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Oct. 23, 2020 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:10:15

Daily Wire Backstage: Mute This Debate Edition

Will Trump’s performance be a departure from his last debate appearance? Can Biden contain his rage if his family scandals are mentioned? How many times will Trump mention Hunter before he is completely muted? Are there any actual “undecideds” at this point who will be swayed one way or the other based on this circus show? 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 Insider or All-Access member for 20% OFF with coupon code: DEBATE to join the fun! https://utm.io/ubFi3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here, and do I have a treat for you.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage is right around the corner, and you do not want to miss it.
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, and the God King Jeremy Boring as we discuss the latest news and cultural events, all while enjoying some fine whiskey and cigars.
	It is going to be all that and more.
	Take a listen.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire Backstage Mute This Debate Edition.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parks as your friendly neighborhood god king.
	That's lowercase g and lowercase k.
	And we're glad you've tuned in.
	Will Trump's performance be a departure from his last debate appearance?
	Can Joe Biden contain his rage if his family's scandals are mentioned?
	How much of the word hunter will Trump be able to utter before he's completely muted by the moderator?
	Are there any actual undecideds at this point who'll be swayed one way or another based on this circus show?
	Probably not.
	Stick around, though, and you'll find out.
	Roll opening graphic.
	Joining me to discuss all of this and more, we have the Ben Shapiro, the Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles.
	Coming up after the debate, we will also be joined by the lovely Elisha Krause.
	Reminder, stick around after the debate live stream for some instant analysis from us here on Backstage.
	If you're an All Access member, make sure you're watching this over on our Discuss page at dailywire.com because we will be joining all of our All Access members in the live chat, reading your comments, and taking your questions during the course of the actual debate.
	If you're not a Daily Wire insider or All Access member, join now.
	We'll give you a 20% off discount with the coupon code DEBATE! That is DEBATE! The exclamation point is to make it confusing.
	Also, if you're an All Access member and you want your question read live on the air, submit them in the chat.
	Alicia will be joining us later in the show, as I mentioned, and she will be getting your questions to us.
	Gentlemen.
	What the hell is about to happen?
	Literally anything.
	The last time we were gathered together in this very room was the first presidential debate.
	This is the third presidential debate.
	There was no second presidential debate.
	On account of the first presidential debate was an unmitigated disaster any way you cut it.
	What do you guys expect is going to happen tonight?
	Well, I think that Donald Trump got the message.
	I mean, I think at first he was kind of saying, oh, that was great.
	I beat Biden up.
	But the polls didn't really reflect that.
	They didn't reflect as much damage as the press would like to say there was.
	And what really hurt him after that was getting the flu.
	I mean, that's what really got him.
	I think that really damaged him in the polls.
	But, you know, last time I said, I think the big surprise is going to be how much Trump now knows.
	And that actually was true for the first five minutes of the last debate until chaos ensued.
	So I'm sort of hoping he has enough restraint to let that come out.
	They have this mute button that could help him because it'll allow Biden to talk.
	The more Biden talks, the more a fool he makes of himself.
	So possibly this could be a good comeback for Trump.
	But if there's some way that Trump can stomp on that, you can almost bet he will.
	MICHAEL, what do you think?
	I agree with this mute button idea.
	Everyone is saying that the mute button is going to be used against Trump.
	And I'm sure that's what the moderator will try to do.
	The thing is, it would actually help Trump if he gets muted during Joe's answers.
	And the reason for that is not because Trump doesn't have good quips.
	He actually does have pretty good one-liners.
	It's because Joe Biden does much, much worse the more time you give him.
	And so, whereas the Trump strategy last time was put Joe off his feet, Joe actually does pretty well when he gets off his feet.
	The guy is a slick politician.
	He doesn't know what state he's in, but he's pretty good at politics.
	And where he doesn't do very well is where he has time to finish.
	And so, I actually think, I'm sure the Presidential Debate Commission was trying to hurt Trump, but I actually think, unwittingly, they may have helped him.
	But Ben, will they use the mute in a way that doesn't appear to be an overt attack on the president?
	Does the media have enough discipline at this point to even come off with the appearance of objectivity?
	I think they'll be careful here because I think that the last thing that they want is to keep underscoring this message, which is that they are biased against Trump.
	Now, they obviously are biased against Trump.
	They obviously hate Trump.
	I mean, you saw NPR today announced.
	They will not cover the Hunter Biden story under any circumstances, which is your taxpayer dollars at work on behalf of Joe Biden.
	I mean, it's an in-kind contribution by NPR with your taxpayer dollars.
	It's basically tax fraud.
	But with that said, I think that they will be, I would say, fairly generous before they actually hit the mute button.
	And I think that more than that, Trump, I think, is going to be a lot more disciplined when it comes to not talking over people because he recognizes that was a bad thing.
	The bigger question is going to be what his angle has to be tonight.
	I mean, we can all disregard the polls and we can say that Trump is ahead and then the debate doesn't matter.
	But if you think the debate actually matters and that this may be Trump's last attempt to turn this thing around, the question is, what should his message be?
	And there are two possibilities.
	Possibility number one is that he goes directly after the Hunter Biden issue, which has been percolating for the last two weeks.
	The media have been trying to cover it up.
	Joe Biden, right before the debate, decided to issue a statement denying that he ever had held stock in a Hunter Biden business or discussed business with Hunter or any of that.
	You could see Trump try to go after it.
	I think the problem there is that it's kind of a complex story, and Trump is not a good storyteller.
	He's a good joke teller, but he's not a good storyteller, and there is a difference.
	Tucker Carlson is very good at laying out all of the stuff A to Z, but Trump is not.
	He kind of speaks in slogans, and he speaks in Twitterisms, so he's more likely to just go straight to the punchline of a story without actually laying out any of the details.
	I think his better policy tonight is probably going to be to just remind everybody that the economy was going great guns until COVID hit.
	And that if the Democrats take charge, they're now talking about making Bernie Sanders Secretary of Labor, which is insane.
	They're now talking.
	About raising taxes so high that 50 cent is off the bandwagon.
	That, I think, might bear more fruit than, you know, he's got to mention that Joe Biden is corrupt and that he's got corruption problems.
	But I think if he makes that the chief issue in the debate, it'll quickly get bollocks up, especially because, you know, the moderator is going to then ask Trump to detail exactly how Biden is corrupt.
	And Trump just does not have the capacity to ferret out all of those particular thickets.
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	So I actually agree with Ben.
	I think that the president's trap tonight is the actual Hunter Biden email scandal.
	And that's because I don't think that he's going to be very effective at explaining it.
	It's not the kind of thing that explains well in a two-minute segment, right?
	It's not the kind of thing that you explain well with a quip.
	I think the president can make the point that Joe Biden is corrupt.
	And the funny thing is, if he does, tomorrow there will be a 180 in the media and every network will actually cover the Hunter Biden email story for the first time to repudiate whatever it is that the president is.
	I think that the president's actual, the most important thing is don't swing, don't be the cat who chases the laser, right?
	Don't go after the shiny object.
	The president needs to actually remind the American people that this modern left is utterly radical.
	That there's a kind of revolution happening in the country.
	It's not an election that's ultimately about policy.
	Almost every election in my lifetime has been about policy differences.
	And listen, policy differences can be life or death.
	Abortion, a life or death policy disagreement between the right and left.
	Health care, life and death policy disagreement between the right and left.
	Your right to bear arms, gun control.
	There are many issues, policy issues that are very important.
	But this election is not fundamentally about policy distinctions.
	It's about the actual structure of our government.
	It's about our rights from free exercise, free speech, the right to bear arms, due process, equal justice.
