Daily Wire Backstage: Summer Is Here But Harambe Is Not
On this, the three-year anniversary of Harambe's tragic end, it's time to once again power through the grief, tighten our boot-straps, and ponder the ways in which we shall keep this republic steaming ahead. Is it possible to thwart the Left's mainstreaming of socialism? Will the Dems ever cease pushing the lies of collusion, obstruction, and cover-up? Will Trump be able to fix the crisis on the border? Can Biden pull off a 2020 win?
Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing, and special guest Texas senator Ted Cruz, 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.
Fake laugh in three, two...
Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
Summer is here, but Harambe is not special.
It's been three years.
Can you believe it?
Too soon.
Too soon.
I'm Jeremy the God King Boring, lowercase g, lowercase k, in case the real guys listen.
Tonight we're going to talk through politics, Game of Thrones, Memorial...
Literally, guys, we have nothing to talk about.
Nothing has happened in the news in weeks.
Joining me, as always, tonight are Ben, the Nazi leader Shapiro...
Thank you for that.
Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, the lovely Elisha Krause, who's gonna tell you how to get your questions answered for the evening.
Elisha.
Hey, guys.
Thanks so much for being there.
I guess the Zodiac Killer moved me out of my seat as I'm back in the broom closet.
But for everyone watching at home, this is a very special episode of Backstage, in case you didn't see him there with Senator Ted Cruz.
We're excited to have him here.
Even though, you know, being an Okie, I just have to say Boomer real quick.
So, if you want to ask him or any of the guys some questions tonight...
Be sure to head on over to thedailywire.com and type all of your questions into the chat box on the live stream at dailywire.com.
And remember, only subscribers get to ask the questions.
So if you're not a subscriber, my main question would be, why the heck not?
You can become one tonight and get your questions in for all of the guys here on Backstage.
And be sure to head over to Facebook because we have a special...
You know, very summery, kickoff for summer Daily Wire poll over on the Daily Wire page.
The question is, what's the best part of summer?
Is it A, less work, B, less rain, C, the climate change, or D, the movies?
Well, thank you, Alicia, and thank you for stealing my Zodiac Killer joke.
We are, though, welcoming a very special guest on the show tonight, the beautiful, beautiful Ted Cruz.
LAUGHTER Well, thank you, Jeremy.
I will say I saw on Twitter today you talked about Harambee, and I guess it's the anniversary of his killing, and someone tweeted on this anniversary, how is it that Ted Cruz's dad is still on the loose?
I almost retweeted it.
Right after the election, I actually created a meme called Justice for Jack with this very somber portrait of Jack Kennedy.
And I started trying to get traction behind it.
I wanted the president to open an inquiry, but so far, you get nowhere in this.
There's a reason I suppressed the Warren Commission findings.
So guys, legitimately nothing has happened.
Should we do Game of Thrones then?
We should do Game of Thrones, but I actually have one thing that I want to talk about, and that's this amazing story put out by BuzzFeed that suggests that our own Ben Shapiro is a gateway drug to Nazi propaganda.
But he has been for me.
I've been saying it for years.
I mean, what can you say?
They've discovered me.
The nefarious Jews working their Jew magic again.
So, to get this straight, I'm an Orthodox Jew who gateways people to the Nazis so that they attack synagogues where my friends go.
Man, I'm good.
You guys are really sneaky.
You Jews.
It is amazing that after literally three years of enduring a kind of anti-Semitism that I legitimately now did not know existed in our country, and certainly didn't know existed on the right in our country, although certainly not among conservatives, but among right-wingers, Now to find that the left's great attack on us is that we are the anti-Semites.
Right.
It's weird.
I'll be honest with you.
I didn't see that one coming.
It was a twist.
It was like sixth sense right there.
But yeah, it's been kind of bizarre considering that three weeks ago I had to file a police report and the FBI arrested somebody who is a white supremacist for threatening my family and targeting my home.
I believe he put out a tweet that said it's time to start bombing synagogues.
Yeah, that guy was real solid.
In 2016, I was amused to see that the Washington Post ran with that piece today about this Indiana schmuck piece of garbage who was swastika-ing a synagogue.
And then they ran the piece that I guess his lawyer contended that this guy's underage wife once read a column of mine, basically, and that this was a gateway to Breitbart News, which was a gateway to Stormfront, which is a big jump right there.
I mean, you really got to jump.
And that the Washington Post ran with that.
Didn't you write a story for the Washington Post like a year ago?
I did, in fact.
I did write a story in 2016 that was specifically about why the alt-right is evil for the Washington Post.
And yet today, the Washington Post ran a story about how I'm a gateway to the alt-right.
So that's kind of a weird thing.
That sounds very convenient there, Ben.
You write a piece in the Washington Post, and then 4D chess later, you're a Nazi.
Yeah, I'm starting to believe this may not all be in good faith.
I mean...
It's starting to occur to me.
You know, right around the time Media Matters starts, you know, watching every episode of everything I do and then clipping out one minute, 30 second segments out of context to target me.
This does explain why you let baby Hitler run free, though.
It does.
I mean, it's been quite a year for my people.
Wow.
I mean, yeah.
I actually want to talk about it.
I mean, obviously, look, what this really is, that all conservatives are Nazis.
All conservatives are outside the Overton window.
I mean, I'm about as mainstream a conservative as it's possible to be.
And this has a long history.
I talked about this on the radio show today.
But this goes all the way back to when they tried to blame Rush for the Oklahoma City bombing back in the 90s.
It goes back further than that.
It actually does go back to the assassination of Kennedy when the left tried to maintain that that wasn't communist, that that was really about evil right-wing rhetoric on race that led to the assassination of Jack Kennedy.
It It's been really interesting watching this EU election with all these right-wing nationalists coming in and everybody complaining, Angela Merkel, complaining about their anti-Semitism when you can't walk around with a yarmulke in Germany under her.
So there's this study.
Did you see the study that she was citing in all these?
The New York Times editorial board cited today in which they suggested that 89% of anti-Semitic attacks in Germany were the fault of right-wingers.
Now listen, the neo-Nazis are garbage people and they should all burn in hell, obviously.
I mean, I'm sorry to say that's my own. - You just had to throw them under the belt. - Yeah, exactly.
The worst people won't.
But that statistic is sheer nonsense.
The EU did its own study last year, and what they found was, among German Jews, when they reported where the actual anti-Semitism was coming from, they reported that 41% of all anti-Semitic incidents were coming from Muslims in Germany, and 20% were coming from the right wing.
So how do you get to 89% in that German study?
And the answer is you ignore all the ones that don't fit your particular study.
I mean, I have lots of friends who are the Jews, the Juden over in Europe, and I can tell you, they are obviously concerned about the neo-Nazis, but there is not, it is not close.
I mean, when it comes to who are you truly concerned about, who is a threat to your safety, why are there security guards at every shul, I kid you not, every single shul, In France, every single shul and day school in Germany, every single one.
Why are Jews moving out of Malmo, Sweden, and moving to Israel?
Why did 5,000 Jews alone last year move from France to Israel?
That is not because of the rabid right wing in France.
That is happening because of the mass migration of Muslims from the Middle East.
And that is not an indicator that every Muslim is an anti-Semite or anything like that.
It is to say that when you have unvetted immigration from places by which polls show that there is high levels of anti-Semitism, you shouldn't be surprised when those people bring their anti-Semitism with them.
It does speak to the real dislike the left seems to have fostered in themselves to the West, that this group of people, these radical Muslims who don't believe in feminism, don't believe in homosexuality, don't like the Jews or absolute, that they support them and protect them.
I mean, the only thing that they have going for them from the left's point of view is that they hate us.
Yeah.
I mean, that's their kind of positive attribute.
Well, it does speak to the Democratic Party's defense of Ilhan Omar, right?
I mean, Ilhan Omar is, you know, she's not a terrorist, obviously.
I'm not going to call her a radical Muslim because I don't know her religious beliefs.
I will say that she's wildly anti-Semitic, and the Democratic Party is obviously making room for her, making room for Rashida Tlaib, and they're doing that for a reason.
I mean, it's really, it's amazing.
I mean, Michael Oren is the former foreign minister for Israel.
He tweeted out in the aftermath of that astonishing New York Times editorial today in which they blamed, it was amazing, they blamed the uptick in anti-Semitism in Europe and in Germany.
They blamed that uptick on Benjamin Netanyahu.
I'm not joking.
They blamed it on the prime minister of Israel.
Well, they have the perfect cartoon to run with that.
They've already got it.
Yeah, exactly.
And so Michael Lauren tweeted out, like, so you guys are missing the irony of, you guys are the actual anti-Semites, and yet it is Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the only Jewish state on planet Earth, who's causing the anti-Semitism.
It's pretty convenient when the only people who seem to be causing the anti-Semitism are, you know, Orthodox Jews like me, or the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Well, you were wearing a pretty short skirt there, Ben.
I mean, don't you think that you and Prime Minister Netanyahu were asking for it?
And that's the law, right?
Yeah, that's right.
That's exactly right.
Wow.
Now, I am interested, though.
There is a rise, at least from my perspective, a rise in anti-Semitism.
I've talked about before how I grew up in the greatest time, apparently, to grow up in the history of ever, which was the 80s and the 90s.
And in the 80s and the 90s, I believe that this country had basically whipped racism.
Yes or no?
Did you ever wear parachute pants?
I did.
I cannot tell a lot.
I'm just checking.
I had a pair of parachute pants and I had a lot of neon.
So much neon.
And slap bracelets.
So not everything about the 80s.
But I do think in the 80s and 90s in this country, we basically had racism whipped.
This is on the run, no question.
I didn't grow up in a racist country.
I grew up in a rural town in Texas where, nevertheless, the most famous sports player in the country was Michael Jordan.
The most famous guy on TV was Bill Cosby.
The most famous person in music was Michael Jackson.
It didn't exist.
If anything, it's worse now.
Much worse than it was then.
That particular trio hasn't turned out too good.
Well, listen.
My hero is...
Jordan is still okay.
Yeah, Jordan...
Agreed.
Greatest of all time, Jordan or LeBron?
I'll take Jordan.
I'll take Jordan.
I think hands down, Jordan.
I mean, he has no one else on his team, and he doesn't get his coaches fired as often.
Well, and he actually made the playoffs.
It's a tough thing to say in LA. No reaction here, but the rest of the country will go for it.
