The Daily Wire Strikes Back(stage): Canceling Cancel Culture
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 58 minutes
Words per Minute
220.9787
Summary
Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles join host Jeremy Boring to discuss Gina Carano's new movie, "Crazy Rich," and the wave of cancel culture that's sweeping the country. Plus, the Daily Wire teams up with Gina on a new feature film.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
This is your theocratic fascist dictator, Matt Walsh, and I'm very disappointed in you for
00:00:04.140
missing the latest episode of Daily Wire backstage. Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, Andrew
00:00:08.400
Klavan, Michael Knowles, and I are covering all the big events, including the Daily Wire partnering
00:00:12.160
with Gina Carano on a feature film and the wave of cancellation sweeping the country.
00:00:16.460
Go ahead and give it a listen. That's not a request, it's a demand.
00:00:19.860
Welcome to the Daily Wire Strikes Back stage. I'm Jeremy Boring, lowercase g, lowercase k,
00:00:26.000
God King. Tonight, we're going to be talking cancel culture in an effort to answer the age-old
00:00:30.660
question, just how rich is the left trying to make us with all this bullcrap?
00:00:50.060
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't let big tech track what you do. Anonymize your web
00:00:54.980
browsing at expressvpn.com slash backstage. I'm joined, per usual, by Smokey Mike Knowles,
00:01:01.620
by Matholomew Walsh, by the ghost of Andrew Klavan, and by the finest Ben Shapiro clone
00:01:06.340
money can buy, still cheaper than the original. And, of course, by the lovely one herself,
00:01:11.300
Mrs. Alicia Krause, here to take your questions. Alicia.
00:01:15.100
Hey, how are you guys doing? And welcome to the Empire Strikes Back stage, the Daily Wire Strikes
00:01:22.400
Back stage. Although, I don't know why you guys want to be relating to the Empire. I thought that
00:01:26.020
we were the good guys, and the woke mob that tried to cancel Gina was the Empire. But, anyway.
00:01:30.700
You're overthinking this, Alicia. You're overthinking it.
00:01:33.680
Sorry, I'm just trying to be accurate, God King. Anyway, it has been one of the biggest months in
00:01:38.480
the Daily Wire history, and we are so excited. I love the Sunday special with Gina and Ben. And,
00:01:43.720
we're going to tell you guys, this is just the beginning. Ben still needs to introduce Gina and I,
00:01:47.920
so we can be BFFs and go for many petties, and then she can teach me how to be a badass so I can
00:01:51.620
beat up Michael Knowles. But, if you're just as excited as I am, then you can be a part of this
00:01:56.620
huge movement by joining us at the Daily Wire. As always, I will be answering your questions tonight
00:02:01.700
throughout the show, and only Daily Wire members can ask the questions later on throughout the show
00:02:06.640
tonight. And, if you're not a member, then you ask, oh, how can I become a member? Well, just head on
00:02:11.300
over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, and you can get 25% off if you use the code DEBUNKED.
00:02:17.920
That code is very specific because it is also the name of Ben Shapiro's new show, DEBUNKED,
00:02:23.480
in which he talks about massive leftist myths that he's going to debunk every single episode.
00:02:29.760
The first episode is this Friday, February 26th. Be sure to check it out. But, after you go to
00:02:35.300
dailywire.com slash subscribe. Use code DEBUNKED for 25% off, because who doesn't love a good sale?
00:02:41.660
I know I do. Stereotypical, right? So, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe. Use that code
00:02:47.320
DEBUNKED. Ask the questions. I'll throw them to the guys later throughout the night.
00:02:51.980
Thanks, Alicia. Fellas, we had an unbelievable last two weeks because the left has decided,
00:02:59.000
in their infinite wisdom, that making us just insanely wealthy is their top priority. They've
00:03:07.700
decided that they're going to cancel many, many valuable Hollywood entertainers, and we have
00:03:13.600
decided that we are going to make movies with those people, specifically with Gina Carano.
00:03:19.840
Alicia mentioned the Sunday special, Ben. It really was. I think it may have been the best
00:03:23.440
Sunday special ever. Gina telling her side of the story was just remarkable.
00:03:28.060
I want to talk about what happened to Gina specifically for the three or four people
00:03:31.600
who live under rocks and didn't pick up on it, but what I really want to talk about
00:03:35.320
is the bifurcation of the culture, the bifurcation of the economy, the tragedy and the comedy of the
00:03:42.500
whole thing, and the opportunities that it presents. So, would you mind walking us just briefly through
00:03:46.440
Gina's story? So, I mean, the way that Gina told it, and first of all, you should watch the
00:03:50.780
Sunday special because it really does allow you to see her side of the story in her own words,
00:03:54.560
and Gina is just a lovely human being, just a wonderful, lovely human being. I had her over
00:03:58.500
for a Friday night dinner, so we actually had Chavez together. It was really nice. My kids loved
00:04:02.320
her, and what happened to Gina basically is that she tweeted a bunch of stuff that Disney didn't
00:04:07.120
like. None of it was particularly horrifying or controversial, and they fired her. I mean,
00:04:11.720
it really is that simple. It started off when she had tweeted a joke about the pressure that
00:04:15.860
people receive online to put their pronouns in their Twitter profiles. She'd put in her Twitter
00:04:20.100
profile, beep, bop, boop, which is actually pretty funny. Droid noises. And Disney called
00:04:26.840
her into a room, and they wanted her to have kind of the woke mob do a Zoom session with
00:04:31.340
her, and she said, I don't really want to do that. I want to actually get in a room and
00:04:33.440
talk with actual human beings. And they finally kind of let her do that, and then they would
00:04:38.160
not let her do any press, basically, from then on. They cut her out of all of the press
00:04:41.700
materials for The Mandalorian, even though she's one of the bigger stars in the show. And
00:04:45.580
then you fast forward, and post-election, she started tweeting things that are fairly
00:04:50.380
well accepted in conservative circles. Like, if you want to crack down on voter fraud, perhaps
00:04:53.580
there should be voter ID. She tweeted that like two days after the election. And people
00:04:57.060
were like, oh, this means that she is in favor of lies about the election. No, that's not what
00:05:01.220
she tweeted. And then a few days later, she tweeted something about how Americans should
00:05:05.300
remove the mask from their eyes so they can see what's actually going on with regard to
00:05:08.060
COVID. Again, this is a fairly mainstream conservative position, even for people like me.
00:05:12.260
Plus, it doesn't even protect you from the virus.
00:05:16.880
Yeah. In any case, that was really not particularly controversial. And then she tweeted out this
00:05:22.880
meme that was just a picture, a very famous picture, from the Holocaust of a Jewish woman
00:05:27.880
running away from German soldiers. And the text next to it was fairly generic. It just said,
00:05:35.420
these sorts of evils don't happen in a vacuum. They start off with people dehumanizing other
00:05:39.120
human beings. And if you treat people horribly, then eventually you could end up at this place.
00:05:42.860
And so you should remember this when you treat people horribly because of their politics,
00:05:46.120
which is a fairly reasonable generic statement. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Holocaust comparisons
00:05:50.240
because I generally feel that most of them are overwrought. But there is nothing remotely
00:05:53.200
anti-Semitic about this one. And in the world of Holocaust comparisons, this one ranks like the
00:05:58.000
lowest 10 percent in terms of controversial, because that's a pretty generic statement about
00:06:01.080
dehumanization of other people. In fact, I've seen the Auschwitz Memorial Museum put out very
00:06:05.480
similar tweets, actually, about the generic nature of dehumanizing other people and how that leads
00:06:09.620
to problems down the road, including death for people. And so, you know, this turned into a big
00:06:14.660
hullabaloo with Disney and Lucasfilm deciding that it was time for Gina to be ousted. Apparently,
00:06:18.920
this had been in the works for a couple of months. They had been meaning to announce her as a spinoff
00:06:22.280
star from The Mandalorian in one of their own series. They had canceled that in December and
00:06:26.880
they were looking for an excuse to canter. They used this as the excuse to canter despite the fact
00:06:30.340
that Pedro Pascal, the actual star of The Mandalorian, had tweeted out a meme comparing Auschwitz to kids
00:06:35.280
being held in cages in 2018 using a picture that was from the Palestinian Authority in 2014.
00:06:40.840
And it was and, of course, no blowback to that. So basically, after they canceled her and she found
00:06:46.220
out about this, essentially via the social media, the way we did. Same way we did. I mean, we found
00:06:51.060
out about the exact same time that Gina did. They didn't even give her the courtesy of a call.
00:06:53.940
They just said, you're not coming back. That's it. In social media. Right. And and we saw this here
00:06:59.060
at Daily Wire and we reached out. I reached out to her personally. And I said, listen, this is
00:07:03.200
it's really tragic what's happening to you, because it's not about the money. It's about
00:07:07.360
the dream. If you ever go to Hollywood and you work with folks in Hollywood and pretty much all
00:07:11.560
of us, except for Matt, have actually have actually done this. People who move out to Hollywood move
00:07:15.660
out there because their dream is to be in a show like The Mandalorian. I mean, it's the biggest show
00:07:20.060
in TV right now and to have a starring role in that and to take that away from somebody summarily
00:07:24.720
and to destroy their career in the process because they released a statement saying essentially she was
00:07:27.920
an anti-Semite and that she was a racist and all this stuff. They categorized people on the basis of
00:07:31.700
religion and ethnicity. I mean, it's just a lie. It's just not true. And they and and for them to
00:07:36.500
do that was an act of cruelty. It was an act of true cruelty. So we called her up and and I said
00:07:41.800
to her, you know, it's terrible what's happening to you, but it's a real opportunity to punch back
00:07:46.080
at these bastards. And we should punch back at them because nobody has ever said to them, you know
00:07:49.580
what? Fine. You want to cancel me? I'm not canceled because there's a whole side of the political
00:07:53.720
aisle that doesn't agree that I should be canceled. And so, you know what? I'm just going to go do my own
00:07:57.380
thing over here. And so that's when we announced and she good for her because it was an act of
00:08:00.700
bravery on her part. For us, it was an opportunity, right? For us, I mean, I'll be to be honest with
00:08:05.600
you, whenever somebody in mainstream in mainstream culture is canceled, I put in a call. So I probably
00:08:10.480
put in over the course of the last four or five years, at least 50 calls to various mainstream
00:08:15.100
figures who have been canceled for bad reasons. It's it's it's something that I just do on regular
00:08:18.740
whether liberal or conservative. There are many people on the left I've done this for. And Gina was
00:08:23.040
just another person who was like that. But Gina really took up the opportunity and said, OK, let's do this.
00:08:27.040
Now, there's an opportunity. I've been wanting to do this anyway. I don't deserve to be
00:08:30.200
canceled. And Americans need to be able to stand up for themselves. So I'm happy to come over here
00:08:34.600
and I'm happy to make a movie with you guys. And we could not be more pumped up about our audience
00:08:38.120
certainly couldn't be more pumped up. It's the biggest week in the history of The Daily Wire.
00:08:41.100
I think people miss that Gina Carano is a real human. Sometimes you read these stories about us
00:08:46.560
or about political figures or about entertainment figures. And we're two dimensional. And that makes
00:08:50.700
sense because we come to you on a screen, which which makes us two dimensional also because we have
00:08:55.020
no souls. Yeah, I personally am two dimensional. But Gina's an actual human. They took they took
00:09:01.500
her career away from her. Her agent dropped her. Her her attorney dropped her. Her publicist dropped
00:09:09.400
her like they took all the tools necessary to have a career away from her. They took the biggest show
00:09:13.660
away from her. They took her ability to pay her bills away from her. They took her good name
00:09:18.500
away from her. Lucasfilm called her aberrant, said that she categorized people on the basis of religion
00:09:23.080
and ethnicity, which she did not do. Fundamentals. It's defamation because it is 100% untrue. That's
00:09:30.540
not even a possible interpretation of the things that she has said. The fact that we were even able
00:09:36.240
to get her on the phone in that situation, I think, is fairly remarkable. She was having what must be one
00:09:41.920
of the worst days that a person can possibly endure when their career and their good name have sort of
00:09:48.260
having a serious health problem. That's about as bad as it gets right there. But you know, the terrific
00:09:51.540
thing about it, and the reason I'm so glad you guys acted, I really, I hate to compliment you
00:09:55.560
because you know who you are. But still, I really am happy you acted is because we all support free
00:10:01.800
speech. And that means when they take an Alex Jones off the air, I'm offended. I think Alex Jones
00:10:06.340
should have a platform. I think he's a loon, but he should have a platform because who cares? You
00:10:10.860
know, we can defeat it. We can defeat his. And they're making the frogs gay with the truth.
00:10:14.440
But the thing is, we're defending a guy that we don't agree with, that we think is out of his
00:10:22.520
mind. Here's a case where this woman did literally zero percent wrong. Her tweet, and I'm with you,
00:10:30.360
I don't like Holocaust comparisons because they're over the top, but she didn't really even deal with
00:10:35.320
that. She was making a perfectly valid point that you begin by dehumanizing people and you end by
00:10:40.540
hurting them. And that's what is happening in our society. It's a perfectly valid point.
00:10:44.800
We're defending somebody who was actually wronged. And that is a terrific position to be in because
00:10:50.080
the left has been very clever and they go after the people on the end. And they proved her point
00:10:53.780
too, because they, not that they're going to cart her off to a concentration camp, but they dehumanized
00:10:58.360
her by labeling her anti-Semite, by lying about her, saying that she was categorizing people based on
00:11:06.360
race and ethnicity. That's just flatly wrong. They know that they're lying, but they figure,
00:11:12.440
well, she deserves to be lied about and to be slandered because she's wrong about all these
00:11:15.780
other things. There are two aspects of this that I want to talk about. I actually want to talk about
00:11:19.920
Holocaust comparisons generally. And I want to talk about what it means that they canceled someone
00:11:24.340
on the basis of nothing. But first, I'm going to talk to you about our friends over at ExpressVPN.
00:11:29.680
I mean, there's just one question. Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet? Ladies and gentlemen,
00:11:32.740
I'll tell you, there's never been a more important time to protect your digital rights.
00:11:36.560
That's why I and thousands of my listeners, I'm joking, thousands of Ben's listeners,
00:11:40.560
choose to secure our online data by using ExpressVPN. Did you maybe believe a VPN isn't for you because
00:11:46.880
you can use the internet fine without one? Sure. But anytime you go online, your internet service
00:11:51.540
provider can see every single site that you're visiting. That's not a good idea. It's particularly
00:11:56.340
not a good idea when big tech is so arrayed against us, when they collude against us. It's not a good
00:12:01.880
idea when there are so many bad actors around the world trying to take advantage of your personal
00:12:06.500
information. Take back your privacy at expressvpn.com slash backstage. And you'll get three extra months
00:12:12.900
for free on a one-year package when you use expressvpn.com and throw in that slash backstage.
00:12:19.100
That's how you get those three extra months for absolutely free. Expressvpn.com slash backstage.
00:12:28.060
They canceled her for nothing. Yeah. Why did they cancel her?
00:12:32.600
They canceled her because it's very wrong to make any comparison to the Holocaust,
00:12:39.620
especially after we just had literally Hitler be president for four years. So you're not,
00:12:44.180
you can't do that sort of thing. You know, it, this is what is most chilling to me. We all support
00:12:49.860
the American free speech tradition in this room. The left does not. We all support it. But we all think
00:12:55.460
there are, there are some things that if you, you know, if you walk up to the water cooler and you
00:12:59.400
say Zig Heil, or, you know, you do something, I think you should lose your job. I don't think you
00:13:03.840
should be allowed to keep your movie or whatever. I think there are some things that are out of
00:13:06.900
bounds. There are always things that are out of bounds. What this woman did was make an absolutely
00:13:14.900
mainstream opinion that we all, everybody left, right, and center would have agreed on even five or
00:13:21.940
six years ago. But now they have so moved the goalposts in this country that if you, if you
00:13:27.520
have an American flag outside your house, you could be. I'm actually not sure that this is right.
00:13:33.040
I think that she was canceled for nothing because it was nothing. I think that we're living through
00:13:38.840
a change in what cancel culture is and what the woke mob wants, that it's no longer about enforcing
00:13:45.400
their rules. I think that it's, it's like the great terror. I think it's just the imposition.
00:13:50.500
Yes. Yeah. I think that the arbitrariness of it, I think the randomness of it is actually part of
00:13:55.460
the terror. If they can take down Gina for nothing, then they can take down you for anything.
00:14:00.100
Well, you see this happening. I mean, the rules are changing every single day. I mean,
00:14:03.480
they're changing every single day and things that are overtly non-racist are now being treated as
00:14:07.160
racist. I mean, you'll have Don McNeil losing his job at the New York Times for using the N-word to
00:14:11.120
describe why using the N-word is wrong, right? And in which situations using the N-word is wrong.
