Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 25, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:58:07

The Daily Wire Strikes Back(stage): Canceling Cancel Culture

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire backstage canceling cancel culture is available now.
	The culture war is on and we are recruiting more and more people to join our side in the fight.
	Check out me, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and the God King Jeremy Boring as we discuss everything from Gina Carano joining the resistance to what it's like changing tires in an ice storm.
	Take a listen.
	Welcome to the Daily Wire Strikes Back stage.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, lowercase g, lowercase k, God King.
	Tonight, we're going to be talking cancel culture in an effort to answer the age-old question: Just how rich is the left trying to make us with all this bullcrap?
	Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Don't let big tech track what you do.
	Anonymize your web browsing at expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	I'm joined, per usual, by Smokey Mike Knowles, by Matholomew Walsh, by the ghost of Andrew Klavan, and by the finest Ben Shapiro clone money can buy, still cheaper than the original.
	And, of course, by the lovely one herself, Mrs.
	Alicia Krause, here to take your questions.
	Alicia.
	Hey, how are you guys doing?
	And welcome to the Empire Strikes Backstage.
	The Daily Wire Strikes Backstage.
	Although I don't know why you guys want to be relating to the Empire.
	I thought that we were the good guys and the woke mob that tried to cancel Gina was the Empire.
	You're overthinking this, Alicia.
	You're overthinking it.
	Sorry, I'm just trying to be accurate, God King.
	Anyway, it has been one of the biggest months in the Daily Wire history, and we are so excited.
	I love the Sunday special with Gina and Ben.
	And we're going to tell you guys, this is just the beginning.
	Ben still needs to introduce Gina and I so we can be BFFs and go for many petties, and then she can teach me how to be a badass so I can beat up Michael Knowles.
	But if you're just as excited as I am, then you can be a part of this huge movement by joining us at The Daily Wire.
	As always, I will be answering your questions tonight throughout the show, and only Daily Wire members can ask the questions later on throughout the show tonight.
	And if you're not a member, then you ask, oh, how can I become a member?
	Well, just head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, and you can get 25% off if you use the code Debunked.
	So go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Use that code DEBUNKED. Ask the questions.
	I'll throw them to the guys later throughout the night.
	Thanks, Alicia.
	Fellas, we had an unbelievable last two weeks because the left has decided in their infinite wisdom that making us just insanely wealthy is their top priority.
	They've decided that they're going to cancel many, many valuable Hollywood entertainers, and we have decided that we are going to make movies with those people, specifically with Gina Carano.
	Alicia mentioned the Sunday special, Ben.
	It really was.
	I think it may have been the best Sunday special ever.
	Gina telling her side of the story was just remarkable.
	I want to talk about what happened to Gina specifically for the three or four people who live under rocks and didn't pick up on it.
	But what I really want to talk about is the bifurcation of the culture, the bifurcation of the economy, the tragedy and the comedy of the whole thing, and the opportunities that it presents.
	So will you mind walking us just briefly through Gina's story?
	So, I mean, the way that Gina told it, and first of all, you should watch the Sunday special because it really does allow you to see her side of the story in her own words.
	And Gina is just a lovely human being, just a wonderful, lovely human being.
	I had her over for a Friday night dinner, so we actually had Chavez together.
	It was really nice.
	My kids loved her.
	And what happened to Gina, basically, is that she tweeted a bunch of stuff that Disney didn't like.
	None of it was particularly horrifying or controversial.
	And they fired her.
	I mean, it really is that simple.
	It started off when she had tweeted a joke about the pressure that people receive online to put their pronouns in their Twitter profiles.
	She had put in her Twitter profile, beep-bop-boop, which is actually pretty funny.
	Very good.
	Droid noises.
	And Disney called her into a room, and they wanted her to have kind of the woke mob do a Zoom session with her, and she said, I don't really want to do that.
	I want to actually get in a room and talk with actual human beings.
	And they finally kind of let her do that.
	And then they would not let her do any press...
	Basically, from then on, they cut her out of all of the press materials for The Mandalorian, even though she's one of the bigger stars in the show.
	And then you fast forward, and post-election, she started tweeting things that are fairly well accepted in conservative circles.
	Like, if you want to crack down on voter fraud, perhaps there should be voter ID. She tweeted that like two days after the election.
	And people were like, oh, this means that she is in favor of lies about the election.
	No, that's not what she tweeted.
	And then a few days later, she tweeted something about how Americans should remove the mask from their eyes so they can see what's actually going on with regard to COVID. Again, this is a fairly mainstream conservative position, even for people like me.
	Plus, it doesn't even protect you from the virus.
	Yeah.
	If it's on your eyes.
	In any case, that was really not particularly controversial.
	And then she tweeted out this meme that was just a picture, a very famous picture, from the Holocaust of a Jewish woman running away from German soldiers.
	And the text next to it was fairly generic.
	It just said...
	These sorts of evils don't happen in a vacuum.
	They start off with people dehumanizing other human beings.
	And if you treat people horribly, then eventually you could end up at this place.
	And so you should remember this when you treat people horribly because of their politics, which is a fairly reasonable generic statement.
	Now, I'm not a huge fan of Holocaust comparisons because I generally feel that most of them are overwrought, but there is nothing remotely anti-Semitic about this one.
	And in the world of Holocaust comparisons, this one ranks like the lowest 10% in terms of controversial because that's a pretty generic statement about dehumanization of other people.
	In fact, I've seen the Auschwitz Memorial Museum put out very similar tweets actually about the generic nature of dehumanizing other people and how that leads to problems down the road, including death for people.
	And so, you know, this turned into a big hullabaloo with Disney and Lucasfilm deciding that it was time for Gina to be ousted.
	Apparently, this had been in the works for a couple of months.
	They had been meaning to announce her as a spinoff star from The Mandalorian in one of their own series.
	They had canceled that in December, and they were looking for an excuse to canter.
	They used this as the excuse to canter, despite the fact that Pedro Pascal, the actual star of The Mandalorian, had tweeted out a meme comparing Auschwitz to kids being held in cages in 2018 using a picture that was from the Palestinian Authority in 2014.
	And it was, of course, no blowback to that.
	So basically, after they canceled her and she found out about this, essentially via the social media, the way we did.
	Same way we did.
	I mean, we found out about the exact same time that Gina did.
	They didn't even give her the courtesy of a call.
	They just said, you're not coming back.
	That's it.
	In social media.
	And we saw this here at Daily Wire and we reached out.
	I reached out to her personally.
	And I said, listen, it's really tragic what's happening to you, because it's not about the money, it's about the dream.
	If you ever go to Hollywood and you work with folks in Hollywood, and pretty much all of us except for Matt have actually done this, people who move out to Hollywood move out there because their dream is to be in a show like The Mandalorian.
	I mean, it's the biggest show in TV right now.
	And to have a starring role in that.
	And to take that away from somebody summarily and to destroy their career in the process because they released a statement saying essentially she was an anti-Semite and that she was a racist and all this stuff.
	It categorized people on the basis of religion and ethnicity.
	I mean, it's just a lie.
	It's just not true.
	And for them to do that was an act of cruelty.
	It was an act of true cruelty.
	So we called her up and I said to her, you know, it's terrible what's happening to you, but it's a real opportunity to punch back at these bastards.
	And we should punch back at them because nobody has ever said to them, you know what?
	Fine.
	You want to cancel me?
	I'm not canceled.
	Because there's a whole side of the political aisle that doesn't agree that I should be canceled.
	And so you know what?
	I'm just going to go do my own thing over here.
	And so that's when we announced, and good for her, because it was an act of bravery on her part.
	For us, it was an opportunity, right?
	For us, I mean, I'll be, to be honest with you, whenever somebody in mainstream culture is canceled, I put in a call.
	So I probably put in, over the course of the last four or five years, At least 50 calls to various mainstream figures who have been canceled for bad reasons.
	It's something that I just do, whether liberal or conservative.
	There are many people on the left I've done this for.
	And Gina was just another person who was like that.
	But Gina really took up the opportunity and said, okay, let's do this.
	This is an opportunity.
	I've been wanting to do this anyway.
	I don't deserve to be canceled.
	And Americans need to be able to stand up for themselves.
	So I'm happy to come over here and I'm happy to make a movie with you guys.
	And we could not be more pumped up about it.
	Our audience certainly couldn't be more pumped up about it.
	It's the biggest week in the history of The Daily Wire.
	I think people miss that Gina Carano is a real human.
	I mean, sometimes you read these stories about us or about political figures or about entertainment figures, and we're two-dimensional, and that makes sense because we come to you on a screen, which makes us two-dimensional, also because we have no souls.
	Yeah, I personally am two-dimensional, yeah.
	But Gina's an actual human.
	They took her career away from her.
	Her agent dropped her.
	Her attorney dropped her.
	Her publicist dropped her.
	They took all the tools necessary to have a career away from her.
	They took the biggest show away from her.
	They took her ability to pay her bills away from her.
	They took her good name away from her.
	Lucasfilm called her aberrant, said that she categorized people on the basis of religion and ethnicity, which she did not do.
	It's defamation because it is 100% untrue.
	That's not even a possible interpretation of the things that she has said.
	The fact that we were even able to get her on the phone in that situation, I think, is fairly remarkable.
	She was having what must be one of the worst days that a person can possibly endure when their career and their good name...
	Short of having a serious health problem, that's about as bad as it gets right there.
	But, you know, the terrific thing about it, and the reason I'm so glad you guys acted, I really hate to compliment you because you know who you are, but still, I really am happy you acted, is because...
	We all support free speech, and that means when they take an Alex Jones off the air, I'm offended.
	I think Alex Jones should have a platform.
	I think he's a loon, but he should have a platform because who cares?
	You know, we can defeat his craziness.
	And they're making the frogs gay.
	With the truth.
	They are making the frogs gay.
	But the thing is, we're defending a guy that we don't agree with, that we think is out of his mind.
	Here's a case where this woman did literally 0% wrong.
	Her tweet, and I'm with you, I don't like Holocaust comparisons because they're over the top, but she didn't really even deal with that.
	She was making a perfectly valid point that you begin by dehumanizing people and you end by hurting them, and that's what is happening in our society.
	It's a perfectly valid point.
	We're defending somebody who was actually wronged, and that is a terrific position to be in, because the left has been very clever, and they go after the people on the end.
	And they proved her point, too, because they, not that they're going to cart her off to a concentration camp, but they dehumanized her by labeling her an anti-Semite, by lying about her, saying that she was categorizing people based on race and Ethnicity, that's just flatly wrong.
	They know that they're lying, but they figure, well, she deserves to be lied about and to be slandered because she's wrong about all these other things.
	There are two aspects of this that I want to talk about.
	I actually want to talk about Holocaust comparisons generally, and I want to talk about what it means that they canceled someone on the basis of nothing.
	But first, I want to talk to you about our friends over at ExpressVPN.
	I mean, there's just one question.
	Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
	Ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you.
	That's why I and thousands of my listeners, I'm joking, thousands of Ben's listeners, choose to secure our online data by using ExpressVPN.
	Did you maybe believe a VPN isn't for you because you can use the internet fine without one?
	Sure, but anytime you go online, your internet service provider can see every single site that you're visiting.
	That's not a good idea.
	It's particularly not a good idea when big tech is so arrayed against us, when they collude against us.
	It's not a good idea when there are so many bad actors around the world trying to take advantage Take back your privacy at expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	And you'll get three extra months for free on a one-year package when you use expressvpn.com and throw in that slash backstage.
	That's how you get those three extra months for absolutely free.
	Expressvpn.com slash backstage.
	Head over there right now.
	Michael.
	Yes.
	They canceled her for nothing.
	Yeah.
	Why did they cancel her?
	They canceled her because it's very wrong to make any comparison to the Holocaust, especially after we just had literally Hitler be president for four years.
	So you can't do that sort of thing.
	You know, this is what is most chilling to me.
	We all support the American free speech tradition in this room.
	The left does not.
	We all support it.
	But we all think there are some things that if you walk up to the water cooler and you say, Zig Heil, or you do something...
	I think you should lose your job.
	I don't think you should be allowed to keep your movie or whatever.
	I think there are some things that are out of bounds.
	There are always things that are out of bounds.
	What this woman did was make an absolutely mainstream opinion that we all, everybody left, right, and center would have agreed on even five or six years ago.
	But now, they have so moved the goalposts in this country that if you have an American flag outside your house, you could be...
	See, I'm actually not sure that this is right.
	I think that she was canceled for nothing...
	Because it was nothing.
	I think that we're living through a change in what cancel culture is and what the woke mob wants.
	That it's no longer about enforcing their rules.
	I think that it's like the great terror.
	It's just the imposition.
	Yes.
	I think that the arbitrariness of it, I think the randomness of it is actually part of the terror.
	If they can take down Gina for nothing, Well, you see this happening.
	I mean, the rules are changing every single day.
	I mean, they're changing every single day.
	And things that are overtly non-racist are now being treated as racist.
	I mean, you'll have Don McNeil losing his job at the New York Times for using the N-word to describe why using the N-word is wrong, right?
	And in which situations using the N-word is wrong.
	See the guy over at Slate, Mike Peska, right?
	We're not big fans of Slate over here.
	Slate fired a guy.
	For saying that maybe we should have a discussion about when use of the N-word is appropriate in, for example, quoting someone who used the N-word.
	And people at Slate were like, nope, can't have that.
	They laid Mike Peska off.
	I think the most ridiculous example of somebody being canceled for non-racism that I've seen in the recent past is not really even Gina, although that was ridiculous.
	I think that it's what's going on with Chris Harrison over at The Bachelor.
	So I'm not a fan of The Bachelor because I am a man.
	I have testosterone.
	It runs in my body.
	But this is one of the cultural institutions of the United States over the last 25 years, right?
	I mean, it's been going since 2002.
	The Bachelor has been...
	On the air for a majority of my lifetime on this planet, right?
	It's been on forever.
