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April 29, 2021 - The Michael Knowles Show

01:37:33

Daily Wire Backstage: Biden’s Congressional Address

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	Hey, Michael Knowles here.
	The latest episode of Daily Wire Backstage.
	Biden's congressional address is around the corner.
	Will Joe Biden fall asleep during his own speech?
	Will President Harris be called up to speak on behalf of Joe?
	Join me, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, and the God King Jeremy Boring as we discuss everything from Biden's first 100 days to the Republicans' chances in 2022.
	Don't miss it.
	Intro!
	Welcome to Daily Wire Backstage, Biden's Congressional Address.
	I'm Jeremy Boring, known around these parts, well, known around these parts by lots of things.
	We're glad that you've tuned in.
	Will Biden be able to make it to the end of this speech without taking a nap?
	If he manages to make it all the way through without a single, come on, man, are we positive that it isn't pure fakery like the moon landing?
	How many times could Kamala have visited the border between the start and finish of this crap show?
	The answer is $10 trillion, because that's how much spending Biden has proposed in his first three months.
	It's truly insane.
	Daily Wire Backstage is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	You have the right to privacy.
	Defend your rights at ExpressVPN.com slash backstage.
	Joining me to, well, discuss this crap show, and probably a little bit more, Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Matt Walsh, Mickey Knowles.
	As always, we will be taking direct questions from our audience throughout the night.
	To get access to the chat box where you can submit your questions, go become a Daily Wire member.
	Visit dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up.
	Really, this show exists because of the Daily Wire subscribers.
	We're so grateful to them.
	We wouldn't be able to produce this show without them.
	We hope you'll consider becoming one.
	Dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Fellas, it's our favorite night of the year.
	I mean, we were just here last week.
	So what the hell?
	Like, that's my first question.
	What the hell?
	Ben has, like, a quota, and he will not go above the quota backstage.
	Oh, my goodness.
	That is certainly true.
	And we are well above the quota.
	And also, I hate this.
	And this is, like, all the things I hate.
	Backstage.
	The State of the Union.
	The State of the Union is the most monarchic garbage thing that we do in American politics.
	I hate it.
	It doesn't matter who the president is.
	Stop trying to get me to like it, Ben.
	It's such garbage.
	Monarchy.
	Apist.
	The ridiculousness of the State of the Union address in which we all pretend that the President of the United States is an elected king and then he comes in and everybody cheers and they feed him like he's an important person as opposed to a geriatric daughter that they're wheeling in on a gurney so that he can babble nonsensically for an hour and they can cheer for proposals that won't be passed.
	It's really maddening.
	I hate it in general.
	Tonight we're going to get Joe Biden proposing another $2 trillion in spending.
	He's also going to, because it's a day, ending in Y. And also he is going to be apparently saying that January 6th was worse than any event in American political life since the Civil War, which skips, you know, like the murder of tens of thousands of people by the KKK over several decades and, you know, the assassinations of at least four presidents and the shooting of another one.
	And, you know, Pearl Harbor, 9-11, spate of bombings in the 60s, Vietnam War.
	I mean, I feel like there are a few, like, he was alive for all of these, so he really should know about them.
	And it's kind of astonishing that he's saying that, but that's not a shock.
	I mean, so I put together my preview of his speech.
	Here we go.
	Here we go.
	I've been working on this all day.
	So it goes like this.
	My fellow Americans, come on.
	Woo!
	Everybody gets up and they scream.
	Except the Republicans.
	I promise that by the end, it might hurt in office, every black American will have a blueberry and two belly buttons.
	Woo!
	President Harris, who you...
	He's going to keep going.
	I heard a preview of this.
	To my left and also to my right.
	And all around.
	She's very...
	Woman, and also black.
	Woo!
	This is what it'll be for an hour, so I just saved you an hour.
	I know, it's over.
	It's over, guys.
	That plus two trillion dollars.
	Done.
	So why do we keep doing this?
	Well, look, this is a great American political tradition.
	When we all gather in late April, when the president shows up with like four congressmen or something, and goes on Zoom to the rest of them, No, it's funny because the monarchical aspect of it, frankly, I think is the best part.
	However...
	Michael Hamburg over here.
	But we don't even get that.
	The one aspect of this whole State of the Union thing that everyone tunes in for is the pomp and circumstance.
	And ladies and gentlemen, the president, right?
	Even if you don't like it, you still, that's what you're watching.
	But we're not getting that.
	We're getting a doddering old man who does not know which end is up reading some lines that have been written for him to a half-empty change.
	Well, I will say there's one thing I'm excited about.
	And that is that whenever Joe Biden speaks for more than 37 seconds, it's like watching Nick Willenda walk over a volcano.
	Like, you just...
	Like, there's always that possibility.
	Nick Willen is real good at walking over volcanoes.
	But let's be real about this.
	You're really watching on the off chance that you will have been watching live when he fails to make it over the volcano.
	Right.
	And when Joe Biden speaks, I mean, he'll be slurring his words and he'll be messing things up and he'll be talking about why he has to give every child a pony delivered by catapult or some such nonsense.
	And then he'll just slip into a reverie.
	And we're all sort of hoping he goes there, right?
	I mean, let's be real about this.
	We want, like, a full dream sequence.
	Yeah.
	A little WandaVision thing to happen where he's back in the 1950s doing sitcoms with Dick Van Dyke.
	That's what I'm rooting for.
	But it's scripted.
	That's the problem.
	You get that moment from Joe Biden when it's not scripted.
	I have actually...
	I don't know that I've ever watched...
	A State of the Union address or a joint speech to Congress because they're so uninteresting to me.
	I've pretended that I've watched them.
	I've even live-tweeted them without watching them.
	So this will be my first experience with this, and I'm kind of excited about that.
	The most fun thing about Joe Biden is watching the press report on him.
	Because they have gone to a level of dishonesty that actually is comedy.
	Well, normally it's X-rated to see that many people orgasm at once.
	Especially faking it.
	That's exactly it.
	That's exactly it.
	It's the O-face.
	It's not really the orgasm.
	I'm a little interested to see the Republican response from Tim Scott.
	Well, you're new to this, by your own admission.
	The worst part of the night is always the response.
	It doesn't matter who gives it.
	I'm expecting that, but I am also curious if they go all in on police reform, which is the exact wrong thing for the Republicans.
	Oh my God, they will.
	You know they will.
	I know they will already.
	I know they will, because there's nothing that Republicans do except things wrong.
	Yeah, I heard that Tim Scott, he gave a quick preview on Twitter, and he said, we're going to talk about how...
	We're a diverse nation, and in that, that's why we're so unified.
	And I'm like, no, we're not unified at all, man.
	That's exactly the opposite of the truth.
	There must be something about Tim Scott, because the Washington Post, a white guy in the Washington Post, wrote a fact check of Tim Scott saying he wasn't black enough, basically.
	I guess he had some white people in his...
	No, no, it wasn't that.
	What they suggested is that he had said that his grandfather, he basically went from sharecropper to Congress in one generation.
	And they were like, yeah, but your father wasn't a sharecropper.
	If you go back to your grandfather and your great-grandfather, he had accumulated 500 acres in South Carolina.
	It's like, okay, so now you're just saying that he's the American dream in spite of vicious Jim Crow racism.
	So, well, solid hit there, Washington.
	I think that the Washington Post, which now basically has announced it's going to stop fact-checking Joe Biden.
	He's just that honest.
	When do they ever start, though?
	Well, they occasionally say this.
	I mean, the funny thing is the difference between the way Joe Biden lies and Donald Trump lied is substantial.
	I mean, Donald Trump was an exaggerator, and he used to say, I exaggerate the truth.
	And that was actually pretty true for the most part.
	You know, obvious exceptions.
	But still, Biden just lied.
	Well, I'll say it this way.
	I think that Trump lied casually.
	Like, if you were just in a conversation with him, he'd be the guy who'd be, like, shaving five strokes off his handicap.
	Yeah, exactly.
	That's what Trump is.
	But Joe Biden is the kind of guy who lies purposefully.
	Like, he's like, what do I need to say to achieve this effect?
	And I'll just lie to do it.
	So I'll just say for months on end that Georgia's voting law is Jim Crow.
	Or I will just say over and over and over that you still need to mask up for no reason.
	No reason at all.
	And that is a significantly worse form of lie because the thing about Trump and kind of the way that he would fib is that nobody took that stuff seriously.
	Like they kept fact-tracking him.
	And I just kept thinking to myself...
	Okay, and?
	Well, you know, before...
	No, they counted the lies and said, oh, he lied so many more times.
	But there's a difference between saying I had a lot of people at my inauguration and saying this is just...
	Yeah, the magnitude of the lie kind of matters.
	Like, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
	A much bigger lie than...
	That's right.
	There were so many people at my inauguration.
	Like, one is a mild irritant that goes to character.
	And the other one is like, you just lied about a massive piece of policy that has hundreds of millions of Americans.
	Also, the lies of the left are the reason that no one trusts government.
	We've been talking a lot about why people won't get the vaccine.
	I happen to think that the vaccine is one of the great, maybe the great, scientific achievements of the 21st century.
	My cell service has never been better.
	I think that it's up there with the Apollo program.
	It's up there with the Manhattan Project.
	It's amazing.
	It's hard for me to get the vaccine right now because I just don't want to be told what to do.
	I want to be free.
	But the reason so many millions of people on the right won't get the vaccine It's because the government keeps lying about it and the media keeps reinforcing those lies.
	Well, let me just debunk real fast the Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccine.
	If he had, they'd be glitching all over.
	They wouldn't know where the hell we were.
	The spinning color wheel of dew, right?
	The new variants are just viruses from like the, you know, mid-Eastern Europe somewhere.
	Yeah.
	But this is the problem with the lies of the left.
	The lies of the left make you actually distrust the institutions that are the only institutions that can create any unifying message of truth around things that do matter.
	Pandemics actually matter.
	They actually have consequences.
	We should be able to believe what the media and the government tell us about them.
	We can't.
	And we can't because people like Joe Biden have spent their entire career lying about such major issues whenever they think they can squeeze just a little bit of advantage out of them.
	By the way, the left-wing media used to admit this about Biden before he was their guy.
	The most really disconcerting of his lies is the central tragic fact of his life is his wife was killed in this car accident.
	And the guy who was in the other car felt terrible about this and lived for many years and was very sorry, but he was totally found...
	To have been innocent, he wasn't drinking, nothing like that.
	Joe Biden never said he was.
	After the man died, Joe Biden on the campaign trail started to say he was a drunk who was drunk driving.
	It was a really vicious, vicious smear.
	So much so that I forget if it was the Atlantic or Vanity Fair called him out for this.
	It's such a deep, intentional lie.
	And it gets to the intrinsic dishonesty of his whole political career.
	The guy's been doing it since the 70s.
	Well, it's also amazing that how many of these people are...
	Right now, they're in the chamber.
	Every single person there is vaccinated.
	Every single person there is vaccinated.
	They're in a chamber, they're socially distanced and vaccinated, far away from each other, and they're all still wearing masks.
	Because the same people who are telling you the vaccines are so, so important, which, by the way, they are, are telling you that you can never strip the mask off your face, even if you're vaccinated, which makes zero scientific sense.
	There's no data to back it.
