Jeremy Boring, Ben Shapiro, and Michael Knowles debate whether America’s "experiment" is over, contrasting biblical freedom (tyranny-free but morally bound) with modern leftist consent culture, which they argue reduces dignity to binary legal terms while ignoring degradation. They critique Biden’s radical shift and Trump’s trial strategy, dismissing revolution as impractical but warning Republicans must fix voter turnout or blame their own failures. The episode ends by framing systemic flaws as beyond human control—redemption lies in divine faith, not politics—while promoting Jeremy’s Razors as a symbol of principled, non-authoritarian resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
You are about to listen to the best show at the Daily Wire, not named the Andrew Clavin Show, and that's Daily Wire Backstage.
Myself, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Jeremy Boring sit down to discuss politics, religion, the culture, basically everything you've ever wanted to hear about on a show.
Take a listen.
Welcome to The Daily Wire backstage.
I'm Jeremy Boring, joined by Ben Shapiro, Andrew Clavin, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles.
Glad to be back with you guys.
It's been a minute.
Just a reminder that we'll be taking some questions during the course of the show from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
If you're not a Daily Wire Plus subscribers, head over to DailyWirePlus.com and join today.
If you are, head over there, ask us your questions.
We're going to do our best to get a lot of answers out tonight.
Interaction with our subscribers is one of the most enjoyable aspects of doing this show.
It is, in fact, the only enjoyable aspect of doing this show.
Earth-Shattering Announcement00:04:24
No, I like being with you guys.
It's a great show.
We have fun.
We get to smoke Mayflowers.
We get to, you know.
We're also going to do something really enjoyable for me tonight.
I don't know if it'll be enjoyable for anybody else, but they told me just as I walked on stage, hey, we've got a little bit of a problem.
I said, what's that?
They said, well, when we've been promoting the show all week, we've been saying, you know, tune in for Daily Wire Backstage.
You'll get all your favorites, Ben Shapiro, Michael.
Plus, we're going to have shocking news, like big news, really big news.
I said, cool.
What is it?
And they said, well, it was a bit of an oversell.
We don't have anything.
I said, what do you mean?
You actually marketed the show publicly.
You said, plus, giant earth-shattering something new.
And they said, yes.
I said, and you don't have anything earth-shattering?
And they said, no, we don't have anything new at all.
I said, well, how does a thing like this happen?
And they said, well, we have, you told us to do it.
That's fair.
That sounds like something I would do.
But what occurred to me is that I in my back pocket do in fact have something new and earth-shattering and cool that we could premiere on this show, except we weren't planning to premiere it until a week from now, which means they are scrambling backstage to put together just for you guys today, the brand new second generation Jeremy's Razors commercial.
We're going to be world premiering it right here on the show in approximately 15 minutes.
So call all your friends and especially the scrumppy ones.
Tell them we'll be doing something.
I think people will enjoy it.
Every one of you plays some small role in the I'm really glad to hear because all week I've been reading off the teleprompter.
I said, this is going to be the biggest show ever.
Jeremy has a huge announcement.
And I felt I had the load.
Yeah, well, I'm glad I was sad that I didn't know what it was.
Now I'm glad that you also did.
Literally turned to me earlier today in the makeup chair and he was like, so what's this thing that's happening tonight?
I was like, I don't know.
I'm just one of the owners of the company.
I have no clue.
Truly, when they said back, when they said, no, you told us to say that, I don't have any idea what I thought it was going to be.
I mean, I must have thought it was going to, I think maybe in the back of my head, I thought we were going to premiere the commercial.
I can't think of any other huge news that I wanted to, but it is huge.
We obviously, this is a long time in the making.
You know, the first commercial has been called by some, including our marketing department, who titled it on YouTube, the greatest commercial ever.
And I stand by it.
Many people say, I stand by it.
I think it was, in fact, the greatest commercial ever.
It was the most well-justified launch of a company ever.
But what it wasn't was the greatest razor ever.
And as it turns out, making a razor is very difficult because it takes a razor-sharp blade and runs it across people's most sensitive spots.
And so we've worked really hard over the last two years to completely redesign our razor.
I never thought that I would employ engineers.
One of my favorite things about being a guy who never made it through college is that I employ Yale graduates, I employ Harvard graduates, I employ lawyers.
But I never thought I would employ engineers.
And now we have full-time engineers on staff.
We've been hard at work.
We've got brand new partners.
We've moved all of our manufacturing out of China.
And this new razor is world-class.
It's on par with the best razors in the market.
And it comes now, I think, alongside our other products through Jeremy's Razors, like our shampoo, our conditioner, our lotions, our deodorants, which are already top-tier products.
The only thing that was lagging was that razor because it's, again, a very difficult thing.
It takes a lot of engineering.
We finally have a really competitive product.
And I think we have a somewhat hilarious and deeply offensive commercial to attend to as much.
So again, turn back in here in about 15 minutes and we'll bring that to you.
Meanwhilst, the world doesn't get better between backstages.
It only seems to get worse.
And there's a new sort of, I shouldn't say new, it's been sort of fomenting for the last handful of years, but I think it's really gaining prominence now, both in the very intellectual part of the American right, but also in the very fringe parts of the American right.
And the fact that what I'm about to bring up is happening in both of those places, like people who we all in this room read, people with whom we are friendly, people with whom we admire, are participating in this conversation.
True Tyranny During COVID00:14:38
Also, the complete whack jobs, the people who I don't think should have any voice in our movement.
I think that they're malevolent forces are also circling the same idea.
That makes the idea, I think, something that we should talk about.
And that's this idea that the American experiment is over.
This idea that none of our institutions that have taken us through the last two plus centuries on this continent exist anymore, that we can't find any solution to our cultural and political problems through the political system, and that perhaps it's time to look to older systems, strongman, monarchy, even dictator.
I mean, when you have major voices in the sort of conservative intelligentsia openly discussing the idea of whether a dictator will be required to save this country or an emperor would be required to save this country or a king would be required to save this country, I think that that's something that merits actual conversation.
So I thought rather than talking about the latest stupid thing Joe Biden said or the most salacious details from the Trump trial, although they are fun to talk about.
Let's talk about something that we can only talk about when we're together.
Let's get to the deep stuff.
So Michael, you're a monarchist.
Yeah, well, look, they tie in.
He pins it on the Catholic, that we're all crypto monarchists.
We all think Trump is Caesar.
And by the way, we don't think that Donald Trump ought to be Caesar.
We think that Baron Trump ought to be Caesar.
Okay, those are very different things.
Look, the problem is this.
I am not calling for the overthrow of the American regime.
The problem is that the American regime has been overthrown.
And it has been overthrown by the 17th Amendment, which fundamentally orders the relationship of the states to the federal government.
It's been overthrown by Congress giving away all of its power to the executive agencies.
It's been overthrown by any number of things that have taken place, not over the last 10 years, but over the past 150 and 200 years.
And even that is not necessarily to be lamented.
It just happens.
You can't rewind the tape.
You can't go back in time.
But the argument to look towards certain classical thinkers, notably Polybius, is that there are different kinds of government.
Our founding fathers and framers wrote about this a lot.
And I think they were channeling Aristotle and Polybius.
Polybius' idea of the cycle of regimes is that you've got three acceptable forms of regime, and then you've got their kind of evil twins.
So you've got monarchy, which can be good.
Monarchy, when it's good, is governing for the common good.
When it goes bad, it's a tyranny, and it's just like a dictator for his own self-aggrandizement.
Aristocracy can be good.
There have been good aristocracies.
Aristocracy means good, you know, or governing for the good.
The bad version of that is oligarchy.
We see those all around the world.
Democracy can be good.
A republic can be a really good thing, but it turns into mob rule when it goes bad, and you ignore the common good and you govern for yourself.
And our framers and founding fathers wrote about that ad nauseum.
So the question is, where are we in that cycle of regimes?
Unless you believe that America just paused history, if you really believe, as Fukuyama, at the very least, is caricatured as having said, that we've reached the end of history and it's over and liberal democracy won.
Unless you think history is really over, then you do have to entertain the possibility that something will come next.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know who those guys are that you just mentioned.
There's some bundles.
What was that from me?
Polybius?
Okay.
I'm kind of, I agree almost with the diagnosis of the people you're talking about, Jeremy, that I do think that the institutions are fundamentally broken.
And I don't see any political solution to it.
But I also don't think that a dictator is a solution either.
So essentially, we're just screwed.
Here's where I landed, I guess.
I might have guessed where you at that hopelessness.
You know, here's the reason.
It's all a question of timing.
I've been having this conversation with my son since he was little.
When do you jump off the carousel?
Because there's no point dying for a regime that is no longer worth it.
There's no point pulling a Cato and saying, oh, we have to bring back the Republic when the Republic is over.
Right.
But here's the one indication that the Republic is not yet over.
Because remember also that despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you despair and you don't fight for what you have, you're not going to keep what you have.
One person, Donald Trump, was elected, and the entire government and the press and the academy and the intelligentsia acted like a Jew had walked into a Nazi bund meeting.
They acted like the worst possible thing.
There's one guy, one guy, a loudmouth who doesn't really know what he's doing, probably never read the Constitution.
And all of this force had to be put together to throw him out.
The lies that are being told as we're speaking, the trials they put him through, the violations of our norms, all of these things, which makes me think they're vulnerable.
It makes me think that the system that is in place is not invulnerable, you know, that it can be taken down.
And so if it can be taken down, and if it can be taken down without mass violence, it seems worthwhile.
Because the essential premise of the founders was that people were a certain way, which is that they should be free.
They didn't say that they wanted to be free.
That was the George W. Bush ridiculous statement that people want to be free.
People don't want to be free.
They want to be taken care of.
But that people should be free, I think, remains true.
And so that remains worth fighting for until it's not.
But isn't there, there's this observation of Tocqueville, who writes Democracy in America, probably the best observer of early American politics.
Unbelievably great.
And he observes that the rhetoric of the revolution and the post-revolution is very liberal and enlightenment and abstract and about freedom and everything.
But the behavior of America is a little different.
It's a little more conservative.
It's a little bit more about tradition and way of life and these tightly knit communities.
And so I sometimes fear that the thing we want to regain is the traditional American way of life.
But we believe our forebears' press releases.
So we're falling for the abstract liberal philosophy, when in fact what we need to return to is tightly knit communities with families having lots of kids and going to their churches.
This critique of liberalism is true, is that liberalism unmoored from virtue turns into moral relativism.
Liberalism is basically the idea that a thousand flowers should bloom, that free speech is a good thing in and of itself, that freedoms are useful, that they're of inherent value.
Now, the reality is that without a framework of virtue, freedom is not of inherent value, actually, because it turns out that when you freely choose to do something evil, it makes you a worse person, not a better person.
Freedom does not free itself a virtue.
Freedom is instrumental if you have choices between a series of virtues and you can prioritize between those virtues.
But freedom to use pornography, for example, is not actually a well-used freedom or a true right in any serious sense.
What that means is that if you don't have that virtue, which is really what's fallen away, then what you end up with is this inability to choose between value systems.
And so all value systems are then treated as equivalent.
And once all value systems are treated as equivalent, then you basically have post-constructionism and the idea that everything is just a matter of grabbing power and imposing it on people that you don't particularly like.
The thing that I think everyone keeps missing, and it's fascinating, I think there actually is some consensus in the United States, even with many people that I truly disagree with, because I've had conversations with them about this.
The consensus is not about values so much as it is about localism.
The reality is that conservatism, that virtue, which I think conservatism really is about conserving.
When people say, what is conservatism conserving?
The idea should be virtue.
And it should be the institutions within virtue that allow you the freedom within virtue to live a wonderful life within this kind of virtuous framework.
That's what we're trying to conserve.
It's not merely the institutions.
It's also that framework.
It's why when you read Locke sort of in a vacuum, for example, you end up with the sort of Joram Hazzoni critique of Locke, which is that Locke is himself attempting to destroy virtue.
But that's not true.
Locke was spending half of his time doing Christian apologetics.
So like the reality.
Protestant apologetics, but sure.
We digress.
But the sort of basic idea is that conservatism is built ground up and leftism is built top-down.
And so those two things are now in conflict.
And the left has used the top-down structure in order to quash the little platoons, right?
It's quash families and communities and religious institutions and churches and all this sort of stuff.
But I don't think that they've gotten quite as far as either they think or as the right things.
I think that they keep kicking the can down the road.
If they really had the power to do full tyranny, does anyone doubt that if Joe Biden really had the true power, the real true power to do true tyranny, that he wouldn't go for it?
I think he would go for it.
I think that he's a little tyrant in his heart.
There's no doubt that he's right.
And I think that was certainly true of Barack Obama, who is a big tyrant in his heart.
But isn't there, he doesn't actually have the power or the approval from the American people to do that, which suggests that this is not quite over.
What would count as true tyranny in your mind?
What would count as true tyranny would be the federal government forcibly dissolving churches.
Forcibly dissolving.
We couldn't have this conversation.
I don't think we're that far from it, but I don't think we're there yet.
I think that you see what you see is kind of little bubbles of tyranny that bubble to the surface and pop.
But I don't think that that you're never that far from it is probably.
I would argue we had true tyranny during COVID.
I mean, I tend to agree with that.
But the rights preferred monarch was the president of the United States at the time.
Right, but it's not just that.
It's also that that is also forgetting that there are many states that did not go along with the true tyranny.
Meaning that I moved my entire family from California to Florida, partially because Florida was not a true tyranny in the way that California legitimately acted full-on tyrannically during COVID.
