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July 25, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:31:25

Daily Wire Backstage: Go Buy Ben's Book Edition

Is America headed for full-on divorce? Can Trump claw his way back in the polls? Was Portlandia a documentary? Join this roundtable discussion featuring Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Daily Wire god-king Jeremy Boreing as they get to the bottom of these questions and more. LIMITED TIME OFFER: Become a Daily Wire All-Access member for 15% OFF with coupon code: BACKSTAGE and get a SECOND LEFTIST TEARS Tumbler: https://utm.io/uqGw Get Ben Shapiro’s new book, “How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps,” on sale now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble! https://utm.io/uHcC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage, Go Buy Ben's Book Edition, is right around the corner, and you don't want to miss it.
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King, Jeremy Boring, as we talk about the madness in today's culture, and as we do our best to sell you on Ben's new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
	Take a listen.
	Politicians pander to protesters as police persist in preventing perpetual pandemonium in Portland.
	The pandemic precipitates preposterous presumptions.
	And go buy Ben's book.
	This is The Daily Wire backstage.
	Welcome to The Daily Wire backstage, Go Buy Ben's Book Edition.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts as your friendly neighborhood god king, and we're glad that you have tuned in.
	Is America past the point of make-up sex?
	Can Donald Trump claw his way back in the polls?
	Was Portlandia actually a documentary?
	Ben covers all of this and more in his book, How to Destroy America, in Three Easy Steps.
	If you don't have one...
	I've said it twice.
	Go buy Vince's book.
	I'm joined today, of course, by the man himself, Mr.
	Ben Shapiro, also by Andrew Klavan and Michael Knowles, one of whom has actually written other books, and the other who has outsold both.
	Also by the lovely Alicia Krause, who is with us via satellite.
	She'll be taking your questions hot off the interwebs and giving us a chance to dazzle you with our answers.
	Jazz hands.
	That wasn't even in the prompter.
	I just totally ad-libbed that.
	Wow.
	Say hi, Alicia.
	Hi guys, how are you?
	It's good to be back.
	And yes, I will be taking those subscriber questions.
	And how can you ask the questions, you wonder?
	Well, you have to be a Daily Wire member, an All Access member to be exact.
	And if you're not an All Access member, then you're definitely missing out.
	And if you're like me and you like a deal, turns out we have one for you.
	Because All Access members get to participate in our All Access Live, where one of the Daily Wire hosts hangs out with you via live stream.
	It's way better than a corporate Zoom, I promise.
	And All Access members also join us for real-time online Q&A discussions like the one that we're all going to have together after tonight's episode of Backstage.
	And it will be available on both the website and the Daily Wire app.
	So tune in to get your questions ready.
	That's once again if you're an All Access member.
	And if you're not, then head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	To get your two, yes, two leftist tears tumblers with that 15% off coupon code backstage right now.
	That's dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Use the 15% off coupon code backstage right now and join us for the discussion after the show.
	So I've been trying to figure out, I was on this trip down to Texas, and someone asked the question, you know, are you an internet celebrity, as people will often ask.
	And I thought about my Twitter following, which has grown, but has still not gotten to the goal that I set in life when I was a small child.
	And my father said, what do you want to be when you grow up?
	And I said, I want to have 100,000 Twitter followers.
	And he said, your life is going to be filled with disappointment, kid.
	And he was, so far, it turns out that he's right.
	And also, what's Twitter?
	And also...
	Don't ruin my story, Ben.
	But I've been looking for an answer to this question, does my life have any meaning?
	And then I found Ben's book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, and I realized nothing has meaning.
	You too could be filled.
	What's the kind of optimism that I have if you were to read this book?
	Ben, since I went ahead and named the whole episode after your book, tell us just a little bit about it.
	Let me tell you about this book.
	So, here's the deal.
	the basic thesis of the book is that the battle in the United States right now is not exactly left versus right, although it largely mirrors it.
	It's between people who I call unionists and people who I call disintegrationists.
	Unionists are people who believe that the country ought to remain one unified body, and they believe that there are certain ties that bind us together, namely philosophy, culture, and history.
	The philosophy of the American founding that is suggested in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, protected by a government of limited powers, and that if that government should choose to exceed its powers, then it would lose its reason for being.
	That was the core philosophy of the United States.
	And then that was preserved by a system of checks and balances and federalism created by the Constitution.
	That was the core philosophy.
	Then there was the core culture of the United States, which was a culture that valued social institutions inculcating virtue like church and family.
	A culture of entrepreneurship and adventure, the culture of the pioneers, people who are pushing over Hill and Dale in order to open new vistas in the human experience, a culture of tolerance for other people's rights.
	Even though you may not agree with how I speak, you acknowledge that I do have the right to say what I am saying.
	And also, a culture of militant defense of those rights, that if the government were to overstep its boundaries, they would get a stern warning.
	And finally, a shared history.
	The idea that we are all part of the same history, the same historic stream, even though American history obviously has victims and villains, even though American history has horrible periods, even though American history has significant periods in which many people in the United States strayed from founding principle.
	The actual story of the United States is not 1619.
	The actual story of the United States is 1776.
	The United States was founded on true, eternally good principles.
	And the story of the United States is about how we have attempted to fulfill those principles increasingly well over time and extend the promises that were made in the Declaration of Independence to more and more human beings over a period of time.
	So black and white Americans are part of that story.
	Black Americans heroically overcoming Jim Crow and slavery.
	White Americans helping them do so and overcoming their own innate sin in all of this and moving toward those founding principles.
	So that is the Unionist philosophy, culture, and history.
	And all of those elements are being disintegrated purposefully.
	By people I call disintegrationists, people who wish to see the country fall apart, who believe that America's philosophy is a lie, was a lie when it was written.
	This is openly stated by the members of the 1619 Project.
	People who believe that all men are created equal is actually just a cover for power politics, because if we treat everybody equally under the law, what about people What about people who are not as well-situated?
	We have to have injustice under the law in order to achieve group or social justice.
	The culture of the United States is inherently bad.
	The culture of adventure and entrepreneurship is actually a culture of exploitation and cruelty to others.
	The culture that says that I have to respect your rights is really about me wanting bad people to win, because if I really didn't want those people to win, I wouldn't respect their rights.
	The culture of valuing social institutions.
	Churches are bad because they cram down social values upon you.
	Family is bad because family is an exploitative institution.
	And finally, the history of the United States is not the story of triumph over innate and universal human sin.
	The story of America is that America was founded in human sin and has merely deepened and broadened that sin over time to the point where all the institutions of America are so thoroughly corrupted they must be torn down at the root.
	That is the battle that is happening in the United States.
	It's not quite left-right.
	There are some liberals who actually believe in a lot of the things that I said are unionist.
	And there are some conservatives who may not agree with all the things that I said are unionist.
	But that, in large scale, is the battle.
	And we're seeing it play out in the streets of Portland, in the streets of Seattle.
	We're seeing it play out in the halls of Congress.
	We're seeing it play out every day in the mainstream media and in the halls of academia.
	But could you have written something more topical, Ben?
	I think that's the question on everyone's mind.
	That was good.
	Nobody needs to buy the book now.
	You heard the whole thing straight from your mouth.
	And now we'll get on to talk about what's going on in the country, which is basically just everything Ben just said.
	In particular, so I haven't been in the news much this week.
	I've been traveling quite a lot.
	You know, as God King, I'm Lord of all that I survey, so I thought I should go look at some stuff.
	Turns out a lot of it doesn't belong to me.
	Really, the title is Kind of giving me a false sense of self.
	But on my travels, I wasn't able to be in the news much.
	But every time I did log onto the Internet, all I could see was the disintegration of one or another American city.
	And what's going on in Portland the last few days seems to really be the giant story that no one's actually allowed to talk about.
	If I'm near a TV, I don't see anything about Portland.
	If I'm on the Internet, it's the only way I hear anything about it.
	Michael, tell us a little bit about it.
	Catch me up.
	What's happening?
	So everything you think is happening, like if you were to have a fevered nightmare, that's what's happening.
	It's happening in Portland.
	And there's this big debate now because you've had these insurrectionists in Portland attacking a federal courthouse and other places as well.
	They look like truly an armed militia.
	And so federal troops have come in.
	And by troops...
	I should be more specific.
	I'm talking about the Department of Homeland Security.
	This has raised a big debate.
	Should these federal agents be able to come in?
	There's a lot of lies that are going on about this.
	The left is saying that the federal agents have no right to do this.
	Of course they do.
	One of the reasons we have DHS in the first place is to protect federal property.
	They're saying that the federal agents are not allowed to go, for instance, arrest people who are committing crimes on federal property, but then leave that property.
	That's also not true.
	It's very clear from U.S. Code that they are absolutely allowed to pursue those individuals.
	They're saying that the federal agents are un-uniformed.
	They're not saying who they are.
	That is also not true.
	They're wearing uniforms.
	It clearly says they're in DHS and they actually have agent numbers, so you can even identify the individual agents.
	So typically a lot of lies from the left and a lot of insurrection that's going on.
	And the biggest lie of all, I think, is they're saying that this is un-American.
	It's Hitler-esque to send in federal troops to put down this insurrection.
	That is absurd.
	There is an American history of putting down insurrections that goes back to 1787.
	It goes back all the way to Shays' Rebellion.
	And actually, one of the reasons we have our Constitution is because the Articles of Confederation were not strong enough to efficiently put down that insurrection.
	And so one of the reasons we got the Constitutional Convention right after Shays' Rebellion was in order to beef up that power.
	And fortunately, finally, people are restoring a little bit of order to the streets.
	So what about the politics of it, Drew?
	Drew, it seems to me that the president slow to act on some of the things that have taken place in America's cities during the sort of Black Lives Matter riots that have been taking place.
	Now he is acting.
	He's sending in federal troops to protect federal property.
	But there's a risk, right?
	The risk is that going into the election, one risk is you look like you've lost control of the country.
	The other risk is that you look like you're a totalitarian, which sort of plays into the narrative that the left has painted of the president really since before he even took office.
	How do you think this shakes out for the president?
	I think the bigger risk is doing nothing, frankly, even though a lot of people on the right are just saying, let these cities burn.
	They're Democrat cities.
	They're suffering from Democrat policies.
	Let them go.
	I think that's wrong.
	Trump has got to show that he's going to do something, that he's going to take care of the country and not let the cities go.
	I think this has been one of Trump's best weeks.
	And of course, obviously, it goes unreported because anything Trump does that's positive It goes unreported.
	I think if he can actually, he's very far back in the polls, and I think he knows it, and I think he acted to fire his campaign manager, and right after that, he suddenly became a really different candidate.
