Daily Wire Backstage： And Iran... (I Ran So Far Away)
Summary
Join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and the God King as they discuss the latest news with Iran, President Trump, the best movies of the year, and much, much more! Subscribe to Daily Wire to get immediate access to all new shows and listen to them wherever you get your shows.
Transcript
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I ran. I ran so far away, right into Trump's arms. If you want me to explain this wonderful
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new song, check out the latest Daily Wire backstage, and I ran, I ran so far away.
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Join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, the God King, Jeremy Boring, and me as we discuss the latest
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news with Iran, President Trump, and the best movies of the year. We will give you that and
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so much more. Take a listen. A cloud appears above your head. A beam of light comes shining
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down on you, shining down on you. The cloud is moving nearer still. Aurora Borealis comes
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in view. Aurora comes in view. And I ran. I ran so far away. I ran. I ran all night and
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Welcome to the Daily Wire. I ran so far away. We're going to be talking about Gervais bombing
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Hollywood, that Covington kid, Nick Sandman, bombing CNN, and of course, all the various
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bombings in the Middle East, all while trying not to bomb ourselves. I'm going to be honest,
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trying might be a bit overstating our effort. Mostly, we're just going to phone it in like
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we always do. I'm Jeremy Boring. You're welcome. I'm joined today by Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles,
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Ben Shapiro, and via satellite, Elisha Krause, the lovely. Elisha, tell the folks at home what
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Well, I mean, if you were a subscriber, then you won the opportunity to ask a question of the
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guys tonight. If you're not a subscriber, then you don't have a Leftist Tears Tumblr and your
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life is awful and meaningless. So you should head on over to dailywire.com. Be sure to navigate to
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the shows page. It's right in the center at the top. Click on backstage and then type in your
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tonight and get your question in for any of the guys or all of the guys.
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Thank you, Elisha. And folks, we've got some other fantastic news for you right now and only right
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now for the duration of the show. You can become a Daily Wire subscriber at the beautiful discount
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Again, that's promo code backstage for 15% off of all memberships. That is only available
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right now during the show. With all that out of the way, what are we going to talk about?
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Is there anything happening? Could we just do another really long, extended pun on the word
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Iran? Yeah, that'll play. This is great because we can all praise President Trump.
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Absolutely. We're all on Team Trump today. This is a major, major foreign policy victory. I mean,
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the best really since Osama bought it. I think in some ways it's better than Osama buying it,
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only because when it comes to Osama buying it, that was the culmination of a very long war
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against a series of terrorists and terror groups. And killing bin Laden degraded capacity,
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but not as much as killing Soleimani did for Iran. Beyond that, Iran was on the upswing in some ways,
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whereas al-Qaeda was already on the downswing by the time that bin Laden was killed. And also,
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there was no division in terms of strategy about bin Laden. I was always confused when people were
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saying, that's the bravest move in the world that Obama said, go for it. What exactly would the choice
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have been? Not go for it and leave the guy alive? He's the most wanted person on planet Earth.
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When it comes to this, this was a very fraught move that President Trump took.
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And the media are the real story here, really even more so than Iran. This was all perfectly
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predictable if you understand international politics 101. This was all fairly predictable
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because this was just deterrence. Deterrence has been foreign policy for everyone for thousands of
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years. It's very easy to understand. Somebody says, they're going to hurt you. And you say,
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well, if you do that, then I'm going to end you. And that's called deterrence. And this has been a
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feature of foreign policy for all of American history, for all of world history, actually.
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Barack Obama spent eight years lying that deterrence was not a possibility with Iran.
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His entire premise was that we had two choices as the United States. One was to sign giant checks to
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a terror regime so they could use that money for terrorism and ballistic missile development.
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And then to pretend that we had somehow mitigated the threat by allowing them to build nuclear weapons
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after 10 years with the additional economic strength, with the additional terrorist,
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with the additional military. Right, exactly. Or alternatively, full-scale war, right? That was the
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lie that Obama kept telling. And they pitched that for eight years. It was either you are for our
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appeasement or you are for war. And they kept saying that over and over. And they're still
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selling. The media is still selling. And this is the point. Trump came in and he said, okay, well,
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there's a third option that you guys are just pretending doesn't exist. And that option is
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called deterrence. That is, if you violate X, Y, and Z, if you violate these rules, if you cross this
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red line, you will get punched in the face. And you'll get punched so hard that you don't want to cross
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those lines anymore. And so Trump was a, what he did to Soleimani was a living rebuke to the
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entire framework that the media had been repeating for eight years and was pushed by the Democrats
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for eight years. I want to jump in and just say one thing. You know, I'm not a giant fan of the
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president. I think that this, in the end, bore out to be maybe the greatest foreign policy decision
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by any president in my lifetime. Right. I didn't think that that was necessarily true just because
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he killed Soleimani. I thought it'd be necessary to see what Iran reacted. Well, not only how Iran
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reacted, but how the president handled the reaction of Iran. When he came to office, despite his
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bellicosity, Donald Trump actually believed in the Obama doctrine. All of the early tests of
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President Trump in terms of foreign policy, he backed down. He, as much as the Democrats,
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was the one who would always give you this sort of false binary of, well, if we don't become
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friends with everyone, we'll just be in open war. He would do this with North Korea very famously.
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And if you would criticize him snuggling up with the North Koreans, that's what all of his
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supporters would say. Oh, so you would rather us just be in nuclear war with North Korea? And
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people like us, Ben, we'd be saying, no, there are other options. The president,
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very tepid response to his first military crisis. He sent some cruise missiles into an airfield in
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Syria. Absolutely did no good. Showed a kind of weakness and indecisiveness.
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This is the one time you'll ever hear me say that Drew may have a point.
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Because I was just about to say, I disagree with everything you're saying.
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The president seems to have learned on the job. He's been weak on foreign policy. He's presented
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all these false binaries about you only have kissing ass or open war. But there was this small
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news story a few weeks ago that said the president had really become disenchanted with his generals
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because of how Afghanistan has conducted itself. And that he started talking to special operators
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and actual guys who operate on the ground. And then you see this really, I'm going to go ahead
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and say it is a radical move to take out Soleimani. It's so radical. George W. Bush, who took us into
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war in two separate theaters, didn't kill Soleimani as he should have.
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When he had the chance. When he had the chance. Barack Obama, who loved to kill people with drone
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strikes and did, in fact, take us into a country, Libya, that there was no declared war on.
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Funny how everybody forgets that Libya actually happened.
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There was an actual war in Libya. And they killed Qaddafi for no reason,
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who was no threat to the United States. And then Hillary chortled about killing him. And then
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Benghazi's embassy gets burned and it's not a big deal.
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But then the president seems to have learned. And he made this very, very gutsy move. And even then,
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because the president isn't always known for his consistency.
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You don't know what he's going to do. I thought, if you escalate and then back down,
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this will be worse than if you didn't kill him, even though I'll still be glad he's dead.
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The president's handling of this missile attack, though, in Iraq last night
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The thing I disagree with you guys about it is that I think you're putting him into this
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framework that's created by Obama and Bush. And I don't think he's operating in that framework
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for good sometimes and sometimes for ill. He is not a guy who will appease another country
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to make friends or keep the peace. He's a guy who will make friends with anybody to keep the peace,
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with any person to keep the peace. He'll say, Kim, Kim Jong-un, love the guy. He's a great guy.
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Come on over. But if Kim Jong-un actually threatens Americans or kills them, he would blow them off the
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face of the earth. And I think also that he does also understand, he does understand, as you're saying,
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there are so many things we could do to Iran with basically the flick of a Xbox controller
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that would cripple them forever. We could take out their ports. We could destroy their Navy.
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Their airplanes are like paper, you know, like airplanes. So we send an airplane out to you,
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you know, and he could take out their entire Air Force.
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He can do to their Air Force what they just did.
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My criticism of Trump, you know, and the thing is, they know it. They know it. And that's why not only
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did they fire the missiles into the dirt, but they were making announcements like,
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By the way, more than that, I mean, the Daily Mail basically reported that Iran called Iraq
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and they said, get your guys out of that base because we need to do something to prove to
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So they actually called up the Iraq, for people who missed the story, they actually called
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up the Iraqi prime minister and they said, you need to move your troops out. The Iraqis
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then went and told the Americans and the Americans moved their troops out, which is why no one's
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dead today. So the Iranians were openly saying to the Americans, okay, we understand.
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We can't go any further than this. Not only that, there was a story today out of Baghdad
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that Muqtad al-Sadr, who's the leader of this huge Shiite group in Iran, has basically
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told the PMF, which was the group that was behind the burning of the embassy, to shut
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So the Iranians are understanding, like, we went too far here and they were pushing,
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right? And here's my problem with Trump's foreign policy for a year there. It was not
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pulling out from the Iran deal, which was great. It was that for a year, the Iranians kept
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telling more and more and more bellicose, right? I mean, they were blowing up shipping
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in the Straits of Hormuz. They had shot down an American drone. They blew up the Saudi
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oil facility. They were firing rockets at American bases. All of this. And Trump really
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did nothing. That's why when people kept saying, Trump desperately wants war with Iran, it's
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But they called him weak before when he didn't respond to the drone being blown up, which I
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kind of agreed with him. I thought, like, I don't know if I want to go with him.
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I certainly didn't agree with him. But I will agree that not since Ronald Reagan has there
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been a president who disdained war more than...
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One reason that we didn't lose any Iraqi soldiers or U.S. soldiers in the ballistic missile strike
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So I just want to finish the narrative here, because I think it's important. So the Obama
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narrative was it was either appeasement or it was full out war. And Trump comes along
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and says, no, there's this thing called deterrence. Right.
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If you cross this line, then I'm going to put a missile through Soleimani's head, which
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is exactly what he did, which is great because Soleimani is better in a thousand pieces.
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Hey, Ben, you know what? The last thing to go through Soleimani.
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No, it actually improved Soleimani's personality.
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You know, I don't tap my own tweets all that often, but that was a great tweet. They
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shipped him back in a box on a civilian airliner in the coach section. I said, well, he
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But here's the point. That was the narrative from Obama. The media repeated it dutifully
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Trump came along and he wrecked the narrative for them because he showed that there was
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this third way. So the media have now responded by refusing to acknowledge that deterrence
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exists. Instead, their narrative has become that Trump is a madman and the ayatollahs are
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rational. Right. It's not that they were deterred. It's that they realized that they didn't
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really want to go to war and Trump is crazy. And so like, by the way, that in and of itself
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does acknowledge that a deterrence took place. It's just that Trump's calculated nuttiness
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made the Iranians back down, supposedly. But they will do anything up to and including
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declaring the ayatollahs who hang gay people from cranes, who oppress women, who spread
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terrorism all across the region. The regime that has been responsible for the deaths of
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tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslims in the Middle East and people abroad, including
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all the way in Buenos Aires when they're bombing synagogues. Right. They are willing to declare
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those people rational actors just to avoid saying that Donald Trump backed them off their
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call. Well, look at what's worse than that. They actually they actually hate Trump and
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us so much that they they. Well, this is. Lawrence O'Toole was rooting for it last night.
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And Michael, I want to get your opinion on this. If the Iranians had responded by bombing
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Trump hotels around the world. Right. Right. Would the media have been able to condemn Iran
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for it? Not a chance. Are you kidding me? They would have been celebrating. They were
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all they were so excited to push Iranian propaganda while the Iranian retaliation was taking place
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completely unvetted, baseless. They were just spouting what the mullahs were giving them.
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Is that Lawrence O'Donnell tweet? Lawrence O'Donnell. I mean, MSNBC was. He said Trump
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wagged the dog. Now the dog is wagging back. Uh-huh. Like openly. On air, they were saying
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30 American casualties. Washington Post is reporting that. A raw story. A number of left wing
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outlets were actually saying the Iranian news agency is calling in 80 casualties. None of it
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happened. The only numbers you need to know are that more Americans were killed by Iran in
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the two weeks before we took out Soleimani than in the entire retaliation. 13 ballistic missiles,
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however many missiles. More were killed before than were killed afterward. It shows you that the
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deterrence works. And the key that Trump reestablished beyond deterrence is unpredictability.