But even that was, as long as it was, it still was, it was a temporary way station.
Now, I think that there are other aspects of tyranny that are more permanent in California than just a COVID lockdown.
I think that was like their most open and obvious example.
The real big reason I moved my family from California, aside from the tax regime, which is a form of property tyranny, is that I think it's going to be nearly impossible to raise a religious family in the state of California.
I think they really will attempt to forcibly dissolve churches and go after full-on religious institutions.
And that will be tyranny.
But I don't think that at the top federal level, that power yet exists.
I think that the founder's system of checks and balances is still robust enough, despite all of the changes that have been, I think, terrible for the country in terms of the administrative state and the executive branch.
That I don't think that we're quite there yet.
But I would also argue that just one quick thing that they might not need true tyranny because once you sort of capture the hearts and minds of people and you own them that way, you don't need true tyranny.
Once you just get us all addicted to drugs and so, for example, shutting down the churches, well, we're at a point where they don't need to do that because people have abandoned church on their own.
It's almost like a pointless endeavor.
And they shut down the churches.
They shut down the churches during COVID and people stopped going and kind of went along with it and they haven't gone back.
But the thing is, there's a vacuum there.
There is a difference between coercion and a vacuum.
The vacuum can be filled by a resurgence.
Coercion prevents the resurgence.
True tyranny says you cannot come back to church.
A vacuum is you left the church and now you're not coming back.
And that's on you.
That's not on the government.
I also think that's not the only thing.
My shoal was closed during COVID.
And you know what happened?
We all went back to Shoal.
And not only did we go back to Shoal, my Shoal went from having about 100 families to having almost 400 families in the course of about three years.
So like true, this is where things get rebuilt is at the local level.
And because, you know, listen, we all talk about national politics all the time and the elections are fun to talk about and they're interesting to talk about.
And of course, they make a huge difference.
I think the area where they actually make the most difference is in foreign policy because the president has plenary power over foreign policy, as you can see from Joe Biden running around like a child with a lip match in a factory of flammables on the international stage.
But domestically, there is still real capability.
I mean, the lives that you guys lead in Tennessee or the life that you're leading in Virginia or the life that I'm leading in Florida, this is not a life dominated by tyranny.
This is a life that I've built in my community that I think is quite rich and filled with social fabric, but that's an act of will on my part and it requires the vacuum.
And the point that I'm making is that vacuum still exists, but it has to be filled by a bottom.
I want to get to a corollary of all the stuff we're talking about because it's really important.
What you just said shows the fact that we have been making the wrong argument.
I'm sure you all saw Harrison Butker, the Chiefs.
The Chad meme, you mean, come to life with the yes.
The guy was great making his speech about the fact that the thing that women should be doing is building, making homes and having children and being homemakers.
The reaction to it shows you exactly what they're afraid of, right?
I mean, that is exactly the thing that they're afraid of, which means that we've been arguing about the wrong thing for a long time.
We've been arguing about systems.
And systems, as you pointed out, don't do anything without the value system in which they're enclosed and out of which they came.
The systems came out of a form of Christianity that basically said, oh, people are individuals.
That individualism was created by the Catholic Church, but it also led to Protestantism.
So there was some kind of syncretism there that we have to deal with.
But I know you hate it.
I'm still kicking myself.
I wasn't around at the time.
But the thing about it is, when Butker made that speech and they jumped on him with the kind of ferocity that let you know immediately they were terrified.
Immediately, this cannot be said.
It wasn't they said, we disagree.
It was this cannot be said.
And the Kansas City Chiefs, to their credit, said, well, you know, we believe in free speech.
That's the wonderful thing about this country.
And conservatives cheered.
Conservatives should not have cheered.
Their answer should have been, no, we believe this too.
The owner of the Chiefs said that.
No, he's right.
This is what we should be doing.
And it's what we should all be doing.
In other words, the system of free speech, I believe in free speech with all my heart, but I believe that we should be using it not to defend free speech.
We should be using it to defend the values that underpin free speech and keep it public.
What I'm not sure of is the contra argument.
I'm not sure that you can use coercion to instill actual values.
I'll give you a great example of it.
It just happened this week.
Julia Fox, who I never heard of before, but I think she dated Kanye West.
That's the only way I've heard about her.
Why Freedom Matters00:13:27
And I think she was an actress and a model or something.
She came out.
She just did a podcast.
I covered it on the show today, where she said, I am celibate.
I have now been celibate for years because the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision.
And my act to reclaim my power is I am going to be celibate.
And I thought, don't threaten me with a good time, honey, you know, to prove, you know.
Even though she lives in a state where she can still get an abortion.
Yes.
And that's the key here.
This is the national government versus the localism argument.
I guarantee Julia Fox lives in a state where she could get as many abortions as she wants.
And yet, the law is a teacher, and that change in the law changed her behavior.
I don't even think she realizes it changed her behavior for the good, but it did change her behavior for the good.
And she sounds more normal, by the way, than the last time I heard her.
You know, it's funny.
This is one of the arguments.
So one of the things that's happening on the right, the young right, is they've gotten a new name for racial thinking.
It's human biodiversity, right?
And so one of the things that they believe, though, is that we're in a perfect situation because the only people who are going to be having children are conservatives.
And I think there may be something to that.
We may have them out.
We may have them exactly where we want them, you know?
Well, so here's the thing.
There is one aspect of conservatism, as it talks about, is the conservation of virtue.
But another aspect of conservatism, as Russell Kirk, Catholic, talked about, was the idea that there is a certain gradualism and carefulness when it comes to the exercise of power.
And so, yes, the law is a teacher, but there is a difference between a teacher and a jailer.
And what I mean by that is that you can teach people, but you have to teach people sort of where they are.
I can't teach calculus to my 10-year-old.
Evolution, not revolution kind of thing.
Well, it's just you can lead the people, but you can't lead them from so far ahead beyond the horizon that they can't even see you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And if you try to drag them from there, the chain's going to break.
It's too long a chain.
And so the idea of the law compelling things that the public is just not going to go along with, you'll actually create a backlash instead of actually getting people to where you want to go.
But aren't there so many examples of the law doing exactly that, where the law changes people's opinions about a thing and their values?
I mean, you gave one example.
Another, maybe smaller example that I was thinking about recently is smoking cigarettes.
I mean, you could still, you can still smoke cigarettes, but in the younger generations, they just don't do it anymore.
Which was 40 years ago, it's unthinkable that you would have a bunch of 25-year-olds that wouldn't even touch a cigarette.
But that's an excellent example of gradualism in the law.
So they didn't just ban smoking outright in the United States.
What they did is they put significant taxes on it and they banned it for people below a certain age.
And then those people all aged up into the agenda.
But it was also all the institutions of power had this relentless message that this is bad and dirty and gross.
Don't do it.
And you hear it over here.
By the way, I agree with that.
So I agree with that.
I agree that our institutions, ideally, and this is your point, Drew, our institutions, ideally, should be echoing virtue.
And we've made a mistake on the right by suggesting, again, it is not actually, this is what I was saying before.
The difference between an instrumental value and inherent value is very crucial.
An instrumental value is a value that you hold in order to get to something, right?
Money has instrumental value, not because you have a sack of cash in your backseat, but because you can use that sack of cash to do things with, right?
Freedom is an instrumental value.
It is not an inherent value.
Just being free is not in and of itself valuable because you're on a desert island, there's nothing else around you.
You're totally free and it's of no value whatsoever.
It's object-oriented.
You have to actually use it for something good.
And so when you're talking about education toward proper use of freedom, that's what all the institutions should be doing.
And that's why it's important to give an example.
It was not enough to me.
Joe Biden gave a speech about one of his terrible speeches about the campus protesters.
And he said, it's just terrible that they're breaking the law, but also there is a right to free speech.
Okay, we all agree there's right to free speech.
That wasn't the question.
The question is, not even whether they're breaking the law.
The question is, are they assholes or not?
Is what they're saying right or is what they're saying wrong?
Because I promise you, if those were white supremacists on the lawn at Columbia University, he wouldn't have been talking about the inherent values of free speech versus law breaking.
He would have been talking about the actual message.
And I agree with you about freedom, though.
I think freedom is an inherent value, but in order to maintain it, the values that underlie it have to be in place.
I mean, you don't have freedom.
I mean, I always say that.
But then it's not this guy who's always saying you have the freedom to do the right thing, but that's not freedom at all.
So yeah, can I ask a freshman philosophy?
What does it have inherent value?
Well, no, what?
Friendship.
What is freedom?
What is freedom?
So the classical definition, I'm glad Drew brought this up as he was mocking me for articulating it.
The classical conception of freedom is articulated not only by Lord Acton, who some of the libertarians still like, but articulated by Dante, articulated by many classical thinkers, is that free, and DeNozo-Cortez puts this very well.
Freedom is not just the ability to choose.
Freedom is willing, and willing is predicated on knowledge.
So to bring that down to earth, if freedom were just choosing, we would be freer than God, because God can't sin.
I can sin.
Am I freer than God?
I'm not freer than God.
Freedom is willing, and willing is predicated on knowledge.
If you don't know anything, if you're totally ignorant, you can't really will.
This is why kids don't have freedom, right?
That's why we have age of consent laws and things like that.
So God has perfect will, in part, because he has perfect knowledge.
He's omniscient.
So he's perfectly free.
am not perfectly free this is why it must be the case that freedom is to put it really bluntly the ability to do what we ought to do rather than just the problem the problem has got where did i go wrong in the logic because god Because God knows what is right to do and we don't.
So the question is who decides?
And who decides?
And if the person who decides has complete control over you to make you choose what he decides is good, you are not free.
So that's a pragmatic limitation on power.
That is not a redefinition of freedom.
So what I mean by that is that you don't want to delegate to any power the ability to define right and wrong so narrowly that you can't choose between objects.
But you also don't want people to have the quote unquote, it's not freedom to harm another person.
Why not?
But why not?
Why shouldn't there be freedom to harm another person?
Because the same logic that creates freedom creates the right not to be harmed.
Okay, how about harm a puppy?
Do you have freedom to harm a puppy?
Here comes Christy No.
Yeah, take the human being out of it.
There's certain things that we agree don't have to do with consent, which we can get into later.
But we don't believe that you have the freedom to do those things because they are inherently harmful.
So are you agreeing, Ben, with his definition?
I do agree with his definition.
Sure.
Sure.
I think that's just why.
That's all I need.
That's where Orthodox Jews and Catholics are united in their belief, but it is not a Protestant belief and it is not a fundamentally American belief.
The fundamental American conception of freedom does include the, at least the, and the Protestant definition of freedom more precisely includes freedom to fail.
It isn't only freedom to succeed.
It's not only freedom to do what's right.
I don't know.
Christ didn't just give us freedom from sin as though that only means that now you have the opportunity to do what's right.
He gave us freedom from sin and that he ameliorated the consequences of sin.
If you went back to the Mayflower, like these cigars, and you talked to Governor Bradford and you asked him his definition of freedom, Governor Bradford, who took toys away from children on Christmas because they had no right to play on Christmas Day.
Whose definition of freedom would the great pilgrim Bradford have agreed to?
That's ridiculous.
There's no question.
It would have been Ryan and Ben.
And I wouldn't ask him.
I'm more than an American definition of freedom.
I'm interested in a biblical conception of freedom.
I thought we're talking about the freedom.
Hold on.
Well, we are because that's what the American experiment is predicated on.
The biblical definition of freedom starts with the Exodus, and it is free from the tyrant.
It is freedom.
It's freedom from Pharaoh, and it's a freedom that is accompanied by risk.
And would that we were slaves again in Egypt?
Because when we were slaves in Egypt, we at least knew from whence our meal would come.
And when and whence our water would come.
God said they're not rejecting the prophet.
They're rejecting me because they're asking for a king.
But how does that differ from what Michael said?
Well, okay, so two things.
One, you have to finish the verse.
The verse in Exodus is, let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness.
That's the actual finish of that particular verse.
So second, which is not what they did.
Right.
They didn't do that, and God smacks them around for it.
Second of all, the biblical term kherut, right?
So the word in Hebrew for freedom is chirut.
It doesn't apply.
It doesn't appear literally anywhere in the Bible, so far as I'm aware.
Khirut is a very modern term.
And it really does.
When we talk about freedom, here's the reason I agree with Michael.
It's because in consequence, it doesn't make so much of a difference because what the founders were saying is that there have to be pragmatic limits on the government because a government that is powerful enough to define virtue is also powerful enough to ban virtue.
Right.
But that is not an argument for the good of the freedom itself to sin.
That's not the same thing.
This is two different types of right.
And so you do have an exemption from the government in the sense that you don't want the government to be quite that powerful.
But inside my own family, for example, my kids are free in the sense that they can do good things, but they are not free to do anything.
Does it make them unfree?
Are my kids unfree by definition?
Yes, your children.
Yes, of course they are.
A parent is a tyrant, and rightly so.
Their children are not free.
Okay, but is my deprived?
Or is that good for my kid?
The point is that he's not a tyrant.
The parent is a parent.
But the government is also not a parent.
Well, some parents are.
Right, but the parent is the boss of the house.
This is why I hate so much when you hear people on the left suggest that the government is a father and a mother, right?
It's not.
The government is neither of those things.
But that is, again, a more pragmatic.
I keep coming back to pragmatism because otherwise you have a universalist theory of what government can and cannot do.
And I don't believe in that.
I think that local government, me and my friends in our HOA, we get to make all sorts of rules the federal government does not get to make.
Why?
