The Michael Knowles Show - The Daily Wire Backstage： Putting the “X” Back in Xmas

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, this is Michael. You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire

00:00:04.380 Backstage, where I join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Plavin, and the man who will one day fire me

00:00:09.320 for real, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture,

00:00:14.760 and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers. Without further ado, here is Backstage.

00:00:20.800 Fake laugh in three, two, one.

00:00:23.400 Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage, the only conservative media podcast television show

00:00:31.440 not owned by Glenn Beck. I'm Jeremy Boring, known round these parts as the Daily Wire God King,

00:00:37.820 that's lowercase g, lowercase k. Tonight, we're going to do our best to kill two hours before

00:00:42.520 our viewers kill themselves.

00:00:53.400 Joining me around the Yule Log, as usual, are the three wise men, Benjamin Birchgold Shapiro,

00:01:01.780 Andrew Frankly Makes No Sense Klavan, and Michael Murr.

00:01:06.800 I don't even get a last name.

00:01:09.680 And what nativity would be complete without a non-binary, gluten-free baby Jesus, 1.00

00:01:14.420 also to be played by Michael Knowles.

00:01:18.460 As always, we're graced by the lovely and talented Alicia Krause, who not only brings

00:01:22.460 the only semblance of professionalism to the show, but she also brings your burning questions 0.85

00:01:27.760 to us, hot off the internet. Alicia, say hi.

00:01:30.620 Absolutely. Hi, everyone, and Merry, Merry Christmas to you.

00:01:33.420 I'm rocking my Mrs. Claus outfit today, down to the hair. Apparently, it looks silver,

00:01:37.780 so hope that's okay. And don't forget that everyone can watch Backstage.

00:01:42.160 Why they would, I do not know. But only subscribers get to submit the questions.

00:01:46.540 How do you submit those questions, you ask? Well, one, you have to become a Daily Wire subscriber.

00:01:49.920 Two, go over to DailyWire.com and log in to the Daily Wire Backstage page and just type

00:01:55.540 those questions away in the Daily Wire chat box, and I will read it on air, ask the guys

00:02:00.440 those questions, and you can have them answered.

00:02:03.680 And also during this episode of Backstage, please remember that Daily Wire merch is 20%

00:02:09.020 off. It's a flash sale kind of thing. It expires at the end of the show, so make sure to click

00:02:13.480 on the link in the description to check out our delightful Daily Wire merch store and take

00:02:18.860 advantage of this sale. It really feels like you're getting in the spirit of Christmas when

00:02:23.260 you hawk, like, wanton materialism.

00:02:26.440 Your schlock. Your money. How much of your money are you willing to do?

00:02:30.600 You guys only do this one month a year.

00:02:31.680 Come on.

00:02:37.140 So we're glad that you're with us, and as always, we're going to talk about all the things that

00:02:41.240 matter, which both of you means things that are amusing.

00:02:43.500 To us.

00:02:44.620 To the four of us, and we're also going to be taking your questions throughout the evening.

00:02:49.840 As Alicia already said, but we're always very grateful to our subscribers over at DailyWire.com.

00:02:55.820 You can become a subscriber for something like a measly $10 a month.

00:02:59.060 You get your Leftist Tears hot and cold Tumblr if you pay the annual subscription membership fee.

00:03:05.820 And we're making some changes in the new year to what lives behind the paywall.

00:03:09.400 We've been getting some great feedback from our subscribers, and we're going to do our

00:03:12.380 best to enhance that experience here over the next couple of months.

00:03:15.880 It's a great deal now. It really is a good deal.

00:03:17.960 It is a great deal.

00:03:18.140 I know.

00:03:18.760 I agree, guys. I mean, come on. How could it get any better?

00:03:22.600 But it will. There's more.

00:03:24.160 There's more.

00:03:24.640 There's more.

00:03:25.200 There's more of me.

00:03:26.880 We're just going to hide a gold.

00:03:28.120 And there'll be people behind the paywall. 0.75

00:03:30.460 It's actually part of what I want to talk about throughout the night, and we're going

00:03:33.360 to talk about putting the X back in X-mas as the evening goes.

00:03:36.400 We're also going to learn something about whatever the Jews celebrate this time of year.

00:03:39.280 Kwanzaa.

00:03:39.660 Who?

00:03:39.900 Kwanzaa.

00:03:40.280 Kwanzaa, yeah.

00:03:40.960 Kwanzaa.

00:03:41.320 That's right.

00:03:41.700 But it is funny how around this time of year, you hear from a lot of typically conservative

00:03:47.480 Christians about how commercial Christmas is becoming. And I always think that's funny 1.00

00:03:52.000 because really Christmas, for being such an American holiday in the 20th century, was not

00:03:58.900 an American holiday until the 20th century.

00:04:00.980 Right.

00:04:01.280 Didn't become a national holiday until 1870. And that was really as part of Reconstruction,

00:04:05.900 of trying to bring the South better into the fold. Up until that time, it had been illegal

00:04:10.740 in many parts of America. Like, the pilgrims made Christmas illegal from the very beginning. 1.00

00:04:14.620 It was illegal in Boston.

00:04:15.760 Yeah.

00:04:16.320 You had to work on Christmas.

00:04:17.840 You had to work on Christmas.

00:04:18.200 You couldn't get out of working on it.

00:04:18.980 Right.

00:04:19.260 And when you read back, like, things that they would say in the early days, like the

00:04:22.580 mayor of Jamestown would write in his diary something like, Christmas passed without incident.

00:04:27.660 Because Christmas was such a body, such a time of basically drinking and haymaking.

00:04:34.160 We couldn't make it a national holiday until Chinese restaurants opened.

00:04:38.480 Otherwise, we'd have no place to go.

00:04:39.960 But the truth is, Christmas, as we understand it, the American Christmas actually started

00:04:46.520 because of Coca-Cola. They wanted to sell more sugar water. And so to sell more sugar water,

00:04:53.200 they hired a great artist to create these beautiful images of Santa Claus. And they put

00:04:59.780 incredible amounts of marketing money into getting Americans to celebrate a holiday that

00:05:04.660 up until that time, they had thought was decidedly unchristian and pagan in nature. And so when

00:05:11.280 we say, oh, Christmas is becoming so commercial, it was started by a corporation to hawk sugar water.

00:05:16.520 Of course it's...

00:05:17.820 We have to put in a good word for Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens really did invent

00:05:21.580 Christmas as...

00:05:22.300 That's what he needs, I mean.

00:05:23.200 Yeah.

00:05:25.540 No, I mean, he did. And you know, here's something really interesting. It very rarely snows in London.

00:05:31.020 But for the first eight years of Dickens' life, which is the time that he looked back on with

00:05:35.140 nostalgia, it actually snowed for every winter. And so he puts the snow into Christmas because

00:05:39.740 he loved it so much. And that's how we got Bing Crosby.

00:05:42.000 Tell me more, Turner, like Santa.

00:05:43.300 Basically, Charles Dickens invented Bing Crosby. Not many people know that.

00:05:48.960 This will be a great conversation for us to have throughout the night because I know few

00:05:52.660 men alive today who love Christmas as much as you do.

00:05:57.040 It's true.

00:05:57.700 But in the true spirit of the season, before we can do that, we have to talk about stamps.com.

00:06:01.600 Oh, of course. Which actually comes in very handy at Christmas time.

00:06:04.580 It does. I mean, around this time of year, you're sending a lot of packages to a lot of different

00:06:07.740 people. And hopefully you're sending them presents and not something else terrible. But

00:06:11.440 if you whatever you're sending them, what you really should be using is stamps.com. Because

00:06:14.680 the fact is, post office is great. You don't want to schlep all your stuff down to the post

00:06:17.780 office. Instead, what you want to do is have the post office's services come to you. You

00:06:21.580 can get all the great services of the post office right there at your desktop at stamps.com. We

00:06:26.660 use stamps.com here at the Daily Wire offices. You can buy and print official U.S. postage

00:06:30.560 for any letter, any package, any class of mail using your own computer and printer. And

00:06:34.080 then the mail carrier just picks it up. You click, you print, you mail, and you are done.

00:06:37.780 You can print it right onto the package. You can print it onto a piece of paper and tape

00:06:40.820 it to the package. You can print it onto a sticker. And right now, they have a very special

00:06:44.240 deal. Stamps.com is giving you the special offer, four-week trial, plus postage and a

00:06:48.720 digital scale without long-term commitments. That digital scale means you're not overpaying

00:06:51.840 for your postage. Go to stamps.com. Just click on the microphone at the top of the homepage

00:06:55.380 and type in promo code Shapiro. That is stamps.com. Promo code Shapiro. It saves you time,

00:07:00.220 saves you money. And most of all, you're not going to have to wait in line at the post office.

00:07:02.700 Because everybody else has the same idea that you do. They're going to bring all their

00:07:04.860 packages with them to the post office. I'm probably the only person who uses this because

00:07:07.920 you don't have to lick the stamps. I'm like, look, Ma, the computer just puts the stamp right

00:07:12.260 on the envelope. It is terrific. I mean, it is much more convenient than going over to

00:07:16.940 the post office. It is. As great as the post office is, this is more convenient.

00:07:20.180 Because last year, when you gave me my present, you know, you mailed me that future diamond.

00:07:25.820 It was a big lump. A big lump of future diamond.

00:07:32.540 Has it turned into a diamond yet? Well, I'm waiting.

00:07:35.380 You've got to grip it really hard. I need to put more pressure on you.

00:07:40.720 So, we're going to talk about Christmas a lot. We're going to talk about what Christmas means,

00:07:45.440 what it doesn't mean. We're going to talk about our favorite Christmas movies. We're going to

00:07:48.340 talk about George H.W. Bush dying. Not really.

00:07:51.200 No, not as jolly. Not as jolly as Russia-gate. Nothing more is Christmas. Nothing says Christmas

00:07:56.660 like Moscow in the snow. But before we get to Christmas, which is actually 22 days away,

00:08:04.880 there is currently a holiday taking place that one of the members of our panel actually does

00:08:10.340 recognize. Another one used to recognize it, but now, I mean, he's left a fold.

00:08:15.020 Well, let me light up a cigar here.

00:08:21.200 Gee, I remember those. Those were good. Those are delicious. The memory is better than the reality.

00:08:28.100 Now, I need napkins.

00:08:28.920 You're going to spit it into the ash tray. You can put it into the ash tray.

00:08:31.440 You've got to spit right in there. Louder with Crowder.

00:08:33.380 I can't really actually chew my way through that story.

00:08:35.420 The Louder with Crowder mug has found yet another great idea.

00:08:41.240 It's like, who's born for this? I feel like this should be a Crowder ad. 0.72

00:08:44.720 The Louder with Crowder mug club. It's not just for ashing cigars.

00:08:48.520 For spitting out baggage picture gum.

00:08:51.820 That's exactly right. We can tell that sucker on eBay. 0.99

00:08:54.600 Okay, so here's the deal with Hanukkah. First of all, it is not just Jewish Christmas. 0.99

00:08:59.820 So all the secular Jews in America, what's funny is that if you ask the Jews in Israel,

00:09:03.320 which are the biggest holidays, the biggest holidays are Passover and Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah

00:09:08.420 and Sukkot, probably. In terms of the rankings of the Jewish holidays,

00:09:12.200 for religious holidays, Hanukkah does not rank high just because it's not an actual full,

00:09:16.780 what they call Yom Tov, meaning we don't actually take off work.

00:09:18.680 I'm here on Hanukkah because we don't take off work during Hanukkah,

00:09:21.600 whereas September I take off like every other day.

00:09:24.060 I know. You wondered what happened to you, actually.

00:09:26.120 Right, exactly. But all the secular Jews in America, 0.95

00:09:28.380 because Hanukkah happens around the same time as Christmas,

00:09:30.640 and Christmas is so attractive with all the pretty lights and the twinklies and everything,

00:09:33.760 and the beautiful music. I mean, it's wonderful. It's wonderful.

00:09:36.380 But all the secular Jews in America, they're like, 1.00

00:09:37.940 we need something to make sure our kids don't celebrate Christmas.

00:09:40.200 Or is he writing the Christmas songs?

00:09:41.580 That's right, exactly. If Irving Berlin isn't writing the Christmas songs,

00:09:44.320 then we have to have our kids celebrate Hanukkah. So we will just make it into like a big thing.

00:09:49.260 Now, Hanukkah was at one point a big thing. It's still in Israel. It's very widely practiced.

00:09:54.060 But what Hanukkah, what's hilarious about this is that the secular Jewish community has taken up 1.00

00:09:58.540 Hanukkah as like this special holiday because of the time of year. Hanukkah is the most anti-secular 0.92

00:10:03.520 holiday there is on the Jewish calendar, probably. The entire story of Hanukkah is taking place 0.58

00:10:08.080 during the Seleucid Empire. So you're talking about hundreds of years before Christ and the

00:10:11.800 Greek Empire basically is presiding over the area of Israel. And there's a civil war essentially

00:10:21.220 breaks out in Israel between a Hellenistic Jewish community and the non-Hellenistic Jewish community.

00:10:26.780 And the Seleucid Empire is sort of playing off one side against the other in an attempt to keep

00:10:30.820 control. And at a certain point, the leader of the Seleucid Empire at that time, Antiochus IV,

00:10:35.820 he decides that he has had enough of these Jews and their Jewish ways and he bans Jewish practice 1.00

00:10:40.720 and he takes over the temple and he installs pagan gods in the temple. And then he bars any sort of 0.93

00:10:46.220 Jewish practice in the temple. And this leads to the Great Maccabee Revolt in which Judah Maccabee and 0.55

00:10:51.340 Matatiyahu and Matthias, the entire Maccabee family basically rises up and they throw out the Maccabees. 0.99

00:10:58.480 Now, there's a great debate inside the Jewish community. I mean, they throw out the Seleucid Empire. 0.85

00:11:02.380 Now, there's a great debate. And they were fighting, by the way, a bunch of Hellenized Jews 1.00

00:11:05.600 as well because the Hellenized Jews were fighting on the side of the Greeks. So it's an actual civil

00:11:08.780 war. A great debate has broken out over the years as to what exactly is being celebrated on the eight

00:11:14.220 days of Hanukkah. Because the story that you typically hear is that then the Jews went into

00:11:18.280 the temple and everything is a mess. And so they clean the place up and they find one vial of oil

00:11:23.060 and they proceed to pour that into the menorah, which is supposed to never go out.

00:11:26.380 And they pour it in and somehow this lasts for eight days, which seems like kind of a cheap miracle

00:11:30.200 to last for eight days. Well, I always considered it to be the miracle of finding oil in the Middle

00:11:33.980 East. It's an amazing miracle. I mean, try to imagine that your iPhone is on like 10% and just

00:11:39.780 stays on for eight days. It's pretty much like that. A blessing from the Lord.

00:11:46.140 Exactly. And so there's this great debate in sort of Jewish philosophical circles about what the

00:11:50.880 actual miracle is. Is it miraculous? So it comes down to, for Baimonides, is it miraculous

00:11:57.440 when something happens that happens inside the bounds of nature, but isn't in and of itself

00:12:01.660 unexpected? Or does it have to be like an actual violation of the physical laws of nature? So

00:12:05.480 the oil thing is a violation of the laws of nature, but the Jews winning the war is a miracle of a 1.00

00:12:10.640 different sort. And Maimonides comes down on the side that what you're actually celebrating is the

00:12:14.180 rebellion. And there's some sort of revisionist history that suggests that the reason that the

00:12:18.340 oil stuff was written in, the reason that they celebrated that later is because the Maccabean

00:12:22.520 empire ended up becoming pretty corrupt near the end. And so there was sort of a retaliation by

00:12:27.880 the time of the Talmud saying, okay, well, the Maccabees weren't that great. So we can celebrate 1.00

00:12:30.860 that they won, but the real celebration is God's providence in the menorah. So that's kind of the

00:12:36.280 story, but it's an anti-Hellenistic story. It's about how secular Jewry was not tolerated by

00:12:39.880 non-secular Jewry. And yet the people who celebrated the hardest in the United States are the 0.96

00:12:43.860 secular Jews. And because of that, I mean, I don't mean to be pessimistic about this, but secular Jews

00:12:49.160 who celebrate Hanukkah to prevent their kids from celebrating Christmas, their grandchildren will 0.52

00:12:52.400 not be celebrating Hanukkah. I mean, the reality is that the people who take Hanukkah seriously are

00:12:57.500 also the people who take all the other Jewish holidays seriously and know something about the

00:13:01.100 other Jewish holidays. It's like the people who celebrate Christmas as sort of a cultural totem.

00:13:04.940 And you know that they're not going to church. And at a certain point when Christmas becomes

00:13:09.760 outclassed in terms of fun by something else, which will be harder because Christmas is inherently a

00:13:13.400 lot of fun, but when it becomes outclassed by, you know, LSD, then at that point, all those kids

00:13:18.500 will abandon. And it's the problem with secular religion generally. People who hold on to all 0.99

00:13:23.860 these cultural hallmarks of religion say, well, we don't really care about Judaism. In fact,

00:13:27.560 we're uncomfortable with Judaism, but we're still uncomfortable with the whole Christmas thing. 0.99

00:13:31.080 So we don't want our kids doing that. So we'll do something fun and tell them we have eight days

00:13:33.700 of presents and it'll be sort of like Adam's down. There's Hanukkah song. We have all these secular

00:13:37.120 Jews who identify as Jewish. And that means that Judaism is really cool. Not a single person has

00:13:41.800 stayed Jewish over history because Judaism is the cool place to be. That's not why people stay Jewish. 0.98

00:13:45.720 It's an interesting thing. You see it across our culture right now where there are all these sort

00:13:48.980 of vestigial remnants of past religious practices. And you see people taking part in all of these

00:13:55.160 symbolic gestures, but they're not actually symbolizing anything. And so there's this sort

00:14:01.280 of superficial beauty to it, but there's a real sense of tragedy, I think, to people going through

00:14:06.080 these symbolic motions where they're not actually... But you can see why you do that, right? I mean,

00:14:10.660 you think that that's the good stuff. You think that the surface, the icing is the good

00:14:14.700 part, but it's really not the meat. It's not the actual... This is why people have a terrible

00:14:18.340 time at the holidays. You put icing on your meat. I put icing on my meat, yeah. I was hoping

00:14:20.980 you wouldn't catch that. This is why people have a terrible time at the holidays because

00:14:24.940 all they think about with Christmas or Reformed secular Jewish Hanukkah or whatever is I'm

00:14:31.260 supposed to be happy. I'm with my family. I'm supposed to be happy. And if you ever try to be

00:14:36.560 happy, you won't be. That's not... You can't do that. You have to be celebrating something.

00:14:41.320 You need to be feeling a joy that is outside of you.

00:14:44.020 And also, you have to be ensconced in the lifestyle the rest of the year in order for

00:14:47.140 you to really say, okay, and now here's when I really get to let loose because I've been

00:14:50.600 celebrating this lifestyle the entire year long. To me, it's the difference between going

00:14:55.580 to Disneyland once a year and having a season pass. When you have the season pass, you can go

00:14:59.420 anytime you want. And so you spend a lot of time there. And then when you go for a long

00:15:03.060 day, it's really just a joy. When you go once, there's a lot of pressure because you just spent

00:15:07.280 a ton of money on this one day. And you can see it. You can see Disneyland people walking around

00:15:11.920 this. I am going to enjoy myself. This is going to be... And you get that feeling from a lot of

00:15:15.400 people at Christmas too. It's like, I'm going to blow it out and have a huge meal and invite over

00:15:18.660 all these people. Hanukkah too. It's like, we'll invite over all these people. We don't see them

00:15:21.560 the rest of the year. And then they get together like, we're supposed to be having fun. Now is the fun

00:15:25.760 time. I love my family. It is a little telling that the Christians at Christmas time, they celebrate 1.00

00:15:30.020 the birth of God, that everything is forgiven, that you're going to heaven for all eternity.

00:15:33.660 And the Jews are celebrating Hanukkah, which is... We're still here.

00:15:38.700 But that's every Jewish holiday in summation, right? Every Jewish holiday basically is, 0.78

00:15:42.820 they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat. Except for Yom Kippur, which is, God is after us, 0.96

00:15:48.540 fast. In our pessimism lies our optimism.

00:15:55.880 It's true. That is true, actually.

00:15:57.240 But it's also a very aggressive holiday, meaning that one of the commandments is that when you

00:16:01.700 light the menorah, you're not supposed to just light it on the interior of your home. You're

00:16:04.340 actually supposed to light it in the window of your home to let everybody know we're still here.

00:16:08.000 And so there's this very famous picture from 1932 of a menorah in the window of, it's probably

00:16:14.140 Berlin. And you can see out the window, all of the Nazi flags flying. And here's this menorah in

00:16:19.260 the window. And that's really the Jewish experience in a nutshell. And you know, everybody's been trying

00:16:23.380 to kill us. They're not here. We're still here. We will remain here. We're not going anywhere.

00:16:26.480 We're actually glad you're still here.

00:16:27.960 What? You know, when Christians say that, we're so happy. 0.96

00:16:31.220 For so long, that was not the case.

00:16:33.360 These are the three people who are still glad.

00:16:36.480 We don't speak for Christianity.

00:16:38.160 So I do want to talk about Christmas. And because this is a political show of sorts, I think

00:16:51.620 that we should, we'd be doing ourselves a disservice, by which I mean, our audience might not give

00:16:55.380 us all their sweet, sweet, beautiful mammon.

00:16:57.640 And we're going to talk about the war on Christmas and the fact that Christmas is certainly under

00:17:04.040 siege in our culture. To me, you can't really do that in a spirit of honesty if you don't

00:17:10.960 also talk about sort of how Christmas became Christmas in our culture in the first place.

00:17:17.120 But before we get into the kind of esoteric and historic, Michael, you've put some thought

00:17:21.120 into...

00:17:21.880 Oh, I've been a general. I've been a four-star general.

00:17:23.720 You are.

00:17:24.300 I think Christmas is winning, baby.

00:17:25.700 The patent of the war.

00:17:26.280 Oh, yeah.

00:17:27.800 You know, so obviously, the first celebration of Christmas in America was an illegal celebration

00:17:34.980 by these Anglican-type people, Church of England-type people, who the Puritans tolerated taking

00:17:42.060 the day off of work. But if they weren't actually praying and celebrating, then they had to go

00:17:47.260 back out and work again. There's long been a war on Christmas.

00:17:49.620 A lot of conservatives say that there isn't a war on Christmas. The majority of Republicans,

00:17:54.980 56%, say there's no such thing as a war on Christmas. We know that there is. The Obama 0.54

00:17:59.180 administration, in their White House Christmas cards, took the word Christmas out. This was

00:18:03.780 breaking a holiday tradition. Donald Trump, in his Trumpian way, has now made a much larger,

00:18:08.940 golder, redder, Merry Christmas. Jim Cooper, a Democrat representative, said it was the gaudiest

00:18:14.660 Christmas card he's ever seen.

00:18:16.000 Wait, Trump's Christmas card?

00:18:17.300 It's shocking.

00:18:17.880 It's a model of subtlety.

00:18:19.620 Yeah. You know, Barack Obama made those nuns pay for abortion drugs. Donald Trump invited

00:18:24.940 nuns in full habit to sing at the White House Christmas tree. I'm sure he just called up and

00:18:29.760 he said, I need the most Christian people you can possibly find.

00:18:32.600 Give me some nuns. 1.00

00:18:33.640 Little sisters of the poor and slightly off-key.

00:18:35.580 Yeah.

00:18:35.780 So, we have all of that.

00:18:38.800 Is Bun Trap family still available?

00:18:42.260 We'll find them. We'll find them. But, you know, to your point, if you're not living it throughout the year, the celebration isn't as fun. And this is why I think, having been a four-star general in the war on Christmas, Christmas is winning, Starbucks has the cups again, everything's going great, nuns are at the White House. You have to look at the war on Advent. And this cuts both ways. The real war on Advent is, if you start playing Mariah Carey on November 1st, and you're sipping...

00:19:05.780 Peppermint lattes and whatever, then there's no build-up. You're not waiting for anything.

00:19:10.120 This is the thing that really annoys me about it. I'm an Episcopalian, which is Catholic lights, right? We have the same thing.

