The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： The Commies Are At It Again

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00:00:37.920 Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage,

00:00:40.740 the commies are at it again, is right around the corner. Don't miss me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew

00:00:44.660 Klavan, Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we discuss everything

00:00:49.280 from Ben's new book and Simone Biles' walk of shame to the dread Delta variant, the Delta,

00:00:56.640 Phi Beta, Lambda Gamma Kappa, SIGCHI. Take a listen.

00:01:05.300 Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage. The commies are at it again. I'm Jeremy Boring,

00:01:10.200 known round here. Nobody actually knows me as the God King, but I say it every time with

00:01:14.260 persistence. We're glad you turned in. Will protesters in Cuba have to burn the American flag

00:01:19.260 rather than march with it if they want to get any mainstream media coverage? Will Joe Biden continue

00:01:23.280 to snap at female reporters until they let him sniff their hair? Does the White House teaming up with

00:01:27.820 Facebook on a censorship campaign against misinformation make anyone else feel like

00:01:31.880 we're living in the authoritarian moment?

00:01:36.020 You know, guys, I'm just not feeling it.

00:01:40.260 What are you talking about?

00:01:40.920 I mean, physically I feel fine, but emotionally I'm just, it's not fun for me anymore, you know,

00:01:47.800 and I'm just not in the right headspace, and so I think I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, I gotta take

00:01:51.480 some time for me.

00:01:52.120 Keep your seat, buddy. You have an obligation to your team. You have an obligation to your country.

00:01:56.460 But, but I, I am still a winner in my own heart, right?

00:01:59.400 Ugh.

00:02:00.260 Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Stand up for your digital rights. Take action at

00:02:22.440 expressvpn.com slash backstage. Yes, they actually pay us to do this show. Joining me to discuss all

00:02:29.140 the news and more is the Ben Shapiro, the Candace Owens, the Matt Walsh, the Michael Knowles,

00:02:33.920 and Andrew Klavan, also guest starring. Mask mandates are back on the table as the COVID

00:02:38.840 Delta variant rears its ugly head and the CDC reissues new guidance. While some state leaders

00:02:43.720 are holding their ground, others are forcing their citizens to adhere to government authority

00:02:47.760 at the expense of personal freedom. Ben Shapiro, of course, predicted all of this in his latest book,

00:02:52.500 The Authoritarian Moment, which hit bookshelves yesterday and is already trending third under

00:02:57.100 Amazon's list of bestsellers. Get your copy now anywhere books are sold, or you can pick up a

00:03:01.540 signed copy for just $30 at dailywired.com slash Ben. On tonight's Backstage, Ben's going to,

00:03:08.140 I have to, this is longer than any ad I've ever read for any paying customer, but it's because we

00:03:13.740 love Ben. I love, just because I love him. Keep reading it. Yeah. Ben's going to offer,

00:03:18.060 Ben's going to offer some insight into this very unique moment in American history and detail some of the

00:03:25.540 examples he writes about in The Authoritarian Moment. As usual, you can watch this live on

00:03:29.920 social media or on our website, but we want to announce that you can now enter to win the ultimate

00:03:34.300 backstage experience where you and a friend can come lounge with us here at Daily Wire HQ,

00:03:39.500 have some good conversation. You can even spark up a cigar if Michael's feeling generous and get

00:03:44.460 signed copies of Ben's newest book. How? You go to dailywire.com slash backstage, use code backstage.

00:03:49.820 You'll get 25% off your new membership. When you do, you'll automatically be entered to win

00:03:54.780 our VIP experience, which includes two tickets plus travel to see an episode of Backstage Live,

00:03:59.980 a meet and greet with me and the other backstage hosts, signed copies of Ben's book, and a tour of

00:04:04.480 Daily Wire studios and offices right here in Nashville. Current Daily Wire members, you can get

00:04:09.320 your questions into the chat box right now for our Q&A later on tonight. Wow. Was that the whole show?

00:04:16.660 Are we done? Yeah. The title, God King, is just an honorific they give you if you make it through

00:04:22.080 all the copy on the top of the book. Really, anyone can be a God King. Michael, I have to say,

00:04:26.260 that was one of the bravest things I've ever seen in my life. Thank you very much for recognizing my

00:04:29.880 courage and that I need to take care of myself. It's just the heroism, the authenticity. Yes.

00:04:34.740 I was blown away by it. Kinzo levels of authenticity. Yeah. Of course, we should talk about

00:04:40.700 this story of Simone Biles, actually one of the great American athletes, one of the great gymnasts of

00:04:44.680 all time, perhaps the greatest gymnast of all time, walking off of her team challenge at the Olympics

00:04:49.660 because she had the sads. And what are we, what are we to make of a culture in which such a thing

00:04:55.920 is possible, Matt? I think it's important for everyone to understand here. And I think I could

00:05:01.380 speak for most people in the room, at least myself. I wouldn't care. I'll just speak for myself. I

00:05:05.920 wouldn't, if she just walked off and quit and then apologized afterwards and said, hey, you know,

00:05:10.800 I really just felt like I couldn't do it. And then everyone reacted with appropriate disappointment

00:05:14.440 and we all said, oh, that's too bad. Then I wouldn't be talking about it at all. I wouldn't

00:05:17.940 care. I would just say, well, yeah, people quit. I understand why people quit. It's relatable. It's

00:05:21.920 understandable. We all quit things when they're hard. The problem is when the media tells us that

00:05:26.600 we have to celebrate this thing. Well, now we take cowardice and I'm not saying that she's nothing

00:05:31.800 but a coward, but this was a cowardly act. It was a difficult thing. She didn't want to do and she

00:05:36.200 decided not to do it. That's, that's, you know, that, that's something we've all, we've all done

00:05:40.700 that before. When you tell us we have to celebrate that. I almost didn't come on the show tonight.

00:05:44.700 When you tell us that that is now, I think the New Yorker called that or the New York Times called

00:05:48.260 that radical courage. That's when it becomes absurd. And there's also a, there's also a double

00:05:53.580 standard here too, because we know, you know, you cannot imagine Tom Brady in the middle of the

00:05:58.960 playoffs, third quarter, they're down by a couple of scores and he walks off the field,

00:06:02.860 goes to the sideline and says to the coach and I, I'm just not in the right space.

00:06:06.120 Right now. I need, I need to sit and collect my thoughts. It would never happen. And if it did

00:06:09.880 happen, um, I don't think there'd be anyone celebrating his courage for doing it. Did you

00:06:13.480 see what, what her teammates said? So she came out and cause one of the arguments was, well,

00:06:18.780 Simone Biles, a woman who I had never heard of until last night, by the way, that's how little

00:06:22.620 I guess I just, I don't care about the Olympics kind of to your point. I wouldn't be talking about

00:06:27.660 it except for this reaction. And they said, well, Simone Biles let her teammates down. And then

00:06:33.460 the teammate came out and said, this is wonderful. We support her. We don't owe you a gold medal.

00:06:39.020 This is just about us. And so it's true that the athletes don't owe us a gold medal, but they do

00:06:46.820 owe us trying. They do owe us competing because it's not actually about Simone Biles. I mean, she's a,

00:06:52.840 I take it to be, she's a wonderful athlete. It is somewhat about the team, but it's really about

00:06:57.700 the country. We sent them to go represent us and go try to win some medals. And so there is a sense

00:07:04.220 of duty, I think, or there used to be. I think that the big question, there's a sort of preliminary

00:07:09.100 question and there's the secondary question. The preliminary question is why she actually

00:07:12.440 walked off. So if she actually walked off because she was suffering from what they're now calling

00:07:15.800 aerial disorientation, which apparently is a thing where you get up in the air and you don't know

00:07:19.760 where you are and it can be really dangerous. Like if you, if you see what she does, I mean,

00:07:23.000 if you actually seen her performance, unbelievable. Michael hasn't, but I think everyone else on

00:07:27.340 earth literally. It's just, I mean, it's incredible what you, what the woman's capable of doing. And

00:07:31.680 she's been the best gymnast on earth for the last eight years. If she was actually in a place where

00:07:36.200 mentally she had lost her ability to orient her body. And so she could really hurt herself. And so

00:07:40.360 she said, I'm not going to do this. That is understandable, but it's still not heroic. And this

00:07:44.460 is the part that that gets to the secondary question. So putting aside whether she's wrong or cowardly,

00:07:49.480 like that depends on what she actually, the reason why she actually walked off. They did,

00:07:52.540 what is, they worked their way to this aerial disorientation argument. That, that isn't the

00:07:57.180 actual, that's not what was being said at the time. It's not what she said. Right. Well, she,

00:08:01.020 right. She explained why she walked off. We're all trying to interpret what was the real reason

00:08:05.300 she actually said it. She said that she said, she said she wasn't having fun. She said she was,

00:08:10.180 she was under a lot of pressure. She wanted to do it for herself, not anybody else. Uh, yeah,

00:08:14.440 those are the reasons she gave. That's fair enough. But the, the, the real bigger question is the one

00:08:18.520 that you're asking, which is why as a culture, cause I care less about her as an individual and why she did what

00:08:22.420 she did. Why as a culture, there were multiple op-eds, one in the times, one in the Washington

00:08:26.520 post talking about how we have to redefine victory to include not participating. And the, and what

00:08:33.640 makes the hero, the hero of any story is overcoming the obstacle, not sitting down, right? Like Michael

00:08:38.880 Jordan played famously a game in the playoffs where he had the flu, right? And he plays this

00:08:42.300 unbelievable game. He scores over 40 points. And this is known as the flu game, right? And it was one

00:08:46.800 of Michael Jordan's kind of storied moments in his career. If he had sat down and said, listen,

00:08:50.080 I have the flu tonight. I can't play. Nobody would have been like, wow, that's terrible.

00:08:52.880 What a terrible person. He didn't play through the flu, but what made him the hero is that he

00:08:57.040 played through the flu, right? Is that he played while he was sick. And, and the move from, I did

00:09:02.000 what I was supposed to do for my teammates despite the obstacle is the heroism to I've, I've honored my

00:09:07.640 own authentic feelings of what I ought to do. That is a society wide problem, right? And that's not

00:09:12.800 relegated to sports. We have decided as a culture that we care more about you honoring your own

00:09:17.080 authenticity than we care about you fulfilling your obligations to others.

00:09:20.240 It's the purpose of what these people do. After all, all they're doing is like flipping through

00:09:23.520 the air. And the reason you do that is to demonstrate excellence and the debt to demonstrate

00:09:27.660 excellence. You have to overcome the obstacles. And I don't want to pick on her. I'm with you on

00:09:31.900 this. I don't want to pick on her. Maybe she felt she was in danger. Maybe she felt she couldn't

00:09:35.600 pull it off. There's no, it's not exactly a shame to say, I cannot do this. It is a shame to hold

00:09:42.860 that up to people as heroism. In the same way to send out a soccer team that kneels,

00:09:47.240 that's the American soccer team that kneels.

00:09:50.180 Well, honestly, I was happy that they lost it this week.

00:09:51.900 Well, me too. I felt like a bunch of Swedish blondes beat these purple headed, you know.

00:09:57.420 Donald Trump's never, Donald Trump's never said anything truer than America is glad that

00:10:02.420 they lost. Of course we're glad that they lost because, because they don't represent us.

00:10:08.180 Why would I be happy that they win when they are choosing not to represent me?

00:10:11.980 There's a reason they're there. There's a reason to honor America.

00:10:14.700 The entire argument that we can have people at the Olympics who kneel or don't pay attention

00:10:19.340 to the anthem, it's the equivalent of the Yankees signing somebody for $100 million and

00:10:23.240 they go out on the field and like, you know what? I hate the Yankees. I'm just going to

00:10:25.460 rip the stripes right off my shoulder. Who in their right mind, the owner wouldn't allow that to

00:10:29.060 happen. I'm so confused as to why we as a country who sponsored these athletes to go to the

00:10:32.800 Olympics are supposed to be okay and celebratory.

00:10:35.020 I also find like this is just, it's kind of almost circular. We started at, I guess,

00:10:38.060 the women's movement being like, we really just need to have women into these spaces.

00:10:41.300 Men have sports. We need to have a women's sports team. Men have a, you know, gymnast team. We need

00:10:45.400 to have women gymnastics team. We can do what men can do. And then it just seems to be over and over

00:10:49.780 again. It's the women that are throwing down the towel and saying, this is too much pressure. I

00:10:53.060 can't do this. You've got like Naomi Osaka, you've got Simone Biles walking away. I just haven't seen a

00:10:58.220 guy do this and say, I just can't do this because I'm under emotional pressure. So, you know,

00:11:02.280 this might be an argument for trans women in the Olympics. I don't know.

00:11:05.340 Well, did you see actually on that point, and it kind of ties in with the excellence point that you

00:11:10.020 made, Drew, the head of the Olympics broadcasting agency said this year, unlike years in the past,

00:11:15.920 we are not going to focus the camera angles on the women's bodies because that's wrong. We

00:11:20.820 shouldn't be looking at the women's bodies. And I thought, you know, these are the most beautiful,

00:11:26.660 exquisitely sculpted people, the men and the women for that matter, like on earth,

00:11:30.480 we send them all there. Like 0% body fat. 0% body fat. This goes back to ancient Greece,

00:11:34.720 that these people are physical specimens. And we're not allowed to marvel at that anymore.

00:11:39.880 Actually, that level of excellence. I actually want to pick up on this idea of marveling,

00:11:42.940 because I think that the entire, I said this about the Victoria's Secret models when they

00:11:48.520 removed the angels from the catalog and everyone was like, well, this is good because these

00:11:52.320 incredibly physically fit, you know, genetically unbelievable specimens of humanity shouldn't be

00:11:58.640 models. And I thought, well, no, that's what a model is. A model, when we call someone a model,

00:12:03.780 it's not the same. The word doesn't mean the same thing as when we say that you have a model train.

00:12:07.820 A model train is a miniature replica of something much larger. When we use the word model for someone

00:12:14.260 who is a fashion model, we're actually saying that they are the ideal form.

00:12:18.580 It's aspirational.

00:12:19.200 It's aspirational. And athletes are aspirational. We watch athletes because we want, not because

00:12:24.080 I can't do what they do. It's the people on Twitter like, how dare you say that she did the

00:12:28.160 wrong thing. You could never do half of what she does. Of course I can't do half of what she does.

00:12:32.820 The reason that we send people up to do these things and to represent our country by doing them

00:12:36.600 is because we aspire to. It's not that I want to be Tom Brady. I don't care about football enough to

00:12:43.220 be Tom Brady. I don't have any of the innate capabilities of Tom Brady. I don't have the

00:12:46.740 discipline of Tom Brady. But in some way, when I engage with the sport, Tom Brady represents an

00:12:52.120 idealized form of what humans can achieve. And that is part, that's part of his job.

00:12:57.360 They do what they do so that we can.

