All Episodes
Previous Next
July 18, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show
01:43:17
Daily Wire Backstage: "The Squad" Edition
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, this is Michael.
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, one.
Some of our best work.
Welcome to Backstage: The Squad Edition.
Howdy folks, I'm Jeremy Boring, known around here as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase I'm Jeremy Boring, known around here as the God King, lowercase g, lowercase k, and joining me this fine evening, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, This, my friends, is my squad.
There are many like it.
This one is mine.
My squad is my best friend.
It is my life.
I must master it as I master my life.
Without me, my squad is useless.
Without my squad, I am useless.
I must fire my squad true.
Knowles, you're fired true.
Now, if you're still with us, I implore you to get your keyboards and submit your burning questions to us in anticipation of our dazzling answers.
Also, submit your resumes, because we'll need to replace Nulls.
Let's do this thing.
Yowza!
So we've got a bunch of things to talk about.
Apollo, we're at the 50th anniversary of mankind stepping foot on the moon.
Mankind.
And only white mankind.
We must face that.
I'm really glad it's a hoax because otherwise it would have been so racist and sexist.
We've got to go up there.
We've got to take down the flag, man.
We've got to give the moon back to the Chinese.
That's the only way to make this happen.
We're going to talk about the president's tweets and the response from the Democrats in Congress.
And, of course, we're going to talk about the squad.
So fresh, so faced.
So fresh, so faced.
So squat.
So squat.
I... I made a little something.
To commemorate the squad.
And I can't take full credit for that.
I mean, I will take most of the credit for this.
There's artists, I'm not crediting them.
For the sake of their careers.
Animators, I'm not crediting them.
But I am going to credit our friend Adam Baldwin, who is one of the great Twitter follows, who observed on Twitter only yesterday that this squad, the JV squad, the Fresh Face squad, the Dim squad, Calls to mind another famous squad, which would be well known to those of us who are in the oft-overlooked generation.
We're not boomers.
We're not millennials.
We're Gen Xers.
And Gen Xers had a little something-something in the early 2000s called Teen Girl Squad.
And I'm going to play for you the original Teen Girl Squad video now, and then we'll see what we were able to do with it here.
So, guys, could we play Teen Girl Squad for the folks at home?
Teen Girl Squad!
Cheerleader!
So-and-so!
Watch your face!
The ugly one!
Hey, guys!
Let's go get ready to look so good!
Okay, now let's start looking good!
Boop!
Christin, you look burnt or dead.
I miss Christina.
I have a crush on every boy.
Arrowed.
Ow, my skin.
Punt.
Dag, yo.
I look so good.
It's over!
That was Strong Bash.
Our friends, Homestar Runner, one of the great...
Before there was YouTube, there was Homestar Runner.
Absolutely.
And I wasted many, many hours of my life.
You know, those guys, I read an article about them back in those days.
They were running a merch business primarily.
They made these great Flash animations, which we all...
Which we all loved at the same time.
And then they sold merch out of their garage.
I can't remember the number.
Obviously this has been almost 20 years ago.
But they were doing like six figures a month selling merch out of their...
I was legitimately inspired by them early in my Hollywood career.
I thought these are...
Entrepreneurial, enterprising guys.
They figured out a new way to communicate what they want to communicate to the world.
They bypassed all of the gatekeepers.
And they were hilarious.
And my son was eight, and he used to sit and watch them.
And his old father used to stand in the back of him just in stitches.
Strong bads emails.
Oh, that's the email.
Email!
I can remember this.
So Adam Baldwin makes the point that There was a girl squad, teen girl squad, for women, and now there is a four-woman squad in Congress known as Dim Girl Squad, and I thought we should take his joke as far as we could, and so I present to you now the world premiere of Dim Girl Squad.
Cheerleader!
So-and-so!
What's-her-face!
The other one!
Hey, gals, let's get ready to fresh-so-face!
Word, word, word!
Ah!
Okay!
Let's start freshen' face!
I hate...
Trump!
Kill hand!
You look fascist-ed!
I miss...
I hate every Jew!
Ow!
My gender!
Tweet it!
Dad, yo!
I'm a Green New Deal!
MP! I'm saying that the video was impeached.
I'm saying the video was impeached.
No wonder you were verified.
What, are you talking about this little thing?
I hadn't even noticed.
Now I can actually be demonetized.
Okay, so now I feel the necessity to break down behind the scenes for just a moment how this all went down after Jeremy came up with his brilliant idea.
Okay, so the way this went down is that Jeremy talked about this video, and we thought to ourselves, Media Matters will watch this show.
And because Media Matters will watch this show, this means that we have to take precautions.
So, for example, we will play the original cartoon so that people know that this is a parody of the original cartoon, a shot-for-shot parody of the original cartoon.
So there can be no mistake.
Jeremy Boring, the God King, does not actually believe that Ilhan Omar was, quote-unquote, concentration camped in her gender by the President of the United States, a robot.
Although he might.
So, that was number one.
Then, Jeremy, we changed, as you'll notice, A lot of things from the original video, because the original video has- No one dies.
Right, no one dies in this one, because we didn't want Media Matters to get the idea that anyone is interested in threatening the lives of any of these people.
We wish no violence on the Dem Girl Squad.
No one's trying to incite violence.
In fact, I would gladly condemn anyone who attempted to do violence to the Dem Girl Squad.
As opposed to the Dem Girl Squad, which apparently will go silent about terrorist attacks on ice facilities.
Also, you'll notice that the Dem girl squad in this iteration is different than the original Strong Bad squad.
Because the Strong Bad squad has...
We have cheerleader, Jack.
Yeah, okay.
We have so-and-so.
So-and-so, Jack.
So-and-so's there.
What's-her-face, Jack.
The ugly one.
There is no ugly one in this version.
There's the other one.
Because we didn't want anyone to assume that we were actually saying that Rashida Talib is ugly.
We wouldn't want anyone to assume that.
No, she's not ugly.
And even if she were, which she's not, then we wouldn't say that because it's mean and cruel and because we don't want to get boycotted by media matters.
So all of these deliberate changes were made.
To tell a freaking joke.
To tell a joke.
Because this is the idiotic world we live in.
Or to tell a strong bad joke, then you will get boycotted by media matters.
Whereas if, let's say, you're a rabid anti-Semite like Ilhan Omar, then you are a victim of our patriarchal evil society.
So I felt like it was necessary to give that back story right there.
I appreciate that.
Also, Jews is spelled J-E-W-S, not J-O-O-S. That's true.
As it is properly spelled.
That is, by the way, the best line in there.
I hate every Jew.
I hate every Jew.
That part is fact-check true.
I'm sorry.
But even though we've explained the joke, I bet that Ilhan Omar, when she watches that, she won't even giggle.
Now, if maybe we had talked about Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah, then she would giggle.
But she's not going to giggle at our video.
She doesn't find it funny.
That's right.
Okay, well, we're all children.
But if you were an adult, you might think about, you know, adult things.
Like the fact that one day you're going to die.
Now, one thing we did today is we put out The pictures of what we'd all look like on the face app.
And some of us are closer to death than others.
And what that means is that Jeremy looked pretty old, I looked pretty old, and those look decrepit because he's younger than all of us right now.
But he smokes like a chimney.
And Drew looks exactly the same.
This got us all thinking about death, as you should if you're a responsible adult, which means you should get life insurance.
And this is why you should go over to Policy Genius.
Policy Genius is the easy way to shop for life insurance online.
In just two minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers and find your best price.
Once you apply, the Policy Genius team handles all the paperwork and the red tape.
No sales pressure, no hidden fees, just financial protection and peace of mind.
Policy Genius does all sorts of insurance, not just life insurance.
They do home insurance and auto insurance and disability insurance.
So if you need life insurance but you don't want to deal with all the legwork, Head on over to PolicyGenius.com right this very instant.
It is the easy way to compare all those top insurers.
Find the best value for you.
Be a responsible adult.
Don't be buried in a pauper's grave.
Make sure that if you plot, your family is fine.
They may miss you, but they won't miss the cash.
Go over to PolicyGenius.com right now.
Delegate what you hate, especially if you hate getting life insurance.
And for God's sake, the children here at The Daily Wire encourage you to be an adult.
Don't be like us.
Because I'm not like you guys, I don't have a daily show and I don't do ad reads on a regular basis.
I actually do sometimes before the show go check out our sponsors because I'm not as familiar with them.
The ease with which you can shop for insurance on Policy Genius is actually pretty shocking.
And it's a reminder that we live in the greatest time in all of humans.
By the way, I just took out a bunch of life insurance and I then sent a picture of myself in 50 years from the Face app to my wife.
And I said to her, if this does not appeal to you, then I've just made a horrible, horrible mistake.
By the way, I also will note, since you don't have a daily show, that's what a professional transition into an ad sounds like.
I wasn't going to say anything, but I really feel like you ruined the show.
Okay, so what should we talk about?
Well, I think that we should talk about Apollo to begin with, because this week our friend Bill Whittle launched a new podcast about Apollo 11 called Apollo 11, What We Saw.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of...
People sometimes call it mankind's greatest achievement.
I don't think it's mankind's greatest achievement.
But it is mankind's greatest adventure.
Mankind's greatest achievement of the will.
And it happened 50 years ago.
The Saturn V took off 50 years ago yesterday.
And the landing itself will have taken place this weekend.
And one of the amazing things as you watch...
Bill, recount this.
You can pick this up anywhere where you can find a podcast.
It's on iTunes.
It's terrific.
It's really first rate.
It looks beautiful.
The set is great.
Bill does a great job with it.
Yeah.
And the story is so riveting because you think you know the story, especially for those of us who weren't already old when it happened in 69.
The amount of detail and the amount of care that Bill takes in telling the story, the personal side of the story and the technological, I think is really fascinating.
And it brings up this question.
I don't recall if we've ever talked about this question on the show.
Why do people subscribe, especially on the right?
There's actually a tendency toward this kind of thinking on the right to conspiracy theories.
There are more people today who believe that mankind never stepped foot on the moon than there were a year ago, more than the year before that.
Every year since 1969, the number of people who doubt the event has increased.
I have a couple of theories about it.
I figured the three of you would have some theories about it as well.
I think it's an interesting conversation because of, you know, exactly the moment that we're commemorating right now.
I think it's an important conversation as well because a lot of our audience, obviously young, male, conservative-leaning right of center, they're on the internet and it is very easy to find yourself tripping down a trail and these guys will make very compelling cases for why things like the moon landing couldn't have and therefore did not happen.
Why the moon doesn't exist, actually.
Why the moon doesn't exist, that's the new one.
It's only a paper moon.
But there's this phenomenon that I call the preponderance of false evidence.
And when you talk to people who buy into one of these conspiracy theories, they'll say, you know, Why are there two shadows on the moon when there's only one light source, the sun?
And you say, well, there's two light sources, the moon.
And they'll say, aha, but the moon doesn't generate light.
Well, no, but the moon reflects so much light that you can read a book at night 200,000 miles away on Earth on a full moon night.
That's a lot of light to create shadow on the moon.
And then they'll pause for just a second because they never considered that there are actually two light sources.
And they'll say, why does the flag wave on the moon if there's no...
And you realize that...
They've been duped, not by a single piece of evidence, but by the preponderance of false evidence.
And because there's so much that isn't true, pointing out individual instances of truth isn't enough to change their thinking.
And if you knock down too many of people's Of the lies that people believe in a row, they want to abandon the conversation altogether because you're expecting them to accept too many of their own mistakes in their process of logic.
So I think that's part of what motivates it on a very technical level.
But on a philosophical level, what is it?
