The Michael Knowles Show - The Daily Wire Strikes Back(stage)： Canceling Cancel Culture

00:00:00.000 Hey, Michael Knowles here. The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage canceling cancel culture

00:00:05.280 is available now. The culture war is on and we are recruiting more and more people to join our

00:00:10.880 side in the fight. Check out me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and the God King Jeremy

00:00:15.720 Boring as we discuss everything from Gina Carano joining the resistance to what it's like changing

00:00:21.860 tires in an ice storm. Take a listen. Welcome to the Daily Wire Strikes Back stage. I'm Jeremy

00:00:28.620 Boring, lowercase g, lowercase k, God King. Tonight, we're going to be talking cancel culture in an 0.98

00:00:34.300 effort to answer the age-old question, just how rich is the left trying to make us with all this bull 0.99

00:00:38.640 crap? Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Don't let big tech track what you do. 0.99

00:00:58.820 Anonymize your web browsing at expressvpn.com slash backstage. I'm joined per uge by Smokey Mike

00:01:05.860 Knowles, by Matholomew Walsh, by the ghost of Andrew Klavan, and by the finest Ben Shapiro clone money

00:01:11.360 can buy, still cheaper than the original. And of course, by the lovely one herself, Mrs. Elisha Krause,

00:01:17.300 here to take your questions. Elisha. Hey, how are you guys doing? And welcome to the Empire Strikes

00:01:23.680 Backstage. The Daily Wire Strikes Backstage. Although I don't know why you guys want to be

00:01:28.860 relating to the Empire. I thought that we were the good guys and the woke mob that tried to cancel

00:01:33.920 Gina was the Empire. But anyway. You're overthinking this, Elisha. You're overthinking it.

00:01:38.460 Sorry, I'm just trying to be accurate, God King. Anyway, it has been one of the biggest months in

00:01:43.260 the Daily Wire history, and we are so excited. I love the Sunday special with Gina and Ben. And

00:01:48.260 we're going to tell you guys, this is just the beginning. Ben still needs to introduce Gina and

00:01:52.560 I so we can be BFFs and go for many petties. And then she can teach me how to be a badass so I can 0.99

00:01:56.400 beat up Michael Knowles. But if you're just as excited as I am, then you can be a part of this huge

00:02:01.760 movement by joining us at The Daily Wire. As always, I will be answering your questions tonight

00:02:06.460 throughout the show. And only Daily Wire members can ask the questions later on throughout the show

00:02:11.420 tonight. And if you're not a member, then you ask, oh, how can I become a member? Well, just head on

00:02:16.080 over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, and you can get 25% off if you use the code DEBUNKED. That code

00:02:23.400 is very specific because it is also the name of Ben Shapiro's new show, DEBUNKED, in which he talks about

00:02:29.280 massive leftist myths that he is going to debunk every single episode. The first episode is this

00:02:35.760 Friday, February 26th. Be sure to check it out. But after you go to dailywire.com slash subscribe,

00:02:42.000 use code DEBUNKED for 25% off because who doesn't love a good sale? I know I do. Stereotypical,

00:02:47.800 right? So go to dailywire.com slash subscribe, use that code DEBUNKED, ask the questions. I'll throw

00:02:54.380 them to the guys later throughout the night. Thanks, Alicia. Fellas, we had an unbelievable

00:03:00.420 last two weeks because the left has decided in their infinite wisdom that making us just

00:03:08.560 insanely wealthy is their top priority. They've decided that they're going to cancel many, many

00:03:15.100 valuable Hollywood entertainers. And we have decided that we are going to make movies with

00:03:21.420 those people, specifically with Gina Carano. Alicia mentioned the Sunday special, Ben. It really

00:03:27.000 was. I think it may have been the best Sunday special ever. Gina telling her side of the story

00:03:31.200 was just remarkable. I want to talk about what happened to Gina specifically for the three or

00:03:36.000 four people who live under rocks and didn't pick up on it. But what I really want to talk about

00:03:40.100 is the bifurcation of the culture, the bifurcation of the economy, the tragedy and the comedy of the

00:03:47.280 whole thing and the opportunities that it presents. So will you mind walking us just briefly through

00:03:51.200 Gina's story? So, I mean, the way that Gina told it, and first of all, you should watch the Sunday

00:03:55.780 special because it really does allow you to see her side of the story in her own words. And Gina is

00:03:59.840 just a lovely human being, just a wonderful, lovely human being. I had her over for a Friday night

00:04:04.140 dinner. So we actually had Chavez together. It was really nice. My kids loved her. And what happened

00:04:09.580 to Gina basically is that she tweeted a bunch of stuff that Disney didn't like. None of it was

00:04:13.120 particularly horrifying or controversial. And they fired her. I mean, it really is that simple.

00:04:17.560 It started off when she had tweeted a joke about the pressure that people receive online to put

00:04:21.680 their pronouns in their Twitter profiles. She had put in her Twitter profile, beep, bop, boop,

00:04:26.120 which is actually pretty funny. Droid noises. And Disney called her into a room and they wanted her to 0.93

00:04:33.300 have kind of the woke mob do a Zoom session with her. And she said, I don't really want to do that.

00:04:37.240 I want to actually get in a room and talk with actual human beings. And they finally kind of let her do 0.99

00:04:42.080 that. And then they would not let her do any press basically from then on. They cut her out of all of

00:04:46.180 the press materials for the Mandalorian, even though she's one of the bigger stars in the show.

00:04:50.000 And then you fast forward and post-election, she started tweeting things that are fairly well

00:04:55.380 accepted in conservative circles. Like if you want to crack down on voter fraud, perhaps there should

00:04:58.600 be voter ID. She tweeted that like two days after the election. And people are like, oh, this means

00:05:02.620 that she is in favor of lies about the election. No, that's not what she tweeted. And then a few days

00:05:07.300 later, she tweeted something about how Americans should remove the mask from their eyes so they can see

00:05:11.720 what's actually going on with regard to COVID. Again, this is a fairly mainstream conservative

00:05:15.580 position, even for people like me. Plus, it doesn't even protect you from the virus.

00:05:20.200 If it's on your eyes. If it's on your eyes. Yeah. In any case, that was really not particularly

00:05:24.740 controversial. And then she tweeted out this meme that was just a picture, very famous picture,

00:05:30.620 from the Holocaust of a Jewish woman running away from German soldiers. And the text next to it was

00:05:37.640 fairly generic. It just said these sorts of evils don't happen in a vacuum. They start off with

00:05:42.920 people dehumanizing other human beings. And if you treat people horribly, then eventually you could

00:05:46.820 end up at this place. And so you should remember this when you treat people horribly because of

00:05:50.100 their politics, which is a fairly reasonable generic statement. Now, I'm not a huge fan of

00:05:54.280 Holocaust comparisons because I generally feel that most of them are overwrought, but there is nothing

00:05:57.540 remotely anti-Semitic about this one. And in the world of Holocaust comparisons, this one ranks like the

00:06:02.760 lowest 10% in terms of controversial, because that's a pretty generic statement about

00:06:05.840 dehumanization of other people. In fact, I've seen the Auschwitz Memorial Museum put out very similar

00:06:10.540 tweets, actually, about the generic nature of dehumanizing other people and how that leads to

00:06:14.660 problems down the road, including death for people. And so, you know, this turned into a big hullabaloo

00:06:19.860 with Disney and Lucasfilm deciding that it was time for Gina to be ousted. Apparently, this had been in the

00:06:24.100 works for a couple of months. They had been meaning to announce her as a spinoff star from The Mandalorian 0.50

00:06:28.540 in one of their own series. They had canceled that in December, and they were looking for an excuse to

00:06:32.780 canter. They used this as the excuse to canter, despite the fact that Pedro Pascal, the actual

00:06:36.320 star of The Mandalorian, had tweeted out a meme comparing Auschwitz to kids being held in cages

00:06:40.860 in 2018 using a picture that was from the Palestinian Authority in 2014. And it was, of course, no blowback

00:06:47.700 to that. So basically, after they canceled her and she found out about this, essentially via the social

00:06:54.000 media, the way we did. The way we did. Right. I mean, we found out about the exact same time that

00:06:56.900 Gina did. They didn't even give her the courtesy of a call. They just said, you're not coming back.

00:07:00.020 That's it. In social media. Right. And and we saw this here at Daily Wire and we reached out.

00:07:05.240 I reached out to her personally and I said, listen, this is it's really tragic what's happening to you

00:07:10.420 because it's not about the money. It's about the dream. If you ever go to Hollywood and you work

00:07:14.520 with folks in Hollywood and pretty much all of us, except for Matt, have actually have actually done

00:07:18.100 this. People who move out to Hollywood, move out there because their dream is to be in a show like

00:07:23.300 The Mandalorian. I mean, it's the biggest show in TV right now and to have a starring role in that

00:07:27.580 and to take that away from somebody summarily and to destroy their career in the process because

00:07:31.140 they released a statement saying essentially she was an anti-Semite and that she was a racist and 0.85

00:07:34.300 all this stuff. It categorized people on the basis of religion and ethnicity. Right. I mean, it's just

00:07:37.860 a lie. It's just not true. And they and and for them to do that was an act of cruelty. It was an act

00:07:43.760 of true cruelty. So we called her up and and I said to her, you know, it's terrible what's happening to

00:07:48.580 you, but it's a real opportunity to punch back at these bastards. And we should punch back at them 0.99

00:07:52.860 because nobody has ever said to them, you know what? Fine. You want to cancel me? I'm not canceled

00:07:56.940 because there's a whole side of the political aisle that doesn't agree that I should be canceled.

00:08:00.280 And so, you know what? I'm just going to go do my own thing over here. And so that's when we

00:08:03.580 announced and she good for her because it was an act of bravery on her part for us. Yeah, it was an

00:08:07.000 opportunity right for us. It was I mean, I'll be to be honest with you. Whenever somebody in mainstream

00:08:12.120 in mainstream culture is canceled, I put in a call. So I probably put in over the course of the last

00:08:16.600 four or five years, at least 50 calls to various mainstream figures have been canceled for bad reasons.

00:08:21.360 It's something that I just do on regular, whether liberal or conservative. There are many people

00:08:25.880 on the left I've done this for. And Gina was just another person who was like that. But Gina really

00:08:29.300 took up the opportunity and said, OK, let's do this. Now, there's an opportunity. I've been wanting

00:08:32.980 to do this anyway. I don't deserve to be canceled. And Americans need to be able to stand up for

00:08:37.600 themselves. So I'm happy to come over here and I'm happy to make a movie with you guys. And we could

00:08:41.340 not be more pumped up about it. Our audience certainly couldn't be more pumped up about it. It's the biggest

00:08:44.420 week in the history of The Daily Wire. I think people miss that Gina Carano is a real human. I mean,

00:08:49.940 sometimes you read these stories about us or about political figures or about entertainment figures

00:08:53.740 and we're two-dimensional. And that makes sense because we come to you on a screen, which makes

00:08:58.020 us two-dimensional. Also because we have no souls. Yeah, I personally am two-dimensional.

00:09:02.940 But Gina's an actual human. They took her career away from her. Her agent dropped her. Her attorney

00:09:11.360 dropped her. Her publicist dropped her. They took all the tools necessary to have a career away 1.00

00:09:16.940 from her. They took the biggest show away from her. They took her ability to pay her bills away

00:09:22.040 from her. They took her good name away from her. Lucasfilm called her aberrant, said that she

00:09:26.180 categorized people on the basis of religion and ethnicity, which she did not do. I mean,

00:09:30.880 it's defamation because it is 100% untrue. That's not even a possible interpretation of the things

00:09:38.000 that she has said. The fact that we were even able to get her on the phone in that situation,

00:09:43.240 I think, is fairly remarkable. She was having what must be one of the worst days 0.97

00:09:47.580 that a person can possibly endure when their career and their good name have already been

00:09:52.940 short of having a serious health problem. That's about as bad as it gets right there.

00:09:55.340 But you know, the terrific thing about it and the reason I'm so glad you guys acted,

00:09:59.020 I really, I hate to compliment you because you know who you are. But still, I really am happy you

00:10:03.680 acted is because we all support free speech. And that means when they take an Alex Jones off the air,

00:10:09.300 I'm offended. I think Alex Jones should have a platform. I think he's a loon. But he should

00:10:13.840 have a platform because who cares? You know, we can defeat it. We can defeat his craziness.

00:10:17.460 And they're making the frogs gay. 0.98

00:10:18.740 With the truth. 0.97

00:10:19.340 They are making the frogs gay. 0.99

00:10:20.880 The frogs gay. 1.00

00:10:22.260 But the thing is, we're defending a guy that we don't agree with, that we think is out of his mind. 0.97

00:10:28.300 Here's a case where this woman did literally 0% wrong. Her tweet, and I'm with you, 0.83

00:10:35.060 I don't like Holocaust comparisons because they're over the top. But she didn't really even deal with

00:10:40.100 that. She was making a perfectly valid point that you begin by dehumanizing people and you end by

00:10:45.300 hurting them. And that's what is happening in our society. It's a perfectly valid point.

00:10:49.560 We're defending somebody who was actually wronged. And that is a terrific position to be in because

00:10:54.840 the left has been very clever and they go after the people on the end.

00:10:57.400 And they proved her point too, because they, not that they're going to cart her off to a

00:11:01.560 concentration camp, but they dehumanized her by, by labeling her anti-Semite, by lying about her, 0.99

00:11:07.080 saying her, saying that she was, was, you know, categorizing people based on race and

00:11:11.720 ethnicity. That's just flatly wrong. They know that they're lying, but they figure, well, 1.00

00:11:17.320 she deserves to be lied about and to be slandered because she's wrong about all these other things. 0.79

00:11:20.920 There are two aspects of this that I want to talk about. I actually want to talk about Holocaust 0.97

00:11:25.020 comparisons generally. And I want to talk about what it means that they canceled someone

00:11:29.100 on the basis of nothing. But first, I want to talk to you about our friends over at ExpressVPN.

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00:12:20.120 expressvpn.com and throw in that slash backstage. That's how you get those three extra months for

00:12:26.040 absolutely free. Expressvpn.com slash backstage. Head over there right now. Michael. Yes. They

00:12:33.280 canceled her for nothing. Yeah. Why did they cancel her? They canceled her because it's very wrong

00:12:41.340 to make any comparison to the Holocaust, especially after we just had literally Hitler be president for 0.52

00:12:47.460 four years. So you're not, you can't do that sort of thing. You know, it, this is what is most

00:12:52.680 chilling to me. We all support the American free speech tradition in the, in this room. The left

00:12:57.640 does not. We all support it, but we all think there are, there are some things that if you, you know,

00:13:02.240 if you walk up to the water cooler and you say Zig Heil, or, you know, you do something, I think you

00:13:07.180 should lose your job. I don't think you should be allowed to keep your movie or whatever. I think

00:13:10.500 there are some things that are out of bounds. There are always things that are out of bounds.

00:13:15.380 What this woman did was make an absolutely mainstream opinion that we all, everybody left,

00:13:24.980 right and center would have agreed on even five or six years ago. But now they have so moved the

00:13:30.120 goalposts in this country that if you, if you have an American flag outside your house, you could be.

00:13:35.480 I'm actually not sure that this is right. I think that she was canceled for nothing because it was

00:13:41.880 nothing. I think that we're living through a change in what cancel culture is and what the woke mob

00:13:47.180 wants, that it's no longer about enforcing their rules. I think that it's, it's like the great

00:13:53.120 terror. I think it's just the imposition. Yes. Yeah. I think that the arbitrariness of it,

00:13:57.760 I think the randomness of it is actually part of the terror. If they can take down Gina for nothing,

00:14:02.980 then they can take down you for, well, you see this happening. I mean, the rules are changing

00:14:06.800 every single day. I mean, they're changing every single day and things that are overtly non-racist

00:14:11.040 are now being treated as racist. I mean, you'll have Don McNeil losing his job at the New York

00:14:14.140 Times for using the N word to describe why using the N word is wrong, right? And in which situations

00:14:18.980 using the N word is wrong. See the guy over at Slate, Mike Peska, right? We're not big fans of

00:14:22.800 Slate over here. Slate fired a guy for saying that maybe we should have a discussion about when use of

00:14:27.520 the N word is appropriate in like, for example, quoting someone who used the N word. And they were, 0.83

00:14:31.780 and people at Slate were like, nope, can't have that. They, they laid Mike Peska off. The, I think the most

00:14:36.440 ridiculous example of somebody being canceled for non-racism that I've seen in the recent past 0.90

00:14:40.840 is not really even Gina, although that was ridiculous. I think that it's what's going 0.90

00:14:45.120 on with Chris Harrison over at the bachelor, right? So I'm not, I'm not a fan of the bachelor

00:14:48.620 because I am a man. I have testosterone that runs in my body, but there, this is one of the

00:14:54.280 cultural institutions of the United States over the last 25 years, right? I mean, it's been going

00:14:57.820 since 2002. It has been, the bachelor has been on the air for a majority of my lifetime on this

00:15:04.680 planet, right? It's been on forever. And right. And the, and the bachelor basically just collapsed

00:15:10.460 over the course of the last month because there's a, the first black bachelor and he was dating one

00:15:16.920 woman. There was a woman named Rachel Kirkconnell when she committed the heinous sin of in 2018,

00:15:21.120 going to a party at a plantation that was dubbed a plantation party or something. And she wore like

00:15:26.500 a Scarlett O'Hara dress. Antebellum party. Antebellum party. Okay. And the idea was that this was

00:15:31.080 racist because you can't have an antebellum party without acknowledging the sins of slavery,

00:15:34.800 which again, I just hate to note this. Unless you're governor of Virginia. Well, right. Then

00:15:39.220 you can dress up as whatever you want, right? But, uh, but I hate to note this for everybody,

00:15:43.360 but if you wear a costume from virtually any historic period prior to 1820, that culture had

00:15:47.440 slavery, right? I mean, like if you, if you dress up as a Viking and there was, there was slavery back

00:15:52.080 then, if you dress up as a Roman, there was lots of slavery back then. In any case, the, the idea was

00:15:57.520 that she was a racist for having gone to this party in 2018. So the, the bachelor who spoiler

00:16:02.260 alert for women who are still watching the bachelor, but it's out of the bag. Now he ended up picking

00:16:05.680 this woman, right? Rachel Kirkconnell is the woman he ended up picking at the end of the bachelor.

