The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： 2022 Season Finale

00:00:00.120 Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you.

00:00:02.740 The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage is right around the corner,

00:00:06.680 and you do not want to miss it.

00:00:08.220 Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring,

00:00:12.480 as we discuss the latest news and cultural events,

00:00:14.780 all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars.

00:00:17.580 It is going to be all that and more.

00:00:19.780 Take a listen.

00:00:30.000 Oh, Merry Christmas, everybody, and welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.

00:00:49.820 Donn we now our gay apparel?

00:00:52.420 Yes.

00:00:53.060 Yes, we do.

00:00:54.440 We donned.

00:00:55.820 I am Jeremy Boring.

00:00:56.900 I am joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles,

00:01:01.280 and we are going to be talking about so many important things that we haven't even made up yet.

00:01:05.460 You're in for quite a treat.

00:01:08.040 But I want to tell you, before we get started, that at the end of this show,

00:01:11.220 we're going to have an unbelievable members block.

00:01:12.780 That's for our Daily Wire Plus members.

00:01:14.500 If you're not a Daily Wire Plus member, head over to dailywireplus.com,

00:01:17.880 click that subscribe button, grab a membership, join us for the rest of the show

00:01:22.380 and the wonderful things we're going to discuss,

00:01:23.780 including our Secret Santa, names were drawn, money was spent, and shenanigans will ensue.

00:01:31.640 That's going to be in the members block as well as our chance to answer questions from you, our members.

00:01:37.440 Which brings me to sacrilege, which was spoken just moments before the cameras rolled

00:01:42.040 when one Matthew Bartholomew Walsh suggested that the Dark Knight does not hold up, end quote.

00:01:49.480 What the hell, dude?

00:01:50.260 I was letting my, I put it on for my kids.

00:01:53.700 They're probably too young to watch it in the first place.

00:01:55.400 You're old, this is nine.

00:01:56.500 Yeah, they were.

00:01:57.260 What?

00:01:58.780 They were traumatized.

00:02:00.740 They cried and cried.

00:02:01.440 My wife was shooting me dirty looks the whole time.

00:02:03.620 Well, yeah.

00:02:04.100 It's not appropriate.

00:02:04.940 I can't imagine why.

00:02:05.980 It's been a while since I've seen it, but then I'm also reassessing it.

00:02:08.920 And I'm thinking, like, first of all, the Batman voice really did bother me.

00:02:13.160 The Batman voice is a mistake.

00:02:14.860 It's hard to take seriously.

00:02:15.700 The Two-Face storyline is an absolute afterthought.

00:02:18.680 They just throw them in.

00:02:19.540 They turn them into Two-Face 30 seconds before the movie's over.

00:02:23.860 And it just didn't, I just didn't think it, it didn't, it didn't have, I think it really

00:02:27.720 is that Heath Ledger's Joker, you take that out of it and it's just kind of a basic B-plus

00:02:34.200 Batman film.

00:02:34.520 And also, as a sequel compared to the original with Adam West, it doesn't look bad.

00:02:39.700 The original is much better.

00:02:40.460 I would like to add, I always liked the first movie best of everything.

00:02:43.900 And I preferred Batman Begins.

00:02:45.420 Batman Begins is a great movie.

00:02:46.260 It is.

00:02:46.580 The first 45 minutes of Batman Begins is just spectacular.

00:02:48.920 See, this is the thing.

00:02:49.800 I think the first 45 minutes of Batman Begins are fabulous.

00:02:54.360 And then the movie doesn't hold up.

00:02:55.540 I agree with that.

00:02:56.360 The Dark Knight, I don't agree with the Two-Face criticism.

00:02:58.760 I think it's just a different, they're using Two-Face in a different way than we're used

00:03:02.200 to seeing villains used in film.

00:03:03.580 The Batman voice is a problem.

00:03:04.700 I watched Dark Knight Rises recently.

00:03:08.260 And between Batman voice and Bane voice.

00:03:11.060 And listen, Tom Hardy's an unbelievable actor.

00:03:13.740 Well, Nolan also uses sound in the theater in a way that I'm not particularly fond of.

00:03:18.280 And I'm a Nolan fanboy.

00:03:19.480 When you actually see these in the theater, you now have to watch Nolan films with the

00:03:23.120 subtitles on so you can actually understand what the dialogue is.

00:03:26.320 But...

00:03:26.560 Why are you a Nolan fanboy, though?

00:03:28.140 To me, he's a cold director.

00:03:30.080 He doesn't really...

00:03:31.040 I forgot who I was talking about tonight.

00:03:33.620 I'm sorry.

00:03:34.920 He talks really fast.

00:03:36.420 Yeah, exactly.

00:03:37.060 The honest answer is that he is a director with ambition.

00:03:40.480 He tries to do interesting and fun and creative things.

00:03:43.580 And so I actually cut a video that's going to come out shortly on YouTube previewing the

00:03:47.820 films for next year.

00:03:48.740 And it was like 13 big films next year.

00:03:50.280 And of the 13 films, 11 of them are either sequels or remakes.

00:03:54.680 11.

00:03:55.480 And one is...

00:03:57.040 And a couple are legacy properties, like a Mario movie or a Barbie movie.

00:04:00.140 There are two that are original movies, one from Scorsese, one from Nolan.

00:04:03.500 The only guy who now has a budget to make actual creative film is Christopher Nolan.

00:04:08.600 And there's stuff that he does that...

00:04:09.840 Like, I didn't like Tenet.

00:04:10.900 I thought Tenet was not good.

00:04:12.080 But Inception is brilliant.

00:04:14.840 Really?

00:04:14.980 I'm the only person who likes Interstellar.

00:04:16.540 I love Interstellar.

00:04:17.240 I love Interstellar.

00:04:17.660 I think Interstellar is fantastic.

00:04:20.360 Interstellar was an insult to me.

00:04:22.160 I was so excited for Interstellar.

00:04:23.800 There wasn't a single alien.

00:04:25.420 Boy, there's...

00:04:26.040 Yes, there's no aliens.

00:04:27.360 But then I thought it would be a film about space, and we spent the whole time listening

00:04:31.980 to Anne Hathaway talk about the power of love.

00:04:34.780 It's like, that's the thing...

00:04:35.160 That's not true.

00:04:35.580 It's three hours long.

00:04:36.360 It's just that for, like, seven minutes.

00:04:37.480 Okay, but he just...

00:04:38.600 He beats you over the head with the message, rather than...

00:04:40.680 Like, we don't need the speech about how...

00:04:42.060 I don't care about that part.

00:04:42.880 That part...

00:04:43.260 But the creation of the planets is amazing.

00:04:46.160 Oh.

00:04:46.420 Like, the water planet, ice planet...

00:04:48.500 Oh, sorry.

00:04:48.880 You allude to the film that's coming out next year, which is Oppenheimer.

00:04:52.220 Right.

00:04:52.440 I read this week that he, you know, the whole movie culminates apparently in the Trinity

00:04:57.480 test, the first atomic explosion ever to happen on planet Earth.

00:05:01.020 Dude, don't spoil it.

00:05:02.040 And he refused...

00:05:02.900 And he refused to use CG.

00:05:05.300 He said if he's going to make the movie...

00:05:06.200 He just actually blew up.

00:05:07.100 They have to figure out how to create an atomic explosion effect.

00:05:10.780 Right.

00:05:11.680 Without...

00:05:12.000 60,000 people were killed.

00:05:13.880 He created...

00:05:14.360 That's a shock.

00:05:15.080 He created his own stock of film.

00:05:16.740 He actually did.

00:05:17.340 He created his own stock of film that had never been used.

00:05:19.380 Of IMAX film.

00:05:19.500 Of IMAX film.

00:05:20.480 Yeah.

00:05:20.860 Just so that it would not degrade.

00:05:21.800 And irradiated all the members of the crew.

00:05:23.560 Just to make sure that it was realistic.

00:05:25.260 I've said many times of Nolan, I don't think...

00:05:27.600 With the exception of Dark Knight, which I think may be a perfect movie without Batman...

00:05:30.340 Other than Batman voice.

00:05:31.900 I think that he rarely sticks the landing.

00:05:35.920 But he is the most ambitious filmmaker.

00:05:38.120 I love the person...

00:05:38.980 But he's the only...

00:05:39.700 He's the only filmmaker who could have made the rescue at Dunkirk a down...

00:05:43.440 You know, like a down...

00:05:44.020 Right.

00:05:44.340 You know, when those ships show up on the horizon, it's supposed to be the moment when

00:05:47.420 you stand up and cheer.

00:05:48.620 And you're like, oh, there's a ship.

00:05:49.740 You know?

00:05:49.920 I was like, there's no passion for it.

00:05:52.020 Oh, a ship.

00:05:52.660 70 millimeter.

00:05:53.600 But do you think if you take Heath Ledger's performance out of that film, is it still a

00:05:57.960 great film?

00:05:59.640 I think it's a very good film.

00:06:01.240 And Heath Ledger's performance certainly takes it to a whole other place.

00:06:05.000 But even...

00:06:05.520 I mean, I feel sort of out of place here because I hate all of these movies and I don't watch

00:06:09.120 any of the superhero ones.

00:06:10.420 Like, I'm not...

00:06:10.920 I don't want to seem like a total Philistine and totally out of the culture, but has there

00:06:15.360 been any great, like actually great movie in the last 30 years?

00:06:22.740 Like the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

00:06:23.600 The Lord of the Rings was the closest thing to a great movie.

00:06:25.700 I walked out of Lord of the Rings.

00:06:26.640 I have to say...

00:06:27.240 I got bored in the words.

00:06:27.960 I have to say, I really believe that Godfather is the last great American movie.

00:06:33.080 Yeah.

00:06:33.340 However, the Lord of the Rings was...

00:06:34.580 So, Clavin, this brings us right back to the conversation you and I were actually having

00:06:37.440 before the show.

00:06:38.040 Which one?

00:06:38.380 Because we were talking about...

00:06:40.080 We were actively talking about this.

00:06:41.740 So, I just was talking with Robert George from Princeton and we were talking about art

00:06:46.600 and how I cannot...

00:06:47.740 I don't think a good book is actually...

00:06:49.020 Like a great book.

00:06:49.720 Not good.

00:06:50.080 A great book has been written since about 1965 in the United States.

00:06:53.640 And I think that the reason for that...

00:06:55.260 There may be a couple of exceptions.

00:06:56.380 I think maybe American Pastoral was written a little after that.

00:06:58.760 And mostly as a critique of the current culture.

00:07:00.840 I think there have been some great books.

00:07:02.420 But I think they're rare and...

00:07:03.820 Werewolf cop.

00:07:05.980 Great thing.

00:07:06.780 The thing that is good and great and also...

00:07:08.640 But the reason for that is because art for nearly all of human history was directed at

00:07:14.340 actual big and interesting questions.

00:07:16.160 And then in the 60s, we decided that all of those questions had been decided in the negative.

00:07:19.860 There was no God.

00:07:20.640 There was no system of morality.

00:07:21.700 There was nothing to struggle against.

00:07:23.160 And when you...

00:07:23.920 And so, all art was directed at either upholding the system of morality and upholding the truth

00:07:28.900 and justice of God or at denying that in transgressive ways.

00:07:33.440 But without the standard there at all, when the standard is obliterated, there's nothing

00:07:36.720 interesting to be done with film anymore.

00:07:38.500 Everything...

00:07:38.900 The scales of everything just become extraordinarily small.

00:07:42.760 The scope of every film becomes very, very...

00:07:45.080 There have been some great...

00:07:45.980 You said any great films in the last 30 years?

00:07:47.720 Yeah.

00:07:48.800 Another one I re-watched last week was No Country for Old Men.

00:07:51.920 Oh, it's a good film.

00:07:52.660 It's so good.

00:07:53.360 Which I think...

00:07:54.640 The first time I saw it, I was...

00:07:55.900 The El Cesar is also very good.

00:07:56.840 So, first of all...

00:07:57.360 I was lukewarm on it, especially the ending.

00:07:59.100 And I watched it after re-watching it several times.

00:08:01.400 But this is a great...

00:08:02.140 And it's particularly the end, the last scene, when he's talking about this dream of seeing

00:08:05.680 his father and how he's waiting for him out in the cold, in the dark.

00:08:08.080 It's a...

00:08:08.540 I think it's a truly great film.

00:08:10.200 I do, too.

00:08:10.600 It's in my top ten.

00:08:11.460 But one of the reasons for that is because it's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel.

00:08:15.820 And Cormac McCarthy deals with questions...

00:08:17.640 Yes, he does.

00:08:18.080 ... about God and death.

00:08:19.280 And that entire film is about the nature of fate and death.

00:08:21.820 I mean, that's what that film is.

00:08:22.640 I couldn't get on the Top Gun 2 train, even though I enjoyed it as a spectacle, a kind

00:08:26.380 of rollercoaster ride.

00:08:29.040 You know, if you can't name your enemies, it's because you can't name what you're fighting

00:08:33.160 for or against.

00:08:34.440 And so it was a completely empty film, except for the beauty.

00:08:37.980 It was wonderful to watch.

00:08:38.920 It was exciting and fun.

00:08:40.200 I'm not knocking it as a kind of brainless entertainment.

00:08:43.180 But it was brainless.