00:14:15.380
See the guy over at Slate, Mike Peska, right? We're not big fans of Slate over here. Slate fired a guy
00:14:19.680
for saying that maybe we should have a discussion about when use of the N-word is appropriate in
00:14:23.860
like, for example, quoting someone who used the N-word. And they were, and people at Slate were
00:14:27.660
like, nope, can't have that. They, they laid Mike Peska off. I think the most ridiculous example of
00:14:33.100
somebody being canceled for non-racism that I've seen in the recent past is not really even Gina,
00:14:38.320
although that was ridiculous. I think that it's what's going on with Chris Harrison over at The
00:14:41.260
Bachelor. Right? So I'm not, I'm not a fan of The Bachelor because I am a man. I have testosterone
00:14:46.020
that runs in my body, but there, this is one of the cultural institutions of the United States
00:14:51.260
over the last 25 years, right? I mean, it's been going since 2002. It has been, The Bachelor has
00:14:56.120
been on the air for a majority of my lifetime on this planet, right? It's been on forever.
00:15:01.460
Right. And The Bachelor basically just collapsed over the course of the last month because there's
00:15:08.940
a, the first black Bachelor and he was dating one woman, there was a woman named Rachel
00:15:13.500
Kirkconnell when she committed the heinous sin of in 2018 going to a party at a plantation that was
00:15:18.880
dubbed a, a plantation party or something. And she wore like a Scarlett O'Hara dress.
00:15:22.860
Antebellum party. Antebellum party. Okay. And the idea was that this was racist because you can't
00:15:27.280
have an antebellum party without acknowledging the sins of slavery, which again, I just hate to note
00:15:32.180
this. Unless you're governor of Virginia. Well, right. Then you can dress up as whatever you want,
00:15:35.600
right? But, uh, but I hate to note this for everybody, but if you wear a costume from virtually any
00:15:40.420
historic period prior to 1820, that culture had slavery, right? I mean, like if you, if you dress
00:15:44.740
up as a Viking and there was, there was slavery back then, if you dress up as a Roman, there was
00:15:48.960
lots of slavery back then. In any case, the, the idea was that she was a racist for having gone to
00:15:53.960
this party in 2018. So the, the bachelor who spoiler alert for women who are still watching
00:15:58.720
the bachelor, but it's out of the bag now, he ended up picking this woman, right? Rachel
00:16:02.160
Kirkconnell is the woman he ended up picking at the end of the bachelor. And so he put out a statement
00:16:06.380
on February 3rd in which he said, you know, she should be given a little bit of grace.
00:16:09.640
Social media shouldn't be going after her. They shouldn't be digging up her parents voting
00:16:12.200
record, like give her, give her a break. And so Chris Harrison, the host was on a show
00:16:16.300
with Rachel Lindsay, a former host of the, she was the former bachelorette, first black
00:16:20.260
bachelorette, I think. And she was interviewing him and Chris Harrison said, you should give
00:16:24.300
her a little bit of grace, right? Social media shouldn't be judged, jury and execution or
00:16:27.200
people should be treated with a little bit of grace. She can explain herself. And Rachel Lindsay
00:16:31.300
then suggested that Chris Harrison for saying she deserved grace ought to apologize and
00:16:35.620
essentially lose his job. And then a couple of weeks later, like just this week,
00:16:39.840
Matt James, who originally had defended Rachel Kirkconnell and was dating Rachel Kirkconnell,
00:16:44.120
he put out a statement over the last 24 hours saying that Rachel Kirkconnell was essentially
00:16:47.500
a racist, that Chris Harrison was a racist, that the bachelor was racist and that it was,
00:16:52.040
it was unthinkable that Chris Harrison could have said what he said in front of Rachel, Rachel
00:16:56.080
Lindsay, who then was forced to do, and I quote, the emotional labor, the emotional labor
00:17:01.100
of explaining to him the history of racism and slavery in this country. Emotional labor. First
00:17:05.820
of all, what, what in the F is emotional labor? I've seen actual physical labor. My wife's
00:17:10.000
done it several times. It's much, it's much the same. I can't even make this joke. It
00:17:14.120
is so over the top. I know if I make this joke, how mad Ben's going to be at me, but
00:17:18.640
I will say this. The fact that he used the term emotional labor is proof that they got to
00:17:24.560
him. Yeah. There's no human being walks around with the term emotional labor in their frontal
00:17:29.160
lobe except woke leftists. Yeah. And that means that somebody came and sat him down and
00:17:32.760
said, listen, uh, the girl you've been dating and obviously like, she doesn't matter the
00:17:37.880
show. That's the only reason you have a platform at all. That doesn't matter. The only thing
00:17:42.200
that matters if you want to keep have, if you want to keep your house and your career and
00:17:47.560
your good name is that you freaking get out there and walk the line. That's right. And I
00:17:52.020
mean the, the utter cowardice of throwing under the bus, the girl you were dating, right.
00:17:56.300
And calling her a racist and then saying the guy who said exactly what you said, exactly
00:18:00.040
what you said, like within days that that guy's a racist, but you you're, you're perfect,
00:18:03.780
right? You're perfect. That's amazing. By the way, I just have to add the capper to
00:18:06.860
this. So again, my producers who, uh, the only reason I know about the bachelor is cause
00:18:11.000
I have two producers. Yes, they are female and, uh, they inform me of this TV remote.
00:18:16.540
That's why a producer savvy and producer Jessica. I will say that they keep me updated on this
00:18:22.320
stuff on a granular level. Uh, and, uh, and they made me aware of a post from Rachel
00:18:26.280
Lindsay that happened in the middle of the black lives matter movement in the summer.
00:18:29.260
And this post was a picture of Rachel Lindsay standing. I kid you not in front of a Cadillac
00:18:34.860
XT six. And the post was when I am fighting on behalf of black lives matter, the way that
00:18:40.640
I like to learn about black history is through podcasts about black history that I listened
00:18:44.800
to on my Bose sound system in my Cadillac XTS capitalism. Number one always wins, but number
00:18:51.160
two, like this is the person who is standing up against the racism and of the capitalist
00:18:56.040
evil American system. This is the person who's doing emotional labor, emotional labor. You're
00:19:00.120
standing in front of a Cadillac XT six and a sponsored ad on Instagram to preach about black
00:19:05.780
lives matter. And you're the person who's supposed to be the, the great Pope of wokenness here. I
00:19:10.460
mean, it's insanity. How dare you is what a, is what a grift it all is. Correct. You know, 15 years
00:19:15.960
ago you were taught discussing in an academic context, the use of the N word and now you're fired.
00:19:21.440
But if you're a black mom who wants her kid to go to school, that can't happen because teachers
00:19:27.200
unions are keeping you out. You know, Bill Gates literally put out a system for teaching
00:19:33.300
algebra to black kids where you got rid of the concept of right and wrong. And I just thought
00:19:38.980
like that, that may be, and I'm like, I've been around a long time. That's one of the most
00:19:43.580
racist things I've ever actually heard. And so it's all a grift, you know, it's all, nobody's
00:19:48.700
doing anything for anybody, but this emotional panic is white America. It's white America.
00:19:55.280
Well, it is. I mean, this is what Shelby Steele writes about. It's a bunch of woke white folks
00:19:58.840
who get to maintain control over the auspices of power by saying black folks don't have
00:20:02.420
to do the work. It's our job to do the work. All you have to do is give me power and I can
00:20:05.900
fix all of these things. Exactly. And corporate America has bought into this, that, that, that
00:20:10.040
ridiculous anti-racism training that Coca-Cola, or as I now call them, Woka-Cola.
00:20:15.560
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's why we have to stipulate, I think with, with cancel culture
00:20:19.380
that it is a left wing phenomenon. I know on the left, they always want to accuse the
00:20:25.140
right of, Oh, you're doing cancel culture because we criticize someone for having, you know,
00:20:29.040
for their opinion. But you know how people on the left say that only white people can
00:20:34.280
be racist because we have institutional power and black people don't. Well, we know that's
00:20:39.020
totally bogus because number one, racism is a condition of the heart. Anyone can be racist.
00:20:43.620
Number two, we had a black president. You know, I consider that to be institutional power,
00:20:46.880
but with, with cancel culture, that actually is about institutional power. You can't cancel
00:20:53.540
someone unless you own the institutions. Canceling someone is all about, they lose their job.
00:20:58.480
They lose the reputation. Uh, they lose their credibility. They lose everything. We on the
00:21:02.740
right, unfortunately don't have the ability to do that. Um, only the left can do that. So the left,
00:21:07.800
so cancel culture is a left wing thing. It's what the left does. And I think we need to be clear
00:21:13.440
about that in our definition of it because that's, that's what I think it is.
00:21:17.720
The collapse of corporate America into wokeism is one of the great disturbing elements of the last
00:21:21.860
several decades. It really is amazing because we were all taught that after you leave college,
00:21:25.720
that you were going to get in the real world and then the real world, there'd be a meritocracy and,
00:21:29.540
and all of the, all of the kind of emotional crap that you learned in college and the microaggression
00:21:33.960
nonsense, all that was going to stop. And it turns out those people just took over the institutions
00:21:37.220
and now you get it twice as hard from the corporations and the corporations have a real
00:21:41.180
interest in promoting this stuff because number one, it's a great way to avoid liability, like
00:21:45.600
discrimination liability. You say, Oh, you know, we hired Robin DiAngelo for 20 grand to teach all
00:21:49.820
of our people that they're racist. So, I mean, how can you sue us for that? And also all your woke
00:21:54.140
staffers are the ones who are most likely to sue you. So if you just give into them, then they won't
00:21:57.820
sue you. But has anyone sued yet? I mean, we're waiting for a white, they're at a point right now
00:22:02.120
in these corporations where they actually single out, they say, this is only for the white employees
00:22:05.640
come to the room and we're going to tell you what a scumbag you are. Has any white employee actually
00:22:10.140
stood up and said, this is racial harassment? But look, look what happens when you, you know,
00:22:13.780
when, when Asian students sued Harvard, right? Wasn't white students suing about the affirmative
00:22:18.140
action policies. It was Asian students who were also disadvantaged. The Asian students sue,
00:22:22.460
what happens? Doesn't go anywhere. The DOJ under Trump looks into Yale for doing exactly the same
00:22:28.000
thing. They're disadvantaging white and Asian students in applications. What happens? The
00:22:31.980
Biden administration gets rid of it. So, you know, if, if I'm a white employee and I'm being
00:22:36.440
told to be less white, and I think I'm pretty swarthy, how much less white can I get? If I'm
00:22:40.460
thinking about suing, I look at the track record of, of these lawsuits and I say, why would I waste my
00:22:45.000
money? That goes back to the institutional point that Matt was making. The institutions are now
00:22:52.820
completely corrupted from the inside by the woke. I want to talk about that a little bit more.
00:22:56.720
First, I want to talk about one of the most important things to me, which is me.
00:23:01.980
When it comes to being me, I like to spend as much time being me as humanly possible. And that means
00:23:07.380
spending as little time doing the things that I don't want as is humanly possible. And that's why
00:23:12.760
I use stamps.com. When you're taking trips to the post office, you're not busy being you. No,
00:23:19.100
you're not doing the things that you want to do. This is not how a God King likes to operate. That's
00:23:23.400
why I recommend mailing and shipping online at stamps.com. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime,
00:23:29.660
anywhere, right from your computer. You can send letters, ship packages, and you can pay a lot less
00:23:34.580
with their discounted rates. With stamps.com, you get discounts up to 40% off post office rates and up
00:23:39.980
to 62% off UPS shipping rates. Not to mention stamps.com is a fraction of the cost of those expensive
00:23:46.860
postage meters. Don't waste your time. Be like me. Sit at your house. Don't go outside. Don't pay
00:23:54.540
attention to anybody else. Look in the mirror. Occasionally break away to send out a correspondence
00:23:59.560
out to the hoi polloi at your computer by using stamps.com. You don't want to go to the post office.
00:24:04.680
You'll want to go to stamps.com instead. There's nothing wrong with a post office. Post office is a
00:24:08.420
perfectly wonderful place if you like to be around other human beings. I don't. Therefore,
00:24:13.640
stamps.com. There is no risk if you use the promo code backstage, you will get a special offer that
00:24:18.720
includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments,
00:24:24.140
no contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone up there at the top of the homepage,
00:24:28.740
and type in the word backstage. That's it. Stamps.com, promo code backstage, stamps.com. Never go to the
00:24:34.500
post office again and just, you know, enjoy being you for a minute. That is the first time I've ever
00:24:39.400
heard the term hoi polloi in an advertisement. Okay, well, first of all, I was actually going to
00:24:43.100
stop you. That is the best ad read you've ever done. As somebody who does this professionally,
00:24:47.480
let me just say, your skill set has grown, Jeremy. I mean, like, I've heard you do some real bad ad
00:24:52.460
reads. Some horrible ad reads. Some truly terrible ones. Really bad. That was excellent. It was a really
00:24:55.980
great segue in, and then it really made it personal when you made it about you, and you really took your
00:25:00.620
time with it. It was really excellent. That was really good. The fact that you were talking about you,
00:25:04.080
that's when you glow. That kind of glow comes over you. I mean, it was really impressive.
00:25:08.360
There was one note that I wanted to make as far as the fact that cancellation is a left-wing
00:25:13.580
phenomenon, and it is because it is connected to institutional power. Occasionally, you will see
00:25:17.320
sort of a right-wing cancellation effort. So, for example, there was some talk about in college
00:25:21.660
removing college scholarships from kids who wanted to kneel for the national anthem or something.
00:25:26.340
Like, I'm not a big fan of that sort of thing, but it's not just that it's a left-wing
00:25:30.540
phenomenon. It's that it's a left-wing mindset. There's an actual mindset of cancellation that
00:25:35.860
exists, and there's a study that I was looking at the other day that is just a truly amazing study.
00:25:41.100
It was quoted in Harvard Business Review. What they did is they took a panel of people of wide
00:25:46.240
variety of political opinion, went all the way right to left, and then they offered them a model
00:25:50.740
corporation. It was like Jobs Corporation or something. And what they told them is that they
00:25:55.060
gave them three examples. One, Jobs Corporation is apolitical. How do you feel about it? You're like,
00:25:59.220
okay, it seems like a nice corporation. Second was Jobs Corporation is liberal. How do you feel
00:26:03.420
about it? People are like, nice corporation. And then they said Jobs Corporation is conservative.
00:26:08.640
It dropped 33 points in the approval ratings. 33 points entirely because the left decided that it
00:26:13.820
was now an evil business. So, in other words, people assume that corporate America is liberal.
00:26:19.320
They assume it. That's why the first two results are the same. That's why apolitical and liberal end up
00:26:22.780
with the same result. It also shows you the right does not care. The right is happy to shop
00:26:26.660
wherever there is a good product. The left does care. The left wants their wokeism infused into
00:26:30.740
everything. Well, there is good news for us in this, as you may have noticed, which is that,
00:26:35.180
fine, you want to do this? You want to boycott any business that's conservative? There's half the
00:26:38.940
country that believes they should be able to shop at businesses that are not going to shove this garbage
00:26:42.380
down their throat. And we are happy to start each and every one of those businesses and rake in the
00:26:45.660
dough. That's right. Drew, this is where the left, I think, has lost their mind. Illiberalism is nothing new,
00:26:51.200
right? There's always been a streak of illiberalism, even on the right, and the leftist is now
00:26:56.620
illiberal. But if you go back, like, to the 60s, illiberals on the right would, like, burn Beatles
00:27:02.480
albums. And you're, I'm sorry, the Beatles were a band who never got, they never got successful
00:27:08.980
because all these illiberal conservatives burned their records. And so then no one ever, no, of course
00:27:13.300
that's not how it works. There's a, there's going to be a reaction against this idea of cancel culture
00:27:18.520
that is going to make us more powerful. To quote, well, the evil empire, the more they tighten their
00:27:26.200
grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers. That's the opportunity that they've given
00:27:30.100
us. I think it's bad for the world that the left is creating a dual culture. I think it's bad for the
00:27:34.680
world that the left is creating a dual economy. But I also think that to the extent that they've had
00:27:39.960
almost unchecked power in the dominant culture and in the dominant economy, only the creation now of the
00:27:46.540
dual economy gives us the, the opportunity to maybe one day make a better economy and a better
00:27:51.960
culture that one day has a chance of being dominant. And you know, this ties into your
00:27:55.400
point on the arbitrariness of it, because I, I, I think it's arbitrary when they say they have rules
00:28:01.200
and they make up the rules on the spot and the rules change day by day and they cancel you for
00:28:05.220
whatever. But what is not arbitrary is the people that they're canceling. Yeah. People that they're
00:28:09.700
canceling tend to hold views very similar to what we think. If you are in any way contradicting the
00:28:15.320
left-wing orthodoxy, you are liable to be canceled and they'll make up some fake rule.
00:28:20.740
This is exactly right. It's all, it's all pretextual. Yeah. They're doing all of this
00:28:24.480
on the basis of who do we want to cancel? And then how do we fit them into the box of sin?
00:28:29.180
But, but you know, this is, this is actually, I was speaking to my son, Spencer Claven, no relation
00:28:33.660
today. And he, and he makes the brilliant point as he so frequently does, that this has a,
00:28:39.780
an almost exact analog in the Inquisition in that. Nobody expects it.
00:28:46.360
Nobody ever expects it. No, no, that, that they said, the Catholic church said in the Inquisition,
00:28:52.260
we have this new technology, which is the printing press. How wonderful. It spreads information. You
00:28:57.500
can now read the Bible. You can now have your own Bible. It's a, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing,
00:29:01.520
but it's spreading some bad information as well. And those people have to be burned at the stake and
00:29:07.220
put on the rack. Basically the Twitter terms of service. It was bad. Well, no, I was going to say
00:29:12.780
I'm in favor of the Inquisition. I'm following it so far, but then when does it go wrong?