	But it's just an article of faith now because Trump didn't like masks, so now we're just going to wear masks until we die.
	Right.
	They don't bother giving any data.
	They say they're insulted.
	They're insulted.
	If you're like, give us data, they're like, nope.
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	So I want to talk about the fact that we're looking at an almost empty chamber.
	This is supposed to be...
	It's inspiring.
	This is supposed to be a joint session of Congress.
	They're not even filling 50% of the seats, it doesn't look like.
	How did they determine who was going to be there?
	So they gave a set number of seats to the Democrats and a set number to the Republicans.
	If you were one of the Republicans and they said, only a few of you can go and you have to wear a diaper on your face, even though you've been vaccinated, why wouldn't you just say no?
	So a bunch of them said, Steve Scully said no.
	Did he really?
	He was like, I'm not interested.
	And honestly, why would you be?
	First of all, if I had any excuse not to go to the State of the Union, I would be there.
	I tried to get out of this.
	Antonin Scalia famously would not attend.
	He thought, for the same reason, he thought it was ridiculous, anti-American nonsense.
	Right.
	Biden should just send a letter to Congress saying, I'm going to do whatever I want.
	And actually, I'm just going to do whatever my chief of staff wants, Ron Klain, President Klain.
	And he's the one who's actually just going to write the agenda.
	But the thing that's amazing about what we're watching is the media's attempt to build Joe Biden up into an important figure in his own right is pretty impressive because everybody really kind of secretly understands Joe Biden is a truly unimpressive figure in American public life.
	He really is.
	He's been a non-entity or a bloviating idiot for most of his career.
	And now he's president of the United States, and they are solely reliant on this man.
	Because if God forbid, and he's the president of the United States, you don't want to see anything bad happen to him.
	If God forbid something happens to Joe Biden, the Democratic agenda is DOA. It is dead.
	Because Kamala Harris, saying the exact same stuff as Joe Biden, is completely unpalatable to the American people.
	Because Joe Biden does not...
	He does not give off a sense of threat.
	He's an elderly daughter who does not know what the hell he's talking about.
	And so he's not threatening because houseplants are not threatening.
	That's how he got away with the speech.
	The speech he gave yesterday was disgusting and repugnant.
	I mean, he's giving us permission to have a picnic for...
	If you're with vaccinated people and if you're not, you have to mask at the picnic.
	Since when is this the relationship we have with the government that we have to tune in to the president to find out if we can have a picnic out at the park?
	And to me, that wasn't even as radical as what he was saying last week about the about the Floyd trial or the show trial, where he was literally coming out and just calling the country racist based on an incident where no one has yet presented any evidence of racism.
	Or before that, or right after that, we talk about lies of Joe Biden and the Biden administration.
	I think, hands down, the worst lie we've heard from this administration, and perhaps any administration in recent memory, is what they said about the Micaiah Bryant situation, where she, clearly a 16-year-old girl, but she was in the process of trying to stab someone to death.
	That is very clear, indisputable.
	It's like a textbook statement.
	A good shoot by a police officer, valid, legitimate, and they come out and tie it to systemic racism.
	This is a hero police officer put in that situation.
	By the way, not only a good shoot in the sense of it was clean and legal and appropriate, a great shot.
	People like to say, why didn't he shoot the knife out of her hand?
	Well, because he's not the Lone Ranger.
	Yeah.
	Why didn't the cop shoot her in the leg?
	I mean, if you actually watch that video...
	He has a split second to hit her and not hit the girl that she's trying to stab.
	And not hit the girl that she's trying to stab.
	Not many trained police officers could have effectuated that shot as successfully as he did.
	He is a true American hero for what he did.
	And he's also willing...
	Sorry, he's also...
	That police officer knows that his life might be over when he does this, but he did it anyway to save this other girl's life.
	It's incredibly telling when they say things like that, because it means they've never been in a physical altercation.
	They have no idea the kind of adrenaline that pumps through your body.
	They have no idea what it takes to hit somebody's center.
	Here's the thing.
	You're assuming honesty, and I don't even think that they honestly think what they're saying.
	I rarely attribute bad motive to people, but that Tape is so unbelievably clear that there's no possible way that you could be motivated by anything other than a belief that every data point involving a black suspect and a white cop is bad.
	That is the only way that you can get to that conclusion after having watched that tape.
	You can't come to the honest conclusion after watching that tape that you should have shot her trigger finger like it's Blazing Saddles or something.
	You can't.
	But the very fact that they would ask that kind of question and expect to get away with it means that they have lived lives that are completely out of touch with the moment that they're reporting on.
	It doesn't even occur to them to go and say to somebody, you know, you were a police officer who was in a shooting.
	You were a soldier who was in a battle.
	You know, what's that like?
	What happens when you do that?
	The thing about narrative, that narrative compounds narrative, narrative builds upon narrative.
	I tweeted out this morning that COVID is to disease what nuclear weapons are to energy and explosives.
	And what I mean is that all the people who say, believe the science, don't actually know anything about the science.
	They don't believe the science.
	Instead, we've attributed to nuclear and we've attributed to COVID these sort of magical, mythical, destructive properties where they're actually not constrained by science.
	They have almost unlimited power to do unbelievable damage.
	And the problem is over time, because of the power of narrative, experts, authoritative people actually believe not reality, but they believe...
	So when it comes to nuclear weapons, everybody believes that...
	People will say all the time, you will hear people in the military say, we have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on Earth a hundred times.
	And that's absolutely absurd.
	We have 1,000 strategic nuclear weapons in our arsenal or something like that.
	For context, we detonated 1,000 nuclear weapons during the 50s and 60s, 65 miles north of Las Vegas.
	A major American city, 65 miles north, we detonated 1,000 nuclear weapons.
	Nuclear weapons are bad.
	Nuclear weapons are very destructive compared to conventional ordinances.
	But they're still just things.
	It's just a bump.
	COVID is a virus.
	COVID is a virus.
	That's all it is.
	This is the entire thesis of the left and has been for about 50 years that narrative shapes reality.
	But the part they leave out is that it can shape it dishonestly or honestly.
	So a narrative can be true or false.
	You know, this is Yuval Harari wrote this book about what is different about humans than every other animal is that we tell fictions.
	And among these fictions, he includes rights, money, religion.
	And you think like, well, wait, wait, wait a minute.
	You know, I've been making up fiction all my life.
	You can make a fiction that's true, or you can make a fiction that isn't true.
	Anybody who walks out of a movie theater can say, that wouldn't happen.
	That was unbelievable, right?
	The thing about money is money is a language.
	It is a language, but it's a language for expressing value.
	It's something we cannot tell how our minds calculate value, but they do it almost exactly.
	They do it to the penny, and money expresses that.
	It's a fiction that's true when it's not controlled by the government, when it's free exchange.
	The problem is not the narrative.
	It is the absolute disbelief that there is such a thing as a truth that goes beyond the physical facts of life.
	Now they don't even believe in those.
	Well, one of the things that I've been noticing is that there have been a couple of polls in recent memory, like in the last month or so, talking about percentages of Americans who believe certain things about things that are factual.
	Like how many black Americans get shot every year by the cops?
	And that poll will show you that liberals are just way the hell off.
	They think 1,000.
	They're off by a factor, and that's unarmed black men.
	They'll say 1,000 unarmed black men are shot.
	That's like 20.
	They're off by a factor of 50.
	And then if you ask liberals, how likely are you to die of COVID? They'll be off by a factor of 10 or a factor of 20.
	And then conservatives, these supposedly ascientific, data-free, fundamentalist crazies, if you ask them, like, how likely are you to die of COVID? They're way closer to the actual reality than the liberals are.
	And the same thing about racial violence in America.
	They're way closer to the actual reality.
	Even they, by the way, even overestimate the number of black men who get shot in America.
	Yeah.
	But this is why I'm saying narrative builds on narrative, because these reporters, not only have they never been in physical danger, not only have they never fired a firearm, everything that they believe about them, and they've researched, they believe they're experts, but everything that they know is just what someone else before them was saying when they were shaping the narrative.
	So it compounds over time that people get more and more and more certain about things that they know less and less about.
	It's not that they don't...
	I mean, it really is Ronald Reagan.
	It's not that they don't know much.
	It's everything they know.
	There's a very famous line about the left, which is, unfortunately, you can sometimes apply it to the right, but it's so true with the left, which is, they'll say, who cares if it works in practice?
	Does it work in theory?
	The obsession with theory, because that is...
	And your reference to the Lone Ranger, by the way, is exactly dead on, because the Lone Ranger actually used to say, I only shoot to wound.
	It tells you where they're getting their information.
	That's right.
	They do get their information.
	There's something else happening in the scientific community also.
	And really, it's true on everything from transgenderism and treatment for it to treatment for gender dysphoria to COVID. And that is what has become my new favorite word because I just think it applies so often these days.
	Ultra-crepidarianism.
	People just speaking outside of their purview of expertise.
	So scientists are not being asked anymore.
	Sum up the data for me.
	Write some up the data for me.
	That's the question you ask a scientist.
	Instead, they're being asked questions like, what do you think Americans ought to do about masking or not masking?
	That is a policy and or moral question.
	Your job is to, like, I don't go to my doctor and then say to him, you know, what do you think that I should do with the rest of my life?
	Like, what decisions should I make in my life?
	He can tell me what the data suggests about what particular things will happen if I do X, Y, or Z. But that's not what the scientists are doing about COVID. They're not doing any of that.
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	Guys, we're only a few minutes away.
	From what promises to be a riveting speech, which, from the video I'm seeing, will be seen by at least 18 people in the House chamber.
	It's remarkable.
	Normally you've got a chamber of hundreds of people.
	If you start to doze off, I think you might as well just shoot elsewhere.
	But if you start to lose it in the middle of this thing...
	You pull the RBG, classically fell asleep.
	You know, there is something to remember as we go into this absolute snooze fest here, which is totally to your point, Ben, that now the scientific experts pontificate about everything that they don't know anything about because it's the only sort of expertise we acknowledge in this country.
	We don't acknowledge philosophical, moral, or religious expertise in self-government.
	Citizens are supposed to be the experts on that sort of thing, but that's all gone now, and I bet he's not going to acknowledge it tonight either.
	Any Republicans that chose to be a part of this charade with the masks on, I mean, they should be held accountable for that by the voters.
	Because this is...
	I actually agree with you.
	This is a grotesque...
	I'm actually...
	It's depressing and infuriating the more I watch this.
	And the fact that I've got to sit now for an hour and watch it is causing me anxiety.
	But this is spectacle.
	I've been in the room.
	Listen, I've been in a room since I was vaccinated.
	I've been in a room with like 350 other people, everybody unmasked.
	And if the media had been there, they would have been like, oh my God, we're all going to die of COVID. No one got COVID. You know why?
	Because everybody's either had COVID or they're vaccinated.
	Everybody in that room is vaccinated.
	Why did any Republican, every Republican there should have to explain why they- Because Republicans are cowards.
	Yeah.
	They're there because they are cowards.
	And they're there because they're too afraid to stand up to the other side, which is not cowardly, but is decidedly convinced that they know what's good for you.
	They know they don't need the mask, but they're afraid that if they don't wear it, you might not wear it.
	And they want to control you.
	They want to determine what is good for you.
	They want to decide when you have a picnic with your family.
	And they'll say that they have good intentions.