	And the Bachelor basically just collapsed over the course of the last month because there's the first black Bachelor and he was dating one woman.
	There was a woman named Rachel Kirkconnell when she committed the heinous sin of in 2018 going to a party at a plantation that was dubbed a plantation party or something and she wore like a Scarlett O'Hara dress.
	Antebellum party.
	Antebellum party.
	Yeah.
	And the idea was that this was racist because you can't have an antebellum party without acknowledging the sins of slavery.
	Which, again, I just hate to note this.
	Unless you're governor of Virginia.
	Well, right.
	Then you can dress up as whatever you want.
	But I hate to note this for everybody, but if you wear a costume from virtually any historic period prior to 1820, that culture had slavery in it.
	I mean, if you dress up as a Viking, there was slavery back then.
	If you dress up as a Roman, there was lots of slavery back then.
	In any case...
	The idea was that she was a racist for having gone to this party in 2018.
	So, The Bachelor, who, spoiler alert for women who are still watching The Bachelor, but it's out of the bag now, he ended up picking this woman, right?
	Rachel Kirkconnell is the woman he ended up picking at the end of The Bachelor.
	And so he put out a statement on February 3rd in which he said, you know, she should be given a little bit of grace.
	Social media shouldn't be going after her.
	They shouldn't be digging up her parents' voting record.
	Like, give her a break.
	And so Chris Harrison, the host, was on a show with Rachel Lindsay, a former host of The Bachelor.
	She's the former bachelorette, first black bachelorette, I think.
	And she was interviewing him.
	And Chris Harrison said, you should give her a little bit of grace.
	Social media shouldn't be judged, jury, and executioner.
	People should be treated with a little bit of grace.
	She can explain herself.
	And Rachel Lindsay then suggested that Chris Harrison, for saying she deserved grace, ought to apologize and essentially lose his job.
	And then, a couple of weeks later, like just this week, Matt James, who originally had defended Rachel Kirkconnell and was dating Rachel Kirkconnell, he put out a statement over the last 24 hours saying that Rachel Kirkconnell was essentially a racist, that Chris Harrison was a racist, that The Bachelor was racist, and that it was unthinkable that Chris Harrison could have said what he said in front of Rachel Lindsay, who then was forced to do, and I quote, the emotional labor, the emotional labor of explaining to him the history of racism and slavery in this country.
	Emotional labor.
	First of all, what...
	What in the F is emotional labor?
	I've seen actual physical labor.
	My wife's done it several times.
	It's much the same.
	I can't even make this joke.
	It is so over the top.
	I know if I make this joke how mad Ben's going to be at me.
	But I will say this.
	The fact that he used the term emotional labor is proof that they got to him.
	Because no human being walks around with the term emotional labor in their frontal lobe except woke leftists.
	And that means that somebody came and sat him down and said, listen, The girl you've been dating and obviously like, she doesn't matter.
	The show that's the only reason you have a platform at all, that doesn't matter.
	The only thing that matters if you want to keep your house and your career and your good name is that you freaking get out there and walk the line.
	That's right.
	And I mean, the utter cowardice.
	Of throwing under the bus the girl you were dating, and calling her a racist, and then saying the guy who said exactly what you said, exactly what you said, like within days, that that guy's a racist, but you, you're perfect, right?
	You're perfect.
	That's amazing.
	By the way, I just have to add the capper to this.
	So, again, my producers, the only reason I know about The Bachelor is because I have two producers.
	Yes, they are female.
	And they inform me of this.
	Yeah, the TV remote, that's why.
	Producer Savvy and Producer Jessica, I will say that they keep me updated on this stuff on a granular level.
	And they made me aware of a post from Rachel Lindsay that happened in the middle of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer.
	And this post was a picture of Rachel Lindsay standing, I kid you not, in front of a Cadillac XT6.
	And the post was, when I am fighting on behalf of Black Lives Matter, the way that I like to learn about black history is through podcasts about black history that I listen to on my Bose sound system in my Cadillac XTS.
	Capitalism number one always wins me.
	But number two, this is the person who is standing up against the racism of the capitalist, evil American system.
	This is the person who's doing emotional labor.
	Emotional labor?
	You're standing in front of a Cadillac XT6 in a sponsored ad on Instagram to preach about Black Lives Matter, and you're the person who's supposed to be the great...
	Pope of wokeness here?
	I mean, it's insanity.
	How dare you?
	What gets me is what a grift it all is.
	Correct.
	You know, 15 years ago, you were discussing in an academic context the use of the N-word, and now you're fired.
	But if you're a black mom who wants her kid to go to school, that can't happen because teachers unions are keeping you out.
	You know, Bill Gates literally put out a system for teaching algebra to black kids where you got rid of the concept of right and wrong.
	Yeah.
	And I just thought, like, that may be...
	Like, I've been around a long time.
	That's one of the most racist things I've ever actually heard.
	And so it's all a grift, you know?
	Nobody's doing anything for anybody, but this emotional panic is...
	And the corporations are buying into it, right?
	White America, by the way.
	It's white America.
	Well, it is.
	I mean, this is what Shelby Steele writes about.
	It's a bunch of woke white folks who get to maintain control over the auspices of power by saying, black folks don't have to do the work.
	It's our job to do the work.
	All you have to do is give me power, and I can fix all of these things.
	And I will solve your problem.
	Exactly.
	And corporate America has bought into this, that ridiculous anti-racism training that Coca-Cola, or as I now call them, Woka-Cola.
	Matt, you talked about this on your show.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, and that's why we have to stipulate, I think, with cancel culture that it is a left-wing phenomenon.
	I know on the left, they always want to accuse the right of, oh, you're doing cancel culture, because we criticize someone for having, you know, for their opinion.
	But you know how people on the left say that...
	Only white people can be racist because we have institutional power and black people don't.
	Well, we know that's totally bogus because, number one, racism is a condition of the heart.
	Anyone can be racist.
	Number two, we had a black president.
	I consider that to be institutional power.
	But with cancel culture, that actually is about institutional power.
	You can't cancel someone unless you own the institutions.
	Canceling someone is all about We're good to go.
	Because that's what I think it is.
	The collapse of corporate America into wokeism is one of the great disturbing elements of the last several decades.
	It really is amazing.
	Because we were all taught that after you leave college, that you were going to get in the real world.
	And then the real world, there'd be meritocracy and all of the kind of emotional crap that you learned in college and the microaggression nonsense, all that was going to stop.
	And it turns out those people just took over the institutions.
	And now you get it twice as hard from the corporations.
	And the corporations have a real interest in promoting this stuff.
	Because number one, it's a great way to avoid Liability, like discrimination liability.
	You say, oh, you know, we hired Robin DiAngelo for $20,000 to teach all of our people that they're racist.
	So, I mean, how can you sue us for that?
	And also, all your woke staffers are the ones who are most likely to sue you.
	So if you just give in to them, then they won't sue you.
	But has anyone sued yet?
	I mean, we're waiting for a white...
	They're at a point right now in these corporations where they actually single out.
	They say, this is only for the white employees.
	Come to the room and we're going to tell you what a scumbag you are.
	Has any white employee actually stood up and said, this is racial harassment?
	But look what happens when Asian students sued Harvard, right?
	It wasn't white students suing about the affirmative action policies.
	It was Asian students who were also disadvantaged.
	The Asian students sue, what happens?
	Doesn't go anywhere.
	The DOJ under Trump looks into Yale for doing exactly the same thing.
	They're disadvantaging white and Asian students in applications.
	What happens?
	The Biden administration gets rid of it.
	So, you know, if I'm a white employee and I'm being told to be less white and I think I'm pretty swarthy, how much less white can I get?
	If I'm thinking about suing, I look at the track record of these lawsuits and I say, why would I waste my money?
	That goes back to the institutional point that Matt was making.
	The institutions are now completely corrupted from the inside by the woke.
	I want to talk about that a little bit more.
	First, I want to talk about one of the most important things to me, which is me.
	When it comes to being me, I like to spend as much time being me as humanly possible.
	And that means spending as little time doing the things that I don't want as is humanly possible.
	And that's why I use stamps.com.
	When you're taking trips to the post office, you're not busy being you.
	You're not doing the things that you want to do.
	This is not how a god king likes to operate.
	That's why I recommend mailing and shipping online at Stamps.com.
	Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere, right from your computer.
	You can send letters, ship packages, and you can pay a lot less with their discounted rates.
	With Stamps.com, you get discounts up to 40% off post office rates and up to 62% off UPS shipping rates.
	Not to mention, Stamps.com is a fraction of the cost of those expensive postage meters.
	Cheers.
	Don't waste your time.
	Be like me.
	Sit at your house.
	Don't go outside.
	Don't pay attention to anybody else.
	Look in the mirror.
	Occasionally break away to send out a correspondence out to the hoi polloi at your computer by using stamps.com.
	You don't want to go to the post office.
	You'll want to go to stamps.com instead.
	There's nothing wrong with a post office.
	Post office is a perfectly wonderful place if you like to be around other human beings.
	I don't.
	Therefore, Stamps.com.
	There is no risk if you use the promo code BACKSTAGE, you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale.
	No long-term commitments, no contracts.
	Just go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone up there at the top of the homepage, and type in the word BACKSTAGE. That's it.
	Stamps.com, promo code BACKSTAGE, Stamps.com.
	Never go to the post office again and just, you know, enjoy being you for a minute.
	That is the first time I've ever heard the term hoi polloi in an advertisement.
	Well, first of all, I was actually going to stop you.
	That is the best ad read you've ever done.
	As somebody who does this professionally, let me just say, your skill set has grown, Jeremy.
	I mean, like, I've heard you do some real bad ad reads.
	Some horrible ad reads.
	Some truly terrible ones.
	That was excellent.
	It was a really great segue in.
	And then it really made it personal when you made it about you.
	And you really took your time with it.
	It was really excellent.
	That was really good.
	The fact that you were talking about you, that's when you glow.
	That kind of glow comes over you.
	I mean, it was really impressive.
	There's one note that I wanted to make as far as the fact that cancellation is a left-wing phenomenon.
	And it is, because it is connected to institutional power.
	Occasionally you will see sort of a right-wing cancellation effort.
	So, for example, there was some talk about, in college, removing college scholarships from kids who wanted to kneel for the national anthem or something.
	Like, I'm not a big fan of that sort of thing.
	But it's not just that it's a left-wing phenomenon.
	It's that it's a left-wing mindset.
	There's an actual mindset of cancellation that exists.
	And there's a study that I was looking at the other day that is just a truly amazing study.
	It was quoted in Harvard Business Review.
	What they did is they took a panel of people of a wide variety of political opinion, went all the way right to left, and then they offered them a model corporation, like Jobs Corporation or something.
	And what they told them is that they gave them three examples.
	One, Jobs Corporation is apolitical.
	How do you feel about it?
	You're like, okay, it seems like a nice corporation.
	Second was, Jobs Corporation is liberal.
	How do you feel about it?
	People were like, hmm, nice corporation.
	And then they said, Jobs Corporation is conservative.
	It dropped 33 points in the approval ratings.
	33 points entirely because the left decided that it was now an evil business.
	So in other words, people assume that corporate America is liberal.
	They assume it, right?
	That's why the first two results are the same.
	That's why apolitical and liberal end up with the same result.
	It also shows you the right does not care.
	The right is happy to shop wherever there is a good product.
	The left does care.
	The left wants their wokeism infused into everything.
	Well, there's good news for us in this, as you may have noticed, which is that, fine, you want to do this?
	You want to boycott any business that's conservative?
	There's half the country that believes they should be able to shop at businesses that are not going to shove this garbage down their throat, and we are happy to start each and every one of those businesses and rake in the dough.
	That's right.
	Drew, this is where the left, I think, has lost their mind.
	Illiberalism is nothing new, right?
	There's always been a streak of illiberalism, even on the right, and the leftist is now illiberal.
	But if you go back to the 60s, I'm sorry, the Beatles were a band.
	They never got successful because all these illiberal conservatives burned their records.
	No, of course that's not how it works.
	There is going to be a reaction against this idea of cancel culture that is going to make us more powerful.
	To quote, well, the evil empire, the more they tighten their grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers.
	That's the opportunity that they've given us.
	I think it's bad for the world that the left is creating a dual culture.
	I think it's bad for the world that the left is creating a dual economy.
	But I also think that to the extent that they've had almost unchecked power in the dominant culture and in the dominant economy, only the creation now of the dual economy gives us the opportunity to maybe one day make a better economy and a better culture that one day has a chance of being dominant.
	And you know, this ties into your point on the arbitrariness of it, because I think it's arbitrary when they say they have rules.
	And they make up the rules on the spot, and the rules change day by day, and they cancel you for whatever.
	But what is not arbitrary is the people that they're canceling.
	People that they're canceling tend to hold views very similar to what we think.
	If you are in any way contradicting the left-wing orthodoxy, you are liable to be canceled.
	And they'll make up some fake rule.
	No, this is exactly right.
	It's all pretextual.
	Yeah.
	They're doing all of this on the basis of, who do we want to cancel?
	And then, how do we fit them into the box of sin?
	But, you know, this is actually, I was speaking to my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, today, and he makes the brilliant point, as he so frequently does, that this is an almost exact analog in the Inquisition, in that Nobody expects it.
	Nobody ever expects it.
	No, no.
	They said, the Catholic Church said in the Inquisition, we have this new technology, which is the printing press.
	How wonderful.
	It spreads information.
	You can now read the Bible.
	You can now have your own Bible.
	It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
	But it's spreading some bad information as well.
	And those people have to be burned at the stake and put on the rack.
	Basically, the Twitter terms of service...
	It was bad.
	I'm not in favor of the inquisition.
	I'm following it so far, but then when does it go wrong?
	The Twitter terms of service are the same thing.
	We have this wonderful internet.
	It's spreading information, but it's bad information, and those people have to be burned at the stake and put on their rack.
	I know you guys are in favor of the inquisition.