00:16:09.880 And so he put out a statement on February 3rd in which he said, you know, she should be given a

00:16:13.960 little bit of grace. Social media shouldn't be going after her. They shouldn't be digging up her 0.97

00:16:16.460 parents voting record. Like give her, give her a break. And so Chris Harrison, the host was on a show

00:16:21.080 with Rachel Lindsay, a former host of the, she was the, the former bachelorette, first black bachelorette, 0.90

00:16:25.520 I think. And she was interviewing him and Chris Harrison said, you should give her a little bit

00:16:29.460 of grace, right? Social media shouldn't be judged, jury and executioner. People should be treated with

00:16:32.740 a little bit of grace. She can explain herself. And Rachel Lindsay then suggested that Chris Harrison

00:16:37.600 for saying she deserved grace ought to apologize and essentially lose his job. And then a couple

00:16:43.080 of weeks later, like just this week, Matt James, who originally had defended Rachel Kirkconnell and was

00:16:47.620 dating Rachel Kirkconnell. He put out a statement over the last 24 hours saying that Rachel Kirkconnell was

00:16:51.940 essentially a racist, that Chris Harrison was a racist, that the bachelor was racist. And that

00:16:56.240 it was, it was unthinkable that Chris Harrison could have said what he said in front of Rachel,

00:17:00.360 Rachel Lindsay, who then was forced to do, and I quote, the emotional labor, the emotional labor 1.00

00:17:05.880 of explaining to him the history of racism and slavery in this country. Emotional labor. First of all,

00:17:11.000 what, what in the F is emotional labor? I've seen actual physical labor. My wife's done it several 1.00

00:17:15.220 times. It's much, it's much the same. I can't even make this joke. It is so over the top.

00:17:19.700 I know if I make this joke, how mad Ben's going to be at me, but I will say this. The fact that he

00:17:25.660 used the term emotional labor is proof that they got to him. Yeah. There's no human being walks

00:17:31.160 around with the term emotional labor in their frontal lobe, except woke leftists. Yeah. And

00:17:35.840 that means that somebody came and sat him down and said, listen, uh, the girl you've been dating and

00:17:40.000 obviously like, she doesn't matter the show. That's the only reason you have a platform at all. 1.00

00:17:45.360 That doesn't matter. The only thing that matters if you want to keep have, if you want to keep

00:17:49.800 your house and your career and your good name is that you freaking get out there and walk the line.

00:17:55.740 That's right. And I mean, the, the utter cowardice of throwing under the bus, the girl you were dating,

00:18:00.500 right. And calling her racist. And then saying the guy who said exactly what you said, exactly what 0.55

00:18:05.020 you said, like within days that that guy's a racist, but you, you're, you're perfect. Right. You're

00:18:08.840 perfect. That's amazing. By the way, I just have to add the capper to this. So again,

00:18:12.920 my producers who, uh, the only reason I know about the bachelor is because I have two producers.

00:18:17.180 Yes, they are. They're female. And, uh, they inform me of this TV remote. That's why

00:18:21.760 a producer savvy and producer Jessica. Uh, I will say that they keep me updated on this stuff on a

00:18:27.560 granular level. Uh, and, uh, and they made me aware of a post from Rachel Lindsay that happened

00:18:31.680 in the middle of the black lives matter movement in the summer. And this post was a picture of Rachel

00:18:36.240 Lindsay standing. I kid you not in front of a Cadillac XT six. And the post was when I am

00:18:43.160 fighting on behalf of black lives matter, the way that I like to learn about black history is

00:18:47.220 through podcasts about black history that I listened to on my Bose sound system in my Cadillac

00:18:52.380 XTS capitalism. Number one always wins, but number two, like this is the person who is standing up

00:18:58.720 against the racism and of the capitalist evil American system. This is the person who's doing

00:19:02.580 emotional labor, emotional labor. You're standing in front of a Cadillac XT six and a sponsored ad

00:19:08.240 on Instagram to preach about black lives matter. And you're the person who's supposed to be the, 0.98

00:19:12.660 the great Pope of wokeness here. I mean, it's insanity. How dare you is what a, is what a grift

00:19:18.360 it all is. Correct. You know, 15 years ago, you were taught discussing in an academic context,

00:19:23.920 the use of the N word, and now you're fired. But if you're a black mom who wants her kid to go to 1.00

00:19:29.640 school, that can't happen because teachers unions are keeping you out. You know, if Bill Gates 0.95

00:19:35.000 literally put out a system for teaching algebra to black kids, where you got rid of the concept

00:19:40.760 of right and wrong. And I just thought like that, that may be, and I'm like, I've been around a long

00:19:47.140 time. That's one of the most racist, and so it's all a grift, you know, it's all, nobody's doing

00:19:53.620 anything for anybody, but this emotional panic is. And the corporations are right. It's white 0.97

00:19:59.680 America. Well, it is. I mean, this is what Shelby Steele writes about. It's a bunch of woke white 0.75

00:20:03.300 folks who get to maintain control over the auspices of power by saying black folks don't 0.99

00:20:07.060 have to do the work. It's our job to do the work. All you have to do is give me power and I can fix

00:20:10.900 all of these things. Exactly. And corporate America has bought into this, that, that, that

00:20:14.820 ridiculous anti-racism training that Coca-Cola, or as I now call them, woke-a-Cola.

00:20:18.900 Matt, you talked about this on your show. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's why we have

00:20:22.320 to stipulate, I think, with, with cancel culture that it is a left-wing phenomenon. This is the,

00:20:27.780 I know on the left, they always want to accuse the right of, oh, you're doing cancel culture

00:20:31.300 because we criticize someone for having, you know, for their opinion. But you know how people on the

00:20:36.440 left say that only white people can be racist because we have institutional power and black people

00:20:42.900 don't. Well, we know that that's totally bogus because number one, racism is a condition of the

00:20:47.340 heart. Anyone can be racist. Number two, we had a black president. You know, I consider that to be

00:20:50.920 institutional power, but with, with cancel culture, that actually is about institutional power. You

00:20:57.600 can't cancel someone unless you own the institutions. Yeah. Canceling someone is all about, they lose

00:21:02.740 their job, they lose the reputation, uh, they lose their credibility, they lose everything. We on the

00:21:07.520 right, unfortunately don't have the ability to do that. Um, only the left can do that. So the left,

00:21:12.580 so cancel culture is a left-wing thing. It's what the left does. And I think we need to be clear

00:21:18.220 about that in our definition of it, because that's, that's what I think it is. The collapse

00:21:22.820 of corporate America into wokeism is one of the great disturbing elements of the last several

00:21:27.120 decades. It really is amazing because we were all taught that after you leave college that you

00:21:31.000 were going to get in the real world and then the real world, there'd be a meritocracy and, and all of

00:21:35.180 the, all of the kind of emotional crap that you learned in college and the microaggression nonsense,

00:21:39.120 all that was going to stop. And it turns out those people just took over the institutions. And now 0.95

00:21:42.440 you get it twice as hard from the corporations and the corporations have a real interest in

00:21:46.420 promoting this stuff because number one, it's a great way to avoid liability, like discrimination

00:21:50.740 liability. You say, oh, you know, we hired Robin DiAngelo for 20 grand to teach all of our people

00:21:55.000 that they're racist. So, I mean, how can you sue us for that? And also all your woke staffers are the 0.73

00:21:59.700 ones who are most likely to sue you. So if you just give into them, then they won't sue you.

00:22:02.800 But has anyone sued yet? I mean, we're waiting for a white, they're at a point right now in these 1.00

00:22:07.120 corporations where they actually single out, they say, this is only for the white employees, 1.00

00:22:10.980 come to the room and we're going to tell you what a scumbag you are. Has any white employee actually 1.00

00:22:14.900 stood up and said, this is racial harassment? But look, look what happens when you, you know,

00:22:18.540 when, when Asian students sued Harvard, right? Wasn't white students suing about the affirmative

00:22:22.920 action policies. It was Asian students who were also disadvantaged. The Asian students sue,

00:22:27.100 what happens? Doesn't go anywhere. The DOJ under Trump looks into Yale for doing exactly the same

00:22:32.780 thing. They're disadvantaging white and Asian students in applications. What happens? The Biden

00:22:36.960 administration gets rid of it. So, you know, if, if I'm a white employee and I'm being told to be

00:22:41.640 less white and I think I'm pretty swarthy, how much less white can I get? If I'm thinking about

00:22:45.800 suing, I look at the track record of, of these lawsuits and I say, well, why would I waste my

00:22:49.780 money? That goes back to the institutional point that Matt was making. The institutions are now

00:22:57.600 completely corrupted from the inside by the woke. I want to talk about that a little bit more.

00:23:01.220 First, I want to talk about one of the most important things to me, which is me.

00:23:07.340 When it comes to being me, I like to spend as much time being me as humanly possible. And that

00:23:11.980 means spending as little time doing the things that I don't want as is humanly possible. And

00:23:17.160 that's why I use stamps.com. When you're taking trips to the post office, you're not busy being

00:23:23.120 you. No, you're not doing the things that you want to do. This is not how a God King likes to

00:23:27.340 operate. That's why I recommend mailing and shipping online at stamps.com. Stamps.com allows

00:23:32.860 you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere, right from your computer. You can send letters, ship packages,

00:23:37.960 and you can pay a lot less with their discounted rates. With stamps.com, you get discounts up to 40%

00:23:43.220 off post office rates and up to 62% off UPS shipping rates. Not to mention stamps.com is a fraction of the

00:23:50.180 cost of those expensive postage meters. Don't waste your time. Be like me. Sit at your

00:23:57.200 house. Don't go outside. Don't pay attention to anybody else. Look in the mirror. Occasionally

00:24:02.440 break away to send out a correspondence out to the hoi polloi at your computer by using stamps.com.

00:24:08.300 You don't want to go to the post office. You'll want to go to stamps.com instead. There's nothing

00:24:11.580 wrong with a post office. Post office is a perfectly wonderful place if you like to be around other

00:24:15.840 human beings. I don't. Therefore, stamps.com. There is no risk if you use the promo code backstage,

00:24:22.200 you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital

00:24:27.080 scale. No long-term commitments, no contracts. Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone up

00:24:32.280 there at the top of the homepage, and type in the word backstage. That's it. Stamps.com,

00:24:36.420 promo code backstage, stamps.com. Never go to the post office again and just, you know,

00:24:41.520 enjoy being you for a minute. That is the first time I've ever heard the term hoi polloi in an

00:24:45.920 advertisement. Well, first of all, I was actually going to stop you. That is the best ad read you've

00:24:49.180 ever done. As somebody who does this professionally, let me just say, your skill set has grown,

00:24:55.060 Jeremy. I mean, like, I've heard you do some real bad ad reads. Some horrible ad reads. Some truly

00:24:58.580 terrible ones. Really bad. That was excellent. It was a really great segue in, and then it really

00:25:02.840 made it personal, and he made it about you. And you really took your time with it. It was really

00:25:06.280 excellent. That was really good. The fact that you were talking about you, that's when you glow.

00:25:10.220 That kind of glow comes over you. I mean, it was really impressive. There was one note that I wanted

00:25:14.340 to make as far as the fact that cancellation is a left-wing phenomenon. And it is, because it is

00:25:19.980 connected to institutional power. Occasionally, you will see sort of a right-wing cancellation

00:25:23.240 effort. So, for example, there was some talk about, in college, removing college scholarships

00:25:28.220 from kids who wanted to kneel for the national anthem or something. Like, I'm not a big fan of that

00:25:32.280 sort of thing. But it's not just that it's a left-wing phenomenon. It's that it's a left-wing

00:25:37.400 mindset. There's an actual mindset of cancellation that exists. And there's a study that I was looking at

00:25:42.620 the other day, that it's just a truly amazing study. It was quoted in Harvard Business Review.

00:25:47.640 What they did is they took a panel of people of wide variety of political opinion, went all the

00:25:52.560 way right to left, and then they offered them a model corporation. It was like Jobs Corporation or

00:25:57.820 something. And what they told them is that they gave them three examples. One, Jobs Corporation is

00:26:02.040 apolitical. How do you feel about it? You're like, okay, it seems like a nice corporation. Second was

00:26:06.720 Jobs Corporation is liberal. How do you feel about it? People are like, hmm, nice corporation. And then they

00:26:11.500 said Jobs Corporation is conservative. It dropped 33 points in the approval ratings. 33 points

00:26:16.860 entirely because the left decided that it was now an evil business. Right? So in other words, people

00:26:21.100 assume that corporate America is liberal. They assume it, right? That's why the first two results

00:26:25.620 are the same. That's why apolitical and liberal end up with the same result. It also shows you the

00:26:29.240 right does not care. The right is happy to shop wherever there is a good product. The left does care.

00:26:33.980 The left wants their wokeism infused into everything. Well, there is good news for us in this,

00:26:38.100 as you may have noticed, which is that, fine, you want to do this? You want to boycott any

00:26:41.940 business that's conservative? There's half the country that believes they should be able to shop

00:26:45.600 at businesses that are not going to shove this garbage down their throat. And we are happy to 0.98

00:26:48.460 start each and every one of those businesses and rake in the dough. That's right. Drew, this is where

00:26:52.020 the left, I think, has lost their mind. Illiberalism is nothing new, right? There's always been a streak

00:26:57.940 of illiberalism, even on the right. And the leftist is now illiberal. But if you go back to the 60s,

00:27:03.880 illiberals on the right would like burn Beatles albums. And you're, I'm sorry, the Beatles were

00:27:10.320 a band. They never got, they never got successful because all these illiberal conservatives burned

00:27:15.820 their records. No, of course, that's not how it works. There is a, there is going to be a reaction

00:27:21.140 against this idea of cancel culture that is going to make us more powerful to quote, well, the evil

00:27:28.940 empire. The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers.

00:27:33.360 That's the opportunity that they've given us. I think it's bad for the world that the left is

00:27:37.360 creating a dual culture. I think it's bad for the world that the left is creating a dual economy.

00:27:42.120 But I also think that to the extent that they've had almost unchecked power in the dominant culture

00:27:47.880 and in the dominant economy, only the creation now of the dual economy gives us the opportunity to

00:27:54.080 maybe one day make a better economy and a better culture that one day has a chance of being dominant.

00:27:58.960 And you know, this ties into your point on the arbitrariness of it, because I, I, I think it's

00:28:04.000 arbitrary when they say they have rules and they make up the rules on the spot and the rules change

00:28:08.620 day by day and they cancel you for whatever. But what is not arbitrary is the people that they're

00:28:12.900 canceling. Yeah. People that they're canceling tend to hold views very similar to what we think.

00:28:17.240 If you are in any way contradicting the left wing orthodoxy, you are liable to be canceled and

00:28:24.100 they'll make up some fake rule. This is exactly right. It's all, it's all pretextual. Yeah.

00:28:28.140 They're doing all of this on the basis of who do we want to cancel? And then how do we fit them

00:28:32.960 into the box of sin? But, but you know, this is, this is actually, I was speaking to my son,

00:28:37.160 Spencer Clavin, no relation, uh, today. And he, and he makes the brilliant point as he so frequently

00:28:42.820 does that this has a, an almost exact analog in the inquisition in that nobody expects it.