	It's about our norms.
	It's about our institutions.
	They want to alter fundamentally the Senate by doing away with the filibuster.
	They want to alter the Senate fundamentally by using simple majorities to add states so that the Senate is disproportionately left-leaning forever.
	They want to change the nature of the Supreme Court, which is, for 151 years, had nine justices.
	They'd like to pack that and have more justices.
	They want to do away with the Electoral College.
	They want to do away really even with the 50 state federalistic way that we elect presidents and go to this national mail in ballot sort of scheme that they have.
	I mean, really making the USPS a major part of our election process in the way that they are is the first step in nationalizing our elections.
	They want to do all of those things so that there is never another policy disagreement between the two parties because there is only one party and there is only one set of policies that can't be allowed to happen.
	That's the argument that the president needs to make.
	He needs to make the point that they want to change everything and it's not even a peaceful revolution.
	Go walk the streets of Portland.
	Go walk the streets of Seattle and you'll see that it's actually in the early stages of being a hot revolution.
	And the only chance of stopping them is right now by getting out and voting.
	Will the president have that discipline, Michael?
	This is a great point, actually.
	The difference between this policy or that policy and what does the government look like.
	It reminds me of Scalia's dissent in the Obergefell decision, which redefined marriage.
	He said, listen, the question of how the law defines marriage is not of particular interest to me.
	What is of interest to me is who rules me.
	What is the rule of government?
	And you know, since the beginning of the Trump administration, this idea of the deep state, the bureaucracy, the administration, has been creeping up a lot.
	Do we the people run the country?
	Do we have a constitutional government?
	Or do we have something different that the progressives gave us?
	I think he can hit on that very well.
	He can actually hit on the Joe Biden corruption as well.
	He can say, Joe Biden was in office for 50 years.
	He didn't accomplish anything for the people.
	He accomplished a lot for himself.
	And now we've got this question.
	What kind of government?
	What do you want?
	You know, one important thing that you brought up before is where the voters are.
	The conventional wisdom is that he has to sway, Trump has to sway, the independents, the people who haven't made up their minds.
	But I agree with you, Jeremy, that there really aren't that many undecided voters.
	Either by strategy or just by instinct, and I really think it's his instinct, I really think it's a limitation on what he's capable of doing, has been playing the game that Molly Hemingway identified very early on, which was get the people who love you to come out.
	Because the one place where he is winning is on enthusiasm.
	It is really difficult to read these polls which show Biden ahead and then see the rallies that Trump is staging and compare them to...
	The graveyard shift that Biden is doing.
	I mean, nobody turns out.
	When you've been dead for five years, the graveyard shift is for demographic.
	It's a pretty good thing.
	There may not be a lot of enthusiasm for Biden, but there's a lot of enthusiasm against Trump.
	And that really is the key to the election, which is why shifting the focus to Biden has been a failure of the Trump campaign that he's been unable to shift any focus, not for one iota of a moment.
	I think Biden made a crucial error today in something that he said in an interview and then tweeted it out.
	He said, America is an idea, and we've never lived up to the idea.
	And I just thought to myself, that would be a great thing for Trump to bring up.
	This idea that America has always kind of sucked.
	That America was an idea, but that we've never in our entire history lived up to that idea.
	So not when we were liberating the concentration camps, not when we were ending segregation, not when we were electing Barack Obama president of the United States.
	At no point in all of American history have we ever lived up to our own ideals.
	That is obviously a lie.
	It's a really disdainful version of how you see the country.
	I actually want to come back and talk about that a little bit more after the debate.
	I think it's a really important point.
	It's a huge gaffe by Joe Biden, and it merits our scorn, and I think it merits some of our attention tonight.
	First, I want to talk to you guys about fatherhood.
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	You hear those studies about how they have little boys and little girls sit in a circle and they observe them.
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	I was able to deal with it safely because I was able to protect my house with Ring.
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	I want to remind you guys to stick around after the debate live stream for some instant analysis from us here at Backstage.
	By instant analysis, I mean we'll be going, what?
	Did you see that?
	Oh, my God.
	Oh, wow.
	If you're an All Access member.
	Stick around right now over at dailywire.com.
	Head to the discuss page and we'll be there with all of you live chatting, reading your comments, taking your questions as we watch what is sure to be the most consequential presidential debate, I think, in living memory.
	Certainly no incumbent has gone into a debate with more on the line than President Trump does today.
	Join us over at dailywire.com.
	All access.
	20% off with the debate coupon code DEBATE! That's DEBATE! If you forget the exclamation point, that's because you're a normal human, but you will not get your 20% off.
	All right, everybody.
	We'll see you over there right now.
	Right now, I think we're going to tune in to the presidential debates, and we'll catch up with you right after.
	Well, welcome back to The Daily Wire.
	I'm here with Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro to recap on what I'm hoping you all just watched as we did, which is the second debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
	Reminder, if you're not a Daily Wire insider or All Access member, you can join during the course of this broadcast for 20% off with the coupon code DEBATE. And now they have removed the exclamation mark, so all you have to remember is just DEBATE, D-E-B-A-T-E. We're We just saw the most civilized debate.
	I think even if you go all the way back to the Democrat primaries, this was the most civil debate, much different in tone than what we saw last time.
	How do you think it played for the president, Michael?
	I think Welker did a good job.
	I don't want to overstate that.
	I think she went easier on Biden.
	I think she went tougher on Trump.
	There's no doubt about that.
	But overall, she did a very good job, and she did infinitely better than Chris Wallace.
	Trump thanked her for it, which was good.
	And Trump knew, he knew what he was doing this time.
	He learned, he took the lessons, and most importantly of all, it's not just he knew when to let Biden talk, but he knew when to emphasize what Biden had just said.
	You heard it right at the end there.
	Biden said, yeah, I'm basically going to get rid of the oil industry.
	And he said, hold on, before we move on, that's a big deal.
	And he said it about three or four times, because otherwise they were going to gloss over it.
	Very important, and it really could sway some votes to Trump.
	Drew, what did you make of it?
	The last time we watched the debate, I said the debate was a tie on points and Trump lost.
	And Trump lost because he didn't let Biden talk.
	He didn't let Biden show himself for what he is.
	He made himself overly aggressive.
	He made himself a bully.
	I thought this was a wash on points and Trump won.
	And he won because two narratives went down the drain.
	The narrative that Biden can't stand for 90 minutes and speak semi-coherently, he did.
	And the narrative that Donald Trump is the devil from hell.
	And I think that that is the more powerful narrative.
	That's the narrative that's been being sold to us for four years by the mainstream media and just about everybody else in the elite communications industry.
	And Trump just destroyed it.
	He was helped, as we all said he would be.
	He was helped by the rules that forced him to have some discipline.
	He is not a disciplined guy.
	He looked disciplined.
	You heard what he was saying.
	And what he was saying basically was Joe Biden doesn't know what he's talking about.
	And I think that's pretty clearly the case.
	I think he had a couple of great lines that will resonate with people.
	Who built the cages, Joe, was probably the best one.
	That's kind of the one that I think will resonate for the longest time.
	The press tomorrow is going to say, isn't it wonderful that Joe Biden is sentient?
	But I think what people saw was a president who knows what he's doing, basically, and a guy who's just a standard issue politician who's been in government for 47 years.
	This is the kind of debate that brings out the people who were thinking, I don't like Trump, I voted for him before, but now I won't.
	Now I think they can come back and say, no, wait a minute, he is the guy I thought he was.
	I think that's a great point.
	Ben, what did you make of it?
	Yeah, no, I totally agree with that last point.