	This is right.
	You saw that House Democratic letter, right?
	Those two House Democrats who wrote a letter to Comcast and AT&T and Amazon and every major carrier in the country about inflammatory language and inciting language.
	They've brought in the definition of inflammatory and inciting to anything they disagree with.
	And then the idea is they're going to cudgel corporations into doing their work, which, by the way, does violate the First Amendment.
	You are not allowed to make private corporations into agencies of the government for purposes of quashing the First Amendment.
	There's case law on this.
	But they're trying it anyway.
	And this is what they're doing.
	I mean, did you see what Amazon is doing this week?
	Oh my goodness, the hate speech standard?
	The hate speech standard with Ryan T. Anderson, who's pal of some of us in this room, ahead of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
	He's formerly at Heritage Foundation.
	This guy is as mainstream and scholarly a conservative as it gets.
	And he came out with a book a few years ago, greatest book title I've ever heard, When Harry Became Sally, responding to the transgender.
	It's a really good book, too.
	It's a really good book, and it's actually not in any way an inflammatory book.
	By the way, it's a sensitive book.
	It's very sensitive.
	He has a bunch of stuff in there about how people who are suffering from gender dysphoria ought to be treated humanely, and there's no excuse for treating people badly.
	I mean, he's got a bunch of stuff in there that is directly a rebuttal to sort of the suggestion that people on the right don't care about.
	And in fact, I don't know any serious person who doesn't say that.
	Of course!
	This is the funny thing about it.
	This is not even an issue.
	But what Amazon had done, they had taken off, you know, if the Confederate flag was really politically incorrect, they took that offline, or sometimes different symbols, they'd take that off.
	But they had this standard.
	They said, we're not going to remove books for being politically incorrect because they don't want to be seen as burning books or banning books as though we're the Inquisition.
	Very quietly, they took away that exception.
	And now, I mean, we've got a lot of books between all of us.
	By the way, Mein Kampf is still on Amazon.
	But Ryan Anderson's book is not on Amazon.
	Unbelievable.
	You know, I got into a brief, I never do this, but I did get into a brief Twitter debate with our friend David French, who basically feels there should be no recourse because of the First Amendment.
	There should be no recourse when private entities who are multinational, richer than most, two-thirds of governments, they have more money than two-thirds of the government, collude together to essentially gut our rights.
	And my feeling is, wait, the point of the First Amendment is to protect our rights.
	Our rights don't go away because the First Amendment makes it difficult to cover a threat to them.
	But the threat to our rights right now is in this collusion between Companies that may not be monopolies in and of themselves, but when they collude, they become essentially monopolies, and they're working in collusion with the government as well.
	Big tech, big government, big business, big, big, big.
	If that is not a threat that needs to be dealt with, and I'm not a lawyer, I don't care how you deal with it, but it's got to be dealt with, you cannot have a system whereby we cannot attack the threats to our speech.
	The right to speech is given to us by God.
	That's the problem on the right, where you've got at least half that are allergic to using the power of the government, whereas on the left there's wide agreement.
	Of course we're going to use the power of the government to do whatever we want, and I appreciate that on the right at least there's a debate about it, but it seems like there are some, a wide, pretty large, significant preponderance, that basically they don't want to use the power of the government to do anything at all.
	And I think that kneecaps us.
	I think there's a smart way to use the power of government, and there's a stupid way.
	Of course.
	And I think that a lot of people are not distinguishing between the two, and so you end up with a really dumb version of the argument, which is, we can either do nothing, or we're going to step in and just tell them exactly what they ought to do in all circumstances.
	The reality is that what has really happened, and this goes back to the Section 230 argument, especially when it comes to these platforms, is that what Section 230 was designed to do was it was designed to enshrine the ability for corporations to actually protect free speech.
	It was not the opposite.
	What Section 230 was, just to get into a little bit of legalism here, because people don't understand Section 230 particularly well, Section 230 does not make a distinction between publishers and platforms.
	Section 230 says when you have an open thread, then you are not responsible legally.
	for what appears in that open thread.
	So So Daily Wire is a private corporation.
	We're responsible for what we put up that's edited.
	But our comments, we're not responsible for.
	If somebody puts up plagiarized material in the comments, we're not legally responsible for that.
	And so that was...
	The goal here was to allow platforms to exist, because otherwise platforms literally would not exist.
	So what Section 230 did is it created an exception.
	The exception was specifically designed to allow platforms to get rid of material that was pretty much widely agreed to be excessive.
	So somebody posts pornography in our comment section, so we can remove that.
	So we post obscenity or actual incitement to violence.
	We can remove all of that.
	Instead, what has happened is, as so often happens with the government, the exception became the rule.
	So then it became the government is going to tell corporations that if they don't use Section 230 to crack down on all the material government doesn't like...
	Then they're going to come after those corporations.
	So the exception ate the rule.
	So that exception was designed to be an exception, right?
	The idea was there was going to be a broad spectrum of ideas that were available, and only here and there were you going to kind of pinpoint and remove material that was truly offensive or truly terrible.
	Or truly indecent, right?
	Because it's the Communications Decency Act.
	Exactly.
	Or truly indecent.
	And instead what happened is that the left basically seized upon this opportunity to say, okay, well now what these platforms really should do is they should act just like a publisher.
	They should edit all of the content.
	They should decide which books they are willing to put out and which books they are not willing to put out.
	Not only that, we're going to have congressional hearings.
	And we're going to say, as Dianne Feinstein says, if you don't do what we want you to do, we will regulate you into doing what we want you to do.
	So if you actually wanted to fix this, there's a good proposal on the table from Marsha Blackburn, our senator here in Tennessee.
	To take away the catch-all provision of Section 230.
	Because originally, Section 230 says that it allows you to remove content that's obscene, content that is incitement to violence, content that normally would be illegal, right?
	Like that kind of stuff.
	But there's also a catch-all provision that says, or anything otherwise objectionable.
	And so what her bill does, it takes away the otherwise objectionable language.
	So now, you cannot be relieved of liability if you just start willy-nilly taking down stuff.
	And I think that that's probably the right move.
	Yeah.
	You know, it's funny how people are blind to the fact that the enemy is always pools of power.
	Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
	So the left has this idea that the state is going to come in and make everything great.
	But it doesn't understand that the state is a bunch of people with power.
	And the right has this idea that big business is always going to be okay.
	But big business is also people with power.
	And the left used to know this.
	The left used to know that corporations can be alternative governments that have the power of governments and can threaten you.
	You know, anybody with power, anybody with power has to be controlled.
	It's simply that because the people we're trying to protect are the ordinary guys, the little guys who have the right to speak.
	I would just define power a little more specifically than that, which is, it's not about the bigness, it's about the actual power to compel.
	That's right.
	Because the problem is not big business.
	The problem is big business working in collusion with government in order to restrict your rights.
	That's right.
	That's the stuff that's actually dangerous.
	Because what we tend to do, and conservatives tend to do this too, we talk about big government versus small government.
	The question isn't big government versus small government, it is what are the delegated powers of government?
	Limited.
	And were they delegated?
	Limited.
	That's right.
	There are specific purposes.
	The same thing is true of business.
	The question isn't big business or small business, it is business acting Hypothetically, I actually want to talk a little bit about why corporations went wrong and why I actually think that corporations are the biggest threat to the country right now.
	But before we talk about that, I want to talk about My favorite company, Policy Genius.
	Policy Genius can help you check two big items off of your list with ease.
	That is comparing life insurance rates, and that is purchasing life insurance.
	You can save 50% or more in the process if you head over to policygenius.com.
	In just minutes, you can work out how much coverage you need and compare quotes from top insurers to find your best price.
	Once you apply, the Policy Genius team will handle all the paperwork and all the red tape.
	If you hit any speed bumps during the application process, they'll take care of everything.
	They literally get you on the phone.
	They get the insurer on the phone.
	They set it all up.
	They take care of you with personal attention.
	They did that for me.
	I purchased my life insurance through PolicyGenius.com, and I purchased life insurance for my wife.
	I guess, actually, the insurance on me now that I think of it is for my wife.
	Maybe the insurance policy on my wife is for me.
	Yeah, wow.
	I don't know.
	There's some bad incentives that get created here.
	That kind of service has earned Policy Genius a five-star rating across over 1,600 reviews on Trustpilot and on Google.
	You need life insurance.
	I have a baby that I adopted.
	She turned eight months old today.
	She's absolutely wonderful.
	And you have thoughts when you look down at your little baby that you never had before.
	One of them is, why don't you sleep?
	And the other one is, what would happen to this little life if I disappeared tomorrow and wasn't here to provide stability, wasn't here to provide her basic needs?
	That's why you need life insurance.
	If you're worried that March is just around the corner and you've barely gotten anything done because it's the new year, don't worry.
	Take a deep breath.
	Policy Genius will help you make the most of this short month.
	All you have to do, go to policygenius.com.
	In minutes, you can save 50% or more.
	Comparing quotes, and you could feel good knowing that your loved ones will be taken care of if anything were to happen to you.
	PolicyGenius.com.
	Go there now.
	Get started.
	PolicyGenius.
	When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right.
	You know, other than insinuating that you might kill your wife, that was an excellent average.
	Or that my wife might kill me.
	That's true.
	You kind of went a little bit awry on that.
	I mean, it is true that the incentives sometimes get misaligned.
	I mean, right now, if I were to do something terrible to my wife, she has a much stronger incentive to kill me than divorce me.
	I've been telling you that for months, you know.
	If I've ever found having been thrown off the back of a train for the double indemnity, obviously, then you know exactly what happened.
	If I ever am found floating face down in my pool with three gunshot wounds in my back, I didn't just trip and hit my head in front of me, no matter what my wife says.
	It was Hillary Clinton.
	It was Hillary.
	Speaking of people who might want to kill Ben, Alicia!
	No, you have that all wrong.
	I like Ben.
	He signs my paychecks.
	It's Michael Knowles that I want to be at.
	Uh-oh.
	Stop.
	You don't want to say happy birthday.
	By the way, it was Alicia's birthday this week.
	Happy birthday!
	Thank you.
	She's at least 25 years old.
	I wish.
	I'm 35.
	Now if my husband decides to impregnate me again with another gorgeous child, I'm considered a geriatric pregnancy, which is just really depressing.
	There's a lot of lively chatter over on the chat box.
	And if you're like, well, hey, wait a second.
	I want to chat with you on the chat box.
	Well, how do I do that?
	How do I ask the guys a question?
	Well, then that means you've already given me an answer.
	You're not a Daily Wire subscriber.
	You should head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and be sure to use the code of Ben's new show, Debunked, which comes out this February 26th, so be sure to take a listen.
	Debunked will get you 25% off, so be sure to go over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use the code DEBUNKED for 25% off.
	Alright, this first question we have goes to the one and only Matt Walsh, who is finally in the Backstage studio.
	Fans have been asking for that for a very long time, so welcome to Backstage, Matt.
	People want to know, on a very serious note, when will you be joining Smokey Michael and the God King, and what instrument will you be playing?
	I think it's like the third backstage.
	Like I said, I didn't make enough of an impression the first two times.
	Wait, Matt Walsh is here right now?
	It was definitely a temporary...
	I do play the banjo, so I... I mean, I can...
	Yes.
	I can pick up a banjo and make noises with it, so...
	I can do that, but I have to hammer it against you.
	That's as far as my...
	The real story is that my wife bought me a banjo.
	It was...
	When we first got married, she bought me a banjo.
	It was my first birthday as a married person.
	Because I had been making all this noise about how I wanted to learn the banjo.
	And she bought it for me.
	And then what that meant was that for the last 10 years, it just kind of sits there.
	And she'll just periodically say, so you never learned that banjo, did you?
	That's it.
	I didn't learn it.
	And how many other instruments do you play?
	Because people want some options here.
	I don't play all...
	I'm very good at not playing every instrument.
	Don't you say that you're as good at every instrument as you are?
	That's a good way of putting it.
	By the way, completely side note, but Matt and I were outside and the conversation turned to the faux masculinity of the show.
	And we decided to create a masculinity ranking of the hosts on the show.
	Okay.
	It should be easy.
	It has but one standard.
	How many children have you sired?
	So by this ranking, it goes Matt, then me.
	Then you, right?
	Yeah.
	And then you, and then you.
	Well, tied for last place.
	Yeah, all right.
	I was going to tweet that out, that Ben Shapiro said I'm the manliest guy at the Daily Wire.
	You just said it.
	It's been said.
	I mean, he's a lumberjack, and he has like 83 children.
	So Jeremy and I are the least toxic people in this entire room.
	That's pretty good.
	I did admit, though, that you...
	So, we have four kids, but the first two are twins.
	Right.
	So it's kind of a two-for-one deal.
	For the same number of pregnancies.
	That's right.
	But I'll happily take...
	I think the beard gives me the tiebreaker.
	I'll actually say, though, that I think one of the things that matters is, can you change a tire?
	I mean, we're probably still tied for a loop.
	I would say that's probably true.
	Maybe it mixes up the top three.
	I not only can change a tire, but have changed many tires frequently on rain-soaked freeways.
	Why?
	Don't you have AAA? It was before you had AAA. Are you a pauper?
	No, you didn't even have phones.
	Changing your own tires?
	What went wrong with tires when they were made of phones?
	That's how long ago it was.
	There were only tires.
	Through changing a tire.
	I know, exactly.
	It was like BC, you know...
	Have you ever changed a tire?
	Be honest.
	No.
	Have you seen me and ever changed a tire?
	I changed a tire once.
	I was visiting L.A. before I lived there, and I was too cheap to get a good rental car, so I did a rent-a-wreck.
	I was driving a 91 Plymouth Breeze around, you know?
	I will tell you, then I go in, I figured out how to do it.
	It was the manliest I've ever felt in my whole life.
	By the way, there's a much higher chance that Alicia has changed the tire than I have.
	Yeah, Alicia's definitely changed the tire.
