53:17.900
This is such a key, because they come out and they cleverly redefine the Cambridge dictionary
00:53:23.920
definition of woman, now it means man also, and Merriam-Webster has followed suit, and
00:53:32.140
We say, okay, well, you got your 2022 dictionary, well, I got my 2012 dictionary, and now we're
00:53:38.080
going to have a battle of the dictionary definitions.
00:53:40.920
I mean, to your point, Matt, and to the heart of your movie, the answer to what is a woman
00:53:45.560
is not some stupid definition in whatever dictionary.
00:53:49.240
The answer to what is a woman is, a woman's a woman, and you know what it is, and shut
00:53:54.000
You know what a woman is, and a woman is, she's the kind of person that's not a man.
00:54:00.020
And we all know it, and that will be true no matter what these editors put in whatever
00:54:05.600
I agree, but there is a, can I, I agree, but one of the social consequences, we can talk about
00:54:13.200
One of them is that even gay men that I know who oppose the redefinition of marriage get
00:54:21.440
Well, they're the more likely people to get married because they're conservative.
00:54:25.140
And in fact, I think that you will end up in, I think that the path we're on will lead
00:54:29.940
to a place where the Christian church is gay, and marriage is gay.
00:54:35.780
Like, I think there's a chance, I think there's a chance that in not that long, that 20 years
00:54:40.540
from now, you are more likely to go to church if you are gay.
00:54:44.000
You are more likely to be married if you are gay because they're the only, they're the only
00:54:48.820
ones who want these things anymore because they feel they've been excluded for them.
00:54:53.280
And everyone else has essentially abandoned them.
00:54:56.020
Is this, or you ask you this though, because you can quote scripture in a way that I can't,
00:55:01.780
But in Romans, isn't there a passage where St. Paul said, I wish I looked this up before
00:55:06.720
I came on, but I still, I still wouldn't be able to memorize it.
00:55:08.840
But where St. Paul says, they abandoned God and therefore God gave the desires of their
00:55:16.100
And the women started sleeping with women, and the men started sleeping with women.
00:55:19.220
And I think of that, and I think like, wait a minute.
00:55:23.980
You are right that in a certain fundamental sense, one of the big things that happens here
00:55:27.940
is it's not just an external attack that's happened on the churches.
00:55:30.560
The churches have destroyed themselves from within.
00:55:33.400
And so in an attempt to modernize themselves, they've taken in the secular catechism, and
00:55:38.060
they've made it the heart of their own religion.
00:55:39.420
And this is something Benedict talked about a lot.
00:55:41.640
It's something that a lot of Orthodox rabbis have talked about, and most obviously Joseph
00:55:45.900
Soloveitchik, who is sort of one of the key founders of Israel University, which is now
00:55:51.080
And, but many of the mainline Protestant churches are giving in, many Catholic areas.
00:55:59.380
The evangelical churches, a lot of the synagogues are giving in.
00:56:02.220
And once you give up the thing that you stood for, which was the traditional wisdom, what
00:56:10.240
The only people who are going to go to church are the people who want the medal.
00:56:12.500
And the people who historically wanted the medal from you don't want that medal anymore.
00:56:16.440
The only people who will go are the people who want that imprimatur so that they can
00:56:20.320
But there's an amazing thing that happened in the Catholic Church, which even with...
00:56:29.420
He's always bringing up the Peace of Westphalia.
00:56:32.340
We were due for a mention of the Peace of Westphalia.
00:56:36.660
You know, when I think of some of the most liberal...
00:56:44.960
But Paul VI, everyone expected him to follow the Protestants and the Lambeth Declaration
00:56:49.340
and endorse free love and contraception and abortion, all these things.
00:56:55.840
He came out with Humanae Vitae and he said, nope, sorry.
00:57:05.440
Pope Francis, who everyone portrays as a big lib and with some good reason.
00:57:09.540
But Pope Francis has said that gay marriage is not a mere political issue.