00:28:51.040 Nobody ever expects it. No, no, that, that they said, the Catholic church said in the inquisition,

00:28:57.040 we have this new technology, which is the printing press. How wonderful it spreads information. You

00:29:02.260 can now read the Bible. You can now have your own Bible. It's a, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing,

00:29:06.420 but it's spreading some bad information as well. And those people have to be burned at the stake and, 0.94

00:29:12.000 and put on the rack. Basically the Twitter terms of service. It was bad. Well, no, I was going to 0.99

00:29:17.440 say I'm in favor of the inquisition so far, but then when does it go wrong? The Twitter,

00:29:22.440 the Twitter terms of service are the same thing. We have this wonderful internet. It's spreading

00:29:26.360 information, but it's bad information. And those people have to be burned at the stake and put on 0.98

00:29:30.720 the rack. I know you guys are in favor of this. This is right. You saw that house democratic letter, 0.99

00:29:35.420 right? Those two house Democrats who wrote a letter, Comcast and AT&T and Amazon and every major carrier in

00:29:40.760 the country about inflammatory language and inciting language. They've brought in the definition of

00:29:44.600 inflammatory and inciting to anything they disagree with. Right. And then the idea is they're going to

00:29:47.740 cudgel corporations into doing their work, which by the way, does violate the first amendment. You

00:29:50.940 are not allowed to make private corporations into agencies of the government for purposes of

00:29:54.940 clashing the first amendment. There's case law on this, but they're trying it anyway. And this is,

00:29:59.540 this is what they're doing. I mean, did you see what Amazon is doing this week? Oh my goodness.

00:30:03.200 The hate speech standard. The hate speech standard with Ryan T. Anderson, who's pal of

00:30:07.140 some of us in this room, a head of the ethics and public policy center. He's a heritage,

00:30:11.600 formerly at Heritage Foundation. This guy is as mainstream and scholarly a conservative as it

00:30:16.780 gets. And he came out with a book a few years ago, greatest book title I've ever heard. When

00:30:21.080 Harry became Sally responding to the transgender. Really good book too. And it's a really good book. 0.91

00:30:26.180 And it's, it's actually not in any way an inflammatory book. By the way, it's a sensitive book.

00:30:29.420 It's a very sensitive. He has a bunch of stuff in there about how people who are suffering

00:30:32.240 from gender dysphoria ought to be treated humanely. And there's no excuse for treating people badly. I mean,

00:30:36.720 he's got a bunch of stuff in there that is, that is directly a rebuttal to sort of the

00:30:40.260 suggestion that people on the right don't care about. I don't know any serious person who doesn't

00:30:42.760 say that. Of course. This is the funny thing. Of course. This is not even an issue. But what

00:30:46.340 Amazon had done, they had taken off, you know, if the Confederate flag was really politically

00:30:50.560 incorrect, they took that offline or sometimes different symbols, they take that off. But they

00:30:54.220 had this standard. They said, we're not going to remove books for being politically incorrect

00:30:57.900 because they don't want to be seen as burning books or banning books as though it were the

00:31:02.100 Inquisition. Very quietly, they took away that exception. And now, I mean, we've got

00:31:08.180 a lot of books between all of us. By the way, Mein Kampf is still on Amazon. But Ryan Anderson's

00:31:11.980 book is not on Amazon. Unbelievable. You know, I got into a brief, I never do this, but I did

00:31:16.500 get into a brief Twitter debate with our friend David French, who basically feels there should

00:31:20.760 be no recourse because of the First Amendment. There should be no recourse when private entities

00:31:25.720 who are multinational, richer than most, two thirds of governments, they have more money

00:31:30.580 than two thirds of the government, collude together to essentially gut our rights. And

00:31:35.860 my feeling is, wait, the point of the First Amendment is to protect our rights. Our rights

00:31:41.100 don't go away because the First Amendment makes it difficult to cover a threat to them. But

00:31:45.760 the threat to our rights right now is in this collusion between companies that may not be

00:31:51.200 monopolies in and of themselves. But when they collude, they become essentially monopolies.

00:31:55.580 And they're working in collusion with the government as well. Big tech, big government,

00:31:59.640 big business, big, big, big. If that's, if that is not a threat that needs to be dealt with,

00:32:03.880 and I don't, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I don't care how you deal with it, but it's got to be dealt

00:32:07.480 with. You cannot have a system where, whereby we cannot attack the threats to our speech. That's

00:32:12.800 the right to speech is given to us by God.

00:32:15.860 I mean, that's the problem on the right, where you've got at least half that are allergic to

00:32:22.360 using the power of the government. Whereas on the left, there's wide agreement. Of course,

00:32:27.280 we're going to use the power of the government to do whatever we want. And I appreciate that on the

00:32:30.480 right, at least there's a debate about it. But it seems like there are some wide, you know,

00:32:35.340 pretty large, significant preponderance that basically they don't want to use the power of

00:32:39.440 the government to do anything at all. And I think that kneecaps us.

00:32:43.800 So I think there's a smart way to use the power of government and there's a, and there's a stupid 1.00

00:32:46.600 way. Of course. And, and I think that a lot of people are not distinguishing between the two. 0.99

00:32:50.480 And so you end up with a really dumb kind of version of the argument, which is we can either

00:32:53.980 do nothing or we're going to step in and just tell them exactly what they ought to do in all

00:32:58.900 circumstances. The reality is that what has really happened, and this goes back to the section 230

00:33:03.220 argument, especially when it comes to these platforms, is that what section 230 was designed to do

00:33:07.140 was it was designed to enshrine the ability for corporations to actually protect free speech.

00:33:13.320 It was not the opposite. What the, what section 230 was, was it, you know, just to get into a

00:33:18.760 little bit of, of legalism here, because people don't understand section 230 particularly well.

00:33:22.580 Section 230 does not make a distinction between publishers and platforms. Section 230 says when

00:33:26.360 you have an open thread, then you are not responsible legally for what appears in that

00:33:30.480 open thread. So Daily Wire is a private corporation. We're responsible for what we put up that's edited,

00:33:34.260 but our comments, we're not responsible for. If somebody puts up plagiarized material in the

00:33:38.180 comments, we're not legally responsible for that. And so that was an idea. The goal here was to

00:33:42.800 allow platforms to exist, because otherwise platforms literally would not exist. So what

00:33:46.700 section 230 did is it created an exception. The exception was specifically designed to allow

00:33:50.840 platforms to get rid of material that was pretty much widely agreed to be excessive. So somebody

00:33:56.480 posts pornography in our, in our comment section. So we can remove that. So we post obscenity or actual

00:34:00.740 incitement to violence. We can remove all of that. Instead, what has happened is as so often happens

00:34:05.540 with the government, the exception became the rule. So then it became the government is going to

00:34:09.380 tell corporations that if they don't use section 230 to crack down on all the material government

00:34:13.620 doesn't like, then they're going to come after those corporations. So the exception ate the rule.

00:34:18.540 So that exception was designed to be an exception, right? The idea was, there's going to be a broad

00:34:21.680 spectrum of ideas that were available. And only here and there were you going to kind of pinpoint

00:34:25.220 and remove material that was truly offensive or truly terrible. And instead,

00:34:29.480 Or truly, truly indecent, right? Because it's the Communications Decency Act.

00:34:33.400 Exactly. Or truly indecent. And instead, what happened is that the left basically seized upon this

00:34:37.740 opportunity to say, okay, well now what these platforms really should do is they should act

00:34:41.060 just like a publisher. They should edit all of the content. They should decide which books they

00:34:44.840 are willing to put out and which books they're not willing to put out. Not only that, we're going

00:34:47.160 to have congressional hearings. And we're going to say, as Dianne Feinstein says, if you don't do what

00:34:51.280 we want you to do, we will regulate you into doing what we want you to do. So if you actually wanted

00:34:55.120 to fix this, there's a good proposal on the table from Marsha Blackburn, our senator here in

00:34:58.360 Tennessee, to, to take away the catch all provision of section 230. Because originally section 230 says

00:35:04.260 that it allows you to remove content that's obscene, content that is, that is incitement

00:35:09.100 to violence, content that normally would be illegal, right? Like that kind of stuff. But

00:35:13.540 there's also a catch all provision that says, or anything otherwise objectionable. And so what

00:35:17.640 her bill does, it takes away the otherwise objectionable language. So now you cannot be

00:35:22.260 relieved of liability if you, if you just start willy nilly taking down stuff. And I think that

00:35:26.420 that's probably the right move. Yeah. You know, it's, it's funny how people are blind to the fact

00:35:30.840 that the enemy is, is always pools of power, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts. Absolutely.

00:35:37.560 So the left has this idea that the state is going to come in and make everything great,

00:35:41.680 but it doesn't understand that the state is a bunch of people with power. And the right has

00:35:45.020 this idea that big business is always going to be okay, but big business is also people with power.

00:35:49.800 And the left used to know this. The left used to know that corporations can be alternative

00:35:54.120 governments that have the power of governments and can, and can threaten you. You know, anybody with

00:35:58.280 power, anybody with power has to be controlled. It's simply that because the people we're trying

00:36:03.620 to protect are the ordinary guys, the little guys who have the right to speak. I would just define

00:36:07.840 power a little more specifically than that, which is, it's not about the bigness. It's about the

00:36:11.600 actual power to compel. That's right. Right. Because the problem is not big business. The problem is

00:36:15.300 big business working in collusion with government in order to restrict your rights. That's right.

00:36:18.500 That's the stuff that's actually dangerous because what we tend to do when, and conservatives tend to do

00:36:22.840 this too. We talk about big government versus small government. The question isn't big government versus small

00:36:26.040 government is what is it? What are the delegated powers of government and were they delegated?

00:36:30.020 Right. It is, it is there are specific purposes. The same thing is true of business. The question

00:36:33.220 isn't big business or small business. It is business acting in favor of free markets and free labor,

00:36:39.020 or is business acting against those things? Because I'm perfectly fine with a big business

00:36:42.840 that does all the things that are in consonance with freedom, being big and being competitive and

00:36:46.920 winning. Hypothetically, I actually want to talk a little bit about why corporations went wrong and why

00:36:51.060 I actually think that corporations are the biggest threat to the country right now.

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00:38:43.680 comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. You know, other than insinuating that you might

00:38:48.420 kill your wife, that was an excellent ad read. Or that my wife might kill me. That's true. 1.00

00:38:52.360 Yeah, you kind of went a little bit awry on that. I mean, it is true that the incentives sometimes get

00:38:57.120 misaligned. I mean, right now, if I were to do something terrible to my wife, she has much stronger

00:39:01.560 incentive to kill me than divorce me. I've been telling you that for months, you know. If I've ever found 0.59

00:39:07.660 having been thrown off the back of a train for the double indemnity, obviously, then you know

00:39:11.600 exactly what happened. If I ever am found floating face down in my pool with three gunshot wounds in

00:39:16.280 my back, I didn't just trip and hit my head in front of me, no matter what my wife said. 0.85

00:39:20.220 It was Hillary Clinton. It was Hillary. You irritated me. Speaking of people who might want to kill Ben,

00:39:24.080 Elisha. No, you have that all wrong. I like Ben. He signs my paychecks. It's Michael Knowles that I want to

00:39:30.720 get up. Uh-oh. You don't want to say happy birthday. By the way, it was Elisha's birthday

00:39:35.380 this week. Happy birthday. Thank you. She's at least 25 years old. I wish. I'm 35. Now,

00:39:42.900 if my husband decides to impregnate me again with another gorgeous child, I'm considered a

00:39:47.080 geriatric pregnancy, which is just really depressing. But thanks for the birthday, Elisha, guys.

00:39:53.800 There's a lot of lively chatter over on the chat box. And if you're like, well, hey, wait a second. I want

00:39:58.640 to chat with you on the chat box. Well, how do I do that? How do I ask the guys a question? Well,

00:40:02.160 then that means you've already given me an answer. You're not a Daily Wire subscriber.

00:40:05.540 You should head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and be sure to use the code of Ben's

00:40:11.780 new show, DEBUNKED, which comes out this February 26th. So be sure to take a listen.

00:40:16.660 DEBUNKED will get you 25% off. So be sure to go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the

00:40:23.340 codes DEBUNKED for 25% off. All right. This first question we have goes to the one and only

00:40:29.900 Matt Walsh, who is finally in the backstage studio. Fans have been asking for that for a very long time.

00:40:34.900 So welcome to backstage, Matt. People want to know on a very serious note, when will you be joining

00:40:40.600 Smokey Michael and the God King? And what instrument will you be playing?

00:40:45.080 I think it's like the third backstage. So I guess I didn't make enough of an impression the first two times.

00:40:48.800 Wait, Matt Walsh is here right now? It was definitely a temporary.

00:40:54.640 I do play the banjo. So I, you know, I mean, I can, I, yes, I can, I can pick up a banjo and make

00:41:01.580 noises with it. So I can do that, but you don't have to hammer it against. That's as far as my,

00:41:06.200 the real story is that my wife bought me a banjo. It was, when we first got married, she bought me a

00:41:11.220 banjo. It was my first birthday as a, as a married person. And cause I had been giving,

00:41:16.460 making all this noise about how I wanted to learn the banjo and she bought it for me.

00:41:20.720 And then what that meant was that for the next, really for the last 10 years, it just kind of

00:41:24.720 sits there and she'll just periodically say, so you never learned that banjo, did you?

00:41:29.720 That's it. I didn't learn it.

00:41:32.500 And how many other instruments do you play? Cause people want some options here.

00:41:36.280 No, I don't play all. I'm very good at not playing every instrument.

00:41:40.640 Don't you say that you're as good at every instrument as you are?

00:41:42.960 That's a good way of putting it. Yeah.

00:41:44.080 By the way, completely side note, but Matt and I were outside and the conversation turned to the

00:41:49.860 full masculinity of the show. And, um, and we decided to create a, um, a masculinity ranking

00:41:55.600 of the hosts on the show. And I have, it has, it has a, it has but one standard. How many children

00:42:01.080 have you sired? So by this ranking, it goes, Matt, then me, then you, right? Yeah. And then you,

00:42:07.900 and then you. Well, my tied for last place. Yeah. All right. I was going to tweak that out that Ben

00:42:13.060 Shapiro said, I'm the, the manliest guy at the daily wire. It's been said, I mean,

00:42:18.060 he's a lumberjack and he has like 83 children. So Jeremy and I are the least toxic people in this

00:42:22.500 entire room. That's pretty good. I did admit though, that you, uh, so we have four kids,

00:42:27.880 but the first two are twins. Right. So it was kind of a two for one deal for the same number

00:42:31.440 of pregnancies. So that's right. But I'll happily take, I think the beard gives me the tiebreaker.

00:42:35.360 I'll actually say though, that I think one of the things that matters is,

00:42:39.680 can you change a tire? I mean, we're probably still tied for last.

00:42:42.120 I would say that's probably true. Maybe it mixes up the top three.

00:42:45.100 I not only can change a tire, but have changed many tires frequently on rain-soaked freeways.

00:42:50.620 Why? Don't you have AAA? It was before you had AAA.

00:42:53.860 Are you a pauper? No, you didn't even have phones.

00:42:56.420 What went wrong with tires when they were made of phones?

00:42:59.680 That's how long ago it was. There were only tires.

00:43:02.080 Peru changing a tire. I know, exactly. It was like BC, you know.

00:43:07.240 Have you ever changed a tire? Be honest.

00:43:09.400 No. Have you seen me? Have you ever changed a tire?

00:43:12.100 I changed a tire once. I was visiting LA before I lived there and I, I was too cheap to get a good

00:43:17.500 rental car. So I did a rent-a-wreck. I was driving a 91 Plymouth Breeze around, you know.

00:43:22.720 I will tell you, then I go in, I figured out how to do it. It was the manliest I've ever felt in my home.

00:43:27.920 By the way, there's a much higher chance that Alicia has changed a tire than I have changed a tire. 0.92

00:43:32.280 Yeah, Alicia's definitely changed a tire. I will say, though, that I had a blowout this weekend. 0.84

00:43:37.240 And in my day, I grew up in rural Texas, I changed a lot of tires, you know. I used to be,

00:43:41.380 when I was a Ute, I would, like, stop and help other people change their tires when they're broke

00:43:45.660 down on the side of the road. It seemed like the thing to do. But I've become soft.

00:43:48.940 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:49.380 And I was driving, we had this huge snowstorm, as did, you know, almost the entire south,

00:43:53.320 south of the country this last week.

00:43:56.520 Florida, man.

00:43:57.020 And it reeked holy hell on the roads here, right? All the freezing, all the ice.

00:44:04.300 So my wife and my baby and I, we rented a little Tesla. I thought maybe it'd be fun to have a

00:44:08.720 Tesla. Elon Musk is cooler than me. And so I rented this Model 3 from a great family. It was cool,

00:44:13.940 pulled up to get this Tesla. It's really cold outside. I get out of the Uber. I'm walking up,

00:44:18.660 this young 17-year-old kid comes out of his house. And I said, hey, man, good to meet you. He goes,

00:44:24.520 oh, yeah, it's real cool to meet you. And I said, yeah, I'm Jeremy. He goes, yeah, I know.

00:44:29.100 And I was like, oh, we live in a town where we're famous. We're used to living in a place where people

00:44:36.260 either didn't know who you were or hated you. Now we live somewhere where people are kind to us and

00:44:42.680 like us. And so I rented this Tesla from this kid. I drive it home and park it in the garage. And then it

00:44:49.720 dumps like 12,000 pounds of snow. And I didn't get to drive the car for a week. So finally, I've got

00:44:54.800 one day left on the rental Saturday. And I jump in the car. I want to see if the baby seat will fit,

00:44:59.160 throw the baby seat in the back. We go for a ride. And I promptly hit one of these newfound potholes

00:45:04.160 at full freeway speed and knock the tire off the rim. Oh, my gosh.

