The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： Introducing the 2nd Greatest Commercial Ever

00:00:00.000 Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Backstage, introducing the second greatest

00:00:04.660 commercial ever, is available now. Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God

00:00:11.920 King Jeremy Boring for the world premiere of the most important commercial about shaving razors

00:00:17.000 this year. Listen now to hear our decision on the definition of freedom, civil war, and most

00:00:24.740 importantly, the president's sex life. Enjoy. Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage. I'm Jeremy

00:00:54.280 Boring, joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles. Glad to be back with

00:00:59.440 you guys. It's been a minute. Just a reminder that we'll be taking some questions during the course

00:01:03.760 of the show from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers. If you're not a Daily Wire Plus subscribers, head

00:01:08.540 over to dailywireplus.com and join today. If you are, head over there, ask us your questions. We're

00:01:13.360 going to do our best to get a lot of answers out tonight. Interaction with our subscribers is one

00:01:17.440 of the most enjoyable aspects of doing this show. It is, in fact, the only enjoyable aspect of doing

00:01:22.600 this show. No, I like being with you guys. It's a great show. We have fun. We get to smoke Mayflowers.

00:01:28.480 We get to, you know. We're also going to do something really enjoyable for me tonight. I don't

00:01:33.860 know if it'll be enjoyable for anybody else, but they told me just as I walked on stage, hey, we've

00:01:37.760 got a little bit of a problem. I said, what's that? They said, well, when we've been promoting the show

00:01:41.520 all week, we've been saying, you know, tune in for Daily Wire Backstage. You'll get all your favorites,

00:01:46.600 Ben Shapiro, Michael. Plus, we're going to have shocking news, like big news, really big news. I

00:01:54.120 said, cool. What is it? And they said, well, it was a bit of an oversell. We don't have anything.

00:02:01.560 I said, what do you mean? You actually marketed the show publicly. You said, plus giant earth

00:02:06.600 shattering something new. And they said, yes. I said, and you don't have anything earth shattering?

00:02:11.100 And they said, no, we don't have anything new at all. I said, how does a thing like this happen?

00:02:15.060 And they said, well, we have, you told us to do it. That's fair. That sounds like something I would

00:02:21.600 do. But what occurred to me is that I, in my back pocket, do in fact have something new and

00:02:28.420 earth shattering and cool that we could premiere on this show, except we weren't planning to premiere

00:02:32.940 it until a week from now, which means they are scrambling backstage to put together, just for you

00:02:38.300 guys today, the brand new second generation Jeremy's Racers commercial. We're going to be

00:02:44.900 world premiering it right here on the show in approximately 15 minutes. So call all your

00:02:49.800 friends, especially the scruffy ones. Tell them we will be, we'll be doing something.

00:02:58.480 I think it will. I think people will enjoy it. Every one of you play some small role in the

00:03:03.820 commercial.

00:03:04.060 I'm just glad. I'm really glad to hear because all week I've been reading off the teleprompter.

00:03:08.360 I said, this is going to be the biggest show ever. Jeremy has a huge announcement.

00:03:11.440 And I felt out of the loop. Yeah. Well, I'm glad I was sad that I didn't know what it

00:03:15.740 was. Now I'm glad that you also did.

00:03:17.460 Matt literally turned to me earlier today in the makeup chair and he was like, so what's

00:03:20.760 this thing that's happening tonight? I was like, I don't know. I'm just one of the owners

00:03:23.640 of the company. I have no clue.

00:03:26.300 Truly when they said back, when they said, no, you told us to say that. I don't have any

00:03:30.500 idea what I thought it was going to be. I mean, I must've thought it was good. I think

00:03:34.100 maybe in the back of my head, I thought we were going to premiere the commercial.

00:03:38.580 I can't think of any other huge news that I wanted to, but it is huge. We, yeah, obviously

00:03:45.200 we've, this is a long time in the making. You know, the first commercial has been called

00:03:49.180 by some, including our marketing department who titled it on YouTube, the greatest commercial

00:03:53.800 ever. And I stand by it.

00:03:57.420 Many people say.

00:03:58.940 I stand by it. I think it was in fact the greatest commercial ever. It was the most well justified

00:04:03.860 launch of a company ever, but what it wasn't was the greatest razor ever. And as it turns

00:04:09.660 out, making a razor is very difficult because it takes a razor sharp blade and runs it across

00:04:15.340 people's most sensitive spots. And so we've worked really hard over the last two years

00:04:19.620 to completely redesign our razor. I never thought that I would employ engineers. One of my favorite

00:04:24.620 things about being a guy who never made it through college is that like I employ Yale graduates

00:04:28.860 and I employ Harvard graduates. I employ lawyers, you know, but I never thought I would employ

00:04:33.720 engineers. And now we have full-time engineers on staff. We've been hard at work. We've got

00:04:37.340 brand new partners. We've moved all of our manufacturing out of China. And this new razor

00:04:41.640 is world-class. It's on par with the best razors in the market. And it comes now, I think,

00:04:47.100 alongside our other products through Jeremy's razors, like our shampoo, our conditioner, our

00:04:50.740 lotions, our deodorants, which are already top tier products. The only thing that was lagging

00:04:55.220 was that razor because it's, again, a very difficult thing. It takes a lot of engineering.

00:04:59.900 We finally have a really competitive product. And I think we have a somewhat hilarious and deeply

00:05:05.020 offensive commercial to attend to its launch. So again, come back in here in about 15 minutes

00:05:10.020 and we'll bring that to you. Meanwhile, the world doesn't get better between backstages. It

00:05:17.420 only seems to get worse. And there's a new sort of, I shouldn't say new, it's been sort of

00:05:22.240 fomenting for the last handful of years, but I think it's really gaining prominence now,

00:05:26.920 both in the very intellectual part of the American right, but also in the very fringe parts

00:05:33.660 of the American right. And the fact that what I'm about to bring up is happening in both of those

00:05:39.320 places, like people who we all in this room read, people with whom we are friendly, people with whom

00:05:45.420 we admire are participating in this conversation. Also the complete whack jobs, the people who I don't

00:05:51.340 think should have any voice in our movement. I think that they, that their malevolent forces

00:05:55.480 are also circling the same idea. That makes the idea, I think, something that we should talk about.

00:06:01.420 And that's this idea that the American experiment is over. This idea that none of our institutions that

00:06:09.780 have taken us through the last two plus centuries on this continent exist anymore, that we can't find

00:06:16.380 any solution to our cultural and political problems through the political system. And that

00:06:21.880 perhaps it's time to look to older systems, strongmen, monarchy, even dictator. I mean, when you have

00:06:27.260 major voices in the sort of conservative intelligentsia, openly discussing the idea of whether a dictator

00:06:34.780 will be required to save this country, or an emperor would be required to save this country, or a king

00:06:39.220 would be required to save this country. I think that that's something that merits actual conversation.

00:06:45.440 So I thought, rather than talking about the latest stupid thing Joe Biden said, or,

00:06:49.460 you know, the most salacious details from the Trump trial, although they are fun to talk about.

00:06:54.160 Let's talk about something that we can only talk about when we're together. Let's get to the deep

00:06:57.620 stuff. So Michael, you're a monarchist. Yeah, well, they, look, they tie in. He, he pins it on the

00:07:02.360 Catholic that we're all crypto monarchists. We all think Trump is Caesar. I didn't think crypto.

00:07:07.260 Yeah. By the way, we don't think that Donald Trump ought to be Caesar. We think that

00:07:12.720 baron Trump ought to be Caesar. Okay. Those are very different things. No, look, the problem is

00:07:17.660 this. I am not calling for the overthrow of the American regime. The problem is that the American

00:07:22.200 regime has been overthrown and it has been overthrown by the 17th amendment, which fundamentally orders

00:07:27.140 the relationship of the states to the federal government. It's been overthrown by Congress giving

00:07:32.240 away all of its power to the executive agencies. It's been, it's, it's been overthrown by any number of

00:07:37.760 things that have taken place, not over the last 10 years, but over the past 150 and 200 years.

00:07:42.280 And, and even that is not necessarily to be lamented. It just happens. You can't rewind the

00:07:46.460 tape. You can't go back in time. But the argument to look towards certain classical thinkers, notably

00:07:51.260 Polybius, is that there are different kinds of government. Our founding fathers and framers wrote

00:07:56.280 about this a lot. And I think they were channeling Aristotle and Polybius. Polybius's idea of the cycle of

00:08:02.440 regimes is that you got three acceptable forms of regime, and then you've got their kind of evil

00:08:08.120 twins. So you've got monarchy, which can be good. Monarchy, when it's good, is governing for the

00:08:14.140 common good. When it goes bad, it's a tyranny. And it's just like a dictator for his own self

00:08:18.440 aggrandizement. Aristocracy can be good. There have been good aristocracies. Aristocracy means good,

00:08:23.980 you know, or governing for the good. The bad version of that is oligarchy. We see those all around

00:08:29.320 the world. Democracy can be good. A republic can be a really good thing. But it turns into mob rule

00:08:34.140 when it goes bad, and you ignore the common good, and you govern for yourself. And our framers and

00:08:37.980 founding fathers wrote about that ad nauseum. So the question is, where are we in that cycle of

00:08:44.580 regimes? Unless you believe that America just paused history, if you really believe, as Fukuyama,

00:08:53.260 at the very least, is caricatured as having said, that we've reached the end of history, and it's over,

00:08:57.940 and liberal democracy won. Unless you think history is really over, then you do have to

00:09:04.160 entertain the possibility that something will come next. Yeah, right. I mean, I don't know who

00:09:09.640 those guys are that you just mentioned. There's some buddies of mine from New York.

00:09:12.420 Was it Plebius? Okay. I'm kind of, I agree almost with the diagnosis of the people you're talking

00:09:22.620 about, Jeremy, that I do think that the institutions are fundamentally broken, and I don't see any

00:09:28.980 political solution to it. But I also don't think that a dictator is the solution either.

00:09:35.700 So essentially, we're just screwed, is where I land on it, I guess.

00:09:39.400 I might have guessed where you would, hopelessness.

00:09:43.840 You know, here's the reason. It's all a question of timing. I've been having this conversation with

00:09:48.540 my son since he was little. When do you jump off the carousel? Because there's no point

00:09:53.140 dying for a regime that is no longer worth it. There's no point pulling a Cato and, you know,

00:09:57.620 saying, oh, we have to bring back the republic when the republic is over. Right. But here's the

00:10:01.440 one indication that the republic is not yet over. Because remember, also, the despair is a

00:10:05.420 self-fulfilling prophecy. If you despair and you don't fight for what you have, you're not going to

00:10:09.460 keep what you have. One person, Donald Trump, was elected, and the entire government and the press

00:10:17.920 and the academy and the intelligentsia acted like a Jew had walked into a Nazi Bund meeting.

00:10:25.420 They acted like the worst possible thing. There's one guy, one guy, a loud mouth who doesn't really

00:10:30.460 know what he's doing. He probably never read the Constitution. And all of this force had to be put

00:10:35.560 together to throw him out. The lies that are being told as we're speaking, the trials they put him

00:10:41.700 through, the violations of our norms, all of these things, which makes me think they're vulnerable.

00:10:47.320 It makes me think that the system that is in place is not invulnerable, you know, that it can be taken

00:10:53.740 down. And so if it can be taken down and if it can be taken down without mass violence, it seems

00:10:59.480 worthwhile because the essential premise of the founders was that people were a certain way, which is

00:11:08.340 that they should be free. They didn't say that they wanted to be free. That was the George W. Bush

00:11:13.500 ridiculous statement that people want to be free. People don't want to be free. They want to be taken

00:11:17.020 care of. But that the people should be free, I think, remains true. And so that remains worth fighting

00:11:22.540 for until it's not.

00:11:23.920 But isn't there, there's this observation of Tocqueville, who writes Democracy in America,

00:11:28.220 probably the best observer of early American politics.

00:11:31.960 Unbelievable.

00:11:32.280 And he observes that the rhetoric of the revolution and the post-revolution is very liberal and

00:11:38.960 enlightenment and abstract and, you know, about freedom and everything. But the behavior of America

00:11:44.320 is a little different. It's a little more conservative. It's a little bit more about tradition and way of

00:11:49.480 life and these tightly knit communities. And so I sometimes fear that the thing we want to regain

00:11:56.460 is the traditional American way of life. But we believe, we believe our forebear is press releases.

00:12:03.080 So we're falling for the abstract liberal philosophy when in fact what we need to return to is

00:12:08.760 tightly knit communities with families having lots of kids and going to their churches.

00:12:12.480 This critique of liberalism is true, is that liberalism unmoored from virtue turns into moral relativism.

00:12:19.800 Liberalism is basically the idea that a thousand flowers should bloom, that free speech is a good

00:12:23.940 thing in and of itself, that freedoms are of inherent value. Now, the reality is that without

00:12:29.760 a framework of virtue, freedom is not of inherent value, actually, because it turns out that when

00:12:33.860 you freely choose to do something evil, it makes you a worse person, not a better person.

00:12:38.020 Freedom is not itself a virtue. Freedom is instrumental if you have choices between a series of virtues and

00:12:45.160 you can prioritize between those virtues. But freedom to use pornography, for example,

00:12:50.040 is not actually a well-used freedom or a true right in any serious sense.

00:12:55.020 What that means is that if you don't have that virtue, which is really what's falling away,

00:12:59.300 then what you end up with is this inability to choose between value systems. And so all value

00:13:04.360 systems are then treated as equivalent. And once all value systems are treated as equivalent,

00:13:07.940 then you basically have post-constructionism and the idea that everything is just a matter of

00:13:11.260 grabbing power and imposing it on people that you don't particularly like. The thing that I think

00:13:16.160 everyone keeps missing, and it's fascinating, I think there actually is some consensus in the

00:13:20.980 United States, even with many people that I truly disagree with, because I've had conversations with

00:13:24.940 them about this. The consensus is not about values so much as it is about localism. The reality is that

00:13:31.720 conservatism, that virtue, which I think conservatism really is about conserving. When people say,

00:13:37.280 what is conservatism conserving? The idea should be virtue, right? And it should be the institutions,

00:13:41.020 within virtue, that allow you the freedom within virtue to live a wonderful life within this kind

00:13:45.440 of virtuous framework. That's what we're trying to conserve. It's not merely the institutions,

00:13:48.780 it's also that framework. It's why when you read Locke sort of in a vacuum, for example,

00:13:53.080 you end up with the sort of Yoram Hazoni critique of Locke, which is that Locke is himself attempting

00:13:57.140 to destroy virtue, but that's not true. Locke was spending half of his time doing Christian

00:13:59.880 apologetics. So like the reality- Protestant apologetics, but sure, we digress. But the sort of

00:14:07.220 basic idea is that conservatism is built ground up and leftism is built top-down. And so those two

00:14:15.380 things are now in conflict. And the left has used the top-down structure in order to quash

00:14:20.800 the little platoons, right? To quash families and communities and religious institutions and churches

00:14:26.160 and all this sort of stuff. But I don't think that they've gotten quite as far as either they think or

00:14:30.460 as the right things. I think that they keep kicking the can down the road. If they really wanted to,

00:14:35.520 if they really had the power to do full tyranny, does anyone doubt that if Joe Biden really had

00:14:40.080 the true power, the real true power to do true tyranny, that he wouldn't go for it? I think he would

00:14:45.420 go for it. I think that he's a little tyrant in his heart. And I think that was certainly true of

00:14:49.340 Barack Obama, who was a big tyrant in his heart. But isn't there this problem? He does not have,

00:14:52.940 he doesn't actually have the power or the approval from the American people to do that,

00:14:57.280 which suggests that this is not quite over yet. What would count as true tyranny in your mind?

00:15:01.220 Um, what would count as true tyranny would be the federal government

00:15:04.760 forcibly dissolving churches, forcibly dissolving. We couldn't have this conversation.

00:15:11.160 Yeah. Right. Like, like, I don't think we're that far from it, but I don't think we're there yet.

00:15:14.820 Right. I think that you see, what you see is kind of little bubbles of tyranny that,

00:15:17.760 that bubble to the surface and pop. But I don't think that, that-

00:15:21.420 You're never that far from it, it's probably-

00:15:22.960 Well, I would argue we had true tyranny during COVID.

00:15:26.640 I mean, I tend to agree with that. The only, the only-

00:15:29.380 But the right's, but the right's preferred monarch was, was, uh-

00:15:33.000 True.

00:15:33.540 The president of the United States at the time.

00:15:35.020 Right. But it's not just that. It's also that, that, that, that is also forgetting that

00:15:38.180 there are many states that did not go along with the true tyranny.

00:15:40.800 Right.

00:15:41.320 Meaning that I moved my entire family from California to Florida,

00:15:45.020 partially because Florida was not a true tyranny in the way that California,

00:15:48.360 California legitimately acted full, full on tyrannically during, during COVID.

00:15:53.580 But even that was, as long as it was, it still was, it was a temporary way station.

00:16:00.080 Now, I think that there are other aspects of tyranny that are more permanent in California

00:16:02.820 than just a COVID lockdown. I think that was like the most open and obvious,

00:16:06.520 this is one, the real big reason I moved my family from California, aside from the tax regime,

00:16:10.780 which is a form of property tyranny, the, the, is, is that I think it's going to be nearly

00:16:15.040 impossible to raise a religious family in the state of California. I think they really will

00:16:18.020 attempt to forcibly dissolve churches and go after full on religious institutions.

00:16:21.960 And that will be tyranny. But I don't think that at the top federal level,

00:16:25.460 that power yet exists. I think that the founder system of checks and balances is still robust

00:16:29.760 enough, despite all of the changes that have been, I think, terrible for the country in terms of the

00:16:33.400 administrative state and the executive branch, that, that I, I don't think that we're quite there yet.

00:16:38.360 I would, I would also, I would also argue that just one quick thing that

00:16:41.440 they might not need true tyranny because once you, once you sort of capture the,

00:16:49.160 the hearts and minds of people and you, you own them that way, you don't need true tyranny.

00:16:52.460 Once you just get us all addicted to drugs and drugs.

00:16:54.440 Right. So for example, shutting down the churches, well, we're at a point where they don't,

00:16:59.100 they don't need to do that because people have abandoned church on their own. It's,

00:17:02.320 it's almost like a pointless endeavor. And they, they, they shut down the churches,

00:17:06.020 they shut down the churches during COVID and people stopped going and kind of went along with

00:17:10.260 it and they haven't gone back. Okay. But, you know, so. But the thing is, there's a vacuum

00:17:14.900 there. There is a difference between coercion and a vacuum. The vacuum can be filled by a resurgence.

00:17:23.720 Coercion prevents the resurgence, right? True tyranny says you cannot come back to church.

