The Michael Knowles Show - Daily Wire Backstage： WE DO NOT COMPLY

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00:00:56.980 A lot of people want to keep pouring around.

00:00:59.020 That's not good.

00:00:59.820 Don't do that.

00:01:00.820 Listen to Why We're Right.

00:01:01.680 Take a listen.

00:01:02.860 Welcome to the DAILYWIRE backstage, We Do Not Comply edition.

00:01:06.640 I'm Jeremy Boring.

00:01:07.480 Known around here as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, and we're glad you've tuned in.

00:01:12.500 It got weird.

00:01:31.620 Will President Biden's call for a vaccine mandate finally wake people up to the tyrannical leanings

00:01:36.200 of this radical leftist administration?

00:01:37.680 Does the Texas heartbeat law mean we may see an end to Roe v. Wade in the near future?

00:01:42.360 Is it too soon to count on the GOP winning big in 2022 as the Dems continue to author

00:01:47.180 disaster after disaster?

00:01:49.540 None of that was funny.

00:01:50.860 Joining me to discuss all of this and more is the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, the

00:01:54.540 Matt Walsh, and the Michael Knowles.

00:01:56.720 For tonight's show, DAILYWIRE members can ask questions in the chat box at dailywire.com,

00:02:01.000 and we will be answering them throughout the night.

00:02:03.280 So please head over and subscribe.

00:02:04.660 Joe Biden announced last week that he's weaponizing the federal agency OSHA to force all companies

00:02:10.040 with over 100 employees to either mandate vaccines or test their employees for COVID

00:02:14.880 at least once per week.

00:02:16.340 I think it goes without saying that this is one of the most tyrannical overreaches of

00:02:19.800 government power Americans have seen in my lifetime, and here at The Daily Wire, we plan

00:02:23.820 to fight it.

00:02:24.620 As we prepare for a battle of epic proportions, we're calling on you to help us fight this

00:02:28.800 obscene and tyrannical mandate. 0.64

00:02:29.960 If you will join us at dailywire.com right now by becoming a member, you'll be giving

00:02:34.800 us the resources that we need to take this all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary.

00:02:38.680 I really feel like if I say take it to the Supreme Court, the light should flash.

00:02:43.200 Head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the promo code DO NOT COMPLY, because

00:02:48.720 we won't be.

00:02:49.820 You'll get 25% off.

00:02:51.240 Americans have been putting up with this crap, ceding freedom after freedom to this authoritarian

00:02:55.680 bureaucracy in the name of public health for long enough.

00:02:58.740 So please, stand with us at The Daily Wire, and perhaps most importantly, help us stand

00:03:02.560 for the rights of all American citizens.

00:03:04.740 I mean, there's a good self-promotion there, but this is like the big story, probably in

00:03:10.240 politics of maybe in my lifetime, is this overreach by the president.

00:03:14.200 It's been building.

00:03:15.360 I mean, even under Trump, the response of our government to the pandemic has been so overwrought

00:03:23.200 and has just at every turn...

00:03:25.280 And the use of administrative agencies to do it, right?

00:03:26.820 The use of administrative agencies to overwrought.

00:03:28.840 The CDC giving eviction moratoriums started under Trump.

00:03:30.780 That's right.

00:03:31.400 Right?

00:03:31.640 But this is the third straight president who said, I don't have the constitutional ability

00:03:35.240 to do this.

00:03:35.900 And then I'm just going to do it, right?

00:03:37.540 We had that with DACA.

00:03:38.600 We had this with the CDC.

00:03:40.000 And now we've had it with Biden several times in the past couple of weeks.

00:03:42.760 That's right.

00:03:42.980 He's just accelerating the pace.

00:03:44.140 So he said, the Supreme Court said you're not allowed to do that with the CDC.

00:03:46.860 And then he's like, well, I agree.

00:03:48.120 And then five seconds later, he turned around and tried to do it again with the CDC and the

00:03:51.180 eviction moratorium.

00:03:51.780 Here he said a bajillion times that you are not allowed to use the federal government to

00:03:56.700 cram down a vaccine mandate.

00:03:58.120 But then his patients began to wear thin.

00:04:00.580 His patients began to wear thin.

00:04:01.280 Yes.

00:04:01.660 This is the part that's so unbelievably tyrannical about all of this is, who the hell are you?

00:04:07.420 Your patients with me is wearing thin?

00:04:09.920 I pay your salary.

00:04:11.700 I mean, he is my employee.

00:04:13.940 This notion that his patients with me is wearing thin, he's not my father.

00:04:17.680 He doesn't get to tell...

00:04:18.340 He's not my wife. 0.76

00:04:18.960 He doesn't get to tell me that his patients is wearing thin with the American people.

00:04:23.440 And the thing about this, again, is I've said this a thousand times.

00:04:26.360 This has nothing to do with whether you're pro or anti-vaccine.

00:04:28.560 This has to do with whether you are pro or anti-liberty, right?

00:04:31.780 The question is not...

00:04:33.040 Like, I am as pro-vaccine as it is possible for a human to be.

00:04:36.580 I've made this clear over and over and over.

00:04:38.160 I've been pro-vaccine since before.

00:04:39.160 It was cool to be pro-vaccines.

00:04:40.100 And the fact that this president of the United States is using an OSHA rule, a vaguely worded OSHA delegation of power, in order to cram down an emergency temporary decree on 100 million Americans.

00:04:53.460 Let's be real about this.

00:04:54.880 It really is not even about the employers.

00:04:56.300 It's about the employees.

00:04:57.180 Because he's going after us as a proxy for going after our employees.

00:05:00.740 If we refuse to...

00:05:01.880 If our employees won't take the test and don't want to get vaccinated, we have to fire them.

00:05:06.780 Well, he's found a loophole around the fact that he doesn't have the power as president to force the citizenry to become vaccinated.

00:05:16.040 As he admitted.

00:05:16.840 But he may have the power to force us to force the citizenry to be vaccinated.

00:05:21.780 And it's not about our freedom.

00:05:22.800 Here's the president.

00:05:23.740 This is not about freedom or personal choice.

00:05:27.620 It's about protecting yourself and those around you.

00:05:31.620 The people you work with.

00:05:33.400 The people you care about.

00:05:34.780 The people you love.

00:05:37.420 My job as president is to protect all Americans.

00:05:41.680 So tonight...

00:05:44.460 Unbelievable.

00:05:45.160 His job as president is to protect all Americans.

00:05:48.200 This protecting people thing.

00:05:49.820 I thought the vaccine is what's supposed to protect you.

00:05:53.000 Correct.

00:05:53.620 This is the contradiction that no one has ever been able to satisfactorily answer.

00:05:57.920 If the vaccine works, then you don't need to force it on anybody else to protect yourself.

00:06:02.460 And the message seems to be from the COVID cult that, well, you need to get the vaccine to protect me because I got the vaccine and I don't trust it to protect me.

00:06:15.100 And so there's a real disconnect there, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

00:06:19.000 He said in the same speech, those two things simultaneously.

00:06:21.780 The thing that drives me crazy, the thing that is so frustrating to me about this is that it's all openly a joke.

00:06:26.560 We've got thousands of guys pouring across the border completely unvaccinated.

00:06:30.960 We, every time, it was either Knowles or AOC at that Met Gala the other night.

00:06:34.920 It was one of us.

00:06:35.740 I couldn't tell the difference.

00:06:37.320 I mean, I think because her backside was kind of nice, I don't think it was you.

00:06:40.780 But I was staring at the back of her dress and then somebody told me there's something written on it and I missed it.

00:06:47.100 But here's the thing.

00:06:50.060 Only the help, only the help is masked.

00:06:52.780 The rich people aren't.

00:06:53.760 And we've seen Gavin Newsom do this at the French Laundry, go out with his friends in this kind of small gathering.

00:06:59.960 And the thing is that when you come to Tennessee, when you go to Florida, you're in another world.

00:07:06.920 I had to go to California for two days.

00:07:09.280 It was like being in an alternate reality.

00:07:11.500 The fact that people have bought into what is clearly, clearly a joke, is clearly no longer serious, is amazing to me.

00:07:18.400 This is the next part of what Matt's talking about, which is if the vaccines really work and they're super-duper effective, then you don't need to worry about the unvaccinated people.

00:07:28.060 But furthermore, if the virus is really the deadliest plague we've ever dealt with, people would probably be all clamoring to get the vaccine, right?

00:07:36.900 You wouldn't have such high rates of people who are vaccinated.

00:07:38.500 So I actually see it a little bit different.

00:07:39.720 I don't think that it's contradictory.

00:07:41.140 I don't think that there's inherent contradiction in saying, as the president said, we have to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.

00:07:48.440 You see that as contradictory because you're judging it on the merits of the actual words having actual meaning.

00:07:53.920 But they don't.

00:07:54.940 Silly you.

00:07:55.580 He's speaking politics.

00:07:57.360 And politics in the 21st century is only a game of turning out the base.

00:08:01.680 Yeah.

00:08:02.380 The president's poll numbers are collapsing because of the absolute travesty that is his withdrawal from Afghanistan.

00:08:08.160 And his own base is starting to question whether or not he's a successful president.

00:08:13.140 And what he's saying to them is, you, hardcore left, are very worried about COVID.

00:08:19.720 You're very concerned that COVID is a threat.

00:08:22.680 You mask your children outside in summer when they're alone.

00:08:26.000 I want you to know that I am going to protect you from these Republicans who are literally disease-ridden, walking pustules of death.

00:08:36.720 And you have to vote like your life depends on it.

00:08:39.980 And those people who are all already vaccinated because they're, to Ben's point, very worried about the disease, they hear that message and go, yes, please, please protect me from the unwashed Republicans.

00:08:49.320 And this is the Pelosi strategy.

00:08:50.880 Pelosi's strategy has been to win every other election, every other election cycle.

00:08:55.500 What she does is she runs these blue dog Democrats. 1.00

00:08:57.920 They go into fairly conservative areas and they win.

00:09:01.180 Then she sacrifices them by forcing them to vote for her left-wing policies. 1.00

00:09:05.160 Then they're gone.

00:09:05.860 She loses the majority.

00:09:06.980 She waits because she knows the ratchet only goes one way.

00:09:09.560 Once a government acquires power, it never loses it.

00:09:11.420 So she doesn't have to win every time.

00:09:13.200 So two things.

00:09:13.760 One, we definitely need to start a garage band called disease-ridden, walking pustules of death.

00:09:17.740 So there's just no question.

00:09:19.380 I thought that was a personal reference to me.

00:09:20.860 Yeah, but the second thing is that the intent here, I think, is not just to mobilize the base.

00:09:28.700 It's to shift blame away from his own failures because he keeps saying that the economy is not recovering because of Delta.

00:09:34.000 This is not true.

00:09:34.940 The economy is not recovering in blue areas because blue area Democrats have decided to legislate that the economy not recover.

00:09:41.120 The way that I know this is that the top ten states in terms of the best unemployment rates in the nation are all red with the exception of Vermont, 0.65

00:09:46.660 which has seven people and a cow, the bottom ten states in terms of unemployment rate, in terms of the worst unemployment rate, are all blue.

00:09:53.760 And the reason for that is not because of the vast death that is occurring in New York.

00:09:57.580 New York is one of those states.

00:09:59.120 Or New Jersey.

00:10:00.080 Those are states that are not experiencing a current massive COVID wave.

00:10:03.220 The reason that that's happening is because people in those states have decided that they want to lock down forever.

00:10:07.080 There's a pagan worship of government that has now taken place.

00:10:09.440 Joe Biden made a promise.

00:10:10.300 The promise is that if you give up all of your liberty and if you give up all of your freedoms and if you give up all control to him, he will protect you literally from everything.

00:10:17.360 He'll protect you from death.

00:10:18.400 He'll protect you from impoverishment.

00:10:20.860 And all you have to do is just climb in that bathtub.

00:10:23.140 I mean, I wrote a column this week called The Wally Strategy because that's what this is.

00:10:26.920 I mean, they're literally just going to push you into a lazy boy and then they're going to put a screen in front of your face and they're going to keep you there for the rest of your life.

00:10:35.000 And this is the promise.

00:10:36.120 That's not the threat.

00:10:36.680 That's the promise.

00:10:37.460 And for a lot of people, that promise is actually good.

00:10:40.880 Right.

00:10:41.040 You will protect me from death.

00:10:42.280 He made that promise last year, by the way.

00:10:43.740 Right.

00:10:43.860 He said, I won't shut down the economy.

00:10:45.460 I won't shut down the country.

00:10:47.000 I will shut down the virus.

00:10:48.420 How?

00:10:49.820 How?

00:10:50.380 You won't.

00:10:50.940 That is not a no human being is capable of, quote unquote, shutting down the virus.

00:10:54.800 That's not a thing that can happen.

00:10:56.180 And so when he inevitably came up short, his next move was it's not my fault that the virus wasn't shut down.

00:11:00.780 It's all these guys.

00:11:01.720 So you need to turn on your neighbor.

00:11:02.800 And then that jackass has the capacity to go on national.

00:11:05.540 He finished that speech with an appeal to unity after saying that everybody who is unvaccinated, including, by the way, everybody with natural immunity.

00:11:12.440 I know that we're all supposed to pretend natural immunity doesn't exist, despite the fact that it is multiple times more durable than vaccine immunity.

00:11:18.280 But all those people, according to him, are bad and morally benighted.

00:11:22.280 And the only thing that we have to do is target them and yell at them and presumably and target their employment.

00:11:28.540 And that will force them to get vaccinated, which totally is not going to happen.

00:11:31.600 It's not about getting people vaccinated.

00:11:33.060 It's not about making the world a better place.

00:11:34.580 It is purely and simply about he does not want the blame for the promises he can never fulfill.

00:11:38.500 And the only solution is give him more power.

00:11:39.920 I don't want the blame when big tech uses your data to target you.

00:11:44.040 Whoa, whoa, dude.

00:11:46.280 See, I'm just getting better and better.

00:11:48.280 Big tech is more powerful than most countries are at this point, and they profit by exploiting your personal data.

00:11:53.140 It's time to put a layer of protection between your online activity and these tech conglomerates.

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00:13:13.880 So it's not just that the president is seizing all of this power over workers.

00:13:17.960 And we're going to talk a little bit more about our response here at the Daily Wire to that.

00:13:21.720 But Matt, something you've been great on is the impact that this is having on school kids.

00:13:25.760 Listen to a story today about schools in New York.

00:13:27.920 They're open for the first time after more than a year of being shut down.

00:13:32.400 And not only do kids have to wear masks inside, kids who are at almost virtually, not no, but virtually no risk of severe illness from COVID.

00:13:43.380 But they have to eat lunch outside.

00:13:46.000 They have to not face each other when they eat.

00:13:48.020 They have to not talk to one another.

00:13:49.680 And if it's raining, then there's no lunch at all, you know, because you've got to eat lunch outside.