Yeah, Jordan over LeBron.
And this comes as a man who's beaten Jimmy Kimmel in basketball.
Look, Jordan has six rings.
And at the end of the day, they'll be the greatest of all time.
You've got to make it to the finals and you've got to win.
And at the end of every game, everyone knew Jordan was going to get the ball.
Everyone knew he was going to be double or triple teamed.
And everyone knew he was going to make it.
Fine, LeBron gets five or six rings, he can have that conversation, but he's not there yet.
But there's one other aspect to it, which is the cultural aspect, which is Jordan defined that sport for a generation in a way that I just don't think LeBron James can lay claim to.
Now, LeBron is freakishly talented.
I mean, the guy, he is strong and fast and amazing.
I suspect he could out-shoot you if you guys ever had a...
With his toes.
LAUGHTER So I want to get back to this issue of the rise in anti-Semitism, but first, Ben, as someone who has to defend himself, or at least faces the specter of having to defend himself, Bravo Company Manufacturing, your go-to?
Yeah, they are fantastic.
Not only are they fantastic, like John Wick, I see guns.
Lots of guns.
And that is where Bravo Company Manufacturing comes in.
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The second thing they did is they enumerated the right of the population to protect that speech and their own persons with force.
You know, I believe in these principles, so does everybody else in this room.
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So I went to the YouTube channel between the last backstage and today, and I went so far down the rabbit hole watching videos about it.
It's actually, it puts you in a trance watching the kind of care.
It's a thing about me that I can watch someone engage in some sort of fine motor function.
So even just like someone making a perfect cup of coffee, like it pulls me in.
And watching these videos about the care that these guys put into creating their product is pretty, it's good TV. How does it cook bacon?
By the way, in that video I overcooked the bacon.
I had three mags and really two is plenty.
See, that's the kind of care Bravo company would show.
Jeremy, you were saying you grew up in a non-racist.
I grew up in a non-racist country and I didn't, listen, I didn't know any Jews.
My vice principal of my high school, a fellow named Bill Jolly, and he was Jewish and he had a jet black, big bushy mustache on one half and snow white mustache on the other, some genetic condition.
But he was my only real exposure to Judaism.
And I went to synagogue with him one time, and he's a great guy and invested kind of in me and my youth.
But I never met a Jew, but I certainly also never encountered any animus toward the Jews.
And I even had an argument, I distinctly remember an argument that I had with you in 2015.
And what you were trying to convince me that anti-Semitism is real.
And I was saying, of course it has been real, but it is not real in our current experience.
And you were saying, no, you're missing something.
There's something that bubbles under the surface.
I've got to say I'm on Drew's side now.
Wait, this is a first.
Having 24-7 security has sort of made that happen for me.
But something, even if you're right, and I'm willing to grant that this was always bubbling under the surface, it's not under the surface at the moment.
That's right.
What is it about our current political climate that on both left and right, at the far extremes, what I call the asshole edge of the left and the asshole edge of the right, They're sort of joined by this anti-Semitism.
I've got to tell you, though, there aren't mainstream, really, Republican congressmen and senators who are endorsing these sort of anti-Semitic ideas that we see in the Democratic Party.
I will absolutely agree with that.
I've analyzed it this way.
When it comes to the threat of anti-Semitism, if somebody's going to come to your house and shoot you, there's a good shot the person who comes to your house and shoots you is going to be a white supremacist.
Because that's just, by numbers...
So we live in a big white country.
Well, that is true.
In Europe, if you're afraid somebody's going to come to your house and shoot you, it is going to be a radical Muslim.
By numbers, that is who it is.
And if you're afraid of governmental policies that make room for all of the worst people in the world, it is going to be people on the left.
That is Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and that is the Democratic Party in the United States, unfortunately.
There's also been an important change.
Listen, Nazis, the Klan, they've both been around a long time.
But Nazis and the Klan are ignorant, bigoted morons.
And anybody with a shred of sense gets that.
I mean, look, Nazis were literally the bad guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark whose faces melt off.
They are the archetype of bad guy Nazi.
We know they're bad guys.
And Klan guys can compete with them.
They can fight for who's in a worse circle of hell.
They're so bad even Hollywood will make films about how bad they are.
Exactly.
But the difference and the really discouraging thing and dangerous thing is the rise of the anti-Semitic left and the paralysis of so-called mainstream Democrats to denounce them.
The inability, I mean, you know, you have this freshman trio in the House.
Who make anti-Semitic comment after anti-Semitic comment and the leadership excuses it.
Well, she just doesn't know what she's saying.
How about give a little bit of credit when you say it's all about the Benjamins.
It's not like we're in the movie Ghostbusters and suddenly she was animated by a spirit that made her type that.
No, she was expressing a sentiment, an anti-Semitic trope that has only been around a couple of thousand years.
And we saw, actually, House Democratic leadership try to come together on a simple resolution condemning anti-Semitism, and the Democratic Party broke in half.
That is dangerous.
When you have one of the two major parties so terrified of its base that they're unwilling to stand up and speak out against them.
They're completing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, too, and that's the big move, right?
So, can you talk about that?
Because one of the...
Now that everyone, because I stood up for you against some crazy white supremacist on Twitter.
And now you get it.
Enjoy.
And now they've all decided that I'm Jewish.
Welcome to the party, Calvin.
I always knew it.
I thought I'd get a gift basket from the Illuminati.
All I got was this lousy t-shirt.
But one of the things that people say to me often is, you guys call any criticism of Israel anti-Semitism.
Where is the distinction?
What is anti-Semitism?
What is not?
I'll give the State Department definition of anti-Semitism on this stuff, which I think is fairly accurate.
Criticizing policy of Israel is not anti-Semitic.
I criticize policy of Israel.
Everyone in this room, I'm sure, has criticized policy of Israel.
You can do it from the left.
You can do it from the right.
There's plenty of policies in Israel that you can criticize.
If you say that the state of Israel does not have a right to exist, that's antisemitism.
If you say that the Jews are the only people on planet Earth who cannot have a state, that's antisemitism.
If you suggest that you're going to hold the state of Israel to a standard you would hold no other country, that's antisemitism.
So if you're calling for a boycott in Israel, but you would never call for a boycott C.C. Ilhan Omar.
You would never call for a boycott on Iran.
Ilhan Omar is saying that we shouldn't boycott Venezuela, but we should definitely boycott Israel.
That's anti-Semitism.
Because now you're obviously applying a standard that only applies to the Jews that you wouldn't apply to anybody else.
And the reason for this, Jonathan Sachs, the former chief rabbi of Great Britain, actually had a really interesting video on this, trying to explain why, when anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism and vice versa.
So first of all, not every...
And not every criticism of Israel makes you an anti-Semite, but there is not yet an anti-Semite who has been born, who doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time criticizing Israel.
It just doesn't exist.
Although there are some who say, well, listen, I support the state of Israel.
All the Jews should go there and not get us to fight their wars.
Right.
And then they don't mean any of that.
Because they also hate Israel.
Right, exactly.
But I get to meet any of them.
And yeah, I'm all for Jews defending themselves in Israel.
That's not a thing.
But what you see is, in history, the anti-Semites have traditionally targeted the largest collective of Jews.
So that could have been a cultural collective of Jews.
So in Europe in the 20th and 19th centuries, it was the Jews are too culturally powerful, so we'll target quote-unquote Jewish culture.
Before that, it was Jews as a religion, so we'll target their synagogues, we'll target Jewish religion.
Now the current largest collection of Jews is in Israel, so Israel becomes the focal point of the hatred.
And again, criticizing Israel is one thing, but you're seeing the left embrace this argument that if you couch your anti-Semitism in anti-Israel terms, that it's okay.
So the most obvious example was in Germany a couple of years ago.
There was a synagogue that was burned down.
And the two guys who burned down the synagogues, radical Muslims, they claimed that they'd burned down the synagogues because they were anti-Israel.
And the court found with them.
The court found that they had burned the synagogues because they were anti-Zionist, not because they were anti-Semitic.
So, again, that conflation is pretty ugly.
I don't want the whole episode to become about antisemitism.
No, no, no.
But I do have one more question.
Can Jews be antisemitic?
Sure.
Oh, yeah.
Of course.
So, one of the things that I think people need to pay attention to is, it was funny, I said, listen, I'm an Orthodox Jew.
I'm, by definition, not an antisemite.
And people are like, well, isn't that identity politics?
No, because there's a word Orthodox before Jew.
Right.
Okay, meaning that I am a Jew who believes in the principles of Judaism.
Which means that I care about Judaism.
I care about Jews.
Like, Noam Chomsky is a Jew, right?
Genetically, he's a Jew.
Ethnically, he's a Jew.
Does he care about Israel?
No.
Does he hate Israel?
Absolutely.
There are a bunch of people who are like that.
Being an ethnic Jew has no—I don't care about that at all.
I care more about your principles and the values that you hold.
So the fact that I stand for what I stand for is the reason I'm not anti-Semitic, not because I was born to a Jewish mother or something.
Well, one of the loudest megaphones for anti-Semitic sentiments has been the New York Times.
And just recently, I mean, I made a joke earlier about their cartoon, but they were forced to actually apologize for running a baldly anti-Semitic cartoon.
But rewind a little bit further.
Go back to a year ago when America opened our embassy in Jerusalem.
I was there in Jerusalem that day.
The next day, the New York Times ran a front-page story, the headline of which, and I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember it exactly, but it was essentially, Israeli military shoots a number of Palestinians.
And what they omitted from the article, and I read this article on the Senate floor, excerpts from it, is that these innocent Palestinians who were shot were Hamas terrorists, which Hamas admitted on its own website.
These were terrorists who were flying kites with swastikas on them.
And they were flying kites with gasoline bombs over the wall in Gaza to bomb within Israel.
And the narrative that the New York Times tells us, for some mysterious reason, these Israeli soldiers shot these peaceful protesters.
I'm sorry, terrorists seeking to murder you are not peaceful protesters.
And when Ilhan Omar made her comments, the New York Times ran the headline that she had reopened the conversation about whether Israel was too powerful.
I thought, like, that's not the conversation she's reopened.
Ilhan Omar is a perfect example.
She has yet to make an actual criticism of Israel.
Every criticism that she has made is not about Israel.
She says that, not Israeli policy anyway, she says that Israel basically buys power in the United States.
