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Aug. 22, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:47:02

Daily Wire Backstage: Live In Long Beach

Should the U.S. buy Greenland? Does anybody know the whereabouts of AOC? Does Trump really think he's the king of Israel? Date: 08-22-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	What you're about to hear is our Daily Wire backstage event performed live in front of a packed house at the Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
	It was a terrific night.
	I got to meet hundreds of people who come out, and we had such a good time.
	There were great questions from the audience, and it was just a fabulous night with a lot of cigars and a lot of booze.
	And less important than that, some really good topics discussed.
	So I hope you enjoy it.
	Check it out and enjoy.
	Fake laugh in three, two, one.
	Well, hello, everybody, everybody, and welcome to the Daily Wire backstage live.
	What's in the news?
	There is a dark psychic force that has taken over the news cycle.
	And it has also given us the possibility of our next president, Marianne Williamson.
	The Orb Gang.
	I know.
	She's great.
	I like to think that this is testimony to the greatness of our president, that he has ended news.
	He's just gotten so much right.
	He didn't just destroy the fake news media.
	I know Ben thinks that.
	Before you go too far in this direction, I hate to break it to you, but the president basically decided that we're going to war with Greenland.
	And it's about damn time.
	Ben, those poor, oppressed people in Greenland, they can't own their own real estate.
	They are oppressed by a Danish tyranny.
	We need shock and awe, we need boots on the ground, and we need to make Greenland great again.
	It's what the people want!
	I'll admit it wasn't what I was seeing when President Trump was elected.
	It's a fight over Greenland.
	There are certain things that were unexpected.
	I also wasn't expecting the second coming.
	It didn't come the way I thought it would.
	I'll be honest with you.
	I didn't think it was coming at all, to be frank with you.
	You're the only one on the panel who wasn't expecting the second coming.
	But I'll admit that we were all a little shocked at the form.
	I mean, this was more like the Spanish Inquisition.
	Nobody expected it.
	When you figure...
	Look, it's your religion.
	But if you're going to talk about Jesus coming back, I figured he wasn't going to come back in this particular form.
	It's like Ghostbusters.
	We just imagine the form of our Redeemer.
	What was it?
	Was he like, they turned me down thrice, so next time I'm coming back and grabbing him by the...
	LAUGHTER Yeah, I don't think he got the before-the-cot crew.
	I don't even want to go down that road.
	You know, you will never know the day or the hour.
	I do want to talk about this because while it's an absolutely hilarious issue, I'm not sure that it's an inconsequential issue.
	The president, if you look at the field and you're sitting where I'm sitting, I think that he has an above average chance of holding onto the White House in the 2020 election.
	When you say above average, do you mean above the average incumbent or just like better than 50%?
	Better than 50%.
	But where I struggle to think about his chances are when he says things like, I'm the second coming of God and the king of the Jews.
	It strikes me that the president's a blunt instrument.
	And the very same things that give him his power also are his greatest weakness.
	And I actually think that's probably true of all of us, that usually your greatest strength and your Achilles heel are located in the exact same spot, right?
	But the president has this amazing ability to go above the media, go past the media, use his Twitter account to speak directly to the people, and not just to speak a message about policy to the people, but he's able to use the kind of Bombastic sense of humor that he has to really decide what the media is going to talk about.
	And this serves him very well.
	But it also comes with a real liability, which is he's not particularly disciplined about it.
	You think?
	Yeah.
	I worry that if the president goes around basically offending Jews and Christians with the exact same tweet, that he's going to have a...
	Then a lot of people who might otherwise be inclined to pull the lever for him come 2020, he runs the risk that what they're going to want instead is just for it to be over.
	Like, we just need a break.
	We just need the temperature to come down.
	We just can't take...
	This tempo anymore.
	That's certainly what the press is trying to set up.
	They have been making noise since this guy got elected.
	He's a Nazi.
	He's a white supremacist.
	He inspires shooters.
	He's a Russian asset.
	He's got dementia.
	They haven't stopped since he started.
	And this isn't just like, you know, clowns like Donnie Deutsch and Joy Reid.
	These are actual so-called journalists.
	I don't think you can refer to journalists as clowns.
	That's a...
	A complete threat to the safety of...
	It's also very offensive to clowns, so you don't want to do that.
	But it is interesting to think about Trump in silence for a minute.
	If you just take out all the noise of the Trump administration, it's a pretty good presidency.
	There's no wars.
	The economy is ticking around.
	And it's nothing magical.
	It's just pure kind of center-right governance, which always works.
	A little conservatism here and there.
	Isn't that kind of like saying, if you turn the sound off, Green Day is a good band?
	Look, here's the deal.
	With every Republican president, they try to make this person out to be evil.
	With Trump, they've obviously ramped it up in dramatic ways.
	I mean, even more than they did with Bush Hitler, right?
	I mean, I'm old enough to remember Bush Hitler.
	He was not Hitler, as it turns out.
	That was Trump, as it turns out.
	But they decided that Trump was going to be all these things.
	The thing is, when people are calling you crazy and senile and volatile, the thing you would like to not look like Is crazy, senile, and volatile.
	And the big problem for the president right now is, as you say, if it were just about his accomplishments, then he'd be re-elected, and I don't think he'd be particularly close.
	Who else are they going to put up against him?
	The Hillary Clinton 0.5 version of Elizabeth Warren?
	Or NARC Kamala Harris?
	Who exactly would it be?
	The problem for him is that Because he is who he is.
	He's obviously alienating a lot of suburban women.
	It's hurting Republicans, particularly in purple areas.
	And that's a really, really dangerous thing.
	Look, I've said to the White House, they know this.
	Everyone at the White House knows this, except for President Trump.
	They have one or two strategies available to them to guarantee his re-election.
	Strategy number one, they need to create a fake Twitter app.
	They need to upload it to his phone.
	And he tweets...
	And he tweets into the Twitter app.
	And he gets back just a bunch of people like, Mega, Mega, you're the best.
	And he's just so happy all day.
	And then he goes out there and he tries to make permanent tax cuts.
	And he thinks that this is all real, but it's not.
	It's like Truman Show just for him.
	That's...
	That's strategy number one.
	Strategy number two is they go upstairs into the top level of the White House and they stock it with Shark Week and a porn star and just leave him there for two years.
	And he's president forever.
	President for life.
	President for life.
	But his personality is, I mean, listen, the reason that people despise him is not because of his policies, because the fact is that until he was elected, nobody even knew what his policies were really going to be.
	It's a personality question.
	Of course.
	He seems not capable of holding that in.
	I would love to see him do it.
	So, we are doing a live show, and this is our first time to have 3,000 people sitting in an audience holiday.
	crowd cheers Did we bring enough booze for 3,000 people?
	We need a miracle.
	We need someone like the president.
	I don't know.
	We'll figure it out.
	To turn water into whiskey?
	Yeah, that's right.
	We are also, however, shooting our normal podcast slash internet television show.
	And as such, we have some advertising sponsors.
	What we would love, we hope you love our ad sponsors as much as we do.
	They make it possible for us to be able to bring this content to you on a daily basis with the guy's shows, on a monthly basis with this show.
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	PolicyGenius!
	Bruce, you seem like you don't agree with Ben's analysis regarding the President's Twitter account.
	Well, no, I mean, look, Trump was elected to do what he does.
	And the fact that he is boorish enough and crazy enough to do it means he's going to be boorish and crazy.
	He's always going to step over the line.
	And I think...
	But I think it's important.
	Look, I think the press has created a world in which we're always the bad guy.
	You know...
	It's a world of complete fantasy.
	It doesn't even make any sense.
	On the one hand, Donald Trump, our president, is Adolf Hitler.
	On the other hand, we shouldn't have any guns.
	It's not even a world that's making much sense.
	And they've been doing this as you say.
	They did it to Bush.
	They did it certainly to Richard Nixon, who did terrible things, but nothing worse than Lyndon Johnson did.
	They did it to Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being who's ever walked here.
	Exactly, exactly.
	So, this is a cultural thing.
	We need to voice a guy who's not afraid.
	And anybody who's not afraid has got to be a little bit nuts at this point.
	How I wish the United States were, and how the voting population of the United States goes, maybe two separate questions.
	Again, I don't want to belabor the point, but we're all in favor of Trump being the hammer that hits the nail.
	As I've been saying for literally years at this point, it's when he hits the baby that everybody begins to get a little bit worried.
	And lately, particularly, he seems to be hitting a lot of babies.
	He's turned into Leroy Jenkins in the last few weeks, right?
	I mean, like Ilhan Omar and the squad, they're having a fight with Nancy Pelosi, and they're going at it, and everybody's like, this is great, just let them pummel each other, and Trump's like, Leroy Jenkins!
	And he just charges right in the middle.
	And then all of a sudden, the narrative is not that anymore, now he's in the middle of the narrative.
	Or just this last week, Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib were...
	Disgusting anti-Semites.
	I mean, just awful, awful people.
	Serious Jew haters.
	These folks decide that they are going to go to Palestine, Jerusalem, Palestine.
	That's that country next to Narnia and on the other side of Wakanda?
	Is that where that is?
	My geography is a little wonky, I don't know.
	And they're sponsored by a group called Mifta, which actually pushes the blood libel.
	And the media, as you say, are awful, terrible people, and so they ignore that entire story.
	It is not important at any point that these women were sponsored by an actual blood libel pro-terror group.
	It's important that Israel said no.
	The Jews were the problem because they're not as high on the intersectional pyramid.
	So now Trump does have something to hit with, right?
	I mean, he can say, look at these awful anti-Semitic congresswomen who are retweeting cartoons from cartoonists who competed in the Iran Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006.
	Let's pause for a minute and think about the fact that there is a Holocaust denial cartoon contest.
	I know, I never get picked!
	It's unbelievable.
	Is it a depressing or an uplifting contest?
	Like, on the one hand, depressing because historically inaccurate.
	On the other hand, the Holocaust never happened.
	So good news, guys.
	All my relatives are back.
	But the media don't cover any of this.
	And Trump finally, I mean, the last week has provided so many case studies in media bias.
	And this is Trump's specialty, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	Going after the media, this is Trump's specialty.
	And instead, Trump decides that he's going to jump into a fray that he doesn't need to jump into and be rather nonspecific.
	Now, his comments in the last couple of days, 48 hours, about Jews voting Democrat, listen, I think that if you're a Jew who cares about Judaism, you should not vote Democrat.
	I think it is wrong for you to vote Democrat.
	I've been saying this my entire career.
	I do not know, if you're a Jew who cares about Judaism, I do not know for the life of me how you can possibly vote for a party that upholds Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar as moral superiors.
	I mean, it's just disgusting and unthinkable.
	But you have to make clear that you're talking about Jews who care about Judaism.
	When Trump says things like, all the Jews need to vote for me because the Jews care about Israel, now you're running along the line of dual loyalty charges, you're running along the line of, just because you were born into a Jewish family, you have to care about Israel.