	Now we've got the question, you know, the $64,000 question, does he have the discipline to maintain doing what he did this week?
	He suddenly took a new tone on the Chinese flu.
	He suddenly took it seriously.
	He came out.
	He was very sober.
	He was very direct.
	He actually had facts in front of him, and he used those facts.
	And he started to move against these cities.
	You cannot have cities devolving into chaos.
	And if you really want to know whether this is good for Trump or not, all you have to do is look at the fact that the minute Trump threatens to act, the mayors and governors suddenly act before he can get there.
	So you suddenly have in Portland, they declare a riot after something like 56 days of burning and vandalism and violence.
	Suddenly it's a riot when Trump says he's going to send in the troops.
	The same thing happened in Seattle with their Chaz.
	The same thing happened in New York.
	They closed the Chaz.
	It's been open in front of City Hall all this time the minute he threatened.
	So the left knows that this is not a good look for them, but they can blame it on Trump until he acts.
	And the minute he acts, they've got to shut it down.
	So I think this was a great week for Trump.
	You know, it's always a question with him whether he's just going to blow it all with a single tweet.
	But right this minute, he looks very good.
	So it occurred to me watching the events unfold that you really only have two options, right?
	You can either defend federal property with federal force or you have to pull all of the federal infrastructure out of these cities, which in addition to being practically impossible, no one on the left would stand for, right?
	Like if you just basically said, fine, we'll just shut down the Social Security Administration in Portland if you're not going to protect it, we're not going to have it be there.
	If you're not going to do that, Ben, don't you have to actually defend this property and defend these employees?
	Well, of course.
	I mean, under federal code, you do have to defend this property.
	It is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security to do so.
	They have the power to call from other agencies through the General Services Administration, other people to serve in this battle against people who are as...
	As Michael rightly noted, insurrectionists.
	The fact that this is controversial at all is a testament to how much our media are just damned liars.
	I mean, they are just damned liars.
	I've been very hesitant to talk about the media as the enemy of the people, mainly because I just don't like the phrase.
	I don't like the phrase enemy of the people 'cause it brings up Stalinist sort of associations.
	But the way that the media have acted over the past few months is just disgusting.
	I mean, the mask is now completely off.
	If you thought it had slipped some with Kavanaugh and slipped more with the Covington Catholic kids, it is just gone at this point.
	I cannot trust a single narrative, not one, that is being fed to me by the media.
	If you listen to the media right now, Portland is entirely peaceful and the only people who are creating chaos are the federal agents who are actually members of the Gestapo.
	Everything in Chicago is hunky-dory except that President Trump is threatening to go in there specifically because Lori Lightfoot is black and a woman.
	Everything in New York is absolutely fine.
	The only reason that you're seeing any sort of uptick in violence is just because Trump is president not because they've decided to absolutely castrate the NYPD. If you listen to the media on COVID Everything that's bad that's happening is the fault of Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Doug Ducey in Florida, Texas, and Arizona, respectively.
	Or Trump, more broadly speaking.
	California just ceases to exist.
	Also, apparently Trump is at fault for the second wave that we are now seeing in Spain, in France, in Japan.
	Apparently Trump is in charge of the entire world.
	Literally every narrative that has been trotted out over the past several weeks is not just a little bit wrong.
	It's not just a little wrong.
	It is overtly false.
	It is overtly false.
	I'm amazed that the media think they can get away with this.
	And, you know, so far they have.
	I mean, that's the sad truth is that when you have this blanket wall tsunami, I think that I felt this way after 2006.
	I remember after 2004, there was this feeling with Republicans after Bush beat Kerry that we're never going to lose again.
	And finally, the power of the mainstream media, with Dan Rather collapsing in on himself like a dying, crazy, drunk old star, that he was basically...
	That was the end of the mainstream media.
	Their power had been broken.
	The back had been broken.
	And then in 2008, it felt like, oh no, the media's still there.
	Then Trump wins, and then Republicans again are like, well, it looks like the power of the media is broken.
	And now it doesn't feel like that at all again.
	again.
	It feels like there is just this vast tsunami-like unified wave that has been rushing over informationally the American population.
	And the best case I can see is not even about Trump.
	It's about the approval ratings in Florida, Texas, and Arizona.
	Ducey, DeSantis, and Abbott are all underwater.
	Gavin Newsom is still at 58% in the state of California, despite experiencing a surge exactly the same size as the other states and not having opened in the first place.
	That's right.
	Drew?
	You know, the most interesting person in the country to me right now is Kayleigh McEnany.
	I call her the species girl because she's a hot blonde who rips men's spines out with her tongue.
	But I think what makes her so fascinating to me is that she is incredibly prepared.
	She knows exactly how to go after that.
	She's kind of like you wish that she would be a ventriloquist for Trump, like Trump would open his mouth.
	Singing in the range, goes behind the curtain.
	Exactly, exactly.
	She is doing everything that one wishes that a George W. Bush or Donald Trump, who are not exactly articulate, you wish that they would do.
	And the media is attacking her for telling the truth and being prepared.
	They're attacking her for having effective notes.
	They're attacking her for using tabs in her notebooks so she can find things.
	Today, I think it was today, it may have been yesterday, she actually showed a movie, a video of what was actually happening in Portland, and they cut it off.
	It's like, please don't interrupt us while we're lying.
	And I think that if she can do what she can do, if she will actually accomplish what she wants to accomplish, she could be a very, very powerful weapon.
	Because, Ben, I couldn't agree with Ben more about this.
	This is an amazing, amazing desertion of any journalistic ethos by journalists.
	I want to talk about that.
	You know, today, the number two podcast in the country is this podcast by the New York Times, hosted by a white woman, by the way, suggesting that the problem with American public education is white parents.
	So the fact that the media has gone all in for activism, I think, is one of the most important stories happening in the country.
	But first, I want to talk about our friends over at Ring.
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	Our friend Dave Rubin keeps posting video from his ring of things being stolen from in front of his house.
	I've actually had to start using a mail center across from our office to take deliveries.
	You know, people are sending gifts to my home because my wife and I just adopted a child and they keep disappearing.
	And, you know, you send somebody a gift, they don't send you a thank you card, you're all resentful and full of spite and not acting like family anymore.
	Well, I didn't get your silly present.
	It was stolen.
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	One of the other things I love about Ring is you can actually talk, right?
	The delivery guy comes up to the front of your house.
	Maybe you're there.
	Maybe you're upstairs changing a diaper.
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	You can actually interact with the person.
	You know who's been to your home.
	You know when.
	The smart lighting brightens up blind spots and makes sure you always come home to a brightly lit house.
	And the whole full home security systems give you everything you need to protect your family, your pets, and your property.
	I am one who needs an alarm system to protect my pet.
	I know many people think that your pet is to protect your home.
	You have never met the chief executive dog, Jasper.
	Listen, he's more of a lover than a fighter, which is another reason that I'm glad that I have Ring.
	All the guys here, have it been...
	You love it.
	I do.
	I love my Ring devices because, let's just be frank about this, some people don't like me.
	And that means that I would like to protect my property.
	And also, I want to know, frankly, if somebody's about to sneeze on a package and then leave it in my mailbox.
	And this is why I love Ring.
	Right now, get a special offer on the Ring Welcome Kit when you go to ring.com slash backstage.
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	That is indeed ring.com slash backstage.
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	Keep yourself and your family safer at ring.com slash backstage.
	Hey there, Alicia.
	Oh.
	What you reading?
	Oh, just this book.
	I think it's by this guy we all know named Ben Shapiro.
	How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
	Ben, I really only wish that you'd written this a lot faster so I would have had something to read during COVID. I took up needle pointing instead and really getting to my eyesight.
	Anyway, you should go buy Ben's book right now.
	Apparently, though, you only get a signed copy if you, you know, co-host his live signing.
	Because this one's not signed to me.
	But anyway, this is also a reminder to join our most exclusive membership tier so you can ask questions of the guys.
	And I will give them all the questions and you will get their pithy answers throughout Backstage tonight.
	With that all-access membership tier, you can also join us for the live online Q&A discussion that's right after this episode of Backstage.
	That's 15% off a coupon using Backstage right now at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	The coupon code is backstage to ask questions during backstage, ask us questions after backstage, and get not one, but two tumblers.
	Okay, first question.
	Ben, you ready to roll?
	First of all, it's a little insulting to me.
	I'm just going to get this off my chest.
	You all have, when you do your shows, you all get to use your own name as the promo code.
	So it's like...
	Ah, promo code Shapiro.
	Ah, K-L-A-V-A-N, there are no E's in Klavan.
	However, Knowles does it.
	I've never listened to jokes.
	N-O-L. I can only assume he has one.
	But anytime I'm around, it's either still Shapiro for some reason, giving me absolutely no credit, or it's the generic backstage.
	Why can't we have promo code God King or promo code Jeremy's Great or promo code could somebody give Jeremy a little more money?
	I don't know.
	I don't like it.
	Listen, it's hard enough to be a grifter.
	Yeah.
	To be a grifter and not get paid for it is the absolutely worst thing.
	What a waste of time.
	Let's take some questions.
	So do you want to take the first question, Jeremy, so you don't feel like a grifter?
	Can I toss it to Ben, who we really know is the boss?
	Wow, that hurt.
	But yeah, better give it to Ben.
	He's looking right at me.
	I mean, he's looking right at me, and he did leave me an unsigned book in the studio to talk about.
	All right, Ben, is America's position on the UN Security Council reason enough to stay in the UN, or should we pull out of the UN immediately?
	No, we should pull out of the UN immediately.
	We should neutron bomb the building and salt the earth.
	The UN is a horrific organization, always was a horrific organization.
	If you look at the origins of the UN, basically Stalin insisted that the USSR have a veto on the Security Council, which ended any and all possibility that there would ever be anything good that ever came out of the UN. The UN has literally done, you can count the number of good things the UN has done, probably on one hand, and maybe on like three fingers.
	It's really incredible what a useless and awful organization the United Nations is.
	All you have to do, obviously, is look at what they pass in the General Assembly, where every single resolution is about Israel and they're not condemning the United States.
	All you have to do is look at the UN Human Rights Council, which is staffed by great nations like Iran and Sudan.
	All you have to do is look at the fact that every time they can steal money and use it to enrich a local despot, they absolutely do it.
	The UN is garbage.
	We should have a League of Democracies instead.
	Or we should just have a bunch of bilateral agreements.
	Frankly, I think the President Trump's approach to alliance is in many ways closer...
	You're never going to hear me say again.