She suggests that anybody who supports Israel has dual loyalty.
Nothing she says is a criticism of anything that Israel actually does.
It's a criticism of Israel.
If you replace Israel with Jews in the sentence, it would mean exactly the same thing.
The nearest thing to a direct criticism of Israel she made was, Israel has hypnotized the world.
We pray that Allah awaken people to the evils of Israel.
That is not the sort of language you use when you criticize trade policy in Germany.
That is not the sort of language we would apply to any other state.
Can I just broaden the conversation just a little bit, though?
I think there is what we saw in this EU election.
There is a struggle between people, between nationalists, people who believe in countries, believe that their country is good, would like to keep their, and globalists, let's call them globalists.
And the old cliche about the Jews was they were cosmopolitan, in a bad sense of that word, meaning they didn't have national loyalties, they had double loyalties, they wanted a global world run on finance because they were good at that, they had traditionally moved from place to place, which made them good at trade and all these things.
And we're actually living in a moment when Some of those old tropes are on the table, but they're actually not connected to Jews.
I mean, the Jews, as they were in Germany, and they are here, were the most patriotic and loyal of Americans we could possibly ask for.
And so when people are putting forward nationalism, they're not necessarily putting forward anti-Semitism.
There was an article attacking Orban in Hungary as an anti-Semite, and they really couldn't come up with an example of anything truly anti-Semitic he had done, whereas the examples of the Yeah.
named Yoram Hazani, who wrote a book called "The Virtues of Nationalism." That seems to always be left out of the mainstream media coverage over resurgent nationalism versus globalism. - But I mean, it does, for those of us, you know, who can at least historically remember, you know, the '40s, I can't live, not in my living memory, but I can remember.
Yeah.
There is a discomfort I have, you know, with people, It was a national socialist movement, and it wasn't really a socialist movement, no matter what right-wingers like to say.
No, but Hitler actually redefined socialism in Mein Kampf to fit his own standards.
It's a little disingenuous.
And he was an anti-Marxist and he killed the socialist wing.
He was right-wing by European standards and left-wing by American standards.
Yes, and he killed the socialist wing of the Nazi party, along with everybody else.
But no, I mean, I think there is this discomfort because of that history, but really, I believe that anti-Semitism is detached from the issues of the day.
I believe it is a disease in the human mind and in the Western mind, maybe specifically, that comes up Basically, whenever people get off track, whenever people lose the narrative of freedom and independence and decency that the West represents when they lose it.
Well, I think decency is the right word.
But what seems to me to happen is just that anti-Semitism is such a shapeshifter because it really is just a giant conspiracy theory.
We don't rely on conspiracy theories when they're unhappy, when they feel like their life is not in their own control.
And so, for a variety of reasons, a lot of people are feeling that way right now.
And so, a lot of those people are immediately going to, okay, well, there is a grand conspiracy, and the Jews are behind it.
So, from the perspective of the far right, the Jews are the globalists, and they're the George Soroses, and the Tom Styers, and the Bernie Sanderses.
And then from the left, the Jews are the ultra-nationalists with the Israeli uniforms on.
And then, in the Muslim world, the Jews are the people who are keeping everybody down with their evil little state.
It's amazing how the Jews shapeshift that way.
And they do have, I mean, because of the Bible, written by Jews, they do have this tremendous psychological and ethical and spiritual influence on the formation of the West.
And if you hate the West...
And I think there's an actual spiritual component to it.
We've talked about this before, but it's interesting to me that you never meet someone with mental illness standing on a street corner saying, I'm so happy!
Everything is going so well!
You also never meet someone standing on the street corner saying, the Jews are fabulous!
Look at all the great science!
I don't have polio!
It's a strange connection, that's right.
So we can't talk about something other than anti-Semitism.
It seems like we ought to, but first, policy genius.
What a great segue.
I've been working on myself.
And I feel like if anybody's going to get my best work, it's policy genius.
You must be a professional broadcaster.
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There's something that's bothering me as I'm sitting here.
Without any flattery, I think we can all say that the people in this room...
Our great respecters of Senator Cruz.
We all, I think we all supported him.
Well, I may have to dissent to that.
Okay, with an exception.
Half of us did commercials for Senator Cruz.
If Senator Cruz had descended to hanging out with us, is our country screwed?
Yeah.
Yes.
I'm Cuban, Irish, and Italian.
All you had to do was offer me a good score.
That makes me feel a little better, right?
Senator, while we have you here, you actually come up on the show quite often.
And the reason is because I always on the show point out that Ben has many, many, many friends in the United States Senate.
And I know one guy.
I don't want to...
call you out as a friend on the air, but I wouldn't do that.
I can feel your ratings tanking.
You're the only person that I know who has been through the gauntlet of running for national office, of running to be president of the United States.
Could you What was it like?
Happy to tell you, but I've got to make a comment first.
I was sitting here listening to the product plugs, which is very cool.
And I was thinking about in the world of politics, we don't get to do that.
And can you imagine the democratic debates with product plugs?
Just think about it.
Just think about Bernie Sanders.
And let me stop and embrace Bolshevik tax collectors.
We'll kick in your door and take everything you own.
And then a special cameo from AOC. Let me stop and endorse, not Amazon.
Get the hell out of our house.
I mean, this is a whole new territory that you guys have opened up.
Are you too employed?
Well, have I got...
Not Amazon.
It's my favorite on your website.
Joe Biden for hairplugs.
That's too real.
I heard Kim Jong-un.
That's what Kim Jong-un said.
That's just what he said.
And that guy's honest.
I don't know about you.
If anything, you're defending Vice President Biden.
That's exactly right.
You should hear what he told me in private, Kim Jong-un.
What he told me in private is so much worse than what I just conveyed to you.
I'm just saying this.
I will pay money.
To see Bernie make fun of Biden's hair.
That'll never.
Such a win.
Actually, I feel a little bad for Biden because they're so good at hair transplant surgery now.
The early 90s is all timey.
Life is all timing.
And by the way, has anyone seen Joe Biden in the last three weeks?
No, he's hidden.
He said his campaign strategy is not to campaign, which is my jogging strategy.
You know, it is true he's doing very well in the polls.
Probably not a great sign if your campaign strategy is just hide and hope it's over soon.
I think that's the smartest thing he could possibly be doing.
What else can he do?
Well, also because, like, the clown car over there, they're just going to beat the crap out of each other, and he's sitting over here just ignoring them.
I'm not sure I agree.
It almost never works to hold your fire in politics.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
And actually, let me push back for a second on them beating each other up.
I think there's a possibility that the Democratic debates are going to be the most boring things on earth.
Because they're not attacking each other.
They're unified by one thing.
They hate Donald Trump.
And the debates are liable to be one person saying, I hate Donald Trump.
And the next person saying, no, no, no.
I really, really hate Donald Trump.
And it's just...
After a while, look, I mean, you know, you talked about the 2016 campaign.
Listen, on the Republican side, we had our fireworks.
Let me tell you, I was standing on that debate stage next to Chris Christie in New Hampshire.
When he unloaded on Marco.
And I gotta say, that was a moment on that stage where all the rest of us...
I was just like, let me read back here and read my paper.
You go on ahead and, you know...
It's not often that you're a witness to an actual political murder-suicide taking place on stage right before you.
I mean, it...
I don't know that we'll see that on the Democratic side.
That's possible.
Although I don't think that Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are going to be able to hold their fire too much longer.
I think that they understand that Biden has 60% or what is it, 40% of all black voters right now are supporting Biden.
So if Kamala wants to win the nomination, she's going to have to open fire on him here at some point.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Buttigieg open on Biden pretty soon on the gay marriage stuff because he voted for DOMA. Biden did.
But if you're Biden, honestly, the worst thing you can do is...
Gay marriage is probably legal in the country today because of Joe Biden.
I mean, it's going to be hard to make it.
He was the first one who came out and said, right?
The cascade happens.
I mean, yeah.
The smartest thing that he can do is just let them all whine about him.
And then just sit out and do nothing.
Because the more he talks, the more gaffes he makes.
And if he just hides, all the others are so desperate for attention.
I just don't see them touching him, really.
Like, unless the media...
Please don't talk about touching Joe Biden.
No.
He likes it.
All right, I'm going to make a confession right here.
I think I am probably the only person in this room who has been on the receiving end of a Joe Biden back rub.
Oh, wow.
You do have very nice hair, Senator, I have to say.
How is that?
2013.
2013, I'm newly elected to the Senate, and the Democrats are making a big push for gun control.
And they're going all in on gun control, and I'm a brand new freshman trying to fight to defend the Second Amendment.
We beat them all back and defeated those efforts.
But if you remember, one of the provisions there was the Manchin-Toomey provision.
That was expanding.
I do not.
But I will nod as if I know what you're talking about.
It was expanding background checks to transactions between private individuals to it would have extended that if a grandfather gives his grandson a shotgun for Christmas that the grandfather has to go and run a background check.
And so a number of us opposed that and we defeated it.
And I was on the Senate floor, and I went to Joe Manchin, who everyone likes Joe.
He's a really nice guy.
And I went over to Joe on the Democratic side of the floor, and I said, Joe, I just wanted to say thank you for how you conducted this debate.
Because, you know, Manchin didn't get personal.
He didn't get nasty.
He argued for the policy.
I disagreed with the policy, but he did it in an honorable and principled way.
So Biden was there as vice president because he was prepared to gavel in this historic gun control provision.
And it ended up getting beaten badly.
I like this story.
Biden came around to the Senate floor.
I'm talking to Joe on the Democratic side and Biden comes behind me.
He puts both hands on my shoulders and begins rubbing my shoulders and kind of rocking back and forth.
And I'm kind of like, dude, what?
And he turns to Manchin and he says, you know, there's nothing worse than a smart Republican.
And I'm just kind of like...
I'm not usually at a loss for words.
I'll admit I had nothing to say that was really hoping someone would distract the vice president.
Then you accidentally voted for the bill?
All right, I give in!
His piercing eyes.
He just got lost.
Although, actually, to Biden's credit, Biden is a charming and funny guy.
His policies are terrible.
Everybody likes him.
Yeah, so that's an interesting thing.
You're running for president, and you're running against guys who are your colleagues, guys who I assume you're friendly with, at least on some level.
And I'm sure it's the same when you run against certain Democrats, but probably more pronounced when you're running against Republicans.
And you have to defeat each other.