00:13:55.340 And during recess, they can have physical activity, but they can't come within six feet of each other.

00:14:01.500 So no kinds of activity that involve, you know, participation with other kids.

00:14:05.960 They actually have outlawed any activity that would cause.

00:14:09.700 There is exact phrasing in the handbook or in the guidelines.

00:14:13.400 I want to say it's excessive breathing.

00:14:14.960 So they don't want excessive breathing.

00:14:17.680 There was someone on CNN that was referring to, there was a doctor on CNN a couple days ago talking about fans at a football game.

00:14:24.040 And he accused them of breathing with gusto or something like that.

00:14:27.680 Breathing with vigor was what he said.

00:14:29.140 So we've got to make sure that maybe for kids in school we could have a, you know.

00:14:32.920 Does vigor mean life?

00:14:34.580 Something like that.

00:14:35.280 Breathing with life.

00:14:36.060 Maybe kids in school will say, look, you can take 10,000 breaths and that's your limit.

00:14:41.100 You go over that and you're suspended.

00:14:42.580 I don't know.

00:14:43.380 I think a lot of it, when we're talking about schools or what the government is doing, a lot of it is they want power and everything that we've talked about.

00:14:52.220 But I also think there's something simpler.

00:14:54.040 And it's a disease that we've seen in government for decades now, which is this mentality that someone just has to do something.

00:15:01.600 Yep.

00:15:02.000 And it's this someone do something mentality.

00:15:04.560 It's kind of like any time there's a tragedy or there's a high-profile murder, then we pass a law with that person's name on it.

00:15:11.360 And here's that person's law.

00:15:13.140 And it's always a law that was unnecessary because this stuff was already illegal.

00:15:17.000 Wouldn't have stopped the crime.

00:15:18.080 Wouldn't have stopped the crime.

00:15:18.780 But it's just let's do something.

00:15:20.760 And so everywhere you go now, I mean, I've been traveling the last couple weeks in a few different cities.

00:15:25.440 I was in New York most recently, which is just an absolute hellscape.

00:15:28.380 But everywhere you go there in New York now, it's just every place you walk into, they're doing something in response to the virus.

00:15:37.180 None of it makes any sense.

00:15:38.260 There's no reason to be doing almost any of it.

00:15:40.520 But at least it's something.

00:15:41.460 And one other thing I want to mention in the schools in New York, there's a video of what they call the COVID buster team.

00:15:49.300 And they're walking through the classrooms before kids show up, spraying some kind of chemical into the air, which what is that supposed to do?

00:15:57.840 But nothing.

00:15:58.500 But it's something anyway.

00:15:59.820 And it makes us feel safer.

00:16:00.980 No, you're exactly right.

00:16:01.640 And when you talk to folks who are in favor of these sorts of measures and you say to them, there's no data to back this.

00:16:07.100 I mean, we actually cite data.

00:16:08.500 They get angry at you for citing the data.

00:16:10.580 So if you point out that there is not a single study that shows that masking school children is an effective tactic, like not one.

00:16:16.860 And in fact, the single largest study was a study done in Georgia.

00:16:18.880 It was a 90,000 student study.

00:16:20.500 And it found that there were lower levels of transmission when teachers wore masks because adults are still transmitting it.

00:16:25.240 But then when school children up to the age of 12 are in school, they actually buried the result.

00:16:30.160 They wouldn't print the result.

00:16:31.840 They filed worded is what it's called.

00:16:33.960 There is no difference between masking and unmasking for kids of that age group.

00:16:38.280 When you say this to people, you say, well, then you really shouldn't mask kids.

00:16:40.920 They'll say, oh, yes, but what if one of the kids gets sick and they're not masked?

00:16:44.460 And you say, well, then the same exact thing as if they were masked because I just gave you the data.

00:16:48.760 And they'll say, yes, yes, yes.

00:16:49.460 But then they don't have masks on.

00:16:51.600 They'll be like, right.

00:16:52.520 But the data says that that makes no difference for children because children don't know how to wear masks because cotton masks aren't doing damn bit of difference for little kids and all the rest of it.

00:17:00.000 And they just they can't let go of it.

00:17:01.820 Because, again, the idea is that if something bad should happen, I think this is really what it comes down to for a lot of the decision makers.

00:17:06.600 Yeah. And this has been the incentive structure all along.

00:17:09.220 If something bad happens, you need to be able to say to somebody else that you did the thing.

00:17:14.660 Yeah. Right. It doesn't matter if the thing was useful.

00:17:16.540 I sacrificed the chicken right this morning.

00:17:18.420 I sacrificed the chicken.

00:17:19.340 And yet the covid got the kid.

00:17:20.620 But I sacrificed the chicken because I sacrificed the chicken.

00:17:23.580 And you can't tell me I didn't try to propitiate the covid gods.

00:17:25.880 I did. I tried to do it.

00:17:27.500 You're really speaking to something important.

00:17:29.200 It is a kind of paganism.

00:17:31.060 A hundred percent. We live in a new paganistic age and paganism is sort of like science but without controls. 0.78

00:17:37.460 Right. Which is exactly what we're seeing.

00:17:39.360 They say trust the science.

00:17:40.720 But, of course, science has controls.

00:17:42.420 Increasingly, science is also science without the controls.

00:17:44.660 Right. Yeah.

00:17:45.220 But what they mean when they say science is really just anecdotal data sets.

00:17:50.740 And we have we have rituals that we engage in in the pagan cult of science.

00:17:54.040 We have the secular keffia that we put on our mouth now.

00:17:56.240 And, you know, speaking of New York, this does remind me I was just in New York about a week and a half ago.

00:18:02.040 We can do something, too.

00:18:04.080 You know that we always have to do something.

00:18:05.700 We've got to pass a law.

00:18:06.280 We can do something, too.

00:18:07.300 If you get on the subway now, it is so creepy.

00:18:09.940 Signs everywhere.

00:18:10.600 Wear the mask.

00:18:11.200 Pull it up over your nose.

00:18:12.460 Not quite.

00:18:13.080 They come on the loudspeaker.

00:18:14.180 Don't breathe.

00:18:14.560 Don't do this.

00:18:15.040 And so I decided, you know what I'm going to do?

00:18:16.520 If I'm on a plane, they're going to make me wear the mask.

00:18:18.740 I won't be able to fly.

00:18:19.580 OK, that's a prudential judgment on the subway.

00:18:22.120 They're not going to do anything.

00:18:22.900 A lot of weird stuff happens on the subway.

00:18:24.320 OK, I've spent a lot of years in New York.

00:18:26.840 So I just wouldn't wear it.

00:18:27.800 And I wouldn't wear it on the trains.

00:18:29.160 And I wouldn't wear it on the subway.

00:18:30.180 And you know what people said to me?

00:18:31.580 Not so much as boo.

00:18:33.300 Me, too.

00:18:33.520 I've had the same experience.

00:18:34.420 If you just, in your own way, resist this stuff, it's important.

00:18:38.260 Because to Ben's point earlier, we've got multiple liberty battles here.

00:18:42.900 You've got the individual liberty battle.

00:18:44.580 That's obviously being taken away.

00:18:46.020 And you've got even the higher political liberty battle.

00:18:48.520 We're not allowed to have a say over the future of our country.

00:18:51.460 Because the administrative agencies and the public health priests are telling us what we have to do.

00:18:56.180 And now this is all going to be enforced by OSHA.

00:18:57.960 What's so crazy is, even the priests of public health, even the administrative agents, just a year ago were saying, that would be overreach.

00:19:06.420 That's right.

00:19:06.780 By the way, did you see that video of Fauci from 2019 talking about what you should do to prevent yourself from getting sick?

00:19:12.160 Did you see this video?

00:19:13.040 It's astonishing.

00:19:13.900 It's a video from 2019.

00:19:15.120 And he's Joe Rogan.

00:19:15.700 He says, the guy literally asked him from Bloomberg, he says, so should we be wearing masks to prevent ourselves from getting sick?

00:19:21.920 He says, no, you shouldn't do all that sort of paranoid stuff.

00:19:24.060 Why would you go into that paranoid stuff?

00:19:25.420 You need to eat healthy.

00:19:26.620 You need to exercise regularly.

00:19:29.320 I mean, like, he sounds exactly.

00:19:31.220 And by the way, if you want to know the reality about the public health establishment, all you have to understand is that one of the major complications from the very start of this thing was obesity.

00:19:41.800 Obesity was a major complicating factor when it came to COVID from the very beginning.

00:19:46.560 And one of the things the public health establishment should have said when there was no vaccine available was not just put on a mask.

00:19:51.400 It should have been get outside and exercise.

00:19:53.900 Right.

00:19:54.020 Get healthier.

00:19:54.700 Meanwhile, they were putting out magazine covers of fat women saying this is healthy. 0.51

00:19:59.700 I mean, you also get cancer at an amazing higher rate if you're obese.

00:20:04.760 You know, the other thing about this is there's no way to talk to anybody like a reasonable person.

00:20:09.100 You know, you and I both were on the vaccine train.

00:20:11.780 We both like vaccines.

00:20:13.060 And a reasonable person can say, well, vaccines are good, but mandates are bad.

00:20:17.140 And you could have that debate and somebody might say, well, mandates might be necessary.

00:20:20.260 But there's no debate.

00:20:21.320 There's no debate.

00:20:21.940 If you say that Dr. Fauci is suspect in terms of competence and honesty, which is just a fact, the guy is a suspect, you want to prove that he's absolutely honest and absolutely competent?

00:20:32.420 Go ahead.

00:20:33.460 But you can't do any of that.

00:20:34.880 You can't discuss it.

00:20:35.640 You've been knocked off social media.

00:20:36.640 Even in the nuance and in the conversation, you could go even further.

00:20:40.420 If you say, OK, I'm even willing to entertain some vaccine mandates.

00:20:43.400 Washington mandated it for the sort of inoculation for the troops.

00:20:46.280 You have mandates in schools.

00:20:47.360 But what Fauci is doing that's so dishonest is he's comparing COVID to smallpox and polio.

00:20:52.340 These are these are different diseases.

00:20:54.000 And what I think is really important for conservatives to take away from all of this is the government does not work the way we were told it does in Schoolhouse Rock.

00:21:04.460 You know, I'm a bill up on Capitol Hill.

00:21:06.280 That's not how it actually works.

00:21:07.980 What happens is some bureaucrat whose name you've never heard of writes a bunch of jargon on a sheet of paper and you don't even know the law was passed.

00:21:14.840 And they actually have power and they're actually forcing it on you now.

00:21:17.900 And the left knows this.

00:21:19.220 That's why the left is so good at mastering the administrative state.

00:21:22.420 But conservatives just never have done it.

00:21:24.740 It's like we bury our heads.

00:21:25.740 I will say that this is this is a failure going all the way back to Reagan.

00:21:29.020 Reagan came into office saying he's going to get rid of the DOE, get rid of the Department of Education.

00:21:32.680 He didn't do it.

00:21:33.580 Bush came in saying he's going to reign in the administrative state.

00:21:35.480 Instead, he added to it.

00:21:36.700 Trump came in saying that he's going to reign in the administrative state.

00:21:39.420 And they passed fewer regulations, but he certainly didn't dismantle it.

00:21:42.360 I'd like to pass a law.

00:21:43.580 I'd like to pass a law that no law can be above 3,000 words and no contract can be above 3,000.

00:21:48.880 I mean, when you sign those things.

00:21:49.940 That law is 5,000 words, right?

00:21:51.280 You're right, right.

00:21:52.420 But here's the real problem is that the Congress, the one thing that the founders never foresaw,

00:21:58.220 it was a form of, I think, human shortcoming that they really didn't see because it was not them.

00:22:04.000 And that was that human beings are not only ambitious, but sometimes they're ambitiously lazy.

00:22:09.980 That's what they didn't see.

00:22:11.200 They didn't see that.

00:22:12.020 They felt that what the competition over power would be was a bunch of people trying to grab power from one another.

00:22:16.820 And so the way that you reign that in is that you have those powers check one another.

00:22:20.420 What they didn't understand is that there might come a point where you would have a bunch of lazy ass hat legislators who decided to delegate all of their power to executive branch agencies simply so that they weren't answerable and so they could continue to pick up their checks.

00:22:33.600 Well, but in some ways, in some ways, we helped create this situation on the right because we came out against pork barrel spending.

00:22:40.780 This is a great point.

00:22:41.560 This was, you know, one of John McCain's big initiatives was to get rid of the earmarks because they're unseemly and they are unseemly.

00:22:48.620 They're disgusting.

00:22:49.280 They are disgusting.

00:22:50.060 They're immoral.

00:22:50.920 They are immoral.

00:22:51.840 This is where congressmen will get together behind closed doors and they'll promise each other things.

00:22:56.900 They'll be like, well, I'll support your crappy bill, but only if there's a bridge built in my district.

00:23:03.180 And you go, well, what do you want with that bridge in your district?

00:23:04.580 It doesn't even go anywhere.

00:23:05.340 And they're like, yeah, but my name will be on it.

00:23:06.740 And so I'll have taken, you know, $64 million worth of taxpayer money and you'll have the J.W. boring, middle name, didn't even start with the W, but bridge to nowhere.

00:23:17.940 And you're like, well, I need your vote.

00:23:19.220 So here's the money.

00:23:19.900 And it's so ugly, right?

00:23:21.480 They're taking the fruit of your labor and just spreading it around.

00:23:26.140 And so we were against it because we didn't like it.

00:23:28.780 But this is a version of conservatism that Michael talks about that I actually usually disagree with.

00:23:32.680 But it's a very practical kind of conservatism that you shouldn't change anything that is, even if it's not great, until you've really thought through the ramifications of it.

00:23:40.380 That pork barrel spending goes all the way back to the founding era.

00:23:43.760 And what pork barrel spending did is incented legislators to legislate. 0.99

00:23:48.560 Because it turns out that doing something, voting affirmatively for something is a risk when you're having to run for office every two or every six years.

00:23:57.640 Every time you take an action, that action can be held against you.

00:24:00.280 If you take no action, nothing can be held against you.

00:24:03.860 And so the only reason these people voted for 250 years was to get bridges named after themselves.

00:24:08.600 And as soon as we took away their ability to get something personally out of the act of legislating, they went, oh, well, then if I want job security, I should never vote on it.

00:24:18.940 Are they talking about bringing this back?

00:24:20.340 Aren't they talking about bringing this back?

00:24:20.800 They've been talking about it a little bit.

00:24:22.120 And, of course, there's a lot of blowback, particularly from the talk radio, right, which wants to be purist about this sort of stuff.

00:24:26.280 Which is why I always say, as part of that, right, I always say, like, you should listen to us when it comes to principle.

00:24:31.320 But when it comes to implementation, you listen to us so you know where the marker is planted, not where the marker is going to end up, right?

00:24:36.480 And don't forget, my job is very different from the job of a legislator who actually has to do the job.