	You ready for this, guys?
	His view on alliance is actually closer to the Washingtonian view of alliance than many of the people who have been promoting the sort of, we're all friends and neighbors routine for a very long time.
	Trump's view of alliance is basically you're friends with the people you're friends with, and you're not friends with the people you're not friends with.
	And that's exactly what Washington says in his farewell address.
	It seems to me that we've strayed far from that, and the U.N. is the formalization of straying exactly from Washingtonian principle.
	Ben, I agree.
	I've been waiting for you to say that Donald Trump reminds us of George Washington for many years now, and I'm glad that we agree.
	No, that's right.
	He also has false teeth and...
	And funny hair.
	Bad wig.
	Yeah.
	Funny hair.
	Yeah.
	Let's say it awkwardly.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Sorry, I thought Michael was going to go on, but, you know, okay.
	It kind of petered out.
	Just like all of our shows, it just sort of came to a sliding halt right there.
	Yeah.
	I got very tired.
	This next question is for the Michael Knowles, you know, illustrious author himself.
	Will Republicans have to lose in 2020, you think, in order to win big in 2024?
	I think that's for not just the White House, but the House and the Senate.
	No, you don't win by losing.
	You don't.
	You cannot win by losing.
	Sometimes people, we get very clever about this and we say like, okay.
	Well, I'm going to lose this race, but then I'm going to win it this way 10 years from now.
	And that's just not how it works.
	You're going to lose.
	I mean, sometimes it's inevitable that you lose, but you have to try to win because politics moves on.
	Politics is about eternal principles applied to constantly changing circumstances.
	And so in those circumstances, you can't predict what it's going to look like.
	Forget four or eight years from now.
	You can't predict what it's going to look like in three months.
	If the election were held today, I think a lot of people think President Trump would lose.
	But who knows?
	Who knows what's going to happen over the next 100 days?
	So, no.
	You've got to win.
	You've got to try to win.
	And if you lose, which is going to happen eventually, then you've got to regroup and try to win the next time.
	All right, Drew, this question is for you.
	It's kind of a two-part question.
	Part one is, should schools that teach the 1619 Project lose their federal funding?
	And what curriculum can be used to counter the 1619 Project?
	That's a great question.
	And yes, A, yes, I think that you should not be a public school teaching 1619.
	It's not true.
	I mean, that's the first thing.
	It's not true.
	Plus, it's anti-American.
	If you can't teach your children to love the country you're in and what's beautiful about it, what's great about it, instead teaching it that it's inherently evil.
	I cannot see how that is in any way an education.
	What we need is a history of freedom.
	We need to follow the train of freedom through Western history so that that really takes us from Greece to Rome to the formation of Europe and to America.
	It's an idea.
	It's the idea that really lights up Western history, makes it different than everybody else.
	And really, it shows you, you can trace then when it falls off, why it falls off, when it surges, when it rises, and what keeps it alive.
	And I've always thought that the history that hasn't been written, and I'm just not equipped to write it, unfortunately, is a history of freedom, a history of how this idea has stayed alive.
	Really, all we have are Lord Acton's letters, which kind of Are interesting, but they're just not the same thing as having a textbook that traces this idea.
	And that's what I think we should be doing on the right.
	And of course, we never do anything on the right to fix the culture.
	But that would be one of the things, a project that I think we should be fronting and paying for.
	All right, Jeremy, the God King, not that many people.
	I mean, actually, they follow you on Twitter.
	They're one of the 100,000 people who do follow you on Twitter.
	They probably know that you're a big baseball fan and that you usually take the whole Daily Wire crew to see a Dodgers game once a year on the anniversary.
	But with that in mind, what do you think about the guys at the MLB caving to the woke mob and promoting these players kneeling?
	Well, first of all, one of the horrible things that's happened is the loss of sports.
	The point of sport is that it allows us to work out our sort of baser instincts.
	Everybody's a little bit tribalistic.
	Everybody's a little bit jingoistic.
	And what sports allow us to do is root, root, root for the home team in an environment where the struggle has no meaning beyond a sort of local, regional pride.
	This is why I sometimes argue with Ben.
	He's obviously a big White Sox fan, and sometimes when we go to Dodger Stadium, he'll wear his White Sox cap.
	And I'll say to him, you know, it actually is important that we root for the home team.
	Like, it's good.
	It's fine when we have a team that we love from afar.
	But then I'd be rooting for Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is a bag of garbage, dude.
	They would have taken it all this year if they were actually baseball anymore.
	They've got such a great team.
	But it's just the case that that's part of what sports are supposed to be.
	That's why team sports provide something that boxing or like the Red Bull kind of individualistic sports don't actually provide.
	I like to watch UFC, or I like to watch sometimes the extreme stuff from Red Bull, but you can't root for that.
	You're not a part of that.
	They don't represent your community.
	They don't represent your...
	They're not your team.
	They're not in any way representative of you.
	You're supporting them in what they do.
	When we support a baseball team, they represent in some way us.
	And if the Dodgers are a terrible...
	Bag of garbage, then that's because Ben has chosen to be part of a bag of garbage community.
	Or his parents did, I don't know.
	All of that to say, the loss of sports right now in our country is going to have a real impact.
	It's one of the few things left in our social fabric that would bring us together in a sort of shared struggle, a shared celebration.
	That's what sports is for.
	We don't have that now.
	Obviously, they've made them political.
	COVID is also part of this.
	They've destroyed sports.
	Apparently, the one place where you can't be in an outdoor environment, shouting is at a...
	Sports arena.
	Anywhere.
	If you're in a town square, you can do it.
	But if you're in a sports arena, you will definitely get the COVIDs.
	I think it's a huge mistake to insert the kind of politics in it the way that the owners are right now.
	My hope is that they will lose enormous amounts of cash as a result.
	I think that that's what's going to happen.
	I suspect that people will just turn it off.
	That's not what people watch sports for.
	I may be wrong because the entire country is shut down.
	It may be that we're so desperate for any kind of distraction that people will go ahead and watch sports sort of in spite of this.
	That's not what I hope happens.
	I hope they lose 40% of their ratings and are forced to correct because we need them to correct because we need sports.
	Listen, I'm blind in one eye.
	I'm horribly uncoordinated.
	I've humiliated myself at almost every sport that's popular among America's youth.
	Nevertheless, I think sports are incredibly important, and I think that the entire idea of sport...
	Sometimes people will say, America puts too much emphasis on sports and not enough emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic.
	Right, but we invent everything.
	We have the military that defends democracy and freedom all across the globe, and we're the greatest economy in the history of the world.
	Our love of sport and the fact that we inculcate love of sport into our children is part of the reason for our success, because sports actually teach you the values of capitalism.
	They teach you that hard work That perseverance, that overcoming adversity can lead to success.
	They teach you that you can't rely on rigged rules.
	You have to, at the end of the day, rely on yourself and on your team.
	That is an important part of what we teach our kids.
	I think that it's an enormous loss if it continues down the path that it's going.
	Yes, please.
	Because it really is devastating for those of us who are major, major baseball fans.
	So I am a diehard Chicago White Sox fan.
	I wrote an entire book about the Chicago White Sox 2005 championship season with my father.
	Both of us have united over baseball.
	Singular championship season.
	Singular.
	Well, they had one.
	It was all the way back in 1918, though.
	In 1917, actually.
	But the basic kind of destruction of all common areas of American life is so horrifying.
	Yeah.
	And it's happening everywhere, right?
	I mean, it's not just sports.
	It's happening in entertainment.
	It's happening that, basically, it is now dictated to you that when you buy an HVAC part, you have to make sure that the CEO of the HVAC company agrees with you on politics.
	You have to make sure that the head of Goya agrees with you about Donald Trump, even if he's already done a different press conference with Barack Obama just a few years beforehand.
	Everybody has to agree on everything.
	And the corporations, I mean, I'm going to sound like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren right now.
	The corporations are to blame for this.
	Corporations have not stood up for principle.
	Corporations have decided that the easiest way out is to cave to the woke mob, that they can make a quick buck by caving to the woke mob because there are enough conservatives who aren't going to boycott them that they feel like they can just grease the squeakiest wheel and get away with it.
	And it really is short-sighted.
	It's quite disgusting.
	And again, when MLB decides they're going to put out this vague Morgan Freeman social justice statement where he talks about Tim Robbins going through 500 yards of foul-smelling stench like you can't believe, and everybody's kneeling, and it's all about empathy and equality.
	And the statement, by the way, meant nothing.
	I mean, if you actually listen to what Morgan Freeman said...
	It made no sense at all.
	It really didn't make any sense.
	But the basic notion here, the footage that you're seeing right now is the Nationals and the Yankees both kneeling before the National Anthem.
	And this was their compromise.
	We're not going to kneel during the National Anthem because that might be perceived as disrespectful.
	Instead, we'll kneel before the National Anthem to signify that America is systemically racist.
	I don't feel particularly respected now.
	As a member of the systemically racist American public, apparently, and systemically a racist American system, I don't feel particularly not insulted by a group of largely diverse millionaires and 10 millionaires.
	It's telling me how racist the American system is.
	And if we don't buy that, then what?
	We're not patriotic?
	What, we're not allowed to watch sport?
	The corporate owners who are doing this kind of stuff, they don't understand that they're cutting off their nose to spite their face, and they're ruining the country in the process.
	And it's gone everywhere, right?
	Because if you even say this, that's political.
	You say you don't like politics and sports.
	Now you're being political and you trend on Twitter for saying, I like my sports without politics.
	Even though, as my friend Clay Travis says, the root of the word sport, the etymology is disport from the French, meaning literally distraction.
	The whole point of sports is to distract you from real life.
	There's plenty of crap happening in real life.
	When I turn on a game, the last thing I want to see is a bunch of vague social justice messaging that is semantically overloaded and can mean everything from support Black Lives Matter as an organization to America systemically racist to the completely inarguable principle that black people matter, which of course they do.
	You know, this is a very good point.
	We obviously don't want these kind of partisan distractions.
	But there is, I would push back and say, a political element to sports going all the way back to ancient Greece.
	And it's a very basic one.
	And the basic political element is patriotism.
	Sports have always been patriotic.
	They've been about celebrating, as Jeremy says, the home team or celebrating your country.
	And one of the virtues that they inculcate, among all the others that, Jeremy, you mentioned, is loyalty.
	Loyalty to your teammates if you're playing the sport, loyalty to the home team.
	If you're going out and watching the sport, loyalty to your country when you stand up for the national anthem.
	And Ben, as you say, the common areas of American life have been completely eroded.