	And that is a distinction that he's never going to make, because it's a nuanced distinction, obviously.
	Think of the comparison you're making.
	You're comparing Trump, who obviously doesn't think before he talks.
	He's a little, just a tad reckless.
	And what he really said, what he really said was, if you are a Jew, you would be disloyal to Israel to vote for the Democrats, which is kind of literally true.
	And then he retweeted.
	He retweeted.
	He didn't say he was the son of God.
	He said he retweeted some clown.
	Everyone is saying I'm the son of God.
	It's not just me saying it and everyone is saying it.
	So compare that to the fact that these virulent anti-Semites who call Israel Palestine, which is the name the Romans gave Israel after they conquered it, it's an anglicization of the word Philistine.
	Remember the Philistines with Goliath and all that?
	That's what Palestine is, so that's what they call it.
	So it's not really a comparison.
	It's only a comparison in a world where the press is all on one side.
	No, you're totally right.
	But again, the art of politics is to make it easy for people to vote for you.
	And Trump has to make it easier.
	He does.
	I mean, just as a matter of data, he needs to make it easier for people.
	Listen, everybody who loves him is already going to vote for him.
	No one is going to say, well, you know, he tweeted one last time today not voting for him anymore.
	But there are a lot of people out there who feel differently.
	And Trump has so many victories that are available to him.
	I mean, that whole New York Times story that unfolded last week, where it came out that Dean Baquet over at the New York Times, the executive editor, had overtly stated to his own staffers that they were shifting from the Trump-Russia narrative to the Trump racism narrative.
	How is that not everything Trump said for an entire week?
	How is that not every rally?
	Just him saying, listen, I've been saying for years about the fake news, and they are fake news.
	I mean, that should have been everything, right?
	The president does a terrible job of running on his successes.
	And I think part of it is because he's...
	It's a compulsive behavior that he wants to have attention.
	And the way he's gotten attention for most of his career is actually to do things that are negative.
	He's kind of like everybody's, you know, your kid brother or whatever.
	My three-year-old.
	Who only knows how to get attention by being bad.
	The president's been famous for, even for all of Drew's life.
	That's how long our president has been famous.
	Impossible.
	No one has been alive as long as it's true.
	He signed the Declaration of Independence.
	He was there at the Constitutional Convention.
	You know this man used to have hair?
	I know.
	Unthinkable.
	And Donald Trump was president even then.
	He...
	He's been president...
	He's been famous for this incredible amount of time, usually by being notorious.
	Donald Trump has more notoriety than he has fame.
	As time went on, The Apprentice happens and he gets a little more legitimate fame.
	But he's been a notorious figure.
	He...
	He still has the same impulses.
	What he hasn't learned is that you can actually be beloved, you can actually be supported on the basis of your actual accomplishments.
	The tax cuts, the great judicial appointments, Gorsuch on the Supreme Court not having us involved in foreign wars, defeating ISIS. And by the way, yes, fighting the culture wars properly.
	Of course fighting the culture wars properly.
	But I think that what he does instinctively and compulsively, I don't think he can control himself, is that even when the news is good for him because it's bad for the left, if it's not specifically about him, he wants to make it about him.
	So when he sees horrible press befalling Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he sees them getting pummeled in the press.
	Instead of going, this is great, it's going to help me win, he goes, why aren't they talking about me?
	Something, something, something, something.
	I'd like to give a counterexample here, which I agree.
	The typical advice would be, when your opponents are killing each other, let them do it and sit back and have a cigar.
	But in the case of the real moment when the squad was burning down, Nancy Pelosi was pouncing, she's been waiting for this for two years now, At that moment, Trump inserted himself into the debate and he said, send them back, which was technically not true because they weren't immigrants, right?
	Most of them weren't immigrants.
	At that moment, he got a ton of negative press.
	But what was the conclusion of that?
	What was the effect of those tweets?
	The effect was, all of a sudden, you had AOC meeting with Nancy Pelosi.
	You had all of the so-called moderate Democrats rallying behind these horrific people.
	Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and AOC. That seems like a win.
	That seems like where we want the Democrats to be, which is showing themselves to be bigoted, hateful radicals.
	And if they're doing that, I think it puts Trump in a decent light, even if he goes through a couple bad weeks of news.
	You know, actually...
	This is a...
	It's an interesting conversation because it is a strategy, but it is a very risky strategy because you are turning, you're helping the Democratic Party turn itself into the Labour Party in Britain.
	And maybe you think they're already there.
	Maybe they are.
	But stripping off the mask, I'm not sure that that is a good long-term strategy because they do have a 50% chance.
	They've run the Congress.
	They do have a 50% chance of winning the presidency.
	And by the way, I don't think Trump is weak enough that he has to...
	Make them all about AOC and Ilhan Omar in order to win.
	I think Trump can beat Joe Biden if he would shut up for five, like not the whole time, just for like every five seconds or so would be awesome.
	Like if he just did that, make all of our jobs easy, that would, I think he could win.
	I think there's a real danger in nutpicking the other side.
	And I think that the Democrats learned that in 2016 when they were like, you know who'd be awesome to run against?
	That guy Donald Trump.
	He'll never win.
	And he'll never win.
	And Hillary Clinton is like, he should run.
	And now she's sitting somewhere up in the woods of Chappaqua quietly weeping to herself.
	You know, that's-- What do you think of this strategy, though, as a serious strategy?
	I've thought numerous times.
	At the time that I met Trump's speechwriters, they said to me, what aren't we doing?
	What should we do?
	And I actually have an idea.
	I actually think that there's a speech Trump should make where he says, I know who I am.
	I know what I look like.
	I know what you hear, but look at what I've accomplished.
	Where he actually says this, and he just says, yes, you know, I got a big mouth.
	That's called humility.
	It's fake humility.
	I would like to one day walk into a quiet little bar in rural Texas somewhere and see a guy sitting in the back corner who looks a lot like Alex Jones.
	And to walk up to the back of the bar and pull up a chair next to him at the bar and look over and, by God, it is Alex Jones.
	And I'd like for him to look over at me and say, I told them they were making the frogs gay and they made me rich.
	Can you believe this crap?
	But I don't think that's who Alex Jones is.
	I don't think he's in on the joke.
	Trump did have this one moment.
	It was the moment that I thought, gosh, there is some humility there, which is when he was talking about how he's never had a drink.
	He said, you know, I'm the only president who's never had a drink.
	Can you believe that?
	Could you imagine if I did have a drink?
	Oh, I'd be the worst.
	It's my only good quality that I never had a drink.
	I thought, oh, this guy really has some self-awareness, maybe.
	The best moment of his presidency for me was the time that the Marine's hat blew off.
	And without thinking, he chased it down and put it back on his head.
	The President of the United States chased down a Marine's hat and put it back on his head.
	He does have good instincts, right?
	I mean, he does have some good instincts.
	Well, he's really that guy.
	He really doesn't get that he's the president.
	He doesn't get that his words have a kind of moral weight that other people's words don't have.
	He clearly doesn't understand.
	I think that's true.
	I mean, the good news for him is that the Democrats seem to be just destroying themselves apace.
	I mean, this is...
	Did you see Elizabeth Warren dancing?
	Did you see Elizabeth Warren dancing?
	And then the rain came.
	You never go full Elaine from Seinfeld.
	And she went fully Lane from Seinfeld.
	And I thought to myself, this is the great hope?
	The great white hope?
	Like, this is Elizabeth Warren?
	The great 1,023 out of 1,024 white hope, actually, yeah.
	This is going to be it.
	I mean, their top three candidates are a dead man.
	An alive, but not quite their man.
	And that's Bernie, I think.
	Yeah.
	Elizabeth Warren who seems like the the alpha version of a beta product I Think I think Elizabeth Warren has a real chance of being the nominee I don't think this is right.
	First of all, Biden's strategy now is, I'm electable.
	I'm electable.
	All that has to happen is he loses Iowa, and he's done.
	His whole argument depends on his not losing.
	And everybody loses.
	All frontrunners lose when they get to Iowa or soon thereafter.
	He's...
	He's not going to make it past a certain number of primaries where people start to question that.
	And I think Elizabeth Warren's been running a good campaign.
	Well, I mean, you want to talk about the media.
	The media backs her up.
	Oh, my goodness.
	I mean, the media treatment of this lady, they're giving her massages in the backroom, Robert Kraft style.
	I mean, it is astonishing.
	I mean, the treatment that they are giving her is the Beto treatment in Texas.
	By the way, you've got to feel bad for Beto, right?
	I love Beto.
	I love the hands of Beto.
	Has anybody ever been, I have so many terms I could use here that are inappropriate, brought to a particular point and then let down, like Beto O'Rourke has been?
	Now, wait a minute.
	Wait a minute.
	I think that Beto could still get to 2% in the polls.
	I think he's upped his game.
	He's doing a little better.
	We could get to a solid 2%.
	That sounds unbelievable, Brad.
	Frankly, it's furry phobia.
	I think it's bigotry, and our country needs to move past it.
	My question is, what happened to Kamala Harris?
	I thought she was supposed to be the big superstar that was going to jump up.
	She looks as nasty as you are.
	We're in California.
	These people know Kamala Harris.
	They know how terrible she is.
	Half of them went to prison because of Kamala Harris.
	They're out here on leave.
	Kamala Harris is a perfect example of a politician who didn't even realize she was a politician until it was too late.
	Right.
	Because she thought she was going to be this great visionary Obama knockoff, and it turns out that she doesn't even know her own positions on any of the issues, and she figured it was just going to be handed to her.
	And meanwhile, the white establishment media, it turns out they like white establishment progressive figures who flatter them about their own intelligence, and that's Elizabeth Warren.
	Who, of course, doesn't even understand her own programs, right?
	She doesn't understand her Medicare for All program.
	I mean, I know Elizabeth, I'm always tempted to call her Professor Warren, because that's how I knew her when she was at Harvard Law School.
	And she was never this radical.
	I mean, when she was at Harvard Law School, she wasn't running it, but she was always perceived as a sort of quasi-populist moderate.
	She was never this kind of crazed Bernie Sanders type.
	And now she's bought fully into it.
	She's obviously the most clever of them.
	The reason that I say I'm more skeptical of her chances than you are, Drew, is because she has no black support.
	All Biden has to do is last till South Carolina.
	If he can last till South Carolina, he will really punch her in the nose.
	Consider this, though.
	Biden is so far ahead in the polls because he fills that kind of slot, that outline of an electable guy.
	If they had an actually electable guy, a guy who was like not 110 years old, a guy who actually had not been corrupt, openly corrupt for, what is it now, 40, 50 years?
	If they actually had the guy who was just like a moderate Democrat, I think they'd win.
	I think for a brief moment they had him in Pete Buttigieg, and then Pete Buttigieg didn't understand that that was actually the best thing he had going for him, was that he was likable and seemed moderate and was fairly appealing, and he got out there and everybody was like, ah, fresh face, somebody who we can actually get behind, and he was like, also I hate Christians!
