It's finally here. After two straight years of Democrats screaming "Russian Collusion" the Mueller Report has been released. Is it a slam dunk for the president? How will the Left try to spin it in their favor? Is this the Thanos death-snap of the Dems' chances for a 2020 White House win?
Join this roundtable discussion featuring @Ben Shapiro, @Andrew Klavan, @Michael Knowles, and Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing, as they get to the bottom of these questions and more.
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You're about to listen to our latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, where I join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, 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.
The President of the United States is not a crook.
I mean, mostly.
Hey guys, welcome to the Daily Wire-Miller Report special coverage.
I am here, joined as always by my good friend, Ben.
We never said collusion.
Shapiro.
Michael, we never said collusion.
Knowles.
And Andrew, we never said collusion.
Clavin.
And we're going to be unpacking the events of the day.
And really, the events of the last week, it's been a remarkable news cycle, but we know that what's on everyone's mind right now, of course, is the report finally released in redacted form this morning and being debated on every cable news channel in the world as we speak.
But who wants to watch that crap when you can sit here and enjoy a little smoke and whiskey with us and pontification?
Lots of pontification.
Hey, roll the opening graphic.
We didn't fake laugh at the beginning.
We were fake laughing in our hearts.
On the inside.
I think it's such a serious, serious day in which very serious people are saying serious things.
I've never gotten more use out of my Tumblr than today.
I've been on Twitter basically since 5 in the morning so far.
It's fantastic, and you're also going to die.
Obviously, we want to jump right into talking about the report, and I think that the best way to start, it's late enough in the day that everyone knows what happened today.
The day began with the Attorney General holding a press conference that was one of the more spirited and delightful events of the Trump presidency thus far, in which he repeatedly said that there was no collusion, no collusion, no collusion, no American found by Bob Mueller to have Colluded with the Russians.
And then he also talked a little bit about the question which I think is like the second tier position of the Democrats which is obstruction.
He basically said that the report outlines ten instances of possible obstruction, that there's a little bit of disagreement maybe in spirit between Mueller and his team and the AG and Rosenstein, but that in the end there is not evidence to support a collusion charge against the president or any of his people in his administration.
Or an obstruction charge.
I'm sorry, an obstruction charge against the president or people in his administration.
Them's the facts.
Everything from that point forward is going to be the spin.
Does this completely exonerate the president, as many are saying?
Is that a factually accurate statement or merely a legally accurate statement?
Does this keep the president from having to face political troubles because of the Russian narrative?
Does this open the door in a strange way for possible impeachment proceedings instead of closing them off?
Those are the kinds of questions that I think we should jump right into.
But let's start by...
You know, the 300-word, two-minute version, each one of you, just give me your gut reaction, your fast response.
Shoot-from-the-hip response to what this—put this in context from us from the point of view of Ben Shapiro.
Well, I mean, it's what I expected.
And I've been predicting for weeks that all of the focus was going to be on obstruction, because since the bar letter, it was pretty obvious that that's where all the action was, that the Russian collusion nonsense that had been going on for two years, the suggestion that Trump was in the back room on the phone with his buddy Vlad, figuring out how to shift votes votes in Wisconsin.
All that was a bunch of crap from the very beginning.
And I think everybody knew that.
And as time went on, the Democrats looked more and more ridiculous on that.
So they shifted to obstruction.
The obstruction stuff since the beginning, I've been saying, is also overblown in the sense that it's pretty obvious that President Trump is very angry about this investigation and lashes out in random directions because of that.
And that causes him to do unwise things.
And then his advisors say, stop doing that unwise thing.
Then he stops doing the unwise thing.
And most of the instances of supposed obstruction that happened here are that.
Now, there are a couple of things that are worthwhile noting about the report itself and the structure of the report because This is the crux of it.
The crux of the argument is basically the definition of obstruction, which differs between Barr and between Mueller.
So Barr's definition of obstruction is you have to show corrupt intent, and it has to be connected to an activity that actually impedes the investigation of justice.
And that seems to be a much more traditional definition of obstruction of justice.
We actually have to do something that interferes with an investigation with corrupt intent to stop the investigation.
Mueller's definition is far broader.
He talks about you could take an action that is completely legal, but if it has corrupt intent, it suddenly becomes illegal.
He suggests that attempt to obstruct is also a thing.
So if you take an overt act toward obstruction, Obstructing and then you don't actually obstruct but you have corrupt intent that that counts as obstruction.
And this takes you to these weird places in the Mueller report where he suggests things like if Trump tweets about Paul Manafort in the middle of the Manafort trial that could theoretically be construed as obstruction of justice in one way or another.
I think that definition is too broad.
I think that the Barr definition is much more likely to be close to what can actually be prosecuted.
The second point that is worthy of note here about Mueller is that Mueller basically had four choices on what to do with the obstruction stuff.
Choice number one is he could have suggested that Trump is exonerated, there's nothing here, we're done.
Choice number two, he's not exonerated, but there's not enough evidence to prosecute, which is very often what prosecutors say, and that's basically actually what he said about collusion.
He didn't even say exonerated on collusion, although effectively he did.
He said not enough evidence to prosecute on collusion.
He says that over and over in the early parts of the report.
Choice number three is prosecute him.
And choice number four is wash my hands of it, all the evidence is in your lap, I'm going to say nothing about it, you take care of it.
And choice number four is the least justifiable of the four because that's not actually his job.
His job is to say whether the guy is prosecutable or not.
Not, here's a bunch of random information and you do it, Attorney General Barr.
And if he is going to do that...
Isn't his title special prosecutor?
Not special...
Special investigator.
That's exactly right.
And so he should be making some sort of recommendation.
This is the point Andy McCarthy made, and he's exactly right.
He should be making some sort of recommendation there.
What that says to me is that he knew full well, and the Mueller team knew full well, that they did not have enough evidence to actually push for an obstruction of justice criminal charge against the president, but they were going to lay out enough evidence that if Democrats feel like impeaching on the basis of President Trump telling people to lie to the press and telling people that they should try to fire Robert Mueller, then that's up to the Democrats.
So it looks more like a roadmap to impeachment, the second part of it, than it does look like a criminal investigation.
I want to get to the question of impeachment and potential impeachment later after everyone's had a chance to get their gut reaction.
But one follow-up to what you just said.
The attorney general has a standard for obstruction.
The special prosecutor has a standard for obstruction.
What's the legal standard for obstruction?
So the legal standard for obstruction, as I say, I think is closer to the definition put forth by William Barr, which is that it has, if I don't screw this up, a couple of elements.
It has to be an attempt to obstruct justice in an actual proceeding with corrupt intent.
Those are the three elements.
So the corrupt intent is the one that really is at issue, because there were actual proceedings.
Trump was obviously telling people to fire people.
He didn't go all the way through with it, so there's a question of how far did he actually go.
Does that count as obstruction when there's no actual impact of the obstruction?
Mueller says no.
He says if you even try and you fail, that that's a crime also.
But the corrupt intent is really what it comes down to.
So there are two plausible reads.
Unlike in the Hillary Clinton investigation where...
Intent is not an element of the crime when it comes to taking classified material and putting it on your homebrew server.
That is not an actual element of the crime.
She didn't have to intend to expose that to prying eyes.
My wife used to work at the VA. When she was working at the VA, if she took classified material out to her car, if somebody had grabbed that, it wouldn't have mattered what her intent was.
She would have...
They had to pay some sort of penalty or go to jail.
But James Stone was sort of superimposed intent as a standard.
That's right.
Here, intent is the actual core of the issue.
And that's why there are two...
I want to be fair.
I really do want to be as fair as I can in analyzing this report.
I think there are two plausible reads of Trump's behavior.
One, I think, is more plausible than the other, and that's the one that says there's no obstruction.
Yes, there is obstruction.
Plausible read is the reason that Trump was doing all this stuff, talking about firing Mueller, firing Comey, doing all this stuff is because he thought that the investigation was eventually going to dig down to issues for him legally, and thus he was stepping in and trying to stop the investigation.
There's not tons of evidence for that, but I suppose you could read what's there that way, maybe, if you stretch it.
The more plausible evidence is, this is what Trump does, right?
Trump gets pissed, and then Trump tells people to fire people, and then he backs off firing people.
I'm bewildered by people who are mystified by Trump's behavior here.
He was saying it out loud on Twitter.
He was saying it out loud on Lester Holtz.
He was pissed off that they wouldn't exonerate him, and so he fired Comey.
And then he was pissed off that Mueller wouldn't just leave him alone.
And he's like, well, maybe I should fire Mueller also.
And that's all that happened here.
And by the way, he has the constitutional authority to fire both Comey and Mueller.
Are you suggesting the President of the United States has a loose tongue?
Come on, Ben.
Michael.
This is actually the important point.
The report literally exonerates Trump in the sense that Bob Mueller doesn't come to a conclusion on the question of obstruction, but we're not just here to leave academic debates to be had among the public.
It's up to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to come to a conclusion.
They came to a conclusion and He is practically exonerated.
But he's exonerated in a more important sense for all of us.
People who hate Trump still hate Trump.
People who like Trump still like Trump.
People who were in the middle, maybe they got swayed a little bit.
It exonerates Trump in the sense that throughout this report it shows he's gotten better at his job.
The report spells out in excruciating detail that early on he made bad decisions.
He made rash decisions, reckless decisions, and it led to some trouble in the report.
But then you fast forward toward the end of it.
What happened?
He didn't fire Rod Rosenstein.
Very good decision not to.
He appointed William Barr.
Very competent, very credible.
He was the AG in the early 90s.
This is a very serious man.
He allowed the investigation to play out.
He didn't ultimately push to fire Bob Mueller.
And look what we got out of it.
We got an exoneration.
We got those great memes, the greatest day of Donald Trump's Twitter feed.
Politically it played out very well.
Legally it played out very well.
And I think it maintains, as much as it can, the credibility of the administration and of the DOJ. Andrew?
You know, I got to use a little bit of my novelist superpower here because I want to talk about the picture of Trump's character that came across.
Both you guys hit on it a little bit, but it really struck me hard.
The two things in the report that really leapt out at me.
One was Mueller kind of mulling over, if you will, the obstruction case, the case of obstruction.
And he says almost in this bemused tone, he says all of this happened In plain sight.
The things that Trump does, he does in public.
He goes on TV and says them.
You know, and it's very hard to prove criminal intent when a guy is sitting on television saying, you know, I'm innocent.
Stop doing this to me.
You're fired.
I hate you.
You know, it's very hard to say, oh, my God, this guy's plotting against...
And the other was the moment that, of course, got a lot of press of Trump hearing that a special counsel had been appointed and saying, this is the end of my presidency.
I'm effed.
You know?
And I thought that at the end of this, I liked Trump more because he is exactly who we think he is.
There is nothing hidden about this man.
He's a bit of a carny barker.
He's a bit of a liar.
But he's also a guy who really does want to do a good job as president.
He wants us to like him because he fixes things.
He's a person.
He's exactly the person we knew we elected.
Donald Trump is the guy who puts pictures of himself with the stripper that he paid off.
He'll stand and pose in front of a picture of himself with the stripper that he made up.
He's an open book.
He was talking to the French.
He's an open book.
He was talking about the French, about rebuilding Notre Dame, and I was picturing Notre Dame with his big Trump across the top.
And, you know, when you think about this, just for a minute, in terms of politics.
You have Barack Obama, who's this guy who pretends to be the Messiah, but he's just a Chicago Paul.
You have Hillary Clinton, who pretends she's talking about the good of America, and she's this desiccated ruin of a corrupt human being.
And then you have Trump.
Who's Trump?
And it's like, there's something great about that.
Well, that's why, there was that one line where he says, listen, why isn't my AG, Jeff Sessions, like Eric Holder?
