The Matt Walsh Show - Daily Wire Backstage： WE WON

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, this is Matt Walsh. Drop everything you're doing and check out the latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage.

00:00:04.680 You're going to hear Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and yours truly,

00:00:08.660 talking about all the important issues affecting you and your family.

00:00:11.660 You don't want to miss it, unless you're a leftist, in which case, you're canceled.

00:00:30.000 Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage. Daily Wire Backstage is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

00:00:45.480 You have a right to privacy. Defend your rights at expressvpn.com slash backstage.

00:00:50.900 Joining us tonight, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and I am the Daily Wire God King,

00:00:56.120 lowercase g, lowercase k, Jeremy Boring.

00:00:58.460 For tonight's show, Daily Wire members can ask us questions in the chat box at dailywire.com,

00:01:03.360 and we'll answer them throughout the night.

00:01:05.060 And now, we'd like to share another great update with you.

00:01:07.800 This is the final trailer for our first original feature film, Shut In.

00:01:12.260 Coming out in February, the film is seat-gripping. It's a thriller.

00:01:15.860 It follows a mother in the middle of her worst nightmare, barricaded inside a closet by her violent ex-husband. 0.53

00:01:21.460 She's forced to use only her voice to guide her and her children on the other side of the wall to safety,

00:01:26.680 all the while the threat of her dangerous ex looms.

00:01:30.060 The film will be released on February 10th, and we'll be here together again for another great Daily Wire premiere,

00:01:35.120 exclusive to our Daily Wire members.

00:01:37.320 You can watch the full trailer yourself and get release details at shutinfilm.com.

00:01:41.940 So please, head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member and get content without the woke.

00:01:47.680 So, we're just excited to have you on this journey with us.

00:01:49.900 How can a film be seat-gripping?

00:01:52.460 Seat-gripping.

00:01:52.920 The film is gripping the seat.

00:01:54.660 Listen, I didn't write it.

00:01:55.720 I read it off the front.

00:01:57.500 The movie really is good, and I say that as someone who has seen the movie 16 times now.

00:02:02.380 One of the worst things about making a movie or being involved in the making of a movie

00:02:05.780 is that you have to just watch it and watch it and make notes and make notes and watch it and watch it,

00:02:09.800 make sound notes, make sound notes, watch it and watch it and watch it.

00:02:12.580 And at some point, you hate the movie.

00:02:15.060 And it's at that very moment that you get to go share it with the world.

00:02:17.740 But it really is fantastic.

00:02:20.380 The cast did an amazing job.

00:02:21.700 And it's...

00:02:22.320 The script is tremendous.

00:02:23.580 It's one of the best scripts I've ever...

00:02:25.020 It's fantastic.

00:02:25.660 ...ever read.

00:02:26.460 And it really is about motherhood, about a woman who probably shouldn't be a mother 1.00

00:02:31.900 and who isn't a very good one.

00:02:34.120 But through this trauma and through what she has to endure,

00:02:38.120 she discovers what it means to be a mother and what it means to take care of her children.

00:02:41.860 So, at some point, they'll show you the trailer.

00:02:43.880 I honestly have no idea when. 0.98

00:02:45.220 And what I want to open up talking about, though, is how we kicked the government's ass last week. 0.99

00:02:51.580 Unbelievable. 0.99

00:02:52.120 Yes, yes.

00:02:53.100 Yep, kudos. 0.94

00:02:53.680 And it's our first time to all get to be together since then.

00:02:55.800 For Drew and Ben, because you guys weren't in office with us last week,

00:03:00.600 I was in a meeting.

00:03:01.580 The day started out and we thought the court might make a ruling on the Biden vaccine mandate.

00:03:05.860 And, of course, we were the first in the nation to sue the Biden administration.

00:03:09.420 When the mandate came down, we've wrapped up hundreds of thousands of dollars,

00:03:12.880 picked a fight with the government to try to stop the vaccine mandate.

00:03:16.600 The stakes couldn't have been higher.

00:03:17.500 I actually think people, even right now,

00:03:19.220 most people haven't fully realized what it would have meant had we lost this case.

00:03:24.480 People would come up to me and say,

00:03:25.900 well, if you had lost, you still would have been in the fight, right?

00:03:28.340 I said, no, if we had lost, it would have been over.

00:03:30.200 Yeah.

00:03:30.460 If you lose it, the Supreme Court.

00:03:31.080 There's no one to appeal to.

00:03:32.160 There is no more appeal, yeah.

00:03:33.480 And we're not talking about penalties of $100 a day if you don't enforce it.

00:03:38.000 Bankrupt your company within two weeks.

00:03:39.480 And that was the goal.

00:03:40.000 I mean, the entire goal of the fines, I mean, they literally went out of their way to raise

00:03:43.660 the fine in some of the regulations.

00:03:46.700 The original fine was something like $14,000 per fine.

00:03:49.660 And then they raised it to $140,000 for purposeful violation, which was specifically dedicated

00:03:54.480 to going after companies like ours that had made a public statement that we weren't going

00:03:57.760 to abide by the VAX mandate.

00:03:58.980 And by the way, it's a 900-page regulation from OSHA.

00:04:02.120 And what it never actually defined is what is an instance.

00:04:04.540 So it was $140,000 per willful instance.

00:04:07.560 And so take the Daily Wire.

00:04:09.640 We have 150 full-time employees.

00:04:12.220 Each one of them is an instance each week.

00:04:15.320 They're talking about $140,000 times $150 every week.

00:04:19.940 The company wouldn't last.

00:04:21.100 So what would have happened is it would have been enforced.

00:04:24.360 What would have happened is the relationship between business and government would have

00:04:28.580 been changed in the country forever.

00:04:30.220 The relationship between employee and employer would have been changed in the country forever.

00:04:33.880 And OSHA had already said, this won't just apply to companies with 100 or more employees.

00:04:38.700 As soon as we find out that the courts aren't going to limit it, we're going to extend this

00:04:43.000 down to everyone, including the self-employed.

00:04:44.760 If you have an employee, even yourself, you'll have to enforce it.

00:04:47.360 What's so insane about this to me is that I've been, like all of us, I'm sure, kind of studying

00:04:52.020 the vaccines and watching the numbers and watching interviews.

00:04:55.180 And I've come to the conclusion that all over the world, especially all over the West,

00:05:00.460 doctors, actual, not Tony Fauci fakes, I mean actual real Jewish doctors, are doing tests

00:05:09.060 and experiments and disagreeing with one another and coming to different conclusions and uncertain

00:05:13.820 whether the vaccine, how long the vaccines work, whether they're strong and all this stuff.

00:05:17.660 Only the government is absolutely so certain about what's going on.

00:05:21.760 The government and guys on Twitter are so certain about what's going on that they are willing

00:05:25.160 to destroy the businesses to enforce it.

00:05:28.140 I think you're giving them more credit than they deserve.

00:05:30.240 I really do.

00:05:31.140 I don't think they're certain of anything.

00:05:32.400 I think they're certain that it doesn't work the way that it was originally pitched to work.

00:05:35.060 And this is coming as a big advocate of the vaccine.

00:05:37.620 Yeah, me too.

00:05:38.000 Somebody who's double vaxxed, and my wife is triple vaxxed, and my parents are triple vaxxed. 0.90

00:05:40.980 The fact is they are very good at preventing hospitalization and death, and they are crappy

00:05:44.040 at preventing transmission.

00:05:45.020 Right.

00:05:45.520 Okay, this is the reality of the situation.

00:05:47.520 Omicron is 140 times as transmissible as the original variant.

00:05:50.180 And the cloth masks don't stop it, not according to me, according to Michael Osterholm, who

00:05:54.440 is a Biden advisor, according to Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, now according to Leanna

00:05:58.360 Nguyen of CNN.

00:05:59.480 Everybody now acknowledges that the cloth masks are completely useless against Omicron.

00:06:02.920 Osterholm went so far as to say they've been useless since the beginning of the pandemic.

00:06:05.700 I'm glad that we're allowed to say that now.

00:06:07.280 But the government kept doubling down because, again, the premise for the government is that

00:06:11.560 the government is capable of controlling everything in your life.

00:06:13.840 And if you don't believe them, they will try to control you even harder.

00:06:16.020 I think because there were too many Americans who weren't listening to the government, they

00:06:19.500 decided they had to ram it down that much further.

00:06:21.780 And the thing to me that was scary about the case was that it was 6-3.

00:06:25.120 Right.

00:06:25.280 Yeah, that's scary.

00:06:26.060 Right.

00:06:26.460 This is the part that's totally frightening, because if you think about it for one second,

00:06:29.540 I voted for Trump in 2020.

00:06:31.340 I've been very critical of President Trump.

00:06:33.160 I was critical of him for many of the things he did during his administration.

00:06:36.440 But he had three Supreme Court nominees, and they were the margin of victory here.

00:06:40.620 If that had been a Democratic president, and there had been a Democratic president who was appointing

00:06:44.100 Democrat judges, that would have been a decision in favor of the federal government being able

00:06:47.920 to cram a vaccine mandate down on 84 million Americans.

00:06:50.680 And here's the thing, when you read the dissents, and it's the same three dissenters as in the

00:06:54.260 eviction moratorium case.

00:06:55.440 So according to those three justices, the federal government, using any auspices, right, using

00:07:01.300 any four-letter or three-letter agency at its disposal, can do literally whatever it

00:07:06.480 wants without any sort of statutory mandate.

00:07:08.800 And it can do so at a moment's notice, so long as it declares that there is some sort of

00:07:12.240 emergency.

00:07:12.600 And you know that that was going to be the end.

00:07:14.100 I mean, that's effectively the end of government in America.

00:07:16.040 And it's frightening how many people agree with them.

00:07:17.620 I mean, there are people who say, apparently a large number of Democrats, like half of

00:07:21.320 them, say that the vaccinated should be cast out of their jobs and put in cans. 0.63

00:07:25.800 It's insane.

00:07:26.600 Actually, in the concurrent opinion which accompanied the court order...

00:07:30.860 This is the conservatives.

00:07:31.920 Yeah, Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch had a great line, Ben, to your point, saying that if they

00:07:38.500 were to have found that OSHA had this authority because of the emergency of COVID, then, quote,

00:07:44.260 declarations of emergencies would never end, and the liberties our Constitution's separation

00:07:48.500 of power seeks to preserve would amount to little.

00:07:51.340 So that really is what was at stake.

00:07:52.900 And we know that for a fact, because they've already declared racism an emergency.

00:07:56.320 And climate change an emergency, and every other thing.

00:07:58.140 What's amazing is the conservative concurring opinion and the liberal dissent both begin

00:08:03.200 with the same question.

00:08:04.560 The first line is, the question is, who decides?

00:08:07.160 And what the conservatives are asking is, who decides? 1.00

00:08:09.220 Some technocrat idiots who have gotten everything wrong about the vaccine, or robed lawyers 1.00

00:08:13.140 on the Supreme Court, or the legislatures, which actually have voiced an opinion. 1.00

00:08:16.640 The United States Senate voiced an opinion on the mandate.

00:08:18.900 They disapproved of it.

00:08:19.920 And the liberals say, who decides?

00:08:22.640 The Supreme Court or the experts?

00:08:25.480 As if those are the only two options.

00:08:27.060 As if the people in the...

00:08:28.420 In fact, they say the administrative agencies are the more democratic version, because the

00:08:32.880 courts are lifelong appointees, but the administrative agencies are answerable to the president.

00:08:37.460 So this is literally what it says in the dissenting opinion.

00:08:40.280 So in their opinion, the way the government should work is that every four years, we should

00:08:42.940 elect our dictator, and our dictator should be able to dictate whatever the executive branch

00:08:46.160 does.

00:08:46.780 And that is our only outlet for democracy.

00:08:48.700 There are no checks and balances anymore.

00:08:49.820 And by the way, the next dictator, because of public sector unions and other rules, can't

00:08:53.900 fire the bureaucracy.

00:08:54.700 The ratchet only moves one way.

00:08:57.680 That's right.

00:08:57.960 The ratchet only moves one way.

00:08:58.880 So you guys weren't in the office when the order came down.

00:09:01.080 But we started the day thinking we might get a decision from the court.

00:09:04.140 And then the court released an opinion for the day.

00:09:06.620 It's a random opinion.

00:09:07.520 A very random, like it was about some 1970 law about who gets Medicare or something.

00:09:12.780 Very, you know, something that had not, you know, society changing ramifications.

00:09:17.320 And the code that they released it had an R. And in the entire history of the court, when

00:09:23.100 they release opinions, the one that has an R code is the last one of the day.

00:09:27.040 And there has never been an additional court order or ruling made.

00:09:30.120 Well, we're already in very unprecedented territory because one thing people don't realize, this

00:09:34.360 case is only the second time in the history of the country that the court has heard oral

00:09:38.880 arguments to oppose an emergency temporary order by the bureaucracy.

00:09:43.280 So a very rare thing that the court even heard our appeal, that the court even took up this

00:09:47.860 case.

00:09:48.420 I had all these cameras set up in my office the night before because we knew orders might

00:09:52.040 come down the next morning.

00:09:53.440 The R code comes down.

00:09:54.680 We're all disappointed.

00:09:56.100 I tell them to strip all the cameras out of my office.

00:09:58.340 Poor Mathis, you know, who's probably up all night single-handedly hanging lights.

00:10:01.660 Has to go back in there and take them all down.

00:10:04.000 And we go about our business kind of deflated because, you know, every day that they don't,

00:10:08.960 you know, reaffirm the stay, the law is going into effect.

00:10:12.820 Parts of it are actually already taking effect and the country is already changing all around

00:10:16.500 us.

00:10:17.040 So I'm in a meeting about some other, you know, shut-in or some other thing.

00:10:21.080 And I suddenly hear, because we have this sort of open seating concept in our office,

00:10:24.660 110 people out there suddenly just go into outrageous applause, like shouting and clapping.

00:10:31.900 And I open the door and it really was like, you know, I wish that just like a little kid

00:10:38.260 with, you know, a little hat had run in with a newspaper.

00:10:41.180 Extra, extra, yeah.

00:10:42.640 Did you hear it, mister?

00:10:43.700 Jeez.

00:10:44.280 You know.

00:10:44.840 And our general counsel, Josh Herr, hands me the printed order, still literally hot off

00:10:51.000 of the copy machine.

00:10:52.060 And I got choked up because we've been living with the stakes of what this would actually

00:10:58.060 mean, not just for our company, but for the country.

00:11:01.000 And to be, you know, it's hard not to be cynical when you're in our line of work, to

00:11:05.520 be handed this document and to realize that the court had done the right thing, that they

00:11:09.040 had found in favor of the constitution, found in favor of administrative law, found in favor

00:11:13.280 of our God-given rights.

00:11:14.940 Again, as someone who's been very pro-vaccine, I'm very anti-tyranny. 1.00

00:11:19.160 Yeah.

00:11:19.420 Yeah.

00:11:19.580 Well, that's, it's not, that's not that hard a concept to understand.

00:11:22.140 Not that hard a concept.

00:11:22.940 What do you guys think?

00:11:23.920 I'm really interested to hear what you think about Kavanaugh going over to the other side

00:11:28.700 on the, on the healthcare workers.

00:11:31.420 Well, I wish that they had found differently on the healthcare case.

00:11:34.120 You know, some people attacked us on Twitter when we were celebrating our victory and they

00:11:37.580 said, but you aren't fighting for, well, we don't have standing.

00:11:41.580 We can't bring that law.

00:11:43.320 That is not our suit.

00:11:44.100 Yeah.

00:11:44.400 You got to celebrate victories when you get it.

00:11:45.960 That's actually, I got the same thing on my show and it's just, it's when this is a

00:11:49.120 huge victory that we pulled ourselves back from the brink.

00:11:52.000 And I think there's, there's a, there's a real wisdom in, you know, celebrating that

00:11:56.540 and even gloating over it a little bit so that it shows that we're not, we're not just

00:11:59.760 losers all the time.

00:12:00.720 Although, um, you know, for me, because I am always looking for the, for the, uh, dark 0.98

00:12:05.700 clouded, it is, it is, it's a, it's a very terrifying thing as we talked about that

00:12:11.240 they, that they wanted to do this in the first place, that they wanted to actually bankrupt

00:12:14.680 a majority of the country, the companies in the country.

00:12:18.300 And that's something to keep in mind as we go into the midterm election.

00:12:20.680 This is, this is what on a Democrat side, it's not like there was debate about this.

00:12:24.960 There were, there were no dissenting voices, hardly at all among Democrats.

00:12:28.960 They all.

00:12:30.160 There's something else that there's a mentality that, that was made very clear to me by,

00:12:33.860 by some of the folks on Twitter on the left over all of this.

00:12:36.060 So I put out a tweet, you know, basically saying that we're really excited that we stood

00:12:40.560 with our employees and our employees are now protected by the law, uh, and that they are

00:12:45.460 going to get to retain their jobs.

00:12:46.820 And some, uh, and, and a, a leftist who shall remain unnamed, uh, tweeted back and he was

00:12:50.840 like, so what you're really celebrating is that you get to force your employees back into

00:12:53.940 work and unsafe environment.

00:12:55.840 And, uh, and I said, and, and I felt like you can't name one of the employees of this company.

00:13:01.600 You can't name them.

00:13:02.460 I mean, this is the, the leftist conceit is they know better than you, what is good

00:13:07.220 for, and they care, they care so much that they would rather fire your, you know, they

00:13:11.160 care, they care so much about my employees who they don't know from Adam and, and whose

00:13:16.940 salaries they don't pay and who's, and, and thank God, you know, we, we have the ability

00:13:21.020 at this company to go out of our way for our employees.

00:13:22.900 And we try to do that as much as we possibly can.

00:13:25.020 We've done that in a lot of different circumstances because we actually care about the people who

00:13:28.600 work at this company.

00:13:29.360 And to have some leftist jet in on a parachute and basically say, well, you know, but I care

00:13:34.000 more about your employees and I'm trying to protect them.

00:13:35.700 And that's why they have to be fired. 0.97

00:13:37.200 It's the same exact mentality as all of these jackasses when it comes to raising your kids, 1.00

00:13:42.300 right? 0.98

00:13:42.480 It's that you don't, I care more about your kids than you care about your kids, which

00:13:45.220 is why I have to dictate how your kids are going to be educated and how they're going

00:13:48.040 to learn about race and how they're going to learn about gender identity because I care

00:13:50.960 about your kids.