	And everybody's like, oh yeah, no, where's Biden?
	Give us Biden.
	But the fact is that the reason that, right now, Bernie is running this campaign and the polls have him variably either up slightly unworn or down slightly too worn.
	And they're running it about even in the polls, somewhere between 20 and 15% for both of them.
	And that really does leave this continuous lane for Joe Biden to wheel his gurney right up the center.
	LAUGHTER I mean, he's running a weekend at Bernie's campaign.
	It's incredible.
	Every time he's out there, he gaffs.
	And so his own campaign is like, what if we just stash him over here in this coffin?
	And we'll leave him there...
	Until November of 2020.
	And it may work.
	It may work because all the other candidates are so unappealing.
	Again, I think that Elizabeth Warren had that first rough go because of the Native American stuff.
	And then she's been getting all sorts of wonderful media treatment since.
	I think there's another point here where the media say, wait a second, she is not intersectional enough.
	She's a white woman.
	We need to take another look at this field.
	We need somebody who...
	I think second look at Kamala is coming.
	I think that in the next few months...
	The question I have with Biden is people forget that Joe Biden is a complete doofus.
	They forget because he's been in politics.
	I don't mean that just to throw a bomb.
	I mean he is like technically and objectively a complete doofus.
	He ran in 1988.
	He dropped out of the race because he lied about his law school record and he plagiarized a speech by this Irish politician.
	Then he passed a good crime bill in 1994 that he now has to run against and pretend he wasn't involved in.
	Then he ran in 2008.
	He ran in 2008.
	He was absolutely nothing.
	The only reason he became vice president is because Barack Obama didn't want to get suicided.
	I'm kidding.
	I mean that he didn't want to have Hillary as his vice president.
	Never put Hillary Clinton one heartbeat away from anything if it's your heartbeat.
	That's like the first rule of politics.
	And so the question I have about Joe Biden is...
	If he can't, he can't really run on anything that he's ever done.
	The one good thing he did, he can't run on.
	He's running on the Obama legacy, and yet Barack Obama won't endorse him.
	Why not?
	What does Obama know that we don't know?
	Well, I think he knows everything that we do know.
	Right.
	He's Joe Biden.
	Yeah.
	But I will say, did you see Biden's campaign ad that he put out in the last 24 hours?
	Called Bones?
	Called Bones, yeah.
	Which, again, bad move when you're a thousand years old until your lead campaign ad is called Bones.
	It's a little too on-the-nose there, Joe.
	But the ad was basically what you would think it is.
	And it is the Democrats' best pitch, which is, everything's too crazy, we need solidity.
	Joe Biden, Barack Obama, you remember those guys and those nice guys.
	At least it won't be so crazy.
	And this is why we come back to, you know, if Trump could just tone it down...
	And not be so crazy.
	It makes it nearly impossible for the Democrats to win.
	They're running on his character.
	They're not running on anything else.
	And I'm not sure that Barack Obama won't at some point end up reluctantly endorsing Joe.
	If Barack Obama thinks Joe is the person who can win, and if he sees that as a way of sort of restoring his legacy, then he probably will come off the sidelines at some point.
	Well, he'll have to eventually, right?
	Yeah.
	Stamps.com.
	What a great segue.
	Is that guy amazing or what?
	I am famous for my segues and fewer better than when I just say the name of the sponsor in the middle of the conversation.
	Well, let me tell you something about Stamps.com since you asked.
	Tell me.
	Okay, so I don't like going to the post office.
	Really?
	Not because the post office isn't great.
	Tell me more.
	The post office is great, but let me explain.
	So the last time I went to the post office, I got a parking ticket because let me tell you something about the authorities in Los Angeles.
	In Los Angeles, they will leave piles of homeless people and their poop and drugs in the street across from my house.
	But if I park in the red zone for more than 37 seconds, there will be a ticket on my windshield.
	If Kamala Harris hears about this, you will be in prison for life.
	This is exactly right.
	You will be in prison for life.
	So I've made a decision.
	No longer will I go to my beloved post office.
	Now, from now on, and this has been true for months, I am using Stamps.com.
	And we use Stamps.com at the Daily Wire offices because Stamps.com brings all the amazing services of U.S. Postal Service directly to your computer.
	Whether you're a small office sending invoices, an online seller shipping out products, even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, Stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
	Drew.
	Do you have anything to say about stamps.com?
	I love stamps.com because it prints.
	You just put an envelope in a machine and it comes out with a stamp and I say, Granny, come here and look at the printer.
	It's making stamps in the machine.
	It's a wonderful thing.
	The printer is a new innovation.
	And then, you know, you've got to tear the little sprockets off.
	It's unthinkably spectacular.
	It's unthinkably spectacular.
	Stamps.com, it's even a no-brainer, which is perfect for Joe Biden.
	It saves you time and money.
	It's no wonder.
	Over 700,000 small businesses already use Stamps.com.
	Right now, our listeners and those in the audience get a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus free postage, and a digital scale.
	No long-term commitments.
	That's the best offer you've gotten tonight.
	Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, type in Shapiro.
	At stamps.com, enter promo code Shapiro, because I'm the one who does the business around here, folks.
	So, that's my song.
	So, it's absolutely, we've talked a little bit about the election, talked a little bit about the candidates.
	I think Ben hit on a story a second ago, and we moved past it too quickly.
	I think it's maybe the most important story that's happened in the last three weeks, besides that predator pedophile hanging himself in a jail cell.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	That was a good story.
	Yeah, hanging himself.
	I'm sorry, guys.
	I'm sorry.
	I didn't know you were a conspiracy theorist.
	You think that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself.
	All right, that's fine.
	Alex Jones, all right.
	I'm sorry.
	I think the best thing that's been said about this was said by our friend Norm MacDonald, who said that, you know, there's a second side to every coin, and that you may think of Jeffrey Epstein as that horrible predator who molested all of and that you may think of Jeffrey Epstein as that horrible predator who molested all of those underage women, but he likes to think of him as That's true.
	Going right to heaven.
	The real accomplishment for Jeffrey Epstein wasn't that he killed himself.
	A lot of people are able to accomplish that.
	It was that he cremated himself, too.
	LAUGHTER Actually, though, the story that we moved right past is a story of, and I think it's one story, even though it's manifested itself even just in the last ten days in three or four different ways, and that's the New York Times really revealing their bias in a way that we've never seen them.
	This is the most important story that's happened recently.
	You know, I've always had this joke, the New York Times, a former newspaper, which I've been making since you and I have met.
	It's the most prophetic joke I've ever made because the New York Times is now, openly, a former newspaper.
	And it's important because the New York Times sends its budget, its list of stories, out to newspapers and radio stations and TV stations across the This is what people don't understand.
	It is absolutely the truth that the New York Times determines the news for the entire country.
	They have investigative journalists, which almost no publication can afford to have.
	They're not the only one, but they're certainly the dominant name brand in this country.
	And they syndicate the news out to all the local News affiliates.
	And people just think this is the New York Times.
	These must be the important stories.
	Right.
	Here is Dean Baguette.
	Nobody knows how to pronounce his last name.
	Dean Baquet or Baquet, the editor of the New York Times, saying to people, well, you know, we cover this phony Russian story as well as we could, but it blew up in our faces.
	Now we're going to call Trump racist, racist, racist until 2020 and hope we win the election.
	He essentially said those exact words.
	That's almost what he said.
	They actually said in their big story, their 1619 story, they said, our purpose for this story is to reframe American history.
	As being centered around slavery and the arguments that they are making.
	This is the same paper, by the way, that had a series of articles called Red Century, in which they argued that women had better sex than the Soviet Union.
	Which is all they had.
	They didn't have bread.
	They were living in a room with their mother-in-law, living with 15 people in a room, but they were having great, they were just banging.
	That's why Bernie Sanders was always there with his shirt off.
	And so now they're making the argument that the entire founding Of America was based on slavery, which is actually the opposite of the literal truth.
	The opposite of the facts is that the founders knew slavery was a problem.
	They wished they could get rid of slavery.
	They couldn't figure out a way to do it.
	They got stuck with it.
	And because they got stuck with it, 700,000 Americans died in the Civil War.
	That's the truth.
	And they're just lying about it in order to make the case that this country is founded on racism when it's actually founded on the opposite of racism and created racism as a problem by being such a great country.
	There are a couple issues here that really are worth breaking down.
	And one of the issues is that the way that that conversation went, if you actually read the leaked transcript to Slate, it was obvious that the executive editor was basically being bullied by the coffee-fetching intern.
	That's right.
	I mean, it's pretty incredible.
	I mean, the staffers are talking to the executive editor of the New York Times and saying, basically, you're not woke enough.
	Because they changed that headline.
	Right, because it said, Trump urges unity versus racism, and this was very bad, because Trump actually had urged unity against racism, and that cuts against their narrative, which is that Trump is the white supremacist, right?
	We're the news, we can't let anybody know about it.
	Right, but the fact that the, and this is happening at a bevy of publications, that the editors no longer run their publications.
	They're run by all of the brand new Wesleyan lesbian dance theory graduates.
	Who are interning in the coffee room and who have decided that because they studied intersectional theory in their gender studies course, they get to determine the course of the news.
	And everybody of the baby boomer generation is deathly afraid of these people and running frightened from these people and saying, you're so right.
	Scourge me.
	Whip me.
	We have to completely change the news coverage here and restructure our newsroom so that racism is at the center of every single story.
	I mean, this was a question from a staffer.
	Why isn't racism seen as the foundation of the country and at the root of every story?
	And Bacay's...
	The response was, well, what do you think the 1619 Project is?
	And these essays are bizarre and insane.
	So there was one essay that opened the collection that I thought was, it's overbroad, but at least wasn't terribly wrong.
	It said that black people were the people who helped bring about the fulfillment of freedom in the United States.
	And I thought to myself, okay, that's true, and they're white allies, right?
	That was the group of people who did this, right?
	Black people and all of their allies who fought for civil rights, who fought to overcome slavery, fought to overcome Jim Crow.
	Totally true.
	Without black people, obviously, the story of America is not only incomplete, it's wrong, right?
	I mean, that obviously is true.
	And then come the bad essays, right?
	And these essays, they said, oh, this is deeply researched.
	My asses.
	We asked all of our friends.
	They went and they got a bunch of their sociology buddies from the faculty lounge to write these garbage essays.
	One of these essays by Matthew Desmond suggested that American-style capitalism was rooted in slavery, that it was founded on slavery.
	This is the most insane contention in the history of economics.
	Well, their argument was that these slaveholders had business practices, and businessmen now have business practices, and therefore there's a relationship.
	It's like saying there's stone in the pyramid, and there's stone in the Empire State Building, therefore it's based on Hebrew slavery.
	This is exactly right.
	They were saying things like, you know, every time you fill out an Excel spreadsheet, it's a time sheet.
