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Jan. 9, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:36:55

Daily Wire Backstage: And Iran... (I Ran So Far Away)

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	I ran.
	I ran so far away.
	Right into Trump's arms.
	If you want me to explain this wonderful new song, check out the latest Daily Wire backstage, And I Ran, I Ran So Far Away.
	Join Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, The God King, Jeremy Boring, and me as we discuss the latest news with Iran, President Trump, and the best movies of the year.
	We will give you that and so much more.
	Take a listen.
	A cloud appears above your head.
	A beam of light comes shining down on you.
	Shining down on you.
	The cloud is moving nearer still.
	Aurora Borealis comes in view.
	Aurora comes in view.
	And I ran.
	I ran so far away.
	I ran.
	I ran all night and day.
	Couldn't get away.
	I hate this crap.
	I hate this crap.
	Welcome to The Daily Wire.
	I ran so far away.
	We're going to be talking about Gervais bombing Hollywood, that Covington kid, Nick Sandman, bombing CNN, and of course, all the various bombings in the Middle East, all while trying not to bomb ourselves.
	I'm going to be honest, trying might be a bit overstating our effort.
	Mostly, we're just going to phone it in like we always do.
	I'm Jeremy Boring.
	You're welcome.
	I'm joined today by Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, Ben Shapiro, and via satellite, Elisha Krause, the lovely.
	Elisha, tell the folks at home what they want.
	Well, I mean, if you are a subscriber, then you won the opportunity to ask a question of the guys tonight.
	If you're not a subscriber, then you don't have a Leftist Tears Tumblr and your life is awful and meaningless.
	So you should head on over to dailywire.com.
	Be sure to navigate to the shows page.
	It's right in the center at the top.
	Click on backstage and then type in your questions into the chat box next to the video.
	Now remember, only subscribers who also have those awesome Leftist Tears Tumblrs get to ask the questions.
	So if you're not one, you can become one tonight and get your question in for any of the guys.
	Thank you, Elisha.
	And folks, we've got some other fantastic news for you.
	Right now and only right now for the duration of the show, you can become a Daily Wire subscriber at the beautiful discount of 15% off using promo code BACKSTAGE.
	Remember, if you're a member, you get our articles ad-free, access to all of our live broadcasts and show library, as well as the full three hours every day of the Ben Shapiro Show and select bonus content, access to the mailbag, other stuff, plus our all-new all-access tier gets you into live online Q&A discussions with me, Ben, Andrew, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles. plus our all-new all-access tier gets you into live online There's other people who you'll get to talk to.
	I don't know any of their names.
	I'm the boss.
	Plus, our site's writers and special guests.
	And don't forget, you'll also get the greatest beverage vessel of all time, the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr.
	Again, that's promo code BACKSTAGE for 15% off of all memberships.
	That is only available right now during the show.
	With all that out of the way, what are we going to talk about this?
	Is there anything happening?
	Could we just do another really long extended pun on the word Iran?
	Yeah, that'll play.
	This is great because we can all praise President Trump.
	Absolutely.
	We're all on team Trump today.
	This is a major, major foreign policy victory.
	I mean, best really since Osama...
	Well, I think in some ways it's better than Osama buying it, only because when it comes to Osama buying it, that was the culmination of a very long war against a series of terrorists and terror groups.
	That's right.
	And killing bin Laden degraded capacity, but not as much as killing Soleimani did for Iran.
	Absolutely.
	Beyond that, Iran was on the upswing in some ways, whereas al-Qaeda was already on the downswing by the time that bin Laden was killed.
	And also, there was no division in terms of strategy about bin Laden.
	Like, I was always confused when people were saying, that's the bravest move in the world that Obama said go for.
	What exactly would the choice have been?
	Not go for it and leave the guy alive?
	He's the most wanted person on planet Earth.
	When it comes to this, this was a very fraught move that President Trump took.
	And the media are the real story here.
	Really, even more so than Iran.
	This was all perfectly predictable if you understand international politics 101.
	This was all fairly predictable because this was just deterrence.
	Deterrence has been foreign policy for everyone for thousands of years.
	It's very easy to understand.
	Somebody says, they're going to hurt you.
	And you say, well, if you do that, then I'm going to end you.
	And that's called deterrence, okay?
	And this has been a feature of foreign policy for all of American history, for all of world history, actually.
	Barack Obama spent eight years lying that deterrence was not a possibility with Iran.
	His entire premise was that we had two choices as the United States.
	One was to sign giant checks to a terror regime so they could use that money for terrorism and ballistic missile development.
	And then to pretend that we had somehow mitigated the threat by allowing them to build nuclear weapons after 10 years with the additional economic strength, with the additional terrorist.
	And with missiles that could carry them.
	Right, exactly.
	Or, alternatively, full-scale war, right?
	That was the lie that Obama kept telling.
	And they pitched that for eight years.
	It was either you are for our appeasement or you are for war.
	And they kept saying that over and over.
	And they're still selling.
	The media is still selling.
	And this is the point.
	Trump came in and he said, OK, well, there's a third option that you guys are just pretending doesn't exist.
	And that option is called deterrence.
	That is, if you violate X, Y, and Z, if you violate these rules, if you cross this red line, you will get punched in the face.
	And you'll get punched so hard that you don't want to cross those lines anymore.
	And so Trump was a, what he did to Soleimani was a living rebuke to the entire framework that the media had been repeating for eight years.
	and was pushed by the Democrats for eight years.
	I want to jump in and just say one thing.
	You know, I'm not a giant fan of the president.
	I think that this, in the end, bore out to be maybe the greatest foreign policy decision by any president in my lifetime.
	Right.
	I didn't think that that was necessarily true just because he killed Soleimani.
	I thought it would be necessary to see how Iran reacted.
	Well, not only how Iran reacted, but how the president handled the reaction of Iran.
	When he came to office, despite his bellicosity, Donald Trump actually believed in the Obama doctrine.
	All of the early tests of President Trump in terms of foreign policy, he backed down.
	He, as much as the Democrats, was the one who would always give you this sort of false binary of, well, if we don't become friends with everyone, we'll just be in open war.
	He would do this with North Korea very famously.
	And if you would criticize him snuggling up with the North Koreans, that's what all of his Supporters would say.
	Supporters would say, oh, so you would rather us just be in nuclear war with North Korea?
	And people like us, Ben, we'd be saying, no, there are other options.
	The president, very tepid response to his first military crisis.
	He sent some cruise missiles into an airfield in Syria.
	Absolutely did no good.
	Showed a kind of weakness and indecisiveness.
	This is the one time you'll ever hear me say that Drew may have a point.
	Because I was just about to say I disagree with everything you're saying.
	The president seems to have learned on the job.
	He's been weak on foreign policy.
	He's presented all these false binaries about you only have kissing ass or open war.
	But there's this small news story a few weeks ago that said the president had really become disenchanted with his generals because of how Afghanistan has conducted itself.
	And that he started talking to special operators and actual guys who operate on the ground.
	And then you see this really...
	I'm going to go ahead and say it is a radical move to take out Soleimani.
	It's so radical.
	George W. Bush, who took us into war in two separate theaters, didn't kill Soleimani as he should have.
	When he had the chance.
	When he had the chance.
	Barack Obama, who loved to kill people with drone strikes and did, in fact, take us into a country, Libya, that there was no declared war on.
	Funny how everybody forgets that Libya actually happened.
	There was an actual war in Libya.
	And they killed Qaddafi for no reason, who was no threat to the United States.
	And then Hillary chortled about killing him.
	And then Benghazi's embassy gets burned and it's not a big deal.
	But then the president seems to have learned, and he made this very, very gutsy move.
	And even then, because the president isn't always known for his consistency, I thought, if you escalate and then back down, this will be worse than if you didn't kill him, even though I'll still be glad he's dead.
	The president's handling of this missile attack, though, in Iraq last night, It was great.
	It's flawless.
	It's been flawless.
	The thing I disagree with you guys about it is that I think you're putting him into this framework that's created by Obama and Bush and I don't think he's operating in that framework for good sometimes and sometimes for ill.
	He is not a guy who will appease another country.
	To make friends or keep the peace, he's a guy who will make friends with anybody to keep the peace, with any person to keep the peace.
	He'll say, Kim, Kim Jong-un, love the guy, he's a great guy, come on over.
	But if Kim Jong-un actually threatens Americans, he would blow them off the face of the earth.
	And I think also that he does also understand, he does understand, as you're saying, There's so many things we could do to Iran with basically the flick of a Xbox controller that would cripple them forever.
	We could take out their ports.
	We could destroy their navy.
	Their airplanes are like paper, you know, like airplanes.
	So we send an airplane out to you, you know, and he could take out their entire air force.
	He could do to their air force what they just did.
	My criticism of Trump...
	And the thing is, they know it.
	They know it.
	And that's why not only did they fire the missiles into the dirt, but they were making announcements like...
	Don't retaliate.
	By the way, more than that, the Daily Mail basically reported that Iran called Iraq and they said, get your guys out of that base because we need to do something to prove to our people that we're not completely pansies.
	Well, this was the question.
	So they actually called up, for people who missed the story, they actually called up the Iraqi Prime Minister and they said, you need to move your troops out.
	The Iraqis then went and told the Americans, and the Americans moved their troops out, which is why no one's dead today.
	So the Iranians were openly saying to the Americans, okay, we understand, we can't go any further than this.
	Not only that, there was a story today out of Baghdad that Muqtad al-Sadr, who's the leader of this huge Shiite group in Iran, has basically told the PMF, which was the group that was behind the burning of the embassy, to shut it down.
	Yeah.
	So the Iranians are understanding, like, we went too far here, and they were pushing, right?
	And here's my problem with Trump's foreign policy for a year there.
	It was not pulling out from the Iran deal, which was great.
	It was that for a year, the Iranians kept getting more and more and more bellicose, right?
	I mean, they were blowing up shipping in the Straits of Hormuz.
	They shot down an American drone.
	They blew up the Saudi oil facility.
	They were firing rockets at American bases.
	All of this, and Trump really did nothing.
	That's why when people kept saying, Trump desperately wants war with Iran, it's like, what are you watching?
	Trump wants war with Iran.
	They called him a week before when he didn't respond to the drone being blown up, which I kind of agreed with him.
	I certainly didn't agree with him, but I will agree that not since Ronald Reagan has there been a president who disdained war more than...
	Absolutely.
	Well, he should.
	One reason that we didn't lose any Iraqi soldiers or US soldiers in the ballistic missile strike of last night is because we had an early warning system.
	Wow.
	I'm in awe.
	I'm in awe.
	I'm sorry.
	They don't call you the god king for nothing.
	Thank you.
	You at home should also have an early warning system, and you can because of our good friends over at Ring.
	Ring produces this terrific home security system.
	Everyone here at the company has it.
	Jay Hay, our head of production, has the best story about this.
	He's sound asleep in his bedroom at night, and he gets an alert on his phone because when there's motion, a knock on your door, someone walks up to your porch, or someone rings your doorbell, the technology at Ring is such that it alerts you to the fact that someone's there.
	You could be on vacation a thousand miles away.
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	You can actually communicate through your phone to the person standing at your front door.
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	So Jonathan gets this alert.
	He looks at his phone, and it is some drunk, stoned-high hippies standing at his front door at 3 o'clock in the morning wondering if this is a rehab.
	It is not a reality.
	It's also the plot of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
	Jonathan's house, by the way, it's almost like a Dr.
	Seuss book.