00:17:28.360 A vacuum is you left the church and now you're not coming back. And that's on you. That's not on the

00:17:31.580 government. Like my, my shul was closed during COVID and you know what happened? We all

00:17:36.000 went back to shul and not only did we go back to shul, my shul went from having met a hundred

00:17:39.320 families to having almost 400 families in the course of about three years. So like true,

00:17:44.020 this is, this is where things get rebuilt is at the local level. And because, you know, listen,

00:17:47.800 we all talk about national politics all the time and the elections are fun to talk about and

00:17:50.700 they're interesting to talk about. And of course they make a huge difference. I think the area where

00:17:53.940 they actually make the most difference is in foreign policy because the president has plenary

00:17:56.600 power over foreign policy. As you can see from Joe Biden running around like a child with a lit match,

00:18:01.400 you know, in a factory of flammables on the international stage. But, you know,

00:18:05.340 domestically there is still real capability. I mean, what the lives that you guys lead in

00:18:09.880 Tennessee or the life that you're leading in Virginia or life that I'm leading in Florida,

00:18:13.200 this is not a life dominated by tyranny. This is a life that I've built in my community

00:18:18.540 that I think is quite rich and filled with social fabric, but that's an act of will on my part.

00:18:23.660 And it requires the vacuum. And the point that I'm making is that vacuum still exists,

00:18:26.560 but it has to be filled by a bottom. I just want to, I want to get to a corollary of all the stuff

00:18:31.540 we're talking about because it's really important. What you just said that shows the fact that we

00:18:35.660 have been making the wrong argument. I'm sure you all saw Harrison Butker, the chiefs picker.

00:18:41.540 Yeah, the Chad meme. You mean come to life with the yes.

00:18:45.400 The guy was great making a speech about the fact that the thing that women should be doing is building,

00:18:50.520 making homes and having children and being homemakers. The reaction to it shows you exactly

00:18:56.300 what they're afraid of, right? I mean, that is exactly the thing that they're afraid of,

00:18:59.460 which means that we've been arguing about the wrong thing for a long time. We've been arguing

00:19:03.260 about systems and systems, as you, as you pointed out, don't do anything without the value system in

00:19:09.960 which they're enclosed and out of which they came. The systems came out of a form of Christianity

00:19:15.120 that basically said, Oh, people are individuals. They, you know, that, that individualism was created

00:19:21.420 by the Catholic church, but it also led to Protestantism. So there was some kind of syncretism

00:19:25.940 there that we have to deal with, but I know you hate it. Still kicking myself. I wasn't around at

00:19:30.560 the time, but, but, but the thing about it is when Butker made that speech and they jumped on him

00:19:35.580 with the kind of ferocity that lets you know immediately they were terrified immediately

00:19:39.720 that this cannot be said. It wasn't, they said, we disagree. It was, this cannot be said. And the

00:19:45.200 Kansas city chiefs to their credit said, well, well, you know, we believe in free speech. That's the

00:19:49.500 wonderful thing about this country. And conservatives cheered. Conservatives should not have

00:19:52.740 shared their answers would have been, no, we believe this too. The owner of the chiefs

00:19:56.040 said that, no, he's right. We, this is what we should be doing. And it's what we should all be

00:20:00.180 doing. In other words, the system of free speech, I believe in free speech with all my heart,

00:20:03.740 but I believe that we should be using it not to defend free speech. We should be using it to defend

00:20:07.900 the values that underpin free speech and keep it. What I'm not sure of is the contra argument.

00:20:14.040 I'm not sure that you can use coercion to instill actual values. I'll give you a great example of it.

00:20:20.000 Just happened this week. Julia Fox, who I never heard of before, but I think she dated Kanye West.

00:20:25.580 That's the only way I've heard about her. And I think she was an actress and a model. So she came

00:20:29.640 out, she just did a podcast. I covered it on the show today where she said, I am celibate. I have

00:20:34.920 now been celibate for years because the Supreme court overruled Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision.

00:20:41.960 And my act to reclaim my power is I am going to be celibate. And I thought,

00:20:48.400 don't threaten me with a good time, honey, you know, to prove, you know,

00:20:53.440 Even though she lives in a state where she can still get an abortion.

00:20:55.480 Yes. And that's the key here.

00:20:56.900 She's going to realize that?

00:20:57.400 This is the national government versus the localism argument. She, I guarantee Julia Fox lives in a

00:21:03.320 state where she could get as many abortions as she wants. And yet the law is a teacher. And that

00:21:08.440 change in the law changed her behavior. I don't even think she realizes it changed her behavior

00:21:12.840 for the good, but it did change her behavior for the good. And she sounds more normal by the way,

00:21:16.740 than the last time I heard her.

00:21:17.580 You know, it's funny. This is one of the arguments. So there's one of the things that's happening on

00:21:20.920 the right, the young, right is they've got a new name for racial thinking. It's a human biodiversity,

00:21:26.840 right? And so one of the things that they believe though, is that we're in a perfect situation

00:21:31.700 because the only people who could be having children are conservatives. And I think there may be

00:21:36.500 something to that. We may have them out. We may have them exactly where we want them, you know?

00:21:40.380 Well, so here's the thing. There is one aspect of conservatism as you talked about is the

00:21:45.840 conservation of virtue. But another aspect of conservatism is Russell Kirk, Catholic,

00:21:49.960 talked about was the idea that, that there is a certain gradualism and care and carefulness

00:21:55.460 when it comes to the exercise of power. And so, yes, the law is a teacher, but there is a

00:22:02.000 difference between a teacher and a jailer. Yeah, yeah. And what I mean by that is that you can teach

00:22:06.600 people, but you have to teach people sort of where they are. I can't teach calculus to my 10-year-old.

00:22:12.100 Evolution, not revolution kind of thing. Well, it's just, you can lead the people,

00:22:16.400 but you can't lead them from so far ahead beyond the horizon that they can't even see you. Yeah,

00:22:21.300 yeah, yeah. And if you try to drag them from there, the chain's going to break. It's too long a

00:22:24.800 chain. And so the idea of the law compelling things that the public is just not going to go

00:22:31.120 along with, you will actually create a backlash instead of actually getting people to where you

00:22:35.600 want to go. But aren't there so many examples of the law doing exactly that, where the law changes

00:22:40.980 people's opinions about a thing and their values? I mean, you gave one example. Another maybe smaller

00:22:46.000 example that I was thinking about recently is smoking cigarettes. I mean, you can still smoke

00:22:51.200 cigarettes, but in the younger generations, they just don't do it anymore, which was,

00:22:55.800 40 years ago, it's unthinkable that you would have a bunch of 25-year-olds that wouldn't even

00:23:00.020 touch a cigarette. But that's an excellent example of gradualism in the law. So they didn't just ban

00:23:05.240 smoking outright in the United States. What they did is they put significant taxes on it and they

00:23:10.100 banned it for people below a certain age. And then those people all aged up into- But it was also

00:23:15.240 all the institutions of power had this relentless message that this is bad and dirty

00:23:21.100 engrossed. Don't do it. And it's over. You hear it over and over again. By the way, I agree with

00:23:25.100 that. So I agree with that. I agree that our institutions ideally, and this is your point,

00:23:29.920 Drew, our institutions ideally should be echoing virtue. And we've made a mistake on the right

00:23:34.420 by suggesting, again, it is not actually, this is what I was saying before. The difference between

00:23:39.440 an instrumental value and inherent value is very crucial. An instrumental value is a value that you

00:23:43.920 hold in order to get to something, right? Money has instrumental value, not because you have a sack

00:23:48.140 of cash in your backseat, but because you can use that sack of cash to do things with,

00:23:51.920 right? Freedom is an instrumental value. It is not an inherent value. Just being free is not in and of

00:23:57.560 itself valuable because if you're on a desert island, there's nothing else around. You're totally free and

00:24:01.220 it's of no value whatsoever. It's object oriented. You have to actually use it for something good.

00:24:06.680 And so when you're talking about education toward proper use of freedom, that's what all the

00:24:13.780 institutions should be doing. And that's why it's important to give an example. When Joe,

00:24:18.420 it was not enough to me. Joe Biden gave a speech about one of his terrible speeches about the campus

00:24:24.100 protesters. And he said, it's just terrible that they're breaking the law, but also there is a

00:24:27.920 right to free speech. Okay. We all agree there's a right to free speech. That wasn't the question.

00:24:31.440 The question is not even whether they're breaking the law. The question is, are they assholes or not?

00:24:35.100 Right? Is what they're saying right or is what they're saying wrong? Because I promise you,

00:24:37.900 if those were white supremacists on the law and at Columbia University, he wouldn't have been talking

00:24:41.140 about the inherent values of free speech versus law breaking. He would have been talking about

00:24:44.380 the actual message. I'm not sure I agree with you about freedom though. I think freedom is an

00:24:49.080 inherent value, but in order to maintain it, the values that underlie it have to be in place.

00:24:55.700 I mean, you don't, you don't have freedom. I mean, I always, this guy is always saying you have the

00:24:59.540 freedom to do the right thing, but that's not freedom at all. So yeah. Can I, can I ask a freshman

00:25:03.220 philosophy? What's an inherent value? Friendship, family. What is freedom? So the classical definition,

00:25:10.000 I'm glad Drew brought this up as he was mocking me for articulating. The classical conception of

00:25:14.440 freedom is articulated not only by Lord Acton, who some of the libertarians still like, but

00:25:19.540 articulated by Dante, articulated by many classical thinkers, is that free, and Donoso Cortez puts this

00:25:25.980 very well. Freedom is not just the ability to choose. Freedom is willing and willing is predicated

00:25:35.000 on knowledge. So to bring that down to earth, if freedom were just choosing, we would be freer than

00:25:43.100 God because God can't sin. I can sin. Am I freer than God? I'm not freer than God. Freedom is willing

00:25:49.700 and willing is predicated on knowledge. If you don't know anything, if you're totally ignorant,

00:25:53.440 you can't really will. This is why kids don't have freedom, right? It's why we have age of consent laws

00:25:57.120 and things like that. So God has perfect will in part because he has perfect knowledge. He's

00:26:03.840 omniscient. So he's perfectly free. I am not perfectly free. This is why it must be the case

00:26:09.280 that freedom is, to put it really bluntly, the ability to do what we ought to do rather than just

00:26:16.980 the problem. Where did I go wrong in the logic? Because God knows what is right to do and we don't.

00:26:23.180 So the question is who decides and if who decides and if the person who decides has complete control

00:26:28.860 over you to make you choose what he decides is good, you are not free. So that's a pragmatic

00:26:35.000 limitation on power. Yes. That is not a redefinition of freedom. Right. So this is. So what I mean by

00:26:39.340 that is that you don't want to delegate to any power. Right. The ability to define right and wrong

00:26:43.880 so narrowly that you can't choose between objects. Right. But you also don't want people to have

00:26:50.200 the quote unquote it's not freedom to harm another person. Why not? Why isn't it? But why not? Why

00:26:56.260 shouldn't there be freedom to harm another person? Because the logic that the same logic that creates

00:27:00.860 freedom creates that the right not to be harmed. OK. How about a puppy? Do you have freedom to harm

00:27:06.240 a puppy? Here comes Christy Noem. Here we go. Yeah. Take the human being out of it. Do you have

00:27:11.080 like there are certain things that we agree don't have to do with consent, which we can get into later.

00:27:14.620 But you don't we don't believe you have the freedom to do those things because they are inherently harmful.

00:27:19.300 So are you agreeing, Ben, with his definition? I do agree with his definition. Sure. Sure.

00:27:23.980 And I think this is where Orthodox Jews and Catholics are united in their belief. But

00:27:28.980 it is not a Protestant belief and it is not a fundamentally American belief.

00:27:32.960 The fundamental American conception of freedom does include the at least the

00:27:37.260 and the Protestant definition of freedom more precisely includes freedom to fail. It isn't only

00:27:43.200 freedom to succeed. It's not only freedom to do what's right. I don't know. By the way,

00:27:47.040 Christ didn't just give us freedom from sin as though that only means that now you have the

00:27:51.680 opportunity to do what's right. He gave us freedom from sin and that he ameliorated the

00:27:55.200 consequences of sin. If you went back, if you went back to the Mayflower like these cigars and you

00:27:59.920 talked to Governor Bradford and you asked him his definition of freedom, Governor Bradford, who took

00:28:04.840 toys away from children on Christmas because they had no right to play on Christmas Day.

00:28:10.240 Whose definition of freedom would the great pilgrim Bradford have agreed with?

00:28:13.600 That's ridiculous. There's no question. It would have been mine and Ben.

00:28:16.640 And I wouldn't ask him.

00:28:18.320 But I'm saying that's the American definition of freedom.

00:28:20.600 I'm interested in the biblical conception of freedom.

00:28:22.780 I thought we were talking about the American.

00:28:23.460 Hold on. Well, we are because that's what the American experiment is predicated on.

00:28:27.780 The biblical definition of freedom starts with the Exodus and it is free from the tyrant.

00:28:31.880 It is, it is, it is, hold on, hold on. It's freedom. It's freedom from Pharaoh and

00:28:36.980 it's a freedom that is accompanied by risk.

00:28:39.020 Would that we were slaves again in Egypt because when we were slaves again, when we were slaves

00:28:43.240 in Egypt, we at least knew from whence our meal would come.

00:28:46.420 And when they went and asked for a king, God said, they're not rejecting the prophet.

00:28:51.040 They're rejecting me because they're asking for a king.

00:28:53.180 How does that differ from what Michael said?

00:28:55.760 Okay. So two things. One, you have to finish the verse. The verse in Exodus is let my people go

00:29:01.000 so that they may serve me in the wilderness, right? That's the actual finish of that particular

00:29:04.960 verse. So the second.

00:29:06.860 Which is, by the way, which is not what they did.

00:29:09.000 Right. They didn't do that and God smacks them around for it. Second of all, the biblical term

00:29:14.240 cherut, right? So the word in Hebrew for freedom is cherut. It doesn't apply. It doesn't appear

00:29:18.180 literally anywhere in the Bible so far as I'm aware. Cherut is a very modern term. And it really

00:29:23.180 does. When we talk about freedom in the, I do, here's the reason I agree with Michael. It's because

00:29:29.180 in consequence, it doesn't make so much of a difference because what the founders were saying

00:29:32.700 is that there have to be pragmatic limits on the government because a government that is powerful

00:29:37.300 enough to define virtue is also powerful enough to ban virtue. Right. Right. That's the, but that

00:29:42.580 is not an argument for the good of the freedom itself to sin. That's not the same thing, right?

00:29:47.600 This is two different types of right. And so you do have an exemption from the government in the

00:29:52.880 sense that you don't want the government to be quite that powerful. But inside my own family,

00:29:55.420 for example, my kids are, are free in the sense that they can do good things, but they are not

00:30:01.280 free to do anything. Does it make them unfree? Are my kids unfree by definition? Yes, of course they

00:30:07.280 are. Okay. A parent is a, a parent is a tyrant and rightly so. Their children, their children are

00:30:11.720 not free. Okay. But is my kid deprived? Or is my, or is my, or is that good for my kid? The point is

00:30:18.240 that a parent is not a tyrant. Right. A parent is not a tyrant. A parent is a parent, but the government

00:30:22.840 is also not a parent. Well, some parents are a parent. Right. But the, the, the, the parent is

00:30:26.480 the boss of the house. The point, this is why I hate so much when you hear people on the left

00:30:29.980 suggest that the government is a father and a mother, right? It's not. The government is neither

00:30:32.760 of those things, but that is again, a more pragmatic. I keep coming back to pragmatism because

00:30:38.400 otherwise you have a universalist theory of what government can and cannot do. And I don't believe

00:30:42.420 in that. I think that local government, me and my friends in our HOA, we get to make all sorts of

00:30:47.200 rules. The federal government does not get to make. Right. Why? Because we have a broader level of

00:30:50.880 homogeneity and agreement about values, which means that we can compel that there can't be a

00:30:55.960 porn shop in the middle of our, of our living facility. Right. But that's not true on the

00:31:00.200 federal level because you have broader disagreements and you have very pragmatic concerns about handing

00:31:03.940 tremendous power. But there's a power. Even your HOA can't compel you to do rightly. Yes. There,

00:31:08.800 there are there because they, because they violate certain fundamental human virtues or the

00:31:12.160 possibility there are. But here, but here's the thing. Here's where, here's where the disagreement

00:31:15.000 lives. You're, you posit that freedom is only freedom. If it's freedom to be virtuous. And I

00:31:22.000 posit that there is no virtue apart from freedom, that this is a chicken and the egg, that it's a,

00:31:26.520 that it's a cycle, that it can't be defined only in one direction. It works in both directions.

00:31:30.800 You can't compel virtue because it, it's unvirtuous to the exact degree that it was compelled.

00:31:36.720 What is education? Well, education isn't coercive. It's very, it's coercive. It is coercive.

00:31:41.720 Public education. It's not, it's not tyrannical. It's coercive. But it's coercive. It's coercive.

00:31:46.600 Doesn't it, doesn't it seem like the concept of freedom is just not a useful concept?

00:31:52.260 Well, I think that's why, that's why many cultures throughout history, probably most of them

00:31:57.120 weren't focused. They didn't talk about freedom at all. Even probably today, you go to most places

00:32:00.780 on earth and you talk about freedom. It's not part of their, it's not part of their language. They

00:32:05.940 don't, they don't discuss it or worry about it. It's not that it's, it's not that it's useless. It's

00:32:08.960 that it's now the victim of tremendous semantic overload. Yeah.

00:32:12.780 But also, also to the exact extent that we're told it is for freedom that Christ has made

00:32:17.960 us free. Yeah. It's pretty central to Christian theology. It's really, it is. I think it's

00:32:22.400 central to all, it's not a useless concept. All theology based on the Bible is that if

00:32:29.120 you're not free, then your love of God is not love. Yeah. But freedom in the Bible is

00:32:34.700 totally different. Freedom of choice is vital to, you're correct, to achieve virtue. That

00:32:40.460 is true. Right. But that does not mean that the freedom to sin is an inherent good. No.

00:32:45.860 That's not the same thing. No, but freedom of sin is a natural accompaniment

00:32:49.760 to the freedom to choose. Jeremy's point I think is very good, especially on Exodus. When

00:32:54.500 you view Exodus as the figure of history, this is a very, to quote my favorite, one of my favorite

00:33:01.840 old dead men, Dante, you know, he, he views Exodus. One of. Yeah. He's, he's pretty close

00:33:06.280 to the top. Certainly his favorite dead man. He, he views Exodus as the figure of history. You know,

00:33:12.820 like all, all stories have a literal meaning. They have an allegorical meaning, a moral meaning,

00:33:16.500 all these, all these different meanings. And so what is the story of Exodus? It is literally the

00:33:21.080 story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt from the Pharaoh toward the promised land.

00:33:26.220 And it is allegorically the story of, uh, God's chosen leader, leading God's people to the promised

00:33:35.080 land and is anagogically, you know, from the perspective of the end times telling us how we

00:33:39.980 all escaped this slavery. I'm going to tell you something you're going to hate. You're misreading

00:33:43.320 Dante. I'm mis, what are you talking about? I'm misreading. I probably am because I. Dante.