00:12:59.720 And that kind of connects with what Ben is saying. So saying it's actually a larger discussion about

00:13:03.120 what we're doing in society right now, right? So now they're trying to edit everybody and say,

00:13:05.980 actually, we shouldn't aspire towards victory. We should aspire towards walking away and just

00:13:10.560 throwing the towel in. That's now something that we should be, you know, should be aspirational

00:13:13.920 in society. And then you take a look at what's going on at the same time in the school system.

00:13:17.420 You know, I talked about it on my show, but, you know, Bill Gates is funding an initiative called

00:13:21.280 Equitable Math, right? Because they've determined that getting the right answer in math is racist,

00:13:25.400 right? I'm not kidding. It's a form of white supremacy to ask kids to get the right answer

00:13:29.180 in math. I was never racist in math class either. But, you know, so they said instead, what we need

00:13:35.620 to do in the classroom is we need to have children that get the correct amount of points, even though

00:13:40.900 their answer is wrong because they tried. And this is really the same thing that's happening here.

00:13:45.000 You're literally just saying it's no longer enough to be good or to be great, doing things

00:13:49.680 absolutely wrong, walking away. That's now. You don't even have to try. Yeah, you don't have to

00:13:54.080 try. There's something so self-serving about this because, yeah, if we criticize Simone Biles,

00:14:00.000 suddenly we're the bad guys. But really, and we're being selfish or something because we want her to

00:14:05.480 put her body at risk. No, no, we, as you say, this is aspirational. These are great people and we want

00:14:12.120 to see them do great things. For them to quit in the middle is disappointing. But the people who say,

00:14:16.200 oh, no, quitting is actually courageous because you're living your truth. And as long as you're,

00:14:21.240 you know, maintaining your own psychological health, it's actually a courageous thing to do.

00:14:24.940 That's just another way of them saying, well, I'm courageous also, because anyone can do that.

00:14:29.040 I mean, anyone, anyone cannot participate. Exactly. It's bravery is rare. That's why we look up to it.

00:14:35.120 When something is, it is very, very difficult to be an Olympic gymnast. I fully understand it.

00:14:39.660 And the pressure that Simone Biles is under as the greatest, and everyone is expecting

00:14:43.080 greatness from you all the time, to even try to live up to that is incredibly difficult. And

00:14:48.660 most people can't do it. That's why we admire it. But saying that this is difficult, I don't want

00:14:52.820 to do it. Anyone can do that. And so if that's courageous, if I'm saying that's courageous,

00:14:57.260 what I'm saying is, well, I get to be courageous too. It's also the misapplication of compassion,

00:15:01.060 which I feel is a really damaging thing for the society as a whole. Of course, I feel compassion

00:15:05.440 for, I feel compassion for a guy who feels like he's a woman inside. I'm compassionate for the

00:15:10.320 suffering that they feel. But that doesn't make him a woman. And it doesn't mean that this is a

00:15:14.420 heroic act. You know, you can actually feel somebody else's pain without trying to erase

00:15:20.020 that pain. I actually do object to our friend Charlie Kirk. And listen, obviously, we all admire

00:15:28.220 and are friendly with Charlie. I think that he went overboard when he said something along the lines

00:15:32.840 of that she's a sociopath for what she did. She's not a sociopath for what she did. She's

00:15:38.120 narcissistic, though, not for what she did, but because of her justification of what she did.

00:15:43.520 That is a narcissistic act. Well, yeah. And I want to get to talking about narcissism because

00:15:46.620 it's funny because they started to sort of thread Naomi Osaka. At the same time, they were trending

00:15:50.520 Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, is that correct? Yes. And Meghan Markle. And they said, this year,

00:15:57.780 black women are saying they've had enough. And again, talking about the irony here, the same

00:16:01.480 argument with the feminist. Right. So it's like you have the black group of black people that

00:16:05.200 believe we're just not allowed into these spaces. Right. There's just institutional racism everywhere.

00:16:10.020 And then when you get into these spaces, you say, I quit. Right. So it's just like I just don't

00:16:13.640 understand where this goalpost is going. Right. So Meghan Markle, they've been historically racist.

00:16:18.760 You marry into the family. I quit. Right. Simone Biles. Oh, it's historical racism. There's no black.

00:16:22.660 You know, I quit. It's like. So what is what what is the actual goal? Is I just I don't know where

00:16:27.200 we're going. And maybe that is the point. It's just chaos. Well, it's this radical kind of

00:16:31.020 subjectivism. Right. Because it's this is actually what ties in the math and the physical bodies and

00:16:35.240 everything. It's this full on assault on standards where when the friend who's on the Olympic team

00:16:40.000 says, well, we're winners in our hearts, I think, well, that's great. But we want you to be winners

00:16:44.320 in reality. My TV prefer. You know, if if you now say that there is a standard of physical excellence

00:16:51.060 or right or wrong or true or false or good or bad, then math is racist and Victoria's Secret is racist.

00:16:56.180 Now you're seeing just this total inversion where that which is sort of false and wrong and ugly,

00:17:00.440 that's exalted as the highest. Is that an actual quote? Winners in our heart. Did someone say

00:17:04.100 that? Yeah. Yeah. This member of the Olympic team. Yeah. She tweeted it out. Yeah. I think

00:17:08.000 earlier earlier this week on on my podcast, I was talking about how one that we have an empathy

00:17:13.900 crisis in this country, but the crisis isn't lack of empathy. It's that we have two very different

00:17:17.340 versions of what empathy constitutes. On the one hand, you have people generally on the right who

00:17:21.800 believe that what empathy is understanding that other people are individual human beings with the

00:17:25.340 capacity to reason and come to conclusions. And so if they come to a conclusion that is different

00:17:29.280 from your own, you still have to respect the fact they came to a conclusion different from

00:17:32.940 your own. But as a reasonable person, you can assess whether that conclusion is right

00:17:37.380 or wrong and you can hold them to particular standards. So you understand that the other

00:17:40.600 person is a person, but they're still held to that particular standard. It's not unempathetic

00:17:44.860 to hold that person to the standard. It's actually more empathetic because you expect them to be a

00:17:47.580 rational human being. And then there's the standard of the left, which is that empathy means

00:17:51.300 that whatever is the subjective feeling that somebody has inside, all of society is supposed to

00:17:55.140 conform to that. All of policy is supposed to conform to that. And that creates a really

00:17:58.760 asymmetrical politics. Because if you're on the left and you conflate policy with empathy,

00:18:04.100 then what this means is that if you oppose my policy, you are non-empathetic by definition.

00:18:07.480 You're a bad person by definition. Whereas people on the right, we understand that policy is completely

00:18:12.600 not connected with empathy. It has nothing to do with empathy in the sense that the left is talking

00:18:17.380 about it. And so you could disagree with me on policy and still be an empathetic person. The left just

00:18:21.360 doesn't accept that. I think that this goes to something. You're saying it in a sort of glib, funny

00:18:24.700 way, but there is a feminine component to this, that we live in a society now that has taken

00:18:29.600 everything feminine, good and bad, and elevated it to virtue. And everything that's masculine, good

00:18:35.480 and bad, and denigrated it to sin. And so the effect of this is that you have negative femininity

00:18:42.040 being treated good and positive masculinity being treated as bad. I'm not saying that a woman's

00:18:49.260 rights should be limited in any way. I'm saying something descriptive here, not proscriptive

00:18:53.840 to borrow from Ben. It is a simple fact that for the vast majority of human history, women have been

00:18:59.640 primarily concerned with building the home. And building the home requires huge amounts of empathy

00:19:05.540 because you're working with the most flawed people, children, and you're helping to rear them

00:19:10.560 and make adults out of them. Men, historically, have been not primarily concerned with building the

00:19:16.580 home. They've been concerned with building the home for the home, which is the society.

00:19:20.580 And for that reason, in societies, we see the best and worst of masculine virtue. Horrible

00:19:27.140 masculinity at its worst is very barbarian. You see this in pre-civilizational societies.

00:19:35.340 You see it in certain third world societies or Middle Eastern societies. But there are positive

00:19:40.200 aspects of masculinity, which were cultivated largely in Western society, imperfectly, but over time,

00:19:46.120 where you have concepts like justice, not social justice, but justice. Justice is not empathetic.

00:19:52.400 You don't want to raise your kids justice first. You have to raise your kids empathy first,

00:19:57.940 but you have to order your society justice first. And we're at this place now where instead of having

00:20:03.920 a natural tension between those two things, we've just completely eliminated one of them as evil.

00:20:08.960 And so it is women primarily.

00:20:10.680 It's an acknowledgment. Yeah, it's an acknowledgment of our biological predispositions. And that's the

00:20:14.160 irony. And that's why I laugh at this stuff, because every time you see it, it's a woman.

00:20:17.420 It is Naomi Osaka. It is Simone Biles. And you look at them and you just go, you are acknowledging

00:20:21.720 that women are not the same under pressure as men. And it's funny, but it is what it is. I laugh at it

00:20:28.300 and I say, OK, you know, I'm happy. You want to go home? I don't mind. I'm with you. I think it's

00:20:32.440 totally fine, acceptable. They are under a lot of pressure. There's no requirement for them to have to

00:20:37.200 perform. But I do have, I think it's very annoying when afterwards they come to us and it's like,

00:20:42.320 well, this person is a hero anyways. I won in our, we won in our hearts, said no male team ever.

00:20:48.360 You know, this also goes back to what Michael was saying about these bodies. I would actually go

00:20:54.840 further than what you're saying, because I think the female body is at the center of all human

00:21:00.020 relationship. I mean, the attraction to the female body. Like everybody, I only watch women's sports

00:21:05.160 for the skimpy outfits. I believe, I believe, I mean, like everyone on earth, right? I believe,

00:21:10.060 I believe they should be able to choose not to wear those skimpy outfits while they're doing the

00:21:13.540 thing that I won't be watching. But still, I think that the truth is the truth. And this attraction

00:21:20.180 that we feel to women's bodies is part of our humanity. We're embodied creatures. We're here to

00:21:24.980 reproduce. I actually said this on Twitter this week. Someone was angry about some man

00:21:30.540 objectifying some woman. And I said, you know, the fact that men find women attractive

00:21:36.160 is not bad. It's not a thing. The promulgation of our entire species depends on men finding women

00:21:43.400 attractive. To your point, that is baked in to who we are biologically. I'm not suggesting that we

00:21:49.700 are only the sum of our biology. I'm not suggesting that every masculine trait is positive, nor am I

00:21:55.280 suggesting every feminine trait is negative. But I am saying that unless we can have a conversation

00:21:59.620 about how you balance those things in a modern world, you're only going to end up with the

00:22:03.820 worst things presenting. And ultimately, it's going to be negative masculinity that prevails

00:22:09.940 because as the society, as good men are weakened, bad men are going to fill that vacuum.

00:22:16.560 I watch the WNBA because I want to see if one of them can dunk for the first time.

00:22:21.940 That's enough. That's enough. I have to do an ad and there's no way to segue.

00:22:26.380 So instead, I'm just going to go right into it. How do you choose which internet service

00:22:31.920 provider you use? The sad thing is most of us have very little choice because ISPs operate

00:22:36.500 basically as monopolies in the regions they serve. And then they use that monopoly power

00:22:40.220 the way everyone uses every monopoly power across history to take advantage of customers.

00:22:44.980 Many ISPs log your internet activity and sell that data to other big tech companies or advertisers.

00:22:50.720 To prevent ISPs from seeing my internet activity, I protect all of my devices with ExpressVPN.

00:22:55.200 So you're asking, what is ExpressVPN? Because you live under a rock and have never listened

00:22:59.540 to a Daily Wire show. It's simple. It's an app that you put on your computer or smartphone

00:23:03.700 that encrypts all of your network data and tunnels it through a secure VPN server so that

00:23:08.660 your ISP can't see any of your activity. I want you to think about that for a minute.

00:23:13.400 How much of your life is on the internet? Sadly, the list of people you've messaged or sites

00:23:18.200 you've visited or videos that you've watched, Michael, get tracked by tech giants who can sell

00:23:23.180 that information for a profit. Your data, their profit. That's why you have to use a VPN. You

00:23:29.740 particularly need to use a VPN when you're on any kind of public network. Anytime I travel,

00:23:34.500 anytime I'm on an airplane, other people on that plane are capable of gaining access to your data.

00:23:39.780 So stop handing over your personal data to ISPs and strangers and other tech giants who mind your

00:23:45.020 activity and sell off your information. Protect yourself with the VPN I trust to keep me private

00:23:50.100 online. ExpressVPN.com slash backstage. That's Express, E-X-P-R-E-S-S, VPN.com slash backstage.

00:23:59.240 You'll get three extra months for free. Go to ExpressVPN.com slash backstage right now to learn

00:24:04.920 more. Matt, you never get to go before I go into an ad read ever again.

00:24:12.660 So I want to talk a little bit about the craziness happening in the country right now around COVID.

00:24:17.920 You know, one of the things I've tried to discipline myself about lately is not to blame

00:24:22.420 any of the effects of the lockdowns on COVID. You find yourself doing it all the time. You'll say,

00:24:27.100 well, unemployment is at record levels because of COVID. Unemployment is not at record levels

00:24:31.880 because of COVID. Unemployment is at record levels because of the unbelievable global overreaction

00:24:37.280 of the elite and people in power to the pandemic. I'm not saying there's not a pandemic. I'm not saying

00:24:42.880 that the pandemic hasn't been deadly. I'm not saying that no action should have taken place.

00:24:46.180 In regard to the pandemic, I'm saying the greatest act of mass hysteria and overreach

00:24:50.800 by governments on a global scale in human history is what we've just lived through.

00:24:55.160 And now, as we're coming out the other side, as the vaccines have been widely dispersed,

00:25:00.640 certainly dispersed enough such that everyone in this country who wants a vaccine has had

00:25:06.500 the opportunity to have the vaccine. At this very moment, our federal government and certain

00:25:11.160 state and local governments are considering forcing you to mask again so that you can protect

00:25:15.740 people who choose not to get the vaccine, which is their God-given right. So some of them are

00:25:22.080 requiring you now to get vaccinated. The Veterans Affairs Office today announced that they're going

00:25:27.280 to require vaccinations from federal workers, which, you know, if it were happening in reverse,

00:25:32.300 you would say that it was a backhanded attempt to drive the opposition party out of what few

00:25:36.380 positions they have left in the federal government. And we're supposed to take all of that lying down.

00:25:41.120 In fact, social media has an entire, basically, list of things that we can and cannot say on this show

00:25:48.060 if we don't want to lose our ability to speak on social media in the future. And you may say,

00:25:52.480 we'll just say it anyway, but we can't sacrifice our voice on this and other important issues just

00:25:57.880 to be reckless and cavalier about the things that we say. But you should know, we can't raise any

00:26:02.400 question as to whether or not vaccines, the efficacy of vaccines, you can't raise any questions about

00:26:06.600 the efficacy of masks. You can't raise any questions about the danger, the threat of COVID

00:26:13.100 to small children unless you are incredibly precise and say that COVID does not appear to have

00:26:20.220 a high fatality rate among children under 12. Like, even that, they're probably going to flag us and

00:26:26.020 then decide it was okay. Well, he was very technically correct. And all of this goes to the central

00:26:30.320 question. Is it the right of governments to combat misinformation simply because they have

00:26:37.100 determined that that misinformation is creating some sort of nuisance to public safety or public health?