00:08:43.940 Oh, no.

00:08:44.280 I totally disagree with you.

00:08:45.380 And I'll tell you the reason I disagree with you.

00:08:46.460 And it's not because you're wrong.

00:08:48.080 Okay.

00:08:48.540 You're actually right.

00:08:49.520 Yeah.

00:08:49.640 But I actually found the film moving, and the reason I found the film moving is not

00:08:53.340 because of the film.

00:08:54.100 It's because of what it's actually fighting in the culture.

00:08:56.160 Meaning that the enemy of the film is not in the film.

00:08:58.480 The enemy of the film is all of Hollywood.

00:09:00.320 The enemy of the film is a Hollywood that would never show a Taiwanese flag on the back

00:09:04.800 of a jacket.

00:09:05.460 A Hollywood that would never just have the United States military as the good guys.

00:09:09.420 A film where a bunch of white men are competent at things.

00:09:12.820 A film in which a traditional male-female couple actually gets together.

00:09:16.960 Hollywood fights every single aspect of this.

00:09:19.020 And this film didn't do any of that.

00:09:20.800 And so I found it actually nostalgically sad.

00:09:23.640 It was actually sad to me to watch the film because I watched it and I enjoyed it.

00:09:26.920 And I'm like, well, why aren't there more of this?

00:09:29.220 And there aren't more of these because Hollywood refuses to make it.

00:09:31.720 I actually thought that it was a bad movie.

00:09:34.060 I enjoyed the hell out of it.

00:09:35.780 I think the plot is so stupid.

00:09:37.480 Well, you're a plot specialist.

00:09:39.160 The plot is so stupid.

00:09:40.880 And there's no excuse for the plot to be so stupid.

00:09:43.220 You could have written five lines that made almost every set piece work and actually make

00:09:51.140 sense.

00:09:51.600 But it doesn't matter.

00:09:52.220 It's obviously a spectacle.

00:09:53.280 Obviously, it's fun.

00:09:54.480 I also found it moving.

00:09:56.040 I agree with everything that you're saying about what it means in the culture.

00:09:59.700 And I'll say the one other thing I'll say about it.

00:10:02.040 I think that it is the greatest nakedly nostalgic movie I've ever seen because it somehow manages

00:10:08.540 to do pure fan service, but in ways almost every time that bring maturity to the character.

00:10:18.480 What do you think about that?

00:10:19.640 Which I found really interesting.

00:10:20.780 There's a line Robert Nisbet, who's a sociologist in the 50s, used about nostalgia.

00:10:26.320 And this is why it made me sad.

00:10:27.440 And the reason nostalgia is sad, he says, is because nostalgia is what's left when the

00:10:32.340 thing itself is worn away.

00:10:33.940 And so the idea of the sacred, which is worn away in our culture, or the idea of the importance

00:10:39.380 of male-female relationships, or the idea of the importance of competence and American

00:10:44.840 patriotism, these have worn away and you feel nostalgic for them.

00:10:48.180 And so much of our culture now is built on nostalgia.

00:10:52.340 And then we refuse to acknowledge that there were things about that time that were better.

00:10:54.560 Not everything was better, but it's a culture that simultaneously tries to leech off of the

00:11:00.680 things that were amazing about, for example, the 1980s and making Stranger Things.

00:11:03.620 And you're nostalgic.

00:11:04.240 You're watching it.

00:11:05.080 And why are you nostalgic?

00:11:05.860 What was so great about the 1980s?

00:11:06.900 You can't say.

00:11:07.480 Nothing was great about the 1980s.

00:11:08.580 It's a place of terrible racism and homophobia.

00:11:10.720 Sexism is horrible.

00:11:11.660 Reagan was president then.

00:11:12.640 You can't mention it.

00:11:13.340 But we're all watching Stranger Things and feeling nostalgic because we're watching Stranger

00:11:16.740 Things.

00:11:17.740 And this is half the stuff that's on TV now.

00:11:19.500 You're watching something and they're doing, I mean, even Disney Plus series like WandaVision,

00:11:23.300 which are based entirely on nostalgia for old TV.

00:11:26.160 Why are you nostalgic for old TV?

00:11:27.520 Old TV is kind of bad.

00:11:28.680 When you watch shows from the 50s, particularly, they start to get better in the 60s.

00:11:32.440 A lot of the old shows from the 50s that are not, you know, the hour-long specials are

00:11:36.120 really not very good.

00:11:37.080 And you're nostalgic for that because what you're nostalgic for is a more innocent time

00:11:40.320 when people actually took morality seriously, even if they were doing it wrong.

00:11:44.040 It's even worse than that because they've made movies.

00:11:46.380 Recently, they made one called Schmigadoon, which was a takeoff on Brigadoon.

00:11:49.680 I remember in Brigadoon, they go back and they find old Scotland and they find this guy.

00:11:54.220 It's a great musical guy who's in a kind of loveless engagement with this woman in New

00:11:59.540 York and he finds that the old values bring him back to life and he falls in love with

00:12:02.820 the Scottish girl.

00:12:03.580 They remade it where they go back into the Scottish, old Scottish town, teach them it's

00:12:07.120 better to be homosexual and it's better to, you know, have this.

00:12:09.800 Then there was this movie about, it was just about going back into Ozzie and Nelson TV

00:12:13.720 and I cannot remember the name where.

00:12:15.640 I mean, that's Pleasantville also, right?

00:12:17.000 Pleasantville.

00:12:17.360 Pleasantville, he goes back and he says, but, you know, the problem is you guys don't

00:12:20.680 have sex and you don't, you know, you don't know any, you know, anything that life is

00:12:24.320 about.

00:12:24.420 Right, it's black and white as soon as they discover sex.

00:12:25.260 And it becomes color.

00:12:26.000 Then all the color comes into the world.

00:12:27.380 So it's not only that they won't let you be nostalgic about what was worthwhile, they

00:12:30.580 want to go back and ruin it, you know?

00:12:31.840 Right, right.

00:12:32.180 Let us go back and destroy it.

00:12:33.300 Though it is worth remembering nostalgia is history after a few drinks.

00:12:37.040 Part of our longing for that period is because the innocent time was our own childhood.

00:12:41.780 So, you know, yes, the culture was more innocent in certain ways, but, you know, on this

00:12:46.020 point of the nostalgic movies.

00:12:47.360 I'm going to challenge you very briefly on that.

00:12:49.640 I watched, over the Thanksgiving break, I went to see my in-laws in Kansas and my father-in-law

00:12:56.860 and the great tradition of father-in-law, father's in-law, was watching Gunsmoke.

00:13:01.020 I, the longest-running live-action television show of all time, made 645 episodes of this

00:13:08.360 show.

00:13:09.440 I've never seen a single frame of it in my life.

00:13:12.200 I watched the last 15 minutes of an episode that he was watching, and I was so transfixed.

00:13:17.020 I came home and downloaded Season 1, Episode 1 on Paramount+.

00:13:20.840 Now, as it turns out, I did not know this at the time, that is a lie, and someone should

00:13:24.840 sue Paramount+.

00:13:25.660 It was actually, it's billed as Season 1, Episode 1, it's actually Season 7, Episode 1.

00:13:30.740 But what that means is that this is something like the 240th episode of Gunsmoke that I watched.

00:13:37.540 I believe it was shot in 1962, and like all television from the early 60s, the writing is

00:13:44.140 sublime.

00:13:45.260 It is hard-boiled.

00:13:47.800 Yeah.

00:13:48.160 It is subtle.

00:13:49.280 It never, it has no sentimentality anywhere in it, and I realized that all modern shows

00:13:56.380 are about a character going on a journey in which he overcomes his flaws.

00:14:01.140 And what's amazing about Gunsmoke is that it's about, it's about the justice of God walking

00:14:08.220 among mortal men, and among mortal men, there is nothing interesting at all about Matt Dillon.

00:14:12.760 He is just the justice of God.

00:14:15.780 The supporting characters who come through bring all of the color, all of the things

00:14:21.540 that are interesting, because they have to encounter the justice of God.

00:14:24.500 So these unbelievable performances, I would sit here, honestly, for 45 minutes and recount

00:14:29.820 the entire plot.

00:14:30.880 I loved it so much.

00:14:31.960 I've been going back here.

00:14:33.040 And that is not my childhood.

00:14:34.500 Right.

00:14:34.640 I am nostalgic for something that I never even experienced before.

00:14:36.860 I totally agree with you.

00:14:37.600 I've been watching a bunch of old films lately, so over the last couple of days, I watched

00:14:41.100 Battleground, which was a movie from 1949, and is sort of the predicate for Band of Brothers.

00:14:45.480 And it's great.

00:14:46.860 It's really phenomenal.

00:14:47.800 The movies that they made in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, some of the 60s, a little bit of the

00:14:51.880 70s, are really fantastic.

00:14:53.780 The best movies.

00:14:54.340 You can find that on, I mean, maybe part of the issue here is that you're talking about

00:14:57.820 there are no great books.

00:14:59.700 Also, the issue with films, maybe people are just moving into different mediums.

00:15:02.500 The great storytellers these days are in different mediums.

00:15:04.640 I just don't think TV is that great.

00:15:05.960 Well, okay, so if Vince Gilligan was Russian.

00:15:11.100 And in the 1870s, maybe he would have written Crime and Punishment.

00:15:14.240 Instead, he made Breaking Bad.

00:15:16.400 Right.

00:15:16.880 Breaking Bad is about fate and morality.

00:15:19.720 Right.

00:15:20.120 Thinking on big issues.

00:15:20.820 Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are not about someone overcoming their flaws.

00:15:24.540 It's sort of the opposite of that.

00:15:26.160 Chernobyl, I think, is one of the masterpieces of all time.

00:15:29.800 I agree with that.

00:15:30.540 And it was made recently.

00:15:31.500 I agree with this.

00:15:32.840 The spirit moves from form to form.

00:15:36.200 But I think overall, the spirit is being lost.

00:15:38.060 I mean, I think there are things on TV that are great.

00:15:40.700 But if you read the Rotten Tomatoes reviews, everything is 100%.

00:15:43.260 Yeah, I know.

00:15:43.740 Literally everything.

00:15:44.680 But remember, there's this telescoping thing, too.

00:15:47.040 There's a lot of, you go back, I love 40s music.

00:15:49.980 Yeah, yeah.

00:15:50.240 But you go back and listen to 40s music, there's a lot of dross.

00:15:52.760 But it all goes away over time.

00:15:54.200 And so you telescope it down.

00:15:55.160 Yeah, but if you look at the Oscar nominees from 1942.

00:15:57.160 Oh, it's amazing.

00:15:57.720 Well, that was.

00:15:58.020 Every single movie.

00:15:58.980 1939 was the peak of the movie industry.

00:16:00.960 1939 is unbelievable.

00:16:01.980 It's unbelievable.

00:16:02.560 Every single movie.

00:16:03.560 Every single movie.

00:16:03.640 And it's not just the Oscar winner.

00:16:06.100 It's also a great movie.

00:16:07.400 An Oscar nominee.

00:16:08.440 It's a great movie and a box office success.

00:16:10.220 Right.

00:16:10.360 So that's the other thing that's worth pointing out here is that the things that we consider

00:16:14.000 now box office successes are capturing a tiny slice of the market.

00:16:17.400 The stuff that was a box office success was the thing that won the Best Picture Oscar in

00:16:21.300 1951 and also was a great piece of art.

00:16:23.180 Right.

00:16:24.080 That's what it was.

00:16:24.700 You would see movies like The Best Years of Our Lives was, I believe, the biggest box office

00:16:28.040 winner of that year.

00:16:29.020 And it is a two-hour, 45-minute treatise about what it's like for men to come back from World

00:16:33.360 War II and reintegrate into American society.

00:16:34.960 And it's difficult.

00:16:35.660 It's difficult.

00:16:35.980 It's not an easy movie.

00:16:37.080 Yeah.

00:16:37.360 And it was like the number one box office movie because people used to be mature in

00:16:40.160 this country and used to actually deal with real issues.

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00:18:04.240 Andrew Klavan.

00:18:04.700 Has anybody watched The Peripheral?

00:18:07.780 Yeah.

00:18:08.280 Yeah, I thought it was pretty good.

00:18:09.580 It was enjoyable.

00:18:10.320 You know, the thing about The Peripheral that got me is, it's William Gibson, who's a very

00:18:14.620 talented science fiction writer.

00:18:16.240 I don't really love that kind of science fiction writing because it has no characters in it.

00:18:19.580 But he invents this role.

00:18:20.480 He's an idea guy.

00:18:21.160 He's invented the Matrix, basically, before there was the Matrix.

00:18:24.240 And that's what this movie is.

00:18:26.240 However, the minute it started, I thought, who wrote the dialogue on this?

00:18:29.080 And it's a guy named Scott B. Smith.

00:18:31.180 Scott B. Smith was, for two novels, the second best genre novelist in America, next to me.

00:18:37.080 And he wrote a book called The Simple Plan, which is just a wonderful book.

00:18:42.600 He was, to be clear, the first best genre title writer.

00:18:48.260 Yeah, he did have that.

00:18:49.640 And then he went Hollywood.

00:18:51.320 And he's just done all this mediocre work.

00:18:53.700 So it was nice to see him at work.