	It sits on the very, very peak of a giant, steep mountain.
	On top of another steep mountain, right?
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	Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
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	I don't need that.
	I just want to know.
	See it on my phone.
	It's a lot easier.
	So you heard it here, folks.
	If we lose Ben Shapiro, it's because of a defect in Ring's product.
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	Ring.com slash backstage.
	So I just want to finish the narrative here because I think it's important.
	So the Obama narrative was it was either appeasement or it was full-out war.
	And Trump comes along and says, no, there's this thing called deterrence.
	And if you cross this line, then I'm going to put a missile through Soleimani's head, which is exactly what he did, which is great because Soleimani is better in a thousand pieces.
	Hey, Ben, you know what the last thing to go through Soleimani?
	No, it actually improved Soleimani's personality.
	It did.
	It's much more likable now.
	You know, I don't tout my own tweets all that often, but that was a great tweet.
	They shipped him back in a box on a civilian airliner in the coach section.
	I said, well, he didn't need the leg rope.
	Not even Comfort Plus.
	But here's the point.
	That was the narrative from Obama.
	The media repeated it dutifully for eight years.
	Trump came along and he wrecked the narrative for them because he showed that there was this third way.
	So the media have now responded by refusing to acknowledge that deterrence exists.
	Instead, their narrative has become that Trump is a madman and the Ayatollahs are rational.
	Right.
	It's not that they were deterred.
	It's that they realized that they didn't really want to go to war and Trump is crazy.
	And so, like, by the way, that in and of itself does acknowledge that a deterrence took place.
	It's just that Trump's calculated nuttiness made the Iranians back down, supposedly.
	But they will do anything up to and including declaring the Ayatollahs, who hang gay people from cranes, who oppress women, who spread terrorism all across the region...
	The regime that has been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslims in the Middle East and people abroad, including all the way in Buenos Aires when they're bombing synagogues, they are willing to declare those people rational actors just to avoid saying that Donald Trump backed them off their point.
	It's worse than that.
	that they actually hate Trump and us so much that they...
	Well, this is...
	Lawrence O'Donnell was rooting for it last night.
	This is a legitimate question.
	And, Michael, I want to get your opinion on this.
	If the Iranians had responded by bombing Trump hotels around the world, would the media have been able to condemn Iran for it?
	Not a chance.
	Are you kidding me?
	They would have been celebrating.
	They were so excited to push Iranian propaganda while the Iranian retaliation was taking place.
	Completely unvetted, baseless.
	They were just spouting what the mullahs were giving them.
	Is that Lawrence O'Donnell tweet?
	Lawrence O'Donnell?
	I mean, MSNBC was...
	He said, Trump wagged the dog, now the dog is wagging back.
	Like, openly.
	On air, they were saying 30 American casualties.
	Washington Post is reporting that.
	A raw story.
	A number of left-wing outlets were actually saying the Iranian news agency is calling in 80 casualties.
	None of it happened.
	The only numbers you need to know are that more Americans were killed by Iran in the two weeks before we took out Soleimani than in the entire retaliation.
	13 ballistic missiles, however many missiles.
	More were killed before than were killed afterward.
	It shows you that the deterrence works.
	And the key that Trump re-established beyond deterrence is unpredictability.
	Because I agree with you, when he didn't respond to the drone, when he didn't respond to the Saudi oil field, when he didn't respond to the tanker, at a certain point...
	You've got to put up or shut up.
	At a certain point, you don't believe the threats anymore.
	And that asymmetrical response, taking out the top military commander, clearly it worked.
	Is there a point with the media?
	I mean, the media, as you say, the media was the story.
	I've never seen anything like that.
	It's disgusting.
	It was unreal.
	Christian, I'm a poor journalist, was actually like almost singing at the funeral of this guy in tribute to him.
	They had Martha Raddatz wearing the headgear.
	Oh my God.
	Is there a point where corporate calls in and says, boys, you know, the American public, we do need them to watch our shows.
	Surely, surely there is a wide swath of America that is looking at these programs and thinking, you have got to be kidding me.
	No, I think, first of all, I think that the corporate higher-ups don't know a damn thing about this region of the world at all.
	I mean, I'm constantly amazed by the coverage at the New York Times.
	They don't No, Ben Rhodes was right.
	They literally know nothing.
	I mean, they are full-on morons.
	And this first occurred to me, not with regard to this stuff, but with regard to Israel, because Israel is in the middle of an election, and they were printing stuff that was so patently absurd that I, who am a fairly well-educated follower of Israeli politics, I was looking at this and going, are you, like, what?
	And their coverage of this whole situation, where Soleimani was being portrayed as just, you know, the obituaries for this guy.
	We're glowing.
	I mean, he was honest, and he was an austere religious scholar, part two.
	I mean, they were contrasting, I guess, this former Cincinnati Bengals coach died in the last couple of days.
	There's a headline from the Washington Post saying, Sam Weish, who did the grievous sin of not allowing a female reporter into the male locker room, has died.
	It's like, thank God Iran isn't run by Don Imus, you know?
	It's like...
	It is truly incredible.
	And so when Nikki Haley suggests that there are people who seem like they are rooting for Iran, there's a fine line between rooting for Iran and just not knowing what the hell you're doing.
	But I think that there's one thing that's certainly true.
	They're rooting against Trump.
	There is no question about that.
	And they cannot allow Trump to have the victory, and so they will rob it from him with anything possible.
	They will suggest that they'll root for more Iranian retaliation to come, just to show that the terms didn't work.
	But it's not true about Christianity.
	Anamanpour does know that area.
	She does know that.
	And she was questioning our deck, Seth Deck, she was questioning our Secretary of Defense, like he was a perp.
	And then she had on an Iranian official and was questioning her, like, you know, tell us the truth now, give us the real information.
	It was incredibly shameful.
	And I don't know, I mean, I've been calling for the The news media to be reformed.
	Obviously, it can't be reformed because of the First Amendment, but it should be forced into reform.
	I'm so happy about this Covington school kid taking out CNN and settling with them for defamation.
	But they have got to do something.
	This is bad for the country.
	Trump is right.
	They're the enemy of the people.
	I will say that the Ayatollahs acted in a way here that was more rational than the media would have had them act.
	The way that the media were covering this thing.
	Richard Engel, who's covering this thing from Tehran for NBC, he was on the air talking about, they didn't just turn Soleimani into a martyr, they turned him into a saint, and he was covering all the people rubbing the relics on the coffin.
	It's like, yeah, they did the same thing with Stalin.
	So the hell what?
	This is my actual favorite tweet of the day from Michael Moore, who's a filmmaker.
	And 2004 DNC presidential box city with Jimmy Carter.
	That's right.
	Just wondering, is there an American general for whom millions of us would turn out for his funeral?
	Mad Dog, Kelly, Colin Powell?
	Can anyone even name the chair of the Joint Chiefs?
	We all support those who serve, but would we pour into the streets like the Iranians?
	Did you hear his podcast?
	Did you hear this?
	He had an emergency podcast that was a message to the mullahs in Iran, begging them.
	He said, I have a way for you to win.
	This is what he said.
	These were his words.
	I have a way for you to win.
	Don't sink to our level.
	Be true to your book and to your God.
	And I thought, if they're true to their book...
	Oh God, we are in big, big trouble.
	You know, he slid into the Ayatollah's DMs.
	He privately messaged Ayatollah Khamenei on Twitter saying, please don't do this.
	We'll get rid of Trump.
	Please don't attack us.
	So I want to know, guys, I want your opinion, though.
	When the American people see this, aside from the far left, aside from this, aren't they going to say, like, what?
	Yes, the takeaway is going to be, I think, that in the past three months, Donald Trump took out the top two terrorists on planet Earth.
	Plus the Hezbollah guys in Iraq.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Who were killed alongside Obama.
	I mean, so I think that it's going to be very difficult.
	Like, what exactly is the Democratic platform here going to be?
	They're desperate for it.
	Now they're relegated to arguing that it was an illegal kill on Soleimani because Soleimani wasn't an imminent threat.
	He's only responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq, and the murder of tens of thousands of people in Syria, and the murder of people in Yemen, and the murder of people in Lebanon, and the murder of people in Israel.
	He's only responsible for those things.
	But he wasn't doing anything that day, except for that he was actually in Iraq.
	Except that he was in Iraq.
	To actually sit with the people who had just burned the embassy the day before.
	But other than that, guys, he was totally not a threat.
	He was basically a Swedish schoolchild.
	That's going to be the DNC slogan.
	It's going to be, win one for Kasim.
	Win one for the Gipper, they've got win one for Kasim.
	One thing that always occurs to me in times like this, and it goes to your point about how the media doesn't really know anything.
	I actually, I agree that Trump actually comes off looking great in this entire affair.
	As I said, I think it's the greatest, or one of the greatest foreign policy achievements of my lifetime.
	Nevertheless, people don't have a great framework for understanding these sorts of events.
	When you hear very serious-seeming people go on television and tell you that we were on the brink of World War III, when they tell you things like, this would be...
	I know someone personally who went and stockpiled food at a grocery store last night.
	That is the honest-to-goodness truth.
	Iran does not have a weapon capable of striking America except perhaps for actual terrorist suicide bombers or something.
	There were people who believed World War III was upon us.
	People thought the draft was about to be reinstituted.
	They thought the draft was about to be reinstituted.
	Iran would last, we know almost to the day, exactly three weeks is how long it would take our military to completely destroy the military of Iran.
	And we also conflate the Iraq war with the Iraq nation building and occupation.
	People are like, the Iraq war was a huge failure.
	Three weeks, we unseated the fourth or fifth largest military on the face of the planet with sub-100 casualties.
	Now, if you want to say that the Iraq nation building and democracy establishing enterprise didn't go very well.
	The Colin Powell Doctrine is a mistake.
	The Powell Doctrine is wrong.
	I do think that the Iranian military is capable of generating more casualties for the United States than the Iraqis did.
	We don't have to say...
	It's not going to be...
	We're not going to have guys in the Persian Gulf paddling their boats.
	No, no, of course not.
	But we do have about 5,000 troops in the region, and they have tens of thousands of militia members.
	So it turned into, there'd be some bloody battles.
	And bottom line is that all of that was speculative because no one wanted to go to war.
	And I kept saying this over and over.
	Donald Trump did not want to go to war.
	The Iranians didn't want to go to war even more than Trump because...
	They knew.
	And what Tillamani really said was, yes, there is a red line, and unlike with Barack Obama, I'm not going to back off it and then just hand Vladimir Putin the keys to the kingdom.
	All these same jackasses who say that Trump is a tool of Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama handed Syria to Vladimir Putin after letting Bashar Assad gas people.
	So why don't you just shut up?
	But even when you say that Iran could generate some bloody casualties for America in theater, I don't fully agree with you, but even let's grant that that's true.
	We had a million troops in the Middle East eight years ago.
	This would have been nothing like that, even if it had turned into a shooting war.
	Oh no, we have 5,000 troops in the region right now.
	Much less World War III, a conflict that you would assume would involve numerous world powers and actual millions of casualties.
	But very serious people.
	The same people who say, we have to believe the science.
	We will all be dead in 12 years.
	And people go...
	Well, that sounds unreasonable, but this is a very serious person saying it.
	But not only does Trump learn things, people learn things.
	And when you go out and you say, oh, the draft is coming and we're protesting the war, and the draft doesn't come and the war doesn't come, and in fact, Iran essentially has backed down.