	It literally says this in the piece.
	That Excel spreadsheet is a vestige of slavery.
	Now listen, I may not like Excel very much, but I am fairly certain that that has nothing to do with the enslavement, chaining, whipping, raping, and separation of families of black people in 1855.
	Pretty sure.
	And this whole thing, by the way, it is also historically wildly inaccurate to link American-style capitalism with slavery.
	As de Tocqueville was writing in the 1820s and 1830s, the most economically backward part of the United States by far was the American South, specifically because of the slave system, which is why the North ran roughshod over the South during the Civil War.
	That's right.
	The South rejected capitalism because you can't embrace the idea of free markets and of forced labor.
	And that was only one of the essays.
	Then there was the essay that suggested that the reason America doesn't embrace Medicare for all is because of racism, Jim Crow, and slavery.
	It's like, no, pretty sure it's the limited government stuff, guys.
	Pretty sure it's that.
	It was essay after essay like this.
	And all of this is directed at a specific point.
	And that is what the left likes to do is they like to say something that is false, that is based on maybe a grain of truth, and then they blow it up to the point that it's false.
	And then you say, that's false.
	And they say, ah, you're denying the grain of truth.
	Right?
	They do this with so many different stories.
	And they do it right here.
	So they say, okay, everything in America is based on slavery.
	And you say, no, that's not true.
	Slavery is a deep, horrible part of the American story.
	Certainly, there are after effects of that that obviously shape history.
	And that's true for every aspect of history.
	But slavery was so deeply rooted that there are obviously after effects.
	And, for example, wealth discrepancies, thanks to red lines.
	Like, there's some truth to those things.
	But I'm not going to say that slavery is the root of all American institutions, because it's not true.
	And they say, well, obviously, this is because you don't take slavery seriously.
	It's because you don't take racism seriously.
	And they do this with everything.
	It's why they specifically pick cases like Michael Brown.
	It's why Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, this month...
	We're pushing a conspiracy theory.
	They were all over Trump for pushing the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory kind of stuff.
	That same weekend, both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris suggested that Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man who attacked a police officer, tried to take his gun off of him, fired it inside the car, tried to run away, then turned around and charged the police officer according to witness testimony and Obama DOJ holdings.
	And multiple autopsies.
	And multiple autopsies and witness testimony from everybody living in the area.
	That that guy was murdered in cold blood by a white police officer for racist reasons.
	That was treated out by two separate Democratic presidential candidates.
	The reason they do that is so that if you note that their story is false, they can claim that you are being too light on racism.
	This is their goal.
	It's all a setup.
	This is the election we're looking at.
	On the one hand, you have the base of the Democrat Party that actually believes that whether it's true or not.
	They think it's true whether it's true or not.
	The narrative is more important than the truth.
	Then you have the Trump base, which is basically they don't care what he tweets, they don't care what he says, they love the guy, they're fine.
	But between those people, there has got to be, there has got to be a large group of Americans who think like, yeah, Trump's a loudmouth, but I am so sick and tired of people telling me I'm a racist.
	So I'll tell you.
	I hope that that's right.
	I'm not sure that it is.
	I'm not sure that the group in the middle who isn't in either camp, you think that they're going to say, Trump's a loudmouth, but I like the stuff that we're getting and I don't like what the left is saying.
	I worry that that group of people...
	I worry that that group of people is actually going to say, Trump's a loudmouth, and I just want everybody to be nice to each other again, like they were back in the Obama days.
	It's a legitimate fear.
	It is a legitimate fear.
	It's a serious worry.
	I mean, there was poll data that was out this week that suggested that for the Americans who don't like either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, they were breaking 45-10 in favor of Biden.
	That is very different from the poll data in 2016, which showed that of the voters who didn't like either Hillary or Trump, they were breaking in favor of Trump.
	Now, with all of that said, listen, we all feel this, right?
	I mean, the left is on a rampage, and it's evil.
	I mean, it really is.
	They have taken the online world of dunking and being dunked upon, and they've extended it to the real world.
	That's right.
	And it is making people crazy, and it's justifiably making people who are even mildly conservative want to throw up the middle finger that is Trump.
	Right.
	I mean, listen, I feel it too.
	I mean, over the weekend, I was in Sacramento, and I was out there with my kids.
	This happened two times in three weeks.
	I was out there with my kids, just at a park, and some middle-aged white couple comes up behind me, and I hear them hiss, ah, there's that anti-immigrant fanatic.
	They're always protesting him.
	That was me.
	Yeah.
	And I'm carrying my five-year-old in my arms at the time.
	And I turned around, I said, I'm libertarian.
	And I start to walk away.
	And this person, who obviously has no familiarity with any of my immigration positions, immediately turns around and says, well, there's enough hate to go around.
	How do you sleep at night?
	And I thought to myself, this kind of thing makes me want to walk over broken glass to vote for Trump just to say, you, right?
	And I think there are a lot of Americans who feel that way, too.
	So, I hear you.
	I agree.
	Go for it.
	Go for that segue.
	I've been working on this one.
	I see it.
	I can smell it coming.
	I've been working on this one.
	Jasper loves you too.
	Jasper doesn't care about you.
	When you die, Jasper will eat your corpse.
	I know Jasper.
	When the news media are rewriting our history, it's important to reflect on the true founding of America.
	And remember that when the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing that they did was make sacred our rights in a Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, Without which there would be no limitation on government.
	And that's why I'm so proud of our sponsor, Bravo Company Manufacturers.
	Unbelievable!
	He stuck the landing!
	They do not call him the God King for nothing.
	Do you love guns?
	I also, coincidentally, love guns.
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	Owning a rifle.
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	I'm not a hunter.
	I know a lot of people are, but I'm mostly about, I need a gun because if someone comes in my house, I want to shoot them in the face.
	The people of BCM.
	Yeah.
	I should amend that.
	If you're invited into my house, I don't want to shoot you in the face.
	But if you come into my house without permission in the middle of the night, I'm not going to stop to ask questions.
	You're going to get shot in the face.
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	If you want to learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, we actually all do know the people who run the company.
	They're fantastic.
	Head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.
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	That's bravocompanymfg.com.
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	This is actually true about Bravo Company.
	If you've never gone to YouTube and watched their amazing videos about their company, you'll get sucked into the black hole of Bravo Company manufacturing just from how great their videos are.
	And it's a common thing with a lot of our ad sponsors, which actually makes us nervous, is that they can make good content too.
	Like our pals from Black Rifle Coffee are here today, and they make great content.
	They do.
	And we'd like you to stop.
	Could you stop making good content?
	Your videos are funnier than ours.
	Black Rifle Coffee, please leave it to the professionals.
	It was really disheartening.
	I've been working to become famous for a long time.
	And I assumed that with that would come great love and adoration.
	And then I had on Matt Best from Black Rifle.
	And Matt Best is like a cartoon superhero.
	I mean, he looks like a cartoon superhero.
	His last name is Best.
	And the entire comment section was young women drooling over Matt Best.
	And I thought to myself, well, you know, you can't win them all.
	So, before we left, I teased a story, because in addition to being, when you're a professional host like I am, you both segue into ads, and you also tease what's going to come up after the intermission.
	What happened to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
	The chick disappeared.
	You know, I know what happened.
	I know what happened.
	Any good idea I've ever had, any accurate observation I've ever gotten was from my wife, sweet little Elisa.
	And this morning, it was, I roll over in my bed on my purple mattress.
	We're still doing product pitches, right?
	I roll over in my bed, and I see sweet little Elisa.
	She goes, Hey, Mac!
	I said, Yeah?
	She goes, Whatever happened to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
	I don't know what ever happened to her.
	She goes, I think that Chief of Staff, Psychot Chagrabati, was really just the whole brains behind the operation and now that he's gone, she's nothing.
	I thought, oh my gosh, that is the most accurate political analysis of that situation.
	Now that her Chief of Staff is gone, she's gone.
	Can you believe that this man does that impersonation of his wife and he's still married?
	You know, she does talk to me, but she has not listened to me in many, many years.
	Yeah, I do think it's funny that she's completely vanished.
	I think you're right as far as the Chief of Staff.
	It's almost as though an organization called Justice Democrats had a casting session to pick someone to run for public office.
	Cast a lovely young lady to be a congresswoman, backed her, got her elected, made her very, very famous, then she fired them, and...
	It's almost exactly like that with documentary proof.
	Yeah, that's so interesting.
	Wow.
	It actually erases a certain conspiracy theory, though.
	People have always told me, you know, Dick Cheney is the power behind George Bush, and the Illuminati are behind Donald Trump, and George Soros owns Barack Obama and all this kind of stuff.
	And my response has always been, it may very well be true.
	That powerful entities exist, and they willed money, and they willed influence, and then they elevate certain people to elected office.
	But once they get you into public office, you have all the power, and I think this is actually proof.
	They picked Cortez, they elevated her, they got her into office, they were pulling all the levers like she was the Wizard of Oz, only now she's the Congresswoman, and all she has to say is, yeah, you're fired.
	I have another theory that I've been developing literally over the course of the last 15 seconds.
	And that is, I mean, it really goes, it cuts against my religious beliefs and basically my whole view of the universe.
	what if God is actually incredibly stupid, but he raptured all the stupid people?
	So she's just gone.
	Well, you guys could listen to us gab on and on about nonsense all day long, but we actually want to hear from you some of your questions.
	Thank you.
	And we were just kidding.
	Here's Elisha Krause.
	Alicia!
	Yeah?
	How's your baby?
	Precious and sleeping backstage at Backstage.
	That's why we named it such.
	It's good to be here.
	Lots of fun.
	Have great questions from the audience tonight, which is really cool because usually only subscribers get to ask the questions.
	So, ready to roll?
	Let's do it.
	Alrighty.
	Love you, Alicia!
	Thank you!
	That, for the record, was a man's voice, and I don't think it was your dad, and it's not my mom, so yay.
	All right.
	Oh, thanks.
	Ben, what are your thoughts on all of your fans being called your "shopeeps?" Well, it's flattering.
	Um...
	But I really think they should be called the Ben Liebers.
	No, branding, no, no.
	You know, screw it, forget it.
	Shopeeps it is.
	All right, serious question, it sounds like.
	How would you address the argument that simply taxing Wall Street speculation could fund Bernie Sanders' free plans for everything?
	Of course it can.
	And as a financial advisor, I know how I would approach the discussion.
	That said, I'm curious, how would you address the argument if conversing with a Bernie bro?
	Well, there are a couple ways to address this.
	Number one is the pure unworkability of believing that taxes are going to pay for a $32 trillion plan over the next 10 years, which amounts to a full doubling of the yearly federal budget.
	Bernie Sanders has no plans to actually fill that gap because nobody has any plans to fill that gap.
	That is simply too much to fill.
	I mean, the fact is we are running a $1 trillion deficit every year under a Republican Senate and a Republican president.
	So, that ain't gonna cut it.