You have to highlight each other's weaknesses.
You have to highlight each other's flaws.
How do you survive that on a personal level?
How do you recover those relationships?
I mean, from what's possible for us to observe from the outside, you have a very good working relationship with the president.
And talk about some slings and arrows that came your way.
No, I didn't notice it.
I'm like, Donald?
Listen, I think he was just afraid of your father.
I will say at the Republican convention in the summer of 16, I did ask more than a few Secret Service agents.
So, my father was a delegate from Texas, and I said, how is it that you let into this convention someone who's already taken out one person?
And this guy knows!
But how does one absorb that and still maintain your humanity, and also maintain your ability to work with the people across from you, or get along with the people across from you?
Oh, look, part of it is you've got to have a sense of humor.
Don't take life so seriously.
It's one of the worst things about the left is that everything is so damn serious.
You know, there's an old joke.
How many radical leftists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
How many?
That's not funny!
Like, guys, just relax.
Like, let it go.
And so, you know, this is a contact sport.
And I'll give an example.
Um...
In 2016, Lindsey Graham, my colleague, publicly said, if you killed me on the floor of the Senate, that no one would convict me.
By the way, it is true for any newspaper reporter, if you're writing any story about me, it's obligatory you quote that Lindsey Graham quote.
That is in every story.
I think the editors put it in there.
Well, fast forward after Lindsey dropped out, Lindsey endorsed me in the campaign.
And as I said, when Lindsey endorsed me, I said, you know what?
This is the first time in my life I've ever been endorsed by someone who's publicly called for my murder.
I never understood that line from Senator Graham because everyone's running in the race and they say, Washington is broken.
Everyone here is a crook and a rat and a liar and they all hate Ted Cruz.
That sounds like sort of an endorsement.
Maybe he endorsed you in that debate.
There you go.
So, thick skin, don't have a sense of humor about yourself.
You laugh and you remember what you're doing.
You remember why you're doing it.
There seems to be tremendous pressure from the people for you to hate each other, though.
The people don't like it when you're convivial with the opposition.
Well, we've become so polarized.
I mean, there's no middle ground on humanity.
Everyone is...
Evil.
I mean, look, Jim Carrey recently painted, I mean, he paints lots of pretty wretched paintings, but this latest one of the governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, he painted her as an unborn child being aborted, and he's reveling in this.
I mean, that's a level of just hatred.
He's mentally ill, though.
You know, and I engaged with him on Twitter and I said, listen, I disagree with Jim Carrey's politics, but I'm going to treat him with decency and respect his humanity.
You know, but the left...
In a lot of ways, Donald Trump broke the Democratic Party.
They hate him so much that they've unleashed just this rage that blinds everything else.
We've got to get past that as a country.
I was happy that Kerry painted that thing of Kay Ivey, not only because it demonstrated the animus, but also because it's the first time a Democrat...
Actually, apparently understands what an abortion is.
Yeah, I thought the same thing.
At least they're being honest about what this is now.
And more broadly, you say the president has broken the Democrat Party.
I think that's probably true.
He has made them, in a very perverse way, much more honest.
Not just Jim Carrey, but nobody's talking about safe, legal, and rare anymore.
They're saying safe and legal until three days after birth.
Even the press isn't pretending to be objective anymore.
He actually has brought everybody out of the bushes.
We'll find out if the breaking is good or not.
There is something to the patina of civility and legitimacy.
Because people are now openly doing this sort of stuff, it has ratcheted things up to such an extent that I guess the Overton window for civility used to be here, and now since there is no civility...
I agree with that.
I'm not in favor of stability just as a general principle.
I want people to speak nationally, but the character attacks are so brutal at this point.
My problem is that it's not as if the left, up until this moment, was being great.
We're saying we want to put black people back in chains and all this, and they had that rhetoric.
Backed up by the news media, this enormous, enormous institution that was all on one side.
And all Trump has done is bring it into the open.
I think I give him a pass on this.
I hate the rudeness.
I hate the boorishness.
I really do.
But at the same time, I can't blame him for simply, as with China, he's simply bringing out what was already there.
Ben has promised a Game of Thrones review.
Yes.
And I just want to bring that up one more time.
Yes, of course.
Obviously, we'll go right over it.
First, we have to hear from some of our Daily Wire subscribers.
If you want to ask a question, in particular if you want to ask a question for Senator Ted Cruz, please become a subscriber.
Go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
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I need your $10.
Please go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
More seriously, though, I will say that your subscription money makes a huge difference to our business because the fact is that the left is on our ass all the time.
All the time.
And the fact is that you are what allows us to bring you all the different shows every day.
This is absolutely true.
Ben made a comment at the March for Life And advertisers were so upset that Ben was at the March for Life that dollars walked out the door.
And in our business, that's...
All the money.
That's the ability to keep people employed.
That's the ability to keep making the content.
And the only reason that we're able to survive that kind of pressure is because we're backed up by these subscribers who say, we're willing to put our money on the line to make sure that you guys can't be wiped out by media matters and their fake trolls on Twitter.
I will tell you, not to suck up too much...
But, look, one of the joys of traveling all across Texas and all across the country is I meet lots of people.
I cannot tell you how many young people ask me with almost awe and amazement, do you know Ben Shapiro?
I really was hoping he was going to say, do you know Ben Shapiro?
I mean, it's nobody else in politics, nobody, you know, in Hollywood, it's like, Do you know Ben Shapiro?
Now, I do tell him, actually, no, he's a robot.
Created in a laboratory.
But it's really good animation.
So, thanks to our Daily Wire subscribers.
Send us your questions.
Alicia, do you have something to kick us off?
Yeah, I sure do.
And I want to remind people that The God King did promise me off-air, but some of the producers overheard it, that if we get more subscribers tonight, when this baby's born, I'll get a bonus.
So...
What I said is...
Hey, listen, I'm just trying to be fruitful and multiply in this very liberal state of California.
You guys gotta help me out.
God bless you, and please name her Jeremina.
Not on the short list.
Alright, this question is for Senator Cruz from a Daily Wire subscriber named Robert.
He wants to know, what do you think the chances are that the recent pro-life bills in different states across the country are able to hold up in the courts?
I think it depends.
I'm glad to see states that are acting to defend life, and there's a debate in the pro-life community.
Does it make sense to defend life and to do it in an incremental way, focusing on initially some of the more egregious practices like late-term abortions, like requiring parental consent so that a teenager needs consent to get a tattoo, but not to end the life of her unborn child?
I think There's a lot to be said for an incremental battle.
I think that's part of why we're winning the battle of public opinion.
You look at young people that are more pro-life today than they've been in a long, long time.
On the other hand, there are others who say go for legislation that is a direct assault on Roe.
One of the virtues of a multiplicity of strategies is the way the Supreme Court takes appeals.
Every year, the Supreme Court's appeals are discretionary, and the court decides what cases to take.
So every year, the court will get roughly 8,000 what are called petitions for certiorari, which are just requests for the court to take a case.
And those come typically either from federal courts of appeals or state Supreme Courts.
These laws, particularly the broader laws, are all going to be struck down in the lower courts because they're contrary to Supreme Court precedent.
So it will be up to the Supreme Court if and when it chooses to overturn it.
But the court, out of those 8,000 cert petitions, they take typically about 80 a year, so about 1%, which means that the justices will make the decisions.
Do they want to take an incremental case or do they want to take a whole-scale challenge?
And I'm perfectly fine with having a multiplicity of cases for the justices to choose, and any four justices can choose to grant certain.
And so I'm sure we will see some of these cases make it to the court in time.
I don't know when they'll take it.
In the event that Roe were overturned, would that hurt the Republican Party in elections?
Well, one of the things that's worth understanding on that, that a lot of people, the media never tells you, if Roe versus Wade were overturned, it wouldn't make abortion illegal.
Right.
The law in this country for 200 years is that abortion was a question for the states, and different states had different standards.
Right.
If Roe were overturned, you'd have 50 states and you'd have 50 different standards.
And nobody thinks, for example, the legislature in California is going to vote anytime soon to prohibit abortion or even, in all likelihood, to restrict it in any meaningful way.
Right.
Part of the virtue of federalism, you know, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis referred to laboratories of democracy, 50 states, is you'd see 50 different standards and people could vote with their feet and they could vote with their values.
And I think abortion would be a far less divisive, cultural, hot-button issue if we'd left it to the legislative process rather than the Supreme Court in 1973 saying, you the people have no right to decide on these questions.
We're taking it out of your hands.
I think our present divisions, a lot of it stem from Roe v.
Wade.
A lot of it stems from the idea that the courts are going to tell us that we can't decide these things in our state.
There were states already liberalizing abortion law before 1973, obviously.
And the truth is that on a national level, in order for anything to be done by pro-lifers, you would need a constitutional amendment, which is something basically everybody acknowledges and also is probably not on the table formally at this point.
As far as the strategy, I've been saying for a long time, I think it is highly doubtful that a Roberts-Kavanaugh swing on the court is in the mood to overrule Roe.
I think that is a wild overreach by, not pro-lifers, but I think that anybody who thinks that because Republicans have appointed five of the justices on the Supreme Court, that that means there's a majority to overrule Roe.
I don't even think there's a majority to restrict Casey.
I think that, which is the secondary case that sort of pairs back Roe a little bit and creates what's called the Undue Burden Standard, essentially arguing that these states are not allowed to unduly burden a woman's ability to get an abortion that's been used to uphold restrictions on abortion past the 20th week, but not before the 20th week.
I think that people who believe that Justice Kavanaugh is on the side of overruling Roe, I don't know what they're smoking.
It ain't these cigars.
I see no indicators of that.
What kind of cigar did you get me here?
Yeah.
I mean, that Indiana case today is a very good indicator that this is the case.
There's an Indiana case that went to the Supreme Court.
It included two provisions.
One was the disposal of fetal tissue.
That provision was ruled in order by the court, basically.
That's fine.
If you want to make people bury or cremate fetal tissue as opposed to tossing in the garbage the way that abortion clinics do because they're disgusting, then that's fine.
But there's a second provision that effectively restricted abortion past, I think it was the eighth week, and the court simply refused to take it up.
And that...
Same bill said that you're not allowed to abort a baby for purposes of racial eugenics or disabled eugenics.
And Justice Thomas wrote an amazing...
He's about to go through the roof.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I think he's frustrated, and I think he has a right to be frustrated.