00:18:55.080 And the dialogue was really hot.

00:18:56.700 And a couple of the character things were good.

00:18:58.220 And ultimately, it's one of these multiverse movies.

00:19:01.860 Yeah, I mean, the end of it doesn't make a lot of sense.

00:19:03.840 It's got some stuff in it that's really nice.

00:19:06.260 The brother-sister relationship, particularly, is very nice.

00:19:08.720 That's the best thing in it.

00:19:09.180 But again, Hollywood can't help itself.

00:19:11.060 And so in the part of one of the key inspector has to be a transgender woman.

00:19:15.540 Yes, yes.

00:19:16.000 Who's very, very obviously a transgender woman.

00:19:17.540 I thought Severance was a great show.

00:19:21.040 That was really interesting.

00:19:22.080 I'm not sure what it was.

00:19:22.780 Although I'm never going to understand how John Turturro and Christopher Walken are supposed to end up together.

00:19:27.640 Yeah, that's the weirdest gay couple of all time.

00:19:29.020 Well, we'll have to see if that's a great show.

00:19:30.920 I just have to see where it goes.

00:19:32.420 Yeah.

00:19:32.800 It had, the best thing about it was the outside, the, you know, the outside where people will have these conversations.

00:19:39.660 Like, they're take-offs on, like, Park Slope, you know, conversations.

00:19:43.780 And people sit around going, you know, back in the day, they didn't call World War I World War I.

00:19:48.380 It wasn't, that wasn't politically correct.

00:19:50.480 There was no World War II yet.

00:19:51.680 People are so stupid and vapid.

00:19:55.200 It's really, it's really cool.

00:19:56.020 Have you guys watched, I was really into this recently, Harry and Meghan on Netflix?

00:20:00.420 I thought it was really great, really great work.

00:20:03.000 Members, my own dear, beloved, probably watching right now, grandmother, my lovely nana, asked me if I had watched Harry and Meghan.

00:20:10.700 And I died a little inside.

00:20:13.240 Oh, I'm not Harry and Meghan.

00:20:14.820 I actually had to watch part of it for the show.

00:20:17.020 I went through it, you know, on behalf of the audience.

00:20:20.300 That woman gets more villainous every single day.

00:20:23.940 The disrespect that she shows to the, the woman is dead, okay?

00:20:28.220 This, like, one of the greatest women of the 20th century is dead.

00:20:30.560 And she's still disrespecting her on camera.

00:20:32.680 And her husband has to watch.

00:20:34.320 It was so, it was, it was the, you're talking about transgender characters in movies.

00:20:37.720 It was, whatever occurred there, it was much more emasculating to watch Harry.

00:20:42.080 The worst cuckold of all time.

00:20:43.240 Yeah, kind of, yeah.

00:20:45.420 And what is this thing?

00:20:47.240 How come nobody ever asked these people what they have accomplished?

00:20:50.240 Elizabeth the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, you know, we have to say she accomplished something.

00:20:54.940 She had a marvelous, what has Meghan ever done?

00:20:57.820 She was on.

00:20:58.580 She was on Suits.

00:20:58.860 She held up the suitcase on that game show, right?

00:21:02.760 And it was very hard for her.

00:21:03.780 It was very hard.

00:21:04.280 It was a brutal, brutal experience for her.

00:21:05.860 People were looking at her for her beauty.

00:21:07.860 They cast her for her beauty in a game show where she holds up a suitcase.

00:21:10.220 How dare they?

00:21:11.780 How dare they?

00:21:12.700 And certainly, she would have been married into the royal family if she were 300 pounds

00:21:16.420 and had a giant wart right here.

00:21:18.520 This point that you're making is so important.

00:21:22.000 I said something about it on Twitter recently.

00:21:23.720 Like, every time you see any sort of post about some sort of peak human achievement,

00:21:28.640 Elon Musk lands a rocket on a ship at sea.

00:21:30.960 NASA lands their first lunar, you know, fires off their first lunar mission in living memory

00:21:38.880 and returns it safely to Earth.

00:21:40.660 Probably going to start a new manned space program.

00:21:43.340 There's always these comments that are like, well, why don't you try doing something for

00:21:47.440 the country, the world we've got right here first?

00:21:50.420 And I'm always like, who's we?

00:21:52.380 Who's we?

00:21:52.860 You've done nothing.

00:21:54.020 That guy landed a rocket on a ship at sea, an enormous achievement for a human being,

00:21:58.920 and you're complaining because he doesn't give you his money.

00:22:01.500 But you know what?

00:22:02.120 This is the guys who pull down statues.

00:22:03.580 It is exactly like the guys who pull down statues.

00:22:05.600 This is one of the things that, again, to mention Top Gun, I think that there is just

00:22:11.200 an anger against competence in our society.

00:22:13.220 Yes.

00:22:13.640 People are angry at the competent.

00:22:15.800 Like, if you're competent, this is a sign that you are somehow discriminatory or bigoted

00:22:18.840 because competence obviously suggests a meritocracy.

00:22:20.900 Meritocracy suggests that maybe people in some mild way kind of deserve what they get

00:22:24.500 as a general matter in life, and we're never allowed to suggest that sort of thing.

00:22:27.960 And that's why, again, in Top Gun, when you're watching people be competent, I just realized

00:22:31.740 I enjoy watching films and movies where people are competent, and it doesn't happen.

00:22:35.540 And part of the reason it doesn't happen is because if it's a movie filled or a show filled

00:22:39.940 with competent people, the writer actually has to be good at his craft.

00:22:41.960 If it's a bunch of incompetence, you can create the dumbest ways possible out of a corner.

00:22:45.820 You write yourself into a corner and someone just does a dumb thing, and then suddenly

00:22:48.300 you're out of the corner.

00:22:49.200 If it's filled with competent people, that's actually difficult because now you have to

00:22:51.900 say, what would intelligent people do that would get them out of this situation or put

00:22:55.460 them into this situation in the first place?

00:22:57.380 And so I think so much of the writing is so bad now just because people do dumb stuff,

00:23:02.960 and you're like, why would they possibly do it?

00:23:04.860 I mean, this is your thing.

00:23:05.940 You watch movies all the time and read scripts.

00:23:09.100 It's like, why is this person doing this?

00:23:10.340 Are they just an idiot?

00:23:10.960 And the answer is, yeah, they're an idiot.

00:23:12.500 There's nobody who's competent on TV or in movies anymore.

00:23:15.000 That's interesting.

00:23:15.440 I haven't ever heard, we've never discussed this idea of a sort of growing hatred of competence,

00:23:20.260 but I think that there is something to it.

00:23:21.640 Well, growing hatred of competence and dignity.

00:23:23.900 I mean, that's what, when Meghan makes fun of the Queen and having to bow to the Queen,

00:23:27.960 it's making fun of dignity and formality.

00:23:30.740 And that, I mean, you see this now.

00:23:32.940 I'm on a crusade.

00:23:33.900 I think we need to ban athleisure wear.

00:23:35.800 I think athleisure wear is a communist plot to destroy the country.

00:23:39.680 Like soccer.

00:23:40.660 Like soccer, actually.

00:23:41.700 Exactly like soccer.

00:23:42.760 And so it just deprives you of dignity, and it speaks to a lack of respect for oneself.

00:23:49.320 But people...

00:23:49.700 Can I wear it in my house or...

00:23:50.920 No.

00:23:51.440 Not even in my house.

00:23:52.260 No, you can't.

00:23:52.860 A tuxedo to bed.

00:23:54.120 A tuxedo, at least to dinner.

00:23:55.620 I mean, that's...

00:23:56.160 Speaking of Harry and Meghan, you watch The Crown, and my favorite scenes, it's when Elizabeth

00:24:00.260 and Prince Philip are sitting to dinner alone, and he's wearing a tuxedo.

00:24:05.180 That was a better time.

00:24:06.640 And it just...

00:24:07.900 When you engage in ritual, whether we're talking about political ritual, religious ritual,

00:24:12.800 you know, we're incarnational beings.

00:24:15.060 And so it's like, you've got to put your body into it, and that's going to affect the

00:24:19.080 way you think of yourself.

00:24:19.960 I completely agree with this.

00:24:21.120 I do think...

00:24:22.220 And I worry about it, like, personally, because I grew up in the 60s when it all fell apart,

00:24:26.380 and I'm a naturally kind of casual person, so I just fell into it.

00:24:31.300 And now I think, like, you know, I should have worn a tie my entire life in bed.

00:24:35.920 I should have worn a tie.

00:24:36.360 Yes.

00:24:37.020 Honey, I'm coming to bed.

00:24:38.360 Are we getting rid of ritual or just replacing...

00:24:42.400 The pronoun thing, for example, is a...

00:24:44.640 That's a modern...

00:24:45.680 That's what it is.

00:24:46.340 It's a ritual.

00:24:47.280 You can't get rid of ritual because we have bodies and we're...

00:24:50.420 It is a replacement of ritual, but I think that actually what we're pretending that the

00:24:53.880 ritual went away and it didn't, it transformed into a ritual of the catechism of poverty.

00:24:57.540 Of course, yes.

00:24:58.400 It used to be that everybody aspired to be rich, and so you dressed like you were rich even

00:25:01.660 when you were poor, right?

00:25:02.860 If you look at the people on the bread lines during the Depression, they are wearing suits

00:25:07.120 in the bread lines in the Depression.

00:25:08.680 And then now you have people who are the embezzlers of billions of dollars at FTX, and they're

00:25:15.880 literally getting money given to them because they are wearing gym shorts and a baggy t-shirt

00:25:19.400 and they have an exercise and they're slob.

00:25:21.560 You know this in LA.

00:25:22.540 You go into an LA restaurant and you can always pick out the richest guy in the room because

00:25:26.260 he's wearing a ripped t-shirt and sweatpants, right?

00:25:28.820 He's the sloppiest dressed person there, and it's become this kind of cult of degradation

00:25:35.980 and poverty.

00:25:37.360 Why did it take us so long to come up with these arguments, though?

00:25:39.200 Because when I was a kid, things like the rituals in Judaism where you wear a shawl, and people

00:25:45.700 say, well, why do you have to do that?

00:25:47.260 And they didn't know.

00:25:48.600 They didn't have the answer.

00:25:49.400 I remember in school listening to teachers...

00:25:51.340 Well, you went to a reformer conservative.

00:25:52.720 Well, okay.

00:25:53.400 That's a problem right there.

00:25:53.800 Okay, no, but...

00:25:54.900 When I went to school, the answer was obvious.

00:25:56.320 It says directly in the good book that you're supposed to wear fringes upon the corners of

00:26:00.520 your garments, and in the Talmud, it talks about you're supposed to do this, and actually

00:26:03.900 it says, you're supposed to look at them, and this is supposed to remind you of your

00:26:07.560 obligations on earth.

00:26:08.780 Right.

00:26:08.920 You're supposed to wear a funny garment in order to remind...

00:26:11.280 I mean, this is the reason we wear a kippah now also, right?

00:26:13.080 It's supposed to remind you constantly that you're subject to a higher power.

00:26:15.940 That's why you do it.

00:26:16.620 But the entire corpus of Talmudic law was written in order to explain why you do this ritual.

00:26:20.700 I completely agree with you, and I also agree with what you're saying, but the people didn't

00:26:24.140 know.

00:26:24.640 The people in charge...

00:26:26.020 You know what?

00:26:26.340 Because there's actually a deeper point, because the reason they didn't know is because they

00:26:31.080 relied, and it was okay to just rely on the tradition.

00:26:34.060 It was just okay.

00:26:35.120 Because it worked.

00:26:35.460 And we have decided that that's no longer enough, and I know this has been a drum

00:26:38.760 I've been beating for a year now, quoting Oakshot to Michael, and Michael...

00:26:41.540 Oh, I'm just my heart's beating out of my chest.

00:26:43.680 But it is true that the vast majority of the things that we do in life are inherited traditions,

00:26:47.960 and we used to just say that was okay.

00:26:49.440 You didn't have to explain why it was that you...

00:26:53.280 Why it was important to dress well.

00:26:54.920 Why it was important...

00:26:55.940 I mean, we've gotten so basic now that it's like, why is it important to marry a person

00:26:59.140 of the opposite sex, as opposed to a person of any random gender?

00:27:02.740 I have to come up with an argument for this now.

00:27:04.900 And I think because we were...

00:27:06.440 Because only the wisest were people who had actually bothered to come up with sort of a

00:27:11.080 rationale.

00:27:12.040 Everybody else just relied on the fact that there was a rationale, and they're like, I don't

00:27:14.560 need to know how to explain this, because why would I possibly need to know how to explain

00:27:17.740 this?

00:27:18.180 You know, there's actually...

00:27:19.400 Here's a bit of what we would call in Hebrew Devar Torah, right?

00:27:21.240 Here's a little bit of biblical wisdom.

00:27:23.120 So this is taught to me by a rabbi near where I live named Rabbi Goldberg.

00:27:27.140 I thought that was really good.

00:27:28.020 So in Hebrew, the word for taste and the word for reason are the same word.

00:27:31.360 The word is ta'am.

00:27:32.920 Okay?

00:27:33.380 And so there's a really nice idea.

00:27:35.880 Why is that?

00:27:36.320 Why are they the same word?