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Because I agree with you. When he didn't respond to the drone, when he didn't respond to the Saudi
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oil field, when he didn't respond to the tanker, at a certain point, you got to put up or shut up. At a
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certain point, you don't believe the threats anymore. And that asymmetrical response,
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taking out their top military commander. Clearly, it worked.
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Is there a point with the media? I mean, the media, as you say, the media was the story.
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I've never seen anything like that. It's disgusting. It was unreal.
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Christian, I'm a poor journalist, was actually like almost singing at the funeral of this guy.
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Oh, they had Martha Raddatz wearing the headgear.
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Oh, my God. Is there a point where corporate calls in and says, boys, you know,
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the American public, we do need them to watch our shows. Surely, surely there is a wide swath of
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America that is looking at these programs and thinking, you have got to be kidding me.
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No, I think, first of all, I think that the corporate higher-ups don't know a damn thing
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about this region of the world at all. I mean, I'm constantly amazed by the coverage at the New
00:16:55.680
They literally know nothing. I mean, they are full-on morons.
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And this first occurred to me, not with regard to this stuff, but with regard to Israel,
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because Israel is in the middle of an election, and they were printing stuff that was so patently
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absurd that I, who am a fairly well-educated follower of Israeli politics, I was looking
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at this and going, are you, like, what? And their coverage of this whole situation, where
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Soleimani was being portrayed as just, you know, the obituaries for this guy were glowing.
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I mean, he was honest, and he was an austere religious scholar. It was part two.
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I mean, they were contrasting, I guess, this former Cincinnati Bengals coach died in the
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last couple of days, and there was a headline from the Washington Post saying, Sam Weish,
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who made the, who did the grievous sin of not allowing a female reporter into the male
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It's like, thank God Iran isn't run by Don Imus, you know.
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It is truly incredible. And so, when Nikki Haley suggests that there are people who seem like
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they are rooting for Iran, you know, there's a fine line between rooting for Iran and just
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not knowing what the hell you're doing. But I think that the, there's one thing that's
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certainly true. They're rooting against Trump. There is no question about that. And they cannot
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allow Trump to have the victory, and so they will rob it from him with anything possible.
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They will suggest that there's more, they'll root for more Iranian retaliation to come,
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And she was questioning the, our deck, Seth Deck, she was questioning our Secretary of Defense,
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like he was a perp. And then she had on a, a Rani official and was questioning her like, you know,
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tell us the truth now, give us the real information. It was, it was incredibly shameful. And I don't know,
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I mean, I've been calling for the media to, the news media to be reformed. Obviously it can't be
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reformed because of the First Amendment, but it should be forced into reform. I'm so happy about
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this Covington school kid, uh, taking out CNN and settling with them for defamation.
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But they have got to do something. This is bad for the country. Trump, you know, Trump is right.
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I will say that the Ayatollahs acted in a way here that was more rational than the media would
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have had them act. The way, the way that the media were covering this thing. I mean, Richard Engel,
00:19:00.240
who's covering this thing from Tehran for NBC, he was on the air talking about, they didn't just
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turn Soleimani into a martyr, they turned him into a saint. And he's covering all the people
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rubbing the relics on the coffin. It's like, yeah, they did the same thing with Stalin.
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This is my actual favorite tweet of the day from Michael Moore, who's a filmmaker.
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And 2004 DNC presidential box city with Jimmy Carter.
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Just wondering, is there an American general for whom millions of us would turn out for
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his funeral? Mad Dog, Kelly, Colin Powell. Can anyone even name the chair of the Joint Chiefs?
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We all support those who serve, but would we pour into the streets like the Iranians?
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Did you hear his podcast where he begged? Did you hear this? He begged, he had an emergency podcast
00:19:39.060
that was a message to the mullahs in Iran, begging them. He said, I have a way for you to win. This
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is what he said. These were his words. I have a way for you to win. Don't sink to our level.
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Don't become, follow your, be true to your book and to your God. And I thought if they're true to
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their book and our God, we are in big, big trouble.
00:19:55.560
You know, he slid into the Ayatollah's DMs. He privately messaged Ayatollah Khamenei on Twitter
00:20:02.240
saying, please don't do this. We'll get rid of Trump. Please don't attack us.
00:20:06.360
So I want to know, you guys, I want your opinion though. When the American people see this,
00:20:11.320
aside from the far left, aside from this, aren't they going to say like, what?
00:20:15.520
Yes. The takeaway is going to be, I think, that in the past three months, Donald Trump took out the
00:20:21.360
top two terrorists on planet Earth. Plus the Hezbollah guys in Iraq. People were killed
00:20:25.780
alongside Soleimani. I mean, so I think that it's going to be very difficult. Like what,
00:20:29.340
what exactly is the democratic platform here going to be? They're desperate for it. Now
00:20:32.000
they're, now they're relegated to arguing that it was an illegal kill on Soleimani because Soleimani
00:20:36.160
wasn't an imminent threat, right? They're all, they're all, he's only responsible for the deaths of
00:20:40.760
hundreds of American soldiers in Iran and in Iraq and the, and the murder of tens of thousands of
00:20:45.440
people in Syria and the murder of people in Yemen and the murder of people in Lebanon and the
00:20:48.640
murder of people in Israel. He's only responsible for those things, but he wasn't like,
00:20:51.360
doing anything that day. Except for that, he was actually in Iraq, except that he was in Iraq
00:20:55.900
to actually sit with the people who had just burned the embassy the day before. But other than that,
00:20:59.440
guys, he was totally not a threat. He was basically a Swedish school child.
00:21:03.080
That's going to be the DNC slogan is going to be win one for Qasim.
00:21:07.800
Win one for the Gipper. They've got win one for Qasim.
00:21:10.200
One thing that always occurs to me in times like this, and it goes to your point about how the media
00:21:13.280
doesn't really know anything. I actually, I agree that Trump actually comes off looking great in this
00:21:18.980
entire affair. As I said, I think it's the greatest or one of the greatest foreign policy
00:21:22.820
achievements of my lifetime. Nevertheless, people don't have a great framework for understanding
00:21:29.380
these sorts of events. When you hear very serious seeming people go on television and tell you that
00:21:35.100
we were on the brink of World War III, when they tell you things like this, this would be,
00:21:41.060
I know someone personally who went and stockpiled food at a grocery store last night. That is
00:21:45.500
the honest to goodness truth. Iran does not have a weapon capable of striking America,
00:21:51.340
except perhaps for actual terrorist suicide bombers or something. There were people who
00:21:55.760
believed World War III was upon us. People thought the draft was about to be reinstituted.
00:21:59.160
They thought the draft was about to be reinstituted. Iran would last, we know almost to the day,
00:22:05.280
exactly three weeks is how long it would take our military to completely destroy the military of
00:22:09.520
Iran. And we also conflate the Iraq war with the Iraq nation building and occupation.
00:22:14.300
People like the Iraq war was a huge failure. Three weeks, we unseated the fourth or fifth
00:22:18.740
largest military on the face of the planet with, with sub 100 casualties. Now, if you want to say
00:22:25.140
that the Iraq nation building and democracy establishing enterprise didn't go very well.
00:22:29.540
It was the Colin Powell Doctrine. That's right. The Powell Doctrine is wrong.
00:22:32.560
I do, I do think that the, the Iranian military is capable of generating more casualties for the
00:22:38.480
United States than the Iraqis did. They do have a, we don't have to say, we're not going to,
00:22:41.440
it's not going to be D-Day. We're not going to have guys in the Persian Gulf paddling their boats.
00:22:45.120
No, no, no, of course not. But we do have about 5,000 troops in the region and they have tens of
00:22:48.580
thousands of militia members. So it turned into, there'd be some bloody battles. But
00:22:51.560
and bottom line is that all of that was speculative because no one wanted to go to war. And I kept
00:22:56.140
saying this over and over, Donald Trump did not want to go to war. The Iranians didn't want to go
00:23:00.280
even more to war, even more than Trump because they knew. And what Tuleman really said was, yes,
00:23:05.560
there is a red line. And unlike with Barack Obama, I'm not going to back off it and then just hand
00:23:09.060
Vladimir Putin the keys to the kingdom, right? All the, all these same jackasses who say that
00:23:13.280
Trump is a tool of Vladimir Putin. Barack Obama handed Syria to Vladimir Putin after letting
00:23:17.460
Bashar Assad gas people. Okay. So why don't you just shut up? But even when you say that Iran could
00:23:21.740
generate some bloody casualties for America in theater, I don't fully agree with you, but even
00:23:26.160
let's grant that that's true. We had a million troops in the Middle East eight years ago. This would
00:23:34.120
have been nothing like that, even if it had turned into a shooting war. Oh no, we have 5,000,
00:23:37.940
we have 5,000 troops in the region right now. Much less World War III, a conflict that you would
00:23:42.460
assume would involve numerous world powers and actual millions of casualties, but very serious
00:23:48.520
people. The same people who say, we have to believe the science. We will all be dead in 12 years.
00:23:54.360
Right. And people go, well, that sounds unreasonable, but this is a very serious person saying it.
00:24:00.540
But not only does Trump learn things, people learn things. And when you go out and you say,
00:24:04.940
oh, the draft is coming and we're protesting the war and the draft doesn't come and the war doesn't
00:24:09.220
come. And in fact, Iran essentially has backed down. I think large swaths of people say, well,
00:24:16.880
wait a minute. I mean, it's like, listen, I was a liberal. I was a liberal. People who are Democrats
00:24:20.380
who were saying like, is it really going to go like this? Like, I have a feeling it's not going to go
00:24:23.900
like this. You know, I was a liberal when Ronald Reagan was president and I thought, what an idiot,
00:24:27.680
what a warmonger. And then one day I thought, you know, everything he's doing works, you know,
00:24:31.900
and then the wall fell down. And the wall fell down. I thought, you know, he was actually right
00:24:36.720
and everybody else was wrong. You start to think about these things. I think, you know, Trump,
00:24:40.780
a lot of people are going to start having, Molly Hemingway just put out a tweet saying she overheard
00:24:44.660
someone say, you know, this guy is kind of good at presidenting. And I think that that's what a lot
00:24:50.640
of people are thinking. It's what I've been thinking for the past several months.
00:24:52.760
You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's big in foreign policy and he said,
00:24:56.600
the thing people get wrong about foreign policy is it's actually much simpler than all the academics
00:25:01.740
and all the experts think. You know, since we're all celebrating Trump here today, Trump had this
00:25:06.660
pretty much stupid advertisement in the New York Times in the 1980s. It was attacking Reagan,
00:25:13.740
but it was to sort of launch his political career. And he was accusing Reagan of being too weak.
00:25:18.500
And what the advertisement said was there's nothing about our American defense policy that
00:25:23.200
couldn't be fixed with a little backbone. Very simple, right? Now, the reason I say it's stupid
00:25:27.640
is I think Ronald Reagan was pretty strong, got the Soviet Union to collapse. But the statement that
00:25:32.700
he made, completely right. It's exactly what we saw here. This was not a fundamental reordering
00:25:37.860
of U.S. foreign affairs. He just had some backbone and it worked.
00:25:42.300
If you would like to talk to us after the show and maybe ask us some very direct questions,
00:25:46.300
you can come over to our new live chat feature at dailywire.com. How do you do it, Jeremy? Well,
00:25:51.940
you become an all access subscriber at dailywire.com using the promo code backstage. We'll get you 15%
00:25:58.420
off, but only if you head over there right now and subscribe during the duration of this show.