00:24:40.380 That's kind of a different thing.

00:24:41.140 The reason this came up, too, was because we were defending John McCain, right?

00:24:45.200 John McCain was the nominee.

00:24:46.440 And John McCain was a big spender.

00:24:48.560 That guy didn't want to reform any entitlements or any aspect of the administrative state.

00:24:52.280 Frankly, he was probably trying to grow it.

00:24:53.740 And so we said, OK, well, we can't make the argument there.

00:24:56.420 Let's make it on pork barrel spending. 0.88

00:24:58.400 And we all went along with it.

00:24:59.340 But here's the truth.

00:25:00.460 OSHA was passed all the way back in the 70s, right?

00:25:02.120 So the rise of the administrative state.

00:25:03.660 But the administrative state has been rising, of course, all throughout the 20th century.

00:25:07.560 But the power that it's grabbed.

00:25:09.020 The radical rise is in the 60s.

00:25:09.360 No, if you look statistically, the radical rise of the administrative state didn't even happen during FDR as much as it did during the 60s.

00:25:15.480 I blame John McCain.

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00:26:46.380 You know, you take the boy out of Texas, but you can't take Texas out of the boy.

00:26:51.620 It's a deeply disquieting fact that we now live in essentially an elected dictatorship.

00:26:57.800 Yeah.

00:26:58.360 We have an elected monarch.

00:26:59.580 We elect him every four years.

00:27:00.760 And he comes in and he says some stuff.

00:27:02.620 And maybe the deep state helps him.

00:27:03.620 Maybe the deep state doesn't.

00:27:05.180 And that's pretty much it.

00:27:06.560 But do you think that he is really the ruler of the country?

00:27:11.880 Or is he just sort of this figurehead and it's the deep state or the agency?

00:27:15.420 When the deep state agrees with him, he's the ruler of the country.

00:27:17.420 When the deep state disagrees with him, no.

00:27:18.720 Then they're the ruler.

00:27:19.600 Right.

00:27:20.060 The reason I say that is because very often you'd see Trump try to formulate a policy.

00:27:24.460 And you'd see General Mark Milley apparently calls up the Chinese.

00:27:27.900 This is an unbelievable story, by the way.

00:27:29.640 You had the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling our enemies the Chinese.

00:27:32.940 And being like, if we're going to strike you, I will call you first.

00:27:35.300 So I trust the Chinese military more than I trust, you know, the Commander-in-Chief.

00:27:39.260 You may have that personal belief.

00:27:41.540 But let me just say, it's an act of treason to call up our enemies and say, I mean, aid and comfort to the enemy is literally you calling the enemy and being like, by the way, guys, if we decide that we're going to take you on, my first phone call is going to be to you.

00:27:54.200 You know what you can do in the chain of command?

00:27:55.620 You can refuse.

00:27:56.680 Yeah.

00:27:56.960 Right?

00:27:57.100 You're allowed to say, no, I'm not going to carry out that order.

00:27:59.000 You can do like Mattis and step down.

00:28:00.600 Right.

00:28:00.760 You can do plenty of stuff, right?

00:28:02.120 The problem we have is that our failed state and our failed elected officials and the bureaucratic state and our stateless businesses, stateless, you know, multi-country businesses, all have the same agenda.

00:28:18.760 And the Chinese have the same agenda, which is to control us and to spy on us. 1.00

00:28:22.700 And that's really, they're all doing the same thing.

00:28:24.900 And, you know, every single one of them.

00:28:26.440 And there's nobody left in power to say, you know what?

00:28:31.360 I mean, it's us.

00:28:32.320 It's all us.

00:28:32.980 This is it.

00:28:33.340 This is like the bunker, you know, the hidden bunker.

00:28:35.600 Well, you mean, you know what?

00:28:36.820 I think individuals should have their own choice.

00:28:38.540 Literally, that is true in the sense that the federal government was very involved in the development and growth of Google.

00:28:43.920 I mean, it basically bankrolled Google Maps just for one issue, and they obviously work with one another.

00:28:50.380 Google has a relationship with China.

00:28:52.400 All of these people are not only surveilling us and compromising, predicting where we're going, they're actually impelling behavior.

00:28:59.320 That's how sophisticated it is.

00:29:00.020 When they took the don't out of their slogan, don't be evil, I think we all should have been, there should have been an alarm for all of us.

00:29:04.140 So I don't like that rebranding.

00:29:05.460 I think that's another point about the vaccine mandate.

00:29:09.580 We talk about the alliance of big business with the government and with this vaccine mandate.

00:29:15.500 I think probably big businesses have no problem with the mandate because they can deal with it.

00:29:21.880 It actually takes the problem out of their hands.

00:29:24.540 This is something that small businesses will have to carry the burden for.

00:29:29.360 And that's something else that you notice when you talk about going around the country.

00:29:32.420 It's here in Nashville.

00:29:33.360 It's everywhere.

00:29:34.660 Everywhere you go, we've almost gotten used to it by now.

00:29:37.880 But there are just small businesses shut down everywhere.

00:29:40.460 And you talk to the locals in any town, whether it's a small town or a city, they'll tell you, oh, that place over there used to be a great place.

00:29:46.640 Shut down during COVID.

00:29:47.900 Never opened again.

00:29:48.600 Never will open again.

00:29:49.640 And meanwhile, Walmart, Amazon, you know, all the target.

00:29:52.700 It's fine because they can work with it.

00:29:53.820 They're doing great.

00:29:54.880 So this is a, we have never seen.

00:29:57.200 It's why big business has always been in favor of higher minimum wage.

00:29:59.940 That's right.

00:30:00.280 Because they're like, okay, we can pay the mom and pops.

00:30:02.980 And regulations too.

00:30:03.900 They can afford the regulations.

00:30:04.580 It's a conspiracy by, really is a conspiracy by the most powerful forces in our country to destroy small business.

00:30:11.440 And we've never seen anything like it.

00:30:12.640 Ron DeSantis did something along these lines.

00:30:15.740 Obviously a big fan of Governor DeSantis.

00:30:17.920 But you remember when the cruise line said, we're thinking about having cruises again, but everyone will have to wear masks.

00:30:23.800 And then Ron DeSantis said, no, if you're going to run a cruise out of the state of Florida, you by law cannot require people to wear masks.

00:30:30.280 And then the cruise lines for like exactly seven minutes were like, oh no, that's awful.

00:30:34.980 Please.

00:30:37.240 The cruise lines were thrilled because they know no one wants to go on a beautiful sunny Caribbean vacation wearing a diaper on their face.

00:30:44.880 But they were afraid of the liability of saying we're going to pack a ship with thousands of potential spreaders.

00:30:51.120 Right.

00:30:51.200 And what DeSantis did is he basically took the bullet for the cruise industry.

00:30:55.600 He said, well, the liability ultimately isn't on you because the state is actually forcing you to do what you want.

00:31:01.640 And in a way, that's what's happening here with big business.

00:31:03.640 A lot of these big companies, listen, at The Daily Wire, we took a few weeks and let our people work from home when this was first starting.

00:31:09.780 And we didn't know what COVID was going to be.

00:31:11.580 We very quickly came to realize that if we didn't ask our people to come back, we would lose the opportunity to ever ask them to come back. 0.97

00:31:19.620 And so even though it was in contravention of the executive orders from the mayor of the city of Los Angeles, we invited our people back.

00:31:26.620 And we didn't say you have to come back.

00:31:28.460 We said if you would like to come back, almost 90 percent of our workers were back in two days.

00:31:32.380 But these big businesses, they kept waiting and they kept waiting.

00:31:37.580 And, you know, 15 days to slow the spread turned into weeks, turned into 15 weeks, turned into 15 months.

00:31:42.640 I mean, here we are more than a year and a half into this.

00:31:44.800 People have moved.

00:31:45.440 People have changed, totally reordered their lives.

00:31:47.760 How do big businesses now get their employees to go back?

00:31:51.400 What can they point to that has changed?

00:31:53.580 How can they say, no, things are safer?

00:31:55.700 They missed every opportunity to say that you should incur some risk in life,

00:31:59.760 to say that something has happened that made the circumstances different.

00:32:03.180 And so now the only way that they can get people to come back to the office is to have the government say,

00:32:07.700 you can enforce these mandates.

00:32:09.340 And they can go, oh, these mandates are terrible.

00:32:11.620 We expect you to work on Tuesday and be vaccinated.

00:32:13.720 You know, it's really interesting.

00:32:14.960 When I was in Hollywood, the age of the star ended.

00:32:18.460 There's no Hollywood star who opens a movie anymore.

00:32:21.260 It used to be the last one was probably Will Smith.

00:32:23.100 But before that, there was Julia Roberts who could open a bad movie. 1.00

00:32:26.000 But people went to see it because it was a Julia Roberts movie. 0.90

00:32:28.100 That doesn't happen anymore.

00:32:29.080 But still, the star system is in place in Hollywood.

00:32:32.180 And the reason the star system is in place in Hollywood is if you're an executive and you hire George Clooney,

00:32:37.160 none of whose movies make any money unless he's starring with Matt Damon and every other movie star in Hollywood.

00:32:42.180 But none of his movies make money.

00:32:43.320 But if you hire him, you won't be fired if the picture dies.

00:32:47.020 Nobody's going to turn to you and say, you're the son of a gun who hired George Clooney,

00:32:50.820 and that's why our movie died.

00:32:53.980 An artist comes in and says, I'm taking this risk.

00:32:58.000 It's beautiful.

00:32:58.600 I've got this beautiful idea.

00:33:00.300 And the executives used to support this to some degree.

00:33:03.800 I've got this great idea.

00:33:04.940 No one's ever done this before.

00:33:06.040 You've never seen this before.

00:33:07.040 And you go out and think like, wow, you know, Jaws.

00:33:09.740 I mean, that's amazing.

00:33:11.000 And then they just copy it all over again.

00:33:13.080 We're living in this period of success.

00:33:14.920 We're living in the tail end of the American century where people stopped wanting to envision things because they were playing with the house's money.

00:33:23.540 They didn't want to lose the money they made.

00:33:25.240 Nobody wants to take the risk anymore.

00:33:26.800 The risk is what it's all about.

00:33:28.160 First of all, it's the only thing that makes life worth living.

00:33:30.580 That's the first thing.

00:33:31.480 And secondly, it's like how you make a great country.

00:33:34.160 And instead, we've got all these people who do not want the blame.

00:33:37.340 They don't want to be the guy what DeSantis is doing, that they call him Death Santus and all this stuff.

00:33:42.940 That takes guts.

00:33:43.980 You know what I mean?

00:33:44.380 This is right.

00:33:44.820 He can be right or wrong, but at least he's governing.

00:33:47.240 So the media, of course, set up the narrative that the act of bravery is to shut everything down.

00:33:51.620 Right.

00:33:51.920 When the real act of bravery is to say that human beings are allowed to be human beings.

00:33:55.120 Yeah.

00:33:55.300 That's a true act of bravery because you don't get blamed if you shut everything down and then a bunch of people die.

00:34:00.580 Yeah.

00:34:00.720 You don't get blamed for that.

00:34:01.680 Then you did everything that you could.

00:34:02.840 See Andrew Cuomo.

00:34:04.280 Exactly.

00:34:04.560 But if you say, listen, people are going to have to make their own decisions.

00:34:08.020 They're going to have to bear their own responsibility.

00:34:09.500 And I will take responsibility for allowing people to take responsibility for their own lives.

00:34:13.780 The media will kill you.

00:34:14.800 The media will spend the next several years talking about how he's Ron DeSantis because not because you'll have Joy Reid on TV every night saying that DeSantis wants people to die.

00:34:23.900 That's literally the language she uses when she's not being batted about by Nicki Minaj.

00:34:27.260 That Ron DeSantis wants COVID to win because he's allowing people to live their lives.

00:34:33.760 And the inevitable result of this is a dependent people who are waiting for some sort of kingly figure to come and save them from all risk. 0.99

00:34:42.560 This is why it's so important to go back to Michael's point.

00:34:46.340 If our leaders aren't going to take risks and they're not going to take the lead, then it's important for us as individuals to decide, you know, where are we going to draw the line?

00:34:53.440 And even with things like masking, you know, I decided early on in this that I'm not going to wear the mask anywhere unless I'm asked by someone in the establishment in a position of authority to put it on.

00:35:05.620 And if they do, then I'll decide whether I want to put it on or just leave.

00:35:10.360 But the instinct for a lot of us is to just is to, you know, well, just wear the mask because you don't want to you know, you know, you don't want to cause any trouble.

00:35:17.520 You don't want to be in an awkward social situation or whatever it is.

00:35:19.920 I think as individuals, we have to decide, well, I'm just we're just not going to go along with this.

00:35:24.400 We're not going to do it. We're not going to play the game.

00:35:25.700 By the way, you will notice, you know, we're all in a lot of airports all around the country.

00:35:31.300 There is a federal mask requirement in all the airports.

00:35:34.400 And yet not everyone wears the masks in all the airports.

00:35:37.720 It doesn't matter what depending on what city you're in.

00:35:40.580 You cannot wear it. You cannot comply.

00:35:42.500 And and there are enough people that no one is going to force you to do it.

00:35:46.200 And you just think, well, what if all Americans did that?

00:35:48.760 What if we all if we all just stood up?

00:35:50.760 I admit, you know, this does go to and this is where we kind of veer into the AOC territory.

00:35:56.620 I think so much of this is cosplaying virtue.

00:36:00.380 Yeah, it's just cosplaying it like the people who are who are wearing the mask at this point must know.

00:36:05.400 Yeah, that everybody who they're around has had the ability to either get the vaccine or decided not to get the vaccine.

00:36:10.700 Yeah, right. This was to me.

00:36:12.260 The masking issue was much more complex and nuanced when there was no vaccine.

00:36:16.540 Now that there's a vaccine and every adult has had the ability to get it.

00:36:19.000 But then the issue, all nuance is essentially removed, because if you get covid because I'm vaccinated and I breathe in your general area and then you get covid, you did not have a right to never be sick again in your life.

00:36:31.260 What you did have a right to do, at least to a certain extent, was to avoid deathly disease.

00:36:35.440 Right. At least the case can be made.

00:36:37.180 That's an externality in the same way that I can't pollute a river.

00:36:39.380 I can't sneeze my covid on you when you're 65 years old or 80 and living in a nursing home.

00:36:44.180 Right. Which is why even when like when it comes to vaccine mandates, I've said before that when it comes to, say, nursing homes, I don't see anything necessarily wrong with vaccine mandate for employees of nursing homes because you're around vulnerable people literally all day long.

00:36:56.500 Right. Or mask mandates in hospitals where you're around people who are vulnerable all day long.

00:37:00.680 However, once you're in just the general public and everybody's had the opportunity to get vaccinated, you don't have a right to require me to wear a mask on my face because you were too dumb or because you decided.