00:45:08.240 The good news is, in a crisis with my wife and my child in the car, I was able to figure out how to

00:45:15.620 call roadside. That's good. I was able to solve that. I was able to get them on the phone. And

00:45:19.860 they told me that they would be there in four hours. Oh, apparently a lot of people were broken

00:45:24.840 down on the side of the road. You know, the last time I got a flat tire, which now, I don't know,

00:45:29.220 about five, six years ago, I was in a very expensive BMW. And I was out in the middle of

00:45:34.960 nowhere. In the trunk, right? Yeah, I was in the trunk. The coyotes, literally coyotes were circling

00:45:40.920 around me. And I thought, well, I know how to change a tire. And I took out the jack from this

00:45:45.480 very expensive BMW and opened it up. And it cracked in half in my hands. And I thought,

00:45:51.480 I guess people don't do this anymore. It was a prop. By the way, I mean, being as close to death

00:45:57.380 as you are, did it ever occur to you that that would have been like the coolest way to die?

00:46:00.860 Like just like mauled by coyotes and broken down on the side of the road after getting out of your

00:46:04.260 BMW. That would have been the headline. I was. Is there ever. Is there ever. Is there ever.

00:46:08.460 Coyotes. Author of a werewolf cop. At your age, is there ever a time when coyotes aren't circling you?

00:46:14.660 Vultures up ahead. Most of the vultures. They travel with me. I feel like they should pay,

00:46:20.820 you know, pay my fare. Alicia. That all those stories just revealed that I was more manly than Ben

00:46:29.820 at my most pregnant with my second child because I put a spare tire on my family wagon because it

00:46:35.480 was also a four hour wait, even though L.A. did not get a blizzard. So yay that.

00:46:39.520 Alicia, let me reiterate. I'm very wealthy.

00:46:45.680 Good point. All right. The next question goes to the God King. Jeremy Boring. This subscriber

00:46:51.180 must not know about Daily Wire 2 because they want to know if the Daily Wire, you know,

00:46:56.260 it's entering into entertainment. You know, you're expanding all of the shows. You're bringing

00:47:00.180 on new talent. You're writing and scripting movies. They want to know about sports. Yeah. Well,

00:47:04.900 as you say, they obviously haven't been fans of the Daily Wire for long because we do very

00:47:10.460 intensive sports coverage every. Is it three? Three? Every three years. Four. Four years. World Cup.

00:47:17.300 Yeah. I mean, whenever the World Cup happens, I cannot be bothered to know. Yeah. We do the Daily Wire 2

00:47:23.660 coverage of the event. Michael and I have been covering it very well, lo these many years. Other

00:47:29.760 than that, if you're talking about real sports that people are interested in that aren't anti-American

00:47:34.580 and that should be played by a first world country, I think it's a great idea. We have talked about it.

00:47:39.860 I think it'd be a lot of fun to create a deeper collaboration with our friends over at Outkick.

00:47:44.300 They have a great attitude. They're absolutely hilarious. Clay Travis is kind of a hero. He's

00:47:48.480 right here in Nashville. You know, we could. But if he covered soccer, no doubt. No, we could. We

00:47:53.360 could call it Daily Wire 3. We could. So we can. We can keep Daily Wire 2, but then we can put the

00:47:58.720 sports. So there's Daily Wire 1. Yeah. Which is politics. Politics. There's Daily Wire 3, which is

00:48:04.260 sports. Yeah. And Daily Wire 2 for, you know. That other thing. The other thing. It's a great idea.

00:48:11.460 The every four years thing. The next question is for Drew. Drew, people want to know what

00:48:16.860 projects are you working on now that you have a little more free time since you don't have your

00:48:20.960 daily show. And more importantly, are there any people that will work with you in Hollywood since

00:48:26.040 you're a very open conservative? No. There are no people in Hollywood. But I am as busy as I have

00:48:33.600 ever been. Well, you got to stand that coffin really. Sanding the coffin. You got to be ready.

00:48:39.680 It could happen any minute. But no, I'm as busy as I've ever been. I just sold. I'm so delighted

00:48:46.460 that I just sold to Thomas Nelson, the Christian publishers who published my memoir. I sold my

00:48:52.900 essentially the sequel to my memoir, which is about literature and the Gospels.

00:48:56.760 Does it have a better title? No. It's called The Truth and Beauty. So you'll hate it.

00:49:02.640 It would be so much better if it was called Yet Another Thing. The Better Thing.

00:49:06.980 I am writing. You know the thing. You know the thing. I just finished a draft of the script we're

00:49:16.100 going to do here, I hope. And another project script. And I've got a new series of mystery

00:49:22.580 novels coming out. So I'm as busy as I have ever been. And it's only because of my hatred for Knowles

00:49:29.460 that I've come here at all. So I can insult him. That's good. Because when he plots, there'll be

00:49:35.120 just this whole trunk filled with unfinished manuscript that we can put out there one by one.

00:49:39.640 Did you take insurance out on me? Policygenius.com.

00:49:47.460 All right. Talking about scripts. Ben, everyone in the chat wants to know,

00:49:52.400 have you seen a script for Gina's movie? What will it be about? And when is it coming out?

00:49:56.780 Yeah. So actually, this question is better directed at Jeremy. So I will say that there

00:50:02.420 are active and ongoing talks about what exactly the script should be. I know that Jeremy is

00:50:06.280 wading through scripts right now looking for the right project. But because it is a development

00:50:11.520 process and because we're working on a very personal level with Gina, it's going to take

00:50:15.620 a little bit of time for us to find exactly what we want to do.

00:50:18.100 I think it's important for people to understand that part of what Gina wants in building this

00:50:22.860 next stage of her career is not just to be an actress for hire, but to be a producer. 0.96

00:50:25.700 She wants the ability to actually help craft the story to put her mark on whatever her next project 1.00

00:50:31.160 is. We're working once again with our friends over at Bonfire Legend. Dallas Sunier is going to

00:50:36.580 produce Gina's film. He read 60 scripts over the weekend. I looked at him. He was a shell of a man.

00:50:44.340 You know, he couldn't tell you about any of them. He'd be like, which one did you like best?

00:50:47.640 He goes, well, there's a Western and a spaceship. And I'm like, okay, get some sleep. Send me the 15 or 16

00:50:53.480 best scripts, which he has done. And we're, and we're working our way through them.

00:50:57.480 By the way, they should hire me for this too.

00:51:01.620 Because I've got a great idea for it.

00:51:04.080 Everybody's got it.

00:51:04.660 What we're learning from Drew is he's never going to retire. And if he does retire, then he'll end up

00:51:10.540 in the trunk eaten by coyotes or something. If Ben's wish comes true. All right. So then the next

00:51:14.980 question, since the God King answered that, the God King answered that last one. So Ben,

00:51:20.260 I'll toss this one to you. It's a very good question. Somebody wants to know, hey, I've become a Daily Wire

00:51:24.560 subscriber, but what are you doing to protect yourself against big tech? As we saw with Parler and other

00:51:30.120 conservative sites that are just shut down because people like Google and Amazon say, hey, we're not

00:51:35.800 going to allow you on our servers. Have you guys protected the Daily Wire and the subscribers against

00:51:40.420 something like that?

00:51:41.340 So we definitely have been working on figuring out alternative platforms that we could shift over to

00:51:45.560 in case something like Amazon Web Services, what they did at Parler ever happens to us. We've

00:51:49.880 expended enormous time and energy and some money on exactly this sort of question. Again, I'm going to

00:51:55.340 miss, I'm going to redirect the question to Jeremy, because if for people who don't understand how the

00:51:58.780 Daily Wire works, basically all business questions go here and all ideological questions go here and

00:52:04.120 all questions about cigars go there and all questions about not paying the bills go there

00:52:07.720 and all questions about just general malaise and cynicism go there. That's basically the breakdown.

00:52:15.820 And if you want somebody who's nice to you, then Alicia's here too.

00:52:17.780 Yeah, that's right. I'll say that as Ben said, yeah, we've expended a lot of time into this question

00:52:22.600 since what happened to Parler took place. The truth is the problem is greater than any company is going

00:52:28.400 to be able to answer. You know, Amazon Web Services controls the servers for 50% of the entire

00:52:36.940 World Wide Web. It's an unbelievable amount of infrastructure. So when people are like, why don't you

00:52:42.760 build your own servers? It'd be like if in 1982, the telephone companies had gotten involved in

00:52:50.380 censorship and somebody had said, well, why don't you just build your own phone company? And my answer

00:52:54.340 would be, okay, it took 100 years to run phone lines to every rural household across a continent.

00:53:02.400 That's what you're talking about. And what if we build all these servers? We go raise $100 billion

00:53:07.700 or a trillion dollars to build the kind of infrastructure on the server side that you need.

00:53:12.260 And then Amazon never actually acts against another conservative, but the ISP providers do.

00:53:20.560 Like the problem that faces conservatives is so vast. And to take on any part of it would take

00:53:26.180 the wealth of a small nation to try to conquer. And then that may not be the attack vector. There are

00:53:32.180 like 100 attack vectors that need to be solved. So what I really believe needs to happen here is

00:53:36.900 several things. On one hand, we need not to reinvent all of this, but to diversify our reliance on any

00:53:45.180 one platform. So to Ben's point, we're looking at other potential data facilities, some that you

00:53:51.060 might be able to put yourself on, some that you might be able to actually use as almost a shadow

00:53:55.400 server where we're constantly being updated on a backup server. And if something happens,

00:53:59.180 you can very quickly and seamlessly move yourself over. Very expensive, not as expensive as building

00:54:03.620 Amazon Web Services. But more than that, I think what needs to happen is conservative millionaires

00:54:10.480 and billionaires need to change the way that they think about technology. There's a reason that

00:54:15.620 Amazon can kick you off. It's that conservatives have no power at Amazon. There's a reason Facebook

00:54:20.740 can kick you off. Conservatives have no or very little power at Facebook. There's a reason that

00:54:24.800 Twitter can treat you the way they do. You don't have a problem of conservatives being run out of

00:54:29.560 their homes because conservatives are great at real estate. You don't have a problem of

00:54:33.200 conservatives running out of gas. Conservatives are great at energy. There's just these different

00:54:36.900 spheres that draw people with different mentalities. And I think the proof that conservatives don't have

00:54:44.140 the mentality necessary to solve this problem is actually in the question, are we building our own

00:54:50.600 servers? The answer to the problems of bifurcated use of technology is not that we build what they

00:54:59.520 currently have. There are conversations happening all over the world right now in real time that

00:55:05.980 make servers obsolete. There are people talking about blockchain. There are people talking about

00:55:10.500 things beyond blockchain, the names of which I don't know. There are kids with backpacks going to

00:55:14.860 left-wing billionaires and left-wing venture capital funds and left-wing angel investors and creating

00:55:20.780 the future. And we're not a part of those conversations either. And the answer to how do you

00:55:26.120 solve the problem of it took a century to build all those phone lines isn't to go try to replicate

00:55:32.500 that. It's to invent the cell phone. And until we change our mentality, we're just going to lose on

00:55:37.580 whatever the next thing is to whatever the next thing is. And we're going to build some crappy 0.54

00:55:41.200 alternative version of what they've already got. And it's not it's just going to further ghettoize

00:55:45.660 us. We have to completely change the way that we think about. Can I ask a follow up a question to

00:55:49.960 this? Because one of the things that is very frustrating to me is that conservatives seem

00:55:55.540 very, very reluctant to think that there may be legal remedies here. But it does seem that

00:56:01.200 at some point, this is a new technology. And the new technology needs new law. And it needs new law

00:56:08.980 to make sure that all of us have a chance to speak. If this is the way we speak to one another,

00:56:13.660 and it is, we should be able to speak to one another no matter what our political beliefs are.

00:56:18.860 And so isn't there some place for lobbying? Let me say two things. I'll say two things and then

00:56:24.240 I'll let the lawyer talk. The first one is conservatives need to embrace lawfare. It's

00:56:29.200 deeply distasteful. It's horrible. It's against our, but we actually need to embrace it because

00:56:34.720 those are the weapons being used against us. That's the battle. But I'll also say this.

00:56:39.140 One reason that the Daily Wire, we're not safe, but we are far less likely to be kicked off of

00:56:45.940 servers than is Parler. It's because Parler wasn't conducting any actual economic activity.

00:56:53.480 Parler is a free platform and everybody who's using it is using it for free. They don't have

00:56:57.280 a vast ad network. If some big tech company were to knock the Daily Wire off of their servers because

00:57:05.260 of speech or something like that, we have over a hundred employees. We do millions and millions

00:57:12.580 of dollars worth of business. We have tens of millions of fans. We have ads on our website

00:57:18.500 every day doing hundreds of thousands of microtransactions. That goes all the way to

00:57:24.460 the Supreme Court. There's actual damages. And one thing that you have to keep in mind when you talk

00:57:29.200 about the law is the concept of damages. And the damages are just fundamentally different

00:57:33.180 where we're concerned. This is why it happens. I mean, it's a sorry state of affairs,

00:57:37.840 but they're not unsophisticated about who they target. Yeah, I know that.

00:57:41.480 They target people who have the weakest opportunity to challenge them.

00:57:46.360 Yeah. And this is one of those areas where you're starting to see some state action, right?

00:57:50.160 Rhonda Santos has talked about going after some of the tech companies and making it so that they

00:57:54.300 can't do this sort of stuff. Extending anti-discrimination law toward politics in the arena 0.94

00:57:59.140 of technology, particularly free speech platforms. And it seems to me that if we've restricted

00:58:02.940 freedom of association so strongly in this country, that we already have anti-discrimination law that

00:58:06.440 applies to every single element of American life, except for your politics, right? You can't

00:58:11.300 discriminate against somebody on the basis of religion, sex, age, disability, anything. And

00:58:15.680 nobody is in favor of that sort of discrimination, but it used to be that freedom of association meant

00:58:19.720 that you just sort of had to deal with the fact that sometimes people didn't want to hang out with

00:58:22.240 you. But the left has completely made that obsolete, right? You have to hang out with whoever the left

00:58:25.880 says you have to hang out with, and you have to do business with whoever the left says you have to do

00:58:28.720 business with. I think there's going to be a strong move made, particularly in red states,

00:58:32.680 against some of these corporations saying, if you guys start booting people, then we are going to

00:58:37.700 take legal action against you. You're going to have violated our state law.

00:58:41.160 Is there a concern that you can no longer have ideological organizations, for example,

00:58:48.100 that the Daily Wire would have to hire left-wing activists to be employed?

00:58:52.380 So you'd have to create actual legal carve-outs. You'd have to say, if you're an overtly partisan

00:58:56.200 organization, then you can do this. In the same way that there are religious carve-outs for

00:59:00.000 anti-discrimination law, right? So you'd have to do that for overtly political organizations. It

00:59:03.980 would pose a problem for 501c3s particularly. There are a lot of political 501c3s that have

00:59:08.080 a conservative or a liberal bent. And because they're non-profit, they can't be overtly associated

00:59:12.960 with the party or not associated with the party. And so it could get very muddy very fast. I mean,

00:59:17.020 listen, in my preferred world, as much as I hate discrimination, I hate cracking down on freedom

00:59:21.720 of association more. In the same way that as much as I hate vile speech, I hate cracking down on free

00:59:26.400 speech more. But it seems like that chip may have already sailed. So as long as that chip has already

00:59:30.060 sailed, then the only alternative left is going to be an extension of anti-discrimination law into

00:59:34.460 the field of politics that already exists in a place like California. It's just never been

00:59:36.980 enforced really. And this is such an important key because we can say, well, we don't like this.

00:59:41.240 I really wish we lived in a different world. But as you say, Jeremy, we've got to play with what

00:59:46.440 we've got. You know, politics involves eternal principles. It also involves applying those principles to

00:59:51.740 real circumstances that are all always changing. And if we want to survive, if we want to be smart

00:59:56.740 about this, then you've got to you've got to play the game. And there's a difference between using

01:00:00.440 the weapons that are the weapons of the battlefield and using the logic that they use. I'd always.

01:00:05.840 Right. I agree with this. I totally agree. It's what we always said about mutually assured

01:00:08.520 destruction. Right. When we launched Truth Revolt, we said we hate the tactics that we're about to

01:00:11.500 use. Right. As soon as you guys stop using them, we'll stop using them. Right. Right. And I think that

01:00:14.880 that's accurate as far as a lot of these things, which is, you know, there's only one thing that is worse than

01:00:19.880 having a nuclear weapon and that's everybody else having one and you not having one. Right. And that's

01:00:24.080 right. And it always bothers me. We play this hypocrisy game with the left, which I think is

01:00:28.620 actually destructive. So the left says, you know, you said it was a dark day when Obama was elected.

01:00:34.120 Dark means that you didn't like the color of his skin. You think, like, that's not what it meant. But you

01:00:38.820 said this, which is accepting their terms of battle. Yeah. And I don't I don't agree with this at all.

