Can America ever be united? Will conservatives need a CHAZ from all the CHAZZES? Is there really a silent majority? What does the Left’s endgame look like?
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The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, All That Chaz edition, is right around the corner.
And as the radical communists in the Chaz zone who can't afford anything, you can't afford to miss this episode.
Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, The God King, Jeremy Boring, and special guest Matt Walsh on this important episode.
Take a listen.
Welcome to the Daily Wire backstage.
It is Thursday, June 18th, a somber day for America and indeed the world.
Sir Paul McCartney is 78 years old.
Two of us riding nowhere Spending someone's hard-earned pay You and me Sunday driving Not arriving on Two
of us sending postcards, writing letters on my wall.
You and me burning matches, lifting latches on We're on our way home We're going home You and I have memories Longer than the road that stretches out ahead
Two of us wearing raincoats Standing solo in the sun You and me chasing paper Getting nowhere On our way back home On our way home On our way home
Going home I f***ing hate this show.
Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Music.
I take us really seriously.
I think people, when they want hard-driving news and commentary, they come to The Daily Wire.
Hey, everybody!
Welcome to The Daily Wire backstage and all that jazz.
We are excited to be with you and...
You know, we're really just excited to do anything.
It's a special, of course, Paul McCartney's birthday episode.
And so I'd first like to say thank you to Paul McCartney.
And also, we're sorry.
You know, it's not only Paul McCartney's birthday.
Also born today, our very own Matt Walsh.
And we're really excited.
Matt's going to be joining us a little bit later so we can wish him a happy birthday.
So be sure to stick around for the insights and explanations that you can only get from one Matt Walsh.
As always, I'm joined today by the entire, I think, lovable cast of the Daily Wire Island.
We have Benjamin Shapiro, we have Andrew Flavin, we have future Chaz Warlord Michael Knowles, and we have, you got it, the lovely Elisha Krause.
Hey Elisha, how's it going?
It's good to be here.
You know, I'm pretty religious about listening to all the Daily Wire podcasts every day, and if you and Michael just sang a Beatles song every single day, I might actually listen to the Michael Knowles show every day.
How about that?
I'm a big fan of doing that, even though we all know Ben doesn't like good music, let alone the Beatles.
Everyone, this is your opportunity to become a Daily Wire subscriber.
And why should you do that?
So you can hang out with us and the guys tonight and be sure to get a question in this evening.
We're going to be running a lot of questions by the guys.
guys.
I promise I'm going to try to keep them short and get lots of answers in so you guys can ask them about COVID, about Chaz, about why Michael Knowles hasn't been fired yet, about whether or not Drew likes to powder his head before the show.
And if you're not an All Access Daily Wire member, you are missing out for sure because All Access members get to participate in all of our All Access live discussions where one of our Daily Wire hosts gets to hang out with you guys via live stream.
where one of our Daily Wire hosts gets to hang out with you guys via live stream.
And this Saturday, by the way, there's going to be a really fun one, Bring Your Covfefe, because our very own Michael Knowles will be hosting a Watch Party live stream of President Trump's rally.
And this Saturday, by the way, there's going to be a really fun one.
Bring your covfefe, because our very own Michael Knowles will be hosting a watch party live stream of President Trump's rally.
You know, that the one that the mainstream media is saying is awful and is going to kill grandma, even though riots and protests are totally fine.
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So after backstage, log on over to dailywire.com if you're an all access member, because we're going to be doing one of those super fun discussions again.
And I've been told that there's going to be some new things.
The system is improving.
We're going to be able to respond to people.
It's going to be lots of fun.
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And I'll see you guys in a little bit.
Thanks, Alicia.
One of the things that I really want to focus more with this show is taking more questions from the audience.
That's really part of the beauty of this show is getting to interact with our Daily Wire members and subscribers.
So we are going to try to be better about that.
But there is so much news that we have to talk about today.
We got this unbelievable docket decision.
We have the Bolton leaks.
Which are definitely something that we want to talk about, as well as all the anarchy, chaos, looting, and peaceful protests that are burning down cities near you nationwide.
But before we do that, I said last week that I was going to actually show everyone, if you're watching the show, not listening, if you're listening, just use your imagination.
But I said that I was actually going to bring in and display my Raycon earbuds.
And you thought that I was lying.
I was not lying.
These are my Raycons.
They are the greatest noise-canceling earbuds.
Listen, look at the seal that these things make.
You would never notice that this was in an ear.
Now I can hear nothing because I have, like, the producer in this ear saying...
It's an audio show.
Nobody can even see these earbuds.
And then in this ear, Michael probably laughing at me, but how would I know?
Because the fit is so good, so cozy.
You don't look like an insect overlord like you do with those other popular earbuds.
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I'm still happy that you're listening to it, but you would enjoy it even more if you were listening on Raycons.
Every one of us has them.
Every one of us uses them.
Benjamin, why don't you tell people about your experience with Raycon?
They are indeed spectacular.
If you are used to those one-size-fits-all earbuds, you are missing out.
These things cost you a lot less than those do, and again, they will fit your ear properly.
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And make the magic happen.
And that way, you can actually listen to the song at the beginning of our shows.
Or alternatively, just wait until next episode and then do it so you don't have to suffer through that.
I always think secretly Ben loves us.
I think so.
But very secretly.
Like deep, deep, deep down.
All I can think of is I was desperately hoping that Knowles had COVID so that you'd both die by the end of the song because you were singing in close proximity with one another.
No, but I'm a protest to Ben so I can't get COVID. I'm actually immune to it because I protest.
So, there's some specific news stories that we should talk about.
But before we do, I think most people who aren't maybe as...
Listen, everyone's in the news these days, but maybe people don't follow it in real time the way that we do.
And perhaps the biggest thing on everyone's mind is more of a macro, a high-level look at what's happening.
There's this sense that things are truly unraveling, that we're losing our society right now, that we've lost our collective minds between the lockdowns, the COVID... The incredibly high death toll from COVID, the incredibly high unemployment numbers from the lockdowns.
You have the insanity happening in the streets.
You have this DA's decision to prosecute this police officer in Atlanta.
People...
A lot of the people who write in, a lot of the people I interact with, I think people just don't know what to make of this moment, how to stay optimistic in this moment, how not to let a moment like this crush you.
And it's occurred to me over these last weeks that that's actually, it seems that that's the objective of the media right now.
It's just to overwhelm people, to crush their spirits.
Could we maybe offer people a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of perspective on how history moves and what we might make of this moment, what it means for our futures?
Drew, what do you think?
Well, you know, I said when the 2016 election happened, I said this is a tragic election.
And I realized only years later that Americans don't have the word tragic in their dictionary.
They always think there's some way out of the tragedy.
But there's not.
One of two tragic things was going to happen.
One was that Hillary Clinton would be elected and the fact that our empty and destroyed...
Elite systems were going to just spread.
And the other was that Donald Trump would be elected and they were going to be exposed as being as empty and as destroyed and as corrupt as they are.
And that's what's happening now.
So they're one of two outcomes of that situation.
When we see that our courts are lousy, our news is lousy, our legislature doesn't work, and all those things.
When you see that happening, either it's going to be like lancing a boil and better days will come of it.
We'll have to suffer through the pain and better days will come of it.
Or it'll be Ben, how do you hold up during times?
I mean, you spend your entire day in the news.
How do you keep it from overwhelming you?
I mean, I stopped watching the news, which is a horrible pitch for our shows, but that is what it is.
I mean, the truth is, the more you're in the news, the more depressed you are.
If you're actually spending time with your family, you're far less depressed.
The problem is that the news has intruded into every area of our lives.
And that really is the culturally totalitarian moment we're in.
You can't watch a movie.
You can't log on to Amazon to buy a product.
You literally cannot—you're getting notes from your favorite exercise joint about Black Lives Matter and the various ways in which you have experienced white privilege.
You're like, man, I just go there to pick up weights.
Like, what are you even talking about?
It's very, very irritating, obviously.
And more than irritating, it's disunifying at a time when unity seems really easy, right?
I mean, we all agree, I think, as that video that our friend Ali Stuckey put together that Knowles was in and Klavan was in, bad things are bad.
Like, these are very obvious things.
But there's an attempt afoot to disunify the country.
In the aftermath, I think, probably of the Cold War, there was a question as to what could unify Americans.
And there are really two ways that you can achieve unity.
Way to achieve unity, number one, is you set a few top-line rules, and then so long as everybody obeys those top-line rules, you can do what you want, right?
This was sort of the founding vision of what unity would look like.
You'd have a couple of rules at the federal level, and then pretty much do what you want.
Have at it, right?
Enjoy.
Go to your local community.
And then there's way, number two, to achieve unity, and that is purity rituals and Maoist struggle sessions and top-down cram-downs in every area of American life and American culture.
And that's what we're watching right now, and it's really uncomfortable.
And so my hope lies in the fact that this is a very uncomfortable moment.
I don't see a lot of people who are looking at this and going, Man, I feel like we're going to come out of this thing so much stronger.
There's a purifying fire.
We're going to come out forged into a more unified country.
No one feels like that.
Everybody feels like it's falling apart because it turns out that totalitarianism is not all that attractive, either culturally or governmentally.
So, Michael, it's the only person on the show who actually supports the Spanish Inquisition.
No one expects it, but I support it.