I think you have a few theories on this, which I'll let you go into because you say them better.
But I think...
One reason conservatives and right-wingers in particular are attracted to these ideas is it's one of conservatives' best attributes being turned against them, which is that we're skeptical of most of what we see in the mainstream.
We are contrarian.
If you're a conservative in 2019 America, you're pretty contrarian against the pop culture.
You are distrustful of the government.
You're distrustful of what your history teachers tell you.
You are distrustful of what you read on the Coke can.
And so...
You couldn't possibly, this fantastic story, this great achievement of mankind, you just don't believe it could happen.
And so you're attracted to every single conspiracy theory, whether it's that we couldn't have survived the Van Allen radiation belt, we couldn't, the flag waved, we filmed it in Culver City right by my old apartment.
where you just, it doesn't matter which theory gets you to that destination, even if the theories contradict each other, the thing that can't be true is the mainstream narrative, 'cause we get lied to by the mainstream narrative all the time. - Right, I think that is fair.
And there's this sort of conflation that happens between different types of lies.
So there are the lies that we're told in the media that we all know are lies and that we can evidence are lies.
The next step is the things about which we are skeptical, that we strongly suspect are lies, but which we can't prove are lies.
And then there's the third, which are things that aren't lies, and we can actually prove they're true, but we approach them with that same skepticism from the very beginning, and so we don't give credence to the actual evidence when it's I take issue with the conservative part of this, though.
I mean, the thing that always strikes me about conspiracy theories is how unnecessary most of them are.
If Ben were to disappear, it would be fair to construct a conspiracy theory.
What happened to Ben, you know?
Although, who wouldn't get rid of him?
But most conspiracy theories, like Islamists say we're going to take down the World Trade Center, they take down the World Trade Center, they say we took down the World Trade Center, and suddenly there's a conspiracy theory, who took down the World Trade Center?
I'm always struck by how unnecessary it is, which says to me that it's performing a function.
And I think the one function that conspiracy theories perform is they keep you from changing your mind.
And I think any time...
JFK, perfect example.
This was from a generation that supported communism.
They thought the Soviet Union was the future and it works.
And here was this guy who killed the president because he was a communist and JFK... He, the assassin.
The assassin was a communist and JFK was a cold warrior.
And they just thought it couldn't happen.
The day that he was arrested, on the front page of the New York Times, there was an editorial saying, hate killed JFK, referring to bigots who hated JFK. And there were bigots who hated JFK. They didn't kill him.
It didn't happen.
Same thing with the Islamists that destroyed It destroyed multiculturalism.
It destroyed irony.
It destroyed all the things that the left had been living with.
So I think it's whose ox gets gored.
With the moon, it's a little strange, because what I think that people don't want to change their minds about is that we have been in decline.
Yes.
This is the issue.
Yeah.
And I think that it's much easier to believe that all those, you know, crew-cut guys smoking cigarettes...
With slide rulers.
...with slide rulers couldn't put a rocket on the moon than to believe that we haven't done it in all this time.
Well, that does bring you to a kind of weird conspiracy theory of the left about moon landing.
Not that it didn't happen, but that it was the overt product of evil.
Which is what you're starting to see in the Washington Post and the New York Times, two articles in the last two days.
One claiming that it was the product of an evil white male culture, and the other claiming that it was the product of an evil white male culture.
The only difference is focus.
One time it was white, one time it was male.
Okay.
And the New York Times ran a long piece today from a lady basically saying that the shortcomings of the space program and the reason we haven't put a woman on the moon now is because we put a man on the moon then.
Meaning if it had been more gender neutral back in 1969, then there would be a woman on the moon right now.
And the article makes no sense and it backs off its point about seven different ways and seven different times.
I think I see their point.
That's how he got verified.
I mean, what they fail to understand is that if the patriarchy really were in charge, all the women would have been on the moon.
Exactly.
But if you could put a woman on the moon, why can't you go home?
Apparently, apparently not.
So there is this attempt to decry the history of the United States as inherently bad.
So even if you accept that good things happened, they were the product of bad things, which means they weren't actually good things in the first place.
And you're starting to see that merge with what is not really a conspiracy, but just a historical inaccuracy.
The left going through and taking one by one American symbols and turning them into symbols of white supremacy.
So you saw this fake story that went around from Yahoo News today about how Chris Pratt was wearing a Don't Tread on Me t-shirt.
You know, the flag that was the first symbol of the U.S. Navy.
And that has flown at everything from Metallica concerts to Second Amendment rallies.
And the idea was that he had, this was a white supremacist symbol.
We know that the Betsy Ross flag in the last two weeks became a white supremacist symbol.
From people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
Why?
Because they went on Gab.
And there were like three trolls who said, you know what would be hilarious?
If we take this symbol, like the OK symbol, Then we say the OK symbol or the three-point symbol is actually white power because WP. See how it works?
And then the entire left goes, wow, it's probably true.
And the question isn't why the white supremacists do that.
They do that for attention.
They do that because they're trying to hijack the symbols.
They've been doing that going all the way back to the American Nazi Party, flying American flags with giant pictures of George Washington in Madison Square Garden.
The question is, Why did the American left decide to go along with this?
And the answer is because their agenda is basically the same, which is to take all of the aspects of American history and paint them with the worst possible brush in the same way that white supremacists are doing.
So white supremacists seize the symbol.
A normal person would go, no, I'm sorry, that's BS. This is not a white supremacist symbol.
You guys are a joke.
Instead, the left goes...
Maybe you're right.
Maybe it was a symbol of white supremacy.
And so you're seeing that with their take on the moon landing now.
Sure, the moon landing happened, but was it really that great?
I mean, it was the product of society in which segregation had only recently been banished.
It was the product of society where men were disproportionately staffing NASA. Could it really have been that awesome if all that happened?
I said, well, you're missing the actual news part of us landing on the moon.
I pointed this out on my show today.
One of the parts of the word news is the word new.
It actually has to be something new.
One of the things that was not new is the patriarchy.
One of the things that was not new was racism.
The thing that was new was when we put a dude on the moon.
That was new.
So if you're talking about the part that's different, the question is not what kind of terrible society produced a man on the moon.
The question is what did we do right to put a man on the moon?
And because the left doesn't want to assume we ever did anything, right, it becomes, was putting a man on the moon really all that important or cool?
And it does raise the question, like, what have they done?
What has the left produced?
What have they created?
They keep telling us, you know, you don't want to be replaced by brown people.
And frankly, I don't care what color Americans are as long as they're Americans, but my question is, Don't people have to do something before we...
They put a man in the ladies' room.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
It's one small step for a man.
If it is a man...
Yeah, I think this is right.
If you can't point to achievement, to accomplishment, then all you're left with is tear down the accomplishments of others.
And this is the fundamental issue with the left, right?
Sense equality does not exist in a vacuum.
What they want to do is penalize success because penalizing success is much, much, much easier to accomplish than turning failure into success.
The obvious example is if one runner is fast and one runner is slow, There's only one way you can get them to run the same.
That's to make the fast guy slow, right?
Yeah.
So they have to tear down what they see as all the spikes of human accomplishment because they don't like who accomplished them, and they don't like that they were accomplished by only some people.
So you have to crush all that.
And I get these questions in the mailbag.
They say, why do they hate Washington?
Why do they hate Jefferson?
Is it because they hate men?
Is it because they hate white people?
Is it because they hate Americans?
And I think it's because they hate themselves.
They hate...
Exactly what you were saying, that we can't do that today.
We can't put a man on the moon right now.
We can't do it because our culture is in decline because those old people in the black and white old-timey days who didn't even have iPads.
Can you imagine?
And they put a man on the moon and they hate that we are in decline.
Maybe we're not so perfect.
Maybe we can't judge and hold in moral opprobrium every past person and Well, the accomplishment of their age was putting man on the moon, splitting the atoms, saving the West from Nazism and from Imperial Japanese fanaticism.
And by the way, destroying segregation in the United States.
That's what I was going to say.
That same generation.
The same generation.
The accomplishment of this generation is declaring itself morally superior to that generation.
That's right.
That is the one thing that we can all do.
And it is quite an accomplishment considering the morals of our generation.
But it really is true, though, that everything they have, everything that they fight for, everything that they believe in, was created by the people who came before them.
You think just a little bit of gratitude, a little bit of gratitude.
Kate Winslet said this week.
It was JFK's mission.
This happened.
Right after an eight year stretch in which Democrats were president.
They could just take credit for it.
Have you ever gone back?
Of course you haven't.
Listened to JFK's speeches.
He sounds like us.
He's an anti-communist.
I'm going to say my freaking Kate Winslet point.
I forgot.
Oh, it was the Kate Winslet wealth thing?
Yeah, she said today she was pleased to find out that her ancestors were peasants and paupers in Britain.
She would have been ashamed and humiliated to have discovered that she descended from wealth.
Because they can't handle the people in the past accomplished anything.
It would actually be a shameful act to be descended from the people who accomplished something.
I do love the fact that Kate Winslet said that.
And we're supposed to appreciate her bravery for saying that she's so appreciative of the fact that she...
Came from poverty.
How about her kids?
Yeah.
I mean, so I presume that she's going to give away all of her wealth and she's going to tell her children to live in absolute penury.
And by the way, she doesn't have to wait to do it.
Her kids are there right now.
They're growing up right now.
She could just give away all that wealth right now.
She could put all of that money to good use fighting global warming.
And she could go play whatever Oscar bait part she's going to play with seven viewers.
I mean, she's a great actress, but anytime she wants, she can give up that money and go right back to the virtuous poverty she seeks.
One of the nice things about the left is that they're always talking about virtuous poverty, and yet so few of them actually want to live in it.
And so little virtue exists in poverty.
Well, I mean, this is one of the great myths.
It drives me up a wall.
And you see it from every presidential candidate, by the way.
The way you can tell I'm a good person is, I grew up in a small house in the prairie.
I can't tell anything from that.
You know what I can tell is that you grew up in a small house on the prairie.
And it drives me up a wall, because then the assumption is, if you disagree with them, We're good to go.
With my three younger sisters.
And my parents worked their asses off, and they paid so that we could eventually not go to public school, and I could start going to private school.
Even then, it was only for a couple of years at a time.
That is not absolute wealth, but that doesn't make me virtuous.
It makes my parents virtuous for making good decisions.
I'm so tired of these.
And you know, when I was in England, and I was among all the mystery writers, there was a big, big controversy about P.D. James, one of the great ladies of British Mysteries.
Who said, I like to write about the middle class, basically because they have more moral choices, so it makes them for a more interesting story.
And they started calling her all kinds of unrepeatable names.
And I was on a panel once, I said, this is Petey James.
She underwrites your industry with her success.
The least you could do is listen to what she's saying.
The people in poverty don't have as much moral leeway As you do, as you get wealthier.
That is why societies, as they get wealthier, get more moral.
They start to think about more things because they have more choices.
All of that is built by the people who come before us, and all of it should inspire gratitude.
There's also this idea, and it actually takes some...
You find it in religious settings quite often, where not only is poverty virtuous, which is obviously an evil thing to say, but sort of asceticism generally is virtuous.
It occurred to me the other day that it's actually just the reverse side of the same coin.
There's a belief that the purpose of religion is to bring order to chaos.
And so the Bible-thumping, rule of Biden, don't look left, don't look right, graceless, puritanical religious person believes that the way that you bring order to the system, you take energy out of the system by stopping movement all around you.
So you know when you heat up a bathtub and the molecules in the water get moving fast?
That's energy, right?
They want to cool it off.
So they're constantly telling people, slow down, don't do this, don't do that.