	I think large swaths of people say, well, wait a minute.
	I mean, it's like, listen, I was a liberal.
	I was going to call from people who were Democrats who were saying, like, is it really going to go like this?
	Like, I have a feeling it's not going to go like this.
	You know, I was a liberal when Ronald Reagan was president, and I thought, what an idiot, what a warmonger.
	And then one day I thought, you know, everything he's doing works.
	Everything he's predicted happened.
	And the wall fell down, and I thought, you know, he was actually right and everybody else was wrong.
	And you start to think about these things.
	I think, you know, Trump, a lot of people are going to start having...
	Molly Hemingway just put out a tweet saying she overheard someone say, you know, this guy is kind of good at presidenting.
	I think that that's what a lot of people are thinking.
	It's what I've been thinking for the past several years.
	You know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's big in foreign policy, and he said, the thing people get wrong about foreign policy is, it's actually much simpler than all the academics and all the experts think.
	You know, since we're all celebrating Trump here today, Trump had this pretty much stupid advertisement in the New York Times in the 1980s.
	It was attacking Reagan, but it was to sort of launch his political career, and he was accusing Reagan of being too weak.
	And what the advertisement said was, there's nothing about our American defense policy that couldn't be fixed with a little backbone.
	Very simple, right?
	Now, the reason I say it's stupid is I think Ronald Reagan was pretty strong, got the Soviet Union to collapse.
	But the statement that he made, completely right.
	It's exactly what we saw here.
	This was not a fundamental reordering of U.S. foreign affairs.
	He just had some backbone, and it worked.
	If you would like to talk to us after the show and maybe ask us some very direct questions, you can come over to our new live chat feature at DailyWire.com.
	How do you do it, Jeremy?
	Well, you become an all-access subscriber.
	DailyWire.com, using the promo code BACKSTAGE, will get you 15% off, but only if you head over there right now and subscribe during the duration of this show.
	We're going to be around for a little bit longer.
	And in fact, we're going to take some questions right now from existing DailyWire.com subscribers and members by kicking it over to Alicia.
	Alicia, what are people back home wanting to know?
	Well, back home, everybody is kind of on the same topic that you guys have been discussing for the first 20 minutes of the show tonight.
	How will the president's handling of Iran affect our relations and just everything, I think, with China, Russia, and North Korea?
	Hmm.
	Well, it's certainly going to throw a scare into all three of them insofar as it shows that there are red lines.
	Again, with Barack Obama, there were no red lines.
	So North Korea is always playing the same game.
	The big difference, of course, is that they have nuclear weapons and they do have an insane amount of ordnance that is aimed directly in the center of Seoul.
	So that is a bigger problem.
	They're not going away anytime soon.
	By the way, the Mullahs aren't going away anytime soon.
	But the idea that the North Koreans are going to get wildly aggressive is obviously untrue because at a certain point they will cross a red line.
	The Chinese are playing a long game, so the idea of them getting openly aggressive was never a real possibility.
	The Russians are...
	I think that they have pretty much finished with their territorial incursions under President Trump.
	I think that they feel like they've gotten away with about as much as they can.
	It's been basically quiet since the invasion of Crimea, which is several years ago at this point.
	I don't think they're going to get territorially...
	Aggressive.
	Again, I think that Trump really sent a message to the world here and the Iranians backing down really is a major foreign policy win for him.
	And I think that the real message in all of this is that Barack Obama was wrong about everything as per our usual arrangement.
	And the media cannot let go of it.
	And the rest of the world basically understands that now.
	And the other thing about Obama was, unlike Jimmy Carter, the second worst president of my lifetime, he never learned.
	He never changed his mind.
	It didn't matter what happened.
	He was so certain of himself.
	I mean, Jimmy Carter, when Russia went into Afghanistan, thought, okay, maybe I was wrong about that.
	Maybe I was wrong about the Soviet Union.
	Obama, you know the comedian who said he was like obsidian?
	He was, except up here.
	You know, even the fact that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out and basically endorsed the president's actions over the last few hours, three days ago, two days ago, Britain was openly basically rebuking the killing of Soleimani.
	So I say that only to say I think everyone learned a lesson.
	I think in capitals all across Europe and in capitals all across the world, people are looking at America with a little bit more serious of an eye, and that's something that's been missing for the last decade, at least, and is a very, very powerful thing for us.
	It does show the disconnect between the supposed importance of rhetoric and the importance of action, especially on stuff like this, because people kept saying, oh, he's tweeting all these nasty things to Iran.
	Right, but the concept is extraordinarily basic.
	It's the same concept that you use with your child or that kids use with each other, which is, if you do this, I'm going to punch you.
	Right.
	That's Trump's message.
	It's right in his wheelhouse.
	And you know, the other thing about the Powell Doctrine is that essentially the Powell Doctrine was that if you break it, you own it, right?
	And that essentially neutralizes our strength because no matter how big you are on the ground, an indigenous guerrilla force can keep you fighting forever.
	I mean, that was George Washington.
	Yeah, Coleman Powell had not learned the first lesson of American warfare.
	Exactly.
	The Washington Doctrine.
	The Washington doctrine, exactly.
	And when you've got a 17-year-old sitting at home with an Xbox controller taking out your main guy, that's power.
	And that's the kind of power we have now.
	And it should be used when we have to.
	You know, the return on the investment is also so great.
	I mean, I don't know how much that drone shot cost that took out Soleimani, but the return on The deterrence is so great because it's a return in North Korea, as you say, in China.
	It's a return among our allies.
	You only have to show the credible use of violence every so often.
	That establishes it.
	You only have to be unpredictable every so often.
	Take Reagan and Thatcher at the Falklands.
	That's right.
	It doesn't take a major military action to convince everybody that you are willing to do what you say you're going to do.
	I also think that this has weighed heavily on President Trump.
	I don't think that, again, since Ronald Reagan, we haven't had a president who disliked war more than Donald Trump.
	That's why it's fun when Hollywood starlets call him a terrorist.
	We've got a terrorist in the White House.
	You've got a guy here who, so far anyway, is the only president since 88 not to start an actual shooting war.
	But if you watch that, if you watch that press conference that the president had this, not press conference, but that address that the president gave this morning, looked terrible.
	He sounded terrible.
	He sounded like he was sick.
	He looked like he had slept in several days.
	Yeah, he looked like he had the flu.
	He was slurring a few words.
	I mean, if you were a Hollywood script writer, you couldn't have done better than he said, I want to be clear.
	The territorial interest of the United States.
	Like, no, you can't slur the word after I want to be clear, but I don't say any of that to make fun of the president, maybe just a tiny bit in good humor, but I think it's taken a toll on the guy.
	The guy does not like the idea of military conflict.
	He doesn't want to kill people.
	Barack Obama was down in the Situation Room bombing people from the air almost every day of his presidency.
	Donald Trump has been clear about this basically his entire life.
	He does not like war.
	He doesn't want to deploy.
	You shouldn't like war, right?
	I mean, we don't like war.
	What is it good for?
	It's bad for children and other flowers and whatever.
	Oh, man.
	Rush Hour reference there?
	All right.
	I don't know if you guys saw this video earlier, but it was Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar kind of giggling during a conversation that Democrats had, a press conference actually, that Democrats had regarding the Iraq war.
	And this question comes from a subscriber who wants to know, with antics like this and their sympathies to Iran, do you guys think that the squad will survive the 2020 elections?
	Absolutely.
	If the squad didn't exist, we'd have to make them in a laboratory.
	I hope so.
	They want to redistrict AOC out of her seat in New York, because the New York Democrats like her even less than the Republicans do.
	I'm going to fight to keep her seat.
	I really want them to stay in power.
	You know what was amazing today, Ilhan Omar?
	She was giggling with Tlaib at that press conference.
	It just seemed like they were acting like children.
	I don't think it was a direct reaction to what was being discussed.
	What was so amazing is she said that the sanctions that Trump is reinstituting on Iran...
	She said sanctions are warfare.
	Sanctions cause death and destruction.
	And that's terrible.
	One year ago, she said, Ilhan Omar supports the boycott, divest, and sanction Israel movement.
	So we can't declare war on...
	The Jews don't count.
	No!
	J-O-O-O-O. We can declare war on Israel, but no war on Iran.
	She's on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
	Thank you, Nancy Pelosi.
	She retweeted George Carlin saying America is in the business of bombing brown and black people.
	That's her retweet on this.
	You know, I do think, listen, people are moving out of red states and moving to blue states.
	And I know we all fear that when they do that, they'll go to the red state and start voting blue and turn the You said move it from blue states to red states, sorry.
	And they're doing it en masse.
	I mean, blue states are losing congressional seats because of the population transfer.
	You know, people catch on to things.
	People are not stupid.
	You know, they do see what's going on.
	They do see through the press.
	The press is not as powerful as it used to be.
	Young people aren't reading the press at all.
	You know, they're reading Reddit.
	You heard it from Andrew Klavan, folks at home.
	People are not stupid.
	You don't agree with anything, Isaac.
	All right, jumping into election 2020, because we're officially in 2020, guys.
	Aren't you so excited?
	I mean, don't do Barbara Walters' impersonation, but just imagine me talking about 2020.
	So the question for all of you guys is, which Democratic primary candidate do you think benefits the most from these increased tensions with Iran?
	Donald J. Trump.
	Are you kidding me?
	I don't think he's a registered Democrat.
	Oh, he's not.
	He was at one time, though.
	He was at one time.
	I mean, the answer is Biden.
	Because anytime people feel a little bit unsettled, they want the person whose face they've seen before and who isn't a bat bleep loony communist.
	I mean, like Bernie Sanders being out there and being like, I've been against every war since the creation of war.
	And I was there when Cain killed Abel.
	And it's like, okay.
	I'm sorry, but you were like stumbling.
	There were only two people there, Bernie, and only one of them lived.
	I don't think that's it.
	He was hiding in the bushes in a community.
	The fact that Bernie and Biden are the top two candidates means that Biden's the nominee.
	I do not see a situation in which those two are the final two, and Sanders walks away with the nomination.
	Jason Reilly was saying today he thought that Bernie was in with a chance.
	I kind of agree with you on this.
	I mean, I think he's got a chance in the sense that he could win the caucuses because caucuses are caucus states.
	Yeah.
	He won New Hampshire last time.
	He won New Hampshire last time, but he won it 49% last time.
	Right now he's pulling at like 25%, 27%.
	If Biden finishes a close second in both those states, it's over.
	I agree with that.
	If Biden gets to act in both those states, if he's in like the 13% rate.
	Do you think Bloomberg has a chance?
	So Bloomberg's only opportunity is basically that Biden loses in Iowa and loses heavily enough that New Hampshire becomes crucial to him.
	He blows all of his money.
	Sanders then wins New Hampshire anyway, so Biden has lost all of his money.
	Sanders wins Nevada, and at that point, Biden is basically out of the race because he's blown all of his money, and the only person who's left in the race as a moderate with money is Bloomberg.
	That's the bet that he's making.
	It's a narrow bet.
	It's not impossible, but it's also not really.
	The idea that the 2020 Democrat Party is going to elect one of the 10 richest people in the world, the President of the United States, an old, rich, white New York billionaire.
	Jew.
	Jew.
	The only thing to say, though, with never say never, Bloomberg, I thought he'd enter the race at 0.2%.
	The people who actually ascribe to his views account for like 4% of the electorate.
	He came in with 6%.
	He's now nationally tied with Liz Warren, who was the frontrunner.