00:29:17.260
The Twitter, the Twitter terms of service are the same thing. We have this wonderful internet.
00:29:21.220
It's spreading information, but it's bad information. And those people have to be burned
00:29:25.140
at the stake and put on the rack. I know you guys are in favor of this. This is right. You saw that
00:29:29.500
house democratic letter, right? Those two house Democrats who wrote a letter to Comcast and AT&T
00:29:33.840
and Amazon and every major carrier in the country about inflammatory language and inciting language.
00:29:38.900
They've brought in the definition of inflammatory and inciting to anything they disagree with.
00:29:41.860
Right. And then the idea is they're going to cudgel corporations into doing their work,
00:29:44.600
which by the way, does violate the first amendment. You are not allowed to make
00:29:47.320
private corporations into agencies of the government for purposes of quashing the first
00:29:50.740
amendment. There's case law on this, but they're trying it anyway. And this is,
00:29:54.780
this is what they're doing. I mean, did you see what Amazon is doing this week?
00:29:57.820
Oh my goodness. The hate speech standard. The hate speech standard with Ryan T. Anderson,
00:30:01.420
who's pal of some of us in this room, ahead of the ethics and public policy center.
00:30:05.900
He's a heritage, formerly at Heritage Foundation. This guy is as mainstream and scholarly a conservative
00:30:11.540
as it gets. And he came out with a book a few years ago, greatest book title I've ever heard.
00:30:16.020
When Harry became Sally, responding to the transgender. It's a really good book too.
00:30:20.220
And it's a really good book. And it's, it's actually not in any way an inflammatory book.
00:30:23.580
By the way, it's a sensitive book. It's a very sensitive.
00:30:25.280
He has a bunch of stuff in there about how people who are suffering from gender dysphoria ought to be
00:30:29.040
treated humanely. And there's no excuse for treating people badly. I mean, he's got a bunch
00:30:32.460
of stuff in there that is, that is directly a rebuttal to sort of the suggestion that people
00:30:36.280
on the right don't care about. And in fact, I don't know any serious person who doesn't say
00:30:38.180
that. Of course. This is the funny thing about it. Of course. This is not even an issue.
00:30:41.260
But what Amazon had done, they had taken off, you know, if the Confederate flag was really
00:30:45.480
politically incorrect, they took that offline or sometimes different symbols, they take that off.
00:30:49.000
But they had this standard. They said, we're not going to remove books for being politically
00:30:52.800
incorrect because they don't want to be seen as burning books or banning books as though it were the
00:30:57.340
Inquisition. Very quietly, they took away that exception. And now, I mean, we've got a lot of
00:31:03.660
books between all of us, right? By the way, Mein Kampf is still on Amazon. But Ryan Anderson's book is
00:31:07.440
not on Amazon. Unbelievable. You know, I got into a brief, I never do this, but I did get into a brief
00:31:12.440
Twitter debate with our friend David French, who basically feels there should be no recourse
00:31:17.020
because of the First Amendment. There should be no recourse when private entities who are
00:31:21.960
multinational, richer than most, two-thirds of governments, they have more money than two-thirds of the
00:31:26.600
government, collude together to essentially gut our rights. And my feeling is, wait, the point of
00:31:33.400
the First Amendment is to protect our rights. Our rights don't go away because the First Amendment
00:31:37.940
makes it difficult to cover a threat to them. But the threat to our rights right now is in this
00:31:43.220
collusion between companies that may not be monopolies in and of themselves, but when they
00:31:48.620
collude, they become essentially monopolies. And they're working in collusion with the government
00:31:53.040
as well. Big tech, big government, big business, big, big, big. If that's, if that is not a threat
00:31:57.640
that needs to be dealt with, and I don't, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I don't care how you deal
00:32:01.380
with it, but it's got to be dealt with. You cannot have a system where, whereby we cannot attack the
00:32:06.920
threats to our speech. That's the right to speech is given to us by God. So I mean, that's the problem
00:32:12.720
on the right, where you've got at least half that are allergic to using the power of the government.
00:32:20.180
Whereas on the left, there's wide agreement. Of course, we're going to use the power of the government
00:32:23.380
to do whatever we want. And I appreciate that on the right, at least there's a debate about it.
00:32:27.780
But it seems like there are some, a wide, you know, pretty large, significant preponderance that
00:32:32.880
basically they don't want to use the power of the government to do anything at all.
00:32:39.240
I think there's a smart way to use the power of government, and there's a stupid way.
00:32:42.480
And I think that a lot of people are not distinguishing between the two. And so you
00:32:45.980
end up with a really dumb kind of version of the argument, which is we can either do nothing,
00:32:49.600
or we're going to step in and just tell them exactly what they ought to do in all circumstances.
00:32:55.080
The reality is that what has really happened, and this goes back to the Section 230 argument,
00:32:58.980
especially when it comes to these platforms, is that what Section 230 was designed to do was it
00:33:02.920
was designed to enshrine the ability for corporations to actually protect free speech. It was not the
00:33:09.240
opposite. What Section 230 was, was it, you know, just to get into a little bit of legalism here,
00:33:15.480
because people don't understand Section 230 particularly well. Section 230 does not make
00:33:19.040
a distinction between publishers and platforms. Section 230 says when you have an open thread,
00:33:22.880
then you are not responsible legally for what appears in that open thread. So Daily Wire is a
00:33:27.320
private corporation. We're responsible for what we put up that's edited, but our comments,
00:33:30.880
we're not responsible for. If somebody puts up plagiarized material in the comments,
00:33:33.620
we're not legally responsible for that. And so that was, the goal here was to allow platforms
00:33:38.780
to exist, because otherwise platforms literally would not exist. So what Section 230 did is it
00:33:43.000
created an exception. The exception was specifically designed to allow platforms to get rid of material
00:33:48.620
that was pretty much widely agreed to be excessive. So somebody posts pornography in our comment section,
00:33:53.720
so we can remove that. Somebody posts obscenity or actual incitement to violence, we can remove all
00:33:57.580
of that. Instead, what has happened is, as so often happens with the government,
00:34:01.200
the exception became the rule. So then it became the government is going to tell corporations that
00:34:05.720
if they don't use Section 230 to crack down on all the material government doesn't like,
00:34:10.080
then they're going to come after those corporations. So the exception ate the rule.
00:34:13.780
So that exception was designed to be an exception, right? The idea was this was going to be a broad
00:34:16.920
spectrum of ideas that were available, and only here and there were you going to kind of pinpoint
00:34:20.420
and remove material that was truly offensive or truly terrible. And instead-
00:34:24.760
Or truly indecent, right? Because it's the Communications Decency Act is where Section 230 is there.
00:34:28.740
Exactly. Or truly indecent. And instead what happened is that the left basically seized upon
00:34:32.760
this opportunity to say, okay, well now what these platforms really should do is they should act just
00:34:36.640
like a publisher. They should edit all of the content. They should decide which books they are
00:34:40.160
willing to put out and which books they're not willing to put out. And not only that, we're going
00:34:42.380
to have congressional hearings. And we're going to say, as Dianne Feinstein says, if you don't do what
00:34:46.520
we want you to do, we will regulate you into doing what we want you to do. So if you actually
00:34:50.160
wanted to fix this, there's a good proposal on the table from Marsha Blackburn, our senator here in
00:34:53.600
Tennessee, to take away the catch-all provision of Section 230. Because originally Section 230 says
00:34:59.500
that it allows you to remove content that's obscene, content that is incitement to violence,
00:35:05.200
content that normally would be illegal, right? Like that kind of stuff. But there's also a catch-all
00:35:09.840
provision that says, or anything otherwise objectionable. And so what her bill does, it
00:35:13.520
takes away the otherwise objectionable language. So now you cannot be relieved of liability if you
00:35:18.900
just start willy-nilly taking down stuff. And I think that that's probably the right move.
00:35:22.500
Yeah. You know, it's funny how people are blind to the fact that the enemy is always
00:35:28.240
pools of power. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. So the left has this idea
00:35:33.980
that the state is going to come in and make everything great. But it doesn't understand
00:35:37.780
that the state is a bunch of people with power. And the right has this idea that big business is
00:35:41.620
always going to be okay. But big business is also people with power. And the left used to know this.
00:35:46.320
The left used to know that corporations can be alternative governments that have the power of
00:35:50.720
governments and can threaten you. You know, anybody with power, anybody with power has to be
00:35:56.200
controlled. It's simply that because the people we're trying to protect are the ordinary guys,
00:36:02.500
I would just define power a little more specifically than that, which is, it's not about the bigness.
00:36:08.460
Right? Because the problem is not big business. The problem is big business working in collusion
00:36:11.840
with government in order to restrict your rights.
00:36:13.720
Right? That's the stuff that's actually dangerous. Because what we tend to do, and conservatives tend to do this
00:36:18.200
too. We talk about big government versus small government. The question isn't big government
00:36:20.760
versus small government. It is, what are the delegated powers of government?
00:36:25.260
Right? There are specific purposes. The same thing is true of business. The question isn't big
00:36:28.860
business or small business. It is business acting in favor of free markets and free labor,
00:36:34.560
or is business acting against those things? Because I'm perfectly fine with a big business that does
00:36:38.700
all the things that are in consonance with freedom, being big and being competitive and winning.
00:36:42.720
Hypothetically, I actually want to talk a little bit about why corporations went wrong and why
00:36:46.300
I actually think that corporations are the biggest threat to the country right now.
00:36:49.940
But before we talk about that, I want to talk about my favorite company, PolicyGenius.
00:36:54.580
PolicyGenius can help you check two big items off of your list with ease. That is comparing life
00:37:00.200
insurance rates, and that is purchasing life insurance. You can save 50% or more in the process
00:37:05.580
if you head over to PolicyGenius.com. In just minutes, you can work out how much coverage you need
00:37:10.320
and compare quotes from top insurers to find your best price. Once you apply, PolicyGenius team will handle
00:37:15.680
all the paperwork and all the red tape. If you hit any speed bumps during the application process,
00:37:19.980
they'll take care of everything. They literally get you on the phone. They get the insurer on the phone.
00:37:24.920
They set it all up. They take care of you with personal attention. They did that for me.
00:37:29.200
I purchased my life insurance through PolicyGenius.com, and I purchased life insurance for my wife.
00:37:35.500
I guess, actually, the insurance on me, now that I think of it, is for my wife.
00:37:38.060
Maybe the insurance policy on my wife is for me. I don't know. There's some bad incentives that
00:37:43.840
get created here. That kind of service has earned PolicyGenius a five-star rating across over 1,600
00:37:49.180
reviews on Trustpilot and on Google. You need life insurance. I have a baby that I adopted. She
00:37:55.640
turned eight months old today. She's absolutely wonderful. And you have thoughts when you look
00:37:59.640
down at your little baby that you never had before. One of them is, why don't you sleep? And the
00:38:04.520
other one is, what would happen to this little life if I disappeared tomorrow and wasn't here
00:38:10.820
to provide stability, wasn't here to provide her basic needs? That's why you need life insurance.
00:38:15.980
If you're worried that March is just around the corner and you've barely gotten anything done
00:38:20.160
because it's the new year, don't worry. Take a deep breath. PolicyGenius will help you make the
00:38:23.800
most of this short month. All you have to do, go to PolicyGenius.com. In minutes, you can say 50% or more
00:38:29.640
comparing quotes, and you could feel good knowing that your loved ones will be taken care of if
00:38:33.640
anything were to happen to you. PolicyGenius.com. Go there now. Get started. PolicyGenius, when it
00:38:38.920
comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. You know, other than insinuating that you might
00:38:43.640
kill your wife, that was an excellent advert. Or that my wife might kill me. That's true.
00:38:47.580
Yeah, you kind of went a little bit awry on that. I mean, it is true that the incentives sometimes get
00:38:52.340
misaligned. I mean, right now, if I were to do something terrible to my wife, she has much stronger
00:38:56.800
incentive to kill me than divorce me. I've been telling you that for months, you know. If I've ever found
00:39:02.900
having been thrown off the back of a train for the double indemnity, obviously, then you know
00:39:06.820
exactly what happened. If I ever am found floating face down in my pool with three gunshot wounds in
00:39:11.520
my back, I didn't just trip and hit my head in front of me, no matter what my wife says.
00:39:15.460
It was Hillary Clinton. It was Hillary. You irritated me. Speaking of people who might want to kill Ben,
00:39:19.300
Elisha. No, you have that all wrong. I like Ben. He signs my paychecks. It's Michael Knowles that I want to be at.
00:39:26.220
Uh-oh. You don't want to say happy birthday. By the way, it was Elisha's birthday this week.
00:39:30.900
Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you. She's at least 25 years old.
00:39:34.720
Thank you very much, I share. I wish. I'm 35. Now, if my husband decides to impregnate me again with
00:39:40.260
another gorgeous child, I'm considered a geriatric pregnancy, which is just really depressing. But
00:39:45.680
thanks for the birthday wishes, guys. There's a lot of lively chatter over on the chat box. And if you're
00:39:52.260
like, well, hey, wait a second. I want to chat with you on the chat box. Well, how do I do that?
00:39:56.080
How do I ask the guys a question? Well, then that means you've already given me an answer. You're not
00:39:59.800
a Daily Wire subscriber. You should head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and be sure to use
00:40:05.920
the code of Ben's new show, DEBUNKED, which comes out this February 26th. So be sure to take a listen.
00:40:11.960
DEBUNKED will get you 25% off. So be sure to go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the code
00:40:18.800
DEBUNKED for 25% off. All right. This first question we have goes to the one and only Matt
00:40:25.420
Walsh, who is finally in the backstage studio. Fans have been asking for that for a very long
00:40:29.840
time. So welcome to Backstage, Matt. People want to know on a very serious note, when will you be
00:40:35.380
joining Smokey Michael and the God King and what instrument will you be playing? I think it's like
00:40:40.980
the third backstage. Like I say, I didn't make enough of an impression the first two times.
00:40:44.040
Wait, Matt Walsh is here right now? It was definitely a temporary.
00:40:49.920
I do play the banjo. So I, you know, I mean, I can, I, yes, I can, I can pick up a banjo and
00:40:56.660
make noises with it. So I can do that, but yeah, I have to hammer it against that.
00:41:00.360
That's as far as my, the real story is that my wife bought me a banjo. It was when we first
00:41:05.600
got married, she bought me a banjo. It was my first birthday as a, as a married person.
00:41:09.240
And because I had been giving, making all this noise about how I wanted to learn the
00:41:13.420
banjo and she bought it for me. And then what that meant was that for the next, really
00:41:17.580
for the last 10 years, it just kind of sits there and she'll just periodically say, so
00:41:21.860
you never learned that banjo, did you? That's it. I didn't learn.
00:41:27.720
And how many other instruments do you play? Because people want some options here.
00:41:31.480
No, I don't play all. I'm very good at not playing every instrument.
00:41:35.700
Did you say that you're as good at every instrument as you are?
00:41:40.360
By the way, completely side note, but Matt and I were outside and the conversation turned
00:41:44.680
to the faux masculinity of the show. And, um, and we decided to create a, um, a masculinity
00:41:50.240
ranking of the hosts on the show. Okay. And I have, it has, it has a, it has but one standard.
00:41:55.720
How many children have you sired? So by this ranking, it goes, Matt, then me, then you,
00:42:01.160
right? Yeah. And then you, and then you. Well, my tied for last place. Yeah. All right.
00:42:06.300
I was going to tweet that out that Ben Shapiro said, I'm the, the manliest guy at the Daily
00:42:10.640
Wire. It's been said, I mean, he's a lumberjack and he has like 83 children. So Jeremy and I
00:42:16.140
are the least toxic people in this entire room. That's pretty good. I did admit though, that
00:42:20.620
you, uh, so we have four kids, but the first two are twins. Right. So it was kind of a two
00:42:24.920
for one deal for the same number of pregnancies. That's right. But I'll happily take, I think
00:42:29.260
the beard gives me the tiebreaker. I'll actually say though, that I think one of the things
00:42:33.900
that matters is, can you change a tire? I mean, we're probably still tied for last.
00:42:37.340
I would say that's probably true. Maybe it mixes up the top three. I not only can change
00:42:41.020
a tire, but have changed many tires frequently on rain-soaked freeways. Why? Don't you have
00:42:46.620
AAA? It was before you had AAA. Are you a pauper? No, you didn't even have phones.
00:42:51.560
What went wrong with tires when they were made of phones? That's how long ago it was.
00:42:56.360
There were only tires. Through changing a tire. I know, exactly. It was like BC, you know.
00:43:02.520
Have you ever changed a tire? Be honest. No. Have you seen me and ever changed a tire?
00:43:07.080
I changed a tire once. I was visiting LA before I lived there and I, I was too cheap to get a good
00:43:12.720
rental car. So I did a rent-a-wreck. I was driving a 91 Plymouth breeze around, you know? I will tell
00:43:18.840
you. Then I go in, I figured out how to do it. It was the manliest I've ever felt.
00:43:23.960
By the way, there's a much higher chance that Alicia has changed a tire than I have.