	No, we just know that people will make bad decisions and we're responsible for public health and we need to protect the preponderance of people.
	You do that by arming people with good information and letting them make their own risk assessments.
	Instead, they're going to lie to you, pose for you, virtue signal for you, in order that they might own you.
	What you don't get, Jeremy, is that the people are a bunch of deplorable, irredeemable idiots, and Maxine Waters is really, really smart.
	And that's why they told us...
	The irony is that's why they told us originally not to mask, because they were treating us like idiots and children, and they thought we'd go and hoard all the masks, and...
	You know, I actually asked my doctor, who is a far-left guy but a brilliant guy, I said, now I've been vaccinated, do I have to wear a mask?
	He said, no, but you should as a political statement.
	He said that to me, and I said, that's not my politics.
	There are fewer people in that chamber than watch the Oscars on TV. There's an entire article about this woman on Medium about why she is still going to jog with a mask even after all of this is over.
	And she said, it's because it's a sign that I care about my fellow man.
	Yeah.
	Really, this is what she said.
	She said it's because I've been running around with the mask and I've had the vaccine for six weeks, but there are so many other people out there who get uncomfortable when I don't wear the mask that I've decided to wear the mask.
	And this goes to so many areas of our politics that if anything I do in my life to exercise my freedom makes you uncomfortable in any way, it is my job to curtail my freedom of speech.
	It is my job to curtail my freedom of the press or my freedom to bear arms or my freedom to walk around without a mask in order to make you feel more comfortable even though I pose zero threat to you.
	That's where things are right now.
	By the way, we should note that the greatest doctor in America was just ushered into the chamber.
	Dr.
	Joe Biden.
	She's a great surgeon.
	As Joy Behar pointed out, or Whoopi Goldberg, one of the two, she pointed that out.
	We should also acknowledge with the masks, I am not saying that the state can't take emergency police action sometime and say, hey, maybe you should wear the mask for a very short period of time.
	But to wear the mask all the time, to have the entirety of the American people wearing the secular keffia, looking like banditos walking around, is actually disordered.
	It's actually bad for our politics.
	People's brains have been broken.
	I think there's a real mental illness factor to it.
	One of my listeners left a comment under the YouTube video today saying that her aunt wears a mask to sleep.
	And, uh, and I wish I could think that that's, that she's joking or making that up.
	Well, I wear one on my eyes.
	This is what people, people are, and we're sending our kids to school.
	They wear masks for seven hours a day.
	I find the saddest comment, the ones that I see on Twitter, people saying, what's so bad about a mask?
	And I think, like, really?
	Not to look at a human face?
	Not to see a pretty girl?
	Not to, you know, not to know each other and smile at each other?
	I mean, what the hell?
	Have you, have you guys all had the weird experience over the past few months as people take off their masks of people you've met with the mask on and they take off the mask like, whoa, I was not aware that you looked like that.
	That's what's happened to many people with me.
	They take off the mask, like, oh my god, that's what he looked like under there?
	It's like that scene from Phantom of the Opera.
	No!
	No!
	If you're an ugly person with nice eyes, then you've been living your best life.
	I know.
	Best life.
	Well, eventually they're going to wheel Joe Biden in back.
	They may just lower him in.
	Open the roof and just drop him in.
	You know, I have to say, Walsh is right, that Republicans showed up for this in masks.
	They actually should be answerable for that.
	So my understanding is that the reason that they are doing that is because Nancy Pelosi runs the chamber, Chuck Schumer runs the chamber, and so there are actual, I believe, criminal penalties they're trying to attach for not wearing masks on the floor.
	And they shouldn't go.
	Or if they get dragged out by the police and they're yelling for my civil rights to breathe and have my nose out, that would be beautiful politics.
	That would be such a great moment.
	And these morons and cowards are too stupid to realize it.
	So we've got a question from Daily Wire.
	You guys have no idea, by the way.
	If you go to leftist places like Brooklyn...
	And you don't wear a mask, which I haven't.
	You know, I haven't worn a mask in public for a long time, outdoors.
	You are actually socially rejected.
	People get very, very upset.
	They actually take it badly.
	You might as well be wearing a MAGA hat.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, so much of this is about that, right?
	It's because Trump made light of the masks originally, like, during the middle of the pandemic.
	And so the entire left decided this was not just a—he was not just wrong on that.
	It was not just a temporary expedience that we could all go back to work or something.
	Yeah.
	What it really was was a symbol that you were a good person who cared about other people to wear the mask.
	It's the new pink hat, right?
	It's just the pink hat of 2021.
	If only Trump had been pro-mask, then no one would be wearing masks.
	Yeah, that's right.
	It would have opened up the country a year ago.
	He really let us down.
	Here's a question from a DailyWire.com subscriber.
	On one hand, it seems promising that states like Tennessee are lifting the mask mandate.
	I actually want to correct you.
	The state of Tennessee never had a mask mandate.
	What happened is Governor Bill Lee made the bold step this week of saying that even the cities in the state that have had mask mandates must lift them before Memorial Day.
	But yes, places are removing their mask mandates.
	But when I see other states cracking down even more like Michigan, I just really don't know how to feel on whether or not this will ever end.
	Do you think it will end?
	When?
	How?
	I just want to be perfectly clear.
	They're saying, do you believe the masks will ever end?
	Not what we're about to witness.
	LAUGHTER Ben, what do you think?
	So, I think that this is going to last approximately another five months until Joe Biden gets a bunch more of his legislation passed and then it stops.
	I think this is all about generating a feeling of crisis for Americans.
	I think that Joe Biden doesn't want this to go to the midterms.
	He would like to be able to declare victory before the midterms over COVID. And so I think that it'll last about as long as it's convenient for it to last.
	He said going in that we're facing four crises and three of them are complete nonsense.
	It was like racial inequity, income inequality, climate change, and no one cares about climate change.
	Let's just be clear about this.
	That doesn't mean it's not happening, but on the list of American concerns, it's like number 87.
	And so the only one that people were actually worried about was COVID because half a million people died of it.
	And so he's just prolonging this at this point.
	And so it'll last until he can ram through some more legislation by saying COVID has completely exposed so many terrible things about American society that must be fixed.
	It's unmasked all of American society.
	And then after all after we fixed all of American society and I can ride off into the nursing home, then I then at that point, everybody will will be able to take off the mask and breathe free air again.
	I really think it's that.
	I think it will last longer than that.
	politically, I think you're right, but a lot of people, like we were just saying, their brains are broken.
	I agree with this.
	Yeah.
	A lot of, a lot of people really, and they'll openly say it.
	I feel safer wearing it.
	And so I just wear it.
	And I don't think that goes away magically in five months.
	I don't know if it ever goes away.
	Yeah.
	I think it's just, it's a cultural thing.
	We'll never live to see a day where no one in America wears masks.
	This is the issue.
	You know, politics is downstream of culture.
	We all know that.
	That's the famous Breitbart doctrine.
	It is also true that politics can influence culture.
	The great example of this is that East Germany is still atheist.
	West Germany is not atheist because it was dominated by commies for the Cold War.
	People, because of the policies of our exalted leader, Dr. Antrim, Anthony Fauci, the high priest of progressivism, he has, I think, broken people's brains, and I think you're going to see a lot of people who just insist on wearing this thing basically in perpetuity.
	Maybe it's not most of the country, but...
	What will happen is there's going to be a massive exacerbation of the big sort that's already happening.
	People are just going to say, I don't want to live in a place that's like New York or like Michigan, where at any moment they can just shut everything down again.
	I think...
	They can move here.
	They can move to Florida.
	No, that's happening already.
	Coeur d'Alene is the place in Idaho.
	That's the place where most people will move.
	At least in the Civil War, we'll know which side people are on based on who's got the mask on.
	That's exactly right.
	So we just saw Schumer enter the chamber, dutifully masked.
	This will be how we know.
	When will Republicans stop going along with it?
	When will airlines stop going along with it?
	As long as you have to wear a mask on an airline, it's awful.
	It's really awful.
	It makes it almost impossible.
	I was so tolerant.
	I was way more tolerant than anybody else in this room.
	I was like, because my parents are in their 60s, I was more tolerant of it.
	Then I got vaccinated, and it started to feel physically restricting to wear the mask, because now I know it's pointless and stupid, and there's no reason for it at all.
	The terrible thing about the airplane, too, is it's absolutely awful.
	It's the one place where it makes the most sense, because airplanes are the terribly unhealthy atmosphere.
	Well, except for the fact that it's not true.
	No, it wasn't at the beginning.
	Airplanes were not a vector of transmission.
	Airplanes have HEPA filters.
	They have HEPA filters, and they circulate.
	You notice, I noticed a real shift, because I've been flying through this whole thing, I think a lot of us have, and you notice a real shift at a certain point a few months in.
	People didn't, they weren't fidgeting with the mask anymore on the flight.
	They just wear it the whole time.
	They didn't have it under the nose.
	And I guess we were supposed to see that as a positive change, but I actually find it kind of creepy now.
	I'm on a plane for six hours, and no one is even touching the mask.
	I mean, I still am, but everyone else just sits there.
	By the way, we have to point out.
	Joe Biden just entered the chamber.
	So Biden entered the chamber, he's got his mask on, and he's doing the fist bumps with everybody.
	Because handshake, that'll spread COVID. But your knuckles, they're coated in Purell or something, so that's fine.
	Because science.
	Because it's science.
	So now we have the President of the United States entering the chamber.
	We're going to go watch the President's speech.
	We'll be back with you as soon as it is over to give you our absolute expert analysis.
	It was boring.
	Yeah.
	Save us some time.
	We'll be back as soon as the President's speech is concluded.
	The President of the United States concluding his first 100 days in office and his first State of the Union address with the greatest line in the history of State of the Union addresses.
	Thank you for your patience.
	Jeremy, before we get into it, should someone wake Ben up?
	Benjamin!
	Benjamin!
	Wait, I think he's gone.
	Thank God you have life insurance on him.
	So, um, what?
	Yeah.
	That was the worst thing I've ever...
	That was genuinely terrible.
	Let's begin to get together, guys.
	Yeah, that was the line.
	We're just going to do 60s song lyrics now.
	Well, it's funny that you bring up 60s song lyrics because it was a 1960s boilerplate speech.
	Yes, it was.
	It was a 1930s boilerplate speech in a lot of ways.
	It was a 1330s.
	And you know, it was really that line where he said, we the people are the government, because he doesn't mean that we the people form the government.
	What he means is the government are the people.
	No, he was explicit.
	He said, we, we are the people.
	We're not a distant force.
	We're you.
	Okay, then if you're me, then shut the f*** up!
	I mean, everything he says, you know, when he talks about—he had this line, American tax dollars are going to buy American property and build American jobs.
	That's actually not the way it works.
	As always with socialists, they never ask the question, where does the money come from?
	It comes from horrible, evil, dastardly capitalists like yourself— Who do they take that tax money from?
	Just simple logic.
	Simple logic tells you that you can create more jobs with a dollar than a government that takes your dollar away, distributes it among its bureaucracies, and then creates a job.
	You're going to create ten times more jobs.
	I have a question.
	We can focus on the content as much as we want.
	This guy's not making it four years, is he?
	It doesn't feel like it, no.
	He looks absolutely ghastly.
	He looks awful.