	If we cannot even recognize one another as fellow Americans, if we cannot even agree on the star-spangled banner, there is nothing left.
	That is the most basic level of American unity and solidarity.
	So much for that loyalty.
	By the way, Anthony Fauci can't throw, right?
	We've established this, right?
	I mean, I feel bad for him.
	He's 80.
	But he's the one who chose to get out there on the mound.
	I get to make fun of you if you throw that out as the first pitch, right?
	Yeah, I'm just going to say that if you're ever invited to throw out the first pitch at any baseball game, just say no.
	Just don't do it.
	Yeah, if you didn't play college ball, Do not get up there and try to throw out that.
	A W throwing out, right?
	A W. He's thrown a baseball team.
	One assumes he had thrown a baseball a few times in his day.
	If you get the opportunity, Ben Shapiro or Michael Knowles or Andrew Klavan.
	But even Donald Trump has a good throwing motion.
	Internet celebrity.
	Well, yeah, that's because he's never exercised.
	I feel like I'm praising Trump so much this episode.
	If you had never exercised, you could throw out a baseball, too.
	You keep picking these guys for the exception.
	That's true.
	No, he does have all his life force.
	He has all his life force.
	That's true.
	And therefore, he's able to.
	I want to talk, speaking of life for us, I want to talk about our friends over at PolicyGenius.
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	There is more now that I can reveal.
	Since we last spoke, my wife got that...
	I went ahead and got a policy on my wife.
	Because I actually thought, it's a little bit unfair that she now gets to root for my demise.
	I should also be able to celebrate the idea that she indeed is mortal.
	And even though the likelihood is, based on every statistic that men will die before their wives, even when that man in question isn't an asshole like me, even with all that, there's an off chance...
	That she could go first.
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	Even that, I thought Policy Genius did a great job of streamlining it and making it very efficient.
	Now, most qualified applicants can actually complete the medical requirement over the phone.
	I kid.
	It is very important, especially once you start having children, especially when you have dependents, especially when you have other people who you need to provide for.
	The loss of a loved one is a terrible enough thing.
	Don't put people in a position of not only having to mourn for you, but also have to worry about how they're going to meet those basic needs when you could have taken it upon yourself to do the responsible thing and provide them with life insurance.
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	PolicyGenius, it is important and nice to get your life insurance right.
	So before we went to break, we were talking, Drew, about this idea of the media having completely taken off the mask, as Ben said, and revealing that they're partisan activists.
	I referenced this podcast, the second biggest podcast in the country today, in which the New York Times says that the problem with education in America is white parents.
	Of course, this comes right on the heels of the 1619 Project and some great reporting done by the Daily Wire discovered that the New York Times spent over $3 million promoting the 1619 Project and was able to obscure the specifics of how they spent that money.
	Just three ads from the 1619 Project.
	Three individual ads by exploiting a protection that was afforded them because they're not activists, because they're supposed to be straight journalists.
	Of course, then they behave as activists.
	The very fact that they're printing curricula now to put into elementary, junior high, high schools, doesn't this evidence that they aren't, in fact, journalistic institutions anymore at all?
	I mean, are we really seeing not only sort of the reveal, but aren't we seeing a shift happen where these organizations are now directly engaging in politics in a way that maybe has not been the case in the post-war consensus?
	Yeah, it's the Trump effect in a lot of ways because Donald Trump hasn't caused any of this to happen.
	He simply lanced the boil.
	I mean, it really was this bad.
	Everybody has this myth that suddenly with Donald Trump, the journalistic community lost it.
	But that's not true.
	You go back to George W. Bush.
	He was Hitler every day.
	Every word he said was a scandal.
	And the system is, as I explain often, the system is not each individual story.
	It is to create an Attitude and atmosphere of chaos so that when something actually happens, like Hurricane Katrina or the Chinese flu, suddenly you think like, oh yeah, it really has been chaotic all this time.
	It's really been a disaster.
	So all that's happened now is the full reveal.
	And it's not just journalism.
	It really is across our institutions.
	We have let our institutions get hollowed out.
	I mean, we have a legislature that doesn't legislate.
	We have a court system that does legislate.
	We have journalists that don't cover anything, academies that don't teach, and I think this is a genuinely serious problem, and it's one of the reasons you should probably buy this book.
	By the way, I want to say I saw this title, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, and I thought I was going to open it up and say, oh my god, it's a cookbook.
	LAUGHTER Not for that.
	No, but I mean, I think this is, we are actually seeing something quite, quite serious, which is the hollowness of our institutions.
	And as long as Trump is there, everybody can sort of point to him and say, oh, look, this is the problem.
	But it's just not so.
	I mean, Trump is in effect.
	Of this.
	And the press, our entertainment system, all of this has been hollowed out for years.
	I've been talking about it for years.
	And suddenly, suddenly my phone starts ringing and people say, you know, gee, what are we supposed to do about this?
	And I say, well, about 20 years ago, you're supposed to start building, you know, news agencies.
	You're supposed to start building movie studios.
	You're supposed to start building academies and teaching institutions.
	And look, the right has not done this.
	And the right One of the reasons the right has not done this is because I think our philosophy has been emptied out by fusionism, by basically saying we're going to put together libertarians, religious people, and capitalism.
	And it all kind of comes, it's all sort of been about money.
	I mean, all we've ever said to people is like, the pursuit of happiness is about money.
	Capitalism is the greatest thing ever.
	And now, one of the things that Ben was talking about, About the fact that corporations are signing on to this racist, Marxist, disgusting Black Lives Matter philosophy.
	It shows you that capitalism won't save you.
	You've got to start with the values.
	It has to start with the values.
	And unless we become a values party or a values movement, we can't stop this because we have no message.
	Until we have a message, we can't do the messaging.
	And I think that it really is a problem that has finally just kind of come open, like I said, like a Boyle being lanced.
	I think that I'm a little bit more pro-capitalism.
	Totally pro-capitalism, but...
	I actually think there's a slightly nuanced distinction that I would make.
	I think one of the problems that happens with the right is that we don't profit off of the culture at all.
	And so we abandon the culture entire.
	If you ask why do conservative billionaires not fund film or music or technology?
	Conservatives famously don't get involved The answer, I think, is because conservatives tend to be fairly conservative in their approach, and therefore rich conservatives tend to be people who got rich through very conservative practices.
	So, for example, while I was in the DFW area over the last week, There's so much real estate wealth.
	There's so much energy wealth that goes on in those places.
	Famously, if you make your money in real estate or in energy or in oil, you're in Texas.
	Think about how those guys make their money.
	If you make your money in real estate, You can put on a spreadsheet the steps to allow you to prosper over time.
	You could start now with very little money in your own bank account, and you could build your way to being an extraordinarily wealthy person in a very meat and potatoes, very predictable, one step in front of the other way.
	And so if you become a very wealthy, conservative real estate person, you probably have spreadsheets that tell you If I increase the rental rates in my skyscraper by 10% over the next three years, I'll be able to afford to do a remodel of the entire structure, which will allow me to increase my rate by 20% over the three years after that, which will allow me to buy a second skyscraper.
	And if I raise my rent 10% over the next three years there, I can do a renovation, which will allow me to...
	And they can, very one step in front of the other, see these ways to build wealth.
	With the exception of wildcatting, a lot of the energy industry functions the same way.
	If we frack this many wells, there's a ratio to understand.
	And so you might make 2, 3, 4, 5, 20 billion dollars in those businesses, but you always know what the next thing to do with your money is.
	If you make a billion dollars in real estate...
	You put the billion dollars back into real estate so that you can make $2 billion.
	Now, imagine that you're that guy.
	You know what to do with every dollar that comes your way and how to turn that into another dollar, how to turn that into a better downtown in your community.
	Let's don't pretend it's just money.
	How to turn that into better jobs for the people in your community and all the things that come with that kind of growth.
	And now a kid walks into your office with a backpack and he says, Hey, dude.
	Nobody calls me dude.
	He says, Yeah, man, listen.
	I built this app.
	What's an app?
	It's this thing on the computer.
	I built this website.
	And basically, I put up a bunch of pictures of hot chicks from my college.
	And I let people vote with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
	And if the chick gets a thumbs up, then she moves to the second ranking and more people can vote on her.
	Please give me $10 million.
	I think I could grow this into something where people can really talk to each other, man.
	And you'd be like, how did you get in here?
	And you would kick that kid out of your office.
	And you wouldn't even know 15 years later that he's worth $75 billion and that that app that he built for voting on how hot chicks are became the most important communication platform ever devised in the history of man.
	Because you knew meat and potatoes, how to take your money and put it into the next thing.
	So we now imagine some...
	Beatnik kid walks into your office with a backpack, and he's got an idea for how he can tell a story that's kind of funny, and he thinks maybe people will laugh, and he tells you a couple jokes that he wrote into scene three about a bong hit.
	And you're like, what on earth?
	But it turns out that guy goes on to be Adam Sandler or something, and he creates one of the most profitable film franchises or film companies ever.
	In modern Hollywood, he has a deal with Sony for years.
	He's the most popular film producer on Netflix for a number of years.
	In other words, there's nothing in the experience of the kind of people who have excess cash on the right to help them understand why they should back these cultural plays.
	Meanwhile, guys who made their money in technology, like Silicon Valley guys, they see money completely differently.
	They make a billion dollars, and there is no next apartment building in There is no community in which they have invested in.
	They didn't pick downtown Fort Worth to be the place where they were going to build and grow.
	They made their money in these very abstract ways, and so they're willing to take bets on other people who think abstractly.
	I think that there is just a cultural difference for how the culture is perceived from people who made their money in abstract ways and people who made their money by renovating apartment buildings.
	I have to tell you why.
	It's not that I disagree with what you're saying, but I think that you're saying that something is built into the system.
	And I think that it's actually a matter of values.
	This is one of the reasons you and I always disagree about Ayn Rand, who I just hate.
	And I think that if you take the value, if you put values first, you can have capitalism and it will be the wonderful machine that it is for raising everybody up.
	But if you don't put the values for, you know, when Jesus said you can't serve God and mammon, he wasn't just whistling Dixie, which would have been racist.
	He was actually he was actually saying you have to put some one thing before the other.
	And I think the thing is, when we see when we see Amazon sending me on my Web page saying, oh, if you like the collected poetry of William Wordsworth, you might like white fragility.
	And you think like, I'm sorry, what?
	He has got to be making a calculation that somehow that's going to help him financially down the road.
	And he may be right when Oprah takes the 1619 project.
	That's an Ayn Randian success.
	I mean, that's everything that Ayn Rand supports, except that it's destructive of the country.
