The Matt Walsh Show - Daily Wire Backstage： No, It Doesn’t Take A Village

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, this is Matt Walsh and you're about to listen to a very special episode of

00:00:03.540 Backstage featuring myself, Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boring, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles. We

00:00:07.960 cover a variety of topics including Elon Musk, Walt Disney, and we're joined by our special guest

00:00:12.860 Tim Pool. Trust me, this is a conversation you don't want to miss. Check it out.

00:00:30.000 Who can fake laugh in a world like this? Daily Wire Backstage is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:44.360 Privacy is a right, not a privilege. Defend your rights at expressvpn.com slash backstage. I'm

00:00:49.860 Jeremy Boring, god king of these lowly Daily Wires, joined as ever by the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew

00:00:55.540 Klavan, the Matt Walsh, and the Michael Knowles. I gave Michael Knowles a the just because I'm

00:00:59.280 feeling generous. We're glad you've tuned in. Oh, I think they already rolled the intro.

00:01:07.840 Mathis is in my ear going, no, we already ran the graphic. Anyway, we're off to a good start.

00:01:13.540 The big news in the world today that I want to most talk about is how little Michael Knowles

00:01:18.260 is willing to do for world peace. It's a slow news week. I got to tell you, so I was at Yale

00:01:25.020 with Senator Cruz. A couple days ago, we got lots of really high-level questions that you

00:01:29.540 would expect from the geniuses in New Haven, one of which was, would you fellate a man to

00:01:34.800 end world hunger? Ah, thank you. Now, but it would have been the same answer with world

00:01:39.000 peace, which is, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not willing to do it. And people said,

00:01:43.060 Michael, that's awful. That's terrible. They don't realize. If they had offered me a part

00:01:46.840 on a sitcom, they had offered me, I don't know, a hundred bucks, maybe that could have been a

00:01:50.400 different answer. World hunger. World hunger. What does that have to do with me? It's an incredibly

00:01:54.620 slow news cycle, which always, I think, leads to the most enjoyable backstages. Rather than

00:02:01.440 sort of working our way through a bunch of stories that nobody cares about, like some bird craps on

00:02:05.340 the president, and he's totally unaware of it, you know, it's just another day. That was the

00:02:08.860 American Eagle. And another day in America. That was just America. Just America.

00:02:12.260 Crapping on the president. He's lucky bulls don't fly as well. I will say that I recently

00:02:16.840 had an interaction with what may have been the same bald eagle, and it crapped on my God King

00:02:21.820 cape. Well, that was God. That wasn't even the eagle. That's God. That's well-deserved.

00:02:26.860 Yeah. You know, since the premiere of the Jeremy's Razors commercial and the announcements about

00:02:32.000 DW kids and all the great work that I've been doing in the world, people recognizing me on the

00:02:39.560 streets thanking me, I just want you guys to know my head has not gotten smaller.

00:02:43.140 It certainly hasn't happened. But I don't just wear my cape, like, around the office or anything.

00:02:48.020 No. I mean, just around your house.

00:02:49.720 Just at home. The wife likes it.

00:02:51.740 Yeah.

00:02:52.880 But these are good times for us to talk about, like, more philosophical issues.

00:02:56.560 Like the left stealing our children and trying to indoctrinate them into queer theory?

00:02:59.860 Like the left? That's just a...

00:03:02.120 Just like an issue?

00:03:03.600 Just one example. Yeah.

00:03:05.240 Obviously, this is something that Matt has, I think, taken a real leadership role in the

00:03:09.240 conservative movement as far as, you know, probing this issue, trying to get people around the world

00:03:14.660 to define what is a woman. An amazing feature-length documentary coming from Matt Walsh in the month

00:03:19.980 of May on that topic. But as we've been watching those events play out for a while, we actually

00:03:24.200 haven't engaged, I think, in this forum and what we used to do in the old days of the show,

00:03:28.060 which is talk about it kind of in a philosophical, religious, political context as opposed to just

00:03:33.580 news of the week. So...

00:03:35.960 I mean, so I talked on the podcast the other day about this issue because I... Not just because,

00:03:40.940 obviously, it's perverse, but because it really says something about where we are as a society.

00:03:44.800 And what it says about where we are as a society is that the cult of authenticity has completely

00:03:48.100 destroyed entire generations of people. And now you have adults who are addicted to their own

00:03:52.080 authenticity to the point where they feel the need to indoctrinate children so that children

00:03:55.740 validate their own views of the world and their own activities. There's been a lot of debate about

00:03:59.700 the use of the term grooming on the right. What I've said on the show is I don't think that all

00:04:03.680 of these teachers who are doing this are grooming the kids so that they can have sex with the kids.

00:04:06.800 I do think that they are politically grooming the kids so that the kids will agree with them

00:04:10.680 and approve of their lifestyles. And they openly say this. That is not a theory. That is just a

00:04:14.440 thing that they say openly. They will say that parents are the real problems here because parents

00:04:17.760 are the barriers to a better, more tolerant world. And so if we take your kids away from you,

00:04:21.660 like Plato's either fake or real republic, right? And we take the kids away and we re-indoctrinate

00:04:27.960 them like Pol Pot would, except in sexual theories of the left, then we will have created a better

00:04:32.660 world for ourselves. And we will also create a better world for children. And this runs so directly

00:04:36.900 against human nature. It is unspeakable. I mean, what they're attempting to do with kids is

00:04:40.760 unspeakable. There's a whole article from Derek Thompson in The Atlantic the other day about the rising

00:04:45.460 rates of mental illness and suicidal ideation among kids. And the answer to this is very clear.

00:04:51.660 When you have a left wing that is teaching people that it is wrong to civilize your kids,

00:04:56.400 that it is wrong to impose rules on your kids and to set rules for your kids, that the greatest way

00:05:00.860 you can parent and the greatest way you can bring up a kid is to destroy all of those rules and all

00:05:04.500 of those rules and then tell kids when they're 15 years old at the stupidest point in their entire

00:05:07.980 life, choose your gender, choose your sexual orientation. And you only get cheered, by the way.

00:05:12.220 You only get cheered if you say you're a non-cisgender pansexual. You are destroying children.

00:05:17.260 You are destroying minors. And you are doing this purposefully. The rates of suicide in this

00:05:21.180 country are about to skyrocket like nobody's ever seen over the course of the next 10 years.

00:05:24.800 I think, I also think the grooming is happening in the, in kind of the pedophilic sense as well,

00:05:30.380 though, because, you know, what we have to realize is that all of this stuff, there is a,

00:05:34.760 a real effort to actually sexualize children. I mean, this comprehensive sex education,

00:05:40.200 you can trace back to Alfred Kinsey and that's where, that's where it comes from. And he believed

00:05:44.180 that children were sexual from birth and he had all kinds of horrific-

00:05:47.800 Wilhelm Reich or something.

00:05:49.240 Right. So that, that's where you trace all this stuff back to. So it's, it's grooming in that kind

00:05:53.980 of general sense, but it also is. I think using grooming in a kind of pedophilia way is, is also

00:05:58.640 correct.

00:05:59.000 I don't think that it's, I agree with Ben that, I agree with you that grooming is happening in kind

00:06:04.640 of a macro and that there are also very specific instances of grooming that are taking place. I think the

00:06:10.500 point that you're making is that the average teacher engaging in this behavior is not engaging

00:06:15.360 in a direct and purposeful act of grooming a child for sex, but they, but they, but they are

00:06:20.280 promulgating a, a political, a political and social thing. I disagree with this because I think

00:06:27.060 that they are in fact grooming the child for a world in which pedophilia is normalized. And I think

00:06:32.660 that, and I think that- I don't think we're, I don't think we're all saying, we're not disagreeing.

00:06:36.520 Well, I mean, what the proposition on the table is whether they are literally taking this child

00:06:40.520 and teaching this kid about sex, they can then have sex with this child.

00:06:43.000 Right. Right. And that is-

00:06:44.200 That the average, that the average teacher promulgating this worldview is not engaged in

00:06:47.680 that direct.

00:06:48.400 Correct. I think there's-

00:06:49.240 They are doing what you're saying.

00:06:49.940 There are some people who are, and those people, you know, obviously should not only go

00:06:52.660 to jail-

00:06:52.780 Actually, a lot of, a lot of adults in the public school system are doing that. That's a,

00:06:56.220 well, it is-

00:06:56.620 That's another piece of this problem is that actually there's a, there's a real sexual abuse

00:07:00.740 epidemic in the school system that's been going on for years. I mean, the Department of Education

00:07:04.340 did a study back in 2004 and found that it was something like 4 million kids at that

00:07:10.140 time-

00:07:10.760 Yeah, the rates of abuse in the public schools are about twice that of even the Catholic

00:07:14.260 Church at the height of the scandal.

00:07:15.400 100 times that.

00:07:16.820 Right.

00:07:17.020 Depends on the measurement.

00:07:17.800 Depends on the measurement.

00:07:18.500 Depends on how you measure it, but it's significantly more.

00:07:20.520 But the reason that I'm hesitant to make it all about the minority of teachers who are actively

00:07:27.060 attempting to sexually abuse children is because I think the issue is way broader than that.

00:07:31.420 Meaning that the real wrong that I think that is going to destroy an entire generation of

00:07:35.400 children is not the minority of teachers who legitimately are going to engage in pedophilic

00:07:39.880 acts with children. I think it's, the major issue across the country is that school districts all

00:07:44.780 across America are indoctrinating small kids into these perverse ideas about what it means to be

00:07:50.160 happy.

00:07:50.500 And that the people doing it don't question their own motives. And that one of the challenges when

00:07:56.740 we on the right say that it's grooming, it's not that we aren't right in many sorts of ways,

00:08:01.880 but to the individual teacher who is not themselves attempting to have sex with one of their

00:08:06.700 students, but who is engaged in promulgating these perverse views, it gives them an excuse.

00:08:12.960 The key word here is that word you said, Ben, which is authenticity. And I totally think you're

00:08:17.600 right. But the irony, of course, is that the little boy who either thinks he's a girl or who

00:08:22.160 just has been told by his teacher that he is a girl, he is not authentically a girl. He is

00:08:26.560 authentically a boy and he's being told to be inauthentic. When we use this phrase, gender

00:08:30.760 affirming therapy, it's ironic because you're not affirming their gender.

00:08:34.880 Right, it's sex denying.

00:08:35.940 The problem we have on the right, though, is that they bring out, Ron DeSantis brings out a bill

00:08:42.220 that keeps teachers from doing this, from foisting this nonsense on these children. And the left

00:08:48.600 immediately calls it the don't say gay bill. The entire press calls it the don't say gay bill.

00:08:52.520 Nobody debates whether it should be called the don't say gay bill. But we say, come back with a

00:08:57.320 great line, which is OK, groomer, which I thought was one of the great right wing lines. And suddenly

00:09:02.220 at NRO, they're sitting around going, well, should we really call it grooming? And my feeling is-

00:09:06.560 No, no. I mean, listen, I don't think anybody on the left has any grounds to stand on when it comes

00:09:10.780 to the abuse of language and the lies about language that are told. And I'm not even saying-

00:09:14.540 But why doesn't we question ourselves when we-

00:09:15.480 Right, by the way, as much as I know it's not a popular position, I'll take the least popular

00:09:19.880 position at the table. If the only question is a question of politics, I agree with you.

00:09:26.040 Yeah.

00:09:26.380 I actually prefer Vivek Ramaswamy's line that we should call it the wait till eight bill,

00:09:31.100 because it actually is very descriptive.

00:09:33.540 The wait till eight bill.

00:09:34.380 But, so on a political level, I agree. Where I disagree is on the sort of, the efficacy

00:09:43.280 at the individual teacher level. That if I'm doing something that I think is good, and I

00:09:48.580 don't have a sexual motive, and you call me a pedophile, that doesn't cause me to reflect

00:09:53.240 on my behavior. It causes me to defend my behavior.

00:09:55.260 But I guess the question-

00:09:56.160 No, you know, I agree with what I thought you were going to say, which is that we should

00:10:00.740 discuss things, and we should actually, we on the right should actually talk about things

00:10:03.580 as opposed to the left. But, but no, I'm not trying, I'm not trying to convince that teacher.

00:10:08.480 No, I actually-

00:10:09.320 I want to drive the teacher.

00:10:10.180 That teacher I think should be arrested.

00:10:12.020 I'll take, I'll take, I'll take up Jeremy's-

00:10:13.480 I don't care about that. I want to convince the country that these people should be-

00:10:16.360 But do you think that every teacher in America who is, is wrapped up in these curriculum should

00:10:21.660 be arrested?

00:10:22.480 No, but it's shame.

00:10:23.480 You're also putting, you're putting shame on this shameful activity.

00:10:27.260 Yes.

00:10:27.860 That's part of what you're doing, which is what we should be doing. So if that teacher

00:10:30.920 feels ashamed-

00:10:32.160 And stops doing it.

00:10:33.580 Well, here's all about-

00:10:34.460 That's, it's a shameful thing that they're doing to kids, and that's-

00:10:37.240 I have no problem with the shaming. I don't even have a problem with the use of the term

00:10:39.900 groomer. I have a problem with what I think happened here. I think one of the things that

00:10:42.960 happened here is people started using OK Groomer, and I also thought, that's pretty funny.

00:10:46.940 And not only is it funny, it's really not a specific term as people on the left immediately

00:10:50.680 took it to be and then twisted it. Because when I saw OK Groomer, I read it as,

00:10:54.040 they are politically grooming children and sexualizing children in order so they'll

00:10:57.360 reflect their points of view. And the left immediately took that, and in order to take

00:10:59.900 the word away, they said, oh, what you really mean is that all these teachers are going to

00:11:03.660 rape small children.

00:11:04.660 That's right.

00:11:04.980 And that's not what I think most people actually meant when they said Groomer. I don't

00:11:08.420 think that everybody who says Groomer means-

00:11:10.540 It means you're cultivating a sexual identity.

00:11:12.360 Correct. I agree. So the point that I'm making is that we should clarify what we mean by it,

00:11:17.260 mainly because it actually broadens the appeal of the argument. Most of the people who are

00:11:21.000 going to agree with us on this issue, which is the majority of the American people,

00:11:23.380 agree the teachers are perverting children.

00:11:25.820 Of both parties, by the way.