How are you keeping your head during these times?
I think if I'm going to find a silver lining in the storm cloud, it is this.
It's clarifying a lot of things here.
I think there's been an impulse, especially among conservatives, who tend to be nice guys, who want to find common ground with people, who really hate the divisiveness that the left has foisted on us racially, sexually.
The list goes on and on for decades now.
We want to find this common ground and say maybe you've got a point, leftists.
And one thing we're seeing here is they don't have a point.
They don't have a point.
And furthermore, if we pretend and we lie and we say they do have a point, that's only going to lead to more mayhem.
They've been telling us for years and years now that there's institutional racism and institutional oppression.
It dawned on me during the last few weeks, the left controls all the institutions.
They control the media.
They control Hollywood.
They control big tech.
They control corporate America.
They control the administrative government.
On and on and on.
So if there were institutional racism, Whose fault would that be?
It would be their fault.
The second thing that occurred to me during this time is conservatives have been so bullied and we're nice guys and we want to prove that we're not racists, right?
So we post the black square to Instagram.
We say Black Lives Matter.
Nobody in this country, nobody thinks that black lives don't matter, okay?
When you say black lives matter, you are signing on to a radical organization that on their very website says one of their goals is to dismantle the western prescribed nuclear family.
You don't need to be bullied into going along with that.
Even people all the way up to the White House have been buying into some of these premises just to be nice guys, just to show that we're all coming together.
And we see the consequences of pushing those lies in Atlanta.
We see a cop being charged with murder unjustly.
We see private businesses going up in flames.
I think it's clarifying, and I think what it tells all of us is a lesson that we don't want to learn, but it's that we need to grow a spine, stand up for the truth, and not spout leftist lies, even if we think it'll make us all come together, because it won't.
That actually segues nicely into the DACA decision today, because I think that John Roberts is a guy who really believes that he can play nice.
I think he thinks that he has a singular role to play in unifying the country, preserving the courts.
Listen, he votes our way.
80, 90% of the time, right?
So it's not like it's a complete disaster.
But then on these very important cases, which he perceives to be really divisive at a cultural level, he always errs on the side of appease the left, don't compromise, don't turn the left's ire against the court.
And even just in the last, what, 72 hours, that's brought us two court cases that Fundamentally change the country.
I mean, this idea from the decision last week, the idea that sex can be defined as gender identity and not by biology.
Gorsuch himself, writing the majority opinion, said that no one who wrote that law could have possibly envisioned that interpretation, and yet he believes it's some sort of textual interpretation.
And then today, this decision that, I guess, if one administration illegally passes through executive fiat some sort of regulation, the next administration can't, by executive fiat, turn back.
What is the standard?
And the standard is...
Well, let's just be nice and get along.
Am I missing something?
Illegal and unconstitutional, by the way, by the administration's own admission when they were doing it.
Sure.
I think you're being too nice to John Roberts.
I think the man is a coward.
When he did the Obamacare decision, friends of mine who supported him said, no, no, he's just telling you that you're going to have to fix this by your vote.
He's not letting you off the hook for having voted for Obama.
But this decision is really different.
This is a cynical complaint.
Completely ridiculous decision that says exactly what he said, that Obama can take an admittedly unconstitutional action by executive order, but Trump can't erase it by executive order.
And, you know, what he said basically was you didn't do this procedurally correctly.
And if I were Donald Trump, which thank heavens I'm not, but if I were, what I would do is I'd come back to him in a week.
With a thing from the Justice Department that does it procedurally correctly and really stuff it to him, because I just think he's a coward.
I disagree about the Gorsuch decision.
I disagree with what people are saying it said.
I think it's an absurd decision, but I don't think it's an illogical decision.
I think he wasn't saying that sex includes transgenderism.
He was saying that if you penalize somebody for doing...
penalize a man for doing the same thing a woman does, that's a...
Discrimination under sex, which is a really bizarre but logical example of textualism.
But this Roberts decision is just an act of cowardice.
Ben, you're one of the only conservatives in America who actually opposed Roberts during his confirmation.
Do you think Drew's reading that correctly?
I think that John Roberts' view of the Constitution and judicial activism is pretty simple, and that is that he misinterprets judicial activism, and he doesn't like judicial activism, to mean the judiciary interfering in the process.
And so, if the judiciary interferes in the process, this constitutes activism.
Now, the way that What constitutionalists and textualists traditionally have read, judicial activism is rewriting the law, rewriting the Constitution toward political ends.
But Roberts, as an institutionalist, which is how he's usually described, that means that he's usually trying to keep the court out of fights.
Now, what's weird is, of course, the LGBT case.
In that case, he voted with the majority, but that cuts against the idea that it really should be left to the legislature, which is normally where you would expect Roberts to come down.
I have a feeling the reason that he voted with the majority in that particular case is because if he had not voted with the majority, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is writing that opinion.
And if Ruth Bader Ginsburg writes that opinion, you get an excoriating routine against religious America, and the decision goes much further than it does.
Gorsuch basically says, don't worry, there'll be carve-outs for religious institutions, there'll be carve-outs for ministerial exceptions, and all the rest of this.
And so my read on Roberts is that, not that it's a matter of personal cowardice, but that Roberts was never...
A particularly originalist guy.
He was never a textualist.
There was no long history.
Gorsuch is more of a shock in that LGBT case only because, again, there is no way to interpret the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation, let alone gender identity.
There's just no way to do it.
And the idea that he is going to backfeed that, that he's going to backfill that sort of meaning into the word sex, when clearly that's not what it means.
It creates all sorts of illogic in the structure of the Civil Rights Act itself, as I've pointed out.
It brings Title VII into direct conflict with Title IX. Because now what about the fact that you're supposed to have separate funding for men and women's sports?
What constitutes a man or a woman, right?
Clearly this is not what was meant by the law.
And Democrats didn't even think this is what was meant by the law, which is why they've been pursuing the Equality Act for all these years, trying to actually rewrite the law to include all these things that Gorsuch just rewrote the law to include.
So the Gorsuch decision is a lot more troubling to me than whatever Roberts does.
As far as the DACA decision, the real key there is that Roberts, and when Trump said, they just don't seem to like me, That's kind of right.
I mean, that kind of is right.
Because basically what the decision is, is if he had done it the right way, then probably we would let it go.
But he did it the wrong way, and so we're not going to let it go.
And they had similar words with regard to even the travel ban.
They said, well, we'll kind of let it go, but we really don't like his verbiage very much.
You know, it just demonstrates all of the trouble that you run into when you're President Trump and you use your Twitter account to do random stuff.
But obviously, it's a very bad decision.
And as Thomas says, it really does leave the door wide open to Donald Trump as he walks out the door in either six months or four years, putting out a series of sweeping executive actions and then basically daring the next administration to knock them down.
Go ahead, Drew, please.
I just want to say about this Gorsuch decision that the thing that I'm trying to clarify is that Gorsuch was being a textualist but not an originalist.
What he was basically saying is if Mary sleeps with a man and John sleeps with a man and you penalize John, you're only penalizing him because he's a man.
So essentially he was saying there are no traits that are natural to men and women.
That's really what he's saying, which is a spectacular thing for Supreme Court justice to say.
And it's such a bad decision because of that.
He's not saying that what they mean by this is you can't penalize somebody for being gay.
What he's saying is that being gay is an act determined by your sex.
And that's nuts.
I mean, that is a nutty thing to say.
But it makes this kind of crazy sense outside of real life, if you see what I mean.
As long as you don't live real life.
With what you're saying, Drew.
And I don't even disagree with what you're saying, Ben, either.
I think that it winds up being more simple than that, though.
I think that these guys put their finger up and they realize the cultural winds are blowing so hard that they do not want history to judge them.
What they're the most afraid of is being a...
Ben, is it Plessy v.
Ferguson?
Or is it Brown v.
Board?
Which one undoes the other one?
The worst thing to them...
You don't want to be Plessy.
You don't want to be Plessy B. Ferguson.
I think that's how they see their role is, listen, this is all fait accompli.
We don't want to be remembered as the guys who are on the wrong side of history, to use Barack Obama's mind.
Well, the history point here, I think, is the key to understanding this.
And this is what Senator Josh Hawley made a real barn burner speech the other day about.
He said that this decision, specifically with regard to the Gorsuch decision, represents the end of what we have called the conservative legal movement.
And you might like the conservative legal movement.
You might like the things that it has to say.
But the mere fact is that we keep losing.
We lose on the most fundamental issues.
They have just, for all intents and purposes, rewritten the most significant law of the 20th century, By those nine robed lawyers on the Supreme Court, and they've redefined sex, the most basic aspect of our nature.
We lost on Obamacare.
We lost on the definition of marriage.
We lost on abortion in Casey.
By the way, they turned down, worth noting, they turned down a bevy of Second Amendment cases that would have clarified the right to keep and bear arms at the exact same time they were doing this.
That's right.
And what it really means is that this quiver in the electoral, this arrow in the electoral quiver for Republicans is almost over.
The idea that you have to elect Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton's going to get to appoint the justices.
But what does that matter if the justices that are appointed by Republicans still vote with the left?
If that's the case, Republicans are going to need a better pitch.
Ben, you bring up the Second Amendment and how the court did not move to defend it.
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The First Amendment, not very popular right now, by the way.