Or Bobby Kennedy.
And it's like, okay, that's fair.
I mean, you know, like he's wrong, but fair.
I know, exactly.
He's like, there's nothing phony about the guy, except that he's a phony, but he's an open phony.
And I think it's just, there's something in politics that is incredibly refreshing about this.
So, he's an authentic liar as opposed to an inauthentic liar.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, he has a picture of all the lies that he told right on his wall.
It's a very good lie.
That was a great one.
I remember that one really well.
So, If the president's ever looking for a new special prosecutor, you know where he could turn?
Zip recruiter.
What a great segue that was.
I'm getting better.
ZipRecruiter sponsors this show, and we owe them a serious advert.
Talk about it, Zuru.
And it's weird when you look at the people we've hired that we're advertising ZipRecruiter.
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I do have to thank the Russians for hacking the Daily Wire job board and getting me into this place.
Well, our listeners right now can get ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address, or at least try it for free.
And we also love it in all aspects of our business.
Also, it's just, I mean, a wise old man just told you.
That you need to try ZipRecruiter.
The Gandalf of the Daily Wire.
That's exactly right.
And if that's not enough for you, I don't know what is.
So try them out at ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.
Yeah, we hire a lot of people at the Daily Wire.
Turnover is unfortunately high because Ben and I rule with an iron fist.
And ZipRecruiter is a great term.
Because I tell you to fire people, and unlike Trump's advisors, you're like, okay.
If that were true, Knowles would definitely not be true.
So, interesting that you, I mean, a lot of similarity in your takes on the situation.
I rarely agree with Drew.
I actually do think that there's a certain charm to the fact that Trump is Trump.
You know, I thought it was funny when everybody was in a lather a week or two ago about Trump visiting Mount Vernon and saying that if George Washington were smart, he would have put his name on it.
That was great, that was great.
Said his name was still famous.
Yeah, so we would remember him.
Yeah, so we would remember old George.
See, I think that Trump in that statement is both serious and kidding.
I think that he's serious in that as a real estate mogul, he thinks...
Oh, you know, people drive by this all the time.
They don't remember the old dead guy.
Yeah, who's Bernie?
Who's Bernie?
Who's Mr.
Bernie?
My favorite was when he talked about how the slats didn't fit correctly and how he would build it better now.
Right!
Because that was built in like 1750.
Yeah, that's right.
That'd be why right now.
We learned a thing or two about building slats in several hundred years.
I want to talk a little bit about this impeachment question, because the president's legal troubles are over.
You say he was completely exonerated.
I would push back on that.
He was practically exonerated, is what I mean.
He was legally exonerated in this moment, absolutely certain.
It's a victory for the president.
He deserves a victory.
I do think, if we look back at the history of how this came to be, that it was an unfair hit by Democrats from day one against the president.
To say that it completely exonerates him, we don't know.
None of us sitting here know what did or didn't take place.
The report talks about how they used encrypted apps at the time to have conversations that we'll never have access to.
And we have...
Listen, in our country, you're innocent until proven guilty.
So, legally, the president has been completely exonerated, completely...
This is behind him.
But his political worries are a different thing, because impeachment is not a legal proceeding.
It's a political procedure.
Well, it's both legal and political.
It's supposed to have a legal aspect and a political aspect, but these days, does it?
I don't know.
You don't have to have criminal grounds for impeachment is the point, right?
High crimes and misdemeanors are poorly defined.
Right.
I mean, it can be whatever you decide it is today.
Now, Democrats would be fools to move on this.
I think so, too.
I agree with you.
Because the American public are not up for this.
They are tired of this.
They are bored with it.
You know, they want to know what the outcome was because, I mean, this is infinity war, right?
I mean, like, this is the culmination of two years of the MCU being built out here.
And then finally you get this report.
But after this, I don't think Americans really want to hear that much about it.
I think Americans are bored with it and they want to move on to 2020.
And in terms of politics, the obstruction thing is almost impossible.
The obstruction case is almost impossible to make if there's no crime Underlying crime.
That's what Barr was saying.
I'm talking about politically.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And also, there's no great narrative here for Democrats.
So who's the victim exactly?
Don McGahn?
Robert Mueller?
Robert Mueller got to finish his job.
Don McGahn stuck around at the White House.
Jeff Sessions eventually left, but they don't like Jeff Sessions, so why do they care?
There's no great story for Democrats to tell because collusion was about Trump not just being bad at his job or corrupt.
Collusion was about him being a traitor.
And that, of course, fell apart.
Now you're going to make the case that he's a doofus or that he's corrupt and that he tries to manipulate the legal system.
He's Trump.
This is a guy who openly says things like, before I was a politician, I used to try to pay off politicians to do what I wanted.
This is a guy who goes out and admits crimes in public.
And so the American people have already decided on this.
I mean, I said to someone earlier today, everything, like, all this stuff is already baked into the cake.
I mean, old shoes, rat feces, it's all in there, man.
It's all in the cake.
And we all either like the cake or we don't like the cake.
And we're all okay with the cake or we're not okay with the cake.
And when we compare that cake to Bernie Sanders, that's really going to be the question of 2020.
So we agree that Democrats would be foolish to pursue impeachment.
But there's a wing of the Democratic Party that will almost force it, right?
Because if you're AOC or you're Ilhan Omar or you're Rashida Tlaib, And that's your wing of the party.
And you have to make a populist appeal as to why the old guard Democrats are no longer in touch with the Ute of America, then this is the move that they will make.
I mean, AOC, did you see that clip of her earlier this week asked about impeachment?
They said, yes, of course I would impeach.
And they said, on what grounds?
They said, emoluments.
They said, name three.
She goes, emoluments.
And then they go, well, what's the second?
She goes, tax fraud.
There's been no allegation of tax fraud.
And then they're like, and what would the third be?
And she goes, I'd stick with tax fraud.
It was like Rick Perry with the three departments.
She had nothing.
But she knows that the right answer for the base is, got to push for impeachment.
And she said we should impeach him for the tax law passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the president.
That's somehow a high crime or misdemeanor.
I mean, the woman's an idiot, to be honest.
But there are some points to be won here against the sort of mainstream Democratic Party, if you're on the wings, by saying that they are insufficiently woke and insufficiently committed to the cause.
In the same way that there are a lot of people who are scoring points off of Mitch McConnell during the government shutdown in 2013, suggesting that he was insufficiently committed to ending Obamacare.
And it's like, okay, well, he's a cuck, that Mitch McConnell.
Now, of course, you love him because he's giving you justices.
But there was that move.
And so I think that you could see that move inside the Democratic Party.
Nancy Pelosi thinks she's got this thing locked down.
She doesn't have her party locked down, not by any stretch of the imagination.
I totally agree.
She is basically whistling past the graveyard.
She's lost all control.
Plus, she's been taking these shots, very thinly veiled shots at AOC, at the freshman congresswoman.
So it's not as though their party is on solid ground or unified at all.
I think impeachment...
I would be surprised if they don't push for it.
I think Pelosi will stymie it.
But that's going to be another divisive thing for the party.
And every 2020 presidential candidate, of course, is going to have to endorse impeachment because otherwise...
I want to know, though, what happens to these guys who are selling...
Not the obstruction narrative, but the collusion narrative.
Adam Schiff.
I've called him a McCarthyite, and I don't use those terms like they do on CNN, just throw them out there.
He's a literal McCarthyite.
He's a literal guy who says, I have in my hand proof of collusion.
But I can't tell it to you.
And then suddenly it's gone.
Well, they never said collusion.
Only William Barr ever said collusion.
They've shifted.
Those goalposts are moving dramatically to obstruction of justice.
I mean, those moved so quickly.
It made your head spin.
It was like two years of he's a Russian agent, and now it's he was mean to Bob Mueller.
I'm sorry.
They overshot the mark by so much here.
And here's the thing.
As we've been saying for years at this point, all the Democrats had to do was not be insane.
That's all they had to do.
I know, I know.
And they just can't do it, right?
They could have just spent the last couple of years saying about Trump and Team Trump, why is he so nice to Putin all the time?
Like, why is he doing that?
And why did he lie to the American people about Trump Tower?
Because he did.
He lied to the American people about still negotiating for Trump Tower Moscow.
And then he went out publicly and lied about it.
And that's true.
He did lie about it.
You may find it refreshingly charming that he's open about the fact that he's dishonest.
What I find refreshing is he goes and he says, like, you know, go fire Mueller.
And the guy doesn't do it, and he doesn't do it.
You know, I mean, it's kind of like he's got a...
He's rash.
He's a New Yorker.
He's a New Yorker.
But he is deeply dishonest.
And the report makes clear that he's deeply dishonest.
That he did instruct people to lie to the press.
And you might say, yeah, the press stinks.
Deserve it, yeah.
The press deserve it.
Nevertheless, that is saying, on the pages of your paper, when you speak to the American public, do not tell them the truth.
That was the goal.
Well, that's why whenever he has said fake news...
I've said, yes, there is such a thing as fake news, but I don't trust Trump's application of the label.
Trump will apply the label of fake news to anything he doesn't like, and then he'll send people out like Sarah Huckabee Sanders to lie about it, and I think that's wrong.
Can we still just say it's wrong?
Let's just do that.
It's wrong, right?
There's no question.
It's not...
We're not dealing with right and wrong.
We know right from wrong.
And of course, you're right about all that.
What I'm talking about is Trump goes on TV and says, I'm lying to you now and I'm going to keep lying to you because that's what I want to do.
Whereas Barack Obama descends from heaven and then sends Susan Rice out.
So it just, is there something charming about a rogue?
That's fair.
That's totally fair.
So, if you're watching this right now and you want to ask us a question, go over to dailywire.com, become a subscriber, dailywire.com slash subscribe.
You could afford yourself, if you become an annual subscriber, this delightful Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr, which runneth over on a day like today.
And you can also ask us questions.
Alicia's going to come in and bring us the first round of questions right now.
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Yeah, that's exactly right.
So, Alicia, come on in here.
We want to hear from some of our daily life subscribers.
Try not to kill her, baby.
I'm two of us, so take that.
Wow, guys, it's not even that smoky this evening.
I didn't know you were in this city.
I just assumed we were beaming you in from some other city.
This is great.
From God's country?
This is great to have you here.
The middle of Oklahoma?
I don't know, the aura of the room has just changed radically.
For the better of me.
Yeah, that's right.
Everybody's like, wait a second.
What happened there?
So, I'm sure that Daily Wire subscribers, like everybody else in the country, have a lot to say on a date like today.
What are they writing in with?
Everyone is wondering what the hell is happening.
Can I say that?
By the way, I'm really annoyed.
When I found out I got to be in here, I thought that I was going to have my Nazi anthem entering music from the greatest musical of all time.
Oh, yeah.
That's fascists are everywhere.
For those who missed it, Maggie Haberman was very upset that apparently the Marine Corps band at the White House was playing Edelweiss while they were introducing William Barr or something.
Like, why is that?
I think she misunderstood that movie.
It's a song written by two Jews about a guy resisting Nazis, and the song's bad because she saw the recapitulated version on Man in the High Castle.
She watched it backwards.
I don't know what she did.
Anyway.
I'm raising Nazis, though, because my two oldest girls are going to be singing Do-Re-Mi at their school variety show next week.
I'll hide in my attic.
Yeah.
I think everybody really wants to know, like, you tune into Fox News, they're saying one thing, you tune into CNN, they're saying another, so what the heck is going on?
So the answer is neither of the two things that are being said.
So don't, really.
So there are a lot of people on Fox News who are going with the, he's totally exonerated, he did great, Trump's been awesome throughout, totally honest, honest, he's off the hook.
And then everybody on CNN's like, he's going to hell.
And not only is he going to hell, he's guilty of all crimes, including murder.