01:00:43.920 I mean, I I'm really offended by the racial pathology of the left. I think it is. I think

01:00:50.520 it is irreverent to the human condition. I think that the to treat people according to the color of 0.99

01:00:57.480 their skin is a wrong. And I think it's wrong no matter what color their skin is. I don't care if 1.00

01:01:03.100 they're hypocrites about it. I want it to stop. I want to say that. No, you know, if you're a black guy 0.95

01:01:09.220 who did a bad thing, you did a bad thing. You're a white guy who did a bad thing. You did a bad thing. 1.00

01:01:13.340 I don't care. I'm taking people as they come. And the idea now that they they're selling to us that

01:01:18.200 anti that being a non-racist is racist. Yeah. Is insane. Right. You can't you can't be non-racist.

01:01:25.080 So I the true the racist or anti-racist. There's no third category called non-racist. That's why I

01:01:31.060 think that's why I think cancel culture is so dangerous, because what it does is it makes people

01:01:34.620 afraid to say your entire premise is wrong. So this is this is the biggest thing. I think that when

01:01:40.860 we talk about cancel culture, it's easy to point to the big circumstances of cancel culture like

01:01:44.700 Chris Harrison or or Gina. But the reality is the people that affects most are the people who are

01:01:50.340 the low level employees at Disney. That's right. Because they are the people it affects most are

01:01:53.820 not people like the people sitting in this room who talk for a living. Right. Or do business at a

01:01:57.720 high level in politics. The people that affects the most are the people who work for Coca-Cola and who

01:02:01.580 make forty five thousand dollars a year and don't have the labor mobility to be able to just move over

01:02:06.240 to Pepsi, especially when Pepsi is teaching the exact same kind of stuff. What cancel culture is

01:02:09.840 about is intimidating everybody into silence. It's not even about canceling anybody. It's about

01:02:13.560 putting a head on a pike. Yeah. And the more heads you put on pikes, more people are scared to speak 1.00

01:02:17.020 out. And they know that, which is why they're going to keep putting heads on pikes. In fact, it is 0.99

01:02:19.780 imperative that they keep putting heads on pikes because the minute that the heads on the pike 1.00

01:02:23.480 stop, somebody might push back against their dominance. And that's why that's why I get so I get so

01:02:27.780 disgusted. I'm almost at the point with cancel culture when a high profile person gets canceled

01:02:33.320 and they start apologizing like Chris Harrison did. Right. Agree. I'm at the point where I despise

01:02:39.360 you more. Right. For apologizing that I do that I do despise the mob for canceling you in the first 0.81

01:02:44.640 place. Like Chris Harrison is such a perfect example. And we didn't even mention that in that

01:02:49.160 interview that we originally talked about, he he was it was at he was so circuitous in in standing up

01:02:57.620 to he could not have been less aggressive in what he said. And he kept articulating. He kept he kept

01:03:04.800 reiterating that, well, I'm not defending her and I don't really know. And she might be a racist. But

01:03:09.000 look, guys, maybe just maybe we shouldn't be destroying people's lives over this. And they

01:03:14.120 still cancel him anyway. And then what does he do? He falls to his to his knees and apologizes and

01:03:19.060 admits he says, yeah, I am a racist. I mean, he he accepts their their accusations against him,

01:03:24.460 even though he's not a racist. If you do that, then you're just as bad as them. And you're also

01:03:29.340 all the other the smaller people, the people you're talking about who don't have this kind

01:03:33.320 of platform, you're throwing them under the bus, too. You're not just as bad as them. You're

01:03:37.800 actually worse because you're you're you've got all of their vices and cowardice. But they're not

01:03:43.300 cowardice. I mean, they're actually that's why that's why I just want to say the the genre of the

01:03:48.320 public apology. Yeah. Has to go away. Even if what you did was wrong. Now, Chris Harrison's case,

01:03:54.200 all these other cases, Gina Carano, like they didn't do anything wrong. But even if you did

01:03:58.300 something wrong and the cancel culture is coming after a great example, still don't apologize for

01:04:02.220 Morgan Wallen. I don't know if you guys track this story. One of the biggest country stars. Oh,

01:04:06.220 yes. In the world has a new album out. It's fantastic. He's a bit of a hellraiser, probably

01:04:12.420 not our kind of guy. He gets home from a long night of partying. He's not being a very good

01:04:17.120 neighbor. He gets out of a couple of pickup trucks in front of his house. Some of his buddies

01:04:21.500 they're honking on the horn. I know it's one 30 in the morning or something in a bit. And

01:04:25.920 he's yelling at some of his buddies and he uses a series of jocular pejoratives to describe

01:04:34.100 his buddies, none of which is his actual friends. None of which can be said on this show. He calls

01:04:40.220 them nincompoops and jerks. Poopy breath, all of it. Then his neighbor, who's probably rightfully 1.00

01:04:51.240 ticked off at the guy. It's one 30 in the morning. You're trying to sleep. Apparently on their security

01:04:55.320 camera, their doorbell camera, the next morning realizes that you can hear him using these words

01:05:01.480 against his friends. And one of them is that one word that no one in America is allowed to say,

01:05:06.720 except for all of Hollywood, uh, children at church. Uh, if you're of a particular race. 0.90

01:05:13.680 Yeah. Um, and so for this total Soviet style erase erasure, he is dropped by his label. He is dropped

01:05:23.800 by his songs are climbing the charts. He's dropped by his label. He's dropped by both of the major radio

01:05:29.900 entities in the country who, who collectively own all of the radio stations. He's dropped by his

01:05:36.620 country music awards took him off. The country music awards disqualifies him. The AMA, everybody

01:05:41.240 disqualifies him. He, he said something distasteful. He said several distasteful things. He said one thing

01:05:49.120 that we as a society know there are special rules around. I actually don't accept those rules. I don't,

01:05:54.740 uh, agree with those rules, but there's no denying the existence of those rules. Um, nevertheless,

01:05:59.980 he said it in a non-racial context to his friends privately. It was captured essentially by a

01:06:05.520 disgruntled voyeuristic neighbor. Uh, and for this, we've erased him from, from civilization. He didn't do

01:06:11.740 anything wrong. He did do something gross. Yeah. He didn't do anything wrong. He did not do anything

01:06:18.300 racist. The apology that he put out to the people who have destroyed his life on the basis of nothing

01:06:26.560 grants them, right? Grants them their premise. Will they give him his career back? Of course,

01:06:34.080 they're not going to give him his career back, but there's no redemption. Think about the asymmetry

01:06:39.720 here for a second too, because when you say he didn't do anything wrong, well, he did something

01:06:43.380 wrong. He came home late. He woke up his neighbors. He was a jerk, you know, so he's using words. He

01:06:47.220 shouldn't use, but he didn't use them, but he didn't use them in the way that is the racist way

01:06:50.940 to use that word. You can find a black guy and shout the N word at him, right? If you're thinking 0.99

01:06:54.840 about what sort of punishment these sorts of things should entail, should it entail destroying your

01:07:00.520 entire life and erasing you from society? There's no proportionality here. This is the thing though,

01:07:04.480 that I think that too many conservatives don't understand, which is this is the fight that we're

01:07:09.600 in. So we're not in the fight where we have to storm Normandy, where we have to come off the

01:07:14.560 ships and the machine guns are coming up. This is the fight we're in. And so, and so when you say,

01:07:19.220 oh, this is going to cost you money, or this is going to cost you your job, or this is going to

01:07:24.020 cost you your friends. This is the fight we're in. And those guys who storm Normandy actually got

01:07:28.600 bullets in the head and were killed, lost their lives. And I'm worried that like, we don't understand

01:07:34.380 as a, as a half of the country, we don't understand that the losses we're suffering are the losses you

01:07:42.200 suffer when you are in a fight that has to be won. And you're going to, and you're going to,

01:07:45.760 you're going to suffer those losses anyway. That's what if the cancel mob is coming after you, 0.53

01:07:49.680 what you have to understand is there's a very good chance that they, that they will destroy your

01:07:53.060 life. They might not. I mean, you might, you might beat them. Gina Carano beat them. You might not

01:07:58.260 beat them. They might destroy you, but that's going to happen anyway. And so what you could decide right

01:08:02.920 now is whether you're going to have your dignity on the way out. Morgan Wallen decided that he's not

01:08:07.120 going to have his dignity because he apologized to these people. Here's the thing about an apology.

01:08:10.640 You apologize to people who you have actually harmed. And so if Morgan Wallen had gone to his

01:08:16.920 neighbors and knocked on their door personally without any cameras there and said, listen, if I,

01:08:21.260 you know, if you had to hear that, I'm so sorry. I apologize to you. That was obnoxious.

01:08:25.160 Had a few too many. I should have gotten home earlier. Sorry. And then if he had just gone and

01:08:29.140 done his video thing and said, listen, I, I spoke to my neighbors. I'm not going to tell you what that

01:08:33.260 conversation was. It's none of your business, but to all you people out there that are trying to

01:08:36.700 destroy me, I do not apologize to you because you were not harmed by what I did. You don't

01:08:41.420 really care. You're excited for the opportunity to destroy my life just because you get a kick out

01:08:45.620 of it. So I do not apologize to you if you were offended. I'm glad you were offended. That's all

01:08:49.840 I have to say about it. You've got to do this. And the thing is, if he had said that, he'd be in the

01:08:53.920 same spot today that he is anyway. And it really, but I do think there's a special duty that adheres to

01:08:58.960 people who have the power to do that. Because if Morgan Wallen had done that, it would have meant a hell of a

01:09:03.120 lot more than the local employee at Coca-Cola, right? When we, when we like what we did with

01:09:07.500 Gina, I think is, is, and I mean, pat ourselves on the back, but we deserve a pat on the back.

01:09:10.660 We're Mother Teresa. I mean, like, and I think the audience knows this, which is why we had the

01:09:16.800 best week we've ever had in the history of the company over this. The, the, by, by putting our

01:09:21.880 money where our mouth is and saying, we're not going to allow people to be canceled. That was a

01:09:26.480 statement in the culture. And that's a statement that more business people need to make.

01:09:29.100 I mean, I'll be real with you. I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow. I tried to reach out to

01:09:34.000 Morgan Wallen. Right. I mean, I would, I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow because I don't think that

01:09:36.680 what Morgan Wallen did was intended to harm black people. And I don't think that what he did, did

01:09:41.020 harm black people. Right. I think that what he did was be an ass. Right. And, and guess what?

01:09:45.640 Being an ass is a bad thing to do. And again, you should apologize to his neighbor, but that is a 0.99

01:09:49.880 legal thing to do in the United States. And sometimes people are asses and there should be 0.94

01:09:52.620 forgiveness available to people who are asses. And again, and again, the president of the United States 0.99

01:09:57.040 won't help schools open. So black people can send their children to get educated. 0.93

01:10:01.880 The real things aren't happening. You know, there's a phrase that, that Jeremy once said, 0.97

01:10:05.780 uh, in a, in a very similar sort of cancellation situation. And it, it resonates here. And that is

01:10:11.200 that, uh, cowards get their friends killed. And that's, that's really what we're talking about 0.99

01:10:14.900 here because it's not just that they're a coward because they're backing down in the hopes that

01:10:18.300 they'll get their career back. It's the cowardice that gets everybody else killed because now you've

01:10:21.860 set the new standard and you've reinforced the standard. This came up originally in the context of

01:10:25.860 Mark Duplass, who of course is this famous director, producer, actor who committed the

01:10:30.760 grave sin of once having said a nice thing about me on Twitter, right? He came to the office. I gave

01:10:34.380 him an hour and a half of my time. I'd cancel him for that. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, of course,

01:10:37.860 but I gave an hour and a half of my time. We talked about the second amendment stuff. I was very nice

01:10:41.320 to him. And as he was leaving, I said, for your own sake, do not post on social media that you were

01:10:45.520 here because they're going to wreck you for it. And a couple of weeks later, he got it into his head

01:10:48.620 that he was going to do a nice thing. And he tweeted out, I miss, I disagree with Ben Shapiro about a lot of

01:10:52.280 things, but he did a nice thing for me when he didn't have to, and he's well-intentioned. He got

01:10:55.260 hit so hard that he not only pulled down that tweet, he then issued a groveling apology, right?

01:10:59.400 And then what ended up happening on the back of that groveling apology is that James Gunn came out

01:11:02.780 and defended him. And then everybody on the right resurfaced James Gunn's old material, and James Gunn

01:11:06.480 ended up getting fired, right? And I ended up defending James Gunn in this bizarre situation. So I was like,

01:11:11.400 Dan knows, like just by existing, I took out half the Marvel universe. And what Jeremy said at the time is,

01:11:17.020 the thing about cowards is they rarely get themselves killed. They get all their friends killed. 0.96

01:11:20.240 Because when you duck out of the battle, what you end up doing is granting the opposition their

01:11:24.360 entire premise. And that premise is then used against all the people who heretofore were your

01:11:28.480 friends. And so that's exactly right. You should only, apologies are a wonderful thing when you have

01:11:32.720 done a wrong thing. If you want to have a good marriage, apologize first thing in the morning to

01:11:35.760 your wife, right? But the reality- Every morning. It doesn't matter what you're done. It's the first word

01:11:41.500 out of your mouth in the morning. But when it comes to public policy, the issuing of these malice

01:11:47.200 struggle session apologies for things that you haven't done wrong to people you have not wrong.

01:11:51.520 When people issue apologies and they say, to everyone who was offended by this, well, no,

01:11:55.780 if you're offended by this wrongly, I'm sorry, your emotions may even be authentic. But that does not

01:12:00.040 mean they are justified. And you do not deserve an apology. Well, you know, on this point of Maoism,

01:12:04.900 I think that's actually the perfect term. There was this phenomenon in the 70s with the New York

01:12:09.140 Radical Women's Group. They coined the term, or sort of popularized the term, consciousness raising. 1.00

01:12:14.320 And there were these famous meetings where you'd get all these housewives to come together 1.00

01:12:17.740 and they would, I call them wine and cheese soirees. They'd just complain the whole time.

01:12:22.200 And there's a famous essay about this by Carol Hainish. And she says that there was a woman who

01:12:26.700 came and she said, you know, before I came here tonight, ladies, I had no idea how oppressed I was, 0.56

01:12:32.340 but darn it when I am so oppressed and furious and aggrieved. Yeah. And you see this now, 0.84

01:12:37.860 people trying to convince themselves to be aggrieved and offended by some public comment that no one

01:12:43.540 cares about. I want to say one thing in Mark Wallen's, is it Mark? Morgan. Morgan. I'm sorry.

01:12:48.480 I just had a, in Morgan Wallen's defense. And that's that, I think that for us, we live in

01:12:55.160 this space and we know about this fight. I think when, when they come for you and you haven't

01:13:00.140 thought about these things in advance. That's a really good point. They are taking your life and

01:13:04.580 your name. We talked about it with Gina. And you think you can save it. And your good name away.

01:13:08.500 Not just that. Everybody who's surrounding you is telling you to do it. Yeah. I mean,

01:13:11.240 honestly, the best thing that happened to Gina and this whole thing is that her agency didn't

01:13:14.260 dump her. Yeah. Because if her agency hadn't dumped her, we would have called her up and 0.99

01:13:17.680 you know, her agent would have said, don't take their call. No way. Don't take her call. Because

01:13:20.860 if you work with them, you'll never work in this town again. Now, the reality is they were never

01:13:23.580 going to let Gina work in the town again anyway. Right. Right. But her agent would have said, no, 0.97

01:13:26.940 maybe in a few years, you know, you go away for a while. You kind of earn your way back in with

01:13:30.440 bit parts. I guarantee what happened with Morgan Wallen is that his initial reaction was probably,

01:13:34.360 I don't even know what is going on right now. And his agent got on the phone with him and his agent probably

01:13:38.700 said to him, listen, you need to issue an apology right now. Maybe we can put out this fire right

01:13:42.340 now and then the news cycle will move on. But you need to at least issue the apology to this. And

01:13:46.340 and if you if you've never been through the fire, it is egregious. I mean, it is it is truly one of

01:13:51.360 the worst. I can tell you that as a person who gets trended on Twitter, approximately every two

01:13:55.760 and a half weeks. Right. I mean, it is never fun, whether it is justified or unjustified. It is

01:14:00.380 never fun. And that's just somebody who does it professionally. Right. Basically trend on Twitter

01:14:03.840 professionally. If you are somebody who only trends once in your life and that time is

01:14:08.540 because you are losing your job and your livelihood and it's a tsunami of media coverage,

01:14:12.700 like a tsunami, because the more you trend, the less big the bumps are, honestly, like in terms

01:14:16.780 of the differential from norm. Like the normal for me is that I get mentioned on Twitter a lot. And

01:14:20.700 then on a few days a month, I get mentioned like a super lot. But if you're Gina, you don't get 0.59

01:14:25.600 mentioned on Twitter all that often, except for people who are saying they enjoy you in the

01:14:27.940 Mandalorian. And then one day you are the only thing that everyone in the country. And the trend is

01:14:32.480 followed by a deluge of emails, often phone calls. And it's overwhelming. And people don't know

01:14:37.580 that it passes to, you know, before we started, Matt and I were talking about media matters who do

01:14:42.600 nothing, but they sit around and they listen to us and try and twist our words and publicize our

01:14:48.180 shows and publicize our public. They try to, they try to make us sound like terrible people for things

01:14:52.460 that we say, which in context are, aren't actually not terrible at all. And I have to admit, it's a

01:14:58.160 terror. You're going to hate me for this. I actually have pity for them. Yeah. Like that's your job.