I think he's looking at his other colleagues on the court going, what the living hell is this?
Why can't I get even four votes to get a hearing on a law like this that is obviously designed to stop the eugenic killing, in many cases, of racial minorities and females?
How is this possibly not Supreme Court worthy?
But is the court going to be able to punt on...
Alabama, Georgia, Missouri.
Of course.
All they have to do is allow the district courts to strike it down in the name of Roe.
Remember, the precedent that already exists can be used, and by pretty much all legal stare decisis rulings, probably should be, unless you're going to overturn old case law.
It's going to be very difficult to argue that under...
Planned Parenthood versus Casey, that you can actually, that Alabama or Georgia or Missouri stand up.
I just think, which is why I'm a Thomas guy, not a Scalia guy.
I think stare decisis is a bunch of crap.
But you know, Justice Scalia, I got to meet him when I was a student, and we asked him precisely about this.
We said, you acknowledge stare decisis, you acknowledge precedent, so why doesn't that hold up for something like Roe versus Wade?
And his answer was simple, which is certain decisions are so egregious So historically egregious, they simply must be overturned.
Yeah, well this is why Thomas is a better justice than Scalia.
Stary decisis can't be an absolute principle.
It's ridiculous, right?
It shouldn't be a principle at all.
Stary decisis is a bunch of nonsense.
Well, and one of the best examples of that is Plessy versus Ferdinand.
Exactly.
It was a decided decision that embraced separate but equal.
It was a horribly wrong decision the day it was decided.
And when it was overruled, that was absolutely right.
The Constitution protects the equal rights of every person, regardless of your race.
Let me shift, though, because you also asked about the political consequences of this.
And one of the things that's important to understand, the modern Democratic Party is wildly out of touch, I believe, with the American people and the question of abortion.
If you take Hillary Clinton's position on abortion, She supports unlimited abortion on demand up until the moment of birth, partial birth, with government funding, and no parental notification or consent.
Now, nationally, 9% of Americans agree with that.
91% of Americans say, whoa, that is not my position.
And as far as I know, of the 346 Democrats running this year, every single one of them agrees with Hillary.
That is required entrance to the Democratic primary, and so it's out of step with 91% of Americans.
Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment.
Five years ago, Joe Biden was saying that the Hyde Amendment needs to remain.
What's the Hyde Amendment?
The Hyde Amendment says there is no federal funding of abortions.
So they'll still fund Planned Parenthood under the lie that Planned Parenthood is using their money for non-abortions.
But Biden used to be in favor of the Hyde Amendment.
They asked him like two weeks ago, and he said, no, no, no, I'm totally in favor of federal funding of abortions, meaning that you and I have to pay taxes so that somebody else can have an abortion, which is, I mean, the founders would be spinning so fast in their graves that they would be Digging brand new steel tunnels.
I mean, it's insane.
Look, it was just a few months ago that the video of Ralph Northam surfaced.
And it was a radio interview he was doing that was videoed.
By the way, who would video a radio interview?
That's a little crazy.
But where he argued for not just late-term abortion, But abortion after birth.
And he's a doctor, and he described how as a doctor he would deliver a child, he would make the child comfortable, and then he would discuss with the parents what to do with the child.
The obvious implication would be whether to kill this infant who was already born.
Listen, even people who are vocally pro-choice are utterly horrified with that.
And by the way, when I spoke out about it, the Houston Chronicle, The head of the editorial page blasted me and said, this is a lie.
This is not true.
This is not what Northam said.
And I responded, here's a link to the video.
And by the way, my tweet on it said, watch the video.
So you watch, you listen to yourself.
Now, let me ask a question.
When's the last time you heard Ralph Northam's name in National News?
I know, he disappeared.
Not only does he advocate for post-birth abortion, but then, of course, his his fame yearbook page where where And let's segue, let's go back to the Klan.
So at a yearbook page with one person in blackface and another person in a Klan outfit.
But he doesn't know which one he is.
And Jeremy, you put your finger on the most important piece of this.
So the media and popular culture has this, the left has this weird fixation with blackface.
Yes.
Now I gotta say, look, I grew up in Houston, but blackface wasn't a thing down there.
And I get that there are cultural insensitivities, and it's probably not worth doing blackface.
Now, I'll mention, I think two of the three late-night comics have appeared in blackface.
There are a bunch of Hollywood folks that have appeared in blackface, but fine.
I'll get the times of change, and I'll even concede some of that.
What was amazing, though, is when he publicly said, his first answer was, he may have been one of the two, he wasn't sure which.
If you cannot stand up and say unequivocally, I have never in my life worn a Klan outfit...
What the hell is wrong with you?
That's amazing.
Think about the media.
They call it the blackface scandal.
Right.
And not the Klan scandal.
I mean, he's like, yeah, that could have been.
And then a day or two later, he changed his mind and said, no, no, no, that wasn't me.
Yeah.
Not a word of that in months, because the fact that you have a Democratic...
It could be a disguise.
That's why we haven't seen him.
And also, because if all the scandals went, then a Republican would be in charge of Virginia.
That's why it's...
That was about the most fun week we've had in politics in a while.
That was great.
That was pretty fantastic.
What's amazing, too, I mean, so the Houston Chronicle asks you, who are you going to believe the Houston Chronicle or your lion eyes?
But they say, well, Ralph Northam...
Lion Ted eyes.
Your lion Ted eyes.
But then they say, well, listen, Ralph Northam's an idiot who said something stupid on the radio.
Well, you don't need to just focus on Ralph Northam.
Look at the governor of New York who passed a law legalizing abortion up to the point of birth, changing the penal code such that if you kill a pregnant woman, it is no longer double murder.
You're only committing a single murder.
What about that guy?
That is a law.
He celebrated it.
He lit the buildings in New York up in pink to celebrate the law.
And virtually every news story about this does what you said.
They say Republicans dishonestly claim that Democrats are in favor of infanticide.
But it's infanticide.
Listen, my quads are real solid from all the pouncing lately.
I've got to say, it's a great exercise.
I've been pouncing just every day.
I get up and I pounce.
Endless pouncing.
Endless pouncing.
Great hamstrings.
What's going on with our poll out there?
All right.
It looks as if less work isn't an option for most of our Daily Wire subscribers.
Our Facebook poll question was, what's the best part of summer?
Less work only got 16%.
Less rain was 17%.
The movies was 22%.
I mean, it's probably because The Avengers has come and gone, and I can't think of another movie I'm excited to see.
But the winner of what's the best part of summer is definitely climate change with 45%.
Yeah.
Guys, it's changing out there.
I woke up yesterday and my wife told me that we were going to a barbecue.
She likes to spring these things on me last minute.
And I said, ah, it is overcast and rainy.
I shall wear a long-sleeved shirt.
Not three hours later.
The climate went and changed so rapidly.
They say it's going to warm up four degrees over the course of a century.
I'm not exaggerating.
It went up 20 degrees by the time afternoon came.
That's because I was driving my car.
How can the deniers keep denying this?
This is an emergency.
Every summer.
We need to bomb every coal factory in China and India.
It's an emergency.
I've been told we have 12 years to fix this thing.
And I've heard it's just like World War II. No, no.
AOC said, how dare you believe her when she says 12 years.
And then Beto made a 10.
Who?
Yeah, I don't know.
Some guy?
He ran a Senate in New Mexico.
He's an Irish fellow?
In Texas.
He's an Irish fellow from Texas, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Have you ever heard of him, Senator Cruz?
Did you happen to see his announcement speech in El Paso?
He gave part of the speech in Spanish.
And AP reported, Beto gave part of the speech in his native tongue.
And they had to issue a correction.
Because Beto is, of course, Robert Francis O'Rourke.
And I had to have some fun with this on Twitter, and so I retweeted.
I said, that is impressive.
I have never seen a political speech given in Gaelic.
I have to say I'm a little offended right now that we have a white man such as Senator Rafael Ted Cruz here criticizing this obviously Mexican man named Robert Francis O'Rourke.
This is a microaggression.
The only reason he'll get away with it is because not one human remembers Beto O'Rourke at this point.
Exactly.
He got Buttigieg'd right out of the national conversation.
Raw.
Raw morning.
It's gonna be amazing.
Raw.
He's got things to do.
One more question.
Go, Alicia, go.
Well, it seems as if not everyone is pretty upset with the Game of Thrones finale.
I'm glad I never wasted time on watching any episodes.
We're definitely gonna talk about it.
Even Jon Snow himself is so upset he checked himself into rehab today.
But a question comes from Jonathan, a Daily Wire subscriber.
He said he wants to know what you guys think of Game of Thrones, but what do you think that the next big show will be now that Game of Thrones is over?
I'll tell you what the best show on TV right now is.
Chernobyl.
Ah, so good.
Chernobyl is incredible.
It's another level of television.
It's so good.
It's like Band of Brothers level good.
It's unbelievable.
It's so good.
Have you guys seen this?
No.
Okay, so you want to pitch this through?
Because this is your profession.
What's the name of the actor?
I forget who's the lead actor.
Oh, the guy from the...
From Mad Men.
Yeah, and also he's been in everything now, right?
He was also in...
The one about the Queen?
He is like Anthony Hopkins level great.
He's one of the great actors of our generation.
I can't remember his name.
This thing is just, it's almost like a documentary, a docudrama.
Yeah.
And it's so beautifully done.
And it's a horror movie.
It's a living, real horror movie.
Right.
And it's filmed like a horror movie.
And it's basically about how Soviet communism allowed, brought the world this close to annihilation, essentially.
And it's all true.
Right, I mean, it's about the meltdown at Chernobyl, and it follows the bureaucrat, like this one bureaucrat, the one honest bureaucrat in the Soviet system who's trying desperately to tell the bureaucracy, to tell the Politburo, you guys need to evacuate this area because it's going to kill 300,000 people if you do not.
And you need to bring in these workers to do this, and they're going to die.
And it is the scene where Emily Watson, as a physicist, goes in to a Soviet official and says, you know, this is a real disaster.
He says, well, I have a different opinion.
And she says, before you did this, you were in a shoe store.
And he says, power to the workers.
She says, I'm a nuclear physicist.
You ran a shoe store.
And it is an amazing, amazing, first of all, the acting, every actor in it is great.
The writing is beautiful.
It's amazing.
It is the best thing I've seen in TV in a very long time.