Ben, you mentioned that we're in a totalitarian moment, and that is absolutely the case.
We still have legal protections for our First Amendment, but culturally, the idea of freedom of expression is really on the chop block right now.
But there's good news where that's concerned, and that's called the Second Amendment.
The second thing that the founders did, they gave us the right to defend against encroachment on our First Amendment rights by giving us that Second Amendment.
We believe in those principles very strongly.
Every one of us here, a gun owner, and all but, well, two of us anyway, rifle owners.
Drew, I don't think you own a rifle.
You've got to get on that.
I've been thinking about it.
You should do it.
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Ben, talk to us a little bit about BCM. Well, here's the thing, guys.
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You know, one of the things that I'm concerned about as a resident of the state of California, especially as you watch all the lawlessness, you watch during the lockdowns, they start turning criminals out of the prisons, then they start allowing for rioters to burn down large segments of the city.
Then they start cutting the funding for the police, not paying the police their overtime.
I've been very concerned about the fact that the state in which I live, if I am forced to use a weapon to defend my own life, it The state's going to actually take up its case against me.
It's not going to support my ability to defend myself.
It's going to support the person against whom I had to defend myself.
And then I tell myself, well, but there are still police out there.
Then you see this case in Atlanta, and you realize, no, they're going to actually turn against the police as well.
And that's not in California.
That's in Georgia.
I'm sure we may get a chance to talk about that a little later, but it's something that I'm very concerned about.
Alicia, before we do that, I want to hear from some of our DailyWire.com subscribers.
Yeah, and one of the cool things about DailyWire.com subscribers is that if you're an All Access member, you get to chat with all of us after Backstage tonight.
And you can watch a live stream of President Trump's rally with Michael Knowles this Saturday.
So head on over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe and be sure to use that code Backstage for 15% off of that All Access membership.
And you get to ask questions on shows like this, like Backstage.
So this question is for Ben, and it is from an awesome DailyWire subscriber who asks, If the governing authorities in Washington state failed to get control of the CHAS, what should the federal government's involvement or strategy be?
Well, at this point, there's a serious question as to whether the federal civil rights of people who are living in that area and don't actually approve of CHAZ are being violated.
And obviously, if this were Ammon Bundy and crew holing up at their ranch in the middle of nowhere and being angry that they weren't allowed to kill tortoises, then we would have a national scandal on our hands.
But because it's a bunch of leftists who have decided to take over a downtown area of a major city and then just sit there and plant themselves there and then create their own police, then obviously that's totally fine according to the media.
I mean, the role here is that if the president wanted, he could actually invoke the Insurrection Act, right?
In the same way that he was talking about for rioters and looters.
He could say that there is an actual insurrection.
I mean, they've declared themselves a separate republic, which is the definition of an insurrection.
Right.
And he could say, listen, if the mayor isn't going to do anything here, and if the state isn't going to do anything here, then this thing is over in 72 hours where I'm going in.
Now, does Trump think that's in his interest?
Probably not.
Because, again, a bloody Waco situation with a largely minority group fighting that.
Although, honestly, if you see the pictures from Chaz, it seems like a bunch of bored white people with a few black people there as well.
But, I mean, that's also called the city of Seattle.
But in any case, the idea...
I mean, I used to do a show in Seattle.
The idea that Trump has to sit there is wrong, but politically, is he going to do anything about it?
Probably not.
And And you know what?
Fine.
Let it fester like a wound in the center of the city of Seattle.
I actually have a lot of sympathy.
It's the same thing.
I have a lot of sympathy for the cops in Atlanta and the cops in L.A. and the cops in New York.
All of them are talking about, you know what?
You don't want us here?
Fine.
Enjoy.
You want the Republic of Chaz to be the new...
It's called CHOP. They renamed themselves, guys.
It's no longer Chaz.
It's now CHOP. Because it's the occupied zone.
If you want that to be the new normal, then just, you know, fine.
All right.
And you know what?
I think that they should expand their territorial holdings, frankly.
It seems like a zone of freedom and happiness.
Mayor Jennings Durkin in Seattle has declared that it's a street fair.
It seems to me that virtually all of Seattle should be put under the tender mercies of Raz Simone and the armed crew over at Chaz Chop.
And they can all enjoy the wonders of an anarcho-communist experiment.
I think that it should just be expanded and the left should get to get what they want good and hard, as H.L. Mencken once suggested.
Couldn't disagree more.
I won't be satisfied until Trump, astride a mighty white stallion, goes all whiskey rebellion on their asses.
America's been waiting 240 years for a president to lead troops into an American city like the good old days.
You know, Jeremy, to this point, this does make you miss the days of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and the neocons.
I want shock and awe in Soymalia.
I want us to invade the Soviet Union, Veganzuela.
I want tanks and troops and to show a little bit of American strength.
Alicia, what else are we hearing?
All right, Jeremy, this question comes from a concerned wife of a future law enforcement officer.
She says that her husband just got hired by their local police department, of course, didn't say where, and will graduate from the police academy in mid-November, right after the election.
So what are your predictions for what law enforcement is going to look like five months from now after the election and maybe even five years from now?
Yeah, it's a great question.
Listen, like Ben, I have a lot of pity for the people.
Sympathy is a better word.
Sympathy for the people who have chosen this profession right now.
I think that we're about to see a major decline in America's urban centers.
I think that the cities are about to descend back into their sort of 1970s pre-Giuliani crime-infested state because what incentive would police officers have to enforce?
So to answer the question of Of the member directly.
It really depends on where your husband is planning to be a cop.
Because I think that if it's in a major urban center, if it's in a city of, I don't know, a metro area of more than a million people, I think that it's...
I think that the prospects are kind of bleak, to be quite candid.
I think it's going to be a bad time to be a cop in those kinds of environments.
At the same time, half the country is still, or slightly less than half the country, is still more rural than that.
Those are communities where I think police forces are still going to be really respected.
You know, really look with admiration to the thin blue line.
So, you know, there's not a one size fits all answer, except to say that I think even in leading red places like Georgia or other states, I think that urban Democrat controlled areas are going to be very hard on law enforcement for the foreseeable future.
Alright, next question is for Drew.
We've seen an increase in homeschooling, of course, due to COVID, and an increase, apparently, in national polling of parents that say they want to continue to homeschool.
So given that information, and with private schools being so expensive, what is your personal opinion of homeschooling, and do you think America would be better off if more parents ended up homeschooling?
Absolutely.
I absolutely think they'd be better off with more parents homeschooling.
I think they'd be better off with charter schools and with any kind of school choice to take our children away from utterly corrupt unions that hide behind the decent teachers who sometimes teach working for those unions, but are basically do not have the best interests of our children at heart and do not have the best interest of families in the future at heart.
So anything parents can do to take back the education of their children I am in favor of.
It's one of the things that may come out of these lockdowns.
Already people are telling their employers they don't want to come back to work.
There are people moving out of the urban areas.
There are women starting to say, you know, This raising kids thing is actually more essential than I thought it was.
So I think there are going to be a lot of people who wake up to the fact that we have been going down a road that has taken us away from our families, that's taken us away from the things that actually matter.
Look, it's going to be an individual thing.
We don't know how much of it will happen, but every time it happens, an angel gets his wings.
And I think that goes especially for homeschooling.
Alicia, one more question.
Yeah.
All right.
This one goes to Michael, and I think that this is going to be interesting to all of us.
If you formed your own autonomous zone, like beyond the Michael Knowles studio, what would you call it?
Don't use words like autonomous zone with Michael Knowles.
What would you call it, Michael?
What would I call it?
Well, obviously, the Occupy Zone, I've already referred to many of the names that it has.
This is a very difficult question.
I actually, what we'll need to do is replace Columbia.
Columbia is going to change its name because, obviously, Christopher Columbus is a terrible guy and the left hates him, and he's canceled.
So I don't know.
They're going to rename it like, you know, Bernie Sanders land or something.
And then Columbia is going to be open again.
And I'm going to name my occupied zone Columbia because they ain't tearing those statues down in Michael Knowles territory, baby.
We're going to have a statue of Christopher Columbus on every street block and people are going to love it.
And they're not going to kneel and they're not going to protest it.
They're going to salute it.
I honestly feel like we just got canceled.
We are now officially canceled.
It's over.
It's hard to tell the difference.
We'll hear for some more of our dailywire.com members here in just a little bit.
Alicia, thanks for bringing those first round of questions to us.
I want to talk about our friends over at Stamps.com.
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I wonder, is the postal service actually running in the chop?
They have their own postal service.
What kind of services do...
It's really a question of what services are acknowledging that the occupied zone is an occupied zone and which ones are not?
So actually, the reason...
Sorry, go ahead.
They have a Department of Agriculture.
Yeah, they have a Department of Agriculture.
If you've seen the farming equipment that they've brought out, it is astonishing.
I mean, I'm a city boy, and I will say I don't know much about farming, but I've never heard of a process by which you put down cardboard on cement and then just take some topsoil, plant it on top, and plop a couple plants on top...
I feel like in seven years, there'll be enough food there for one half of a vegan salad, which is very exciting stuff.
You know, the reason they changed the name from Chaz to Chop, this is not a joke, the reason they changed the name is precisely because they kept wanting the welfare.
So they wanted the government services.