00:26:03.900
We're going to be around for a little bit longer. And in fact, we're going to take some questions
00:26:06.800
right now from existing dailywire.com subscribers and members by kicking it over to Alicia. Alicia,
00:26:13.780
what are people back home wanting to know? Well, back home, everybody's kind of on the same
00:26:17.240
topic that you guys have been discussing for the first 20 minutes of the show tonight. How will
00:26:20.860
the president's handling of Iran affect our relations and just everything, I think, with China, Russia,
00:26:25.500
and North Korea? Well, it's certainly going to throw a scare into all three of them insofar as it
00:26:31.640
shows that there are red lines. Again, with Barack Obama, there were no red lines. So North Korea is
00:26:36.860
always playing the same game. The big difference, of course, is that they have nuclear weapons and they do
00:26:40.120
have an insane amount of ordnance that is aimed directly in the center of Seoul. So that is a
00:26:45.440
bigger problem. They're not going away anytime soon. By the way, the mullahs aren't going away
00:26:49.120
anytime soon. But the idea that the North Koreans are going to get wildly aggressive is obviously
00:26:53.660
untrue because at a certain point they will cross a red line. The Chinese are playing a long game,
00:26:57.320
so the idea of them getting openly aggressive was never a real possibility. The Russians are—I think
00:27:03.100
that they have pretty much finished with their territorial incursions under President Trump. I think
00:27:07.080
that they feel like they've gotten away with about as much as they can. It's been basically quiet since
00:27:10.960
the invasion of Crimea, which is several years ago at this point. I don't think they're going to get
00:27:14.840
territorially aggressive. Again, I think that Trump really sent a message to the world here,
00:27:20.320
and the Iranians backing down really is a major foreign policy win for him. And I think that the
00:27:26.400
real message in all of this is that Barack Obama was wrong about everything, as per our usual
00:27:29.800
arrangement. Seriously. And the media cannot let go of it. Yeah. And the rest of the world basically
00:27:33.840
understands that now. And the other thing about Obama was, unlike Jimmy Carter, the second worst
00:27:37.980
president of my lifetime, he never learned. He never changed his mind. It didn't matter what
00:27:42.680
happened. He was so certain of himself. I mean, Jimmy Carter, when Russia went into Afghanistan,
00:27:47.060
thought, okay, maybe I was wrong about that. You know, maybe I was wrong about the Soviet Union.
00:27:51.560
Obama, you know, the comedian who said he was like obsidian? He was, except up here.
00:27:57.420
You know, even the fact that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out and basically endorsed the
00:28:02.640
president's actions over the last few hours. Three days ago, two days ago, Britain was openly
00:28:09.600
basically rebuking the killing of Soleimani. So I say that only to say, I think everyone learned a
00:28:15.160
lesson. I think in capitals all across Europe and in capitals all across the world, people are looking
00:28:19.900
at America with a little bit more serious of an eye. And that's something that's been missing for the
00:28:24.560
last decade, at least, and is a very, very powerful thing for us. And it does show the disconnect
00:28:28.960
between the supposed importance of rhetoric and the importance of action, especially on stuff like
00:28:33.340
this, because this was, people kept saying, oh, he's tweeting all these nasty things to Iran.
00:28:36.640
Right. But the concept is extraordinarily basic. It's the same concept that you use with your child
00:28:40.620
or that kids use with each other, which is if you do this, I'm going to punch you. Right.
00:28:44.120
Right. Trump, that's Trump's message, right? It's right in his wheelhouse.
00:28:47.520
And you know, the other thing about the Powell Doctrine is it essentially, the Powell Doctrine was that
00:28:51.800
if you break it, you own it, right? And that essentially neutralizes our strength, because no matter
00:28:55.740
how big you are on the ground, an indigenous guerrilla force can keep you fighting forever.
00:29:01.740
I mean, that was George Washington. Yeah. Coleman Powell had not learned the first lesson
00:29:05.480
of American warfare. Exactly. But the Washington Doctrine. The Washington Doctrine. Exactly. And
00:29:10.400
when you sit, when you sit, got a 17 year old sitting home with an Xbox controller taking out
00:29:14.620
your main guy, that's power. And that's the kind of power we have now. And it should be used
00:29:19.160
when we have to. You know, the return on the investment is also so great. I mean, I don't know how much
00:29:23.900
that drone shot cost that took out Soleimani, but the return on the deterrence is so great
00:29:29.080
because it's a return in North Korea, as you say, in China. It's a return among our allies.
00:29:33.920
You know, you only have to show the credible use of violence every so often. That establishes
00:29:40.700
it. You only have to be unpredictable every so often. It's like Reagan and Thatcher at the
00:29:44.540
Falklands. That's right. Right. I mean, it doesn't take a major military action to convince
00:29:48.700
everybody that you are willing to do what you say you're going to do. I also think that this
00:29:52.300
has weighed heavily on President Trump. I don't think that, again, since Ronald Reagan, we haven't
00:29:56.840
had a president who disliked war more than Donald Trump. It's fun when Hollywood starlets call him
00:30:02.620
a terrorist. We've got a terrorist in the White House. You've got a guy here who, so far anyway,
00:30:07.800
is the only president since 88 not to start an actual shooting war. But if you watch that,
00:30:13.720
if you watch that press conference that the president had this, not press conference,
00:30:16.620
but that address that the president gave this morning, looked terrible. He sounded terrible.
00:30:21.300
He sounded like he was sick. He looked like he had slept in several days. He was slurring
00:30:24.920
a few words. I mean, if you were a Hollywood script writer, you couldn't have done better
00:30:29.480
than he said, I want to be clear. The territorial interest of the United States. Like, no, you
00:30:37.120
can't slur the word after I want to be clear. But I don't say any of that to make fun of the
00:30:41.700
president, maybe just a tiny bit in good humor. But I think it's taken a toll on the guy.
00:30:46.300
The guy does not like the idea of military conflict. He doesn't want to kill people.
00:30:51.960
Barack Obama was down in the Situation Room bombing people from the air almost every day
00:30:55.920
of his presidency. Donald Trump has been clear about this basically his entire life. He does
00:31:01.360
not like war. He doesn't want to deploy. He called off a drone strike.
00:31:03.820
You shouldn't like war, right? I mean, we don't like war.
00:31:08.520
It's bad for children and other flowers and whatever.
00:31:11.120
Oh, man. Rush Hour reference there? All right. I don't know if you guys saw this video earlier,
00:31:17.320
but it was Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar kind of giggling during a conversation that Democrats had,
00:31:22.380
a press conference actually, that Democrats had regarding the Iraq war. And this question
00:31:27.120
comes from a subscriber who wants to know, with antics like this and their sympathies to Iran,
00:31:31.240
do you guys think that the squad will survive the 2020 elections?
00:31:35.040
If the squad didn't exist, we'd have to make them in a laboratory. I hope so. They want to
00:31:39.980
redistrict AOC out of her seat in New York because the New York Democrats like her even
00:31:44.680
less than the Republicans do. I'm going to fight to keep her seat. I really want them to stay in
00:31:49.440
power. You know what was amazing today? Ilhan Omar, she was giggling with Tlaib at that press
00:31:53.500
conference. It just seemed like they were acting like children. I don't think it was a direct
00:31:57.320
reaction to what was being discussed. What was so amazing is she said that the sanctions that Trump
00:32:03.060
is reinstituting on Iran. She said sanctions are warfare. Sanctions cause death and destruction,
00:32:09.960
and that's terrible. One year ago, she said, Ilhan Omar supports the boycott, divest, and sanction
00:32:17.300
Israel movement. So we can't declare war on the Jews.
00:32:20.760
J-O-O-O-O. You know, you can, we can declare war on Israel, but no war on Iran. She said that
00:32:28.380
almost- It's on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
00:32:30.920
Yeah. She retweeted George Carlin saying America's in the business of bombing brown and
00:32:35.600
black people. That's her retweet on this. You know, I do think, listen, people are moving out
00:32:41.060
of red states and moving to blue states. And I know we all fear that when they do that,
00:32:44.160
they'll go to the red state and start voting blue and turn the state over.
00:32:47.220
You said moving from blue states to red states.
00:32:49.340
Sorry. And they're doing it en masse. I mean, blue states are losing congressional seats because
00:32:54.360
of the population transfer. You know, people catch on to things. People are not stupid. I,
00:33:00.100
you know, that they do see what's going on. They do see through the press. The press is not as
00:33:04.780
powerful as it used to be. Young people aren't reading the press at all. You know, they're reading
00:33:09.980
You heard it from Andrew Klavan, folks at home. People are not stupid. Alicia,
00:33:16.040
All right. Jumping into election 2020, because we're officially in 2020, guys. Aren't you so
00:33:20.880
excited? I mean, I don't do Barbara Walters impersonation, but just imagine me talking about
00:33:25.440
2020. So the question for all of you guys is which Democratic primary candidate do you think
00:33:30.280
benefits the most from these increased tensions with Iran?
00:33:38.300
Oh, he was at one time, though. He was at one time.
00:33:40.920
I mean, the answer is Biden, because anytime people feel a little bit unsettled, they want the
00:33:43.940
person whose face they've seen before and who isn't a bat bleep loony communist. I mean,
00:33:48.100
like Bernie Sanders being out there and being like, I've been against every war since the
00:33:51.260
creation of war. And I was there when Cain killed Abel. And it's like, OK, you know, I'm sorry,
00:33:56.100
but you were like, there are only two people there, Bernie, and only one of them lived.
00:34:02.700
But like Bernie, the fact that Bernie and Biden are the top two candidates means that
00:34:07.740
Biden's the nominee. I just I do not see a situation in which those two are the final
00:34:12.520
two. And Sanders walks away with the nomination.
00:34:14.660
Jason Reilly was saying today he thought that Bernie was in with a chance. I kind of agree
00:34:18.500
I mean, I think he's got a chance in the sense that he could win the caucuses because caucuses
00:34:22.980
Yeah. And he's expected to win New Hampshire last time.
00:34:25.060
He won New Hampshire last time, but he won it 49 percent last time. Right now he's pulling
00:34:28.100
at like twenty five, twenty seven percent. If Biden finishes a close second in both those
00:34:31.700
states, it's over. If I agree with that in both those states, if he is in like the 13
00:34:37.120
percent rate. Do you think Bloomberg has a chance?
00:34:39.180
So Bloomberg's only opportunity is basically that that Biden loses in Iowa and loses heavily
00:34:44.880
enough that New Hampshire becomes crucial to him. He blows all of his money.
00:34:48.420
Sanders then wins New Hampshire anyway. So Biden has lost all of his money.
00:34:51.980
Sanders wins Nevada. And at that point, Biden is basically out of the race because he's blown
00:34:55.500
all of his money. And the only person who's left in the race is a moderate with
00:34:58.020
money is Bloomberg. And that's it. That's that's the bet that he's making.
00:35:00.700
And it's a narrow bet. It's not impossible, but it's it's also not really the idea that
00:35:05.180
the that the 2020 Democrat Party is going to elect one of the 10 richest people in the
00:35:10.020
world to be president of the United States, an old, rich, white New York billionaire.
00:35:14.660
Jew. Well, the only thing to say, though, with never, never say never.
00:35:20.280
Bloomberg, I thought he'd enter the race at zero point two percent.
00:35:23.600
The people who actually ascribe to his views account for like four percent of the electorate.
00:35:28.020
He came in with six percent. He's now nationally tied with Liz Warren, who was the front runner.
00:35:32.900
One national poll has him at 11 percent. That's much better than I thought.
00:35:36.340
The invisible prop on this set is not going to be relevant.
00:35:38.300
His other his other big problem is that he actually supports school choice and charter
00:35:46.820
Yeah. Oh, you mean his big problem is that he's a Republican?
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40% off while supplies last. Well, I mean, I was just thinking that, speaking of people
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on camera, I thought the most important commentary on everything happening in Iran came from Patricia
00:38:42.740
Arquette, because Golden Globe always. Hold on. How good was Ricky Gervais? He was tremendous.
00:38:53.060
Magnificent, right? Like, that was just wonderful. We're all going to be saved by comedians because
00:38:56.980
they can't stand being told what not to say. That's right. But the best part about the Ricky
00:39:01.320
Gervais routine was not Ricky Gervais. It was all the cutaways. Yes. The cutaways were by far the
00:39:05.020
best thing where you would have the cutaways. Tim Cook was the classic. Oh my God. I actually
00:39:08.600
couldn't believe that one. That one was spectacular. But there were some from, like that woman from
00:39:13.880
the Gilmore Girls when he was making the joke about Jeffrey Epstein and she just looked like she
00:39:17.520
was sucking on a woman. And all these various actors and actresses, they would cut away to them
00:39:22.640
and they were so upset that anybody would dare prick this balloon of self-esteem that they had.