00:57:13.120
It's a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.
00:57:20.540
He said that you can't have Christian gay marriage ceremonies.
00:57:24.720
I mean, he's become very conservative on this sort of issue.
00:57:27.600
And the reason for it, by the way, I don't know what they think about...
00:57:29.940
I don't know what these men think about personally, obviously, but they can't do it because
00:57:37.620
He was converting, obviously, from Protestantism to Catholicism.
00:57:41.060
And he said, with Protestantism and with so much modern thought, you follow your individual
00:57:48.160
We all like following our individual conscience.
00:57:50.080
But with Catholicism, there's a big role for individual conscience.
00:57:54.060
But ultimately, you must submit your obedience to the authority of the church.
00:57:58.700
And so to zoom it out a little bit from denominational kinds of arguments, this is the thing about
00:58:04.660
tradition, is that we surrender a little bit of our individual will and our own individual
00:58:12.260
rationalistic ideas to just the way things have worked in the past and a little deference
00:58:17.140
for our elders and our country and to tradition.
00:58:21.440
And things tended to work a lot better before we surrendered that idea.
00:58:27.380
To Jeremy's point, I don't think in 20 years it's going to be only gay people at church.
00:58:31.340
But I think it's more likely there'll just be no churches left in 20 years.
00:58:42.900
This is something that came up in my conversation with Joe Rogan on this issue, and it always
00:58:47.760
comes up, is that basically Christians and religious people in general lost the marriage
00:58:53.600
argument 50 or 60 years ago because we gave up.
00:58:58.100
Marriages are not just fundamentally procreative.
00:59:03.020
And those are the three pillars, you might say, of marriage.
00:59:06.540
We said that, well, it doesn't have to be permanent.
00:59:09.320
And if it's not permanent, that means it's not monogamous.
00:59:13.920
It's just you have to do it one at a time rather than all at once.
00:59:16.420
And once that happened, it was like you can still make the argument for so-called traditional
00:59:24.520
And people just don't believe you anymore when you say that you cherish the marriage sacrament.
00:59:30.200
I think it just got to a point where the other side, they just didn't buy it.
00:59:35.240
And if you got rid of that, if you got rid of no-fault divorce and remarriage,
00:59:39.220
marrying and all that stuff, then you'd get rid of gay marriage because a very small
00:59:42.440
percentage of gay men are going to stay married and be monogamous.
00:59:47.260
But one of the positive consequences of gay marriage is that probably for the first time
00:59:54.700
in history, a lot of gay men are considering that question.
01:00:04.500
I'm not suggesting that it's worth it, but I am saying that there are positive consequences.
01:00:09.640
I mean, the two major changes that have happened societally, the major changes, are one, that
01:00:14.860
marriage has been so redefined over the past 50 years that it essentially was transformed
01:00:18.180
into a voluntaristic arrangement rather than family being a matter of consanguinity and
01:00:24.460
production of family units that provide the basis for society.
01:00:29.560
The basis of the family was largely duty, not love.
01:00:35.000
I mean, you love each other and that love comes with duties.
01:00:38.260
The fundamental durable nature of marriage and a family is a duty-based relationship.
01:00:42.580
You don't spend every day in a tizzy over your spouse.
01:00:45.440
You spend every day doing your duty because you are a married person who loves your spouse.
01:00:51.320
And so when we redefined family units themselves away from consanguinity and from procreation
01:00:56.460
and from being those little platoons into a voluntaristic arrangement, that was the first
01:01:03.500
And that further atomization of individuals has now been exacerbated by same-sex marriage
01:01:06.780
because all the stuff that I said before was prior to same-sex marriage.
01:01:09.940
The destruction of the family unit is prior to same-sex marriage.
01:01:12.640
And so when you hear people who are talking about same-sex marriage, they say, well,
01:01:15.040
you know, your family units were already broken.
01:01:17.160
What do you have to say about same-sex marriage?
01:01:18.460
The answer is, I mean, I have a lot to say about both of those things.