00:37:10.820 And here's the thing that's most amazing.

00:37:12.820 No one who is unvaccinated is asking anyone to mask.

00:37:16.460 It is vaccinated people who are asking people to mask.

00:37:18.720 Right. That's the part that's utterly insane about all of this.

00:37:20.760 I've drawn this Venn diagram on my show at this point, probably 10 times of the unworried and the worried.

00:37:26.320 Right. Nor in a normal logical world.

00:37:27.900 What you would assume is the unworried are the vaccinated and the worried are the unvaccinated.

00:37:31.980 Right. It is precisely the reverse.

00:37:33.740 All of the worried are vaccinated and all of the unworried are the unvaccinated, which means that the pandemic is over for all public purposes.

00:37:40.740 Because once all of the unworried are unvaccinated, once then nothing you do is going to get.

00:37:46.100 They're not worried.

00:37:46.880 They're not going to spend their days sitting up at night worrying about covid.

00:37:50.180 So how are you going to worry them into getting the vaccine?

00:37:52.080 And everybody who was worried got vaccinated.

00:37:54.140 And now they're still worried because you guys keep telling them to work.

00:37:56.580 But you actually you saw the literally the AOC play acting of it all at the Met Gala.

00:38:01.520 Right. Because she it is cosplaying the revolution. 0.99

00:38:03.340 She's she's she's cosplaying the revolution.

00:38:05.320 She is showing up there as the revolutionary.

00:38:07.680 I'll show you it at this thirty five thousand dollar seat dinner.

00:38:11.300 I'll show you people.

00:38:12.820 And she's actually now got an ethics complaint because she may not have been able to accept the dress that she was given. 0.88

00:38:16.920 But but when she when she shows up there, I don't know if she knows it or if she's maybe she does know and she's just playing along.

00:38:25.560 But AOC is not in any way challenging the establishment.

00:38:30.320 She is the toast of high society. 0.61

00:38:31.860 Oh, that's why she was invited to the Met Gala.

00:38:33.820 She is a tool of the plutocratic establishment. 1.00

00:38:37.200 She is exactly the opposite of what she's the plutocratic establishment and the left of the same people. 1.00

00:38:43.320 Yes, they are. They're identical. And it's a problem that the right hasn't caught on to yet.

00:38:47.800 The right has not caught on to the fact.

00:38:50.480 I mean, to me, this is just proves the fact that the whole problem with Ayn Rand is that John Galt is just the biggest son of a bitch as the as the people in government.

00:39:00.400 Anybody with power, anybody with too much power is a threat to liberty.

00:39:04.220 I mean, and that doesn't mean you take their power away.

00:39:05.960 It means you control the things that they can do.

00:39:07.740 You put it limits on it. You say you have certain rights.

00:39:10.220 The individual has certain rights that no powerful person can take.

00:39:13.380 Whether it's Google or whether it's government.

00:39:15.520 Can we also just stipulate on a tax the rich thing?

00:39:19.660 I don't personally care what tax rate Jeff Bezos pays.

00:39:23.580 Like you can raise taxes on him. I don't really care that much, to be honest.

00:39:26.260 But the idea that the rich are not taxed is so absurd.

00:39:30.420 I mean, they they they are they pay the vast majority of taxes.

00:39:35.580 All I was I was I was when you remove the government benefits, they pay literally all taxes in America.

00:39:41.440 Just just today, I was I saw a report on CBS, which was a couple months old.

00:39:45.860 Just because I'm curious on how did this idea get out there that the rich don't pay taxes when they pay all the taxes.

00:39:52.180 There was just a good example.

00:39:53.860 It's not like it's just from this report, but there was a report done by ProPublica, I think, a few months ago,

00:39:57.600 claiming that the rich pay almost no taxes.

00:40:01.820 And then you look at the report and the way they come to that conclusion is they're using Jeff Bezos for an example.

00:40:07.340 And they said Jeff Bezos, between 2008 and 2018, he paid like one point four billion in income taxes.

00:40:13.440 He's like, how's that almost none? That's one point four billion.

00:40:16.180 Well, they were saying, well, compared to the 200 billion that he's worth, it's only like, you know, it's just a fraction of a percent.

00:40:22.860 Because they don't understand how wealth. Right.

00:40:24.440 You know, you don't pay an income tax on your whole net worth.

00:40:27.080 That would be a disaster for everyone.

00:40:28.740 If you imagine, you know, April 15th.

00:40:31.160 You have to liquidate your house every year.

00:40:32.280 Right, exactly.

00:40:32.960 The New York Times has been complaining about this in the paper today.

00:40:35.100 Right.

00:40:35.420 And they're not taxing the wealth they already have.

00:40:38.080 And I think part of the problem is that, you know, you've got the elites, of course, who spread these ideas and they know better.

00:40:43.820 A lot of people in the peanut gallery who go around screaming that the rich aren't taxed,

00:40:47.840 they have no assets, no net worth at all.

00:40:50.380 And they don't even understand the difference between income and net worth.

00:40:53.920 They don't understand that Jeff Bezos doesn't have 200 billion dollars.

00:40:57.800 He doesn't have like a Scrooge McDuck money vault out back filled with 200 billion dollars with a gold coin.

00:41:02.960 Not much in it.

00:41:03.460 He has, he has, he has ownership in something with an imaginary value of 200 billion dollars.

00:41:10.580 If he liquidates any of that, meaning if he converts any of that imaginary money into real money.

00:41:15.700 If he sells his stock.

00:41:16.580 If he sells his stock.

00:41:17.720 He now is taxed on it.

00:41:19.400 Yeah.

00:41:19.620 At the point that it becomes.

00:41:21.680 And not only that, by the way.

00:41:22.420 And it tanks, by the way, too.

00:41:23.540 Well, that's the bigger point, right?

00:41:24.740 I mean, there's one point where Zuckerberg, who's worth, you know, a trillion dollars,

00:41:28.980 where Zuckerberg tried to liquidate, I think it was $1 billion of his stock.

00:41:35.580 And the Facebook stock tanked by like 10%.

00:41:38.660 Because if you are-

00:41:39.860 Like the founder getting out.

00:41:40.660 Correct.

00:41:41.340 So this idea that the wealth is worth what the wealth is worth is just absurd.

00:41:44.840 First of all, there are a thousand different valuations on every single company.

00:41:47.560 It's only worth what it's worth at the moment of liquidation.

00:41:49.620 It changes based on the moment.

00:41:50.880 This is why my favorite Warren Buffett take was in 2008, they asked Buffett, you know,

00:41:55.200 you just lost like a billion dollars in the market over the course of this crash.

00:41:58.400 You know, if you look at your stock holdings, he said, what are you talking about?

00:42:00.420 I didn't lose a dollar.

00:42:01.340 They said, what do you mean you didn't lose a dollar?

00:42:02.220 I said, I didn't sell anything.

00:42:03.280 Yeah.

00:42:03.940 Correct.

00:42:04.380 If you don't realize the loss, the loss is not realized, right?

00:42:06.960 If you own a house and the house loses value, you did not lose anything unless you sell the

00:42:11.580 house after it has lost the value.

00:42:13.160 I had a driver, a chauffeur explain this to me because he was day trading.

00:42:17.820 And he said, you know, I said, how are you doing this week?

00:42:19.900 And he said, fine, I just haven't sold anything, so I haven't lost anything.

00:42:23.360 But he knows.

00:42:25.840 He's driving a car.

00:42:27.140 And the cosplaying of it is the entire point.

00:42:28.880 I think that our entire politics right now is not about doing virtue.

00:42:33.700 It is about cosplaying the revolution.

00:42:35.600 It's about I am a revolutionary, not for like she wasn't standing outside the Met Gala

00:42:39.960 holding a sign saying, screw these rich people and their giant bags of cash.

00:42:43.820 Right.

00:42:44.380 She was going in there to hang out with them and take pictures with them with their arms 0.98

00:42:48.740 draped about each other, all unmasked, except for the help, who are in the back, like the

00:42:52.240 peons they are, wearing the masks. 0.86

00:42:53.660 Keeping their filth away from all the good rich people.

00:42:54.960 You saw Carolyn Maloney.

00:42:55.920 Carolyn Maloney is, that was the best picture.

00:42:58.300 There's a picture of Carolyn Maloney, the congresswoman from New York, and she's wearing

00:43:00.780 an outfit that says, equal rights for women. 1.00

00:43:02.700 Yes, that's right.

00:43:03.140 And behind her, and she's unmasked, and behind her is a bunch of, it's like 10 women all 1.00

00:43:08.660 wearing masks.

00:43:09.140 And she's not, right, because she's a special person.

00:43:11.660 Now, we know, according to the CDC, you're supposed to mask even if you're vaccinated.

00:43:14.800 So clearly, they're violating the CDC's own standards because vaccinated people can pass

00:43:18.480 the disease.

00:43:19.260 It doesn't matter to her because she's one of the specials.

00:43:21.380 It's all about the signal.

00:43:22.520 The signal is the only thing that matters.

00:43:24.080 It's not even that it is a thing that matters.

00:43:25.660 It is the only thing that matters.

00:43:27.380 You can do whatever the hell you want, so long as you are signaling properly.

00:43:30.840 And AOC thinks that she was signaling properly because all of the glitterati are cheering 0.96

00:43:35.900 her.

00:43:36.300 All the blue checks are cheering her. 0.97

00:43:37.720 I mean, I tweeted out, Robespierre was not famous for going over Versailles and saying

00:43:42.460 to Marie Antoinette and company, gang, screw the monarchy, and then eating the cake with 0.57

00:43:47.420 them.

00:43:48.180 If you're going to eat the rich, you actually have to eat the rich.

00:43:50.280 You know, it was so scary to me.

00:43:51.480 I was on the subway in New York, not wearing my mask, and I looked over and I saw what looked

00:43:55.800 like a political advertisement.

00:43:57.040 It said, we're starting a revolution.

00:43:59.100 This is about equality.

00:44:01.100 This is about freeing people.

00:44:03.300 And it's the, this, and I was looking, I was like, what is the revolution?

00:44:05.640 I looked.

00:44:06.800 It was an ad for Old Navy.

00:44:08.600 Yeah.

00:44:08.960 It was an ad.

00:44:09.360 The revolution is what sells products.

00:44:11.180 And this is what AOC either doesn't understand or she does understand and she's pulling a

00:44:15.460 fast one on all her constituents. 1.00

00:44:16.560 But they called themselves the resistance all through the Trump administration.

00:44:19.280 They agreed with the corporations.

00:44:20.880 They agreed with Hollywood.

00:44:21.760 They agreed with the academy.

00:44:22.780 They agreed with media.

00:44:23.760 They agreed with everybody in power.

00:44:25.400 They're the tools of capitalist egemony.

00:44:27.360 They were resisting the people.

00:44:28.360 And it's an interesting question too, though, about why AOC, she was around a bunch of

00:44:33.400 rich people.

00:44:34.280 And why are rich, why would rich people embrace this message of tax the rich, tax me?

00:44:39.260 Because, you know, and that's the point people are making in AOC's defense is that, well,

00:44:42.760 it's actually brave for her to go around rich people with that message.

00:44:45.260 But it's not exactly the same thing.

00:44:46.440 I mean, if I were to go to a Planned Parenthood fundraiser with a shirt that said, you know,

00:44:49.980 imprison abortionists, I would probably get a very different reception.

00:44:53.460 So why were they embracing her?

00:44:55.320 And I think the reason is, the reason, which actually sounds like a great idea to do that.

00:44:59.340 But the reason is, number one, they know it's not serious.

00:45:03.520 It's virtue signaling.

00:45:04.220 But also for these rich people, this is the ruling class.

00:45:07.920 They know that, OK, yeah, you raise the taxes on me a little bit.

00:45:10.260 I can afford it.

00:45:10.900 But also, I'm investing, you know, we're all part, we're all comrades, we're part of the

00:45:14.700 same crew here.

00:45:15.480 So I'm investing in you and you're going to advance my ideological agenda.

00:45:19.360 So sure, take a little bit more of my money.

00:45:20.960 It benefits me in the end.

00:45:22.340 Not so much.

00:45:23.160 Also, let's be frank about this.

00:45:24.600 Most of the people in that room have very good accountants and those accountants are tasked

00:45:27.440 with avoiding the taxes.

00:45:28.580 Yeah.

00:45:28.840 Right.

00:45:29.020 Just like every other human being, which is why they're not giving charity.

00:45:31.420 And it's also why they're not actually bothering to sign checks that are above and beyond what

00:45:34.980 they're supposed to pay to the federal government, to the federal government.

00:45:36.960 Every single person in that room, there is a provision on your tax forms that allows you to

00:45:40.780 send extra money to the federal government.

00:45:42.280 Not one person in that room has ever signed a dollar to that provision because no human

00:45:46.060 being has ever signed that provision of the IRS tax form unless they are completely and

00:45:50.840 utterly delusional.

00:45:51.840 It is insane to me that we are supposed to pretend that this was some sort of act of true

00:45:56.720 bravery when she's walking into a place where they are cheering.

00:45:59.840 They're cheering for her.

00:46:00.760 There's a quote by Thomas Chatterton Williams put out a fantastic quote from Stefan Zweig where

00:46:07.700 he says anybody who is saying something supposedly revolutionary, who is risking nothing, is

00:46:12.440 of course not saying anything revolutionary.

00:46:14.620 She's not only risking nothing, she's benefiting from all of the look at slay queen kind of

00:46:19.520 nonsense.

00:46:20.120 The reason these people do this is because it gets them off the hook for the same reason

00:46:22.920 the corporations do it.

00:46:23.820 Now the left is fine with all of them being wealthy.

00:46:26.220 It's the reason why the left doesn't care whether athletes are wealthy. 0.99

00:46:28.540 They only care whether business people are wealthy because business people might actually

00:46:31.000 live their principles, but athletes signal their principles and then live like the business

00:46:34.500 people.

00:46:34.920 Did anybody go with AOC though in this?

00:46:37.200 Did anybody like this AOC stuff?

00:46:39.880 Yeah, the left did.

00:46:40.560 Rolling Stone called it iconic.

00:46:42.180 Did they really?

00:46:42.960 Yeah, they did.

00:46:43.460 Absolutely.

00:46:44.200 Well, it is iconic.

00:46:46.280 This goes all the way back to, I'm sure that some of us have read Tom Wolfe's Radical

00:46:51.260 Chic. 0.94

00:46:51.660 This is all just Radical Chic.

00:46:53.020 The single greatest political essay ever written.

00:46:55.200 If you haven't read it, you should go read it.

00:46:56.420 It's an essay about Leonard Bernstein holding a dinner party.

00:46:59.320 That whole book is great.

00:47:00.540 Unbelievable.

00:47:00.940 And the whole, this chapter of the book, which was originally a cover piece in New York Magazine

00:47:06.100 before New York Magazine was complete trash.