Because we have a broader level of homogeneity and agreement about values, which means that we can compel that there can't be a porn chop in the middle of our living facility, right?
But that's not true on the federal level because you have broader disagreement and you have very pragmatic concerns about handing tremendous power.
Even your HOA can't compel you to do rightly.
Yes, because they violate certain fundamental human virtues or the possibility thereof.
But here's the thing.
Here's where the disagreement lives.
You posit that freedom is only freedom if it's freedom to be virtuous.
And I posit that there is no virtue apart from freedom.
That this is a chicken and the egg, that it's a cycle, that it can't be defined only in one direction.
It works in both directions.
You can't compel virtue because it's unvirtuous to the exact degree that it was compelled.
What is education?
Well, education isn't coercive.
It's very coercive.
It's not tyrannical.
It's coercive.
But it's coercive.
Doesn't it seem like the concept of freedom is just not a useful concept?
Well, I think that's why many cultures throughout history, probably most of them, weren't focused.
They didn't talk about freedom at all.
Even probably today, you go to most places on earth and you talk about freedom.
It's not part of their language.
They don't discuss it.
It's not that it's useless.
It's that it's now the victim of tremendous semantic overload.
Yeah.
But also, also, to the exact extent that we're told it is for freedom that Christ has made us free, it's pretty central to Christian theology.
Freedom is not useless.
I think it's central to all of us.
It's not a useless concept.
All theology based on the Bible is that if you're not free, then your love of God is not love.
Yeah, but freedom in the Bible is totally different.
Freedom of choice is vital to, you're correct, to achieve virtue.
That is true.
But that does not mean that the freedom to sin is an inherent good.
No, that's not the same thing.
No, but freedom of sin is a natural accompaniment to the freedom to choose.
Jeremy's point, I think, is very good, especially on Exodus.
When you view Exodus as the figure of history, this is a very, to quote my favorite, one of my favorite old dead men, Dante, he views Exodus.
He's pretty close to the top.
Certainly his favorite dead men.
He views Exodus as the figure of history.
All stories have a literal meaning, they have an allegorical meaning, a moral meaning, all these different meanings.
And so what is the story of Exodus?
It is literally the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt from the Pharaoh toward the promised land.
And it is allegorically the story of God's chosen leader leading God's people to the promised land and is anagogically, you know, from the perspective of the end times, telling us how we all escaped this slavery.
That's something you're going to hate.
You're misreading, Dante.
What are you talking about?
I'm misreading.
I probably am.
Dante, you're not.
I'm going to let you argue about Dante because you have diverse perspectives and diversification is key.
Precision Shave Techniques00:09:47
Whoa.
One person is the hard way.
Isaac Newton invested a large sum of money in the South Sea company.
Unfortunately, when the South Sea bubble burst in 1720, Newton lost a lot of money.
This is why diversification is really important, even for people like Isaac Newton.
During times of economic uncertainty or market volatility, investors tend to flock to gold as a safe haven asset.
His value tends to increase during turbulent times, providing a buffer against those market downturns, which is why people are turning to gold right now and why Birch Gold is busier than ever.
Birch Gold understands that navigating financial decisions can be incredibly daunting, Dante.
That's why their dedicated in-house IRA department is there to guide you every step of the way.
Birch Gold is committed to addressing your questions and concerns promptly.
Their team is always ready to provide answers and clarity, whether it's about fees, taxes on rollovers, or the timing of the process.
They're here to ensure you feel valued and well-informed.
Text Ben to 98.98.98 to talk to one of Birch Gold's experts in claim your free info kit on gold.
You'll learn how to convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA and gold.
The best part is it doesn't cost you a penny out of pocket.
Just text Ben to 98.98.98.
That's Ben to 98.98.98.
You know how much gold they've sent me for all the work we've done for them?
None gold, zilch.
No gold.
I'd say every now and then you'd open a pack and go, ah, gold.
None.
I said that at the 15-minute mark of the show, we were going to do something big, something huge, something unprecedented.
We're going to premiere the second greatest commercial ever.
And we didn't do that because it's now 40 minutes in.
But we're going to do it now.
This is, as I said before, we've been hard at work for two years on trying to move our manufacturing out of China, and we've done just that.
I'm going to tell you more about it.
Michael shaved with it.
I've watched people shave with it.
I have a beard.
I mean, it's part of my shit.
And we'll talk about that when we come back.
But first, here it is.
We're proud to present the world premiere of the second greatest commercial ever.
Oh, hey, I'm Jeremy Boring, CEO of Daily Wire and founder of Jeremy's Razors.
Woke Razor companies love to take your money while trampling on your values.
To me, I just love your money.
Cut, cut, cut!
What the hell is this?
On my set, but me.
What do you run, Hollywood now?
Two on the nose.
What is this?
We're filming the commercial for the brand new second generation Jeremy's Razor.
Yeah, I get it.
We moved our manufacturing out of China.
Plus, with the new Sprint 3 and Precision 5 blades, you can shave like a man, not a manifesto.
But who's he?
I'm Black Jeremy.
Huge fan.
You mind if we get a selfie?
Oh, yeah, come on.
Look, we talked about this.
Customers want diversity.
Customers want inclusion.
Customers want Black Jeremy.
And for the commercials to be less macho.
Can we please lose the flamethrower and the car?
It's overcompensating and we need to- Who are you?
I'm Jessica.
I've been following you around half-naked for two years.
That makes you some kind of expert on advertising.
Besides, don't you think it's a little insulting to black people?
Oh, we prefer people of color.
Don't you think it's a little insulting to black people of color that instead of giving them their own roles to play, you just recast them as a beloved white character?
Hell yeah, it is.
We don't do it for people of color.
We do it for liberal white women.
I'll spell it out for you.
Liberal white women make most of the purchasing decisions for the family, so happy commercials with people of color smiling at each other make them feel hella virtuous.
Bitches love to feel virtuous.
They do.
That's why there's no white people in commercials anymore?
Exactly.
But that's so.
Okay?
Sorry, I'm the body positivity hire.
You are so brave.
What is even happening right now?
Think of all the razors you'll sell.
And don't forget Jeremy's shampoo and conditioner.
They are excellent products.
Hey, what if I play your character a little less bitchy?
Unbelievable.
Jeremy's Razors isn't for liberal white women.
It's for men.
Conservative men.
So stop giving your money to woke corporations who hate you.
Give it to me instead.
Hey, liberal white ladies.
You know what's up.
Go to Jeremy'sRazors.com now and buy the new radically redesigned second-gen razors featuring sharper, longer-lasting blades and superior durability.
Now in more inclusive three- and five-blade models.
Oh man, I am so offended.
That was a thing that happened in all of our lives.
That's two days.
That was two days in March.
It's actually the truth, right?
You don't see any white people in corners anymore.
And everybody says, oh, it's like they don't understand that white people are still their customer.
No, they do understand.
They understand who their customer is.
That's the problem.
We know who our customer is too.
We feel like our customer will probably appreciate the commentary.
We're doing something different in addition to rolling out the brand new Gen 2 Razor.
As I said before, it's a truly world-class razor.
It's on par with anything else that you've tried.
We have a precision blade.
We have a quick shave blade.
Michael, which one have you used?
So I've got the precision, and I don't want to brag or anything.
I have very supple skin.
I've got a little cute little baby face over here, and I dry shave.
So I get out of the shower.
I don't use, I hate shaving cream and stuff.
And I was a little nervous that I'd lose half the money maker, you know, if I just, no, it's a beautiful shave.
It's really, it really is an excellent shave.
And then I get to keep my supple little face.
I want to test this thing on my head for Friday show.
Give me the one that was going to work best on my.
I will do.
And in fact, co-CEO Caleb has been shaving his head with it, and I've seen blood very few times.
No, he's dead.
We're doing something else new, which is we're selling on Amazon.
Heretofore, you've only been able to go to jeremysrazors.com.
Today, you can go to Amazon.
That's really important for us because we want, obviously, for the product to be accessible to more and more people.
And that's important, A, because it's how we keep the lights on around here.
It's also important, though, because we do have a mission with all of this.
And our mission is to actually create competition in the marketplace on behalf of conservatives for basically the last two decades.
Corporations have moved further and further and further to the left, taking for granted fully 50% of their potential customers.
In this country, they've done so because they just assume that if they cater to the right, the left will abandon them and have a lot of options in doing so.
But if they pander to the left, you have no option.
You're just going to keep buying their product share.
Keep giving them your money no matter what.
That's what we're trying to challenge by building these brands and these companies.
So we hope you go over to Amazon.
It's hard, you know, getting into a new platform like Amazon.
Obviously, everybody's there, but you need to trend.
You need to rank.
We need it to be prime eligible, which means that Amazon needs to see that there's demand for it.
So head over to Amazon.
This is what you're looking for, this lovely new box, and the brand new Jeremy's Razor second gen Razor 2.0.
Do it right now.
We're really excited about the product.
And if it's good enough for Michael Knowles, I mean, then it needs a better recommendation.
Well, I mean, producing that commercial was the seventh circle of hell.
So back to Dante.
Yes, that was.
Very good.
I did.
By the way, you're really funny in the commercial.
You love that.
That's nice of you.
When we started the company, I used to routinely tell people you were a terrible actor.
And I said so on account of you were a, I mean, truly bad.
Yes.
Truly bad.
But you found it.
Let's talk about this.
You found it somewhere.
I feel like in Lady Ballers, you were hilarious.
In the commercial, you're hilarious.
Again, if you just give me like a very, a person who's just pissed off to be there, I'm a method actor.
I have to be in the place.
I have to find my motivation.
Was he in the commercial?
I had the most important role of the whole thing.
He's a black guy.
You were a black guy in there?
Yeah, hold on.
Is that you?
Yeah, that was me.
You enjoyed Behar.
He really lost himself in the character.
Wow, that's impressive.
Appears in the background of the selfie.
That's good.
Second view, and you'll see it.
I was hoping for a full Al Jolson.
I love to sing.
I was going to say for a minute.
I thought we'd let a black guy in here.
By the way, Siaka, who plays Black Jeremy and also had a very funny role in Jeremy's Razors, is a good buddy of ours, is now Black Jeremy.
Like, I think it's going to buy me a lot of freedom not to have to be in all the commercials.
He's funny.
He's genuinely hilarious.
He's genuinely hilarious.
And a good guy, too.
It is true.
And also, I will admit that I found it very funny when the actress says that she has been following around half naked for two years and you never noticed.
I do like that line a lot.
Yeah.
Was the car different?
Yes.
That was a different McLaren.
So the God Kings McLaren is a Bass Boat Blue.
I don't know if that's the official color, but I call it a Bass Boat Blue McLaren 600.
And we thought that for Black Jeremy that he needed something with a little more attitude.
A little funkier.
We got a purple McLaren 720.
So we now have two McLarens.
Am I going to keep getting paychecks or is this?
I don't know that I've ever gotten a paycheck.
Ben said it was in the mail.
Rights Versus Duties00:08:45
So I assume it's coming at some point.
Yeah.
It's hard to find money to pay you when we have to keep spending day after day to change the locks over and over again.
Just keep picking me.
So anyway, back to the freedom conversation.
Back to Dante.
Let's go back to Dante.
Do you want to talk about that?
Yes.
I have one final point on Dante.
Then you can tell me why I'm totally wrong.
Dante was a little bit of a rhino.
And this is a weird thing.
Dante, he fights at the Battle of Campaldino for the Pope, the Pope's side.
Then he goes back.
I don't want to hear it.
The Pope's side wins.
Then he becomes like a rhino of the Pope's side, and he's pro-emperor side.
And then the Pope's side kicks him out and sends him into exile.
So the upshot of all of this is Dante argues to the point of like pragmatic limitations on power for a kind of early separation of church and state.
And it's not a total separation.
He thinks the civil authority should receive light from the spiritual authority, should be guided by the spiritual authority and illuminated by it, but that they're distinct.
That the state, the emperor, and the pope, the spiritual authority, both receive their power directly from God.
And so basically the emperor doesn't have to answer to the pope.
And this is a kind of early limitation on the power of government, though it's not this total secular, you know, the church should have no say in anything.
And I think Dante was right.
First of all, we're having a kind of conversation across purposes because one thing we're talking about is the nature of man before God, which is different than the nature of man before government.
So that we're talking about two different things.
And the quality of freedom in those two different situations is different, which is the problem with Catholic theocracy.
In Dante, Dante goes into hell and views the people who are damned for the choices that they have made.
And because Dante is an actual great poet, the people come to life in such a way that you actually feel for them in their situation.
But he's told not to feel pity for them because they have made their free choices.
So they're obviously, the freedom is a good, even in hell.
And so he's not saying that they only have the, we're given the freedom to do the right thing.
He's saying we don't pity them because they have chosen where they are and their humanity shines out of their own.
Well, hold on.
I don't understand why that makes freedom to do the wrong thing itself a good as opposed to a natural consequence.
Because it naturally accompanies the freedom to do what's right.
That's right.
Which is why in the Exodus, we see that God's people sin even on their way out and God doesn't forsake them.
And in Christian theology, that's fulfilled in Christ, who, yes, gives us freedom to do what's right.
But that is accompanied by forgiveness for doing what's wrong.
Yeah, but in the ultimate.
You have to free hell above.
There's a multiplicity of God just going hog wild on people.
Okay, so the distinction that I was going to make about the definition of freedom is that people misuse it because it's such a broad term.
And so people mean a bunch of different things by it, right?
Sometimes what people mean is I'm free to do whatever I want to do.
Sometimes it means that I need a freedom to have health care, right?