If you're an autonomous zone, you were declaring yourself an independent state.
They realized that wasn't a good look.
Seriously, yeah.
So it became the Capitol Hill occupied or organized protest.
So you're still protesting within the bounds and you can still receive welfare.
You can still receive government services and it reduces the risk that the cops are going to come in and shoot you.
I honestly, I want this thing to be like the Berlin Airlift.
I want this thing to become fully autonomous and China just starts flying in air supplies to Chaschop and it becomes this island of communist chaos.
The Castro brothers are sending in military supplies to Chaschop.
Let's just do this thing whole hog, I feel like.
I'm with you 100% on this, Ben.
I want this thing to really show everybody exactly what's been being pushed down our throats for all these years.
Here it is.
Live like this.
Or you can go back to the way you were before.
It's perfect.
Although this Trump on a horse was good, too.
Yeah, Trump on a horse is...
Listen, it'd make a great painting.
Remember, Matt Walsh is coming up on the show.
He's going to be joining us from his studio.
Where is Matt?
He's on the East Coast.
He's in the woods somewhere.
He rarely sees civilization.
But Matt's going to be joining us because it's his birthday.
So we'll be hearing some great insights from Matt coming up, and plus you'll have the chance to wish him a happy birthday.
In the meantime...
I want to talk about John Bolton and what it means for the 2016 election.
For those who haven't followed the news today, you'll remember back during the impeachment hearings that John Bolton was teasing that he had a book that he was going to release.
The left seemed convinced that this book would be the nail in the coffin for impeachment.
They wanted John Bolton to testify.
Ultimately, the Senate decided that they were not going to bring additional witnesses.
And so Bolton did not have an opportunity to come up and play a role in those hearings in the Senate.
Now, however, he's in a real feud with the White House.
He has been ever since about releasing the book.
The White House says that they will block it, that there's classified material in it.
And so here we are six months later, and they're actually starting to leak, which I thought was going to happen.
I mean, isn't it shocking that none of these leaks happened during the impeachment hearings?
It's not, it's not, dude, it's not leaked.
I have a copy in my house of the book.
Do you really?
I do.
Okay, absolutely.
Simon& Schuster has been sending out copies of the books to everyone.
This is not a leak.
There is a full 450-page book if you really feel like that many musings and note-takings of John Bolton.
It exists.
It is sitting in my den right now.
I flipped through it a little bit earlier.
And, I mean, as soon as it did, my eyes burned through because I'd seen classified material and all the world was ended.
But the media's sudden recognition that John Bolton is a truth-teller is really amusing.
Strange new respect.
Although they still hate him.
I mean, he's the only one I've seen, really, where they don't even give him the strange new respect.
I mean, the reviews are all like, you should totally read this book.
But also, John Bolton's a jackass.
They hate him so much because he's a neocon that they can't even give him the credit of the strange new respect for like the five seconds that everyone is normally a lot in this Andy Warholian universe of where you oppose Trump, you get the strange new respect for five minutes.
But the part of it that's amazing to me is that any of this is truly a story because I'm just wondering what we learned.
You mean Donald Trump says the quiet part out loud and reads the stage directions aloud?
You mean that Donald Trump says terrible things?
On a routine basis if he thinks that he's in the midst of a transactional negotiation.
Like, I'm old enough to remember when he just went on Bill O'Reilly's show and said that America killed people like Russia.
So the idea that he said to Xi Jinping that concentration camps sounds amazing.
Like, yes, is it atrocious?
Also...
Have you been, like, alive for the past several years?
I'm just confused.
He has a Twitter account.
He says crap all the time on the Twitter account.
I assume most people on Twitter can read, although that may be more of an assumption than anything else.
And the idea that there's anything that's like bombshell revelations, oh my god, he's transactional, oh my god, he says stupid crap, oh my god, he doesn't know that Finland isn't part of the Soviet Union.
And?
And?
What exactly is the giant revelation here?
Something can be news without it actually being news.
And I think that's what this book is, really.
I think this is exactly the point here, Ben.
My view on it is the conservative ire at Ambassador Bolton is a little bit misdirected, precisely because this didn't interfere with the impeachment.
This didn't really cause any political harm to President Trump.
Actually, President Trump...
He thrives when he has an opponent and someone that he can be dunking on, and this is probably going to sell more books for John Bolton.
To me, this seems, as you say, much ado about nothing.
It's good political drama, but ultimately, is it really going to hurt the president or the White House?
I don't think so.
True.
I can't understand why Trump made such a fuss about it unless there's some strategy here that is to say not only is he a liar, but he's a traitor.
He's revealing all this information.
Because all he's done is give this book...
I mean, look, a new book saying all this stuff.
Like Ben said, all this stuff about Donald Trump that we've all heard before.
We've seen it in front of us.
It rolls right off him.
It never sticks to him.
And yet he's given this thing enough advertising to put it on the bestseller list.
I don't really think it would have been that long if he had just kept quiet.
I want to start a drinking game for every time that Drew says that Trump has strategy.
If you say Trump and strategy in the same sentence ever again, Drew, I am going to reach through the COVID-riddled world through the wires that connect me to you at this point.
And a hand is going to emerge from your computer screen and just finish you off.
Because, my God, dude, we've been in the midst of rioting and looting for, like, several weeks at this point.
The entire Atlanta PD walked off its job yesterday.
And this idiot—I'm sorry, like, what he's doing is idiotic.
It is idiotic.
It is political malpractice.
I'm going to vote for him, by the way.
And it's political malpractice.
I've gotten more calls to my show in the last month from people who love Trump, who are chiding me in 2016 for not voting for Trump, and who are saying, what the hell is he doing?
And I don't have an answer because he doesn't have an answer.
It is political malpractice.
He's being handed rioting and looting, and he's tweeting about John Bolton and whatever stupid ratings CNN is getting or is not getting.
He's in the middle of a re-elect effort in which he is down by double digits to a dead person.
By double digits to a dead person, he is losing by the polls in Arizona and North Carolina.
He's getting wiped out in Florida by nearly double digits.
And he's spending his time tweeting about, John Bolton's a mean man.
He's a very bad, mean liar.
And also he's a traitor.
And I'm going to sue to get back those half a million books that have already been shipped to people and are sitting in their living rooms.
I'm going to go to their house.
I'm going to scratch them out with a Sharpie.
Drew, if you tell me that there is anything remotely like a strategy happening here right now, I'm going to start to question your sanity.
I swear.
This is ridiculous.
You know, I... I have to say, first of all, I agree that he's handled these last month, at least, really, really badly.
And I've been wondering if, you know, look, you can say he has no strategy, whatever you want, but he has instincts.
He's always had good instincts, and he sometimes had better instincts than we have had when we have been kind of overthinking things.
He feels his way.
But I wonder if being locked down in Washington...
He's basically suffering from the greenhouse effect.
He's basically surrounded by all the people that politicians are surrounded by all the time.
And he's lost his feel for the people who actually do like him.
So I'm kind of glad he's going to Oklahoma to do this thing.
I'd just like him to get out of the house a little bit more because he can't...
I agree with you about this, Ben.
The idea that anybody cares anymore who his enemies are when their cities are burning down, when the economy is lousy and all this stuff is going on, and he's still in these private fights, I don't know what to say about it.
I just think he has lost his time because he hasn't been in touch with the people who love him.
He tweeted about walking down a ramp.
The ramp was very steep and it was slippery.
And if I walked very, if I had not walked slowly, momentum!
Exclamation point.
Like, what?
What?
Like, no one has a job.
Everyone's been locking their house for four months.
We're going insane because our children are around us all the time.
What are you...
What are you talking about?
They locked down L.A. They locked down Beverly Hills at 1 p.m.
two weeks ago for a week because there were riots in a major city.
And then I walked down a ramp.
And let me tell you, it was the most masculine walk you have ever seen.
It was an unbelievable masculine stomping of the ramp in very short, choppy steps.
It was not that I have an imbalance problem.
What?
What's going on?
As you know, I love the tweets, and yet I do agree with this point.
I've kind of knocked him for some of the decisions he's made in the past few weeks.
I thought the executive order on police reform was sending the wrong message at the wrong time.
I have hit him on a few of those things.
Good for you, dude.
Seriously, good for you.
Thank you.
And I have agreed with Drew here.
I think he's getting bad advice, and I think his gut instincts, very likely, are being stymied by Washington.
But I agree with you, Ben, in this broader point that we were talking about before, which is I don't think a lot of this matters.
And I agree with you, Jeremy.
I can't believe I'm agreeing with everybody.
I'm agreeing with you, Jeremy, on this point that the judges don't matter anymore either.
And that's the judges not mattering because now we can't rely on the originalists.
We can't rely on the textualists.
We can't rely on any of our judicial nominees.
What that means is this election is now about the economy.
We can't even point to the judges anymore, right?
It's about the economy.
I don't care what Trump tweets.
I actually kind of got a kick out of the ramp tweet, but I don't really care about it either.
What he's got to do is reopen the country, and he's got to get that economy moving again.
It looks as though we actually do have a chance at a V-shaped recovery, which we were hoping for a long time ago, and maybe that could happen.
That's his path to victory in November.
And all of these other sideshows, the Bolton book, the tweets, fine, whatever, I don't care.
Just get the country moving again.