00:33:48.860 I'm going to, I'm going to let you argue about Dante because you have diverse perspectives and

00:33:53.040 diversification is key. One person who works the hard way is Isaac Newton who invested a large sum

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00:34:07.360 Newton. During times of economic uncertainty or market volatility, investors tend to flock to gold

00:34:12.020 as a safe haven asset. His value tends to increase during turbulent times, providing a buffer against

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00:34:20.560 than ever. Birch Gold understands that navigating financial decisions can be incredibly daunting.

00:34:25.440 Dante. That's why they're dedicated in-house IRA department is there to guide you every step

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00:34:33.680 is always ready to provide answers and clarity, whether it's about fees, tax on rollovers, or the

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00:34:58.640 You know how much gold they've sent me for all the work we've done for them over the years?

00:35:02.060 None gold. Bilge.

00:35:03.260 No gold. I just think every now and then you'd open a pack and go, ah, gold. None.

00:35:07.000 I said that at the 15-minute mark of the show, we were going to do something big, something huge,

00:35:12.380 something unprecedented. We were going to premiere the second greatest commercial ever. And we didn't

00:35:20.140 do that because it's now 40 minutes in. But we're going to do it now. This is, as I said before,

00:35:25.120 we've been hard at work for two years on trying to move our manufacturing out of China, and we've done

00:35:29.880 just that. I'm going to tell you more about it. Michael's shaved with it. I've watched people shave

00:35:34.800 with it. I have a beard. I mean, it's part of my shtick. And we'll talk about that when we come

00:35:38.820 back. But first, here it is. We're proud to present the world premiere of the second greatest

00:35:43.180 commercial ever.

00:35:54.620 Oh, hey, I'm Jeremy Boring, CEO of Daily Wire and founder of Jeremy's Razors.

00:36:00.280 Woke razor companies love to take your money while trampling on your values.

00:36:03.960 Me? I just love your money.

00:36:09.660 Cut, cut, cut!

00:36:14.660 What the hell is this?

00:36:16.160 What the hell is this?

00:36:18.160 Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Nobody calls cut on my set but me.

00:36:38.600 What, do you run Hollywood now?

00:36:40.320 Two on the nose.

00:36:41.780 What is this?

00:36:42.880 We're filming the commercial for the brand new second generation Jeremy's razor.

00:36:46.700 Yeah, I get it. We moved our manufacturing out of China. Plus, with the new Sprint 3 and

00:36:50.740 Precision 5 blades, you can shave like a man, not a manifesto.

00:36:54.900 But who's he?

00:36:56.300 I'm Black Jeremy. Huge fan.

00:36:58.080 Do you mind if we get a selfie?

00:37:00.200 Oh, yeah, come on.

00:37:02.500 Look, we talked about this. Customers want diversity. Customers want inclusion. Customers want Black Jeremy.

00:37:10.800 And for the commercials to be less macho. Can we please lose the flamethrower and the car?

00:37:16.100 It's overcompensating and we need to...

00:37:18.520 Who are you?

00:37:19.600 I'm Jessica. I've been following you around half naked for two years.

00:37:23.160 That makes you some kind of expert on advertising? Besides, don't you think it's a little insulting to Black people?

00:37:27.820 Oh, we prefer people of color.

00:37:30.640 Don't you think it's a little insulting to Black people of color that instead of giving them their own roles to play,

00:37:35.240 you just recast them as a beloved white character?

00:37:38.600 Hell yeah, it is.

00:37:40.060 We don't do it for people of color. We do it for liberal white women.

00:37:43.560 I'll spell it out for you.

00:37:47.760 Liberal white women make most of the purchasing decisions for the family,

00:37:50.680 so happy commercials with people of color smiling at each other make them feel hella virtuous.

00:37:55.400 Bitches love to feel virtuous.

00:37:57.280 They do.

00:37:59.240 That's why there's no white people in commercials anymore?

00:38:02.340 Exactly.

00:38:03.180 But that's so...

00:38:04.360 Gay?

00:38:05.760 Sorry, I'm the body positivity hire.

00:38:08.040 You are so brave.

00:38:09.860 What is even happening right now?

00:38:11.200 I think of all the razors you'll sell.

00:38:13.560 And don't forget Jeremy's shampoo and conditioner.

00:38:16.960 They are excellent products.

00:38:18.980 Hey, what if I play your character a little less bitchy?

00:38:26.460 Unbelievable.

00:38:29.440 Jeremy's razors isn't for liberal white women.

00:38:32.340 It's for men.

00:38:33.720 Conservative men.

00:38:35.300 So stop giving your money to woke corporations who hate you.

00:38:37.840 Give it to me instead.

00:38:39.840 Hey, liberal white ladies.

00:38:49.120 You know what's up.

00:38:51.840 Go to jeremysrazors.com now and buy the new radically redesigned second-gen razors,

00:38:57.920 featuring sharper, longer-lasting blades and superior durability.

00:39:01.720 Now in more inclusive three- and five-blade models.

00:39:04.780 Oh, man, I am so offended.

00:39:11.600 That was a thing that happened in all of our lives.

00:39:13.520 Yeah, that's two days.

00:39:14.640 That was two days in March.

00:39:17.740 It's actually the truth, right?

00:39:18.940 You don't see any white people in corporations anymore?

00:39:20.680 I know, yeah.

00:39:20.860 And everybody says, oh, it's like they don't understand that white people are still their

00:39:24.340 customer.

00:39:24.920 No, they do understand.

00:39:26.800 They understand who their customer is.

00:39:28.760 That's the problem.

00:39:29.520 We know who our customer is, too.

00:39:31.480 We feel like our customer will probably appreciate the commentary.

00:39:35.220 We're doing something different.

00:39:36.100 In addition to rolling out the brand-new Gen 2 razor, as I said before, it's a truly world-class

00:39:41.020 razor.

00:39:41.440 It's on par with anything else that you've tried.

00:39:44.160 We have a precision blade.

00:39:45.520 We have a quick shave blade.

00:39:46.840 Michael, which one have you used?

00:39:47.820 So I've got the precision, and I don't want to brag or anything.

00:39:52.940 I have very supple skin.

00:39:54.580 I've got a cute little baby face over here, and I dry shave, so I get out of the shower.

00:39:59.280 I don't use, I hate shaving cream and stuff.

00:40:01.800 And I was a little nervous that I'd lose half the moneymaker, you know, if I just, no, it's

00:40:06.620 a beautiful shave.

00:40:07.380 It really is an excellent shave, and then I get to keep my supple little face.

00:40:11.280 I want to test this thing on my head for Friday's show.

00:40:15.100 Give me the one that was going to work best on my head.

00:40:17.020 I will do.

00:40:17.820 And in fact, co-CEO Caleb has been shaving his head with it, and I've seen blood very

00:40:22.440 few times.

00:40:22.820 No, he's dead.

00:40:26.160 We're doing something else new, which is we're selling on Amazon.

00:40:29.020 Here at a 40, you've only been able to go to jeremysrazors.com.

00:40:31.520 Today, you can go to Amazon.

00:40:32.860 That's really important for us because we want, obviously, for the product to be accessible

00:40:35.660 to more and more people.

00:40:37.000 And that's important, A, because it's how we keep the lights on around here.

00:40:40.260 It's also important, though, because we do have a mission with all of this, and our mission

00:40:44.280 is to actually create competition in the marketplace on behalf of conservatives.

00:40:47.860 For basically the last two decades, corporations have moved further and further and further to

00:40:53.100 the left, taking for granted fully 50% of their potential customers.

00:40:56.940 In this country, they've done so because they just assume that if they cater to the right,

00:41:00.700 the left will abandon them and have a lot of options in doing so.

00:41:03.800 But if they pander to the left, you have no option.

00:41:05.560 You're just going to keep buying their products here.

00:41:07.440 You keep giving them your money no matter what.

00:41:09.080 That's what we're trying to challenge by building these brands and these companies.

00:41:12.340 So we hope you'll go over to Amazon.

00:41:14.540 It's hard, you know, getting into a new platform like Amazon.

00:41:16.740 Obviously, everybody's there, but you need to trend.

00:41:18.340 You need to rank.

00:41:19.140 We need it to be prime eligible, which means that Amazon needs to see that there's demand

00:41:22.240 for it.

00:41:22.760 So head over to Amazon.

00:41:23.960 This is what you're looking for, this lovely new box and the brand new Jeremy's Razor

00:41:27.980 second gen, Razor 2.0.

00:41:30.620 Do it right now.

00:41:31.360 We're really excited about the product.

00:41:33.480 And, you know, if it's good enough for Michael Knowles, I mean, then it needs a better

00:41:37.640 recommendation.

00:41:40.260 Well, I mean, producing that commercial was the seventh circle of hell.

00:41:43.580 So back to Dante.

00:41:44.380 Yes.

00:41:45.000 Oh, you had fun.

00:41:46.660 That is segues.

00:41:47.940 By the way, you're really funny in the commercial.

00:41:49.700 You are funny.

00:41:50.000 That's nice of you.

00:41:50.700 When we started the company, I used to routinely tell people you were a terrible actor.

00:41:54.980 And I said so on account of you were a, I mean, truly bad.

00:41:58.300 Yes.

00:41:58.820 Truly bad.

00:41:59.580 Yes.

00:41:59.840 But you found it.

00:42:00.480 Let's talk about this.

00:42:01.020 You found it somewhere.

00:42:02.100 I feel like in Lady Ballers, you were hilarious.

00:42:04.440 In the commercial, you're hilarious.

00:42:05.200 Again, if you just give me like a very, a person who's just pissed off to be there.

00:42:09.000 I'm a method actor.

00:42:10.760 I have to be in the place.

00:42:12.360 You have to find my motivation.

00:42:13.800 Was he in the commercial?

00:42:14.820 I had the most important role of the whole thing.

00:42:17.160 He was a black guy.

00:42:18.220 You were a black guy in there?

00:42:19.600 Yeah.

00:42:19.900 Hold on.

00:42:20.420 Is that you?

00:42:20.920 Yeah, that was me.

00:42:21.600 That's great.

00:42:22.140 He really lost himself in the character.

00:42:24.200 Wow.

00:42:24.480 That's impressive, man.

00:42:25.400 Robert Downey, when you're up.

00:42:26.520 That appears in the background of the selfie.

00:42:29.560 That's good.

00:42:30.460 On second viewing, you'll see it.

00:42:31.520 I was hoping for a full Al Jolson, you know.

00:42:33.760 I love to sing it.

00:42:34.400 I was going to say for a minute, I thought we'd let a black guy in here.

00:42:38.420 By the way, Siaka, who plays Black Jeremy and also had a very funny role in Jeremy's Razors,

00:42:44.740 is a good buddy of ours, is now Black Jeremy.

00:42:47.920 Like, I think it's going to buy me a lot of freedom not to have to be in all the commercials.

00:42:52.100 He's funny.

00:42:52.800 He's genuinely hilarious.

00:42:54.840 He's genuinely hilarious.

00:42:56.480 And a good guy, too.

00:42:58.280 It is true.

00:42:59.020 And also, I will admit that I found it very funny when the actress says that she has been

00:43:04.980 following around half naked for two years and you never noticed.

00:43:09.160 I do like that line a lot.

00:43:11.080 Yeah.

00:43:11.540 Was the car different?

00:43:13.360 Yes.

00:43:13.900 That was a different McLaren.

00:43:15.200 So, the God King's McLaren is a Bass Boat Blue.

00:43:19.960 I don't know if that's the official color, but I call it a Bass Boat Blue McLaren 600.

00:43:25.180 And we thought that for black Jeremy that he needed something with a little more attitude.

00:43:29.940 A little funkier.

00:43:30.740 We've got a purple McLaren 720.

00:43:32.480 So, we now have two McLarens.

00:43:34.280 Am I going to keep getting paychecks or is this?

00:43:36.720 I don't know that I've ever gotten a paycheck.

00:43:38.380 You can paychecks.

00:43:38.980 Yeah.

00:43:39.740 Ben said it was in the mail.

00:43:41.020 So, I assume it's coming at some point.

00:43:43.400 Yeah.

00:43:43.580 Well, it's hard to find money to pay you when we have to keep spending day after day to

00:43:47.800 change the locks over and over and over again.

00:43:49.700 Just keep picking them.

00:43:50.540 It keeps on.

00:43:52.300 So, anyway, back to the freedom conversation.

00:43:54.720 Back to Dante.

00:43:55.260 Let's go back to Dante.

00:43:56.400 I want to talk about it.

00:43:57.000 Do you want to talk about that?

00:43:58.260 Yes.

00:43:58.620 Okay, fine.

00:43:59.060 I'll let you.

00:43:59.580 I have one final point on Dante, then you can tell me why I'm totally wrong.

00:44:02.120 Okay.

00:44:02.440 Dante was a little bit of a rhino.

00:44:04.760 And this is a weird thing.

00:44:06.300 Dante, he fights at the Battle of Campaldino for the Pope, the Pope side.

00:44:10.440 Then he goes back.

00:44:11.180 I want to hear about it.

00:44:11.620 The Pope side wins.

00:44:12.900 Then he becomes like a rhino of the Pope side, and he's pro-emperor side.

00:44:16.640 And then the Pope side kicks him out and sends him into exile.

00:44:19.320 So, the upshot of all of this is Dante argues, to the point of like pragmatic limitations on

00:44:25.440 power, for a kind of early separation of church and state.

00:44:29.420 And it's not a total separation.

00:44:30.840 He thinks the civil authority should receive light from the spiritual authority, should be

00:44:35.240 guided by the spiritual authority and illuminated by it.

00:44:37.900 But that they're distinct.

00:44:39.180 That the state, the emperor, and the pope, the spiritual authority, both receive their

00:44:44.160 power directly from God.

00:44:45.900 And so, basically, the emperor doesn't have to answer to the pope.

00:44:49.560 And this is a kind of early limitation on the power of government.

00:44:54.460 Though it's not this total secular, you know, the church should have no say in anything.

00:44:58.620 And I think Dante was right.

00:44:59.760 First of all, we're having a kind of conversation at cross purposes, because one thing we're

00:45:03.480 talking about is the nature of man before God, which is different than the nature of

00:45:07.480 man before government.

00:45:08.320 So, we're talking about two different things.

00:45:10.180 And the quality of freedom in those two different situations is different, which is the problem

00:45:14.540 with Catholic theocracy.

00:45:18.520 In Dante, Dante goes into hell and views the people who are damned for the choices that they

00:45:24.480 have made.

00:45:25.280 And because Dante is an actual great poet, the people come to life in such a way that

00:45:30.340 you actually feel for them in their situation.

00:45:32.760 But he's told not to feel pity for them because they have made their free choices.

00:45:37.680 So, they're obviously, the freedom is a good, even in hell.

00:45:41.640 And so, he's not saying that they only were given the freedom to do the right thing.

00:45:46.380 He's saying we don't pity them because they have chosen where they are, and their humanity

00:45:52.100 shines out of the poem.

00:45:53.400 Well, hold on.

00:45:54.340 I don't understand why that makes freedom to do the wrong thing itself a good, as opposed

00:45:58.720 to a natural consequence of misusing freedom.

00:46:00.580 Because it naturally accompanies the freedom to do what's right.

00:46:03.320 That's right.

00:46:03.600 Which is why in the Exodus, we see that God's people sin, even on their way out, and God doesn't

00:46:11.500 forsake them.

00:46:12.460 And in Christian theology, that's fulfilled in Christ, who, yes, gives us freedom to do what's

00:46:18.420 right, but that is accompanied by forgiveness for doing what's wrong.

00:46:23.020 Yeah, but in the Old Testament, there's a multiplicity of God just going hog wild on

00:46:27.300 people.

00:46:29.880 Okay, so the distinction that I was going to make about the definition of freedom is that

00:46:33.960 people misuse it because it's such a broad term.

00:46:36.540 Right.

00:46:36.980 And so, people mean a bunch of different things by it, right?

00:46:39.180 Sometimes what people mean is, I'm free to do whatever I want to do.

00:46:43.220 Sometimes it means that I need a freedom to have health care, right?

00:46:48.200 Which is, I want somebody else to do something for me.

00:46:49.980 Like, there are a bunch of different uses of the word freedom that are actually mutually

00:46:53.280 exclusive in some cases.

00:46:54.520 The two that I want to focus on that I think that get mixed up really easily in this particular

00:46:58.280 conversation are a right in the sense that you have no duty to do X, where you have two

00:47:06.240 choices that are both morally justifiable or interesting or irrelevant.

00:47:12.000 Like, whether you're going to have meat or whether you're going to have milk tonight,

00:47:14.000 right?

00:47:14.120 Like, if you're a Jew, you're going to have meat or milk tonight, you're going to have

00:47:16.700 a cheeseburger or pork if you're a Christian, which is your, like, that has no moral qualifications

00:47:23.400 and really has no moral importance.

00:47:26.000 And so, there's no duty.

00:47:27.660 So, the definition of that kind of freedom is you have a right to do X because you have

00:47:31.360 no duty not to do X, right?

00:47:33.760 That is one kind of freedom.

00:47:35.100 That is not the same thing as you have a freedom to sin.

00:47:38.940 That's the, you have the, you have freedom to choose among various different things because

00:47:42.480 you have no duty not to do that.

00:47:44.160 So, in other words, I don't have a, I do have a duty not to sin.

00:47:47.100 I do have a duty not to sin, which means I don't have a right to sin.

00:47:50.080 I have a duty not to sin on a moral level.

00:47:52.080 That is different from the thing we're talking about on a governmental level, which is an

00:47:55.120 immunity, which is the government does not have the power to compel me to do this thing.

00:48:00.460 That's why I keep going back to the pragmatic thing.

00:48:02.500 Yeah, so the two different kinds of freedom.

00:48:03.980 Right, so if you agree with that, then we're actually all in agreement.

00:48:06.340 So then, I think we basically, that goes back to my point, which is that when I say is it

00:48:13.120 a useful concept, I'm not saying it doesn't matter or it's unimportant, but in conversation

00:48:21.600 and in political debate, if the definition of freedom required, you know, we could debate

00:48:26.340 it for two hours and it has 50 different meanings and people mean 50 different things, it gets

00:48:31.340 to the point where just in common conversation, when we're having a political debate, and it seems

00:48:36.320 like it's just not useful to talk about.

00:48:38.720 And so I feel the same way about rights.

00:48:40.800 We talk about rights and what even is a right?

00:48:43.060 And that's why I've tried to not use that term as much and instead talk about responsibility,

00:48:48.460 which is the flip side of rights, like you're talking about.

00:48:50.580 But people understand that concept more.

00:48:52.820 It's a more useful concept and a useful term.

00:48:55.600 Wait, there is an important thing about this, going back to Polyvius, because I think the

00:48:59.320 cycle of regimes is real.

00:49:01.060 There's no question about it.

00:49:02.320 All history shows it.

00:49:03.320 But the question to me is this, when a democracy or whatever you want to call it, when it becomes

00:49:11.560 chaos such that a strong man has to be brought in and it then morphs into a tyranny.

00:49:18.040 I mean, Lord Acton's point in the fall of the Roman Republic that you were actually freer

00:49:22.140 after the Republic fell in August.

00:49:24.360 And this is actually true.

00:49:25.780 If you think the empire was bad, just wait till you hear about the Republic.