	I will say, though, that I had a blowout this weekend.
	And in my day, I grew up in rural Texas, I changed a lot of tires, you know?
	I used to be, when I was a Ute, I would, like, stop and help other people change their tires when they're broke down on the side of the road.
	Seemed like the thing to do.
	But I've become soft.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I was driving, we had this huge snowstorm, as did, you know, almost the entire south of the country this last week.
	Florida, man.
	Woo!
	It reeked holy hell on the roads here.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	All the freezing, all the ice.
	So my wife and my baby and I, we rented a little Tesla.
	I thought maybe it'd be fun to have a Tesla.
	Elon Musk is cooler than me.
	So I rented this Model 3 from a great family.
	It was cool.
	Pulled up to get this Tesla.
	It's really cold outside.
	I get out of the Uber.
	I'm walking up.
	This young 17-year-old kid comes out of his house.
	And I said, hey, man, good to meet you.
	And he goes, oh, yeah, it's real cool to meet you.
	And I said, yeah, I'm Jeremy.
	He goes, yeah, I know.
	And I was like, oh, we live in a town where we're famous.
	We're used to living in a place where people either didn't know who you were or hated you.
	Now we live somewhere where people are kind to us and like us.
	So I rented this Tesla from this kid.
	I drive it home and park it in the garage.
	And then it dumps like 12,000 pounds of snow.
	And I didn't get to drive the car for a week.
	So finally, I've got one day left on the rental, Saturday.
	And I jump in the car.
	I want to see if the baby seat will fit.
	Throw the baby seat in the back.
	We go for a ride.
	And I promptly hit one of these newfound potholes at full freeway speed and knock the tire off the rim.
	Oh my gosh.
	The good news is...
	In a crisis, with my wife and my child in the car, I was able to figure out how to call roadside assistance.
	That's good.
	I was able to solve that.
	I was able to get them on the phone, and they told me that they would be there in four hours.
	Apparently, a lot of people were broken down on the side of the road.
	You know, the last time I got a flat tire, which now, I don't know, about five, six years ago, I was in a very expensive BMW. And I was out in the middle of nowhere.
	In the trunk, right?
	Yeah, I was in the trunk.
	The coyotes, literally coyotes, were circling around me.
	And I thought, well, I know how to change a tire.
	And I took out the jack from this very expensive BMW and opened it up and it cracked in half in my hands.
	And I thought, I guess people don't do this anymore.
	It was a prop.
	By the way, I mean, being as close to death as you are, did it ever occur to you that that would have been, like, the coolest way to die?
	Like, just, like, mauled by coyotes and broken down on the side of the road after getting out of your BMW? That would have been the headline?
	Is there ever a time when coyotes aren't circling you?
	Vultures up ahead.
	Most of the vultures, they travel with me.
	I feel like they should pay, you know, pay my fares.
	Alicia.
	All those stories just revealed that I was more manly than Ben at my most pregnant with my second child because I put a spare tire on my family wagon because it was also a four-hour wait, even though L.A. did not get a blizzard, so yay that.
	Alicia, let me reiterate, I'm very wealthy.
	Good point.
	All Alright, the next question goes to the God King.
	Jeremy Boring, this subscriber must not know about Daily Wire 2 because they want to know if the Daily Wire, you know, it's entering into entertainment, you know, you're expanding all of the shows, you're bringing on new talent, you're writing and scripting movies, they want to know about sports.
	Yeah, well, as you say, they obviously haven't been fans of the Daily Wire for long because we do very intensive sports coverage every, is it three, three, every three years.
	Four, right?
	Four years, yeah.
	World Cup.
	Whenever the World Cup happens, I cannot be bothered to know.
	Yeah.
	We do the Daily Wire 2 coverage of the event.
	Michael and I have been covering it very well, lo these many years.
	Yeah.
	Other than that, if you're talking about real sports that people are interested in that aren't anti-American and that should be played by a first-world country, I think it's a great idea.
	We have talked about it.
	I think it'd be a lot of fun to create a deeper collaboration with our friends over at OutKick.
	They have a great attitude.
	They're absolutely hilarious.
	Clay Travis is kind of a hero.
	He's right here in Nashville.
	But if he covers soccer, no doubt.
	We could call it Daily Wire 3.
	So we can keep Daily Wire 2, but then we can put the sports.
	So there's Daily Wire 1, which is politics.
	There's Daily Wire 3, which is sports.
	And Daily Wire 2 for, you know...
	That other thing.
	It's a great idea.
	The every four years thing.
	The next question is for Drew.
	Drew, people want to know what projects are you working on now that you have a little more free time since you don't have your daily show.
	And more importantly, are there any people that will work with you in Hollywood since you're a very open conservative?
	No.
	There are no people in Hollywood.
	But I am as busy as I have ever been.
	Well, you've got to sand that coffin, really.
	Sanding the coffin.
	You've got to be ready.
	It could happen any minute.
	But no, I'm as busy as I've ever been.
	I just sold.
	I'm so delighted that I just sold to Thomas Nelson, the Christian publishers who published my memoir.
	I sold essentially the sequel to my memoir, which is about literature and the Gospels.
	Does it have a better title?
	No.
	It's called The Truth and Beauty.
	So you'll hate it.
	It would be so much better if it was called Yet Another Thing.
	The Better Thing.
	I am writing.
	You know the thing.
	You know the thing.
	I just finished a draft of the script we're going to do here, I hope, and another project script, and I've got a new series of mystery novels coming out.
	So I'm as busy as I have ever been.
	And it's only because of my hatred for Knowles that I've come here at all.
	LAUGHTER So I can insult him.
	That's good, because when he plots, there'll be just this whole trunk filled with unfinished manuscripts that we can put out there one by one.
	Did you take insurance out on me?
	Policygenius.com.
	All right, talking about scripts, Ben, everyone in the chat wants to know, have you seen a script for Gina's movie?
	What will it be about, and when is it coming out?
	So actually, this question is better directed at Jeremy.
	So I will say that there are active and ongoing talks about what exactly the script should be.
	I know that Jeremy is wading through scripts right now looking for the right project.
	But because it is a development process and because we're working on a very personal level with Gina, it's going to take, you know, a little bit of time for us to find exactly what we want to do.
	I think it's important for people to understand that part of what Gina wants in building this next stage of her career is not just to be an actress for hire, but to be a producer.
	She wants the ability to actually help craft the story, to put her mark on whatever her next project is.
	We're working once again with our friends over at Bonfire Legend.
	Dallas Sunye is going to produce He read 60 scripts over the weekend.
	I looked at him.
	He was a shell of a man.
	He couldn't tell you about any of them.
	He'd be like, which one did you like best?
	He goes, well, there's a Western and a spaceship.
	I'm like, okay, get some sleep.
	Send me the 15 or 16 best scripts, which he has done, and we're working our way through them.
	By the way, they should hire me for this, too.
	Because I've got a great idea for it.
	What we're learning from Drew is he's never going to retire.
	And if he does retire, then he'll end up in the trunk eaten by coyotes or something, if Ben's wish comes true.
	All right, so then the next question, since the God King answered that one.
	The God King answered that last one.
	So, Ben, I'll toss this one to you.
	It's a very good question.
	Somebody wants to know, hey, I've become a Daily Wire subscriber, but what are you doing to protect yourself against big tech, as we saw with Parler and other conservative sites that are just shut down because people like Google and Amazon say, hey, we're not going to allow you on our servers.
	Have you guys protected the Daily Wire and the subscribers against something like that?
	So we definitely have been working on figuring out alternative platforms that we could shift over to in case something like Amazon Web Services, what they did at Power Lover, happens to us.
	We've expended enormous time and energy and some money on exactly this sort of question.
	Again, I'm going to redirect the question to Jeremy, because for people who don't understand how the Daily Wire works, basically all business questions go here.
	And all ideological questions go here.
	And all questions about cigars go there.
	And all questions about not paying the bills go there.
	And all questions...
	And all questions about just general malaise and cynicism go there.
	That's basically the breakdown.
	And if you want somebody who's nice to you, then Alicia's here, too.
	Yeah, that's right.
	I'll say that, as Ben said, yeah, we've expended a lot of time into this question since what happened to Parler took place.
	The truth is, the problem is greater than any company is going to be able to answer.
	You know, Amazon Web Services can...
	It controls the servers for 50% of the entire World Wide Web.
	It's an unbelievable amount of infrastructure.
	So when people are like, why don't you build your own servers?
	It would be like if in 1982 the telephone companies had gotten involved in censorship and somebody had said, well, why don't you just build your own phone companies?
	And my answer would be, okay, it took 100 years to run phone lines to every rural household across a continent.
	That's what you're talking about.
	And what if we build all these servers?
	We go raise $100 billion or a trillion dollars to build the kind of infrastructure on the server side that you need.
	And then Amazon never actually acts against another conservative, but the...
	ISP providers do.
	The problem that faces conservatives is so vast.
	And to take on any part of it would take the wealth of a small nation to try to conquer.
	And then that may not be the attack vector.
	There are like 100 attack vectors that need to be solved.
	So what I really believe needs to happen here is several things.
	On one hand, we need not to reinvent all of this, but to diversify our reliance on any one platform.
	So to Ben's point, we're looking at other potential data facilities, some that you might be able to put yourself on, some that you might be able to actually use as almost a shadow server, where we're constantly being updated on a backup server, and if something happens, you can very quickly and seamlessly move yourself over.
	Very expensive, not as expensive as building Amazon Web Services.
	More than that, I think what needs to happen is conservative millionaires and billionaires need to change the way that they think about technology.
	There's a reason that Amazon can kick you off.
	It's that...
	Conservatives have no power at Amazon.
	There's a reason Facebook can kick you off.
	Conservatives have no or very little power at Facebook.
	There's a reason that Twitter can treat you the way they do.
	You don't have a problem of conservatives being run out of their homes because conservatives are great at real estate.
	You don't have a problem of conservatives running out of gas.
	Conservatives are great at energy.
	There's just these different spheres that draw people with different mentalities.
	And I think the proof that conservatives don't have the mentality necessary to solve this problem Is actually in the question, are we building our own servers?
	The answer to the problems of bifurcated use of technology is not that we build what they currently have.
	There are conversations happening all over the world right now in real time That make servers obsolete.
	There are people talking about blockchain.
	There are people talking about things beyond blockchain, the names of which I don't know.
	There are kids with backpacks going to left-wing billionaires and left-wing venture capital funds and left-wing angel investors and creating the future.
	And we're not a part of those conversations either.
	And the answer to how do you...
	Solve the problem of it took a century to build all those phone lines isn't to go try to replicate that.
	It's to invent the cell phone.
	And until we change our mentality, we're just going to lose on whatever the next thing is to whatever the next thing is.
	And we're going to build some crappy alternative version of what they've already got.
	And it's just going to further ghettoize us.
	We have to completely change the way that we think about these platforms.
	Can I ask a follow-up question to this?
	Yeah.
	One of the things that is very frustrating to me is that conservatives seem very, very reluctant to think that there may be legal remedies here.
	But it does seem that at some point this is a new technology and the new technology needs new law.
	And it needs new law to make sure that all of us have a chance to speak.
	If this is the way we speak to one another, and it is, we should be able to speak to one another no matter what our political beliefs are.
	And so isn't there some place for lobbying and legalism?
	I'll say two things and then I'll let the lawyer talk.
	The first one is conservatives need to embrace lawfare.
	It's deeply distasteful.
	It's horrible.
	It's against our...
	But we actually need to embrace it because those are the weapons being used against us.
	That's the battlefield.
	But I'll also say this.
	One reason that the Daily Wire, we're not safe, but we are far less likely to be kicked off of servers than is Parler.
	It's because Parler wasn't conducting any actual economic activity.
	Parler is a free platform and everybody who's using it is using it for free.
	They don't have a vast ad network.
	If some big tech company were to knock the Daily Wire off of their servers because of speech or something like that, We have over 100 employees.
	We do millions and millions of dollars worth of business.
	We have tens of millions of fans.
	We have ads on our website every day doing hundreds of thousands of microtransactions.
	That goes all the way to the Supreme Court.
	There's actual damages.
	And one thing that you have to keep in mind when you talk about the law is the concept of damages.
	And the damages are just fundamentally different where we're concerned.
	This is why it happens.
	I mean, it's a sorry state of affairs, but they're not unsophisticated about who they target.
	They target people who have the weakest Opportunity to challenge them.
	And this is one of those areas where you're starting to see some state action, right?
	Rhonda Santos has talked about going after some of the tech companies and making it so that they can't do this sort of stuff.
	Extending anti-discrimination law toward politics in the arena of technology, particularly free speech platforms.
	And it seems to me that if we've restricted freedom of association so strongly in this country, that we already have anti-discrimination law that applies to every single element of American life, except for your politics.
	Right.
	You can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of religion, sex, age, disability, anything.
	And nobody is in favor of that sort of discrimination, but it used to be that freedom of association meant that you just sort of had to deal with the fact that sometimes people didn't want to hang out with you.
	But the left has completely made that obsolete.
	You have to hang out with whoever the left says you have to hang out with, and you have to do business with whoever the left says you have to do business with.
	I think there's going to be a strong move made, particularly in red states, against some of these corporations saying, if you guys start booting people, then we are going to take legal action against you.
	You're going to have violated our state law.
	Is there a concern that you can no longer have ideological organizations, for example, that the Daily Wire would have to hire left-wing activists to be employed?
	So you'd have to create actual legal carve-outs.
	You'd have to say if you're an overtly partisan organization, then you can do this in the same way that they're religious carve outs for anti-discrimination law.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So you'd have to do that for overtly political organizations.
	It would pose a problem for 501C3s particularly.
	There are a lot of political 501C3s that have a conservative or a liberal bent.
	And because they're nonprofit, they can't be overtly associated with the party or not associated with the party.
	And so it could get very muddy, very fast.
	I mean, listen, in my preferred world.