00:26:44.360 I think you're being way too kind that that's why they're doing it. The Biden administration has

00:26:49.120 made it very clear that the people they blame for misinformation are conservatives and Fox News.

00:26:55.100 And the thing is, that's literally untrue. The reason conservatives are not listening to the

00:26:59.860 government and listening to the media about the vaccinations is because the media has lied about

00:27:03.700 them for the past 10 years. It has told them Donald Trump was a Russian spy. It's told them

00:27:08.960 Brett Kavanaugh was a racist. And then, oh, by the way, you should do this. And people think like,

00:27:13.800 why should we trust them? I just want to add on, yeah, I want to point out that even that is a lie

00:27:19.100 because the least people that are likely to get the vaccines are black Americans. So even the lie

00:27:22.740 that it's the conservatives aren't getting the vaccines. But it's black Americans in red states.

00:27:26.820 Black Americans. And also blue Americans in blue cities. OK, 40 percent of all New York City

00:27:33.880 teachers are not vaccinated. Right. The CDC.

00:27:36.520 L.A. County. L.A. County. L.A. County. Last I checked, L.A. County, a minority of the residents

00:27:41.880 of L.A. County are vaccinated at this point. There's not like there are like five Trump voters

00:27:45.560 left in L.A. County since I took my family and my company out of L.A. County. Right. We all left.

00:27:50.360 We were all the Republican voters in L.A. County. The stats, the move that is just mind boggling to me.

00:27:56.820 Beyond the V.A., mandating vaccines. And I think, to be honest, I think that there's a case that if

00:28:02.000 you work in a hospital and you're working with uniquely vulnerable people who can't get the

00:28:05.580 vaccine, the notion that if you work in a nursing home, for example, for a living, you have to get

00:28:09.360 a vaccine to work in a nursing home. That's a different story. There's no question that certain

00:28:14.080 career choices that you make come with certain. Right. But if you're if you're working for MTA or

00:28:18.540 something in New York, the notion that they can fire you if you don't get a vaccine is absurd.

00:28:21.760 And the one that's utterly mind boggling, astonishing to me as the pro-vax guy on the

00:28:27.700 right. Right. I love the vaccines. I think the vaccines are great. I got the vaccine. My wife

00:28:30.860 got the vaccine. My parents got the vaccine. We got it literally the first day that we could.

00:28:34.040 I think I think they're I think they're a miracle. I think that if you look at the disconnect between

00:28:39.000 the case rate and the death rate in countries that have wide levels of vaccination, it is unbelievable

00:28:43.620 how they've been disconnected. I mean, like we we are on we are averaging in this country

00:28:47.620 a seven day average, two hundred and ninety deaths a day. We are up at three, four thousand deaths a

00:28:51.760 day back in the early part of the year. That is largely because of the vaccinations and as well

00:28:56.120 as the natural immunity that's been produced by widespread of the actual covid. The OK, as the

00:29:01.620 pro-vax guy, the notion that we are that we the vaccinated are supposed to mask up is so unrooted

00:29:07.780 in anything remotely approaching the science that it's insane. It is. It makes me want to punch a wall.

00:29:13.500 It is it is beyond crazy. I don't know why the pro-vax people thought that getting the vaccine

00:29:17.780 was going to give your freedom back. That was the part that like I was going like, LOL,

00:29:21.600 like I was like, everyone really thinks like two weeks or so. I mean, just I just like how far are

00:29:25.280 we going to go? No, but the difference is for me. So let me take my parents. My parents are 65.

00:29:31.380 I didn't want them walking around unprotected with covid. Once they got the vaccine, then forget about

00:29:37.880 everything else. Now I said to them, it is much safer for you to walk around unmasked, which it is.

00:29:43.000 It's much safer for them to walk around unmasked because even if they were to be exposed to covid,

00:29:46.620 their chances of actually being hospitalized from covid are vanishingly small. I read the same

00:29:51.140 CDC that's saying the vaccinated need to mask up now reports there have been 161 million Americans

00:29:56.400 who have been vaccinated, right? Totally vaccinated. 160, which, by the way, is an unbelievable thing.

00:30:00.660 We vaccinated half the country with a non-FDA approved vaccine, right? We're still operating under

00:30:06.000 FDA. This is also mind boggling. We're operating under FDA. It shows the FDA is a pile of garbage.

00:30:10.140 FDA emergency authorization. But you're mandated to get the vaccine before full authorization of the

00:30:14.560 vaccine. OK, so what are you going to suck it back out of my arm if you don't get the full

00:30:17.400 authorization? So but put that aside, 161 million people in the United States have been fully

00:30:22.480 vaccinated. There have been a grand total, according to the CDC, of less than six thousand

00:30:27.280 hospitalizations among the vaccinated in the United States, which means that your chances of being

00:30:32.060 hospitalized after being vaccinated in the United States are one in twenty seven thousand two hundred

00:30:36.180 and twenty three. But based on that, this is literally don't matter. Why did you think that if you did

00:30:41.300 everything the government said you were going to get your freedoms back? That's my question.

00:30:44.260 Well, I'll say this. But here's the thing. It's the government. But there came a point. And this is

00:30:47.480 this is the thing that's happening. I didn't think that the left was going to ever give the freedoms

00:30:51.860 back. But I thought I did think that more Americans were going to take their freedoms back.

00:30:56.320 And this has been fun. It's been Jeremy and I have had this kind of conversation many times since the beginning

00:30:59.980 of the pandemic. Jeremy was very anti everything at the very beginning. But he also thought that everybody was

00:31:04.880 going to be very robust in their defense of their individual freedoms. I was much more like, let's

00:31:10.020 hold off. Let's see how this thing goes. I was much more cautious with regard to the pandemic. But I also

00:31:13.880 thought that a lot more people were going to be like me, like they're going to be more cautious.

00:31:16.720 But even I am just bewildered and befuddled by the fact that so many Americans are going along with

00:31:24.060 this absolute, utter, unbelievable bullshit. It's unbelievable to me. I'll say in my own to toot my own

00:31:28.860 horn, because with a name like God King, it was Liz Wheeler and I from day one.

00:31:36.120 It was pretty close.

00:31:37.860 It was pretty, but yes.

00:31:38.860 A couple of weeks after me, maybe like two months after me, I was day freaking one on my Twitter

00:31:44.420 feed. Like, come on, guys.

00:31:45.820 Oh, I was too.

00:31:46.700 Come on. I mean, it's just...

00:31:48.660 And my whole, my entire point was, what the government takes, it is loath to ever give back.

00:31:53.660 Of course.

00:31:54.300 But I will say where I was wrong. I think I was right about the nature of government. I was wrong

00:31:58.820 about the nature of the citizenry. I genuinely thought, you know, people will take this for weeks.

00:32:05.980 And then as the weeks turned into months, I thought, well, people are really afraid. Maybe

00:32:09.340 another month or two people are going to put up with this. But Americans, we're a feisty bunch.

00:32:13.220 We're a rebellious bunch. We're a self-determining bunch. I'm shocked at the level of people.

00:32:18.200 I mean, we're 18 months into this thing or something.

00:32:20.360 But do you know what we're missing? The thing that is missing from this conversation

00:32:23.260 is we're thinking of it, okay, there's big government pushing this on one hand and the

00:32:27.360 citizens either going along with it or fighting back on the other. But it's not just big government.

00:32:31.800 We've said it ourselves tonight. It's the media. It's not just the media. It's the media. It's

00:32:35.940 big tech. It's the universities. It's the corporations. It's the blob. It's the liberal

00:32:41.040 establishment working in concert, by the way. You've got now the Biden administration admitting

00:32:45.500 for all intents and purposes that big tech is acting as a proxy and enforcement weighing

00:32:50.040 for the government. So it's, you know, just to focus all of our ire on the government. Obviously,

00:32:54.220 I'm extremely irritated at them. But it's the NGOs. It's just everything.

00:32:58.800 It's also, it's not just, I think your point is correct. We can talk about government. We can talk

00:33:04.380 about media. We can talk about all these big institutions. But it's also, there's something

00:33:08.660 deeply sick within the American population. And that is a frightening thing to confront. It's very

00:33:15.640 depressing. And there's no quick answer to it. But I think part of it, at a deep level, I think

00:33:20.840 part of what's happened here and why people haven't been robust in the defense of their liberties is

00:33:25.520 that for a lot of Americans, this was a confrontation with mortality that they've just never, I think a

00:33:32.380 lot of Americans had lived, because we live very comfortable lives, more comfortable lives than

00:33:37.200 anyone had ever lived in the history of mankind, like an unprecedented level of comfort and luxury

00:33:41.600 and freedom up until now. And this was this moment where for the first time, lots of people had to

00:33:48.540 confront the fact that they're going to die and that death is lurking around the corner. And I

00:33:52.580 actually think that there are millions of people who had never actually reflected on that fact. And

00:33:57.040 now they cannot, they can't handle the reality. Any level of risk, they cannot handle.

00:34:03.240 It's a very peculiar thing. And I've said this on the show before, that essentially after the Second

00:34:08.400 World War, the West defeated war, disease, poverty, and death. We live these lives where it's not that

00:34:15.040 there is no poverty. It's not that there is no disease. It's not that there is no war or that

00:34:18.880 there is no death. It's that the vast majority of us very rarely, if ever, encounter those things.

00:34:24.280 And the result of that is that for the first time in history, if you happen to be one of the people

00:34:29.040 who did encounter one of those things, it becomes very defining for you because it's isolating,

00:34:34.000 because there's no one with whom you can share that experience. And so, you know, I mean,

00:34:37.500 we talk about how the forever war, neocons just won a forever war in Afghanistan 20 years. I mean,

00:34:42.880 you know, the British had a war called the 100 Years War. Like, war was forever until the middle of

00:34:49.980 the 20th century. There were fighting seasons. And every fighting season, every fighting age man,

00:34:54.580 that's where these words come from, fighting season, fighting age man, every fighting age man

00:34:58.740 during the fighting season would go off to war. When that happened, you saw horrible atrocities.

00:35:03.480 You saw terrible things, just like modern combat soldiers do. But when you came home and you were

00:35:08.940 haunted by those things, you hadn't been unique out of the common human experience. Your neighbor

00:35:15.200 had gone through those things. Your father had gone through those things. Your grandfather

00:35:17.860 had gone through those things. And so you had some context to understand your experience.

00:35:23.820 Similarly, you know, if you lose a child in this day and age, obviously, I can't fathom anything

00:35:29.620 harder than losing a child. It's almost unimaginable. And yet, if you lived before

00:35:34.360 the 20th century, every single person lost a child. Every one of them. And so if you lost a

00:35:41.760 child, you weren't unique out of the human experience. Your mother had lost a child and

00:35:45.680 your neighbor had lost a child. So all these things that we experience now confronting our mortality,

00:35:51.460 PTSD, loss of, we see. And so disease is the other one. Most of us have not really encountered

00:35:57.180 disease. And when we do, we put ribbons on our door. We're basically made heroes because we're

00:36:02.040 the one in anybody who's actually faced, especially if you're below a certain age, the one of anybody

00:36:07.680 who ever faces a disease. You have no context to put that in. Now comes a disease, not in the scheme

00:36:14.440 of things, all that fatal a disease, although obviously compared to the average.

00:36:19.420 Compared to the bubonic plague, it's not particularly fatal.

00:36:21.620 Correct. Along comes this disease, and it does suddenly affect all of us for the first time again,

00:36:25.460 and none of us are prepared for it. We're not prepared for it experientially. We're not prepared

00:36:30.440 for it as a community. We're not prepared for it spiritually, which is, I think, a big part of

00:36:35.540 what you're driving at here. We have absolutely no way to contextualize the thing that we're experiencing.

00:36:40.900 And you know, when you say disease, it's not just disease, it's pandemics. Just like there was a

00:36:45.500 fighting season, pandemics swept through all the time, and you're absolutely right.

00:36:48.840 It was cholera season.

00:36:49.580 The cholera season and the plague. I mean, you forget that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet during the plague.

00:36:54.520 There were always plagues. And the plagues, some of those plagues wiped out like a third of the

00:36:59.240 world. And it was just what happened to people. And that has stopped. It has complete, it's a

00:37:06.840 miracle. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. But of course, it has the side effect of making people

00:37:12.820 afraid.

00:37:13.100 I also think, to go back to the media for one second, the media are such damned liars about

00:37:17.600 this. It is unbelievable. And they lie with stats, and people have no familiarity with how statistics

00:37:21.480 work. And so they'll say things like, wow, the number of deaths is up like 40%. Oh, you mean it

00:37:26.120 went from like two to 2.8? Right? That's really what there's, like, there was a clip the other

00:37:30.600 night of Allison Camerata and Victor Blackwell trying to browbeat a mayor outside of St. Louis.

00:37:34.840 And they were saying to him, you're not forcing your citizens to mask up. You should be forcing

00:37:38.500 your citizens to mask up because people are dying in St. Louis County. So I had the temerity to actually

00:37:43.400 look how many people are dying in St. Louis County. St. Louis County is a county of about 996,000

00:37:47.160 people. Their daily rolling average of deaths from COVID is one. Yeah. We're still missing also

00:37:52.680 some of the political aspect here, which is, yeah, the media probably at the lead of it. But when we

00:37:57.900 say it's an overreaction by the ruling class, it's an overreaction from the perspective of our way of

00:38:03.680 life and our rights. It's not an overreaction from them because what this lockdown has resulted in

00:38:08.260 is a massive historic transfer of wealth and power from the, especially the middle class, but lower

00:38:14.960 classes too, to a very small handful of extremely wealthy billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley

00:38:21.700 who own newspapers, Amazon, and obviously to the government. Yeah. That's why I thought it was so

00:38:26.960 ironic and frustrating when Jeff Bezos goes into space, which is a different topic. I thought

00:38:33.120 that was great, but I think it's great to have billionaires going into space and if they're going

00:38:36.400 to build stuff rather than building like a mansion for their, for their poodle or whatever.