	One national poll has him at 11%.
	That's much better than I thought he would do.
	The invisible prop on this set is not going to be relevant.
	His other...
	His other big problem is that he actually supports school choice and charter schools.
	And he likes Israel.
	You mean his big problem is that he's a Republican?
	A rational human being.
	Yeah, we just elected a Democrat, so I don't know.
	Dogs and cats living together.
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	One day he'll make it as an actor, guys.
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	Not to be the Duke of Sussex.
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	Well, I mean, I was just thinking that speaking of people on camera, I thought the most important commentary on everything happening in Iran came from Patricia Arquette.
	Of course.
	- Of course, we're Wills. - Always.
	- Hold on. - Feel like that. - How good was Ricky Gervais?
	He was tremendous.
	Magnificent, right?
	That was just wonderful.
	We're all going to be saved by comedians because they can't stand being told what not to say.
	But the best part about the Ricky Gervais routine was not Ricky Gervais.
	It was all the cutaways.
	The cutaways were by far the best thing.
	Tim Cook was the classic.
	I actually couldn't believe that one.
	That one was spectacular.
	But there were some from...
	Like that woman from the Gilmore Girls when he was making the joke about Jeffrey Epstein and she just looked like she was sucking on a lemon.
	And all these various actors and actresses, they would cut away to them and they were so upset that anybody would dare prick this balloon Of self-esteem that they have.
	And the important thing was not just him telling them that they didn't know anything about politics.
	It was him calling them out for the massive, massive hypocrisy.
	Tim Cook made one of the stupidest speeches I have ever heard when he said, you know, we're going to take hate off our sites because it's the right thing to do and our conscience is sacred.
	I thought, you're a billionaire CEO. Shut up.
	You know, just make your phones and let us do the talking because we're the people.
	You know, whoever At what point does a billionaire CEO decide that he is the guy in charge of what we can say?
	I'll at least say for the billionaire CEO, at least he's providing a product or service that millions of people are gaining access to.
	All of that's good, but Michelle Williams makes art house films that no one's ever seen.
	I didn't know who she was before she gave that speech.
	Before she killed the Hare Krishna member, took his garb, put it on, grabbed a plastic bag, put it on her shoulder, and then went up there and started talking about killing babies.
	This is the thing about them.
	They're all incredibly talented at what they do, and they should just do it.
	But her speech was, I had to kill a child in order to get fame and fortune.
	That's the oldest story.
	Come on.
	Yeah, right.
	I mean, you get a little golden statue.
	If I could get something that I could maybe just really worship.
	You can't put a child on your shelf like that.
	They fall off.
	Nothing says female power.
	I had to kill this baby to become an actress.
	Alyssa Milano said the same thing like three months ago.
	And you read about it and you think, I've read that story.
	What was going on with the set of Charmed?
	Between Rose McGowan, who's literally stumping for the Iranians and saying she wanted to move over there, and Alyssa Milano, who's also a kook.
	What was going on over in Charmed?
	It's the same thing that goes on on every set.
	Hollywood actually steers into, if you've ever been here and seen any of the architecture, Hollywood steers into this sort of Babylonian, pagan ancestry that they see as sort of being, this was...
	To quote Don Henley, Gamora by the Sea, but I think to quote our friend Andrew Breitbart, this was Babylon.
	He wrote a book very famously called Babylon Sheik.
	Hollywood interrupted Babylon Sheik, right?
	I just finished Ronan Farrow's book, and I have to tell you, I was listening to it.
	I'm going on these hikes, and I'd go up, and then I'd meet my wife at the top because she's slower than I am, and then we'd walk down together.
	By the time I'd walk down, I was like frothing at the mouth with the rage, the hypocrisy.
	Ronan Farrow, who...
	You know, he was heroic in this instance.
	He was heroic in this instance.
	But he kept bringing this stuff, and they kept saying, they wouldn't even say, we're not going to do this because we got pressure from Harvey Weinstein.
	They wouldn't even say that.
	All they would say is, let's put it on pause.
	Let's put it on the back burner.
	And it turned out the reason they were doing it is because they were protecting Matt Lauer, who was doing exactly the same thing right under their nose.
	And everybody knew it.
	The corruption is incredible in these industries.
	And to have Gervais stand up and say, not that you shouldn't talk about it because you don't know about it, but you shouldn't talk about it because you're the worst people in the country.
	You work for the worst people in the country.
	And the guy out in the Midwest in his checked shirt who's voting for Donald Trump hasn't done those things.
	You know, he hasn't organized the incredible mass abuse of young women.
	But this is actually where I was going with the Babylon thing, that they don't hear what they're actually saying.
	If I had to say, I had to kill my little sister to build the Daily Wire, everyone would go, well, that's...
	Maybe it wasn't worth it.
	Maybe that's not a good thing.
	But they have this Babylonian pagan mentality, and it's actually a real insight into the truth about abortion.
	Abortion is just paganism.
	It's just the belief that if you kill your children, the sky god will send rain and you'll get more crops.
	It's a genuine belief that if we sacrifice our babies, we will be more materially successful.
	This explains why they hate the Jews.
	This is what the Jews put an end to.
	The Jews brought us monotheism.
	Monotheism defeated Babylonian people.
	And it stopped sacrificing your children.
	You know, there was one...
	I actually have to give credit to an actor at the Golden Globes, other than Ricky Gervais, and that is Joaquin Phoenix.
	Yeah, I agree.
	Joaquin Phoenix goes up there, and he is a lefty, right?
	His whole speech was about environmentalism, how we have to save the planet.
	But in his speech, he said, look, guys, it's really good, you know, to have all these kind of gimmicky dinners and stuff.
	Maybe don't fly private everywhere.
	Maybe fly commercial like once every so often.
	Just maybe you should do something in your own life rather than just prattle on and tell everyone else what to do.
	Although I will say that I have a hypocrisy Joaquin Phoenix story.
	So very, very recently I was visiting a restaurant.
	I won't mention which restaurant.
	And the restaurant was about to open and Joaquin Phoenix walks in and he's at the counter.
	And this is a restaurant that basically sells only meat.
	Like it only sells meat.
	And he walked in and he walked out with a box.
	Or I think he had to leave because he couldn't wait for the box or something.
	And he was wearing a vegan shirt.
	Is it hypocrisy or is the guy just...
	Is he actually hip enough to know that that's funny?
	Maybe.
	I mean, he's the Joker.
	He just wants the world to burn.
	Honestly, I thought that the best joke was not even that one.
	I thought that the best joke that Gervais told was the thing about how he was going to do an in memoriam, but there were too many white people and not on his watch.
	Because you know that that's what's going to happen at this year's Oscars, right?
	I just had Brett Easton Ellis on my show today, and we were talking about the Golden Globes, and he was saying that when it comes to the BAFTA Awards, for example, all 20 nominees in all the categories are white, which means we're going to get another Oscar So White routine this year.
	How about there were just a lot of really good movies that got made, and they happen to have white people in them?
	No, no, that's not allowed.
	And the line about the foreign press, the Hollywood foreign press being racist, that's true.
	I mean, that is just stone true.
	Well, the only place where you're not allowed to be a racist is America.
	I know.
	I mean, that's actually one of the funny...
	Funny, True.
	You've talked about it before, True.
	You can be black, and of course you're just an American.
	You were born in America, you grew up in America, but not so much in Germany.
	I don't know, though.
	Rose McGowan said that Iran is pretty progressive on these issues.
	I feel for poor Rose McGowan.
	Harvey Weinstein actually did a number on her.
	She's an actress.
	She went nuts.
	And she was fairly heroic in that situation as well, but also still crazy.
	Funnily enough, you don't get to abuse women just because they're crazy.
	If you did, we'd all be having a big party.
	And with that, we probably ought to check back in with Alicia.
	Speaking of crazy women.
	We're going to have Alicia try to save us from ourselves.
	We're going to have Alicia try to save us from ourselves.
	If you are a Daily Wire subscriber, be sure and send your questions in to Alicia.
	She will get them to us.
	If you're not a Daily Wire subscriber, however...
	What are you waiting on?
	Now is the time.
	If you want to get 15% off of your Daily Wire membership, head over to dailywire.com right now.
	Use the promo code backstage because this show is called...
	Backstage.
	We'll give you 15% off.
	You will become a subscriber.
	You will be able to beam Elisha all of your questions.
	You will also be able to talk to us after the show.
	We have this new feature on the website that allows us to do live chats with our all-access members.
	We're going to be able to...
	It's almost like a Reddit AMA. You write in your questions, we write back responses.
	This will be the third time that we've done it following this show.
	And I love it.
	I think it's a great addition.
	It's really fun.
	When we take the questions live, you can only fit so many into the show.
	When all four of us are able to engage in this chat feature and really go directly to some of our...
	We'll crank through 100 questions on this thing.
	Oh yeah, we answer at least 100 questions.
	So head over to dailywire.com slash backstage.
	Use the promo code backstage to get 15% off, but only if you do it over the next half hour during the duration of this show.
	That's the only way you're going to be able to get that.
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	They will have greater concerns, however, than not only not being able to join us for our...
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	I said we were going to go to Elisha.
	You're never supposed to telecast when you make a mistake.
	You're just supposed to seamlessly act as though I had never offered to pitch it to Elisha, and now we just go into another news story.
	But they keep trying to tell...
	They're in my ear saying, don't go to Elisha, don't go to Elisha.
	They're putting on the teleprompter...
	Elisha isn't ready.
	Elisha isn't ready.
	And I'm so desperate to know where the hell is Elisha.
	Where did she go?
	I just can't help but say.
	I don't know, folks.
	She'll get to your questions here just a little bit.
	She walked out after that crazy joke.
	The crazy joke.
	That's what it was.
	I actually, with that crazy joke, I was about to put out a disclaimer to Media Matters.
	But they're all still at Soleimani's funeral, so I actually don't.
	We're not even watching.
	It's fine.
	We were talking before the show, and it's actually something that I think when we talk about it live on the air, it's always one of the more engaging things that we have.
	But because the news is usually so overwhelming, we don't get a chance.
	There were a lot of great movies made this year.
	There were, yes.
	You know, my son Spencer has a theory that the...
	The fact that the Marvel Universe has played itself out has opened up, not the money because the money is already being spent, but it has opened up the imagination in Hollywood because it really was remarkable.
	The end of this year, one good adult movie after another about real people with real problems, you know, came out and it was great.
	Great stuff.
	I finally had a chance to watch a bunch of them at the end of the year.
	So what was your favorite movie of the year, Drew?
	Boy, that's a tough one.
	I really enjoyed Knives Out, which I didn't think was a great film, but I just thought it was incredibly entertaining, and as a mystery writer, I usually sit there and pick these things apart, but I was sitting there going, no, this is good.
	This is a good mystery story.
	It's incredibly well plotted, actually, and it's a very complex plot, and he makes it accessible, the director.
	And as I was saying before the show, it's the first film that I've seen in a long time where I actually felt like the filmmaker's only motive was to entertain.
	Which I'm so grateful for that.
	Absolutely.
	I think that my favorite film this year was the Tarantino film, and I'm not a Tarantino fan, but I thought Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the first film with really...
	Great values.
	It was just imbued.
	I mean, that's not what makes a film great, except that it did move the movie.
	That they had these characters that you really liked, who rose above what they were, and who rose above the Hollywood culture.
	And it had, the last 15 minutes, I laughed without stopping.
	I mean, I just laughed, I sat there and laughed.