00:19:15.360 Twice the liturgy, half the guilt.

00:19:16.480 Yeah, exactly. But this thing that you are not allowed to celebrate Christmas during Advent, because it's a penitential time, I'm like, good idea. Take all the joy. Suck all the joy out of religion. That'll bring them in. That'll stack them in.

00:19:29.400 My view is that you should never play Mariah Carey.

00:19:32.240 It's always too soon.

00:19:33.200 Year-round, it's always too soon.

00:19:34.440 It does offend God.

00:19:35.460 That we do know that.

00:19:36.540 No question.

00:19:37.720 But it is clearly moving in that direction.

00:19:41.540 And so, who knows, though, what happens after Donald Trump makes it a major campaign promise to say Merry Christmas.

00:19:49.640 I mean, corporations are changing this. They really are reacting to it.

00:19:53.220 But what happens next?

00:19:54.300 And I actually think...

00:19:54.920 Is it taking the Lord's name in vain in a strange way for Donald Trump to say Merry Christmas?

00:20:00.220 We're going to say Merry Christmas.

00:20:02.800 Don't.

00:20:03.200 So I think because we live in a predominantly Protestant nation, I think that we should actually not just assume that everyone in the audience even knows what Advent is.

00:20:17.760 So I want to talk about what is Advent.

00:20:19.900 First, I want to talk about where Santa Claus gets his suits.

00:20:23.120 And I think there can be very little question, as form-fitting as they are, that it's Indochino.

00:20:27.440 I mean, how else could he fit down the chimney?

00:20:29.280 I mean, those things had better be tailored.

00:20:31.020 And that's why you need an Indochino suit.

00:20:32.740 We've got a huge variety of fabrics, colors, and patterns that makes Indochino incredibly stylish.

00:20:36.760 You want to look like James Bond this holiday season?

00:20:38.720 Well, you can when you go to Indochino.

00:20:40.280 They're North America's leading made-to-measure menswear company.

00:20:42.880 Indochino suits are just fantastic.

00:20:44.240 Not only that, they allow you to personalize pretty much everything.

00:20:46.600 The lapel, the lining, the pockets, the buttons.

00:20:48.420 You can write in your own monogram.

00:20:49.840 I went to an Indochino headquarters over here in Santa Monica.

00:20:52.580 And you really walk in, and it's like, it's a tailor who works with you.

00:20:55.780 Yeah, but did you throw in that monogram thing just to see if you can get Michael Knowles to buy an Indochino suit?

00:21:00.840 100%.

00:21:01.080 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:21:02.720 And it is really great.

00:21:04.780 And not only that, these things are really stylish.

00:21:07.060 It's a lot of fun.

00:21:07.780 And you can do it from home also.

00:21:08.920 You don't actually have to go over to one of their headquarters.

00:21:10.740 You can take your measurements at home.

00:21:11.800 Then they send you a tailored made-to-measure suit.

00:21:14.000 This week, my listeners get any premium Indochino suit for just $359 at Indochino.com when you enter backstage at checkout.

00:21:20.420 That is 50% off the regular price for a made-to-measure premium suit.

00:21:23.720 Plus, shipping is free.

00:21:24.720 The Indochino.com, again, promo code BACKSTAGE for any premium suit for just $359 and free shipping.

00:21:30.120 It's better than anything you're going to get off the rack.

00:21:31.940 And it's less expensive than anything you're going to get off the rack.

00:21:33.740 And it fits you better than any of those things.

00:21:35.520 It's an incredible deal for a premium made-to-measure suit.

00:21:37.460 Again, go check it out right now.

00:21:38.760 Indochino.com, promo code BACKSTAGE to make that happen.

00:21:41.840 Look your best for the holidays and humiliate all of your family members who have not bought a suit from Indochino. 0.92

00:21:46.340 Which is what Christmas is all about.

00:21:49.620 So we're going to talk Advent, but they're telling me in my ear, and they're right to do so,

00:21:53.220 that we owe our members a question first.

00:21:56.280 Far be it from us to not talk about Advent.

00:21:58.720 Riveting Michael Knowles' commentary on Advent.

00:22:02.060 I say we owe our members because they give us their money.

00:22:04.900 I know.

00:22:05.320 It's amazing.

00:22:05.900 I owe the money.

00:22:06.200 Listen to Michael Knowles talk about Advent.

00:22:09.160 That's what they're paying for.

00:22:10.280 Maybe they're paying to get you to stop.

00:22:11.840 Yeah, they want to hear about death, judgment, heaven, and hell, but only after the questions.

00:22:16.100 Elisha, what do you got for us?

00:22:17.880 We have lots of great questions.

00:22:19.180 And don't forget, I mean, in the season of giving, go over to the Daily Wire store,

00:22:23.360 and the four wise men, sure, is one of my faves.

00:22:26.220 You know, don't, what's the other one?

00:22:27.400 The snowflake one is hilarious and amazing.

00:22:29.440 But first, we have subscriber questions from our very awesome subscribers,

00:22:33.500 who are the only ones who get to ask the questions, by the way, in case you didn't know that.

00:22:37.040 Dana asks a very important question in all caps.

00:22:41.100 Why isn't Ben in the bunny suit?

00:22:44.680 So this was discussed, and it turned out that the general consensus was that

00:22:49.320 I say enough serious things that ought to be taken seriously

00:22:52.520 that them coming out of me while I wore the bunny suit for two hours.

00:22:55.200 That would be amazing.

00:22:57.300 Elisha, I know.

00:22:58.660 So, shh, quiet you.

00:23:00.580 Okay, but.

00:23:01.380 By consensus, Ben thought, means that just he thought.

00:23:03.840 Yeah, exactly.

00:23:05.680 I've been here with a bunch of people who are breathing smoke into my lungs.

00:23:08.300 I'm not doing that and wearing a bunny suit for two hours.

00:23:10.600 Are you freaking kidding me?

00:23:11.920 There's only so much I'm willing to do.

00:23:13.420 Ben, you're so cute in the bunny suit.

00:23:15.420 Elisha, what's next?

00:23:16.600 All right, Joel J says, what was the best Christmas or Hanukkah gift you guys ever got?

00:23:21.360 Oof.

00:23:22.860 Hmm.

00:23:23.760 No one?

00:23:24.360 No one?

00:23:24.920 All I wanted for Christmas was you.

00:23:26.060 I thought you didn't like Mariah Carey. 0.78

00:23:31.440 That's an actual burn.

00:23:32.980 Elisha just actually got an egg burn. 1.00

00:23:35.280 That doesn't mean I don't know what Mariah Carey does.

00:23:37.360 Why do you think I don't like Mariah Carey?

00:23:38.760 In any case, okay, so who has it?

00:23:40.620 The best Christmas gift I ever gave was probably Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a Comprehensive Guide, now available for sale, $9.99 on Amazon.com.

00:23:49.780 What was the question?

00:23:50.560 I'm sorry.

00:23:51.780 I have one, actually.

00:23:53.820 So I don't know how everybody's parents do these things differently, but my parents, we had Santa Claus, you know?

00:24:00.200 And so there'd be gifts under the tree all the month of December, and those were from Mom and Dad, and you knew who paid for those.

00:24:07.120 But then when you woke up on Christmas morning and came in the room, there'd be a few gifts that were not wrapped that had been made by Santa Claus and his indentured servants, the little small people that he didn't pay a living wage.

00:24:19.200 And so I remember very clearly being a little boy and walking in to see what Santa Claus had brought me, and there was a giant red telescope on my parents' sofa, and I was so excited because I was kind of a little nerdy kid, you know?

00:24:34.440 And I thought I liked space and was a Trekkie and was finally going to get to see the stars, you know?

00:24:39.400 And then I took my telescope out that very night, and have you ever tried to use a telescope?

00:24:45.220 Yeah.

00:24:46.000 It's hard.

00:24:46.660 It's hard.

00:24:46.980 And the problem is, if you don't have anybody to tell you these things, like, you look at a star through a telescope, and when you finally get the star into the lens, you realize that it's, like, if you look up with the naked eye, a star is just a white dot in the sky.

00:25:01.000 Once you get it into the telescope, it is a slightly larger white dot in the sky.

00:25:06.120 And I didn't have anyone to tell me, like, no, there's only, like, eight things you can see.

00:25:11.200 Or teach me how to point it at. 0.97

00:25:12.760 And so, literally, the most excited I've ever been to receive a present, and after one single night of futzing with it, I was like, I hate this stupid day, and never look through it again. 0.73

00:25:21.700 You know, I think this would be an excellent time for me to give you the greatest Christmas presents you will ever get. 0.96

00:25:26.960 Oh, wow.

00:25:27.620 True.

00:25:27.680 Yeah, so this is, you will never beat this Christmas present.

00:25:29.780 I swear to God, if this is the New Testament trip.

00:25:32.880 It's better.

00:25:34.060 Better than the New Testament.

00:25:36.180 John MacArthur already tried that earlier this week.

00:25:39.380 This is something you'll remember, possibly, for the next ten minutes.

00:25:43.520 Oh, self-present.

00:25:45.380 Oh, wow.

00:25:46.820 That's really, that's the spirit of the season.

00:25:49.280 That's so sweet.

00:25:49.420 This is promoting myself.

00:25:52.020 Relentless self-interest.

00:25:52.880 So we've had him self-promote, and you self-promote, and I'm the only Jew in the room.

00:25:58.720 Wow.

00:25:59.300 The lefty's dictionary.

00:26:00.940 I can't believe it.

00:26:02.180 But you don't look like him.

00:26:03.400 Where's the beard?

00:26:03.860 I know.

00:26:04.720 You were so much younger.

00:26:06.400 So many years ago.

00:26:07.580 It was so many years ago.

00:26:08.560 You look back in the rear view mirror and you thought, what did I do with my leg?

00:26:10.720 Where did I go wrong?

00:26:12.460 It's just this afternoon.

00:26:13.680 I know.

00:26:14.560 So this has all the same art as the videos.

00:26:16.680 It is brilliantly done by Rebecca Shapiro, I think.

00:26:19.640 Is there, Drew, did you find any single person you couldn't offend just on the cover, actually?

00:26:26.060 I think that I have managed now.

00:26:27.980 My wife has said that the mission of my life is to offend every single human being.

00:26:31.800 I think I've now done it.

00:26:33.280 Well, she knows you better than anyone.

00:26:34.280 Yeah, exactly.

00:26:35.240 I think she may be the only person I haven't quite offended yet.

00:26:37.780 Maybe the whole marriage is just the...

00:26:39.760 Well, while I think of something that I can promote myself by talking on our Christmas special,

00:26:44.680 Alicia, do you have another question from a subscriber?

00:26:46.620 Sure do, and I have to say, I'm a fan of the Klavan beard. 0.99

00:26:50.480 I mean, I've been telling him, and I actually think it makes him look young and hip and cool.

00:26:54.780 So keep that beard, Drew.

00:26:56.120 See, the babes get five votes to your one. 1.00

00:26:59.640 I also like the beard, but I disagree with almost everything she said.

00:27:06.140 I like it because all I can think is, you know, that'll probably keep growing after he dies.

00:27:12.060 I think it probably is growing now after I die.

00:27:16.620 Oh, Lord have mercy.

00:27:18.700 They say that you're the cruelest to those that you love, so take that as a compliment, Drew.

00:27:22.260 I love who they are.

00:27:24.760 This question comes from Christopher.

00:27:26.420 He says, hey, how does Ben feel being surrounded by all these Christians and Christmas apparel? 1.00

00:27:31.180 I mean, mostly that's called living in America.

00:27:34.180 But also, like, who cares?

00:27:36.560 The truth is, I love the Christmas season.

00:27:39.000 I've always loved the Christmas season.

00:27:40.200 I think that it's fantastic that people are celebrating God.

00:27:42.820 I think that I love the beauty of the season.

00:27:45.960 The songs of the season are just fantastic.

00:27:47.740 Everybody's in a good mood, which, like, in L.A. is a big thing because everybody's usually grumpy and nasty.

00:27:53.120 And so now everybody's, like, in a very good mood because we're nearing the end of the year.

00:27:56.120 And so that's a lot of fun.

00:27:57.060 I think I've always said that I think that the best hope for the country is going to be a religious revival.

00:28:01.020 So every time there's even a sign of a religious revival in the country, it puts me in a better mood.

00:28:04.960 And I've never been, not only have I never been offended by Christian observance, I've been very happy with Christian observance, particularly American Christian observance, which has not been associated historically with anti-Semitism, which is very different from European Christian observance, which for 1,500 years was heavily associated with anti-Semitism.

00:28:19.380 American Christianity is a unique brand that has been uniquely philo-Semitic for essentially its entire history. 0.89

00:28:25.160 And so when the Christmas season rolls around, it puts me in a really good mood.

00:28:27.980 I'm really happy with it.

00:28:28.860 And I've never felt like I have to protect my kids from it.

00:28:32.160 I'll say to them, like, we'll drive around, I'll say, look at the pretty Christmas lights, and then we go home and we celebrate something different.

00:28:37.180 And that's great, and it's a different thing.

00:28:39.040 And that's why, as I say about the Hanukkah stuff, like, if you are trying to dissuade your kids from liking Christmas by liking Hanukkah, you're totally doing it wrong.

00:28:46.260 That's just something that Jews don't do, but it's a beautiful thing that other people do, and that's a great thing.

00:28:50.840 I think you lose the Jewish kids to Christmas when you don't have God. 0.97

00:28:54.200 If you are celebrating Judaism with God... 0.92

00:28:57.220 Yeah, then it's like, wow, look at all this pretty stuff.

00:28:59.220 Exactly, exactly.

00:29:00.040 Everybody's in a good mood, awesome.

00:29:01.140 Yeah.

00:29:02.160 And they have God, too.

00:29:04.460 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:05.160 And they're great shopping deals.

00:29:07.340 So, I mean, what's their complaint about?

00:29:09.760 Well, part of the question, though, wasn't just how do you feel being surrounded by Christmas.

00:29:12.800 It's how do you feel being surrounded by Christians. 1.00

00:29:14.880 And I think, you know, someone asked me on Twitter this week something similar, which was like, I mean, they were kindly pointing me to a resource for someone who could help me learn how to better convert you.

00:29:26.200 And they said, you know, Jeremy and Michael, I think you were on this.

00:29:28.500 I was on this.

00:29:29.000 Jeremy and Michael.

00:29:29.300 As opposed to the fire and sword, I wanted them to do that.

00:29:31.140 When you tried to convert Ben, maybe use this.

00:29:34.760 And they meant well, of course, because, you know, as we've all talked about before, there's a kind of people, it's a kindness when people want to share their religious faith with you, right?

00:29:43.160 I totally agree with this.

00:29:43.920 If somebody cares enough about my soul that they want to spend time trying to save me, great.

00:29:47.060 As long as they're not coming at me with a sword and they take the fact that I'm an independent human being with independent judgment, then sure, go at it.

00:29:53.320 I mean, that's totally fine.

00:29:55.020 And that's why when we had on John MacArthur and he did a 15-minute segment on Isaiah 53, and I didn't bother to get into, you know, the Jewish disagreements about Isaiah 53.

00:30:02.680 It's like, listen, go for it.

00:30:04.160 Enjoy.

00:30:04.400 Like, it doesn't, not only does it not matter to me, I'm flattered by it, you know, again, these are people who care about me, and that's great.

00:30:10.700 I also think there's another aspect to it, which is you're interested in it.

00:30:14.460 In the same, I think that part of the unique culture that we have here, because we have four very disparate religious points of view, our CEO, Caleb Robinson, I think represents a fifth really unique religious point of view that's always a part of our conversation.

00:30:29.140 This is because conservatives are so contrarian.

00:30:31.540 Even if we were both Catholic, we'd find out how to even disagree with each other on that.

00:30:36.340 You know, it is very nice.

00:30:37.780 It's very different.

00:30:38.480 We're all interested in each other's points of view.

00:30:40.540 We're all flattered that we care enough about each other to share our points of view.

00:30:45.260 And we have really free-range conversations.

00:30:46.880 And the other thing is that I think that, and the nice thing is also that when Christians talk to me about my own faith, what's nice about that is that it forces me to become a stronger defender of my faith if it's something that I believe.

00:30:57.080 And I think the same thing is true for you guys.

00:30:58.300 When I talk about Judaism and our take on Christianity, it sometimes makes you think, okay, well, what should I do to, you know, dig down into my own faith and respond to that?

00:31:05.620 And I think that it makes the conversation much more interesting.

00:31:06.940 I mean, sure, being in heaven while you're in hell will be nice.

00:31:09.240 But is there a way that I could be in heaven and be gooder?

00:31:13.500 Somehow gooder.

00:31:14.260 And it's funny because people always ask me, like, doesn't it bother you when you know that, like, all your friends think you're going to hell?

00:31:19.820 It's like, no, because when I die, we'll find out.

00:31:22.000 Right?

00:31:22.220 Like, until then, what do I care?

00:31:24.700 I also think legitimately, what do I care?

00:31:26.920 We're smuggling you in.

00:31:27.680 Right, well, this is, and the same thing when people say things like, well, you know, there are Christians who will only care about Israel because they think that in the end times,

00:31:34.760 Jesus is going to come back and then the rapture is going to happen and all the Jews are going to be left. 1.00

00:31:39.300 And it's like, okay, so when Jesus comes back, we'll talk.

00:31:41.620 It is amazing, though, that we have a lot of religious conversations around here.

00:31:47.140 And one of the things that is just amazing to me, and the Bible talks about this a lot, is it really doesn't matter where people are coming from, what their IQ is.

00:31:56.920 I mean, we could have a brilliant guy like Ben and Knowles, you know, and yet these insights come pouring out of them that actually change your point of view.

00:32:06.080 And you talk to people with really, as long as you're actually focused on God, you say things that you just wouldn't believe would come out of people's mouths.

00:32:13.780 And you think, like, wow, I never thought of that, and that's a new thing.

00:32:16.000 And I think that there's a, listen, I think there's a lot of wisdom about God from people of various perspectives, which is why, same thing Maimonides thought, who's trying to learn about God by looking at Aristotle and Plato.

00:32:25.160 I mean, I think that if you, when I read the writings of Pope Benedict, I'm thinking this is pretty amazing stuff.

00:32:30.800 I mean, there's a lot here that's terrific.

00:32:31.880 When I read Augustine, I'm thinking that there's a lot here that's really fascinating, and here's where I agree, and here's where I disagree.

00:32:38.540 The fact that we're all working within the same Judeo-Christian universe obviously matters a whole hell of a lot.

00:32:42.580 There's certain common preconceptions that we're taking.

00:32:44.440 But it makes it, you know, it has never, not only never bothered me an iota to be surrounded by Christians, I think that it's made me a better Jew to be surrounded by Christians as well.

00:32:53.200 Well, this is what you find from the militant atheist set that is pretty funny.

00:32:58.240 I mean, there's the line, an atheist, a crossfitter, walk into a bar, how do you know? 1.00

00:33:01.720 They tell you within five seconds.

00:33:03.600 And with that militant atheist, they'll bring up objections because they've never engaged with people of faith, from people of any faith.

00:33:10.980 And they've never thought, hmm, maybe some church fathers have asked the questions that you seem to.

00:33:17.000 No, no one's ever thought about the problem of evil before.

00:33:19.020 That's right.

00:33:19.440 That's the part that, and it really is astonishing.

00:33:21.420 When you talk to people who are militantly anti-religious, and they just start quoting you Bible verses out of context.

00:33:26.880 Like, can you give me the verse before and after, and then maybe I'll take you seriously enough that I know what you're saying.

00:33:31.640 But it's also, contemplation of God leads to humility.

00:33:35.360 This is why Adam hid his nakedness from God, because actually coming face to face with God illuminates our insufficiency.

00:33:45.560 And so people who actually believe in God, not people who are culturally religious, or even religiously culturally religious, which is a slightly different category, they can be filled with an enormous amount of hubris.

00:33:59.060 People who actually contemplate God are filled with humility, which is why we can have religious conversations with one another.

00:34:06.820 And once you get past all those sort of faux hubris, you get down to the actual humility that allows us to engage with these ideas.

00:34:13.100 Because the way that you know atheism is true to its name, that they actually reject God, is that there is so much hubris.

00:34:21.300 I mean, there's nothing worse than atheists in social media or in the comment sections condescending constantly in every single thing. 0.85

00:34:29.160 You and your sky God.

00:34:30.380 You and your sky God.

00:34:31.620 That's right.

00:34:32.240 That's right.

00:34:32.700 It's like, why don't you make a contention that no one in the history of religion has ever made, and then pretend that that's my contention?

00:34:37.740 I was always moved by Sam Harris's, I think it was his first book, The End of Toleration.

00:34:44.620 He talks about his Buddhist practice, and he quotes one of the typically kind of mysterious, complex phrases from one of the Buddhist texts.

00:34:53.680 And he says, where in Christianity do you find anything that complex?

00:34:57.300 And I just thought, you're kind of missing the point, pal, because the complexity flatters your intellect.

00:35:02.100 But the simplicity cuts through your intellect to the heart of things.

00:35:05.900 Well, I mean, also, this is the conversation that I had with Sam on stage when I did his podcast, is we were talking about the fact that he and I shared 95% of our values.

00:35:15.420 And I said, where did you get your values?

00:35:17.340 And he said, well, you know, I've studied Buddhism, and I've studied Eastern religion, and I've studied all this stuff.

00:35:20.560 He said, right, but I didn't study any of that, and you and I have 95% of our values in common, so where do you think you're getting those values?

00:35:25.260 And the answer, of course, is 3,000 years of common history springing from Sinai and moving forward through the Sermon on the Mount.

00:35:29.640 I mean, that is where your common culture came from, and that's the culture we all grew up in.

00:35:34.080 And if you don't appreciate that culture, then you are failing to recognize what it is that has shaped the world around you.

00:35:40.300 And that's the part where we all agree.

00:35:42.920 I mean, the doctrinal differences between Catholicism and Protestantism and Judaism, when you pull back from the Surratt painting a little bit,

00:35:51.040 and you see what is the broad river of Western history, what you see is that those differences are minute compared to the vast number of things that we have in common.

00:35:59.440 And the things we have in common are, in my view, significantly more important for the preservation of Western civilization than the things that divide us,

00:36:06.440 which is sort of the piece of Westphalia agreement, right, is that we have a lot more in common.

00:36:10.760 If we all hold hands going forward into the future, that's going to be a lot stronger.

00:36:14.260 But if we spend a lot of time trying to beat each other up.

00:36:15.520 But the question you ask, Harris, though, is an important one, because people are always saying to me,

00:36:19.860 do you think people can be good if they're atheists? 1.00

00:36:21.780 And I think, yes, they can.

00:36:23.060 Of course.

00:36:23.340 But actually, they're not making sense.

00:36:24.780 Right, exactly.

00:36:25.620 I'm kind of obsessed with that.

00:36:27.020 You should make sense.

00:36:27.780 No, this is exactly right.

00:36:28.900 It's people who say that you are a wandering ball of meat, sort of just moving through the universe without any will of your own.

00:36:34.540 But you should try to make the world a better place, and you should try to create human flourishing,

00:36:37.680 and you should try to create happiness and minimize sadness and minimize suffering and all this stuff.

00:36:42.000 It's like, how can you hold these things in common?

00:36:44.500 When you say that you can look at science and then derive morality from science, all I can think is, how could you possibly make that argument?

00:36:50.700 How could you possibly make that argument?

00:36:52.000 You have to at least start from the idea that you're going to submit to some authority greater than yourself.

00:37:00.200 And for them, I think the authority is a kind of collectivism.

00:37:04.460 They're basically saying, you can look at the world through strictly scientific terms and see how it is better to be moral for the construction of a society.

00:37:12.140 But what they can't answer is why you should be moral for the advancement of the individual.

00:37:16.860 Like, I understand that, yes, we need to, even in the absence of God, by treating each other well, we're going to have better collaboration.

00:37:24.840 We're going to have better partnerships.

00:37:26.240 It's going to be easier to keep the lions at the gates, and it's going to be easier to raise children.

00:37:32.480 But what's in it for me?

00:37:33.860 Well, that's it.

00:37:34.340 That's a good argument for everybody else to behave.

00:37:36.540 That's not a great argument for me, the superconscious man, to behave right.