00:47:08.100 And the entire article is about Leonard Bernstein, the famous conductor, hosting the Black Panthers

00:47:12.140 in his penthouse apartment with all of these white celebrities.

00:47:15.860 And all these white celebrities are fawning over these exotic revolutionaries.

00:47:19.600 And the exotic revolutionaries are saying directly to them, yeah, when the time comes, 0.85

00:47:22.640 we're going to kill you. 0.99

00:47:23.940 And all of these people are clapping for them and cheering for them.

00:47:27.100 And the thing is that in this particular analogy, AOC is not the Black Panthers.

00:47:31.680 She's Leonard Bernstein putting on the cap.

00:47:33.760 Right.

00:47:34.180 She's not even Black Panther. 0.96

00:47:35.220 Right.

00:47:35.560 That's a great point.

00:47:36.040 She was in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, this exact scene where she hosts, there's a

00:47:39.740 woman, a rich woman who hosts all the radicals in town who are actually blowing people up 1.00

00:47:44.380 and killing children and all this stuff.

00:47:45.780 But she's hosting them and they keep saying to her, you know, you're next.

00:47:48.880 And she goes, yes, I know.

00:47:49.960 It's wonderful.

00:47:50.260 So this week, I'm a young man, 42, and yet I had to subject myself to the humiliations

00:48:00.800 of an older man of 45 and get a colonoscopy.

00:48:03.920 Oh, my God.

00:48:04.700 It was...

00:48:05.380 Welcome to the club, pal.

00:48:06.880 It was not great.

00:48:07.980 Yeah.

00:48:08.480 It was not great would be the official way to report on it.

00:48:11.480 Oh, you don't know what fun is.

00:48:13.640 Literally the only time in Jeremy's life he has not been full of shit.

00:48:18.420 You're not.

00:48:18.960 They clean you up.

00:48:20.820 But all I did yesterday was sleep.

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00:48:29.440 I hate that.

00:48:30.160 That was the worst phrase.

00:48:31.500 I love my mattress.

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00:50:01.500 You know what they teach you in podcaster school?

00:50:03.060 They always say, there is nothing advertisers like to be associated with more than colonoscopies.

00:50:08.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:08.960 Well, they always say like at the top of the ad.

00:50:10.520 So which advertiser gets the prostate exam?

00:50:14.180 I always say at the top of the ad, like, riff on your personal sleep experience.

00:50:18.520 I did sleep all day yesterday.

00:50:20.880 You know what?

00:50:21.560 One of the things that was so amazing with MacGal is to see all of these people who truly are

00:50:25.140 both brave and stunning and also victims, right?

00:50:29.040 They're all victims.

00:50:29.700 Like, every single one of them is wearing, like, AOC is a victim, right?

00:50:33.100 She said this in her own statement.

00:50:34.280 She said, people are constantly policing intersectional bodies and like, oh, yeah, so much.

00:50:40.240 Jonathan Swift, oh, yeah, Jonathan Swift couldn't write this stuff.

00:50:42.740 It's an incredible parody.

00:50:44.480 And then you have, by the way, not a week goes by that she doesn't come up with some victim

00:50:47.580 group to superimpose herself. 1.00

00:50:50.000 My favorite is when they come up with victim groups that make no sense.

00:50:51.940 My favorite recent one was when Cori Bush recently tweeted out that the Texas abortion law had 1.00

00:50:55.820 a disproportionate effect on black women, brown women, and queer women.

00:50:59.760 And I thought to myself, well, I hadn't heard that one before.

00:51:03.760 You're going to have to explain the biology of how queer women are particularly affected

00:51:06.980 by abortion law.

00:51:08.900 That doesn't make so much sense to me.

00:51:11.320 But beyond that, the victim complex was with all, right, you have Megan Rapinoe, who is

00:51:18.460 celebrated for playing a sport that people watch once every four years because it is mandatory

00:51:22.320 under the Constitution of the United States for us to care about women's soccer once 1.00

00:51:25.340 every four years.

00:51:26.720 I miss that, I guess.

00:51:28.300 Well, that's because you're a traitor.

00:51:29.820 Your execution order will come through tomorrow.

00:51:32.020 And then complain about a contract that she herself signed to be paid inordinate amounts of 0.97

00:51:36.280 money to play a sport that no one cares about.

00:51:38.000 And she goes to this thing with a little clutch that says, in gay we trust, because she's 0.90

00:51:45.140 a victim, right?

00:51:46.240 Because she's a lesbian, she is a victim, but also a hero, but also a hero and a hero, and 0.98

00:51:53.100 so victimized but heroic.

00:51:54.680 It's like Normandy, but if the heroes were also victims, who were heroes?

00:51:58.640 That's what it's mostly like.

00:52:00.280 Let's not forget, speaking of sports heroes, Naomi Osaka.

00:52:04.180 Wow.

00:52:04.540 Yes.

00:52:05.480 Stunning bravery.

00:52:06.080 Yeah, who's too much anxiety to answer questions from the media showed up with a very outlandish

00:52:12.480 outfit drawing attention to herself as well.

00:52:15.120 And my favorite thing, though, that AOC said was she was talking about her fashion designer

00:52:20.020 and trying to put the fashion designer in a victim group. 0.99

00:52:22.980 And she said something like, this is a black immigrant fashion designer.

00:52:26.820 It's like, yeah, but she's from Ontario.

00:52:28.260 So, you know, it's technically an immigrant, but.

00:52:32.060 So, like, that lady is in charge of a massive fashion line that sells, I read the prices on 1.00

00:52:36.580 her website today.

00:52:37.420 She sells shoes that are like $1,000 shoes.

00:52:39.700 She ain't selling, like, pay less for the people. 1.00

00:52:42.260 At every turn, you must be a victim.

00:52:44.820 You can't, right.

00:52:45.380 She couldn't say, my fashion designer, truly one of the greatest fashion designers in the

00:52:51.460 world today.

00:52:52.380 Because that compliment bestows no virtue.

00:52:55.700 Correct.

00:52:56.080 Instead, you have to say, my fashion designer, an immigrant. 0.94

00:52:58.760 My fashion designer, a person of color.

00:53:00.920 My fashion designer, a survivor of childhood abuse.

00:53:04.340 Whatever it is, that's your way of saying a good person.

00:53:08.000 Right, exactly.

00:53:08.620 And it's every single person who is there.

00:53:10.280 So it's Cara Delevingne wearing a bib that also looked like a straitjacket that said, 1.00

00:53:13.480 peg the patriarchy.

00:53:15.000 Yeah.

00:53:15.140 And you're like, you seem to have benefited pretty wildly from the patriarchy.

00:53:19.820 And by the way, if you believe that America is a patriarchy, let me just say that if we

00:53:23.160 airdropped you into a true patriarchy right now, let's say Afghanistan wearing that outfit. 0.80

00:53:26.960 Where one is around, yeah.

00:53:27.960 Then you would last approximately 0.2 seconds.

00:53:31.040 And if America were a patriarchy, you wouldn't get away with that slogan.

00:53:34.520 And if the rich weren't being taxed, you wouldn't get away with that slogan.

00:53:37.240 This is exactly right.

00:53:38.120 It's everything.

00:53:38.700 I mean, it's Lil Nas X showing up wearing variously ball gowns that he stole from Billy

00:53:43.760 Porter or a gold suit of armor that, I mean, honestly, like still, still less gay than 1.00

00:53:50.160 C-3PO.

00:53:51.180 But it's inarguable.

00:53:52.600 Inarguable.

00:53:52.920 I want to stand up for Lil Nas X, though.

00:53:54.940 He admits it.

00:53:56.360 He admits it.

00:53:57.040 He comes out and he says, I'm doing this just to make the right angry because I love

00:54:00.120 it when they yell at me and it makes me, you know, I felt like, okay.

00:54:04.020 It's a living, you know.

00:54:05.040 Speaking of him, I mean, we've already forgotten because this was a big, this was a big week

00:54:08.780 for Hollywood degenerates because just the, just the day before that was the VMAs.

00:54:14.340 Yeah.

00:54:14.760 And there was something, and like, nobody cares that the VMAs, nobody even knows the VMAs

00:54:18.020 happened.

00:54:18.520 I don't even know what the V stands for in VMAs.

00:54:20.840 Yeah, I don't either.

00:54:21.780 But it's, it's, it's, you know, one of the saddest things I think I've ever seen, which

00:54:27.080 I just saw on, on Twitter, because of course I, like everyone else, I didn't watch it.

00:54:30.720 But, Madonna comes out in like a, in a, you know, in an age appropriate coat at first

00:54:37.280 and then.

00:54:38.500 Grand Madonna.

00:54:39.460 Right.

00:54:39.900 Grand Madonna.

00:54:40.760 She's 63.

00:54:41.560 She's 63.

00:54:42.080 And then she, she strips it off and she has this, this, um. 0.98

00:54:45.000 Ilsa, Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS. 0.81

00:54:47.260 Right.

00:54:47.660 She's like this, yeah, this weird dominatrix outfit. 1.00

00:54:50.900 It's the kind of thing that when you, when you see that, you know, that it's like time

00:54:53.540 to put Nana in a home.

00:54:54.460 But it really was, it's just sad, it's in a way, it's just sad to see.

00:55:00.700 And you see how kind of, uh.

00:55:02.960 By the way, we're being told that is the height of liberty.

00:55:06.180 That if a 63-year-old woman can dress up like a prostitute and sort of jiggle around, that 1.00

00:55:12.260 is the height of liberty.

00:55:13.080 Like a Nazi prostitute. 1.00

00:55:14.000 Like a Nazi prostitute. 1.00

00:55:15.580 That that's, and you just think maybe there were some other life choices that may have involved

00:55:20.040 a little more patriarchy or may have involved a little more, uh, you know, reigning things 0.99

00:55:24.160 in where you would be happier.

00:55:25.700 I'll never forget, Lucille Ball did an interview in the 1970s or something.

00:55:30.200 And they said, oh, Lucille, you're a prominent woman, a powerful woman. 0.55

00:55:34.120 Are you in favor of women's liberation?

00:55:36.980 She said, you know, I think I'm liberated enough already.

00:55:40.260 I think I've got a lot of money.

00:55:41.400 I'm very powerful.

00:55:42.140 I kind of, I want a more stable life.

00:55:45.400 She had a cigar in her hand at the time.

00:55:46.840 She certainly did, yeah.

00:55:48.360 Daily Wire members, the chat box is open and we're about to start taking questions from

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00:56:07.140 And here's our first question from one of our Daily Wire subscribers.

00:56:10.880 How dirty is the right allowed to play before we lose the morality stance?

00:56:15.380 How what?

00:56:16.020 How dirty can we play?

00:56:17.420 I think what they're saying is before we lose, uh, our moral position.

00:56:21.800 Look, I'm a big, I'm a big advocate of wielding government power in a just and moral way.

00:56:27.400 So I think probably more so than a lot of people on the right, I think one of the big

00:56:30.360 mistakes we've made is that we have not wielded the power, even the power that the people have

00:56:34.620 given us on the happy occasions that we win elections.

00:56:36.760 I don't think there's anything wrong with wielding government power.

00:56:40.100 I don't think you need to be immoral to do that.

00:56:42.500 I don't think we need to do the stuff that the left does.

00:56:44.520 But I think if the people vote for us, if we have the ability, if we control the Congress

00:56:49.080 or the Senate or the presidency, if we have people on the court, we ought to use that in

00:56:52.840 a way that is right and just and oriented toward virtue and also in keeping with the American

00:56:58.320 political tradition.

00:56:59.460 And I just think we've, I think a lot of the reason Republican politicians have not done

00:57:03.300 that, they've talked a good game about how it's immoral to use government power.

00:57:06.620 I think largely it's because they're cowards.

00:57:08.660 And to the points we've all been making tonight, they don't want the accountability of actually

00:57:12.500 making decisions.

00:57:13.540 So I will say, I think there is a pretty major distinction to be made here in terms of wielding

00:57:17.320 power and using tactics between defensive tactics and offensive tactics.

00:57:21.700 What I mean is that when you're talking about, for example, this is true in pretty much every

00:57:25.300 area of law.

00:57:25.900 So, for example, if I were to walk up to somebody and just kill them, I'm now a murderer.

00:57:29.320 If that person is trying to kill me and I kill them, that's now self-defense and nothing

00:57:32.200 happens to me, right?

00:57:33.320 I may be performing the exact same act, namely taking the life of another person.

00:57:36.480 But the circumstance determines the morality of the actual activity.

00:57:39.500 The same thing is true with regard to the use of government power from time to time.

00:57:43.240 If you're using government power, for example, to get rid of government power, right?

00:57:47.340 There's an edifice that's been built up and now you need to tear down the edifice.

00:57:50.700 That is a different thing than using the same level of government power in order to impose.

00:57:55.340 The same thing might be true with regard to, for example, boycotts, right?

00:57:57.820 We've had this discussion before.

00:57:59.200 On a pure, nobody's boycotting anybody level, I think it's probably immoral to boycott people

00:58:04.440 based on the political views of the people who own the company alone, right?

00:58:07.540 Not how the company acts, just based on the political views of the people who own the company.

00:58:10.320 I think it's bad, okay?

00:58:11.420 However, if we now live in a world in which the left is doing this to all companies and

00:58:15.780 therefore forcing all companies to the left, you have a moral obligation to defend yourself

00:58:20.280 by using a similar tactic and creating mutually assured destruction.

00:58:23.940 What's wrong with imposing?

00:58:25.460 I would go further, yeah.

00:58:26.480 I would impose.

00:58:27.440 I mean, I just think...

00:58:28.200 Is the assumption that it's wrong for the government to impose?

00:58:31.320 Because I'm not sure I would agree with the...

00:58:32.500 Well, it depends on the level of imposition that we're talking about specifically.

00:58:36.040 Here's an example.

00:58:36.640 Isn't every law an imposition?

00:58:37.860 I mean, even every prohibition is also a mandate, right?

00:58:41.720 I mean, if you're prohibited from driving over 65, you're mandated to drive 65 or under.

00:58:46.740 So...

00:58:47.100 Let me give an example.

00:58:48.440 Let me give an example to maybe clarify it, which is this.

00:58:50.480 Uh, I don't think the founding fathers would have considered a drag queen story hour to

00:58:55.360 be a constitutional right for anybody.

00:58:57.160 I think it's perfectly right and just and preferable to ban a drag queen story hour. 1.00

00:59:01.860 Maybe you do it at the local level.

00:59:03.260 Maybe you enforce obscenity laws.

00:59:05.220 To ban drag queen story hour from what?

00:59:07.200 From the libraries, from the schools, from these sorts of places where it exists.

00:59:12.400 From places paid for with public dollars?

00:59:14.340 Or private dollars, for that matter.

00:59:15.700 I think we can have obscenity...

00:59:16.460 Would you ban drag queen story hour in my private home? 0.93

00:59:19.340 Yes.

