Daily Wire Backstage: March Madness Edition pits Ben Shapiro against Media Matters’ smear tactics, exposing its 2006–2007 private investigator plans to dig up dirt on Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson over old Bubba the Love Sponge jokes—while ignoring David Brock’s own transphobic and antisemitic past. The panel mocks International Women’s Day as communist propaganda, slams liberal arts colleges as credential mills (Harvard’s grade inflation, $99k degrees for no skills), and dismisses Captain Marvel’s "tedious slogans" as woke overreach. They argue policing cuts in Baltimore fueled murder spikes, not racism, and that boycotts backfire—like Chick-fil-A’s stock rising under pressure. The takeaway: Leftist outrage is weaponized hypocrisy, while free speech and meritocracy demand execution, not performative virtue. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey there, you're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, where I join Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring for an in-depth conversation on politics and culture, and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers.
Enjoy.
Fake laugh in three, two.
Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage.
March Madness.
What is March Madness?
Who writes this crap?
Is that the one with basketball?
Basketball.
Oh, yeah, the one with the hoop.
It's where you pay somebody to say that your kid's a basketball star.
So they can get in there.
Oh, yeah, March Madness.
That's how I got into junior college.
We've really hit a new low in terms of titling these shows.
It's a slow news month, my friends.
I'm Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire with a lowercase G and a lowercase K.
And tonight we are going to do our honest best to fill something like 90 minutes.
Has that always been our theme song?
God knows.
I've never heard of that.
Tonight, we're going to talk politics.
We're going to talk culture.
We're going to talk about Tucker Carlson's response to Media Matters hit job and why that matters to all of us.
And we'll also be taking questions from our subscribers.
Go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Give us your measly $99 a year.
We're going to send you Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr.
And we're going to do something tonight that we have never done before.
So pay attention.
If you sign up and become a Daily Wire annual subscriber during this actual live broadcast tonight, you and a guest will be entered into a raffle to win, drum roll, don't do a drum roll, a free trip to Los Angeles to sit in on a taping of this very show.
So I'm going to say it all again.
If you give us your $100, you will not only get access to the greatest conservative content online, the Ben Shapiro show, the Michael Knowles show, whatever it is that Drew does for a living.
You will not only get the leftist tears, hot or cold tumbler, you will also get to get onto an airplane, fly your rear end to Los Angeles, put on some sort of mask so that you can cut through the cigar smoke and sit in on a taping of the Daily Wire backstage.
We look forward to getting to meet you, take one picture with you, never talk to you again.
All right.
With me tonight, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, Michael Knowles, and the lovely Alicia Kraus.
Why do they always make me say the lovely Alicia Krauss?
But imagine if what I said with me tonight, the lovely Ben Shapiro, the king of the world.
The oh, so talented Michael Knowles, the piercing eyes of Andrew Clavin and Alicia Krauss.
She'll be joining us here a bit later to bring us your questions.
Get over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, become a subscriber, enter for a chance to fly out here and meet us as we tape an episode of this show.
In the meanwhile, can we add to that offer that they sit in for me?
Yeah, so it'll be like, and here for a piercing political analysis is Bob.
Bob.
Hey, Bob.
Yeah, no, they can't sit in for you.
I think meeting you is the only reason anyone will do this.
You don't know me.
That's the only reason that's any way appealing.
We were originally going to say, you get to fly out and spend a day shadowing Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring.
And then when even our own staff said, who's that?
It's not going to get us anywhere.
We're going to talk about all kinds of things tonight.
Tucker Carlson, we're going to talk about International Women's Day, which happened over the weekend.
I'm still getting over the celebration.
I did see Captain Marvel because Drew is a sadist, so he sent me down there.
I think we'll talk a little bit about college and why you shouldn't go.
Since I'm the only one who didn't go, I have a perspective on this.
But first, I know a lot of people tune in for my clunky segues.
That's wild.
Tucker Carlson's Shock Jock Show00:15:39
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And if you're like me, you're particularly grateful for sponsors on a news week like this week when we're watching Tucker Carlson face down a hit job from Media Matters.
Media Matters is the worst organization in America.
Yeah.
They're truly, it's an evil organization.
It was started, for those who don't know the background of Media Matters, Media Matters was started by essentially Hillary Clinton as a way to target the so-called vast right-wing conspiracy.
David Brock.
David Brock, the smear artist, who the formerly allegedly cocaine addled smear artist, who has spent his entire career just going after his political opponents while mistreating his own employees, allegedly.
And Media Matters was specifically designed to go after people on the right.
It is not a media watchdog.
The media lie to people.
They say oh it's a media watchdog.
No, a media watchdog is an organization that follows the entire media and then calls people out on their mistakes.
Media Matters is the kind of organization where internal memos showed several years back that they were actively talking about hiring private investigators to shadow hosts at Fox News to dig up crap in their private lives so they could use it against them and take them off the air.
Media Matters is now designating, obviously, with Tucker Carlson, some poor sap who's using their sociology degree to good benefit by watching 100 hours or listening to 100 hours of Tucker Carlson on old episodes of Bubba the Love Sponge from 2006 to 2000.
And this was this, and we have been told that what Tucker said on there is deeply important to everyone.
They are deeply offended.
Now, a couple quick notes and then, and then I'm just giving the intro here.
A couple quick notes.
Media Matters is badly motivated.
We all know this.
When Joy Reed of MSNBC was caught in bad old blog posts, Angela Coruson, the head of MMFA, Media Matters for America, came out and said, no, this is a right-wing smear.
Of course, we shouldn't go after any of her advertisers.
It's all a right-wing smear.
He himself has now been caught in a bunch of old posts.
There will be no consequence to any of that.
And Media Matters deployed a bunch of protesters to Fox News, not to call for Tucker's ouster, but to call for a complete advertising boycott of the entire network of Fox News because they don't like Fox News.
Because Tucker Carlson was on Fox News when he said those things on Bubba.
No, no, no.
He's on MSBC.
And here is the kicker to all of this.
Media Matters designed as a hit group is being given all sorts of credibility by people who do not give two craps what Tucker said.
I was never a fan of Shock Jock Radio.
I don't like Shock Jock Radio.
A lot of what Tucker said was a joke.
Some of what Tucker said wasn't.
It's Shock Jock Radio.
It's specifically designed for people to go on and say the most offensive things they can possibly say for the listener.
And the attempt to go after Tucker for this old stuff is not in good faith.
It's not an attempt to ask him what he meant by it.
It's not an attempt to garner his views.
It is the same deal they do with every prominent conservative figure.
They try to go back, find something that they can cast as embarrassing, and then call for an apology.
If you apologize and they step on your neck and say you did something wrong, obviously, that means advertisers should pull.
If you don't apologize, they say you obviously still believe that bad stuff, so your advertisers should pull.
They go after you to destroy you.
It is despicable.
It is despicable because, again, it's not about you said something in the here and now that was bad, and now we're all reacting to the here and now.
It is you pretending to be outraged about a thing about which you are eminently non-outraged.
It's also funny to me.
You bring up that it was on a Shock Jock radio show.
You know, if you take yourself back in time 10 years, the heady days of yesteryear, conservatives weren't the audience for that show.
Right, right.
So Tucker Carlson, of course, at the time on MSNBC, goes on Bubba the Love Sponge, something that almost every conservative in America, when they read this story yesterday, thought, who?
What?
Because that entire format existed basically as a rebuke of the right.
It basically was a left-wing comedy format.
And to me, that's actually the worst aspect of it is we now live, we talked last time we were together about how we live in a graceless age.
And I think that's a really important subject matter.
We also live in an era where there is no comedy.
Absolutely no comedy is allowed.
You're not allowed to be satirical, satire is dead.
You're not allowed to parody or totally through the looking glass on parody.
I'd never, like you, I've never cared for the shock jock format.
Maybe when I was 16 years old, I might have grinned a few times listening to, was it Tom Likas?
You were in that once or twice, but never a format that really did anything for me.
But we live in a better country when someone can go on a shock jock radio show and say outrageously terrible things and everyone snickers at them and then we move on with our lives.
You know, there's something I want to add to the Media Matters picture, though.
David Brock was the former boyfriend of the guy who ran the pizza parlor that was the center of Pizzagate.
When the Pizzagate rumors started, that was when the idea of fake news before Trump took it over started to spread.
And David Brock said openly, we are going to use this to impose on social media censors who will cut down conservative voices.
Barack Obama picked up the thread.
Hillary Clinton picked up the thread.
This is a very, very sophisticated organization meant to silence the voices of the opposition.
It's not, as you say, it is not meant to call people out.
It is not meant to question ideas.
And this thing, I mean, look, as far as I'm concerned, for that day when Tucker Carlson stood up to these guys and made that incredibly precise opening speech about the outrage mob, for that one minute, he was the most important person in America.
And the reason I say that is the right to joke around and make stupid jokes and say things that maybe you shouldn't say, that's part of free speech.
And I don't think it should cost you your job.
And by the way, this whole thing, he said it 10 years ago, I don't care if he said it yesterday.
I don't care if he was sitting in a bar and somebody heard him have a couple and say something he shouldn't have said.
That's part of being a human being.
It's part of being a guy, especially.
Guys say stupid things.
We like to step over the line.
We're jocular.
We like to step over the line.
We say them sometimes to make a point, sometimes because they strike us as funny in the moment.
We all do it.
And everybody's doing it.
I will say, I do think there's a difference between old material and new material.
New material, we get to react in real time to the stuff that's being said now.
There's something particularly off-putting about digging up old stuff that we were not outraged over a decade ago.
And now you're re-aggressing.
We have to distinguish between the jokes people make and the things that they are actually saying in the middle of the day.
Of course I agree that we should make a distinction between jokes and people's actual beliefs.
Of course I believe that we should be able to say terrible jokes.
I think that it's not only fundamental to freedom, it's like it's an essential aspect of how men express themselves.
It's a form of de-escalation.
Like racist jokes, there are two kinds of racist jokes.
There are racist jokes that are meant to demean people of other races and people who make those jokes are racist.
Then there's racist jokes which are meant to diffuse differences. between the races and those jokes traditionally were made by all kinds of people of good faith.
By the way, you would have comedy troupes where these jokes would be made between the races toward each other.
And that was a part of the de-escalation during the civil rights movement.
So this brings me to what I actually hate.
And the reason that I fundamentally agree that it's even worse to go back into the past is because the rules have changed.
I disagree with the new rules, but I do recognize that there are new rules.
I want to fight against them.
I want to push back against them.
But we push back within a certain framework.
It's particularly disturbing to go back to a time when, you know, like next we're going to go back to Howard Stern and start finding all kinds of things that were said on the Howard Stern show.
Well, they already have, I mean, right?
They go back to friends and they say you can't watch the show friends anymore, the most popular show of the 1990s.
You're not supposed to watch it anymore because there are episodes in which people are joking about gay marriage or people are making jokes about fat people or people making racial jokes.
It's like, oh, well, you hit the title.
They're trying to superimpose modern sensibilities back onto people in a different era who abided by different sensibility.
It's also, I mean, it's fundamentally dishonest in an extraordinary way.
And that is that once you, what are they, what exactly is the ask?
So if you want to make society better, there has to be an ask.
So what exactly is the ask?
So I say something on my show today that's wrong.
And the ask is, okay, I have to come on the show tomorrow and I have to correct it.
That's a fair ask.
I say something that is offensive or terrible.
It's my job to apologize to the people that I was wrong to.
I'm not going to say the people who were offended because that puts the onus on them.
If I did something wrong, the onus is on me.
But what is the ask?
When somebody said something bad 13 years ago and no one took offense, is Tucker supposed to apologize to media matters?
Because those people can go F themselves.
Is Tucker supposed to apologize to people who are offended now by comments that didn't make a dent 13 years ago?
I mean, like, here's a situation in which I would say Tucker should apologize.
So Tucker, for example, said, made some comments about Warren Jeffs, who was, I guess, tried and convicted for facilitating rape.