00:43:27.400
Yeah, Alicia's definitely changed a tire. I will say, though, that I had a blowout this weekend.
00:43:32.440
And in my day, I grew up in rural Texas. I changed a lot of tires, you know? I used to be,
00:43:36.600
when I was a Ute, I would like stop and help other people change their tires when they're broke down on
00:43:41.080
the side of the road. Seemed like the thing to do. But I've become soft. Yeah, yeah. And I was driving,
00:43:45.240
we had this huge snowstorm, as did, you know, almost the entire south, south of the country
00:43:49.720
last week. It's Florida, man. It reeked holy hell on the roads here, right? All the freezing,
00:43:58.280
all the ice. So my wife and my baby and I, we rented a little Tesla. I thought maybe it'd be fun
00:44:03.400
to have a Tesla. Elon Musk is cooler than me. And so I rented this Model 3 from a great family. It was
00:44:08.760
cool, pulled up to get this Tesla. It's really cold outside. I get out of the Uber. I'm walking up this
00:44:13.960
young 17-year-old kid comes out of his house. And I said, hey, man, good to meet you. He goes,
00:44:19.960
oh yeah, it's real cool to meet you. And I said, yeah, I'm Jeremy. He goes, yeah, I know.
00:44:24.280
And I was like, oh, we live in a town where we're famous. We're used to living in a place where
00:44:31.160
people either didn't know who you were or hated you. Now we live somewhere where people are kind
00:44:37.320
to us and like us. And so I rented this Tesla from this kid. I drive it home and park it in the
00:44:43.240
in the garage. And then it dumps like 12,000 pounds of snow. And I didn't get to drive the
00:44:48.360
car for a week. So finally, I've got one day left on the rental Saturday. And I jump in the car. I
00:44:52.920
want to see if the baby seat will fit. Throw the baby seat in the back. We go for a ride. And I
00:44:57.480
promptly hit one of these newfound potholes at full freeway speed and knock the tire off the rim.
00:45:02.280
Oh my gosh. The good news is in a crisis with my wife and my child in the car,
00:45:09.000
I was able to figure out how to call roadside. That's good.
00:45:13.800
I was able to get them on the phone and they told me that they would be there in four hours.
00:45:17.560
Oh, apparently a lot of people were broken down on the side of the road.
00:45:20.920
You know, the last time I got a flat tire, which now, I don't know, about five,
00:45:24.760
six years ago, I was in a very expensive BMW and I was out in the middle of nowhere.
00:45:30.520
In the trunk, right? Yeah, I was in the trunk. The coyotes,
00:45:34.520
literally coyotes were circling around me. And I thought, well, I know how to change a tire.
00:45:39.000
And I took out the jack from this very expensive BMW and opened it up and it cracked in half
00:45:45.080
my hands. And I thought, I guess people don't do this anymore. It was a prop.
00:45:50.520
By the way, I mean, being as close to death as you are,
00:45:53.160
did it ever occur to you that that would have been like the coolest way to die?
00:45:55.400
Like just like all by coyotes broken down on the side of the road after getting out of your BMW?
00:46:03.240
Is there ever. Is there ever. Is there ever a time when coyotes aren't circling you?
00:46:14.840
I feel that they should pay, you know, pay my fare.
00:46:21.960
All those stories just revealed that I was more manly than Ben at my most pregnant with my
00:46:26.520
second child because I put a spare tire on my family wagon because it was also a four hour wait,
00:46:31.800
even though L.A. did not get a blizzard. So, yay that.
00:46:41.080
Good point. All right. The next question goes to the God King.
00:46:44.600
Jeremy Boring. This subscriber must not know about Daily Wire 2 because they want to know if the
00:46:50.360
Daily Wire, you know, it's entering into entertainment. You know, you're expanding all of the shows.
00:46:55.000
You're bringing on new talent. You're writing and scripting movies. They want to know about sports.
00:46:59.240
Yeah. Well, as you say, they obviously haven't been fans of the Daily Wire for long because we do
00:47:05.320
very intensive sports coverage every, is it three, three, every three years.
00:47:11.880
World Cup. I mean, whenever the World Cup happens, I cannot be bothered to know.
00:47:16.440
Yeah. We do the Daily Wire 2 coverage of the event. Michael and I have been covering it very
00:47:23.240
well, lo these many years. Other than that, if you're talking about real sports that people are
00:47:27.640
interested in that aren't anti-American and that should be played by a first world country,
00:47:32.680
I think it's a great idea. We have talked about it. I think it'd be a lot of fun to create a deeper
00:47:37.400
collaboration with our friends over at OutKick. They have a great attitude. They're absolutely
00:47:41.560
hilarious. Clay Travis is kind of a hero. He's right here in Nashville.
00:47:45.800
But if he covered soccer, no doubt. No, we could call it
00:47:49.240
Daily Wire 3. So we can keep Daily Wire 2, but then we can put the sports.
00:47:54.280
So there's Daily Wire 1, which is politics. There's Daily Wire 3, which is sports. And Daily Wire 2,
00:48:01.480
for that other thing. It's a great idea. The every four years thing. The next question is for Drew.
00:48:10.600
Drew, people want to know what projects are you working on now that you have a little more free
00:48:15.080
time since you don't have your daily show. And more importantly, are there any people that will
00:48:19.960
work with you in Hollywood since you're a very open conservative? No, there are no people in
00:48:25.960
Hollywood. But I am as busy as I have ever been. Well, you got to sand that coffin, really.
00:48:32.440
Sanding the coffin. You got to be ready. It could happen any minute.
00:48:37.640
But no, I'm as busy as I've ever been. I just sold. I'm so delighted that I just sold
00:48:43.320
to Thomas Nelson, the Christian publishers who published my memoir. I sold my essentially the
00:48:48.760
sequel to my memoir, which is about literature and the gospel. Does it have a better title?
00:48:52.760
No. No. It's called The Truth and Beauty. So you'll hate it.
00:48:57.880
It would be so much better if it was called Yet Another Thing.
00:49:08.680
I just finished a draft of the script we're going to do here, I hope. And another project,
00:49:15.560
script. And I've got a new series of mystery novels coming out. So I'm as busy as I have ever been.
00:49:20.680
And it's only because of my hatred for Knowles that I've come here at all.
00:49:26.760
So I can insult him. That's good, because when he plots, there will be just this whole trunk
00:49:31.000
filled with unfinished manuscript that we can put out there one by one.
00:49:38.680
All right. Talking about scripts. Ben, everyone in the chat wants to know,
00:49:47.240
have you seen a script for Gina's movie? What will it be about? And when is it coming out?
00:49:52.600
So actually, this question is better directed at Jeremy. So I will say that there are active and
00:49:58.360
ongoing talks about what exactly the script should be. I know that Jeremy is waiting through scripts
00:50:02.520
right now looking for the right project. But because it is a development process,
00:50:07.080
and because we're working on a very personal level with Gina, it's going to take a little
00:50:11.480
bit of time for us to find exactly what we want to do.
00:50:13.320
I think it's important for people to understand that part of what Gina wants in building this next
00:50:18.200
stage of her career is not just to be an actress for hire, but to be a producer.
00:50:21.480
She wants the ability to actually help craft the story, to put her mark on whatever her next project is.
00:50:26.600
Because we're working once again with our friends over at Bonfire Legend, Dallas Sunier is going to
00:50:31.720
produce Gina's film. He read 60 scripts over the weekend. I looked at him, he was a shell of a
00:50:39.240
man, you know. He couldn't tell you about any of them. He'd be like, which one did you like best?
00:50:42.680
He goes, well, there's a Western and a spaceship. And I'm like, okay, get some sleep. Send me the 15 or
00:50:48.280
16 best scripts, which he has done, and we're working our way through them.
00:50:51.320
By the way, they should hire me for this too. Because I've got a great idea.
00:51:02.040
What we're learning from Drew is he's never going to retire. And if he does retire,
00:51:05.160
then he'll end up in the trunk eaten by coyotes or something, if Ben's wish comes true.
00:51:09.000
All right. So then the next question, since the God King answered that,
00:51:13.240
the God King answered that last one. So Ben, I'll toss this one to you. It's a very good question.
00:51:17.400
Somebody wants to know, hey, I've become a Daily Wire subscriber,
00:51:20.360
but what are you doing to protect yourself against big tech? As we saw with Parler and
00:51:25.000
other conservative sites that are just shut down because people like Google and Amazon say,
00:51:30.440
hey, we're not going to allow you on our servers. Have you guys protected the Daily Wire and the
00:51:34.760
subscribers against something like that? So we definitely have been working on
00:51:38.200
figuring out alternative platforms that we could shift over to in case something like Amazon Web Services,
00:51:43.240
what they did at Parler ever happens to us. We've expended enormous time and energy and some money
00:51:47.640
on exactly this sort of question. Again, I'm going to miss I'm going to redirect the question to
00:51:52.120
Jeremy, because if for people to understand how the Daily Wire works, basically all business questions
00:51:56.040
go here and all ideological questions go here and all questions about cigars that go there and all
00:52:01.320
questions about not paying the bills go there and all questions about just general malaise and cynicism
00:52:08.280
go there. That's basically the breakdown. And if you want somebody who's nice to you, then Alicia's
00:52:12.360
here too. Yeah, that's right. I'll say that as Ben said, yeah, we've expended a lot of time into this
00:52:17.400
question since what happened to Parler took place. The truth is the problem is greater than any company
00:52:23.320
is going to be able to answer. You know, Amazon Web Services controls the servers for 50% of the entire
00:52:32.200
world wide web. It's an unbelievable amount of infrastructure. So when people are like, why don't
00:52:37.800
you build your own servers? It'd be like if in in 1982, the telephone companies had gotten involved
00:52:45.400
in censorship and somebody had said, well, why don't you just build your own phone company? And my answer
00:52:49.480
would be, OK, it took 100 years to run phone lines to every rural household across a continent. That's
00:52:57.960
what you're talking about. And what if we build all these servers? We go raise $100 billion or a
00:53:03.720
trillion dollars to build the kind of infrastructure on the server side that you need. And then Amazon
00:53:08.680
never actually acts against another conservative, but the ISP providers do. Like the problem that faces
00:53:17.480
conservatives is so vast. And to take on any part of it would take the wealth of a small nation to try
00:53:23.960
to conquer. And then that may not be the attack vector. There are like 100 attack vectors that need
00:53:28.680
to be solved. So what I really believe needs to happen here is several things. On one hand,
00:53:34.680
we need not to reinvent all of this, but to diversify our reliance on any one platform. So to Ben's point,
00:53:42.360
we're looking at other potential data facilities, some that you might be able to put yourself on,
00:53:47.800
some that you might be able to actually use as almost a shadow server where we're constantly being
00:53:52.040
updated on a backup server. And if something happens, you can very quickly and seamlessly
00:53:55.720
move yourself over. Very expensive, not as expensive as building Amazon web services.
00:54:00.680
But more than that, I think what needs to happen is conservative millionaires and billionaires need
00:54:06.760
to change the way that they think about technology. There's a reason that Amazon can kick you off.
00:54:11.960
It's that conservatives have no power at Amazon. There's a reason Facebook can kick you off.
00:54:16.600
Conservatives have no or very little power at Facebook. There's a reason that Twitter can treat you
00:54:20.600
the way they do. You don't have a problem of conservatives being run out of their homes
00:54:25.640
because conservatives are great at real estate. You don't have a problem of conservatives running
00:54:29.000
out of gas. Conservatives are great at energy. There's just these different spheres that draw
00:54:33.800
people with different mentalities. And I think the proof that conservatives don't have the mentality
00:54:40.040
necessary to solve this problem is actually in the question, are we building our own servers?
00:54:46.200
The answer to the problems of bifurcated use of technology is not that we build what they
00:54:54.760
currently have. There are conversations happening all over the world right now in real time that
00:55:01.240
make servers obsolete. There are people talking about blockchain. There are people talking about
00:55:05.640
things beyond blockchain, the names of which I don't know. There are kids with backpacks going to
00:55:09.960
left-wing billionaires and left-wing venture capital funds and left-wing angel investors and
00:55:15.560
creating the future. And we're not a part of those conversations either. And the answer to how do you
00:55:22.680
solve the problem of it took a century to build all those phone lines isn't to go try to replicate
00:55:27.800
that. It's to invent the cell phone. And until we change our mentality, we're just going to lose on
00:55:32.680
whatever the next thing is to whatever the next thing is. And we're going to build some crappy
00:55:36.440
alternative version of what they've already got. And it's not, it's just going to further ghettoize
00:55:40.840
us. We have to completely change the way that we think about. Can I ask a follow-up question to
00:55:45.080
this? Because one of the things that is very frustrating to me is that conservatives seem
00:55:50.760
very, very reluctant to think that there may be legal remedies here. But it does seem that
00:55:57.240
at some point, this is a new technology and the new technology needs new law. And it needs new law
00:56:04.120
to make sure that all of us have a chance to speak. If this is the way we speak to one another,
00:56:08.840
and it is, we should be able to speak to one another, no matter what our political beliefs
00:56:13.880
are. And so isn't, isn't there some place for lobbying, lobbying and I'll say two things and
00:56:19.240
then I'll let the lawyer talk. The first one is conservatives need to embrace lawfare.
00:56:24.040
It's deeply distasteful. It's horrible. It's against our, but we actually need to embrace it
00:56:29.640
because those are the weapons being used against us. That's the battle. But, but I'll also say this.
00:56:34.200
One, one reason that the Daily Wire, we're not safe, but we are far less likely to be kicked off of
00:56:41.720
servers than is Parler. It's because Parler wasn't conducting any actual economic activity.
00:56:48.520
Parler is a, is a free platform and everybody who's using is using it for free. They don't have a vast ad
00:56:53.080
network. If, if some big tech company were to knock the Daily Wire off of their servers because
00:57:00.440
of speech or something like that, we have over a hundred employees. We do millions and millions of
00:57:07.880
dollars worth of business. We have tens of millions of fans. We have ads on our website
00:57:14.040
every day doing, you know, hundreds of thousands of micro transactions. That goes all the way to the
00:57:19.640
Supreme Court. There's actual damages. And one thing that has, one thing that you have to keep
00:57:23.640
in mind when you talk about the law is the concept of damages. And the damages are just fundamentally
00:57:28.040
different where we're concerned. This is why it happens. I mean, it's a, it's a sorry state of
00:57:32.360
affairs, but they're not unsophisticated about who they target. Yeah. I know that they target people
00:57:37.880
who have the weakest opportunity to challenge them. Yeah. And this is one of those areas where
00:57:43.720
you're starting to see some state action, right? Rhonda Santos has talked about
00:57:46.840
going after some of the tech companies and making it so that they can't do this sort of stuff.
00:57:52.760
toward politics in the arena of technology, particularly free speech platforms. And it seems
00:57:57.080
to me that if we've restricted freedom of association so strongly in this country that
00:58:00.040
we already have anti-discrimination law that applies to every single element of American life,
00:58:04.120
except for your politics, right? You can't, you can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of
00:58:08.280
religion, sex, age, disability, anything. And nobody is in favor of that sort of discrimination,
00:58:13.080
but it used to be that freedom of association meant that you just sort of had to deal with
00:58:15.800
the fact that sometimes people didn't want to hang out with you, but the left has completely
00:58:18.760
made that obsolete, right? You have to hang out with whoever the left says you have to hang out
00:58:21.720
with and you have to do business with whoever the left says you have to do business with.
00:58:24.680
I think there's going to be a strong move made, particularly in red states,
00:58:28.120
against some of these corporations saying, if you guys start booting people,
00:58:31.800
then we are going to take legal action against you. You're going to have violated our state law.
00:58:36.120
Is there a concern that you can no longer have ideological organizations, for example,
00:58:43.240
that the Daily Wire would have to hire left-wing activists to be employed?
00:58:47.560
So you'd have to create actual legal carve-outs. You'd have to say, if you're an overtly partisan
00:58:51.480
organization, then you can do this in the same way that there are religious carve-outs for
00:58:55.160
anti-discrimination law, right? So you'd have to do that for overtly political organizations. It would
00:58:59.320
pose a problem for 501c3s particularly. There are a lot of political 501c3s that have a conservative or a
00:59:03.960
liberal event. And because they're a non-profit, they can't be overtly associated with the party
00:59:08.600
or not associated with the party. And so it could get very muddy very fast. I mean, listen,
00:59:12.360
in my preferred world, as much as I hate discrimination, I hate cracking down on freedom
00:59:16.920
of association more in the same way that as much as I hate vile speech, I hate cracking down on
00:59:21.400
free speech more. But it seems like that ship may have already sailed. So as long as that ship has
00:59:25.000
already sailed, then the only alternative left is going to be an extension of anti-discrimination law
00:59:29.480
into the field of politics that already exists in a place like California. It's just never
00:59:31.960
been enforced, really. And this is such an important key because we can say,
00:59:35.400
well, we don't like this. I really wish we lived in a different world. But as you say,
00:59:39.240
Jeremy, we've got to play with what we've got. You know, politics involves eternal principles.
00:59:44.760
It also involves applying those principles to real circumstances that are always changing.
00:59:49.720
And if we want to survive, if we want to be smart about this, then you've got to play the game.