And it literally, I'm not even finished with it yet.
It has me on the edge of my seat every episode.
Who plays the dragon?
So I will confess, the nuclear meltdown I'm having the most fun watching is the Democratic presidential.
And you know what?
The line, I'm a shoe salesman, there are actually quite a few of them that say that as well, because that's what they know about running an economy as well.
Senator Cruz is literally running around saying, I am a professional politician!
This is not going to work!
But as far as Game of Thrones, okay.
Did everybody see it?
Yes.
You saw it?
Well, my favorite part of the whole finale was when Gandalf...
Shut up.
Shut up.
I have not seen one episode.
I'm dreading this conversation.
I've seen every single episode.
Every single one.
Me too.
I saw every episode.
I think the four of us have all seen all the episodes.
I'm dreading this because I know I'm in the minority.
Oh, you liked it.
Oh, you are so wrong for me.
As per our usual arrangement.
All right, you are incorrect, sir.
Give us the pitch for King Brian.
Yeah, I'm gonna need to hear this.
Slowly, in short sentences.
I thought that it...
First of all, I think there was something inherently damaging about telling a story over that length of time with input coming in from the public.
So I think that no television show, including television shows I've loved, like The Wire and Breaking Bad, have really sustained...
Breaking Bad was awesome.
It was awesome, but it didn't sustain...
I can pick it apart...
In its narrative, because as a writer, you start reacting to the crowd.
And it had all those problems, and I thought the penultimate season was terrible.
I think it was the penultimate season.
However, first of all, I was grippingly entertaining every step of the way.
Every step of the way.
It was never not entertaining.
There was a moment in the middle of the last season where I thought, I care more about who wins that throne than I care about the 2020 election.
I was so I was so taken with it.
Anytime a story does that, it's good.
It is a good story.
If you are telling a story and you are that gripped and that carried away, it's a good story.
I thought that weirdly...
And it turned out like Eric Garcetti ended up in the world.
Weirdly, it imitated real life in the sense that wars begin with big questions and great enthusiasm and racial intensity.
And they end with a bunch of bureaucrats setting up the sewer system.
And I thought that that was basically what happened in Game of Thrones.
I thought the tragic love affair between Jon Snow and Daenerys was absolutely terrific.
I was wrapped up in that till the end.
Did you see her turning bad?
Yeah.
See, that's the other thing.
People keep saying that wasn't set up, but I saw it like two seasons ago.
And when...
I saw it in season one.
Season one.
Yeah.
I mean, I watched her brother get turned to death with molten gold.
At that point, you're like, yeah.
She crucified.
I saw the possibility.
I just didn't know if they would go there.
So when it happened, all these people said it wasn't set up.
I thought it was pretty well set up.
And I just thought it was just a terrific story that really understood power.
It understood how power works and what it does to people.
And it understood the randomness of life.
I don't think the idea that they killed people randomly wasn't quite true, but they gave the impression that they were doing that.
And I just thought it was a terrific show.
And it didn't bother me that...
That it didn't resolve in the way that I wanted it to resolve.
I don't think that's a story's job.
So here's my problem.
I don't even care that Bran becomes king.
Although I think from basic storytelling 101, once you melt the Iron Throne, you then can't have in the next scene we choose a king.
Because the entire point of melting the Iron Throne was to break the wheel to change the whole concept that we're gonna have these kings.
But I'm even willing to grant them that they don't understand what symbolism is.
The worst thing that happened in the finale is not Bran becoming the king.
The worst thing that happens in the finale is that after the most consequential thing that has happened in the entire series, which is Jon Snow kills Daenerys Targaryen, they fade to black.
They fade to black, and they say, three weeks later.
And three weeks later, the bureaucrats are sitting.
So what they did is they faced the most difficult question that they were going to have to face as screenwriters.
And they got so terrified of coming up with the wrong answer that they punted.
And they gave no answer.
So you're saying you don't think the Unsullied would have reacted well to that?
I'm saying when the Unsullied come in, Jon Snow does not come out.
The obvious way to end that story, the way that everything had built to...
The whole fact of Jon's actual lineage as a Targaryen faded to black.
Nothing matters.
The obvious way to end the story, and you could have played every single scene, the bureaucrats, Bran, you could have played 100% of that the same, if he kills Daenerys Targaryen, the dragon doesn't burn the throne, because the dragon is an animal and doesn't understand symbolism any better than the writers, the dragon tries to burn because the dragon is an animal and doesn't understand symbolism any better And he doesn't burn.
And he doesn't burn.
And then, now his lineage has been proven.
Now he is the master of the dragon.
He flies out on that dragon, which keeps the Unsullied from being an issue.
And he melts the iron throne.
And he says, look, I'm obviously the chosen one.
History, fate, magic, raised from the dead, bloodline, the whole thing built to this.
And I say, screw the Iron Throne.
I'm receding into the North.
You guys figure it out.
And if they had done that, and then all the other scenes are the same.
They sit around, they take Bran.
It still wouldn't have made any sense that Bran is...
But I wouldn't have cared, because yes.
They robbed Jon of his agency.
They rob him of his agency.
They turn Jon into a passive character in the final season, spends the entire season doing nothing until he kills Daenerys, at which point they imprison him and then forcibly send him back to the North, which again makes no sense since the Unsullied have now left.
And who is the Queen of the North?
Oh right, his sister, who could theoretically just be like, yeah, we're not doing any of that stuff.
The Unsullied are gone.
To turn him into a prisoner and then send him back north makes no sense whatsoever.
He has to take the throne and then abdicate the throne.
That makes perfect sense because then he's an active character.
He's done all the things he needs to do.
Although he's kind of been a passive character throughout.
Yes and no.
He does charge directly into the 6,000 person army.
He's a brave guy but he's a lone wolf.
That's fine for him to be a lone wolf but Which is why he could advocate.
That's why it would have been satisfying for him to finally say, okay, you know what?
My whole character has been me being unwilling to step up and take leadership even though people keep trying to thrust leadership on me.
So for just this moment, I have to do it because it's the only way for all these people to survive.
That would have made sense.
There were a couple beats in the final episode with him and Daenerys that make no sense.
That whole conversation with Tyrion where he's like, ah, but she's still my queen.
You just watched her roast a million people.
That ship has sailed, my friend.
If you had just, you know, had sex with her two episodes ago, everything's hunky-dory.
Right?
She was basically like, marry me, have sex with me, and everything's good.
And he's like, no.
And she burns a million people.
He's like, now I'm into her.
What?
Wait, what now?
I'm confused.
You're...
I don't know how anybody dates you, man.
You're sending some mixed signals here, I guess what I'm saying.
And then the whole final scene with Tyrion where Tyrion gets up in front of the council and Unsullied Guy is like, well, Grey Worm is like, well, you don't talk.
And then he's like, okay.
And then he proceeds to give a seven-minute speech.
To all of Sansa's direct relatives, right?
I mean, everybody there is a direct relative of Bran, right?
Every single person there, with I think two exceptions, is a direct relative.
So it's pretty obvious how this particular election is going to go.
And when he gives his speech, first of all, there's nothing I hate more in TV than this pathetic Pathetic nonsense where writers justify their own job to the audience.
I hate this crap so much.
So you have him give a speech.
The only thing that matters is story.
Oh, that was terrible.
Shut your frickin' head.
I agree.
That's a bunch of nonsense.
That's that Yuval Harari crap.
I hate that.
It's garbage.
It's garbage in sociology, and it's garbage when it comes to writers justifying why I'm watching your show.
I don't need you to lecture me on why I just watched your show.
I got it.
It was entertaining.
I don't need you to tell me stories are the only thing that matters and all this kind of nonsense.
And then, for him to say, and the best story is Bran, the Broken, who is thrown off a tower.
His story is so good that he set out a season.
Right.
One entire season.
My favorite thing there was that Tyrion is saying things like, and then he became the Three-Eyed Raven.
Now...
No one in that room knows what the F Tyrion is talking about.
He goes, he became, no one knows what the Three-Eyed Raven is.
The only person who knows what the Three-Eyed Raven is, is maybe Sansa.
Maybe.
And also, Sansa's sitting right there, and she's like, well, I gotta be honest.
Like, my story's kind of better than this, right?
Like, my story was, like, I got forcibly married to this guy.
He got killed.
And then I got married to Tyrion.
And then I got shipped off to get raped.
Yeah, and Daenerys' story was the best story.
Daenerys' story.
She's one of the best female characters anybody's written.
Actually, Arya is pretty.
Aria has a good job.
So basically everyone there, including the weird uncle who gets up and tries to take the crown for a second, has a better story than Bran.
And he's like, but story.
Story is everything.
First of all, you know what's everything?
I guarantee you the weird uncle is a U.S. Senate.
Final note.
When he says story is everything, this has never been true in Westeros ever.
Ever.
It is a lie.
When he says stories, everything.
So, yeah, the people are just going to suddenly accept this weirdo as the head of the Iron Throne.
My only point, though, and all of this, I think, is absolutely great.
I would sit and listen to it forever.
When little Nell died, people gathered on the ports in America waiting for the chapter to come and screaming.
As the boat came in, they screamed, does she live or does she die?
When you do that to somebody, you've done a great job.
They did a great job.
They fumbled at the one-yard line.
Even the fact that we're sitting here talking about it is...
Indicates what a great job.
I don't think that's fair.
Yes, they did a great job for eight seasons and five episodes.
That doesn't mean...
The fact that we were that invested doesn't mean that they actually carried the ball across the world.
And Lost was great for five seasons.
But it's also...
The whole thing is based...
Five episodes, I knew Lost was over.
The whole thing is based on The War of the Roses.
Yeah.
And the War of the Roses doesn't end when you take the person with the best claim to the throne and you send them over to Normandy because guess what that person does less than a generation later.
It has to end with the murder of all of your opponents.
That's the only way that it can...
Well, you know, Hollywood has gotten so political.
There are two alternative endings they could have done that would have mirrored the 2020 election.
They could have, number one, made Ned Stark The king.
Because like the 2020 Democrats, he has no brain and lost his head.
Or if they gave in to their political predilections, they could have made the white walkers the king and said that all Republicans are Nazis.
To be honest, that was my biggest disappointment in the show was the White Walkers.
I loved that they introduced that in the first episode, and then it just kind of crept in.
And it had a lot of symbolic valence, the idea that everybody has to unite against death because death is a threat to every single person.