The reverse side of that is the ascetic who says, I'm going to bring energy out of the system by slowing me down.
And I'm going to become I'm going to become an inert object.
All the chaos can happen all around me, but I'm contributing to the chaos on behalf of God through not pursuing anything, sitting under the eucalyptus tree and contemplating my navel.
And it occurs to me that the reality of God is that if there is a God, he must surely be the God of what is, not the God of what could have been or what might be.
He's the God of what is.
And therefore, He's the God of the dynamic molecules that are bouncing around.
Creation.
Creation.
This is an incredible thing.
Life, yeah.
So what God wants from us is not that we stop the energy in the world and not that we not participate in the energy in the world, but that we trust that He is guiding the energies of the world.
Maybe we try to align ourselves with His chosen direction for the energies of the world, but we could have theological debate about the exact relationship that we're supposed to have with Him.
But surely it's not to stop it.
You know, that's another great point.
I had no idea we were this intelligent.
I know, you're good.
I have no idea what you're just intelligent.
Uh oh.
Wait, wait, wait.
Bravo us, and bravo also.
Wow.
Wow.
Amazing.
Well, when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing that they did was protect our right to share our ideas, which it turns out may not have been a good idea, given what we're doing here tonight.
Without limitation by the government, that's the First Amendment.
But then they created the Second Amendment so we could protect the First Amendment and, indeed, all the other amendments.
All of us in the room here, our gun owners, all of us, We're good to go.
BCM, not a sporting arms company, so I don't hunt.
I'm not really a target shooter.
I own a gun because if someone comes into my house, I want to kill them.
And BCM understands this.
They design, engineer, manufacture life-saving equipment.
The people at BCM assume that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, a law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas to learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing.
Head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.
You can discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news.
That's bravocompanymfg.com.
If you need more convincing, find out even more about BCM and the awesome people who produce their products at youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa.
We know the folks who run the place.
It is a great company, and their product is similarly awesome.
Go check them out at bravocompanymfg.com.
So I do want to move on from the conversation about conspiracies, but I think before we do, because of the anniversary of Apollo, we should talk a little bit about the specific, most widely circulated conspiracies about the moon landing and just knock them down quickly for our audience.
I'm sure we each have kind of a favorite one, maybe a couple.
I'll pick up some at the end.
Does anybody have one that they're Yeah, I mean, I've got a great conspiracy.
There's one that in 1969, three men actually went into lunar orbit and then took a lunar module and landed on the moon, which is obviously impossible, because it's a flat disk.
I want to bring up a point that Bill brings up, which I think was a brilliant point, was that You can trace every step of the moon landing from bottle rockets.
It's such a great point.
There's one step after another step after another step.
If they hadn't landed on the moon, you would have had to come up with a conspiracy theory for why not?
Why did the change suddenly stop?
He says, where does the miracle occur?
Was it Apollo 11?
So Apollo 10, not a miracle.
Apollo 11 completely could not be accomplished.
Apollo 8 went to the moon.
That was fine.
It's also a matter of such brute force that it's just like real life.
It's just a matter of throw weight.
How hard can you get something to go off so that it gets to the moon?
That really is what it is.
So that's a great point.
There was a Saturn V. Millions of people saw the Saturn V, the biggest rocket ever made, go into orbit or go into space.
The entire country had been enthralled with Sputnik when the Russians put a satellite that would zoom over our head and we could hear it on our little radios.
Well, not we, you.
We're quite young.
I remember well, I do.
And yet somehow the Russians, I guess if we sent the Saturn V and all it did was sort of hang out in orbit, because it couldn't go through the radiation belts and it couldn't go 200,000 miles to the moon, that means it would have been up there.
Wouldn't our mortal enemies, the Soviet Union, with whom we were in an existential crisis and who had radar stations all over the Earth, have been aware that the biggest thing ever launched into orbit was spinning around up there and not going up there?
This is the biggest defeater for these conspiracies.
The biggest defeater is the existence of the Soviet Union.
Correct.
So obviously they're tracking these things live.
By the way, it's not just the government's tracking them live.
There were just individuals tracking all of these rockets, all of these satellites.
And it's not also like we aired this footage after the fact.
Everything is happening in real time.
But the Russians, because they're so nice and honest and they always want to do a favor for the good old US of A, they decided to admit defeat falsely.
You know one of the false things that people think?
That people think that Americans got bored with the space program.
That is true.
But it's also true that as a kid, I mean, I was a little kid when we landed on the moon.
It never occurred to me we wouldn't land on the moon.
The president said we would.
We had all these astronauts who were my heroes.
The astronauts and baseball players were my heroes.
It never occurred to me we wouldn't land on the moon.
So when we landed on it, I remember my father sitting there going like, There's people on the moon.
And it wasn't like I thought, oh, so what?
I didn't think that.
I just thought, of course.
Of course.
We're America.
We decided to go to the moon.
There is something, too, about the fact that maybe one of the reasons that we've lost a bit of purpose is the lack of the oppositional, meaning that the entire moon program was based on the fact that we were going to defeat the Soviets.
And the Soviet Union disappears, and suddenly it's the end of history.
What do we have to go to the moon for?
Yeah.
The Soviets aren't going there.
What difference does it make?
And you feel the same thing when people talk about Mars.
Like, oh, that's cool.
They're kind of talking about Mars.
I guess that's kind of a neat thing.
That'd be cool if we did it.
But there's no drive like, well, if we don't do it, the Soviets are going to do it.
And you never know what they're going to do with Mars.
But that's a shame.
You know, one of the things that really pains me is whenever anybody in a debate, in a political debate, a political setting...
Starts talking about space.
They sound nuts.
And I remember listening to Dan Aykroyd, who is a nutty comedian actor.
But I remember years ago saying, you know, we've got to get off this planet.
And of course that's true.
I mean, of course that's true.
We're here because we got out of Europe just before Europe went down the drain.
That's kind of the way human beings are.
We sort of move on to the next place.
We need territory.
You know, we need new places to go.
Well, this is the other thing that is going to be fascinating.
I think we should be able to imagine that.
I mean, it was governments that got us to the moon.
But it's going to be private industry that gets us to Mars.
I think so, too.
And I think government, in a way, sucked a lot of the energy out of the program by taking all those guys out of the private sector.
I mean, it's a great achievement, but at the same time, if we hadn't had to do it in such a hurry, it might have happened through private industry.
Well, there's a second piece to this, which is the motive of the government went from defeating the Soviet Union to working with the Soviet Union.
Yeah.
That became the du jour thing.
We can't defeat the Soviets.
We have to coexist with them.
When they originally built, we're conceiving of the space station, the ISS. What became the ISS? They wanted a space station that would make it easier to mount missions to the moon and beyond.
A place where you could go up to the station and you could take off from the station and go further out into the solar system.
But then they decided that it needed to be an international space station and the Russians were going to kick in like three cents on the dollar.
And what they came up with was because Russia is a northern hemisphere country and all their holdings were very far north, Russia could not get to an orbit.
That would allow for a station from which you could proceed out to the moon and other places in the solar system.
And so the entire reason they designed this station was so that we could go back to the moon much more economically, so that we could go to Mars, so we could go to Saturn by 70 or whatever.
They had all these ideas, right?
So, we want to build a station so that we can go back to the moon and Mars.
Cool.
We also want the Russians to be involved.
Are they going to pay for it?
Barely at all.
Okay, can they get to it?
No.
Alright, well let's move it.
Will we still be able to go to the moon and beyond?
No.
So what will we do?
We'll work with the Russians.
And literally, for 30 years after that, the only purpose of NASA, of the manned space component of NASA, Was basically so that we could build something together with the Russians.
So we designed the space shuttle to build the space station so that the space shuttle would have a place to go.
And that was it.
Well, this is like during the Obama administration.
There were those news stories that the mission of NASA had become to flatter Muslims about their own scientific histories or something to that effect.
What happened to that?
I missed that.
Well, it actually did begin earlier.
It began when we fundamentally changed the purpose of the International Space Station and the U.S. space program.
And surprise, surprise, we haven't done very much in the last 30 years.
You know who's tired of talking about space?
Who?
Every woman watching backstage currently.
Not one of them wants us to keep talking about space.
They want us to move on to just any other topic because they're exactly like men.
This may explain why the big patriarchy went to the movies.
So here's a fun thing to talk about.
We're taking this show on the road.
I know.
I know.
I can't wait.
I'm so excited.
Fun for whom?
So Backstage Live is on its way.
It's coming up in August.
We are going to be in Long Beach, California.
And it's going to be awesome.
The four of us are going to be there.
There will be cigars.
There will be whiskey.
Whatever fruity Ben chooses.
It's going to be on August 21st at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
Lots of politics, lots of pop culture, lots of insights and laughs.
Absolutely no more talking about manned spaceflight.
Your questions, though, lie from the audience.
That's the most important part.
It is the only time...
In 2019, that there will be a live Daily Wire production for people to attend.
Now, I say that.
What if we have another one?
I'll apologize.
It's like when the Eagles go on their farewell tour like three times a year.
Did Jeremy just gender spaceflight when he's a manned spaceflight?
No.
No, no, no.
This is, as far as we know, the only live Daily Wire event of the year.
Last year we had two great events with Ben Shapiro Live in Dallas and in Phoenix.
People flew in from all over the country.
People flew in from Canada.
They were terrific.
We wanted to do the same thing this year, but we wanted the whole gang to be able to be there.
There's a VIP experience.
People can pay a little bit extra, come back, meet the four of us, get their pictures with the four of us.
We need a dunk tank for NOLS. But imagine the swimsuit is the real trouble.
Tickets are available at dailywire.com slash backstage and there are some VIP ticket packages still available wherever you are.
LAX is a mediocre airport, let's be honest.
But it is in close proximity to the theater, so please fly out, drive out, come on out and see us.
You can have some great photos at the meet and greet with each of us and a gift of schwag from us.
You may think this is a cold and calculated ploy to get you to turn loose of some of your money.
DailyWire.com slash Backstage.
Come get your tickets.
Come visit us at DailyWire Backstage Live.
If you pay a little extra, they don't have to meet us.
That's the super VIP level.
These are the best events, by the way.
We do some of these college events all the time.
And they're great.
I love meeting the students and talking to them.
But when we went out for your last year, those two events, it was so cool talking to everybody.
It was really an incredible experience.
So I'm very much looking forward to it.
One of the things that really amazed me at the event in Dallas, because that was the first one that we did, It was how much interaction we got to have with the fans.
I thought the VIP thing might be kind of lame.
It might move too fast.
I really got to meet a ton of the people who support The Daily Wire.
It was a blast.
It's the best thing about going out.
One of the best things about going to colleges is just meeting people.
We're in this business where you can listen to yourself a lot.
And if you don't have the little input coming in, you start just repeating yourself, and it's great to hear what people are thinking about.
Also, you're super old.
You don't remember why you said, like, five minutes ago.
Where am I? One of the best things about being on the road.
So, the topic du jour that we have to address, that we have not gotten to yet.
The racist elephant in the room.
The President of the United States had...
Why?
Why, God, why?
So, to review this story.
Please.
As of last Friday and last Thursday, and it hasn't been a week, guys, because time has stopped.
This is interstellar.
We have entered the water planet where all time is meaningless.
Well, just last Thursday, we were all laughing to ourselves because AOC and Nancy Pelosi were clubbing each other with sticks.
And it was great.
So perfect.
Because Nancy Pelosi was saying about AOC that she is basically just a glass of water in her district and doesn't really matter very much.