	And a tax on Wall Street transactions, unless you mean literally confiscating all wealth involved in any Wall Street transaction, is not gonna pay for it.
	And even if you did that, you could only do that for, like, maybe a year.
	And that would pay for everything for maybe a year.
	So, that's argument number one.
	Argument number two is the fact that taxing Wall Street transactions Does, in fact, impact all the people who invest in the market.
	And at this point, that is nearly everyone in the United States economy.
	Pension funds, teachers' funds.
	I mean, you're talking about a huge number of union funds that are in the market.
	So when you talk about taxing Wall Street transactions, you're not talking about hitting Goldman Sachs.
	Goldman Sachs is still going to make its money.
	They don't care.
	I mean, they're just going to upcharge everybody, right?
	They're just going to raise the price of the actual transaction costs and then pass it on to the consumer.
	The people who are going to get hurt are the people who are paying Goldman Sachs to actually make those trades on the market.
	It is odd that the left, whenever they want to get rid of something like cigarettes, they tax it, realizing that people do something less when you tax it.
	So when they tax Wall Street transactions, you get fewer Wall Street transactions, especially from the people who are paying the ultimate price.
	It's very easy for people to rip on Wall Street, quote unquote, speculators, because people don't actually know what Wall Street does.
	And you feel like they're just We're pushing dollars around and they're not producing a product.
	So what is it that they actually do?
	And the answer is that liquidity in financial markets is what provides the incentive to create new businesses, to IPO them, to allow people to invest their money in businesses that they don't actually own.
	All that seems pretty important when it comes time to retire and in the development of the American economy as a whole.
	Alrighty.
	That's the first time that liquidity in markets has ever gotten a round of applause ever, but I appreciate it.
	We have a very financially literate crowd.
	Oh, this is very, very important for the God King himself.
	How has your life changed since getting your blue Chet Mart?
	How much time do we have?
	I'm going to sit back with popcorn and just enjoy.
	You can eat it off the floor if it falls.
	For anyone who hasn't helped me reach my personal goal of having even more Twitter followers than Elisha, you could go over to at Jeremy D. Boring and just give me a like right now.
	I'd appreciate it.
	It actually did all start, and Elisha, you and I have never discussed this, but a year ago I noticed that Elisha had 26,800 Twitter followers and I had 212.
	And I thought, I can't live in this world.
	I can't live in this world.
	And so I set about to see if I could beat her, and so I began tweeting incessantly.
	And a day came when I finally had gotten to 28,000 Twitter followers, and I noticed at that time that Alicia had 36, because she was also growing.
	And that's when I realized that my entire problem was that I did not have a blue checkmark.
	The only problem.
	Interestingly, by the way, during this time when he was spending all this time incessantly tweeting, I think revenue went up at Daily Wire.
	Not enough.
	He actually does have a Twitter account, Jasper the Chief, at Jasper the Chief.
	And if my dog gets more Twitter followers than me, then I'm basically going to shut down the company.
	Alrighty, so Ben, why do you suppose that Media Matters left you off of the 6 minute and 53 second Daily Wire highlight reel that they posted on Twitter?
	Well, not to revel in my own fame and abilities, but the fact is that Media Matters has dedicated half of their entire staff to just watching my show.
	So, this is actually a mutually beneficial phenomenon.
	I mean, they're like the leech, they're the barnacle on the ass of a whale.
	And they provide, we provide them with materials so they can fundraise from their sucker donors and so that they can create clips out of context so that all of their blue checkmarked friends from Al Jazeera can retweet stuff around the internet and so that The Hill can make a little bit of money off of clickbait and then they repay us in the form of leftist tears in our Tumblr.
	Because they cry and they whine and they can't do anything about us because all of you subscribe, which we really appreciate.
	And they actually must own a Leftist Tears Tumblr considering they are certainly annual subscribers and watch the show every single day.
	I love the nature of their criticism.
	They released this video of Michael and Drew and Matt Walsh and all these horrible things that they said.
	And I thought, oh, I watched it and I thought, oh man, what did our guys say?
	Is there going to be some really terrible stuff?
	The headline basically could have been, Daily Wire contributors believe in conservatism.
	I suspect their next headline will be, Ben Shapiro talks very fast.
	You know?
	The folks at Media Matters are basically militantly stupid children who refuse to understand the most basic English statements.
	So you'll say something that is perfectly obvious, like however many jobs you choose to get in the United States, that's a you problem, meaning it's a problem you have to solve because that's a thing for you to solve, not a thing for government to solve.
	And it's perfectly obvious.
	And they're like, a you problem?
	Are you saying that's a problem with me?
	Are you saying I'm inferior?
	And it's like, no, that's not what I'm saying.
	I speak English.
	And they're like, because you're a racist.
	And you're like, no.
	The language of racists.
	Right.
	And that's how our relationship goes.
	So it's a little bit dysfunctional, but I think we both get something out of it.
	You know, you bring up a point.
	I think we should hit it one more time.
	It is absolutely true that we're greedy capitalists and we want a lot of subscribers so that we can buy nice watches and fast cars.
	We also need subscribers because there is a concerted effort from organizations like Media Matters and the left more broadly to take away our advertising revenue.
	Ben appeared at the March for Life earlier this year.
	And for the crime of believing that babies have a fundamental right to be born, Media Matters... Media Matters...
	Media Matters made a concerted effort to take all of our advertisers away from us, and fortunately, you'll never hear us stop lauding our wonderful advertisers, and we have great partners, and most of them stuck by our side.
	Not all of them stuck by our side, and enough money that it put the livelihoods of ourselves and of our employees in jeopardy walked out the door.
	It's a very real threat.
	You can imagine that as the election draws nearer, their attacks are not going to diminish.
	You know, on this point of the March for Life and those blood-sucking hyenas at Media Matters, I will point out, in that best of clip, is what I call it, that they put together of me and Drew and Matt Walsh, the most egregious statement that they found that I said...
	Was over the Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, that whole episode, when he wore blackface, and then the same week that that came out, he said that we should be able to kill babies after they've been born.
	And I made the egregiously bigoted statement.
	I said, I think, this is my opinion, I think it's a little bit worse to kill babies after they have been born than to wear an offensive costume 30 years ago.
	And they...
	I think.
	I don't know.
	I would think.
	But here's the good news in all of this, really.
	I mean, what Jeremy's saying is correct.
	The fact is that when all that happened at the beginning of the year, sure, that hurt us a little bit, but we could tell everybody to go, screw, because the fact is that we had subscribers like you who were out there making sure we could bring you the content that you want.
	And this is true for, by the way, this isn't just true for us.
	This is true for the folks over at the Blaze Media.
	This is true for Fox News.
	If you like stuff, you should go subscribe to it because you are the protection against the nasty cusses on the left who want to censor everything.
	And besides that, there is no better ashtray in America today than the Louder with Crowder Mug Club mug.
	And this is the whole game.
	The whole game.
	You know, we can disagree on policy.
	We can have arguments about how best conservatism can be served.
	But if we can't speak, if we can't make jokes, if we have to think about everything we say because they're going to cause this outrage panic and our sponsors are going to disappear, we're done.
	We're finished.
	All of us.
	And I think that the fact that our sponsors stick with us are great, but basically it's you guys subscribing that keeps us alive.
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's it.
	So this is really cool.
	Thank you.
	David brought his entire family from Toronto to see you guys tonight.
	Wow.
	Feel free to get any necessary MRIs, CAT scans, sonograms while you're here.
	Dental work.
	Also, good news for you, you won't have to live outside America much longer once.
	President Trump makes Canada our 51st state.
	LAUGHTER Washington's greatest mistake.
	So David wants to know, since you flew all that way, a question for all y'all, who was the best American president in U.S. history?
	Michael?
	George Washington actually was.
	I know it's the obvious answer, but he's just peerless, even among the founding fathers, even among all of the other presidents.
	So Washington takes the cake.
	Obviously, yeah, George Washington, I guess.
	Definitely Washington.
	And then, honorable mentions, Adams, Lincoln, Reagan, and of course, of course, President Kofethe himself, Donald J. Trump.
	Throw popcorn at him.
	All right, keeping in line with the presidential discussion tonight, if the election were tomorrow, what would each of you do?
	Would you pull the lever for Trump against the Democratic field?
	Show of hands, who'd vote for Trump?
	So I picked up two votes right here.
	It is true.
	Neither Ben nor I voted for the president in the last election.
	People will say, what's changed since then?
	Well, a lot's changed.
	Things that were unknown are now known.
	Things that were feared either didn't happen or did and now are baked into the fabric.
	And I think Ben has spoken about this fairly eloquently in the past.
	The bottom line is that the 2016 election was what it was.
	the 2020 election seems to me that it's going to be a race between a fairly bombastic figure who is not always easy to support and a completely radicalized insane socialist left that must not get the levers of power in this country.
	I have a feeling you might want to offer this FANA job because they want to know why did you name Backstage Backstage instead of, quote, The Boring Show, the most ironically thrilling podcast in America?
	I love you too.
	Thank you.
	You know, it's funny, we actually did toy with calling it like Cigars with the God King.
	We toyed with calling it Drinks in Jeremy's Office, and then we realized that I'm not very famous.
	So we went with Backstage.
	Alright, serious question that we all want to know the very important answer to.
	What do we have to do to get Michael Knowles fired?
	So, let's discuss this in a serious fashion.
	Someone just yelled, Knowles lives matter.
	I would hate it if people started to chant that.
	I would hate that.
	Everyone who thinks that Knowles should be fired say aye.
	All opposed?
	So, the eyes have it.
	You're like that guy at the DNC convention.
	I don't believe that.
	Let me explain.
	So, Jeremy Boring and I have been business partners for, what, nearly 10 years at this point?
	Almost a decade.
	Almost a decade, Jeremy Boring and I have been business partners.
	There are very few matters on which we have thoroughly disagreed.
	One of them is the continued employment of Michael Molson.
	In any good marriage, there are certain times where you just have to say, you know what?
	We disagree.
	You can have your way.
	And as much as it pains me on a personal level each and every day to wake up knowing that this human being is in my life, I sometimes have to let my business partner have his way.
	And so if you're going to blame anybody, blame the schmuck.
	And Ben has very, very cold feet at night.
	Lisa, I'm unremovered!
	Elisha for Congress is a great idea.
	That is a great idea.
	I think I'd have to move back to Oklahoma to win that one.
	Correct.
	The real problem that Elisha would have in Congress, though, is that she'd believe some things.
	But I don't know if it would be a fresh change.
	Me and Dan Crenshaw could go to bat together.
	That could be fun.
	We could mend some Red River rivalry, you know, work together.
	Oklahoma and Texans, side by side.
	If you make another Oklahoma reference, I'm gonna vomit.
	Continue.
	Boomer.
	Alrighty.
	Do you think we are headed for a recession and what's causing the commotion?
	Is it hashtag fake news?
	Drew?