And it's like, none of that is true.
Okay, so I know you're going to do your Fox News.
You can do that in a second, Knowles.
But here is the reality of the situation.
There are 220 pages about him telling people in his administration to lie to other people, including the public.
That ain't great for him.
I mean, that's not great.
Like, he's not going to jail over it.
He's not going to be prosecuted over it.
And so that part's crappy.
And then the part that's good is that there's no collusion.
And also, he's not going to jail over it.
So there's the upside.
There's the downside.
There's a short story, Andrew.
The left is spreading an actual piece of fake news about this, though, which they're taking out the line that you mentioned earlier, which is he found out the special counsel had been appointed and he said, oh no, my presidency's over, I'm effed.
And they're taking this out as evidence that he committed a crime he felt guilt.
They don't read not two sentences down in that paragraph where he says, everyone tells me when a special counsel gets appointed, your presidency's over, it stops your whole agenda, you can't get anything done.
That is what he was referring to.
And the other aspect I Which means, by the way, that Fox News is closer to the truth than CNN, as usual.
And the reason that I think celebration is called for is, obviously, a two-year investigation into anybody, much less Donald Trump, is going to turn up a lot of dirt, a lot of ugly things about everybody that they investigate.
But my question is, on exoneration, how could this have turned out any better for Donald Trump, given the fact that he is Donald Trump?
Right, exactly.
Is there any way this turns out better for him?
No, that's absolutely fair.
No, that's right.
All right.
Matt wants to know, does this report make Trump more or less likely to win in 2020?
Oh, I think more.
Right this minute, I would actually...
I never bet on elections because I've seen Shapiro do it.
It's a disaster.
It's ugly.
But right this minute, I would actually put money on Trump when I see what the Democratic Party is doing to itself.
And when I see they've put themselves in this absurd position because no matter what Trump did during this investigation, I believe this investigation should never have taken place.
I do not believe the idea of Trump gathering with Putin in a huddle, like on the football field, and saying, here's what we're going to do, that was a complete fantasy from the beginning.
And I do not think that the, as far as I can see so far, what they call the predicate for the investigation, doesn't seem to have been sound.
I'm not yet ready to say that, I think there's a scandal here, but I'm not quite ready to say that I know there's a scandal here.
And I think that it just makes Trump look very sympathetic, even though all the information, all the bad information that we're hearing, we knew already.
We already knew who he was.
But there's something about this that really gets him off the hook and makes him look like beleaguers.
I think there's one other piece of this, because I agree with you, to my chagrin.
That's the end of your career.
I think it helps them in another way, too, which is that, listen, 30% of the country are so angry about Trump that they'll hold on to this.
He definitely obstructed it.
You're never going to reach them, but they were never going to vote for him anyway.
And then one of the things about the Trump presidency that really is offensive to me is that there's 30% of the people on the right who historically would have disagreed with Trump on a great many things, who now today, if Trump wakes up tomorrow and says the sky is red, they will be all in that the sky is red, and you're a cuck if you say that the sky isn't red.
I don't like that.
You trying to say the sky isn't red?
Nah, he didn't say it, Michael.
He didn't say it.
He said it if he said it.
I'm offended by that.
Nevertheless, it is.
Those people are going to vote for Trump no matter what happens.
There is still some middle in the country.
And what this report does for people in the middle, it isn't just that it exonerates the president from his legal troubles.
It immunizes him against future accusations from the left over the next two years.
No matter what, they could find out that there are 500 bodies buried under Trump Tower and that Whoever murdered them wrote his name on them and then gilded it.
But were they shot in the middle of Fifth Avenue by Donald Trump?
It will not matter because everything will look like sour grapes after a two-year investigation by the Democrats turned up nothing.
You don't understand the construction business in New York, I think.
I think that what it showed is that after Barr released his letter, the polls really did not shift, either for or against Trump.
And I don't think the polls are going to shift for or against Trump after this thing.
I think that it's just another thing that's another obstacle out of his way.
It was something that was looming out there that theoretically could have hurt him, and now it's a roadblock that he's avoided.
I don't think that it significantly upticks his chances at the presidency or downgrades his chances at the presidency, other than if you actually were counting on that deus ex machina finishing him, as so many Democrats were.
But I guess what I'm saying is that this prevents future accusations from becoming major impediments.
I mean, I think that's true.
I do think that's true.
And I think that's why you're seeing the Democrats immediately shift to an attack on Barr.
Right.
The suggestion is that Barr actually should prosecute him and that somehow he's betrayed the message of Mueller by not prosecuting him.
I agree that's going nowhere.
But don't you think also there's this thing, I mean, we all know this, that the one thing leftists know, the one thing they know, is that we're evil.
And when I saw, you know, we were, Alicia and I were talking about this on the Another Kingdom show, that when I saw that Reagan was right about a lot of things, it suddenly made me think, oh wait, that the people who were saying he was right weren't evil.
The guys at National Review weren't evil.
What are they saying?
What are they talking about?
So when you see that Trump was not a Russian spy, all that stuff about treason that they were talking, John Brennan was spewing as if...
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
All that stuff is gone.
Now people start to look around and say, well, things are going pretty well, actually.
The economy's going well.
There's more jobs in my state than there was.
It's an opportunity for Trump to redirect.
So here's a question.
Do you think that Trump should, in fact, swivel and turn this into investigate the investigators?
Or do you think that he should actually turn to other issues that Americans care about now?
I think he should do both.
I do not think he should let these people off the hook.
I think this investigation was wrongly done.
I think that for the Obama administration to send what, no matter what you call them, are spies into the opposition's...
You know, they could have just gone to Trump and said, you know, the Russians are coming.
You know, you want to look out for them.
They didn't do that.
I thought of electronic surveillance and undercover operatives as spying.
I thought, how do you define spying, really?
So this does raise a question as to what you think the Trump-Russia investigation was and what it became.
So there's two theories that I find plausible.
One is that it was initiated under bad auspices and it remained bad.
And one is that it was initiated under kind of normal auspices and then it got bad.
Because by the end, when they were, I mean, one of the key elements that is very obvious from the Mueller report, the Steele dossier is mentioned, I think, twice.
I think it's pretty obvious that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page...
And all the members of McCabe, Comey, a lot of these members got caught up in their own—they were sniffing their own farts in the car.
And then they got too high on their own fumes, I think.
And it really put them in—but the question is whether that means that systemically this was initiated from outside by James Clapper.
Was this initiated from the outside by somebody in the Obama administration?
Because you do read the report.
And there's an awful lot of contact between Trump people and Russians.
And there is a lot of...
And Trump was saying weird stuff and lying about Trump, Taylor, and Moscow.
So I don't find it completely implausible that somebody in the FBI was like, you know, this is weird.
We should probably check this out.
And then they start to check it out.
And then within weeks, Peter Strzok picks it up and he's like, Trump's a bad guy.
Clearly he's guilty.
Now let's just start pushing as hard as we can on what we've got.
In fairness, all throughout the election, one of the things that concerned me the most about Trump, and there were several things, I've not been shy about it, His unrelenting praise or equivocation in regard to Vladimir Putin.
It was unseemly.
It was unique sort of in an American experience.
He was more consistent about that than he was about building a wall throughout the election.
But in retrospect, I have a lot more context.
Now I've seen that Donald Trump routinely uses flattery as a mechanism for dealing with strong men.
And now I understand that even though he was lying to us about it, Donald Trump was still hoping to do some business in Moscow and didn't think that he would become president.
He thought it was much more likely that he would leave this election needing to go build a tower in Moscow.
There's even the political angle.
There are many Republicans who view Russia as the geopolitical threat to the United States.
There are many Republicans who view China as the political threat to the United States.
Trump is clearly in the latter category.
He talked about it on the campaign trail.
And that gives context for some of the Putin stuff.
Nevertheless, we didn't have all of this context two years ago.
And it's not unfair to think that two years ago other people within the government were as concerned about the strangeness of the way that Trump spoke of Vladimir Putin as I was.
This is one of those rare cases where Ben and Jeremy are more generous than I would be.
I really feel that these guys panicked.
I think they saw this wrecking ball, this loose cannon, and he is a loose cannon, coming toward A deep state, and it is a deep state, and they thought this man has no right to come in here and mess with our institutions and mess with our power, and he's got to be stopped.
And I think they oversaw it.
When you listen to James Comey, you hear it.
You hear what he's saying, that it was up to me to defend our nation.
It was up to him to do nothing except investigate and recommend whether somebody should be prosecuted or not.
All I'm saying is maybe we ought to wait.
I'm seeing some people immediately jump to the conclusion, and I didn't jump to the conclusion on Mueller, and I think that was right, and I don't want to jump to the conclusion the other way.
I am absolutely willing to be proved wrong, but the fact that he said things about Putin that I seriously disagree with, I think Putin is a stone gangster, and I don't think anybody should deal with him, including Obama when he sent him the reset button, all that stuff, I thought was nonsense.
But who investigates Using the FBI, a U.S. presidential candidate, on the basis of not liking what he says.
It's insane.
We also haven't made enough of the FISA abuse.
The number of FISA applications that are rejected is quite different than the number of FISA applications that are granted.
And these initially were all rejected.
They were in that very small category that were rejected.
They were flimsy.
They were based on bizarre, contrived evidence.
This is why I think it demands that President Trump It goes after this.
One, because you've got to attack, and he's an attack dog, and he does well when he's attacking.
But also, people are rightly really angry about this.
They're really angry that there seems to have been a bureaucratic attempt to overturn a presidential election.
Whether that is true or not, at least it has to be investigated.
I think what we all agree about is what this became.
And the only thing that we disagree about is what was the initiation.
And even to the extent that I say, use the word disagree.
We don't know yet.
Exactly.
I'm just waiting for evidence.
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You know something about Bravo Company and rifle ownership generally that I've never said before publicly, but I'll admit to you guys, I pride myself on, since I've moved to L.A., I've created gun owners.
Like, I take a bunch of people.
Michael Knowles, I think you.
You took me?
Yeah, yeah.
Many people, I've taken them to purchase their first firearm.
And one thing that I've never talked about is that I actually don't like shooting.
I grew up in Texas.
I've, you know, among the wild cottontails and jackrabbits of West Texas, I am known as Jeremia Sel Muerte.
LAUGHTER You couldn't have put more rounds downrange than I have in my lifetime.
But the truth is I don't love it.
For some people it's a wonderful hobby.
For me it's an awesome responsibility.
And I think that it is the responsibility of free men and women to own rifles.
And in particular to own the unpopular rifles.
Because you have to make a stand that this is our right.
And the right...
In order for the right to exist, it's like in copyright law, which we deal with so often in our business.
If you don't enforce copyright, you don't own copyright.
And it's the same.
I own black rifles so that I can preserve the rights of others to own black rifles.
It requires us to step up and take part in that responsibility.
We should take it seriously.
But you don't have to be a sportsman to understand why companies like Bravo, company manufacturing, are so important to the preservation of our...
And I have to say, on the other side of that, to paraphrase The Simpsons, the first time you ever showed me how to shoot an AR-15, I felt like God must feel when he shoots an AR-15.
Yeah, it was great.
By the way, quick note, everybody go subscribe right now at dailywire.com.
If you're not subscribing, there's only one reason we're here, guys, and that's to get you to subscribe.
And if they subscribe, then they can ask questions.
Excellent!
Wonderful.
Well done.
Have any of them asked us questions?
How about that segue?
I like it.
All right, Michael, you know, Drew, you just mentioned some 2020 presidential stuff.
So Michael, a brilliant subscriber, wants to know, do you think that the JV Democratic contenders are hoping for a brokered convention?
Ooh.
How do brokered conventions work?