	It's really the only place in the movie where there's brutal violence.
	Because normally with a Tarantino film, you expect brutal violence the entire way.
	But it's really violence-free up until the last 15 minutes.
	And then it is brutal violence.
	And my wife, who despises brutal violence, she was watching it and she was cringing.
	But she was also laughing hysterically.
	It was really funny.
	The final punchline of the movie is so unbelievably funny.
	And it's well set up.
	You know, what's so great about that movie...
	That was actually my favorite movie of the year, too.
	And I don't think it's a great movie.
	But I thought it was very, very good.
	It's about the exact moment when Hollywood completely went crazy.
	It was right there.
	And so you saw what was being lost and you saw what was coming in.
	And that's sort of the theme, right?
	So for those who don't know sort of the setup of the film, basically Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski live next door to Leonardo DiCaprio, who's a failing 1950s, 60s Western star who's...
	He's Clint Eastwood before he comes there, yeah.
	Right, because he ends up doing some spaghetti westerns and all of this.
	And he's actually a very good actor, right?
	He's supposed to be a very good actor, very talented guy, but he's being left behind by the Art Nouveau crowd.
	And his stunt double, who is Brad Pitt, is this old World War II veteran who's incredibly competent in everything he does.
	He's just incredibly competent, but...
	Doesn't actually have a life.
	It just kind of sits around as chauffeur for Leonardo DiCaprio.
	And it's about how these two guys, one of whom portrays the manly man version on TV but isn't actually all that manly, and the one who actually is the manly man who makes sure that the fake manly man can keep safe.
	It's about how these two guys are being left behind by Hollywood, and if only Hollywood, because it's an alternative history like all of Tarantino's movies have now become, the entire thing is basically if 1970s Hollywood had not thrown away the masculinity that was inherent in 1950s and 60s Hollywood, it would have saved Hollywood as opposed to destroying it.
	It had a scene at the ranch.
	It involves the Manson.
	The Manson family, yeah.
	It has a scene out at the Manson Ranch, which may have been the most suspenseful scene I've seen in a movie in 10 years.
	It was literally Hitchcockian.
	It was quiet.
	It was understated.
	It reminded me of the last scene of Notorious, which is just a guy walking down a flight of stairs, and you just sit there on the edge of your seat.
	Well, Tarantino does have a gift for that, right?
	There's that Christoph Waltz scene in Inglourious Bastards.
	Yes, in the opening scene.
	It's also unbelievably intense.
	But this was quieter.
	I mean, that was a setup.
	This was just like you understood, first of all, the incredible decency of the Brad Pitt character, what he was doing, and you understood he was surrounded by evil.
	And it was just a man doing the right thing in the midst of evil, and you sat there...
	Man, if you don't like hippies, this is the movie for you.
	It was interesting.
	He just won the award last night.
	I forget what it was, Producers Guild or something, or Directors Guild, who knows.
	He wins the award and he goes up and he dedicates the movie to John Milius, who is one of the great directors in Hollywood history and one of the only conservatives in town.
	And for me, it sort of confirmed what I thought, which is that this really is a lowercase C conservative movie.
	It's about conserving something that was lost.
	The other conservative movie of this year that they didn't realize was conservative, because they never realized they're making a conservative film.
	It's just a conservative film.
	Ferrari, which is just a great American film about cars and men, and men doing manly things that are responsible, and building cool stuff.
	And doing so in order to promote America as opposed to foreigners.
	And it's such a uniquely conservative film.
	And it's so funny because Hollywood thinks of it as, well, this is them speaking up against the nastiness of capitalism because the sort of quasi-villain of the film is Henry Ford II, who was, in fact, not a very good CEO. But the entire premise of the film is that it's the capitalist enterprise that gets this thing going and off the ground and allows them to build this really cool stuff.
	What I loved about it, though, was it was an honest...
	I mean, art is always a little culture critical.
	You know, art doesn't just celebrate a culture.
	And what I liked about it is it showed capitalism in all the good of it and all the bad of it.
	It showed you how corporate society can crush individuals and not let them do what they can do best.
	But it also showed you how the competition that it inspires builds things that are wonderful.
	You know, and it was really honest.
	It was an honest film.
	I thought it was quite wonderful.
	And both of those movies you should see in the theater.
	And 1917 I've seen.
	Yeah, I've seen that day.
	Which I saw in an early showing.
	And it's great.
	It's great, which I did not expect it to be.
	Because the director is Sam Mendes, I think, who directed it.
	So I'm not a huge Sam Mendes fan.
	Like, American Beauty, I think, is one of the worst films ever.
	Oh, it's one of the worst films ever.
	But this film is actually quite good.
	And the entire kind of...
	Conceited the film from a directorial point of view is that it is one long tracking shot for two hours.
	And so that gets unbelievably creative because they're full-on battle scenes happening through this one tracking shot for two hours.
	It doesn't feel as gimmicky as it did in Birdman.
	Remember Birdman, which won Best Picture, and it's incredibly gimmicky.
	It's just not a good movie.
	This actually...
	I like Birdman.
	Of course you do.
	All you theater people.
	Birdman's a load of bullshit.
	Anyway...
	Birdman is garbage.
	This is not a garbage film.
	And it does have honest, actual respect for soldiers in World War I without any of the sort of revisionist history where the British soldiers were duped and morons of the higher-ups, the sort of paths of glory view of World War I. It really doesn't have that.
	It's these guys who are being brave for the sake of being brave and are fighting some pretty vicious people because it turns out the Hun was not a great folks.
	They're pretty brutal on the Germans in the movie.
	Oh, yeah.
	And I have to disagree a little bit with this.
	I will agree with you in that I really enjoyed the movie.
	I liked every minute of it.
	It's unbelievably well shot.
	It's beautiful.
	The performance by the main actor is really outstanding.
	However, I left the movie, I won't give any spoilers, but I left the movie feeling that it was more a video game than a movie.
	And my takeaway from that is that the movie, like so many movies today...
	It just became about how skillful the movie was rather than about telling a full story with full character and full plot.
	I think that it's not a film that could have ever been made in the past.
	The ability to do a movie that's essentially a guy running for two hours and actually have that be Kelly.
	Technically impossible.
	Did you see Richard Jewell?
	No, you said this.
	You know, it's funny.
	When it came out and it bombed, I cringed because I knew what all the stories were going to say.
	It was Clint Eastwood's biggest bomb since True Crime, which was based on my novel.
	But the only difference was True Crime was not one of Clint's best movies, you know?
	And this was a really good movie and the performances are unbelievable.
	Olivia Wilde, who plays the kind of wild, crazy reporter who'll do anything for a story...
	And I've worked with a lot of those women, basically.
	And she gets that character.
	She is so real.
	She's almost three-dimensional.
	She almost comes out of the screen and stands there in front of you.
	It's an unbelievable performance.
	The lead guy, whose name I don't even know, who plays Richard Jewell, It's like an uncanny performance.
	It's just like you forget that he's acting.
	I know that's a cliché thing to say, but you actually forget that he's not the guy.
	It's a really good movie.
	And the thing that's different, the funny thing about True Crime is True Crime is about a white guy who's put on, the novel is about a white guy who's put on death row because they don't want any more black guys on death row and they make a mistake, you know?
	And they changed it in the movie and made him a black guy, which ruined the entire story.
	Yeah.
	In this one, Clint just goes for it.
	He just says, the press is dishonest.
	They stink.
	Ordinary Americans are where it's at.
	And it's really, really beautiful.
	Did any of you guys see Joker?
	Yes.
	What did you guys think of it?
	I didn't like Taxi Driver, and I thought this was kind of a better version of Taxi Driver.
	Right.
	I wasn't totally taken with it.
	I mean, I think he's a good actor.
	He's kind of limited in at least the types of roles he plays.
	He's pretty much always playing some version of the Joker, this very intense, introspective, kind of weird guy.
	But I just felt it didn't...
	I hate the superhero movies.
	I felt it didn't really do respect to anything about that superhero story and that superhero genre.
	So I can't say I loved it.
	Yeah, so this was sort of my take as well, which was that on its own, if it was just a movie about a dispossessed guy going nuts, which is basically the movie, then it works from that perspective.
	And there is a scene with Robert De Niro near the end that really is a truly great scene.
	It's a phenomenon.
	It is a really, really good scene.
	And it is, again, a commentary on the media and what the media do.
	And any time they comment...
	I mean, there may be a theme that you've noticed in the show, which is that anything that rips on the media, we're in favor of.
	Yeah.
	But my biggest problem with the film is that because the Joker is a Batman character, the entire question is, does he provide a worthy rival to Batman?
	For me, as a fan of the Batman series.
	And so Heath Ledger, obviously his character is insanely clever.
	He's pre-planning everything.
	He's always three steps ahead.
	So the fact that Batman has a hard time handling him makes a lot of sense.
	In this movie, basically, the Joker is a loser with severe mental illness who sort of lucks into these plots.
	I mean, he's pretty feckless.
	I mean, he's not good at what he does, and he's not subtle about what he does.
	And so the idea that Bruce Wayne, who's supposed to be this genius billionaire with unlimited resources, would have any trouble at all capturing the Joker or putting him down, that didn't play for me.
	But otherwise, I kind of thought it was overrated, which I was shocked by, because I thought I was going to like it based on how the fact the critics were kind of ripping on it.
	In fairness...
	The Joker always gets caught by Batman.
	Almost every Batman story starts with, at Arkham Asylum, in the bottom cell.
	And the Joker's actually already caught.
	And then he's like, I'm going to escape!
	It has to be a challenge, right?
	Right.
	Talk about a conservative film, though.
	I mean, that film basically took place in the New York of the 70s and 80s.
	The indication of its corruption is the porno films being shown all over the place.
	And basically, the Joker is an anti-capitalist.
	And they show Bruce Wayne's father, I guess it is.
	They show him as kind of a jerk.
	But still, I mean...
	He's not wrong.
	He's a jerk, but he's not wrong.
	Yeah, exactly.
	He's not really unfair or unjust.
	You're right.
	And it was kind of a rebuke to that film that I hate so much, V is for Vendetta.
	Oh, V for Vendetta is a piece of crap.
	Rebuke for that, because it shows the guys in the masks are really the bad guys, you know?
	And I thought that was really worthwhile, too.
	So you guys know who's back?
	Elisha.
	Elisha, where were you?
	Well, you know, I go to a special pump room, because if I were to do that on camera, you guys should charge more for subscribers.
	But I am back, and I really think that...
	I was not expecting that.
	I just have to say, of all of the answers...
	Just being honest.
	But I am back, and I think that you guys really forgot to tell the audience, I know your favorite film that was totally unrecognized was Truly Cats.
	Let's be honest.
	Magical Mr.
	Mistoffelees' performance was just stunning.
	If there's one thing that makes the work of Andrew Lloyd Webber even more sublime, it's beautiful Hollywood starlets.
	Teetering on the backside of the uncanny divide.
	Doing sexual impressions of felines.
	I'm in.
	T.S. Eliot, who is actually a good poet, must be rolling over in his grave that this is what remains...
	He wrote those little awful poems for his grandkid or something.
	Meant to be hidden away in a box somewhere.
	Never.
	And then Andrew Lloyd Webber basically blows up his whole legacy.
	I actually don't hate Andrew Lloyd Webber.
	I hate cats.
	I hate cats, but I like Phantom of the Opera.
	Phantom is well-crafted.
	Cats is just...
	Absolutely.
	Hey, hold on.