01:01:22.680
And not, you don't get to throw in my face the failure of marriage and say, okay, so
01:01:26.760
now we just get to redefine the institution entirely.
01:01:28.840
You're right about the failure of the institution.
01:01:33.320
And then there's been another thing added on top of that.
01:01:35.400
And the other thing that's been added on top of that is this idea that the core of your
01:01:41.100
This is the thing that matters most about you in the world.
01:01:43.820
And that it is not about your duties to family in the traditional sense.
01:01:47.500
About your duties to have children and create children and live with the wife that you have
01:01:53.720
And build a family unit that includes, yes, a vital mother and, yes, a vital father.
01:01:59.020
These are all impositions by a cruel, vicious society.
01:02:01.660
And really what lies at the heart of you is your desires.
01:02:04.960
Well, I mean, there's nothing more, and I use this word advisedly, satanic, than the
01:02:09.200
idea that what lies at the core of you is your desires.
01:02:23.780
I have to say, this brings to mind the wonderful poem of Ogden Nash, who said,
01:02:28.660
Oh, duty, why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
01:02:50.400
I know that'll hurt the feelings of my dear, sweet Nana, who is also still watching.
01:03:03.880
This is why I guarantee you they could have come up with a great name for the institution
01:03:10.780
But the funny thing is, is their best work, the best work by gay people is gay people pretending
01:03:17.020
It's just like Irving Berlin writing White Christmas.
01:03:19.380
There's something about the outsider creating something that gives it this wistfulness and
01:03:23.340
By the way, the best work of anybody in any society comes when people tamp down their
01:03:31.420
And no one talks about it now because we're told that we're just all steam engines and
01:03:53.180
And then it was Wilhelm Reich and the rest of the crew who decided that part was, we
01:04:00.240
By the way, a lot of people don't know who Wilhelm Reich is.
01:04:02.980
Just for those who are unaware, he's a man who believed that the fundamental force in the
01:04:10.260
And the orgones, you had to sit in a wooden box, I don't know what you're doing in there,
01:04:13.760
to have a lot of orgasms, to accumulate orgones.
01:04:17.440
And if you simply had enough orgasms, you could cure cancer, war, sadness, poverty, everything.
01:04:25.120
How did this not beat Scientology to, like, most important Hollywood?
01:04:33.320
This is what Orson Bean believed before his birth.
01:04:34.840
He didn't believe it when he got older, but when I...
01:04:38.920
It's hard to believe that once the prostate gives out.
01:04:43.800
Orson Bean, every single time I think about our lost friend Orson Bean, I smile.
01:04:53.280
...light that just moved through our lives there for a season.
01:04:58.020
He told the dirtiest joke I've ever heard at his son-in-law's funeral.
01:05:06.300
He was like a, kind of an, the anime character of a, of a Hollywood celebrity.
01:05:17.680
To switch topics, what do you make of the Sam Bankman freedom of it all?
01:05:25.440
And it's just damn bad luck that the day before he was going to have to testify,
01:05:30.760
the second largest owner of the Democratic Party was going to have to testify about all
01:05:34.340
of his scams and crimes that paid for all their elections.
01:05:47.140
This is the fundamental, the fundamental problem of our time is that there is no reason for
01:05:59.660
We were talking this morning, Drew and I, about what is the truth of the COVID vaccines?
01:06:07.260
We all kind of had different positions at different points of time in this whole thing.
01:06:11.560
Although people sometimes criticize some of us for some of our positions.
01:06:15.200
And I would like to say almost everyone who criticizes us would be vaccinated if we hadn't
01:06:19.540
sued the federal government to stop the vaccine mandate.
01:06:22.480
But the question is what, Drew's question was how right and how wrong were we?
01:06:28.580
And the answer is it is, it is genuinely in this moment unknowable because all of the
01:06:35.160
institutions, all of those intermediary institutions that used to hold power to account have now
01:06:40.260
become instruments of the state and instruments of the left.