And then it just kind of died.
You never found out who the Night King was.
This is actually the big problem with the Night King as a character.
So somebody pointed this out online.
I want to give credit, but I can't remember who it is.
They were saying, if you contrast Sauron, I think it was Ross Dudehead.
If you contrast Sauron as a character with the Night King as a character, the thing about Sauron is that what's interesting about Sauron is not Sauron.
What's interesting about Sauron is how everyone reacts to Sauron.
So in the middle of the Battle of Gondor, you have Denethor, who's lighting his kid on fire, Because he's gone crazy from having to make these decisions about what to do with Sauron.
By the way, I've just been officially out-geeked.
You've got Saruman, who becomes an actual emissary of the Dark Lord, right?
You have a bunch of people reacting in different ways.
The problem with the Night King is because he is death, there's only one way for the characters...
Realistically, to act toward him, which makes it a very boring conflict because everyone is innately united by this.
The only person...
The way to fix that would have been to give him a better story, to give the Night King a better story.
That's true.
So a final point on my Ned Stark theory...
If you think about his central theme, It is winter is coming.
So it's climate change.
Jay Inslee is going to be the Democratic nominee.
Jay Inslee is the brand of this race.
He's just sitting there all uselessly.
I can't wait to get the nomination.
Isn't there a nomination fight?
I'm flying like a bird.
Don't disrespect Eric Solwell.
Well, actually, you're right.
He is like Bran.
He just released a video where he said his job is to sit and listen.
Did you see that?
And oddly enough, when you threaten to launch thermonuclear weapons at the voters, that turns out not to be good public.
And just as a literal fact, Eric Swalwell campaigns on the slogan, I am you.
So he actually is Bran.
So he actually does.
I have to say, by the way, as someone who's not a big fan of the Game of Thrones, the Lord of the Rings books, I love the movies, but I just thought the books were just almost an act of insanity.
However, J.R.R. Tolkien was a brilliant guy who had a vision and put that vision onto paper, and that is the problem entirely with Game of Thrones, which I think undermines it from beginning to end.
Is that there is no vision in it.
And nobody actually knows.
I mean, there's a lord of light in it who brings people back to life repeatedly.
But he's completely irrelevant.
And I think that that actually...
Except that Melisandre provides the services of a grip in that one episode so we can see what the hell is going on.
But that's very real for people like the author.
It's very real for...
The guy's an atheist, basically.
And it's very real that all the effect of God is there and they know it.
But they're just not going to react.
They're just going to ignore it.
And I think that that is...
Okay, so now it's time for me to piss It's on George R.R. Martin.
So this guy's last book, when did last one come out?
Book number five?
Came out 1982.
It came out like seven, eight years ago.
And so he sits around doing nothing and not contributing anything.
So that was Joe Biden's sixth term?
And he sits around doing nothing for years on end.
I know.
And then, did you see this?
The series finale came out.
And then they asked him about it.
He said, well, you know, I'm going to write the books differently.
It's like, oh, you are just the worst.
So you're willing to take millions of dollars from HBO so they can buy the rights to your stuff, and then you're going to wait for everybody to hate the ending, and then you're going to crap all over the people who did the only...
He basically abandoned the books when it became clear that he had no place to go.
I mean, I've read all the books, and books one and three are good, and the rest are garbage.
Yeah.
And he just ran out of things to say, and so he just stopped writing.
And then other people filled in his blanks, and now he's mad at them for filling in his blanks.
The weirdest thing is when J.K. Rowling came out and said that Jon Snow was always gay.
That's so weird.
I didn't even know she wrote that book.
There is this problem with TV, though.
The Wire is a classic example.
The last season of The Wire is some of the worst television I've ever seen, and the first season is some of the best.
The first season's fantastic.
Yeah, it's amazing.
And third season's pretty good.
There's a genuine problem with writing a story over that much time with people in your head.
Well, this is how Picard said that same arc.
The first two seasons are spectacular, and then it steadily went downhill.
And almost every television show is best in the first season, because that's the arc, and It's just part of the business of writing TV that you have to throw in everything you've got in the first episode and then explain it over the first season.
By the end of that, you're kind of done.
This is why I'm a fan of streaming because the truth is the move toward miniseries, which I thought were dead back in the 1980s.
This was the big thing.
In the 1980s, they actually had all these great miniseries that came out.
And then they stopped at the miniseries and they went to just series series.
And that only works for comedy because you can write the same characters every single episode.
But for a drama that actually has some sort of connection between the episodes, if there's no character development, then there's no place to go.
And if there is character development, then there has to be a termination point for the characters.
And so you end up in this weird situation where basically you should basically just say three seasons and out.
And every show here would have been better at three seasons and out.
That's what the British used to do.
And it's funny because the only show that's actually about this, and I think it's probably one of the best Works of Art of our time is The Sopranos, which is actually about the fact that in TV, nobody ever changes.
And so, like, TV is actually a lot more like life than books and plays, because in a book and a play, there's a character who has an arc.
But in real life, most people just don't change.
They just do different things.
Like, so if you're a cop, you're the same guy when you started, but you handle a lot of different cases.
It's a lot more like television.
And in The Sopranos, all this stuff happens, and everybody says, oh, now I've got a revelation.
And then the next episode, like in The Simpsons, they're exactly back where they started.
And that I thought was just genius, because I thought that was what the show was about.
And that one does hold up.
It worked, right?
It worked through all of the seasons.
Yeah, it does.
It's an amazing show.
To quote the Bard, things in this life change very slowly if they ever change at all.
Which Bard is it?
Don Henley.
Whenever I say the Bard, it's always Don Henley.
Listen.
The one that I'm excited about right now, and it's a one-time thing.
It's an event.
It's not going to be a new series.
John Wick 3.
Ben is so into John Wick 3.
Oh, my God.
Don't tell me.
I've seen 1 and 2.
I haven't seen 3.
Okay, so I won't spoil it.
All I will say is that...
Isn't there a pretty tough dog in it?
Yeah.
All I will say...
Okay, so it's all in the preview.
He's right now.
Worse.
Okay, man?
He rides a horse.
And also, there are three action sequences that open the film, and they are maybe the three best action sequences ever.
Okay, stop talking.
Stop talking, because I haven't seen it yet.
They're so good.
Oh, my goodness.
Deadwood.
Oh, yeah.
On the 31st, we get a finale to Deadwood, which I think the first season of Deadwood, the first four episodes of Deadwood are unbelievably good.
And then it's just a lot of cursing.
And we know.
Every now and again in Deadwood, there's a great episode.
It'll go for like five episodes and it'll be terrible.
And then suddenly you go like, whoa, what was that?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Ben, you talk about shows with a lot of cursing.
One of my favorite movies, one of the funniest movies ever, I think, is Team America.
It's just side-splitting.
But I will say, when Heidi and I were fairly newly married, and Heidi and I watched together, she's not a movie person.
But she laughed so hard she almost fell out of the chair.
So we then were on a family vacation with her parents and we're like, okay, this is so funny.
Let's put it on.
And I guess we'd sort of forgotten just how much cursing there is.
So I'm sitting there with my in-laws watching this like...
It was really...
Okay, don't go down that road.
Do not watch Team America with your in-laws.
Bad, bad movie.
The puppet sex scene would be like marriage and...
I did tell my dad until my dad had seen the movie.
And my mom said, can't you watch him?
I said, no, this is too old for you.
Even I cringe during the public session.
Oh my God.
So I want to take two more questions from our Daily Wire subscribers since, you know, they keep us all in business.
So we're going to kick it back over to Elisha at Daily Wire headquarters.
You can put in your, it's not too late to get in a question for any of us or for Senator Cruz over at www.dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Elisha, what have you for us?
I'm sorry.
I'm just burning up over here because I have my own personal space heater that is my 33-week-old baby.
It's not a baby.
It's a cluster of cells.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
Fetus.
The heartbeat isn't real, either.
I heard some idiots say that on Twitter, too.
But I got, like, Michael and I got his and hers matching velvet smoking jackets.
We're so cute, you and I. And I'm still really hurt that I got kicked out of the room.
And this velvet jacket is burning up, and I can't handle it anymore.
But I will keep it on for our subscribers.
Yeah.
Best dedication.
Arun wants to know, and this question is for everyone, so I'd really like everyone's feedback, especially since we have a guy that actually ran for president in the room.
Tonight, the question for everyone is, who do you think is the most genuine Democratic presidential candidate?
Genuine?
The most genuine one.
Bernie.
Bernie is not afraid to fully be Bernie.
Bernie says what Bernie believes.
Bernie shouts what Bernie believes.
Bernie sings what Bernie believes, topless in the Soviet Union.
I guess.
At no point is Bernie anything other than Bernie.
And let me plead with the other Democratic candidates, please don't follow that particular reason.
Ben, what do you think?
Well, I think you've answered the question.
We all have the same answer.
Okay, next question.
Next question.
All right.
This one is for Senator Cruz and comes from a subscriber named John.
He wants to know, can you give us some insight into what it's actually like behind the closed doors of Congress?
Are people actually civil?
Or is it exactly how we see it in the media?
You know, talking heads, yelling at each other all the time.
It varies a lot.
One of the things is there's very little debate in Congress.
So if you go speak on the Senate floor, you have visions of Mr.
Smith going to Washington, and you're passionately persuading your colleagues.
Truth of the matter is when you speak on the Senate floor, it's usually a completely empty chamber, and you're just talking to the C-SPAN camera.
If you remember the first year I was in the Senate, we were debating gun control, and I tried to engage Dianne Feinstein.
On the Second Amendment and actually have a constitutional debate where her gun control bill specified about 2,000 different guns that would be banned.
And she specifically named which guns would be banned and which wouldn't.
And I asked her, I said, look, you've specified you're going to ban some guns and not others.
Now, the language of the Second Amendment That talks about the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
That's exactly the same language that you find in other parts of the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, the right of the people to peaceably assemble, to speak.
And I said, you know, would you allow the same kind of restrictions on the First Amendment, specifying which books are allowed and which books aren't, that you're willing to allow in the Second Amendment?
And I sort of naively as a freshman thought, okay, that's a constitutional question.
We're in the Senate.
We're in the Judiciary Committee.
We ought to be able to debate these things.
And you may remember she turned and roared at me, I am not a sixth grader.
And she got incredibly angry with me that I asked her this question.
