Daily Wire Backstage: Go Buy Ben's Book Edition
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 31 minutes
Words per minute
219.63968
Harmful content
Misogyny
14
sentences flagged
Hate speech
38
sentences flagged
Summary
Ben Shapiro's new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps is right around the corner, and you don t want to miss it! Join us as we talk about the madness in today s culture, and as we do our best to sell you on Ben s new book.
Transcript
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Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage Go Buy Ben's Book Edition
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is right around the corner and you don't want to miss it. Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan,
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and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we talk about the madness in today's culture and as we do our
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best to sell you on Ben's new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. Take a listen.
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Politicians pander to protesters as police persist in preventing perpetual pandemonium
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in Portland, The Pandemic Precipitates Preposterous Presumptions, and Go Buy Ben's Book. This is The
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Daily Wire Backstage. Welcome to The Daily Wire Backstage Go Buy Ben's Book Edition. I'm Jeremy
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Boring, known around these parts as your friendly neighborhood God King, and we're glad that you
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have tuned in. Is America past the point of make up sex? Can Donald Trump claw his way back in the
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polls? Was Portlandia actually a documentary? Ben covers all of this and more in his book,
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How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. If you don't have one, I've said it twice. Go buy Ben's
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book. I'm joined today, of course, by the man himself, Mr. Ben Shapiro, also by Andrew Klavan and
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Michael Knowles, one of whom has actually written other books, and the other who has outsold both.
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Also, by the lovely Alicia Krause, who is with us via satellite, she'll be taking your questions hot
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off the interwebs and giving us a chance to dazzle you with our answers. Jazz hands. That wasn't even
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in the prompter. I just totally outlived that. Say hi, Alicia. Hi, guys. How are you? It's good to be
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back. And yes, I will be taking those subscriber questions. And how can you ask the questions you
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wonder? Well, you have to be a Daily Wire member, an All Access member to be exact. And if you're not an
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All Access member, then you're definitely missing out. And if you're like me and you like a deal,
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turns out we have one for you. Because All Access members get to participate in our All Access Live,
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where one of the Daily Wire hosts hangs out with you via live stream. It's way better than a corporate
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Zoom, I promise. And All Access members also join us for real-time online Q&A discussions, like the one
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that we're all going to have together after tonight's episode of Backstage. And it will be available on both
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the website and the Daily Wire app. So tune in to get your questions ready. That's once again,
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if you're an All Access member. And if you're not, then head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe
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to get your two, yes, two leftist tears tumblers with that 15% off coupon code backstage right now.
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That's dailywire.com slash subscribe. Use the 15% off coupon code backstage right now and join us for
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the discussion after the show. So I've been trying to figure out, I was on this trip down
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to Texas and someone asked the question, you know, are you an internet celebrity? As people
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will often ask. And I thought about my Twitter following, which has grown, but has still not
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gotten to the goal that I set in life when I was a small child. And my father said, what do you want
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to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to have 100,000 Twitter followers. And he said, your life is
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going to be filled with disappointment, kid. And he was, so far, it turns out that he's right.
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And also, what's Twitter? Don't ruin my story, Ben. But I've been looking for an answer to this
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question. Does my life have any meaning? And then I found Ben's book, How to Destroy America in Three
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Easy Steps. And I realized nothing has meaning. You two could be filled with the kind of optimism
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that I have if you were to read this book. Ben, since I went ahead and named the whole episode after
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your book, tell us just a little bit about it. Let me tell you about this book. So here's the deal.
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The basic thesis of the book is that the battle in the United States right now is not exactly left
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versus right, although it largely mirrors it. It's between people who I call unionists and people
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who I call disintegrationists. Unionists are people who believe that the country ought to remain
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one unified body. And they believe that there are certain ties that bind us together, namely
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philosophy, culture, and history. The philosophy of the American founding that is suggested in the
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Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with inalienable
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rights, protected by a government of limited powers. And that if that government should choose to exceed
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its powers, then it would lose its reason for being. That was the core philosophy of the United
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States. And then that was preserved by a system of checks and balances and federalism created by
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the Constitution. That was the core philosophy. Then there was the core culture of the United
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States, which was a culture that valued social institutions and inculcating virtue like church
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and family, a culture of entrepreneurship and adventure, the culture of the pioneers, people
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who are pushing over Hill and Dale in order to open new vistas in the human experience, a culture
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of tolerance for other people's rights. Even though you may not agree with how I speak,
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you acknowledge that I do have the right to say what I am saying. And also a culture of militant
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defense of those rights, that if the government were to overstep its boundaries, they would get
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a stern warning. And finally, a shared history. The idea that we are all part of the same history,
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the same historic stream, even though American history obviously has victims and villains,
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even though American history has horrible periods, even though American history has significant
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periods in which many people in the United States strayed from founding principle. The actual story of the
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United States is not 1619. The actual story of the United States is 1776. United States was founded
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on true, eternally good principles. And the story of the United States is about how we have attempted
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to fulfill those principles increasingly well over time and extend the promises that were made in the
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Declaration of Independence to more and more human beings over a period of time. So black and white
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Americans are part of that story. Black Americans heroically overcoming Jim Crow and slavery, white
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Americans helping them do so and overcoming their own innate sin in all of this and moving toward those
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founding principles. So that is the unionist philosophy, culture, and history. And all of
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those elements are being disintegrated purposefully by people I call disintegrationists, people who wish
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to see the country fall apart, who believe that America's philosophy is a lie, was a lie when it
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was written. This is openly stated by the members of the 1619 Project. People who believe that all men
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are created equal is actually just a cover for power politics. Because if we treat everybody equally
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under the law, what about people who are not as well off? What about people who are not as well
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situated? We have to have injustice under the law in order to achieve group or social justice. The
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culture of the United States is inherently bad. The culture of adventure and entrepreneurship is
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actually a culture of exploitation and cruelty to others. The culture that says that I have to
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respect your rights is really about me wanting bad people to win. Because if I really didn't want
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those people to win, I wouldn't respect their rights. The culture of valuing social institutions,
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churches are bad because they cram down social values upon you. Family is bad because family is an
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exploitative institution. And finally, the history of the United States is not the story of triumph over
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innate and universal human sin. The story of America is that America was founded in human sin
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and has merely deepened and broadened that sin over time to the point where all the institutions
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of America are so thoroughly corrupted they must be torn down at the root. That is the battle that
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is happening in the United States. It's not quite left-right. There are some liberals who actually
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believe in a lot of the things that I said are unionist. And there are some conservatives who may not
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agree with all the things that I said are unionist. But that, in large scale, is the battle. And we're
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seeing it play out in the streets of Portland, in the streets of Seattle. We're seeing it play out in the
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halls of Congress. We're seeing it play out every day in the mainstream media and in the halls of
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academia. But could you have written something more topical, Ben? I think that's the question
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on everyone's minds. That was good. Nobody needs to buy the book now. You heard the whole thing
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straight from the mouth. And now we'll get on to talk about what's going on in the country,
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which is basically just everything Ben just said. In particular, so I haven't been in the news much
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this week. I've been traveling quite a lot. As God King, I'm Lord of all that I survey. So I thought I
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should go look at some stuff. Turns out a lot of it doesn't belong to me. Really, the title is
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kind of giving me a false sense of self. But on my travels, I wasn't able to be in the news much.
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But every time I did log on to the internet, all I could see was the disintegration of one or another
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American city. And what's going on in Portland the last few days seems to really be the giant story
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that no one's actually allowed to talk about. If I'm near a TV, I don't see anything about Portland.
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If I'm on the internet, it's the only way I hear anything about it. Michael, tell us a little bit
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So everything you think is happening, like if you were to have a fevered nightmare,
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that's what's happening. It's happening in Portland. And there's this big debate now,
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because you've had these insurrectionists in Portland attacking a federal courthouse and other
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places as well. They look like a truly an armed militia. And so federal troops have come in.
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And by troops, I should be more specific. I'm talking about the Department of Homeland Security.
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This has raised a big debate. Should these federal agents be able to come in?
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There's a lot of lies that are going on about this. The left is saying that the federal agents
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have no right to do this. Of course they do. One of the reasons we have DHS in the first place
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is to protect federal property. They're saying that the federal agents are not allowed to go,
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for instance, arrest people who are committing crimes on federal property, but then leave that
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property. That's also not true. It's very clear from U.S. code that they are absolutely allowed
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to pursue those individuals. They're saying that the federal agents are ununiformed. They're not
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saying who they are. That is also not true. They're wearing uniforms. Clearly says they're
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in DHS and they actually have agent numbers. So you can even identify the individual agents.
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So typically a lot of lies from the left and a lot of insurrection that's going on. And the biggest
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lie of all, I think, is they're saying that this is un-American. You know, it's Hitler-esque to send
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in federal troops to put down this insurrection. That is absurd. There is an American history of
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putting down insurrections that goes back to 1787, goes back all the way to Shays' Rebellion.
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And actually, one of the reasons we have our constitution is because the Articles of
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Confederation were not strong enough to efficiently put down that insurrection. And so one of the
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reasons we got the Constitutional Convention right after Shays' Rebellion was in order to beef up that
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power. And fortunately, finally, people are restoring a little bit of order to the streets.
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So what about the politics of it, Drew? It seems to me that the president, slow to act on some of the
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things that have taken place in America's cities during the sort of Black Lives Matter
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riots that have been taking place. Now he is acting. He's sending in federal troops to protect
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federal property. But there's a risk, right? The risk is that going into the election, one risk is
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you look like you've lost control of the country. The other risk is that you look like you're a
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totalitarian, which sort of plays into the narrative that the left has painted of the president
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really since before he even took office. How do you think this shakes out for the president?
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I think the bigger risk is doing nothing, frankly, even though a lot of people on the right are just
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saying, let these cities burn. They're Democrat cities. They're suffering from Democrat policies. Let
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them go. I think that's wrong. Trump has got to show that he's going to do something that he's going
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to take care of the country and not let the cities go. I think this has been one of Trump's best
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weeks. And of course, obviously, it goes unreported because anything Trump does that's positive
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goes unreported. But I think if he can actually he's he's very far back in the polls. And I think
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he knows it. And I think he acted to fire his campaign manager. And right after that,
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he suddenly became a really different candidate. Now we've got the question, you know, the $64,000
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question. Does he have the discipline to maintain doing what he did this week? He suddenly took a new
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tone on the Chinese flu. He suddenly took it seriously. He came out. He was very sober.
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He was very direct. He actually had facts in front of him and he used those facts.
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And he started to move against these cities. You cannot have cities devolving into chaos.
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And if you really want to know whether this is good for Trump or not, all you have to do is look
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at the fact that the minute Trump threatens to act, the mayors and governors suddenly act before he can
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get there. So you suddenly have in Portland, they declare a riot after something like 56 days of
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burning and vandalism and violence. Suddenly it's a riot when Trump says he's going to send in the
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troops. The same thing happened in Seattle with their Chaz. The same thing happened in New York.
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They closed the Chaz that's been open in front of City Hall all this time the minute he threatened.
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So the left knows that this is not a good look for them, but they can blame it on Trump until
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he acts. And the minute he acts, they've got to shut it down. So I think this was a great week for
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Trump. You know, it's always a question with him whether he's just going to blow it all with a
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single tweet. But right this minute, he looks very good.
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So it occurred to me watching the events unfold that you really only have two options, right? You
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can either allow, you can either defend federal property with federal force, or you have to pull
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all of the federal infrastructure out of these cities, which in addition to being practically
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impossible, no one on the left would stand for, right? Like if you just basically said, fine,
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we'll just shut down the Social Security Administration in Portland if we can't send, if you're not going to
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protect it, we're not going to have it be there. If you're not going to do that, Ben, don't you have to
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actually defend this property and defend these employees?