00:27:37.100 It's spelled tet-i-mem.

00:27:39.040 Why are they the same word?

00:27:40.180 Because reason, just like you eat food to nourish you, but taste is what gives you pleasure

00:27:47.300 from the food, you do the rituals and you do the things in life to nourish you.

00:27:51.460 You don't actually have to have a reason as to why you're doing it.

00:27:55.520 The reason just makes it better.

00:27:57.380 The reason makes it better.

00:27:58.360 The reason lives on top of the nourishing mechanism that is the rituals and traditions that you've

00:28:03.720 been handed.

00:28:04.260 Well, this is why...

00:28:05.000 And what we've done is we've reversed that.

00:28:06.920 We've basically said that every tradition is subject to tabula rasa reasoning.

00:28:11.720 Explain to me why everybody should wear a suit.

00:28:13.020 They shouldn't wear a suit.

00:28:13.600 You should wear athleisure.

00:28:14.420 How do I defend a necktie?

00:28:16.400 I don't know.

00:28:16.820 I'm just going to wear it.

00:28:17.580 I mean, this is why Burke defends the naughtiest word that you're not allowed to say today,

00:28:21.800 which is prejudice.

00:28:23.200 Prejudice in its simplest form, which is prejudgment, which we all engage in all the time.

00:28:29.800 We have to.

00:28:30.600 I cannot write a 50-page treatise on every single thing that I am going to do before I do it.

00:28:36.040 I would be absolutely paralyzed.

00:28:38.040 I'd be impotent.

00:28:38.640 I couldn't act in the world.

00:28:39.900 And so we rely on these things.

00:28:41.880 We always did.

00:28:43.200 But now, in the last 50, 60 years, it has completely flipped such that every single little thing

00:28:51.140 that we would just take for granted out of common sense, we now have to provide some

00:28:54.740 hyper-rationalist explanation for it.

00:28:56.600 That's why the best answer, I think, is the drum I'm always beating, is it's about burden

00:29:02.740 of proof.

00:29:03.180 So if you're the one coming along challenging the thing that people have been doing for generations,

00:29:08.520 that's fine.

00:29:09.000 You can challenge it.

00:29:10.080 In fact, I'm interested to hear your challenge.

00:29:11.740 But you have to explain why.

00:29:13.460 It's not up to me to defend what everyone's been doing forever.

00:29:16.660 What is your problem with it?

00:29:18.120 And instead of asking people that, instead of saying, what's your issue with this?

00:29:22.240 What's your argument against it?

00:29:24.180 Instead, we scramble around looking for justifications.

00:29:26.800 I think we should—we've already lost the game when we do that.

00:29:29.740 Should we shift it back to you?

00:29:31.840 You explain what the issue is, and then we can go from there.

00:29:34.740 But they can't do that.

00:29:35.500 I think because people who are radical and challenge the tradition very often don't have

00:29:39.840 a reason and they're very passionate about it, I think that people of traditional bent

00:29:42.620 immediately look to short-circuit the conversation by looking for some sort of compromise.

00:29:48.000 And they always think that this will be the last compromise.

00:29:51.460 I mean, I think that's what you saw at the White House yesterday, right?

00:29:54.240 You get 12 Republicans in the Senate to vote in favor of enshrinement of same-sex marriage

00:29:57.640 because this will be the final compromise.

00:29:59.180 This will finally be where the buck stops.

00:30:01.340 And it's like, well, no, it won't.

00:30:03.500 He's telling you it won't be.

00:30:04.560 He's telling you—in 2006, this same schmuck was on national television.

00:30:09.280 Joe Biden.

00:30:09.340 People may not know exactly what we're saying here.

00:30:10.680 Yeah, sorry.

00:30:11.040 You're talking about the president of the United States had a schmuck.

00:30:12.700 Yeah, that schmuck.

00:30:13.560 I mean, that schmuck, the president of the United States.

00:30:15.860 It's Yiddish for president.

00:30:16.700 Right.

00:30:17.140 Mr. Schmuck presidents of the United States.

00:30:18.840 Because they finally passed this—

00:30:21.460 Respect for Marriage Act.

00:30:23.360 Respect for Marriage Act.

00:30:23.840 We only name acts that are precisely the opposite of what they are now.

00:30:26.800 The Inflation Reduction Act.

00:30:27.920 The Respect for Marriage Act.

00:30:29.480 It's a mandate now.

00:30:31.520 Soon it'll be the—so you can keep your kids' act.

00:30:33.700 Right.

00:30:35.100 And so Joe Biden goes out there and he, in 2006, says,

00:30:39.020 we don't need a constitutional amendment to protect marriage,

00:30:41.040 because everyone believes that marriage is between a man and a woman.

00:30:43.740 I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act.

00:30:45.600 What exactly is the problem?

00:30:47.000 Why would you even want to pass a constitutional amendment?

00:30:49.020 We're now 16 years later, and he's basically—not basically.

00:30:51.380 He's openly saying that you are a bigot.

00:30:53.160 You are a bigot, and probably—you are a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, transphobe,

00:30:57.560 if you believe in traditional marriage rather than same-sex marriage.

00:31:01.360 I mean, he actually said that.

00:31:02.480 I mean, I think we have a clip, actually, of the President of the United States

00:31:04.740 actually saying that racism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia,

00:31:09.780 anti—being anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism, they're all the same.

00:31:12.460 All the things I don't like are in the same box.

00:31:13.780 Let's play the clip.

00:31:14.340 Racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, they're all connected.

00:31:23.200 But the antidote to hate is love.

00:31:26.540 This law and the love it defends strike a blow against hate in all its forms.

00:31:33.300 I love you guys so much, I will punch you in the face to enforce my perspective on the evils of your tradition.

00:31:38.020 It was so profound.

00:31:38.100 And then he says that he kept saying over and over, this is the first step.

00:31:44.300 I was like, wait a damn minute, homophobe a second.

00:31:47.540 So just to get this straight, no pun intended, just to get this straight,

00:31:52.120 the original case was, don't criminalize what you do in our bedroom.

00:31:54.960 And everyone was like, okay, fair enough.

00:31:56.540 I mean, those laws were not enforced in the first place.

00:31:58.380 All right, fine.

00:31:59.060 And then it was, well, we would like civil unions so that we can go visit our partners in the hospital

00:32:03.460 and bequeath property to one another.

00:32:05.380 And people were like, okay, fine.

00:32:06.800 And then they're like, well, we want same-sex marriage,

00:32:08.760 and it's going to be called the exact same thing as marriage.

00:32:10.360 And many of us were like, oh, well, now you're starting to edge and honor our marriage.

00:32:13.140 But they said, well, no, no, no.

00:32:14.420 How does that affect you?

00:32:15.220 If we get married, how does that affect your marriage?

00:32:16.940 And most people, not understanding the flaw in that argument, were like, okay, fine.

00:32:20.420 And then they're like, but we definitely, definitely will never say that your church

00:32:23.880 has to do what we want it to do or that your business has to do what we want it to do

00:32:27.000 or that we have to indoctrinate your kids with this stuff

00:32:28.700 or that we have to make sure that your educational institutions mirror all of our values.

00:32:32.140 We would never do any of those things.

00:32:33.620 So I have a question.

00:32:34.180 Why in the world, unless you're an insane, stupid jackass, would you believe them?

00:32:39.540 They've been lying every step of the way.

00:32:40.960 Not only that, not only that, this thing that's happening with children,

00:32:43.820 like, you know, I'm past the point where anything shocks me, you know?

00:32:46.780 You just, after a while, you've seen too much.

00:32:49.060 But this is, what shocks me is not that they're doing it to children.

00:32:52.420 What shocks me is that people have not shown up with pitchforks and torches,

00:32:56.280 you know, to say, like, that's great, you're going to do that,

00:32:58.820 but now we're going to take you out and throw you in the river.

00:33:01.560 Joe Biden, in this speech, it demonstrates what the actual agenda is.

00:33:05.780 Because in this speech, where he was supposedly upholding the value of male-male monogamous relationships,

00:33:10.960 which was, again, the way that the left portrayed same-sex marriage,

00:33:14.040 was it's exactly the same as traditional marriage,

00:33:15.900 except it doesn't produce kids and it's two dudes or two ladies.

00:33:18.660 But then he's in the same speech saying that you have to be in favor of transing the kids.

00:33:25.100 What do these things have to do with one another?

00:33:26.840 They have nothing to do with one another, theoretically,

00:33:28.300 but in reality, they have everything to do with one another because they're about the destruction of the idea

00:33:33.180 that there is a distinction between the sexes that matters,

00:33:35.320 and more importantly, they are directed against the nuclear family.

00:33:37.900 They're directed against the idea that there are intermediate institutions in society

00:33:40.960 that shape and mold us from family to religious community,

00:33:45.060 and the left considers these things actively bad, and these things have to be obliterated.

00:33:48.380 They will not stop until we are a society of atomized individuals on the one hand

00:33:51.480 and an overarching national government on the other and nothing in between.

00:33:54.740 That means getting rid of women.

00:33:56.960 You've got to get rid of women.

00:33:58.260 Women are relational.

00:33:59.660 They're the things that bind people together.

00:34:01.220 They're the things that give men their motivations.

00:34:03.240 You have to basically erase them or make them.

00:34:05.040 Well, they've done a great job of convincing women not to be women.

00:34:06.980 That's what they do.

00:34:07.900 They convince the women first.

00:34:09.100 It was also so disingenuous because they say,

00:34:11.060 well, why do you care about what we do in our own homes?

00:34:14.180 And then the direct consequence of what they do in their own homes

00:34:17.740 is to light up the people's home, the people's house, in the rainbow flag.

00:34:21.220 Because obviously this is not just a personal question.

00:34:23.780 This is a political question.

00:34:24.980 But it was always BS anyway.

00:34:26.380 Because the libs go in and they tell me what kind of light bulbs I'm allowed to screw in in my bedroom.

00:34:31.960 But we're not allowed to have anything to say about what marriage is.

00:34:35.620 You can't grow grain to feed your own family because it prevents you from engaging in interstate congressmen.

00:34:41.000 That's right.

00:34:41.960 And, you know, the thing is, I actually do have, I have a right as someone in self-government

00:34:47.500 to discuss how people relate to one another and what the definition of marriage is.

00:34:52.200 And frankly, I think that we have a right to talk about what people, what happens in people's bedrooms.

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00:36:11.660 This minute.

00:36:12.740 Right this minute.

00:36:13.560 It was kind of amazing.

00:36:16.980 I'm saying that they say this is the first step.

00:36:18.920 No, no, no.

00:36:19.440 We would never.

00:36:20.200 We're not coming after your churches.

00:36:21.420 We're not coming after your kids.

00:36:22.260 So Karine Jean-Pierre, world's most untalented press secretary, she was asked a direct question by Brian Karam, who's one of the world's most untalented reporters.

00:36:31.240 And he asked her, but his question was actually the correct one from the left side of the aisle, which is, why does this bill, the Respect for Marriage Act, which that's how I respect people, is I just completely redefine them into nonexistence.

00:36:43.900 That's my favorite way.

00:36:44.860 And then I destroy their businesses.

00:36:45.840 Yeah, exactly.

00:36:46.520 It's my favorite thing.

00:36:47.960 He says, so why does this bill enshrine bigotry?

00:36:51.960 And she had no answer for it.

00:36:54.320 Like none.

00:36:55.100 She didn't even bother trying to say that it wasn't enshrining bigotry because, of course, she believes that it's bigotry.

00:36:58.460 She believes that religion is a cover for bigotry.

00:37:01.040 Yeah.

00:37:01.600 And so all these morons, like, I'm sorry, Senator Mitt Romney and all of the morons who voted on the Republican side of the aisle for this in the Senate.

00:37:08.940 Awful.

00:37:09.360 Incredible.

00:37:09.640 I'm thinking, just, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt of thinking that they're not malicious and that they're just unbelievably stupid and naive.

00:37:18.320 Anybody who believes that the left is going to stop at this is out of their damned minds.

00:37:23.240 The only thing that stands between the left doing this at the federal level right now, the only thing that stops that is the Supreme Court.

00:37:29.040 That is the only thing that stops this.

00:37:30.320 And that is cold comfort because, frankly, you know what the Supreme Court is going to do 5, 10, 15 years from now.

00:37:36.540 And so this notion that the left is somehow going to come to an arranged agreement, that they're going to come to a compromise, how many times can you feed this alligator?

00:37:45.060 And how, I mean, this is the black knight in Monty Python at this point.

00:37:49.060 There are no limbs left.

00:37:50.120 You're stumping around here.

00:37:51.400 It doesn't even make sense from their perspective.

00:37:53.240 Right.

00:37:53.520 Because if gay marriage is a human right, you have a human right to it.

00:37:57.360 And they compare, they often will compare denying gay marriage to, like, slavery.

00:38:02.100 Well.

00:38:02.640 Interracial marriage is in this bill.

00:38:03.860 Right.

00:38:04.020 So, you know, if it's a human right, then it would be correct that a church wouldn't have the right to take it away from you.

00:38:10.520 Just like a church, a church could say, oh, well, in our religion, we believe in slavery.

00:38:14.420 That doesn't mean that you keep slaves in your basement because you don't, even from a religious standpoint, you can't take away someone's basic human right.