Because the Democrats, in order to steal the election from Bernie Sanders, they invoked these superdelegates, but then they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and they changed their rules around superdelegates, which I don't understand all the implications.
Second ballot superdelegates kick in.
Second ballot superdelegates.
So if it makes it to ballot two.
Right.
Then superdelegates kick in.
But they don't really want that.
What they really don't want is a position where Bernie Sanders has a plurality of the delegates, which is probably likely to happen at this point.
Because remember, for Democrats, it's not a winner-take-all system in virtually all of these states.
You win a percentage.
It's just delegates who are based on the percentage of the vote.
So it could presumably be much closer.
Right.
Oh, yeah.
You could certainly see a circumstance where Bernie wins, say, 40% of the vote in California.
Everybody else splits the other 60% of the vote.
He does the same thing in New York.
He does the same thing in Massachusetts.
You could see Bernie pretty easily walking away with about 40% of the delegates and the other 60% being split among four or five different candidates, particularly, say, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and some of the others who are in the race.
And then it gets to the first ballot, and Bernie is the frontrunner.
And then the question is, do they hand it to him?
Or does he just play kingmaker and he has to go to the—because what they don't want is the repeat, right?
What happens if in the second ballot, he doesn't win first ballot, and second ballot, suddenly Joe Biden wins the nomination on the back of the superdelegates all saying, we can't have Bernie be our nominee.
And then all the Bernie bros are just like, well, screw this.
I'm not going to vote.
See how you like Trump for a second term.
It's a problem for him.
And I'm not sure that anyone wants a brokered convention because of how ugly it would get, how brutal it would get.
Except for us.
Except for us, it would be the greatest thing ever.
But I do think that some people are running for president who are not actually running for president.
I think it's very possible that Pete Buttigieg is running for governor right now, and he's doing it by running for president.
He's not running for governor.
He can't win governor in Indiana.
He wants a VP slot.
He certainly couldn't have won governor when he was just a lowly South Bend mayor, but I'm not totally convinced that he can't mount a campaign against Eric Holcomb with all of that free press that he's gotten.
I agree.
I think Holcomb still wins it.
Indiana's trending real strong, right?
Indiana, yeah.
Indiana is still a good holdout.
Kirsten Gillibrand, I think, is obviously running for VP. I don't think she is so crazed.
Well, what if it's some boring white guy who wins the nomination?
So you're going to pick a boring white chick?
Yeah.
It is really funny, though, how the left loves to be, yes, all women, but none of the women are polling well that are running for president on the Democratic ticket.
All these all white guys, yeah.
You know, Kamala is polling better than all the other people who aren't Beto, Biden, and Bernie.
All the other white guys, you know?
But I still...
Beto, Biden, Bernie, and Buttigieg.
And Buttigieg, and Buttigieg.
Buttigieg is now polling Beto.
Beto, by the way, is taking it right on the chin.
I mean, Buttigieg, I think he's toast.
I mean, Buttigieg has stolen all of his thunder.
And it's pretty amazing.
I mean...
I guess that a fake Hispanic name and speaking Spanish does not trump speaking Norwegian.
I think that no one deserves to lose more than Beto.
Because this concept that the Democrats have grabbed a hold of, that you should be able to fail your way up in electoral politics.
I love this concept.
You have to win an election in order to then win a bigger election.
No, but shh, shh.
Noles will be president in 2020.
Yeah.
Best-selling author and president of the United States.
Please, God, no.
Alicia.
You want some more?
I want some more.
Alright, Akras asks, criminal investigation ought to start with a crime and be followed to a person, not vice versa.
How are counter-intel investigations supposed to be targeted?
So counterintelligence investigations, just legally speaking, are about looking into nefarious activities on the parts of foreigners, presumably.
And that's why this was begun as a counterintelligence investigation.
Now, the accusation is that it was started as a counterintelligence investigation specifically because the intelligence community could not come up with a crime to pin on Trump.
So instead, what they did...
Because it initiated it as counterintelligence, specifically so they could go searching around for something nefarious.
And then once there was a nexus with Trump, then they sort of came after Trump.
But doesn't a special counsel have to have a specific crime?
I mean, shouldn't Mueller have actually turned this job down?
So this is what McCarthy argues, right?
Andrew McCarthy's been saying for a long time that the scope of the special counsel is not a counterintelligence investigation.
The scope of the special counsel is criminal activity that's actually taking place.
Now, the argument, I guess, to be made is that The accusation was criminal conspiracy by members of the Trump campaign by the time that Mueller came around.
But this does go to the initiation of the actual investigation in the first place prior to Mueller.
I mean, even Mueller in the report says, I'm not going to use the word collusion because it's not a crime.
Right, exactly.
But that really does bring up the question of whether he should have taken the job in the first place and said, you know, I can't fulfill the mandate of the special counsel.
Right.
I mean, you can investigate whether a crime occurred or not, I suppose.
Especially if it's obstruction at that point, right?
Because at that point, he was really appointed in the aftermath of the Comey firing.
So then it was, the accused crime was obstruction, which is why I think there's so much focus on obstruction.
Again, I don't think Mueller did a terrible job with this report or anything.
Well, you know, I actually, I half agree with that.
Yeah.
On the collusion stuff, I thought he did a fine job.
But Trump has that magical power to make people betray themselves, betray their own principles.
And Mueller did two things.
That I think really indicate how much he hated Trump and that he actually lost it a little bit.
One is what you mentioned before, is that his job was to say yes or no, prosecute or don't prosecute.
And when he said, I'm not going to decide about obstruction, I thought it was just, I hate this guy so much that I can't admit the fact that I got nothing.
I cannot go after this guy in criminal intent.
I don't have criminal intent.
And I think that was really embarrassing for him.
It indicated that Trump got to him personally.
That's one read.
It could also be a kind of cowardice.
Well, okay.
He didn't want to end up like Comey, coming to a conclusion.
But the other thing was the raid on Roger Stone.
And I have no sympathy for Roger Stone, the Michael Cones of this world, the people I really dismiss out of hand.
But you don't drop out of the sky like stormtroopers, with CNN waiting in the wings to film it.
Coincidentally.
Coincidentally.
They did this to Lori Loughlin.
They showed up with SWAT to get Felicity Huffman.
Really, they do this.
Every time they think that somebody's inside destroying documents, or possibly destroying documents, they show up with SWAT. But what was Roger Stone going to be doing?
Destroy documents.
About what?
I'm not saying that this is a great procedure, but I don't think it's specific to Roger Stone.
I disagree, Ben, because Roger Stone was famously going around for six months before his arrest saying, I can't make plans this weekend because I'll probably be arrested.
Right.
I'm not suggesting, again, that this generalized procedure is good.
All I'm saying is it's not specific to Roger Stone.
They did it to frickin' Felicity Huffman over a college admissions scandal.
Yeah, well, have you ever seen Shifty Eyes?
Isn't she married to Bill Macy?
He's kind of a strange fella.
I'm just saying that there was something in this about...
The first one, I'm with you.
There's something in this that hinted that Trump got to Mueller at some level, and yet, I thought, all in all, he did a fair, honest job for someone who hated the guy he was going after and couldn't get his hands on him.
One more question, Alicia.
All right.
John K. wants to know, why is it when you ask Democrats to live by their own policy proposals, they always punt?
Because their policy proposals suck, man.
Yeah.
Because who wants to live under that crap?
Of course.
Nobody wants to live under that crap.
That's the best thing about Bernie doing the whole, I wrote a best-selling book.
It's like, yeah, join the rest of us in this room.
The moment for me that would have ended...
Anybody else's career but Bernie's is when they asked him, why you didn't just pay the taxes you think you should pay?
And there was that long, long moment when he couldn't answer, and then he said, well, what about Trump?
And I thought, that's not an answer.
No, first he went after Martha McCallum.
First he said to Martha McCallum, why don't you do it?
And then Martha McCallum was like, I didn't propose a wild tax.
What the hell are you talking about?
It's amazing.
He has generated this durability.
That's pretty impressive.
Because he believes what he's saying.
The dirty little secret about Bernie is that Bernie is exactly the same as every other Democrat.
That's the actual dirty secret about Bernie Sanders, is that he says Medicare for all.
And okay, great, it's very radical in all this.
But he knows in his heart that's never getting done.
He knows that this is going to be, at best, an incremental plan.
And when Bernie does this routine, "I hate capitalism so bad, there's the rich and the poor and all this routine." The truth is that in the past, 20 years ago, he used to still say things like, "Yeah, capitalism generates a lot of wealth." Now he avoids saying it because it's the only distinguishing mark.
It's the only distinguishing mark.
They are all promoting Norway.
They're all promoting Denmark.
So what distinguishes Bernie from everybody else?
That he got there first?
I mean, I guess that's a pitch, but his real pitch, and everybody knows it, and this is why they got so mad when people mentioned he was a millionaire, and then he couldn't handle it, and they were like, how dare you target Bernie over that?
He's a democratic socialist, not a socialist.
The reason they got mad is because they understand that his real pitch is that capitalism is inherently bad, the same way that AOC's pitch is that capitalism is inherently bad.
But AOC is an idiot, and Sanders is a true believer, and I think that that is a difference.
That's possible.
I'm sorry, Michael.
This is a unique strength of Trump, though, just from a campaign perspective, is because Trump is, what you see is what you get with him.
And so with the Democrats right now, there's such a gulf between the appearance and the reality.
Even in the way their proposals are pitched, Medicare for all is very popular.
And then you get into any specific, and the approval ratings plummet to the ground.
This, obviously, Kamala Harris wants to take our guns.
She's got a gun.
She's got armed bodyguards.
Beto and Bernie want to take all our money.
They underpay on their taxes, and they don't give any money to charity.
That gulf is so big.
Trump is just this bundle of honest, dishonest guys.
Authenticity.
Authenticity.
I've got to stop here for a second.
The best clip of the last year was Beto O'Rourke talking about his charitable giving.
I loved it.
It was the best.
The best.
It was a narcissism off between Beto and AOC this week.
Between Beto suggesting that his very presence...
Is the charity?
And it's such an easy answer, right?
Somebody says something to you like, you know, my friend gave more charity.
And you're like, good for your friend, man.
That's awesome.
Like, I wish that I had given more.
I aspire to be more like that.
Exactly.
How hard is that answer?
It's so easy.
But instead he's like, I'm not home with my kids right now.
I'm here with you schmucks.
Shouldn't you appreciate me?
I mean, look at me.
But Beto's only the best because AOC's clip about how she brings the future is incomprehensible.
You're wrong.
You're wrong.
I see it differently.
I see it as Beto's like, I'm going to show them what a true narcissist looks like, and AOC's like, hold my cheeseburger.
I don't think anything better has ever happened on the internet.
Not actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf.
Not Life of Julia.
Not Life of Julia.
AOC talking to us from 30 years in the future.
Magnificent.
There's not even, like, my favorite part of it is all of it.
But there is a takeaway that I think is very important, and it goes to your point.
You say that Bernie is actually no different than all the other Democrats.
I would challenge that.
Bernie is no different than all the Democrats except the so-fresh, so-faced...
Right.
The ones who took him seriously.
The ones who took Bernie Sanders seriously.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proudly calls herself a Democratic Socialist, and that's kind of a radical position to take in the United States.
No one's ever...
We don't use the term democratic socialist.
That's a European term.
It embraces a word that has a negative connotation in America historically, socialism.
But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a democratic socialist.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Stalinist Maoist, Marxist of the highest order.
What this video says is that 30 years in the future, she looks back and says, my Green New Deal changed everything.
It changed the way that we eat.
It gave free health care to all.
A federal jobs program guaranteed a job to everyone except the people who don't want to work, who will not be required to work.
You said the biggest problem was that there was a labor shortage.
There was a labor shortage.