	He sounds awful.
	Slurring his speech.
	That seemed like four years.
	Does that count?
	I don't know how anyone thinks he's running for re-election.
	I don't know how you can watch that.
	I don't know that anyone thinks he's running for re-election.
	The question is, will he serve out a term?
	But here's the thing.
	What the speech makes clear is two things.
	One, he's not going to make it for re-election.
	I mean, he's just not.
	And two, they desperately need this guy.
	They need him so badly.
	Because if you actually just read the text of the speech, what you will see is a litany of spending and regulation and taxation and big government and rethinking of the fundamental relationship between the American people and the government That sounds like it's coming directly from Bernie Sanders.
	I mean, it is extraordinarily radical stuff.
	But because the person who is saying it is a mush-mouthed old man that nobody fears because he's a mush-mouthed old man, they are deeply...
	Because he's been around forever.
	Yeah, well, not just that, because he...
	I, honest to God, wonder if the entire design of the speech, because he backloaded all the controversial stuff you noticed about how America's racist and about how the government is the people.
	He put all of that in the last 10 minutes of the speech.
	I, honest to God, wonder whether his strategy here was, I will just bore you into unconsciousness so you don't actually know what I'm saying.
	And I can go to the left and I can tell them I said all the stuff that I said.
	And then I can use that as the predicate for all of the things I want to pass.
	But you, you went to sleep, right?
	It wasn't that scary.
	You fell asleep.
	That's right.
	Because that's what it was.
	I mean, Joe Biden is capable.
	He could have done what he's done before, which is do a 25-minute speech.
	He could do that.
	He could go in there and give a 25-minute speech.
	Instead, he goes for an hour and a half.
	It is soporific nonsense.
	And he can't even speak it clearly.
	I mean, he's stumbling over his own words.
	He's repeating himself.
	And he gets to the end, you kind of feel bad for the guy.
	You're like, this guy is not with it.
	But then you actually read what he's saying, and he's talking about spending not $10 trillion.
	He's talking about spending, I'm sure, at least twice that when you add up everything that he's talking about over the course of years.
	And you're supposed to just be like, well, you know, he's a nice old gentleman.
	I guess that was okay, and it was good for the country.
	And I can't wait to see the media reactions.
	The media reactions will, like, if you can get to the sort of climax the media will reach based on that speech, hats off to you, man.
	I mean, like, at that point, you definitely don't need to get Roman because there's something going on here.
	Bill Whittle talks about this idea of government as we the people as eloquently as anyone I've ever heard discuss it.
	Essentially, the Constitution is a legal compact between three groups, the federal government, which it is creating, the states, and the people.
	We the people is the people who are consenting to the creation of this federal government.
	Having the President of the United States say, we up here, we, we're you.
	We the people are the government.
	Would be akin to like in any criminal case, if the defendant said, no, I We the plaintiff.
	We the plaintiff.
	You see the trick of the whole thing that the left has been pushing in overdrive for the past year is this blurring of the distinction between the federal government and the state government.
	Right now, H.R. 1, the first thing they're taking up, is designed to steal all that power from the states, particularly over elections.
	What could go wrong there, right?
	Congressmen writing their own election laws and the people.
	But then what they're doing is they're outsourcing all of that political power, per Woodrow Wilson and the progressives for a century, to these bureaucrats that are, you know, it's the random agencies that are really making the law.
	There's something else that's happening when they say that we the people are the government.
	And that is that what our government originally was supposed to be was a limited government designed to protect individual rights.
	That's what the...
	I mean, it's in the Declaration of Independence, it's in the Constitution of the United States, the government of enumerated powers.
	But there's something else there, too.
	It's a government of checks and balances specifically created in order to protect those rights.
	When you say we the people are the government, what you are saying is that checks and balances are a bad...
	They're an obstacle.
	Because the people are the government.
	And if the people collectively are the government, well then they don't have arguments among themselves.
	They don't have checks and balances.
	You don't need checks and balances.
	Checks and balances are a bar to what he calls democracy in action.
	That's what the Democrats have been saying since Wilson.
	Which is called mob rule.
	What's interesting is that it was Lincoln who basically said...
	He declared that the declaration was the philosophy behind the Constitution.
	And it has been the Democrats who have been trying to unwrite that.
	Ever since.
	Civil War.
	They make the same argument now that Calhoun made.
	They just make it on a different basis.
	And the trick, too, is we debate it between small and big government.
	But really, the distinction here is limited and unlimited.
	That's right.
	It's enumerated powers, government, and government that can do whatever.
	Joe Biden literally said that we have the power in our hands to cure cancer.
	He said that in that speech.
	And everybody's just going to be like, oh, you know what?
	That's totally fine.
	Explain to me that.
	Seriously, I want to know.
	I want to know who are these evil people standing in the way of us curing cancer.
	Because if it's adult Joe Biden who's going to cure cancer, why has he been holding back to cure all this time?
	It seems like that would have been a little bit useful.
	Is it Dr.
	Jill?
	Is it Fauci?
	Like who?
	I want to know who in their safe can open up that safe and there's the cure for cancer.
	If only we just throw a bunch of cash at things, then magically these things get cured.
	I'll also note that he spent a little bit of time there bashing big pharma.
	He spends the entire beginning of his speech talking about the magic of the vaccines and we've pranched out these vaccines.
	Who do you think created the vaccines?
	Wasn't Joe Biden?
	Wasn't useless Dr.
	Fauci?
	Wasn't the CDC or the FDA? It was big pharma.
	It was big pharma.
	That's always the tension because the other problem is you spend the first part of the speech and the last part Talking about America, we're a light to the world, we're unified, we're a great country.
	And then you take that detour in the middle, saying that, oh yeah, we're systemically racist, we're oppressing black people.
	Well, I mean, which is it?
	I mean, this is a horrible country for minorities to live in.
	We're killing them in the street just for existing.
	But we have to defeat China.
	Right, and we're...
	But Joe Biden, we have to admit here that Joe Biden is riding a wave created by Donald Trump to some degree.
	He's riding a double wave.
	One is that the vaccine, which was...
	Brought into existence by Trump's program, by Operation Warp Speed, is basically bringing an end to this pandemic.
	That's one thing.
	And this shutdown, this ill-advised and overlong and ridiculous shutdown, is going to come to an end and the economy is going to boom.
	And so Biden knows that he's riding that wave.
	He's riding the wave of the end of this pandemic, which is going to create good feelings, as it should.
	And he's riding the wave of the economy coming back.
	The question that I have about Biden right now is, is he waiting for, is he hoping that through this he can get this left-wing agenda?
	Because, let's face it, Biden is not a leftist.
	He's not anything.
	He's a weathervane.
	He goes where the party goes.
	Well, he wants his legacy.
	Right now the party, he wants...
	He wants his legacy.
	He wants his legacy, but right now the party is a left-wing party.
	It is a far-left party, and it is pushing him along.
	If he loses in the midterms, if he loses the majority in the House and even could lose the majority in the Senate, really, is that better for him in some way?
	Yes, because he doesn't because he doesn't.
	Then here's the thing.
	He doesn't care.
	He does what happens.
	That's four years from now.
	That's not running for reelection.
	Right.
	All he wants to be known as is a he doesn't want to be the old man who is just the bridge to Kamala.
	He wants to be the guy who they should put on Mount Rushmore because he had the most consequential single term in American history.
	And so he's going to ram through as much of this crap as possible.
	He has the single best issue ever to do it, namely this COVID pandemic.
	So that's why he's hanging on to this thing with the skin of his teeth.
	I mean, he is just grabbing onto the COVID pandemic.
	He's like, we've got to remake the economy.
	We've got to make racial politics in this country.
	We've got to redo our foreign policy.
	We've got to redo our unionization laws.
	We've got to pass everything.
	We've got to do it right now, right now, right now.
	Because of what you're saying.
	If he waits too long, the economy already will have recovered.
	And then we're going to be like, we don't need any of That's one of the many reasons why it's insane that we allow a 78-year-old man to be president in the first place, because they're not going to be around for the future, so they've sort of got nothing to lose.
	I don't know why.
	This should be...
	He's a lame duck.
	There should be agreement across the entire country that there should be an age limit for the presidency on the upper end, just like there is in the lower end.
	35, you can't run before 35.
	Why should we allow you after 75 to run?
	That gives you a 40-year window to become president.
	You can't do it then.
	Go home to your family, sit in a rocking chair, talk to your grandchildren.
	It wasn't meant to be.
	I do think they should put him on Mount Rushmore because he's as lively as the other presidents.
	I want to push back on some conventional wisdom that you cited.
	You said he's going to ride this wave of goodwill that will accompany the end of the pandemic.
	He's going to ride the economic boom that comes at the end of the pandemic.
	You had one other thing about the end of the pandemic.
	Just the good feeling of people coming back to it.
	I actually wonder if any of those things are true.
	Okay.
	I think they could have been true.
	And I think in the final analysis, they will not be true.
	I think that the economy is not going to surge.
	I think that the economy has to some degree surged already because red states started going back to work six months ago.
	Right.
	But I think they've printed so much money during this pandemic that what we're actually going to see is this huge wave of economic activity that everybody's kind of been counting on.
	I think it's not going to happen the way that we thought it would.
	And the markets, because they've been so wound up waiting for that to happen, Are going to suddenly become disillusioned.
	And markets run on the illusion of momentum.
	I think that that economic surge isn't coming.
	I think inflation is coming instead.
	And I don't think there's going to be a wave of euphoric goodwill at the end of the pandemic.
	Because I actually think they've created it.
	Since the lockdowns weren't actually...
	That was your other one, the lockdowns.
	Since the lockdowns weren't actually driven by the science of the pandemic.
	Masks weren't driven by the science of the pandemic.
	The CDC guidelines weren't driven by the science of the pandemic.
	Nothing, therefore, has changed scientifically to justify the end of...
	But what I mean is this.
	People aren't going to take their masks off.
	People aren't going to acknowledge an end of the pandemic.
	You're going to have the people who were the most afraid, who wore masks every day, got vaccinated, still wear masks.
	And the people who were not very afraid, made a different risk assessment, probably never wore masks that much, don't get vaccinated and have been living their lives more or less already.
	Those two camps are just going to remain.
	I don't think Joe Biden can wave a wand and say, congratulations, pandemic done, over.
	It's gone, done, totally over.
	They can't put it back together.
	I actually think that what we're actually disagreeing on is timing.
	I think there's going to be an economic boom.
	I think there's going to be an end to the pandemic.
	But the question is, over the long term, the things that Biden is doing are going to cost us dearly, but not for two years.
	Well, that's the question.
	Is it going to be two years?
	Is it going to be a year and a half?
	Right?
	That's the gamble.
	That really is the gamble.
	I mean, if things start to crash in the middle of next year, then they lose the Congress.
	First of all, I think they lose the Congress anyway.
	I think they're going to lose the House of Representatives.
	I find it very hard to believe that they're going to retain the House considering that they did so poorly when Joe Biden won seven million more popular votes than Donald Trump and they barely held on to the House.
	But there is a question here, which is, do they get through this major election overhaul that gives a distinct advantage to Democrats?
	Well, they can't.
	I mean, not without Manchin breaking the filibuster, right?
	Right.
	And Sinema breaking the filibuster, and I don't think either of them are going to do that.