00:38:20.280 So if we're agreeing that you have a human right to gay marriage, then it's not a far leap.

00:38:26.420 It's not a leap at all.

00:38:27.260 It's just another step to say, well, of course, churches can't take away someone's human right.

00:38:30.580 But once you've agreed with that, you've already agreed to the destruction of religious liberty.

00:38:35.160 Actually, actually, I've been thinking about that, too.

00:38:37.280 And I'm not quite sure that holds together because you can have a right to do something that's wrong.

00:38:41.960 I mean, we do have rights to do, we should have rights to do things that are wrong.

00:38:45.180 We can, you have the right to say things that.

00:38:46.780 But the left doesn't believe that.

00:38:48.520 Also, Drew, you're talking to a couple of Catholics here.

00:38:50.420 There is that, you know, that liberal stuff.

00:38:52.560 That's not going to lie.

00:38:52.960 I mean, the truth is I'm actually not a believer that you have the right to do something that's wrong.

00:38:57.640 I think that you may have an immunity from the government in doing something that's wrong.

00:39:00.580 Well, that's what I'm saying.

00:39:02.200 I'm trying to distinguish between two of the two because we're kind of sloppy about how we discuss rights.

00:39:05.080 Well, you have a political right to say things that are ugly and stupid.

00:39:08.560 And, you know, you have a political right.

00:39:09.820 I personally think you have a political right to be a bigot.

00:39:12.020 But the left doesn't believe that, right?

00:39:13.760 From a left's perspective, if you have enshrined gay marriage as a human right, then it's just, it's a logical conclusion that obviously churches aren't allowed to deny that from their perspective.

00:39:26.880 So it's just, whether they say it or not, it makes no difference that is 100% where it leads.

00:39:32.080 You see the whole thing is religious because Joe Biden, the most amazing thing that he did at this signing ceremony, it wasn't bringing the drag queen who does the creepy stuff to the kids.

00:39:40.100 It wasn't bringing all the Hollywood celebrities.

00:39:42.480 He said that this was exactly what the Declaration of Independence was all about.

00:39:48.440 And he said.

00:39:49.340 Oh, look at the wigs.

00:39:50.680 That's right.

00:39:52.460 It would have been a more coherent argument.

00:39:54.320 Because what he said was the Declaration of Independence talks about our natural rights that we have because they are secular values.

00:40:02.620 That's what he said.

00:40:03.500 He said from the Declaration of Independence, which explicitly grounds those rights in our creator, which grounds those rights in not being secular values.

00:40:11.460 They are religious values because those rights don't make any sense without God.

00:40:15.360 Yes.

00:40:15.660 And he completely inverted it.

00:40:17.360 Also, I mean, the attempt to separate off natural rights and natural law is completely nonsensical.

00:40:21.560 Exactly.

00:40:21.680 Where is he even getting the term natural rights except for the rubric of natural law?

00:40:24.920 And natural law tradition is grounded in Judeo-Christian and largely Catholic theology.

00:40:29.440 I mean, it's just, it's an absurdity.

00:40:32.260 But again, the absurdity is sort of the point.

00:40:35.000 They can, they've appointed government as God.

00:40:37.360 That's what this is.

00:40:38.160 It is the whole reason why there are so many people who wanted the government to grant gay marriage in the first place.

00:40:42.560 Because if you ask people why gay marriage is important, you already had all the benefits of marriage.

00:40:46.140 You just weren't calling it marriage.

00:40:47.160 So why do you need gay marriage?

00:40:48.340 What's the difference?

00:40:48.820 You were getting the tax benefits.

00:40:49.740 You were getting all of the contractual benefits.

00:40:51.120 Why do you need to call it marriage?

00:40:52.000 And the answer is because we want the moral imprimatur of the state, which is actually God, determining for us what is right and what is wrong.

00:40:59.040 And now that God has spoken, none can speak counter to the great God of government.

00:41:02.600 And the state which can coerce you to affirm it.

00:41:04.500 Right.

00:41:04.800 I do have some gay friends who get frustrated.

00:41:07.380 Wait, you have gay friends?

00:41:08.440 I know.

00:41:09.920 I am much, I am not a Catholic.

00:41:14.700 They get upset when we talk about this because we have changed, the world is different.

00:41:20.500 We have made substantial social change, societal change, and there are people who have premised their lives, ordered their lives around these concepts.

00:41:29.040 That happens very, very rapidly.

00:41:30.580 That's a consequence of social engineering is that you've engineered society.

00:41:35.540 You did do that.

00:41:37.500 So I have friends and they will hear us talk about gay marriage and they will say, you know, I ordered my life around it.

00:41:44.780 I'm in a committed monogamous relationship.

00:41:47.380 I want, you know, I want the, I don't want to go back to a time when I have to live in fear and I don't want to go back in a time where I don't have, you know, the sort of civil rights, you know, the hospital rights, the bequeathing property rights, all the things that you mentioned.

00:42:03.980 Can't you just fix that with a few bills and contracts?

00:42:06.280 I mean.

00:42:07.120 Well, this is the problem.

00:42:08.120 I think you could have, we didn't.

00:42:11.680 This is why I was, I was adamantly against gay marriage, adamantly against gay marriage.

00:42:17.400 I always believed that there were, that the most fabulous and creative people historically ever to live, gay men, could probably create something fabulous for themselves that probably would pass muster in society, but that wouldn't encroach on the very concept of marriage itself.

00:42:32.780 I think the language around that matters a great deal.

00:42:36.240 We didn't do that.

00:42:37.680 And this is where I think the challenging part of the conversation is, is that since we, you could say, don't say we, I opposed it, but we meaning.

00:42:48.480 The society.

00:42:49.100 The society.

00:42:50.940 Did, did change the definition of marriage to make it, marriage was always inclusive of gay people.

00:42:57.460 It just wasn't, it included them marrying, but now we have changed the definition of marriage to say that a man can marry a man, a woman can marry a woman.

00:43:04.820 For better or for worse, we did it.

00:43:06.340 Millions of people have ordered their lives around it.

00:43:08.300 People have adopted children on this, on this basis.

00:43:11.080 Again, you might say, I don't believe that two men should be able to adopt a child.

00:43:15.020 Of course.

00:43:15.420 That, that isn't, I'm not saying, what do you believe?

00:43:17.340 I'm saying they do.

00:43:19.480 But can't we just stop it?

00:43:20.500 And?

00:43:20.960 Well, see, this is the thing.

00:43:22.620 You can't really just stop it.

00:43:23.760 It's not the same as abortion, for instance, where, where you're actually committing a crime.

00:43:28.620 You know, if, if, if a man sleeping with a man is a sin, it's not, it, it's not a sin against us.

00:43:35.340 You know what I mean?

00:43:35.880 Okay, but let me just, let me just, let me just, let me just, let me just.

00:43:39.440 Right, exactly.

00:43:40.200 That I think both you and Ben are talking about is this difference between the micro and the macro.

00:43:46.320 You know, if, if you have a friend and he's gay and he's sleeping, it really doesn't bother most people at all.

00:43:52.860 We all, you know, we, there was just, there's a new biography of J.

00:43:55.680 I mean, I'd prefer not to think too much about it.

00:43:57.280 You don't want to think about it at all.

00:43:58.280 Yeah.

00:43:58.440 But, but, but there's a biography of J.

00:44:00.160 O.

00:44:00.320 Hoover where Nixon would send him a Christmas invitation to the Christmas party to him and his boyfriend, you know, because they all knew he was like living with a guy.

00:44:08.400 And it doesn't bother people.

00:44:09.940 And it never, it never really has in American life.

00:44:12.780 People always knew this existed, you know, in, in, in certainly in sophisticated, you know, coastal circles, people always knew this was going on.

00:44:19.460 But when the society says that this is a right and this is something that this is on a par with marriage, which is just a lie, then this, this, this, the society becomes a lying society.

00:44:32.120 And the same thing was true with abortion where you think, like, there's always going to be abortions.

00:44:36.320 That's always, that's always happened.

00:44:37.720 It always will happen.

00:44:38.580 And that's an evil.

00:44:39.580 But we live in a world with evil in it.

00:44:41.460 But when the Supreme Court says it's a right for you to kill that, then you become evil.

00:44:45.660 Then the country becomes evil.

00:44:46.540 And so on this point, I mean, but this is why I was, I was trying to distinguish between the language of rights that we were talking about earlier.

00:44:52.620 Yeah.

00:44:52.920 But I want to get, but I actually want to get down to this very practical question.

00:44:56.220 Well, I've got an answer.

00:44:56.660 What does one do now?

00:44:58.620 Not, not what, not what should we do?

00:45:00.460 Here's what we do.

00:45:01.220 The Democrats were bragging today about how even the ones who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, like the president, got rid of the Defense of Marriage Act and they repealed it.

00:45:09.820 And so just like they repealed the Defense of Marriage Act, I think Republicans, if they could ever muster a spine and some other anatomical features, could repeal the quote unquote respect for marriage act.

00:45:18.940 They could do that.

00:45:19.600 We could overturn Obergefell.

00:45:20.960 To your point, Jeremy, people have ordered their lives, gay guys have ordered their lives to create something that resembles more than was previously done, something like a marriage.

00:45:31.040 But they can continue to do that without the sacralization, as you're discussing, Ben, of the state.

00:45:37.980 And so when I think back, just to use a personal example, two of my absolute favorite teachers in high school were gay and, you know, just and Republicans, by the way, and just great guys, you know, love them to death.

00:45:49.980 And they then they're gay apparel.

00:45:52.920 They did.

00:45:53.660 They had very gay apparel, actually.

00:45:55.240 Yeah, they donned.

00:45:56.280 But they, you know, they had a kind of committed, stable relationship long before gay marriage existed.

00:46:03.540 I don't think they supported gay marriage.

00:46:04.820 I don't want to speak for them, but I don't think they supported the idea of gay marriage.

00:46:07.160 And they just did that.

00:46:08.420 And they just did.

00:46:09.060 And people could continue to do that without the state pretending that it's the same thing as marriage.

00:46:12.620 And for the adoption, we just stop it.

00:46:14.920 You know, there are a lot of problems here.

00:46:16.620 Not just gay adoption.

00:46:17.800 I don't just mean to single out the people who, you know, are attracted to the same sex.

00:46:21.560 I'm talking about single parent adoption.

00:46:23.960 Obviously wrong.

00:46:25.560 The IVF is so, I think is not moral, but it's obviously abused incredibly.

00:46:31.020 No fault divorce is at the heart of a lot of these problems.

00:46:33.260 I think it's the heart of a lot.

00:46:33.940 It is.

00:46:34.440 And we could just get rid of it.

00:46:36.900 And, you know, there are social consequences that come from that.

00:46:40.680 People will have children that, you know, and they're going to continue to raise them in that way.

00:46:44.100 But we can do something.

00:46:45.600 We're not totally in it.

00:46:46.340 We can do that because actually what we hear from the left, we heard from Biden about people have the right to love each other.

00:46:52.160 Well, right.

00:46:53.840 And no one can take away your ability to love another person.

00:46:57.520 Of course, you can continue to love whoever you want.

00:46:59.100 There was never any law preventing anyone from loving someone else.

00:47:02.420 So you change the laws.

00:47:04.060 It's not going to change that at all.

00:47:05.060 You're still loving them.

00:47:05.560 Well, but I am saying that I'm not trying to be clever.

00:47:09.500 There is a difference between loving someone and living with them, having joint property, and raising kids.

00:47:14.980 The one thing that makes it different than abortion, you said that it's different than abortion.

00:47:18.620 I don't fully agree with the reasons you laid out.

00:47:21.400 But here's one that makes it very different than abortion.

00:47:23.260 If you change from having abortion in your society be lawful to not having abortion be lawful in your society, you are stopping something from happening.

00:47:34.140 The individual act of abortion that will not happen because of that law changing is the one tomorrow.

00:47:40.180 You can't do anything about the abortion that took place three days before this happened, right?

00:47:45.800 It would have to be the same, I think, if you were to make these kinds of changes to adoption law or gay marriage.

00:47:53.040 Well, you're not going to take people's kids away.

00:47:54.780 You're not going to be able to break up the unions that they've created and the civil rights.

00:47:58.620 But you couldn't anyway.

00:47:59.340 Nobody was talking about doing that in the first place.

00:48:00.760 Yeah, people, they'd still be limited.

00:48:01.960 I'm asking us to, I'm asking us to, none of us have said anything about this.

00:48:07.360 But what are we going to, no one's going to, I'm asking us to talk.

00:48:08.920 No one's saying that you're going to go in and say, hey, you, move out, move out from your roommate's house.

00:48:13.060 And get that kid back to.

00:48:14.560 Yeah, but there would be no legal mechanism even to do that.

00:48:17.520 I mean, first of all, kids get taken out of homes all the time because of abuses, so that would continue.

00:48:21.580 But it wouldn't change.

00:48:23.180 That's not what we're talking about.

00:48:23.960 But that's not what we're talking about.

00:48:25.300 And so, yeah, there'd be no way.

00:48:26.420 I have to say that I kind of tend to agree with Knowles on this, at least in terms of aims.

00:48:30.320 I think that, you know, there's no reason to say we can't do something.

00:48:33.400 There's no reason to say that things can't change.