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Well, of course. I mean, under federal code, you do have to defend this property. It is the
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responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security to do so. They have the power to call
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from other agencies through the General Services Administration, other people to serve in this
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battle against people who are, as Michael rightly noted, insurrectionists. The fact that this is
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controversial at all is a testament to how much our media are just damned liars. I mean, they are just
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damned liars. I've been very hesitant to talk about the media as the enemy of the people,
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mainly because I just don't like the phrase. I don't like the phrase enemy of the people because
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it brings up Stalinist sort of associations. But the way that the media have acted over the
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past few months is just disgusting. I mean, the mask is now completely off. If you thought it had
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slipped some with Kavanaugh and slipped more with the Covington Catholic kids, it is just gone at this
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point. I cannot trust a single narrative, not one, that is being fed to me by the media. If you
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listen to the media right now, Portland is entirely peaceful and the only people who are creating chaos
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are the federal agents who are actually members of the Gestapo. Everything in Chicago is hunky-dory,
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except that President Trump is threatening to go in there specifically because Lori Lightfoot is
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black and a woman. Everything in New York is absolutely fine. The only reason that you're
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seeing any sort of uptick in violence is just because Trump is president, not because they've
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decided to absolutely castrate the NYPD. If you listen to the media on COVID, everything that's bad
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that's happening is the fault of Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Doug Ducey in Florida,
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Texas, and Arizona, respectively, or Trump, more broadly speaking, California just ceases to exist.
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Also, apparently Trump is at fault for the second wave that we are now seeing in Spain,
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in France, in Japan. Apparently Trump is in charge of the entire world. Literally every narrative that
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has been trotted out over the past several weeks is not just a little bit wrong. It's not just a
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little wrong. It is overtly false. It is overtly false. I'm amazed that the media think they can get
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away with this. And so far they have. I mean, that's the sad truth is that when you have this
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blanket wall tsunami, I think that I felt this way after 2006. I remember after 2004,
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there was this feeling with Republicans after Bush beat Kerry that we're never going to lose again.
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And finally, the power of the mainstream media with Dan Rather collapsing in on himself like a dying,
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crazy, drunk old star, that he was basically going, that was the end of the mainstream media.
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Their power had been broken. The back had been broken. And then in 2008, it felt like, oh no,
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the media is still there. Then Trump wins. And then Republicans again are like, well,
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it looks like the power of the media is broken. And now it doesn't feel like that at all again.
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And it feels like there is just this vast tsunami-like unified wave that has been rushing over
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informationally the American population. And the best case I can see is not even about Trump. It's
00:14:36.740
about the approval ratings in Florida, Texas, and Arizona. Ducey, DeSantis, and Abbott are all
00:14:41.040
underwater. Gavin Newsom is still at 58% in the state of California, despite experiencing a surge
00:14:45.280
exactly the same size as the other states and not having opened in the first place.
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You know, the most interesting person in the country to me right now is Kayleigh McEnany.
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I call her the species girl because she's a hot blonde who rips men's spines out with her tongue.
1.00
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But I think what makes her so fascinating to me is that she is incredibly prepared. She knows
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exactly how to go after that. She's kind of like you wish that she would use Trump,
00:15:09.720
be a ventriloquist for Trump, like Trump would open his mouth.
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Exactly, exactly. She is doing everything that one wishes that a George W. Bush or a Donald Trump,
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who are not exactly articulate, you wish that they would do. And the media is attacking her
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for telling the truth and being prepared. They're attacking her for having effective notes. They're
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attacking her for using tabs in her notebooks so she can find things. Today, I think it was today,
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it may have been yesterday, she actually showed a movie, a video of what was actually happening in
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Portland, and they cut it off. It's like, please don't interrupt us while we're lying.
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And I think that if she can do what she can do, if she will actually accomplish what she wants to
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accomplish, she could be a very, very powerful weapon. Because Ben, I couldn't agree with Ben
00:15:56.180
more about this. This is an amazing, amazing desertion of any journalistic ethos by journalists.
00:16:03.920
Yeah. I want to talk about that. You know, today, the number two podcast in the country
00:16:07.500
is this podcast by the New York Times, hosted by a white woman, by the way, suggesting that the
00:16:12.740
problem with American public education is white parents. So the fact that the media has gone all
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in for activism, I think, is one of the most important stories happening in the country.
00:16:22.060
But first, I want to talk about our friends over at Ring. You know, now is a time when more and more
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00:16:46.500
posting video from his ring of things being stolen from in front of his house. I've actually had to
00:16:51.660
start using a mail center across from our office to take deliveries. You know, people are sending
00:16:56.640
gifts to my home because my wife and I just adopted a child, and they keep disappearing. And,
00:17:02.100
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00:17:45.520
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00:18:08.980
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00:18:14.500
another reason that I'm glad that I have Ring. All the guys here have it. Ben, you love it.
00:18:19.720
I do. I love my Ring devices because, let's just be frank about this, some people don't like me. And
00:18:24.200
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00:18:28.300
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slash backstage. Go check them out right now. Keep yourself and your family safer at ring.com
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slash backstage. Hey there, Alicia. What you reading? Oh, just this book. I think it's by this guy we all
00:18:57.640
know named Ben Shapiro. How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. Ben, I really only wish that
00:19:03.320
you'd written this a lot faster so I would have had something to read during COVID. I took up needle
00:19:06.900
pointing instead and really getting to my eyesight. Anyway, you should go buy Ben's book right now.
00:19:12.980
Apparently, though, you only get a signed copy if you, you know, co-host his live signing
00:19:17.220
because this one's not signed to me. But anyway, this is also a reminder to join our most exclusive
00:19:23.140
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00:19:27.800
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00:19:31.820
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00:19:36.740
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00:19:48.580
get not one but two tumblers. Okay, first question. Ben, you ready to roll? First of all, it's a
00:19:53.740
little insulting to me. I'm just going to get this off my chest. You all have, when you do your shows,
00:19:58.340
you all get to use your own name as the promo code. So it's like, promo code Shapiro. Oh, K-L-A-V-A
00:20:04.640
and there are no E's in Clavin. However, Knowles does say, I've never listened to shows. I can only assume
00:20:09.120
he has one. But anytime I'm around, it's either still Shapiro for some reason, giving me absolutely no
00:20:15.040
credit. Or it's the generic backstage. Why can't we have promo code God King or promo code Jeremy's
00:20:20.080
great? Or promo code, could somebody give Jeremy a little more money? I don't know. I don't like it.
00:20:24.680
Listen, it's hard enough to be a grifter. To be a grifter and not get paid for it is the absolutely
00:20:30.620
worst thing imaginable. What a waste of time. Let's take some questions. So do you want to take the
00:20:36.120
first question, Jeremy, so you don't feel like a grifter? Can I toss it to Ben, who we really know is
00:20:39.860
the boss? Wow, that hurt. But yeah, better give it to Ben. Okay. He's looking
00:20:45.020
right at me. I mean, he did. He's looking right at me and he did leave me an unsigned book in the
00:20:48.920
studio to talk about. So, all right, Ben, is America's position on the UN Security Council
00:20:54.360
reason enough to stay in the UN or should we pull out of the UN immediately? No, we should,
00:20:58.880
we should pull out of the UN immediately. We should neutron bomb the building and salt the earth.
00:21:02.780
The UN is a horrific organization, always was a horrific organization. If you look at the origins of
00:21:07.640
the UN, it basically Stalin insisted that the USSR have a veto on the Security Council, which ended
00:21:13.380
any and all possibility that there would ever be anything good that ever came out of the UN.
00:21:17.440
The UN has literally done, you can count the number of good things the UN has done probably
00:21:21.240
on one hand and maybe on like three fingers. It's really incredible what a useless and awful
00:21:26.560
organization the United Nations is. All you have to do, obviously, is look at what they pass in the
00:21:30.540
General Assembly where every single resolution is about Israel and they're not condemning the
00:21:33.520
United States. All you have to do is look at the UN Human Rights Council, which is staffed by great
00:21:37.240
nations like Iran and Sudan. All you have to do is look at the fact that every time they can steal
1.00
00:21:42.240
money and use it to enrich a local despot, they absolutely do it. The UN is garbage. We should
00:21:46.940
have a League of Democracies instead, or we should just have a bunch of bilateral agreements. Frankly,
00:21:50.920
I think the President Trump's approach to alliance is in many ways closer. You're never going to hear
00:21:56.620
me say again. You ready for this, guys? His view on alliance is actually closer to the Washingtonian
00:22:00.680
view of alliance than many of the people who have been promoting the sort of we're all friends and
00:22:07.780
neighbors routine for a very long time. Trump's view of alliance is basically you're friends with the
00:22:11.580
people you're friends with, and you're not friends with the people you're not friends with. And
00:22:14.280
that's exactly what Washington says in his farewell address. It seems to me that we've strayed far
00:22:17.580
from that, and the UN is the formalization of straying exactly from Washingtonian principle.
00:22:21.580
Ben, I agree. I've been waiting for you to say that Donald Trump reminds us of George Washington
00:22:25.820
for many years now, and I'm glad that we agree.
00:22:28.340
No, that's right. He also has false teeth and...
00:22:38.240
Sorry, I thought Michael was going to go on, but you know, okay.
00:22:40.720
Okay, it kind of petered out. Just like all of our shows, it just sort of came to a sliding
00:22:47.060
This next question is for the Michael Knowles, you know, illustrious author himself. Will
00:22:51.260
Republicans have to lose in 2020, you think, in order to win big in 2024? I think that's for
00:22:55.880
not just the White House, but the House and the Senate.
00:22:58.000
No, you don't win by losing. You don't. You cannot win by losing. Sometimes people,
00:23:02.800
we get very clever about this, and we say like, okay, well, I'm going to lose this race,
1.00
00:23:06.600
but then I'm going to win it this way 10 years from now. And that's just not how it works.
00:23:09.900
You're going to lose. I mean, sometimes it's inevitable that you lose, but you have to try
00:23:13.800
to win because politics moves on. Politics is about eternal principles applied to constantly
00:23:19.960
changing circumstances. And so in those circumstances, you can't predict what it's
00:23:24.040
going to look like. Forget four or eight years from now, you can't predict what it's going to
00:23:27.440
look like in three months. If the election were held today, I think a lot of people think President
00:23:31.180
Trump would lose. But who knows? Who knows what's going to happen over the next 100 days?
00:23:34.940
So no, you got to win. You got to try to win. And if you lose, which is going to happen eventually,
00:23:39.520
then you got to regroup and try to win the next time.
00:23:42.560
All right, Drew, this question is for you. It's kind of a two-part question. Part one is,
00:23:45.940
should schools that teach the 1619 Project lose their federal funding? And what curriculum can
00:23:54.240
That's a great question. And yes, A, yes, I think that you should not be a public school
00:23:58.740
teaching 1619. It's not true. I mean, that's the first thing. It's not true. Plus, it's anti-American.
00:24:04.740
If you can't teach your children to love the country you're in and what's beautiful about it,
00:24:07.920
what's great about it, instead teaching it that it's inherently evil, I cannot see how that is in
00:24:13.620
any way an education. What we need, what we need is a history of freedom. We need to follow the train
00:24:19.320
of freedom through Western history so that that really takes us from Greece to Rome to the formation of
00:24:24.740
Europe and to America. It's an idea. You know, it's the idea that really lights up Western history,
00:24:29.940
makes it different than everybody else. And really, it shows you, you can trace then when it falls off,
00:24:35.400
why it falls off, when it surges, when it rises, and what keeps it alive. And I've always thought
00:24:40.320
that the history that hasn't been written, and I'm just not equipped to write it, unfortunately,
00:24:44.160
is a history of freedom, a history of how this idea has stayed alive. Really, all we have are Lord
00:24:49.280
Acton's letters, which kind of are interesting, but they're just not the same thing as having
00:24:54.260
a textbook that traces this idea. And that's what I think we should be doing on the right. And of
00:24:58.780
course, we never do anything on the right to fix the culture, but that would be one of the things,
00:25:02.760
a project that I think we should be fronting and paying for.
00:25:06.480
All right, Jeremy, the God King, not that many people, I mean, actually, they follow you on
00:25:10.080
Twitter. They're one of the hundred thousand people who do follow you on Twitter. They probably
00:25:13.040
know that you're a big baseball fan and that you usually take the whole Daily Wire crew to see a
00:25:16.820
Dodgers game once a year on the anniversary. But with that in mind, what do you think about the
00:25:21.480
guys at the MLB caving to the woke mob and promoting these players kneeling?
00:25:26.200
Yeah, well, first of all, it's one of the horrible things that's happened is the loss of sports.