	Well, you know, actually, I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that it's August, and in August, some of the smarter investors go to the beach, and it actually thins out the...
	It's true!
	It's true!
	It thins out the number of people, smart people, making decisions in the market, and the markets get very volatile.
	Happens every August.
	We're due for a recession, and what I'm a little bit afraid of is that I think back To the election between George H.W. Bush and Clinton, when the great Reagan economy, which lasted through the Clinton years and through most of the George W. Bush years, when it took a little bit of a dip, and that's, remember, the campaign where Clinton ran on the economy, stupid.
	And the reason he was able to do that was the press made such a big deal out of this little dip in the economy, this incredible recession that had come upon us.
	And you can just tell they are slavering I actually think that's the bigger story.
	Can you believe how the left openly roots for the economy of the country to collapse so that they can win a freaking election?
	I mean, Bill Maher at least had the courage to come out and say it.
	He's rooting for a recession to get rid of Trump.
	Because why?
	Because he's not going to lose his job.
	Look, two things can be true.
	One, the media is obviously slavering, hoping for a recession.
	They would like to see the economy take a dump before the election so they can blame it on Trump.
	There's a poll out today showing that if there is some sort of recession, 69% of Americans would blame that largely on President Trump.
	Obviously, the media see that.
	At the same time, there are some fundamental problems with the global economy.
	Not so much the American economy, but the global economy.
	Chinese manufacturing has slowed dramatically.
	The tariffs are hurting China.
	You cannot hurt China without also hurting the United States.
	They do $700 billion worth of business with us every year.
	It is also true that Germany has a significant slowing in their economy.
	They're now providing bonds with negative yields.
	For the first time in 30 years.
	Yeah, I mean, the inversion of the yield curve is a pretty good signal that a lot of investors who are not interested in losing their money for the sake of politics are rushing to the bond market because they are uneasy about the numbers.
	I mean, there's a report that came out tonight that downgraded job growth last year by half a million jobs.
	The biggest problem right now for President Trump is that...
	He doesn't have a lot of tools at his disposal that he is willing to use.
	He's ranting and railing against the Fed, and that really doesn't help too much.
	Because on the one hand, he's promoting the message that the economy is really solid and on good footing and everything's going to be fine.
	And on the other hand, he's tweeting out like a maniac that the Fed needs to cut the rates by 100 basis points, which is a crisis kind of treatment.
	What President Trump should theoretically be doing is pushing very hard for making permanent the tax cuts that were temporary.
	I mean, those tax cuts were temporary.
	They're going to sunset.
	He should be pushing to make those permanent.
	The reason that the economy has been so good under Trump is not really even just because of the tax cuts and because of the regulatory changes.
	It's because business in America got confident the moment he was elected that he was not going to crack down on them and hurt them.
	You know, I hate to be optimistic because it's so lonely, but...
	But in fact, people don't vote a recession.
	They vote the recession they feel.
	They vote when they start to feel bad.
	And right now, consumer confidence is at record highs.
	If there were anything but a crash, we wouldn't really feel a recession for two years, for about 26 months.
	The old carbon version is a 22-month recession.
	Yeah, so the election is actually not going...
	I know that the press hopes this will happen, but I don't think there's going to be the kind of recessions that's going to affect the election coming up in 2020.
	Look, we know, we know the press is going to do every single thing it can to make this look bad for Donald Trump.
	And that's why I think it's a positive thing that Trump has hammered them the way he has hammered them and taken them on the way he's taken them on.
	It has been a long time It has been a long time since any president, it's been since Reagan, it's been since Reagan, since any president has turned to the press and said, you lie.
	And they lie.
	They just lie.
	And I think at this point, the people get it.
	So I don't think there's going to be a recession that's going to hurt the president.
	That's what I... I also want to say though that if you ever find yourself, no matter who you vote for, no matter what party you support, if you ever find yourself in a position where you're saying to yourself, I hope older people lose their retirement savings so that the person I like can win a presidential election, you have lost your freaking soul.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And let's not forget these are the same people who, under George W. Bush, hoped we'd lose the war so that he would lose the election.
	The same people.
	All right.
	Along those lines, what do you gentlemen think is the greatest threat to America today?
	Michael.
	The greatest?
	I mean, there are so many...
	That was his answer.
	That was his answer, actually, yeah.
	It depends if you're talking about the short term, the medium term, or the long term.
	Even when we're talking about the economy, the trouble with economic pessimism is eventually you're right.
	In the long run, we're all dead, and in the long run, there will be a recession, there will be an economic downturn.
	So right now, we're in the midst of...
	A trade war with China that has really been going on for about 18 years now, and we're finally fighting back.
	And there's even some bipartisan agreement on this.
	Chuck Schumer is one of the few Democrats who talks openly about getting tough on China.
	President Trump just today said he is the chosen one who is going to be the first guy to get tough on China, which does pose a serious Economic and geopolitical threat.
	They steal our IP, they violate trade treaties, they illegally subsidize steel and aluminum, they spy on us, they challenge our interests in the region.
	So that's a real worry.
	The bigger problem is not on the political level, it's on the cultural and religious level.
	As Saint Andrew Breitbart, who everyone knew, actually I got here, unfortunately, after he was gone, he pointed out that politics is downstream of culture, and culture we know is downstream of religion.
	What the culture worships defines that culture.
	Cult and culture are related terms.
	It's time for Catholic talk.
	Yeah, and now let me all bring you into the church.
	And what this means, though, is...
	As we see, Pew Research always shows these studies, people are getting less and less religious.
	The bigger group now is the nuns, the religiously unaffiliated.
	We don't have a sense of who we are, what we're doing.
	We don't have a sense of virtue.
	We don't have much of a sense of justice anymore.
	In the long run, that's going to really kill us.
	John Adams said that the Constitution is built for a moral and religious people.
	That wasn't him speaking out of some sort of Christian bias.
	He meant it very seriously, and it's a really true statement.
	Actually, the most sound and insightful thing that any Democrat said on that debate stage the other night was that Marianne Williamson, of all people, said that there is a dark, psychic force, and that's what we have to attack.
	Now, she thinks it's Trump.
	I think it's the devil.
	She thinks that Trump is the devil, so we're almost talking about the same thing.
	But that is the real issue.
	Ultimately, what we have to recapture in America is a moral sense and a religious sense.
	And without that, it doesn't matter how good the economy is.
	eventually it's going to kill us.
	I want to follow up.
	Follow-up, and I mentioned this before the break.
	There is this phenomenon that's been happening for a while, but we've seen two really high-profile examples of it in the last few weeks, which is prominent religious leaders walking away from their faith.
	I would say one example, while I don't think that it's fair to say that Pope Francis is not a religious man, I think that would be an overstatement.
	He's certainly not a traditional Catholic in the way that John Paul II or Pope Benedict were.
	You move over into the evangelical world.
	You have two very high-profile evangelical leaders over the last couple of weeks who've announced that they're walking away from their faith.
	One who wrote the book How I Kissed Dating Goodbye.
	Another who is the worship leader for Hillsong, which basically means the worship leader for the entire evangelical movement.
	Because that's where almost all the evangelical music of the last, you know, 15 or 20 years has come from.
	In Judaism, Ben, you write about this often and even talked about it tonight in reference to the President's comments about loyalty vis-a-vis Israel, that the largest contingent, I think, at this point of Jews in America are irreligious.
	They're Jews ethnically, but they don't participate in Judaism.
	Isn't that really the hollowing out of our religious institutions is happening right in front of us?
	What do we do about it?
	I just want to say I think this is only half of the phenomenon.
	There's another phenomenon going on, again, cursed with optimism, but still.
	There's another phenomenon going on where intellectuals are starting to realize that their default setting of materialism, relativism, and multiculturalism doesn't make any sense and has fallen apart.
	At the same time that these guys, the Hillsong guy and this, I think it's Joshua Harris is his name, who wrote the book about dating, at the same time they were announcing they were losing their faith, David Gerlinter from Yale, a legendary computer scientist, said that mathematically, evolution as an origin of species Didn't make sense, that there was no possible way that a new species could be created mathematically.
	The odds against it were so huge, and went on to say that intelligent design, while he wasn't embracing it, was a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem.
	So...
	So what I think we're seeing, what I think we're seeing falling apart is a simplistic Christianity, is falling apart, while an intellectual Christianity is forming.
	And I know this to be true because I know a lot of the young intellectuals Who are meeting together and reading the Gospels in a fresh way, not a new way.
	There's no new way to read the Gospels, but there are fresh ways and modern ways and intelligent ways to read the Gospels.
	You know, the philosopher Schopenhauer said that Christianity had devolved into a...
	Into a banal optimism.
	And I think that that's the problem.
	I think when you watch the Christian movies, like God is not dead, and when you listen to some of the Christian songs, you hear this banal optimism that actually doesn't describe the world.
	The birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a big event.
	It's a big thing.
	And when you embrace it, you're not just telling other people how to have sex.
	I don't think that's what it's about.
	You're talking about an entire way of viewing the world.
	And as that way of viewing the world returns into the intellectual sphere, which I think it actually is doing as we speak, I think that's going to start to trickle down and refresh and reform Christianity in ways that are genuinely amazing.
	This has happened throughout history.
	It happened throughout the Middle Ages.
	is happening again.
	You know.
	You had me at not telling people not to have sex.
	Because I actually sort of had this experience.
	I was cradle Catholic.
	We went to church sometimes.
	I fell away.
	I became an atheist at 13.
	And I fell away because I thought the religion was childish.
	I thought religion in general was childish.
	I read those stupid books by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which are geared exactly toward a 13-year-old boy who thinks he's smarter than he is.
	And...
	I rejected a faith that was childish.
	I think it was Niebuhr, the Protestant theologian, who said that it was God without wrath leading a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
	It was childish, saccharine, sentimental religion with terrible songs from the 1970s and stupid felt banners and I just didn't like it.
	And then, one thing I noticed when I got to college, everyone was an atheist and they were all pretty smart.
	But the smartest people were religious.
	And the very smartest people were very religious.
	And I thought, oh my goodness, I've been lied to for 20 years.
	I think, I have the same hope you do.
	I think there is a growing movement of young people who approach religion with a fresh look and with seriousness, with sobriety.
	And they push away all that saccharine stuff.
	And they say, oh my gosh, there's something here that is good and true and beautiful.
	And you know, the thing is that so many of the problems that we face today are problems of wealth and success.
	You know, so many of the problems we face are problems of wealth and success.
	I mean, even if you look at the border, people want to come here because we're so successful.
	When you toss away, you know, there's an old Christian joke, I think it's a Christian joke, that everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.
	Well, likewise, everybody wants to save the world but nobody wants to be crucified.
	And I think that the idea of a religion that takes away your pleasures, I don't think so.
	I don't think religion has actually disappeared.
	I think it's just become leftism.
	I mean, this is a point that my friend Dennis Prager makes, right?