And the true power lies with Nancy Pelosi, so why are you listening to these numbskulls and their stupid policy proposals?
Fact check, true.
And then AOC returns by saying, that's because you are a racist.
And Nancy Pelosi was like, what?
What?
And AOC was like, yeah.
And Nancy Pelosi was like, what?
And AOC was like, racist.
And Nancy Pelosi was like, how dare you?
And AOC was like, racist.
And it was great!
I mean, we were all having ourselves a ball of a weekend.
It was just terrific because this is what they've had coming for so long.
Nancy Pelosi and every Democrat I'm playing the race card incessantly against Republicans.
And not only that, AOC has been lying about playing the race card against Republicans for a long time.
Nancy Pelosi bought into the lie that the definition of racist is anyone who disagrees with the left.
And didn't understand that the actual definition of racist is anyone who disagrees with the person to their left.
This is right.
It's whatever the party says it is.
Over the weekend, you had Ayanna Pressley suggesting in fully racist fashion that you are not truly black unless you are a leftist.
You are not truly gay and not truly a Muslim unless you are on the left.
Which would come as a shock to a lot of Muslims who are in fact not on the left.
A lot of black folks were not on the left and a lot of gay folks were not on the left.
In any case...
This was all going on.
And the piranhas were eating each other.
And it was great.
It was the Iran-Iraq war of domestic policy.
It was just like two parties, and you don't really like either of them.
But as long as they're hitting each other, okay.
All right.
Okay.
And then Donald Trump.
And then Donald Trump.
So you guys know the World of Warcraft meme, right?
Yeah.
Leroy Jenkins, right?
You remember that meme.
So for those who don't recall, there's a World of Warcraft meme where there are a bunch of people and they're all sitting around and they're playing.
They're making a plan.
They're making a plan to invade a particular room.
And Leroy Jenkins is a character in World of Warcraft and he has gone out to make himself in the microwave some chicken.
And he comes back and they're making the plan.
And he simply sits down in his controller.
And charges directly into the line of fire while screaming, Leroy Jenkins!
President Leroy Jenkins decided over the weekend.
You know what would be a great idea?
AOC and Nancy Pelosi are beating the crap out of each other.
You know what I should do?
I should go in there and just say something dumb.
Like, something as dumb and offensive as I can think of, like, on the spur of the moment, like, right now.
I don't know.
I'll say that, like, all the progressive congresswomen come from countries that suck, and that they should go back to those countries that suck.
Like, that's what I'll say.
And he tweeted that out, and naturally, everybody went...
Whoa.
And then Nancy Pelosi was like, I love you, AOC. And AOC was like, right back at you, Nance.
And suddenly they were on the same team attacking President Trump and passing resolutions in the House to condemn bigotry, which is a shock since just a few months ago they condemned all bigotry that has ever existed or ever existed.
Except, of course, for Ilhan Omar's.
That was the recap.
Donald Trump was playing 16-dimensional chess.
Underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry.
I'm going to take issue with both of these sides.
It's not 16-dimensional chess, but I don't think that's quite fair.
Donald Trump has a genius, an instinctive genius, for playing the left.
The problem is a question of whether he is expanding the right.
I think he did something.
He made a mistake, and you can tell he made a mistake because without apologizing, because Trump never apologized, he changed what he said.
This is right.
That's how you can tell.
And we can all say that go back where you came from.
I don't actually think Trump is a racist, but it partakes of that racist meme, go back where you came from, in the same way that it's all about the Benjamins partakes of anti-Semitic memes.
So that was a mistake, and then he changed it to if you don't like the country, you can leave.
Clearly, clearly, his instinctive plan, I don't know how much he thinks these things out, I don't know, but his instinctive plan was to not let them get into a civil war.
Yes.
He wants them wrapped around these four horsewomen of the apocalypse.
That's exactly right.
And that is, there is a genius to this because they keep falling for it because he's them.
He's a guy created by leftist culture and he's fighting back the way the leftists fight us and that's why people love him.
I think that's backfilling a rationale, but that's the effect.
I don't think he was sitting there going...
I think he does it instinctively.
The instinct is...
Why is the news not about me today?
No, I think that's unfair.
I think he knows what he's doing with the left.
He knows how to play them.
He plays them like a puppeteer.
But the question is, and this is the place where you have to question whether his strategy is long-term, is there a single human being who reads those tweets, who didn't vote for him before, who says, wow, if I had only known what a jerk he was...
I would have voted for him the first time.
And it's doubtful.
I mean, he may be able to suppress enough Democrat votes to win again, but I don't know if he's going to be able to add.
By the way, I think this is going there anyway.
Because I think that Nancy Pelosi...
One of two things is going to happen.
Either Nancy Pelosi was going to get her head on the stick in the form of Saikot Chakrabarty, who was AOC's chief of staff.
And then they were all going to make up with each other because AOC would have no choice but to make up with Nancy Pelosi.
Or the media were going to jump in on the side of AOC and the squad, which is what they were already doing, right?
Michelle Goldberg and the New York Times were doing that.
The fact is that, again, I don't even think that it's Trump saying, I want them all lumped in.
Trump picks the people he wants to argue with, and then he argues with them.
And because he argues with those people, people who oppose President Trump all unify to take the other side of the argument.
So I don't even think he was like, you know what, I need Nancy Pelosi and Ilhan Omar to get back together.
I don't think that was it.
I think he was like, you know who sucks?
Those people.
Those people are jerks, and I hate them.
And then Nancy Pelosi was like, well, if you say they're jerks, They're probably great.
So I don't agree with either of you.
I think that it really is just the news cycle wasn't about him.
He doesn't have any real impulse control.
He jumps in.
I don't think that it's fair to say that the tweets were racist.
I think that the tweet was kind of disgusting.
And it was wrong.
It was jerky.
I think that it was hugely presumptuous.
And race may have played a factor in the presumption.
The presumption being that The four women are American.
Right.
I think the presumption may have been informed by race, but it's more informed by their rhetoric.
They present themselves as being an American.
And not just an American in terms of values, but AOC talks more about Puerto Rico than she talks about...
Rashida Tlaib is always talking about Palestine.
She even said this country belongs to everyone.
It's like, news to me.
So I think you don't have to grant the left this catch-all term of racist.
Well, so this is the thing.
I think that there is, to be intellectually honest, an argument that the tweet was racist.
And the intellectually honest argument is...
That he said something clearly xenophobic.
Go back to your country to a bunch of people, including people who were born here in the United States.
It was xenophobic, yeah.
No question.
And the question is, if there had been a white member of the Justice Democrats, which of course there is not, would he have said the exact same thing?
Or is he saying that because he's assuming they're all foreigners because they are brown in color?
And we don't know the answer to that question.
We don't know the answer, but I think people have suspicions one way or another.
I think people on the right suspect he wouldn't have said it.
And people on the right, I mean, he would have said it anyway because he says things.
And people on the left suspect he only would have said it because it's about a bunch of brown people because they do this with everything he says.
Whenever he attacks a black person, for the left, it's because they're black.
For the right, it's like, no, he attacks everyone.
Have you met any Republican?
Everyone.
But the problem with all of this, obviously, is that He doesn't have to do that in order to achieve the, if you believe that there was any even gut level strategy to it, he doesn't have to do that to achieve that response, right?
I mean, all he had to do was just dump on Ilhan Omar and Nancy Pelosi in the second way he did it.
And Nancy Pelosi would have rushed.
He made a mistake.
There's no question he made a mistake.
Compare where we are a week ago to where we are today.
I mean, this is why I think we all grant what he said was factually untrue, and it was an unfair attack to say, at least it was unfair for three of them, for three of the four that he was almost certainly alluding to.
They were born in America.
They're not going to go back to their other country.
So a week ago, we have AOC, we have the whole squad feuding with Nancy Pelosi, and that's really enjoyable.
Also a week ago, you had AOC's approval at, what, 22%?
You had Ilhan Omar's approval at 9%, which is why Nancy Pelosi was jumping on them at that moment, because they look very politically weak.
Among white, non-college-educated voters, by the way.
That's that poll from Axios.
Sure.
The actual poll has them at about...
Seven or eight points underwater each.
That's the poll from YouGov today.
So, and AOC in her own district, right?
AOC in her own district is down.
She's very unpopular.
So, it looks like Nancy Pelosi, who's a brilliant tactician, is going in and taking her moment.
President Trump goes in, he makes this comment.
Which is in part factually untrue and creates this whole firestorm.
What is the effect of it today?
The House votes to call Trump a racist.
They've been calling Trump a racist for three years.
AOC and the whole squad is currently today feuding with Nancy Pelosi again.
They went on ABC or CBS last night and Rashida Tlaib called Nancy Pelosi a racist.
So we get that exact same thing.
She has all the impulse control of Donald Trump.
But then the best part of this is...
She has more than Omar.
Omar has none.
But why did Pelosi go out there and say, yes, he's a racist, they're all talking about what a racist he is, is so that they don't have to do the thing, which is call for impeachment.
They're saying that America's like Nazi Germany, that Trump is running concentration camps, Trump is Hitler, but they're not going to impeach?
That's crazy.
Until today, Al Green...
The congressman, not the singer, makes moves to impeach the president, which is a fabulous position for conservatives to be in.
It's a very difficult position for Nancy Pelosi.
She's tried to avoid it now for over two years.
It just seems to me, sure, more people are going to call Trump a racist, and they can point to a stupid part of a tweet that was untrue.
But it seems tactically we're in a better position today than we were.
He does correct himself.
And when he said, if you don't like the country, leave, I was kind of thinking, well, yeah, I say that myself.
Okay, so I think, first of all, we're tactically in a worse position as far as the presidential race.
I think the Democrats are burning themselves down because they can't help but burn themselves down.
They were doing it last week.
They're doing it again this week.
It was never going to change.
They were going to call for impeachment.
Pelosi was going to refuse them.
That fight was going to keep going.
And Trump inserting himself and making himself the issue, as you say, has he won one additional voter anywhere in here?
If you just let the Democrats burn themselves down, you're in good shape.
Would they have rallied around the squad if not for this?
Yes, because they would have to rally around the squad at some point because Trump was going to attack them at some point, just not in the dumbest possible way.
Can we distinguish between the fact that Donald Trump is very good at picking his opponents and Donald Trump also then tries to club them with a rubber mallet?
Like, he is very good at picking His enemy.
That he's great at.
And then, half the time, his attacks are done well and they kind of hit correctly.
And then half the time, he's just like a wild man fighting you.
Okay, there's the wild guy in your class and you don't want to fight him because he's crazy.
And you never know.
Is he going to pull a switchblade or is he going to pull a rubber doll?
You just don't know what it's going to be.
He's the crazy person you don't want to fight.
And Donald Trump is that, but sometimes he does pull a rubber doll.
Okay, and the fact is that his attack on this group, he could have made an attack on the group that wasn't idiotic, and that didn't border on racism, or he could have done all those things.
Well, by the time he was finished, he did.
Right.
Okay.
By the time he's finished.
Yeah, and by the time I pull my hand out of the fire, it's no longer on fire.
It was just in the fire.
I do not agree.
You think no damage was done here?
What's that?
You think no damage was done here?
I'm agreeing with you that there may be 2020 damage there, but I'm not sure because, look, what is happening is Joe Biden, one of the worst politicians in America, I mean, the guy is as dumb as an ashtray as somebody once said.
He really is.
But he's polling really well because people are thinking, well, he's kind of normal.
He kind of looks normal, and we're tired of all the drama.
Trump knows this.
He knows that the danger comes from any Democrat who looks sane.
And so he made them all look crazy.