00:48:36.020 What they can't do is they can't go backwards.

00:48:37.580 And that's what you're kind of getting at.

00:48:38.240 That's what I'm getting at.

00:48:38.940 Yeah, they can't go backwards.

00:48:40.280 But that doesn't mean they can't go forward to a new thing.

00:48:42.220 We have to remember that before, it's not like gay people weren't being gay.

00:48:46.240 But a lot of them were being forced into situations that were degrading both to them and to the society.

00:48:51.380 I mean, when people were getting together in bathrooms and, you know—

00:48:54.140 And bathhouses.

00:48:54.840 And bathhouses and things like that, that was actually bad for society.

00:48:58.280 Maybe not as bad as what we have now, but certainly it wasn't a good thing.

00:49:02.140 And so, yeah, I think there is a level of tolerance.

00:49:04.720 You can go forward into a new thing that is different than the thing we got.

00:49:09.040 And I don't know why, when they essentially feed us a crap sandwich, we can't say, this is a crap sandwich.

00:49:13.760 We don't want this anymore.

00:49:15.160 Not to punt on the issue completely, but do we even have to get into the weeds of discussing all the practical implications of how this will be implemented?

00:49:22.020 Because it's not actually ever going to happen in reality.

00:49:25.920 I don't know about that.

00:49:26.680 And the left—

00:49:27.800 That's the thing that Nolz is saying.

00:49:29.420 Yeah, I sort of think, you know, the left never does this.

00:49:31.640 Like, they talk about the ideals and what they want.

00:49:33.820 And they don't get into the weeds at all about the practical—how it practically implemented.

00:49:38.240 And I think sometimes on the right, we do that almost too much.

00:49:40.380 We allow our—rather than just—right now, all that matters is the ideal, what marriage is supposed to be.

00:49:47.460 Well, I agree.

00:49:48.080 And I'm all for upholding marriage and distinguishing marriage from gay marriage.

00:49:52.740 Like, even if all they had come up with was the term gay married, like—

00:49:57.080 Yes.

00:49:58.120 Even that would be better than just marriage, right?

00:50:00.200 Certainly.

00:50:00.640 By the way, if we could get rid of no-fault divorce, we would get rid of gay marriage.

00:50:03.420 But the truth is, as intermediate steps to desacralizing marriage and reinstituting traditional marriage,

00:50:10.400 I mean, there are certain things that we certainly could and, in my opinion, should do.

00:50:14.880 I mean, for example, we should get the federal government out of the business of marriage entirely.

00:50:19.100 Because what business is it of the federal government in the first place?

00:50:22.060 This was always a state level.

00:50:22.420 It's a fundamental political unit.

00:50:23.540 I agree with you.

00:50:25.200 But if we can't get there, then why don't we start with disestablishing it at the federal level entirely,

00:50:30.240 and then at least I will have the ability to have my state define what marriage looks like.

00:50:33.720 I can live in a state that actually agrees with me about what marriage looks like.

00:50:36.420 Or, here's another alternative.

00:50:38.240 What if we defanged all of the insane structure of anti-discrimination law that we've come up with

00:50:43.640 that prevents people from actually making decisions about their own life,

00:50:47.180 and then they can make decisions about what are the consequences of whether they believe somebody is married or not?

00:50:51.820 What if we just did that?

00:50:52.620 Instead of having the government come in with its heavy boot and just stamp something on the face,

00:50:55.040 I have to interrupt just to say that, you know, one of the things about listening to Ben is,

00:50:59.240 an old expression comes to mind, he really knows beans.

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00:52:18.020 There's something, there's another point I think that's worthy of discussion here.

00:52:20.540 And that is just the simple fact that we can try to redefine whatever we want.

00:52:24.240 But in the same way that we are currently trying to redefine male is female and female is male,

00:52:27.980 and it's just a lie, and it's not true, there is only one marriage.

00:52:31.280 Yes.

00:52:31.560 Yeah, we can try to redefine this as much as we want.

00:52:33.840 We can pretend that two men is the same as a man and a woman,

00:52:36.620 and that the fundamental basis of society is not a man, a woman, and a child.

00:52:39.420 We can try to pretend that that's the case.

00:52:40.740 That is not the case.

00:52:41.680 And if we continue along these lines, the real consequence,

00:52:44.920 yes, it'll be paid by people in our society,

00:52:46.500 and yes, it'll be paid by children who are indoctrinated with lies,

00:52:49.100 and yes, it'll be paid by a society that increasingly devalues the fundamental relationship

00:52:53.400 that stands at the heart of all durable civilizations.

00:52:55.840 But what's going to end up happening is that we as a civilization just will not be the winners.

00:52:59.680 That's all that's going to happen, because when you run directly up into the face of reality,

00:53:02.560 it turns out other civilizations don't have quite the same problems.

00:53:05.360 And so we can play this game as much as we want to play this game,

00:53:08.400 and it's all fun and games up until precisely the point that our society has no children,

00:53:11.940 which we don't, a society where people don't get married, which they are not,

00:53:15.080 a society in which the center of all human life is the sexual identity,

00:53:17.940 which is essentially what we've now created,

00:53:20.140 and that will last about two or three generations,

00:53:21.660 and then there won't be anything left to preserve.

00:53:23.200 And when that happens, we just lose.

00:53:24.840 This is such a key, because they come out,

00:53:27.000 and they cleverly redefine the Cambridge Dictionary definition of woman.

00:53:30.840 Now it means man also, and Merriam-Webster has followed suit.

00:53:34.920 And what do we do?

00:53:37.460 We say, okay, well, you got your 2022 dictionary.

00:53:40.100 Well, I got my 2012 dictionary,

00:53:42.640 and now we're going to have a battle of the dictionary definitions.

00:53:45.180 But it just doesn't matter.

00:53:46.340 I mean, to your point, Matt, and to the heart of your movie,

00:53:49.300 the answer to what is a woman is not some stupid definition in whatever dictionary.

00:53:54.140 The answer to what is a woman is, a woman's a woman, and you know what it is.

00:53:57.580 And shut up.

00:53:58.380 Just shut up.

00:53:59.320 You know what a woman is.

00:54:00.460 And a woman is, she's the kind of person that's not a man.

00:54:04.400 That's what a woman is.

00:54:05.320 And we all know it, and that will be true no matter what these editors put in whatever dumb dictionary they come out of.

00:54:10.840 I agree, but there is a, can I, I agree, but one of the social consequences,

00:54:15.080 we can talk about all the social consequences of Obergefell.

00:54:17.640 One of them is that even gay men that I know who oppose the redefinition of marriage get married.

00:54:26.760 Well, they're the more likely people to get married because they're conservatives.

00:54:29.920 Right.

00:54:30.460 And in fact, I think that you will end up in, I think that the path we're on will lead to a place where

00:54:35.980 the Christian church is gay and marriage is gay.

00:54:41.080 Like, I think there's a chance, I think there's a chance that in not that long, that 20 years from now,

00:54:46.940 you are more likely to go to church if you are gay.

00:54:49.300 You are more likely to be married if you are gay.

00:54:51.980 Because they're the only, they're the only ones who want these things anymore because they feel they've been excluded for them.

00:54:57.520 They're pursuing them.

00:54:58.720 And everyone else has essentially abandoned them.

00:55:01.360 Is this, or you ask you this, though, because you can quote scripture in a way that I can't.

00:55:05.280 I can never remember exactly.

00:55:06.460 But in Romans, isn't there a passage where St. Paul said, I wish I looked this up before I came on,

00:55:12.480 but I still wouldn't be able to memorize it.

00:55:14.140 But where St. Paul says they abandoned God and therefore God gave the desires of their hearts over to themselves

00:55:21.400 and the women started sleeping with women and the men started sleeping with women.

00:55:24.620 And I think of that and I think like, wait a minute.

00:55:27.380 That's not good.

00:55:29.280 You are right that in a certain fundamental sense, one of the big things that happens here is it's not just an external attack

00:55:34.600 that's happened on the churches.

00:55:35.720 The churches have destroyed themselves from within.

00:55:37.940 Synagogues do.

00:55:38.860 And so in an attempt to modernize themselves, they've taken in the secular catechism

00:55:42.940 and they've made it the heart of their own religion.

00:55:44.740 And this is something Benedict talked about a lot.

00:55:47.080 It's something that a lot of Orthodox rabbis have talked about.

00:55:49.620 Most obviously, Joseph Soloveitchik, who was sort of one of the key founders of Yeshua University,

00:55:53.960 which is now being sued to have a gay club.

00:55:56.480 And, but many of the mainline Protestant churches are giving in, many Catholic areas.

00:56:02.320 Not just in Germany.

00:56:03.440 The evangelical churches too.

00:56:04.560 The evangelical churches, a lot of the synagogues are giving in.

00:56:07.540 And once you give up the thing that you stood for, which was the traditional wisdom,

00:56:12.400 what the hell good are you?

00:56:13.980 And why exactly would people go to church?

00:56:15.560 The only people who are going to go to church are the people who want the medal.

00:56:17.800 And the people who historically wanted the medal from you don't want that medal anymore.

00:56:21.000 So you're right.

00:56:21.740 The only people who will go are the people who want that imprimatur so that they can put it on their wall.

00:56:25.600 There was an amazing thing that happened in the Catholic Church, which even with...

00:56:29.980 It was called the Reformation.

00:56:30.940 It was called, yeah.

00:56:32.060 It did start with the Catholic Church.

00:56:32.980 I liked it.

00:56:34.260 But you know...

00:56:34.740 He's always bringing up the Peace of Westphalia.

00:56:37.660 We were due for a mention of the Peace of Westphalia.

00:56:40.120 Westphalia, carry on.

00:56:40.860 You know, when I think of some of the most liberal popes we ever had, Paul VI, right?

00:56:48.060 Super liberal pope, includes Vatican II.

00:56:50.280 But Paul VI, everyone expected him to follow the Protestants and the Lambeth Declaration

00:56:54.680 and endorse free love and contraception and abortion, all these things.

00:57:00.540 And he didn't.

00:57:01.080 He came out with Humanae Vitae and he said, nope, sorry, the traditional teaching is true.

00:57:05.540 No contraception, no abortion, no nothing.

00:57:08.200 Sex has a purpose.

00:57:09.060 You know, he reaffirms that.

00:57:09.740 People were shocked.

00:57:10.740 Pope Francis, who everyone portrays as a big lib and with some good reason.

00:57:15.160 But Pope Francis has said that gay marriage is not a mere political issue.

00:57:18.360 It's a machination of the father of lies that seeks to deceive and confuse the children of God.

00:57:21.920 He did say that.

00:57:22.540 He did say that.

00:57:23.100 He came out.

00:57:23.660 He told the German bishops to cut it out.

00:57:25.840 He said that you can't have, you know, Christian gay marriage ceremonies.

00:57:29.820 I mean, he's become very conservative on this sort of issue.

00:57:32.900 And the reason for it, by the way, I don't know what they think about...

00:57:35.740 I don't know what these men think about personally, obviously, but they can't do it because

00:57:39.240 of a fact of the Catholic Church, which is...

00:57:41.620 John Henry Newman explained this.

00:57:43.160 He was converting, obviously, from Protestantism to Catholicism.

00:57:46.360 And he said, with Protestantism and with so much modern thought, you follow your individual

00:57:51.600 conscience, which is good.

00:57:53.400 We all like following our individual conscience.

00:57:55.460 But with Catholicism, there's a big role for individual conscience.

00:57:59.460 But ultimately, you must submit your obedience to the authority of the church.

00:58:04.380 And so to zoom it out a little bit from, you know, denominational kinds of arguments, this

00:58:08.880 is the thing about tradition, is that we surrender a little bit of our individual will and, you

00:58:16.520 know, our own individual rationalistic ideas to just the way things have worked in the

00:58:21.560 past and a little deference for our elders and our country and to tradition.

00:58:25.080 That's what we used to do.

00:58:26.740 And things tended to work a lot better before we surrendered that idea.

00:58:30.900 Honor your father and mother.

00:58:31.500 That's the thing.

00:58:31.940 Honor your father and mother.

00:58:32.900 To Jeremy's point, I don't think in 20 years it's going to be only gay people at church.

00:58:36.480 But I think it's more likely there'll just be no churches left in 20 years.

00:58:40.220 But it is true that this is one thing...

00:58:42.360 Let's actually do get back...

00:58:43.540 Yeah, let's get back together in 20 years.

00:58:45.740 Well, yeah, it's true that this something came up in my conversation with Joe Rogan on

00:58:50.820 this issue, and it always comes up, is that basically Christians and religious people

00:58:57.400 in general lost the marriage argument 50 or 60 years ago because we gave up.

00:59:02.140 You know, there are...

00:59:03.740 Marriages are not just fundamentally procreative.

00:59:05.740 They're also monogamous and permanent.

00:59:07.960 Right.

00:59:08.320 And those are the three pillars, you might say, of marriage.

00:59:10.500 And we gave up two of the pillars.

00:59:11.860 That's right.

00:59:12.140 Well, it doesn't have to be permanent.

00:59:14.640 And if it's not permanent, that means it's not monogamous.

00:59:16.300 It means basically the church has bought into polygamy.

00:59:19.220 It's just you have to do it one at a time rather than all at once.