	I mean, after having cut that video this week talking about how I'll vote for Trump, because, you know, despite all of the character flaws and all those problems and everything that we know about him, the bottom line is that when you look at the alternatives, this is the better alternative for the country.
	It makes you more comfortable voting for him.
	After the last debate, I think a lot of people got very uncomfortable voting for him because of his behavior.
	I think after his COVID behavior, people got very uncomfortable voting for him.
	You saw it in the polls.
	They started to immediately separate.
	I think you're going to see the polls start to come back together a little bit here.
	And I will say that I thought that the only aspect of this where he did not handle himself really well, actually, was about the first 15, 20 minutes.
	I I thought the first 15-20 minutes before he got to the actual lockdown of it, when they were just talking about how you handled COVID generally, I thought that Biden was very on message the first 15-20 minutes.
	I mean, it was a lying message.
	It was an untrue message, right?
	He keeps saying over and over that everybody has died because of Trump, and I wish that Trump would have just said to him, Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Did Andrew Cuomo not save and Gretchen Whitmer and various other people who took exactly your political recommendations.
	But I thought that after that, he acquitted himself, I thought incredibly well actually.
	That's about as good as you're gonna see Donald Trump on a debate stage.
	And as you were mentioning, Michael, I thought that there were several moments where he jumped in and he really hammered home a point And this is where he really is good, right?
	He's a hammer in search of a nail.
	And sometimes he stumbles on a nail and he hits it really, really hard.
	So there were three or four of these times.
	He did it over and over with, you've been here for 47 years.
	You've been here for eight years.
	You did nothing.
	I thought the weakest moment of the debate for Biden by far was that moment where Trump turned to him and said, so where were you?
	Why didn't you do anything?
	And there's this long pause.
	And then Biden says, we had a Republican Congress.
	Well, that isn't even true.
	He had a Democratic Congress up through 2010.
	So I mean, he has to lie about it.
	And then Trump comes back with, well, you could talk to them, right?
	I mean, it was actually a really good moment for Trump.
	I thought that the moment where he went after him on criminal justice reform, again, same kind of thing.
	I thought that he hammered him pretty well on the Hunter Biden stuff.
	Although, again, he wasn't able to draw the whole narrative.
	But just the fact that now the media are going to have to come out and explain what Trump was talking about, which is going to be the story, right?
	After this is going to be Trump lied about how much money.
	There's no evidence that Joe Biden took direct money from the Russians.
	He didn't take $3.5 million.
	But they're going to have to explain that Hunter Biden actually did receive money via the mayor of Moscow's wife.
	And what does that mean?
	And he was smart enough to keep saying the Biden family, right?
	As opposed to just Joe Biden personally.
	So, you know, I think that he'll get fact checked up the wazoo.
	I think some of it will be deserved.
	But I think that in the end, this was a much, much, I mean, infinitely better performance for Trump.
	And if you are somebody who is on the fence, not about which candidate to support, but on the fence about you kind of like Trump or at least you're OK with Trump.
	And you're wondering, you know, is it really worth it for me to go out and vote for him in one of these swing states?
	I think you feel a lot more comfortable going out and standing in line and voting for the guy after this.
	Can I just make one other point?
	On the fact checks, I think if there's any even semblance of fairness in the fact checks, Biden loses.
	He lied several times on major, major, major points.
	Trump got some things, made some inaccuracies, but Biden looked into the camera and lied repeatedly.
	The trouble is, Drew, if I had some ham, I could make a ham sandwich if I had some bread.
	There is no such thing as a fact check.
	The fact checks are Democratic left-wing opinion comments.
	But you're right, if there were, it wouldn't be.
	Joe Biden openly said in that debate that not a single human being lost their private health insurance because of Obamacare.
	I mean, that was literally called the number one lie of the year by PolitiFact just a few years ago when Barack Obama suggested that you wouldn't lose your doctor or lose your insurance under Obamacare.
	And literally millions of people were kicked off of their private health insurance because many of those insurance plans became illegal under Obamacare.
	You couldn't buy a But the biggest lie of the night, and it's gone completely unchecked now at two consecutive debates, is that if you lost someone to COVID-19, that is Donald Trump's fault.
	COVID-19 has killed people all over the world.
	And to the president's point, it killed more people in New York than anywhere else in this country.
	The fact that they allow Joe Biden to say that, that there won't be a single fact check about it, is evidence of what Michael is saying, which is that fact checking sites right now are really just the most front facing piece of the Democrat propaganda machine.
	It's a real vulnerability for conservatives and one that we as a group probably need to think a little bit more about.
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	So before we get to any of the other important policy clips, I want to get to the most important clip of the night because it is indeed the most important clip in the history of American politics, and that is clip number 12 in which Joe Biden, well, you just have to see it to believe it, You know what?
	North Korea, we're not in a war.
	We have a good relationship.
	You know, people don't understand.
	Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.
	We have a lot of questions to get to.
	We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded Europe.
	Listen, I'm no history fan.
	That guy right there.
	He was a pal.
	He was a pal, Hitler.
	I always liked him until he invaded Europe.
	If he hadn't invaded Europe.
	Then I thought, maybe he's not as nice as I thought he was.
	I feel like Daniel Dale might want to get right on that one over at CNN. I mean, the guy does spout lies at an unbelievable rate.
	I mean, the fact that Trump is the one who always gets fact-checked with these huge, enormous, long lists of fact-checks.
	I mean, Joe Biden for a long time has been an incredible liar.
	I mean, he's been lying in politics like a rug since the 1980s when he was claiming to, you know, have a railroading background or some such that was actually Neil Kinnick's background.
	So there's nothing new about that.
	But he did lie like many, many times tonight, like a lot of times.
	So here's Joe Biden lying in one single statement.
	He is on both sides of a particular issue.
	Roll clip number three for us.
	And I don't look at this in terms of the way he does.
	Blue states and red states.
	They're all the United States.
	And look at the states that are having such a spike in the coronavirus.
	They're the red states.
	They're the states in the Midwest.
	They're the states in the upper Midwest.
	That's where the spike is occurring.
	I don't see red states or blue states and the red states suck.
	You know, by the way, if I did, I do love that he is now just overtly hijacking Barack Obama's slogans.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I made one up the other day.
	I think it goes like this.
	Yes, we can.
	I think that's it.
	In fact, as the son of a black father and a white mother, I feel like I unify.
	He kind of threw Obama under the bus, though.
	He kept saying, I was the vice president, not the president.
	If I'd been the president, I would have done things as well.
	The best point is where he just face-planted Bernie.
	I will admit that I did get a bit of a thrill when he absolutely took Bernie and gave him the swirly.
	I mean, he just stuck his face directly in the toilet and fly.
	It was fantastic.
	It was a good clip, although...
	It was about Medicare for all.
	He kept saying, well, I'm not a socialized medicine guy.
	I don't listen to these crazies in my own party.
	I'm not going to tweet.
	It turns out that he was actually lying about his own policy, of course, because everyone knows the public option is the first step to getting rid of private insurance, because once you can subsidize a public option and you can use that public option in order to cram down low drug prices on the pharmaceutical companies, and presumably you would have to mandate that doctors and hospitals take that public option in order to make any of this work, well, then you've already taken the first step to getting rid of private insurance.
	But it was pretty glorious to watch him just absolutely disown Bernie Sanders, who's now wandering around in Vermont, wondering what he's done with his life.
	I wonder if there will actually be a consequence to throwing Obama under the bus.
	Obama is a thin-skinned man.
	Obama has no sense of humor about himself.
	Obama sees himself.
	He doesn't love Biden.
	And he sees himself as a religious figure, not a political figure.
	He was reluctant to endorse Biden.
	He essentially endorsed Biden after Biden seized the nomination.