00:39:27.820
And the important thing was not just him telling them that they didn't know anything about
00:39:31.000
politics. It was him calling them out for the massive, massive hypocrisy. Tim Cook made one
00:39:36.120
of the stupidest speeches I have ever heard when he said, you know, we're going to take hate off our
00:39:40.600
sites because it's the right thing to do and our conscience is sacred. I thought, you're a
00:39:44.840
billionaire CEO. Shut up. You know, just make your phones and let us do the talking because we're the
00:39:49.700
people. You know, at what point does a billionaire CEO decide that he is the guy in charge of what we
00:39:55.580
can say? I mean, I'll at least say for the billionaire CEO, at least he's providing a product or
00:39:58.460
service that millions of people are gaining access to. So do it. Do it. No, like that. All of that's
00:40:03.120
good. But like Michelle Williams makes art house films that no one's ever seen. I didn't know who
00:40:08.060
she was before she gave that speech. Before she killed the Hare Krishna member, took his garb,
00:40:12.240
put it on, grabbed a plastic bag, put it on her shoulder and then went up there and started talking
00:40:15.480
about killing babies. This is the thing about them. They're all incredibly talented at what they do
00:40:18.560
and they should just do it. But her speech was, yes, I had to kill a child in order to get fame and
00:40:23.980
fortune. That's the oldest story. Come on. Yeah, right. I mean, you get a little golden
00:40:27.580
statue. If I could get something that I could maybe just really worship. You can't put a child
00:40:32.080
on your shelf. That's very true. They fall off. Nothing says female power. Like I had to kill
00:40:37.300
this baby to become an actress. Alyssa Milano said the same thing like three months ago. And you read
00:40:42.100
about it and you think, I've read that story. What was going on with the set of Charmed?
00:40:45.200
It was in Rose McGowan, who's literally like stumping for the Iranians and saying she wanted to move
00:40:49.980
over there. And Alyssa Milano, who's also a kook. Like what was going on over there? It's the same thing
00:40:54.560
that goes on on every set. Hollywood actually steers into, if you've ever been here and seen
00:40:58.960
any of the architecture, Hollywood steers into this sort of Babylonian pagan ancestry that they
00:41:05.460
see as sort of being, this was, to quote Don Henley, Gamora by the sea. But I think to quote our
00:41:11.680
friend Andrew Breitbart, this was Babylon. He wrote a book very famously called Babylon Sheik. Hollywood
00:41:18.260
interrupted Babylon Sheik, right? I just finished Ronan Farrow's book. And I have to tell you,
00:41:23.080
I was listening to it. I'm going on these hikes and I'd go up, I'd go up and then I'd meet my wife
00:41:27.900
at the top because she's slower than I am. And then we walked down together. By the time I'd walk
00:41:31.160
down, I was like frothing at the mouth with the rage, the hypocrisy. Ronan Farrow, who, you know,
00:41:37.140
he was heroic in this instance. He was heroic in this instance. But he kept bringing this stuff and
00:41:41.460
they kept saying, they wouldn't even say, we're not going to do this because we got pressure from
00:41:45.980
Harvey Weinstein. They wouldn't even say that. All they would say is, let's put on pause. Let's put it on
00:41:50.260
the back burner. And it turned out the reason they were doing it is because they were protecting Matt
00:41:53.800
Lauer, who was doing exactly the same thing right under their nose. And everybody knew it.
00:41:57.720
The corruption is incredible in these industries. And to have Gervais stand up and say,
00:42:02.960
not that you shouldn't talk about it because you don't know about it, but you shouldn't talk about
00:42:05.940
it because you're the worst people in the country. You work for the worst people in the country.
00:42:10.340
And the guy out in the Midwest in his checked shirt who's voting for Donald Trump hasn't done those
00:42:15.980
things. You know, he hasn't organized the incredible mass abuse of young women.
00:42:21.400
But this is actually where I was going with the Babylon thing, that they don't hear what
00:42:24.940
they're actually saying. If I had to say, I had to kill my little sister to build the Daily Wire,
00:42:31.140
everyone would go, well, that's, maybe it wasn't worth it. That's not a good thing.
00:42:38.480
But they have this Babylonian pagan mentality. And it's actually a real insight into the truth
00:42:42.880
about abortion. Abortion is just paganism. It's just the belief that if you kill your
00:42:48.400
children, the sky god will send rain and you'll get more crops. It's a genuine belief that if we
00:42:54.240
sacrifice our babies, we will be more materially successful. And so it's no...
00:42:58.620
This explains why they hate the Jews. This is what the Jews put an end to, right?
00:43:01.620
Yes. The Jews brought us monotheism. Monotheism defeated Babylonian paganism.
00:43:05.880
And it stopped sacrificing your children to the ball.
00:43:08.100
You know, there was one... I actually have to give credit to an actor at the Golden Globes.
00:43:12.080
other than Ricky Gervais. And that is Joaquin Phoenix.
00:43:15.520
Joaquin Phoenix goes up there and he is a lefty, right? His whole speech was about environmentalism,
00:43:20.400
how we have to save the planet. But in his speech, he said, look, guys, it's really good,
00:43:24.640
you know, to have all these kind of gimmicky dinners and stuff. Maybe don't fly private
00:43:29.080
everywhere. Maybe fly commercial like once every so often. Just maybe you should do something
00:43:34.820
in your own life rather than just prattle on and tell everyone else what to do.
00:43:38.700
Although I will say that I have a hypocrisy Joaquin Phoenix story. So very, very recently
00:43:43.940
I was visiting a restaurant. I won't mention which restaurant. And it was... The restaurant
00:43:47.740
was about to open and Joaquin Phoenix walks in and he's at the counter. And this is a restaurant
00:43:51.600
that basically sells only meat. Like it only sells meat. And he walked in and he walked
00:43:55.500
out with a box and he... Or I think he had to leave because he couldn't wait for the box
00:43:58.620
or something. And he was wearing a vegan shirt.
00:44:02.560
Is that... Is it hypocrisy or is the guy just... Is he actually hip enough to know that that's
00:44:15.160
Honestly, I thought that the best joke was not even that one. I thought that the best joke
00:44:17.880
that Gervais told was the thing about how he was going to do an in memoriam, but there
00:44:20.980
were too many white people and not on his watch. Because you know that that's what's going
00:44:24.480
to happen at this year's Oscars, right? I just had Brett Easton-Ellis on my show today
00:44:29.260
and we were talking about the Golden Globes. And he was saying that when it comes to the
00:44:32.360
BAFTA Awards, for example, all 20 nominees in all the categories are white, which means
00:44:36.220
we're going to get another Oscars so white routine this year. How about there were just
00:44:39.680
a lot of really good movies that got made and they happen to have white people in them?
00:44:44.720
And the line about the foreign press, the Hollywood foreign press being racist, that's true.
00:44:50.080
Well, the only place where you're not allowed to be a racist is America.
00:44:52.800
I mean, that's actually one of the funny truths. Like, you've talked about it before, Drew.
00:44:58.260
You can be black and of course you're just an American. If you were born in America, you
00:45:02.960
grew up in America. But not so much in Germany or not so much in...
00:45:06.460
No, I don't know. The Rose McGowan said that Iran is pretty progressive on these issues.
00:45:11.000
I feel for poor Rose McGowan. Harvey Weinstein actually did a number on her. She's an actress.
00:45:17.000
Well, yeah. And she was fairly heroic in that situation as well.
00:45:25.500
Funnily enough, you don't get to abuse women just because they're crazy. If you did, we'd
00:45:31.600
And with that, we probably ought to check back in with Alicia.
00:45:36.620
We're going to have Alicia try to save us from ourselves.
00:45:39.500
We're going to have Alicia try to save us from ourselves.
00:45:41.660
If you are a Daily Wire subscriber, be sure and send your questions into Alicia. She will
00:45:46.140
get them to us. If you're not a Daily Wire subscriber, however, what are you waiting
00:45:50.220
on? Now is the time. If you want to get 15% off of your Daily Wire membership, head over
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to dailywire.com right now. Use the promo code Backstage because this show is called Backstage.
00:46:02.660
We'll give you 15% off. You will become a subscriber. You will be able to beam Alicia all of your
00:46:07.180
questions. You will also be able to talk to us after the show. We have this new feature on the
00:46:12.620
website that allows us to do live chats with our all-access members. It's almost like a Reddit
00:46:18.440
AMA. You write in your questions. We write back responses. This will be the third time that we've
00:46:22.460
done it following this show. I love it. I think it's a great addition. It's really fun. When we
00:46:27.780
take the questions live, you can only fit so many into the show. When all four of us are able to engage
00:46:33.180
in this chat feature and really go directly to some of our... We'll crank through 100 questions on this
00:46:38.600
thing. Oh, yeah. We answer at least 100 questions. So head over to dailywire.com
00:46:41.720
slash Backstage. Use the promo code Backstage to get 15% off it only if you do it over the next
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Elisha. You're never supposed to telecast when you make a mistake. You're just supposed to
00:49:24.720
seamlessly act as though I had never offered to pitch it to Elisha. And now we just go into another
00:49:28.920
news story. But they keep trying to tell... They're in my ear saying, don't go to Elisha. Don't go to
00:49:32.920
Elisha. They're putting on the teleprompter, Elisha isn't ready. Elisha isn't ready. And I'm so
00:49:37.580
desperate to know where the hell Elisha is. Where did she go? I just can't help but say, I don't know, folks.
00:49:44.060
She'll get to your questions here just in a little bit. She walked out after that crazy joke.
00:49:47.560
The crazy joke. That's what it was. I actually, with that crazy joke, I was about to put out a
00:49:52.200
disclaimer to Media Matters. They're all still at Suleimani's funeral. So I actually don't...
00:49:56.300
We're not even watching. It's fine. We were talking before the show and it's actually something that
00:50:01.340
I think when we talk about it live on the air, it's always one of the more engaging things that we
00:50:05.900
have. But because the news is usually so overwhelming, we don't get a chance. There were a lot of great
00:50:27.120
movie after another about real people with real problems, you know, came out and they
00:50:32.900
I finally had a chance to watch a bunch of them at the end of the year. So what was your
00:50:36.920
I think... Boy, that's a tough one. I loved... I really enjoyed Knives Out, which I didn't
00:50:41.500
think was a great film, but I just thought it was incredibly entertaining. And as a mystery
00:50:46.480
writer, I usually sit there and pick these things apart, but I was sitting there going,
00:50:50.160
no, this is good. This is a good mystery story.
00:50:52.160
It's incredibly well plotted, actually. And it's a very complex plot and he makes it accessible,
00:50:56.620
the director. And as I was saying before the show, it's the first film that I've seen in
00:51:00.400
a long time where I actually felt like the filmmaker's only motive was to entertain.
00:51:08.500
Absolutely. I think my favorite film this year was the Tarantino film, and I'm not a
00:51:13.020
Tarantino fan, but I thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the first film with really
00:51:18.160
great values. It was just imbued. I mean, that's not what makes a film great, except that it
00:51:23.060
did move the movie. That they had these characters that you really liked who rose above what they
00:51:28.080
were and who rose above the Hollywood culture. And it had... The last 15 minutes, I laughed
00:51:33.100
without stopping. I mean, I just laughed with... I sat there and laughed with me.
00:51:35.860
It's really the only place in the movie where there's brutal violence, because normally
00:51:38.240
with the Tarantino film, you expect brutal violence the entire way. But it's really
00:51:41.200
violence-free up until the last 15 minutes. And then it is brutal violence. And my wife,
00:51:44.260
who despises brutal violence, she was watching it and she was cringing, but she was also laughing
00:51:50.340
The final punchline of the movie is so unbelievably funny. And it's well set up. You know, what's so
00:51:56.400
great about that movie... That was actually my favorite movie of the year, too. And I don't think it's a
00:52:00.300
great movie. I don't think... But I thought it was very, very good. It's about the exact moment when
00:52:06.300
Hollywood completely went crazy. It was right there. And so you saw what was being lost and you saw what
00:52:13.220
And that's sort of the theme, right? So for those who don't know sort of the setup of the film,
00:52:16.620
basically, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski live next door to Leonardo DiCaprio, who's a failing
00:52:23.300
He's Clint Eastwood before he turns there, yeah.