So not only do I completely agree that we have to get the country moving again, the left obviously agrees too, which is why the only news story that you read anymore is COVID. I remember that for like three weeks, COVID didn't exist anymore because if you were peacefully protesting and the definition of peacefully means agreeing with the left.
So if you were agreeing with the left protesting, it was okay for you to like have 100,000 people crammed into a one city block, you know, like a one football field size city block.
The problem though is The president has, you know, for the last two years, what people who support the president often say to me is, when I say, you know, he's got to pick up millions of new voters in order to win in 2020, and I worry that, you know, he's going to see a lot of erosion with, like, suburban housewives and other groups that he needs to win.
And people will say, be honest, who do you think voted for the president last time who's not going to vote for him this time?
Suddenly, in the last two weeks, we've seen very high-profile Trump supporters from 2016, people who sort of led the attack against so-called Never Trump, turning completely on the president.
And it's not difficult to understand why, when you have tens of millions of people moving into unemployment, a complete erosion of most of our liberties, the burning, the rioting, the looting.
The kind of uncertainty that everyone's feeling, that's not good.
That's not good for a president.
And we're seeing the first erosion, I think, in his actual base, not just in the fringes of who supports him, but diehard Trump supporters.
Does he have time to get them back?
Yes.
But only if he opens the country.
And not only that, the only way to stop the looting and the rioting that's happening nationwide is to give us back the pressure valves that allow us to operate as humans, social animals, in a civilization.
You can't have it to where the only place where...
Listen, Gavin Newsom said today, the governor of California today said it's now illegal anywhere in the state of California to be outside without a mask.
If the only place you can go in life to have social interaction is to a good looting, that's not going to redound very well for the civilization.
You've got to give us movies.
You've got to give us Major League Baseball.
It's summertime.
You've got to open up theme parks.
You've got to let people get back to life, or all we're going to have is more of this disaster.
And the president will not win re-election.
I will say, Mike Pence could win the election right now.
Generic R. It's a layup.
They're burning the city's vote for the other guy.
But Trump sticks his finger in it so much, he can't take the win.
And so he uniquely can't win if he doesn't get the country moving again.
Ben?
Yeah, I mean, I will say that I think that one of the areas that he's kind of blowing here, I think the rally's a bad idea.
I think the rally's a bad idea because he had the layup.
The layup was the left didn't care about COVID until, like, the last five seconds, right?
They decided that it was the most woke virus in existence and that if you protested for the right reasons that no one would die of it.
And if you protest in favor of ending lockdown, then you were definitely going to die of it.
So it's an incredibly woke virus.
It really knows everything.
It's a wise, wise virus.
And President Trump could have had it all.
And by the way, magnified the size of his crowds by saying, what we're going to do is we're going to do this outdoors.
We're going to do this with a certain amount of social distancing.
We're going to take away the baton to the left.
By doing it indoors and then suggesting that the masks are optional, he's just handing a club to the left.
And whatever you think of the masks, the reality is that we are, in fact, seeing spikes in Arizona, in hospitalizations.
We're seeing spikes in Texas, in hospitalizations.
It's not swamping the healthcare system.
As the reopening happens, it's not swamping the healthcare system.
Arizona just shut down its casinos again.
If you actually would like to see the economy reopen and then stay open without sort of sporadic shutdowns again...
I know we have significant disagreements on this, but I think that the more people are, in fact, wearing masks, not unreasonably, not like out at the beach, but in close contact with each other, in close quarters, that will be a better thing.
I'm rooting for a better economic recovery, which is why, frankly, I would love to look more like Japan or Hong Kong, if it takes a few months of Japan or Hong Kong mask wearing, in order to get the V-shaped recovery, as opposed to this sort of zigzag, we have to shut down, we reopen, we shut down, we reopen.
Even in certain areas of American life, that's going to be very disquieting.
And as far as public Public games, it ain't happening, right?
I mean, MLB is going to play to closed stadiums.
The NBA is going to play to closed stadiums.
These giant events are just not coming back anytime soon.
And people are going to keep dying, and cities are going to keep burning.
I think that's what you're going to get.
Well, I mean, if they have jobs, they won't.
If they have jobs, they won't.
I mean, if you're expected to go to work and wear a mask, then you don't have time to burn crap.
There's a whole bunch of, I mean, a lot of this is a bunch of bored 20-year-olds who can't get outside and party any other way.
It turns out that when Melrose is completely shut, right?
You saw the pictures of Melrose.
When Melrose, every window is shattered and it's burned out.
If there are people who are shopping in those stores, then that wouldn't have happened.
People need jobs.
People don't spend most of their time partying, contrary to popular opinion.
People spend most of their time working a job.
And going back to your office and working a job is really important right now.
And if that means wear a mask, then wear a mask.
You're such a nerd, Ben.
People love to party.
So I think keeping you guys up to date, as I've been going through this process with our friends over at Policy Genius.
I told you a couple of months ago that I'd started the process with Policy Genius.
I realized that I needed to actually think about the future of the people whom I love, the people who I help provide for, and that I needed a life insurance policy.
And we've had Policy Genius as a sponsor for some time on the show, so I thought I'm going to go over and see, is it as good a product as you guys always say that it is?
I signed up for the process through Policy Genius and through another website just to compare them.
Hands down, Policy Genius provided an amazing service.
And I've continued to go through that process these last eight weeks.
Policy Genius sent someone to my home in the middle of the lockdowns to do the sort of medical work that's required for a life insurance policy.
They got that.
I got some follow-up medical procedures done.
And just this week, since the last time that we all saw each other, I actually got approval for my life insurance policy.
So my days are numbered.
My wife has come to realize that she's going to be just fine if I'm gone.
And I've made a tragic, horrible mistake.
That's what I've come to realize.
But I can't speak highly enough about policy genius and how easy it was to make this happen, even in these very difficult times.
I mean, Obviously, special circumstances would be even easier had this not been going on, but they went above and beyond right now.
You have to get life insurance, and yes, you can get it even in these difficult times.
As an insurance marketplace, Policy Genius is in contact with the life insurance companies on their platform every day.
They're keeping track of all the changes in the market so that you don't have to, which means they can get you covered quickly and for the best price.
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I bought my first policy.
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I'm about to buy one on my wife because two can play that game.
Man, policy genius.
Well, if you are one of the many people looking to buy life insurance right now, if you've heard us talking this entire time and you realize just during this broadcast that your risk of death has radically escalated over the past several weeks, either from COVID or from rioting or looting or from the lack of police or from the other thousand things that we will scare you with.
I haven't even talked about India and China and the possibility of Nuclear war.
Well, if you're worried about all that stuff, now's a great time to buy life insurance.
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Head on over to PolicyGenius.com for all of your insurance needs.
So I know that everybody is anxious to hear from Matt Walsh.
It's his birthday.
We're going to wish him a happy birthday.
He's going to be with us in just a few minutes.
But I made it my priority that we're going to get to more questions than we ever have on a backstage broadcast before.
And I am going to live up to that commitment.
Elisha, what are you hearing over there?
All right.
And to ask those questions, by the way, if you're not already an awesome Daily Wire subscriber, who we love and appreciate so much, and you guys are the very, very best, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use that code backstage for 15% off.
And then you can ask us questions right now during the backstage show, afterwards in our discussion, or on that live stream that Ben just said that President Trump shouldn't be doing the rally for my home state of Oklahoma.
You can watch that rally with Michael Knowles and chat with him about it.
This first question is for the great Andrew Klavan.
This subscriber wants to know, when do you think that people are gonna realize how hypocritical Hollywood is?
Example, they claim that they're so woke and want to destroy those in power, yet they are in power themselves.
Yeah, you know, I don't think people are fooled by Hollywood.
Nobody listens to what celebrities say.
I think the problem, people, especially on the right, don't understand the way the culture works.
It's kind of like a cloud.
It's kind of like the atmosphere that we breathe in and out.
It's not, you know, some clown getting up at the Oscars and telling us that we're idiots for voting for Trump.
We know they're fools.
We know they're, you know...
Berserk, crazy people and have nothing authoritative to say.
But after a while, when you pump this kind of propaganda into the atmosphere long enough, you just start to have the idea that there are certain things you can't say, certain things you can't think, certain ways in which you're not supposed to approach the world.
You know, just the other day, I was talking to a fairly important Hollywood mogul who said to me, well, I can't tell that story anymore.
I was trying to tell them about something I thought should be made.
And I said, why can't you tell it?
What is to stop you?
You don't have to worry about distribution.
You can put it on TV. You can put it on your own place and people will see it.
People just close down mentally.
So it's not a question of realizing what Hollywood people are.
It's a question of getting people into Hollywood or getting people into the movie and creative business who That's the important thing.
Essentially, Hollywood is comprised of that little monkey with the fez hat and the cymbals who goes around and gets your coins, right?
Except that they have a $100 million budget and they put out candles that smell like an orgasm.
That's essentially what Hollywood is.
I'm waiting for that to show up now.
Don't knock the Gwyneth Paltrow orgasm candle.
I'm still sitting by the mailbox waiting for mine to show up.
Oh, God.
I think it was the Daily Wire's own Amanda Presley Giacomo who said that, you know, white women must be stopped.
And I would fully agree.
Yeah.
All righty then.