He was the cult leader and he was facilitating child marriages between 27-year-old and 16-year-old.
And Tucker made some comments about how he thinks that guy should be free.
Let's say that Warren Jeff's victims had come forward and said, I was offended by that.
And Tucker said, listen, I was on Bubba the Love Sponge.
I was saying stupid stuff.
I apologize.
That seems to me that that would be a fair recompense.
But who is Tucker supposed to apologize to?
The world at large?
He's just like, he doesn't owe me a damn thing.
He doesn't owe me an apology for something that he said.
Like, why?
This is what the left does.
The left gets offended on behalf of other people.
You'll notice nine times out of ten, there's always white liberals who are pretending to be offended on behalf of every allegedly aggrieved minority.
And it's even further.
Context is so important.
Context, particular circumstances are important to everything in life.
And so when I speak in public, I don't swear.
I just try not to.
I don't like to do it.
When I'm at the bar, I talk like a dirty sailor.
And I'm not sorry that I do that.
I don't think it's wrong that I do that.
I think it is right and just.
I think it is perfectly appropriate to those contexts.
So Tucker Carlson is invited on this shock jock show.
Now, you could say, maybe you shouldn't go on a shock jock show.
Maybe that's career advice.
Maybe the leftists at MSNBC should have told him to stay off of it instead of encouraging him to go on it.
But instead, he goes on the show.
Is he supposed to go and play Bach in a rock band?
Is that what he's going to do?
Is he going to go start playing the Brandenburg concerto when he's with the beats?
This is interesting.
And I think that the femininization of Christianity, which led to the femininization of American society generally, really contributes to this, which is men do compartmentalize behaviors.
Women, generally speaking, compartmentalize relationships.
There's a lot that's interesting to unpack from both of those points, from both of those distinct from that distinction.
But if you take men who compartmentalize behaviors, It doesn't just apply to behaviors within a sexual or romantic relationship.
It is a compartmentalizing of all kinds of behaviors within certain contexts.
And it is a legitimate, I agree with you, there is a legitimate argument to be made that what is wrong in one context is not wrong in another.
I mean, obviously, we can come up with huge examples.
Killing someone in war is different than killing someone on the streets that you can take as killing someone on Bubba the Love Sponge is a different thing.
But even with coarse language, even with baudy jokes, even with sort of the sort of ways that men use disparagement as a form of camaraderie, things like that are not always appropriate.
There's not like, I'm not saying universally people should be allowed to behave this way.
I'm saying in certain contexts, it's appropriate for people to behave.
But this is a weaponization of shock, and it's been used now for 30, 40 years against the entirety of Western culture.
Before the show began, we were talking about all the references, anti-Jewish references that go like a thread through all of Western literature.
Now, when they teach literature, they go back and say, well, here's an anti-female thing.
Here's an anti-black thing.
The famous one was the attack on Jane Austen for supporting the English Empire, simply, the British Empire, simply by writing her books.
I mean, that was this Edward Saeed argument.
It's been an attempt to silence all of Western civilization by this targeted outrage that doesn't extend to everything that everybody does.
I mean, nobody is going to say, oh, Don Lemon demonized white people, which he did, white men.
Nobody's going to say that.
Here's a great example of this that I've heard you talk about with our friend Dave Rubin.
That in one context, your position towards Dave Rubin's part is political and as part of your public advocacy that you do as a political voice.
In another context, it's congenial because it's based on your friendship with Dave Rubin, your general support of his well-being and his happiness.
Another example might be the use of certain pronouns.
Right, I've said this about transgender pronouns.
Absolutely.
Exactly right.
In public, if somebody says, are transgender pronouns the right pronouns to use, I will say no because I don't believe that there is a set of pronouns that is not connected to biological sex.
If I'm sitting across the table from a person who's transgender, I'll use whatever pronouns they feel like because we're out to dinner.
Why would I be a jerk just to be a jerk?
It's called being polite.
Because context does matter when trying to make a moral determination about someone's behavior.
Of course it does.
The way that you can tell that this is supreme bad faith is the pod bros today, Pod Save America, they came forward, the Obama bros, they came forward and they were actively stumping for people to attend MMFA's rally outside of Fox News.
These guys make their money the same way that we do.
And they make money off advertising on programs like this one.
And because I make my money off this, although I held this position before we ever did this.
Of course.
With that said, understanding how advertising works in this space and that advertisers should be able to advertise on a wide variety of political programs without being perceived to have endorsed any of the views on those political programs, I have never called, nor would I call, for a boycott against the Pod Save America bros, even though I think that they are actively promoting policies that are detrimental to the country, actively promoting a vision of America that I think is false, dangerous, and harmful.
I still think that the advertisers who advertise on Pod Save America have every right to do so, and boycotting them is morally wrong.
And it's good for America that many of the people who advertise on Pod Save America also advertise with us.
That's exactly right.
Policy Genius Bashir00:14:38
Of course it is.
But the comfort level, you can see that there's a tool of power because the people at Pod Save America, if they truly believed that the boycottability was mutual, if they truly feared the possibility that we were all going to go after their advertisers, they tripped their position in a hard time.
But this is what was so good about Tucker's statement is that he pointed out that we're not playing by the same rules.
We're in a conversation.
They're in a jihad.
We're trying to argue our point of view and win.
They're trying to silence us.
They do it everywhere.
And when what Tucker said was that the right too often plays along, the right too often pretends that there's some kind of legitimate thing going on and we have to pull back.
And I don't think we do, especially, I mean, because I do all the satire.
I say all these absurd things that I know are absurd and you know are absurd and I'm kidding around.
But I know that you could take those out of context and nail me with them.
I just don't care, you know, because I do not feel, I do not feel they have the right to do that to me.
And so I feel it's only right for me to stand up to him.
I think that is the argument.
But this is where the left really plays on, I think, the morality of the right, meaning that we all acknowledge, for example, that Tucker said some stuff that we don't like.
Of course.
Right.
Okay, that stuff is wrong.
So instead of, so what the left will do is they'll find the thing that they say is what he did wrong.
And we may agree that it's wrong.
And we'll say, like, as a broader principle, we're not going to call for boycotts or his destruction for a thing he said 13 years ago.
And they say, ah, you agree with the thing that he said 13 years ago.
This is where, and you saw some of this from the right.
This is where Tucker is right.
But the lesson can be extended too far in the other direction.
So where Tucker is right is he says, okay, well, what you guys are doing is in bad faith.
You are not attempting to police the dialogue.
You are attempting to come after me and destroy me on the basis of these old statements.
And there are people on the right who fall for this.
And you saw this.
You saw some people on the right going, well, Tucker's not the hill to die.
I didn't really want to die on this hill defending this kind of matter.
That's the worst thing.
And which is a bunch of nonsense.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
Because if there's any hill to die on, it's the hill of you don't get to dig up people's old crap, use it against them without even asking them what their opinion on is on it now, specifically in bad faith to destroy their career.
Like you don't get to do that.
It's a bad thing to do.
But on the other side, what will happen is people will say, okay, well, then I'm just going to double down on everything.
So somebody says something bad today, like an actual bad thing, and it's today.
Should that person apologize for it?
And people on the right will go, listen, if I apologize, I'm acknowledging the left point.
No, sometimes you have to apologize.
This is what I liked about Tucker's monologue.
Tucker said, good people, when they do something wrong, they apologize.
But I'm not going to apologize to hyenas.
I'm not going to apologize to the jackals who have no interest in receiving an apology and who are looking to destroy me on the basis of this old stuff.
As I said, I'm sure that if a victim of Warren Justice came to Tucker and said, listen, what you said on Bubba the Love Sponge in 2007, I found I didn't even know about it.
Now I heard about it.
I'm offended.
I'll bet you that Tucker would say, you know what, I shouldn't have said it.
It was the wrong thing to say.
But this brings us back to our conversation last time we were together where we were discussing the graceless civilization.
And you made the point that from a tactical point of view, it's always wrong now to apologize.
Yes.
If you apologize now, you are putting your neck in the guillotine.
That's right.
I mean, you saw it with Chris Cuomo.
Did you see Chris Cuomo did this insane monologue?
Objective journalist Chris Cuomo, block of wood, less smart of the Cuomo brothers, which is an amazing statement.
And Chris Cuomo did it.
He did a monologue on CNN where he said, Tucker Carlson is a coward.
How do I know he's a coward?
Because he's not apologizing for these statements.
And he's also not going on his show tonight and saying the same statements over again.
It's like, okay, in that one sentence, you have set up a catch-22 for him, which is if he apologizes, then you're going to say, ah, you see, he knows that he was wrong, and that's why he should be boycotted, because he's that kind of person.
He should never have said it in the first place.
And even he acknowledges that.
And if he doesn't apologize, he says, well, he's not apologizing because he still agrees with it.
So why doesn't he just double down on it today?
You know, but beyond this, and this is something that really bothers me, is the entire definition of the offense.
Usually it's racism they come after us for.
The entire definition of racism has now become any glitch, any tribal glitch in the human mind that causes you to behave in a certain way when, for instance, a black guy gets on an elevator.
If you get in a car, near side swipe with a car, and you see the guy in the car is black or Jewish or female, you're very likely to shout, you know, you stupid blank, whatever the kind of person it is.
I'm sorry, that's not racism.
That's a little glitch in the human person that we can overcome by goodwill.
You know, it is not racism to sort of think like, oh, you know, I grew up with people who look like you.
I kind of feel more comfortable with that.
You can overcome all those things.
And what the left does is it takes these human foibles, which we all have, and we all say, and it makes, turns them into an aspect of your philosophy, which is not true.
Racism is a philosophy.
I know racist people.
I know people who believe that other people are inferior to them because of the way they were born.
That is true racism.
I oppose it with all my soul.
I truly do it.
You guys know I do.
You've heard me rant about it.
But it's not the same thing as the fact that we're all human beings and we have these flaws and we have these little tribal glitches.
To call people out for that is the first time.
It's the only acceptable standard for behavior.
And it has to be perfect perfection.
Because if you were ever imperfect, this is like you can't even tell a story about how you were once imperfect as a cautionary tale.
He has the Liam Beeson.
And what they do is they take one instance, what you're talking about.
And I'll disagree with you to the extent that I think that if you're in the car and somebody sideswipes you and it's a woman and you just start shouting at her as a woman, that that would be a sexist incident.
But that does not mean that you are a sexist.
In other words, I think we're saying the same thing, but I'm trying to hone in a little more precisely.
A racist moment does not make you a racist for your entire life because all we are as human beings are a series of moments.
That's all we are.
And then the way we judge your character is by weighing up the totality of those moments and your viewpoint.
And that's how we decide whether you're a good person, whether you're a racist or not, whether you're somebody who you should trust or not.
There's no one who's perfect on this earth.
And what we have decided is that we are going to take one instance, one moment, where you did a wrong thing, and we will use that as the key moment that is the flashpoint that shows your behavior.
The left does this about America, by the way.
This is their favorite thing to do.
I was ranting about this on my show, I think, yesterday.
It was really terrible.
There was a young man named Victor, I think it was Victor McElhaney, and he was a young black man who was shot to death near USC just last week.
And his mother is a city councilwoman in Oakland.
And the reason that this hit my radar is because somebody emailed me and said, this is a person who asked you a question at USC at your appearance just a couple of months ago.
And I remembered the kid.
He's 21.
And it was really nice, cordial.
He disagreed with me, but it was really cordial.
It was really warm-hearted and really good.
And it didn't make the national news for more than a blip.
It didn't because he was killed by people who were killing him as part of a robbery.
It was just a criminal act in a high crime neighborhood near USC.
And so this doesn't make the national news.
If he'd been killed by a white cop, then it makes the national news.
And I connected this to the fact that there was this long article in the New York Times magazine about what they call the tragedy of Baltimore, where they're talking about how Baltimore has completely fallen apart.