	And it may not be constitutional.
	Well, that too.
	I mean, I think it's pretty wildly unconstitutional.
	You know, what was interesting to me, too, about the speech, though, is what wasn't in it.
	There was no mention of free speech.
	There was no mention of wokeness, of any of the kinds of things, of the critical race theory.
	You know, even though he said we were racist.
	Well, he's in favor of it.
	Yes, he is in favor of it.
	And those are things that are really starting to bother them.
	And the way you can tell they're starting to bother them is the left is starting to say, woke is a bad term.
	Woke is a bad term.
	Whenever they get caught being who they are, they change the word.
	You know, that is like, yeah, we used to be liberal.
	Now we're progressive.
	That's what political correctness is, right?
	I think Biden knows that his time is limited and is rushing him.
	For two reasons.
	Not just because of the four-year thing and him being in, obviously, declining health and all of that.
	I think that there's something else going on.
	The poll numbers for him are not good.
	They're just not good.
	I agree.
	He's at 52-53%.
	He won at 51%.
	And I think that's belonging.
	Okay, but even if you think it's true, he's at the exact same percentage that he was in the popular vote.
	OK, with the end of the pandemic, with the booming economy, with no major foreign crisis.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	And with the media fawning all over him and treating him as though he's a historic president with 100 percent positive media coverage.
	And he's still at 51 percent, which means that he only has one direction that he can go at this point.
	Right.
	And it ain't up.
	There's.
	What can he do to make himself more popular at this point?
	Seriously, he's handed literal cash checks to Americans.
	He's just sent checks to millions of Americans.
	He's said to them, here are your vaccines, and you know what?
	He hasn't said go back to life, but he will.
	There's no place to go for him but down from here.
	And so he's like, okay, well, time's a waste in, right?
	The clock is ticking, because if I start hitting 45%, 40%, everything's gone.
	Right.
	We're going to take questions from some of our DailyWire.com subscribers.
	They're the reason that we're here tonight and able to bring this show to you.
	So we want to hear from him.
	Question.
	How dumb does he think we are?
	Who will pay for all of this?
	Of course, those of low income will vote for him.
	And Democrats, they can continue to get things for free and all of these reductions for staying at a low income.
	I mean, we all know the answer.
	Who's going to pay for it?
	Ben's going to pay for it.
	But he's not.
	Because you can't tax billionaires to get trillions of dollars.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	I'm sorry.
	It really doesn't.
	And the question of how dumb does he think we are?
	Dumb.
	Every D-U-M-B with big letters.
	It is humanly possible to be.
	I was screaming at the television when he was talking about taxes.
	Because what he is saying is so obviously asinine.
	When he says that rich people don't pay their fair share in this country, that is just an abject, disgusting lie.
	It is a lie.
	The top 10% of income earners in this country pay all Net taxes.
	Not some of the net taxes.
	All of the net taxes.
	Because net taxes are defined as what you pay into the government minus what you get back from the government.
	So, if you get back from the government more than you paid in, this means that you were not a person who paid net taxes into the government.
	Only the people at the top of the spectrum are paying net taxes in this country.
	All of the net taxes in this country.
	When he says they're not paying their fair share, the only thing he means by they're not paying their fair share is it should be nearly all of your income goes to the federal government.
	And when he says things like...
	I'm not going to tax anybody who's making under $400,000 a year.
	He is lying to you through his teeth.
	When he says I'm going to tax corporations, corporations are not human beings for purposes of taxes.
	The money that would have been passed on to you via income is being taxed up here.
	That money is now being withdrawn from the system and taken away from you.
	Corporations are going to have to raise prices in order to deal with the taxation effects.
	When he says that I'm going to tax all of these rich people on their capital gains taxes, what do you think those rich people are going to do rather than put their money in the stock market where they get taxed on capital gains?
	They're not going to put their money in the stock market.
	So what happens to your 401k if you're a union member or a teacher's union member?
	What do you think happens to all the other 50% of the population who are invested in the stock market right now?
	And what happens to the businesses that hire you when Joe Biden decides that your boss needs to be taxed out of existence in order so that he can determine where the dollars go?
	This jackass who's never created a single job in his entire life.
	The people who don't pay their fair share in this country are the poor.
	We need to raise taxes on the poor.
	I'm not joking.
	I'm not joking.
	The poor in this country pay zero.
	The lower middle class in this country pay net zero.
	So we have a group of people who pay no taxes, a group of people who pay no net taxes, a group of people who pay all the net taxes, and his argument is that it's Category 3 who don't pay their fair share.
	Fair share means you're...
	Percentage of taxes.
	We've determined that there are some people who shouldn't pay any percent of taxes.
	The only fair taxing system is one in which everyone pays.
	But you know what's complicated about this, and it's the bait that Biden wants us to take, is he wants to make this a class issue.
	Poor people vote for Democrats.
	Rich people vote for Republicans.
	It's just not true.
	Millionaires broke for Biden, and very often it's those poor, deplorable Americans who vote for Republicans.
	And it's just a lie that Biden and all these...
	And it's just all double taxation.
	It's all double taxation.
	Every dollar is getting taxed seven different ways.
	If I earn a dollar, I get taxed as income if I earn a dollar.
	Then, if I invest in the stock market, they tax that dollar.
	Then, if God forbid I die and I pass it on my kids, they tax that dollar.
	Then, if I use it in a transaction, they tax that dollar in sales tax.
	If I used to buy a house, they tax it in property tax.
	The problem is nobody cares.
	Of course.
	Spending is, I think, sort of the Republican climate change.
	It's an issue we talk about, but nobody cares because it's not a reality.
	Now, the difference is that spending is an actual problem where climate change isn't.
	But in people's lived experience, which is the phrase we hear from the left all the time, it's just not a reality to them.
	They don't feel it.
	So it's just this doesn't mean anything.
	And on top of it, we also know that...
	For the last four years, there's this sort of glaring dead zone where Republicans stopped talking about this issue completely.
	And now they're getting back to it.
	I think it rings hollow.
	That's 100% true.
	I will say that there is a difference that is not even degree anymore.
	It is now turning into a difference of kind between you spend $4 trillion a year and you spend $10 trillion a year.
	Yes, Republicans did a horrible job restraining themselves on spending, but that's been true for decades.
	I mean, seriously, really only in the 90s with Newt Gingrich do they do anything serious about spending.
	Other than that, Republicans have spent like drunken sailors.
	But Joe Biden isn't spending like a drunken sailor.
	Joe Biden is spending like an entire drunken Navy.
	I mean, it's insane.
	And there will be effects to this.
	On the taxation side, what people should understand is that it's not just me bitching about paying too much in my taxes, even though I do pay way too much in my taxes.
	And in fact, one of the main reasons for me leaving a high-tax state was because I did not wish to spend...
	Large sums of money with the worst government in America, the government of the state of California, so that I could have a drug-addicted homeless person standing directly outside my front gate suffering and threatening my family.
	That seemed like not a great way to spend my tax dollars.
	But what people need to understand is that when he talks about raising taxes, those are the dollars that go to make your job.
	This lie, when he says the middle class built this country, Where did the middle class get its money?
	Where does he think that came from?
	That is such crap.
	I mean, like, I was a middle class person for the vast majority of my life.
	My parents were middle class people for the vast majority of their lives.
	The middle class is great, but people are in and out of the middle class.
	It's not a set group of human beings.
	Yeah, that's right.
	You start off in America as a poor person.
	Then you move into the middle class as you age.
	And then by the time you retire, usually you're upper middle class.
	Same for minimum wage workers.
	That's not a set group.
	You're supposed to be a minimum wage worker for, you know...
	We're not living in a British TV show from 1773, where everybody is a part of a class and you just stay there your whole life and you can never escape it.
	That's not how it works here.
	Every time a president or a government worker uses the word investment, I want to explode because the investment means that you go out to work, you make a dollar, they take the dollar and say, you know what I'm going to spend this dollar on?
	I'm going to spend it on what I want to spend it on.
	Whereas if you choose, if you go and say, I'm going to buy a Chinese meal, you've actually created another job.
	You've actually invested your money where you think it should go.
	Investment by nature, by definition, entails taking a risk.
	Okay, when I invest a dollar, I am taking a risk.
	I'm putting the dollar in, and then maybe if things go well, I will make more dollars out than the dollar that I put in.
	When the government invests your money, they don't give two craps whether a dollar comes back in the other end.
	In fact, they know that a dollar is not coming back in the other end.
	But investment also involves choice, and who's going to make that choice?
	Is it going to be you who earned the money?
	I mean, we had that system in the South before the Civil War, where somebody else did the work and the other guy got the money.
	That's not the way it's supposed to be.
	By the way, if the government wanted to invest, it would actually be fairly remarkable.
	So we pay approximately $2,000 a month to people over 65 in this country for Social Security.
	It's almost impossible to live a good life on $2,000 a month in this country.
	But that's what we give them, and we tell them that we're very charitable and we're very caring because we do it.
	Now, if you live for, let's say, 20 years, and we're paying you $2,000 a month, we're paying you $24,000 a year, we're paying you $240,000 a decade, we're paying you approximately $500,000 every 20 years, every 20 years, for the 20 years of your retirement.
	During that period of time, there is no money.
	It's not your money.
	They told you it was your money.
	They said they were going to take your money and put it in a lockbox.
	They didn't.
	They spent all your money.
	Now they're taking the money from younger people to give to you.
	And there are fewer of them, too.
	And there are fewer and fewer of them.
	So they're taking money from people who are working, giving it to people who aren't working to the tune of $2,000 a month, $24,000 a year.
	You're not doing very well.
	And the government owns you.
	Block stock.
	That's right.
	Now, if the government wanted to invest...
	It could, instead of doing that, it could say, instead of paying you $2,000 when you retire, we're going to put $2,000 a month into the market in your name on the day that you're born.
	And if they did that for 24 months...
	You would have three times more money in retirement and you could live more than 20 years.
	You could retire at 65 and live for 40 years.
	If they put it in Dogecoin, you'd be a trillion.
	The point being, investments bear returns.
	The government just confiscates money from the people who have it and give it to the people most likely to vote for them.
	And they call that an investment.
	How do you get people to...
	To care about this issue, though.
	That's what I can...
	They're about to care.
	They're about to care.
	We haven't cared heretofore because there's been more and more and more money.
	The problem is now the interest that we actually...
	The debt isn't free.
	You have to pay interest on the debt.
	It's been the case that up until now, the interest on the debt was a serviceable number.
	But we're getting to a place now where the interest on the debt will require us to pay higher and higher taxes and get nothing else in return for it.
	Well, this is where we're about to hit within the next five to ten years where Germany was, right?
	We're going to start having to take austerity measures.
	And the Democrats are not going to want to do austerity measures, but they're really not going to have a choice because even Angela Merkel has to do austerity measures, right?
	Even the Greeks had to do austerity measures.
	Like, there comes a point where you just don't have any choices left.
	And then it's basically going to be a fight over how much austerity is too much austerity and how much taxation is too much taxation.
	But we're going to find ourselves in a world of hurt.
	And the only way that you're going to be able to get out of that world of hurt is by actively cutting benefits.
	And if you want actual economic growth, actively cutting taxes, because otherwise the only solution is to raise taxes sky high and cut benefits, in which case you get a stagnant economy and crappy social service.