	Wait, are you telling me that...
	Just listen to these poetic lyrics.
	Jellicle, jellicle cats.
	Jellicle cats.
	Jellicle cats.
	It's like about fiber.
	You don't like that?
	Alicia, what are our DailyWire.com subscribers telling us?
	Well, continuing with the Golden Globes Hollywood conversation, people are, of course, all week long have been talking about how Netflix was the most nominated studio at the Globes, yet they didn't walk away with a single win.
	Do you guys agree with that decision?
	It's not the Academy.
	What is it?
	The Foreign Press, whatever it is called.
	Do you guys agree with that?
	Or do you think any of the Netflix things that were nominated should have won?
	No, none of them should have won.
	Marriage Story is the most overrated film of the year by a very, very large margin.
	And maybe close second is Irishman.
	Oh, my God.
	Just awful, interminable, nine hours long.
	It's like Wagnerian ring cycle with less action.
	Totally self-referential and not entertaining.
	It's awful in every way.
	I will watch those movies.
	I'm kind of a sucker for those types of movies, even if I don't really...
	I don't love the morality of them, but if I get caught in the middle of Goodfellas, even though I don't even like the movie Goodfellas, I will still watch the movie Goodfellas.
	If I got caught in the middle of Irishman, You could flick the channel so easily.
	There's no rewatchability to it at all.
	It's just awful.
	And A Marriage Story is the most...
	It's like...
	Have any of you guys seen...
	I know you've seen it, Drew, but have any of you guys seen Kramer vs.
	Kramer?
	Yeah, sure.
	1979 film with Dustin Hoffman and...
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's a good movie.
	Right.
	It is.
	And Meryl Streep.
	Yeah.
	It's like Kramer vs.
	Kramer if both characters were Meryl Streep.
	You mean like nutty neurotic?
	Nutty, leaving to find myself, abandoning my child.
	I have to go find my fulfillment.
	That's what they both are.
	They're both awful theater people who make absolute pap.
	And then they are like, well, I have to stay in New York to pursue my career.
	And the woman's like, but I have to leave to go to L.A. to pursue television.
	And then the child is like, what the?
	At no point anywhere in the movie does anybody go, by the way, we have this child.
	Wouldn't it be nice if one of us sublimated our own desires to take care of our children like any decent parent on planet Earth would?
	And the fact that this is celebrated as the bravery, the bravery, I couldn't stand it.
	I do want to say one good thing about the Irishman.
	I once asked my brother, Is there, in self-examination, is there a gangster movie so bad that I wouldn't like it?
	And finally I found one and I feel so much better now.
	I think there was a really brave choice that Scorsese made, which was to make young De Niro and young Pesci hobble around like people.
	I just didn't expect it.
	Honestly, I think I'm saying that they use the de-aging technology, and I was like, but Robert De Niro looks the same at 20 as he does at 80.
	Like, literally the same, in the face, too.
	They de-age him, and he doesn't look like...
	We all know what 20-year-old Robert De Niro looks like, because he was in the movies when he was 25.
	And he was skinny, and...
	And he was a very good-looking guy.
	And now it just looks like Robert De Niro with a lot of makeup.
	And Robert De Niro old is Robert De Niro with a little bit of makeup.
	And the scene where Robert De Niro kicks the crap out of the guy on the curb, it was at that point that Scorsese should have just gone and reshot the entire scene.
	Because him kicking the crap out of the guy on the curb, he's supposed to be maybe 40 at that point in the film.
	And he does it in front of his daughter, so it's kind of a crucial scene.
	He can't just cut it.
	It looks like your grandfather trying to avoid breaking a hip while dancing the Macarena.
	It's the most ridiculous thing in the entire world.
	That was too real.
	Alicia.
	All right, so now we found out that unfortunately the Oscars for a second year in a row will not have a host.
	And Ricky Gervais said that he will no longer host the Globes.
	But do you think he will?
	Will he be back?
	Will the Oscars ever have a host?
	What's going to happen?
	I'm going to host the Oscars.
	Because I've never made a comment like Kevin Hart has made.
	Oh, wait, that's all I do.
	I'm sorry.
	I forgot.
	I don't think Ricky Gervais will ever come back.
	I think Ricky Gervais is the kind of guy who understands the power of going out on top.
	I think he just made his statement.
	The Oscars, of course the Oscars will have a host again.
	They'll have a host again when we're on the other side of Me Too and Trump.
	Right now...
	That host's name will be Hannah Gadsby, the funniest...
	Redefining comedy is everything that is not funny.
	So you've just been getting it wrong for thousands.
	Comedy means not funny.
	It's tragedy.
	It's tragedy.
	Correct.
	Correct.
	Is Hollywood going to ever be able to get out of the box they put themselves in?
	You see, this is why I feel that conservatives, if there were no leftist, conservatives would be the stupidest people in the country.
	Because this is the moment for us to build an industry that makes good films that people like.
	And they're openly patriotic and openly, you know.
	But forget dramas.
	How about comedies?
	Really?
	The space to run in comedy right now is just endless.
	It's endless.
	Because the left has banned everything.
	And you're getting great comedy specials right now, by Right.
	A lot of great comedy specials that everybody can watch.
	And instead, what you're getting from Hollywood is, well, what if we remade Ghostbusters but with women?
	And now there's this new movie that it's a remake, and I'm trying to remember what it's of.
	And it's about female CEOs.
	And it's like every movie has to be a comedy in which the conceit is that it's women basically not being funny as women.
	Because there are movies where women are funny as women.
	But women being men.
	And all of the lines can be written for men.
	It's just that it's women playing the parts.
	And this is supposed to be funny.
	The problem is that when stuff happens to women, it's not funny in the same way as when it happens to men.
	I mean, I've said this before on the show, but my wife dies laughing when I clock myself in the head.
	If I walk into the kitchen and I smack my face on a...
	And this is for the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers.
	If you walk in and you clock yourself in the head, everybody in the audience laughs.
	Or if you get hit in the crotch, everybody laughs.
	It's funny.
	If a woman clocks herself in the head, no one's going to laugh because your first concern is, is she okay?
	Right.
	That's a really good point.
	And you know, like, they used to make those films, Three Men and a Baby.
	Men changing diapers is funny.
	And feminists would say, what's so funny about it?
	Well, it's just funny.
	Because they do it badly.
	They do it badly.
	They're not used to it.
	You know, I actually...
	Well, that's the other thing, is that comedy is very largely about people failing to live up to expectation.
	So it's men trying to do something and then being really bad at it, and that's really funny.
	But the conceit of Hollywood is that women both can be funny and also cannot be bad at anything.
	Right.
	So there can never be a comedy about a person who's just insanely competent at things.
	That's not funny in the slightest, right?
	That's actually just called a drama.
	That's the difference between Incredibles and Incredibles 2.
	Incredibles 1 was before the Obama PC era, so the mother had flaws and problems.
	And in Incredibles 2, she doesn't.
	And the dad is terrible at everything.
	I'm actually less hopeful than you are that Hollywood will recover at some point.
	Kind of to your point on art forms.
	I think art forms have their moment.
	Yeah, movies are gone.
	And movies are gone.
	And there will be something out of Hollywood, I guess, or there will be some new version of Hollywood.
	But I think the movies are pretty much done.
	Did you guys see what happened to me this week on The Witcher thing?
	Yeah.
	Oh my gosh.
	Unbelievable.
	Well, because I read Newsweek so often, so I saw that hippie song.
	Forbes went after me.
	You know, they have this female character who goes out into what is essentially a medieval battle with a sword and comes back covered in blood and eats a, you know, takes a, rips off a leg off a turkey and bites it.
	So why not just make it, it's a man.
	That's a man character, you know, because a woman- Does she have magical powers or anything?
	No, no, nothing, nothing.
	She's just like a normal A female who walks into a battle with a sword in 1400 and walks away fine.
	And she's about your size, you know, and a woman.
	So she's not like Brienne of Tarth or something.
	She's not six foot nine.
	No, that was a great character because Brienne of Tarth had this sadness about not being a feminine person.
	Also, it's credible when she beats the crap out of someone.
	She's eight feet tall.
	Right, exactly.
	So I said, you know, that woman would be killed in a moment.
	Fury that was unleashed on me.
	I was thinking, no.
	And they were challenging me to a sword fight.
	And I said, you know, if you're in a medieval sword fight, you're not going to be fighting a 65-year-old scribe.
	Another warrior who's twice your size.
	And I just thought, like, why do we have to lie?
	You know, I mean, there's so many powerful women characters, so many ways to make women admirable and respectable and make you care about them.
	Characters, when you watch the movie The Ring, The fact that she has a man who does all the heavy lifting for her makes you admire her courage because she's going into a place where she can't really fight like a man can and it's just that you're worried for her.
	By the way, in real life, the stuff that women do that's really courageous is just as courageous as the stuff that men do.
	It's just different stuff.
	That's right.
	This is so stupid.
	But this comes back to the fact that when very serious people say very serious things, people believe it.
	There are people in our company, I've had these conversations with some of the young men who work for us in this company who don't know What is just simple fact that men are stronger physically than women?
	On average.
	Of course, there's always exceptions.
	Of course, but you have to say on average that people aren't morons.
	What he means is on average, obviously.
	Yes, Brienne of Tarth is stronger than the scrawny 5'3 guy.
	Like, come on.
	And that's always their answer.
	Well, here's a woman who's strong.
	You think like...
	What is that?
	Yeah, look at Joan of Arc.
	You, Joan of Arc?
	I don't think so.
	Even when you watch Star Wars, and you make allowances because of the Force, because there's this magical thing.
	Right.
	But the truth is, if a 90-pound actress swung a bat at a...
	At Adam Driver, who's an ex-military batman.
	At Adam Driver also swinging a bat, the 90-pound actress would eat both bats.
	Right, right.
	It...
	I also love it when, like, so they solved this by giving the woman a bow and arrow.
	Not a compound bow, which a woman could use, because that's a modern piece of technology.
	But bow and arrow.
	I couldn't shoot a freaking bow and arrow.
	It takes so much upper body strength to actually utilize that rudimentary bow and arrow.
	You're taking...
	You're putting women in positions where they're acting as though women have the same level of physical...
	The reason, by the way, that I like Rise of Skywalker is because they actually solved that problem.
	That was the biggest problem with Rey's character, and they solved it.
	I mean, not to give a spoiler, they did solve it.
	I mean, I won't give the spoiler.
	They actually explain why she is great at everything, so she's not just a complete Mary Sue.
	And you're like, okay, that makes sense now.
	I agree.
	But it requires that magic in order for that to be credible at all.
	Otherwise, you're spending six years after Force Awakens going, hold up a second.
	She picks up a sword for the first time and she beats the guy who's been training with the Force.
	Here's what I'll say.
	The most badass fighting women out there won't fight men.
	Of course not.
	The only people who will say, well, here's this badass fighting woman.
	You're saying you could take her?
	Well, no, I'm not saying I could take her.
	But she won't fight men like her.
	That's right.
	You use her as an example, but she wouldn't use herself.
	Do you remember the moment when the Serena Williams controversy blew up?
	Can one of the great female tennis players beat a man?
	And initially she said no, and then later on she sort of turned it into, yes, of course I could.
	They actually did this.
	This happened in 1996.
	There was a battle of the sexes, and the Williams sisters said, we could beat a man who's ranked outside of the top 200.
	So they found a guy who was ranked like 203, named Karsten Brosh.