00:59:19.600 Yes, probably I would, yeah.

00:59:21.180 Yeah, I would not.

00:59:22.780 But I...

00:59:23.880 I do believe that that is an...

00:59:26.040 Yes, the school...

00:59:27.600 Well, schools are different for two reasons.

00:59:29.360 One, because to the extent that you're targeting children at all, children don't have the same

00:59:34.460 rights as adults and we have a responsibility as adults to...

00:59:39.140 But drag queen story hour always targets children. 1.00

00:59:41.140 To the extent that drag queen story hour is specifically referring to something involving

00:59:44.220 children, then yes, I agree that it could be...

00:59:46.460 There you go.

00:59:46.660 That it could be prohibited.

00:59:47.260 But take one that doesn't involve kids because kids, you're now talking about a subgroup

00:59:50.920 of people who literally, you know, have to have other people...

00:59:53.260 Could you...

00:59:53.580 Would you outlaw a drag show at my private home for adults?

00:59:57.220 Well, I attend your drag shows, so I obviously...

00:59:59.840 But let's take it even...

01:00:03.220 I mean, the debate that this usually hinges on, and I think it does clarify the point, is

01:00:06.940 pornography.

01:00:07.880 Do you...

01:00:08.280 Do we say that we can never impose our views of pornography on anybody?

01:00:12.100 Or do we, in what I think is the American political tradition, say, you know, there's no right to

01:00:16.720 obscene material and we should really reign this...

01:00:18.820 But I think...

01:00:19.940 We're on the same page of, I believe, outlaw all pornography.

01:00:24.140 But with that, you can also hinge that argument.

01:00:27.980 You don't have to do this, but I think maybe the most effective argument is that can be

01:00:31.620 entirely hinged on children also.

01:00:33.280 I mean, you can make the argument for banning all pornography, all internet pornography, which

01:00:37.820 is the only kind of pornography we're talking about, because children exist and because they

01:00:43.180 have access to the internet.

01:00:44.620 And so by putting it on the internet, you are putting it potentially...

01:00:47.320 I don't agree with the two of you about pornography.

01:00:51.020 I don't agree that you can say the fact that kids exist means that a thing that isn't right

01:00:56.140 for kids shouldn't exist.

01:00:57.760 An example would be cigars.

01:00:59.120 You could say the existence of cigars in the world does...

01:01:02.320 It does necessarily...

01:01:03.760 It does necessarily follow that some kids will have access to tobacco.

01:01:08.500 That's why I say internet.

01:01:09.020 Are you just talking about because I started smoking cigars as a kid?

01:01:11.860 Is that what you...

01:01:12.380 It's because of the internet.

01:01:14.140 Like, the cigars can't exist on the internet.

01:01:15.460 I mean, you could buy them on the internet, but you can't smoke them on the internet.

01:01:17.820 So because of the unique medium, which the internet is, there's just no way, as long

01:01:24.620 as you put that stuff out there on the internet, any child can access it just by hitting a button

01:01:29.640 on a computer.

01:01:30.580 Yeah, I think we would all agree that something should be done to make porn far less accessible

01:01:35.040 to children.

01:01:36.640 But that is different than saying I would outlaw all pornography.

01:01:38.340 But then to broaden it out, though, to the point we are suggesting using the government

01:01:42.540 to impose...

01:01:43.900 But again, we're still using examples that are centered around children, and children

01:01:49.740 aren't imbued with the exact same rights that adults possess.

01:01:54.780 What about banning pot?

01:01:56.660 Banning marijuana?

01:01:57.460 I would ban...

01:01:57.780 I mean, it still is technically illegal.

01:01:59.740 Marijuana's been illegal my entire life for all the good it's done.

01:02:02.640 I think that that's a pretty...

01:02:03.940 No, I don't know.

01:02:04.680 I think...

01:02:05.060 Uneffective law.

01:02:05.920 I think more people use it when it's legal.

01:02:08.180 I don't think that the same number of people use it when it's illegal as use it would.

01:02:11.920 So I think that there's also questions of prudence that then arise in terms of at what

01:02:15.980 level you are going to do these, quote-unquote, moral things.

01:02:18.840 Yeah.

01:02:19.140 Right?

01:02:19.300 So I think that one of the big problems here is that we fail to get specific enough when

01:02:23.200 we talk about which body ought to do this.

01:02:24.940 So I have far less problem with, quote-unquote, legislating morality when you're talking about

01:02:28.560 a local level with a much more homogenous population than I do when you're talking about

01:02:31.900 nationally.

01:02:32.320 For the specific reason that if you want to share a polity with people with whom you're

01:02:35.080 a heterogeneous...

01:02:35.580 Prudence, yeah. 1.00

01:02:36.120 ...then you're going to have to acknowledge that there are differences in perception on

01:02:39.600 issues like, for example, marijuana or even pornography, which is consensual activity between

01:02:43.660 adults.

01:02:43.960 Most of the ones where I think that the federal government ought to get involved in general

01:02:46.460 bans do involve children, which is why I think abortion is a federal issue, right?

01:02:49.680 You're talking about literally the removal of life from other human beings, which is why

01:02:53.020 it's not a state issue.

01:02:53.840 But when you're talking about, do you want to...

01:02:56.600 This is, I think, it isn't a question as to whether, and maybe that we don't, whether

01:03:02.460 we want to share a country with New York.

01:03:05.540 Yeah.

01:03:05.900 Really, I mean, this is a serious question, because New York obviously doesn't want to

01:03:08.640 share a country with us.

01:03:09.420 So if you have a federal government that, for example, is saying that there's now a federal

01:03:13.440 standard, this is what Joe Biden has now said, right?

01:03:15.080 There's a federal standard that you must allow abortion in your states. 1.00

01:03:18.280 Yeah.

01:03:18.700 What he's effectively saying is that New York should govern Texas.

01:03:20.780 But don't you...

01:03:21.260 And if Texas says, okay, well, you know what?

01:03:23.460 The same way you feel about abortion, that is the way that we feel about pornography.

01:03:27.200 And so we're going to do this.

01:03:28.680 Eventually, what you're going to get is just the country splitting.

01:03:30.860 What you're not going to get is everybody living by your standard, because in the end...

01:03:35.500 This is...

01:03:36.300 I think this is the right answer.

01:03:38.660 The fact is that local government has a lot of power.

01:03:44.320 The police power of states...

01:03:45.060 Has a lot of power that the federal government should not have.

01:03:47.960 And there is no reason, there really is no reason why New York can't govern itself as

01:03:52.580 it wishes to govern itself.

01:03:53.660 The problem is continually, and this is true continually, is that California wants Texas

01:03:58.360 to be California.

01:03:59.260 Right.

01:03:59.580 But Texas doesn't want California to be Texas.

01:04:01.660 Correct.

01:04:02.020 And I think this is where we have to make our stand.

01:04:05.300 I mean, we have to make the stand that Texas has the right to be Texas.

01:04:09.060 Because, you know, I think on abortion, this is a different issue because, as you say,

01:04:12.960 it's a question of killing people.

01:04:14.280 But states make their own murder laws.

01:04:15.460 I mean...

01:04:15.800 What's that?

01:04:16.100 No, murder laws are statewide.

01:04:17.300 Yeah, so then wouldn't it...

01:04:18.640 Well, but there is no...

01:04:20.900 No state would have the right to decriminalize murder.

01:04:23.920 Well, yeah, we haven't tried it, I guess.

01:04:25.480 No one's...

01:04:26.120 No, no.

01:04:26.620 And murder is also...

01:04:27.600 You're violating your federal civil rights.

01:04:30.280 You'd have a federal case against the state government if they decriminalize murder.

01:04:32.660 Because you have a right to...

01:04:33.160 I think pornography is just...

01:04:35.020 We really have to grapple with what pornography is.

01:04:37.120 I mean, first of all, when it comes to splitting the country apart, I actually think that ultimately

01:04:40.160 that is what's going to happen.

01:04:41.820 Maybe there's something...

01:04:42.500 That may very well be.

01:04:43.200 But pornography is such an insidious and damaging thing, which is helping to destroy our country

01:04:51.640 and the next generation of children in such a particular and devastating way that I think

01:04:57.160 it does call...

01:04:58.040 It will never happen.

01:04:59.080 There's never going to be a federal ban on pornography, but I think it could be justified.

01:05:01.940 They tried it.

01:05:02.380 Also because the idea that anybody has a right to have sex, record it, and then upload it

01:05:09.620 to the internet for everyone to see, I just don't...

01:05:12.480 I don't believe that that right exists.

01:05:14.200 Why are we afraid to give states different cultures?

01:05:17.400 I mean, Arkansas is not the same place as California.

01:05:20.520 Why can't they be different?

01:05:21.420 I don't understand this.

01:05:22.500 I do not understand the compulsion.

01:05:24.740 And it does exist on the right, but it really is prevalent on the left.

01:05:28.000 I don't understand the compulsion to make other...

01:05:30.160 This country is so huge.

01:05:32.560 I lived in Europe for seven years.

01:05:33.880 I lived in England for seven years.

01:05:34.820 I couldn't explain to people that England is the size of Oregon, you know, and you can 0.63

01:05:39.500 do different things in a country the size of Oregon than you can in a country that includes

01:05:43.800 both Oregon and Florida.

01:05:45.600 So I agree with your point, and I do think that states have different cultures, and they

01:05:49.200 ought to have different cultures, but one of the reasons here why California wants Texas 1.00

01:05:53.760 to be like California, and why I understand that, is in order for there to be a nation,

01:05:58.800 we need to have something that kind of links us together.

01:06:01.800 We don't come from the same stock.

01:06:03.400 We don't have the same religion, which, and both, those things were not true at the founding

01:06:07.800 era, or they were much, you know, they were truer at the founding era, I suppose.

01:06:11.780 We increasingly don't speak the same language, even.

01:06:14.340 I'm not talking about Spanish.

01:06:15.200 I'm talking about English.

01:06:15.980 We can't even speak the same English language.

01:06:17.700 And so in order to have, we don't even have borders.

01:06:20.300 So if you don't have anything in common, then you can't have a republic, right?

01:06:24.080 A republic refers to the things we hold in common.

01:06:25.760 I agree with that, but one of the principles that we used to have in common was a sort of leave

01:06:29.300 each other alone principle, right?

01:06:30.680 So that's why I think that, you know, I go back to the defensive point, which is that

01:06:34.600 if California wishes to legislate California on everybody else, I can see where the drive

01:06:38.020 comes from to say, okay, well, let's legislate Texas on everybody else.

01:06:41.480 And this is why it's a little bit of sophistry, I think, to say all laws regulate morality.

01:06:47.560 Sure, that's true.

01:06:48.880 By definition, it's true.

01:06:49.760 That's true as far as it goes, but there is a fun, but it's obscuring another truth,

01:06:54.520 which is there is a fundamental difference between laws that preserve liberty and laws

01:06:59.060 that encroach on liberty.

01:07:00.000 But is that not a moral, those are, those, that itself is making a moral claim that it

01:07:03.880 is good to, right?

01:07:04.780 I mean, that's the sophistry though.

01:07:06.140 No, I think it's just, it's not that you're, it's not that you're wrong, but you're still

01:07:09.300 obscuring the fact.

01:07:10.720 It's like saying, well, if we have power, we should use the power to make whatever we want

01:07:14.240 happen.

01:07:14.560 And if they have power, they should use power to make whatever they want.

01:07:16.800 But that's what I'm saying.

01:07:17.400 And I'm saying we should use power to constrain the power.

01:07:20.440 But I am not saying that.

01:07:21.340 I am saying when we have power, we should use that power to pursue good and avoid evil.

01:07:25.900 And what you're saying is when we have power, we should use that power to pursue good and

01:07:29.000 avoid evil, which you're defining as maintaining individual liberty.

01:07:32.240 No, but if you never make this argument, this was one of my big problems with Trump was

01:07:35.620 essentially the way he behaved during the COVID thing.

01:07:39.640 Forget about the stuff that, the garbage that came out of his mouth.

01:07:42.700 But one of the things that he did was he let each state basically make their own rules.

01:07:48.100 Now, how can that not be right in a state with the population density of South Dakota versus

01:07:52.660 a state with a population density in Manhattan of New York City?

01:07:57.300 Of course, they should make different rules.

01:07:58.960 Of course, they should make different rules.

01:07:59.720 Is it part of the problem?

01:08:01.460 But he never said it.

01:08:02.620 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:03.000 He didn't make that fight.

01:08:04.260 Right.

01:08:04.600 Part of the problem, I mean, I don't mean to make this even more obscure and broad, but one

01:08:10.480 of the reasons why these conversations never go anywhere, we talk about, well, the government

01:08:13.200 is supposed to preserve liberty or preserve rights.

01:08:14.700 Everyone has to find our terms.

01:08:15.940 No one even knows.

01:08:16.840 What the hell is a right in the first place?

01:08:18.840 And what is liberty?

01:08:19.620 And how do you distinguish it?

01:08:20.500 Like, what liberty should you have?

01:08:21.420 That's a really good point.

01:08:22.320 Where does any of this stuff come from?

01:08:24.080 How do we know that we have any of it?

01:08:25.740 Who decided any of this?

01:08:26.660 I'm not saying that, you know, that they don't exist or that rights are purely a, you know,

01:08:30.760 a human fabrication or construct.

01:08:33.080 I think you actually, you can kind of make that argument.

01:08:34.680 And it's not a totally crazy argument, but that's part of the problem.

01:08:38.100 We talk about what we don't have in common.

01:08:40.360 We might have once said that we all had in common this belief in human rights.

01:08:44.440 Well, now you get 100 people in a room and you ask them, well, define a human right,

01:08:48.180 you're going to get 99 different answers.

01:08:49.300 Right.

01:08:49.420 But I think, so I think the discussion can be made a lot more specific by asking, do you

01:08:54.680 ever have a right to be sinful?

01:08:57.040 Right.

01:08:57.360 Is there ever a right to be sinful?

01:08:58.720 No.

01:08:58.920 Okay, so I think that the answer is that, the answer is yes, actually.

01:09:04.740 Yeah, yeah.

01:09:05.140 I think the answer is yes.

01:09:06.220 So how would you define it?

01:09:07.040 Lord, act it.

01:09:07.560 The reason, no, the reason I, and the reason that I say that is because the minute you say

01:09:11.760 you do not have the right to be sinful, I know, but the reason that I say that you do

01:09:14.840 have the right to be sinful is specifically because of the definitional problem that you

01:09:18.020 now have with regard to sin.

01:09:20.180 What I mean by this is this was the Treaty of Westphalia, essentially.

01:09:23.420 Right?

01:09:23.580 Because if you, I mean, not to steal Clavin's thunder by citing the Treaty of Westphalia.

01:09:28.240 Eventually we always end up, it's like, it's like the internet argument, whoever invokes

01:09:32.560 Hillary first on this show.