Which is that I want somebody else to do something for me.
Like there are a bunch of different uses of the word freedom that are actually mutually exclusive in some cases.
The two that I want to focus on that I think that get mixed up really easily in this particular conversation are a right in the sense that you have no duty to do acts, where you have two choices that are both morally justifiable or interesting or irrelevant, like to whether you're going to have meat or whether you can have milk tonight, right?
Like is it like if you're a Jew, whether you're going to have meat or milk tonight?
You're going to have a cheeseburger or pork if you're a Christian.
Which is your, like, which of the, like that, that has no moral qualifications and really has no moral importance.
And so there's no duty.
So the definition of that kind of freedom is you have a right to do acts because you have no duty not to do acts.
Right.
That is one kind of freedom.
That is not the same thing as you have a freedom to sin.
You have freedom to choose among various different things because you have no duty not to do that.
So in other words, I do have a duty not to sin.
I do have a duty not to sin, which means I don't have a right to sin.
I have a duty not to sin on a moral level.
That is different from the thing we're talking about on a governmental level, which is an immunity, which is the government does not have the power to compel me to do this thing.
That's why I keep going back to the pragmatic thing.
Yes, there are two different kinds of freedom.
Right.
So if you agree with that, then we're actually all in agreement.
So then I think we basically, that goes back to my point, which is that when I say, is it a useful concept, I'm not saying it doesn't matter or it's unimportant, but in conversation and in political debate, if the definition of freedom required, you know, we could debate it for two hours and it has 50 different meanings and people mean 50 different things.
It gets to the point where just in common conversation, when we're having a political debate and it seems like it's just not useful to talk about it.
And so I feel the same way about rights.
We talk about rights and what even is a right.
And that's why I've tried to not use that term as much, instead talk about responsibility, which is the flip side of rights like you're talking about.
But people understand that concept more.
It's a more useful concept.
But a useful term.
Wait, there is an important thing about this, going back to Polivius, because I think the cycle of regimes is real.
There's no question about it.
All history is frozen.
But the question to me is this.
When a democracy or whatever you want to call it, when it becomes chaos such that a strong man has to be brought in and it then morphs into a tyranny.
I mean, Lord Acton's point in the fall of the Roman Republic that you were freer after the Republic fell and August.
And this is actually true for about 20 years.
If you think the empire was bad, just wait till you hear about the Republic.
Right, exactly, exactly.
So you were actually freer in that situation.
But my argument with Acton on this is that if you don't have the right to choose who governs you, you actually aren't free.
And so my only point is this.
In the fall, in the morphing of a democracy into a tyranny, you have lost something of value.
And that's why I think before you let the democracy fall to bring order, you should actually try to preserve the democracy.
And there is something at least to, you know, I love American history.
We're talking about the pilgrims and the revolution and everything.
You know, America doesn't have a tradition of a king.
We could have.
There were very serious founding fathers and framers who argued for it or for some kind of elective monarchy or Washington as king or something.
But we don't.
We just don't.
We don't have a royal family.
I quite like the Windsors for all of their foibles and eccentricities.
I think they've been basically good for England over the last century or more.
But we don't have that.
So until Emperor Barron comes up, we've got to deal with our own political.
But don't we see in Washington turning over his sword to the political authorities, don't we see something amazing?
I mean, aren't we seeing something there that is unique in history, almost unique in history, and just an inherent good?
I mean, don't we see in that moment something that is inherently inherent?
Very inherently good.
And in the fall of the Republic, don't we see something that is unfortunate?
King George is said to have remarked upon hearing that Washington had an over- The king said this.
The king said this.
He said that Washington might be the greatest man in the world.
I think he said it to Benjamin West.
Yes and no.
I mean, this guy, well, I mean, listen again, as a defender of the Republican and a deep non-believer in the return of a tyranny or a monarchy, just on a theoretical level, the idea that one form of government is inherently better than another because you vote, I don't think is true.
I agree.
Because I think that rights precede, if you like rights all that much, and I'm talking here about, or structures of law, property, these things historically precede the form of government.
They don't act as a result of the form of government, historically speaking.
Meaning that if you want to look at the rights that existed for the British, those well pre-existed the power of parliament.
They started with a bunch of oligarchic lords fighting with the king to dissemble power.
They weakened under the power of the true.
And by the way, I mean, one of the cases that you can easily make with regards to the American Republic is that if you're looking at the rights, I mean, and here, obviously, you get into very dicey territory because not everybody in America had rights, most obviously black Americans.
But if you were looking at the inherent centralizing power of a tyrannical government, it was very weak early on.
And one of the reasons that it was kind of weak early on is because not everybody could vote.
One of the things that, one of the things that you get along with full suffrage is the ability to swamp rights in dramatic new ways, right?
A welfare state.
But to hear that you don't support democracy is going to keep me awake at night.
Consensual and Degrading00:07:28
And that's why I'm glad I have a Helix mattress.
Wow.
I have loved my Helix mattress for years.
And one of the reasons is I never sleep.
And when I lie awake, I know how comfortable it is.
But, you know, I've had it for a decade.
It's a gift that keeps on giving.
I just got my son his very first Helix mattress.
He's got a twin size that is firm, yet breathable.
If you haven't already checked out the Helix Elite collection, you need to, you need to.
That's it.
Helix.
You know, this must be Knowles' thing because I didn't get my son anything.
I did.
I did.
It was a twin.
This must be Knowles' copy.
Before I get my son, before I pay for my son's, oh, wait a minute.
Helix Harnis is years of mattress expertise to offer a truly elevated sleep experience or lying awake experience.
The Helix Elite collection includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences.
I love this thing truly.
And I truly am awake all night so I'm thinking this is comfortable.
You guys are going to sleep on it.
You'll miss it.
But I'm just telling you, if you're nervous about buying a mattress online, you don't have to be.
Helix has a sleep quiz that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress.
Why would you buy a mattress made for someone else?
Plus, Helix has a 10-year warranty.
You can try it out for 100 nights, risk-free.
They'll even pick it up for you if you don't love it, but that's not going to be a problem because you will.
Helix's financing options and flexible payment plans ensure a great night's sleep is never far away.
Helix is offering our listeners 30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows.
Go to helixleep.com/slash backstage.
That's helix sleep.com slash backstage.
This is their best offer yet.
It won't last long with Helix, better sleep or better lying awake.
Starts now.
Can I just kind of interject?
On that copy, it did say in big red letters to ask Matt if he likes his Helix mattress.
Do you like it?
And I was waiting for my moment.
You didn't even ask me.
Well, go ahead.
Come on.
Just call it up.
You didn't ask me.
I'm asking you now.
Let's go.
Do I like my Helix mattress?
I don't know.
Do you?
Hey, Matt, do you like your Helix mattress?
I do.
Thank you.
I like it a lot.
That's awesome.
I never read it.
So one of the aspects of it.
So I'm going to.
So 20 is Nightline did a full episode on our good friend Andrew Tate the other day.
And it was, you know, mediocre Chris Nightline usually is.
And it included some interesting material and included some really dumb material from some sort of gender studies professor who's explaining why feminism is good for us all, which is exactly why Andrew Tate exists.
Legitimately, it's like the episode was made about why Andrew Tate is evil.
And then some of which I agree.
And then large chunks of which I agree.
And then the counter is not responsible manhood.
It's some dude being like, but feminism is a solution for everyone.
I was like, God bless it.
ABC, you're the worst.
But the most interesting part of the doc was that there are all these outstanding sexual assault warrants on the Tates and sex trafficking warrants on the Tates and all of this.
And there are a couple of the women who have come out and said, I was not sex trafficked.
I consented.
And the prosecutor in that particular case says, well, it doesn't matter if you consented.
It's still sex trafficking.
If you were convinced to come via the Loverboy method to Romania and then serve effectively as a prostitute on camera, it doesn't matter whether you wanted to do it or you didn't want to do that.
That is still sex trafficking.
It's a crime.
It is a crime.
And this raises that question of freedom because freedom always sort of implies with it consent, right?
Consent of the governed would be democracy.
So this goes back to, is consent the core value?
Because for the West, it's not just that, even if you argue that it's an inherent value, it has become the inherent value in the West.
It's the only value that matters.
And you can see the breakdown of that system of morality every single day, particularly with young women who have been told their entire life that their consent is a binary question.
It's yes or no.
And then men look at that and they're like, okay, well, if consent is all that matters here, then I can do whatever I want to do to you so long as you consent to it.
And our society no longer has the language to condemn women for saying yes to the thing or even more importantly, condemn men for taking advantage of a woman who says yes to a thing.
He's not taking advantage if she says yes to the thing.
And that's a sickness in a society.
This is, if you read the New York Times, the New York Times writes like three or four sex articles every week.
And every single one of them is musing over how things could have gone so wrong when they had consent.
And this is again and again.
In the New York Times, which I take to be the voice of the left as an old-fashioned, they're kind of a fusty old paper.
They're dealing with leftism as it was 60 years ago, but now it's permeated our society.
But their idea is like sex is the only willed human action that takes place outside a moral context.
So that if you have consent, you can do this.
There's no such thing as if you dress up in leather and have somebody stick cigarettes in you, you're not degrading yourself as long as you consent.
It's empowering.
And the idea that you can degrade, because if you have no soul, there's nothing to degrade, right?
As long as your body is not a single person.
You have no pleasure to condemn that.
Yeah, that's exactly.
I think the important point is that they don't have the language, but the concepts are still there.
But the only language they have to describe the concepts is consent.
That's how you end up with a woman who shacks up with a guy for a night, gets drunk or whatever, college campus, and then wakes up in the morning and she's feeling, she knows she feels a certain way.
She feels degraded.
She feels like her dignity has been violated.
She feels like she's been taken advantage of.
She was not raped, but the problem is that consent is the only word she has to describe how she feels.
And so she says, well, my consent was violated.
And so then this thing that is not rape becomes rape because that's just her way of condemning not just the guy, but also her own behavior.
But then it becomes, so then everything is.
Everything's a binary question.
It's either on this side of the consent line or on that side of the consent line.
But the reality is there's a whole, there's a whole X axis here, right, that you're ignoring, right?
You've got the Y axis, which is like consent or not consent.
And then you have the X axis, which is degrading or not degrading.
And things can exist in all four quadrants, right?
You have stuff that's consensual and not degrading, which is hopefully, you know, like marital sex.
And then you have things that are consensual and degrading, which is a very real quadrant right there.
And then you have things that are consensual and non-consensual and non-degrading.
It would be probably empty.
That's an empty quadrant.
Then you have non-consensual and degrading.
That's a huge quadrant.
Consensual and degrading is a really big quadrant.
Non-consensual and degrading is a very big quadrant.
But they've disappeared an entire quadrant from that.
Non-consensual and non-degrading.
Like a cocktail waitress runs in here right now, clips a cigar, shoves it in my teeth, lights it on fire and forces me to drink a McAllen 25.
Right.
It's not consensual.
Nonsensual, but not degrading.
But it was edifying.
That's fair.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But that category of the people.
It's not a culture, but.
Consensual and degrading just doesn't exist for these people.
It just doesn't exist at all.
And so women are lost for this language.
And then because of that, because they've degraded themselves, it makes it very difficult for them to form normal human relationships.
Also, the fact that men and women have a nature that if you get drunk with a bunch of guys, you're making a mistake.
And they say, well, that's blaming the victim.
But it's not.
It's just like walking down an alley at 3 o'clock in the morning and you get mugged.
It's the mugger's fault, but you're an idiot.
And you've done something because there are muggers, because human beings are corrupt.
And that's not a place to be at 3 in the morning.
Walking out in a tsunami without an umbrella, I guess it's the weather's fault in a way, but these things are to be expected.
Also, an umbrella and a tsunami is not going to do you much good.
Not much good.
But again, I think that does go to the when you make freedom your highest priority without any countervailing values, you end up in these very ugly places.
Explicitly Buying Votes00:15:43
Yeah.
Well, again, I think that we're confusing the freedom that is part of the dignity of being a human being and the freedom, the political freedom, which is yeah, agree.
Yeah, agree.
I mean, what do you want to talk about that's not this?
Because you guys resolve your differences?
What's that?
Resolve yourself.
I think we just have to excise Knowles.
Well, I was launching.
Hold on.
I was launching an entirely new business called Jeremy's Razor 2.0.
When I said one minute before walking on set, well, let's just release the razor.
I didn't realize that they'd need me to send out tweets and give instructions to the team and sign documents.
I'm going to say that when I host this show, I'm a little more involved than this.
You're a better host than I am in a lot of ways.
The advantage that I have over you is that the less you know, the more charming you can be.
Basically, for me, it just comes down to like, I'm not going to give up my freedom.
Yeah.
I mean, it really is that simple.
I know that's like a simple thing, but even my freedom to fail.
Economic freedom is an enormous part of freedom that I don't think you can maintain in a coercive, I mean, you don't have economic freedom in Russia because if you even start to build a successful business, Vladimir Putin comes and takes it away from you and makes it his business.
Yes, but in the year 900 BC, he owned that business.
That's the thing.
But you don't understand.
In the Lithuanian Polish comic book.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, we've covered most of the big topics.
We covered Jeremy's Razors 2.0, the Battle of Compaldino, Compaldino, we covered Dante, we covered freedom in Exodus, consent.
Julia Fox.
Yeah, I don't know.
Is there anything else?
The only thing we haven't talked about is Donald Trump's sex life.
So I think it's probably worth just coming out of this beautiful philosophical world that we've lived in and get down into really disgusting solitude policy.