We're going to rebuild nature on behalf of nature.
We're going to change 25% of the economy or so, which is...
She says we're going to change full human interactions.
We're going to change our souls.
We're going to change how we raise our children.
That's scary the most.
The state will be responsible for how we raise our children.
And the truth is, this is not hyperbole.
I'm not trying to just score political points.
The only two humans in the history of the world who have ever wrought change in a society at the level that she suggests in that video are Stalin and Mao.
They literally changed fundamentally how even human interactions work.
The Reign of Terror was about the way that people have interacted with other people for all of recorded history is not the way I want my people to interact.
It's five-year plans.
It's fundamentally changing the economy.
What she proposes is in no way less radical.
Than those proposals.
What's amazing about it is she clearly saw the South Park episode where they made fun of Al Gore.
Because they made fun of Al Gore for his global warming alarmism.
They said he was going to stop Man Bear Pig.
And the punchline of it was, he said, and then in 30 years people are going to look back and say, thanks Al Gore, you're super awesome.
And that is this AOC video.
The part that goes...
It's so abrupt that no one's mentioned it, because it's just so shocking, is where she's talking about global warming and how it's going to destroy the world, and then, without any segue, she switches to full-scale socialism, bordering on communism, jobs programs, eliminating poverty.
Wait, what about the environment, though?
Where did...
But if you don't envision it, you can't see it, Michael.
That's what I learned.
Seriously, there's so many great things.
It's so good when she starts off by saying, and then a brand new Congress was elected, and I saw the faces of all the children who finally saw hope in me.
And then one of them grew up to be me.
And that's like the greatest thing anyone could grow up to be.
But she never worked as a bartender.
The new girl that took her place didn't work as a bartender.
The new girl had four jobs.
She did.
She had many jobs.
She's not satisfied with her life.
She never gets married, just like Julia, in life with Julia.
She's defined by her career, and her career is that she starts off, after graduating college, digging in the bayous of Louisiana, which sounds, like, terrible, by the way.
Was it replanting the mangroves?
Yeah, yeah, replanting the mangroves.
Who graduates college?
You know what?
I'm spending the next couple years planting mangroves, man.
Not only that, who wants more mangroves?
Man, they're terrible.
And then with the oil workers, with the out-of-work oil workers who have been shifted to replanting the mangroves.
But don't worry, we've lost the knowledge about the land, so we bring in our Knight of American friends.
Ha-ha!
Here they are!
And they will teach us the ways of nature.
And then they just kind of shove them off the screen again.
Really, that's exactly what happens.
It's amazing.
And then that girl, I can't remember her name.
Aliyah or something.
Aliyah.
Yeah.
Not battle Aliyah.
Not Aliyah.
Did something different.
Anyway, she starts off planting mangroves, and then she's like, you know what?
Can't handle it.
I'm going to go build solar panels.
And she goes and she builds solar panels.
She's an engineer at a solar panel plant.
It's like, how did you get qualified for all this crap?
I mean, wow, that's incredible.
You went from literally holding a shovel to being able to engineer solar panels?
Holy crap!
That's unbelievable!
This lady's a genius.
And then she's like, you know what?
I can't engineer solar panels anymore.
I need to go mold the minds of preschoolers, and we're going to pay our preschoolers.
It's a different world.
So we're going to pay our preschool teachers like $150,000 a year, and that's going to come straight from my ass.
I mean, like, it's just going to...
Where is this coming from?
What is it?
And then the great thing about...
I mean, you write fiction, Drew, so you know.
You get to create entire worlds out of your imagination.
It may be the greatest video ever made.
It's so good.
It's so good.
She creates this entire magical world from purely her imagination.
In which she is the queen.
That's exactly right.
And it's obvious that she means to be president in that video.
This is what I was going to say.
The subtext is...
She's still taking the bullet train to D.C. Correct.
But not to be a lowly congresswoman.
Someone took her slot, right, in Congress.
That means she's no longer a lowly senator.
By the way, she's wearing the same white outfit that she wore at the State of the Union.
And she's got the storm streak from X-Men.
So that's pretty exciting.
That's actually how we cure climate change, is that she actually started shooting lightning from her fingertips, just like storm, and was able to control the climate.
I mean, if she knew how to do that now, what the hell is she waiting for?
We're all going to be dead in 12 years.
I mean, what the heck?
Another hurricane bomb is gonna go off.
Oh, yeah.
As Miami sinks underwater for the last time.
Yeah.
You know, if you live in Miami and you're worried about Hurricane Spencer or whatever it is that's gonna come sink your city, you gotta go over to Policy Genius.
Wow.
This guy is a genius.
He's a policy genius.
- You gotta go to Policy Genius and score you.
- I'm gonna buy him a Segway because he's so good at Segway.
- Can we just sit in the corner?
- And just every time you make a Segway, you just jump on it and just ride it around the room and make it a Segway.
- No, I think you guys aren't understanding.
What I'm saying is, if you live in Miami and your house is going to sink, you need insurance.
- Oh!
- Gotcha! - And our friends at Policy Genius-- - Insurance, I get it.
I gotta put that together.
- Well, let me tell you something.
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PolicyGenius is easy.
It saves you money.
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Spend less time comparing life insurance, more time doing literally anything else.
Check them out.
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Compare those quotes and makes it really easy.
And they have all types of insurance.
And as Jeremy says, I mean, if you're about to drown, that's a really good time to get life insurance.
You know when the wrong time is?
After you drown.
Yeah, that's it.
After you drown, it's too late to get insurance.
That's a pre-existing condition.
Alicia, hang out with us for a little bit longer.
And if you want to get your question in, go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
As Ben said, we're really here because we want your money.
We are, unlike, well, all of the Democrats alive today, apparently, we are capitalists.
We want to provide you with a good or service, which we have and value very little, in exchange for what you have that we value a lot, which is your money.
So please, go over to Daily Wire.
And your friendship.
And your friendship.
And your money.
We said the money, right?
First the money.
Isn't the real Daily Wire the friends we've made a long time ago?
And the money.
Dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Get your questions in.
We're going to take a few more.
But first, I want to talk about another...
I mean, really, we live, as you say, in the best timeline.
So much news happened since the last time that we were together.
And one of the more delightful things that happened...
Is that somebody sprayed Michael Knowles in the face with lavender oil on bleach?
I paid them for bleach.
I know.
They still don't know, by the way, which household chemicals they were.
All we know is they really, really made me smell great.
We know that they're really...
They left glitter on your sockless loafers?
Yes, I got glitter on my loafers.
The joke is on that assailant, though, by the way, because I'm a man of...
He got tackled in taste.
Well, he got tackled in taste.
But also, what he didn't realize is I'm a man of Sicilian descent.
I was wearing much more cologne than he could ever spray on me.
There is no way.
Also, if I'm going to pay a hit, man, my God, you just got to do everything yourself.
I know.
If there was a gun here right now, I would just put an end to this nonsense.
He could only afford a super soaker.
I mean, that's a real...
There is a lot to laugh about whenever Michael suffers, and I think it's appropriate that we do so, but I actually want to talk about it seriously for a moment.
But first, let's play the clip of the attack on Michael.
Oh, yeah, let's shut up.
I didn't think I was this intimidating.
Rob, can we get the close-up of the attack?
Here we go.
That guy is such a boss.
That guy made an NFL attack.
He's an amazing guy.
That sergeant was amazing.
That's enough of the clip.
By the way, that sergeant was like, this is the best day of my life.
I want to talk about two aspects of this from a serious point of view.
One is, this was obviously premeditated, it's assault.
It's not assault with a deadly weapon, but it's assault.
And it was also a conspiracy.
There were multiple people involved to make this happen.
They entered through a fire door that had to be opened from the inside.
One of the things that concerns me, the police acted very quickly and were grateful to them.
At the same time, they weren't able to do that.
To secure the environment.
They weren't even able to keep the fire door shut.
Someone sneaks behind them as they're yelling at them during the fracas and opens the door a second time.
It could just as easily have been more people out there ready to storm in.
It could just as easily have been that that was a 9mm and not a super soaker.
And what it raises for me is something that we've talked about on the show before, and it's the state of higher education in America today.
I watched this video, and I'm left with the conclusion that you cannot prune this garden back to health.
It's time to till it.
That we need to completely tear down the American higher education system and plant new trees in its place.
That if you are sending your children, if you're spending your money, if you're indebting yourself or allowing your children to become indebted so that they can go and become this, in service of what?
33% of them, college graduates in America today, move back in with mom and dad when they get out of school.
What recommends this?
If you're sending your kid, if you're paying your money, if you're an alumni of a university, alumni organizations raised $44 billion, with a B, billion dollars last year.
Every 12 months, $40 billion from people who presumably escaped alive from college and were still able to go on and make a living, which means that they...
We're not utterly indoctrinated and destroyed.
And they're paying to make this happen.
It's our fault that this is happening.
Well, I'll tell you something.
Because everyone's focusing on the guy who busts in.
Somehow he gets in the back door.
He manages to get his squirt off of whatever that was.
And luckily he got tackled and hauled out.
They're focusing on that.
I think that's actually not really the scandal.
The scandal is this was premeditated.
This highly motivated...
A relatively small group of students came in from the very first sentence I uttered.
They started screaming.
You can't really hear it on the video because my mic was going to the broadcast.
They were screaming so loudly that the people in the room who came to hear the speech could not hear it.
They could barely hear a word of it.
They screamed for 20 consecutive minutes.
Then, when I wouldn't shut up, they really thought they were going to get me to shut up.
When that didn't happen, they started to walk out, opened up that door, got a guy to come in to try to cover me in whatever that was.
When that didn't work, finally, these guys get hauled out by the cops.
And the next day, a letter goes out from the chancellor of that university, Molly Agrawal.
And I assumed there would be some apology.
I'm sorry, we invited a speaker to come.
He was harassed, silenced.
They tried to shut him up.
They physically assaulted him.
And I'm sorry, this is not the way that higher education is supposed to be.
What happened instead from the...
Third paragraph of that letter, he smeared me baselessly as a bigot.
He then went on and said, it's not good to get violent, but before you got violent, students, it was so wonderful how you stood up and stood up to that protester who had extreme views, like men are not women, which is the only actual view that I was espousing in this speech.
This chancellor of not just an American university, but a state university, was endorsing the heckler's veto, was saying that even when a speaker gets invited, shout him down, shut him up, silence him.
If you think that you might disagree with his views, it made me much more sympathetic to your point of view that we need to cut this off at the roots.
The chancellor literally says in his statement, in the statement about you, that That you don't belong in our community, or you're a threat to our community, or your values don't align with our community.
And I thought, who is our?
Who is we?
Because you are an adult, and you have been paid to create an environment not where you find common cause with little preening children, but where you help little preening children become adults by teaching them.
Education.
Your job is to teach them things that they don't know, not sympathize with everything that they know incorrectly.
You know, the only thing I disagree with what you say is that we have to destroy the educational system.
I don't think we have to do that any more than iPhone had to destroy the beeper.
I think we have to replace it.
We just have to be better than they are, and it will go away because it is now useless at the level of the liberal arts.
Knowles and I were at Texas A&M. Great place.
And we were talking to the major donors and alum afterwards, and they were saying to us, you know, we have an agricultural department, it's all conservative.
We have an engineering department, all conservative.
STEM, all conservative.
The only place where the liberals get in is in the liberal arts.
History and literature.
But history and literature are what contain the basis of the ideas that created our capitalism, our system of government, the engineering, and the STEM. And what we started talking about was forming a federalist society for shaping the minds of tomorrow's teachers of the liberal arts.
Because if you go in, I mean, I was teaching, I had a fellowship at Hillsdale, And you go there and the children, children, the kids are incredibly sane, incredibly inspired because they're being taught the liberal arts at the level of the liberal arts.