00:38:39.460 But anyway, yeah, Jeff Bezos goes into space. You got all these, all these leftists that are

00:38:44.900 complaining about this rich guy and he's so evil and Amazon is evil. Well, not only do they all use

00:38:50.860 Amazon, of course, and like almost every adult in the country is an Amazon prime member, literally,

00:38:55.520 but it's, Amazon was enriched by these lockdown policies to a, to an extreme degree. And a lot of

00:39:02.520 these same people supported those policies, which as you say, is, is, is this thing that transferred

00:39:06.380 wealth over to these corporations? They are the first people, these corporations are the first

00:39:08.960 one to really hit hard on that fear mechanism. They want to keep you fearful. You go into Whole

00:39:12.500 Foods, Jeff Bezos owns that. You go onto Amazon.com, we're all in this together. All this messaging,

00:39:16.500 we're all in this together. When you look at the corporations that are controlling that messaging,

00:39:19.680 who want to keep this pandemic going on forever, they're the ones that are simultaneously lining

00:39:23.480 their pockets and people don't need to think through that. So I always follow money, you know,

00:39:27.640 because to me, there's always going to be a financial incentive. And, you know, you see Bill Gates

00:39:31.720 popping up everywhere. I mean, just recently, before it was announced a couple of days ago about the PCR

00:39:36.040 tests, CDC issued some, I'm sure you saw that updated guidance about the PCR tests and saying

00:39:40.080 they're no longer, you know, efficient. They, they pulled back. They're not efficient in terms

00:39:44.840 of determining the differences between COVID and other viruses, which the conspiracy theorists said

00:39:49.900 for a very long time, but surprise, surprise took them this long. But prior to them making that

00:39:53.320 announcement, we see that Bill Gates is invested in a new, you know, technology to determine COVID.

00:39:59.420 So it's just like, how much they know? When are they knowing this stuff? When are we getting this

00:40:02.800 information? It seems like we're getting the information sort of at the, at the end of

00:40:06.380 everything. And I don't trust the government, but I do want to say in defense of the American

00:40:09.200 people, because I actually don't think the reason that there's, you don't see these uprisings as

00:40:12.940 much, because you look overseas, obviously in Europe, you've got the uprisings happening every

00:40:15.940 day in France. You have the uprisings happening in England, happening in Greece, and people have

00:40:19.800 had enough of lockdowns, but it's also the structure of our government that this allows that

00:40:22.940 for better or for worse. What I mean by that is state rights, right? There's no reason people in

00:40:27.820 Florida, no reason people in Tennessee to get up and start, because we're not living, well, how people are

00:40:31.660 living in New York are the neurotic types that are okay with these lockdowns. So that's part of the

00:40:38.380 reason that you're not seeing the uprisings is people that are most likely to say, hey, I want

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00:42:15.660 examiner to come to my office and make sure that I qualified for the policy that I needed for my family.

00:42:21.000 I did nothing. They did everything. When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. Head

00:42:25.440 over to PolicyGenius.com and get started right now. PolicyGenius.com. True. Can I just speak

00:42:32.940 into something that Knowles was talking about, which is this frightening conglomeration. Although

00:42:36.480 this is the second time that you've affirmed something that Knowles was talking about. This

00:42:39.620 is way too many. I'm going to try and make it intelligent. The conglomeration of powers that is now,

00:42:45.520 you know, the corporations, the government, the media, the academy. Imagine for a moment if the

00:42:51.780 churches had stood up against the lockdowns. If they had said what John MacArthur at Grace Church

00:42:55.740 in California said, he said, I'm not here to protect people from the flu. I'm here to protect people

00:43:00.040 from eternal damnation. Because of what you're talking about, because of the way that death and

00:43:04.980 the four horsemen of the apocalypse have sort of been pushed back into the background, we have lost

00:43:09.740 that sense of immediacy that used to be represented by the Magdalene with her skull that your sins are

00:43:15.900 about to be answered for soon. And you're not in the distant future, but soon. And so the churches

00:43:21.680 have lost their faith. I believe the churches have lost their faith in actually in the supernatural,

00:43:26.500 in the thing that they're supposed to be preaching. So there is no, there used to be a state

00:43:30.200 and the church. That used to be the two people who argued over who had the power. Now the church is

00:43:36.460 basically folded. I mean, there's very, very few churches, incredibly few churches that said,

00:43:40.840 you don't have the right to shut down churches. Constitutionally, you do not have the right.

00:43:45.360 And because they didn't do that, there's a sense like, why, why shouldn't, why should we rebel?

00:43:50.500 What, what side are we on if we rebel? I do want to ask a question, just, I'll last it to anybody,

00:43:54.900 but maybe Ben, I actually want to hear you. What is your opinion on people who are naturally immune?

00:43:58.940 I mean, who naturally have the antibodies? Like, where is that in the discussion?

00:44:01.500 It is, again, an insane failure of the public health establishment not to even talk about

00:44:06.500 this. There are some good studies out of Israel that suggest that not only is natural immunity

00:44:10.100 a result of infection, but also that natural immunity may be more durable, right? That's

00:44:13.980 what the studies from Israel are suggesting. And when we make these herd immunity-

00:44:17.160 Common sense suggests that too, right?

00:44:17.880 Yes. I mean, when you make these herd immunity, you know, sort of arguments over what percentage

00:44:22.100 of the population is vaccinated, it would be remiss not to actually say how many people,

00:44:26.480 I mean, how do we not even have that stat? How do we not even have the stat as to how many people

00:44:29.920 who are not vaccinated already got COVID and were diagnosed with COVID?

00:44:33.300 What happened to the ticker on CNN that was counting up infections?

00:44:35.900 Right.

00:44:36.460 Basically, by now, everybody should have had COVID, and yet they're telling us that doesn't

00:44:40.460 matter. Everyone has to get the vaccine.

00:44:42.140 And it's also an easy way for the media to elide one reason why a lot of people are not

00:44:46.700 getting the vaccine. If you talk to people who are not getting the vaccine, there are a

00:44:49.320 bunch of reasons why people aren't getting the vaccine. Some range from the completely unreasonable

00:44:53.520 to the somewhat reasonable. And the somewhat reasonable is, I had COVID three months ago,

00:44:57.200 and I was diagnosed with COVID, and I have a natural immunity now, so I don't need the

00:45:00.540 vaccine. I have not heard any scientists really speak to, does the vaccine make things stronger?

00:45:05.360 I had chicken pox when I was a kid. I wouldn't just go get the chicken pox vaccine for no reason.

00:45:09.160 You used to have chicken pox parties when people were kids, right?

00:45:10.960 That's what we had, chicken pox parties.

00:45:11.940 But I think you're missing an important aspect of this, which is that the vaccine mandates

00:45:16.760 are not about public health. At this point, vaccine mandate is about making you bend the knee.

00:45:21.640 It's the imposition.

00:45:22.360 It is, yes. You must, you must acknowledge the power of the ruling class. You must acknowledge

00:45:28.780 the authority of the media, the authority.

00:45:30.680 Oh, yeah. Now, this is why they're talking about expanding testing into small children

00:45:35.240 for whether we should use the vaccine or not. Okay, to date, again, I will quote the CDC statistics

00:45:40.620 because we can't get blacklisted for quoting the CDC, apparently, the all-knowing, all-powerful

00:45:44.660 CDC. So I'm only going to quote CDC stats tonight. Okay, according to the CDC, grand total number

00:45:48.940 of children under the age of 18 who have died of COVID is 337. A huge number of those kids

00:45:53.980 had pre-existing conditions, right? It had real comorbidity.

00:45:56.840 Leukemia.

00:45:57.400 Right. The number of people in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, under the age

00:46:01.480 of 18 is somewhere between 73 and 75 million people. Okay, the number of people who have

00:46:05.680 died in the same period, in the same age group, from pneumonia is 810, according to the CDC.

00:46:10.740 So this idea that we have to vaccinate every single three-year-old or that all the three-year-olds

00:46:14.760 have to mask up to protect their teachers, right? If the teacher wants to get the vaccine,

00:46:18.300 get the vaccine, get the vaccine. 40% of New York City teachers are not vaccinated.

00:46:23.120 Okay, the reason they're not vaccinated is because a lot of them don't want to go back

00:46:25.360 to the classroom, frankly, and they have no intention.

00:46:26.840 And I think also there's the gaslighting because we've expanded the definition of what

00:46:29.180 it means to be anti-vax. It used to mean that you just don't believe in vaccines and don't

00:46:32.120 want to touch vaccines. You think they're all bad, right? And now it's included people

00:46:35.400 who have gotten the vaccine, had a bad reaction, spoke about it. Eric Clapton is now in the

00:46:39.700 anti-vaccine category going, okay, that's weird. It also includes people that are just being honest

00:46:43.520 with you about what's going on. And there's been this tremendous gaslighting. This is where I really

00:46:47.400 have a problem. And I agree with you that this is not actually about public health. People have

00:46:50.680 listened to exactly what the government told them to do. They have locked down their businesses.

00:46:53.920 They have stayed at home. They got in line. They got the vaccine. And there are people that have

00:46:57.740 talked about the reactions afterwards. Myocarditis obviously is now listed, but that was after we

00:47:02.460 knew about the myocarditis. We were just listening to people telling their stories who were getting

00:47:06.060 banned and censored. Moms who did the right thing, took their kids to the doctor and said,

00:47:10.320 since then my kid has had heart inflammation. I knew four months before the CDC decided to

00:47:14.160 acknowledge it. So that is what makes people even more uncomfortable with what's going on. It's that

00:47:18.180 you are purposefully censoring some people to be quiet and hushing them up rather than having an

00:47:23.280 honest discussion. If they were honest and said, like we are with everything, by the way, no matter

00:47:26.380 we could put Tylenol on this table, somebody could have a bad reaction. Tylenol is generally a good

00:47:30.460 drug. You know, every drug, right? There's going to be a few people who are not going to have a good

00:47:35.200 reaction to Tylenol. People who are allergic to everything you take. You can eat an apple. People are going to be

00:47:38.800 allergic to it, right? Apples are good to eat. I'm not going to say I don't need an apple,

00:47:41.640 but they're pretending that this vaccine, it is impossible. You are crazy. And this mass gas

00:47:46.880 lighting is actually turning people who are traditionally very pro-vax into believing that

00:47:51.760 there is some evil conspiracy here. The idea that you have, this whole idea that you have to have

00:47:56.000 one opinion about what's your opinion on vaccines? Are you pro or anti? I've always found that to be

00:48:01.360 absurd. Even before COVID, when people would ask you, are you pro or anti-vaccine? I mean, it doesn't,

00:48:06.380 it depends on the vaccine. It depends on the situation. It depends on who we're talking about.

00:48:10.320 It depends on a lot of things. It should be the same thing with the COVID vaccine.

00:48:14.000 And I, you know, Rand Paul is one who I believe didn't get the vaccine because he had prior

00:48:16.940 infection. And that seems like you don't have to have any ideological, philosophical opinion about

00:48:22.480 vaccines to just make that reasonable judgment. This is just one of the, to your point, it's one of

00:48:26.640 the, one of the, one of the several things about COVID that we just don't talk about.

00:48:29.940 It all flows from this crazy term, settled science.

00:48:33.420 Well, this is the nonsense, which doesn't exist.

00:48:36.200 In my book, The Authoritarian Moment, I talk about the conflation of the science,

00:48:40.260 TM trademark, you know, the science as an institution with the actual scientific process.

00:48:44.540 And one of the things that you'll notice, and this is really driving me up a wall,

00:48:47.200 if you, like me, would like to see more people who are in vulnerable positions get vaccinated,

00:48:51.220 right? I say this all the time. I'd like to see, like, there was a guy I was talking with today,

00:48:54.760 63 years old, didn't get the vaccine. I said to him, you probably should. He said,

00:48:58.740 well, I'm waiting a year to see what happens. I said, do you have like a rationale for that?

00:49:01.300 You really should, at the very least, go talk to your doctor about getting the vaccine and then

00:49:05.580 get the vaccine. You're in the vulnerable category. The way that you convince people,

00:49:10.880 if you actually want to take them seriously, is you say, okay, here are the statistics that we

00:49:15.020 know about adverse reactions to the vaccine. Here are the statistics we know about adverse

00:49:18.460 reactions to COVID. Your chances of getting an adverse reaction from COVID are this percentage

00:49:22.580 higher than your chances of getting an adverse reaction from the vaccines, right? That is the way

00:49:26.240 that you would convince somebody. But no one in the media wants to do that. And the reason they don't

00:49:30.000 want to do that is because they don't actually care whether you get vaccinated. They care about

00:49:33.220 yelling at you. Or also, if you do it, like Tucker, you then get thrown and castigated and called a

00:49:37.740 conspiracy theorist anti-vax and you read actual VAERS data. And spied on. And they're making the

00:49:43.380 frogs gay. By the way, he was right about that. You know, the historical component of this too

00:49:49.620 is something that I think is probably the most scary aspect of it. Because what we're talking about

00:49:55.320 is big data, big science, big information. And in the 19th century, we had the industrial

00:49:59.860 revolution. In the 20th century, we had the managerial revolution. And in the 21st century,

00:50:04.160 what if we had the information revolution? Everything is becoming smart. Your refrigerator

00:50:08.400 is smart. Everyone's spying on you. You just read an ad about how everyone's spying on you.

00:50:12.300 And there's a great new book out, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I'm not sure if you guys

00:50:16.700 have read it yet, by Shoshana Zuboff. Really good book about how these big data companies working

00:50:22.700 with, often working with the government, are gaining a huge amount of power and a huge amount

00:50:27.980 of influence. So while we're talking about the blob and the Fauci's and all of these people

00:50:33.080 taking a lot of political control and money during this, there's a major historical shift in the way

00:50:38.240 that the economy works. And so I think we're going to continue to idolize science and data. And the

00:50:43.800 people who have benefited most from this lockdown in terms of power and money are the people who are

00:50:47.560 monetizing. You know, listen, I think that we all have a great science remains by pulling data,

00:50:52.220 the one institution in American life that people trust. Why? Well, because science has produced

00:50:55.520 unbelievable goods for the human race over the course of the last couple of centuries.

00:50:59.140 Undeniable. Undeniable, right? Uncontroversial human goods. But because it is such a powerful

00:51:04.260 institution, because it has so much trust, the left has now infused these institutions with its own

00:51:08.220 politics and skewed away from the science. They've decided that science is actually just a tool to be

00:51:13.100 wielded like everything else in American society. And therefore, if we have to ignore the stats,

00:51:17.080 and if we won't, we won't even tell you the stats, even if it makes the case for what we're talking

00:51:20.720 about, because it's more important that we stake a position here, a moral position. And it's

00:51:25.340 important that you not take that moral position. In fact, we will avoid making a convincing case to

00:51:29.500 you. Instead, we will say that you are an idiot denier who's only doing this because you watch

00:51:33.580 Tucker Carlson. And ignorant because you don't have the data that they have. Right. And then you're

00:51:37.700 refusing to give us. Did you see Jen Psaki yesterday being asked about the data to support

00:51:41.980 the mask mandate on the vaccinated? She was asked about it. She didn't cite a single stat.

00:51:47.080 She didn't cite a single fact. She just said, the scientific institutions tell us that this is

00:51:50.740 what's important. Well, I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that there was a person called the scientific

00:51:54.720 institutions who was touched by the hand of God. But this is exactly how Fauci talks too.

00:51:58.460 If you question Fauci, you're questioning the science. Well, then was I questioning the science

00:52:02.160 when Fauci was pro or anti-mass? Was I questioning the science when Fauci was pro or anti-school?

00:52:06.260 This is my problem with science. And of course, science, unbelievable, created the modernity

00:52:11.260 and all the miracles that we have. We're created utilizing the scientific method.