This is driving me crazy.
I have to admit, this Trump trial is making me nuts.
I mean, I love it.
I love it.
Well, it's incredibly entertaining, but it is the greatest violation of American norms and principles and ethics that I think I've seen in my lifetime.
It reminds me of a Capra movie, you know, like Mr. Smith goes to Washington where everybody is corrupting.
Except for Mr. Smith, you know, this is the thing.
They have turned this guy almost like that.
They have turned this guy into a hero in the same way that Samson is a hero.
Samson has there.
It's also true that if you shear him off his hair, he loses his great power.
Exactly.
It's also true.
And so I can't wait for him to be in the doorway of the courthouse.
I mean, he pushes down all of the pillars and all of the collapses upon the hill.
This is like, talk about a tsunami.
This is like a tsunami of oppression that has hit him.
Everybody, every single institution we have is trying to bring this guy down.
And they can't stop him.
This is the thing.
Even I have come to admire Donald Trump.
Everybody jokes.
Donald Trump has lived a very colorful life and he's talked about it, bragged about it.
I cannot think of another human being who, with this kind of stuff thrown for indictments, they want to put him in jail for 700 years or whatever.
And he seems only to be energized by it.
He's going out.
He goes to Harlem to do a little bodega rally.
He's doing a rally in the South Bronx.
A Republican has not, a white guy, much less an orange guy, has not entered the South Bronx in probably 100 years.
This guy's going to go do it.
And the reason I love the trial, it is so unjust and it's so absurd.
And their star witness has committed more egregious crimes than the guy they're actually trying to prosecute.
And unprosecuted, by the way, for their star witnesses.
And basically just can't help but talk about them all the time.
And like with all of that, they are so farcically bad at prosecuting Trump.
Everyone, the AG, this judge is a complete joke.
The prosecution didn't know what their star witness was going to say.
They didn't realize the defense had prepared anything that every second this trial goes on, I feel that Trump gets stronger.
I don't think it's just a blessing.
It's a blessing for him.
It's absolutely a blessing.
It's a blessing in disguise.
It's the worst thing.
I would never want to be put through it.
It's a massive blessing to his political campaign for a couple of reasons.
One, as you say, it's on its face an absurd charge.
Second, the coterie of witnesses that they have is legitimately a woman who sells sex for money on camera.
And a lawyer who stole $60,000.
Right.
I mean, when she said to you that she was shocked, how did I find myself here?
I mean, I don't know.
How do you find yourself there every single day on camera?
On camera, yeah.
You were just doing your job is the answer.
Like, you found yourself shocked the same way.
I find myself shocked to be sitting behind a desk talking.
Like, what are you talking about?
But the whole trial is absurd.
But it's also done him the favor of putting him, as he says, the ice box.
That's actually great for him.
If I could have constructed a campaign wherein Twitter did not exist for him, he would be forced into fake Twitter where no one was, and he would just tweet into it and no one would ever notice.
The oblivion, we might call it.
Right, exactly.
You might call it truth social.
And he was then put into a room where he was literally not allowed to talk for multiple hours a day, but he could only emerge to speak about how he wasn't allowed to talk and then go back into that place.
And if he could do that for the rest of, I hope that this trial lasts another seven months.
Well, don't worry.
There's three or four more coming up right behind it.
But they're not going to get him.
They're not going to get there in time.
They can't do it.
This is the only one.
This is the word.
He's the whole world on fire.
He's the worst president.
He is the worst president.
He's so terrible.
Everything the man does.
He's just rash.
The world is literally on fire and it's all his fault.
It is.
Every element of it is his fault.
He is rash at this.
It's unbelievable how bad he is.
Did you see he, so he releases, he's going to release a million barrels of oil from this Northeast Reserve?
Yeah.
Joe Biden.
He'll bring it down by two cents for one.
Yeah, he'll bring gas down by nothing.
But he needs to do it to have any shot of restoring gas prices.
And so he can't just drill for more oil because the left won't accept that.
But they need more oil.
So they do it in this really inefficient way.
Then Joe Biden, he goes after the International Criminal Court because they seem to be getting big for their bridges.
Even though Joe Biden is the one who rescinded Trump's sanctions on the International Criminal Court.
Then he's whining about how Russia invaded Ukraine.
Russia only invades Ukraine, according to Zelensky, because Joe Biden weakens America's stance on Russia.
Because he said if it's only a minor invasion, he literally just did the just the tip routine.
He's like, if it's just the tip, it's probably fine.
This is just a title.
And he's like, really?
It's like Gran in Afghanistan.
Yeah, that's right.
It should be, it should, the strategic oil reserve thing, that should be an impeachable offense in a lot of ways.
You're stealing from the strategic oil reserve to explicitly.
Like I know it's not impeachable, but it's.
He's explicitly trying to buy votes now.
Like explicitly trying to buy votes.
He's going to young people.
He's like, just shoveling cash at them.
He's like, here's a student loan bailout.
You want some money?
I'll give you some money, man.
Here's some money.
And he's like, you know what?
The oil prices are too high.
What if I just take some money?
I just throw the money at you.
And he's doing this over and over.
I mean, it's so clear at this point that he's just handing out goodies to constituent groups.
I will.
And it's not going to work.
I think he's going to lose.
Let me say this.
I am hopeful that he will lose.
After 2016, I'll never say again.
I've been in every election since like 2008, by the way.
But I think that I think he could truly lose.
The thing that concerns me, I'm deeply concerned about this early debate.
I think that the early debate is a mistake.
On Trump's one?
And I think that we will go, we meaning conservatives broadly, and I fear Trump himself will go into the debate with the exact wrong set of expectations.
Every time there's a State of the Union with Joe Biden, we're like, oh, I can't wait to watch this train wreck.
He's probably going to poop himself and fall off the stage.
And he doesn't.
He's good.
He mixes it up with the Republicans.
He's good.
He was energetic.
He's energetic.
He's feisty.
He was good in the debates last time and Trump was not good.
And we keep going in with these like low expectations like they won't give this guy a shot of adrenaline in the arm and he won't be able to perform.
And when you go in with those expectations, you lose every single time.
If you think there's no way Joe Biden can stand up to Donald Trump in a debate, first of all, he did and became president probably in large part because of it last time.
And he will again.
Donald Trump has to go in here and fight for his life and win.
But here's what he really needs.
Okay, so here's my suggested strategy for the Trump debate.
Okay, so number one, he should go in and he should just be calm.
If he's calm, he's going to win.
If he gets agitated, Biden is going to win because Biden, as you say, he's going to go in the back room.
He's going to find a youth and he's going to suck the blood from the youth.
He's going to reinvigorate himself.
He's not just going to smell the youth this time.
This time it's the fangs.
He's going to go full force.
But the other thing is that I really believe that Donald Trump should push very hard to have RFK Jr. on that stage.
I think he should really push to have RFK Jr. on that stage.
And I'll tell you why.
I think this is right.
Because RFK Jr. right now is drawing somewhere around 10% of the vote.
He seems to be drawing a little bit more from Biden than from Trump.
And I think that's only going to grow because it turns out there are many never Bidens, more never Bidens than there are never Trumps at this point in time.
If you're voting for Trump, it's because you actually want to vote for Trump.
Like who's voting for Trump because they just, they hate Joe Biden so much that they're voting for Trump.
That's really not Trump's base.
Trump's base is mostly people who really, really like him.
His base is like 43, 44%.
Joe Biden's base is right now like 36, 37%.
It sucks.
And not only that, RFK Jr., he thinks that he is running for right-wing votes, which means that in a debate, he's going to turn, he's going to smack Trump.
When he turns and he smacks Trump, who does that attract?
Not the Trump voters.
It attracts the Biden voters.
The Biden voters like that RFK Jr. is going after Donald Trump.
Then RFK Jr. will turn and he will clock Joe Biden on being a bad president and he will continue to bleed viters, Biden's voters.
It's risky.
Plus, he fills time.
Plus he fills time.
And I think the more time I think Donald Trump in debate is pepper, he's not salt.
He's great in primary debates because he has about six minutes combined to talk and it's all little jabs.
And if you give him 40 minutes on a stage to debate, I've never seen him be good in a debate that's 40 minutes.
I don't agree with this.
I think Trump jumped on this because he smelled blood and I think he's right to smell blood.
Even though I don't actually think Trump is going to underestimate Biden.
I think he's, you know, he's going to make, he's foolishly saying he's not going to be any good.
But I think he knows that he has to do something here.
And there's something else about this.
And this is an insight I've actually stolen from my son.
I let him say it, but he's in Edinburgh drinking McAllen.
On his twin mattress, right?
On his twin helix.
Yeah, exactly.
He knows his mattress.
Hunter only drinks those peaty whiskeys.
He does.
He loves those dirt.
He could eat coal as well as Hunter's.
However, he pointed out that Trump has a new coalition.
This is not just the minorities, but he also has a coalition of people who are saying like, I don't like him, but I'm voting for him.
The first time that people said that in 2016, when we sort of said, you know, when I sort of said, all right, I'm going to vote for him because he's better than Hillary, we felt that we had to join the crowd of the people who loved him.
Now we don't even feel that way.
We feel like I feel perfectly free.
I mean, people yell at me for it, but I feel perfectly free to say, I don't think he's a good guy.
I don't think, you know, I thought he did a good job for three years, a decent job for three years.
But I'll vote for him twice.
I'll move from state to state and vote for him.
I mean, because it's just so obvious.
And I think if he can go on and basically make that case, make the cases like, Joe, you have done a terrible job.
You did this, you did this, you did this, you did this.
I think he has to not get sucked into January 6th.
That's the big trap that Biden is going to set for him.
He's going to start off and he's going to say, that's an interesting thing.
He's going to say, you lost the election.
You won't accept that you lost the election.
And then you led an insurrection.
And Trump, because he's almost pathologist.
He's like Marty McFly in Backs of the Future 2, right?
It's like, you chicken, you chicken McFly.
And then he's like the Pettsville Lynn, the Dolly Zoom.
Exactly.
If he can avoid that, if he can just say, listen, Joe, you and I disagree about who won the 2020 election, but there's one thing that everyone agrees about, and it's that you're a shit president.
I mean, if he says that, he'll win.
And I agree that I think that this will be a disaster for Biden.
And it's different than 2020.
For the most obvious reason, that Biden now is fully senile.
He's actually senile.
And he only has two gears now.
And one gear is confused, doddering and confused and incoherent.
The other gear, and this is what we saw on the State of the Union, is angry and shouting.
And the only way that he's able to be coherent for a long stretch of time is to be angry and shouting the entire time.
He just did it at a commencement speech with Morehouse, where he just, it didn't make any sense tonally.
Like he's angry and shouting at a commencement speech because that's the only way that they can get this guy to make sense for a long period of time.
So he's going to come into this debate and he's going to be in angry shouting mode.
And if Trump can just be not only calm, but also sort of just his whimsical sort of self with this angry shouting old man, I think the contrast will be will be really favorable to Trump.
Except that if Trump makes the election a referendum on Trump, he will lose.
If Trump makes the election a referendum on January 6th, 20 or on 2020, broadly speaking, he will lose.
And if Donald Trump makes the election a referendum on Joe Biden, he will be the 47th president.
The problem is I've never seen Trump not make himself the center of whatever conversation he walks into.
But I think, you know, I don't know.
I'm kind of optimistic about this debate.
I'm not even sure it's going to happen, to be honest, but like, I think if it happens, I think the minute Biden said it, you could tell he did it because he's running scared.
I mean, there's no reason for him to do it.
And the way Trump jumped on it, I just thought like he smells blood and he is, you know, people keep saying he's not a politician, but he kind of is a politician.
You mean he was the president of the United States for four years?
Well, not only that.
Run three times.
He's a natural politician.
Yeah, he is.
Is there a world where a bad performance leads to a move to ouster Biden from the ticket at his convention?
He's almost impossible.
No way.
Is it impossible?
Yeah.
Well, because if you oust him, who are they going to put in place?
There's no one they can put in place.
There's one person.
Well, it's Michelle.
And that's it.
Michelle's the only person.
They're not going to do it.
I just don't think they're going to do it.
I think they're going to ride this horse past its death.
I mean, I would say they're going to ride this horse until the end of the day.
I don't know what chapter you're going to do.
Ride this horse in the face.
We are going to be taking questions from our Daily Wire Plus subscribers.
We've been seeing your questions in the chat.
We're going to take them now.
If you're not yet a member, please head over to DailyWirePlus.com, become a member today.
Our subscribers make it possible for us to continue to bring you this great content, to continue to bring you this show, Ben's show, Drew's show, Matt's show.
Michael's is more like a charity thing.
You don't really contribute to that.
That's something that I get.
It's full of love, you know.
I get points in heaven for that one.
But also, the entertainment that we're doing, if you haven't seen Mr. Bertram, please go over to Daily Wire Plus, give it a watch.
It's fulfillment of Adam Corolla's really 30-year vision.
It's the character he first created that brought him into show business.
And we've helped him realize that with our first animated series for grown-ups, other than our children's animated stuff over at Bentkeep.
If you haven't seen Judged, Matt Walsh, the fulfillment of Matt Walsh's 30-year vision to sit and condemn people.
Please head over and give that a watch as well.
I will say this about Mr. Bertram.
I wanted to say this at uh if they'd asked me at the premiere to say anything, I was going to bring up the fact that the first time I met Adam Carolla, he charged me $15,000 for the privilege.
So Ben and I were running a thing called Truth Revolt at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
And we were having a student conference at Pepperdine University.