	As much as I hate discrimination, I hate cracking down on freedom of association more.
	In the same way that as much as I hate vile speech, I hate cracking down on free speech more.
	But it seems like that chip may have already sailed.
	So as long as that chip has already sailed, then the only alternative left is going to be an extension of anti-discrimination law into the field of politics.
	It already exists in a place like California.
	It's just never been enforced, really.
	And this is such an important key because we can say, well, we don't like this.
	I really wish we lived in a different world.
	But as you say, Jeremy, we've got to play with what we've got.
	You know, politics involves eternal principles.
	It also involves applying those principles to real circumstances that are always changing.
	And if we want to survive, if we want to be smart about this, then you've got to play the game.
	And there's a difference between using the weapons that are the weapons of the battlefield and using the logic that they use.
	I agree with this.
	I totally agree.
	It's what we always said about mutually assured destruction.
	When we launched Truth Revolt, we said we hate the tactics that we're about to use.
	As soon as you guys stop using them, we'll stop using them.
	And I think that that's accurate as far as a lot of these things, which is there's only one thing that is worse than having a nuclear weapon, and that's everybody else having one and you not having one.
	That's right.
	And it always bothers me.
	We play this hypocrisy game with the left, which I think is actually destructive.
	So the left says, you know, you said it was a dark day when Obama was elected.
	Dark means that you didn't like the color of his skin.
	You think, like, that's not what it meant.
	But you said this, which is accepting their terms of battle.
	And I don't agree with this at all.
	I mean, I'm really offended by the racial pathology of the left.
	I think it is...
	Irreverent to the human condition.
	I think that to treat people according to the color of their skin is a wrong.
	And I think it's wrong no matter what color their skin is.
	I don't care if they're hypocrites about it.
	I want it to stop.
	I want to say that, no, if you're a black guy who did a bad thing, you did a bad thing.
	You're a white guy who did a bad thing, you did a bad thing.
	I don't care.
	I'm taking people as they come.
	And the idea now that they're selling to us that being non-racist is racist.
	Yeah.
	Is insane.
	Right.
	You can't be non-racist.
	It's the picture.
	You're either racist or you're anti-racist.
	There's no third category called non-racist.
	That's why I think cancel culture is so dangerous because what it does is it makes people afraid to say your entire premise is wrong.
	So this is the biggest thing, I think, when we talk about cancel culture.
	It's easy to point to the big circumstances of cancel culture, like Chris Harrison or Gina, but the reality is the people it affects most are the people who are the low-level employees at Disney.
	That's right.
	What affects most are not people, like the people sitting in this room who talk for a living, right?
	Or do business at a high level in politics.
	The people that affects the most are the people who work for Coca-Cola and who make $45,000 a year and don't have the labor mobility to be able to just move over to Pepsi, especially when Pepsi is teaching the exact same kind of stuff.
	What cancel culture is about is intimidating everybody into silence.
	It's not even about canceling anybody.
	It's about putting a head on a pike.
	And the more heads you put on pikes, the more people are scared to speak out.
	And they know that, which is why they're going to keep putting heads on pikes.
	In fact, it is imperative I'm almost at the point with cancel culture...
	When a high-profile person gets canceled and they start apologizing like Chris Harrison did.
	Right.
	Agree.
	I'm at the point where I despise you more for apologizing than I do despise the mob for canceling you in the first place.
	Like, Chris Harrison is such a perfect example.
	And we didn't even mention it.
	In that interview that we originally talked about, he was so circuitous in standing up to it.
	He could not have been less aggressive in what he said.
	And he kept reiterating that, well, I'm not defending her and I don't really know.
	And she might be a racist.
	But look, guys, maybe we shouldn't be destroying people's lives over this.
	And they still cancel him anyway.
	And then what does he do?
	he falls to his knees and apologizes and admits He says, yeah, I am a racist.
	I mean, he accepts their accusations against him, even though he's not a racist.
	If you do that...
	Then you're just as bad as them.
	And you're also, all the other, the smaller people, the people you're talking about, who don't have this kind of platform, you're throwing them under the bus too.
	You're not just as bad as them.
	You're actually worse because you've got all of their vices and cowardice.
	They're not cowardice, right?
	That's why I just want to say the genre of the public apology is Yeah.
	Has to go away.
	Even if what you did was wrong.
	Now, in Chris Harrison's case, all these other cases, Gina Carano, like, they didn't do anything wrong.
	But even if you did something wrong and the cancel culture is coming after you, still don't apologize for it.
	Morgan Wallen, I don't know if you guys tracked this story, one of the biggest country stars in the world, has a new album out.
	fantastic.
	He's a bit of a hell raiser, probably not our kind of guy.
	He gets home from a long night of partying.
	He's not being a very good neighbor.
	He gets out of a couple pickup trucks in front of his house.
	Some of his buddies, they're honking on the horn.
	I don't know, it's 1 30 in the morning or something.
	He's a dick.
	And he's yelling at some of his buddies, and he uses a series of jocular pejoratives to describe his buddy's His friends.
	His actual friends.
	None of which can be said on this show.
	He calls them nincompoops and jerks.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Poopy breath.
	All of it.
	Then...
	His neighbor, who's probably rightfully ticked off at the guy, it's 1.30 in the morning, you're trying to sleep, apparently on their security camera, their doorbell camera, the next morning realizes that you can hear him using these words against his friends, and one of them is that one word that no one in America is allowed to say except for all of Hollywood, children at church, if you're of a particular race.
	And so for this...
	Total Soviet-style erasure.
	He is dropped by his label.
	He is dropped by...
	But his songs are climbing the charts.
	He's dropped by his label.
	He's dropped by both of the major radio entities in the country who collectively own all of the radio stations.
	He's dropped by his...
	The Country Music Awards took him off.
	The Country Music Awards disqualifies him.
	him.
	The AMA, everybody disqualifies him.
	He said something distasteful.
	He said several distasteful things.
	He said one thing that we, as a society, know there are special rules around.
	I actually don't accept those rules.
	I don't agree with those rules, but there's no denying the existence of those rules.
	Nevertheless, he said it in a non-racial context to his friends privately.
	It was captured essentially by a disgruntled voyeuristic neighbor.
	And for this, we've erased him from civilization.
	He didn't do anything wrong.
	He did do something gross.
	He didn't do anything wrong.
	He did not do anything racist.
	The apology that he put out, We're good to go.
	Well, he did something wrong.
	He came home late.
	He woke up to his neighbors.
	He was a jerk.
	He's using words he shouldn't use, but he didn't use them in the way that is the racist way to use that word.
	You can find a black guy and shout the N-word at him, right?
	If you're thinking about what sort of punishment these sorts of things should entail, should it entail This is the thing, though, that I think that too many conservatives don't understand, which is this is the fight that we're in.
	So we're not in the fight where we have to storm Normandy, where we have to come off the ships and the machine guns are coming up.
	This is the fight we're in.
	And so when you say, oh, this is going to cost you money, or this is going to cost you your job, or this is going to cost you your friends...
	This is the fight we're in.
	And those guys who stormed Normandy actually got bullets in the head and were killed, lost their lives.
	And I'm worried that we don't understand as a half of the country, we don't understand that the losses we're suffering are the losses you suffer when you are in a fight that has to be won.
	And you're going to suffer those losses anyway.
	If the cancel mob is coming after you, what you have to understand is there's a very good chance that they will destroy your life.
	They might not.
	I mean, you might beat them.
	Gina Carano beat them.
	You might not beat them.
	They might destroy you.
	But that's gonna happen anyway.
	And so what you can decide right now is whether you're gonna have your dignity on the way out.
	Morgan Wallen decided that he's not gonna have his dignity because he apologized to these people.
	Here's the thing about an apology.
	You apologize to people who you have actually harmed.
	And so if Morgan Wallen had gone to his neighbors and knocked on their door personally without any cameras there and said, listen, if you had to hear that, I'm so sorry.
	I apologize to you.
	That was obnoxious of me.
	Had a few too many.
	I should have gotten home earlier.
	I'm sorry.
	And then if he had just gone and done his video thing and said, listen, I spoke to my neighbors.
	I'm not going to tell you what that conversation was.
	It's none of your business.
	But to all you people out there that are trying to destroy me, I do not apologize to you because you were not harmed by what I did.
	You don't really care.
	That's right.
	You're excited for the opportunity to destroy my life just because you get a kick out of it.
	So I do not apologize to you if you were offended.
	I'm glad you were offended.
	Yeah.
	That's all I have to say about it.
	You've got to do this.
	And the thing is, if he had said that, he'd be in the same spot today that he is anyway.
	But I do think there's a special duty that adheres to people who have the power to do that.
	Because if Morgan Wallet had done that, it would have meant a hell of a lot more than the local employee of Coca-Cola, right?
	What we did with Gina, I think, is...
	I don't mean to pat ourselves on the back, but we deserve a pat on the back.
	We're Mother Teresa.
	No, you actually deserve a pat on the back.
	And I think the audience knows this, which is why we had the best week we've ever had in the history of the company over this.
	By putting our money where our mouth is and saying we're not going to allow people to be canceled, that was a statement in the culture.
	And that's a statement that more business people need to make.
	I mean...
	I'll be real with you.
	I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow.
	I tried to reach out to Morgan.
	I would hire Morgan Wallen tomorrow because I don't think that what Morgan Wallen did was intended to harm black people.
	And I don't think that what he did did harm black people.
	I think that what he did was be an ass.
	And guess what?
	Being an ass is a bad thing to do.
	And again, you should apologize to his neighbor, but that is a legal thing to do in the United States.
	And sometimes people are asses and there should be forgiveness available to people who are asses.
	And again...
	And again, the President of the United States won't help schools open so black people can send their children to get educated.
	The real things aren't happening.
	You know, there's a phrase that Jeremy once said in a very similar sort of cancellation situation.
	And it resonates here.
	And that is that cowards get their friends killed.
	And that's really what we're talking about here.
	Because it's not just that they're a coward because they're backing down in the hopes that they'll get their career back.
	It's the cowardice that gets everybody else killed.
	Because now you've set the new standard and you've reinforced the standard.
	This came up originally in the context of Mark Duplass, who of course is this famous director, producer, actor who committed the grave sin of once having said a nice thing about me on Twitter.
	He came to the office.
	I gave him an hour and a half of my time.
	I'd cancel him for that.
	Well, yeah, I mean, of course.
	I gave him an hour and a half of my time.
	We talked about the Second Amendment stuff.
	I was very nice to him.
	And as he was leaving, I said...
	For your own sake, do not post on social media that you were here, because they're going to wreck you for it.
	And a couple weeks later, he got it into his head that he was going to do a nice thing, and he tweeted out, I disagree with Ben Shapiro about a lot of things, but he did a nice thing for me when he didn't have to, and he's well-intentioned.
	He got hit so hard that he not only pulled down that tweet, he then issued a groveling apology.
	And then what ended up happening on the back of that groveling apology is that James Gunn came out and defended him.
	And then everybody on the right resurfaced James Gunn's old material, and James Gunn ended up getting fired, right?
	And I ended up defending James Gunn in this bizarre situation.
	So I was like, Dan knows.
	Just by existing, I took out half the Marvel Universe.
	And what Jeremy said at the time is, the thing about cowards is they rarely get themselves killed, they get all their friends killed.
	Because when you duck out of the battle, what you end up doing is granting the opposition their entire premise, and that premise is then used against all the people who heretofore were your friends.
	And so that's exactly right.
	Apologies are a wonderful thing when you have done a wrong thing.
	If you want to have a good marriage, apologize first thing in the morning to your wife.
	But the reality...
	Every morning.
	It doesn't matter what you're doing.
	It's the first word out of your mouth in the morning.
	But when it comes to public policy, the issuing of these malice struggle session apologies for things that you haven't done wrong to people you have not wrong.
	When people issue apologies and they say, to everyone who is offended by this, well, no, if you're offended by this wrongly, I'm sorry, your emotions may even be authentic, but that does not mean they are justified and you do not deserve an apology.
	Well, you know, on this point of Maoism, I think that's actually the perfect term.
	There was this phenomenon in the 70s with the New York Radical Women's Group.
	They coined the term, or sort of popularized the term, consciousness raising.
	And there were these famous meetings where you'd get all these housewives to come together, and they would, I call them wine and cheese soirees.
	They'd just complain the whole time.
	And there's a famous essay about this by Carol Hainish.
	And she says that there was a woman who came and she said, you know, before I came here tonight, ladies, I had no idea how oppressed I was.
	But darn it when I am so oppressed and furious and aggrieved.
	And you see this now.
	People trying to convince themselves.
	To be aggrieved and offended by some public comment that no one cares about.
	I want to say one thing in Mark Wallen's...
	Is it Mark?
	Morgan.
	I'm sorry.
	In Morgan Wallen's defense.
	And that's that I think that for us, we live in this space and we know about this fight.
	I think when they come for you and you haven't thought about these things in advance...
	That's a really good point.
	They are taking your life and your name...
	We talked about it with Gina.
	And you think you can save it.
	And your good name away...
	Not just that.
	Everybody who's surrounding you is telling you to do it.
	Yeah.
	I mean, honestly, the best thing that happened to Gina in this whole thing is that her agency didn't dump her.
	Yeah.
	Because if her agency hadn't dumped her, we would have called her up.
	And you know what her agent would have said?
	Don't take their call.
	No way.
	Don't take her call.
	Because if you work with them, you'll never work in this town again.
	Now, the reality is they were never going to let Gina work in the town again anyway.
	Right.
	But her agent would have said, no, maybe in a few years.
	You go away for a while.
	You kind of earn your way back in with bit parts.
	I guarantee what happened with Morgan Wallen is that his initial reaction was probably, I don't even know what is going on right now.
	And his agent got on the phone with him.
	And his agent probably said to him, listen, you need to issue an apology right now.
	Maybe we can put out this fire right now.
	And then the news cycle will move on.
	But you need to at least issue the apology.