00:25:31.620
You know, the point of sport is that it allows us to work out our sort of baser instincts. You know,
00:25:37.500
everybody is a little bit tribalistic. Everybody's a little bit jingoistic. And what sports allow us
00:25:41.800
to do is root, root, root for the home team in an environment where the struggle has no meaning
00:25:47.400
beyond a sort of local regional pride. This is why I sometimes argue with Ben. He's obviously a big
00:25:53.560
White Sox fan. And sometimes when we go to Dodger Stadium, he'll wear his White Sox cap. And I'll
00:25:57.480
say to him, you know, it actually is important that we root for the home team. Like, it's good.
00:26:02.180
It's fine when we have a team that we love from afar.
00:26:05.000
But then I'd be rooting for Los Angeles. And Los Angeles is a bag of garbage, dude.
00:26:08.240
They would have taken it all this year if they were actually baseball anymore. They've got such a
00:26:13.060
great team. But it's just the case that that's part of what sports are supposed to be. That's why
00:26:16.820
team sports provide something that boxing or like the Red Bull kind of individualistic sports don't
00:26:22.600
actually provide. You know, I like to watch UFC or I like to watch sometimes the extreme stuff from
00:26:28.100
Red Bull. But you can't root for that. You're not a part of that. They don't represent your community.
00:26:31.840
They don't represent your, they don't represent your, they're not your team. You know, they're not
00:26:36.560
in any way representative of you. You're supporting them in what they do. When we support a baseball team,
00:26:41.560
they represent in some way us. And if the Dodgers are a terrible bag of garbage, then that's because
00:26:49.100
Ben has chosen to be part of a bag of garbage community. Or his parents did. I don't know.
00:26:56.800
All of that to say, the loss of sports right now in our country is going to have a real impact.
00:27:03.120
It's one of the few things left in our social fabric that would bring us together in, you know,
00:27:08.140
a sort of shared struggle, a shared, a shared celebration. That's what sports is for. We don't
00:27:14.140
have that now. Obviously, they've made them political. COVID is also part of this. They've
00:27:17.840
destroyed sports. Apparently, the one place where you can't be in an outdoor environment,
00:27:23.580
shouting is at a sports arena. Anywhere, if you're in a town square, you can do it. But if you're in a
00:27:29.400
sports arena, you will definitely get the COVIDs. I think it's a huge mistake to insert the kind of
00:27:35.260
politics in it the way that the owners are right now. My hope is that they will lose enormous
00:27:40.440
amounts of cash as a result. I think that that's what's going to happen. I suspect that people will
00:27:45.800
just turn it off. That's not what people watch sports for. I may be wrong because the entire
00:27:49.760
country is shut down. It may be that we're so desperate for any kind of distraction that people
00:27:54.100
will go ahead and watch sports sort of in spite of this. That's not what I hope happens. I hope they
00:27:58.560
lose 40% of their ratings and are forced to correct because we need them to correct because we need
00:28:04.540
sports. Listen, I'm blind in one eye. I'm horribly uncoordinated. I've humiliated myself at almost
00:28:10.920
every sport that's popular among America's youth. Nevertheless, I think sports are incredibly
00:28:16.060
important. I think that the entire idea of sport, sometimes people will say, America puts too much
00:28:20.980
emphasis on sports and not enough emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic. Right, but we invent
00:28:26.800
everything. We have the military that defends democracy and freedom all across the globe,
00:28:32.700
and we're the greatest economy in the history of the world. Our love of sport and the fact that
00:28:37.960
we inculcate love of sport into our children is part of the reason for our success because sports
00:28:43.160
actually teach you the values of capitalism. They teach you that hard work, that perseverance,
00:28:48.420
that overcoming adversity can lead to success. They teach you that you can't rely on rigged rules.
00:28:54.300
You have to, at the end of the day, rely on yourself and on your team. That is an important part of
00:29:00.360
what we teach our kids. I think that it's an enormous loss if it continues down the path that
00:29:05.320
it's going right now. Can we stop on this topic for a second? Yes, please. Because it really is
00:29:08.640
devastating for those of us who are like major, major baseball fans. So I am a diehard Chicago
00:29:14.240
White Sox fan. I wrote an entire book about the Chicago White Sox 2005 championship season with my
00:29:18.220
father. Both of us have united over baseball. Singular championship season. Singular. Well,
00:29:22.700
they had one. Well, it was all the way back in 1918, though, 1917, actually. But the basic kind of
00:29:29.660
destruction of all common areas of American life is so horrifying. And it's happening everywhere,
00:29:35.600
right? I mean, it's not just sports. It's happening in entertainment. It's happening that
00:29:38.960
basically it is now dictated to you that when you buy an HVAC part, you have to make sure that the CEO
00:29:44.140
of the HVAC company agrees with you on politics. You have to make sure that the head of Goya
00:29:48.400
agrees with you about Donald Trump, even if he's already done a different press conference with
00:29:52.420
Barack Obama just a few years beforehand. Everybody has to agree on everything. And the corporations,
00:29:57.360
I mean, I'm going to sound like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren right now. The corporations
00:29:59.880
are to blame for this. Corporations have not stood up for principle. Corporations have decided that the
00:30:03.900
easiest way out is to cave to the woke mob. And they can make a quick buck by caving to the woke mob
00:30:07.660
because there are enough conservatives who aren't going to boycott them that they feel like they can just
00:30:11.700
grease the squeakiest wheel and get away with it. And it really is short sighted. It's quite
00:30:16.380
disgusting. And again, when, when they, when, when MLB decides that they're going to put out like
00:30:21.080
this vague Morgan Freeman, social justice statement, where he talks about Tim Robbins going through 500
00:30:26.000
yards of foul smelling stench, like you can't believe. And everybody's kneeling and it's all about
00:30:31.060
empathy and equality. And the statement, by the way, meant nothing. I mean, if you actually listen to
00:30:34.820
what Morgan Freeman said, it made no sense at all. Like it really didn't make any sense. But
00:30:39.000
the, the basic notion here, they knelt the footage that you're seeing right now is the,
00:30:43.060
is the nationals and the Yankees both kneeling before the national anthem. And this was their
00:30:46.460
compromise, right? We're not going to kneel during the national anthem because that might be perceived
00:30:49.720
as disrespectful. Instead, we'll kneel before the national anthem to signify that America is
00:30:54.160
systemically racist. I don't feel particularly respected now as, as a member of the systemically
00:30:59.340
racist American public, apparently, and systemically a racist American system. I don't feel
00:31:03.520
particularly not insulted by a group of largely diverse millionaires and 10 millionaires telling
00:31:10.400
me how racist the American system is. And if we don't buy that, then what? We're not patriotic.
00:31:14.660
What? We're not, we're not allowed to watch sport. The corporate owners who are doing this kind of
00:31:18.220
stuff, they don't understand that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face and they're
00:31:20.780
ruining the country in the process. And it's, it's gone everywhere, right? Because if you even say
00:31:24.400
this, that's political. If you say you don't like politics and sports, now you're being political
00:31:28.080
and you trend on Twitter for saying, I like my sports without politics. Even though, as my friend
00:31:31.820
Clay Travis says the root of the word sport, the etymology is disport from the French,
00:31:36.060
meaning literally distraction. The whole point of sports is to distract you from real life.
00:31:40.260
There's plenty of crap happening in real life. When I turn on a game, the last thing I want to see
00:31:43.300
is a bunch of vague social justice messaging that is semantically overloaded and could mean
00:31:47.520
everything from support black lives matter as an organization to America systemically racist,
00:31:51.040
to the completely inarguable principle that black people matter, which of course they do.
1.00
00:31:54.520
You know, this is a very good point. We, we obviously don't want these kinds of partisan
00:31:58.340
distractions, but there, there is, I would push back and say a political element to sports going
00:32:03.460
all the way back to ancient Greece. And it's a very basic one. And the basic political element
00:32:08.420
is patriotism. Sports have always been patriotic. They've been about celebrating as Jeremy says,
00:32:14.200
the home team or celebrating your country. And one of the virtues that they inculcate among all the
00:32:19.400
others that, that Jeremy, you mentioned is loyalty, loyalty to your teammates. If you're playing the
00:32:24.740
sport, loyalty to the home team. If you're going out and watching the sport, loyalty to your country,
00:32:29.160
when you stand up for the national anthem. And Ben, as you say, the common areas of American life
00:32:34.680
have been completely eroded. If we cannot even recognize one another as fellow Americans,
00:32:40.000
if we cannot even agree on the star spangled banner, there is nothing left. That is the most
00:32:46.300
basic level of American unity and solidarity. So much for that loyalty. By the way, Anthony Fauci can't
00:32:51.940
throw, right? I mean, we've established this, right? I mean, I feel bad for him. He's 80,
00:32:55.300
but he's the one who chose to get out there on the mound. I get to make fun of you if you throw
00:32:57.820
that out as the first pitch, right? Yeah. I'm just going to say that if you're ever invited to
00:33:02.020
throw out the first pitch at any baseball game, just say no. Just don't do it. Yeah. If you didn't
00:33:06.140
play college ball, do not get up there and try to throw it out. W threw it out, right? W. He
00:33:11.060
thrown a baseball team. One assumes he had thrown a baseball a few times in his day. If you get the
00:33:17.160
opportunity, Ben Shapiro or Michael Knowles or Andrew Klavan. But even Donald Trump has a good
00:33:21.620
throwing motion. Internet celebrity. Well, yeah, he's never exercised. I feel like I'm
00:33:24.980
praising Trump so much this episode. If you had never exercised, you could throw out a baseball
00:33:28.520
too. You keep picking these guys. That's true. No, he does have all his life force.
00:33:32.220
He has all his life force and therefore he's able to. I want to talk, speaking of life force,
00:33:36.400
I want to talk about our friends over at Policy Genius. I've been telling you guys about my journey
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00:33:49.380
couldn't be more simple. They gave me all these opportunities to compare prices and I even ran
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a little control in my experiment. I looked in another location online. I priced out a policy
00:33:59.440
and sure enough, Policy Genius gave me better opportunities. There is more now that I can
00:34:04.260
reveal. Since we last spoke, my wife got that. I went ahead and got a policy on my wife because I
1.00
00:34:10.300
actually thought it's a little bit unfair that she now gets to root for my demise. I should also be
00:34:15.680
able to celebrate the idea that she indeed is mortal. And even though the likelihood is based
00:34:20.160
on every statistic from that men will die before their wives, even when that man in question isn't
00:34:26.340
an asshole like me, even with all of that, it's still, there's an off chance that she could go
0.98
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00:35:28.400
making it very efficient. Now, most qualified applicants can actually complete the medical requirement over
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the phone. Getting life insurance, listen, I kid, it is very important, especially once you start
00:35:39.020
having children, especially when you have dependents, especially when you have other people who you need
00:35:42.480
to provide for. The loss of a loved one is a terrible enough thing. Don't put people in a position
00:35:47.680
of not only having to mourn for you, but also have to worry about how they're going to meet those basic
00:35:52.240
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life insurance right. So, before we went to break, we were talking, Drew, about this idea of the media
00:36:24.260
having completely taken off the mask, as Ben said, and revealing that they're partisan activists. I referenced
00:36:28.800
this podcast, this second biggest podcast in the country today in which the New York Times says that
00:36:35.020
the problem with education in America is white parents. Of course, this comes right on the heels
0.99
00:36:39.740
of the 1619 Project and some great reporting done by the Daily Wire discovered that the New York Times
00:36:45.240
spent over $3 million promoting the 1619 Project and was able to obscure the specifics of how they spent
00:36:50.840
that money. Just three ads from the 1619 Project. Just three individual ads by exploiting a protection that
00:36:55.420
was afforded them because they're not activists, because they're supposed to be straight journalists.
00:36:59.640
Of course, then they behave as activists. The very fact that they're printing curricula now to put
00:37:06.420
into elementary, junior high, high schools, doesn't this evidence that they aren't, in fact,
00:37:12.480
journalistic institutions anymore at all? I mean, are we really seeing not only sort of the reveal,
00:37:18.940
but aren't we seeing a shift happen where these organizations are now directly engaging in
00:37:24.000
politics in a way that maybe has not been the case in the post-war consensus?
