JD Vance’s 2024 VP debate performance—"cool, collected, and empathetic"—countered Tim Walz’s gaffes (e.g., Tiananmen Square misstep) while avoiding aggressive contrasts on abortion or climate change, despite Trump’s platform. Critics praised his strategic moderation but questioned policy consistency, like defending Obamacare elements, and the moderators’ bias favoring Walz. Though lacking viral moments, Vance’s articulate, Catholic-friendly approach may sway suburban women and independents, setting up a potential 2028 run if Trump loses. Meanwhile, Democrats resist labeling cartels as terrorists, preferring military intervention over legal classification, while the host frames voting for Trump as a moral duty to preserve conservative gains like judges and judicial appointments. [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.
Well, folks, that ends the vice presidential debate.
So So here is the immediate takeaway.
JD Vance delivers one of the great debate performances that we've seen in modern history.
Truly a stellar performance from JD Vance.
And for all the people who believe that he was weird on the left, there was nothing weird about JD Vance's performance tonight.
He looked not only cool and collected, he looked kind and empathetic.
He delivered what I thought was a truly articulate defense of Donald Trump's policy positions.
I may not agree with all those policy positions, but he delivered a very articulate defense of them.
He presented an incredibly non-threatening face to the sort of Trump Vance ticket.
The goal for Tim Walz tonight was to make JD Vance look weird, was to make the Trump Vance ticket look dangerous and scary.
That's what they were intending to do.
And JD Vance thwarted that by doing precisely the opposite.
He played it cool.
He played it low-key.
He was very friendly to Tim Walz.
At some points, I thought to myself, man, I wish he weren't quite so friendly to Tim Walz.
I wish at some points he would jab Tim Walz a little bit harder.
In fact, there were many times when the two of them would talk about how they were sort of agreeing with one another, but it was a very, very friendly debate from that perspective.
That's very good for JD Vance, who, again, is trying to demonstrate to the American people that the Trump Vance ticket is not chaotic.
It is not volatile.
It is not scary.
It's some people that you can trust.
Meanwhile, Tim Walz looked really awkward out there, particularly at the beginning of the debate.
I think he picked up some steam later on in the debate when they got to domestic policy issues on which there seemed to be both sides contending as to who could spend more.
But at the very beginning, Tim Walz was stumbling and bumbling all over himself.
He got a few cutaways that were pretty glorious of JD Vance giving the Jim Halpert from the office to the camera.
I'm like, is this guy really saying what he seems to be saying?
Tim Walz made a couple of gaffes that were particularly egregious.
The one that is going to become the viral clip of the night is one where he was asked about the fact that like everything else in his record, he has fibbed about when he went to Tianmin Square and where he was during Tiananmen Square.
He had said that he was in Hong Kong.
That isn't true.
He's fibbed about nearly everything.
JD Vance really didn't call him on a lot of that stuff.
He's pretty kind in how he did call him on it.
But Walls looked absolutely like a deer in the headlights to be even asked the question.
He started rambling about how he had grown up in a poorer community.
And then finally, he sort of stopped and said that he was a knucklehead.
And then he stopped again and then suggested that he misspeaks frequently.
It was a really bad look for him.
And there was a lot of that tonight.
He had these sort of awkward cadences, strange pauses.
He looked bewildered.
A lot of the time, he's kind of writing a lot of notes, a lot.
He must have written a book tonight on that podium.
He also looked extremely sort of bewildered as to why he was up there, like big eyes, a lot of split screens that didn't look very good for Tim Walz.
At this point, Kamala Harris has to be thinking, why didn't she pick Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania?
We all know he was a Jew.
She didn't pick Josh Shapiro for that reason.
Shapiro certainly would have outperformed Tim Walz, who delivered what I thought was at best a mediocre performance.
Probably the only good aspect of the night for Tim Walz came in that last sort of section where they were talking about January 6th and Walls was trying to call JD Vance on January 6th.
I don't think that means a lot to people.
It was also at the very end of the debate.
I don't think it scores a lot of points.
For JD Vance, then 10 out of 10 debate.
For Tim Walz, like a three out of 10 debate.
For the moderators, 0 out of 10.
Again, terrible moderation.
These moderators said going in, they were not going to do some sort of big fact-checking routine.
There was a point during this debate where JD Vance suggested correctly that many of the people who are in Springfield, Ohio are not legal immigrants.
And he was talking about how they'd been given temporary protective status, which means that they didn't go through a green card process.
And the fact-checkers tried to fact-check him and suggested these were all legal immigrants to the United States who were on the way to a green card.
And he started correcting them.
He said, no, that's not what.
And they cut off the mics.
So they'd said, we're not going to fact-check you.
We're going to let you fact-check each other.
Then they jumped into fact-check.
Every question was to Tim Walz some sort of question about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and Donald Trump.
And then they would go to JD Vance and instead of asking him to respond to what Tim Walz had said, they would then ask him the single most inappropriate form of the question in an attempt to sort of cudgel him into a corner.
So the moderators did a quite a terrible job tonight, but JD Vance is a pro.
He handled it extremely, extremely well.
This does a few things for Donald Trump.
The thing that it does, number one, for Donald Trump is, again, it quiets fears that this is a very volatile ticket.
Number two, for JD Vance, it does a lot.
JD is obviously looking beyond just 2024.
He's super young.
He's my age.
J.D. is 40 years old, which means he's going to be at the center of American politics for years to come.
This debate really enshrined that.
The one thing that Vance didn't really do tonight, and I was hoping for him to do, was to really cast Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as radical.
I don't think there was enough of that.
I do think that Kamala Harris, he banged on her about not getting things done, which, again, is a great approach.
It's something that I've been recommending for a really long time.
She is the current vice president of the United States.
She is the person responsible for everything that is happening right now.
And he really focused in on that.
But I don't think that he really drew enough contrast as to just how radical Tim Walz is.
I was sort of surprised that JD didn't bring up the fact that Tim Walz had said that socialism is just another name for friendliness.
I'm sort of surprised they didn't bring up in more robust fashion Tim Walz' record on abortion.
When he did bring it up, he brought it up almost half apologetically.
And that brings me to sort of the final point that I have here, which is that when you listen to JD Vance's policies and where the Republican Party now is under Donald Trump, there have been some pretty significant shifts.
I mean, JD Vance is a pro-life guy.
His answers on abortion, however, were obvious dodges.
I mean, he was obviously attempting not to answer his own positions with regard to abortion.
I get that.
I get it.
He's running for the vice presidency.
He has no intention.
And Donald Trump has already said he has no intention of signing into law any sort of federal law with regard to abortion.
But J.D. could have been much more aggressive in pushing back against Tim Walz with regard to abortion up until point of birth.
He tried to do it and then he sort of backed off a little bit.
His answer was about how much sympathy and empathy he had for people who had had abortions, which is fine if you then go to the next step and you say, but that still does not justify the end of a baby's life in the womb, right?
Like that, that is something that I think is sort of non-negotiable for a lot of Republicans and pro-life people, even if they plan on voting as I do for Trump and for Trump and Vance.
I also think that there's a lot of talk about federal spending.
J.D. obviously is a much bigger government guy.
I think it is fair to say after that particular debate that the era of semi-small government may be over.
It's been over for quite a while.
I didn't hear a lot of talk about cutting the size and scope of government in that debate.
But again, that is really not on JD.
That's really on Donald Trump and the platform that he's proposing.
So all in all, a very good night for JD Vance.
Does it shift the nature of the race in any serious way?
I don't think so.
I think most people's opinions are set.
But it does shift a lot of opinions about JD Vance going forward.
Great night for JD Vance.
Good night for the Trump Vance ticket.
Justifies Trump's pick of JD Vance in this race and really makes Kamala Harris look like a dunderhead for having picked Tim Walz.
I thought there was one big revelation from the debate.
Tim Walz is friends with school shooters.
I thought that was interesting.
Maybe he made friends with them while he was handing out tampons in the boys' bathroom.
I don't know.
I did want to steal one point from Michael Ols before he has a chance to reiterate it.
Right.
You're welcome.
Just like I stole your idea for a board game, by the way.
You're going to do a blank book now.
So, right?
Cigarettes.
I do think that all of the Americans who are not super clued into politics that have been hearing for weeks now that JD Vance is this weird guy were probably mystified watching that and seeing this really cool, calm, collected, eloquent dude totally unrattled up there.