00:13:51.660 You don't know my kids.

00:13:52.640 You don't know my employees.

00:13:53.820 You don't care about any of these people.

00:13:55.140 What you care about is your own vision of controlling the universe wherein everyone is a widget.

00:13:59.360 Everybody's either a tool of your vision or an obstacle to your vision.

00:14:02.180 And you must control everybody top down.

00:14:04.220 Well, you know what?

00:14:05.060 You.

00:14:06.100 And you know, on top of this, this whole idea of caring really bothers me.

00:14:09.180 You know, the guy who said, the NBA owner who said, nobody cares about the Uyghurs.

00:14:13.420 It's like, who cares if you care?

00:14:14.840 You don't do the right thing because you care.

00:14:16.860 You do the right thing because it's right.

00:14:18.180 It's right.

00:14:18.920 Everybody cares more about money than the Uyghurs. 1.00

00:14:21.580 Every single person, even the Uyghurs care more about money than doing the right thing. 1.00

00:14:24.600 You know, you do the right thing.

00:14:25.800 I care more about myself than a stranger, but I'm still called upon to run into a burning

00:14:29.520 building to pull the stranger out.

00:14:30.660 That's right.

00:14:31.100 Not because I care more about this.

00:14:32.240 Yes.

00:14:32.480 Because I care about something more than me.

00:14:34.320 Exactly.

00:14:34.880 Exactly.

00:14:35.200 When did we decide to stop upholding free speech as a basic right?

00:14:39.060 What's playing out right now at big tech companies and social media sites sets a dangerous precedent.

00:14:43.600 Look, it doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for.

00:14:46.900 I mean, it matters to me at The Daily Wire, but it doesn't matter in regard to your privacy.

00:14:50.760 Everyone should have the right to express themselves freely.

00:14:53.860 Sadly, the big tech monopoly has instead opted for silencing tactics and censorships

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00:16:10.860 One other point about this I think is important to make because we know that there are still

00:16:16.080 plenty of companies that are enforcing the vaccine mandate, even though they don't have

00:16:18.740 to.

00:16:19.600 And Carhartt was the most recent example, and they sent an email out reportedly saying that

00:16:24.260 they're going to, you know, enforce the mandate.

00:16:26.300 If you're not vaccinated, you're going to get fired.

00:16:28.240 And so then there's a question about what do we, do we just, to the employees of those

00:16:32.540 companies, do we just say, you're on your own?

00:16:34.380 What should we do about that?

00:16:35.940 And there's not the same issue with rights, I suppose, that there is when the government's

00:16:40.800 doing it.

00:16:41.420 But there still is a problem here.

00:16:43.500 And I think if you're upset about that, about the companies that are still imposing this

00:16:48.080 on their employees, what bothers me when I see conservatives in media or just on social

00:16:54.260 media saying, well, you know, you should quit.

00:16:57.160 You should quit your job if there's a vaccine mandate.

00:17:00.800 You should just quit and take a stand.

00:17:02.020 Well, you know what?

00:17:03.460 I'm in a fortunate position where my employer was suing the government to not do this.

00:17:07.360 So I don't have to worry about it.

00:17:08.640 But I've got four kids to feed and I've got a wife at home and I've got my family that

00:17:12.220 I've got to worry about it.

00:17:12.800 So I can't afford to just storm out one day.

00:17:16.460 It might make me feel good.

00:17:17.540 But then I go home to my kids and I say, daddy took a stand.

00:17:19.620 And they say, great, how am I going to eat tonight?

00:17:20.980 This is the common collective action problem that we see all across our society.

00:17:24.720 It's very easy for sort of the armchair quarterback to say that other people should lay down their

00:17:29.420 lives or lay down their livelihoods.

00:17:31.080 Unless you have collective action, though, none of that will work.

00:17:34.240 So if you quit your job over this, the government doesn't care.

00:17:38.280 Joe Biden doesn't care if you can't provide for your family.

00:17:40.140 That's great for Joe Biden.

00:17:41.120 And Carhartt will just replace you with another employee.

00:17:43.580 But here's the point.

00:17:46.020 If that's your position, there's another group of people who could make a much smaller sacrifice

00:17:52.700 and bring about the change.

00:17:55.640 That would be the consumers.

00:17:57.080 So all of the consumers of Carhartt, they could say, we're not going to buy your product

00:18:00.920 anymore until you get rid of this VAX mandate.

00:18:03.900 And for us, I buy Carhartt sometimes.

00:18:05.820 It's basically zero sacrifice for me to buy no more car.

00:18:08.500 I could buy some other, I got 15 jackets in my closet already, or I could buy a jacket

00:18:11.460 from somewhere else.

00:18:12.380 So that's really where the onus, if we're concerned about this and doing something about

00:18:17.200 the VAX mandates that are chosen by these employers, then we should be looking at the

00:18:20.960 consumers, I think, more than the employees.

00:18:23.100 I want to make one defense, actually, of Carhartt and others.

00:18:25.780 And it's a tepid defense, I'll grant you.

00:18:28.180 But it's this.

00:18:29.520 I believe that any company in America has the right to enforce a vaccine mandate, all

00:18:34.680 things being equal. 0.83

00:18:35.620 I believe that any company in America should have the right to not hire black people or 1.00

00:18:39.780 not hire Jews or only hire left-handed leftists.

00:18:43.220 I think the market is perfectly capable of solving that problem in practice. 0.98

00:18:48.400 Because if you don't hire black people, no one is going to shop at your business. 0.99

00:18:51.320 If you don't hire Jews in this country, no one is going to shop at your business. 1.00

00:18:53.980 We'll drive you out of business with our dollars, with our market activity.

00:18:58.020 That is, to me, what freedom should look like.

00:19:00.300 But see, in this instance, things aren't equal.

00:19:02.980 Because while I think in the abstract that a company may have the right to enforce vaccinations,

00:19:06.420 I also think in the abstract, a 22-year-old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed intern at the Daily 0.99

00:19:11.900 Wire may decide that she wants to have sex with an old, fat, rich guy who calls himself 1.00

00:19:15.940 a god king. 1.00

00:19:17.180 In the abstract, that is absolutely possible.

00:19:19.180 You can dream, anyway.

00:19:20.480 In practice, though, we have concluded as a society that I have intrinsic power over that

00:19:25.700 intern.

00:19:26.140 And that my intrinsic power over her, not an active threat, there may not even be a...

00:19:31.920 I may never make a threat.

00:19:32.960 But intrinsically, my authority results in a situation where she is, in some ways, being

00:19:38.440 pressured, in some ways, being brainwashed, even if she thinks she does like me, by the

00:19:42.200 power that I have over her.

00:19:43.240 The government isn't using intrinsic power to coerce businesses right now.

00:19:47.820 It's using extrinsic.

00:19:49.600 It's using every single power at its disposal.

00:19:52.120 Local governments like Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., state governments like California or New

00:19:56.900 York State, and Biden, through every federal mechanism possible, have been essentially telling

00:20:02.060 businesses, you will comply or we will destroy you. 0.99

00:20:05.000 You will comply or we will bankrupt you. 1.00

00:20:07.540 You will have sex with me or I will fire you. 1.00

00:20:09.640 They're actively saying it. 0.98

00:20:11.020 And in that environment, with the media reinforcing it, for two years now, I don't know that you

00:20:16.400 can say that a company like Carhartt is actually deciding that on their own.

00:20:20.300 But this is a little different than the other examples.

00:20:22.180 I agree with you that I think a business should be able to be run by bigots, and I would never

00:20:27.280 go there, and I think we should shut them down.

00:20:29.420 But this is, you're not allowed to force someone else to be a bigot.

00:20:32.280 You're not allowed to say to somebody, you have to do this.

00:20:34.560 This is actively telling people to do something that they have a right to not do.

00:20:40.460 But what about...

00:20:41.140 But this is why I'm saying my defense is tepid.

00:20:43.060 All I'm saying is that these businesses who are in places like New York, many of them in

00:20:47.060 places like L.A., in places like San Francisco...

00:20:49.180 That state government should step in and say there will be no coercion of vaccines in this

00:20:54.920 state.

00:20:55.300 Because what you're saying really is that there is no neutral space anymore.

00:20:58.580 But then doesn't that...

00:20:59.880 This is what I'm saying.

00:21:00.480 I'm saying that the government has coerced these businesses already.

00:21:03.500 So the argument isn't actually a defense of the business, to make clear.

00:21:05.640 That's right.

00:21:06.020 I'm not defending the business.

00:21:06.360 What it really is, is that you're saying that were there a neutral space, people could

00:21:08.920 make their own decisions.

00:21:09.660 There is no neutral space.

00:21:10.480 There is no neutral space.

00:21:10.640 The government has occupied the space.

00:21:11.940 That means the only thing that can occupy the space is government in opposition to government.

00:21:14.760 That's right.

00:21:15.300 And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

00:21:16.340 It's like segregation in the South.

00:21:17.700 The government caused it.

00:21:18.600 Only the government can fix it.

00:21:19.540 But you get into a battle of the mandates here, which is actually in the concurring

00:21:22.680 opinion.

00:21:23.080 The conservative concurring opinion with the three conservatives on the court said,

00:21:27.680 we're not suggesting that state and local governments can't impose mandates.

00:21:31.640 We're actually not even saying that.

00:21:33.060 What we're saying is that OSHA does not have the legal right to do this.

00:21:36.440 And so in certain conservative states, you can see Ron DeSantis saying, we're not going

00:21:40.320 to have vaccine mandates.

00:21:41.200 So it's an anti-mandate mandate, but that's still coming from the government.

00:21:44.300 It's created a massive gridlock in Florida, for example.

00:21:46.820 Governor DeSantis, right, he said,

00:21:48.600 that he is not going to allow hospitals to impose the VAX mandate.

00:21:52.380 Well, the Supreme Court came down on the side of hospitals in order to receive Medicaid and

00:21:56.420 Medicare dollars.

00:21:57.360 They might be forced to do that.

00:21:59.440 So this now puts hospitals in this bizarre kind of choice of law situation where can they

00:22:03.600 accept Medicare dollars?

00:22:04.300 Can they accept Medicaid dollars?

00:22:05.320 Do they have to abide by the VAX mandate or not abide by the VAX mandate?

00:22:07.540 It's going to end up back in court is the answer to that question.

00:22:09.960 But if you're an administrator at a hospital, you don't really have a problem on your hands,

00:22:14.060 which is why what Kavanaugh did is so bad.

00:22:15.420 I mean, Kavanaugh certainly should not have voted the way that he voted on the CMS case.

00:22:18.120 There was no legal basis to do so.

00:22:19.920 But, you know, on a broader level, you know, putting aside the VAX mandate specifically,

00:22:25.160 can we just say that this has been the second worst week of the Biden administration?

00:22:28.440 I mean, this guy is a full scale disaster.

00:22:32.200 I mean, he I think a year in. 0.81

00:22:34.060 It is fair to say that he is the worst president in American history.

00:22:36.820 It's one year into his administration.

00:22:38.060 It's certainly the worst year any president has ever been.

00:22:40.120 It's unbelievable. And here's the thing. It's entirely 100 percent self-caused.

00:22:44.200 Yep. Right. That's the part that's crazy.

00:22:45.820 Right. If you were to look at the first year of the Bush administration, right,

00:22:49.420 Bush gets inaugurated in 2001, September 11th, you get September 11th.

00:22:52.820 OK, that's a pretty bad thing to happen.

00:22:54.480 That's a bad thing.

00:22:54.820 While you're president of the United States.

00:22:56.440 OK, but he didn't call it a September 11th contract.

00:22:58.520 Oh, you're one of those.

00:22:59.380 Yeah.

00:22:59.560 But Joe, every problem that Joe Biden is experiencing right now is because of Joe Biden.

00:23:05.900 Right. Inflation is because of Joe Biden.

00:23:07.540 The complete collapse of the United States on foreign policy leading to, by the way,

00:23:11.040 joint military exercises now between Russia, China and Iran.

00:23:13.600 That is that is because Joe Biden pulled precipitously out of Afghanistan for no apparent reason.

00:23:18.000 The the complete destruction of all sort of semblance of rationality with regard to covid.

00:23:24.160 That is on Joe Biden because Joe Biden was handed the vaxes.

00:23:27.120 He was handed a distribution plan and then he got handed.

00:23:29.560 The greatest gift that any president could be handed, which is the endemic nature of this disease.

00:23:33.960 OK, Omicron is a gift to the Biden administration.

00:23:36.080 If you could just see it as that it is an extraordinarily non deadly form of this disease

00:23:39.780 that every single human, including those who are triple vaxed, is going to get. 1.00

00:23:42.600 You could just say, listen, you're going to get Omicron.

00:23:44.940 You should get vaxed because of the lawyer chance of hospitalization and death.

00:23:47.600 But you're probably like chances are extremely high that you're going to live.

00:23:50.480 And now we should all go back to normal and you should lead our lives.

00:23:52.740 And we've done a great job of tranching out the vaccines.

00:23:54.960 Credit to us. Pat ourselves on the back.

00:23:56.400 What an amazing job we've done.

00:23:57.640 Go back to normal.

00:23:58.100 He can't do any of those things.

00:23:59.760 He's proposing trillions of dollars and more spending.

00:24:01.740 And then he's swiveling to what if I just call everybody in the United States who disagrees with me, 0.98

00:24:05.540 all seven and ten Americans, vicious, brutal Jim Crow racists who want to turn fire hoses on black people. 0.99

00:24:10.700 It's insane. 1.00

00:24:11.800 Putin must have laughed into his sleeve when he heard that speech. 0.96

00:24:15.320 First of all, it's one of the ugliest speeches I've ever heard for all the time.

00:24:18.280 I have I have knocked Donald Trump for his comportment again and again in the way he treated people and all this stuff.

00:24:24.000 He never said anything, anything remotely like this.

00:24:26.820 And when when Putin is sitting there looking at whether we're going to take strong action against him in the Ukraine, he's thinking, take strong action against me.

00:24:35.120 They're fighting with each other.

00:24:36.240 They're calling each other racist and bigots.

00:24:38.080 You know, why would he even worry about what we're doing?

00:24:40.140 We're so busy being at each other's throats.

00:24:42.080 That was that was a disgrace.

00:24:43.880 I got to say, you know, I agree.

00:24:45.420 One of the worst speeches ever by an American. 0.99

00:24:47.480 Really, really. 1.00

00:24:48.260 And nobody, you know, this is what gets me all the time is it's not what politicians do because politicians suck. 0.90

00:24:55.440 You know, it is not what they do. 0.89

00:24:56.560 It is that having a utterly corrupt corporate press that will not call them out on this.

00:25:02.420 They were there were some people, even on the Democrat side.

00:25:05.280 Yep.

00:25:05.680 Who looked at this and said, you know, no, it's Durbin.

00:25:08.280 Yeah, Dick Durbin.

00:25:08.880 The senator from Illinois who once compared Gitmo to Pol Pot and Hitler.

00:25:13.300 I actually like, you know, who was the guy who said on CNN the other day that we don't have bad leaders.

00:25:19.080 We have bad followers.

00:25:19.960 Oh, a Democrat, a Democrat guy.

00:25:22.880 It was great. 0.99

00:25:23.220 And now they're saying that white women are no good. 0.97

00:25:25.340 Who's going to be left to vote for these people? 0.96

00:25:26.680 To your point that, you know, Donald Trump, whatever you say about his rhetoric, he would attack specific individuals, usually people in media, other politicians who attacked him.

00:25:35.200 He had personal grudges.

00:25:36.260 Whereas what you get from Biden and the Democrats is they just hate everybody.

00:25:38.680 They hate the entire country.

00:25:39.620 It is amazing.

00:25:40.720 And we should also just know, I think it's important to emphasize that the entire premise of his speech is a total fantasy.

00:25:46.640 Yep, that's right.

00:25:47.740 And I say this, there's nobody attacking voting rights.

00:25:50.480 I say this as someone who wishes that we would attack voting rights.

00:25:53.260 So when I hear the voting rights under attack, I always get my hopes up.

00:25:56.000 I'm like, finally, it's happening.

00:25:57.820 But that's not, I'm the only person who's saying we should actually curtail voting rights.

00:26:01.000 I believe that.

00:26:01.660 Nobody else believes it.

00:26:02.560 Everyone else is saying, let's just have everybody vote.

00:26:04.740 We don't even invite you over to our party.

00:26:06.200 We're like, oh, man.

00:26:07.400 It is amazing, though, that in a week where Kamala Harris gave us the soaring vice presidential rhetoric of, it is time to do what we have been doing.

00:26:17.120 And that time is every day.

00:26:19.160 Yes.

00:26:19.600 Which actually.

00:26:20.120 That is one of the great quotes in news.

00:26:21.060 I know.

00:26:21.740 I love it.

00:26:22.420 I love it.

00:26:22.860 Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

00:26:24.260 It is time to do what we have been doing.

00:26:25.300 And what it shows.

00:26:26.320 Were I not married, I would make sweet love to that quote.

00:26:28.260 It was an extraordinary quote.

00:26:29.560 But it shows the Biden administration doesn't even have a pivot.

00:26:32.100 They don't even know how to dig themselves out as their approval ratings are plummeting.

00:26:35.260 But Joe Biden actually managed to give worse rhetoric than Kamala Harris, who is babbling incoherently.

00:26:41.720 You know, to your point, this Omicron has a very strange structure where it's almost a different disease than COVID.

00:26:48.000 It's as if COVID went off into a corner somewhere and recreated itself.

00:26:52.320 It would have been a perfect time for them to say, well, this is a new thing.

00:26:55.980 Get rid of the mask.

00:26:56.780 Get rid of, you know, you're going to get this and it's going to be like a flu.

00:26:59.920 It would have been a perfect time to just put people through.

00:27:01.960 I had Omicron.

00:27:03.620 I'm a survivor.

00:27:04.360 We're both.

00:27:04.780 I just had it.

00:27:05.540 Yeah.

00:27:05.740 I likely had it.

00:27:06.660 I don't know.

00:27:06.860 Yeah, me too.

00:27:07.460 I think I had it.

00:27:08.820 I didn't test.

00:27:09.480 But my kids all had it.

00:27:11.120 And guess what?

00:27:11.720 They're kids.

00:27:12.100 They're fine.

00:27:13.160 And then my dad had it and he's an adult and he's fine.

00:27:15.860 Well, let's not deprive ourselves of the ability to talk about the fact that we're survivors.

00:27:18.340 We're survivors.

00:27:19.760 Our heroic battle with the virus.

00:27:21.540 AOC, you know, just inside a year, AOC has survived the ravages of a trip to the hellscape in which I live, Florida.

00:27:28.040 She survived Omicron and she survived the brutal near-slaying that she experienced on January 6th.

00:27:34.460 And a boyfriend who wears sandals unironically.

00:27:37.640 Well, it was really all about his feet.

00:27:40.360 The other really tricky problem with Omicron is there was this study that came out of Israel that suggested that the fourth shot actually won't protect against this new version of the virus.

00:27:49.900 So you might need a fifth shot to do it.

00:27:52.320 Actually, Israel is now saying no more vax passports.

00:27:54.160 They said that there's one of their top scientists today.

00:27:56.620 He's like, these vax passports are completely useless.

00:27:58.520 So naturally, the CDC is like, we need vax passports because that's what we do.

00:28:02.820 But the thing about Joe Biden, just to get back to the race talk for just one second.

00:28:06.600 So Nate Silver, I thought, made an excellent point.

00:28:09.220 Everybody is acting like, why is Joe Biden doing this?

00:28:11.260 It's such a mystery.

00:28:12.480 Joe Biden was elected as not Donald Trump, right?

00:28:14.940 Dead person who's not Donald Trump.

00:28:16.160 That was his entire pitch.

00:28:17.040 I am an inanimate object who's not Donald Trump.

00:28:18.880 And then he comes into office and he's Bernie Sanders, right?

00:28:22.820 He's very, he's still barely alive, right?

00:28:25.680 He's mostly dead, but still a little alive.

00:28:28.080 And he's Bernie Sanders.

00:28:29.460 And so people are like, what is he doing?

00:28:30.800 Where is this coming from?

00:28:31.840 And Nate Silver makes the point that everybody treats Joe Biden like he's a moderate.

00:28:35.400 It's not that Joe Biden is a moderate.

00:28:36.880 Joe Biden is always dead center of the Democratic Party.

00:28:39.580 So if the Democratic Party moves to the left, Joe Biden moves to the left.

00:28:43.400 The entire Democratic Party has moved to the left.

00:28:45.320 There's a Gallup poll that was out today, and it was showing the political affiliations of various groups of Americans.

00:28:50.120 And what it found is that only 25% of Americans total across the country consider themselves liberal.

00:28:54.780 But literally half of all Democrats consider themselves liberal.

00:28:58.740 Okay.

00:28:58.940 Well, what that means is that the base of the Democratic Party is wildly out of touch with the rest of even the Democratic Party, but the entirety of the American population.

00:29:08.560 If you look at the polls and you break it down demographically, only 28% of Hispanics identify as liberal.

00:29:14.060 The rest of them identify as either—more Hispanics identify as conservative than liberal, 31% to 28%, according to the Gallup polls.

00:29:20.520 Roy Teixeira, who was the author of this entire theory in the early 2000s that was taken up by Obama to his certain amount of success, his theory was you get enough minorities together,

00:29:31.180 and you cobble together this majority-minority coalition, and you will never lose an election again.

00:29:35.180 And in 2012, that's basically what Obama did, and Democrats have fallen in love with that theory.

00:29:39.620 And Roy Teixeira came out like three months ago, and he said, my theory is completely wrong because Hispanics are breaking in favor of conservatives,

00:29:46.240 and if this continues, it completely upends my theory.

00:29:48.720 And by the way, he came out today, he said Asians are moving conservative.

00:29:51.980 Okay, if this happens—

00:29:52.880 Some blacks too.

00:29:53.760 Some blacks too, but the reality is the Democratic Party has basically decided the only minority group that they are going to pander to now, 0.77

00:29:59.780 because it turns out that no one cares about Latinx.

00:30:01.800 That was a giant fail. 1.00

00:30:02.780 The only minority group that they are going to pander to is black people, and they're going to do so in the most ham-fisted, idiotic way, 1.00

00:30:08.380 which is why you see Joe Biden out there doing the everybody who dislikes me is in favor of Jim Crow. 1.00

00:30:13.180 He did the same thing in 2012, right? 0.91

00:30:14.280 Mitt Romney, the unsweetened oatmeal of American politics, Mitt Romney, was going to put black people back in chains. 0.90

00:30:21.480 This is his shtick, but the bottom line is he has alienated every single other minority group and majority group in the country at this point.

00:30:28.700 And by the way, Hispanics comprise about 19% of the American population, and black Americans are about 13% of the American population.

00:30:34.860 So this seems unwise on a political level.

00:30:36.860 I'm wishing we could clone our new governor in our state of Virginia.

00:30:41.560 I love this guy.

00:30:42.660 He's not only standing up for what he said he was going to stand up for, but he's also like a presentable human being, which is kind of—

00:30:50.820 Well, you've got a few of those now, right?

00:30:51.720 You've got Ron in Florida.

00:30:52.600 You've got a young kid over there.

00:30:54.140 And Ron DeSantis apparently is maybe gearing up to face down.

00:30:58.360 By the way, you even see it—this is, to me, the best sign for the conservative movement in the GOP.

00:31:02.780 You even see it with the moderate Republican governors.

00:31:05.220 So Christy Noem up in South Dakota, she initially did not want to support the transgender—

00:31:10.100 or she didn't want to support a transgender bill that would have kept boys out of the girls' sports at all levels. 1.00

00:31:15.480 And she kind of squished out on it.

00:31:16.740 Then she kind of backtracked.

00:31:17.800 Now she's got a campaign ad saying, I never backed down.

00:31:20.520 I was always supportive of this.

00:31:21.680 Same thing with the lockdowns.

00:31:22.620 Initially, she wanted power to be able to lock down.

00:31:25.620 Then her legislature prevented her from doing that. 0.93

00:31:27.840 She complained about that.

00:31:28.740 Then she became the big anti-lockdown governor. 1.00

00:31:30.740 I don't care one way or the other about Christy Noem's personal political career.

00:31:34.360 The fact that she feels that in order to be viable, she needs to move way to the conservative side,

00:31:39.720 that is a great sign for the electorate and for Republicans.

00:31:42.580 Well, I want to talk about Youngkin for a minute because we helped elect him.

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00:34:19.460 But they obviously fixed it.

00:34:20.600 So that's their aces.

00:34:22.300 Just one addition on Naturally It's Clean.

00:34:24.040 And let me just say that I put it through the roughest test, which is I have three young children.

00:34:28.780 And nothing creates just disaster, like three young children, unless it's more than that.

00:34:34.860 Four young children is even more of a disaster.

00:34:37.700 Okay, if you want to try this product out, just let your kids loose in the house. 0.66

00:34:40.960 And Naturally It's Clean pretty much fixes all the problems.

00:34:44.020 It's an unbelievable thing.

00:34:45.980 I mean, it was tutoring my kids.

00:34:48.740 You would expect a cleaner to do.

00:34:50.640 It's unreal.

00:34:50.940 So the only thing better than Naturally It's Clean is Yunkin up in Virginia.

00:34:56.320 This guy had the best first day, probably of any governor in recent memory, right?

00:35:01.900 I mean, it's very rare that a politician does exactly what they say they're going to do.

00:35:06.460 And I think that for some people, listen, we like to boast about how we elected Yunkin, 0.98

00:35:10.820 but that's just because we completely and totally deserve all the credit for electing Yunkin,

00:35:14.320 starting with Matt's reporting on CRT and going all the way into these trans issues as exposed by our reporter, Luke Rosiak.

00:35:23.560 So we-

00:35:24.400 That's one more shout out there.

00:35:25.480 One more shout out for a reporter, which I keep promising I'll never say his name again.

00:35:29.200 Don't worry, you'll never remember it.

00:35:31.380 But here's the thing.

00:35:32.460 We didn't know about Yunkin in a lot of ways.

00:35:34.460 I mean, he was our guy.

00:35:35.240 We were glad he was there.

00:35:35.980 We've talked about how you aren't always going to get the reddest red guy in every state.

00:35:40.740 And you should be happy if you have, as Republican a guy you can get in whatever place you can get him is my sort of way of looking at it.

00:35:48.080 But I thought, you know, what are we really going to get out of the guy in the final analysis?

00:35:51.960 If all you get is his first day, his entire governorship was worth it as far as I can go.

00:35:56.240 And, you know, this thing about comportment is not a small thing.

00:35:59.760 You know, this is when you're dealing with the people, when you're dealing with votes, it's nice to behave well.

00:36:05.640 You know, it makes a big difference.

00:36:07.120 And he was, I hate to use this word, but he was Reagan-esque on that first day because he was doing things that he said he would do.

00:36:13.460 He was fulfilling his promises.

00:36:14.800 But he was doing it in this kind of graceful, eloquent way where it made the opposition look like the loudmouths and the radicals, which they are.

00:36:23.260 He even dressed the same way Reagan dressed on his inauguration.

00:36:26.000 He wore a proper morning dress.

00:36:27.720 And, I mean, this is the thing that I believe, I deeply believe that Trump was the man of the moment when he ran.

00:36:33.900 And that he was the guy who had to be there to make this difference happen.

00:36:38.080 But it's nice to see some politicians doing the right thing.

00:36:41.340 If you can pour the fight into a more attractive bottle, right, then that's not a terrible thing.

00:36:46.920 It's not.

00:36:47.400 And conservatives need to learn this because we think if we say the truth, you know, it's like that Paul Simon song, I want some tenderness with your honesty.

00:36:55.220 You know, I think the conservatives think if they say the truth, that's enough.

00:36:58.600 But it's not.

00:36:59.360 There's also one thing that the Youngkin speaks to that Trump, you know, because Trump is sort of a blunderbuss, right, because he's a hammer and he hits nails and sometimes babies.

00:37:09.120 He's not a person who attracts the core constituency that Youngkin ran on and that if Republicans run on, they will not lose elections.

00:37:16.060 And that is parents.

00:37:17.020 Trump was not a person who attracted parents as a constituency.

00:37:20.360 It doesn't mean parents didn't vote for him.

00:37:21.360 Parents did vote for him.

00:37:22.180 But it means that there are all these problems with, like, can you even show a Trump rally to your kids?

00:37:26.760 Like, is this the kind of person whose behavior you want to model?

00:37:30.280 But when you have Youngkin or DeSantis or a thousand other Republicans who have realized they've picked up the fact that Trump was a fighter and that is a vital, vital thing.

00:37:38.400 That's a gift that Trump gave to the Republican Party.

00:37:40.220 It's a gift that I think that he gave to the country.

00:37:41.980 If you can combine that with the new constituency group that Democrats have created, which is the parent group.

00:37:47.220 This was not a constituency group.

00:37:48.820 Parents were not a constituency group. 1.00

00:37:50.260 And the reason was, who would be stupid enough to attack parents as a constituency group? 1.00

00:37:55.400 Who would be idiotic enough to attack parents' ability to attack, to educate their own children? 1.00

00:38:01.180 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 1.00

00:38:02.540 I mean, it's insane.

00:38:03.480 It's totally crazy.

00:38:04.460 But if you look at how parents were treated in the past and when they were actually a voting group, you take a look at, like, 2004.

00:38:09.560 It was security moms, right?

00:38:10.500 It was Bush running on behalf of women with sedans, with minivans, with their kids in the back, and they were afraid of terrorism and Bush was going to protect.

00:38:16.940 But it wasn't like this had to do with parenting specifically.

00:38:19.700 He was just campaigning on security.

00:38:22.160 Youngkin literally campaigned on, we want you to be able to raise your own children.

00:38:25.780 And also, we don't want to force your small babies into masks.

00:38:28.620 And the New York Times would write articles saying, you should not be allowed to raise your own children.

00:38:31.980 It's madness. 1.00

00:38:33.040 These people said this crap out loud. 1.00

00:38:35.300 They campaigned on it. 1.00

00:38:36.340 Terry McAuliffe campaigned on, we should be able to indoctrinate your kid into racial essentialism and mask him like Bane for the rest of his life.

00:38:42.640 And then Youngkin comes out and he says this his first day.

00:38:44.840 And the first move of the left is to send Jen Psaki out there to be like, well, I'm not going to, you know, I'm just glad that the Alexandria public schools are going to put a big plastic bag around my kid's head and send them to the bottom of the ocean to avoid COVID.

00:38:57.300 Did someone in California today suggest that the best way for California, the best way to bring progress?

00:39:03.660 It was a parody article.

00:39:05.020 Fair enough.

00:39:05.580 It was a parody article.

00:39:05.820 I think he meant it.

00:39:08.440 That's one of the problems.

00:39:09.200 It's hard to tell anymore if they actually mean it or not.

00:39:10.640 There is no parody.

00:39:11.360 But I think with Youngkin, the interesting thing, we say that he campaigned on parental rights, he didn't originally campaign that way.

00:39:19.500 And so there was this change.

00:39:20.640 And this isn't to say that he's insincere now.

00:39:22.100 But I think he noticed something because early on, just from my own, you know, outside analysis, it seemed like he was sort of campaigning as a corporate sort of normal.

00:39:30.580 Chamber of Commerce.

00:39:31.840 Republican.

00:39:32.180 And there was even a moment early on in the debate where he was asked the pro-life question.

00:39:36.100 And he took this really kind of obfuscating, he was dancing around it sort of answer.

00:39:40.860 And then there was this switch.

00:39:41.720 And I think part of it had to do with what we did at The Daily Wire and what other conservatives did by showing that this is what people really care about.

00:39:46.460 But also the moment, the moment that will live in infamy with McAuliffe saying that, well, parents shouldn't decide what their kids are taught.

00:39:52.380 And that was the switch.

00:39:54.000 That was the moment when the Youngkin campaign realized that, look, I think with most voters, what they care about, if they're parents, they care about their kids and they care about their rights.

00:40:02.840 Also, the other big thing, the big issue of our time, aside from parental rights, is just sanity.

00:40:08.840 That people feel like, and if you talk to anybody anymore, any normal person, they'll say, look, it feels like the country's going insane.

00:40:16.040 It feels like the society is losing its mind.

00:40:18.380 And so they want basic sanity.

00:40:20.560 And that's where things are gendered. 1.00

00:40:21.280 But this also speaks to something else.

00:40:22.720 It speaks to why leftist feminism and feminism has become part of the left have been telling women all this time that they're not important if they're just mothers. 0.80

00:40:32.180 Just mothers. 1.00

00:40:32.780 You know, I mean, we had a mom come by and visit backstage the other day, and she said, you know, I'm so-and-so's mother, but I also have another identity.

00:40:40.320 And I said, you know, you've walked into the mother fan club.

00:40:43.080 You might as well grab hold of it.

00:40:44.740 Because, listen, these are the most important people in the country.

00:40:48.080 The guy who said the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world knew exactly what he was talking about.

00:40:53.280 The reason they want women out of the home, the reason they want them out of the home is so that they can do to our kids whatever they want to do. 1.00

00:40:59.380 Our friend Eric Erickson tweeted out an article from the New York Times, an op-ed this week, and he was frustrated about it because his argument was that it encouraged women to abandon their children.

00:41:10.020 And I don't know if you guys actually read the op-ed.

00:41:11.760 I read it.

00:41:12.680 That's not what it did.

00:41:14.020 I think we—

00:41:14.500 Well, it was observing that the culture is now—

00:41:16.400 It was observing that the culture is doing that.

00:41:17.960 But the writer actually said something I thought quite nice at the very end, which she read all these books, which it's a new trend in literature to have absentee moms, moms who essentially abandon their children to go pursue career opportunities and sexual dalliances. 1.00

00:41:32.140 And at the end of the article, the writer said, you know, in the end, I found that these works were kind of boring because they've created a fiction of their own, which is to say that the only way a woman can be interesting is if she stops being a mother.

00:41:47.640 I thought that was a wonderful line.

00:41:49.260 This is a new genre in op-eds that I call misery porn where they tell you that we're unhappy and you can be unhappy too.

00:41:56.140 I left my husband and deserted my kids, and you can too.

00:41:59.780 And the entire standard should change.

00:42:02.500 The other one that I love is this standard didn't work for me personally.

00:42:06.720 Therefore, it shouldn't work for anyone ever again, and the standard should be completely exploded.

00:42:10.480 But to go back to Matt's point about sanity, it's amazing.

00:42:13.060 What the left took away from the Trump era was things are insane, and they are insane because of the mannerisms used by the presidents of the United States.

00:42:20.040 And so if we just use nicer mannerisms, but we say completely batch loony things all the time, but we say it's super nice, then people will think that we're sane.

00:42:29.860 And it turns out that there is a deeper type of insanity that people really, really don't like.

00:42:34.620 And that deeper type of insanity is the policy insanity that's now being pushed upon the country by the social left.

00:42:39.660 The culture war was declared by the left.

00:42:41.240 They continue to maintain those culture wars.

00:42:42.740 They are the important wars.

00:42:43.800 Anybody who tells you that the culture wars aren't the seriously important wars has got it completely wrong.

00:42:48.220 But you realize they finally figured it out.

00:42:50.380 I'm on a kick right now of the GOP finally waking up a little bit and that this is a good sign.

00:42:54.740 Kevin McCarthy, Kevin McCarthy, as establishment a figure as there is the Republican leader in the House of Representatives,

00:43:00.500 he just did an interview in which he said the GOP is no longer the party of the Chamber of Commerce.

00:43:05.800 The Chamber of Commerce hates our guts, so we hate them back.

00:43:08.680 We are not going to run on just cut taxes and do whatever you want.

00:43:12.080 We're going to run on cultural issues.

00:43:13.760 Glenn Youngkin, as you say, Matt, started his campaign as a Chamber of Commerce, standard, just cut taxes Republican.

00:43:18.900 He ends his campaign running against transgenderism, running against racism in the curriculum, running against all of these things.

00:43:24.860 You look at the successful governors right now, it's Ron DeSantis.

00:43:27.540 You're looking at every successful Republican in the country.

00:43:30.080 The thing about politicians whose names you know is that they're actually pretty good at being politicians.

00:43:35.860 They actually know which way the wind is blowing.

00:43:38.400 And when you've got the most establishmentarian types in D.C. realizing that the cultural battle is where it's at right now to win elections, you're in a pretty good spot.

00:43:46.120 Well, it's because the left, I mean, they really have lost it.

00:43:48.540 So, Matt, you were the first person I saw tweet out this new Canada law, the actual text of this new law in Canada,

00:43:53.980 which effectively bans both religion and reason in the country.

00:43:57.200 Yes.

00:43:57.400 I mean, it is a bill that is just mad.

00:44:00.380 It is a fall of the West bill.

00:44:02.300 It is a stark, raving, mad bill encoded into law and punishable by five years in prison.

00:44:07.220 If you use your brain or you worship God or both, then you are going to end up in prison in Canada for being a baseline decent parent is basically the way that this bill is written.

00:44:16.700 Why don't you talk about it a little bit?

00:44:18.020 I saw it from you.

00:44:19.060 Right.

00:44:19.340 It's an anti—it's Bill C4 in Canada.

00:44:22.460 It's anti-conversion therapy, and there are several countries across the world that have banned quote-unquote conversion therapy.

00:44:29.460 Always got to put the air quotes around it.

00:44:30.920 There are, I think, 20 more than dozens of states in this country that have done the same.

00:44:35.500 And, of course, we're told that conversion therapy is this process of trying to convert, you know, a gay person to be straight.

00:44:43.100 And—

00:44:43.520 What they say is that it's—what it used to be was electrocute people.

00:44:46.320 Right, exactly.

00:44:46.660 They get aroused by same sex.

00:44:47.840 Exactly.

00:44:48.160 When you hear the term conversion therapy, it brings to mind, quite intentionally, this image of people, you know, someone strapped with a straitjacket being electrocuted in a sane asylum. 0.75

00:44:57.440 Mike Pence standing next to him pulling a lever.

00:44:58.960 Right, exactly.

00:44:59.480 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:59.760 But that, of course, is not happening anywhere in the West right now.

00:45:03.380 And so then you ask, well, what exactly is conversion therapy?

00:45:05.360 And so you read the bill that bans conversion therapy in Canada.

00:45:07.960 Because you always have to ask—anytime the government bans something that isn't really happening, you have to ask, well, what exactly is the bill doing?

00:45:14.040 And you read the text, and it's right there.

00:45:15.960 They define conversion therapy—first of all, it applies to both gender and sex.

00:45:20.560 And it says that, essentially, if you—if you're—if a child or anybody wants to change their sex, and you engage in any—I think the word is practice, counsel, or service, which is like anything.

00:45:35.980 Or if you're a parent who refers them.

00:45:37.360 Right, if you—to try to convince them otherwise, or to try to suppress their true gender identity, then you're guilty of conversion therapy, you go to prison for five years.

00:45:46.640 And the same goes for sexual orientation.

00:45:48.440 Any counsel, service, or practice that encourages or suppresses gender identity or sexual orientation—

00:45:57.160 Or sexual behavior, by the way.

00:45:58.240 Right.

00:45:58.600 If you repress sexual behavior.

00:45:59.960 Is sexual orientation.

00:46:00.580 So just think about that for a second.

00:46:02.040 It's—if you encourage your son, let's say, to embrace his biological identity, if you say to your son, you are a boy, and that's good, and you're a male, and that's what you should be, that's conversion.

00:46:17.420 By telling him to be who he is, that's conversion therapy. 0.93

00:46:20.560 And you can go to prison for it.

00:46:21.760 And it also means that, as many pastors in Canada have realized, that if they get up there at the pulpit, and very few pastors are even doing this anyway, but if they did get up there at the pulpit and read from, you know, from the Pauline epistles, or give a sermon about biblical sexual morality, they are guilty of conversion therapy, they could go to prison for it.

00:46:43.580 This is being described as an issue of religious liberty, and of course, to a degree, it is about religious liberty.

00:46:48.580 They just outlawed Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

00:46:51.760 But it's deeper than just religious liberty.

00:46:54.380 They've outlawed the truth.

00:46:56.100 They've outlawed the truth.

00:46:57.280 If you tell your kid the truth about who he is, you'll go to prison.

00:47:01.000 And that is a much scarier thing, even than the already dangerous issue of limiting—

00:47:06.660 By the way, it only works one direction.

00:47:10.480 Yeah, that's the other thing.

00:47:11.440 In terms of falsehood.

00:47:12.420 The law specifically states that you cannot try to convert someone to heterosexual or convert them to cisgender.

00:47:19.920 It doesn't say, you know, it doesn't say you can't try to suppress someone's gender identity. 0.68

00:47:23.980 It could say that, but instead it says you cannot suppress their gender identity of a non-cisgender identity. 0.69

00:47:29.860 So it specifies that, which means that it's actually legal to try to convert someone to trans or convert them to gay.

00:47:35.960 It specifically leaves that open in the law.

00:47:38.580 Well, because if it weren't, the entire ruling class would be in the clink right now, because that's what they're trying to do. 0.90

00:47:43.620 Right.

00:47:43.860 Yeah, that's right.

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00:49:18.320 Yeah, to pick up on what Michael said, talking about conversion therapy, the anti-gay conversion therapy does not happen anywhere in the West.

00:49:26.600 That's right.

00:49:26.840 It doesn't exist.

00:49:27.720 But the other kind of conversion therapy, the type that Canada specifically says is still legal, that's the only type that really happens.

00:49:35.180 I mean, you look at the numbers.

00:49:36.740 There was a recent Gallup poll, and it found that 40% of Generation Z, 40% identify as LGBT.

00:49:45.540 The trans identification of the youngest generation has risen tenfold over older generations.

00:49:51.600 Now, this is unprecedented in human history.

00:49:55.680 In the history of civilization, we've never seen anything like this before.

00:49:58.180 And, of course, it's not accidental.

00:49:59.200 There is a real effort ongoing to recruit kids into the LGBT ranks.

00:50:05.440 It is happening.

00:50:06.720 And any time you talk about it, you're shouted down with the rage of a thousand suns.

00:50:11.660 But that only shows you that it's correct.

00:50:13.300 I mean, this is a real thing that's happening, that they are making a concerted effort.

00:50:17.060 Did you see the viral video?

00:50:18.180 There was a viral video going around.

00:50:19.620 It might have been posted on Libs of TikTok.

00:50:21.240 Two kids and a mother.

00:50:22.740 And they were just answering questions.

00:50:24.320 The mother is obviously exploiting these little kids for her own social media gain. 1.00

00:50:27.460 And the kid said, look, he was asked about being LGBT.

00:50:31.580 And she said, go ahead, say it, say it, Sonny.

00:50:34.060 And he said, look, my mother doesn't care if I'm gay or a lesbian or trans. 0.99

00:50:38.020 She just wants me to be some part of the LGBT community.

00:50:41.540 And the mother kind of, her eyes opened.

00:50:42.820 She goes, what are you saying?

00:50:44.160 And he says, I'm saying facts.

00:50:46.020 I'm saying facts.

00:50:47.360 Wow.

00:50:48.260 And he's almost certainly...

00:50:49.000 It's quite a terrifying video when you look at the expression on this mother's face.

00:50:52.980 It's the expression of anger, but also the expression of, specifically,

00:50:56.240 you're saying something you're not supposed to be saying.

00:50:57.680 I'm caught.

00:50:58.460 And there are many kids that are in this exact position in their home, whether this is exactly...

00:51:03.280 Well, we've set up an incentive structure.

00:51:04.920 And this is true for a wide variety of things in American life, where being perceived as

00:51:10.560 a member of a victim group is an effective good.

00:51:12.880 And the highest victim group in American society right now is considered to be the LGBTQ community.

00:51:18.480 And so if you can be not part of the majoritarian community, if you can be part of the LGBTQ

00:51:22.180 community, this is why you're seeing people who are identifying as things that are not

00:51:26.440 in any way sexual minority positions, for example, right?

00:51:29.180 You saw this move toward people identifying as demisexual, which means you only have sex

00:51:33.220 with people you love, which we used to call marriage, right?

00:51:35.620 We used to call that like normal human existence on planet Earth.

00:51:37.960 I don't know.

00:51:38.400 A demisexual certainly always meant women. 0.97

00:51:40.580 Right, but the baseline sort of attempt to push the notion that if you are a member of

00:51:49.580 a victimized group, this means that you have additional moral authority and you're to be

00:51:52.760 treated with tremendous care and people will celebrate you and people will give you attention.

00:51:55.980 I mean, obviously, when it comes to things like rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is

00:51:58.940 a very real phenomenon documented by Lisa Littman over at Brown University and shouted down

00:52:03.200 by all the academics.

00:52:04.500 Now, when you document this stuff, there is a social contagion that is happening.

00:52:07.560 And it is very clearly a social contagion that is happening.

00:52:10.520 And it's particularly spotable when you look at the stats with regard to transgenderism.

00:52:13.940 When you look at the stats with regard to this, which used to be a mostly male to female

00:52:17.220 phenomenon, that was the thing.

00:52:18.700 It was young men who are identifying as women.

00:52:21.700 And now it's completely flipped.

00:52:22.720 And it's teenage girls who are identifying en masse as transgender.

00:52:25.980 And it's in specific social groups.

00:52:27.320 One girl does it and then many girls in the group do it. 0.99

00:52:30.040 This has been shouted down as not happening.

00:52:32.680 And if you mentioned that perhaps the thing to pursue here would be weightful watching as opposed

00:52:36.700 to immediate hormone treatment and surgery and life-destroying surgery, then this means

00:52:41.260 that you're a bigot. 0.72

00:52:42.100 And I do love the way that the scientific community works on this.

00:52:44.920 They declare something to be science that is not science.

00:52:47.120 That's right.

00:52:47.400 Then somebody says, wait, that's not science.

00:52:49.240 And they say, well, you're a bigot.

00:52:50.440 And then two years pass.

00:52:51.520 And it turns out that, of course, they were lying.

00:52:53.540 And it wasn't science.

00:52:54.440 And then they print an article two years later saying, well, it turns out the science may

00:52:57.580 be more complicated than we originally assumed, but you're still a bigot.

00:53:00.360 The New York Times ran an article this week, this week, talking about how, you know,

00:53:03.780 there are some psychiatrists who say that perhaps before we give hormones out like candy and

00:53:09.100 before we start giving transgender surgeries, we might want to actually do a mental illness 1.00

00:53:12.640 or mental disorder screening for people before we just start chopping off their breasts and 0.99

00:53:16.940 restructuring genitals. 0.98

00:53:18.040 You know, I get most of my information, not from, you know, fancy books or anything, but

00:53:21.480 from these TikTok videos.

00:53:22.660 And there was another TikTok video of a gal who has dissociative identity disorder.

00:53:27.660 So she's got lots of voices in her head.

00:53:29.260 And she said, most of the voices are men.

00:53:32.020 And because of that, I do not want to get the gender surgery, but I am going to transition.

00:53:37.700 And it's hard for me, but it's going to make my headmates, that was the term she used,

00:53:41.180 it's going to make my headmates happy if I mutilate myself.

00:53:45.140 And what is such an indictment of our culture is this girl can walk in and say, I've got voices 1.00

00:53:51.120 speaking to me in my head.

00:53:52.360 And at least as of today, she will get a diagnosis that she has a disordered psyche and she'll

00:53:57.500 be treated for that disorder.

00:53:58.720 But if that same girl walks in and says, I'm actually a boy, there's nothing wrong with 0.69

00:54:03.580 her.

00:54:03.860 Five years ago, she would have been told it was a disorder.

00:54:05.680 Now it is wonderful.

00:54:06.780 And today, if she's told it's a disorder in Canada, the doctor will go to jail for five

00:54:09.800 years.

00:54:10.100 That's right.

00:54:10.620 Exactly.

00:54:11.080 And this is this obsession with labels.

00:54:12.760 I mean, the dissociative identity disorder, which by the way, I think is totally fake anyway.

00:54:16.700 But I did a dive down the TikTok sewage system with that recently.

00:54:23.200 And, you know, and there's, there's been some reporting on this.

00:54:25.660 This is actually a huge trend on TikTok right now.

00:54:28.800 And TikTok gives you a, it gives you a view.

00:54:30.380 We could joke about it, but it gives you a view into what, what's going on with kids.

00:54:33.840 I mean, cause they all live on this thing.

00:54:35.220 And so this is a real trend.

00:54:36.740 There are like millions, hashtags have millions of, uh, of, uh, of, you know, entries where

00:54:42.740 lots of kids now are saying, Oh, I'm, I actually have disassociative identity disorder as well.

00:54:46.380 I've got, I have multiple personalities.

00:54:47.980 We are a legion.

00:54:48.960 Teenagers have no prefrontal cortex and they are risk seeking and attention seeking.

00:54:54.640 So if you combine risk seeking and attention seeking with an internet and a leftist culture

00:54:58.360 that celebrates this stuff, you're all supposed to be celebrated for this sort of behavior.

00:55:01.900 What do you think you're going to get?

00:55:03.060 And also, but, but don't worry.

00:55:04.160 It's, it's, it's strictly hardwired biologically.

00:55:06.140 It's just that until now we didn't realize that 40% of humans are LGBT.

00:55:09.280 Nature to ensure the continuation of the race has made it possible to convince teenage girls 0.99

00:55:13.520 of anything, but you know, it does, it does bother me that, you know, the Chinese have 1.00

00:55:20.640 banned effeminate men from being celebrities and the Chinese own Tik TOK and are selling 0.99

00:55:28.020 this stuff to us. 0.84

00:55:29.240 You know, sexual disorder is, it's, it's funny.

00:55:32.540 I got, I got to admit it's hilarious to watch these people destroy themselves, but it's also

00:55:36.840 not funny.

00:55:37.420 It is, it is like this sort of central question.

00:55:40.600 And when I think of every single dystopian novel, every great dystopian novel, the first

00:55:46.220 thing that happens is women are erased. 1.00

00:55:48.120 The first thing that happens is the reproductive role of women is erased.

00:55:52.300 And I think that, you know, we've gotten to that point and you have to start to ask yourself,

00:55:56.340 well, wait a minute, what are we trying to solve when we say that a boy can become a,

00:56:02.200 an athlete as a woman can become a female athlete and beat every female athlete? 1.00

00:56:07.000 What problem are we trying to solve?

00:56:08.460 And I think we're trying to solve the problem of women. 1.00

00:56:10.620 I am absolutely convinced that a horror of what women's bodies actually are has infested 1.00

00:56:17.640 our society in general.

00:56:19.280 And you can see it in the movies.

00:56:20.600 If you look back to the, uh, when, when the transition was taking place from the kind 0.99

00:56:26.500 of, uh, traditional idea to the idea that the future was going to be different, you can

00:56:31.760 suddenly see that all the horror movies were suddenly about women's bodies. 0.99

00:56:35.200 The Exorcist is about a girl basically having her first period.

00:56:38.400 Carrie is about a girl having her first period.

00:56:40.340 The Omen and, uh, uh, Rosemary's Baby are about a woman, you know, having Satan take over 0.95

00:56:45.000 her body.

00:56:45.580 The fact that these bodies are a connection with creation in, in such a, uh, a physical

00:56:51.500 way has horrified those people who don't like human beings.

00:56:55.300 Did you see that there was a Planned Parenthood tweet that all the conservatives were dunking

00:56:59.120 on?

00:56:59.340 And a plant, Planned Parenthood from their main account tweeted out, uh, folks with

00:57:03.740 vulvas are not just reproductive machines.

00:57:07.280 And now conservatives were dunking on this because it seems contradictory, right? 0.51

00:57:10.700 You say folks with vulvas, you're defining women by their genitals. 1.00

00:57:13.180 You say they're not just reproductive machines, but it wasn't contradictory.

00:57:16.840 They use their words very carefully.

00:57:18.360 They didn't say folks with ovaries.

00:57:19.780 They didn't say folks with fallopian tubes.

00:57:21.480 They said folks with external organs that are more oriented toward pleasure than reproduction.

00:57:26.520 Because what they're saying is women are not just reproductive machines, they're also 1.00

00:57:29.940 pleasure machines.

00:57:31.060 They're also sterile pleasure machines that you can use for your own hedonistic desires,

00:57:36.140 but don't ever think about what they actually do, the miracle that occurs uniquely within

00:57:41.000 women. 0.81

00:57:41.340 I was watching TV the other night with my wife and a commercial came on.

00:57:44.620 And this commercial was, uh, about this couple and they had been attempting to get a better

00:57:50.100 phone plan.

00:57:51.160 So we got married so we could get a better phone plan.

00:57:53.140 And then we had a bunch of kids so we could get a better, better phone plan.

00:57:55.700 And so it shows like the entire room is now filled with children. 0.98

00:57:57.960 Of course, they're miserable and there's crap everywhere and all this. 0.88

00:58:00.100 And then it cuts to a single woman living in a perfectly immaculate apartment with no 1.00

00:58:04.660 one else in it.

00:58:05.340 And she says, well, I just got a better phone plan by going to whatever the company was.

00:58:08.920 And I turned to my wife and I said, our society is selling unhappiness.

00:58:12.460 Yep.

00:58:12.760 Our society is selling unhappiness.

00:58:14.240 That's a misery point.

00:58:15.600 Our society has decided that the apex of human civilization is to live alone in an immaculate

00:58:20.940 apartment in New York City working 2,200 billable hours a year, but being able to watch sex

00:58:26.360 in the city with a, with a glass of rosé.

00:58:28.180 And this is what womanhood is supposed to be. 1.00

00:58:30.060 I mean, I can't think of anything more flattening than trying to remove the single most central

00:58:35.620 thing about being a woman from womanhood. 1.00

00:58:38.200 By the way, we're doing the same thing with men because the single most important thing

00:58:41.320 that a man does is become a father and raise the next generation and protect his family.

00:58:44.800 And we've removed all of that from men too.

00:58:46.580 The idea of the apotheosis of manhood now is basically, shockingly, the exact same as

00:58:51.840 a woman, to live in an apartment alone by herself, drinking a glass of rosé and watching 1.00

00:58:55.520 Sex in the City.

00:58:56.940 It's the exact same thing.

00:58:58.120 Because I don't think it's just, I don't think everyone needs to get married.

00:59:01.320 I actually don't, I don't think everyone needs to get married.

00:59:02.900 I don't think everyone needs to have kids.

00:59:03.980 A lot of people can't have kids.

00:59:05.560 And what traditionally would happen then is that people would join religious life.

00:59:11.520 You'd become a priest, you'd become a nun, you'd become a brother.

00:59:13.760 You would just consecrate your singleness.

00:59:15.720 You would attach it to something greater than yourself.

00:59:19.720 And many religions do that.