00:37:28.600
Yeah, it's the Trump effect in a lot of ways, because Donald Trump hasn't caused any of this
00:37:33.460
to happen. He simply lanced the boil. I mean, it really was this bad. Everybody has this myth that
00:37:40.020
suddenly with Donald Trump, the journalistic community lost it. But that's not true. You go back
00:37:45.200
to George W. Bush. He was Hitler every day. Every word he said was a scandal. And the system is,
00:37:50.240
as I explain often, the system is not each individual story. It is to create an attitude,
00:37:55.860
an atmosphere of chaos so that when something actually happens, like Hurricane Katrina or the
00:38:01.340
Chinese flu, suddenly you think like, oh, yeah, it really has been chaotic all this time. It's really
00:38:06.040
been a disaster. So all that's happened now is the full reveal. And it's not just journalism. It really
00:38:12.240
is across our institutions. We have let our institutions get hollowed out. I mean, we have
00:38:17.020
a legislature that doesn't legislate. We have a court system that does legislate. We have journalists
00:38:23.520
that don't cover anything, academies that don't teach. And I think this is a genuinely serious
00:38:28.160
problem. And it's one of the reasons you should probably buy this book. By the way, I want to say
00:38:33.640
I want to say I saw this title, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, and I thought I was going to
00:38:37.220
open up and say, oh, my God, it's a cookbook. It's not for that. No, but I mean, I think this is we
00:38:44.420
are actually seeing something quite, quite serious, which is the hollowness of our institutions. And as
00:38:51.140
long as Trump is there, everybody can sort of point to him and say, oh, look, this is the problem. But
00:38:55.660
it's just not so. I mean, Trump is an effect of this. And the press, our entertainment system,
00:39:02.320
all of this has been hollowed out for years. I've been talking about it for years. And suddenly,
00:39:07.920
suddenly my phone starts ringing and people say, you know, gee, what are we supposed to do about
00:39:12.360
this? And I say, well, about 20 years ago, you're supposed to start building, you know,
00:39:16.060
news agencies. You're supposed to start building movie studios. You're supposed to start building
00:39:20.740
academies and teaching institutions. And look, the right has not done this. And the right,
00:39:26.740
one of the reasons the right has not done this is because I think our philosophy has been emptied out
00:39:31.080
by fusionism, by basically saying we're going to put together libertarians, religious people,
00:39:36.320
and capitalism. And it all kind of comes, it's all sort of been about money. I mean,
00:39:40.520
all we've ever said to people is like the pursuit of happiness is about money. Capitalism is the
00:39:44.880
greatest thing ever. And now one of the things that Ben was talking about, about the fact that
00:39:49.220
corporations are signing on to this racist, Marxist, disgusting Black Lives Matter philosophy,
0.99
00:39:55.380
it shows you that capitalism won't save you. You've got to start with the values. It has to start
00:39:59.440
with the values. And unless we become a values party or a values movement, we can't stop this
00:40:05.540
because we have no message. Until we have a message, we can't do the messaging. And I think
00:40:10.440
that it really is a problem that has finally just kind of come open, like I said, like a boil being
00:40:15.160
lanced. I think that I'm a little bit more pro-capitalism. I may be the last...
00:40:20.280
I actually think there's a slightly nuanced distinction that I would make. I think one of the problems
00:40:25.580
that happens with the right is that we don't profit off of the culture at all. And so we
00:40:32.880
abandon the culture entire. If you go to... If you ask why do conservative billionaires not fund film
00:40:40.140
or music or technology? It's another... Conservatives famously don't get involved in any major way in
00:40:45.960
technology. The answer, I think, is because conservatives tend to be fairly conservative
00:40:51.160
in their approach. And therefore, rich conservatives tend to be people who got rich through very
00:40:56.700
conservative practices. So for example, while I was in the DFW area over the last week,
00:41:03.160
there's so much real estate wealth. There's so much energy wealth that goes on in those places,
00:41:08.320
right? I mean, famously, if you make your money in real estate or in energy or in oil,
00:41:14.400
you're in Texas. And think about how those guys make their money. If you make your money in real
00:41:18.080
estate, you can put on a spreadsheet the steps to allow you to prosper over time. You could start
00:41:24.000
now with very little money in your own bank account. And you could build your way to being
00:41:28.940
an extraordinarily wealthy person in a very meat and potatoes, very predictable, one step in front
00:41:33.520
of the other way. And so if you become a very wealthy, conservative real estate person, you probably
00:41:39.860
have spreadsheets that tell you, if I increase the rental rates in my skyscraper by 10% over the
00:41:47.900
next three years, I'll be able to afford to do a remodel of the entire structure, which will allow
00:41:52.740
me to increase my rate by 20% over the three years after that, which will allow me to buy a second
00:41:57.320
skyscraper. And if I raise my rent 10% over the next three years there, I can do a renovation,
00:42:01.540
which will allow me to... And they can, very one step in front of the other, see these ways to build
00:42:05.860
wealth. With the exception of wildcatting, a lot of the energy industry functions the same way.
00:42:11.580
If we frack this many wells, there's a ratio to understand. And so you might make two, three,
00:42:18.060
four, five, $20 billion in those businesses, but you always know what the next thing to do with your
00:42:23.760
money is. If you make a billion dollars in real estate, you put the billion dollars back into
00:42:29.140
real estate so that you can make $2 billion. Now, imagine that you're that guy. You know what to do
00:42:34.640
with every dollar that comes your way and how to turn that into another dollar, how to turn that into
00:42:38.900
a better downtown in your community. Let's don't pretend it's just money. How to turn that into
00:42:43.340
better jobs for the people in your community and all the things that come with that kind of growth.
00:42:47.540
And now a kid walks into your office with a backpack and he says, hey, dude. Nobody calls me dude. He
00:42:54.020
says, yeah, man, listen, I built this app. What's an app? Well, it's this thing on the computer. I built
00:43:00.200
this website and basically I put up a bunch of pictures of hot chicks from my college and I let people
0.96
00:43:06.320
vote with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And if the chick gets a thumbs up, then she moves to the
1.00
00:43:11.280
second ranking and more people can vote on her. Please give me $10 million. I think I could grow
00:43:15.420
this into something where people can really talk to each other, man. You'd be like, how did you get
00:43:20.660
in here? And you would kick that kid out of your office and you wouldn't even know 15 years later
00:43:26.060
that he's worth $75 billion and that that app that he built for voting on how hot chicks are became the
00:43:32.820
most important communication platform ever devised in the history of man. Because you knew meat and
00:43:40.000
potatoes, how to take your money and put it into the next thing. So we now imagine some beatnik kid
00:43:45.980
walks into your office with a backpack and he's got an idea for how he can tell a story that's kind of
00:43:51.880
funny. And he thinks maybe people will laugh. And he tells you a couple of jokes that he wrote into
00:43:55.680
scene three about a bong hit. And you're like, what on earth? But it turns out that guy goes on to be
00:44:00.700
Adam Sandler or something. And he creates one of the most profitable film franchises or film
00:44:06.280
companies in modern Hollywood. He has a deal with Sony for years. He's the most popular film producer
00:44:12.460
on Netflix for a number of years. In other words, there's nothing in the experience of the kind of
00:44:17.160
people who have excess cash on the right to help them understand why they should back these cultural
00:44:21.580
plays. Meanwhile, guys who made their money in technology, like Silicon Valley guys, they see money
00:44:27.560
completely differently. They make a billion dollars and there is no next apartment building
00:44:32.060
to buy. There is no community in which they have invested in. They didn't pick downtown Fort Worth
00:44:37.260
to be the place where they were going to build and grow. They made their money in these very abstract
00:44:41.060
ways. And so they're willing to take bets on other people who think abstractly. I think that there is
00:44:46.080
just a culture. It's funny, a cultural difference for how the culture is perceived from people who made
00:44:51.900
their money in abstract ways and people who made their money by renovating apartment buildings.
00:44:55.920
You know, I have to tell you, I have to tell you why it's not that I disagree with what you're
00:45:00.340
saying, but I think that you're seeing something you're saying that something is built into the
00:45:03.980
system. And I think that it's, it's actually a matter of values. This is one of the reasons you
00:45:08.160
and I always disagree about Ayn Rand, who I just hate. And I think that if you take the value,
00:45:13.620
if you put values first, you can have capitalism and it will be the wonderful machine that it is
00:45:19.220
for raising everybody up. But if you don't put the values for, you know, when, when Jesus said,
00:45:22.640
you can't serve God and mammon, he wasn't just whistling Dixie, which would have been racist.
00:45:26.560
He was actually, he was actually saying, you have to put some, one thing before the other.
00:45:32.520
And I think the thing is when we see, when we see Amazon sending me on my webpage saying,
00:45:38.220
oh, if you like the collected poetry of William Wordsworth, you might like white fragility. And you
1.00
00:45:42.480
think like, I'm sorry, what he, he has got to be making a calculation that somehow that's going
00:45:47.480
to help him financially down the road. And he may be right. When Oprah takes the 1619 project,
00:45:53.520
that's an Ayn Randian success. I mean, that's everything that Ayn Rand supports, except that
00:45:58.200
it's destructive of the country. If you don't put the values first, if you don't put the values above
00:46:02.440
the money, and we have, we fail to preach this as conservatives. If you don't put the values above
00:46:06.700
the money, you really hollow out what capitalism is. And you have China basically, where they have
0.99
00:46:13.560
Well, I think that there is a problem that you're diagnosing, but I think that I'm not sure I agree
00:46:18.200
with the exact diagnosis. So I totally agree that conservatives have failed to talk about
00:46:22.420
values in markets. They've talked about the value of markets, but not values in markets. And that
00:46:26.380
makes a huge difference. The, as soon as conservatives made the moves to talk in terms of utilitarianism,
00:46:32.240
they lost. Conservatives are not utilitarians. As soon as conservatives started to say, the reason
00:46:36.680
that markets are good is because they produce prosperity and wealth. It was over because it's so easy
00:46:41.440
for somebody else to say, right, but prosperity and good for whom, right? How about this group?
00:46:45.540
This group's been left behind. Why can't we just capture the value of the market? And then we can
00:46:49.440
turn it and twist it and we can do X, Y, or Z with it, right? This is the sort of language that both
00:46:53.940
Tucker Carlson uses on the right about markets, right? Markets are just a mechanism and we can chain
00:46:57.860
them to anything we want. So why don't we chain them to things that we like? And Elizabeth Warren,
00:47:01.260
who will say things like, the markets are just a mule that you can hitch to your wagon and it will take
00:47:05.460
you exactly where you want to go. The point of markets, and this is something that I've been focused on for a
00:47:09.180
very long time. The reason that markets are good is because markets are a reflection of a truth about
00:47:13.720
human nature was that human beings are free and deserve to own their own labor. And so people
00:47:18.400
have asked me, okay, so what if a market was less efficient than a fascist economic system? I would
00:47:22.100
still believe in the market. I would still believe in the market because I think that there's an
00:47:25.300
inherent goods, the belief that human beings own their own labor, that they are individuals created
00:47:29.300
in the image of God. And as Locke argued, if you're an individual created in the image of God and you mix
00:47:33.060
your labor with the earth, you then own that labor. That is an inherent good. And that is not reliant
00:47:37.260
on the effect of the capitalist enterprise. It just turns out that this also happens to create
00:47:42.160
the most wealth in the history of humanity. But you have to argue that people actually own their
00:47:45.380
own labor and that they ought to own their own labor as a moral matter, not as a utilitarian matter.