00:59:21.780 And once that happened, it was like you can still make the argument for so-called traditional

00:59:27.980 marriage, but it's a much weaker argument.

00:59:29.740 And people just don't believe you anymore when you say that you cherish the marriage sacrament.

00:59:35.720 I think it just got to a point where the other side, they just didn't buy it.

00:59:38.660 They didn't believe that we really cared.

00:59:40.320 And if you got rid of that, if you got rid of no-fault divorce and remarrying and all

00:59:44.980 that stuff, then you'd get rid of gay marriage because a very small percentage of gay men

00:59:48.720 are going to stay married and be monogamous.

00:59:51.240 I mean, that's just not...

00:59:51.800 Well, I mean...

00:59:52.880 But one of the positive consequences of gay marriage is that probably for the first time

01:00:00.000 in history, a lot of gay men are considering that question.

01:00:02.640 Yes.

01:00:03.040 No, that is positive.

01:00:04.220 You're right.

01:00:04.440 It's at least an option.

01:00:05.180 And as I said, it's better than...

01:00:06.420 I don't think that that trade was worth it.

01:00:07.960 Well, but it's better than the meeting in...

01:00:09.820 I'm not suggesting that it's worth it, but I am saying that there are positive consequences

01:00:14.200 when there's giant changes.

01:00:14.900 I mean, the two major changes that have happened societally, the major changes, are one, that

01:00:20.160 marriage has been so redefined over the past 50 years that it essentially was transformed

01:00:23.500 into a voluntaristic arrangement rather than family being a matter of consanguinity and

01:00:29.760 production of family units that provide the basis for society.

01:00:32.980 That's what they were.

01:00:33.540 They were just natural family units.

01:00:34.880 The basis of the family was largely duty, not love, which, by the way, is what it ends

01:00:39.220 up being.

01:00:39.880 Right.

01:00:39.960 I mean, you love each other, and that love comes with duties.

01:00:43.580 The fundamental, durable nature of marriage and a family is a duty-based relationship.

01:00:47.880 You don't spend every day in a tizzy over your spouse.

01:00:50.740 You spend every day doing your duty because you are a married person who loves your spouse.

01:00:55.360 And the same thing is true for your children.

01:00:57.000 And so when we redefined family units themselves, away from consanguinity and from procreation

01:01:01.760 and from being those little platoons into a voluntaristic arrangement, that was the first

01:01:06.600 change, and it atomized individuals.

01:01:08.340 And that further atomization of individuals has now been exacerbated by same-sex marriage

01:01:12.080 because all the stuff that I said before was prior to same-sex marriage.

01:01:14.920 Right.

01:01:15.120 The destruction of the family unit was prior to same-sex marriage.

01:01:17.860 And so when you hear people who are talking about same-sex marriage, they say, well, you

01:01:20.440 know, your family units were already broken.

01:01:22.460 What do you have to say about same-sex marriage?

01:01:23.820 The answer is, I mean, I have a lot to say about both of those things.

01:01:27.600 Right.

01:01:27.980 And not, you don't get to throw in my face the failure of marriage and say, okay, so now

01:01:32.200 we just get to redefine the institution entirely.

01:01:34.120 Right.

01:01:34.240 You're right about the failure of the institution.

01:01:37.060 And that's our fault.

01:01:38.780 And then there's been another thing added on top of that.

01:01:40.720 And the other thing that's been added on top of that is this idea that the core of your

01:01:44.980 being is your sexual identity.

01:01:46.420 This is the thing that matters most about you in the world.

01:01:49.120 And that it is not about your duties to family in the traditional sense, about your duties

01:01:53.640 to have children and create children and live with the wife that you have and with whom

01:01:57.860 you have created children.

01:01:59.020 And build a family unit that includes, yes, a vital mother and, yes, a vital father.

01:02:02.340 That none of that is imposed upon you.

01:02:04.340 These are all impositions by a cruel, vicious society.

01:02:07.040 And really what lies at the heart of you is your desires.

01:02:10.260 Well, I mean, there's nothing more, and I use this word advisedly, satanic, than the

01:02:14.500 idea that what lies at the core of you is your desires.

01:02:16.820 Of course.

01:02:17.120 That is literally the temptation of things.

01:02:18.420 But you're, you mean your appetites?

01:02:20.580 Yes.

01:02:20.700 You don't mean your high desire.

01:02:21.820 No, no, no.

01:02:22.300 I mean your passions.

01:02:24.380 The things that you, just the things that you want at any given moment.

01:02:28.760 I have to say, this brings to mind the wonderful poem of Ogden Nash, who said,

01:02:34.040 Oh, duty, why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

01:02:40.480 Which kind of defines our entire society.

01:02:45.000 Well, that's super depressing.

01:02:46.440 You guys got anything else to talk about?

01:02:47.500 You want to go back to movies?

01:02:48.400 Yeah, let's go back.

01:02:50.020 All the best movies were made by gay guys.

01:02:53.680 That is actually just me.

01:02:55.020 That is.

01:02:55.480 I know that will hurt the feelings of my dear sweet nana, who is also still watching.

01:02:59.740 But yes, even in the heyday.

01:03:01.080 Jewish gay guys, would you?

01:03:02.180 Even in the heyday of all the great movies.

01:03:05.500 This is my whole point.

01:03:07.160 This is why they.

01:03:07.720 Who just loves Vincenzo Minnelli?

01:03:11.260 This is why I guarantee you they could have come up with a great name for the institution

01:03:15.660 they wanted to create.

01:03:16.080 But the funny thing is, is their best work, the best work by gay people is gay people

01:03:19.560 pretending to be straight.

01:03:21.080 There's something about that.

01:03:22.320 It's just like Irving Berlin writing White Christmas.

01:03:24.560 There's something about the outsider creating something that gives it this wistfulness and

01:03:28.260 this beauty.

01:03:28.720 By the way, the best work of anybody in any society comes when people tamp down their

01:03:34.840 sexual desires.

01:03:36.720 And no one talks about it now because we're told that we're just all steam engines and

01:03:41.160 we've got to let steam off.

01:03:42.460 This is true.

01:03:43.160 Hemingway said never have sex until nighttime.

01:03:45.240 Yes.

01:03:45.840 Yeah, that's right.

01:03:47.200 But never more than one woman at a time.

01:03:50.140 By the way, you know who said this?

01:03:51.360 Actually, Freud.

01:03:52.100 Yeah, exactly.

01:03:52.800 That's right.

01:03:53.180 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:53.820 Right.

01:03:54.920 Sublimation was an actual thing.

01:03:56.380 Yeah, the golden sublimation.

01:03:57.980 Right, exactly.

01:03:58.480 And then it was Wilhelm Reich and the rest of the crew who decided that that part was

01:04:01.780 we need to dispense with all of the sublimation.

01:04:04.400 The sublimation was actually the problem.

01:04:05.540 By the way, a lot of people don't know who Wilhelm Reich is.

01:04:08.280 Just for those who are unaware, he's a man who believed that the fundamental force in the

01:04:13.440 universe was something called an orgone.

01:04:15.560 And the orgones, you had to sit in a wooden box.

01:04:18.120 I don't know what you're doing in there.

01:04:19.080 To have a lot of orgasms.

01:04:20.960 To accumulate orgones.

01:04:22.860 And if you simply had enough orgasms, you could cure cancer, war, sadness, poverty, everything.

01:04:30.420 How did this not beat Scientology for like most important Hollywood?

01:04:33.460 Also, hey, I'm willing to try.

01:04:35.120 I'll try anything once.

01:04:37.680 Well, he became a Christian.

01:04:38.620 This is what Orson Bean believed before his birth.

01:04:40.060 He didn't believe it when he got older, but when I believed it.

01:04:42.500 Oh, James Salinger believed it.

01:04:44.280 It's hard to believe that once the prostate gives out.

01:04:47.580 He became a Christian.

01:04:48.780 I mean, that was...

01:04:49.120 Orson Bean, every single time I think about our lost friend Orson Bean, I smile.

01:04:55.820 He sees...

01:04:56.400 What a wonderful little...

01:04:57.760 Wonderful person.

01:04:58.600 ...light that just moved through our lives there for a season.

01:05:01.500 He told the dirtiest joke I've ever heard at his son-in-law's funeral.

01:05:08.220 That was a great moment.

01:05:09.620 Even I, my jaw kind of went down.

01:05:14.360 He was like kind of the anime character of a Hollywood celebrity.

01:05:18.760 You would have loved him.

01:05:22.940 To switch topics, what do you make of the Sam Bankman for it at all?

01:05:26.600 You know, it's just quite a coincidence.

01:05:30.100 And it's just damn bad luck that the day before he was going to have to testify,

01:05:36.280 the second largest owner of the Democratic Party was going to have to testify

01:05:39.140 about all of his scams and crimes that paid for all their elections.

01:05:42.620 Dagnabbit, he just got arrested.

01:05:43.940 Couldn't testify.

01:05:44.780 What are the odds?

01:05:45.500 Oh, well, moving on.

01:05:46.400 I'm just going to put it here.

01:05:47.020 Sam Bankman-Fried did not kill himself.

01:05:50.460 You see Hillary creeping.

01:05:52.440 This is the fundamental problem of our time is that there is no reason for conspiracy theories

01:05:58.280 to be discounted.

01:05:59.640 Right.

01:05:59.880 Yes.

01:06:00.160 It's information.

01:06:00.920 Information crisis.

01:06:01.800 It is an information crisis.

01:06:03.240 We cannot trust the source of any information.

01:06:05.100 We were talking this morning, Drew and I, about what is the truth of the COVID vaccines?

01:06:10.860 How right were we?

01:06:11.960 How wrong were we?

01:06:12.560 We all kind of had different positions at different points of time in this whole thing.

01:06:16.880 Although people sometimes criticize some of us for some of our positions.

01:06:20.500 And I would like to say almost everyone who criticizes us would be vaccinated if we hadn't

01:06:24.840 sued the federal government to stop the vaccine mandate.

01:06:26.960 So pound sand.

01:06:29.100 But the question is, Drew's question was, how right and how wrong were we?

01:06:33.600 And the answer is, it is genuinely in this moment unknowable.

01:06:39.380 Because all of those intermediary institutions that used to hold power to account have now

01:06:45.580 become instruments of the state and instruments of the left.

01:06:48.040 You simply can't, you can't even say facts don't care about my feelings.

01:06:51.220 You can't even say I let the data drive my understanding.

01:06:54.520 It is impossible to know what is happening in the world.

01:06:58.400 Has anyone even done, has there been a comparison?

01:07:01.400 Because we keep hearing these stories of people dying suddenly at the age of 25.

01:07:04.780 And has there been?

01:07:06.260 They've just started it, right?

01:07:07.440 So in Europe, they've barred now the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under the age

01:07:11.180 of 30 because of the myocarditis events that were occurring.

01:07:13.580 But how many people under the age of 30 die suddenly of cardiac events in 2019 versus now?

01:07:20.240 Do we know that?

01:07:20.480 The government has not spent the money to study this.

01:07:22.180 The government has not spent the money to study mask efficacy.

01:07:24.020 The government has not spent the money to actually...

01:07:26.040 In Germany, there was a test where they found of 25 people, four of them, they attributed

01:07:31.480 it to the vaccine.

01:07:32.740 25 people who died young of that heart disease, four of them, they attributed it to the disease.

01:07:39.400 And that's why DeSantis brilliantly is now having...

01:07:42.860 Right.

01:07:43.060 Well, I mean, it depends on the 25, as opposed to how many, right?

01:07:46.820 I mean, these are very small sample sizes.

01:07:48.200 But again, they banned Moderna in large swaths of Europe for people who are under the age

01:07:53.160 of 30 because the risks of the virus are significantly lower than the risks of actually taking the

01:07:58.020 vaccine for people who are young.

01:08:00.620 I mean, they're still trotting out the idea that you should be vaccinating your six-month-old.

01:08:03.980 There's not only no longitudinal data, there's no data, period.

01:08:06.280 Yeah.

01:08:06.540 On the efficacy...

01:08:07.260 Fauci this week was making that argument, right?

01:08:09.180 I mean, it's totally insane.

01:08:10.160 And honestly, as somebody who, you know, listen, I traveled in the expert circles, right?

01:08:15.640 I went to Harvard Law.

01:08:16.600 I tend to have a lot of respect for people who spend their entire career studying vaccines

01:08:19.740 as opposed to, you know, people who have spent the last five minutes reading up on it on Wikipedia.

01:08:23.080 But it turns out that those people were lying to us.

01:08:25.520 And that's a serious problem, really.

01:08:27.080 I mean...

01:08:27.940 And that there was no media to hold them to account.

01:08:31.080 Right.

01:08:31.240 And that because we have such worship of the expert class now, unrelated experts will back

01:08:37.040 the claims of experts outside of their own field, right?

01:08:41.800 It's just an amazing...

01:08:42.620 It is an amazing moment.

01:08:43.660 We should probably stop talking about it so they don't ban us on YouTube.

01:08:45.920 We're about to go to our members block.

01:08:47.860 And members block is where we're going to interact for the next little bit with our DW Plus members.

01:08:52.100 We're going to exchange gifts in our Secret Santa.

01:08:54.720 We're going to answer questions.