And Ben came up to me and he said, Well, I think maybe I said we should have a speaker.
And Ben said, I'm really good friends with Adam Carolla, but he would definitely come down.
It's a 23-minute drive.
I mean, he'll drive 23 minutes to do it for me.
Ballot Battles and Delusions00:14:32
I've known him for, I've known him since I was a kid.
So I was like, oh man, they're close.
They're good friends.
I call up Adam's team and they're like, yeah, 15 green.
And I was like, but it's 20, it's 23 minutes.
You've known Ben since he was a kid.
Don't make me say 17 green.
So I was thinking, look at how far we've come.
The first time I met Adam, he charged me $15,000 for the privilege.
And here we are a decade later, and he charged me $9 million to get to go to one party with him.
It's a fun show, though.
It's worth watching.
Our Daily Wire subscribers make it possible.
So thank you to you.
And here is our first question.
Is it worth debating falsehoods about Trump?
The drink bleach falsehood, the fine people falsehood, et cetera, with people who constantly complain about Trump and refuse to change their minds no matter how many times you disprove their statements.
I think that question answers itself.
Yeah, it does.
I will say that one thing that I've done.
So obviously, if you hadn't noticed, Jewish.
And that means there are a lot of people I know who are libs because not in the Orthodox community, but everybody else who's not in the Orthodox community.
The Orthodox community is like 150% pro-Trump.
And then you have all the lib Jews.
The Jew-ish.
He's not very religious.
But there are some who are really, really mad at Biden because they're looking at how Biden, I mean, it's long past time, obviously, but because of what Biden has done on Israel, they are livid.
And I talked to some of them and they're like, yeah, but I just can't vote for Trump.
I can't vote because they're still libs.
I can't vote for Trump.
And what I've said to them is, okay, so either stay home or vote for RFK Jr.
If you're not going to vote for Trump, do not give your vote to Joe Biden because the minute that you give your vote to a person with whom you heartily disagree, your vote means nothing.
It means nothing.
It's not malleable anymore.
If they know they can just check you up in that conversation.
I agree with this with someone with whom you would say I'll give my vote to someone with whom I heartily disagree.
I heartily disagree with Donald Trump quite often.
I would not give my vote to someone with whom I fundamentally disagree.
That's fair.
So I mean, these are people.
Also, when you're discussing, I too know many liberals for my sins.
And one of the things that I've decided is I never discuss personalities with them because I'll say the minute the conversation starts, I'll say, look, you're going to tell me how much you hate Trump.
I'm going to tell you how much I hate Biden.
They're politicians.
They have many, many hateful things about them.
Let's talk about the principles.
And then if I can convince them on the principles, then I'll say to them, then just don't vote.
If you can't vote for Trump, just don't vote.
I think you could also, on the questioner's point of do you fact check, you know, all the fake propaganda, I think if you just calmly, you don't need to go tit for tat because there will be 10 more lies for every one you correct.
But if you just sort of calmly say, yeah, none of that's true, just none of it's true.
And I'm happy to disprove any number of them that you want.
But at a certain point, I just, you have to recognize the sources of your information are not credible.
I know that you believe that they're true because of the bubble in which you operate.
People will not believe that.
They will not believe it.
I mean, even after this NPR thing came out, I would say to people that I've been telling people that NPR is poisoned for years.
And when it came out that the woman who runs NPR is essentially a CIA operator, I said, now do you believe me?
No, come on.
They just will not believe it.
Those lies are just absolutely permeate the atmosphere.
Wait, you're saying that government-funded propaganda isn't wholly accurate?
But anti-American propaganda, that's the crazy part we're living in.
That's one of the big mistakes our deep state makes.
They're very anti-American.
If only we had a good deep state.
If the courts allowed Donald Trump to be kicked off the ballot in the swing states, do you think that would justify a civil war?
I think justifies the wrong question.
I mean, you can make an argument.
Look, I mean, our founders thought that a tax on Snapple or whatever tea they were drinking justified a revolt.
I mean, you could make an argument that the income tax justifies a revolt of some kind.
But however, you have to ask questions like, does it have any chance of succeeding?
Does it have any chance of creating a better situation than what we have right now?
Do you want to shoot your cousins?
Exactly.
You have to start asking all those kinds of questions.
And I think that, you know, so then the answer is obviously no in that case.
I don't know if they prevent us from being able to function as a country, which removing the frontrunner from one of the parties from being on the ballot unconstitutionally, you are getting, if not fully there, very close to the point where the political system can no longer give you a win.
But it's such a hypothetical, like it's just, that's not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is what's happened.
The court's going to get involved and the court's going to say, yeah, that's not how, that's not how it works in this country.
You can't pull those shenanigans.
By the way, I think that that's, it's such an important point because as seriously as we take the, you know, throwing Trump off the ballot thing is about, they take the January 6th thing way more seriously.
Neither of those were destined to succeed or be in any serious way a threat to the working order of our sick of this crap about how this is going to be the last election.
There will be no more election.
Not a single person in the United States believes that.
No one believes it.
When politicians say it, they don't believe it.
When who say it, they don't, this is not going to be the last.
I promise you, it's not going to be the last election.
I don't bet 100% on very many things.
I will bet 100% that four years from now, we will be in the middle of another presidential election cycle.
I'd be willing to bet everything that I own and all of my children's future ownings on that proposition.
And anybody who says different, I got to tell you, like, I don't believe you.
And if you really believe that, then I think that, you know, if you lose the election, then right now, if you believe that Joe Biden is such a threat, for example, on the right to democracy, that it's literally the end of the country, the end of the country, if he gets elected, then you're in, then you have a duty to do something about it.
And you don't because it's not true.
This is why the first guy who believes evil things and is going to do evil things.
And we have a system that prevents the most.
This is why the first conversation of the night was important.
Because if you believe that we can gain no more goodness out of our political system, then you have a duty to revolution.
When the founders did what they did, yes, it was over a one-cent tax on Snapple.
But it wasn't really over the one-cent tax on Snapple.
It was over the fact that they petitioned their government and petitioned their government and petitioned their government, and they were given no voice.
They were given no recourse.
There was nothing that they could do to have a say in how they were governed.
They could not affect political change in any way.
If they had been able to affect political change, if George III and Parliament had just decided to give representation to the colonies in parliament, there would have been no moral justification for the American Revolution.
But they wouldn't.
And so there was.
But they also, but to go back to my point, that the other thing they had going is that they could win.
Now, it's quite amazing that they won, but they could win given the situation they were in at the time.
But, you know, the question that we have is even if the government does something like they kick Trump off the ballot.
Now, that's, we agree, that's full-on tyranny.
Can some sort of movement like that actually have any hope of succeeding?
Only if it's organized by the states.
Yeah, it would have to grow up organically.
It would have to be organized by the states.
There's no like we the people, like your militia down in, you know, Plainview, Texas or something is going to overthrow the federal government.
Of course, that's not going to happen.
Your militia up in Michigan would, of course, that's not going to happen.
A move like that, if it were to have any chance of succeeding, would have to be a collection of the states doing it.
And listen, you're talking, again, you were talking about shooting your cousins.
I get a little frustrated when people act as though they look forward to the idea of revolution.
Revolution depends on the cousin.
Revolution is not the moment that we are in, and it is not a moment that we should hope to find ourselves in.
We're in a moment where we are losing political battles at a rate that we need, that demands a change in tactics.
At the same time, we're winning political battles all the time that still mattered.
Donald Trump was president three and a half years ago.
Roe versus Wade was overturned, which is something I frankly never thought was going to happen.
That's exactly right.
And so I'm sorry to disabuse everyone of their fantasy that at 65 years old, you with your semi-automatic AR-15, as long as you don't have to run more than four steps uphill, are somehow going to overthrow the United States military.
That's not real, and you shouldn't want it to be real.
I'm hoping to be sent to France to flirt with the girls.
That's what I have to do.
The good news, though, too, is the fact that Biden's freaking out over everything and spilling oil from the Northeast and agreeing to the debates and everything.
The one thing it shows you, it's not that Trump is going to win.
It's not that it's not rigged.
At least it's not totally rigged.
That's right.
At least Biden thinks he could lose.
Yes.
Which is good.
I'm telling you, they are vulnerable or they would not be behaving like they wouldn't have reacted to Harrison Butker if they realized that women are waking up.
Look what it took for Biden to win the first time.
And they will not succeed at shutting down the country again going into this election.
If they could, they would.
If they could, they would.
What are the chances that the debate gets canceled because of Trump's insistence on a drug test?
I think there's a high chance it'll get canceled, but I don't know if that'll be.
It won't be because of that.
I think it's funny to demand a drug test.
But if you think that Joe Biden couldn't pass a drug test, the way drug tests work.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like giving the guy a shot of adrenaline two minutes before he takes the stage, your drug test isn't possible.
They couldn't get Jose Conseco in the 90s.
Is he continent enough to pee in like a jar on people?
Run him.
If we lose this election, whose fault will it be?
Knowles.
It's the fault of whoever you already didn't like.
Yes.
I like it.
Here's what I know for a fact.
Knowles.
It will be my fault.
And I base this on the fact that no matter what happens in politics, it's your fault.
I get blamed.
You should have pushed harder for Ron DeSantis.
I literally voted for Ron DeSantis in the primary after he backed out, after he dropped out.
That's how much I wanted Ron DeSantis to be the nominee.
And then if I say that, people are like, you don't sufficiently support Donald Trump.
And I'm just like, guys, I am a mere shampoo cell phone.
If you think that the Daily Wire being a little nicer to your preferred candidate would change the fact that the base, the voters wanted Donald Trump to be.
I did not want Donald Trump to be our nominee.
I wrote an essay that said, I don't think Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump should be disqualified on the basis of his behavior.
Some of your hosts have been very pro-Trump for many years.
And some have been very pro-Trump for many years.
We have a political process in this country.
And also, we're a media company.
It's not my job to get Ron DeSantis to be the nominee.
That's not my job.
That's Ron DeSantis' job.
And you're missing an important point.
It's the Jews.
I'm right here.
Oh, you're sitting there.
If you want to recast that question as what can Donald Trump do to win, that's not on Donald Trump, right?
And like, I think everybody understands that if he loses, then he bears a large percentage of the responsibility for losing.
I don't think people understand.
No, I really, no, I don't.
I think they're looking for other reasons.
But if there is one thing that he can do to win, it is not just personality-driven, liberate the state parties to go get the votes.
Build state parties that are not complete crap.
The biggest problem the Republican Party has right now is not Donald Trump as a candidate.
The biggest problem the Republican Party has right now is not even the media, although the media are, of course, a huge problem.
The biggest problem the Republican Party has is that they destroyed their state parties in places like Arizona and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
And you need people to go knock on doors and collect votes.
That's what you need to do because Democrats are doing that.
You know how I know this?
Because there's only one state in the country that did it right in 2022, and there was a red wave in that state, and that was Florida.
Everywhere else, they blew it, and they got this little pink trickle at best.
And so if Donald Trump wants to win, every dollar that is pouring into the RNC, every single dollar should be a get-out-the-vote dollar in the swing states.
In the swing states, Donald Trump could lose and it not be his fault.
It is more likely if he loses that it will actually be his fault because of his lack of discipline and his inability to frame it.
It's so funny that this is not existing because no one ever doubted this for one second about John McCain, about Mitt Romney.
If George Bush had lost in 2004, people would have been like, ah, I can't believe that kind of thing.
Part of it, though, is the extraordinary measures taken against Trump in 2020 and 2022.
Correct.
Agree.
So they upended a lot of the voter rules.
I do think part of the state.
The entire apparatus of the government is a raid against him.
That could cost him the election.
Yes, it could.
Of course.
So one thing you do, yes, you have to have the state parties to get out the vote.
You also need a robust voter integrity effort.
This is what I remember in my early days in politics working on campaigns.
Out of walking, out of knocking.
Yes, exactly.
Passing out pom cards.
But we would have the ballot integrity people, and we would catch people, and we'd catch SEIU busting in union members out of district and all that kind of.
That always happens everywhere.
The Baltimore Board of Elections Supervisor just got caught on camera this week and he said, yeah, there was some shady stuff that happened in that election.
We still don't have clarity.
Someone might upload it a thumb drive twice or whatever.
So that happens all the time.
To quote FDR's advice to LBJ after LBJ lost an important election to him, FDR said, you ran fine, but you forgot to sit on the ballot box.
You forgot.
In a way, it's actually, to FDR's credit, you forgot who counts the votes.
That's really what matters.
And then LBJ took an extreme lesson from that and stole the election.
Is the Democrats' election strategy delusional or are they confident knowing it already ran?
That's a strange question.
I mean, the only thing delusional about it is that they thought Biden might be a good candidate.
No, but as you say, they have no one else to report.
But it is delusional.
It is delusional because a normal candidate would, like Joe Biden is, I've been saying he's delusional for three years on a political level.
He won in 2020 because he ran against Bernie Sanders as a moderate.
And then he ran as a dead person against Donald Trump.
And what the American people wanted was a moderate dead person.
Why Anti-Semitism Is Unique00:13:42
And instead, what they got was a radical dead person.
And they don't like radical dead people, as it turns out.
It turns out that all the people that Joe Biden is pandering to are the least popular people in America who do not like the college protesters.
People who do not like the pro-Klamosniks in Dearborn, Michigan.
People do not like the trans radicals.
People are not fond of these people.
And Joe Biden keeps doubling down.
We've done this so many times on the show, I won't repeat it.
2012 is the most important election.