00:11:26.740 Of both parties. Agree the teachers should not be teaching kids this stuff because it

00:11:30.400 is bad and evil to sexualize children. They don't agree on a broad level that all these

00:11:35.600 teachers actively want to have sex with the children.

00:11:37.820 So what I'm saying is that I don't think it's a political winner to accuse all these

00:11:41.700 people of pedophilia. I think it's a political winner to accuse all of them of perverting children

00:11:44.820 for their own sick political.

00:11:45.620 So clarify what you mean, but we clarify what we mean, but keep using the word.

00:11:48.760 Yes.

00:11:50.020 That's one thing. What we cannot do is back off of it and say, okay, well, we'll find

00:11:53.380 a different word.

00:11:53.800 Right. I agree. I've used, what I've done on, the only thing I've done on my program is

00:11:58.180 when I discuss it, I just say political grooming, just to clarify what I'm using. So I'm using

00:12:02.380 the same word.

00:12:03.540 Michael?

00:12:03.840 Sure.

00:12:04.020 You know, I want to take the left-wing argument and steel man it as best I can because I

00:12:08.500 think they do make one point. When they're arguing against this Florida bill, they say,

00:12:13.000 well, no, look, we're not talking about transing the kids or drag shows in kindergarten. But

00:12:16.740 if I'm in a math class and I'm writing a math problem, am I not allowed to refer to Johnny's

00:12:22.100 two dads? Or am I not allowed to refer to a they or an intersex or a pansexual or whatever?

00:12:27.800 I can't bring it up even, you know, casually. And so the answer from the bill is, no, you can't.

00:12:32.900 Just don't talk about sex.

00:12:33.780 Wait till 8.

00:12:34.360 Wait till 8. But it does raise this bigger problem. If you're in kindergarten story time

00:12:39.920 class, you're probably going to talk about a marriage or a family. That's probably going

00:12:44.020 to come up in some storybook. Well, I guess that's kind of sexual education. And really

00:12:48.580 what you are saying is, no, you're not going to talk about transsexuality or any kind of

00:12:52.000 more modern sexual ideology. So then don't you get to the question of, don't we just need

00:12:57.900 to say the reason you can't teach your kids about transgenderism in kindergarten

00:13:02.300 is because it's not true. Because boys can't be girls.

00:13:05.700 That's exactly right.

00:13:06.340 No, you know, I would go further than that. I think we have the right to defend the norm.

00:13:10.980 Yeah.

00:13:11.140 There is no such thing, or if there is such a thing, it is anomalous. But there is really

00:13:16.700 no such thing as a parent who wants their child to not become a parent of another child. That

00:13:22.420 is what we're here for. That's what our bodies do. We want our children to go off and get married

00:13:26.520 as we got married, form a family. We want to see our grandkids. That's all the things

00:13:30.600 that we want, that we should be loving and accepting of people who can't participate in

00:13:35.840 that. If your child is gay, like my child is gay. You know, I love the kid to death.

00:13:39.820 You all know that. But, you know, I want my kids to marry the opposite sex person and have

00:13:46.200 children. That's what we all want. That's what the norm is. And we have a right to defend

00:13:50.260 that norm. It's a human norm. It's not a cultural norm. It is a human one.

00:13:53.460 That's a really important point, too, because we talked a little bit off air. I think this

00:13:57.740 is where the right can lose on this issue. I think this should be a winning issue, the

00:14:02.620 trans, gender ideology. We obviously are correct. It's common sense. And most people, when you

00:14:08.040 explain it to them, even if they're not political, they are going to be on our side. Where we

00:14:12.540 could lose it, though, is where we say, where we focus almost too much on the kids. And we

00:14:17.720 say, well, we just leave the kids out of this. But we're not criticizing transgenderism

00:14:22.540 in general. Just leave the kids away from it. I agree. Our message has to be fundamentally,

00:14:27.140 like you said, the reason we don't want the kids taught this stuff is because it's false

00:14:31.220 and harmful. You wouldn't teach a kid that two plus two equals seven. Right. And it will

00:14:35.100 send them barreling into a life of despair. And we're going to have a mass wave of suicides

00:14:40.260 coming, even worse than what we have right now with kids, when 10, 20 years from now, they're

00:14:44.020 looking around and saying, what did you people let me do to myself that I can't reverse?

00:14:48.260 Well, the stats on this are pretty clear. And it's amazing to me. Nobody, frankly, has

00:14:52.400 the balls to actually say it. But the stats are very clear that, I mean, according to

00:14:57.580 Gallup polls, 0.8% of people born before 1945 identifies LGBTQ. For people who were born

00:15:04.000 between 1997 and 2003, that number is 20.8%. If you go to people who are even younger than

00:15:09.600 that, if you're going to go to the 12-18 crowd, because remember, everybody who was born

00:15:12.100 in 2003 is now 19. So if you're going to people who were born in the five-year period after

00:15:15.560 that, I would guarantee you it's at least 25% to 30%. Right. And so if you're looking

00:15:19.740 at that group, and then you look at the suicidal ideation rates among LGBTQ, you're talking about

00:15:24.360 suicidal ideation rates that are in the 40% range, as opposed to the general population

00:15:28.020 where it's closer to 10% to 15% among teen girls, for example, maybe 8% among teen boys.

00:15:34.360 So what you're doing is you are taking an entire population of people who are not going to be

00:15:38.240 suicidally ideated, and you are celebrating them for selecting into a population that is having

00:15:43.800 very, very high suicide rates. And almost 30% attempted suicide rates.

00:15:48.640 Right. In the trans community, yes. For people who identify as transgender, the actual suicide

00:15:53.840 attempt rate is, depending on which group you're looking at, between 40 and 50%. I mean,

00:15:57.700 these are insane statistics. And you're telling people that they will be celebrated,

00:16:01.140 and they will be cheered if they come out and engage in this behavior. And then you're saying

00:16:05.740 that you're helping kids by doing this. And not only that, we know that if you actually,

00:16:09.200 if a kid is genuinely dealing with this, not they've got rapid onset gender dysphoria and all

00:16:14.580 their friends are doing, but they actually have some form of gender dysphoria, we know that 70 to

00:16:19.040 90% of those kids are simply going to desist. But we know that 100% of kids who are given puberty

00:16:23.480 blockers end up moving on to further states of transitioning. So you are actively locking people

00:16:28.220 in to a choice that is going to harm them dramatically. And pretending this isn't happening

00:16:33.900 is just insane. It's insane. It's a social contagion. There is no way that evolutionary

00:16:37.680 biology suggests that in the course of one generation, you go from 5% of the population

00:16:41.800 identifying as LGBTQ to 30% of the population identifying that way.

00:16:46.160 But this is an important point because it points out the depth of the dishonesty. It's not just when

00:16:50.000 they tell us that somebody who declares himself a female is automatically a female, which is

00:16:54.360 incredibly dishonest. But it's also dishonest about the human condition. I mean, we know as

00:16:58.920 you're talking about evolutionary biology, we know what we're here to do is reproduce. We know that

00:17:03.260 there's pain when you do not fulfill nature's template of a man. I think men feel bad when

00:17:09.720 they're not soldiers, let alone, you know, when they actually are not sleeping with a woman and

00:17:14.100 creating more children. You know, this is what we're here to do, that there's pain involved in

00:17:18.160 that. And tragedy, any honest gay person will tell you, any honest gay person will tell you

00:17:23.720 that being gay comes along with a certain amount of pain. Now we can be loving and accepting and

00:17:28.700 understanding of that, but to foist it on people as, as not only, not only, uh, normal, but also

00:17:35.200 as the only way you can avoid the evil of being a white person. You know, in other words, some of

00:17:40.420 these kids, that's their only, that's their only strategy to get out of being the bad guy.

00:17:44.260 So this goes back to the authenticity point that I was making earlier. So if you believe that

00:17:47.940 one part, and I think the largest part of human happiness lies in becoming a civilized human being,

00:17:53.260 which is to say that you civilize to the major institutions that make you happy in life,

00:17:57.320 being a father, being a, being a, a friend, being a person who, who protects, being a husband,

00:18:03.020 right? All of these things that that is a, not, maybe not just a major part of life, maybe all

00:18:07.300 of life is in that. But then you're told by society that authenticity is to be measured by how many

00:18:12.740 roles you shuck off, how many, how many roles you get rid of, right? If you blow up the role,

00:18:16.560 because you can't really be yourself unless you destroy those roles and you break the rules.

00:18:19.740 It's the rule breakers and the, and the people who destroy the roles who are the most authentic.

00:18:23.280 So we can measure how authentic you are by how many of these things you destroy. Is there any,

00:18:27.180 is there any rational reason why the more authenticity you seek, the more unhappy you are?

00:18:31.460 You are literally taking the things that make human beings happy and you are destroying them

00:18:34.540 for the sake of supposed authenticity that lies within and really is not your own authenticity.

00:18:38.240 It's a reflection of the social media idiots who are, who are echoing you.

00:18:41.360 Right. It's authenticity, ironically, that we're a lot. It's becomes a communal project.

00:18:45.360 Right. It's authenticity that relies desperately on the affirmation and the acceptance of, of,

00:18:51.440 of everybody else. So that's like, you're, you're, we're giving kids this identity that's now that,

00:18:55.520 that affirmation will not suffice. Even that will not suffice. It doesn't change the reality.

00:19:00.760 Right. And that's why it's, it's like for me as a, as a man, if somebody calls me a woman,

00:19:05.020 it's just, it's absurd. It doesn't cause any problems for me. I just laugh at you. But this,

00:19:09.280 this identity we're giving to kids, if you misgender them, which would be to correctly gender them,

00:19:13.780 it just, it, their whole world falls apart because they're utterly dependent on society

00:19:19.180 to constantly affirm. Because it's an, it's an act of violence in their view for you to subject

00:19:25.520 them to reality or, or to, or to shatter their sort of delusions, delusions. I mean, this is why it

00:19:31.560 has to be culturally crammed down, right? This is why Disney's doing what it's doing. I love you guys.

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00:21:16.160 to learn more. And we have a great question that's come in from one of our dailywire.com

00:21:21.280 members. These guys are incredibly important to us. They make it possible for us to do the work

00:21:25.240 that we're doing. You can become a member by heading over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:21:30.540 Right now in our battle against Disney, we are running a promotion. They wrote down the promo

00:21:35.680 code for me because I forget everything. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. Enter code BUILDTHEFUTURE

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00:22:06.420 Here's the question from one of our said members. How does it feel that you guys have been the

00:22:12.920 catalyst for the changing of the national political landscape and cultural landscape?

00:22:17.240 How does it make us feel that we've had the kind of impact, I suppose, that we've been able to have?

00:22:20.720 First of all, I'm glad that we hired somebody to send that question.

00:22:23.080 It feels great. I want to answer this question first because I feel like I was banging on this

00:22:29.060 drum in a wilderness for 20 years. And really, dude, you have actually done the stuff that I was

00:22:36.560 making all these speeches about. And I kept making speeches and saying, you know, Fox News came on and

00:22:41.020 they got 50% of the audience basically, but they never said, well, let's do Fox movies. Let's do Fox

00:22:46.340 comedy. And I could never understand that. It was because they weren't you. No, and I flatter you,

00:22:52.220 but it actually is true. I think it is an amazing thing. I think it's what is needed. I love the

00:22:58.140 fact that they do not know we are coming and we're going to destroy them because we're going

00:23:02.140 to destroy them. This is fruit lying on the ground. And this is why I don't get into inner

00:23:09.140 discussions about whether we should use this word or that word. We should wipe them off the face of

00:23:14.180 the planet. Everything they believe is wrong. Every single thing they believe is wrong. They destroy our

00:23:19.240 cities. They destroy our children. They destroy our marriages. I mean, the thing is for most of us,

00:23:24.620 90% of us, at least the relationship between a man and a woman is one of the major consolations for a

00:23:29.500 tragic life. This is a very difficult life. It has lots of pain. It ends in death. You know,

00:23:33.840 no matter what you believe that is, that's the truth of the life we're in. The love between a man

00:23:38.160 and a woman is one of the most beautiful things in the world. And even that, even that they want to

00:23:42.500 poison, I saw this, I can't think of the right word, a punk go after you at one of your speeches.

00:23:50.180 And he was screaming at you and he was saying, this is a white formulation. Well, BS. I mean,

00:23:55.340 you know, this is a universal thing. Every story, the one thing I know about a story is in every

00:23:59.860 single story, in every single culture tells the journey of a man to become a man and a woman to

00:24:04.960 become a woman. That not everybody makes that journey, that people have other journeys and that

00:24:08.920 there are physical reasons for that. I'm fine with it. And I've always, listen, I've been in the

00:24:13.620 arts all my life. Half the people I know are gay. They've been my best friends. They've been my

00:24:18.200 great associates and I respect them and I understand their worldview and I understand what they want.

00:24:23.640 This is not the norm. This is, we have a right to the norm and the human beings because it's creation.

00:24:29.280 The norm is creation. The norm is what we were made to do. And I think God is a lot funnier than most

00:24:34.500 people do. You know, I think he threw in a lot of variation and we should respect that variation.

00:24:39.480 But you can't be tolerant without a center, you know. And that we are making this argument and we

00:24:45.300 are making the argument for the center, for the fact that this country is great, for the fact that

00:24:49.340 freedom is great. I'm just happy to be here. I'm just happy that I'm still alive. And I'm just

00:24:53.400 going to add for Media Matters that asterisk. When he says white people off the earth, he does not

00:24:56.540 mean that physically. It just means the ideology should be different. Wait, oh, yeah, I guess that's true.

00:25:01.720 Speaking, I'll try to get us some more Media Matters fact checks on this point. But, you know,

00:25:06.200 speaking of diversity and variation here, I think that is kind of the point. In our first business,

00:25:12.560 the first version of this business, we have more political diversity than any channel on the left

00:25:19.220 or the right. We've got the entire gamut of the right and it doesn't exist anywhere. And obviously,

00:25:23.660 the left is completely uniform. And we've taken that through every other new business that we're

00:25:28.440 starting, the books and the movies and everything else. And it made me realize that being a unique

00:25:35.240 company either could have completely killed us in the first 12 months or it meant that it would be

00:25:39.760 this rocket ship that we're on. When the game is rigged, you have to break the rules. And that's

00:25:44.780 exactly what... There are places for conservatives in our rigged liberal society. You're allowed to

00:25:50.560 write certain columns on certain topics. You're allowed to maybe give a few speeches here or there,

00:25:55.160 even run for Congress. But there are things that you can't do. And that's why we're always going

00:25:58.960 to be the losers and we're always going to be the second party. And then DW walked up to the window,

00:26:03.300 kicked the glass in and just started doing whatever the hell we want. And it's taken off

00:26:07.480 like a rocket. I want to say one thing about this, which is that what it makes me feel most of all is

00:26:11.600 grateful, mainly not just to God, of course, but grateful that we went out on a limb because we knew

00:26:17.780 that there was an audience out there for all of this because we are a business. We are not a 501c3.