	And he didn't go on the road for Biden during the general election until...
	Today?
	Or yesterday?
	Literally, it was this week.
	And now, how are they going to go out on the road tomorrow when Biden threw him under the bus?
	You know, there's this other issue, which is that back in the 80s, when Biden was plagiarizing people...
	He did it.
	First of all, there was no internet, so they couldn't check it.
	And he was plagiarizing foreign politicians over in Ireland.
	Now he's plagiarizing politicians that he worked for in America.
	They were the president.
	People can look it up.
	That's one issue.
	We keep calling Biden a liar.
	And he tells lies, so he's a liar.
	But I think the thing that's more definitive about Biden is that he's a cynic.
	He doesn't care about the truth.
	It's not that he's actively...
	He just doesn't care.
	And so he can actually say two completely opposite things in the same sentence.
	Because when you've been in politics for 47 years, you actually know that the truth doesn't matter to you.
	This is one of Trump's best moments, and nobody's going to talk about it tomorrow, but I think it played, which was when Trump said, Biden was saying, oh, look at your kitchen table, and you're reaching for your bed, and all this.
	And Trump said, you know, is that all you've got?
	Is that all you've got?
	That old politician stuff about the kitchen table and your bedroom.
	It was so good.
	And I think that was just in a moment that undermined Biden completely, and every time he went back to it, every time Biden went back to the technique, it came back into your mind.
	That's right.
	It was the Christie Rubio moment, right?
	It was the Christie Rubio moment.
	That's where Rubio kept saying the same thing and then Christie jumped in in the 2016 early debates.
	And just for those who missed it, and Christie jumped in and said, what you're going to say now is this whole thing about make no mistake, blah, blah, blah.
	And then Rubio immediately came back with it.
	That was fantastic because it was highly irritating that after being hit on his family, he went to this pre-planned line about...
	They don't care about my family.
	They don't care about your family.
	They care about, oh, you should be caring about your family.
	You, the American people.
	And Trump was like, go F yourself.
	It's ridiculous.
	It actually is about your family, Joe.
	And I was like, you know what, good for him because it is bull crap.
	I mean, it just is.
	It's bullshit.
	I'm sorry.
	When Joe Biden turns to camera and starts, there's nothing I hate more in life.
	Then the sincere voice.
	I hate it.
	I hate it in politics.
	People go down to the low register and they look to camera.
	They're just talking out here.
	And all of a sudden they go like this.
	And now I'm very sincere.
	So you're not a big Don Lemon fan is what you're saying.
	Oh my God.
	It's just absolutely the worst.
	Even our friends who do it, right?
	Like Ted used to do it during debates.
	And I'd be like, don't do it, Ted.
	Stop it, Ted.
	Don't do it, Ted.
	But like when Biden did that, and he's been doing it consistently throughout the debates, and Trump was like, That's pathetic.
	You wrote that.
	You pre-wrote that.
	Nobody knows you pre-wrote that.
	You know, it kills me to flatter Ben here, but actually, you did this to Piers Morgan, and it's a great tactic that Republicans should pay attention to.
	When you went on Piers Morgan's show to debate gun control, you knew exactly what he was going to do, and you say, okay, here's what Piers is going to do.
	He's going to come out, and he's going to stand on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook, which he was planning.
	He was going to do that, and it totally put him off guard, and it was the same thing here.
	When you can call out the contrived tactic that your opponent is about to use, it is so devastating, and Trump used it to great effect.
	Sorry, one more quick note on the China stuff.
	And I think he didn't explicate the China stuff particularly well.
	He kind of threw out some accusations, kind of like chum in the water, hoping that the sharks are going to circle around and feed off of it.
	The one thing that he did create was the fact that Joe Biden went over the top.
	So Biden didn't just say, I never received money from any foreign deals, which...
	Okay, fine.
	He said, my son never did anything wrong.
	Hunter never did anything wrong.
	Nobody's ever said Hunter has done anything wrong.
	That's just a lie.
	Hunter Biden himself has admitted that he went around jet-setting, using his daddy's name to pick up bags of cash, and now he's got an ad.
	Right now all Trump has to do is cut that ad.
	That's right.
	I want to talk about the Hunter Biden stuff in detail because it's the big story of the week, the big story of the day, and was obviously a big issue in this debate.
	But first, I want to talk about the Second Amendment.
	Now more than ever, our Second Amendment is under assault.
	The left, as we discussed earlier in the program, the left, we're not debating the left.
	We're debating the left on the fundamental structures of our government.
	They actually want to do away with the protections of the First Amendment, the protections of the Second Amendment, the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment.
	They want to do away with the Electoral College.
	They want to do away with the filibuster, which, while not constitutional, is a major norm in our system of government.
	When the founders crafted the Constitution, the very first thing that they made sacred was the right of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their government.
	And back then, there wasn't social media to limit it either.
	That's Amendment 1.
	The Second Amendment is essential.
	It's the bulwark against encroachment into that First Amendment.
	The Second Amendment is there to protect us from government intrusion.
	It's there to protect us from tyranny.
	That's the reason it comes right after the Second Amendment.
	I'm a gun owner.
	Owning a rifle, huge responsibility.
	I like to make other people gun owners.
	I like to take other people to buy their first firearms.
	I like to take other people to buy their first rifles.
	And one of the things that I tell them at all times, I don't even like to shoot.
	I don't love to hunt.
	I don't like to go to the shooting range.
	I own a rifle because I believe it's my civic responsibility to own a rifle.
	And I want to own the rifle that's contentious.
	I want to own the rifle that the left wants to take away from me because that's my civic responsibility too.
	I'll tell you the truth.
	If the left wasn't coming for our guns, I wouldn't own any guns.
	If the left wasn't coming for AR-15s, I wouldn't own any AR-15s.
	But the very fact that they want them means that I have a responsibility to own them and I have a responsibility to own one that will work, one that will serve me if, God forbid, I'm ever put in a position of needing to use it.
	Bravo Company Manufacturing, our friends at BCM, they understand this.
	They build a professional-grade product built to combat standards.
	It's because BCM believes that the same level of protection should be provided to every American.
	You shouldn't have the rich Hollywood elite getting better protection than you.
	You shouldn't have government officials getting better protection than you.
	And the difference between private and professional, in both cases, if you need a firearm, you need it to work.
	The people at Black...
	I'm sorry, the people at Bravo Company Manufacturing 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 that 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 you harm, someone coming to deprive you of your rights.
	BCM works with leading instructors and marksmen from top levels of America's Special Operations Forces, from the Marine Corps of 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, and others.
	It's not just a right to own a firearm.
	It's a responsibility.
	You should do it.
	And if you're going to do it, you should own something that's going to work.
	To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, go over to bravocompanymfg.com.
	You'll discover more about their products, their special offers, and their upcoming events.
	That's bravocompanymfg.com.
	But what you really need to do is just go to YouTube.
	Because these guys are geniuses at marketing.
	They really understand how to use the internet, which is as important a skill to protect your rights and to protect the future of your rights as firearm ownership is.
	And our pals over at BCM really understand it.
	They make really entertaining videos.
	And you will learn a lot about what they do.
	YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA. That's YouTube.com slash Bravo Company USA. So...
	Hunter Biden.
	The media has basically blacked out all information about Hunter Biden for the last week.
	As we said in the beginning of the show, NPR put out a statement in which they said, I mean, that's essentially what they said.
	We don't think it's news because we don't like that it's news.
	Donald Trump used this opportunity tonight to make absolutely sure that everyone in America, even people...
	Listen, we live in a bubble.
	We live in conservative media.
	Everybody we know has been talking about it for a week.