00:49:28.720 Right.

00:49:29.020 Exactly, exactly.

00:49:30.420 So you were actually freer in that situation.

00:49:32.880 But my argument with Acton on this is that if you don't have the right to choose who governs

00:49:40.140 you, you actually aren't free.

00:49:41.840 And so my only point is this.

00:49:43.760 In the fall, in the morphine of a democracy into a tyranny, you have lost something of value.

00:49:49.760 And that's why I think before you let the democracy fall to bring order, you should actually

00:49:54.720 try to preserve the democracy.

00:49:55.900 And there is something at least to, you know, I love American history.

00:50:00.340 We're talking about the pilgrims and the revolution and everything.

00:50:03.460 You know, America doesn't have a tradition of a king.

00:50:05.780 We could have.

00:50:07.160 There were very serious founding fathers and framers who argued for it or for some kind

00:50:11.380 of elective monarchy or, you know, Washington is king or something.

00:50:14.580 But we don't.

00:50:15.360 We just don't.

00:50:15.920 We don't have a real family.

00:50:17.280 I quite like the Windsors for all of their, you know, foibles and eccentricities.

00:50:21.840 I think they've been basically good for England over the last century or more.

00:50:25.060 And, but we don't have that.

00:50:27.220 So, you know, until Emperor Barron comes up, we've got to deal with our own political tradition.

00:50:32.100 But don't we see in Washington turning over his sword to the, you know, political authorities,

00:50:39.000 don't we see something amazing?

00:50:41.120 I mean, aren't we seeing something there that is unique in history, almost unique in history,

00:50:45.060 and just an inherent good?

00:50:49.140 I mean, don't we see in that moment something that is inherently good?

00:50:52.880 And in the fall of the republic, don't we see something that is unfortunate?

00:50:56.160 King George is said to have remarked upon hearing that Washington handed over.

00:51:00.420 The king said this.

00:51:01.220 The king said this.

00:51:01.780 He said that Washington might be the greatest man in the world.

00:51:04.140 Yeah.

00:51:04.400 I think he said it to Benjamin West.

00:51:05.680 Yeah.

00:51:05.800 I mean, yes and yes and no.

00:51:08.900 I mean, well, I mean, listen again, as a defender of the republic and a deep non-believer in

00:51:14.460 the return of a tyranny or a monarchy, just on a theoretical level, the idea that one form

00:51:19.880 of government is inherently better than another because you vote, I don't think is true.

00:51:24.520 I agree with you.

00:51:24.980 Because I think that rights precede, if you like rights all that much, and I'm talking

00:51:29.480 here about, or structures of law, property, these things historically precede the form

00:51:34.080 of government.

00:51:34.580 They don't act as a result of the form of government, historically speaking.

00:51:39.300 Meaning that if you want to look at the rights that existed for the British, those well pre-existed

00:51:43.900 the power of parliament.

00:51:45.180 They started with a bunch of oligarchic lords fighting with the king to dissemble

00:51:50.240 power.

00:51:50.840 They weakened under the power of the equality.

00:51:52.780 I mean, that's actually true.

00:51:53.720 And by the way, I mean, one of the cases that you can easily make with regards to the

00:51:56.660 American Republic is that if you're looking at the rights, I mean, and here, obviously

00:52:00.360 you get into very dicey territory because not everybody in America had rights, most obviously

00:52:03.740 black Americans.

00:52:04.720 But if you were looking at the inherent centralizing power of a tyrannical government, it was very

00:52:10.640 weak early on.

00:52:11.880 And one of the reasons that it was kind of weak early on is because not everybody could

00:52:14.120 vote.

00:52:14.620 One of the things that you get along with full suffrage is the ability to swamp rights in dramatic

00:52:21.760 new ways, right?

00:52:22.540 A welfare state.

00:52:23.860 But to hear that you don't support democracy is going to keep me awake at night.

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00:53:40.600 Starts now.

00:53:41.700 So 20 is Nightline.

00:53:43.140 Did a full episode on our good friend Andrew Tate the other day.

00:53:48.180 And it was, you know, mediocre, as Nightline usually is.

00:53:52.060 And it included some interesting material and included some really dumb material from

00:53:55.920 some sort of gender studies professor who's explaining why feminism is good for us all,

00:53:58.960 which is exactly why Andrew Tate exists.

00:54:00.760 Legitimately, it's like the episode was made about why Andrew Tate is evil, and then some

00:54:05.500 of which I agree, and then large chunks of which I agree, and then the counter is not

00:54:11.320 responsible manhood.

00:54:12.140 It's some dude being like, but feminism is a solution for everyone.

00:54:14.960 I was like, God bless it, ABC, you're the worst.

00:54:17.780 But the most interesting part of the doc was that there are all these outstanding sexual

00:54:24.220 assault warrants on the Tate and sex trafficking warrants on the Tate and all of this.

00:54:29.180 And there are a couple of the women who have come out and said, I was not sex trafficked,

00:54:33.400 I consented.

00:54:34.000 And the prosecutor in that particular case says, well, it doesn't matter if you consented,

00:54:38.180 it's still sex trafficking.

00:54:39.780 If you were convinced to come via the lover boy method to Romania and then serve effectively

00:54:44.440 as a prostitute on camera, it doesn't matter whether you wanted to do it or you didn't

00:54:48.240 want to do that.

00:54:48.740 That is still sex trafficking.

00:54:49.720 It's a crime.

00:54:50.260 And this raises the question of freedom because freedom always sort of implies with it consent,

00:54:56.860 right?

00:54:57.140 Consent of the governed would be democracy.

00:54:58.920 So this goes back to, is consent the core value?

00:55:04.620 Because for the West, it's not just that, even if you argue that it's an inherent value,

00:55:08.420 it has become the inherent value in the West.

00:55:10.000 It's the only value that matters.

00:55:11.760 And you can see the breakdown of that system of morality every single day, particularly

00:55:16.460 with young women who have been told their entire life that their consent is a binary

00:55:20.900 question.

00:55:21.480 It's yes or no.

00:55:22.580 And then men look at that and they're like, okay, well, if consent is all that matters

00:55:25.780 here, then I can do whatever I want to do to you so long as you consent to it.

00:55:29.880 And our society no longer has the language to condemn women for saying yes to the thing

00:55:35.640 or even more importantly, condemn men for taking advantage of a woman who says yes to a thing.

00:55:41.240 He's not taking advantage if she says yes to the thing.

00:55:44.080 And that's a, that's a sickness in a society.

00:55:46.180 This is, if you read the New York Times, the New York Times writes like three or four sex

00:55:49.760 articles every week.

00:55:50.800 And every single one of them is musing over how things could have gone so wrong when they

00:55:57.080 had consent.

00:55:57.940 And this is again and again in the New York Times, which I take to be the voice of the

00:56:02.080 left as a, an old fashioned, they're kind of a fusty old paper.

00:56:05.780 They're dealing with leftism as it was 60 years ago, but now it's permeated our society.

00:56:10.000 But their, their idea is like sex is the only willed human action that takes place outside

00:56:15.580 of moral context so that if you have consent, you can do the, there's no such thing as if

00:56:20.380 you dress up in leather and have somebody stick cigarettes in you, you're not degrading

00:56:24.520 yourself as long as you consent.

00:56:26.620 And the idea that you can degrade because if you have no soul, there's nothing to degrade,

00:56:30.380 right?

00:56:30.520 As long as your body is having pleasure.

00:56:32.180 Yeah, that's, I think the important, the important point is that they don't have the language,

00:56:36.540 but the concepts are still there, but the, the only language they have to describe the

00:56:40.980 concepts is consent.

00:56:41.800 That's how you end up with, you know, a woman who shacks up with a guy for a night, gets

00:56:46.520 drunk or whatever, college campus, and then wakes up in the morning and she's feeling,

00:56:51.580 she knows she, she feels a certain way.

00:56:53.140 She feels degraded.

00:56:53.960 She feels like her dignity has been, has been violated.

00:56:56.440 She feels like she's been taken advantage of.

00:56:58.080 She was not raped, but the problem is that consent is the only word she has to describe how she feels.

00:57:03.920 And so she says, well, my consent was violated.

00:57:06.520 And so then this thing that is not rape becomes rape because that's just her way of condemning,

00:57:11.600 not, not just the guy, but also her own behavior.

00:57:14.280 Correct.

00:57:14.620 But it, then it becomes, so then everything's a binary question.

00:57:17.820 It's either on this side of the consent line or on that side of the consent line.

00:57:20.600 But the reality is there's a whole, there's a whole X axis here, right?

00:57:23.920 That you're ignoring, right?

00:57:24.860 You got the Y axis, which is like consent or not consent.

00:57:27.600 And then you have the X axis, which is degrading or not degrading.

00:57:31.700 And things can exist in all four quadrants, right?

00:57:34.300 You have stuff that's consensual and not degrading, which is hopefully, you know, like marital sex.

00:57:37.920 And then you have things that are consensual and degrading, which is a very real quadrant right there.

00:57:42.180 And then you have things that are consensual and non-consensual and non-degrading.

00:57:47.200 It would be probably empty.

00:57:48.340 That's an empty quadrant.

00:57:49.120 Then you have non-consensual and degrading.

00:57:51.260 And that's a huge quadrant, right?

00:57:53.680 Consensual and degrading is a really big quadrant.

00:57:56.140 Non-consensual and degrading is a very big quadrant.

00:57:58.220 But they've disappeared an entire quadrant from that part.

00:58:00.940 Non-consensual and non-degrading.

00:58:02.600 Like a cocktail waitress runs in here right now, clips a cigar, shoves it in my teeth, lights it on fire, and forces me to drink a Macallan 25.

00:58:12.100 Right.

00:58:12.520 It's not consensual.

00:58:13.600 Consensual but not degrading.

00:58:14.240 But it was edifying.

00:58:15.280 That's fair.

00:58:15.960 Exactly.

00:58:16.860 Exactly.

00:58:17.440 But that category of consensual.

00:58:18.880 That's not a little degrading, but.

00:58:21.100 Consensual and degrading just doesn't exist for these people.

00:58:23.260 Yeah.

00:58:23.400 It just doesn't exist at all.

00:58:24.200 And so women are lost for this language.

00:58:25.640 And then because of that, because they've degraded themselves, it makes it very difficult for them to form normal human relationships with people.

00:58:30.480 Also the fact that men and women have a nature that if you get drunk with a bunch of guys, you're making a mistake.

00:58:35.780 And they say, well, that's blaming the victim.

00:58:37.260 But it's not.

00:58:38.020 It's just like walking down an alley at 3 o'clock in the morning and you get mugged.

00:58:41.520 It's the muggers' fault.

00:58:42.520 But you're an idiot.

00:58:43.360 Yeah.

00:58:43.500 And you've done something because they're muggers, because human beings are corrupt.

00:58:47.100 And, you know, that's not a place to be at 3 in the morning.

00:58:49.280 Walking out in a tsunami without an umbrella, I guess it's the weather's fault, you know, in a way.

00:58:56.220 But these things are to be expected.

00:58:57.300 Also, an umbrella in a tsunami is not going to do you much good.

00:58:59.320 Not much good, no.

00:59:00.660 But, you know, again, I think that does go to the, when you make freedom your highest priority without any countervailing values, you end up in these very ugly places.

00:59:08.220 Yeah, well, again, I think that we're confusing the freedom that is part of the dignity of being a human being and the freedom, the political freedom, which is, yeah, agreed, yeah, agreed.

00:59:20.800 I mean.

00:59:21.120 What do you want to talk about that's not this?

00:59:22.420 Yeah.

00:59:22.740 Can you guys resolve your differences?

00:59:24.140 What's that?

00:59:24.760 I think we're talking about, I think we just have to excise Knowles.

00:59:29.340 Well, I was launching, wait, hold on.

00:59:30.460 I was launching an entirely new business while Jeremy's raising 2.0.

00:59:34.340 So when I said one minute before walking on set, well, let's just release the razor, I didn't realize that they'd need me to, like, send out tweets and give instructions to the team and sign documents.

00:59:45.820 I will say that when I host the show, I'm a little more involved than this.

00:59:50.360 You're a better host than I am in a lot of ways.

00:59:53.520 The only thing, the advantage that I have over you is that the less you know, the more charming you can be.

00:59:59.280 Basically, for me, it just comes down to, like, I'm not going to give up my freedom.

01:00:05.780 Yeah.

01:00:06.120 I mean, it really is that simple.

01:00:07.080 I know that's, like, a simple thing, but even my freedom to fail.

01:00:11.400 Economic freedom is an enormous part of freedom that I don't think you can maintain in a course of, I mean, you don't have economic freedom in Russia because if you even start to build a successful business, Vladimir Putin comes and takes it away from you and makes it his business.

01:00:26.200 Yes, but in the year 900 B.C., he owned that business.

01:00:29.080 That's the thing, which you don't understand, in the Lithuanian-Polish commonwealth.

01:00:32.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:35.060 Well, we've covered most of the big topics.

01:00:36.860 We covered Jeremy's Razor's 2.0.

01:00:39.940 The Battle of Campaldino.

01:00:41.360 The Battle of Campaldino.

01:00:42.360 We covered Dante.

01:00:43.580 We covered freedom in Exodus, consent.

01:00:46.180 Julia Fox.

01:00:47.240 Yeah, I don't know.

01:00:47.740 Is there anything else in there?

01:00:48.480 I'd say the only thing we haven't talked about is Donald Trump's sex life.

01:00:50.660 So I think it's probably worth, like, just coming out of this beautiful philosophical world that we've lived in and get down into a really disgusting, salacious politics.

01:00:58.680 I have to say, this is driving me crazy.

01:01:00.160 I have to admit, this Trump trial is making me nuts.

01:01:03.800 I mean.

01:01:04.380 I love it.

01:01:05.080 I love it.

01:01:05.660 Well, it's incredibly entertaining.

01:01:07.540 Yeah.

01:01:07.800 But it is the greatest violation of American norms and principles and ethics that I think I've seen in my lifetime.

01:01:14.420 It reminds me of a Capra movie, you know, like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where everybody is corrupting.

01:01:20.300 Except for Mr. Smith, you know.

01:01:21.760 Well, this is the thing.

01:01:22.840 They have turned this guy.

01:01:24.340 Aside from this.

01:01:24.880 They have turned this guy.

01:01:25.320 Almost like that.

01:01:26.100 They have turned this guy into a hero in the same way that Samson is a hero.

01:01:30.320 You know, Samson.

01:01:30.720 That's fair.

01:01:31.660 It's like.

01:01:32.480 It's also true that if you shear him off his hair.

01:01:34.820 Yeah.

01:01:35.440 Yeah, yeah.

01:01:35.700 It uses his great power.

01:01:36.640 Exactly.

01:01:37.280 It's also true.

01:01:38.040 And so I can't wait for him to be put in the doorway of the courthouse.

01:01:41.520 I mean.

01:01:42.100 He pushes down all of the pillars and all of the.

01:01:44.140 But nothing stops him.

01:01:46.060 This is like.

01:01:46.580 This is like.

01:01:47.180 Talk about a tsunami.

01:01:48.200 This is like a tsunami of oppression that has hit him.

01:01:52.380 Everybody.

01:01:53.040 Every single institution we have is trying to bring this guy down.

01:01:55.800 And they can't stop him.

01:01:56.840 This is the thing.

01:01:57.820 Even I have come to admire Donald Trump.

01:01:59.340 Everybody.

01:01:59.900 Everybody jokes.

01:02:00.920 Donald Trump has lived a very colorful life.

01:02:02.500 And he's talked about it.

01:02:03.360 Bragged about it.

01:02:04.920 I cannot think of another human being who with this kind of stuff thrown.

01:02:09.220 Yep, yep, yep.

01:02:09.640 Four indictments.

01:02:10.660 They want to put him in jail for 700 years or whatever.

01:02:12.720 And he seems only to be energized by it.

01:02:16.300 He's going out.

01:02:17.240 He goes to Harlem to do a little bodega rally.

01:02:19.960 He's doing a rally in the South Bronx.

01:02:21.780 A Republican has not.

01:02:23.200 A white guy, much less an orange guy, has not entered the South Bronx in probably 100 years.

01:02:27.760 This guy's going to go do it.

01:02:28.720 And the reason I love the trial, it is so unjust and it's so absurd.

01:02:35.060 And their star witness has committed more egregious crimes than the guy they're actually trying to prosecute.

01:02:38.780 Yeah, of course.

01:02:39.560 But, and unprosecuted, by the way, for their star witness.

01:02:42.400 Yeah, and basically just, like, can't help but talk about them.

01:02:44.860 And like, with all of that, they are so farcically bad at prosecuting Trump.

01:02:54.660 Everyone, the AG, this judge is a complete joke.

01:02:58.380 The prosecution, like, didn't know what their star witness was going to say.

01:03:03.020 Like, they didn't realize the defense had prepared anything.

01:03:05.900 That every second this trial goes on, I feel that Trump gets stronger.

01:03:10.300 I don't think it's just Rosie.

01:03:11.260 It's a blessing for him.

01:03:11.640 It's absolutely a blessing for him.

01:03:12.900 It's a blessing in disguise.

01:03:13.860 It's the worst thing.

01:03:14.720 I would never want to be put through it.

01:03:15.980 It's a massive blessing to his political campaign for a couple of reasons.

01:03:19.320 One, as you say, it's on its face an absurd charge.

01:03:23.120 Second, the coterie of witnesses that they have is legitimately a woman who sells sex for money on camera.

01:03:29.300 And a lawyer who stole $60,000.

01:03:32.320 Right, I mean, when she said that she was shocked, how did I find myself here?

01:03:34.780 I mean, I don't know.

01:03:35.440 How do you find yourself there every single day on camera?

01:03:37.180 On camera, yeah.

01:03:37.880 You were just doing your job is the answer.

01:03:39.380 You found yourself shocked the same way I find myself shocked to be sitting behind a desk talking.

01:03:43.380 Like, what are you talking about?

01:03:44.920 But the whole trial is absurd.

01:03:47.180 But it's also done him the favor of putting him, as he says, the icebox.

01:03:50.600 That's actually great for him.

01:03:51.980 If I could have constructed a campaign wherein Twitter did not exist for him,

01:03:56.440 he would be forced into fake Twitter where no one was.

01:03:58.980 And he would just tweet into it and no one would ever notice.

01:04:01.060 The oblivion, we might call it.

01:04:02.020 Right, exactly.

01:04:03.120 You might call it truth social.

01:04:03.960 And he was then put into a room where he was literally not allowed to talk for multiple hours a day.

01:04:10.960 But he could only emerge to speak about how he wasn't allowed to talk and then go back into that place.

01:04:16.280 And if he could do that for the rest of it, I hope that this trial lasts another seven months.

01:04:20.140 Well, don't worry.

01:04:20.660 There's three or four more coming up right behind it.

01:04:22.460 But they're not going to get there in time.

01:04:24.240 They can't do it.

01:04:24.680 This is the only one.

01:04:25.560 This is it.

01:04:26.600 The weakest of the four.