01:06:42.560
You simply can't, you can't even say facts don't care about my feelings.
01:06:45.920
You can't even say I let the data drive my understanding.
01:06:49.200
It is impossible to know what is happening in the world.
01:06:53.080
Has anyone even done, have, have, has there been a comparison?
01:06:56.100
Because we keep hearing these stories of people dying suddenly at the age of 25.
01:07:02.160
So in Europe, they've barred now the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under the age of 30
01:07:06.260
because of the myocarditis events that were occurring.
01:07:08.260
But how many, how many people under the age of 30 die suddenly of cardiac events in 2019 versus now?
01:07:15.180
The government has not spent the money to study this.
01:07:16.880
The government has not spent the money to study mask efficacy.
01:07:18.700
The government has not spent the money to actually.
01:07:20.740
In Germany, there was a test where they found of 25 people, four of them, they attributed it to the vaccine.
01:07:27.440
25 people who died young of that heart disease, that four of them had, they attributed it to the disease.
01:07:34.040
And that's why, and that's why DeSantis brilliantly is now having.
01:07:37.740
Well, I mean, it depends on the 25, like, as opposed to how many, right?
01:07:42.760
But again, they banned Moderna in large swaths of Europe for people who are under the age of 30 because the risks of the virus are significantly lower than the risks of actually taking the vaccine for people who are young.
01:07:55.020
I mean, they're still trotting out the idea that you should be vaccinating your six-month-old.
01:07:58.700
There's not only no longitudinal data, there's no data, period, on the efficacy.
01:08:05.900
Honestly, as somebody who, you know, listen, I traveled in the expert circles, right?
01:08:11.300
I tend to have a lot of respect for people who spend their entire career studying vaccines as opposed to, you know, people who have spent the last five minutes reading up on it on Wikipedia.
01:08:17.780
But it turns out that those people were lying to us.
01:08:23.160
And that there was no media to hold them to account.
01:08:25.940
And that because we have such worship of the expert class now, unrelated experts will back the claims of experts outside of their own field, right?
01:08:38.360
We should probably stop talking about it so they don't ban us on YouTube.
01:08:42.560
And members block is where we're going to interact for the next little bit with our DW Plus members.
01:08:46.800
We're going to exchange gifts in our Secret Santa.
01:08:50.680
But before we part, there are two things that I think are very important for us to touch on while we're still alive for the masses, for the people.
01:09:05.060
And the reason is, if a person wanted to buy a great gift for that gentleman in their life whose masculinity is under constant threat from the woke left,
01:09:16.020
who's being asked to drag a blade across his face in service of companies who want to teach your daughter to shave,
01:09:23.580
who's being asked to subordinate the very essence of his manhood in service of an agenda that says that he might as well be a woman,
01:09:32.180
and very likely is one, this man needs to be given the greatest Christmas gift of all time, a Jeremy's razor.
01:09:40.400
And if you order one right now, and when I say right now, I mean, no, right now.
01:09:46.060
Because literally tomorrow, which many of you will be watching this, and it will already be tomorrow,
01:09:50.600
will be the last day in which one could make such an order and still receive this before Christmas,
01:09:56.180
put under the tree for that gentleman in your life who deserves to be treated like a man.
01:10:00.120
And Jeremy's razors.com, if you go right now, you're going to get 30% off.
01:10:03.480
While you're doing it, you can head over to Daily Wire Plus, click on that store icon,
01:10:07.000
all of our Daily Wire merch, including our gift subscriptions.
01:10:10.500
If you order them in the next 24 hours, 30% off, and you'll still receive that gift card to put in the stocking for Christmas.
01:10:18.180
You couldn't think of a better gift, I don't think, than a Daily Wire Plus membership for, you know,
01:10:22.320
the kid heading off to college, somebody who needs access to this kind of information,
01:10:25.500
who's being subjected to all kinds of, you know, woke propaganda all the time.