00:52:17.580 My problem with people putting trust in science, I don't like young earth creationism. That's

00:52:22.860 a thing in particularly in evangelical Christianity is where you look for scientific evidence that

00:52:29.080 the earth is precisely this age or that age. 6,000 or 5,000 or 18,000. I mean, there's a few

00:52:34.140 different numbers, but they'll measure the pressure from oil wells. And they're always coming to you

00:52:39.780 and saying, well, now we've got proof of something that we believed going in. And I always say, well,

00:52:44.560 here's the problem with doing that. The problem with doing that is the science will change.

00:52:49.740 And so if you have built your justification for what you believe in faith on something that you

00:52:55.520 believe has been proven by science, what is going, what's going to happen to your faith when the

00:52:59.540 science changes, it will change. The one thing that will absolutely happen every single time is

00:53:04.820 the science will change. That's not a flaw in science. That's the good thing about science.

00:53:09.600 That's the honest part of science, right? You're saying that there should always be a debate.

00:53:12.560 And if there was more of a debate and people talking about what's going on, you know,

00:53:15.620 different reactions that they're having, that I would be much more inclined to say, you know what?

00:53:18.680 Okay, at least I know the discussion is honest and I'm more inclined to go and trust this vaccine

00:53:22.280 with the knowledge that I have, but there is no debate. And again, in my personal opinion,

00:53:26.600 I think that what we are going to see because of the dishonesty, because of the changing,

00:53:30.920 because of the censorship, censoring doctors off of YouTube who are talking about what they're

00:53:34.700 seeing in the emergency room saying only doctor that can speak is Dr. Fauci. I think it's actually

00:53:39.500 going to create an underbelly of people that are explicitly anti-vax because they're going to now

00:53:43.660 correlate this experience with every vaccine under the sun. And they're going to think, okay,

00:53:47.680 well, if they lied to me about this one, I know that they lied. If they gaslit me about my own reaction to this,

00:53:51.500 then they won't even acknowledge that this happened to me. Then what about all these other

00:53:54.420 vaccines? What am I doing? And you're going to start that process of saying, okay, I don't trust

00:53:58.380 any of this. And like for one, one big discussion that every woman is having, if anybody's paying

00:54:02.400 attention and they're just now starting to look into it, is that women are having, you know,

00:54:06.340 menstruation is being affected by this, whether it's, you know, coming later, starting earlier,

00:54:10.520 you know, I'd love to have a discussion with all you boys, but like this is a ton.

00:54:13.520 Mine has been unaffected.

00:54:14.880 Right. Tons of women have been talking about this, right?

00:54:17.400 Just listening to this.

00:54:18.020 And this is a very big deal for women that are in their baby making years. Like for me,

00:54:21.280 like this is, this is the most important discussion to be having. I want to hear doctors talking about

00:54:25.080 this, debating this. If you want to have children. And by the way, it could be because, oh, that's

00:54:28.180 because of blah, blah, blah. That happened. There's tons of reasons.

00:54:30.580 By the way, the CDC website openly admits that they have no data with regard to how this vaccine

00:54:34.720 affects pregnant women.

00:54:35.580 Exactly. And, and, and it's, rather than having a discussion, they're saying, women, you have to

00:54:38.520 get this vaccine. That is so horrible to say to a woman that we don't have a data.

00:54:42.800 But we haven't looked into it and we're not willing to have a discussion with you, but

00:54:46.320 you damn well better get it.

00:54:47.400 That's what, that's how you know, that's, that's how you know that someone is not, someone

00:54:51.720 is pro science. If they're open to questions, if someone doesn't want any questions, then

00:54:56.460 you know that they're, that this is, this is not a scientific person, but even, even the

00:55:00.300 phrase pro science and anti science, the way that we're talking, it's hard not to lapse

00:55:03.920 into it, but, um, the way we're talking about it doesn't actually even make sense because

00:55:08.340 we have to keep reminding ourselves and everyone else that science is just a process by which

00:55:14.280 we, we come to understand the physical world. And so that's, that's all it is to say you're

00:55:19.420 anti science. It's like saying you're anti, I don't know, walking or something. It's like,

00:55:22.880 it's like you're, you're going to, it's a process of going to a certain place. Um, so it's, we

00:55:27.600 talk about it like it's an institution. We talk about it like it's a person. Uh, we talk

00:55:31.780 about it as if it's this idea that you could be against or, or instead of a tool, a tool

00:55:35.700 for understanding. That's all it is. It's a process. As I was coming in here, as I was coming

00:55:39.000 into the shop, I was thinking this is in some strange way, an act of insanity, not just because

00:55:43.920 I'm here with Walsh, but, but here we, you know, Ben, Ben, we'll talk about him as if he's not here

00:55:50.160 for a moment. He's brought out a book. He runs a major media company. Despite the way he looks,

00:55:55.960 he's actually a fairly intelligent fellow. He's written about a really interesting thing. The only place

00:56:00.740 where you're going to be interviewed is places like this. And why, why doesn't ABC think,

00:56:07.460 you know, there's a guy I disagree with, but that's an interesting point of view. Let's bring

00:56:10.400 him on and discuss what it is. He sees the fact, the fact that that doesn't happen is insane.

00:56:15.440 It's insane. In fact, ABC finds Republicans to have on. They find the ones with whom they agreed

00:56:20.860 the most, right? What, what Republican disagrees with me the least? I'd be curious what he thinks

00:56:25.860 about the court gesture, right? I mean, those are the only two possible options, but we saw this last

00:56:30.220 week when NPR literally put out an article about Daily Wire, in which they admitted that we don't

00:56:34.680 tell lies on the site, that we don't engage in conspiracy theories on the site, that we were

00:56:38.520 critical of President Trump from time to time, that we openly acknowledge that we are a conservative

00:56:42.880 website. And then they were like, also, they have traffic and that really has to stop.

00:56:46.880 It was like successful. Right. And my favorite, my favorite phrase was the professor who said,

00:56:51.500 well, you know, any information stripped of context can be misinformation. Whoa. Okay.

00:56:55.440 So amazing. Well, you might want to look at the media then like from time to time, you might want

00:57:00.620 to actually look at the media. It is, it is an amazing thing. And I think it does come down to

00:57:05.020 the left's deep and abiding need to demonize anybody who they disagree with. They don't want

00:57:08.740 to convince. They just want to destroy. Earlier this week, I put out a tweet that was sort of a fun

00:57:13.900 thought experiment where I said, you know, if you want to, every, he's talking about polarization in

00:57:17.940 society, how we all hate each other and all this. Okay. Well, if you want to stop that,

00:57:20.520 here's an easy idea. Just right now, all of us pick somebody who didn't vote like you did in the

00:57:25.400 last election, tweet at them, famous person say, I like this person. I think what they have to say

00:57:30.480 is interesting, even though we disagree. Right. Very, very easy. Right. Super easy. All of us

00:57:34.980 can list a dozen people off the top of our head who we disagree with, but we still, you know,

00:57:39.100 talk to from time to time and they're not cool. Well, I said, nice. And the, and, and the only people,

00:57:46.520 there were a bunch of people who did it. The only people who did it were people on the right.

00:57:49.260 Yeah. There was not a single blue check on the left who did it. In fact,

00:57:51.440 Media Matters started tweeting back at me, my, you know, bad old tweets to demonstrate again.

00:57:54.860 It couldn't be me, right? It could never be, but it couldn't be anybody. That's the whole point.

00:57:58.660 Yeah. All of this has become a religious totem for them. The masking is now a religious totem.

00:58:02.760 If you don't wear the mask, you could see how frustrated people were when the mask mandate ended

00:58:06.360 from the CDC. There are a bunch of people in New York who are like, well, I'm still wearing my mask.

00:58:09.660 I don't see why the CDC should be able to say that. AOC notoriously. I'm just not comfortable.

00:58:12.580 Well, do you know, AOC made a point exactly on what you're saying, Ben. She made it just this week.

00:58:16.580 She said, it was unwittingly honest. She said, it's not enough to fact check Republicans

00:58:22.120 subtext because we can't do that because they're generally not lying. She said, we need to attack

00:58:27.940 their core logic. And I don't think she intended to say this, but what she's saying is we need to

00:58:32.960 attack logic. We can't, we actually, and they do that. They say that logical argumentation,

00:58:38.120 objective reality, reason, those are all dog whistles of white supremacy. And we all need to

00:58:42.760 just club each other on the head with our interest.

00:58:44.100 And this kind of gets into what we brought up before we started rolling today, but like

00:58:47.280 the PayPal thing of like everything that they said that they're going to start conquering

00:58:50.580 on PayPal with any money to anti-government. That means, does that mean if I make a statement

00:58:54.660 against Biden, like that you could just say, am I allowed to have a PayPal account? Like

00:58:57.520 what are they actually saying when you say you're going to misinformation, anti-government

00:59:02.000 rhetoric, all of this stuff, it's so subjective.

00:59:04.600 I'm sure that they mean that you can't use PayPal to give money to Kamala Harris after she

00:59:09.240 said that she wouldn't take a vaccine that was created under Donald Trump.

00:59:11.880 Right. You know exactly where this is headed, you know, and it's...

00:59:15.160 It also goes to, and it creates the reactivity from the right. So the right looks at the

00:59:19.300 left and we say, we know your game and we know what you're trying to do here. And so

00:59:23.260 that's why it's so funny to see sort of the naivete of sort of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger

00:59:27.140 on the January 6th commission. We're like, well, we have to uncover the facts here. This

00:59:29.920 is just a fact finding mission. And then you have Adam Schiff crying, right, about how,

00:59:33.860 about January 6th. And you say to yourself, well, what is the actual purpose here? Like

00:59:37.560 we all know what the actual purpose here is. There's not a single human being in America

00:59:40.540 who believes a single new fact is going to be uncovered by the January 6th commission,

00:59:43.320 right? No one believes that. So what is this really about?

00:59:45.580 By the way, though...

00:59:46.020 They're going to figure out who left that bomb outside the RNC and the DNC.

00:59:48.840 Yeah.

00:59:49.020 Do you know what Kinzinger said too? I mean, I'll go with the charitable read that it was

00:59:53.060 naivete on their part. But Kinzinger, when people brought up, hey, you know, pal, you didn't,

00:59:58.160 this guy is a liberal Republican. He's probably not going to be in Congress for long. And

01:00:01.740 they said, you know, you didn't raise any issues about a commission to investigate the

01:00:05.800 BLM riots and who was involved in that, namely the sitting vice president. And he said, well,

01:00:11.580 that's different. BLM and Antifa, they committed crimes. But what happened at the Capitol,

01:00:16.100 that was an attack on the rule of law because, you know, the horn guy came in. And I don't

01:00:19.660 mean to downplay. They really made a big mess of things at the Capitol. BLM torched police

01:00:24.720 stations and a federal courthouse.

01:00:26.940 And people died.

01:00:27.540 And people died. So you can burn a federal courthouse. That's not an attack on the

01:00:31.720 rule of law. But you steal Nancy Pelosi's lectern. And that's the worst.

01:00:34.500 And nobody's been charged, by the way, with insurrection, treason. No one has been charged

01:00:39.000 with that.

01:00:39.440 Right. Nothing. No seditious conspiracy.

01:00:41.820 Right.

01:00:41.960 They've been charged with trespassing. Right. Because that's the best.

01:00:44.500 That's the best they can do. Because that's actually what they did.

01:00:47.760 Vandalism. Right.

01:00:48.560 Yeah.

01:00:49.120 And if what they did, and this is the obvious point, but as you said, we have to keep,

01:00:53.460 I don't know what else we could do, but keep repeating it. That, you know, if that qualifies

01:00:57.240 as insurrection, then I don't know how that wouldn't also apply to going

01:01:01.600 into a police station in a major American city and burning it to the ground. I mean,

01:01:05.260 that is, you want to talk about dark days in America. It's what everyone said about January 6th.

01:01:10.040 I want to make sure that we don't seem like we're flying cover for what happened at the

01:01:14.000 Capitol on January 6th. Obviously, there were a million people in town for the president's

01:01:17.960 rally, a million people there to protest. I disagree with those million people about

01:01:21.980 what they were there to protest, but they were well within their rights to be there to protest.

01:01:25.940 So I don't want to paint with such a broad brush that I'm guilty of what the media is guilty.

01:01:29.940 A million Republicans sacked the Capitol. Of course, that's not true.

01:01:34.000 There was a very small minority of those people who did do something that was wrong. They did do

01:01:38.820 something that was criminal. They did do something that was-

01:01:40.980 It was mostly peaceful.

01:01:41.900 It was mostly peaceful. Yeah, it might say it was.

01:01:43.580 It was mostly peaceful.

01:01:45.860 Nevertheless, you may recall that someone on the left shot up the congressional baseball game and

01:01:55.220 almost killed Steve Scalise. You wouldn't know that if you ever watched the media in this country.

01:02:00.180 They're so selective.

01:02:01.340 The BLM supporters shot six cops.

01:02:03.100 Shot six under Barack Obama.

01:02:04.660 A bottle of cocktail to police cruisers.

01:02:06.960 The BLM of the White House and 60 Secret Service agents were wounded in that last year.

01:02:11.820 But this is what we're doing right now. This is whataboutism. So you're not allowed to do this because

01:02:15.720 whataboutism is a bad thing, apparently. Which, of course, it isn't. Whataboutism is simply-

01:02:20.600 It's right. It's trying to understand what the standard is, and it's holding you to your own

01:02:25.580 standard, which we're not allowed to do. And, of course, here's the thing. I think everyone in

01:02:29.760 this room, I know everyone in this room, has previously stated that they're not in favor of

01:02:36.540 what happened on January 6th. So, like, that's been said. We all understand that. We're all on the

01:02:42.640 same page. What the media wants us to do is we have to continue repeating that over and over and

01:02:49.280 over again just because they tell us to. Well, it's for 2022. Right. I mean, their program is-

01:02:55.160 That's what it is. Their program is unpopular. The president is not good at his job. His

01:02:59.840 administration is blowing out the inflation and lowering the growth rates. People aren't going

01:03:03.500 back to work. He didn't put an end to the virus as he bragged that he would. And so now they have

01:03:08.400 to come up with some other narrative. And the narrative for four years was Trump. Trump's no

01:03:11.560 longer in office. So how do you keep that narrative alive? You just keep saying January 6th over and

01:03:14.980 over and over again. Okay. The reality is everybody who participated in criminal activity on January 6th

01:03:19.260 is now being prosecuted and they will go to jail. Okay. That is certainly not true of all the

01:03:23.100 thousands of riots. Well, they're actually being let- they're being let off the hook in Manhattan

01:03:27.300 and the Bronx. The majority of the people who were involved in BLM for looting are just being

01:03:31.620 dismissed for that. Right. Exactly. So- I want to point out the people who threw a Molotov cocktail

01:03:35.440 into a police grouper during the BLM riots in New York were released on bail. Yeah. So the- so the- the kind

01:03:41.360 of attempt- and we can see what's happening, right? The real goal here is not about January 6th. The real goal

01:03:46.000 is to do exactly what, Jeremy, you didn't do, right? The goal is to say that it was everybody

01:03:50.060 who's not- who's at the protest and not only everybody who's at the protest, every single

01:03:53.340 person who voted for Trump- Yeah, everyone who was sympathetic. And everybody who even didn't vote

01:03:56.880 for Trump but is sympathetic to anything that doesn't resemble the left-wing position is in

01:04:00.860 their heart guilty of this deep act of evil that happened on January 6th. And that is a- it's an

01:04:07.440 argument that's bound to fail. It is not going to work. Most Americans don't believe that. Most Americans

01:04:11.300 can see January 6th for what it was, which was an act of criminality and in some cases

01:04:16.440 evil. And also that that does not represent, as one of the cops said the other day, all

01:04:21.340 of America, right? One of the cops said like yesterday on the stand, it turns out this person

01:04:25.620 tends to be kind of a left-wing activist on Twitter, that- that unsurprisingly, that this- that his

01:04:31.000 experiences during January 6th when people were calling him racist names, this is indicative

01:04:33.900 of something broad about America. And that is the left-wing pitch. Well, good luck with

01:04:37.640 that because I think the Republicans are just going to kick the living hell out of the Democrats

01:04:41.140 in 2020. I think the Republicans are going to take the House. I think there's a 60% shot

01:04:45.260 they retain the Senate. I think the Democrats are in for a world of hurt.