00:37:40.580 You know, I've been reading a lot of atheist science this year, and the key mistake in logic they almost all make is they talk about evolution, and they say, this is how the eye evolved, and that's why we can see light.

00:37:52.720 And this is how our moral sense evolved, and that's how we invented morality.

00:37:56.180 You think, we didn't invent light, you know?

00:37:57.880 There has to be a source point outside of evolutionary biology for morality, and the biggest problem with this is that it can't be something that's invented by humans.

00:38:08.460 This was the entire enlightenment attempt, right?

00:38:10.480 I mean, Kant did the best of anybody, and Kant failed, right?

00:38:13.500 Kant basically tried to reverse engineer Judeo-Christian morality into morality without God.

00:38:19.520 He basically took all of the ends of Judeo-Christian morality and said, okay, let me see if I can come with an alternate explanation for why this should work in a sort of utilitarian or deontological sense.

00:38:29.120 And it doesn't work.

00:38:30.760 But he did at least say there is a world, which is so obviously true, there is a world of things as they are that we cannot know.

00:38:38.500 And in that world, all religious assumptions, the basic Christian religious assumptions may well be true, and we have to believe in them in order for morality to exist.

00:38:47.000 He did make that stand, and they keep using him to attack it.

00:38:50.320 And this is where I think that there are certain atheists who are honest enough to acknowledge that they have to make certain core assumptions about morality in order to build a system.

00:38:58.180 The people who say, I don't make any assumptions at all, I'm a scientist all the way through, you're not.

00:39:02.740 It's just not true.

00:39:04.000 It's just not true.

00:39:04.840 So most of our core values we hold in common as the four of us, one of the things that sort of separates some of us from others is the concept of eternal life.

00:39:14.780 Ben, as one who rejects the concept of eternal life, where do you get your life insurance?

00:39:20.540 Well, I don't actually reject the concept.

00:39:23.540 I've worked so hard on my segues.

00:39:25.520 I know, I know.

00:39:25.940 That's so good.

00:39:26.600 It's such a good segue.

00:39:27.080 I know.

00:39:27.600 It's a great segue.

00:39:28.540 I'll explain why you're theologically incorrect after I tell you about what happens when you die.

00:39:32.280 When you die, a couple of things happen.

00:39:34.540 First of all, there's a bunch of stuff that may or may not happen after you die.

00:39:37.860 But the thing that certainly will happen is your family's not going to have as much money as when you were alive if you were an earner at all, unless you have life insurance.

00:39:45.080 And this is why you need to actually be a responsible human.

00:39:48.240 It's the holiday season.

00:39:49.180 That means a lot of drunk drivers on the road. 0.68

00:39:50.640 You don't want to be killed by one of those drunk drivers.

00:39:52.700 And then your family looks around and they say—

00:39:53.900 Or a reindeer.

00:39:54.520 That's correct.

00:39:55.340 And then they bury you in a pauper's grave.

00:39:57.320 Is that something that you really want in the middle of the holiday season?

00:40:00.040 A pauper's grave?

00:40:01.020 I don't think so.

00:40:01.980 I think you want something better.

00:40:03.260 And that's why you need policy genius.

00:40:05.100 It's the easy way to get life insurance.

00:40:07.980 In minutes, you can compare quotes from top insurers and find the coverage that you need at a price that you can afford.

00:40:12.520 From there, you can apply online.

00:40:13.740 The unbiased advisors of policy genius will handle all the red tape for you, leaving you free to do the things you actually enjoy, like drink eggnog and make fun of the Jews. 0.93

00:40:20.940 And policy genius doesn't just make life insurance easy.

00:40:23.500 Whether you're shopping for disability insurance to protect your income, homeowners insurance, or auto insurance, they can help you get covered fast.

00:40:29.100 So, if you've been intimidated or frustrated by insurance in the past, give policy genius a try.

00:40:33.080 And really, you should, just as a responsible person with a family and people you care about, go to policygenius.com right now.

00:40:38.460 Get your quotes.

00:40:38.980 Apply in minutes.

00:40:39.720 You can do the whole thing on your phone this very instant.

00:40:42.320 Policy genius, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.

00:40:45.580 Okay, now.

00:40:46.180 Wait, wait, wait.

00:40:46.600 How about this about policy genius?

00:40:47.960 And then you do your theology.

00:40:48.820 And that's that policy genius is one of our most steadfast advertisers.

00:40:55.140 And one of the things that I tell people is if you want to support the content, supporting our sponsors really is the best way that you can do it, right?

00:41:03.700 You go support our sponsors. 0.70

00:41:05.680 I like policy genius in particular because since they're one of our biggest advertisers across a range of our shows, this show, your show, the other two shows, they put up with a lot of our crap.

00:41:17.020 Can you imagine being the advertiser while we just did that ad read?

00:41:22.880 And yet policy genius does.

00:41:24.840 And they stick by us.

00:41:25.880 And they stick by us and they provide a great service.

00:41:28.460 So it's good for you to go to policy genius and it's good for us if you go to policy genius.

00:41:32.980 And it's maybe evidence that it's good for policy genius to keep putting up with us.

00:41:36.840 Right.

00:41:37.100 Well, you know, there are always questions with insurance policies over acts of God.

00:41:42.560 How does that relate to the rapture?

00:41:44.000 Because then if my policy is with policy genius, we'll have to ask our next poll with our advertisers.

00:41:49.960 Ben, I joked about Jews and eternal life.

00:41:52.280 Tell me the actual.

00:41:53.160 So, I mean, there's a long history of Jews believing in the afterlife.

00:41:56.740 Of course.

00:41:56.900 The Talmud is full of statements about what happens in the afterlife.

00:42:00.140 There's pretty significant debate about what happens in the afterlife.

00:42:02.620 But the idea that you're guaranteed a portion in the afterlife if you fulfill certain basic commandments, particularly if you're not Jewish, it's actually easier to get into the afterlife or at least into the good part of the afterlife. 0.95

00:42:12.600 If you are not Jewish, then if you are Jewish. 0.82

00:42:16.120 If you are Jewish, you have the burden of the 613 commandments, which is why we actively discourage converts. 1.00

00:42:20.960 If you are not Jewish, then you basically only have seven.

00:42:23.320 And those seven are pretty easy.

00:42:24.360 It's like believe in God, don't commit adultery, don't kill anybody, no theft, don't eat the flesh of a living animal, set up courts of law.

00:42:31.040 These are very basic things.

00:42:32.540 Come in.

00:42:33.220 Right.

00:42:33.740 I love this religion.

00:42:34.640 You may not. 0.99

00:42:35.280 What the hell? 0.96

00:42:36.020 You may not.

00:42:37.300 So, Drew's got some problems where we come from, right?

00:42:40.160 Of the people in the room.

00:42:41.100 So, according to the Jews, the only people who got a problem, Drew, are the people who had an obligation to stay within the faith.

00:42:47.200 I knew there was something about you people.

00:42:48.360 But the Sicilians are okay. 0.74

00:42:49.380 This is the revenge of the Jews, right? 1.00

00:42:50.820 We say everybody gets in but you.

00:42:52.120 But me.

00:42:52.600 But you.

00:42:53.200 You are in serious trouble.

00:42:53.940 I can buy into any religion that doesn't accept Andrew Clayton.

00:42:58.000 Yeah, so can I, oddly enough.

00:43:01.100 Even Abraham was laid with his father or went to... 0.52

00:43:04.700 Yes.

00:43:05.680 What's the line from Genesis?

00:43:06.660 So, it's that he's...

00:43:10.040 He sleeps in the dust with his father.

00:43:11.980 Sleeps in the dust with his father.

00:43:12.320 So, it's...

00:43:13.260 Yeah, that sort of language is used pretty frequently in the Old Testament.

00:43:15.920 And it seems to me that that language implies the possibility of...

00:43:19.160 Right.

00:43:19.400 There's nothing explicitly in the five books of Moses about the afterlife.

00:43:21.740 Right.

00:43:21.840 It's a very this place-driven volume.

00:43:24.620 But, yeah.

00:43:25.700 I mean, there's a lot more in the prophets about the afterlife.

00:43:28.200 And, obviously, there are certain...

00:43:29.460 Like, even in the stories with regard to Saul, there are times...

00:43:32.080 Like, Saul confers with the witches of Endor who are dead, right?

00:43:34.980 I mean, like, he raises Samuel up from the grave, right?

00:43:37.900 Like, there's an idea of an afterlife that's obviously present in the prophets as well.

00:43:41.600 For sure.

00:43:42.440 So, now that we've discussed all the meaningful religious concepts, tell us about Advent.

00:43:45.680 So, Advent is very important.

00:43:47.800 It is very important.

00:43:49.060 I want to have the Catholic and Episcopalian putting a damper on all of the fun. 1.00

00:43:54.040 No more fun.

00:43:55.700 Only penitence.

00:43:57.420 Because what you do during Advent is you contemplate four mysteries.

00:44:00.980 Death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

00:44:03.260 And I actually think this is very important.

00:44:04.540 Not the national debt.

00:44:05.800 Yeah.

00:44:06.480 And a lot of debt for all the Christmas presents that you've got to buy.

00:44:09.780 It's actually very important because in our culture, we don't confront any of these questions.

00:44:14.640 Religious or irreligious.

00:44:16.120 We don't confront death.

00:44:17.220 We're terrified of death.

00:44:18.460 We're getting all these cosmetic surgeries and doing everything we can not to die.

00:44:22.560 We're terrified of judgment.

00:44:24.460 It's so judgy.

00:44:25.680 You know, there's your truth.

00:44:26.620 There's my truth.

00:44:27.360 Judgment is the judgiest.

00:44:28.620 Judgment.

00:44:29.060 It's so judgy.

00:44:30.700 And then we deny heaven.

00:44:32.400 We deny hope.

00:44:33.080 And there's huge despair spreading throughout the culture.

00:44:35.480 Suicide is way up 70% among teenagers.

00:44:39.160 There's a lack of hope.

00:44:40.900 And then there's no fear of hell.

00:44:43.140 There's no fear.

00:44:43.980 But hell implies justice.

00:44:45.920 Hell implies that there is some justice.

00:44:48.160 There is mercy, but there is justice too.

00:44:50.560 And it also means that we have freedom.

00:44:52.600 It means that we have free will as people to God can come down the mountain, can give

00:44:56.640 us all of this grace, but we still have the freedom to accept that or to turn away from

00:45:01.380 that and to celebrate that freedom and how that freedom can be turned toward good and

00:45:06.440 how our death, which comes through sin and our judgment can be redeemed in Christmas, makes

00:45:12.360 Christmas so much more beautiful and joyful and you wait for it.

00:45:15.620 Or you can listen to Mariah Carey.

00:45:16.880 Oh, I'm sorry.

00:45:19.340 In a very technical way.

00:45:20.440 What do you do for it?

00:45:21.300 How many presents do you get?

00:45:22.440 You open little boxes and there's chocolate inside, right?

00:45:24.560 You open little boxes, there are little chocolates, and you listen to O Come, O Come, Emmanuel on

00:45:28.360 repeat.

00:45:29.340 So Advent is the period before Christmas.

00:45:31.620 It's celebrated four Sundays before Christmas.

00:45:33.720 And it's a period of advenire, of the arrival of what is to come.

00:45:38.860 And even, you know, the one of the major Advent hymn is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

00:45:45.600 And it's actually an acrostic poem that says, arrow, cross, I will be tomorrow in Latin.

00:45:51.020 And it's this waiting.

00:45:52.140 So it's this period of...

00:45:52.840 I did not know that.

00:45:53.620 Yes.

00:45:53.940 That's the first time we've ever said anything.

00:45:55.120 It's the only insight I've ever had.

00:45:56.840 It's the only...

00:45:57.640 Yes.

00:45:58.140 You are waiting.

00:45:59.320 And so it's this period of expectation.

00:46:02.280 You're not celebrating yet.

00:46:03.980 The incarnation hasn't happened yet.

00:46:05.740 But the flip side of this is, Christmas is supposed to go on for 12 days.

00:46:08.920 Yeah.

00:46:09.340 On the 12th day of Christmas, or 12 days of Christmas, now you have Christmas breakfast

00:46:13.080 and then you just start ripping the tree down, you throw it on out.

00:46:15.700 People don't want to wait for that anymore.

00:46:17.420 But that's the period of celebrating Christmas.

00:46:19.500 And when you're expecting it, when you're waiting, when you're longing, when you're contemplating

00:46:23.280 your own mortality, I think it really helps us in our culture.

00:46:27.080 It reminds us that we're human.

00:46:28.800 We're going to die.

00:46:29.680 Memento mori.

00:46:30.540 We sin.

00:46:31.420 We need somebody to come and help us out.

00:46:34.080 And then when that does happen, it's such a joy.

00:46:37.300 So you're saying that the mystery is not like we all get together for dinner and one

00:46:39.880 of us plays the murderer.

00:46:42.140 That's the great mystery.

00:46:43.980 And the murderer is always Ben.

00:46:45.860 It's always...

00:46:47.100 The great mystery theater.

00:46:49.460 That's right.

00:46:50.100 And it's also because we just love instant gratification.

00:46:54.480 We love insta-everything.

00:46:55.800 So we just can't wait.

00:46:57.080 I mean, look, I'm as guilty of this as anybody.

00:46:59.060 My spiffy little bow tie here was my Christmas present from sweet little Elisa.

00:47:03.120 And we woke up today, December 2nd, or whatever it is, and she said,

00:47:07.840 Mac, I just got to give it to you now.

00:47:09.780 Here you go, Mac.

00:47:10.780 So we all do this.

00:47:12.560 Why is she Southern? 1.00

00:47:13.620 Yeah, I don't know.

00:47:14.480 Why has she become like Cartman?

00:47:15.920 I don't know.

00:47:16.280 There is a question about her voice.

00:47:18.200 But, you know, we get so much gratification.

00:47:21.140 But when you delay it a little bit, it's so much more enjoyable.

00:47:25.060 There you go.

00:47:25.900 How about that?

00:47:26.680 Did I make you all a bunch of Episcopalians and Catholics?

00:47:29.420 I can't help.

00:47:31.380 I go to church all through Advent.

00:47:33.260 I mean, I go to church a lot anyway, but I go to church all through Advent.

00:47:35.900 And they do kind of...

00:47:37.640 It gets kind of solemn.

00:47:39.000 And I'm always so...

00:47:40.280 I always feel so great when I'm in church.

00:47:42.000 I always feel so great.

00:47:43.560 I don't think it's rubbing off on me.

00:47:45.520 At your age, you feel great most places.

00:47:46.940 It's just the fact that I'm here.

00:47:48.120 It's great to be here.

00:47:50.080 It's great to be anywhere.

00:47:51.480 But, yeah, no, I mean, I do love Advent.

00:47:54.440 And I love the Christmas season.

00:47:55.660 And I love the joy.

00:47:56.920 But I can't...

00:47:58.040 I don't understand why the church wants to damp down the joy of the season.

00:48:03.360 Because it is a joyful season, even in the waiting.

00:48:05.200 But we just want...

00:48:06.480 That's true.

00:48:06.980 It is joyful in the waiting.

00:48:07.860 Because, I mean, it's like waiting for a Christmas present, right?

00:48:10.100 It's waiting for the Christmas present.

00:48:11.640 So you're not upset.

00:48:12.460 I mean, you're upset that you can't open the new race car or whatever yet.

00:48:16.300 But you are excited because you know you are going to get that gift.

00:48:19.100 It's those sermons about, like, you know, why do they put up the decorations so early? 0.99

00:48:23.720 Shut up. 0.95

00:48:24.480 As far as I'm concerned, I would live in one of those stores with the... 0.97

00:48:27.220 You know, this is where I want to talk a little bit about the history of Christmas and putting the X back in Xmas, which is my favorite thing to say at this time of year.

00:48:35.260 Because it's funny to me when religious people want to put Christ back into something that didn't involve him in the first place.

00:48:43.980 Right, right.

00:48:44.400 And when they want to have everybody stop having fun on a holiday that was basically just invented for the purpose of having fun.

00:48:52.200 So obviously, since the beginning of time, as long as there were agrarian societies, there were celebrations of the winter solstice.

00:48:59.460 And the winter solstice, as everyone knows, is the shortest day of the year.

00:49:02.520 And if you live in an agrarian society, in particular, if you live in an agrarian society in some place like Europe where it gets very, very cold in the winter and you have to store up foodstuffs in order to make it through, your crops don't grow, you are very happy when you're past, starting to move past winter.

00:49:20.820 And they would identify this by the winter solstice.

00:49:23.760 That this is when now we're turning the corner and we're moving toward spring.

00:49:27.640 You know, every day now is a day that spring is getting closer, not a day that...

00:49:30.760 But every day before, the days are getting shorter and darker.

00:49:33.940 That's right.

00:49:34.240 And the days, the more light creeps in every day after.

00:49:36.740 We're celebrating from darkness to light, from death to life, from cold to warm.

00:49:41.100 Yeah.

00:49:42.360 And they would celebrate this through all of these things that have become part of our modern Christmas iconography, right?

00:49:47.380 Evergreen trees, for example.

00:49:48.700 Well, why would you have an evergreen tree in a celebration of the winter solstice?

00:49:52.000 Because it's the only thing that's alive and you're speaking to whatever gods you happen to believe in in your pagan civilization and hoping that they'll bring back the warm days and the long days and the light days so that you can have something to eat.

00:50:05.780 It's kind of a way of saying in the middle of the darkest, most godless and lifeless part of the year, you're going, hey, whichever god it is I believe in, remember me?

00:50:14.420 Yeah.

00:50:14.580 Sure would be nice if you could send a little something to eat this way.

00:50:18.060 And so they would celebrate it by having these evergreen trees, for example, and they would celebrate it through a lot of drinking because it keeps you warm and because fermented drink survives for this winter period.

00:50:31.900 They would celebrate it through all kinds of revelry.

00:50:34.560 There'd be fistfights and all the things that go along with drunkenness and lots and lots of merrymaking.

00:50:40.940 You know, the kind of merrymaking that happens in the tent.

00:50:42.880 You know, they'd go in the tent and do all kinds of merrymaking.

00:50:46.760 And even that is symbolic in a way because they're inviting life back. 0.83

00:50:52.100 So they would have all these pagan sex, you know, orgies and other things. 0.92

00:50:56.520 Jeremy, I went to college. 0.96

00:50:57.580 Yeah, I remember.

00:50:58.800 Christmas and the man from Yale.

00:51:02.620 And they would invite life back and then that life would, you know, would come forth.

00:51:07.240 So it's not until like 500 years ago, 1500 years after Christ, that the Bishop of Rome decides in his attempt to sort of co-opt what would be a very rowdy holiday that was sort of ubiquitous across all peoples.

00:51:23.000 Everybody everywhere on earth celebrated the winter solstice.

00:51:25.740 And they all celebrated it in approximately the same way, which is getting drunk and rowdy and having lots and lots of sex.

00:51:32.500 And he, I think, identified in that certain things that actually did speak to the coming of Christ, that it's about moving from darkness to light.

00:51:41.680 It's about moving from death, sin and death into life and righteousness.

00:51:45.100 It's about the provision of the return of the provision of God.

00:51:49.120 And he wanted to sort of co-opt that.

00:51:51.820 And so he identified it with the birth of Christ.

00:51:55.100 And he didn't get the date exactly right.

00:51:56.520 There's reasons that he did it a few days off of what the solstice actually is.

00:52:01.160 But he identified this day as the 25th.

00:52:04.800 The Catholics then have Christmas. 0.94

00:52:07.260 The Protestants, though, who came into existence around about that same time, didn't have Christmas because they hated the Pope.

00:52:14.000 Right.

00:52:14.280 So we reject the Pope.

00:52:16.260 We reject the pagan celebration as well. 0.76

00:52:18.300 In other words, we agreed with the Pope's motive.

00:52:20.520 The Protestants don't like that everyone's getting drunk, having fights and having lots and lots of sex and catching things on fire, you know, around the winter solstice. 0.85

00:52:27.360 But we can't acknowledge a good idea because the good idea came from the Pope.

00:52:30.760 And no Pope can have a good idea.

00:52:32.460 And so really until, as I said at the beginning of the show, really until the 20th century, Protestants, and once America gets here, especially Protestants in America, reject Christmas.

00:52:42.900 So you'll see some Christmas happening across Europe, especially Catholic Europe. 0.50

00:52:48.240 You know, Cromwell during his time in England, outlaws Christmas even in England.

00:52:52.880 The Pilgrims, as I said, disliked Christmas.

00:52:56.920 It was illegal in many places in America because it was associated with either Catholicism, which was generally frowned upon in early America.

00:53:03.740 Or Anglicanism, which is Catholicism, yeah, pretty close.

00:53:06.760 Or pagan rowdiness, because it was very religious people who came over.

00:53:11.100 And so they, you know, it's kind of funny, like one of the earliest depictions of Santa Claus in America was a piece of Union propaganda during the Civil War.

00:53:18.680 Because in the South, where it was much more agrarian, there was more of a love of Christmas than there was in the more industrial North.

00:53:26.740 And so Lincoln sort of co-opted Santa Claus.

00:53:29.880 He drew this, he had this picture made of Santa Claus with Union troops as a way of ticking off the Confederates and saying, you think he's your state?

00:53:37.180 No, he's our state now.

00:53:38.340 And that's why in 1870, that's a big part of the reason why Christmas became a national holiday as part of Reconstruction.

00:53:44.700 But it's funny that we're trying to, since the beginning of the celebration of Christmas 500 years ago, when the Bishop of Rome determined that that's when it would be, we've been trying to insert Jesus into a pagan celebration of drunken revelry and merrymaking.

00:54:04.320 So that makes it funny to me when people say they want to put the Christ back in Christmas.

00:54:08.160 It's like, well, he wasn't here.

00:54:10.760 It's kind of a beautiful thing, though, that Christianity touches these things and turns them into celebrations.

00:54:16.240 Well, that's all of Rome.

00:54:17.320 When I visited Rome with my wife, I was just walking around, I'm like, there is an interesting thing.

00:54:21.600 You walk around, there's like a giant Egyptian obelisk.

00:54:23.720 There's a little cross on top of it.

00:54:24.940 I know.

00:54:25.460 And you're like, that doesn't seem right.

00:54:28.100 It doesn't seem like I was there originally.

00:54:29.660 Did you see when you were in Rome that rock that has Mithra on one side and you turned it over, it's got Christian iconography?

00:54:34.740 They just took over everything and made it Christianity. 1.00

00:54:36.260 I love it.

00:54:37.000 And I'm not again it.

00:54:38.280 I'm again using language like putting Christ back in Christmas in sort of disregard of the real history of how Christ came to be in Christmas.

00:54:47.280 And the big debate over spelling Christmas, X-M-A-S, is one of the great evidences of this because American Christians get outraged when you write, like, merry X-mas on a card or something.

00:55:01.400 They get outraged because you're crossing out the name of Christ.

00:55:04.960 But the truth is you're not crossing out the name of Christ at all.

00:55:09.360 500 years before the celebration of Christmas really became a Christian thing, before the Pope even decided that that would be the celebration of Christmas on the 25th.

00:55:22.360 And that makes it 400 years before we start celebrating Christmas in America.

00:55:27.440 In 1021, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is the first place that we see this, that the Greek letter chi, which is an X, is actually pronounced when you use it in certain context, Christ.

00:55:40.480 And so when you would write X-mas, you were literally writing Christmas.

00:55:45.820 You were writing it in an abbreviated fashion, but not the way that we abbreviate things.

00:55:49.660 It wasn't as...

00:55:52.120 It was like shorthand.

00:55:52.760 It was like shorthand, but it wasn't like writing Texas T-X.

00:55:58.860 It wasn't...

00:55:59.460 It was...

00:56:00.000 The symbol itself is actually pronounced in that context, Christ.

00:56:03.580 Right, right.

00:56:03.700 It comes from Christmas.

00:56:04.860 And so from a thousand years ago, people were spelling Christmas X-M-A-S.

00:56:11.060 And one of the jokes is, up until 50 years ago in America, people might use X to be pronounced Christ even in people's...

00:56:20.940 In names.

00:56:21.500 Like you might spell Christopher X-O-F-E-R.