00:52:25.160
Right? Because he ends up doing some spaghetti Westerns and all of this. And he's actually a very
00:52:28.980
good actor. He's supposed to be a very good actor, very talented guy, but he's being left behind
00:52:32.220
by the Art Nouveau crowd. And his stunt double, who is Brad Pitt, is this old World War II veteran
00:52:38.940
who's incredibly competent in everything he does? He's just incredibly competent, but doesn't
00:52:43.040
actually have a life. He just kind of sits around, is chauffeur for Leonardo DiCaprio.
00:52:47.360
And it's about how these two guys, one of whom portrays the manly man version on TV, but isn't
00:52:52.260
actually all that manly, and the one who actually is the manly man who makes sure that the fake
00:52:57.160
manly man can keep safe. It's about how these two guys are being left behind by Hollywood. And if only
00:53:02.180
Hollywood, because it's an alternative history, like all of Tarantino's movies have now become,
00:53:05.260
the entire thing is basically, if 1970s Hollywood had not thrown away the masculinity that was
00:53:11.060
inherent in 1950s and 60s Hollywood, it would have saved Hollywood as opposed to destroying it.
00:53:15.020
It had a scene at the ranch. It involves the Manson family. It has a scene out at the Manson
00:53:20.360
Ranch, which may have been the most suspenseful scene I've seen in a movie in 10 years. It was
00:53:24.960
literally Hitchcockian. It was quiet. It was understated. It reminded me of the last scene of
00:53:30.200
Notorious, which is just a guy walking down a flight of stairs, and you just sit there on the edge of
00:53:34.440
Well, Tarantino does have a gift for that, right? There's that Christoph Waltz scene in
00:53:36.840
Inglourious Basterds. Yes, in the opening scene. But this was quieter. I mean, that was a setup.
00:53:42.440
This was just like, you understood, first of all, the incredible decency of the Brad Pitt
00:53:47.340
character, what he was doing, and you understood he was surrounded by evil. And it was just a man
00:53:51.780
doing the right thing in the midst of evil, and you sat there.
00:53:55.200
Man, if you don't like hippies, this is the movie for you.
00:53:56.880
It was interesting. He just won the award last night. I forget what it was, Producers Guild
00:54:01.720
or something, or Directors Guild, who knows. He wins the award, and he goes up and he dedicates
00:54:08.000
the movie to John Milius, who is one of the great directors in Hollywood history, and one
00:54:14.120
of the only conservatives in town. And for me, it sort of confirmed what I thought, which
00:54:19.040
is that this really is a lowercase c conservative movie. It's about conserving something that was
00:54:24.380
lost. The other conservative movie of this year that they didn't realize was conservative,
00:54:28.200
because they never realized they're making a conservative film, it's just a conservative
00:54:30.520
film, was Ford vs. Ferrari, which is just a great American film about cars and men, and
00:54:36.980
men doing manly things that are responsible, and building cool stuff, and doing so in order
00:54:41.720
to promote America as opposed to foreigners. And it's such a uniquely conservative film.
00:54:47.880
And it's so funny, because Hollywood thinks of it as, well, this is them speaking up against
00:54:51.320
the nastiness of capitalism, because the sort of quasi-villain of the film is Henry Ford
00:54:55.980
II, who was, in fact, not a very good CEO. But the entire premise of the film is that
00:55:00.380
it's the capitalist enterprise that gets this thing going and off the ground and allows
00:55:05.520
What I loved about it, though, was it was an honest, I mean, art is always a little culture
00:55:09.380
critical. You know, art doesn't just celebrate a culture. And what I liked about it is it showed
00:55:13.420
capitalism in all the good of it and all the bad of it. It showed you how corporate
00:55:17.920
society can crush individuals and not let them do what they can do best. But it also
00:55:22.660
showed you how the competition that it inspires builds things that are wonderful. You know,
00:55:27.460
and it was really honest. It was an honest film.
00:55:29.800
Yeah, I thought it was quite wonderful. And both of those movies you should see in the
00:55:36.220
Which was I saw an early in early showing. And it's it's great. It's great, which I did
00:55:41.700
not expect it to be because I because the director is Sam Mendes, I think, who directed
00:55:45.720
him. So I'm not a huge Sam Mendes fan. Like American Beauty, I think, is one of the worst
00:55:52.980
And it's and the entire kind of conceit of the film from a directorial point of view
00:55:57.360
is that it is one long tracking shot for two hours.
00:55:59.920
Yeah. And so that gets unbelievably creative because they're full on battle scenes happening
00:56:05.140
through this one tracking shot for two hours. It's it's it's it doesn't feel as gimmicky
00:56:11.400
Yeah. Which won Best Picture? And it's incredibly gimmicky. It's just not a good movie.
00:56:17.420
Oh, you theater people. Birdman is a load of bullshit.
00:56:20.840
Anyway, Birdman is garbage. This is not a garbage film. And it's and it does have honest,
00:56:26.360
actual respect for soldiers in World War One without any of the sort of revisionist history
00:56:30.860
where the British soldiers were duped and morons of the of the higher ups, the sort of paths
00:56:35.260
of glory view of World War One. It really doesn't have that. It's these guys who are being brave
00:56:39.660
for the sake of being brave and are fighting some pretty vicious people because it turns
00:56:43.140
out the Hun was not a great. They're pretty brutal on the Germans in the movie.
00:56:47.340
Oh, yeah. And, you know, I have to disagree a little bit with this. I will agree with you
00:56:51.140
in that I really enjoyed the movie. I liked every minute of it. It's unbelievably well
00:56:56.000
shot. It's beautiful. The performance by the main actor is really outstanding. Yeah.
00:57:01.880
However, I left the movie. I won't give any spoilers, but I left the movie feeling that
00:57:05.980
it was more a video game than a movie that it actually and my takeaway from that is that
00:57:11.000
the movie like so many movies today just became about how skillful the movie was rather than
00:57:16.940
about telling a full story with full character and full plot that it's not a film that could
00:57:21.080
have ever been made in the past. The ability to do a movie that's essentially a guy running
00:57:26.520
for two hours and actually have that be killed. It's technically impossible.
00:57:33.460
You know, it's funny. When it came out and it bombed, I cringed because I knew what all
00:57:37.740
the stories were going to say. It was Clint Eastwood's biggest bomb since True Crime, which
00:57:42.080
was based on my novel. But the only difference was True Crime was not one of Clint's best movies.
00:57:47.440
And this was a really good movie. And the performances are unbelievable. Olivia Wilde,
00:57:53.980
who plays the kind of wild, crazy reporter who will do anything for a story. And I've
00:57:59.480
worked with a lot of those women, basically. And she gets that character. She is so real.
00:58:04.080
She's almost three-dimensional. She almost comes out of the screen and stands there in
00:58:07.780
front of you. It's an unbelievable performance. The lead guy whose name I don't even know who
00:58:12.060
plays Richard Jewell, it's like an uncanny performance. It's just like you forget that
00:58:18.400
he's acting. I know that's a cliché thing to say, but you actually forget that he's
00:58:21.920
not the guy. It's a really good movie. And the thing that's different, the funny thing
00:58:26.380
about True Crime is True Crime is true crime is about a white guy who's put on, the novel
00:58:30.520
is about a white guy who's put on death row because they don't want any more black guys
00:58:34.260
on death row and they make a mistake. And they changed it in the movie and made him a black
00:58:38.140
guy, which ruined the entire story. In this one, Clint just goes for it. He just says,
00:58:42.460
the press is dishonest. They stink. Ordinary Americans are where it's at. And it's really,
00:58:52.380
Well, you know, I didn't like Taxi Driver, and I thought this was kind of a better version
00:58:57.780
Right. I wasn't totally taken with it. I mean, I think he's a good actor. He's kind of limited
00:59:03.020
in at least the types of roles he plays. He's pretty much always playing some version
00:59:07.660
of the Joker, this very intense, introspective kind of weird guy. But I just felt it didn't...
00:59:15.220
I hate the superhero movies. I felt it didn't really do respect to anything about that superhero
00:59:21.120
story and that superhero genre. So I can't say I loved it.
00:59:24.080
Yeah. So this was sort of my take as well, which was that on its own, if it was just a
00:59:27.420
movie about a dispossessed guy going nuts, which is basically the movie, then it works
00:59:31.280
from that perspective. And there is a scene with Robert De Niro near the end that really is
00:59:35.660
It's a phenomenal scene. It is a really, really good scene. And it is, again, a commentary
00:59:38.300
on the media and what the media do. And anytime they comment... I mean, there may be a theme
00:59:41.800
that you've noticed in the show, which is that anything that rips on the media, we're in
00:59:45.520
But my biggest problem with the film is that because the Joker is a Batman character, the
00:59:50.540
entire question is, does he provide a worthy rival to Batman? For me, as a fan of the Batman
00:59:55.660
series. And so Heath Ledger, obviously his character is insanely clever. He's pre-planning
01:00:00.420
everything. He's always three steps ahead. So the fact that Batman has a hard time
01:00:03.460
handling him makes a lot of sense. In this movie, basically, the Joker is a loser with
01:00:08.560
severe mental illness who sort of lucks into these plots, but he keeps getting arrested.
01:00:13.460
I mean, he's pretty feckless. I mean, he's not good at what he does and he's not subtle
01:00:17.880
And so the idea that Bruce Wayne, who's supposed to be this genius billionaire with unlimited
01:00:21.420
resources, would have any trouble at all capturing the Joker or putting him down,
01:00:25.440
that didn't play for me. But otherwise, I kind of thought it was overrated, which I was
01:00:29.140
shocked by because I thought I was going to like it based on how the fact the critics
01:00:31.280
were kind of ripping on him. In fairness, the Joker always gets caught by Batman.
01:00:35.980
Like half of every Batman story starts with, at Arkham Asylum, in the bottom cell. And
01:00:42.660
the Joker's actually already caught. And then he's like, I'm going to escape.
01:00:49.180
I talk about a conservative film, though. I mean, that film basically took place in the
01:00:53.640
New York of the 70s and 80s. It's the indication of its corruption is the porno films being
01:01:00.620
shown all over the place. And basically, the Joker is an anti-capitalist. And they show
01:01:06.500
Bruce, Bruce Wayne's father, I guess it is, they show him as kind of a jerk. But still,
01:01:14.520
He's not really unfair or unjust. You're right.
01:01:17.460
And it was kind of a rebuke to that film that I hate so much, V is for Vendetta.
01:01:23.520
It was kind of a rebuke for that because it shows the guys in the masks are really the bad
01:01:26.740
guys, you know? And I thought that was really worthwhile, too.
01:01:37.740
Well, you know, I go to a special pump room because if I were to do that on camera, you
01:01:41.240
guys should charge more for subscribers. But I am back. And I really think...
01:01:46.080
I was not expecting that. I just have to say, of all of the answers...
01:01:49.740
Just being honest. But I am back. And I think that you guys really forgot to tell the audience,
01:01:57.760
I know your favorite film, you know, that was totally unrecognized was Truly Cats. Let's
01:02:04.580
Magical Mr. Mistoffelees' performance was just stunning.
01:02:08.300
If there's one thing that makes the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber even worse of line,
01:02:14.220
it's beautiful Hollywood starlets teetering on the backside of the uncanny divide, doing
01:02:26.780
T.S. Eliot, who is actually a good poet, must be rolling over in his grave that this
01:02:30.940
He wrote those little awful poems for his grandkid or something, meant to be hidden away
01:02:35.920
in a box somewhere, never. And then Andrew Lloyd Webber basically blows up his whole legacy.
01:02:39.840
I actually don't hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. I hate cats.
01:02:43.220
Yeah, I hate cats, but I like Phantom of the Opera.
01:02:44.740
No, Phantom is well-crafted. Cats is just absolutely horror.
01:02:48.840
Hey, hold on. Wait, are you telling me that... Just listen to these poetic lyrics.
01:02:53.280
Jellicle, jellicle cats. Jellicle cats. Jellicle cats. It's like about five or a million.
01:03:01.300
Alicia, what are our DailyWire.com subscribers telling us?