	People who, you know, watch the CBS Evening News after a hard day's work probably did not know any of these accusations until tonight.
	The president did a fantastic job.
	And while I agree that Kristen Welker did a fairly good job tonight, the one place where she really intervened to save Joe Biden...
	It was in the very first exchange when the president came at VP Biden specifically about his family's history of corruption.
	And she didn't want Biden to be angry.
	She didn't want Biden to make a mistake.
	So she kept trying to pull it away and pull it away.
	But Biden demanded to be heard.
	So we had a lot of back and forth on this.
	My question...
	In fact, let's play clip 5A here and let people hear what was said.
	Joe got $3.5 million from Russia, and it came through Putin because he was very friendly with the former mayor of Moscow, and it was the mayor of Moscow's wife, and you got $3.5 million.
	Your family got $3.5 million, and, you know, someday you're going to have to explain why did you get $3.5 million.
	I never got any money from Russia.
	I don't get money from Russia.
	And then let's roll right into 5B when, to Ben's point, Biden really overstates his claim here.
	Vice President Biden, you may respond.
	And then I do want to follow up on the election security.
	I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.
	We learned that this president paid 50 times the tax in China, has a secret bank account with China, does business in China, and in fact is talking about me taking money?
	I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever.
	I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever.
	And then later he says, my son has not done anything wrong.
	Those aren't, I mean, those are definitive statements.
	Will they hold up, Ben?
	Well, I think that there's a possibility the first holds up.
	I mean, we've seen his tax records.
	There's nothing in there that suggests that he's received foreign money.
	It is also possible that he can claim he didn't receive foreign money if Biden is holding the cash and trust somewhere.
	I mean, that's also possible for him.
	If you were really to kind of parse these things.
	But I think that in all likelihood, he probably has not seen money directly.
	I think my guess is that if you really had to boil this thing down, just looking at what we've seen, he probably said to Hunter Biden, go with God, use my name, go make bank.
	And I think that that's pretty obvious.
	I mean, Hunter Biden has said that fairly publicly.
	And that's Fairly corrupt in and of itself.
	Whether he was personally benefiting from it or not, if your kids are making money off of your name while you're vice president of the United States and you're taking them on Air Force Two to go pick up giant checks in China, that is not a particularly good-looking thing.
	That did not require these emails in order to reveal.
	The part where he overextended himself is that statement about Hunter.
	When he said nobody's ever indicated that Hunter did anything wrong, well, I mean, there are some indications considering that two of his business partners are now in jail for fraud.
	So it feels like there are some things that he probably did wrong here.
	Yeah, there's also this issue that we know that Joe Biden has lied about this before.
	Because Joe Biden said, I never spoke about my son's business dealings with him ever once.
	But his son contradicted that in an interview, I believe with New York Magazine.
	It was with one of these magazines where he said, yeah, I talked to my dad and my dad said, you better know what you're doing.
	He then, Hunter, went on a television interview and said, yeah, I never talked to my dad.
	And the interviewer, to her credit, said, well, what about this business of you better know what you're doing?
	Well, actually, no, it wasn't even a conversation.
	Yeah, that's right.
	It wasn't a conversation.
	That's the story, and I'm sticking to it.
	So he has no credibility on it.
	And it's also a matter of narrative, which is a very important thing.
	The narrative that Biden has been selling is that Trump is bad, I'm good.
	And that's just not true.
	You know, people sent Donald Trump to the White House because they had the feeling that the government was no longer responsible to them.
	It was kind of a scam.
	It was what my kids call an op, you know, that there was a Republican Party and a Democrat Party.
	But really, no.
	It was really just a party that was snuggling up to the public trough and somehow sucking up this money.
	Joe Biden...
	Which, by the way, the president said, he said, I became president because of you, Joe.
	That's right.
	And the thing is, they said, drain the swamp.
	Joe Biden is swamp thing.
	He is the guy who has kind of lived...
	He's brought his family together, and they have lived off his influence.
	Whether or not...
	I agree with Ben on this.
	It's still unclear whether or not Joe Biden himself benefited...
	In terms of dollars from what Hunter Biden was doing, but that he allowed Hunter Biden, an obviously messed up guy, to profit off his influence is very clear at this point.
	I'll actually push back on Drew and Ben.
	There are funny alliances that form on this show.
	It's quite often Jeremy and Ben versus Drew and Michael, but then every now and then it's Jeremy and Drew versus Ben and Michael.
	And today, I don't know where Michael is yet, but it's definitely Jeremy versus Ben and Drew.
	Where did Joe Biden's big-ass house come from?
	Bingo, buddy.
	Totally.
	Totally.
	This is the actual thing.
	Is there evidence that this particular chart...
	No.
	Joe Biden has been in the government since he was literally too young to be sworn in constitutionally.
	He was elected to the Senate, and he had to wait for his birthday in order to be sworn in because he was too young.
	47 years he's been in government.
	Where did the big house come from?
	Where did the luxury travel come from?
	And it's not just Joe Biden.
	I think that when the story of this era is written, one of the enormous scandals that people will look back on is how people can spend an entire life making $180,000 in government service and somehow have net worths of $38 million.
	And you can say, oh, well, he wrote some books.
	He wrote a book and it did $10 million of business.
	That's amazing.
	A book that did $10 million of business might have paid him $5 million.
	And of that $5 million, he paid the government half.
	That does not give you a net worth.
	I mean, that's the thing.
	You wouldn't even make 50% of the...
	So, okay, let's say he made $10 million on it.
	What does he take home?
	A million or less?
	And then he pays half of that to the government.
	The numbers, I suspect, don't add up.
	Now, to Ben's point, I don't know that you're going to find a W-2 or something from Joe Biden taking money from some Ukrainian oligarch, but some...
	Some money has made its way into Joe Biden's pocket somewhere.
	This is the thing about this, because I actually, this is weird, but I kind of agree with both Jeremy and Ben on this.
	The real money that Biden has made, he made after he left office, as these guys typically do.
	Obama did it too.
	He made a lot of money after he left office.
	Bush did.
	The loans and the houses and the things that you get, the kind of easy mortgages that you get and the easy loans that you get, those are things that come from the swamp.
	And Joe Biden has accepted it all.
	He is a swamp creature.
	He is the face.
	He is the face of the government that they sent Donald Trump to Washington to fight.
	2008, the New York Times reported this.
	I mean, in 2008, the New York Times, before it was verboten to...
	Report anything bad about Joe Biden.
	They reported back in 2008 when Obama was considering him.
	They talked about how he got a sweetheart loan from some people back in Delaware.
	He was able to buy a piece of land under market value in order to do that, which we know Barack Obama, by the way, also did with his neighbor back in Chicago.
	Politics allows people who want to influence you to do these kind of, not quite illegal, but kind of scuzzy things in order to make clear to you exactly where your bread is buttered.
	And we know that Hunter's been doing that for years.
	I mean, it's been known for a very long time that Joe Biden, who's from Delaware, which is a state that is, you know, very often used in order to incorporate businesses.
	But also Scranton is anywhere else where people might be.
	He's from Michigan.
	He's really from Delaware.
	Michigan, Texas.
	Delaware is credit card land.
	And we all know that he's been a lobbyist essentially for the credit card companies for a very, very long time.
	And his son was working for some of the credit card companies.
	I mean, again, all this was reported by the New York Times.
	So, it is true that he has a long history of just being a typical politician who is making a good living off of being a politician in public service.
	And Trump hit him hard on that today.
	I think that the foreign ties sort of highlight some of that stuff and they make it more relevant today.
	It makes it feel like an October surprise.