They teach them classics.
They teach them classics.
I heard a story that really reached me.
A wonderful woman with the great name of Reagan Cool.
And she said to me, you know, I came here, and they gave the incoming speech, and they said, we're going to teach you about the good and the true and the beautiful.
And she said she started to cry, and she thought, why didn't anybody tell me about this before?
And I was so moved by that, because why didn't anybody?
If we start to tell people about that, if we build institutions that tell people about that, not just at the university level, But at the K-12 level, I think those things will go away.
I think they'll shrivel up and die, just like the beeper industry did when the iPhone came out.
This, I think, is a genuine innovation because the state of law, certainly the state of constitutional law, was really dismal before the Federalist Society.
And if there were a Federalist Society for graduate students, for history and literature and all of these, which obviously does not exist, and conservatives don't go into those fields because they know they're not going to get a job, they might not get into the program, they're not going to get through the program.
It's actually very similar to the way that law was.
If we could do that, there actually might be a fighting shot because the situation is so much worse than even I thought.
I disagree with you guys.
I think that you're...
I think that because you're men of letters, because you're sophisticated, because you're well-educated, because you're well-read, because you're handsome, you have to say the certain taste.
I only have about three of them.
Drew more so than Michael.
I think that for this reason, you all hang on to a romantic notion about what it could be.
And you think that, well, we could create our own versions of it that slowly replace...
I think that all that message is going to accomplish is convincing people that, well, I just need to find one that's better than one of the others.
And, you know, the one that I went to wasn't as bad as the...
Like, I saw what happened to Michael on that campus, but I went to University of Texas.
And, I mean, there were some liberal professors, but it was nothing like that.
So as long as I don't send my kid there, I'll send them here.
And you miss the point.
The thing is rotten to the core.
A tree blew down.
We had a big windstorm in L.A. two weeks ago.
And a tree in my neighborhood was knocked over by the wind.
This tree...
Two of us together couldn't put our arms around it.
The tree must have been a century old.
And I thought, how could the wind knock down such a substantial tree as this?
And when I walked by, the interior of the tree trunk was literally swarming with termites.
That's the state of higher education today.
I agree with you.
And the wind needs to come along and knock it down.
But my point on it is not that there's a romantic notion.
Certainly that's part of it, I suppose.
My point is the fear that if once you lose the liberal arts entirely, I mean, let's say they're 99% gone now, once you lose that entirely, that is the stuff that makes up your civilization.
What I disagree with is that the liberal arts can be destroyed by the destruction of colleges that don't teach them anyway.
I think that you have to get rid of this antichrist so that people can see the actual Christ.
You have to get rid of the thing that purports to be the thing but is not the thing.
The only thing I'm being romantic about is the power of capitalism.
I think that if you give people the liberal arts as they are supposed to be given, That you will replace these people.
You don't have to go after...
You don't have to attack...
But this really starts...
We're starting from the wrong end.
Meaning we're starting with how do you change the colleges.
The truth is that the people that we're talking to right now are all employers.
You know, people who actually hire people.
You want to change the colleges, all you have to do is change the incentive structure.
Meaning that we at Daily Wire, instead of us looking at where somebody went to college to hire...
We should be looking at somebody else's credentials.
I mean, Jeremy went to a music college and dropped out.
I mean, you discussed this last time on Backstage.
Elisha, you went to college, but not for long.
Like, less than a year?
Right.
So, I mean, the idea that college is innately linked to future success is a bunch of crap, particularly in the liberal arts.
It is linked to future success in the hard sciences that we're talking about.
Those universities should maintain in the hard sciences, because there's no way to really screw those up too badly.
I think when people come out of Hillsdale and they've been trained in the good, the true, and the beautiful, they know something.
I agree.
I'd hire somebody out of Hillsdale before I'd hire somebody out of Harvard.
That's it.
One of my first acts as God King, when we finally got to the level where we were hiring people who weren't my personal friends, we put together our first job description, and the person who put it together for us, one of the requirements was a bachelor's.
And I said, you have to take that out.
And she said, no, it's good to know people's educational background.
I said, it's not.
Your boss doesn't have a bachelor's degree.
How can I ask people to present a bachelor's degree when I don't have one?
I'm with you 100% on that.
I'm just saying that when we turn to colleges like Hillsdale and Franciscan that we both...
Sorry to shift topics, but I have sort of another point with regard to what happened to Knowles.
It was a perfect example, and the letter was a perfect example, of how the left equates speech with violence, which is the Ilhan Omar thing.
You criticize somebody, and this is equivalent to inciting violence against them.
Why wasn't the speech that she made that we're criticizing, why wasn't that violence?
Correct.
How about anti-Semitism?
She talks about hate crimes against Muslims and all this.
Four times in three months you said openly anti-Semitic crap.
Hate crimes are up, what, 37% or something, according to the same reports she likes to cite.
Those reports are dubious because they're more reporting agencies.
But I'm not a big believer that rhetoric incites violence unless you are actively calling for violence.
Calling for violence, right, right.
But if you're going to use her logic, then she incites as much violence or more than anybody...
I mean, she literally said the President of the United States was not human, which is worse than anything else that anyone has said about her on the right.
I mean, it's pretty astonishing to suggest that somebody is not a human being.
That is the essence of...
There's an actual word for it.
It's called dehumanization.
And she engages directly in that.
How do these Jews continually become invisible?
Because the Jews actually have high economic health and because Jews are highly educated and because they don't fit into the intersectional box.
They're too successful.
Asians also.
Andrew Yang is a white guy, according to the left.
Really, this is how it works.
Asians are not minorities anymore, which is why they can be excluded from Harvard University.
So that means that the definition of minority is a failure.
Correct.
For the left, that's exactly right.
Because as soon as a minority...
You're seeing this with Buttigieg right now.
There's people saying, well, he's not really gay because he wasn't victimized in his life.
And it's like, well, he's pretty gay.
I mean, he's very good, too.
He's not as gay as you can get.
Yeah, he's pretty gay, yeah.
But this gives a lot of credence to Candace.
This gives a lot of credence to Candace Owens.
Because what they're saying to her and to all black people is you're only authentically black if you fail.
And if you don't fail, then you're not really right.
Or if you believe like us, right?
It's those two things.
If you fail or if you believe like us, that there is this intersectional hierarchy that you have personally been able to overcome but is keeping everybody else down.
This victimhood mentality that is being promoted.
And they've actually, you know, the chain started with punch a Nazi, all conservatives are Nazis, punch a conservative.
And they're bringing it all the way out to not just conservatives.
It's criticize somebody on the left.
This makes you a conservative.
Being a conservative means that you are a Nazi.
Punch a Nazi.
And they've gone all the way.
I mean, it really is all the way.
I saw a video of Candace walking onto campus and a masked white person screamed obscenities at her.
And I thought, are you kidding me?
It's like the Democrats have reverted to what they were.
They've gone back to Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan.
And at root, it really is an attack.
I don't mean to transition to Notre Dame, but this is an attack on fundamental principles of Western civilization.
You white supremacists.
You Nazi.
I read the Washington Post.
Two times in three days, guys.
Two times in three days.
I said that Notre Dame, all I said, I thought this was the most anodyne thing I could possibly say, and the most- Should I know how and Omar kind of say the same thing?
She said it was a mastery?
She said it was art and architecture, Omar.
Okay.
And I said, no, it's actually connected to something beyond art and architecture because I felt more for Notre Dame burning than I did if I had seen, for example, a great architectural wonder like the Taj Mahal burn because I have more, I mean, God forbid, that would be terrible, but I have more in common with the, with the I can't be upset with this white supremacist anymore.
I've got to tell you something.
It's astonishing.
I've got to tell you something.
I hate to say anything nice about you, and I know you don't need me to defend you, but I am so sick and tired of listening to people call you alt-right and far-right.
It's insane.
It's really bothering me.
It's insane.
The day I come in and see you punching yourself in the face and shouting anti-Semitic slurs and all that stuff, No, but seriously, this is the Washington Post.
These are people who should know better.
They did it twice in three days.
They did it with Talia Levin, who is a bag of garbage when it comes to journalism.
She was fired from the New Yorker because she labeled falsely an ICE agent, a neo-Nazi, or having a marine insignia.
He's a disabled ICE agent.
He lost the use of his legs in, I think, Afghanistan or something.
And she labeled him a neo-Nazi.
She teaches at NYU. And she labeled me...
Akin to Richard Spencer, and then suggested at the end of the piece- Who you hate.
Right.
Who I despise.
I think he's the worst person.
And at the end of the piece she says, and these are people who should be silenced, and then I blow back on them.
I say, like, this is crap, right?
And they feel the blowback.
A day later, the next day, they print another piece with the same exact criticism, suggesting that because I said that Notre Dame is a symbol of Western civilization, And the Judeo-Christian heritage.
And that we ought to reacquaint ourselves with the Judeo-Christian heritage.
This was actually code for white supremacy.
And then the next line of the piece that was in today's Washington Post was, Richard Spencer was more blunt.
So I'm being subtle.
I'm just being subtle about my white supremacy.
By the way...
The other message here for conservatives out of two attacks on you as a Nazi in one week is actually scary.
And all conservatives, even the ones who go after you, should really take note.
You are as mainstream as they get.
You are a straight shooter.
Who is left, guys?
I know.
David Frum is the only...
And even he, when he says things about immigration, he's out of the club.
I guess Anna Navarro is the only reason.
But why are they going after you?
They're going after you because you have a giant platform and because you're very successful.
And what the message is, is that any conservative, any conservative, will be smeared not just as a little racist, not just as a little sexist, but as a neo-Nazi, as the most odious person in the entire country, if you get a platform that's big enough.
Well, this is why, you know, five words that I hate to repeat over again, but this is how you got, six words, Trump.
Okay, this is how you got Trump right here.
Okay, this is how you got Trump.
You call everyone a neo-Nazi, and then everyone's like, okay, you know, we're going to nominate the guy who just craps on you all day.
Because we don't care.
Again, not to say anything nice about you, but you do have ideas.
You put forward your ideas.
I wrote an entire book on Judeo-Christian heritage.
Let them come out and argue against your ideas.
And what's funny, they don't know anything about the alt-right, because the alt-right rejects the term Judeo-Christian heritage.
Yes.
The very term Judeo-Christian is offensive to the alt-right.
The funny thing is, you went out and helped me buy a gun because the alt-right was after me.
They didn't come after me as bad as you, but they came after me pretty bad.
And I started to think, you know what?
These guys are threatening me.
If they come in, I'm going to kill these guys.
You know the other point?
People didn't notice this in the reporting about Notre Dame, but the people who were reporting on it are religiously illiterate.
There was this hero priest, chaplain in Paris, who ran in.
He saved the crown of thorns, a relic that was put on Christ's head, and he saved the blessed sacrament.
Blessed sacrament is the Eucharist.
It's the communion.
It's what you take on the salvific amuse-bouche, right?
The little snack at the church.
This is known to all religiously literate people.
I forget if it was the Washington Post or the New York Times or both.
It was the New York Times.
They thought that this referred to some statue.
And they reported this in the Grey Lady, all the news that's fit to print, that he ran in and, I guess, carry out some giant statue of Christ on his back or something.
They didn't even know what the communion is.
They called it a statue of Christ.
That's amazing.
The BBC reported on this for hours without mentioning the word Christianity, without mentioning the word Christ or church.
And this is why I say at root, this is an attack on Judeo-Christianity, because at the root, they are actually arguing the exact same thing the alt-right is arguing.
That's the irony.
They're arguing that if I say Judeo-Christian, I mean white.
That's right.
No, I don't.
No, I don't.
You know what the evidence is that I don't?
I'm a Jew.