The last word you'd use to describe him is weird.
So as you now, in fact, I'm pointing out.
You said it very well, what I said.
Right, yes.
Well, it was I, because I had, I also thought it, but then you said it, so it's both of our points.
So in a way, the media set JD Vance up for a victory here just.
And what they did too, I mean, the moderators were so bad.
So bad.
And what JD Vance did so skillfully was, one, he treated them like the Haitians treated those cats and dogs.
I mean, he absolutely devoured them for dinner.
But then importantly, he recovered.
So instead of allowing them to rattle him, he remained cool, calm, and collected.
I totally agree with your point, Ben.
There were moments where I, as a rock-ribbed Republican and conservative, wished that he had punched a little harder, thrown a little red meat.
But JD Vance knew the occasion.
He knew that this debate was not a didactic exercise.
He was not there to instruct people on the bioethics of abortion or fertility treatments.
He was there to win 5% to 7% of voters in crucial states.
He knew where his weak points are.
He knew where his strong points are.
I thought he did masterfully in handling those questions in a way that didn't compromise his principles, but was reaching out.
I mean, everything down to wearing a soft-colored tie.
You know, it was about appealing to voters, countering the media narrative.
I think he succeeded 100%.
I think it's interesting to point out the way the moderators were bad, because they didn't do to Vance what they did to Trump, which was cut him off and say things that weren't true, basically.
What they did was they directed every question to an issue that was of interest to them when that wasn't necessarily the issue, which is, to my point, journals should be completely removed from the debate process.
So for instance, when they asked about the storm, they brought it around to climate change.
But in fact, those storms have gone down since around 1900.
They've dropped.
The number of people who've died in climate-related incidents has plummeted.
So there's no reason to talk about climate change.
And I think that I would like to see Republicans stand up a little bit more to what is being used as yet another reason to grow the government.
I mean, if we don't start to say these things aren't true, I don't know why people surrender to these lies.
They do it because of the press.
There's a lot of stuff.
Every time Walsh opens his mouth, he lies.
I don't think that guy can actually blink without lying.
When he talked about Amber Thurman dying because of Roe v. Wade was repeals, he died because she took the abortion pill.
And then the case was mishandled by the doctors, but not because of the passage of Roe.
She didn't go to the hospital when she was supposed to.
He didn't go to the hospital when she was supposed to.
They didn't do a DNC and all this.
But I mean, still, that's a major, major lie.
When he said that the number of border crossings have dropped, that's a major, major lie.
They've doubled almost, I think.
And I think that that kind of thing, the fact that Tim Walsh gets away with it will be interesting to see over the days ahead whether that continues to stick.
I also, I agree with you guys about JD Vance handling himself beautifully.
I expected it from him.
He's just an articulate, educated guy.
He really, I wish I could put sometimes his soul into Donald Trump's body so that Donald Trump had that personality and the charisma, but could bring out those kinds of specifics and the calm, cool, collected attacks.
I think you're right that his point was to win over women and to win over people who might think he was a little bit weird.
I don't think this is going to make any change whatsoever.
I just don't think there was enough in it.
I was bored, stiff after about 30 minutes.
Well, that's actually what's interesting to me about the debate.
And I'll say something nice about Tim Walz, too, even though I know it's unpopular to do so.
This was a professional debate from competent candidates.
Do I think that Tim Walz did as good a job as JD Vance?
No.
Do I think JD Vance was a 10 out of 10?
No.
I think it was a 9 out of 10, though.
I think that he handled himself incredibly well.
But this entire debate took me back to a different time in American politics.
It took me back to 2012 when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had their debates, and they were incredibly competent, thoughtful, articulate debates.
Now, you had problems with the moderators, and very famously, Candy Crowley may have cost Mitt Romney the election in one of the debates.
But since the 2012 election, we've not seen a debate.
In this country where you, where you actually heard substantive policy positions being put forth by the candidates who, broadly speaking, had command of the issues, who knew exactly what they were trying to accomplish and accomplished it, I mean, you could one couldn't help but wish that these two guys were running for president.
Well, and to your point, Jeremy I mean, this is actually gets to your point, Ben about JD.
JD is looking forward.
He has to be because President Trump could only get one term right.
He's not the only one looking forward, though.
Kamala Harris is a weak candidate.
She's never won a single vote in a primary while running for president, and Tim Walz, by current standards, is a young man too, and he's probably looking ahead as well.
By the way, Kamala Harris, can you imagine her in a debate with JD Vance?
Oh my God, he would just wipe the floor with her.
If Donald Trump hadn't so trounced Joe Biden that Joe Biden literally had to remove himself from the election.
We would have gotten JD Vance versus Kamala.
And it just would have been carnage.
Bloodbath.
Just absolute carnage.
Now, I will say for Walls, I do think that the question is what each side was trying to accomplish tonight.
So I think one of the things that Vance was trying to accomplish is what you guys are talking about and what I talked about also, because of course I'm right.
And that is he was trying to look softer to a broader audience.
He was trying to soften that image from the sort of hard charging guy who's on stage with people who are sometimes considered fringy to move offline and into sort of the touchgrass world.
And I think that he succeeded admirably in that.
But there was another thing on the table that he really needed to do that I don't think actually got done.
And that was create a real perception that the Harris-Walls campaign is deeply radical.
I don't think you came away from that debate thinking the Harris-Walls campaign is deeply radical.
I think you came away from that debate thinking that there was a shocking amount of agreement on a stage between Vance and Wall.
They kept saying to each other, I agree with you.
I would agree with that, except for.
And so that was left on the table.
And in that sense, I think that Walls actually got away with one, meaning that I think that Walls had a dual purpose.
His dual purpose was to cast JD and Trump as totally out of bounds.
You could never vote for them.
They're so crazy.
And he failed in that.
He failed in that.
But I think that he did succeed in making himself and Kamala Harris appear to be viable, somewhat center-left candidates as opposed to the radical communist that he probably is.
I mean, again, he is a person who literally said just weeks ago that socialism is another form of neighborliness.
That's crazy.
Like, how does that not come up on the debate stage?
And so in that sense, I think that would that have radically changed the race?
Probably not.
And so I think that the first rule of a VP debate probably is do no harm.
So you can understand why J.D. didn't get too aggressive because he's figuring, okay, if I go overboard, if I punch too hard, there's going to be some backlash.
I understand the strategy.
However, it depends on how you think the race is going.
If you think that Donald Trump is currently winning the race, perfect debate for JD, all you do is don't make waves, perform really, really well, be really articulate.
If you think that Donald Trump is actually down in the polls right now, you got to take a swing because Trump doesn't have another debate coming.
I so rarely disagree with you that I'm going to offer up an alternative viewpoint.
And that is this, that I have friends in Hollywood who are to the left of us on every single issue who voted for Hillary Clinton, who voted for Joe Biden, who are strongly considering voting for Donald Trump in this election.
JD Vance's Strategy00:02:23
Why?
Well, because reality on the ground has asserted itself because the country is markedly worse than it was in 2019.
And because they see in Kamala Harris a sort of vapid disingenuous character who they are afraid will actually be in practice what she appears to be.
And because there are is that group of people, because of RFK Jr. giving independents an excuse now or a permission, it's a better word, not an excuse, permission to say that they're pro-Trump.
Because Mark Zuckerberg has given people permission to say that Trump was badass when he stood up and said fight, fight, fight in Butler, Pennsylvania after he took a bullet through the year.
You're seeing this shift where people feel empowered to consider Trump in a way that even in 2016, they didn't, even in 2020, they didn't.
But there is one group of people that Donald Trump still has a major problem with, and that is suburban women.
He does horribly with them.
They see him rightly as being very borish.
They see him rightly as being very crude.
I'm not convinced that this, like every other VP debate that we've witnessed in our lifetimes, will mean nothing.
I think that it very well could mean something.
What it could mean is that JD Vance just gave that last holdout group of people permission to vote for Donald Trump.
And you don't have to move them seven points.
You don't have to move them 20 points.
There's a very narrow race.
If you make a one, 2% change in that last holdout group of people who are so fundamentally, not fundamentally, but sort of constitutionally opposed to Donald Trump, if you tell them, no, no, no, no, we're reasonable, we're sensible, you can vote for us, you could have an enormous impact in the election.