	And we're living on the illusion that the American dollar is still the strongest economic vehicle in the world, where ultimately, eventually, that's just not going to be true.
	This is why I think the next step that's going to be made is they're going to come after Bitcoin with a vengeance.
	They're going to wreck Bitcoin.
	The government cannot allow Bitcoin to exist.
	They can't.
	Because more and more people are saying, as you inflate the dollar, I'm just going to take my money and I'll put it in gold or I'll put it in Bitcoin.
	FDR didn't like when people were investing in gold for a very specific reason, right?
	They're going to do exactly the same thing with Bitcoin, which basically just is a repository of value that is not inflatable by a centralized government.
	So can I talk about the best part of the speech, the part I like the most?
	It's the part where Joe Biden sold 100,000 AR-15s.
	I think at the end of that speech, he sold approximately 100,000 AR-15s by saying that he's going to take away AR-15s.
	And the Washington Post, by the way, actually called him on the idea that Republicans and gun owners support him in this.
	Oh, of course not.
	Of course not.
	Gun control is becoming less and less popular every day.
	One of the amazing things that's actually happening in the country and was really escalated during COVID is that not only did we sell more guns in the last year than had ever been sold before, there were more first-time gun owners.
	Well, it's impossible to get ammo now, unfortunately.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	But the more people buy guns, the less people support...
	Well, they keep saying things like, what if we got rid of all the guns because guns are bad?
	Also, what if we got rid of all the cops because cops are bad?
	And you're like, well...
	Also, what if we shut down all the prisons because prisons are bad?
	Also, what if we take away all of your investments so you have any money?
	This is the one issue.
	Gun control is maybe the one issue that Republicans and conservatives have held the line on for decades and have actually won this one issue.
	It's a very important issue.
	It's not, to my mind, the most important issue, but it's very, very important.
	And, you know, I always wonder what lessons can we take from that?
	Look at what the gun rights lobby has done.
	And can we do similar things with, like, the life issue and protecting children and those sorts of things?
	agree, we've held the line well on the life issue, and it is another issue that we went on.
	What we haven't done a good job of is actually using government to forward the life issue when we have power.
	Good point.
	But we have done a great a great job, I think.
	There are no pro-choice Republicans in national elected office, are there?
	Right.
	Now, the fact that we suck at doing anything about it once we're in power, I totally agree.
	But those are the only two...
	I would say there are two issues that we've been incredibly ideologically pure on in my life.
	It's also different math with regard to legislation, just because on guns, it's easier to obstruct than it is to pass, right?
	Yeah.
	It's much easier to say, okay, you guys want to pass this stuff, you don't have the votes for it, than to say, okay, we're going to roll back all of this pro-choice nonsense.
	Well, but we also...
	$500 million a year going to Planned Parenthood kills 330,000 babies a year, and that continued when Republicans had total control of the government.
	They're talking about Republicans being cowards.
	They do not want to do it.
	Even think about it.
	Trump stripped $60 million, I think, from Planned Parenthood.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's going to go right back.
	You can't really do it.
	The thing is, when we talk about following the science, the science is on our side in this.
	The technology is on our side.
	You can now see a baby.
	You know, this didn't happen before.
	When Aquinas was writing about the quickening, he didn't have a sonar machine that he could just say, oh, there's the baby.
	It's a baby, you know?
	You know, I'll give an example on this.
	My cute little son, I never got a good sonogram of him because he had his fist right by his face.
	I actually couldn't.
	I paid for the extra 3D sonogram.
	I never got it.
	And you know what?
	My little son, after he came out of the womb, you know what he always does?
	He always has his hand by his face because he's the baby.
	He's the same baby that was in the womb.
	What I'll say about the abortion argument, there is something happening in America right now, which I think goes unnoticed.
	And that's that the states are winning huge victories in the life of shit.
	Yes.
	Our argument about Roe v.
	Wade has always been that it was an issue better decided by the states.
	And we're right.
	The federal government can't make the right decision about it.
	States, Texas, Tennessee, are making great decisions on the life issue, consequential decisions.
	It's much harder to get an abortion in the reddest of red states than it has been at any point in the lifetime of anyone except true.
	We just had a new bill passed two days ago in Idaho, another heartbeat bill.
	Yeah, that's right.
	What you're seeing also with Joe Biden accelerating, I mean, this is real accelerationism, what he's doing right now.
	And what it's going to result in is the amount of movement by conservatives into red states is just going to be overwhelming.
	It's already pretty amazing.
	I mean, yeah.
	I can tell you that in Florida, the real estate market is just extraordinary right now.
	People are buying houses sight unseen.
	Because they're like, I've got to get out of here, and I've got to get someplace seen.
	There are people at this company who bought houses sight unseen in Tennessee, actually.
	I'm looking forward, as an Angelino leaving Los Angeles, I'm looking forward to bringing homelessness and ugly billboards to the rest of the country.
	You're going to be great.
	So I'm going to take a few more questions from DailyWire.com subscribers.
	They are the people keeping the show on the air.
	Go over to DailyWire.com slash subscribe and get your question in for the group.
	Biden refers to China as our direct competition, but do you think he will stand up against them if China follows through and becomes aggressive toward Taiwan?
	Michael.
	How much money did Hunter Biden have on the line there with that private equity deal?
	I guess it didn't go through.
	No, of course not.
	The thing that we have learned over the last couple of years, I think, and the conservative movement, is that there is the blob.
	The liberal establishment, which there's an uncomfortable overlap between the government and the administrative state and big tech and big corporations, those big woke corporations in Georgia.
	And where are they getting a lot of their money from?
	Just ask LeBron James.
	Just ask the NBA. That's right.
	They get it from China.
	So is Joe Biden, who not that long ago was cheering on the rise of China, saying this is a wonderful thing.
	A rising China is great for everybody.
	Let him into the WTO. Of course not.
	He's the last guy that's going to stand up.
	Well, I don't think China is going to make a full-on militarily aggressive move against Taiwan because I think they don't think they need to.
	I think what they're going to do is they're going to start a low-level pressure campaign against Taiwan, see if they can get a government elected in Taiwan that is much more pro-China, and then just start using authoritarian measures because this is exactly what they did in Hong Kong and the rest of the world just shrugged.
	I mean, it is an amazing thing that we have watched in our lifetime.
	The first reversal of a free state into absolute tyranny through a foreign country's influence.
	It's the first time this has happened basically since the end of the Cold War.
	And everybody just shrugged.
	They went, okay, so they just subjected 7 million people in Hong Kong to absolute tyranny and no one cared.
	You know, we have a serious problem with China.
	First of all, I want to say that if I were China, I'd go into Taiwan tomorrow.
	I'd take it over tomorrow.
	I'd do it militarily.
	And I mean, they just...
	What is Biden going to do at this point?
	He has not got the wherewithal.
	It proves America to be neutered if they do it.
	What's that?
	They both get Taiwan and they get to show that America...
	That's right.
	And the American people don't want to go send the military into...
	No, it wouldn't turn into a military...
	They'd be able to take it, but there would be some pretty significant economic consequences for them, so why not do it the easy way?
	The left's problem with China is the left is China.
	They actually believe in a free market, but in chained people.
	And China has shown so far, I don't actually believe that's going to work in the long run, but they have shown so far that they can make that work.
	Our belief is that China is just sans Holocaust.
	And if you include what's going on in Shenzhen, including Holocaust, they're just Nazi Germany.
	That's all they are.
	They have a Nazi economy, which is a top-down corporatist economy, in which they have a few approved companies.
	And the government of China says, you're allowed to make a lot of money here, and you're allowed to make a lot of money here.
	It's basically mercantilism.
	I don't agree that that's a free market.
	That's not a free market.
	It's mercantilist corporatism.
	But that's essentially what the Democrats are for.
	I mean, they believe in controlling the people through the corporations and controlling the corporations through the government.
	That is China.
	So why should they fight them?
	How can we count on Republicans, asks OneDailyWire.com subscriber, to actually fight back against these policies that Biden is implementing?
	Well, we can't.
	We didn't see the whole Tim Scott speech, but what we needed to see, and maybe he did it, I'm skeptical, is a fiery defense of law and order.
	You know, a defense of free speech.
	This is what people care about.
	They need to get fired up.
	Getting on board with police reform in any capacity at all.
	We shouldn't even be entertaining the idea.
	There's no reason for it because this crisis of police brutality is manufactured by the left.
	But I don't have any confidence in the Republican Party at all, especially because, as we talked about before we went there, these Republicans came to the speech and wore their masks, including some Republicans who previously had great moments where they said, I'm not going to wear the mask because I don't need to.
	And there they are sitting.
	Well, you know, we just said that there is this model here where the liberal establishment is going to use the corporations to control the people.
	Money talks and BS walks.
	And just a few hours ago, there was an excellent op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal by our pal Ted Cruz.
	Cruz came out and he said, look, Republicans were wrong to shill for corporations before.
	We were all part of it.
	We're not going to do it anymore.
	We're not going to let them do it.
	I'm not going to take a penny from corporate PACs.
	More than that, I call on all of my fellow Republicans.
	Absolutely.
	Especially if it pressures Republicans to break this hold.
	Because how many big tech hearings did we see where those senators, they sat there and they yelled at Mark Zuckerberg.
	They yelled at all these guys.
	And then what followed from that?
	Absolutely not.
	Because Big Tech was donating to their campaigns.
	I think it's not just that Big Tech donates to their campaigns.
	I think that it's also what we've been talking about all night.
	It's a fundamental kind of cowardice among Republicans to take action.
	One of the things that's happened is that Congress generally has ceded all of its constitutional authorities to the executive and the bureaucracy.
	They don't want to do anything because you can't really be judged by That's right.
	On nothing.
	You only are going to lose, their theory goes, if we do something, there will be people who don't like it and then we'll lose.
	It's also true that there are a lot of conservatives who think that conservatism is really more attitudinal than programmatic.
	Meaning it's more about the attitude that you take about stopping change as opposed to a program for actually implementing change.
	Well, if it's just about the attitude and what you're conserving is a system that is largely moved to the left, you're not...
	And you see this over and over from members of government, which is, well, you know, we did thwart their plans, right?
	Our job is to be there and it's to stand to thwart the rails of history shouting stop.
	Well, what happened if the train already pushed you several hundred yards in this direction?
	It doesn't matter.
	This train needs to be put on a completely different track.
	They don't understand.
	They act like European conservatives.
	They don't understand that American conservatives are liberal.
	American conservatives are conserving the Constitution, the most liberal document in the old style meaning of liberal, most liberal document ever invented because it leaves people free.
	Liberalism is freedom and it leaves people free.
	We are defending something, a philosophy, an act of philosophy, as opposed to Europeans defending blood and soil and rank and all the things that conservatives in Europe defended.
	We don't defend any of that.
	We defend the Constitution.
	We are defending a revolutionary idea, the only revolutionary political idea that's existed for decades.
	I mean, it's kind of incredible.
	I spoke to the House Republican Caucus a little bit earlier this week, as reported in a few of the kind of political outlets.
	And one of the things that I was talking about was the contract with America.
	I said, you guys ought to have a second contract with America.
	And as I went back, I looked at the original contract with America.
	What I noticed is that the original contract with America, which promised that the Republicans would pass about 10 different bills and eight different reforms, they did pass all of those things.