00:59:54.040
And there's a difference between using the weapons that are the weapons of the battlefield
00:59:58.600
and using the logic that they use. I'd always agree with this. I totally agree. It's what we
01:00:02.680
always said about mutually assured destruction, right? When we launched Truth Revolt, we said,
01:00:05.320
we hate the tactics that we're about to use. Right. As soon as you guys stop using them,
01:00:08.120
we'll stop using them. Right. Right. And I think that that's accurate as far as a lot of these
01:00:11.640
things, which is, you know, there's only one thing that is worse than having a nuclear weapon,
01:00:16.040
and that's everybody else having one and you not having one. Yeah. Right. And that's right. And it
01:00:20.120
always bothers me. We play this hypocrisy game with the left, which I think is actually destructive. So the
01:00:25.080
left says, you know, you said it was a dark day when Obama was elected. Dark means that you didn't
01:00:30.760
like the color of his skin. You think like, that's not what it meant. But you said this,
01:00:34.600
which is accepting their terms of battle. Yeah. And I don't, I don't agree with this at all. I mean,
01:00:39.480
I, I'm really offended by the racial pathology of the left. I think it is, I think it is irreverent
01:00:47.640
to the human condition. I think that the, to treat people according to the color of their skin
01:00:53.160
is a wrong. And I think it's wrong no matter what color their skin is. I don't care if they're
01:00:58.520
hypocrites about it. I want it to stop. I want to say that, no, you know, if you're a black guy who
01:01:04.560
did a bad thing, you did a bad thing. You're a white guy who did a bad thing. You did a bad thing.
01:01:08.640
I don't care. I'm taking people as they come. And the idea now that they they're selling to us,
01:01:13.080
that anti, that being a non-racist is racist. Yeah. Is, is insane. Right. You can't,
01:01:19.280
you can't be non-racist. So I, I, the racist or anti-racist, there's no third category called
01:01:24.360
non-racist. That's why I think, that's why I think cancel culture is so dangerous because what it does
01:01:29.240
is it makes people afraid to say your entire premise is wrong. So this is, this is the biggest
01:01:35.380
thing I think that when we, when we talk about cancel culture, it's easy to point to the big
01:01:38.360
circumstances of cancel culture, like Chris Harrison or, or Gina. Um, but the reality is the
01:01:43.240
people that affects most are the people who are the low level employees at Disney. That's right.
01:01:47.540
Because they, right. The people it affects most are not people like the people sitting in this room
01:01:50.440
who talk for a living, right. Or, or do business at a high level in politics. The people that affects
01:01:54.820
the most are the people who work for Coca-Cola and who make $45,000 a year and don't have the labor
01:02:00.020
mobility to be able to just move over to Pepsi, especially when Pepsi is teaching the exact same
01:02:03.580
kind of stuff. What cancel culture is about is intimidating everybody into silence. It's not even
01:02:07.480
about canceling anybody. It's about putting a head on a pike. And the more heads you put on pikes,
01:02:11.240
more people are scared to speak out. And they know that, which is why they're going to keep putting
01:02:14.020
heads on pikes. In fact, it is imperative that they keep putting heads on pikes because the minute,
01:02:17.540
that the heads on the pike stop, somebody might push back against their dominance.
01:02:21.180
And that's why, that's why I get so, I get so disgusted. I'm almost at the point with cancel
01:02:25.180
culture when a high profile person gets canceled and they start apologizing like Chris Harrison did.
01:02:32.640
I'm at the point where I despise you more, right. For apologizing that I do, that I do despise the
01:02:38.720
mob for canceling you in the first place. Like Chris Harrison is such a perfect example. Uh,
01:02:43.100
and we didn't even mention it in that interview that we originally talked about. He, he, he was,
01:02:48.740
it was at, he was so circuitous in, in standing up to, he could not have been less aggressive in
01:02:56.200
what he said. And he kept, uh, articulating, he kept, he kept reiterating that, well, I'm not
01:03:01.360
defending her and I don't really know. And she might be a racist, but look guys, maybe just,
01:03:05.960
maybe we shouldn't be destroying people's lives over this. And they still canceled him anyway.
01:03:10.120
And then what does he do? He falls to his, to his knees and apologizes and admits, he says,
01:03:15.660
yeah, I am a racist. I mean, he, he, he, he accepts their, their accusations against him,
01:03:19.700
even though he's not a racist. If you do that, then you're just as bad as them. And you're also
01:03:24.580
all the other, the smaller people, the people you're talking about who don't have this kind
01:03:28.540
of platform, you're throwing them under the bus too. You're not just as bad as them. You're
01:03:33.020
actually worse because you're, you're, you've got all of their vices and cowardice, but they're not
01:03:38.540
power. And that's why, I mean, they're actually, that's why, that's why I just want to say the,
01:03:41.920
the, the genre of the public apology has to go away. Even if what you did was wrong. Now
01:03:48.720
in Chris Harrison's case, all these other cases, Gina Carano, like they didn't do anything
01:03:51.880
wrong, but even if you did something wrong and the cancel culture is coming after you,
01:03:55.660
a great example, still don't apologize for Morgan Wallen. I don't know if you guys track
01:03:59.000
this story. One of the biggest country stars in the world has a new album out. It's fantastic.
01:04:04.480
Dick. He's a bit of a hell raiser, probably not our kind of guy. Uh, he gets home from
01:04:09.820
a long night of partying. Uh, he's not being a very good neighbor. He gets out of a couple
01:04:13.980
of pickup trucks in front of his house. Some of his buddies, they're honking on the horn.
01:04:17.860
I know it's one 30 in the morning or something in a dick. And, uh, he's yelling at some of
01:04:24.100
his buddies and he uses a series of jocular pejoratives to describe his buddies. None of
01:04:30.880
which is his actual friends. None of which can be said on this show.
01:04:34.480
He calls them nincompoops and nincompoops and poopy breath, all of it. Then, uh, his neighbor
01:04:44.780
who's probably rightfully ticked off at the guy. It's one 30 in the morning. You're trying
01:04:48.760
to sleep. Apparently on their security camera, their, their doorbell camera, uh, the next
01:04:53.220
morning realizes that you can hear him using these words against his friends. And one of
01:04:58.400
them is that one word that no one in America is allowed to say, except for all of Hollywood.
01:05:04.480
Uh, children at church. Uh, if you're of a particular race. Yeah. Um, and so for this
01:05:11.360
total Soviet style erase erasure, he is dropped by his label. He is dropped by his songs are
01:05:20.200
climbing the charts. He's dropped by his label. He's dropped by both of the major radio entities in
01:05:25.700
the country who, who collectively own all of the radio stations. He's dropped by his country music
01:05:32.520
awards. Took them off. The country music awards is qualifies him. The AMA is it. Everybody just
01:05:36.700
qualifies him. He, he said something distasteful. He said several distasteful things. He said one
01:05:44.040
thing that we as a society know there are special rules around. I actually don't accept those rules.
01:05:49.360
I don't, uh, agree with those rules, but there's no denying the existence of those rules. Um,
01:05:54.840
nevertheless, he said it in a non-racial context to his friends privately. It was captured essentially
01:06:00.280
by a disgruntled voyeuristic neighbor. Uh, and for this, we've erased him from, from civilization.
01:06:06.040
He didn't do anything wrong. He did do something gross. Yeah. He didn't do anything wrong. He did
01:06:12.940
not do anything racist. The apology that he put out to the people who have destroyed his life on
01:06:20.440
the basis of nothing grants them. Right. Grants them their premise. Will they give him his career
01:06:27.760
back? Of course, they're not going to give him his career back, but there's no redemption.
01:06:33.580
Think about the asymmetry here for a second too, because when you say he didn't do anything wrong,
01:06:37.880
well, he did something wrong. He came home late. He woke up his neighbors. He was a jerk, you know,
01:06:41.500
so he's using words he shouldn't use, but he didn't use them, but he didn't use them in the
01:06:44.960
way that is the racist way to use that word. Right. Find a black guy and shout the N word at
01:06:48.780
him. Right. If you're thinking about what sort of punishment these sorts of things should entail,
01:06:53.300
should it entail destroying your entire life and erasing you from society? There's no
01:06:57.780
proportionality here. This is the thing though, that I think that too many conservatives don't
01:07:02.000
understand, which is this is the fight that we're in. So we're not in the fight where we have to
01:07:07.000
storm Normandy, where we have to come off the ships and the machine guns are coming up.
01:07:11.120
This is the fight we're in. Right. And so, and so when you say, oh, this is going to cost you
01:07:15.620
money, or this is going to cost you your job, or this is going to cost you your friends. This is
01:07:21.140
the fight we're in. And those guys who stormed Normandy actually got bullets in the head and
01:07:25.300
were killed, lost their lives. And I'm worried that like, we don't understand as a, as a half of
01:07:32.840
the country, we don't understand that the losses we're suffering are the losses you suffer when you
01:07:38.100
are in a fight that has to be won. And you're going to, and you're going to, you're going to
01:07:41.260
suffer those losses anyway. That's what, if the cancel mob is coming after you, what you have to
01:07:45.240
understand is there's a very good chance that they, that they will destroy your life. They might not.
01:07:49.860
I mean, you might, you might beat them. Gina Carano beat them. You might not beat them. They
01:07:53.960
might destroy you, but that's going to happen anyway. And so what you can decide right now is
01:07:58.380
whether you're going to have your dignity on the way out. Morgan Wallen decided that he's not going to
01:08:02.440
have his dignity because he apologized to these people. Here's the thing about an apology.
01:08:05.860
You apologize to people who you have actually harmed. And so if Morgan Wallen had gone to his
01:08:12.160
neighbors and knocked on their door personally without any cameras there and said, listen, if I,
01:08:16.460
you know, if you had to hear that, I'm so sorry. I apologize to you. That was obnoxious.
01:08:20.520
Had a few too many. I should have gotten home earlier. Sorry. And then if he had just gone
01:08:23.960
and done his video thing and said, listen, I, I spoke to my neighbors. I'm not going to tell you
01:08:28.260
what that conversation was. It's none of your business, but to all you people out there that are
01:08:31.600
trying to destroy me, I do not apologize to you because you were not harmed by what I did.
01:08:36.200
You don't really care. You're excited for the opportunity to destroy my life just because
01:08:40.180
you get a kick out of it. So I do not apologize to you if you were offended. I'm glad you were
01:08:44.120
offended. That's all I have to say about it. You've got to do this. And the thing is, if he had said
01:08:48.760
that, he'd be in the same spot today that he is, that he is anyway. And it really, but I do think
01:08:52.600
there's a special duty that adheres to people who have the power to do that. Because if Morgan Wallen
01:08:57.000
had done that, it would have meant a hell of a lot more than the local employee at Coca-Cola,
01:09:00.340
right? When we, when we like what we did with Gina, I think is, I don't mean pat ourselves on the back,
01:09:04.900
but we deserve a pat on the back. We're Mother Teresa. I mean, like,
01:09:07.440
and I think the audience knows this, which is why we had the best week we've ever had in the
01:09:12.840
history of the company over this. The, the, by, by putting our money where our mouth is and saying,
01:09:19.240
we're not going to allow people to be canceled. That was a statement in the culture. And that's
01:09:22.580
a statement that more business people need to make. I mean, I'll be real with you. I would hire
01:09:26.900
Morgan Wallen tomorrow. I tried to reach out to Morgan Wallen. Right. I mean, I would,
01:09:29.820
I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow because I don't think that what Morgan Wallen did was intended
01:09:34.260
to harm black people. And I don't think that what he did, did harm black people. Right. I think that
01:09:38.400
what he did was be an ass. Right. And, and guess what? Being an ass is a bad thing to do. And again,
01:09:43.560
you should apologize to his neighbor, but that is a legal thing to do in the United States. And
01:09:46.560
sometimes people are asses and there should be forgiveness available to people who are asses.
01:09:49.500
And again, and again, the president of the United States won't help schools open. So black
01:09:54.020
people can send their children to get educated. The real things aren't happening.
01:09:58.860
You know, there's a phrase that Jeremy once said, uh, in a, in a very similar sort of
01:10:03.040
cancellation situation. And it, it resonates here. And that is that, uh, cowards get their
01:10:07.720
friends killed. And that's, that's really what we're talking about here because it's not just
01:10:11.420
that they're a coward because they're backing down in the hopes that they'll get their career
01:10:14.120
back. It's the cowardice that gets everybody else killed because now you've set the new
01:10:17.440
standard and you've reinforced the standard. This came up originally in the context of Mark
01:10:21.240
Duplass, who of course is this famous director, producer, actor who committed the grave sin
01:10:26.580
of once having said a nice thing about me on Twitter, right? He came to the office. I gave
01:10:29.620
him an hour and a half of my time. I cancel him for that. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, of course,
01:10:33.080
but I gave an hour and a half of my time. We talked about the second amendment stuff. I was
01:10:36.220
very nice to him. And as he was leaving, I said, for your own sake, do not post on social media that
01:10:40.580
you were here because they're going to wreck you for it. And a couple of weeks later, he got it into
01:10:43.580
his head that he was going to do a nice thing. And he tweeted out, I miss, I disagree with Ben Shapiro about a lot
01:10:47.420
of things, but he did a nice thing for me when he didn't have to. And he's well-intentioned. He got hit
01:10:50.620
so hard that he not only pulled down that tweet, he then issued a groveling apology, right? And then
01:10:54.840
what ended up happening on the back of that groveling apology is that James Gunn came out
01:10:58.000
and defended him. And then everybody on the right resurfaced James Gunn's old material and James Gunn
01:11:01.700
ended up getting fired, right? And I ended up defending James Gunn in this bizarre situation.
01:11:06.220
So I was like, Dan knows, like just by existing, I took out half the Marvel universe. And what Jeremy
01:11:11.200
said at the time is the thing about cowards is they rarely get themselves killed. They get all their
01:11:15.040
friends killed. Because when you duck out of the battle, what you end up doing is granting the
01:11:18.720
opposition their entire premise. And that premise is then used against all the people who heretofore
01:11:23.020
were your friends. And so that's exactly right. You should only, apologies are a wonderful thing
01:11:27.560
when you have done a wrong thing. If you want to have a good marriage, apologize first thing in
01:11:30.680
the morning to your wife, right? But the reality- Every morning. It doesn't matter what you've done.
01:11:35.540
Every husband does. It's the first word out of your mouth in the morning. But when it comes to public
01:11:40.220
policy, the issuing of these malice struggle session apologies for things that you haven't done wrong
01:11:45.140
to people you have not wrong. When people issue apologies and they say to everyone who is offended
01:11:49.740
by this, well, no, if you're offended by this wrongly, I'm sorry, your emotions may even be
01:11:54.340
authentic. But that does not mean they are justified. And you do not deserve an apology.
01:11:57.860
Well, you know, on this point of Maoism, I think that's actually the perfect term. There was this
01:12:02.340
phenomenon in the 70s with the New York Radical Women's Group. They coined the term or sort of
01:12:07.620
popularized the term consciousness raising. And there were these famous meetings where you'd get all
01:12:11.680
these housewives to come together and they would, I call them wine and cheese soirees. They'd just
01:12:16.140
complain the whole time. And there's a famous essay about this by Carol Hainish. And she says that there
01:12:21.420
was a woman who came and she said, you know, before I came here tonight, ladies, I had no idea how
01:12:26.460
oppressed I was, but darn it when I am so oppressed and furious and aggrieved. Yeah. And you see this now,
01:12:33.100
people trying to convince themselves to be aggrieved and offended by some public comment that no one
01:12:38.780
cares about. I want to say one thing in Mark Wallen's, is it Mark? Morgan. I'm sorry. I just
01:12:43.880
had a, in Morgan Wallen's defense. And that's that I think that for us, we live in this space and we
01:12:51.120
know about this fight. I think when, when they come for you and you haven't thought about these
01:12:56.000
things in advance, that's a really good point. They are taking your life and your name. We talked
01:13:00.540
about it with Gina. And you think you can save it. And your good name away. And not just that,
01:13:04.240
everybody who's surrounding you is telling you to do it. Yeah. I mean, honestly,
01:13:06.760
the best thing that happened to Gina and this whole thing is that her agency didn't dump her
01:13:09.740
because if her agency hadn't dumped her, we would have called her up. And you know,
01:13:13.060
her agent would have said, don't take their call. No way. Don't take her call. Because if you work
01:13:16.460
with them, you'll never work at this town again. Now, the reality is they were never going to let
01:13:19.140
Gina work in the town again anyway. Right. Right. But her agent would have said, no, maybe in a few
01:13:22.700
years, you know, you go away for a while, you kind of earn your way back in with bit parts.
01:13:26.500
I guarantee what happened with Morgan Wallen is that his initial reaction was probably,
01:13:29.580
I don't even know what is going on right now. And his agent got on the phone with him and his agent
01:13:33.580
probably said to him, listen, you need to issue an apology right now. Maybe we can put out this
01:13:37.040
fire right now and then the news cycle will move on. But you need to at least issue the apology.
01:13:41.240
And if you've never been through the fire, it is egregious. I mean, it is truly one of the worst.
01:13:47.600
I can tell you that as a person who gets trended on Twitter, approximately every two and a half
01:13:51.240
weeks. Right. I mean, it is never fun, whether it is justified or unjustified. It is never fun.