	If you don't put the values first, if you don't put the values above the money, and we fail to preach this as conservatives, if you don't put the values above the money, you really hollow out what capitalism is.
	And you have China, basically, where they have free markets and no freedoms.
	Well, I think that there is a problem that you're diagnosing, but I think that I'm not sure I agree with the exact diagnosis.
	So I totally agree that conservatives have failed to talk about values in markets.
	They've talked about the value of markets, but not values in markets.
	And that makes a huge difference.
	As soon as conservatives made the moves to talk in terms of utilitarianism, they lost.
	Conservatives are not utilitarians.
	As soon as conservatives started to say, the reason that markets are good is because they produce prosperity and wealth, it was over.
	Because it's so easy for somebody else to say, right, but prosperity and good for whom?
	How about this group?
	This group's been left behind.
	Why can't we just capture the value of the market, and then we can turn it and twist it, and we can do X, Y, or Z with it?
	This is the sort of language that both...
	Tucker Carlson uses on the right about markets, right?
	Markets are just a mechanism and we can chain them to anything we want, so why don't we chain them to things that we like?
	And Elizabeth Warren, who will say things like, the markets are just a mule that you can hitch to your wagon and it will take you exactly where you want to go.
	The point of markets, and this is something that I've been focused on for a very long time, the reason that markets are good is because markets are a reflection of a truth about human nature, was that human beings are free and deserve to own their own labor.
	And so people have asked me, okay, so what if a market was less efficient than a fascist economic system?
	I would still believe in the market.
	I would still believe in the market because I think that there is an inherent good to the belief that human beings own their own labor, that they are individuals created in the image of God, and as Locke argued, if you're an individual created in the image of God and you mix your labor with the earth, you then own that labor.
	That is an inherent good, and that is not reliant on the effect Of the capitalist enterprise.
	It just turns out that this also happens to create the most wealth in the history of humanity.
	But you have to argue that people actually own their own labor and that they ought to own their own labor as a moral matter, not as a utilitarian matter.
	So I think reading values in capitalism and opposition is incorrect, except in that people have started to discuss capitalism only in utilitarian terms.
	And very often when they speak about capitalism in utilitarian terms, they don't mean long-term utilitarian terms.
	The problem with Ayn Rand is she assumes that everybody who engages in capitalism is going to think More than five minutes down the road.
	She assumes that people are going to forego the immediate profit margin that is to be found in doing the wrong thing in order to preserve the system that is going to allow, right?
	Ayn Rand actually does assume that there is a value that you are assuming in your own life, your ownership of your own living, right?
	As much as I disagree with her sort of values on capitalism when applied to your personal life and your treatment of family, when she talks about selfishness is a value, what she really means is that you ought to own your own labor.
	There is a value in owning your own labor.
	There is something good in the creative human spirit.
	That is a value-laden argument, and that's been left behind by a lot of the people who tend to speak about capitalism purely as a utilitarian creator of what?
	But there's also this issue, I mean, Ben, I agree with you exactly on the utilitarian point, and Drew, I agree with you on this point, that you need values.
	We've made this mistake, especially Republicans have, you know, at Republican fundraisers for the last 30, 40 years, which is that the Republican Party fundraiser speech was always schizophrenic.
	It began with, we need to maintain strong communities and family values and conserve all of our wonderful rituals and traditions.
	And by the way, we need to destroy all of that through creative destruction that is constantly ever-progressing and is always making people move all over the place.
	And not even just all around the country, but all around the globe.
	Isn't that great?
	We're all going to make a lot more money.
	And the latter part of that argument undercuts the very values that you're talking about at the beginning.
	So I agree entirely, Ben, that you need to make a moral argument for not just markets, but for so many other facets of our economic system.
	But you also you have to begin with the human person, what we want, an authentic politics, which since ancient Greece means a lot of people coming together and deciding how we want to live, debating ethical questions, ranking our priorities.
	And only then will you be able to even have an economic system that doesn't completely undercut itself as we're seeing right now with the woke companies who are chopping off at the knees the very country that allowed these markets to flourish.
	Yeah, I think it's possible.
	I mean, I always make the moral argument for capitalism.
	I agree with you 100% on that, Ben, but you're...
	You're looking at it from one side, which is if fascism worked better, was more efficient than capitalism, would fascism be alright?
	And of course the answer is no.
	But if capitalism starts to sell fascism and make a bundle, would that be alright?
	And the answer is also no.
	I think when you're using corporations, for instance, when you have corporations that are silencing free speech, that are cutting down free speech, to me, that is a value that actually supersedes all kinds of capitalist rules.
	If your company is in any way harming the right of Americans to speak freely in an effective way, your company's gotta go.
	Your company should be just shut down.
	You know, your rights, if you don't start with the fact that your rights come from God, then there's always gonna be different kinds of power centers that can take away those rights.
	And I think those rights have to be defended because they are holy, because they come from a source outside of ourselves, and capitalism Listen, again, I'm a total capitalist, but capitalism has to rest on that pedestal.
	It can't create that pedestal itself.
	And if you want to defend that pedestal, you need to go talk to our friends over at Petal Company Manufacturing.
	When the founders created the Constitution...
	That was so beautiful.
	I appreciate it.
	Listen, I'm the true capitalist.
	You all give a lot of lip service to it.
	I'm the only one who makes sure you all get paid.
	When the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their government.
	The second right they enumerated was the right of the population to protect that speech and their own persons with force.
	You know how strongly each of us here believes in these principles.
	Every one of us here, a gun owner...
	And owning a rifle in particular is an awesome responsibility.
	Building rifles is no different.
	Bravo Company Manufacturing, BCM, built a professional-grade product, which is built to combat standards.
	That's because BCM believes that the same level of protection should be provided to every single American, regardless of whether or not you're a private citizen or a professional.
	The people at BCM assume that when a rifle leaves their shop, it will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas.
	With that in mind, every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans.
	The people at BCM feel it's their moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the end user when it's not just a paper target, but someone coming to do them harm.
	BCM also knows that making a reliable, life-saving tool is only half the story.
	The company also works with leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's Special Operations Forces, from Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance to U.S. Army Special Operations Forces, connecting them with other Americans.
	These top instructors teach the skills necessary to defend yourself, your family, We love the guys over at Bravo Company Manufacturing.
	They make a great product, and they actually do believe it's based on the values, as Drew was saying.
	They make a great product, they're great in the marketplace, but they also believe that that product serves the ideals that are ensconced in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
	Bravo Company Manufacturing, Ben.
	To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to bravocompanymfg.com.
	You can discover more about their products, special offers, upcoming news.
	That is bravocompanymfg.com.
	If you need more convincing, find out even more about BCM and the amazing people who make their products at youtube.com slash bravocompanyusa.
	Here, we imitate masculinity by having men smoke cigars.
	There, they just do masculinity by making firearms.
	And smoking cigars.
	And smoking cigars.
	YouTube.com slash bravocompanyusa or bravocompanymfg.com.
	Alicia?
	Does that code work for people that work at the company?
	Just asking for someone.
	All righty.
	Reminder to join our most exclusive membership tier.
	Are you like me?
	You like exclusive things?
	Well, turns out, even at The Daily Wire, we have a very exclusive membership tier.
	It's our all-access tier, and you can join us for a live online Q&A discussion right after this episode of Backstage.
	Using that code that Jeremy doesn't love because it doesn't have his name in it backstage.
	It's the name of his show, though.
	And that code will get you 15% off using the code backstage with two tumblers.
	So dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Code backstage for 15% off for the very exclusive All Access membership.
	Go and do it now because we still have time to ask the guys your questions and get answers from them.
	First question goes to Ben Shapiro, New York Times.
	I just want to say, I mean, I know it's our show.
	It's just that you guys also have your show.
	That's the problem.
	It's my show.
	I mean, I guess in a way they're all my show.
	Yeah, you're the executive producer of all of the shows.
	I mean, your name pops up on every single one.
	Oh, that's something.
	Yeah, there you go.
	The men behind the curtain.
	All right, Ben, how would you handle the concentration camp situation in China?
	And should there be more sanctions from the United States?
	And when is the world really morally culpable without taking direct intervention?
	And why hasn't more action been taken?
	Okay.
	It's like a four-part question, but I think it's a really good one.
	Yeah, that was a lot.
	So when it comes to when is a country responsible for taking a direct humanitarian intervention, my general rule of thumb is if the risk is low and the benefit is high, then you should do it.
	The risk, obviously, is not low.
	If you're going to talk about bombing China over this, then the question becomes, are you really willing to basically start World War III at this point in time?
	And the answer there is no for pretty much everybody involved.
	I mean, China is the world's most populous country.
	Is India now?
	Has India passed them?
	China may be the second most populous country on planet Earth.
	In any case, a billion people over in China with an incredibly large army and significant capacity to do Americans harm.
	Starting a war with China would be a mistake.
	Does that mean that you have to abandon people to their fate?
	Absolutely not.
	We should be engaging with the Chinese government exactly the way we engage with the USSR, which is to say we should cut them off at the knees economically.
	We should recognize them for exactly the threat they are, globally speaking.
	They are an evil dictatorship, a full-on evil dictatorship, not merely for what they're doing to the Uyghurs, shaving heads and sending people on trains to concentration camps where they force them into slave labor and or sterilize them.
	But what they've done to Hong Kong in subjecting a free people to the predations of absolute communistic tyranny and the rest of the world shrugging and yawning, is an unbelievable chastisement of the idea that the West was ever willing to stand up for the freedom of anybody in that region.
	And the next people who are going to take it directly on the nose are the folks over in Taiwan, which is why the United States should immediately recognize Taiwan as an independent country.
	They shouldn't wait more than five seconds.
	China ain't going to start a shooting war over it.
	They might get mad at us.
	Tough.
	The United States should immediately declare Taiwan a sovereign country.
	No more of this two systems, one country nonsense that China insists upon.
	The United States should immediately sanction pretty much any business that is currently run by the Chinese government.
	And if the United States wants to take measures to prevent people from doing business with China, I'm not against it.
	I mean, right now the problem is that you have a collective action problem, which is that if businesses don't do business with China, they're immediately undercut by other businesses that do do businesses with China.
	But that is exactly why governments should get involved and they should be sanctioning China on a full scale.
	One of the great mistakes, I think, in history, and maybe it was excusable at the time because we were at war with the Soviet Union, but one of the great mistakes, in my view, was the opening of China.
	The idea that economics was ever going to overcome values has been thoroughly rebuked by the presence of Chinese dictatorship, which has strengthened, become more powerful, become more deep.
	More tyrannical?