The world's greatest deliberative part.
If you had been a sixth grader, she would have yelled at you.
You should have visited her offices and talked to her about climate change.
It would have been great.
That was actually pretty spectacular.
That was the best thing.
So I have hated my senator my entire life.
This is my senator.
And that was the best moment I have ever seen.
And I actually did compliment Diana on that after.
When she turns to the protestor, the protestor said, you know what?
What was it?
I'm sorry I voted for you.
She says, how old are you?
16.
Well, then you didn't vote for me.
That was a pretty remarkable issue.
It was the only time I've thought that Dianne Feinstein has earned my vote.
It was so great.
Her owning small children.
I was like, absolutely.
I love Dianne Feinstein every single moment that Barbara Boxer was in the Senate.
Yeah.
I just thought, well, if I've only got two, I've got to pick one.
So, but on the question, it varies a lot.
There are some senators, sort of like every other group of people, there are some senators that are nice, that are funny.
You know, there are several of the senators who are running for president on the Democratic side who I really like.
I get along really well with...
Amy Klobuchar and Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, all three of them I've had dinner with, I've hung out with.
Other than their policies, they're perfectly nice people.
There are other people who, not so much.
And so it varies quite a bit.
Have you ever seen anybody in the Senate change his or her mind, literally on the basis of a logical constitutional argument, even off screen?
I mean, even off the Senate floor?
Not often.
Um...
I can tell you a time when I did, which actually going back to Gillibrand.
So she and I served on the Senate Armed Services Committee together, and she's been a leader in changing how sexual assault is prosecuted in the military.
And tragically, sexual assault has been a persistent problem.
And she's been advocating moving the charging decision for a sexual assault case from the commanding officer to a military prosecutor, still a military officer, but someone not in the direct chain of command.
And I went into one of the hearings or markups we had on that, and I had an open mind.
I didn't have really a strong opinion on it.
And she made a whole series of arguments that, number one, we'd been trying for decades to fix it, and the military kept saying, let us fix it, let us fix it, and they weren't fixing it.
The problem was persisting.
Number two, the argument the military made is that moving it out of the commanding officer would undermine good order and discipline in the military.
She pointed out a number of our allies, like the UK and Canada and Israel, have done this, and it hasn't undermined good order and discipline.
And I listened to those arguments, and I said, you know what, that is pretty persuasive.
And I went and told her afterwards, I agree with you, I joined her bill, and she and I have led the fight to do that.
And that was really an instance where I listened to the arguments and was persuaded on the merits.
Absolutely.
That makes me feel better.
That's nice, yeah.
That's so nice.
That's the nicest thing I've heard about DC in life.
He could only name one example.
And it's him.
You know, if anything, Senator Cruz just cares too much.
I cannot count the number of times I've been told that.
Alicia, one more from our Daily Wire subscribers.
All right, this question comes from Dan, and congratulations, Dan, to you and your wife.
He says that they're having their first child in June and wants to know, what's the best parenting advice that you can give for a new parent?
Ooh.
Ladies and your family.
You're a parent.
For a new parent, swaddle.
All right.
All right.
So let's go back.
So our girls, Caroline and Catherine, are 11 and 8 when Caroline was born.
Okay.
One of the things I didn't know.
So when Caroline was born, she was up all day or up all night and slept all day.
And I remember we went to the pediatrician like a week into it.
I'm like, okay, there's something wrong with this child.
What's going on?
And the doctor begins laughing at me and said, look.
Look, when the baby is in the womb, during the day, the mom is walking around and it's swaying back and forth.
And so the baby in the womb is sleeping during the day.
And then when the mom goes to sleep, the baby wakes up and says, for a week or two, the clocks are inverted.
And I sort of felt relieved.
Okay, we're not doing something wrong.
But getting a child to go to sleep...
You will do anything.
And Caroline, like I would do some of the late night duty and swaddling where you wrap the baby tightly in a cloth and it actually simulates being squeezed in the womb and then rocking back and forth.
I used to rock Caroline to sleep swaddled and listening to Pavarotti, which oddly enough comforted her.
And so with the parent of a newborn, getting your child to bed is a victory that will exceed the highest points in your life to that point.
Yeah, the ones that they recommend are swaddling and shushing and swinging.
So those are big.
Also, if you don't live near family, make sure that you have a parent come in for the first few weeks to help take shifts.
I live very close to my parents and that has been extremely helpful for me.
So that is definitely a big one.
And then as they get older, one that I'm still having trouble with but is absolutely necessary is say no and then stick to no.
Because you realize that kids think that you're saying no because you're being mean to them, and the truth is that it is much harder for you to say no than it is for them to hear no.
It is very, very difficult to say no to your child, because half the time you're saying no to something that you also wish you could enjoy with the kid.
We're not going to go out to ice cream now because you were bad.
It's like, well, I want to take you out for ice cream.
That's fun to take you out for ice cream.
I have a good time taking my kids out for ice cream.
But if you're acting like a brat, now I've got to do something about it.
And that's harsh for me.
It's hard for me to deal with that.
Being a parent is a lot about recognizing when you're doing something for you and when you're doing something for the kid.
But yeah, the biggest thing, honestly, is just recognizing how hard your life is going to become.
It does radically shift your life.
I mean, as I've said a thousand times, basically the sort of spectrum of happiness and misery in life when you're single, barring health problems or something, when you're single, your spectrum of happiness and misery can get up to like a seven in terms of happiness and down to like a two in terms of unhappiness.
And then you get married and it goes up to like a ten in terms of happiness and maybe a zero in terms of unhappiness because now you take on your wife's problems or your spouse's burdens and that's very difficult.
And then...
And then you have a kid.
And all limits are eliminated.
And then the greatest things that will ever happen to you in your life are the things that your kids do and being with your kids and watching your kids laugh.
And the worst things that will ever happen to you in your life, bar none, are all things involving your kids.
I can easily say that the three or four worst things, and my kids are only five and three, the three or four worst things in my life that have ever happened to me are things that involve my kids.
And I'm not just talking about health problems.
I mean, thank God we had some health problems, but thank God those have been taken care of.
I'm talking about like even when your kids are just being terrible or mean to each other or horrible and you have to deal with it.
And then here's the other thing.
Trust yourself a little bit.
So everybody always has input and advice.
The fact is people have been doing this for several thousand years at this point.
And barring cataclysmically bad decision making, you'll be fine.
I agree with all of that.
I think when you have a kid, it is as if you had been living with what on stage they call a scrim, which has the painted scenery on it, and suddenly the thing goes up and you realize, oh no, now I see the world in three dimensions.
I completely agree that you have to stick to the consequences.
One of the hardest things, if you make a threat, you've got to carry it out.
My son has learned that I don't do this consistently, and he's eating me a lot right now.
That's why you don't threaten to kill them, because you're probably not going to do that.
Yeah, because then you have to do it.
The other thing as they grow up, you know, Wordsworth had a great line about wise passiveness.
And one of the things about kids is they are going to be themselves.
And you can teach them your values.
You should teach them your values.
You can teach them your vision of the world.
But you've got to let them become themselves.
That is the whole trick.
And it's almost like being a column where you're going to keep the limits of where they can go.
But you're going to let them go up in their own particular way.
And that is one of the hardest things to learn, especially for active people with strong opinions.
And you raised one and a half good kids.
I raised two of the greatest human beings on Earth.
However, it was my wife.
You were a kid recently.
And I was in college, so as far as I know, I don't have any kids.
I certainly haven't acknowledged any of them.
And one of the great lines in the Odyssey is, it's a wise man who knows his own child.
So this is all advice that I've taken in my perspective of parenting.
But as for the practical parenting, I haven't done any of it.
So I'm not a parent, but I, you know, I'm a lay minister and I counsel people through difficult times in their life.
You work in Hollywood, so you're familiar with infants.
LAUGHTER And my parenting advice that I give to prospective parents is, among my friends, I'm known as the baby whisperer, and it's only because I know the three S's.
Because I'm the oldest of 20,000 grandchildren on my maternal side, and my mother raised my whole town.
So there are always little kids around, and it's amazing what just wrapping them tight and shushing them will accomplish.
Yeah.
I've always wanted to try this with an adult.
Somebody's complaining too loudly, just grab a blanket, you swaddle them.
I do have one great piece of parenting advice for our subscriber and his wife, and that's don't get a divorce.
No, it's great advice.
Excellent.
Your children, and Drew, you speak about this all the time.
Your children have a planet on which they live.
And that planet is your relationship with your wife.
And when you choose to sever that bond, you are blowing up their planet.
And they will not recover.
And I had this argument with a close friend recently.
And he pushed back and said, you know, kids are versatile.
They bounce back.
You know, they're made out of rubber.
And all of that's true.
People survive.
People adapt, and people survive.
But the fundamental damage that you do to a child when you sever from them the relationship between their mother and father cannot be repaired, won't be repaired.
When they're in their 30s, they're going to struggle as a result of it.
When they're in their 50s, they're going to struggle as a result of it.
When they're grandparents themselves, they're going to struggle as a result of it.
There won't be a day of their life that isn't marked By the thing that you took away from them in service of self.
And ultimately I think what it means to be a parent is not to serve self as the highest.
I think all of that is great advice.
And just to add to that a little codicil is be nice to your spouse.
Be grateful.
Because spouses do all the stuff that's invisible.
You know, like husbands put roofs over your head and nobody ever looks up, you know, what was that Chris Rock line?
Nobody ever says, thanks, Dad, it's easy to read with this light that works.
And wives do a million things that are easy to ignore.
Well, it's cliche, but, you know, marriage is hard work.
One of the things Heidi and I try to do is we try to do date night every week.
Actually, our girls get mad at us because I'm on the road a lot.
They say, why are you guys going out together?
I try to, with our girls, say, look, this is important for you and for the family, for us to keep a strong marriage.
When you all grow up and are married and have kids, you need to keep a strong marriage.
You need to marry a man who loves you and who you are the best friend to them in the world.
That That's hopefully a good example for kids to see.
This is the best advice we've ever given on the show.
This guy lucked out, whoever he was.
Take our advice on parenting, but don't drink and smoke for God's sake.
Don't do as we do.
So thanks everybody for tuning in for another, I think, fabulous episode of Backstage.
If you'd like to participate in the next one, head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Become a subscriber.
We will be back in a mere matter of weeks to talk about some other meaningless crap.