Barack Obama changed the way Democrats think about elections by basically cobbling together a coalition of the dispossessed and doubling down on his baseball, ignoring the moderates, and he won.
And every Democrat since then has thought they can do that.
The only reason it worked in 2020 is because every voting rule changed and everyone voted nine months in advance of the election.
That's right.
That's literally the only reason.
What's the delusional part here?
The delusional part is that he thinks that if he keeps doubling down on his base, he thinks that if he delusion is that Joe Biden thinks he's Barack Obama.
Yes.
That's the delusional.
But the Democrats are scared out of their wits.
They're not delusional.
They understand.
But all the people around him are fully delusional because if they were smart, I mean, James Carville was saying this.
If they were smart, they'd be in his, Roy Teixeira is saying this.
They'd all be in his ear saying, dude, the votes you're losing are in the middle of the spectrum.
Those votes are wide open.
They're so wide open that RFK Jr. is running at 10%.
Those votes are wide open.
What in the F are you doing?
And it said everyone.
That's what James Carville said?
All I heard was, that old Nazi is going to get down there.
Hang on.
You have to play it backwards.
What do you make of big right-wing Twitter accounts starting to blame Jews for everything?
They're all on my feed.
Drew's leading them.
What I like is that they hate Jews for making money.
So they hate them for being capitalist.
They hate them for being socialists.
It's like you can't win.
Whatever the Jews do.
Generally.
I mean, anti-Semitism, to give a definition, anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about the power of the Jew in society.
Whatever you hate most in society, the Jew is behind it.
It is why it is distinct in definition from other forms of discrimination.
It doesn't mean it's better.
It doesn't mean it's worse.
It is distinct because it is a distinct phenomenon.
Again, not better, not more important, not worse, just distinct.
Okay, the reason that you see right-wing Twitter accounts that are now doing this crap is because the right-wing does now have a grievance mentality.
Part of that grievance mentality has been justified by the institutional dominance of the left and right-wingers who rightly feel that they have been ground under the boot heel of a culture that dispossesses particularly white Christian males.
All of that is true, but this has resulted in a quasi-intersectional philosophy wherein white Christian males are at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy and those who are quote unquote most successful in the society are to blame, which is identical to left-wing intersectional philosophy.
The only difference is who they think are at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy and who's at the top of the intersectional hierarchy.
And so grievance culture comes all the way around.
The only thing that the intersectional leftists and the right-wing anti-Semites agree on is that at the top of the hierarchy is the Jews, because the Jews are disproportionately successful.
The thing is, the intersectional hierarchy, they think that the Jews are white, so they're disproportionately successful.
And the white supremacists and the alt-righters and the anti-Semites think that the Jews hate white people and therefore they're at the top of the intersectional hierarchy.
But they all seem to agree.
That's power.
You're at the top of both hierarchies.
I am.
So that's the famous.
That's the famous joke about the Jew in 1939 who walks past the other Jews sitting on the park bench reading Dr. Sturmer.
And he says to him, why are you reading Dr. Sturmer?
He says, look how much good news there is in here.
We run the banks.
I have to say that I do not agree with this thing about the source of anti-Semitism.
It is a religious thing.
If you go back and see pre-Nazis, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, all these guys were saying this weird religion, Christianity, has come in and stolen our true German values, and it's all the fault of the Jew.
That is what they say.
They say Christianity is against our nature.
The blood of the Germans, the Aryan blood is running in our veins.
It's all the fault of the Jew who sold us Christianity.
And that's why the thing survives as long as it does.
And it is worse than other forms of bigotry because it's a bigotry against God.
It is bigotry against God.
And just one other thing I have to say is that, as far as I'm concerned, the Jews aren't powerful enough.
My biggest problem with the order, the Elders of Zion thing is that it's a forgery.
I don't understand.
Where are the Jews?
Why don't they make things run better?
Well, I mean, you did use our space laser on Raisi's helicopter.
Oh, that one's good.
But you missed the other two.
Intentionally.
We aren't like, we don't hit every time.
I will say, I take a more limited and simpler view of anti-Semitism.
And that I would classify it like, like any other bigotry, racism.
Of course, racism is a big one.
If you're an anti-black racist, it's because you hate black people.
You think that black people are inferior in some way.
And if that's what you think about black people, then you're racist.
Now, you might not hate black people, but have other views about black people, some stereotypical views even.
And some of those views might even be like insulting, but it doesn't automatically make you a racist.
That's true.
Or the example I give is like, you know, let's say Asians.
You might not hate Asians.
However, you might subscribe to the stereotype that Asians are bad drivers.
Now, are they actually bad drivers?
I don't know.
They're probably not any worse than anybody else.
But if you believe that, you just happen to believe, it doesn't mean that you're racist or ethnocentric against Asians.
And so I would say that anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews.
Okay, the reason I'm going to make a distinction here, no one ever says, I hate blacks because they're too powerful.
That's generally not a thing.
For literally hundreds of years, blacks were hated when they were slaves and not powerful.
When it comes to- They're viewed as less- Right.
Right.
When it comes to Jews, the reason that anti-Semitism has so often resulted in anti-Jewish pogroms and violence, and this is going back centuries, I mean, there's nothing new.
The reason is because when you perceive a group as unjustifiably powerful, typically that means that you're going to drag them in the streets and kill them.
And so when- The Russians, they weren't powerful in Russia when the Cossacks came into their little village.
No, wrong.
So if you go back to the history of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, second callback.
Second calling.
The claim of the Cossacks was that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dominated at the top levels by merchant Jews.
This was pushed by the Cossack leaders.
It's legitimately in their rhetoric.
So again, that's true.
By the way, that goes all the way back to the Bible.
I mean, if you want to go all the way back, Pharaoh says it.
He says there are these Jews and they're a foreign people and they're going to become powerful and they're going to rise up against us, right?
That's his justification.
Heyman's justification in the book of Esther is there's a people and they dwell among you and they're not going to listen to your laws and they're going to rebel against you, right?
Every aspect of anti-Semitism is typically geared against the quote-unquote nefarious power of the Jews, which of course is what Hitler is talking about, which is why Hitlerian anti-Semitism crosses streams with these other forms of anti-Semitism, historically speaking.
Muslim anti-Semitism is much the same thing.
It's these perfidious Jews who have somehow gained power over Muslim holy sites and are using their world powers in order to manipulate.
The reason that anti-Semitism crops, this is why anti-Semitism is so weird in a sense, is that typically speaking, when you are racist against a group, it's because you look down on that group.
It's actually more, if you're going to make an analogy, the analogy that you'd make is more like know-nothing hatred of Catholics in 1850.
That's actually the better analogy.
It's Catholic.
Literal loyalty.
It's literal loyalty.
The whole same thing, right?
Matt Fratis actually made this point.
I think it's a good analog.
If you substitute Catholics for Jews, then you'll understand this form of discrimination better.
Because this actual argument was made about Catholics throughout the 19th century in an attempt to limit Catholic immigration, suggesting that Catholics were nefarious tools of the Pope who were coming in, taking over the financial industry, dominant in wide and varied industries in the United States, and had to be stopped because of that.
Yeah.
You see.
Check, check, check.
Jeremy's on board.
Is that really different in kind from what people who are bigoted against a group always do to the group?
Now, you're right that with Jews or with Catholics in this example, they're accused of being too powerful.
But what's really happening there is that they're being blamed for whatever happens to be going wrong in society.
And I would argue that when people are bigoted against the group, they tend to find a way to blame that group in some way for the problems in society.
That's interesting.
It's a better definition of racism than what you were giving before.
I don't like the definition of racism, which is just I hate people.
No, but what I'm saying is that if you're racist, legitimately racist against someone, this is what tends to happen next.
It's what happens after the racism.
Because you hate them, now you want to blame them for stuff.
But that's the blaming for stuff is not what the racism is.
Again, this is the group that's a group.
Well, no, no, no, I'm talking about the group.
I am talking about the.
It's like the chicken and the egg thing.
Because I don't think that racism starts with I hate them in my heart and then I blame them for everything.
I think it can start with blaming them for everything and then become hatred in your heart.
That's true.
That thing, that cycle goes both directions.
And even the whites who are holding black slaves in the South feared their power.
It was they were going to cut your throat at night.
That was that they all, that appears in all of their letters.
They're going to.
There is.
That's more to my, that's more to my.
And on your point, Matt, look, all stereotypes are true.
That's why they're stereotypes.
You know, that's how they became stereotypes.
There's an element of truth in them.
Yeah, and so it obviously doesn't apply to individuals necessarily.
So that's part of it.
Another part of it is what Drew says, which is if you look into like esoteric Nazism, there is a deeply anti-Christian aspect in as much as it becomes pagan and it's an occult and it becomes the head of the head of the church advisory to Hitler said this idea that Christ is part of Christianity makes me laugh.
The Fuhrer is Christianity.
Yeah, yeah.
Positive Christianity is their like kind of occult version of it.
So there's that aspect, certainly.
But also then it comes down to me at this basic level of different groups are different, right?
And sometimes they have the same interests, sometimes they have different interests.
And when you're living together, different groups find reasons to get frustrated with each other.
So it's no surprise that groups with different religions find reasons to get a little hostile to each other.
When it comes to the modern, again, it's in niche segments of the right, but this obsession with the state of Israel, I think, what's the big problem with the state of Israel?
Let's throw out, as I do, the theological claims for the state of Israel, because obviously it's not my religion.
Let's throw out even historical claims.
Let's just get down to brass tax, the right of conquest, as we used to call it before 1947.
The Israelis went to a land that historically had been theirs and they went back to it and they were granted this land by international bodies and then they fought a war and now it's their land.
How does that different from America going in and taking America?
But I would like to go beyond that too, though, and the question that nobody seems to ask is which do you want the world to look like?
The state of Israel or everything else?
Yeah, I guess this is my answer.
You can only get into an argument because if the right of conquest is all that matters, then why not conquer?
That's not all that matters, but I guess my point on this is the very height of our civilization was a period where we, in Christendom, went to the Holy Land to take it away from Muslims.
So the notion that we're now saying that the Muslims- What you're arguing is correct in the sense that when you talk, I've said this before when I talk about Israel.
It's the only country in the world where I'm asked to explain the legitimacy of its existence.
It never happens literally anyplace else.
Nobody ever is like, why is France deserved to be France?
What does Franceness?
Ukraine now, right?
Right.
I mean, the United States gets the same challenge.
I mean, I would say that at a far lesser level.
Even the people who argue that the United States is on stolen land don't really want to be able to do that.
There aren't like natural.
There's not UN charter or UN resolution after UN resolution.
And also they're demanding that it's not a problem.
So that group of people who are acknowledging stolen land, they aren't immediately calling for the entire country to be turned over to the tribe of the Sioux in a real way.
It's a bunch of bullshit they say in order to please their left-wing friends and pretend that they give a shit, which they don't.
But when it comes to the state of Israel, suddenly you're forced to make these arguments about like, well, is it based on history or is it based on religion?
Is it based on the, so to your argument, I agree.
If you win, you exist.
End of story.
Then the only question becomes, does the world look better or worse if it looks like this thing or that thing?
And that's Drew's question.
And that's really the only question that we tend to ask generally in foreign policy.
Especially for us who aren't Israel.
As an American, when I look at, say, Ukraine and Russia, I'm looking at America's interests.
Now, I can decide that differently than other people, but do I want Ukraine to look more like Ukraine or do I want it to look more like Russia?
Do I want China to look more like Taiwan or do I want Taiwan to look more like China?
These are the questions that you typically ask when it comes to foreign policy.
When you look at Israel versus Hamasistan in the Gaza Strip, are the Palestinian Authority terror-dominated areas?
And the question is, should there be a state there?
In a vacuum, there shouldn't even be a state there.
Forget about Israel.
I'm not for the establishment of any terrorist state anywhere.
I wasn't for the establishment of ISIS stand.
Like, this is so absurd.
And the claim that somehow it's bad for the world if Israel thoroughly destroys and defeats a terror group that is currently holding five Americans hostage is so beyond reason.
It's so crazy to me.
And that doesn't mean you can't critique Israel.
Go ahead.
Fine.
Critique it.
Critique all these places.
Critique, America and France and UK.
Do all of it.
The one thing I will say is that the critiques that are brought against the state of Israel are never paralleled by any critiques anywhere else.
They are unique to the state of Israel.
You never see abroad on it.
Israel And Hamasistan00:04:02
Obviously, if you get me going on this topic, it's incredibly annoying to me.
And one of the things that makes it so incredibly annoying to me is that now that Israel is at the top of the news, which it has been since October 7th, I talk about Israel a lot.
I spent my entire career not talking about Israel.
Literally my entire career.
If you go back through the first show through show number whatever it was on October 9th, the amount of time that I spent talking about Israel was, I am sure, less than 1% of the total runtime of my show.
And now you're doing it.
Well under 1%.
And then I start talking about the thing that literally is on the front pages every single day.
And critiques are brought against me personally that would not be brought against people who are Christian who say the exact same things.
And there I find something peculiar.
Unless it's a Catholic defending the Pope, right?
Unless it's tragic.
There's something tragically comic about the fact that the Jews are in position.
As you say, every country, every great nation, every great empire was built on conquest, somewhere along the line.
Somebody conquers somebody.
So the Jews are in the position of having to do what you do at the beginning of a society.
But because much of their leadership is European-based, they actually have the mindset of people later on in society when they start to say stupid stuff like, maybe women should have power too.
Maybe we should feel guilty about killing our enemies.
You know, those are things.