01:04:27.900 He's the world on fire.

01:04:28.800 He's the worst president.

01:04:29.960 He is the worst.

01:04:30.660 He is so terrible.

01:04:32.080 Everything the man does is just trash.

01:04:34.720 I mean, the world is literally on fire and it's all his fault.

01:04:38.080 It is.

01:04:38.560 Every element of it is his fault.

01:04:40.140 He is trash at this.

01:04:41.740 It's unbelievable how bad he is as a president.

01:04:43.840 Did you see?

01:04:44.320 So he releases, he's going to release a million barrels of oil from this Northeast Reserve, Joe Biden.

01:04:49.300 He'll bring it down by two cents for one day.

01:04:50.540 Yeah, he'll bring gas down by nothing.

01:04:52.260 But he needs to do it to have any shot of restoring gas prices.

01:04:55.920 And so he can't just drill for more oil because the left won't accept that.

01:05:01.040 But they need more oil.

01:05:01.960 So they do it in this really inefficient way.

01:05:04.120 Then Joe Biden, he goes after the International Criminal Court because they seem to be getting

01:05:07.900 big for their britches.

01:05:08.920 Even though Joe Biden is the one who rescinded Trump's sanctions on the International Criminal

01:05:12.780 Court.

01:05:13.220 Then he's whining about how Russia invaded Ukraine.

01:05:15.420 Russia only invades Ukraine, according to Zelensky, because Joe Biden weakens America's

01:05:19.700 stance on Russia.

01:05:20.680 Because he said if it's only a minor invasion.

01:05:22.600 Yeah, it's only a minor invasion.

01:05:23.720 He said he literally did the just the tip routine.

01:05:26.200 He's like, if it's just the tip, it's probably fine.

01:05:28.060 This is after staging the room on the Saigon in Afghanistan.

01:05:31.240 Yeah, that's right.

01:05:33.020 It should be, it should, it should, the Strategic Oil Reserve thing, it should, that should be

01:05:37.300 an impeachable offense in a lot of ways that you're, you're stealing from the Strategic

01:05:40.960 Oil Reserve to start your election.

01:05:43.280 Yeah, during the election.

01:05:44.600 Like, I know it's not impeachable, but it's.

01:05:46.600 He's explicitly trying to buy votes now.

01:05:48.400 Like, explicitly trying to buy votes.

01:05:50.340 He's going to young people, he's like, just shoveling cash at them.

01:05:52.780 He's like, here's the, here's the student loan bailout.

01:05:54.360 You want some money?

01:05:54.940 I'll give you some money, man.

01:05:56.020 Here's some money.

01:05:56.980 And he's like, you know what?

01:05:57.880 The oil prices are too high.

01:05:58.800 What if I just take some money?

01:05:59.660 I just throw the money at you.

01:06:01.040 And he's doing this over and over.

01:06:02.420 I mean, it's so clear at this point that he's just handing out goodies to constituent

01:06:05.840 groups.

01:06:06.160 I will.

01:06:06.480 And it's not going to work.

01:06:07.580 I think he's going to lose.

01:06:08.280 Let me say this.

01:06:10.700 I am hopeful that he will lose.

01:06:13.160 After 2016, I'll never say again.

01:06:15.240 I've been going to have an election since like 2008, by the way.

01:06:17.560 But I think that, I think he could, could truly lose.

01:06:22.100 I, the thing that concerns me, I'm deeply concerned about this early debate.

01:06:26.020 I think that the early debate is a mistake.

01:06:28.120 On Trump's side?

01:06:29.120 Mm-hmm.

01:06:29.420 Oh, gee, okay.

01:06:30.080 And I, and I think that we will go, we meaning conservatives broadly, and, and I fear Trump

01:06:36.020 himself will go into the debate with the exact wrong set of expectations.

01:06:40.860 Every time there's a state of the union with Joe Biden, we're like, oh, I can't wait to

01:06:44.660 watch this train wreck.

01:06:45.840 He's probably going to poop himself and fall off the stage.

01:06:48.200 And he doesn't.

01:06:49.200 He's good.

01:06:50.400 He mixes it up with the Republicans.

01:06:52.280 He's good.

01:06:53.340 Yeah.

01:06:53.560 He was energetic.

01:06:54.960 He's energetic.

01:06:56.840 He's feisty.

01:06:57.640 He was good in the debates last time, and Trump was not good.

01:07:01.220 And we keep going.

01:07:01.700 The first one, he was not good.

01:07:02.500 He was all right.

01:07:02.880 And we keep going in with these like low expectations, like they won't give this guy a shot of adrenaline

01:07:07.140 in the arm, and he won't be able to perform.

01:07:09.040 And when you go in with those expectations, you lose every single time.

01:07:12.300 If you think there's no way Joe Biden can stand up to Donald Trump in a debate, first

01:07:16.740 of all, he did and became president probably in large part because of it last time.

01:07:21.760 And he will again.

01:07:23.040 Donald Trump has to go in here and fight for his life and win.

01:07:26.060 But here's what he really needs.

01:07:26.780 OK, so here's my suggested strategy for the Trump debate.

01:07:29.760 OK, so number one, he should go in and he should just be calm.

01:07:33.420 If he's calm, he's going to win.

01:07:35.260 If he gets agitated, Biden is going to win because, Ben, as you say, he's going to go

01:07:38.180 in the back room.

01:07:38.820 He's going to find a youth and he's going to suck the blood from the youth.

01:07:41.780 He's going to reinvigorate himself.

01:07:44.220 He's not just going to smell the youth this time.

01:07:45.860 This time it's the fangs.

01:07:47.020 He's going to go full four.

01:07:48.080 But the other thing is that I really believe that Donald Trump should push very hard to have

01:07:53.420 RFK Jr. on that stage.

01:07:54.400 I think you should really push to have RFK Jr. on that stage.

01:07:57.340 And I'll tell you why.

01:07:57.960 I think this is right.

01:07:58.720 Because RFK Jr. right now is drawing somewhere around 10 percent of the vote.

01:08:02.100 He seems to be drawing a little bit more from Biden than from Trump.

01:08:05.300 And I think that's only going to grow because it turns out there are many never Bidens,

01:08:09.160 more never Bidens than there are never Trumps at this point in time.

01:08:11.500 If you're voting for Trump, it's because you actually want to vote for Trump.

01:08:14.460 Like who's voting for Trump because they just they hate Joe Biden so much that they're

01:08:17.280 voting for Trump.

01:08:18.220 That's really not Trump's base.

01:08:19.800 Trump's base is mostly people who really, really like him.

01:08:22.420 His base is like 43, 44 percent.

01:08:24.620 Joe Biden's base is right now like 36, 37 percent.

01:08:27.240 It sucks.

01:08:28.040 And not only that, RFK Jr., he thinks that he is running for right wing votes, which means

01:08:33.640 that in a debate he's going to turn.

01:08:34.720 He's going to smack Trump when he turns and he smacks Trump.

01:08:37.300 Who does that attract?

01:08:38.420 Not the Trump voters.

01:08:39.440 It attracts the Biden voters.

01:08:40.440 The Biden voters like that RFK Jr.

01:08:42.200 is going after Donald Trump.

01:08:43.820 Then RFK Jr. will turn and he will clock Joe Biden on being a bad president.

01:08:47.300 And he will continue to believe Biden's voters.

01:08:51.320 Plus, it's risky.

01:08:52.500 Plus, he fills time.

01:08:53.880 Plus, he fills time.

01:08:54.580 And I think the more time I think Donald Trump in debate is pepper.

01:08:57.040 He's not salt.

01:08:57.760 He's great in primary debates because he has about six minutes combined to talk.

01:09:00.940 And it's all little jabs.

01:09:02.100 And if you give him 40 minutes on a stage to debate, I've never seen him be good in

01:09:06.160 a debate that's 40 minutes.

01:09:06.980 I don't agree with this.

01:09:08.560 I think Trump jumped on this because he smelled blood.

01:09:10.780 And I think he's right to smell blood, even though I don't actually think Trump is going

01:09:14.840 to underestimate Biden.

01:09:15.980 I think he's, you know, he's going to make he's he's foolishly saying he's not going to

01:09:20.440 be any good.

01:09:21.220 But I think he knows that he has to do something here.

01:09:23.620 And there's something else about this.

01:09:25.120 And this is an insight I've actually stolen from my son.

01:09:27.560 I'd let him say it.

01:09:28.300 But he's in Edinburgh's drinking McAllen.

01:09:31.280 On his mattress, right?

01:09:32.320 On his twin helix.

01:09:33.060 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:34.260 Exactly.

01:09:35.100 On his mattress.

01:09:36.220 Spencer only drinks those Petey with him.

01:09:38.120 He does.

01:09:38.500 He likes the dirt.

01:09:39.500 He likes he could eat coal.

01:09:41.500 Yes.

01:09:42.260 However, he pointed out that Trump has a new coalition that is this is not just the minorities,

01:09:47.300 but he also has a coalition of people who are saying, like, I don't like him, but I'm

01:09:51.600 voting for him.

01:09:52.200 The first time that people said that in 2016, when we sort of said, you know, when I sort

01:09:57.220 of said, all right, I'm going to vote for him because he's better than Hillary.

01:10:00.140 We we felt that we had to join the crowd of the people who loved him.

01:10:03.920 Now we don't even feel that way.

01:10:05.320 We feel like I feel perfectly.

01:10:06.720 I mean, people yell at me for it, but I feel perfectly free to say, I don't

01:10:09.500 think he's a good guy.

01:10:10.500 I don't think, you know, I thought he I thought he did a good job for three years, a decent

01:10:14.840 job for three years.

01:10:16.240 But I'm I'll vote for him twice.

01:10:17.600 I'll move from state to state.

01:10:19.280 Of course.

01:10:19.520 I mean, yeah, because because it's just so obvious.

01:10:22.200 And I think if he can go on and basically make that case, make the cases like, Joe, you

01:10:27.080 have done a terrible job.

01:10:28.380 You did this.

01:10:28.920 You did this.

01:10:29.340 You did this.

01:10:29.820 You did this.

01:10:30.420 I think he he has to not get sucked into January 6th.

01:10:35.300 That's the big trap that Biden is going to set for him.

01:10:37.460 He's going to start off and he's going to say that's when he's going to say you lost

01:10:40.840 the election.

01:10:41.300 You won't accept that you lost the election.

01:10:42.460 And then you led an insurrection.

01:10:44.100 And Trump, because he's almost patholized.

01:10:46.360 He's like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, too.

01:10:48.240 Right.

01:10:48.380 It's like chicken, chicken McFly.

01:10:51.520 And then he's like the Petzfeld Lynn, the Dolly Zoom.

01:10:56.120 Exactly.

01:10:56.660 If he can avoid that, if he can just say, listen, Joe, you and I disagree about who won

01:11:01.560 the 2020 election.

01:11:02.240 But there's one thing that everyone agrees about.

01:11:03.700 And it's that you're a president, right?

01:11:05.340 I mean, if he says that, he'll win.

01:11:07.420 OK.

01:11:07.980 And I agree that I think that this will be a disaster for Biden.

01:11:12.260 And it's it's different than 2020.

01:11:14.600 The most obvious for the most obvious reason that Biden now is fully senile.

01:11:18.520 He's actually senile.

01:11:19.540 And he only he only has two gears now.

01:11:21.760 And one gear is is confused, doddering and confused and incoherent.

01:11:26.340 The other gear.

01:11:27.060 And this is what we saw in the State of the Union is angry and shouting.

01:11:29.780 And the only way that he's able to be coherent for a long stretch of time is to be angry and

01:11:34.460 shouting the entire time.

01:11:35.500 He just did it at a commencement speech with Morehouse, where he just it didn't make any

01:11:38.860 sense tonally like he's angry and shouting at a commencement speech because that's the

01:11:42.600 only way that they can get this guy to make sense for a long period of time.

01:11:45.920 So he's going to come into this debate and he's going to be an angry shouting mode.

01:11:49.820 And if Trump can just be not only calm, but also sort of just his his whimsical sort of

01:11:55.240 self with this angry shouting old man, I think the contrast will be will be really favorable

01:11:59.860 to Trump.

01:12:00.820 Except that if Trump makes the election a referendum on Trump, he will lose.

01:12:05.640 If Trump makes the election a referendum on January 6th, 20 or on 2020, broadly speaking,

01:12:10.480 he will lose.

01:12:11.940 And if Donald Trump makes the election a referendum on Joe Biden, he will be the 47th president.

01:12:17.700 The problem is I've never seen Trump not make himself the center of whatever

01:12:22.080 conversation he walks into.

01:12:24.480 But I think, you know, I don't know.

01:12:26.860 I'm kind of optimistic about this debate.

01:12:28.860 I'm not even sure it's going to happen, to be honest.

01:12:30.700 But like, I think if it happens, I think the minute the minute Biden said it, you could

01:12:34.600 tell he did it because he's running scared.

01:12:36.160 I mean, he would have no reason for him to do it.

01:12:38.240 And and the way Trump jumped on it, I just thought like he smells blood and he is, you know,

01:12:43.720 people keep saying he's not a politician, but he kind of is a politician.

01:12:46.300 You mean he was the president of the United States for four years?

01:12:49.360 Well, not only that, he's a natural politician.

01:12:52.840 Yeah, he is.

01:12:53.420 Is there a world where a bad performance leads to a move to ouster Biden from the ticket at

01:12:58.360 his convention?

01:12:58.920 He's almost impossible.

01:12:59.860 No way.

01:13:00.400 No way.

01:13:00.960 Is it impossible?

01:13:01.780 Yeah.

01:13:02.400 Well, because if you oust him, who are they going to put in place?

01:13:05.780 There's no one they can put in place.

01:13:06.960 That is.

01:13:07.360 There's one person.

01:13:08.040 Well, it's Michelle.

01:13:08.920 Michelle's the only person.

01:13:09.880 Michelle.

01:13:10.100 She's not going to.

01:13:10.540 They're not going to do it.

01:13:11.500 I just don't think they're going to do it.

01:13:13.080 I think they're going to ride this horse past its death.

01:13:15.740 I mean, they're going to ride this horse until it dies.

01:13:18.180 I don't know what chapter you think.

01:13:19.260 We're way past that.

01:13:20.400 Ride this horse until the corpse is a skeleton.

01:13:22.240 We are going to be taking questions from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.

01:13:25.680 We've been seeing your questions in the chat.

01:13:27.080 We're going to take them now.

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01:13:31.260 Become a member today.

01:13:32.180 Our subscribers make it possible for us to continue to bring you this great content,

01:13:35.840 to continue to bring you this show, Ben's show, Drew's show, Matt's show.

01:13:41.100 Michael's is more like a charity thing.

01:13:42.660 You don't really contribute to that.

01:13:44.300 That's something that I get.

01:13:45.360 It's full of love, you mean.

01:13:46.140 I get points in heaven for that one.

01:13:48.120 But also, the entertainment that we're doing.

01:13:50.060 If you haven't seen Mr. Burcham, please go over to Daily Wire Plus and give it a watch.

01:13:53.460 It's the fulfillment of Adam Carolla's really 30-year vision.

01:13:58.260 It's the character he first created that brought him into show business,

01:14:01.740 and we've helped him realize that with our first animated series for grownups,

01:14:07.000 other than our children's animated stuff over at Bent Key.

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01:14:14.840 to sit in and condemn people, then please head over and give that a watch as well.

01:14:20.220 I will say this about Mr. Burcham.

01:14:22.140 I wanted to say this.

01:14:23.560 If they'd asked me at the premiere to say anything,

01:14:25.960 I was going to bring up the fact that the first time I met Adam Carolla,

01:14:29.040 he charged me $15,000 for the privilege.

01:14:34.420 So Ben and I were running a thing called Truth Revolt at the David Horowitz Freedom Center,

01:14:39.000 and we were having a student conference at Pepperdine University.

01:14:41.980 And Ben came up to me and he said,

01:14:43.320 well, I think maybe I said we should have a speaker.

01:14:45.680 And Ben said, I'm really good friends with Adam Carolla,

01:14:47.880 but he would definitely come down.

01:14:49.180 It's a 23-minute drive.

01:14:50.320 I mean, he'll drive 23 minutes to do it for me.

01:14:51.960 I've known him since I was a kid.

01:14:53.920 So I was like, oh, man, they're close.

01:14:55.500 They're good friends.

01:14:56.820 I call up Adam's team.

01:14:58.520 And they're like, yeah, 15 drinks.

01:15:01.200 And I was like, well, it's 23 minutes you've known Ben since he was a kid.

01:15:04.620 Don't make me say 17.

01:15:07.680 So I was thinking, look at how far we've come.

01:15:10.700 The first time I met Adam, he charged me $15,000 for the privilege.

01:15:14.940 And here we are a decade later, and he charged me $9 million.

01:15:21.420 They get to go to one party with him.

01:15:24.300 It's a fun show, though.

01:15:25.440 It's worth watching.

01:15:26.120 Our Daily Wire subscribers make it possible.

01:15:27.540 So thank you to you.

01:15:28.880 And here is our first question.

01:15:31.980 Is it worth debating falsehoods about Trump?

01:15:34.720 The drink-bleach falsehood, the fine people falsehood, et cetera,

01:15:38.580 with people who constantly complain about Trump and refuse to change their minds

01:15:42.060 no matter how many times you disprove their statements?

01:15:44.600 I think that question answers itself.

01:15:46.340 It does.

01:15:47.020 I will say the one thing that I've done.

01:15:48.800 So obviously, if you hadn't noticed, Jewish.

01:15:52.480 And that means there are a lot of people I know who are libs.

01:15:55.980 Because not in the Orthodox community, but everybody else who's not in the Orthodox community.

01:15:59.620 It's like 150% pro-Trump.

01:16:01.380 And then you have all the lib Jews.

01:16:03.320 The Jew-ish.

01:16:04.420 Right.

01:16:04.660 It's not very religious.

01:16:05.580 But there are some who are really, really mad at Biden.

01:16:10.020 Because they're looking at how Biden, I mean, it's long past time, obviously.

01:16:13.340 But because of what Biden has done on Israel, they are livid.

01:16:17.020 And I talked to some of them, and they're like, yeah, but I just can't vote for Trump.

01:16:19.940 I can't vote.

01:16:20.420 Because they're still libs.

01:16:21.700 I can't vote for Trump.

01:16:22.820 And what I've said to them is, okay, so either stay home or vote for RFK Jr.

01:16:27.500 If you're not going to vote for Trump, do not give your vote to Joe Biden.

01:16:30.940 Because the minute that you give your vote to a person with whom you heartily disagree,

01:16:36.000 your vote means nothing.

01:16:36.960 It means nothing.

01:16:37.540 It's not malleable anymore.

01:16:38.540 If they know they can just check you up in that comment.

01:16:39.920 I agree with this.

01:16:40.680 With someone with whom you, I would say, I'll give my vote to someone with whom I heartily disagree.

01:16:46.260 I heartily disagree with Donald Trump quite often.

01:16:48.720 I would not give my vote to someone with whom I fundamentally disagree.