01:09:35.520 I was there.

01:09:36.740 I think there is a reason why this conversation is breaking down on Catholic versus non-Catholic

01:09:41.540 lines, really, because the basic idea that human reason allows for the possibility of

01:09:48.180 you have to be able to find virtue, but that does require you to have to explore in order

01:09:52.920 to get to virtue.

01:09:53.460 And not only that, but you have to also accept the possibility that your definition of virtue

01:09:59.700 may differ pretty significantly from that of, say, the Protestants or the Jews who are

01:10:03.680 living under the auspices of a Catholic country.

01:10:05.900 The basic agreement of Westphalia was at a certain point you have to leave each other

01:10:09.040 alone.

01:10:09.580 And so the question is...

01:10:10.560 Definitionally, virtue has to be chosen.

01:10:11.540 But the other problem with virtue is that virtue is a habit.

01:10:13.980 And so while we say culture influences politics, but politics influences culture.

01:10:18.400 Statecraft is soulcraft, you might say.

01:10:19.960 So it is certainly...

01:10:22.140 I mean, this is like Plato would say the very same thing.

01:10:24.680 But Plato was a fascist.

01:10:26.000 He might take it a little far.

01:10:27.520 But I think statesmen throughout all of history, including the Founding Fathers, when they say

01:10:31.640 that, for instance, liberty is not the same thing as licentiousness.

01:10:34.380 What they are saying is a different version of...

01:10:36.440 No, but that's why the system they created...

01:10:37.980 The reason the founders demanded that the people have religion is because they understood

01:10:42.560 that without religion, the government will be...

01:10:44.200 But they also had established churches in the states.

01:10:46.320 So can I ask...

01:10:46.960 I actually want to...

01:10:48.300 I'm interested in what your answer is.

01:10:49.560 What is a right, would you say?

01:10:50.760 How would you define it?

01:10:51.600 So what I would say is that a right...

01:10:54.420 I mean, going all the way back to the Aristotelian sort of definition of natural law, it derives

01:11:01.260 historically from natural laws.

01:11:02.780 The idea being that you can derive from the universe that there are certain laws that apply

01:11:06.180 to humanity and there is a set and fundamental human nature and interaction with the world

01:11:10.580 generates laws that you are best off living by.

01:11:12.560 Okay, the converse of that is that you have to have the right to use your mind to investigate

01:11:16.760 the natural law because nobody has yet been able to peg down exactly every specific of

01:11:20.280 what natural law constitutes, right?

01:11:21.640 This is a point made by Grotius, who's really the first person who starts talking about natural

01:11:24.980 right.

01:11:25.900 So the fundamental right to use your mind to investigate the world requires things like

01:11:31.240 freedom of speech.

01:11:32.360 The fundamental right that you have to property is predicated upon a natural law notion that

01:11:37.720 human nature is acquisitive.

01:11:38.760 And therefore, once I acquire something, you do not have the ability to encroach upon me

01:11:43.300 and steal it, right?

01:11:44.600 So life, liberty, and property are, to me, the basic natural rights.

01:11:48.660 Now, that does include the possibility that as we create polity, we now have to use pragmatic

01:11:55.820 means to determine what the polity is going to look like, which is why I think that you

01:11:59.500 can encroach more on trying to restrict law to virtue on the local level than you can on a

01:12:06.500 broad level, right?

01:12:07.100 At a certain point, morality and ideal morality are going to have to conflict with how you

01:12:13.100 actually govern.

01:12:14.660 And so this is actually almost two separate conversations.

01:12:16.800 In the ideal state, should we have a monarch who is perfect and also instills virtue?

01:12:20.400 Or how do we actually set up a system of governance?

01:12:22.440 What the founders came up with, and I still think it's the best system, is a system whereby

01:12:25.980 these rights, life, liberty, and property, are left to two dual things.

01:12:30.780 We only think about government whenever we have these conversations.

01:12:32.680 But they are really left to two dual and necessary means.

01:12:36.940 One is a government that is large enough to stop the negative violation of your rights,

01:12:41.520 but not large enough in many of its essences in order to promote virtue.

01:12:46.440 And a social body that promotes virtue.

01:12:51.060 This is what Tocqueville talks about.

01:12:52.320 Can I add one thing to this, though?

01:12:54.160 It's the rights involved doing what you want with what is yours.

01:12:59.600 And this is to Jeremy's point, that if he wants to have drag queen story hour, leaving

01:13:04.540 children out of it in his home, that's his right because it's his home.

01:13:08.220 But the statesmen in America of the...

01:13:10.320 The kids going to the...

01:13:11.800 No, no, no, we're leaving the kids out.

01:13:13.800 This is for the...

01:13:14.360 This is just for us.

01:13:15.180 Drag hour, not drag.

01:13:16.320 Okay.

01:13:19.020 Guys dressed up as women. 0.97

01:13:20.220 They're telling the stories just to him.

01:13:21.460 Okay.

01:13:21.800 But the statesmen of the founding era, it seems to me, I think we are misrepresenting here.

01:13:26.820 I don't think that they believed that you had a natural right to sin given to us by

01:13:30.500 the Treaty of Westphalia.

01:13:32.240 It seems to me they had laws.

01:13:34.060 No, I don't agree with this.

01:13:35.560 Hold on.

01:13:36.080 They were Protestant.

01:13:36.820 They were Protestant.

01:13:37.420 They were.

01:13:37.760 And a core component of Protestantism is a belief that Christ set us free from the

01:13:42.260 law.

01:13:42.580 Then why did...

01:13:43.380 That freedom particularly means...

01:13:45.860 Sure.

01:13:46.520 ...freedom to fail.

01:13:47.480 But then why did they outlaw obscenity?

01:13:49.640 Why did they outlaw adultery?

01:13:50.780 Because they lived in a different time.

01:13:52.500 But they outlawed all these things that were saying we all have a natural right to...

01:13:54.840 Michael, hold on.

01:13:56.360 They didn't, but they didn't at the federal level.

01:13:58.020 Not at the federal level, but they did it everywhere else.

01:14:00.120 But this goes to my point.

01:14:01.320 Oh, sure.

01:14:01.840 If you're talking about homogenous communities where people generally agree, then you have the right

01:14:06.520 to make your own community.

01:14:07.200 One of the rights is to have...

01:14:09.200 This goes to your point more.

01:14:10.620 Yes.

01:14:10.860 One of the rights of a community is to form a polity.

01:14:13.660 Yes.

01:14:13.980 Right?

01:14:14.100 You do have a right to form an HOA, for example.

01:14:15.860 Yes.

01:14:16.160 And essentially, a local government is an HOA.

01:14:18.100 Yeah.

01:14:18.380 And you have the right to decide that.

01:14:19.320 And as long as people also have the right to leave that HOA and go somewhere else,

01:14:22.900 right?

01:14:23.020 You do not have the right to restrict that somebody has to stay in the area.

01:14:25.640 Right?

01:14:25.760 No Berlin Walls. 0.89

01:14:26.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:26.740 Right?

01:14:26.920 So you do have the right to set up a moral system.

01:14:30.080 And America is the history of...

01:14:31.740 People leaving town.

01:14:32.160 ...browdier and rowdier Protestants leaving town. 0.91

01:14:33.880 Yeah.

01:14:34.460 I mean, this is...

01:14:35.140 And going west.

01:14:35.680 And going west.

01:14:35.800 And going west.

01:14:35.900 This is how we end up with 13 states, right?

01:14:37.340 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:37.640 I mean, you literally have people who say, we don't want you here because of your religion.

01:14:40.940 And then they just go and they found Delaware.

01:14:42.540 Right?

01:14:43.540 And so...

01:14:44.360 And thank you for that, Joe Biden.

01:14:45.860 Anyway, so...

01:14:47.300 But I think that the generalized point, which is that we should use as much power as possible

01:14:53.140 on the federal level, which is really what we're talking about.

01:14:55.100 When we talk about the common good conservative versus the libertarian conservative argument,

01:14:57.920 which is really what we're kind of boiling this down to, we're never talking about this

01:15:01.200 at the state level nearly as much as we are at the federal level.

01:15:03.200 I'm not sure.

01:15:03.760 I mean, the...

01:15:04.640 Because in my local community, if you ban porn in my local community, I really don't have

01:15:08.140 a problem with it.

01:15:08.840 Yeah.

01:15:09.020 I really don't.

01:15:09.600 The problem with...

01:15:10.040 In fact, I argue specifically for it in my second book.

01:15:11.820 But then to Matt's point, the problem with the internet is, because of technological

01:15:15.720 development, some of these things happen.

01:15:17.020 I agree.

01:15:17.440 By the way, I even think with regard to pornography, there's a fairly good argument to be made

01:15:20.980 that it's more like drugs than it is like anything else.

01:15:22.800 Yeah.

01:15:22.980 Because it does have the effect of drugs on the human psyche.

01:15:25.500 Well, this is...

01:15:26.120 But it's worse because of how accessible it is to everyone.

01:15:28.820 I tend to agree with you.

01:15:29.740 To everyone.

01:15:30.440 Well, I don't think any of us disagree that it should be less accessible.

01:15:32.520 And this is one of...

01:15:33.460 You know, Blake Masters from the Teal Foundation wrote this terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal

01:15:37.380 this week, where he basically said, one of the things we have to deal with is they are using

01:15:41.760 our brains as drug dispensers.

01:15:45.240 Yeah.

01:15:45.340 And I think that that's a really interesting question, especially for all these people

01:15:48.740 who don't believe in God, who are materialists, than essentially they're drug dealers.

01:15:52.600 I guess when it comes to politics, I guess what I'm arguing for is when we think about

01:15:56.380 what does the moral polity look like, we should stop thinking top down.

01:15:59.640 We should start thinking bottom up.

01:16:00.760 I agree.

01:16:01.100 Meaning what does the moral polity look like in your family and then in your local community?

01:16:05.340 And then, are you willing to have a local community that is a common polity with a bunch of other

01:16:09.120 local communities that may disagree with you on some stuff and forces you to leave in

01:16:12.120 a local level and then on the federal level?

01:16:13.800 What happened is that America is a Protestant country and the Protestant church was overrun 0.84

01:16:18.580 by evangelicalism, particularly in the second half of the 20th century.

01:16:22.640 And it gutted itself and is in collapse.

01:16:25.040 And what we're living through right now is as Protestantism is collapsing as the moral

01:16:30.880 center of American, let's call it American traditional conservatism, for lack of a, we

01:16:36.220 could argue about all these terms, but American conservatism at a moral level has always been

01:16:40.520 a Protestant movement.

01:16:41.940 The Protestant church in America is in collapse.

01:16:44.140 And what we're seeing right now is that there is an urge to now use the government to enforce

01:16:51.780 on us what it never had to enforce on what we used to basically, uh, do ourselves, do ourselves.

01:16:58.000 And one of the changes that's happening in the American conservative movement is that there's

01:17:02.760 an enormous amount of American conservative Catholics now that has not historically been

01:17:07.360 true.

01:17:07.940 May I just make that?

01:17:08.420 That's not been historically true in American history.

01:17:09.800 I think historically it is true.

01:17:11.040 I think the entire conservative movement has had this bizarre, because I agree it's a

01:17:14.920 Protestant country, but I think it's had this bizarre. 1.00

01:17:16.920 It's a Protestant idea. 0.79

01:17:17.200 It's not a Protestant. 0.82

01:17:17.800 It's a Protestant idea. 0.79

01:17:18.340 But it's had a bizarre Catholic heart.

01:17:20.100 But Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, Phyllis Schlafly, Brent Bozell, all the, I mean, the list goes

01:17:25.180 on and on and on.

01:17:26.020 The American hardcore conservatives, bizarrely, have been Catholics. 0.94

01:17:30.860 Maybe that tells you something.

01:17:31.700 Not bizarrely.

01:17:32.120 No, it makes, it makes perfect sense because it's a Protestant idea and the Protestant idea,

01:17:36.880 like the Catholic idea, has a borderline where it starts to become, it starts to fall

01:17:41.120 apart.

01:17:42.040 These, these two forces are actually in a good relationship of struggle in this country.

01:17:47.120 I'll tell you what.

01:17:47.720 Historically, I think right now they're not.

01:17:48.980 No, I actually think, because of what you said.

01:17:50.640 I think right now, right now Catholicism is in it.

01:17:53.640 One of the things that's happening and that is encouraging is that the sort of subsidiary

01:17:56.320 that we're talking about is happening naturally.

01:17:58.240 Yeah.

01:17:58.500 Because what you're seeing is a massive sorting effect.

01:18:00.520 Yeah.

01:18:00.800 Right?

01:18:01.000 We all left California, except for, except for Walsh, right?

01:18:03.340 We all, we all left California and now we're all living in Tennessee or Florida or Virginia,

01:18:08.380 variously.

01:18:08.880 We're moving to, except for Drew, more, more red areas.

01:18:12.460 Virginia is still more red than California.

01:18:13.560 Yeah.

01:18:13.740 Drew was like, Drew was like, this place is so left.

01:18:15.780 I got to get out of here and loaded up the truck and moved to Washington, D.C.

01:18:18.840 It's like moving to Mississippi from California.

01:18:21.020 That's right.

01:18:21.440 That's right.

01:18:22.000 But the basic idea is that subsidiarity is being chosen by people in how they live.

01:18:26.940 Yeah.

01:18:27.500 Right?

01:18:27.880 People are moving to communities where they are getting the communities that they want.

01:18:31.400 Which, to your earlier point, may actually exacerbate the balkanization.

01:18:35.220 Right.

01:18:35.420 It may exacerbate the balkanization.

01:18:37.140 Well, now we're going to have a choice.

01:18:38.380 This is where I really think the future of the country is.

01:18:40.260 The choice is going to be, do we want to share that polity?

01:18:42.560 Right?

01:18:42.680 I keep coming back to that question.

01:18:44.020 Do we want to share the polity?

01:18:44.860 If we want to share the polity, you have to have a set of weak rules that we can all agree

01:18:47.740 on at the top, right?

01:18:48.600 That are pretty universal.

01:18:49.600 Yeah.

01:18:49.720 Which is why the founders set up the system to require essentially supermajority across

01:18:53.500 nearly all the spectrum in order to get any broad thing done.

01:18:56.400 Yeah.

01:18:56.520 Right?

01:18:56.700 It required like huge majorities of people, not bare majorities, not 51 votes in the 0.58

01:19:00.460 Senate or 50 plus one and 50 plus one in the House.

01:19:02.960 That's right.

01:19:03.180 It required federal state balance.

01:19:04.980 It required the Supreme Court to sign off on things.

01:19:06.840 It required like all of these checks.

01:19:08.640 And if it was really big, it required a constitutional amendment.

01:19:11.100 Right?

01:19:11.520 That's right.

01:19:11.820 All of this was designed to create the notion, and the founders were brilliant about this,

01:19:15.300 that at the top level, very few rules.