00:47:50.320
So I think reading values in capitalism and opposition is incorrect, except in that people
0.93
00:47:55.760
have started to discuss capitalism only in utilitarian terms. And very often when they speak about capitalism
00:48:01.380
in utilitarian terms, they don't mean long-term utilitarian terms, right? The problem with Ayn Rand is she
00:48:05.480
assumes that everybody who engages in capitalism is going to think more than five minutes down the
00:48:09.960
road. She assumes that people are going to forego the immediate profit margin that is to be found
00:48:14.900
in doing the wrong thing in order to preserve the system that is going to... Ayn Rand actually does
00:48:19.800
assume that there is a value that you are assuming in your own life, your ownership of your own
00:48:23.720
living, right? This is why as much as I disagree with her sort of values on capitalism when applied to
00:48:28.620
your personal life and your treatment of family, when she talks about selfishness is a value,
00:48:33.440
what she really means is that you ought to own your own labor. There is a value in owning your
00:48:37.680
own labor. There is something good in the creative human spirit, right? That is a value-laden argument
00:48:41.780
and that's been left behind by a lot of the people who tend to speak about capitalism purely as a
00:48:45.380
utilitarian creator of wealth. But there's also this issue, I mean, Ben, I agree with you exactly on
00:48:49.280
the utilitarian point and Drew, I agree with you on this point that you need values. We've made this
00:48:54.100
mistake, especially Republicans have, you know, at Republican fundraisers for the last 30, 40 years,
00:48:59.280
which is that the Republican party fundraiser speech was always schizophrenic. It began with,
00:49:05.000
we need to maintain strong communities and family values and conserve all of our wonderful rituals
00:49:09.680
and traditions. And by the way, we need to destroy all of that for creative destruction that is
00:49:14.200
constantly ever progressing and is always making people move all over the place and not even just
00:49:18.920
all around the country, but all around the globe. Isn't that great? We're all going to make a lot more
00:49:21.980
money. And the latter part of that argument undercuts the very values that you're talking about at the
00:49:28.040
beginning. So I agree entirely, Ben, that you need to make a moral argument for not just markets,
00:49:33.760
but for so many other facets of our economic system. But you also, you have to begin with
00:49:39.740
the human person, what we want, an authentic politics, which since ancient Greece means a lot
00:49:45.200
of people coming together and deciding how we want to live, debating ethical questions, ranking our
00:49:49.600
priorities. And only then will you be able to even have an economic system that doesn't completely
00:49:54.980
undercut itself as we're seeing right now with the woke companies who are chopping off at the knees,
00:50:00.260
the very country that allowed these markets to flourish.
00:50:02.200
So, yeah, I think it's possible. I mean, I always make the moral argument for capitalism. I agree with
00:50:07.700
you a hundred percent on that, Ben, but you're, you're looking at it from one side, which is if
00:50:12.300
fascism worked better, was more efficient than capitalism, would fascism be all right? And of course,
00:50:16.620
the answer is no. But if capitalism starts to sell fascism and make a bundle, would that be all
00:50:21.120
right? And the answer is also no. I think when, when, uh, when you're using corporations, for
00:50:26.000
instance, when you have corporations that are silencing free speech, that are cutting down free
00:50:29.740
speech, to me, that is a value that actually supersedes all kinds of capitalist rules. If your company is in
00:50:36.520
any way harming the right of Americans to speak freely in an effective way, your company's got to go.
00:50:41.900
Your company should be just shut down. You know, your rights, if you don't start with the fact that
00:50:45.760
your rights come from God, then there's always going to be different kinds of power centers that
00:50:50.080
can take away those rights. And I think those rights have to be defended because they are holy,
00:50:54.760
because they come from a source outside our, ourselves and capitalism. Listen, again, I'm a
00:50:59.980
total capitalist, but capitalism has to rest on that pedestal. It can't create that pedestal itself.
00:51:07.280
And if you want to defend that pedestal, you need to go talk to our friends
00:51:10.100
manufacturing. When the founders created the constitution, so beautiful.
00:51:18.560
Listen, I'm the true capitalist. You all give a lot of lip service to it. I'm the only one who
00:51:22.660
makes sure you all get paid. When the founders crafted the constitution, the first thing they did
00:51:26.800
was make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their
00:51:30.700
government. The second right they enumerated was the right of the population to protect that speech
00:51:35.060
and their own persons with force. You know how strongly each of us here believes in these
00:51:39.300
principles. Every one of us here, a gun owner and owning a rifle in particular is an awesome
00:51:44.860
responsibility. Building rifles is no different. Bravo Company Manufacturing, BCM, built a professional
00:51:49.760
grade product, which is built to combat standards. That's because BCM believes that the same level of
00:51:54.720
protection should be provided to every single American, regardless of whether or not you're a
00:51:58.740
private citizen or a professional. People at BCM assume that when a rifle leaves their shop,
00:52:03.140
it will be used in a life or death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer,
00:52:07.340
or a soldier overseas. With that in mind, every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and
00:52:11.720
tested by Americans. The people at BCM feel it's their moral responsibility as Americans to provide
00:52:17.220
tools that will not fail the end user when it's not just a paper target, but someone coming to do
00:52:22.020
them harm. BCM also knows that making a reliable, life-saving tool is only half the story. The company
00:52:27.860
also works with leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's special operations
00:52:32.760
forces, from Marine Corps force reconnaissance to U.S. Army special operations forces,
00:52:37.100
connecting them with other Americans. These top instructors teach the skills necessary to defend
00:52:41.380
yourself, your family, or others. We love the guys over at Bravo Company Manufacturing. They make a great
00:52:46.760
product, and they actually do believe it's based on the values, as Drew was saying. They make a great
00:52:53.080
product. They're great in the marketplace, but they also believe that that product serves the ideals
00:52:58.520
that are ensconced in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Bravo Company Manufacturing, Ben.
00:53:03.440
To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to bravocompanymfg.com. You can
00:53:07.700
discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news. That is bravocompanymfg.com.
00:53:12.260
If you need more convincing, find out even more about BCM and the amazing people who make their
00:53:15.940
products at youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa. Here, we imitate masculinity by having men smoke cigars.
00:53:21.340
There, they just do masculinity by making firearms.
0.94
00:53:25.460
And smoking cigars. YouTube.com slash bravocompanyusa or bravocompanymfg.com.
00:53:32.560
Does that code work for people that work at the company? Just asking for someone.
00:53:36.560
Alrighty. Reminder to join our most exclusive membership tier. Are you like me? You like
00:53:41.780
exclusive things? Well, turns out, even at the Daily Wire, we have a very exclusive membership tier.
00:53:46.800
It's our all-access tier, and you can join us for a live online Q&A discussion right after this
00:53:52.500
episode of Backstage using that code that Jeremy doesn't love because it doesn't have his name in
00:53:56.520
it. Backstage. It's the name of his show, though. And that code will get you 15% off using the code
00:54:02.300
Backstage with two tumblers. So dailywire.com slash subscribe. Code Backstage for 15% off for the
00:54:08.940
very exclusive all-access membership. Go and do it now because we still have time to ask the guys your
00:54:14.620
questions and get answers from them. First question goes to Ben Shapiro, New York Times.
00:54:18.240
I just want to say, I mean, I know it's our show. It's just that you guys also have your show. That's
00:54:23.960
the problem. It's my show. I guess in a way they're all my show. Yeah, you're the executive
00:54:29.540
producer of all of the shows. I mean, your name pops up on every single one. Oh, that's something.
00:54:34.480
Yeah, there you go. The men behind the curtain. All right, Ben, how would you handle the concentration
00:54:39.280
camp situation in China? And should there be more sanctions from the United States? And when is the
00:54:44.300
world really morally culpable without taking direct intervention? And why hasn't more action been
00:54:49.240
taken? It's like a four-part question, but I think it's a really good one. Yeah, that was a lot. So
00:54:52.900
when it comes to when is a country responsible for taking a direct humanitarian intervention,
00:54:57.680
my general rule of thumb is if the risk is low and the benefit is high, then you should do it.
00:55:02.900
The risk obviously is not low. If you're going to talk about bombing China over this,
00:55:06.240
then the question becomes, are you really willing to basically start World War III
00:55:09.480
at this point in time? And the answer there is no for pretty much everybody involved. I mean,
00:55:15.080
China is the world's most populous country. Is India now? Has India passed them? China may be
0.60
00:55:19.120
the second most populous country on planet Earth. In any case, a billion people over in China with an
00:55:23.040
incredibly large army and significant capacity to do Americans harm. Starting a war with China would
0.96
00:55:28.680
be a mistake. Does that mean that you have to abandon people to their fate? Absolutely not. We should be
00:55:32.380
engaging with the Chinese government exactly the way we engage with the USSR, which is to say we should cut
0.96
00:55:37.000
them off at the knees economically. We should recognize them for exactly the threat they are
00:55:40.940
globally speaking. They are an evil dictatorship, a full on evil dictatorship, not merely for what
00:55:46.000
they're doing to the Uyghurs, shaving heads and sending people on trains to concentration camps where
1.00
00:55:49.800
they force them into slave labor and or sterilize them. But what they've done to Hong Kong in subjecting
00:55:54.340
a free people to the predations of absolute communistic tyranny and the rest of the world shrugging
00:55:59.280
and yawning is an unbelievable chastisement of the idea that the West was ever willing to stand up for
00:56:04.180
the freedom of anybody in that region. And the next people who are going to take it directly on
00:56:08.380
the nose of the folks over in Taiwan, which is why the United States should immediately recognize
0.97
00:56:12.140
Taiwan as an independent country. They shouldn't wait more than five seconds. China ain't going to
00:56:15.780
start a shooting war over it. It might get mad at us. Tough. The United States should immediately
00:56:19.180
declare Taiwan a sovereign country. No more of this two systems, one country nonsense that China insists
00:56:25.060
upon. The United States should immediately sanction pretty much any business that is currently run by
00:56:31.320
the Chinese government. And if the United States wants to take measures to prevent people from
00:56:34.760
doing business with China, I'm not against it. I mean, right now, the problem is that you have a
1.00
00:56:38.260
collective action problem, which is that if businesses don't do business with China, they're
00:56:41.520
immediately undercut by other businesses that do do businesses with China. But that is exactly why
00:56:45.420
governments should get involved and they should be sanctioning China on a full scale. One of the great
1.00
00:56:49.200
mistakes, I think, in history, and maybe it was excusable at the time because we were at war with the
00:56:53.680
Soviet Union. But one of the great mistakes, in my view, was the opening of China. The idea that economics was ever
0.78
00:56:58.020
going to overcome values has been thoroughly rebuked by the presence of Chinese dictatorship,
00:57:02.640
which has strengthened, become more powerful, become more deep, more tyrannical, with the advent
00:57:08.180
of more capitalism. They've just taken all the spoils of a state-run, basically, fascist economy,
00:57:14.760
and then they've dumped it into their own dictatorship. The entire Western world should be united against
00:57:19.080
China right now. Whether they will or not is anybody's guess, but as the leaders of the free world,
00:57:22.900
it seems to me that we should be doing whatever we can to make it known to the Chinese economically
00:57:26.760
that we are simply not going to abide by their intellectual property theft, their human rights
00:57:30.640
predations, and their expansionism. All right, next question is for Jeremy. This is a pretty
00:57:35.960
interesting take, too. It says that we've seen this week, I know that you guys have seen that poll
00:57:39.240
that Frank Luntz and others have tweeted out that shows that 62 percent of Americans are afraid to share
00:57:43.760
their political views. But does this mean that the recent polls showing that Trump is down double
00:57:48.660
digits are then meaningless? So I'm not one who believes that we can just write off polls as
00:57:54.040
meaningless. Very often when conservatives say, well, the polls were wrong, the polls actually
00:57:58.300
weren't that wrong. You know, we like to say the polls showed that Hillary Clinton was going to win
00:58:04.000
in 2016, but she did win more votes in 2016. And basically by the same numbers that the polls
00:58:09.820
said that she would, the polls were very useful at helping understand human behavior. They were not
00:58:14.320
very good at specifying what was going to happen in some of the Midwestern states, which came down to
00:58:19.600
some fairly, very small and very anomalous things that occurred that allowed Trump to win. Listen,
00:58:25.060
I'm not saying he didn't win fair and square based on the system we have. He did. What I'm saying is
00:58:29.760
that the polls also were not wildly wrong about what the outcome was going to be in terms of the
00:58:33.840
human voting behavior at that time. That said, one other thing, there is no silent majority of
00:58:40.080
conservatives. There's this sort of idea hearkening back to Nixon that there's this silent majority
00:58:44.260
that all think the way that we do is going to rise up. It's very comforting, I think,
00:58:48.100
for conservatives to believe that. But it is not true. The left has won. Their opinions are the
00:58:55.700
more popular opinions by and large in the country, in particular among the young. If the election were
00:59:00.800
held today and only millennials were able to vote, Donald Trump would probably win zero states. At
00:59:06.500
most, he would win one state. And lest you roll your eyes and say, oh, who cares what the millennials
00:59:11.500
think? You're wrong about who millennials are. Michael Knowles is a millennial. The 20-year-old
00:59:16.220
that you just hired to work at your factory or the 16-year-old kid who you're still trying to get
00:59:22.020
out the front door. You got a couple more years of raising them. They aren't millennials. They're a
0.92
00:59:25.240
whole new generation that's coming up behind the millennials. The millennials are closer to 40 by and
00:59:30.200
large than they are to 20. And they are, for the first time in our history, the largest voting
00:59:36.580
demographic in the country. So the idea that you could have the largest voting demographic in the entire
00:59:42.860
country utterly despise everything that we believe, and yet somehow we're still a silent
00:59:48.520
majority and secretly everybody agrees with us, it's absurd. And it's going to be cold comfort when
00:59:55.680
to tell ourselves, oh, well, there's still a silent majority. They just didn't show up to vote
00:59:59.780
when we start getting pummeled in elections. Instead, we better stop lying to ourselves and do something
01:00:04.900
about the problem. So with those two caveats in mind, are there a lot more people who agree with us
01:00:12.100
than are willing to admit it? Of course. Are you out of your mind? You could lose everything by
01:00:16.060
agreeing with us on even the most benign topics. Men are not women, right? Men are not women is
0.99
01:00:22.620
bannable, boycottable in our society today. Even more benign things than that, saying I agree that
01:00:29.460
Black Lives Matter, but I don't agree with Black Lives Matter, would cost most people working in most
1.00
01:00:35.540
companies in this country today to lose their job. So you bet your rear end, there are a lot of
01:00:41.540
people afraid they should be afraid to speak their mind. I want to, though, tell you what I think the
01:00:46.500
answer is and not just leave you with a sort of despair. You know, Ben said that the government
01:00:51.640
needs to get involved in China because one of the good things that capitalism does is it creates
0.97
01:00:57.360
competition and competition creates efficiencies. We produce a wonderful tumbler, the leftist here's
01:01:03.760
hot or cold tumbler. The leftist here's hot or cold tumbler is manufactured in China. You might say,
01:01:08.900
why don't you manufacture it in America? Because there are zero companies in the United States of
01:01:14.280
America that manufacture still tumblers. It's not that it's more expensive to do it here. It is that
01:01:20.840
it is not possible to do it here. We've looked into it. Maybe we've missed one and somebody will correct
01:01:26.260
me to our ability to search it out. Trade with China has been going on now for over 50 years. There
01:01:33.480
are consequences of that change. We have moved a lot of our manufacturing overseas and I know some of you
01:01:38.760
are going to write in pissed off at me now and say, you're a hypocrite for buying your tumblers in
0.78
01:01:43.580
China. And you're going to type to me, of course, on your iPhone, which was also made in China or your
01:01:48.840
Android, which was made in China or your laptop, which was made in China. And I'm going to ignore
0.80
01:01:53.120
you because you're only actually proving the fact that manufacturing happens in China.