01:16:51.240 Right.

01:16:51.480 That's fair.

01:16:51.920 But also, I, too, know many liberals for my sins.

01:16:57.300 And one of the things that I've decided is I never discuss personalities with them.

01:17:01.220 Because the minute the conversation starts, I'll say, look, you're going to tell me how much you hate Trump.

01:17:05.960 I'm going to tell you how much I hate Biden.

01:17:07.880 They're politicians.

01:17:08.640 They're many, many hateful things about them.

01:17:10.200 Let's talk about the principles.

01:17:11.620 And then if I can convince them on the principles, then I'll say to them, then just don't vote.

01:17:15.980 If you can't vote for Trump, just don't vote.

01:17:17.200 I think you could also, on the questioner's point of do you fact check, you know, all the fake propaganda, I think if you just calmly, you don't need to go tit for tat because there will be 10 more lies for every one you correct.

01:17:30.520 But if you just sort of calmly say, yeah, none of that's true, just none of it's true.

01:17:35.820 And I'm happy to disprove any number of them that you want.

01:17:39.860 But at a certain point, I just, you have to recognize the sources of your information are not credible.

01:17:46.540 I know that you believe that they're true because of the bubble in which you operate.

01:17:49.720 People will not believe that.

01:17:51.160 They will not believe.

01:17:51.980 I mean, even after this NPR thing came out, I would say to people, I've been telling people that NPR is poison for years.

01:17:58.660 And when it came out that the woman who runs NPR is essentially a CIA operator, I said, now do you believe me?

01:18:05.840 No, come on.

01:18:07.060 They just will not believe it.

01:18:08.760 Those lies are just absolutely permeate the atmosphere.

01:18:12.000 Wait, you're saying that government funded propaganda isn't wholly accurate?

01:18:17.580 But anti-American propaganda, that's the crazy part we're living in.

01:18:20.780 That's one of the big mistakes our deep state makes.

01:18:23.320 They're very anti-American.

01:18:24.760 If only we had a good deep state.

01:18:26.660 If the courts allowed Donald Trump to be kicked off the ballot in the swing states, do you think that would justify a civil war?

01:18:33.400 I think justifies the wrong question.

01:18:34.960 I mean, you can make an argument.

01:18:36.060 Look, I mean, our founders thought that a tax on Snapple or whatever tea they were drinking justified a revolt.

01:18:43.660 I mean, you can make an argument that, like, the income tax justifies a revolt of some kind.

01:18:49.420 And how.

01:18:50.500 But, however, you have to ask questions like, does it have any chance of succeeding?

01:18:55.960 Does it have any chance of creating a better situation than what we have right now?

01:18:59.400 Do you want to shoot your cousins?

01:19:00.560 You have to start asking all those kinds of questions.

01:19:04.160 And I think that, you know, so then the answer is obviously no in that case.

01:19:08.800 I don't know.

01:19:09.700 If they prevent us from being able to function as a country, which removing the front runner from one of the parties from being on the ballot unconstitutionally, you are getting, if not fully there, very close to the point where the political system can no longer give you a win.

01:19:29.300 But it's such a it's such a hypothetical.

01:19:32.260 Like, it's just that's not what's going to happen.

01:19:34.180 What's going to happen is what's happened.

01:19:35.780 The court's going to get involved and the court's going to say, yeah, that's not how that's not how it works in this country.

01:19:40.600 You can't pull that those shenanigans.

01:19:42.020 By the way, it's I think that that's it's such an important point because as seriously as as we take the, you know, throwing Trump off the ballot thing is about they take the January 6th thing way more seriously.

01:19:54.500 Neither of those were destined to succeed or be in any serious way a threat to the working order of our.

01:19:59.900 That's right.

01:20:00.300 And I'm so sick of this crap about how this is going to be the last election.

01:20:04.260 There'll be no more election.

01:20:05.520 Not a single person in the United States believes that no one believes it.

01:20:09.460 When politicians say it, they don't believe it.

01:20:11.420 When hosts say it, they don't.

01:20:12.620 This is not going to be the last.

01:20:13.700 I promise you, it's not going to be the last election.

01:20:15.660 I don't bet 100 percent on very many things.

01:20:17.920 I will bet 100 percent that four years from now, we will be in the middle of another presidential election cycle.

01:20:22.860 I'd be willing to bet everything that I own and all of my children's future earnings on that proposition.

01:20:27.440 And anybody who says different, I got to tell you, like, I don't believe you.

01:20:30.500 And if you really believe that, then I think that, you know, if you lose the election, then right now, if you believe that Joe Biden is such a threat, for example, on the right to democracy, that it's literally the end of the country, the end of the country.

01:20:40.460 If he gets elected, then you're then you you have a duty to do something about it.

01:20:45.820 And you don't because it's not true.

01:20:47.420 This is why the first guy who believes evil things and is going to do evil things.

01:20:50.460 And we have a system that prevents the most.

01:20:51.840 This is why the first conversation of the night was important, because if you believe that we can gain.

01:20:57.440 There's no more goodness out of our political system than you have a duty to revolution.

01:21:02.660 When the founders did what they did, yes, it was over a one cent tax on on Snapple, but it wasn't really over the one cent tax on Snapple.

01:21:13.040 It was over the fact that they petitioned their government and petitioned their government and petitioned their government.

01:21:18.320 And they were given no voice.

01:21:19.900 They were given no recourse.

01:21:20.900 There was nothing that they could do to have a say in how they were governed.

01:21:25.760 They could not affect political change in any way if they had been able to affect political change.

01:21:31.040 If if George the third and parliament had just decided to give representation to the colonies in parliament, there would have been no moral justification.

01:21:42.320 For the American revolution.

01:21:44.940 But they wouldn't.

01:21:46.100 And so there was.

01:21:46.880 But they also but to go back to my point that the other thing they had going is that they could win.

01:21:53.300 Now, it's quite amazing that they won, but they could they could win given the situation they're in at the time.

01:22:00.240 But, you know, the question that we have is that even if the government does something like they kick Trump off the ballot.

01:22:06.780 Now, that's we agree that's full on tyranny.

01:22:12.700 Can some sort of movement like that actually have any hope of succeeding?

01:22:17.680 Only if it's organized by the states.

01:22:20.060 Yeah, it would have to grow up organically.

01:22:22.000 It would have to be organized by the states.

01:22:23.980 There's no like we the people like your militia down in, you know, Plainview, Texas or something.

01:22:31.340 It's going to overthrow the federal government.

01:22:32.540 Of course, that's not going to happen.

01:22:33.580 You're a militia up in Michigan with, of course, that's not going to happen.

01:22:38.940 A move like that, if it were to have any chance of succeeding, would have to be a collection of the states doing it.

01:22:45.720 And listen, you're talking again, you were talking about shooting your cousins.

01:22:48.400 I get a little frustrated when people act as though they look forward to the idea of revolution.

01:22:53.540 Revolution.

01:22:53.860 You haven't met my cousins.

01:22:54.780 Depends on the cousin.

01:22:57.440 Revolution is not the moment that we are in and it is not a moment that we should hope to find ourselves in.

01:23:01.680 We are in a moment where we are losing political battles at a rate that we need, that demands a change in tactics.

01:23:08.780 At the same time, we're winning political battles all the time that still mattered.

01:23:12.360 Donald Trump was president three and a half years ago.

01:23:15.400 Roe versus Wade was overturned, which is something I frankly never thought was going to happen.

01:23:18.340 That's exactly right.

01:23:19.220 And so I'm sorry to disabuse everyone of their fantasy that at 65 years old, you with your semi-automatic AR-15, as long as you don't have to run more than four steps uphill, are somehow going to overthrow the United States military that's not real and you shouldn't want it to be real.

01:23:37.040 I'm hoping to be sent to France to flirt with the girls.

01:23:39.120 The good news, though, too, is the fact that Biden's freaking out over everything and, you know, spilling oil from the Northeast and agreeing to the debates and everything.

01:23:49.320 The one thing it shows you, it's not that Trump is going to win.

01:23:51.620 It's not that it's not rigged.

01:23:53.380 At least it's not totally rigged.

01:23:55.180 That's right.

01:23:55.580 At least Biden thinks he could lose.

01:23:57.480 Yes.

01:23:57.780 Which is good.

01:23:58.480 No, I'm telling you, they are vulnerable or they would not be behaving like they wouldn't have reacted to Harrison Butker if they realize that women are waking up.

01:24:05.360 Look what it took for Biden to win the first time, and they will not succeed at shutting down the country again going into this election.

01:24:13.660 They can't.

01:24:14.380 If they could, they would.

01:24:16.640 If they could, they would.

01:24:17.660 What are the chances that the debate gets canceled because of Trump's insistence on a drug test?

01:24:21.900 I think there's a high chance it'll get canceled, but I don't know if that'll be.

01:24:24.060 It won't be because of that.

01:24:25.180 I think it's funny to demand a drug test, but if you think that Joe Biden couldn't pass a drug, the way drug tests work.

01:24:31.340 Yes, yeah.

01:24:31.960 Yeah, yeah.

01:24:32.300 Like, giving the guy a shot of adrenaline two minutes before he takes the stage, your drug test isn't going to happen.

01:24:37.300 They couldn't get Jose Canseco in the night.

01:24:39.260 Is he continent enough to pee in a jar on TV?

01:24:44.140 Run him, man.

01:24:46.500 If we lose this election, whose fault will it be in the lie?

01:24:49.320 Noles.

01:24:50.120 In the lie.

01:24:51.060 It's the fault of whoever you already didn't like.

01:24:55.300 Yes.

01:24:55.700 I like that.

01:24:56.400 Here's what I know for a fact.

01:24:58.300 Noles.

01:25:00.620 It will be my fault.

01:25:01.900 And I base this on the fact that no matter what happens in politics...

01:25:06.900 It's your fault.

01:25:07.800 ...I get blamed.

01:25:09.040 You should have pushed harder for Ron DeSantis.

01:25:12.660 What are you talking about?

01:25:14.020 I literally voted for Ron DeSantis in the primary after he backed out, after he dropped out.

01:25:19.720 That's how much I wanted Ron DeSantis to be the nominee.

01:25:22.420 And then if I say that, people are like, you don't sufficiently support Donald Trump.

01:25:27.100 And I'm just like, guys, I am a mere shampoo self on the internet.

01:25:32.760 I, if you think that the Daily Wire being a little nicer to your preferred candidate would

01:25:39.440 change the fact that the base, the voters wanted Donald Trump.

01:25:42.980 I did not want Donald Trump to be our nominee.

01:25:44.920 I wrote an essay that said, I don't think Donald Trump.

01:25:48.040 I think Donald Trump should be disqualified on the basis of his behavior in 2020.

01:25:53.000 And by the way, some of your hosts have been very pro-Trump for many years.

01:25:55.880 And some have been very pro-Trump for many years.

01:25:58.540 We have a political process in this country.

01:26:00.640 And also, we're a media company.

01:26:03.660 It's not my job to get Ron DeSantis to be the nominee.

01:26:06.480 That's right.

01:26:06.860 That's not my job.

01:26:07.800 That's Ron DeSantis' job.

01:26:08.760 And you're missing an important point.

01:26:09.960 It's the Jews.

01:26:10.740 Does that mean...

01:26:11.040 I'm right here.

01:26:13.720 If you want to recast that question as what can Donald Trump do to win, that's not on

01:26:19.900 Donald Trump, right?

01:26:20.840 And then, like, I think everybody understands that if he loses, then he bears a large percentage

01:26:25.940 of the responsibility for losing.

01:26:27.160 I don't think people understand.

01:26:28.280 No, I really don't.

01:26:29.400 I think they're looking for other reasons.

01:26:30.740 But if there is one thing that he can do to win that is not just personality-driven,

01:26:36.240 liberate the state parties to go get the votes.

01:26:39.800 Build state parties that are not complete crap.

01:26:42.360 The biggest problem the Republican Party has right now is not Donald Trump as a candidate.

01:26:46.040 The biggest problem the Republican Party has right now is not even the media, although

01:26:49.320 the media are, of course, a huge problem.

01:26:51.800 The biggest problem the Republican Party has is that they destroyed their state parties

01:26:54.900 in places like Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

01:26:59.160 And you need people to go knock on doors and collect votes.

01:27:02.100 That's what you need to do, because Democrats are doing that.

01:27:04.660 You know how I know this?

01:27:05.440 Because there's only one state in the country that did it right in 2022, and there was a red

01:27:08.540 wave in that state, and that was Florida.

01:27:09.680 Everywhere else, they blew it, and they got this little pink trickle at best.

01:27:13.640 And so if Donald Trump wants to win, every dollar that is pouring into the RNC, every

01:27:17.300 single dollar should be a get-out-the-vote dollar in the swing states.

01:27:20.320 In the swing states.

01:27:20.980 Donald Trump could lose and it not be his fault.

01:27:24.520 It is more likely if he loses that it will actually be his fault because of his lack of

01:27:28.620 discipline and his inability to frame the conversation.

01:27:29.780 It's so funny that this is a controversial statement because no one ever doubted this for

01:27:32.420 one second about John McCain, about Mitt Romney.

01:27:34.740 If George Washington lost in 2004, people would have been like, ah, can't believe that guy.

01:27:38.600 But part of it, though, is the extraordinary measures taken against Trump in 2020 and 2024.

01:27:42.600 Correct.

01:27:42.900 Agreed.

01:27:43.320 So they upended a lot of the voter rules.

01:27:47.140 I do think part of the state-

01:27:48.740 The entire apparatus of the government is a raid against him.

01:27:51.240 Yes.

01:27:51.420 That could cost him the election.

01:27:52.520 Yes, it could.

01:27:53.320 Of course it could.

01:27:53.680 So one thing you do, yes, you have to have the state parties to get out the vote.

01:27:56.780 You also need a robust voter integrity effort.

01:27:59.940 This is, I remember in my early days in politics, working on campaigns-

01:28:04.020 Out of walking, out of knocking.

01:28:05.380 Yes, exactly.

01:28:06.360 Passing out palm cards.

01:28:07.800 But we would have the ballot integrity people, and we would catch people, and we'd catch SEIU

01:28:13.720 bussing in union members out of district and all that.

01:28:15.800 That always happens everywhere.

01:28:17.460 The Baltimore Board of Elections Supervisor just got caught on camera this week, and he

01:28:21.660 said, yeah, there was some shady stuff that happened in that election.

01:28:24.180 We still don't have clarity.

01:28:25.300 Someone might have uploaded a thumb drive twice or whatever.

01:28:27.560 You know, so that happens all the time.

01:28:29.380 You know, to quote FDR's advice to LBJ after LBJ lost an important election to him, FDR

01:28:35.800 said, you ran fine, but you forgot to sit on the ballot box.

01:28:39.240 You forgot, in a way, it's actually, to FDR's credit, you forgot who counts the votes.

01:28:46.080 That's really what matters.

01:28:47.560 And then LBJ took an extreme lesson from that and stole the election in 1948.

01:28:53.220 Is the Democrats' election strategy delusional, or are they confident knowing it's already

01:28:58.120 written?

01:28:58.560 That's a strange question.

01:29:00.320 I mean, the only thing delusional about it is that they thought Biden might be a good

01:29:04.280 candidate.

01:29:05.140 But as you say, they have no one else to replace him.

01:29:07.000 It's delusional.

01:29:07.740 It is delusional.

01:29:08.440 Because a normal candidate would, like Joe Biden, I've been saying he's delusional for

01:29:13.540 three years on a political level.

01:29:14.940 He won in 2020 because he ran against Bernie Sanders as a moderate.

01:29:18.260 And then he ran as a dead person against Donald Trump.

01:29:21.300 Right.

01:29:21.480 And what the American people wanted was a moderate dead person.

01:29:23.980 And instead, what they got was a radical dead person.

01:29:26.600 Right.

01:29:26.740 And they don't like radical dead people, as it turns out.

01:29:28.860 It turns out that all the people that Joe Biden is pandering to are the least popular

01:29:31.880 people in America.

01:29:32.880 That's right.

01:29:33.180 People do not like the college protesters.

01:29:34.620 People do not like the pro-Khamasniks in Dearborn, Michigan.

01:29:37.020 People do not like the trans radicals.

01:29:38.700 People are not fond of these people.

01:29:40.260 And Joe Biden keeps doubling down.

01:29:42.760 We've done this so many times on the show, I won't repeat it.

01:29:45.180 2012 was the most important election.

01:29:46.580 Barack Obama changed the way Democrats think about elections by basically cobbling together

01:29:49.680 a coalition of the dispossessed and doubling down on his base while ignoring the moderates.

01:29:53.000 And he won.

01:29:53.720 And every Democrat since then has thought they can do that.

01:29:56.120 The only reason it worked in 2020 is because every voting rule changed and everyone voted

01:29:59.440 nine months in advance of the election.

01:30:01.180 That's right.

01:30:01.500 That's literally the only reason.

01:30:02.560 But what's the delusional part?

01:30:04.540 The delusional part is that he thinks that if he keeps doubling down on his base.

01:30:07.360 He thinks that if he, yes.

01:30:09.260 Yeah.

01:30:09.740 The delusion is that Joe Biden thinks he's Barack Obama.

01:30:12.840 Right.

01:30:13.200 That's the delusion.

01:30:13.900 But the Democrats are scared out of their wits.

01:30:17.120 They're not delusional.

01:30:17.900 They understand.

01:30:18.680 But all the people around him are fully delusional because if they were smart, I mean,

01:30:22.800 James Carville was saying this.

01:30:23.980 If they were smart, they'd be in his, Roy Teixeira is saying this.

01:30:26.800 They'd all be in his ear saying, dude, the votes you're losing are in the middle of the

01:30:31.180 spectrum.

01:30:31.800 Those votes are wide open.

01:30:33.560 They're so wide open that RFK Jr. is running at 10%.

01:30:35.860 Those votes are wide open.

01:30:37.420 What in the F are you doing?

01:30:38.880 And instead, everyone around.

01:30:39.360 That's what James Carville said?

01:30:41.120 All I heard was, that old guy's going to get down, down, down, down, down, down, down.

01:30:46.260 You have to play it backwards.

01:30:49.000 What do you make of big right-wing Twitter accounts?

01:30:52.800 Starting to blame Jews for everything.

01:30:55.600 They're all on my feed.

01:30:58.220 Drew's leading them.

01:31:01.120 What I like is that they hate Jews for making money, so they hate them for being capitalists.

01:31:05.580 They hate them for being socialists.

01:31:06.920 It's like, you can't win whatever the Jews do.

01:31:10.080 I mean, anti-Semitism, to give a definition, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about the

01:31:14.820 power of the Jew in society.

01:31:16.420 Whatever you hate most in society, the Jew is behind it.

01:31:18.980 It is why it is distinct in definition from other forms of discrimination.

01:31:21.600 It doesn't mean it's better.

01:31:22.320 It doesn't mean it's worse.

01:31:22.960 It is distinct because it is a distinct phenomenon.

01:31:25.400 Again, not better, not more important, not worse.

01:31:27.200 Just distinct.

01:31:28.080 Okay.