I think that's what JD Vance was trying to do.
And I think that he probably rightly has concluded people already know they're radical and are already very worried about ascending them, which is why people in Hollywood are saying out loud that they might vote for Donald Trump.
You're right.
But there's one work that needs to be done.
Maybe he did it.
To your point, Jeremy, with Trump, the man is a wrecking ball.
And it is probably one of the greatest things about the guy.
He's got other great features too, but he's just this wrecking ball that comes in.
Defending Gaming Jokes00:03:50
And JD Vance is not a wrecking ball.
That's part of why he balances out the ticket.
He is a scalpel.
And he was surgically trying to carve out that little group that you're talking about.
And I think he did it, inasmuch as it has any effect at all in the race.
I think he's to be seen.
I agree with all that.
And that's obviously why on the abortion answer, it was killing me that he was taking such an apologetic, like an incessantly apologetic tone almost with that.
I understand strategically why he did it.
And I understand why he wasn't being aggressive.
I think that that was actually smart.
The man was literally wearing pink.
Right, yeah.
And he did a couple of times.
He even absolved Tim Walz.
I think on immigration, he said, well, I know that you agree, but I don't think Carla Harris, no, he doesn't agree on immigration.
But what I would have liked to see maybe JD Vance do a little bit more is just challenge the premise on some of these questions, which doesn't have to be an aggressive thing, but whether it's climate change, he didn't challenge the premise of like, why are we talking about climate change on this hurricane?
It's got nothing to do with it.
Abortion didn't challenge the premise.
Even the gun violence epidemic didn't challenge the premise.
Child care, you know, we're talking about the childcare crisis.
Well, the child care crisis is a crisis mostly because we have a bunch of people that are having kids and aren't married and so get married and then have kids and stay married and the child care crisis mostly goes away.
Maybe on that last one, I understand why he didn't want to make that point in this environment.
But on a couple of the other ones, I think, and he's obviously a really smart guy.
It's like a strategic choice he made to not challenge the premise on some of these things.
And I'm not sure if it pays off or not.
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What I love the most about that ad read, I mean, other than the money that will undoubtedly come my way, is that most people watching the ad assume that you are joking about being a gamer.
And they probably even assume that you're joking about Ben not being a gamer.
And if they only knew the truth.
It's all true.
You know, one of the things that I think is sort of amazing about everyone praising JD's performance, and again, I agree.
I gave it a 10 out of 10, not a 9 out of 10.
I think it was strategically brilliant.
I think he did an amazing job with it.
Republican Agenda Debate00:15:43
The agenda that he is pressing in that debate sounds, with the exception of being harsher on the border, like compassionate conservatism from 2000.
It does.
I mean, hate to break it to you, but every element of that agenda sounds like compassionate conservatism from 2000.
What if we do more childcare?
What if we restructure the healthcare environment so as to make healthcare easier and more available?
What if we do peace through strength?
I was informed that Reaganism was dead.
I was informed that we were past the age of Ronald Reagan.
And yet there I was sitting there and listening to the exact slogan from the Gipper himself, peace through strength.
Despite all of the radical changes that have supposedly broken upon the Republican scene, it turns out that except for some trade policy, perhaps, and the border, again, both of those are important things.
I agree with one actually on immigration.
I kind of disagree on some of the trade policy stuff.
Except for that, sounds a lot like kind of the Republican agenda for my entire lifetime.
And in fact, the Republican agenda that was actually largely dissociated from in 2010 with the Tea Party.
Again, there was a lot of big government talk.
I understand that a lot of this is being done because a lot of it's electioneering.
And I understand you want to win.
One of the things that Trump did, and it was a smart political move, although it broke my heart as a fiscal conservative, is when he said there would be no restructuring of the entitlements.
And basically, anybody who says that, we should just know, okay, Republicans, anybody who says there's no restructuring of the entitlements is lying to you.
They're all lying.
It's not true.
There will be restructuring of the entitlements or we're going to go bankrupt.
There will be either a massive increase in taxes, a massive increase in inflation in order to pay off our national debt that we'll have to use in order to pay off the entitlements or a massive restructuring of the entitlements.
There is no choice.
It's just a thing that's going to happen.
With that said, they're all lying about it.
But, but, you know, again, we've heard so much about the Make America Great Again movement and how different it is in a wide variety of ways.
But in terms of just actual on-the-ground policy, it kind of looks a lot like a lot.
Like John McCain circa 2008.
This is a hugely important point, and you're absolutely right about it.
It wasn't true necessarily when Trump started out, except for the entitlements.
The entitlements was always the one that stuck in my craw because you're absolutely right.
You're going to have to reform them.
But it is something that is true.
The great benefit of Donald Trump was he allowed people to use language again clearly so that we could say the things that we actually mean, that there is a problem in the black community with violence.
There is a problem in the Muslim community with violence.
The problem of fatherless children is enormous and has more to do with crime than anything else, certainly than racism or anything like that.
And one of the things about Trump when he started out was he just said that stuff, and it was beautiful.
And I think that moment has passed.
And I think is part of the reason that he's now acceptable, that you can walk down the street in San Francisco with a Trump hat on and not get clocked.
And I think that this is that moment, the Trump moment has really passed.
The thing about it is, is that in Europe, these right-wing parties, or as they call them, the far-right, which just means right-wing conservative parties, they take years to build themselves back up into acceptable parties.
They win a seat here, they win 10 C's here, they win 20 C's, and then suddenly you maybe get one of them who takes over.
Here, you don't do that.
It's win or lose, and people get frightened.
They get especially frightened by the press, and they start to back off.
It goes back to what you were saying about challenging the premise.
I think we don't do it enough.
I think when we start to do it, when we get back to the Trumpian version of doing that, we will start to win in a bigger and easier way.
It's going to take somebody with a little bit more finesse, I think, than Donald Trump.
But there's also an importance to being wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove.
In some ways, Ben, I think your point is truer even than you're willing to grant, which is that you're right.
There are a lot of resonances to some of the policies of the Bush era.
Now, there's some big changes.
JD and Trump, for that matter, call for more foreign policy restraints, certainly than we saw during the Bush era.
That was a much more Wilsonian policy.
I will point out, that was not George W. Bush's campaign in 2000.
Correct, correct.
He ran against nation building.
He was isolationists.
Of course.
But then even you can consider George H.W. Bush, or certainly Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan was called bellicose and a warhawk and a cowboy.
But of course, he did, in practice, have a relatively restrained foreign policy.
And he spoke a lot about free trade, but he also called for tariffs when he felt it was strategically important.
And even going further back than that, you know, one thing that's going to stick in the craw of some people tonight is that JD Vance appeared to defend parts of Obamacare.
Now, not all parts of Obamacare.
He actually tried to hit Waltz on the individual mandate, which was the beating heart of Obamacare.
But I think he was being clever about this.
He was trying to be subtle about it.
But it tells you something about politics and conservatism, which is that when people get political wins, they really are wins, and you can't go back in time.
The Tea Party ran on fiscal conservatism.
We didn't get any of it.
It just didn't work.
Republicans have been running on fiscal conservatism, at least since Ronald Reagan, and it's never worked.
We keep getting deficits.
We keep getting big spending.
Reagan got screwed over by Tip O'Neill, sure, and the Tea Party was traded out by the leadership.
And, you know, you can make a thousand excuses, but it's just that's how the political system works.
So when Reagan ran as a Republican, he said, look, I'm an old New Deal Democrat.
I didn't leave my party.
My party left me.
Now, that was a way of spinning his evolution, but he didn't really challenge the New Deal.
That was over.
The old right used to challenge the New Deal.
The new didn't.
We don't really challenge Medicare.
We don't really challenge Social Security.
And now, as Obamacare has become the system, we can't challenge it in as aggressive a way as we previously did.
And so, you know, it's a sad fact of politics.
But this is what's going to be interesting.
Because when MAGA came along, one of the things that was shouted from the rooftops was, what has conservatism ever conserved, right?
What did the movement ever win?
You won elections, but then he didn't do anything with that.
Now, listen, I'm a big fan of what Donald Trump did in his first term.
I think that his foreign policy was excellent.
I'm a big fan of his judicial picks.
I'm a big fan of his tax cuts.
I'm a big fan of his deregulatory policy.
But if you're going to make the point that you're making, I think that that does require a more mature view of politics than what is currently spouted and has been spouted for many years in the commentariat, which is the idea that 100% of the loaf is always on the table.
You're right.
And I think that that creates a perverse incentive structure, even when it comes to many of the candidates who run for higher office.
One of the things that we saw from JD Vance is that that is a person on the stage who's willing to take 80% of the loaf or 70% or maybe 60% of the loaf.
In some cases, 50% of the loaf.
Because what he sounded like was a moderate.
What he sounded like tonight was somebody who on policy and in persona was quite moderate.
In fact, if you compared his performance tonight in the VP debate, which again, I think was extremely articulate, to Mike Pence's VP debate performance in 2020, I'll venture to say that Mike Pence was more conservative on the stage than JD Vance was tonight on issues like abortion, on issues like spending, on issues like Obamacare.
Okay, so what that means is that when we make arguments about the art of the possible and politics being the art of the possible, I think that everyone in our business should stop being a little disingenuous about this idea that the people you like are 100% gung-ho going to fix everything tomorrow.
That's just the way that it works.
I think there's many people in our industry who lie about this.
And then they suggest that when Republicans somehow fail to meet that standard, it's because they're sellouts and they're cucks and all the rest of it.
Because by that standard, there are a lot of sellouts and cucks among the people we love.
But there's a really important lesson here from this that you're making, which is Donald Trump spoke in a more moderate way than Mike Pence, than most Republicans in my lifetime.
JD Vance tonight spoke in a more moderate way.
And yet think about the effect of Donald Trump's presidency.
While he downplayed abortion in the 2016 campaign, he downplayed marriage and all the rest of it.
Trump is the guy that got the originalists on the court that overruled Roe v. Wade a half-century victory.
So there is some wisdom.
And the Democrats are really good at this.
The Democrats are really good at talking like moderates.
Moderation is a virtue.
But then advancing their agenda.
And in crucial ways, Trump did that.
I trust that JD Vance would do that if he found himself in the Oval Office.
If he talks a way that is not immoral and not dishonest, but is strategic and tactical and gets you over the finish line and allows a conservative agenda to flourish, I'm all for it.
I think this is true.
I do think that it's a game of checkers.
The times when you get a triple jump are going to be very rare.
You're usually moving one space at a time.
And that's always true.
And you're absolutely right that it's bad to have a media that is constantly encouraging people to sound extreme.
You have to say that.
If only they use their Nietzschean willpower and get everything out of the way.
Exactly.
However, there are big victories.
And it would be nice if we would think to conserve them.
For instance, the Krauthammer rule that a really truly successful president is when the guy after him, even if he's from another party, has to continue his policy.
So Reagan was a truly successful president because Clinton basically had to continue his policies.
The era of big government is over.
And one of the ways he did that was reforming welfare.
And when they reformed welfare, we heard this was going to be a disaster.
It was one of the most successful policies that came out of the Clinton administration.
And Obama just gutted it.
We just let him gut it.
Nobody celebrated it.
Nobody said this is a great thing.
He gutted welfare reform.
We were right back where we started.
I think the thing is, I really do believe that the great society has to be destroyed.
And I think you have to do that step by step because so many people are eating off it, mostly in the government.
Because it mostly is not doing anything for the people, but it's doing a lot for the government.
But you have to start to take that thing apart.
Another big victory was the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
And that's why I, again, I understand all the strategic stuff.
But I think there's a strategic mistake being made on the abortion issue by Republicans.
Totally agree with this.
I understand that it is.
There are elements of our position as pro-lifers that are unpopular.
I get all that.
We want to win the women over as suburban women.
I understand all that.
But the leftist position on abortion is in fact barbaric.
It is in fact deranged.
It's actually indefensible intellectually.
There are so many landmines for the left on this issue that they're able to just like jump over because we don't guide them into it.
So, and I've been waiting for someone to do this, and I guess it's not going to happen this cycle.
But in one of these debates, sometime I would love for a Republican to just turn to the Democrat and say, okay, what we're really talking about here, this is the fundamental issue here, is what is a person?
When is a person a person?
Right.
Maybe it will be.
When is a person a person?
So turn to the Democrat and say, this is what we're talking about.
So at what point is the baby in the womb a person?
Can you answer that?
And they won't be able to answer it.
They're going to say, Obama famously said, above my pay grade.
Okay, so you can't answer.
You don't know when the baby's a person.
And yet so you're just saying, well, we don't know, but let's make abortion legal through all stages of pregnancy anyway, which is so even from your own position, by your own premise, that's analogous to like throwing a hand grenade into a dark room, not knowing if there's a person in there.
Well, guess what?
If you kill a person in there, you're morally responsible for that because even according to you, there might have been.
So I understand the difficulties of maybe articulating some of this in this kind of environment, but we just let them off the hook completely on stuff.
And it drives me nuts.
And we let them do this thing with the hard cases that make bad law.
You know, my 10-year-old was raped by her uncle and all this stuff.
You know, the answer to that is, okay, fine.
But is it okay to abort a child because you want a Capricorn instead of a Scorpio?
Is it okay because you want a girl instead of a boy?
Is it okay because you did a genetic test and now they can prove that someone's gay?
Is it okay to abort a man?
I want to know the answers to those questions.
Those questions are never brought up on a debate stage.
See, I agree with you.
I don't think we can win the votes that we need.
But that doesn't mean we can't win the argument.
And JD Vance did it.
He talked about part of the partial birth abortion.
Right.
And again, he kind of.
That was totally left.
Right.
Right.
I'm saying all this.
JD Vance did a brilliant job.
That was one of the most impressive debate performances I've ever seen.
So I don't mean a nitpick.
But at the same time, they let Walls off the hook.
And he said, well, I know we all agree that partial birth abortion is wrong.
We don't all agree.
Every mainstream Democrat, in fact, believes in partial birth abortion, which means, just so everyone knows, that you're killing the baby as it is emerging from the birth canal.
I agree.
Look, as a pro-lifer, I think J.D. is ardently pro-life.
But we're all watching that.
We're thinking, if this were a pro-life speech, I'd be coming out of my skin.
I do think JD's view, and the Republican view, and I think it's a correct view, is that this issue in October and November is not going to win any of those votes.
We have to win.
And it's an important, it's, to my mind, as important an issue as any there is.
But anytime abortion is being talked about, we're losing votes.
If you're explaining, you're losing.
It's a hard issue.
It eludes people who don't have a serious bioethical framework.
And so just like the Israel issue is tough for the Dems, for instance, this one is tough for us right now.
But we don't have to explain.
We can ask.
I mean, I love what you just said, Matt, that it doesn't, it isn't that we have, man, I lost what you said.
I liked it.
I'm sure it was whatever it was.
It was right.
One thing we can all agree on, I would say.
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What you said that I loved was we may not be able to win the votes, but we can win the argument.
And in the end, the votes are going to follow the argument.
We have to fight.
As I've said about abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we had no plan.
The right had no plan because it assumed that it was never going to win on overturning Roe v. Wade.
It's going to take a generational effort of winning the argument before those votes finally do change.
What I object to is giving up the argument.
I don't think that it is necessarily the case that in order to win in November, we have to just pretend that we're not a pro-life party.
But I don't think that's what J.D. did.
I agree with your point.
But JD Van said, look, I'm pro-life.
You know, we've got to do a better job at communicating.
Fighting For Pro-Life Votes00:12:11
It's basically what he said.
Here's my problem with that.
And again, I think we all agree.
JD did a great job.
And we keep using that kind of disclaimer at the beginning because he did.
He did a really good job.
But there are some deeper issues that get uncovered in debates like this.
And this is one of them.
The thing that he did that is a problem, I think, on this particular issue.
And again, I totally understand the tactic, is when he says we have to do a better job of communicating, that immediately gets you into a democratic frame in which the problem is that we need to convince individuals that they should not abort their babies.
Okay, that is not the question at hand.
I, of course, agree that we should convince individuals that they should not abort their babies.
We're big backers of, for example, Pre-Born, big sponsor of a lot of the shows here who actually do that on like a case-by-case basis and show women ultrasounds of their babies.
You should check out Pre-Born.
They're a really great charity.
But when it comes to this issue, the problem with saying that is that what you're actually doing is undercutting the very basis of overruling Roe versus Wade.
The basis of overruling Roe versus Wade is that in states there should in fact be legislation.
And that is not just a matter of convincing individuals.
That is a human rights issue.
And so when you, what you could say, here would be a sample answer, would be, listen, I'm going to be the vice president of the United States.
The federal government's role in abortion has been spoken on by the Supreme Court of the United States already, which is to say it's extremely limited.
This is an issue that has been kicked back to the states.
And because there are different state definitions, that's just the way that it is.
I will argue in every case that children deserve a right to life, and people are going to disagree in various states.
And that's the way that our system works.
That's not going to be as evocative an answer for maybe some of the women that he's attempting to appeal to, but it is going to not undercut the argument that pro-lifers are now going to have to make for a generation in the aftermath of that.
And the problem with making it into a question of individual willpower is that a question of individual willpower is the Roe versus Wade framework, right?
Because the argument they're making is, well, sure, I mean, you're saying individual will, and we get to make our own.
That's our argument, right?
Then all abortions should be legal.
And we also make the call.
It is, from just a political perspective, if you want to win the election, you do, yes, you need some suburban women.
You also need pro-lifers, and that is your base.
And you need to mobilize them, and you need to make them feel like you're their champion.
And that's the really difficult needle that they're trying to thread.
I'm glad I don't have to thread it.
I know it's very easy for me that I can just rant because I'm not running for office.
But I will say that I am worried that there's a potential political problem here in that a lot of pro-lifers are really demoralized right now.
And I've been to these pro-life events.
I've gone to the fundraisers.
We all have.
And you talk to the pro-lifers, you know, off the record, off camera, and that's what you get, that they're just feeling really demoralized.
Now, everyone here has said the same message.
If you're pro-life, vote for Donald Trump.
Vote for him.
If you don't vote for him, you're voting for Kamala Harris.
She's radically pro-abortion.
It would be an insane thing to not vote for Donald Trump.
Go vote for him.
Absolutely.
It will save babies.
But even so, when you have a demoralized base, that's going to hurt you politically.
And so that's why we can't just completely ignore that fact.
You got to give the pro-life base something to hang on to.
It is kind of a positive thing that Republican politicians aren't willing to go the Obama route of like, I believe that marriages between a man and a woman is the way I evolve.
You know, they actually are having a hard time lying.
And so they're coming up with all this stuff and they're bobbling the ball.
But I do think that we can speak to the radicalism of the left.
I think we can question them.
I think we can answer the moderators with questions.
We don't have to take on this, oh, you know, a 10-year-old rape by.
The truth is, and we all know this, America is one of the most radical countries of abortion in the world.
That's why when they said 15 weeks, like that was a shock.
That's most of Europe.
That's most of Europe.
Far left, and in some cases, full-on socialist Europe.
The only countries that have our level of permissiveness around abortion are like North Korea, China.
It's Canada.
The most radical countries in the world.
Put them in a position of having to defend their radicalism, even if you can't fully defend life in the ways that we have historically done so as a party.
We're going to take some questions from our Daily Wire Plus members.
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First question from a DW member.
Why and how do you think that Trump and Harris are so close in the polls?
And what does Trump need to do to change?
What does Trump need to change in order to lead in them?
So can I start with like a quick comment on the polls?
Yes.
So the polls themselves, I am not sure how much I trust them, which is a weird thing for me to say.
But when all the polls keep saying the same thing and they all keep saying that every single state is margin of error, I start to think that pollsters are grouping, meaning that they are just being risk averse.
When you're looking at these polls, what they're doing is they're constructing what they call likely voter screens.
They're trying to figure out what the constituency of the voting population in each state is going to be.
And that means they get to play with the numbers.
There's something when it comes to scientific studies that are fake, it's called p-hacking.
And what that means is that you're actually screwing around with the interior stats to come up with these statistically significant results you can get it published.
And when it comes to these polls, I feel like there's some p-hacking going on because when I see every single poll in every single swing state this tight, I start to think, I don't know, man, is that just a bunch of pollsters who are afraid to say what they actually think is going to happen in this election?
So first of all, I recommend that we look at registered voter polls as opposed to likely voter polls because again, those likely voter polls, they're so weird, right?
When you're seeing a poll that's showing Donald Trump only losing union members by like seven to 10 points and only losing Hispanics by 14 points, and then he's tied with Kamala Harris.
You're like, what the hell?
There's no way he loses Hispanics by 14 points and maybe comes close to winning union members and then loses the election in the blues.
Like, what are you even talking?
But that's what all the polls are saying.
And so all I can say is I don't think anyone has a read on the election.
Anyone.
I don't think pollsters have a read.
I don't think I have a read.
I don't think anyone has a read.
I kind of swivel from having a gut feeling that Trump is going to win when I think about what a terrible candidate she is.
And when I think about the fact that I think there is a hidden male vote that looks at Tim Walz and Doug M. Hoff and goes, oh, God, no, not that, anything that.
And then I swivel into, well, does Donald Trump have a get out the vote campaign?
Like, what does his get out the vote look like?
Which to me is the single greatest factor in the election.
And I have no idea.
I'm hearing conflicting information on the ground from some who say, seeing a lot of Trump signs to people who are like, yeah, I haven't seen anybody door knocking here for a year.
So it's, I got no idea.
I think that there are three plausible scenarios and Trump loses two of them.
Plausible scenario: number one, the polls are largely accurate.
It's a very evenly divided country.
Trump has some good pickups among Hispanics.
He has some good pickups among working men, and he wins the election.
Option two, the polls are largely right.
It's a very narrowly divided country.
Suburban women vote in greater numbers than men.
Even though Trump makes some gains, he loses the election, right?
That's kind of the 50-50.
There is kind of an outlier possibility, and it really only works in one direction.
And that is with the near ubiquity now of mail-in voting, young people actually show up for the first time.
Historically, young people don't vote in our national elections, and we always bemoan the fact.
But it's actually quite a good thing.
Young people, as a general rule, should not vote in our elections.
Elections are supposed to be a little bit difficult to participate in because then there's a kind of self-selection that happens.
If you're the kind of young person, as I'm sure Ben Shapiro was, who the day he turned 18, he found an election somewhere to vote in, and he knew everything there was to know about all the issues that were on the ballot, and he knew everything there was to know about each candidate on the ballot ballot.
He probably even knew the judges in California.
Nobody knows the judges.
If you're that kind of young person, great, vote.
You're the outlier.
You're the exception to the rule.
And you will take, you'll take the initiative and you'll go register and you'll stand in line at your precinct on election day and you'll go in and you'll register your vote.
And that's great.
I'm glad that you vote.
But what I don't is for college campuses to become part of the left's ballot harvesting operation because of now the ubiquity of mail-in voting.
So it is at least possible that for the first time we will see massive, almost parity level voting among the very young college-age population, as we historically always have in older populations, because we've completely changed what it means to vote in this country.
And if that is true, Kamala Harris will win 49 or 50 states.
So I have to say that I agree with everything you just said, except for one thing.
I think there's also another possibility, which is Trump will win by a substantial margin, a much greater margin than the polls show because of the internals on the polls, which show that most people agree with him on most of the big issues and the groups that are moving in his direction, like the unions and Hispanics, are actually substantial.
And that could be a big difference.
So if that is the other, to me, that's the fourth option.
I also agree with what you said, that literally at this point, no one knows.
But when you say that Trump could win by a large margin, I don't think that Trump could win in a landslide.
I think the only landslide possibility is that voting has just fundamentally changed in the country.
Well, I don't know about a landslide, but I think a substantial, you know.
You mean he could win the blue wall states and he could win all the states?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think the important thing here is that it is true that whichever one you pick, you've got a 50-50 chance of winning.
And so you're probably winning.
The one thing I will say is that there are polls right now that are showing that 51% of people who vote in this election are going to vote mail-in, are going to vote early.
And those people are going to vote extraordinarily high levels for Democrats.
So I've been around campaigning with a bunch of different Senate candidates.
I was campaigning with Eric Hovdy in Wisconsin the other day.
I was campaigning with Sam Brown in Nevada.
I'm going to go campaign with Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania and Bernie Moreno in Ohio.
Every time I go out and campaign, there's one guy in the crowd who raises his hand and says, I'm afraid that if I vote by mail, then they're going to steal my ballot and dump it in the river.
Like literally every single one of these campaign events, somebody will say that.
What I keep saying to them is, then vote by mail and then go vote your provisional ballot.
Right.
Because the reality is that one of the singly most damaging things that Donald Trump ever did was to himself in 2021 when he suggested that because he had not won the 2020 election, that no one should vote in the 2021 Georgia election because they were stealing the votes and throwing them in the river.
It turns out that he set in the minds of Republican voters this bizarre idea that if you vote by mail, there's somebody at the balloting place who's taking your vote and chucking it out.
Now, whether or not that's true, and I really do not think that there's a high likelihood that that is happening on a mass scale, whether or not you think that's true, it's the dumbest thing you could possibly tell Republican voters because then a lot of people ain't going to vote.
They're going to get on election day and they're going to have a cold, they're going to have the gout and they're going to be like, you know what?
I can't vote today.
And does my vote really matter?
It turns out Democrats do the only thing that matters, which is they tell everybody to vote early and vote often.
The question, it's really a question of whether every political rule, all the political rules have been completely thrown out.
Are we living in a country now where like none of the political rules that have governed this country since its inception apply anymore?
Because if any of that stuff, if anything makes sense in this country right now, then Donald Trump wins because you've got the last president that dropped out of the race because he's senile.
Voting Early Matters00:03:47
You put in this candidate nobody knows anything about, and she's deeply unimpressive.
Donald Trump has been almost assassinated twice.
You have multiple crises in this country and abroad.
You have war overseas.
You have inflation here.
People are literally underwater.
Like their houses are underwater in multiple different ways.
And so all of that should mean that Donald Trump wins.
And if he doesn't, then that means we live in a country where like nothing matters.
Where they're eating dogs and cats.
Yeah.
Where they're eating dogs cats and nothing matters and it's just impossible to predict anything anymore.
And I'm not sure.
I think that's right.
He's actually almost been assassinated three times.
Because of Iran, you mean?
Because of Iran.
Ben, I think you have something that you want to tell the people.
Do I?
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Ben actually does work out every day and you actually do play video games and dogs and cats live together.
The whole world has done mad.
Michael, how do the VP candidates' performances compare to each one's running mate?
I thought that JD gave, as we've all said, gave one of the best debate performances for either the VPs or the nominees of anyone in my lifetime.
I mean, it was up there with Reagan.
And even Reagan had some stumbles in his debates.
So I thought he just did phenomenally.
I thought Walls did better than Kamala did.
I thought Kamala, she and Trump were basically a draw in the last debate.
She helped herself a little bit.
Trump was good.
You know, obviously Trump in the Biden debate was extraordinarily good so that he knocked Biden out.
And Biden was extraordinarily weak.
So I really, you know, not to be, I don't want to praise the guy incessantly, but I just thought, especially compared to the degraded sense of debates that we've had going back to the 2000s, I just think Vance did better than anyone just about.
Well, what Vance did is he gave a consistently good performance.
It was reliable.
What he did not do was ever have like a standout memorable moment.
Trump is full of the standout moments.
I mean, you can go through a lot of them.
But this is actually a really good point, actually, because I do wonder what impact that has.
Meaning the way that we consume it.
We talked about this last time with the Trump versus Harris debate where we watched it.
And I think the immediate takeaway was Trump did not perform well and Kamala performed better than expected because we all sort of expected the possibility she was going to completely word vomit for like the entire time.
And she mostly word vomited, but she didn't kind of vomit all over herself, so it wasn't particularly visible.
Trump's Standout Moments00:03:03
And meanwhile, Trump was chasing every rabbit down every rabbit hole is possible to find in a 300-mile radius.
And one of the things that I said at the time, you know, again, being right always, is that when you look at how debates are then viewed in retrospect, what you see are the clips, right?
And so a lot of the clips went viral.
The biggest clip that went viral for Trump was, of course, the eating the cats and the eating the dogs.
It didn't seem to have any impact on the race because everybody kind of understood what he meant, which is the way that things tend to process.
It's helpful, actually.
It certainly didn't seem to hurt him too much.
But when it comes to this debate, I think there's really only going to be maybe one serious standout moment.
The Democrats are going to try to make the January 6th thing a standout moment for Walls.
But the really only standout moment was that moment where Walls looked for a second like a deer in the headlights when he was asked about the China line.
When that happened, Walls looked as though a trapdoor had opened out from underneath him and he was wily coyote in the moment before he was about to plummet through to the alligators below.
But that was kind of the only one.
I'm friends with school shooters, could go viral on TikTok.
Yeah, but nothing JD said in particular was sort of like, this is the moment where JD just knocked this guy through a wall.
And that's different, too, because it's obviously, he's obviously miserable.
He's not funny, but no.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Why do you think these are from questions from our DailyWire.com subscribers?
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Why do you think the Dems oppose labeling the cartels terrorist organizations?
Because they're the government of Mexico.
It would have large implications.
They're actually not terrorist organizations.
They're criminal organizations.
It's different.
Different category.
Well, I mean, they kind of are terrorist organizations.
It's just the terrorism is not directed directly at the United States population.
It's directed at the government of Mexico.
I mean, they literally chop up police officers.
Yeah, but that's because it's a criminal.
I agree.
There's a distinction.
I don't think that's a terrorist organization.
I think of terrorism as targeting civilians to achieve political ends, whereas these guys, they sort of target politicians to achieve personal ends.
For example, today, Iran launched at least 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, and that is terror bombing.
And the government of Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism.
But the Iranian regime is not a terrorist regime because it is a regime.
Its soldiers wear uniforms and drive around in tanks and therefore are a military.
So while they can engage in terror bombing as they attempted to do today, in other words, we're perhaps a bit loose with the term terrorists.
The cartels are not, by the technical definition, terrorist organizations.
They are national security threats to us.
And I believe they should be handled by our military.
I don't know why we don't go in with the military and bomb the New Smithereans, but we don't have to call them a terrorist organization.
No, it can bomb all kinds of organizations.
Right.
I can bomb anybody.
America.
Does the nice guy appearance between Vance and Walls seem to be genuine, or do you think it was a play?
Well, I think Vance probably has a slight anger problem.
And I think Walls is obviously killing women and wearing their skin as suits.
Silicon Valley's Billionaire Divide00:02:41
Do you think JD has a chance to be president after Trump's presidency, assuming that Trump wins?
Yes.
Of course.
He has a chance to be president, even assuming Trump doesn't win.
I mean, he's super young.
He's super, he's very good at this.
His chances are much lower if Trump doesn't win.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, listen, you're the running mate to anybody, and there's always this assumption that you are then going to be the next president.
And actually, it's kind of historically rare.
I mean, it's been a while since this happened.
Who has been the running mate on a failed ticket who became president?
Wow, this is a really good quiz question.
Really tough one.
Let's see.
On a failed ticket.
And can we even remember the voice?
Golly.
I can't.
I don't know that I could.
I was just thinking of Nixon.
I was thinking of Nixon.
But no, he failed on his own run, and then he got it the next time.
Or, you know, a couple times later.
Yeah.
Wow.
That is an excellent question.
You'd think somebody would have written a book about something like this.
Ben.
Oh, my God.
Why do the Democrats keep saying that Donald Trump is the candidate who benefits billionaires when almost all billionaires are on Kamala Harris' side?
This would be a big question.
I think the reason the Democrats keep saying that is because they keep playing this class warfare shtick.
They also say that Trump's tax cuts benefited the rich more than anybody, which is a total lie.
It was actually a regressive tax cut.
It actually helped people in the middle class and the lower class by percentage much more than it helped people at the top of the tax spectrum.
In fact, I was living in California.
He got rid of the salt deduction.
My taxes went up, right?
Because I was still paying that 13% state income tax in the state of California.
It wasn't deductible against my federal income tax.
And my taxes as a non-billionaire, but as a rich person in California, actually went up under Donald Trump's tax plan.
I think this is, by the way, one of the signal failures of the elite billionaire class, truly, is that the divide between the billionaire class and the way they earn and then their values is truly shocking.
Because if you look at it, there's a famous book called What's the Matter with Kansas that was written by Thomas Frank back in the 2000s.
And the sort of proposition was, why does everybody in Kansas vote red when they're all on welfare?
Because there's a heavy share of people who are on welfare.
And the answer, of course, was values.
It turns out that they went to church.
It turns out that even if you're on welfare, you really didn't want to be on welfare.
And it turns out people vote their values.
Well, one of the things that's happened, I think a lot of the disdain that common people have for billionaires, as opposed to wanting to be them and aspire to be them is the fact that billionaires by and large now imbibe from this well of terrible social policies in which they hate church and they hate religious people and they hang around at cocktail parties in Silicon Valley and they're like Sam Bankman, freed over in the Bahamas setting up sex pods and you're like well, those are weirdos, those are, those are really really strange people.
And and so that's actually created the case for a class warfare on the right right, the reverse class warfare that you're now seeing on the right, the anti-billionaire sentiment you see on the right, is not because Republicans and conservatives hate wealth or wealth creation.
Values Voting00:04:43
It's because they look at the billionaires in Silicon Valley.
And this is exactly, by the way, what happened to Jd Vance.
Like on a personal level.
This is what happened to Jd Vance right, if Jd wrote, Hill Billiology was very popular with the Silicon Valley class, so much so that he went to Peter Thiel and people in Silicon Valley and started companies with them.
And then he has said this.
He said, I hang, I hung out a lot with people in Silicon Valley and I found that they actually hated my values and it's one of the things that actually turned his politics toward this sort of more populist, anti-capitalism sentiment in a lot of ways, and I don't think that's rare.
What does the Minnesota law on abortion actually say?
Is Vance right?
Why can't the moderator say something on that?
He repealed the requirement that doctors he walls he governor, Tim Walz as governor intentionally repealed a requirement that that made doctors provide medical care to babies who were born alive, surviving abortion, and so uh, there have been multiple cases I think it was something like eight reported cases of babies being born alive, surviving abortion.
So they're there, you know, like governor Ralph Northam, Democrat in Virginia, saying the baby will be born and made comfortable, and then we'll have a conversation about what to do with him.
That actually happened and these babies died and then there were no reporting requirements that Waltz removed those and so that.
So it's, it's barbaric and it is a defense of infanticide.
It is, for all intents and purposes, Walls saying, kill babies who survive abortion.
Vance was totally right and that's the mainstream Democrat position.
Correct is to not provide aid to these babies, because that's the position they have to take.
Really, I you know, politically they have to take that position because if they say we're going to provide medical care and aid to the babies, then you're acknowledging number one, the life of the baby, and number two, the violence of the abortion that the baby just survived.
They can't acknowledge that.
So this is the mainstream position.
Infanticide is a mainstream Democrat position.
It comes down to also your description earlier of what partial birth abortion is, what late-term abortion is that it?
It is a delivery of the baby and then a killing of the baby during delivery, which is why sometimes, sometimes it misses and crap the baby's here.
Now, what do we do?
By the way, that's the question.
I mean, the question that you asked is obviously the deeper question about abortion, what is a person?
But uh, the question that I just that's super simple, that I wish somebody would just ask somebody like Tim Walz on a stage, is, would you veto a bill guaranteeing the life of a baby born alive during an abortion, Abortion?
Would you veto that bill?
And then if he says, I would veto that bill, so why then you did in Minnesota, right?
I mean, you actually did.
That's the thing you did.
Right.
Like, ask him straight up the question.
That's the thing I wish that the Vance had done today.
Here we go.
And according to our crack research team, in 1920, RNG party, FDR was the running mate of the loser, James Cox.
I was going to say that.
I had it.
And then he went on to win the presidency 400 times.
How do you think the purchase of over 200 radio stations by George Soros will affect the election?
And why would the FCC extradite this?
That's a question that answers itself.
It actually is a propaganda instrument that they're giving him because he's on their side.
That's all it is.
Will it affect the election?
It might, but probably not.
It's probably too late.
This question is for Michael.
Did JD Vance make Catholics proud?
The question is decidedly not for Matt.
Yes, that's forget about that.
About that other Catholic.
He did.
He made Catholics very proud because he did a fabulous job.
And there was one moment that I thought was actually really masterful and helpful, which is there are certain issues that are extraordinarily controversial that are probably not appropriate to bring up in the weeks before a presidential election.
One of those is IVF, which the Democrats have tried to make great hayover.
And it's an extremely, it's a relatively novel technology.
It's one that the Catholics are opposed to IVF.
The Southern Baptists have recently come out against IVF.
So it's not just the Catholics, but this is a new thing.
People are grappling with the meaning of bioethics, and it's an extremely emotional issue.
JD tonight said, we want more reproductive help and reproductive technologies and therapies.
And so he spoke in such a way that conveyed the true meaning of the Trump campaign, which is we do want more reproductive help and family care and all the rest of it.
But he didn't lie.
He didn't contradict his beliefs and principles.
He didn't scandalize people with a controversial issue.
He didn't needlessly raise an extremely controversial issue.
I thought it was really well stated.
It's part of why I say Trump is a wrecking ball and we love him for it.
And JD Vance is a scalpel and we love him for that.
By the way, I will mention that that was the first mention I think that I've heard of a presidential candidate actually invoking Christ on a stage.
Yeah, that's a good point.
He did that in the middle of the debate and he did it casually, which I thought was actually quite nice.
That's a very good point.
Another question from a DailyWire.com subscriber.
Defending Gamers00:02:51
Can the Daily Wire please do something to focus on nerd culture?
There are millions of young men who don't know politics and love superheroes and video games.
And the fact that we aren't making it known that we care about what they care about is a crime.
They'll end up falling in with leftists who do not appeal to them on these grounds who do appeal to them on these grounds.
I have played video games on the air.
I've actually had a lot of people.
Yeah, we know about nerd culture.
The 70-year-old who read every book in the Western family.
I think I do.
Who has been playing video games since they were invented?
I do a lot to appeal to nerd culture.
I will say, I did once do a nerd call.
I talked about video games on the show.
I was defending gamers on the show.
And then the gamers spent the next three days yelling at me on Twitter, telling me, how dare I speak on this issue?
I have no right to speak about it.
That did happen.
That's a thing that happened.
I will say this.
It's going around right now.
I think that our friend Liz Wheeler may have started it on the right, although it's also going around on the left.
This idea that it is a total stone-cold no, like complete turnoff, absolute non-starter for a guy to play video games.
Women hate video games.
They do.
And it is, I think it's, I think that that's absurd.
Obviously, video games, like anything, can be abused and people can form unhealthy relationships as they can in the entire sort of interconnected online world and people can devote far too much of their lives to video games.
But men should be allowed to have things that they like that women don't like.
So do you agree, at least with Liz's point, that video games give women the ick?
Well, unless it's like bejeweled or something, which women play lots of video games.
They just play video brush.
They just play video games that don't have story depth, meaning, plot.
Actually, as someone who famously is not a video game fan, I do sympathetic to the, because the argument gamers will make, especially if someone like me is, well, you say video games are for kids.
You're sitting around watching football on Sunday.
What's the difference?
I think there is a little bit of a difference, but I'm sympathetic to argument.
I actually think that it is pretty similar.
And so my take on video games is similar to football.
I like watching football.
Men can have an unhealthy obsession with it.
Where it becomes your whole personality is football.
Disappear for the season.
Right.
And that's unmanly.
It's ridiculous.
It's unmanly.
Now your whole life is a game.
It's okay to sit down and watch a football game.
I watch it as a family.
It's a family thing.
And so it's the same thing with video games.
If it becomes your whole life, if it's the focal point of you and your identity, then that's a problem because no form of entertainment or recreation should be the focal point of your existence, no matter what it is.
That doesn't mean that we don't engage in that stuff.
Yeah.
I have to say your Ravens looked amazing.
Why Football Matters00:10:59
35 to 10.
I had a family living.
But they looked like super.
And the touchdowns?
Yeah.
They scored them.
They showed them, right?
Joe Flacco's.
Right for the Colts now.
Yeah, sorry.
Why are Kamala and Tim bringing to attention the fact that they are gun owners?
Won't that be controversial among their base?
No, because they're not.
Because they're lying.
Well, actually, this is a fascinating thing, actually.
If you want to know where the parties believe the American people are, watch where they converge.
It really is interesting.
If you watch the debate tonight, again, one of the points I've been making is they kept saying they agreed with each other.
So where do they agree with each other?
Where do they think the American people are?