Those are late stage civilizational things, but they're in a kind of first stage civilizational moment.
It's kind of tragic comic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I need some advice.
Is it off-putting if the girl asks the guy out?
Off-putting to the guy, I suppose?
Yeah.
I can't imagine this as a girl saying.
Yes.
Is it a problem if I ask a guy out?
Yeah.
That's got to be what this question is.
I never responded all that well to it.
It actually happened on a few occasions.
And yeah, thank you.
I'm very a little humble bragging.
But it actually, I'm trying to think, because my gut instinct says, no, that'd be great, ladies.
If I'm single, ask me out.
But no, actually, when it happened, I did not like it.
There's a way to do it, though.
There's a way to do that.
I mean, how hot are we talking here?
No principles.
You have no principles.
It would be a total deal killer to me if a woman proposed marriage.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Total deal killer.
Yeah.
But if a gal came up to you and said, hey, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we ought to grab a drink sometime or whatever.
As a way of...
This is a party I'm going to.
Yeah, breaking the ice or something, you know, or in some cases, maybe the girl knows that the guy's a little shy and...
And I think that there's an appropriate, there's an appropriate version of that.
The problem with a woman proposing, though, is now you've broken whatever those ICEs are early.
Now you have to be in a position of actually agreeing to the institution of marriage, which is agreeing to a form of male headship over the family.
Yeah.
So it is a kind of perversion of a woman.
Could you imagine that?
Also, also, let's be real about this.
A man entering into a marriage is generally making a decision that males are hesitant to make.
Right.
Yeah.
Where women entering into a marriage is a decision that women are generally very eager to make.
Generally, that doesn't mean true in every certain circumstance, but that is generally the way the math works.
Men are giving up the field of women for this one woman, and that is a very, very important decision, obviously.
And women, because they're not driven by the same impulses, have found the person they wish to share children with.
So, of course, they want to get married.
So, if they're saying to the man, do you want to get married to me?
That's a form of pressure.
That's not actually a form of proposal.
When a man says that to a woman, he's offering her a thing that she wants.
It's not, it's how dare you, generally speaking.
How dare you?
For Ben, during your first book club, you mentioned a dystopian sci-fi novel you had written would soon be published.
Did you scrap it or do you still plan to go ahead with it?
That's for Jeremy.
I mean, so I did, I did write, in fact, a dystopian sci-fi novel.
It's been done for like two years or something.
They sent it to you, Drew.
I like that.
Yeah, Drew was kind enough to pretend he liked it.
And, you know, like, maybe we'll do something with it or maybe we won't.
It'll go alongside the other two complete books.
Ben writes books sometimes, guys.
This question's for me.
So you redesigned the men's razor.
Are you doing the same for the women's razor?
Redefining Original Sin00:12:45
Indeed, we are.
We will have a brand new women's razor, hopefully in time for the holidays.
It's different in kind than the men's razor.
I think one of the problems with the original women's razor that we released is that it was very similar to the men's razor, and women's shaving needs are different than men's.
So the razor that we're going, yeah, the razor we're going to release acknowledges those differences.
For the whole group, what is the end game?
If all of these nefarious characters are trying to bring down the country, what do they stand to gain?
This country makes them rich.
I can't imagine another country would offer them the same possibilities.
I'll offer my thoughts and then I'll let everyone go around and answer this question.
I think that you start from the assumption that politics are fundamentally rational.
And I don't think that they are fundamentally rational.
I think that they're driven fundamentally by the spiritual and that it is the nature of man.
We can argue about what the Pope said about man being fundamentally good or what Luther said about man being or Calvin about man being depraved.
I think they're both right.
I like that.
As Bishop Barron pointed out today on X, by the way.
But at the end of the day, man in his sin tries to accumulate material wealth to himself.
He tries to accumulate power to himself.
He tries to advance his needs, his wants, his ego.
He tries to wheel and deal.
He tries to get laid.
I mean, you really can't imagine how much of human history has been driven just by some guy in power trying to get laid.
I mean, so much of what happens in politics does not happen in a purely rational way.
People will vote against their interests.
Of course they will.
You can't believe how much happens out of ideology, which is things that people believe are true that aren't.
And so they'll do something that harms them that they thought would help them.
All of this is always at play in any institution that involves human beings.
And so I just think you can't reduce our politics down to science.
It is like every other aspect of the human experience.
It's a projection of underlying spiritual truths.
And people are kind of a spiritual train wreck.
Yeah, I would say it's a little bit like asking, what does someone gain from revenge?
And it, well, they gain revenge.
They gain it for its own sake.
And that's basically what's happening here.
You've got a lot of people that have told themselves a story where they are the victims and they have all these forces victimizing them and they seek to destroy those forces just to destroy them because they feel like it's the right thing to do and they have this instinct of destruction.
I don't think they've thought, to your point, I don't think they've thought much farther ahead than that.
Like, what happens next?
What happens when you, and we talk about this all the time, you know, they tear down things, they redefine things.
They don't really redefine.
They get rid of one definition, replace it with nothing.
And so there is no step two.
It's just the step one of destruction, and that's it.
So I'll break it down into, I think there are two distinct groups.
And I think that one usually leads and then surrenders to the second.
So I think what you say about a certain group of people is totally true.
Those are the revolutionaries.
The revolutionaries don't care what comes next.
And the great lie they say is there's going to be utopia after they tear everything down, but all they really want to do is just burn things because they hate the system in which they live and they have no idea for what comes next.
But it's got to be better than this terrible thing that's victimizing me.
I agree with you.
That's a revolutionary group.
Then you have the elites.
And they're the ones who are the real mystery, right?
Those are the people like the Joe Bidens of the world who have sat high on the hog for a very long time or the idiots in Hollywood or the people on Wall Street who support this whole agenda.
What are they doing?
And I think there, the answer is that they believe falsely, as it turns out, that like elites do in nearly every society that ends up being transformed, that they can channel the passion of the revolutionaries into a gradualistic change in which they get to retain the levers of power, which is like the best of both worlds for them.
They get to retain the elite status.
They get to retain the money and the power and all these things.
All they have to do is harness the 1.21 gigawatts that is the college protesters.
And they can use that power in order to forward the mission of making the world a gradually better place.
And when you're in rooms with people like this, and I've been in a lot of rooms with people like this, that is how they talk.
They talk about, not in revolutionary terms, but we together can make the world a better place.
And there are people who are agitating on the outside.
They're dark of their two radicals toward justice.
Right, exactly.
And I think that when they say stuff like that, what they fail to recognize is they have no systemic immunity, they have no immune system to the revolutionaries when confronted with them.
Which is why when you look at the college campuses in 1968, 1969, or even today, you're like, why are these administrators just handing over the place to the revolutionaries?
The answer is they agree with the revolutionaries.
It's not that they're handing it over.
They are the revolutionaries.
They just don't have the balls or the willingness to give up what they have in terms of power in order to just join the group.
And so when they're confronted with that reality, their own hypocrisy, they end up just surrendering full scale to the revolutionaries.
I basically agree with Jeremy on this.
I think that the things are, this Pope was utterly wrong.
And the reason he was utterly wrong, here comes the Calvinism here, which no, it has nothing to do with Calvinism.
It has nothing to do with Calvinism.
It's because he wasn't saying what all the slavish Catholics who want to prove him right say he was saying.
He was talking about people's behaviors.
He was not talking about the creation being good.
He was saying that he said we were all sinners.
Two sentences.
He said you have the occasional sinner.
Afterward, but before he said, but he said you have the occasional sinner.
But the thing is everything ends up being a post-tactical clarification.
It's Jesuitical corona.
The thing that I saw in Hollywood is that people who think they are good usually have not had the offer of sex, money, and power.
And sex, money, and power on the table.
I would say about 85% of people will sell every principle they have.
And so once you have the power, I think a lot of these people are just capturing the flow.
I think Joe Biden is a perfect example.
I mean, the guy's a weather vein, but he thinks he's capturing the flow.
The guys who are dangerous are guys like Obama.
I think Obama is actually, in some ways, has far more integrity than Joe Biden because he's a believer.
He believes that we're a bad country and that we're the problem.
And that's why he wanted to realign us with Iran.
Barack Obama is the least cynical evil president who did the most cynical thing to get re-elected.
Yeah, I agree.
You know, it pains me to say that I agree with everyone, even Drew spouting this Calvinist message.
But especially, I agree with your point, Jeremy, that even bringing up the Pope, who my brief defense of the Pope, which I'm obligated to do as a duly loyal, is it seems to me what he's saying is, man, god doesn't make anything evil, so god makes man and the whole creation good, but man abuses his free will and sins, and sin and death pervade the world, and so now we end up in this spot where there's concupiscence and all, and we're all just gonna like sell everything for sex and money and everything.
But uh, to know what the end game is, you have to have some sense of the nature and the final end of man.
Yeah, and so you know, I have a sense of it.
I think we all have basically roughly the same sense of it.
You know, pretty close at least, and uh, for a lot of people though, and especially for our liberal friends, they have a very different sense.
They deny original sin and they deny heaven and hell.
So they're actually, they disagree with us on both the, the nature and where we're going exactly yeah, so then what's the other thing that we're all inherent right now?
People yeah, people are inherently good, and the kingdom of heaven can be made here on earth by my hands.
Yep yeah the, the most, the most fundamental conservative belief is the belief that original sin is original sin and that only God can redeem and can redeem what's fallen.
Like that.
That really is the, the heart of the whole thing.
And the left, every ism of the left, is a is an attempt to redefine what is original sin.
Even even libertarianism and I have a lot of libertarian, lowercase l, libertarian tendencies in my theology and in my politics but libertarianism just says that original sin is coercion.
Yeah, just like socialism says that the original sin is communism, it's class and socialism, it's the means of production, etc.
Yeah, like they've all just come up with a.
If this hadn't happened, everything would be good.
Yes, and if we can overcome that, everything will be good.
And the and the view of the men at this table uh, with with very important and notable theological distinctions between uh Catholic, Protestant and and orthodox, uh Jewish perspectives.
I mean there are places where we wildly disagree, but at a sort of fundamental level we say, no, original sin is the thing that actually happened in the Garden Of Eden and the thing that man and his free will yes uh, perpetuates.
And there is no one doing that by man there.
No, no thing that we accomplish as a society will change fundamentally what human beings are, and that ultimate redemption is in the hands of God, and for the Christian it's accessed by way of the cross of Christ uh, and for the Catholic, it's got something to do with the cross of Christ.
It used to say, it used to have something to do with the cross of Christ, but now no, the thing, the thing that that Protestant and Catholic agree, of course, is that uh, the the redemption of man is not in the hands uh, it's not man's problem to solve, it's man's.
It's man's problem.
Yeah yeah, at some point we're gonna have to comment on our, on like just the people with the religious differences on, like the first couple of chapters of Genesis, because it really is fascinating, like the Jewish take is pretty different on some of this stuff.
It ends up in in much the same place.
Well, this I was.
I was careful to be inclusive of you when I said that man perpetuates that sin uh, through his, through his free will choices.
Yes yes, I understand that we don't.
We don't agree on the uh forward transmission of original sin.
No no, actually.
So actually I was going to argue with the original sin part, meaning that there there's widespread sort of dissension inside Orthodox Jewish texts about origin, whether human beings were made good in the Garden of Eden and then brought sin about through the sin, or whether human beings were always conflicted and then they brought sin about because they didn't bring sin about.
They sinned by eating from the tree because what that sin was was supplanting their own conception of what the world should be for what God's conception of what the world should be.
Oh, that's my view.
I mean, so yeah, I think that what that's not.
No, I think the important thing is that when you put us all together, our basic beliefs, we're right.
I mean, we are provably right about the nature of mankind.
Yes, people are really, people can be really, really bad.
And this notion that people are naturally wonderful and tend toward the good in their actions.
That's false.
Like they, they, they, they, whatever, call it concupiscence, call it the Yitzer Hara in Judaism, call it sinful nature of man, whatever you call it.
Right.
Human beings take a room full of people and they are not going to naturally do the good thing because of all of whatever you want.
And no curing any one particular flaw of man will lead to a utopia.
No system will close with this thought for you, though, which is that in my personal view of the garden, it's not that man was sinful per se or virtuous per se based on his actions or choices or predilections from the moment of creation.
It's that righteousness by God was defined and declared by himself.
He made it.
He made man just exactly how man was, naked and dumb and tripping over rocks in the garden and lonely and prone to who knows what kind of bad behaviors if it had all played out.
That wasn't the definition of what was good to God.
God defined his creation as good based on his own declaration.
And the temptation of man was the temptation to judge whether or not God was right.
It was to supplant God as the moral authority, as the judge.
And so I don't believe that man got worse when he ate.
It's not that I think his behavior got worse.
It's that I think he, the deal that he made with the devil, in some ways, the devil was lying with truth.
He did suddenly see his nakedness.
He did suddenly see his failure to measure up to God.
Whereas before that, the question of whether he measured up to God wasn't even on the table, which is why you like it.
God made him and said he was good, and that was good enough.
That's why I should read the Bible in the original Hebrew.
The word for cleverness and the word for nakedness are the same word.
It's a room.
That's an exact word in Hebrew.
Yeah.
At any rate, we could probably fix it if we just vote for the right guy.
Thank you guys for hanging out with us here at Daily Wire Backstage.
We're going to do another one eventually.
And please head on over to Amazon.com, buy your second gen Jeremy's Razors.
We'd really appreciate it.
Support all of the sponsors from today's show, Helix Sleep and Birch Gold.
And go over and become a subscriber if you're not one now.