01:10:30.580
So, dailywireplus.com, click on the store, head over to jeremysrazors.com, 30% off in both places,
01:10:35.920
and right now is the time to do it if you want something before Christmas.
01:10:38.720
And that brings me to that last thing that we absolutely need to talk about, Christmas.
01:10:43.400
This is the last time we're going to see each other before Christmas.
01:10:46.320
So, I thought, in the past, we've talked about really important Christmas issues,
01:10:51.620
we've talked about what does it mean that God walked among man,
01:10:54.880
what does it mean that, you know, the so-called Son of God and God reigned on a throne in far-off Rome
01:11:06.420
But the one thing that we've never done is just had a conversation, the four of us,
01:11:10.540
about how we're going to drive Ben out of our city in celebration.
01:11:33.720
Yeah, Stephen Crowder, actually, on his podcast, he asked me, like,
01:11:38.840
And I said, well, that we don't do pogroms anymore.
01:11:48.580
But you do live in a culture that celebrates Christmas.
01:11:52.320
What is your view of living in a culture that celebrates Christmas?
01:11:55.760
I mean, I would much rather live in a culture that celebrates Christmas than a culture that disdains it.
01:11:59.980
And I think that that's essentially what we're on the verge of.
01:12:03.440
As a Jew, I think it's very important that Christians go to church.
01:12:06.140
And I think it's very important that they take the gospel seriously.
01:12:08.060
And I think it's very important that they take the religious precepts seriously because a Christian world is a better world,
01:12:13.180
not just for Jews in the American context, which is obviously true,
01:12:17.660
but also is a better world for the values that it helps to propagate.
01:12:20.720
So you don't get offended when someone wishes you a Merry Christmas.
01:12:22.820
No, in fact, last night at the holiday party, a bunch of people were coming over and saying,
01:12:26.320
Happy Holidays, and I would respond, Merry Christmas.
01:12:28.280
And you said to me, what I thought was a great line, you said,
01:12:31.940
I don't mind if they say Merry Christmas because they're not having a pogrom.
01:12:35.060
No religious Jews ever get offended by Merry Christmas.
01:12:40.280
It is only secular people, Jews and Gentiles alike, who pretend to be offended by Merry Christmas.
01:12:45.460
Because as Ben and I have discussed of late, the world is really breaking into the two camps of believe in God, do not believe in God.
01:13:02.600
But it seems more and more in this moment that that's where the lines are.
01:13:06.060
And so in that sense, we're all in a very important struggle together.
01:13:10.060
For our parting words on the true meaning of Christmas, I'm going to leave you with a blast from the past.
01:13:19.220
And we'll let one Andrew Klavan wish you the true spirit of the season.
01:13:28.040
And the glory of the Lord shone round about them.
01:13:48.060
Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
01:13:54.920
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
01:14:03.200
You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
01:14:07.600
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
01:14:15.140
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men.
01:14:25.380
That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
01:14:45.040
And it's funny to think about how much bigger we are as a company today than when we made that video.
01:14:52.140
What we realized this morning is how few people have seen it.
01:15:01.340
I had some of our mutual friends who are celebrating their first Christmas over to the house this week to watch Charlie Brown Christmas is what it's called, right?
01:15:11.920
And it's remarkable how cruddy the animation is.
01:15:20.900
I put it on for my kids, and my son said, Daddy, why are we watching this?
01:15:29.040
It's because you destroyed them with the Batman film.
01:15:43.460
It's ended in near disaster, friendship ending ruin every single time.
01:15:49.620
So I don't even know how it came to be that we each were tasked with buying a gift for the person who we were.
01:16:00.880
Because, you know, in the past, I have gotten great Secret Santa presents.
01:16:10.840
Ben gave me, I still have it on display in my office, in a beautiful Tiffany box.
01:16:26.880
Well, I think we should start with you, Michael.
01:16:32.500
And I don't, obviously, I don't know, because it's a Secret Santa, so I don't know who my secret, okay.