	He started his morning by playing a round of golf, smoking cigarettes, drinking two beers.
	He then played the Williams sisters back to back.
	He beat one of them 6-2, and he beat the other one 6-1.
	The thing is, if all you respect about women, whether they compete with men, you have no respect for women.
	This gets me.
	It's essentially that Michelle Williams getting up and saying, I had an abortion, so I win a prize.
	That's erasing your womanhood.
	That's not...
	By the way, women are now the majority of medical students for the first time.
	Women are the majority of college students right now.
	This idea that women, in order to prove that they're great at things, have to prove that they are great at all the things that men are great at is just absurd.
	In order to establish parity, do we have to establish that women are going to comprise the same percentage of the firefighting force as men?
	Or can we just be happy that women are the majority of doctors?
	What is the problem here?
	I'm happy that women are the majority of women.
	I think that that's right.
	Well, exactly.
	I mean, they're trying to erase, you know, half of humankind.
	And half that I happen to be particularly fond of.
	The actual irony of the whole thing is that the left hates women.
	They do hate women.
	Of course they do.
	Well, because if all you think of women is the same as a man, that's not respecting women.
	Right.
	Alicia.
	A woman.
	An actual woman.
	An actual woman Elisha.
	An actual woman Elisha.
	And now for the woman's perspective.
	Oh, really?
	Oh, really?
	That could be fun.
	All right.
	Do you guys really think any more Hollywood celebrities are going to follow the Ricky Gervais example and speak out about the hypocrisy or not?
	Yes, but only comedians.
	Only comedians, yeah.
	I think it's actually a really fun time in comedy because nobody's being like, well, there are the handful of people being woke in comedy, including some of the unfunny people that you already mentioned.
	But I hope that this is a, I don't care if my comedians left, right, or center.
	I just want them to be funny and offend everyone.
	To be funny.
	I want to say on Ricky Gervais' behalf, I know he's not actually a conservative, but he does own the trees that border my property and he lets me cut them down every year so I can see L.A. So I really admire that.
	Not conservative.
	But of course, one of the things, the mistake that we make on the right is any time someone shows any movement outside of left-wing orthodoxy is we try to suddenly claim them.
	Of course, Ricky Gervais isn't conservative.
	And the thing is, I don't actually want to claim them, but I would like him to notice.
	He sent out a tweet saying, how can I be right-wing when I'm making fun of corporations?
	Name a corporation that's not left-wing at this point.
	I mean, big corporations are all left-wing because they caught on to the fact that big government is good for big business.
	Yeah, well, one of the things, too, is I hope that they notice who it is who isn't attacking them when they say things, even the things that we don't agree with.
	Like our friend Bridget Phatasy, you know, on Twitter, she's one of the best...
	I think she's the best follow on Twitter.
	But she does do this one thing that sort of irritates me, where she's like, you know...
	I don't have a home on the left or the right.
	And I'm like, no, we all love you on the right.
	Yeah, you certainly do.
	We disagree with you.
	Yeah, that's the thing.
	But we actually love you and we're glad you're out there saying the things that we disagree with.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't mean to pick on her because she's really hilarious.
	She's great, yeah.
	Everybody should follow her.
	Alicia.
	All right, now back to serious issues.
	Do you guys think that the focus on Iran right now on the news is taking away from all the Democratic focus on the impeachment trial?
	Yeah.
	What impeachment?
	The fact that the impeachment has fallen completely out of the headlines, it had very little to do with Iran, actually.
	It was already sort of falling out of the headlines.
	They tried to revivify it with some of this Bolton stuff.
	But the fact is that we're not going to know what Bolton has to say until Bolton says it.
	And him playing sort of coy with the media and coy with the Democrats...
	Everybody's sort of speculating.
	If he has some sort of bombshell, my guess is that we'd already know about it.
	The bottom line is you can't keep impeachment as the number one headline in the country when you won't send the articles.
	Nancy Pelosi has stopped impeachment.
	Until Nancy Pelosi stops stopping impeachment.
	Even Democrats, like Dianne Feinstein, was like, just send this.
	What are you doing?
	It's an emergency constitutional crisis.
	Oh, now we're going on vacation.
	I think also what happened is...
	As they've done so many times in the Trump era, they just miscalculated during the entirety of impeachment, Trump's numbers just steadily increased.
	They realized it was a miscalculation.
	This is why it's hilarious when after the president kills Salami, everybody starts talking about how, oh, he's just doing this because he's so afraid of impeachment.
	The president is going to dance.
	Yes.
	He's going to dance into the Capitol.
	First of all, Bill Clinton actually did that in 1998 when he bombed Iraq.
	Yeah, that's true.
	So he actually did that to get impeachment out of it.
	I remember.
	I was eight years old.
	I asked my mother.
	I said, Mom, are we going to war with Iraq?
	She goes, Oh, no, Michael.
	The president's being impeached.
	Every president has to bomb Iraq.
	And Bill Clinton's being impeached, so he wants it out of the newspapers.
	Donald Trump doesn't need impeachment out of the newspapers.
	Donald Trump doesn't want impeachment.
	He doesn't want it out of the way.
	He loves it.
	I will say, just on a slightly off-topic note, I am enjoying watching the winnowing of the Democratic field.
	Are you guys enjoying this as much as I am?
	Oh, yeah.
	I miss...
	You just had to bring up that Julian Castro, my favorite candidate, now he's out of the race.
	Yeah, and I didn't know that he was running until...
	My favorite thing is how the media laments people after they're gone.
	They give him the Soleimani treatment.
	I mean, like...
	I'm going to start calling it that, like the glowing obits.
	I'm just going to call it the Soleimani treatment.
	But it is amazing.
	Like, after Kamala Harris dropped out and she was terrible, it was like, it's so sad that this powerful black woman is no longer in the race.
	And Julian Castro, they wouldn't pay two cents of attention to.
	It's like, well, he was a real radical who was really revolutionizing the campaign.
	As each one of them drops out, it's like, wow, that person was just amazing.
	But this is part of why the media being all on one side is bad for the Democrats, because the Democrats live in this bubble and they do not know what the rest of us are thinking.
	They not only don't know what we believe, you know, they have no idea what we believe, really, because they only pick out the things that offend them.
	But they don't know what ordinary people believe.
	They don't understand what they look like to ordinary people because they get this reflection, this glowing reflection from the press.
	They think, I must be doing great.
	Look at the way Chuck Todd is talking about me.
	And everybody else is going like, you kind of suck.
	But I am getting particularly enjoyment from Elizabeth Warren imploding.
	You're getting what?
	Particular enjoyment from Elizabeth.
	She really collapsed.
	She did.
	I mean, four months ago, we were all sitting here going, oh, we may have spent good money on a prop.
	Smart guy.
	And now we're all sitting here going, is anybody going to get that joke?
	You know, the other thing about this is watching the field and predicting who the next guys are going to be.
	The Democrats do nothing before they wake up and call us racist.
	That's what they do.
	They wake up in the morning, they call us racist, then they brush their teeth.
	And we are watching, week by week, every racial minority in the race is dropping out.
	The next one out is Booker, right?
	There's no way Booker's going to last much longer.
	After that, it's going to be Yang.
	I mean, you are going to get to a field where hashtag Democrats are white.
	The one time that the media will acknowledge that Andrew Yang is, in fact, a minority is on the day after he dropped And then they replace him on their cable news networks with another Asian guy.
	Did you guys see that?
	Just a random Asian guy.
	No, I missed this one.
	So they showed, it was on MSNBC, yeah?
	Yeah, seriously.
	They showed the whole Democrat lineup.
	Oh, no.
	Yeah, MSNBC. What did you say?
	I think it was either CNBC or MSNBC. CNBC. Yeah, and it was just a stock photo.
	They put Asian man in it, too.
	Oh, no.
	Someone else, too.
	Was it Klobuchar?
	In the same graphic?
	I'm going to admit that I don't know.
	In their defense, I don't know.
	They just put a woman up there.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Klobuchar.
	So, if you are not a Daily Wire subscriber, tonight is the night.
	Head over to dailywire.com.
	Click on that subscribe button.
	Use the promo code backstage during the rest of our broadcast tonight, and you will get 15% off.
	And what do you get for your trouble?
	Well, you get to ask us questions like this one from Elisha.
	All right, these guys want to know, do you think that anyone will run as a third-party candidate, and could that help or hurt the Democrats?
	I don't think it's going to happen, or if it does, it's not going to move the needle anybody, because they can't really think of who could do it.
	Well, the one person who could do it, who could potentially cause problems, is Bloomberg.
	It seems that he's already chosen his side.
	Yeah.
	I mean, there could be people on the right who cause problems.
	If James Mattis were to run, for example...
	That could be a bit of a problem, but he's not going to.
	Trump has 95% approval in the Republican Party.
	Mattis ain't running.
	I think the only people who could plausibly run would hurt the Democrats.
	Could you see a world where Joe Biden gets the nomination and Bernie Sanders just being super old and super curmudgeonly and super pissed just runs third party?
	Offbeat, but I could see it.
	It's not impossible.
	He's a nut, and he's getting up there, and he's thinking, how many more times can I do this?
	Forever more times.
	Yeah, 10 or 12.
	Forever more times.
	Training Jedi for 800 years, has he been?
	And he's a genuine communist.
	I mean, he actually does believe what he believes.
	So he might actually think, well, these mere liberals aren't really...
	It is interesting.
	We didn't talk about it, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did say that only in America could she and Joe Biden belong to the same...
	Political party.
	I mean, you can imagine them playing out.
	China.
	You can imagine them playing out that line of thinking and giving Bernie a third party run.
	Especially if it starts to get later in the race and Biden's really trailing Trump.
	Here's what I could see.
	If the Democrats were to pull on Bernie what they pulled on him in 2016, I can imagine him going, screw it, I'm just going to burn this.
	It's outlandish, but it's not impossible.
	It's going to be tougher because they have reformed the superdelegates, at least that's reportedly what we're hearing.
	It seems less likely than in, say, 2016, but I don't know, Bernie might be his last shot.
	Listen, Bernie could just actually win the thing, and what could help him win it is actually that after stealing it from him in 2016, the DNC had to make internal changes, which will make it harder to steal it from him this time.
	Seriously.
	They didn't anticipate that he could mount another successful run.
	You know what's kind of interesting?
	The Clintons still seem to have a certain amount of power within the party and had a lot of power within the party until the defeat of Hillary Clinton.
	Obama doesn't really seem to have a lot of sway in the party.
	People like him.
	They think of him fondly in the Democrat Party, but when he opens his mouth and says something that's not leftist enough, they attack him.
	But the reason is because Barack Obama has not projected any future interest.
	You have to understand that all the power that the Clintons had for that 12-year period...
	Was that they might come back.
	...is because they might come back in the form of...
	And nobody's afraid of Michelle.
	Well, if Michelle started openly...
	Yeah, this is right.
	If she started openly seeking office, if Michelle ran for Senate, suddenly Barack Obama would have a ton of power in the DNC again.
	Right.
	But right now, he's out to pasture.
	He seems happy with his Netflix deal.
	Yeah, he's making millions of dollars.
	So, I mean, at some point you have enough money, but I guess...
	He has not found that point.
	Alicia, we're going to take three rapid-fire questions.
	Alrighty, so most of us are millennials, minus the God King and Drew, but what do you guys think is going to happen to the generation after millennials?
	Most of us have jobs.
	But what do you guys think is going to happen to the generation after us millennials, especially with all this talk of gender conformity and LGBTQ things that are being taught in schools, etc.?