00:56:25.240 And that would be pronounced Christopher.

00:56:27.100 It's not an abbreviation of Christopher.

00:56:28.720 It would be the actual spelling of your name.

00:56:30.480 And it is a cross.

00:56:31.340 It also is a cross.

00:56:32.560 So it's Christ-O-F-E-R. 1.00

00:56:34.340 So it's funny to me that in America, which is by and large a Protestant nation, Christians, who are by and large Protestant, are really angry that you're crossing Jesus out of Christmas.

00:56:44.060 But the joke is, Christmas means the Christ Mass.

00:56:47.360 That's right.

00:56:47.840 Which Protestants don't believe in Mass in the first place. 0.98

00:56:50.420 So I want to actually pronounce it...

00:56:53.500 I want to spell it Christ-X. 0.96

00:56:55.780 Christ-X, Christ-X.

00:56:56.720 Because I want to mark out the Mass.

00:56:58.620 It does often seem to me...

00:57:00.440 It's a funny thing to be angry about.

00:57:01.660 Well, it is.

00:57:02.240 But it does often seem to me that a lot of Christianity, and I say this as an outsider who joined, a lot of Christianity is based on eliminating the best parts of the Christian message.

00:57:11.920 A lot of Christianity seems to be like, you know, you're forgiven. 0.56

00:57:14.620 Not so fast.

00:57:17.140 Eternal life.

00:57:18.000 Love your neighbor.

00:57:18.900 Not that.

00:57:19.420 Yeah, exactly.

00:57:20.660 Judge not.

00:57:21.120 My favorite is, anytime I say this on my podcast, anytime I say, you know, Jesus says, judge not.

00:57:26.400 They say, that's not what he meant.

00:57:28.600 What the hell did he mean?

00:57:30.800 That's what he meant.

00:57:31.540 No, but that person knows what the divine logic of the universe is, man.

00:57:34.080 What are you talking about?

00:57:35.540 I mean, he keeps saying it, and it's like, no, no, no.

00:57:37.620 But he means, when he said that, what he meant was you should judge your neighbor and hate him, you know?

00:57:41.820 And there just seems so much of this.

00:57:43.480 And the thing about Advent that bothers me, even though I celebrate Advent, the thing that bothers me is this kind of urge, like, are you singing Christmas carols?

00:57:51.140 Knock it off.

00:57:51.800 And what I'm telling you, what I'm telling you is that from the minute that Jesus became associated with Christmas, it was for the specific purpose of religious people driving the joy out of Christmas.

00:58:03.400 That was the mission.

00:58:04.500 There's too much drinking and too much merrymaking.

00:58:07.860 I do love this, though.

00:58:08.800 I do love the sort of baptizing pagan things and just making them better because it does mean, you know, you'll hear this a lot from atheists.

00:58:16.880 They'll say, well, this culture does this, and this culture thinks this, and this culture has this.

00:58:21.640 And, you know, how can they all be right?

00:58:23.500 And the fact is, we broadly, cultures broadly, recognize very similar symbols.

00:58:30.300 We have very similar conceptions of morality.

00:58:33.280 We have a human nature that is speaking with some sort of conscience, and we have this in the myths.

00:58:42.140 All of these cultures make up all of these myths, and the myths are very, very similar.

00:58:46.820 And then Christianity, for those of us who believe in it, is the true myth. 0.99

00:58:51.180 It takes those myths, and it is in real time.

00:58:54.420 And so then we can go back and go to all those fun little orgies and everything, baptize them a little bit more wholesome. 0.97

00:59:01.220 That was a beautiful Christian orgy.

00:59:03.020 If there's one thing you need during the war on Christmas, it's a great tactical holster. 0.98

00:59:07.880 The best place to get one is over at G-Code.

00:59:10.560 What did you say?

00:59:11.240 A hundred percent.

00:59:12.380 So the fact is that your Second Amendment rights are deeply important to protect all of your rights, particularly your First Amendment rights to freedom of religion here in the state of California.

00:59:19.040 I mean, obviously, we have serious problems protecting our freedom of religion.

00:59:21.840 But if you actually want to provide a sort of counterweight to both crime and fascism and all sorts of other terrible things, it is actually imperative that you be able to have a gun.

00:59:33.480 Not only have a gun, have all of the gear that is associated with that weapon so that you can actually use it effectively.

00:59:38.460 Which is why, depending on the state you live in, you actually need a great holster to properly carry your gun.

00:59:42.320 And that's why G-Code exists.

00:59:43.720 For more than 20 years, G-Code has produced what many people consider to be the finest holsters in the industry.

00:59:47.980 We're talking a crisp break on the draws, no rattle carrying.

00:59:50.660 These are 100% American-made products.

00:59:53.140 All materials, all components sourced right here in the United States.

00:59:56.100 And what's awesome is the owners of G-Code holsters are military veterans.

00:59:59.100 They are meticulous about their quality.

01:00:00.500 I mean, I've seen these holsters.

01:00:01.320 They are incredible.

01:00:02.180 Innovation, worksmanship, excellence.

01:00:04.420 Drives everything they do.

01:00:05.220 Every product comes with a lifetime warranty, so you really have nothing to lose.

01:00:07.700 Whether you are military, law enforcement, or civilian, G-Code has a holster just for you.

01:00:11.820 Check out the all-new G-Code Phenom in the waistband holster.

01:00:14.940 It's being hailed as a game-changer for comfort and concealability.

01:00:17.780 It is a must-have.

01:00:18.500 Order online at range5.com.

01:00:20.740 That's range, the number 5, dot com.

01:00:23.040 Again, range5.com.

01:00:24.700 Be sure to use the promo code BEN for 15% off.

01:00:27.420 Again, that's range5.com.

01:00:29.460 That's the number 5, range5.com.

01:00:31.500 And use promo code BEN for 15% off because your weapon may be great.

01:00:34.960 You need a great holster to carry it in if you are legally able to do so.

01:00:37.680 If you're not in Los Angeles, for example,

01:00:39.620 and you actually want to be able to carry your weapon properly,

01:00:42.300 this is the best way to do it.

01:00:43.060 Go check it out.

01:00:43.840 Range5.com.

01:00:44.680 Use promo code BEN for 15% off.

01:00:46.840 Alicia, we want to hear from some of our subscribers.

01:00:49.920 One of the things that we tend to do on our backstage episodes is get long-winded

01:00:54.540 because we are four verbose people.

01:00:57.320 And I want to do a better job of hearing from our subscribers.

01:00:59.580 We're going to cut back to Alicia,

01:01:00.660 and her feet are just going to be swinging from the bottom of the room. 0.97

01:01:02.460 I'll be like, oh, back here yawning, sipping my own whiskey.

01:01:08.380 I mean, and by the way, a little behind the scenes,

01:01:10.660 this show is called Backstage.

01:01:12.760 It's not just on this show where you guys can be long-winded

01:01:15.680 to bring it to the audience.

01:01:17.200 How dare you, Matt?

01:01:17.800 You know, that reminds me of a pretty funny story.

01:01:22.200 But first to the subscribers, you know,

01:01:24.620 who are putting covfefe in your cup, Michael.

01:01:26.620 So shush it just for a moment, all right?

01:01:28.260 Dan says, do you guys think that given the outrage

01:01:31.520 that some feel over a holiday,

01:01:32.800 that they don't even believe or partake in,

01:01:35.100 should they have to pay full price

01:01:36.380 at the Christmas sales and protests?

01:01:39.840 This is a government intervention that I support.

01:01:42.260 I think they should have to pay double.

01:01:43.820 That's a good market intervention.

01:01:45.400 Really encourages a good culture.

01:01:48.280 All right.

01:01:49.000 This question comes from Ben.

01:01:50.640 He says that this question is for the whole crew,

01:01:52.360 all of you guys on the panel over there.

01:01:55.380 Could you offer any insight on the historical roots

01:01:57.920 of Santa Claus?

01:01:59.560 Yes.

01:02:00.060 Yes.

01:02:00.620 So Santa Claus,

01:02:01.500 this is one of the greatest stories of Christmas.

01:02:03.380 Other than the incarnation of our risen Lord,

01:02:06.140 the second best one is when...

01:02:08.580 Our risen Lord.

01:02:11.460 The second best one is Saint Nicholas

01:02:14.260 at the Council of Nicaea,

01:02:16.200 from whom we get jolly old Saint Nick and Santa Claus.

01:02:19.200 He was having an argument with Arius.

01:02:21.800 Arius was an early Christian heretic.

01:02:24.160 Arius denied the divinity of Christ.

01:02:25.980 There were many heresies and there were many councils

01:02:28.560 to figure out what was true and what was false. 0.94

01:02:31.940 And so Arius is up there spouting his ridiculous heresy 0.92

01:02:35.220 and he's up there denying the divinity of Christ. 0.89

01:02:37.780 And then Saint Nicholas gets up there 0.97

01:02:40.880 and punches him in the face.

01:02:43.000 Jolly old Saint Nick gets up.

01:02:44.440 And there are many memes about this.

01:02:45.700 It says,

01:02:46.500 he sees you when you're sleeping.

01:02:48.240 He knows when you're awake.

01:02:49.600 He knows if you've denied the divinity of Christ. 0.93

01:02:51.340 So if you're an Arian duck, 1.00

01:02:52.800 and there are many other songs that go along with this,

01:02:55.280 one of the great saints of history, Saint Nicholas.

01:02:57.980 Got a great left hook.

01:02:59.180 And the Dutch had their center claws, right? 1.00

01:03:02.720 I can't pronounce it.

01:03:03.040 Yes.

01:03:04.080 As a self-respective man, I can't speak Dutch.

01:03:06.920 What I like, though, is that,

01:03:08.340 so some of these myths trace back,

01:03:09.920 like that he would throw coins down the chimney

01:03:11.820 so the kids would set up little stockings on the mantle

01:03:15.020 in the hopes that they would catch some of the coins

01:03:16.520 that fell down.

01:03:17.500 But do you know what he gave the bad little boys and girls?

01:03:19.600 This is true.

01:03:21.040 You know what he gave the bad little boys and girls,

01:03:22.300 old Saint Nick?

01:03:22.780 Like, switches.

01:03:25.540 This is true.

01:03:26.520 Switches.

01:03:26.840 For them to beat themselves with?

01:03:27.860 So that their parents could better beat them.

01:03:30.320 So that maybe next year they could get a nice little present.

01:03:32.820 I like Santa Claus more and more.

01:03:34.080 Yeah.

01:03:34.600 Better than the Coca-Cola guy.

01:03:36.060 Very tough guy, this Santa Claus.

01:03:37.180 Drew's all, spare the rod, spoil the child.

01:03:39.820 That's right.

01:03:41.400 I love the Finnish.

01:03:43.240 So I've been to the North Pole.

01:03:45.180 It's on the Arctic Circle in Finland.

01:03:46.720 And Finns are adamant that Saint Nicholas is indeed Finnish.

01:03:51.680 They even claim that they can trace his roots back to there.

01:03:54.200 So, you know, my oldest thinks that Santa is indeed in Finland.

01:03:57.540 So it helps me at Christmas time because I don't got to go to the Americana.

01:04:02.400 Our next question comes from Sally.

01:04:04.540 She says she's a Catholic and she celebrates Christmas,

01:04:07.240 but she knows that not everyone does.

01:04:09.100 Should she say happy holidays to strangers during the holidays

01:04:11.820 or Merry Christmas?

01:04:13.260 No, of course not.

01:04:14.120 What you should do, so this is a good year actually. 1.00

01:04:15.960 You punch people in the face. 1.00

01:04:16.740 You punch them right in the face. 1.00

01:04:18.720 In the tradition. 0.98

01:04:19.820 This is a great year for this because Hanukkah is so early this year. 0.99

01:04:23.140 So if I'm walking around on December 2nd,

01:04:25.500 I don't tell somebody Merry Christmas.

01:04:26.960 It's a very long time until Christmas.

01:04:28.620 When I see Ben, I wish him a happy Hanukkah.

01:04:30.820 Yeah, this is right.

01:04:31.520 Because that's what Ben celebrates.

01:04:33.120 What is the other holiday?

01:04:33.940 The other holiday is Christmas,

01:04:35.220 which in three weeks we can wish our Christian friends Merry Christmas.

01:04:38.560 There is another holiday which is a complete contrivance.

01:04:41.440 It was made up by a guy, Milana Karenga.

01:04:44.420 He was a Cal State professor.

01:04:46.280 In the 1960s, he was a socialist atheist who created a holiday called Kwanzaa.

01:04:51.340 The word Kwanzaa is a Swahili word, and he wanted it to be a Pan-African holiday.

01:04:56.740 But the American Africans and people of African descent all come from West Africa. 0.95

01:05:02.120 He even got the damn coast of Africa wrong. 0.98

01:05:04.240 It is a contrivance. 0.99

01:05:05.180 He was arrested for viciously beating women.

01:05:07.820 Nobody, statistically zero people celebrate this holiday.

01:05:09.960 That's what you actually celebrate on Kwanzaa.

01:05:11.300 Yeah, there are two holidays that occur in December.

01:05:15.360 There is Hanukkah, which you can wish to your Jewish friends, and Christmas.

01:05:18.840 Everything made up in the 60s.

01:05:20.480 Kwanzaa, the moon landing.

01:05:24.080 You've got to see, though, the first Kwanzaa celebration at Culver Studios.

01:05:26.860 It's a really beautiful shot.

01:05:28.420 But when you take the particularity out of the holidays, it becomes this bland, sad, nothing.

01:05:34.960 Celebrate the particularity.

01:05:36.100 It becomes pagan again. 0.73

01:05:37.220 It becomes bad to being pagan, which is what I think they're aiming for, actually. 0.99

01:05:40.240 I also think that any time that you try to browbeat someone into not expressing joy to their fellow man, if I say Merry Christmas to Ben, that's not a loaded statement.

01:05:52.960 No.

01:05:53.380 It's that I'm living in a season of this certain celebration for myself.

01:05:58.900 I'm filled with a kind of joy, and that joy outpours in my interactions with other people during this time of year.

01:06:04.040 And I'm not checking myself every time that I almost express that joy and pulling it back.

01:06:09.360 It's my job to lighten the F up, right?

01:06:11.480 As a person who's not big into the preferred pronouns stuff, I don't get to date preferred greetings. 0.89

01:06:16.520 If you say Merry Christmas, I don't take it as like, and you're going to hell.

01:06:22.060 There's no second half to that particular greeting.

01:06:25.220 Ceremonially, maybe there is.

01:06:26.220 I'm not hearing it.

01:06:27.040 You just turn away very quickly. 0.99

01:06:28.960 But it is ridiculous. 0.94

01:06:31.200 And especially, as you say, I wish Merry Christmas to my Christian friends all the time. 0.86

01:06:35.260 I would also say that Christmas is actually a national holiday in addition to being a religious holiday.

01:06:41.160 Yeah, that's right.

01:06:41.660 So there is an American holiday even celebrated by you, at least in as much as that you don't send stuff through stamps.com, through the postal service, and you can't go to the DMV.

01:06:52.000 There is a national holiday for Christmas.

01:06:52.700 Also, nobody's actually taking it.

01:06:54.400 When I say Merry Christmas to somebody wearing my yarmulke, nobody's taking it that I'm suddenly converted and I'm going to church.

01:06:58.800 And that's the part that's it.

01:06:59.440 How few problems do you have to have to worry about this stuff?

01:07:02.160 This is exactly right.

01:07:04.900 Especially what I hate is secular Jews who legitimately spend no time at all being religious, engaging with religion, and suddenly they're deeply, deeply offended when someone says Merry Christmas to them. 1.00

01:07:14.420 It's like, you don't care about anything having to do with your religion that has nothing to do with Christianity. 0.90

01:07:19.120 All you care about is that someone may have assumed your religion.

01:07:22.640 That somebody may have assumed that you wouldn't be upset by this.

01:07:25.780 I don't know, really, virtually any Orthodox Jew who would get offended by somebody saying Merry Christmas to them.

01:07:31.100 Of course, it's not a thing.

01:07:33.940 I mean, this seems to be a theme that we keep coming back to, and it's a really good theme.

01:07:37.440 If the God is there, you're solid.

01:07:39.840 You're angered.

01:07:40.540 You know what you think.

01:07:41.280 You know who you are.

01:07:42.020 It's like when people apologize to me because we'll go out to a restaurant and I can't eat the food.

01:07:45.500 It's like, why are you apologizing to me?

01:07:48.000 That's my thing.

01:07:48.700 It's not your thing.

01:07:49.380 Why are you apologizing?

01:07:50.020 It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

01:07:53.220 All right.

01:07:54.160 Do you have any more questions, Alicia?

01:07:55.380 Always.

01:07:55.880 We always have tons of questions here.

01:07:57.940 This question might be more geared towards Ben.

01:08:00.300 And this comes from, I think, Justin.

01:08:02.860 And he talks about, you know, if you do not—oh, sorry.

01:08:05.940 I just lost the question there.

01:08:07.500 Actually, sorry.

01:08:08.200 The question from Justin comes from Knowles.

01:08:10.140 Will you challenge Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a debate? 0.96

01:08:13.680 Because he thinks that you might get more luck since your book is the only one that she could read.

01:08:17.540 Well, that's true.

01:08:18.660 You make a very good point.

01:08:20.080 It was a sort of portrait of her political ideology.

01:08:23.400 Well, I would, except Elisa's going to get very angry at me when I catcall other women. 1.00

01:08:27.700 Yeah, I can't be catcalling her at this time.

01:08:30.760 Once Elisa tunes out, ask me the question again.

01:08:33.040 Okay.

01:08:33.440 All right.

01:08:33.980 Once SLA is not watching, we'll be sure to do that.

01:08:37.220 This question comes from Haley.

01:08:38.540 It says that this one is probably for Ben.

01:08:40.420 Why don't more Christians, even herself, celebrate Jewish holidays, given that the first half of the book is the same?

01:08:46.400 Shouldn't we observe the same holidays except Christmas?

01:08:49.060 Well, this one actually is for you guys.

01:08:50.780 And so, you know, I do all those holidays.

01:08:52.320 I keep all the commandments.

01:08:53.340 You speak for yourself, folks.

01:08:55.140 I'll speak to this a little bit.

01:08:56.340 Caleb, our CEO, is a Christian but keeps most of the Jewish high holy days.

01:09:02.260 He keeps Yom Kippur, Passover, Rosh Hashanah. 0.95

01:09:06.000 Although there is a disagreement once every four years as to the day.

01:09:09.200 The calendar, right.

01:09:09.880 Yeah, as to the calendar.

01:09:12.320 The Apostle Paul says in the New Testament,

01:09:14.380 don't let anyone judge you in regard to a new moon or a Sabbath day or a festival or a holiday.

01:09:21.020 What he's basically speaking to is that in the middle of Acts, there's this divide that happens.

01:09:26.220 Acts is basically the story of the Christian church in the years following the death and resurrection of Jesus.

01:09:33.220 And for the first many years, seven, eight, ten, I don't know.

01:09:36.560 For the first many years of the history of the church, every single Christian is a Jew. 0.98

01:09:42.980 Pentecost happens.

01:09:43.980 It happens in and around Jerusalem.

01:09:46.280 All the first people to receive the message, Paul says, Christ came first for the Jew, then for the Greek.

01:09:52.520 And so all of the Christians are Jews. 0.98

01:09:54.240 And they don't identify as Christian.

01:09:55.680 The term hasn't come into use yet.

01:09:58.080 They're just Jews who believe that Jesus was the Messiah in fulfillment of certain Old Testament prophecies.

01:10:04.620 And all of their message in the early days, because you can read many of their sermons in early Acts,

01:10:09.820 are about Jesus as the fulfillment of those prophecies, Jesus as the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecies,

01:10:20.140 and the fact that this Jesus whom you have crucified, God has raised up.

01:10:24.600 That's the recurring theme of Peter and the other advocates of Christ in the first days.

01:10:30.280 As you proceed through time, an interesting thing happens, which is that the message gets carried to the Gentiles. 0.96

01:10:37.380 When the message gets carried to the Gentiles, there's a lot of ramifications.

01:10:41.480 Ramification one is now we need a moniker by which to identify this thing, which is obviously not just Judaism anymore.

01:10:49.020 It's something out of but apart from Judaism. 0.96

01:10:52.540 And so the word Christian becomes a concept in Middle Acts.

01:10:56.440 Another thing that happens is conflict between the Jews who believe they have received their Messiah,

01:11:05.600 but who still see themselves as uniquely Jewish,

01:11:08.800 now confronting the idea that if Christ is also the Messiah and Savior of the Gentiles,

01:11:15.200 then what does it mean to be Jewish?

01:11:16.740 Obviously, if you can have Jews and Gentiles on the team, there are literally 100 times more Gentiles than there are Jews,

01:11:26.240 and this is going to have an eroding effect on what it means to be Jewish.

01:11:30.900 And so there's a lot of conflict that emerges in the early church trying to solve that question.

01:11:35.460 And the third thing that it means is that Christianity takes on theology.

01:11:38.820 Because really, in the early days of the church, there isn't uniquely Christian theology.

01:11:44.880 There's just Jewish fulfillment, a view of Jewish fulfillment. 0.83

01:11:48.820 By the way, Jesus isn't the first person to come along who some Jews thought was the Messiah.

01:11:52.620 He's not the last guy to come along who some Jews believe is the Messiah.

01:11:55.440 In our lifetime, there's been a Jewish Messiah who a lot of Jews believed in,

01:11:59.900 but that is a uniquely Jewish Messiah.

01:12:02.360 And so once the Gentiles get folded into Christianity, Christianity becomes something unique, 0.99

01:12:08.720 and it takes on these theological ideas.

01:12:10.760 Well, as they explore the theology of this new religion, they come across this,

01:12:17.100 and there's a chapter of Acts, Acts 15, where they have a council in Jerusalem,

01:12:20.960 where they all get together, the church fathers, to talk about the question of Gentile inclusion.

01:12:25.860 And the question is, must a Gentile, in order to become a Christian, first become a Jew? 0.76

01:12:33.820 That's the question.

01:12:35.440 And if so, then he must, in becoming a Jew, he must bring himself into conformity with the law, 0.65

01:12:41.140 and he must be circumcised. 0.75

01:12:42.700 In bringing himself into conformity of the law, part of the law is the keeping of these high holy days.

01:12:48.560 The Passover, for example, is given by God in the Exodus,

01:12:51.280 and God says to the Jews, you will do this forever. 0.88

01:12:55.500 As long as there's a you, you will do this in remembrance of being led out of bondage in Egypt

01:13:02.280 and brought into freedom in Israel.

01:13:05.100 That's, by the way, what Jesus is celebrating when he says,

01:13:07.640 from now on when you do this, do it not in remembrance of that, but in remembrance of me.

01:13:12.040 That becomes the communion.

01:13:13.100 That becomes the last chapter.

01:13:14.420 That becomes the Eucharist.

01:13:15.840 That concept.

01:13:16.820 And so they're debating, must a Greek become a Jew to then become a Christian?

01:13:22.880 They conclude that the answer to that is no.

01:13:25.980 Well, imagine the ramifications of the answer to that being no.

01:13:28.680 What it means is that now, in order to be a Christian, it is not required that you keep Passover.

01:13:34.800 To be a Christian, it is not required that you keep the Sabbath.

01:13:38.000 To be a Christian, it's not required that you recognize Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur

01:13:42.700 and these other religious holidays.

01:13:44.520 Well, that only heightens the division in the early church because now you have Christians 1.00

01:13:49.700 who do keep those holidays and you have Christians who do not keep those holidays. 0.97

01:13:54.200 The ones who do, by and large, are Jewish Christians.

01:13:58.400 The ones who do not are Gentile Christians. 0.99

01:14:01.780 Over time, the church becomes very rapidly predominantly Gentile,

01:14:06.020 which means the majority of Christians don't keep those holidays

01:14:09.680 because the church fathers concluded that they weren't required to become Jewish in order to be Christian.

01:14:14.820 And that's the legacy that we, by and large, in the West experience.

01:14:18.520 We are Gentile Christians who were not required, according to Acts 15,

01:14:22.820 to come into conformity with Jewish holidays.

01:14:26.000 And that's what Paul is speaking to when he says,

01:14:27.620 don't let anyone judge you about this.