	And many of them were vetoed by Bill Clinton.
	But A lot of those things are still not done.
	Things like zero-baseline budgeting.
	That's an easy one.
	There are certain things that are...
	Police reform was being proposed...
	Not police reform.
	Additional police funding was being proposed by the Republicans in 1993 so that they would win back to Congress in 1994 because there were serious problems with crime at that point.
	Even Joe Biden thought there were serious problems with crime at that point, back when he had not completely lost his mind.
	Is that back when Kamala was marching at Selma?
	No.
	I think so.
	She was in the scroller, yeah.
	And the fact is that the Republicans have held Congress several times since then with a Republican president and with a Republican Senate, and they didn't make that stuff permanent.
	They only passed it when Democrats were in control.
	We should be fair, though.
	We did have a Republican leader read Green Eggs and Ham, and that was an important moment for all of us.
	Less than four years ago, Republicans controlled the Congress and the presidency, and they did nothing.
	And you know, there is a way...
	Oh, they passed a tax cut.
	A temporary...
	They changed me as a copyright law.
	That was big.
	That was actually a good thing.
	No, it was a good thing.
	But it wasn't successful.
	On my list of priorities, it wasn't like...
	You know, there are a lot of conservatives right now who hear when we talk about the Constitution and these abstract philosophical ideas who say, I don't care about things that are floating in the sky.
	I want tangible results.
	And I think there is a way to bring these things together, which is the American way of life.
	There is an American way of life where all these great philosophical ideas have actually been embodied in real institutions and real rights that we've all cherished for a very long time that the left is trying to destroy.
	And I just think if Republicans would get down to brass tacks and say, you know, the stuff that's going on in our streets, it's just wrong.
	We don't like it.
	It's not part of our political tradition, which comes from our ideas and the way it's been enacted.
	Get back to that.
	Get back to that America that we cherish and love.
	Trump did a very good job of putting it in really practical terms.
	And I just fear sometimes Republicans were too pie in the sky about it.
	Just give people something to hold on to in this world.
	You know, it is funny.
	Trump didn't do a good job of telling stories.
	He was really good at that.
	And it was something that Republicans and conservatives in general need to learn.
	But, you know, all the time Trump was in office, I would complain about his personality and his rudeness and his unkindness.
	And I think, like, that really was the turning point in the sense that, for instance, John McCain...
	Destroyed the end of Obamacare because he was ticked off.
	He had been mistreated.
	These guys are all narcissists and they don't want to be mistreated.
	We are left with, and I think you, Matt, tweeted this out yesterday or today, that we're left with a Republican administration that left us nothing of enduring value.
	And unfortunately, that happens just too often because of what you're saying, Ben, that they don't have a positive vision of what it means to be a conservative.
	And I think you're right, too.
	I think that the idea...
	We are talking about things that maybe are a little too pie in the sky.
	We have to show people how they work.
	It's a harder story to tell.
	It's a harder story to tell that each individual person making decisions on his own, each individual person trying to better his life, actually betters the country more than Joe Biden's idea that he's just going to pour money into it.
	What's kind of fascinating is that Democrats do one thing that I've never really heard a Republican do.
	Democrats do something that is very useful in nearly every state that has popular support, and that is they ask for sacrifice.
	They do this all the time.
	You're going to have to sacrifice this for climate change.
	You're going to have to sacrifice this for racial inequity.
	You're going to have to sacrifice this for income inequality.
	And the truth is that Republicans never do that.
	They sort of suggest, okay, well, you can have your cake and you can eat it too, which is how you end up with tax cuts and high spending, right?
	At no point did they ever say, you know what?
	For the sake of the country and for the sake of your children, we're going to have to cut spending, and it's going to come from places that you're upset about.
	It's going to come from places where you may be upset at me that I'm cutting this, but for the sake of your kids, you are going to have to just take the hit.
	You're going to have to be an adult.
	And so what they've done is they've trained an entire generation of Republican voters to vote for Republicans, but then when it comes time to pass a piece of legislation that requires some sacrifice here or there, the Republican voter goes, well, I do want to cut spending, but I really don't want to cut that.
	But the difference is, the difference is, I totally agree with what you're saying.
	I think that needs to be the message from the Republican Party, absolutely.
	But the one advantage that the Democrats have is they ask for sacrifice But it's someone else who's making the sacrifice.
	So you as the voter are not sacrificing.
	So on climate change, on taxes, everything, it's the bad guys.
	I'm actually not sure, Matt.
	I think that But they like the sacrifice, right?
	Recycling is a sacrifice.
	The masking is a sacrifice.
	And this is Orwell on Hitler, right?
	Orwell very famously during the war, early in the war, 41 maybe, writes an introduction to Mein Kampf.
	And it's one of the most fascinating reads.
	If you've never read, it's very short, two or three pages.
	It's fascinating because he predicts the end of the pact between Germany and Russia vis-a-vis Poland.
	He basically tells the future.
	And so you read it now and it feels like, well, yeah, we all know that that's what happens.
	At the time, no one knew that's what was going to happen except Orwell, right?
	And he's saying exactly what's going to happen.
	And at the conclusion, he says, very close to what you're saying, Ben, he essentially says that the liberal West offers its people the promise of a life of security and ease.
	And the power of Hitler...
	Is that he stands before his people against the backdrop of Western ease and promises them only honor and valor and toil and sacrifice.
	And so does Churchill.
	Churchill did the exact same thing, blood, sweat, and tears.
	Which is why people see him as an inspirational leader.
	That's right.
	The lie of modern liberalism is that what people actually want from their leaders is stuff.
	That if you give them a prosperous state, then they'll be super happy.
	And it's just a lie.
	We have the most prosperous America that we've ever had.
	We had it before the pandemic, and we'll have it again after the pandemic.
	And yet people are deeply unhappy because normally the things that they would be called to sacrifice for, like their religion, even their religions are not calling for them to sacrifice anymore.
	Their religions aren't even calling for them to sacrifice their own personal desires on behalf.
	Is it less sacrifice?
	It's...
	There's an element of sacrifice, but I think the main thing with Democrats and the left, especially somebody like Bernie Sanders, he's making a moral argument.
	That's what he's talking about.
	He's saying this is the right thing to do, and that's why we need to do it.
	Whether there's sacrifice or not, it's just the right thing.
	It might not be the most practical thing, but it's the right thing.
	And that's the argument that the Republican Party doesn't make.
	They've sacrificed the moral argument.
	There is a liturgical element to this in that You remember a few years ago, and I guess more than a few years now, under Obama, Obama said, look, we'll solve this terrorism thing once we get some more jobs in Pakistan.
	Then it's all good, and more jobs in Afghanistan.
	Then they'll all be happy because they'll have iPhones.
	And you had this strange phenomenon of third-generation foreigners, you know, third-generation immigrants in the United Kingdom, flying to the Middle East to join ISIS. Why are you leaving London to join ISIS? Because of exactly what Orwell said.
	That's right.
	Because that is a life imbued with meaning and sacrifice and an enactment of these values.
	But you guys are leaving one thing out.
	You're leaving one thing out.
	In order to call for sacrifice, you have to have a crisis.
	And the left manufactures crisis again and again and again, and we never do.
	What we always say is the only crisis is the left.
	But we do have a crisis in this country.
	We have a crisis of spirit.
	We have a crisis of vision.
	We have a crisis of freedom, most importantly of all.
	And we have to...
	Push that forward and make people understand that those things are things you sacrifice for.
	I'm not sacrificing to turn off the sun.
	I'm sorry.
	The sun is going to be there, and if it's not there, it's just going to be a very, very cold night.
	But I will sacrifice.
	You know, we were talking about Nick Fuentes today, a guy all of us despise, and we despise the things he believes in.
	I personally am offended by what Nick Fuentes says, but he got on a plane and they wouldn't let him fly, and I want to defend his rights, not because I defend him, but because his rights are my rights, and they're your rights, and we want to preserve those rights.
	We've got to make people understand.
	And for our children, too.
	It sounds like a cliché, but that's a real crisis.
	We're murdering our children.
	They're being corrupted and perverted in schools.
	We're literally trying to turn boys into girls, drugging and mutilating them.
	That's a real crisis that I think most people are willing to sacrifice for their children.
	And that's a message that somehow the Republican Party doesn't make.
	One of the most essentially left-wing moments of these last few weeks was the New York Times saying that we mustn't judge, we mustn't talk about the fact that these children who have been out of school are never going to catch up because that stigmatizes them.
	So in other words, our lousy programs, our lousy ideas, the terrible things that we did are not going to be addressed because, oh, that would stigmatize the children.
	You know, of course we have to defend our children.
	The left has sold them to the teachers' union.
	Can I make an unpopular?
	No.
	Damn it.
	You?
	We want you to be popular every damn minute.
	More unpopular than tax the poor?
	Taxing the poor is moral, and we should do it.
	See?
	I'm just going to keep double down on this one.
	Can we also beat up the poor?
	No, no.
	Stop that.
	God.
	We preach in this country the virtue of not working.
	You have books, the 40-hour work week.
	Everyone wants early retirement.
	How can I retire by 35?
	Retire by 40?
	How can I retire by 50?
	We are meant in a fallen world to work.
	The Bible doesn't say, take one day of your two-day weekend and don't work.
	The Bible says six days you will toil.
	It's a biblical both prescription and description, to borrow from Ben, that you would work six days of your life and rest on the seventh day.
	We're going to talk about the theological ramifications of that.
	That's a great conversation, but I'm not.
	I'm talking in a very practical sense.
	God commands and describes man as one who will work six out of seven days.
	By the sweat of your brow.
	By the sweat of your brow.
	And we say you shouldn't.
	I see all these women in America today who are miserably unhappy.
	And they're miserably unhappy, Christian women, because they believe that it's wrong for a woman to work outside the house.
	They believe they're supposed to be homemakers.
	And listen, if you've got young children at home, I think it's very beautiful for you not to work and to raise those young children.
	That is a kind of toil.
	That is a kind of labor.
	But a lot of these women in America, they have one kid or two kids.
	They leave the workforce.
	They raise them until they're six.
	Then they send them to public school.
	And then they call themselves stay-at-home housewives or stay-at-home homemakers.
	But the problem is we've replaced that job.
	The 20th century replaced the job of the homemaker.
	We...
	We have washing machines.
	We have dishwashers.
	We have vacuums.
	All the things that caused a homemaker to toil were replaced.
	And women in that position became less and less happy.
	And they believe that the Bible tells them, many of these Christian women, that they're supposed to stay home and watch daytime TV instead of having a job.
	And that isn't true.
	That is toil.
	That is true toil.
	But you're not supposed to stay home and watch daytime TV. That is a miserable life and it makes you miserable.
	You're supposed to stay home and toil.
	Raising kids, yes.
	Homeschooling kids.
	Of course, I'm not saying that everybody has to have a job outside the house, but you have to have a job.
	You have to have a thing that you do with your hands that creates value.
	Listen, I have to say in my new book, which comes out in April, The Truth and Beauty, I write an entire chapter about it.
	Wait, what's the title?
	The Truth and Beauty.
	It's called Another Good Thing.
	Can I please write your titles?
	For the love of God, Drew.
	It's like the third straight title where I'm...
	I think that's a great title.