00:59:22.640 But what the culture is selling right now is, no, no, no.

00:59:25.400 Don't consecrate yourself to anyone, to any family, to any god.

00:59:30.020 Consecrate yourself to that glass of rosé and you do you, honey.

00:59:33.260 And you'll be so happy.

00:59:33.660 I was just reading a philosopher that both Knowles and I like very much, Rene Girard.

00:59:38.940 And he said that when you lose the transcendental aspect of life, you're divided into two things.

00:59:44.220 One is that you basically magnify your feelings.

00:59:47.320 Everything becomes your feelings.

00:59:48.600 But you have no sense of the outside world so you turn to experts.

00:59:51.580 And you have to be ruled by experts while your whole life becomes about your feelings.

00:59:56.000 I felt like this was a book that was written, you know, decades ago.

00:59:59.140 And I thought, wow, that's bingo.

01:00:01.080 That is the effect of losing your sense of the spiritual.

01:00:04.120 Yeah, I think the point Michael makes is a good one.

01:00:07.300 Because any time we talk about how women are called to be mothers and we shouldn't encourage 1.00

01:00:10.780 them to reject that, of course, immediately you get these objections.

01:00:14.000 Well, what about women who can't have babies? 1.00

01:00:15.200 Or what about this and that?

01:00:16.340 Well, I think that it's still accurate, in fact, to say that all women are called to be

01:00:20.020 mothers and all men are called to be fathers.

01:00:21.600 It's just that that can take on different forms.

01:00:23.500 The most obvious one is obviously adoption.

01:00:25.300 Lots of people are called to that.

01:00:27.060 But there could even be other forms of parenthood.

01:00:29.380 I mean, you could go into missionary work, go into religious life.

01:00:31.060 But the point is that everyone is called to service in that capacity, in some form.

01:00:38.040 Nobody is called to just live a life entirely for themselves in their apartment watching

01:00:43.100 TV.

01:00:43.540 That's not a life that anyone's called to.

01:00:45.280 It's also not a life that anyone can derive real joy from.

01:00:48.300 And I think that's the point.

01:00:49.160 When they have the term gender assignment, I think we have a gender assignment. 0.57

01:00:52.320 I think it is literally an assignment.

01:00:55.020 Everyone hates the term gender role, but that's exactly what... 1.00

01:00:57.580 That's what I was about to say.

01:00:59.140 I've been working on this theory.

01:01:00.480 I'm working on a book on sort of the roots of politics and freedom and where freedom

01:01:05.680 lies in regard to rules.

01:01:07.360 And I was trying to start from the very, very basics.

01:01:09.720 Well, what are the things that we need for human happiness?

01:01:11.780 And most philosophers try to start from the basis of what are the higher goods?

01:01:15.620 And so they'll say things like justice or virtue.

01:01:17.780 And the problem that I have with that is that it's very difficult to pin those things down.

01:01:20.920 I mean, we've been trying to pin down what is justice for several thousand years at

01:01:23.720 this point.

01:01:24.080 We seem no closer to achieving the goal.

01:01:26.080 So, but what is much easier to pin down is the roles that we all play in our lives, right?

01:01:31.860 The stuff that goes on your tombstone, right?

01:01:34.080 Because on every tombstone at the cemetery, it says, beloved husband and father, right?

01:01:38.200 Beloved brother and son, right?

01:01:39.780 That's every single tombstone at the cemetery.

01:01:42.160 Beloved drinker of rosé.

01:01:43.480 Correct.

01:01:45.280 Beloved Netflix binge.

01:01:46.400 And this is exactly the point.

01:01:49.060 Society, this is, you know, there's a sort of sociological notion that's called structural

01:01:54.900 functionalism.

01:01:55.540 And the idea there is that there are roles in society.

01:01:57.740 These roles have been constructed over the course of thousands of years in order to create

01:02:01.320 a functional society.

01:02:02.400 And these roles work with one another.

01:02:04.240 Roles are not bad.

01:02:05.200 Roles are extremely good.

01:02:06.360 If you don't have roles, you end up as a free-floating agent without anything to hem you

01:02:10.320 in.

01:02:10.760 Your desires are not hemmed in.

01:02:12.260 Your life is not hemmed in.

01:02:13.600 And you're essentially living on a desert island.

01:02:15.580 There's never been a human being who is happy living on a desert island because that doesn't

01:02:18.440 work.

01:02:18.920 What you actually need are these roles.

01:02:20.340 And what I mean in a practical sense is it's very difficult to lock down what is justice

01:02:23.500 or what is virtue.

01:02:24.220 It's pretty easy to lock down what does a good father constitute, right?

01:02:27.580 Because we can see what a bad father is.

01:02:28.660 We see tons of examples of them all over the place.

01:02:31.260 And so if we geared our lives toward fulfilling these societal roles, and there are many of them

01:02:35.900 that we simultaneously live, right?

01:02:37.280 We have a role as a worshiper.

01:02:38.540 We have a role as a seeker of truth.

01:02:40.380 We have a role as a learner, right?

01:02:41.440 These are all roles that we live throughout our lives at different points in our life, right?

01:02:45.020 When you're a child, you're predominantly a learner and not a father.

01:02:47.080 When you're older, you're predominantly a teacher and a father and not a learner as

01:02:49.780 much, right?

01:02:50.440 As we progress through lives, playing those roles, that's where happiness lies.

01:02:53.880 And we are a society that is dedicated to the proposition that roles need to be exploded.

01:02:58.680 All roles are bad because roles are an imposition from the outside.

01:03:01.840 And of course, the problem is that human beings are adaptable tools.

01:03:05.740 They're adapted to fulfill those roles.

01:03:07.280 And if those roles go away, then if human beings are sort of like water that is poured into

01:03:11.280 vessels and we take the shape of the vessel, you get rid of the vessel, the water just

01:03:14.320 goes everywhere.

01:03:14.800 And that's what's happened.

01:03:15.780 This kind of goes to a thought that I've been nurturing for a few weeks now, which is that

01:03:18.720 we need, the world needs the left.

01:03:22.600 What I mean by this is that there are many good things that happen in a healthy society

01:03:27.720 that are not intrinsically conservative.

01:03:30.660 Journalism, interestingly enough, is one of them.

01:03:32.980 Journalism is not a constructive task.

01:03:35.260 It's a destructive task.

01:03:36.480 It's an intrinsically left-oriented task.

01:03:40.100 But it's a necessary task.

01:03:41.560 And so journalists, they pull at the thread of something that's wrong in a healthy society

01:03:47.700 and they expose it.

01:03:49.160 And in doing that, they're not actively involved in construction.

01:03:53.260 They're actively involved in destruction.

01:03:56.040 But in a healthy society, a better construction can be built through the journalistic practice

01:04:02.660 exposing a problem.

01:04:03.580 So we might not like the journalists in a healthy society.

01:04:06.480 We as conservatives may think, oh, they're tearing down something important.

01:04:11.540 But on the other side of the thing, if it actually is healthy and important, it will

01:04:15.180 correct in response to that and become better than it was.

01:04:18.320 So in a healthy society, you need an element of left.

01:04:20.960 In a role-based society, as you're describing it, I like eccentrics. 0.82

01:04:27.020 I say to you all the time, like, I'm a Christian.

01:04:29.100 The world's better with Jews in it. 1.00

01:04:30.120 Like, I want to live in a world where not everybody thinks like me, where not everybody

01:04:33.500 looks like me.

01:04:34.160 I want my ideas challenged.

01:04:35.900 I love Nashville.

01:04:37.580 I'm very happy here.

01:04:38.560 One of my problems with Nashville is that it's so Christian. 1.00

01:04:42.260 And because it's so Christian, Christianity is easy. 0.99

01:04:44.980 And because Christianity is easy, it's comfortable. 0.78

01:04:47.080 And because Christianity is comfortable, it's in no way intriguing or stimulating. 1.00

01:04:50.920 It's hard to actually engage the ideas with anyone and be disruptive and find better

01:04:56.240 and find better thoughts.

01:04:57.220 But in an unhealthy society, like the one that we have right now, the left is dominant

01:05:03.000 in the culture.

01:05:04.180 And when the left is dominant in the culture, everything has been destroyed and nothing now

01:05:08.400 can heal.

01:05:09.200 It's like when you work out, you know, without resistance, there is no growth of muscle, right?

01:05:14.020 Resistance is necessary.

01:05:15.660 In a healthy society, the left creates some of that resistance.

01:05:18.160 In an unhealthy society, you've broken everything under the weight.

01:05:21.840 And now nothing grows back.

01:05:23.040 This is why conservatives, though, have a problem with the arts, because the arts are

01:05:28.620 by nature, cultural critical.

01:05:31.500 And so you have a guy like Pete Seeger, folk singer and communist spy, singing about how

01:05:36.840 Levittown and all these suburbs are ticky-tack.

01:05:40.800 It's all ticky-tack.

01:05:41.820 And you think, well, you know, princes would have killed to live like people lived in Levittown.

01:05:46.920 And this is one of the great, you know, gifts of capitalism.

01:05:50.740 But he's also right.

01:05:51.520 And he's also, we have to question the conformity and the fact that all these, and that is a

01:05:56.680 healthy society.

01:05:57.440 You're absolutely right.

01:05:58.640 And it should be that, you know, the guy who said this years ago is Prince Charles, who

01:06:04.440 said, we need an avant-garde.

01:06:05.640 But when the avant-garde becomes the leaders, we've lost our way.

01:06:08.820 And that's absolutely right.

01:06:10.200 The way that I've been thinking about liberty within all of these roles that I'm talking

01:06:14.000 about is that each role does contain with it necessity for liberty.

01:06:17.760 You need liberty to raise your child in a way that you see fit while still upholding the

01:06:22.060 general rules of being a father.

01:06:24.020 You need the liberty of the ability to learn, but within the institution of learner, meaning

01:06:30.140 you're not destroying the possibility of rationality, for example.

01:06:32.800 You're not destroying the possibility of a common language, which is what the left has

01:06:35.280 done with things like deconstructionism.

01:06:37.380 And what that means is that liberty is instrumental as opposed to the highest goal.

01:06:43.180 Liberty isn't the highest goal.

01:06:44.380 Liberty is a goal that lives within each one of these roles, and it is necessary for it

01:06:49.440 to be there, because without it, these roles don't mean a whole hell of a lot.

01:06:52.460 You see this in the Constitution, in the preamble, it refers to not liberty per se, but the blessings

01:06:58.800 of liberty, liberty as an instrument.

01:07:00.560 Right.

01:07:00.740 I mean, so the notion of an instrumental liberty does not mean that liberty is of no consequence.

01:07:04.140 There are some people on sort of the Adrian Vermeule side who seem to say that liberty

01:07:07.240 means nothing.

01:07:08.780 I don't know.

01:07:09.200 I'm sympathetic to that a little bit, but you know.

01:07:11.500 But, you know, that liberty can be flattened in favor of the ultimate good.

01:07:15.000 But it is to say that when the critique that you see from some common good conservatives

01:07:20.400 of classical liberalism is that classical liberalism, when it elevates liberty to be the

01:07:26.060 highest good, what it is actually doing is it's leading the way for liberty to be used

01:07:30.560 as a brick bat against all of those institutions.

01:07:32.500 And once you wipe away those institutions, even liberty won't remain.

01:07:34.920 And I think that that critique is fairly well taken.

01:07:38.320 I don't think that that critique is entirely wrong.

01:07:40.280 I think the critique goes too far when people start to say, okay, well, if liberty is a

01:07:43.660 danger, then the answer is to pluck out liberty completely and destroy it over here in order

01:07:48.440 to make sure that all of these roles are protected.

01:07:50.520 I don't think that either one of those things is a possibility.

01:07:53.800 I think that if you're going to have proper roles in society that leads to human happiness,

01:07:56.800 one of our roles is as chooser, right?

01:07:58.780 It is as the person who decides how we fulfill each one of these roles.

01:08:01.360 We can't get rid of the roles and we can't get rid of the liberty that's inherent in

01:08:04.820 those roles.

01:08:05.440 Well, this was the idea of liberal education is that it educates you to make sense of your

01:08:10.120 liberty so that you can fulfill those roles and have a little leeway in fulfilling.

01:08:14.040 But Edmund Burke, who is increasingly becoming my hero, just basically said, we need to allow

01:08:20.060 people to do the wrong thing.

01:08:21.800 I'm obviously paraphrasing, but we need to allow people to do the wrong thing and be free

01:08:26.200 so that we have freedom.

01:08:29.120 It is better than turning them into machines that are forced to do the good thing.

01:08:33.480 The problem with freedom, the problem of freedom is that it allows people to do bad things.

01:08:37.560 You need cultural answers to cultural questions.

01:08:40.040 And what I don't like on the right right now is that we blame liberty for our collapse.

01:08:45.900 Liberty is not responsible for our collapse.

01:08:47.900 Don't we, I think, as someone who's a little more sympathetic to that view, aren't we, we're

01:08:52.180 not, at least I am not, blaming liberty.

01:08:55.560 I think liberty has been misdefined.

01:08:57.680 So we say, you should be allowed to do the wrong thing.

01:08:59.840 But we don't think we should be allowed to commit murders or violent acts against people.

01:09:03.800 I don't think we should be allowed to use very harmful drugs, even though it ostensibly

01:09:08.380 doesn't harm anybody else.

01:09:09.440 It's just you.

01:09:09.920 But I still think drug laws are great.

01:09:11.640 I still think obscenity laws are great. 1.00

01:09:13.120 Certain porn laws are great.

01:09:14.080 All these are your opinion, and they might make for a very interesting conversation.

01:09:17.740 But you actually started, you're invoking these as examples as though those are the

01:09:22.840 things that have destroyed our country.

01:09:24.440 Yeah, I think licentiousness has destroyed liberty.

01:09:27.440 But hard drugs, hold on, hard drugs are illegal in America right now.

01:09:29.800 But they're increasingly legalized.

01:09:31.280 But they're being increasingly legalized in our collapse.

01:09:35.600 They were not legalized, which precipitated our collapse.

01:09:38.480 I'm not so sure.

01:09:39.380 I think the broader philosophical argument, I think the broader philosophical argument

01:09:44.080 point is not that pornography destroyed everything.

01:09:46.160 I think the broader philosophical point is that classical liberalism relies on a view

01:09:49.340 of the individual that is untethered from reality, right?

01:09:51.780 This is the critique.

01:09:52.520 The fair critique is that classical liberalism essentially devolves all responsibility to

01:09:57.940 individuals untethered from the society around them.

01:10:00.040 And the only thing that matters is that they're not hitting somebody in the face.

01:10:02.780 And so atomistic individuals, so long as you're not hitting anybody else in the face,

01:10:05.400 you're not providing a threat to anything else.

01:10:07.180 And that assumes that there is no sort of public space where there are a set of rules that

01:10:10.780 apply and where rules must be upheld by that set of rules.

01:10:14.700 Now, I think that there's a model that I've frequently been using now in thinking about

01:10:19.880 rights.

01:10:20.120 Because I think rights talk is really, really messy and sloppy.

01:10:22.940 And I think the way that people think about rights is really messy and sloppy.

01:10:25.240 So a few one of these ago, I asked a question, which is, is there a right to sin?

01:10:28.980 And you said no.

01:10:30.200 And you said no.

01:10:30.760 And Jeremy kind of said yes.

01:10:31.620 And I was kind of like on the side, yes, kind of.

01:10:33.500 But, you know, there's a model that I think that is helpful in thinking about this.

01:10:38.040 And it was created by a guy named Wesley Hofeld.

01:10:40.940 He's a lawyer in the early 20th century.

01:10:42.580 And what he did is he said, basically, when you talk about rights, you're talking about

01:10:44.920 four separate things.

01:10:45.920 And you have to be exact about what you're talking about.

01:10:47.860 The first thing that you're talking about is you have a right to do something if you

01:10:51.320 have no duty to do otherwise.

01:10:53.160 Okay, so you have a right to eat a hamburger because there's no duty for you to forego the

01:10:56.080 hamburger.

01:10:56.960 Right?

01:10:57.140 Then there's a claim right.

01:10:58.280 This is what the left likes.

01:10:59.040 The left likes to say, I can claim against you a right to health care.

01:11:02.300 Okay, I have a right to health care.

01:11:04.120 It means I can claim from you the ability to take your services.

01:11:07.000 That's the kind of right number two.

01:11:08.540 Then there are rights that are, there's a power to control how rights are redefined.

01:11:15.520 Right?

01:11:15.620 Which is like, as an employer, you have the right to control sort of how your employees

01:11:18.880 do their work.

01:11:19.680 And then there are immunities.

01:11:21.000 And immunities are somebody does not have the right to redefine your rights.

01:11:24.520 We as a society have confused the first type of right, right, that privileges with immunities.

01:11:28.920 Okay, so what we have said is just because the government does not have the

01:11:32.220 power to control a thing, that means it is morally right to do the thing or morally acceptable

01:11:36.580 to do the thing.

01:11:37.400 This is not the same thing.

01:11:38.860 Right?

01:11:39.000 So I would say that you have no right to drug use.

01:11:41.520 You don't have a right to drug use.

01:11:42.780 I would also say that there is a plausible argument that you have an immunity from government

01:11:45.720 prosecution for drug use, depending on whether it is practical or not, for the government

01:11:49.460 to effectively police that.

01:11:51.200 And that depends on the level of government.

01:11:53.140 Right?

01:11:53.240 But I think that where things get messy for libertarians is that they start defining the immunity

01:11:58.200 from government involvement in a particular area as a right to do X, right?

01:12:02.360 I have a moral right to pornography because the government, and the government can't invade

01:12:06.140 that right because I have a moral right to pornography.

01:12:08.740 No one has a moral right to pornography.

01:12:10.480 The government may be very bad at policing it.

01:12:12.100 The government on a pragmatic level may not have the ability to police it properly, but

01:12:15.680 that does not mean that you have a right as a human being to use pornography because

01:12:18.100 you do in fact have a duty not to use pornography.

01:12:20.060 But this is, even in what you're saying, I mean, look, the spoiler alert to this is there's

01:12:23.820 no system, there is no system that perfects a human heart, right?

01:12:27.340 Right.

01:12:27.440 So we have to, we have to-

01:12:28.540 But some are better than others.

01:12:29.600 Some are better than others, but we have to, we want individuals to be free because

01:12:33.420 we believe that to be a right, but we have to inculcate in people an assessment of virtue,

01:12:40.340 an idea of virtue.