01:14:29.140 He's basically saying, don't have division.

01:14:31.000 If you believe in Christ and you keep the Passover, 0.99

01:14:35.980 don't be in conflict with someone who believes in Christ and does not keep the Passover and vice versa.

01:14:42.360 So he's not saying, if you're a Christian, don't keep the Passover.

01:14:45.280 He's not saying, if you're a Christian, don't keep the Sabbath.

01:14:47.320 He's saying, if you're a Christian, be true to your conscience

01:14:50.760 and don't fight with other people who share the thing that we share.

01:14:54.120 What we share isn't Jewish identity, Gentile identity, Passover, not Passover, Sabbath, not Sabbath. 0.93

01:14:59.900 What we share, what unifies us, is that we put our faith in Christ and his supremacy.

01:15:06.400 Which is, again, one of the interesting things about,

01:15:08.360 this is a conversation we've all had in part in this office

01:15:10.980 because we have a Christian in our community, in our company,

01:15:14.460 who keeps the holidays, who does not live in conflict with those of us who do not keep those holidays.

01:15:20.180 That's what Paul's speaking to.

01:15:20.760 And far from being in conflict, when it gives us the day off,

01:15:23.700 we're celebrating.

01:15:25.940 All right, one more question, Alicia.

01:15:29.420 All right, and don't forget, only subscribers can ask the questions.

01:15:32.540 And you're like, how do I do that?

01:15:33.640 Well, head over to dailywire.com and click to become a subscriber.

01:15:36.700 If you're already a subscriber, log in, go to the Daily Wire backstage page,

01:15:40.540 and that's where you can enter all those little questions in the chat box.

01:15:43.500 This next one is a very good one from Alexandra.

01:15:46.020 She wants to know, if you could have a holiday miracle happen in the United States

01:15:50.060 or even the world, what would it be?

01:15:52.060 True, that's you.

01:15:53.700 If I could have a holiday miracle happen in the world, you know, it would be a religious revival.

01:15:58.480 I think that this is the thing that has taken the heart out of our country.

01:16:01.260 And I don't mean to be grim about it, but I think that if there is a way forward,

01:16:05.000 it is going to be through revival.

01:16:06.600 You said it earlier.

01:16:07.360 I couldn't agree with you more.

01:16:08.600 I think that every single argument we have and the way we have arguments is because we have lost our faith.

01:16:15.060 And I think we've lost our faith.

01:16:16.520 Interestingly enough, I think we've lost our faith.

01:16:18.740 I'm a great believer in the power of narrative.

01:16:20.420 I think the left is right about this.

01:16:22.000 The left thinks that narrative changes actual reality.

01:16:24.720 They're completely wrong about that.

01:16:26.340 But they're right that narrative changes the way we see reality.

01:16:30.060 And I talk a lot about the fact that one of the greatest heroes of liberty, George Washington,

01:16:35.000 it took him his lifetime to understand why slaves were unhappy being slaves.

01:16:38.860 Because the narrative didn't allow him to think outside that box and to see what was so obvious.

01:16:44.760 And I think that the narrative that I now call the Enlightenment narrative,

01:16:48.540 this narrative that we broke free of religion in order to find science

01:16:52.540 and all the blessings that science has bestowed on us, is just a false narrative.

01:16:56.260 It is not the truth.

01:16:57.520 It is a story that was told.

01:16:59.360 It was told as propaganda from its earliest days.

01:17:02.260 The whole idea that there was a Middle Ages.

01:17:04.720 There was the classical world.

01:17:06.300 The Dark Ages.

01:17:06.540 And the Dark Ages, and then there was the Enlightenment.

01:17:10.000 The Renaissance.

01:17:10.780 The Renaissance.

01:17:11.660 It's a propaganda tool, and it worked.

01:17:13.820 It really sold itself.

01:17:15.200 And if I could ask for anything, seriously, truly,

01:17:18.120 what I would ask is for people to see through that narrative and to reestablish their faith.

01:17:22.540 Because I think that what is getting in the way of faith is narrative.

01:17:26.020 It's like a wall between people and the obvious presence of God in our lives.

01:17:29.680 This is totally right.

01:17:30.200 And the misread on the Enlightenment, I mean, not to pump a book that I have not yet brought out,

01:17:33.800 but there will be a book in March that is coming out.

01:17:36.000 But I think it may be available for pre-order even now on Amazon.

01:17:39.220 But that book is entirely about this, basically.

01:17:42.360 It's about how the history of the West is an organic growth that starts at Sinai and grows through Greece

01:17:48.200 and moves through the Sermon on the Mount and moves through the Catholic Church and moves through Protestantism

01:17:52.480 and then eventually emerges in this flower that is the Enlightenment.

01:17:56.940 But that has a stem.

01:17:58.560 The flower didn't just come out of nowhere.

01:18:00.060 And this bizarre idea that you can cut the stem and that the flower will live indefinitely is such absolute trite.

01:18:05.820 It's just nonsense.

01:18:06.940 And, you know, it's interesting because I have this argument with Jonah Goldberg all the time.

01:18:10.060 And I have it with him off screen most of the time.

01:18:12.120 But he was always attacking the Romantics.

01:18:14.780 And I love the Romantic poets, especially the British Romantics.

01:18:17.260 But one of the things that the Romantics noticed was that the Age of Reason, as it was invented by the French, failed. 0.98

01:18:23.700 It ended up with people lopping each other's heads off.

01:18:25.800 It ended up with World War and Napoleon Concrete.

01:18:27.260 Well, this is Steven Pinker's entire book called Enlightenment Now has not one mention of the French Revolution.

01:18:31.700 Not one.

01:18:32.280 I don't know how you can write a book called Enlightenment Now and never mention the French Revolution.

01:18:35.800 What they've done is they've decided there's a no-true-Scotsman fallacy that's applicable.

01:18:38.940 That basically anybody who's bad isn't part of the counter-enlightenment.

01:18:42.060 That's right.

01:18:42.580 Everybody who's good is part of the Enlightenment-enlightenment, as though there was no interplay between Rousseau and Burke. 0.90

01:18:48.060 And it's just ridiculous. 0.97

01:18:49.340 It's ridiculous. 0.96

01:18:49.680 And our old pal, Uncle Jesus, said, you know, if you follow me, you will do more miracles than I did. 0.72

01:18:55.780 You will do greater miracles.

01:18:57.180 And I think that the scientific revolution is proof of that.

01:19:00.540 It took that idea of the world.

01:19:02.220 Jesus fed 5,000, and the people who followed him figured out how to feed literally everyone.

01:19:07.100 Yeah, that's right.

01:19:07.760 And make the poorest of them fat.

01:19:09.520 And this was part of the original mission, going all the way back to, again, Sinai and stretching forward through Greek teleology.

01:19:16.040 The idea that you had an affirmative obligation to seek beyond for the logic of God and then to apply that knowledge.

01:19:23.120 I mean, this is something Roger Bacon is talking about in the 13th century.

01:19:25.680 The idea that this is something that's brand new and that nobody's ever thought of science before 1700.

01:19:31.680 It's just sheer nonsense.

01:19:32.520 And the irony is, in the so-called Dark Ages and late Middle Ages, that was a period of rigorous logic.

01:19:40.040 That was a period of scholasticism, right?

01:19:42.400 And actually, in the Enlightenment, you see much more of a romantic sense of things.

01:19:46.240 It was also a period when the organizing civilization had collapsed and these savage tribes, I think we can call them savage tribes, were being civilized by this religion. 0.99

01:19:58.120 So it was really, when people say nothing was happening, they don't know how far they had to come.

01:20:00.860 The first universities were set up by the Catholic Church, all of the great architecture.

01:20:04.520 It's so funny.

01:20:04.860 All these people who are like, wow, look at this beautiful architecture.

01:20:07.160 And then they assume that it was built in like 1600.

01:20:08.880 Right.

01:20:09.180 All this stuff was built in like 800.

01:20:10.560 Yes.

01:20:11.060 In the middle of the Dark Ages, they're building these gorgeous cathedrals that are spanning to the sky. 0.55

01:20:14.700 And it's like, well, how did they move from the crap they were building 500 years before that to this?

01:20:19.220 Yeah. 0.89

01:20:19.460 The idea that history is not, it's so funny.

01:20:21.740 They'll say that evolution is continuous and organic, but history itself, it just sort of comes into being.

01:20:27.240 There's like a big bang of history in 1750 and suddenly people know things.

01:20:31.240 And not only do people know things, it's a universal thing.

01:20:33.580 It's not that it's unique to Western civilization, only happened in one place, in one time, with a common foundation.

01:20:39.540 It's like, well, it could have happened anywhere.

01:20:41.260 You know, it could have just happened in the middle of Africa, in the middle of Asia, in the middle of the Middle East.

01:20:44.680 And if you wonder how we know so many things, how we do so much smarts, because there's a lot of smarts.

01:20:49.760 It's mostly you, the three of you.

01:20:51.760 I'm always observing, man, those guys can smart.

01:20:54.900 I wondered what was the trick.

01:20:56.140 It's the trick, the Enlightenment?

01:20:57.280 No, the trick is Omax.

01:20:58.460 That's right.

01:20:58.880 It's Omax.

01:20:59.400 That's correct.

01:21:00.300 Omax.

01:21:00.960 So, you are seeking to make your attention span better.

01:21:06.080 You are seeking to stay motivated, but you feel foggy and you feel forgetful.

01:21:10.420 Well, the solution may not be drinking coffee or energy drinks.

01:21:13.000 Maybe that's not working for you.

01:21:13.940 Maybe you have indigestion because of it.

01:21:15.240 Well, you need to try Omax Cognitive Boost.

01:21:18.360 It's a game-changing solution that fuels peak performance by boosting memory, focus, energy, and all-around crystal-clear thinking.

01:21:24.200 You will feel the difference.

01:21:25.100 And here's the great thing.

01:21:26.040 Omax is offering my listeners a 70% off a one-month supply of Cognitive Boost plus free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

01:21:32.320 So, either it works for you or it doesn't.

01:21:34.060 And if it doesn't, you don't lose anything.

01:21:35.360 Just go to omaxboost.com slash backstage today and take advantage of the incredible savings.

01:21:40.760 That is omaxboost.com slash backstage.

01:21:44.940 O-M-A-X boost.com slash backstage.

01:21:47.980 You get 70% off a one-month supply.

01:21:50.620 It's the only way that Knowles here has been able to stay sensitive.

01:21:53.060 It is.

01:21:53.620 Frankly, I am eating that by the bushel.

01:21:56.520 I am just guzzling Omax all the time.

01:21:58.960 And so, I'm able to extend my memory past that about a fruit fly.

01:22:02.120 It's very helpful.

01:22:03.000 You may have heard of omega-3s before.

01:22:04.420 This formula uses high DHA, which is the omega-3 that is critical to brain health.

01:22:09.100 They have a bunch of ingredients that are safe, natural, backed by years of clinical research.

01:22:12.220 You will feel energized.

01:22:13.480 And again, if you don't, well, they have a money-back guarantee.

01:22:15.580 So, you really have nothing to lose.

01:22:16.960 Omaxboost.com slash backstage today to get 70% off a one-month supply plus free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee.

01:22:23.200 That is omaxboost.com slash backstage.

01:22:28.100 Terms and conditions do apply.

01:22:29.600 Go check it out right now.

01:22:30.700 And if you want to get in on the action of asking us questions here at the backstage, we're going to do at least one more round of questions before the end of the show.

01:22:37.120 Can we do Christmas movies or something?

01:22:38.200 We are going to.

01:22:38.800 Come over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.

01:22:43.700 Give us your $10 and we will grant you a question.

01:22:47.680 Yeah, let's do something fun.

01:22:48.580 Before we do movies, I know, I know.

01:22:50.500 The Acts and the...

01:22:51.660 There is one last theological point.

01:22:53.900 The Advent.

01:22:54.820 One last theological point.

01:22:55.900 I'm over here going like, infleshment.

01:22:57.880 We haven't run up against someone here.

01:22:59.620 This is actually an Old Testament theological point.

01:23:02.360 Oh, good.

01:23:02.760 Yeah, I like that.

01:23:03.440 That's the book I like.

01:23:04.520 Yeah, that one's good.

01:23:05.240 You and I were talking, I think, on your Sunday show, and you mentioned, which I think is absolutely true,

01:23:09.480 that one of the key moments in the Bible that has shaped Western civilization is the line that God made man in his image.

01:23:16.840 Single most important verse in human history.

01:23:18.280 Huge, huge, yeah.

01:23:19.100 But there's also this moment when Moses confronts the burning bush, which to me, just as a guy who loves literature, one of the great pieces of literature ever written,

01:23:27.620 and the idea that this system, this earth that grows and destroys, that's fire and bush, speaks and says, I am, I am.

01:23:36.260 And that, to me, changes your entire perspective of nature and all of science as we know it comes out of it.

01:23:41.480 That idea that we are engaged in a conversation of intellect with intellect, I think, is what causes a Newton, and it's what causes a Galileo,

01:23:49.500 and it's why so many of those guys were in the church, so many of the people who created the scientific revolution, which Pinker also never mentions, were in the church, were church deans.

01:23:57.660 Again, these folks who pretend that science began, again, in 1750 or 1760, it's like, where do you think all the science came from?

01:24:03.620 I mean, really, there's a long history of science, most of it within the Catholic Church, specifically between 1100 and 1600,

01:24:11.760 and a lot of stuff is happening at that time.

01:24:14.760 This notion that history just sort of fits and starts and that it really only began at a certain point in time is just not true.

01:24:20.640 What the Enlightenment really did is the Enlightenment essentially said that human freedom from government could be consonant with human virtue, right?

01:24:29.540 That's what the good part of the Enlightenment was, and this is what you see in all the American founders,

01:24:32.640 and this is what differentiates the American founding specifically from the French founding, right?

01:24:35.980 As you were fond of saying, it's the French Enlightenment that's saying that we have to strangle the last priest with the—

01:24:40.740 what is it, the strangled last king with the guts of the last priest?

01:24:43.000 Right.

01:24:43.220 But that's not the American Enlightenment.

01:24:44.420 The American Enlightenment and the British Enlightenment, they're saying we require freedom because we have rights,

01:24:50.020 but we also have to exercise virtue because if we don't have those virtues, then these rights are going to fall about us like tenpins.

01:24:56.500 This is the Edmund Burke point, that without the social fabric, liberty turns into libertinism almost immediately.

01:25:01.300 Isn't it kind of a rebuke of the Enlightenment to say that the rights come from God?

01:25:06.000 Yeah, I mean—

01:25:06.860 It's a rebuke of the worst excesses of the Enlightenment.

01:25:09.040 Well, and this is what Burke is arguing with, right?

01:25:11.000 Burke doesn't believe that the rights just are self-perpetuating.

01:25:15.400 He believes that the rights come from, at the very least, a fabric of time that unifies the past, the present, and the future,

01:25:22.780 which is why he thinks, unlike Jefferson, that you're not allowed to just override the Constitution every 20 years.

01:25:26.840 This is why I'm a big Wordsworth fan is because Wordsworth, living to 80, as most of the romantic poets died when they were 30,

01:25:33.440 but Wordsworth lives into the Victorian era, and he starts out as a radical, loving the French Revolution.

01:25:38.220 He says bliss was it in that time to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

01:25:42.180 And then he sees it all goes wrong, and he writes this long poem called The Prelude, which he doesn't publish in his lifetime.

01:25:49.100 He writes this long poem, the history of his thought, and it's a history that ends with him becoming a Christian

01:25:53.660 because he realizes that in this logic, in taking out everything but logic, you have destroyed the human soul.

01:26:01.260 The human soul is not just logic.

01:26:02.520 This is what Chesterton said, is the madman is not the man who's lost his reason, he's the man who's lost everything but his reason.

01:26:07.980 Yes, that's right.

01:26:08.560 Well, I mean, and this is just basic neuroscience, right?

01:26:11.520 I mean, people who are sociopathic very often are people who are the most reasonable in the room, right?

01:26:15.400 They're people who just don't have any moral preconceptions or rules that bind them.

01:26:19.080 Jonathan Haid writes about that.

01:26:19.900 Right, Jonathan Haid specifically talks about this.

01:26:21.580 And so it is true that this picture of the Enlightenment as disconnected from its Christian roots is simple nonsense.

01:26:27.660 I mean, the fact is that even the very idea of natural rights as opposed to natural law, that starts with Hugo Grotius.

01:26:32.280 I mean, it's Grotius who really starts talking about that, particularly in the middle of these religious wars.

01:26:36.100 He's saying, well, we have a right to practice our religion.

01:26:38.140 The church didn't like Grotius very much at the time.

01:26:39.960 I mean, it's that logic that leads to the peace of Westphalia and the idea all these religions have to tolerate each other within the common framework of we keep essential values the same.

01:26:49.340 But you can practice basically however you want, and the religious minority must be protected.

01:26:53.760 And it's from that religious schism that emerges the idea of these natural rights that span religions and extend to beyond what the church may want to give you at the time.

01:27:01.840 So it's this constant interplay in the West between religion and reason and their intention, but they're also a mutual support system.

01:27:10.220 You can't have reason without the religion that undergirds it. 0.93

01:27:12.860 Reason is based on certain fundamental premises, freedom of the will, the ability to think beyond your biology, the capacity to be convinced by somebody else's argument, not by mere self-interest.

01:27:20.940 These are based in an idea of a discoverable, logical universe that has certain rules and you being endowed with the creative capacity of God.

01:27:28.620 When God says you're made in his image, that's what he means, because so far in the Bible, when it says God is going to make man in his image, God's only done one thing, and that's create.

01:27:35.800 And so when it says that you're going to be now made in God's image, it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to make your own morality.

01:27:41.060 It means that you're going to be able to create.

01:27:42.720 You're going to be able to choose in the same way that God creates and chooses.

01:27:46.100 You're a fundamental factor in the forwarding of creation itself.

01:27:48.760 This is why I think the scientific revolution begins with the burning bush, because it's that moment when basically man says, oh, I get it.

01:27:56.240 I'm in an interplay.

01:27:57.400 I'm in a dialogue with something that is like me in the fact that it has reason and it actually makes sense.

01:28:04.000 It actually matters and it's alive like me.

01:28:06.260 And I just think that there is no scientific revolution without that moment.

01:28:08.780 I really do.

01:28:09.820 There's not enough OMAX for me to be able to, in all the world, there's not enough OMAX for me to participate in this conversation.

01:28:16.320 You've got to hit it before you can walk in.

01:28:17.480 That's the trick.

01:28:18.720 Unbelievable, unbelievable.

01:28:19.840 I want to talk, though, Ben, what's your favorite Christmas movie?

01:28:22.100 Yeah.

01:28:22.720 Die Hard.

01:28:24.260 Die Hard.

01:28:25.100 He took the best one.

01:28:26.220 It is such a great movie.

01:28:26.720 We all knew it.

01:28:27.660 And it's a Christmas movie.

01:28:28.740 Come on.

01:28:29.140 It is a Christmas movie.

01:28:29.880 We all agree with that.

01:28:31.060 Don't we? 1.00

01:28:31.720 Anybody who argues it's not a Christmas movie is just an ignorant man. 0.99

01:28:34.020 He doesn't understand basic New Testament theology. 0.99

01:28:36.100 That's right.

01:28:36.380 And he brought me this.

01:28:37.100 He's thrown off the top of it.

01:28:39.080 Nothing of influence.

01:28:39.720 That's right.

01:28:40.020 Come on.

01:28:40.320 That's right.

01:28:40.620 I mean, obviously, the best Christmas movie, aside from Die Hard, is It's a Wonderful Life,

01:28:43.620 and there's not really any sort of close second.

01:28:45.340 I have to disagree.

01:28:46.220 I disagree.

01:28:46.800 Oh, here we go.

01:28:47.480 No, I think it's the Alistairson Christmas Carol.

01:28:50.280 Okay, original Christmas Carol.

01:28:50.820 Yeah.

01:28:51.100 No, and I actually think, I've often talked about the fact that they're the mirror image of each other.

01:28:55.620 One is about a totally generous man who learns about what the world would be like without him,

01:29:01.200 and one is about a totally stingy man who learns what he has done in his life that has ruined everything.

01:29:06.200 And they're really mirror images.

01:29:07.640 They're the same story.

01:29:08.320 And they're the only great Christmas stories besides the gospel.

01:29:11.880 Well, no, but this is actually, this is also how I know, this is how I know that you guys haven't seen Jingle All the Way.

01:29:18.640 I mean, because in A Christmas Carol, is Sinbad in A Christmas Carol?

01:29:22.100 Wait, is Jingle All the Way the Schwarzenegger one?

01:29:24.220 Yes.

01:29:24.500 I laughed at the last scene of that.

01:29:26.320 I embarrassed myself laughing.

01:29:28.720 I really like it.

01:29:30.000 It's a hilarious movie.

01:29:31.820 But yeah, now I wonder, do you think A Christmas Carol, the movie, is actually a better movie than It's a Wonderful Life,

01:29:36.840 or do you just love A Christmas Carol so much that it's biasing your case?

01:29:39.300 Because I know you think that A Christmas Carol is legitimately like the best novella ever written.

01:29:42.800 It is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever.

01:29:44.940 And it's the best thing Dickens ever wrote.

01:29:46.480 Also the only time he ever stuck to a word camera.

01:29:47.940 But I think that the thing that I love about it is that the performance of Alistair Simm is the only person who plays Scrooge as if he thinks he's right.

01:29:58.620 Yeah.

01:29:58.940 As if he's, he doesn't play, he doesn't play like a cranky old man. 0.98

01:30:01.840 No, no, no, no.

01:30:05.100 Westward Elementary School in Slate, Texas.

01:30:09.240 Your God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, played Ebenezer Scrooge in the third grade play.

01:30:17.940 And was I, was it the greatest performance of Dickens?

01:30:24.800 Yes.

01:30:25.540 It was certainly the cutest.

01:30:27.900 It was certainly the cutest.

01:30:29.800 Out comes your God King with a little cane and a little beard and little stockings. 0.98

01:30:35.540 And everybody in the entire class is standing behind him and they sing,

01:30:39.780 Mr. Scrooge, Mr. Scrooge, you got your smile on upside down.

01:30:45.280 Mr. Scrooge, Mr. Scrooge, bah humbug.

01:30:49.940 You got your smile on upside down.

01:30:52.660 Did you do this like six months ago?

01:30:54.480 This is my debut as an actor.

01:31:00.980 It worked out great.

01:31:03.500 I think you found your, frankly though, compared to most people in Hollywood, that is a great career.

01:31:07.640 You know, I mean, that actually did pretty well.

01:31:09.280 You cannot have a lead.

01:31:10.700 So is A Christmas Carol a rejection of Ayn Rand?

01:31:14.220 Oh, absolutely. 0.99

01:31:15.080 Ayn Rand is nuts.

01:31:17.080 Ayn Rand read this one, I feel like she read that one book whose name I always forget, the French economist. 0.74

01:31:23.100 He wrote The Laws, I think it's called.

01:31:25.020 Frederick Bastien.

01:31:25.560 Yes, thank you.

01:31:26.340 And it's the one book she read.

01:31:27.980 He wrote in 70 pages, but she writes in 5,000 pages.

01:31:31.000 And then she writes a lot of bad characters that don't make any sense and throws those in.

01:31:35.100 And who are all her.

01:31:36.020 And who are all her.

01:31:36.960 And have these weird Germanic names.

01:31:39.040 And I rock and I...

01:31:40.480 You know, if you were sort of traumatized by communism, I see how you become Ayn Rand.

01:31:46.100 Also because of how sexy Alan Greenspan is.

01:31:48.560 How could you resist?

01:31:49.860 How could you resist that relationship? 0.98

01:31:51.620 But yeah, she was crazy. 0.96

01:31:52.660 She got most things wrong. 0.94

01:31:53.700 So I've come up with an answer.

01:31:55.200 Your idea of the perfect gift for the holidays is reasons to vote for Democrats.

01:31:59.660 Seriously, yeah.

01:32:00.180 Your idea of the perfect gift for the holidays is The Lefty's Dictionary, available now on Amazon.com.

01:32:05.400 Your idea of the perfect gift for Christmas is apparently a book that isn't even published yet.