And ever since Freddie Gray, particularly, the murder rate has skyrocketed because the police have just stopped policing because they don't want to be held up on all of the, every time they go out there, there's 10 people with cameras who are attempting to get them fired, ruin their life, and put them in jail.
So they've just stopped policing.
So the murder rates have risen in Baltimore.
What the left likes to do is pick instances that reinforce a narrative that they have already pre-written.
That's what's happening with Tucker.
That's what happens with people like me or Rush or Mark Levin or anybody who achieves any level of prominence in the conservative movement.
And it's what the left does with America.
Instead of looking at the broad trend of where is crime happening and why is it happening, by the way, it's happening in areas where there is high level of single motherhood, not enough men in the community, and not enough police.
That is the answer.
That's where all crime is happening.
And that's not a racial thing.
That's true in white communities too.
Instead of looking at those trends, instead what they'll do is they'll pick out an incident that they think reinforces the true narrative that the real problem in America is racism.
They'll feature it for months on TV.
Then there's a riot about the false narrative.
And then they say, well, that riot is proof positive that our narrative was true in the first place.
You know what it is, too?
Especially on this point of these incidents, these series of incidents, these series of actions.
The way it works, we're all guilty of it.
The left takes it to an extreme, is we judge others by their actions.
We judge ourselves by our intentions.
And so Andrew Caruson, the head of Media Matters, he had these blog posts unearthed from 2005, around the same time that Tucker was going on Bubba the Love Sponge.
And they were degrading and mocking transgender people, then called transvestites, degrading Japanese women who were sexually abused, degrading Bangladeshis, Jews, Jews as well.
Of course, Jews always.
I mean, they always throw in the Jews for us.
And all of these people, but they'll, of course, not go after him for it.
First of all, because Media Matters itself is a bad faith organization, but also because the left judges itself on its intentions, solely on its intentions.
When they say vile things about Sarah Palin, vile things about Nikki Haley, whoever, they can't be misogynists because they support abortion.
They have wonderful intentions for women.
They're feminists deep, deep down.
And us, one action, one little incident, one guy yelling at a car who sideswiped him, you are dead.
You're wicked, you're evil, you're bound to perdition.
I think we can all agree that if you're going to boycott Tucker Carlson, it should be over that Luddite crap he said about stopping self-driving vehicles.
Get rid of that nonsense.
I do want to say, in the interest of disclosure, three of the four of us once worked for an organization that Ben and I started together called Truth Revolt.
And our premise was to be a right-wing sort of answer to Media Matters.
And we did successfully lead a few actions against a few prominent left-wing people who said, not jokes.
They said some legitimately horrible things.
Martin Bashir talked about excreting into Sarah Palin's mouth.
Correct.
But there was nothing disingenuous about Truth Revolt.
No.
It was so honest.
We had a mission statement.
And our mission statement was, this is a vile, horrible tactic that has no place in a free society.
But the only thing more immoral than doing this action is allowing this action to continually be done to one side with absolutely no answer.
And so Ben and I had this premise called mutually assured destruction, which was when the left stops doing this, we'll stop doing it.
Until the left stops doing this, they have to also know what it feels like to lose your advertising base.
And we pursued that for a short amount of time.
And it was successful.
And this is the thing that I think that advertisers need to start understanding, True, is that all this crap is astroturf.
It is absolutely astroturfed.
That's right.
There have been good studies on the effectiveness of boycotts.
Boycotts are almost never effective.
Like it's almost impossible to name an effective boycott.
You remember when they tried to boycott Chick-fil-A and Chick-fil-A stock went up.
It's a great example, yeah.
Every single time there's an attempted boycott.
The IP stock went up.
That's right.
Colin Kaepernick.
This is correct.
Anytime you piss people off and they're in the headlines more, the truth is that the sales tend to go up because all earned publicity is still public.
The Wall Street Journal did a piece about the University of Wyoming with they had their thing that there should be more cowboys, the world needs more cowboys.
And of course, the faculty came in and said, oh, this is eliminationist and heterosexist and all this stuff.
And they told them to go pound sand.
They made thousands of dollars.
Their applications went up.
It's like, stand up to these people and you will.
The reason I mentioned this is because since we know this from the inside, since we actually did this operationally, it's not hard to astro-turf this stuff.
People assume that Media Matters has this vast crowd of people who are doing things.
They got like five people to show up for this protest.
And that's all it takes, by the way, if advertisers don't actually sit there for 40 minutes and think to themselves, guys, is this real?
Is this like an actual thing?
Because here is the truth of the thing.
Okay, when we did it to MSNBC, we did it, went after a couple of their advertisers.
We got a couple of advertisers to pull from Martin Bashir, and Martin Bashir ended up losing his show.
We had 80 activists.
I kid you not, 80 activists.
We send them an email and it said, here's the number for the customer service line at MSNBC.
Here's the customer service line for this advertiser.
Call them up and tell them you're angry at them for advertising on Martin Bashir.
Within two days, Martin Bashir's show had been pulled.
Okay, that was not a vast groundswell of people who are never going to shop with this advertiser again.
That was us.
And again, it's a bad tactic.
And we said openly, it's a bad tactic.
We said, you know what?
You know what would be great is if we didn't have to do this tactic.
So how about this?
You guys stop all this crap.
We'll stop all this crap.
And then we can go back to a system where you can advertise wherever you want.
And that's that.
You shop wherever you want.
If you don't, you know what the actual boycott should be if you don't like Tucker Show?
Don't watch his dad.
Boycott Tucker Drug.
Boycott show.
You don't like my shows?
Boycott my damn show.
Don't watch my show.
Do you think a single person pissed off at Tucker Carlson has ever watched two straight episodes of Tucker Carlson?
Not a chance in the world.
This is, again, why I'm so appreciative for our advertisers.
And you know who's an advertiser with a genius policy?
What a great segue.
That was a genius.
Genius policy.
Wow.
Policy genius.
Oh, man.
All right.
This guy's a broadcasting genius.
It's pretty impressive.
I will say that those pitches are so strong that when I die, I hope that they read them in my will to others.
But if I should die, what you actually want to make sure is that you have some life insurance.
That's where policy genius comes in.
If you've got a mortgage or kids or anybody who depends on your income, you need to be an adult.
Go get some life insurance right now.
Policy Genius is the easy way to get life insurance.
Two minutes.
You can compare quotes from top insurers and find the best policy for you.
When you apply online, the advisors at Policy Genius will handle all the red tape for you.
They'll negotiate your rate with the insurance company.
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And Policy Genius doesn't just do life insurance.
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So if you find life insurance puzzling, head on over to policygenius.com.
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Policy Genius, again, the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
Be a responsible human.
Don't be an irresponsible human.
Make sure that your family is taken care of.
Don't be buried in a pauper's grave.
Go check out Policy Genius.
What have you got against?
This is homophobic lines.
Homophobic lines.
So we're going to check in with our Daily Wire subscribers.
They keep the lights on as much as our advertisers do.
And some lucky Daily Wire subscriber who subscribes during this broadcast, go at dailywire.com, subscribe, and becomes an annual subscriber, will win a chance to sit in this room, breathe in our secondhand cigar smoke, and see how the magic is made.
That's a second prize.
First prize, you don't have to come, right?
Alicia Krauss, we're checking in with you to hear from our subscribers.
Hello, everybody.
Hello, how are y'all?
We can't see you, but we're happy to hear from you.
Natural-Born Citizenship Debate00:15:54
No, happy to be here, you know.
Where are you?
Well, I'm on backstage where women are either prostitutes or barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
Which one are you?
Wow.
Are you actually barefoot and actually pregnant and actually in the Daily Wire kitchen?
Yeah, yeah.
I love this organization.
I mean, at least it's the shiny new kitchen, right?
And I'm making chocolate chip cookies.
Don't worry, none of them are for you.
They're for me.
Come on.
Entirely for me and the baby.
So I will be down here.
At least I'm not in Michael Knowles' broom closet anymore, but I will be down here taking subscriber questions.
And don't forget, how do you submit those questions?
Well, become a subscriber.
And not only could you win the chance to maybe be stuck barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen with me, but you also get to sit on a future episode of Backstage if you become a subscriber right now.
And you get to ask a question of the guys.
So go to the Daily Wire Backstage banner on the top of the page to watch the live stream and submit your questions there.
And now we can't smoke around Alicia.
That's true.
So say the doctors.
Is that why it was set down the whole floor?
Have we officially become the most conservative outlook?
Do we have any questions?
I do, actually.
One comes from William.
He wants to know what's the constitutional definition of a natural-born citizen.
If a person is born in the U.S. to two illegal aliens, can that person go on to be president?
Michael Knowles.
Well, because I'm the one who went to Harvard law here, I'll certainly be happy to describe this one.
There actually is, correct me when I inevitably get something wrong.
There is a long-standing debate over the exact meaning of natural-born citizen.
It seems to me that if you are born to the child, or if you are the child of an American citizen, you are a natural-born citizen.
At the time of your birth, you are an American citizen.
So the whole birther conspiracy was a little bit superfluous because Barack Obama, even if he were born on Mars, would have been a natural-born citizen.
This seems to be in dispute in any case, but if you're born to illegal aliens here in America, you are also a natural-born citizen since at least that case in what, 1898?
Yeah, Wong Kimar.
That's right.
The Wong case.
After that, it seems to be resolved that you are a natural-born citizen.
There's been some discussion of repealing birthright citizenship or clarifying birthright citizenship.
We've had that since 2016.
But the question, as far as I can tell, remains somewhat unresolved.
That's right.
There's one phrase in the 14th Amendment specifically that is read to maybe exclude birthright citizenship.
The truth is that in the British Empire, the idea of birthright citizenship was sort of tradition.
So going back to Blackstone, the notion of natural-born citizenship is fairly well established in Anglo-American law.
The sort of countervailing viewpoint is that in the 14th Amendment, it says that if you're born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, so it's the phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof that comes up in these legal debates because the question is, if you are a citizen of another country, like you're, let's say you're a Mexican citizen, and you commit a crime in the United States, well, then they have to contact the consulate of Mexico because you are a Mexican citizen.
Your child, presumably, is not subject.
You haven't accepted American law upon yourself.
So you're not subject to the jurisdiction of American law.
Neither is your child.
That at least is the argument against birthright citizenship.
You know, I think that it's an open debate.
It's a live debate.
It's interesting to remember that the subject to the jurisdiction thereof came into play when John McCain was seeking the nomination to be president because he was born in Panama.
So two American parents, so born as citizen of the United States, born with the opportunity to be a citizen of the United States.
The question was, was Panama at that time, was he subject to the jurisdiction?
That's exactly right.
And the way that the courts traditionally have interpreted subject to the jurisdiction thereof would be to exclude, for example, foreign ministers.
So if you're a foreign minister from Mexico and you have a kid in the United States, your kid is not necessarily a subject of the United States because you're a foreign minister and therefore you're not subject to the jurisdiction of the American citizens.
And this is the part that does pain me as someone who thinks, I think as probably we all do, that birthright citizenship has been abused.
It's created very bad incentives at the southern border, is it does seem explicitly to take out diplomats, to take out the children of diplomats or whatever.
But other people, even if you're a foreign national in this country, perhaps you are subject to the jurisdiction of the American citizens.
Yeah, it's not supremely clear as the truth of it, but it's also not a precedent that's going to change anytime soon.
Someone who's immaculately conceived is a naturally born.
That's the question.
This raises not just political, but theological questions.
It's also interesting to think about it from the point of view of the framers of the Constitution at the time that they were conceptualizing these ideas that no person in America was a natural born citizen of the United States of the United States.
So they were specifically thinking about loyalties, right?
They were thinking about where your loyalty would be, to what sovereignty would your loyalty be.
They didn't want someone to be elected to be president of the United States who had a divided sense of national allegiance.
And I think that that's at the very least the spirit of it, which is why I think that probably if an American diplomat at that, if John Quincy Adams had been born in France or been born in the Netherlands, he was not.