	We all know Dennis, and Dennis is constantly saying that the most successful religion of the 20th century is leftism.
	And he's right about this, because people are searching for an identity that We're good to go.
	And then, after the Peace of Westphalia, we basically said, okay, we're going to put all that aside, and we're going to do our own thing on religion, but we'll have a political sphere and we'll fight about policy.
	And now, as the common backdrop of religion is falling away, people are reinvesting religious feeling into politics themselves.
	And so people are treating Democrat versus Republican like it's Protestant versus Catholic, circa 1650.
	And that is really scary stuff.
	And it's why you're seeing violence in the streets.
	It's why you're starting to see people treat each other in religious ways, right?
	People who are sinners, and they must be cast out.
	And there is no repentance in the leftist version of religion.
	And people are looking for something that is more fulfilling, and something that does require them to sacrifice.
	You know, the lie that you can...
	I think that you're hitting on something, and it's something that Jordan Peterson hits on, too.
	And it's something that I think that...
	I think that religious people are fully cognizant of the sacrifice that is required by religion.
	Religious people who are truly religious are fully cognizant of the struggle of trying to discern a good benevolent God in a world that is rife with cruelty and malice.
	Good religious people are dealing with these questions all the time.
	But the alternative to that is to not even face up to the question.
	It's to say that this is all random chance.
	It's to say that there is no system by which to live.
	And that is going to lead to a feeling of helplessness, of depression.
	It's going to make you feel as though you are not living in a world that you can navigate.
	Because that's not a world you can navigate.
	A chaotic world without any compass doesn't allow you to navigate those seas.
	It just means that you're going to die of scurvy somewhere out there.
	And so if you actually want meaning, you're going to have to Believe in a couple of fundamental concepts.
	And I think that a lot of people who are not religious agree with these fundamental concepts without understanding that they're religious in nature.
	The idea that the universe is ordered, that there are rules of cause and effect in the universe that make sense, that you can discern the way that life ought to be lived, right?
	These are religious assumptions.
	These are not secularistic assumptions.
	And people feel that those assumptions are true even if they don't know that they're religious assumptions.
	So I am optimistic that there will be a comeback.
	The message that has been sent to us through history is so incredibly loud that only intellectuals could possibly not hear it.
	You and I both read this book by Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, in which he really excoriates the idea of God and talks about all the things that have been done, terrible things that have been done in the name of God, and there are terrible things that have been done in the name of God.
	And this is coming after a century in which the communists Openly rejecting God slaughtered tens of millions of people after the Nazis rejecting God.
	I mean, the Nazis almost, in this kind of morbidly hilarious way, put Hitler where Jesus was supposed to be.
	They openly said, no, no, Christianity is just announcing the coming of Hitler.
	I'm sorry to laugh, but it's so crazy that it's almost funny.
	We had this century, half a century of absolute slaughter in the rejection of Christianity and the rejection of God.
	And, you know, you talk about the Peace of Westphalia.
	The Peace of Westphalia came about because people said, we cannot do this as Christians.
	We can't slaughter each other as Christians.
	It goes against our religion.
	We must come up with a better way.
	All of these messages, it's as if God were writing on the sky with a gigantic purple finger.
	You know, you've got to believe in order to go forward.
	It is just now, it is just now occurring to intellectuals, ah, you know, maybe we won't kill each other so much if we just embrace the faith of our fathers.
	And I think that that will come to pass.
	It will. - I want to get to a few more questions, but I wanted to say one thing on this, which is my reaction to hearing the intersection of everything the three of you just said.
	Question your own faith.
	Don't have a childish faith.
	There's a New Testament idea of coming unto Christ in a childlike manner as a...
	Coming unto him as a child, but that doesn't mean that you should be childish in your thinking.
	And we all give ourselves a lot of, we make a lot of excuses for ourselves.
	We can see all the silliness that people are like, it's easy for me to make fun of my Catholic friends and all their silly beliefs.
	A lot harder to reflect on.
	So easy.
	So easy.
	And fun.
	So difficult to reflect on the inconsistencies in my own viewpoint.
	I think one of the horrible things that conservatives did throughout the Christian coalition sort of moral majority 80s, 90s, that really brought us to this moment is embracing saccharine Christianity, is not preparing our children, teaching our children that people will disagree with them, and saying things like, oh, they'll hate you for Jesus' namesake, but not telling them they will also hate you if you're an asshole.
	Not teaching them the best arguments of your opposition.
	And then as our friend Jonathan Hay, who produced the show tonight and did a great job, as he says...
	As he says, when you teach your children only caricatures of the arguments against your own positions, you send them into battle worse than unarmed.
	You send them into battle against mechanized armies with wooden swords painted silver, and they think they are actually armed.
	And then they...
	And then they get out in the world, and they hear actual smart arguments against what they believe, and they crumble.
	And when they crumble, they believe, ah, what my parents taught me is a lie because they led me like a sheep unto the slaughter.
	You have to teach your children the best arguments that are going to be made against them, which means you have to have the courage to confront the worst arguments that you believe and better yourself continually, even in your faith.
	And I would add one thing to that, which is, If you think you're going to win the country by keeping Donald Trump in office for four more years, or if you think you're going to win the country by getting the Republicans back into control of the Congress or keeping control of the Senate, if you think if we can get lower taxes or if we can build a wall that you're somehow going to lead to some sort of Edenic utopia,
	and that we can arrive at success as a nation by hating our brothers and sisters, by hating our fellow citizens and somehow defeating them, You're missing the most important part of what we all believe, which is that the collective is only made better in this country when the individuals become better.
	You should focus yourself on improving news.
	This goes to a question of something that I feel has corrupted our conversation, which is the fact that we can communicate around the world which is the fact that we can communicate around the world so easily has destroyed It's destroyed the idea that really solutions are created by individuals in action with other individuals.
	And I think we always come up with these ideas that are supposed to solve all the problems of the world.
	Like, try being nice to the guy next to you.
	Try doing the thing that needs to be done in your neighborhood.
	Try lifting the guy up who's beside you.
	Try having an argument with somebody without cursing his name.
	Look who's sitting next to me.
	Well, not you.
	I didn't mean you.
	I mean, come on.
	This is actually true.
	I think that, like, sometimes...
	I know Christians in particular sometimes are like, we've got to send a lot of money to Africa.
	And look, people in Africa need a lot of help.
	A lot of bad, poor, third-world countries around the world.
	But I think that it's kind of a cop-out half the time.
	That we want to help people who we will never have to meet because they aren't real to us.
	And the people who we're actually in a position to do the most good for...
	We know them, and we know their flaws, and we don't like them very much.
	And so it's a cop-out to go, eh, just send it to the third world, instead of going, no, I actually have to like all the people who disagree with me.
	This is the big dichotomy, and you see it, I mean, everyone does it, but you see it especially on the left, which is that the left loves humanity.
	They really do.
	They love humanity.
	And they detest humans.
	I know this because I look at my Twitter mentions.
	I know this because I go to these, and I will talk to people that I've just met, leftists, I mean you get this all the time, we all do, and they'll scream at you like you're not a fellow human being.
	and you just think, gosh, if you put just one hundredth of the vitriol, if you took that vitriol that you have for me and put that into a little bit of kindness, maybe you would be able to affect your grand vision to all of humanity if you could be nice to like one single human being.
	It's hard to hear them clap for him.
	I'll admit.
	I want to do something we've never done before.
	I want to do a 10-question lightning round.
	I'm going to have Alicia ask 10 questions.
	Alicia, if you would aim each question at just one member of the panel.
	Okay.
	And we're going to keep our answers concise.
	One, two, three sentences top.
	And unless somebody misses something that we can't allow to stand or says something that we can't allow to stand, we're going to keep it to a one-person answer per question.
	Number one.
	Alright, this is interesting.
	Back to the parenting thing.
	This is a white middle-aged woman here in the audience with her 18-year-old son.
	She's been concerned about his mostly liberal views, most of which come from his public school system.
	What bits of wisdom can you impart to him?
	P.S. She's very glad that he came tonight, and she thinks it's a step in the right direction.
	Okay.
	So first of all, Mom, nothing really helps your son become more conservative like a public shaming.
	But the answer, of course, is that, as I always recommend on my podcast and folks on Pod Save America never will, you should listen to my podcast and you should listen to Pod Save America.
	You should read our website over at Daily Wire and then you should go check out Huffington You should examine all of the arguments.
	You should.
	You should examine all of the arguments and then recognize that the other guy's arguments are wrong.
	That really is the reason the education system sucks is because they don't present all of the arguments.
	They just present you the left-wing version of American history and then suggest there is no other version of American history.
	I'll clap for you.
	Number two.
	I feel like this one should go to Michael Knowles.
	Someone wants to know, are you going to raid Area 51 on September 20th?
	Or please do.
	Listen, we have 3,000 illegal aliens coming over every single day, and we pretend that that's a problem.
	Who knows how many aliens we have at Area 51 for the last 50 years!
	I'm going.
	Three.
	Andrew Klavan.
	David, please name a Democrat in today's climate whose views you respect.
	David B.
	I'm stumped.
	I haven't You know, they always say that there are these guys, these middle-of-the-road guys who are the majority of the Democrat Party, and I never see any of them.
	I never see anybody who comes out and says...
	How about Kyrsten Sinema?
	He's a senator of Arizona.
	There are these people who are buried within the Congress who actually do have middle-of-the-road views, but you never see them because they vote with Nancy Pelosi.
	They vote with the Democrats.
	I'll give you a weird answer.
	I actually have respect for Andrew Yang's views.
	I don't agree with them.
	But I respect that he's the only guy having any ideas on the left right now.
	You know, the problem with Andrew Yang is he's the civilized version of a very uncivilized solution, which is pay people to go away.
	And I cannot agree with that at all.
	Look, I think he's a good person.
	And I think you're reacting to that.
	And he is a good person and a decent guy.
	But I think that this is the problem.
	We cannot abandon ordinary people Having a meaning to their lodge.
	We cannot pay them to not have a meaning to their lodge.
	Four.
	God King.
	Other than Frito.
	Or is it Fredo?
	Fredo.
	Fredo.
	I don't know.
	I'm from Oklahoma.
	Hey, that's our word.
	Okay?
	That's our word.
	It's like the N-word, right?
	I'm not allowed to say it?
	You can't say it.
	Okay.
	Unless you're Italian or something.
	Okay.
	Who is your favorite character from The Godfather?
	I can't honestly, I cannot answer the question.
	I am not one of these guys who's watched The Godfather 48 times since Christmas.
	I love The Godfather.
	I think it's a great film and an even better sequel.
	There's nothing more entertaining than any movie with a 17-minute live-action wedding that just takes place right in the middle of the...
	That's riveting stuff.
	But I'm not one who's completely chopped apart The Godfather and can ruin it.
	Ask Drew then, because this is Drew's question.