	With the advent of more capitalism.
	They've just taken all the spoils of a state-run, basically, fascist economy, and then they've dumped it into their own dictatorship.
	The entire Western world should be united against China right now.
	Whether they will or not is anybody's guess, but as the leaders of the free world, it seems to me that we should be doing whatever we can to make it known to the Chinese economically that we are simply not going to abide by their intellectual property theft, their human rights predations, and their expansionism.
	Alright, next question is for Jeremy.
	This is a pretty interesting take, too.
	It says that we've seen this week, I know that you guys have seen that poll that Frank Luntz and others have tweeted out that shows that 62% of Americans are afraid to share their political views.
	But does this mean that the recent polls showing that Trump is down double digits are then meaningless?
	So I'm not one who believes that we can just write off polls as meaningless.
	Very often when conservatives say, well, the polls were wrong, the polls actually weren't that wrong.
	You know, we like to say the polls showed that Hillary Clinton was going to win in 2016, but she did win more votes in 2016, and basically by the same numbers that the polls said that she would.
	The polls were very useful at helping understand human behavior.
	They were not very good at specifying what was going to happen in some of the Midwestern states, which came down to some fairly anonymous Very small and very anomalous things that occurred that allowed Trump to win.
	Listen, I'm not saying he didn't win fair and square based on the system we have.
	He did.
	What I'm saying is that the polls also were not wildly wrong about what the outcome was going to be in terms of the human voting behavior at that time.
	That said, one other thing.
	There is no silent majority of conservatives.
	There's this sort of idea hearkening back to Nixon that there's this silent majority that all think the way that we do is going to rise up.
	It's very comforting, I think, for conservatives to believe that.
	But it is not true.
	The left has won.
	Their opinions are the more popular opinions by and large in the country, in particular among the young.
	If the election were held today and only millennials were able to vote, Donald Trump would probably win zero states.
	At most, he would win one state.
	And lest you roll your eyes and say, ah, who cares what the millennials think?
	You're wrong about who millennials are.
	Michael Knowles is a millennial.
	The 20-year-old who you just hired to work at your factory or the 16-year-old kid who you're still trying to get out the front door.
	You got a couple more years of raising them.
	They aren't millennials.
	They're a whole new generation that's coming up behind the millennials.
	The millennials are closer to 40 by and large than they are to 20.
	And they are, for the first time in our history, the largest voting demographic in the country.
	So the idea that you could have the largest voting demographic in the entire country utterly despise everything that we believe and yet somehow we're still a silent majority and secretly everybody agrees with us.
	It's absurd, and it's going to be cold comfort to tell ourselves, oh, well, there's still a silent majority.
	They just didn't show up to vote when we start getting pummeled in elections.
	Instead, we better stop lying to ourselves and do something about the problem.
	So, with those two caveats in mind, are there a lot more people who agree with us than are willing to admit it?
	Of course.
	Are you out of your mind?
	You could lose everything by agreeing with us on even the most benign topics.
	Men are not women, right?
	Men are not women is bannable, boycottable in our society today.
	Even more benign things than that, saying, I agree that Black Lives Matter, but I don't agree with Black Lives Matter, would cost most people working in most companies in this country today to lose their job.
	So you bet your rear end there are a lot of people afraid, they should be afraid, to speak their mind.
	I want to, though, tell you what I think the answer is and not just leave you with a sort of despair.
	You know, Ben said that the government needs to get involved in China because one of the good things that capitalism does is it creates competition, and competition creates efficiencies.
	We produce a wonderful tumbler, the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler.
	The Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler is manufactured in China.
	You might say, why don't you manufacture it in America?
	Because there are zero companies in the United States of America that manufacture still tumblers.
	It's not that it's more expensive to do it here.
	It is that it is not possible to do it here.
	We've looked into it.
	Maybe we've missed one and somebody will correct me to our ability to search it out.
	Trade with China has been going on now for over 50 years.
	There are consequences of that change.
	We have moved a lot of our manufacturing overseas, and I know some of you are going to write in, pissed off at me now, and say, you're a hypocrite for buying your tumblers in China.
	You're going to type to me, of course, on your iPhone, which was also made in China, or your Android, which was made in China, or your laptop, which was made in China, and I'm going to ignore you because you're only actually proving the fact that manufacturing happens in China.
	You don't stop that by Daily Wire saying we're going to start a Tumblr company.
	There's no reason why we...
	You would need to make millions of Tumblrs.
	We purchased tens of thousands of Tumblrs.
	We can't start a Tumblr factory.
	Someone should start a Tumblr factory, and they will do so when there's incentive for them to do, when they can do it competitively, when they won't lose by doing it.
	One thing that I've discovered is everybody says that they want to buy American until they see the price tag for buying American, and then everybody just buys China or buys India.
	Right.
	Jeremy, this happened, my wife said, at the beginning of all the craziness with China, you know, even before the pandemic, how they're cheating on the traders, she said, we're just going to buy American.
	I said, okay, that's fine.
	Buy dresses, buy shoes, buy American.
	There are only, as you say, like three companies that do this, and even they get a lot of their stuff from China.
	But the price, I'm actually willing to pay it.
	I am actually, like, I am stubbornly American enough to pay for it.
	But it's not just 20% more.
	It's like 3x.
	Like, it is so much more expensive.
	Yeah.
	We looked at what it would take to actually manufacture the tumbler and our cost on manufacturing the tumbler wouldn't be 3x.
	It would be 20x if we were to manufacture the tumblers directly and the machines that we would have to install in order to do it are themselves made in China.
	So the only way that you deal with a problem like this is to take some sort of collective action Where the people who do what we don't want aren't the ones who succeed at the expense of the people who try to do the thing that we do want.
	This is why capitalism actually does...
	There is a value component to capitalism, which is that competition makes it to where the people who do the best make the most.
	When you start interfering with that in a bad way, I think you create some perverse incentives.
	The same thing holds true, though, on this question of the silent majority, the people who are afraid to speak out.
	It is a collective action problem.
	If every single person in America today who thinks that it is egregious that Major League Baseball is kneeling and condemning our society before the game would just turn off the game, 100% of us, you would see change.
	If every one of us who is afraid that we might lose our job for speaking mainstream, traditionally middle-of-the-road American opinions like For example, segregation is bad.
	Equal justice under the law is good.
	Hard work is not only for white people, which the Smithsonian literally said last week.
	Hard work is a white value that is, or the nuclear family is only a white value system.
	Yeah.
	If we would all just say, bullcrap, men are men, women are women, everybody can and should work hard.
	Black people are not inferior or superior to white people.
	They're just people who should be held to the same set of standards.
	Yes, some people are born in circumstances that are worse than others.
	Some of those people are black.
	Some of those people are white.
	Some people are born with circumstances that are better than others.
	And some of those people are black.
	And some of those people are white.
	And the best we can do is make a fair society and leave each other the hell alone.
	If we would all say that, they couldn't fire all of us at the same time.
	The problem is, we don't.
	And then we let one or two brave suckers stick their necks out, and they lose their jobs, and we all go, well, I wish somebody would stand up to the left.
	And we go hide in the corner.
	It's a collective action issue.
	When the day comes that we're all willing to stand up, they will have to stop, even if we're not the majority.
	A significant plurality is enough to put a stop to this.
	And rant.
	Next question for Andrew.
	All right.
	Drew, this comes from a Daily Wire all-access subscriber, by the way.
	That's why they get to ask you a question.
	And they say that they've been rereading 1984.
	And is it not so very concerning how similar the structures that seem to be being built currently are to the structures and the procedures of this fictional book?
	Drew, you didn't write 1984.
	No, I did actually.
	I used a different name then.
	No, listen, 1984 is a perfect description of Soviet Russia, and of course the left always works the same way.
	It has to work the same way.
	The thing about it is there actually is a moral order.
	There actually is moral truth and spiritual truths, and in order to erase these things, you have to erase every form of logic and information that is available to people.
	It's not enough.
	It's not enough to lie to people.
	You have to stop people from telling the truth.
	That's why you have cancel culture.
	There's no reason to have cancel culture if you're right, if you're actually telling the truth.
	So everything in 1984, the famous scene in 1984 where they torture Winston Smith and they say to him, it's not that two and two is four.
	It's not that two and two is five.
	It's that two and two is whatever the party says it is.
	That's the system that you have to install in order to overcome reality.
	And so whenever you have a movement like Black Lives Matter, like Antifa, like anything that comes from the far left, that is actually in opposition to reality, those same systems for silencing the truth, for silencing people's Even their own thought processes have to come into play.
	1984 is prophetic.
	They always used to say that he got it wrong in 1984 and it was Brave New World that got it right.
	But no, I think the two of them hopscotch over each other.
	Brave New World is a technological tyranny, but 1984 is the face of tyranny.
	In a technological world, and it always will be and it will always remain.
	And when you look at what's happening in our media, when Ben talks about the media, that's 1984.
	That's exactly what we're talking about.
	When you talk about cancel culture, that is 1984.
	I wish people would read it because it is an absolute exact and precise case study of this kind of tyranny.
	By the way, here I will, again, stump for a movie that everybody should go watch right now.
	If you're looking for a good piece of entertainment that really does have excellent values and has something to say, go check out the movie Mr.
	Jones on Amazon.
	You should go rent it.
	It is the story of Gareth Jones, who is the journalist who uncovered the Ukrainian Haladomar, and the villain in the piece is Walter Durante, who is portrayed clear-eyed as the villain.
	I'm astonished.
	New York Times reporter.
	Yeah, I'm amazed the movie was ever made.
	It's really clear-eyed and accurate and worth the watch.
	Speaking of the New York Times and 1984, when we were talking about that podcast, Jeremy, earlier, that basically said the whole problem in American education is white people, I reacted to that jokingly, and I said, yeah, white people are terrible, and every other kind of person is better, and they're better particularly because of the color of their skin.
	Hashtag anti-racism.
	You know, obviously a little bit of a joke, except it actually makes sense from within the framework of the New York Times and the left, because what they have defined racism as is anything white people do, right?
	They say all white people are racist, and racism is exclusively white.
	So you can't be any other kind of color or ethnicity and be racist because blah, blah, blah.
	I don't know, because they've come up with some definition of that.
	And so...
	It actually does make sense that you have to just say that white people are the problem for everything.
	If you live in a world where the definition of words is not what it was today, it's not what it was yesterday, it's not even what it will be tomorrow, the definition of words is what the party says it is.
	And where can we read that?
	You read that in the New York Times and every other cultural institution the left took over.
	Michael, this question is for you.