01:13:56.480
And that's just somebody who does it professionally. Right. I basically trend on Twitter
01:13:59.080
professionally. If you are somebody who only trends once in your life and that time is because
01:14:03.980
you are losing your job and your livelihood and it's a tsunami of media coverage, like a tsunami,
01:14:08.580
because the more you trend, the less big the bumps are, honestly, like in terms of the differential
01:14:12.560
from norm. Like the normal for me is that I get mentioned on Twitter a lot. And then on a few days
01:14:17.000
a month, I get mentioned like a super lot. But if you're Gina, you don't get mentioned on Twitter
01:14:21.360
all that often, except for people who are saying they enjoy you in the Mandalorian. And then one day
01:14:24.620
you are the only thing that everyone in the country is talking about. And the trend is followed by a
01:14:28.420
deluge of emails, often phone calls. And it's overwhelming. And people don't know that it passes
01:14:33.480
to, you know, before we started, Matt and I were talking about media matters who do nothing,
01:14:38.720
but they sit around and they listen to us and try and twist our words into. And publicize our shows.
01:14:43.740
And publicize our shows. They try to make us sound like terrible people for things that we say,
01:14:48.180
which in context are actually not terrible at all. And I have to admit, it's a terrible,
01:14:53.660
you're going to hate me for this. I actually have pity for them. That's your job. Your job is to
01:14:59.540
try and make other people look bad and to listen to us. And I just think like, you know, at the end
01:15:03.820
of your life, like you're going to stand before the throne of God and he's going to go like,
01:15:07.260
what did you do? These are damaged people. There's no question about that. And it does get to your
01:15:14.840
point, which is I don't, I don't need to accept their standard. You know, if they, if they basically
01:15:19.760
on the left, all they exist to do is call us all racist every day. And then one day a clip of Joe
01:15:25.000
Biden goes around and it's, he stumbles on his words cause it's a day that ends in Y and he sort
01:15:30.100
of sounds like he said the N word. And then we all sort of giggle about that. I don't care. I don't
01:15:34.660
think he really said that. I don't, I don't think he is some bigot. I don't think that I just think
01:15:40.320
it's playing into their game, pointing out a hypocrisy that they don't care about cause they don't care
01:15:44.980
about the rules anyway. They just don't like us. I would much rather do what I'm going to do.
01:15:49.420
I would much rather build culture, make movies with people we want to work with, do those sorts
01:15:54.360
of things than worry about their stupid rules, which change every day.
01:15:56.920
Well, that's right. I mean, this is the thing that I cling to is that racism is an actual philosophy,
01:16:01.700
which I don't hold. I don't think any of the people in this room hold. It's not a slip of the
01:16:07.220
tongue. It's not something that you might've said that was untoward. It's not even a moment of anger
01:16:11.540
when some tribal glitch in your brain goes off. It's an actual way of life. I know racists. They,
01:16:17.860
they actually think the things that these people are being canceled for. I just don't accept the
01:16:24.040
terms. I do not accept the terms of the argument. I don't accept that. As you say, if, if somebody
01:16:29.280
shouted a word, he shouldn't shout. Well, that's a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a racist
01:16:33.760
thing. This thing you're talking about the bachelor. I just think it's absurd, especially because we
01:16:39.400
know it's a grift because of the governor of Virginia who doesn't get canceled for it because
01:16:43.540
then a Republican. I'll even go a step further. Shouting a racial pejorative is not necessarily
01:16:49.280
racist. That's right. That's right. No, you're absolutely right. Doing something racist does
01:16:56.120
not necessarily make you a racist. It means you did a racist thing. So there are, there are actually
01:17:00.960
even, there's an, even another gradiation, which is, I think a very interesting point you just made.
01:17:05.020
Like sometimes people in their worst moments actually do succumb to the worst thoughts.
01:17:09.800
That's right. That doesn't actually define them. You know, people say all the time, like,
01:17:14.100
and this is not to let them off the hook. This is to point out that there are gradations of sin.
01:17:17.480
There are gradations of sin. And what the left has decided is there are no gradations of sin.
01:17:20.260
There is just the damned and the woke and that's it. That's right. There, there, this thing that
01:17:23.920
people used to say back in college, it's like, well, you know, you'd, you'd have a couple too many
01:17:27.960
drinks and you'd say something you shouldn't about one of your buddies or whatever. And you'd apologize the next
01:17:31.860
day. And they'd be like, no, what you say when you're drunk is that's who you really are. I saw the real
01:17:35.600
you, uh, because all your inhibitions were gone. You said what you really believe. And that never
01:17:40.340
resonated with me. Yeah, that's ridiculous. What I actually thought was, no, when my inhibitions were
01:17:45.680
gone, when my rational mind was gone, when I was only given into my vices and racist passions, you're,
01:17:53.200
you're, you're saying that that's the real me, but no, the real me is all of the things that I've built
01:17:58.400
on top of my worst impulse. That's right. Right. All the things that I've built on top of my
01:18:02.180
intrinsic tribalistic way of looking at things or my selfish ways of looking at things or my,
01:18:08.600
you know, vain ways of looking at things or my hateful way. We all have the seed of sin in us.
01:18:14.760
What we build on top of that is the real us. This is why we, you know, uh, when I was talking about,
01:18:20.140
uh, rush a lot of this week, as we all were in thinking about rush. Uh, and, um, uh, you know,
01:18:25.600
I was really, uh, obviously, I think all of us were really just moved by the passing of this guy
01:18:29.860
and all these liberals celebrating his death and publishing things that he had said, some of
01:18:36.840
which were untoward. Most of the things they published, he never said, but now and again,
01:18:41.360
he said something that I thought, like, I don't agree with that. And I don't think probably rush if
01:18:45.600
you pushed him to the wall would agree with it, but he spoke three hours a day live to people.
01:18:50.420
That's more 30 years. That's 30 years. People speak to their spouses. You do not speak to your
01:18:55.420
spouse vastly a day. And I, and I, what I say to all these people is you ever say anything to your
01:19:00.460
spouse that you're glad didn't become. I mean, this is, this is what I have, but this is what
01:19:04.820
I wrote in the New York times, which frankly, I'm shocked that they solicited an op-ed from me. I
01:19:09.240
will, I will say, uh, they took out a slap I had at the New York times in that piece.
01:19:13.160
There was originally, I know I mentioned the fact that the headline in the New York times about rush
01:19:17.660
was that he had like turned talk radio into an aggressive right wing attack machine. And their headline
01:19:22.000
about Ayatollah Khomeini was thoughtful religious leader. Right. Um, but, but the, um, but the,
01:19:27.640
the point that I was making is that what the left did with rush is what they are going to do with all
01:19:32.220
of us. They're like the, so in, in Judaism, uh, so to teach you all about a different religion.
01:19:37.140
So in Judaism, Satan is not a character who's opposed to God. That's not what Satan is. Satan is
01:19:42.420
known as the accuser because he's essentially the prosecutor. The idea is that after you die, Satan comes
01:19:46.400
and he basically is the one who is going to try you in court before God. And he's the one who
01:19:51.460
strings together all of your sort of worst moments. Right. And, and that is what this is. And this
01:19:57.620
will come for all of us. I said in the piece that it wouldn't have mattered if it had been Tucker or
01:20:01.180
if it had been Sean or if it had been me, or if it had been you, or if it had been anybody who was
01:20:04.480
prominent on the right, the reaction would have been the same because all our lives would have been,
01:20:08.120
would have been a compendium of the worst moments of us taken out of context and robbed of all
01:20:13.540
meaning. Right. That's all it would have been. And that's what you saw in the CNN montage.
01:20:16.400
The montage of Rush was like Sandra Flock and it was the AIDS stuff from 1988. And it was,
01:20:21.020
it was all this, it was like the, out of the 30 years of material, what are the six worst things
01:20:25.880
he did? And can we use those things to rag on him? Can we use those things to characterize his
01:20:30.040
entire life? And we should all refuse to accept this frame. We should refuse to accept this frame.
01:20:35.240
The reality is that we are all a compendium of all the things that we've done over the course of
01:20:38.740
our life, most of which people never see. And for those of us who are in public life,
01:20:42.300
the notion that everything that you do can be boiled down into one bad tweet or one bad moment,
01:20:48.600
all that really is, is because it can be done to anybody, all that anybody, but it isn't, but it
01:20:53.500
isn't, but because it can be done to anybody, that's how you know who they hate, right? Because you can do
01:20:58.380
with anybody, literally anybody. Right. And be, but there's only one side of the aisle that they
01:21:02.240
choose to do this to. Those are the people that they cancel. And so don't accept the standard that
01:21:05.460
this is how people should be characterized. I think it's so important for us to reject this
01:21:09.420
framework for the sake of our children. Yes. Because our, our children, I mean, I feel somebody,
01:21:14.820
please think of the, let's actually think of the children because our kids, uh, not my kids,
01:21:21.680
but so many kids are, are starting out on social media at the age of like eight years old and, um,
01:21:28.180
or even if they started social media at 14 or 15 and, and just everything they think that
01:21:33.480
everything that enters their head is documented forever online. And you got to think about what
01:21:38.680
we're, what we're starting right now with this cancel culture. If it continues like this 30 years
01:21:42.940
from now, all of our children are ruined. Their, their lives are ruined. I'm legitimately grateful to
01:21:47.680
God that I grew up before cell phone. Oh my God. Right. You know, also on this rush point,
01:21:52.860
I mean, you, you figure these kids are going to be on social media all the time. Imagine what's
01:21:55.900
going to crop up. Imagine if you've been on air for three hours a day for, for 30 years and your job,
01:22:01.480
by the way, is to be provocative, especially earlier on in the career. And the best thing they
01:22:06.100
got on you is an AIDS joke you made in 1982. Can you imagine that? I think like I wake up in the
01:22:12.800
morning, right? We, we actually pray this sort of thing. It's like, God have mercy on me,
01:22:16.680
a miserable sinner. You think of these lines from Shakespeare of like, I could accuse myself
01:22:21.320
of such things that it would be better that my mother had not born me. All the sins we all commit.
01:22:26.600
That's the best they got on the guy. He's pretty clean. Pretty well. And we're taking out of,
01:22:31.160
like the other thing we're doing is we're not taking, of course, the time when these things
01:22:35.480
were said into context at all. And we, and we, you know, forget about 1980. We're going back to
01:22:39.860
the 1840s and saying like, whatever someone did back then, we're going to hold them to the
01:22:44.020
standards of the year 2021, which of course is complete madness. I mean, as somebody who was
01:22:48.640
writing publicly from the time I was 17, I can say the great majority of the things I regret having
01:22:52.060
written occurred between the ages of 17 and 22. Right. Right. Like the, because when you're first
01:22:56.220
starting out, number one, you're trying to get attention and number two, your thoughts aren't
01:22:59.120
fully formed. Right. Right. If you don't get better at what you do over time and become a better
01:23:02.240
thinker over time, you're not being a human being. Yeah. Right. That's just called maturing.
01:23:05.800
And so what the, and the media celebrate this stuff. This is how it's the easiest form of fake
01:23:10.520
journalism, right? This is the other thing is that the media have made an entire model. The same
01:23:13.840
people who whine about the fact that we get good traffic over at daily wire, because we happen to
01:23:17.320
be conservative and then say that we're clickbait. These are the same people who will run a 3000 word
01:23:22.080
piece about some jackass of a 19 year old student who decides to out a high school cheerleader who once
01:23:29.320
texted something about learning to drive and quoted a rap lyric with the N word in it and get her kicked
01:23:35.160
off the university of Tennessee cheerleading team. The New York times actually did that. The New York times
01:23:38.960
ran a long piece about this, this terrible student. I mean, this guy's a terrible person who literally
01:23:44.180
held, there's a 15 year old girl. As she got a driver's permit, she put up a video on her phone
01:23:48.840
saying something. I can drive now N word. And it was obviously meant to quote a rap lyric. I mean,
01:23:53.940
clearly meant to quote a rap lyric. Soft R. This was not an epithet aimed at racial. And everybody
01:23:59.000
acknowledged this, right? This is fully obvious. And this jerk decided, cause he was in her class,
01:24:04.120
he decided that he was going to hold onto this video. He waited until two, I think it was three years later,
01:24:08.460
just kept this video around. Waited until three years later when black lives matter happened. And
01:24:12.660
she made the grave misfortune of posting something in support of black lives matter. And he said, well,
01:24:17.500
you say you support black lives matter. You said this, boom, puts out the video. The university
01:24:21.640
of Tennessee withdraws her cheerleading scholarship, which was her dream was to be the, on the university
01:24:26.740
of Tennessee cheerleading team, which is one of the great cheerleading teams in the country.
01:24:29.360
She had to withdraw her entire admission from university of Tennessee over this. Okay. We are creating an
01:24:34.960
unlivable culture. It is only livable for people on the hard left. And by the way,
01:24:38.460
everybody knows this. Everybody knows. It's not even going to be livable for them.
01:24:43.000
Ultimately it's not. Yeah. Revolutions eat their own. Revolutions eat their own. Every one of them
01:24:47.620
is going to burn. All the people like you talk about our publicists over at media matters and
01:24:51.780
sleeping giants and Judd Lum Lum and Kevin Roos and Kara Swisher. They don't know. They're all doomed.
01:24:58.120
Right. Not because of us. Yeah. Not because of us. Yeah. Because they're not 23. Yeah. They're not woke
01:25:04.460
23-year-olds. The woke 23-year-olds will one day eat them for lunch. Yeah. Yeah. Think of poor Trotsky.
01:25:12.520
You know. Trotsky thought he had it so well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever hear a ringing in your
01:25:16.520
ear, guys, it's an ice pick. Ice pick. And it ain't us bringing it. It ain't us. But that's why,
01:25:20.880
you know, sometimes you hear people on the right and they'll lament this happening to some of the
01:25:23.600
cancelers. Nope. Nope. They deserve every bit of what they've got coming to them. They built this
01:25:29.160
and they deserve what they have coming to them. I can object to it happening to them and still
01:25:32.060
recognize that they have exactly what they built coming to them. It's really interesting to me who
01:25:36.660
has always, you know, I've been an artist all my life. Half the people I know are gay. I've worked
01:25:42.000
with all these gay people. I've always enjoyed their company. They're hilariously funny. All this stuff.
01:25:46.260
I once went snorkeling with Ryan Anderson when Harry became Salic. So I'm,
01:25:50.260
Ryan and I together as one gay guy. Yeah, that is. I mean, I don't know.
01:25:54.100
But I remember back in the day, seriously, liberals, liberals who wouldn't come back to my house
01:26:00.740
because they met a gay person there. They wouldn't come back to see me because they'd come to a party
01:26:05.820
and there was a gay couple there. And those same people, those same people are walking around with
01:26:10.380
their rainbow flags now and canceling anybody. And I just think like it's all malarkey. This is the
01:26:16.620
thing that really gets me. It's all a grift. It has nothing to do with the happiness of gay
01:26:23.240
people, of black people, of women, of trans. It has nothing to do with any of that. Is the world
01:26:27.240
happier because of cancel culture? It is much, much more. Well, this is, by the way, this is sort
01:26:31.420
of the thesis of the, my first book with words is this kind of, wait a minute, wait a minute.
01:26:36.100
This is shocking. We'll see if I can finish it. But that political correctness basically replaces
01:26:40.960
moral codes with speech codes, the old moral codes with the new speech codes. So it matters much
01:26:45.020
less what you do. It actually doesn't really matter at all what you do. It matters what you say and
01:26:49.840
the imposition of that because the word can solve. It's like my fair lady, isn't it? It doesn't matter
01:26:53.440
what you do as long as you say it correctly. I think about this with the actor Armie Hammer.
01:26:57.400
Yeah, Armie. Who you guys know was many years ago, a good friend of mine, a good pal of mine. And
01:27:03.320
in later years, we've not been close. Our paths have taken us in different directions and he doesn't
01:27:08.580
share our politics, but still a guy I'm very fond of. And he said some things on, to some gals that
01:27:16.420
are hard to read. Yeah. They're weird. He expressed sexual predilections to them. And for that, he's
01:27:25.400
being erased from the world. I don't even understand the story. This is my point. So Armie says, you know,
01:27:31.120
I want to eat toes and I'd like to eat your rib and some other things. Right. And who among us
01:27:35.480
has it? Ribs are delicious. Oh, wait. Human. Oh, oh, oh. If just taking back what Adam once gave.
01:27:44.880
If Armie didn't need anybody. Yeah, right. Right. Armie didn't, uh, uh, drug and sodomize a 13 year
01:27:54.640
old girl like Roman Polanski did. And Harrison Ford flew to France to give him an honorary Oscar.
01:28:01.820
Yeah. Like this is why I don't get this. It's only what you say there. He, he expressed some words.
01:28:07.480
He expressed some dark fantasies. No, but wait, he, as I understood the story, he, he has some kind
01:28:13.960
of weird sexual fetish that he performed on some of these girls who were there. They didn't stop him
01:28:20.060
from doing this. I'm not understanding. I don't understand what he's being canceled for. Like in other
01:28:24.220
words, like I saw what he was doing. Engaged in consensual sex. Yeah. And he said that he would
01:28:29.120
like to eat a rib or eat a couple of toes. Yeah. Uh, in some direct messages. And for this,
01:28:33.340
he must be destroyed. Now I'm not making a moral defense of. No. Yeah, it is. It is definitely
01:28:38.640
very disordered. But I am saying what, what did he do? I'm just trying to think of puns to be honest
01:28:43.620
with you. Oh, come on. Come on. Yeah. There are a lot of good ones. Talk to me after the show.