	And if you've never been through the fire, it is egregious.
	I mean, it is truly one of the worst...
	I can tell you that as a person who gets trended on Twitter approximately every two and a half weeks, right?
	I mean, it is never fun.
	Whether it is justified or unjustified, it is never fun.
	And that's just somebody who does it professionally, right?
	I basically trend on Twitter professionally.
	If you are somebody who only trends once in your life, and that time is because you are losing your job and your livelihood...
	And it's a tsunami of media coverage, like a tsunami, because the more you trend, the less big the bumps are, honestly, like in terms of the differential from norm.
	Like the normal for me is that I get mentioned on Twitter a lot.
	And then on a few days a month, I get mentioned like a super lot.
	But if you're Gina, you don't get mentioned on Twitter all that often, except for people who are saying they enjoy you in The Mandalorian.
	And then one day you are the only thing that everyone in the country is talking about.
	The trend is followed by a deluge of emails, often phone calls.
	It's overwhelming.
	And people don't know that it passes, too.
	Before we started, Matt and I were talking about media matters who do nothing, but they sit around and they listen to us and try and twist our words into And publicize our shows.
	And publicize our shows.
	They try to make us sound like terrible people for things that we say, which in context are actually not terrible at all.
	And I have to admit, you're going to hate me for this.
	I actually have pity for them.
	That's your job.
	Your job is to try and make other people look bad and to listen to us.
	And I just think at the end of your life, you're going to stand before the throne of God and he's going to go like, what did you do?
	Yeah.
	These are damaged people.
	There's no question about that.
	And it does get to your point, which is, I don't need to accept their standard.
	You know, if they basically, on the left, all they exist to do is call us all racist every day.
	And then one day, a clip of Joe Biden goes around, and he stumbles on his words, because it's a day that ends in Y, and he sort of sounds like he said the N-word, and then we all sort of giggle about that.
	I don't care.
	I don't think he really said that.
	I don't think he is some bigot.
	I just think it's playing into their game, pointing out a hypocrisy that they don't care about because they don't care about the rules anyway.
	They just don't like us.
	I would much rather do what I'm going to do.
	I would much rather...
	Build culture.
	Make movies with people we want to work with.
	Do those sorts of things.
	Then worry about their stupid rules, which change every day.
	Well, that's right.
	I mean, this is the thing that I cling to, is that racism is an actual philosophy, which I don't hold.
	I don't think any of the people in this room hold.
	It's not a slip of the tongue.
	It's not something that you might have said that was untoward.
	It's not even a moment of anger when some tribal glitch in your brain goes off.
	It's an actual way of life.
	I know racists.
	They actually think the things that these people are being canceled for I just don't accept the terms.
	I do not accept the terms of the argument.
	I don't accept that, as you say, if somebody shouted a word he shouldn't shout, well, that's a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a racist thing, the thing you're talking about, The Bachelor.
	I just think it's absurd, especially because we know it's a grift because of the governor of Virginia who doesn't get canceled for it because then a Republican...
	I'll even go a step further.
	Shouting a racial pejorative is not necessarily racist.
	That's right.
	That's right.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	Doing something racist does not necessarily make you a racist.
	It means you did a racist thing.
	So there's actually even another gradiation, which is, I think, a very interesting point you just made.
	Sometimes people in their worst moments actually do succumb to the worst thoughts.
	That's right.
	That doesn't actually define them.
	You know, people say all the time, like...
	And this is not to let them off the hook.
	This is to point out that there are gradations of sin.
	There are gradations of sin.
	And what the left has decided is there are no gradations of sin.
	There is just the damned and the woke.
	And that's it.
	That's right.
	This thing that people used to say back in college is like, well, you know, you'd have a couple too many drinks and you'd say something you shouldn't about one of your buddies or whatever.
	And you'd apologize the next day.
	And they'd be like, no, what you say when you're drunk is that's who you really are.
	I saw the real you because all your inhibitions were gone.
	You said what you really believe.
	And that never resonated with me.
	Yeah, that's ridiculous.
	What I actually thought was, no, When my inhibitions were gone, when my rational mind was gone.
	When I was only given into my vices and racist passions.
	You're saying that that's the real me, but no, the real me is all of the things that I've built on top of my worst impulses.
	That's right.
	All the things that I've built on top of my intrinsic, tribalistic way of looking at things, or my selfish ways of looking at things, or my vain ways of looking at things, or my hateful ways.
	We all have the seed of sin in us.
	What we build on top of that is the real us.
	This is why, you know, when I was talking about Rush a lot this week, as we all were and thinking about Rush.
	And, you know, I was really obviously I think all of us were really just moved by the passing of this guy and all these liberals celebrating his death and publishing things that he had said, some of which were untoward.
	Most of the things they published, he never said.
	But now and again, he said something that I thought, like, I don't agree with that.
	And I don't think probably Rush, if you pushed him to the wall, would agree with it.
	But he spoke three hours a day live to people.
	That's more than people speak to their spouses.
	You do not speak to your spouse three hours a day.
	And what I say to all these people is, you ever say anything to your spouse that you're glad didn't become public?
	I mean, this is what I wrote in the New York Times, which, frankly, I'm shocked that they solicited an op-ed from me.
	I will say they took out a slap I had at the New York Times in that piece.
	There was originally...
	I know.
	I mentioned the fact that the headline in the New York Times about Rush was that he had like turned talk radio into an aggressive right-wing attack machine and their headline about Ayatollah Khomeini was thoughtful religious leader, right?
	But the point that I was making is that what the left did with Rush is what they are going to do with all of us.
	They're like...
	So in Judaism, so to teach you all about a different religion.
	So in Judaism, Satan is not a character who's opposed to God.
	That's not what Satan is.
	Satan is known as the accuser because he's essentially the prosecutor.
	The idea is that after you die, Satan comes and he basically is the one who is going to try you in court before God.
	He's the one who strings together all of your sort of worst moments, right?
	And that is what this is.
	And this will come for all of us.
	I said in the piece that it wouldn't have mattered if it had been Tucker or if it had been Sean or if it had been me or if it had been you or if it had been anybody who was prominent on the right.
	The reaction would have been the same because all our lives would have been would have been a compendium of the worst moments of us taken out of context and robbed of all meaning.
	Right?
	That's all it would have been.
	And that's what you saw in the CNN montage, right?
	The montage of Rush was like Sandra Flock, and it was the AIDS stuff from 1988.
	It was like, out of the 30 years of material, what are the six worst things he did?
	And can we use those things to rag on him?
	Can we use those things to characterize his entire life?
	And we should all refuse to accept this frame.
	We should refuse to accept this frame.
	The reality is that we are all a compendium of all the things that we've done over the course of our life, most of which people never see.
	And for those of us who are in public life, The notion that everything that you do can be boiled down into one bad tweet or one bad moment, all that really is, is because it can be done to anybody.
	It can be done to anybody, but it isn't.
	But because it can be done to anybody, that's how you know who they hate.
	Because you can do it with anybody.
	Literally anybody.
	But there's only one side of the aisle that they choose to do this to.
	Those are the people that they cancel.
	And so don't accept the standard that this is how people should be characterized.
	I think it's so important for us to reject this framework for the sake of our children.
	Yes.
	Because our children...
	Would somebody please think of this...
	Let's actually think of the children because our kids, not my kids, but so many kids are starting out on social media at the age of like 8 years old.
	Or even if they started social media at 14 or 15.
	And just everything they think, everything that enters their head is documented forever online.
	And you've got to think about...
	What we're starting right now with this cancel culture, if it continues like this, 30 years from now, all of our children are ruined.
	Their lives are ruined.
	I'm legitimately grateful to God that I grew up before cell phone.
	Also, on this rush point, you figure these kids are going to be on social media all the time.
	Imagine what's going to crop up.
	Imagine if you've been on air for three hours a day for 30 years, and your job, by the way, is to be provocative, especially earlier on in the career, and the best thing they got on you is an AIDS joke you made in 1980.
	Can you imagine that?
	I wake up in the morning, right?
	We actually pray this sort of thing.
	It's like, God, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner.
	You think of these lines from Shakespeare of like, I could accuse myself of such things that it would be better that my mother had not born me.
	All the sins we all commit.
	That's the best they got on the guy.
	He's pretty clean.
	He did pretty well.
	The other thing we're doing is we're not taking, of course, the time when these things were said into context at all.
	Forget about 1980.
	We're going back to the 1840s and saying, whatever someone did back then, we're going to hold them to the standards of the year 2021, which, of course, is complete madness.
	I mean, as somebody who was writing publicly from the time I was 17, I can say the great majority of the things I regret having written occurred between the ages of 17 and 22.
	Right.
	Right?
	Because when you're first starting out, number one, you're trying to get attention.
	And number two, your thoughts aren't fully formed.
	Right.
	If you don't get better at what you do over time and become a better thinker over time, you're not being a human being.
	Yeah.
	That's just called maturing.
	And the media celebrate this stuff.
	It's the easiest form of fake journalism.
	This is the other thing.
	The media have made an entire model.
	The same people who whine about the fact that we get good traffic over at Daily Wire because we happen to be conservative and then say that we're clickbait.
	These are the same people who will run a 3,000-word piece about some jackass of a 19-year-old student who decides to out a high school cheerleader who once texted something about learning to drive and quoted a rap lyric with the N-word in it and get her kicked off the University of Tennessee cheerleading team.
	The New York Times actually did that.
	The New York Times ran a long piece about this terrible student, this guy's a terrible person, There's a 15-year-old girl.
	As she got a driver's permit, she put up a video on her phone saying, I can drive now, N-word.
	And it was obviously meant to quote a rap lyric.
	I mean, clearly meant to quote a rap lyric.
	Soft R. This was not an epithet aimed at a racial.
	And everybody acknowledged this, right?
	This is fully obvious.
	And this jerk decided, because he was in her class, he decided that he was going to hold on to this video.
	He waited until, I think it was three years later, just kept this video around, waited until three years later when Black Lives Matter happened.
	And she made the grave misfortune of posting something in support of Black Lives Matter.
	And he said, well, you say you support Black Lives Matter?
	You said this.
	Boom.
	Puts out the video.
	The University of Tennessee...
	Withdraws her cheerleading scholarship, which was her dream, was to be on the University of Tennessee cheerleading team, which is one of the great cheerleading teams in the country.
	She had to withdraw her entire admission from University of Tennessee over this.
	Okay, we are creating an unlivable culture.
	It is only livable for people on the hard left.
	And by the way, everybody knows this.
	It's not even going to be livable for them.
	Ultimately, it's not.
	Revolutions eat their own.
	Revolutions eat their own.
	Every one of them is going to burn.
	All the people, like you talk about our publicists over at Media Matters and Sleeping Giants and Judd Lum Lum and Kevin Roos and Kara Swisher, they're all doomed.
	Not because of us.
	Not because of us.
	Because they're not 23.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	They're not woke 23-year-olds.
	The woke 23-year-olds will one day eat them for lunch.
	Yeah.
	Think of poor Trotsky.
	Trotsky thought he had it so well.
	If you ever hear a ringing in your ear, guys, it's an ice pick.
	It ain't us bringing it.
	It ain't us.
	That's why sometimes you hear people on the right and they'll lament this happening to some of the cancelers.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	They deserve every bit of what they've got coming to them.
	They built this and they deserve what they have coming to them.
	I can object to it happening to them and still recognize that they have exactly what they built coming to them.
	It's really interesting to me who has always, you know, I've been an artist all my life.
	Half the people I know are gay.
	I've worked with all these gay people.
	I've always enjoyed their company.
	They're hilariously funny.
	All this stuff.
	I once went snorkeling with Ryan Anderson when Harry became Scalic.
	Ryan and I together as one gay guy.
	Yeah, that is.
	But I remember back in the day, seriously, liberals, liberals who wouldn't come back to my house because they met a gay person there.
	They wouldn't come back to see me because they'd come to a party and there was a gay couple there.
	And those same people, those same people are walking around with their rainbow flags now and canceling anybody.
	And I just think it's all...
	Malarkey.
	This is the thing that really gets me.
	It's all a grift.
	It has nothing to do with the happiness of gay people, of black people, of women, of trans.
	It has nothing to do with any of that.
	Is the world happier because of cancel culture?
	It is much, much more.
	Well, this is, by the way, this is sort of the thesis of my first book with words.
	Is this kind of trick?
	Wait a minute.
	This is shocking.
	We'll see if I can finish it.
	But political correctness basically replaces moral codes with speech codes.
	The old moral codes with the new speech codes.
	So it matters much less what you do.
	It actually doesn't really matter at all what you do.
	It matters what you say and the imposition of that.
	It doesn't matter what you do as long as you say it correctly.
	I think about this with the actor Armie Hammer.
	Yeah, Army.
	Who you guys know was, many years ago, a good friend of mine, a good pal of mine.
	And in later years, we've not been close.
	Our paths have taken us in different directions, and he doesn't share our politics, but still a guy I'm very fond of.
	And he said some things to some gals that are...
	Hard to read.
	Yeah.
	They're weird.
	He expressed sexual predilections to them, and for that, he's being erased from the world.
	I don't even understand the story.
	This is my point.
	So, Armie says, you know, I want to eat toes, and I'd like to eat your rib, and some other things.
	Right.
	And who among us has...
	Ribs are delicious.
	Oh, wait.
	Human...
	Oh.
	If...
	Just taking back what Adam once gave.
	If...
	Army didn't need anybody.
	Yeah, right.
	Army didn't drug and sodomize a 13-year-old girl like Roman Polanski did, and Harrison Ford flew to France to give him an honorary Oscar.
	This is why I don't get this.
	It's only what you say.
	He expressed some words.
	He expressed some dark fantasies.
	No, but wait.
	As I understood the story, he has some kind of weird sexual fetish that he performed on some of these girls who were there.
	They didn't stop him from doing this.
	I don't understand what he's being canceled for.
	In other words, I saw what he was doing.