	If you could construct an ark to preserve man's greatest works of art and literature, what would be the first three things that you'd put in there after the Bible, of course?
	After the Bible, it would be Dante.
	It would really be Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, the three parts of Dante's Divine Comedy.
	Or, if you get rid of that, I would do Dante, and then I would do Shakespeare, and then I would do, I don't know, let's throw a Coravaggio in there.
	How to Destroy America in three easy steps.
	Yeah.
	I, like, left it hanging there for you, dude.
	It was so obvious.
	Like, just pick it up and be like, here you go.
	Is that not in Dante's Divine Comedy?
	That was the fourth canticle of Dante's...
	You know, I am rereading Dante right now.
	You don't say.
	I am.
	I actually haven't really read it in 10 years.
	God, you're a douchebag.
	It is...
	It's so great.
	Well, no, but this time, Ben, I'm reading it in English, so I haven't done that before, and I... You know, initially it was in the Italian, of course.
	You read the Milton in the Italian.
	It's so great.
	This is the thing that drives me the craziest about how the left has destroyed education.
	It's not even that they teach us just stupid nonsense like, you know, feminist dance theory or all these other kind of crazy things.
	It's what they don't teach you.
	Because the whole point of education is you're supposed to get to enjoy all of these great works of your civilization that you are simply not exposed to anymore.
	And even at, like, top colleges, if you get an English degree, you're no longer required to read Shakespeare.
	And so I think actually after the educational institutions completely deteriorate, we are going to have to go to that desert island.
	And I hope we bring good books.
	This question comes from a Daily Wire subscriber, also All Access, which don't forget to use that code for 15% off backstage and two tumblers that are made in China, apparently.
	Who knew?
	But Ben, this question is...
	I mean, it's just right on a made in China.
	I mean, we weren't really hiding it.
	Ben, where should this Daily Wire subscriber get all of their COVID news?
	I mean, other than the Daily Wire.
	So there are a couple of websites that are really worth checking out.
	There's one called COVID and Markets.
	It's run by a guy named David Bonson, who writes for National Review.
	And every day he puts together kind of the most relevant charts with regard to COVID.
	And it really is as objective as objective can be.
	He looks at the data with a skeptical eye.
	He is not alarmist in any way, but he is realistic about sort of where things stand.
	And he'll look internationally as well as domestically.
	So that's very good.
	In terms of mainstream media, frankly, there's the Washington Post Health 202 blog is actually quite good and shockingly nonpartisan in a way that the rest of the newspaper just is not.
	The political pages cover COVID, which is insane.
	The political pages should not cover COVID.
	Only the health pages really should cover COVID because it's a health issue.
	And that's why you see kind of idiot reporters who don't know the first thing about even the coverage of epidemiology pretending they know what they're talking about.
	But those would be a couple of really good sources.
	There are a couple of people on Twitter who are sort of skeptics that I sort of balance with people who are not as skeptical.
	I'll say something controversial.
	I'll take a look at Alex Berenson.
	I'll take a look at Aaron Ginn.
	I'll take a look at, you know, and Weiss.
	These are all three people who are kind of skeptical of the mainstream media narrative on this stuff.
	But then I will also follow people like Scott Gottlieb from the FDA and I'll try.
	One of the big problems here is that there are no experts on a brand new pandemic.
	So when people say listen to the experts, no one is an expert on a thing that has never happened before.
	It is impossible to be an expert on that, which means that basically what we've been left with is a piece of expertise that is not expertise at all.
	Stay away from other people.
	Don't breathe on them.
	Wear a mask if you're going to be in close proximity to them and wash your hands a lot.
	Okay, which is all crap that we knew in 1918, right?
	Literally nothing has changed except that we pretend that we know things that we absolutely don't know, and then we blame Trump for all the things that we don't know.
	Trump is the god of the gaps for so many of these reporters.
	It really is amazing, right?
	They're constantly talking about religious people.
	Well, you know, in the areas where science doesn't have an answer yet, you say, oh, there's where God is.
	Well, that's exactly what they do with Trump, right?
	Once the science has made clear that lockdowns may not have worked all that great, once the science makes clear that California does one thing and Massachusetts does another, New York does another, and Florida and Texas, they all do different things, and yet the result seems kind of similar, so we don't actually know what the hell is going on.
	Well, yeah, that's different.
	That's because Andrew Cuomo is horrible.
	But the go-to is a god of the gaps.
	You don't know what's happening.
	Trump.
	It's unbelievable the religious fervor with which they dedicate their lives to sussing out the various doctrinal intricacies of Trump's mind.
	When, as we all know, It ain't that intricate, guys.
	So, like, it really isn't.
	By the way, just a quick note on this.
	I know it's off topic.
	Have you been following Andrew Cuomo and his fascist quest to outlaw buffalo wings while making restaurant serve sandwiches?
	Everything that they say about Trump and COVID, that he's a fascist, that he's incompetent, that he's running everything into the ground, that he's micromanaging, that he wants to control your life, every single one of those things is true about Andrew Cuomo, except 83,000 times more, including the number of deaths, and Andrew Cuomo is Building frickin' papier-mâché mountains of the dead and then standing in front of them like Richard Dreyfuss with a fork in front of a giant sculpture of Devil's Tower explaining to people that he has actually saved thousands of lives.
	That guy has a 60-70% approval rating in New York.
	I don't want to hear about how New Yorkers are smart anymore.
	I just don't.
	I'm not willing to hear it anymore.
	You've blown your opportunity to prove to me how smart you are by telling me that Andrew Cuomo is a good governor.
	And Bill de Blasio is a good mayor.
	What the hell is wrong?
	Come on.
	Two months ago, you know, California is taking COVID more seriously than many places.
	Two months ago, though, if you walk around my neighborhood in the evening, out walking Chief Executive Dog Jasper here, you would see that most people had a mask, but they weren't wearing a mask.
	Why were they not wearing the mask?
	Because they were outside, and it was 90 degrees, and they were walking.
	And they would go out of their way to avoid you, you know, and everybody gave each other a wide berth.
	Today, you walk out on the streets, everyone is wearing a mask.
	Why?
	What's the reason?
	The answer is the same as why Cuomo has a 65% approval rating.
	It's because COVID has become...
	Decidedly political.
	And the mask, it's not a mask against getting COVID. It's a mask of being in any way perceived to be rejecting the narrative that you must believe in order to be a virtuous person.
	And so you will see people jogging in the now 90 degree Sherman Oaks heat wearing masks.
	It's not to keep them safe from the virus.
	It's to keep them safe from the mob.
	And that's why, that's the same reason Cuomo, it doesn't matter how many people die on Cuomo's watch, Cuomo has been determined by the party to be the great responder to the pandemic and therefore he is.
	No data required.
	Alright, this question is about healthcare.
	Speaking of COVID, somebody wants to know broadly, how can we improve the system and is it possible to unlink insurance from work or create privatization to encourage better competition like across state lines, etc.?
	This question is for Ben.
	Well, Okay, so let me put down the popcorn for just a second here.
	So here's the deal.
	It didn't seem like it was going to be a bin question.
	Right, I mean, I just answered one like one second ago.
	Anyway, this around the horn has really stopped dead.
	So the answer is, it is actually quite difficult to delink employment and insurance at this point in time, simply because so many people are dependent on it.
	If you threw people back on their own personal insurance, people would freak the hell out.
	They would lose their minds, even though that is really the only step that could be taken to really heavily privatize the insurance industry and link your level of cost with your level of risk, which is what is necessary in order to have a transparent and functional market.
	Yeah.
	So with that said, there are certain things you can do around the edges to make the markets more efficient.
	You can certainly remove a lot of the regulations that are placed on insurance companies, which are, by the way, not earning money hand over fist.
	This idea that insurance companies are just raking it in is not true.
	That is a 2% industry at best.
	That's like a good year for the health insurance industry is they make a 2% margin.
	They're not raking it in to the tune of billions and billions.
	If they are raking it in, the reason they're raking it in is because the government is subsidizing them, which is one of the reasons that so many insurance companies actually supported Obamacare, because in the short term, it mandated that people buy insurance, which meant that the insurance companies in the short term made a lot of money, even though on the back end, they were going to lose a lot of money when Obamacare's regulations started to kick in, and all of a sudden, you have to cover all these people with pre-existing conditions who'd never joined before.
	There are certain things you can do that...
	Avic Roy has talked about this over at the Apothecary and the Forbes blog.
	He's written full studies on what could be done to make health markets more efficient.
	Getting rid of regulations on state lines would be an easy one.
	Getting rid of a lot of the regulations with regard to how insurance is done would be an easy one.
	If you actually want to make health insurance cheaper, then what you have to do is get rid of all the provisions that nobody is willing to do politically, namely pre-existing conditions.
	Health insurance is never going to be cheap so long as it's not insurance at all.
	If I'm insuring myself, and I already have a disease, that's not insurance.
	That is me buying the same coverage at a discount.
	In the same way that if I set my house on fire and then buy insurance, that's not me buying insurance against the fire.
	That is me attempting to game the system by having the insurance company pay for the damages that I have already incurred.
	Yeah, you're stealing from all the people who are actually paying the whole time.
	Right, and that's not true for people with pre-existing conditions who are just desperate to get care, obviously.
	But what we're talking about here is how you lower costs.
	So the framework I always use in discussing health insurance is very easy.
	You can have two of the following three.
	You cannot have all three.
	You can either have a universal system, or you can have a quality system, or you can have a cheap system.
	You cannot have all three of those.
	There's no such thing as a universal quality cheap system.
	They do not exist.
	If you want a universal system that is quality, it will be expensive.
	If you want a universal system that is cheap, it's going to lack in quality.
	If you want a cheap system that has good quality, it is probably not going to be universal.
	Andrew, is it possible for you to name a member of the media or just in general that's a liberal that you follow or read that actually has some well-thought-out arguments that make you think about their perspective?
	Is that one for me?
	Andrew!
	You know, that's a really good question.
	I read the New York Times every single morning, and it has become consistently, it has consistently gone from being a fair statement of what the left believes to being crazy land.
	I mean, you really feel, I always call the op-ed page knucklehead row, but it's almost more like an asylum at this point.
	When I think of liberals who are thoughtful, I'm now thinking of conservatives.
	I'm thinking of conservatives who are a little bit more to the center.
	I think I live a little bit more in the center in most things.
	A long time ago, Lionel Trilling, the famous literary critic, I think that this is where the debates are happening.
	It's where the...
	Where nobody's afraid to speak.
	I mean, I always say, you know, I said to Barry Weiss when she left the New York Times, I said, you know, you're on the wrong side.