That press conference the squad gave was one of the greatest moments.
When they wouldn't condemn Al-Qaeda?
You mean that press conference?
That woman is.
I mean, my joke about her was she was so angry she almost exploded, but the TSA took the belt off her.
She is as bad.
She is as bad.
I'm going to give a Media Matters break down.
Thank you, Drew.
I appreciate it.
Here's the photo for the article.
Okay, for Media Matters, she's not actually a suicide bomber, nor is she an Islamic terrorist.
She just believes bad things.
That's Drew, who's a satirist, making a joke.
Betty's going to have to, like, follow me around.
The official explainer.
It's like Obama had the anger explainer, and I'm like the Drew Ironian comedy explainer now.
But again...
This goes back to if Trump had an ounce of discipline, he'd be president forever.
And there's a way to launch attacks on your political opponents and pick your opponents.
I mean, Obama did it regularly.
You can do it, and it is good that Trump has the capacity to do it, but then don't proceed to kick yourself directly in the nuts.
And it's like, why do we have to always, every time, watch him stick his hand directly in the fire, and then when he pulls out, you're like, ah, but he pulled his hand out of the fire.
How about just don't stick your...
One of the things about him, somebody in the Wall Street Journal, I think his name is Holman Jenkins, he's a really good writer, especially about climate change.
But he points out that Trump is one of the most known quantities ever to have been elected president.
So everything that he is was elected.
Everything that he is is part of the message that people were sending to the government.
And so when he does stuff like this, I understand that he is alienating, especially women who don't like the meanness.
They don't like the bullying.
I don't blame them.
I don't like it either, to be honest with you.
But we knew who he was.
We actually hired him to do what he's doing.
And I think that he's...
But this comes down to, do you think that 2016 is replicable in the absence of Hillary Clinton and based on the fact that he is the incumbent president?
But everybody...
These people are worse than Hillary Clinton.
In the presence of whom is the question.
No, no.
But Hillary Clinton...
Okay, so Hillary Clinton...
Didn't get the votes for two reasons.
One, she's terrible.
You're right.
They're going to be just as terrible.
Two is that everyone thought Hillary Clinton was going to win, so a bunch of Democrats didn't show up to vote.
That is not going to be replicated.
I don't know about that.
That is 100% true.
There was wild under turnout by Democrats in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Absolutely.
It's statistically provable.
There was significant under turnout by Democrats compared to both 08 and 012.
Well, there's not going to be under turnout by anybody.
And this is my point.
I'm not sure how much more upside turnout there is on the Trump side.
I think that there is upside turnout on the Democratic side.
That's what 2018 really looked like.
So the question is, Again, when the focus is on Democrats, we're good.
And here's the good news.
It's a game of hold my beer.
So in my view, Donald, the Democrats are like, hold my beer.
We're going to fight with each other over something completely stupid.
And then Trump is like, no, you hold my beer.
I'm going to jump in here for no reason.
And then AOC and Pelosi, they're like, you know what?
You hold the beer.
You hold the beer.
Because we're going to go back to fighting each other.
And then today, Ilhan Omar was like, you hold every beer that I ever would have but cannot drink.
You take all of those beers and you take all those beers and you take them forever.
Because in the middle of a fight over whether Ilhan Omar has the country's best interests at heart and is a bigot and hates Jews, today, this afternoon, she launched her first squad initiative of the new world.
And her first squad initiative was, I'm going to the Palestinian territories, where I'm going to do a propaganda effort on behalf of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, both terrorist entities.
And I'm also going to push forward the Boycott to Vestan Sanctions movement against Israel, which has been declared antismanic by, wait for it, Nancy Pelosi five weeks ago at AIPAC.
Right.
So, I mean, we don't have to...
This is what I keep saying.
Everybody is like, well, look how Trump is really able to make them look crazy.
Okay, and guess what?
I was able to make Frances Farmer look crazy because she was crazy.
Like, I don't know what you want from me.
Sybil was crazy.
I don't have to be like, you know what makes Sybil even crazier?
If I poke her with a stick, boom!
Now she's got another personality.
See that?
But this is why Republicans hate Republicans, is because they don't do this.
They stand by and they let people do this, let the Democrats be crazy, and they don't stand up and say...
No, no.
You know, I'm fine with him doing the Donald Sutherland from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
You know, I'm fine with him just pointing at them and saying, you know...
What a great image.
And him just saying, okay, look at this crazy thing they said.
Look at this crazy thing they said.
Look how terrible they are.
Like, I thought it was hilarious today when Trump was asked about Ohana Mar.
And he was...
That was a five-star Trump.
I haven't really heard anything about her except, like, was she married to her brother?
And it was...
And you ask me, I don't know.
I don't know.
You guys, isn't it your job to find out?
People are saying it.
And AP immediately, like, that, okay, that is, like, grade A Trump quality Trump.
Because then AP comes out and they're like, how dare he say something like this?
And everyone's just like, okay, well, here's a Minneapolis Star Tribune column asking the same question.
Like, a full investigation, why all of us won't answer questions about it.
Like, that, right, that is, like, When I say Trump picks the right opponents, but he should actually attack in the way that is most effective, I mean by not saying, American Congresswoman, go back to your crap hole country you came from.
That would be the not effective way of doing it.
And Drew has this thing where it's like, ah, but he course corrects.
He does course correct.
Okay, you know what would be even better?
Maybe it's asking too much, but you know what would be even better?
Is before you course correct from the Indy 500 pileup on the outside wall, if you just didn't steer directly into it.
Because that was the part that was purposeful.
You had to be sitting there.
You know what would end all of Donald Trump's problems, honestly?
If he had a tweet checker.
Okay, all the people around him, they love Trump.
I think that's a great idea.
All of his staffers like him.
And they know him.
And they are interested in letting Trump be Trump.
If he had what all normal people have, which is a prefrontal cortex that functions and says, don't do that thing, then he wouldn't need this.
But he can let somebody else be the prefrontal cortex.
He just writes a tweet, or he makes a video, and then he has somebody view the video and determine whether the video might be problematic.
And then...
90% of them, they'd probably still let go.
Almost 100% they would let go because it's just him mouthing off or whatever.
It's only the rare tweet.
And the media fulminates so much that we think that his normal, weird tweets are really...
Those aren't bad tweets.
And I think everyone has sort of accepted...
Him being kind of weird and crazy on Twitter.
I've never seen a skinny person drink a Diet Coke.
I mean, that's just a true tweet that he sent out.
And you're right, we've all priced this in.
But every so often he does something, you're like, God, am I sure that was priced in quite enough yet?
No, of course, but that's what makes him Trump.
That's what makes him willing to take this wave after wave.
I mean, he has turned the accusation of racism into a silence.
Now, when they say the word racism, it's like nothing, ashes come out, because we've heard it so often.
And to watch the news guys...
So there's another way of reading that, and this is a much more cynical way of reading that, and they're the ones who made racism a non-factor, and Donald Trump doesn't give a crap if they call him a racist, and that's the only difference between him and everybody else.
Which makes him great.
Well, no, in one sense it makes him great.
In one sense it means that he doesn't care enough about an issue he should care about.
What I mean by that is he does cross lines, like he did this Sunday, that are inappropriate to cross.
The same person who doesn't care about accusations of racism enough to actually police himself, Should not be the person who is standing up to accusations of racism.
This is another point by our pal Bill Whittle.
He says the accusation of racism only bothers people who aren't racist.
You know, the only people who get upset are guys like us who sit there and go like, no!
I don't think you want to apply that logic to the president.
No, what I'm saying about him is that he actually, look, he has done great things for people of color in this country.
This is how you know.
I mean, this is the known entity argument.
Yeah, he succeeded at basically most of what he's done in life, except being a racist.
If he's as bad a racist as they say he is...
No, it's not that anybody's saying he's that bad a racist, but elections are about perception.
Elections are about perception.
And the perception of him...
I mean, you can look at the polling numbers.
So Republicans are not reacting anymore to anything Trump says.
It's all priced in for Republicans at this point.
The polling numbers show that everybody on the Republican side already has an opinion about the guy.
And I did a whole analysis today of the polls about this tweet because 57% of Republicans said they agreed with the tweet and something like two-thirds of independents said that they hated the tweet and overall 59% of Americans said that they didn't like the tweet at all.
And three-quarters of women and all of this stuff.
And people were immediately saying, well, this is because Republicans are racist.
And what I said is, no.
What this is, is Republicans answering the question they hear when the media asks the question.
Republicans don't hear, is the tweet racist when the media asks this question?
What they hear is, first, do we agree with your generalized definition of racism media?
And the answer is, no, we don't.
Because if we say, sure, the tweet's racist, your next move is, well, aren't the tax cuts also a little racist?
Isn't net neutrality racist?
Wasn't Mitt Romney a racist?
So that's a question we hear.
We also hear the media saying, we are the impartial arbiters of what is racist and what is not.
What say you?
And we go, well, hold up just a second.
Iona Presley said over the weekend that black people aren't black if they disagree with her.
So I'm going to go with no on you're the impartial.
And then there's the third question that we hear, which is, You're not really asking if Trump's tweet was racist.
You're asking if Trump himself is a racist.
This is the point.
And that we're not willing to say, meaning there are people who say things off the cuff that suck.
There are people who say things that are uncomfortable because they're ignorant or they say something dumb.
Does that mean that Trump in his heart hates black people and thinks they're inferior?
No, we're not willing to go there.
And then finally, the fourth question, which I think is the biggest one, and this is what you're getting from Republicans, is when you say, is the tweet racist?
What most Republicans hear is, you're saying that I'm racist.
And they are.
That's correct.
Because the next move they make from all three of the prior questions is, if you disagree with us, then you are.
Meaning, if you say Trump is not a racist, it's because you are a racist.
If you say that you disagree with our definition of racism, it's because you're a racist.
And if you say that we are not impartial in our judgment of racism, then you are a racist.
And so Republicans, most of them, are simply cutting off the debate.
They're just saying, okay, we don't want to have any of those secondary conversations we know are coming.
So, you know what?
You ask us the question.
We basically say, go after yourself.
And no, I don't think the tweet was racist.
But I still do not think you're taking into account how much Trump has changed the game.
And he has done what he was sent to do, which is change the dialogue.
Look, we agree on a lot of this.
We agree that his first tweet was a mistake.
And I think he course-corrected.
And that doesn't mean the other tweet goes away.
But it does mean he understood that he made a mistake.
I think we all even agree that he course-corrected.
Yeah, okay.
And we agree that there's a danger here that he won't expand his base, which I think is a genuine danger and really worries me because the opposition is out of control crazy.
I mean, they are now guano crazy.
They have gone beyond anything I've ever seen Democrats do.
What I don't think you are taking into account is Trump has literally changed the way people react to him because he is Trump.
What you're saying is he was incautious and belligerent.
He was Donald Trump.
He was Donald Trump.
No, I'm not just saying he was incautious.
Now the question that voters are going to be asked is, do I want Donald Trump, this guy who got elected and who is a loose cannon, who basically is the picture next to a loose cannon in the dictionary, or do I want these people who They hate this country.
They hate this country.
I thought it was as simple as that, but I think that freshness in the mind matters.
Meaning that there are things about all of us that bug each other, right?
No, wait a minute.
Like Noel's breathing.
We're very lovely.
Okay, okay.
The fact that we pay him actual money, right?
But one of the things that That we try to do is avoid doing the things that bug each other.
If you're in a marriage, right?
You try to avoid the things that bug your spouse.
If every day you're like, you knew me when you married me.
I'm farting as much as I please right at the dinner table and you're just going to deal with it.