I still think that that would not have, at their time, they would not have thought of him as not eligible to become president.
It took a long time to travel back then.
He was born over there because his father was there in service of the country.
So they would have seen, they would have seen that change.
I just want to read more about the debate.
John Yu takes one side of the debate in favor of natural-born citizenship.
And Mark Crocori and the folks at Center for Immigration Studies tend to take John Eastman.
They tend to take the other side of the debate.
Interesting.
Alicia.
Questions over time.
I just want to know, can Dan Crenshaw run for president?
Because he wasn't born on American soil.
That's the most important thing.
Oh, interesting.
Where was Dan Crenshaw born?
I believe on a military base in Germany.
So military bases are exempt too, right?
I thought he was born in Asgard.
His birthday is coming up, by the way.
Yeah, it is because I'm never going to forgive him for making me arm wrestle him.
What are more humiliating?
It was close.
Wasn't it close?
It was not close.
It was actually true.
So good.
It is actually true, though, that that's what was determined in the McCain question is that since he was born basically on a military base, he was still an actual person.
You should have had him wrestle all four of us.
We all go flying out the window.
All right, here comes a question from Joe about college education.
He wants to know, for those of us who are majoring in a useless liberal arts major with the intent of entering the academy, what do you believe is the best mode by which we can improve it?
You know, unfortunately, I know too much about this, but ever since 2008, people have been talking about the liberal arts collapsing for a long time.
But ever since 2008, the liberal arts have collapsed.
And there are very few jobs in the liberal arts.
And if you do get one of them, the thing that really has to be changed is you have to understand what it is to teach the liberal arts.
To teach the liberal arts means to teach, first of all, the history of the liberal arts, for instance, literature, the history of literature, but also to teach what the people who were speaking at the time were trying to say in their moment.
It's not about telling them how they can be eradicated by me overlaying my philosophy on top of them.
It is what Plato was trying to communicate, what Shakespeare was trying to communicate.
These are hard things to study and really worth knowing because they make you wiser and they make you more involved in your culture.
I didn't go to an actual university.
I went to a junior college and majored in country music and then dropped out.
That's true.
I told this story about you.
Did you?
Yeah.
But with my limited amount of education that I have, I know that the word liberal is associated with liberty and that therefore the liberal arts could be translated literally to mean the freedom arts and that the entire purpose of a liberal education as we understand it in later days in the West was so that you could learn the art of freedom.
But you were studying the architecture of the West, the philosophical and liturgical and literary history of the West, so that you would understand the art of being free.
You would understand and earn your freedom that we have.
You know, you almost sound like you have one of those fancy degrees.
That is actually what the liberal arts are.
That is the entire purpose.
Because I just made that up.
It absolutely seemed true.
You know, people don't even know this.
And this is why the debate actually matters.
I think a lot of conservatives want to, in our kind of reactionary way, we want to say, get rid of it.
We hate it all.
The liberal arts really, really matter.
Free society is not gonna remain free for even five seconds if liberal education dissolves.
And the problem is that it- Well, it's already dissolved, so.
Well, it's been hollowed out from within.
Came over, man.
I mean, there are, you could count on one hand the number of programs in the liberal arts that are still actually carrying on that tradition.
You know, my new book, not to pitch it, but The Right Side of History, available right now, but not really available until next Tuesday.
It is kind of a layman's read on Western philosophy.
There are people who have spent generations studying this and know this way the hell better than I do.
And my very basic gloss, which you guys have read, and it is, you know, I think it's quite good, but it's obviously not to the level of expertise as people who have spent their entire life.
Like your son spends his entire life studying this stuff.
He knows this stuff better than I do.
You know, that has been completely lost to the extent that if I even speak about this, there was a, I spoke at University of Michigan last night.
The history department has not read my book.
It's not out yet.
They held a panel called Dilettante in History, The Power of the Enlightenment.
If you study the Enlightenment and all you got from it is it's white people, then you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
And the classics are dead.
I think this is a lot of people.
I said that was heavily attended.
Oh, yeah.
Professors.
I think they ended up with about 35 people.
We had, by contrast, 1,000 people who showed up to ours, an overflow room with another 106,000 people on the waiting list at the University of Michigan.
So there's some appetite for this stuff, which shows how badly the universities have botched it because there is appetite for all of this stuff.
But, you know, quick note, this person is asking, they're already in the liberal arts and they intend on teaching.
So you're actually doing a career path that makes sense.
I've ripped down the liberal arts as a career path if you don't actually intend on going into the liberal arts because it seems to me that this whole college scandal that's happening right now, these uber rich parents who are paying for their kids to get into places like Yale, there are two questions that deserve to be answered.
One is, why would uber rich people pay for their kids to get into Yale when you could just give your kid the $500,000 and just set them up for life in a trust fund or something?
That's question number one.
And number two, if these kids are really unqualified, if they're getting into Yale with 1,200 SATs, shouldn't they fail out?
Like in the first year, shouldn't they fail out?
It's very hard to get in, but it's very easy to stay in.
Well, and this is the point that I make about colleges.
What the public thinks colleges are for is not actually what colleges are for.
So we all think that it's for developing a skill set and being educated and learning about Western civilization.
Bulls.
That is not what colleges are for.
Colleges are for two things in reality, unless you are studying in the maths or the sciences, in which case you're actually learning something.
It's not about skill set.
What it is about is two things, credentialing and social group.
That's it.
That's the only thing college is for.
That's why all these people.
There's a third thing that Michael got out of college.
It was treated with penicillin.
I count that as social group for Michael.
I mean, he created his own human social group that are his children.
And one day he'll go back and take responsibility for his pass-ins.
Well, New Haven's very far away.
I don't know.
That's a long flight.
But this is why these rich parents will pay because they want the credential for their kid.
And the credential matters because it's the imprimatur that you're a member of the elite.
And they want their kids to be members of this airsat social fabric so they can go to the alumni dinners and they can know friends who are in very powerful positions.
And I know this because when I went to a very highfalutin university, when I went to Harvard Law School, the very first day I was at Harvard Law School at Orientation, Elena Kagan, who was then the dean of the law school, now she's Supreme Court justice, she gets up in front of a class of 500 of us.
And the first thing she says is, you know, you're all worried this is going to be the paper chase.
It's going to be super competitive.
You're going to have to really compete for your slot and you're going to have to work really hard.
Let me tell you, you already won.
You're in.
The competition is over.
You will all have jobs.
She said, you will be running the world.
The people in this room will be running the world.
Look to your right, look to your left.
These are the people who are going to be running the world.
I remember thinking to myself, really?
Why?
Why?
Like, because we did well on our LSATs.
That's why we should run the world.
But the question was how to improve this.
And I mean, I think you're absolutely right.
I agree with everything you're saying, but it doesn't have to be that way.
I mean, the way, so let me give you my quick solution on how to improve all of this.
One, employers need to stop using universities for credentialing and they need to start taking apprentices directly out of high school to learn how to do a business because most people in America learn to do their job by actually doing their job, not by going to some program that taught them philosophy.
Like philosophy majors make a lot of money because they're lawyers, right?
That's why philosophy majors make a lot of money because they're accountants and they're lawyers and they're in marketing.
And how many of them are philosophy professors?
Three, right?
So when people say philosophy major teaches you something, it may teach you something, but it's not worth $200,000 of something.
The degree is worth $200,000 because it's a credential.
But what you learned in your philosophy courses in undergrad.
Let me push back.
Let me push back on this a little bit.
I was probably saying, I was a terrible student.
I was an awful student.
And I really got my education after I left school when I read all the books that I had bought in school.
But while I was in school, I did kind of listen and it kind of filtered in.
And I remember walking down the street, and this will sound like the dopiest thing on earth, but I remember walking through the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and suddenly thinking, oh, wait a minute, I get it.
First came Greece, then came Rome, then came Europe, then came us.
And each one of those things built on the other and reflected on the other and actually was changed by the fact that the other existed.
And when I saw that, that changed everything for me.
And that's that to me.
But when you said, I completely disagree.
When you attended the University of Berkeley in the late 1800s, a liberal arts degree was an elite thing to accomplish, an inexpensive thing comparatively to accomplish, and a valuable thing that required rigor in order to accomplish.
You can't connect that experience.
I think one of their big problems is that you made sure you what it is now.
I think one of the major problems with the modern academia is that people send their children there.
And they send their children there because they hear things like, oh, American campuses are liberal.
And they kind of fondly harken back to 25 years ago when they were in school.
And they're like, yes, I remember I had that one professor who wore a beanie and that one professor who talked in a black scent, even though they were white and was the early black studies professor.
And we all knew that they were kind of a dope, but they did expose us to some ideas we had never thought of.
My kid can make it because I made it.
What they fundamentally don't understand, that is not what the university today is.
If you want to know how to fix academia, you don't fix it from the inside.
You fix it with the government.
I say that as a conservative who believes that the government isn't the solution to anything, but the government created our current university fiasco.
And they created it when they basically decided that they would fund schools on the basis of square footage.
How many, the square footage of your buildings would determine how much money you actually receive from the federal government.
And they started this enormous push at the university level to grow the physical footprint of universities, to grow the structural footprint of universities, and to fill those big buildings with as many people as possible.
And that's when it became the case.
Yes.
That the credential no longer has a value because it's no longer that the elite go to college.
Everyone goes to college.
College is high school with a quarter million dollar price tag.
Alcoholics Anonymous and Dave Ramsey00:14:02
This is your only.
But why should the government fix that?
The government fixes it by stopping paying.
This is so because the government has to stop.
I mean, I'm a believer that the government should get completely out of the business of college.
I agree completely.
Like, if you want to go and study the classics at a university, then go out and get a second job.
And it's not my job to do that for you.
And by the way, civic education should not be taking place at the college level.
You should be knowing a lot of the stuff that you're supposed to know long before you're 18 years old.
Then how are you going to learn your gender?
That's what they have to do.
What are we overlooking, though?
The thing that we're overlooking here is the point that Elena Kagan made to you, which is true, which is that this isn't true in the world of business, but this is true in the world, at least of government.
The people who run the government went to Yale, Harvard, Princeton.
They all went to at least an expensive private school, whatever it is.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the evidence that we need to rethink and rehabilitate the liberal arts.
Because STEM, broadly speaking, at least engineering, is a skill.
It's a job.
It trains you for a job.
The liberal arts don't do that.
They train you to think about the world, to understand your own civilization.
If you don't understand your past, you won't understand your future.
And the idea that we now have someone in the government like AOC who is scolding Tim Sloan of Wells Fargo, a man whose IQ is seven times what AOC's is.
I'm going to push back again.
You went to Yale for how long?
Well, you know, it depends on the year.
No, I went for four years.
You went for four years.
How long did you go to public school before that?
13 years.
For 13 years.
So it doesn't make sense to me if the government's going to pay for education and that education is supposed to result in you knowing a thing or two and being prepared for the real world.
How is it possible that they should be able to accomplish this in four years?
Where they have been unable to accomplish anything of the sort in 13 years.
So your point is so right.
I mean, the way to fix it, because I am actually a great defender of liberal arts education over the trade schools, it like it really matters for some people.
The problem with democratic egalitarian society is we've decided if one person goes to a four-year private college, everybody has to go to a four-year.
And if everybody's going to do it, then the government has to pay for it.
And then everyone's going to get in.
Standards are going to be lowered.
A bunch of fake academic disciplines are going to be created.
It's just utterly leveling.
It harms people who have $250,000 worth of debt.
It harms taxpayers.
It harms the government.
It harms the university.
All those books are available for free.
Yeah.
Parents and students have been lied to.
They were told that when they sent their kid to college, a couple of things were going to happen.
One, their earning potential would inevitably rise no matter what they did in college.
And two, they were going to exit with a skill set.
And both of those things are essentially false.
The earning potential may rise, but only as an adjunct of sorting, meaning that employers look at a person who went to Yale differently than a person who went to Juco.