	But the truth is that I'm not sure that you needed it if anybody had any sort of level of awareness about what exactly the government is because you can write that story about nearly every politician in Washington, D.C., all of whom seem to enter the government Being middle class and then all leave the government being in the top 1%.
	By the way, Bernie Sanders is worth a million bucks and has a lake house, right?
	As somebody who was a reporter in my youth, I keep going back to the image in my mind of those 1940s movies of reporters, the guy with the snap rim hat and the press card and the hat band, you know, and he's typing on his typewriter and Cary Grant comes in and says, you know, I've got a story for you.
	The leading candidate for president has been basically profiting off the There's no influence peddling while he was vice president.
	And the reporter says, yeah, I'm not going to cover that because there's no governing authority, as Al Gore would say, that really makes it illegal.
	No, it is corruption.
	It doesn't have to be illegal.
	There are plenty of things that are not crimes that are wrong and are bad.
	And Joe Biden has done all of them.
	And I think that this is the thing, the fact that the press is trying to cover this up, and I don't believe they've succeeded, by the way.
	I believe this is, they've actually brought this story to the fore by trying to cover it up.
	The fact that the press is trying to cover it up is a point in Donald Trump's favor.
	It says to the people that the communications industry and the Democrats it supports and the institutions it supports is against you and doesn't really care what you think.
	And I think we also need to give Trump credit for a tactic that he used here, which is he didn't get into the exact precise way that the money went from Ukraine or from China or wherever.
	He made this broad statement, which is, as Ben says, going to invite all of these fact checks.
	Namely, he said, Joe Biden, your family made three and a half million bucks.
	How did they do that?
	I think it's actually good to get the fact checks.
	Because it's going to elicit much more press.
	The media were trying to ignore it to begin with.
	It's going to elicit all this press, and it's going to put them on the defensive because they're going to have to say, no, Biden didn't get the three and a half million.
	His son got the three and a half million from them.
	Any way you explain it, people are going to be exposed to more of the story, which in itself is a very ugly story.
	I will say one other area where I thought that Trump really excelled, putting aside the Hunter Biden stuff for a second, I thought that when he got to his anti-lockdown program, I thought that was very, very strong stuff.
	And I thought it was deeply necessary.
	So the first 15 minutes, which was all about Joe Biden lying that everybody died because of Trump, and if there's an empty chair at your dinner table, it's because of Trump, and if there's a bad man hiding in your closet with a knife, it's because of Trump, and if you get cancer, it's because of Trump, and if your dog crapped the carpet, it's because of Trump, and all this.
	After all that was done, and Trump looked at him and he said, right, but you're Captain Lockdown over here.
	And Biden was like, well, you know, I really am only going to lock down if it's what the science says.
	Like, well, I've got lots of people in the bureaucracy and, you know, Anthony Fauci is one of them, but I'm not just going to listen to one guy if they say lockdown.
	I thought that's.
	That's good stuff.
	I don't think most Americans are in the mood for further lockdown.
	And the heavy bet that Democrats are placing right now is that people are continuing to be absolutely petrified of the virus.
	And I got to tell you, I think in L.A. that's true.
	So now I'm in Florida.
	I don't think it's true.
	I don't think it's true.
	I think in a lot of swing states, people are not petrified of the virus.
	I think that people are treating the virus with the appropriate level of risk.
	I think people are generally out and about living their lives.
	What I'm seeing here in South Florida, which again is hotly contested territory, I think Trump is going to win the state.
	I think the reason that Trump is going to win the state is because there's enormous enthusiasm, particularly in the Hispanic community actually for Trump in the state of Florida.
	But I think beyond that, people are not shutting down the way they do in California.
	In California, people seem pretty sanguine about like, okay, so I'm never going to my business again.
	Okay, so Disneyland is just going to be closed forever.
	Well, Disney World is open here and they haven't had massive infections.
	All the schools are open here and they have not had massive infections.
	In certain counties, they have mask mandates.
	Most people are abiding by them.
	But there doesn't seem to be just this generalized level of mask shaming that you see in some of the heavy blue areas.
	I think if there is a secret Trump vote out there that manifests beyond the polls, and this really is the question, right?
	Is are the polls so super wrong?
	Is there this big hidden Trump vote?
	If it's there, I think it is manifest in the number of people who are irritated by the overt level of government control that has been exercised by the Democrats with regard to lockdown.
	And there are a lot of people out there who are going, listen, I'm okay with the masks.
	Like, when Biden holds up the mask and he acts like it's the be-all end-all, you know what?
	Fine.
	I wear a mask when I'm—I'm more pro-mask than all you guys.
	I'm, you know, I wear a mask when I'm out in public and I'm near other people.
	I think that it's a good idea to wear it when you're in close contact with other people.
	I've been told this by people, including Scott Atlas, that when you're in close contact with other people, that you should wear a mask.
	But— That doesn't mean shut down my life.
	And if there's an uptick in a school, I don't think that means that you shut down the entire school.
	And when Trump says, I will say Kristen Welkert really blew it on one hour.
	There was one line she said, and I smote my forehead, like physically smote it, which hurt.
	And that was when Trump said, young people are fine.
	That is 100% true.
	Okay, young people are fine.
	They are much more fine from this than they are from the flu.
	There have been a grand total of, last count, as of yesterday, 74 Americans under the age of 15 who have died of COVID. Out of several hundred thousand infections at this point.
	That is compared to some 470 Americans who died of flu in the last flu season under the age of 15.
	And Trump said it's not particularly dangerous for young people.
	And Kirsten Welker said, well, yes, but they can get it and they can transmit it.
	And it was like, Okay, so you take measures to prevent them from transmitting it.
	And?
	And if the teachers are young, then that's okay.
	And if the teachers are not so young, then you keep them out of the classroom.
	And by the way, the evidence on transmission from kids tends to be that older kids transmit it and younger kids do not transmit it nearly as much.
	And that's why you haven't seen massive outbreaks in school.
	So I thought that was a very strong point for Trump.
	And I was glad to see him argue that.
	I thought he was shockingly good on minimum wage.
	He actually understands that basic idea.
	So there are a couple moments where he actually said things and I thought, well, I didn't realize that he could articulate it that well.
	So we've got the lovely Alicia beaming in, not from her normal closet, but beaming in from the Ronald Reagan Museum in beautiful Santa Barbara, California.
	Alicia, you have some questions from our Daily Wire subscribers?
	Absolutely.
	The big question everybody wants to know is, did tonight's debate change anyone's minds?
	And because of all the early voting, does it really matter?
	Yeah, so I'll take a shot at that.
	I don't think that tonight's debate changed anyone's mind about which worldview they would rather see emerge victorious in the election.
	But I think, as the guys were saying earlier, I didn't weigh in, I think that it did change people's minds perhaps about whether or not they can vote for Donald Trump as a personal, moral decision.
	I think that one of the reasons that the last debate didn't hurt Trump overly is because people are pretty dug in in terms of the two camps at the moment.
	But that That still isn't great for Trump because being fully bought in to the conservative vision for the country still doesn't make it easy to vote for a guy with the personal failings that Trump has.
	And that last debate was so difficult to watch for this reason.
	It was so poisonous and turned people off.
	I think this made you see Donald Trump in a different way, probably the best light that we've seen him in in any debate in the time that he's been in public life.
	And that it perhaps will give people the ability to say, yeah, I can get behind that.
	I can get behind that.
	As far as the early vote, by the way, quick note on the early voting.
	So there is a question as to whether the early voting is a reflection of new voters coming in or whether it's just banking the old voters, meaning maybe it's all the people who are already highly motivated to vote who are standing out there voting.
	They would have voted on Election Day.