You're making the marriage more difficult.
Voting is about making it easier for people to vote for you, not harder for people to vote for you.
It is not merely do they know you.
Yes, everybody knows Donald Trump.
And then, when you don't think about all the dumb things that he's doing, you're like, wow, the economy's great, and he's actually doing some pretty good things.
And then every so often, he jetpacks in, parachutes in from the sky, like the blue angel flyover, and all of a sudden it's like, and now I'm going to say something stupid!
And you're like, oh...
But now you've made it harder for me today.
Because people are emotional creatures.
And it's not all priced in on the day.
It's priced in in general.
Which is why the polls are remarkably stable for him.
He's been at 41-42% public approval since literally that he was elected.
He has not moved from a 4% ban his entire year.
The entirety.
That's all priced in.
And it's why there are certain things that won't have any impact on him at all.
Meaning like NBC News breaks this dumb tape of him dancing in 1992 and standing next to Jeffrey Epstein and talking about raiding women.
I did a whole 10 minute segment on my show today about like, wait, you're telling me that the guy nailed his second wife when he was married to his first and then nailed his third wife when he was married to his second and bragged publicly on tape about grabbing women by the genitals and they would let you do it And had an affair with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDoodle and every other person you can imagine and was on the cover of Playboy magazine and ran a competition with swimsuits so he could rape women,
was making jokes about raiding women, and also was dancing with women that he hired to come to him Who were good looking?
And then he was grabbing them exactly the way that he said.
And they were smiling because they were happy.
But it's not just figured in.
It's part of the reason he was elected.
Right.
And you bring up the point of the...
That's fine.
I don't really care.
I think maybe, maybe not.
If he hadn't done all those things, if he were similarly famous, but he had not made a habit of...
I don't think so.
I think they elected him to be this guy.
They did.
Now you're making a not great argument about conservative voters, which is we elected him because he's a bad man.
No, I think what conservative intellectuals did is they let the culture become so poisonous that only a guy like this could break the chains.
They let the basic rules of politeness become the rules of leftism.
So we needed an impolite Boris guy to break those changes.
I don't disagree with that.
You bring up the steadiness of his approval ratings, which I think is obviously true.
It's not even a Trump problem because over the years the country has become more polarized.
We've become more set in our politics and Trump is a polarizing figure.
How many votes did he lose?
Not how many people did he upset, not how many of his voters did he make a little uneasy about voting for him.
How many votes next November did he lose because of this tweet, which he then changed a couple days later?
I think very few, because the question for a known entity like Donald Trump is...
Look, racial bigotry bothers all of us, and I think it bothers the The vast, vast majority of this country.
The question is, is Donald Trump really a racial bigot?
Is Donald Trump going to use his position to discriminate against racial minorities?
Does he harbor ill will toward racial minorities?
He married his daughter off to a Jew.
He has two towns in Israel, a town and a train station in Israel named after him.
He has the biggest pop star in the world, a black man, say, I love this guy in the Oval Office.
The same guy who said, George W. Bush doesn't care about black people.
The last very nice, very genteel Republican president.
I just don't think, as ugly as we think that that line is, as ugly as the line is, what effect is that actually going to have a whole year from now?
Let me ask you this though, because I feel like I'm always caught between you two guys.
Is there a problem with his not expanding the base?
Is there a problem with these tweets that nobody who didn't vote for him is going to vote for him?
I don't think that Donald Trump is one of those Republicans like Tom Keen, you know, in New Jersey who says, politics is the art of inclusion.
I don't think he's one of these nice Republicans.
He's not that guy.
He's one of these big tent guys.
He's not.
President Trump doesn't win by making himself more likable.
He wins by making the other guy unlikable.
He's a pugilist.
He punches.
He's a tough dude.
So in terms of numbers, you think that he is going to suppress enough Democrats to make it unlikely that he needs more?
I think he's going to push them and encourage them to rally around the worst elements of their party and the worst elements of their base.
They already have an absolutely abysmal field in 2020, and he's making it worse for them by making them rally around the It is the other theory.
You've got to admit that since we don't know what's going to happen, it is the other idea.
Listen, and again, he picks the right opponents.
I mean, I've said that the whole conversation.
It's getting easy at this point.
I have one piece of counter data, and that is the election of 2018.
In 2018, during the Kavanaugh hearings, the Democrats set themselves on fire.
They took a vat of gasoline, they jumped in it, and then they lit a match, like that scene from Zoolander.
And the poll numbers went like this, right?
The Democrats were up in the generic poll 10 points, and suddenly, within two weeks, the entire gap was gone.
Republicans and Democrats were right together.
And then Donald Trump said, you know what?
I need to rev up my base and I need to suppress the other guy's base.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about immigration because that's what my base loves.
They love immigration.
So we're going to talk about immigration crisis.
And for three weeks, he took Kavanaugh off the front pages and he talked about immigration crisis and he got shellacked.
He got shellacked.
So there's one problem with- He has an instinct.
But he ain't always right.
One of the dangers in revving up your base is that you also rev up the other guy's base.
And the whole point of revving up your base is that you don't want to rev up the other guy's base.
The worst thing that can happen to Trump...
Listen, every Republican is going to show up...
Like in 2016, every Republican in the world showed up to vote against Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton was, as we all know, demon spawn over the course of 20 years.
Everybody knew this for two decades.
She'd been the most hated woman in American politics.
Coming up in 2020, you're not going to have to make the case to Republicans that whoever the Democrats nominated, by the way, will not be Joe Biden because Joe Biden still has a shred of sanity left in him.
And as some of us have been saying from day one, his first day was going to be his best day.
He's not going to be the nominee.
He's the one who could most easily contest Donald Trump.
Maybe not win, but he could certainly do the most damage.
His own party won't vote for him.
Right, exactly.
And so they'll replace him with Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.
You're not going to have a problem getting Republicans out to the polls to vote against the media and vote against the left and vote against AOC and vote against Tlaib and vote against all these people.
What you are going to have a problem with is if he doesn't Be quiet.
Every Democrat in the world is going to, on a daily basis, feel the moral compulsion to kick him out of office.
And they're not going to stay home.
You need them to stay home.
Because he isn't doing the Tom King thing.
He hasn't won over anything.
Between 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush picked up 11 million additional votes.
Aside from me, can you name like five people, and any of them in the middle of the country, in the districts that matter, that he has picked up?
Can you name it to the altitude of 11 million votes?
No, this is the thing I fear.
This is the thing.
The funny thing for me is that the president's kind of grown on me.
I didn't vote for the guy.
I didn't like him.
There's a lot about him I still don't like.
I get a big kick out of him.
There's many places where he's done a really good job.
I'm very likely that I will vote for him.
This go around.
I think all of us will.
But to Ben's point, he doesn't always make it easy.
He does not make it easy.
Even when you want to support the guy, he doesn't make it easy.
One thing that makes this show different than all the other shows, except for every one of your shows on Thursdays, is that it's mailbag all the time on backstage.
And we're going to go to our first question, and this one is from our newest Daily Wire subscriber.
Hey guys, sorry for not fixing my hair.
We've been a little busy around here.
Anyway, our newest Daily Wire subscriber is number one, very excited for her Love to Cheers bottle.
I think it's being custom made, so it'll probably take more than six to eight weeks to get here.
Oh well.
And also, she wanted to know, who do y'all think will be the leaders of the DNC and the RNC? You know, the parties.
Will there be new parties?
Will there still be a two-party system?
By the time she can vote in 2038.
Will there be a new party by the time she can vote?
Are you really focused on the question?
I'm focused on that beautiful, green-ass baby.
What a plus for ourselves that is.
Congratulations, Alicia.
I'm so glad that that baby was born and not terminated early like Leanna Wynn over here.
President of the Planned Parenthood.
She didn't make it to full term, only eight months in.
They forced the head out and then they terminated it.
I think Alicia actually submitted that question so we would still have to pay her talent fee for this episode.
The question, though, the question, will there still be a two-party system in 2038?
You know, I think there is a possibility that we are going to lose one of the major parties.
I actually do.
It's something that almost never happens, but then it does, right?
And I think, you know, it is possible that we are watching the end of the Democrat Party.
And I think that this is...
I mean, I'm watching how much...
You know, somebody asked this.
I asked it on my show.
Why would you have somebody...
Oh, and Tucker Carlson also said it.
Why would you have people who hate this country govern the country?
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
If there were one reporter still left in the country, that's the question I would ask.
If you think we're running concentration camps, if you think we're Nazis, if you think the Betsy Ross flag is...
You know, a sign of white supremacy.
If you think our history is just, why would we let you run the place?
You know, I mean, why would we do that?
It's insane.
It's like marrying somebody who hates you.
People do do that, but it's a very small number of people, ultimately.
You want somebody who loves the country to run the country.
And I think the Democrats may be finished.
Let me offer a counter.
Yeah.
I'm not saying this is what I believe, but it's just a counter thought.
We could also be watching the end of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party has completely remade itself ideologically over the last 24 months.
I mean, as rapid a change as has happened in my lifetime in terms of a shift.
In the ideological center of a party.
Possible that it's only a reflection of Trump, that we're kind of conforming ourselves to the guy who is our leader.
That's definitely a possibility.
Possibility that it's a new streak that's sort of moving through the right and it's just going to get sort of embraced into the...
It can't stay what it is right now.
Like, this party is too narrow.
So possible that this just becomes a part of the...
Sort of the ingredients of the Republican Party over time.
Also possible that right now we don't see that the division is fatal in our party because we're ascendant in terms of the power of the president and the regulations in the court.
But that the second that the presidency changes will actually be left sort of where they are right now.
Do you see that as a possibility?
I do see it as a possibility.
But one thing I think, you know, it's becoming the party of Trump.
And I don't think there's any way around that.
I don't think there was ever any way around that.
I have to put this exactly right because I don't want five guys to have to pull Shapiro off me.
But certain things that Trump is doing are incredibly smart.
And I don't know how he got there, but he has gotten there.
And one of them is his awareness that the post-war global order is over and has been over for about ten years.
I'm not sure.
What does that mean?
I think that the idea that we are moving unstoppably into a global economy, into a global world view, I think that that idea has hit a snag in the sense that a lot of people were being hurt by that.
And started to get upset about it.
And a lot of people like their countries.
I mean, this is one of the things.
We like our neighborhoods.
When you move a million immigrants into a country that has 16 million people, you have done serious damage to that country, to the nature of that country.
And suddenly people are saying, well, wait a minute.
We kind of liked our neighbor being the son of the guy who lived there before.
That's not racist.
That's not anything.
But nationalist is saying, I like my country.
And I think that he has put the brakes on that.
Whether he has a philosophy to replace it, there you and I probably agree.
I'm not so sure he does.
Again, I don't actually disagree with your take on transnational governance.
I disagree that the replacement for The global economy is going to be nations.
I think the return to mercantilism is not a winning strategy for anybody involved because mercantilism kind of sucked.
But his theory is that the country is like a company that competes with other countries.
Yes, but our country is a country that competes with other countries for power, but that doesn't mean that...
But also for money.
Well, that's just an ignorant view of economics.
We don't compete with people for money.
That's not how trade works.
That's not how economics works.
You and I do not compete for the same dollar.
We produce more dollars.
This is how capitalism functions.
This is how free markets work.
Of course, that's true.
But we do compete for what people do.
I mean, we cannot abandon...
If he wants to compete for t-shirt jobs and bring him back from Vietnam, go for it, man.
I mean, that's all you.
But you can't...
You know, look, there is a moment when the Luddites are burning down the machines.
When the Luddites have a point, okay?