01:32:09.340 But also by...

01:32:10.540 Because he's awaiting the Messiah.

01:32:12.720 We think we got him, you know.

01:32:14.720 And the cover of which will be revealing soon.

01:32:17.160 Yeah, that's true.

01:32:17.760 If people come over to DailyWire.com.

01:32:19.940 My idea of the perfect gift for Christmas is iTarget Pro.

01:32:24.620 It's a fantastic gift because there's no one on my gift-buying list who is a good shot.

01:32:32.840 Literally, they're all terrible shots.

01:32:34.140 And one thing about personal security is you really need your friends to be good at this.

01:32:39.860 You've got to be, yeah.

01:32:40.860 100%.

01:32:41.180 I mean, the fact is that if you don't have time to go to the range, they're always recommending,

01:32:44.360 oh, go to the range three times a month.

01:32:45.760 It's like, do you have kids?

01:32:46.800 Like, okay.

01:32:47.360 That is not a thing that is going to happen.

01:32:49.200 That's why you need iTarget Pro because you survive Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

01:32:52.440 But what about the rest of the year?

01:32:53.940 We have the best gift your friends and loved ones can use all year long.

01:32:57.380 It could save their life.

01:32:58.240 This is iTarget Pro.

01:32:59.320 It's a product that revolutionizes dry fire training.

01:33:01.600 So you utilize your smartphone.

01:33:02.820 It's really cool.

01:33:03.500 They have a proprietary app.

01:33:04.560 And it tracks a caliber-specific laser, which actually fits into your firearm.

01:33:08.020 It detects exactly where your shots are landing.

01:33:10.160 It's completely safe.

01:33:11.120 It comes, again, with the caliber-specific laser, target system, and instructions.

01:33:14.380 So you can begin training immediately.

01:33:15.400 I've installed it on my phone.

01:33:16.380 It really is supremely cool.

01:33:18.140 It's basically you're doing target training in your house.

01:33:20.100 You just go to the letter iTargetPro.com.

01:33:22.620 Check out the video.

01:33:23.180 You can see how it works.

01:33:24.140 Choose your caliber and then download the app so you're ready when the system arrives.

01:33:27.580 Right now, you get free shipping through the end of the year plus.

01:33:30.080 Save an additional 10% with the offer code backstage when you purchase the iTarget Pro system.

01:33:34.960 That's the letter iTargetPro.com.

01:33:36.920 Again, iTargetPro.com.

01:33:38.920 And the offer code is backstage.

01:33:40.480 I know that when the iTarget Pro came to the office, we actually almost had a fistfight over who got to take it home.

01:33:45.200 It ended up Candace, I believe.

01:33:46.100 It was like a pagan Christmas celebration, just drinking and slugging. 0.99

01:33:49.520 Because Candace was armed, I think that's why. 0.99

01:33:51.480 Yeah, Candace ended up taking it home. 1.00

01:33:52.800 That's exactly right.

01:33:53.800 And we haven't seen her since, actually.

01:33:55.500 She's basically been at home playing with the iTarget Pro.

01:33:57.560 So go check it out, iTargetPro.com.

01:33:59.400 And again, use that offer code backstage and save an additional 10%.

01:34:02.520 It feels like the future when you use this thing.

01:34:04.300 It's like I got in a Tesla to take a test drive one time.

01:34:07.200 And it's the first time that you realize, like, automobiles have not changed in one century.

01:34:11.980 They've gotten quieter and the air conditioning's gotten colder.

01:34:14.420 But they are essentially the same technology.

01:34:16.360 And then you get in a Tesla and you're like, this is a whole future thing.

01:34:19.700 This is a different something.

01:34:21.000 And that's how iTarget Pro is.

01:34:22.380 You're like, every time you've ever used a firearm in your entire life to train, it was one thing.

01:34:28.040 And now here is something completely new.

01:34:29.440 Cool, cool.

01:34:29.660 I was just wondering, am I not on the gift list or am I a terrible shot or is this not an either-or question?

01:34:35.720 They don't want you armed.

01:34:38.440 Here's something I would like to bring up.

01:34:40.780 We know what the great Christmas movies are.

01:34:43.020 What's the second tier Christmas movie that you really like?

01:34:46.220 Mine, I will tell you, is The Bishop's Wife with David Niven and Cary Grant

01:34:50.340 about an angel who comes down to help a bishop who's lost his way and starts to fall for his wife.

01:34:55.820 What a great idea.

01:34:57.280 It's a great idea.

01:34:58.040 And it's got Cary Grant and David Niven.

01:34:59.880 It couldn't be any more charming.

01:35:00.920 It's a really lovely film.

01:35:02.120 How about Home Alone?

01:35:03.160 Home Alone actually might even bump into the movie.

01:35:05.540 Home Alone 2.

01:35:05.580 It has the President of the United States in the film.

01:35:08.160 That's true.

01:35:08.680 The man who saved Christmas is in Home Alone 2.

01:35:11.400 That's how you know it's the greatest, it's the greatest, best movie.

01:35:14.900 It's the best Christmas ever.

01:35:16.380 Home Alone may have been the last great Christmas movie.

01:35:18.980 I don't know that there's been that kind of great, everyone goes out to see it movie.

01:35:23.860 Makes you feel warm and nice inside since then.

01:35:26.340 Have we made any movies that make people feel warm and nice inside in 20 years?

01:35:30.100 You know, you recommended that Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

01:35:33.560 I love that.

01:35:35.140 And it really, I have to say.

01:35:36.340 Well, you have very deep reads on Christianity in which you watch these deeply nihilistic films.

01:35:40.980 Then you're like, you know what?

01:35:41.840 It's actually Christian.

01:35:42.860 The Coen brothers are not nihilistic.

01:35:44.520 They're Christians.

01:35:45.180 They're Christians.

01:35:45.560 They're becoming Christian or something. 0.96

01:35:48.040 Because I mean.

01:35:49.180 I'm pretty sure they're Jews.

01:35:50.540 What?

01:35:51.240 I'm pretty sure they're Jews.

01:35:52.000 They're not like Coen.

01:35:53.220 I don't think they are.

01:35:53.980 Oh, I think they are.

01:35:54.460 No, I'm pretty sure not.

01:35:55.160 They're not Jewish? 0.95

01:35:55.820 I'm pretty sure not.

01:35:56.440 I'm not.

01:35:56.660 I mean, ethnically Jewish.

01:35:58.840 No, I don't think they're ethnically Jewish.

01:36:00.460 I'll check it.

01:36:01.140 Okay.

01:36:01.340 I'm fairly certain not.

01:36:02.180 It turns out they're Muslims.

01:36:03.240 Who saw that one coming?

01:36:04.200 Really sure.

01:36:04.900 Because they're really, really good at arts.

01:36:06.340 But I will tell you that I went to, I watched this show.

01:36:10.740 Yeah.

01:36:10.860 And I thought, I really enjoyed that, but I have no idea what it's about.

01:36:14.200 And then I went to bed and I woke up just incredibly energized.

01:36:17.220 And I realized, oh, I didn't know what it was about because it's so obvious.

01:36:19.480 It was right there.

01:36:20.400 I mean, it's all about, you know, salvation and that starts with a hymn to water and baptism.

01:36:26.780 You know, it's just a wonderful show.

01:36:28.100 Yeah.

01:36:28.500 No, you're correct.

01:36:29.240 They are of a Jewish family, but of course have not practiced them.

01:36:31.100 Yeah.

01:36:31.200 No, but yeah, the movie itself.

01:36:34.020 I can't understand why you, see, you think they're nihilist because secretly, down deep,

01:36:37.760 you think there's such a thing as karma.

01:36:39.520 There's no such thing.

01:36:40.060 No, I think because they're cynics who are using the trappings of Christianity in order

01:36:45.600 to, I think they're mocking it.

01:36:48.200 I think that the entire first segment of that film is mocking religious pretensions.

01:36:53.600 And the final segment is basically their cheap takeoff on a Twilight Zone film.

01:36:58.240 And there are parts of it that I think are just brilliant.

01:37:00.860 I mean, that one of Buster Scruggs.

01:37:02.240 Like, I really appreciated a lot of it.

01:37:04.660 Yeah.

01:37:04.780 The last one is too long.

01:37:06.040 The last, the last stick.

01:37:07.420 I liked every one except that the one, the second one, the guy gets hanged.

01:37:11.180 Yeah, that one also.

01:37:11.900 Those were the two that didn't make sense to me.

01:37:13.260 The last one and that one.

01:37:14.300 Oh, I loved the last one.

01:37:15.100 The other one.

01:37:16.020 Of course you did.

01:37:16.580 It's super talky.

01:37:17.520 It takes forever to guess the point.

01:37:19.220 It's called The Great Good Thing.

01:37:21.340 It's improperly titled.

01:37:22.740 You got a good lawsuit on your hands there, Buster.

01:37:24.740 Yeah, exactly.

01:37:25.700 Well, I mean, A Christmas Story is still a classic.

01:37:28.280 A Christmas Story is still a classic.

01:37:29.440 It's a wonderful film.

01:37:30.440 Wonderful, yeah, yeah.

01:37:31.560 And Dabney Coleman is wildly underappreciated.

01:37:35.380 Darren McGavin.

01:37:36.060 Darren McGavin.

01:37:36.480 Yeah, no, that is a great performance.

01:37:38.160 Darren McGavin is wildly underappreciated as an actor.

01:37:39.940 And I loved him because he was the tough guy detective on TV all the time.

01:37:43.880 He was in a show called The Outsider, and he played Mike Hammer, I think.

01:37:46.940 And he was just a great actor.

01:37:48.220 But he's so funny in that thing with the...

01:37:50.440 It's kind of constant grumbling.

01:37:52.820 It's great.

01:37:53.460 It's a great show.

01:37:54.020 I like the Charlie Brown Christmas movie.

01:37:56.020 Yeah, it's a great movie.

01:37:56.800 Charlie Brown is so fantastic, and it's so full of heart and throws back to a time when

01:38:01.740 the country wasn't awful.

01:38:03.840 It's from the 60s, but it's from an earlier part of the 60s before they started making

01:38:07.320 stuff up and just telling lies, like the moon landing.

01:38:10.980 That's right.

01:38:11.700 Here's a great story for you.

01:38:12.460 Second wave feminism. 0.98

01:38:13.140 You mentioned earlier that Christmas is just a part of being an American, and I totally

01:38:18.840 agree with this as a cultural matter, and there is a reason why Jews write all the best

01:38:22.520 Christmas music, and that is specifically because there's a sense...

01:38:24.940 And you've talked about this, so I'm cribbing from you here.

01:38:26.960 But the sense of nostalgia that is existent in Jewish Christmas music, which is sort of

01:38:31.520 the outsider feel, but there's a nostalgia for the Christmas season.

01:38:35.160 In all of Irving Berlin's Christmas music, it's obviously present.

01:38:38.080 So there's a very famous story about these two incredibly famous rabbis.

01:38:40.900 I believe one was Moshe Feinstein for people who are watching and care about this sort

01:38:44.300 of thing.

01:38:45.300 And so these two rabbis get in the back of a cab, and it's in the Christmas season. 0.61

01:38:49.240 And they start talking, and they're asking each other where they went to school.

01:38:52.060 And one of them says, well, I went to public school here.

01:38:53.580 Like, I grew up in public school.

01:38:54.560 And everyone says, I went to public school here, too.

01:38:55.980 And he said, I don't believe you went to public school.

01:38:57.580 These guys have spent their entire life in yeshiva, right?

01:38:59.960 I mean, these are the great scholars of the Jewish people.

01:39:01.740 And they say, well, really?

01:39:02.960 You don't believe that?

01:39:04.180 Okay, well, on three, O come all ye faithful.

01:39:08.140 And so they start singing Christmas carols in the back of the cab.

01:39:10.560 Because that is the reality.

01:39:12.080 I mean, this is a thing my family used to do to prank all the Jewish families on Christmas. 1.00

01:39:16.180 We actually used to go and carol at people's houses on Christmas.

01:39:20.280 Like, we'd go to Jewish families' houses, knock on the door, and in four-part harmony,

01:39:23.520 start singing, Oh, Christmas tree.

01:39:25.240 That is such a superhero move.

01:39:26.260 It's pretty spectacular.

01:39:27.520 It's really good.

01:39:28.160 I mean, I still know all of those.

01:39:29.400 I love it.

01:39:29.720 They're great.

01:39:30.340 I mean, Christmas music is spectacularly good.

01:39:33.460 I mean, Silent Night may be the most beautiful song ever written.

01:39:35.540 Silent Night is just an incredible piece of art.

01:39:36.180 It is amazing.

01:39:37.540 This is the other thing.

01:39:38.520 The art that came out of Christianity, when you compare it to the empty kind of, you know, 1.00

01:39:43.900 happy talk movies that the Christians make, you know, where everything turns out all right. 1.00

01:39:47.920 When you compare that to Bach and the Sistine Chapel and the art that Christianity engendered.

01:39:52.400 Well, even in the films, I mean, the fact is that people treat Christmas as treacle.

01:39:57.360 I mean, it's all saccharine treacle.

01:39:58.360 Yeah.

01:39:58.860 And now all of the films that come out are the Hallmark movie, you know, everything's

01:40:03.320 great because we celebrate Christmas together.

01:40:06.000 Because we fell in love.

01:40:06.460 And we lit a thousand candles randomly in the five minutes in this room.

01:40:09.340 We somehow were able to light all 5,000 of these candles for the first time since

01:40:12.880 that love scene in that other weird movie, like, three months ago.

01:40:15.620 Have you ever gotten that?

01:40:16.200 Like, you watch these movies, and suddenly, like, people are about to have sex, and suddenly

01:40:19.820 there's 1,000 candles lit in the room.

01:40:22.140 Like, when did that happen?

01:40:23.260 How did that happen?

01:40:23.800 You know how long it takes to light one candle?

01:40:25.520 I do it every time.

01:40:26.320 I burn my fingers.

01:40:27.100 A bunch of candles, and it takes me, like, 15 minutes.

01:40:29.100 What are you even doing?

01:40:30.100 Do they have, like, a blowtorch?

01:40:31.020 Like, how does this work in any case?

01:40:32.800 But if you look at A Christmas Carol, or if you look at It's a Wonderful Life, these

01:40:36.320 are dark.

01:40:37.320 They're dark.

01:40:38.120 They really are.

01:40:39.260 It's a Wonderful Life is the meanest performance Jimmy Stewart gives outside of Once Upon a

01:40:43.920 Time in the West.

01:40:44.780 I agree with you. 1.00

01:40:45.740 It's him playing a bastard, right? 0.99

01:40:47.600 I mean, like, when he loses it with his family, and starts shouting at them, and he's drunk, 1.00

01:40:52.960 and he's screaming at his kids, they're like, wow.

01:40:55.380 This is not, like, everybody has the picture of It's a Wonderful Life as the final scene.

01:40:59.060 The final scene is the last five minutes of the movie.

01:41:01.400 The rest of it is so dark.

01:41:03.040 And it doesn't change.

01:41:03.580 And the bad guy doesn't get punished, right?

01:41:04.860 And it doesn't change his life.

01:41:06.000 The thing that I love about it, this is true in A Christmas Carol 2, that finding religion,

01:41:13.240 essentially, finding God, doesn't change everything that's happened before.

01:41:16.300 He's never going to go around the world and become an architect.

01:41:18.820 He is who he is.

01:41:19.620 Right.

01:41:19.900 But he just sees it all differently.

01:41:21.500 And that is the beautiful thing.

01:41:22.660 And it's a wonderful life.

01:41:23.260 It's a beautiful religion.

01:41:24.080 Yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

01:41:24.880 I mean, the amazing thing in It's a Wonderful Life is that, in the Hays Code, the basic 0.63

01:41:29.220 rule was, if you commit a crime, you don't get away with it.

01:41:31.580 In that movie, the criminal gets away with it.

01:41:33.160 That's true.

01:41:33.700 Lionel Barrymore stiffs him and commits bank fraud, right?

01:41:36.780 And gets away with it.

01:41:37.600 And my favorite line, by the way, in the Alistair Sim Christmas Carol, which I've quoted so

01:41:42.700 much that if I do it again, my wife is actually going to knock me unconscious. 1.00

01:41:45.380 Just like St. Nick?

01:41:46.220 Because it's not from Dickens.

01:41:49.100 He says, I don't deserve to be so happy, but I can't help it.

01:41:53.180 And I just, that to me is my whole life.

01:41:55.400 Right.

01:41:55.600 And I think that is a Christmas, that is Christmas right there.

01:41:59.580 I don't deserve to be so happy.

01:42:00.480 But this brings us to this whole war on Christmas concept, because one of the things that I've

01:42:03.500 observed over the last few weeks is how there's now a kind of Victorian puritanicalism on the

01:42:10.180 left where they can't even handle a moral tale, because in order to set up the moral payoff

01:42:15.700 at the end, they have to first demonstrate things that the left finds anathema.

01:42:19.560 So, the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer thing is unbelievable.

01:42:24.100 What is this?

01:42:24.800 So, I keep seeing the headline, I haven't read the piece. 0.99

01:42:27.060 He's gay. 0.99

01:42:27.800 Spoiler alert, he's gay. 1.00

01:42:29.360 He's a gay reindeer. 1.00

01:42:30.440 He has a girlfriend in the thing, right? 0.99

01:42:33.560 He does have a girlfriend.

01:42:34.380 The left is angry about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, because before it gets to the part

01:42:38.800 where it teaches you that you should tolerate people who are different than you, it first 0.98

01:42:43.360 has to show people not tolerating people who are different than you.

01:42:46.500 Really?

01:42:46.940 Yeah.

01:42:47.040 Oh, yeah.

01:42:47.740 They're like, can you believe that we still show this to kids?

01:42:49.980 It has bullying.

01:42:51.320 It has bigotry. 1.00

01:42:52.700 It has to father be gay. 0.99

01:42:53.800 And these are the exact same people who are saying about religious people who are upset 0.99

01:42:57.120 that during the Thanksgiving Day parade that they showed lesbians kissing on TV. 0.91

01:43:00.480 And they were like, well, those people are so intolerant. 0.83

01:43:02.660 Why can't they just deal with the fact that their six-year-old watched lesbians kissing 1.00

01:43:05.340 on TV?

01:43:06.060 And they're like, but they can't watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

01:43:08.140 It will scar them for life if they watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

01:43:10.480 The whole point of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is to include people.

01:43:13.500 It's to include people.

01:43:14.200 That's right.

01:43:14.680 That's right.

01:43:15.560 Yeah.

01:43:16.120 They don't even kill the abominable snow monster.

01:43:18.080 That's how tolerant that movie is.

01:43:20.000 That's a spoiler if you haven't seen it.

01:43:22.020 But they let the snow monster live.

01:43:23.920 They let the snow monster go.

01:43:24.440 But what I do like about religion generally is that, and it's something that atheists 1.00

01:43:29.900 don't seem to understand or forcibly fail to understand, religion is dark, right? 1.00

01:43:35.080 Religion is not sweetness and light. 0.91

01:43:37.020 Religion is not about all of the wonderful things that happen to you because you decide

01:43:42.100 to believe in God.

01:43:42.720 Now there'll be no more tragedy and no child will die of cancer and nothing terrible will

01:43:45.800 ever happen the rest of your life and everything will be hunky-dory.

01:43:48.560 And that's what I dislike about, it's less so in Judaism, but I see it a lot in the Christian 1.00

01:43:52.620 world.

01:43:52.900 Oh, yeah.

01:43:53.220 This whole, I mean, I don't want to rip on people who are your folks, but I'm not sure

01:43:58.400 they're your folks, honestly.

01:43:59.440 Like, folks who are preaching the prosperity gospel.

01:44:01.600 Like, this idea that if you believe...

01:44:02.780 That God wants you to have your best life now.

01:44:04.680 Yeah.

01:44:04.980 You've obviously never read what happened to any person in the Bible.

01:44:09.160 Or including Jesus.

01:44:12.360 No, I mean, I had this conversation with Dennis Prager once that there is no happiness without

01:44:17.180 a tragic sense, without the sense that life as we know it, from cradle to grave, is

01:44:21.900 tragic, that there's no joy.

01:44:24.560 You know, because you have to be...

01:44:25.580 You have to understand how incredibly great this moment is to feel the joy.

01:44:30.000 And if you don't know what life actually is, what it can be, how bad it can be, and what

01:44:34.580 happens to you in the end of it, how can you enjoy this moment?

01:44:37.460 This is part of that.

01:44:38.080 I think this is one of the things that's happening.

01:44:39.880 We talk about the suicide epidemic and the heroin epidemic.

01:44:41.800 I think people have been told, because they were born in America and were prosperous and

01:44:45.540 were free, that their life is just going to be awesome.

01:44:48.760 Like, from beginning to end, it's just going to be terrific.

01:44:51.360 And then, it turns out that no one's life is fully terrific, right?

01:44:55.900 Even the most successful people you know, all the people you watch on TV, all the people

01:45:00.060 who are successful and famous, all of them, every single one of them has had some tragedy

01:45:04.180 that you did not know anything about.

01:45:05.760 That's right.

01:45:06.100 And you're sitting there judging them, thinking they had happiness.

01:45:08.260 Why can't I have happiness?

01:45:09.160 Just like that.

01:45:10.300 And in order, and the world is unfair, and the world is a terrible place.

01:45:13.100 Religion teaches you that the best of us, I mean, you guys have Jesus, but for us, Moses

01:45:17.600 spends his entire life trying to bring the stiff-necked, annoying people all the way from

01:45:22.220 slavery.

01:45:22.440 He liberates them from slavery with God, and then takes them all the way across the desert 0.61

01:45:26.200 for 40 years.

01:45:27.360 He watches his brother die.

01:45:28.600 He watches his sister die.

01:45:29.940 He watches every member of his generation die.

01:45:31.680 And then he finally gets to the end, and God says, you can't go in.

01:45:33.960 You have to die on top of this mountain.

01:45:35.380 And you have to have your deputy, who is not your kid, by the way.

01:45:37.920 Moses has a whole discussion in the Bible about, can it be my son, basically?

01:45:41.720 And God says, no, it can't be your son.

01:45:42.700 It's got to be Joshua.

01:45:43.520 It's got to be this guy who's going to take them across the river.

01:45:46.220 All you can do is you can be on top of this mountain.

01:45:47.820 You can see it.

01:45:48.580 That's all that you can do.

01:45:49.580 And that is the religious sensibility.

01:45:51.220 You're never going to enter the promised land, maybe after you die, but certainly not

01:45:55.560 in this life.

01:45:56.020 There is no promised land to enter, because the fact is, the best that you can do is see

01:46:00.060 dimly across the horizon a better world in which people accept God more freely.

01:46:05.460 Part of this is because we live in a culture.

01:46:07.260 We talked about this at our home church last night, Jay Hay and I, that we live in this

01:46:14.320 anomalous moment in history where we have created a system that does seem to guarantee

01:46:21.480 that things generally improve over time.

01:46:23.380 So only in the last 200 years, we've essentially gotten all of technology, all of medicine,

01:46:29.760 all of the great growth in economy, lifespan.

01:46:34.180 And so we're left with this false sense that we can expect constant improvement.

01:46:40.280 But God never promised constant improvement.

01:46:42.580 And the constant improvement that the world offers, that our modern society offers, modern

01:46:48.360 society can't keep its promises.

01:46:49.720 There's no guarantee that those systems can deliver.

01:46:52.380 It can't even keep life expectancy.

01:46:54.040 This year, for the second year in a row, first time in 50 years.

01:46:56.280 Third actually, third, right?

01:46:57.300 15, 16, and 17, yeah.

01:46:58.960 And those three, for the first time in 50 years, life expectancy in America has declined.

01:47:03.880 Because of suicide, which is...

01:47:05.200 And drugs.

01:47:05.480 And heroin over there.

01:47:06.460 70,000 last year.

01:47:07.580 You know what the terrible thing is?

01:47:08.800 The terrible thing is that intellectuals and elite people come up with these theories about

01:47:13.180 how life would be better if we didn't have marriage, how life would be better if we didn't

01:47:16.260 have God, or God is ridiculous, and then the rich people think, like, no, that was untrue. 0.86

01:47:21.340 And it's the poor people who die. 0.98

01:47:22.700 It's the middle class.