01:03:04.600
Well, continuing with the Golden Globes Hollywood conversation, people are, of course, all week
01:03:08.520
long have been talking about how Netflix is the most nominated studio at the Globes, yet
01:03:12.540
they didn't walk away with a single win. Do you guys agree with that decision? It's
01:03:17.900
not the Academy. What is it? The Foreign Press is whatever it is called. Do you guys agree
01:03:22.520
with that, or do you think any of the Netflix things that were nominated should have won?
01:03:26.260
No, none of them should have won. Marriage Story is the most overrated film of the year
01:03:29.660
by a very, very large margin. And maybe close second is Irishman.
01:03:35.340
Just awful, interminable, nine hours long. It's like Bagnarian Ring Cycle with less action.
01:03:43.720
It's awful in every way. I will watch those movies. I'm kind of a sucker for those types
01:03:48.640
of movies, even if I don't really... I don't love the morality of them, but if I get caught
01:03:52.500
in the middle of Goodfellas, even though I don't even like the movie Goodfellas, I will
01:03:55.080
still watch the movie Goodfellas. If I got caught in the middle of Irishman, you could flick
01:03:59.120
the channel so easily. There's no watchability to it at all. It's just awful. And A Marriage
01:04:02.580
Story is the most... It's like... Have any of you guys seen... I know you've seen it,
01:04:07.860
Drew, but have any of you guys seen Kramer vs. Kramer?
01:04:15.920
It's like Kramer vs. Kramer if both characters were Meryl Streep.
01:04:20.500
Nutty, leaving to find myself, abandoning my child. I have to go find my fulfillment. That's
01:04:25.800
what they both are. They're both awful theater people who make absolute
01:04:28.900
pap. And then they are like, well, I have to stay in New York to pursue my career. And
01:04:33.760
the woman's like, but I have to leave to go to L.A. to pursue television. And then the
01:04:37.780
child is like, what the... At no point anywhere in the movie does anybody go, by the way, we
01:04:43.620
have this child. Wouldn't it be nice if one of us sublimated our own desires to take care
01:04:48.660
of our children like any decent parent on planet Earth would? And the fact that this is celebrated
01:04:52.960
as like the bravery, the bravery, I couldn't stand it.
01:04:56.260
I do want to say one good thing about The Irishman is that I once asked my brother, is
01:05:00.180
there, in self-examination, is there a gangster movie so bad that I wouldn't like it? And
01:05:05.820
finally I found one and I feel so much better now.
01:05:07.940
I think there was a really brave choice that Scorsese made, which was to make young De Niro
01:05:19.520
Honestly, I think I'm saying that they use the de-aging technology. And I was like, but
01:05:22.840
Robert De Niro looks the same at 20 as he does at 80. Like literally the same in the face
01:05:27.720
too. But they de-age him and he doesn't look like... We all know what 20-year-old Robert
01:05:31.140
De Niro looks like because he was in the movies when he was 25.
01:05:33.600
And he was skinny and he could stand up straight to him.
01:05:36.720
And he was a very good looking guy. And now it just looks like Robert De Niro with a lot
01:05:41.080
of makeup. And Robert De Niro old is Robert De Niro with a little bit of makeup. And
01:05:44.800
the scene where Robert De Niro kicks the crap out of the guy on the curb is one of...
01:05:48.440
Like it was at that point that Scorsese should have just gone and reshot the entire scene
01:05:51.860
because him kicking the crap out of the guy on the curb, he's supposed to be maybe 40 at
01:05:55.520
that point in the film. And he does it in front of his daughter. So it's kind of a crucial
01:05:57.960
scene. He can't just cut it. It looks like your grandfather trying to avoid breaking a
01:06:02.480
hip while dancing the Macarena. It's the most ridiculous thing in the entire world.
01:06:09.040
Alicia. All right. So now we found out that unfortunately the Oscars for a second year
01:06:15.160
in a row will not have a host. And Ricky Gervais said that he will no longer host the Globes.
01:06:19.580
But do you think he will? Will he be back? Will the Oscars ever have a host? What's going
01:06:23.900
I'm going to host the Oscars. Because I've never made a comment like Kevin Hart has made.
01:06:29.040
Oh, wait, that's all I do. I'm sorry. I forgot.
01:06:32.200
I don't think Ricky Gervais will ever come back. I think Ricky Gervais is the kind of guy
01:06:36.200
who understands the power of going out on top. I think he just made his statement.
01:06:43.460
The Oscars, of course the Oscars will have a host again. They'll have a host again when
01:06:47.160
we're on the other side of Me Too and Trump. Right now...
01:06:50.760
That host's name will be Hannah Gadsby, the funniest.
01:06:55.680
Redefining comedy is everything that is not funny. So you've just been getting it wrong
01:07:01.520
It's tragic. Correct. Correct. Is Hollywood going to ever be able to get out of the box
01:07:06.800
they put themselves in? I mean, see, this is why I feel that conservatives, if there were
01:07:10.560
no leftist, conservatives would be the stupidest people in the country. Because this is the
01:07:14.200
moment for us to build an industry that makes good films that people like and they're openly
01:07:23.240
The space to run in comedy right now is just endless. It's endless. Because the left has banned
01:07:28.700
And you're getting great comedy specials right now, by the way.
01:07:30.760
Right. A lot of great comedy specials that everybody can watch. And instead, what you're
01:07:35.300
getting from Hollywood is, well, what if we remade Ghostbusters but with women? I know
01:07:41.000
there's this new movie that it's a remake. And I'm trying to remember what it's of. And
01:07:44.680
it's about female CEOs. And it's like every movie has to be a comedy in which the conceit
01:07:52.640
is that it's women basically not being funny as women. Because there are movies where women
01:07:56.660
are funny as women. But women being men, and all of the lines can be written for men. It's
01:08:01.680
just that it's women playing the parts. And this is supposed to be funny. The problem is
01:08:04.180
that when stuff happens to women, it's not funny in the same way as when it happens to
01:08:07.620
men. I mean, I've said this before on the show, but my wife dies laughing when I clock
01:08:11.940
myself in the head. Like, if I walk into the kitchen and I smack my face on a... And this
01:08:16.600
is for the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers.
01:08:18.260
If you walk in and you clock yourself in the head, everybody in the audience laughs.
01:08:22.140
Right. Or if you get hit in the crotch, everybody laughs. It's funny. If a woman clocks herself
01:08:25.920
in the head, no one's going to laugh because your first concern is, is she okay? Right.
01:08:30.700
That's a really good point. And you know, like they used to make those films, Three Men
01:08:34.200
and a Baby. Men changing diapers is funny. And a feminist would say, what's so funny about
01:08:38.860
it? Well, it's just funny because they do it badly.
01:08:41.600
They do it badly. They're not used to it. You know, I actually...
01:08:43.800
Well, that's the other thing is that comedy is very largely about people failing to live up
01:08:48.500
So it's men trying to do something and then being really bad at it. And that's really
01:08:52.760
funny. But the conceit of Hollywood is that women both can be funny and also cannot be
01:08:56.680
bad at anything. So there can never be a comedy about a person who's just insanely competent
01:09:01.480
to things. That's not funny in the slightest, right? That's actually just called a drama.
01:09:05.300
That's the difference between Incredibles and Incredibles 2 is Incredibles 1 was before
01:09:09.540
the kind of Obama PC era. So the mother had flaws and problems. And in Incredibles 2, she
01:09:15.600
doesn't, you know, and the dad is terrible at everything. I'm actually less hopeful than
01:09:19.960
you are and less hopeful than you are that Hollywood will recover at some point. Kind
01:09:24.740
of to your point on art forms. I think art forms have their moment.
01:09:29.120
And movies are gone. And there will be something out of Hollywood, I guess, or there will be
01:09:33.160
some new version of Hollywood. But I think the movies are pretty much done.
01:09:36.860
I mean, did you guys see what happened to me this week on The Witcher thing?
01:09:42.860
Forbes went after me. You know, they had this female character who goes out into what is
01:09:49.860
essentially a medieval battle with a sword and comes back covered in blood and eats a,
01:09:54.800
you know, takes a, rips off a leg off a turkey and bites it. So why not just make it, it's
01:09:58.960
a man. That's a man character. You know, because, because a woman.
01:10:05.160
She's just like a normal female who walks into a battle with a sword in 1400 and walks away
01:10:12.320
So she's not like Brienne of Tarth or something. She's not six foot nine.
01:10:13.960
No, that was, that was a great character because Brienne of Tarth had this sadness about not
01:10:20.640
Also, it's credible when she beats the crap out of someone. She's eight feet tall.
01:10:23.200
Right, exactly. So I said, you know, that woman would be killed in a moment. And the fury that
01:10:28.060
was unleashed on me, I was thinking, no. And they were challenging me to a sword fight. And I said,
01:10:32.880
you know, if you're in a medieval sword fight, you're not going to be fighting a 65-year-old
01:10:35.900
scribe. Another warrior who's twice your size. And I just thought like, why, why do we have
01:10:43.500
to lie? You know, I mean, there's so many powerful women characters, so many ways to make women
01:10:47.640
admirable and respectable and make you care about them. Characters, when you watch the
01:10:52.820
movie, The Ring, the fact that she has a man who does all the heavy lifting for her makes
01:10:57.880
you admire her courage because she's going into a place where she can't really fight like
01:11:02.940
a man can. And it's just that you're worried for her. Also, by the way, in real life, the
01:11:05.820
stuff that women do that's really courageous is just as courageous as the stuff that men
01:11:09.180
do. It's just different stuff. That's right. Yeah.
01:11:10.800
But this comes back to the fact that when very serious people say very serious things,
01:11:16.340
people believe it. There are people in our company, I've had these conversations with
01:11:18.980
some of the young men who work for us in this company who don't know what is just simple
01:11:24.240
fact that men are stronger physically than women.
01:11:27.240
On average. Of course, there's always exceptions. Of course, but you have to say on average that
01:11:32.160
people aren't morons. What he means is on average, obviously. Yes, Brienne of Tarth is stronger
01:11:35.860
than the scrawny five foot three guy. Like, come on. And that's always their answer. Well,
01:11:39.620
here's a woman who's strong. You think like, you know, I get it. Yeah. Look at Joan of Arc.
01:11:43.260
You, Joan of Arc. I don't think so. Even when you watch Star Wars and you make allowances
01:11:46.760
because the force, because there's this magical thing. Right. But the truth is, if a 90 pound
01:11:51.100
actress swung a bat at a... At Adam Driver, who's an ex-military batman. Adam Driver also
01:11:59.200
swinging a bat, the 90 pound actress would eat both bats. Right. Right. I also love it when like,
01:12:05.820
so they solve this by giving the woman a bow and arrow, not a compound bow, which a woman could use
01:12:10.680
because that's a modern piece of technology, but bow and arrow. I couldn't shoot a freaking bow and
01:12:15.760
arrow. It takes so much upper body strength to actually utilize that rudimentary,
01:12:21.100
bow and arrow. You're taking, you're, you're putting women in positions where they're acting
01:12:26.280
as though women have the same level of physical... Honestly, it was the reason, by the way,
01:12:29.200
that I liked Rise of Skywalker is because they actually solved that problem. That was the
01:12:31.560
biggest problem with Rey's character and they solved it. Right. They, I mean, not to give a
01:12:35.660
spoiler, they did solve it. I mean, I won't give the spoiler. They actually explain why she is
01:12:39.160
great at everything. So she's not just a complete Mary Sue. And you're like, okay, that makes sense
01:12:42.000
now. But it requires that magic in order for that to be credible at all. Otherwise you're spending
01:12:45.740
six years after Force Awakens going, hold up a second. She picks up a sword for the first
01:12:49.720
time and she beats the guy. Here's what I'll say. The most badass fighting women out there
01:12:54.480
won't fight men. Of course not. Do you? The only people who will say, well, here's this
01:12:58.940
badass fighting woman. You're saying you could take her? Well, no, I'm not saying I could take
01:13:02.260
her, but she won't fight men like her. That's right. That's right. You use her as an example,
01:13:07.100
but she wouldn't use herself. Do you remember the moment when the Serena Williams controversy
01:13:10.740
blew up? Yeah. Can one of the great female tennis players beat a man? And initially she said
01:13:15.720
no. And then later on she sort of turned it into, yes, of course I could. They actually
01:13:19.960
did this. This happened in 1996. There was a battle of the sexes and the Williams sisters
01:13:25.980
said we could beat a man who's ranked outside of the top 200. So they found a guy who was
01:13:30.560
ranked like 203 named Karsten Brosh. He started his morning by playing a round of golf, smoking
01:13:36.360
cigarettes, drinking two beers. He then played the Williams sisters back to back. He beat one
01:13:42.080
of them six to two and he beat the other one six to one. The thing is, if all you respect
01:13:47.780
about women, whether they compete with men, you have no respect for women. This gets me.
01:13:52.360
It's essentially that Michelle Williams getting up and saying, I had an abortion, so I win
01:13:55.700
a prize. That's erasing your womanhood. That's not being that. That's not.
01:13:59.700
By the way, women are now the majority of medical students for the first time. Women are the majority
01:14:03.200
of college students right now. And this idea that women are, in order to prove that they're
01:14:08.240
great at things, have to prove that they are great at all the things that men are great
01:14:11.140
at is just absurd. In order to establish parity, do we have to establish that women are going
01:14:16.020
to comprise the same percentage of the firefighting force as men? Or can we just be happy that
01:14:19.900
women are the majority of doctors? Like, what is the problem here?
01:14:22.720
I'm happy that women are the majority of women. I think that that's...
01:14:27.000
Yeah, not for long. Well, exactly. I mean, they're trying to erase, you know, half of humankind
01:14:31.820
and one half that I happen to be particularly fond of.
01:14:35.440
Well, this is the actual irony of the whole thing is that the left hates women.
01:14:38.820
They do hate women. Of course they do. Well, because if all you think of women is, are you
01:14:43.100
the same as a man, that's not respecting women.
01:14:58.900
All right. Do you guys really think any more Hollywood celebrities are going to follow the Ricky
01:15:03.460
Gervais example and speak out about the hypocrisy or not?
01:15:10.920
I think it's actually a really fun time in comedy because nobody's being like, well,
01:15:15.420
there are the handful of people being woke in comedy, including some of the unfunny people
01:15:18.280
that you already mentioned. But I hope that this is a... I don't care if my comedian's
01:15:22.060
left, right, or center. I just want them to be funny and offend everyone.
01:15:23.900
To be funny. I want to say on Ricky Gervais' behalf. I know he's not actually a conservative.
01:15:27.540
But he does own the trees that border my property, and he lets me cut them down every year so
01:15:33.800
That's not not conservative. But of course, one of the things, the mistake that we make
01:15:37.760
on the right is any time someone shows any movement outside of left-wing orthodoxy is
01:15:44.120
we try to suddenly claim them. Of course, Ricky Gervais isn't a conservative.
01:15:47.860
And the thing is, I don't actually want to claim them, but I would like him to notice.
01:15:51.480
He sent out a tweet saying, how can I be right-wing when I'm making fun of corporations?
01:15:55.360
Name a corporation that's not left-wing at this point. I mean, the big corporations are
01:15:59.320
all left-wing because they caught on to the fact that big government is good for big business.
01:16:02.740
Yeah, well, one of the things, too, is I hope that they notice who it is who isn't attacking
01:16:06.500
them when they say things, even the things that we don't agree with. Like our friend
01:16:10.180
Bridget Phatasy, you know, on Twitter, she's one of the best... I think she's the best
01:16:14.180
follow on Twitter. But she does do this one thing that sort of irritates me, where she's
01:16:18.160
like, you know, I don't have a home on the left or the right. And I'm like, no, we all love
01:16:24.160
you on the right. Yeah, you certainly do. We disagree with you. Yeah, that's the thing.
01:16:27.640
But we actually love you, and we're glad you're out there saying the things that we disagree
01:16:30.220
with. Yeah, yeah. I don't mean to pick on her because she's really hilarious. She's great,
01:16:34.360
yeah. Everybody should follow her. Alicia. All right, now back to serious issues. Do
01:16:39.100
you guys think that the focus on Iran right now on the news is taking away from all the
01:16:42.560
Democratic focus on the impeachment trial? What impeachment? Correct. The fact that the
01:16:50.520
impeachment has fallen completely out of the headlines. It had very little to do with Iran,
01:16:54.700
actually. It was already sort of falling out of the headlines. They tried to revivify it with some
01:16:58.000
of this Bolton stuff. But the fact is that we're not going to know what Bolton has to say until
01:17:01.080
Bolton says it. And him playing sort of coy with the media and coy with the Democrats,
01:17:05.380
everybody's sort of speculating. If he has some sort of bombshell, my guess is that we'd already know
01:17:09.240
about it. I don't think that we're... The bottom line is you can't keep impeachment as the number
01:17:12.480
one headline in the country when you won't send the articles. Nancy Pelosi has stopped
01:17:18.600
impeachment. Yeah. Until Nancy Pelosi stops stopping... Even Democrats, like Dianne Feinstein
01:17:22.760
was like, just send this. What are you doing? What are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. And Dianne Feinstein
01:17:26.220
is calling... It's an emergency constitutional crisis. Oh, now we're going on vacation. You know?
01:17:30.020
I think also what happened is, as they've done so many times in the Trump era, they just
01:17:35.580
miscalculated during the entirety of impeachment, Trump's numbers just steadily increased. They
01:17:41.100
realized it was a miscalculation they're trying to... This is why it's hilarious when after the
01:17:45.000
president kills Salami, everybody starts talking about how, oh, he's just doing this because he's
01:17:50.760
so afraid of impeachment. The president is going to dance. Yes. He's going to dance into the Capitol.
01:17:56.340
First of all, Bill Clinton actually did that in 1998 when he bombed Iraq. Yeah, that's true.
01:18:00.700
So he actually did that to get impeachment out of it. I remember, I was eight years old. I asked my
01:18:04.120
mother, I said, Mom, why are we going to war with Iraq? She goes, Oh, no, Michael. The president's
01:18:08.420
being impeached. Every president has to bomb Iraq and Bill Clinton's being impeached. So he wants it
01:18:12.560
out of the newspapers. Donald Trump doesn't need impeachment out of the newspaper. Donald Trump
01:18:16.760
doesn't want impeachment. He doesn't want it out of the newspaper. I will say, just on a slightly
01:18:20.640
off-topic note, I am enjoying watching the winnowing of the Democratic field. Are you guys enjoying
01:18:24.560
this as much as I am? Oh, yeah. I miss... You just had to bring up that Julian Castro, my favorite
01:18:29.680
candidate, now he's out of the race. Yeah, and I didn't know that he was running until he was dropping out.
01:18:34.400
My favorite thing is how the media laments people after they're gone. They give him the
01:18:37.920
Soleimani treatment. I mean, like... I'm going to start calling it that, like the glowing
01:18:41.860
obits. I'm just going to call it the Soleimani treatment. But it is amazing. Like, after Kamala
01:18:46.520
Harris dropped out and she was terrible, it was like, it's so sad that this powerful black woman
01:18:51.520
is no longer in the race. And Julian Castro, they wouldn't pay two cents of attention to. It's like,
01:18:55.180
well, he was a real radical who was really revolutionizing the campaign. As each one of them
01:18:59.640
drops out, it's like, wow, that person was just a magical, magical person. But this is part of why
01:19:03.400
the media being all on one side is bad for the Democrats, because the Democrats live in this
01:19:07.860
bubble and they do not know what the rest of us are thinking. They actually don't... They not only
01:19:11.880
don't know what we believe, you know, they have no idea what we believe, really, because they only
01:19:15.900
pick out the things that offend them. But they don't know what ordinary people believe. They don't
01:19:20.380
understand what they look like to ordinary people because they get this reflection, this glowing
01:19:24.360
reflection from the press. They think, I must be doing great. Look at the way Chuck Todd is talking
01:19:28.360
about me. And everybody else is going like, hey, you kind of suck, you know. But I am getting
01:19:32.080
particular enjoyment from Elizabeth Warren imploding. You're getting what?
01:19:34.780
Particular enjoyment from Elizabeth Warren. She really collapsed. She did. I mean,
01:19:38.520
four months ago, we were all sitting here going, oh, we may have spent good money on a prop.
01:19:42.440
Smart. And now we're all sitting here going, is anybody going to get that joke?
01:19:46.960
You know, the other thing about this is watching the field and predicting who the next guys are going
01:19:52.540
to be. The Democrats do nothing before they wake up and call us racist. That's what they do.
01:19:58.660
Wake up in the morning, they call us racist, then they brush their teeth.
01:20:00.940
And we are watching week by week, every racial minority in the race is dropping out. The next
01:20:07.240
one out is Booker, right? There's no way Booker's going to last much longer. After that, it's going
01:20:11.120
to be Yang. I mean, you are going to get to a field where hashtag Democrats are white.
01:20:14.700
The one time that the media will acknowledge that Andrew Yang is, in fact, a minority is on the day
01:20:20.800
after he dropped out of the race. And then they replace him on their cable news networks with another
01:20:25.520
Asian guy. Did you guys see this? Just a random Asian guy. No, I missed this one.
01:20:28.700
Yes. So they showed, it was on MSNBC, yeah? Yeah, seriously. They showed the whole Democrat
01:20:33.820
And for Andrew Yang, it was the stuff. Yeah, MSNBC. What did you say?
01:20:36.340
I think it was either CNBC or MSNBC. Oh, CNBC. Yeah, and it was just a stock photo. They put
01:20:42.380
They screwed someone else, too. Was it Klobuchar? In the same graphic, it was like they screwed...
01:20:45.900
I'm going to admit that I don't know a Klobuchar. In their defense, I don't know, yeah.
01:20:49.320
You just put a woman up there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Klobuchar.
01:20:54.580
So if you are not a Daily Wire subscriber, tonight is the night. Head over to dailywire.com.
01:21:00.220
Click on that subscribe button. Use the promo code backstage during the rest of our broadcast
01:21:04.580
tonight, and you will get 15% off. And what do you get for your trouble? Well, you get to ask us
01:21:08.580
questions like this one from Elisha. All right. These guys want to know, do you think that anyone will run
01:21:13.580
as a third-party candidate, and could that help or hurt the Democrats? I don't think it's going
01:21:18.100
to happen. Or if it does, it's not going to move the needle anybody, because they can't really think
01:21:22.380
of who could do it. Well, the one person who could do it, who could potentially cause problems,
01:21:26.360
is Bloomberg. It seems that he's already chosen his side. Yeah. I mean, there could be people on
01:21:31.440
the right who cause problems. If James Mattis were to run, for example, that could be a bit of a
01:21:35.960
problem, but he's not going to. Trump has 95% approval in the Republican Party. Mattis ain't running.
01:21:40.920
I think the only people who could plausibly run would hurt the Democrats.
01:21:46.620
Could you see a world where Joe Biden gets the nomination, and Bernie Sanders just being super
01:21:51.540
old, and super curmudgeonly, and super pissed, just runs third party? Offbeat, but I could see it.
01:21:55.900
It's not impossible. I could see it, because he's a nut, and he's getting up there, and he's thinking,
01:21:58.340
how many more times can I do this? I mean, forever more times. Yeah, 10 or 12, forever more times.
01:22:03.660
Training Jedi for 800 years, has he been? And he's a genuine communist. I mean,
01:22:07.800
he actually does believe what he believes. So he might actually think, well, these mere liberals
01:22:13.240
aren't really- It is interesting. Well, we didn't talk about it, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did say
01:22:18.020
that only in America could she and Joe Biden belong to the same political party. I mean,
01:22:26.760
You can imagine them playing out that line of thinking and giving Bernie a third party run.
01:22:31.520
Especially if it starts to get later in the race, and Biden's really trailing Trump.