01:01:58.140
China. You don't stop that by Daily Wire saying, we're going to start a tumbler company. There's
01:02:05.080
no reason why we, you would need to make millions of tumblers. We purchased tens of thousands of
01:02:11.200
tumblers. We can't start a tumbler factory. Someone should start a tumbler factory and they will do so
01:02:16.620
when there's incentive for them to do, when they can do it competitively, when they won't lose by doing
01:02:21.800
it. One thing that I've discovered is everybody says that they want to buy American until they see the
01:02:26.400
price tag for buying American. And then everybody just buys China or buys India.
01:02:30.680
Jeremy, this happened. My wife said at the beginning of all the craziness with China,
1.00
01:02:34.720
you know, even before the pandemic, how they're cheating on the trade is, she said, we're just
01:02:37.800
going to buy American. I said, okay, that's fine. Buy dresses, buy shoes, buy American. There are only,
01:02:42.540
as you say, like three companies that do this. And even they get a lot of their stuff from China,
01:02:46.980
but the price, I'm actually willing to pay it. I am actually like, I am stubbornly American enough to
01:02:53.500
pay for it, but it's not just 20% more. It's like three X. Like it is so much more expensive.
01:02:59.480
So we looked at what it would take to actually manufacture the tumbler and our cost on manufacturing
01:03:04.640
the tumbler wouldn't be three X. It would be 20 X. If we were to manufacture the tumblers directly
01:03:10.660
and the machines that we would have to install in order to do it are themselves made in China.
01:03:16.520
So the only way that you deal with a problem like this is to take some sort of collective action
01:03:20.900
where the people who do what we don't want aren't the ones who succeed at the expense of the people
01:03:25.820
who try to do the thing that we do want. This is why capitalism actually does. There is a value
01:03:30.680
component to capitalism, which is that competition makes it to where the people who do the best make
01:03:39.020
the most. And when you start interfering with that in a bad way, I think you create some perverse
01:03:42.660
incentives. The same thing holds true though, on this question of the silent majority, the people
01:03:47.140
who are afraid to speak out. It is a collective action problem. If every single person in America
01:03:52.420
today who thinks that it is egregious that major league baseball is kneeling and condemning our
01:03:58.660
society before the game would just turn off the game. A hundred percent of us, you would see change.
01:04:03.920
If every one of us who is afraid that we might lose our job for speaking mainstream, traditionally
01:04:09.020
middle of the road, American opinions, like for example, segregation is bad. Equal justice under the
01:04:17.160
law is good. Hard work is not only for white people, which the Smithsonian literally said last week,
01:04:23.660
hard work is a white value that is, or the nuclear family is only a white value system. If we would all
01:04:29.700
just say bull crap, men are men, women are women, everybody can and should work hard. Black people are
01:04:34.880
not inferior or superior to white people. They're just people who should be held to the same set of
01:04:39.660
standards. Yes, some people are born in circumstances that are worse than others. Some of those people
01:04:45.280
are black. Some of those people are white. Some people are born with circumstances that are better
0.95
01:04:48.640
than others. And some of those people are black and some of those people are white. And the best we can
01:04:52.460
do is make a fair society and leave each other the hell alone. If we would all say that, they couldn't
01:04:57.140
fire all of us at the same time. The problem is we don't. And then we let one or two brave suckers
01:05:04.160
stick their necks out and they lose their jobs. And we all go, well, I wish somebody would stand up
01:05:09.480
to the left. And we go hide in the corner. It's a collective action issue. When the day comes that
01:05:15.400
we're all willing to stand up, they will have to stop, even if we're not the majority. A significant
01:05:21.540
plurality is enough to put a stop to this. And rant. Next question for Andrew. All right. Drew,
01:05:29.540
this comes from a Daily Wire all access subscriber, by the way. That's why they get to ask you a
01:05:33.940
question. And they say that they've been rereading 1984. And is it not so very concerning how similar
01:05:39.340
the structures that seem to be being built currently are to the structures and the procedures
01:05:43.820
of this fictional book? Drew, you didn't write 1984. No, I did actually. I used a different name
01:05:51.340
then. But no, listen, 1984 is a perfect description of Soviet Russia. And of course, the left always works
01:05:58.920
the same way. It has to work the same way. If you don't have, you know, the thing about it is,
01:06:02.720
there actually is a moral order. There actually is moral truth and spiritual truths. And in order
01:06:08.380
to erase these things, you have to erase every form of logic and information that can be, that is
01:06:14.420
available to people. It's not enough. It's not enough to lie to people. You have to stop people
01:06:18.720
from telling the truth. That's why you have cancel culture. There's no reason to have cancel culture
01:06:22.960
if you're right, if you're actually telling the truth. So everything in 1984, the famous scene in
01:06:29.060
1984, where they torture Winston Smith, and they say to him, it's not the two and two is four. It's
01:06:34.880
not the two and two is five. It's the two and two is whatever the party says it is. That's the system
01:06:40.560
that you have to install in order to overcome reality. And so whenever you have a movement like
01:06:46.620
Black Lives Matter, like Antifa, like anything that comes from the far left, that is actually in opposition
01:06:52.800
to reality. Those same systems for silencing the truth, for silencing people's, even their own
01:06:58.540
thought processes have to come into play. 1984 is prophetic. You know, they always used to say that
01:07:03.940
he got it wrong in 1984 and it was Brave New World that got it right. But no, I think the two of them
01:07:09.340
hopscotch over each other. Brave New World is a technological tyranny. But 1984 is the face of tyranny
01:07:15.300
in a technological world. And it always will be, and it will always remain. And when you look at what's
01:07:20.400
happening in our media, when Ben talks about the media, that's 1984. That's exactly what we're
01:07:25.420
talking about. When you talk about cancel culture, that is 1984. I wish people would read it because
01:07:30.460
it is an absolute exact and precise case study of this kind of tyranny. By the way, here I will again
01:07:37.220
stump for a movie that everybody should go watch right now. If you're looking for a good piece of
01:07:40.120
entertainment that really does have excellent values and has something to say, go check out the movie
01:07:45.260
Mr. Jones on Amazon. You should go rent it. It is the story of Gareth Jones, who is the
01:07:50.160
journalist who uncovered the Ukrainian Haladomar. And the villain in the piece is Walter Durante,
01:07:54.600
who is portrayed clear-eyed as the villain. I'm astonished. New York Times reporter. Yeah, I'm amazed
01:07:59.880
the movie was ever made. It's really clear-eyed and accurate and worth the watch. Well, you know,
01:08:04.360
speaking of the New York Times and 1984, when we were talking about that podcast, Jeremy, earlier,
01:08:09.680
that basically said the whole problem in American education is white people. Yeah. I reacted to that
01:08:14.980
jokingly and I said, yeah, white people are terrible and every other kind of person is better
0.96
01:08:19.460
and they're better particularly because of the color of their skin. Hashtag anti-racism. And
01:08:24.600
you know, obviously a little bit of a joke, except it actually makes sense from within the framework of
01:08:29.840
the New York Times and the left, because what they have defined racism as is anything white people do,
01:08:35.380
right? They say all white people are racist and racism is exclusively white. So you can't be any other
0.74
01:08:40.920
kind of color or ethnicity and, and be racist because blah, blah, blah. I don't know, because
01:08:46.160
they've come up with some definition of that. And so it, it, it actually does make sense that you have
01:08:50.920
to just say that white people are the problem for everything. If you live in a world where the,
0.60
01:08:55.120
the definition of words is not what it was today. It's not what it was yesterday. It's not even what
01:09:00.800
it will be tomorrow. The definition of words is what the party says it is. And where can we read that?
01:09:06.360
You read that in the New York Times and every other cultural institution the left took over.
01:09:09.620
Yeah. Michael, this question is for you. If you could construct an art to preserve man's
01:09:15.000
greatest works of art and literature, what would be the first three things that you'd put in there
01:09:19.900
after the Bible? Of course. After the Bible, it would be Dante. It would really be Inferno,
01:09:26.040
Purgatory and Paradise. The three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy. Or if you get rid of that,
01:09:30.360
I would do Dante and then I would do Shakespeare. And then I would do, I don't know, let's throw like a
01:09:36.000
Coravaggio in there just because- How to Destroy America in three easy steps.
01:09:40.700
I like left it hanging there for you, dude. It was so obvious. Like, just pick it up and be like,
01:09:45.980
here you go. Is that not in Dante's Divine Comedy? That was the fourth canticle of Dante's. You know,
01:09:52.380
I am rereading Dante right now. Man, that guy- You don't say. I am. I love, I actually haven't
01:09:57.180
really read it in 10 years. God, you're a douchebag. It is. It's so great. It's, well,
01:10:01.800
no, but this time, Ben, I'm reading it in English. So I haven't done that before. And I, you know,
01:10:05.580
initially was in the Italian, of course. And- You read the Milton in the Italian.
01:10:10.400
It's so great. Like, I, this is the thing that drives me the craziest about how the left has
01:10:14.580
destroyed education is it's not even that they teach us just stupid nonsense, like, you know,
01:10:19.540
feminist dance theory or all these other kinds of crazy things. It's what they don't teach you
1.00
01:10:25.220
because the whole point of education is you're supposed to get to enjoy all of these great
01:10:29.980
works of your civilization that you, you are simply not exposed to anymore. And even at like top
01:10:35.260
colleges, you, if you get an English degree, you're no longer required to read Shakespeare.
01:10:39.780
And so I think actually after the educational institutions completely deteriorate, we are
01:10:44.900
going to have to go to that desert island and I hope we bring good books.
01:10:48.780
All right. This question comes from a Daily Wire subscriber, also All Access,
01:10:53.100
which don't forget to use that code for 15% off backstage and two tumblers that are made in
01:10:58.220
China, apparently. Who knew? But Ben, this question is where- I mean, it says right on a
01:11:03.140
made in China. I mean, we weren't really hiding it. Ben, where should this Daily Wire subscriber
0.82
01:11:09.580
get all of their COVID news? I mean, other than the Daily Wire. So there are a couple of websites
01:11:13.920
that are, that are really worth checking out. There's one called COVID in Markets. It's run by a guy
01:11:16.940
named David Bonson who writes for National Review. And every day he puts together kind of the most
01:11:20.580
relevant charts with regard to COVID. And it really is as objective as objective can be.
01:11:23.980
He looks at the data with a skeptical eye. He is not alarmist in any way, but he is realistic about
01:11:30.280
sort of where things stand. He'll look internationally as well as domestically. So that's very good.
01:11:33.880
In terms of mainstream media, frankly, there's the Washington Post Health 202 blog is actually quite
01:11:38.020
good and shockingly nonpartisan in a way that the rest of the newspaper just is not. The political
01:11:43.760
pages cover COVID, which is insane. The political pages should not cover COVID. Only the health pages
01:11:47.820
really should cover COVID because it's a health issue. And that's why you see kind of idiot
01:11:51.420
reporters who don't know the first thing about even the coverage of epidemiology pretending they
01:11:56.440
know what they're talking about. But those would be a couple of really good sources. There are a
01:12:01.460
couple of people on Twitter who are sort of skeptics that I sort of balance with people who are not as
01:12:04.660
skeptical. I'll say something controversial. I'll take a look at Alex Berenson. I'll take a look at
01:12:09.100
Aaron Gann. I'll take a look at Younone Weiss. These are all three people who are kind of skeptical
01:12:14.140
of the mainstream media narrative on this stuff. But then I will also follow people like Scott
01:12:18.320
Gottlieb from the FDA. I'll try it. One of the big problems here is that there are no experts on a
01:12:23.240
brand new pandemic. So when people say, listen to the experts, no one is an expert on a thing that
01:12:27.100
has never happened before. It is impossible to be an expert on that, which means that we basically
01:12:31.120
what we've been left with is a piece of expertise that is not expertise at all. Stay away from other
01:12:34.740
people. Don't breathe on them. Wear a mask if you're going to be in close proximity to them and wash your
01:12:39.840
hands a lot. Okay. Which is all crap that we knew in 1918, right? Literally nothing has changed
01:12:43.740
except that we pretend that we know things that we absolutely don't know. And then we blame Trump
01:12:47.280
for all the things that we don't know. Trump is the God of the gaps for so many of these reporters.
01:12:51.460
It really is amazing, right? They're constantly talking about religious people. Well, you know,
01:12:54.720
in the areas where science doesn't have an answer yet, you say, oh, there's where God is. Well,
01:12:58.300
that's exactly what they do with Trump, right? Once the science has made clear that lockdowns
01:13:02.420
may not have worked all that great. Once the science makes clear that California does one thing
01:13:06.160
and Massachusetts does another, New York does another, and Florida and Texas, they all do different
01:13:09.760
things. And yet the result seems kind of similar. So we don't actually know what the hell is going on.
01:13:12.800
To New York where everybody died. Well, yeah, that's different. That's because
01:13:15.020
Andrew Cuomo is a horrible, but the, but the, the go-to is a God of the gaps. You don't know
01:13:20.100
what's happening. Trump, right? It's unbelievable. The religious fervor with which they dedicate their,
01:13:24.300
their lives to sussing out the various doctrinal intricacies of Trump's mind. When, as we all know,
01:13:31.080
it ain't that intricate guys. So like it really isn't. By the way, just quick note on this. I know it's
01:13:35.960
off topic. Have you been following Andrew Cuomo and his fast and his fascist quest to outlaw buffalo wings?
01:13:41.900
Well, making restaurant serve sandwiches, everything that they say about Trump and COVID,
01:13:47.380
that he's a fascist, that he, that he's incompetent, that he's running everything into the ground,
0.88
01:13:51.020
that he's micromanaging and that he wants to control your life. Every single one of those
01:13:54.340
things is true about Andrew Cuomo, except 83,000 times more, including the number of deaths. And
01:13:59.800
Andrew Cuomo is building fricking paper mache mountains of the dead. And then standing in front
01:14:06.540
of them, like Richard Dreyfuss with a fork in front of a giant sculpture of Devil's Tower,
01:14:10.540
explaining to people that he has actually saved thousands of lives. How that, that guy has a 60,
01:14:15.860
70% approval rating in New York. I don't want to hear about how New Yorkers are smart anymore. I just
01:14:19.080
don't. I'm not willing to hear it anymore. You've blown your opportunity to prove to me how smart you
01:14:22.380
are by telling me that Andrew Cuomo is a good governor and Bill de Blasio is a good mayor. What the
01:14:25.960
hell is wrong. Come on. Two months ago, you know, California has taken COVID more seriously than
01:14:30.340
many places. Two months ago, though, if you walk around my neighborhood in the evening,
01:14:33.780
out walking a chief executive dog, Jasper here, you would see that most people had a mask, but they
01:14:39.120
weren't wearing a mask. Why were they not wearing the mask? Because they were outside and it was 90
01:14:43.340
degrees and they were walking. And they would go out of their way to avoid you, you know, and everybody
01:14:48.460
gave each other a wide berth. Today, you walk out on the streets, everyone is wearing a mask. Why?
01:14:53.800
What's the reason? The answer is the same as why Cuomo has a 65% approval rating. It's because
01:15:02.580
COVID has become decidedly political. And the mask, it's not a mask against getting COVID. It's a mask
01:15:10.300
of being in any way perceived to be rejecting the narrative that you must believe in order to be a
01:15:17.340
virtuous person. And so you will see people jogging in the now 90 degree Sherman Oaks heat wearing masks.
01:15:23.160
It's not to keep them safe from the virus. It's to keep them safe from the mob. And that's why
01:15:28.640
that's the same reason Cuomo, it doesn't matter how many people die on Cuomo's watch. Cuomo has been
01:15:33.040
determined by the party to be the great responder to the pandemic. And therefore, he is no data required.
01:15:42.740
All right. This question is about health care. Speaking of COVID, somebody wants to know broadly,
01:15:46.720
how can we improve the system? And is it possible to unlink insurance from work or create privatization
01:15:52.640
to encourage better competition like across state lines, et cetera? This question is for Ben.
01:15:58.960
Well, okay. So let me put down the popcorn for just a second here. So here's the deal.
01:16:04.560
It didn't seem like it was going to be a Ben question.
01:16:06.140
Right. I mean, I just answered one like one second ago. Anyway, this around the horn has really
01:16:10.100
stopped dead. So the answer is it is actually quite difficult to de-link employment and insurance at
01:16:16.600
this point in time, simply because so many people are dependent on it. If you threw people back on
01:16:20.300
their own personal insurance, people would freak the hell out. They would lose their minds, even
01:16:24.200
though that is really the only step that could be taken to really heavily privatize the insurance
01:16:28.120
industry and link your level of cost with your level of risk, which is what is necessary in order
01:16:32.760
to have a transparent and functional market. So with that said, there are certain things you can do
01:16:37.380
around the edges to make the markets more efficient. You can certainly remove a lot of
01:16:40.280
the regulations that are placed on insurance companies, which are, by the way, not earning
01:16:43.720
money hand over fist. This idea that insurance companies are just raking it in is not true.
01:16:47.540
That is a 2% industry at best. That's like a good year for the health insurance industry is they
01:16:51.240
make a 2% margin. They're not raking it in to the tune of billions and billions. If they are raking it
01:16:55.560
in, the reason they're raking it in is because the government is subsidizing them, which is one of the
01:16:59.360
reasons that so many insurance companies actually supported Obamacare, because in the short term,
01:17:02.620
it mandated that people buy insurance, which meant that the insurance companies in the short term made a lot of
01:17:06.540
money, even though on the back end, they were going to lose a lot of money when Obamacare's
01:17:09.760
regulations started to kick in. And all of a sudden, you have to cover all these people with
0.99
01:17:12.780
preexisting conditions who'd never joined before. There are certain things you can do that Avic Roy
01:17:18.120
has talked about this over at the Apothecary and the Forbes blog. He's written full studies on what
01:17:22.680
could be done to make health markets more efficient. Getting rid of regulations on state lines would be
0.75
01:17:28.160
an easy one. Getting rid of a lot of the regulations with regard to how insurance is done would be an easy
01:17:32.300
one. If you actually want to make health insurance cheaper, then what you have to do is get
01:17:36.480
rid of all the provisions that nobody is willing to do politically, namely preexisting conditions.
01:17:40.380
Health insurance is never going to be cheap so long as it's not insurance at all. If I'm insuring
01:17:45.200
myself and I already have a disease, that's not insurance. That is me buying the same coverage at
01:17:50.360
a discount. In the same way that if I set my house on fire and then buy insurance, that's not me buying
01:17:55.880
insurance against the fire. That is me attempting to game the system by having the insurance company
01:17:59.880
pay for the damages that I have already incurred.
01:18:02.700
You're stealing from all the people who are actually paying the whole time.
01:18:05.320
Right. And that's not true for people with preexisting conditions who are just desperate
01:18:07.680
to get care, obviously. But what we're talking about here is how you lower costs. So the
01:18:11.680
framework I always use in discussing health insurance is very easy. You can have two of
01:18:15.280
the following three. You cannot have all three. You can either have a universal system or you
01:18:18.540
can have a quality system or you can have a cheap system. You cannot have all three of
01:18:21.400
those. There's no such thing as a universal quality cheap system. They do not exist. If you
01:18:25.160
want a universal system that is quality, it will be expensive. If you want a universal
01:18:28.380
system that is cheap, it's going to lack in quality. If you want a cheap system that has good
01:18:32.040
quality, it is probably not going to be universal. Andrew, is it possible for you to name a member
01:18:37.380
of the media or just in general that's a liberal that you follow or read that actually has some
01:18:42.120
well thought out arguments that make you think about their perspective? Is that one for me?
01:18:46.860
Andrew. Oh, you know, that's that's a really good question. I read the New York Times every
01:18:51.920
single morning and it has become consistently it is consistently gone from being a fair statement of
01:18:59.640
what the left believes to being crazy land. I mean, you really feel I always I always call the op-ed
01:19:04.220
page knucklehead row, but it's almost more like an asylum at this point. And when I think of like
01:19:09.440
liberals who are thoughtful, I can't when I think of liberals who are thoughtful, I'm now thinking of
01:19:16.160
conservatives. I'm thinking of conservatives who are a little bit more to the center center. I think
01:19:22.180
I live a little bit more in the center in most things. And I think that almost, you know, a long time
01:19:27.240
ago, Lionel Trilling, the famous literary critic, said that there is no such thing as an intellectual
01:19:32.080
conservative movement. Conservatism is just a kind of emotional gesture. I think that's true of the
01:19:38.020
left now. I don't think that there is an intellectual left. I think that there is only an intellectual
01:19:42.240
right, which goes from middle of the road guys to the far right. And I think that this is where the
01:19:48.020
debates are happening. It's where the where nobody's afraid to speak. I mean, I always say, you know,
01:19:52.300
I said to Barry Weiss when she left the New York Times, I said, you know, you're you're on the wrong
01:19:56.320
side. You know, I keep saying this to all these people. You know, you're on the wrong side. Barry Weiss
01:20:01.080
would be an example of a thoughtful of a thoughtful person who considers himself liberal that I do read.
01:20:07.540
My sister, Caitlin Flanagan, is a very fine writer who frequently says really interesting things. And she
01:20:12.700
tends to trend toward the left a little bit. There are these people, but they are fighting a system that really
01:20:18.160
wants to shut them up. So if you want to go to places where you can argue with things, if you
01:20:22.340
want to live in the sort of Dave Rubin world where we're all talking to each other, you really have
01:20:26.780
to be on the right. This is where the conversations are taking place. Quick note here. So I want to
01:20:30.520
just say about that Harper's Weekly letter. So there's Harper's Weekly letter where a bunch of people
01:20:33.720
who are sort of liberal minded said we're done with cancel culture. And there wasn't a single Trump
01:20:37.360
voter on that list. I'm very happy that that letter exists. And until one member of that group is
01:20:42.760
willing to have a conversation publicly with a person who did vote for Trump, it means nothing.