01:19:17.080 Because if you want to share a polity with people who are very diverse, then you are going

01:19:19.760 to need very few rules at the top.

01:19:21.660 And then increasingly, as you go down toward the bottom, you don't mind if there's, like,

01:19:25.920 I don't mind in my local community.

01:19:27.200 My local community is very orthodox, right?

01:19:29.340 It's a very orthodox Jewish community.

01:19:31.060 If there was a regulation among members of my community that on Sabbath you don't drive,

01:19:36.640 it would certainly alienate some people.

01:19:38.560 Do I think there's anything deeply immoral about that?

01:19:40.880 I mean, I'm not sure that I see something truly, deeply, and horrifically immoral about

01:19:44.780 that, so long as people are given the opportunity to leave.

01:19:46.820 But it would be if Joe Biden said...

01:19:48.740 That's exactly right.

01:19:49.620 This is exactly right.

01:19:49.980 Here's a question, kind of along these lines, as long as we're talking about the death of

01:19:53.720 evangelicalism and the sad, sad fact that nobody's yet killed Catholicism, is the very 0.69

01:19:59.420 argument that Biden is making about vax mandates that it's sinful to be unvaccinated?

01:20:04.940 Is he making fundamentally a religious argument?

01:20:07.140 Well, I think, with another Catholic, Cardinal Manning, I think all human conflict ultimately 0.99

01:20:13.500 is theological, and it might be at a very removed level, but when we're having arguments

01:20:17.260 about how we ought to live together, ultimately we're making kind of religious arguments.

01:20:21.240 And that's what we see from the left always, is that they always make the moral argument.

01:20:26.860 And they make the practical argument.

01:20:27.740 Exactly.

01:20:28.180 Every policy proposal, they make it on a moral grounds.

01:20:31.220 They say this is just the right thing to do.

01:20:33.180 And they don't bother a lot with the practical stuff.

01:20:35.200 And then, right, the conservatives will respond, well, this is too expensive, or this is going

01:20:38.700 to cause this practical effect.

01:20:40.260 And it's just, it's almost always the wrong response.

01:20:43.040 The fact that we've ceded the moral argument.

01:20:45.780 I agree with this 100%.

01:20:46.240 I think this is so true about the way we talk about it.

01:20:48.440 We've ceded the moral argument to insane perverts, basically.

01:20:53.400 And we're right.

01:20:54.340 And we're right.

01:20:54.780 We've ceded the moral argument, and we are right on moral.

01:20:57.100 The irony, though, we have to point out is Joe Biden is making this moral argument, and

01:21:01.080 he says he's a devout Catholic.

01:21:02.840 And he's making a religious argument, but it's not a Catholic argument.

01:21:06.260 He's making a progressive religious argument.

01:21:08.000 But that makes perfect sense.

01:21:09.020 He argues like a Catholic without Catholicism.

01:21:10.740 Yeah.

01:21:11.340 Right.

01:21:11.760 I mean, he took all the doctrine, he threw it out the window, and he kept all the attitudes.

01:21:14.400 Right.

01:21:14.800 It's like, I mean, you see the secular Jews all the time.

01:21:19.940 Yeah, yeah.

01:21:20.440 They keep the kind of, a lot of them will keep this sort of very, midoctic is the word,

01:21:25.120 very specific articulation of particular issues.

01:21:28.780 But they just got rid of the whole religion thing.

01:21:30.140 They just sort of kept the sensibility.

01:21:31.480 So true.

01:21:32.080 Takuna Lam.

01:21:32.760 So here's a question from the DailyWire.com subscribers.

01:21:35.840 You can get your question in at DailyWire.com slash subscribe.

01:21:38.660 The vaccine mandate seems like a stepping stone to some very authoritarian legislation.

01:21:43.220 My question, where do you see this leading?

01:21:46.260 Well, I think that if they can do a vaccine mandate simply through the power of the administrative

01:21:50.580 state, it's hard to see how they can't do it with regard to all other forms of health

01:21:54.780 problems.

01:21:55.100 And you've seen how they've done this with nearly everything, right?

01:21:56.800 They declared last year that racism was a public health problem.

01:21:59.980 They say this in Chicago.

01:22:01.320 It's a public health crisis.

01:22:02.660 Now, if you can declare that post-vaccination, COVID is such a public health crisis that the

01:22:07.800 federal government can cram down mandates on everybody else, if racism is a public health

01:22:12.060 crisis, why can't OSHA cram down rules about CRT and workplaces? 0.62

01:22:16.520 And you think all this is bizarre and crazy, except that all of it is bizarre and crazy.

01:22:19.720 Well, the head of the CDC, right after saying that the eviction moratorium was going to

01:22:23.880 continue, said that she wants to turn her attentions to guns as a public health crisis in America.

01:22:28.320 I think rock and roll is a public health crisis.

01:22:31.260 Rock and roll is over.

01:22:33.000 You're still talking about rock and roll as though Barack Obama didn't happen.

01:22:36.000 Honestly, it's for another day, but Barack Obama destroyed rock and roll.

01:22:38.760 You have convinced me of this.

01:22:39.800 There was rock and roll, then there was Barack Obama.

01:22:41.520 Now there's no rock and roll.

01:22:42.920 So he did something good.

01:22:44.300 Because rock and roll was about white male angst.

01:22:50.480 White male teenage angst.

01:22:51.680 And then Barack Obama came along and said that young white men aren't allowed to have

01:22:59.020 angst.

01:22:59.600 They're not allowed to basically express their dissatisfaction because they're so toxic.

01:23:06.740 And so truly, rock and roll just stopped.

01:23:08.780 Yeah, I think you're right.

01:23:10.040 I was hoping to see Norm Macdonald on the book club.

01:23:13.620 So now I should have read ahead because I actually do want to talk about Norm.

01:23:17.860 Did Michael ever hear any of Norm's thoughts on crime and punishment?

01:23:21.620 Michael?

01:23:21.980 Yeah, I will say, you know, I wish I could say that I was a close, dear friend of Norm

01:23:26.580 Macdonald.

01:23:27.140 I really, I've been a fan and admirer of his since I can remember, you know, since I was

01:23:32.740 a kid.

01:23:33.580 And I did get to talk to him.

01:23:36.800 I mean, Jeremy and I went to see one of his shows and we wore, we actually had custom

01:23:41.360 hats made from his book.

01:23:43.980 Like it was a total, he looked at us kind of in the crowd and like, who are these crazy

01:23:47.020 people?

01:23:47.720 And, but I noticed the strange thing, which is when Norm got on Twitter, he followed me

01:23:52.260 like really early on.

01:23:53.300 And I thought, this is so weird, you know, and, but I never abused it.

01:23:56.580 I didn't want to DM him.

01:23:57.460 I was so in awe of him.

01:23:58.560 He was the funniest man that, that was alive in our age.

01:24:01.680 And one day he sent out a tweet about how he was in pain or something.

01:24:05.700 And I, I feared that he was depressed or something.

01:24:08.100 So I sent him a note and I said, Hey pal, I'm in awe of you.

01:24:11.020 I don't, I don't want, but if you want to talk and we had a very long exchange, we had

01:24:16.840 this long correspondence of like 10 paragraph DMs, you know, and it was, it was about religion.

01:24:23.860 And I, I, I'm not going to, uh, you know, I'm not, I don't intend revealing this private,

01:24:28.360 private correspondence, but I, the man, he did this thing and he did it publicly too, where

01:24:34.000 he'd say, you know, Michael, man, you're really educated.

01:24:36.440 You know me, I'm just an old chunk of coal and I'm totally uneducated.

01:24:39.500 And then he would use a word that I didn't know that I, which means he had, his reading

01:24:44.120 was so deep.

01:24:45.380 And, uh, the, the one thing I will say about our correspondence is I am convinced the man

01:24:50.340 had not only incredible wisdom, but a deep, profound, abiding, lifelong faith.

01:24:56.700 I am a hundred percent convinced of that.

01:24:58.740 And so the last part of our correspondence was he was going to come on the book show and

01:25:02.160 do, uh, crime and punishment or one of the Russian novels.

01:25:05.640 Actually, one of his most famous jokes is based on the death of Ivan Ilyich, which I

01:25:08.900 ended up doing on the book show with Matt.

01:25:10.540 And, uh, he, he wouldn't come on and he said he didn't want to, during the coronavirus, he

01:25:15.800 didn't want to go into a studio.

01:25:17.100 And I thought this was just him being eccentric.

01:25:19.260 Now, looking back, it's clear he was in, uh, cancer treatments.

01:25:22.600 Yeah.

01:25:23.100 Michael, we actually have that joke, uh, queued up.

01:25:25.680 Let's play it for, for everyone.

01:25:27.620 A moth goes into a podiatrist's office.

01:25:30.480 A moth goes into a podiatrist's office.

01:25:32.080 And, uh, the podiatrist's office says, what's the problem?

01:25:42.140 And the moth says, what's the problem?

01:25:44.420 Where do I begin, man?

01:25:46.120 He goes, I go to work for, uh, Gregory Olinovich.

01:25:51.340 And, uh, all day long I work.

01:25:53.160 Honestly, doc, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore.

01:26:00.020 I don't even know if Gregory Olinovich knows.

01:26:02.720 He only knows that he has power over me.

01:26:05.020 And that seems to bring him happiness.

01:26:07.580 But I don't know.

01:26:08.620 I wake up in a malaise and I, I walk here and there.

01:26:12.920 And the podiatrist says, oh yeah?

01:26:15.700 And the moth goes, yes.

01:26:17.080 And he goes, uh, at night I, I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that's on my arm. 0.96

01:26:27.160 A lady that I once loved, doc.

01:26:30.780 I don't know where to turn to.

01:26:32.580 My youngest, Alexandria.

01:26:36.580 She fell in the, in the, in the cold of last year.

01:26:41.140 The cold took her down as it did many of us.

01:26:47.160 And my other boy.

01:26:51.160 And this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc.

01:26:54.560 My other boy.

01:26:57.000 Gregorio.

01:27:00.160 Ivinolinovich.

01:27:05.160 I no longer love him.

01:27:06.860 As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I, that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror.

01:27:22.340 If only the cowardice was stronger, then perhaps, perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me.

01:27:33.680 And then this hellish facade once a throw.

01:27:37.200 How long a drive was this?

01:27:42.800 Do you live in the valley?

01:27:44.060 Where do you live?

01:27:45.800 Please, sorry.

01:27:49.520 He says, doc.

01:27:53.400 Sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth.

01:27:57.000 Just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me.

01:28:04.460 I'm not feeling good.

01:28:06.440 And so the moth, the doctor says, moth, man, you're troubled.

01:28:11.260 But you should be seeing a psychiatrist.

01:28:13.560 Why on earth did you come here?

01:28:15.700 And then the moth said, because the light was on.

01:28:18.340 I have to tell you, I have to tell you, this is in his, in his memoir, his wonderful memoir.

01:28:28.620 And I listened to it in the car.

01:28:30.720 I, and I'm not joking.

01:28:32.260 I had to pull off the road three times because I was going to die.

01:28:36.080 I was laughing so hard and driving in L.A. at the same time.

01:28:39.560 And he, it goes on and on.

01:28:41.140 And it reflected also, I mean, just on top of this, a deep knowledge of Russian literature, which he really had.

01:28:46.820 And, and, and, you know, Crime and Punishment is the book that essentially made me a Christian.

01:28:51.480 I mean, that's the book that changed my life.

01:28:52.960 That book changed my life.

01:28:54.620 I mean, I was 19 years old.

01:28:56.040 I read that book and all the relativism that was rising through the university system that I was in.

01:29:00.860 I thought, oh, it's all wrong.

01:29:02.220 I get it.

01:29:03.000 It's all wrong.

01:29:03.700 You know, and, and I, it, it genuinely changed my life and put me on a 30 year track toward Christianity.

01:29:10.140 And that joke, I just, I don't know.

01:29:14.440 It's a profound joke, but it's hilarious.

01:29:16.260 He, he had an almost religious commitment to the joke.

01:29:20.080 Yeah.

01:29:20.340 And I actually think it held him back in his career.

01:29:22.500 I mean, very famously.

01:29:23.260 Oh, sure.

01:29:23.280 Because he was an artist.

01:29:24.180 He was fired from SNL because he wouldn't stop telling the funniest jokes, which at the time were about O.J.

01:29:28.940 About O.J. Simpson.

01:29:30.200 They said, you, we will keep paying you, but you have to stop making that joke.

01:29:33.700 He would bomb deliberately in settings where he thought the funnier punchline was for him to fail.

01:29:39.620 Goes to Bob Saget.

01:29:40.680 It was amazing.

01:29:41.200 It was unbelievable.

01:29:42.360 He, he, and what's funny is that a guy that committed to the joke, a guy who would put the joke ahead of his own career, ahead of his own happiness in many ways, I think, here at the end, carried around this cancer for nine years.

01:29:55.160 Apparently didn't even tell his family, was willing to carry all of that on himself so that the joke wouldn't suffer.

01:30:03.700 And yet, I think that this is the most united, if you look at social media right now, the most politically united of anything, there's the most political unity around the death of Norm Macdonald that I've seen about the death of any public figure in the last 10 years.

01:30:18.040 He's universally beloved left and right.

01:30:21.040 And this is an excerpt from his book that I, I think it's, his greatest work is based on a true story, a memoir.

01:30:29.760 And this is Norm Macdonald talking about meeting God outside of the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas.

01:30:35.460 He said, I find my way through the casino, and in a moment I'm on the strip.

01:30:40.260 There's a dry chill that begins to freeze my naked face, and the buildings of iron and glass feel as immortal as the ancient streets they sit upon.

01:30:48.040 I look above the sun shining amid the blue sky and the white, white clouds as they cast a pall of futility over the man-made monuments in their sickly neon lights.

01:30:57.680 And I stand by the pyramid of Luxor and gaze upon the firmament above, and in a sudden the sky becomes a face, and I look away in fear and shame.

01:31:07.120 It's the face of God, and he speaks, and his voice is both your voice and mine at once.

01:31:12.840 And he speaks unto me, why do you not look at me, neither yesterday nor today?

01:31:18.040 And so I remove my dirty work hat, and I look upon him, and I study his countenance.

01:31:24.940 Now people always wonder, is he's got a man or a woman?

01:31:28.320 Is he black or white or yellow or brown?

01:31:30.960 But I'm here to tell you that none of that silly stuff matters.

01:31:34.000 He's a white guy, by the way.

01:31:34.960 He's a true master craftsman, and I doubt, it sounds cliche to say, we will not see his bike again.

01:31:47.980 Oh, we will not see his bike again for a long time.

01:31:49.380 We will not see his bike again.

01:31:50.180 Well, thank you for joining us.

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The Michael Knowles Show - September 14, 2021

Daily Wire Backstage： WE DO NOT COMPLY

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