01:12:41.100 And this is-

01:12:42.100 One thing I would say is that this fear of liberty shrinks the more local you get, right?

01:12:46.860 Because when you find the community in which you are, like, I don't think that it's

01:12:49.600 equal, and I think everybody makes a mistake.

01:12:51.060 I think libertarians think that you should be libertarian in your local community and

01:12:53.760 conservatives think that you should be national conservatives at the top level in-

01:12:56.460 But there is subsidiarity, right?

01:12:58.520 The sphere of liberty never disappears.

01:13:00.260 There's no point at which the government has a right to tell you to stop saying what

01:13:04.840 you think.

01:13:05.920 Right, there's certain core liberties that can't be invaded.

01:13:07.540 That's right.

01:13:07.780 But that's a pretty small list.

01:13:09.000 Are we skipping over the question of how we even know?

01:13:11.980 Everything you just said about rights, a lot of interesting observations, but there's

01:13:15.280 the real fundamental basic question of how do we even know where any of these rights

01:13:19.260 come from?

01:13:19.620 You say, well, I have a right to do this.

01:13:20.600 Who says you have a right to do that?

01:13:21.960 How do you know you have a right to do that?

01:13:22.820 And what I'm suggesting is that there are very few rights that you have.

01:13:25.660 And when I say rights, I mean like a moral right.

01:13:28.960 Right?

01:13:29.200 A thing where you don't have a duty.

01:13:30.180 I think you have lots of things.

01:13:30.960 You're saying you're living on the Jenga Tower.

01:13:32.520 I'm saying that there are very few things where you have rights in the way that we tend

01:13:35.920 to understand rights, which is you have the moral right to do acts.

01:13:38.540 I don't think you have lots of moral rights to do things.

01:13:40.080 Right, yeah.

01:13:40.520 I think you have a lot of immunities from the government because the government's ineffective.

01:13:42.520 So to try to maybe tie this back to identity, I mean, part of the problem is we remove responsibilities

01:13:49.080 from rights, and then the whole thing falls apart.

01:13:52.120 And kind of the same thing happens with identity.

01:13:53.780 We have this obsession with identity in our culture today where we're finding identity with

01:13:58.200 all these different labels, and we want to categorize our identities and compartmentalize

01:14:02.640 everything.

01:14:03.320 But there's no role or responsibility that comes with any of those identities, so it doesn't

01:14:07.740 mean anything.

01:14:09.020 You could say, well, I'm a man, I'm a woman, I'm whatever, but it doesn't mean anything.

01:14:12.080 Because it's all the same.

01:14:13.240 Right, it's all the same.

01:14:14.260 So you can list your identities and have 50 different identities and 50 different labels,

01:14:20.260 but what does any of that actually mean?

01:14:22.360 It doesn't mean anything at all.

01:14:23.160 In our society, what it means is that you have a claim right against somebody.

01:14:25.680 It means that you have a claim against somebody.

01:14:26.900 When you say I have an identity, you don't mean I identify.

01:14:28.960 It's such a switch in how religious people think.

01:14:31.540 When I identify as a Jew, what I mean is I have this many duties.

01:14:34.580 I have this giant list of duties because I am a Jew.

01:14:37.220 And when you say you're a Catholic, same thing.

01:14:38.660 When you say that you are a Protestant, same thing. 0.67

01:14:41.100 When you say you're a Berkian, actually, the same thing.

01:14:43.460 But the way that we now do identity, when I say that I have an identity as a trans person,

01:14:48.600 I don't mean this comes along with a list of duties.

01:14:50.540 I mean this comes along with a list of demands.

01:14:52.640 That's right.

01:14:53.040 My identity is a list of demands against you.

01:14:54.800 But can we go back to what you were saying?

01:14:56.220 Because I thought that was a really important point, that we have lost, I mean, we're living

01:15:00.300 in a Jenga tower of certain ideas that have come down to us that have logically led to

01:15:06.440 the idea of liberty.

01:15:07.820 And if you pull out the bottom of that Jenga tower, the tower collapses.

01:15:11.420 And that's exactly where we are.

01:15:13.120 I mean, we have people like this guy Yuval Harari, who was a great futurist, basically,

01:15:17.920 who says, no, this is all fiction.

01:15:19.960 We just invented this idea of rights.

01:15:21.920 But no, we didn't.

01:15:22.860 We didn't invent this idea of rights.

01:15:24.240 It comes from an idea of what a human being is and what a human being is in society.

01:15:29.060 And we've thought this through.

01:15:31.100 And if all those ideas are just fictions, then we can hurl them out.

01:15:35.440 It doesn't matter.

01:15:36.240 But if they're not, then we should understand where they come from.

01:15:39.680 We've basically inculcated ignorance.

01:15:42.020 Well, maybe there's something else that we should add, which is that we haven't thought

01:15:44.300 them through.

01:15:45.280 I'm not a big believer, like Michael Oakeshott, I'm not a big believer that our rights are the

01:15:50.020 result of rationalism.

01:15:50.940 And this is, I think, one of the Enlightenment mistakes, right?

01:15:52.720 Is this idea that rights spring full-blown from people's heads?

01:15:55.200 I don't think that's right.

01:15:55.600 Preach.

01:15:55.680 My heart is beating pitter-patter in my chest.

01:15:57.320 Okay, so the basic idea here is that rights are an outgrowth of thousands of years of

01:16:01.700 sociocultural evolution.

01:16:04.500 And most of that is done naturally ground up.

01:16:06.560 It is not done by a bunch of thinkers sitting in ivory towers who are like, today I have a

01:16:09.400 right.

01:16:09.920 Those things were implicit in the way that people lived, right?

01:16:13.100 When Locke came along and started discussing rights, rights already existed in Britain.

01:16:16.340 He was talking about things that already existed.

01:16:18.320 And so he was providing an intellectual framework for those things to continue to exist.

01:16:23.060 And that's why I think that the attempt to sort of read Locke as a complete radical separate

01:16:27.180 from Christianity is actually misbegotten.

01:16:28.940 I think that a lot of the critiques of Locke are overwrought.

01:16:31.620 But the basic idea, which is that rationalism is what brought us rights, is extraordinarily

01:16:36.240 dangerous.

01:16:36.740 Because as soon as you start saying that rationalism is what brought us our institutions or our rights,

01:16:40.120 the first thing that happens is that people start saying, well, show me the evidence.

01:16:44.000 Show me the evidence.

01:16:44.560 Show me how that's true.

01:16:45.720 If that's not true, then maybe we should just get rid of that thing.

01:16:47.560 And this is what they've done to marriage, right?

01:16:48.880 Marriage is an institution which has a long and storied history throughout human existence.

01:16:53.560 But defining, like explaining why marriage is important is sort of like explaining why

01:16:58.040 error is important.

01:16:59.000 Yeah.

01:16:59.440 Can you explain?

01:17:00.340 It defies explanation.

01:17:01.900 You can say, like, I need it to live.

01:17:03.240 But I can't explain to you all of the biological pathways why I need the error to live because

01:17:07.620 I haven't really thought about it.

01:17:08.420 I just do it.

01:17:09.120 I just kind of need it.

01:17:09.960 I don't think about it.

01:17:10.600 This is where Tolstoy gets things right.

01:17:12.560 I mean, Tolstoy kind of devalued the individual, but he always thought of the individual as

01:17:17.660 a historical entity, an avatar of what was happening in history.

01:17:22.200 So he would say of Locke, history will throw up a Locke when it's ready to have Locke say

01:17:26.900 what he has to say.

01:17:27.920 And there's a certain truth to that because it is a system of evolution or development

01:17:33.440 that comes from basic ideas that just kind of infest, infuse the community and are part

01:17:40.780 of the community.

01:17:41.240 You're absolutely right that reason is not the path to intervention.

01:17:44.720 Well, I think the one thing we can all agree on is that we have an intrinsic God-given

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01:22:24.860 So, obviously, I'm the most libertarian guy on the panel.

01:22:28.780 I think everything you're saying is true.

01:22:32.380 What I don't like is that on the right today, as I said, we're blaming liberty for our current state.

01:22:37.980 And liberty is not responsible for our current state.

01:22:40.040 What's responsible for our current state is that we've abandoned all the important roles and structures

01:22:44.280 that undergird our liberty. 0.94

01:22:45.900 You can't have, as our founders were very clear, you can't have liberty apart from values.

01:22:50.740 You can't have liberty apart from religion. 0.88

01:22:52.140 You can't have liberty apart from morality.

01:22:54.000 But it is necessarily the case that if you have those things, you must also have liberty.

01:23:01.140 We've been talking about a lot of interesting things tonight, you know,

01:23:03.900 about the nature of sexual preference and gender identity and these laws in Canada.

01:23:08.620 And it raises certain questions about, you know, the mind.

01:23:13.260 It raises certain questions about sin.

01:23:14.620 It raises certain questions about liberty.

01:23:16.400 It raises certain questions about the soul.

01:23:18.360 You know, I observed to Ben earlier today that there's this question raging on Twitter about,

01:23:22.680 can you be homosexual and conservative?

01:23:25.340 And I think that we're so behind as conservatives, even having that conversation, 0.87

01:23:30.040 that we don't know that in the future all homosexuals will have to be conservative 0.99

01:23:33.520 because the transgender ideology has gone so far 0.85

01:23:37.560 that you won't be able to be homosexual without being a bigot 0.81

01:23:40.500 and they'll all move over to be conservative.

01:23:42.740 But the best debate raging on the internet over the last 24 hours, I think,

01:23:46.920 was inspired by our very own Matt Walsh.

01:23:49.300 And that's the question of, it started, Matt, if I'm not mistaken,

01:23:54.940 a tweet that you put out that was about the increase in episodes of depression,

01:24:00.560 increase in episodes of anxiety by young people in this country,

01:24:04.920 children in this country because of these horrible lockdowns

01:24:08.980 that the government has foisted upon us

01:24:10.300 and that so many of us have willingly embraced and brought into our homes.

01:24:14.920 And someone made the point that mental illness is on the increase because of COVID.

01:24:19.180 And Matt, you responded by saying, well, there are two problems with

01:24:21.680 essentially what you're saying.

01:24:23.000 One is COVID didn't cause any of this.

01:24:24.860 We did through our misguided policies in response to COVID.

01:24:27.680 And two, your position is that you can't call it mental illness

01:24:32.920 when we inflicted it upon children.

01:24:34.740 It wasn't created by their biology.

01:24:37.380 It wasn't created by virus or bacteria or not even by birth.

01:24:42.340 It was created by our very deliberate action,

01:24:44.960 something that we did to these kids.

01:24:46.820 And therefore, I think what you were implying is that

01:24:48.740 the surest way to address it is to stop doing that to our kids.

01:24:53.980 And from there, you can tell us more, but the internet melted.

01:24:57.680 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:58.320 I mean, I think the point is that for kids who are in despair or they're anxious

01:25:05.020 or they're stressed out or they're sad, especially over the last two years,

01:25:09.140 that's a totally, that's not mental illness.

01:25:11.660 They're not diseased.

01:25:13.100 That is a totally justifiable and, in fact, rational response

01:25:16.660 to the position that they've been put in.

01:25:18.780 It's a response to their environment.

01:25:20.480 And so we can look at a kid who's been, you know, he spent one year locked away in his house,

01:25:25.860 having to go to school online, taken away from his friends.

01:25:29.260 Then he goes to school and now he's got to wear a mask.

01:25:31.580 And he doesn't get it.

01:25:32.500 You know, kids, some kids have gone two years not seeing their friends' faces

01:25:35.180 and not being able to show their face.

01:25:36.800 I mean, these kinds of things have a real effect on people's psychology and on their spirit.

01:25:40.980 And so that's a response.

01:25:42.320 Now, it's not a good response.

01:25:44.160 It doesn't mean that we should just, oh, well, they're depressed and we should just,

01:25:46.580 so they've got to deal with it.

01:25:47.800 No, but we have to understand the source of the problem.

01:25:50.600 And then there could be counseling.

01:25:52.220 There could be all kinds of ways to address it. 0.99

01:25:53.880 But the problem is if we say, well, you've got a mental illness. 0.98

01:25:57.000 And so we're going to give you some drugs. 0.96

01:25:58.220 We're going to give you some counseling.

01:25:59.020 And then throw you right back into the environment that caused it in the first place.

01:26:01.800 And then that started this whole debate about depression in general.

01:26:06.920 And my position, which is what really provoked the wrath of lots of people on the left and right,

01:26:11.840 is that I don't think that depression and anxiety for anyone, that this counts as a mental illness.

01:26:19.680 I don't think that it's a mental illness.

01:26:21.200 I don't think it's a disease.

01:26:22.400 I think that it is always that anytime someone is depressed and you talk to them or they go to a counselor,

01:26:28.220 you can trace the reason to something that's going on in their lives.

01:26:31.980 And sometimes it may go back to, very often it's kind of obvious what's going on.

01:26:37.480 And it could go back to their childhood.

01:26:39.020 It could go, many, many different factors play.

01:26:40.620 It could go back to their understanding of their role in the world and spirit and religion.

01:26:44.860 If nothing else, it goes back to the fact that we are conscious beings living in the world.

01:26:51.440 And I think that there's a certain amount of, you know, we used to know that to live is to suffer, right?

01:26:55.660 And so there's a certain amount of suffering that comes with simply being a conscious agent in the world.

01:27:02.000 And so to chalk that up to a disease, I think, I'm accused of minimizing it because I say it's not a disease.

01:27:09.080 I think it minimizes it to say that, oh, it's just a chemical imbalance in the brain.

01:27:13.280 Take a pill and you'll be fine.

01:27:14.600 I think there's something much deeper and more serious going on.

01:27:17.860 Doesn't mean that, oh, just toughen up and get over it.

01:27:21.160 Doesn't mean that depression doesn't exist.

01:27:23.200 It doesn't mean we shouldn't help people that are suffering it.

01:27:25.280 It just means that we should understand that it's much more complex and much deeper than simple chemicals.

01:27:30.700 But before we launch off, and Michael, I'll go to you next, to be clear, do you believe that there is such a thing as mental illness?

01:27:40.820 I mean, that's an interesting question.

01:27:42.360 I'm actually a little bit, I was mentioning off the air, there's this guy named Thomas Zazz who wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness in the 1960s.

01:27:48.700 And he was a psychiatrist, and his position was that the entire category of mental illness, it's a category error.

01:27:55.480 And, in fact, we have brain diseases, which is like dementia, epilepsy.

01:27:59.540 And you can look at what's happening in the brain, and it's very clear that the brain itself is diseased, and it's being destroyed by this disease.

01:28:07.880 Mental illness is a separate thing.

01:28:09.540 In fact, we call it a mental illness because its link to the brain is not exactly clear.

01:28:13.980 And so what we're doing with mental illness is we're diagnosing behaviors.

01:28:17.240 I mean, a good example, aside from depression, is ADHD.

01:28:19.740 We see that a kid is being hyperactive, or he's not paying attention, he's bored in school or whatever.

01:28:24.780 And we're deciding based on the behavior that there's something wrong in the mind, but the trace back to the physical brain is always quite unclear.

01:28:32.660 And so his point is that mental illness is really sort of a metaphor for behaviors that we find abhorrent or inconvenience or distressing.

01:28:45.300 And what we've done is we've medicalized these behaviors when, in fact, there's an origin that's deeper than that, and it goes back to the conscious mind.

01:28:54.340 And so I'm sympathetic to that view.

01:28:56.080 I don't know if I totally buy into it.

01:28:57.280 But when it comes to depression, anxiety, ADHD, I mean, I think that these things are essential to the human condition.

01:29:05.000 Anxiety, this is something that philosophers, it used to be for thousands of years, who do we go to to find out about a problem like anxiety or despair?

01:29:13.880 We went to priests.

01:29:14.820 We went to philosophers.

01:29:16.060 It was a philosophical question.

01:29:18.160 And now we've decided that it's a medical question.

01:29:21.400 And I don't think that things have gotten better because of that.

01:29:23.740 I don't think anything has been clarified because of that.

01:29:25.560 Michael?

01:29:26.280 I'm very sympathetic to your take on this.

01:29:28.760 But would you say that some people are born with, because it's a fallen world, or some people born with just some problems of their body or of their mind that make them perhaps a little more prone to melancholy, as we used to call it.

01:29:45.540 Now we call it clinical depression or something.

01:29:47.560 That make them a little more depressive or make them a little more eccentric.

01:29:51.000 I mean, it would seem to me that these sorts of things can be inborn, that they can have some biological basis.

01:29:56.900 Sometimes you'll hear conservatives, they'll say, nobody is born gay, or nobody is born transgender.

01:30:03.260 And I think, well, I mean, what do you know?

01:30:05.780 Maybe they're, maybe they're, I have no reason to think.

01:30:07.820 I mean, it's a fallen world.

01:30:08.920 Some people are born with four fingers.

01:30:11.020 I mean, there's some people.

01:30:12.200 But even if they're born that way, take ADHD, for example.

01:30:14.240 So there are some kids who are born that way, and they're much more hyperactive than other kids.

01:30:19.080 And maybe you can even trace it to the brain and see there's certain chemical reactions happening in the brain that make them more hyperactive.

01:30:23.940 Well, the next question is, and this, again, I think is a philosophical question.

01:30:27.580 How do you know the kid isn't supposed to be like that?

01:30:30.760 I mean, you have decided that that sort of personality isn't supposed to exist in the world, and therefore it's a medical problem.

01:30:38.520 But that is a philosophical judgment.

01:30:40.640 That is not a scientific judgment.

01:30:42.060 And it's a judgment that we make, especially with ADHD, because that, because we don't know how to deal with that.

01:30:48.300 It's like when you go to a doctor and you say, my kid has ADHD.

01:30:51.040 One of the first questions they ask you, the doctor, is, is it causing problems at school and at home?

01:30:56.240 Now, if you go to the doctor and you say that I, that, you know, and he diagnoses you with liver cancer,

01:31:01.840 he's not going to ask you whether it causes problems at home or at school because it's irrelevant.

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01:32:42.740 To be clear, there are differences in degree and also in kind.

01:32:48.320 So schizophrenia is a mental condition, right?

01:32:50.940 The problem with brain science is that it's extraordinarily underdeveloped, right?

01:32:54.180 We actually know very, very little about how the brain works.