And we all know that 100 years later, all those machines worked out pretty well.
What is their point?
The point is that those machines destroyed their families, destroyed their home industries, destroyed their lifestyles.
I mean, of course they had a point.
And nobody denies that that is true.
It is also true that they were wrong.
And what I mean by that is that in the broad span, if they think beyond their own job, they recognize that an economy run by Wheelwright is not an economy that is going to either be competitive on the world market or an economy where they have jobs or their kids have jobs.
This is just not how economics works.
I don't understand.
I know it's not how economics work, but it's how life works.
You take away people's families.
You take away their communities.
You destroy their jobs.
You have 3.7% unemployment.
More people working now.
Because Trump has brought a lot of that stuff back.
Okay, there was 5% unemployment when Obama was president.
Let's not pretend that...
No, no, no, no, no.
Yes, yes, yes.
At the end of his presidency, it was 5% unemployment.
What are you talking about?
The Obama economy was a fake.
I'm using the same unemployment statistic that you are currently quoting.
You can't say that it was fake when it was Obama, but it's not fake when it's Trump.
Look, you travel around the country, you see a help wanted sign in every store.
During Obama, I used to walk down streets that were boarded up, and you do not see that anymore, and that's the Trump economy.
I'm not saying that the Trump economy is not better than the Obama economy.
The point that I'm making is that the Trump economic policy has not been based in reality on the notion that we are going to steal jobs back from the countries that took those jobs.
It is to some degree the fact that he's deregulated the energy industry.
Okay, deregulation is not competition with other countries.
Of course it is.
No, it is not competition with other countries because you would deregulate whether or not they regulate.
That's silly.
You're deregulating for your own good.
You're not deregulating because you're taking jobs away from other countries.
That's one of the reasons conservatives want people to come into the country illegally.
I'll challenge what Ben just said only slightly, because I think you actually agree about this.
Deregulation makes us more competitive for industry.
Being more competitive for industry is something all four of us support.
Bribing industry to work here or penalizing industry to work somewhere else is not the same as making this...
Deregulation.
Deregulation.
No, hold on.
What I'm saying is that deregulation is not looking at the economy as a zero-sum game.
And the philosophy of the Luddites is that the economy is a zero-sum game.
That a job that is lost in one industry is lost to somebody else.
You're confusing two points.
What you just said, you said it makes us more competitive, which means we're in competition with somebody else, which is what I started out by saying.
My point about the Luddites is the human point that the machines did bad things to the people who were alive at that time.
And you can't make an argument and say, well, don't care about your own interests, don't care about your own family, don't care about your community.
No, but I can say that you are a damn liar over the course of any span of time if you believe that wrecking the machines is going to save your job or save your economy.
But that is the promise.
But that's why this is going to all fall down.
That's why if you think that the post-war consensus about Free trade and property rights which has brought nearly all of the globe out of poverty.
That's not what I'm arguing about.
This is why I was distinguishing before because you said two things in one sentence and I'm agreeing with one and disagreeing with the other.
You said global economics Versus global governance.
And I'm saying I agree with you on global governance.
On a cultural level, you cannot have the idea that all borders are permeable and that all people are widgets and all of that.
It's the difference between visions of global economics.
It's the difference of saying we are going to become more competitive even on jobs of a lower level.
We are going to become more competitive in every way.
It's the difference between saying We are an entity that is competing with other entities and saying we are all one big economy.
Those are two different ways of looking at the same idea of global economy.
I know that's actually an accurate description of the economy.
This is why the parties are not going away.
This is why I don't think the Republican Party is collapsing.
I don't think the Democratic Party is collapsing.
I think they are both adjusting to deal with changing political circumstances because it's not 1945, it's not 1985, it's not even 2005.
We're in a new political circumstance at the moment.
I don't think that they're fundamentally changing everything they've always believed.
I think the Democrat Party has always been terrible and it remains terrible.
I think the Republican Party has embraced global trade, free trade economics for the past 40 years or so.
It's also the case that the GOP was founded on tariffs.
Abraham Lincoln said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest nation on earth.
That's not an argument for tariffs.
We're not even instituting a lot of tariffs.
Where did he get his iPhone?
And where did he get his iPhone?
My point is, those two parties are actually adapting to market demands among voters, and what would the third party be?
We're always told by people, especially on the internet, especially guys who spend a lot of time thinking about politics, they say, you know, and I hear this, I've talked to billionaires who've told me, you know, Michael, if the GOP would just drop those social issues, if we If you had a third party that was economically really competitive and socially totally liberal, you'd win every vote.
You know how many votes you would win?
They've done polls on this.
Four percent of votes.
Nobody wants that.
I think actually, right now, for all of our chaos, the two parties are very stable.
The real problem with the Luddites, and then we're going to take another question.
The real problem with the Luddites isn't that they're right that they're hurting.
It's that they're wrong about what should be done about their suffering.
Of course.
Of course they are.
And the ultimate problem from a governmental point of view is who gets to decide whose interests to advance above the interests of someone else?
Who gets to say that the guy who has the job as a truck driver is more important than the guy who is building the self-driving car?
And what the free market posits is no one gets to make that decision.
The collective economic decision-making of everyone gets to make that decision.
Yes, but the thing is that in that moment, I don't think there's going to be self-driving cars.
I think there are going to be automatic cars because we don't have self-driving planes.
I mean, a plane basically at this point could take off and land itself, but you're not going to get in a plane without...
Not with that Boeing, but all the other planes can do that.
You're not going to get in a 40-ton truck.
A 40-ton truck is just as dangerous as a plane...
They're not going to be 40 tons.
Okay, the Germans are just picking an example.
That's eliding the example.
No, no, no.
My point is that the mistake that the Luddites make is that the jobs are going to go away when, in fact, technology actually increases employment.
It actually does over time.
The mistake I feel that conservatives make when they side with the guys who own the factories is you can't have a generation wiped out and maintain cultural stability.
You can't have people, their lives being destroyed.
You know, Karl Marx was exactly wrong.
He said religion is the opiate of the people.
It turns out that opium is the religion of the people.
The people are going to People are going to kill themselves if you take their lives away.
I can't remember who it was who said if you take away a person's way of life, you've got to replace it with something of value.
There's nothing wrong in starting to think about it.
It doesn't have to be more government.
It doesn't have to be more government action.
There's nothing wrong with starting to think about what do we replace people's lives with?
What do we go into those towns where the jobs disappear and say, okay, well, what is it going to look like?
I think that there is a I think this has to do with education myself.
I think our educational system stinks.
I think it should be destroyed.
I'm a Leninist when it comes to...
Rip it out by the roof.
Rip it out.
Yeah, let it go as bad as it can get so it will fall apart.
But I think we need a more rapid response.
To the way jobs change.
Because we're conservatives.
We believe in the mediating institutions.
We believe in communities.
We believe in churches.
You can't just say, oh, your community fell apart.
You should move.
Move to the city.
Then we'll be conservative.
That's right.
You know, conservatives believe in those things that are falling apart, that fell apart in the Midwest under Obama.
Which is why we want the government not making these decisions, even our government, even our president, even President Trump.
We want the government not to have so much power that it has crowded out all the people who can't address these issues, which are communities and churches.
But you're talking about the federal government.
The federal government should have that power, but local governments should be able to make rapid responses to the rapid changes that come into their communities and destroy them.
There's a difference between they should be able to, on a constitutional legal level, and it's good policy to do so.
I think that the truth is that the history of the United States, frankly the history of humanity, is in fact mobility.
And I'm sorry, but Donald Trump telling you that the Mexicans and Chinese jacked your job from your town, that is not going to bring the job back to your town if you're in a non-competitive industry, and if it does, it's for a very short period of time, as Foxconn is finding out.
So this whole routine where we lie to voters by telling them that their jobs will be there forever in the towns that they are guaranteed and that you're going to be buried in the same town that your grandfather was buried in.
I mean, I had this exact conversation with Tucker.
That is not what...
American history was literally about people leaving the lands of their birth and coming to the United States and then people crossing a wide-fruited plain in the face of people who wanted to kill them in many cases.
And then building something up.
This notion that you're born in America, therefore you get to stay there and live with the job that your grandfather had.
First of all, nobody has the job their grandfather had.
Pittsburgh was the dirtiest city in America.
And the sky was basically green because of all of the pollution.
I remember, yeah.
And now, the unemployment rate in Pittsburgh is under 4% because the entire industry transformed into healthcare industry and education.
Right.
Your job is the best it'll ever be, and what we need to do is bring back your grandpappy's job.
You know what your grandpappy probably didn't like doing?
Probably he didn't like sitting on an assembly line and dying at age 60, because he was sitting there, chain-smoking cigarettes with his dead-end job for 40 years, putting rivets in cars.
The fallacy in what you're saying is that in the big picture, mobility is very important, which is why I think we need to go into space.
Politics is about the big picture.
It's not always about the big picture because you have elections and people will not vote for you if their lives are falling apart.
All politics is localism.
Wait, wait, wait.
So you're saying the policy should be general.
Wait, wait, wait.
Don't do that.
And the political thing should be a lie.
This is not the world right now.
Where there is a wilderness that people can fill.
We do not believe, none of us believes that people should be constantly on the move, constantly destroying their communities.
Nobody believes that.
The moment when the new world was created is the moment when that happened.
But now we are an older country with- Even if I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, I don't trust you to make those decisions.
I don't trust me to make those decisions either, but I think there are decisions that can be made.
There is such a thing as good policy, right?
I mean, there's good policy and bad policy.
There even are good statesmen.
We don't have a lot of them, but there are some.
You just said on a general policy level you agree with me, so I'm not sure what your good policy looks like.
No, no, no.
I said over time, mobility is important.
That's why I think we should go into space.
But we're not in space right now.
Our country has its borders.
The substitute for the wilderness was commerce.
That was the substitute for the end of the wilderness.
The wilderness in the United States ended in the late 19th century.
That's right.
And the substitute for that was entrepreneurship and commerce.
It was also islands overseas and different territories.
Realistically it was commerce.
It was making the United States into the greatest commercial power in the history of the world, bar none, and driving the vast majority of the globe out of abject poverty.
So when Donald Trump When he stood up and said to the people in the middle of the country who were killing themselves at such a rate that our life expectancy was going down, when he says, I remember you, I have not forgotten you, and came into office and by deregulating actually created the jobs that Obama said could not be created, was he mistaken?
I didn't object to one word.
I have no bad words to say about his words on deregulation.
What I'm saying is that when he says that he's going to rejigger the global economy, I was in favor of that for security concerns, but not for economic concerns.
That's not been good for the economy.
What's that?
Is the suicide rate going down?
I don't know yet.
We won't know for at least two years.
Let's take at least three questions from our backstage.
If you want to get a question, go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Give us your hard-earned cash.
And we will give you very, very, very few answers because we talked a lot about that.
This question comes from Christopher.
Why do you think Bernie is losing so much of his base when other Democrats like Warren are just parroting his ideas?
It tastes so good.
I don't know.
It is a fair question.
The guy's the only person actually proposing policy in the entire...
And he's created the modern Democrat Party.
Because he was the only rival to Hillary Clinton.
That's the only reason he was popular in the first place, right?
He was the only one allowed to be a rival.
He was Martin O'Malley.
Yeah.
- Yeah, it was Martin O'Malley and Jim Webb who made the great sin of saying that he killed a Vietnamese soldier in the Vietnam War, which makes him a very bad man.
And then it was Bernie Sanders, who was not a war hero, and in fact, is a communist.
And he was the chief rival to Hillary Clinton.