01:28:49.540
That was an interesting story because it should, because Cosmopolitan magazine actually published
01:28:55.660
an article after that defending, um, cannibalism fetishes. That's right. And I read, I read the
01:29:02.900
article for some, I always, I read the article for some reason and it just struck me that, um,
01:29:08.900
that this is kind of off topic a little bit, but I guess, but it's just, our culture has no language
01:29:13.080
anymore to condemn any kind of perversion because it's all about consent. And so the, the only
01:29:20.760
language, the only, the only moral rule we have left is consent. And that's everything comes down
01:29:24.880
to consent. And as long as people consent, then we have no language with which to condemn anything.
01:29:29.580
And so this article was going through it, you know, it couldn't just come out and say, well,
01:29:34.880
this is wrong to want to eat people. That's weird and wrong. It couldn't say that. So instead it was
01:29:39.300
trying to figure out how, well, he didn't really have consent. Well, you know how they did this,
01:29:43.640
the greatest version of this, forget, forget Army's thing was Marilyn Manson. Marilyn Manson
01:29:48.420
is being accused by the actress, Evan Rachel Wood, who's very left-wing, but just testified on this
01:29:52.680
and some other women of engaging in very sort of bizarre sexual behaviors. We're not just talking
01:29:58.780
about fantasies anymore. And the thing is, these women were in longstanding relationships with him.
01:30:04.380
And so when Evan Rachel Wood, and I really take her side in this, but she's saying, well, I know
01:30:08.220
we were in a consensual relationship, but it wasn't really consensual because, you know, I was
01:30:13.600
brainwashed. He manipulated me, you know, fine. I, I totally understand that argument, but that
01:30:19.720
argument doesn't work in the modern liberal framework. I actually don't, I actually disagree
01:30:23.760
with you guys about this. I, I think I agree with a fundamental point that you're making that
01:30:28.780
consent isn't the ultimate definition of morality, but consent is consent, but that doesn't mean that
01:30:34.960
consent isn't a standard. I don't, I actually, I don't know. It's a legal standard for sure.
01:30:39.220
Most of all, that is the only standard that the left applies. So how do you cancel somebody on
01:30:42.440
the basis of violate, of violating a standard you have not violated? Right. Right. I mean,
01:30:46.120
I can understand conservatives saying that's weird and perverse and it's always wrong. And it's
01:30:50.860
always wrong. We're not going to be patronizing businesses with people who want to eat each
01:30:54.120
other's toes because it's weird. But for liberals, for whom literally nothing is off limits so long
01:30:59.520
as it is consensual, there is no, there is no basis for canceling. It's a weak, it's a weak
01:31:03.740
standard. So, but the, but the point is they, they've, if, if your standard for judging the
01:31:08.980
morality of a sexual act is something like love, devotion, are you respecting the dignity of the
01:31:15.100
other person? Well, then you don't have to talk about consent at all because that's included in the
01:31:18.960
love, devotion and dignity bit. Yeah. But you get rid of all that and it all comes down to,
01:31:22.760
to, to consent. And that's why you have all these, you know, all these cases on college campuses,
01:31:27.660
a woman wakes up the next day, she had consensual sex with a man, but she feels used and cheap and
01:31:33.180
dirty. And, and, and she, and she was used, you know, she was used like an object, but she did
01:31:37.980
consent to it. And the problem is not that she didn't consent. The problem is that it was not
01:31:41.720
sex with dignity and love, but she doesn't have that language. So instead she figures, well,
01:31:46.120
this feels wrong. I didn't really give consent. So I must, yeah, I must not have gotten given consent,
01:31:50.460
even though I did. That's a great, that is a great point. That is absolutely, you know,
01:31:53.680
because it is a great point until you say you're taking Rachel Evan Wood's side. I'm, I'm, I'm sort
01:31:59.140
of taking her side. I'm not taking it all the way. This is actually where I disagree with you. I
01:32:01.420
agree with everything you just said as a moral standard. But I'm not, I'm not saying that
01:32:04.920
Marilyn Manson for the, for the sort of consensual acts that he's being accused of it not being
01:32:10.480
consensual or something. I'm not, I'm not saying you ought to go to jail for it. I think you're
01:32:14.320
making the same point that Matt is. He's not, you're not saying that you take Evan
01:32:17.520
Rachel Wood's side in the sense that he has violated some sort of left-wing cultural standard
01:32:22.680
and ought to, or civil law ought to be, or civil law and ought to be ended that way. I think
01:32:26.320
you're just saying what Matt is saying, which is that I fundamentally though, object to the idea
01:32:31.820
that you can retroactively remove consent because of regret. But the point that Matt is making is such
01:32:40.400
a perceptive one, which is that people aren't actively, it's a lie. In other words, when they say
01:32:45.360
that they're retroactively removing consent, the only moral standard they have is consent,
01:32:49.360
but they know they feel like something wrong just happened to them. So they do not have the
01:32:52.680
language to express what morality has been violated other than by retroactively saying
01:32:57.660
that the only value they have was violated. Since I know it was bad, it must not have been
01:33:01.180
consent. There's a huge irony here though, which is that you have these left-wingers grappling at
01:33:06.120
this very traditional definition of consent and liberty, the kind of Aristotelian or old classical
01:33:12.960
Christian idea, which is that if you're constantly in vice and sin, you're not actually free, right?
01:33:19.080
The man who sins is a slave to sin. The example I use is the heroin addict. By the kind of modern
01:33:24.220
leftist standard of liberty, the heroin addict is the freest guy in the world, right? As long as he's
01:33:28.520
got a couple bucks in his pocket, he can shoot up, he can pursue his appetites however he wants.
01:33:32.600
But we all know the heroin addict is the least free person on earth.
01:33:36.760
This is the thing, you know, you and I like the show Billions and it features this guy who's a
01:33:44.440
prosecutor who is a masochist. He's a sexual masochist and it begins, and he's, you know,
01:33:49.740
for me, like masochism, sadomasochism is like you flick people with a towel, you know, but this is
01:33:54.540
like sticking cigarettes on people. It's like, it's not, it's not a joke, you know, but he's in a
01:33:59.500
loving relationship with his wife where they do this thing. And what you're left with is something's
01:34:05.380
wrong with him. You know, it's not, it's not that they're doing anything illegal and it's not even
01:34:09.640
that they're outside of a loving relationship because for a large period of the show, they're
01:34:13.960
actually in a loving relationship, but something's the matter with him. And it's, you know, it's when
01:34:18.840
I look at the guy who's supposed to be a girl who's in the, now the health and human services,
01:34:25.020
Rachel Levine, I think like, you know, I have nothing but sympathy for this person, but something's
01:34:32.180
wrong with him. You know, there's something the matter with him. And I think that like,
01:34:35.520
we have to be able to talk about that without necessarily moral judgment, but at least with
01:34:42.100
some kind of understanding. Because right now the argument is, well, you can do whatever you want
01:34:45.060
as long as you consent to it. But the question then is, well, if there's something that's a
01:34:50.080
little wrong, maybe we do need to qualify. But two things can be true at once, which is,
01:34:56.620
you can do anything that you consent to as long as you're an adult, but that doesn't make it right.
01:34:59.880
That's right. And this is something that, and this is something, and this is an ethos that is
01:35:04.500
completely foreign to the left, right? This is where they're running into trouble because the
01:35:08.140
ethos that you can do something wrong, but still it can be wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Is something that the
01:35:13.380
left fundamentally does not accept, right? It's why they're now cracking back against freedom of
01:35:16.340
association and freedom of speech and all individual rights, right? If you can misuse freedom of
01:35:19.740
speech, that means that freedom of speech should actively be curbed. If you misuse freedom of
01:35:23.600
association, freedom of association should, should actively be curbed. The right understands that
01:35:27.620
there is a difference between the right to do wrong and the possibility of doing wrong with
01:35:32.980
that right, right? That you can, you can abuse a right, but that doesn't vitiate the central right
01:35:38.160
that you're talking about. The left fundamentally does not understand this. So what this creates
01:35:41.400
is this bizarre situation where they'll know something is wrong and they can't explain why it's
01:35:45.880
wrong or which rule it has violated. Right. And so they have to post facto create a rule that allows
01:35:50.900
them to bar that thing, right? Because, because they can't accept the idea that somebody could do
01:35:54.780
something wrong and also it wouldn't violate any of their chief principles because in essence,
01:35:58.400
they're authoritarian, right? In essence, everything they don't like ought to be banned.
01:36:01.960
Yeah. And so if they can't even come up with a good reason in their own head why it ought to be
01:36:04.520
banned, they will come up with a new rule. That's right. Or they will spin the rule so that that
01:36:07.880
thing ought to be banned. And that's incredibly dangerous. This is my only question for any leftists
01:36:12.220
ever, really. This is what, this is what I would ask if I got to ask a question at a Democrat debate
01:36:16.720
is, is there anything that you believe is bad that should not be banned by government? Yeah.
01:36:23.680
Is there anything you believe is good that should not be mandated by government?
01:36:27.680
Right. You're right. You know, it's so, it's, it's incredibly biblical even for your half of the
01:36:33.400
Bible. No, it's incredibly biblical that we talk about why God allows evil. And there's a large body
01:36:42.480
of discussion about this. And one of the ideas is that because he believes that men have to be free
01:36:47.820
and men and women have to be free in order to love God, in order to serve God freely. But that means
01:36:53.420
that you cannot do that. And so that's, that's the relationship of power to the people who are
01:36:59.380
less powerful is yes, you have to have the right to do things that are wrong. But I do think, I think
01:37:04.160
that doesn't mean they're right. That's why wokeism is a pagan religion. Yes. Yeah. I do, I do think
01:37:09.320
though the left is saying something even more radical, which is they're saying, I'm not really free.
01:37:14.140
You know, in the case of Evan Rachel Wood or something, she's saying, I'm not free to consent
01:37:17.840
for whatever reason, you know, I was manipulated or whatever. And this actually gets to something
01:37:23.300
the founding fathers talked about. This gets to something that sort of classical Lord Acton talks
01:37:28.380
about, actually classical theorizers of, of liberty, which is to be free, you actually have to be a moral
01:37:36.600
and religious people in the words of John Adams, or you need to practice the virtues and cultivate that
01:37:41.640
the point of liberal education is to do this, right? It's why we take little kids who are just
01:37:46.340
basically appetite machines and doing everything that's bad for them. We educate them in their
01:37:50.920
liberty and hopefully they can kind of tame it and be able to master that. But what the left is
01:37:56.500
saying is we don't have that. We're just appetite machines. Well, so one of the things that happened
01:38:02.660
and just philosophically, that was a really radical shift in, in sort of how Western thought went
01:38:08.020
is that it used to be that people perceived natural law in the way that the Catholic church
01:38:12.060
perceived natural law, which is you can look at the, at the way that nature is constituted and you can
01:38:15.640
derive from it rational rules as to how the world should work and natural rules of virtue as to
01:38:20.160
how you should live your life, right? And that, that is embedded in the laws of nature and nature
01:38:23.480
is God, as is the language of the, of the Declaration of Independence. And the, there was a shift that
01:38:28.480
happened, particularly in the 19th century from the idea of natural law to nature as guide, right?
01:38:34.680
As in scientific nature, as in if something happened to you and it was natural to you, you had a natural
01:38:39.400
desire, then this meant that this natural desire was justified. And you see, this is this, you can
01:38:44.160
see this in, in, I mean, to, to be, you know, as, as sort of cretinous as possible in terms of public
01:38:49.300
culture. If you look at Lady Gaga's born this way, right? This is the argument, right? If it is natural
01:38:53.000
for you to do, it is therefore good for you to do. Well, that is the precise opposite of what natural
01:38:56.580
law suggests, which is it may be natural for you to have a particular inclination, but the world around
01:39:01.400
you suggests a particular set of rules and you are supposed to incline yourself toward that particular set of
01:39:05.460
rules. And you can know that for your reason. Right. Because man was meant to reason. But the,
01:39:10.000
the, the, this goes back to, I think the, another fundamental distinction that the left
01:39:14.700
is, is now attempting to conflate. There was an entire editorial in the New York Times today that
01:39:19.480
was kind of fascinating. And it was a complaint about why Western philosophy was so focused on
01:39:23.880
separating man from animals. I don't know if you guys saw this. It was kind of fascinating. It was,
01:39:27.480
it was an entire essay about why do, you know, all of Western philosophy is dedicated toward the idea
01:39:31.680
that man is not the same as a squirrel. And this is very bad. We should actually
01:39:35.220
allow man to just be the same as a squirrel because squirrels are natural and squirrels have,
01:39:39.600
and, and human beings are natural. And we should acknowledge we are not just our reason. We are
01:39:42.780
not just our prefrontal cortex. We are all of the elements of us. Right. And Western philosophy was
01:39:47.220
built around the idea that we are not the same as animals specifically because Western philosophy
01:39:51.580
was built around the idea that man was made for a purpose. And that purpose was to reason.
01:39:55.540
That purpose was to use our brains in order to seek out God and to seek out the rules to live a
01:40:00.460
virtuous life. And the left has attempted to vitiate that. This is why Darwinian theory did
01:40:05.820
so much damage to religion. Not because there's anything that doesn't fit in terms of evolution
01:40:10.180
and religion. You can square that circle for sure. But what really finished it was the idea that man
01:40:14.980
is an animal. And once you treat man as an animal. And there's no fixed nature. Right.
01:40:19.120
Nature's evolving. Right. But, but more importantly, that, that you, there is nothing better about the
01:40:23.940
prefrontal cortex than the amygdala. Yep. There's nothing, there's nothing preferable about being a
01:40:27.680
reasonable person, as opposed to being an emotional person or a person who just follows
01:40:31.100
their passions, follows their nature. And by the way, it's worth pointing out when Woodrow
01:40:33.980
Wilson are, you know, sort of first, the worst president in American history. Yeah. The first,
01:40:38.160
you know, and the first left progressive president, he who destroyed the entire country. When he writes
01:40:42.880
about what is progress, what is progressivism? He uses that exact example. He says, the constitution
01:40:48.160
is based on the science of Newton, fixed laws, permanent nature, all these sorts of things.
01:40:53.840
But we know that's bunk. We now live in the age of Darwin. I don't think Woodrow Wilson,
01:40:58.760
he understood Darwin very well anyway, but he says, Darwin, nothing's fixed. It's all just kind
01:41:03.420
of a continuum, man. We're not that different. And therefore throw out all those permanent laws.
01:41:08.540
Have we gotten, have we gotten to a point where, cause I've been thinking about this a lot. Have we
01:41:12.120
gotten to a point where the whole conversation around rights is, is just hopeless? Uh, because we
01:41:20.220
can't, you get a hundred Americans into a room, you ask them what, what does, what does it mean
01:41:24.700
to have a right? What is a human right? And you're not going to get even a 50% agreement. Nobody has
01:41:29.120
any idea even what these things are. We don't have the same, we don't have the philosophical grounding
01:41:32.640
for it. Well, that's, we got to a point where this, where we, you know, maybe we stop, maybe we
01:41:37.860
as conservatives stopped framing our arguments so much around rights and find a different framework
01:41:42.000
for it. Like, so for example, um, uh, abortion. And so for, for so long, pro-lifers would say we
01:41:49.320
have a right to life. And that, that actually raises a lot of questions. Like what, what do
01:41:54.180
you mean a right to life, a right against whom? Who are you claiming this right? Right, exactly.
01:42:00.300
If you have a right to life, does that mean that you can't be executed and so on? Um, maybe a better
01:42:04.620
R word would be responsibility. And so what we should be saying is, and I believe we do have a right
01:42:10.540
to life understood a certain way, but maybe we should be saying that, um, a parent has a
01:42:16.040
responsibility to their child. And what that means at a minimum is that you can't kill your child.
01:42:21.780
You have to provide for them. We all agree with that. When it comes to born children,
01:42:25.540
you let your kids starve to death. You go to jail. That is the kind of traditional conservative
01:42:28.320
framing too, right? Maybe it's maybe responsibility. When I got into this brief Twitter exchange with,
01:42:32.960
uh, David French, one of the things I said was you, you are endowed by your creator with certain
01:42:39.460
rights and government is instituted among men to ensure those rights. So if those rights are under
01:42:45.700
threat, it doesn't matter where they're under threat from government has a right to stop that
01:42:49.280
threat. And many, many people came on this, this Twitter thread and said, Oh, any argument from God
01:42:55.500
is absurd. Yeah. But the problem, the problem with that is that's actually the axiom of our civilization.
01:43:02.480
It is the self-evident truth that doesn't have to be proved. It only has to be asserted because
01:43:07.160
everything else is built on top of it. You can't remove it. You cannot remove that assumption.
01:43:11.820
And we shouldn't be afraid to make that assumption because it's the axiom of the country.