01:22:36.560
Here's what I could see. If the Democrats were to pull on Bernie what they pulled on him in 2016,
01:22:41.880
I can imagine him going, screw it. I'm just going to burn this- It's outlandish,
01:22:45.020
but it's not impossible. It's going to be tougher because they have reformed the superdelegates,
01:22:48.860
at least that's reportedly what we're hearing. So it seems less likely than in, say, 2016,
01:22:55.080
but I don't know. Bernie might be his last shot. Listen, Bernie could just actually win the thing,
01:22:59.460
and what could help him win it is actually that after stealing it from him in 2016,
01:23:05.040
the DNC had to make internal changes, which will make it harder to steal it from him this time.
01:23:10.360
They didn't anticipate that he could mount another successful run.
01:23:12.760
Interesting. You know, what's kind of interesting is that when the Clintons still seem to have a
01:23:17.460
certain amount of power within the party and had a lot of power within the party until the defeat of
01:23:21.560
Hillary Clinton, Obama doesn't really seem to have a lot of sway in the party. People like him.
01:23:25.920
You know, they think of him fondly in the Democrat party, but he doesn't, you know,
01:23:30.040
when he opens his mouth and says something that's not leftist enough, they attack it.
01:23:33.280
But the reason is because Barack Obama doesn't current, has not projected any future interest.
01:23:38.900
You have to understand that all the power that the Clintons had for that 12-year period
01:23:42.860
is because they might come back in the form of Hillary Clinton.
01:23:49.820
If she started openly seeking office, if Michelle ran for Senate,
01:23:52.500
suddenly Barack Obama would have a ton of power in the DNC again.
01:24:00.780
So, I mean, at some point you have enough money, but-
01:24:05.980
Alicia, we're going to take three rapid-fire questions.
01:24:08.760
So, most of us are millennials, minus the God King and Drew.
01:24:12.700
But what do you guys think is going to happen to the generation after millennials?
01:24:16.780
But what do you guys think is going to happen to the generation after us millennials,
01:24:23.380
especially with all this talk of gender conformity and LGBTQ things that are being taught in schools, etc.?
01:24:30.660
I think that the generation that proceeds the millennials are actually a riper target for us.
01:24:40.880
They grew up in this sort of leftist monopoly on thought, and they seem to be pushing back.
01:24:49.800
Do they believe some things that, yeah, we lost.
01:24:52.200
We lost, and because of us losing for a generation, they believe some stuff that we wish they didn't.
01:24:59.460
But does that mean that they're going to be little marching line soldiers the way that the millennials have been for the left?
01:25:05.860
I think that's right, and I think that's because a lot of them have older siblings, and the older siblings are millennials.
01:25:12.960
I mean, they just, they're the older sibling who has just taken away the ice cream and telling them that they need to eat their vegetables.
01:25:18.980
And the vegetables are not only horrible tasting, but they're also bad for you.
01:25:23.000
And all these younger people are looking at the people who are just one generation above, and they're saying, these people are boring as all hell.
01:25:32.180
And the other thing is, is people forget, you know, recently, I'm sure you saw J.K. Rowling spoke some truth to transgender people and then stood up for her truth, didn't let them cancel.
01:25:43.700
And Vox said, has she tarnished the Harry Potter legacy?
01:25:47.100
And I thought, you know, Harry Potter is going to last as long as it entertains people.
01:25:53.780
You know, I mean, at some point, the truth will out.
01:25:56.320
And it's not that some people won't have these problems, the problem of feeling that they're...
01:26:00.340
When you say it'll go away, you just mean the whole societal movement to suggest that biological women are men and biological women are women.
01:26:06.780
These are the things that the only thing that's remembered about them is the people who made fun of them.
01:26:10.820
You know, there is actually a great deal of hope in the Zoomers in increasing despair.
01:26:18.080
There was a piece in the New York Times, came out just yesterday, about how young Americans are depressed, anxious, and killing themselves.
01:26:27.820
And what I mean by that actually being a sign of sort of hope, ultimately, even though right now it's very damaging, very painful, is because this is a wide cultural phenomenon.
01:26:39.720
It's not merely a pharmaceutical or a psychological one.
01:26:44.400
And you have a whole generation that has grown up with the totalizing idea of secular liberalism.
01:26:50.720
And they're not just seeing, ah, the economy's not doing well, ah, the tax rates.
01:26:54.960
They're actually feeling a deep personal pain that is wrought by this culture.
01:27:00.280
And I think they're waking up pretty clearly and saying, something here is broken.
01:27:09.640
Do you guys listen to music while you read or do you read in silence?
01:27:15.140
When I listen to music, I actually like to listen to music.
01:27:25.600
I can't do that because the rhythms get in my head.
01:27:27.940
Well, I mean, it depends what kind of music you're listening to.
01:27:30.200
If you're listening to something that is very regular, you can't listen to Beethoven while
01:27:44.800
I throw on the Goldberg variations and write a screenplay.
01:27:47.540
I cannot write and have music on because the rhythms of the music get into my head.
01:27:51.760
If it's Flava Flav or Public Enemy, then I can write to it.
01:27:56.220
You absolutely can't have anything with lyrics.
01:28:02.080
So no Lizzo or Nicki Minaj for y'all when you're writing those screenplays?
01:28:10.400
What do you think that the odds are of Republicans taking back the House in 2020?
01:28:15.400
What are the odds of the Republicans taking back the House in 2020?
01:28:22.160
The Democrat, they'd have to pick up 20 seats, something like that.
01:28:28.820
I mean, if Trump were to win a sweeping victory, then of course they would take back the House.
01:28:33.380
I think that the likelihood right now, if you had to put money on the 2020 election,
01:28:38.380
I think there's a very high likelihood that what you actually see is a pretty close repeat
01:28:41.760
of the 2016 election, namely that Trump loses the popular vote but wins the electoral
01:28:45.120
The reason I say that is because every Democrat in California and New York will vote, and there
01:28:49.960
But it doesn't matter how many of them vote in California and New York because they won
01:28:55.340
I think that Trump has a good shot of winning all the swing states.
01:28:58.000
The problem with that, of course, is that there are congressional seats in all of those
01:29:02.700
And it seems unlikely to me that a lot of those congressional seats are going to swing back
01:29:07.940
I think that the highest likelihood is that after 2020, and again, who the hell knows?
01:29:15.740
But my best guess would be that at this point, Trump wins re-election.
01:29:23.540
See, I think if we had the vote today, I think everything is so unpredictable because we
01:29:30.500
But if we had the vote today, I think we'd win back the House.
01:29:34.460
Well, if you mean today, the greatest news cycle Donald Trump has had in the presidency.
01:29:40.320
I do think that Trump is, right now, it's his to lose.
01:29:44.500
Over the holiday, I kept reading the newspaper and I kept saying, it was all good news.
01:29:50.860
Because all the journalists were gone for Christmas.
01:29:55.000
So the news, the real news kind of rises to the long-term stories rise to the surface.
01:30:06.480
Just the basic categories of what you want looking into a presidential election.
01:30:15.120
You've got 187 good judges, including two Supreme Court judges.
01:30:20.560
You've got wages rising for the first time in about 10 years.
01:30:28.140
I think we actually have to conclude, right now, election being held today, this guy is an excellent president.
01:30:38.480
I wish nothing ill on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but nobody lives forever.
01:30:41.940
If she actually dies before the election, it's going to be just one of the most fun...
01:30:46.520
Again, I wish nothing ill on her, but it is going to be one fun election.
01:30:49.500
I mean, the political situation will be fun, for those of you in media batters.
01:30:59.460
Listen, the big problem for me is that as we approach 2020, no matter how 2020 goes,
01:31:06.400
one half of the country is going to believe that the election was stolen.
01:31:10.560
Because the Democrats have been claiming for years at a time that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected in 2016.
01:31:15.020
Now they're claiming that because of the Ukraine situation and he should be impeached and all of this stuff,
01:31:19.920
that no matter what happens in 2020, he will have prevented a legitimate vote from taking place.
01:31:25.180
Stacey Abrams is the legit governor of Georgia.
01:31:27.080
And meanwhile, if the Democrats win a victory, I don't see Trump going away quietly into that good night,
01:31:33.740
suggesting that the election was purely and fairly held and everything went hunky-dory.
01:31:36.920
So I think that the chances of a conflagration post-election,
01:31:40.480
and this is particularly true if something should happen to Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
01:31:42.860
if something happens to Ginsburg and the future of the Supreme Court rests on the next election,
01:31:47.520
the, I mean, right now, it's the beginning of the year.
01:31:49.760
Everybody's in kind of a good mood coming off of Christmas.
01:31:53.540
We just had a very good moment for the United States, no matter which party you are of.
01:31:56.440
This is a good moment for the United States with regard to Iran.
01:32:02.440
This moment where everybody's in a fairly decent mood.
01:32:05.460
Remember that even when we're in a good mood, like the country is in a fairly good mood after the holidays,
01:32:09.520
we're all feeling good, beginning of New Year resolutions and everything,
01:32:11.700
people are openly clapping for Richard Spencer because he hates Donald Trump.
01:32:15.140
So wait for six months before we start getting to getting...
01:32:18.760
You have to admit, this speaks well of Trump, that Richard Spencer hates him.
01:32:29.300
This is the point, it was like the Ilhan Omar logic.
01:32:33.040
She didn't realize that in going after the Iran sanctions,
01:32:37.500
Joy Behar didn't realize that in celebrating Richard Spencer divorcing himself from Trump,
01:32:45.560
And then tomorrow she'll be like, oh, Charlottesville, Charlottesville.
01:32:49.020
I do want to sound one cautionary note, and that is, you're right, economy, all the...
01:32:56.340
You just outlined terrific foreign policy victories, victory over ISIS, victory over Soleimani.
01:33:02.200
When Barack Obama won re-election, all of those statistics that you just cited were inverted.
01:33:09.700
If you look back at any historic election in the 20th century, Barack Obama should not have won.
01:33:17.060
The economic recovery very stalled at that point.
01:33:20.020
Obamacare, huge, so unpopular that Scott Brown won Teddy Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts.
01:33:30.040
Drew, this is a conversation you and I have been having sometimes with reasonable voices.
01:33:38.840
When a country is as prosperous and as peaceful as this country, when people have it this good,
01:33:45.860
when the number one health epidemic among the desperately poor is obesity,
01:33:50.860
when you have the kind of society we have now, which has only rarely existed in all of human history,
01:34:02.380
Why is it that we have things as good as we've ever had them in this country,
01:34:05.400
and yet most people feel like we're on the brink of a civil war?
01:34:10.960
People are killing themselves in record numbers.
01:34:12.820
It's because some things are not as easy to quantify as the economic index or the job index.
01:34:19.880
There is a spiritual component and there is a perception component.
01:34:23.240
And when you have the very serious people who control almost every facet of popular communication
01:34:28.900
and information distribution, constantly telling you that this is the worst it's ever been,
01:34:33.200
that we're the worst place at the worst point of time, it has a deleterious effect.
01:34:39.840
I will be fascinated to see what the polls say about how this Iran thing went,
01:34:43.900
because the obvious truth of the situation is that this is a huge win for the United States,
01:34:51.460
But I would not be surprised if at least half the American people believe that we've just narrowly averted World War III here.
01:34:57.300
I have to say, in Ford vs. Ferrari, there's a scene where the two guys get in a fight with each other,
01:35:01.320
and they're fighting, and the guy picks up a soup can to hit him in the head and then realizes it's his friend,
01:35:05.700
so instead he hits him in the head with a bag of potato chips.
01:35:08.940
Well, I want to thank everybody for tuning in tonight to our Daily Wire backstage,
01:35:14.180
especially thank everyone who went over to dailywire.com and clicked subscribe and got that 15% off promo.
01:35:19.780
Thanks to Elisha and everyone who got in questions for us tonight.
01:35:24.260
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01:35:28.380
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01:35:33.420
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Please get in here, visit with us in the chat room, and join us.
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We're going to be back together a little sooner than usual because on February 3rd, we have the Iowa caucuses.
01:35:47.160
The very next day, on February 4th, we will be broadcasting live for the president's State of the Union.
01:35:54.740
We can only pray that the impeachment saga has not yet been resolved.
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My two favorite things at once, the State of the Union and Daily Wire backstage, I cannot wait.
01:36:04.260
But you've got to admit, if they have not resolved impeachment and the president has to walk into a building and face down people who are actively impeaching him, it will be the greatest show on earth.
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