	I think that the generation that proceeds the millennials are actually a riper target for us.
	The hope lies in the Zoomers.
	There is no question.
	They grew up in this sort of leftist monopoly on thought.
	And they seem to be pushing back.
	Now, listen, are they affected by it?
	Yeah.
	Do they believe some things that, yeah, we lost.
	We lost.
	And because of us losing for a generation, they believe some stuff that we wish they didn't.
	Are they going to give up those beliefs?
	No.
	But does that mean that they're going to be little marching line soldiers the way that the millennials have been for the left?
	I don't think they will be.
	I think that's right.
	And I think that's because a lot of them have older siblings.
	And the older siblings are millennials.
	And those millennials are obnoxious.
	Yes.
	I mean, they're the older sibling who has just taken away the ice cream and telling them that they need to eat their vegetables.
	And the vegetables are not only horrible tasting, but they're also bad for you.
	Yeah.
	And all these younger people are looking at the people who are just one generation above.
	And they're saying, these people are boring as all hell.
	This is the thing.
	Leftism is so boring.
	It's so boring.
	And the other thing is, people forget, you know, recently I'm sure you saw J.K. Rowling spoke some truth to transgender people and then stood up for her truth, didn't let them cancel.
	She didn't speak up for her truth.
	She spoke the truth, yeah.
	And Vox said, has she tarnished the Harry Potter legacy?
	And I thought, you know, Harry Potter is going to last as long as it entertains people.
	This transgender thing, it's a fad.
	It'll be gone.
	I mean, at some point, the truth will out.
	The truth comes back.
	And it's not that some people won't have these problems.
	When you say it'll go away, you just mean the whole societal movement to suggest that biological women are men and biological women are women.
	This is a fad.
	These are the things that the only thing that's remembered about them is the people who made fun of them.
	You know, there is actually a great deal of hope in the Zoomers in increasing despair.
	There was a piece in the New York Times, came out just yesterday, about how young Americans are depressed, anxious, and killing themselves.
	I mean, young person suicide is way up.
	It's up 70% or something.
	What I mean by that actually being a sign of hope, ultimately, even though right now it's very damaging, very painful, is because this is a wide cultural phenomenon.
	It's not merely a pharmaceutical or a psychological one.
	It is a cultural phenomenon that's happening.
	You have a whole generation that has grown up with the totalizing idea of secular liberalism.
	And they're not just seeing, ah, the economy's not doing well, ah, the tax rates.
	They're actually feeling a deep personal pain that is wrought by this culture.
	And I think they're waking up pretty clearly and saying, something here is broken, something's rotten, we need a new way.
	That was number one.
	Alicia, give us number two.
	Alright, here's a fun question.
	Do you guys listen to music while you read, or do you read in silence?
	I read in silence.
	When I listen to music, I actually like to listen to music.
	I rarely have it on in the background, and I love to read, so I read quietly by myself.
	I read in silence, but I write with music.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	I can't do that because the rhythms get in my head.
	Well, I mean, it depends what kind of music you're listening to.
	If you're listening to something that is very regular, you can't listen to Beethoven while you're writing.
	You can listen to early Mozart and Bach.
	Bach you can do it because it's very rhythmic, so it's just very, very regular, so it's perpetual motion.
	I almost exclusively write to Bach.
	Yeah.
	I throw on the Goldberg variations and write a screenplay.
	I cannot write and have music on because the rhythms of the music get into my head.
	If it's Flava Flav or Public Enemy, then I can write to it.
	You absolutely can't have anything with lyrics.
	Right.
	That was two.
	What is three?
	So no Lizzo or Nicki Minaj for y'all when you're writing those screenplays?
	Or any other time.
	Okay.
	Final question.
	Who are those people?
	What do you think that the odds are of Republicans taking back the House in 2020?
	What are the odds of the Republicans taking back the House in 2020?
	How many seats need to turn, Ben?
	Well, let's see.
	The Democrats, they'd have to pick up 20 seats?
	Something like that?
	15 to 20 seats?
	It's not that many.
	15 to 20 seats?
	It depends.
	I mean, if Trump were to win a sweeping victory, then of course they would take back the House.
	I think that the...
	The likelihood right now, if you had to put money on the 2020 election, I think there's a very high likelihood that what you actually see is a pretty close repeat of the 2016 election, namely that Trump loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College.
	The reason I say that is because every Democrat in California and New York will vote, and there are lots of them.
	But it doesn't matter how many of them vote in California and New York because they won all those votes last time, so that doesn't matter.
	I think that Trump has a good shot of winning all the swing states.
	The problem with that, of course, is that there are congressional seats in all of those states, in New York and in California.
	And it seems unlikely to me that a lot of those congressional seats are going to swing back to Trump.
	I think that the highest likelihood is that after 2020, and again, who the hell knows?
	I mean, I lost a bunch of money on 2016, but my best guess would be that at this point, Trump wins re-election.
	The Republicans do not regain the House.
	The Republicans hold the Senate.
	See, I think if we had the vote today, I think everything is so unpredictable because we know Trump blows himself up.
	All these things can happen.
	But if we had the vote today, I think we'd win back the House.
	I think right now, Donald Trump would win.
	Well, if you mean today, the greatest news cycle Donald Trump has had in the presidency.
	I agree.
	Absolutely.
	I do think that Trump is, right now, it's his to lose.
	You know, it's shocking.
	Over the holiday, I kept reading the newspaper and I kept saying, that's all good news.
	Because in the...
	Because all the journalists were gone for Christmas.
	Well, all the journalists go away.
	And also the news quiets down.
	So the news, the real news kind of rises to the long-term stories rise to the surface.
	The economy is unbelievable.
	It's unbelievable.
	No, I was doing the math in my head today.
	Just the basic categories of what you want looking into a presidential election.
	You've got a booming economy.
	You've got the head of ISIS dead.
	You've got the head of Iran's military dead.
	You've got 187 good judges, including two Supreme Court judges.
	You've got record low unemployment.
	You've got wages rising for the first time in about 10 years.
	Your 401k is up $89.
	My 401k is up $89.
	That's more money than I get my salary.
	I think we actually have to conclude, right now, election being held today, This guy is an excellent president.
	You know what's interesting, too, by the way?
	I wish nothing ill on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but nobody lives forever.
	If she actually dies before the election, it's going to be just one of the most fun...
	Again, I wish nothing ill on her, but it's going to be one fun election.
	You mean the political situation will be fun for those of you in media matters?
	No one...
	They're not here.
	No, I really do wish nothing ill on her.
	I mean that seriously.
	No, of course, of course.
	Listen, the big problem for me is that as we approach 2020...
	No matter how 2020 goes, one half of the country is going to believe that the election was stolen.
	And that is actually dangerous.
	Because the Democrats have been claiming for years at a time that Donald Trump was not legitimately elected in 2016.
	Now they're claiming that because of the Ukraine situation and he should be impeached and all of this stuff, that no matter what happens in 2020, he will have prevented a legitimate vote from taking place.
	Stacey Abrams is the legit governor of Georgia.
	And meanwhile, if the Democrats win a victory, I don't see Trump going away Quietly into that good night, suggesting that the election was purely and fairly held and everything went hunky-dory.
	So I think that the chances of a conflagration post-election, and this is particularly true if something should happen to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
	If something happens to Ginsburg and the future of the Supreme Court rests on the next election, I mean, right now, it's the beginning of the year.
	Everybody's in kind of a good mood coming off of Christmas.
	The impeachment thing seems to be dying down.
	We just had a very good moment for the United States, no matter which party you are of.
	This is a good moment for the United States with regard to Iran.
	You know, Mark this moment.
	This moment where everybody's in a fairly decent mood.
	Remember that even when we're in a good mood, like the country's in a fairly good mood after the holidays, we're all feeling good, beginning of New Year resolutions and everything, people are openly clapping for Richard Spencer because he hates Donald Trump.
	So wait for six months before we start getting to...
	You have to admit, this speaks well of Trump, that Richard Spencer hates him.
	I mean, that really does, because he's...
	Yeah, yeah, I've been waiting for four years for that.
	It's hard to get a smile out of this.
	It was like the Ilhan Omar logic.
	She didn't realize that in going after the Iran sanctions, she was openly declaring war on Israel.
	Joy Behar didn't realize that in celebrating Richard Spencer divorcing himself from Trump, she was allying herself with Richard Spencer.
	And then tomorrow she'll be like, oh, Charlottesville, Charlottesville.
	Yesterday you were literally...
	I do want to sound one cautionary note, and that is, you're right.
	You just outlined terrific foreign policy victories, victory over ISIS, victory over Soleimani.
	When Barack Obama won re-election, all of those statistics that you just cited were inverted.
	If you look back at any historic election in the 20th century, Barack Obama should not have won.
	The misery index was very high.
	The misery index was very high.
	The economic recovery very stalled at that point.
	Obamacare, huge, so unpopular that Scott Brown won Teddy Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts.
	And yet, Obama easily won re-election.
	And it is because of this thing, Drew, this is a conversation you and I have been having sometimes with reasonable voices.
	With louder reasonable voices.
	When a country is as prosperous and as peaceful as this country.
	When people have it this good, when the number one health epidemic among the desperately poor is obesity, when you have the kind of society we have now, which has only rarely existed in all of human history, reality isn't always the determining factor.
	People's perception.
	Why is it that we have things as good as we've ever had them in this country, and yet most people feel like we're on the brink of a civil war?
	Why is it that we've never had anything better?
	People are killing themselves in record numbers.
	It's because some things are not as easy to quantify as the economic index or the job index.
	Material goods are not everything.
	There is a spiritual component and there is a perception component.
	And when you have the very serious people who control almost every facet of popular communication and information distribution, constantly telling you that this is the worst it's ever been, that we're the worst place at the worst point of time, it has a deleterious effect.
	I mean, today's a perfect example of this.
	I will be fascinated to see what the polls say about how this Iran thing went, because the obvious truth of the situation is that this is a huge win for the United States, it's a huge win for Trump.
	That is obviously 100% true.
	But I would not be surprised if at least half the American people believe that we've just narrowly averted World War III here.
	That's possible.
	That's right.
	I have to say, in Ford vs.
	Ferrari, there's a scene where the two guys get in a fight with each other, and they're fighting, and the guy picks up a soup can to hit him in the head and then realizes it's his friend, so instead he hits him in the head with a bag of potato chips.
	Reminded me of you and me arguing.
	Well, I want to thank everybody for tuning in tonight to our Daily Wire backstage.
	Especially thank everyone who went over to dailywire.com and clicked subscribe and got that 15% off promo.
	Thanks to Alicia and everyone who got in questions for us tonight.
	Thanks to you guys, most of you.
	And if you are a subscriber, please log in now and join us.
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	We're going to be back together a little sooner than usual because on February 3rd we have the Iowa caucuses.
	The very next day, on February 4th, we will be broadcasting live for the President's State of the Union.
	We can only pray.
	We can only pray that the impeachment saga has not yet been resolved.
	My two favorite things at once, the State of the Union and Daily Wire backstage.
	I cannot wait.
	But you've got to admit, if they have not resolved impeachment and the president has to walk into a building and face down people who are actively impeaching him, it will be the greatest show.
	It will be fun.
	It will be fun.
	This is a fun presidency.
	He's having a good time.
	Thanks, everybody.
	Hey, you guys want to go out on a fake laugh?
	Yes.
	Oh!
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