	Now they're just voting early because they can vote early.
	So that is unclear.
	Right now, they're saying maybe 50 million people have already voted, which is insane.
	First of all, it just shows the bull crap that early voting is.
	I mean, really, you should not be allowed to vote until Election Day.
	Unless you have some sort of physical incapacity to vote in person, you should be in a line, you should be voting Election Day.
	And if you've got to wait a couple hours to do that, well, I'm sorry to break it to you, but that ain't the end of the world.
	I'm sorry that treating it like the media, every time there's a long line, they're like, it's voter suppression.
	Seriously, it's voter suppression because there's a line?
	Because there's a line, it's voter suppression?
	Like, last I checked, voter suppression was like people with hoses and dogs and clubs beating the living crap out of you because they don't want you to vote.
	Not you had to wait in line while watching Netflix on your iPhone.
	And when did the left decide it dislikes lines?
	Every single policy that they come up with forces us to stand in lines.
	What is it that Churchill said about socialist Great Britain after the war?
	He said it was cutopia?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Alicia, what are people saying?
	All right.
	The other thing then is this is for everyone based on tonight and where the polling is.
	I know you've talked about a little bit.
	Obviously, Pennsylvania came up a lot because it's an important Rust Belt swing state.
	Where do you guys think?
	What are your election predictions as of now?
	There is one important issue here.
	I agree, generally, probably didn't sway too many people other than people who are a little bit more moderate Republicans who now feel more comfortable to vote for Trump.
	But this issue of, I'm going to destroy the oil industry, which Trump really hit Biden on...
	That is going to matter for some voters.
	Now, how large an effect that's going to have, I'm not so sure.
	But going after fossil fuels, going after natural gas or oil or any of those industries, that could move some boats in Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania could decide the election.
	Yeah, so here's my view of this.
	And Kristen Soltz's Henderson, the pollster, sort of laid this out on my show today.
	Basically, there are two sets of states that you need to watch on election night.
	One is the Sunbelt states and the other is the Rust Belt states.
	If Biden wins North Carolina, the election is essentially over early.
	If Biden wins Florida, the election is essentially over early.
	Those are the ones that are going to start to come in early because those are East Coast states.
	Pennsylvania will start to come in fairly early as well, but this is what happened with Romney.
	I remember when North Carolina and Florida started to move against Romney, it was like, oh, okay, this is going to be over fairly early, even though I think Romney ended up pulling out North Carolina narrowly.
	Once he lost Florida, it was dead over.
	So Trump needs to win the following states.
	He needs to win Arizona.
	He needs to win Florida.
	He needs to win North Carolina.
	And then he needs to win one of the following three states, the Rust Belt states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania.
	Now famously, Hillary Clinton had built up that blue firewall.
	So the question right now really in my mind comes down to Pennsylvania.
	I think the entire election may hinge on Pennsylvania, which is why Trump is going to go full broke on the – he's banning fracking.
	He's getting rid of the oil industry.
	He's got to win Pennsylvania.
	If he doesn't win Pennsylvania, it is basically over because the chance is that he loses Pennsylvania and Michigan but somehow pulls out Wisconsin.
	I think that's going to be very difficult for him.
	Yeah.
	I think there's a good shot that, as I say, I think that he's going to win Florida.
	Florida tends to overperform for Republicans.
	That's why DeSantis is governor here instead of the meth addict in a hotel room with the gay porn star guy, Andrew Gillum.
	But I think North Carolina will trend red.
	I think that That Rust Belt, which nobody expected him to win last time, it's going to be harder for him, and it's really going to come down to Pennsylvania in the main.
	So that's why that last—the thing you mentioned there, Michael, is the thing.
	I mean, if he's able to really hone in on the fracking and he's threatening your job and he's threatening your future— That's going to have to be the ballgame for him, because that's where he's going to have to put his chips.
	There's one other narrative here.
	I don't know what's going to happen.
	I've got to be absolutely honest.
	I'm not a gambling man in general, but I will put a flutter on something.
	I wouldn't put a nickel on this race.
	I do not know who's going to win.
	I'm not a person who dismisses polls.
	I don't think the pollsters are trying to deceive us or anything like this, and they've been fairly accurate in...
	In the midterms, they were fairly accurate actually in some ways in the Hillary Clinton-Trump election.
	But something is really I'm discordant in what I'm seeing.
	I am seeing Donald Trump go out there and speak to thousands of people who show up.
	I'm seeing Joe Biden go out and speak to nobody.
	And I'm seeing people who say, you know, I didn't vote like one is Ben Shapiro, who I didn't vote for Trump before.
	I'm going to vote for Trump now.
	I'm not seeing anybody who said I voted for Trump before, but I'm going to vote for Biden now.
	Something is wrong.
	Yeah.
	The move in identification and people who identify as Republicans, which is something like between five and eight points, a shift from people who identified as Democrats to identifying as Republicans.
	There is another narrative here where Trump wins by a landslide.
	I'm not saying that's going to happen.
	I really don't know what's going to happen.
	But there is something terribly wrong, a discordant between the polls and what I'm seeing with my own eyes.
	I agree with you.
	Trump could win 49 states or lose 49 states, or he could win by three votes in Wisconsin and think it's litigated for 20 years, or Joe Biden could die of COVID-19 next Tuesday.
	It's 2020.
	And then we'd have a constitutional crisis because legitimately the Constitution does not answer the question of what happens in an election in which one of the candidates dies.
	You could say, oh, it'll be then Kamala wins.
	That's not actually how it works.
	All of that to say, I agree with you, Drew.
	When you read that it's Biden 10, Biden 14, that 56% of people say Trump doesn't deserve a second term, all these numbers that we keep seeing, obviously very discouraging.
	When you drive around, you don't see Biden flags, and you don't see Biden rallies.
	When the NBA finals are down 70% from the numbers that they had just one year ago, now you...
	You would probably think the numbers might even tick up because nobody's been able to go to games in person.
	TV's all you have.
	That's obviously a political activity that's happening.
	There are there are these strange signs that make you think it is actually possible that that are that our accounting system is so broken either by intent or by simply not changing with the times that we're missing.
	And we're just not going to know that until election night.
	And to Ben's point, we could know it one hour in.
	If if Florida drops blue, you know, one not even an hour, 15 minutes after the polls close on the East Coast.
	Right.
	Then all of it was right.
	All of it was true.
	If if the night goes well for Donald Trump, there is going to be there's going to need to be a reckoning in the way that we approach these questions, which which was not true in 2016.
	The polls were not radically wrong in 2016.
	But if Donald Trump has a big night on election night, the polls will have been actually fundamentally wrong.
	And by the way, this is something that the pollsters say, and they point this out, is that the polls were wrong in Romney's direction in 2012.
	Right?
	So they were wrong against Donald Trump in 2016.
	They were wrong in Romney's direction in 2012.
	Romney was supposed to be very competitive in Ohio, right?
	He was supposed to be very competitive in Pennsylvania.
	He held this big rally in the last days, and the polls were saying it was super close.
	And then he just got absolutely blown out in both Ohio and Pennsylvania.
	I mean, at some point, we're gonna have to, if they're wrong again, at some point, all the pollsters have to learn to code because this is just, it's too wild.
	The one area where I will say that I think the debate could matter that nobody's actually talking about is it's not just about comfort level with voting for Trump.
	It's about Republicans showing up to the polls generally to vote for Senate candidates, which may be the most important thing that happens because if the Republicans lose the Senate and Biden is elected, prepare for Armageddon.
	I mean, it's just going to be a disaster in every possible way.
	And there are a thousand close races, right?
	Maine is a close race.
	North Carolina is a close race.