And now it turns out that they've got people who can speak in more than two complete sentences, who actually have crafted a patina of of intellectual planning around his kind of dumb sloganeering.
So you'll see people like Elizabeth Warren, he'll say, "We should make college free for everybody "and remove all student debt." And then she'll be like, "Well, let me give you the exact specifics." And they're like, "Wow, she's so sophisticated.
"She has plans." And she hasn't got the Soviet Union tied to her leg like a chain.
And she's not old and she's not grumpy.
I mean, you saw it in the last debate when he looked like he had nothing.
I mean, there was one follow-up question to him about taxation.
And they're like, so how are you going to do all this?
He's like, the people will rise!
The people will come out!
And we'll argue with the streets!
And we'll wave our pudding and chow!
And then...
End of the world!
There is a verified guy on Twitter named Jeremy.
I don't know.
What's his name?
Who sent out a tweet about Bernie Sanders that I thought was the most accurate thing anyone has ever said about him, which was that he's running to make up for the fact that everything he ever thought was wrong.
This is the big problem.
I think all the Democrats are doing it.
This is why he can't actually win the election, though, is because as just a matter of accomplishment in government, he's been there since 1776, and he's never accomplished one single thing.
He actually is the intellectual leader of the current Democratic Party, which tells you more about the intellectual state of the Democratic Party than about his intellect.
But he did craft the party from an intellectual level.
He's just never done anything.
He doesn't have the spirit for it.
Whereas Elizabeth Warren, as detestable as she is, actually has accomplished certain things in her life.
And has the great spirit.
And she has the greats.
This next question.
Michael, why does entertainment from conservative artists and companies appear to lack the creative quality that the progressive...
First of all, did they not say Dem Girl Squad?
I know.
Maybe the question came in before Dem Girl Squad.
What do you think, Michael?
Why do conservative movies, why are they bad?
Yeah.
Well, a lot of movies, a lot of the greatest movies of all time have been conservative.
They've had conservative messages.
We just don't call them conservative movies and they don't air on conservative channels.
They're made by liberals.
Like Chernobyl's fantastic.
The guy who made it doesn't get it.
Exactly.
He doesn't get it.
This often happens.
But yeah, part of the reason why conservative movies or Christian movies are often very terrible is because we've just sort of ghettoized ourselves.
And because when we know that we are selling a product that is going to a specific audience, we put the ideology and we put the philosophy at the forefront.
And we allow that as a sort of shortcut to making a good story and casting good actors and all those sorts of things.
So the left doesn't have to do that.
They get their messages in a little bit more subtly and they own the industry.
There's one other piece of this, which is every now and then a guy is born in some small town in some backwater state who can throw a hundred mile an hour fastball.
And God touches the person who can throw a 100 mile an hour fastball.
That's not one in three people.
It's not one in ten people.
You are special.
You have a gift from God.
You might as well be an X-Man.
Mostly though, if you take the 100 mile an hour fastball guys out, all the best baseball players are going to come from bigger towns.
If my hometown Slayton, Texas football team plays against any of the football teams from nearby Lubbock, Slayton will lose.
It will lose not because there aren't talented people in Slayton, but because the total pool of people from whom we have to choose our football team in Slayton is so small.
Lubbock has orders of magnitude more people from which they get to choose their football players.
So, with the exception of...
By the way, even if you're born able to throw the 100 mile an hour fastball and you're from a very, very small town, when you do get to the professional league or you do get to college ball, you will be at a disadvantage.
It may be temporary because of your gifts, but you'll be at a disadvantage because you didn't play against the quality of opposition that the guys in the bigger town played because they played other big towns.
The truth is...
There are artists on the right, and they work hard and they're trying.
We have a lot fewer people from whom to choose.
And so the quality that rises to the top over...
We may get the 100-mile-an-hour fastball guy one of these days.
They don't have to count on the 100-mile-an-hour fastball guy.
They've got everybody.
It's also a funding problem, right?
I mean, the people who fund conservative film, their general perception is...
The first question they ask is, is it conservative enough?
That's right.
Where's the come to Jesus call, right?
At the end of the movie, where's the thing where they say, and that's why abortion's wrong?
And then the title of the movie is, abortion is wrong.
This is the other thing.
I mean, great movies, and I don't even think movies are the question anymore because I think movies are an outdated form, but great art is made by great artists.
It's not made by great conservatives.
It's not made by great Christians.
It's made by great artists.
And I think, just given the numbers, I think there could be as many great conservative artists and even good conservative artists as liberal artists.
But let's face it, they're blacklisted.
They do not have the venues to go to.
But you do agree that the movies may be over, but everyone who spent their life making movies has a right to keep making movies and getting paid because it's not their fault that the global economy...
And they should be paid as much as men.
Yeah, very good.
This question comes from Mark.
Why do you think people are seeking the extreme, such as the views held by AOC and the rest of the fresh faces of the Democrat Party?
Because purity is easier to sell than moderation, just as a general rule.
And so it's always a lot easier to say, well, you are insufficiently pure in your intent.
And also, we live in an era where castigation of motives is the easiest game in town.
And so it is easier to castigate the motives of somebody who is impure than it is to castigate the motives of somebody who is pure.
So you can't say to AOC, well, you're not sufficiently socialist enough because you're obviously willing to compromise.
But she's not willing to compromise, right?
This is Bernie Sanders' whole pitch.
He kept using it with Hillary Clinton.
It was like, well, you kept compromising.
Look at me, I've never voted for anything.
I've never done a useful thing in my entire life.
And that is my selling point because I have never done anything useful. - People are like, he hasn't done anything useful.
It's great.
That's why he didn't do anything.
It also goes back to what you're saying about losing the Soviet Union as an enemy, though.
This country won.
Our system won.
Our philosophy won.
And now we need a new vision of what that's going to look like in the 21st century.
And I think it's easier to find those things in the extremes.
There's not a lot of vision to this sort of incremental...
Small changes based on winnowing history.
It's not a sexy self.
Except that we did have, we did have in that moment, we had an overall vision which could be defined in opposition to the slave states of the Nazis.
But Burke is never as solid as the French Revolution.
And Rousseau is always a better self.
There is actually a plus to this, I think, which is people used to complain 70 years ago that the parties were too similar.
And nobody had a clear ideological vision.
And over time, the parties have become ideologically much more extreme.
To quote Barry Goldwater, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
Not sure I totally agree with it, but I just mean there is...
The only part of it that he has a problem with is liberty.
Yeah.
I'm all for the vice.
He didn't think vice was a bad thing.
But I just mean, I like that people are following their ideas to their logical conclusions.
I like that the left isn't lying to us anymore about their view on abortion.
They're actually telling us their honest view about abortion.
The other reason I think that we're getting extreme is C.S. Lewis predicted it.
He said a sick culture needs to talk about politics just like a sick man needs to take medicine.
But if all you're doing is talking about politics as we currently are, I mean our whole culture, Donald Trump is the TV star, he's the movie star, he's everything.
If that's all you're talking about, the culture is so sick that you're actually not doing any of the things that politics is supposed to permit, like the arts and like religion.
I have to inject a religious argument here because I think that David Brooks, of all people, wrote a good column this week about how the thing about AOC... Stop the clock twice a day, right?
But the thing about AOC and Nancy Pelosi was really an argument over whether we were going to still have liberalism.
Because Nancy Pelosi, as far left as she is, is still a liberal in the sense that she believes in compromise and the system working and all that stuff.
And I think that we're in this moment when liberalism is under attack.
And I think it's under attack because it became a secular system.
And as a secular system, I think it lost its reason for being.
I think the reason we were liberals is because we were Christians.
And, you know, Judeo-Christians.
And I think when you take that away, I think somebody wrote a book about this.
It is for freedom and Christ has made us free.
That's right.
And I think when you take that away, you take that bottom jingle block out.
We removed religion from politics because we wanted to protect religion from politics.
And then religion died.
And then we made politics our religion because we still needed religion.
And once politics becomes religion, well, that was the same as when religion was politics.
So now you're back to actual religious internecine warfare.
I made this point on my program a few days ago that We have returned to a time where you can't actually...
Because there's no actual discussion to be had beyond a certain point about religion.
Because either I'm right or you're right.
Either you're going to heaven and I'm going to hell or vice versa in most religions.
Well, in politics, it's the same thing now.
Now, if you don't vote Democrat, you are an evil person who is going to hell.
And they've got their votive candles to Robert Mueller.
And they've got their sacraments that you have to perform with recycling and abortion.
And there are all these things, these little things that you have to do.
And you have to pay lip service.
We have Latin mass in the Democratic Party where if you don't say precisely the right words about men and women and transgenderism, then we consider you a bad person who is destined to hell forever.
If you tweet a bad thing, there's no forgiveness.
It's the worst kind of religion 'cause there's not even any level of forgiveness.
And so without any grace, what you end up with is politics returning to religion and return to religious warfare because if we have the absolute truth, why should we have this whole liberal construct It is an amazing thing that, like, for all of human history, men were men and women were women, and we understood that that had a wide range of definition, but still, there was this essential fact.
In one day, that becomes hateful.
I mean, it's not just that, like, gee, I have an idea that maybe gender is a construct.
Let's discuss.
Let's discuss, you know?
It's not that.
It's like, I believe that, and you are a terrible, terrible person for not thinking that.
I just came back from this conference of evangelical teenagers, right?
And I'm always a little odd there because I basically think that a loving homosexual relationship can be tolerated and included within the Christian vision of humanity.
And so I'm always the guy who's kind of arguing for...
You don't think it's marriage, though?
I don't think it's marriage.
I don't think it's actual marriage.
I think it's sacramental marriage, which is obviously the center of human life.
But I don't think people should be chased out any more than I think divorced people or fat people or lustful people or envious people should be chased away from the church.
And I would even go further and say that I do believe that there is a state of homosexual relationship that isn't actually any more sinful.
You know, it's off-center, but it's not necessarily sinful.
But anyway, my point is this.
These kids talk to me.
They argue with me.
They discuss things with me.
At no point does anybody stand up and say, you're going to hell.
Never.
They're always open to these ideas, and they disagree, and they disagree ferociously, and we have these wonderful, friendly, actually loving conversations, which to me are one of the great joys of life.
We talked about this when Dave Rubin was here, arguing like this, And walking away and saying, you know, that guy actually made a good point.
I may adjust something.
That's part of the joy of life.
And they've completely eradicated it.
Well, I've enjoyed the argument.
I don't think you made any good points.
No.
There were a lot of things we didn't get to tonight.
The horrors of Jeffrey Epstein, which I do think...
Yes, we should.
We all agree.
He's terrible.
He should burn in hell.
We're all on the same page.
Everybody who also involved with him should burn in hell.
And I don't care how the economy changes.
That man should lose his job.
He should.
And I hope everyone involved gets caught.
Oh, yeah.
We didn't get to talk about the fact that a left-wing would-be domestic terrorist actually stormed a government facility while quoting...
Trump tweeted something.
Yeah, while quoting one of the squad.
So there is more to talk about.
We will talk about it the next time that we are together, which I believe will be at Backstage.com.
Live at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California on August 26th.
You can still get your tickets.
We'd love to see you there.
DailyWire.com slash backstage.
DailyWire.com slash backstage.
DailyWire.com slash...
That's not even the prompt.
I'm just saying it three times.
You remember that guy?
Beetlejuice appears?
No.
It was like...
Apply directly to the forehead.
What was that?
I do remember that.
So we'd love to see you backstage live.
Come hang out with us.
To everybody who wrote in their questions, we appreciate it.
Go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Get in your questions for next time, and we will see you there.
Fake live.
▲
Export Selection