That's just the way that it works.
Even if the person who went to Juco ends up being a much better business person than the person who went to Yale.
I mean, this is a point.
Hypothetically.
Hypothetical.
I'm pointing my other human beings in the room.
I mean, I made this point on my show.
I told a story that I probably shouldn't have told about a human who will remain unnamed cursing you out for not having gone to college, because this is what people- They went to Harvard, after all.
This person did go to Harvard.
And that was deeply, deeply important because it was credentialing.
They knew that in the elite strata of American society, that credential matters.
But the reason originally the credential mattered was not for the sorting.
It was because the assumption was not only that you were smarter if you went to this university, but that you learned more and better things at these top-level universities.
That is no longer true.
The only thing that Ivy leagues provide is the credential on the wall unless you are learning an actual thing.
And the actual things, and here's the thing.
Once it got watered down and you weren't learning actual things anymore and it was just the credential, this is how you get to the point where colleges now have an active interest in not exposing people to uncomfortable ideas.
Because if you go there just for the credential and just to build a social fabric, the last thing you want is somebody spoiling the party with things like tough grades or ideas you've never heard.
This is why Harvey Mansfield was forced not to give actual grades to his own students.
At Harvard.
Grade inflation was bad.
It was an inherent bad.
At what point does the fact that you can go on the internet and learn so much of this stuff and get even classes and lectures from people who actually know things or get the great courses, DVDs and CDs and listen to those, at what point does that kind of overcome the branding?
When employers stop being full of crap.
This is really about the employers because the fact is that if there were not a market interest in you spending $200,000 for a four-year education in which you learned nothing, okay?
Because if you're a poli-sci major, I'm a poli-sci major.
You didn't learn anything.
Right, of course.
You didn't learn how to write.
You didn't learn how to think.
You learned nothing.
You didn't learn any great country riffs on the piano?
Nothing.
Legitimately, you probably learned more in Juco studying country music than I did studying political science at UCLA.
If employers were instead to look at, like, honestly, you want to know the actual solution to this?
Real credentialing.
Okay, what this would be is you would take the SAT, you wouldn't go to college.
The SAT and your GPA would determine where you were.
You'd publish those.
You would just go straight there or you'd go straight to trade school on the basis because that's what they're doing.
Okay, that is exactly how it is.
Well, go ahead.
Well, you've identified the problem, which is there is this idea that we all have now, which is that four-year liberal arts college is supposed to give you a skill.
That isn't true.
You are not supposed to get a skill from the liberal arts.
You are explicitly not supposed to have any skill.
You were supposed to study history, math.
If you have a skill, you have the art of freedom.
That's right, yeah.
That's right.
I want to get to another question, but I'll close out with this.
I have a theory, and it's the 5% theory.
Alcoholics Anonymous has a success rate of approximately 5%.
That is true.
If you're an alcoholic and you go through the program at AAA, 5% of you will get clean.
So AAA fixes your tires.
Alcoholics Anonymous.
The interesting aspect of that is that if you don't go through Alcoholics Anonymous, you also have a 5% chance of getting sober.
So statistically, a drunk in Alcoholics Anonymous has the exact same chance of getting sober as a drunk outside of Alcoholics Anonymous.
And you could look at that and say, well, see, Alcoholics Anonymous is a sham.
I don't.
Put a pin right there.
My theory is that this same thing will apply across the board.
Dave Ramsey is a pal of ours, kind of a hero in broadcasting and somebody that I personally look up to an awful lot for the business that he's built.
I have some disagreements with Dave Ramsey's financial philosophy.
I think it has a great sort of understanding of human nature, but I think that it also has a few problems with it.
I suspect that something like 5% of people who adhere to the Dave Ramsey philosophy actually manage to save up a successful nest egg for retirement.
And I suspect that also 5% of people who don't listen to Dave Ramsey will manage to save up a successful nest egg for retirement.
I think college and a liberal arts degree, your son Spencer is a grand example.
Spencer knows a thing or two about the liberal arts for his trouble.
I suspect that 5% of people who go through the university system will walk out knowing a thing or two about the liberal arts.
I suspect 5% of people who don't go through the system will know a thing or two about the liberal arts.
I'd use you as an example.
You're kind of a hybrid.
You went through the system, learned nothing about the liberal arts, then got out.
My 5% theory doesn't mean that a liberal education is bad.
It doesn't mean that Dave Ramsey's financial freedom universe is wrong.
It doesn't mean that Alcoholics Anonymous is useful.
It means that some small part of the population is going to find the answers.
And for that small part of the population, the answers that are provided in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous in the form of Dave Ramsey in the form of a liberal arts education, a university education, become the mechanism by which they affect that betterment.
And similarly, they might find some other path.
They might find a book by some other financial theorist other than Dave Ramsey.
They may find a program other than Alcoholics Anonymous.
They might read the books that they didn't read in college.
The only part of this I disagree with, because I basically agree with that, but the only part of this I disagree with is in the system that teaches civics, history, math, science, in the lower grades, not in the college grades, you have a better society.
And that has actually broken up.
If what you're saying is that we ought to have those things, then I think we all agree.
I think what we're saying is we don't.
But we, well, I think that is right.
We are saying that we don't, but we are saying that there's no reason that we should give up on that.
When the guy says, when the guy asks the question, how do I improve this?
That is what we should be doing.
And this is where we disagree.
My solution is fire.
I think you solved the university problem of fire.
I don't think, I think that it is so bad and so rampant and so big.
A trillion dollar seed loan industry.
Think that you can, through incrementalism, fix the university.
The left took it over by incrementalism.
I don't know why we can't take it back.
Because we don't operate the way that they do.
That may be a mistake.
By the way, I also don't think that's true.
I don't think the left took it over by incrementalism.
I think there was a massive revolution in the 1960s and they turned everything on its head.
Yeah, but then they just waited for the old people to die.
But they did, but they did.
No, but they did move into the universities on purpose, with purpose.
God and Man at Yale was written in the 50s.
That's right.
It was Buckley's first.
Yeah, that's right.
And there's no reason that we can't do that except that we won't.
I mean, you're right that we don't.
But I think there should be like 15 colleges in the country.
This is exactly the thing.
This is very fewer people should go to college.
The government shouldn't pay for it.
The people who should not go to college will thrive doing something else.
They won't be burdened.
Kids, unless you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a rocket scientist.
Or a congresswoman from New York.
Be like me.
Get college and have them a millionaire.
Alicia, we have time for one more question.
I mean, all you really need to know about colleges is that Michael Knowles got into Yale and his mommy and daddy did not pay them $500.
I know.
If you could imagine, I would have gone to Oxford if they'd actually been willing to pay attention to that.
I don't know why I didn't do Yale.
Knowles got in on a water polo style.
This was superimposed.
Yeah, and it was real weird the first time he showed up to the pool riding a horse.
This is the guy that actually posted a picture on Instagram from the University of Michigan while tagging his location at the University of Michigan and said, where am I?
That's a Yale degree.
Well, there were a lot of like, there were transvestites.
Now I'm sounding like the Media Matters guy.
I can't say this.
All righty.
So speaking of Knowles' illegitimate children that they probably created at Yale, Ryan says that he's been seeing some interesting Twitter parenting advice floating out there.
Ryan, don't follow the Twitter parenting advice.
It says, quote, never punish or praise your children.
What are your thoughts?
That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
Yeah.
So those of us with children get to answer first.
Noel's younger than you.
Clinton, you want this?
Because your kids are grown.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely.
They turned out all right.
They did turn out.
My kids turned out great.
Well, first of all, you've met my wife.
You understand why my kids turned out well.
But I mean, no, that of course is absurd.
What you shouldn't do is you shouldn't praise your kids for nothing and you shouldn't punish them for nothing.
You know, there should be, you have a moral system.
And when you say something is going to hold, this is the most important thing you can be as a parent is consistent.
When you say something is not going to be done, it's not going to be done.
When you say there's going to be a consequence, that consequence has got to be there.
It doesn't have to be fire and sword.
It just has to be some kind of limitation on what you're going to do.
Where you're going to be yes and you're no be no.
The biggest threat to consistency is.
That was very good.
You make that up.
The biggest threat to consistency as a parent is not your kid.
It's you.
That's right.
Because it sucks to be a consistent parent.
Oh, my God.
It does.
It's so terrible, right?
It's so terrible.
When you have to punish your kids, it's the worst thing in the world.
When you threaten, like, we're not going to do X, and you know that everybody wants to do X like in five minutes when the kid apologizes, but you're still going to want to do X. You're going to want to go back on it, and then you can't.
It's just awful.
You want to rein goodness on your kids.
You want a good piece of advice.
It's your responsibility.
That's the advice of a parent.
Everything is your responsibility.
Everything is your responsibility.
And if parents really understood that from education to feeding their kids, then it would solve 98% of the problems in the United States.
And you know, what I don't understand is hard.
It's hard to be.
It is hard.
I mean, you're saying that parents have to be good and responsible, and you're against abortion.
I don't understand why you're forcing children to live in worlds with suboptimal parents.
I mean, I'm for abortion, but only after birth.
It was so funny.
So last night I was speaking at University of Michigan, and a guy got up and he was asking me about the food stamps program.
Now, there's yet to be in childhood nutrition.
He was specifically asking about school lunches and the fact that they're really not nutritious.
And the fact is that Michelle Obama tried to make them more nutritious.
The kids didn't eat it.
They threw it out and all the rest.
And he asked, what's your solution to that?
And I said, abolish school lunches and have parents feed their own damn kids.
Because I am a parent.
You know what my number one priority is?
And the only priority that matters, feeding my child.
And if you can't feed your child, you shouldn't have that child.
It should be removed from your home.
The notion that it is the government, like you have, legitimately, the one thing you have to do today is feed your kid.
End of story.
And we have a society where it's like, no, you know what, if I don't feel like feeding my kid today, we'll just make sure that the government feeds my kid.
Or if I don't feel like punishing my kid, well, I'm sure my kid will get educated at school.
And you're seeing it, parents abdicating duties to, it's not just public schools, parents, religious parents, abdicating religious education to religious day schools.
Okay, I'll send my kid there.
That's where they'll learn everything they need to know about religion.
Or my kid's a bad discipline problem.
I don't do anything at home.
That's their teacher's job.
I mean, did you not have the experience?
The experience I have, I have a visceral memory of this.
I can call it up in my skin is bringing that first baby home and realizing, oh no, I have to do this.
This is my responsibility.
This kid lives or dies on me.
I've got to make a living.
I've got to keep, you know, when it rains, there cannot be water on my kid.
There's got to be a roof over that kid's head.
That to me is the moment you grow up.
Majority Women Voters00:10:55
That's the thing.
That was the first and last thought Michael Knowles ever had.
I do actually have a thought on parenting, which is this for all the people that have ever been told that Michael Knowles is their father.
There's a lot of cats with that name.
There's a lot of cats with that name.
All right.
So if you're enjoying this conversation, what's wrong with you?
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Since you're the god king of the Daily Wire, small cheek, how do Knowles and I get our scotch recharge?
This is the real problem here.
I thought we were running a series of place is this.
I think that the answer is obvious.
You had them served in those glasses instead of in the leftist tier.
You still have scotch recharge.
In which no matter how much you drink, it just automatically refills.
The real problem here is that the popcorn here just doesn't have enough flavor.
That's the real problem.
Now that's better.
That's what gives you that special tang.
So it is International Women's Day just past us Friday.
And I actually just feel like it wouldn't be very Christian or whatever Ben is of us not to talk briefly, not to talk briefly about the absurdity that is International Women's Day.
I celebrated Ketland Jedder.
All those track and field stars in high school.
How condescending is it?
Do you know nobody knows this?
They only get one day.
One day.
53% of the population.
You know, one 365th of the day.
International Women's Day destroyed the 20th century.
Oh, God.
Very few people know this.
The International Women's Day on March 8th.
It did.
On March 8th, in what was it, 1918, 1917, started the Russian Revolution.