	You know, I keep saying this to all these people.
	You know, you're on the wrong side.
	Barry Weiss would be an example of a thoughtful person who considers himself liberal that I do read.
	My sister Caitlin Flanagan is a very fine writer who frequently says really interesting things and she tends to trend toward the left a little bit.
	There are these people, but they are fighting a system that really wants to shut them up.
	So if you want to go to places where you can argue with things, if you want to live in the sort of Dave Rubin world where we're all talking to each other, you really have to be on the right.
	This is where the conversations are taking place.
	By the way, quick note here.
	So I want to just say about that Harper's Weekly letter.
	So this is Harper's Weekly letter where a bunch of people who are sort of liberal minded said we're done with cancel culture.
	And there wasn't a single Trump voter on that list.
	I'm very happy that that letter exists, and until one member of that group is willing to have a conversation publicly with a person who did vote for Trump, it means nothing.
	Because that entire statement was designed to open the Overton window just enough for them.
	In other words, we want to escape the cancel culture ourselves, but how many of us are willing to actually cry?
	Now, here's the truth.
	I know a lot of people on that list, and I know some of them are willing to have those conversations, but that letter is only going to matter when that letter includes people ranging from Noam Chomsky to people like you, Drew.
	And ranging from people like Ann Applebaum to people like Knowles.
	And ranging from people like Thomas Chatterton Williams to people like Jeremy.
	That's the only time that's going to matter because either there's going to be an alliance built between the old school liberals who are not hardcore leftists and people on the right who are committed to free speech or there will be no alliance at all and the left is just going to eat this entire steak piece by piece.
	You know, on this point of where to look in the apparatus of the mainstream media, I don't think there is any place to look.
	I mean, I love Caitlin Flanagan and a couple other people, but I don't think that's really where you look.
	I think the interesting far left even stuff and certainly right wing stuff you see is on Twitter.
	It's on these accounts that are named.
	They're like puns on old philosophers or their other kind of meany kinds of names.
	And, you know, you can actually find some accounts there that are anonymous because if these even the leftists, if they say things that are contrary to the approved views of, you know, the liberal establishment, they'll get killed.
	So they, you know, they hide their their names.
	You can find some interesting debates happening there.
	But, you know, as you mentioned, Ben, these people are so afraid to even come out and speak to anyone who may have voted for Trump.
	They're so afraid that those those conversations, unfortunately, right now often have to happen anonymously.
	I just want to point one thing out about that Harper's letter too, which is really interesting, that it started out with this big kind of liberal throat clearing about how the right is so much worse, but we're going down this wrong road.
	And there was a line in there saying, we know that the right is really the censorious side.
	Every time I see them make that statement, I think, name one time.
	Name one place where right-wingers censor people.
	Just please, where they cancel people, where they get people fired.
	It is really impossible.
	I feel this way about Trump, too.
	I love, by the way, Ben, I gotta tell you, I love Trump of the gaps.
	I think that that is the only original thing anybody said about Donald Trump of the gaps.
	The last year.
	But I think every time I hear that Trump is a unique threat to our way of life, I think, name one thing.
	Name a thing he's done.
	And the New York Times, as Barry White said, when you read their op-ed section, it's one op-ed after another saying, what a terrible threat to our way of life is Donald Trump.
	And I think, okay, name a specific thing.
	And they never can.
	It really is amazing.
	And the reason for that is they don't listen to anybody but themselves.
	Well, and that people like Barry and people like...
	I won't name them because it's unfair.
	Many of our friends who are part of the either intellectual dark web movement or the sort of online moderate centrist, self-described centrist movement.
	Even they, they're like people who used to be Republicans but call themselves libertarians because maybe they wouldn't get made fun of at work.
	This movement is a group of people who cannot acknowledge, even to themselves, that both sides aren't equally bad.
	The only way that they're able to criticize the left at all is if they first denounce the right.
	And I don't think they're just doing it.
	Actually, I will stick up for Barry there.
	Barry's letter didn't do that.
	So to be fair, Barry's letter didn't do that.
	But the Harper letter certainly did.
	And I don't think that they're just posturing in their own minds.
	They are just posturing.
	But I'm sure that in their minds they've actually carved out some way in which they believe that that's true.
	Because they're still looking at a right that doesn't exist.
	And many of you, Michael and I were actually talking about this before the show, about someone with whom we're all friendly.
	The right they denounce is not the right that actually exists.
	They don't know what people on the right actually believe.
	And so they want to say things like, Well, you know, yes, on the extreme end of the left, you've got people who are tearing down statues and calling for segregation.
	But, you know, on the extreme side of the right, you guys have a lot of people who want to tear down statues and go back to segregation, too.
	And you're like, well, no, that's not on the extreme side of the left.
	That's on the very mainstream side of the left.
	Like, literally, not one person in Congress will denounce either of those ideas if they're a Democrat.
	And on the right, there is no one in...
	The Republican Party in Congress who wouldn't denounce anyone who believed that.
	And they look at you like you're crazy.
	Like, well, that can't be true because in my mind, that's what the right is.
	It's very comforting to believe that there's sort of equal evil on both sides or they're both a problem, but it just ain't the case.
	Sorry.
	Sorry, folks.
	You know, the funny thing is, is when people get red-pilled, they first get red-pilled and they start to associate with conservatives, the first thing they say is, gee, people are so nice.
	And when you consider the four of us, if they're saying that about us, people on the left must be awful.
	Terrible.
	No, but that's exactly right, because every time I was on Joe Rogan's show this week, and I'm very friendly with Joe, I think Joe's a great guy, we have a lot of fun together, and all the comments are like, I didn't know that Shapiro was such a nice guy, he's such a human being, and it's like, I'm the exact same human being on my show as I was on Joe's show, it's just that nobody on the left really wants to have an open conversation.
	If they do, it's extraordinarily rare.
	What they actually want is to browbeat people, or not to have them on at all.
	That's really the goal.
	And it's really, it's quite disheartening, because I really believe that if there is to be a future for the country that lies in rights, there is going to have to be a liberal part of the country that stands up on its hind legs and says, I would rather associate with these people I disagree with about nearly everything when it comes to policy than you people with whom I agree with on policy about a lot of things.
	But you guys want to tear down the entire system.
	I'm not going to do that.
	I'm not going to give away my rights just because you and I both agree that America should move toward a more progressive tax system.
	That's not something I'm willing to do.
	Until liberals are willing to actually cross that aisle and shake a few hands and more than anything, just recognize that we're human beings, too, on this side.
	I mean, it's what I've said a thousand times.
	It's the happy birthday problem.
	Every time I have a birthday, I will get 20 texts from people who are on the left inside mainstream leftist organizations with whom I am friendly, who I've offered a public shoulder to when they have been ripped on.
	I'm the guy out there defending frickin' Matt Iglesias, who I've called the Ralph Wiggum of the Internet.
	When he's being assaulted by the members of his own publication, I'm out there defending Matt Iglesias.
	I'll get letters from inside major organizations on the left.
	Happy birthday.
	And then, on Twitter, nothing.
	Because the minute you acknowledge that people on the right are human beings, then you have humanized them.
	And you must never, ever humanize anybody on the right.
	It's more important not to humanize anybody on the right than to preserve the rights for everybody.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And we all know that Ben's really a robot, and he just put on a different mask when he went on Joe Rogan.
	It was a very enjoyable interview, by the way.
	I finally get to curse.
	I mean, with Joe, it's almost, it's in the water.
	It takes you a while to warm up, though.
	Like, the first ten minutes, you're, like, the effing, and then you, like, eventually got there.
	Eventually you're dragged down into Joe's world.
	That's the way that that works.
	Speaking of being dragged down, Michael, do you think that Ghislaine Maxwell will make it to testify in other thoughts?
	I was under the impression she had already committed suicide in the future.
	What day is it?
	Is it not?
	No, you're right.
	I'm sorry, the Clintons haven't scheduled that until at least next Monday.
	I actually do think, I mean, all sort of Clinton, Epstein didn't kill himself jokes aside, I do think she probably will make it because...
	If this woman ends up dead in her jail cell, the conspiracy theorists will march on Washington.
	They will take over the country.
	Because, by the way, it will be evidence of a conspiracy.
	You can't call it a conspiracy theory anymore.
	It seems as though she's already cooperating with the feds.
	It seems that she's given up some names, which I'm sure will remain redacted, you know, for the near future because they, you know, implicate so many powerful people around the world.
	But this is the real problem.
	I don't particularly care about Ghislaine Maxwell in particular.
	But on this issue generally, the left is always, and some people on the right complain about conspiracy theorists.
	Why are there, and you know, the left will even label sort of mainstream ideas, conspiracy theories.
	But they never ask themselves, why do conspiracy theories take hold?
	They take hold because we have no faith in our institutions, in the media, in the administrative government.
	And we have no faith in them because they have squandered that faith.
	They have squandered that credibility.
	You can't believe what you read in the papers or see on cable news, and you see obvious incidents of incompetence or corruption in the federal government, or very often both.
	So, you know, I'm sort of sick of hearing the left complain about the conspiracy theorists because Quit creating the breeding ground on which those conspiracies crop up.
	Also, Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself, man.
	I mean, come on.
	I will say, I have said a lot of warm words about President Trump.
	He made it into the same sentence as Washington, in the same sentence as God for me on this very podcast.
	Let me just say, it's real weird that he went into a press conference and wished Jelaine Maxwell the best.
	I loved it.
	Of course you loved it.
	I loved it.
	What other answer was he going to give?
	Was he supposed to?
	I hope she fries in hell.
	She was procuring underage prostitutes for overage men.
	Like, how about that?
	That would be a good answer.
	A presumption of innocence?
	What the heck?
	We need due process, even for the madam of the most notorious monster that we've seen in the last 30 years.
	Listen, I think that if we can't even agree on whether or not Donald Trump was right to approve of Maxwell, then it's probably time to call this show off and engage in our inner...
	Internet.
	Well, we have no unionist tendencies left.
	Go buy Ben's book.
	That was the name of the episode, and it's also a good note on which to conclude.
	Also, become an All Access member if you're not already one.
	You can keep hanging out with us right now over yonder at dailywire.com, where we'll be taking even more questions.
	If you haven't been over to one of these because you're not an All Access member, you're really missing out.
	We answer, I think it's fair to say...
	A hundred questions probably get answered during the course of this all-access discussion that we're going to go have.
	92 by Ben, because he types so fast, but the rest of us get in there too.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Come over and see us.
	Thanks for hanging out with us, and we will see you over at dailywire.com.
	Bye, Ben's book.
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