Michael, how are we supposed to continue to participate in society without succumbing to the dictates of all of the woke scolds?
You just have to say no, and that requires a cost, and that's where most people give up.
We all get this question when we speak at colleges, and they'll say, hey, how do I get...
All A's on my transcript and still voice opinions that are absolutely illegal on my campus, and how do I do both at the same time?
And I guess they've really imbibed a lot of the Marxism that their professors have told them, even unconsciously, because they think that you can do something without a cost.
And you can't.
Everything has a cost.
There is truly no such thing as a free lunch.
You do get what you pay for.
And so you can make that choice.
You can say what you think.
And it's going to cost you friends.
It's going to cost all of us friends.
It's going to cost you invitations to parties and associations.
And that's the cost.
It's going to cost you in your career, very possibly.
I think it's cost almost everybody in this room in their careers at some point or another.
And that's the cost.
But I will say the only thing for it that I can tell you is...
We should have integrity.
Integrity is a good thing.
It makes you feel really good.
It makes you walk through the world with a little skip in your step and it allows you to sleep at night with a grin on your face.
Your bank account won't be as full, but okay, that's fine.
I'd much rather sleep soundly and have a good life than worry about that.
Well said.
You know, a good book you can read about this.
I will add one.
You can read the Gospels about this.
It tells you what happens to you when you speak the truth.
Yeah, that's right.
It's not pleasant.
Let's put it that way.
I will say one thing.
I think that the days of being punished for your opinion are going to end and they're going to end sooner rather than later.
And the reason for that is not because of the kindness of the left, it's because we are going to segregate politically.
And it's a really bad thing for the country, but it's just an inevitable reality.
Eventually what's going to happen is that if you're an accountant at a firm and you fail to post the black square and are thus chided for it, and you say, listen, I believe that black lives matter because they do, but I'm not going to virtue signal about how cops are bad, that's just not something I'm into, and then they fire you, What will end up happening is that you will end up starting your own firm and conservatives will recognize that you stood on principle and conservatives will then patronize you.
And what will end up happening is that the only people who will end up patronizing leftist causes are leftists, and the only people who end up patronizing right-wing causes are right-wingers, and you'll end up with two separate companies for each element of the market.
Because that's what the left is doing.
They've taken the war to all elements of American society.
It's a really ugly outcome because this is not how conservatives think.
I have never once, buying a pair of shoes, thought to myself, I wonder what the political convictions of the person who runs this company are.
But leftists have made it an element of faith that you must actually think about that because the externalities of you buying that pair of shoes may be keeping the environment in shambles or something like that.
I mean, it's a religion for the left.
And once you have a religious schism, the religious schism cannot be unmade.
I mean, Ask Knowles has been trying to unmake the religious schism for several hundred years at this point.
This is such a good point, Ben.
This is what the left did in the 60s and 70s.
It became their motto, especially the feminists, but it spread out broadly to the left.
They said, the personal is the political, meaning every area of personal association now has got to be politicized and become ideological.
And We're good to go.
I feel that we should, as Matt Walsh said in a tweet this week, we should do away with the public apology, in particular for private citizens engaged in private activities.
When that woman in Central Park who had her dog walking off leash, you'll remember, and then the black fellow with the cell phone came up and offered her dog a treat and they got into an altercation, and the woman said, I'm going to call the police.
He said, call them, please.
And she said, I'm going to tell them An African-American man is threatening me.
And implicit in that, obviously, is the belief that the police would take disproportionate force against him on the basis of his race.
So she was making a threat on the basis of his race.
That is a despicable thing that that woman did.
I should not know about it.
It was a private interaction between two private citizens.
She made a public apology.
She owes me no apology.
She does owe an apology to someone.
It is none of us.
She owes none of us anything, and we shouldn't even know about it happening.
We live in an era where private citizens make public apologies.
Politicians who have constituents, athletes who have fans, or celebrities who have fans making public apologies.
In some instances, I can understand that.
If you live your life in a public way, there are certain responsibilities that come along with that.
But for private individuals to make public apologies for private actions, that is a religious act of sacrifice to the god of the mob.
And you absolutely should not take part in it.
You should never apologize for anything that you didn't actually do.
You should never apologize for things that people did in the past or things that worse men than you may have done in the present.
And you should never apologize for anything unless you feel genuine remorse for your action.
And you should never apologize to anyone other than to the people whom you actually hurt.
And by the way, when I say...
Remorse for the action.
I don't mean remorse for the consequences of the action to yourself.
I don't mean you apologize because you did something bad and lost your job and you're sorry you lost your job.
I mean you should only apologize when you're sorry that you did the bad thing regardless of whether or not you lost your job.
That's the only kind of apology that is an actual apology and it's the only kind of apology that you should ever make as an honest person.
Never be bullied into Any other form of apology, especially the most virtuous signaling false kind of all, which is where you just apologize to the God of the angry masses.
Don't do it.
I'd just add, I don't think the God of the angry masses will ever be, you know, satiated either.
Ben, this comes from a Daily Wire subscriber that says, how can we take power away from the Supreme Court and give that power back to the citizens?
So the truth is that under Article 1, the legislature does have the ability to limit the jurisdiction of the courts in the Constitution.
So you do have the ability to limit the subject matter jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and theoretically the legislature Could do that.
The reality is that the Supreme Court has never actually been an engine of social change.
The great lie is that when the Supreme Court makes a decision, that it pushes forward everything else.
Really, the Supreme Court tends to follow more than it leads.
I mean, Brown v.
Board of Education happened in 1955.
It took until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for any of that to be effectuated.
So the idea that the court has any independent power is really not true.
I tend not to worry too much about court decisions simply because, again, if your state decided to resist the court decision, unless the federal government is going to come in and actually cram it down, there's not much that is going to be done about it.
Also, people have a real tendency to adapt to changing circumstances.
But if you actually wanted to stop judicial supremacy, well, it would take a couple things.
One, a president who just says to the Supreme Court what Jackson supposedly, apocryphally said, which is, Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.
Right.
You're going to say that I can't enforce DACA? Well, screw you.
I'm going to do it.
And then if Congress wants to impeach me, well, then that's their prerogative.
Or if Congress wants to change the law, that's their prerogative.
But I'm just not going to pay attention.
And people are like, well, that's lawless.
Really, because FDR basically threatened to do it.
Barack Obama threatened to do it.
By the way, remember that time like three weeks ago when every Democratic, every single Democratic candidate pledged to pack the Supreme Court and or ignore the Supreme Court if they didn't like what they got from it?
So the idea that judicial supremacy exists is ridiculous.
There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the judiciary is the sole repository of all constitutional interpretation and therefore has complete power over all constitutional interpretation.
That is not correct.
It is an arbiter.
It is an arbiter that has to jockey for position with other branches of the federal government.
And in the end, if you really wanted to limit the power of the federal courts, then the Congress does have the power to do that without a constitutional amendment.
I completely agree with this.
Well, I just think that the problem is that the legislature doesn't want to legislate.
I think that they don't want the power.
They've handed it off to bureaucracy and they've handed it off to the court and they don't want it back.
It's a hot potato because you have to take responsibility for it.
And the way you get unelected is by passing laws that people don't like.
They don't want to do that.
When was the last time?
I mean, maybe Obamacare, maybe.
But when was the last time they passed a consequential law that did anything?
And I think they pass laws that are 4,000 pages long, so you don't even know what's in them, where you can't be free if you don't know what is in a law.
They mean it to happen this way.
And I think it's really on the legislature that they've let this go.
You know, Adrian Bermude, who we've talked about on the show before, the Harvard Law Professor, who interestingly focuses on administrative law, he posted something about this the other day, which is that the way our system of government really works is that power flows to the branch of government that is able and willing to exercise that which is that the way our system of government really works And as you say, Drew, the legislature doesn't want to do it, so it's going to flow somewhere else.
That's great.
Alicia, one more question.
All right, this one is for Drew.
Who do you think is the greatest American character either in novels, a TV show, or a movie?
Oh, it's got to be Huckleberry Finn.
He's certainly the quintessential American character.
He's also the character who expresses the kind of...
How can I put it?
He expresses the...
He sees America as it is.
He doesn't see it as people think it is.
He doesn't see it as this dream of floating down the Mississippi...
When you look at Huckleberry Finn, it is a satire of American life, and it's a satire of the idea that you can become anything you want.
Everybody in it is a fake.
Everybody in it is pretending to be royalty from other countries.
And you can actually look at Huckleberry Finn and see a world in which people will one day declare themselves women.
And expect to be treated as women because they've said they are.
I mean, it's actually part of the American dream.
And so he really captured in that novel something that's beautiful about America, the idea that Huckleberry Finn has the courage and the independence and the individuality to stand against slavery even when the entire culture says it's all right.
That's something beautiful in the American personality.
But he also captured a flaw in the logic of America that if you can be anybody you want, You will turn into a con man, ultimately.
That book, you know, Ernest Hemingway said that all American literature comes out of that book, and I think he's right.
Isn't that because Mark Twain is the quintessential American himself?
Like, that guy just embodies what it meant to be an American man at that time.
By the way, you want to read that?
I will still make the case that the best Mark Twain novel is Connecticut Yankee.
That Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court is still...
Well, that wasn't the question.
No, I understand.
But now we've gone far abroad because I took us here.