01:15:03.380 Your job is to like try and make other people look bad and to listen to us and try. And I just

01:15:07.500 think like, you know, at the end of your life, like you're going to stand before the throne of

01:15:10.800 God and he's going to go like, what did you do? Yeah. Well, I, you know, no, these are damaged

01:15:16.480 people. There's no question about that. And it does get to your point, which is I don't, I don't need

01:15:21.720 to accept their standard. You know, if they, if, if they basically on the left, all they exist to do

01:15:26.180 is call us all racist every day. And then one day a clip of Joe Biden goes around and it's,

01:15:31.360 he stumbles on his words cause it's a day that ends in Y and he sort of sounds like he said the

01:15:36.240 N word. And then we all sort of giggle about that. I don't care. I don't think he really said that.

01:15:40.300 I don't, I don't think he is some bigot. I don't think that I just think it's playing into their

01:15:46.100 game, pointing out a hypocrisy that they don't care about cause they don't care about the rules

01:15:50.300 anyway. They just don't like us. I would much rather do what I'm going to do. I would much rather

01:15:55.040 build culture, make movies with people we want to work with, do those sorts of things than worry 1.00

01:15:59.940 about their stupid rules, which change every day. Well, that's right. I mean, this is the thing 0.99

01:16:03.260 that I cling to is that racism is an actual philosophy, which I don't hold. I don't think

01:16:08.820 any of the people in this room hold. It's not a slip of the tongue. It's not something that you

01:16:13.820 might've said that was untoward. It's not even a moment of anger when some tribal glitch in your

01:16:18.440 brain goes off. It's an actual way of life. I know racists. They, they actually think the things

01:16:24.220 that these, you know, people are being canceled for. I just don't accept the terms. I do not

01:16:29.780 accept the terms of the argument. I don't accept that. As you say, if, if somebody shouted a word,

01:16:35.080 he shouldn't shout. Well, that's a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a racist thing. This

01:16:38.960 thing you're talking about the bachelor. I just think it's absurd, especially, especially because

01:16:44.080 we know it's a grift because of the governor of Virginia who doesn't get canceled for it because

01:16:48.300 then a Republican. I'll even go a step further. Shouting a racial pejorative is not necessarily

01:16:54.060 racist. That's right. That's right. No, you're absolutely right. Doing something racist does not

01:17:01.120 necessarily make you a racist. It means you did a racist thing. So there are, there are actually

01:17:05.740 even, there's an even another gradiation, which is, I think a very interesting point you just made.

01:17:10.100 Sometimes people in their worst moments actually do succumb to the worst thoughts. That's right.

01:17:14.860 That doesn't actually define them. You know, people say all the time, like.

01:17:18.740 And this is not to let them off the hook. This is to point out that there are gradations of sin.

01:17:22.240 There are gradations of sin. And what the left has decided is there are no gradations of sin.

01:17:25.020 There is just the damned and the woke. And that's it. That's right.

01:17:27.640 There, there, this thing that people used to say back in college, it's like, well, you know,

01:17:30.940 you'd, you'd have a couple too many drinks and you'd say something you shouldn't about one of your

01:17:34.520 buddies or whatever. And you'd apologize the next day. And they'd be like, no, what you say when you're drunk is

01:17:38.920 that's who you really are. I saw the real you, uh, because all your inhibitions were gone. You said what you really

01:17:43.420 believe. And that never resonated with me. Yeah, that's ridiculous. What I actually thought was, no, when my

01:17:49.720 inhibitions were gone, when my rational mind was gone. When I was only given into my vices and basest passions.

01:17:57.560 You're, you're, you're saying that that's the real me, but no, the real me is all of the things that I've built on top of

01:18:03.840 my worst impulses. That's right. Right. All the things that I've built on top of my intrinsic tribalistic way of looking at

01:18:10.260 things or my selfish ways of looking at things or my, you know, vain ways of looking at things or my

01:18:15.720 hateful way. We, we all have the seed of sin in us. What we build on top of that is the real us.

01:18:22.060 This is why we, you know, uh, when I was talking about, uh, rush a lot of this week, as we all were

01:18:27.000 and thinking about rush. Uh, and, um, uh, you know, I was really, uh, obviously I think all of us were

01:18:32.600 really just moved by the passing of this guy and all these liberals celebrating his death and publishing

01:18:38.280 things that he had said, some of which were untoward. Most of the things they published,

01:18:44.040 he never said, but now and again, he said something that I thought, like, I don't agree

01:18:48.700 with that. And I don't think probably rush. If you pushed him to the wall would agree with it,

01:18:52.140 but he spoke three hours a day live to people. That's more 30 years. That's 30 years. People

01:18:57.740 speak to their spouses. You do not speak to your spouse a day. And I, and I, and I, what I say to all

01:19:03.640 these people is you ever say anything to your spouse that you're glad didn't become. I mean,

01:19:07.960 this is what I have, but this is what I wrote in the New York times, which frankly, I'm shocked

01:19:11.660 that they solicited an op-ed from me. I will, I will say, uh, they took out a slap I had at the

01:19:16.740 New York times in that piece. There was originally, I know I mentioned the fact that the headline in

01:19:21.620 the New York times about rush was that he had like turned talk radio into an aggressive right-wing

01:19:25.380 attack machine. And their headline about Ayatollah Khomeini was thoughtful religious leader,

01:19:28.560 right? Um, but, but the, um, but the, the point that I was making is that what the left did with

01:19:35.000 rush is what they are going to do with all of us. They're like the, so in, in Judaism, uh, so to 0.99

01:19:40.280 teach you all about a different religion. So in Judaism, Satan is not a character who's opposed

01:19:45.480 to God. That's not what Satan is. Satan is known as the accuser because he's essentially the

01:19:48.900 prosecutor. The idea is that after you die, Satan comes and he basically is the one who is going to

01:19:53.660 try you in court before God. And he's the one who strings together all of your sort of

01:19:58.340 worst moments. Right. And, and that is what this is. And this will come for all of us. I said in

01:20:03.960 the piece that it wouldn't have mattered if it had been Tucker or if it had been Sean or if it had me,

01:20:07.240 or if it had been you, or if it had been anybody who was prominent on the right, the reaction would

01:20:10.740 have been the same because all our lives would have been, would have been a compendium of the

01:20:14.740 worst moments of us taken out of context and robbed of all meaning, right? That's all it would

01:20:19.500 have been. And that's what you saw in the CNN montage, right? The montage of rush was like Sandra

01:20:22.480 Flock and it was the AIDS stuff from 1988, right? And it was, it was all this, it was like the,

01:20:27.360 out of the 30 years of material, what are the six worst things he did? And can we use those things

01:20:32.420 to rag on him? Can we use those things to characterize his entire life? And we should

01:20:36.540 all refuse to accept this frame. We should refuse to accept this frame. The reality is that we are

01:20:41.300 all a compendium of all the things that we've done over the course of our life, most of which people

01:20:44.300 never see. And for those of us who are in public life, yeah, the, the notion that everything that you

01:20:49.420 do can be boiled down into one bad tweet or one bad moment. All that really is, is because it can be

01:20:54.840 done to anybody, all that anybody, but it doesn't, but it isn't, but because it can be done to

01:21:00.160 anybody, that's how you know who they hate, right? Cause you can do it with anybody, literally

01:21:04.020 anybody. Right. And, but there's only one side of the aisle that they choose to do this to. Those

01:21:07.840 are the people that they cancel. And so don't accept the standard that this is how people should be

01:21:11.000 characterized. I think it's so important for us to reject this framework for the sake of our

01:21:15.680 children. Yes. Because our, our children, I mean, somebody, please think of the, let's actually

01:21:23.540 think of the children because our kids, uh, not my kids, but so many kids are, are starting out on

01:21:29.120 social media at the age of like eight years old. And, um, or even if they started social media at 14

01:21:34.960 or 15 and, and just everything they think that everything that enters their head is documented

01:21:40.460 forever online. And you got to think about what we're, what we're starting right now with this

01:21:44.880 cancel culture. If it continues like this 30 years from now, all of our children are ruined.

01:21:49.880 Their, their lives are ruined. I'm legitimately grateful to God that I grew up before cell phone.

01:21:54.660 Right. You know, also on this rush point, I mean, you figure these kids are going to be on social

01:21:59.540 media all the time. Imagine what's going to crop up. Imagine if you've been on air for three hours a day

01:22:04.300 for, for 30 years and your job, by the way, is to be provocative, especially earlier on in the

01:22:09.200 career. And the best thing they got on you is an AIDS joke you made in 1989. Can you imagine that? 0.51

01:22:16.080 I think like I wake up in the morning, right? We, we actually pray this sort of thing. It's like,

01:22:20.420 God have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. You think of these lines from Shakespeare of like,

01:22:24.560 I could accuse myself of such things that it would be better that my mother had not born me.

01:22:29.680 All the sins we all commit. That's the best they got on the guy. He's pretty clean.

01:22:33.480 Pretty well. And we're taken out of a con. Like the other thing we're doing is we're not taking,

01:22:38.220 of course, the time when these things were said into context at all. And we, and we, you know,

01:22:42.960 forget about 1980. We're going back to the 1840s and saying like, whatever someone did back then,

01:22:48.060 we're going to hold them to the standards of the year 2021, which of course is complete madness.

01:22:52.400 I mean, as somebody who was writing publicly from the time I was 17, I can say the great majority of

01:22:56.040 the things I regret having written occurred between the ages of 17 and 22. Right. Right. Like,

01:23:00.020 because when you're first starting out, number one, you're trying to get attention. And number two,

01:23:03.480 your thoughts aren't fully formed. Right. Right. If you don't get better at what you do over time and become a

01:23:06.860 better thinker over time, you're not being a human being. Yeah. Right. That's just called

01:23:09.800 maturing. And so what the, and the media celebrate this stuff. This is how it's the easiest form of

01:23:14.940 fake journalism, right? This is the other things that the media have made an entire model. The same

01:23:18.620 people who whine about the fact that we get good traffic over at daily wire because we happen to be

01:23:22.180 conservative and then say that we're clickbait. These are the same people who will run a 3000 word piece

01:23:27.180 about some jackass of a 19 year old student who decides to out a high school cheerleader who once texted 0.97

01:23:34.500 something about learning to drive and quoted a rap lyric with the N word in it and get her kicked 0.97

01:23:39.940 off the university of Tennessee cheerleading team. The New York times actually did that. The New York

01:23:43.540 times ran a long piece about this, this terrible student. I mean, this guy's a terrible person who

01:23:48.600 literally held, there's a 15 year old girl as she got a driver's permit. She put up a video on her

01:23:53.300 phone saying something. I can drive now N word. And it was obviously meant to quote a rap lyric. I mean,

01:23:58.720 clearly meant to quote a rap lyric. Soft R. This was not an epithet aimed at racial. And everybody

01:24:03.780 acknowledged this, right? This is fully obvious. And this jerk decided, because he was in her class,

01:24:08.880 he decided that he was going to hold on to this video. He waited until two, I think it was three 1.00

01:24:12.720 years later. Just kept this video around. Wait until three years later when Black Lives Matter 1.00

01:24:16.920 happened. And she made the grave misfortune of posting something in support of Black Lives Matter.

01:24:21.840 And he said, well, you say you support Black Lives Matter. You said this, boom, puts out the video.

01:24:25.520 Well, the University of Tennessee withdraws her cheerleading scholarship, which was her dream,

01:24:30.200 was to be on the University of Tennessee cheerleading team, which is one of the great

01:24:32.940 cheerleading teams in the country. She had to withdraw her entire admission from University of

01:24:37.280 Tennessee over this. We are creating an unlivable culture. It is only livable for people on the hard

01:24:42.280 left. And by the way, everybody knows this. Everybody. It's not even going to be livable for

01:24:46.620 them. Ultimately, it's not. Yeah. Revolutions eat their own. Revolutions eat their own. Every one of them

01:24:52.380 is going to burn. All the people, like you talk about our publicists over at Media Matters and

01:24:56.560 Sleeping Giants and Judd Lum Lum and Kevin Roos and Kara Swisher. They don't know. They're all doomed.

01:25:03.060 Right. Not because of us. Yeah. Not because of us. Yeah. Because they're not 23. Yeah. They're not

01:25:09.000 woke 23-year-olds. The woke 23-year-olds will one day eat them for lunch. Yeah. Yeah. Think of poor

01:25:16.600 Trotsky. You know. Trotsky thought he had it so well. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever hear a ringing in your

01:25:21.300 ear, guys, it's an ice pick. An ice pick. And it ain't us bringing it. It ain't us. But that's why,

01:25:25.660 you know, sometimes you hear people on the right and they'll lament this happening to some of the

01:25:28.380 counselors. Nope. Nope. They deserve every bit of what they've got coming to them. They built this 0.75

01:25:33.920 and they deserve what they have coming to them. I can object to it happening to them and still

01:25:36.820 recognize that they have exactly what they built coming to them. It's really interesting to me who

01:25:41.440 has always, you know, I've been an artist all my life. Half the people I know are gay. I've worked with 0.91

01:25:46.920 all these gay people. I've always enjoyed their company. They're hilariously funny. All this stuff. 1.00

01:25:51.060 I once went snorkeling with Ryan Anderson when Harry became Salic. So I'm, Ryan and I together as

01:25:56.540 one gay guy. Yeah, that is. I mean, I don't know. But I remember back in the day, seriously, liberals,

01:26:03.360 liberals who wouldn't come back to my house because they met a gay person there. They wouldn't come back

01:26:08.360 to see me because they'd come to a party and there was a gay couple there. And those same people,

01:26:13.500 those same people are walking around with their rainbow flags now and canceling anybody. And I

01:26:18.560 just think like it's all malarkey. This is the thing that really gets me. It's all a grift. It

01:26:24.020 has nothing to do with the happiness of gay people, of black people, of women, of trans. It has nothing

01:26:30.580 to do with any of that. Is the world happier because of cancel culture? It is much, much more.

01:26:34.640 Well, this is, by the way, this is sort of the thesis of the, my first book with words is this kind of

01:26:40.060 wait a minute, wait a minute. This is shocking. We'll see if I can finish it. But that political

01:26:44.520 correctness basically replaces moral codes with speech codes, the old moral codes with the new

01:26:48.440 speech codes. So it matters much less what you do. It actually doesn't really matter at all what you

01:26:52.260 do. It matters what you say and the imposition of that because the word is my fair lady, isn't it?

01:26:57.400 It's like, it doesn't matter what you do as long as you say it correctly. I think about this with

01:27:00.540 the actor Armie Hammer. Yeah, Armie. Who you guys know was many years ago, a good,

01:27:06.120 a good friend of mine, a good pal of mine. And in later years, we've not been close. Our paths have

01:27:11.880 taken us in different directions and he doesn't share our politics, but still a guy I'm very fond

01:27:16.040 of. And he said some things on to some gals that are hard to read. Yeah, they're weird. He expressed

01:27:25.720 sexual predilections to them. And for that, he's being erased from the world. I don't even understand

01:27:32.340 the story. This is my point. So Armie says, you know, I want to eat toes and I'd like to eat your

01:27:38.040 rib and some other things. Right. And who among us has it? Ribs are delicious. Oh, wait, human.

01:27:44.600 Oh, if just taking back what Adam once gave. If Armie didn't need anybody. Yeah, right. Right.

01:27:53.940 Armie didn't drug and sodomize a 13-year-old girl like Roman Polanski did. And Harrison Ford flew to

01:28:04.400 France to give him an honorary Oscar. Yeah. Like, this is why I don't get this. It's only what you

01:28:09.440 say. He expressed some words. He expressed some dark fantasies. No, but wait, as I understood the

01:28:16.800 story, he has some kind of weird sexual fetish that he performed on some of these girls who were 0.74

01:28:23.140 there, they didn't stop him from doing this. I'm not understanding. I don't understand what he's 0.76

01:28:27.320 being canceled for. Like, in other words, like I saw what he was doing. He engaged in consensual sex.

01:28:32.660 Yeah. And he said that he would like to eat a rib or eat a couple of toes. Yeah. In some direct 0.99

01:28:37.240 messages. And for this, he must be destroyed. Now, I'm not making a moral defense of. No. Yeah, 0.99

01:28:42.300 it is. It is definitely very disordered. But I am saying what, what did he do? I'm just trying to think of

01:28:47.780 huntings, to be honest with you. Oh, come on. Come on. No, yeah, there are a lot of good ones.

01:28:53.120 Talk to me after the show. That was an interesting story because it should, because Cosmopolitan

01:28:59.260 Magazine actually published an article after that defending cannibalism fetishes. That's right.

01:29:06.500 And I read, I read the article for some reason. Who doesn't? Yeah, I was, you know, I read the article

01:29:10.660 for some reason and it just struck me that, that this is kind of off the topic a little bit,

01:29:15.100 I guess, but it's just our culture has no language anymore to condemn any kind of perversion. Yeah.