01:04:48.000 Do you think, though, if we do not get the multiple election integrity measures that are

01:04:53.120 trying to go through the states right now, if we still have things like widespread mail-in,

01:04:56.360 ballot harvesting, motor voter laws, are you still confident that we're going to take the House?

01:05:01.280 Yeah, I am.

01:05:01.860 I hope so. I mean, the polls look good.

01:05:03.240 I mean, first of all, I think that those laws have passed in a lot of these states. But second

01:05:07.740 of all, I just don't think that the Democrats- Donald Trump ain't on the ballot. He's a great

01:05:11.800 turnout machine for everybody. And him not being on the ballot is for congressional candidates,

01:05:16.860 virtually all of whom outperformed her. I mean, pretty much every Republican congressional

01:05:21.340 candidate, including in the senatorial seat, outperformed Trump in the last election cycle,

01:05:25.040 which is why Republicans outperformed in Congress. With Trump not on the ballot in 2022,

01:05:29.600 I think that Republicans, they've taken away the biggest Democratic talking point. That's the

01:05:33.660 reason why Pelosi keeps saying Trump in January 6th over and over and over again. She wants that

01:05:38.600 report to come out next year. She wants to claim that all the Republicans were complicit in that.

01:05:42.360 But guess what? Americans are not into this. They're not into this. Trump has not been in office

01:05:46.260 for six months at this point. The president of the United States is a doddering, senile old buffoon

01:05:50.620 who can't hold it together and is presiding over the most radical agenda of our lifetime.

01:05:54.240 And on whom they depend. Yes. That doddering old senile president is their only hope. If God

01:06:02.980 forbid something were to happen to him, Kamala Harris cannot win a national election. Kamala

01:06:07.460 Harris couldn't win a California primary. She is the worst politician I have ever seen in my

01:06:12.820 entire life. And the Democrats know this. They know how fragile this is. And the thing for Biden

01:06:16.620 is that Biden also recognizes that because he's a one term president, they've really put themselves

01:06:21.500 between a rock and a hard place. Biden knows that he's a one term president. He also knows the only

01:06:24.860 way he goes down in history is to do a bunch of radical stuff in this one term. And he knows

01:06:28.280 that by the end of next year, he didn't control Congress. Well, let's before we call her the

01:06:31.300 worst politician, let's let's not pretend that Hillary Clinton never existed. Kamala is worse than

01:06:35.820 Hillary. Yeah, I can see that. Because she has intersectional benefits. Hillary won votes.

01:06:39.680 But by the way, the thing with Kamala, though, on the worst politician thing, because I liked her.

01:06:44.040 I didn't like her. I think she's awful. But I said she might do well from the beginning. And she's a

01:06:49.340 terrible politician with the people. But she's pretty good behind the scenes. She's pretty I

01:06:53.540 mean, the woman. What do you mean by that? Exactly. All right. I don't want to get too

01:06:56.260 into detail. But she but at least in terms of the presidency, I'm not talking about California

01:07:00.760 in terms of the presidency. The woman ended up the vice president of the United States.

01:07:04.980 Yeah, but that was an easy woman, black, Indian. That's it. That's how they think.

01:07:10.180 That's literally what they thought. That's the whole reason they put her up. They thought

01:07:13.800 she was going to perform much better. I think that they actually wanted her to be the candidate.

01:07:15.420 I think you can leave Indian out, by the way. I don't think they know about that.

01:07:17.840 Black woman. Yeah, that's it. There was no other reason because they actually thought she

01:07:24.300 performed much better. And they were shocked when the black community didn't respond to

01:07:26.880 her because they were very aware of her record as a prosecutor. And they just did. They were

01:07:31.500 not about Kamala Harris. She's also fundamentally she has that Hillary Clinton factor where she's

01:07:35.140 just fundamentally unlikable. Every time she speaks like she just looks so bad next to Pence

01:07:40.180 in that debate. She looks petty. And I think that they realized that and they just sort of

01:07:44.500 pitched her on to Joe Biden's wagon because who else? Cory Booker. I mean,

01:07:47.440 I have certain lifelong dreams. One of them is to play Brahms with Condi. Another one

01:07:51.380 is to go and have a long interview with Thomas Sowell. One of the third is to play poker with

01:07:56.200 Kamala Harris because I will take her for all her money. You'll be so rich. I mean, that woman's

01:08:00.940 poker face. She has the worst poker face in the history of politics. She's actually just a bad

01:08:04.180 actress. So here's a question. I want to take some member questions from our members over

01:08:09.340 at dailywire.com. You can become a member right now. Dailywire.com slash subscribe. And this

01:08:16.340 question is for the whole group. Though the Olympics have gotten a little woke, you have

01:08:19.940 to remember the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid when the United States hockey team defeated

01:08:24.780 the Soviets and went on to win gold. I'm hyped just thinking about it. Do you think we will

01:08:29.540 ever get back to that? Funny to think that the country actually bonded over the communist

01:08:34.000 hate and how quickly we have forgotten that communism used to be the common enemy.

01:08:38.100 Russia will beat us first.

01:08:39.920 I don't think we will. We're not going to get back to that anytime soon in terms of that

01:08:45.420 sense of national unity and cheering together because the thing that's lost, and I think

01:08:51.840 this is why people find, for example, the women's soccer team to be so disgusting and we were

01:08:55.940 happy when they lost. And I know I certainly was. It's just there's this sense of gratitude

01:09:00.580 for the country that's been lost. And that's a lot of what patriotism really is. It's being

01:09:07.320 grateful for the blessings that have been given by our country. And I think we've got

01:09:10.480 a whole generation of people, multiple generations, that haven't been raised with that.

01:09:13.800 We don't have an American pastime anymore, right? Because we don't have an idea of what

01:09:18.700 Americans are uniting around.

01:09:19.940 You know, this is a very interesting thing. I've been a little under the weather, not with

01:09:25.320 COVID. Whatever you're going to catch from me is far, far worse. But I went home from

01:09:30.140 work early yesterday because I was taking some prescriptions and just needed some rest.

01:09:34.400 And as I was laying in bed, I watched the pilot episode of a show from the 90s called Star

01:09:39.300 Trek Deep Space Nine. And I'm a big Trekkie. I've watched every episode of every Star Trek

01:09:43.280 series except Deep Space Nine. And the real hardcore Trekkies say it's the best. I just

01:09:48.840 never got into it. And I was laying there sick. And I thought, well, I'm going to watch

01:09:51.000 it. So I download this episode. I'm watching it. It's famous for being the first Star Trek

01:09:55.920 that had a black lead, a black commanding officer. Because I hadn't prepared to talk

01:10:00.840 about it, I don't know the actor's name off the top of my head. But the character's name

01:10:04.640 is Sisko. And this was a major moment in the 90s. Star Trek was a major franchise. Star

01:10:09.880 Trek, the next generation, a major show. And they gave us Captain Janeway, who was the first

01:10:14.560 female captain. That made big news. And just before that, they gave us Commander Sisko, who

01:10:18.660 was the first black lead. And as I was watching the show, I was so struck by how disingenuous

01:10:25.560 this racial moment is that we live in right now. Because here you had this actor playing

01:10:30.660 a role. And the role was a 24th century Starfleet commanding officer, right? And we know, if you

01:10:38.040 ever watch The Next Generation, in particular, it's very utopian. And in the future, humans,

01:10:42.740 we're a little bit more collectivist. And we're a little bit more evolved. And we have all these

01:10:46.020 common thoughts about what it means to be a person and what it means to be sentient. And

01:10:51.200 this actor gives a performance in which essentially the role that he's playing would not have been

01:10:58.880 dramatically different had it been played by a white actor. And in fact, there's a scene where

01:11:03.400 he's on the holodeck where you can make all of your fantasies come true. He's on the holodeck with

01:11:07.300 his son, and they're playing a game of baseball. And he's having to explain to this non-corporeal

01:11:13.600 alien life form who doesn't understand the physical universe or time. And he's trying

01:11:18.560 to explain to them what memories are, and what imagination is, and how we linear corporeal

01:11:23.980 beings can move ourselves out of this moment and into moments that don't even exist, our

01:11:28.540 past, aspirations for our future, this game of baseball that he plays with his son. And

01:11:33.460 because it's on the holodeck, it's like a 1930s game of baseball. You know, it's a different

01:11:40.440 world even from now. And part of his speech is about how this is the great pastime. You

01:11:45.340 know, this is one of our great endearing pastimes. And how illogical it is in its way, but how

01:11:50.300 what we're really doing when we engage in sport is we're facing, as linear beings, we're facing

01:11:56.000 an almost unlimited number of possibilities that don't become a predictable reality until

01:12:01.540 you've already done them. You can't know what's going to happen. Anyway, all of this to

01:12:05.040 say, it was this very aspirational speech about, essentially, about humanity from a

01:12:11.780 Western point of view. I mean, he was declaring what's great about America, although they certainly

01:12:16.500 didn't say America. It's in the 21st century. And a white actor could have played the role.

01:12:21.340 An Hispanic actor could have played the role. Race was incidental. And I thought, by God,

01:12:27.520 in the 90s, we had this thing licked. You can't say today that Ibram X. Kendi, all this

01:12:36.100 crap about structural racism, you can't say that the reason that they're burning down Minneapolis

01:12:40.400 and all of this stuff is about Jim Crow. And in order to be able to say that, you have

01:12:45.800 to be able to draw a line straight back from today to Jim Crow. And you can't have the 90s

01:12:51.940 exist in that thread. You can't have a time when Bill Cosby was the most famous American.

01:12:57.520 You can't have a time when Michael Jackson was the most famous person on Earth.

01:13:05.540 Whitney Houston was the most famous female singer of the time.

01:13:07.360 The most famous female singer in the world. You can't have that time when a black actor

01:13:12.840 playing a role in which he defends Western civilization, essentially, could have also

01:13:17.900 been played by a white actor and could have also been played by an Hispanic actor where race was not

01:13:22.180 the defining central. The fact that that time existed and that it culminated in the ascension

01:13:28.080 of Barack Obama, who was the bow on top of our victory over Jim Crow and over the legacy.

01:13:35.380 I'm not saying that there are no lingering effects of the treatment of black people in America.

01:13:39.100 Of course, that would be a silly thing to say. What I am saying, though, is that you can't take this

01:13:44.080 moment and go straight back to Jim Crow without ignoring that moment.

01:13:47.880 I really believe that this whole thing is the Democrat hysteria over the failure of the great

01:13:53.140 society. Because the fact is, you can't take that moment even before the great society. Before the

01:13:58.340 great society, blacks were rising into the middle class faster than after the great society. It has

01:14:03.520 been a massive, massive failure and the left has been feeding off it like a tick. And so they don't

01:14:08.400 want it to go away. They don't want all that money and all those bad programs to go away. And that's why

01:14:12.920 they're telling. Listen, I'm sorry, I travel all over the place. We all travel all over the place.

01:14:17.780 I mean, people of every color. There are lots and lots of black people making it in America and

01:14:23.540 really grateful to be here and really grateful. Like all of us are grateful to be here. I do not

01:14:29.340 believe they can sell this thing past a certain point of hysteria. They own the media. They only

01:14:33.960 they own the government. They own the academy. But at some point, the truth will out.

01:14:38.580 But there's this problem actually getting back to the viewer question. There's this problem of

01:14:42.780 what are we focused on right now? And so the American left always shield for communism and

01:14:47.560 for the Soviet Union, especially on the fringes of it. And they never apologized for it. But the

01:14:52.500 American right was really unified because you had all these disparate factions, the libertarians and

01:14:57.060 the hawks and the traditionalists, the religious right and all of them kind of came together to

01:15:00.400 fight the Soviet Union, which they hated for various and diverse reasons. And then the Soviet Union

01:15:04.740 falls. And so you're not fighting an enemy. Then you start fighting like terror broadly, or you start

01:15:10.780 fighting, you start fighting each other, I suppose, because there's no unifying external enemy. Now

01:15:17.200 we're all just focused on these issues that we basically had, like, in the 90s. Which is everything.

01:15:23.040 Working together is everything. I mean, if we start to have these arguments between the Trumps and the

01:15:27.560 RNC and all this stuff, we'll fall apart. They are so organized. You know, the people who took over

01:15:33.380 Russia, who formed the Soviet Union, it's like 23,000 people out of the millions of people who

01:15:39.880 populated Russia. It just takes an organized minority to take over a government and take over

01:15:44.900 a country. It feels disorganized. It feels like a dream now or something. But it was real.

01:15:50.100 Yeah. Growing up in the 90s, as I did, and I can remember, you know, in the school system,

01:15:56.100 I went to public school, unfortunately, for all my schooling years. And one of many failures to come

01:16:02.060 out of that system. But I can remember, I went to a very diverse school system. And we had, you know,

01:16:08.940 black kids, white kids, a lot of, there's a heavy Asian population as well. And I can just remember

01:16:13.440 that it was, we never talked about it. It was never an issue. There was never any time when we all sat down

01:16:18.780 and talked about our racial differences. And what does this mean? Let's confront the sins of

01:16:22.720 whiteness. That never happened. And I'm not saying that it was harmonious and everything was great.

01:16:27.380 There were a lot of problems, but it wasn't an issue. We just said, and as kids, this is what

01:16:33.220 makes me so angry because having experienced that, I know that if you kind of leave kids to their own

01:16:37.440 devices and you put them in an environment together, yeah, they're going to ask questions,

01:16:41.680 sometimes awkward questions about their differences and that sort of thing. But they're not going to make a,

01:16:45.720 they're not going to see any great deep significance in that. They're just going to see each other as

01:16:49.940 kids and they're going to play on the playground. You have to make it an issue. You have to go to

01:16:54.620 these kids and say, oh, you see that person over there? They look different from you. That difference

01:16:59.340 is important and significant. And here are some feelings you should have about those differences.