01:47:23.020 Well, this is Charles Murray's pointing coming apart.

01:47:24.460 Charles Murray has an entire book about this, about white folks, right?

01:47:27.080 Because he did the bell curve.

01:47:28.020 Because he was so afraid.

01:47:28.760 And then he was like, I can't talk about race anymore, so I'm just going to do differences

01:47:31.800 in the white community.

01:47:32.820 And he specifically points out that, basically, there are a bunch of rich white liberals who 1.00

01:47:36.440 don't pay attention to any of the crap that they spout. 0.99

01:47:38.560 And then there are a bunch of poor people who pay attention to what they spout and follow 0.99

01:47:41.140 those rules out.

01:47:42.000 Because the marriage rates in rich white liberal areas are still very high.

01:47:45.260 The childbearing rate in rich white liberal areas before marriage is still extraordinarily

01:47:49.400 low.

01:47:50.400 And people get jobs, and they finish high school.

01:47:53.040 But then they're told, no, let your children run free.

01:47:55.020 You don't need to get married.

01:47:55.960 A powerful woman is a woman who doesn't need a man. 1.00

01:47:58.580 And they don't live those lives.

01:48:00.520 Of course not.

01:48:00.840 And then the consequences are felt by everybody else.

01:48:03.540 But I think that there is, back to the religion point, because that's really what the show is

01:48:07.040 about.

01:48:07.540 And we've all said this, and it really is true.

01:48:09.220 There is a God-shaped hole in the human heart, and we've decided to fill it with a bunch of 1.00

01:48:13.140 bullshit. 1.00

01:48:13.740 We've decided to fill it. 1.00

01:48:14.680 It's so true, man.

01:48:15.620 With political rage, and we've decided to fill it with hedonism and entertainment, and

01:48:18.860 we've decided to fill it with political partisanship, and we've decided to fill it with fake social

01:48:22.240 media, which isn't real social fabric.

01:48:23.900 Social fabric requires you to actually care enough about someone to do something for them,

01:48:27.220 not to virtue signal about a third party so that someone pats you on the back who you

01:48:30.120 don't even know.

01:48:31.240 It's just that none of this creates any semblance of a community or a society.

01:48:35.060 All it creates is atomization.

01:48:36.560 And an atomization is normally, in the past, when you would have turned to God.

01:48:39.060 You would have said, there's nobody else to help me.

01:48:40.460 I need you, God.

01:48:41.180 It's you and me, and we're in this together.

01:48:43.140 But instead, because God has been thrown out, it's like, okay, it's just me.

01:48:47.060 There's nobody.

01:48:47.940 And that loneliness.

01:48:50.200 The religious man, by nature, is... 0.99

01:48:53.360 So Rabbi Joseph Soloveitcha calls it the lonely man of faith.

01:48:56.720 But the lonely man of faith is inherently not as lonely as the lonely man of no faith.

01:49:00.700 That's true.

01:49:01.020 The lonely man of faith has to walk his own path in the pursuit of God.

01:49:05.060 But the lonely man of no faith is walking a path that has no pursuit.

01:49:09.920 And that's not even walking a path.

01:49:11.220 You find yourself in the middle of the moors.

01:49:13.680 And if you take a false step, you're going down.

01:49:15.520 And that's basically...

01:49:16.160 And he has the illusion of not being lonely because the world is with him.

01:49:19.220 The lonely man of faith is lonely because he believes.

01:49:21.740 He's the guy who's lonely in the crowded room.

01:49:23.420 That's right.

01:49:23.840 Because, again, the collective can't keep its promises.

01:49:28.580 Absolutely.

01:49:29.420 And that was the thing...

01:49:30.660 Nobody collectively loves you.

01:49:31.800 People only individually love you.

01:49:33.020 There's no such thing as a collective that loves you.

01:49:34.460 To go back to Buster Scruggs, the speech that I loved and the speech that seemed to come out of the heart of the movie

01:49:39.140 is one speech where the guy says, you know, in this world...

01:49:43.580 He almost says, in the flesh.

01:49:44.820 He says, in this world of things and flesh, there's no certainty.

01:49:49.200 You have to wait for the certainty.

01:49:50.680 The certainty is at the spiritual level.

01:49:52.440 And I think that this is what we're dealing with.

01:49:53.940 We're dealing with these people who put certainty in that God-shaped hole,

01:49:57.160 and the certainty just collapses because there is no certainty in this life.

01:49:59.900 The certainty is beyond.

01:50:01.260 The certainty is in that spiritual level.

01:50:02.780 It would be unbecoming of us, I think, not to pay a little tribute to our 41st president who died this weekend,

01:50:11.220 George Herbert Walker Bush, who it occurs to me, as I'm sure we've all kind of reflected on his presidency

01:50:16.700 and on what we know of his life over the weekend.

01:50:19.480 And it's pretty in vogue in movement conservatism and in Trumpism, in the Trump revolution.

01:50:30.260 Both sides of that tend to agree that George Herbert Walker Bush wasn't a great president.

01:50:36.820 One of the things, though, that I think really stands out about George Herbert Walker Bush, in retrospect,

01:50:43.620 is that he was a great example of how to live a joyous and purposeful life.

01:50:48.440 No, he was a great man.

01:50:49.220 He wasn't a great president, but he was a great man.

01:50:51.200 And it is, I would offer as an argument, perhaps an unpopular argument,

01:50:59.300 that we actually need more leadership on how to be good than on how to be ideologically pure.

01:51:08.560 And that when George H.W. Bush was president,

01:51:11.480 there was a point in his presidency where he had a 90% approval rating.

01:51:15.680 Nothing like that will ever happen again until we fix the problem that you described moments ago,

01:51:23.780 that we've replaced the pursuits of the inner man with these exterior battles

01:51:30.800 that get us accolades from the collective, and political rage is one of them.

01:51:34.420 The era of political rage breeds unhappiness.

01:51:37.120 But the era of, and I'm not defending his political ideology, which, of course, I disagree with,

01:51:43.140 but we were a better country when he was president,

01:51:46.440 even though we didn't have some of the policy gains that we've had.

01:51:49.600 So, you know, I'm going to disagree with this slightly, actually.

01:51:52.160 Do you?

01:51:52.460 Well, not with your points about George H.W.,

01:51:55.040 but the point about us being a better country then,

01:51:56.900 because the fact is that by the time he left office, he had a 33% approval rating,

01:52:00.340 and then we elected a guy who schtucked everything he could possibly find.

01:52:02.800 So, you know, and the media, I do find it absolutely appalling

01:52:07.140 that the media that ripped this man down his entire life,

01:52:10.040 called him a wimp after he volunteered for the military,

01:52:12.720 and was the youngest pilot in the Navy, right? 0.91

01:52:15.180 And he was a wimp, and called him every name they could think of, 0.97

01:52:18.820 a racist because of Willie Horton, 0.98

01:52:19.920 a guy who was not in touch with a common man because they lied about him 0.97

01:52:22.600 not being able to use a grocery scanner and all this nonsense.

01:52:25.280 And all of a sudden, just like every other Republican who dies,

01:52:28.320 suddenly that person becomes the...

01:52:28.720 That's what they like about it.

01:52:30.020 Right.

01:52:30.600 Now they're dead so we can talk about how great they were.

01:52:32.700 And also, there's no question they're doing this because President Trump is president, right?

01:52:35.840 Oh, yeah.

01:52:36.100 If Hillary Clinton were president, it would be like, 0.97

01:52:39.300 we bid a fond farewell to George H.W. Bush,

01:52:41.640 but because Trump is president, look at the America we've lost.

01:52:45.140 Look at the Republican Party we've lost.

01:52:47.120 They're doing this routine now.

01:52:48.260 They did it about McCain.

01:52:49.240 They'll do it about George W. Bush when, you know,

01:52:51.200 God forbid his time comes sometime in the future.

01:52:53.240 You know, this is just the nonsense that they peddle.

01:52:56.240 But I do agree that one of the things that both right and left have fallen into

01:53:00.320 is the belief that the community, that virtue can be had in politics.

01:53:05.460 And the reality is that George H.W. Bush was not a great president

01:53:09.780 because he was a president out of time.

01:53:11.720 If George H...

01:53:12.280 I was talking about this with my father.

01:53:13.400 If George H.W. Bush had been president from 1924 to 1928,

01:53:17.700 he would have been one of the best presidents in American history.

01:53:19.720 Interesting.

01:53:19.920 Because this was a guy who was not there to do stuff.

01:53:23.520 This was a technocrat, right?

01:53:24.900 His job was basically to stay out of people's business

01:53:27.060 and then do the things that had to be done.

01:53:28.860 Manage things well.

01:53:29.860 He was a manager, right?

01:53:31.280 And that's what a good president was up until the time we decided

01:53:33.940 that the presidency and the federal government ought to be our moral leadership,

01:53:36.600 at which point we decided that we were going to cast all of our faith

01:53:39.860 on the person who was in office.

01:53:41.120 And if that person didn't cure every problem that the country had to offer,

01:53:43.640 then they would immediately fall down the memory hole.

01:53:46.460 And that's sort of what happened with H.W.

01:53:48.500 But it was a kind of moral leadership.

01:53:49.280 Great point.

01:53:50.300 Being a president and not a strong man is a kind of moral leadership.

01:53:56.500 No, I totally agree with that.

01:53:57.420 But he wasn't appreciated at the time.

01:53:59.360 Is that, I guess, the point that I'm making?

01:54:00.720 And so when it comes to Americans being better or being worse,

01:54:03.520 I think this is a problem that we've been experiencing,

01:54:06.680 the great man problem, which I do think is a...

01:54:10.000 I do think that the great man problem is an outgrowth of the death of religion itself.

01:54:14.800 Because it used to be that every year we have these polls from Time Magazine,

01:54:18.500 who's the most admired person in America.

01:54:20.580 If you ask me who's the person I admire the most, it's my dad.

01:54:23.780 If you ask people who are good,

01:54:24.940 they're going to say someone they know personally who they think of as a moral model.

01:54:28.040 It's your priest.

01:54:28.580 It's your rabbi.

01:54:29.220 It's your mom.

01:54:29.740 It's your wife.

01:54:30.320 It's somebody who you admire the most.

01:54:31.800 It's a person who has a personal impact on you.

01:54:33.880 But we as a society have built around, since the death of God, right?

01:54:37.180 We've built around who is the most powerful figure we can think of,

01:54:40.280 who channels the ideas that are closest to my own.

01:54:43.280 And that person, if you're a Christian, used to be Jesus.

01:54:45.960 And if you're a Jew, it used to be Moses. 0.96

01:54:47.580 And if you are neither of those two things,

01:54:49.720 then it was somebody who I guess was a political leader.

01:54:53.000 But now that's why people on the right now see President Trump

01:54:57.340 not just as a guy who's the president and fulfilling some of their political purposes,

01:55:00.820 but as the leader of a movement.

01:55:02.100 As daddy.

01:55:03.000 Right, as daddy.

01:55:04.320 That comes along with some financial side effects.

01:55:06.640 I have to say that one of the things that I really disliked about both the Bushes

01:55:10.720 was their idea that the things that they said that implied that conservatism

01:55:15.820 was inherently not compounding.

01:55:17.620 The idea that we're going to be a kinder, gentler nation,

01:55:20.080 and Nancy Reagan is supposed to have said, 1.00

01:55:21.800 kinder and gentler than whom.

01:55:23.320 But I have to say that looking back,

01:55:26.280 conservatism does have a reluctance,

01:55:29.640 a very masculine reluctance, to communicate that compassion.

01:55:33.280 Mia Love said this the other day when she lost.

01:55:35.280 She said, you know, it's one thing to give stuff.

01:55:37.980 It's one thing to be transactional.

01:55:39.560 You've got to come over.

01:55:40.500 You've got to come over the house.

01:55:41.660 You've got to come into the neighborhood.

01:55:43.120 You've got to say, we love you, and this is why conservatism works.

01:55:46.340 And what do you want?

01:55:47.440 What makes you happy?

01:55:48.280 You've got to listen, too.

01:55:49.280 And I think we do have this problem,

01:55:50.900 and I think it is a problem that Trump has in spades that, you know,

01:55:54.620 I love some of the stuff that he's doing,

01:55:56.420 but he alienates people because he's a bore.

01:55:58.340 Well, I will say that this also is a difference between, I think,

01:56:01.420 President Trump and some other Republicans.

01:56:04.160 I think that the generic Republican, so in Judaism,

01:56:07.120 the highest form of charity is the charity you give anonymously.

01:56:09.680 You're not going out and tooting your own horn.

01:56:10.640 Right, right, right.

01:56:11.500 And I agree with that as a general rule.

01:56:13.500 Of course.

01:56:14.260 But the reality is in politics, if you're not tooting your own horn,

01:56:16.900 you're not showing you care.

01:56:17.640 Right.

01:56:18.060 And so this is a real problem for a lot of conservatives

01:56:19.720 because you'll reach out and you'll do nice things for people.

01:56:22.180 And I know it wounds my image to say that I do nice things for people

01:56:25.240 on a really regular basis.

01:56:26.580 We never tell.

01:56:26.980 But, you know, to blow the image apart right now,

01:56:29.460 I actually do nice things for people with whom I disagree

01:56:31.400 on an extraordinarily regular basis,

01:56:33.080 including people who I disagree with on the most basic levels.

01:56:37.120 And, you know, the fact that that happens,

01:56:39.280 because I don't want to talk about it,

01:56:41.000 because I see it's a mark of lack of character.

01:56:43.400 Yeah.

01:56:43.580 To talk about the good things that you do,

01:56:45.560 it makes you seem uncaring.

01:56:46.920 Yeah.

01:56:47.100 But if you're in this world, unfortunately,

01:56:49.960 I agree with you.

01:56:50.360 If you want to convince people that religious people do the right thing, 1.00

01:56:52.060 you actually have to talk about the right things religious people do.

01:56:53.520 And there's also this thing that conservatives have,

01:56:56.320 which I kind of love about them on the one hand,

01:56:58.540 where we'll say,

01:57:00.120 what do you mean conservatism isn't good for black people? 0.69

01:57:02.700 Look at the statistics.

01:57:04.120 But what Mia Love was saying is,

01:57:05.600 yeah, the statistics are good,

01:57:07.120 but you've got to show up.

01:57:08.080 It's got to be a face thing.

01:57:09.260 You've got to be there in those neighborhoods and say,

01:57:11.320 this is why.

01:57:11.960 You know, when we did that thing at Loyola Marymount,

01:57:14.520 somebody says,

01:57:14.960 what have the conservatives done?

01:57:16.600 What have the Republicans done for black people?

01:57:18.200 What we should have said,

01:57:19.140 and neither of us said is, 0.84

01:57:20.480 we don't want to do anything for black people. 1.00

01:57:22.020 We want to do things for everybody all together.

01:57:24.600 But you've got to say that.

01:57:25.600 You've got to be there,

01:57:26.340 and you've got to be in that neighborhood and say,

01:57:27.780 you are Americans,

01:57:28.620 we are Americans, 0.99

01:57:29.320 and we want you to be black people. 0.95

01:57:29.840 But this is the thing. 0.98

01:57:30.680 George H.W. Bush was supposed to,

01:57:32.000 this demonstrates the lie of the media.

01:57:34.320 George H.W. Bush was the kinder, gentler version.

01:57:37.060 He was perceived as aloof.

01:57:38.400 Yeah.

01:57:38.560 He was perceived as a guy who had no connection.

01:57:40.520 Patrician.

01:57:41.380 Patrician.

01:57:41.920 A man who doesn't have any contact with a common man. 0.73

01:57:43.660 I mean,

01:57:44.200 it really is gross to see the 180 that's been done by the media about H.W.,

01:57:50.020 and that is incredible.

01:57:51.480 And it will also be going when they,

01:57:52.600 I have to say this,

01:57:53.420 I'm going to say this prospectively and disrespectfully,

01:57:56.140 when Jimmy Carter passes,

01:57:57.120 which he will when his time comes,

01:57:58.440 because we all will.

01:57:59.220 Long after we're all dead.

01:58:00.420 He's going to live at least until 250.

01:58:02.080 When Jimmy Carter passes,

01:58:03.500 there will be this,

01:58:05.240 the outpouring that you're seeing about George H.W.,

01:58:07.140 will be dwarfed by the outpouring that you see about Jimmy Carter,

01:58:10.020 a man with, in my view,

01:58:11.900 significant anti-Semitic connections

01:58:13.400 and real problems with his moral character. 1.00

01:58:15.420 And he's a bitter, nasty man. 0.99

01:58:17.480 I've always thought so. 1.00

01:58:18.080 Right, exactly.

01:58:18.600 But once he dies, 0.51

01:58:19.380 this is something else that I hate,

01:58:20.760 is that when people die,

01:58:22.060 all of a sudden we have to not discuss anything about the actual human.

01:58:24.000 Well, for a day.

01:58:24.760 For a day.

01:58:25.160 I think for a day is kind of nice.

01:58:26.920 No, for a day, it's fine.

01:58:29.440 But the kind of glow,

01:58:31.780 the sepia glow that we put around people,

01:58:33.500 I don't think it's good when they're alive.

01:58:35.740 And we do it when they're alive.

01:58:36.960 It's like he's either the greatest or the worst.

01:58:39.600 They're not an individual human being.

01:58:40.900 Which, by the way, is an irreligious view.

01:58:43.520 Hagiography is evil.

01:58:44.820 Hagiography is bad,

01:58:45.580 but the only thing I do think is when somebody dies,

01:58:48.180 it reminds you that in the fight,

01:58:50.220 in the screaming, in the yelling,

01:58:51.620 you forget that we all have this common fate.

01:58:53.760 We all are common human beings.

01:58:55.440 It would be nice if we remembered that while people were alive

01:58:57.580 and just said, you know,

01:58:58.700 when you go on Twitter and you say, like, 1.00

01:59:00.640 you're an idiot, you know, you stink, 1.00

01:59:02.360 you forget that these are people of flesh and blood 1.00

01:59:04.220 with terrible problems.

01:59:05.400 No, not on Twitter.

01:59:06.940 They're not real.

01:59:08.040 I'm just talking to bots anyways.

01:59:09.400 The other thing, too,

01:59:10.660 is that with George Bush,

01:59:11.760 conservatives knock him for all the many things he got wrong.

01:59:14.680 He wasn't a conservative.

01:59:15.560 He invented the term voodoo economics.

01:59:17.000 He rates taxes.

01:59:17.820 It could go on for another hour.

01:59:19.320 He was a very loyal vice president

01:59:21.500 during the Reagan revolution.

01:59:23.240 He was loyal in many ways.

01:59:24.620 He didn't undercut Reagan once he was running with him.

01:59:28.520 He didn't undercut him as vice president.

01:59:30.180 When Reagan was shot,

01:59:31.300 he didn't take Reagan's seat at meetings.

01:59:33.700 He played it so straight.

01:59:35.760 Because he was a good man.

01:59:36.880 Right.

01:59:37.280 And this is the thing, you know,

01:59:38.340 I think that in the end result,

01:59:40.460 the message of religion is that

01:59:42.140 it is harder to be a good man than to be a great man.

01:59:44.960 It is harder to be a good man

01:59:46.520 who just does the right thing than to be a great man.

01:59:48.380 I was reading a lecture.

01:59:51.080 There are a lot of rabbis

01:59:52.160 who actually do not transcribe their lectures

01:59:53.660 and don't write things down

01:59:54.720 because their idea is that

01:59:55.900 their name is less important.

01:59:57.540 They don't want their name to live on

01:59:58.760 because that's not actually important to them

02:00:00.160 because that's actually just a message of ego

02:00:01.820 is to have your name live on.

02:00:04.460 Look, we all want to be remembered after we're gone.

02:00:06.920 Like the gold letters on the sides

02:00:08.440 of the many, many buildings?

02:00:09.680 A hundred percent.

02:00:10.720 And if I could get away with it,

02:00:11.560 I would do it too.

02:00:12.100 Like we all would, right?

02:00:13.360 But the fact is that

02:00:15.060 to be a good person,

02:00:16.520 which means to be doing all the things

02:00:18.000 people will forget about.

02:00:19.640 Right.

02:00:19.780 To do all the good things,

02:00:20.540 taking your kids to school,

02:00:21.720 to take care of your kids,

02:00:22.920 to take care of your wife.

02:00:23.760 And we all pretend,

02:00:24.360 well, you know,

02:00:24.600 those are the things that matter.

02:00:25.420 Really, do you remember

02:00:25.920 what your grandfather did

02:00:26.620 when he took your parents to school?

02:00:27.600 The answer is no.

02:00:28.200 Were your great grandparents?

02:00:29.300 You don't remember that.

02:00:29.800 You remember what Churchill did.

02:00:30.760 He lived the same time.

02:00:31.620 We remember great men.

02:00:32.600 We don't remember good men.

02:00:33.860 And that's the challenge

02:00:34.620 of being a good person

02:00:35.520 is knowing that you're doing

02:00:36.980 the hard work of not being remembered

02:00:38.520 so that civilization can preserve.

02:00:40.120 This is one of my key arguments

02:00:42.380 with feminism 0.94

02:00:42.920 is that people don't celebrate motherhood

02:00:45.360 and they don't celebrate homemaking,

02:00:47.300 which to me is one of the most beautiful things

02:00:48.980 that people can do.

02:00:50.380 The fact that they don't celebrate it

02:00:51.560 tells you about the world.

02:00:52.540 It doesn't tell you about motherhood.

02:00:53.660 It tells you about what the world values 0.90

02:00:55.380 and how trashy its values are

02:00:57.540 and have always been. 0.98

02:00:58.460 The world's values are trashy. 0.68

02:01:00.080 The world values the flesh.

02:01:02.140 So I want to grab three more questions

02:01:04.320 from our Daily Wire subscribers.

02:01:07.100 They give us their alms

02:01:09.080 and we give them our wisdom,

02:01:11.760 by which I mean the stuff we make up.

02:01:13.160 Alicia, join us with some questions.

02:01:16.720 If I may, I have to say

02:01:17.740 H.W. gave us Clarence Thomas,

02:01:19.740 so God bless him for that.

02:01:21.580 And I'm really disappointed in all of y'all

02:01:23.720 and some people on Twitter agree with me

02:01:25.200 that no one mentioned White Christmas

02:01:26.900 as a favorite Christmas movie.

02:01:28.460 Come on, guys.

02:01:29.440 That's not a good one.

02:01:30.120 We're afraid of the old white connections. 0.99

02:01:31.880 We don't want any bad optics.

02:01:32.800 It's a great, fun, mediocre movie.

02:01:34.940 No.

02:01:36.340 Patriotism.

02:01:36.900 Sorry.

02:01:37.480 Happily Ever After. 0.98

02:01:38.940 Ridiculous. 0.96

02:01:39.520 Anyway. 0.99

02:01:39.840 You say you raise chickens.

02:01:40.420 Yes, and give you good eggs, 0.98

02:01:43.980 so be thankful.

02:01:45.040 Joshua says,

02:01:46.260 in Ben's conversation with Pastor MacArthur,

02:01:48.280 MacArthur mentioned why he thinks

02:01:49.720 the American Revolution

02:01:50.740 and violent revolutions in general

02:01:53.080 was not in keeping with Christian values.

02:01:55.140 What are y'all's thoughts on this?

02:01:56.540 Well, I'm a Jacobite,

02:01:57.760 so I'm all for it.

02:01:58.700 Restore James II. 0.83

02:01:59.940 I think his line is the Duke of Bavaria

02:02:02.040 at this point.

02:02:03.080 There's something to be said for this.

02:02:05.540 Christians are the ones who are dancing 1.00

02:02:07.360 while they're being fed to lions, right? 0.99

02:02:08.920 Christians are the ones who are, 1.00

02:02:10.740 you know,

02:02:11.200 we were talking about the prosperity gospel,

02:02:13.000 your best life now.

02:02:14.220 The apostles say to Christ,

02:02:15.640 we want to follow you,

02:02:16.460 and he says, 0.99

02:02:16.820 are you crazy? 0.99

02:02:17.740 Really? 1.00

02:02:18.340 Do you know what that means?