01:31:28.240 The reason that you see right-wing Twitter accounts that are now doing this crap is because

01:31:33.140 the right-wing does now have a grievance mentality.

01:31:36.080 Part of that grievance mentality has been justified by the institutional dominance of the left and

01:31:40.400 right-wingers who rightly feel that they have been ground under the boot heel of a culture

01:31:43.560 that dispossesses particularly white Christian males.

01:31:45.740 All of that is true, but this has resulted in a quasi-intersectional philosophy wherein

01:31:51.260 white Christian males are at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy and those who

01:31:54.440 are quote-unquote most successful in the society are to blame, which is identical to left-wing

01:31:58.660 intersectional philosophy.

01:31:59.920 The only difference is who they think is at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy

01:32:02.600 and who's at the top of the intersectional hierarchy.

01:32:04.760 And so grievance culture comes all the way around.

01:32:06.520 The only thing that the intersectional leftists and the right-wing anti-Semites agree on is

01:32:10.120 that at the top of the hierarchy is the Jews because the Jews are disproportionately successful.

01:32:13.420 The thing is, the intersectional hierarchy, they think that the Jews are white, so they're

01:32:17.320 disproportionately successful.

01:32:18.560 And the white supremacists and the alt-righters and the anti-Semites think that the Jews hate

01:32:23.240 white people and therefore they're at the top of the intersectional hierarchy.

01:32:25.980 But they all seem to agree.

01:32:27.120 So that's power.

01:32:28.280 You're at the top of both hierarchies.

01:32:30.440 That's the famous joke about the Jew in 1939 who walks past the other Jew sitting on the park

01:32:35.060 bench reading Der Sturmer.

01:32:36.320 And he says to him, why are you reading Der Sturmer?

01:32:38.020 He says, look how much good news there is in here.

01:32:39.520 We run the banks.

01:32:40.180 I have to say, I do not agree with this thing about the source of anti-Semitism.

01:32:47.580 It is a religious thing.

01:32:49.160 It is because, if you go back and see pre-Nazis, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, all these guys were

01:32:55.280 saying this weird religion, Christianity, has come in and stolen our true German values and

01:33:03.160 it's all the fault of the Jew.

01:33:04.660 That is what they say.

01:33:05.540 They say Christianity is against our nature.

01:33:08.700 The blood of the Germans, the Aryan blood is running in our veins.

01:33:12.100 It's all the fault of the Jew who sold us Christianity.

01:33:14.880 And that's why the thing survives as long as it does.

01:33:17.700 And it is worse than other forms of bigotry because it's a bigotry against God.

01:33:23.100 It is bigotry against God.

01:33:24.620 And just one other thing I have to say is that as far as I'm concerned, the Jews aren't powerful

01:33:30.260 enough.

01:33:32.140 My biggest problem with the Order of the Elders of Zion thing is that it's a forgery.

01:33:37.140 Like, I don't understand.

01:33:38.920 Where are the Jews?

01:33:39.820 Why do they make things run better?

01:33:41.560 Well, I mean, you did use our space laser on Raisi's helicopter.

01:33:44.420 That was good.

01:33:44.980 But you missed the other two.

01:33:46.220 Right.

01:33:46.740 Intentionally.

01:33:47.200 Well, we aren't like, we don't hit every time.

01:33:49.400 I will say, you know, I take a more limited and simpler view of anti-Semitism in that I

01:33:59.240 would classify it like any other bigotry, racism.

01:34:03.860 Of course, racism is a big one.

01:34:06.940 You know, if you're an anti-black racist, it's because you hate black people.

01:34:11.020 You think that black people are inferior in some way.

01:34:13.540 And if that's what you think about black people, then you're racist.

01:34:15.620 Now, you might not hate black people, but have other views about black people, some

01:34:22.060 stereotypical views even.

01:34:23.600 And some of those views might even be like insulting, but it doesn't automatically make

01:34:27.460 you a racist.

01:34:27.920 That's true.

01:34:28.580 Or the example I give is like, you know, let's say Asians.

01:34:32.340 You might not hate Asians.

01:34:33.780 However, you might subscribe to the stereotype that Asians are bad drivers.

01:34:40.320 Now, are they actually bad drivers?

01:34:41.760 I don't know.

01:34:42.420 They're probably not any worse than anybody else.

01:34:43.980 But if you believe that, you just happen to believe it doesn't mean that you're, that

01:34:47.280 you're, you know, racist or, you know, ethnocentric against, against Asians.

01:34:51.940 And so I would say that anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews.

01:34:56.660 Okay.

01:34:56.760 The reason I'm going to make a distinction here, no one ever says I hate blacks because

01:35:01.160 they're too powerful.

01:35:02.520 That's generally not a thing for, for literally hundreds of years, blacks were hated when they

01:35:06.920 were slaves and not powerful.

01:35:08.900 When it comes to, they're viewed as less than.

01:35:10.140 Right.

01:35:10.280 When it comes to Jews, the reason that anti-Semitism has so often resulted in anti-Jewish pogroms

01:35:15.340 and violence, and this is going back centuries, I mean, there's nothing new.

01:35:17.880 The reason is because when you perceive a group as unjustifiably powerful, typically that

01:35:22.380 means that you're going to drag them in the streets and kill them.

01:35:24.740 And so when-

01:35:25.440 The Russians, they weren't powerful in Russia when the Cossacks came into their little

01:35:28.820 village.

01:35:29.000 No, no, no, wrong.

01:35:29.680 So if you go back to the history of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, second callback, if you go

01:35:34.860 back, then the claim of the Cossacks was that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dominated

01:35:39.920 at the top levels by merchant Jews.

01:35:42.820 This was pushed by the Cossack leaders.

01:35:45.400 It's legitimately in the rhetoric.

01:35:46.980 So again, that's true.

01:35:48.600 By the way, that goes all the way back to the Bible.

01:35:50.240 I mean, if you want to go all the way back, Pharaoh says it, he says there are these Jews

01:35:53.520 and there are foreign people and they're going to become powerful and they're going to rise

01:35:55.880 up against us, right?

01:35:56.580 That's his justification.

01:35:58.160 Haman's justification in the book of Esther is there's a people and they dwell among you

01:36:01.940 and they're not going to listen to your laws and they're going to rebel against you, right?

01:36:05.380 Every aspect of anti-Semitism is typically geared against the quote-unquote nefarious

01:36:09.620 power of the Jews, which of course is what Hitler is talking about, which is why Hitlerian

01:36:12.540 anti-Semitism crosses streams with these other forms of anti-Semitism, historically speaking.

01:36:16.680 Muslim anti-Semitism is much the same thing.

01:36:18.640 It's these perfidious Jews who have somehow gained power over Muslim holy sites and are using

01:36:23.140 their world powers in order to manipulate.

01:36:25.160 The reason that anti-Semitism crops, this is why anti-Semitism is so weird in a sense,

01:36:32.240 is that typically speaking, when you are racist against a group, it's because you look down

01:36:37.540 on that group.

01:36:38.460 It's actually more akin, if you're going to make an analogy, the analogy that you'd make

01:36:42.160 is more like know-nothing hatred of Catholics in 1850.

01:36:44.940 That's actually the better analogy.

01:36:46.500 With dual loyalty.

01:36:47.400 With dual loyalty.

01:36:48.120 The whole same thing, right?

01:36:49.140 Matt Fratt has actually made this point.

01:36:50.260 This is a good, I think it's a good analog.

01:36:53.340 If you substitute Catholics for Jews, then you'll understand this form of discrimination

01:36:59.140 better.

01:36:59.500 Because this actual argument was made about Catholics throughout the 19th century in an

01:37:02.880 attempt to limit Catholic immigration, suggesting that Catholics were nefarious tools of the

01:37:06.580 Pope who are coming in, taking over the financial industry, dominant in wide and varied industries

01:37:12.380 in the United States, and had to be stopped because of that.

01:37:14.840 Yeah.

01:37:15.120 You see?

01:37:15.620 Check, check, check.

01:37:16.420 But isn't, but isn't, Jeremy's on board now.

01:37:19.900 Isn't that just a, is that really different in kind from what people who are bigoted against

01:37:25.060 the group always do to the group?

01:37:27.740 Now, you're right that with Jews or with Catholics in this example, they, you know, they're accused

01:37:34.080 of being too powerful.

01:37:35.260 But what's really happening there is that they're being blamed for whatever happens to be going

01:37:39.380 wrong in society.

01:37:40.080 And I would argue that when people are bigoted against the group, they tend to find a way

01:37:45.180 to blame that group in some way for the problems in society.

01:37:49.060 That's an argument for better, so that's, by the way, that's a better definition of racism

01:37:52.500 than what you were giving before.

01:37:53.500 I don't like the definition of racism, which is just, I hate people.

01:37:57.460 Well, no, but what I'm saying is that, is that if you're a racist, legitimately racist

01:38:01.620 against someone, this is what tends to happen next.

01:38:05.040 It's what, it's what happens after the racism because you hate them.

01:38:07.520 Now you want to blame them for stuff, but that's the blaming, the blaming for stuff

01:38:12.200 is not what the racist, again, this is, again, this is a, again, this is a, therefore you

01:38:17.240 hate the group.

01:38:17.540 Well, no, I'm talking about the group.

01:38:19.200 I am talking about the group.

01:38:19.740 This is a chicken and the egg thing.

01:38:20.920 Because I don't think that racism starts with, I hate them in my heart and then I blame them

01:38:25.400 for everything.

01:38:26.420 I think it can start with blaming them for everything and then become hatred in your heart.

01:38:30.140 That's true.

01:38:30.600 That thing, that cycle goes both directions.

01:38:32.940 And even, even the whites who are holding black slaves in the South feared their power.

01:38:37.880 It was, they were going to cut your throat at night.

01:38:39.360 That was, they all, that appears in all of their letters, they're going to cut them.

01:38:42.440 There is, but isn't that, that's more to my, that's more to my point.

01:38:44.800 No, I agree with you.

01:38:45.700 And on your point, Matt, look, all stereotypes are true.

01:38:48.500 That's why they're stereotypes, you know, that's how they became stereotypes.

01:38:51.240 There's an element of truth in them.

01:38:52.380 Yeah, and so it obviously doesn't apply to individuals necessarily, but, but, so that's,

01:38:56.660 that's part of it.

01:38:57.440 Another part of it is what Drew says, which is, if you look into like esoteric Nazism, there

01:39:02.660 is, there is a deeply anti-Christian aspect in as much as it becomes pagan.

01:39:06.600 Well, they said, the head of, the head of the church advisory to Hitler said, this idea

01:39:12.740 that Christ is part of Christianity makes me laugh.

01:39:15.300 The Fuhrer is Christianity.

01:39:16.460 Yeah, yeah, positive Christianity is their, like, kind of occult version of it.

01:39:19.960 So there's that aspect, certainly.

01:39:22.300 But also then, it comes down to me at this basic level of different groups are different,

01:39:27.980 right?

01:39:28.340 And sometimes they have the same interests, sometimes they have different interests.

01:39:31.520 And when you're living together, different groups find reasons to get frustrated with each

01:39:35.760 other.

01:39:37.140 So it's no surprise that groups with different religions find reasons to get a little hostile

01:39:41.180 to each other.

01:39:42.480 When, when it comes to the modern, again, it's in niche segments of the right, but this,

01:39:48.100 this obsession with the state of Israel, I think, what's the big problem with the state

01:39:51.220 of Israel?

01:39:51.700 Let's throw out, as I do, the theological claims for the state of Israel, because obviously

01:39:57.400 it's not my religion.

01:39:58.240 Let's throw out even historical claims.

01:40:00.140 Let's just get down to brass tacks, the right of conquest, as we used to call it before 1947.

01:40:09.840 The Israelis went to a land that historically had been theirs, and they went back to it,

01:40:14.720 and they were granted this land by international bodies, and then they fought a war, and now

01:40:18.620 it's their land.

01:40:20.100 How does that, how is that different from America going in and taking America?

01:40:23.820 How is that different from other countries?

01:40:24.800 Beyond that, too, though, and the question that nobody seems to ask is, which do you

01:40:28.780 want the world to look like, the state of Israel or everybody else?

01:40:31.220 Yeah, I guess this is my point.

01:40:32.240 I mean, this is the thing, you can always get into an argument, because if the right

01:40:34.340 of conquest is all that matters, then why, why not conquer it back?

01:40:37.320 It's not all that matters, but I guess my point on this is, the very height of our civilization

01:40:42.220 was a period where we, in Christendom, went to the Holy Land to take it away from Muslims.

01:40:49.120 So the notion that we're now saying that the Muslims are-

01:40:52.080 What you're arguing is correct in the sense that when you talk, I've said this before

01:40:55.720 when I talk about Israel, it's the only country in the world where I'm asked to explain the

01:40:59.080 legitimacy of its existence.

01:41:00.260 Right, right.

01:41:00.680 It never happens with literally any place else.

01:41:02.080 Nobody ever is like, why is France deserve to be France?

01:41:04.480 What is France-ness?

01:41:05.440 Ukraine now.

01:41:06.120 Right, right.

01:41:07.120 You know, I mean, the United States gets the same challenge.

01:41:09.680 I mean, I would say-

01:41:11.160 On stolen land.

01:41:12.320 At a far lesser level.

01:41:14.400 Even the people who argue that the United States is on stolen land don't really-

01:41:18.500 Yeah, there aren't like, there's not UN charter, or UN resolution after UN resolution-

01:41:24.300 And also, that group of people who are acknowledging stolen land, they aren't immediately calling

01:41:29.120 for the entire country to be turned over to the tribe of the Sioux in a real way.

01:41:33.220 Yeah, yeah.

01:41:33.480 It's a bunch of bullshit, they say, in order to please their left-wing friends and pretend

01:41:37.320 that they give a shit, which they don't.

01:41:38.640 So, but when it comes to the state of Israel, suddenly you're forced to make these arguments

01:41:42.700 about like, well, is it based on history or is it based on religion?

01:41:45.140 Is it based on the-

01:41:45.780 So, see, your argument, I agree.

01:41:47.520 If you win, you exist.

01:41:49.840 End of story.

01:41:50.740 Then, then the only question becomes, does the world look better or worse if it looks

01:41:54.520 like this thing or that thing?

01:41:55.940 And that's Drew's question.

01:41:56.800 And that's really the only question that we tend to ask generally in foreign policy.

01:42:00.200 Especially for us who aren't Israel.

01:42:03.240 As an American, when I look at, say, Ukraine and Russia, I'm looking at America's interests.

01:42:07.540 Now, I can decide that differently than other people, but do I want, do I want Ukraine to

01:42:12.120 look more like Ukraine or do I want it to look more like Russia?

01:42:14.340 Do I want China to look more like Taiwan or do I want Taiwan to look more like China?

01:42:18.480 Right?

01:42:18.660 Like, these are the questions that you typically ask when it comes to foreign policy.

01:42:21.280 When you look at Israel versus Hamasistan in the Gaza Strip or the Palestinian Authority

01:42:27.040 terror-dominated areas, and the question is, should there be a state there?

01:42:30.960 In a vacuum, there shouldn't even be a state there.

01:42:33.480 Forget about Israel.

01:42:34.640 I'm not for the establishment of any terror state anywhere.

01:42:37.380 I wasn't for the establishment of Isistan.

01:42:39.480 Like, this is so absurd.

01:42:40.840 And the claim that somehow it's bad for the world if Israel thoroughly destroys and defeats

01:42:46.240 a terror group that is currently holding five Americans hostage is so beyond reason.

01:42:50.740 It's so crazy to me.

01:42:52.120 And that doesn't mean you can't critique Israel.

01:42:53.540 Go ahead.

01:42:54.080 Fine.

01:42:54.420 Critique it.

01:42:54.820 Critique it.

01:42:55.240 All these places.

01:42:55.740 Critique America and France and UK.

01:42:57.180 Do all of it.

01:42:57.680 The one thing I will say is that the critiques that are brought against the state of Israel

01:43:00.180 are never paralleled by any critiques anywhere else.

01:43:02.800 They are unique to the state of Israel.

01:43:04.340 You never see it brought on, like, obviously, if you get me going on this topic, it's incredibly

01:43:09.020 annoying to me.

01:43:09.980 And one of the things that makes it so incredibly annoying to me is that now that Israel is

01:43:14.000 at the top of the news, which has been since October 7th, I talk about Israel a lot.

01:43:17.440 I spent my entire career not talking about Israel.

01:43:20.580 Literally my entire career.

01:43:21.580 If you go back through the first show, through show number whatever it was on October 9th, the

01:43:26.260 amount of time that I spent talking about Israel was, I am sure, less than 1% of the total

01:43:29.860 run time of my show.

01:43:30.660 And now you're a dual.

01:43:31.240 Well under 1%.

01:43:32.080 And then I start talking about the thing that literally is on the front pages every single

01:43:35.120 day, and critiques are brought against me personally that would not be brought against

01:43:39.360 people who are Christian who say the exact same things.

01:43:42.080 Right.

01:43:42.220 And there I find something peculiar.

01:43:43.800 Unless it's a Catholic defending the Pope, right?

01:43:46.700 Unless it's where you can invoke dual loyalty.

01:43:48.780 There's something tragically comic about the fact that the Jews are in position, as you

01:43:53.600 say, every country, every great nation, every great empire was built on conquest, somewhere

01:43:58.720 along the line.

01:43:59.440 Somebody conquered somebody.

01:44:00.400 So the Jews are in the position of having to do what you do at the beginning of a society,

01:44:03.660 but because much of their leadership is European-based, they actually have the mindset of people later on in society when

01:44:10.720 they start to say stupid stuff like, maybe women should have power too.

01:44:13.760 And maybe we should feel guilty about killing our enemies.

01:44:18.100 You know, those are things, those are late stage civilizational things, but they're in a

01:44:21.720 kind of first stage civilizational moment.

01:44:23.880 It's kind of tragic comic.

01:44:26.060 Yeah.

01:44:26.800 Yeah.

01:44:27.600 I need some advice.

01:44:29.940 Is it off-putting if the girl asks the guy out?

01:44:34.520 Off-putting to the guy, I suppose?

01:44:37.620 Yeah.

01:44:38.180 Or is the girl off-putting?

01:44:39.000 I would imagine this as a girl saying, is it a problem if I ask a guy out?

01:44:42.660 Yeah.

01:44:43.260 That's got to be what this question is.

01:44:44.480 I never responded all that well to it.

01:44:47.160 It actually happened on a few occasions.

01:44:49.580 Good for you, dude.

01:44:50.160 Yeah, thank you.

01:44:50.940 I'm boasting.

01:44:51.820 Just a little humble brag right there.

01:44:53.000 Yeah.

01:44:53.660 But it actually, I'm trying to think, because my gut instinct says, no, that'd be great,

01:44:58.000 ladies.

01:44:58.300 If I'm single, ask me out.

01:44:59.500 But no, actually, when it happened, I did not like it.

01:45:03.600 There's a way to do it, though.

01:45:04.760 There's a way to do it.

01:45:06.020 I mean, how hot are we talking here?

01:45:09.660 That's a mess.

01:45:10.180 You have no principles.

01:45:10.840 You have no principles.

01:45:11.860 It would be a total deal killer to me if a woman proposed marriage.

01:45:17.300 Oh, yeah, for sure.

01:45:18.240 Total deal killer.

01:45:19.080 Yeah.

01:45:19.840 But if a gal came up to you and said, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we ought to

01:45:23.680 grab a drink sometime or whatever.

01:45:25.600 There's a party I'm going to.

01:45:27.160 Yeah, breaking the ice or something.

01:45:28.780 Or in some cases, maybe the girl knows that the guy's a little shy.

01:45:32.660 I think that there's an appropriate version of that.

01:45:35.440 The problem with asking, the problem with a woman proposing, though, is now you've broken

01:45:40.300 whatever those ices are early.

01:45:42.100 Now you have to be in a position of actually agreeing to the institution of marriage, which

01:45:46.580 is agreeing to a form of male headship over the family.

01:45:50.620 Yeah.

01:45:51.200 So it is a kind of perversion of a woman.

01:45:53.900 Could you imagine?

01:45:54.460 Also, let's be real about this.

01:45:57.540 A man entering into a marriage is generally making a decision that males are hesitant

01:46:04.520 to make.

01:46:05.140 Right.

01:46:05.520 Yeah.

01:46:05.860 Where women entering into a marriage is a decision that women are generally very eager

01:46:09.300 to make.

01:46:09.880 Yeah.

01:46:10.060 Generally.

01:46:10.340 Like, that doesn't mean true in every certain circumstance, but that is generally the way

01:46:14.220 the math works.

01:46:14.800 Men are giving up the field of women for this one woman, and that is a very, very important

01:46:19.500 decision, obviously.

01:46:20.320 And women, because they're not driven by the same impulses, have found the person they wish

01:46:23.880 to hire children with.

01:46:24.760 So of course they want to get married.

01:46:25.780 So if they're saying to the man, do you want to get married to me?

01:46:29.020 That's a form of pressure.

01:46:29.940 That's not actually a form of proposal.

01:46:31.840 When a man says that to a woman, he's offering her a thing that she wants.

01:46:35.160 It's not, it's generally speaking.

01:46:37.360 How dare you?

01:46:37.760 For Ben, during your first book club, you mentioned a dystopian sci-fi novel you had

01:46:42.660 written would soon be published.

01:46:44.600 Did you scrap it, or do you still plan to go ahead with it?

01:46:46.620 That's for Jeremy.

01:46:48.000 I mean, so I did write, in fact, a dystopian sci-fi novel.

01:46:51.280 It's been done for like two years or something.

01:46:53.080 I think I sent it to you, Drew.

01:46:53.980 I liked it.

01:46:54.420 Yeah, Drew was kind enough to pretend he liked it.

01:46:57.260 And, you know, like, maybe we'll do something with it, or maybe we won't, and it'll go alongside

01:47:01.220 the other two complete books.

01:47:03.340 Ben writes books sometimes, guys.

01:47:05.460 This question's for me.

01:47:06.360 Hey, so you redesigned the men's razor.

01:47:07.700 Are you doing the same for the women's razor?

01:47:09.300 Indeed, we are.

01:47:10.800 We will have a brand new women's razor, hopefully in time for the holidays.

01:47:15.340 It's different in kind than the men's razor.

01:47:18.700 I think one of the problems with the original women's razor that we released is that it was

01:47:22.280 very similar to the men's razor.

01:47:24.880 And women's shaving needs are different than men's.

01:47:28.020 So the razor that we're going to release acknowledges those differences.

01:47:34.400 For the whole group, what is the end game?

01:47:38.040 If all of these nefarious characters are trying to bring down the country, what do they stand

01:47:42.080 to gain?

01:47:42.580 This country makes them rich.

01:47:43.820 I can't imagine another country would offer them the same possibilities.

01:47:47.660 I'll offer my thoughts, and then I'll let everyone go around and answer this question.

01:47:50.380 I think that you start from the assumption that politics are fundamentally rational.

01:47:57.900 And I don't think that they are fundamentally rational.

01:48:00.480 I think that they're driven fundamentally by the spiritual and that it is the nature of

01:48:06.020 man.

01:48:06.440 And we can argue about what the Pope said about man being fundamentally good or what...

01:48:13.600 And he was right.

01:48:14.380 Or what Luther said about man being...

01:48:16.400 Or Calvin about man being depraved.

01:48:18.060 I think they're both right.

01:48:19.700 As Bishop Barron pointed out today on X, by the way.

01:48:24.600 But at the end of the day, man in his sin tries to accumulate material wealth to himself.

01:48:31.640 He tries to accumulate power to himself.

01:48:33.520 He tries to advance his needs, his wants, his ego.

01:48:38.500 He tries to wheel and deal.

01:48:41.060 He tries to get laid.

01:48:42.540 I mean, you really can't imagine how much of human history has been driven just by some

01:48:46.860 guy in power trying to get laid.

01:48:48.380 Yeah, yeah.

01:48:49.020 I mean, so much of what happens in politics does not happen in a purely rational way.

01:48:54.460 People will vote against their interests.

01:48:56.940 Of course they will.

01:48:58.060 You can't believe how much happens out of ideology, which is things that people believe are true

01:49:02.340 that aren't.

01:49:03.380 And so they'll do something that harms them that they thought would help them.

01:49:07.020 All of this is always at play in any institution that involves human beings.

01:49:13.360 And so I just think you can't reduce our politics down to science.

01:49:18.400 It is like every other aspect of the human experience.

01:49:21.320 It's a projection of underlying spiritual truths, and people are kind of a spiritual train wreck.

01:49:27.780 Yeah, I would say it's a little bit like asking, what does someone gain from revenge?

01:49:34.200 Well, they gain revenge.

01:49:36.200 They gain it for its own sake.

01:49:37.620 Yeah, yeah.

01:49:38.160 And that's basically what's happening here.

01:49:40.380 You've got a lot of people that have told themselves a story where they are the victims,

01:49:46.140 and they have all these forces victimizing them, and they seek to destroy those forces

01:49:50.960 just to destroy them because they feel like it's the right thing to do.

01:49:56.620 And they have this instinct of destruction.

01:49:59.300 I don't think they've thought, to your point, I don't think they've thought much farther ahead

01:50:03.520 than that.

01:50:04.000 Like, what happens next?

01:50:05.040 What happens when you, and we talk about this all the time, you know, they tear down things.

01:50:09.460 They redefine things.

01:50:10.700 They don't really redefine.

01:50:11.560 They get rid of one definition, replace it with nothing, and so there is no, like, step

01:50:18.000 two.

01:50:18.320 It's just the step one of destruction, and that's it.

01:50:20.520 So I'll break it down into, I think there are two distinct groups, and I think that one

01:50:24.940 usually leads and then surrenders to the second.

01:50:27.420 So I think what you say about a certain group of people is totally true.

01:50:30.800 Those are the revolutionaries.

01:50:31.680 The revolutionaries don't care what comes next, and the great lie they say is there's going

01:50:35.320 to be utopia after they tear everything down, but all they really want to do is just

01:50:37.920 burn things because they hate the system in which they live, and they have no idea for

01:50:41.480 what comes next, but it's got to be better than this terrible thing that's victimizing

01:50:44.400 me.

01:50:44.820 I agree with you.

01:50:45.540 That's a revolutionary group.

01:50:46.800 Then you have the elites, and they're the ones who are the real mystery, right?

01:50:50.040 Those are the people like the Joe Bidens of the world who have sat high on the hog for

01:50:54.360 a very long time, or the idiots in Hollywood, or the people on Wall Street who support this

01:50:58.940 whole agenda.

01:50:59.700 What are they doing?

01:51:00.480 And I think there the answer is that they believe, falsely, as it turns out, that, like

01:51:06.000 elites do in nearly every society that ends up being transformed, that they can channel

01:51:09.720 the passion of the revolutionaries into a gradualistic change in which they get to retain

01:51:14.640 the levers of power, which is like the best of both worlds for them.

01:51:17.480 They get to retain the elite status.

01:51:19.000 They get to retain the money and the power and all these things.

01:51:21.380 All they have to do is harness the 1.21 gigawatts that is the college protesters, and they can

01:51:26.680 use that power in order to forward the mission of making the world a gradually better place.

01:51:32.500 And when you're in rooms with people like this, and I've been in a lot of rooms with people

01:51:34.480 like this, that is how they talk.

01:51:35.680 They talk about, not in revolutionary terms, but we together can make the world a better

01:51:39.600 place.

01:51:40.140 And there are people who are agitating on the outside.

01:51:41.440 The arc of history bends toward justice.

01:51:43.600 Right, exactly.

01:51:44.280 And I think that when they say stuff like that, what they fail to recognize is they have

01:51:49.120 no systemic immunity.

01:51:50.520 They have no immune system to the revolutionaries when confronted with them, which is why when

01:51:54.720 you look at the college campuses in 1968, 1969, or even today, and you're like, why are

01:51:58.880 these administrators just handing over the place to the revolutionaries?

01:52:01.280 The answer is they agree with the revolutionaries.

01:52:03.500 It's not that they're handing it over.

01:52:04.820 They are the revolutionaries.

01:52:06.200 They just don't have the balls or the willingness to give up what they have in terms of power

01:52:09.280 in order to just join the group.

01:52:11.260 And so when they're confronted with that reality, their own hypocrisy, they end up just surrendering

01:52:15.080 full scale to the revolutionaries.

01:52:17.340 I basically agree with Jeremy on this.

01:52:19.280 I think that the things are, the Pope was utterly wrong.

01:52:22.800 And the reason he was utterly wrong-

01:52:25.000 Here comes the Calvinism.

01:52:26.140 Here we go.

01:52:26.720 No, it has nothing to do with Calvinism.

01:52:28.440 It has nothing to do with Calvinism.

01:52:29.600 It's because he wasn't saying what all the slavish Catholics who want to prove him right

01:52:33.340 say he was saying.

01:52:34.400 He was talking about people's behaviors.

01:52:36.740 He was not talking about the creation being good.

01:52:39.220 He was saying that he said-

01:52:40.520 He said we were all sinners.

01:52:41.700 Two sentences before.

01:52:42.460 He said you have the occasional sinner and-

01:52:45.180 Afterward, but before he said we're all sinners.

01:52:46.520 But he said you have the occasional sinner and-

01:52:48.000 But the thing is-

01:52:48.820 This is the problem with this poem.

01:52:49.600 Everything ends up being a post-actual clarification.

01:52:51.180 It's Jesuitical-

01:52:52.900 This is the thing.

01:52:53.460 Coronas-

01:52:53.800 The thing that I saw in Hollywood is that people who think they are good usually have

01:52:59.680 not had the offer of sex, money, and power.

01:53:04.060 And sex, money, and power on the table, I would say about 85% of people will sell every

01:53:09.800 principle they have.

01:53:11.060 And so once you have the power, I think a lot of these people are just capturing the flow.

01:53:15.360 I think Joe Biden is a perfect example.

01:53:16.960 I mean, the guy's a weathervane, but he thinks he's capturing the flow.

01:53:19.760 The guys who are dangerous are guys like Obama.

01:53:22.760 I think Obama is actually, in some ways, has far more integrity than Joe Biden, because

01:53:27.580 he's a believer.

01:53:28.480 He believes that we're a bad country and that we're the problem, and that's why he wanted

01:53:32.700 to realign us with Iran.

01:53:34.000 Barack Obama is the least cynical-

01:53:36.100 Yes.

01:53:36.620 Evil president who did the most cynical thing to get reelected.

01:53:39.460 Yeah.

01:53:39.820 Yeah.

01:53:40.380 I agree.

01:53:41.040 You know, it pains me to say that I agree with everyone, even Drew spouting this Calvinist

01:53:44.940 nonsense.

01:53:45.200 But especially I agree with your point, Jeremy, that even bringing up the Pope, who my brief

01:53:52.720 defense of the Pope, which I'm obligated to do as a duly loyal, is it seems to me what

01:53:59.900 he's saying is, God doesn't make anything evil, so God makes man and the whole creation good,

01:54:04.240 but man abuses his free will and sins, and sin and death pervade the world.

01:54:07.020 And so now we end up in this spot where there's concupiscence, and we're all just going to sell

01:54:11.340 everything for sex and money and everything. But to know what the end game is, you have

01:54:18.120 to have some sense of the nature and the final end of man. And so, you know, I have

01:54:23.580 a sense of it. I think we all have basically roughly the same sense of it, you know, pretty

01:54:27.140 close at least. And for a lot of people, though, and especially for our liberal friends, they

01:54:31.560 have a very different sense. They deny original sin, and they deny heaven and hell. So they're

01:54:37.060 actually, they disagree with us on both the nature and the end.

01:54:40.340 Same problem, where we're going.

01:54:41.240 Exactly.

01:54:42.100 So then what's the end game?

01:54:42.900 Other than that, we're all on the same page.

01:54:43.900 Right now, people are inherently good, and the kingdom of heaven can be made here on earth

01:54:47.340 by my hands.

01:54:47.960 Yes.

01:54:48.020 Yep.

01:54:49.560 Yeah, the most fundamental conservative belief is the belief that original sin is original

01:54:58.120 sin, and that only God can redeem what's fallen. Like, that really is the heart of the

01:55:05.120 whole thing. And the left, every ism of the left is an attempt to redefine what is original

01:55:10.900 sin, even libertarianism. And I have a lot of libertarian, lowercase l, libertarian tendencies

01:55:15.760 in my theology and in my politics. But libertarianism just says that original sin is coercion.

01:55:22.500 Yeah.

01:55:22.660 Just like socialism says that the original sin is, or communism, it's class, and socialism,

01:55:29.300 it's the means of production, et cetera.

01:55:30.880 Yeah.

01:55:31.100 Like, they've all just come up with a, if this hadn't happened, everything would be good.

01:55:34.940 Right, yes.

01:55:35.140 And if we can overcome that, everything will be good. And the view of the men at this table,

01:55:41.920 with very important and notable theological distinctions between Catholic, Protestant,

01:55:48.020 and Orthodox Jewish perspectives, I mean, there are places where we wildly disagree. But at a sort

01:55:53.060 of fundamental level, we say, no, original sin is the thing that actually happened in the Garden

01:55:56.380 of Eden, and the thing that man and his free will perpetuates. And there is no one doing that by

01:56:03.680 man. No thing that we accomplish as a society will change fundamentally what human beings are.

01:56:10.480 And that ultimate redemption is in the hands of God. And for the Christian, it's accessed

01:56:14.560 by way of the cross of Christ. And for the Catholic, it's got something to do with the cross of Christ.

01:56:22.220 It used to have something to do with it.

01:56:23.840 It used to have something to do with the cross of Christ. But now, no. The thing that Protestant

01:56:29.800 and Catholic agree, of course, is that the redemption of man is not in the hands, it's not

01:56:34.820 man's problem to solve. It's man's, it's man's problem.

01:56:39.320 Yeah.

01:56:39.880 At some point, we're going to have to do a seminar on, like, just the people with the religious

01:56:43.480 differences on, like, the first couple of chapters of Genesis. Because it really is fascinating.

01:56:47.420 Like, the Jewish take is pretty different on some of this stuff. It ends up in much the same place.

01:56:51.020 Well, I was careful to be inclusive of you when I said that man perpetuates that sin

01:56:55.800 through his free will choices. I understand that we don't agree on the forward transmission

01:57:02.940 of original sin.

01:57:03.580 No, no. Actually, I was going to argue with the original sin part. Meaning there's widespread

01:57:08.160 sort of dissension inside Orthodox Jewish texts about whether human beings were made good in the

01:57:15.480 Garden of Eden and then brought sin about through the sin. Or whether human beings were always

01:57:21.180 conflicted. And then they brought sin about because, and they didn't bring sin about. They

01:57:25.180 sinned by eating from the tree because what that sin was was supplanting their own conception of what

01:57:30.560 the world should be for what God's conception of what the world should be.

01:57:32.680 Oh, that's my view.

01:57:33.540 Right.

01:57:33.680 I mean, so, yeah, I think that...

01:57:35.320 That's not...

01:57:36.480 No, I think the important thing is that when you put us all together, our basic beliefs,

01:57:41.320 we're right. I mean, we are provably right about the nature of mankind.

01:57:46.040 Yes, people are really... People can be really, really bad.

01:57:48.640 Yeah, that's...

01:57:49.100 And this notion that people are naturally wonderful and tend toward the good.

01:57:52.120 Yeah.

01:57:52.820 Like, in their actions. That's false.

01:57:55.320 Like, they... Call it concupiscence. Call it the Yetzir Hara in Judaism. Call it sinful nature

01:58:03.220 of man in Cal... Whatever you call it.

01:58:04.900 Right.

01:58:05.180 Human beings take a room full of people and they are not going to naturally do the good thing

01:58:10.240 because of all of... Whatever you call it.

01:58:11.700 And no curing any... One particular flaw of man will lead to a utopia.

01:58:15.540 No system will.

01:58:16.560 No system will.

01:58:17.440 I will close with this thought for you, though, which is that in my personal view of the garden,

01:58:21.580 it's not that man was sinful, per se, or virtuous, per se, based on his actions or choices or

01:58:29.060 predilections from the moment of creation. It's that righteousness by God was defined and

01:58:36.300 declared by himself. He made it. He made man just exactly how man was. Naked,

01:58:40.240 and dumb, and tripping over rocks in the garden, and lonely, and prone to who knows what kind

01:58:45.080 of bad behaviors if it had all played out. That wasn't the definition of what was good

01:58:48.780 to God. God defined his creation as good based on his own declaration. And the temptation of man

01:58:54.280 was the temptation to judge whether or not God was right. It was to supplant God as the moral

01:59:00.060 authority, as the judge. And so I don't believe that man got worse when he ate. It's not that I think

01:59:04.920 his behavior got worse. It's that I think he, the deal that he made with the devil, in some ways the

01:59:10.720 devil, the devil was lying with truth. He did suddenly see his nakedness. He did suddenly see

01:59:16.060 his failure to measure up to God. Whereas before that, the question of whether he measured up to

01:59:20.180 God wasn't even on the table. Which is why you like this. He was, God made him and said he was good,

01:59:23.500 and that was good enough. So I should read the Bible in the original Hebrew. The word for cleverness

01:59:26.660 and the word for nakedness are the same word. It's a, it's a room. The same exact word in Hebrew.

01:59:32.160 Yeah. At any rate, we could probably fix it if we just vote for the right guy. Thank you guys for

01:59:36.560 hanging out with us here at Daily Wire backstage. We're going to do another one eventually. And

01:59:40.560 please head on over to amazon.com, buy your second gen Jeremy's Razors. We'd really appreciate it.

01:59:46.080 Support all of the sponsors from today's show, Helix Sleep and Birch Gold. And go over and become a

01:59:53.720 subscriber if you're not one now. If you are, thank you again. We'll see you guys next time.

01:59:56.660 Bye.

The Michael Knowles Show - May 22, 2024

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