01:08:56.800 But before we part, there are two things that I think are very important for us to touch on.

01:09:01.240 while we're still alive for the masses, for the people.

01:09:04.740 Hoi polloi.

01:09:05.280 The hoi polloi.

01:09:06.500 One of them is Jeremy's Razors.

01:09:10.200 And the reason is, if a person wanted to buy a great gift for that gentleman in their life

01:09:17.040 whose masculinity is under constant threat from the woke left,

01:09:21.360 who's being asked to drag a blade across his face in service of companies

01:09:26.560 who want to teach your daughter to shave,

01:09:28.440 who's being asked to subordinate the very essence of his manhood

01:09:33.860 in service of an agenda that says that he might as well be a woman,

01:09:37.660 and very likely is one,

01:09:39.660 this man needs to be given the greatest Christmas gift of all time,

01:09:43.820 a Jeremy's Razor.

01:09:45.220 And if you order one right now,

01:09:47.600 and when I say right now,

01:09:48.720 I mean,

01:09:50.220 no,

01:09:50.520 right now.

01:09:51.400 Because literally tomorrow,

01:09:53.040 which many of you will be watching this,

01:09:54.360 and it will already be tomorrow,

01:09:55.900 will be the last day in which one could make such an order

01:09:58.720 and still receive this before Christmas,

01:10:01.480 to put under the tree for that gentleman in your life

01:10:04.040 who deserves to be treated like a man.

01:10:05.900 Jeremy's Razors.com.

01:10:07.140 If you go right now,

01:10:07.700 you're going to get 30% off.

01:10:08.800 While you're doing it,

01:10:09.420 you can head over to Daily Wire Plus,

01:10:11.080 click on that store icon,

01:10:12.300 all of our Daily Wire merch,

01:10:13.580 including our gift subscriptions.

01:10:15.820 If you order them in the next 24 hours,

01:10:18.000 30% off,

01:10:18.720 and you'll still receive that gift card to put in the stocking for Christmas.

01:10:23.380 You couldn't think of a better gift,

01:10:24.780 I don't think,

01:10:25.260 than a Daily Wire Plus membership

01:10:26.500 for the kid heading off to college,

01:10:29.040 somebody who needs access to this kind of information,

01:10:30.900 who's being subjected to all kinds of woke propaganda all the time.

01:10:35.920 So Daily Wire Plus.com,

01:10:37.340 click on the store,

01:10:37.980 head over to Jeremy's Razors.com,

01:10:39.540 30% off in both places,

01:10:41.240 and right now is the time to do it

01:10:42.540 if you want something before Christmas.

01:10:44.020 And that brings me to that last thing

01:10:45.340 that we absolutely need to talk about,

01:10:47.860 Christmas.

01:10:48.700 This is the last time we're going to see each other

01:10:49.980 before Christmas.

01:10:51.640 So I thought,

01:10:53.160 in the past,

01:10:54.180 we've talked about really important Christmas.

01:10:56.500 Issues,

01:10:57.040 we've talked about what does it mean

01:10:59.000 that God walked among man,

01:11:00.180 what does it mean

01:11:00.840 that the so-called Son of God and God

01:11:05.060 reigned on a throne

01:11:05.960 in far off Rome

01:11:07.480 when Christ was born

01:11:09.000 and laid in a manger.

01:11:11.820 But the one thing that we've never done

01:11:13.220 is just had a conversation,

01:11:15.180 the four of us,

01:11:15.860 about how we're going to drive Ben

01:11:17.420 out of our city

01:11:19.080 in celebration.

01:11:21.760 You know,

01:11:22.460 and it's long overdue.

01:11:24.000 Long overdue.

01:11:24.540 We really haven't been doing our bit.

01:11:27.300 I just want the Cossack hat.

01:11:28.980 That's all I want.

01:11:29.660 The furry hat.

01:11:30.920 Drew, you're next to go, my friend.

01:11:33.960 Maybe the hat will protect me.

01:11:35.360 I don't know.

01:11:36.140 Turns out not.

01:11:36.940 Turns out not,

01:11:37.520 historically speaking.

01:11:39.060 Yeah, Stephen Crowder,

01:11:40.140 actually,

01:11:40.440 on his podcast,

01:11:41.180 he asked me,

01:11:41.640 like,

01:11:42.140 what's your favorite thing

01:11:42.920 about Christmas?

01:11:44.160 And I said,

01:11:44.800 well,

01:11:45.200 that we don't do pogroms anymore.

01:11:46.340 That is my favorite thing, Ben.

01:11:50.560 That old tradition.

01:11:51.660 That is a great answer

01:11:52.760 for Stephen Crowder.

01:11:53.900 But you do live in a culture

01:11:55.880 that celebrates Christmas.

01:11:57.080 It's true.

01:11:57.600 What is your view

01:11:58.740 of living in a culture

01:12:00.220 that celebrates Christmas?

01:12:01.060 I mean,

01:12:01.200 I would much rather live

01:12:01.980 in a culture

01:12:02.300 that celebrates Christmas

01:12:03.100 than a culture

01:12:04.120 that disdains it.

01:12:05.280 And I think that that's

01:12:07.000 essentially what we're

01:12:07.760 on the verge of.

01:12:08.740 As a Jew,

01:12:09.500 I think it's very important

01:12:10.220 that Christians go to church.

01:12:11.440 And I think it's very important

01:12:12.260 that they take the gospel seriously.

01:12:13.500 And I think it's very important

01:12:14.300 that they take

01:12:14.720 the religious precepts seriously

01:12:15.820 because a Christian world

01:12:16.940 is a better world,

01:12:18.480 not just for Jews

01:12:20.180 in the American context,

01:12:21.660 which is obviously true,

01:12:22.960 but also is a better world

01:12:24.660 for the values

01:12:25.200 that it helps to propagate.

01:12:26.020 So you don't get offended

01:12:26.700 when someone wishes you

01:12:27.560 a Merry Christmas.

01:12:28.120 No, in fact,

01:12:28.660 last night at the holiday party,

01:12:30.420 a bunch of people

01:12:30.760 were coming over

01:12:31.240 and saying Happy Holidays

01:12:32.040 and I would respond

01:12:32.520 Merry Christmas.

01:12:33.600 And you said to me,

01:12:35.540 I thought it was a great line,

01:12:36.780 you said,

01:12:37.320 I don't mind

01:12:38.000 if they say Merry Christmas

01:12:39.040 because they're not

01:12:39.740 having a pogrom.

01:12:40.580 Right.

01:12:41.200 No religious Jews

01:12:43.080 ever get offended

01:12:44.260 by Merry Christmas.

01:12:45.020 This is 100% correct.

01:12:45.600 It is only secular people,

01:12:47.300 Jews and Gentiles alike,

01:12:49.200 who pretend to be offended

01:12:50.360 by Merry Christmas.

01:12:50.740 Because as Ben and I

01:12:51.840 have discussed of late,

01:12:54.400 the world is really breaking

01:12:55.980 into the two camps

01:12:57.120 of believe in God,

01:12:58.700 do not believe in God.

01:13:00.100 And that isn't...

01:13:01.180 People who believe in God

01:13:01.760 are in this room.

01:13:03.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:13:03.840 And that isn't the...

01:13:05.400 That isn't always

01:13:06.540 where the lines are.

01:13:08.040 Yep.

01:13:08.380 But it seems more and more

01:13:09.200 in this moment

01:13:09.840 that that's where the lines are.

01:13:10.880 Yeah.

01:13:11.320 And so in that sense,

01:13:12.100 we're all in a very important

01:13:13.180 struggle together.

01:13:15.340 For our parting words

01:13:17.020 on the true meaning

01:13:17.720 of Christmas,

01:13:18.440 I'm going to leave you

01:13:19.600 with a blast from the past.

01:13:21.340 We're going to head over

01:13:22.060 to Members Block.

01:13:22.860 We'll see you there

01:13:23.460 in three minutes.

01:13:24.520 And we'll let one Andrew Clavin

01:13:26.460 wish you the true spirit

01:13:28.600 of the season.

01:13:29.340 Lights, please.

01:13:33.380 And there were in the same country

01:13:37.440 shepherds abiding in the field,

01:13:40.040 keeping watch over their flock

01:13:41.760 by night.

01:13:42.860 And lo, the angel of the Lord

01:13:45.100 came upon them,

01:13:46.120 and the glory of the Lord

01:13:47.440 shone round about them,

01:13:49.200 and they were sore afraid.

01:13:50.920 And the angel said unto them,

01:13:53.280 Fear not, for behold,

01:13:55.400 I bring you good tidings

01:13:56.960 of great joy,

01:13:58.220 which shall be to all people.

01:14:00.140 For unto you is born this day

01:14:02.220 in the city of David

01:14:03.160 a Savior,

01:14:04.480 which is Christ the Lord.

01:14:06.140 And this shall be a sign unto you.

01:14:08.480 You shall find the babe

01:14:09.760 wrapped in swaddling clothes,

01:14:11.860 lying in a manger.

01:14:13.420 And suddenly there was with the angel

01:14:15.600 a multitude of the heavenly host,

01:14:17.960 praising God and saying,

01:14:20.440 Glory to God in the highest,

01:14:22.260 and on earth peace,

01:14:24.800 good will toward men.

01:14:30.820 That's what Christmas is all about,

01:14:32.420 Charlie Brown.

01:14:36.080 Who the hell is Charlie Brown?

01:14:44.780 Special effects are just great.

01:14:48.100 I love it so much,

01:14:50.220 and it's funny to think about

01:14:51.520 how much bigger we are

01:14:52.600 as a company today

01:14:53.440 than when we made that video.

01:14:54.760 Drew, you look so young there.

01:14:57.340 I'm only 78 there.

01:14:58.880 What we realized this morning

01:14:59.900 is how few people have seen it.

01:15:01.820 Our audience was so much smaller back then.

01:15:03.940 It's true, it's true.

01:15:04.740 It all happened so fast, too.

01:15:06.860 I had some of our mutual friends

01:15:08.240 who are celebrating

01:15:08.740 their first Christmas

01:15:09.520 over to the house this week

01:15:11.020 to watch Charlie Brown Christmas

01:15:14.920 is what it's called, right?

01:15:15.800 Charlie Brown Christmas.

01:15:16.440 And it's remarkable

01:15:18.760 how cruddy the animation is.

01:15:21.820 Not just rudimentary, cruddy.

01:15:23.440 It's so great, though.

01:15:24.380 And it's so good.

01:15:25.380 It's so great.

01:15:26.180 I put it on for my kids,

01:15:28.100 and my son said,

01:15:29.200 Daddy, why are we watching this?

01:15:30.900 They, for whatever reason,

01:15:32.440 they didn't...

01:15:33.000 They didn't get it.

01:15:33.520 It didn't, yeah.

01:15:34.540 It's because you destroyed them

01:15:35.460 with the Batman film.

01:15:36.340 Maybe.

01:15:37.560 They're still traumatized

01:15:38.640 from Heath Ledger.

01:15:39.440 I don't know.

01:15:39.640 So, it's Christmas time.

01:15:43.320 We have gifts for one another.

01:15:45.480 Secret Santa,

01:15:46.680 we've done it almost every year.

01:15:48.760 It's ended in near disaster,

01:15:50.980 friendship ending ruin

01:15:51.840 every single time.

01:15:53.080 So, it's like,

01:15:53.500 why not do it again?

01:15:54.920 So, I don't even know

01:15:56.880 how it came to be

01:15:57.920 that we each were tasked

01:16:00.980 with buying a gift

01:16:02.380 for the person who we were,

01:16:03.880 but I thought we'd get right to it.

01:16:05.620 That sounds great,

01:16:06.220 because, you know,

01:16:06.640 in the past,

01:16:07.200 I have gotten great

01:16:08.620 Secret Santa presents.

01:16:09.580 Have you?

01:16:09.820 Yes, you gave me

01:16:10.800 one of my favorites last year.

01:16:12.480 You gave me a nice,

01:16:13.560 juicy meatball in tinfoil.

01:16:15.260 I loved that.

01:16:16.140 Ben gave me...

01:16:16.740 I still have it on display

01:16:17.620 in my office

01:16:18.160 in a beautiful Tiffany box.

01:16:20.840 It was a nice little

01:16:22.080 future diamond.

01:16:23.860 You know,

01:16:24.080 a nice, black,

01:16:26.200 coal-ish...

01:16:27.200 A Santa Claus

01:16:27.960 lives every year.

01:16:28.860 That's right, yeah.

01:16:30.000 So, they're great.

01:16:30.640 So, I look forward to this year.

01:16:31.920 All right.

01:16:32.200 Well, I think we should

01:16:32.720 start with you, Michael.

01:16:33.480 Okay.

01:16:34.120 So, I open...

01:16:34.860 Mine is here on my left.

01:16:36.040 That's your gift right there.

01:16:36.820 Okay, all right.

01:16:37.840 And I don't...

01:16:38.480 Obviously, I don't know,

01:16:39.820 because it's a Secret Santa,

01:16:41.040 so I don't know

01:16:41.440 who my Secret...

01:16:41.960 Okay.

01:16:43.000 All right.

01:16:43.540 All right.

The Michael Knowles Show - December 14, 2022

Daily Wire Backstage： 2022 Season Finale

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