02:02:19.640 He says to Peter,

02:02:20.520 you're going to follow me, 0.99

02:02:21.520 and you're going to be crucified upside down. 0.99

02:02:23.480 I think there's quite a lot to this.

02:02:25.740 The argument for the American Revolution

02:02:27.280 is that it was a conservative revolution,

02:02:29.600 that it was conserving things

02:02:31.380 and recognizing a nation

02:02:32.760 that already existed,

02:02:34.340 that was separated.

02:02:35.960 But I'm quite empathetic

02:02:37.680 to MacArthur's view.

02:02:38.740 I understand the point he's making.

02:02:40.380 I understand where in Scripture

02:02:42.120 he's getting to that point.

02:02:43.300 But I actually don't agree with him.

02:02:44.540 I think that what the Christian has to do

02:02:47.100 is be a Christian in his time.

02:02:48.740 He has to be a Christian 0.81

02:02:49.420 no matter what the moment is.

02:02:50.980 And that may be the moment

02:02:51.880 when you take up arms

02:02:52.780 because it has to be done.

02:02:54.760 And I think that,

02:02:55.580 I don't think that there's necessarily

02:02:57.720 anything wrong

02:02:58.660 with Christians taking up arms

02:03:01.080 in a great cause.

02:03:02.280 That's certainly not.

02:03:02.880 I might have a slightly,

02:03:03.460 a slightly different point of view,

02:03:05.220 although I'm very sympathetic

02:03:06.420 to your point of view.

02:03:08.120 Mine is that

02:03:09.000 I don't think that the purpose

02:03:10.500 of Christianity

02:03:11.180 is to be a great Christian

02:03:12.360 and that in the gospel

02:03:13.780 is the freedom to be wrong

02:03:15.440 and that God wields

02:03:16.920 people who are wrong

02:03:18.400 because those are the only people

02:03:19.500 that he has to wield.

02:03:21.440 And so I'm not a fan

02:03:23.240 of the Catholic Church.

02:03:24.160 I don't hide it.

02:03:25.900 And yet,

02:03:26.780 I recognize the many great contributions

02:03:28.640 of the Catholic Church

02:03:29.960 to Western civilization.

02:03:31.860 My argument is

02:03:32.680 that's a recommendation of God,

02:03:34.240 not a recommendation

02:03:34.820 of the Catholic Church.

02:03:36.100 And while that's,

02:03:36.740 from my point of view,

02:03:37.340 an extreme example,

02:03:39.080 I would use the same example

02:03:40.340 even for things

02:03:40.920 that we think are good

02:03:41.860 or that we all collectively

02:03:43.220 agreed were good.

02:03:44.360 That we make the mistake

02:03:45.940 of attributing

02:03:48.260 kind of godliness

02:03:50.660 to things that we agree with only

02:03:52.340 when the reality is

02:03:53.540 that God is unfolding history.

02:03:55.020 He's moving the...

02:03:55.520 Absolutely.

02:03:55.800 And so maybe it is the case

02:03:57.840 that on some theological level,

02:03:59.360 the founders were mistaken

02:04:01.320 in pursuing the revolution

02:04:05.100 as men of faith.

02:04:07.220 I can grant that that premise

02:04:08.840 might be accurate,

02:04:10.340 but it's neither here nor there

02:04:11.480 because certainly what they did

02:04:13.780 was bent by God

02:04:14.720 for some of the greatest good

02:04:16.360 that the world has known

02:04:17.920 in terms of the building

02:04:19.600 of this nation.

02:04:21.340 And when they face their creator,

02:04:23.160 the fundamental question

02:04:24.300 is not going to be,

02:04:25.360 did you get all the theology right?

02:04:27.540 Were all of your actions

02:04:28.720 perfectly rooted in scripture?

02:04:30.140 Was all of your logic

02:04:31.160 perfectly sound?

02:04:32.480 No.

02:04:32.900 The question that we're going to,

02:04:34.880 I would say,

02:04:35.460 that we're going to face

02:04:36.040 when we stand before God

02:04:38.040 is what did you do with me?

02:04:39.800 What did you do with God?

02:04:41.080 Not what did you figure out?

02:04:44.380 God's not sitting around

02:04:45.520 waiting for us

02:04:46.380 to figure it all out.

02:04:48.720 Here's the power.

02:04:49.400 I'm happy to be a Jew.

02:04:50.320 I don't really have to worry

02:04:51.640 about all this stuff

02:04:52.280 about like, well,

02:04:53.080 leave it to the princes

02:04:54.300 get to rule

02:04:54.840 and all this stuff.

02:04:55.480 No, I mean,

02:04:55.860 we're celebrating a holiday

02:04:56.660 right now

02:04:57.300 where we overthrew

02:04:58.260 an actual regime.

02:05:00.580 So none of this exists

02:05:02.100 in Judaism.

02:05:02.740 The basic standard of Judaism

02:05:03.620 is constitutional monarchy

02:05:04.980 by which it says

02:05:06.760 in the Old Testament

02:05:07.380 that the king

02:05:08.180 is supposed to write,

02:05:09.160 every Jew is supposed 0.99

02:05:09.800 to write a Torah.

02:05:10.660 The king is supposed

02:05:11.080 to write two

02:05:11.500 because the idea

02:05:12.180 is that he has to be

02:05:12.820 constantly reminded

02:05:13.700 of his biblical obligations

02:05:15.200 and that when he surpasses

02:05:17.000 his biblical obligations,

02:05:18.240 then he has to be chided, right?

02:05:19.440 And this is the story

02:05:20.020 of Nathan and King David.

02:05:21.500 It's the story of Saul

02:05:22.260 having his kingship

02:05:22.920 taken away by Samuel, right?

02:05:24.520 The idea that people

02:05:25.660 in authority

02:05:26.260 cannot have their authority

02:05:27.260 removed by people

02:05:28.520 who are faithful

02:05:29.300 is complete anathema

02:05:30.800 to Judaism.

02:05:31.620 In fact,

02:05:32.000 we celebrate a number

02:05:33.020 of holidays

02:05:33.460 in which we are

02:05:34.000 specifically removing authority

02:05:35.340 from other people

02:05:36.520 because in our vision,

02:05:38.100 while God put those people

02:05:39.580 in place,

02:05:40.300 who's to say

02:05:40.640 he didn't put the people

02:05:41.320 who took those people

02:05:41.980 out of place

02:05:42.680 in place as well?

02:05:43.360 Well, I agree with this

02:05:44.640 and I think that

02:05:45.140 to be a Christian

02:05:46.040 in your moment

02:05:46.860 may be to pick up a musket.

02:05:48.680 I mean,

02:05:49.140 I think that each person

02:05:50.840 is...

02:05:51.360 This is why I asked

02:05:53.460 Pastor MacArthur

02:05:54.140 specifically about,

02:05:55.020 okay, so you're a Christian

02:05:55.580 living in Nazi Germany.

02:05:56.460 Do you have the moral obligation

02:05:58.520 if you can

02:05:59.180 to resist the Germans 0.87

02:06:00.260 insofar as overthrowing them,

02:06:02.000 for example?

02:06:02.800 And he kind of said no,

02:06:04.840 which surprised me.

02:06:05.660 Yeah, and I don't want

02:06:07.180 to mischaracterize.

02:06:07.720 You can go back

02:06:08.060 and watch the exchange.

02:06:09.140 But to me,

02:06:11.000 the idea of the authority,

02:06:14.240 trying to create

02:06:16.120 a full dichotomy

02:06:18.320 between city of God

02:06:19.240 and city of man

02:06:19.980 is mistaken

02:06:21.780 and not only mistaken

02:06:23.020 in the Jewish view,

02:06:25.780 at least.

02:06:26.020 It's anti-biblical. 0.89

02:06:27.120 That's actually not

02:06:28.020 what God says, right?

02:06:29.020 It does say

02:06:29.580 in the Old Testament

02:06:30.140 that the Torah was...

02:06:32.220 It's not out there

02:06:32.800 in the heavens.

02:06:33.220 It's here for you now.

02:06:34.520 The things of God are God.

02:06:36.080 I also think

02:06:36.940 that the particular verses

02:06:38.540 that we're all referring to

02:06:40.040 from Paul

02:06:41.120 about submitting

02:06:42.420 to governing authorities,

02:06:44.580 I think it's important

02:06:45.940 to contextualize them

02:06:46.940 that Paul is speaking

02:06:48.840 against the notion

02:06:49.840 that Christianity 0.95

02:06:51.080 is a revolutionary force.

02:06:52.840 Right.

02:06:53.100 First, that the Christ,

02:06:55.340 the Jewish notion

02:06:56.360 that the Christ

02:06:56.900 would be a political figure,

02:06:57.880 he's speaking against

02:06:58.520 that notion.

02:06:59.420 Second, the idea

02:07:00.280 that might be emerging

02:07:01.420 in the Roman world

02:07:02.300 that Christianity 0.95

02:07:03.020 is going to present

02:07:03.720 some sort of revolutionary

02:07:04.620 zeal against Rome.

02:07:06.520 And within that context,

02:07:07.520 he's saying

02:07:07.980 the purpose of the gospel

02:07:09.060 is not political change.

02:07:12.260 And that's true.

02:07:13.140 The purpose of the gospel

02:07:13.940 is not political change.

02:07:15.180 That's right.

02:07:15.200 I agree.

02:07:15.320 But the purpose

02:07:17.360 of the believer on earth

02:07:18.460 is put one foot

02:07:20.720 in front of the other.

02:07:21.280 That's right.

02:07:23.560 Alicia.

02:07:24.540 Yeah, we got more.

02:07:25.400 This is for everyone.

02:07:26.580 They want to know,

02:07:27.200 Anthony wants to know,

02:07:28.140 I'm sorry,

02:07:28.460 Angela wants to know,

02:07:29.520 what are some of the most

02:07:30.260 memorable or fun traditions

02:07:31.880 that you personally have

02:07:33.180 during the Christmas season?

02:07:35.720 It's arguing with my wife

02:07:36.980 about how many presents

02:07:37.820 we're going to give people

02:07:38.460 because I would give people

02:07:39.760 presents until they were

02:07:40.660 just buried.

02:07:41.360 You would just see

02:07:41.780 like this wrapping

02:07:42.540 and a hand coming out

02:07:43.640 of the top.

02:07:44.200 And my wife just thinks,

02:07:45.120 you know,

02:07:45.320 like one present for you.

02:07:46.260 Are all of them your books?

02:07:47.200 Yeah, all of them.

02:07:47.840 Of course.

02:07:49.040 I mean, it does seem

02:07:50.820 a lot less generous

02:07:52.760 when you really focus

02:07:54.100 on the specifics.

02:07:55.240 Michael, what are your...

02:07:55.700 I've got one.

02:07:56.200 We've talked about

02:07:56.700 all the religious stuff.

02:07:57.700 You can all guess

02:07:58.620 what all of those traditions are.

02:07:59.820 All the good Italian ones.

02:08:00.940 That's fine.

02:08:01.720 I have one very particular tradition.

02:08:04.060 Pugrums.

02:08:04.820 Pugrums.

02:08:05.700 We go out at midnight

02:08:07.180 on Christmas Eve.

02:08:09.400 And yeah,

02:08:09.980 we,

02:08:10.740 one of my favorite ones,

02:08:12.060 I was one time,

02:08:13.580 we'd had some family tragedies.

02:08:15.160 It was a really tough Christmas

02:08:16.360 and I'm there

02:08:17.140 with my stepbrother

02:08:18.180 and we didn't know

02:08:19.060 what,

02:08:19.240 it's Christmas Eve,

02:08:20.260 you know,

02:08:20.700 we weren't going

02:08:21.280 to midnight mass

02:08:21.900 and we didn't know

02:08:22.740 what to do

02:08:23.220 and we decided

02:08:24.100 to create

02:08:24.780 the Frasier drinking game.

02:08:26.440 And we would watch

02:08:27.340 episodes of Frasier

02:08:28.480 whenever your character

02:08:29.840 said or did anything pretentious,

02:08:31.380 you would have a drink.

02:08:32.500 So you were speaking

02:08:33.340 in cursive

02:08:33.960 within about three seconds.

02:08:35.660 You were Brett Kavanaugh

02:08:37.000 by the end of the episode.

02:08:38.380 And this,

02:08:38.740 this is an example

02:08:39.620 of an entirely irreligious,

02:08:42.060 Christmas tradition

02:08:43.000 that I cherish

02:08:44.240 in my heart.

02:08:44.720 I think we all have them.

02:08:45.540 You didn't wear

02:08:46.000 your juridic robe.

02:08:47.900 That's right.

02:08:49.360 Alicia,

02:08:49.880 we got time

02:08:50.300 for at least one more.

02:08:51.260 All right,

02:08:51.520 this last question

02:08:52.200 comes from Brittany

02:08:52.840 who says that

02:08:53.420 she's a third grade teacher

02:08:54.500 in a public school

02:08:55.320 and she has a Jewish girl

02:08:56.400 in her class

02:08:57.000 and the rest of the kids

02:08:57.880 celebrate Christmas.

02:08:59.060 She's wondering

02:08:59.700 how she can honor Judaism

02:09:01.200 and also bring Christmas activities

02:09:03.060 to all of her students.

02:09:04.240 Hmm.

02:09:04.620 Good question.

02:09:04.940 So, I mean,

02:09:05.480 as a Jewish student

02:09:06.360 who went to a public school,

02:09:07.980 it never bothered me

02:09:09.640 that people

02:09:10.520 were celebrating Christmas.

02:09:11.460 I mean,

02:09:11.580 I always assumed

02:09:12.160 that this is

02:09:13.020 a Christian country

02:09:13.780 overwhelmingly,

02:09:14.600 that the foundations

02:09:15.160 of the country

02:09:15.720 are based on

02:09:16.540 Christian concepts.

02:09:19.000 So, I mean,

02:09:19.960 really it depends

02:09:20.560 on how the parents

02:09:21.280 of the kids take it

02:09:21.820 because some parents

02:09:22.500 are very uptight

02:09:23.420 about things

02:09:23.840 for reasons

02:09:24.760 that I can't really explain.

02:09:26.640 Honestly,

02:09:27.080 I think the best way

02:09:27.600 to do it

02:09:27.880 is to treat Hanukkah 0.93

02:09:29.100 with respect

02:09:29.480 when Hanukkah comes up 0.51

02:09:30.340 and then when it's time

02:09:31.160 for Christmas,

02:09:31.620 treat Christmas with respect

02:09:32.560 and you don't have to

02:09:33.960 make specific provision

02:09:36.200 for the girl,

02:09:36.780 although you can say

02:09:37.180 to the girl,

02:09:37.500 listen,

02:09:37.920 if you don't want

02:09:38.340 to participate

02:09:38.760 in any of this,

02:09:39.320 you don't have

02:09:39.640 to participate

02:09:40.220 in any of this.

02:09:41.320 If you want to participate,

02:09:42.540 ask your parents,

02:09:43.420 see if your parents

02:09:43.940 are cool with it.

02:09:44.980 I think that's

02:09:45.560 a sign of respect

02:09:46.100 because you don't want

02:09:46.800 to force anybody

02:09:47.400 into participating

02:09:48.500 in a religious ritual

02:09:49.440 or something

02:09:49.800 they perceive

02:09:50.200 as religious

02:09:50.640 without any sort

02:09:51.360 of upfront statement.

02:09:55.120 But, again,

02:09:56.720 I don't think

02:09:57.000 it's disrespectful

02:09:57.760 to the Jewish girl

02:09:58.500 to do something

02:09:59.000 for the Christian students

02:09:59.840 any more than I think

02:10:00.460 it's disrespectful

02:10:01.000 to the Christian students

02:10:01.880 to do something

02:10:02.300 for the Jewish people.

02:10:02.720 It is a nice idea

02:10:03.520 to celebrate the Hanukkah

02:10:04.480 for the one kid,

02:10:05.780 though.

02:10:05.880 I like that.

02:10:06.160 It's a very American idea.

02:10:07.220 It is.

02:10:08.400 You know,

02:10:08.680 have you ever seen,

02:10:09.960 I mean,

02:10:10.120 I'm sure Drew's seen it,

02:10:11.860 the Frank Sinatra,

02:10:13.760 he cut the song

02:10:14.980 in the middle

02:10:15.340 of World War II.

02:10:16.120 That's correct.

02:10:17.240 The house I live in.

02:10:18.020 The house I live in,

02:10:18.720 exactly.

02:10:19.180 And that's sort

02:10:19.920 of the basic concept.

02:10:21.220 While the house

02:10:21.940 we live in

02:10:22.480 has been built

02:10:22.920 by Christian hands

02:10:24.220 because it has,

02:10:25.280 this is a house

02:10:25.940 that we all live in together

02:10:26.940 and acknowledging

02:10:28.180 that as part

02:10:28.740 of living in the house

02:10:29.480 but also

02:10:30.500 the house

02:10:31.400 filling with all

02:10:32.800 of these people

02:10:33.240 is part of what

02:10:33.720 makes America,

02:10:34.320 America.

02:10:34.700 Yep.

02:10:35.480 So I want to close

02:10:36.380 with this final thought

02:10:37.360 about Christmas.

02:10:38.260 All right.

02:10:38.740 And that's that.

02:10:40.680 If we look to the

02:10:42.000 biblical account

02:10:42.640 of the birth of Christ,

02:10:43.460 in those days,

02:10:45.100 a decree went out

02:10:45.800 from Caesar Augustus

02:10:46.780 that all the world

02:10:47.620 should be registered.

02:10:49.000 That's how Luke's narrative

02:10:50.080 about the birth

02:10:50.740 of Christ begins

02:10:51.600 with a demagogue

02:10:52.780 politician scheme

02:10:53.780 to more effectively

02:10:55.000 tax his subjects.

02:10:56.320 Right?

02:10:56.860 It's the reason

02:10:57.420 that they have a census

02:10:58.540 so he can find out

02:10:59.600 just how many people

02:11:00.520 owe him a nickel.

02:11:02.880 Caesar Augustus,

02:11:03.880 Gaius Octavius,

02:11:05.100 the first emperor

02:11:05.960 of the Roman Empire.

02:11:07.180 He was the most powerful

02:11:07.940 man in the world

02:11:08.740 and he was known

02:11:10.140 as both a god

02:11:11.040 and as the adopted

02:11:11.940 son of Julius Caesar

02:11:12.980 as the son of a god.

02:11:14.820 He ushered in

02:11:15.400 the Pax Romana,

02:11:16.260 the Roman peace,

02:11:17.020 and was known

02:11:17.580 as the Prince of Peace.

02:11:19.140 From his throne

02:11:19.840 in the most glorious

02:11:20.580 city on earth,

02:11:21.340 this god-king

02:11:22.180 of the lowercase g,

02:11:23.320 lowercase k variety,

02:11:24.840 would have been

02:11:25.280 wholly unaware

02:11:25.960 that in distant

02:11:27.080 and backward Palestine,

02:11:28.660 the god of the uppercase G

02:11:30.040 was tenting himself

02:11:31.040 in human form,

02:11:32.220 condescending to be born

02:11:33.380 into the world

02:11:33.980 as the only begotten

02:11:34.900 of the father,

02:11:35.860 through whom he would

02:11:36.820 adopt unto himself

02:11:37.800 many sons and daughters,

02:11:39.400 as many as there are

02:11:40.160 stars in the sky.

02:11:41.640 The Prince of Peace

02:11:42.480 between God and man

02:11:43.620 had no throne,

02:11:44.800 but instead slept

02:11:45.700 in a feeding trough

02:11:46.620 for beasts of burden

02:11:47.620 who were his roommates,

02:11:49.200 there being no room

02:11:50.060 for him in the familial home,

02:11:51.660 probably because his parents

02:11:52.660 were being shunned

02:11:53.360 by their kin

02:11:53.920 for the stigma

02:11:54.580 of carrying him

02:11:55.380 in contribution

02:11:56.280 of religious ideals

02:11:57.980 in the first place.

02:11:59.820 Prophecy had declared

02:12:00.680 centuries earlier

02:12:01.520 that the Christ

02:12:02.160 would be born in Bethlehem,

02:12:03.680 but without the machinations

02:12:04.760 of the lowercase g

02:12:05.880 god-king in Rome

02:12:06.880 to make himself

02:12:07.540 even richer,

02:12:08.520 the prophecy

02:12:09.020 would not have been fulfilled,

02:12:10.200 just as without the roads

02:12:11.760 that that same

02:12:12.380 lowercase god-king

02:12:13.440 built to more effectively

02:12:14.480 gather his taxes,

02:12:16.020 Christ's gospel

02:12:16.680 would not have spread

02:12:17.620 after his death.

02:12:19.300 None of this,

02:12:20.020 of course,

02:12:20.240 happened in December.

02:12:21.440 That was the affect

02:12:22.420 of yet another

02:12:23.220 lowercase g,

02:12:24.120 lowercase k,

02:12:24.800 muckety-muck,

02:12:25.380 sometime about

02:12:26.480 1500 years later,

02:12:27.620 the Bishop of Rome.

02:12:28.580 In an effort to co-opt

02:12:29.820 one of the most popular

02:12:30.800 and universal holidays

02:12:31.880 of the pagan world,

02:12:32.840 the winter solstice,

02:12:34.000 saw a correlation

02:12:34.860 between the celebration

02:12:35.760 of life from death

02:12:36.840 that agrarian societies

02:12:38.180 marked on the shortest

02:12:38.980 day of the year

02:12:39.720 in the dead of winter

02:12:40.760 with evergreen trees

02:12:41.880 and mistletoe

02:12:42.520 and merrymaking

02:12:43.160 in the tent kind,

02:12:45.780 and the concept

02:12:46.800 of eternal life,

02:12:47.680 being literally born

02:12:48.500 into a world

02:12:49.060 of sin and death

02:12:49.780 to rescue us

02:12:50.640 from darkness to light.

02:12:52.300 So while we're all busy

02:12:53.400 trying to get Christ

02:12:54.320 back into Christmas,

02:12:55.460 it's worth remembering

02:12:56.140 that he was never

02:12:56.980 actually there at all,

02:12:58.260 but so what?

02:12:59.360 The uppercase g,

02:13:00.340 uppercase k,

02:13:01.100 god-king,

02:13:01.900 has been making good use

02:13:03.120 of us scheming,

02:13:03.940 conniving,

02:13:04.520 self-serving,

02:13:05.340 self-serving,

02:13:06.080 lowercase g,

02:13:06.920 lowercase k's,

02:13:07.780 since way back

02:13:08.740 in the beginning,

02:13:09.520 revealing his truth

02:13:10.380 and his grace

02:13:10.920 and his life

02:13:11.540 through many

02:13:12.320 a flawed vessel,

02:13:13.500 and that's a truth

02:13:14.700 worth celebrating

02:13:15.440 in December

02:13:16.520 and every other month.

02:13:18.300 So, Merry Christmas

02:13:19.400 to all of you

02:13:20.140 from us here

02:13:20.660 at the Daily Wire.

02:13:21.700 He's not here,

02:13:22.440 of course,

02:13:22.780 he's risen,

02:13:23.740 but now's as good a time

02:13:24.960 as any to think about him.

02:13:26.760 Good night.

02:13:27.940 I disagree with,

02:13:28.620 like,

02:13:28.940 everyone.

02:13:29.380 I disagree with everything.

02:13:31.480 You ruined everything.

02:13:32.400 I appreciate it.

02:13:33.500 I appreciate it.

02:13:45.420 Bye.

02:13:45.860 Bye.

02:13:46.400 Bye.

02:13:46.540 Bye.

02:13:47.140 Bye.

02:13:47.180 Bye.

02:13:47.200 Bye.

02:13:49.360 Bye.

02:13:49.620 Bye.

02:13:50.020 Bye.

02:13:50.260 Bye.

02:13:50.680 Bye.

02:13:51.120 Bye.

02:13:52.760 Bye.

02:13:57.360 Bye.

02:13:58.060 Bye.

02:13:58.360 Bye.

02:13:58.520 Bye.

02:13:58.960 Bye.

02:13:59.580 Bye.

02:14:00.360 Bye.

02:14:00.840 Bye.

02:14:01.060 Bye.

02:14:01.600 Bye.

The Michael Knowles Show - December 04, 2018

The Daily Wire Backstage： Putting the “X” Back in Xmas

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript