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March 29, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:53:49

Daily Wire Backstage: Spring Break Special

With students spending so much money on bribing admissions boards how will they afford the amount of Natty Light they'll need for a week in Panama City Beach? How much magic sand will Beto have to eat to win the primary? Is Pauly Shore the only proper choice to moderate the Dem's debates? Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing, and special guest Matt Walsh, as they get to the bottom of these questions and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Hey everybody, this is Michael.
	You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, where I join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Plavin, and the man who will one day fire me for real, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, for a great conversation on politics and culture, and where we answer questions from Daily Wire subscribers.
	Without further ado, here is Backstage.
	I think we're on!
	Oh!
	Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage Spring Break Edition.
	Unlike Girls Gone Wild, Spring Break we have...
	I can't even read that!
	I got to Girls Gone Wild in the whole show so far.
	So far this is great, dude.
	Unlike Girls Gone Wild, you just start drooling.
	- Roll opening graphic. - So that's why you always do a test of reading the teleprompter before the show, which we definitely do.
	What if you hosted a show, dude?
	Yeah, that's what I did.
	Twitter thinks it'd be a great idea.
	Twitter couldn't possibly be.
	I am Jeremy Boring, god king of The Daily Wire, lowercase g, lowercase k.
	With me tonight, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan.
	Alicia Krause, the only married pregnant mother ever to appear in a Spring Break edition of anything.
	And we have a special guest tonight.
	He is perhaps even grumpier than Ben about needing to be...
	And he does his show from a car.
	You guys know this guy?
	He works here.
	Matt Walsh.
	Yeah, Matt Walsh.
	He's that well-known Buddhist?
	Is that well-known yogin?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Okay.
	We're going to do something really cool tonight, so pay attention.
	If you sign up to become a Daily Wire annual subscriber during the live broadcast of this episode, you and a guest will be entered into a raffle to win, get this, a free trip to L.A., and an opportunity to sit in on the set and watch us as we tape the Daily Wire backstage.
	You'll get to meet all of us after the show, except for Matt Walsh, because, let's be honest, he doesn't want to meet you.
	And also, we'll probably never see him again.
	In fact, tonight, right now, we have the winners who won the raffle last time we did a Daily Wire backstage.
	They're sitting in on our smoke-filled set just off camera.
	They subscribed during the live stream last time we were together and won the sweepstakes, and here he is with his wife.
	Thank you guys for joining us tonight.
	Well, now you can never get a job anywhere, so...
	I appreciate it.
	Thank you. - Yeah.
	So you two could win a chance to look as miserable as they do right now by becoming a Daily Wire annual subscriber during tonight's live stream.
	Subscribers also get to ask questions during the show.
	Elisha, let them know how.
	Yeah.
	You know, I once worked for a really generous boss who gave my husband and I a pretty hefty check that helped pay for a lavish honeymoon on the beaches of Australia.
	So when I heard the spring break edition and the God King said I would get to go to a beach...
	I thought it'd be better than a green screen.
	Uh, anyway.
	Alicia, you're not supposed to ruin the joke.
	Those are some of our best special effects.
	As we've ever done.
	I don't know, the special effect of Matt Walsh in a Hawaiian shirt is pretty good.
	Maybe you spent everything trying to convince him to get here, and that's why I'm not actually on a beach in Oahu, but...
	He drove here in his studio.
	All the way from the East Coast.
	I'm glad it could make it across countries.
	That's a lot for that car.
	So yes, you should sign up tonight.
	Oh sorry, the beach is so loud.
	Excuse me a moment.
	You should sign up to be a Daily Wire subscriber tonight because not only do you get to submit your questions, you could have the chance to win to sit in on that awful smoke-filled room.
	I mean, I feel really bad being a married mom of three.
	Like, they're married and have two kids at home and this is their idea of a date night.
	We should really do better, guys.
	So, go over to dailywire.com.
	If you're a subscriber, be sure to type your question into the Daily Wire chat box so you can have it read and answered on the air.
	And, I mean, if you thought that March Madness was all about college basketball, which is something I just learned last year as the reigning Daily Wire March Madness bracket champ.
	Did you just say that March Madness is about college basketball?
	I've been wondering that for three weeks.
	I'm more just angry that she won the pool last year, Alicia.
	I'm just reminding everyone because I know I'm not going to win again this year.
	But March Madness, I think, also stands for politics this week because this week, the greatest news week ever, you can go over to our Facebook poll and check out and vote what do you think the best story is of this greatest news week ever.
	A, the Mueller report destroys the Russian hoax.
	The Russian collusion hoax.
	Michael's super-duper excited about that one.
	B. Not a single Senate Democrat votes for the Green New Deal.
	C. Jussie Smollett gets off scot-free.
	Or D. The Economist apologizing for calling Ben an alt-writer.
	Well, that sounds great.
	Can we go?
	I think that the poll tonight is just an outline of tonight's show.
	I'm glad that we finally organized this thing.
	Basically, what there is to talk about is the greatest Newsweek in the history of...
	I do have to point out that our definition of great conservative Newsweeks has radically changed because it used to be that a great conservative Newsweek was like, you know, appointing a Supreme Court justice or...
	Change on the Berlin Wall.
	Right.
	Great conservative, winning World War II. Like, great conservative Newsweeks.
	Now it's like, the president is not a Russian catchpaw.
	Take that, leftist.
	Eat it!
	The reason it's the greatest Newsweek is, I mean, it's not, we're saying, okay, good, the president's not a stooge of Russia.
	That's great.
	It's the fact that a narrative that the leftists told us for over two years was not just 40% wrong.
	It was not just 60%.
	It was 175,000 million percent wrong.
	That's Yale math right here.
	That's Yale math right here for you.
	And it was just the perfect victory.
	I think it deserves a bigger drink than we're used to drinking around here.
	You should talk about that whiskey, by the way.
	Did you see what it is?
	Look at the label of it.
	If you just...
	It says, it's the Republicans' pounce whiskey.
	That's right.
	That's what it is.
	Pounce whiskey is a little picture of you.
	It's a little Shapiro riding a tiger and pouncing.
	How did they get that picture of you on the tiger?
	I mean, it's a live-action photo.
	And then it says on the bottom, in case of indictment, break, seal, and pour over email servers.
	Right on the bottom.
	Pretty fantastic.
	So yeah, the media fail here is the real story, right?
	The media and the Democratic fail here.
	Because all they had to do was just say, President Trump.
	Weird.
	Right?
	That's all they had to do for like the last couple of years.
	This guy?
	Really?
	Hmm?
	And instead it was, no, he works for Vladimir Putin.
	No, without a doubt, the evidence is going to come forth.
	And you have schmucks like Adam Schiff pretending that he has backroom knowledge.
	My favorite, of course, was John Brennan suggesting for two years on national television...
	That he had secret information that said that Donald Trump was, in fact, working for Vladimir Putin.
	And then it comes out that that's not true.
	And he says, well, maybe I got a little ahead of the evidence.
	I just sort of assumed.
	It's like you ran the intelligence services.
	That's right.
	You piece of crap.
	You are the head of the CIA. What's so beautiful about this, I agree with you that it's a negative victory.
	It's not a positive victory.
	However...
	The destruction of the mainstream media, as I've been saying for many years, the thing about the mainstream media is not the way they cover Trump.
	I'm happy to have the media go after the president.
	He's a powerful man.
	I want all powerful people to be hunted like dogs.
	That's his absolutely great American...
	He's a French revolutionary.
	Yeah, great American journalism.
	However, it's what they did with Obama for eight years.
	They turned a blind eye during the IRS scandal, the Fast and Furious scandal.
	He turned every department.
	You know, you talk about Jussie Smollett.
	He turned Washington into Chicago.
	And what happened, all these guys who did this, the John Brennans, the James Clappers, the James Comeys, they're all his guys.
	And it's because the press acted as a ring of invisibility.
	It was like they turned Obama into Gollum.
	This is a great line that kept telling about how Obama...
	His biggest scandal was a khaki suit.
	It was a khaki suit.
	The truest thing ever uttered by an Obama was actually uttered by the First Lady, Michelle Obama, recently unseated from her number one position on the New York Times.
	Who did that?
	I can't remember.
	It was an all-right guy, I think.
	And she said, unironically, we're going to bring South Side Chicago values to Washington, D.C. And all I know about the values of the South Side Chicago All I know about the South Side of Chicago is that it's the baddest part of town.
	That's the only thing I know about.
	The only film clip anybody knows about Chicago is Al Capone beating someone to death with a baseball bat.
	So the only thing lower right now than the media's credibility rating is Michael Knowles' credit score.
	Oh, the credit score.
	You know how I know about that?
	Lightstream?
	Lightstream.
	What a segue.
	I worked on that segue.
	I'll tell you why we don't jest about Lightstream.
	We're talking to a man who, if left to his own devices, would spend himself into the ground.
	If my wife didn't take care of me, as you all know, I would be living...
	He's a kept man.
	I better be a kept man or I'm lost.
	We do this, all of us.
	We take our credit card, we spend it, and then the bill comes due, and then suddenly you're looking at 18% APR interest.
	I mean, that is a genuine credit card interest rate.
	If you get Lightstream, you can refinance your high-interest credit card balances and save with a credit card consolidation loan.
	Lightstream will get you a rate as low as 6.14% APR with AutoPay.
	You've got to use AutoPay.
	The rate is fixed.
	It never goes up.
	up, you can get a loan from $5,000 to $100,000, and there are no fees.
	And you can even get your money as soon as the day you apply.
	Plus, because we're here, because of us, you can save even more.
	Our listeners get an additional interest rate discount.
	The only way to get this discount is to go to lightstream.com slash backstage.
	It's L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash backstage.
	And now I have to read this part.
	Ready?
	I read it really quickly.
	You get it right.
	Subject to credit order.
	Approval rate includes 0.50% auto pay discount.
	Terms and conditions apply and offers are subject to change without notice.
	Visit Lightstream.com slash backstage or more.
	Were you improvising that last part?
	I just made those three up.
	It's a really good ad read, but I can do the last part faster.
	That's what it needs.
	It needs a fast talker.
	I'm not a fast one.
	So here's the question on a going forward basis.
	What should Trump focus on when it comes to the Mueller report?
	Should he let it go?
	Should he try and ram this down the necks of Democrats?
	What do you think is useful here?
	My personal feeling on this is that he should obviously go at the media.
	But if he tries to turn this into a cause to love that, I'm going to uncover the corruption in the FBI and the CIA, and we're going to go after all the nefarious actors.
	It feels good.
	But on a political grounds, I'm not sure that that just doesn't look like petty vindictiveness, as opposed to begs.
	Because remember, there's another half to this story, which is that everybody's saying, you know, the media were humiliated, which is true.
	Democrats were humiliated, which is true.
	The truth is also that Donald Trump spent two years saying that Robert Mueller was a shill of the left who was going to indict him.
	And then Robert Mueller turned out to be honest, right?
	Robert Mueller ended up doing his job, which many of us were saying that that was probably going to happen.
	So him going after everybody now, it seems like now would be the time where it's magnanimity in victory, at least to the intelligence community generally.
	Or just ignore it and move on to the media are garbage.
	And then every time they attack him, he says, you guys were garbage on this, you're garbage on that too.
	Yeah, you know, I can't quite go with this for a couple of reasons.
	One, Karl Rove says he should do this, so we know it's the wrong thing to do.
	Karl Rove, by his own admission, said his biggest mistake was basically positioning Bush above the fray.
	And so the fray took Bush to pieces.
	They blamed him for the weather in New Orleans.
	Hurricane, oh, that's your fault.
	And Bush never struck back because he had too much dignity.
	I don't think we have to worry about Trump having too much dignity.
	I also don't think magnanimity is actually in his holster.
	I don't think he actually has that weapon.
	So what I would do if I were he, I would definitely go after the corruption.
	I would definitely make a lot of noise.
	Nobody's going to jail over this.
	Hillary Clinton's not going to jail.
	But I would just make noise about it while doing other things.
	One of the things about Trump that I really do appreciate is a lot of the noise he makes covers up the fact that he's doing some important stuff.
	You know, he actually does things that matter to us.
	Like, he's revamping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which I think is a huge deal.
	And he does that, like, off to the side while everybody's focusing on the noise.
	That's one possibility.
	The other possibility is he doesn't even know that's going on.
	That is a possibility, too.
	But here's my problem with him going after the intel.
	He's not running against the intel community in 2020.
	No, that's true.
	He's running against the Democrats.
	So run against Adam Schiff, run against Chuck Schumer, run against all the Democrats who maintained that this was always the end for Trump.
	Run against the media, because everybody hates the media, as well they should.
	But running against, like, who cares?
	Like, James Clapper isn't a big enough person for him to punch at, except he, like, say what you want tonight, right?
	Tonight's his rally in Michigan.
	Yeah.
	Let him do his thing.
	Oh, yeah.
	Have a victory lap.
	Exactly.
	Like, enjoy yourself.
	The important thing, though, that is on his side is that so many people have been gutted from the FBI that if the New York Times ran a front-page headline, as it did during Watergate, every time a guy quit, we'd all be sitting around going, this is the biggest scandal ever.
	This has gutted the intelligence community.
	But they're all gone.
	And the people who are there are good.
	You know, most FBI agents are great cops and they're doing a great job.
	And so he can constantly praise the people who are there now.
	He's really talking about Obama.
	And the people running are echoes of Obama.
	You've got Eric Holder making these stupid comments about how we should all feel guilty.
	America was never great.
	You've got Joe Biden apologizing for American jurisprudence.
	So it's a reminder of who he's running against and why he's there in the first place.
	I've got an interesting question to take it in a slightly different direction.
	Why did this story stick the way that it did?
	It occurs to me that you could say because the echo chamber is so vast and they were so dedicated to it.
	But I tend to think that most false narratives that stick do so because they have some air of plausibility.
	What made this story seem plausible?
	And therefore, what allowed it to get the kind of traction that it did?
	I mean, I think two factors.
	And this is actually a question that I think is pretty well substantiated, the answer anyway.
	Two factors.
	One, everyone thought Hillary would win.
	When she didn't win, it had to be something nefarious that meant that she didn't win.
	The Democrats still cannot understand that Hillary was the worst candidate in American history.
	And then she proceeded to lose to the second worst candidate in American history.
	So they can't deal with that.
	And so what they've done is they've channeled that into, it must have been stolen somehow.
	It's like Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
	We can't deal with this.
	The second thing is that Donald Trump with Russia is weird.
	He was weird.
	The entire campaign, he was weird.
	He was saying things like, well, you know, he said to Bill O'Reilly, we kill people too, just like Putin kills people.
	You know, we're not better.
	And he's saying out loud at his rallies, I hope that Putin hacks our emails.
	And so if you put those two dots together, and it seems like for a lot of the left, that's really what it was, because they were firmly convinced.
	I mean, really firmly convinced that this was going to happen.
	You see that in Rachel Maddow's ratings.
	They dropped 500,000 people in one night as soon as this happened.
	Which shows you the kind of wish-casting that was happening.
	Not to be too self-aggrandizing, but I'm going to point out that when I was on Bill Maher's show, this was exactly the debate.
	I said to Bill Maher, you could just be reasonable.
	You could just say, Mueller's going to find what Mueller's going to find, and I have faith that he's going to uncover the evidence.
	And I haven't seen any evidence thus far of actual collusion.
	And Maher's like, you really don't believe that there's collusion?
	Yeah, no, he was stunned.
	I remember that.
	You, a smart young man.
	Right, he kept saying, I just can't believe that you...
	He said, you don't?
	I said, I don't believe that there was collusion because I don't see any evidence of it.
	He goes, you don't.
	Don't?
	He could not fathom the possibility there wasn't because it answers all the questions.
	It's an answer that answers why Hillary lost.
	It answers why Trump is weird.
	It speaks to the idea that Trump is not...
	Also, I think there's a real sense of digging at Trump because they really don't like the idea that Trump, deep down, is kind of a patriotic dude.
	And so it bothers them.
	When he says, make America great, they want to feel like they are more patriotic than Donald Trump is.
	So saying that he's a Russian Manchurian candidate is one of their favorite things.
	This is kind of a leftist version of the Bertha thing, though, because the left was constantly saying that the Bertha conspiracy was a racist thing, or Trump was racist because he said he was from Kenya.
	That was about Obama's difference.
	Obama was not like other presidents.
	He wasn't patriotic like other presidents.
	He didn't have that sense of American exceptionalism that other presidents, every other president, every other president had had.
	There was something about him that was not one of us, and it was not the color of his skin.
	It was the color of his philosophy.
	And so that thing, it stuck with people, even after we knew it was untrue.
	Right, it was the same thing people were saying about how he's secretly a Muslim.
	Yes, he was different.
	Right, it was a feeling of foreignness.
	And Trump is the same way.
	Trump is like a loose cannon.
	We're not quite sure of him.
	And when they say things like that, everybody thinks, well, maybe that might be true.
	You know, the other reason why it's stuck, though.
	By the way, the bird of the thing is dumb.
	We all agree the bird of the thing is dumb.
	Yeah, it's ridiculous.
	By we all, you mean all of us except the president, who is like the loudest proponent of it for it.
	The other reason why it stuck is because it was a totally cooked up, contrived narrative pushed on every single medium.
	And I think we're not giving that enough credit.
	It actually reminds me of the Michael Jackson documentary, that Leaving Neverland thing on HBO. How for so long did we...
	We saw this guy sleeping in beds with children for a long period of time, and we said, no, it couldn't be.
	And it's celebrity.
	You had government celebrities at the DOJ and the FBI telling us this guy was working with Russia.
	You had political celebrities, electeds.
	Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, all of these people.
	And you had news celebrities wearing ties with nice combed hair and makeup, saying night after night, for 791 consecutive days, an average of three minutes a night, that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians.
	And it was a total lie.
	It was a total empire of lies, to use your phrase.
	But that's part of it.
	And that's not Donald Trump's fault.
	And it's not the fault of a guy who had a weird tabloid history.
	I want to talk a little bit more about Trump's attitude toward Russia during the election, which I do think is a factor in this.
	But you just raised something really interesting that I had not previously considered, which is that before Barack Obama...
	The government was not an organization that was trusted by the media.
	One of the massive changes that happened during the Obama administration is that you could have political celebrities who had sort of...
	Cache.
	Cache.
	Has that ever existed before?
	I mean, even when Clinton was president, was it the case that...
	I've never seen a news media defend the intelligence community from doubters.
	That was one of the most shocking parts of the entire...
	This is what I was about to say, is that this may be, in many ways...
	The most damaging scandal in modern American history.
	Bigger than the WMD thing.
	Because the WMD thing, people said Bush lied.
	Bush did not lie.
	The entire intelligence community, everywhere on Earth, and the media, and the Democrats, they all believed this stuff.
	And it turned out that Saddam Hussein was the one who was lying about his weapons capacity.
	And despite the fact that, again, a terrible thing the president has said, implying the president that Bush lied us into war and all of that, this one...
	Our institutions, the institutions that we are supposed to trust, their institutional credibility was leveraged for this narrative.
	That's right.
	It wasn't like they just reported what came out.
	They leveraged the institution.
	And key players in these institutions leveraged the institutional credibility in favor of these narratives.
	That's why I think that whatever he has to say about Brennan and Clapper and Comey is absolutely warranted.
	Because these are people...
	Peter Strzok, these were people leading our intelligence agencies.
	And they were going on national television night after night and suggesting they had secret knowledge because they led these intelligence agencies.
	And they knew in a way that you didn't know.
	And Adam Schiff doing the same thing.
	I'm on the Intelligence Committee.
	I know in a way that you don't know.
	And so when that collapses, How am I supposed to have faith in an intelligence community when people are legitimately using my trust against my trust?
	And by the same token, this is the same news media that told us, oh, you have to love us because we're the ones who ferret out the flaws of power.
	Democracy dies in darkness.
	Democracy dies in darkness.
	And here they were saying, what do you mean, you don't trust the CIA? No, I don't trust.
	The NSA, they were spying on me.
	You know, why should I? The idea of the press after Watergate, the press since Watergate, suddenly coming out and defending our institutions, and then the institutions turning out to be, in fact, corrupt.
	I mean, this is the thing.
	Every time I see Carl Bernstein, I think you have become what you beheld.
	You became the thing that you exposed.
	You are now Richard Nixon.
	And that's an amazing irony, and it's an amazing truth that's been kind of right beneath the surface for a long time.
	And the media cannot accept what's happened.
	No.
	They're writing articles about how they still did a fantastic job.
	How we really just went after the news.
	That note from Jeff Zucker, where he suggested...
	We're not investigators.
	We just report what comes across our desk.
	Really?
	Is that what you were doing?
	It's like Doctor Strange.
	You can't do news in here.
	There's a CNN. You mean the chyrons with the parentheses?
	Editorials?
	Yeah.
	I mean, what I want is a chyron on CNN that says, Trump-Russia collusion proved wrong.
	And then in parentheses, and we failed.
	Right?
	Because that is the reality.
	That's exactly what happened.
	And you know, by the way, a news media that's 90% Democrat at the editorial level is corrupt, per se.
	You cannot be, this whole argument that they always say, well, I can be a Democrat and still be fair.
	One person can be a Democrat and still be fair.
	A roomful of Democrats can't be fair.
	And the idea that they have allowed the news media to become that, a spokesperson, basically, a spokesman arm for the Democrat party.
	Excellence in Journalism Award to CNN for the Parkland Town Hall, the most egregious single media event I've seen in 10 years.
	And the NAACP, by the way, just nominated Jussie Smollett for an image award, making me wonder, yeah, his image is good.
	They should nominate his two Nigerian attackers.
	I think they should be at the image.
	Those guys were wearing whiteface, though.
	So last question on this topic, Michael, for you.
	Why does...
	I mean, why are you asking?
	I think his position will be the most interesting on this question.
	Why is...
	Why was Donald Trump so up Putin's ass?
	For the entirety of the election.
	The only thing that Trump was completely consistent about, never equivocated for even a moment in 2016 during the election, was that he respects Vladimir Putin.
	We're just like Putin's Russia.
	I mean, you could not get the guy to criticize that.
	First of all, he was much less of Putin than Barack Obama was when he said, I have more flexibility after my election to Medvedev.
	No, no, I don't agree with that.
	Barack Obama literally colluded with Trump.
	That's right.
	But the question is, why was Trump a Putin sycophant?
	I'll tell you exactly why.
	Because, one, his view of politics is much more...
	Realpolitik, for lack of a better term.
	His view of politics is not terribly idealistic or inspirational or aspirational.
	It is pretty brutal and it's pretty New York.
	He also talks like a New Yorker.
	So he tells jokes such as, hey, what do you think?
	Do you think the Russians are hacking the emails of Hillary Clinton?
	I don't know, but we can't find them, so I sure hope they release them.
	In the final analysis, it can only be that Donald Trump did not believe he was going to be president and was buttering up Putin so that he could build condos in Moscow.
	Or...
	It's that Donald Trump's view of politics is you flatter strong men.
	You never criticize strong men.
	Well, not that.
	You'll notice with Donald Trump, he only attacks people who attack him first.
	The classic example, this is Rosie O'Donnell.
	This is the real answer.
	Okay, so all of your intellectualization crap is just intellectual.
	He doesn't...
	He doesn't have any realpolitik view of anything.
	He doesn't know how to spell realpolitik.
	He thinks that it has a C and a K. For a dummy, he did a pretty good job.
	He got himself elected pretty well.
	Okay, don't give me that.
	Seriously.
	Have you seen Congress?
	All these people got themselves elected.
	They have a collective IQ lower than the IQ of this table.
	That's true.
	That's actually the best answer to that question ever.
	No, the real answer is that Donald Trump loves people who flatter him, and he hates people who do not.
	He has done this with Kim Jong-un, okay?
	It's not unique to any of these people.
	And everybody knows this, which is why even Justin Trudeau tried to flatter him for a little while, and then as soon as Justin Trudeau hit him, suddenly Donald Trump went from, I love Justin Trudeau, to Justin Trudeau is Satan, he's just handsome Satan.
	But hasn't everybody fallen for Putin?
	I mean, didn't Obama?
	Yeah, George W. Bush said, I saw his soul.
	The guy is a gangster.
	Putin is Al Capone running a country.
	That's who he is.
	He's got one president after another.
	I see his heart.
	He is the constant temptation, Putin, because what Putin does is he's like, well, if you could somehow get me.
	Then the world would be at peace.
	Because we'd be allied and you'd be allied.
	And everything would be great.
	And everybody is thinking back to the end of the Cold War.
	And they're thinking, it's so true.
	If we could finally be on the same side.
	They can't believe he's as bad as he is.
	Plus those conducts.
	That's the other thing.
	Nobody in modern politics understands that Vladimir Putin is not a modern political leader.
	That's right.
	Vladimir Putin is a thug circa 1946.
	And Vladimir Putin, the guy has invaded two separate countries in the last decade.
	There's no one else on earth who has invaded a country.
	In the last decade, at least in the industrialized world.
	He's invaded two of them, and he's gotten away with it both times.
	We invaded some countries, but not to annex their territory.
	Right, that's what I mean.
	He legitimately tried to annex both Georgia and Crimea.
	And accomplished it, effectively.
	He's the real deal.
	He's a real bad guy.
	So, Bravo Company Manufacturing, if we were going to invade another country for the purpose of annexation, you would want these guys by your side, right?
	More importantly, if you wanted to protect yourself from...
	Let's be better about this.
	If we were invaded, you'd want Bravo Company Manufacturing on your side.
	Well done.
	Yeah, you know, we're all on the same side when it comes to defending our rights to bear arms, and all the other rights that we have are defended by that right to bear arms.
	We all in this room believe in that principle.
	I obviously believe in that principle.
	appears Morgan doesn't believe in that principle, but you know who does.
	Bravo Company Manufacturing.
	BCM was started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
	BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American, regardless of whether they're a private citizen or a professional.
	BCM is not a sporting arms company.
	They design, they engineer, they manufacture life-saving equipment.
	They assume that every rifle that leaves the shop will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, a law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas.
	Every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
	They feel a moral responsibility at Bravo Company Manufacturing to provide tools that will not fail the user when it's not just a paper target, but somebody who's actually coming to do you harm.
	To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.
	You can discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news.
	That's BravoCompanyMFG.com.
	We love this company.
	They're really terrific.
	They do terrific work founded by great folks.
	Need more convincing?
	Find out even more about BCM and the amazing people who make their products at YouTube.com slash BravoCompanyUSA.
	That is YouTube.com slash BravoCompanyUSA.
	Go check them out.
	Great American company.
	What I love most about so many of our sponsors, Bravo Company is a great example of it.
	Our friends at Black Rifle Coffee who were here with us visiting yesterday is that they just own what they are.
	They're unapologetic about what they are, who they serve, and why.
	In today's age, that's a pretty good thing.
	Alicia, we want to hear from some of our Daily Wire subscribers.
	They're the reason that we are here today and able to afford all these fancy cameras.
	Do you have anything for us?
	Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	I'm going to unapologetically drink this pina colada.
	No, I'm kidding.
	It's a virgin.
	Too bad.
	All right, we do have some questions.
	I think it's pretty funny when the pregnant lady is seen drinking on camera.
	Because, you know, we're a traditional company of Family Valley.
	Yeah.
	You guys would all probably be the ones, like, in the cigar, like, in the waiting room while your wife is in labor with the cigar in the waiting room.
	That is untrue.
	I watched my wife give birth both times.
	So did I. I'm joking.
	It's pretty great, by the way.
	It was fantastic.
	It's unbelievable.
	For me, I mean, I didn't have to do it.
	No, but one of the great experiences.
	It was amazing.
	I just want to be there when Knowles' wife eventually...
	Well, I gotta tell you, I don't know any of my children, but I assume I was smoking a cigar while they were being born.
	Statistically.
	Statistically speaking.
	That's almost a certain thing.
	There's gonna be a Netflix documentary about Michael Knowles and all of his illegitimate children in like 10 years.
	Why didn't we know?
	We knew.
	He was saying it on the show.
	Leaving backstage like All right, first question comes from Lance.
	He wants to know, do you think that Trump has pushed conservatives towards a big government mentality?
	And why aren't we seeing Democrats turn away from a big government mentality when they say Trump has too much power?
	I do not think that Trump has pushed conservatives toward a bigger government mentality.
	I think he has dialed back government in very important ways, especially in the regulatory way, which is one of the worst.
	He's appointed judges who seem more inclined to limit the powers of government to those enumerated in the Constitution or something like that.
	Which is really a problem.
	He has not addressed entitlement and spending.
	And entitlement and spending are basically the same thing.
	He promised the people.
	He knows the people are dependent on that.
	He knows the people in the Midwest who lost so many jobs in the last administration and the end of the administration before.
	He knows they need that stuff.
	And so he will not come out and say, Look, social security was put in place when people died at 63.
	It kicked in at 65.
	When you live to 80, you've got to work longer to make more wealth to live off in your retirement.
	It's true for individuals, true for the country, and that's the only way in which I feel he's let the government get out of control.
	I think that the key here is that the government was already out of control when Trump got there.
	I think everybody starts to think that the world began to spin when Trump became president.
	It's like when people look at the 1996 Australia gun ban.
	They say, oh, look how the murder rate went down after that.
	It's like, yeah, look before that, how the murder rate was going down.
	It's a straight line.
	It continues in the same direction after the gun ban, so there's no actual market effect.
	The direction of the government was already getting bigger before Trump got there.
	Trump got there.
	He didn't make it any smaller.
	It continues to grow at record rates because Republicans are effectively full of crap when it comes to spending.
	And this has been true forever.
	And also, you can't get a consensus on cutting anything because the American people lie to ourselves all the time.
	We're always like, we want a small government with fewer services.
	And then they're like, okay, how about this one?
	No.
	I like that one.
	Bill Maher is right about this.
	Bill Maher says Americans like socialism, and my answer to that is they like opiates, too, just because they like it doesn't mean it's good for you, you know?
	Well, we like socialism without the cost.
	Right.
	It's like living in California.
	Whenever they call Medicare for all, it's like, yeah!
	And then they're like, we're going to get rid of your private health care plan, and your taxes are going to be 60%.
	And we're like, oh, wow.
	Yikes.
	Actually, we're kind of good.
	We're okay.
	We're kind of good.
	I mean, the last Republican president to cut spending was Calvin Coolidge.
	Nobody has done it.
	Reagan didn't do it.
	Bush 1 didn't do it.
	Bush 2 didn't do it.
	So conservatives have embraced their bigger spending priorities for a very long time.
	But I actually think, even with the tariffs, which many Republican presidents have engaged in tariffs, many conservatives have liked tariffs.
	Going back to Abraham Lincoln, I think he's actually a fairly mainstream conservative guy, at least in his governance.
	Who knows about his ideology?
	He also is pretty restrained when it comes to constitutional governance.
	He waits for the courts to make decisions.
	He's never done...
	I mean, he's done some of the executive order stuff that Obama did, but not anywhere near as badly and not in the same kinds of context.
	He's actually, for all the screaming about what an authoritarian he is...
	No, he hasn't fundamentally broken the institution.
	He's code within the lines, yeah.
	That's right.
	Alicia.
	Alright, I think I know who this subscriber is.
	This question comes from Laurel.
	She wants to know, is it realistic to try to become an artist these days, or is it a foolish thing to pursue?
	Michael, I think we better let you take that.
	Hey, Laurel.
	Well, I would say, and if you're the Laurel I'm thinking of, then you're a wonderful artist.
	You might have seen on Twitter, one of the Daily Wire viewers, Laurel, paints these pictures of us, and they're beautiful pictures.
	You can be a very good artist.
	By the way, if you're not the Laurel that we think you are...
	Well, that's a coincidence.
	That's really, yeah, gosh, who are you?
	I think it's important for me to answer this question rather than say, like, Drew, you know, because Drew's a very, very successful artist who's made a lot of money on his art.
	It's an illusion.
	And I think I've made about $17 in my artistic life.
	I think it's a wonderful thing to do, though.
	If you want to...
	Be an artist.
	If you have something to say, if you have some artistic expression, you should do it.
	You shouldn't ruin your life because of it.
	You shouldn't allow your life to fall apart and sit around waiting for the phone to ring or some magic to happen.
	You should be out there.
	I think.
	No, but my answer to this question is always if you can do anything else, do it.
	If you're like me and you literally can't stop, then you're an artist and you have to find a way to make a living.
	That's the answer.
	But I will say that the romance of poverty does not apply to people actually in poverty.
	Absolutely.
	And there's this whole thing with the starving artist pauper and he's like...
	You know, the greatest art of its time is usually the art that makes the most money.
	When poetry was at its height in England during the Romantic period, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, all those great poets, you got famous if you got a best-selling poem.
	God, I hope that's not true now.
	Cardi B is the greatest art of our time.
	The other point on these famous artists, like really the ones we think, T.S. Eliot, Chekhov, Wallace Stevens, I'm talking about poets, Dana Joya, these guys, all were working jobs and taking care of their families.
	Good jobs.
	Insurance salesmen, doctors, all these sort of things.
	They were doing it, and I so agree.
	I have a lot of actor friends who are really good, who are really talented actors, and they're making $17 a hit doing off-off Broadway theater, and they're living in misery, and they don't need to live in misery.
	They could...
	Actually do something productive with her time as well.
	They could learn to code.
	They could learn to code.
	Now our show's going to get kicked out.
	One thing interesting about the Laurel that we know, though, is she may be specifically talking about visual art, which is something that none of the four of us have a lot of experience with.
	But I do have one thought about it, which is we live in an age where...
	We basically have embraced the literal.
	So if you think about a film is more literal than a play, right?
	And a YouTube video is more literal than a film.
	And so everything, all the trend, a photograph is more literal than a painting.
	So all art in the modern age moves towards literalism.
	And the problem with literalism is that it's It leaves someone like Laurel, the Laurel we know anyway, in a place where it would probably be very difficult to understand what is the role of visual, artistic expression, painting, drawing, in a world that has so embraced more literal forms.
	Is there a place for a painter?
	Is there a place for a sketch artist in today's world?
	It may be a dated, you know, impressionism comes in as photography comes in, and it may be, in fact, a dated form.
	That doesn't mean that no great artist will ever come along, just like there are great playwrights, even though the theater's no longer a main form of talking to one another.
	I mean, I think there's great art being made in the digital space.
	Well, that's what I was gonna say.
	In the digital space, it's unbelievable.
	Some of the video games and the fact that you can enter into those worlds as you play, that's something new, and I've never seen it before, and it's brilliant.
	Did you see this, there's this new Netflix series, and it's not all good, but there's something that's called Love, Death, and Robots.
	No.
	And it was made by David Fincher.
	And a lot of it is just different types of animation.
	And it doesn't all work, but it's like these little ten minute snippets.
	He just decided we're going to make the series and we're not going to make it half an hour long.
	All these things are eight to ten minutes.
	And it's all different types of art.
	And the art is just astonishingly great.
	It's amazing.
	And the experience of playing a game, I mean, we've talked about this before, but the experience of playing a game is so immersive that you get that thing that you used to have to use your imagination for.
	There's still great art.
	I mean, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse is a piece of art.
	Into the Spider-Verse is a beautiful piece.
	And maybe this is part of the answer for someone like Laurel, is that you have to find a modern application for those sort of antiquated skills, and that could be in the form of animation.
	We have great illustrators and animators who work for us.
	It could be some sort of graphic design for which there's a huge home.
	It could be video game design for which there's, I mean, it's bigger than Hollywood, one of the biggest markets.
	But I do think, you know, art has always been subsidized by the wealthy.
	This is correct.
	Even in America, art is ultimately subsidized by the wealthy.
	But you do have to find the place where the wealthy are willing to exploit it, where they're willing to subsidize it.
	So part of it is finding some application for your...
	There's nothing artistic about rejecting the reality of the world.
	So true.
	There's this thing I see among young artists, particularly people who are actors who have scripts and are working at Coffee Bean, where it's like, if only the world were fair.
	If only there were a market for this thing that I'm doing.
	And it's like, well...
	Yeah.
	The unhappiest people in the world are the people who argue with fundamental realities that they cannot control.
	It's why teachers always get so bent out of shape about their pay, right?
	They're all like, you know, teachers should make more than congresspeople.
	And I always think, well, I mean, there's only 435 congresspeople in the country.
	Like, they got themselves elected to something unique and special.
	Break the teachers' unions, and then you get paid a lot more.
	And then you get paid a lot more.
	But it is this thing of, like...
	Teachers have never gotten paid more than this.
	When you decided to pursue becoming a teacher, there was an understanding of what the reality, maybe it's fair, maybe I think it's fair, maybe you think it's not fair, but it is.
	And one of the great lessons that you helped me learn in my own career as a young artist who wasn't making any money, I was once young, and I once didn't make any money.
	And Ben helped me understand, there is no pathway to a happy life Peeing into the wind.
	And the answer isn't that you have to stop peeing.
	It's that you have to turn around.
	That's beautiful.
	It was good advice.
	But everything is a choice.
	Everything is a choice.
	You know, we live in a city where some handsome Dan who's never done a thing for anybody can get paid a quarter of a million dollars a week pretending to be a police officer who risks his life, right?
	Where if you're a police officer, you make maybe $60,000.
	Pretending to be a man who was victimized by a racial privilege in Chicago.
	Exactly.
	But if you are an actual police officer actually helping people and risking your life, you make what Jesse Smollett makes a week in a year.
	And so you just have to say, this is the choice I'm making.
	That's the choice.
	You can't say, oh, I should be paid more.
	You say, this is the choice I make because I love helping people, because I love getting shot at and treated badly by the press.
	And that's what I'm doing.
	Racing into buildings that are on fire.
	Or putting up with kids.
	I mean, really, teachers do do a heroic...
	I don't want to sound like I'm down on teachers.
	Mostly I just want to clip that and we can use it in the LAPD press release.
	Alicia, one more question.
	I'm still really bummed that y'all were knocking Cardi B. I mean, everyone knows that she just makes money moves.
	That's true.
	She does make money moves by drugging men and then robbing men.
	That works, right?
	You know, she didn't have to specify in that song how she made money moves.
	But then later she did, and that was great.
	She does that, like, thing.
	I don't know how she does it.
	I really want to master it, though, and just annoy the heck out of Ben when I do it.
	I don't even know if you want to know how she got to know how to do that, Alicia.
	Elisha, the question!
	For God's sakes, Elisha!
	Sam, I'm going down the wrong path.
	Sam wants to know, will the left's newfound anti-Semitism really alienate left-leaning Jews, considering that many are already reformed or secular, and will likely favor their political identity over their religious identity?
	I think the only person allowed to answer that question is Mr.
	Perry.
	Yes, let's hear it.
	Why hello?
	So the answer is, as always, that Jews who care about Judaism are going to be offended by this, and Jews who do not care about Judaism are not going to be offended by this because they don't care about Judaism.
	This is like saying, will Maisie Hirono's anti-Catholic rhetoric alienate Catholics?
	And the answer is, if you are a practicing Catholic, yes it will.
	And if you are not a practicing Catholic, you won't give two dams about it.
	And this is true for Jews also.
	There's this weird thing in the press because many members of the press are secular Jews who still have cultural affiliation with Jewishness, which means they have a bagel once in a while.
	They like matzah ball soup.
	They've seen Fiddler on the Roof like three times, maybe even a fourth time.
	And then they go to synagogue like once a year, maybe, and then they break for lunch on Yom Kippur.
	And it's like, well, now I'm Jewish because I'm not a white person.
	I'm a Jewish person.
	And it allows them a certain level of minority status.
	And that's what they care about in Judaism.
	That's not Jewishness, right?
	That's cultural Jewishness, sort of.
	It's not really anything related to Jewish religion or Jewish principles or the Torah.
	It's Jew-ish.
	I would say culturally Jewish, but not religiously Jewish in any sense.
	And then the media poll people by ethnic Judaism, which, again, makes no sense because there are plenty of people.
	Noam Chomsky is an ethnic Jew.
	He's also a piece of crap.
	So, like, why would I? Bernie Sanders is an ethnic Jew.
	What does he care about Judaism?
	He's an open, militant atheist.
	Who hates Israel and thinks that the Bible is antiquated.
	Like, why would I pull him?
	So my answer is the people who care about principles that Judaism stands for are going to be offended by this.
	I think there's a group of older Jews particularly, people who are above the age of 60, who have historically voted Democrat, who still care about the state of Israel, who still care about going to synagogue, even if it's conservative reform, and they will be offended.
	And you'll see a little bit of drop off there.
	But young Jews who don't have any affiliation aren't religious.
	Honestly, I'm so bewildered why people would think it would be any different.
	Can I ask a follow up question?
	Whenever anybody asks me a question about why do the Jews vote Democrat, I say they don't.
	The Orthodox Jews vote 70-30 or 80-20 Republicans.
	A follow-up question.
	Toast sliced bagels, yes or no?
	What the F was that?
	What was that?
	Did you see that?
	There's a bagel and they sliced it vertically?
	I mean, my feeling is...
	Health and negotiation nonsense is this.
	You can't do a bagel wrong, so it's not terrible.
	But where do you put all the lox and the scallion cream cheese?
	Where do you put that on a sliced...
	You want to know something true?
	It's absolutely 100% true.
	I'm from Texas.
	I have never had a bagel.
	Oh my lord!
	How are you my business partner?
	I'm pretty sure that I made it 30 years before I met anyone who had had a bagel.
	Okay, I'm going to tell everybody in LA. Best bagels, they are kosher.
	Western bagel, they have a factory on Sepulveda Boulevard.
	They bake them fresh.
	So they take them out of the factory, they put them in the window.
	They are the best bagels in the history of mankind.
	Oh, no, no, no.
	Best bagels in the history of mankind are in New York.
	They are in New York.
	They are in New York.
	Whatever, New York.
	No, they are.
	Have you had Western bagels, though?
	Yes.
	They are really solid.
	No, I got them.
	You recommend them?
	I got them.
	But New York bagels are another planet.
	They really are.
	I don't know.
	Do you like the doughy or you like more of like the air?
	I like the big doughy ones.
	Plus, people from New York don't know that there is anything outside of New York.
	It's the best New Yorker cover ever.
	That was the best New Yorker cover.
	The New Yorker's view of the United States.
	Yes.
	And it's just, in the foreground, you see New York, and then you just see Chicago and L.A. And all over the United States is three inches wide.
	Exactly.
	If you want to sit in on this riveting conversation, maybe, and die of secondhand lung smoke like business, you can become an annual subscriber during tonight's live stream, and you will automatically, automatically be entered to win a free trip to LA, where you will get to watch a future taping of Backstage in person.
	This is a true story, so we did this last week, and we were proud of ourselves.
	We were like, hey guys, wouldn't it be cool if we...
	Found a fan out there.
	He signs up during the podcast, during the live broadcast, and we will, whatever it costs, we will fly them to LA, we will put them up in a hotel, and we will let them sit in on a live taping of backstage.
	And so then after the show, there's this random number generator system that we use, and we pull up the number, and we look, and the winner...
	lives 48 miles from our studio.
	Best value for any prize.
	True fiscal conservatives.
	True fiscal conservatives, we are.
	You and a guest will be on set for the show and will get to meet us all afterward.
	Can you imagine anybody wanting this prize?
	No, this is okay.
	People are unsubscribing.
	We'll pawn this off on some poor sucker.
	Go to dailywire.com right now if you're watching the live broadcast.
	Become an annual subscriber to be automatically entered for a chance to win.
	Plus, when you become an annual subscriber, you'll get the world-famous Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr.
	Everybody wants it.
	You ever meet anybody on the street and they're like, hey, Michael, can you hook me up with one of those mysterious tumblers?
	And you're like, no.
	I can't, bro.
	I literally can't.
	By the way, the thing is, though, this week, as we pitch this, the thing is, everybody watching is already a subscriber.
	Because if they don't have the tumbler, then they have long since drowned in the news cycle.
	They are gone, dead and gone.
	There were no survivors.
	There were none.
	So let's talk about another one of the great stories of the week.
	Can we talk about the Green New Deal thing is the best?
	Cocaine Mitch.
	I mean, you've got to hand it to Cocaine Mitch.
	We love him.
	To Mitch.
	To Mitch.
	Oh, yeah.
	I'm going to use the tumbler for this one.
	Mitch Escobar McConnell.
	Unbelievable.
	So, undoubtedly, you know the story.
	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
	Tell us the tale of Cocaine Mitch.
	Whom we must refer to as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or AOC and not as Cortez.
	No, no.
	So fresh.
	So face.
	So face.
	AOC comes up with this piece of legislation called the Green New Deal.
	She writes it.
	She writes it herself.
	It basically outlaws cow farts and everything.
	Literally all things plus cow farts.
	And costs $93 trillion.
	And then they start berating the right for saying that it's a ridiculous piece of legislation.
	They say this is our World War II. This is WWII. We're fighting the Nazis.
	And we have to put everything we have...
	The world will end within 12 years.
	In 12 years.
	So this week, Mitch McConnell thinks, for a laugh, just to make our week even better, he thinks, let's get him a chance to vote on the Green New Deal.
	He brings it to the floor of the Senate.
	But by the way, all of the Senate Democrats who are currently running for president co-sponsor the legislation.
	Twelve co-sponsors, every one of them running for president.
	How many of them voted, Michael, for the Green New Deal?
	Hold on, let me carry the Senate.
	And none!
	Zero!
	No Senate Democrats voted for the Green New Deal.
	The best part of the story, though, is that AOC gets asked on Twitter, why didn't the Senate Democrats try to save the world?
	You've condemned us to die.
	And AOC's answer was, because I encouraged them not to vote for it.
	She's the boss.
	She encouraged them to vote present.
	And that's how senators make the decision when the Congresswoman from Queens...
	When first term...
	And all I could think is, why has she condemned us all to die in 12 years?
	I was assured by the press, it was not only important, it was deeply popular, I was told.
	I was told that this was popular, particularly among the youngins, that they loved nothing but having air travel banned, and every building in the United States retrofitted or destroyed.
	That they were into all of those things.
	And every single Democrat voted present, except for four who voted against.
	Those are the ones in the red states.
	That was Manchin and Doug Jones and Kyrsten Sinema and then Angus King up in Maine, who's an independent but is a Democrat.
	And the best reaction was the reaction afterward.
	Because afterward, they were all like, can't believe the Republicans pulled this stunt.
	We wanted to hold debate on this.
	But the purpose of debate for legislation usually is to get to the vote.
	And you guys were all like, No, you know, we can't vote for this.
	Sorry.
	We just don't want to be associated.
	You know, it's a little bit much.
	It's a little much.
	Alexandria, I call her occasional cortex, but Alexandria made a speech afterwards that was pure word salad.
	She was talking about Flint, Michigan, where this Democrat town poured, took the water out of the river and killed people with it, while the Republicans were saying, don't do that!
	Don't do that!
	What does that have to do with climate change?
	It has nothing to do with climate change.
	My favorite thing was, have you seen the polls on her?
	They're brutal.
	I mean, people do not like her.
	Trump is more popular in New York than she is.
	It turns out that after all this media coverage, after putting her on the cover of Time magazine, after treating her as though she is the face of the new Democratic Party, the more people see her, the more they dislike her.
	Because when you see her at the beginning, you're like, oh, she's enthusiastic and kind of fun.
	And then you listen to the things coming out of her face, and you're like, these are bad things that come out of your face.
	And she's also mean.
	She's not a nice person.
	You see this about Ilhan Omar also.
	I mean, Ilhan Omar is just a nasty...
	She's especially mean to guys like you.
	Something about you she doesn't like.
	I'm not sure what it is.
	Guys, it's just that he's a supporter of Israel.
	That's her only problem.
	This was one of the great moments.
	And then Mike Lee getting up on the floor of the Senate.
	He was magnificent.
	He deserves some kind of award.
	Oh, it was so great.
	Because for those who didn't see, you should go watch it.
	He did basically a Bob Newhart routine.
	He got up there, and he's very low-key, Mike Lee.
	He's a very serious guy.
	He was considered pretty seriously for the Supreme Court for the last...
	Vacancy.
	And he gets up there with a picture of Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor while firing a machine gun with an RPG strapped to his back.
	And he gives an entire disposition describing the immense patriotism of the velociraptor that is holding the flag, the tattered flag.
	And then he says, this has as much to do with the Green New Deal as the Green New Deal has to do with stopping climate change.
	And then the press does what the press does.
	And this is why...
	The common theme of Donald Trump's presidency, and it is why he is president, and it pre-existed Trump, and it will post-exist Trump.
	We hate the media.
	And we deserve to hate the media.
	Because they are sheer, freaking, burning, flaming piles of garbage.
	The way that they covered the Mike Lee thing was such evidence of intellectual dishonesty.
	Like, I will acknowledge that Stephen Colbert is a comedian, and he was doing jokes.
	And I will acknowledge that Jon Stewart, who I really dislike, He's doing jokes.
	I will acknowledge all of that.
	But he's doing an obvious riff, Mike Lee.
	It's obviously a joke.
	He's obviously making fun of the stupidity of a bill so bad, not a single Democrat voted in favor of it.
	And the headlines were, Mike Lee makes bizarre attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using silly painting.
	It's like...
	That's called a comedy routine.
	Yeah, and it was genuinely funny, which is really rare in government.
	It's very funny.
	I wish that Senator Ted Cruz, hashtag the only senator I know, would have gotten up during his remarks and just bread, green eggs, and ham.
	It would have made it the perfect week for me.
	I know.
	It's pretty close to a perfect week.
	It is a really good week.
	This is...
	Well, yeah.
	Since Kavanaugh, I've not been there.
	Guys, even on the Green New Deal, this story went unreported, but it happened during the throes.
	It actually happened on the greatest day ever.
	You were out.
	I was having propofol.
	Well, we missed one of these, right?
	So I go in to get an endoscopy because I have esophagitis, which is this weird esophageal thing.
	And I go in and I get drugged.
	And as I come out of my drug-induced coma...
	I read that Michael Avenatti has been arrested.
	And I thought to myself, this can't be happening.
	On the same day they released the Mueller report, Michael Avenatti has been arrested for running the stupidest scam in legitimately all of human history.
	And he's getting dumped on by Stormy Daniels, who's saying, yeah, he was a crappy lawyer.
	And I legitimately woke up and I thought, like Michael Jackson, I died of a propofol.
	I don't know what's going on here.
	And don't forget, it's not...
	So Avenatti, who was on CNN and MSNBC 108 times between last March and last May.
	108.
	108 times.
	Avenatti goes down, frequent CNN guest.
	His co-conspirator is Mark Garagos, the CNN legal analyst.
	He goes down in the scheme.
	And then, I'm reading...
	I'm literally just reading the news as I'm on the air.
	And I see...
	This little underreported story.
	The world's fastest melting glacier.
	We're getting ready for the Green New Deal vote.
	The world's fastest melting glacier on Monday stopped melting and started gaining ice.
	Global warming itself ended this week.
	It's like Franklin Graham from the president's inauguration.
	Mr.
	President, God has blessed us with rain just as he started to speak.
	Mr.
	President, God, stop global warming.
	Just as you were being exonerated.
	You know what I love about the Michael Avenatti story, though?
	Everything?
	Yeah, everything.
	But they hit Trump on being associated with Michael Cohen.
	A fair hit.
	You shouldn't associate with guys like Michael Cohen.
	He's a slime, right?
	True.
	But they associated with Michael Avenatti.
	They love this guy.
	Bill Maher said, oh, he's Donald Trump's worst nightmare.
	If that's Donald Trump's worst nightmare, I'm the queen of Romania.
	That quote from him, it was so perfect.
	The writers of the season are just perfect.
	They're doing great work.
	And they plant these clues like a season earlier and then they come to fruition.
	I mean, the real payoffs, right?
	He goes on The View and he says, all my fantasies involve handcuffs.
	And then he ends up being arrested.
	I thought that was wonderful.
	And he's arrested for trying to bully Nike, right?
	The company of Colin Kaepernick.
	And he's trying to bully them.
	What is it also with these lawyers pretending to be gangsters?
	Say what you will about gangsters.
	They're gangsters.
	They're really dangerous characters.
	When they threaten you, you're afraid, right?
	These guys come and say, Nike, I'm going to take you down.
	I'm going to tweet, Nike.
	Here's the thing about that.
	Michael Avenatti knows he can get on CNN. That's why he was able to do that.
	The part of that story that is underreported is that when he says, I'll take your market cap down a billion dollars, what he means by that is, I will go on CNN tonight with all of my friends, like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo, And I will talk very bad things about your company.
	That's what he meant.
	And he knows he can do that because he's on speed dial with the producers at CNI. And Brian Stelter said to him, I take you seriously as a presidential candidate because you've been on cable news so much.
	That's what he said to him.
	You know, so they build him up.
	They actually are talking about him as a presidential candidate.
	One thing you've got to say about Trump, he never talked about Michael Cohen running for president.
	The press did that with Michael Alvanade.
	Alicia, we want to hear from a few more of our Daily Wire subscribers.
	After all, they pay for my house.
	By going over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and becoming annual subscribers, you too can help me pay my mortgage.
	And if you do it, during this broadcast, you will be entered automatically for a chance to win a trip to L.A. to, you know, sit in and...
	Watch us do whatever this thing is.
	What are we doing?
	So, Alicia, what are our subscribers asking us right now?
	Oh, I'm real glad you didn't ask me what are we doing, because none of us have that answer.
	There's no chance.
	Before we get to those awesome subscriber questions that make it possible for all of us to be stuck here, me in a non-smoke-filled room, so thanks for that, guys, we do have our Facebook polling results.
	Turns out that people think that The Economist, having to apologize to Ben and change their headline, got 7% of the vote about the craziest slash greatest Newsweek ever.
	Jesse Smollett comes in at 10%.
	The Green New Deal utterly failing and no Democrats voting for it.
	Came in at 23%.
	But of course, the Mueller report showing absolutely no collusion.
	You know, either Trump is a really...
	Super secret Russian spy or he's really dumb.
	Democrats can't have it both ways.
	60% of the people say that the Mueller report results showing no collusion with Russia is the story of the week.
	I can't believe that our Daily Wire audience could be so wrong.
	Clearly the economists having to apologize to Ben today is the biggest news story of the week.
	This was the first thing I saw this morning.
	It was trending on Twitter.
	It was trending on Twitter.
	Ben, who writes a book about philosophy without his picture on the cover.
	So, like, a guaranteed three copies sold to your grandmother, each one autographed for her friends.
	Ben made the New York Times number one best-selling book in the country this week, unseating Michelle Obama, who's held on to that number one spot with her Becoming Second Place book.
	That's what I'm calling it.
	Her Becoming book for the last minute.
	And then The Economist says, well, I actually think of Fairness was quite a nice...
	The interview was good.
	Yeah, the interview was good.
	I thought so, too.
	Yeah, I didn't mind the interview at all.
	And then they tweet out the story today under the headline, you'll get it right.
	It was Ben Shapiro, the alt-right sage without the rage.
	Which is wrong in two ways, right?
	Right.
	I mean, I'm surprised you didn't say three, but yeah.
	But yeah, the alt-right, man.
	And I was like, really?
	It's the yarmulke with the swastik on it.
	This is where they're going.
	There's a company.
	It's called Google.
	And when you type things into the Google machine, it tells you things about people.
	So if you typed in Ben Shapiro alt-right, the first results would have been me ripping the alt-right in the Washington Post.
	And probably the second results would have been me doing an entire episode ripping the alt-right on my show.
	Then it would be the alt-right ripping you.
	Right, then it would be the alt-right ripping me.
	I've spent the last four years doing open war with the alt-right.
	If they had bothered to do a Control-F inside my book, I referenced the alt-right four times.
	All four times I called them racist pieces of crap.
	So this seemed to be a bit odd.
	I never go to war with media people who attack me, because I get attacked a lot, as it turns out.
	This one I was not going to stand for, so I really went after them on Twitter.
	I said, you need to apologize, you need to pull this down, you need to change the title.
	I threatened to get a solicitor in Britain because the libel laws in Britain are a lot looser than the libel laws here.
	So they're going to play by those rules.
	And when people call you Nazis, you probably have a good libel.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so within four hours, they pulled down the original headline.
	Now I'm a radical conservative.
	I'm no longer the all-right sage without the rage.
	They defended it first, though.
	They defended their headline as long as they could, and then I guess they didn't want to lawyer up, so they changed it.
	Yeah, something happened, and they decided to change.
	And then they issued a full apology.
	As it turns out, Ben Shapiro's a longtime critic of the alt-right.
	We apologize.
	And they spelled it with an S, which just shows what jerks they are.
	Oh, man.
	They probably put a U in color.
	It's ridiculous.
	Unbelievable.
	It is amazing, though, because I thought about this morning how they could have come to such a patently absurd conclusion.
	And then I realized it's because the left, and particularly the left media, is so ensconced in their ideological bubble that they legitimately cannot discern the difference between the right and the alternative...
	To the right, which is the alt-right.
	From their point of view, we are all white supremacists, Nazi, racist, violent, anti-Semitic, jingoistic, one step away from murder.
	I think that conflation is one of the most dangerous things in public life.
	And the reason that I say that is because of what it conveys and also the view that it springs from.
	So what it conveys is that if you are on the right, if you have a heterodox opinion, you're a Nazi.
	We can't talk with you and presumably you should be banned because Facebook in the last couple of days has said that they are no longer going to allow you to post anything that's white nationalist or white supremacist.
	I hate white nationalism.
	I hate white supremacy.
	Turns out they don't like me much either.
	But I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of Facebook using data from Media Matters and the SPLC to determine which speech should be banned.
	The thing is, you and Jordan Peterson, There's not much to go after you about, you know, I mean, you're not a racist, you're obviously not a white, but they always go after you on this transgender thing.
	Here's a thing that didn't exist like two years ago, I mean, and suddenly this is the worst thing they can say about you.
	Also, it's called biology.
	The truth is, the real reason they're pissed, really, is because if you look at the people that Jordan...
	it is young men who are dispossessed, and he is trying to make them better. - Right. - And if you look at my audience, which is actually pretty diverse, it is very young and it is very large.
	And that means that if I am trying to teach people to be better, then all they have to do is point out people who are not better and say, "This is probably your crowd." Even though it obviously is not my crowd.
	But the real problem I have is, again, that conflation is an attempt to write conservatism into Nazism and then toss it out the window.
	And the view that that comes from is such a perverse view of what Western civilization is.
	And this brings me to the Joe Biden quote that I think is one of the worst quotes I've seen from a political candidate in a decade.
	When Joe Biden said at a rally in front of, I think it was a racial minority crowd, he said something to the effect of, English jurisprudence is white culture.
	And I thought to myself...
	And should be...
	And we have to get past it.
	It needs to change.
	And I thought, first of all, English jurisprudence is...
	Anglo-American jurisprudence is one of the best things that has ever happened to humanity.
	To humanity, right.
	And particularly to minorities.
	Because it turns out that Anglo-American jurisprudence is about the rights of the individual.
	You know who don't have a lot of minority rights?
	People who are living in non-Anglo-American jurisdictions.
	Those people tend to be charged head taxes.
	Those people tend to be victimized along racial and religious lines.
	Right.
	What the hell are you talking about?
	But for the left, for the hard left, like Joe Biden, or for the intersectional left, Western civilization is a veneer.
	It's a post-facto intellectual veneer that we put on power relations.
	And what Western civilization really is, is white people cramming down their viewpoints on everybody else, and then giving some sort of post-facto justification with a bunch of nice, pretty words about freedom of speech and Equality under law.
	And so if we just tear down that Western civilization, then the hierarchy will go along, too.
	That is exactly the same thing that the alt-right actually says, except they like Western civilization.
	They say that they like the power hierarchy in which white people are more powerful than everybody else.
	All the nice words about freedom and free markets and all that stuff, that's a bunch of crap that we say just to sweeten the tea a little bit.
	But the real tea is white supremacy, and we like the white supremacy.
	So you're suggesting that the two alternatives to the right, the alt-right and the left, agree that the right is wrong.
	I want to talk more about this.
	I also want to finally get to those questions that we promised we were going to take from our DailyWire.com subscribers.
	But first, we have a special guest.
	We promised that one day this would happen.
	That from his lofty perch on the American East Coast...
	Matt Walsh would descend and deign to spend a little time with us here.
	People ask for this all the time on Twitter.
	They're like, where's Matt Walsh?
	The Daily Wire guys get together and there's no Matt Walsh.
	Jeremy grew a beard just so that we wouldn't notice that Matt Walsh wasn't on the show.
	But we today are demonstrating our great power because we got Matt Walsh to come join the show.
	The host of the Matt Walsh show.
	If you aren't familiar with the show, you're missing out.
	Here's some clips.
	Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today.
	Was Jesus a socialist?
	No, you nitwits.
	He was not a socialist.
	Bernie Sanders is an arrogant, power-hungry, hypocritical, cowardly, morally deranged communist.
	They're gonna chemically castrate this boy.
	He is being physically, psychologically, emotionally abused.
	Some old tweets from Cory Booker.
	Sleep and I broke up a few nights ago.
	I'm dating coffee now.
	She's hot.
	The Green New Deal is finally here.
	It's the kind of thing that would sound brilliant if you were high.
	That around half of all millennials find socialism appealing.
	They want daddy in Washington to supplant daddy at home.
	I think Cory Booker might have a condition, actually.
	I'm kind of worried about him.
	Someone should probably check on.
	Matt Walsh, thanks for being with us.
	You just appeared like that.
	That was crazy.
	I did.
	It was a long drive to get here, but I'm here.
	How many episodes did you shoot in transit?
	I got quite a few of them done, so now I'm here.
	You didn't wear your bathing suit.
	I got an email.
	I was told this was spring break edition.
	It was Catholic bathing suit day.
	It was Catholic bathing suit.
	No, that is too short for Catholics.
	Way too skimpy.
	I need like a big alb or something.
	That's right.
	It's actually great because he's sitting between me and he's the only person more dour than I am.
	And you and he's the only person more Catholic than you are.
	So there's kind of a transition here.
	Exactly.
	So Matt, we were just talking about the conflation of all conservatives with the alt-right.
	And how the alt-right and the left actually agree broadly on identity politics.
	They just disagree about who the victor should be.
	What makes us different than the alt-right?
	Well, I'm sitting here next to the leader of the alt-right, which is pretty fun.
	From what I can tell, the main thing that jumps out at me about the alt-right is that it's very nihilistic.
	I mean, it's identity politics, yes, but at the core of it, there doesn't appear to be much of a moral core, and so for me, conservatism should have that moral foundation and that moral core.
	Which is also what makes the alt-right related to the alt-left, in that at the end of the day, it's relativistic, it's nihilistic, it's, you know, your truth is whatever your truth is.
	I think they both share that foundation.
	Michael, you wrote one of the earliest pieces sort of exposing the reality of the alt-right, I think, to the mainstream.
	Audience.
	And one of the things that you touched on in that piece was the sort of religiosity of the alt-right and how it's a religiosity without any connection to the spiritual truths of religion.
	It's very post-modern.
	And this is an issue I really wanted to get out and explain what the alt-right was when that phrase had meaning, which it no longer does because Ben Shapiro is now the leader of the alt-right.
	Anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton is.
	They do this to a lot of words.
	Racism, sexism, and they've done it to the alt-right.
	But it does have a meaning.
	It's an alternative to what we would call the conservative tradition.
	It's an alternative that emphasizes brutal power politics.
	It's a zero-sum game.
	It's rooted essentially in racial identity.
	The trouble with it, as the trouble with so many of these things...
	Is that it inverts reality.
	You know, Andrew Breitbart, who everyone in L.A. knew except for me because I got out here too late, would talk about how politics is down from culture, and culture, as Russell Kirk says, is down from religion, from the cult.
	What they do is they invert that, and so they substitute.
	Rather than talking about recreating Christendom, recreating Western civilization rooted in the religion that forms that, They say, no, no, no.
	We want all the trappings of Christendom without the Christ.
	They want all the trappings of Western culture without the cult that makes the culture.
	That actually is leftism.
	It is.
	Well, it reminds me.
	It's like the sort of people who drink decaf coffee and Diet Coke.
	They eat vegetarian bacon.
	They want the semblance of the thing, but they don't want the essence of the thing.
	And that's what the alt-right does.
	So they use the sort of language that might get some conservatives excited.
	We need to go back to our foundations.
	We need to go back to Western civilization.
	But they misunderstand what Western civilization is, essentially.
	Probably because they haven't read the alt-right leader's book on the right side of history.
	You know, if you can get past the aesthetic long enough to take Michael seriously, he really knows a lot of stuff.
	No, no, no.
	Let's not understand the case.
	LAUGHTER You know, there was one time on the show, we were talking about sort of debates among Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, all these things, and we were in this really intense debate, and I realized it was Halloween and I was wearing a Moana costume.
	I said, this is a great video.
	Can we talk about Jussie Smollett?
	Oh, can we not talk about it?
	To me, in a week of great stories, it is the greatest story.
	It is the most fun story.
	It is the most fun story.
	Because there's a schadenfreude to the Mueller report, like two years in the making.
	It's a long wind-up, and when the pitch comes, it's really great.
	But the Jussie Smollett being let off the hook for being a racial hoaxster, and now his lawyer maintaining that he was, in fact, innocent.
	He was the victim of a hate crime from two Nigerian brothers.
	In his employee.
	In his employee, his personal trainers who are extras on Empire, who beat him up, and now his lawyers are saying that they legitimately beat him up while wearing whiteface.
	Under their ski masks.
	Under their ski masks.
	This is the actual theory of the case.
	And I just think, this timeline is...
	Freaking great, man.
	I mean, this is great.
	And Michelle Obama's friends are calling up the DA over there and telling her, can you kick this thing?
	And she's like, sure.
	And I'll pretend to accuse myself, but I won't.
	That was only meant in the colloquial sense.
	In the colloquial sense.
	Because that's what lawyers do.
	We speak in the colloquial sense.
	When I'm lawyering, what I always do when I write a contract is I say, I make it as colloquial as I can.
	Hey, y'all.
	Right, exactly.
	Can we do some stuff here?
	Like, you'll do some stuff, I'll do some stuff, we'll be happy.
	That's how I write all my contracts.
	Ben always says, hey, y'all.
	Hey, y'all.
	Parentheses.
	Party one.
	You know, one of the things I've always...
	Why corruption always makes me laugh is because when it gets as corrupt as Chicago, they stop hiding it.
	You know, it says, like, what did you do with the money?
	Well, I put it in a little tin box kind of thing, you know?
	And now, the thing about this Smollett story is nobody is clean.
	You know, you want to root for the cops.
	I love the cops.
	They're, you know, our first responders and all this stuff.
	But the cops in Chicago...
	Have not been so good.
	Before this new guy came in, they hid that video of Laquan McDonald getting shot.
	They hid it for something like 13 months.
	Rahm Emanuel was part of that.
	And that's the reason this woman who dumped the case is in office, basically.
	She came in saying they're not treating black people.
	So it's basically bad Democrats versus evil Democrats.
	But when you're too corrupt for a guy who legitimately used to send fish in newspaper to his enemies when he was on the Hill, Rahm Emanuel...
	You may have gone a little too far.
	You're past the rainbow.
	The rainbow left you behind a while ago.
	The unmentioned part of this, though, because once he got off the hook, once they said, okay, you're not guilty.
	Although, they kept the money.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You're not guilty.
	Give us that 10 Gs and you have to go do some work for Jesse Jackson's non-profit.
	Retroactively.
	Retroactively.
	But you're off the hook.
	But initially we heard, oh, Empire is going to hire him back.
	He's going to come back on.
	He's going to have a career.
	Everyone is forgetting the federal charges that could be brought against him for sending a hate hoax through the mail with white powder.
	Will they bring federal charges?
	I mean, I certainly hope so, although they didn't say that he's not guilty, because that's the thing, the prosecutors out there are saying that he's guilty.
	Kim Foxx said that, yeah, well, we think he's guilty.
	The charges made sense, so they're not making any attempt to hide it.
	That's what really is kind of scary about it, so it shows you something about how privilege really works in our It's not necessarily tied to being white, straight, and male, apparently, as Jussie Smollett has shown us, or as Cardi B has shown us.
	You know, privilege has a lot more to do with, well, certainly money is the first thing that matters.
	Also, you know, identity, the trendiest identity is not white and male, as we've discovered.
	And connections.
	Celebrity status.
	Celebrity status helps an awful lot, right?
	Joseph Epstein down in Florida getting off on his charges.
	I mean, that guy should be in jail forever and never get out.
	For 100% of time.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Honestly, I'll be honest.
	I'm really looking forward to them finally breaking all the people who visited his sex slave island and all of their activities.
	I want all this stuff out in the public because I want to know...
	Jeffrey Epstein.
	Jeffrey Epstein.
	I'm just going to head out of here, guys, before that story breaks.
	Nobody ever invited Jude in.
	I think part of the problem, too, is that...
	There's so little integrity on either side of the aisle anymore.
	So that's how people get away with things, is that they always have their own side that's going to overlook it.
	And it happens on the other side, too.
	So that's part of the problem, is that the peanut gallery, who should be demanding justice, were always looking at things through a political lens.
	And so now the left is looking at Jesse Smollett and saying, Well, I guess he's kind of ours, and so we have to sort of at least look the other way.
	It was that thing that the black community said after O.J. Simpson, I realize that's a long time ago, where they basically said, you owe us one.
	We know he's guilty, but you just owe us one.
	And I feel like...
	That's one of the problems with identity politics, yes, on both sides of the aisle, is that we tend to want this sort of broad sense of justice, like a correction against broad injustice, but there can't be broad justice without individual instances of Of justice.
	You can't get to justice through injustice.
	Time only goes one way, you know.
	And once it's over, you can't do a thing about it.
	You can't correct slavery.
	You can't punish a guy just because he's white for holding slaves, which he never held.
	It just doesn't work that way.
	And the left frequently thinks without time, like with abortion, when they say, oh, well, that's not really a person.
	You think, like, yes, it is.
	It's a person at a certain time in this...
	Time that is his life.
	And I think that the left does this all the time.
	They just eliminate the dimension of time when they think.
	Because how can you recompense people who are dead?
	You can't.
	That's what injustice is.
	So this is a legitimate question for you guys about Jesse Smollett.
	I referenced OJ, and one of the most interesting things to me about OJ is that he didn't get away with anything.
	Right?
	He got away in the moment.
	But there is a kind of justice, a supernatural justice that seems to exist on Earth.
	And in the act of getting away with it, I think O.J. Simpson was so...
	Not only corrupted because he's a murderer, but...
	Corrupted by the idea of his own invulnerability in the face of the law that it led him to do other terrible things which eventually caught up with him.
	Will a similar justice track Jussie Smollett at some point?
	Well, the problem is he's going to need publicity for something else.
	Because if he just disappears into the ether and the last we hear of him is this nonsense, then he's never going to get hired again.
	You know, maybe, although I will say that the nice thing, O.J. was never, he was in Hollywood, but he really was not of Hollywood.
	I mean, Jussie Smollett is a Hollywood person, which means that everybody gets a second shot in Hollywood.
	Five years from now, Jordan Peele will cast him in a movie or something, and it'll just be kind of a big joke that he did this five years ago, and we'll all laugh about it, and he'll be like, oh, well, isn't that funny that now he's back doing this sort of stuff?
	Although you have to be pretty crazy to do what he did, so maybe that'll catch up with him.
	He's a self-destructive human.
	That's absolutely true.
	When you believe that everyone believes your lie, I mean, it's pretty audacious to have the police say you're guilty, the mayor say you're guilty, even the prosecutor who just dropped the charges say you're guilty, and the court keep the bail money, and then your press conference isn't...
	I'm really sorry about this.
	I'm very glad, obviously, that I'm not facing worse charges.
	Instead, you're, no, I was a victim.
	I was always telling the truth.
	I wouldn't be able to face my mama if I had been alive.
	You talk like someone who's never met an actor, which I know.
	But it's actually true of everybody, right?
	I mean, brazening it out is always the best thing to do in modern politics.
	And anywhere in modern life.
	I mean, we talked about this a couple of episodes ago.
	In the graceless society.
	In the graceless society.
	If he were to apologize, then he'd be like, okay, he can't work again.
	Maybe because then he's acknowledged his guilt.
	But if he never acknowledges his guilt, then he can continue to maintain that he was beat up by two Nigerian brothers in whiteface.
	Under their ski masks.
	Right?
	Under their ski masks.
	I mean, my going theory of the case, by the way, is that it wasn't the Nigerian brothers at all.
	It was Ralph Northam in blackface in whiteface.
	Mm-hmm.
	Which is why I think I have no problem with them dropping the charges.
	All they had to do, I thought that that would actually be the best case scenario, is if they drop the charges on the condition that he'd go out on the courthouse steps and admit what he did.
	And then there's no problem.
	Then they can say, yeah, you're fine.
	Because even if they had given him two weeks of jail time or something like that, and he could maintain his innocence, then he still wins in some respects.
	So that's what makes this such a travesty, is that if they want to claim, oh, it wasn't worth going through the whole rigmarole of a trial, fine, I get that.
	So then tell him that he needs to go, the fact that you let him go out on the courthouse steps and claim innocence is what makes this such a travesty.
	And the fact that they sealed the court records means we don't even know the deal.
	Did you see what Kim Fox said about that?
	She said, we accidentally applied to have the court records sealed.
	She said, we're now applying to have them unsealed.
	The Chicago way, yeah.
	Sure.
	They were saying that this best week ever with all this crazy news, the Jussie Smollett thing, that was a little too bad because that was injustice.
	He got off the hook.
	No way.
	That's a little cherry on top of the sundae.
	Because it's such a gross injustice, there is a chance that the Feds look into this, look into both how he got his deal and look into the fake hate mail hoax.
	But also, Republicans get to point to this as such an egregious example of hoaxes and identity politics gone wrong.
	We can use this for two years.
	The media coverage of Smollett has been hysterically funny.
	Brian Stelter, the ombudsman over at CNN doing reliable sources, he gets on TV after all this happens and he goes, we may never know what happened with Jussie Smollett.
	Because no one was there.
	I wasn't there.
	You weren't there.
	We may never know what happened with Jussie Smollett.
	Weird, because for two years your entire network was proclaiming that President Trump was a cat's paw of the Russians.
	And you had no evidence and it turned out to be false.
	And you still want to apologize for that.
	We have this way of finding out called a trial.
	Also, this doofus signed a personal check to the people who committed a hate crime against him and called them on the phone an hour before it happened.
	How many times have you been hate-crimed over that sort of thing?
	Guys, he didn't drop the Subway sandwich.
	We have all the proof we didn't.
	That, by the way, is the best.
	That will never die.
	That is the best part of the story.
	Those are good sandwiches.
	You don't want to let go of your Subway sandwiches.
	I got to say that if Subway does not hire him for a commercial campaign after this, they've really missed their opportunity.
	I mean, if their two spokespeople are not Jared and Jussie, I mean, that's pretty fantastic.
	So, Elisha, while we've got Matt here, let's see if any of our Daily Wire subscribers have questions that he might know the answer to.
	Lord knows we do not.
	Elisha.
	Oh, sorry.
	You guys didn't even give me a working umbrella?
	Dear lord.
	There's not even a working sun where you are.
	Well, I don't know.
	It's a good thing there's no working sun because you don't pay me enough to get Botox.
	So, alrighty.
	That's true.
	This question, I guess it's for all the guys.
	Charles wants to know, what would be your advice to somebody who yearns for the freedom of the world of philosophical commentary, but also wishes to keep the security of a full-time job they consider a bore and mundane?
	Give up that dream.
	He didn't know the answer.
	That's the problem these days.
	And that's what makes it easier.
	People say to me all the time, well, how do you have the courage to speak your mind?
	Well, it's easy for me because it's my job to be a loudmouth and have opinions.
	And we're all in the same boat.
	Our job is opinions.
	But it's a lot harder when you have a real job And then you're trying to balance that and being, you know, the prudence of when do I speak up.
	So that's a much more difficult thing, which is why I think people that are in the opinion realm would get way too much credit, I think, for being warriors for truth when really this is what we do.
	This is definitely true.
	I will also say that...
	I think underlying that question is, how do I get into sort of the opinion business?
	And the answer is, you do a lot of stuff for free for a very long time.
	I mean, really.
	Everybody sort of wants to go to immediately Charles Krauthammer status, where just you're on Fox News every night, or how did you get where you are?
	How'd you do this...
	I'm in year 18 of this project.
	I'm 35 years old, so I look somewhat young at this point still.
	I've been doing this for nearly two decades, and for nearly no pay for most of that time.
	And you also acquired an expertise first.
	You are a Harvard lawyer.
	You've had a varied career in show business.
	I have no idea what no Yeah, well, the real way to do it is to not write a book.
	I mean, I hate to disagree with you.
	This is actually interesting because, you know, I like to bring in a little business advice for how people might be able to make themselves successful.
	So I like a question like this.
	You bring up working for free.
	One of the amazing things that you will hear people say routinely, especially young people, is I know my value.
	I know what I'm worth.
	You'll say, hey, I mean, if you want to write something for us, submit it and we'll review it.
	And if we like it, I don't write for free.
	I know my value.
	I know my worth.
	I do too.
	I offered it to you.
	You have no worth.
	You have no value.
	Your time is not automatically valuable.
	The fact that you typed into a computer does not create value for me.
	Value is when I can take what you've created and I can monetize it in some way that brings in money.
	And then I can keep some of that money and I can give some of the money to you.
	That's the definition of value.
	And in order to gain value as a commentator, you have to write a lot of commentary.
	It's when people in Hollywood, people will tell me they want to move to Hollywood.
	They'll say, you know, in my hometown, I'm an actor.
	Acting is my dream, so I want to move to Hollywood.
	And I'll say, well, you have the wrong dream.
	Because when you move to Hollywood, the first thing that happens is you stop acting.
	You could do high-end regional theater or community theater in your hometown.
	Some of it very good.
	And you could probably act in six shows a year if you're worth your salt back where you are.
	You move to L.A., you may not act for years.
	75 auditions to book a role is basically the average for an actor in Hollywood.
	And the role might be one line one day.
	Same with musicians.
	People will say, you know, I have this band.
	We play in bars all around my hometown.
	My passion is playing music, so I'm going to move to L.A. or Nashville and make it.
	Well, you have the wrong dream.
	You play music where you are.
	Moving to Nashville is a way to not play music anymore because they don't pay you 200 bucks to play in a restaurant in Nashville because everyone in Nashville plays music.
	The market is saturated.
	They do pay you that in your small town.
	And even if they did in Nashville, you couldn't live off the 200 bucks the way you can in your small town.
	Your actual ambition is misstated.
	What you really mean, but you don't want to say because it sounds terrible, is I would rather act less...
	I would rather play music less for the opportunity to gain a higher level of recognition or to play at a higher level with better people or play on a greater stage with a greater audience.
	But that sounds...
	People don't like to say honest things about themselves.
	So they say, oh, my dream is acting or my dream is...
	Stay where you are.
	And at the end of the day, what it takes to be...
	A musician is playing music.
	And what it takes to be an actor is acting.
	What it takes to be a commentator is commentating.
	And over time...
	And learning things.
	And learning things.
	And reading a ton of books.
	You develop skill and you...
	I will say that the YouTube culture has really hurt us in this way because there are people who somehow soar to stardom without ever having done anything or learned anything.
	And listen, when I was younger, the dues paying stuff...
	It pissed me off.
	It really pissed me off because I knew I was more talented than half the people that I was watching.
	I knew that I knew more stuff than they did.
	And I felt it was a grave injustice that I was not getting more recognition for the fact that my writing was very good and that I'd really studied these issues.
	But the fact is that that required me to put in more time and the world didn't owe me anything.
	And the same thing, I feel like, I mean, Drew, how many scripts have you written and how many have actually made it screen?
	I wrote, I think, four novels before I published one.
	And the thing about screenwriting is you can make a good living without ever having them get to screen.
	Almost none of the screenplays I sold for good money made it to the screen.
	I mean, that's the movie.
	I even want to puncture one of the great dreams that I get asked this question at every campus speech.
	Because I actually did get paid a ton of money to do nothing.
	Like, literally nothing.
	Now you're a number one New York Times bestselling author, so that does hit above, you know.
	But this was a number one bestselling blank book.
	I worked...
	From the age of 18 to, I don't know, when did I do the book?
	27 or something?
	I worked for Peanuts all that time.
	I worked a million political campaigns.
	I did a ton of off, off, off, off, off Broadway plays for making pennies.
	And the only thing that keeps you going through that is because you want to do the thing.
	Because you want to write the columns.
	Because you want to write the books.
	Because you want to do plays.
	You've got to do it for that.
	If you think you're going to get a payday for it...
	I want to challenge...
	People used to interview me when I started to hit it big and get big money for novels.
	And they would say, well, you really made a lot of money.
	I said, we've got to prorate it.
	We've got to prorate it.
	That's right.
	We prorate it over all the things I wrote.
	I mean, for years, I've been writing a syndicated column since I was 17 years old.
	It started to make any sort of money that would even look like money in the last three years, maybe.
	But I want to challenge even this thing.
	You said, you know, it's kind of unfortunate we live in the age of YouTube and people can legitimately become superstars who've done nothing.
	And it is true.
	And it's always been true in every medium.
	Right.
	Some guy scratches out nothing on the page and it becomes a best-selling book.
	I mean, that's a tale as old as time.
	But that's not the norm.
	But not only is it not the norm, as you famously have said, luck is not a business model, but there is more to it, which is they may attain a small measure of fame, a large measure of fame, rapidly on the basis of nothing, but they won't preserve fame on the basis of nothing.
	And a great example of this is Logan Paul.
	So Logan Paul and his brother are YouTube stars.
	Logan Paul...
	I'm not a connoisseur of this content.
	As far as I can tell, he became very, very famous for doing very, very dumb things while a camera was rolling.
	And you look at him, and he makes like $600 trillion.
	He has a staff of Logan Paul and his buddies.
	They live in a giant mansion.
	And it is manna from heaven and beautiful women rained down upon them.
	And you wonder, like, how is such a thing possible?
	It seems like an injustice.
	This week, Logan Paul put out a video, a documentary, of his examination of the flat earth conspiracy theory, which is...
	As good as any comedy film made in the last decade.
	It's a 50-minute feature.
	The production value, unbelievable.
	The skill, the directing, the editing, the performance.
	His performance is subtle.
	It's self-deprecating.
	It's...
	It was brilliantly conceived.
	It took stones the size of beach balls to actually put himself in the environments that he did in order to create this piece of entertainment.
	And I guess what I'm trying to tell you is Logan Paul He may have gotten famous for filming himself do stupid things, and he may have ridden a wave that seems from the outside to be kind of unfair.
	He has maintained his level of fame.
	He and many, many...
	PewDiePie and others who have created enormous brands, creating a brand difficult, maintaining a brand nearly impossible, improving your brand.
	He also generates an insane amount of content.
	That's right.
	Spoiler alert, we've met Logan Paul, and another spoiler alert, he called me a mother bleeping G. It was a really interesting experience.
	But Logan Paul told me, because I asked him, what's your daily schedule?
	I asked this to kind of everybody famous who comes by, what's your daily schedule?
	And he said, well, I have a camera on me for 10 hours a day, and then we spend seven hours at night editing.
	That's right.
	He works 17 hours a day.
	I think that is one of the great things that we talk about paying your dues and everything, but...
	These days you could cut out the middleman and if you do have talent you can just go right to the people.
	I tend to think if you do manage to attract a huge audience that probably means you have some sort of talent because there are a billion people on the internet trying to do it.
	And so if you manage to do it, it probably means that you've got something going on.
	So it is different now.
	The paying your dues thing, I think, looks a little bit different than it used to.
	It is also a matter of investment.
	Meaning that what I see a lot is people who don't actually want to invest either their time or their money.
	They want you to invest your time and your money in them.
	And that's not a thing.
	Either you've got to invest an enormous amount of time getting so good at the thing that I cannot turn down the opportunity to give you my money, or you have to put in your own money and risk.
	I mean, you want the reward, you've got to take the risk.
	That's right.
	Stuff like this is a huge risk.
	That's the thing with artists and anybody who does a creative job.
	You're risking your life.
	You're risking your whole life.
	Because most people who do this stuff are smart enough to have done something much safer.
	You could have been a lawyer.
	I mean, you could have done...
	I did.
	I worked at a law firm.
	Right.
	And that's the thing.
	Most of them are putting aside a way of life and taking this incredible risk with your whole life.
	You can wind up, and I've seen it happen to people, you can wind up 50 with nothing.
	Not me, boys.
	It was smooth sailing all the way here to the end.
	Absolutely nothing else that I'm qualified to do on Earth.
	Listen, if you would like to come and sit in on the live taping of a show where we recommend Logan Paul feature films, you are welcome to head over to dailywire.com.
	There's a little bit of time left during this live broadcast where if you click on subscribe, become an annual subscriber, you'll be automatically entered for an opportunity to do just that.
	We'll pay for you a flight or an Uber.
	To come down to our studios here in L.A., and we'll light you up a nice cigar and let you sit in with us while we film a future episode of Backstage.
	Alicia, for those who are already subscribers and able to ask us questions, they're able to get a Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr if they're annual subscribers, they're able to tune in daily to the Matt Wall Show, the Andrew Klavan Show, the Michael Knowles Show, or the Ben Shapiro Show, and to our radio show behind our paywall.
	They may also want to, you know, just ask us something.
	Do they?
	Oh, I do have a question, though.
	After seeing that wide shot, now that Michael Knowles is closer to that camera, he once asked me for my waxer, and I thought it was for his wife.
	It's very apparent it was for his very own legs, and now I am mortified.
	Listen, I know that transgenderism is becoming the new dominant theme, and listen, I'm just saying there aren't a lot of roles in Hollywood for men.
	Half the roles are for women.
	Why wouldn't I leave myself available for that?
	Make it stop.
	Make it stop.
	We've hit a new left.
	Joe frickin' Nameth over here.
	Hopefully we can end on a high note and tell Sam where he can go for the most conservative vacation spot, considering that this is a very special spring break edition.
	Matt?
	The best vacation spot?
	Yeah.
	I've been living in my car for 32 years.
	I don't know.
	I don't go on vacation, so I don't know, Six Flags?
	I've got the most conservative vacation spot.
	Waikiki Beach in the, for some reason it's a state, of Hawaii.
	This is the most conservative thing.
	Because one, it's beautiful.
	It's almost entirely man-made on that beach.
	It is so gorgeous.
	Everything has been manicured perfectly for you.
	You've got steakhouses.
	You've got the Cheesecake Factory.
	You've got the Cheesecake Factory.
	You've got every single beautiful comfort you want.
	No driving, no nothing.
	They hand you big silly drinks and big silly glasses like this.
	How's the cell service?
	You can be Instagramming.
	It is the most American vacation spot on earth.
	Andrew?
	I gotta say Rome.
	I gotta say Rome.
	All of Western history is right there.
	You can turn over Iraq and you've got, like, Catholic history.
	You can turn it over, you get the Roman Empire.
	You can turn it over, you get the Renaissance.
	You get the Jews being oppressed.
	The Jews keep turning it.
	Part of Western civilization, right?
	I'll go one further.
	Delphi in Greece.
	I was once, there's a true story, by moonlight, broke into the Oracle, hiked down the hill around the security station, came in, beautiful full moon, sat at the amphitheater, had one of the most sort of transcendent experiences of my life, lifted up a rock, looked under it, and it said, Socrates was here.
	Benjamin.
	In English.
	I'll take the other half of Western civilization.
	So I still think that visiting Israel is probably the most conservative place that it can be.
	Not only is it a Western civilized country in an area that is not Western or civilized, it is also the font of The Judeo-Christian morality that has shaped the West in the most profound ways.
	And also, it is an order of magnitude more ancient than anything else you will ever see.
	I mean, you go there and it is astonishing.
	Every so often it hits you.
	And it's funny, I know it hit you, Jeremy, when you visit it.
	But I remember that, you know, I'm a big history buff.
	And so when I was younger, I was very into Revolutionary War history.
	This is my thing.
	And so when we went to Philadelphia, I was like, oh my god, this is so cool.
	Here's the Liberty Bell.
	And this stuff is like, it's so old.
	I mean, this stuff is from like 1776.
	This stuff is like 225 years old.
	This is like 2000.
	It's like 225 years old.
	This is amazing.
	And then we go to Israel and it's like, okay, so take that and now multiply it by 10.
	And that's, these are the stones where the Judean revolt was fought.
	I mean, I have coins in my house.
	Actually, I bought a couple of ancient coins.
	So I have a I have a coin from the Hersanus regime, which predates Christ by several hundred years.
	And then I have a coin from the revolt, the Bar Kokhba revolt.
	And these things are thousands of years old.
	And you're walking around, you're like, okay, well, what's great about it is the description of Jerusalem in all of Western literature, sort of the axis mundi, is the central pillar of humanity.
	It's just true.
	When you're there, it does feel different than any place else I've ever been.
	It's amazing.
	It would be my second favorite spot.
	I mean, I love Italy.
	It is spectacular.
	I've been to France.
	I've been to Britain.
	Britain is a wonderful place.
	You go to Israel, there's a different feel To everything there, it's almost, it's like there's a different spiritual dimension to just being there.
	And then you're walking through a valley where David slew Goliath.
	I mean, it's an actual place.
	You're like, this, you know, the civilization, we stand on the top.
	I mean, this is the theme of my book, but it really, it's moving to me.
	We stand on top.
	When you see a skyscraper in New York, when you see a car driving down the street, that is standing, all of that is happening atop We're good to go.
	That stuff ain't gonna stand.
	It's just not gonna stand.
	And you don't realize that until you actually study your civilization, whether it is in Greece or whether it's in Rome or whether it's in Israel, which I think is the place where it runs the deepest.
	I'm just so pleased to have heard Ben acknowledge the historicity of Christ.
	Alicia, another question for us.
	All right, Christian wants to know, should he get married at 18 even if he has to live on ends meet and work a minimum wage job?
	If it will result in long-term happiness down the road?
	Yes.
	By a show of hands.
	I say yes, but I didn't do it.
	I mean, did you guys get married at 18?
	I assume you just met the girl.
	You get married young, and then that is the foundation of your adulthood, rather than it being the capstone of it.
	You begin there.
	That's right.
	And then you go through that journey and having nothing and that struggle with your spouse, and then you bond over that.
	I think the problem is when you have people that, you know, they have their own life and then they go get married, and so you have a lot of these issues where now you're trying to merge these two separate existences instead of forging one existence together.
	I will tell you, I... We're good to go.
	For years.
	And ended up marrying the girl I dated at 18.
	If I had it to do over, I would have done it years and years and years earlier.
	And I have to say, having been married longer probably than all you guys put together, that you become a true partnership in a way that is mystical.
	I mean, it is just after a while, you are just, you know, you start out with all these things like you're talking about.
	You have to merge these two lives.
	And after a while, you're one life.
	And that's an incredibly beautiful thing.
	It's funny, the other day I was talking to my wife about something and I can't remember what it was.
	And I said, you remember when this happened to me?
	She said, no, that happened to me.
	This is just something that you end up doing with your spouse all the time, where your memories become your spouse's memories.
	You become two halves of one whole.
	It is one of the great tragedies of the West that people are getting married at 28 and not getting married at 21.
	It is absolute stupidity.
	I mean, how old was everybody when they got married?
	Yeah, I was about to say, Drew, how old were you?
	Well, now, when we moved in together, I was about 21, but we got married years later, but we lived together before that.
	How long did you live together first?
	Four years.
	Four years?
	Yeah.
	Michael, how old were you?
	I was 27, I guess, 28, something like that.
	Matt?
	I was 25 years old when we got married.
	24.
	24?
	I was the oldest at 30.
	I win again, guys.
	Listen, there are consequences to getting married old.
	Higher likelihood of divorce, for one.
	Higher likelihood of divorce.
	Your options for marriage do change, right?
	The nature of the foundations of your marriage is going to necessarily be different.
	And there are biological consequences to getting married older as well.
	That's not to say that people should be completely foolish, although I do generally say that any Christian...
	A young man can marry any Christian young woman and it will work if they believe in the institution of marriage itself.
	I'm not saying that that's necessarily the preferred way of going about this, although it actually did work for many thousands of years.
	And I say Christian, I really mean people who share a foundational writing system.
	You're right that commitment to the institution of marriage is actually more important than the soulmate idea of marriage.
	So there's a really interesting thread today from the National Foundation for Marriage, I think is what it's called, Marriages are now lasting longer, so we've actually reversed the trend.
	And one of the reasons that is suggested is that the 1980s and 90s version of what marriage was supposed to be, the soulmate version of marriage, which ended so poorly because people thought soulmate means madly in love, passionate about each other in just the way that I was the first six months of the marriage, which is not true for anyone.
	Love changes, it transmutes, it becomes deeper, it becomes more profound in many ways.
	But it's not quite as like, I can't wait to be with the person every single second of every single day, the way that it is when you're first dating somebody, for example.
	That model completely failed.
	And it's been replaced by what they call the all-factor view of marriage, which is commitment to common goals, common values, the institution itself.
	That's the good stuff.
	And it used to be, I mean, the separation of sex from marriage has had dire ramifications for our society in an incredibly serious way.
	The other problem with the soulmate thing is that if you say, well, I'm looking for my soulmate.
	Someone was destined in the stars.
	You know, we were meant to be together.
	Okay, well, then what happens when you marry someone you thought was your soulmate and then that feeling dies?
	And then, oh, you meet the secretary at work and you say, oh, no, she was my soulmate.
	I got this wrong.
	Okay, so I got to leave my wife and go to her.
	No, it's, you know, the person becomes your soulmate.
	This is what the sacrament of marriage is in Christianity anyway.
	The person becomes your soulmate, literally, in a metaphysical sense, when you marry them.
	They weren't your soulmate before that, but in that moment of bestowing that sacrament onto each other, now you're locked.
	And that's why Christianity, it's supposed to be that you literally cannot separate.
	And that is such a good point because I've asked people, before I got married, I said, what's the secret to a long marriage to people who have done it?
	And they gave a lot of advice, patience, all this sort of thing.
	And don't get divorced, is what people told me.
	Don't get divorced.
	And it is, in the traditional Christian view, divorce is not permissible.
	And so if you go in and you say, look, we better, if there's a little tiff, we better work this out.
	Because divorce is not going to happen.
	So you better work it out.
	There is a real sense of security and comfort there.
	You say, you are, by definition, my soulmate.
	So we're going to be together.
	I discovered this backwards because...
	I was not committed to the institution of marriage or to anything when I got married.
	I was too young and too nuts, you know, and I think that what I was committed to, I was madly in love with my wife, as I am to this very day, and slowly I began to notice that there was a third thing that bound us together, and it was really this marriage kind of purified all our own kind of shambolic Flaws and tendencies and was actually better than either of us alone.
	And so I kind of discovered the institution of marriage by providence.
	And it really is a real thing.
	It's a real thing.
	And if you commit to it, I think that you're in solid because it's a beautiful way to live.
	Also, the kids, too.
	I mean, that's what, you know, the kids need the security of knowing that both parents are Are, you know, are devoted to this marriage and I can remember when I was a kid and all of my friends, all their parents were getting divorced and I talked to my mom one night and I was very upset and I said, all my friends are getting divorced, what if that happens to you and dad?
	And she looked at me and she said, We will never get divorced.
	Period.
	It will never happen.
	And I believed her.
	But I needed to know that.
	That they both felt that way.
	No matter what happens, that is just not an option.
	It's not on the table.
	And for me, as a child, I needed that assurance.
	And there's a lot of kids growing up who don't have that security.
	And I think it wreaks havoc on them.
	You know, when I see people, and I know a lot of them, who have left their wives, mostly I know guys who have left their wives, with children, small children behind.
	And they always say to me, and I know women who say this too, they always say, the kids will be fine.
	The kids will adapt.
	And I thought, yeah, you blew up their planet.
	You blew their planet up.
	They're floating in space.
	They'll never be all right.
	They will never, ever be all right.
	And I think that that, it's such a travesty for a momentary thing.
	Do you have that story of the person who Who got the divorce and their child became an adult.
	It was many years later, their child's 18, 19 years old.
	I'll ruin this.
	It was 10 years later and the child went off the rails and went so badly off the rails, they finally had to do that thing where they virtually kidnapped the kid and take them to a psychiatrist.
	And they all sat down to the psychiatrist and the first words out of her mouth were, why did you get divorced?
	And the mother said, that was 10 years ago.
	And it's like, yeah, you blow up somebody's planet, it sticks.
	You know, they remember.
	I mean, Jesus had a lot to say about this, and it always makes me laugh when they cast gay people out of the church, but they have a divorce workshop.
	Marriage is one of the few issues.
	Divorce is one of the few sort of hot-button societal issues.
	That Jesus spoke about very directly.
	That's right.
	Because on a lot of, you know, he spoke in parables, and sometimes it's very frustrating that you're trying to decipher, well, what does that mean?
	On marriage, though, he said, no, you can't get divorced.
	Yeah.
	Can't do it.
	If you do that, you're an adulterer.
	If you remarry, then you're making that person an adulterer.
	That's right there.
	It's in all the Gospels.
	Yep.
	And yet Christians still find a way to, yeah, he said that, but...
	And we worked hard, you know, we worked hard to keep the marriage going, and I mean, in the Old Testament, there's a very bizarre section that's very hard to understand about a husband who accuses his wife of being an adulteress.
	And so they're supposed to go to the Kohen Gadol, they're supposed to go to the priest, and he is supposed to make her drink this kind of magic potion where he dissolves the name of God and then he makes her drink it.
	And then if she's an adulteress, then she dies, essentially.
	And if she's not an adulteress, then she lives and they have to stay married.
	And it's very puzzling.
	It's very weird.
	It's called the Sota section of the Bible.
	This is in Numbers, right?
	Yes.
	And it's really strange and people don't really understand it.
	The purpose of that whole situation, the purpose of that illustration, is that it is forbidden.
	In the Ten Commandments to take God's name in vain.
	God is very serious about you not destroying his name.
	In Jewish law, if there's a scroll, any piece of parchment, any piece of paper where you write God's name out, that's why many Orthodox Jews won't write even in English the word God.
	They'll do G-D because they don't actually want to throw it in the trash.
	You actually have to take the scroll, you have to go bury it somewhere.
	That's how seriously we take the name of God.
	You're not allowed to pronounce what we call Yudke Vavke.
	You're not even allowed to spell it with the letters.
	That would be Jehovah in the English transliteration.
	But in Latin.
	Exactly.
	But the purpose there is that God considers the institution of marriage so serious that he is more willing to have his own name trampled and dissolved than to allow marriage to dissolve for bad reasons.
	That's the message there.
	I would say, too, there are a lot of divorced people.
	I'm married to someone for whom our marriage is not their first.
	And it is true that Jesus says that if you, you know, the New Testament holds that if you remarry, you make of your spouse an adulterer.
	Jesus also says that if you lust, you're an adulterer.
	Not you're on the path to adultery.
	Not you're kind of like an adulterer.
	I mean, really, if you think about it, Jesus wasn't smoking pot and they're like, oh, it is kind of like that.
	No, Jesus made a lot of very absolute statements about the nature of morality so that people would understand the absolute nature of their state and depravity.
	And one of the things that bothers me, you'll hear evangelicals of a certain stripe sometimes say, Oh, you married a divorced person.
	Well, you know that in God's eyes, they're still married to their first spouse.
	And I'm like, when did God become an idiot?
	That is obviously not true.
	And if it were true, imagine what the morality of it would be over time.
	So let's say you got married when you were 18.
	You got divorced when you were 22.
	You got remarried when you were 30.
	You had four kids, now you're pushing 50, and some evangelical gets a hold of you and says, well, you know, in God's eyes, you're still married to your first spouse.
	And you go, well, holy crap, I don't want to disappoint God.
	So you walk away from the four kids, and you walk away from the current husband, and you go find, I guess, some person that you used to know 20 years ago, and see if maybe they also believe that you're still married.
	And you knock on their door, and you're like, hey, we're still married.
	And they're like, what the...
	God's not dumb.
	God doesn't function outside of reality.
	God isn't the hypothetical God.
	God is the God who lives.
	And while divorce is a terrible, terrible thing, is absolutely a destruction of the great analogy, according to Paul, that God gave us for our relationship with him, is our relationship between husband and wife.
	In marriage, as in all things, God's a God of grace as well, and a God who functions within reality, a God who actually does know what we are.
	I'm not saying that if you remarry, you don't make of your spouse an adulterer.
	I'm saying that the actual takeaway from the teachings of Christ is supposed to be, I'm an adulterer.
	Not, how could I possibly not be an adulterer?
	No, I agree with this because what Jesus says is Moses gave you a law by which you could get divorced because he knew your hearts.
	He knew basically...
	Yeah, Jews are okay with...
	Divorce is a thing in Judaism.
	I mean, we are anti-divorce, but it is a possibility.
	And I think you're absolutely right.
	We're not supposed to live...
	In this savage way where people get stuck in a...
	I know a lot of people who got divorced, like, minutes after they got married, like, you know, within months, and then got a very happy second marriage.
	I definitely think that's a very different thing.
	But it really is a serious business to tear apart what God has brought to us.
	No question.
	I'm not making any defensive divorce.
	That's why I think, you know, the Catholic Church, the concept of annulment, which is...
	The idea there is...
	It's also not like you're going to get stuck on a technicality because God's not going to do that.
	So just because you said the words, it's not like God is saying, well, you're stuck.
	But there's an investigation to find out.
	So you could have a situation where you get married and you get divorced right away.
	Obviously, you weren't serious about the vows.
	And in that case, the marriage just never occurred.
	You go to Las Vegas or something and get married when you're drunk.
	You drink a giant one of these full of booze.
	But there's also no question that I would assume in the Catholic view that that is innately connected to, because when you're talking about annulment, you're talking about sexual activity also.
	That's innately connected to the possibility of bearing children.
	I mean, the real shift that has happened in Western culture is the disconnection of marriage from childbearing.
	And it used to be that the, I mean, a plurality of people who got married, the woman was pregnant when they got married.
	And this was as late as the 1930s and 1940s.
	A huge number of people.
	The majority.
	Was it the majority?
	It was either the plurality or the majority.
	A huge percentage of people were having seven-month babies.
	Because people were not...
	But the expectation was, you know, you do the crime, you do the time.
	Because it's not about you.
	It's not about you.
	If marriage is about you, then you ought not get married.
	Really, and this is true with your spouse, it's true with your children, it's true with your God.
	If marriage is about you finding a way to personally satisfy yourself...
	Then don't get married, because honestly, marriage isn't going to do that for you.
	Marriage is not about personal satisfaction.
	Marriage is about you becoming a better human being.
	That's what marriage does for you.
	The same way that that's what religion is supposed to do for you.
	That's why when people look at religion like, oh, I'm personally satisfied.
	I'm spiritually satisfied.
	I don't give a crap.
	You know what?
	God really doesn't either, because God has a bunch of things you are supposed to do that he expects of you and that are duties.
	Your spiritual fulfillment is last on his list.
	Yeah, Job wasn't particularly spiritually sad.
	By the way, I mean, you know Jesus better than I do, but it doesn't look like if he were a human, it would have been a particularly satisfying life, right?
	And if you look at Moses, Moses has a pretty miserable life.
	Moses gets crapped on by fate one million times, then dies right before he enters the land of Israel, so he never even gets to achieve his lifelong dream.
	He doesn't even get to pass on the leadership to his son.
	God says, pass it on to Joshua.
	You don't get to pass it on to your own kids.
	That's right.
	These are people who live...
	I mean, David fights civil wars with his own children.
	These are people who live hard, terrible, difficult lives.
	Because God is the God of reality.
	This is right.
	But he's also...
	I have to inject this.
	I hate to do it.
	But he's also the God of joy in all the things you're talking about.
	Actually are a great joy.
	It may be at a different level than picking up a girl in a bar and going home with her, which can be a pleasure.
	But the joy is in you reshifting your mind to meet him, not him reshifting reality.
	But that's it.
	He rewards you for that with joy.
	And I think even people like Moses, like Jesus, who live these lives of great tragedy and great difficulty, there is some kind of transcendent feeling when you have met your God It talks about Moses' face shining so strongly he has to put on a mask when he comes off of Mount Sinai because the idea is that when you have aligned...
	I mean, this is the natural law of human Catholicism.
	When you've aligned yourself with nature's God, when you've aligned yourself with the God who created you, created the cosmos, created this entire system, then that's what's supposed to give you purpose.
	That's what's supposed to give you meaning.
	And when you disconnect all that stuff and then you demand of reality that reality change to fit you, Then you are declaring war on the only thing that can make you happy.
	Because God is the God of reality.
	And when you love him, suddenly reality makes a whole bunch of sense.
	You know, it always gets me when somebody says, you know, my wife died in a plane crash and now I've lost my faith.
	And I thought, why didn't you lose your faith when somebody else's wife died?
	Because that is the world, you know.
	I think one of the great messages of the Bible, Old and New Testament, is...
	To find joy through suffering rather than in modern times we find joy, we try to find it by getting around suffering.
	And it's just not out there.
	You've got to go through it.
	But that takes patience and...
	Well, this is why the entire question when people say, well, how can you rectify the idea of a good God with suffering in the real world?
	It's because God's idea of good is not your idea of good.
	You are not God.
	And this whole idea where God is supposed to conform to your idea of what's right and good, you don't even know as much as the basic...
	It's a conglomeration of humanity that sets the price of a pencil.
	Why do you think that you know as much as God?
	By the way, God is God, you're not God, is almost the entirety of the gospel.
	I'm always trying to think, how can you get the gospel down to its simplest form?
	The way they always put it is, God is not a gumball machine.
	People who expect God to be a gumball machine, if I do X, Y, and Z, then I will get X. Or, why isn't this gumball machine working for me?
	I don't really want to put in the quarter, I'd rather put in the dime and get the gumball.
	Too bad, man.
	That's not how this works.
	So, if you are 18 and you are contemplating, Getting married.
	I do have a patented piece of marriage advice.
	I have several.
	One is two bathrooms and a king-size bed.
	I promise you can't go wrong, but you may say, but Jeremy, Jeremy, I can't afford a king-size bed, or I can't afford, eh, get married anyway, but this is really good advice, and no one will tell you this.
	Go to bed angry.
	This is my great marriage advice.
	It's not great marriage advice day to day.
	People will tell you never go to bed angry, and that's fine advice if you lose the never.
	What they should say is do everything you can not to go to bed angry.
	But in the final analysis, sometimes when you try to navigate life with another human being who is in every way different than you, where you can't even agree on the things that you think you agree about, because you're actually using the same words to mean different things, you won't figure it out for 10 more years.
	When you're in that situation, you do occasionally come to moments that you simply cannot resolve in the moment.
	And you sit in that moment of complete desperation.
	You do not know how to reconcile yourself to your spouse.
	And the best thing you can do in that moment, go to bed.
	And what I mean is, go to bed, literally.
	Because you will wake up in the morning and you will still be married.
	The beauty of marriage is that marriage is.
	You don't have to create marriage on a daily basis.
	Marriage will carry you through these problems if you lean on it as an institution given to you by God.
	The only thing you can do is break your marriage.
	So, if you reach the moment of sort of irreconcilable conflict...
	Stop trying to reconcile it and just lean into the reality of your marriage.
	Lean into the fact that tomorrow you will still be married as long as you don't do anything stupid like stop being married, which has been statistically the cause of 100% of all divorces.
	Elisha, we have one last question for the group for the night.
	Final question of the night is, I think, a question that is on all of our viewers' minds.
	Michael, do you only gym tan laundry everything else on your body besides your legs?
	And why are they so pale?
	And why is the control room showing them to me again?
	You know, I'll give you the real reason.
	I can't handle this.
	I'm so triggered.
	This is like sexual harassment.
	I'm over this.
	I'm done.
	She's gone.
	She's out of here.
	No, wait.
	Please, don't go.
	The real answer for this is men should not wear shorts.
	I am doing it for you, people.
	All right?
	This is the spring break edition, and you're going to see the only part of my body that is a little more on the white side.
	This is the white supremacy of my body right now.
	Stop stroking your legs.
	It's really nice, you know.
	But really, this is the problem.
	Tony Soprano, I think, said it.
	In The Sopranos, he said, a don is not supposed to wear shorts.
	It's not a good look.
	It's for little boys.
	For grown men, not a good look.
	Thank you very much for joining us on this, I think, rousing edition of the Daily Wire backstage.
	I want to especially thank Matt Walsh and all the people who subscribed during the broadcast today.
	We're going to be drawing a name tomorrow for someone to win a chance to come out here and see us.
	Thank you to all of our subscribers, even the ones who didn't sign up tonight.
	We appreciate you keeping Michael Knowles in giant comedic bottles of hooch.
	And we look forward to seeing you back here next time.
	Adios.
	Fake laugh.

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