01:29:22.700 Because it's all about consent. And so the only language, the only, the only moral rule we have

01:29:27.960 left is consent. And that's, everything comes down to consent. And as long as people consent,

01:29:31.540 then we have no language with which to condemn anything. And so this article was going through,

01:29:37.280 you know, it couldn't just come out and say, well, this is wrong to want to eat people. That's weird

01:29:41.700 and wrong. It couldn't say that. So instead it was trying to figure out how, well, he didn't really

01:29:46.280 have consent. Well, you know how they did this, the greatest version of this, forget, forget Army's 0.79

01:29:50.780 thing, was Marilyn Manson. Marilyn Manson is being accused by the actress Evan Rachel Wood,

01:29:55.360 who's very left-wing, but just testified on this and some other women of engaging in very sort of

01:30:01.340 bizarre sexual behaviors. We're not just talking about fantasies anymore. And the thing is,

01:30:06.480 these women were in longstanding relationships with him. And so when Evan Rachel Wood,

01:30:10.180 and I really take her side in this, but she's saying, well, I know we were in a consensual

01:30:14.320 relationship, but it wasn't really consensual because, you know, I was brainwashed. He

01:30:19.400 manipulated me, you know, fine. I, I totally understand that argument, but that argument

01:30:24.960 doesn't work in the modern liberal framework. I actually don't, I actually disagree with you

01:30:28.880 guys about this. I, I think I agree with a fundamental point that you're making that consent

01:30:33.940 isn't the ultimate definition of morality, but consent is consent. But that doesn't mean that

01:30:39.720 consent isn't a standard. Yeah. I don't, I actually. And it's a legal standard for sure.

01:30:43.980 Most of all, that is the only standard that the left applies. So how do you cancel somebody on

01:30:47.200 the basis of violating a standard you have not violated? Right. Right. I mean, I can understand

01:30:51.880 conservatives saying that's weird and perverse and it's always wrong. It's always wrong. We're

01:30:56.260 not going to be patronizing businesses with people who want to eat each other's toes because

01:30:59.560 it's weird. But for liberals, for whom literally nothing is off limits so long as it is consensual,

01:31:05.120 there is no, there is no basis for canceling. It's a weak, it's a weak standard. So, but the,

01:31:09.400 but the point is they, they've, if, if your standard for judging the morality of a sexual act is,

01:31:15.200 is something like love, uh, devotion, are you respecting the dignity of the other person?

01:31:20.780 Well, then you don't have to talk about consent at all because that's included in the love,

01:31:24.020 devotion and dignity bit. Yeah. But you get rid of all that and it all comes down to, to,

01:31:27.960 to consent. And that's why you have all these, you know, all these cases on college campuses,

01:31:32.320 a woman wakes up the next day, she had consensual sex with a man, but she feels used and cheap and 0.99

01:31:37.960 dirty. And, and, and she, and she was used, you know, she was used like an object, but she did 1.00

01:31:42.740 consent to it. And the problem is not that she didn't consent. The problem is that it was not

01:31:46.500 sex with dignity and love, but she doesn't have that language. So instead she figures, well,

01:31:50.920 this feels wrong. I didn't really give consent. So I must, yeah, I must not have gotten given,

01:31:54.780 given consent, even though I did. That's a great, that is a great point. That is absolutely,

01:31:58.140 you know, cause it is a great point. And until you say you're taking Rachel Evan Wood's side,

01:32:02.740 I'm, I'm, I'm sort of taking her side. I'm not taking it all the way where I disagree with you.

01:32:06.120 I agree with everything you just said as a moral standard, but I'm not, I'm not saying that

01:32:09.700 Marilyn Manson for the, for the, the sort of consensual acts that he's being accused of it

01:32:14.960 not being consensual or something. I'm not, I'm not saying you ought to go to jail. I think you're

01:32:19.660 making the same point that Matt is. He's not, you're not saying that you take Evan Rachel

01:32:22.600 Wood's side in the sense that he has violated some sort of left-wing cultural standard and ought to,

01:32:27.900 or civil law to be more civil law. It ought to be ended that way. I think you're just saying

01:32:31.520 what Matt is saying, which is that I fundamentally though, object to the idea that you can retroactively

01:32:38.320 remove consent because of regret. But the point that Matt is making is such a perceptive one,

01:32:45.860 which is that people aren't actively, it's a lie. In other words, when they say that they're

01:32:50.500 retroactively removing consent, the only moral standard they have is consent, but they know they

01:32:54.820 feel like something wrong just happened to them. So they do not have the language to express

01:32:58.380 what morality has been violated other than by retroactively saying that the only value they

01:33:03.320 have was violated. Since I know it was bad, it must not have been consent. There's a huge irony here

01:33:07.760 though, which is that you have these left-wingers grappling at this very traditional definition

01:33:13.160 of consent and liberty, the kind of Aristotelian or old classical Christian idea, which is that if

01:33:19.560 you're constantly in vice and sin, you're not actually free, right? The man who sins is a slave

01:33:24.960 to sin. The example I use is the heroin addict. By the kind of modern leftist standard of liberty, 0.77

01:33:30.760 the heroin addict is the freest guy in the world, right? As long as he's got a couple bucks in his

01:33:34.100 pocket, he can shoot up, he can pursue his appetites however he wants. But we all know the

01:33:38.940 heroin addict is the least free person on earth. This is the thing, you know, you and I like the show

01:33:44.420 Billions. And it features this guy who's a prosecutor who is a masochist. He's a sexual

01:33:52.380 masochist. And it begins, and he's, you know, for me, like masochism, sadomasochism is like you 0.99

01:33:57.360 flick people with a towel, you know, but this is like sticking cigarettes on people. It's like,

01:34:01.620 it's not, it's not a joke, you know, but he's in a loving relationship with his wife where they do

01:34:06.600 this thing. And what you're left with is something's wrong with him. Yeah. You know, it's not,

01:34:12.180 it's not that they're doing anything illegal and it's not even that they're outside of a loving

01:34:15.980 relationship because for a large period of the show, they're actually in a loving relationship,

01:34:20.140 but something's the matter with him. And, and it's, you know, it's when I look at, uh, the guy

01:34:25.640 who's supposed to be a girl who's in the, uh, now the health and human services, but Rachel Levine.

01:34:30.740 Yeah. I think like, you know, I have nothing but sympathy for this person, but something's wrong

01:34:37.140 with them, you know, there's something's the matter with them. And I think that like,

01:34:40.300 we have to be able to talk about that without necessarily, uh, moral judgment, but at least

01:34:46.720 with some kind of understanding. Because right now the argument is, well, you can do whatever

01:34:49.480 you want as long as you consent to it. But the question then is, well, if there's something

01:34:54.540 that's a little wrong, maybe we do need to qualify. But two things can be true at once,

01:35:00.620 which is you can do anything that you consent to as long as you're an adult, but that doesn't

01:35:04.160 make it right. That's right. And this is something that, and this is, this is something,

01:35:06.900 and this is an ethos that is completely foreign to the left, right? This is where they're running

01:35:11.780 into trouble because the ethos that you can do something wrong, but still it can be wrong.

01:35:16.820 Yeah. Yeah.

01:35:17.600 It's something that the left fundamentally does not accept, right? It's why they're now cracking

01:35:20.400 back against freedom of association and freedom of speech and all individual rights, right? If you

01:35:23.680 can misuse freedom of speech, that means that freedom of speech should actively be curbed.

01:35:27.620 Right.

01:35:27.680 If you misuse freedom of association, freedom of association should, should actively be curbed.

01:35:31.180 The right understands that there is a difference between the right to do wrong and the possibility

01:35:36.700 of doing wrong with that right, right? That you can, you can abuse a right, but that doesn't

01:35:41.340 vitiate the central right that you're talking about. The left fundamentally does not understand

01:35:44.980 this. So what this creates is this bizarre situation where they'll know something is wrong

01:35:48.640 and they can't explain why it's wrong or which rule it has violated. Right. And so they have

01:35:52.940 to post facto create a rule that allows them to bar that thing, right? Because, because they can't

01:35:58.440 accept the idea that somebody could do something wrong and also it wouldn't violate any of their

01:36:01.440 chief principles because in essence, they're authoritarian, right? In essence, everything

01:36:05.260 they don't like ought to be banned. Yeah. And so if they can't even come up with a good reason in

01:36:08.400 their own head why it ought to be banned, they will come up with a new rule or they will spin the rule

01:36:12.100 so that that thing ought to be banned. And that's incredibly dangerous.

01:36:14.700 This is my only question for any leftists ever, really. This is what, this is what I would ask if I

01:36:19.340 got to ask a question at a Democrat debate is, is there anything that you believe is bad that should not be

01:36:27.220 banned by government? Yeah. Is there anything you believe is good that should not be mandated by

01:36:32.340 government? Right. You're right. You know, it's so, it's, it's incredibly biblical even for your half 0.97

01:36:37.960 of the Bible. Uh, no, it's incredibly biblical that we talk about why God allows, uh, evil. And there's a

01:36:45.460 large body of, uh, discussion about this. And one of the ideas is that because he believes that men have

01:36:51.860 to be free and men and women have to be free in order to love God, in order to serve God freely.

01:36:57.360 But that means that you can not do that. And so that's, that's the relationship of power to the

01:37:03.560 people who are less powerful is yes, you have to have the right to do things that are wrong.

01:37:08.100 But I do think, I think that doesn't mean they're right.

01:37:10.100 That's why wokeism is a pagan religion. Yes.

01:37:12.240 Yeah. I do. I do think though, the left is saying something even more radical, which is they're

01:37:16.980 saying, I'm not really free. You know, in the case of Evan Rachel Wood or something, she's saying,

01:37:20.960 I'm not free to consent for whatever reason, you know, I was manipulated or whatever. And this

01:37:26.400 actually gets to something the founding fathers talked about. This gets to something that sort of

01:37:31.600 classical Lord Acton talks about, actually classical theorizers of, of liberty, which is to be free,

01:37:38.840 you actually have to be a moral and religious people in the words of John Adams, or you need to

01:37:43.800 practice the virtues and cultivate that. The point of liberal education is to do this, right? It's

01:37:49.160 why we take little kids who are just basically appetite machines and doing everything that's

01:37:53.420 bad for them. We educate them in their liberty and hopefully they can kind of tame it and be able

01:37:59.640 to master that. But what the left is saying is we don't have that. We're just appetite machines.

01:38:04.980 Well, so one of the things that happened and just philosophically, that was a really radical shift

01:38:10.860 in sort of how Western thought went, is that it used to be that people perceived natural law in

01:38:16.000 the way that the Catholic Church perceived natural law, which is you can look at the way that nature

01:38:19.480 is constituted and you can derive from it rational rules as to how the world should work and natural

01:38:23.620 rules of virtue as to how you should live your life, right? And that that is embedded in the laws

01:38:27.640 of nature and nature is God, as is the language of the Declaration of Independence. And the, there was a

01:38:32.780 shift that happened, particularly in the 19th century, from the idea of natural law to nature as guide,

01:38:38.860 right? As in scientific nature, as in if something happened to you and it was natural to you, you had

01:38:43.640 a natural desire, then this meant that this natural desire was justified. And you see, this is, you can

01:38:48.920 see this in, I mean, to be, you know, as sort of cretinous as possible in terms of public culture. 0.73

01:38:54.520 If you look at Lady Gaga's born this way, right? This is the argument. If it is natural for you to do,

01:38:58.500 it is therefore good for you to do. Well, that is the precise opposite of what natural law suggests,

01:39:02.080 which is it may be natural for you to have a particular inclination, but the world around you suggests a

01:39:06.700 particular set of rules. And you are supposed to incline yourself toward that particular set of

01:39:10.240 rules in violation of your own, right? Because man was meant to reason. But the, the, the, this

01:39:16.100 goes back to, I think the, another fundamental distinction that the left is, is now attempting

01:39:20.960 to conflate. There was an entire editorial in the New York Times today that was kind of fascinating.

01:39:25.320 And it was a complaint about why Western philosophy was so focused on separating man from animals.

01:39:29.880 I don't know if you guys saw this. It was kind of fascinating. It was, it was an entire essay about

01:39:33.320 why do, you know, all of Western philosophy is dedicated toward the idea that man is not the

01:39:37.400 same as a squirrel. And this is very bad. We should actually allow man to just be the same as a

01:39:41.600 squirrel because squirrels are natural and squirrels have, and, and human beings are natural. And we

01:39:45.980 should acknowledge we are not just our reason. We are not just our prefrontal cortex. We are all of

01:39:49.360 the elements of us, right? And Western philosophy was built around the idea that we are not the same

01:39:53.860 as animals specifically because Western philosophy was built around the idea that man was made for a

01:39:58.140 purpose. And that purpose was to reason. That purpose was to use our brains in order to seek out

01:40:02.980 God and to seek out the rules to live a virtuous life. And the left has attempted to vitiate that.

01:40:08.160 This is why Darwinian theory did so much damage to religion, not because there's anything that

01:40:13.020 doesn't fit in terms of evolution and religion. You can square that circle for sure. But what really

01:40:18.220 finished it was the idea that man is an animal. And once you treat man as an animal-

01:40:22.020 And there's no fixed nature. Nature's evolving.

01:40:24.700 Right. But, but more importantly, that, that you, there is nothing better about the prefrontal

01:40:29.100 cortex than the amygdala. Yep. Right. There's nothing, there's nothing preferable about being

01:40:32.300 a reasonable person as opposed to being an emotional person or a person who just follows

01:40:35.880 their passions, follows their nature. And by the way, it's worth pointing out when Woodrow

01:40:38.740 Wilson are, you know, sort of first, the worst president in American history. Yeah. The first,

01:40:42.940 you know, and the first left progressive president, he who destroyed the entire country,

01:40:46.660 when he writes about what is progress, what is progressivism, he uses that exact example. He says,

01:40:52.220 the constitution is based on the science of Newton, fixed laws, permanent nature, all these sorts of

01:40:58.400 things. But we know that's bunk. We now live in the age of Darwin. I don't think Woodrow Wilson,

01:41:03.460 he understood Darwin very well anyway, but he says, Darwin, nothing's fixed. It's all just kind

01:41:08.200 of a continuum, man. We're not that different. And therefore throw out all those permanent laws.

01:41:13.180 Have we gotten, have we gotten to a point where, cause I've been thinking about this a lot. Have we

01:41:16.900 gotten to a point where the whole conversation around rights is, is just hopeless? Uh, because

01:41:24.780 we can't, you get a hundred Americans into a room and you ask them what, what does, what does it mean

01:41:29.480 to have a right? What is a human right? And you're not going to get even a 50% agreement. Nobody has

01:41:33.880 any idea even what these things are. We don't have the same, we don't have the philosophical grounding

01:41:37.420 for it. Well, that's, we got to a point where this is where we, you know, maybe we stop, maybe we

01:41:42.640 as conservatives stopped framing our arguments so much around rights and find a different framework

01:41:46.780 for it. Like, so for example, um, uh, abortion. And so for, for so long pro-lifers would say we

01:41:54.080 have a right to life and that, that actually raises a lot of questions. Like what, what do

01:41:58.940 you mean a right to life or a right against whom? Who are you claiming this right against? Right,

01:42:04.300 exactly. If you have a right to life, does that mean that you can't be executed and so on? Um,

01:42:08.540 maybe a better R word would be responsibility. And so what we should be saying is, and I believe we

01:42:14.860 do have a right to life understood a certain way, but maybe we should be saying that, um,

01:42:19.920 a parent has a responsibility to their child. And what that means at a minimum is that you

01:42:25.520 can't kill your child. You have to provide for them. We all agree with that. When it comes

01:42:29.100 to born children, you let your kids starve to death, you go to jail. So kind of traditional

01:42:32.600 conservative framing. Right. Maybe it's maybe a responsibility. When I got into this brief

01:42:36.660 Twitter exchange with, uh, David French, one of the things I said was you, you are endowed

01:42:42.360 by your creator with certain rights and government is instituted among men to ensure those rights.

01:42:48.700 So if those rights are under threat, it doesn't matter where they're under threat from government

01:42:52.660 has a right to stop that threat. And many, many people came on this, this Twitter thread and said,

01:42:58.660 oh, any argument from God is absurd. Yeah. But the problem, the problem with that is that's actually

01:43:04.420 the axiom of our civilization. It is the self-evident truth that doesn't have to be proved. It only has

01:43:10.920 to be asserted because everything else is built on top of it. You can't remove it. You cannot

01:43:15.380 remove that assumption. And we shouldn't be afraid to make that assumption because it's

01:43:19.060 the axiom. Well, there's a, there's a common argument that the founders consistently made

01:43:23.280 and which they were right about, which is that the other half of right is duty, right? Rights

01:43:27.100 and duties were just the flip side of each other. Your right to life is my duty not to kill you.

01:43:30.220 Yeah. Right. And, and your right to free speech is my duty not to inhibit your free speech.

01:43:33.640 And we all understood this fundamentally. What we have done is we have dumped the duty and we have

01:43:37.660 kept the rights. And so once you dump the duty, then you can have rights against anyone for

01:43:41.580 anything because you have no duty not to infringe on them. I just want to say dump the duty is a

01:43:45.400 funny phrase, but go ahead. It is. I think I'm very, uh, yeah, it's true.