And Leon Trotsky, no less a communist than Trotsky, credited International Women's Day, which had been invented in 1909 in New York by the Socialist Party.
It then spread in 1910.
There were a couple celebrations.
Eight years later, fast forward in Russia, they had an International Women's Day demonstration.
Trotsky credited it with launching the revolution, which is why Lenin made it a national holiday in the Soviet Union.
And not only that, once you gave them the vote, they stopped letting us have alcohol.
I mean, this is one of the things that there's only one thing that matters about International Women's Day.
Captain Marvel came out.
Finally, equality has been achieved.
Finally, we have a female superhero.
Not like the other one from like Wonder Woman.
The 70s that all the guys had posters of in their bedroom.
Not like any of the, not like Electra, which no one saw.
That was a movie, by the way.
Yes, Jennifer Garrett.
By the way, that's true equality.
If women can make superhero movies that bomb at the box office, then they are equal to men.
But yeah, International Women's Day is always, it's always shocking to me that on International Women's Day, we're supposed to worry about how difficult women have it in the freest society in the history of humanity for women, where they constitute the majority of voters, the majority of people who get college degrees, and a higher-earning cohort when they first get out of college before they start having kids and taking time off from the workforce.
This is the real trouble.
Like, we can't look across the sea where women are forced into hijab, or where they are forced into abortion in China, or where they are victimized with forced genital mutilation.
We can't talk about any of those things on International Women's Day.
You know, like actually helping women who are suffering?
We have to pretend that true suffering is that it took 21 Marvel movies for a mediocre actress like Brie Larson to finally be cast in a Marvel movie with a female lead superhero, not like Scarlett Johansen.
But I want to know why you can't suffer from that.
What would it look like if we celebrated men?
I want to celebrate the things that men discovered.
You get everything.
Everything.
I want to discover.
Look at the things we invented.
Like everything.
Like everything.
Okay, Tucker Carlson.
All right, here we go, medium actors.
You could argue that the greatest thing that men, in addition to discovering the entire everything, except uranium, I think.
That one of the greatest achievements of men, particularly in the West and particularly in this country, is that men afforded to women the right to vote.
Absolutely.
Which is the largest peaceful voluntary transfer of power probably in all of human history, in which the group of people, men, who had all political power, 100% of it, chose to give all of the political power, not half of it, all of it, because in an electoral democracy, whoever has the majority of the votes has the political power.
By the way, so women are over 50% of the population, but the voter gap gives women a 15-point advantage.
Women vote at a significantly higher rate.
And men voluntarily gave that power to women because they recognized an historic injustice.
They thought that there was a better way.
As you often say, they built on the foundations of previous generations who moved the world toward a freer and freer place.
And they elected to give women this position.
And no, no, this is to ignore the fact that for a long time and continually, men are schmunks.
I mean, like, all of this is true.
And when we say men invented everything, of course, the automatic counterargument is right because women weren't in the workforce because men didn't want them in the workforce.
There's truth to that, too.
But it is also true that men did a lot of good things.
Like, I don't understand why we can't just recognize that both sexes have given enormous amount to civilization or the automatic denigration of women who have chosen to be mothers, which is the other money matter.
No, see, the whole problem, that's the whole problem.
The whole problem is that feminism has imposed masculine values on everybody.
So that women are actually less under feminism than they were when people said, oh, women, the other half of the civilization, who've given birth to every single human being who made every home, who made every life.
How dare you wish that?
No, I mean, the idea that it was somehow more important to build the civilization that we built to protect women than to be the woman that it was being built to protect is insane.
It is insane.
And to sell to women that the only way that they can succeed is to be essentially men is to cut short what it is to be a woman.
Well, you know, the truth is, though, that this is something that I said after the death of George H.W. Bush, that it's harder to be a good man than it is to be a great man.
That being a great man is about fame and being in a moment where you are needed and lots of people know who you are and you step forward and you pick up the flag and you are in the paintings and all that kind of stuff.
It's a lot harder to be the good person who is actually making the daily sacrifices to make the world work.
And the truth is that for the vast majority of human history, it was men were the people who were in the position to be the great men.
Women were not in the position to be the quote-unquote great women, but it was women who made the world work, of course, because women make every homework.
They make every civilization work.
And ignoring that is to ignore the historic, like one of the problems I have with feminism is that it actually ignores the contributions that women made to Western civilization over history.
It's like, oh, yeah, you guys, like they actually agree with the statement that you were making half facetiously that men created everything.
They're like, yeah, you guys created everything, all the good, all the bad, the entire civilization.
Now, if you just give us all the power, then we'll change everything.
It's like, no, you guys were not.
That is the joke.
That is the joke.
Once you impose male values on everybody, men win.
Once you do that, that's what it is.
We should point out, too, though, in the realm of political power, perhaps the most famous politicians, political leaders ever were women, Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Catherine in Russia.
I mean, they actually, women did have a fair share of governance and in many cases, glorious governance that just that is ignored, I guess, by a feminist ideology.
It's also sometimes missed by us, and it probably shouldn't be, that women are smarter than feminists.
That women in this country have 53% of the population as women.
As you say, they have a 15-point spread in terms of the electoral vote, which means they have, if they chose to marshal it in a monolithic way, 100% of political power.
I often think it's funny when people say, if we were truly an equitable society, then women would have 53% of representatives in Congress and men would have 47.
And I always say, you don't actually know how electoral democracies work.
Because if all women voted for women, it wouldn't be that 53% of Congress would be women.
All of Congress would be women.
Because the majority would win every single race, right?
But fortunately, women are smarter than feminists.
And women aren't just trying to create this false equality in the world.
Women are using their votes.
They use them more than men do.
And they don't just use them in these sort of brainless identity politics feminist ways.
They use them to elect people who they think are going to do a good job.
And that results in a world that, again, have there been historic injustices?
Of course there have been.
If you go back and say, I mean, up in the early, in the early days of the 20th century, women couldn't vote.
And I would say, yes.
And if we were in the early days of the 20th century, that would be a compelling argument for why things are wrong.
But of course, as time has gone by, we've done a fairly good job of extending the benefits of our free society to previously underrepresented people.
And fortunately, on top of that, women have stewarded that in a fairly good way and haven't embraced this.
Now it's our turn.
We're going to kick all them into the curb.
I mean, liberal feminist women have that point of view, but the majority of women who vote don't.
It's a bigger point also about activists versus people.
When you take feminists versus women, gay activists versus gay people, black activists versus black people, it really, they really give the people they represent or pretend to represent a terrible name because these activists are the worst of the group almost always.
And the majority of the people are oftentimes incredibly smart and incredibly commonsensical.
And I think that's true of all.
They're people who have ties to other members of the civilization.
Activists are their own little bubble.
That's right.
And that means that they're only associated with members of the bubble and everybody else is the out group for them to fight.
Going back to what you said, by the way, about men giving women power, which is also true of Protestants giving Catholics power and Christians giving people of other religions power.
If a little bit of gratitude were injected into the civilization, I can't see how that would be a bad thing.
I can't see how the idea should be, we're here now and you're the old people and you should get out.
Buffy's Take on Feminism00:08:12
I can't see why it's not thank you very much for letting us in.
Great ideas that you came up with, and I hope we can participate and add our own great ideas.
I don't understand why that's not a better idea, a better approach.
Yeah, the world would be a much better place with some gratitude, which is why if you're a man in the world, you should be grateful for good women every day, not just on one communist holiday every year.
And if you're a good woman, you should be grateful for all the stuff.
All the machines.
All the machines.
I'm mostly grateful for Captain Marvel.
I'm grateful that you made him watch it.
Captain Marvel, I'll save you guys if you don't want to go.
I mean, you know, I'll be very honest.
I hate the genre.
I despise the genre.
I liked Dark Knight and Logan.
Those are the two superhero movies I like.
So I'm putting that out there.
At least you picked two good ones.
Two good ones.
I've seen most of these movies, probably at least half of them.
This movie was subpar, even by the genre standards.
The reason is that it was extraordinarily boring.
It had no stakes whatsoever.
And it had a female superhero.
And I understand female superheroes.
What was that about?
And because it had this feminist ideology injected into it, the problem with the feminist superhero is she can't do anything wrong.
She's just perfect.
It's like Superman without the kryptonite.
She starts out awesome.
She ends awesomer.
So there's never any stakes whatsoever.
And the movie itself had no story.
I mean, there was no storyline.
There was no narrative whatsoever.
It was so tedious.
It was so boring.
By the genre standards, it was only like 30% worse than most of these formulaic movies, but it was 30% worse.
And they say that only male critics are knocking the movie.
That is not true.
Major female critics are knocking the movie.
It's just bad.
And it tells you a lot about our society that Rotten Tomatoes is completely redoing their voting system.
They're purging negative comments from the board to protect an ideology even through a terrible movie.
In my own defense, I would like to say that I calculated how much longer Knowles has to live and how much longer I have to live.
And if I had gone to see it, it would have been relatively like spending three months in the movie theater.
Professor Jonathan Hay had a great point about the Rotten Tomatoes thing.
He said, amazing that the left will shift the identification required to sound off on Captain Marvel, but they're against voter ID.
Really?
Which is a great point.
By the way, I mean, I haven't seen Captain Marvel yet.
I do plan on seeing it at some point.
I'll point out that Wonder Woman was actually a good movie.
Of course.
Wonder Woman was good because it was not self-consciously feminist, meaning they sort of just assumed that the character is feminist.
And then Galgadot actually plays a woman with actual womanly qualities.
This is my great rip on, did you see the movie Atomic Blonde with Charlize Theron?
So basically she plays James Bond, but it's like, she doesn't just play James Bond.
Like they make her quasi-lesbian and all of this stuff.
And it's legitimately, which is, you know, their prerogative.
But what is true is that you could have substituted a male for her character.
It would not have changed one line of dialogue for the entire film.
If that's true, you've written a bad movie.
Really?
Because characters are specific.
The best characters are specific.
This is my problem with Captain Marvel.
And it's not a problem with the film.
I have not seen the film.
It's a problem with the celebration of Captain Marvel as an archetype for a strong woman.
And it's that I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I think Buffy is one of the greatest TV things that has ever happened in the history of television.
And people would always be, she's a strong, powerful woman and a great example to little girls everywhere.
And I thought, no, Into Every Generation is born a slayer, and she's imbued with supernatural powers given to her across the centuries to fight the vampires.
And it's sort of like the conversation we've had about Black Panther, where it's like, you know, the magic space rock falls down and then Africa got to be Europe.
And that's actually kind of a racist premise.
It's also kind of a sexist premise to me to say women are just as powerful as men if they're given gamma radiation and a secret laser from space and magic.
Like, I see Buffy as a great story with a female lead, and that might be novel and interesting to women.
But Buffy can fight men because Buffy has supernatural powers.
And Captain Marvel can fight men because Captain Marvel has supernatural powers.
Superman can stop a bullet, not because he's a man.
It's because he's super.
Yes.
And so I'm not supposed to look to Superman and go, that's just proof that all men are more powerful than a locomotive.
No, it's proof that supermen are more powerful than locomotives.
There is a kernel of an interesting idea in Captain Marvel.
This is not spoilers, because I think this was even in some of the previews very early in the movie.
Physically, she's not as strong as the men.
She can't jump the rope or whatever.
And actually, the main problem she has is she gets too emotional and their emotions run away with her.
And it's actually making a sort of a comment on sex.
And the real problem facing her is pride.
This is quite interesting.
This is something that we all face.
She keeps trying to do, people will warn her against, you can't make that jump or you can't make that.
Yep.
And she'll do it anyway out of pride.
Yeah.
And there was that little kernel there that really could have made Captain Marvel pretty good.
And they just overwhelmed it with boring story, tedious slogans, ideology, and it was weak.
It actually could have probably been a pretty good movie.
It's kind of a sad thing that we fight over these stories as if it mattered.