01:20:46.640
Okay. Because, because that entire, that entire statement was designed to open the Overton window
01:20:51.560
just enough for them. In other words, like we want to escape the cancel culture ourselves,
1.00
01:20:56.220
but how many of us are willing to actually cry? Now here's the truth. I know a lot of people on
01:20:59.840
that list and I know some of them are willing to have those conversations, but that letter is only
01:21:03.360
going to matter when that letter includes people ranging from Noam Chomsky to people like you drew
01:21:08.620
and ranging from people like Ann Applebaum to people like Knowles and ranging from people like
01:21:12.940
Thomas Chatterton Williams to people like Jeremy, right? That's the only time that's going to matter
01:21:16.380
because either there's going to be an alliance built between the old school liberals who are
01:21:19.820
not hardcore leftists and people on the right who are committed to free speech, or there will be no
01:21:24.220
alliance at all. And the left is just going to eat this entire, this entire steak piece by piece.
01:21:27.840
You know, on this point of the, where to look in the apparatus of the mainstream media,
01:21:33.100
I don't think there is any place to look. I mean, you met like, I love Caitlin Flanagan and a couple
01:21:37.840
other people, but I don't think that's really where you look. I think the interesting far left even stuff
01:21:44.100
and certainly right-wing stuff you see is on Twitter. It's on these accounts that are named,
01:21:50.200
they're like puns on old philosophers or there are other kind of meany kinds of names. And you know,
01:21:55.540
you can actually find some accounts there that are anonymous because if these, even the leftists,
01:22:00.040
if they say things that are contrary to the approved views of, you know, the liberal establishment,
01:22:04.760
they'll get killed. So they, you know, they, they hide their, their names. You can find some
01:22:10.360
interesting debates happening there. But you know, as you mentioned, Ben, these people are so
01:22:14.380
afraid to even come out and speak to anyone who may have voted for Trump. They're so afraid that
01:22:18.800
those, those conversations, unfortunately right now often have to happen anonymously.
01:22:23.360
I just want to point one thing out about that Harper's letter too, which is really interesting
01:22:27.480
that it, it started out with this big kind of liberal throat clearing about how the right is so much
01:22:32.980
worse, but we're going down this wrong road. And there was a line in there saying,
01:22:36.460
we know that the right is, is, is really the censor, uh, censorious side. Yeah. And every time
01:22:42.120
I see them make that statement, I think name one time, name one place where right-wingers censor
01:22:47.420
people, just please, where they cancel people, where they get people fired. It is really impossible.
01:22:52.120
And this, I feel this way about Trump too. I love, by the way, Ben, I got to tell you, I love
01:22:55.900
Trump of the gaps. I think that that is the only original thing anybody said about Donald Trump
01:22:59.780
the last year. But I think every time I hear that Trump is a unique threat to our way of life,
01:23:04.880
I think name one thing, name a thing he's done. And the New York times, as Barry White said,
01:23:09.760
when you read their op-ed section, it's one op-ed after another saying, what a terrible threat to
01:23:14.300
our way of life is Donald Trump. And I think, okay, name a specific thing. And they never can.
01:23:18.680
It's, it really is amazing. And that the reason for that is they don't listen to anybody but
01:23:22.660
themselves. Well, and that people like Barry and people like we've got, I won't name them for
01:23:29.560
this unfair. Many of our friends who are part of the either intellectual dark web movement or
01:23:34.380
the sort of online moderate centrist, self-described centrist movement. Even they,
01:23:42.020
they're like people who used to be Republicans but call themselves libertarians because maybe they
01:23:46.120
wouldn't get made fun of at work. This movement is a group of people who cannot acknowledge even
01:23:50.840
to themselves that both sides aren't equally bad. The only way that they're able to criticize
01:23:56.720
the left at all is if they first denounce the right. And I, and I don't actually, I will say,
01:24:04.360
I don't think they're just doing it. Barry's letter didn't do that. So to be fair,
01:24:06.860
Barry's letter didn't. But the Harper letter certainly did. And I don't think that they're
01:24:12.600
just posturing in their own minds. They are just posturing, but I'm sure that in their minds,
01:24:17.520
they've actually carved out some way in which they believe that that's true because they're still
01:24:22.500
looking at a right that doesn't exist. And, and many of you, Michael and I were actually talking
01:24:27.120
about this before the show about, uh, uh, someone with whom we're all friendly who the, the right
01:24:33.180
they denounce is not the right that actually exists. They don't know what people on the right
01:24:37.720
actually believe. And so they want to say things like, well, you know, yes, on, on the extreme end
01:24:43.440
of the left, uh, you've got people who are tearing down statues and calling for segregation,
01:24:48.380
but you know, on the extreme side of the right, you guys have a lot of people who want to tear
01:24:52.240
down statues, uh, and go back to segregation too. And you're like, well, no, that's not on the
01:24:57.120
extreme side of the left. That's on the very mainstream side of the left. Uh, like literally
01:25:01.340
not one person in Congress will denounce either of those ideas if they're a Democrat. And on the
01:25:05.960
right, there is no one in the Republican party in Congress who wouldn't denounce anyone who
01:25:11.900
believed that. And they look at you like you're crazy. Like, well, that can't be true because in my
01:25:16.300
mind, that's what the right is. It's very comforting to believe that if there's sort of equal
01:25:21.180
evil on both sides or they're both the problem, but it just ain't the case. Sorry. Sorry, folks.
01:25:25.980
And you know, the, the funny thing is, is when people get red pilled, they first get red pilled
01:25:29.660
and they start to associate with, uh, conservatives. The first thing they say is, gee, people are so
01:25:34.620
nice. And when you consider the four of us, if they're saying that about us, people on the left
01:25:39.020
must be awful. No, but this is all, that's exactly right. Because every time I was on Joe Rogan's
01:25:44.320
show this week, and I'm very friendly with Joe. I think Joe's a great guy. We have a lot of fun
01:25:47.240
together. And all the comments are like, I didn't know that, that Shapiro was such a nice guy. He's
01:25:51.440
such a human being. And it's like, I'm the exact same human being on my show as I was on Joe's
01:25:54.820
show. It's just that nobody on the left really wants to have an open conversation. If they do,
01:25:59.440
it's extraordinarily rare, but they actually want is to browbeat people or not to have them on at all.
01:26:03.980
Right. That's, that's really the goal. And it's, it's really, it's quite disheartening because
01:26:08.540
I really believe that if there is to be a, a future for the country that lies in rights,
01:26:13.020
there is going to have to be a liberal part of the country that stands up on its hind legs and says,
01:26:18.140
I would rather associate with these people. I disagree with about nearly everything when it
01:26:21.400
comes to policy, then you people with whom I agree with on policy about a lot of things,
01:26:25.760
but you guys want to tear down the entire system. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to give
01:26:29.300
away my rights just because you and I both agree that America should move toward a more progressive
01:26:33.320
tax system. Like that's not something I'm willing to do until liberals are willing to actually cross
01:26:37.060
that aisle and shake a few hands and reckon more than anything, just recognize that we're human
01:26:41.220
beings too on this side. I mean, it's what I've said a thousand times. It's the happy birthday
01:26:44.240
problem. Every time I have a birthday, I will get 20 texts from people who are on the left inside
01:26:48.240
mainstream leftist organizations with whom I am friendly, who I've offered a public shoulder to
01:26:52.980
when they have been ripped on, right? I'm the guy out there defending fricking Matt Iglesias,
01:26:56.500
who I've called the Ralph Wiggum of the internet. When he's being assaulted by the, by the members of
01:27:00.580
his own publication, I'm out there defending Matt Iglesias. I'll get bunch of, I'll get, you know,
01:27:04.160
letters from inside major organizations on the left, happy birthday. And then on Twitter, nothing because the minute you
01:27:09.940
acknowledge that people on the right are human beings, then you have, you have humanized them
01:27:13.260
and you must never, ever humanize anybody on the right. It's more important not to humanize anybody
01:27:16.560
on the right than to preserve the rights for everybody. Yeah, that's right. And we all know
01:27:20.560
that Ben's really a robot and he just put on a different mask when he went on Joe Rogan. It was a
01:27:24.460
very enjoyable interview, by the way. I finally get to curse. I mean, with Joe, it's almost, it's in the
01:27:29.200
water or the DMT or whatever it is. It takes you a while to warm up though. Like the first 10 minutes,
01:27:32.420
you're like the effing. And then you like eventually got there. Eventually you're dragged down into,
01:27:37.840
into Joe's world. That's the way that that works. Speaking of being dragged down, Michael,
01:27:43.360
do you think that Ghislaine Maxwell will make it to testify and other thoughts?
01:27:49.320
I was under the impression she had already committed suicide in the future. What day is it? Is it not?
01:27:55.180
No, it's what you're right. I'm sorry. The Clintons haven't scheduled that until at least next Monday.
01:27:59.460
I actually do think, I mean, all, all sort of Clinton, Epstein didn't kill himself jokes aside.
01:28:03.720
I do think she probably will make it because if, if this woman ends up dead in her jail cell,
1.00
01:28:12.860
like the conspiracy theorists will take, they will march on Washington. They will take over the
01:28:18.000
country because by the way, it will be evidence of a conspiracy. So you can't call it a conspiracy
01:28:21.440
theory anymore. It seems as though she's already cooperating with the feds. It seems that she's
01:28:26.200
given up some names, which I'm sure will remain redacted, you know, for, for the near future because
01:28:31.360
they, uh, you know, implicate so many powerful people around the world. But, but this, this is
01:28:36.080
the, like the real problem. I don't particularly care about Ghislaine Maxwell in particular,
01:28:39.620
but on this issue generally, the left is always, and some people on the right complain about
01:28:43.740
conspiracy theorists. Why are there, and you know, the left will even label sort of mainstream ideas,
01:28:48.960
conspiracy theories, but they never ask themselves, why do conspiracy theories take hold? They take
01:28:54.240
hold because we have no faith in our institutions, in the media, in the administrative government,
01:28:59.420
and we have no faith in them because they have squandered that faith. They have squandered
01:29:04.600
that credibility. You can't believe what you read on the papers or see on cable news. And you,
01:29:09.380
you see obvious incidents of incompetence or corruption in the federal government or, or very
01:29:14.880
often both. So, you know, I, I, I'm sort of sick of hearing the left complain about the conspiracy
01:29:20.100
theorists, uh, quit, quit creating the breeding ground on which those, uh, conspiracies crop.
01:29:26.620
Also Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, man. I mean, come on. I have said a lot of warm words
01:29:33.040
about president Trump. He, he made it into the same sentence as Washington in the same sentence
01:29:36.880
as God for me on this very podcast. Let me just say it's real weird that he went into a press
01:29:41.380
conference and wished Ghislaine Maxwell the best. I love, I don't know what, of course you loved it.
01:29:46.720
What other answer was he going to give? Was he supposed to, I hope she fries in hell. She was
0.98
01:29:50.060
procuring underage prostitutes for overage men. Like, how about that? That'd be a good answer.
1.00
01:29:54.460
No presumption of innocence. What the heck? We need, we need due process even for, uh, the madam
1.00
01:29:59.220
of the most notorious monster that we've seen in the last 30 years. Listen, I think that if we
01:30:05.240
can't even agree on whether or not Donald Trump was right to, to approve of Maxwell, then it's
01:30:10.580
probably time to call this show off and engage in our inner, uh, uh, internet. Yeah. Well, we have
01:30:16.700
no unionist tendencies left. Uh, go buy Ben's book. That was the name of the episode. And it's also a
01:30:22.040
good note on which to conclude. Also become an all access member. If you're not already
01:30:26.160
one, you can keep hanging out with us right now over yonder at dailywire.com where we'll
01:30:31.260
be taking even more questions. If you haven't been over to one of these because you're not
01:30:34.880
an all access member, you're really missing out. We answer, I think it's fair to say a
01:30:39.680
hundred questions probably get answered, uh, during the course of this, uh, all access discussion
01:30:43.980
that we're going to go. 92 by Ben. Cause he types so fast, but the rest of us get in there.
01:30:47.680
Yeah. Yeah. Come over and see us. Thanks for hanging out with us and we will see you
01:30:59.680
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