	Michigan is a close race.
	We've got close races in two close races in Georgia.
	We've got close races basically across the board in Montana, in Colorado, in Arizona.
	A lot of Republicans are up for reelection in Iowa.
	It's a bad map for Republicans in the Senate this year.
	It's a terrible map for Republicans in the Senate.
	And all of this stuff, all those races are pretty close.
	So even if Trump is outside the margin of error in some of those states, if he ticks up the polls just a little bit for the Senate candidate, then he will have done a world of good for the Republican Party generally.
	Yeah, that's absolutely right.
	Alicia, I want to get a few more questions in from our DailyWire.com subscribers.
	Absolutely.
	Some All Access members, you guys just talked about the Senate there.
	That was a question that was brought up.
	Of course, Trump talked about Republicans regaining Congress.
	Do you guys think that that's even plausible?
	No.
	It's unlikely.
	I mean, anything's possible, but it's not.
	Tell us how you really feel.
	No, this is not possible.
	It's not possible.
	This I will put money on.
	There is no way on planet Earth.
	By the way, I mean, nobody's talking about this, but one of the real disasters for Republicans, if it does occur, will be something nobody has talked about yet, and that is the regaining of state legislatures and governorships by the Democrats, because in 2020 is redistricting in census.
	I mean, they could fundamentally reshape how Congress is elected and take the House away from Republicans for 10 years based on the redistricting and the census.
	So you picked a bad time to quit sniffing glue here.
	I mean, it turns out to be a bad year.
	Any year ending in zero is a very, very bad time for the Republican Party to have a rough year.
	Along those lines, do you guys think that there will be an increased interest in the removal of the Electoral College?
	Only if Trump wins.
	I think either way.
	I think if the Democrats win, actually, that's when they'll push it forward.
	It is an amazing thing that they don't like the First Amendment, they don't like the Second Amendment, they don't like the Electoral College, and they want to pack the court because Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution.
	I do think there is this movement to democratize everything, which, you know, that's the way they use that term.
	I don't think that's really what democracy would call for, but they want to erode all of these safeguards that are in our Constitution and move to this much more egalitarian type of system.
	The one thing impeding this, though, and it's what I think has preserved the Electoral College over the years, is that Whoever wins, if they make the argument that the Electoral College is illegitimate somehow, then they're saying that their own victory is illegitimate because the Electoral College elects the president.
	So I think that is one sort of pushing on the brakes toward abolishing the Electoral College.
	But probably in the long run, if we continue down...
	We lose the Electoral College, not...
	To a national election.
	It would require an amendment to the Constitution which they can't pull off.
	We're going to lose the Electoral College when we start losing more and more state houses, because the movement that's afoot where the Electoral College is concerned is actually a nullification movement at the state level, where people are just essentially deciding as state governments that whoever wins the majority nationally will get all of the so-called where people are just essentially deciding as state governments that whoever wins the majority nationally will get
	There is not a national election for president in this country, but they've made up this term, the national popular vote, and they're saying whoever wins it gets all of our electors, no matter who won, in our actual state.
	And many states have already passed this.
	And so I actually think that that's what happens to the Electoral College.
	There's a backdoor way of doing it also where they just proportionally split it, where instead of it being a winner-take-all for the electors, instead they proportionally split it by vote.
	And you can see that happening for sure.
	By the way, it is worth noting that the Democrats pushing for the quote-unquote most democratic system, it would not be the most democratic system, right?
	We would still be a two-party system.
	If you're going to push for, quote unquote, pure democracy, then basically you have to, at that point, you need a parliamentarian system so that coalitional politics are actually required.
	Because otherwise, you literally have a 51% party cramming down on the other 49% of the population anything they damn want.
	And that is just, that's pure mob rule through popular vote.
	Which, I mean, if they want that, it's amazing how fast people, it is truly amazing how fast people I mean, it was pure majoritarian mob rule in states that allowed for Jim Crow.
	I mean, that is what was happening.
	Yeah, and they also don't know what actually goes on in parliamentarian systems.
	It's funny, when you're an American, people will often, when they're unhappy with the results of an election, come to you and say, we've got to get rid of this two-party system.
	We need a third party to rise.
	The two-party system's broken.
	The two-party system's flawed.
	The two-party system makes us radical.
	But the truth is, the two-party system...
	defeats radicalization.
	It homogenizes all political beliefs.
	If America had a parliamentary system with numerous parties, there would be actual Nazis in our Congress.
	Actual Nazis, like swastika waving actual genuine Nazis.
	And when they got elected the first time, there'd be three of them or four of them, and we'd all be kind of outraged and ashamed and we'd be embarrassed.
	But someone would have to make coalition with them eventually because somebody, in order to get to that 51%, to get to that governing majority, they'd have 49 and a half percent.
	And they've just got to find somebody to agree with them that one and a half percent more to give them the majority.
	And they'll go make a deal with the devil, at least, literally, and make a deal with the Nazis.
	And then the next election after that, you'd have 48 Nazis get elected to parliament because now it's been mainstreamed.
	Now, instead of taking people who might drift over toward those radical views and pulling them into the mainstream, You instead validate those radical views and make it a mainstream idea to be a radical.
	And that's why, when you go to Europe, there are major communist factions in every parliament and every Western democracy in Europe.
	There are genuine white supremacist movements that have parliamentary representation in almost every parliament in Europe.
	I mean, parliamentary systems...
	Swing radically.
	And they also, and this is why people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg like them, they get a lot more done because they essentially grant ultimate power to the prime minister during the prime minister's tenure.
	It would be like if every time you elected a president, he got the Senate and the House and the Supreme Court all to agree with him at the same time because it requires that confidence in the prime minister in order for him to become prime minister.
	And so they're very effective at getting things done.
	But America's great success is in that we don't let politicians do very much.
	You know, we all get frustrated.
	Oh, the government doesn't do enough.
	It doesn't.
	It does plenty.
	And it would be even better if it did half as much.
	Like, you want to know why Texas is so successful?
	We only let the legislature get together once every two years.
	They can only do half as much bullcrap as the statehouses in most other states.
	So I really think this move toward democracy, Michael, or true democratic representation is a horrible idea.
	It would destroy everything that's made America what America is.
	Alicia, we're going to take one more question.
	Awesome.
	Last question is, can a president really mandate a mask requirement until 2022?
	I mean, you know, yes and no, right?
	We're living under the dictatorship of the lab coats right now, where apparently we've farmed out all of our governance to, like, Fauci and formerly Dr.
	Scarf, although she seems to have left the scene.
	So the answer is no.
	I mean, certainly in a constitutional system, you can't do that.
	But because we now are governed by these bureaucrats much more so, there is a world in which they can exert much greater control than probably our founding fathers would have expected.
	Yeah, good luck.
	I won't do it.
	So now what happens to your plan?
	This is how all left-wing plans are.
	All left-wing plans say, if everyone would do everything that I want all the time, then I would get my preferred result.
	And the problem with their system is that there's guys like me who say, well, I won't do it, so now your whole frickin' plan just collapsed.
	What are you gonna do about it?
	And ultimately what they do about it is they put us in gulags so that people like me can't get in the way of their utopia.
	And then it turns out their ideas don't work anyway.
	But the first problem with their idea...
	Is that we won't all do it.
	The second problem with their idea is after they kill all of us off, the idea is actually revealed to be absolute crap.
	But no, the president doesn't have that kind of power.
	I want to thank everyone for tuning in tonight.
	It was a long night, but it was, I think, on the whole, a very good night for conservatism, a very good night for the president.
	What will come of it, we'll know in about two weeks' time.
	Thanks, everybody.
	Bye.
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