I mean, this is the new theory, basically, on the materialist left, is that everything we have as human beings is based on stories.
This is kind of the Yuval Harari idea that nations are a story.
Money is a fiction.
Human rights are a fiction.
God is a fiction.
And these are just stories that we tell, and they create something real because we all agree with them.
And therefore, it matters.
These stories somehow are much more important than you think.
Somehow, you know, I thought Wonder Woman was a good picture too.
I really enjoyed it.
But women, critics, intellectuals cried at that movie as if it somehow changed the estate of women.
And that's just not true.
That is not the way stories work.
And it's not the effect that stories have.
That was my take on Black Panther.
And people got really uptight about it.
My blowback on Black Panther was not that it was a bad movie.
I thought it was a fine movie.
It's a fine movie.
Yeah, I enjoyed it, honestly.
But I had some problems with some basic concepts in it.
Again, the very notion that natural resources are the rationale for civilizations growing is not, I think, a very good one.
But with that said, my real problem was all the lead up to it.
As though black people in the United States finally had been empowered by this movie with a bunch of black people playing superheroes.
It's like, if you're finding your meaning in superhero movies to the extent that you feel that the entire history of race in America has been deeply affected by a superhero movie in 2019, let me suggest that you enter the real world for a second.
And I would say the same thing about a Jewish superhero.
I mean, this is not race specific.
But people got so angry at this.
It was like, oh, how dare you take this away from people?
You're just mad there's a black superhero.
I don't care if there's a black superhero.
That's my point.
My whole point is I don't care if there's a black superhero.
That's great.
That's fine.
Who cares?
I think that's exactly right.
And the fact that people are fighting over this, first of all, shows that they don't have enough to do.
This is my favorite thing is when people forecast opposition that isn't there.
When you're like, oh, look at all these guys who are really angry at Captain Marvel.
You're angry, aren't you?
You're like, no, no, you're pissed.
I can tell you're pissed.
And you're like, no, really not.
And 50% of leftist argument, though.
Like all of it these days.
All of it.
This assumption that you're angry.
And you're like, nope, pretty much not angry at that.
And then Brie Larson insults 50% of the audience.
And I'm pissed that Marvel insults the entire audience by acting like they're making history.
The fact that there's a female Captain Marvel doesn't bother me in the slightest.
Right.
I'm mostly pissed that Marvel thinks they can get away with this crap where they pretend they killed Spider-Man.
What kind of nonsense was that?
By the way, anyone who cried at the end of Avengers, anyone who cried at the end of Avengers, you're an idiot.
If you cried at the end of Adventures Infinity War, the minute they killed Black Panther, if you were crying, you are so stupid, man.
You would have been so stupid.
I actually love, I loved Infinity War.
I think it was a fundamental mistake by the filmmakers to kill Spider-Man and Black Panther.
Of course.
Of course.
Everyone else died.
Steven Spielberg's Rewrite Magic00:04:25
You could have been like, oh, no, it's real.
It is the big Marvel reset.
Maybe they're really going to kill these people.
And then they kill off two of their billion-dollar industries.
You're like, well, you guys are slying, man.
So I do want to go for one more round of questions with our Daily Wire subscribers.
They keep the lights on.
They give us their sweet, sweet mammon.
And if they've signed up as annual subscribers during this live broadcast, which means you still got a little time left to sign up during this broadcast, you could win a flight to LA paid for by Ben Shapiro.
He's the only one with any money around here to sit in on a live taping of this, your favorite Daily Wire show, The Daily Wire Backstage.
Alicia Krause is going to read some questions from some of our fair subscribers.
Alicia, what do you got for us?
She's already given birth.
What is she doing?
Oh, just making a nice little tea.
Wow.
I love international.
Oh, hey, guys.
I'm just a, you know, if I'm going to be stuck in the kitchen, I figure I'd make myself a hot toddy.
Alicia, you can't drink when you're pregnant.
Show that to Betty Draper.
I mean, come on.
We do have questions from more subscribers.
Nicole wants to know, do you think the key to having a successful business is to start it in your garage?
Or might I, Alicia, add the God King's pool house?
It was definitely the key to us having a successful business.
No, I think that the key to having a successful business is to start wherever you can.
And the key to having a successful business is to understand that not all of your businesses will be successful.
Almost everyone who's successful in business has failed at business.
Business is very hard.
It's sort of like I've made this joke on the show before.
I hate it when guys leave the hospital after having their first child and they've got the world's greatest dad ball cap.
And I always think, you're not even a mediocre father.
You've been a father for literally hours.
Like there's got to be more that you're going to have to learn than what you have acquired at the gift shop in the hotel.
And of course, it's the same with business.
You're going to learn an awful lot when you set about to be in business.
You're going to fail.
You're going to have to get back up.
You're going to have to learn from your mistakes.
Where should you do it?
In your garage?
Sure, if you've got an idea that can start in your garage.
Not every idea can.
Some ideas require seed capital.
They require angel investors.
They require larger amounts of capital than can be sort of acquired at those levels.
And you're not going to take $20 million worth of investment capital and start something in your garage.
Every business is unique.
Every opportunity is unique.
I have a speech that I give to young.
Typically, it's young people who move to Hollywood because they want to make it in the movies.
And they're all, everybody who moves out here is looking for the same wisdom.
They want to know, how do I make it?
And when I moved out, I had the same thought.
Like, if I could meet Steven Spielberg, he could tell me how to make movies.
I thought I'm a smart guy.
He could tell me, then I could do it.
And what I came to realize over time is that if I ever got that meeting with Spielberg, I'd go up to him and I'd be like, Mr. Spielberg, longtime listener, first time caller, how do I make a movie?
And he would say, oh, making a movie is easy.
So here's what I do.
I read a book or a magazine article that I really respond to, and I call up my lawyer and I say, hey, are the rights available to this?
They say, hey, we'll kick it around.
We'll dig for it.
They call me back a week later.
They say, you know what, we track down the author.
The rights are available.
They're going to cost about a million dollars.
I'm like, great, pick it up.
So we write a check for a million dollars.
We get the rights to the book.
Then I say, well, I'm going to need a screenwriter.
So I call up my agents over at CAA and they go look for a good screenwriter.
We set up a bunch of meetings.
I meet with a bunch of guys.
I hire a guy who had a great hit last year as one of the biggest hits at the box office.
I pay him a million dollars to write a draft of the script.
He comes back six months later.
I read the script.
You know, it's not what I was hoping for.
So I go to number two on the list and I pay him a million dollars.
He does a page one rewrite of the thing.
At the end of the year, though, I've got a script that I'm really happy with.
So now I call up my partners over at Universal.
I say, hey, you know that first look deal that I've got where you have to guarantee 4,500 screens for one movie for me every year because I'm Steven Spielberg and they go, yeah.
And I go, have I got the movie for you?
And they're like, okay, cool.
We'll open it on 4,500 screens.
So then I call my business partners over at DreamWorks and I'm like, we're going to need $180 million to make this.
They say, cool, we'll architect half of it out of our domestic fund.
Then we'll go to a bank in India and put the rest together.
And before you know it, three years later, I'm on a set with 250 employees and I'm making a movie.
And I'd go, that's awesome, Steven Spielberg.
How do I make a movie?
And he'd go, oh, how do you make a movie?
How the hell would I know?
I know how you're going to make a movie.
Building Towers with Blocks00:05:37
Zero percent of that applies, right?
So I always give a speech to young people in Hollywood, and it applies to people in business too.
And it's this.
It's all my accumulated wisdom.
And it's about those who do and those who don't do.
And what I have observed, having lived on this life a fair bit now, gotten a few gray hairs, met people who've started podcasts in my poll house and become the biggest podcasters in the country.
I have friends who star in these big superhero movies that we talk about.
I have friends who've started businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
I have friends who still wait tables.
I have friends who washed out and moved back home.
I have friends who found other things like me to do that weren't what they originally anticipated, but they've gone on and have had successes.
I know somebody who's done it all.
And what I have discovered is that the difference between those who do and those who don't do is that those who do do and those who don't do don't do.
That is great advice.
And when I give this advice, people are so disappointed because it doesn't satisfy.
Because what you're looking for, the thing that would satisfy you, does not exist.
There is only those who do do and those who don't do don't do.
And the truth is, you usually know those who do long before they have done.
Like I have a pretty good average now of being able to size somebody up and determine will they do?
It may be a decade before they do, but they're doers and they're doing.
And those who do do.
What does it mean?
It means they do whatever.
They're always doing.
They're learning from the things that they've done and trying to do something else.
They're not waiting by the phone for an agent to call them.
They're not waiting by the phone for somebody to discover them down at the soda shop and cast them.
You're the next big thing hit.
They're out there making their way.
And the other thing that they do is they respond to what God brings into their lives.
They basically take the opportunities that come before them.
They don't try to will the world into complete conformity with their vision, which by the way, is a vision that they formed before they'd done anything and therefore before they knew anything.
They are willful people, by and large.
They're strong willed.
Let me say it differently.
They're strong-willed people, but they have the humility to let God be God and not them.
And those people do.
So if you want to be a successful business person, you want to make it in the movies.
You want to be one who does, do.
And that's it.
That's great advice.
Yep.
Nothing to add to that.
My question would be then, what does Michael Knowles do?
Well, some do by not doing, really.
I think my book proved that was.
Speaking of Michael, this comes from a subscriber named Michael.
Let's hope that his last name is not Knowles, or you've been really busy up there with your phone, like tweeting away questions.
He wants to know, how can the left and the right converse when they can't even agree on facts?
I actually think it's a language problem.
The problem is the only way that you can converse with anybody is if you speak the same language, right?
There is an objective reality outside of two people, and you're using words and symbols and always things outside here to make whatever's going on in your head accessible to whatever's going on in somebody else's head.
And what the left does is it constantly is perverting language.
It's always undermining language.
It's inverting language sometimes to mean the opposite of what it actually means.
They do this famously with justice, right?
Justice is now social justice.
It means the opposite of justice.
Political correctness is the opposite of correctness, right?
So what you have to do is be so precise about language.
When we were at Michigan yesterday, I came out to talk to some of the protesters and they had a sign.
It said, trans women are women.
And I said, okay, I want to, I am not trying to set you up here.
I want you to explain your point of view.
We're talking about, you use this phrase trans women, which is very ambiguous.
We're talking about somebody born a man, has all the male genitals, has the male chromosomes, had a short haircut when he was a kid.
Now he identifies as a woman.
Should that, and as I said the word, he said, I am not, how dare you?
I will not speak to you if you use that pronoun, he, to refer to her, which used to be him.
And this person that I was just asking, please give, hear you, a million people.
We'll see what you have to say.
Give your point of view.
He walked away because he refused to converse.
You can't make somebody come to the table and converse with you.
The best way that you can try to make yourself understandable, make someone else's views understandable, is to use really, really clear language.
But if they're unwilling to talk, you're not going to make them do it.
I'm offended that you said that.
Ken, what do you think?
You talk to a lot of people that disagree with you.
I mean, I think that the only way to have a conversation, you need two things.
One, a common understanding that a fact is a fact, that facts exist.
And two, you need to have a common understanding of the rules of the conversation, because otherwise you end up falling apart.
Because what you'll do is you'll start a conversation about facts, somebody gets emotional, and then all of a sudden you're into character attacks.
And that's not a conversation anymore.
Basically, a conversation is sort of like you're building a tower out of blocks with somebody.
And if you put down a block and the person immediately takes that block away, the tower doesn't get built.
There's no second level to the conversation.
The best conversations are the ones that are happening once you get three or four levels up in the conversation.
But you actually have to build the foundations together.
So one of the mistakes I see people make is they try to build on the third floor of the building when the first two floors don't exist.
So there's no common agreement as to the rules of the conversation.
What are the limits of the conversation?
Which issue are we talking about?
Is it insulting for me to use certain phraseology with you?