So in these difficult times, listen, my house, I'm going to tell you, my house is one and a half blocks off of the main thoroughfare of the San Fernando Valley here in Los Angeles.
The main street, Ventura Boulevard, had 1,500 protesters march down it on Saturday.
And I sat on my front stoop and watched them go by.
And I thought...
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I went over to Ben's home recently and Ben has these beautiful gates outside of his house and I shimmied in.
I know the secret code and I kind of shimmied in there and I got up to the front door and I knocked on the front door and I thought he's going to be so surprised.
Because I rarely come to his house.
He can be so surprised when he opens up the door, and it's me.
And he opens the door, and he's like, hey, Jared.
I'm like, dude, I'm at your house.
He's like, yeah, yeah, I mean, I could see you because of the ring.
Like, eh, you ruined everything, ring.
Except home security, which you've actually made infinitely better.
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By the way, I have small children and I have to keep an eye on them at like all times because if I don't, then they're probably setting each other or themselves on fire.
And so having Ring on my property means that I can have an eye on them whenever I need to have an eye on them.
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I feel like with three kids, you actually need the ring drone, ring aerial surveillance.
Jeremy, I've got to take issue.
You mentioned earlier, Drew, the homeschooling issue, and there are those polls saying that many parents are finding homeschooling more attractive after this.
And all I can think of Who are these people?
Who are these human beings?
It finally occurred to me, let's be clear, my kids are learning more not being in school and being home with my wife and with my parents and with me, but school was constructed so that I miss my children.
So when I finally see them again, I'm like, oh, good to see you.
Because it turns out that when you see your children 24 hours out of every day, and I mean 24 hours out of every day, because those who have small kids know, they don't sleep.
Ever.
And so when you see them 24 hours out of every day, you're like, I need you to go away from like 9 to 3, and then come back, I don't care what you've learned, but you've been away, and then I can miss you and you're cute.
But if I get too much of you, then it's like, I'm going to need you to just go in this closet here.
Not that I like my kids in an actual chokey, like, Roald Dahl, but, you know, if I did, then I would need a break from the children.
And, yeah, all the people who are in favor of homeschooling, those are the real heroes.
Those are the heroes today.
Kids are very lovable 16 hours a day when they sleep for 10 of them.
Sorry, Drew, what was that?
I was referring to human beings when I was talking about that.
Well, that's the key.
This is my issue because protecting human beings is good, but Jeremy, I have to take issue and point out a fact check here.
The mainstream media have reliably informed me while the peaceful rioters are looting all the shops that property...
Property doesn't matter, man.
That can be replaced, which is the new line that I'm going to start using when I mug people is I'm going to pull out the weapon.
I'm going to say, stick them up.
Give me your wallet.
Don't worry.
Property doesn't matter.
It can be replaced.
Thank you for all of your money.
So you don't want to protect that.
It could really be great.
You could walk up to them and you could point a gun at them and say, what are the important things in life?
I actually think this whole idea that property and life are distinct, of course, at a high level, at a spiritual level, of course, that's true.
At a very practical level, though, what a rich, entitled thing to say.
You have to live in a society that's so rich.
That you have excess stuff, and you can only imagine a world where everyone else also has excess stuff, when in reality, most people have to trade part of what their life is, which is their time, their health.
They trade their labor so that they can afford to have those things that the media is so cavalier about criminals being able to take away from them.
I'm also not willing to hear this from Marxist materialists.
I'm not willing to hear this from Marxist materialists who suggest that the definition of everything in your life is determined by your material circumstance.
So when I steal all of your money, it has no impact on you.
But if you don't give me all your money, then you have somehow affected my life on such a deep level that I deserve all of your money.
I'm not willing to hear it from these folks.
I'm also, I find it kind of delightful in this morbid way to have the people who are supposed to be running the country telling us that running the country doesn't matter.
I love having a mayor in Seattle who says, you know, this is wonderful.
People, you know, rioters have taken over part of our city.
And you think like, wait, aren't we paying you to run the city?
Don't we actually take money out of our pockets and give it to you so you will run the city?
And she's just kind of abandoned that.
It's actually kind of amazing and hilarious if you don't mind watching your country.
I know.
I hate freedom.
So I know you guys have been waiting all night to be able to wish Matt Walsh a happy birthday.
We have him here live, joining us from distant, wherever Matt Walsh lives, by way of this amazing technology that we have, which probably everybody else also has.
Matt Walsh's birthday is today.
Matt, thanks for coming by.
Hey, thanks for having me on, Jeremy.
Oh, man, are you kidding?
We've been looking forward to this all night.
I know many Daily Wire fans have been looking forward to the opportunity to wish you a happy birthday.
So, man, just thanks for making time to be on the show, and, you know, happy birthday.
Okay, so...
Yeah, Michael, I mean, a lot of great birthdays today.
You know, Matt, Sir Paul McCartney, of course, from the top of the show, 17th century Russian theologian, Theofan Prokopevich.
Also Blake Shelton.
All really, really important guys.
And people don't listen to Prokopovich's early albums, by the way, which I thought was much better than his later work.
But that's a great point you make.
It's a very special birthday episode.
That's the most important thing.
So Ben, you brought up a little bit earlier in the night in passing a story that I don't think most Americans are yet paying attention to, but actually could be the biggest story going on in the world right now.
And that's this conflict taking place between China and India.
I think something like 50 soldiers have been killed in the last 48 hours in hand-to-hand combat, which as far as I can tell really just means beatdowns.
The Chinese are using these spiked handheld weapons and they're coming just beating down and killing.
These are two, not only the two most populous Nations on Earth.
They probably would have fought many more wars throughout history, except that there's this Tibet, which for most of history has been very difficult to traverse between them, right, these mountains.
But here you have the two most populous nations on Earth and two nuclear powers actually in a border conflict in which their soldiers are killing each other.
What are we to make of this?
Well, all I can say is that I think the only solution here is to send the leadership of Chaz there to really calm the situation.
We need a republic right on that border, a free republic, an anarcho-communist republic to really calm down that border.
By the way, if you think that there's going to be a nuclear war between India and China, first of all, like...
I can't say at this point we don't all deserve it.
I feel like 2020 has to go somewhere.
And it's like the end of a Stephen King novel.
It's just a bunch of stuff that happens and then everything blows up at the end.
And you're like, well, that was out of nowhere.
I feel like that would be sort of the appropriate ending to 2020 and also the world.
But there's not going to be a nuclear exchange between India and China.
India has always been on the verge of war with Pakistan for, you know, 60 years, 70 years since the origins of the...
The notion that these two states...
China doesn't actually want to be in an armed conflict with anybody.
China wants to economically annex all of its neighbors.
They don't actually want to have to use physical force.
They just want to put such severe economic pressure on its neighbors that they start making nice trade deals with them and so that they give China control of their security arrangements.
But China is not interested in a nuclear exchange with the second most populous country on planet Earth or the most populous country on planet Earth.
Not a thing.
I think that's right.
And as part of this economic expansion, there is a territorial expansion, which you see in Hong Kong.
You see this on the border with India.
You see this with our interests maybe in the South China Sea.
But sure, they don't want armed conflict.
And I think this is the key that obviously the mainstream media, but even many conservatives are missing here, which is that while we are all arguing over whether or not to cancel Aunt Jemima, China is growing and moving in on some of our interests.
Our geopolitical adversaries are laughing and they're taking advantage while America burns and burns from its own internal frivolity.
But isn't there the chance?
Maybe it's true that there won't be direct...
Nuclear conflict between India and China.
I certainly think that's the most likely outcome, although all escalations have the potential to be very deadly.
But isn't there the risk of a sort of Cold War-style, proxy war situation starting to break out?
I mean, we've just gone through this amazing global economic turmoil.
China has all these ambitions, as Michael just outlined.
Do you guys worry at all about this sort of proxy conflicts beginning to crop up between these sort of emerging global powers?
I just want to say one thing, that as an eternal optimist, I've worked it out where there is a scenario where everything in 2020 breaks just right so that everyone I dislike will die.
I think that that's at least one possible...
What a hopeful vision!
Yeah, I know.
It's amazing.
But I do think...
I do think one of the things that has been hidden by all this is we actually have entered a Cold War with China, and we're going to be in it for another 10 to 20 years, if not more.
I think that is actually the new story.
It's entirely possible that when you go back 100 years from now and you look at the textbooks, the history textbooks...
They won't be about any of the things we're experiencing here that are all nonsense.
They'll actually be about the fact that we've started a Cold War with China, and we're going to have to have a Cold War with China, because otherwise we'd have a hot war and that would be a disaster.
But it's going to define, I think, you know, it's going to define the rest of my life, and it's going to define a large period of the next 50 years.
So the next two and a half weeks, really, is what we're talking about.
And then we'll move on.
Whichever comes first.
This is actually very important, though, for 2020.
And it's an issue that if the Trump campaign is serious about winning, they'll hammer on and on, which is that China's growth China's ascendancy has been applauded, actually by people in both parties, but in particular by Joe Biden.
Joe Biden gave a speech where he said, a rising China is good for everybody.
We allowed China into the World Trade Organization.
They immediately broke all the rules and they took great advantage, but it really helped them out.
And there was this consensus that China will liberalize and democratize as they grow economically.
That didn't happen.
That was not true.