	Yeah, I mean, my favorite character in The Godfather is Don Corleone, is the Marlon Brando character, because he actually represents some kind of old-fashioned idea of morals.
	I do have to point out about Fredo, though.
	I just want to say one thing about Fredo.
	I gotta say this.
	I have to say this.
	Fredo is the son of a guy who rose from nothing to become very powerful.
	He is the brother of a guy who took the place of the father who became very powerful.
	He is Chris Cuomo.
	Five.
	Ben, you give Michael a lot of, I think, necessary crap, but somebody in the audience wants to know, can you find one nice thing?
	Ah.
	Ah, yes, somebody named Michael in the audience wants to know.
	You know.
	What to say about him?
	God commands us in the Bible.
	To love each and every human being.
	To love our neighbor as ourselves.
	Since that's impossible...
	All I can say about Michael Moles is I'm just grateful that I don't have to be in the room when he changes outfits for his show.
	That is...
	He's known around...
	I understand I'm not answering the question.
	Around the office, he is mostly known for...
	We have a separate room for changing.
	For just changing in the middle of the office...
	For no reason at all.
	Like Harvey Weinstein would.
	You see Alicia nodding over there?
	No, for serious, I was doing hair and makeup earlier, and my husband witnessed this.
	Wait, hold on.
	You're saying you were in the changing room earlier?
	Hair and makeup.
	All this brings me to the one thing that I can say that's nice about Michael Moles.
	He has the proper number of human nipples.
	Prove it.
	Prove it, he says.
	Wow, that's pretty nice.
	I think that is technically a compliment.
	That's enough!
	Six!
	Ben has cold feet.
	Michael has two nipples.
	This is, no.
	Who said he had two nipples?
	He said he has the proper number.
	He didn't say it was two.
	Wait, wait.
	You non-Jews have two nipples?
	Oh my gosh.
	I think this is a good one for the God King.
	Born and raised in L.A., but I'm thinking of moving out of the state.
	What are your thoughts?
	Stay and fight or move on.
	It's like our conversation every single day.
	Yeah, Ben and I talk about this on the drive down here and every other time we're in a car together.
	Listen, it's quite difficult.
	This is where the action is.
	The Daily Wire wouldn't be what it is if we weren't in LA.
	The fact that we're an enemy-occupied territory forces us to make our argument sharp.
	It forces us to have a sense of humor.
	It forces us to know ourselves.
	It forces us to build good relationships.
	It forces us to learn and continue to learn.
	It also costs us just a crap ton of money in taxes.
	And it makes it very difficult to operate a business.
	I guess the one thing that I would say is I do believe in moving.
	I think that one of the mistakes that's being made on the left and the right today is this belief that if the factory shuts down, we have to come where you are and build a life for you.
	But the history of the American experiment The history of America is that people left the Old World and they traveled at great risk to themselves across the sea, and then they left the East Coast and they traveled across the Appalachians, and then they traveled to California during the Gold Rush, and then they traveled back into Texas and some of those areas.
	As recently as my hometown was founded in 1912, very recently in a place that the Comanche called the place where no one lived, and we proved them wrong because we now live there.
	Like 200 people, but...
	Yeah, it's not many of us, but we're rigorous.
	I think that it is important that you be daring.
	It is important that you take risks.
	And if that means you have to get up and go, then you need to get up and go.
	If that means that you need to leave your job and create something new, maybe you'll fall on your face.
	But what's the point of living in the land of opportunity if you don't take any opportunities when they're put in front of you?
	The one piece of caution I would give though is this.
	There is a need for good people to be here fighting the fight.
	It's also important if you leave here because you don't like the taxes and the regulation and you go to my home state of Texas, for God's sakes, don't vote to raise the taxes and increase the regulation.
	Seven.
	Bang for president!
	2024, baby.
	Andrew, can universal basic income ever work?
	No.
	That was easy.
	No, it's ridiculous.
	The whole thought of it is ridiculous.
	Look, work is changing.
	There's no question about it.
	We've been through something that was just as violent and chaotic and traumatic as the Industrial Revolution.
	We're still going through it.
	The technological revolution has made localism difficult.
	It's made federalism difficult.
	It's made nationalism difficult.
	It has made globalism a de facto state of mind.
	To just say to people, you're done, here's some money, go away, is insane.
	It is basically writing off the vast number of human beings who have something to offer.
	Every single one of them.
	Every single one of them is a child of God with something to do.
	And the whole point of capitalism is if there's something that you can do, you can make money off it.
	We don't have to offer you some kind of income to go away.
	I think we have to create worlds and think up worlds and not do it through government regulation.
	We do it through creativity, where you create worlds where there is work for everybody to do.
	And I don't believe that's impossible in any, by any stretch of the imagination.
	Michael, when do you think we can start packing for Greenland?
	I can't wait.
	I think Greenland is a great idea.
	Everybody joked about it when it happened.
	It's one of Trump's best ideas.
	First of all, it's always good to buy land because God ain't making any more of it.
	The United States has always done very well on real estate.
	The Louisiana Purchase did us very well.
	Getting Texas was pretty good.
	Getting California was pretty good.
	Buying Alaska has done us very well.
	Also, we've tried to buy Greenland now for well over a hundred years.
	Andrew Johnson looked into buying Greenland.
	Harry Truman actually tried to buy it for a hundred million dollars, but he wasn't the art of the deal kind of guy, so he didn't really know how to make that deal happen.
	And President Trump, what he does, because he's this media genius, is he says something, and just because he says it, people laugh.
	You know, he's just a funny guy who knows how to...
	However, the idea has been floated for a very long time.
	I want to do it.
	I can't wait to go.
	It sounds like the Danes don't want to sell.
	Who cares?
	Since when do we care what the Danes think?
	Greenland is a really good opportunity.
	Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, said it's a good opportunity because it's sort of like a win-win.
	I'm not that worried about climate change killing us all in the next five minutes or whatever AOC says it is.
	But if it does, as Mike Pompeo pointed out, it will open up a lot of Arctic sea lanes.
	It could reduce the amount of time that we can get goods and services over to Asia by about 20 days.
	He says it could be the Suez or Panama Canal of the 21st century.
	It's a great military base.
	We're launching Space Force.
	I want to go to Greenland.
	Not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
	So, Michael, I have a plan to send you to Greenland.
	Did you whisper to Trump?
	Is that how we got this in the first place?
	Who's going to stop us, the Little Mermaid?
	I mean, we have nothing.
	One of our employees, Matt Gerard, said on Twitter, I think the greatest plan that Trump should actually employ, which is that we should rename Hawaii Greenerland.
	And then we should rename Alaska Greenestland.
	And then the value of Greenland will just plummet.
	We can buy it for pennies on the dollar.
	Nine!
	For God's sakes, nine!
	Well, our plan to send Michael to take Sarah Huckabee Sanders' job didn't work, but ambassador to Greenland.
	Governor of Greenland?
	Something.
	Governor of Greenland?
	Knowles.
	That's pretty good.
	Keon of Greenland?
	Court Jester?
	Peasant of Greenland.
	As conservatives, how worried should we be about the electoral map when states like Texas and Arizona seem to be turning blue?
	Ben.
	Super-duper-duper-duper worried.
	Like, really worried.
	I know a lot of folks in both the Texas Republican Party as well as in the Arizona Republican Party.
	And Arizona, Martha McSally losing that senatorial race to Kyrsten Sinema, despite the fact that there were all these comments that Sinema had made that were truly anti-American.
	I mean, really awful comments.
	And then she won.
	And now she is smart enough to be governing as moderate.
	That is a bad sign for Arizona.
	The Texas...
	Texas isn't going to be blue in the next election cycle.
	Trump will win Texas.
	But it is trending in the wrong direction.
	Mitt Romney won the state by 12 points.
	Trump won the state by 6 points.
	Cruz won the state by 2 points.
	There were four Republicans in Texas who have already retired going into the 2020 cycle.
	They lost 14 House legislative seats in the last legislative elections.
	They lost a bunch of judicial seats because a lot of judicial seats in Texas are elected.
	The suburbs are turning purple, and the cities are blue already.
	Dallas is blue, Austin is blue, Houston is blue.
	Texas is a mirror to the rest of the country in the sense that all of the urban areas are extraordinarily blue, all the suburbs are beginning to turn purple, and the rural areas are very red.
	But people are overestimating the amount of population in Texas that lives in the rural areas.
	They're getting the math wrong.
	And the same thing is true in Arizona.
	Now, if you lose Texas, Republicans basically never win another election, obviously.
	So it's a real disaster, and it's one of the reasons why Banking on the same base that got him there for Trump is not a victorious strategy for Republicans in the long run.
	You do need to grow the base.
	I mean, you do need to reach into new audiences.
	I think Trump is trying to do this in certain ways, but I think that he's actually trying to pick some of the hardest fruit off the tree, right?
	You're starting to see him carve into, for example, the African-American vote share.
	Well, that's kind of a hard vote share to cut into.
	I'll give you an easier vote share to cut into.
	White college-educated women who Mitt Romney won in 2012, with whom Donald Trump performed fairly decently in 2016.
	He also performed great among white high school-educated women.
	They are now voting in minority, according to the polls, for him.
	So, Trump's The Republican Party is tied to whoever is the president, just as the Democratic Party was tied to whoever is the president.
	That doesn't mean it's a long-term irreversible trend.
	It does mean that, of course, people should be worried deeply about Texas and Arizona.
	It would be foolhardy to say otherwise.
	I don't mean to be a downer, but that's the election analysis.
	I think you're right, but I don't...
	I agree with you about African Americans.
	I think African Americans are winnable.
	They're people, just like everybody else.
	I'm not saying they're not winnable.
	I'm saying they're not the most obvious area.
	It's easier not to lose the people who voted for you last time than the people who didn't.
	Criminal justice reform is not going to pick up 10% of the black people.
	You know what's interesting is that the union people are going with Trump.
	The union people are showing up for the Democrat candidates, but they're not applauding the way they used to.
	The union leaders are staying in their seats when everybody else is leaping to their feet.
	I mean, Trump has re-established the manufacturing base in this country, and the unions are noticing it.
	I think there's a lot of good stuff.
	He did very well among those voters in 2016.
	The problem, again, is moving forward.
	How do you expand those bases?
	Question number 10.
	Question number 10, I think I want all of y'all to answer.
	Okay?
	Which is the number one absolute bestest Star Wars movie?
	Is the easiest question in the world.
	Phantom Menace, right?
	Now that's pod racing!
	Well, of course it's Empire Strikes Back.
	Of course it's Empire Strikes Back.
	Okay, and also, all of them, all the new ones are an abomination.
	They're an abomination.
	The Last Jedi is an abomination.
	The Force Awakens, despite Jeremy's best efforts to pretend that J.J. Abrams is an A-list director, The Force Awakens is a disappointment.
	When Ben says all the new ones are a disaster, he means starting with Return of the Jedi.
	Listen, there's 3,000 of you and you made this a badass night for us.

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