Building Blocks of Debate00:02:50
If you don't agree on the fundamental framework of is the building going to be a square or is it going to be an octagon, then you and you immediately start arguing about what sort of minaret to put atop the building.
There's no conversation to be had.
Alicia.
All right.
This is a pretty good question, one that I've wondered myself.
This comes from a subscriber named Mike, which don't forget that if you subscribe right now during this broadcast, you too could be stuck here with me.
So be sure to sign up for that.
Alicia, how do I unsubscribe?
I have no idea.
I've been trying.
No, I'm kidding.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Mike says, hey guys, does the political right run the risk of giving AOC too much exposure and thus giving her more credibility?
It seems that Democrats did this with Trump in 2016.
No, no.
I mean, yes, in the sense that she's prominent because we give her attention in part.
That's in part.
By the way, I think that's total crap.
I'm going to stop you right there.
That is garbage and it is crap.
It's not the only reason she's prominent.
No, it is not a reason she is prominent.
You really think so?
You don't think we contribute to it?
No, I think that the left, so what the left did is they put her on the cover of every magazine.
They elevated her to national prominence.
They feature her at every conference.
And then they say, oh, she pisses you off, doesn't she?
And she really annoys you.
She's in your, and you're like, no, I think her ideas are just bad.
And it's exactly what we were talking about before.
And then they're like, no, no, she really annoys you.
We'll show you three times as much of her until you're annoyed.
You're like, no, I think it's a bad idea.
Here's why I think it's a bad idea.
Oh, you're obsessed with her, aren't you?
Because we put her on.
I didn't put her on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine.
And if I had never talked about her, you know what she would be on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine.
I'm so tired of this.
And by the way, I don't even agree with it about Trump.
I don't think that if people had ignored Trump, Trump would have just gone away.
I think it's such wishful thinking that you're in control of a universe that you're not in control of.
Donald Trump was never going away.
He was one of the most famous people in the United States.
People knew who he was.
People thought it was hilarious.
People wanted to hear what he had to say.
And you know what?
Every other candidate in the race tried to do with Donald Trump?
Ignore him.
That's what they did.
I mean, go back to the primaries.
Republicans ignored Donald Trump.
And you know what happened?
He won the nomination.
Really?
We were talking, I was talking to the Cruz campaign and the Rubio campaign.
I was like, guys, you can't ignore him.
Stop ignoring him.
You're attacking each other.
And you think that he's just going to go.
Do you not, you don't think a billion, two billion dollars worth of free media helped him out?
I think that he was going to get that regardless.
And I think that the media that was providing him that coverage were people.
Left wingers.
Left wingers and right-wingers.
Okay.
Fox and Friends built him.
The guy was going to get media coverage.
He's a celebrity.
Celebrities get media coverage.
AOC has star power.
She's a celebrity.
You want to see how well this works?
Let's all pay attention to Amy Klobuchar for a week and see if she's suddenly a media celebration.
She might throw a disc at us.
But the reason why I, I mean, I give her a lot of coverage, even things that aren't on the cover of Rolling Stone, I play her all the time.
The reason I don't think it's a bad thing to give her a lot of coverage is because AOC takes leftist arguments to their logical conclusion.
Mommy Porn Coverage Needed00:10:41
And their wacky, crazy conclusions that knock down every building in America.
She's so much more honest than Bernie.
Totally honest.
I love being able to refer to her.
I think that's inherently important.
She's inherently important.
You have to cover her.
And she is the avatar of socialism.
She's attractive.
She's self-confident.
She's ignorant and destructive.
And that is essentially what socialism is.
Socialism looks beautiful.
You know, she's very attractive.
It says, I'm going to solve all these problems for you.
She says that.
It knows nothing about human nature or economics.
And it ultimately destroys everything it touches.
She is socialism.
Yeah, she said the great thing this week, which is so honest, which is that if automation comes, none of you will have jobs, and that'll be great because you'll be able to learn languages and art and music and literature.
And Bill Whittle very famously talked about this almost a decade ago because this is a common socialist communist argument that one day you won't have to work so hard and then you'll be able to learn all these languages.
You'll be able to do all this art.
You'll be able to play the violin.
And Bill Whittle said, yeah, that happened, though.
It was called the iPhone.
Capitalism gave it to us.
It gave us 100% of all the accumulated knowledge of man that we carry around in our pocket.
You want to learn a language?
There's an app.
You want to learn music?
There's an app.
You want to know about the Peloponnesian work?
There's an app.
And what do you do?
Yeah, look at porn.
That's all that anybody does.
Alicia.
Really?
On that note?
By the way, did any of you on your shows this week cover mommy porn from the UK?
Oh, God.
I saw the headline and then I closed my computer.
I actually read the story.
These mothers in the United Kingdom saw online pornography for the first time that their teenage children were watching, and they were moved.
Two of them said that they vomited because it's so disgusting what actually takes place in online pornography, which is anything, the worst things that the mind can conceive of.
And so they were trying to think: you know, what do we do about this that our children are being exposed to these horrible, dehumanizing, objectifying images of women in all of these exploited sexual positions?
And their idea was, let's make mommy-approved pornography for our children to watch.
So they contact a pornographic production company and they hire them to make mom-approved porn, which is pornography that sort of adheres to the normal customs of sex.
You know, there's little foibles and people's bodies aren't perfect, and it doesn't always work the way you think it's going to work.
And it requires, you know, it requires conversation and looking in each other's eyes and a great storyline.
And then they premiered the movie and made their children sit with them with their mothers and watch mommy-approved.
You know, before, I mean, obviously, that's like the worst thing I've ever heard, but these women are clearly the shrewdest mothers in history because they know anything that mommy does or mommy thinks is cool, like instantly you'll reject it.
They might be able to single-handedly, there will be no grandchildren.
Yeah, right?
The entire next line.
Destroyed sexism.
Yeah, I have a story about this, believe it or not.
It has nothing to do with my own mother.
So we were, so we were.
So when I was at UCLA, you know, studying things that really matter, you had to take some kind of generalized GE courses.
One of the courses I had to take was a course in Israeli film.
So Israeli film, in particularly, it's gotten a lot better now, but in the 1990s and 2000s, was basically Europorn.
So it was just like everything that was the trashiest of European TV was what the Israelis made.
This particularly true of like 1960s, 1970s film when Israel was just getting on its feet as a country.
So there's a famous Israeli actress whose son was in the class and they decided that they were going, she was going to come in and she's going to speak about this film and they were going to show this film.
And in this film, she is completely nude and she is having pretty graphic sex with a couple of different dudes on the screen.
And her son is in the classroom watching this.
So this is already awkward enough.
And she, and during the QA, she asks her son, how did you feel watching?
He's like, well, it's pretty awkward, mom.
Well, so a couple of weeks later, we're back in the class.
And, you know, I'm an Orthodox Jew, right?
And I'm sitting there.
Most of the, it's an Israeli film class.
Most of the kids are Jewish.
So behind me, I'm sitting with the son and a couple of other kids.
And they turn to me and they're like, oh, so you're Orthodox.
Right.
And they're like, so you've never had sex, right?
You're a virgin until marriage.
Like, right, that's my religious principle.
I've never had sex.
And they're like, well, have you?
And they start kind of getting mocking.
And they go, so have you ever seen a naked woman?
And I was like, well, yeah, I mean, I live in Western culture.
It's almost impossible not to see a naked woman at one point.
And one of them goes, well, who's the last naked woman you saw?
And I heard the guy go, your mom.
Best her mother joke.
All sorts of naked jokes.
That's so correct.
Alicia, save us from ourselves.
Oh, God.
I don't know if I can.
I'm currently sadder than Beto's dog looked in that entire baby hair spread.
Yeah, man.
Keenan wants to know: hey, guys, what are your thoughts on the spread of conservatism among millennials?
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Here's what I would say about millennials and conservatism.
It's a pretty amazing thing.
The CEO of YouTube was interviewed by Kara Swisher.
Kara Swisher.
Kara Swisher, who is a fixture really in reporting on Silicon Valley.
Very famously famously interviewed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together.
It was a huge thing that she made happen once.
And in the interview, Swisher actually asks for YouTube to ban the Ben Shapiro show.
And what I loved about it is she says, she says that Ben Shapiro is a gateway drug to the far worse things that need to be Nazis.
It's Nazis.
The Andrew Clayman show on the microphone.
She actually says Nazis because she says they watch me and then they watch Jordan Peterson and then they watch Nazis.
That's the fact.
But the beautiful thing is the cycle of violence.
The circle of life, actually.
The reason she knows about Ben Shapiro is because she walked in to her living room and her son was watching something on YouTube and she could hear the violent, hate-filled, bigoted rhetoric coming from his screen.
And she walked over and he was watching Ben Shapiro.
And she says to her son, son, why are you watching this evil, evil Ben Shapiro?
And he said, well, no, that's Ben Shapiro.
He's super smart.
She says this in the interview.
She says, no, that's Ben Shapiro.
He's super smart.
She's like, no, he's not smart.
He's clever, but he's an idiot and he's immoral and he's terrible.
And the CEO of YouTube says, oh, yeah, you don't want us to, you're not suggesting we ban Ben Shapiro.
And she says, I would.
She's like, I would.
No, obviously you can't.
No, no, I can't.
But then the best thing that she says is, anyway, don't worry about my son.
He's already lost.
And I thought, what an amazing thing that we live in a generation where if you are a millennial American today and you want to rebel against your parents, what you do is you go over to the YouTube and you look for most religious, buttoned-down, Bible-adhering Orthodox Jew in America.
And when he pops up and he says things like, hey, kids, get a degree, get a job, and don't have sex before marriage, and you'll be successful.
And it's like your parents are like, oh, back in our day, we were having tons of sex.
It is amazing.
I mean, so I spoke at U of M last night and there's a tweet last night from a person who is conservative who said they brought a liberal friend.
And after the lecture was over, the liberal friend turned to this conservative in astonishment and said, he's not a racist.
And it's like, yeah, no, right, of course.
But this is why I think that there is hope still for the millennials is that at a certain point, reality does intrude.
I mean, this fantasy world that we've been living in, where you can rip on all of the evils of capitalism while benefiting from every aspect of capitalism imaginable, where you can talk about how terrible personal responsibility is while living in the freest country in the history of the world, where you are told you're a victim every day while being the most privileged people who have ever lived, and where you are told that people who are racist who are legitimately not racist and are in fact anti-racist.
And you are told that true racism is not acknowledging that group identity should trump individual identity.
That's real racism.
At a certain point, reality intrudes and you just go, these people are joyless.
They're scolds.
They're annoying.
And they make no sense.
It really is that the left has gotten so irritating and annoying.
And this is not a female term, bossy.
Okay, male and female, bossy.
Okay, it's just like, I don't want Bernie Sanders running my life.
I don't want AOC running my life.
And when I say this, I think there are a lot of millennials who are like, yeah, that's basically right.
That's basically right.
And as they get older and they realize just how bossy these leftists have, what they have in mind, it's going to get worse and worse.
This is why AOC and Bernie Sanders are wonderful for us because it's like, they're just stripping away all pretense.
Like, yeah, no hamburgers.
We're going to get rid of the cars.
We're going to get rid of the airplanes.
You're going to watch all of our favorite entertainment.
Breadlines are good.
Breadlines are good.
Red lines are good.
Means you get bread, maybe.
Red lines are good.
There is a little bit of a distinction, too, between the millennials who came of age with Barack Obama.
They all fell in love with him.
There's not a red America.
There's not a blue America.
And the Gen Z, the group actually that's younger than millennials that we were talking to yesterday at Michigan, that we see on college campuses.
Those are different groups.
And I think that group has come of age in the age of the woke scolds, in the age of censorship, in the age of AOC and breadlines and the touting of socialism.
Those are very different moments that happen very close to one another.
And it gives me a lot of hope for those youth these days of Gen Z.
And hopefully maybe the millennials can learn something from them.
Yeah, because if the left has taught us anything, it's that you learn exclusively from the children.
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