00:26:21.320 And what that means is that everything that we do is driven first and foremost by looking at the

00:26:26.360 market and seeing, is there a market for this? Because Jeremy and I have been talking about doing

00:26:29.960 movies since we literally... Literally, our very first conversation we ever had together was,

00:26:33.880 how do we make conservative movies? And you were doing Declaration Entertainment at the time,

00:26:36.460 which was a 501c3, in which people gave money so that you could make movies. And it didn't go

00:26:41.120 anywhere. And the reason it didn't go anywhere is because it was not a market-based business and the

00:26:44.040 market was not right because the left had not pushed far enough to the left at that point.

00:26:47.280 And one of the things that I think is the most gratifying about all of this is the recognition

00:26:52.040 that the reason we're winning is not because we're so great at this, although, to be honest,

00:26:56.460 we are, but it's because all of our supporters are there. They're the ones who are picking us up.

00:27:01.740 They're the ones who are funding all of this. They're the ones who are making all of this happen.

00:27:04.580 I mean, that's an amazing experience. I get a lot of questions all the time because,

00:27:07.540 you know, not as much as Jeremy, but I get confronted a lot publicly and asked for pictures.

00:27:11.980 Some people know who I am. And when that happens, I tend to be pretty nice about it,

00:27:17.840 which runs counter both to my nature as well.

00:27:21.200 Your nature and your reputation.

00:27:22.520 Right. And I'm asked about that. And I say the reason that I do that is because when I'm like

00:27:28.800 an actor, when people come up to me and they say that they enjoy the show, what they mean is that

00:27:32.220 they've been actually listening to the ideas that I'm promoting. And so the fact that our ideas are

00:27:36.760 finding fertile ground, that's the part that I'm really grateful for. The fact that there is a crowd

00:27:40.700 out there that supports this and that feels emboldened by this and that feels energized by

00:27:44.040 this and that wants to join the fight, that's what I feel really good about. Because, I mean,

00:27:47.400 honestly, we would be doing this stuff for free and we did do this stuff for free for literally years,

00:27:50.760 but we don't have to do this stuff for free anymore. And because we're not doing it for free,

00:27:53.800 we're able to do so much more stuff, so much bigger stuff because of the people who support

00:27:57.600 the agenda. And I'm more optimistic about the country now than I was a year ago, five years ago,

00:28:03.040 10 years ago in many ways. Because I feel like the pushback has finally arrived. The pushback I think a lot

00:28:07.120 of us have been waiting for.

00:28:07.880 One of the beautiful things about building alternatives is suddenly, which is what the

00:28:12.800 right has not been doing for basically our entire lives, but suddenly when you begin building

00:28:17.960 alternatives, everything the left does actually becomes an opportunity for us. It becomes an

00:28:23.700 opportunity for us to succeed. We talked at our town hall a few weeks ago about all the money that

00:28:29.160 Disney is going to spend on kids' content in this next year. And I thought, bring it on. It's just

00:28:33.640 direct advertising for us at this point. When they say the kinds of things that they've said

00:28:37.920 over the last several weeks about their open agenda with their children's content, I hope that

00:28:43.240 they spend billions of dollars because I don't have billions of dollars to spend telling people

00:28:47.440 that they need to come over here. So I'm glad that they're telling them that they should come over

00:28:50.500 here.

00:28:50.940 Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say that I personally should be getting more credit

00:28:55.640 as the trailblazer of children's content at the Daily Wire.

00:29:00.000 No, there's no.

00:29:01.080 As the children's author.

00:29:01.900 And as our top LGBTQ.

00:29:04.000 And women's.

00:29:05.420 There's many hats. Rainbow plethora of hats.

00:29:09.160 But the other thing also is that, talking about the opportunity, it's like Hollywood is kind of

00:29:13.640 reverting back to what conservative and Christian entertainment was in the 90s, where it's just,

00:29:18.060 it's message first, story, script, acting second. And so this is kind of our opportunity to

00:29:24.000 actually put the entertainment first and foremost.

00:29:26.980 Have you seen what unbelievable hypocrites these jackasses are? This story about how

00:29:31.540 they took that new Harry Potter spinoff.

00:29:33.860 Yes.

00:29:34.160 First of all, J.K. Rowling retconning Dumbledore into a gay man because she realized there's

00:29:39.600 not enough wokeness in her series back in like 2009. It was hilarious.

00:29:42.620 It made her a hero for about five minutes.

00:29:44.040 For five minutes before they realized she actually thought women existed. She's a villain again.

00:29:47.280 Who's in lead with Vladimir Putin, by the way, which is a new one. But she, but Hollywood

00:29:51.260 decided that they were just going to remove all the gay references.

00:29:54.000 From this movie, which is designed largely for preteens in China, because China was like,

00:29:59.080 no, we're not, we're not going to show this movie and you're going to lose hundreds of

00:30:01.540 millions of dollars unless you remove this six seconds that, that is in this movie basically

00:30:05.800 just to please GLAAD. And Hollywood was like, well, you know, it's very important people

00:30:10.240 in China see this movie. Very, very important people in China see this movie. And so, so this

00:30:14.120 tells me two things. One, these people have no principles at all. And two, this is actually

00:30:17.900 really good news. They are responsive to a market if the market says no to them.

00:30:21.460 And this is really good because our agenda is not just to provide a competitor for these

00:30:25.940 folks. It's to show them that we are a competitor to them so that they stop doing this.

00:30:29.760 So that they compete. Because right now they don't compete for our business. They take our

00:30:33.940 business for granted.

00:30:35.040 Did you see-

00:30:35.700 I want to take my kids to Disneyland. I don't want my kids to go to Disneyland where they

00:30:38.460 won't see ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. And so I'd like them to go back to saying

00:30:41.680 ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, because as it turns out, that is the entire spectrum

00:30:45.020 of humanity. There are no other people.

00:30:46.280 Did you see at Dallas Love Airport, they're trying out these new seven-foot-tall robots

00:30:51.220 that have cameras. They make announcements. They have cameras. And if you're not wearing

00:30:54.580 your mask, they're going to yell at you for not wearing your mask.

00:30:57.380 Really?

00:30:57.500 And they can call the cops. They're just trying them out, but there's a possibility they'll

00:31:01.340 roll these things out at other airports.

00:31:03.280 They're called Karens.

00:31:04.140 They're called, yes, the Karen machine. And it got me thinking. So now we've got surveillance

00:31:08.760 everywhere. We've got robots yelling on us to muzzle ourselves. America is now a lot

00:31:13.680 like China, except the movies are just a little gayer. You know, the movies are just a little

00:31:18.240 more woke. But that's a very scary thing. When you see it in the politics and the corporations,

00:31:23.120 if you don't fight back now, if you don't get Elon to buy Twitter, if you don't start

00:31:26.200 pushing back on that whole apparatus, it just suffocates.

00:31:28.760 I love the people at Twitter complaining that Elon was going to stop them from censoring

00:31:33.120 conservatives. I mean, at least they're open about it.

00:31:36.640 You know, Washington Post had an entire article.

00:31:38.560 From Jeff Bezos.

00:31:39.600 Democracy dies in darkness. Democracy dies in darkness. But we need more darkness.

00:31:43.680 Or else democracy will die.

00:31:44.820 And we can't have rich people telling us what to say.

00:31:46.560 Yeah, we definitely cannot.

00:31:47.540 Can we, Mr. Bezos? No, no, you can't have that.

00:31:50.020 But it is, again, I'm very gratified that there, I think the pushback this year is going

00:31:54.760 to be huge. And I think, frankly, that the biggest vulnerability is something that Matt

00:31:58.780 has mentioned before, and that is weak-kneed Republicans, man. I mean, if I have to watch

00:32:02.220 Spencer Cox, the Utah governor, refer to his own gender pronouns again, Utah is the

00:32:07.720 reddest state in America. Okay, like what in the world is happening?

00:32:11.060 The Mormons will tell you this. The Mormons are very left-wing religious, you know, they're

00:32:16.280 very culturally left.

00:32:17.520 I think the guys like Spencer Cox, he's kind of betting on the anti-gender ideology backlash

00:32:23.740 among conservatives as sort of a trend. It's a fad, and we'll get over it, and we'll get

00:32:27.200 back to, you know, focusing on taxes and all the rest of it. But I think that's the wrong

00:32:31.940 bet. I think this is something people are going to find out.

00:32:33.280 You know, it's also this, it's just the cult of niceness.

00:32:36.380 Yep.

00:32:36.900 Yeah.

00:32:37.080 And niceness is not goodness. Niceness is not righteousness.

00:32:41.880 But I think we should remain, I think we should remain loving and accepting of people.

00:32:45.440 Loving and accepting is not the same as nice.

00:32:46.840 No, of course not. But I mean, I think we should remain loving and accepting, but understand.

00:32:50.340 Well, loving, but not accepting necessarily.

00:32:51.920 But, you know, the thing is, the thing is, in order to be accepting, you need a norm.

00:32:56.220 You know, when you're an artist, you're an oddball. You know, you're outside of the norm.

00:33:01.460 All my life, I've known that, like, I'm here, I'm living in the house of the garbage man and

00:33:06.320 the cop and the businessman. I've always understood that, you know, that I'm like the entertainer.

00:33:10.780 I'm the guy, hopefully, I entertain and enlighten and do all that stuff. But I'm not the guy who

00:33:14.840 builds the house. I live in the house. I mean, Homer lives in the house of the soldiers. You

00:33:18.720 know, that's the way it is. If the soldiers aren't there, there's no Homer. If Homer's not

00:33:22.280 there, there's still soldiers, you know. They can live. And I think that understanding

00:33:26.200 that you're not at the center of things makes you more valuable in what you do, if you do

00:33:30.520 it well and if you serve the center. I do not understand, I do not understand why we on

00:33:35.020 the right should accept every single argument for destroying the things that make the country

00:33:39.740 free and good, you know.

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00:34:57.120 ability to provide for them financially, really is an obligation. Do the right thing. Head to

00:35:03.280 policygenius.com. And we have another question from one of the members that Ben so eloquently

00:35:08.000 pointed out. Pay our bills. Make it possible for us to engage in the cultural battles that we're

00:35:13.520 engaged in at The Daily Wire. How can we help people understand that life involves pain and that

00:35:18.240 not everything is supposed to be easy? That's like the great question. How the hell should we

00:35:24.120 know? Yeah. If you just wait around long enough. Yeah, they'll figure it out. Yeah, they'll figure

00:35:28.920 it out. Well, the first thing is that we teach in gratitude, right? I mean, understanding that life

00:35:35.300 is not supposed to be easy is the first step toward becoming a grateful person, which means being a

00:35:39.860 happy person. Because then you're grateful for the good stuff that happens rather than ungrateful for

00:35:43.860 the bad stuff that happens. And there's a picture for the Kansas City Royals named Dan Quisenberry.

00:35:48.140 And he passed away of brain cancer, I believe, in the 90s. And when he was diagnosed with brain

00:35:52.520 cancer, he's still upbeat. And people are asking him, why are you so upbeat? He said, well, because

00:35:58.940 when most people would ask me, like, people go into this mode and they say, why me? And he said,

00:36:03.380 well, why not me? I mean, that's kind of meaning like that is unfortunately life. I mean,

00:36:08.500 just bad stuff happens to everyone. And the question is, how grateful are you going to be for the

00:36:13.260 good stuff that happens to you? And I think that because we, I've said this before, but I think

00:36:16.920 maybe the most meaningful single verse in the Bible after human beings are made in the image of God

00:36:21.800 is Yeshua and got fat and kicked. I think that's the description of all civilized societies. It's from

00:36:27.660 Deuteronomy. The idea being that once you live in a fat and happy society, you forget there's

00:36:33.760 supposed to be pain. You forget that God is protecting you from a lot of these things. You forgot

00:36:37.920 the foundations of your society that allow you to escape that pain. You start wailing away at those

00:36:42.400 foundations with a sledgehammer, and then you're shocked when the building comes caving in on you.

00:36:46.000 And so, you know, I think that we are privileged to have lived in the freest, most prosperous

00:36:51.780 country in the history of the world. And so we are not used to any level of pain to the point where

00:36:56.280 we're idiots about even allowing certain baseline levels of risk to exist in our lives, which is

00:37:01.020 why we're masking up two-year-olds on planes still. But it's a real, you know, it's an interesting

00:37:04.780 point that there's a great writer that I just discovered this year named Thomas Traherne,

00:37:09.280 who wrote what C.S. Lewis called the most beautiful book in the world. If you've never

00:37:12.840 read this, it's a wonderful book. But he talks about this. He talks about this exact thing that

00:37:18.340 every day you wake up and like the sun is still there and you don't see it. You know, you don't

00:37:23.140 see that the sun is there and it provides all this heat and warmth and, you know, gives you the

00:37:27.160 vegetation. You do not see it. But when things go wrong, you say, why me? But you didn't ask all the

00:37:32.520 other days. Why me? Why am I here? Why do I get to do this? Why do I get to live? You know,

00:37:37.540 where were you when I created the sun? You know, but yeah, I mean, it is a thing that every day is

00:37:43.680 a day and every day is like this kind of celebration of life. And yeah. I do have an important tool too

00:37:48.980 here, which is this is as an attitudinal matter, probably the central Catholic insight, which is

00:37:56.060 suffering is not necessarily bad. Suffering, you know, you get the caricature of a Catholic like

00:38:02.100 flogging himself and running down the street bleeding. But there's a lot of wisdom in recognizing

00:38:07.060 suffering is, as you say, Ben, it's a fact. It's neither morally good or morally bad. It's just

00:38:12.940 something that you will encounter. And so you do have a moral choice here, though. And the moral

00:38:17.940 choice is how you react to the inevitable suffering that you will endure. That's just the core of free

00:38:22.580 will. Will you do it in a way that is destructive and harms you and harms the

00:38:26.000 people around you? Or will you do it in a way that is edifying? I think spiritually edifying,

00:38:30.980 but certainly even just physically edifying. You know, the old whatever doesn't kill me makes

00:38:34.980 makes me stronger. How are you going? That's the only thing in your control. You're not you are not

00:38:39.300 going to avoid suffering. So how are you going to react to it when it comes? And it's such a mystery

00:38:42.940 the people who are political, you know, prisoners and political victims who get tortured, who get

00:38:48.740 imprisoned and come out saying like, no, now I get it. Now I understand. And, you know,

00:38:53.440 assaults on this and there's a good one. Viktor Frankl writes about Viktor Frankl. Oh,

00:38:56.620 my God, what a great book that is. Man's Search for Meaning. He writes at length about the idea

00:38:59.760 that you can be in a prison camp. They're executing all of your friends by shoving them

00:39:03.680 into gas chambers. But you still have the choice in how to address even that situation. That's that's

00:39:08.080 the root of man. That is such a great book. And a guy who was, you know, a guy who was kind of

00:39:12.920 pushed to the side because he invented a therapy that actually depended on gratitude and God,

00:39:18.040 which I think was they were actually working to push aside. It's wonderful. It's also the meaning of freedom.

00:39:22.140 If you are simply the victim of circumstance and you take suffering as depriving you of choice,

00:39:29.020 then you're not free. Then you are a slave. But if you can actually be facing the gas chamber,

00:39:33.140 the firing line, a lion in the Colosseum and say, no, you actually can't take from me my dignity.

00:39:38.380 You can't take from me my faith and my hope. You're a truly free man.

00:39:42.640 And by the way, I agree with you as a person who will avoid suffering in every possible...

00:39:46.920 It's like they say everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

00:39:48.960 I think that is an aspect of this that we haven't hit on, which is that

00:39:52.140 the desire to avoid suffering or the desire to make life easier than it might ordinarily be

00:40:00.180 is a great motivating desire in the market. I mean, it causes us to create new technologies.

00:40:05.920 It causes us to create new therapies. It causes us to create the world, right?

00:40:11.560 The mistake is to believe that simply because man can take steps to mitigate against pain and

00:40:17.640 suffering. Pain and suffering aren't part of the natural state.

00:40:21.620 And the other mistake is thinking that we've talked before about the definition of rights.

00:40:25.480 So the modern attitude is that actually you have a right to a life free of suffering. You have a

00:40:30.640 right to the avoidance of suffering, which actually brings us back to the kind of the gender ideology

00:40:34.020 conversation because you hear it there a lot where, for example, you know, well, you got to give

00:40:39.640 someone puberty blockers because they didn't consent to puberty. And, uh, and puberty is a real thing.

00:40:46.840 I did not consent to this thing happening to my body. It makes me uncomfortable. And so therefore

00:40:51.700 I have a right to stop it. Right. But that's the natural order. When I was eight or 10 years old,

00:40:57.880 my, uh, one, one of my uncle's wives, uh, broke wind in a public setting. Uh, and immediately thereupon

00:41:05.880 said, I can't believe that did that. Obviously it's a funny line and it stuck with me, but it,

00:41:12.780 it is part of this sort of the, the, the heresy of the moment to believe that your own body is apart

00:41:19.060 from you, that your own body is back to Cartesian duality now. And we've been trying, I mean,

00:41:24.080 one of the great Catholic insights is of course that we are embodied human beings. Um, and, uh,

00:41:28.120 this is, you know, and which is true for, I think virtually all major religion is that you're an

00:41:31.640 embodied human being, but the Cartesian duality that has been so thoroughly debunked is back in with

00:41:35.840 with vengeance and all this. I also, I also think that the, we need to separate out types of pain

00:41:40.640 here. So there, we've been talking about the natural pain. It's just a part of life, illness,

00:41:44.640 death, real suffering. And then there's pain that people just wish to avoid because they wish to

00:41:49.620 avoid anything that is difficult for them to do. And that's obligation. And that's not pain.

00:41:53.760 Right. I mean, I think that, that we, we in Western society have largely conflated the notion of

00:41:57.680 obligation with pain because obligation is a burden and burdens are innately more difficult.

00:42:02.920 That's why they are called burdens. But what we failed to realize that those

00:42:05.680 obligations are what make life fulfilling. The more obligations you take on in your life is,

00:42:09.760 you know, Jordan Peterson makes this point a lot, but it's, but it's true long before Jordan was

00:42:12.540 saying it. The obligations we take on in our lives are the things that make us the most human. They

00:42:16.920 are the things that define who we are. Those choices we make to take on having a wife, having

00:42:21.280 children, or getting, you know, getting married, having friends, being a building part of your

00:42:25.720 community. These are all a pain in the butt. But when we say they're a pain in the butt, we don't

00:42:29.380 actually mean that they're physically painful or that they're painful in the way cancer is painful.

00:42:32.400 What we mean is that they are additional obligations, but a life free of obligation is also a life free

00:42:37.000 of all of the bonds that actually root you in a community and root you to the things that make

00:42:41.560 you happy in life. Discipline. The word that we're looking for is discipline. The Bible says that God

00:42:45.360 disciplines those whom he loves. It doesn't say he punishes those whom he loves. That's a completely

00:42:49.020 different concept. Discipline, you know, it's by discipline that you graduated law school. It's by

00:42:54.580 discipline that you write so many crappy books. It's by discipline that you avoid writing books.

00:42:59.680 All of that is a great discipline, right? You're working against your worst impulses in service

00:43:06.940 of perhaps some of your better, you know, the better you that can be revealed through those

00:43:12.680 actions. Working out is a discipline. Learning a language is a discipline. And so it's not that

00:43:18.620 there is no pain in discipline. Of course there is. You know, if you just use working out as an

00:43:24.180 example, working out creates physical discomfort. But through the process of that discomfort, one is

00:43:29.020 made stronger. And then one can absorb more discomfort. I mean, that's part of the beauty

00:43:32.360 of discipline. I think that, you know, I've heard pastors before say that God punishes those whom

00:43:38.380 he loves, which I don't see any real evidence for that in the text. But that he disciplines us,

00:43:44.180 certainly, that he allows us to face adversity, that we might gain strength. And probably, I would

00:43:49.640 say, ultimately, he allows us to face adversity so that we can learn humility.

00:43:54.260 Can we talk about the working out thing for a minute? Have you noticed that the left has suddenly

00:43:57.780 become very, very anti-working out? Not just that they're very, like, there's this whole thing

00:44:02.280 online. It's a right-wing conspiracy. Correct. That's right. A whole article recently. Where

00:44:05.880 was that article? I think it was about the New York Times. Yeah, about how, or Slate or Salon. I

00:44:10.600 can't remember. It was this little article about how it was right-wing extremism, all these right-wing

00:44:14.460 extremists in there, and they're working out. And it's like, I mean, first of all, I mean,

00:44:18.360 Jane Fonda was doing workout videos back in the 80s. Now, shortly after she was hobnobbing with the

00:44:21.740 Vietcong. So I'm pretty sure that this is not necessarily a right-wing thing. But when did it be,

00:44:25.540 the left has decided that they are so invested in breaking the bonds between cause and effect

00:44:31.360 that they will actively get angry at you if you're like, you know what? It would be better if you

00:44:36.240 lost weight. I don't want to disabuse them of that because they want to get fat and out of shape.

00:44:41.480 For the coming civil war, it's like, it's probably better off. But it is amazing. I mean,

00:44:45.820 there's this whole article, there's this whole debate online today because Shank Uyger was saying

00:44:50.320 that Joe Rogan and Tim Poole and all these crazy right-wingers, and they named a bunch of people

00:44:56.360 who aren't right-wing. And he's like, all these people, they're very into working out. And they

00:45:00.580 pretend that it's because they're anti-obesity. It's just because they hate fat people. It's

00:45:03.620 obesity phobic. And it's all cover for their, like Bill Maher, it's all cover for how much they

00:45:08.260 hate fat people when they tell fat people to lose weight. And it's like, every condition is worse

00:45:12.520 because of obesity. I don't understand. Like, what?

00:45:14.460 In the New York Times op-ed page, if almost every other day, but certainly every week,

00:45:20.460 there's an article by someone saying, usually a woman, saying, I'm miserable and you can be

00:45:26.580 miserable too. Whereas, like, I get letters because I'm very big on moms and families and

00:45:31.520 homemaking. I think that they're essential tools of both society and freedom. And I think the problem

00:45:37.120 we have with, the problem I have with feminism is not that women shouldn't have a choice,

00:45:41.980 but that it advises them against their best choice, what is often their best choice. Now,

00:45:46.400 again, there are exceptions, but still, in general, this should be one of the elevated positions.

00:45:51.260 It's a superpower for God's sake. It's a superpower, but not just giving birth,

00:45:55.860 raising children. That's the superpower. It's all part of a giant superpower called raising kids.

00:46:01.280 Transforming houses into homes. I mean, this is a major, major thing that supports everything.

00:46:05.460 And we don't give it enough credit and we don't support it. Now with feminism, we actually attack it.

00:46:09.400 And I get letters all the time, like every single day from women saying, you know what,

00:46:13.380 I took your advice or I was encouraged to do this and now I'm so much happier. Whereas the New York

00:46:17.260 Times actually has, every week, has an article by a woman saying, boy, I'm miserable. And you should

00:46:23.760 do this too because, you know, then we'll all be miserable together. You know what you think?

00:46:27.120 By the way, we'll all be miserable together is basically the leftist pitch. It really is. From economics

00:46:31.600 to social policy, it is all the leftist pitch. We will all be miserable together. We'll be equal in our

00:46:36.820 misery. And no one will be better. And that's utopia. Utopia is we are all equal in our misery.

00:46:40.980 This is something that, I guess I can't say a lot about it, but making the film, we went to Africa

00:46:46.360 and... Easy now. Here we go. That's in the teaser.

00:46:51.400 You may want to leave this chat for a while. The one thing I will say is that, you know,

00:46:55.660 talking to a tribal community in Africa, very focused on duty and obligation. Like that's

00:47:04.080 everything is your roles and your responsibility. And it's not, this is not a lifestyle that any

00:47:08.520 of us would want to live. I mean, living in mud huts and so on. But because they, they knew what

00:47:13.040 their duties and responsibilities were, they had, they had no questions about their identity. You

00:47:15.900 know, they didn't think about that. And they were also, there was also certain contentment because

00:47:19.740 you knew what you were supposed to do. And we, we've gotten rid of, of, of that sense of what are

00:47:23.720 you supposed to do? So you lose your sense of identity.

00:47:25.680 But are, this is a great point, Matt, are conservatives willing to articulate and defend

00:47:31.720 and dare I even use the word enforce a norm and say that not all norms need to be blown up to

00:47:38.320 Drew's point. I don't know that we are because we're, because we're nice guys and we don't actually

00:47:43.080 care how people live their lives. And we just kind of want to have a nice family and live in a nice

00:47:46.940 society. Are we really willing to say, Hey, don't chop off that body part. That's an important one,

00:47:51.480 by the way. Doctors shouldn't do that. Or are we really willing to do what our society did for

00:47:56.760 all the time? Only in moments, only in moments like that, when they're chopping people up and

00:48:00.160 we're disgusted by it because of some natural disgust that we can't defend and debate.

00:48:05.080 Right. But, but nonetheless, it's right. Right. I mean, the problem we have, and it is a serious

00:48:08.960 intellectual philosophical problem is we want to remain free. And we understand that in order to

00:48:14.340 remain free, people have to behave in a moral and probably religious manner, but we can't enforce that

00:48:19.700 religious manner because we want to remain free. That's right. It is a genuine paradox.

00:48:23.900 It is the, it is the Superman paradox. That's right. I always say that Superman is, is the secular

00:48:28.220 American mythological God figure. That's what, that's what Superman is in our culture. And of

00:48:33.180 course, which is why the left hates Superman. They always try to make him less than that.

00:48:36.600 But you know, the great problem of Superman is that he has the power to defeat every evil thing,

00:48:43.220 but were he to act upon that power, he would himself become the evil thing. And so Superman has to

00:48:49.420 content himself with stopping like petty criminals and getting, rescuing cats out of trees. Because

00:48:54.940 if he were to truly act as Superman, then he would, then he would be Lex Luthor, right? Then he would,

00:48:59.480 then he would be the, and that, and that is, that is the problem of free men. Well, the problem of,

00:49:04.980 the problem of free men is that in order to, is, is, is the paradox that one cannot enforce.

00:49:11.360 So I don't think, I don't think he's better cap or better capitalists than we are so often.

00:49:15.440 Yeah. They make movies that are basically propaganda. We pay to see them. That's right.

00:49:19.760 In the same way, they are good at manipulating the culture. Whereas we immediately say like,

00:49:25.320 we just need a law to do that. This is also the paradox. Actually, it's the left that always says

00:49:28.740 we need a law. I think what, what the right is doing is a rear guard action. What happens,

00:49:31.800 the left takes the law away from the right. And then the right says, okay, well, we need a law in

00:49:34.640 response to fix that. And, and the law has to be equal and opposite. So if the left is forcing a

00:49:39.560 certain behavior, we then have to ban that behavior. Right. And so the, the, I think that

00:49:44.880 what there's something, I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this lately, like how you balance these

00:49:49.260 things, how you achieve liberty without destroying roles, because it is true that liberty can be a

00:49:53.520 universal asset that just destroys everything around it. If it's left unbounded, including

00:49:57.280 liberty, including liberty, a hundred percent. Uh, and, uh, and you know, the, the, the solution that

00:50:02.320 I keep coming back to is that, because this is so true in my own religious community and it's true in my

00:50:06.060 life. In my religious community, there can be an enormous amount of social pressure to engage in

00:50:11.640 particular behaviors. And there can be actual social consequences for failing to engage in

00:50:16.400 certain behavior. And that is good. And that is appropriate. If people don't like it, they can

00:50:19.340 leave. And that's true in my local community. And as you abstract out where you're now ruling over

00:50:24.080 more and more people, you can't do that top down. What the left does is they impose secularism top

00:50:28.920 down in order to destroy all the social fabric that exists at the local level. And what the right does in

00:50:32.840 response to like, well, we can rebuild the social fabric by seizing the reins of power,

00:50:36.060 and then cramming down our values top down. But the truth is that real religion and real social

00:50:41.000 capital cannot be built top down. You can only destroy social capital top down. So what you have

00:50:45.240 to do is you have to create freedom up here so that you can build the social capital down here

00:50:49.320 with all of the actual enforcement mechanisms that exist in all of our lives, right? Their

00:50:52.980 enforcement mechanism, take the, the most, the, the basic unit, right? The family in the family,

00:50:57.180 there are tons. There's a lot of compulsion in the family. There's a lot of social consequences

00:51:01.220 in the family. These are also the closest bonds you will ever have with any other human

00:51:04.380 beings on planet earth. And that's perfectly appropriate. And that is right because this

00:51:07.660 is the people who are, they're most local to you. They're the people you agree with the most.

00:51:11.180 They're the people with whom you share values. They're the people who you're going to share

00:51:13.560 costs and benefits and pain and suffering with, right? And so you can have a lot of, of, you know,

00:51:18.840 heavy handedness at the local level. That's what a family is. As you abstract up the chain,

00:51:23.240 I think it's a mistake for the right to think, okay, we can do what we do with the family up here.

00:51:26.360 That's exactly what the left does. They say we can do what we should do up here,

00:51:29.260 down here. And the right response should be up here. We're going to have to understand that

00:51:34.580 there's a lot of disagreement up here. And so the basic functions of government, we cannot give

00:51:38.500 mass enforcement power on, on tons of issues unless they're really extreme. And there's wide

00:51:44.420 agreement up here, but down here, we have to let, we have to let the social capital be built.

00:51:47.660 The only thing I would say to this, I do believe, I agree with everything you just said.

00:51:52.420 The only thing I would say is that we really do have to restore to the states a certain,

00:51:57.060 like, in other words, I don't think it's, right. The state, the state is one of the intervening

00:52:02.040 institutions. The fundamental, the fundamental institution is the religion between man and

00:52:06.500 God. Uh, the, the second institution is family, which is what Ben's talking about. Then you have

00:52:11.640 local religious, religious community, and then you have local community.

00:52:16.020 Ultimately, you have states. Right. But I think it's the state that is.

00:52:18.960 But I want to go one step further. You also have corporations. The reason that we're in collapse

00:52:22.860 right now, the thing that nobody ever really wants to talk about is that the final

00:52:26.700 institution that the left has, has really rotted from the inside is corporate America.

00:52:31.820 The corporations in this country served in an incredibly vital civic role until, I mean,

00:52:38.500 honestly, until the last 15 years, you know, the states have been gone for almost a century.

00:52:43.600 The, the corporations have kept Americans free.

00:52:45.440 It's funny. I was just going to talk about this on my show on Friday. I completely.

00:52:48.360 Then the corporations replaced the church is what happened.

00:52:49.980 That's right. But I just want to take a moment and compliment Ben, because I actually think

00:52:53.500 as someone who's, you know, I like to think one of the first people who recognized your talent and

00:52:59.600 what you could be beyond just your intellect. I think this is the best idea that you've ever

00:53:04.280 articulated. I think that, you know, we were on the phone when you sort of found language for this

00:53:08.900 for the first time. And even hearing you say it again today, slightly more refined, I just think

00:53:12.480 it's incredibly important, which is to say that, you know, one of, one of the great lessons,

00:53:18.340 I think of 2016 is that the right needed to, to actually fight with the same vigor with which

00:53:24.300 the left has been fighting against us. But one of the wrong conclusions that we've come to since

00:53:28.640 2016 is that the techniques that promulgate leftism can be the exact same techniques that

00:53:34.340 promulgate. And it's, and it's not true. Religion is the only thing that can ultimately save our

00:53:40.100 freedom in our country and religion cannot be enforced top down. And it's actually, it's not that the

00:53:45.980 left, the left didn't destroy religion where religion works. They destroyed the religion by

00:53:51.680 taking away freedom. And I think that this, one of the things I hear on the right an awful lot now

00:53:56.840 that I really disagree with is that sort of, this is the inevitable outcome of liberty. Well, you know,

00:54:03.580 almost from the second that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree, we were always going to

00:54:07.900 have drag queen story hour. I'm like, well, that's just a nonsensical point of view. You, you can't treat

00:54:12.820 history as though 250 years didn't happen. And as though every choice that was made was the only

00:54:18.200 choice that could have possibly been made at all the millions of decision points that happened

00:54:22.140 in between. You can certainly say this is, this did flow from that, but you can't suggest

00:54:26.460 this is the only thing that could have flown from it. And we think right now it's in vogue on the right

00:54:31.460 to say, what we're dealing with now is the consequences of liberalism, meaning liberty and the,

00:54:37.680 not, not meaning leftism. This is the consequence of liberalism and the answer must be illiberalism.

00:54:43.120 And I think, well, it's, it's actually fundamentally not true. We're not fundamentally dealing with the

00:54:48.640 consequences of liberalism on the, on the left right now. We're dealing with the consequences

00:54:52.880 of illiberalism on the left. What's really got everyone so worked up since, essentially since 2012,

00:55:01.060 I'll, I'll say 2012 because I actually think the beginning of the Obama era,

00:55:04.000 uh, uh, I disagree with the ascension of Obama country. I didn't, I didn't vote for Barack Obama

00:55:09.080 in 2008, but I do think that the ascension of Obama in 2008 is like what was in some ways America's

00:55:14.580 highest aspiration for itself that we, that's why he won. He had no accomplishments. That's right.

00:55:19.260 But we were saying something about us. We were saying we have defeated this sort of historical

00:55:23.720 evil in the country. And then Barack Obama made an incredibly cynical political decision

00:55:28.740 at, uh, just before the midpoint of his tenure, which was he could, he was elected as

00:55:33.900 the, there is no black America and there is no white America. There's the United States

00:55:36.660 of America. He was reelected as a, no, just kidding. There's only a white America and it's

00:55:41.180 evil and we have to defeat it. Trayvon Martin's my son. Trayvon Martin's my son. Yeah, that's

00:55:44.620 right. If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. And from, and from that moment, the left became

00:55:48.220 utterly illiberal. And, and we're reacting, 2016 was a reaction to that illiberalism. It was a reaction

00:55:53.860 to the fact that we were being told that we couldn't freely exercise our speech, that we couldn't

00:55:58.860 freely exercise our religion, that we couldn't freely even exercise, uh, our, our base, uh, uh,

00:56:04.860 expressions of what reality was. And we're react, it's that illiberalism fundamentally that we've

00:56:09.940 been reacting to. And I think that this, this Obama moment changed the country in so many profound

00:56:15.880 ways, including, you brought this up a little bit ago, the fact that, uh, the fact that the don't,

00:56:21.520 don't say gay bill down in Florida, that, that, that line don't say gay, that's how the,

00:56:26.380 that might as well be the name of the bill in all mainstream publications, right? The,

00:56:30.620 the actual centers of journalism for the country, the New York times, the Washington post, the wall

00:56:36.780 street journal, they all without a hint of self-awareness, identify the bill as the don't

00:56:43.940 say gay bill. If we say Joe Biden is president, we will get a missing context fact check for not

00:56:50.220 saying, and he is also a great president, the most popular president ever. They will fact check us for

00:56:55.840 it. Yeah. The New York times can refer to the legislation down in Florida as the don't get

00:57:01.260 say gay bill. Well, they put it in quotes though. So that gives them, or they say, they say they're

00:57:04.880 so-called, but they won't say who says the so-called. That's right. But, but in doing that, they're,

00:57:09.680 they're promulgating a particular talking point of the left with absolutely no consequences. And it's

00:57:17.620 because the illiberalism of Barack Obama fundamentally changed the relationship between

00:57:23.120 news media. But this is the great example. This is, this is absolutely true. And it's always true.

00:57:28.100 It was true, you know, in the, uh, in the Spanish civil war, that it was the socialism that, uh, you

00:57:33.820 know, that spread out through the community that caused the fascists to rise. It's not, you know,

00:57:39.000 the right is always reactionary. This is why I am daily praying that the Supreme court will have the

00:57:45.380 guts to overturn Roe v. Wade, because in the same way that's the evil of slavery tainted states' rights,

00:57:51.620 I think the evil of abortion has tainted the federal government. And, and, and it's a great,

00:57:56.700 I think in, in the moment, if, if they have the guts to overturn it, I think we will continue this

00:58:01.420 trend of what is cultural federalism. People will start to move to states, not just because they can

00:58:06.800 get a job there, but because people live the way they want to live. And I think that that's a

00:58:10.540 beautiful thing. It could, if you follow the wrong track, it could lead to civil war. But if you follow

00:58:15.400 the, you know, a more optimistic path, it could mean that we do what we're supposed to do,

00:58:20.060 which is experiment in our states with a different way of life.

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01:00:23.300 I just want to make one point about you mentioned the Obama moment, because I was thinking about

01:00:26.860 this past week when we were hearing about Kentonji Jackson, and she was confirmed, and we're

01:00:33.860 supposed to accept this as a great moment because we have a black woman on the Supreme Court.

01:00:37.420 Wait, you don't know if she's a woman, neither is she.

01:00:38.860 Oh, well, we don't know that. Right. But assuming for a second that she's a woman, that she is

01:00:41.980 black, because I guess we don't really know that either. But even if I wanted to accept

01:00:46.580 that, it's like, well, because of Obama, we've made racism, systemic racism, into an

01:00:51.920 unfalsifiable theory. So they say, you know, last week, it's a big moment. We've achieved

01:00:56.960 something. And the very next day, we're back to where we started. It's just like slavery.

01:01:00.300 How far we have to go.

01:01:00.900 And that's what happened with Obama, because they turned racism into this kind of like abstract

01:01:05.200 thing that exists in the ether. And so you could ask them, well, okay, you say we have systemic

01:01:10.240 racism or a racist country. What would you need to see happen to convince you otherwise? And there's

01:01:17.100 literally nothing that could happen. We can't even elect a black president to convince you

01:01:20.440 otherwise. And that's one of the things that's just ripping our country apart right now.

01:01:23.640 What they will say is, what they will say is, the income of black Americans and white Americans

01:01:29.840 will have to be identical. The number of college degrees between black Americans and white Americans

01:01:33.180 per capita will have to be identical. In other words, we'll have to buck every trend that has

01:01:36.600 ever been known to humanity. And two groups, who are disparate in many ways, will have to be exactly

01:01:41.340 the same in outcome, no matter the inputs.

01:01:43.780 But even that wouldn't matter. I mean, Jon Stewart has been on this, he just recently discovered

01:01:50.040 critical race theory. And so he's on this white guilt tour. And he, on his show, which I didn't

01:01:53.700 even know existed until last week, he was talking about how the American dream is, it doesn't exist

01:01:59.200 for black people. And his proof of this was the three-fifths compromise. Like that, that's the,

01:02:05.620 we have not improved since then.

01:02:08.380 And not only that, but he's wrong about the three-fifths compromise. The three-fifths compromise

01:02:12.700 is one of the better kind of concepts that the founders came up with to long-term in slavery

01:02:18.820 in America. They didn't say a black person is three-fifths of a human. They said, you know,

01:02:24.380 it doesn't make sense, slave owners in the South, that you're going to count your unrepresented,

01:02:29.080 unable to vote, and unable to function in everyday life slave population in your census for the

01:02:35.080 purpose of representation in the Congress. Maybe you can't count them. And the South, particularly

01:02:39.620 South Carolina, essentially said they wouldn't join the union if they didn't get to count them.

01:02:43.120 And so the compromise was, they don't get to count all the way, so that you don't get to use

01:02:49.600 an enslaved population to gain votes.

01:02:53.760 And that's an important academic point. It's true, but it's also like, we should just be able

01:02:58.280 to respond. That makes no difference right now. That has no bearing on modern America.

01:03:03.160 It is against this argument, the whatever it is, 1619 thing, that America's DNA is racist because

01:03:12.240 your DNA makes you more yourself, and we have gotten less and less and less racist.

01:03:15.800 But the 1619 Project, it's being taught in schools. It's being taught in schools all around

01:03:19.340 the country. And I actually think this is why we're focused on the education issue. The reason

01:03:23.800 we talk about girls' sports is no one cares about girls' sports. I don't want to be insensitive,

01:03:28.400 but no one watches the WNBA. We talk about it because-

01:03:30.940 How dare you, sir? I know, no, I'm sorry. Media Matters is going to clip it.

01:03:34.420 But the reason we talk about it is it's the only socially acceptable way to talk about

01:03:39.020 transgenderism, which we all know is wrong, but we don't want to say it. It's the same

01:03:42.380 thing with education. The reason we're focused on education, obviously, it's because we care

01:03:46.000 about our kids. We don't want our kids being brainwashed in this racial nonsense and the

01:03:49.480 sexual nonsense. But it's also because of that paradox in education, which is education

01:03:55.240 makes us free, but education is coercive. So to be free, we have to be coerced, and to

01:04:00.880 learning things. And so it's not even just about, well, which grades, and we got to wait

01:04:06.020 until eight. The question is really, what is America? What is the nature of the relationship

01:04:11.480 of the man to the state? What's the relationship of the man to his own genitals? What's the truth

01:04:16.220 of the matter? And we're having this proxy battle through education, but ultimately, we just need

01:04:20.920 to make some substantive claims, don't we?

01:04:23.100 Yes. No, of course we do. But at the level of education, we can do it coercively beyond that.

01:04:29.980 We can't. That's right. And to your point, we need to make these claims culturally. And this is

01:04:35.660 what the left has been so successful at doing. They actually change the window for the conversation.

01:04:41.860 They make it to where you can only talk about ideas on their terms. And they do this more than

01:04:46.660 anything. They do it through entertainment because we engage so much more in entertainment content,

01:04:51.760 most people, than we do in news content. That's why what we're doing at The Daily Wire over these

01:04:56.020 last, I think, really since 2020, and particularly over these last several weeks, has been so

01:05:01.320 important. We're rolling out feature films from Shut In, The Hyperion, Soon To Be Terror on the

01:05:05.200 Prairie. We're rolling out documentaries now. What is a Woman Coming in May from Matt Walsh,

01:05:10.980 another surprise documentary. I'm not going to announce it tonight, but just hold on to your

01:05:14.720 butts. An unbelievable piece of documentary work that we're going to be releasing over the next

01:05:20.940 couple of months that I know is going to catch the world on fire. And why we're engaging now in

01:05:25.000 this children's content with our DW Kids initiative. It's because if you don't, you have to fish where

01:05:31.180 the fish are, right? And the great, as I've said this in business since we started the company,

01:05:36.100 the great lie of the 20th century is if you build it, they will come. It's simply not true. One reason

01:05:41.780 The Daily Wire has been very successful is because we believe, no, you have to build it. Then you have to

01:05:46.040 tell people that you built it. Then they still won't come and you have to take it to where they are.

01:05:49.800 And maybe then, if you take it where they are and you tell them about it, maybe then they'll engage

01:05:54.680 with your content. When we first put Ben's podcast on radio, no one had done that before in that

01:06:00.680 direction. Plenty of radio shows would also release as a podcast. We wanted to take a podcast and

01:06:05.760 syndicate it to AM radio. And many of the people that we talked to said, well, you can't do that.

01:06:11.800 It's a used piece of content. People want original content. So, well, it is original to your audience.

01:06:16.360 They said, well, no, no, no. It's the same audience. They're going to listen to you guys

01:06:20.120 over there. And I said, it's not the same audience. The people who listen to AM talk radio

01:06:24.420 are not the people who in 2016 were downloading podcasts on their iPhones. That's a completely

01:06:32.420 disparate group. We wanted to put our content everywhere that people engage with it. We want

01:06:37.840 to fish where the fish are. We want to fight where the fight is. And the fight is an entertainment where

01:06:43.160 people's eyeballs are actually affixed as entertainment primarily, where people get most

01:06:47.180 of their ideas. It's sort of like every pastor hates this. But the truth is in most churches,

01:06:53.620 the music pastor has actually more influence than the actual pastor who studies the word his entire

01:07:00.200 life. Because people get a little drowsy when you start going through the Bible and they hear your

01:07:04.760 same tired old jokes again. But in their own voices, they sing the hymns. In their own voices,

01:07:09.180 they sing the songs. And the repetition of that, the power of music, the power of doing it yourself

01:07:13.460 over time, that actually creates the framework. And that's how entertainment works. And that's why

01:07:17.860 we're doing what we're doing at The Daily Wire. That's why we're asking you to go become a member

01:07:21.160 over at dailywire.com slash subscribe. Remember, for the next 24 hours, 24 hours from now, we'll be

01:07:26.440 bringing to a close the longest sale that we've ever run at the company, which is 45% off of your

01:07:33.820 membership. This is not a donation. It is very useful to us in helping to power the work that

01:07:39.860 we do. It makes it possible for us to do what we're doing. It makes it possible for us to make

01:07:43.560 this animated and live action children's content that we're hard at work on right now. But you get

01:07:49.020 something for your money. It's a purchase. You're purchasing terrific content from Ben, from Matt,

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01:08:08.280 relationship that we get to have with our dailywire.com members. Again, dailywire.com

01:08:12.280 slash subscribe for 45% off. Use the promo code BUILDTHEFUTURE. 24 hours left on that promotion.

01:08:19.540 And just to prove that we mean it, here's a question from one of our dailywire.com members.

01:08:24.680 Fellers, what are your predictions for the country in the rest of Biden's term? What should we prepare

01:08:30.280 for? What wins should we focus on? Well, until Biden's out of office, the possibility of major

01:08:36.120 wins are all going to happen at the state level, which is fine, frankly. I mean, as a new resident

01:08:40.620 of a red state, I'm a big fan of federalism. Wasn't as big a fan when I was in California.

01:08:44.820 And I'm fine with Florida continuing to have the best governor in America, Governor DeSantis,

01:08:50.640 press forward excellent legislation. That's fine with me. You know, stymieing Joe Biden's spending

01:08:54.660 plans is going to be a big thing. Trying to press to rebuild the military is going to be a rather

01:08:58.480 major thing. I think economically speaking, the chances that we head into a recession inside of

01:09:02.180 the next year are very, very high right now. I don't think, like economists say, it's like a 28%

01:09:06.200 chance. I think it's more like a 75% chance. I don't think that the Federal Reserve, which has

01:09:09.380 gotten it wrong every step of the way, is suddenly going to start getting it right now. So I think

01:09:14.360 that inflation will be curbed by the Federal Reserve. It'll happen over the course of the next year

01:09:19.260 and a half, but at the cost of a higher unemployment rate and at the cost of economic stagnation.

01:09:24.960 I don't think anybody in either party has the actual stones to do what's necessary on spending.

01:09:28.520 I think the new normal is we spend $6 trillion a year, which means that we go bankrupt sooner

01:09:32.280 rather than later. And austerity measures will come down the pike, say about 2030. That's where

01:09:36.720 I think we're going for the next several years. As far as where the kind of politics of the

01:09:40.620 country go, I think the backlash has begun. I don't think the social backlash is going to let up

01:09:43.900 because I think that the left is so disconnected, utterly disconnected from reality, that they cannot

01:09:47.840 get back to it. I'm amazed. I mean, truly amazed at how wild the left is. Obviously, we all knew

01:09:53.440 because we'd spent a lot of time speaking on college campuses that it was mainstream radical left

01:09:57.760 thinking that a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man. Now you have the press secretary

01:10:01.160 at the White House saying that it is best care to, quote unquote, gender affirm small children.

01:10:06.620 You're supposed to be giving puberty blockers to small children to the extent that the DOJ is going

01:10:10.020 to crack down on states that prevent doctors from giving puberty blockers and gender affirming,

01:10:15.860 meaning biology denying surgeries, to minors. That is so patently insane. I cannot believe it.

01:10:21.600 And so I think the backlash is going to just continue. The only thing I fear here in terms

01:10:25.980 of the politics, aside from the spending issue, is that there is going to be some ability of the

01:10:31.860 Republicans to screw it up, which normally they do. There's only one add on. I agree with every

01:10:36.480 single thing you said. The Biden administration is not going to pass bills. He can't even get his

01:10:41.960 budget through. He's got two stubborn Democrats who are not going to let that happen. Republicans,

01:10:46.380 presumably, are going to retake the House and they might retake the Senate. And so that's not going

01:10:50.420 to matter. The problem, of course, is that the legislature doesn't legislate and they don't

01:10:54.500 actually make our laws. And I am a bill up on Capitol Hill is not the way that our government

01:10:58.260 works. The government is run by the executive agencies. It has been for a long time. And you're

01:11:02.660 going to still get a lot of terrible policy out of that. Just ask the person next to you wearing the

01:11:07.880 muzzle on the on the airplanes. Oh, wait, you can't ask them because they're going to sound like a

01:11:11.720 teacher on peanuts. I mean, I think that the good news here is that the Supreme Court has been

01:11:16.060 cracking back as in the CDC case where we fought back against the OSHA case. And I think that the

01:11:22.300 Supreme Court is going to do some heavy lifting there. But I'm deeply fearful, mostly, that

01:11:29.500 Republicans screw this up in one of two ways. One, they go squishy on the issues that matter most

01:11:33.080 because we've seen this already in places like Utah and Indiana where they are so shy of Larry

01:11:38.180 Hogan in Maryland making the argument that we shouldn't engage in these cultural battles because

01:11:41.440 after all, you might offend somebody. So I'm afraid of Republicans going squishy because they have a

01:11:44.540 tendency to do this. And frankly, I'm also fearful that we get to 2024 and Donald Trump throws his

01:11:51.020 hat in the ring and he is less concerned about the priorities that I care about. And he's more

01:11:54.940 concerned about his own viewpoint with regard to what happened in 2020. I mean, this seems to be

01:11:59.340 what's happening in Georgia right now. And frankly, I got to say, listen, if he's the nominee, I'll vote

01:12:04.840 for him. But would I prefer that he run? No. Would I prefer he be the nominee? No. Do I think there are

01:12:09.640 more effective candidates, including Governor DeSantis? 100% yes. I think that the enthusiasm for

01:12:14.040 Governor DeSantis is justified. I think it is correct. And frankly, I think that he's an

01:12:20.060 extraordinarily competent executive of a major American state who has stood up to the predations

01:12:24.120 of the media in a truly effective way that's made a difference in his state. So if Republicans,

01:12:28.880 I think, make the mistake of trying to relitigate 2020 for 2024, I just think that's such an enormous

01:12:33.320 political blunder that it could steal defeat from the jaws of victory for no apparent reason.

01:12:37.380 I think when it comes to 2024, not that this is scientific or anything, but I did a poll on my

01:12:43.160 Twitter about who would you like to see DeSantis or Trump in 2024. And there's something like 190,000

01:12:49.280 people voted. And it was 70% DeSantis. Again, not scientific, but I think if I had done a poll like

01:12:55.620 that two years ago, certainly two years ago, it would have been 90, 10 the other way. So I do think

01:13:01.140 that there's something there. But I also want to say that with Trump, the argument against him in

01:13:06.200 2024, I think the main one is that, yes, he's going to make it about 2020 when it should be about

01:13:10.480 Biden. It should be about the extreme nature of Democrat Party, gender ideology, culture. It

01:13:17.080 should be about that. But we don't even need to get into that. I think the real argument is that

01:13:21.160 it's just age. I mean, we don't have to get past that, that he's going to be, he would be

01:13:25.320 our oldest president breaking the record set by the last president who was Biden. So the idea that

01:13:30.620 we're going to go from our oldest president to the next oldest president, I think that's enough

01:13:35.300 reason not to. Now, do you think though, that the, that the poll result is about Trump or about

01:13:40.000 DeSantis? Because I love DeSantis. He's the best governor in America. There's no question about

01:13:43.920 it. He, he is unbloodied at the moment. He, they haven't given the deluge of attacks. He hasn't run

01:13:49.900 for president. Trump obviously has, they threw the kitchen sink at him. So is it, is it merely that

01:13:55.480 Trump has been so terribly bloodied people say, cast him to the side? So first of all, I'm going to

01:14:00.160 disagree with the premise. Okay. The media spent the last two years crapping on DeSantis. The

01:14:04.620 reason that he, the reason that DeSantis is a national figure is because the media decided

01:14:07.920 that he was death Santa. Death Santa. He was murdering hundreds of thousands of people in

01:14:11.480 Florida while Andrew Cuomo was grabbing ass up in New York. And so the idea was that he was,

01:14:15.680 that he was the bad guy and he was still a bad guy, right? He quote unquote, don't say gay bill.

01:14:19.480 He's killing all the trans kids and he's attacking Disney and all this. Like the idea that they

01:14:23.720 haven't been going after DeSantis is just not. But it'll get worse in a presidential. It will.

01:14:27.840 But, but, but I mean, of course, but the, the, the fact of the matter is that on a pure

01:14:33.520 governance law, I think the strongest case for DeSantis versus Trump, that on a pure governance

01:14:36.640 level, DeSantis has actually been more effective in, in effecting change in his state than Trump

01:14:41.140 was federally. And I like a lot of what Trump did federally. And if there were skeletons in his

01:14:44.500 closet, if there was dirt on him, you'd think the media would have found it by now. It's not like

01:14:47.920 they're not looking. So I don't have to worry about it. Here's the best proof. Okay. Florida went from a

01:14:52.340 state that had a democratic registered voter majority of 350,000 in 2018 to a state that has

01:14:58.520 a 100,000 vote advantage, registered vote advantage for Republicans in the state of Florida. Ron DeSantis

01:15:04.100 in his current gubernatorial race has raised $101 million. His nearest competitor is Charlie

01:15:09.220 Chris, who has raised $7 million in this gubernatorial race. And it's April. So, you know,

01:15:14.440 like I think that the enthusiasm, I actually don't think it's about Trump. I think it's about some

01:15:18.700 waning enthusiasm for, because listen, the fact that Trump was bloodied is what drove the enthusiasm

01:15:23.160 on our side for him. It's the fact they kept attacking him that drove people like me into

01:15:26.760 his camp, right? It was like, you keep going after him for the dumbest possible reasons because you

01:15:30.460 don't just hate him, you hate me. And that's why I ended up in his camp. It's not that, it's not that

01:15:34.880 they've hit Trump so hard that now everybody, the bloom is off the rose or anything. It's that Trump

01:15:39.100 was unfocused at the last part of his presidency, at the very least, if not throughout his

01:15:42.960 presidency. He's very unfocused now on the things that I think matter most to Americans. I mean,

01:15:46.600 he's busy like trying to take Brian Kemp out as governor of Georgia and get Stacey Abrams

01:15:50.280 away. The problem with President Trump, and it ended up being a great strength for the first

01:15:55.900 three years of his administration. In the last year of his administration, he really choked

01:16:00.540 around with COVID. He choked. He choked going into the election, obviously. And that's not to say that

01:16:05.180 the election was fair, that it wasn't rigged up. Of course, it was rigged by the media and others.

01:16:09.200 But he also gave us Fauci. He did not handle the pandemic the way I would have liked for him to.

01:16:14.840 But the great strength that made him so important in those first three years

01:16:18.920 interestingly was how personally he takes attacks. His great liability now is that he can't get over

01:16:29.380 what is, I understand his feeling about 2020. I don't agree with every aspect of it, but I

01:16:35.740 certainly understand where he's coming from. It was an unfair election. He can't let go of that and

01:16:41.420 look to the actual concerns that his base is facing right now. He's not in the fight that

01:16:46.100 we're in. And to make that situation worse is his endorsement of Dr. Oz this week, which is part and

01:16:52.780 parcel of the same thing, that Trump sees everything through a lens of Trump. And Dr. Oz is like Trump.

01:16:59.440 He's a TV star. They're probably friendly from their days in entertainment.

01:17:04.380 Plus, the rival's a moderate, though. David McCormick's a moderate.

01:17:06.860 But Donald Trump's support of Dr. Oz is not ideological in any way. It's Trump-apological.

01:17:14.880 And that's sometimes what's hilarious about him. Sometimes what's funny about him. And to the

01:17:19.820 extent that the left was attacking him as president, it was a very useful thing about him because he

01:17:24.040 took personally their attacks against him, which, as you say, were attacks against us.

01:17:27.860 I've always thought that Trump was a tragic figure. I always thought the two people who said this were

01:17:32.720 me and Victor Davis Hanson. I said it first, but he wrote a great book about it. And I think that

01:17:37.560 he was the guy that you bring in at that moment because his personal flaws are the personal flaws

01:17:43.740 you need to break the wall that was between the right and these cultural issues that he knew were

01:17:49.880 important. And most politicians, most right-wing politicians didn't. He's too far off. The next

01:17:56.440 presidential election is too far off to worry about. We don't know what's going to happen. We actually

01:18:00.360 don't know, though everybody I know who knows Trump says, I'm 100% sure he's going to win,

01:18:04.420 run. I mean, we don't know that. We just don't because this is the only way he can stay relevant.

01:18:09.240 The point I'm making is a little broader than Trump, which is just Republicans cannot take

01:18:12.120 their eye off the ball. And that's a terrible habit of taking the eye off the ball.

01:18:14.240 Don't look back. To quote the Bard, don't look back. You can never look back.

01:18:17.760 No, that's right. But I think that Trump taught us something. If we don't learn that,

01:18:21.020 I mean, Youngkin learned it. I think DeSantis learned it. No question about it. If we don't

01:18:25.080 remember that, we're going to be in trouble. You know, the point that you made about corporations,

01:18:29.060 I just want to go back to this for a minute. You know, corporations do what they do almost

01:18:34.060 always at an essential level for economic reasons. And the thing is that you can, uh-oh.

01:18:39.480 Hey, what is this? They just let anybody in here?

01:18:42.000 Oh, my God. What's security? I thought we had security in them.

01:18:44.480 No, no. I beat all of them.

01:18:50.200 You're going to hang out with us?

01:18:51.260 Absolutely, sir.

01:18:51.920 Hey, that's fun.

01:18:52.480 Wow, great. And actually, you guys are taking over my show at the same time.

01:18:56.380 Are we live right now?

01:18:57.740 We're on Tim Poole's show right now.

01:18:59.700 You are all my guests on TimCast IRL right now.

01:19:02.560 Wow.

01:19:02.960 I couldn't fit all of your names in the title, so I just went with Ben Shapiro.

01:19:06.660 Wait a minute.

01:19:07.440 That's fair. That's the only one that's going to get you to the audience.

01:19:09.420 Nice set, dude.

01:19:10.520 Oh, thank you.

01:19:10.880 I mean, like, you did a nice job with this.

01:19:12.420 This is way better.

01:19:14.160 We're in a trailer out in your alley.

01:19:16.940 Yeah.

01:19:17.260 People don't realize that Tim has been broadcasting from our hill all week from a fifth-wheel trailer

01:19:22.700 that he converted into a mobile studio, and tonight he's going to learn how God feels

01:19:26.820 about it because we have thunderstorms coming through Nashville in 45 minutes, and he'll

01:19:31.740 still be broadcasting from the most dangerous place in America to be in a theater.

01:19:35.520 Welcome to my show, everybody.

01:19:37.020 Oh, good to be here.

01:19:37.780 Thanks for having me.

01:19:38.860 Absolutely.

01:19:39.620 This is the best lineup of guests I've ever had on TimCast IRL.

01:19:42.340 I really like being on your show from here because when I go on your show from the hinterland,

01:19:47.140 I've got to drive an hour through the woods with serial killers.

01:19:50.080 It's like the Texas Chainsaw Man.

01:19:50.800 It is.

01:19:51.400 It is.

01:19:52.080 It's a cool house.

01:19:52.940 Your security guy almost gave me a heart attack as I was walking out.

01:19:56.020 I walk out in the dark of night, and this guy goes, hi.

01:20:00.560 Well, it's funny when we've invited some left personalities who already have apprehension

01:20:06.240 and then get really scared because, you know, we're in, it's Western Maryland, but it's the

01:20:11.820 middle of nowhere.

01:20:12.260 It's like the Blue Ridge Mountains.

01:20:13.460 Yep.

01:20:13.640 And you drive through pitch black, and then you have to drive up a long, it's about a,

01:20:19.360 you know, what, like 1,500 feet driveway.

01:20:21.660 And there are security deer everywhere.

01:20:23.600 They are.

01:20:24.660 They're ready to pound.

01:20:25.300 Well, you know, when you're driving up in the dead of night and your lights are on,

01:20:28.280 all of a sudden you see glowing eyes everywhere.

01:20:30.600 And then you're like, I think most people are fine with it.

01:20:33.640 In the summer, it's fine.

01:20:34.500 It's still day out when you arrive.

01:20:35.820 It is.

01:20:36.280 That's true.

01:20:36.640 Well, what were you guys talking about before I interrupt you?

01:20:38.240 We were talking about 2024 and what we think is going to happen, and we're sort of positing

01:20:43.560 the thesis that Democrats are so wildly out of tune with the American public right now

01:20:47.140 that Republicans look pretty good, but they could make the mistake of taking their eye

01:20:50.360 off the ball, which brought up the inevitable T-word, right, of course, which is Trump and

01:20:53.980 whether he runs it.

01:20:54.400 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:20:55.600 I think so, but isn't it starting to feel like DeSantis might be-

01:20:58.740 Your mouth's to God's ears, my friend.

01:21:01.740 I will say that Trump's saying, I think just this last week, that his health would be a factor.

01:21:06.000 And making the decision is the first time that he said anything that in any way left

01:21:10.980 him an out not to run.

01:21:12.320 Yeah.

01:21:12.820 And in many ways, you know, he has a lot to lose.

01:21:17.980 I agree.

01:21:18.400 If he runs.

01:21:19.900 There's always going to be an asterisk beside his 2020 loss.

01:21:23.560 If he were to run and lose in 2024, you remove the asterisk.

01:21:27.680 And all the prosecutions that they're threatening him with is clearly political.

01:21:31.880 Now, that makes me want him to run.

01:21:33.620 Like, keep playing dirty.

01:21:35.380 No, I don't think so, because I think that he could actually be hurt financially by those

01:21:40.280 if he runs.

01:21:40.800 If he doesn't run, they won't.

01:21:42.180 I have this sense.

01:21:43.560 Everybody keeps telling me I'm wrong.

01:21:45.080 Everybody who knows Trump tells me I'm wrong.

01:21:46.860 I have this sense he's not going to run, that he's staying relevant.

01:21:49.620 He's raising money off his, you know, the hints that he's going to run.

01:21:53.580 But I just don't think there's enough in it for him.

01:21:55.840 And he's old.

01:21:56.640 Well, I always like to tell you you're wrong.

01:21:58.000 Now, to your point, Drew, that the prosecutions could hurt him, that this is the problem that

01:22:02.840 the powers that be are powerful.

01:22:04.900 Yes, yes.

01:22:05.660 They can actually wield that power and really hurt you.

01:22:07.800 But why is DeSantis not in the same vein as Trump?

01:22:11.880 Well, he doesn't run if Trump runs, I think.

01:22:14.560 I think he might.

01:22:14.980 You know, I'm beginning to doubt that's true.

01:22:16.640 Really?

01:22:16.840 I'm beginning to doubt that's true.

01:22:17.640 And the reason that I'm beginning to doubt that's true is because I think that what

01:22:20.820 DeSantis, like most good politicians, understands is there is a time.

01:22:24.420 This is something that Jeremy and I have discussed a bunch of times before, which is that there

01:22:28.620 are certain politicians where it's like if they had grabbed the moment, it would have

01:22:31.440 been their moment.

01:22:32.480 And if they missed the moment, they're toast.

01:22:33.900 And this happened with, for example, Elizabeth Warren in 2016.

01:22:36.240 If she had jumped in in 2016 and not let Hillary Clinton foreclose her, she would have

01:22:41.020 been the Bernie figure in that race.

01:22:42.400 And she would have stolen a lot of thunder from Hillary Clinton being the first presidential

01:22:46.440 woman nominee.

01:22:48.340 Chris Christie in 2012.

01:22:49.480 Right.

01:22:49.720 Chris Christie in 2012.

01:22:50.400 Like there are certain periods where if you take, if you go for the brass ring and you

01:22:54.240 grab at it, it's your moment.

01:22:55.720 And then if you miss it, it's just gone.

01:22:57.260 And also, also the other thing is, I think DeSantis understands that in the primary in

01:23:03.260 2016, Republicans running against Trump, they either just ignored him and didn't attack

01:23:08.100 him at all, which was a mistake, or they attacked him basically from the left.

01:23:11.220 And they said that, well, I don't like his attitude.

01:23:13.740 It makes me uncomfortable.

01:23:14.540 Well, I think Trump is vulnerable.

01:23:16.900 And what DeSantis probably understands, although I don't know him, is that if you can go at

01:23:21.000 Trump from the right and you can say, you can hit Trump on vaccines, you can hit him

01:23:24.420 on Fauci, you can hit him on COVID.

01:23:27.040 And I think-

01:23:27.880 I actually think the best path for DeSantis, as you said, we're still two years away from

01:23:32.960 this.

01:23:33.780 But if DeSantis were to choose to challenge Trump, I actually think his best path is not

01:23:37.560 to hit Trump.

01:23:38.440 I think his best path is essentially to say, Mr. President, I voted for you.

01:23:44.480 There's no question in my mind that you are the man we needed in 2016.

01:23:48.320 The question is, are you the man that we need in 2020?

01:23:50.360 Trump's not going to allow that.

01:23:51.940 That's what they tried in 2016.

01:23:53.820 And then eventually Trump will turn around and go after you.

01:23:57.120 And you're just sitting there, you're not prepared for it.

01:23:59.900 So I think you have to be more proactive.

01:24:02.200 You don't have to be obsessive about it, but you make your argument from the right.

01:24:06.160 I agree with you that a lot of Trump's appeal in 2016, because I felt this way when he was

01:24:10.220 debating Jeb Bush, is that he just kept pummeling the guy who was more to the center.

01:24:13.800 And Jeb Bush would be like, I'm really uncomfortable with how you talk about illegal immigration.

01:24:16.900 And Trump would be like, you're stupid.

01:24:18.400 Like, yeah!

01:24:19.480 And there's a lot of that.

01:24:20.840 I feel like I have a different perspective from you guys, because for one, look how I'm

01:24:25.460 dressed compared to you guys.

01:24:26.640 I do think, in all honesty, though, I come from kind of a different world.

01:24:29.360 I grew up in Chicago, and I didn't vote for Trump in 2016.

01:24:32.560 I don't think everybody here did.

01:24:33.640 Did you guys?

01:24:34.120 No, I didn't.

01:24:34.460 I did.

01:24:35.020 I did not vote for either.

01:24:35.960 In 2020, I've just been seeing over the past decade what I would describe as the left

01:24:40.880 being so unreasonable and just out of their minds.

01:24:43.760 I'm sitting with a group of prominent conservatives, and this is not how I grew up.

01:24:48.640 I grew up in Chicago, surrounded by Democrats.

01:24:51.320 And now I'm looking at 2024, and I'm like, I would vote for DeSantis.

01:24:56.220 I didn't like Trump in 2016.

01:24:59.360 I voted for him because I know Biden, because I knew the Obama administration.

01:25:02.700 You voted for him in 2020.

01:25:03.960 2020, sorry.

01:25:04.740 In 2020, I voted for Trump.

01:25:06.760 I liked that he didn't start new wars.

01:25:08.360 I liked the Abraham Accords.

01:25:09.440 I liked school choice.

01:25:10.960 And I did not like wokeness, because I think it's an affront to all of the civil rights battles

01:25:16.060 that have been fought.

01:25:17.300 Now we see DeSantis in Florida, and everything he's doing speaks to me.

01:25:20.460 Not everything, but a lot of it.

01:25:21.540 So I don't know if I would vote for Trump.

01:25:23.700 I didn't necessarily want to vote for him in the first place.

01:25:25.720 This is, I think, the biggest issue for Trump.

01:25:28.100 And that is that my theory of elections is that elections are oppositional, and whoever

01:25:32.960 the election is a referendum on loses.

01:25:35.160 So in 2016, the great myth that the media tried to create is that it was a referendum

01:25:38.380 on Trump.

01:25:38.880 And it was not a referendum on Trump.

01:25:40.020 It was a referendum on Hillary Clinton.

01:25:41.280 People looked at Hillary, and they're like, I hate that lady.

01:25:43.360 She's awful.

01:25:44.160 She's garbage.

01:25:45.000 And I don't know this Trump guy.

01:25:46.180 He's real weird.

01:25:46.960 He says dumb stuff.

01:25:47.880 But I'll take a shot at it.

01:25:48.980 That's right.

01:25:49.240 This is how Trump can get fewer votes in Wisconsin than did Mitt Romney four years earlier.

01:25:54.760 That's right.

01:25:55.180 And still win Wisconsin.

01:25:56.340 Correct.

01:25:56.580 Because the election was really about Hillary.

01:25:59.040 Right.

01:25:59.220 The Democrats were like, eh.

01:26:00.620 And then by 2020, Joe Biden ran what for him was, I think, the only campaign he could

01:26:04.440 run.

01:26:04.640 But it turned out to be kind of a brilliant campaign, which is he'd just lay in a basement

01:26:07.460 for six months.

01:26:09.300 And every so often, they would creak open the crypt.

01:26:11.960 He'd walk out and say, and then he'd go back downstairs, and that would be the end of his campaign.

01:26:16.440 And so the referendum was not on Biden.

01:26:17.760 And the referendum was on Trump.

01:26:18.780 You go to 2024, if Trump runs again, the question is, I'm not sure who that's a referendum on.

01:26:22.780 Is it on Biden or is it on Trump?

01:26:24.240 Right.

01:26:24.360 That's a real question because they're now really, really prominent figures.

01:26:27.220 If it's anybody, anybody but Trump, it's hard for it not to be a referendum on Biden.

01:26:31.320 He's been president for the last four years.

01:26:32.740 And he's done, I'm honest to God, I'm amazed he's been able to set this many things on fire

01:26:38.400 for a man who's not ambulatory.

01:26:40.640 You know, there is a tactic DeSantis is using, a rhetorical tactic that I think every Republican

01:26:45.440 needs to adopt.

01:26:46.620 The old Republican view of things, when they were asked a question, what do you want for

01:26:50.320 breakfast in the morning?

01:26:51.480 Let's say, hey, Senator Rand Paul, what do you want for breakfast?

01:26:53.860 He'd say, well, you know, some people want omelets and some people want pancakes.

01:26:57.900 And the great thing about America is we can have whatever we want for breakfast, right?

01:27:00.860 And it's this very sort of ambiguous thing.

01:27:02.380 And you ask DeSantis, what do you want for breakfast?

01:27:04.540 He goes, look, we tried pancakes in Arkansas and we tried omelets and we're going to have

01:27:10.060 scrambled eggs.

01:27:11.100 Scrambled eggs work in Florida and they're going to work throughout America.

01:27:14.220 And there's no question or ambiguity.

01:27:16.960 It's very persuasive.

01:27:18.120 Well, let me ask you, is Joe Biden even going to run in 2024?

01:27:21.620 I mean, I think they have to.

01:27:22.720 I think they have to strap him to a gurney.

01:27:24.080 They have to turn him upright and they have to just reel him around because they have to.

01:27:27.820 What are they going to do?

01:27:28.520 They're going to try out Kamala Harris, the worst candidate who has ever been created

01:27:31.820 by God or man.

01:27:32.980 It's unbelievable.

01:27:33.720 He will not be able to speak at all.

01:27:35.560 I agree.

01:27:36.620 82 years old.

01:27:37.280 What are you going to do?

01:27:38.120 Kamala Harris is, the best description I've heard is from the account JTLOL, which is that

01:27:42.680 she is the human embodiment of a predictive text program.

01:27:46.160 You start typing words into Google and whatever is the next word is what she says.

01:27:51.220 And so the importance of the passage of time is important with regards to the passage of time.

01:27:56.880 And so she's terrible.

01:27:58.980 And then they're like, oh, well, you know, we've got this other guy over here and he's

01:28:01.640 so great that he went on paternity leave for two months and nobody even noticed.

01:28:05.120 He couldn't fill a pothole in South Bend, Indiana.

01:28:06.580 But on the other hand, he is gay.

01:28:08.740 And that's literally the pitch for Steve Buttigieg.

01:28:11.840 That's an impact.

01:28:13.340 First of all, I like that.

01:28:14.880 Kamala Harris, to me, she's always like I was in high school when I have to give a book

01:28:20.580 report, but I didn't read the book.

01:28:21.840 That's what she always sounds like.

01:28:22.840 But you run into just a simple fact of age.

01:28:28.320 So are you going to run a guy who will be, what, he'll be 82, right?

01:28:31.900 And so by the end of his term, he's 86.

01:28:34.200 That's just like an impossible thing.

01:28:35.380 Well, they don't have to get him to the end of his term.

01:28:36.900 They just have to get him to...

01:28:38.200 But for the purpose of running, they have to pretend that he's going to make it to the

01:28:41.980 end of the term.

01:28:42.680 No, he didn't pretend he was going to make it to the end of the term this time.

01:28:45.540 The problem that they have, the reason I think they have to run him, and I think that

01:28:50.480 the base doesn't care if he's still cogent.

01:28:54.220 No, the base doesn't care.

01:28:54.940 They don't care.

01:28:55.440 The reason they have to run him is Kamala.

01:28:57.380 They would like to sub him out with Buttigieg.

01:29:00.680 They might even like to sub him out if we are making moves towards Trump with Hillary Clinton,

01:29:05.900 which would be their great revenge fantasy playing out.

01:29:08.440 But the problem is that there is a sitting vice president.

01:29:12.020 And how do you get her to just move aside and let you do that?

01:29:16.000 The only way is if they do have one Trump card, right?

01:29:19.060 Which is they could theoretically call on Michelle.

01:29:21.680 That is clearly their best move.

01:29:23.500 That is their best move.

01:29:24.400 Because she is a black woman VP, you just say, listen, there's this other black woman,

01:29:28.120 and she's more famous than you, and she's more popular than you, and she's a best-selling

01:29:31.060 author, and we have now softened her image to the point where she's not the radical who

01:29:35.580 is writing Princeton theses about how America is racist.

01:29:37.980 Everybody wants to be president.

01:29:39.760 She might not be.

01:29:40.600 She likes being Oprah.

01:29:41.460 She likes being Oprah.

01:29:42.140 She's very, very popular.

01:29:42.780 Oprah wants to be president.

01:29:43.860 Oprah would...

01:29:44.580 That's a better selection.

01:29:45.220 Everyone wants to be president.

01:29:46.560 Listen, Michelle Obama is the nuclear option.

01:29:50.580 No question.

01:29:51.420 No question.

01:29:52.040 Why wouldn't they use her?

01:29:53.480 I think they would love to use her.

01:29:54.400 I think the only question is whether she and Barack want to have his...

01:29:57.460 Like, if she were to run and lose, whether this would tarnish the Obama magisterial image

01:30:02.360 that he's created for himself.

01:30:03.240 And that guy loves him.

01:30:04.260 I mean, Obama loves him from Obama.

01:30:05.900 I mean, when he came to the White House, that was...

01:30:08.120 It's one of the sorriest displays I've ever seen.

01:30:09.620 It was so sad.

01:30:10.220 It really was.

01:30:10.840 It was the first time...

01:30:11.720 Sorry.

01:30:11.980 It actually did...

01:30:14.140 I can't believe what it says.

01:30:15.300 It made me feel bad for Biden.

01:30:16.800 It did.

01:30:17.360 Oh, yeah.

01:30:17.460 I mean, I...

01:30:18.240 Like, he walks up on stage and he makes a joke about how he's Barack Obama's vice president.

01:30:22.940 And then Barack Obama gets away and is like, well, yeah, over there's my vice president.

01:30:25.700 It's like, you don't get to make that joke.

01:30:26.880 That makes you a dick.

01:30:28.080 I mean...

01:30:28.640 Seriously.

01:30:30.160 The two things that were most on display in that entire episode were, one, what a sorry

01:30:36.440 bastard Barack Obama is.

01:30:38.820 And if you read Maureen Dowd during his administration, she hated him for his treatment of Joe Biden

01:30:44.360 as his vice president.

01:30:46.060 Biden was this completely loyal, subservient even, vice president.

01:30:50.820 And Obama treated him like absolute dirt the entire time.

01:30:54.680 And so you see, you just see how his view of himself and his view of people around him.

01:31:01.900 And then the other sorry thing is you saw the media's view of him.

01:31:05.220 You know, that horrible clip where Biden realizes that the president of the United...

01:31:08.960 No one wants to talk to the president of the United States.

01:31:10.900 Multiple.

01:31:11.180 Because they're all talking to Barack Obama.

01:31:13.440 He's got his hand on Obama's shoulder and Obama's shaking him off to shake hands over here.

01:31:16.520 You just realize the media...

01:31:18.660 All he wanted was somebody to guide him to the bathroom.

01:31:20.480 That's right.

01:31:20.800 That's all he wanted.

01:31:21.540 The media genuinely believes that Barack Obama is a deity.

01:31:25.380 And Barack Obama agrees with them.

01:31:27.200 That's what was on display to me.

01:31:28.720 Did Joe Rogan say something to that effect about Michelle Obama?

01:31:32.420 And I don't want to put words in Joe's mouth, but he mentioned something about Barack Obama

01:31:35.340 being a great president or something to that effect.

01:31:37.460 And Michelle Obama being a potentially great option.

01:31:40.420 I think, you know, he's relevant for one, having the biggest podcast in the world.

01:31:43.920 But I think he speaks to a lot of people who are in the middle and confused or don't necessarily

01:31:47.620 know how they're going to vote come 2022 and 2024.

01:31:52.500 But I think if these people, moderates, independents, former left people, see Michelle Obama, I

01:31:57.600 think a lot of them will be convinced to vote Democrat again.

01:32:01.740 I'm not entirely convinced.

01:32:03.160 For me, my brain exploded after 2020 with just, yeah, I'm done with this.

01:32:08.140 You know, our 20, 2018, even when I think it was 31 seats that districts that voted for

01:32:15.080 Trump vote Democrat.

01:32:17.060 And all of these moderate Democrats said, we're going to bring you kitchen table issues.

01:32:20.200 We're not going to focus on culture war issues.

01:32:21.660 And the first thing they do is they move to impeach Trump.

01:32:23.960 And it felt like I was just spit on.

01:32:25.880 I was like, you know, I had faith that if I if I just, you know, push back, I donated

01:32:30.040 to a lot of some of these Democrats thinking that they'll actually re, you know, reconfigure

01:32:34.640 things and fix this.

01:32:35.760 And they only made it worse.

01:32:37.260 The only thing I think that they could really harm Michelle Obama if she were to run is

01:32:40.080 I think that she really has ideologically, she always has been very radical.

01:32:43.920 And I think that she will re-embrace wokeness because she too is in that bubble.

01:32:47.660 I think the most, ironically, the thing that we complain the most about is probably the

01:32:51.240 thing that may save the Republic.

01:32:52.240 And that is the media bias.

01:32:53.420 The media bias is so strong that Democrats do not understand that there's an entire world

01:32:58.040 outside of the beltway that just thinks they're crazy.

01:33:00.520 And so the reason that you see the White House saying things like, well, you know, it's very

01:33:03.320 important that we use the DOJ to crack down on people stopping little girls from being

01:33:06.840 turned into little boys.

01:33:07.880 The reason they say that is because the New York Times agrees with them and the Washington

01:33:10.760 Post agrees with them and everybody they know agrees with them.

01:33:12.980 The other thing about Michelle Obama is that she's attractive to people, I guess, not to

01:33:16.840 me, but to people as like an idea.

01:33:20.160 But if she's running for office, then she's actually got to be out there talking.

01:33:23.640 When you listen to her talk, kind of to your point about how radical she is, but also

01:33:26.780 she's just really a kind of a vile human being.

01:33:29.660 I'll never forget this story she told on a podcast somewhere about when she experienced

01:33:34.780 racism, like she was still harboring this resentment because she went to get ice cream

01:33:39.460 and a white woman didn't notice her and like, and cut in front of her.

01:33:43.560 And she told this whole story about how she was a victim of racism as the first lady in

01:33:47.280 the United States because a white woman was getting ice cream before her.

01:33:50.280 There's that story that she told about how she went to the grocery store and she was

01:33:53.200 tall.

01:33:53.540 So somebody asked her to take something down from the top.

01:33:55.360 Exactly.

01:33:55.920 She said that that was racism.

01:33:57.280 It's like, no, you're just tall.

01:33:58.460 I mean, I'd ask Matt to get something from the top shelf for me.

01:34:01.620 Who are the voters who fall for that stuff?

01:34:04.120 Yeah, I agree with you, Tim.

01:34:05.820 You know, I think that she's, I think that Michelle Obama, I don't think she would run,

01:34:09.500 but I think that she is a good candidate if she runs.

01:34:11.980 But, you know, the voters are not as enamored of identity politics as the Democrats are.

01:34:16.840 In no way are they.

01:34:18.140 Well, the poll about the parental rights and education bill in Florida has overwhelming support

01:34:22.460 from Democrat voters who were polled at the very least.

01:34:24.840 Yet they double down on this stuff.

01:34:26.860 It's like you were saying, the media bias is palpable.

01:34:30.540 I don't know if you guys saw CNN Plus only has 10,000 daily active users.

01:34:34.020 Wow.

01:34:34.860 In the, you know.

01:34:35.620 Hold on just a second.

01:34:37.100 Yeah.

01:34:37.300 But I think I'll enjoy Chris Wallace's new show, What Have I Done, I think.

01:34:45.920 By the way, who was the business genius at Warner who was like, okay, so we have CNN and no one

01:34:50.840 watches.

01:34:51.700 What if we take the same host and we put them behind a paywall doing more boring things?

01:34:58.360 I mean, how does this go wrong here, guys?

01:35:00.340 This seems like a genius business plan to me.

01:35:02.620 Well, they're essentially giving you money every time you don't watch CNN.

01:35:06.040 You know, make money.

01:35:06.960 I like it.

01:35:07.380 You know, I will tell you guys something interesting, though, because Matt and I were talking about

01:35:10.340 this the other day when I asked you, why is it the Daily Wire is 600,000 plus subscribers?

01:35:14.840 CNN can't even get 10,000 daily users.

01:35:17.160 You mentioned Mission, I think is what you said, right?

01:35:19.740 Well, I said the reason is me.

01:35:22.540 The number two reason.

01:35:23.940 He did say that.

01:35:24.720 He said he was better than everybody.

01:35:27.200 You know, when I was working for these big corporate media outlets, I was at a company

01:35:31.580 called Fusion, which is ABC News and Univision.

01:35:34.580 They said mission-driven storytelling.

01:35:36.880 That was their line as to what their goals were.

01:35:39.400 It's almost like they were either predicting or wanting politics to be the main driver of

01:35:44.940 what was going to bring people to different media outlets.

01:35:46.500 It's the only issue is I felt like their narratives were built on lies and manipulation.

01:35:51.540 We have to withhold information from people, trick them, feed them only the information

01:35:56.300 we want, whereas I feel like with what you guys do, with what we do, it's here's everything.

01:36:01.140 Let's argue about it.

01:36:02.140 Yeah.

01:36:02.840 Well, that's what I love about this show that we get to do once a month is that we quite

01:36:06.340 often disagree, and those disagreements, I think, are central to what makes the Daily

01:36:10.720 Wire work.

01:36:11.220 I think at the core of the Daily Wire's success is our fundamental religious difference, that

01:36:16.200 we talked about it today, in fact, that our fundamental religious disagreement means

01:36:21.100 that central to our friendship is the idea that there's not ubiquity, or that there's

01:36:25.320 not...

01:36:26.000 Uninimity.

01:36:26.880 Uninimity in our thought.

01:36:28.160 And it's not that we don't have a strong perspective as a company, it's not that we don't have a

01:36:31.560 strong, that we don't have a side in the fight, but it's that we are actually engaged

01:36:36.540 in the exchange of ideas and trying to always learn more and know more and be better.

01:36:40.480 Tim, thank you for, well, for coming on uninvited.

01:36:43.560 Please feel free to invite yourself on the show again in the future.

01:36:48.120 Thank you to all of our DailyWire.com members for making this possible.

01:36:50.860 We're going to wrap up because there's a thunderstorm rolling in.

01:36:52.800 This guy's got to get back to his tornado bait trailer, and Ben Shapiro has to get on an

01:36:56.360 airplane and get out of here.

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The Matt Walsh Show - April 14, 2022

Daily Wire Backstage： No, It Doesn’t Take A Village

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