	He engaged in consensual sex, and he said that he would like to eat a rib or eat a couple of toes in some direct messages, and for this he must be destroyed.
	Now, I'm not making a moral defense of...
	It is definitely very disordered.
	But I am saying, What did he do?
	I'm just trying to think of puns, to be honest with you.
	Oh, come on.
	Come on.
	Yeah, there are a lot of good ones.
	Talk to me after the show.
	That was an interesting story, because Cosmopolitan Magazine actually published an article after that defending cannibalism fetishes.
	That's right.
	And I read the article for some reason.
	Who doesn't?
	I read the article for some reason, and it just struck me that...
	This is kind of off the topic a little bit, I guess, but it's just our culture has no language anymore to condemn any kind of perversion because it's all about consent.
	And so the only language, the only moral rule we have left is consent.
	And everything comes down to consent.
	And as long as people consent, then we have no language with which to condemn anything.
	And so this article was going through...
	You know, it couldn't just come out and say, well, this is wrong to want to eat people.
	That's weird and wrong.
	It couldn't say that.
	So instead, it was trying to figure out how, well, he didn't really have consent.
	You know how they did this?
	The greatest version of this, forget Army's thing, was Marilyn Manson.
	Marilyn Manson is being accused by the actress Evan Rachel Wood, who's very left-wing, but just testified on this, and some other women, of engaging in very sort of bizarre sexual behaviors.
	We're not just talking about fantasies anymore.
	And The thing is, these women were in long-standing relationships with him.
	And so when Evan Rachel Wood, and I really take her side in this, but she's saying, well, I know we were in a consensual relationship, but it wasn't really consensual because, you know, I was brainwashed, he manipulated me, you know.
	Fine, I totally understand that argument.
	But that argument doesn't work in the modern liberal framework.
	I actually disagree with you guys about this.
	I I think I agree with a fundamental point that you're making, that consent isn't the ultimate definition of morality.
	But that doesn't mean that consent isn't a standard.
	It's a legal standard, for sure.
	That is the only standard that the left applies.
	How do you cancel somebody on the basis of violating a standard you have not violated?
	Right.
	I can understand conservatives saying, that's weird and perverse.
	It's always wrong.
	It's always wrong.
	We're not going to be patronizing businesses with people who want to eat each other's toes, because it's weird.
	But for liberals, for whom literally nothing is off-limits, so long as it is consensual, there is no basis for canceling.
	It's a weak standard.
	But the point is, they've...
	If your standard for judging the morality of a sexual act is something like love, devotion, are you respecting the dignity of the other person?
	Well, then you don't have to talk about consent at all because that's included in the love, devotion, and dignity bit.
	But you get rid of all that and it all comes down to consent.
	And that's why you have all these cases on college campuses.
	A woman wakes up the next day.
	She had consensual sex with a man, but she feels used and cheap and dirty.
	And she was used.
	She was used like an object, but she did consent to it.
	And the problem is not that she didn't consent.
	The problem is that it was not sex with dignity and love.
	But she doesn't have that language.
	So instead she figures, well, this feels wrong.
	I didn't really give consent.
	So I must not have given consent even though I did.
	That's a great point.
	It is a great point until you say you're taking Rachel Levin Wood's side.
	I'm sort of taking her side.
	I'm not taking it all the way.
	This is actually where I disagree with you.
	I agree with everything you just said as a moral standard.
	But I'm not saying that Marilyn Manson, for the sort of consensual acts that he's being accused of it not being consensual or something, I'm not saying he ought to go to jail for it.
	I think you're making the same point that Matt is.
	You're not saying that you take Evan Rachel Wood's side in the sense that he has violated some sort of left-wing cultural standard.
	Or civil law.
	Or civil law.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't have to be ended that way.
	I think you're just saying what Matt is saying, which is that...
	I fundamentally, though, object to the idea that you can retroactively remove consent because of regret.
	The point that Matt is making is such a perceptive one, which is that People aren't actively...
	It's a lie, in other words.
	When they say that they're retroactively removing consent, the only moral standard they have is consent.
	But they know, they feel like something wrong just happened to them, so they do not have the language to express what morality has been violated other than by retroactively saying that the only value they have was violated.
	Since I know it was bad, it must not have been consent.
	There's a huge irony here, though, which is that you have these left-wingers grappling at this very traditional definition of consent and liberty.
	The kind of Aristotelian or classical Christian idea, which is that if you're constantly in vice and sin, you're not actually free, right?
	The man who sins is a slave to sin.
	The example I use is the heroin addict.
	By the kind of modern leftist standard of liberty, the heroin addict is the freest guy in the world, right?
	As long as he's got a couple bucks in his pocket, he can shoot up, he can pursue his appetites however he wants.
	But we all know the heroin addict is the least free person on earth.
	This is the thing.
	You and I like the show Billions.
	And it features this guy who's a prosecutor who's a masochist.
	He's a sexual masochist.
	For me, sadomasochism is like you flick people with a towel.
	But this is like sticking cigarettes on people.
	It's not a joke, you know.
	But he's in a loving relationship with his wife where they do this thing.
	And what you're left with is something's wrong with him.
	You know, it's not that they're doing anything illegal.
	And it's not even that they're outside of a loving relationship.
	Because for a large period of the show, they're actually in a loving relationship.
	But something's the matter with him.
	And it's, you know, when I look at the guy who's supposed to be a girl who's in the, now the Health and Human Services, Rachel Levine.
	Yeah.
	I think, like, you know, I have nothing but sympathy for this person, but something's wrong with him, you know?
	There's something the matter with him.
	And I think that, like, we have to be able to talk about that without necessarily moral judgment, but at least with some kind of understanding.
	Because right now the argument is, well, you can do whatever you want as long as you consent to it.
	But the question then is, well...
	If there's something that's a little wrong, maybe we do need to qualify.
	But two things can be true at once, which is, you can do anything that you consent to as long as you're an adult, but that doesn't make it right.
	That's right.
	And this is an ethos that is completely foreign to the left.
	This is where they're running into trouble.
	Because the ethos that you can do something wrong, but still it can be wrong, is something that the left fundamentally does not accept.
	It's why they're now cracking back against freedom of association and freedom of speech and all individual rights.
	If you can misuse freedom of speech, that means that freedom of speech should actively be curbed.
	If you misuse freedom of association, freedom of association should actively be curbed.
	The right understands that there is a difference between the right to do wrong and the possibility of doing wrong with that right.
	You can abuse a right, but that doesn't vitiate the central right that you're talking about.
	The left fundamentally does not understand this.
	So what this creates is this bizarre situation where they'll know something is wrong and they can't explain why it's wrong or which rule it has violated.
	And so they have to post facto create a rule that allows them to bar that thing.
	Because they can't accept the idea that somebody could do something wrong and also wouldn't violate any of their chief principles because in essence they're authoritarian.
	In essence, everything they don't like ought to be banned.
	And so if they can't even come up with a good reason in their own head why it ought to be banned, they will come up with a new rule or they will spin the rule so that that thing ought to be banned.
	And that's incredibly dangerous.
	This is my only question for any leftists ever, really.
	This is what I would ask if I got to ask a question at a Democrat debate.
	Is there anything that you believe is bad That should not be banned by government.
	Is there anything you believe is good that should not be mandated by government?
	It's incredibly biblical, even for your half of the Bible.
	No, it's incredibly biblical that we talk about why God allows evil, and there's a large body of discussion about this.
	And one of the ideas is that because he believes that men have to be free, Men and women have to be free in order to love God, in order to serve God freely.
	But that means that you cannot do that.
	And so that's the relationship of power to the people who are less powerful, is yes, you have to have the right to do things that are wrong.
	But I do think...
	But that doesn't mean they're right.
	That's why wokeism is a pagan religion.
	Yes.
	I do think, though, the left is saying something even more radical, which is they're saying, I'm not really free.
	You know, in the case of Evan Rachel Wood or something, she's saying, I'm not free to consent for whatever reason.
	You know, I was manipulated or whatever.
	And this actually gets to something the Founding Fathers talked about.
	This gets to something that sort of classical Lord Acton talks about, actually.
	Classical theorizers of liberty, which is...
	To be free, you actually have to be a moral and religious people, in the words of John Adams.
	You need to practice the virtues and cultivate that.
	The point of liberal education is to do this.
	It's why we take little kids who are just basically appetite machines and doing everything that's bad for them.
	We educate them in their liberty, and hopefully they can kind of tame it and be able to master that.
	But what the left is saying is...
	We don't have that.
	We're just appetite issues.
	One of the things that happened, just philosophically, that was a really radical shift in sort of how Western thought went is that it used to be that people perceived natural law in the way that the Catholic Church perceived natural law, which is you can look at the way that nature is constituted and you can derive from it rational rules as to how the world should work and natural rules of virtue as to how you should live your life.
	That is embedded in the laws of nature and nature is God, is the language of the Declaration of Independence.
	And there was a shift that happened, particularly in the 19th century, from the idea of natural law to nature as guide, as in scientific nature.
	As in, if something happened to you and it was natural to you, you had a natural desire, then this meant that this natural desire was justified.
	And you can see this to be as sort of cretinous as possible in terms of public culture.
	If you look at Lady Gaga's born this way, this is the argument.
	If it is natural for you to do, it is therefore good for you to do.
	That is the precise opposite of what natural law suggests, which is it may be natural for you to have a particular inclination, but the world around you suggests a particular set of rules, and you are supposed to incline yourself toward that particular set of rules.
	And you can know that through your reason.
	Right, because man was meant to reason.
	But this goes back to, I think, another fundamental distinction that the left is now attempting to conflate.
	There was an entire editorial in the New York Times today that was kind of fascinating.
	And it was a complaint about why Western philosophy was so focused on separating man from animals.
	I don't know if you guys saw this.
	It was kind of fascinating.
	It was an entire essay about why do, you know, all of Western philosophy is dedicated toward the idea that man is not the same as a squirrel.
	And this is very bad.
	We should actually allow man to just be the same as a squirrel because squirrels are natural and human beings are natural.
	And we should acknowledge we are not just our reason.
	We are not just our prefrontal cortex.
	We are all of the elements of us, right?
	And Western philosophy was built around the idea that we are not the same as animals specifically because Western philosophy was built around the idea that man was made for a purpose.
	And that purpose was to reason.
	That purpose was to use our brains in order to seek out God and to seek out the rules to live a virtuous life.
	And the left has attempted to vitiate that.
	This is why Darwinian theory did so much damage to religion.
	Not because there's anything that doesn't fit in terms of evolution and religion.
	You can square that circle, for sure.
	But what really finished it was the idea that man is an animal.
	And once you treat man as an animal...
	And there's no fixed nature.
	Nature's evolving.
	Right.
	But more importantly, there is nothing better about the prefrontal cortex than the amygdala.
	Yep.
	There's nothing preferable about being a reasonable person as opposed to being an emotional person or a person who just follows their passions, follows their nature.
	And by the way, it's worth pointing out when Woodrow Wilson, our sort of first progressive president.
	The worst president in American history.
	Yeah, and the first left progressive president, he who destroyed the entire country.
	When he writes about what is progress, what is progressivism, he uses that exact example.
	He says the Constitution is based on the science of Newton.
	Fixed laws, permanent nature, all these sorts of things.
	But we know that's bunk.
	We now live in the age of Darwin.
	I don't think Woodrow Wilson understood Darwin very well anyway, but he says, Darwin, nothing's fixed.
	It's all just kind of a continuum, man.
	We're not that different.
	And therefore...
	Throw out all those permanent walls.
	Have we gotten to a point where...
	Because I've been thinking about this a lot.
	Have we gotten to a point where...
	The whole conversation around rights is just hopeless because we can't...
	You get 100 Americans into a room and you ask them, what does it mean to have a right?
	What is a human right?
	And you're not going to get even a 50% agreement.
	Nobody has any idea even what these things are.
	We don't have the philosophical grounding for it.
	Have we gotten to a point where maybe we as conservatives stop framing our arguments so much around rights and find a different framework for it?
	So for example, abortion.
	And so for so long, pro-lifers would say, we have a right to life.
	And that actually raises a lot of questions.
	Like, what do you mean a right to life?
	A right against whom?
	Who are you claiming this right against? - We can take it away, obviously, right? - Right, exactly.
	If you have a right to life, does that mean that you can't be executed and so on?
	Maybe a better R word would be responsibility.
	And so what we should be saying is, and I believe we do have a right to life, understood a certain way, but maybe we should be saying that a parent has a responsibility to their child.
	And what that means, at a minimum, is that you can't kill your child.
	You have to provide for them.
	We all agree with that.
	When it comes to born children, you let your kids starve to death, you go to jail.
	That is the kind of traditional conservative framing, too.
	Right.
	Maybe responsibility instead of right.
	When I got into this brief Twitter exchange with David French, one of the things I said was, You are endowed by your creator with certain rights, and government is instituted among men to ensure those rights.
	So if those rights are under threat, it doesn't matter where they're under threat from.
	Government has a right to stop that threat.
	And many, many people came on this Twitter thread and said, oh, any argument from God is absurd.
	Yeah.
	But the problem with that is that's actually the axiom of our civilization.
	It is the self-evident truth that doesn't have to be proved.
	It only has to be asserted because everything else is built on top of it.
	You can't remove it.
	You cannot remove that assumption.
	And we shouldn't be afraid to make that assumption because it's the axiom.
	There's a common argument that the founders consistently made, which they were right about, which is that the other half of right is duty.
	Rights and duties were just the flip side of each other.
	Your right to life is my duty not to kill you.
	And your right to free speech is my duty not to inhibit your free speech.
	We all understood this fundamentally.
	What we have done is we have dumped the duty and we have kept the rights.
	And so once you dump the duty, then you can have rights against anyone for anything because you have no duty not to infringe on them.
	I just want to say dump the duty is a funny phrase, but go ahead.
	It is.
	I think on that elevated note, I want to do something that we haven't done in a while.