01:43:49.260 Not that we're childish here. I think on that elevated note, I want to do something that we

01:43:54.400 haven't done in a while. I want to, this has been a great conversation. Uh, I want to wrap out the

01:43:58.760 show with 10 rapid fire questions from our dailywire.com subscribers. Alicia is going to bring them

01:44:04.560 to us. Here's the rules. What, whoever the question is, uh, addressed at, they're the

01:44:09.860 only one to make an answer. And it's a, and it's a fast pithy answer. We want to get through 10

01:44:14.500 rapid fire questions. Alicia. All right. The first question goes to Michael Knowles. A dailywire

01:44:21.380 member wants to know they live in a liberal Mecca and they're considering leaving like the dailywire

01:44:26.400 did, but should they be considering this? And what do you think their options and decision

01:44:30.820 making should be considering they don't have a job or housing situation set up yet?

01:44:34.960 Well, you're probably more likely to get a job in a cheaper house and a conservative place. So I think

01:44:38.860 those are both marks actually in favor of coming here. I love it. I wish we came here sooner. I love

01:44:44.360 being in a red state and specifically in Tennessee. All I will have a caveat here is I feel I got a lot

01:44:54.400 out of growing up in left-wing places because I learned all the stupidest arguments and it cost me a lot 0.98

01:44:59.600 of time and it impelled a lot of bad behavior, but I feel I came out stronger and wiser for it. 0.98

01:45:04.540 That was a constructive process. However, if you're already formed and comfort is your,

01:45:09.320 is your goal, come on over baby. Tennessee is fabulous. 1.00

01:45:13.640 All right. This question goes to Matt. People want to know, do you think that the general public

01:45:19.280 or major corporations will ever grow a spine and just say no to the woke mob and the Twitterati?

01:45:25.020 No. No. I think Matt took that, like those instructions a little too seriously. Can we

01:45:36.760 give him like 280 characters? I think he said it all. All right. Drew, who would win a cage

01:45:45.960 match between Gina Carano and the entire Daily Wire team? Oh, we'd be killed. Are you kidding?

01:45:50.700 She'd kill us. In my youth, I might've given her one, I might've gotten one slug in, but now it's, 0.54

01:45:56.720 it's over. Yeah. Media matters. In his youth, Andrew Klavan would have punched a woman.

01:46:03.460 Headlines write themselves. All right. Jeremy, people want to know what kind of cigars are you

01:46:10.300 guys smoking? I'm not smoking tonight. So I'm going to kick the question over to Mickey.

01:46:15.100 Little Davidoff Colorado Claro, not a super duper expensive cigar, but it's got six years age on it

01:46:20.960 from our buddies at our old shop in LA. Ben, it is award season, even though it seems a little

01:46:26.940 weird in this age of COVID and people want to know what are your Oscar picks? Oh my God. Well,

01:46:31.880 all the ones that they've talked about for Oscars this year absolutely suck or I haven't seen them.

01:46:35.960 So I really haven't seen many good movies this year. Run, hide, fight should win all of the

01:46:39.480 Oscars. Aside from, aside from run, hide, fight, the unproduced Gina Carano film should obviously

01:46:44.340 also be nominated for next year's Oscars. 2022. 2022. I, you know, I'm trying to think of anything

01:46:49.880 that's really, have you guys seen anything of this year? I'm like, I'm really, I'm really trying to

01:46:53.360 all the Oscar movies. It's like, call me by your moonlight or some nonsense and no one watches it.

01:46:57.280 Gentleman was, was that this year? Cause that was a good guy. Richie film. Okay. I'll have to,

01:47:01.640 I'll have to give that one a look. Really fun. I got nothing. All right. Uh, Jeremy, this,

01:47:06.560 this question is for you. A daily wire member wants to know which actor are you kind of hoping

01:47:11.440 gets canceled next? So you guys can snatch them off. Well, I have a list. Uh, I, I, I hate to say

01:47:18.320 an answer to that, but it's so terrible. I will say that on the same day that fire Gina Carano,

01:47:23.040 uh, was trending, uh, fire Chris Pratt was trending and for God's sakes, Hollywood, please,

01:47:29.960 please, please send Chris Pratt to us.

01:47:32.060 I love me some Chris Pratt out of all the Chris's he's obviously the best. Alrighty. Uh, Michael,

01:47:40.100 do you think that we need more conservatives going into politics or going into cultural positions like

01:47:44.800 filmmaking and producing and editing and all those things? Well, I think the answer is yes. And I also

01:47:51.000 think it's a little bit of a blurry distinction, you know, because obviously politics, the biggest

01:47:55.320 definition of it is what we all do together, but it's a, it's a two pronged approach because

01:47:59.780 forget elected politicians, they're always going to be sociopaths running for that.

01:48:03.500 It's the bureaucracy that we lose in the actual administrative state and the entire cultural

01:48:08.540 apparatus. And we just don't have anybody in any of those areas. So we, we need to go into both and

01:48:14.000 both, both are important. I don't think it's only when the culture and forget about politics. And I

01:48:18.320 don't think it's only focus on bureaucratic politics and ignore it and technology and tech and

01:48:23.140 everything. Yeah. Matt, uh, earlier on Twitter, I saw that you retweeted Tommy Lahren. She said Trump

01:48:29.940 DeSantis 2024. You said you agreed with half of the ticket other than, other than Ron DeSantis.

01:48:36.900 Who would you pick? Like, what are your top three for the GOP in 2024? I don't have a top three. I like

01:48:42.780 Ron DeSantis. Um, I, I hate almost all politicians. So for me to even say I like him is, is me going out

01:48:49.300 on a limb and I, I give him, you know, that we've got three years, four years left before. So he

01:48:53.780 could easily disappoint me, but I'll be ready to toss him to the curb if he does. But, um,

01:48:57.920 Ron DeSantis is great. He's got the governor of my excellent new state, Florida. He is a stud.

01:49:04.640 And I really feel we don't have time to get into all this. It's supposed to be rapid fire,

01:49:08.360 but I feel very strongly that, uh, Ron DeSantis on the top of the ticket is a great idea. Trump on the

01:49:15.180 top of the ticket. I don't know if we want to do all this again in 2024. Um, so I, I hate to

01:49:21.200 interrupt because I said we had to be rapid fire, but Candace Owens could, would be formidable if she 1.00

01:49:26.040 actually decided to make good on her tweet threat. It is true. It would be formidable. It is a true

01:49:30.600 story. I wouldn't want to run against her. I also, just to put a little plug in here, I would like to

01:49:35.140 be the first podcast host, you know, so there's other, there are other Republican politicians who could

01:49:40.420 be out there. Wouldn't mind doing a podcast. Yeah. I'm just throwing that out there.

01:49:44.380 Something I'm encouraging people to do. We all know Michael is hoping that Ben runs,

01:49:50.060 so then he can get his radio slot. That's true. That's the way I could actually become the first

01:49:53.640 podcast host. If I took his podcast. Drew, do you plan on double masking? No, I don't even single

01:50:01.560 mask. I only wear a mask when I walk into a store and on the front of the store, it says you have to

01:50:08.400 have a mask to, you have to wear a mask to enter the store. Otherwise I haven't worn a mask since this

01:50:13.480 whole thing beginning. I mean, Drew's immune to death. That's what happens after you've been

01:50:16.840 dead for five years. If I were, if I were going to die, I'd have died already. Let's face it. 0.67

01:50:21.240 I just say, I know I'm not supposed to speak, but, uh, but on the mask thing, I discovered this

01:50:25.600 weekend that when you're wearing a suit jacket, if you wear the neck gaiter, which is my move and

01:50:30.200 you wear it around your neck, it actually looks like an ascot. Um, so it's kind of, it kind of

01:50:33.820 works like that. So yeah, no, I haven't done, I haven't done anything that anything that Anthony

01:50:39.720 Fauci says I do the opposite. I've heard that I've heard that, um, I did an Anthony Fauci

01:50:46.300 impersonation the other day and, uh, I heard from a lot of our listeners that your Anthony

01:50:50.140 Fauci impersonation, this is the only nice thing I've ever said to Michael Knowles. I don't know

01:50:53.460 what you're talking about. In 10 or 15 years, maybe I'll have done a good impression.

01:51:01.000 That is good. Solid stuff. We know how Ben feels about Fauci and the vaccine, but Ben,

01:51:10.300 somebody wants to know if you get the vaccine, is it okay? I know it's against Jewish law to get 1.00

01:51:14.660 a tattoo, but this Daily Wire subscriber wants to know, would you get it tattooed on your arm or

01:51:18.820 somewhere that you got the vaccine? So then you don't have to wear a mask anymore and you can go to

01:51:21.980 a baseball game. As I've been hearing you talk about a lot on your podcast. So a couple of things.

01:51:26.160 One, Jews not big into tattoos. Two, Jews super not big into governments giving you tattoos. 0.71

01:51:31.880 Right? I think it was an optional. It was optional so that you can go with your dad to a White Sox game.

01:51:37.920 It sounds weird to me. Like, I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but it's kind of

01:51:41.320 uncomfortable. I mean, uh, you know, but, um, yeah, I'm, I'm not in favor of, as a general liberty

01:51:48.260 matter, I'm not in favor of the idea that you should be barred from all public places unless

01:51:51.920 you have a vaccine green card. I do think that our public officials are doing us an enormous

01:51:57.300 disservice in continuing to lie to us and say that you can't go back to regular life after

01:52:01.880 you've had the vaccine. It's literally the only tool that we know of right now that is going to

01:52:05.840 give you the kind of safety, particularly if you're older from the disease that would reduce

01:52:10.620 this to below the risk of the flu. I mean, if you get these vaccines, these vaccines are 99%

01:52:14.660 effective in preventing death, 95% effective in preventing serious illness and 90% effective in

01:52:19.860 preventing transmission. So this bizarre idea that after you get the vaccine, you're going to be

01:52:23.680 still living with the mask and socially distancing in 2022 is anti-science. It is bizarre. And it

01:52:28.840 actually encourages people not to get the vaccine. Cause if I'm 37 and I'm thinking to myself, okay,

01:52:33.440 well there's may, there may be like the risk of getting a little sick from the vaccine. I won't

01:52:36.440 feel so good. I don't know what the long-term effects of the vaccine are. And listen, if I get COVID,

01:52:39.900 I'm not going to die anyway. I'm 37. And then you tell me, okay, but you can go back to regular

01:52:44.480 life. I might think to myself, okay, that, that seems like it's worth the risk. But if you keep

01:52:48.160 telling 25 year olds that they can't go back to regular life after they get the vaccine,

01:52:51.960 who in their right mind would get the vaccine? And you have all of these idiots like Fauci 1.00

01:52:55.840 saying, you may, maybe we'll never go back to our regular life. Maybe we'll never do it. Never. 1.00

01:53:00.820 And it's like, what are you, why, why? It's, I mean, it's a scientific miracle. Right. First of all,

01:53:07.060 that we've been ripping on big business a lot. Let me just say that the greatest thing in the world

01:53:10.480 is big pharma, big pharma. They're unbelievable at what they do. And the only problem,

01:53:14.440 they generated a cure for a disease in less than a year. It's unbelievable. But, but as far as kind

01:53:19.000 of the general concept of the government mandating vaccine cards to go anywhere, uh, that, that raises,

01:53:24.900 I think, serious Liberty concerns. I think frankly, people would start forging them to go wherever

01:53:28.520 they want anyway. They're, they're, they're making the same mistake now that they made in March.

01:53:32.400 Again, it's just being replayed because in March they told everyone don't wear masks. It's stupid 1.00

01:53:36.860 to wear masks. The surgeon general said people stop wearing masks. And the reason they said that is 1.00

01:53:40.340 because they didn't want us to run out and they didn't trust us to not run out and buy all the

01:53:43.520 medical masks. And then they wanted it to go to all the nurses and not to us. And so for now,

01:53:47.640 now with the vaccine, they're doing the same thing again, where they're saying, Oh no, you know,

01:53:52.540 if you get the vaccine, you still have to wear the mask, uh, because they don't trust people who

01:53:58.660 aren't vaccinated to not wear the mask, because they think that if they, if they start allowing

01:54:02.280 people to, well, if you wear them, if you, if you get the vaccine, you don't have to wear a mask

01:54:05.360 and think everyone's not going to wear it. They're not trusting. They seem to, they seem to think

01:54:09.120 there are three choices here and there are only two, right? They think that there is a third choice

01:54:12.440 where everybody gets vaccinated and then doesn't go out and party. There's only two choices.

01:54:16.700 Everybody gets vaccinated and parties and nobody gets vaccinated and parties. There is no third

01:54:21.640 choice where everybody continues to lock down until the end of time, especially after being

01:54:24.940 vaccinated. It's idiotic. Like this is one thing that Israel is doing right with the vaccine. 1.00

01:54:29.020 They've done a lot of things right. But one thing they're doing right, I mean, they have shot in a

01:54:31.540 shot night at the bars. They're telling people like, come and get a shot and we'll give you a free shot.

01:54:35.600 They're encouraging people to actively do this. And that is a, that is a smart thing to do.

01:54:41.280 Yeah. All right. Uh, Matt, people want to know how is it finally being a daily wire HQ in Nashville

01:54:49.500 and how different is it doing your show from there? Uh, it's pretty nice. I have a, I have a

01:54:54.400 series of complaints that I could, uh, much of them having to do with the break room. Uh, there's a lot

01:55:01.200 of, you know, the other day I wanted to grab some half and half and all they had was coconut milk and

01:55:05.480 like soy milk and almond milk. I have everything except for, for real milk. Um, there's also a lot

01:55:12.760 of seaweed related snacks that I don't really understand. It must be an LA thing, but I think

01:55:18.940 you should take it up with your supervisor. I will. I've already registered with HR, but they

01:55:23.720 thought that away. So said it wasn't a valid complaint. They're not going to be investigating

01:55:28.880 that. Too bad. So sad. Michael Knowles. I heard from a little birdie maybe named Dave Rubin that

01:55:34.380 he's slightly bitter that the night before the daily wire announced their move to Nashville,

01:55:37.780 you claimed that you were staying here in California. I was there. He wants to know,

01:55:41.960 was it worth it? So there were, there were a couple, couple of these nights. Rubin never forgave

01:55:47.360 me for this. Now in my defense, nobody tells me nothing around here. Okay. In my, in my defense,

01:55:53.880 seriously, these guys, they're not telling me stuff. To be fair. I didn't want you to come.

01:55:56.840 Yeah. Please, Dave, get Knowles to stay. But it was funny because I was at Dave, this was actually,

01:56:03.440 we had our, truly our farewell dinner. It was a, you, me, Drew, uh, Adam Carolla, Prager was there.

01:56:09.900 And then we all, you guys, I think you guys were already gone at this point. And then we really

01:56:12.960 hightailed it. But I was at Dave's place and he said, you know, Knowles, you know, Knowles,

01:56:18.000 we're going to just take back California and we're going to, you know, we're going to just win

01:56:23.140 back the hearts and minds and get rid of Newsome. And I was like, yeah, man, hell yeah. We're

01:56:27.320 going to, yeah, FOA and yeah, all this stuff. And then like six hours later, it was like, yo,

01:56:31.240 bye Dave. I'm going to Tennessee. See you out there, buddy. So what you're telling me is that

01:56:35.420 you're a liar who personality mirrors. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. You ever think 1.00

01:56:40.440 about acting? Yeah, maybe, you know, I might. Is there a part in that Gina Carano movie? Dave Rubin ain't

01:56:46.660 staying in California. No, he'll be, he'll be in Florida tomorrow. It's like, you're going to walk

01:56:50.780 outside. We're going to grow old together as Jews in Florida.

01:56:53.140 Alicia, how many questions have we done? At least like one and a half. We've done more

01:57:00.380 than 10, but I'm just still like rolling through them because I, you know, you hadn't stopped

01:57:03.980 me. Last question. All right. Last question goes to you, God King. And it kind of piggybacks

01:57:09.760 on you asking if Michael, if he had considered getting into acting, which he hadn't done in

01:57:14.060 a while, unless that's what he's doing every day on his podcast. Will any of the Daily Wire

01:57:21.100 talent be making cameos in the upcoming Daily Wire entertainment scripted shows?

01:57:26.340 Ooh, wouldn't you like to know, fair audience? All that I'm willing to say on this topic is

01:57:32.400 yes. I meant to say, ah, listen, be sure to tune in for Ben's first episode of the hit

01:57:41.880 new show debunked this Friday. We just know it's going to be a hit Ben's in it. The series

01:57:45.440 will be available exclusively to Daily Wire members to you. So use code debunked to save

01:57:50.520 25% off your membership today over at dailywire.com. Don't miss the opportunity to see Ben brandish

01:57:56.060 facts and logic. I want, in my original draft, I said facts and or logic. Someone has obviously

01:58:01.280 corrected the teleprompter. Thanks again for joining us for the Daily Wire,

01:58:05.360 the Empire Strikes Back stage. We will see you next time.

The Michael Knowles Show - February 25, 2021

The Daily Wire Strikes Back(stage)： Canceling Cancel Culture

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