01:32:57.300 MRIs and functional MRIs really haven't done very much to determine even what the various centers of the brain do at this point,

01:33:02.160 other than, like, the most broad-based sort of assumptions.

01:33:04.800 Schizophrenia is an actual mental condition that requires actual medication.

01:33:07.900 Okay, when it comes to anxiety, there's a difference between experiencing mild anxiety

01:33:10.720 and experiencing such severe anxiety that you can't get out of bed in the morning.

01:33:14.520 And sometimes that can be situationally caused, and sometimes it absolutely is not situationally caused.

01:33:19.280 And, you know, when it comes to things like OCD, OCD is an actual disorder

01:33:23.120 in which you see people who are performing the same tasks over and over and over again.

01:33:28.540 For example, they'll sit there, and they will write a word, and then they'll erase the word,

01:33:31.720 and then they'll write the word, and then they'll erase the word, and they'll write the word, and they'll erase the word.

01:33:34.440 That is not something that is coming in the vast majority of cases

01:33:38.080 from some sort of deep-seated societal trauma that's coming from an actual problem in the wiring of the brain

01:33:45.240 that requires both cognitive behavioral therapy as well as, in some cases, medication.

01:33:50.480 But there's a social phenomenon that I think, Matt, you're reacting to, which I react against as well,

01:33:54.700 which is it's very popular now to say we need to de-stigmatize mental illness.

01:33:59.780 And what that means on the surface is we shouldn't make people feel bad if they wake up clinically depressed.

01:34:04.360 You know, I was depressed once in my life because a family member died, and I got over it.

01:34:08.960 That's not depression.

01:34:09.600 That's not sadness.

01:34:10.580 That's sadness and despair.

01:34:12.060 Now, some people wake up, and nothing has gone wrong in their life, and they're just depressed,

01:34:16.100 and that's a different thing.

01:34:17.060 So I'm not denying that.

01:34:17.960 And so you're saying, don't feel bad because you've got schizophrenia or bipolar or whatever.

01:34:22.520 But I think the effect of de-stigmatized mental illness is now everyone takes to TikTok

01:34:27.320 and brags about their mental illness, and it carries some social currency.

01:34:30.340 We're sort of dichotomous about this.

01:34:31.340 So on the one hand, we say de-stigmatize mental illness, so that means let homeless people live on the streets 1.00

01:34:35.180 and push people in front of subway trains.

01:34:36.800 And on the other hand, we say de-stigmatize mental illness such that there is no such thing as normal anymore.

01:34:43.140 And so anybody's behavior has to be treated as normal even when it is completely abnormal.

01:34:47.420 So I believe that there is normal.

01:34:48.800 I believe that there are people who do require medication in order to reach some sort of stasis and function.

01:34:53.220 So what you're saying is that we, and I don't want to speak for you, but what I am saying is

01:34:58.020 then in a certain way, we need to re-stigmatize mental illness, not to make people feel bad,

01:35:03.160 but to make people seek treatment for these behaviors that are destructive to themselves and society.

01:35:07.180 The problem is materialist bias in the medical community.

01:35:10.800 I mean, having had the experience of actually having gone insane and having been saved,

01:35:16.720 I believe, healed, I believe miraculously by talking to another human being, never took any kind of drug at all, never, anything.

01:35:25.460 But I was healed.

01:35:26.740 I was remarkably healed.

01:35:29.420 I do believe that these psychotropic drugs are tools that can be used sometimes even by people whose lives,

01:35:38.760 the narrative of their lives has caused them to be unhappy.

01:35:41.480 Sometimes they're so unhappy that they can't get to the point where they can profit by therapy without a little bit of help.

01:35:47.600 My grandfather's life was saved by lithium, right?

01:35:49.540 Exactly, exactly.

01:35:50.620 His life was saved by lithium.

01:35:51.600 And there's no question that some people, as you point out, and I think this is a really important point,

01:35:56.280 that some people are born with a chemical imbalance that can be fixed by chemicals.

01:36:00.440 You know, we are holy, material creatures who represent spiritual truths.

01:36:07.440 You know, that's what we are.

01:36:08.560 We are the language of spirit.

01:36:10.900 Matter is the language of spirit.

01:36:12.680 And so the problem is that once psychiatrists went from being talking cure people to being drug dealers,

01:36:22.580 they gained incredibly in prestige.

01:36:26.360 The prestige of a psychiatrist now is huge because all that happens, you say, well, I'm divorced and I'm sad.

01:36:32.140 Here's a drug.

01:36:32.860 That's what they do.

01:36:33.740 That's literally what they do.

01:36:35.160 Not good ones.

01:36:35.880 What?

01:36:36.280 Not good ones.

01:36:37.040 Right.

01:36:37.220 Not a good one.

01:36:37.640 But a lot of them.

01:36:38.140 But a lot of them.

01:36:39.000 I know I want to look all psychiatrists together.

01:36:40.760 No, but 85% of them.

01:36:41.660 And they're going, you know, their consequence, you can look at the DSM, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,

01:36:46.760 and at this point it's longer than the Bible.

01:36:48.640 And literally they have, in fact, medicalized and categorized every aspect of the human condition.

01:36:54.500 And, you know, everyone sort of agrees with that.

01:36:56.400 And any time we have this conversation, people always say, well, yeah, these problems are overdiagnosed.

01:36:59.760 Well, maybe we should stop and think, why is our mental illness is so often overdiagnosed?

01:37:05.020 We don't have that problem with diabetes.

01:37:06.200 We don't have that problem with cancer.

01:37:07.480 I mean, there may be false diagnosis, but it's not nearly the same.

01:37:11.040 And so maybe that's because there's a problem with the way we perceive the category.

01:37:14.940 So to your point about schizophrenia, for example, you can trace it to the brain.

01:37:18.140 Well, the Thomas Zazz sort of way of looking at this, which, again, I'm not saying I totally endorse.

01:37:21.640 I just think it's an interesting idea.

01:37:23.100 But he would say, well, okay, if you can totally trace it to the brain and it's clearly a disease,

01:37:26.860 then it's a brain disease.

01:37:27.760 And call it that.

01:37:28.420 Don't call it a mental illness.

01:37:29.760 So maybe that's the distinction we have to draw here because, yeah.

01:37:33.520 Whatever you call it, the treatment is the question.

01:37:36.360 Well, I'm not sure.

01:37:37.420 You can call it whatever you want, but the treatment is the question.

01:37:38.840 What we call it matters.

01:37:39.820 And, yes, the treatment is the question, but the treatment is a question, but I'm not sure that it's the question.

01:37:44.520 I think what we're, you really hit on something, the materialist bias of the medical community.

01:37:51.940 And I think that that's where this thing lives.

01:37:54.240 It's brain primacy, right?

01:37:56.360 The meat primacy.

01:37:57.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:37:57.740 Material primacy.

01:37:59.020 That's how we solve every question.

01:38:00.700 But even the word mental, mental implies the mind.

01:38:03.840 What is the mind?

01:38:05.120 The mind is the obvious intersection between our meat and what is transcendent about us.

01:38:10.780 My mind is where I am, right?

01:38:12.760 It's everything that I physically am, but it's all the things that I am that are not merely physical as well.

01:38:19.060 The mind is the intersection of the body and the soul.

01:38:21.080 The mind is the intersection of thought and feeling.

01:38:25.880 The mind is where our actual identity actually lives, not the identities that we procure for ourselves through diagnoses.

01:38:32.640 As such, the mind is not exclusively the brain.

01:38:38.280 Right.

01:38:38.680 The mind is not exclusively the material.

01:38:40.920 And the mind cannot exclusively be treated through material means.

01:38:44.940 But it is also the case that the mind is not exclusively spiritual.

01:38:49.320 The mind is not exclusively transcendent.

01:38:52.260 And therefore, the mind can't exclusively be healed by exclusively transcendent means in every instance.

01:38:58.040 And so there are people who will say, pray the gay away, or people who will say, pray your depression away. 0.82

01:39:02.440 I'm not an advocate for that.

01:39:04.400 There are also people who will say, oh, you've got a feeling, take a pill.

01:39:07.340 I'm not an advocate for that either.

01:39:09.160 I think that we're in the most mysterious, least understood, and most essential part of what it means to be a person.

01:39:15.600 And it is undoubtedly the case in a fallen world that is a child can be born with four fingers.

01:39:20.000 A child can be born with a brain disorder.

01:39:22.620 There are corruptions of the brain that can, left untreated, become corruption of the soul.

01:39:28.620 Because the mind is the sinew between those two ideas.

01:39:32.040 It is also the case, though, that there are problems of the soul, problems of thought that can become,

01:39:38.360 and this is the part that no scientist will ever talk about because it cuts against their entire materialist view.

01:39:43.600 I can think thoughts that change my physical brain over time.

01:39:48.580 We know it's true, but we will not talk about it.

01:39:51.680 Behaviors will change my brain over time, just like a lifting a weight will change the muscle in my arm.

01:39:56.620 Well, of course, that's the fundamental basis of the only form of psychiatry that actually has been shown to do anything aside from drugs,

01:40:02.000 cognitive behavioral therapy.

01:40:02.960 That's right.

01:40:03.280 The entire basis of that is that you repeatedly breaking the chain of your own thoughts changes the pathways in your brain

01:40:08.540 such that you have a different reaction.

01:40:09.700 This is why, I'm sorry, because everything is in Shakespeare, you know.

01:40:12.420 You read A Midsummer Night's Dream, and he asks the question,

01:40:15.580 if I give you a potion and you fall in love, are you, in fact, in love?

01:40:20.020 And I think the question now is, if they give you a potion and you stop being depressed, are you, in fact, happy?

01:40:25.260 And the best line about this came from a friend of mine who was given antidepressant drugs,

01:40:30.640 and she said, I'm still depressed.

01:40:32.100 I just can't feel it anymore.

01:40:33.340 And that is, to me, that was a very profound remark, because if you don't feel your depression,

01:40:39.280 there are people who will say you are no longer depressed, but clearly that's not true.

01:40:43.500 And just as if you...

01:40:44.400 I'm not sure I totally agree with all of this.

01:40:46.620 The reason I'm not sure that I agree with all of this is because for a lot of people,

01:40:50.560 clinical depression, for example, is an obstacle to happiness.

01:40:52.860 Yeah, but you're talking about practicality, and I'm talking about the reality.

01:40:56.840 Yeah, but there's another...

01:40:57.920 Distinguish for me.

01:40:59.720 Well, for instance, I know people who have so badly raised their children

01:41:04.740 that their children have mental problems, and they give their children drugs, 0.64

01:41:07.480 and both the children and they are happier.

01:41:09.240 But I don't think that that has solved the problem.

01:41:11.460 I think it has erased the effects of it.

01:41:13.340 Well, I mean, I'm not saying that that's the situation.

01:41:14.940 And sometimes that's the only thing you can do.

01:41:16.360 Right, but the reality of the situation is that the best combination for some people,

01:41:21.680 and again, I think that the reason people are getting uptight about this

01:41:24.600 is because the suggestion when it comes to the notion that this is mostly a spiritual problem

01:41:30.400 that can be solved through mostly spiritual means

01:41:31.960 is that the responsibility for your own happiness lies with you.

01:41:34.820 In many cases, that's true.

01:41:36.440 I mean, I think we all agree that in many cases that's true,

01:41:38.200 that the only thing that can change your circumstance is your outlook on the world, right?

01:41:41.260 There's been a religious perspective since religion began, right?

01:41:43.980 Or that the only way that you can change your approach to the world

01:41:47.620 is through changing the way that you act toward the world.

01:41:49.840 All of that may be true.

01:41:50.740 And then for a lot of people, there may be another problem.

01:41:53.960 And that problem was not caused by an outside stimulus.

01:41:56.940 Or if it was caused by an outside stimulus, it cannot be removed anymore by changing the outside stimulus.

01:42:01.380 These are not mutually exclusive things.

01:42:03.360 That's right.

01:42:03.800 What I'm saying about depression, I don't think it's a mental illness or disease,

01:42:07.400 that doesn't necessarily preclude the option of taking a drug to help address it.

01:42:13.400 You know, I'm skeptical of a lot of these drugs, and I think that they're way overused.

01:42:16.940 But there's no reason, just because if you were to subscribe to my idea that it's not a disease,

01:42:22.300 that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't take a drug to address it.

01:42:25.060 There's also a chicken or egg problem here, which I think Jeremy alluded to,

01:42:28.720 which is even if we could trace depression back to a chemical imbalance in the brain,

01:42:32.500 which, by the way, is a totally outdated theory,

01:42:34.420 and almost any scientist you talk to now or doctor who's being honest will tell you that that's,

01:42:38.140 that's at best a massive oversimplification.

01:42:41.160 But even if you could find a, quote, chemical imbalance in the brain of a depressed person,

01:42:45.460 well, the question is, are they depressed because of the chemical imbalance,

01:42:49.200 or is the chemical imbalance there because they're depressed?

01:42:51.600 And what I would say is that we talk about the mind.

01:42:54.600 I mean, what's the mind?

01:42:55.980 The mind is your conscious experience of the world, okay?

01:42:59.720 And your brain is the organ in your head.

01:43:01.940 So this idea that we can really simply and kind of blithely medicalize someone's conscious experience of the world

01:43:11.180 and say, well, your experience is incorrect.

01:43:13.700 And so it's, and not only is it incorrect, but it's diseased. 0.98

01:43:17.240 It's sick.

01:43:18.000 I actually do have a fundamental disagreement with this.

01:43:20.540 I think that there are certain circumstances where you can look at a person

01:43:23.140 and you realize there's a reason why the person is depressed.

01:43:25.440 So, for example, you had a friend or family member who died, and now you're down, right?

01:43:28.900 We can tell that that is not a medicalization of your problem.

01:43:32.260 You had a stimulus.

01:43:33.180 You have responded to the stimulus in what we would consider a normal way.

01:43:36.320 If you had gotten suicidal over that person,

01:43:39.200 that would assume that there was probably some underlying problem with you

01:43:42.240 that has now been triggered by this existential stimulus.

01:43:44.200 But that problem could be, yes, I agree, it could be some problem.

01:43:47.960 In other words, I'm saying that I don't think that it's a fully subjective matter.

01:43:51.880 There has to be some sort of outside analysis of whether the reaction to a particular stimulus

01:43:56.880 or to your surrounding circumstances.

01:43:58.180 The problem is hopelessness.

01:43:59.560 This is the problem.

01:44:00.500 The problem is a suicidal person, we're talking about,

01:44:03.660 and that's why I use depression and despair interchangeably,

01:44:06.720 because despair is the worst thing a person can internally experience is despair,

01:44:12.140 which is why I was always, it's sort of strange to me,

01:44:14.060 people got upset when I compared depression to despair.

01:44:16.620 Despair is the worst possible thing.

01:44:18.620 Despair is worse than depression.

01:44:20.120 Right.

01:44:20.860 Despair is a total loss of hope.

01:44:22.680 So someone who's suicidal, they have no hope and they see no meaning in their lives,

01:44:26.120 and that's why they're suicidal.

01:44:27.620 Now, that's not good.

01:44:28.700 We should not accept it.

01:44:29.380 We should do everything we can to try to help them.

01:44:31.100 But the question is, is a lack of hope a medical problem?

01:44:37.640 Is there a good reason for the lack of hope or no?

01:44:40.280 Well, not in my life.

01:44:41.620 I mean, really, I mean, it's a serious question.

01:44:43.980 It's a serious question.

01:44:45.040 If your entire family is, if you're Job, and your entire family is struck down,

01:44:49.700 and then you are hopeless, that's not a medical problem.

01:44:52.060 If, however, you wake up in the morning, you have a good job, you're married,

01:44:54.140 and you have two kids, and you wake up hopeless, that's probably a medical problem.

01:44:57.340 That's a philosophical question.

01:44:58.080 That's probably a medical problem.

01:45:00.100 Providentially, though, providentially, I was reading Job today.

01:45:03.060 This is the way the world works, I guess.

01:45:05.220 And there is this issue.

01:45:07.060 Job remains faithful to God, right?

01:45:09.060 At least, you know, most of the book, he's quite cheery in the face of his entire family being wiped out

01:45:13.760 and everything he loves going away.

01:45:15.500 If someone loses a loved one, and they get down, and they're sad, and they're despairing,

01:45:21.840 and then they become suicidal, it might be because there's some problem in their brain. 1.00

01:45:24.660 It might be because their view of the world is that life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. 1.00

01:45:30.660 And that is not a chemical problem, though there might be some chemical effect of it. 0.99

01:45:34.860 That's a philosophical problem, it's a theological problem, it's a mystery.

01:45:37.720 I believe that I went through mental illness for a moment at age 38.

01:45:45.220 And I'm using that word loosely, but also acutely.

01:45:49.060 The worst thing I've ever gone through, I had a thought in my mind,

01:45:52.340 and I could not separate myself from the thought or of the consequences of the thought.

01:45:57.720 The thought dominated everything.

01:45:59.200 It was only a thought.

01:46:00.700 It was only a thought.

01:46:01.840 It was a thought that risked burning my marriage to the ground.

01:46:05.060 It's a thought that, left unchecked, could have burned my life to the ground.

01:46:08.780 Could have burned this business to the ground.

01:46:10.220 It was only a thought.

01:46:11.480 But it was also chemicals in my brain.

01:46:13.340 I could feel, like when you were a teenager and you started having hormones for the first time,

01:46:16.720 I could feel the wave of the chemical when it would come over me in response to the thought.

01:46:21.420 And like a wash that would wash across my brain

01:46:24.800 and change how I saw the world from that moment forward.

01:46:28.120 Now, all mental illnesses are not the same.

01:46:29.960 It was not schizophrenia.

01:46:31.420 It was not—I don't want to be overly simplistic in how we talk about these things.

01:46:36.220 I am using the language mental illness. 0.96

01:46:38.140 You may be right that that's a bad use of language.

01:46:40.120 But whatever we're talking about, we know that they're a different thing.

01:46:42.580 We're talking about a wide range of possible phenomena.

01:46:45.740 By the way, just on this point, I mean, you compare it to a teenager.

01:46:48.940 Let's say a teenager experiences love for the first time.

01:46:51.040 And he says, oh, I have heartache.

01:46:52.560 He's describing an actual physical phenomenon going on.

01:46:56.300 And this was a physical phenomenon as much as anything.

01:46:58.060 But it was also just a thought.