I wear a yarmulke publicly.
I'm probably the most famous Orthodox Jew on planet Earth.
What are you talking about?
I know.
But if I argue that it's a principle, they say, no, no, no, you're just talking about whiteness.
And the alt-right says, you're not arguing about a principle, you're arguing about whiteness.
Well, I'm glad you guys meet, you know, go hook up in the room over there because you're closer to the alt-right than I am.
It's that famous Jordan Peterson interview where she keeps saying what you're saying.
Right, exactly.
Well, let the guy talk.
Ask him what he's saying, you know.
So I want to talk a little bit more about Notre Dame and sort of what it means, get past what the left is saying it means, and get down to what it actually means.
But I think we should have a few more questions from our subscribers first.
Otherwise, Alicia's sitting here for no reason.
Yeah, well, and if I've learned anything, when we get into really esoteric religious conversations, you've got to save those for the very end.
I mean, if I have to get a lot of sacramental lessons from Knowles here, our viewership plummeting by...
I keep complimenting Ben so I can just baptize him like really sneakily at the end.
I turn the other way.
FYI, it's not left his tears in that tumbler.
It's holy water.
I'm just going to toss that on you at the end.
I actually think that they should make a movie.
Someone should make a movie.
About that priest, because other things, he survived an attack by the Taliban, and he works for the fire department of Paris, and ran in and was praying with people and giving them last rites after the Bataclan massacre.
Now that he saved the crown of thorns, I believe he's king of France, correct?
You should be, if only you were.
Michael is an amazing subscriber because only subscribers can ask the questions as we've talked about here.
I'm glad I get to say that now because I couldn't say that earlier during the conversation.
It was real weird.
But Michael says that he actually thinks he knows who it was that attacked Michael Knowles.
Really?
Yeah.
Ted Cruz's father.
I should have known.
All the marks were there.
Yep.
Are you sure it wasn't Ted Cruz himself, Mr.
Zodiac?
Who knows?
It could have been.
We'll investigate.
You wouldn't be alive to tell.
Yeah, that's right.
When the Zodiac killer comes to knocking.
You can just tell from the beard.
Ask Beto O'Rourke how it does.
Rosemary wants to know, who do you guys think is going to be the first Democrat to drop out of the 2020 race?
Oh boy.
Gillibrand.
Gillibrand.
Yeah, I don't even know if she'll make the ballot.
Gillibrand.
Just because she won't be able to get on stage at these debates.
Inslee.
What's that?
Inslee.
Oh, I kind of forgot about Inslee.
So obscure that, yeah.
Inslee, but Gillibrand soon.
Gillibrand soon.
And no one will notice.
It's a tree falling in the forest right there.
The last Democrat to get out will be John Kasich.
Guys, are you excited?
William Weld is running.
I can't wait.
Well, I actually was going to guess Bill Weld.
He's a Republican, technically.
He's the guy that used to be a libertarian that's now running as a Democrat.
Did you see his logo?
He tweeted out, like, Yes, with a badger or something.
With a badger or something.
And then there was Terry McAuliffe who tweeted out some photo of a crab on top of an alligator.
And the crab was labeled McAuliffe and the alligator was labeled Trump.
And I was like, what, they're going to form up like a crabigator?
That's going to be their, they're teaming up now for a Transformers movie?
Marie is asking, how much of what Trump has done that's wrong should we as conservatives be calling out?
Every bit of it.
And then we should point out all the good stuff he's done.
Because otherwise, here's the thing.
Here's the thing that people miss.
And I've made this point to people.
Older Republicans don't seem to get it the same way the younger Republicans do.
When you talk about Trump, Trump's credibility is not on the line.
Your job is not to defend Trump.
Your credibility is on the line.
And when people talk with you, they're judging you.
They're not judging the person that you are talking about, unless you're talking with a close family member who's already prejudged you or something.
But if you're just talking with somebody else, they're going to judge your political credibility on whether you're honest with them.
And if they feel that you are being dishonest because you refuse to acknowledge the man's flaws, they're not going to listen to anything else you say, and they are less likely to vote for Trump.
If you want to alienate people who are winnable, The worst thing that you can do is lead with, Donald Trump is an honorable man who treats women terrifically and never lies.
He is a MAGA genius.
No one will listen to the next word you say.
It's over.
And people will come back at you and say, you didn't talk this bad about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And there is an answer to that, which is that one of the things you say is refreshing about Trump is that he sort of wears his sin on his sleeve.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But for that reason, you also have to acknowledge it more openly.
I agree with you.
It's like our favorite joke about the man who has a great big orange for a head.
Or it's like that scene from Austin Powers where he can't help himself but say moly, moly, moly, moly.
This guy has a giant mole.
You can't have credibility when you're ignoring the giant obvious thing.
With more subtle men, you can take a more subtle approach.
Right.
And you can say about Trump, it's really not hard.
I'm puzzled why people don't just do this.
I understand we can't stand cognitive dissonance.
We're human beings.
But it is not hard to have a conversation where somebody says, you know, that Trump, he's a really bad guy.
And you say, listen, I think he's bad with women.
I think he's bad with this.
I think he's bad with that.
I think he lies a lot.
I also think that he's given me these ten things.
And the candidates he's facing do all these bad things.
And so in a race between the two of them...
That's it.
Because he's also in a context.
You know, I'm reading VDH, Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump.
And I'm really impressed with it.
Because he's not like...
He shows Trump exactly as he is.
He doesn't candy him up at all.
He doesn't paint him, you know, put lipstick on him at all.
He simply shows him in the context of his opposition.
And putting him in the context of his opposition, you think like...
Yeah, I'll take Trump.
This is the key that people always want to forget.
But context, detail, specificity, particularity actually is our friend.
So you should never lie for Trump.
You should never lie.
You should never pretend for Trump.
You should be very honest.
And very detailed.
You should put him in his context.
Because politics exists in context.
When you vote for Trump, are you voting for Trump because you'd rather vote for Trump over Calvin Coolidge or Ronald Reagan?
No.
But you'd rather vote for him over Hillary Clinton at this moment, with these judgeships open, with this and this and this.
I think that's perfectly honest.
And it's, I think, a true view of politics.
And it's funny.
People get on my case because I didn't vote in the last election cycle at the top of the ticket.
And they say, well, now you're talking binary choice language and you didn't then.
Because I was choosing between two timelines then.
We're now in one of the timelines.
The timeline is there.
Trump is president.
All the stuff that he is, is.
And nothing is foreclosed by voting for him in 2020 now that all that stuff is materialized.
Some of the stuff that I was worried about materializing has materialized with Trump.
Some of it has not materialized with Trump.
We're here.
So now it's a new situation.
So now we have two new timelines.
So now you have to choose between the two timelines that are on the table.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Alicia, one more question.
All right.
Billy is asking, if a Democrat must win in 2020, do you think that Andrew Yang is going to be the best option?
I mean, I like him the most.
I like him because he's different.
He's honest.
He seems to have some integrity.
He's completely insane, and his view of politics is utterly wrong.
It is wrong to the core.
It is 100% wrong.
But I like that he's pretty honest about it, and I like that he's also thinking beyond talking points.
He's also not an a-hole.
I mean, like, really, this is a central contention for me at this point.
It's a problem.
It's one of the reasons why, at the beginning, I looked at Buttigieg's nomination, and I looked at his run, and I was like, okay, this guy seems like maybe the most normal of the crazy people over there.
Like, he'll say Hilly to Chick-fil-A. He at least pays homage to people who own guns.
He doesn't pretend that they're all evil.
Like, seems kind of normal.
And then he started with the, Mike Pence is out to get me and wants to put me in a gay concentration camp and wants to shock me with conversion therapy.
And I was like, okay, well, he's done, so I guess we're done with that.
But...
I mean, listen, lots of props to Yang for coming on the Sunday special.
And listen, I'll give more props to Bernie for actually going on Fox News.
Like the fact that if you treat people like human beings, it's one of my pet peeves now.
This has become a pet peeve for me.
So the best example I can think of is on people's birthday on Twitter, if they are on the left, I will say happy birthday to them.
I'll say happy birthday to Jake Tapper.
I'll say happy birthday to Jane Koston.
I'll say happy birthday to anybody with whom I am at least relatively acquainted on the internet.
Yeah, my birthday was March 18th.
Yeah, I don't care about you.
But it's amazing.
No one on the left, everyone on the left will text you happy birthday.
No one will publicly say happy birthday to you.
And why is that?
Because they don't want to treat you as a human being.
They don't want all their friends to say, how dare you humanize such a human being as this?
This is what I hate most about the Democrats right now, is this.
So if a Democrat treats Republicans as a human, I'm more likely to be in favor of that Democrat than any of the other Democrats on the stage.
I agree with you.
I will say this, though.
Somebody asked me at...
At the University of Texas at Arlington yesterday, I guess it was.
Which Democrat I would like to see win of all the...
And I couldn't think of one.
I really couldn't.
We were stumped.
We were totally stumped at this talk.
What is that?
UTA? Yeah, that was...
We couldn't figure out, like, they're so far left.
They've gone so far.
I'll admit it.
I'd rather see Bernie win than any of these other cats.
Really?
Yep.
Because he won't get anything done.
He's totally crazy.
He'll be a full-scale disaster.
And I'm with H.L. Mencken on this one.
Give the people what they want and give it to them good and hard.
Let's not go half measures here.
I don't want Joe Biden.
I want Bernie Sanders.
I want you guys to own the guy who wants a 60% tax rate on people making 50 grand.
But that's a little different.
Than saying, is there a Democrat that you could support in good conscience?
I get what you're saying, but it's a little different.
No, of course not.
They're all for abortion up to a point of birth.
How can I support that?
What can you support?
There's a flip side to Ben's principle that you really want to support the candidate who treats Republicans like human beings.
On the flip side, you could support the Democratic candidate who treats Democrats like animals, which would be Amy Klobuchar as she throws desk furniture at them.
So either one, I think, could work.
So, thank you to our subscribers who came over to dailywire.com and asked questions.
Thank you to Elisha for bringing them to our attention.
How is it in this room?
Not bad.
It's because only he's smoking.
Terrified air in here.
You lost 10 IQ points.
Probably.
I do have one more thing I want to talk about.
You're smoking, you're a baby guy.
It's somewhat esoteric.
Somewhat esoteric.
One of the feelings that I had during the tragedy in Paris this week, the priest who ran in and saved, as you say, the crown of thorns.
I do not believe that to be the crown of thorns.
You say it is the crown that rested upon Christ's head.
I think it's a crown that Louis IX bought at a bazaar in the Middle East 1,200 years after Christ.
But I'm not only going to pick on Catholics, because that's not the entirety of my point.
It's only like 95.
By the way, Knowles' face was like just sheer disappointment when you said that.
Knowles is like, please don't ask me on camera to say whether or not I think it's the crown of thorns.
I absolutely think it's the crown of thorns.
So, my point...
Can we go out and just have a drink together?
I want to have a serious conversation.
My point is that for hundreds and hundreds of years, millions and millions of people have made pilgrimage to behold the crown of thorns, to pray at the foot of the crown of thorns.
Many of them have walked away from that having had transcendent religious experiences.
Others have probably walked away feeling that their prayer wasn't granted and lost their faith, right?
Because human religiosity is a very complex thing.
The experience of God, I am willing to grant, may very well be, and in innumerable cases in fact is, an authentic experience of God.
Though you couldn't pay me enough to say that the crown of thorns that was in Notre Dame Cathedral ever rested on the head of Christ.
So, Similarly, in Israel is a garden tomb.
And it's interesting, if you've ever been to Israel, there are Protestant locations where certain things are said to have happened, and there are Catholic locations where certain things are said to have happened.