01:17:04.140 And that's what we're doing to kids now. And it just infuriates me.

01:17:07.920 I just want to say also running parallel to this argument, though, to answer the question other way is,

01:17:11.600 and I made the joke, Russia will have that moment first, but I'm being serious because we're moving away from a

01:17:15.500 meritocracy. This goes back to our earlier discussion about like you're winning by not

01:17:19.780 even competing, right? Winning in your heart. You're winning in your heart. This is now becoming

01:17:23.300 the American perspective. So how do you expect America to have a moment in which we win and

01:17:27.320 have something triumphing like against Russia or against the Soviet Union or ever being able to

01:17:31.440 replicate that moment when we don't even understand fundamentally what winning is? And we're starting

01:17:35.260 to say that the concept of winning is wrong. That's what's going on in America right now. So

01:17:38.880 no, unless we reverse, you know, reverse the Titanic away from the iceberg, I don't see

01:17:43.020 how we have that moment, at least on our lifetimes until we we're going to we're going to need to

01:17:47.380 have, as Michael says, an existential threat. Normally, it would be perfectly obvious what

01:17:51.040 that existential threat is, which is the rising tide of China. Yeah, China is an existential threat

01:17:55.060 to the future of the United States. It's an existential threat to the future of the world.

01:17:58.220 They're a communist authoritarian power that is on the move. They have made radical moves

01:18:02.080 against Hong Kong. They've made radical moves in the South China Sea. They just unleashed a virus,

01:18:06.500 whether accidentally, which I think or or not accidentally, that is killed in excess of four

01:18:11.340 million people, probably closer to six million people if you get the actual stats from India.

01:18:14.880 And yet the West response to that has been, can we yell at each other some more? One of the

01:18:19.220 things that's been so amazing is that Europe, which is usually where bad ideas come from in

01:18:22.560 America, usually there's a bad idea in Europe. And then we take it here and we're like, what if we

01:18:25.260 just like up the ante on the really terrible idea? Now Europe is looking at us and they're going,

01:18:29.380 what are you guys trying to export over here? Are you seeing the French go, what is this woke crap

01:18:33.040 that you're trying to push over here? When the Europeans are telling us that we're too far to the left,

01:18:37.380 I think that we have to start having some conversations. So here's a question from

01:18:41.020 a dailywire.com member. Should we start a movement to boycott sports that succumb to the woke mob?

01:18:46.620 Do you think that type of movement could be organized? Would it even work?

01:18:50.380 So I think that long-term boycotts are very difficult to make work. What does work is the

01:18:55.180 immediate blowback effect. So you can have an immediate blowback because the left never has a

01:18:58.380 long-term boycott, right? The left couldn't even long-term boycott Chick-fil-A. What they did is they

01:19:02.080 create a bunch of headlines in the moment. And the headlines are enough to scare the corporate bosses

01:19:05.360 into thinking they're going to have a bad quarter and then they just kowtow. So you can certainly

01:19:09.340 do that. And I think, frankly, that the right kind of successfully did this with MLB. I think the

01:19:13.520 Major League Baseball, after the All-Star game, felt the heat. And it seemed like they sort of backed

01:19:17.820 off of some of this stuff a little bit. And you've seen it with other corporations that have sort of,

01:19:21.740 Coca-Cola did the same sort of thing. They sort of backed off. In order to re-normalize an institution,

01:19:26.740 which is one of the things that I talk about in my book, The Authoritarian Moment,

01:19:29.420 in order to re-normalize the institutions, all it requires, as you say, and this is the correct step,

01:19:33.980 it's about 20% of an institution that is diamond hard, rock core, aggressive, and will not give up

01:19:40.980 on the principle. And the left has used that in order to cudgel everybody else into silence. But

01:19:44.760 the right and the center is like 50, 60% of the country. And so all you really have to do at your

01:19:50.280 place of work or in response to MLB is say, listen, for one week, none of us are going to a game.

01:19:56.180 Just a week. We're just going to flex our power for one week. We're not going to go to any MLB games.

01:20:00.920 And that would have the sought after impact. I think the idea that people are going to like

01:20:04.600 boycott the NFL or boycott MLB for the rest of time is probably a pipe dream, but you don't have

01:20:09.140 to. I actually don't think it's a pipe dream. I think it's happening right now. I was going to say,

01:20:11.260 I think this is already happening. It doesn't even need to be organized. If you look at the numbers,

01:20:14.700 the viewership has tanked compared to five years ago. The viewership has absolutely tanked in NBA

01:20:19.420 finals. I don't even know who played. I canceled my MLB. Everybody is canceling their subscription.

01:20:24.440 And it's not even, like I said, it's not even because I'm trying to be like, ah,

01:20:26.780 I'm trying to stage a boycott, but because I fundamentally, I'm like, I don't feel like being

01:20:30.560 lectured. Here's the problem. I used to watch sports to tune out. Now you guys, every time

01:20:33.800 we're watching a sports, it's a lecture. We're seeing people on their knees because they have

01:20:36.420 to say something. People are wearing a shirt because they have to say something. Someone's

01:20:39.100 wearing a BLM mask. They have to say something. And quite frankly, that's not why Americans watch

01:20:43.340 sports, you know? So I think we're seeing that naturally. And at the same time, the UFC is picking

01:20:47.820 up Dana White. UFC is great. The UFC has gone off the chains in the last couple of years because

01:20:51.920 they decided not to make wokeism corporate. But what I think the problem with what you're

01:20:55.980 describing, Candace, is that that's a bifurcation of the culture. And there's no question that the

01:21:00.180 culture is bifurcating, the economy is bifurcating to some degree. For a boycott to be effective,

01:21:05.120 it actually has to be organized. The reason is this. We all stop watching the NBA because

01:21:09.820 screw the NBA. But they don't care because China will keep paying for the NBA.

01:21:13.920 Yeah.

01:21:14.520 They can accept the loss. What they can't accept is instability in the predictability of income,

01:21:20.000 which is why a boycott actually has to come both with the threat of removing the support

01:21:26.780 and the potential to restore the support. Only when that exists is there an economic incentive

01:21:32.940 for them to change their behavior. When we all just stop, because we have, we've stopped watching

01:21:36.320 the Oscars. We've stopped watching the Golden Globes. We've stopped watching the NBA Finals.

01:21:39.720 When that happens...

01:21:40.800 They double down on their audience.

01:21:41.940 They double down on the people who are still watching. That's right. Which in this case is the

01:21:44.800 Chinese.

01:21:45.140 But who cares? What's the downside of that? Who cares?

01:21:47.160 Well, it's actually changing who the celebrities are and they're realizing this, right?

01:21:52.040 Once upon a time, everybody, and Oscars is a great example, everybody watched it. The speeches

01:21:56.360 meant something because we were all tuning in. Now we're tuning out. So if they want to just

01:22:00.220 still say we're going to have it every year and we're going to flood in a bunch of money

01:22:02.400 from China, who cares? They're not having an impact on our culture anymore because nobody

01:22:06.700 actually looks up to those people that are giving the speeches.

01:22:08.880 There's an issue, one issue with the boycotts is, I don't have any problem with it in principle.

01:22:13.380 I think it's a good idea. But there's a certain futility to it because I'm sure, you know,

01:22:18.940 as conservatives, I stopped watching the NBA too. Another issue here is I'll have to admit,

01:22:23.340 I was never a huge NBA fan. So a lot of the people doing these boycotts on the left and

01:22:26.620 right were never using the product to begin with. So I was kind of like, I was a moderate

01:22:30.740 fan. I just stopped watching. I wasn't much to give up. But, you know, if we're really,

01:22:35.160 if we as conservatives were serious about it, we're going to start boycotting companies

01:22:39.040 that are not in line with our values, that are working against us in the culture, that

01:22:43.100 hate us. We should be starting with, how about Disney? That should be the first place we start

01:22:47.400 because Disney hates our guts. The amount of filth that they put out into the culture.

01:22:53.260 And remember, Disney owns ABC, ESPN, so on and so forth. But you put that out there to a lot

01:22:58.180 of conservatives and they say, whoa, hang on a second. I got to watch Marvel. I can't give

01:23:02.420 that up. I mean, this is my whole entertainment repertoire you're asking me to give up.

01:23:06.100 And so then you start making these calculations and you realize, well, if I'm going to go down

01:23:09.460 this road, I got to give up like everything or at least all of the things that I care

01:23:13.820 about as a consumer. And I identify myself so much as a consumer because we all do as

01:23:17.600 Americans. And then and then I think people just sort of like here and there will kind

01:23:21.760 of, OK, we won't watch the NBA. But I kind of think you're not watching the NBA, but you're

01:23:26.280 still watching Marvel movies. So what difference does it really make in the end?

01:23:30.860 I think that Ben, I agree with Ben that short term boycotts are fine.

01:23:36.380 Long term, though, we have to create our own. Yeah. And this is this is the actual reason

01:23:40.600 we call you the God King. You know, because the stuff we're doing here, I think that's

01:23:44.060 the answer. And that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. People are watching this. This is the

01:23:47.660 reason NPR writes an article. Right. Why is this? Despite the fact that we we used to

01:23:51.320 be the kingmakers, we'd have this person speak on the Oscar stage and they would be the number

01:23:54.580 one person watched. It's just not happening anymore. This is why they're actually demanding

01:23:57.620 more censorship. This is the reason why CNN goes, oh, my gosh, we need to censor Candace

01:24:01.900 sellers in the Daily Wire and all of a sudden it seems to be gone. Miss conquering misinformation is

01:24:05.060 what they're always saying. But in reality, what they're saying is that they've they're

01:24:08.380 becoming powerless. Well, and for this reason, let them have their shows. I don't care for

01:24:12.120 this reason. People should go over and become subscribers at dailywire.com. We are we started

01:24:16.060 on Monday. I can't tell you much about it. On Monday, we we started producing our next

01:24:20.740 feature film. It's not one that the audience knows anything about yet. It's not the Gina Carano

01:24:24.900 film, although that begins production very soon as well. And we're very excited about

01:24:28.800 it. But this is something we haven't even told you about yet. And Ben and I were watching

01:24:32.140 dailies in my office earlier. It's great. It looks great. It's fabulous. Here's a very

01:24:36.800 important question from a dailywire.com member. If you were an NFL player, A, what position would

01:24:42.260 you each be? And B, how would you handle the forced vaccination situation? Drew?

01:24:46.600 The forced vaccination situation? Yeah. Yeah. Well, if I were, I think that I would have to be

01:24:52.080 a defensive lineman because I'd only live through one play, but no one would get past me.

01:24:57.860 So I think that's where that's where I would have to be fair. And, and yeah, I'm, I'm not for I'm

01:25:03.760 with you on this. I'm not for forced vaccinations, except in certain situations. And I think they've

01:25:09.320 got to refuse them. I've got to think they've got to refuse them on mass and in sports.

01:25:13.100 Yeah. Um, I mean, look at me, I'm a kicker. That's just the reality of the situation.

01:25:18.200 Every so often I'll like, I'll be called upon to fake a puns and then I'll throw the ball four

01:25:22.920 yards and then that's, that's pretty much how that works. Uh, I'm already vaccinated. So

01:25:27.100 but, but I mean, obviously I agree with Drew. I think that the whole point of vaccinating

01:25:31.840 is to protect you. If somebody else is unvaccinated, that you have taken that upon yourself. You

01:25:36.900 have now made the choice because we're all getting immunity one way or the other. You're

01:25:39.380 either getting COVID or you're getting the vaccine. Those are your two options. There's really

01:25:42.040 not a third option where you just don't get COVID. It's here to stay. I think I'd probably

01:25:46.340 play third base if I had to pick a position. That's the worst. I assume I would. I don't

01:25:51.440 know. I'm a lefty, so maybe first base. I don't know. Or, you know, the issue of

01:25:56.720 the, the athlete protests is I think the craziest one because these are the healthiest, most

01:26:03.540 virile in there are the people in the best shape in the entire world. And we are telling

01:26:08.780 them, no, you who are, are we allowed to say it statistically not at a great risk of

01:26:13.320 death from COVID? Is that, I think the CDC would agree with that?

01:26:15.460 Young and healthy people, yeah.

01:26:16.400 Young and healthy people. And, but, but the reason that they're forcing it on them is the

01:26:20.560 reason that they're forcing it on the kids going to school because it's about the imposition

01:26:24.820 much more than it is about any of the data. Although I will say there, there, there's

01:26:28.060 a funny line from somebody whose podcast is directly opposite my own, John Lovett over

01:26:31.960 at Pod Save America. And he said, it is sort of ironic that the athletes who, uh, who very

01:26:37.120 often are turning down the vaccines have not turned down cocaine from their friends.

01:26:44.100 Candice.

01:26:44.460 Yeah, definitely. And, um, obviously I think everybody knows where I stand on it. I think

01:26:54.660 this is another one of those things that I'm going to say, you give the government this

01:26:58.120 power now to be able to force vaccinate you with something that is not FDA approved in

01:27:01.500 which they have removed themselves and the vaccine makers from liability. And you will

01:27:05.460 never get that back.

01:27:07.980 I don't have any opinions that haven't already been taken or any funny answers that haven't

01:27:11.740 already been taken. So that's it. Well, I mean, in this fantasy world where I can actually

01:27:19.000 play football, I guess I'd be the quarterback too. Yeah. I, uh, if, if I were in the NFL,

01:27:24.960 the sport would truly have reached. Uh, Drew, what are your thoughts on women, uh, being entered

01:27:34.060 into the draft?

01:27:35.720 I'm, I'm entirely opposed to it. I'm entirely opposed to women in combat roles. I think that,

01:27:40.660 uh, you know, women as ancillary staff is fine. The whole point of the military is men going out

01:27:46.040 and killing other men. I think that, uh, women who leave their children behind and go overseas

01:27:51.100 are doing a terrible disservice to their children and their families. I, I, I love the people who do

01:27:56.840 it. I understand that they are service people. I understand that they have served, but I think

01:28:00.560 our society should just say, this is, you know, killing, killing is something that men do. You know,

01:28:06.060 95%, I think of crimes are committed by men. We are the people who do this stuff. And I think we

01:28:11.620 should keep it that way. Yeah. I, I wonder if this would actually be, we talk about something that

01:28:16.280 would, uh, ignite something within the American people to actually resist and, and, and stand up

01:28:21.260 for themselves. Uh, maybe this, cause I can tell you for sure, for me, I, I would, as a father of two

01:28:26.980 daughters, I would go to jail in a heartbeat. I would move from the country. I would do whatever was,

01:28:31.780 was necessary to actually protect my daughters from being drafted into combat if it would ever

01:28:36.120 come to that. Um, and, uh, and I, I think that's how most people instinctively feel. I mean, I, I

01:28:42.320 could be wrong, but of course the problem is, yeah, I'm, I'm totally opposed to, to drafting women for

01:28:46.880 the reasons that you, that, that you gave. This is the whole point of, of, of having men fight is to

01:28:51.320 protect the women and children. Um, but then there's also that sort of that, this, you got to say to

01:28:57.400 feminists, this is what you wanted. This is what you called for the gander here, right? You, you,

01:29:01.340 you said that, uh, you, you're saying there's no difference between the two sexes and it's not

01:29:05.900 just feminists saying that the whole left, no, no real significant difference. We can have men

01:29:10.280 competing against women and track, track and field and wrestling, and it's not a big deal.