And I think the people who cheered it on ought to be held to account, first and foremost in this election, Joe Biden.
Maybe it's good for America to have a Cold War.
The last Cold War kept the left from having its ultimate victory, right?
Because they couldn't go to the ultimate extreme without actually being the enemy.
Like, you're able to define why communism is bad, why the ultimate excesses of leftism are not to be desired.
I mean, it could be that we find that, you know, America needs an enemy and it needs its enemy to be leftists.
That's my optimism.
I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
I mean, I do think there's a lot of truth to that, that America does need an external threat in order to have any sort of internal unity.
That is certainly a real possibility.
I will say that because of the policies taken toward China over the last 40 years in the United States, it's going to be a lot more difficult in a lot of ways.
I mean, China is significantly more economically powerful than Russia ever was.
Russia was always a second-rate state, masquerading as a first-rate state.
We cut them off economically very early.
They're really underdeveloped.
China is far more developed.
China is far cleverer.
And they're far less ideological.
They're just a totalitarian state.
I don't think they're interested in America being communist so much as they're interested in maximizing their own power.
And I think that's true in Africa, too.
I don't think they're interested in we need a communist proxy state in South America as much as we need more states in our sphere of influence.
So if they had their druthers, I'm not sure that it would look like a USSR situation.
It would look more like a situation where they're funding a bunch of states that just don't like the United States, which is why you see them reaching out to various kind of anti-American regimes without really demanding anything of them in terms of their own economic program.
The fact that we gave them so much money over the past few decades and thought that we were going to strengthen them is idiotic.
This is the one area, by the way, where Bolton's book actually does hurt Trump.
Because the one thing that Bolton does make very clear in the book is that Trump was a lot softer on China than he has appeared to be publicly.
China, that he was kind of tough on trade, but kind of not tough on trade.
That he was speaking harsh...
Things about Xi Jinping, but at the same time, he was going behind closed doors and saying that he's fine with concentration camps and you really want to make a deal and can you help me get reelected and all of this kind of stuff.
The problem is that that gives Biden a go-to comeback in a debate.
Trump says something like, you're really weak on China.
You went along with this whole trade regime.
And Biden comes back and says, I'm weak on China.
You're the guy who said that they should go ahead and build concentration camps according to your own national security advisor.
That's the one area where this could hurt Trump.
It's a little bit of a challenge that Trump is always hardest on his friends.
He actually winds up being a lot tougher on friends than he does on enemies.
The idea that Joe Biden could remember anything that's in John Bolton's book is laughable, I think.
You know, before I came on, I read that 55% of people think he has dementia.
I just think, you know, I shouldn't laugh, but it's just the idea that people might actually vote for him over Donald Trump.
So, Drew, what you read is that 45% of Americans are completely oblivious.
Is that the idea?
That's exactly right.
Elisha, I want to do one more round of questions.
But before we do, wasn't it great to have Matt Walsh on the show for his birthday?
It was nice to hear from him.
It was amazing.
It was worth the wait.
It was worth the wait.
Elisha.
All right.
Raise your hand if you're like me, who's been doing a lot of online shopping during lockdown.
And raise your hand if you're just like me when you got your paycheck.
You're like, I could afford to do a little more online shopping.
Well, if that's you, I have a deal.
You need to head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the code backstage because you get 15% off.
And who doesn't love a deal, especially us ladies?
I know I'm being stereotypical.
I don't know.
Maybe in 20 years, the Supreme Court will tell me that that's wrong.
Who knows?
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So this question is for Ben.
A Daily Wire subscriber wants to know, do you think it's possible for the left to...
To de-radicalize?
And if so, do you see any specific leader on the left that could see them walk away from all of their extreme ideals?
I think it's very difficult for them to de-radicalize because they have so normed themselves into intersectional ideology.
Intersectionality is the key motivating factor inside the Democratic Party.
Right now, there's a bit of a battle that went on for just a brief moment in time between sort of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party, which said that the cure to all of this is Marxist economics, and then the intersectional wing that said, no, no, no, you're ignoring the real motivating factor in human life, which is race.
And it seems like the race side won and kind of unified with the socialist economic side.
They said, it's going to be both.
It's going to be both.
We're going to have a more socialist, unifying, top-down government control of the economy.
And also, we are going to divvy ourselves up among various racial groups.
And we can only assume that equality has been achieved when we achieve true economic socialism as well as true social equality, meaning equal results at the end of the day.
It's going to be very difficult to see the left respond to this until...
Look, people only respond to losing.
That's the reality.
People don't respond to winning.
So the left responded to losing in 2016 by basically doubling down and treating Trump as an aberration.
And it was up to Trump to prove that he wasn't an aberration.
And so the question in 2020 is, was he or wasn't he?
And if he was an aberration, they're going to keep doubling down on this.
Joe Biden basically has signified that he is just a placeholder, that the person who comes next is going to be deep into radical philosophy.
You can assume that his VP pick will not be somebody like an Amy Klobuchar.
It will be somebody at the very least like an Elizabeth Warren and maybe like Kamala Harris.
It'll be somebody radical.
The Democratic Party will move down that path until they are checked.
I mean, it is that simple.
And if Republicans do not win, they will continue to move down that path.
And this has been true in major cities around the United States.
Major cities around the United States have been governed by Democrats.
The only time Republicans ever win is when things get so bad that there is literally no alternative but to elect a person from the party you've never heard of.
And this is how Rudy Giuliani becomes mayor of New York.
So...
We're in for a dark period here.
I mean, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it.
If Trump loses, it's this weird irony where I said in 2016 that if Hillary won and Mitch McConnell was head of the Senate, that that would be bad, right?
It would be worse in many ways than Trump being president.
But it wouldn't necessarily be the end of the world because it would be Hillary doing some stuff and Mitch McConnell checking her.
And now it would be Joe Biden as president probably taking along with him the Senate because the Senate is really in trouble right here.
Joni Ernst is trailing in Iowa, which is a terrible indicator.
If there's a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President and a Democratic House, then, ironically enough, Trump's unpopularity, which is generating a lot of momentum for that, makes it much more imperative that Republicans actually vote for Trump to stop what's coming next, because otherwise we are in for a very, very dark period in American history.
That's a very good point, Ben, this moment of sort of the old-school socialists basically getting wiped out for intersectionality, but I do see A challenge to intersectionality, ironically coming from Black Lives Matter.
Intersectionality is this idea that every oppressed group in history bands together, even if they disagree with one another.
So Linda Sarsour, an Islamist, and Gloria Steinem, a feminist, are holding hands at the Women's March, even though they don't seem to have much in common, yet they go together.
Transgenderism and homosexual activists, who don't have a lot in common, but they still hold hands.
That's the intersectional idea.
But that is being challenged by Black Lives Matter, which is explicitly excluding groups from it, right?
They're saying it's It's not about all lives matter.
It's not about Hispanic lives matter.
It's explicitly about Black Lives Matter.
Except that if you go to Black Lives Matter's website and go to their About page, they actually have all this intersectional language about trans rights, about gay rights.
They're still trying to cloak themselves as part of the broader intersectional movement.
I think what eventually takes down the intersectional movement is its inherent contradictions.
The fact that the arguments in favor of trans ideology actually cut against the arguments in favor of the traditional homosexual biological determinism, right?
Or the fact that feminism and trans rights come into such conflict with each other.
Or about the fact that groups like Asians in America, for some reason, don't merit inclusion in the intersectional movement.
And they're discriminated against.
I think those inherent contradictions are ultimately going to be what tears it apart.
It's also a recipe for internecine war.
I mean, it's just you can't follow the logic of intersectionality without everybody being at each other's throats.
That's why it's sometimes entertaining to watch them devour one another, which is ultimately all they'll be able to do.
Elisha.
I guess all we need is love, right?
Get it?
Get it?
Hey!
Where are the guitars, guys?
Can we get the guitars back?
All right.
This question is for Drew.
This comes from a Daily Wire subscriber that lives in Minneapolis area.
And, of course, the park board just voted there not only to move towards defunding the police, but they also voted to let the homeless sleep in their parks, something that our state of California has been doing for a while, by the way.
And so they want to know, what is the purpose of the leftists and goal here?
Like, how is this helping homeless people?
They're not helping anybody.
They're just actually consolidating their power.
Chaos always leads to more power at the top.
And they basically have lost faith in the actual system of governance that they're supposedly running.
So it actually is a moment when their idea that emptying out the system that they are on top of We're good to go.
That this country is something terrible, that order and civilization is something terrible, and some of them actually say that.
And, you know, one of the funny things about this is always, always throughout history, the elites think that somehow they're going to be left alone.
They think that they're going to be able to maintain their elite control while the lower orders kind of devour one another.
And it always ends up, it's always the elites who wind up on the guillotine.
So it's really a kind of crazy idea.
And the idea that they have some sort of...
I mean, you talk about Donald Trump not having a strategy.
The idea that the left has a strategy that goes beyond the next victory is also insane.
We've seen this happen before in the 70s.
I lived in New York in the 70s.
It's madness.
The difference here is it's happening so fast that I'm wondering if the short, sharp shock will wake people up more quickly than they woke up in the 70s.
He means the 1870s people.
The biggest problem happening in New York at that time was actually horse dung.
And it was a major issue.
What do you do with all this horse dung?
We live on an island.
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