And because Catholicism It grew into authority at a time when most people lived mean, meager, terrible lives in medieval Europe, when people spent most of their time outdoors.
People, you know, like on Monty Python, they moved mud from one hole to another hole.
When they would walk into these great cathedrals, they had never seen anything like it.
They didn't feel the presence of God when they saw a sunset.
When they saw a sunset, what they felt was the onset of cold and fear.
And darkness.
In darkness.
But when they would make pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and they would see these gilded statues and these unbelievable buildings that took centuries to build, that elevated the experience of what they were seeing.
When I see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I'm not a medieval mud farmer, and I'm not a papist.
And so when I see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I don't feel any religious experience.
When I go to the Garden Tomb, however, because I've spent my entire life in the West, indoors, air-conditioned, well-fed, when I see, oh, this is...
This is what the scene would have looked like.
This is the exact aesthetic.
That transports me because evangelicalism and Protestantism came later when we had modernity.
I'm being transported out of modernity to touch what once was.
The result is millions of Protestants have made pilgrimage to the Garden Tomb in Israel.
Millions of them have had religious experiences praying at the foot of the tomb.
Weeping at the foot of the tomb.
They will say to you, there is no question.
I visited the garden tomb.
There is no question that that is where the resurrection took place because I felt God there.
And yet, the garden tomb is almost certainly not the tomb of Christ.
Almost certainly meaning there is less than a 1% chance that the garden tomb in Israel ever held the body of Christ.
Millions of Protestants would be just as mad at me about saying that as would be Catholics for saying that the crown of thorns is not the crown of thorns.
Well, you do have this great ability to offend every single person.
But herein is the question that I want to leave.
The question that I want to get each of you to weigh in on, because it really was kind of a startling and unsettling notion as I watched that beautiful building burn.
And I thought, what is it that...
We each believe of our religion, and Judaism undoubtedly has similar problems.
I'm just not expert to speak to them.
What is it that we believe that the God of Abraham actually identifies himself as truth?
He is not only the God of truth, he is truth.
The actual concept of truth is embodied in God.
What does it say that his people can have authentic experiences of the God of truth through fabrication, through things that are themselves almost certainly not true?
Can I answer that?
Please.
All right.
First, let me start with a story.
When I was in Israel, I had the same feeling as you.
When I go to the Catholic sites and they tell me this is the place where this happened and I know it's not, I feel there's a sentimentality that goes against my nature.
I'm not a sentimental person.
When I was in the Mount of Olives, there's a church there called the Church of the Rock, and it's built around a rock, and the rock is, by tradition, supposed to be the place where Jesus fell down, sweated blood, and prayed to God to let this cup of crucifixion pass from Him.
And I walked in, totally cynical, completely, walked around the corner and thought, oh my God, this is the place.
And I was imbued with the Spirit.
It lasted for about an hour.
I walked around in a kind of daze of inspiration.
I don't know whether that's the place or not, but I know that on that telephone, I got a call.
Jesus spoke in parables.
Those parables are untrue.
There was no man with two sons, one of whom became a prodigal, and the other one stood.
He knew that was an untrue story.
And he told that story, and yet, when he told that story, he was giving you a telephone on which the Spirit was calling.
I have a lot of sympathy for that.
I'm not a sentimental person, and I'm not a superstitious person.
And when I see things that aren't true, I have the same, you know I do, you know I have the same feeling of you of whoa, whoa, whoa.
But when somebody's on the other end of the line, I pick up the phone.
And I think that parables, stories, fictions are ways in which meaning comes to us.
Is it a slight distinction though that the parable wasn't When Christ told a parable, he said, here's a parable.
He didn't say, this is true.
It's not a slight distinction.
It's an important distinction.
You know, there's certain kinds of stories you tell.
There was a man who had two sons.
It doesn't matter if it's true or not.
Certain kind of stories, I saved two people from a burning building.
It matters whether that's true or not.
Brian Williams.
What's that?
He was there at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
We do want to distinguish between those stories, but we don't want to forget the fact that everything in a way is a story.
Life itself is a story, and it communicates.
I mean, I think this is the point of telling parables.
By the way, I think this is what Jesus was saying when he told parables, was not, oh, this is the meaning, but physical things have a meaning.
And I think that when we live that way, we live in truth.
And so I'm not as...
I'm not as alienated by the crown of thorns.
I'm with you.
I don't believe that's the crown of thorns.
I'm not as alienated by that when it communicates to somebody the truth of the crucifix.
I think there's also, for me, I don't believe any of the stuff that you guys are talking about, right?
Yeah, well, you're going to Alan.
Right, of course.
I mean, this is clear.
But when Notre Dame burned, I was very upset about it.
And Notre Dame has a pretty significant anti-Semitic history.
I mean, there are statues there that talk about supersession of Catholicism over Judaism.
The copies of the Talmud were burned right in front of Notre Dame in the 13th century.
And still, I felt something.
The reason that I felt something was because we are all part of this same river of history in this civilization.
And I owe something to even the people who persecuted my people living in a civilization that is built on those foundations.
There's a lot of fossils in the fossil record here.
And that does not mean that I'm not standing atop a bunch of different layers of sediment.
And so there's something to that.
I think as far as your more basic question, which is how do people get value from these things, I think that there's something else to it, and that is we innately get value from things that other people have imbued with value.
Meaning that when I look at Notre Dame, the reason that that strikes me in a way that a new church burning would not...
Is because that did take 200 years to build.
And that was blood and sweat and tears of people.
Those were people bringing ox carts full of stone from far off lands to build this monument to God.
182 years.
Yeah.
And there's something deeply wonderful.
Think about the idea, especially in a society where everything is supposed to be given to us right now.
We want it right now.
And we're not supposed to think about tomorrow.
There is no tomorrow.
We're not supposed to even think about the national debt because that's too difficult for us to think about.
Think about the idea that you're going to start building a building that your great-great-great-grandchildren will probably not live to see completed.
But you're going to start building it.
To me, that's the story of civilization and the story of religion, which is that you are not here to finish the task.
you're here to begin the task.
And so when you see people who have completed that task, and when you see people go and spend their money to go and worship something even that I don't believe in, I think the fact that they are even going to pay homage to God using their own money to pay homage to something that people have imbued with value, even if I think that the thing itself doesn't actually hold the value, that is a testament to the place that God holds in human hearts that is ineradicable.
You cannot get rid of it.
And I think secular society has tried to erase it and suggest that people don't have that innate need for God, that innate yearning for God.
The yearning is still there, and without any fulfillment of the yearning, the unhappiness is the only thing that's left.
You know, this is a major distinction in the response to Notre Dame between conservatives and radicals.
Because all myths are true.
All myths are true.
You don't believe in certain relics or something.
Even legends.
Even the legends of saints killing dragons.
Have some bit of truth to them.
They tell some truth.
And this is a big distinction that was drawn by the philosopher John Stuart Mill between the conservative Carlisle and the radical Bentham.
He said the radicals, what we would call now the leftists, when they see something like the Cathedral of Notre Dame or a relic or some tradition or some legend, they ask, is it true?
And what the conservative like Carlisle asks is, what does it mean?
What does the cathedral mean?
What does it mean that people have come on pilgrimages to this relic of the crown of thorns?
What does it mean that people have come up with this legend?
This legend has developed of some saint slaying a dragon.
What does that mean?
What does it say about us?
What does it say about where we come from?
What does it say about what we worship?
That is obviously the sane view.
That is obviously the humble view.
That is obviously the view that gives you awe and wonder and veneration and an appreciation of your society and civilization.
And there's another view That is just ready to rip it and burn it down.
It was an honest article.
It's obviously the view of Christ when he tells parables.
I mean, I think that is the message of parables.
And by the way, you know, if anything speaks to me of God's truth, it's the music of Bach.
And when I listen to the music of Bach, you and I, who disagree on the divinity of Christ, you and I are swimming in that stream.
And we're there together, and that stream is carrying us to the same place.
Like...
I have no, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you and I are going to be arguing about the truth in heaven.
Hell!
You meant hell, right?
No, that's you.
I'll argue with you.
And that the stream of Bach, which speaks to us of God, is going to carry us there.
I think that's exactly what you're talking about.
I agree with you 100% that the meaning of things is so much more important And more interesting, by the way.
I agree in as much as when the Taliban brought down those statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in the 90s.
I felt devastated by that.
Yeah, me too.
But the slight distinction that I want to make is that we here in this room are not Buddhists.
But we are all each in our way believers in the God of Abraham who defines himself by the truth.
So what's interesting to me is I completely agree with the meaning.
I completely agree with the communal experience of the millions of people who have made pilgrimage.
They spent centuries building and that that imbues it with power and meaning.
I completely agree.
The subtle question that I'm asking though is How is it that the God of truth actually speaks to people through falsehood?
And maybe it's as simple as the crown of thorns recommends God, but God does not recommend the crown of thorns.
Maybe it's the garden tomb and the church of the sepulcher.
They both recommend God.
God may not recommend either the Church of the Sepulchre or the Garden Tomb.
But I've spent my life as a novelist telling stories that aren't true.
I mean, about people who don't exist.
And why?
Why do I do that?
But again, the subtle distinction is you don't claim that they're true.
The millions of people who make pilgrimage to the Garden Tomb and the millions of people who make pilgrimage to the Crown of Thorns do so on the basis That it is, in fact, the crown of thorns, or that it is, in fact, the tomb of Christ.
But if people even knew that, so they'd just switch locations.
Meaning that, okay, so then they would just switch.
Like, to me, what is happening is a modern form of the Korbanot.
It's just a modern form of sacrifice.
You're going to a place, to an altar, and you are sacrificing to God, and you are saying, here are all the things that I have brought with me, and I'm sacrificing those in these place.
And the place happens to be the place, but that's...
This is right.
But I think that, you know, if you told people, okay, so we find out through DNA analysis that the crown of thorns never was on Christ's head, Okay, fine.
So then they just go to Notre Dame and they visit Notre Dame and they don't visit the Crown of Thorns.
And this is the distinction between veneration, which is such a foundational conservative principle, and worship.
They're not the same thing.
Nobody is going to worship the Crown of Thorns.
Nobody is going because of the Crown of Thorns itself.
They're going because it rested on the head of Christ.
They are venerating something which is an icon, which is transporting you to something much higher, to actually the same thing, whether you're going to the Garden Tomb or the Church of the Holy Supplement.
What people who are not religious, I think, don't understand about people who are religious is that there is an if attached to most sentences.
Absolutely.
Meaning that people who are going there, I think that many people say, yes, this is definitely the crown of thorns.
And then there are a lot of people who are probably going and saying, well, if this is the crown of thorns, then I'm here to pay homage.
And I think that that's true for most religious pilgrimages.
I think that's true for most religion, period.
That's true.
For me, it's everything about religion.
I mean, the very fact of Christ's incarnation is an admission by God that we can't see him, we can't reach him, we can't touch him without something in front of us that we know as ourselves, that we can recognize as ourselves.
It's all fiction.
All of life is fiction, as far as I'm concerned.
Even our bodies are a fiction.
Now you sound like Jordan Peterson.
Well, but no, because Jordan doesn't believe I don't want to speak for Jordan.
But it seems to me that he doesn't quite believe in the truth beyond the fiction.
And the thing is, I believe that's the only truth.
Like, I believe this body is not the truth of me.
This is a metaphor for what's happening on the spiritual.
That's right.
If you would like to write in and tell me how wrong I am about Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism...
Throw Islam in there.
Islam.
Buddhism.
Buddhism.
Or just...
I won't read those.
Just these should be nicer to me.
Head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, write in your questions, and we'll be sure to get to them on our next episode of Backstage.
I don't want a fake laugh, do you guys?
No, I'm not.
How about an actual authentic yawn in three, two, don't be a sociopath.