	Thank you very much.
	But you're absolutely right about this, that every...
	When you look at the, what is it, the Proverbs 31 woman that they talk about?
	She does everything.
	She's making clothes.
	She's buying property.
	She toils.
	But all of those things, all of those things were taken out...
	You've seen that every Friday night in the Jewish community.
	No, they were destroyed by the Industrial Revolution.
	They absolutely were.
	Children were taken out of home.
	All these things that made a woman's work less valuable.
	The...
	To me, the great prospect is because I think the toil of making a home for people is a huge humanizing task.
	I think homemakers are the most important people in America.
	I think that's the central job that all other jobs, as C.S. Lewis said, are built to support.
	And what I think the answer to this is that there are new versions of work that can be done in the home.
	I don't think women should leave the home.
	I think homemaking is the humanizing job of women that we discount so much.
	But let me just say for the record in Media Matters that women should definitely do whatever they want with their work.
	But we're not saying that for Media Matters.
	I know.
	Screw media matters, but I mean, of course, everybody has their own choice about what they're going to do.
	I'm simply saying that this should be a dignified, celebrated choice.
	We should distinguish between, and this is where a lot of confusion comes in, distinguish between a job and work or two, not necessarily the same thing.
	You can work at your job.
	But there's a lot of work to be done at home.
	Recently, there was some left-wingers that were tweeting about how they don't respect stay-at-home moms because they want people who have ambition.
	And it takes a lot of ambition to work at home and to build a home.
	Now, you can be an unambitious parent, and your kids are going to be miserable, and your spouse is going to be miserable, it's going to be a terrible home.
	But there's a difference between ambitious parenting and ambitious spouse.
	Forcing women out of the home is an actual structured strategy of the left.
	There's a great story that I recount in my upcoming book, Speechless.
	It's available June 22nd, now for pre-order.
	This title is better than yours.
	Oh, yes!
	This is like the first compliment.
	I know, but the bar was so low.
	So there was this great moment between Simone de Beauvoir, very famous feminist theorist.
	She was the jilted common law wife of Jean Paul Sartre, the notorious philanderer, and Betty Friedan, who was the American feminist.
	And Betty Friedan said, women, if they want to go out and work at the widget factory, they should be allowed to do it.
	And Simone de Beauvoir said, no, you're getting it wrong.
	Women must leave the home.
	They should not be given the choice to stay at home and raise the family.
	Because if they are given that choice, they will take it.
	Too many of them will take it, and that will not live.
	Hang on, I appreciate what you guys are saying.
	But I'm saying something else.
	I'm saying that women should not stay home and not work.
	I'm saying that men should not retire at age 30.
	I'm saying that we should not promise people lives of leisure.
	I'm saying that we shouldn't burden Christian women with the idea that being home alone with nothing to do makes you virtuous.
	I'm saying that God expects everyone, male and female, to work.
	I'm saying that 65, you shouldn't be promised not to have to do anything anymore except sit on the boat because you earned it.
	You didn't earn it.
	You earned it back when people died at 66.
	People now die at 95, and you should work.
	You should work.
	Because it's better for you.
	It is better for you, and it is better for society.
	It all goes back to this idea that we are not offering anyone any piece of dignity.
	We're not offering anyone any path to creating with their hands— We're not offering them any...
	That's because we've changed the definition of dignity, though.
	Because it used to be that dignity was earned.
	It wasn't something that you were just handed.
	There was no idea that you had the sort of right to dignity.
	What you had was the right to go out and...
	No, of course, it's silly, because that's literally a right to somebody else's sentiment.
	Dignity is something somebody else gives you, right?
	The idea changed.
	It was that dignity was something that is to be found in your own sense of authenticity.
	Because you're authentic, therefore you deserve dignity.
	And that's not correct.
	It's because of what you do in your life.
	It's because of the actions that you take in the world and in relationship with your society that you are provided with dignity.
	Now, that doesn't mean that people can treat you like garbage, but it's an abuse of the word dignity to treat the word dignity the way that we have.
	The word dignity never meant treat somebody decently.
	Decently is not the same as dignity.
	Dignity has an element of honor to it.
	Everybody should be treated decently, of course.
	I'm saying that if you expect nothing from anyone...
	They will be miserable.
	Do you remember what Nancy Pelosi said when she was selling Obamacare?
	She said, this is a wonderful...
	It's an entrepreneurial bill.
	Because now you don't have to work.
	It frees you from labor.
	You can be a poet.
	You can be a musician.
	And you know the thing about poets is...
	There aren't that many of them.
	And most of them are not very good.
	Well, I also noticed that of all the vast numbers, millions of Americans on welfare programs and food stamps and disability, I noticed how many just unbelievable poets, painters, and string quartet members there are in this.
	Like, that's how people spend their time.
	Yeah.
	That's not a rip on people's skill sets, by the way.
	That's just a recognition that when you pay people a lot to work, they don't spend the time doing wonderfully productive things.
	Shakespeare spent a pandemic writing Lear, supposedly.
	But that's because Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
	It wasn't like if they paid him not to write Lear.
	If they'd incentivized Shakespeare, they were like, you know what, dude?
	Same stipend, don't write Lear.
	He probably doesn't write Lear because that's the way things work.
	It's another great Bill Whittle observation that this idea that if we...
	People have the means of production.
	They'd only have to work two hours a day and they could devote the rest of their time to learning art and learning music.
	And Bill says, the internet disproves that because we now, in our pocket, carry around all human knowledge and wisdom available at our fingertips for free.
	At any moment, you could be learning a language, you could be reading Lear, and instead we look at pornography and we play Candy Crush.
	That's all we do all day long.
	Isn't there, I mean, there's potentially a I agree with what everyone is saying, but also I maybe have a problem with the idea that you could just go outside of the house and get a job somewhere and you're going to find dignity in that because the way that the job market is set up and the way that a lot of companies operate, you know, it can be a very dehumanizing experience.
	Oh, for sure.
	Does it make it better to sit at home and do nothing?
	No.
	But the problem is that...
	Well, I mean, charity work was always a thing that many people did.
	They get involved in the religious community, right?
	As communities die, that takes away a lot of work that people typically did outside the home.
	Like, when people would retire, this was, you know, for most Americans, I would say, when most people retired at age 65, if they were church-involved, it would be like they would go and get involved in their church.
	They got more involved in church.
	Exactly.
	They spent that extra time going and doing charity work.
	I mean, I lived for many years in Montecito, one of the richest communities in the world.
	Living in a very wealthy community is really interesting because people do what they want to do, right?
	They have free choice, and so you see what people want to do.
	The women stayed home, but they also manufactured the community.
	They went to the schools.
	They made sure the schools ran on time.
	They ran the charities.
	They called the Montecito Moms.
	Talk about dignity.
	When Montecito moms walked down the street, everybody stood still because everybody respected them because they ran the community.
	They gave us the community in which we work and for which we work.
	And I think that those are things, of course, you don't have to get a paycheck for those for them to be worked.
	But they also speak to...
	In a weird way, this gets us back to Biden because what Biden is creating is a culture of expectation.
	Yes.
	It's a culture where...
	And Republicans are accepting the premise.
	They always accept the premise.
	Of course.
	They're saying, you're right, you do deserve all these things.
	We just want to give them to you in a more effective way.
	Effectiveness is never a good argument.
	Efficiency and effectiveness are not good arguments.
	That's right.
	A good argument here would be, there should be no culture of expectation.
	You do not deserve to expect anything from us, and society can expect that you are going to be a productive citizen in order for you to actually earn things.
	The culture that we've created, this culture of expectation is what's created Occupy Wall Street.
	It's what's created BLM in the streets.
	It's what's created so many of the things that are destroying the country right now.
	It's this expectation that you, like, I've stopped using the term soft bigotry of low expectations.
	I now use the term bigotry of no expectations because that's where we are right now.
	When we are now living in a society where every single time there is a police shooting, we full-on expect that there will be riots.
	We full-on expect it.
	That is not a culture that expects any sort of good behavior.
	That's a culture that expects bad behavior and treats it as virtuous.
	You made a point many years ago that somebody who actually liked you did a satire of it that was very funny, where you said that to say that health care is a right is to say that you have the right to other people's labor, which is just not true.
	And you were right.
	You were absolutely right.
	The joke they made about you was a friendly joke, but it was very funny of you saying, you know, you have no right to other people's labor.
	But you don't have a right to other people's labor.
	You have a right to be left alone.
	You have a right to say what you want to say.
	You have a right to think what you want to think, and you have a right to make your own choices.
	But you don't have a right to other people's labor, including the labor of health care workers.
	No one owes you anything.
	Anything.
	No one owes you anything.
	You owe me a couple of bucks.
	I got a cigar built.
	No one owes you anything.
	This is the fundamental problem.
	I mean, the fundamental problem, obviously, is that we reject God.
	But in a very practical sense, the fundamental problem with our society today is that everyone believes that they're owed something by someone.
	What you're describing is an emanation of your first place.
	And it's true in every area of life.
	If you want to talk about why marriages are dying, it's because you believe that you have a right to expect things from your spouse.
	And expectations kill marriages.
	They absolutely do.
	In a family, though, I would say that's the one place where you are owed something.
	Your children are owed.
	And this actually should be the pro-life message, in fact, that you as a parent, you have a responsibility to your child.
	You owe them something.
	You brought them into this world, and you have to take care of them.
	Children are the only people who have a right to expect something.
	Exactly.
	That's the only thing.
	I want to take issue with this a little bit.
	I mean, I think that individuals, especially in relationships like marriage, they do have a right to expectations of one another.
	Yeah, you've entered a covenant.
	Yeah, that's right.
	You've made an agreement.
	Fidelity, integrity, breakfast.
	But that's the very difference we're talking about.
	Individuals owe each other things.
	Individuals entered agreements.
	The society owes you nothing.
	The world owes you nothing.
	Although I will say that when it comes to marriage, I think one of the big things that does plague marriage is people having expectations without having expectations of themselves.
	The idea of a covenant in marriage is the idea that now the trade is over and not ongoing.
	Right?
	Like, oh, well, we signed a contract, so I guess that's the end of the deal.
	No, no, no, no.
	The earnings continue, right?
	You have to work in order to receive from your partner.
	And if you actually want to have a happy marriage, and you're sitting there and you're like, yeah, but under the contract it says you owe me X, Y, and Z, that's going to be miserable.
	Well, it's like in a job, you know, you say, okay, I've signed my employment contract, great.
	Now I'm getting my paycheck.
	One of the most popular stupid memes and slogans you see out there is something like, if you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best.
	That's, I think, attributed to Marilyn Monroe incorrectly.
	And that's the attitude people bring into romantic relationships, is that you have to sort of deserve me to...
	You have to, you know...
	Deal with that bullcrap in order to get me at my best.
	And it's like, well, or you could just not do that.
	Right.
	Or just be a good person and also be forgiving of my faults.
	I always say, if you want to be my lover, you've got to give it to my friends.
	I've never actually understood what that was.
	What does that mean?
	I'm done.
	And we're done.
	Thank you guys for hanging out with us.
	We'll see you the next time we do one of these things.
	Become a member over at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	Check out the guys.
	Be able to ask questions the next time we do a backstage.
	We're really appreciative to everyone who's done that tonight.
	And we'll see you next time.
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