01:29:14.140 Um, and so this is this, you should be celebrating this. You should be throwing a parade celebrating

01:29:19.180 this because it's such a profound statement of gender equality. Candace, I'm not going to ask you

01:29:22.420 your opinion because I get so tired of people saying, well, you didn't get the woman's opinion

01:29:27.100 about an absolute moral issue. Like, what are you talking about? This is the absolute moral issue

01:29:32.460 is kind of it because what you always hear from the left, they always say, they're like, well,

01:29:36.580 you know, but actually some study that I did actually shows that women with a certain kind

01:29:40.860 of hormone, they actually are just as strong as, and it's like, first of all, that isn't true.

01:29:44.600 But second of all, second of all, that's not the point. The point is it's wrong. It's ugly. It's

01:29:50.340 not right. It's not just to send women to go die in combat to protect. It's just because

01:29:56.940 men and women are different. If there were, if there were a truly existential, like in the real

01:30:01.240 meaning of existential threat where, and this has happened at various times in various places where

01:30:06.780 women have had to take up arms because of, because of the severity of, you know, I watched this Chris

01:30:12.100 Pratt film because I absolutely love Chris Pratt. Uh, and it was like a $200 million movie on

01:30:17.300 tomorrow work. God, it was terrible. It just was awful. I wanted it to be good because it's got

01:30:23.900 everything. Chris Pratt, aliens, Chris Pratt, time travel, Chris Pratt. Uh, but it, it wasn't great.

01:30:30.020 Um, but one of the things that offended me about the film is actually that, so these, these soldiers

01:30:35.280 come from the future and they say, we're your sons and daughters, you know, 20, 30 years on. Uh,

01:30:40.740 and this alien force has invaded and it's what humanity's down to 500,000 people. And we have to ask you,

01:30:46.100 you are fathers and mothers to come forward, uh, to save your progeny. Basically, we need you to

01:30:51.160 come forward through time to be soldiers in this existential war that we're in. And then the next

01:30:56.380 scene is like this montage of things that happened very quickly over the next couple of years and the

01:31:00.320 peoples of the world mobilize. And you see like, uh, Taliban warlords, you know, going through the

01:31:05.960 time portal and you see, uh, you know, like people from the people down in the Amazon who've been

01:31:11.140 untouched and never met any, uh, outside human. They go through the time machine to fight for the

01:31:15.260 future. And you see Americans go through and fight for the future. Women, uh, women and men go

01:31:19.180 through and fight for the future. And I thought it's such a bull crap concept to think that if

01:31:25.740 soldiers came through a wormhole and said, we need you to come save us in the future, that the

01:31:30.780 Taliban would sign up for it. Like there, there's this thing that, that Hollywood does. And it's part

01:31:37.240 of this whole corruption that we'd started with the Simone Bills conversation tonight, the entire

01:31:40.840 corruption of our society that ultimately results in you making women register for the draft is the

01:31:46.480 one that says everyone everywhere is the same. And deep down, if we, if we all knew there was a

01:31:51.900 problem, we'd all band together and we'd all, what you're basically doing is you're taking Western

01:31:56.200 values and you are super imposing them on people who do not claim them. I mean, to your point earlier,

01:32:04.660 like Simone Biles told us why she didn't do it. Don't, you can't take what would have caused you to have

01:32:10.320 not. People are making all these, you know, this is because of the sexual abuses that were taking

01:32:14.700 place in gymnastics, uh, over the last several decades. She didn't say that you can't, it's

01:32:19.920 after nine 11 when people would say, well, you know, I mean, Osama bin Laden just wants to be

01:32:23.580 able to raise his children in peace. No, that's your values. And in this instance, in a weird way,

01:32:30.260 and I agree that feminists earned it, they, they asked for it and now they've received it. But

01:32:33.760 essentially what they're saying is the values of men should be superimposed onto women.

01:32:39.300 And that is fundamentally corrupting because this will be my controversial statement for

01:32:44.760 the night because discrimination is neither good nor bad. Discrimination like science is

01:32:52.360 simply a judgment. Judgment can be used for good and the judgment can be used for evil. If

01:33:01.100 you, if you, if you, if you make a discrimination in which you say a black man cannot eat at the,

01:33:06.040 at the same counter, yeah, at the lunch counter, you have used a valuable tool,

01:33:11.260 discrimination for a evil purpose. If you say women should not be going into combat roles and

01:33:18.280 murdering people overseas, you have used discrimination, that same tool for a very good

01:33:23.260 and noble purpose. I think, I think any person, any person who has formerly, formerly believes a

01:33:27.820 woman who formerly believes that there are no differences between men and women should be

01:33:30.540 drafted. I really do call it controversial, but there's enough out there. Go ahead, Lena Dunham,

01:33:36.040 you know, do your thing. You know, I'm totally okay with that. I've been so, I don't want them

01:33:40.180 actually fighting. I think that the feminists should, yeah. I mean, I think I should have asked

01:33:44.740 the woman her opinion. I think they should, they should have to go. It shouldn't be all women.

01:33:49.940 I've acknowledged biological differences. You know, we acknowledge biological differences. Why not?

01:33:53.740 I think that's the best way for people to, to come up against the truth. I say, send them all,

01:33:57.660 Lena Dunham, Taylor Swift. I'd love to see it. Can we just draft them for a mission to Mars

01:34:02.740 instead of something? Send them off the planet? Why not? Last question. How do people not see

01:34:07.880 that all those Cubans who risked their lives to escape actively vote against the progressive

01:34:12.640 Democrats? And by the way, this is true for people from Eastern European countries who fled here in the

01:34:18.160 60s, 70s, and 80s as well. Has it really never occurred to people why all those who, who escaped from

01:34:25.240 communism, now lean toward conservatism? Um, those are bad, those are bad Latinos.

01:34:31.080 You should understand. Those are the bad Latinos. That's right.

01:34:32.780 I mean, that's the ones that Biden administration's actually going to stop from coming.

01:34:35.600 The ones that actually... You swim here, you're going back.

01:34:37.340 Dallas needs to go back to Cuba. Yeah. Really, really important. If you're, if you're crossing

01:34:40.320 the, the southern border and you come from a country where the Democrats perceive you to...

01:34:43.620 Come on in. ...sharing their values, then you should come on in and bring your COVID with you.

01:34:47.080 Yeah. And if you are, and if you are a Cuban refugee attempting to escape actual overt tyranny,

01:34:52.120 then, uh, then you are a bad... So well said, Ben. So well said. It's really, it's, I mean,

01:34:56.720 it's, I'm sorry, it's, it's, it's, it's so absurd, but it does go back to the point that you were

01:35:00.200 making, Jeremy, which is that we are so America-centric in this country. First of all, America is such an

01:35:05.140 amazingly broad country and a big country that very few Americans have actually spent any serious

01:35:08.640 time abroad. Or in America. That's true. Right, or, right, exactly. Or outside of California or New York.

01:35:13.500 But they, but it really is more about, they've never spent any time in an impoverished country

01:35:17.580 or in a country that doesn't share our values. And so they tend to think, okay, everybody shares

01:35:21.200 our values. And so when somebody comes from one of those countries and then they mirror

01:35:25.620 the sort of Republican values, conservative values, they go, well, they're an outlier.

01:35:29.960 There's something wrong with them. They don't understand that true communism has never really

01:35:33.120 been tried. It's like, well, I've noticed a fact about the vast majority of communists who live

01:35:37.540 in the United States. None of them come from communist countries, right? It's very pleasant to be a

01:35:41.160 communist in a capitalist country. It's very unpleasant to be a capitalist in a communist

01:35:44.280 country. And so the complete failure of our education system to even teach about flaws

01:35:50.080 everywhere else. This is one of the things, I mean, this really ties together a lot of things.

01:35:52.780 It ties together the Olympics as well. The insanity of people from America kneeling for the national

01:35:58.100 anthem or protesting the national anthem in front of the Iranians and in front of the Chinese

01:36:01.820 government and in front of some of the worst regimes on the planet. And the State Department of the

01:36:06.980 United States, by the way, saying that we should empower people at the U.S. embassies around the

01:36:10.340 world to explain to foreign countries all the flaws that are inherent in the U.S. system,

01:36:14.500 like the Saudis or to the Pakistanis. The utter madness and navel-gazing narcissism of our country

01:36:21.900 is what's destroying it. It's that we're too focused on ourselves. It's not-

01:36:26.680 It's a lack of education. In some cases, it's not even narcissism, right? So what you're talking about

01:36:29.520 is the majority of students can't point out the 50 states, right? If you told them, hey, could you

01:36:33.440 just give me a general area of where you think Nebraska is? They're going downward, you know,

01:36:37.860 to the left. They have no idea. And it goes back to what I was saying earlier about Bill Gates,

01:36:42.020 who's funding this initiative to equitable math. So that getting the wrong answer, you get an

01:36:45.960 applause, you still get correct because it's white supremacy to get the right answer, you know? So

01:36:49.080 that Marxism that we're talking about, seeping through the education system is what's leading

01:36:52.100 to this because they're absent any facts. They've never left their country. Many of them haven't even

01:36:56.600 left their states. It's very rare people have been to three states, yet alone to talk about going into

01:37:00.980 another country. And America is, unfortunately, it's one of the only countries, or very few countries,

01:37:06.440 or you can be in a plane for six hours and still be in your same country. You're allowed to be

01:37:09.860 ignorant and travel. Before we leave, I just have to, this went off the subject for a minute.

01:37:14.740 Our pal, Steve Crowder, who makes the best astrays in the country, is in the hospital fighting for

01:37:20.700 his life. And he's really come close. He's come close to the dark edge of things. And I just want to

01:37:28.260 say that crazy as he is, we love him and we're thinking about him. We hope he makes it back.

01:37:33.620 You're a better man than I am. Well, that's true. I was actually just looking forward to the show

01:37:38.360 being over so that I could text him and say, you know, hope you don't make it, pal. You know, actually,

01:37:43.920 this is a real story. Last night, I had to go for a drive because I, long story, but I had to burn

01:37:48.380 down gas to take my car into the shop. And so I was going to smoke a cigar and, you know, I was going

01:37:52.440 to say my nightly prayers. I thought, oh, you know, I should probably pray for Crowder, you know,

01:37:55.920 because he's in this. I thought, oh, well, you know what's great? I'm going to light up one of the

01:37:58.720 cigars that Crowder sent me. And Crowder, this guy who's a complete maniac, he sent me these

01:38:03.720 beautiful cigars. And I was like, oh, pal, I'm going to send you some cigars right away from

01:38:06.500 my humidor. Haven't sent him a single thing, you know, but that guy, he, you know, really a

01:38:11.200 generous, generous fellow. I actually got enough credit. I actually did text him and say that we

01:38:15.620 were praying for him at great risk to our souls. And if he dies, I personally will kill him.

01:38:22.000 You know, the last thought, Ben, on what you were saying, I've had the opportunity to travel in the

01:38:29.580 third world, in developing nations and in the third world, in Cuba in particular, in Africa in

01:38:36.780 particular, in Latin America in particular, and always in group settings. Like, you know, I traveled

01:38:44.340 in Africa and the Middle East with actors from Hollywood. I traveled in Cuba, Michael and I,

01:38:49.640 and encountered a lot of Americans, you know, on the various stops that we'd make on that trip and

01:38:54.680 would engage with them. Every time I've been in the third world and engaged with Westerners in that

01:39:00.620 setting, there are two polar opposite reactions. You either look at the abject poverty, the abject

01:39:10.520 despair all around you and think, my God, what have we done to these people? Or you look at it and say,

01:39:19.640 my God, what have these failed systems done to these people? And if you're standing in the

01:39:25.780 literal pile of trash that is Djibouti Africa, I mean, as far as you can see, it is like a landfill

01:39:33.920 from horizon to horizon created by the French, a landfill and people living in it. If you look at that

01:39:42.240 and think, the history of slavery, you've missed the entire point. Of course, slavery, what you

01:39:51.060 should be seeing when you look at this kind of poverty, when you see the kind of poverty that

01:39:54.760 exists, people staring down at their shoes, people in, like our driver in Cuba wasn't allowed to go

01:39:59.760 in the hotels with us because they don't want the people to actually see what exists past the

01:40:04.360 sliding glass doors. It's not for Cubans. It is not for Cubans. What you should see when you see all of

01:40:09.500 that is the beauty of what we've created in the West, flawed as it is, the beauty of what capitalism

01:40:15.760 has created, flawed though it may be, the beauty of what Christianity has created on a civilizational

01:40:21.620 scale, flawed though Christians mightily are. It is a kind of hubris to look at the suffering that

01:40:30.080 exists in the third world and think that it's because of you. It isn't because of you. It's because

01:40:35.820 of these systems. And the people in those settings have no power to overthrow them. And what we're

01:40:41.500 seeing in Cuba right now, they're not just winners in their heart. They are probably losers. But by God,

01:40:48.220 they're brave. They are actually doing something that puts them in actual jeopardy. And they will

01:40:55.080 probably fail. And like Stephen Crowder, they're worthy of our prayers. Thank you everybody for

01:41:03.160 tuning in with us tonight. As always, we're very happy that you've joined us. If you'd like to become

01:41:07.460 a member, we would sure love to have you. You'd be supporting not only the shows that we do, this one

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01:42:23.180 new book, which released only yesterday and I think is as good as anything, Ben, that you've ever

01:42:29.200 written. And certainly about the moment in which we live right now, it's too bad that Mark Levin

01:42:34.080 beat you to publication by two weeks.

01:42:38.860 That book, my God, unbelievable for him.

01:42:42.100 You can pick it up anywhere that books are sold and you can get a signed copy for just $30 over

01:42:47.780 at dailywire.com slash Ben. Thank you again for joining us. We'll see you guys right back here next

01:42:52.480 month.

01:42:59.500 Daily Wire Backstage is produced by Mathis Glover. Executive producer is me, Jeremy Boring. Our technical

01:43:05.120 director is Austin Stevens. Our production manager is Pavel Wadowski. Studio and equipment management

01:43:10.560 is by Patrick Kennedy. And broadcast engineering is by Mark Herman. Editing is by Jim Nickel. Audio is

01:43:16.540 mixed by Mike Coromina. And our audio assistant is Israel McFarlane. Playback is operated by McKenna

01:43:21.880 Waters. Hair and makeup by Nika Geneva. Daily Wire Backstage is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2021.

The Michael Knowles Show - July 28, 2021

Daily Wire Backstage： The Commies Are At It Again

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