01:46:59.800 And I believe that I was miraculously healed as well from that thought,

01:47:02.740 which could have—which had power over me.

01:47:05.120 And this is where the spiritual question,

01:47:07.140 which is more important to me than the diagnostic question,

01:47:09.500 it is more important to me even than the treatment question.

01:47:11.780 It's the underlying spiritual question.

01:47:13.940 And in the underlying spiritual question,

01:47:18.660 there is a belief in Christianity about being born into sin,

01:47:23.980 that Adam was made in the image of God according to Genesis,

01:47:26.920 but according to Genesis 5, Seth was born in the image of Adam,

01:47:30.560 and that man born in the image of Adam has carried with him

01:47:34.620 not even the possibility.

01:47:37.800 No act of free will could result in a righteous life.

01:47:40.380 Righteousness is not attainable in the Christian view by a man.

01:47:45.940 By saying that, we are acknowledging that something can exist

01:47:50.840 that we cannot overcome,

01:47:53.500 that you do not sin just because you want to sin.

01:47:58.040 Paul says, the things I don't want to do, I do all the times.

01:48:01.280 The thing that I want to do, I scarcely ever do.

01:48:03.840 That implies that there is a limit to what free will is,

01:48:06.460 that we cannot think our way into perfect health.

01:48:09.360 If sin is the root cause of all corruption,

01:48:12.580 and therefore, not your sin is the reason you have cancer,

01:48:15.360 but sin is the reason there's cancer.

01:48:16.940 That's an important distinction.

01:48:18.120 I'm not saying you have a mental illness because of your sin,

01:48:20.780 but mental illness is the result of sin

01:48:22.440 in this way of thinking writ large across humanity.

01:48:26.160 So there is corruption.

01:48:28.020 There are kids born with four fingers.

01:48:29.420 There are kids born with a hole in their heart.

01:48:32.160 There are kids born addicted to drugs.

01:48:33.740 They never chose to do drugs.

01:48:34.800 They're born addicted to drugs.

01:48:37.140 There are undoubtedly kids who are born with,

01:48:39.340 at a minimum, not solving all the answers of the cosmos here,

01:48:43.720 with a proclivity toward depression, 0.90

01:48:48.980 a proclivity toward homosexuality. 0.97

01:48:52.120 Are kids born gay? 0.93

01:48:52.900 I don't know.

01:48:53.660 But there are certainly kids for whom that struggle is different.

01:48:56.780 And there are people who have sex with other men in prison or on ships.

01:49:00.200 And that was not in any way biological.

01:49:01.860 Well, it's biological, but it's not that form of biological.

01:49:05.020 Mostly convenient.

01:49:05.940 Yeah.

01:49:06.240 Right.

01:49:07.100 All of this range of messiness exists in the human condition.

01:49:10.580 And so when we talk about the spiritual underpinning of this thing,

01:49:13.760 I'm not suggesting that it is exclusively a spiritual problem

01:49:17.120 that can be exclusively solved by spiritual means.

01:49:19.480 I don't think even, Matt, that you're saying that.

01:49:21.200 I'm not saying that every problem is a thought that you can think your way out of.

01:49:24.740 I am saying, though, that because the mind lives between the spirit and the brain,

01:49:29.940 the corruption can flow both directions.

01:49:32.020 And sometimes something that may have started as a thought

01:49:34.220 may have moved over into corruption in my brain.

01:49:37.800 And I may even need brain treatment to even help myself get out from my...

01:49:41.900 I might need brain treatment in the form of a drug

01:49:45.720 to even help right me enough to even be able to deal with these thoughts

01:49:50.260 and get back to this other problem, or vice versa.

01:49:52.180 Maybe at every level.

01:49:53.160 It may be at every level.

01:49:54.260 It depends on what perspective you have.

01:49:56.420 From God's perspective, it all may be demons taking you over.

01:50:00.480 You know, from our perspective, obviously,

01:50:02.500 the tools that we have are drugs and physicality and all this.

01:50:05.360 So these things, you know, I often wonder with schizophrenics 1.00

01:50:07.940 who hear, like, a demon in their mind telling them to do something awful,

01:50:11.600 I often wonder, like, maybe there's also... 0.95

01:50:14.460 Maybe they should be drugged to get rid of their schizophrenia, 0.95

01:50:17.560 but maybe their schizophrenia is allowing... 0.99

01:50:18.780 There are demons.

01:50:19.900 Right there, Angel.

01:50:20.800 You've made the point before.

01:50:21.860 No one ever hears voices telling them...

01:50:23.440 To do something.

01:50:24.500 You're a great guy.

01:50:25.420 Good job, buddy.

01:50:26.620 I think...

01:50:27.000 And I agree with you that it's not exclusively spiritual,

01:50:30.060 but I do think it's fundamentally spiritual,

01:50:31.560 because to go to Ben's question before about,

01:50:34.080 you know, we're talking about someone who's hopeless

01:50:35.420 and they're suicidal, and you said...

01:50:37.460 You asked, well, is there a reason for him to be hopeless?

01:50:40.300 And my answer to that is no.

01:50:42.360 There's no reason for anyone to be hopeless.

01:50:44.140 But that is a fundamentally religious answer that I'm giving.

01:50:47.160 And there's no way to separate that

01:50:50.320 because you could have a philosophical view of life

01:50:54.760 which is fundamentally hopeless.

01:50:56.980 And there are many philosophers who have argued

01:50:59.460 that basically there's no hope, there's no meaning to life.

01:51:02.280 I think that's incorrect.

01:51:03.720 I think it's damaging.

01:51:04.600 I think it's horrible.

01:51:05.260 I think it's ugly.

01:51:05.900 I think that people that suffer from that,

01:51:07.400 we have to help them.

01:51:08.460 But it's not medical.

01:51:10.020 That's not a medical...

01:51:11.440 But I do think that there are distinctions even here

01:51:14.140 between questions that we ask

01:51:16.020 that are within the realm of rationality

01:51:17.400 and ones that we ask that are not.

01:51:19.080 If somebody is suicidal

01:51:19.980 because they didn't get enough P's in their alphabet soup,

01:51:24.360 that's fundamentally different

01:51:25.280 from somebody is deciding that they're suicidal

01:51:27.100 because life is meaningless

01:51:28.080 and there's no hope in the universe.

01:51:29.580 I would push back only...

01:51:32.020 I'm going to push back and then pull.

01:51:33.380 My push is, at the end of the day,

01:51:35.280 my guess is that the person who feels suicidal

01:51:37.020 because of the P's also has a thought problem.

01:51:39.560 It may not be the thought of loss like Job's thought.

01:51:42.540 It may be a thought of narcissism.

01:51:44.180 It may be a false expectation

01:51:45.440 of what the world can provide.

01:51:46.500 There are thoughts related to that that are wrong.

01:51:48.260 But here's my pull.

01:51:50.180 My pull is also that there is likely something

01:51:52.280 that we can measure in their brain

01:51:53.560 and treat medically that may also be wrong.

01:51:55.840 And this is why I say...

01:51:56.660 That's all right, because I'm not a cartoonist.

01:51:57.580 That's always true.

01:51:58.840 That's true if your wife leads you to that. 0.79

01:52:00.600 That's right.

01:52:01.060 But this is the ultimate thing that I'm driving at,

01:52:03.600 which is to say,

01:52:04.540 I agree with Matt that it is fundamentally a question,

01:52:08.040 a spiritual question,

01:52:09.560 in the way that all questions

01:52:10.780 are fundamentally spiritual questions.

01:52:12.480 But that doesn't mean in a very practical sense

01:52:14.820 that our only tools are spiritual tools.

01:52:17.600 Totally agree.

01:52:18.040 Because just like I say the things I don't...

01:52:20.440 Paul says the things I don't want to do, I do.

01:52:22.700 The answer isn't try harder.

01:52:24.860 That's never...

01:52:25.400 That isn't even the spiritual answer

01:52:26.900 is not try harder.

01:52:28.860 When we...

01:52:29.460 Sometimes as conservatives,

01:52:30.500 we speak in certain kinds of absolutes,

01:52:32.760 and I think they're the correct absolutes

01:52:34.360 to order a society.

01:52:36.120 Free will,

01:52:36.860 as a concept to order society around,

01:52:40.180 is a far better concept than determinism

01:52:42.100 to order a society around.

01:52:44.140 But free will...

01:52:44.840 Which is impossible.

01:52:45.600 Which is impossible.

01:52:46.440 But free will isn't a complete answer.

01:52:49.380 It's a framework with which we can build around.

01:52:52.480 Reality is often messier.

01:52:54.200 Even a spiritual problem that,

01:52:56.560 as I said,

01:52:57.440 cancer is the result of sin,

01:52:58.820 that doesn't mean your cancer

01:52:59.960 is the result of your sin.

01:53:01.860 We live in this corrupted world,

01:53:03.780 and in this corrupted world,

01:53:05.560 we sometimes bear consequences

01:53:06.940 for things that we didn't do.

01:53:08.480 Again, the child born addicted to drugs

01:53:10.600 did nothing.

01:53:11.800 They are still addicted to drugs.

01:53:13.260 The answer to their addiction

01:53:14.320 isn't the same

01:53:15.160 as the answer to your teenage buddy

01:53:18.120 who's starting to experiment with drugs.

01:53:20.260 Your answer to him

01:53:20.960 is going to be a very whip-cracking, 0.99

01:53:23.100 cut-that-crap-out answer. 0.99

01:53:24.920 That's no answer to a baby... 0.99

01:53:27.180 But I would say that the problem

01:53:28.280 of the two people

01:53:28.840 is fundamentally different, right?

01:53:29.860 The child's not experiencing

01:53:30.600 a spiritual problem.

01:53:31.280 The child's experiencing

01:53:32.000 a physical problem.

01:53:32.480 Well, I'm saying in the final analysis,

01:53:34.260 the child is dealing

01:53:35.540 with a spiritual problem,

01:53:36.740 but not an individual...

01:53:37.240 Well, it would be nice...

01:53:38.260 Right, okay, so this is a big distinction.

01:53:40.780 Okay, so this is a big distinction.

01:53:41.820 I think this is...

01:53:42.240 Well, no, no.

01:53:43.700 This is a fundamental distinction

01:53:44.760 that I think we ought to keep in mind.

01:53:45.900 So if you go all the way back

01:53:46.840 to Emile Durkheim,

01:53:47.560 who was the first sort of sociologist

01:53:49.160 person to write very seriously

01:53:50.620 about suicide, right?

01:53:51.540 Writing in the 1870s

01:53:52.620 who wrote a book called On Suicide,

01:53:54.000 in which he looked at

01:53:54.460 comparative suicide statistics

01:53:55.760 across countries and across cultures.

01:53:57.620 And he talked about why it was

01:53:59.060 that he thought that there were

01:53:59.700 certain cultures

01:54:00.280 that were more prone to suicide

01:54:01.260 and why certain cultures

01:54:02.200 were less prone to suicide

01:54:03.260 and all of this.

01:54:05.180 All of that is well worth discussing

01:54:06.380 because there are certain societies

01:54:07.360 that are just sicker than others. 0.86

01:54:08.820 There are certain societies

01:54:09.660 that just have more social problems

01:54:11.440 than others

01:54:11.800 that breed a spiritual malaise.

01:54:14.580 There's no question

01:54:15.380 that that's true.

01:54:16.260 It is also true that

01:54:17.120 to try and apply that

01:54:18.700 to an individual inherently,

01:54:21.420 to say that every individual

01:54:22.460 who is suffering from depression

01:54:24.680 is doing so because

01:54:25.780 of this suicidal thing,

01:54:27.500 because of this broader

01:54:28.340 social problem.

01:54:29.900 That's right.

01:54:30.780 It's almost like the mistake

01:54:32.040 that people make by saying

01:54:33.060 that bad things happen

01:54:36.180 to bad people,

01:54:37.380 so therefore,

01:54:38.700 if something bad happened to you,

01:54:40.020 it's because you did a bad thing.

01:54:41.160 That's right.

01:54:41.680 There's a fundamental religious belief

01:54:43.160 that if you do the right things...

01:54:44.280 The rain falls on the just

01:54:45.600 and the unjust alike.

01:54:46.360 Right.

01:54:46.680 But there's a fundamental

01:54:47.900 spiritual belief

01:54:48.620 that on a general level,

01:54:50.040 if you do good things,

01:54:51.060 your life will be better for it.

01:54:52.140 But we all know people

01:54:52.900 for whom that's not true.

01:54:53.940 Okay, and that means

01:54:54.700 that when you look

01:54:55.140 at the individual,

01:54:55.700 you can't say to that individual, 1.00

01:54:56.840 the reason your life sucks 0.99

01:54:57.560 is because you made bad decisions. 1.00

01:54:59.100 Maybe that's not true.

01:55:00.140 Okay, the same thing to me

01:55:01.180 is true when we get to

01:55:02.240 things like mental illnesses

01:55:03.300 and depression and disorders.

01:55:05.760 Yes, it is true

01:55:06.360 that our society

01:55:07.160 has bred depression.

01:55:08.420 There is no question.

01:55:09.180 We've gotten rid

01:55:09.760 of fundamental societal institutions.

01:55:11.620 This breeds depression.

01:55:12.560 We have known about this again

01:55:13.560 for 150 years.

01:55:14.840 This is nothing new.

01:55:15.920 I mean, Durkheim called it

01:55:17.120 the problem of enemy,

01:55:18.920 the idea that,

01:55:19.800 spelled A-N-O-M-I-E, 0.52

01:55:21.340 the idea was

01:55:22.160 that people are reliant

01:55:23.360 on the fundamental institutions

01:55:24.440 around them.

01:55:24.880 When there are sea changes

01:55:25.580 to those institutions,

01:55:26.620 people fall into despair

01:55:27.820 and confusion

01:55:28.380 and they can't

01:55:29.340 sort of find their center again.

01:55:32.600 This has been happening

01:55:33.760 throughout society,

01:55:35.000 particularly in the West,

01:55:35.840 for 150 years.

01:55:38.080 With that said,

01:55:38.780 I think the reason

01:55:39.300 that you drove a lot of outrage

01:55:40.540 is because what people did

01:55:41.380 is then they applied it

01:55:42.020 to the individual.

01:55:43.120 They made the mistake

01:55:43.860 that religious people

01:55:44.460 sometimes make of saying,

01:55:45.340 well, the bad thing

01:55:45.760 happened to you,

01:55:46.260 that's because it's a social problem

01:55:47.540 that you have failed

01:55:48.120 to somehow grasp with.

01:55:49.460 And for a lot of people,

01:55:50.440 that's not true.

01:55:50.920 For a lot of people,

01:55:52.660 you can say that society

01:55:53.820 has a sickness

01:55:54.340 and you can also say

01:55:55.320 that the individual has OCD

01:55:56.480 or the individual

01:55:57.400 has generalized anxiety disorder.

01:55:59.400 And sometimes that may be

01:56:00.280 because of some sort

01:56:01.060 of outside problem

01:56:01.900 and that can be cured

01:56:03.000 by fixing the outside problem,

01:56:04.340 such as taking the masks

01:56:05.460 off your kids

01:56:05.980 and letting them go to school 0.54

01:56:06.820 and leave them the hell alone. 0.64

01:56:07.960 And sometimes,

01:56:08.880 the kid just has OCD.

01:56:10.520 Sometimes the kid

01:56:11.100 just has general anxiety disorder.

01:56:12.620 Sometimes the material

01:56:14.460 corrupts the spiritual.

01:56:15.460 Yeah.

01:56:15.660 Sometimes the spiritual corrupts them.

01:56:16.800 It would be nice

01:56:17.320 if we had psychiatrists

01:56:18.200 who looked at people

01:56:18.920 as whole things

01:56:20.080 instead of as, you know,

01:56:22.020 meat puppets.

01:56:22.860 Yeah, meat puppets.

01:56:23.400 The consequence of this

01:56:25.220 is that,

01:56:26.520 talk about the outrage

01:56:27.560 that came my way,

01:56:28.660 is that we're dealing

01:56:30.860 with these really big,

01:56:32.760 complicated problems

01:56:33.580 like despair,

01:56:34.660 suffering,

01:56:35.140 the human mind,

01:56:36.360 and we can't even talk

01:56:37.880 about these problems anymore.

01:56:39.280 Like, the conversation

01:56:40.180 in our society

01:56:41.120 is over

01:56:41.800 about human suffering

01:56:43.480 and consciousness

01:56:44.280 and despair

01:56:45.180 because we've decided

01:56:46.500 that it's medicalized

01:56:47.420 and there's no room

01:56:48.160 to even discuss it anymore.

01:56:49.100 And because of identity.

01:56:50.640 Because when you make

01:56:51.460 your identity

01:56:51.940 something other than God,

01:56:53.920 you now can't wrestle

01:56:55.960 with those ideas anymore

01:56:57.120 without it being

01:56:58.000 an absolute attack

01:56:58.920 on your actual person.

01:56:59.940 It's also because

01:57:00.700 what people are doing

01:57:01.340 is they're doing

01:57:01.700 the mistake

01:57:02.080 that I talked about

01:57:02.720 earlier in reverse.

01:57:03.720 So if the idea is

01:57:05.180 on the religious level

01:57:06.780 that good things

01:57:08.120 happen to good people,

01:57:08.680 bad things happen

01:57:09.160 to bad people,

01:57:09.560 but there are exceptions,

01:57:11.320 then the reverse is

01:57:12.380 for a lot of people.

01:57:14.120 If I'm suffering

01:57:14.860 from depression

01:57:15.400 and it's not my fault,

01:57:17.040 therefore,

01:57:17.660 all depression in society

01:57:18.640 is nobody's fault.

01:57:20.020 Right.

01:57:20.300 And that's also a mistake.

01:57:21.840 There's a mistake

01:57:22.960 of individualizing the general

01:57:24.080 and there's a mistake

01:57:24.720 of generalizing the individual.

01:57:26.100 That's right.

01:57:26.800 Yeah.

01:57:28.100 I want to thank you

01:57:28.900 for tuning in.

01:57:29.540 As always,

01:57:30.260 we're happy to have you join us

01:57:31.540 and we'd love to invite you

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01:57:33.700 Head over to

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01:57:36.520 and remember,

01:57:37.520 we did not comply

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01:57:40.440 We'll see you next time.

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The Matt Walsh Show - January 19, 2022

Daily Wire Backstage： WE WON

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