So if you were to follow the arguments tonight, here's where you think they are.
Hawkish on the border, hawkish on foreign policy, right?
Both of them converge on the, we need steady, strong American leadership in the Middle East.
And both of them are making that argument.
Kamala Harris is guy falsely, right?
He's lying.
But on entitlements, both of them seem to be pretty pro-entitlements.
On abortion, they both seem to be running away from the pro-life position, unfortunately, as we've been talking about tonight, at least publicly.
And on guns, both of them are running to the guns are really kind of great.
Like we all like guns, don't we?
And so apparently that's where both parties actually think the American people are.
And that is kind of a fascinating case study.
Did you notice there was a really interesting, I think most people missed an answer when they tried to pin JD on some particular shooting with a particular father's culpability over guns where this kid got the gun.
And JD's answer highlighted a subtle difference between a conservative view and like a libertarian view or a liberal or leftist view, where he said, well, in that specific case, I would defer to local law enforcement.
I think they probably know their community better than some one-size-fits-all policy, you know, say machine guns for everybody or something nationwide.
That was, I think, indicative of his more traditional kind of conservatism.
And I also think it played.
How do you think the longshoreman strike will impact the election?
I think if they continue to soft-soap the unions, it'll be really bad for the Democrats.
I mean, this is going to, you know, the big toilet paper shortages and food shortages and things like that.
If Biden goes around bumping into walls and saying, well, we have to have enough people talking with the, you know.
I don't know.
This feels like a setup to me, honestly.
It feels like a setup.
Yeah, it feels to me like Biden-Harris have already gone to the unions and then they've gone to the employers and they basically are going to walk out.
Look, look at the strike that we just averted.
And we did it on behalf of our union workers because they know that they're really trailing with unions.
This whole thing feels, it smells like a setup.
If you're right, then it's because Joe Biden wants Kamala Harris to win.
There's one really terrifying thing that could happen in the coming weeks and months with the Longshoreman strike, which is that it will be much more difficult to get Mayflower cigars, which is why someone should probably stock up on them right now, everybody out there.
If it's a setup, it would be fitting because the union boss looks like the love child of Archie Bunker and Tony Soprano, and he's, you know, he seems to be in the tank for the Democrats.
But I don't know.
You know, the head of the Teamsters comes out for Trump in this election.
Maybe something really is changing.
That's kind of been on my mind, but you may be right.
It's hard to know.
One thing that's on my mind, and I want to leave everyone with this thought.
Elections are incredibly consequential.
We talked about it tonight, the changes in both parties as a result of elections, the change in our national politics just because of the success of Obamacare.
Not its success as a policy, but its success in becoming national policy.
So elections matter.
This election matters.
I have a lot of people that I know, like multiple people that I know, who are so afraid of Kamala Harris ascending the presidency that they've begun canning.
And this is one of the things that I love about conservatives is that they think that if the end of the world comes, they can perhaps avert the worst impact of the collapse of our society by having enough peach preserves in the pantry.
Right?
It's charming.
And it is, of course, always possible that we could lose all of this.
We were not promised tomorrow.
We're certainly not promised that tomorrow will be good.
We're certainly not promised that our complex government structures will hold throughout society.
Throughout history, they change.
Often, often it's cataclysmic.
Often people suffer greatly and for long periods of time when great empires fall.
All of that is on offer.
We could lose the country.
I don't think that it's particularly likely.
I think that should Kamala Harris win, and make no mistake, Kamala Harris could be the next president of the United States.
You can feel in your gut that maybe Trump is going to win.
You can think that maybe people aren't paying attention to the media.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that people aren't going to put up with this, but they might.
Kamala Harris might win.
It could be a worst case.
Like I said, young people could vote because of the ubiquity of mail-in voting.
She could win 50 states.
It could be a complete sea change in the country.
And if that happens, well, we'll just have to wake up the next day and get back to fighting.
And the fight will get harder.
There will be substantial policy that comes out of a Kamala Harris ascension that will set us back.
It will be terrible.
There could be what even seem like worst cases that they could take the Senate, do away with the filibuster, add two states, try to create sort of permanent one-party rule in the country.
They could censor us greatly.
Truly bad things can happen, and many bad things will happen if she is elected president, but it will not be the end of history.
There is every possibility that the short-term pain of a Kamala Harris ascension could lead to a kind of national restoration, not through her presidency, but because of her presidency.
Her presidency could be like Jimmy Carter in the 70s that leads to Reagan in the 80s because it was so bad that it shook even all those new people who seem like they'll never change the way they vote.
Should you be cavalier about that?
No.
when people like Dick Cheney or David French or others say that they're willing to vote for Kamala Harris because of all of the unique evils of Donald Trump and because they want to save the Republican Party.
Many of their criticisms of Donald Trump aren't wrong.
What they're fundamentally wrong about is their assessment of the left, right?
They're sort of rightly observing that things are happening on the right that they're uncomfortable with, and they're being, I think, pretty pollyanna about, but people will suffer if Kamala, like it is a certainty that Kamala ascending will lead to suffering.
There's a certainty that Kamala winning will lead to the destruction of many advantages that our values have in the culture.
And so even if we think that is it possible that Kamala winning could, in a longer view of history, redound to the good of the country, maybe so, but that's not the sort.
That's for Providence to sort out.
What's before us is the election.
And in the election, we have to do the thing that's given to us to do.
What's given to us to do is to vote for Donald Trump.
Not because Donald Trump is great.
I happen to not think Donald Trump is great.
We have disagreement on this panel about how great he is or isn't.
He is better than Kamala Harris.
He is the people he will appoint to run the federal bureaucracy are far superior to the people who she will appoint to run the federal bureaucracy.
The judges that he will help move through the Senate are far, far superior to the judges that she will help move through the Senate.
We've lived through four years of Donald Trump, and we know that despite his somewhat unique, I think he has some unique character flaws, he also has many unique advantages that we've seen redound to the benefit of the country.
That's what's been put before us.
So I'm not trying to say the election isn't important.
I'm not saying don't vote.
On the contrary, I think you have a moral obligation to vote, and I think you have a moral obligation to vote for Donald Trump.
But we can't approach the election as though this is the last election of our lifetime.
That kind of language is both demoralizing instead of motivating.
People think it's motivating, but I think it's actually demoralizing.
It keeps people from engaging in the political process because if you think it's all over, then there's really no reason for you to go to the polls.
But it's not just that it's demoralizing.
It's also a kind of amelioration of your responsibilities.
Because if you do the thing you're supposed to do and go vote on November 5th for the Republicans and we lose, your responsibility didn't end.
You just have a responsibility the next day to fight the harder fight.
And we're going to wake up and do that.
I hope we wake up on November 6th.
I mean, I think we're joking if we think we're going to wake up on November 6th and even know who the president is.
On December 15th, I hope we wake up.
Somewhere in mid-December, we'll have a president.
And I hope that it's Donald Trump.
And if it is, we're going to wake up and we're going to know that we have to hold Donald Trump accountable in some ways and we have to support Donald Trump in some ways and we have to continue to fight the fight.
Have to drink a lot of champagne, smoke a lot of cigars.
And if Donald Trump is not the president, fight's going to be harder.
It may not be, you know, we may not live in the world that we want to live in.
We may not be faced with the kinds of challenges we had hoped to be faced with.
We may be faced by even harder challenges.
And if that's the place God puts us in the world, then we just wake up and we go and do that thing.
You can't live your life as though you have no agency.
And you can't live your life as though the end of agency is, you know, 33 days from now.
You're still fully you, and you still have responsibilities going into whatever is next.
And that's really been on my mind to communicate because I see, well, I see people canning peach preserves, but it's more than that.
I just see people thinking like somehow Kamala winning is the end.
And it may very well be the end of some things, but it's not the end of everything.
And it's not the end of the responsibility that God's given us.
When the Bible says that God establishes government, That must mean us, because sort of uniquely in human history, it's a government of the people.
We are a functioning part of the government in a republic, in a democratic republic.
And that means that all the reasons that God established kings and queens of old are still in play when he established this country.
And those responsibilities, many of those responsibilities now are with us, not just with the people who are in that top chair.
And those responsibilities continue for as long as we're here.
Thank you for joining us tonight for the Daily Wire Backstage.
We'll see you.
I think the next time we'll see you is election night.