	This has been a great conversation.
	I want to wrap out the show with 10 rapid-fire questions from our DailyWire.com subscribers.
	Alicia's going to bring them to us.
	Here's the rules.
	Whoever the question is addressed at, they're the only one to make an answer, and it's a fast, pithy answer.
	We want to get through 10 rapid-fire questions.
	Alicia.
	All right, the first question goes to Michael Knowles.
	A Daily Wire member wants to know, they live in a liberal mecca, and they're considering leaving like the Daily Wire did, but should they be considering this, and what do you think their options and decision-making should be, considering they don't have a job or housing situation set up yet?
	Well, you're probably more likely to get a job and a cheaper house and a conservative place.
	So I think those are both marks actually in favor of coming here.
	I love it.
	I wish we came here sooner.
	I love being in a red state and specifically in Tennessee.
	All I will have a caveat here is...
	I feel I got a lot out of growing up in left-wing places because I learned all the stupidest arguments.
	And it cost me a lot of time and it impelled a lot of bad behavior.
	But I feel I came out stronger and wiser for it.
	That was a constructive process.
	However, if you're already formed and comfort is your goal, come on over, baby.
	Tennessee is fabulous.
	Alright, this question goes to Matt.
	People want to know, do you think that the general public or major corporations will ever grow a spine and just say no to the woke mob and the Twitterati?
	No.
	I think Matt took those instructions a little too seriously.
	Can we give him like 280 characters?
	I think he said it all.
	Alright, Drew, who would win a cage match between Gina Carano and the entire Daily Wire team?
	Oh, we'd be killed!
	Are you kidding?
	She'd kill us!
	In my youth, I might have gotten one slug in, but now it's over.
	Media matters.
	In his youth, Andrew Klavan would have punched a woman.
	Headlines write themselves.
	Alright, Jeremy, people want to know, what kind of cigars are you guys smoking?
	I'm not smoking tonight, so I'm going to kick the question over to Mickey.
	Little Davidoff Colorado Claro.
	Not a super-duper expensive cigar, but it's got six years' age on it from our buddies at our old shop in L.A. Ben, it is award season, even though it seems a little weird in this age of COVID, and people want to know, what are your Oscar picks?
	Oh my god.
	Well, all the ones that they've talked about for Oscars this year absolutely suck, or I haven't seen them.
	So I really haven't seen many good movies this year.
	Run, Hide, Fight should win all of the Oscars.
	Aside from Run, Hide, Fight, the unproduced Gina Carano film should obviously also be nominated for next year's Oscar.
	2022.
	2022.
	You know, I'm trying to think of anything that's really...
	Have you guys seen anything of this year?
	I'm really trying to...
	All the Oscar movies, it's like Call Me By Your Moonlight or some nonsense and no one watches it.
	The Gentleman, was that this year?
	Because that was a good...
	Was it the Guy Ritchie film?
	Yeah, Guy Ritchie.
	Okay, I'll have to give that one a look.
	I enjoyed that.
	It was really fun.
	I enjoyed that film.
	Yeah.
	I got nothing else.
	All right, Jeremy, this question is for you.
	A Daily Wire member wants to know, which actor are you kind of hoping gets canceled next so you guys can snatch him up?
	Well, I have a list.
	I hate to say an answer to that because it's so terrible.
	I will say that on the same day that Fire Gina Carano was trending, Fire Chris Pratt was trending, and for God's sakes, Hollywood, please, please, please send Chris Pratt to us.
	Yeah.
	I love me some Chris Pratt.
	Out of all the Chrises, he's obviously the best.
	Alrighty.
	Michael, do you think that we need more conservatives going into politics or going into cultural positions like filmmaking and producing and editing and all those things?
	Well, I think the answer is yes.
	And I also think it's a little bit of a blurry distinction, you know, because obviously politics, the biggest definition of it is what we all do together.
	But it's a two-pronged approach because forget elected politicians.
	There are always going to be sociopaths running for that.
	It's the bureaucracy that we lose in, the actual administrative state, and the entire cultural apparatus.
	And we just don't have anybody in any of those areas.
	So we need to go into both.
	And both are important.
	I don't think it's only win the culture and forget about politics.
	And I don't think it's only focused on bureaucratic politics and technology.
	And tech and everything.
	Matt, earlier on Twitter, I saw that you retweeted Tommy Lahren.
	She said Trump DeSantis 2024.
	You said you agreed with half of the ticket.
	Other than Rhonda DeSantis, who would you pick?
	What are your top three for the GOP in 2024?
	I don't have a top three.
	I like Ron DeSantis.
	I hate almost all politicians, so for me to even say I like him is me going out on a limb.
	We've got three years, four years left, so he could easily disappoint me.
	I'll be ready to toss him to the curb if he does.
	He's my boy.
	Ron DeSantis.
	Ron DeSantis is great.
	He's great.
	He's the governor of my excellent new state, Florida.
	He is a stud.
	And I really feel...
	We don't have time to get into all this.
	It's supposed to be rapid fire, but I feel very strongly that...
	Ron DeSantis on the top of the ticket is a great idea.
	Trump on the top of the ticket.
	I don't know if we want to do all this again in 2024.
	I hate to interrupt because I said we had to be rapid fire, but Candace Owens would be formidable if she actually decided to make good on her tweet threat.
	It is true.
	It would be formidable.
	It is a true story.
	I wouldn't want to run against her.
	I also, just to put a little plug in here, I would like to be the first podcast host.
	You know, so there are other Republican politicians who could be out there.
	Wouldn't mind doing a podcast.
	Direct from Cancun?
	Yeah, just throwing that out there.
	Something I'm encouraging people to do.
	We all know Michael is hoping that Ben runs so then he can get his radio slot.
	That's the way I could actually become the first podcast host if I took his podcast.
	Drew, do you plan on double masking?
	No, I don't even single mask.
	I only wear a mask when I walk into a store, and on the front of the store, it says you have to wear a mask to enter the store.
	Otherwise, I haven't worn a mask since this whole thing began.
	I mean, Drew's immune to death.
	That's what happens after you've been dead for five years.
	If I were going to die, I'd have died already, let's face it.
	I know I'm not supposed to speak, but on the mask thing, I discovered this weekend that when you're wearing a suit jacket, if you wear the neck gaiter, which is my move, and you wear it around your neck, it actually looks like an ascot.
	There you go.
	So it kind of works like that.
	No, I haven't done anything that Anthony Fauci says I do the opposite.
	Quick note there, by the way.
	I've heard that I did an Anthony Fauci impersonation the other day, and I heard from a lot of our listeners that your Anthony Fauci impersonation, this is the only nice thing I've ever said of Michael Knowles.
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	In 10 or 15 years, maybe I'll have done a good impression.
	That is good.
	Solid stuff.
	We know how Ben feels about Fauci and the vaccine, but Ben, somebody wants to know, if you get the vaccine, is it okay?
	I know it's against Jewish law to get a tattoo, but this Daily Wire subscriber wants to know, would you get it tattooed on your arm or somewhere that you got the vaccine so then you don't have to wear a mask anymore and you can go to a baseball game?
	As they've been hearing you talk about a lot on your podcast.
	So a couple of things.
	One, Jews not big into tattoos.
	Two, Jews super not big into governments giving you tattoos.
	Yeah.
	I think it was an optional.
	It was optional so that you can go with your dad to a White Sox game.
	It sounds weird to me.
	I don't mean to put too fine a point on it, but it's kind of uncomfortable.
	But yeah, I'm not in favor of, as a general liberty matter, I'm not in favor of the idea that you should be barred from all public places unless you have a vaccine green card.
	I do think that our public officials are doing us an enormous disservice in continuing to lie to us and say that you can't go back to regular life after you've had the vaccine.
	It's literally the only tool that we know of right now that is going to give you the kind of safety, particularly if you're older, from the disease that would reduce this to below the risk of the flu.
	I mean, if you get these vaccines, these vaccines are 99% effective in preventing death, 95% effective in preventing serious illness, and 90% effective in preventing transmission.
	So this bizarre idea That after you get the vaccine, you're going to be still living with the mask and socially distancing in 2022 is anti-science.
	It is bizarre.
	And it actually encourages people not to get the vaccine.
	Because if I'm 37...
	And I'm thinking to myself, okay, well, there may be like the risk of getting a little sick from the vaccine.
	I won't feel so good.
	I don't know what the long-term effects of the vaccine are.
	And listen, if I get COVID, I'm not going to die anyway.
	I'm 37.
	And then you tell me, okay, but you can go back to regular life.
	I might think to myself, okay, that seems like it's worth the risk.
	But if you keep telling 25-year-olds that they can't go back to regular life after they get the vaccine, who in their right mind would get the vaccine?
	And you have all of these idiots, like Fauci, saying, maybe we'll never go back to our regular life.
	Maybe we'll never do it.
	Never.
	And it's like, what are you?
	Why?
	Why?
	I mean, it's a scientific miracle.
	First of all, we've been ripping on big business a lot.
	Let me just say that the greatest thing in the world is big pharma.
	Big pharma, they're unbelievable at what they do.
	They generated a cure for a disease in less than a year.
	It's unbelievable.
	But as far as kind of the general concept of the government mandating vaccine cards to go anywhere, that raises, I think, serious liberty concerns.
	I think, frankly, people would start forging them to go wherever they want anyway.
	They're making the same mistake now that they made in March.
	Again, it's just being replayed.
	Because in March, they told everyone, don't wear masks.
	It's stupid to wear masks.
	The Surgeon General said, people, stop wearing masks.
	And the reason they said that is because they didn't trust us to not run out and buy all the medical masks.
	Because they wanted it to go to all the nurses and not to us.
	And so now, with the vaccine, they're doing the same thing again, where they're saying, oh, no, if you get the vaccine, you still have to wear the mask.
	Because they don't trust...
	People who aren't vaccinated to not wear the mask because they think that if they start allowing people to...
	Well, if you get the vaccine, you don't have to wear a mask.
	They think everyone's not going to wear it.
	They're not trusting people to make it.
	They seem to think there are three choices here and there are only two.
	They think that there is a third choice where everybody gets vaccinated and then doesn't go out and party.
	There's only two choices.
	Everybody gets vaccinated and parties.
	And nobody gets vaccinated and parties.
	There is no third choice where everybody continues to lock down until the end of time, especially after being vaccinated.
	It's idiotic.
	Like, this is one thing that Israel is doing right.
	With the vaccine, they've done a lot of things right.
	But one thing they're doing right, I mean, they have shot in a shot night at the bars.
	They're telling people, like, come and get a shot, and we'll give you a free shot.
	They're encouraging people to actively do this.
	And that is a smart thing to do.
	That is a smart thing to do.
	All right, Matt, people want to know, how is it finally being a Daily Wire HQ in Nashville, and how different is it doing your show from there?
	It's pretty nice.
	I have a series of complaints that I could...
	Much of them having to do with the break room.
	There's a lot of, you know, the other day I wanted to grab some half and half and all they had was coconut milk and like soy milk and almond milk.
	Everything except for real milk.
	There's also a lot of seaweed related snacks that I don't really understand.
	Must be an LA thing, but...
	I think you should take it up with your supervisor.
	I will.
	I've already registered with HR, but they thought that was no way.
	Said it wasn't a valid complaint.
	They're not going to be investigating that.
	Too bad.
	So sad.
	Michael Knowles.
	I heard from a little birdie, maybe named Dave Rubin, that he's slightly bitter that the night before the Daily Wire announced their move to Nashville, you claimed that you were staying here in California.
	I was there.
	He wants to know, was it worth it?
	So there were a couple of these nights.
	Rubin never forgave me for this.
	Now, in my defense...
	Nobody tells me nothing around here, okay?
	In my defense, seriously.
	These guys, they're not telling me stuff.
	To be fair, I didn't want you to come.
	Please, Dave, get Knowles to stay.
	But it was funny, because I was at Dave...
	This was actually...
	We had truly our farewell dinner.
	It was you, me, Drew, Adam Carolla, Prager was there, and then we all...
	I think you guys were already gone at this point.
	And then we really hightailed it.
	But I was at Dave's place, and he said, you know Knowles...
	You know, Knowles, we're gonna just take back California and we're gonna, you know, we're gonna just win back the hearts and minds and get rid of Newsome.
	I was like, yeah, man, hell yeah, we're gonna, yeah, FOA and yeah, all this stuff.
	And then like six hours later, I was like, yo, bye, Dave.
	I'm going to Tennessee.
	See you out there, buddy.
	So what you're telling me is that you're a liar who personality mirrors.
	I cannot believe it.
	I cannot believe it.
	You ever think about acting?
	Yeah, maybe, you know.
	Is there a part in the Gina Carano movie?
	Dave Rubin ain't staying in California.
	No, he'll be in Florida tomorrow.
	You're going to walk outside.
	We're going to grow old together as Jews in Florida.
	Alicia, how many questions have we done?
	At least like one and a half.
	We've done more than ten, but I'm just still rolling through them because you hadn't stopped me.
	Last question.
	Alright, last question goes to you, God King, and it kind of piggybacks on you asking if Michael, if he had considered getting into acting, which he hadn't done in a while, unless that's what he's doing every day on his podcast, but will any of the...
	Will any of the Daily Wire talent be making cameos in the upcoming Daily Wire Entertainment scripted shows?
	Wouldn't you like to know, fair audience?
	All that I'm willing to say on this topic is, yes.
	I meant to say...
	Listen, be sure to tune in for Ben's first episode of the hit new show, Debunked, this Friday.
	We just know it's going to be a hit.
	Ben's in it.
	The series will be available exclusively to Daily Wire members, so use code DEBUNKED to save 25% off your membership today over at dailywire.com.
	Don't miss the opportunity to see Ben brandish facts and logic.
	In my original draft, I said facts and or logic.
	Someone is obviously...
	Corrected the teleprompter.
	Thanks again for joining us for the Daily Wire, the Empire Strikes Back stage.

▲