01:43:15.100
There's a, there's a common argument that the founders consistently made and which they were
01:43:19.320
right about, which is that the other half of right is duty, right? Rights and duties were just the
01:43:22.980
flip side of each other. Your right to life is my duty not to kill you. Right? And, and your right
01:43:27.040
to free speech is my duty not to inhibit your free speech. And we all understood this fundamentally.
01:43:30.480
What we have done is we have dumped the duty and we have kept the rights. And so once you dump the duty,
01:43:34.860
then you can have rights against anyone for anything because you have no duty not to infringe
01:43:38.700
on them. I just want to say dump the duty is a funny phrase, but go ahead.
01:43:41.380
It is. I think I'm very, uh, yeah, it's true. Bringing you back.
01:43:45.840
I think on that elevated note, I want to do something that we haven't done in a while.
01:43:50.540
I want to, this has been a great conversation. Uh, I want to wrap out the show with 10 rapid fire
01:43:56.680
questions from our dailywire.com subscribers. Alicia is going to bring them to us. Here's the rules.
01:44:01.180
It's what, whoever the question is, uh, addressed at, they're the only one to make an answer. And
01:44:06.560
it's a, and it's a fast pithy answer. We want to get through 10 rapid fire questions. Alicia.
01:44:13.960
All right. The first question goes to Michael Knowles. A daily wire member wants to know they
01:44:17.960
live in a liberal Mecca and they are considering leaving like the daily wire did, but should they
01:44:23.520
be considering this? And what do you think their options and decision-making should be considering
01:44:27.120
they don't have a job or housing situation set up yet? Well, you're probably more likely to get a
01:44:31.580
job and a cheaper house and a conservative place. So I think those are both marks actually in favor of
01:44:36.140
coming here. I love it. I wish we came here sooner. I love being in a red state and specifically in
01:44:42.440
Tennessee. All I will have a caveat here is I feel I got a lot out of growing up in left-wing places
01:44:51.660
because I learned all the stupidest arguments and it cost me a lot of time and it impelled a lot of
01:44:56.120
bad behavior, but I feel I came out stronger and wiser for it. That was a constructive process.
01:45:02.040
Uh, however, if you're already formed and comfort is your, is your goal, come on over baby. Tennessee
01:45:07.040
is fabulous. All right. This question goes to, uh, Matt. People want to know, do you think that the
01:45:13.700
general public or major corporations will ever grow a spine and just say no to the woke mob and the
01:45:19.840
Twitterati? No. I think Matt took that, like those instructions a little too seriously. Can
01:45:31.900
we give him like 280 characters? I think he said it all. All right. Drew, who would win a cage match
01:45:41.620
between Gina Carano and the entire daily wire? Oh, we'd be killed. Are you kidding? She'd kill us.
01:45:46.820
In my youth, I might've given her one. I might've gotten one slug in, but now it's, it's over. Yeah.
01:45:53.800
Media matters. In his youth, Andrew Klavan would have punched a woman.
01:46:01.840
All right. Uh, Jeremy, people want to know what kind of cigars are you guys smoking?
01:46:06.580
I'm not smoking tonight. Uh, so I'm going to kick the question over to Mickey.
01:46:10.320
Little Davidoff Colorado Claro, not a super duper expensive cigar, but it's got six years age on it
01:46:16.180
from our buddies at our old shop in LA. Ben, it is award season, even though it seems a little weird
01:46:22.460
in this age of COVID and people want to know what are your Oscar picks? Oh my God. Well, all the ones
01:46:27.540
that they've talked about for Oscars this year absolutely suck or I haven't seen them. So I really
01:46:32.040
haven't seen many good movies this year. Run, hide, fight should win all of the Oscars. Aside from run,
01:46:37.280
hide, fight the unproduced Gina Carano film should obviously also be nominated for next year's
01:46:41.260
Oscar. 2022. 2022. I, you know, I'm trying to think of anything that's really, have you guys
01:46:46.220
seen anything of this year? I'm like, I'm really, I'm really trying to all the Oscar movies. It's
01:46:49.700
like call me by your moonlight or some nonsense and no one watches it. Gentleman was, was that this
01:46:53.920
year? Cause that was a good, was it the guy Ritchie film? Yeah. Guy Ritchie. Okay. I'll have to,
01:46:56.860
I'll have to get that one. It's really fun. I got nothing. All right. Uh, Jeremy, this,
01:47:02.300
this question is for you. A Daily Wire member wants to know which actor are you kind of hoping
01:47:06.680
gets canceled next. So you guys can snatch them off. Well, I have a list. Uh, I, I, I hate to say
01:47:13.560
an answer to that, but it's so terrible. I will say that on the same day that fire Gina Carano,
01:47:18.260
uh, was trending, uh, fire Chris Pratt was trending and for God's sakes, Hollywood, please,
01:47:25.220
please, please send Chris Pratt to us. I love me some Chris Pratt out of all the Chris's he's
01:47:32.860
obvi the best. Alrighty. Uh, Michael, do you think that we need more conservatives going into
01:47:37.260
politics or going into cultural positions like filmmaking and producing and editing and all those
01:47:43.760
things? Well, I think the answer is yes. And I also think it's a little bit of a blurry distinction,
01:47:48.020
you know, because obviously politics, the biggest definition of it is what we all do together,
01:47:52.700
but it's a, it's a two pronged approach because forget elected politicians. They're always going to be
01:47:57.400
sociopaths running for that. It's the bureaucracy that we lose in the actual administrative state
01:48:02.140
and the entire cultural apparatus. And we just don't have anybody in any of those areas.
01:48:07.320
So we, we need to go into both and both, both are important. I don't think it's only when the
01:48:11.660
culture and forget about politics. And I don't think it's only focus on bureaucratic politics and
01:48:15.940
ignore and technology and tech and everything. Yeah. Matt, uh, earlier on Twitter, I saw that you
01:48:23.020
retweeted Tommy Lahren. She said Trump DeSantis 2024. You said you agreed with half of the ticket
01:48:28.780
other than, other than Ron DeSantis, who would you pick? Like, what are your top three for the GOP in
01:48:34.780
2024? I don't have a top three. I like Ron DeSantis. Um, I, I hate almost all politicians. So for me to
01:48:42.380
even say, I like him is, is me going out on a limb and I, I give him, you know, that we've got three
01:48:46.980
years, four years left before. So he could easily disappoint me, but I'll be ready to toss him to the
01:48:51.960
curb if he does. But, um, I like Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis is great. He's the governor of my
01:48:57.380
excellent new state of Florida. He is a stud. And I really feel we don't have time to get into
01:49:02.500
all this. It's supposed to be rapid fire, but I feel very strongly that, uh, Ron DeSantis on the
01:49:08.500
top of the ticket is a great idea. Trump on the top of the ticket. I don't know if we want to
01:49:11.860
do all this again in 2024. Um, so I, I hate to interrupt because I said we had to be rapid fire,
01:49:18.020
but Candace Owens could, would be formidable if she actually decided to make good on her tweet
01:49:22.920
threat. It is true. It would be formidable. It is a true story. I wouldn't want to run against her.
01:49:27.340
I also, just to put a little plug in here, I would like to be the first podcast host,
01:49:32.900
you know, so there's other, there are other Republican politicians who could be out there.
01:49:36.280
Wouldn't mind doing a podcast. Yeah. I'm just throwing that out there. Something I'm encouraging
01:49:41.020
people to do. We all know Michael is hoping that Ben runs so then he can get his radio slot.
01:49:46.820
That's true. That's the way I could actually become the first podcast host if I took his
01:49:50.600
podcast. Drew, do you plan on double masking? No, I don't even single mask. I only wear a mask
01:49:59.580
when I walk into a store and on the front of the store, it says you have to have a mask to,
01:50:04.600
you have to wear a mask to enter this store. Otherwise I haven't worn a mask since this whole
01:50:08.840
thing began. I mean, Drew's, Drew's, Drew's immune to death. That's what happens after you've
01:50:12.000
been dead for five years. If I, if I were, if I were going to die, I'd have died already. Let's face
01:50:15.860
it. I just said, I know I'm not supposed to speak, but, uh, but on the mask thing, I discovered
01:50:20.580
this weekend that when you're wearing a suit jacket, if you wear the neck gaiter, which
01:50:24.380
is my move and you wear it around your neck, it actually looks like an ascot. Um, so it's
01:50:28.260
kind of, it kind of works like that. So yeah, no, no, I, I haven't done, I haven't done anything
01:50:33.580
that anything that Anthony Fauci says I do the opposite. I've heard that I've heard that. Um,
01:50:40.500
I did an Anthony Fauci impersonation the other day and, uh, I heard from a lot of our listeners
01:50:44.460
that your Anthony Fauci impersonation, this is the only nice thing I've ever said to
01:50:47.540
Michael Knowles. I don't know what you're talking about. In 10 or 15 years, maybe I'll have done
01:50:54.720
a good impression. That is good. Solid stuff. We know how Ben feels about Fauci and the vaccine,
01:51:05.000
but Ben, somebody wants to know if you get the vaccine, is it okay? I know it's against
01:51:09.260
Jewish law to get a tattoo, but this daily wire subscriber wants to know, would you get
01:51:12.540
it tattooed on your arm or somewhere that you got the vaccine? So then you don't have
01:51:15.860
to wear a mask anymore and you can go to a baseball game as they've been hearing you talk
01:51:19.160
about a lot on your podcast. So a couple of things. One, Jews not big into tattoos. Two,
01:51:24.300
Jews super not big into governments giving you tattoos. Right?
01:51:27.640
Your arm or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I think it was an optional. It was optional so then you
01:51:32.400
can go with your dad to a White Sox game. It sounds weird to me. Like, I don't mean to put too
01:51:35.020
to find a point on it, but it's kind of uncomfortable. But yeah, I'm not in favor of,
01:51:42.380
as a general liberty matter, I'm not in favor of the idea that you should be barred from all
01:51:46.140
public places unless you have a vaccine green card. I do think that our public officials are
01:51:51.620
doing us an enormous disservice in continuing to lie to us and say that you can't go back to
01:51:56.500
regular life after you've had the vaccine. It's literally the only tool that we know of right now
01:52:00.260
that is going to give you the kind of safety, particularly if you're older, from the disease
01:52:04.700
that would reduce this to below the risk of the flu. I mean, if you get these vaccines,
01:52:08.620
these vaccines are 99% effective in preventing death, 95% effective in preventing serious illness,
01:52:13.900
and 90% effective in preventing transmission. So this bizarre idea that after you get the vaccine,
01:52:18.560
you're going to be still living with the mask and socially distancing in 2022 is anti-science.
01:52:22.660
It is bizarre. And it actually encourages people not to get the vaccine. Because if I'm 37
01:52:26.540
and I'm thinking to myself, okay, well, there may be like the risk of getting a little sick from
01:52:31.120
the vaccine. I won't feel so good. I don't know what the long-term effects of the vaccine are. And
01:52:34.120
listen, if I get COVID, I'm not going to die anyway. I'm 37. And then you tell me, okay, but
01:52:38.840
you can go back to regular life. I might think to myself, okay, that seems like it's worth the
01:52:42.600
risk. But if you keep telling 25-year-olds that they can't go back to regular life after they get
01:52:46.540
the vaccine, who in their right mind would get the vaccine? And you have all of these idiots like
01:52:50.660
Fauci saying, maybe we'll never go back to our regular life. Maybe we'll never do it. Never. And it's
01:52:56.240
like, what are you? Why? Why? I mean, it's a scientific miracle. First of all, we've been
01:53:02.880
ripping on big business a lot. Let me just say that the greatest thing in the world is
01:53:05.820
big pharma. Big pharma, they're unbelievable at what they do. They generated a cure for a
01:53:10.860
disease in less than a year. It's unbelievable. But as far as kind of the general concept of
01:53:15.160
the government mandating vaccine cards to go anywhere, that raises, I think, serious
01:53:20.660
liberty concerns. I think, frankly, people would start forging them to go wherever they want
01:53:24.020
anyway. They're making the same mistake now that they made in March. Again, it's just being
01:53:28.640
replayed. Because in March, they told everyone, don't wear masks. It's stupid to wear masks. The
01:53:32.680
Surgeon General said, people, stop wearing masks. And the reason they said that is because they
01:53:35.840
didn't want us to run out and they didn't trust us to not run out and buy all the medical masks.
01:53:39.600
Because they wanted it to go to all the nurses and not to us. And so now, with the vaccine,
01:53:44.080
they're doing the same thing again, where they're saying, oh, no, if you get the vaccine,
01:53:48.300
you still have to wear the mask. Because they don't trust people who aren't vaccinated to not
01:53:55.240
wear the mask. Because they think that if they start allowing people to, well, if you get the
01:53:59.720
vaccine, you don't have to wear a mask. They think everyone's not going to wear it. They're not
01:54:02.680
trusting people to make it. No, they seem to think there are three choices here and there are only
01:54:05.700
two. They think that there is a third choice where everybody gets vaccinated and then doesn't go out
01:54:09.660
and party. There's only two choices. Everybody gets vaccinated and parties. And nobody gets
01:54:14.320
vaccinated. And parties. There is no third choice where everybody continues to lock down until the
01:54:18.740
end of time, especially after being vaccinated. It's idiotic. Like, this is one thing that Israel
01:54:22.620
is doing right with the vaccine. They've done a lot of things right. But one thing they're doing
01:54:25.680
right, I mean, they have shot in a shot night at the bars. They're telling people, like, come and get
01:54:29.100
a shot and we'll give you a free shot. They're encouraging people to actively do this. And that is
01:54:34.160
a smart thing to do. That is a smart thing to do.
01:54:36.460
All right, Matt, people want to know, how is it finally being a Daily Wire HQ in Nashville? And
01:54:45.020
how different is it doing your show from there?
01:54:48.120
It's pretty nice. I have a series of complaints that I could.
01:54:52.960
Much of them having to do with the break room. There's a lot of, you know, the other day I wanted
01:54:57.620
to grab some half and half and all they had was coconut milk and like soy milk and almond milk,
01:55:03.120
everything except for real milk. There's also a lot of seaweed related snacks that I don't really
01:55:10.100
understand. Must be an LA thing, but. I think you should take it up with your supervisor.
01:55:16.160
I will. I've already registered with HR, but they thought that was no way, so.
01:55:21.560
Said it wasn't a valid complaint. They're not going to be investigating that. Too bad. So sad.
01:55:25.820
Michael Knowles. I heard from a little birdie maybe named Dave Rubin that he's slightly bitter that
01:55:30.600
the night before the Daily Wire announced their move to Nashville, you claimed that you were staying
01:55:34.720
here in California. I was there. He wants to know, was it worth it? So there were a couple of these
01:55:40.420
nights. Rubin never forgave me for this. Now, in my defense, nobody tells me nothing around here,
01:55:47.720
okay? In my defense, seriously, these guys, they're not telling me stuff. To be fair, I didn't want you
01:55:51.820
to come. Yeah. Please, Dave, get Knowles to stay. But it was funny because I was at Dave. This was
01:55:58.260
actually, we had truly our farewell dinner. It was you, me, Drew, Adam Carolla, Prager was there,
01:56:05.160
and then we all, I think you guys were already gone at this point, and then we really hightailed
01:56:08.580
it. But I was at Dave's place, and he said, you know, Knowles, you know, Knowles, we're gonna just
01:56:14.420
take back California, and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna just win back the hearts and minds and
01:56:20.020
get rid of Newsom. I was like, yeah, man, hell yeah, we're gonna, yeah, FOA, and yeah, all this stuff.
01:56:24.700
And then, like, six hours later, he was like, yo, bye, Dave. I'm going to Tennessee. See you out
01:56:28.740
there, buddy. So what you're telling me is that you're a liar who personality mirrors. I cannot
01:56:33.200
believe it. I cannot believe it. You ever think about acting? Yeah, maybe, you know, I might, uh,
01:56:39.240
is, uh, is there a part in that Gina Carano movie? Dave Rubin ain't staying in California. No,
01:56:43.020
he'll be, he'll be in Florida tomorrow. It's like, you're, you're gonna walk outside. We're
01:56:48.300
Alicia, how many questions have we done? At least like one and a half. We've done more
01:56:55.620
than 10, but I'm just still, like, rolling through them because I, you know, you hadn't
01:56:58.920
stopped me. Last question. All right, last question goes to you, God King, and it kind
01:57:04.460
of piggybacks on you asking if Michael, if he had considered getting into acting, which
01:57:08.480
he hadn't done in a while, unless that's what he's doing every day on his podcast. But will
01:57:12.300
any of the, will any of the Daily Wire talent be making cameos in the upcoming Daily Wire
01:57:20.000
entertainment scripted shows? Wouldn't you like to know, fair audience? Uh, all that
01:57:25.660
I'm willing to say on this topic is yes. I meant to say, ah, listen, be sure to tune
01:57:35.320
in for Ben's first episode of the hit new show debunked this Friday. We just know it's
01:57:39.000
going to be a hit Ben's in it. The series will be available exclusively to Daily Wire
01:57:42.740
members to you. So use code debunked to save 25% off your membership today over at dailywire.com.
01:57:49.020
Don't miss the opportunity to see Ben brandish facts and logic. I want, in my original draft,
01:57:54.540
I said facts and or logic. Someone has obviously corrected the teleprompter. Thanks again for
01:57:58.960
joining us for the Daily Wire, uh, the Empire Strikes Back stage. We will see you next time.